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I’ve been pursuing a long thread (one, two, three, four, five, six, seven) on the importance of Hyppolite’s Logic and Existence, and his reading of Marx.  Doing so has involved excavating a lot of historical context, as reading Marx in particular was indissociable from both the reception of his recently published early writings and debates in the Soviet Union that were reflected in the PCF.  Moreover, though Hegel was an absolutely central figure in postwar France, the interpretation of Hegel was up in the air.  Although very prominent, Alexandre Kojève’s humanistic version was seen as problematic for a number of reasons, not least because it abandoned good-sized chunks of Hegel’s corpus to maintain the anthropology.  Clearly in the shadow of his engagement with Heidegger, Hyppolite’s Logic and Existence opened the possibility of a non-humanist, non-anthropological version of Hegel that simultaneously resisted another prominent reading, one that assimilated Hegel into religion.  Hyppolite also wrote about Marx in the late 1940s and read Marx as a theorist of alienation.

In this post and the next, I’ll discuss Hyppolite’s reading of Marx in Logic and Existence.  Although the book involves a radical re-thinking of Hegel, or at least a radical reorientation away from the Phenomenology and to the Logic, Hyppolite’s reading of Marx does not change significantly.  I want to note four points. This time, I’ll contrast (1) the positivity that Hyppolite thinks is inextricable from Marx with (2) the negativity he thinks is important in Hegel.  Next time, I’ll look at (3) Hyppolite’s specific complaint about alienation in Marx, and finally (4) his concession that historicity is also a significant problem for reading Hegel.

The final chapter of L&E returns to the question of Marx.  Recall the four aspects of Hyppolite’s Marx reading I emphasized previously in parts four and five, framed in terms of Althusser’s critique.  First, Hyppolite said that Marx might require “revising” in light of changing historical circumstances that involved changes in the material constitution of the proletariat.  Second, Althusser says that Hyppolite treats the proletariat as a (mere?) instrument; Hyppolite’s language here largely is used to insert some skepticism about whether the installation of the proletariat to power will stop the conflicts to which it gave rise. Third, Hyppolite’s entire reading is based on Marx’s use of alienation, reading the later works through the earlier.  Finally, Hyppolite uses some will to power language, suggesting that Marx uses terminology that suggests the presence of something like a will to power in class struggles, but then doesn’t have a good answer to the question of whether that will to power will cease after communism is established (the fourth point overlaps the second quite a bit).  The final chapter of Logic and Existence revisits but ultimately maintains the argument by way of the Heideggerian Hegel of that text.  The overall direction of the argument is to show that there is not enough of the negative in Marx.

The L&E chapter opens by noting that Hegel’s philosophy can be extended in two different directions; “one direction leads to the deification of Humanity; the other, the one that we have followed in this work, leads to the Absolute’s self-knowledge across man” (177).  The Feuerbach-Marx line represents the former; in the chapter, Hyppolite both explains his reading and engages the two lines with one another.  He begins by reciting Hegel’s critique of religion, and the centrality of alienation to it, adding that “alienation is indeed the concept to which Feuerbach and Marx will fasten themselves.  Not only will they extend the Hegelian critique, in the form of a critique of religion, but also they will try to show that speculative philosophy, Hegel’s absolute knowledge, is itself also a form of alienation, a substitute for religion” (178).  Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts “propose[] to replace the term ‘self-consciousness’ with the term ‘man’ and thereby to demystify Hegelianism” (179).  It seems to me that there are a few basic steps to Hyppolite’s critique.

1. Too much positive thinking. First, Hyppolite suggests that Marx runs into a limit when he separates the “positive” from sublation.  This focus on the positive allows Marx to posit an unmediated beginning – “man” – as a positivity; history can then be read as a series of alienations that can be overcome with the overcoming of capitalism and the restoration of the human to its essence (as a social being).  Hyppolite writes:

“[Marx] rediscovers, more or less, Hegelian dialectic in the concrete conflicts of history, but he refuses to reduce the positive to the negation of the negation. The distinction is important. The Absolute, for Hegel, will never be an immobile synthesis. His position will always contain negation, the tension of opposition; but Marx, like empiricism, starts from the positive, from the immediacy which is not in itself a negation, from nature. Human objectification is not for him an alienation, because the determined object is not a negation, it is first. History then has created the conflicts and will put an end to them” (183).

He then teases the idea of a will to power implicit in Capital, but then settles on the existence of a “negativity in human self-consciousness … an existence which therefore is discovered alienated in every determination, in every manner of being in the world.” (183).  This strikes me as a more conceptually elaborate version of the worry that Marx is too much of a finalist, that he cannot explain how his history is going to end with the ascent of the proletariat.  Hyppolite’s move against Marx was highlighted in Mimica Cranaki’s early review of the book (it appeared shortly after Deleuze’s and Jean Wahl’s); as she puts it, citing Hyppolite, “but wouldn’t the humanist reflection be the fall into the too human? …. If one privileges logs at the interior of Hegelianism, one will give value to this negativity that Marx was unable to account for (204).

As Frank Müller notes in a recent paper, Hyppolite’s reading of positivity in Hegel had, since the 1930s, emphasized its dialectical nature; an affirmative always related to a historically given positive and vice versa.  Here, we see how Marx can say that the proletariat will bring history to an end because the proletariat starts from a simple beginning, an immediacy that can eventually be aufgehoben in history.  But not only is the positive always also negative, a further problem is that immediacy and temporal succession are illusions: “the Logos presents … temporality as eternal” and “this is why history’s objective spirit becomes absolute spirit; this is a becoming which is difficult to conceive of as an epoch of world history” (188; for those who doubt the Heidegger here, earlier in the paragraph he writes: “time is the concept, but the concept in its immediate Dasein because time is the extasis of difference”).

2. Hegel understands negativity better. Second, as the above suggests, Hyppolite thinks Hegel is better at understanding that negativity is everywhere and ineliminable.  “For Marx, what is the source of this real negativity, this prodigious historical growth …. One has to admit that Hegel went a lot farther than Marx on this point” (183).  If Marx thought that it was possible to have an objectification in the world that is not an alienation, for Hegel “every determinate objectification is an alienation” (183).  Pure subjectivity is “nothingness [néant].”  He grounds this point in the master-slave dialectic in the Phenomenology; as Sabina Hoth glosses the argument, Hyppolite’s “Hegel has uncovered the pure self-referential negation, the ungrounded [substratlose] nothing, as the ground of pure subjectivity, which shows itself in nature as disappearance and death” (Der französische Hegel, 100). Heidegger does some work now:

“The ground of self-consciousness is what, in nature, presents itself as disappearance and death … by comprehending death, man attains this supreme freedom or rather suspects it in himself, because it always sustains his determination …. By apprehending death, man becomes the supreme abstraction which was nature’s interiority, its nothingness, its detachment from every Dasein, from every determination” (L&E, 184).

Death, in other words, is man’s ownmost nonrelational possibility for being. Negation in this sense is an existential, structural condition of the human (and everything else, but we’re talking about the human for now), and death is the ontic version of negation.  Hence Hyppolite’s precise usage of Dasein.

Of course this is Hegel not Heidegger, so the presentation is in terms of abstract negation (my ownmost non-relational possibility) and its sublation into the concrete negation of the finitude of human historicity.  That is, this “melting away of everything stable is the negation of the negation, because everything stable is for man a negation, a self-limitation” (184).  As will become evident, historicity becomes a real problem for Hyppolite’s Hegel.

Thus for the first two points of Hyppolite’s L&E critique of Marx.  I’ll look at alienation and historicity next time.