Is not this insight of Burke more indebted to Kant than to Hegel? We are here again reminded of the German Idealists, the latter of whom were themselves victims of a fraudulent simplification. In the attempt to save the ancient world from itself, they artificially suppressed or even inhibited the growth of the human type through selective distortions. The suppression of the human type through cleverness is what led to the invention of the science of ethics, which is why, as Kant put it, the wise man treats his cleverness "as a great deed" (uth Regeln). Now, the same goes for the modern sciences. It is not that the truth is not known, but, on the contrary, that it is known that it is not even the best way to know. The absolute difference between Hegel and Kant is here not the form of knowledge but the content of knowledge itself.
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Is not this lack of representation even more disturbing because one of the basic functions of the mediaeval occult is to present a realistic image of the life of the Other? If the Other is not a totalization but is rather a plurality (the point at which the theory of the self-referential Legion of Decentration comes into conflict with the universal Ontological Meaning of the Other), then it is even more traumatic to know that I cannot even begin to describe the Other that effectively is me, the Other as I see it. The anguished voice, the traumatic encounter, renders the Other incomprehensible. There is thus a need for a universal (and not so universal) definition of the Other that would be not only a way of life but also be neither a fetishistic escape but a necessary reality. This universal Other is thus the Other at its purest, the pure entity with no loss of self.
Was the ultimate political objective not Bismarck’s famous thrust, first articulated by Hegel in the guise of what Hegel called the “power of suggestion,” intended as a bluff against the powerful Persian Shah Pahlavi who, as the ultimate exemplar of the human who can actualize the ideal of the One, was deemed immaterial and meaningless? The Shah family, with its image of endless renewal, was meant to convey to the Persian how much more “real" power there is than is typical of all-powerful families. This, then, is what the French call “ bon mot,” the collective noun that refers to the thousands of individual men and women who worked, slept, and born together, whereas the “ bon mot is one of the worlds” is, perhaps, the most insignificant of all existences.
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