New APPS

In the US at least, as far as I can tell, Jean Hyppolite is largely unknown outside of specialists in 20c French thought and Hegel.  Hyppolite is best-known here for his influential Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, which appeared in 1946-7.  In 1953, however, he published Logic and Existence (L&E), which took on Hegel’s Logic and which reframed how one should read Hegel. At the end of L&E, Hyppolite says:

“The leading difficulty of Hegelianism is the relation of the Phenomenology and the Logic. Today we would speak of anthropology and ontology. The one studies the properly human reflection, the other the absolute reflection that passes through man” (189)

When L&E appeared, in 1953, this difficulty mattered a lot for the interpretation of Marx, which is my interest here, because the question of Marx’s humanism (or not) was a live one.  Those who said Marx was humanist usually read him through Hegel and his early works like the 1844 Manuscripts.  For its part, the French Communist Party (PCF) had forcefully rejected the study of Hegel and the relevance of Hegel to Marx, substantially because of the humanist implications of Hegel (as routed especially through Feuerbach), the very ones that Hyppolite associates with the Phenomenology and not the Logic.  As I will (eventually, not this time) note, Hyppolite proposes a radically non-anthropological Hegel in L&E, though he generally reads Marx as a humanist.

In any case, to set some context first. Arriving at the rejection of Hegel had been a process for the PCF (for this history see this paper by Fabrizio Carlino and this one by Serge Wolikow). Starting in the early 1930s, the PCF encouraged work on Marx’s texts; French readings of Marx had initially been receptive to the Hegel connection, using it to help legitimate the idea that Marx should be taken seriously as a philosopher.  Following the rise of Stalinism, references to Hegel became hostile by the end of the decade and engagement with many of Marx’s texts atrophied.

The French were getting their cues from the Soviets; Andrei Zhdanov’s (in)famous 1947 “On the History of Philosophy,” a denunciation of Georgi Alexandrov’s The History of Western European Philosophy (1946), is exemplary.  Zhdanov was a brutal apparatchik (he was a major figure in the Terror of the 1930s) who was by then Stalin’s culture minister. Alexandrov’s book had originally won a Stalin prize, but Stalin didn’t like its valuation of Hegel, and so condemnations followed, including the June, 1947 conference at which Zhdanov spoke (per Wikipedia, Alexandrov survived all this, though he was demoted; he was also no angel either, having for example led the denunciation of Anna Akhmatova).

In his speech, Zhdanov emphasized the radicality of Marx’s philosophical innovation.  Alexandrov, he says, made too many references to historical predecessors of Marx and presented the emergence of Marxism as in too much continuity with them.  Hence, Alexandrov “describes the history of philosophy and the development of philosophical ideas and systems as a smooth, evolutionary process through the accumulation of quantitative changes. The impression is created that Marxism arose simply as the successor to preceding progressive teachings – primarily the teachings of the French materialists, of English political economy, and the idealist school of Hegel.” This is a Very Bad, Totally Wrong Thing to Do:

“As you see, it is a question here only of quantitative changes. But that is metaphysics. The rise of Marxism was a genuine discovery, a revolution in philosophy. Like every discovery, like every leap, like every break in gradualness, like every transition into a new condition, the rise of Marxism could not have occurred without the previous accumulation of quantitative changes – in this instance, the development of philosophy prior to Marx and Engels. But the author evidently does not understand that Marx and Engels created a new philosophy, differing qualitatively from all antecedent philosophies, however progressive they were. The relation of Marxist philosophy to all preceding philosophies and the basic change which Marxism effected in philosophy, transforming it into a science, is well known to all. All the more strange, therefore, is the fact that the author focuses his attention, not on that which is new and revolutionary in Marxism but on that which unites it with the development of pre-Marxist philosophy. This, notwithstanding the statement of Marx and Engels that their discovery meant the end of the old philosophy”

The language in this passage confirms that Zhdanov is Stalin’s mouthpiece.  In his “Dialectical and Historical Materialism” (1938; that version is on Marxists.org; this one is better for citations), Stalin had repeatedly emphasized both the distinction between “metaphysics” and “dialectics” and the transition from quantitative and qualitative change.  Opening the section arguing that “Natural Quantitative Change Leads to Qualitative Change,” Stalin proposes that:

“Contrary to metaphysics, dialectics does not regard the process of development as a simple process of growth, where quantitative changes do not lead to qualitative changes, but as a development which passes from insignificant and imperceptible quantitative changes to open ‘fundamental changes’ to qualitative changes; a development in which the qualitative changes occur not gradually, but rapidly and abruptly, taking the form of a leap from one state to another; they occur not accidentally but as the natural result of an accumulation of imperceptible and gradual quantitative changes”

Three interpretive points to help situate this; I’ll get to one of them here:

(a) Stalin draws heavily from Engels’ late (1886) “Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy” and from his Dialectics of Nature and Anti-Dühring.  This is a fairly narrow range of sources, and notably does not say much about even Capital, much less any of Marx’s earlier works.  Most of Stalin’s essay is dedicated to espousing historical materialism in the political sense, but the ontologization of it in nature draws almost entirely from Engels and from Lenin’s early Philosophy and Empirio-Criticism – a text that Lenin wrote a decade before he’d read Hegel’s Logic and declared “Aphorism: It is impossible completely to understand Marx’s Capital, and especially its first chapter, without having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel’s Logic. Consequently, half a century later none of the Marxists understood Marx!!” (LCW 38, 180).  So Stalin is super selective in not only his Marx and Engels, but also his Lenin.

The history of Lenin’s Hegel notebooks, from which the aphorism was derived, will say something of the difficulties here.  So I want to undertake a substantial diversion (what follows is a synthesis of James D. White’s “Lenin and Philosophy”  and a couple of invaluable studies by Kevin D. Anderson: “Lenin, Hegel and Western Marxism from the 1920s to 1953” and his subsequent book, Lenin, Hegel and Western Marxism, which covers overlapping but not identical territory).  White argues that Lenin’s reading of Marx and Engels was initially as a student of Plekhanov, and that Lenin basically wrote Philosophy and Empirio-Criticism as pro-Plekhanov intervention into a critical exchange between Plekhanov and Alexander Bogdanov.  The gist of their side of the exchange is that neither Plekhanov nor Lenin after him engaged in a substantive critique of Bogdanov’s views; rather, they argued that his views were not Marxist. 

Anderson and White agree that Lenin spent a good deal of time in the winter of 1914 in Switzerland in a study of Hegel’s Logic.  Anderson says in his book that this view was transformative for Lenin as a theorist, who went from the vulgar materialism of Philosophy and Empirio-Criticism and other early works to the more interesting works on dialectics and texts like Imperialism and State and Revolution. Let’s call this the pro-Hegelian version of Lenin.  White argues that the transformative moment for Lenin occurred when he got his hands on the Marx-Engels correspondence (published in 1913).  He took extensive notes, and when he overwintered in Switzerland, he read the works that Marx and Engels had said one should read – not just Hegel, but figures like Clauswitz and Leibniz.  In 1920, Lenin again felt the need to combat Bogdanov (who was about to publish a major new work), so he arranged for the reissue of Philosophy and Empirio-Criticism.  After Lenin died, Ryazanov pushed for the importance of the Hegel notebooks as showing Lenin’s development as a Marxist theorist, but Stalin needed a counter-narrative: Lenin the genius whose every word was a testament to than genius, rather than a thinker whose thought developed.  White summarizes the result of this:

“Here, then, is the origin of the interpretation of the ‘Philosophical Notebooks’ as the regeneration of dialectical Marxism, the reaction to its vulgarisation at the hands of the theoreticians of the Second International. It is not history, but a piece of Soviet ideology approved, and perhaps even invented by Stalin.” (139)

So the Hegel notebooks were published, but not Lenin’s notes on the Marx-Engels correspondence, since those would clearly show his efforts to be a faithful expositor of Marx, rather than an innovator. As for the famous aphorism? “Despite the extraordinary powers of perspicacity commentators have attributed to Lenin for this insight into Marx’s thinking, there is really nothing remarkable about it. It is simply a re-statement of what Marx had told Engels in his letter of 14 January 1858” (137)

By the time of the Zhdanov conference, Hegel’s importance to Lenin and Marx had vanished.

If this is the “true story,” Anderson’s history is nonetheless important for a couple of reasons.  First, White doesn’t establish that Lenin did not learn from Hegel.  We know that Lenin read widely.  But even if we assume his only philosophical goal was to get Marx right, it could well be that doing so required Hegel, and that having assimilated Hegel made the more theoretically sophisticated later works possible.  We won’t know, since I think White is convincing that Philosophy and Empirio-Criticism is a bad barometer of Lenin’s understanding of philosophy.  But the Anderson thesis is at least possible.

Second, and more importantly here, Anderson does a tremendous amount of work excavating the Rezepzionsgeschichte of the Lenin notebooks.  Most of that reception, or at least most of Anderson’s focus, is on exchanges between the U.S.-based CLR James and Raya Dunayevskaya.  In Europe, they weren’t read much, and theorists like Korsch and Lukacs had to be super careful because they were routinely condemned as too Hegelian.  In France, however, both Lefebvre and Hyppolite appear to have read them.  In the “1930s [Lefebvre] and Guterman introduced the first French translations, not only of Lenin’s Hegel Notebooks, but also of Marx’s “Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic,” from the 1844 Manuscripts” (Anderson (article), 93).  The notebooks didn’t sell, and were banned by 1940 (125 n38). The introduction to the Notebooks (which I have not read) only spends a little time on Lenin, but it seems to pick up on aspects of surrealism, as well as mounting a critique of Heidegger; “throughout, Hegel, Marx and Lenin are contrasted to Heidegger and Nietzsche. This is an effort to make Lenin and Hegel actual for the philosophical debates of the 1930s” (98).

After the war, Lefebvre’s Logique formelle, Logique dialectique (1947) picked things up, arguing for a more Hegelian Marxism and including an appendix with lots of quotes (and little annotation or discussion) on the dialectic.  By 1949, however, Lefebvre was publishing an auto-critique that named Stalin and Zhdanov as authorities on Hegel/Marx. Anderson notes of the capitulation that this “rather sad 18-page essay ends by attacking Marxist humanism as a possible diversion away from Marxism toward liberalism, and by applauding the discussions, then taking place in Stalin’s Russia, on both Stalin’s concept of genetics and on socialist realism in art.” (105).

Thus for the status of Lenin’s notebooks as an index of the strange politics of Hegel and Marx during the Stalinist era.  Next time I’ll pick back up with the Zhdanov.