(Andy Davis) Hegel’s Rhythm: Speculative Thinking and the Relationship between Philosophy and Poetry

DEAN'S LECTURE SERIES

What can poetry teach us about the demands of writing and reading philosophy? In this talk I explore this question through the lens of a few paragraphs at the end of Hegel’s preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, with some passing references to his account of poetry in the Aesthetics lectures. Hegel’s puzzling account of “der spekulative Satz” [the speculative sentence/proposition] employs a comparison to poetic rhythm in paragraph sixty-one. Just as poetry plays formal meters off of natural accents, speculative expressions of philosophical content rely on a
productive conflict between the form of the proposition (subject is predicate) and the unity of the Concept in which such differentiations between subjects, objects and qualities disappear. Poetry provides a model of unity in conflict that produces a “floating center” of meaning. What might it mean for philosophical thinking to likewise embrace a “floating center?” Andy Davis is a professor of philosophy at Belmont University. He works on modern philosophy with an emphasis on German idealism and has been particularly interested in the relationship between metaphysics and aesthetics. He is the author of “Hegel on Pseudo-Philosophy: Reading the Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit.” He was recently a visiting faculty member at Deep Springs College.