CHAPTER 3

HEGEL’S NIGHT OF THE WORLD

The project of the Enlightenment, deriving its name from the idea that progress entails a bringing of light, understands the search for truth as being concomitant with an elucidation of all dark psychic representations. The light of knowledge separates from the darkness of ignorance as Sarastro’s reason does from the superstition of the Queen of the Night. Yet if in The Magic Flute all knowledge that does not follow the laws of rationality ultimately must be expelled from an enlightened order of things, the dramaturgy of the opera reveals a seminal conundrum. A domain of nocturnal phantasmagoria must first be (re)produced, so that, in the course of surmounting this prior knowledge, the Enlightenment project can emerge victorious. In Schikaneder’s libretto, the cultivation of reason demands an unconditional renunciation of the star-blazing Queen of the Night, who at the end of the opera is irrevocably banished from Sarastro’s temple into an eternal night. At the peak of the Enlightenment, the bringing forth of light and the production of knowledge, is, after all, meant to render all psychic material attributed to the night—dreams, magic, doubt, and death—comprehensible, and thus rationally controllable.

Nevertheless, as Karl Philipp Moritz’s Teachings of the Gods illustrates, the ancient Nyx experienced a cultural revival around 1790, albeit as a vestige of prior paganism. Located at the boundary between chaos and world, the night is endowed with the power of an unfathomable knowledge. To Moritz, this uncanny deity and her offspring give shape to something that the gaze of the enlightened subject cannot disclose because it recedes from its intellectual grasp, or what the enlightened subject prefers conceptually to enclose in nocturnal darkness, so as to mark the dark spots on the map of enlightened thinking. Given this epistemological order of things, Michel Foucault found the nocturnal realm rediscovered at the height of the Enlightenment to be a source of powerful clandestine forces developed from a primordial and inaccessible point. The night, he argues, re-emerges at this historical moment as a critical metaphor for a depth obscured by darkness. From this formless mass, conceptually comparable to the chaos of classical and biblical cosmogenetic narratives, manifestations are called forth that then take shape in a world regulated by clear distinctions. As such, the impenetrable nocturnality from which the light of reason separates comes to be assigned a distinct place: Even when the night is not explicitly embodied as a dark maternal figure and is invoked instead as a critical figure of thought, it marks the site of what rationality must repress, what it must designate as unknowable, or what it calls sacred. Enlightened reason can only assert its hegemony by discovering a piece of night located both within its epistemological system of ordering the world and outside, residing on the very margins that are also interwoven with its conceptual fabric.

In other words, the portion of the night every enlightened subject carries within is registered on the cognitive map of what is rationally knowable. As a figure of thought, night (and thus the proximity to Nyx’s personification in classical and biblical cosmogonies) renders visible the unthought qua unthinkable knowledge with which an order of things produced and regulated by the illumination of rational enlightenment is inevitably entwined. If, however, a form of thinking aimed at rational illumination contains night at its core, as its ground and vanishing point, the epistemological break that Foucault locates around 1800 exceeds a simple reversion to an earlier mode of obscure, mythopoetic thinking. This chapter explores the way Hegel’s romantic philosophy does more than simply admit to the existence of dark places on the map of what can be thought, which have been left obscure only because illuminating reason has not yet reached them. The Enlightenment insists on drawing a decisive boundary to the dark depth of the subject; it is adamant that there is a coexistence—although decidedly not a conversation—between rationality and the ungraspable piece of night that even the most enlightened subject carries within the self. Hegel responds to the project of Enlightenment by explicitly turning his attention toward this nocturnal side of the mind/spirit (Geist), declaring it to be the precondition for all thought. For Hegel’s subject, as for Milton’s Adam and Eve, the long and arduous path to the light of self-knowledge requires an encounter with the nocturnal aspect of thinking, an engagement with uncanniness that consists in thinking extimacy, an externalized intimacy. What he responds to is the fact that, at the height of the Enlightenment, the human subject was no longer plagued with the doubt of skepticism, pertaining to whether one could be certain of the existence of the world. Descartes’s worry at the darkest moment in his Meditations that all existence might be a delusion—a trick, played on him by some demonic force—was no longer at issue. By the beginning of the nineteenth century a different doubt had emerged: an epistemological uncertainty pertaining not to the relation thought has to the world, but rather to the thinking subject himself. What if, as Goya so pointedly asks in his Los Caprichos, the slumber of reason brings forth an array of monsters?

This chapter focuses on the way Hegel consistently has recourse to the night as a conceptual figure while tracing the progress of the mind/spirit out of a formless absolute to its perfected self-manifestation. The implicit connection to the cosmogonies discussed so far is that Hegel’s night reiterates the way these mythopoetic narratives attribute a productive potentiality to formless chaos, conceiving the primordial night as always already containing what will only gradually come to be realized in a process of externalization. Hegel’s debt to cosmogenetic thinking is that he repeatedly conceives of the night as containing the potential fulfillment of the mental spirit. Indeed, it is in the night that the moment announces itself, in which the subject will know itself in its self-differentiated absoluteness. Hegel’s night thus reiterates the primordial chaos of cosmogenetic narratives in that, in his thinking, nocturnal darkness emerges as a conceptual figure that always already includes as potentiality all manifestations of the mind/spirit, which, as its internal momentum, incessantly seek articulation and manifestation.

“The ‘I’ is the vacuum or receptacle for anything and everything: for which everything is and which stores up everything in itself,” Hegel argues in his Encyclopedia (1830). “Every man is a whole world of conceptions that lie buried in the night of the ‘I’. It follows that the ‘I’ is the universal in which we leave aside all that is particular, and in which at the same time all the particulars have a latent existence” (48). To compare the “I” with a night that contains an array of manifestations, concealing and preserving them, suggests that there is a prior unconscious, an amorphous formation of the subject that still has to be filled with identity. In a chapter of his Jena Lectures on the Philosophy of Spirit (1805), which focuses on the spirit and the treasure trove of images it generates, Hegel introduces the night as a critical trope for the unfathomable origin of the mind’s manifold fantasy formations. The pure self, which Hegel posits as the point of departure for the formation of the subject, initially contains only possible distinctions that have not yet become operative differentiations. The contoured self, through which the human subject becomes aware of its existence by virtue of a detour through externalized images, has not yet distinguished itself from the prior formless unity of the “I.” Instead, this self exists in the human subject as “something undifferentiated.” The subject as yet not conscious of its self, may be “in possession of that image, is master of it” (86). And yet, that self has not yet revealed itself to the subject. Instead, it “is stored in the mind’s treasury, in its night” (86–87). In this primordial state, the self is not conscious because it has not yet come to stand, as an object, before its own conceptual imagination. It has not yet undergone the process of being regarded by the subject; a process that alone leads to the subject consciously taking possession of its self.

Like Hesiod in his cosmogony, Hegel thus maintains that the existence of an amorphous darkness is the prerequisite for all subjectivity to take shape, a darkness which already contains all possible externalized figurations or manifestations within itself: “The human being is this night, this empty nothing which contains everything in its simplicity—a wealth of infinitely many representations, images, none of which occur to it directly, and none of which are not present. This is the night, the interior of human nature, existing here—pure self” (87). In contrast to Schikaneder’s Sarastro, Hegel foregrounds the fact that to be human is to be part of the night. The wealth of images, which only begin to develop over time so as to allow a differentiated personality to emerge, is always already inherent in the subject. And yet these self-images are not yet present to the subject because it has not yet consciously grasped them. At this early stage, the subject cannot yet abstract them from himself and therefore cannot yet invoke them. The comparison of a pure self with a night that is empty, even although it contains all manifestations in a state of potential development, serves Hegel both as a point of departure and the dynamic point of transition to which the subject keeps returning. In his claim regarding a “night of the world,” Hegel has recourse to the same phenomena of the uncanny (although this is not his term) that gothic writers were celebrating in their fictional narratives about psychic nocturnality at the same time he published his Jena Lectures. The empty nothing (or non-being), in which the inner life of nature is revealed, is not to be thought of as a unique experience that helps bring about a successful constitution of the self once it has been completed. Instead, the “I” repeatedly encounters its own night. “In phantasmagorical conceptions night is everywhere,” Hegel proceeds to argue: “Here a bloody head suddenly shoots up and there another white shape, only to disappear as suddenly. We see this night when we look a human being in the eye, looking into a night which turns terrifying. For from his eyes the night of the world hangs out toward us” (87).

Hegel not only posits the emptiness of the pure self as the point of departure from which the mind will experience the mental invocation of the entire world, in the sense of a spiritual world; as the chronotopos for experiencing all kinds of conceptions that have not yet been realized, but could become realized, the night incessantly flares up again whenever the “I” withdraws from the realm of the ordinary everyday into the realm of phantasmagoria. The night of the “I” not only propels forward a differentiated development of subjective identity, but can also lead the subject in the direction of madness. Although the experience of nocturnal phantasmagoria allows the subject to confront again its pure self, this return is accompanied by a strange transformation of the self. The manifold images appear as externalized conceptions that the subject comes to realize by consciously looking at them, and that are in part rendered strange to the point of being horrific. This first conscious experience of pure self corresponds to a night because the chronotopos into which one withdraws from the ordinary world is filled with externalized manifestations of all conceptions potentially contained in each subject. What is decisive is that this return to the original void of the pure self is also the point at which the “I” traverses its own boundary. One catches sight of a night of the world that has become horrific most prominently whenever one looks directly into another’s eyes: When one perceives oneself as another, or when one perceives the pure self of another, thus once more traversing the point of individual distinction, one will merge the exterior other with the inner self in one’s imagination.

In contrast to the philosophy of the Enlightenment, Hegel does not regard the relationship the subject has to the world and the objects in it as being imbued with darkness. Rather, it is the subject itself that allows the night of the “I” (from which it has emerged) to reawaken during nocturnal phantasmagoria and press forward into consciousness. If at this point at which the self passes beyond itself, the night of the world hangs out toward us, this is because Hegel is arguing from a position of radical subjectivity. At issue is the gradual development of a consciousness as it emerges from the pure self. When the subject returns to that mental night from which his thinking has evolved, he experiences those conceptions that he had always already contained in himself as horrific. Gazing at these externalized representations corresponds to a nocturnal state of mind because it reveals a circular reference to the self: the moment in which the thinking subject refers to itself with the help of conceptions of itself. For this reason, the pure self onto which the subject falls back in his phantasmagorical self-conceptions represents a paradoxically fertile void. As Hegel notes in the Encyclopedia, the “‘I’ is thought as a thinker. What I have in my consciousness is for me” (48). This “I” from which the formation of a specific, differentiated consciousness emerges, and to which the passage through all conceptions, all knowledge, and all thinking of the self incessantly returns, is the arsenal of unrealized self-representations. These come to be filled with substance by virtue of a movement toward the absolute, distinctive mind/spirit.

The reversal of the Enlightenment tradition that Hegel’s thinking performs is significant. The thinking subject is not the bearer of a light of reason that counteracts an impenetrable darkness. Instead, the thinking subject carries this darkness within, in the sense of a mental/spiritual night. This nocturnal portion of his mental world is, in a twofold manner, the prerequisite for traversing all potential modes of thinking and knowing. On the one hand, this psychic night makes up the point of departure from which the pure self can enter into being and take on substance as a conception. With the help of these figurations, corresponding to the naming in Genesis, the multitude of images of the “I” comes into existence and assumes shape. On the other hand, the night of the world also renders possible the subject’s return to the point of incoherence, so seminal to the development of the mind/spirit. In this nocturnal state of mind, phantasmagorical representations allow the thinking “I” to repeatedly see the as-yet-unrealized wealth of his infinite self-conceptions. The “I” whose mind/spirit comes to develop in the process of thinking is thus fundamentally informed by that portion of the night that each subject carries within himself.

The night of the world, however, does not only constitute a retreat from the everyday. It also manifests itself by fragmenting the reality of the ordinary into horrific phantasmagoria. The “I” then comes to experience all conceptions that are not yet conscious, even though they are contained in itself. It also encounters an expression of the violence dominating all free mental/ spiritual activities as yet not determined. This experience of a pure self beyond all symbolic and phenomenological relations to the world awakens those monstrous figures that, as Goya surmised, enlightened reason banished to the realm of sleep. The encounter with the nocturnal side of the mind/spirit also opens the way for a return into a new day, distinguished by a higher, more sophisticated level of consciousness.

In his Difference essay (1801), Hegel had already devised a correspondence between night and the absolute as a critical trope for the origin of all development of mind/spirit. Called upon to designate the prerequisite for all philosophy, he names the absolute as the first condition. This inseparable totality forms the “objective that is sought after,” but also, as contradictory as this may seem, the definitive starting point for all manifestations of the wealth of images contained in the pure self. For, according to Hegel, the entire process of mental/spiritual development moves toward an absolute, which is also the point of origin at which the multitude of self-conceptions emerges. Hegel’s dialectical conception of the development of mind/spirit claims that it traverses like a spiral through cycles of self-determination, so as to return, on a higher level, to that absolute from which its thinking had originally evolved. Only in retrospect can one recognize that this all-synthesizing objective had to have existed from the beginning, for “how else could it have been sought after?” In the course of traversing all possible forms of thinking and knowing, reason merely produces an absolute that had always already been in existence, by “freeing consciousness from its limitations” and thus leading it to complete consciousness. The circularity of Hegel’s dialectic thinking proposes that the “suspension of the limitations is conditioned by the presupposed limitlessness” (93), drawing out what is already there, as discussed in my presentation of the Nyx of classical antiquity. The movement of the mind/spirit thus leads from a limitless, but not yet conscious pure self, through a plethora of limitations of the self that must be traversed. This passage corresponds to a gain in consciousness comparable to the separation of light from darkness in Genesis, as the first step in bringing forth the multitude of terrestrial phenomena.

The second prerequisite for philosophy, according to Hegel, consists in the rupture between “being and non-being, concept and being, finitude and infinity,” which goes in tandem with the emergence of consciousness out of its initial totality. Comparable to the originary chaos of classical cosmogony, Hegel’s dialectical thinking, operating as it does from the perspective of this division, posits an “absolute synthesis” as a “beyond,” as an indeterminate and formless entity standing in opposition to all individual distinctions. From this he develops the central critical trope of his cosmogony of the mind/spirit. “The absolute is the night,” he explains, “and the light is younger than it, and the distinction between them, like the emergence of the light out of night, is an absolute distinction; the nothing is the first out of which all being, all the diversity of the finite has emerged” (93). The synthesis, which he proposes both as the point of departure and the objective of the passage to knowledge, is located beyond, outside worldly phenomena. As such, it corresponds to the night because this absolute synthesis has either not yet introduced the separation between being and non-being, or has already sublated it. Either still undetermined, or no longer determinate, this absolute constitutes a rich formlessness, as unfathomable as it is fundamental. Although the light of reason is deemed younger than the nocturnal absolute, the difference between these two conditions, as in Genesis, proves to be one of radical separation. The foundational distinction between light and night gives birth not only to a diversity of finite manifestations, but also to absolute difference.

Because one can think of the night as the absolute only from the perspective of the separation into being and non-being, the originary “nothing” out of which all diversity emerges is necessarily a conception that has been posited belatedly. In Hegel’s essay on Difference, the fact at issue is that this originary totality of the self is not only characterized by an absolute difference between night and light, but the absolute is also to be thought of as internally differentiated, as an absolute negativity, even if it is still waiting to be realized. The absolute must already contain in itself the differential moment, for how else could all differentiating distinctions arise from the primordial night? According to Hegel, mind/spirit should be fundamentally understood as self-referential, given that thinking allows the self to consciously relate to itself with the help of externalized self-conceptions. As such, mind/spirit makes up not only the thematic content of philosophy, but also its process. The absolute must be recognized by the mind/spirit by virtue of an incessant process of differentiation. Although the absolute determines this cognitive movement, the passage to knowledge also produces the absolute preceding it by rendering graspable the point of origin, from which all being, all finite manifolds, and all possible figures of thought emerge.

Hegel’s cosmogenetic narrative can be rephrased as follows: As the origin of the mental/spiritual world, the absolute represents a night whose radical negativity and radical potentiality is decisive not because it must be overcome; rather, the absolute is determined as much by the mental/spiritual process born of this nocturnal absolute as it is by the manifold appearances that reason incessantly generates as conscious conceptions in relation to this night. In the process of traversing all knowledge available to it, the mind/spirit merely realizes that wealth of infinite conceptions is always already contained in its arsenal. For this reason, the knowledge obtained on the basis of absolute difference is interminable. According to Hegel, the prerequisite for philosophy consists of an incessant alternation between the absolute, the pure self, and the division between being and non-being. The dynamic principle of his dialectical thinking attempts to synthesize this absolute difference by creating relationships between ideas. The task of philosophy is to unite its two prerequisites—the absolute and the division into dichotomies, “to posit being in non-being, as becoming, to posit the dichotomy in the absolute, as its appearance, and to posit the finite in the infinite, as life” (93–94). Once it is reflected and sublated into names, determinations, knowledge, and thought, the pure self is restricted. For Hegel, all being, by virtue of having been mentally posited, also contains its opposite. It determines and is determined. Reason fulfills and thus overcomes its restrictions by virtue of positing opposite restrictions.

In the process of traversing all possible self-conceptions, the mind/spirit incessantly discovers within itself all of its own internal differences. In the array of externalizations that the radical separation from the originary pure self engenders, the mind/spirit belatedly conceptualizes this point of origin. The mind/spirit discovers itself in its separation from that earlier, absolute synthesis which lies beyond reason—discovers itself in its difference to this nocturnal absolute. The thinking subject thus incessantly returns to the absolute not in the sense of an originary site, but in the sense of a mental/spiritual movement, which renders conscious the undifferentiated aspect of this point of origin. All thinking that creates relationships, which realizes and thus distinguishes the internal wealth of potential self-conceptions, does so from a position of belatedness, after the division from the undifferentiated absolute. Yet the night, conceived as the cipher for the absolute, for non-being, for the infinite, continues to have its effect on the movement of the mind/spirit aimed at synthesizing all difference. All thinking inevitably bears the traces of the source from which it has evolved. As Hegel maintains, “every being that the mind produces is determinate and the determinate has something indeterminate before and after it, and the diversity of being lies between two nights, without support. It rests on nothing, for the indeterminate is nothing to the intellect and it ends in nothing” (95). Our lives are bounded by the night.

The cosmogenetic gesture inscribed in Hegel’s philosophy of the mind/spirit proposes a conceptual re-creation of a world emanating from an absolute negativity. In contrast to Hesiod, the conception of a cosmos is less at issue than the unfolding of an all-encompassing mind. The night Hegel posits as the beginning of the history of ideas (Geistesgeschichte) is conceived both as a point of origin and as a dynamic principle of all philosophical thinking. Owing to this doubling, the point of departure for the progress of mind/spirit, the absolute, contains in itself the act of division and concomitant with it the production of dichotomies, which dialectical thinking seeks to sublate into a synthesis. Thus, his night of the world is comparable to Hesiod’s Nyx, who shares a border with formless Chaos even while residing on the periphery of the world from which the ordinary alternation of day and night takes its course. Although the mind/spirit is always at work, rendering conscious what always already existed in a non-conscious form, it will ultimately return to itself on a perfected level of self-consciousness as absolute in its self-differentiation. Yet mind/spirit can do so only after having transferred the entire treasure of its self-conceptions into determinate appearances—into particular manifestations of itself.

The infinity of the mind/spirit’s development is decisive about Hegel’s cosmogony, something closer to the thinking of classical antiquity than to Christian eschatology. The passage to knowledge corresponds to a journey through the night in the sense that the thinking subject must pass through the play of dichotomies in an effort to sublate them. At issue, however, is not the attempt to leave or surmount that portion of the night that the subject carries within, and to which he has recourse in moments of phantasmagorical illumination. Instead, the play of dichotomies engendered by this reversion to the night should be thought of as a productive oscillation, comparable to the ordinary experience of the alternation between night and day. The sustained opposition between determinate and indeterminate, finite and infinite, being and non-being does not serve to cause nocturnal concepts to disappear before the light of reason. Rather, its function is to allow the subject, in the course of thinking, to traverse these dichotomies as articulations of radical negativity. The movement of the mind/spirit merely brings forth, in a conscious form, the radical negativity already contained in the absolute at the beginning of the passage through all possible manifestations of mind/spirit, and that will be fulfilled at the end of this journey.

NIGHT AS POINT OF TRANSITION

If thinking the absolute involves an interminable knowledge, it proceeds in two directions. We have a retreat into phantasmagorical representations, in which night is everywhere, and we have a return to a new day following this withdrawal, which in turn incessantly reverts back into a further night. In the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), dedicated to a discussion of the emergence of knowledge, Hegel presents the different stages of consciousness. These entail the mental path the subject must take to experience himself and enter into a state of absolute knowledge. The individual discovers himself, in the sense that although his mind/spirit emanates from a void of pure potentiality, he consistently strives for concrete distinction. As Hegel puts it: “He can have only the consciousness of the simple transference of himself from the night of possibility into the daylight of the present, from the abstract in-itself into the significance of actual being, and can only have the certainty that what happens to him in the latter is nothing else but what lay dormant in the former” (242). Conceived as radical negativity, the night represents a point of departure for the absolute that is always in the process of unfolding; it is a realm of not-yet-awakened images and figurations to which the movement of mind/spirit has constant recourse.

As Hegel argues in his Phenomenology, one not only returns to a night of the world in phantasmagoria, but also whenever a form of knowledge is set in motion, knowledge that is not yet concrete but that has already been abstractly posited. Hegel makes deliberate use of the night as a critical metaphor whenever it can be said of a particular concept that it has not yet been realized but is already in the process of becoming realized. Although initially each concept is empty, as yet unknown how it will specifically be determined, it is already clear that it will be filled with meaning and become conscious as a determined concept. The night thus functions as an expression for the unconsciousness of the mind/spirit, which does not yet know about itself and thus veers toward the unfathomable. In a section on “essential light” (Lichtwesen), Hegel notes that in relation to the reality, which it will produce for itself with the help of the movement of its consciousness, this mind/spirit is “only now its own idea.” Regarding the “day of this development,” this as yet not fully realized concept is the “night of its being,” regarding the “being of its moments as independent figuration, the creative mystery of its birth.” Hegel locates the mystery of the mental/spiritual creation on the side of the night, because this involves a conception that has not yet been developed consciously in the day. Once this conception has passed through all of its determinations, it will reside entirely on the side of the day; however, although not yet realized, it refers back to the creative mystery of its origin.

This secret, furthermore, “contains its own revelation within itself, because existence has its necessity in this conception.” Because Hegel conceives of every beginning as an absolute, as “pure negativity in the form of universality” (418), each concept can only engender itself. This self-positing, however, is an act governed by necessity, because each concept makes up a manifest figuration of the knowing mind/spirit, and thus in itself already contains the will to press forward into the light of consciousness. According to Hegel, it already contains “the momentum of being conscious, of conscious representation.” Hegel has recourse to the night as a critical trope for the absolute so as to speak of the pure “I” at the beginning of all existence as a “universal object,” which in itself contains the certainty of itself as well as the certainty that it will penetrate all thought and all reality. This night of existence, conceived as a necessity, is thus inexplicable, indispensable, and inescapable. Against this background, the externalization of the mind/spirit in all its possible manifestations is conceived of as assuming a distinct representation, comparable to the everyday cycle of night and day that in turn is also conceived as a moment of independent figuration taking place against the backdrop of the primordial night from which both emerged.

Hegel’s Phenomenology passes through different domains, in which the mind/spirit takes on manifest shape by virtue of its externalization. In his reflections on essential light in the chapter on religion, Hegel names, in retrospect, what is at issue for any discussion of how knowledge assumes manifest appearance. The process of the externalization of the mind/spirit involves a passage from night to light. Being, filled with the concept of mind/spirit, proves to be “an all-embracing and all-pervading essential light of sunrise” (419). Unmediated being, contrasted with consciousness even while dissolving its distinctions, is, in turn, understood as nocturnal darkness. Meanwhile, the mind/spirit’s creations, owing to which it can come to know itself (by giving shape to itself), should be thought of as “torrents of light” (419). Under the influence of such light, substance becomes subject. The primordial, unmediated being sets out on its path of mental/spiritual development and begins to experience its individuation into isolated moments of knowledge. Although this process of becoming represents a betrayal of the night of unmediated certainty, it also brings with it the liberation from unconscious being: An act that allows the mind/spirit to undergo experience and set determinations, so that, having passed through all its possible figurations, it can mentally/spiritually grasp itself. Even though, in each instance, night comes to be externalized, it is never dissolved. Night necessarily belongs to the absolute mind/spirit, which cannot be thought without its nocturnal side, much as it must succumb to the urge to fully grasp itself, because this makes up its internal necessity. Even though this will to self-recognition requires an incessant passage through a plethora of self-externalizations, aimed at objectifying knowledge, it also requires—and this marks Hegel’s contribution to a philosophical thinking of the night beyond the Enlightenment project—a constant reference back to undifferentiated mind/spirit; which is to say, to the night of the world.

Night proves such a tangible trope for the externalization of mind/spirit because the positing and traversing all possible mental/spiritual objects and formalization can only be thought of in relation to the absolute difference, which separates the pure absolute from its manifestations. Out of the “depth of a creative night,” Hegel suggests, the mind/spirit can single out its substance, its not yet conscious representations, its pure individuality, and transfer these into an externalized, distinct shape, be it language, art, or place of worship. Owing to the dialectical merging of opposites—being and non-being, absolute and division from it—something is revealed to the self-conscious mind/spirit. This involves a “simple essence as the movement, partly out of its dark night of concealment up into consciousness, there to be its silently nourishing substance; but no less, however, the movement of again losing itself in the nether darkness, and lingering above only with a silent maternal yearning” (437). The latter is a “return of consciousness to the depths of the night of the ‘I = I,’ which never distinguishes or knows anything but the night” (476). Each of these returns represents a loss of what the passage had brought to life through various mental/spiritual formalizations, namely, the confrontation between substance and consciousness. By retreating into this night of pure subjectivity, the mind/spirit comes to experience the pure certainty of itself. It is once again absorbed in its own self-consciousness. At the same time, the everyday existence that the mind/spirit has left behind is also contained in this night, and “this transformed existence—the former one, but now reborn of the mind’s knowledge—is the new existence, a new world, and a new shape of mind” (492). In these conceptual formulations of the mental/spiritual oscillation between nocturnal and diurnal states of consciousness, Hegel anticipates Freud’s mapping of the unconscious, which is discussed in the next chapter.

The loss and retrieval of the world thus emerge as two mutually implicated aspects of the dialectical passage to recognition. Knowledge entails a process of inspiration, by which substance becomes subject; the mental/spiritual urge toward manifestation, which by necessity transforms abstraction and lifelessness into an actual, universal, self-consciousness. The constant reversal that oscillates between a retreat into the depth of the night and a return into the light of rupture and externalization is decisive. Hegel clearly opposes his conceptualization of the radical absolute to any notion of the night as a point of escape for the dialectical movement subtending all earthly manifestations. To him, a reversion into the night is not a salvation from the differentiated process of incessant transformation and becoming, as this inevitably entails division from a more prior position, externalized representation of what hitherto had only been inherent intuitive knowledge and sublation of oppositions. In the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, he states that such knowledge is naïve, empty recognition, which declares that “in the absolute everything is the same, against the full body of articulated cognition, which at least seeks and demands such fulfillment, to palm off its absolute as the night in which, as the saying goes, ‘all cows are black’” (9).

Although the withdrawal from a world illuminated by the mind/spirits’ light serves to articulate terrifying phantasmagoria but also a pure subjectivity of substance, it does not entail the passage into a night in which the mind/spirit seeks to fully dissolve itself. Rather, the night of the world to which the mind/spirit incessantly has recourse on its path toward self-fulfillment is one whose mysterious charm resides in the fact that it serves as point of transition between what existed before and what is about to be created anew. By emphatically distancing himself from the notion of a fully recovered origin, which would obliterate all difference between absolute and division from it, between being and non-being, finitude and infinity, Hegel is concerned with positing a night of the absolute, which is not to be thought of as a state of pure identity between the thinking self and its point of origin. Any return on the part of consciousness into “the depth of night of I = I” (476) always entails a difference between the self and the night surrounding him.

The emptiness that constitutes the mental/spiritual night of the world is not the last word on the absolute. Rather, this emptiness is the precondition and the point of departure for the mind/spirit’s passage through the world of externalizations and self-mediation and, once it has been fulfilled with all possible determinations, it can now become part of the absolute mind/spirit. In his Phenomenology, Hegel thus maps the path of taking on mind/spirit as a development of knowledge, which includes an experience of all the representations and figurations contained in the pure self that still await realization. The absolute knowledge sought by mind/spirit can only be realized as a passage. It articulates itself in the act of appearing, of becoming, of taking on life, which is to say in those mental/spiritual figurations that arise from the night and incessantly lead through it. At issue is a dynamic passage of the mind/spirit to an absolute knowledge of itself. It can never be completed, but always continues. It actualizes what has from the outset already implicitly been conceived in the absolute night from which the light of reason, younger than it, emerged. As such, Hegel’s night also includes the promise of fulfillment of mind/spirit still to come. His night announces the moment in which mind/spirit will know itself in its internally differentiated absoluteness (because it has always already contained this possibility of self-completion) as the momentum propelling it forward.

Hegel designates this spiritual momentum of knowledge, which traverses both its own point of departure as well as all the new figurations evolved from it, as follows: “The living substance is being which is in truth subject, or, what is the same, is in truth actual only in so far as it is the movement of positing itself, or is the mediation of its self othering with itself” (10). As a subject, this living substance is “pure, simple negativity” from which every division, every split into dichotomies will emerge, every doubling that juxtaposes two oppositions, along with all negations of such figurations by which new oppositions are produced. An interminable gesture of inspiration (qua spiritually propelled knowledge) remains inscribed in Hegel’s cosmogenetic thinking, given that he insists: “only this self-restoring sameness or this reflection in otherness within itself—not an original or immediate unity as such—is true” (10).

A movement occurs in the transition from substance to subject, bringing forth a truth in which life, becoming, and appearance represent themselves with the help of an interplay of absolute and division into opposites of being and non-being, of finitude and infinity. In contrast to Christian eschatology, Hegel’s thinking of the night entails “the process of its own becoming, the circle that presupposes its end as its goal, having its end also as its beginning; and only by being worked out to its end, is it actual” (10). The absolute mind/spirit, located in the pure self, is a condition of knowledge sought out but never fully achieved. It neither seeks to disappear in the “nocturnal depth of the ‘I = I’,” nor does it try to fully cast off the “night of the I.” As a thinking entity, the mind/spirit remains bound up with a mutual implication of night and light, which Hegel declares to be its determinacy and its certainty.

KNOWLEDGE AS A PLAY OF LIGHT AND SHADOW

Early on in his Science of Logic, in a footnote revolving around the fundamental determination of being, non-being, and becoming, Hegel maintains that although being is the point of departure for the becoming of all manifold appearances, of life and of mental activity as such, it always presupposes the state of nothing or non-being. Any juxtaposition of these two concepts aimed at contrasting them can only be thought of in relation to what they have in common, namely, the primordial unity of being and nothing, pertaining to the moment when the two states were as yet not separate and not separable. In the beginning there is pure being, minus all determinations. Pure being forms a unity together with pure nothingness, as they merge with each other. However, a third factor is already at play in the transition from pure being to nothing, namely, the process of becoming, which calls forth the rupture between being and nothing and with it the determinacy of all manifest appearances. Becoming separates being from nothing, as light is separated from nocturnal darkness in Genesis. The fact that pure being and pure nothing are simultaneously the same and different can only be conceptualized from the vantage point of becoming, whose function as a tertiary term is to render difference visible. Hegel reminds us: “If being and nothing had any determinateness by which they were distinguished from each other then, as has been observed, they would be determinate being and determinate nothing, not pure being and pure nothing.” In their initial condition, however, each of them is “in the same way indeterminate” and the distinction between the two “is therefore completely empty.” Any difference can emerge only in relation to a third, subjective position, in the alterity represented by becoming, “in which they are distinguished” (92).

Decisive about this passage in Logic of Being is the fact that Hegel compares the determinacy, which transfers pure being into a manifest existence mediated by the nothing it has come to be contrasted with, with the interplay of light and darkness:

But one pictures being to oneself, perhaps in the image of pure light as the clarity of undimmed seeing, and then non-being as pure night—and their distinction is linked with this very familiar difference in feeling. But, in fact, if this very seeing is imagined more precisely, one can easily perceive that in absolute clarity, just as much (and as little) is seen as in absolute darkness, that one seeing is as good as the other, that pure seeing is a seeing of nothing. Pure light and pure darkness are two empty voids that are the same thing. Something can be distinguished only in determinate light or darkness (light is determined by darkness and so is darkened light, and darkness is determined by light, as illuminated darkness). For that reason, only darkened light and illuminated darkness have within themselves the moment of difference and are, therefore, determinate being. (93)

It is only the contrast between two different states that calls forth being as well as visual determinacy. Hegel not only equates absolute clarity and absolute darkness, declaring them to be “the same thing,” he also conceives of them as “two empty voids.” Neither of these states is accessible to determinacy. In pure light, we see as much or as little as in absolute darkness. That is to say, we see nothing.

The absolute difference between pure night and pure light is manifested only in the process of transition. It can only be conceived of retrospectively, after light has transformed night into an illuminated darkness and night has turned light into darkened clarity. Although both absolute clarity and absolute darkness permit sight, we have in both cases a pure, as yet indeterminate vision of nothingness. A determined sight that allows distinct shapes to emerge from indistinguishable nothingness requires the mutual determination of clarity and darkness, which produces visual difference of an original unity. Distinction distinguishes both states from each other, as it differentiates both pure light and pure night, thereby limiting both. Conversely, everything that does not represent a void necessarily proves to be inscribed by the interplay of light and darkness in the process of a dynamic becoming that engenders distinctions. Phenomena can be distinguished in both determinate light and determinate darkness. The limiting of pure light and pure night does not, however, produce only determinate figures of being. Manifest appearance also requires that the two opposite terms, light and night, be brought together conceptually in relation to the distinction they are mutually able to bring forth. Light is determined by darkness, as darkness is determined by light. Only in darkened light, only in illuminated darkness does the exchange occur that continually transforms pure being into a determinate and incessantly reborn existence.

The absolute difference between pure light and pure night manifests itself when, with the help of a third term, one state is introduced into the other. If, in their primordial unity, being and nothing are the same, because no distinction can be made between the two states, after having been separated, then they come to mutually determine each other. Comparable to the starry night God creates in Genesis, Hegel’s night always already contains light, just as nothingness always already partakes of being. The difference is simply whether they merge with each other in an undifferentiated manner, or whether they appear as a determinate juxtaposition. Any fundamental confrontation between darkness and light presupposes the difference between two undifferentiated quantities as well as a dynamic development. At issue in Hegel’s refiguration of Hesiod’s cosmogony is primarily the development of manifold phenomenological appearances, which attest to an incessant process of becoming. Concomitant with this is the pressure for the mind/spirit to move forward and determine all possible existence. Night and light do not compete with each other, nor do they make up a moral antithesis. Hegel forgoes the Enlightenment principle that seeks to bring light as far as possible into a night that is deemed unfathomable. Instead, he claims that pure light and pure darkness can add nothing to what he calls determination. Night and day, light and darkness, being and nothing can only be thought of together, mutually determined yet separate.

Philosophy requires oscillation between darkened light and illuminated darkness, which incessantly plays out on the border between nothing and being, between the absolute and its division into opposites. In his foreword to Elements of a Philosophy of Right, Hegel offers a further critical trope for this conceptual threshold: “When philosophy paints its gray on gray, one form of life has grown old. By means of gray, it cannot be rejuvenated, but only known. The owl of Minerva only starts her flight at dusk” (30). Philosophy comes after appearances have already become manifest; it renders graspable what has already come into being. Coming after the fact, philosophy can conceptualize the passages of experiences, the formations of knowledge, and their determinations gray on gray, as these have come to develop in the delimited space of a determinate interplay of light and darkness. If the owl of Minerva is a critical trope for the philosophy of the mind/spirit, it is striking that it waits for twilight to begin its flight, on the threshold between day and night. It is decisive for Hegel that the flight of thought is most prominent when it moves across a sky in which light and darkness mutually infiltrate, and as such enforce each other, so as to proclaim the beginning of something new after one form of life has grown old. A presentiment of the change in light forms the perfect backdrop for the inspiration that propels knowledge forward and compels it to take flight again.

What, then, is the role of night in Hegel’s thinking? Hegel is consistently focused on a rebirth of the movement of the mind/spirit, and he positions night as the point of contact between the descent of one form of thinking and the ascent of another. The mind/spirit must traverse the night, given that one can only awaken when one returns once more to light from darkness. Valorizing the night as a critical trope enables him to move beyond the Enlightenment project; it allows him to posit an absolute as the point of origin for all movement of the mind/spirit, a primordial entity encompassing all possible self-conceptions and phenomenological manifestations. The night allows him to conceive of a cyclic movement of thought that keeps returning to a more primordial position—not, however, as the return to a unity over and beyond all division into separate entities as an obliteration of difference. Even as Hegel valorizes a retreat into the depths of the night, this is always thought of in tandem with the counter-directional move. Any move into the night serves to sustain a will to knowledge that perpetually compels the mind/spirit to return back into the light of day, into the world of distinct manifestations with their play of differences.

As shown in greater detail in Part II, Hegel’s notion of a night of the world, in which the subject meets those terrifying phantasmagoria that he has been carrying within (albeit unknown), is this romantic philosopher’s debt to the gothic imagination. It too discovered and indeed celebrated the dark regions of the psyche as an arsenal of knowledge separate from but equally important as the illuminating reason of the Enlightenment project. However, before turning to literature’s engagement with the night as scene and state of mind, there remains one final cosmogony to be explored. Therefore, the next chapter turns to the way Sigmund Freud, implicitly picking up on Hegel’s discussion of the “night of the I,” comes to map the nocturnal side of the psychic apparatus. Comparable to the pure self, the unconscious of psychoanalysis is to be thought of as an unfathomable domain, to which one not only reverts in dreams or states of madness, but that also spills over into the fabric of the everyday, making available to the conscious mind an arsenal of representation by which the subject can think and discover himself. I argue that Freud’s debt to Hegel’s thinking of the night is that his own cosmogenetic narrative about the birth of the mature subject out of unconscious psychic processes thrives on the idea that the origin of all psychic activity in its purest form is not accessible to the conscious mind. Rather, the primordial night of the psyche can only be grasped with the help of secondary representations—whether dreams, symptoms, or fantasies—that allow repressed psychic material to resurface from where it has been repressed in the unconscious.

For both of these modern cosmogenetic thinkers, the night is more than merely a convenient critical trope. It marks an attempt to think about what the Enlightenment project designates as unthinkable, or what has not yet been illuminated by the light of reason. By insisting that the light of theory and the night are irrevocably enmeshed, both think through the night rather than pitting it as the obscure counterpoint to the light of reason, and as such think the inversion of rational illumination. Hegel’s charting of how the world as well as the manifold ways in which it can be thought of both emerge from an undifferentiated absolute marks the significant point of transition between the hegemony of rationality celebrated by Schikaneder’s sun priest and Freud’s need to foreground the side of psychic processes that have either withdrawn from consciousness or been repressed by it. Indeed, it is in Hegel’s resilient acknowledgment of a point of origin, which is incessantly in the process of being retrieved and relinquished, and that marks the necessary point of transition between waning and renewal, disappearance and reemergence, that the night Schikaneder’s sun priest seeks to expel into an eternal darkness fully comes into its own.