Eliza Starbuck Little

This paper brings together the Italian Existentialist author Alberto Moravia’s novel Boredom and Hegel’s account of empirical cognition from the Philosophy of Spirit. I use analysis of Moravia’s text as a jumping off point for arguing that Hegel’s theory of empirical cognition offers a proto-existentialist model for understanding both the complex way in which our political lives intersect with our perceptual lives and the special role that works of imaginative fiction play in bringing this relationship to light. In Boredom, main character Dino is afflicted with a chronic case of the titular condition, which he describes as “a malady affecting external objects and consisting of a withering process; an almost instantaneous loss of vitality.” Using a Hegelian lens, I argue that, in Dino’s case, boredom is not simply a contingent psychological situation; rather, this affect describes a structure of mental intentionality, a propositional attitude, that reflects the political circumstances of 1960s post-Fascist Italy in which he is embedded. I conclude with a discussion of Hegel’s account of imagination that shows how Hegel’s text provides a technical compliment to Moravia’s literary depiction of the political character of perception.

This paper outlines a reading of the Objective Logic that emphasizes Hegel’s post-Kantian metametaphysical aims. I defend two claims: (1) Hegel’s Objective Logic reorganizes what Longuenesse has famously termed the ‘leading thread’ that structures Kant’s Table of Categories. (2) The aim of this reorganization is to demonstrate that the apparent reality of objects given in qualitative sensation must ultimately be explained by appeal to the notion of modal actuality – or, rephrased, that sense perception must be explained by appeal to the activity of thought. To start, I briefly sketch the understanding of Hegel’s thought that serves as a backdrop for my reading of the Objective Logic. Next, I introduce Longuenesse’s discussion of Kant’s leading thread and lay out what Kant has to say about quality and qualitative synthesis following cues from Longuenesse’s treatment of quantity. Finally, I discuss in detail two modifications that Hegel makes to Kant’s leading thread: the primacy of qualitative determinations at the outset of the Objective Logic and the related discussion of actuality at the end of the Objective Logic.

How can a subjective experience make a claim to universal validity? This question, famously asked and answered by Kant in his Critique of Judgment, stands at the heart of Hegel’s aesthetic project as I construe it. In this essay, I aim to motivate this view by way of a proposal about Hegel’s understanding of how it is that works of art convey knowledge. I argue that one of the things that Hegel thinks works of art can show are the seemingly private subjective mental states that attend our experience of worldly objects. In this way, art has the potential to make structures of mind that we typically understand as being internal to subjectivity and, as such, only accessible through the activity of reflection, into externally accessible objects that are available to perception. On my reading, this thesis is tightly bound up with the social character of Hegel’s theory of the mind. By making subjective mental states available to view, Hegelian works of art have the potential to exert an influence on the ways in which spectators will go on to perceive the world after encountering such works. Thus, artworks are also crucial sites for understanding how rationally minded thinkers construct their perceptual world together. I develop these claims in the abstract, then track them into the specific domains of poetry and architecture, before concluding with a discussion about the poetics of architecture in the work of contemporary author Renee Gladman.