Schopenhauer’s term, the understanding, best understood in modern terms as brain function, or what the brain is for, what it does in its every day activity as a biological organ. The understanding is the faculty of the mind that produces and compares representations of perception.

Reason is the higher function that creates, stores and utilizes the abstract concepts, which makes thinking possible. However, the perception-attuned function of the brain is primary, in both the evolution of the species and the development of the individual. The lower functions of perception, or the understanding in the brain, work involuntary, in all animals, and independent of consciousness. For instance, all the concentration in the world can never raise consciousness to the level of biological functions such as hair growth, lymph glands manufacturing blood corpuscles, and regulate them. These functions are automatic, autonomous, and wholly inaccessible. Therefore, reason, while considered “higher,” is secondary in the greater scheme of things.

The moon appearing larger at the horizon, the apparent motion of the beach while sailing past it, and others are some of the many examples of perception that turns out to be an illusion - the deception of the understanding - yet the illusion remains entrenched because the understanding is distinct from reason. Perception is immediate in two ways: instantaneousness (time) and direct contact (space). The immediacy of time, at the level of perception, seems to not have taken any time at all, despite scientific knowledge that there is an elaborate process that actually takes time, and the immediacy of direct contact, there is no awareness of any perceptual apparatus being in the way between us and the object of perception. The understanding, because its knowledge already precedes reason, is also inaccessible to reason.

However, “if in the representation of perception illusion does at moments distort reality, then in the representation of the abstract error can reign for thousands of years, impose its iron yoke on whole nations, stifle the noblest impulses of mankind; through its slaves and dupes it can enchain even the man it cannot deceive.” (WWR, I § Errors have a greater staying power, and the very possibility alone charges the history of abstract thought guilty of inertia.

The concept of ‘character’ has had a pervasive effect in the history of human relationships, and has led to the twin myths of royalty and race.

To posit “character” as something that underlies behavior, or causing it, is worse than mythical, for the consequences of such assumptions leads to essentializing character as something stable, solid, a determinate nature underlying one’s existence. This “mystification” is perhaps the main reason why people convince themselves that a person cannot act other than what s/he did, and that they are resigned to supposing that one is forced to act out the “hidden” self.

Therefore, the conception of character merely disguises, or conceals the fundamental nature of man’s existence as freely choosing and self-aware beings.

As long the term “character” denotes a provisional empirical generalization of behavior, then this will not lead us into the bad faith of postulating an “essence” of a person, of which the actions are merely the “appearance” and derivative of the “real” character of the person.

To use a concrete example, a person who has behaved like an asshole up till now can be legitimately called a “asshole” but once he chooses to act friendly, he is no longer an asshole, and ceases “being” one.

Ergo, there are no such thing as “motives” behind actions, or motives causing the person to act, because that leaves out the all too subtle moment of choice. It is the choice that turns a potentially motivating factor into an acual motivation.

I have been tweaking my essay on Derrida, while finishing off the Schopenhauer review, for submission to the Galilean Library. This excerpt covers the french poststructuralists’ reception and response to Hegel.

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Suspicion of Hegel

Poststructuralists found Hegel’s technique of dialectical arguments charming, even seductive, due to their gift of demonstrating the incoherence of particular concepts. But more importantly, the Absolute of Hegel was an omen about how the critique of philosophy is little more than the latest pretender to the throne of supreme cognitive authority. Hippolyte interpreted Hegel as saying that the discourse of philosophy contains the critique of philosophy within itself. Foucault realized this and cautioned that “we have to determine to which (our) anti-Hegelianism is possibly one of his tricks directed against us at the end of which he stands, motionless, waiting for us.” (Archaeology of Knowledge, p. 235) Derrida claims différance “must sign the point at which one breaks with the system of the Aufhebung and with speculative dialectics.” (Positions, p. 44)

Judith Butler on Hegel’s French reception

Judith Butler’s work, Subjects of Desire is an insightful genealogy of the Hegel reception in 20th century France.

The coherence of the self-identical Hegelian subject has been disintegrated by two generations of 20th century french thinkers, from the 30’s to the 60’s. Yet the Hegelian subject is not what the French describe, which is not a self-identical subject that travels smugly from one ontological place to another, for it is its travels, and is every place in which it finds itself.

The second generation of French thinkers (Lacan, Deleuze and Foucault) took the concept of desire as a sign of the disintegration of the coherence of Hegel’s ontological entity. Butler says they misread Hegel’s formulations of subjectivity, while remaining in prison of the Hegelian dialectical mode of analysis they try to escape.

They attempt to evade the Hegelian dialectic as a philosophical black hole by rejecting the “romantic postulation of the dialectical unity of opposites” as something untenable in the context of the poststructuralist formulations of language as an open-ended field of potential meanings where difference, not unity, is emphasized, which means the freedom of interpretation is emphasized over closure, finitude, and etc.

Derrida, just like Foucault, was wary of the seduction of Hegel. His declaration that Hegel was the “last philosopher of the book and the first thinker of writing” (Grammatology, p. 26) only meant Hegel’s philosophy was both the final culmination of western metaphysics and its initial deconstruction.

But Butler insists the rejection or negation of Hegel enacts a philosophical move which is in itself dialectical and implictly a Hegelian move. In order to refute the dialectic one deploys a dialectical mode of reasoning. An argument against the logic of the dialectic will only be its own antithesis, which will in turn yeild a new synthesis that transcends the initial thesis and the antithesis. Therefore, Hegel’s dialectical logic is a cannibal of philosophy, since it gobbles up the opposition by transforming them into antitheses.

Derrida knows this all too well, and in Glas, he went to extremes with artifice and obscurity in his showdown with Hegel and avoided falling victim to the system’s uncanny power of assimilating its critics, for the history of ideas is a continued absorption and sublation by the system in its passage towards the genuine historical Absolute. Derrida had the text split into two columns on each page where the left provided an analysis of Hegel with respect to the family and the right discussed Genet’s novels, but this is an opposition that does not meet the dialectical logic of Hegel head-on. The Genet column is actually a parody, for it copies the dialectical mode of Hegel by mimesis. Because it is not an refutation of the Hegel dialectic, this mimic cannot be cannibilized. This reciprocal exchange beween literature and philosophy creates an undecidable text in Glas.

By leaving the final meaning of his text within the unsaid relations between the two columns, Derrida eludes Hegel and places himself outside his own discussions of Hegel. A self-styled “purest of the bastards?” Say it with me.

No wonder!