Culture as Alienation

Back to Le neveu de Rameu, that pre-Post-modernist. A passage from Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. First, the summary by J. N. Findlay:

§520. Self-consciousness uses a language of noble flattery in dealing with state power: it employs a language of ignoble flattery in dealing with wealth. But the language which truly expresses its Zerrissenheit, its torn state, is one which makes diremption its essence, which in all its judgements unites terms in an utterly irrelevant, external fashion. Its only reason for dealing with things together is that they have nothing to do with each other.

§521. The absolute, universal inversion of reality and thought, their mutual estrangement, is the final product of culture. Everything becomes void of substance and confounded with its opposite All values become transvalued. Spirit in this phase of culture speaks a language of utter disintegration, which takes the novel form of wit.

§522. Wit runs the shole gamut of the serious and the silly, the trivial and the profound, the lofty and the infamous, with complete lack of taste and shame (see Diderot's Nephew of Rameau).

§523. Plain sense and sound morality can teach this disintegrated brilliance nothing that it does not know. It can merely utter some of the syllables the latter weves into its piebald discourse. In conceding that the bad and good are mixed in life, it merely substitutes dull platitude for witty brilliance.

§524. The disintegrated consciousness can be noble and edifying but this is for it only one note among others. To ask it to forsake its disintegration is merely, from its own point of view, to preach a new eccentricity, that of Diogenes in his tub.

§525. The disintegrated consciousness is, howerver, on the way to transcending its disintegration. It sees the vanity of treating all things as vain, and so becomes serious.

§526. Wit really emancipates the disintegrated consciousness from finite material aims and gives it true spiritual freedom. In knowing itself as disintegrated it also rises above this, and achieves a truly positive self-consciousness.