Abstract

My thesis concerns the question of what constitutes the factum of experience. A factum is any evidence or claim of fact that supports a given contention. The factum of experience, therefore, is what supports the validity of a given experience, and I am concerned to show that the factum for our experiences of things and our experience of personal identity lies not in any theoretical supposition, e.g. Descrates' cogito, but in the nature of work and self-formation as a social animal. In particular I am interested in the notion that the self-identity of the individual is an aesthetical achievement of a producer, but by the demands of the market place and conditions of a 'civilized' environment that self-identity constitutes a fraud. Only in the exhaustion of the singular factum in the particular experience of das Individuum is the fraud fully disclosed, and only in the love and reconciliation of the divine community is it possible for that fraud to be relinquished. ;This discussion of the factum is bracketed, on the one hand, by a discussion of Hegel's renewal of metaphysics and the failure of a number of commentators to recognize that the nature of the factum is the central issue in the Phenomenology, and, on the other hand, by a discussion of what is necessary in the Phenomenology and how Hegel's argument is susceptible to criticism from the romantic viewpoint of Kleist and the anti-idealism of Nietzsche