But, as I have already said several times, the Wise man can speak of Science as his Science only to the extent that he can speak of death as his death. For, as he proceeds to the Logik, the Wise Man completely abolishes Time--that is, History--that is, his own truly and specifically human reality, which already in the Phenomenology is but a past reality: he definitively abandons his reality as a free and historical Individual, as Subject opposed to the Object, or as Man who is essentially something other than nature.
Hegel himself knows this full well. And he knew it at least as early as 1802. For his essay of 1802 entitled Glauben und Wissen, there is a passage in which he plainly says so, and which I would like to cite in ending my commentary on the Phenomenology.
In this passage we read the following (Volume I, pages 303f.):
Hegel himself knows this full well. And he knew it at least as early as 1802. For his essay of 1802 entitled Glauben und Wissen, there is a passage in which he plainly says so, and which I would like to cite in ending my commentary on the Phenomenology.
In this passage we read the following (Volume I, pages 303f.):
The whole sphere of finiteness, of one's being something, of the sensual--is swallowed up in true-or-genuine Faith when confronted with the thought and intuition of the Eternal, [thought and intuition] here becoming one and the same thing. All gnats of Subjectivity are burned in this devouring flame, and the very consciousness of giving-of-oneself and of this annihilation is annihilated.Hegel knows it and says it. But he also says, in one of his letters, that this knowledge cost him dearly. He speaks of a period of total depression that he lived through between the twenty-fifth and thirtieth years of his life: a "Hypochondria" that went "bis Erlähmung aller Kräfte," that was so severe as "to paralyze all his powers," and that came precisely from the fact that he could not accept the necessary abandonment of Individuality--that is, actually, of humanity--which the idea of absolute Knowledge demanded. But, finally, he surmounted this "Hypochondria." And becoming a Wise Man by that final acceptance of death, he published a few years later the First Part of the "System of Science," entitled "Science of the Phenomenology of the Spirit," in which he definitively reconciles himself with all that is and has been, by declaring that there will never more be anything new on earth.
(Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel)
