I Was a Gen X Millennial (PS §§73–89)

Re-reading Hegel in middle age.

I was a senior in college the year Douglas Coupland’s Generation X was published and the year Time put a quintet of sad “twentysomethings” on its cover. The economy had gone through one of its periodic crashes then too, so I feel for Millennials as they are forced to read endless think pieces about themselves, though — being opposed to them by generational mandate — I suspect they enjoy it. I, on the other hand, stomped out of Reality Bites in protest, so … oh well. Whatever. Nevermind.

(I dwelled for a long time on whether or not to retain this cliched reference to Nirvana and its pleasing patness, ultimately deciding to retain it, as you can see. It is important to note, however, that where you fall in a generation can have a big effect on how you experience it. Having spent a year or so relishing the virtual unlistenability of Bleach, the effect of having Nirvana become the #1 band in the country felt like being generationally doxxed, as though someone had gone through our mailbox full of ‘zines and was reading it on TV. It felt like cooptation, a word we used in the ’80s to describe it when corporations invested in things we loved — since replaced by “going viral” or “public” or, simply, “validation.” So I feel entitled to a little snark where Nirvana is concerned. But people who were 16 in 1991, just six years younger than me, report experiencing the arrival of grunge as pure generational effectiveness. What they had found and liked became the Law, only through their consciousness of it. They had succeeded, at last, in levitating the Pentagon–or so it seemed to them.)

This same senior year was also when I received my Millennial-style comeuppance, likely the most important event of my intellectual life, such as it has been. I was a good, if smug, student. I liked to espouse, preferably while stoned, the theory that the road to a 3.5 GPA was to divide one’s course load in half and determine beforehand in which half you were shooting for As and in which you were shooting for Bs. I took my second mandatory year of Latin pass/fail and slept through the Cyclops so regularly freshman girls straight out of Catholic school thought I was Jewish.

I graduated with university and departmental honors in philosophy, so I was brought up short when the department chair, my thesis adviser, refused to write a letter recommending me for graduate school. He did not so much refuse, I guess, as decline.

He was a Husserlian — a wild-haired Irishman with a nose like a clove of garlic — and you could actually see him clamp on the epoché by removing his glasses and tuning down the ontic so he could grasp the ontological. He could not write me a recommendation, he explained (as if reading it from the Forms themselves) because I was intellectually arrogant. Specifically I was relativist — a Sartrean, I’m ashamed to admit, though I was young — who smirked at all mention of trans-personal (let alone trans-cultural or trans-historical) truths.

Descartes? What a clown. Plato? Please.

Here is what he told me, as I remember it:

These thinkers that we study did not spend their entire lives developing theories that were manifestly ridiculous to them. If they are manifestly ridiculous to you, it means that you do not understand them as they did, and the principle of hermeneutic charity requires that you work with these theories until their necessity is as compelling to you as it was to their authors, and then — and only then — are you ready to level a responsible critique.

I don’t remember how I reacted, though I’m sure I was indignant. But it changed me. I got a recommendation from a junior faculty member and went to graduate school anyway. I spent the summer sitting in a coffeehouse, smoking cigarettes, and reading Ulysses. (Somehow I was terrified to turn up for graduate school without having read it.) I didn’t think about philosophy at all, but this sense of charity — of humility — sunk in.

In my first semester, my work was leagues ahead of where it had been as an undergraduate. Ultimately, my sole academic publication — before I dropped out of academia five years later — was a book review for a specialist journal edited by the same thesis adviser who had declined to write me a letter of recommendation. (Though when I look at the at review now, I shiver to see that I still did not quite appreciate how much I did not know. Do we ever?)

Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is the book that I’ve done the most sincere battle with — more than 20 years ago now — and the waning testosterone of middle age has visited upon me the urge to pick something large and complicated — yet finite — and try and understand it before I die. Wars seem to be a popular choice, as is space travel, but I have chosen The System.

Hegel is famously difficult to understand on his own terms. Even Adorno admitted he didn’t get all of it, and most sympathetic commentators have to do a lot of the old soft shoe throughout. What he is trying to say. It is easy to condescend to Hegel, and tempting, too, since he is so difficult and what he is trying to think about — the coming to consciousness of consciousness itself — is so hard to think that it would just be easier if we could throw him it out with the phrenology text books and move on. I would have liked that as an arrogant undergraduate. A part of me would still like that now.

Unfortunately, I find something compelling about what Hegel was trying to do. It has stuck with me for all these years — not least because his method, if you will, seems to explain things (poetically, at the very least) that cannot be explained by positivist, linear thought. And if this method could be recovered, it could be used to explain a lot of commonplace things that currently seem puzzling.

Okay. Like what?

Let me take a shot.

Imagine that you are oppressed by life. You do not enjoy its objects or the people you find yourself surrounded by. Imagine that you are Franny in Franny and Zooey. (I wonder how many people would fail to correctly identify the genders of these titular characters, given how name trends have broken, but Zooey is the boy.)

You become so smart, so goddammed Caulfieldian, that you see through everyone else’s pretentiousness until you can’t take it anymore, so you return to your family’s Manhattan apartment and throw yourself on the couch and you pray. But it doesn’t work. It doesn’t work so completely that you have to be counseled by your twin brother Zooey, who appears to be the only person on earth more self-centered than you.

What has happened? Well, in Hegelian terms, you have gone toward the world with a sort of naive belief in its truth and virtue and you have been disappointed. The object has not met your standard, so you have rejected the world and retreated into yourself.

How does this work out? Not so well, since if the world is nothing, you find that you are nothing. The baby has gone out with the bathwater, and all that. (Zooy spends most of the novella in the bathbub, after all.)

But then Zooey — of all people — lays it on you. The double negation. He tells you that negating the phonies is easy, but then you have to get moving anyway, and be with the people, if not for them, then for the Fat Lady that Seymour — that great crypto-Hegelian — was always talking about.

I don’t think anyone other than Hegel could really explain what’s going on with Franny here, and certainly no one this side of him, where the answers would be sought in antidepressants and MRIs. I don’t think anyone else could quite explain what Zooey is trying to explain, that detachment is not a negation, but a negation and a reunion — a tear followed by a suture — that holds the world together, but in a different way than it held together before.

Proponents of literature might respond that, well, Salinger was clearly able to explain this, and this is what literature still does now. Maybe, but I’m not so sure. I think this is what contemporary literature thinks it is doing, but I’m not sure it is successful, precisely because it has become so sidelined by the positivism of technology that has carried the day. Thus, even erudite and sincere justifications of art end up veering into sentimentality or mysticism, the only ground that has been ceded to it.

But what if there were another way. A lost science — that was not afraid to call itself science — that could explain precisely what so-called science cannot explain and vindicate subjective experience as something more than personal, the truth rather than my truth.

This is what Hegel was trying to do.

So I want to get Hegel. I want to read him charitably. Beyond charitably. I want to assume that the Phenomenology of Spirit is as actionable as a TED talk.

But the most puzzling thing that that one has to get right from the Introduction (I will follow tradition and prudence by tackling the Preface last if I ever get there) is the idea of how consciousness approaches its object with an idea about the object, but when it tries to apply that idea to the object, the object escapes. The object proves to be other than the idea consciousness had of it.

In an everyday, positivist sense, this is not a problem. I thought the wall was black, but when I turned the lights on, I realized it was white. Now I have the idea that the wall is white, and the wall is white, so we’re done. This, however, is just error in the realist sense and cannot drive consciousness through the contortions Hegel (or even Salinger) finds there.

Rather, as Hegel describes at PS §86, there are some cases in which the non-correspondence of knowledge with the object does not change the knowledge, but instead changes the criterion consciousness uses to evaluate knowledge. This might seems elusive, but it’s commonplace in argumentation. When cornered, a disputant is likely to question the framework of the discussion, and dialectical consciousness is the same way. It will do anything to try to get knowledge and object to agree without remainder, and it is constantly frustrated that it’s attempted improvements gain and lose at something at the same time. They bring something into the circle that wasn’t there before, but something else is left out. It is like a person trying to pick up a fifth basketball. Everytime they do, they drop one of the others.

Sometimes people point to the fact that history has not ended to discount Hegel–I would have definitely done that as an undergrad–but (I would argue) what is essential to the System (and therefore worthy of the adjective Hegelian) is this movement by which a non-correspondence between knowledge and its object change not just the content of the knowledge, but the criterion for knowledge itself, as I was altered that summer when I appeared to be doing nothing but reading Ulysses.

Originally published at milesglorios.us on May 3, 2017.