The Seventh Degree of Wisdom — Part Seven
‘But by writing thithaways end to end and turning, turning and end to end hithaways writing and with lines of litters slittering up and louds of latters slettering down, the old semetomyplace jupetbackagain from tham Let Rise till Hum Lit. Sleep, where in the waste is the wisdom?’
- James Joyce, ‘Finnegans Wake’
This passage is taken from a chapter in the Wake the theme of which is ‘Hum Lit.’, Humaniores Literae (Latin), Humane Letters, the Humanities; (also here suggesting of course William Shakespeare’s, (1564–1616), ‘Hamlet’, as does ‘tham Let’), literature, writers and writing; and to establish the thought of literature the chapter is compacted with allusions to many diverse writers and literary works besides Shakespeare. For literature is creation, and creation accords well with Giambattista Vico’s, (1668–1744), divine age; it is his theory of cyclical history that informs the Wake after all, and in the divine age metaphor is the means by which to comprehend human and natural phenomena, according to Vico. And given that an apt opening for a chapter on renewal would be a river, so the chapter begins with an invocation, in the rhythm of the prayer Our Father, to the River Goddess, the feminine creative principle, Anna Livia Plurabelle: ‘In the name of Annah the Allmaziful, the Everliving, the Bringer of Plurabilities, haloed be her eve, her singtime sung, her rill be run, unhemmed as it is uneven!’
Overseeing this new genesis is Eve, Great Mother, river, Muse, … and hen, for here reappears the mysterious letter from Boston, referred to in various other places throughout the text, becoming a focal point for discussion; perhaps penned by A.L.P. herself, the hen or poule had dug up this letter amid the litter of Waterloo, that litter full of letters, amidst other refuse; for from out of the debris of the Fall comes renewal by letters, and now the hen has dug up the letter again; and a close examination of the letter is undergone, word for word, letter by letter, to decipher its meaning; and what is to be made of it? Thus following upon the invocation is a lecture conducted as in a dream, an analysis both concealing and revealing, a burlesque of critical method and practice; at once beyond reason and against it. The letter represents all literature but most especially the Wake itself; for how are we to read and understand it? This work, the Wake, that is meant to be ‘keen again and begin again to make soundsense and sensesound kin again’.
The authorship of the letter, its origin and content, even its envelope, all are investigated; forbearance will be required however prior to any discovery as to ‘who in hallhagal wrote the durn thing’; much work is to be carried out before it delivers up its meaning; and so diverse theories and approaches to the interpretation of the letter are adduced, serving as an analogy to an interpretation of the Wake itself. These include textual and historical analyses, as well as the kind of analysis one would expect Sigmund Freud, (1856–1939), to advance; and following upon this is a discussion of the beauty and intricacy of the letter; its elaborate complexity illustrated through Joyce’s mimicking of Sir Edward Sullivan’s, (1852–1928), commentary upon the Book of Kells, an illuminated manuscript of the Gospels, c. 800 ACE, in particular highlighting the tunc page of this work; ‘Tunc cru cifixerant XPI cum eo du os la trones’ … ‘Then there were crucified with him two thieves’, (Matthew 27:38).
But A.L.P. centres upon her husband, Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, for the letter is the ever and forever re-interpreted memory of A.L.P. and H.C.E.’s life together, an interwoven series of signs and symbols, expressions and indications, interpreted and misinterpreted; born out of the woman, by her words laid down, thence in the man brewing; summoned forth by the woman’s deed, a concoction of man and woman, a synthesis of no longer to be borne feminine penmanship and commanding masculine punctuation, for writing just like reading can be a collusive endeavour; half the writing going ‘thithaways’ and half ‘hithaways’, hithering-thithering, falling and rising, waking and sleeping, like Hamlet (‘tham Let’) … And so the letter is viewed ‘under the pudendascope’: ‘All schwants (schwrites) ischt tell the cock’s troot about him. Kapak kapuk. No minzies matter. He had to see life foully the plak and the smut, (schwrites)’. That is to say, she wants God’s truth, the absolute truth, little by little, don’t mince matters, but speak plainly; it’s of no use mincing matters, or making secrets, is it? … in whatsoever a wicked or foul manner he sees life.
And ‘for to tell the cock’s truth’ brings to mind Ophelia’s song from ‘Hamlet’:
By Gis and by Saint Charity,
Alack, and fie, for shame!
Young men will do ’t, if they come to ’t.
By Cock, they are to blame.
Such are letters in the wasteland. ‘Sleep, where in the waste is the wisdom?’… and that, of course, refers to T. S. Eliot’s, (1888–1965), ‘The Waste Land’:
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
‘Where in the waste is the wisdom?’ you may well be asking of this series given its title and now that I have reached the final part. I did say in part one that I intended to look into Immanuel Kant’s, (1724–1804), transcendental idealism as presented in the ‘Critique of Pure Reason’, to be followed by Bishop Berkeley’s, (1685–1753), subjective idealism as presented in ‘A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge’, to demonstrate why Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, (1770–1831), considered them both to be species of bad idealism, and to end with an account of why objective or Absolute idealism is a good idealism; but I have already addressed Berkeleyan idealism in ‘The Language of God’ parts one and two; and so I will end here with an account of Hegelian idealism. For the Wakean themes of interpretation together with the themes of birth and renewal continue: ‘Our epoch is a birth-time’, wrote Hegel, ‘and a period of transition. The spirit of man has broken with the old order of things hitherto prevailing, and with the old ways of thinking, and is in the mind to let them all sink into the depths of the past and to set about its own transformation’.
Hegel lived in a period of philosophical as well as historical and political ferment, where original and thrilling potentialities and prospects for thought were becoming available, alongside the emergence of competing conceptions of these; and German Idealism was a truly remarkable phenomenon that most certainly matched classical Greek philosophy for originality and significance. German Idealism was initiated by Kant’s ‘critical philosophy’, with its attempt to set metaphysics upon ‘the secure path of a science’ and to balance the competing perspectives of determinism in natural science and freedom in morality; but those following upon Kant came to regard his actual achievement as leaving philosophy susceptible to scepticism, while falling short of overcoming certain dualisms, between freedom and determinism, morality and the scientific perspective, the autonomous subject and the natural self; for in philosophy explanation should always tend towards monism; ultimate reality after all is ultimately real in virtue of being dependent on nothing outside of itself. Another philosophical system was therefore sought for, one that went beyond Kant but that would achieve that which he endeavoured to do, encompassing the natural sciences, the arts, and history, and epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, political philosophy, and the philosophy of religion.
‘The battle of reason’, said Hegel, ‘is the struggle to break up the rigidity to which the understanding has reduced everything’, while ‘the metaphysic of understanding is dogmatic, because it maintains half-truths in their isolation’; whereas the ‘idealism of speculative philosophy carries out the principle of totality and shows that it can reach beyond the inadequate formularies of abstract thought’
Hegel’s approach is rather than to directly confront seemingly intractable intellectual problems to reflect upon them to enquire into why such problems have arisen in the first place; and discovering the source of a problem in a set of one-sided assumptions, it is then possible to overcome such one-sidedness, so that the problem dissolves and we are spared the wavering between one unsatisfactory position and its equally unsatisfactory alternative. ‘The questions which philosophy fails to answer, are answered by seeing that they should not be so posed in the first place’, said Hegel (Yes, Hegel did write aphorisms, collected in his delightfully named ‘Wastebook’; John Locke, (1632–1704), did the same, although he called his a ‘Commonplace Book’). Hegel’s approach should not be confused with similar ‘philosophy as therapy’ approaches, however; for instance, those of Ludwig Wittgenstein, (1889–1951), and J. L. Austin, 1911–1960); for Hegel was no champion of the putative supremacy of so-called ordinary language nor of the supremacy of the pre-philosophical perspective against the enticements and delusions of philosophy and its losing sight of our common-sense conception of things. On the contrary, for Hegel it is precisely the reverse; the understanding forms the natural place to begin in our thinking, so that it is only with the intervention of further philosophical reflection that we can see our way through the problems that this engenders; common-sense or our ordinary pre-philosophical scientific, political, or religious beliefs should by no means be left as they are but are to be reflected upon philosophically if we are to make the ‘discovery . . . that gives philosophy peace’, as Wittgenstein put it.
Hegel maintains that these beliefs are in fact drenched in philosophical assumptions, and are slippery on their own; and although took some of the central problems of philosophy to be pseudo-problems, for they are engendered by our way of looking at the world, rather than inherent in the world itself, and therefore should be resolved reflectively rather than through further inquiry, he nevertheless held that they can only be dealt with by turning to philosophy rather than away from it, as only philosophy and not natural consciousness is capable of the kind of dialectical thinking that is necessary in order to overcome the puzzles that natural consciousness itself produces:
‘What man seeks in this situation, ensnared here as he is in finitude on every side, is the region of a higher, more substantial, truth, in which all oppositions and contradictions in the finite can find their final resolution, and freedom its full satisfaction. This is the region of absolute, not finite, truth. The highest truth, truth as such, is the resolution of the highest opposition and contradiction. In it validity and power are swept away from the opposition between freedom and necessity, between spirit and nature, between knowledge and its object, between law and impulse, from opposition and contradiction as such, whatever forms they may take. Their validity and power as opposition and contradiction is gone. Absolute truth proves that neither freedom by itself, as subjective, sundered from necessity, is absolutely a true thing nor, by parity of reasoning, is truthfulness to be ascribed to necessity isolated and taken by itself. The ordinary consciousness, on the other hand, cannot extricate itself from this opposition and either remains despairingly in contradiction or else casts it aside and helps itself in some other way. But philosophy enters into the heart of the self-contradictory characteristics, knows them in their essential nature, i.e. as in their one-sidedness not absolute but self-dissolving, and it sets them in the harmony and unity which is truth. To grasp this Concept of truth is the task of philosophy’.
Rationalism does bear with it a spirit of optimism, for consciousness is brought to look at the world as a place where it can be at home: ‘Now that self-consciousness is Reason, its hitherto negative relation to otherness turns round into a positive relation. Reason holds that the world is rational, and so now sets out to find itself in this otherness’. But for Hegel, arch rationalist though he may be, Berkleyan and Kantian idealism is rationalism in distorted form, it hardly makes us feel at home in the world; they are one-sided, they are inadequate, the tension between the categories of individuality and universality remains unresolved, as Hegel explains in his discussion of idealism in the ‘Phenomenology of Mind’, whereby the distinction between the subject and the world collapses, and thoughts and things are taken to coincide immediately:
‘Up till now [self-consciousness] has been concerned only with its independence and freedom, concerned to save and maintain itself for itself at the expense of the world, or of its own actuality, both of which appeared to it as the negative of its essence. But as Reason, assured of itself, it is at peace with them, and can endure them; for it is certain that it is itself reality, in that everything actual is none other than itself; its thinking is itself directly actuality, and thus its relationship to the latter is that of idealism . . . It discovers the world as its new real world, which in its permanence holds an interest for it which previously lay only in its transiency; for the existence of the world becomes for self-consciousness its one truth and presence; it is certain of experiencing only itself therein’.
Idealism enables consciousness to gain release from the appetite for the transcendent, and the need to negate the world: ‘Apprehending itself in this way, it is as if the world had for it only now come into being; previously it did not understand the world; it desired it and worked on it, withdrew from it into itself and abolished it as an existence on its own account, and its own self qua consciousness — both as consciousness of the world as essence and as consciousness of its nothingness’. Idealism therefore represents a way forward, for through it we have our rationalistic faith restored, in that the subject will find the world accessible to reason, in so far as it is created by the subject, so ‘it is certain of experiencing only itself therein’. But the idealistic rationalism that Hegel is arguing against does not itself argue for its position or make an effort to take on board other points of view, but simply dogmatically asserts that:
‘Reason is the certainty of being all reality’.
And Hegel continues:
‘Its first declaration is only this abstract empty phrase that everything is its own. For the certainty of being all reality is at first only the pure category. This Reason which first recognises itself in the object finds expression in the empty idealism which grasps Reason only as it first comes on the scene; and fancies that by pointing out this pure ‘mine’ of consciousness in all being, and by declaring all things to be sensations or ideas, it has demonstrated this ‘mine’ of consciousness to be complete reality’.
………
‘This idealism therefore becomes the same kind of self-contradictory ambiguity as Scepticism, except that, while this expresses itself negatively, the former does positively; but it fails equally with Scepticism to bring together its contradictory thoughts of pure consciousness being all reality, while the extraneous impulse or sensations and ideas are equally reality’.
- Hegel, ‘Phenomenology of Mind’
But in Hegel’s philosophical methodology other standpoints are gone through first: ‘the consciousness which is this truth has this path behind it and has forgotten it, and comes on the scene immediately as Reason; in other words, this Reason which comes immediately on the scene appears only as the certainty of that truth . . . The idealism that does not demonstrate that path but starts off with this assertion is therefore, too, a pure assertion which does not comprehend its own self, nor can it make itself comprehensible to others’.
And further, Kant’s metaphysical deduction in the ‘Critique of Pure Reason’, whereby he derives his table of categories from a table of logical judgements, (see ‘The Seventh Degree of Wisdom’ — Part Four) is really very much an unsatisfactory way to proceed, ‘an outrage on Science’, Hegel calls it, for it disregards any demonstration the necessity of the categories. In addition, Hegel claimed that ‘everything turns on grasping the True, not only as Substance, but equally as Subject’; for Hegel was an idealist, but it is also vital for him that he ensured that this unity ‘does not again fall back into inert simplicity, and does not depict actuality itself in a non-actual manner’. Kantian idealists contravened this restriction, with the consequence that the emptiness of the subject necessitated them to reintroduce another kind of negation, the Kantian unknowable thing-in-itself, and thus their rationalism ends up being compromised by an underlying scepticism:
‘Consciousness’ first declaration is only this abstract empty phrase that everything is its own. For the certainty of being all reality is at first [only] the pure category. This Reason which first recognizes itself in the object finds expression in the empty idealism which grasps Reason only as it first comes on the scene;and fancies that by pointing out the pure ‘mine’ of consciousness in all being, and declaring all things to be sensations or ideas, it has demonstrated that ‘mine’ of consciousness to be complete reality. It is bound, therefore, to be at the same time absolute empiricism, for in order to give filling to the empty ‘mine’, i.e. to get hold of difference with all its developed formulations, its Reason requires extraneous impulse, in which first is to be found the multiplicity of sensations and ideas . . . The pure Reason of this idealism, in order to reach this ‘other’ which is essential to it, and thus is the in-itself, but which it does not have within it, is therefore thrown back by its own self on to that knowing which is not a knowing of what is true; in this way, it condemns itself of its own knowledge and volition to being an untrue kind of knowing, and cannot get away from ‘meaning’ and ‘perceiving’, which for it have no truth. It is involved in a direct contradiction; it asserts essence to be a duality of opposed factors, the unity of apperception and equally a Thing; whether the Thing is called an extraneous impulse, or an empirical or sensuous entity, or the Thing-in-itself, it still remains in principle the same, i.e. extraneous to that unity’.
(The ‘extraneous impulse’ refers to Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s, (1762–1814), Anstoss, ‘impulse’, free practical activity of the I, a postulation of Fichte’s performing a similar role to the Kantian thing-in-itself, except that is not foreign to the I but is an original encounter of the I with its own finitude; a limit to the I but the I is positing its own limit .. bad idealism again.)
‘I lock my door upon myself,
And bar them out; but who shall wall
Self from myself, most loathed of all?’
- Christina Rossetti (1830–1894)
Hegel is criticising Kantian subjective idealism, for his own idealistic rationalism is to be understood as absolute idealism. Subjective idealists made the subjectivist turn because reality was considered to be intelligible to consciousness only in so far as it has a form imposed upon it by the mind; at the same time, things in themselves, which do not have this form imposed upon them, rest beyond the apprehension of the intellect. But although it is true that reality must have a certain form in order to be intelligible to consciousness, it is not imposed by the subject upon reality, it is inherent in reality itself, for the absolute idealist, whereby the form mediates between the subject on the one hand and the world on the other. ‘Thought contains reconciliation in its purest essentiality’, said Hegel, ‘because it approaches the external world in the expectation that this will embody the same reason as the subject does’. And Idealism proper is the doctrine that the world has a rational structure that is accessible to thought, thought is identical to being in fact, and therefore can be brought to consciousness, that is, consciousness can make itself aware of this rational structure as it exists in the world, but absolute idealism rejects any idealism that treats such rational structures as mind-dependent or mind imposed.
One could say therefore that Hegel was an absolute idealist and a conceptual realist:
‘But after all, objectivity of thought, in Kant’s sense, is again to a certain extent subjective. Thoughts, according to Kant, although universal and necessary categories, are only our thoughts — separated by an impassable gulf from the thing, as it exists apart from our knowledge. But the true objectivity of thinking means that the thoughts, far from being merely ours, must be at the same time the real essence of things, and of whatever is an object to us’.
Rather than the world being dependent on a constructive mind, human consciousness reflects and makes known the fundamental conceptual order inherent in things as they are in themselves, rather than things as they are constituted by us; and while subjective idealism may well present itself as an option for the rationalist because in some sense it breaks down the barrier between mind and world, in fact this option is unstable, for it breaks this barrier down immediately, without proper respect for the mind-independence of reality, so that sceptical problems present themselves once again. Kantian idealism treats the phenomenal world as constituted by the mind and hence as knowable, but it is thereby is forced to posit a mind-independent noumenal reality beyond it, to provide the mind with some content for its constituting activity; but this reality is then deemed unknowable, as it lies outside the world as the subject determines that world:
‘This idealism is involved in this contradiction because it asserts the abstract Notion of Reason to be the True; consequently, reality directly comes to be for it a reality that is just as much not that of Reason, while Reason is at the same time supposed to be all reality. This Reason remains a restless searching and in its very searching declares that the satisfaction of finding is a sheer impossibility’.
In Absolute Idealism the Absolute Idea, the ultimate category, is Spirit, the ultimate foundation of the world; the Absolute is the system of categories, and it is the final phase of human spirit. The Absolute is not any particular spirit, it is not me, it is not humanity in general; Absolute spirit is perfect spirit; but it is in me, this individual me, as my very centre of my being; it is the very pattern upon which I am made;, because it is the pattern on which I am made. And yet I, this individual, with all my unreasonable changeableness, my oddities, my self-centredness, my jealousies, my bad habits, my insensitivity, my anxieties, my loneliness and isolation, I am but a distortion of Absolute Spirit. For to adopt religious language, which is to say, metaphorical language, the Absolute Spirit is the spirit of God, the totally rational and all knowing and all wise perfect Spirit; and to say that Absolute Spirit is the final phase of human spirit means no more than this, that the human spirit is of essentially the same kind as the spirit of God, and that every person is potentially divine. But lest there be any misunderstandings here, in nowise did Hegel believe in a personal God, a God perceived as a person, or even a God in three persons, among other persons; for the The Absolute is personality, another term for the Absolute Idea, or the Absolute Spirit; but not a particular person, or a particular spirit, for that would mean finite spirit.
‘I Am’
by John Clare (1793–1864)
I am: yet what I am none cares or knows
My friends forsake me like a memory lost;
I am the self-consumer of my woes,
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shades in love and death’s oblivion lost;
And yet I am! and live with shadows tost
Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life nor joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems;
And e’en the dearest- that I loved the best-
Are strange- nay, rather stranger than the rest.
I long for scenes where man has never tro
A place where woman never smil’d or wept;
There to abide with my creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept:
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie;
The grass below — above the vaulted sky.
‘Now gode. Let us leave theories there and return to here’s here’.
- James Joyce, ‘Finnegans Wake’
Notes to ‘Finnegans Wake’ quotation:
1. thitherways = in that direction
2. end to end = with the ends in contact, lengthwise (in the direction of the length, longitudinal); and ‘ox-turning’: writing alternate lines in opposite directions, description and imitation of boustrephodon.
3. litter = odds and ends, fragments and leavings lying about, rubbish; and letters; and Budge: ‘The Book of the Dead’ lxxiv: (of Osiris) ‘the god who is the lord of the ladder’.
4. slettering = slitter, to slide, glide; and Slattery’s Mounted Foot, Percy French’s song about comic Irish peasant warriors, extravagant in heroic wish, cowardly in act (in the song they come down from the mountains, go up again).
tham = them; that; the.
Hum. Lit. = Humaniores Literae (Latin), Humane Letters, the Humanities; and Hamlet.
