Rhapsodic dispositions: Engenderments of the ground in the discourse of the 'beautiful soul' (Shaftesbury, Kant, Hegel, Heidegger).

摘要

I perform a gender-theoretical, rhetorically-informed reading of the eighteenth- to nineteenth-century discourse on the grounding of the "beautiful soul" as self-grounding subject-objectivity. I re- and de-construct the operations of this grounding--in Shaftesbury, Kant, and Hegel--at the moment when the "beautiful soul," delegitimated by secularization, answers with an emphatic denegation. I interpret the claim to grounding in: reason (as feminine aesthesis), nature (as masculine telos), and conviction (as excessive engenderment).;The passage from Part II to Part III, from nature as ground to conviction as ground, is based on Shaftesbury's and Kant's grounding of nature in the mode of conviction appropriate to the conscious experience of such nature. In Part III, I read Hegel's historico-philosophically convincing and convicting reduction of rational-natural totality--"conscience"--to pure self-conviction. The pure, self-reflexive Uberzeugung as which conscience is convoked amounts to a supra-rational, supra-natural, excessive- or over-engenderment no longer assimilable to a restricted economy. The dialectic of forgiveness does not overcome this excess but affirms its ubiquity as the impossibility of any (ethics the telos of which would be a) subject-object totality. I juxtapose here Heidegger's reading of Hegel as a subjectivist with my reading of Hegel as rhetorician. This juxtaposition allows, contra Heidegger, for the rapprochement of Hegel's concept of conviction and Heidegger's concept of aletheia. I conclude with a brief exposition of Lacan on the "beautiful soul" as paranoid ego.;In Part I, I contrast Shaftesbury's and Kant's groundings of the "beautiful soul" in reason qua sensus communis. In Part II, I contrast their groundings of the "beautiful soul" in nature. In each contrast, Shaftesbury employs rhapsodic, popular, or literary form; Kant employs architectonic, scholastic, or philosophic form. Shaftesbury's form is that of nature, Kant's that of reason. The contrast between the two forms introduces the difference between reason and nature within both reason and nature, renders impure on the level of form what has purified itself of its other on the level of content.