“J.N. Findlay remarked that it was not worth the effort to read the 19th and 20th century British Idealists as heirs of Kant or Hegel because their grand systems smacked too much of empire, colonialism, and Eurocentrism. The march of abstract categories to the triumph of the Universal was just too systematic, and reason far too hegemonic for the power of the negative and the persistence of the particular (‘ethicality’) to manifest their true force.”
“Following French 20th century interpretations of Hegel instead, which increasingly focused on the Phenomenology rather than the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences, Russon produces a reading of Hegel attuned not to a false beyond of an imagined universality, but to the stickiness of particularity as we experience it.”
“His Hegel interpretation is guided by the readings of the Phenomenology offered by Jean Wahl, Alexandre Kojève, and Jean Hyppolite early in 20th century France.”
“Russon brings in contemporary non-Hegelian voices to challenge or support an initial position presented in linear fashion: Derrida, Deleuze-Guattari, R.D. Laing, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre and de Beauvoir.”
“These are intelligent and illuminating additions, and though brief they are authoritative and not doctrinaire.”
“Russon’s division of human reality into knowing, desiring, and (collectively) acting seems both straightforward and comprehensive.”
“It recapitulates Kant’s dry division of the distinct human capacities for truth and falsity, pleasure and displeasure, and good and evil, except that it is the genius of the genetic narrative of the Phenomenology to turn a chart into a life-adventure.”
“Of course, life itself seems to get more vivid when Hegel overwrites Kant’s serene ‘capacity for [aesthetic] pleasure or displeasure’ with the single word desire.”
“Philosophy, if true, is authorless; the one who crafts a philosophy removes her subjectivity from what she works on, the way the artist subtracts his point of view from his work to allow the work to emerge as an independent entity, or the way the religious seeker removes her ego or even her final ambition from her quest.”
“In a first look at what appears, the observer sees the immediate reality of the ‘here’ and ‘now’ inflate into a multiplicity of ‘here-now’s and the simple reality of what is apprehended explode into a series of ’is’es.”
“Two things happen at this initial stage: (1) what first appears or the ‘first object’ shows up as a double appearance, both substance and subject, connected and interdependent; description and interpretative point of view are yoked from the start; (2) “what appears is always infinite,” for the object of experience, while given only in experience, turns out to always be more than the experience gives, or something not defined by that single experience.”
“What Russon here calls ‘the infinite’ is what Kant called the a priori. The continua of space and time (and all subsequent transcendental structures) are internal to the happening of experience and constitutive of its objectivity.”
“What Hegel’s philosophical observer sees at first glance is the network of objectivity and intersubjectivity that is the final object of Kant’s labor in the Critique of Pure Reason.”
“A word about the word absolute: when Schelling and Hegel use to term to denote ultimate reality, they resort to the novel term not, say, “God” in a vague or non-denominational way, nor to ape Enlightenment deism, nor to reproduce Spinoza’s double-entry ontology with self-enclosed substance on one side of ledger and elaborated modal reality on the other. The term connotes ideal ultimacy — Anselm’s “greater than that which cannot be conceived” — without any existence claim, with all hopes of a conceptual derivation of existence surrendered.”
“Kant had it right: all proofs for the divine existence collapse into the ontological proof, which is not a proof but a category mistake.”
“Russon cites Schelling’s final word on religion in the System of Transcendental Idealism, the work which recruited Hegel to Jena in 1801: “God never exists, for if existence is that which presents itself in the objective world, if He existed thus, we should not; but He continually reveals himself.””
“For Russon, this continual revelation or the appearance of the infinite in and at the site of finite self-consciousness is the crossing to two different logical structures: the modal relationship of possibility and actuality in which concreteness means that the latter is conceptually thinner than the former, and the temporal relationship of pastness and futurity in which only so much that is the heritage of the past can be realized in the present, and only so much of the future is realizable due to the determinacy of the past and present.”
“Ontologically, there is no past or future except in the present, nor any possibility outside of what actually obtains; conceptually, the finite lags behind the infinite.”