In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hegelian RhetoricThora Ilin BayerIntroduction: Rhetoric and DialecticAristotle in the famous first line of his Rhetoric defines the relationship between rhetoric and dialectic: "Rhetoric is the counterpart of dialectic" (1354a). Both rhetoric and dialectic belong to no definitive science. They treat those things that come within the purview of all human beings. As an antistrophes to dialectic, rhetoric concerns particular cases and "may be defined as the faculty [dynamis] of (...) observing in any given case the available means of persuasion" (1355b). Dialectic concerns reasoning on general issues and in its generality it is like deduction. But unlike deductive demonstration, dialectic, as Aristotle says in Topics, "reasons from reputable opinions," rather than from premises that are true and primitive (100a).Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason takes a more extreme view of dialectic than Aristotle. Kant regards dialectic as a logic of illusion (Schein) that occurs when reason takes its powers beyond experience to make claims concerning the nature of the soul, world, and God. When reason attempts to determine the nature of what the soul is in itself, its assertions end in paralogisms; when it does so about the world its claims end in antinomies; and when it does so about God its efforts end in the impossibilities of the ontological, cosmological, and teleological arguments. Kant regards rhetoric as having no role in the philosophical pursuit of truth. In the Critique of Judgment Kant classifies rhetoric (Beredsamkeit) as belonging [End Page 203] to fine art. He regards ars oratoria as an art of manipulation and deception that achieves its end by a beautiful show (Schein) of speech that plays upon human weaknesses. He says oratory deserves no respect whatsoever—"ist gar keiner Achtung würdig" (1951, 172n50; 1974, 185n).1 Kant's exclusion of rhetoric from Kritik (with which he identifies philosophy) establishes the general exclusion of rhetoric in the development of philosophical idealism.Hegel interpretation for a century and a half presumed that rhetoric was irrelevant to understanding Hegel's thought. It considered Hegel's dialectic as a method independent of any connection to rhetoric. The first book on Hegel in English, James Hutchinson Stirling's The Secret of Hegel, published in 1863, regards the key to Hegel's system as his formulation of the concrete universal (Begriff). He makes no reference to rhetoric as an element in Hegel's thought (1887, xxii). In his preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel mentions Plato's Parmenides as "surely the greatest artistic achievement of the ancient dialectic," but he makes no mention of rhetoric (1952, 57; 1977, 44). A ground for ignoring rhetoric as important for Hegel's philosophy is the fact that Hegel himself ignores it. There is no discussion of rhetoric (Redekunst) in his whole corpus beyond a few pages concerning the differences between poetry and prose in his Lectures on Fine Art (1986, 15:257–68; 1998, 2:986–95).All of the approaches to Hegel in nonrhetorical terms changed with the appearance of Donald Phillip Verene's Hegel's Recollection: A Study of Images in the "Phenomenology of Spirit" (1985) followed by John H. Smith's The Spirit and Its Letter: Traces of Rhetoric in Hegel's Philosophy of "Bildung" (1988).2 Verene's work showed that there is a dialectic between image (Bild) and concept (Begriff) within Hegel's mode of expression that provides the reader with a necessary means of access to the work. Smith's study showed not only that Hegel employs rhetorical principles in the composition of the Phenomenology but that Hegel in his early years studied rhetoric closely and was concerned to master it. Smith's work, although developed independently of Verene's, joined with it to present a new reading of Hegel. This poetical and rhetorical grasp of Hegel's thought has been recently restated in Verene's Hegel's Absolute (2007).My views that follow begin where Verene's and Smith's accounts leave off. I wish to consider two questions that extend what has been broached in their readings of Hegel. (1) In what sense does Hegel's Phenomenology embody a transformation of the Aristotelian conception of rhetoric as an antistrophes to dialectic? (2) To... (shrink)

Drawing on Hegel’s anthropology, this paper reconstructs ‘madness’ as an essential stage in the formation of the subject by developing the dialectical character of madness. This goes along with resituating the negativity of spirit as arising on an intermediary stage between nature and developed spirit as second nature. Hegel determines the freedom of spirit as “absolute negativity”. Madness shows a moment of radical negativity that is not viable as such. The formation of subjectivity is thus threatened by that which makes (...) it possible. The art of spirit is to over-come this form of abstract negativity, though not to lose the radicality of negativity, but to deepen it. ‘Absolute negativity’ is Hegel’s term for this successful sublation and simultaneous deepening of negativity. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that one of the reasons for Hegel’s failure in consummating the project of “construct the absolute for consciousness” presented in 1801 in his Writing on Difference consisted in the patent mismatch between the negativity to which the determinations of finitude would be submitted and the conception of the absolute still substantially thought. Precisely, what we call here the archaism of substantiality would set the tone of this mismatch that still entailed the (...) heterogeneity between finitude, with its way of ascending to the absolute, and the absolute itself. Among other things, this will become clearer observing the formalism of the intuitionist proposal that Hegel presents at that time, aiming to safeguard the elevation of consciousness without its intrinsic negativity tainting the absolutity of the principle to which it was elevated. (shrink)

This paper proposes a transversal lecture of the Phenomenology of Mind from Hegel by following in the text the idea of death. To show the different figures of the death in the book, the author uses three lecture`s key: a) the death as natural end of the life, b) the fear of the death as regulative idea by the constitution the society, c) overcoming death through one kind of rational way of survival.