Solipsists Against Smoking

George Blecher's argument in "Healthier in lungs, poorer in spirit" is one we've heard before, but which bears repeating.

The efforts to curb smoking are symptomatic of a larger Puritanism that promises us all the 'pleasure' of being safe and protected. As Pynchon might put it, Americans are seduced by the false promise of being exempt from the ravages of time and, ultimately, death. As Zizek would say, it's the logic of the chocolate laxative. Yes, you can have the substance, but deprived of the 'harmful' ingredient that makes it pleasurable.

One of the great ironies, of course, is that while smoking and smokers are attacked in the name of better health, we still have no national health-care plan that would provide coverage for every American and the Bush Administration and its Repug allies are plotting to cripple Social Security, which will only make the situation worse. Blecher is aware of this, as he notes America is "profoundly anti-social" and increasingly "altruism takes a back seat to solipsism."

Smoking or not smoking isn't the issue. It never really was, since as every non-smoking New Yorker knows, he inhales the equivalent of two packs a day just by breathing. What concerns me is the picture of who we perceive ourselves to be: self-involved children pretending that we can escape death by playing God the Doctor and Personal Trainer. Though smoking may not have been good for us, the camaraderie that went along with it made this journey more fascinating, and its end perhaps more bearable.

Camaraderie, as a value, in America? These days, it sounds like wishful thinking.

Another Year Older and Deeper in Debt

I don't generally feel old, except when I get those statements from the Social Security Department indicating how much I've paid into the system and how much I can expect to receive per month upon retirement. The amount wouldn't cover expenses today, let alone in thirty (ha!) or forty years. And since Bush the Younger is set on destroying Social Security altogether, perhaps I shouldn't worry about that. Of course, 'not worrying' or being cynical about the possibility of doing anything is precisely what Bush and those conservative ideologues in the GOP who want to do away with social services altogether are counting on.

But this is dreary talk for a birthday. After receiving an excellent wake-up gift from Ira, Tom Wait's last CD, Real Gone, and then Amazon e-certificates from my parents and Claire (Vollman's 3500-page treatise on violence is suddenly looking affordable), I decided to 'indulge' myself. I allowed myself a respite from grading papers and (for now, anyway) The Phenomenology of Spirit. Instead, I took a bus downtown to go to the Art Institute, where I planned to reread some of Beckett's Molloy, which I'm teaching in my English and American Fiction course. (Beckett, of course, was neither English, nor American, but the course title is obviously outdated, so it doesn't matter). Emilio, a fellow Hegel seminarian, happened to be on the bus, and we ended up talking about, big surprise, Hegel. Our task: to figure out how to make all the time we've devoted to studying Hegel worthwhile, that is, how to apply it to our research interests. We both seemed to conclude that while Hegel's dialectical logic could be useful, deploying it seemed to be something of a 'long cut,' i.e. similar insights could be obtained by pondering less opaque thinkers.

At the Art Institute, I rather quickly looked at some photos by Tokihiro Sato... (typed a lot more, then lost it; dunno if I'll get around to recreating the rest of my lengthy post, detailing lunch with Ira at the MCA, etc.)

Laurie Anderson: No Time for Nostalgia or Schlumping

The New York Times Sunday Magazine features a short interview with Laurie Anderson, who has just completed a stint at NASA as artist in residence, a $20,000/year position that will no longer exist. The interview is short, and the interviewer's questions aren't exactly provocative (I mean does she really think that Anderson worries about wrinkles?), but Laurie displays her comic sensibility with some straightforward one-liners.

My favorites...

Q: Have you ever been psychoanalyzed?
A: No. I started a couple of times, but then I had to leave for the airport.

Q: At 57, do you worry about aging and wrinkles?
A: Not really. I think some prunish people look pretty good. I am more worried about turning into a schlump than into a prune.

Q: Do you find this to be a schumpy era compared with the 80's, when you were part of a creatively inspired New York art scene?
A: I don't miss the 80's. I don't miss anything right now. I have zero time for nostalgia.

Hegel's “Unhappy Consciousness” and the Need for Self-Surrender

In the final paragraphs (¶228-30) of the chapter on “Freedom of Self Consciousness,” Hegel declares that the Unhappy Consciousness, if it is to obtain “relief from its misery” (¶230), must surrender its will to a minister or priest. Such a claim may sound ominously authoritarian to many contemporary readers, for whom the individual’s freedom of choice is, in theory, regarded as an inalienable right. Therefore, I want to discuss the logic of liberation via subservience as it relates to Hegel’s “Unhappy Consciousness,” which is above all a profoundly alienated consciousness. The specific question that I propose we take up is this: what are we to make of the mediator to whom the Unhappy Consciousness is called upon to relinquish its will? But first, let me unpack the figure of the Unhappy Consciousness through a few basic questions.

Q1: What is the Unhappy Consciousness? In Hegel’s words, “the Unhappy Consciousness is the consciousness of self as a dual-natured, merely contradictory being” (¶206). That is, the Unhappy Consciousness is Hegel’s figure for a debilitating state of mind that arises when the self posits an irreconcilable rift between the Unchangeable and the Changeable, the infinite and the finite, the divine and the mortal, and the universal and the individual, etc. and then identifies itself with the second, degraded term. The fundamental self-contradiction at the core of the Unhappy Consciousness is that by means of its powers of abstract thought the self senses the potential power of the universal that it harbors within, but it is unable to harness this power insofar as the universal is experienced as something alien or beyond. What the Unhappy Consciousness fails to grasp is that it is itself a particular instantiation of universal Spirit. Self-contradiction is the catalyst for change in Hegel’s philosophy, and the point of this section is not, of course, to condemn the Unhappy Consciousness but rather to identify it as an inevitable stage in the gradual emergence of Spirit.

While most of Hegel’s commentators take as obvious the religious nature of the Unhappy Consciousness, far fewer, Robert Solomon argues, properly recognize “the extremely sarcastic tone” that Hegel adopts in this section. Solomon, our foremost contemporary existentialist philosopher, notes that “Hegel despises traditional Christianity just as much in 1806 as he did in 1793, and his treatment of Catholicism is particularly vicious” (466). Solomon suggests that St. Augustine provides a ‘real-life’ historical antecedent for the Unhappy Consciousness, draws attention to the way Hegel anticipates Nietzsche’s attacks on “slave morality,” and stresses that this section of the Phenomenology refutes those who would translate Hegel’s philosophy into an apology for Christianity. Solomon’s account raises the question of whether we should treat the Unhappy Consciousness as a historical phenomenon that is best mapped on to a particular place and time, or whether it can be deployed as a sort of ahistorical psychological profile. To get at this question, we might begin by asking:

Q2: How does the Unhappy Consciousness arise? The Unhappy Consciousness emerges dialectically from Skepticism, which is characterized by epistemological doubt and an extreme subjectivism that at times seems libratory and empowering, but can also be experienced as agonizingly confusing. Ultimately, this mode of thinking is debilitating, because the skeptical consciousness gets trapped in a vicious circle wherein the ‘I’ alternates between euphoria and despair in a state of “absolute dialectical unrest” (¶205). The euphoria derives from the skeptical consciousness’ sense that its powers of abstract thought can liberate it from the constraints imposed by specific worldly contexts, whereas its despair results from a sense that its powers of thought, while capable of causing “objective reality” and “its relationship to it” to disappear, are unable to yield anything more substantial than a vertiginous state of contingency and confusion (¶204). As a consequence of doubting and thereby negating objective, determinate reality entirely, the skeptical consciousness concludes that it “is in fact nothing but a purely casual, confused medley, the dizziness of a perpetually self-engendered disorder” (¶205). This ‘identity crisis,’ results from the skeptical consciousness’s over identification with the “protean Changeable,” an identification which prompts it to “set about freeing itself from the unessential, i.e. from itself” (¶208) and which yields the Unhappy Consciousness. But this project of self-liberation is destined to fail, “[f]or though it indeed takes itself to be merely the Changeable, and the Unchangeable is, for it, an alien Being, yet it is itself a simple, hence unchangeable, consciousness, and hence is aware that this consciousness is its own essence, although in such a way that again it does not itself take the essence to be its own” (127). In other words, the Unhappy Consciousness’ very sense of hopelessness, of being absolutely alienated from the Unchangeable, prompts a misrecognition about its state of being—the recognition being the paradoxical one that its inability to free itself from the unessential means that it is, in a sense, an unchangeable (with a lowercase ‘u’) consciousness. While the distinction between an unchangeable consciousness and an Unchangeable consciousness is enormous, and while the Unhappy Consciousness still fails to fully grasp its essence as part of the Unchangeable, we, that is the Unhappy Consciousness, is showing signs of making some progress. The next question, then, is:

Q3: How can the Unhappy Consciousness break free from this back and forth movement and its contradictory state? Liberation will occur when the Unhappy Consciousness rises to a mode of “thinking where consciousness as a particular individuality is reconciled with pure thought itself” (¶216). This failure to ascend to this mode of thought is due to a failure to understand that “the Unchangeable, which it knows essentially in the form of individuality, is its own self, is itself the individuality of consciousness” (¶216). In other words, what the Unhappy Consciousness fails to grasp is that the rift between the individual (contingent, finite, changeable) and the universal (eternal, infinite, Unchangeable)—as the insurmountable obstacle, as pure negativity, as the gap in the order of being—is precisely what makes the advent of Reason possible. The next paradox Hegel presents is that for the Unhappy Consciousness to liberate itself from its unhappy state, it must relinquish its freedom entirely to another, the minister who is said to have a “direct relationship with the unchangeable Being,” and in the process objectivize itself in such a way that it can no longer think of itself as an ‘I’ that exists for itself (¶228).

Hegel specifies three “moments of surrender” that are required of the Unhappy Consciousness, if it is to break free from its misery. First, it must surrender its right to make decisions for itself, then it must surrender the property and enjoyment that it derives from its labors in the world, and finally, it must surrender its desire to act in a comprehensible fashion, to practice “what it does not understand” (¶229). Why, we might ask, would Hegel prescribe the Unhappy Consciousness, already tormented by a sense of hopelessness, to such a harsh regimen? If it is already in such a miserable state, why is it necessary for it to act in such a way that would seem to place it in an even more abject position? Hegel’s response is that only by following these steps mechanically or automatically does the Unhappy Consciousness “truly and completely depriv[e] itself of the consciousness of inner and outer freedom, of the actuality in which consciousness exists in itself” (¶229). In other words, this deprivation is necessary in order to negate a self-consciousness that, again, mistakenly identifies its relation to the Unchangeable by understanding itself to be autonomous and individual and thus continues to oscillate wildly between over-confidence about its freedom of thought and despair at this freedom ever providing access to what it conceives as a ‘beyond’. Of the Unhappy Consciousness is to succeed at breaking free from the vicious circle of skepticism, a minister must intervene or mediate. This mediation makes possible a surrender or sacrifice of self, a negation during which “immediate self-consciousness [is turned] into a Thing, into an objective existence” (¶229).

Q4: So why is a mediator/minister/priest necessary?An external agent is necessary for an actual sacrifice (of will to decide, of property and enjoyment) to take place, because without this mediator the troublesome self-consciousness would not be fully objectified. Basically, the idea is that if a third party doesn’t assume responsibility for the Unhappy Consciousness’s decisions, thereby effectively objectifying the Unhappy Consciousness’s sense of itself, the self-consciousness will continue to deceive itself regarding its relationship to the Unchanageable. The deception referred to here results from what Zizek often refers to as the conflict between the enunicated (the theoretical position)—here, the Unhappy Consciousness’s “disclaim[ing] of all power pertaining to its own independent existence”—and its position of enunciation—i.e., the fact that in making this disclaimer, it “holds on to its own particular existence…” (¶229). In other words, despite its good intentions in acknowledging its gratitude for various gift of freedom—the right to decide, property and enjoyment, etc.—in the very act of acknowledgement the Unhappy Consciousness cannot help but imagine itself as being an agent whose existence is radically detached from the Spirit responsible for these gifts. Consider, for example, the call to give up or renounce what one has acquired through work. Without the surrendering of one’s will, this renunictory gesture alone could be insufficient and produce merely a false sense of humility. Although the gesture is supposed to express one’s thanks for the grace of God, it has an inverse effect. By treating the world and one’s capacities to change it as a divine gift, one feels blessed by these gifts, privileged to be one of the chosen, which then becomes a source of pride. In the penultimate paragraph of the section (¶229). We’re all aware of this phenomenon of false humility, which the Protestant emphasis on outwards signs of one’s Elect status effectively endorses, and which I would argue is a defining characteristic of contemporary American religious zealotry.

To recap, then, the Unhappy Consciousness is an alienated consciousness, tormented by its sense of being irrevocably separated from the Unchangeable, which it fails to identify as its own essence or nature and understands to be somewhere far beyond. In its misguided efforts to liberate itself from its worldly existence, the Unhappy Consciousnesss only makes itself more miserable. What the Unhappy Consciousness fails to grasp is that the Spirit is immanent in and can only be accessed via particular, concrete instances, which is to say that, in order for self-consciousness to actualize the Spirit within, it must do so by engaging with the finite, material world in which it is embodied. For Hegel, this means first and foremost engaging with others, as it is only through the recognition of the other that true self-knowledge is possible. In order to overcome its self-alienation the Unhappy Consciousness must negate its distorted self-consciousness through a surrender of its will to an other, the minister. Only through the mediation effected by this minister will the process of becoming, through which the individual subject is reconciled with the Absolute predicate occur.

At the end of this section, the Unhappy Consciousness does not yet recognize itself as being the “essential will,” though it is progressing towards this recognition. Because the Unhappy Consciousness still regards itself as “pitiable,” still remains in “pain,” and still regards the Unchangeable to be “a beyond, ” it would seem that little progress has been made. Nonetheless, Hegel insists that through the very act of divesting itself of the ability to exercise its will, through relinquishing its decisions to another, the Unhappy Consciousness has restored its belief in “the idea of Reason, of the certainty that, in its particular individuality it has being absolutely in itself, or is all reality” (138). My final line of questioning is this:

Q5: Can we say anything more about this third mediating figure? When Hegel speaks of the need for a “mediator or minister [priest],” how literally should we take this comment (¶228)? Must this figure be a official holy man or woman, ordained by some religious institution? Obviously not, if we want to provide a secular gloss on The Phenomenology. The important point appears to be that the Unhappy Consciousness, relinquish responsibility to another person, and while he specifies a minister, this need not be a literal priest or holy man, just a person in a position of authority who has a “direct relationship with the unchangeable Being” (Zizek would suggest Lenin or Lacan). Nonetheless, how are we to know whether or not the mediator to whom we are to surrender are will truly has “a direct relationship with the unchangeable Being” and isn’t just a charlatan or fraud seeking disciples to use and exploit?

The following question might seem to be ‘out there,’ though I raise it because the tendency to personify texts, granting them a status equivalent to another human being, has become common in the past fifty or so years: Is “Third” figure, whom Hegel figures as a “minister,” and a “counselor” another living human being—which the reference to “someone else” (¶228) would seem to suggest—or could this “other” that is to be posited “not as a particular but as a universal will” take the form of an inhuman entity, e.g., a text, perhaps even The Phenomenology of Sprit itself, with which one could have an encounter?

Addendum: Can we say more about the relationship of the lord and bondsman section to the Unhappy Consciousness? Hegel makes a direct link between these two figurations when he suggests that, “the duplication which was formerly divided between two individuals, the lord and the bondsman, is now lodged in one. The duplication of self-consciousness within itself, which is essential in the Notion of Spirit, is thus here before us, but not yet in its unity: the Unhappy Consciousness is the consciousness of self as a dual-natured, merely contradictory being” (¶206). The Unhappy Consciousness internalizes within a single mind the contradiction previously figured between the lord, the emblem of Stoic freedom, and the bondsman, whose subservient status is associated with Skepticism.

Hegel, G.W.F. The Phenomenology of Spirit. 1806. Trans. A.V. Miller. New York: Oxford UP, 1977.
Solomon, Robert C. In the Spirit of Hegel: A Study of G.W.F. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. New York: Oxford UP, 1982

Bush Displays Satanic Signifier

Note to self: The 'fact' that Norwegians confused Bush's inaugral salute with hailing Satan provides a nice example of the arbitrary relationship between the signifier (the gesure of displaying the right hand with the index and pinky finger raised) and the signified (hailing Satan or the 'Hook 'em, horns sign), a concept that we spent some time discussing in my American Literature and Culture class Thursday.

The article also provides an example of a pseduo-news story (more on that later...)

And did Dubya flash the sign or just Jenna? I know, who gives a rat's ass, but I've been reading Hegel all afternoon.