The aporia of recollection: From Lessing to Hegel, and beyond

This dissertation examines the notion of "recollection" in its relation to the philosophy of history that emerged during the second half of the eighteenth century. This new philosophy, in which knowledge itself was temporalized, supplemented the subject "man" with the transcendent subject of "history," which became readable for man from a higher perspective. The reflexive structure that made possible this conversion of perspectives was recollection.;Lessing evoked Augustine's theology of history as a frame of reference for his own Education of the Human Race and turned the logic of conversion into a reading technique that relied on the structure of recollection and could be applied to history in its entirety. The condition of such a reading was the liquidation of the letter and a hermeneutics aimed at a transcendental meaning that could be recollected in advance.;In his writings on history, Kant came to similar conclusions. However, the strict dualism of phenomena and noumena established in the Critique of Pure Reason made a coincidence of recollected history and recollecting subject impossible. Faced with the moral depravity of human history, the observer feels merely indignation, Kant maintained. Only after having established "negative (re)presentation [negative Darstellung]" in the "Analytic of the Sublime," did Kant conceive of a homologous negative hermeneutics permitting the reading and recollecting of the "sign of history.";Not restricted by Kantian boundaries, Hegel connected history and subjectivity via "Er-Innerung"---recollection and interiorization. His system allowed him to account for otherness and plenitude, while at the same time exalting and empowering absolutely the (philosophical) subject. The recollection of Hegel's former friend Holderlin and his philosophy (as well as Hegel's own early allegiance to this philosophy) serves as a case study to examine the limits and costs of "Er-Innerung." Recollection is the act through which the system constitutes itself. Yet, ultimately, this recollection itself had to come under the scrutiny of the philosophical subject. The final question of Hegel's system concerns the transition from recollection to thinking proper and thus the moment when recollection recollects itself as its end.