Derrida and Hegel

I said I took this class because Hegel pops up everywhere, but as an English major with a cursory philosophy education, I only regularly encounter Hegel in Derrida. Hegel’s Preface serves as a focal point for Derrida’s “preface” to Dissemination, and as I read Hegel’s Preface I found myself returning to Derrida’s, specifically to this passage: “There is nothing but text, there is nothing but extratext, in sum an ‘unceasing preface’ that undoes the philosophical representation of the text, the received opposition between the text and what exceeds it” (43). I bring this up because it seems to identify a problem that Hegel only gestures towards and that nevertheless seems to complicate his project. Hegel would like, he tells us, “to help bring philosophy closer to the form of Science, to the goal where it can lay aside the title ‘love of knowing’ and be actual knowing” (5). “Actual knowing,” though, seems to be a pretty slippery concept. In the first few paragraphs, Hegel also refers to the “real issue” (3) and the “true shape in which truth exists” (5), and again in the Introduction to “the truth in its purity” (73)—equally non-descript terms (presumably) for “actual knowing.” Words are paltry things—as Hegel mentions, some words “do not express what is contained in them” (20)—and I don’t mean to be stubborn or dense, but I think that poses a not insignificant problem for Hegel’s “goal.”

And I think Hegel knows this. In the Introduction, Hegel considers that knowing a thing “in itself” might only be knowing a thing “for consciousness,” or how a thing relates to and is perceived by the consciousness. It sounds almost as though consciousness, even in comprehending things “in themselves,” comprehends consciousness itself: “The first object, in being known, is altered for consciousness; it ceases to be the in-itself, and becomes something that is the in-itself only for consciousness. And this then is the True: the being-for-consciousness of this in-itself” (86). “Actual knowing,” it seems, is really knowing about knowing, or as Hegel says, consciousness can “comprehend nothing less than the entire system of consciousness” (89). If this is what “actual knowing” is, it seems like an impossibly tall order to really get on with the actual knowing.

Perhaps I am being needlessly skeptical, and perhaps it's still too early to say, but I doubt that Hegel’s Phenomenology will get much further than what Derrida calls the “unceasing preface.” If Hegel would like his text to accomplish actual knowing, it seems his text would have to exceed itself. And Hegel certainly resists the suspicion that language can only dance around the meaning it gestures towards when he says (almost regretfully) that “sometimes what is in itself meaningful, e.g. pure determinations of though like subject, Object, Substance, Cause, Universal, etc.—these are used as thoughtlessly and uncritically as we use them in everyday life” (50). Certainly these words are used uncritically, but I’m not sure these words are in themselves meaningful, and I am certain they aren’t pure determinations—if only because they have been determined in many different ways. Yet these are the words on which  Hegel’s text depends. So while I admire Hegel’s ambition to get on with the actual knowing, I suspect that he won’t be able to go much further than a prefatory note on actual knowing.