From: "L Spencer" <L.SPENCER-AT-tasc.ac.uk>
Date:          Wed, 29 Jan 1997 10:42:25 GMT
Subject:       Re: a & h and d of e


To speak of the world as "unreconciled" one simply need recognise the 
existence of evil... (in other words, as containing circumstances, 
antagonisms which one will not, or cannot, simply live with or 
accept).
    As Scott Everett Johnson pointed out: the notion takes one 
directly back to Hegel. But that is not a simple step to take. 
Because, as Adorno never tires of pointing out, if one reads Hegel as 
offering us the sense that reconciliation has been achieved, in the 
social arrangements in Europe in the early nineteenth century, or in 
his philosophical system... then he seems to have betrayed his own 
most profound insights.
    "Reconciliation" is a more slippery notion than the patient 
exegises of excellent commentators like Houlgate can allow. There is 
a sense in which it is first put on the agenda for Hegel by his 
visionary pal, Hoelderlin,... whose longing for "reconciliation" led 
him to worship (almost literally) Greek antiquity, and 
to extraordinary experiments in poetry and translation, to 
secret involvement in revolutionary societies dedicated to awakening 
the German-speaking states to the spirit of the French Revolution, 
and finally to "withdrawal within himself" and a kind of madness 
whose exact nature is still the subject of intense dispute.
    If this seems like a rather wordy digression, its relevance will 
be grasped if we just think of the word "reconciliation"- Versohnung. 
Hegel's closest, most intimate friend (they roomed together in a loft 
when they first arrived as students in Tuebingen)... went down a path 
that left to madness. Schelling, who had been friends with both, was 
5 years younger. When he reported to Hegel that Hoelderlin was 
wandering the country, his clothes dishevelled and his mind dis-
ordered, Hegel - apparently - gave only a perfunctory response and 
never mentioned Hoelderlin again. 
    I hope I am not doing an injustice to any of the geniuses 
involved if I suggest that perhaps Hegel needed to sustain the project 
of "reconciliation" in order to achieve a reconciliation with his 
lost friend, and through him, with his own half-grasped, youthful 
visions...


l.spencer-AT-tasc.ac.uk

Lloyd Spencer, School of Media
Trinity & All Saints University College, 
Leeds LS18 5HD, England

Tel. (0113) 2 837 186     
Fax. (0113) 2 837 200