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Hegel’s “Notion,” as elaborated in the Science of Logic (1812), makes an interesting premise for considering the specifically ethical relation of knowledge to ignorance. It proffers a métier for self-superseding experience. It likewise suggests how character might be a counter of aesthetic value. For with the Notion, Hegel famously presupposes a mode of subjective consciousness propelled by ignorance that is nonetheless experientially grounded in its own historical trajectory. On this assumption, subjective consciousness is always moving beyond its immediate powers of self-recognition, but never abdicating its responsibility to experience. If, as Hegel maintains, the Notion is the relation of being to essence, where essence is the first negation of being, being de facto becomes illusory being. And if the Notion proper is the second negation, or the negation of this negation (Logic 596), then the underlying stakes of Hegel’s speculative inquiry demand something like a respect for illusionism. After all, as Robert Pippin observes, “Essence and appearance…are not understood as separate beings, but as ‘moments’ of any being that reflection can identify and understand” (202). Reflective mind seems to entail the plot reversals of illusionism (i.e. the transition from being to essence) as the condition of its universal objectivity for Hegel.

Inasmuch as essence and appearance are the controlling terms of Hegel’s account of human being as reflective consciousness, the reflective capacity itself would seem to be deeply implicated in a drama of self-deception. One might even risk the generalization that self-deception exhibits a Notional logic in the imperatives of reasoning that actualize the narrative articulation of literary and visual art forms. It is important to recall that Hegel’s (and Fichte’s) innovation in understanding subjective self-relation and selfhood is purveyed as a repudiation of Kant. Notional thinking challenges the proposition that pure thought is conditioned upon an a priori form, a spontaneous self-relation that pre-empts narrative rationalization. Hence Hegel’s emphatic distinction between appearance, understood as a subject without a predicate, or the “thing without qualities,” and the determinate being of the subject, understood as the preserve of the Notion (Logic 628). Hegel’s corollary emphasis on determinacy [End Page 148] over immediacy compels a shifting of our attention away from forms of experience proper to the tribulations of formative experience in human activity. Within this frame of reference we can countenance illusoriness as a métier of determinative subjectivity. Self-deception, when understood as part of a rationalizing project, follows this determinative activity. In this way, it throws off the stigma of self-blinding irrationality.

The underpinning of Hegel’s critique of Kantian idealism is the assertion that one cannot represent the immediacy of experience as Kantian schemata purport to do. I would like to suggest that self-deception bears out this claim because its rationalistic/rationalizing trajectory can only be realized in the prospect of further determinations. The practice of trompe l’oeil illusionism in the history of visual arts offers a vivid dramatization of this exigency of self-deception and might thereby serve as a stage for speculating upon the ethical and creative fruits of Hegel’s corrective. Illusionism is, after all, a practice that seeks something like the representation of immediacy without incurring the Kantian contradictions. Hegel famously and controversially aspires to an accounting of immediacy that is mediated—i.e. a “mediated immediacy.” This immediacy is representable, but within the “moment” of its representability. The representation is rendered indecipherable as such.¹ Trompe l’oeil, for example, presents this indecipherability as an ability of the viewer to see beyond the bounds of the immediacy that seeing denotes when we stand within the horizon of a unique objectification of “reality.” Trompe l’oeil renders that horizon permeable. Where we penetrate this horizon, the indecipherability of representation itself becomes the cipher of a new ability. It is one that we might fruitfully contemplate as Hegel’s faith in the becoming of being, where becoming makes illusoriness coherent with actuality or Wirklichkeit.

The concept of Wirklichkeit, which preoccupies Hegel in Book II of his Science of Logic, is pre-eminently the relationality that...