The question of spirit in Hegel
10
Jul
Byung-Chul Han criticizes Hegel’s Phenomenology
of Spirit seen “in terms of the forgetfulness of being” (Heidegger’s central theme) as an “arid self” that finds “its limitation to the being that encounters it” (Han, 2023, p. 334), this is not the resistance of the spirit.
Hegel recovers in part, in the epigraph of the last chapter “truth is the whole”, re-discusses the dialectic and its metaphysics in idealism “in relation to “just being” which empties it to a name “that no longer names anything”, consciousness natural… when he realizes being, he assures that it is something abstract” (Han, 2023, p. 336).
This natural (idealistic) consciousness “lingers on “perversities” … “it tries to eliminate one perversity by organizing another, without remembering that the authentic inversion” [occurs when] “the truth of the essence is withdrawn into the being” (Han, 2023, p. 336, citing Heidegger).
In contrast to Hegel’s dialectic, this topic would fill a book, it engages in a dialogue with Derrida and Adorno on the question of mourning and the work of mourning, killing death is not just something secret in the heart of Plato or Hegel (pg. 384), but also reverse the negative of Being.
This work of “tragedy” is distinguished from the “work of mourning” of dialectics (Han, 2023, p. 385), it is what Han calls in other works excessive positivity, not understanding pain (in the palliative society, for example, analyzing the pandemic and the pain itself).
“Tears free the subject from his narcissistic interiority… they are the “spell that the subject casts on nature” (Han, 2023, p. 394), citing Adorno the “Aesthetic Theory” is the book of tears and that contrary to Kant, “the spirit perceives, in relation to nature, less its own superiority than its own naturalness” (Han, 2023, p. 395).
Hegel’s absolute is abstract: “the Absolute is absolute only to the extent that it knows itself as Absolute, that is, as self-consciousness” (Hegel in §565 of the Phenomenology of Spirit).
For true asceticism it is beyond human nature, it leads to an ascension, a new interiority that expresses itself in a more human exteriority, not human self-consciousness (even thought of in religion) but rather that which admits human singularity in the one divine and This is Absolute.
Han, B-C. (2023) O coração de Heidegger: o conceito de tonalidade afetiva em Martin Heidegger (Heidegger’s Heart: on the concept of affective tonality in Martin Heidegger). Trans. Rafael Rodrigues Garcia, Milton Camargo Mota. Brazil, RJ: Petrópolis, Vozes.
