The Trouble With The Absolute: Donna Tartt’s The Secret History
L’homme n’est ni ange ni bête, et le malheur veut que qui veut faire l’ange fait la bête. (Pascal, Pansée, c.1654-1662, Pensées, pt.6, nº358.)
Preamble
According to Friedrich Nietzsche, the prominent Persian thinker Zarathustra supposedly declared empathically in a typical mannerism of a Übermensch: Humankind must be overcome! He does so often, so relentlessly, that his preaching may cause one some serious migraine.
Given the popularity, one must not be surprised to hear the echo of the influential Swiss philosopher’s forceful voice in some unexpected venues. Indeed, during my pleasure reading of a very fine fiction, The Secret History by Donna Tartt, I was once again confronted with the all-too-human desire to break free from the constitutive condition by which our species are constrained within the ‘phenomenal world’ and to make a blind leap of faith into the ‘sublime’. Whilst Tartt’s debut fiction may be conceived as a secular and contemporary American version of Crime and Punishment without the religious, historical, and philosophical backdrop that makes Dostoevsky’s work so impactful, I am not interested in pursuing this venue of inquiry (I am also not at all convinced with the notion of secularity in this novel, but I shall refrain from directly addressing this subject). What I wish to examine in this article is one central aspect of this novel, namely, the paradox regarding our relation to the ‘Absolute’ in many guises.
Disclaimer: This article should be considered a spoiler. Hence, if you wish to enjoy the book with its full effect of masterful storytelling as the author intended, you must do so before proceeding further from this point.
The Secret History
The Secret History follows the fate of the six students from the department of Classics at a fictional liberal art college in the US state of Vermont. Whilst it lacks a significant historical context that adds to the scope of the work, it is nonetheless a piece of wicked storytelling whose note of acute poignancy haunts the readers long after one sets the book aside. My personal testimony to the skills with which the story is told by the author is this: I have been dreaming about the story to the point where I find myself as a participant of the story in my restless sleep.
That being acknowledged, Tart’s debut novel is more than meets the eye; it is not a merely well-written novel that deserves the recognition as a cult novel with intellectualism that resurrected the long tradition of what is now known as the ‘Dark Academia’ sub-genre. What picked my interest is the central character’s struggle with what one might call a Greek Paradox. Whilst The Secret History can be read as a sophisticated ‘murder mystery’ in a vein of Tom Ripley novels, or the tragic exposition of the hollowness of the contemporary American Form of Life (it is interesting to note: Tartt was a schoolmate of a notorious chronicler of the hallowing American Geist, that is, Bret Easton Ellis, and The Secret History can be read as a robust rebuke of this mode of exposition), these reading, however legitimate, are external to the scope of my inquiry. The Secret History is first and foremost the exploration of a Greek Paradox, and has done so brilliantly as a novel of idea, presented as an absorbing fiction (I must emphasise that the paradox considered here is not the only Greek Paradox: a case in point would be the paradox of desire in the Ancient Greeks elaborated by Ann Carson in her brilliant piece of literary criticism, Eros, the Bittersweet).
The Phenomenal and the Sublime
To our purpose, there is no better place to begin than the lessons which these students dutifully attend. So let us begin by examining what it is that they are taught by the charismatic mentor, Julian Morrow, for it is where the tragedy begins.
Amongst other sweeping claims, Julian consistently drives two points to his young charges: 1) Beauty is Terror; and, 2) Civilisations are founded upon the repression of appetitive desire, and without the safety mechanism to ease the tension arising from the unrelenting suppression, it is fated to self-destruct.
Upon reading the story, the first point appears rather ironic as well as sinister. Given that the plot is partly driven by Henry Winter’s repressed sexual desire for Camilla (and the protagonist’s own desire toward her as well as the perverted one from her twin brother, Charles), the only woman in the group and the victim of the male projection of the femme fatale upon her, this repeated proclamation by the mentor of male gender in the company of predominantly male audience is problematic to put it mildly. Like Helen of Troy, Camilla is forced to be the object of a terrifying prize competition, as it were, and to be ultimately left alone to look upon the ruin of the violent acts committed in her name (Your beauty made me do so, claimed a certain king of England). Hence, a more accurate way to phrase it would be: Beauty, though no fault of its own, invites the terror. Despite her wishes, a so-called femme fatale is objectified as the ultimate prize by the bidders who descent into bestiality, and she is forced to witness the violent acts that would be recorded as some sort of ‘epic’ that inspires and feeds the collective imagination and thus perpetuates the cycle of dehumanising violence (Perhaps I am not alone in wishing to read the story told by Camilla and Helen). Therefore, attributing the terror to the beauty as if the latter is the intrinsic cause of the former is not only inaccurate; it is grotesquely unjust.
Whilst the first point casts a dark shadow over the fate of each character and primarily drives the plot, it is the second point that illuminates the book’s Geist. The reason is evident: it is Henry Winter, not Richard Papen, the protagonist, embodies the tale as the central character. The force of his personality defines The Secret History as a contemporary American exposition of a Greek Paradox that concerns the human relation to the concept of ‘sublime’, or, more accurately, the Absolute. (Henry haunts the story even from the grave: Charles stays away from Camilla; Camilla, despite her affection toward Richard, won’t be with him due to her enduring love for Henry and lives alone as a caretaker for her ailing grandmother, as if having been sent to a nunnery. And yet, since she is the one staying true to her feeling toward the dead, it is fair to say that she is the one who is embodying the possibility of transcending mere physical desire and attraction by practicing in actuality the love she feels for Henry in the most disinterested manner.) Hence, it is critical to grasp what is driving Henry Winter that made him so distinct amongst an eclectic collection of personalities to sufficiently appreciate Tartt’s first novel.
Outwardly, Henry’s ambition is to study the twelve great civilisations. A gifted polyglot and an academic prodigy who has a paper published in a peer-reviewed journal before attending Hampden, he sets himself above the chaotic mundane of the ordinary campus life as he sincerely heeds the call to the ‘sublime’ in the expense of the phenomenal, the dedication which Julian Morrow expects from his select students of six.
Henry takes this call to the ‘sublime’ with deadly seriousness. It soon turns out that he is alone in this devotion. Francis Abernethy, who seems to be the only student who can approach the lofty height presided by Henry and Julian, does not. To Francis, the study of Greek is a gentleman’s ‘vocation’. For the heir to an old, wealthy New England family with a trust fund of his own, there is no need for him to ‘waste’ his time with vocational disciplines. Studying Classics, hence, suits him well: it is esoteric, exclusive, intellectually demanding, yet without worldly utility. As for the rest of his peers, there is not much to add in this regard: despite they being heavily influenced by Henry’s Spartan dedication to intellectualism, mostly, this group of select few is just as hedonistic as their disdained schoolmates. Despite their outward pretence to be otherwise, and notwithstanding the appearance of grandeur granted by Francis as the host of weekend lounging at his aunt’s magnificent estate off campus, all they do is to indulge themselves with appetitive desiring; in fact, they spend an inordinate amount of their time by consuming food and alcohol. For the ones who are supposedly preoccupied with Plato and his notion of the Republic, it strikes peculiar that food is central to their existence. In fact, there is so much space spared for food in this novel that one feels rather ill by just reading it.
This practice is by no means limited to the students; Julian Morrow himself has been a known connoisseur of bon goût. He places a revelatory importance to the practice of serving lunch to a chosen student at his ‘inner sanctum’, a part of the phenomenal world to which he dedicates himself in order to beautify every aspect of it. And thus, Julian is no Wittgenstein; contrary to his self-presentation as the high priest of the ‘sublime’ caught unwillingly in the midst of the modern plastic mundane, he is, in fact, solely dedicated to the phenomenal; indeed, there is no one who has been so irredeemably trapped by the phenomenal in the most superficial sense of the word. Even Bunny Corcoran, who is the most corrupt and narcissistic to the point of being a toxic bully, next to Julian, appears to retain some level of excuse for his way of existing.
It is later revealed that Julian Morrow is not at all sincere when he praises the notion of the ‘sublime’. In fact, Julian has never been serious about anything due to the fundamental lack of interest in and care for the others. However charming in his executions, his intellectual engagement in front of his students has always been a hollow veneer to the profound nihilism at the core of his existence. In this sense, Julian Morrow is very much a Nietzschean character with a very Nietzschean view of the Ancient Greeks expressed in The Birth of Tragedy in the Spirit of Music: according to the Swiss philosopher, Athenians understood the theatre as the safety mechanism for their civilisation, the primal device to guard against nihilism which had inevitably fostered under the unforgiving gaze of the Apollonian logic and order which suppressed the primordial desires. Athenian theatre allows them to incorporate the Dionysian impulse as a performance piece to be contained atop the stage, thereby preventing it from threatening the social order, that is, the Athenian synthesis. For Julian, however, it has nothing to do with the wider society or the notion of governing. He is solely dedicated to maintaining the attractive veneer that conceals the hollowness of his soulless core. Until the horror of the inevitable catches up with him, as it will, Julian is going to maintain the show in which he is a special guest, an immortal, to the Olympia. Hence, he prefers the audience who are young and rich, carefree students of his choosing, to push the unpleasant fact of life as far away from his consciousness.
With tragic earnestness, however, Henry has taken the notion of ‘sublime’ life with all seriousness. So passionately, in fact, that he convinces his peers to initiate the ancient mystical ritual of bacchanal in the woods of Hampden. He is not satisfied with the plastic-cup hedonism that defines the contemporary American Form of Life. He sees that, despite the classy and aristocratic setting, their weekends and evenings are wasted by the numbing enslavement to the appetitiveness. To make the point, as much to himself as to others, Henry concludes that he and his peers must attain the divine height by reviving the most obscure mythic ritual of the bacchanal from the Classical Greek period.
The Bacchanal
The peril of Henry’s logic must be obvious: he seeks the chance of transcending the numbing mundanity of contemporary hedonism and the living-death of unforgiving Apollonian logic and order in, of all places, the mythic rite that promises to be one with the God of Illusion, Dionysus.
It is curious that Henry, of all people, sets his mind on the bacchanal. As a prolific classicist, he should have known the stark warning from Euripides: in his perhaps the most important work, The Bacchae, things did not exactly end well from the modern human perspective. Whilst Julian repeatedly discussed the undeniable temptation amongst the members of a civilised society to lose one’s agency completely, he is clear about his distinctly Nietzschean view in his praise of the Athenians: the impulse for the transcendence must be contained as a staged performance to avoid the total descent into the violent manifestation of desires in real life. It is as if to say: such things must be dressed to remain pleasant to the judges of good tastes such as himself. Hence, it is predictable how Julian reacts when Henry reveals his intent of committing to the call for the ‘sublime’ through the Dionysian rite. He does not explicitly disapprove of his star pupil’s plan, yet he does not hide his confusion either. As customary for Julian, he never reveals his card, and he only demurs as if to say: Why would anyone wish to do such a thing? For once, he understands the importance of the stage management; life is not a theatre; thus, there is no beautiful synthesis of the opposite off the stage. Then, to practice what Nietzsche claims Athenian did, we must enact the conflict of virtues as a performance; one cannot try it in real life.
Then, we must ask ourselves: Why must Henry commit himself and his peers to the bacchanal, of all things?
The most obvious answer could be found in his character. A prodigious scholar and a linguistic genius, Henry Winter has been leading a life dedicated to a lofty purpose. He is intellectually gifted, although, unlike his mentor, he is deadly serious about his scholarly pursuit. And yet, he is not at all one dimensional: there is an episode of violent altercation involving Camilla and Richard’s dorm-mate, Judy, in which Henry dismantled a ‘tough guy’ who attempted to defend Judy; six men unsuccessfully attempted to pull them apart as Henry disfigured the man’s face, in addition to having broken his rib cage and a collarbone. Beneath the strict and refined appearance inhabits a beast. Yet, by all accounts, Henry is someone whose life is squeezed out by his devotion to the higher intellectual life at the altar of Apollo. He is someone who could become a philosopher king in Plato’s Republic, and he knew it, if not for his deep affection for Camilla and his passion for the Ancient Greek poets such as Homer, the obsession that would have been frowned upon by the philosopher himself.
By all indications above, it is plain to see that Henry suffers from dissociation and fragmentation: the dissociation from his person as well as the wider humanity, and his inability to integrate his many attributes harmoniously into a distinct and coherent self-consciousness. Whilst Julian’s academic set-ups for his select few should theoretically help him keep everything confined within the bound of respectability, it was there he met Camilla, a kind, mysterious, and entrancingly attractive girl from Virginia. Her stark yet ethereal beauty charms both Henry and Richard, yet Henry, due to his devotion to a higher life, cannot do anything about his desire. Under the unforgiving gaze of Apollo, he is paralysed. If you are an accomplished classicist like Henry, then, the most logical way to escape from the demand of rigid order is to turn to another God, the deity who is everything Apollo is not.
Curiously, this logic makes sense for Henry; if successful, the bacchanal should offer him an escape from his agency and at long last enable him to act upon his desire for Camilla. And yet, he need not betray his devotion for a higher life: it is the rite in the name of Dionysus, after all; their experiment is a world apart from those random, mindless carnal accidents that are all too common. In this way, Henry is not betraying his commitment to the life devoted to a higher purpose; he is only now discovering another, equally important aspect of the Form of Life to which he has been so loyal. His devotion to Camilla also bears an uncanny resemblance to Dante’s worship of Beatrice. As he confided to Richard, the bacchanal involves a ‘certain carnal aspect’, which is ‘besides the point’. Hence, his love for Camilla must be proven to be above some youthful lust and attraction; he must show that it is fated, committed, and not only lustful but divine above all. In short, Henry agrees with Zarathustra: he must overcome himself.
The problem is: the deity who promises to annul one’s agency completely as a mean to achieve the divine height is the most dangerous God of all.
Winter’s Tale
Naturally, their experiment with the ancient mythic rite brings casualties. In an utter chaos and confusion, they find themselves having murdered a chicken farmer in the rural Vermont, thereby setting the deadly machination in motion. Edmund ‘Bunny’ Corcoran, angry at having been slighted by the group who proceeds with the bacchanal without him (for having been blatantly ignoring the agreed-upon preparation protocols and having been generally a terrible drag to the entire group), blackmails the rest until everyone sees who he truly is: a callous and greedy bully who extorts everyone around him without a hint of remorse. Ultimately, he is murdered by the rest of the class. When an unexpected complication turns what is supposedly a straightforward matter of an apparent ‘hiking accident’ into a headliner, each member of the club begins to buckle under the weight of the unwanted attention to the case. Most notably, Camilla’s twin brother, Charles, a charming lad who is privately alcoholic, deteriorates under the strain of the FBI investigation of Bunny’s death. He becomes increasingly volatile and turns violently toward Camilla. As Henry swoops in as the protector and the lover of Camilla, and Julian discovers the truth behind Bunny’s death and abandons the students to preserve his pleasant veneer of hollow life, it leads to the final confrontation between Charles and Henry wherein Henry confirms his love to Camilla before fatally shooting himself.
Whilst his final act appears improbable and senseless in equal measure, as Richard observes, every move of Henry’s is consistent with his will to overcome the mundanity of the ‘phenomenal world’ and to attain the ‘sublime’. Even his suicide is to make a point: his love for Camilla has been something which transcends mere worldly desires. Whilst I do not condone his action, and his solipsism, his final act expresses who he is: he represents in this story the desire to overcome the human condition that ‘limits’ us.
In this precise sense, The Secret History reveals itself as a contemporary cousin of the Early German Romantic literature. Henry Winter’s singular devotion to the ‘sublime’ is inseparably intertwined with Camilla, a maiden in the ‘phenomenal’ world, the attitude that readily reminds us of Werther, Friedrich Hölderlin, and Karoline von Günderrode. The Secret History’s touching poignancy is inspired by the internal conflict of the central character: Henry’s singular will to reach toward the ‘sublime’ and his rejection of the mundane, which is at odds with his desire to be with Camilla in the ‘phenomenal’ world. Despite his cold and egotistical appearance, enforced by his strict mannerisms and bluntly objective statements that render him often heartless, one must be able to see a vulnerable soul behind his rigid spectacles that shield it from the careless world.
And yet, as the most readers have noted, Henry Winter is outwardly a distinctly Faustian character; whilst he demonstrates care and incredible generosity toward his friends, to Richard in particular, he also shows the astonishing lack of empathy toward certain characters whom he deems lacking in virtue: he indicates the minimum remorse toward the first victim, and, as for the second victim, he shows nothing but contempt. Granted, Bunny’s callousness is impossible to ignore. As Henry points out, Bunny’s demeaning behaviour toward Richard, a transfer from a state college in California with very modest means, has been excruciatingly ugly and cruel. He takes liberty with Henry’s credit cards while his ‘friend’ is paralysed in bed with a migraine, and buys himself Italian suits and loiters around at bars and restaurants in Rome paid by Henry without his knowledge or consent, whilst showing no interest in the magnificent artefacts of the former imperial capital. And Bunny is not close to being done; he is not even grateful for Henry’s silent accommodation to his senseless whims, and relentlessly reproaches his ‘friend’ for being ‘cheap’. Such is the typical behaviour of his: he takes advantage of his relatively well-to-do ‘friends’ whenever possible, yet since the first act, this shameless conduct has escalated into something far more toxic, threatening to expose all. Whilst the rest of the group thinks the premeditated murder of Bunny unnecessary, Henry thinks it is. Following the unrelenting logic and the understanding of Bunny’s character, he has come to the deadly conclusion: Bunny must go. As the most readers readily agree, there is something distinctly chilling about the way in which he comes to this conclusion and goes about to make it happen. One often wonders just how far Henry has taken the notion of the narrowness and the relentlessness of the ‘Ancient Mind’ that is unmoved by the Gewalt of the most terrifying kind, epitomised by the likes of Homer.
Hence, the invocation of Goethe’s character proves superficial: this lack of ethical concern makes the Classical world distinct from the modern one. The critical difference between Henry and the tragic personalities from the German Romantic movement is thus: as someone devoted to the Ancient Greek literature and philosophy, he does not adapt to himself a Dantesque path to the transcendence which is founded in the Christian model of the tripartite world consisting: the Hell, the Purgatory, and the Heaven. The Gods of the Ancient Greeks are not the supreme judges of morality; they are there to represent what they called ‘virtues’, that is, the idea of superiority expressed in the anthropocentric concepts such as physical strength and beauty, superb creative and intellectual prowess, and the most prized idea of all, the agelessness and the immortality. As someone who is passionately devoted to the study of the Ancient Greek to the point where being completely oblivious of his epoch (Henry had not known humankind’s landing upon the moon until Richard informs him of a ‘giant step’), it makes sense that Henry displays such a different attitude toward the prospect of committing Bunny’s murder from the rest of the cast, as well as from us. To him, ridding of Bunny is exactly the same as removing a tumour.
Once again, whilst this attitude of Henry’s strikes us inhuman, we must also recognise its logic. As Richard once tersely noted to his worldly dorm-mate, Judy, the Greeks did not have the concept of Hell, for they recognised no concept of moral judgment: to appreciate the concept of ethics as we do, we must presuppose the recognition of human agency, the concept which was alien to them. Whilst the Ancient Greeks had developed their own sense of justice, even familiar ones such as Platonic and Aristotelian notions of ethics are fundamentally alien to us; their understanding of virtues and justice are not something we can grasp intuitively. To a modern mind like ours, knowing one’s place in the ideal Republic and doing the best one can to fulfil one’s ‘natural’ function, or identifying what one’s ‘nature’ is and cultivating it the best one can like the rest of the natural world operates, do not come close to our understanding of ethics: despite the strong disagreements amongst philosophers. Modern ethics is informed by the concept of moral judgment that presupposes individual agency.
Therefore, so long as one accepts the Ancient Greeks’ world-view, one cannot escape the following implication: there is no concept of human agency that is rational and moral.
Hence, Henry’s understanding of the world is radically different from ours. That, however, is not to say that Henry is completely incomprehensible. His Weltanschauung may be alien to ours, yet it is rooted in certain characteristics that we all share at least to some degree.
A Greek Paradox
Then, we must ask ourselves: What do we in fact have in common with this strange fictional character?
The answer to this question must be as simple as it can be: Henry fixes his strained eyes on something higher than the mundane world of senselessness, which is mindlessly enslaved to the eternal recurrence of appetitive consumption. The only problem is: he has been trapped in seeking the Absolute amongst the absolutes.
It is possible to entertain the concept of the Absolute for someone like Henry who has studied and adopted the way of the Ancient Greeks in literature: the abstract concept of the Absolute is not exclusive to the monistic Form of Life such as the Judaeo-Christian Form of Life broadly construed, since the abstract concept of the Absolute is just as logical as the concept of infinity for anyone familiar with the numbers. This is, however, not to deny the specificity of this particular Form of Life to which Henry has been dedicated. In the Greco-Roman world of the Classical Period, there was no Absolute as a singular entity, as the logic of the very concept suggests; there were only the absolute representations of absolute virtues. For the worshipper of the temple of Apollo, for example, the virtues represented by the sun god were absolute; they did not worship other gods despite their recognition of their status as the deities. Whilst their subject of worship represented the absolute picture of a given virtue, in a polytheistic world such as the Ancient Greece, there were many Gods who fiercely guarded their claim of the Absolute in their respective jurisdictions while leaving others to govern theirs. Since each virtue is absolute in itself, each deity representing the respective virtue is absolute, yet only within one’s respective domain alone, thereby excluding the possibility of a dialectical process toward a sublation, without which the concept of the Absolute, the singular concept of perfection, cannot be conceived. Hence, a Greek Paradox can be summarised as follows: whilst the Greeks sought the ‘sublime’ in the absolute representation of an individual virtue as a distinct virtue from other virtues by accepting each deity’s absolute jurisdiction over their domain of virtues, they could not conceive the Absolute, that is, a singular abstract representation of all virtues. They were incapable of finding the path to the sublation of the socially recognised abstract virtues, despite their ability to inspire the absolute concepts of each virtue. Since they conditioned themselves to worship an absolute amongst absolutes, there was no path to the singular concept of the Absolute, despite their aspiration to reach toward this ideal state to which they are blind.
Naturally, according to poets, this state of affairs in the Ancient Greece traps the humanity in the perpetual conflicts between Gods:, the humanity is merely there to fight the proxy wars between them. There is no room for human agency; only for the fates. As Hegel elaborated in his analysis of Antigone in The Phenomenology of Spirit, the conflicting virtues, each with its own absolute legitimacy, ends in violence and a tragedy. It is important to note: a direction to the singular desirable ‘goal’ gives us the reason for having a mutually respectful discourse with a sound exercise of our capacity to reason. Without conceiving such a ‘goal’, which could be the final outcome of a logical consequence, or something achievable in actuality, or something else entirely, one cannot begin to imagine the very possibility of dialectic. And with it, one loses the sight of ethics: In the fragmented world with the absolutes competing for the claim of superiority, if one is not favoured by one deity, one can always turn to another. Hence, there could be no basis for the moral judgment for the Ancient Greeks. They may have been ‘noble’, yet they have only honour and ‘justice’, but no ethics in a recognisable sene to us. Despite Henry’s brief moment of inner harmony before the tragedy strikes, so long as he adheres to the virtue of the Ancient Greeks, his world has always been fragmented amongst competing virtues, and divided between the domination and the subjugation based on the level of one’s virtuousness, whatever that may be. This, clearly, is a very egotistical Weltanschauung: one must defend one’s virtue at all costs in the face of likely oppositions who, in turn, intend to defend their respective virtues. There will be no compromise; there will be no peace before the violence runs its course.
Another problem with this polytheistic model is: one cannot, at least in principle, simultaneously serve two Gods. Hence, Henry must choose either to worship Apollo or Dionysus. Whilst in Henry’s way of thinking, he is still serving a deity, and thus his actions are still elevated from the mindless addiction to appetitive desires, it prevents him from realising all aspects of his person: one is either Apollonian or Dionysian, not both. Given that one must devote to one representation of a specific virtue at any given time, in the world of the Ancient Greeks, a virtue knows no compromise: Gods demand the total surrender from their subjects, and thus denying the possibility of realising one’s potential to subulate other virtues within oneself for a higher degree of self-realisation (once again, the Ancient Greek notion of virtues does not have the moral aspect as we can understand; the virtues for them are the abstract concepts by which they measured the superiority as attributes found in individuals).
Consequently, Henry is left in a strangely fragmented state without a path to establish his personality as an integrated entity. Despite having a brief period of a seeming harmony and happiness before the final tragic act, so long as Henry is spellbound with the world of the Ancient Greeks, his attempt to reach the ‘sublime’ remains impossible, since he can only attain one virtue represented by a particular deity at a time while he remains aware of other virtues. This particular paradox of the Ancient Greek world, which aspires to seek an absolute amongst absolutes, denies its logical consequence: the Absolute.
The Absolute Paradox
Whilst Henry’s dedication to the Ancient Greek Form of Life has brought tragic catastrophes upon everyone involved, both voluntarily and otherwise, with the ‘Project Bacchanal’, this acknowledgement is not the absolution of the monistic concept of the Absolute in philosophy and religions. For once, Immanuel Kant soundly demonstrated the inaccessibility of the Absolute, or pure concepts such as’ Substance’, in his critical philosophy. Then, it is most interesting that Hegel, who studied Kant and eventually followed him to become the next major philosopher, developed the concept of the Absolute as the final outcome of dialectic in his first seminal work, The Phenomenology of Spirit. It is the work that represents one of the most extraordinary chapters of modern history, hurriedly written under the threat of the advancing Napoleon’s army before his eventual evacuation.
The most controversial idea from The Phenomenology of Spirit must be the concept of the Absolute: Hegel claims that, as the final conclusion of dialectic amongst competing Forms of Life, the humankind may arrive at the Absolute, namely, the absolute understanding available for the humanity, which in turn results in the coming of the Weltgeist, or the World-Spirit that unites us in harmony granted by the attainment of the highest possible level of self-understanding. Hegel argues that the practice of dialectic enables us to overcome the fragmentation amongst humankind, and the duality of the subjugation and the domination amongst ourselves. This, ultimately, should enable us to lead Sittlichkeit, or an ethical Form of Life.
Whilst one may accept his notion of the Absolute purely on a ground of theoretical consistency and integrity, it certainly invokes a profound wariness: one is readily reminded of Kant’s reservation regarding the notion of the perpetual peace. The Prussian philosopher insisted that his thesis on perpetual peace had nothing to do with the possibility of such a state in actuality: he merely tasked himself to elaborate on the necessary precondition for us to entertain such a concept seriously in the first place. Whilst I am willing to accept the sincerity with which Hegel advances his argument, I must admit that I am not prepared to seriously consider the literary, or the strong, interpretation of the Hegelian Absolute as a realisable concept. Whilst the objectivity examined in The Phenomenology of Spirit is neither semantic nor scientific, for Hegel’s project examines the way in which we engage with socially constructed concepts, I think that there is a good reason to be wary of the notion of the Absolute as an objective concept.
That being acknowledged, there are ways in which we can interpret the Hegelian Absolute as a reasonable concept. The first interpretation is a modest one, according to which the Hegelian Absolute is merely an abstract ‘destination’, the logically necessary outcome of dialectic: it has no bearing upon the actuality, yet it occupies the place in his theory as the logical ‘conclusion’, the ‘potentiality’ only in the realm of abstraction. It is similar to the theoretical status of numerical infinity: anyone who is familiar with the concept of numerical sequence should realise that the string of numbers could go on ad infinitum. The Hegelian Absolute can be interpreted as a purely abstract concept in this precise manner: one can plausibly speculate that, since the finite varieties of Forms of Life existing amongst us, we can point to such an endpoint in abstraction. Regardless the realistic probability of arriving at such a ‘destination’ being non-existent, it is not unreasonable to recognise it as a logically necessary concept.
The problem with this interpretation is that, by weakening the notion of Absolute, it also hollows out the concept of dialectic. If the Hegelian dialectic is indeed the dynamic process to bring humanity to the desirable state governed by Weltgeist, then acknowledging its nature as a pure abstract concept that has no bearing in actuality does negate its meaningfulness. One can argue: if one cannot reach the destination, why bother starting the journey in the first place?
Another interpretation reverses the order: Hegel began by conceiving the destination, that is, the concept of the Absolute and Weltgeist, and reverse-engineered the entire process of dialectic as a means to the end. As outlandish as it sounds, this is a commonplace practice: we set a goal for ourselves, then work out how to achieve it. Instead of wondering to where dialectic will take us, in this interpretation, allegedly, Hegel had already set his eyes on the goal, and mapped the route to the pre-determined destination.
The problem with this interpretation is: envisioning the destination tells us neither about the access, nor the justifiability of conceiving such a destination in the first place. In addition, we must note: the desirability of the object does not justify conceiving it as a goal. The intensity of will does not make our objective achievable.
In addition, there is a problem with both interpretations: there can be no clear linguistic concept of the Absolute. We cannot explicitly articulate how such a state looks like. We may utter some vague and broad notions of ‘unity’ and ‘harmony’, yet there is no linguistically specific description of how such a state would be. Then, we are starting from the goal that is neither specific nor clear. This entails that we have no idea where we are heading to or starting from.
That is not to say that the Hegelian Absolute should not be taken seriously. It is a unique concept in that it is at once philosophical and historical; analysing it from a purely logical point of view in abstraction does not help us fully appreciate its significance and its unique character as a philosophical concept. Hegel thought that philosophy was a thought captured in time. Therefore, we must evaluate the Hegelian Absolute within a specific historical context from which it emerged.
Hegel’s Absolute only makes sense once it is situated within a specific historical development: for better or worse, he was a child of the French Revolution. Whilst he did not absolve the Terror, he appreciated the seismic shift made possible by this historic event: the inception of the notion of humanity. Once one appreciates this notion, history is no longer the history of a specific Form of Life. History, for Hegel, was no longer limited to that of German-speaking people, or European people. It had become l’histoire de l’humanité, albeit only in a limited scope and flawed manner originally, and still remaining in the realm of potentiality today. With its inclusiveness which is founded upon the mutual respect to the equal right for life, dignity, and self-determination, and as the counter-force against cultural relativism, the Hegelian dialectic is not only political, yet ethical by nature, as signified by the notion of Sittlichkeit, which defines the state of the Hegelian Absolute. This is possible by recognising one collective identity that supersedes all possible identities without overwriting them: regardless of race, nationality, class, sex, gender, or anything one might identify oneself with, we are all human beings, namely, equal entities who are required to practice mutual respect to one another’s rights as rational agents. The inception of this concept signified the seismic shift: for the first time, we saw the possibility of seeing ourselves as the humankind, one ‘people’, thereby having made ourselves understood the potentiality of the Hegelian Sittlichkeit. Even if this concept strictly remains in the realm of potentiality, the subsequent history shows us how profound a shift it initiated. Despite the constant and consistent resistance, the idea of humanity survives and remains an inspiration: it is fair to say that, for the one who is willing to read an article such as this, one can no longer understand ourselves without it.
Yet, again, the desirability of the object does not warrant the obtainability. It is also true that the purely abstract theoretical placeholder of an unrealisable concept is too remote to motivate us to begin the rigorous process of dialectic. And yet, given the historic shift in our self-consciousness, that is, the fact that we cannot conceive ourselves without the recognition that we are humankind first, there is a way to interpret the Hegelian Absolute as something unattainable yet constitutive to our self-understanding. In order to make this theory work, we need to turn to another prominent voice in philosophy.
In A Lecture on Ethics, Wittgenstein argues that every concept related to ethics is an absolute concept, that is, a linguistic concept that is beyond our linguistic ability to clearly define and describe, yet its judgment is absolute, that is, independent of specific attributes, for to say a person is ‘good’ differs from to say a person is ‘good at’ something. It is a judgment of the whole, not the specifics. He famously argues that the predicate ‘good’ in ethics cannot establish a clear semantic relation to particular attributes of a parson or an action, since the said concept transcends the limit of language. When one judges someone as a ‘good’ person, such a judgment is an absolute one: there is no specificity or degree of ‘goodness’ when one judges someone ‘good’. And yet, such a judgment is also an impossible one. Whilst one can describe what one means by a ‘good chair’, and even points to such an object, one cannot establish a clear description of what one precisely means by a ‘good’ person. Despite our best effort, our attempts to describe what we mean by ‘good’ as an ethical concept eventually bottoms out, only to reveal the limit of our language. According to Wittgenstein, for our ‘thoughts’ to count as such, we must be able to give it a clear linguistic form. Hence, our inability to describe the most fundamental ethical notion of ‘goodness’ renders any linguistic concepts related to ethics as ‘nonsensical’, or sinnlos (When Wittgenstein uses this term, we must construe it in a Fregean sense of the word; in a colloquial sense, the word ‘nonsensical’ often denotes stupidity, yet, naturally, Wittgenstein is using this term within a very specific philosophical context).
On a superficial level, this seems to imply that Wittgenstein discredits Ethics as a pointless discipline. Contrary to the appearance, for Wittgenstein, ethics and aesthetics are of the most important subjects of inquiry. Instead of dismissing these subjects as frivolous pass-times, he insists on recognising ethics and aesthetics as indispensable disciplines for our individual and collective self-understanding.
What this means is: to Wittgenstein, the absolute concepts of ethics and aesthetics are not only ‘nonsensical’: these absolute concepts are paradoxes. Whilst we have no hope of giving the absolute concepts clear linguistic forms, without them, we cannot recognise ourselves. In short, we owe our self-understanding to the concepts that transcend our understanding. Hence, the absolute concepts of ethics and aesthetics are constitutive to our self-understanding that is nonetheless out of reach. There is no language we can use to describe them clearly. And yet, without these absolute concepts, both individually and collectively, we have no self-understanding at all.
It turns out that the Hegelian Absolute is an absolute concept precisely in this Wittgensteinian sense. As is often the case with political slogans such as ‘unity’, the Hegelian Absolute and Sittlichkeit defy our attempt to give clear linguistic forms. Naturally, abstract concepts such as these are sinnlos; hence, there is no hope for us to establish concrete semantic relations with actual objects or the clear representations of such concepts. In addition, the Hegelian Absolute is a necessary concept for dialectic to take place. Since every action implicitly presupposes a goal, for an action is not the same as physical or mental compulsion, it is impossible to imagine engaging with a rigorous activity such as dialectic without having its final destination in mind, however vague and poorly defined it may be. In addition, since the Hegelian Absolute is the final destination for dialectic, it is an absolute concept: it is the concept of humanity that supersedes all other identifies without overwriting them. Hence, in modern democratic Form of Life, dialectic and the Hegelian Absolute are necessary concepts, since it is equivalent to the concept of humanity as the totality of all possible identities coexisting based on the mutual respect to one another’s rights, and the ongoing process of establishing it by defining it and reinventing it. And thus, once again, we owe our self-understanding to the concepts that transcend our understanding. As we discussed earlier, the Hegelian Absolute and Sittlichkeit cannot be clearly, or even adequately, captured by any linguistic means.
The important difference between Hegel’s Absolute and other absolute concepts is: the Hegelian Absolute, the precondition for Sittlichkeit, is a historical concept, not a purely linguistic one as in the case for ethical concepts such as being ‘good’: it is dependent upon the notion of humanity as a ‘universal’ concept; hence, it is contingent upon a specific historical development. As the notion of metoikos (μέτοικος) in Ancient Greece represents, the notion of ‘humankind’ that transcends the categories that separate us from the Other is a concept whose recognition depends upon the specific stage of historical development of a given Form of Life: despite the significant contributions made by them, the likes of the Ancient Greeks simply did not have the concept of humanity. That being the case, the notion of humanity will not be understood and accepted automatically by modern citizens as a default mode of our self-understanding. It is supposed to be the result of rigorous dialectic conducted with good faith.
Furthermore, the recognition of dialectic and the Hegelian Absolute that leads to Sittlichkeit is not as straightforward as The Phenomenology of Spirit might initially impress. It is hard to see the story of humanity as a singular plot without having done some work on one’s own, and neither the current state of affairs nor the recent history are exactly affirming to this concept. There have been strong pushbacks to the notion of history as the shared process of progress for all humanity, the noble march to the bright future for us to realise our potentiality in its best possible form, whatever that may be. Many recent and current events remind us that a large portion of the global populace does not, and perhaps is not wiling to, recognise the very concept of humanity for all humans. And yet, the concept of humanity that is based on mutual respect for one another’s equal right appears enduring. Even in the most authoritarian Forms of Life, the struggle to be a part of the story of humanity is ongoing, despite in insufficient scale and without effective means to overcome the odds.
By defining the Hegelian Absolute as a paradox that is constitutive of ‘our’ self-understanding, the concept gains more theoretical scope while eschewing to become a purely abstract, lofty yet utterly unrealistic, or simply unintelligent concept as in the notion of the ‘End of History’. This reading enables ‘us’ to see The Phenomenology of Spirit in the more nuanced light, thereby denying a simplistic assessment of this seminal work as a Jugendkunst. Taken as an absolute concept as per with ethics and aesthetics according to Wittgenstein, then, the Hegelian Absolute is neither a mirage that merely functions as a forced logical destination of pure abstraction, nor a false destination of delusion: it is one of the critical linguistic concepts that make humanity’s self-understanding possible in the first place despite our fundamental inability to define it linguistically.
If that is the case, then, we have been asking wrong questions regarding the Hegelian Absolute. It is not about realisability that matters; it is the necessity for our self-understanding in a particular historical context that matters to ‘us’. And the justifiability of such an absolute concept to ‘our’ self-understanding is dependent upon how well it fares under the rigour of sound critical scrutiny.
If one accepts this reading of the Hegelian Absolute, one will find oneself in a good company, namely, Samuel Beckett and Albert Camus, amongst others regarding the attitude toward the notion of Absolute. The Hegelian dialectic is neither the path to the ‘Absolute’ that has often been attempted to obtain by force and domination, nor a counterfeit ticket to the Promised Land. It is a paradox that we must embrace with the wisdom of irony. As Beckett famously stated, we must fail again, but fail better. Whilst we may no longer look to extract ourselves from the Purgatory, there are many meaningful activities one could pursue. Yet, in order to render such activities meaningful, paradoxically, one must unwaveringly fix our sight upon the Absolute, with full understanding of its unattainability because it is not enough to accept its unattainability; we must strive toward it with all we have, knowing that we are never going to get it. Whilst this picture of perpetual dialectic may seem grim, Camus argues that it need not be so: he empathically concludes that Sisyphus was happy. Georg Trakl was fully aware of the nature of his endeavour with his poetry: he attempted to transcend the limit of language, all the while fully committed to the limit of language. Hence, we must conclude that it is not what we aim for or what we gain by our dialectics toward the Absolute that matters; it is what we experience and develop in the process of dialectic that makes our existence meaningful.
The Epitaph
Whilst The Secret History is many things, it is undeniable that Henry Winter’s personality drives the story. Whilst his untimely death does not end it, he still dictates it in the way no one else can: ultimately, Bunny and Julian have been relegated to footnotes. Ultimately, it is Henry’s will to reach to the ‘sublime’ while being irresistibly transfixed by Camilla in the ‘phenomenal’, his predicament of being trapped by a Greek Paradox, that dictates the story.
It is a tragedy in many shades: his untimely death, the unfulfilled promise of love, and the wasted life unlived. And yet, perhaps the most poignant is his inability to free himself from a Greek Paradox: within this particular Form of Life, one can only chase an absolute amongst absolutes, for there is no path to the Absolute, or what Hegel calls ethical life. As Henry and Camilla confide to Richard, their absolute aim was to witness Dionysus, and at least two of them believe that they have succeeded, if only fleetingly. And the ‘success’ of their endeavour brought ruins.
The Secret History is often described as the story about wasted youth. Whilst this assessment is not wrong, the reasons to which they attribute to the missed opportunities are. For the central character, Henry Winter, the campus hedonism is not the reason for his demise. One of the reasons for his tragedy is the nihilistic mentor who has promised the ‘sublime’ in which he himself does not believe. Another stems from the subject of his study itself: the Ancient Greek Form of Life is quintessentially tragic, since it excludes the possibility of dialectic, is trapped by the conflicting absolute virtues without a path for sublations. Just as monotheism falls for the illusion of obtaining the access to the Absolute, Greek polytheism fails to appreciate its own conflicting nature. If he were to meet a mentor with enough intellectual humility, then such a teacher should have directed him to expand his learning instead of restricting him with a stage management to satisfy his own end. Still, despite overwhelming odds, Henry manages to elevate the story into something truly tragic with his unrelenting gaze toward the elusive Absolute to which he remains blind.
Tragic, not because his actions are noble; it is because his cultivated blindness has left devastations to those who have been touched by his presence.
A tragedy, as is often the case, has as much to do with who is left behind as who departed. It is the most effective theatrical device, yet, as Julian has discovered, one can neither script nor stage-manage life. Hence, for the false idols, who present themselves as higher beings than fellow humans, there is no tragedy: only shame.