Animating Hegel’s Mysticism

Third Place for Best Essay
Glen Skahill, Pomona ’22

I will critique Hegelian metaphysics using the Daoist philosophy of Zhuangzi (Chuang-tzu 莊子). Hegelian thought conceptualizes the object, and thus existence, in the friction of our perception and its external existence, causing the split in the object. This split traces back to the primary split within the subject, our subjective alienation of ourselves from ourselves, which Freud later develops into the conscious and unconscious split. Zhuangzi’s philosophy offers a way of critiquing how this alienation always returns to the individual subject, exposing a foundational metaphysics of the unconscious within the objectfor the intersection of critical psychology and religion. Zhuangzi’s retroactive intervention thus outlines the possibilities for what constitutes subjecthood, and the sacrifices in those determinations, and reveals Hegel’s ability to speak on human experience.
This critique proceeds twofold: towards the mysticism that speaks to human experience inherent in Hegel’s thought and towards bringing Hegelian thought towards the animacy of objects. Zhuangzi’s skeptical Daoism and famous short stories pose as powerful points of criticism for this analysis. Moreover, while Zhuangzi’s philosophy retains certain key differences in its metaphysical foundations, some of these key differences aid the criticism at hand and others reveal the psychoanalytic value of Hegelian thought, which always returns to the subject’s psyche.
Thus, for this paper, I will use the short stories from Zhuangzi’s philosophy and historian Theodore de Bary’s analysis of Zhuangzi to comprise the Daoist philosophical critique of Hegel, and I will turn to Todd McGowan’s Hegel—corrected from the mistranslations and misinterpretations of Alexandre Kojève.¹ McGowan’s Hegel distinguishes himself through the emphasis on irreconcilable contradiction that requires dialectical movement rather than Hegel’s supposed aim towards synthesis in the popular canon.² Geist—spirit in the English translation—arises out of the irreconcilable contradictions that constitute something.³
The foundational contradiction that comprises Hegelian metaphysics is the split between objectivity—the external world as it exists—and subjectivity—our perception of the external world as it exists. As perceiving subjects, our perception always clouds our view into the external world as it exists. The friction in this contradiction gives rise to the Freudian parapraxis: when our perception overrides the world as it exists. Most may think of parapraxes in the classic Freudian slip—saying something you did not mean to say—but parapraxes may occur in mis-seeing or mishearing things as well. These moments make the foundational Hegelian contradiction apparent to us in the friction between perception and reality. Even when we watch movies, we may feel the shock and awe that the protagonist or other characters feel despite sitting in a comfortable chair with popcorn to our side. These jarring moments that shock us into remembering this fundamental contradiction—between reality as such and our perception of it—mark Hegel’s continuous return to the human psyche in his thought.
Rather than the seemingly contradictory movement of yin and yang, Zhuangzi’s Dao, best translated as ‘way’ to describe the order of the universe or governance, creates the basis for extending Hegel’s geist beyond the human psyche.⁴ To make this move with Zhuangzi, we must articulate the unconscious within the object—object here in the general sense of anything besides human subject. Unconsciousness provides the basis for animacy—and thus mysticism of the object—through the way that it emphasizes a point of unknowability beyond the mere consciousness of animals. While most generally agree that animals have consciousness, the unconscious opens the door for the point of mystery and spirit that animates life. In this manner, subjecthood—being with the unconscious as this point of unknowing—demarcates animacy, especially for the manner that the unconscious bestows excessive desire. In dialectics, we may think of this in two key ways. First, friction occurs between our unknown desires that seep into our perception of the world without our knowing and the world as it exists as such, for example the Freudian slip. These desires, though unknown to us, are nevertheless the part of us that make for the animated mystery of humanity. Second, we may also think through this in terms of language. The words we speak are our own, yet they exist outside of us and in the objective world. Through this necessary process of speaking, and creation in a broader sense, we generate parts of the objective world that reveal truths about us that may remain hidden to ourselves. Befitting, Zhuangzi’s Dao remains more mysterious and unknowable than Hegel’s geist; since Hegel’s geist arises between the friction in an irreconcilable contradiction, its ‘place’ remains knowable.⁵ Hegel’s geistarises in the friction of the individual and social organization, as emblematized through his Freudian, Marxist, and Fanonian successors. As we will see with the case of Cook Ding, one cannot speak Zhuangzi’s Dao and the Dao exists in the transformation of nature rather than a locatable irreconcilable contradiction in the subject or society.
Zhuangzi’s imaginative skepticism allows for the unconscious in the object as seen through his use of objects to speak to people in his short stories. We may consider Zhuangzi’s story of walking along the road and stumbling upon a talking skull, which takes on great significance here.⁶ Zhuangzi wonders aloud about what may have caused the skull’s death for it to return to him in his sleep to speak with him about his assumptions regarding death. The skull replies that “No monarch on his throne has joy greater than ours,” implying that his and others’ experience of death is desirable. Rather than contending that death is objectively greater than life, Zhuangzi uses the narrative device of the skull to voice this possibility without claiming it as absolute. What sort of joy does this skull have in the afterlife? Is this afterlife available to all or merely the owner of this skull? He goes as far to leave open the possibility that the entire conversation is some form of trickery. Through Zhuangzi’s method of skeptical suggestion, the skull takes on the unconscious within the object, as Zhuangzi bestows animacy to it in how it speaks to Zhuangzi in his dream.
Zhuangzi’s story of carpenter Shi considers the utility, or lack thereof, of trees in the forest. Here, Zhuangzi builds upon the reasoning inherent in the story of the skull, revealing the potential for a Hegelian theory of animacy. In the story, carpenter Shi enters the forest to cut down trees, but becomes dismayed when he observes that certain trees cannot be used for the village. He thinks to himself that such trees are useless. That night, as he dreams, the tree that Shi had commented on speaks to him, chastising him for his remarks. The tree explains that useful trees get torn apart in their use and live shorter lives because of it, whereas trees that humans see as useless live longer lives.

As for me, I’ve been trying a long time to be of no use, and though I almost died, I’ve finally got it. This is of great use to me. If I had been of some great use, would I have grown this large? Moreover, you and I are both of us things. What’s the point of this—things condemning things? You, a worthless man about to die—how do you know I’m a worthless tree?⁷

With this story of carpenter Shi, we may extract two key observations.
First, Zhuangzi achieves dialectical movement through his usage of yin and yang in this story—thought here through usefulness and uselessness. Zhuangzi employs the Daoist method of emphasizing the undervalued aspect, such as the tree’s yin in its useless beauty. This emphasis pushes Zhuangzi towards a Hegelian dialectic of contradiction internal to the object rather than acceding to the mistake of conflating transformation with contradiction. As Zhaungzi uses stories, the yin-yang emphasis takes on a process akin to the manner that dialectics involves movement. This narrative emphasis distinguishes Zhuangzi’s skeptical Daoism from the popular Daodejing that makes Zhuangzi preferable as a basis for comparative philosophy with Hegel. Revealing the movement of this process distinguishes Hegelian dialectics from the Buddhist observation on impermanence in the constant transformation of things. Zhuangzi’s use of stories to articulate his skepticism mirrors Hegel’s dialectical movement in the contradictions that arise through Zhuangzi’s stories.
Second, Zhuangzi’s tendency to use otherwise inanimate objects to deconstruct the assumptions of dreamers reveals his animating mysticism. Both the skull in his journey and the tree for carpenter Shi come to life as speaking subjects. And not only do they maintain status as speaking subjects, but their speech reveals that they have some knowledge that the dreamer themself lacks about the world. Their knowledge that they speak to the dreamers distinguishes them by the subjective knowledge that they hold and reveals their status as animate objects in their desire to be heard by the dreamer. Animating these objects through speech and therein the desire to be heard bestows subjecthood unto them.
Dreams become Zhuangzi’s space for considering the unconscious, then, in a manner akin to Freud. However, Zhuangzi uses dreams to animate objects rather than to perform therapy on the dreaming subject. The point of unknowability for Zhuangzi features in the hidden yin or yang that he emphasizes to the speaking subject. Nevertheless, the dream still reveals hidden truths to the subject. With this qualification, we may imagine the manner that Zhuangzi uses objects in the dreams to articulate the basis of a Hegelian animacy or Hegelian mysticism, befitting of the very nature of the unconscious.⁸ On the one hand, we know that of course trees cannot speak, but Zhuangzi offers us the image of the speaking tree in keeping with his skeptical imagination. This skeptical imagination in combination with a Hegelian metaphysics reveals the mystical element of the unconscious, what is thought of as this point of unknowability in psychoanalytic thought.
Zhuangzi utilizes the unconscious to animate supposed nonsubjects through his imaginative skepticism, which offers insight into thought or imagined contradictions, whereas psychoanalysts—through their implicit use of Hegelian metaphysics—uncover the psychic conflict within the subject via the unconscious for therapeutic treatment. Zhuangzi’s preference for animism serves to reveal the inherent individualism within Hegel’s philosophy of contradiction, which always returns to the split subject. The subject—or individual—remains as the center of thought, even if the split occurs in a necessarily social manner.⁹ Thus, through this comparative analysis, we reveal some distinctive aspects of the foundational metaphysics between these systems of thought. Rather than decrying Western individualism, Hegelian thought founds the basis for a metaphysics that speaks to human experience alongside the therapeutic clinic for easing humanity’s difficulties with life. Zhuangzi—centuries before the secular rise of psychology to replace religion in answering the difficult questions of life—imagined the various spiritual possibilities latent in an agnosticism remarkable for his premodern times.
In short, if we follow Zhuangzi’s animism, then we may sacrifice the ability of Hegelian metaphysics to work through the turmoil of the psyche; regardless, this move reveals the mysticism inherent to either approach, and in this mysticism may we find the power of both approaches. Hegelian metaphysics through the turmoil of the psyche in its constant return to the split in the subject.¹⁰ Zhuangzi’s animism sacrifices this continuous return to the split in the subject to consider the various animacies in the world around him, sacrificing Hegel’s therapeutic potential for Zhuangzi’s imaginative skepticism. Hegelian dialectics distinguishes itself from knowledge-seeking positivistic scientism in the manner that dialectics produce geist, whereas positivism produces truth. On the one hand, positivism retains the ability to produce truth and knowledge that aid in a systemic understanding of the world around us in the way that understands the objects and objective world around us. However, geist, through dialectics, speaks to human experience better than scientific claims can, especially when considering the history of scientific racism and eugenics.¹¹
Scientism’s hegemonic grasp on society has perhaps cast widespread aspersions on Hegelian dialectics. Freud contends psychoanalysis to be a science as an attempt to overcome its accusations that it is a “Jewish science” due to his Jewish background.¹² Freud even considered Carl Jung his “arian prince” who would continue the project of psychoanalysis that he had developed. This false hope later haunted Freud, given Jung’s fascist tendencies and ultimate betrayal of Freudian psychoanalysis.¹³ In contrast, I position Zhuangzi as offering a retroactive, proto-Hegelian intervention, speaking to the importance of mysticism for grappling with human experience. Hegelian thought analyzes the necessity of religion—or meaning-producing mysticism more broadly—in human life, which takes the form of psychological theory or capitalist monetization in secular modernity. Hegelian dialectics shine in their ability to grapple with this exigency, offering the mysticism that we necessarily imbue into some part of our world to make sense of it.
Zhuangzi’s retroactive elucidation of Hegel’s latent mysticism culminates in his famous dream of being a butterfly: “...he didn’t know if he was Zhou [Zhuangzi] having dreamed he was a butterfly or a butterfly having dreamed he was Zhou [Zhuangzi].”¹⁴ Zhuangzi implies two important ideas. First, Zhuangzi keys us into the fact that we cannot know some truths about the world. We must live with some epistemological assumptions, lest we float free of any meaning to grasp onto in the world. In this sense, Hegelian dialectics assert their value to navigate the point of unknowability—the unconscious within the structure, often the psyche—that arises with the contradiction at hand between the two dreams. Second, Zhuangzi cues us into the mystical manner in which our assumptions must occur through the parallel dreams at hand. Whereas the Freudian analyst may interrogate Zhuangzi’s unconscious desire to become a butterfly, Zhuangzi reveals the mysticism inherent to human life as we attempt to fill in the gaps of our understanding of the world. As a premodern thinker involved in religious discussion, Zhuangzi remains aware of the human necessity of religion—better understood here as mysticism in the general sense of meaning-production. In this manner, his imaginative skepticism takes form, and his doubt becomes productive of possibility. In the productivity of Zhuangzi’s doubt, we both find Hegel’s mysticism as speaking to this human need for meaning and as part of the imaginative animism that Zhuangzi opens for Hegel.
The world of the butterfly speaks to Zhuangzi’s Hegelian animacy in its imagined power. As aforementioned, it seems obvious on some level that the butterfly may not dream of Zhuangzi, but the thought poses a philosophical directive: to doubt our metaphysical assumptions of existence. In this place of imagination, and in a sense speculation (as Hegelian thought creates), Zhuangzi poses stories to induce doubt in the reader and engage new forms of animism that allow for the unconscious within the object. If we extend this unconscious beyond the scope of dreams, then we may consider the various spiritual existents in our world—perhaps in the form of nature spirits or other supernatural phenomena used to explain the precarity of life.
Furthermore, we may look to Zhuangzi’s example of Cook Ding, who had found the Dao in his activities as a butcher, to extend the unconscious to action itself. Zhuangzi’s natural Dao emphasizes the nature of relations between things. In this sense, one may experience the Dao in a state of ‘flow’—that is, when performing some action well. Cook Ding finds the Dao when chopping meat on the butcher block; he skillfully avoids the bones in the meat to preserve the quality of his knife.¹⁵ In this sort of spiritual action in everyday existence—later emphasized in Chan Buddhist thought, especially with the role of the cook—Hegelian dialectics locates the unconscious in the contradiction of the relation between two things that comprise the action itself. Perhaps the tension between Cook Ding’s knife and the meat that he cuts gives rise to a Hegelian geist that mirrors Zhuangzi’s Dao.
Cook Ding, however, shows the difference between Zhuangzi’s Hegelian animism and a psychoanalytic return to the psyche in the distinction between naming in Zhuangzi and language in Freud. The contradiction at hand for Zhuangzi appears in the physicality of the material objects, and Zhuangzi could still contend that labeling—with language—detracts from the knowledge of the actual things themselves. Per the parapraxis in psychoanalytic theory, language retains its power to reveal more about the subject than the subject might consciously want or even know to speak. Cook Ding thus reveals the final major distinction between Zhuangzi’s animism and Hegelian metaphysical emphasis on the psyche in their respective distrust of labeling and reliance on signification.¹⁶
In considering the unconscious within the object as Zhuangzi’s stories do, the enduring individualism of Hegelian metaphysics becomes apparent. Today, Hegelian metaphysics retain a central place in political thought and leftist thought in particular, both in the form of psychoanalysis (most commonly encountered through gender theory and Slavoj Zizek) and in the enduring legacies of Marx and Fanon.¹⁷ Due to this importance, I reveal the potential for a Hegelian animism through the works of Zhuangzi whilst defending McGowan’s Hegelian metaphysics for their clinical value. Hegelian animism opens the door for considerations of theorizing collectivity and the environment against the continuous return to the individual.
Beyond the possibility of Hegelian animism, the articulation of Hegel’s latent mysticism reveals the role of geist in knowledge discourse. Hegel’s mysticism opens the path for a leftism that speaks to human experience to combat the rise of conservative figures that predominate psychological discourse such as Jordan Peterson. In the manner that psychology has taken the place of religion, Hegel’s mysticism and emphasis on the psyche gives his theory the tools to expand our notions of the self, as well as what constitutes animacy.

Endnotes

Todd McGowan, Emancipation after Hegel: Achieving a Contradictory Revolution (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2021); Zhuangzi, “The Way of Laozi and Zhuangzi,” in Sources of Chinese Tradition, ed. De Bary Wm Theodore and Irene Bloom (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1999), 77-111.
Ryan Engley and Todd McGowan, hosts, “Alexandre Kojeve,” Why Theory (podcast), May 21, 2021, accessed December 20, 2021, https://soundcloud.com/whytheory/alexandre-kojeve.
Glen Skahill, “Trauma, Conflict, & Contradiction,” Tabula Rasa 1, no. 1 (2021): 54-59.
McGowan, Emancipation. See chapters one through three of McGowan’s book for the difference between opposition and contradiction. In short, opposition works to define oneself against something, whereas contradiction sees how the subject is internally divided. Yin-yang thinking can tend towards posing the subject as whole through oppositional forces coming together, rather than the geist that arises out of the irreconcilable contradiction that composes the subject. In this manner, yin-yang thought can risk the idea of overcoming our constitutive contradictions, which is impossible in Hegel’s metaphysics.
Paul J. D’Ambrosio, “The Phenomenology of Spirit and the Daoist Sage,” Comparative and Continental Philosophy 9, no. 3 (2017): 202-217, https://doi.org/10.1080/17570638.2017.1356016.
Place in the sense that the contradiction between two conceivable things reveals some geist or spirit upon the matter of conflict.
Arthur Waley and Zhuangzi, Three Ways of Thought in Ancient China (London, UK: Allen & Unwin, 1969).
Zhuangzi, “The Way of Laozi and Zhuangzi,” 107.
This fits the nature of the unconscious insofar as the unconscious cannot be ‘proven’ through scientific means. Its precise value is in how it speaks to human experience outside of positivist epistemologies. Many detractors remark that the unconscious is a mystical object that you have to believe in for psychoanalytic theory to work, whereas this paper contends that this mystical element of psychoanalysis, rooted in Hegelian metaphysics, reveals the epistemological strength of psychoanalysis in speaking to human experience.
The split in Lacanian psychoanalytic thought—that which largely informs the academic left today—occurs with the subject's entrance into signification.
McGowan, Emancipation, 257.
Ryan Engley and Todd McGowan, hosts, “Defending Freud (side a).” Why Theory (podcast), October 23, 2019, accessed June 20, 2020. https://soundcloud.com/whytheory/defending-freud-side-a.
Jung’s ultimate betrayal of psychoanalysis came in his move towards the collective unconscious away from the subject’s unconscious.
Zhuangzi, “The Way of Laozi and Zhuangzi,” 103.
Zhuangzi, 103-104.
For more on the psychoanalytic emphasis on signification, see the works of Jacques Lacan.
Hegel’s influences spreads wide across critical theory, assisting Karl Marx’s class conflict, Franz Fanon’s writings on internalizing colonization, Judith Butler’s Gender Troubles in the difficulty of coming into being, and in the manner that Laura Mulvey utilizes the Lacanian gaze—itself indebted to Hegelian thought.