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Invisible man reader response5/16/2023 ![]() ![]() Such biographical facts highlight the need for a discussion of how Ellison utilized and critiqued aspects of Hegelian phenomenology in Invisible Man. These insights into Ellison's use of Hegel are without a doubt valuable. (1) Rampersad further shows how Ellison in "A Congress Jim Crow Didn't Attend," a piece of propaganda written for New Masses, drew on Hegel when he wrote the delegates at the third convention of National Negro Congress possessed "a temper of militant indignation" (134). Arnold Rampersad discusses how Ellison viewed Bigger Thomas's consciousness as an "indignant consciousness," which is a clear appropriation of Hegelian thought (132). ![]() John Wright argues that Ellison agrees with the Hegelian notions that "consciousness is all," "human life is a move toward the rational," and freedom is a byproduct of consciousness, not political projects in the name of abstract ideas (69). Lawrence Jackson acknowledges, for example, that Ellison wrote to Richard Wright in 1940 searching for Hegel's Philosophy of Mind (229). There has been little scholarship connecting Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man to Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit despite biographical information that Hegel influenced Ellison. You ache with the need to convince yourself that you do exist in the real world, that you're a part of all the sound and anguish and you strike out with your fists, and you curse and swear to make them recognize you. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit And, let me confess, you feel that way most of the time. Self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another that is, it exists only in being acknowledged.
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