The Cunning of Reason — Part Four
‘With however what sublation of compensation in the radification of interpretation by the byeboys? Being they. Mr G. B. W. Ashburner, S. Bruno’s Toboggan Drive, Mr Faixgood, Bellchimbers, Carolan Crescent, Mr I. I. Chattaway, Hilly Gape, Poplar Park, Mr Q. P. Dieudonney, The View, Gazey Peer, Mr T. T. Erchdeakin, Multiple Lodge, Jiff Exby Rode, Mr W. K. Ferris-Fender, Fert Fort, Woovil Doon Botham onto whom adding the tout that pumped the stout that linked the lank that cold the sandy that nextdoored the rotter that rooked the rhymer that lapped at the hoose that Joax pilled’.
- James Joyce, (1882–1941), ‘Finnegans Wake’
The setting is Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker’s tavern, our landlord has been on the defensive as accusations are levelled against him; but the time for the tavern to close arrives and the customers leave, while he drinks their leftovers, passes out, and begins to dream ….
‘…. what sublation of compensation in the radification of interpretation by the byeboys… ‘. Sublation is a translation of a German term employed by Hegel, aufheben or aufhebung, to sublate, to raise, to hold, to lift up, to abolish, to suspend, to preserve, to transcend; the term seemingly bearing contradictory meanings; what is overcome is also preserved. But sublation is the very mechanism by means of which dialectic operates. Through sublation a concept is both preserved and changed through its dialectical interplay with another concept. And further, earlier stages of a temporal, developmental process are sublated into higher ones; for instance, in Hegel’s philosophy earlier philosophies are both annulled and preserved. It is important to note the conflation of the logical sublation of a concept with the physical sublation of a thing; for instance, death is the sublation of the individual (animal) and hence the emergence of the category of Spirit; though death physically sublates the individual animal, the result of this is not the next stage in the physical process, that is to say, a corpse, but the next stage in the logical process, the category, that is, in this case, and indirectly, Spirit. For sublation proceeds from the lower to the higher, not from, for instance, an animal to a corpse, and in addition there is a profound connection between the development of concepts and the development of things; this is is essential for an idealist philosophy.
Hegel’s philosophy of history thus emphasises the importance of the negative in history, but sublation itself is alone in being not subject to the historical process, for it is presumed to be true for all time and at no time changes or develops further. A sublation annuls and preserves an abstraction and its negation, this latter being an apparent contradiction that led to complications of interpretation of the abstraction; and just as in logic self-contradiction is perfectly in accord with principles of logic and is indeed necessary, history proceeds at every stage through sublation; and thus in formulating his philosophy of history Hegel traces the development of consciousness of freedom as it moves from Eastern to Western civilisation; that is to say, history navigates itself from the East to the West. And whereas Oriental civilisation is the childhood of history, Greek civilisation marks the period of adolescence; and in Roman civilisation history develops to adulthood; and Germanic civilisation appears as the fourth phase of world history, that is, old age.
The people of the Orient had acknowledged only one person as being free, the despot; and insofar as the freedom of the despot expressed itself through the reckless abandon of passion, it must be accounted as mere whimsicality and unpredictable changeability; hence, in the civilisation of the Orient there was no freedom, properly understood. In Greece and Rome, the consciousness of freedom manifested itself in the recognition that some people are free; for slavery with its restriction of freedom was an accepted institution in both Greece and Rome. It is not until the advent of the Germanic nations that it is acknowledged that all people are free; for Germanic civilisation, under the influence of Christianity, attained the consciousness of universal freedom.
Among the peoples of China and India, who comprise Oriental civilization, there is to be discovered only the first glimmering of a historical consciousness; history as such does not begin until the rise of the Persians. In China and India, the Idea remains bound to Nature; whereas the peculiar determinants of Spirit are absent. In China, morality is equated with legislative enactments, individuals are dispossessed of personality, and the will and passions of the emperor constitute the highest authority; and the emperor as the supreme head of political affairs is also at the same time the chief priest of religion; and religion is thus subordinated to the despotism of a particular bureaucratic organisation.
Such an organisation, according to Hegel, is the very negation of a historical State as a cultural unit; and the civilisation of India displays a comparable bondage to Nature; expressed particularly in the institution of the caste system. The individual does not choose his or her particular passion for him or herself but receives this from Nature; as Nature is the governing power. And so it was that in the civilisation of the Orient the universal Idea emerges in Nature, but it does not drive beyond itself to the self-consciousness of Spirit.
The Persians are the first historical peoples, and this historical consciousness is expressed in their use of Light as a symbol for the Good (Ormuzd). Light provides the condition for the exercise of choice, action and deeds which constitute the stuff of history, and historical states are what their deeds are. The Persians understood history as a struggle between Good and Evil, in which the participants were confronted with the inescapability of choice. There is a deficiency however, in the historical consciousness of the Persians, as they failed to grasp the higher unity in which the antithesis of Good and Evil is synthesized.
Judaism, which took its rise in the same geographical and cultural milieu, provides a further advance in the progressive development of the consciousness of freedom; for in Judaism, Spirit is liberated from Nature and is purified. Both the individual person and Israel as a nation come to a consciousness of themselves as distinct from Nature; and Jehovah, as the quintessence of Spirit, is understood as the Lord of Nature. Nature is thus subordinated to the role of creature, and Spirit is acknowledged as Creator. As Hegel explains:
‘The Idea of Light has at this stage advanced to that of ‘Jehovah’ — the purely One. This forms the point of separation between the East and the West; Spirit descends into the depths of its own being, and recognizes the abstract fundamental principle as the Spiritual. Nature — which in the East is the primary and fundamental existence — is now depressed to the condition of a mere creature; and Spirit now occupies the first place. God is known as the creator of all men, as He is of all nature, and as absolute causality generally’
Judaism thus marks the transition from East to West, and Spirit is acknowledged in its separation from Nature, but neither Spirit nor Nature are yet fully comprehended. It is in Greek civilisation that another advance becomes apparent; Greece, as the adolescent period of the historical process, introduces the principle of subjective freedom or individuality; a principle that is expressed both in the personal or subjective morality of Socrates (as contrasted with the customary morality of society), and in the rise of Athenian democracy. As despotism was the peculiar characteristic of the political life of the Orient, so democracy is the peculiar characteristic of the political life of Greece, and Spirit becomes introspective and posits itself as particular existence, but it posits itself precisely as the ideal and this suggests the possible triumph over particularity through a comprehension of universality itself.
But the universals of Greek thought are fixed and static essences, hence they are still fettered by the limitations of Nature; they still remain dependent upon external conditions; and therefore the new direction projected by the consciousness of the Greek Spirit still retains natural elements. A concrete expression of this principle is the continued practice of slavery, which grants freedom to some but not to all. In Rome, in which history attains its adulthood, an advance is made from democracy to aristocracy, and the institutions of the people are united in the person of the emperor. In the will of the emperor the principle of subjectivity, enunciated in Greek thought, gains unlimited realization. The will of the emperor becomes supreme, but insofar as subjectivity is universalized and objectivized at the expense of the claims of art, religion, and morality, the State which emerges in Roman civilization is still an inferior State, lacking in cultural content.
The State, understood as the concrete embodiment of subjective and objective freedom, comes to its full realization in the German Spirit; for the German Spirit, like the Greek, apprehended the principle of subjectivity, but unlike the Greek it became the bearer of the Christian ideal and thus universalized the principle to mean that all men are free. The Greek and Roman Spirit still kept some people, the slaves, in chains. The individual interests and passions of people thus find their fulfilment only in the German Spirit, and this fulfilment is the unification of the objective Idea of freedom, as the aim of history, with the particular and subjective passions of humankind, in the concrete embodiment of a cultural whole. Subjective freedom, without objective order, is mere caprice, expressed either in the will of a despot or emperor, or in the chaos of anarchy. Thus, subjective freedom cannot be realized until it finds its place within a structured whole, that is to say, the State. As Hegel explains:
‘This is the point which consciousness has attained of that form in which the principle of Freedom has realized itself; — for the History of the World is nothing but the development of the Idea of Freedom. But Objective Freedom — the laws of real Freedom — demand the subjugation of the mere contingent Will — for this is in its nature formal. If the Objective is in itself Rational, human insight and conviction must correspond with the Reason which it embodies, and then we have the other essential element — Subjective Freedom — also realized’.
‘History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake’.
- James Joyce, ‘Ulysses’.
THE END
Notes to quotation from ‘Finnegans Wake’:
1. sublation = the act of taking away, removal; in logic, denial; and the four and the rest of the customers are quite drunk, a report of supposedly known facts is compiled; and Hegel’s aufheben, having opposite meanings of destroy and preserve.
2. radification = ratification.
3. byeboys = byebye, a colloquial and nursery variant of good-bye; and by the by (phrase).
4. Mr G. B. W. Ashburner = James Joyce:Gas from a Burner; and George Bernard Shaw + (six names and addresses).
5. Saint Bruno = founder of Carthusians; and Saint Bruno pipe tobacco; and Giordano Bruno.
6. Faix = (French), load, burden; and Fox Goodman.
7. Bell chimbers = bell-chimes.
8. Carolan = last of the ancient Irish bards (died 1738), blind at eighteen; and Carolan Crescent, M.I.I. Chattaway.
9. Poplar Park = People’s Park, Dún Laoghaire.
10. Dieudonney = Dieu-donné (French), God-given; and Dieu-donné, (French Colloquial), of uncertain parentage.
11. Peer = pier; and Ghazi Power, Irish journalist.
12. Erchdeakin = Archdeacon J.F.X.P. Coppinger.
13. Rode = road.
14. Ferris-Fender, Fert Fort = F.E.R.T., ‘Fortitudo ejus Rhodum tenuit’ (‘His firmness guarded Rhodes’). This is a tribute to Amadeus the Great (b.1249), the founder of the dynasty of Savoy. In 1310 he helped against the Saracens at the siege of Rhodes; and fert, Irish monument to dead; and fahrt fort (German), rides away.
15. Botham = bothan (buhan) (Gaelic), hut; Woeful Dane Bottom, valley in Gloucestershire, possibly site of a Danish defeat.
16. tout = a spy, an informer; one who solicits custom; one who surreptitiously watches the trials of race-horses, so as to gain information for betting purposes.
17. pumped = pump, to raise or move water or other fluid by means of a pump.
18. lank — a lanky or lean person.
19. sandy = Sandy, a shortened form of the name Alexander, chiefly used in Scotland; Hence used as a nickname for a Scotchman.
20. nextdoor = the (door of the) nearest or adjoining house.
21. rotter = a thoroughly objectionable person.
22. rooked = rook, to cheat; to defraud by cheating, especially in gaming; to clean of money by fraud, extortion, or other means.
23. rhymer = one who makes rimes or verses; especially an inferior poet, a mere versifier
24. lapped = to drink greedily up (like an animal); and lived.
25. pilled = pill, to plunder, pillage, spoil; and ‘The House That Jack Built’ (nursery rhyme).
