Allegra de Laurentiis last paragraph on Absolute Knowing

[R Srivatsan]

De Laurentiis has written perhaps one of the best (of two or three!) essays on the final section of the Phenomenology of Spirit, i.e., "Absolute Knowing" in a chapter by that name in Ken R Westphal, The Blackwell Guide to Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (Malden, Mass: Blackwell, 2009).  It is a long and detailed chapter, but this final couple of paragraphs are worth excerpting.

quote

The argument underlying the elaborate metaphors of these passages [the last paragraphs] may be reconstructed as follows: The goal of spirit’s movement is its completion. Completion (like the entelecheia of Aristotle’s intellect) means the full actualization of a potency. Since spirit is knowing, its completion cannot be other than absolute knowing, that is, the knowing of knowing and its content. (The goal is a condition of spirit analogous to that in which Aristotle’s intellect becomes “capable of thinking itself”; De Anima III, 4:429b9.) The path leading to this goal consists of transforming the external experiences of spirit into its internal contents. In other words: what absolute knowing knows is the being, Dasein, or substance of its Self. As it directs its gaze outward, it gains inward insight. To inwardize (insichgehen) means also to recollect or remember (erinnern) one’s past being, and thus to preserve what lacks external reality (because it is now past). A known past is a state of affairs that has vanished from time and space, but nonetheless exists. It is active in that it forms the material and spiritual substrate of the present and future: 

In its inwardization, [spirit] has sunk in the night of its self-consciousness, but its vanished existence (Daseyn) is preserved in that night, and this sublated being – past, but reborn in knowing – is the new being, a new world and shape of spirit. (PS 433.21–23/M 492)

In this new beginning, it may seem as if spirit had nothing to build upon, but in truth it is building upon the sublated forms of existence of its own past.
Epistemically, experience is the content, and thus integral part, of knowing in general. Past ways of thinking, expressing, and producing human life are the historical correlative of experience in knowledge: they are the content or “substance” of the presently dominant forms of human life. Both in natural and in human history, spirit’s spatial and temporal unfolding is a circular movement. But while (according to Hegel) individuals and species in nature are born and die out in a merely circular pattern, the rise and fall of historical epochs of cultural and political dominance is best represented as a spiral figure. The  history of spirit’s epochs (“the realm of spirits”; PS 433.31/M 492) forms a series in which each phase replaces by sublation the preceding one in world dominance. In the Philosophy of Right (§342–343), Hegel writes that history is not an irrational succession of world powers in the grip of blind fate, but rather the unfolding of spirit in the rational process of taking hold of (or grasping: erfassen) itself as this unfolding. In the closing passages of the Phenomenology, the same conception is couched in terms of an internal goal explaining the very fact of human history.  We can call this the entelechy of human thinking (in Hegel’s comprehensive use of this term): making the Self transparent to itself, or revealing “the absolute Concept” (PS 433.34/M 492). As for the apparent contingencies of human history, the “rightfulness and virtue, wrongdoing, violence and vice, talents and achievements, passions weak and strong, guilt and innocence” (PR §345) of states, peoples, and individuals are realities in which the actors are altogether “unconscious instruments” (PR §344) of spirit’s movement of self-knowing.  As a discipline, history may well recollect events as if their succession in time had no raison d’être except time itself. But philosophical science is able to reveal the organic order of the real succession, the logic of its being, the rational explanation of human history. Together, then, the recollection and the logic of spirit’s deeds form “comprehended history” (PS 434.4–5/M 493): philosophical science proper.

end quote

(pp 262-263)

Srivats

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R Srivatsan
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There is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life, and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence a meaning – devotion to individuals, to groups or to causes, social, political, intellectual or creative work … in old age we should wish still to have passions strong enough to prevent us turning in on ourselves. One’s life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation, compassion. - Simone de Beauvoir 

[R Srivatsan]

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Rama Melkote <melko...@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, Feb 13, 2024 at 7:14 AM
Subject: Re: Allegra de Laurentiis last paragraph on Absolute Knowing
To: R Srivatsan <r.sr...@gmail.com>

Reading this, somewhere I get the feeling that the present...Hindutwa etc...has layers and layers of the past buried underneath it...I wonder if this present will move on and get buried...Spirit will find its way towards a more humane and scientific subjectivity, the I and We merge in that universal Spirit....

Do I make sense?

Thanks Srivats 

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