Hello Ulysses, my comments that follow are not meant to flame your short post on Hegel and Kierkegaard. Anybody who takes the time to read and ponder H & K these days is certainly entitled to (my) respect. However, I must admit that there are a number of things about it that I find puzzling, and which I can’t square with my own reading.

First, on unhappy c in Hegel in general: Hegel reflects on this condition in a number of places throughout his oeuvre, where he draws upon the “history of the experience of consciousness” to tell the story (dialectic) of the Idea in history — he breaks out the unhappy c in different places to describe the provisional (and thus failed) syntheses of form and content hitherto — either the Idea in history (the content or substance) has not reached maturity, or philosophy (the form of consciousness as adequate self-reflection) is not yet mature. So there are the sections of the Phenomenology on self-consciousness (he discussed ancient stoicism and skepticism as the unhappy moment before the revealed religion); Prior to that, he runs through something similar in his early work, Faith and Knowledge — here the target is the world of the German Enlightenment in the age of Kant — Deism and Romanticism and the subjective idealism of Fichte. So Kant, Fichte, Novalis, these are also “embodiments of unhappy c” for Hegel. Unhappy c is also relevant to his Aesthetics — the breakdown of the ideal of beauty in ancient Greek art is another story about the necessity for the coming of the truth of revealed religion (the Christian message), which is the content of the Idea not yet in its final form (Hegel’s philosophy as science of logic/science of experience.

I run through this catalog as a basis for pointing out the anachronism of calling Kierkegaard “the embodiment of the unhappy consciousness.” As I am sure you are well aware, Kierkegaard, as more or less an ad hoc “young right Hegelian” was a critic of Hegel’s philosophical system — so casually invoking Hegel as a critique of Kierkegaard, once again, strikes me as oddly anachronistic.

Next, your remark about the highest form of self-consciousness not being attained by doubting; I have some problems here too. Hegel has quite a lot to say about the negativity of consciousness being nothing negative (since it is really the engine of the dialectic). So there is a sense in which reflection upon the negativity of consciousness is precisely how the highest form of self-consciousness is achieved in Hegel. This being said, I think what you have in mind is what Hegel referred to as “tarrying with the negative” — the self-satisfaction of finite reason with itself (Enlightenment) in its “unhappiness.”

I suppose you could try to lump Kierkegaard in with this crowd. But the moment of his thinking is all about a kind of collision between reason and what he calls the paradox (the notion of truth demanded by the most rigorous encounter with Christianity). Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript is a really astonishing and sustained attack on Hegel’s philosophical system — denying the possibility of both of its major elements — the Hegelian science of logic and the Hegelian science of the experience of consciousness. I think you fatally underestimate Kierkegaard when you say that he exhausted himself on doubt and turned to religion. I also think you are wrong to say that Hegel mocked religion — I certainly agree that he was no Christian; but as mentioned above, he thought that the message of Christianity was “the Idea, in-itself, but not yet for itself.” Don’t see any mockery in that.

So to end with your concluding doublet:

K was a relentless pessimist concerning (Hegel’s) logic, you say. I certainly think that’s true. That he was some sort of optimist concerning matters of faith however, I reject out of hand. Don’t recall K every being referred to as an optimist by anyone. Kierkegaard thought that Christian faith was damn near impossible, so he wanted to make it as hard as possible on himself and everyone else, and in that I do believe he succeeded.

Hegel was a relentless optimist about logic you write. If by this you mean that he embraced an infinitist science of logic like one never seen before or since, well, you’d have to be pretty optimistic about logic (as the deep structure of the world itself) in order to do that. You close by saing that Hegel was a pessimist about Faith. I partially addressed this above, where I said that he was serious about the Christian message, so in this sense was not a pessimist about faith. I also admitted however, that he was not a believer in any conventional sense (he thought philosophy to be higher than religion after all). This being said, recall that in Faith and Knowledge, he takes the side of faith over the Enlightenment. So it’s not that simple. Really, I don’t think Hegel was any kind of pessimist. He thought all negativity of experience could be reconciled and overcome in history and thought. What could be less pessimistic than that. A final thought on your phrase “humorously hidden pessimist.” I’ve read thousands of pages of Hegel, and I don’t recall even a whiff of humor!