MA Defence: Guilherme Balduino Gonzaga, Philosophy

Solitude in a Phantasmal World: The Crisis of Modernity According to the Young Hegel

Guilherme Balduino Gonzaga

Supervisor: Emilia Angelova

ABSTRACT: This paper attempts to understand the young Hegel’s diagnosis of modernity as a singularly distinctive event, proposing that modernity inaugurates a new historical epoch characterized by a state of permanent crisis. The young Hegel saw modernity as a process of detachment from the past, producing a rupture in which the role of subjectivity takes on a twofold manifestation, as subjective freedom and as reflection. Although Hegel recognized the immense historical importance of the modern concept of freedom, he also argued that subjectivity is a one-sided principle, triggering the split [Entzweiung] between the individual and the whole. In my interpretation of the young Hegel, Entzweiung spreads itself through all spheres of culture and social life, forming many divisions and dualisms, which appear fixed in their oppositions due to the reflective activity of the Understanding [Verstand], thus becoming unsolvable contradictions. The proliferation of contradictions in all spheres of social life constitutes what I call a state of permanent crisis—a deeply fractured totality, unable to reach a resolution [Entschluss] to its inherent negativity, giving rise to a melancholic longing and striving for reconciliation. Finally, I will defend the hypothesis that Hegel's solution to the state of crisis inaugurated by the advent of modernity is none other than the formulation of his dialectical method, thus claiming that implied in Hegel’s philosophy is an implicit notion of philosophy for times of crisis.