Mythology, Madness, and Laughter: Subjectivity in German Idealism

209 Pages·2009·0.81 MB·English

by  Markus Gabriel

MYTHOLOGY, MADNESS,
AND LAUGHTER
Also available from Continuum:
Interrogating the Real, Slavoj Žižek
The Universal Exception, Slavoj Žižek
MYTHOLOGY, MADNESS,
AND LAUGHTER
Subjectivity in German Idealism
Markus Gabriel and Slavoj Žižek
Continuum International Publishing Group
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© Markus Gabriel and Slavoj Žižek 2009
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: HB: 978-1-4411-9105-2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gabriel, Markus, 1980-
Mythology, madness, and laughter: subjectivity in german idealism/Markus
Gabriel and Slavoj Zizek.
p. cm.
ISBN-13: 978-1-4411-9105-2 (HB)
ISBN-10: 1-4411-9105-4 (HB)
1. Idealism, German. 2. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1770-1831.
3. Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von, 1775-1854. 4. Fichte, Johann
Gottlieb, 1762-1814. I. Žižek, Slavoj. II. Title.
B2745.G33 2009
141.0943–dc22 2009008265
Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India
Printed and bound in Great Britain by the MPG Books Group
Contents
Introduction: A Plea for a Return to Post-Kantian Idealism 1
Markus Gabriel and Slavoj Žižek
1. The Mythological Being of Refl ection – An Essay on Hegel,
Schelling, and the Contingency of Necessity 15
Markus Gabriel
1. The Appearances – Hegel on Refl ection 27
2. The Unprethinkable Being of Mythology – Schelling on the
Limits of Refl ection 50
3. The Contingency of Necessity 81
2. Discipline between Two Freedoms – Madness and
Habit in German Idealism 95
Slavoj Žižek
1. The Hegelian Habit 99
2. The Auto-poiesis of the Self 104
3. Expressions that Signify Nothing 112
4. Habits, Animal and Human 118
3. Fichte’s Laughter 122
Slavoj Žižek
1. From Fichte’s Ich to Hegel’s Subject 123
2. Absolute and Appearance 130
3. The Fichtean Wager 137
4. Anstoß and Tat-Handlung 146
CONTENTS
5. Division and Limitation 151
6. The Finite Absolute 154
7. The Posited Presupposition 164
Notes 168
Bibliography 190
Index 199
vi
Introduction: A Plea for a Return to Post-Kantian
Idealism
Markus Gabriel and Slavoj Žižek
Although an insurmountable abyss seems to separate Kant’s critical
philosophy from his great idealist successors (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel),
the basic coordinates which render Post-Kantian Idealism possible are
already clearly discernible in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. The original
motivation for doing philosophy is a metaphysical one, to provide an
explanation of the totality of noumenal reality; as such, this motivation
is illusory, it prescribes an impossible task.1 This is why Kant’s explicit
motivation is a critique of all possible metaphysics (which is not yet
science). Kant’s endeavor thus necessarily comes after the fact of meta-
physics: in order for there to be a critique of metaphysics, there fi rst has
to be an original metaphysics; in order to denounce the metaphysical
‘transcendental illusion,’ this illusion fi rst has to occur. In this precise
sense, Kant was ‘the inventor of the philosophical history of philoso-
phy’2: there are necessary stages in the development of philosophy, i.e.,
one cannot directly get at truth, one cannot begin with it, philosophy neces-
sarily began with metaphysical illusions.3 Post-Kantian Idealists share
Kant’s preoccupation with transcendental illusion but argue that illusion
(appearance) is constitutive of the truth (being). This is what this whole
book is about.4
According to Post-Kantian Idealists, the path from illusion to its critical
denunciation is the very movement of philosophy, which means that the
1
MYTHOLOGY, MADNESS, AND LAUGHTER
successful (‘true’) philosophy is no longer defi ned by its truth-apt
discursive explanation (or representation) of the totality of being, but by
successfully accounting for illusions, i.e., by explaining not only why
illusions are illusions, but also why they are structurally necessary,
unavoidable, why they are not just accidents. The occurrence of illusions
is necessary for the eventual emergence of truth, an idea Fichte, Schelling,
and Hegel inherited from Kant.5 The ‘system’ of philosophy thus no
longer represents the alleged ontological structure of reality, but becomes
a complete system of all metaphysical statements. The proof of the
illusory nature of metaphysical propositions in the traditional sense
consists in an argument to the effect that they necessarily engender
antinomies (contradictory conclusions). Since metaphysics attempts to
avoid the very antimonies which emerge when we make our metaphy-
sical commitments downright explicit, the ‘system’ of critical philosophy
is the complete – and therefore self-contradictory, ‘antinomic’ – series of
metaphysical notions and propositions: ‘Only the one who can look
through the illusion of metaphysics can develop the most coherent, con-
sistent system of metaphysics, because the consistent system of meta-
physics is also contradictory’6 – that is to say, precisely, inconsistent.7
The critical ‘system’ amounts to a presentation (Darstellung) of the
systematic a priori structure of all possible/thinkable ‘errors’ in their
immanent necessity, thus preparing the ground for Hegel’s ‘presentation
of appearing knowledge (Darstellung des erscheinenden Wissens)’8: what we
get at the end is not the Truth that overcomes/sublates the preceding
illusions – the only truth is the inconsistent edifi ce of the logical inter-
connection of all possible illusions . . . This shift from the representation
of metaphysical Truth to the truth of the shift from error to error is
exactly what Hegel presented in his Phenomenology (and, at a different
level, in his Logic). The only (but crucial) difference is that, for Kant, this
‘dialogic’ process of truth emerging as the critical denouncing of the
preceding illusion is restricted to the sphere of our knowledge, i.e. to
epistemology, and does not concern the noumenal reality which remains
external and indifferent to it, while, for Hegel, the proper locus of this
process is the Thing itself. Like Hegel, the later Fichte and Schelling
ultimately locate the necessary displacement of truth, the necessity of
error, in the noumenal itself.9 In other words, the relative occurs within
the absolute. The absolute is not distinguished from its contingent mani-
festations. It loses the status of a substance underlying the illusory
2
INTRODUCTION
appearances and becomes the movement of a self-othering without
which the illusion of a substance could not take place. The traditional
hierarchy of substance and accident is thus completely inverted. The
accidents take over and dissolve substance into a misleading appearance.
In our view, the reason for this ontological overcoming of epistemo-
logical dichotomies (appearances vs. the thing in itself; necessity vs.
freedom etc.) can indeed be motivated by the Post-Kantian insight that
the very mode of appearance occurs within the noumenal. If we oppose
the noumenal and the phenomenal in terms of an account of the
fi nitude of knowledge we blind ourselves to the fact that this opposition
ex hypothesi occurs within the noumenal itself. Otherwise put, the whole
domain of the representation of the world (call it mind, spirit, language,
consciousness, or whatever medium you prefer) needs to be understood
as an event within and of the world itself. Thought is not at all opposed to
being, it is rather being’s replication within itself.
In what, then, does the break between Kant and Post-Kantians
consist? Kant sets out with our cognitive capacities. The apparatus of our
cognitive capacities is affected by (noumenal) things and, through its
active synthesis, organizes affections into phenomenal reality. However,
once Kant arrives at the ontological result of his critique of knowledge
(the distinction between phenomenal reality and the noumenal world of
Things-in-themselves), ‘there can be no return to the self. There is no
plausible interpretation of the self as a member of one of the two worlds.’10
This is where practical reason enters the picture: the only way to return
from ontology back to the domain of the Self is freedom. Freedom unites
the two worlds, and it provides the ultimate maxim of the Self: ‘subordi-
nate everything to freedom.’11
Yet, at this point a gap between Kant and his followers is opened up.
For Kant, freedom is an ‘irrational,’ i.e. unexplainable ‘fact of reason,’ it
is simply and inexplicably given, something like the umbilical cord inex-
plicably rooting our experience in the unknown noumenal reality. While
Kant would refuse to regard freedom as the fi rst theoretical principle out
of which one can develop a systematic notion of reality, Post-Kantian
Idealists from Fichte onwards transgress the limit constitutive of noume-
nal freedom in Kant’s sense and endeavor to provide the systematic
account of freedom itself. Freedom’s self-explication assumes a different
shape. Freedom is no longer opposed to necessity, it does not remain a
transcendent postulate, but becomes an inherent feature of being as
3