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, six), I’ve tried to develop a lot of the background for why the appearance of Hyppolite’s Logic and Existence in 1953 was so important in that context.  Last time, I made some general remarks on the book and started on what I take to be some interpretive guideposts for the it.  I argued that: (1) Hyppolite wants to decenter the Phenomenology in Hegel studies. Today, I’ll add (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.

2. Being is not a substance. Second, the absolute subject of all of this is “being.”  As with Heidegger, what “being” means is somewhat unclear, but the essential move of L&E is here, shifting the subject of the dialectic unambiguously to being and away from “man.” Hyppolite does not want us treating being as a traditional metaphysical subject, however.  For example, he insists that one not treat being as a “substrate:”

“Absolute being reflects itself and thinks itself. Representation, which is characteristic of empirical consciousness as such, is replaced by the concept. There is no longer any substrate [C’est l’être absolu qui se réfléchit et qui se pense. La représentation, qui est caractéristique d’une conscience empirique comme telle, fait place au concept. Il n’y a plus de substrat]” (L&E 150).

Or, contrasting Hegel with religion, he emphasizes “this Logos is not a divine understanding which would exist somewhere else in another world. It is the light of Being in human reality” (178). As John Heckman notes in his introduction to the translation of Genesis and Structure, there was a significant reading of Hegel in postwar France as religious, represented immediately after the war by Henri Niel, in De la Médiation dans la philosophie de Hegel (1945) and several articles.  Hyppolite is thus partly distinguishing his reading from that. The need to do so in an anti-anthropological reading had already been signaled by Kojève, who argued in 1946 against a theistic reading of Hegel (citing Niel) that “Hegel understands and proclaims that what was called ‘God’ is, in reality, humanity, taken in the completed totality of its historical evolution” and “theology was always an unconscious anthropology” (“Hegel, Marx and Christianity,” 26).  That is, the structure of Christian thought is an abstract representation of reality, “man projected into the beyond,” but it is wrong only to the extent that it is a representation. In this sense, “the metaphysical anthropology of Hegel therefore preserves the fundamental categories of Christian theology. But can one say that the Hegelian transcendence of the spirit is anything other than the transcendence of man with respect to nature. Can one say that, for Hegel, objective-Reality is anything other than natural and human” (25)? 

The instability of Kojève’s dismissal of theism had already been raised by Tran Duc Thao, who  (also citing Niel) suggested that “the absolute separation of man and nature leads in practice to a new form of spiritualism which leaves the door open for a return to religion” and “religion has nothing decisive to fear from a philosophy of history which posits human subjectivity as absolutely separate from nature and thus reintroduces an element of transcendent; a subtle apologist needs nothing more” (108).

Hyppolite risks the problem from a different direction. L&E repeatedly rejects dualism and artificial transcendence.  But at the moment he answers Kojève’s question in the affirmative, and says that objective-Reality is something other than natural and human, Hyppolite loses access to the anthropological refutation of religion in Hegel and re-opens the question of how, exactly, one is to understand the Absolute. 

Interestingly, absolute being is characterized as something like a… process without a subject.  That is perhaps not immediately helpful, except to signal that it might compare interestingly with Althusser’s later work (and to suggest a subaltern, indirect influence of Heidegger on Althusser). 

In any case, it seems to me that Hyppolite’s inspiration is coming from Heidegger, so a comparison with how Hyppolite reads Heidegger is helpful.  In a 1954 paper on Heidegger’s use of “phenomenology,” he makes an interesting comparison with Freud, emphasizing process and distancing the project from anthropology:

“There is in Heidegger a method that is as concrete and historical as Freud’s in psychoanalysis (on the condition that one does not take this psychoanalysis in the exposé of results, but in the movement which climbs out of forgetting in order to get to the question), but the question in Freud is empirical and anthropological, and concerns this or that being – and not being in its being – Heidegger’s analytic is oriented by this horizon of the opening of Being. This concern for being dwells [habite] in Dasein … one must discover it without getting bogged down in a particular anthropology” (314).

The Heideggerian language was there clearly enough in L&E; at one point, Hyppolite writes that “Man is the house (la demeure) of the Logos, of the being which reflects on itself and thinks itself” (74; I’ll return to this on the question of historicity later).  Freud, of course, is widely understood in people like Foucault to be one of the main thinkers who destabilized the idea of a substance-like Cartesian subject; by making subjectivity a process that involves drives and an inscrutable unconsciousness that can only be understood through its symptoms, psychoanalysis points to the possibility of understanding underlying phenomena without relying on substance.  The process thus offers a rough analogy to what Heidegger thinks he is doing by talking about the necessity of what he will later call a “sending” of Being, while Being itself is always-already and only withdrawn.

3. Hegel in the Middle Voice. Third, the movement away from subject (while insisting on something happening) and the prevalence of reflexive verbs suggests that Hyppolite is treating the movement of logos here in the middle voice.  He could have gotten this from either Heidegger or the linguist Émile Beneviste, whose “Active and Middle Voice in the Verb” appeared in 1950.  I’ll stick with the Heidegger here, while noting that a more complete reading would also include discussion of Beneviste (the full reference there is: “Active and Middle Voice in the Verb,” in Problems of General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables, FL, 1971), 145–51).

I focus on Heidegger here, because of the importance of Heidegger to Hyppolite.  Hyppolite is not the first to use Heidegger to read Hegel; Kojève remarks that Hegel’s Phenomenology “would probably never have been understood if Heidegger had not published” Being and Time (259 n41; Althusser refers to this passage in his review of the book, Spectre of Hegel, 174).  However, as Wilma Pilati points out, Kojève’s is the existentialist/anthropological version of Heidegger, differentiated by its voluntarism and the sense that existence radically precedes essence, rather than the two being co-constituted.  Pilati writes that for Hyppolite’s Heidegger, on the contrary:

“One can’t say that Dasein is man, but one must instead affirm that man is Dasein. Hyppolite brings Hegelian and Heideggerian thought together to the extent that he underlines that the substitution of the concept of man for that of self-consciousness leads to a poor understanding of Hegel’s philosophy. If in Heidegger’s perspective it is not man who is Dasein but it is Dasein which is man, in Hegel’s perspective it is not man who is self-consciousness but it is self-consciousness that is man” (97).

The contrast with Kojève is clear enough. In the footnote quoted above, Kojève says that “since Hegel, atheism has never again risen to the metaphysical and ontological levels. In our times Heidegger is the first to undertake a complete atheistic philosophy. But he does not seem to have pushed it beyond the phenomenological anthropology developed in the first volume of Sein und Zeit” (259 n41).

It seems to me that one way to see Hyppolite’s use of a post-Being and Time Heidegger and the move against any anthropological reading of Hegel is by way of the middle voice.

(a) The Middle Voice in Heidegger: For the middle voice, I’ll rely on the late Charles Scott.  In an article version of his reading, he both describes the middle voice and explains how it disrupts the narrative of Being and Time.  The middle voice, which is prominent in ancient Greek and exists now mainly in reflexive constructions, “speaks of things that are self-showing without agency in their occurrence qua self-showing” (161).  In other words: things happen, but there is no obvious agent/subject of their happening, nor is the thing which is shown the object of some other agent.  For Heidegger, logos is a specific place where the middle voice matters, because “words let something be seen in self-showing occurrences” (162). That is, language as a mediation is itself something that needs to be understood without relying on activity and passivity (in more Heideggerian terms, one might say the understanding of language as the pure activity of a speaking subject is a derivative one).

That is, as I read Scott, the presence of a middle voice allows one to view language in a non-representational way.  This reading is definitely geared to my Heideggerian explanation of Hyppolite, but I think it works; for Scott, “if the showing activity of speaking is taken without the middle voice process of self-showing – speaking will be interpreted as making present or as presencing. But if both functions are held together, speaking will be interpreted as addressing not only what is shown but a showing itself with the self-showing of what is shown” (162).

A couple of things.  First, the difficulties in expression here are similar to those that show up in Logic and Existence when Hyppolite talks about the centrality of Logos and mediation, and the difficulty in relating Logos-with-a-big-L to the ordinary speech of ordinary people.  So I take it there is a general problematic here.  Second, the opposing language-without-the-middle-voice is easy to understand as a point of contrast.  If I say “look at the cat,” then I am making the cat present as a cat, or bringing attention to the cat, or something like that.  I am the agent, and the cat is the object.  I am representing the cat in language.  But if (this part is much harder) the middle voice is involved, then we can talk about how the cat’s presence occurs in and through my language, without either centering me as a subject or making me into an object.  This seems very much to be what Hyppolite’s Heideggerian Hegel is after.

Scott takes historicity as his central example.  Historicity is of course central to Being and Time; just before suggesting that “Dasein is not essentially a subjective occurrence,” Scott has this to say:

“Historicity will further destabilize the idea of transcendental unity, will eliminate subject-object pairing in thinking about history, and will recast the question of history into a nonlinear conception of historical happening. Historicity functions as an elaboration of mortal temporality, and only when Dasein has come to a free and open relation with its own deathliness is it prepared to reinterpret history, and historicity with primary reference to its own being” (166).

This, I think, is the basic anti-anthropological move that Logic and Existence wants to find in Hegel, even as (this will be the hard part) the construction of the Absolute is nonetheless teleological.  The decentering of the human qua agent makes it impossible to ignore finitude and negativity; “any idea of history and historicity that cover over Dasein’s deathliness, thrown fragmentariness, the question of Being, or the deep and structural sense of its own instability – such ideas will not attract authentic Dasein” (166).  As I will argue when applying all of this to Hyppolite’s reading of Marx, it is Marx’s use of a human positivity in the Gattungswesen (species being) of the 1844 Manuscripts that Hyppolite thinks is at the core of what he finds wrong in Marx.

Authentic Dasein does not get to choose its own adventure or be the only narrator of its story.  That’s because language and Being happen through it, just like Hyppolite’s Hegel says that the absolute happens through history. “Being is its own self-comprehension, its own sense, and the Logos is being positing itself as sense” (L&E, 176).  As I will also suggest when I look at how Hyppolite applies this reading of Hegel to Marx, there are limits to how far one can push Hegel and Heidegger together.  As Scott says, “Heidegger looks for a way to say that something unfolds out of itself and throughout the human world without indicating dialectical development or objective ‘world-historical processes’” (168).

Hyppolite does not, as far as I know, talk about the middle voice in Heidegger directly.  But his reading is compatible.  In the 1954 paper on what phenomenology means in Heidegger, he writes:

“Phenomenology signifies reading phenomena, but this reading is not a construction or a reconstruction in the sense of starting with a thinking subject who would be the center of all signification …. Phenomenology … signifies that which shows itself, letting it be seen as it shows itself from itself [le laisser voir comme il se montre à partir de lui-même]. Letting (Lassen) is neither pure passivity nor pure activity. It is not a matter of constituting a sense, but it is no longer a matter of being disinterested, of letting go [laisser aller]” (308).

(in both the Scott and Hyppolite, I’ve omitted the discussion of the Greek words around phainesthai, but they are roughly parallel).

(b) The middle voice in Hyppolite’s Hegel: Recall the passage on representation I quoted above: “Absolute being reflects itself and thinks itself. Representation, which is characteristic of empirical consciousness as such, is replaced by the concept. There is no longer any substrate” (L&E 150). The second two sentences should thus be read together.  The first establishes representation, where a subject – an empirical consciousness – represents to itself something external.  When one transitions from representation to the concept, there is no longer a representing subject: everything happens in and through the concept.  It is this that distinguishes Hegel from humanism, or at least enables a reading that distinguishes Hegel from humanism.  Hyppolite writes earlier in the text that:

“Hegelian thought transcends the distinction between pure humanism, the one his unfaithful disciples will develop, and absolute speculative life. Without ignoring the other aspect (pure humanism) and the Hegelian texts that could justify it, we believe that Hegel has chosen the speculative conception, being’s self rather than the human self” (107).

Except Hegelian being just is this process of mediation that unfolds itself.  What Hyppolite is doing might be usefully contrasted with Merleau-Ponty, who suggested in 1946 (the essay was then reprinted in Sense and Non-sense (1948)) that:

“Whereas for Heidegger we exist for the sake of death and the awareness of death remains fundamental to philosophy as well as to behavior, Hegel transmutes death into a higher form of life. He therefore moves from the individual to history, whereas for Sartre there can be no remedy for the contradictions of the for itself and the for others, with the result that his dialectic is truncated. One might say that in this sense the Phénoménologie de l’esprit makes possible a Communist philosophy of the party or a philosophy of the Church rather than a philosophy of the individual such as existentialism” (69)

As I suggested earlier, Hyppolite’s Heidegger is several notches less existentialist than the dominant French reading.  But Hyppolite’s Heidegger when applied to Hegel pushes back against reading Hegel’s understanding of sublimation and history in this way.  As I will argue next time, it also furnishes the core of his complaint against Marx in Logic and Existence.