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Saturday, February 02, 2008
Hegel Hates The Stars
Sounds like a track by Air. But it’s nothing but the bald truth:
Altogether, Hegel’s conversation was always a kind of monologue, sighed forth by fits and starts in a toneless voice. The baroqueness of his expressions often startled me, and I remember many of them. On beautiful starry-skied evening, we two stood next to each other at a window, and I, a young man of twenty-two who had eaten well and had good coffee, enthused about the stars and called them the abode of the bessed. But the master grumbled to himself: “The stars, hum! hum! the stars are only a gleaming leprosy in the sky.” [Heinrich Heine, Confessions (1854)]
I have no idea why Hegel hated the stars. Unless it’s an oblique dig at what Kant saw above and therefore within him. Hum! Hum! indeed.
Comments
Stars are highly inconvenient to certain cosmologies. Remember Olbers’ Paradox? (Pretty good description at wikipedia for those unfamiliar.) Leaving out the rather unlikely to occur to Hegel fractal explanation, the fact that we see stars, rather than have the entire sky have the luminosity and temperature of the surface of an average star, is evidence of a finite, expanding universe—although it’s possible without other evidence that we now have to think of it as evidence for only finitude or expansion.
Though my own attitude to the stars is Heine-esque to the point of bathos, I love Hegel’s rejoinder. It seems the guy had a personality, after all.
Come, now, use your reason. Hegel was German. Therefore he was a fascist. Therefore he hated puppies and little girls. Little girls love the stars, and puppies use the stars in their navigation. All liberal fascists believe that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Likewise, the friend of my enemy is my enemy. Thus, Hegel hated the stars. QED.
Walter Benjamin in The Arcades Project:
“Scattered across the sky like luminous seeds of gold and silver, radiating out from the deep darkness of night, the stars represent [for Baudelaire] the ardor and energy of the human imagination.” Elisabeth Schinzel, Natur and Natursymbolik bei Poe, Baudelaire, und den fransösischen Symbolisten (Düren [Rhineland], 1931), p. 32. [J13,6]
Key passages on the stars in Baudelaire (ed. Le Dantec): “Night! You’d please me more without these stars / which speak a language I know all too well— / I Long for darkness, silence, nothing there . . .” (“Obsession”).—Ending of “Les Promesses, d’un visage”: the “enormous head of hair— / . . . which in darkness rivals you, O Night, / deep and spreading starless Night!”—“Yet neither sun nor moon appeared, / and no horizon paled” (“Réve parisien”).—“What if the waves and wind are black as ink” (“Le Voyage”). —Compare, however, “Les Yeux de Berthe,” the only weighty exception, and, in another perspective, the constellation of the stars and the aether, as it appears in “Delphine et Hippolyte” and in “Le Voyage. On the other hand, highly characteristic that “Le Crépuscule du soir” makes no mention of stars. [J21a,1]
A sardonic accent marks the spot where it is said of the stars: “decent planets, at a time like this, / renounce their vigilance—“ (“Sépulture”). [J21a,3]
The hidden figure that is the key to “Le Balcon”: the night which holds the lovers in its embrace as, after day’s departure, they dream of the dawn, is starless—“The night solidified into a wall.” [J21a,7]
Since the beginning of time, liberals have yearned to destroy the sun. Hegel, Hitler, the whole shitload of them us.
Well, this is different than the version of the story Heine told Lassalle:
According to Lassalle “One evening, Heine, as he often did, when he studied in Berlin, went to visit Hegel. Hegel was still busy with work; and he, Heine, went to the open window and looked out of it for a long time at the warm, starbright night. A romantic mood had him in its grip, as so often in his youth, and he had, at first in his head, and then unknowingly out loud begun to phantasize about the starlight, and the divine love and omnipotence that flowed forth therein. Suddenly, as he was standing there, forgetting where he was, a hand was laid on his shoulder and at the same time he heard the words: it isn’t the stars; yet what people put into them, that’s what it is. He turned around and Hegel stood there. From that moment on he knew, Hegel concluded, that in this man, whose doctrines he found impenetrable, beat the pulse of the century.”
Hegel was also close the Hoelderlin. Not an analytic philosopher.
http://www.waggish.org/2007/04/15/heinrich-heine-on-hegel
“Summary: might be better to believe that there is something in the universe not within one’s authority or knowledge. Could be God, could be aliens, could be the unified theory.”
It must be tough when the weight the entire universe bears down on your shoulders like that. No wonder he was so cranky, he had to figure out how to account for all those darned cankers into his grand systems.
it was just temperament. Heine had the whole universe on him too, but he was completely blithe about it.
All of which Hegel perceives, including what appear to be stars (or the light which reaches the earth after many centuries), arrives (apparently) via impressions upon his own subjective, perceptual apparatus.
Sense impressions are not the ding-an-sich, but part of a person’s brain.
Thus, if Hegel hates stars, he hates himself.
Qed
I want to tie this to your earlier reference to the Verve by saying that Hegel was definitely thinking of Kant when he grumped at Heine. All that night sky shit had already been covered, man. I guess what I’m saying is that Hegel was just trying to do the philosophical version of restless hip.
Which also gets us back to Air.
Air; breath; spirit; Geist. It all connects.
Hegel may hate stars; belle-lettrists however generally hate Hegel (and his more methodical bruder Kant).
Hegel is the Christian philosopher, therefore he does not worship the stars, unlike the pagans. The worship of stars belongs to satan, who belongs to the air.
Ephesians 2.2:
Wherein in time past ye walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience.