Animating Hegel’s Mysticism Glen Skahill, Pomona ’22 Staff Writer – Third Place for Best Essay I will critique Hegelian metaphysics using the Daoist philosophy of Zhuangzi (Chuangtzu 莊 子 ). Hegelian thought conceptualizes the object, and thus existence, in the friction of our perception and its external existence, causing the split in the object. This split traces back to the primary split within the subject, our subjective alienation of ourselves from ourselves, which Freud later develops into the conscious and unconscious split. Zhuangzi’s philosophy offers a way of critiquing how this alienation always returns to the individual subject, exposing a foundational metaphysics of the unconscious within the object for the intersection of critical psychology and religion. Zhuangzi’s retroactive intervention thus outlines the possibilities for what constitutes subjecthood, and the sacrifices in those determinations, and reveals Hegel’s ability to speak on human experience. This critique proceeds twofold: towards the mysticism that speaks to human experience inherent in Hegel’s thought and towards bringing Hegelian thought towards the animacy of objects. Zhuangzi’s skeptical Daoism and famous short stories pose as powerful points of criticism for this analysis. Moreover, while Zhuangzi’s philosophy retains certain key differences in its metaphysical foundations, some of these key differences aid the criticism at hand and others reveal the psychoanalytic value of Hegelian thought, which always returns to the subject’s psyche. Thus, for this paper, I will use the short stories from Zhuangzi’s philosophy and historian Theodore de Bary’s analysis of Zhuangzi to comprise the Daoist philosophical critique of Hegel, and I will turn to Todd McGowan’s Hegel—corrected from the mistranslations and misinterpretations of Alexandre Kojève.¹ McGowan’s Hegel distinguishes himself
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through the emphasis on irreconcilable contradiction that requires dialectical movement rather than Hegel’s supposed aim towards synthesis in the popular canon.² Geist—spirit in the English translation—arises out of the irreconcilable contradictions that constitute something.3 The foundational contradiction that comprises Hegelian metaphysics is the split between objectivity—the external world as it exists—and subjectivity—our perception of the external world as it exists. As perceiving subjects, our perception always clouds our view into the external world as it exists. The friction in this contradiction gives rise to the Freudian parapraxis: when our perception overrides the world as it exists. Most may think of parapraxes in the classic Freudian slip—saying something you did not mean to say—but parapraxes may occur in mis-seeing or mishearing things as well. These moments make the foundational Hegelian contradiction apparent to us in the friction between perception and reality. Even when we watch movies, we may feel the shock and awe that the protagonist or other characters feel despite sitting in a comfortable chair with popcorn to our side. These jarring moments that shock us into remembering this fundamental contradiction—between reality as such and our perception of it—mark Hegel’s continuous return to the human psyche in his thought. Rather than the seemingly contradictory movement of yin and yang, Zhuangzi’s Dao, best translated as ‘way’ to describe the order of the universe or governance, creates the basis for extending Hegel’s geist beyond the human psyche.4 To make this move with Zhuangzi, we must articulate the unconscious within the object—object here in the general sense of anything besides human subject.
