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search for constellations. If these appear in Weber in place of a systematics, whose
absence one would gladly reproach him for, then his thinking proves its worth as a third
possibility beyond the alternatives of positivism and idealism.
Essence and Appearance 169-172
Where a category  through negative dialectics, that of identity and of totality  changes
itself, the constellation of all changes and thereby in turn each one. The concepts of
essence and appearance are paradigmatic of this. They originate out of the philosophical
tradition, are maintained, but their directional tendency is redirected. Essence is no longer
to be hypostasized as pure intellectual being-in-itself. Rather, essence passes over into
what lies hidden beneath the façade of the immediate, of the presumed facts, which
makes them into what they are; the law of doom, which history has obeyed hitherto; all
the more irresistible, the deeper it crawls beneath the facts, in order to be comfortably
denied by them. Such essence [Wesen] is downright mischief-making [Unwesen], the
arrangement of the world which degrades human beings into the means of their sese
conservare [Latin: self-preservation], curtailing and threatening their life, by reproducing
it and deceiving them that things are so, in order to satisfy their needs. This essence too
must appear like the Hegelian one: masked in its own contradiction. Only in the
contradiction of the existent to that which it claims to be, can essence be cognized.
Indeed it, too, is conceptual in respect to the presumed facts, not immediate. But such
conceptuality is not mere physei [Greek: by nature], the product of the subject of
cognition, in which it finally finds itself once more confirmed. Instead it expresses the
fact that the conceptualized world, however much also through the fault of the subject, is
not its own but hostile to it. This is almost imperceptibly attested to by the apperception
[Wesenschau] of the Husserlian doctrine. It amounts to the complete alienation of
essence from the consciousness which grasps it. It recalls, albeit in the fetishized form of
an utterly absolute ideal sphere, that even the concepts to which their essentialities are
unthinkingly equated are not only the products of syntheses and abstractions: they
represent equally, too, a moment in the many, which calls up the concepts, which
according to idealistic doctrine are merely posited. Husserl s hypertrophied idealism, the
ontologization of pure Spirit, for that reason long unknown to itself, helped in its most
effective texts to give distorted expression to an anti-idealistic motive, the dissatisfaction
with the thesis of the hegemony of the thinking subject. Phenomenology forbade the
latter from proscribing laws, where it already had to obey them: to that extent it
experiences them as something objective. Because meanwhile for Husserl, as for the
idealists, all mediations are put on the noetic side, that of the subject, he cannot otherwise
conceive of the moment of objectivity in the concept than as immediacy sui generis
[Latin: general in itself] and must copy it, with an epistemological act of violence, from
the sense-perception. He frantically denied that the essence in spite of everything is also
for its part a moment: originated. Hegel, whom he damned with the arrogance of
ignorance, already had the superior insight that the essence-categories of the second book
of the Logic are as much historically become, products of the self-reflection of the
categories of being, as objectively valid. A thinking which zealously rejected dialectics
can no longer attain this, even though Husserl s basic theme, the logical propositions,
ought to have thrust this upon him. For such propositions are, according to his theory,
equally objective in character,  laws of essence , as, something he at first passed over in
silence, tied to thinking and dependent in their innermost core on that which they for their
part are not. The absolute of logical absolutism justifies itself in the validity of formal
propositions and of mathematics; nevertheless it is not absolute, because the claim of
absoluteness, as the positively achieved identity of subject and object, is itself [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]