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So it’s time to take stock and wind-up this very long thread (one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine) on Hyppolite’s Logic and Existence and readings of Marx around it (I know the title promises Foucault. That turns out to be a minor part of how this developed, but I’ll say a little something about Foucault at the end today). Here I’ll reframe the debate, and track its echoes in Althusser’s “Lenin and Philosophy” and the discussion around it; along the way, I’ll note the influence of Althusser and Hyppolite on each other.

By way of a summary, then, Hyppolite’s Logic and Existence emerged in a very specific context.  It was a context where how one read Hegel mattered for how one read Marx.  The Stalin-Zhdanov line emphasized a radical break with Hegel in Marx.  It also required that one endorse Engels and the project of a dialectics of nature.  This is clear from the examples they use to construct dialectical materialism, which involve temperature changes and other natural phenomena.  This is what it meant to find the “rational kernel” in Hegel: to see dialectics as a general way of giving an account of everything but without treating the Absolute as something transcendental.  In contrast, someone like Hyppolite (who represents an interpretation common among non-Marxist philosophers) could read Marx through Hegel, a process that involved emphasis on the earlier writings and alienation as the central Marxian insight, coupled with a sense that it was not ever going to be possible to resolve alienation.  Hyppolite thought this was an empirical proposition; Althusser thought it was a bad faith effort by the bourgeoisie to recast its own problems as human nature, but the upshot was a general skepticism in the Hyppolite camp about the ability of communism resolve alienation.

There was dissatisfaction with all of these options. The Hegel that had emerged in France, through Wahl, Kojève and Hyppolite, as Althusser complained bitterly, was centered on the Phenomenology of Spirit.  In a 1947 review of Kojève, Althusser says that “Kojève culls an anthropology from Hegel: he develops the subjective aspect of Hegelian negativity, deliberately neglecting its objective aspect.  The partiality of his approach leads him to a dualistic position: he is left face to face with nature, the objective reality he neglects in Hegelian negativity” (Spectre, 174).  This process, Althusser says, emphasizes the becoming substance of the Hegelian subject, but neglects the reverse process.  In a letter to Tran duc Thao, Kojève basically concedes this line of argument, 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).

Other thinkers were unimpressed with the extension of dialectics to nature; Bataille, for example, argued as early as 1932 that the development of mathematics does not track Engels’ argument at all:

“Mathematics – whether higher or not – underwent, during the nineteenth century, an evolution that in every way was contrary to Engels’s program; it eliminated every appearance of a dialectic. Rigor in demonstrations, noncontradiction in principles, constant accord with logic; those are the ends pursued, and on the whole attained, by mathematics” (Visions of Excess, 111).

This thus marks a fault line: “it is not a question of setting aside dialectical thought; one must instead try to know the limit beyond which its application in this direction is fruitful” (ibid.) Bataille attended Kojève’s seminars, and Philippe Sabot argues that Bataille played an important role in conceptually getting from Kojève’s humanism to Foucault’s anti-humanism of the 1960s. The issue was precisely whether there would be some sort of residual negativity after the humanist achievement of the end of history.  This, of course, was the same problem that Hyppolite suggested was in Marx (using “will to power” language) and which he tried to suppress as an issue in Hegel, even as his Heideggerian framing suggested that the dialectical reading was too tidy (obviously there is much more that can be said here, especially the role of Bataille)

The specificity of the context needs emphasis.  By the late 1960s, Althusser had largely (though not completely) dropped the philosophy of nature and had been advancing the rupture thesis for several years, allowing him to claim a specificity to Marx’s later work and to discount the Hegel question almost altogether.  He gave “Lenin and Philosophy” as a lecture in Feb. 1968. As he put it in a follow-up essay, “Lenin before Hegel,” “Marx’s scientific theory did not lead to a new philosophy (called dialectical materialism), but to a new practice of philosophy, to be precise to the practice of philosophy based on a proletarian class position in philosophy” (Lenin and Philosophy, 81).  This is a long way from the Stalin-Zhdanov emphasis on dialectical materialism. It is clear that Althusser still takes his work to refute the alienation version of Marx that Hyppolite advocated; as he puts it, that thesis “exploded. The result of this explosion was the evaporation of the notions of subject, human essence, and alienation, which disappear, completely atomized, and the liberation of the concept of a process (procès or processus) without a subject, which is the basis of all the analyses in Capital.” (81)

Hyppolite’s innovation was to develop a Logic-centered version of Hegel, and without wanting to read too much into it, it is as close as one can get to a process without a subject and still be reading Hegel.  As nearly everyone immediately recognized, Logic and Existence showed that one did not need an anthropological or humanistic reading of Hegel. Althusser notes: “Hyppolite decisively proved that Hegel’s conception of history had absolutely nothing to do with any anthropology” (81) and opposes Hyppolite to the “erroneous” interpretations of Kojève and Lukacs.  Althusser adds:

“Now what matters to us here is that Nature itself is not, in Hegel’s eyes, its own origin; it is itself the result of a process of alienation which does not begin with it: i.e. of a process whose origin is elsewhere — in Logic” (82).

This production of a non-anthropological Hegel also had implications for Marxism because it threw into question what, exactly, Hegel stood for and thus what, exactly, it meant for Marx to read Hegel.  Recall that there had been a logic-centered reading of Hegel in Lenin, as developed through his detailed commentary on Hegel’s Logic and his aphorism that “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).  The Soviets did a lot of work to keep this reading under the radar, in favor of the Stalin-Zhdanov line that emphasized Engels’ philosophy of nature. 

Even as late as the initial “Lenin and Philosophy,” Althusser focuses on “Lenin’s great ‘philosophical’ work: Materialism and Empirio-criticism” (27) and makes favorable reference to Engels’ Anti-Dühring. But in the follow-up essay, he is somewhat more circumspect.  Althusser thinks Lenin has refuted the idea that logic is alienated into nature, but that is not everything: “for it is clear that Lenin swept aside in one sentence the absurd idea that Nature was a product of the alienation of Logic, and yet he says that the Chapter on the Absolute Idea is quasi-materialist. Surprising” (82, citing LCW 38, 234).  That “absurd idea” of course is very close to Hyppolite’s reading in L&E. Lenin’s interest is in “retaining the Absolute, but rejecting the Idea, which amounts to saying that Lenin takes from Hegel the following proposition: there is only one thing in the world which is absolute, and that is the method or the concept of the process, itself absolute” (82).

I think Althusser’s initial essay shows the widespread implications of moving beyond a humanist reading of Hegel for Marxists.  The subsequent “Lenin before Hegel” shows the influence of Hyppolite on Althusser.  As I noted in part 3, Hyppolite, in one of his last public appearances, says in the discussion after Althusser’s “Lenin and Philosophy” talk:

“As to Lenin, I think that the Philosophical Notebooks are subsequent to the book against empirio-criticism; I am familiar above all with the Philosophical Notebooks, and it seems to me that the great admiration that Lenin shows for Hegel, the surprising manner in which he copies Hegel, is as surprising as the manner in which he copies Abel Rey with [writing] in the margin, ‘shamefaced materialist, go away’. As for Hegel, he says things in the margins which are very profound: he remarks, with respect to the theory of essence, that he moves well [va bien] between the accidental and the essential, because between the deeper currents and the surface, the surface is very important for explaining things.” (qt. Anderson, Lenin, Hegel and Western Marxism, 329).

As Anderson notes, the next year’s follow-up “Lenin before Hegel” appears to be an attempt to address this.  At least, sort of: I noted some of the concessions above, but at the same time, Althusser responds directly to the notebooks, insists that Lenin did not change his mind about anything in Philosophy and empirio-criticism on their account, and this because “basically, Lenin did not need to read Hegel in order to understand him, because he had already understood Hegel, having closely read and understood Marx” (Lenin and Philosophy, 74).

Interestingly, Althusser also influenced Hyppolite.  In a posthumously published essay (so presumably one of the last things he wrote), Hyppolite basically concedes the Althusserian reading of Marx as breaking with alienation.  Hyppolite is particularly interested in Althusser’s development of structural causality and his movement away from invoking a transcendentalized subject in Marx.  That is, in Althusser’s Marx, thought sees the structures underlying social reality without transcendentalizing them: “in the structure that thinking reconstitutes, the instances, that is to say the particular practices articulated together are not the expressions of a subject … but they are not any longer the terms or particular structures exterior to one another, as in a mechanical chain where things only have relations of exteriority” (rpt. in Bianco, ed., Jean Hyppolite, entre structure et existence, 209-10. There’s a lot in this book that looks to be super interesting but that I haven’t explored yet).

In direct opposition to his own earlier work affirming the humanist alienation in Marx, Hyppolite now argues that:

“The Marxist dialectic can no longer be an affirmation, an internal contradiction, an integral reprise of the self, for there is no Self; historical totality can indeed be of moments which are opposed, of relations susceptible to evolution, and thus a certain dialectic, but this is no longer that of a Hegelian subject which poses itself, contradicts itself, and resolves the contradiction into a higher form, by a reaffirmation of itself” (207-8).

Earlier, he cited his earlier work and Lukacs as representative of the reading that Althusser enables one to move past (206).  In short, “the real thing [chose réelle] for Marx cannot be either totality or the ontological negativity of Hegel as such. Marxism would otherwise be an ontotheology which is unaware of itself or a self-creating [autocréatrice] anthropology in the manner of Feuerbach” (205).

There’s probably a lot of things that can and should be said about the distance Hyppolite has traveled in his own work, the ongoing influence of Heidegger, the significance of Althusser’s influence, and the depth of the anti-humanism in late 1960s France (and the degree to which Hyppolite is indexical of it).  For now, I want to close by noting that Hyppolite is prepared to invoke Althusser’s reading of Marx against Althusser.

Althusser is determined to show that Marxism is a science and that Marxist science escapes ideology, in any of the negative senses of that word.  Hyppolite cites the following passage from Reading Capital:

“This ‘break’ between the old religions or ideologies, even the ‘organic’ ones, and Marxism, which is a science, and which must become the ‘organic’ ideology of human history by producing a new form of ideology in the masses (an ideology which will depend on a science this time – which has never been the case before” (1979 Verso ed., p. 131, italics (as usual for Althusser) original).

It is really hard to read all the historical epistemology and conclude that everybody else is thinking in their historical terms, but that you yourself transcend that in some sort of scientific way!  How, after all, could you know this?  Hyppolite notes Althusser’s efforts to keep the boundary between ideology and Marxist science clean, and the self-referential move by which Marxist science “is the only knowledge [le seul savoir] that decides for itself [its epistemic status] and reflects its own difference.”  He adds:

“It is therefore not absurd to compare it, with all the necessary reservations, to what Hegel calls absolute knowledge. The science-ideology difference which it has at first purified for us, still conserves in this philosophy a certain impurity. Perhaps there is a certain kind of necessity, to the extent that a philosophy – albeit dialectical materialism – persists alongside the sciences” (223).

Since I have promised but not delivered Foucault, I’ll give him the last word.   Althusser had titled the chapter in which the above quote appeared “Marxism is not a historicism.”  In Society must be Defended (so about 10 years later), Foucault says “if there is one objection to be made against Marxism, it’s that it might well be a science,” and adds with clear Nietzschean overtones, that one should focus on the “aspiration to power that is inherent in the claim to being a science” (10).  Later in that year’s lectures, he argues that:

“Historicism is nothing other than … the link, the unavoidable connection, between war and history, and conversely, between history and war. No matter how far back it goes, historical knowledge never finds nature, right, order, or peace. However far back it goes, historical knowledge discovers only an unending war, or in other words, forces” (172).

That is, “Knowledge is never anything more than a weapon in a war, or a tactical deployment within that war” (173) and so:

“We must try to be historicists, or in other words, try to analyze this perpetual and unavoidable relationship between the war that is recounted by history and the history that is traversed by the war it is recounting” (174).