New APPS

I’ve been working out a reading of the Hegel-Marx relation via Hyppolite in the early 1950s.  In previous installments (one, two, three, four, five), I’ve tried to develop a lot of the context for why the appearance of Hyppolite’s Logic and Existence in 1953 was so important in that context.  Here, I’ll start looking at L&E.  I’ll offer some general points on the text, and three basic interpretative points for making some sense of it: Hyppolite is interested in (1) decentering Hegel’s Phenomenology, (2) coming up with a way of understanding the Absolute that does not substantialize it, and (3) characterizing things in a way that recalls Heidegger’s use of the middle voice.  I’ll get to the general points and (1) today.

Recall that Lenin’s famous aphorism directed attention to Hegel’s Logic: “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).  Recall also that the French readings of Hegel, at least those of Kojève, Wahl and Hyppolite had been Phenomenology-centered, which tended to lead to a humanist Hegel.  Kojève in particular pushed Hegelianism as anthropology by way of the Phenomenology. Logic and Existence was Hyppolite’s development of his own Logic-centered reading of Hegel.  The consequence, as was immediately understood at the time, was to produce a non-humanist version of Hegel. 

I do not claim to fully understand this text, but I’ll try to outline a few things that seem important here.  Hyppolite’s basic move is to deflect the humanist question: Hegel is really making an ontological argument, and a lot of what had been interpreted through a humanist lens is really about language and mediation.  As he puts it, “language is the Dasein of spirit” (19) and “Hegel’s philosophy is a philosophy of mediation” such that “there is no sense before language, any more than there is an ineffable absolute” (24).Because of the role of mediation, any essence (including a declaration of human essence) is necessarily abstract and therefore nothing. You only arrive at the humanism if you stick with the Phenomenology. Hence, “the leading difficulty of Hegelianism is the relation of the Phenomenology and the Logic. Today we could speak of anthropology and ontology. The one studies the properly human reflection, the other the absolute reflection that passes through man” (189).  As the move to “ontology” suggests, a central part of Hyppolite’s conceptual apparatus is grounded in Heidegger, a point I’ll return to next time.

Here is the basic argument in more detail:

“It is quite remarkable, however, to see reflection, the thought of thought, appear in the Encyclopaedia‘s dialectic in a form different from that in which it appears in the Phenomenology of Spirit. In fact, reflection, this passage from thought in itself to thought for itself, is considered in the Encyclopaedia, as a necessary passage. After an opposition of reflection to the thought of the content, it will lead to the dialectical identity which is the soil of the Logic (which this philosophy of language prepares), to an identity which will show that reflection is the very reflection of being in thought, and as well that thought is the thought of being. In contrast, the Phenomenology studies the anthropological conditions of this reflection; it starts from human, properly subjective, reflection in order to sublate it, in order to show that this Phenomenology, this human itinerary, leads to absolute knowledge, to an ontological reflection which the Phenomenology presupposes. If we just stayed with the Phenomenology, separating it from its conclusion as well as from its preface, we would remain at a humanism, at a philosophical anthropology, and the Logic, the Logos of Being, which is of such importance to Hegel, would be incomprehensible” (34).

As he says a couple of pages later, this means that “the Logic therefore explains the Phenomenology” such that “philosophy, Hegel says, must alienate itself [s’aliéner]” (36). This makes for tricky territory, as Hyppolite admits:

“Experience and the Logos are not opposed [ne s’opposent pas]. The discourse of experience and the discourse of being, the a posteriori and the a priori, correspond to one another [se correspondent] and mutually require one another [s’exigent mutuellement]. There would be no possible experience without the presupposition of absolute knowledge, but the path of experience points ahead to absolute knowledge. It is true that the historicity of this absolute knowledge poses at the very heart of Hegelianism new and perhaps unsolvable problems” (36; next time I’ll explain why I’m highlighting so many of the reflexive constructions).

He concludes the chapter: “this Logic says being – a little like the epic poet saying the world in his primordial language – but it says being by replacing merely representational thought with the rigor of the concept” (37).

There is a lot going on here, but (as promised), I want to highlight a few basic interpretive guideposts.  I’ll note three, of which I’ll get to the first today: (1) Hyppolite wants to decenter the Phenomenology; (2) The Absolute is not to be understood as a substance; and (3) Hyppolite makes heavy use of a Heideggerian middle voice in his exegesis.

1. Decentering (the) Phenomenology:  First, to reiterate, the entire point is to decenter the Phenomenology.  This means that however we’re to understand the human subject, you can’t say the human subject is an absolute subject.  The separation of those two is the key to getting past humanist anthropology.  Early in the text, Hyppolite points to the mediating role of language but decenters it in a way that will seem both strange (because of the language of Being) but familiar (because language happens in and through a given speaker) to those familiar with structuralist and poststructuralist accounts:

“That of which one speaks and the one who speaks show themselves to be inseparable. Object and subject finally transcend themselves as such in the authentic language of being, in the Hegelian ontology. This language appears as the existence of the essence, and dialectical discourse appears as the becoming of sense. However, within natural language, how is this language, which is no longer that of anyone, which is being’s universal self-consciousness, to be distinguished from human, all-too-human, language? In other words, how does the passage from the Phenomenology to absolute Knowledge work? This question is the Hegelian question par excellence, and the very purpose of this work lies in the attempt to pose this question by confronting Hegel’s diverse attitudes concerning it” (26-7).

As I will note, Hyppolite keeps this tension central to his reading, up to and including the final chapter’s treatment of Marx (of which more later). Hyppolite was not the first to suggest both that Kojève both read Hegel anthropologically and that this represented only a part of the system.  In a 1947 review of Kojève’s Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, Althusser said exactly this, arguing that “Kojève culls an anthropology from Hegel: he develops the subjective aspect of Hegelian negativity, deliberately neglecting its objective aspect” and “he is left face to face with nature, the objective reality he neglects in Hegelian negativity” (Spectre of Hegel, 174). Indeed, the neglect is quite deliberate; Kojève explicitly rejects the extension of dialectics to nature.  As he puts it in a footnote, Hegel’s attempt to understand nature dialectically represents a “grave error” and such “ontological monism” is misguided. Rather, “it seems necessary to distinguish, within the dialectical ontology of revealed Being or Spirit (dominated by Totality), a nondialectical ontology (of Greek and traditional inspiration) of Nature (dominated by identity), and a dialectical ontology (of Hegelian inspiration, but modified accordingly) of Man or of History (dominated by Negativity)” (Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, 212-13 n15). In another footnote, he says that “personally I share the point of view of the Phenomenology and do not accept the dialectic of natural Being, of Sein” (199 n10).

The ontological monism line drew other criticism as well. Merleau-Ponty had complained that “if nature is nature, that is, exterior to us and to itself, it will yield neither the relationships nor the quality needed to sustain a dialectic” (Sense and Non-sense, 126). He then contrasts Engels – who “took over from Hegel the bold idea of a dialectic in nature” – with the Marx of The German Ideology, for whom “we are dealing with that nature perceived by man and inseparable from human action” (ibid.).  Canguilhem complains that Kojève “quite cheerfully” lets “all of the philosophy of nature, cosmological philosophy and biological philosophy” fall away from Hegel’s system. He adds that “if we did not have Hyppolite’s translation of the Phenomenology, [Kojève’s interpretation] would be unusable for the for the French reader who is concerned to understand Hegel” (290, 292).

A different strategy is found in Tran Duc Thao’s review of Kojève (1948); there, Tran cites the ontological monism line, noting that for Kojève “the appearance of humanity will be an absolute beginning. But as Hegel understands it, the dialectic consists precisely in identifying contradictions by bringing out the difference in unity” (93).  Kojève has thus “not just eliminated ‘materialism,’ but all dialectic as well, even the Hegelian variety” (93). Tran then undertakes a reading of the early sections of Hegel’s Phenomenology (roughly sense certainty through force) as accounting for the logic of the development of labor and capitalism (it reads sort of like a fusion of The German Ideology and Hegel), before returning to the point that “the concept of the identity of contradiction defines the very foundation of the dialectic. In brilliantly defending dualism, Kojève deliberately places himself outside the Hegelian framework” (107-8).  In a letter to Tran about the review, Kojève basically concedes the main point, saying that:

“I gave a course on phenomenological anthropology in which I made use of Hegelian texts, but said only what I considered to be the truth, leaving aside whatever seemed to me to be, in Hegel, an error. Thus in renouncing Hegelian monism, I consciously parted ways with that great philosopher. On the other hand, my course was primarily a work of propaganda, intended to make an impression” (349).

He then debates some of Tran’s points, but also encourages him further to develop the reading outlined in the review.

Given this sort of crossover into Marx, it is therefore perhaps useful to contrast what Hyppolite is doing (trying to make the absolute more immanent) with the orthodox Marxist decentering of the Phenomenology, since it is also anti-anthropological (in the sense the term has when applied to Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts). That interpretation basically makes dialectics immanent to nature and rejects any talk of an absolute outside of nature. Engels, in his late Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, argues by way of the distinction between idealism and materialism.  Commenting on Hegel’s Logic, Engels characterizes the Hegelian argument as follows:

“According to Hegel, dialectics is the self-development of the concept. The absolute concept does not only exist – unknown where – from eternity, it is also the actual living soul of the whole material world. It develops into itself through all the preliminary stages which are treated at length in Logik and which are all included in it. Then it ‘alienates’ itself by changing itself into nature, where, without consciousness of itself, disguised as the necessity of nature, it goes through a new development and finally comes again to self-consciousness in man.  This self-consciousness then elaborates itself again in history from the crude form until finally the absolute concept again comes to itself completely in Hegelian philosophy” (MECW 26, 383).

This reading no doubt ontologizes the absolute in a way that Hyppolite resists.  As he says, “we must not therefore say the Logos and Nature, but that the Logos is nature, nature is the Logos” (L&E, 101).  Specifically, one should avoid ontologizing anything outside of Logos and nature:

“Logos and Nature are no species of one genus which contains them both and on the basis of which they are distinguished. This distinction would no longer be immanent to them; it would exist only for a third which would compare them, which would consider them from the viewpoint of their similarity or dissimilarity” (L&E, 100).

In other words, as I will argue below, Hyppolite insists repeatedly that we not treat the Absolute as a substance.  Engels seems to do exactly that here. On the other hand, as I will show, it allows Engels to focus on a problem that Hyppolite admits is Hegel’s most difficult: how to relate the movement of the absolute to history.  Engels thinks that problem is disqualifying and uses it to label Hegel as idealist.  He argues that, according to Hegel, “the dialectical development apparent in nature and history … is only a copy of the self-movement of the concept going on from eternity, no one knows where, but at all events independently of any thinking human brain. This ideological perversion had to be done away with.” He then characterizes the materialist alternative:

“We comprehended the concepts in our heads once more materialistically – as images of real things instead of regarding the real things as images of some or other stage of the absolute concept. Thus dialectics reduced itself to the science of the general laws of motion, both of the external world and of human thinking – two sets of laws which are identical in substance …. Thereby the dialectic of concepts became merely the conscious reflection of the dialectical motion of the real world and thus the Hegelian dialectic was placed upon its head; or rather, turned off its head, on which it was standing, and placed on its feet” (MECW 26, 383).

Thus “the great basic thought that the world is not to be comprehended as a complex of ready-made things, but as a complex of processes” (MECW 26, 384) is redirected to the sciences; Engels immediately celebrates developments in cell biology, the “transformation of energy” (different forms of energy transform into one another and “the whole of nature is reduced to this incessant process of transformation of one form into another”) and Darwin’s development of evolutionary theory (MECW 26, 385-6).

Next time I’ll pick up with the second two interpretive points, both of which embed Hyppolite in Heidegger.