2309. Harvie, Ferguson wrote: The infinite/eternal/possible is the sphere of ‘pure’ thought, and more particularly, for the pseudonyms it is represented by the philosophical system of Hegel. Speculative metaphysics, which is itself the culmination of a long tradition of western thought which began with the misrepresentation of Socratic irony as a form of abstraction, appears to have ‘escaped’ from the constraints of actuality, and to have been liberated into an ethereal realm in which it can freely and indefinitely expand in conformity with an autonomous inner principle of its own. The content of this realm is made up entirely of abstract concepts and pure relations detached as it were from empirical contingencies. Each term becomes defined, then, in terms of its position within a system of similar, and similarly abstract, concepts or ‘categories’. The ‘system’ once complete is self- perpetuating and internally self-referential. Its inner principle is ‘mediation’. That is to say there are no discrete breaks or ‘gaps’ in its internal relations. From any arbitrarily chosen starting point the mind can be led to any other concept within the system through the repeated application of a limited number of simple rules. There is in principle no ‘other’ category within the system, no alien ‘substance’ lurking, so to speak, in an out-of-the-way corner closed off from immediate inspection. If the aim of philosophy is the construction of such a system of pure categories, then for the pseudonyms this has been Hegel’s great achievement. [Melancholy and the Critique of Modernity]
Posted on: Sun, 21 Sep 2014 15:08:20 +0000