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I’m most of the way through a long series (one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight) on Hyppolite’s Logic and Existence and his reading of Marx. Last time, I started on his reading of Marx in Logic and Existence.  As I noted, although the book involves a reorientation away from the Phenomenology and to the Logic, Hyppolite’s reading of Marx does not change significantly.  I want to note four points. Last time, I contrasted (1) the positivity that Hyppolite thinks is inextricable from Marx with (2) the negativity he thinks is important in Hegel.  This 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, a problem that is made very apparent by his usage of Heidegger.

3. Enough with the alienation!

For Hyppolite, Hegelian negativity shows the limits of humanist alienation.  “In Marx, the proletariat is the comprehension of human alienation and this comprehension is its existence” and “if objectification were not an alienation, history would stop” (L&E, 184).  So Marx has allowed the initial positivity of “man” to generate an endpoint that was pure positivity.  But no such endpoint is possible.  This is because the human individual is always “there for others and this for-others is the limit over which his subjectivity cannot go” (184).  Judith Butler’s reading of Hyppolite on the Phenomenology is helpful: “for Hyppolite, the absolute is not an achievement as such, but the dialectic of achievement and loss, the perpetual noncoincidence of beings and, in the human sphere, the permanence of desire, the inevitability of transience” (Subjects of Desire, 83).  Here, that reading is explicitly applied to Hegel tout court.

This means, among other things, that the proletariat taking over doesn’t eliminate negativity or desire or achieve some sort of plenitude. Hyppolite quotes Hegel’s Phenomenology on the quest for political power:

“Power [Macht] and Wealth are the supreme ends of its [the self’s] exertions; it knows that through renunciation and sacrifice it forms itself into the universal, attains the possession of it, and in this possession has universal validity [und in diesem Besitze allgemeine Gültigkeit hat]; they are real, recognized powers [sie sind die wirklichen anerkannten Mächte]. However this validity [sein Gelten / cette validité] is itself vain; and just by taking possession of it, it knows them not to be essences themselves [Selbstwesen / essences autonomes], but rather that it itself is their power [sondern vielmehr sich als ihre Macht / mais qu’il est leur puissance], and they are vain things” (PhG sec. 526; trans. revised from the suhrkamp taschenbuch Werke 3, p. 391. The French is from Hyppolite’s text).

In other words, political power isn’t essential power; taking political power doesn’t add to one’s essence.  Political power is at best a form of projection; it may not even lead to recognition.  You can’t make negativity go away, as he had already emphasized in his review of Lukacs.  Given Hyppolite’s move against the anthropological Hegel, and given the importance of the dialectic of recognition for the anthropological Hegel, it is worth noting that “history will stop” is also in Kojève, who says that history is “a more or less uninterrupted sequence of foreign wars and bloody revolutions,” but “will stop when man will be perfectly satisfied by the fact of being a recognized citizen of a universal and homogenous State, or, if you prefer, of a classless society comprising the whole of humanity” (“Hegel, Marx and Christianity,” 33-4).

4. Actually, historicity is hard for Hegel too.

Fourth and finally, Hyppolite admits that historicity is a problem for Hegel too. “It is here that Hegelianism presents almost insurmountable difficulties.  What is the relation between absolute knowledge, the Logos, and this philosophy of history?” (186).  Whatever the difficulties, it is clear to Hyppolite that the problem cannot be posed as an anthropology: “For Hegel, is the common work Humanity? We can respond to the second question quite clearly. Humanity as such is not the supreme end for Hegel …. Man is an intersection; he is not a natural Dasein which would have a primordial positivity” (186).

This version of Hegel, for which every determination is a negation, underlines the problematic humanism in the alienation-based version of Marx (i.e., Hyppolite’s Marx). On that account, there is a human essence as a positivity that capitalism can alienate, as when the worker puts their personality into their work and gets back only an inadequate, dehumanizing, hourly wage in return.  The move to communism would then overcome that alienation by allowing an objectification that returned the human essence to itself without locating it in another, such as the capitalist boss.

But for the Hyppolite’s Hegel, there is no original positivity to be lost, and all objectification is a form of alienation.  It is precisely this that someone like Althusser had objected to when he claimed that the “mystified” Hegelian dialectic projects the political problems and suffering of the current class period onto all of human nature, and that it finds “in it the idea that the basis of the ‘human condition’ is anguish and violence … and conceive the condition of their own class, in its death agony, as the ‘universal human condition’” (Spectre of Hegel, 187; for discussion see part 3)

The reorientation moves Hegel considerably toward Heidegger and ontology to explain the problem with historicity.  So this is a specific reading of Hegel, and Hyppolite liberally invokes Heideggerian terminology.  In freedom:

“Man does not conquer himself as man, but becomes the house (la demeure) of the Universal, of the Logos of Being, and becomes capable of Truth. In this opening which allows the existent of Nature, and history itself, to be clarified, to be conceived, Being comprehends itself as this eternal self-engendering; it is Logic in Hegel’s sense, absolute knowledge. Man then exists as the natural Dasein in which being’s universal self-consciousness appears. Man is the trace of this self-consciousness, but an indispensable trace without which self-consciousness would not be” (187)

Heidegger had written in 1950 that “dwelling … is the basic character of Being in keeping with which mortals exist [Das Wohnen aber ist der Grundzug des Seins, demgemäß die Sterblichen sind]” (Poetry, Language, Thought, 160 / GA 7, 163). A year or so after Hyppolite’s book appeared, Foucault wrote in his anthropology course that anthropology asks “not: what is that truth that man dwells in [habite], but how can one dwell in [habiter] the truth?  … It responds to the question: if man inhabits the truth, how can he setup his residence [aménager sa demeure]?  And which truth ought he to dwell in [doit l’habiter] in order to build [bâtir] and to recognize, in the truth, his residence [sa demeure]?” (Question anthropologique, 63). And “if man, in this space of generalized anthropologism, would have clear right of access to his truth, he loses at the same time originary access to the truth” (62-3; I discuss these passages here and earlier installments there say a bit more about Heidegger on humanism).

The year before L&E, speaking against the error of believing that “because the absolute idea is manifest in history, the absolute would be historic, an end of history” (Figures I, 157), Hyppolite had already said:

“The manifestation of this universal consciousness of self, is no longer the state, but the authentic language, which is the dwelling of being [demeure de l’Etre]. It is not man who interprets being, but is being which is said in man, and this unconcealing [dévoilement] of being, this absolute logic – substituted for a metaphysics (which can be more or less theology) that passes through man” (Figures I, 157).

He then rehearses the anthropology vs. ontology question, and how one has to ask “what history becomes in the perspective of absolute knowledge.”  Rejecting Marxist and Sartrean humanisms, he closes the piece by suggesting that “Heidegger’s ontology perhaps could contribute to clarifying this second possible direction of Hegelianism” (ibid.)

All of that said, there is an obvious limit to the how much the invocation of Heidegger can help us to understand historicity in Hegel because of the status of the absolute and dialectic. The issue is the Hegelian sense of totality, that everything is supposed to fit together into some sort of articulated whole (“Absolute”). If one starts with the Phenomenology, one can retrospectively say how the moments of history have connected to one another.  If one follows the Logic, then (as Hyppolite repeatedly emphasizes) somehow absolute knowing is already there even in the first stages.  There’s at least a couple of ways of framing this concern, one as a problem with closure and one as a problem with the logical structure.

(a) Closure.

A number of Hegelian concepts, and particularly dialectic, don’t have obvious Heideggerian analogs, and the Heideggerian concepts that one might align with them (Being? Proffer/withdraw?) don’t obviously say the same thing.  Hegel, after all, characterized his history as a “theodicy.” In Genesis and Structure, Hyppolite quotes Being and Time but immediately adds in a footnote that “the spirit of Heidegger’s text is completely different from that of Hegel’s. For Hegel, there exists negativity, guilt, the necessity for taking the negative seriously, splitting, but in spite of all that, there is reconciliation” (519 n25).  

Logic and Existence perhaps moves a little further in the direction of Heidegger and against reconciliation, but Hegel is still read as a theorist of the negative and its irreducibility as a motor of the system. For Heidegger, the problem is that Hegel prioritizes the negation of the negation (i.e., the logic) over temporality, and therefore has to pose the insoluble problem of how spirit “falls into time.”  This is precisely the problem that Hyppolite acknowledges in Hegel as being “almost unsurmountable.” 

Heidegger notes near the end of Being and Time the value of comparing his own and Hegel’s understanding of time, but says that “Hegel’s concept of time presents the most radical way in which the vulgar understanding of time has been given form conceptually” (SZ 428, following the Stambaugh translation).  That is, for Heidegger, when Hegel conceives of time as the concrete negation of space, he locks himself into viewing time as a succession of “nows,” which then prevents him from understanding time as temporality.  Thus “he leaves totally unexamined the question of whether the essential constitution of spirit as the negating of negation is possible at all in any other way than on the basis of primordial temporality” (SZ 435).  He contrasts his own view on exactly this point:

“Our existential analytic of Dasein, on the other hand, begins with the ‘concretion’ of factically thrown existence, and reveals temporality as what makes such existence primordially possible. ‘Spirit’ does not first fall into time, but exists as the primordial temporalizing of temporality” (SZ 435-6).

In other words, temporalizing is open-ended in a way that the process of the Absolute is not.  Because the process of the absolute is not temporalizing in this sense, it cannot avoid the problem of how it is broken up into segments of time, i.e., of how it falls into history.

(b) Reduction to negation.

Jean Wahl (who was of course a Hegel scholar, but who also knew Heidegger’s work very well) raises what strikes me as the same general problem from a slightly different angle. Wahl is concerned, as it were, with a different kind of closure.  Rather than the reduction of temporality to an ontic process with a definite endpoint, Wahl indicts the dialectical logic, the “prodigious and monstrous mechanism” that holds the Hegelian apparatus together. In a review of L&E that appeared shortly after its publication, Wahl argues that the Hegelian narrative embodies a fundamental philosophical mistake in its reduction of difference/alterity to opposition. Wahl’s review, which says nothing against Hyppolite’s reading of Hegel but rather goes after Hegel, deserves more space than I’m going to give it here.  But here’s the core of it:

“Let’s advance a hypothesis … Let’s suppose that, on the diversity of the universe, the Sophist and Philebus on the one hand, [Leibniz’s] Monadology and [Descartes’] Discourse on Method on the other hand, bring truth, and that Hegel brings us error. We don’t minimize the differences, the oppositions between the Monadology and the Phenomenology; there is nonetheless, as Hyppolite shows, [and] as Heidegger would admit, a profound relationship between Leibniz’s and Hegel’s visions. Leibniz has indeed correctly seen the distinction of one thing with relation to all the others …. But he would not say that this essential difference is the difference of a thing and its other; he would not say that this duality is the speculative duality, the fundamental double …. He would not speak of the opposition of a thing to itself and in-itself” (“Une interprétation de la logique de Hegel,” 1053).

Wahl traces out how he thinks this gradual but inexorable reduction of alterity to dialectical contradiction happens, summarizing that:

“For us, a thing does not have an other, does not have its other, it has others which are not its others [elle a des autres, et qui ne sont pas ses autres]. Here, it seems, are the last links of this chain: diversity, negation, opposition, contradiction, internal contradiction, the last link being the most difficult to grasp, but each of the preceding ones constituting an error, the whole being governed by idealism and monism” (1062).

In sum, Hyppolite’s reading of Hegel involves a lot of Heidegger, but this then generates tensions both with how Heidegger understands temporality and the extent to which Hegel’s understanding of the absolute can be reconciled with that, on the one hand; and how Hegel’s logic reduces alterity to internal contradiction, on the other.  Hyppolite’s reading of Marx attributes to Marx an more obvious version of the closure and logic problems: on what basis does Marx think that it’s ever possible to get to a point of reconciliation, or, rather, on what basis does Marx think that a given moment – communism – could actually be a reconciliation?  But Hyppolite’s Hegel does not escape a version of that question.

Finally, note that Hyppolite’s critique of Marx depends on reading Marx through alienation. A more theoretically sophisticated version of Marx that did not depend on alienation would be less subject to this critique.  I suspect that’s part of why Althusser went looking for one, almost immediately after destalinization got underway. I’ll have something to say about that, and the impact of Althusser’s Reading Capital on Hyppolite, next time.