Monday, 26th July, 2021.
One of the last propositions which Anup Dhar offered me in my questioning him regarding Hegel's thought was that it may be categorized as an aspect or expression of the Christian religion. I had till then not read his texts on Christianity, but did read the Phenomenology in full, and with patience. Though admittedly, it was a broken affair with many interruptions. These often took the form of me trying to clarify concepts or relations as I understood them from the text, in the classroom. Bear in mind that I am referring to at least two classrooms here. My unsuccessful attempt at completing a masters in philosophy at Manipal University, and my successful (to some extent) efforts at receiving the degree of a masters in sociology from Ambedkar University Delhi.
These efforts were often attritional yet briefly elucidating. In being able to point out commonalities in the conception of relations, between people and their objects, I derived great satisfaction.
There are many academic literatures, yet there is a tendency among the slightly more straight-jacketed ones to domesticate their claims and arguments in a register approaching greater resemblance, like the instinct of a pack achieving herd immunity or safety in numbers etc. Though from another angle this does also appear to be how a genre is discerned by us.
I suppose it is not surprising that the literatures of exile, imprisonment and insurrection, appealed to me for they were not guided by an in-house writing style, and hence confronted novel problems, on terrains that were still new in the societal spectrum. A preference, which I might add was far more conducive to an Althusserian such as myself, who traces encounters between contesting interests, representing heterogeneous bodies of thought.
Yet, as instructive and engaging such exercises may be, occasionally it helps a mind to explore minor relations of differences, and so, I would like to return to the proposition we began with. Is Hegel a Christian thinker? Here, I would like to interject, merely to point out that the degree of circumspection required in understanding what it is that we are asking in such a situation. Does it entail for instance an admittance that how we read Hegel; the splitting of his thought via the self-differentiation of concepts seeking to grasp and represent moments such as perception, consciousness, self-consciousness etc. are these, is this, a specifically Christian phenomena? This indeed would be a bold claim.
Whatever the answer to the first question however, we can state that Hegel himself, explicitly refers to 'Christendom' which may even include Jews in its ambit.
At this stage itself, which some may find 'premature', the inquiry, this question seems to have exhausted its productive potential. For what use is a denomination, religious or otherwise if we already know that our subject lies in it? Does this question sound absurd? In the sense, we all at least notice places of worship, bells, prayers etc. and some may even feel called to such sites. Well, to explain why it may not be an absurd question, we may have to retrace some of our footsteps.
Thought, which is the object that philosophy studies, begins with perception. An empiricist beginning to be sure, yet one which, is completely uncertain of that which it is a thought of, in other words - indeterminate. The example presented in the Phenomenology is that of 'this'. The word refers to a self evident immediacy which is apparently transparent to perception, yet inasmuch as it remains at that, it tells us nothing of what 'this' may be. It's taste, texture, sound, smell, meaning, relations to other objects (conceptual or otherwise) remain a mystery. At most, depending on our encounter with it, we merely have an apprehension of its spatio-temporal location.
So there is a sense in which 'this' denotes something, yet inasmuch as it remains the same, it amounts to and denotes maybe the most sublime ignorance of all. The sustenance of thought requires it to tarry with that which it does not understand, unless of course its non-understanding itself is apparent to it, in which case it can no longer be thought which is willing to take up its object.
To begin with, perhaps the most primary differentiation that is to be made is between the 'I' which perceives , and that which is perceived - a sense of oneself, and the self in the world. Here, we already have two moments whose cognition itself requires the positing of a vantage or perspective, point of view, etc. which can perceive both of these instances. Without any other mediations at all, we can already see how the self differentiation of concepts, elementary ones such as the 'I', the self, the world, etc. demonstrate a trajectory which perhaps isn't merely inward looking, a refrain often made of philosophy and its expression. So, allow me to return to the proposition we were considering which provoked this detour - what use is a denomination, a denotation, any act of naming, if we already know what is in it? Here, I would like to posit a preliminary hypothesis - that the prompt to name arises in us in the face of an unknown. Yet, and I believe this is more important, every name, by the token of it's very origin carries with it an incomplete index of how it is cognized - this is what permits for predication. So, inasmuch as a subject, as a subject of thought is worth raising, an aspect of that which is not known in the subject in question, which may be the object of our thought - is apprehended, even if we do not as of yet comprehend it.
Those interested in a topography of the subject, a question which may be of interest is whether this unknown, as it is constructed above, does it reside inside or outside the subject? This question is interesting because when seen from within the perspective of the relation between the 'I' and one's name, or the self and the world, or indeed between categories and denominations, changes in one, however minor, force changes in the other - yet, there is a strict sense in which this is not organic, in any vegetal sense. Perhaps here, we have once again reached a point, where it may be necessary to reassess our inquiry, and, maybe education will remain nothing other than the art of asking better questions, and on this slightly bitter note I will end this piece.
K. S Arsh, Indore
No comments:
Post a Comment