19thC Philosophy

In Senior Seminar, my fellow Seminarees and I just finished a fascinating text by Susan Buck-Morss, called Hegel, Haiti and Universal History. In it, she argues for a new form of Universal History that disrupts Hegel's teleological aims. Using the specific example of Hegelian scholarship, she also shows the disciplinary blindness of both History and Philosophy departments, a critique grounded in a re-interpretation of the "Lordship and Bondage" section. Interestingly, she argues, the Haitian revolution may have inspired Hegel's abstract articulation of consciousness' first encounter with an other. A particular chapter drew my attention, and I'd like to delve into it further now. 

            Buck-Mors concludes the chapter’s section, entitled “At the Crossroads,” with a simple aphorism: “Only a distorted history is morally pure” (138). Living in Memphis, it is difficult to excise the signifier “crossroads” from Robert Johnson’s mythos. According to legend, he met the Devil in the middle of the night, while walking down a desolate strip with his guitar. At the point of this meeting, Johnson, by all accounts, lingered in mediocrity as a musician, a detail that enhances the myth’s power. The Devil approaches him with a common proposition. Johnson accepts the terms by handing over his guitar. The Devil tunes it and hands it back. From that moment on, Johnson, if you believe the stories, became the bluesman we know him as today. (Some say his wife and child paid the price for his choice—they both died during child birth. Others say different.)

            Buck-Mors offers an alternative to the either/or option given to Mr. Johnson. For her money, ‘both’ reconciles the distortions that disrupt the apparent teleological trajectory so often peddled by Historians, Philosophers, and Politicians, alike: “The less we see historical actors as playing theatrically coherent roles, the more universally accessible their human dilemmas become” (145). In an attempt to encapsulate the totality of history, teachers and students accept the historical shorthand that jacks up the contrast on a complicated picture, so much so that all the detail gets lost. We must employ a porosity that does not exclude on detail on disciplinary or methodological grounds. 

            Rather than appropriating this Manichean metric, revisionary historians tend on the side of detail but inevitably omit certain factors in order to intrench—either accidentally or maliciously—a certain vantage points that valorizes or demonizes: “Empathic imagination may well be our best hope for humanity. The problem is that we never seem to imagine this humanity inclusively enough, but only by excluding an antithetical other, a collective enemy beyond humanity’s pale” (144). Through difference comes creation and ossification. The movement towards this kind of thinking, however, leaves the creator and the created stuck, bound to the other, limited. The stultifying impact degrades the position of history and localizes it to particular places. These oppositions, then, play out in the same way as the metaphysical concepts of Light and Dark, entombed in perpetual battle. Buck-Mors recognizes how this position debilitates the scholar and her scholarship: “The limits of our imagination need to be taken down brick by brick, chipping away at the cultural embedded-ness that predetermines the meaning of the past in ways that hold us captive in the present” (149). For Buck-Morss, the differences between these two methods is the difference between the M/S dialectic's denouement and the miracle found in absolute spirit. In the same way that Haiti seems stuck, even now, in the later show down, Scholarship, too, seems stuck in a situation the denies every subject the recognition that they need.