Philosophy in a Foreign Language: Hegel’s Writing of Spirit in The Aesthetics

[HEGEL 1979, p. 257].

Hegel’s anxiety over a philosophy in the “mother tongue” – Leibniz, after all, did not write in German – was shared by J.G. Fichte in his Addresses to the German Nation. But this anxiety should be read alongside Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s comment that the Germans, lacking England’s sense of “nationality”, had many universities, and were “forever … thinking”. On the other hand, England, with her “fullness of occupation with commerce” and “the affairs of the whole” [COLERIDGE 2000, II, p. 574], had only two universities. If the lack of a national identity made richness of thought possible, German Idealism was also complicated by its multidisciplinarity and the many cultures through which it wandered in constructing philosophies of religion, art, or mythology. For Hegel could not say everything in the language of philosophy, and still less through the nationalistic hypostasis of this philosophy as The Philosophy of History. Rather he was driven to think both philosophy and history through alien disciplines such as natural history and aesthetics. In the Aesthetics, moreover, there is no form of art that properly speaking is not foreign, or if there is, it does not speak properly. To be sure, Classical art is the paradigm for a thought at home with itself in the “adequate embodiment of the Idea” [HEGEL 1975,1, p. 77]. But this art is not German. For the Classical too is a foreign concept, and no more “belongs” to Hegel than the Oriental art whose problems it purports to resolve.
One example of idealism’s translation of itself through alien concepts is Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature, which draws extensively on English and French as well as German science, thus admitting a materialism deeply foreign to idealism. In this paper, however, I will not explore philosophy’s self-estrangement in natural science (a topic I explore elsewhere1), but the consequences of thinking philosophy’s labour of the negative through art as what Antoine Berman calls “the experience of the foreign”. The Aesthetics traces three stages of art – Symbolic, Classical and Romantic -, involving different relations of meaning and shape, inwardness and its expression. Of these only the Classical properly meets aesthetic norms of beauty and mimesis. Whereas in the Symbolic or Oriental meaning and shape do not cohere because the Idea is still indeterminate, the Classical is the “free and adequate embodiment of the Idea” [HEGEL 1975, I, p. 77], in appropriate, transmissible forms that can be used for aesthetic education. Yet the Classical is not the desired synthesis, and is superseded by the Romantic. The Romantic once again unworks the hypostasis of meaning in shape, thus “revert[ing]” to the “difference and opposition” of the Symbolic on a “higher” level [Hegel 1975, I, p. 79 ]. While in Symbolic art spirit is not yet clear to itself, in Romantic art the Idea is “perfected in itself”, but as “spirit and heart” which are incapable of an “adequate union with the external” [HEGEL 1975,1, p. 81].
This unworking of classicism gives the Aesthetics its curious form as an inversion and hollowing out of the dialectic. In the Encyclopedia this dialectic traces a movement of exile and return: logic is the “idea in and for itself, untested by experience, despite the synthetic formulation; the philosophy of nature is “the idea in its otherness”; and the philosophy of spirit is “the idea as it returns to itself from its otherness” [HEGEL1990, p. 54). The Philosophy of Right also has three stages, and more like the Aesthetics, the middle stage is one of limited resolution in the free market synthesis of civil society. Yet the state, which occupies the same narratological position as the Romantic in the history of art, is an improvement on civil society through an Aufhebung of commercial into ethical life. But in the Aesthetics the classical is simply inadequate, despite being “the completed Ideal … actualized in fact” [HEGEL 1975, I, p. 77]. Its perfection is merely formal, even though it also expresses the Idea in its “essential” nature. And the Romantic is not an Aufhebung but a falling apart.
The disaffection with Classicism poses problems, since Classicism is homologous with Hegel’s ideal of philosophy as a language of “the concept […] that leaves nothing veiled” [HEGEL 1979, p. 257]. Classicism is associated with concepts of Bildung, nation, and freedom that Hegel does indeed claim as his own. As a signifying apparatus Classicism best performs the work of naturalizing these concepts, since it admits no disjunction of form and content, desire and actuality. Yet Hegel associates it with formalism, a word he uses for terms, mostly Latin and Greek, that remain foreign [HEGEL 1979, I, pp. 258-259]. The limitations of the classical have to do precisely with freedom. On the one hand, the Classical artist can “accomplish” “what he wills”, and is “clear” about “the substantial content which he intends to shape outwardly” [HEGEL 1975, I, p. 438]. His art is a “free totality” because it “display[s] in its existence nothing but itself [HEGEL 1975, I, p. 431]. On the other hand this freedom is “technical.” For the classical artist gets his “content” “cut and dried” from “national faith”. And it is because this content is predetermined that he is “free” to concentrate on “shaping the external artistic appearance” in a decorous way [HEGEL 1975, I, pp. 439-440].
By contrast Symbolic art has an energy lacking in Classicism. On the one hand, it is overdetermined by thought that is not concept. For the Idea is still “indeterminate” yet must be expressed through “natural objects” that are “determinate in their shape” [HEGEL 1975, I, p. 76]. The Symbolic artist thus “tosses about” endlessly, as his imagination “adapt[s] to the meaning sought the shapes that ever remain alien” [HEGEL 1975,1, p. 439]. On the other hand this non-identity is a kind of freedom. This “restless fermentation”, “quest” and “sublimity” [HEGEL 1975, I, pp. 438, 77] stems from an unformulated originality which is substantive and not merely formal. For Symbolic art is still involved in “producing its content and making it clear to itself [HEGEL 1975, I, p. 438]. This not-yet art is thus the very condition of possibility for art, “the beginning of art”, where classical art is merely its “result” [HEGEL 1975, I, p. 441].
To be sure Hegel cannot praise the Symbolic because it is Oriental. His interpellation by the Classical in the Philosophy of Right and The Philosophy of Mind is apparent in the way he inadequately, one could say Symbolically, embodies the Romantic moment in the state. But Hegel also does not feel at home in the Classical, in what Jacques Derrida calls this monolingualism of the Other: this language that will always be a law, because it comes from the other, though it is the only language one speaks properly, for which reason one wants to speak it more properly than any other [DERRIDA 1996, pp. 46-49, 56]. Lacking, not a mother tongue like Derrida, but a mother tongue with an intellectual tradition, Hegel must remake German as the monolingualism of the Other, with all the resistances implied in Derrida’s phrase. He must develop, even in Jena at the height of Romanticism, his other, Roman committment to objective spirit. But this is a hard task, since the very term objective spirit is an aporia. Hegel does after all say that “spirit” is incapable of union with the external. Hence the troubled form of the Aesthetics as a disturbed dialectic where synthesis is displaced from the end to the middle of history, as if thought cannot end with speaking properly.
One could argue that the Romantic is an Aufhebung of the Classical, as the state improves on civil society. Conceding that the Romantic reverts to Symbolic problems, Hegel also distinguishes them as a failure of form due to the Idea’s deficiency in the Symbolic and an inadequacy of external forms in the Romantic. Yet this opposition between fundamental and formal inadequacy keeps collapsing. Thus Hegel sees the symbolic artist as “striv[ing] to imagine […] a meaning for the shape”, only to describe him as struggling “to imagine a shape for the meaning” [HEGEL 1975,1, p. 440]. Of course the two are linked: an artist who cannot imagine a shape for the Idea cannot do so because of an incompletion of the Idea itself. But one can ask how this differs for Romantic art, which is equally caught in the impossibility of formulation. The difference between Symbolic and Romantic art seems geographical more than intrinsic. The Romantic, Christian instead of Oriental, is in fact an alibi for revisiting the Symbolic in a more aesthetically and culturally assimilable form. As such, it once again calls in question a philosophy where science is certain knowledge, and returns us to the difference between thought and its hypostasis.
Thus it is not surprising that there is an affinity between the German and the Symbolic. In the Jena fragment, Hegel contrasts a philosophy that has found its own language with mysticism, which he calls “the Oriental attempt to present the Idea, just as much as Jakob Boehme’s.” The Oriental is “a dark halfway house between feeling and scientific knowledge, a speculative feeling for the Idea”, which cannot get beyond, and yet is not just, “imagination and feeling” [HEGEL 1979, p. 257]. Hegel later writes that it is through Boehme that “Philosophy first appeared in Germany” [HEGEL 1995, III, p. 188]. His account of Boehme in The History of Philosophy closely anticipates his account of the Symbolic in the Aesthetics. Boehme is described as barbaric, an enthusiast [HEGEL 1995, III, pp. 189, 192], but is also praised: Boehme’s “interest is in the Idea, and he struggles hard to express it” [HEGEL 1995, III, p. 193]. His faults are those of the Symbolic. His writing does “not attain either to clearness or order” [HEGEL 1995, III, p. 192]. Moreover, “he forcibly takes natural things and sensuous qualities to express his ideas rather than determinations of the Notion” [HEGEL 1995, III, p. 192]. Hence the “rudeness” of his style, which yokes together religion and chemistry, material and psychic qualities.
Thus Boehme speaks of “qualities” such as bitterness and acidity, which he then attributes to God [HEGEL 1995, III, p. 200]. He attempts what Jean-Paul Sartre names a “psychoanalysis of things” [SARTRE 1956, p. 765]. Boehme’s sulphur is not the thing “we so name, but [its] essence” [HEGEL 1995, III, p. 192]. Boehme thus inaugurates what Schelling calls the distinctively German, as opposed to English, project of idealizing “all the sciences” [SCHELLING 1988, p. 272n] but it is an idealism that remains “confined in the hard knotty oak of the senses” [HEGEL 1995, III, p. 195). His language would seem less strange if we thought of it as allegory. But allegory translates an empirical signifier into an ideal signified, whereas for Boehme the religious and chemical fail to translate each other: “conceptions are lacking, and there are only […] forms to be found” [HEGEL 1995, III, p. 210]. Boehme’s sulphur, even his “god”, are thus better described as catachreses, the abusive use of a figure or term to name what has no name, resulting, Hegel says, in “barbarism [and] incomprehensibility” [HEGEL 1995, III, p. 210]. But this is no less true of Hegel, who also forcibly conjoins the material and spiritual in The Philosophy of Nature, so as to find the Idea in mechanical and geological, even digestive, processes.
That Hegel’s Naturphilosophie is based on a barbarous prosopopopeia or animation of nature may be why its various versions are not as available in English as his other texts. Its fancifulness deligitimises it as philosophy of science, and marks it as having to remain in German, as falling short of universality. Boehme too falls short of universality. Yet how can German philosophy speak in its own language if it disavows the “first philosopher” to write in the mother-tongue? For this reason Boehme returns throughout the history of German philosophy that is a subplot in Hegel’s History of Philosophy. Boehme stands in an originary position, as the condition of possibility for Leibniz, who is German in being speculative rather than empirical, even though he did not write in German. And if Leibniz’ follower Wolff, who did write in German, disappoints Hegel it is because he is not German like Boehme³. Wolff professionalised German philosophy, but worked at the level of “the understanding merely” [HEGEL 1995, III, p. 350]. With Wolff, the “spiritual philosophy” that emerged with Boehme, “still in a peculiar and barbarous form … has disappeared […]; his very language was forgotten” [HEGEL 1995, III, p. 350].
To “speak and think in one’s own language”, Hegel says, is a “form of being-at-home-with-self that correlates to “subjective freedom” [HEGEL 1995, III, p. 150]. But it seems that such speech does not always produce true dwelling with self, that freedom may occur only if one is not at-home-with-self. As Derrida says of an earlier vernacularization in Descartes, writing philosophy in the national language went together with “the monarchical State” and the suppression of dialects. The properly scientific value of clarity thus became a “juridical” and “political” as well as philosophic value. At work, then, was a process in which the subject was “given back to the mother in order better to be subjugated to the father” [DERRIDA forthcoming, II, pp. 21, 12-13, 8, 17]. There is thus a constant dissymmetry between writing in the mother-tongue, speaking properly, and freedom. Foreign words and ideas are the site of this dyssymmetry, as they contain the “possibility of being elsewhere in language” [DERRIDA forthcoming, II, p. 16], which is why, from the Romantics to Nietzsche, translation and philology were at the heart of a reflection on what constitutes philosophy.
Boehme is the possibility for Hegel to be elsewhere, even in his own language. To be sure, Boehme is early, like Symbolic art, and so perhaps his foreignness should be domesticated, sublated. But Boehme not just the first. He is “genuinely German” “for what marks him out […] is the Protestant principle […] of experiencing […] in one’s own self-consciousness all that formerly was conceived as a Beyond” [HEGEL1995, III, p. 191]. Boehme thus also exemplifies a Romanticism of philosophy. In the Jena fragment Hegel describes Boehme and the Oriental in Romantic terms. “The oriental spirit is exalted above mere beauty or limited shape” [HEGEL 1979, p. 257]. Interestingly, it is already exalted above the Classicism that supercedes it. This spirit “is the infinite, the shapeless which [Oriental art] struggles to grasp in its fanciful images, but it is always driven beyond the image by the infinite” [HEGEL 1979, p. 257].
I can only touch on what links Boehme and Hegel, not to mention Schelling, who also did not speak properly. Hegel notes Boehme’s contributions as “God’s diremption of himself and “the generating of Light […] from qualities, […] through [a] living dialectic” [HEGEL 1995, III, p. 216]. God’s diremption is the condition for a dialectic that is “living” rather than logical because it seeks freedom in the heart of necessity, which is to say that what Hegel found in Boehme and not Wolff is the negativity of dialectic. Boehme’s “eternal Contrarium” is this “negativity” and “anguish” [HEGEL 1995, III, p. 197], as Hegel calls it, that also becomes the endless “rotatory movement” of Schelling’s Ages of the World, which at once forestalls and compels a “beginning” of history [SCHELUNG 2000, p. 20]. In the Aesthetics Schelling’s rotatory movement is the “restless ferment” of imagination in the Symbolic. In The History of Philosophy Hegel recognises the trace of this imagination in philosophy through Boehme, but wants to put it before philosophy proper, philosophy that speaks properly. To move from the beginning to the “result”, which is philosophy, Hegel must write philosophy’s history as Bildung rather than episodically. As Schelling says a “true beginning” that allows for “a steady progression” cannot produce only an “alternating retreating and advancing movement”; it must be a beginning that “persists”. Such a beginning is also the only hope for a “veritable end” that “does not need to retreat from itself back to the beginning” [SCHELLING 2000, p. 20]. A true beginning, moreover, is possible only on the basis of a “decisive past”, a decision to separate past and present [SCHELLING 2000, p. 42]. Yet the history of philosophy for Hegel is precisely this undecidable advance and retreat. Hence several chapters into this history, with German philosophy, we seem to be beginning again, and two hundred years after Boehme, in the last chapter on F.W.J. Schelling we are still only at the beginning, a problem masked by the history’s symphonic last pages. What returns in Schelling is precisely the imagination. Schelling’s “great merit” is to have discerned spirit in natural forms such as electricity and magnetism [HEGEL 1995, III, p. 542] by thinking nature imaginatively rather than scientifically. But in so doing Schelling is also fanciful, and has “misconceived the nature of thought”, making the work of art “the supreme mode in which the Idea exists for spirit” [HEGEL 1995, III, p. 542]. And yet Schelling is in this sense the unavowable remainder of Hegel’s own philosophy, particularly his philosophy of nature, which is why Hegel never entirely dismisses Schelling and instead turns his criticisms on Schelling’s more literal-minded followers⁴ [HEGEL 1995, III, pp. 540-543]. Indeed so little can Hegel put Schelling behind him that his history of philosophy ends, indecisively, with Schelling.
The impossibility of history as modernity in the History of Philosophy, the inability to decide the past as past, is tied up with Hegel’s failure to put art behind philosophy. This is to say that he also cannot write the history of art. For if philosophy keeps beginning again in different places, art also begins several times over: in the Orient (which is itself several places), Classicism (which is Greece and Rome), and then Europe. Hegel is not finished with art, and so cannot bring philosophy to a “veritable end”. If philosophy does not supersede art, then perhaps we can ask whether the Aesthetics, rather than being a philosophy or history of art, might be thought of as an art of philosophy. Might we see its modes as simultaneous rather than successive: as ways of writing and experiencing thought that are mutually necessary? And could we not then use Hegel’s work on form to think about the forms produced by his own thought: dialectic, Absolute Knowledge, spirit, and even the state? Throughout his career these remain ideas that have not been determined as concepts of the understanding that can be understood properly, and are thus subject to an incessant retreat from the form of their formulation.
That philosophy is implicated in the aesthetic is recognised by Kant when he discerns an incompletion in the ideas of reason as distinct from the concepts of understanding. This inchoateness has to do precisely with the aesthetic. For Kant, ideas are either rational and fall short because they lack (aesthetic) concreteness, or they are aesthetic ideas, shapes without a concept [KANT 1951, pp. 157-159]. Either way philosophy requires the work of art. This connection between the aesthetic and philosophy is also made in “The Oldest Systematic Program of German Idealism”, a text in Hegel’s handwriting which is also sometimes credited to Schelling or Friedrich Hölderlin, which proclaims that the “philosophy of spirit […] is an aesthetic philosophy”. According to this text, it is only when we make “ideas aesthetic, i.e. mythological”, while at the same time making mythology “reasonable”, that we have true philosophy [HEGEL 1987, pp. 162-163].
As a moment in the art of philosophy the Symbolic, then, is the beginning of the infinite idea, which must be limited, or in Schelling’s terms, inhibited, to be posited. The Symbolic has two aspects: its restless fermentation of ideas, and, because this ferment must have a result, its distorted binding of the infinite. In this sense the Symbolic is a first version of the Classical, as a giving of form to the formless, but a distorted and untrue form. In the Classical, accordingly, formulation is refined and naturalised. But if the Classical represents thought as finished, the Romantic once again unworks this thought, because subjectivity cannot “find its adequate reality” in external shapes. Curiously, the Romantic becomes a retrospective awareness of the Classical as “symbolic”: as the limitation of thought by a material hypostasis. The state provides an example of a classical and proper notion that is in effect a Symbolic resolution of underlying contradictions. For after all, Hegel himself, as part-author of “The Oldest Systematic Programme”, writes that the state “is mechanical” and cannot be an idea: “Only that which is the object of freedom is called idea” [HEGEL 1987, p. 161]. Yet the historicity of thought that discloses classical concepts as merely symbolic, also lets us read the Symbolic romantically for the “potencies” it disfigures and conceals in the mythologies of the time. And it is thus that Jean-Luc Nancy rethinks the spirit of the Hegelian state within the genealogy of his own idea of community. Nancy claims to have left Hegel “far behind” [NANCY 2002, p. 7], but it is Hegel who makes possible this departure from Hegel. For the three moments of his art of philosophy are involved in a perpetual supplementing and rethinking of each other. Classicism is the idea of thought as finished, which the Symbolic and Romantic unwork by circulating thought between a hypostasis that is always premature, and withdrawing thought as “spirit” from the concepts that limit it so as to think it once again.

¹ See RAJAN T. (Forthcoming): “(in)Digestible Material: Illness and Dialectic in Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature” in Morton T., ed. Eating Romanticism: Cultures of Taste, Theories of Appetite, London, Palgrave. ² As always, there are multiple versions of the lectures. The Haldane-Simson version (used here), based on the second edition of Karl Ludwig Michelet’s version of the lectures, is still the only complete English translation Michelet’s version of the lectures, is still the only complete English translation. ³  Wolff in fact did also write in Latin, which for Hegel is symptomatic: he wrote “German and Latin quartos on every department of Philosophy […] twenty-three thick volumes of Latin” [HEGEL 1995, III, p. 352]. Metonymically at least, Hegel also associates Wolff with the English spirit [hegel 1995, III, p. 353]. ⁴ It is also worth noting that Hegel singles out Philosophical Investigations Into the Nature of Human Freedom for particular praise, describing it as “deeply speculative”, even though Schelling never quite got to the “philosophy of Spirit” with which Hegel affiliates himself. The passage, which comes at the beginning of the section in Michelet’s second version [HEGEL 1995, p. 514] occupies a more crucial position at the end in the first version.

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