Mary C. Rawlinson - The Betrayal of Substance

Columbia University Press

Publishers Since 1893

New York Chichester, West Sussex

cup.columbia.edu

Copyright 2021 Columbia University Press

All rights reserved

E-ISBN 978-0-231-55292-9

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Rawlinson, Mary C., author.

Title: The betrayal of substance : death, literature, and sexual difference in Hegels Phenomenology of spirit / Mary C. Rawlinson.

Description: [New York : Columbia University Press], 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020013864 (print) | LCCN 2020013865 (ebook) | ISBN 9780231199049 (hardback) | ISBN 9780231199056 (paperback)

Subjects: LCSH: Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 17701831. Phnomenologie des Geistes.

Classification: LCC B2929 .R39 2020 (print) | LCC B2929 (ebook) | DDC 193dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020013864

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020013865

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at .

Cover image: Widayat, while fishing, he has to pee, woodcut print on cloth, 80 x 40 cm. Copyright OHD Museum. Courtesy of Dr. Oei Hong Djien.

Cover design: Lisa Hamm

At a time when the universality of spirit has gathered such strength, and singularity, as is fitting, has become correspondingly less important the share of the total work of spirit which falls to the individual can only be very small. less must be expected of him, just as he must expect less of himself, and may demand less for himself.

G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit , Preface, 72

Appearance is the arising and passing away that does not itself arise and pass away, but is in itself, and constitutes the actuality and the movement of the life of truth. The true is thus the Bacchanalian revel in which no member is not drunk; yet because each member, as he detaches, is immediately dissolved, the revel is just as much transparent and simple repose. Judged in the court of this movement, the singular shapes of spirit do not persist any more than determinate thoughts do, but they are as much positive and necessary moments, as they are negative and evanescent. In the whole of the movement, seen as a state of calm, what distinguishes itself therein, and gives itself a differentiated and specific existence, is preserved as something that remembers itself, whose existence is self-knowledge and whose self-knowledge is as well immediate existence.

G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit , Preface, 47

The ethical substance having withdrawn from its outer existence back into its pure self-consciousness is the aspect of the concept or of the activity with which spirit brings itself forth as object. This activity is pure form, because the individual, in ethical obedience and service, has worked off every unconscious existence and fixed determination in the same way that substance has become fluid essence. This form is the night in which substance was betrayed and made itself into subject. It is out of this night of pure certainty of self that the ethical spirit is resurrected as a shape freed from nature and its own immediate existence.

G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit , 703 (My Emphasis)

[Philosophers] are like children who imagine that when they come to the end of a plain, they shall be able to touch the sky with their hand.

tienne Bonnot De Condillac, An Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge