MASARYK UNIVERSITY FACULTY of ARTS Department Of

MASARYK UNIVERSITY FACULTY OF ARTS

Department of Philosophy Philosophy

Saman Pushpakumara

PhD Thesis

Supervisor: doc. dr. phil. Jakub Mácha, PhD.

Brno 2018

The Power of Negativity: A Philosophical Study of the Hegelian Heritage in Philosophy

Saman Pushpakumara

Abstract

The content of this thesis represents a selection of some of the most prominent Hegelian and anti- Hegelian philosophers of the 19th and 20th century, which starts with Hegel himself and then proceeds historically from Feuerbach and Marx via Adorno and Heidegger to the French metaphysical tradition, to British Idealism and via Russell’s and Moore’s analytic philosophy to the current American post- analytic and neo-pragmatic philosophical tradition. While each of the seven chapters is complete in itself in the sense that it represents one facet of a much larger whole, it simultaneously forms a constituent part of it for a more complete understanding of, arguably, the most central issue of the whole Hegelian tradition which is Hegel’s meta-concept of absolute negativity as the self-generative principle for overcoming the Cartesian subject-object dualism and the establishment of a speculative science.

While Hegel employed this meta-concept methodologically to develop his new phenomenological logic, he also used it as an epistemological and ontological category of thought in order to point out the limitations of Kant’s, and indeed, many of his predecessors’ unreflected presuppositions. Having identified this multipurpose-conceptual tool as the core of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and Science of Logic, I have then examined whether post-Hegelian philosophers and traditions also understood and applied this powerful concept in the same way, or whether they have reduced it to different modes of negation for their own philosophical agendas.

My findings are based on Hegel’s dialectic method of writing which I have tried to reconstruct through a continuous process of hermeneutic reading and rereading over three years. Through this experience I gained a valuable insight into the part-whole dynamic within Hegel’s work as well as between him and his followers and critics. The resulting thesis, as I am presenting it here, might offer a new pathway for future Hegel-studies beyond the traditional analytic-continental, or non-metaphysical-metaphysical, split.

Summary of Contents

Chapter 1: Hegel and NEGATIVITY: Tarrying with the NEGATIVE

1.1 Introduction 1.2 NEGATION as internal conceptual differentiation 1.3 Dialectics as the methodology of NEGATION 1.4 Hegel’s law of absolute NEGATIVITY 1.5 NEGATIVITY in the Phenomenology of Spirit 1.6 From phenomenology to ontology 1.7 Chapter summary

Chapter 2: Feuerbach’s Humanistic Critique of Hegel and Negativity

2.1 Introduction 2.2 The Three periods in the development of Feuerbach’s thought 2.3 The beginning of Feuerbach's independent spirit 2.4 The evolution of Feuerbach’s critique 2.5 Feuerbach’s new philosophy 2.6 Alienation and projection as Feuerbach’s mode of NEGATIVITY 2.7 Chapter summary

Chapter 3: Marx and Negativity: Alienation and the Negative Power of Labour

3.1 Introduction 3.2 The demystification of Hegel’s dialectic of NEGATIVITY 3.3 From idealist speculation to materialist critique 3.4 NEGATIVITY as Marx’ methodology 3.5 Alienation as Marx’ form of NEGATIVITY 3.6 NEGATION as the mode of changing existing reality 3.7 The power of NEGATION in the proletariat 3.8 Chapter summary

Chapter 4: Adorno’s Critical Theory and Negative Dialectics

4.1 Introduction 4.2 Criticism as a NEGATIVE force 4.3 Critical Theory as a philosophical praxis 4.4 NEGATIVITY in the Dialectic of Enlightenment 4.5 Adorno’s understanding of Hegel’s ‘determinate NEGATION’ 4.6 Adorno’s Hegel: Three Studies and NEGATIVE experience 4.7 ‘Negative dialectics’ as Adorno’s conceptualisation of NEGATIVITY 4.8 Chapter summary

Chapter 5: Heidegger’s Ontological Difference and Destruktion of Metaphysics

5.1 Introduction 5.2 Heidegger’s relation to Hegel in his development of thought 5.3 The place of Hegel in Heidegger’s ‘Destruktion’ of metaphysics 5.4 Heidegger’s interpretation of Hegel’s concept of time 5.5 Hegel’s infinity of Spirit versus Heidegger’s finitude of Being 5.6 Heidegger’s critique of Hegel’s concept of experience 5.7 Heidegger’s version of NEGATIVITY 5.8 Ontology or theology? 5.9 Chapter summary

Chapter 6: French Philosophy, Hegel and NEGATIVITY 6.1 Introduction 6.2 The unhappy consciousness 6.3 The logic of desire, the struggle for recognition, and the master-slave dialectic 6.4 Existentialist and Phenomenological Critiques of Hegel 6.5 The Spectre of Hegel in Structural Marxism 6.6 The Philosophy of difference 6.7 French Psychoanalysis, deconstruction and NEGATIVITY 6.8 Malabou’s ‘plasticity’ as negativity 6.9 Chapter summery

Chapter 7: British and American Hegel Interpretations

7.1 Introduction 7.2 Hegel and negativity in British idealism 7.3 Russell’s and Moore’s rebellion 7.4 From analytic to post-analytic philosophy 7.5 Chapter summary

Conclusion Appendix: overview of Hegelian ontologies, methods and themes Works cited

Abbreviations

Hegel

(EPS I) Hegel, GWF 1991, The Encyclopaedia Logic: Part 1 of the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences, TF Geraets, WA Suchting, and HS Harris (trans.), Hackett, Indianapolis.

(EPS II) Hegel, GWF 1970, The Encyclopaedia Logic: Part 1I of the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences, AV Miller (trans), Oxford University Press, Oxford.

(PS) Hegel, GWF 1977, Phenomenology of Spirit, AV Miller (trans.), Oxford University Press, Oxford.

(SL) Hegel, GWF 1977, The Science of Logic, AV Miller (trans.), Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Marx

(EPM) Marx, K 1975, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, M Milligan (trans.), Lawrence and Wishart, London.

Adorno

(ND) Adorno, TW 1973, Negative Dialectics, EB Ashton (trans.), Routledge, London.

Heidegger

(BT) Heidegger, M 1996, Being and Time, J. Stambaugh (trans.), State University of New York Press, Albany

Introduction

The guiding question of this thesis

The main purpose of this study is to examine the reason why Hegel’s idea of NEGATIVITY still attracts German, French and British-American philosophers nearly two hundred years after his death. Thus we might ask whether Hegel’s NEGATIVITY is still a living concept. A few years ago, Catherine Malabou published the book ‘The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectics’ (2005) in which she pointed out the same question. However, unlike the current neuro-science-discourse on the plasticity of the human brain, I see the power of Hegel’s philosophy to arise from the NEGATIVITY inherent in the human mind itself.

The perplexing nature of the philosophically enquiring mind is such that it keeps coming back to

Hegel’s NEGATIVITY in order to pinpoint exactly what its elusive quality is. One of its characteristic features is that it contains an enormous capacity to reproduce ever new forms of self-negation which includes itself, and even Hegel himself. Thus by negating Hegel we seem to confirm him. In other words, the central dynamic that underlies the various modes of post-and anti-Hegelian thought such as ‘the negation of negation’, ‘the master-slave dialectics’, ‘the unhappy consciousness’, ‘the logic of desire’, and even ‘deconstruction’, seems to be the same. Therefore, it is not surprising that NEGATIVITY has been described by Hegel in positive terms as a self-generative principle.

Initially, my interest in the power of NEGATIVITY arose from the following statement in the Preface of the Phenomenology of Spirit:

Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being. This power is identical with what we earlier called the Subject, [...]. (PS § 32).

Here, Hegel identifies the historical subject with the power of NEGATIVITY. When we read philosophical trends and individual philosophers through the lense of this statement we may be able to detect whether and how Hegel’s original notion of NEGATIVITY has undergone a transformation not only in form but

also in essence. According to its original meaning, NEGATIVITY is a self-mediating concept and as such a synonym for change; its aim is to dissolve any conceptual substantialisation in order to transcend all polar dualities.

At the micro-level, Hegel applied its logic to any form a determinate NEGATION might take, while at the macro-level, he understood the history of philosophy as an ongoing process of system- differentiation based on the same principle. Through his later encyclopaedic system, he attempted to sublate the philosophies of his predecessors like Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Fichte, and Schelling without trying to abolish them. Instead, any particular partial representation of the history of Western philosophy should be located along two axes, a synchronic (simultaneous) and a diachronic (sequential) axis of totality.

Hegel thus saw the history of philosophy to be constituted by all the philosophies as its constituent parts which his system was designed to integrate. Its purpose was to achieve a total vision of the history of thought and only through this vision of totality would the limitations of all the previous philosophies become understandable. But there remained a gap, a qualitative difference between this new totality and the sum of its parts which Hegel sought to heal by means of the dialectic process itself that necessarily would include his own system.

While Hegel’s predecessors lacked this panoramic awareness of totality, we may ask whether his followers and critics had a more inclusive vision of the history of philosophy. If we try to review the current totality in a similar way as Hegel from our vantage point of today, then we need to ask whether post-Hegelian philosophers have had the same self-awareness as Hegel through which they would be able to locate themselves and each other along these two axes.

Hegel’s review of pre-Hegelian philosophies and their inadequacies has been well documented, for example by Hegel himself in his essay on the difference between Fichte’s and Schelling’s system (1801). What remains to be ascertained, however, is whether post-Hegelian philosophers represent insights that genuinely go beyond Hegel or whether these new developments merely exemplify disconnected facets of his system. Post-Hegelian philosophers have tended to see themselves above Hegel simply due to their later manifestation in time without considering perhaps that Hegel had already anticipated some of these developments and thus integrated them in his system ahead of historic time; for example, the French Hegelian discourse about the unhappy consciousness and the master-slave

dialectic became a new totality for a while which limited the Hegelian discourse to these specific issues. Other examples are Hegel’s critiques of the Kantian a priori and logic and the mathematisation/quantification of the human sciences which analytic philosophy and positivistic research programmes are still continuing to promote despite Hegel’s warnings.

More recently, Stepen Houlgate and Michael Baur have published ‘A Companion to Hegel’ (2011) which covers a wide range of relatively new Hegelian themes without, however, giving an overview and some kind of assessment of their philosophical status in relation to Hegel himself. The collating of separate articles into one book without any attempt to identify the current state of Hegelianism in relation to Hegel may be read as symptomatic for today’s silent acceptance of the fragmentation of the Hegelian spirit – the opposite polarity of the 19th and early 20th century Hegelian focus on the Absolute. It reflects the general trend towards further compartmentalisation of specialist academic fields which makes interdisciplinary communication across these specialisms increasingly difficult. When the analysis of increasingly smaller parts is all that remains of Hegel, then Hegel’s hermeneutic dialectic of part versus whole is lost and Hegelianism is sooner or later doomed to dissolve itself into nothing.

It is important not to forget that Hegel regarded his project not merely as an academic exercise for specialist scholars of metaphysics but as part of a much larger educational programme through which a self-critical communal spirit would develop. This leads to a further question, which is whether post- Hegelian philosophers have shown a commitment to the same educational purpose, or whether as separate individuals they are merely responding to their immediate predecessors by way of a simple, i.e. external negation – an instinctual process of self-assertion that, in the name of reason, merely flips from one polarity to its opposite without internal mediation.

What distinguishes Hegel from both, his predecessors and followers alike is his identification of this internal mediation of historic consciousness. By historicising his philosophical ontology, Hegel has been the only philosopher in history who has written about both, the philosophy of history and the history of philosophy. According to him, both spheres are subject to the same NEGATIVITY as the only power that could develop the Spirit’s self-awareness through which all dogmatic clinging to preconceptual and conceptual shapes of consciousness could be overcome.

Towards a new Hermeneutic Approach to Reading Hegel

While reviewing the Hegelian literature, I became aware of a conspicuous lack of self-reflectivity with regard to this core-issue of internal mediation. Apart from the different foci on content, form, and emphasis, a careful reader will notice this gap. It stands in direct opposition to Hegel’s own highly self- reflective style of writing, which is most clearly evident in the Preface and Introduction to the Phenomenology, as well as in his Introduction to the Science of Logic. This lack of an open, self-critical approach to interpreting Hegel as the philosophical father figure of the dialectics of NEGATIVITY of our time seems to be symptomatic for a proud but divided Hegelian tradition that has lost sight of the whole.

In fact, the most prominent Hegelians who I am presenting in this thesis, from Ludwig Feuerbach to Robert Brandom, have neither regarded themselves as 'faithful interpreters' of Hegel, nor as phenomenologists, but rather as philosophers in their own right who, in search for recognition, have asserted their own version of truth. In search for some answer to a contemporary religious, philosophical, or political issue they seem to have silently bypassed Hegel’s meta-concept of

NEGATIVITY. The following seven chapters are devoted to this dialectic between Hegel and

Hegelianism, that is, how, over a period of two centuries, Hegel’s meta-concept of NEGATIVITY has repeatedly been reinterpreted from various non-phenomenological and non-hermeneutic frames of reference to the point where it has lost its original power.

A hermeneutic reading of Hegel’s work would, for example, seek to make the purposive nature of Hegel’s dialectic clear by elucidating how Hegel's phenomenological process of self-differentiation meanders towards the overcoming of the gap that has arisen from the dualism between subject and object, without, however, falling in the abyss of the Absolute as an undifferentiated, static totality. Hegel thus offered perhaps the only real solution to Kant’s problem of the antinomies. In contrast, traditional logic has seen itself as a ‘hard science’; it is based on substance-thinking which implies identity and non-contradiction of its object. Its claim for universality shows that it cannot tolerate any alternative logic beside itself. During its rise to power, it has rejected the hermeneutic part-whole dynamic that refrains from imposing an ‘objectivist’, i.e. dualistic methodology onto its object, and variously labeled it as subjectivist, relativistic or metaphysical – all of which would at best be ‘pre- scientific’ ways of generating some preliminary knowledge.

A complete cognitive act that a hermeneutic reader seeks to achieve, however, requires not only a linguistic analysis of the constituent logical elements of language but also the reverse process of allowing a genuine organismic synthesis to form within the reader’s mind - not just assuming that the

new concept of the whole would simply be the sum total of its parts with merely a quantitative difference.

A hermeneutic approach that dialectically inter-relates the parts with the whole as they repeatedly undergo transitions between two evolving polarities seems to be the most basic method of understanding a text. In fact, a hermeneutic approach is so basic that it does not just contain an interpretive method but seems to reflect more fundamentally the negative ontological structure of consciousness, and indeed, of reality itself.

Given this understanding of the fundamental nature of hermeneutics, it can then be applied to the micro- as well as to the macro-level, for example, to the whole of the Hegelian tradition in which the

Phenomenology represents the foundational text whose core-concept of NEGATIVITY some Hegelians related to, more or less self-critically, from their own personal and political agendas that drove their responses at the time. If, as we will see, external interests override a purely hermeneutic interest that merely seeks to understand the dynamic nature of Hegel’s concepts from within their own inner logic, then only certain elements of Hegel’s text become highlighted while the rest remains in the background. But a partial view is always incomplete, distorted, and one-sided. Hegel himself emphasised that his truth is to be found only in the whole, which means the whole phenomenological process and its results. Thus only an approach that is designed to conceptualise this whole would be able to access the truth of its negative essence.

Here we can see the long-term effects of the unfortunate break-away of logic from hermeneutics as the same basic pattern is still being reflected today in the so-called analytic-continental split. Thus it is not surprising that even after 200 years of Hegel-Studies, dualistic misconceptions of his work abound. Since Descartes’ time, methodological and epistemological reflections have been based on the presupposition that objective reality is always ‘out there somewhere’ at a certain distance from the reader as observer. Being fully identified with this perspective, it does not seem to occur to him that this presupposition has already created the gap a priori between himself and his object, the text. Thus he tries to close it by employing and refining his methodological tools and strategies. In other words, having unconsciously created this conceptual gap in the first place he then tries everything possible to close it while cleverly inventing further dualistic concepts. Unfortunately, the utter futility of this kind of approach has still not been recognised and acknowledged by positivistic epistemologists. Thus the negative relation between the interpreter and the author, and the text as well as the secondary literature, has remained largely unspoken.

Overview of the Seven Chapters

Chapter 1: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

In the first chapter I am seeking to identify the standard from where I will then assess the Hegelian and anti-Hegelian philosophers considered in this study. Despite the complexity of Hegel’ thought, it seems that a definite standard can be established through Hegel's meta-concept of NEGATIVITY as it appears to be the actual power that drives the dialectical process forward. By differentiating between different modes of NEGATIVITY such as abstract or simple NEGATIVITY, Hegel tries to elucidate the essence of his meta-concept which he calls ‘absolute NEGATIVITY’. My reading of Hegel, which is based on his three most important works: the Phenomenology of Spirit (1806), the Science of Logic (1812) and the

Encyclopaedia Logic (1827), shows that this term was intended by him to not only NEGATE but also to supersede all other modes of NEGATIVITY since it contains a restless, self-originating power that seeks to negate even itself. Through his dialectics of NEGATION as his method of elucidation these three core- texts show that this NEGATIVE force represents his fundamental ontological principle whose implications point far beyond the Kantian epistemological problematic.

The reason why Hegel’s dialectics of NEGATIVITY is distinctly different from a merely epistemic negation arises from his realisation that it represents not just an external contradiction between the cognising subject and its cognised object but rather an ontological self-contradiction within the subject itself since its NEGATIVE essence keeps generating ever new modes of self-contradictory historic constellations. The tragic of this ontological constitution of reality, however, is that while the subject purposively searches for a final harmony with its object, its NEGATIVITY simultaneously keeps sabotaging any positive formation of a synthesis.

Chapter 2: Ludwig Feuerbach

In the second chapter I will concentrate on Ludwig Feuerbach’s work because it represents the first independent and genuine critique of Hegel’s ontology while simultaneously reflecting the post- idealistic Zeitgeist of transition from metaphysical system building to empirical science. As the most courageous thinker among Hegel’s students of the 1830s and 40s, Feuerbach challenged the pervasive Hegelian dominance at German universities at the time by developing his own version of negativity based on Hegel’s Phenomenology and Science of Logic.

The chapter follows the three structural stages in the development of Feuerbach’s thinking in relation to Hegel’s concept of NEGATIVITY. It starts with Feuerbach’s defence of Hegel against the anti-Hegelian criticism of the 1820s, which leads to a transitional period in which he begins to formulate his own philosophy. And finally, this transition results in a complete break with Hegel’s philosophy which is marked by his major work The Essence of Christianity (1841).

In this chapter, I am describing how Feuerbach turns Hegel’s concept of Being as his most basic metaphysical point of departure into a real, i.e. non-metaphysical human being. By trying to bring Hegel’s ontological approach ‘down to earth’, Feuerbach seeks to make a transition from metaphysics to empirical reality. Having gained insight into Hegel’s ontological notions of alienation through externalisation and objectification, he then formulates his key idea of ‘projection’ as his psychological term for the negation of Hegel’s metaphysical Absolute which he interprets to be synonymous with the Christian idea of God. In this way, Feuerbach aims not to abolish religion as has often been thought but to ‘humanise’ it within his new framework of anthropology.

Chapter 3: Karl Marx

The third chapter seeks to answer the question whether Marx really grasped the essence of Hegel’s meta-concept of NEGATIVITY via his concept of the negative capacity of 'human labour’. The chapter starts with Marx’ Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts and focuses on its most important section: ‘Critique of Hegel’s Dialectic and General Philosophy’. Then the chapter highlights one of the most important places of this section which directly relates to Hegel’s NEGATIVITY:

The outstanding achievement of Hegel’s Phenomenology – the dialectic of negativity as the movement and creative principle – is, first, that Hegel grasps the self-creation of man as a process, objectification as loss of the subject, as alienation and transcendence of this alienation, and that he therefore grasps the nature of labour, and conceives objective man (true, because real man) as the result of his own labour. (EPM, XXIII)

While Hegel’s principle of alienation remained an ontological condition of the Spirit, in Marx it turns into a capitalist mode of production that needs to be overcome. Here, Marx distinguishes between two negative phenomena, ‘objectification’ and ‘alienation’ – an important distinction that Hegel could not yet make. Having gained the necessary philosophical insights from Hegel’s logic, Marx then turns his materialist critique against Hegel himself when he points out its real power, negation should not remain merely a philosophical principle but must become the weapon for negating existing reality. I will show how Marx identifies the negative capacity of the proletariat for changing the oppressive capitalist conditions. The final part of the chapter reflects Marx’ later intellectual development where he moves from the negative capacity of labour to the negative dialectic of capital.

Chapter 4: Theodor W. Adorno

This fourth chapter gives an insight into Adorno’s negative thinking which is quite unique in several ways while also sharing some common features with Hegel. Like Hegel, Adorno criticises Kant’s distinction between phenomena and noumena by arguing that the transcendental conditions of experience cannot be so distinct from each other as Kant claimed. As concepts, for example, the a priori categories of the faculty of understanding (Verstand) would be unintelligible if they would not be able to relate to something that is non-conceptual. Genuine experience is made possible by that which exceeds the grasp of traditional logic and sense perception. Adorno calls it ‘the nonidentical’ (das Nichtidentische).

The non-identical marks the difference between his materialism and Hegel's idealism. Although he shares Hegel’s ambition to work towards a speculative unity between thought and being, between subject and object, and between reason and reality, he denies that this unity can be achieved through Hegel’s phenomenological journey. Logic has always imposed identities and unities upon its objects by suppressing or simply ignoring their uniqueness, difference and diversity. Thus Adorno’s negative dialectic rejects the affirmative character of any formal logic (ND 143-61). In Hegel’s terms what this amounts to is a deep scepticism not only about historic progress through the activation of the power of absolute NEGATIVITY, but even the desirability of any unity between subject and object.

In this respect, Adorno did not see the self-corrective function of suffering that inevitably leads Hegel's spirit towards absolute knowing as insight into the necessity to reconcile itself with

nature. But Adorno still arrives at a similar conclusion as Hegel, which is the necessary condition for truth realisation: the dialectic experience of negativity through which the truth of suffering as non-identity is given its voice in order to speak for itself.

What most clearly distinguishes Adorno’s materialist philosophy from idealism, whether Kantian or Hegelian, is his insisting on the ‘priority of the object (der Vorrang des Objekts, ND 183-97). Adorno regards as idealist any philosophy that is based on identity-thinking between subject and object and thereby assigns constitutive priority to its subject.

Chapter 5: Martin Heidegger

In the fifth chapter I will present some of the main points of Heidegger's confrontation (Auseinandersetzung) with Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and Science of Logic as he first formulated it in his magnum opus, Sein und Zeit (1927), and later taught in his 1930/31 lectures on Hegel at Freiburg university. I will consider Heidegger’s interpretations of Hegel’s notions of temporality, the Concept, metaphysics, finitude and being as instances in which he misreads Hegel’s absolute NEGATIVITY as a logical ‘construction’. What is important in this discussion is to distinguish Hegel’s original intention from Heidegger’s ‘destruction’ (De-struktion) so that a less biased assessment of Hegel’s relevance for us today is not being prevented from the outset.

According to Heidegger, Hegel’s determination of time as the NEGATION OF NEGATION would amount to the most radical version of the Aristotelian conception of time, but also the most levelled down conception of temporality in Heidegger’s originary, existential-ecstatic sense. What Heidegger does not see here is how Hegel tries to show the possibility of the historical actualisation of the spirit in time by going back to the identity of the formal structure of spirit and time as the NEGATION OF NEGATION. This is one important point where Heidegger misreads Hegel.

Heidegger also discusses the essence of the Hegelian spirit as the Concept (Begriff) which he defines as ‘the very form of thinking that thinks itself: conceiving itself as grasping the non-I’. He interprets this as the Fichtean difference between the ‘I’ and the ‘non-I’. The Concept thus has the formal structure of a SELF-NEGATION. The absolute NEGATIVITY of the Concept, for Heidegger, gives ‘a logically formalised interpretation of Descartes’ cogito me cogitare rem’. In other words, the Concept

comprehends itself in self-consciousness: it is the ‘conceivedness of the self conceiving itself’, the self as it can authentically be, namely as free, a universality that is just as immediately ‘individuality’.

Heidegger’s next engagement with Hegel occurs in the 1930/31 lecture series on the first two chapters of the Phenomenology of Spirit, a reading that is centred on the problematic of finitude. This theme is deepened in the later (1942/1943) commentary on the ‘Introduction’ to the Phenomenology, the essay entitled ‘Hegel’s Concept of Experience’ published in his book Holzwege in 1950. In his lectures on the Phenomenology, Heidegger explicitly situates his critical dialogue with Hegel in the context of the post-Kantian metaphysics of the self-conscious subject. There his confrontation with Hegel is based on the cross-over between Hegel’s concept of the infinitude of spirit versus his finitude of being where Heidegger continues his deconstruction of the history of ontology.

Chapter 6: The French Tradition

While the first five chapters present Hegel and the most influential post-Hegelian thinkers separately, in chapters six and seven I can only give a brief overview of the French and Anglo-American philosophical tradition as they have tried to appropriate, reframe, or reject some of Hegel’s core- concepts.

Hegel’s influence on 20th century French philosophy developed into a major event in which many prominent French philosophers share their unconventional insights via different pathways of thought like Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Husserl and Heidegger. From 1929 onwards, the Hegel-reception in France circulates around three main concepts that Hegel formulated in his Phenomenology of Spirit: the unhappy consciousness, the master-slave dialectic, and the logic of desire. All three conceptual complexes I read as specific forms of NEGATIVITY. Jean Wahl and Jean Hyppolite focus on the ‘unhappy consciousness’, Alexandre Kojève elucidates the ‘master-slave dialectic’ while ‘the logic of desire’ forms the background of both, the unhappy consciousness and the master-slave dialectic. In the following generation, Marxist philosophers like Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Louis Althusser critically engage with Wahl, Hyppolite and Kojève by developing new directions of discourse which contain both, Hegelian as well as anti-Hegelian ideas.

Wahl, Hyppolite and Kojève focus on particular modes of NEGATIVITY in a classical idealist fashion by working with Hegel's original concepts whereas the next generation shifts the discourse from Hegel’s idealist phenomenology towards an existentialist phenomenology. This widens the inner subjective experience to include Husserl's concept of intersubjectivity. Merleau-Ponty proposes a hyperdialectic viewpoint which criticises the totalistic and synthetic trend of Hegelian dialectics while Althusser and

Derrida break with the Hegelian tradition. Derrida replaces Hegel’s concept of NEGATIVITY with his philosophy of différance which is based on Hegel’s concept of NEGATIVITY without, however, accepting Hegel’s dynamic progression and positive results.

Lacan’s work is based on Kojève’s interpretation of the ‘master-slave dialectic’ and 'the logic of desire’.

It integrates Hegel’s concept of NEGATIVITY into a psychoanalytic reading of Hegel. In response to the last group, Žižek returns to Hegel and challenges the anti-Hegelian camp in France. His influential interpretation signifies Hegel’s continued relevance even after the deconstructive readings of post- structuralism. Malabou’s recent work on the plasticity of Hegel’s concepts confirms his influence on 21st century French philosophy.

Chapter 7: The Anglo-American Tradition

Historically, we can distinguish three main phases of British and American Hegel-interpretions: the first group has been classified as British Idealism which dominated 19th century British universities up to the beginning of the 20th century, particularly by Scottish philosophers who worked at Cambridge and Oxford. I will briefly introduce some of their basic ideas as the necessary background for understanding the second group.

The second group evolved from Russell’s and Moore’s anti-Hegelian criticism which led to the formation of the analytical school of philosophy that subsequently gained prominence throughout the 20th century in the English speaking world. But since Wilfrid Sellars' challenge of Bertrand Russell's

‘myth of the given’ in 1956, analytic philosophers began to realise that they had reached an impasse which could not be resolved from within analytic philosophy itself. A new group of American philosophers, consisting of Robert Pippin, Robert Brandom, John McDowell and others, have been trying to overcome this problem by integrating certain parts of Hegel’s philosophy into their analytic programme and by reading Hegel in a Kantian, neo-Kantian, or Aristotelian way.

In the conclusion I will point out that none of these post-Hegelian or anti-Hegelian philosophers seem to have really understood the true nature of Hegel’s negativity as they have either completely rejected what they construed to be it, overlooked it, or only partially seen and applied it within their own programme. What I have realised through this thesis is that Hegel’s meta-concept of absolute negativity contains a meta-conceptual dimension which is the essence not only of the Spirit as distinct from Being, as Kojève tried to prove, but that Being as nature or substance itself is essentially negative and thus spiritual (non-material) since its essential nature is continuously self-transforming itself, not just its outer form but its inner essence as well.

The truth of a positive empirical science is limited to the rationalisation of positive sense data, a non- metaphysical analytic philosophy is limited by its rational conceptualisations of this experience, but Hegel’s speculative science tries to catch the elusive quality of the negativity of the totality itself which is necessarily metaphysical. The qualitative difference of this realisation is that it goes beyond not only of preconceptual sense-certainty but even the conceptual level since it can only be received intuitively beyond any willful ego-based construction, reconstruction or deconstruction. In this sense, Hegel’s Phenomenology is a phenomenology of the Spirit, and not of the mind; it points to a third dimension beyond the dualism of body and mind, substance and subject, nature and spirit, thesis and antithesis. This third dimension, however, is not the result of identity-thinking as Adorno assumed or the logical construction of a positive synthetic unity but an unmediated, direct experience that becomes possible only in the gap between two thought moments when the egoic mind has stopped fabricating concepts and reached total stillness in full self-awareness. Given this realisation, it is not surprising that Hegel’s last words apparently were that nobody seems to have understood him.

While the 19th century Hegel interpretations can be characterised from this perspective as the phase of losing Hegel’s spirit, the 20th century represents the general loss of spirit (the state of the unhappy consciousness) with only a few marginalised people left who still tried to resuscitate it. After the phase of scientific nihilism, we may currently witness a turning point where the truth of Hegel’s metaphysics is gradually being recognised even in the analytical tradition.

Chapter 1

Hegel and NEGATIVITY: Tarrying with the NEGATIVE

Contents

1.1 Introduction

1.2 NEGATION as internal conceptual differentiation

1.3 Dialectics as the methodology of NEGATION

1.4 Hegel’s law of absolute NEGATIVITY

1.4.1 The Absolute

1.5 NEGATIVITY in the Phenomenology of Spirit

1.5.1 NEGATIVITY as explained in the ‘Preface’

1.5.2 ‘Looking the NEGATIVE in the face and tarrying with it’

1.5.3 The phenomenological process as explained in the ‘Introduction’

1.5.4 Absolute Knowing as reconciliation

1.6 From phenomenology to ontology

1.6.1 NEGATIVITY in the Science of Logic

1.7 Chapter summary

1.1 Introduction

This thesis focuses on the meta-concept of NEGATIVITY as the essence of Hegel’s entire philosophy which has haunted German, French and Anglo-American Hegelian and anti-Hegelian philosophers for over two centuries. Hegel himself summarises the real source of the power of his own philosophy as

“The tremendous power of the NEGATIVE; it is the energy of thought, of the pure ‘I’” (PS § 32). It is not only tremendous but even ‘terrific’ (die ungeheure Macht des Negativen). Hegel approaches its essence from various angles by employing a variety of interrelated metaphysical terms such as

‘Nothing’ (das Nichts) as the logical and ontological contradiction to Being, ‘determinate NEGATION’

(bestimmte Negation) as the ‘mortar’ of dialectics, or NEGATION OF NEGATION (Negation der Negation) as the deep structure of his dialectical logic.

Surprisingly, and in contrast to Kant’s emphasis on the limitations of knowledge, Hegel’s concept of

NEGATIVITY does not bring about a negative attitude towards thinking, philosophical speculation, or political action but rather creates a host of positive implications which are still to be recognised and acknowledged. It shows that Hegel’s NEGATIVITY is not only a destructive power but also a very creative and constructive force that drives the dialectical process forward.

Having discovered this power, Hegel thought to have found the key to the workings of the human mind and applied its principles to the understanding of human history, particularly the deeper, underlying cause for the re-arising of human suffering. This shows his commitment to the aim of the Enlightenment, which is to empower the individual to think for himself in order to become the true subject of history. He saw the various forms of human suffering as manifestations of the inner force of

NEGATIVITY in the Spirit’s journey towards self-awareness and freedom.1Therefore, a deeper understanding of Hegel’s concept of NEGATIVITY is an absolutely indispensable prerequisite for an evaluation of his philosophy. It provides us with a set of conceptual tools for penetrating apparent reality down to its roots.

Hegel was convinced that if people deeply understood the 18th century Enlightenment promise as the light of reason, all the social, political and economic problems of humanity could be solved. But as long as this light is projected only onto outer objective reality, human suffering is bound to continue, as Hegel himself was able to witness. The price of the rational constitution of France at the time of the

1789-revolution was bloodshed, chaos and terror. NEGATIVITY is inherently anarchic: “Universal freedom, therefore, can produce neither a positive work nor a deed; there is left for it only negative action; it is merely the fury of destruction” (PS § 589). This NEGATIVE force is a tremendous power. By

1 For detailed studies of Negativity in the social and political spheres, see Ruda, Hegel’s (2011) and Žižek’s introduction to this book: “The Politics of Negativity”. See also Comay (2011).

highlighting its nature, Hegel reveals a depth dimension within the human mind that previous generations of philosophers had not been able to grasp.

This implies that progress on the path of truth-realisation must consist in the progressive dissolution rather than the accumulation of preconceived notions of truth. As long as the individual consciousness is still entangled in the world of appearance it is far away from its goal of knowing itself as it really is in its true nature.

This insight positively identifies the only method possible: each step along the path must go a little bit deeper by which consciousness becomes purified until only pure intuition (thought), which is free from imagination (‘picture-thinking’), remains. In other words, only the continuous NEGATION of any given structure, such as irrational fixations or dogmatic views, can lead to a deeper truth, until eventually, the unconditioned purity of the absolute ground has been reached (cf. SL, pp. 68-70).

Hegel believed that the ego can be purified and the subject-object-division overcome. But it is only in hindsight that the basic truth of his approach can be confirmed as each step from the very first one must be in harmony with the final truth. In this way, the path of Hegel’s new logic of science forms within itself a hermeneutic circle in which the last step is also the first. Thus the beginning and the end are immanent in every step throughout the subsequent transitions by which the logic of science turns into the science of logic (cf. SL, p. 71).

In the course of certain phenomenological types of experience, which for Hegel reflect at the macro- level certain historical eras, what he calls ‘Spirit’ (der gemeinsame Zeitgeist einer Epoche), individual consciousness becomes more and more self-reflective as it sharpens its conceptual tools with which it tries to understand its objects. It discovers that not only are concepts referring to the infinite difficult to formulate, but even those that describe finite phenomena always turn out to be incorrect. Thus, consciousness becomes aware of itself of how it constructs and solidifies its objects into things which it falsely takes to be reality.

If the knowing subject could become fully self-aware and transparent to itself then this would constitute the ideal starting point for a new phenomenological philosophy as a science of consciousness. Self- consciousness as self-reflective awareness, however, is a way of knowing which is methodologically different from an epistemological grasp of outer appearances because here, the knowing subject tries to adopt an internal perspective of reality. This difference is reflected in the type of concept that consciousness must generate and apply for the description and analysis of its own inner experiences.

Hegel realises that when consciousness tries to penetrate its objects, they always turn out differently to how they first appeared. In other words, there are several contradictions arising in self-consciousness with regard to the object as well as to itself. By going deeper, consciousness then also discovers that even the so-called essence cannot be positively defined. Instead, both appearance and essence are

subject to an underlying force of NEGATION. Further, and most significantly, this realisation does not just apply to the object domain but also to the knowing subject itself. Herein lies the paradox that despite having seen NEGATIVITY, consciousness can only very gradually free itself from its deeply introjected dogmatic beliefs and old habitual habit pattern of pre-judging its experiences in a formulaic manner.

Over the course of the whole Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel shows how consciousness struggles to free itself from these hindrances, which can be located between two basic polarities, dualism versus monism, which itself is a dualism through which consciousness tends to explain to itself how things are. As it turns out, neither polarity would be able to appropriately conceptualise the actual experience of consciousness as it really is. Until Kant, and after him Fichte, began to develop the idea of a subjective dialectic, metaphysical thinking was centred around substance as either a soul or a material atomistic unit. But Hegel concludes that even Fichte’s subjective idealism was falling short of a systematic account of the underlying unity between subject and object.

In the end, Hegel finds his own solution by embarking on a different path of knowing. Along this path, knowing becomes absolute not by trying to align itself to an imaginary absolute substance, but by becoming conscious of its own inner essence: a Heraclitian stream of constant transitions meandering between two polarities which keeps regenerating its own momentum through SELF-NEGATION. Hegel maintains that only by bringing consciousness in harmony with itself from the inside will it become united with its object, not the other way round. Thus the gap between subject and object is essentially the gap between consciousness and its awareness of itself.

By intuitively following the natural unfolding of the objects of consciousness in awareness back to their source, self-consciousness discovers that this flow springs forth from an unresolved tension between the past, the present and the future. Every new determination is a NEGATION of what is. As it arises it seeks to assert its individual uniqueness in the present against whatever had manifested before. Since this tension is experienced by self-consciousness as a form of suffering, it seeks to dissolve it. But every new attempt to recreate the old harmony fails because it can only provide a momentary release through a new but incomplete unity.

From each new vantage point, a new cycle of determination begins through which the flow of consciousness continues. This continuity is not just circular in endless repetition but spirals out of itself, it evolves in a certain direction which is qualitatively and quantitatively new. Hegel views its nature as goal-oriented and thus purposive because it wants to heal the gap between the past and the present and thus between the present and the future. Whenever it manages to achieve a partial and momentary unity, there is a breakdown of the old structure, which, however, cannot fully dissolve its NEGATIVITY. Instead, it is this NEGATIVE residue that carries the process forward towards the next momentary unity.

Whenever one object asserts itself against its subject as a determinate NEGATION, an imbalance or cognitive dissonance results which dissolves the momentary satisfaction that consciousness had gained

through the partial unification with its object, and this dissonance is the tension that provokes a reaction by which the process continues.

Hegel realises that what is taken to be subject and object in the Aristotelian tradition is merely the externally posited side of what is actually happening inside the mind which is nothing but a contingently arising and passing dialectical stream between the two polarities of part and whole without any positively defineable substance as essence. These two polarities are not neutral but charged with a certain NEGATIVE energy; together they constitute a magnetic field whose inner tension is carried forward from one antithesis to the next. Since consciousness experiences this inner tension as unbearable, it constantly seeks to dissolve it. In fact, Hegel identifies this need as the subject’s deepest desire – a tremendous power – which pushes the stream of consciousness upwards towards higher levels of awareness.

Every partially successful unity is interpreted as proof for the possibility of a total harmony which magnetises self-consciousness in that direction, i.e. it becomes increasingly determined to attain its goal. This may be one possible explanation why in the Phenomenology consciousness never falls back onto earlier stages of knowing. Another reason that distinguishes Hegel’s new logic from the traditional Kantian logic is that a phenomenological experience cannot be repeated since each and every moment in time is unique in its own right. Thus what may appear as a return to an earlier stage is actually a progress towards a higher vantage point. Bowman (2013, p. 255) points out that Spinoza’s vitalistic philosophy of nature (natura naturans) had inspired a new post-Newtonian speculative science that also Herder, Goethe, Schelling and others tried to conceptualise.

But if neither part nor whole, form nor its essence, can ultimately be positively defined as two distinctly separate and independently existing realities, then they can only arise in dependence on each other. The same pattern repeats itself at every level from the smallest unit to the largest system. At the ultimate level, every determinate finite appearance is mediated through an indeterminable NEGATIVE essence.

The aim of this first chapter is to shed new light on Hegel’s concept of NEGATIVITY as the key that Hegel himself discovered and freely offered to his reader in order to be able to understand the basic principle that governs the unfolding of the thought process within himself in relation to Hegel’s Phenomenology and Science of Logic. In order to be able to grasp the evolution of this concept, the reader must follow the same path that Hegel developed. As the two titles Phenomenology and Logic suggest, Hegel approaches this path not only from an external perspective but tries to show that the Spirit’s journey towards freedom is essentially the mind’s inner thought-process itself.

Apart from these two core-texts, I will also consult some of Hegel’s other sources like his early essay on the difference between Fichte’s and Schelling’s system (Differenzschrift) and The Encyclopaedia

Logic for further clarification of Hegel’s intention behind his concept of NEGATIVITY. What is important here is that the reader becomes aware that Hegel employs his concept of NEGATION in different ways

which may at times imply several dimensions simultaneously: thus the cognitive-epistemic process may refer to a holistic phenomenological experience, its hermeneutic-dialectic methodology of part versus whole, or/and may refer to an ontological absolute meaning.

1.2 NEGATION as internal conceptual differentiation

In his 'Essay on the Difference between Fichte's and Schelling’s System’, the so-called ‘Differenzschrift’ (1801), one of the shorter texts that Hegel composes in Jena prior to his

Phenomenology, he develops the idea of NEGATION as ‘internal conceptual differentiation’. With this text he shows that philosophy can only advance when there is a recognised need for a new organic philosophy that is different from Fichte’s and Schelling’s. Hegel refers to this as ‘system- differentiation’ – the ability to recognise the essential difference behind the mere difference in appearance between philosophical systems and the necessity to contextualise a system within the history of philosophy.

Here, Hegel understands differentiation (Differenzierung) as the process and result of internal reflection in which the spirit presents itself in many different forms as it organically grows out of earlier frames of reference. In this sense, the verb ‘differentiate’ (differenzieren) implies a movement within consciousness, a new development that brings out its own characteristics by means of which one can identify different stages of a larger process. A new shape of consciousness must diverge from its overall structure for it to be recognisable as such, otherwise there would neither be any change at all, nor would consciousness be able to recognise it.

As consciousness becomes aware of itself as a constantly changing process, it also wants to know where it comes from, what the original impulse, the ‘seething urge’ (Triebkraft) was through which it originated. By observing itself, consciousness begins to understand that this impulse is a powerful creative force that wants to initiate change. It asserts itself against whatever has manifested earlier. This same principle can be seen not just in a microscopic moment in individual consciousness but also during the rise of a new philosophical system and even a whole new culture. While each form expresses its uniqueness, it simultaneously generates a new momentum for the overall flow to continue. Hegel regards each determinate

NEGATION here as a channel through which the Spirit seeks to express itself (cf. Hoffmann 1997, pp. 245ff).

Analytic philosophers have shown an interest in the question of how to measure the inner cohesion among the different forms of NEGATION in Hegel – an interest that seeks to quantify and standardise the means of a procedure. If this kind of enquiry becomes all important, however, it tends to bypass the question of the purposive function of NEGATION in relation to Hegel's work as a whole.2 It also does not seem to be concerned with the cultural-historic context in which Hegel employs his dialectic of

NEGATION as a tool for changing the individual and collective consciousness of his era. An insight into these determining factors that emerge during his Jenaer period (1801-1807) seems to be a necessary prerequisite for reconstructing the beginning of his understanding of NEGATIVITY.

Soon after arriving in Jena, Hegel begins to formulate his own distinct way of conceptualising philosophy by building on Fichte’s notion of dialectics and Schelling’s notion of a comprehensive system of philosophy. Rather than determining things according to how they fit into a formal framework of relations of exclusion between predicates, Hegel seeks to go beyond Fichte’s dualistic subjectivism, for which any ‘real other’ is only a trigger (Anstoß) for consciousness to posit ‘the I’ (das Ich) against itself (das Nicht-Ich). Here, determinate NEGATION is introduced for the first time as self-positing; it contains a dynamic relationship of opposition within itself which originally produced the concept of ‘I’.

Hegel makes use of Fichte’s idea of a developmental logic and develops it further into an organically interrelated system in which repeated SELF-NEGATION does not go down to nothing but upwards towards more refined constellations which in turn require that the concepts used for their description and analysis equally be purified to match the new levels of sublation (Aufhebung).3

Through a close investigation of this process of NEGATION within consciousness, Hegel establishes an immanent perspective of a speculative metaphysics that seeks to express conceptually what previous philosophers only vaguely intuited.4 But he still needs to give an account of how opposed determinations can turn into a new and more complete unity between subject and object, or why they do not confirm the limits of knowledge that Kant had claimed. By studying the deep nature of

NEGATION, Hegel finds that a NEGATION involves a determination of finite concepts. It consists of a subtle process of internal mediation which consists of a DOUBLE-NEGATION, a NEGATION OF NEGATION, in which the second movement does not return to the previous situation as in the traditional logic, but this repetition rather sublates it onto a new level of self-awareness. Hegel realises that in a

2 See Chapter 7 of this study. 3 Hegel uses the term sublation (Aufhebung) in a threefold way: to dissolve or NEGATE, to preserve, and to lift up (PS § 113; SL, p. 107). A moment of understanding sublates itself because it involves an organic sequence which is driven forward by a desire to know. This desire is a manifestation of its inner negative essence.

4 See Adorno’s critique of identity-thinking in Chapter 4.

phenomenological process, which contains an indeterminate lawfulness as a contingent but freely unfolding process, neither content nor form undergo a repetition but that each movement is unique in time as it manifests its inner power of NEGATIVITY. Having gone to the root of this force, Hegel sets himself apart not only from his predecessors but also from his followers.

For Hegel, a true philosopher is a process thinker without the need to defend any a priori; instead, he closely studies those moments in which a change in the structural pattern of consciousness occurs. This change in the inner structure of knowing is the SELF-NEGATIOPN of Absolute NEGATIVITY which becomes Hegel’s conceptual core. Its essential function is not to perceive external reality, which is the function of the simple NEGATION of natural consciousness, but to set an internal process of differentiation in motion through which consciousness becomes self-reflexive, i.e. aware of itself. It is this new awareness of self that now constitutes reality for the subject.

1.3 Dialectics as the methodology of NEGATION

Absolute NEGATIVITY is the inherent life force of dialectics. In Hegel’s system, there is no fixed beginning or endpoint. As Hegel penetrates into the subject’s inner world of thought he does not offer a convenient solution in which all opposition is suddenly transformed. Actually, Hegel’s main focus is not on the external relations between two opposing forces but rather on the internal process of differentiation within each force itself by analysing how one category of thought turns into its other.

As one category is vanishing, it soon reappears in a new form and at a new level of consciousness. Thus even the categories themselves keep transforming themselves dialectically into new categories. With the metaphor of the flower Hegel emphasises that this process is a natural, i.e. organic inner unfolding, not a mechanistic one, which would imply a merely external, quantitative change.

For the development of the rational essence of consciousness its own resisting ‘other’ is needed. Only through this inner conflict will the deepest and purest essence be activated and find its way home to the absolute ground. There is an indeterminable lawfulness within this dialectical logic which leads onwards towards successively higher stages of consciousness. But this lawfulness can only be fully understood in hindsight. Since the opposing forces are not static but dynamic, they contain a potential which cannot be anticipated in advance. Therefore, dialectical polarities do not simply neutralise each other into a zero sum equation as in Aristotle’s logic of non-contradiction but its process keeps constructing, reconstructing and deconstructing itself at ever higher and subtler levels within the microcosm of consciousness as well as in the macrocosm of the outer world. Hegel illustrates this process of transformation with the metaphor of the father-son relationship:

The father is the other of son, and son the other of father, and each only is as this other of the other of the other; and at the same time, the one determination only is in relation to the other; their being is a single substance. The father also has an existence of his own apart from the son-relationship; but then he is not father but simply man; just as above and below, right and left; are each also a reflection-into-self and are something apart from their relationship, but then only places in general. Opposites, therefore, contain contradiction in so far as they are in the same respect negatively related to one another and are indifferent to one another. (SL, p. 441)

A careful reading of Hegel will clearly reveal his actual intention: to unveil the process of self- contradiction within consciousness and in society as well. In contrast to the lifeless, static, and linear structure of Aristotelian logic, Hegel’s concepts become more and more alive, dynamic, and interrelated as their NEGATIVITY unfolds. There is an inner tension within the subject that manifests in the slightest self-difference through which being gradually turns into its own other by which it begins to move not backwards, but forwards in the direction of its completion. The depth and complexity of this organic process becomes clearer when the subject begins to see that not only are its finite determinations contradictory, but that they keep arising out of and passing away into their existential and ontological ground. Each contains its own other within itself because each is essentially self-contradictory.

Therefore, the key principle of dialectics lies within the subject; it is its own NEGATIVITY whose essence is void.

Consequently, the rational subject cannot follow a preset method. A scientific methodology is based on external rules or a priori principles which already predetermine and direct the cognitive process and thereby turn it into a standardised technique which tends to prevent the possibility of a spontaneous unfoldment of self-awareness by replacing it with an automatic algorithm. One reason for Hegel to reject Kant’s epistemology is Kant’s acceptance of a priori rules. In the first chapter of his Science of Logic, Hegel insists that the new science must begin with a presuppositionless beginning, a total and unconditional self-acceptance, because only from such a vantage point could truth ever be realised. The purpose of this principle is to explore the dialectical process from within itself until the darkness within is completely dispelled (cf. Beiser 2005 p. 160).

As the inherent movement of consciousness, dialectics is a contingent process that unfolds in time. It is neither based on an arbitrary point of departure, nor does it depend on any ready-made methodology that imposes itself onto its content. Formal logic, on the other hand, is tautological. It works in accordance with a priori rules in which the DOUBLE-NEGATION always ends in a zero balance (~~P =

P). Hegel’s NEGATIVE dialectics in contrast is progressive and moves onwards to ever higher and more sophisticated stages of self-consciousness and freedom.

During the dialectical process, the self-reflective reader tries to understand a concept from within itself by unravelling its inner complexity. As its self-contradictory deep structure is brought to the surface, the transitional nature of the mind itself becomes apparent as the infinite creative ground that keeps

producing and reproducing ever new constellations of NEGATION. The shift beyond the traditional positive ontology of being (which Heidegger still tried to find, see chapter five) occurs when Hegel demonstrates that even the ontological Absolute itself contains its own NEGATIVE life force and is subject to the same law of Absolute NEGATIVITY. For the development of self-awareness, its own resisting ‘other’ is needed which appears in the form of a finite determination. Only through this inner conflict does its NEGATIVE essence become purified.

This often misunderstood self-generating logic will thus only in hindsight become clear. In its formlessness, the category of NEGATIVITY is itself an infinite concept as it always points back to its insubstantial infinite ontological ground of the Absolute from where all forms spring forth and to which they must return.

An analytic philosophical approach to Hegel’s NEGATIVITY is bound to involve a range of conceptual violations (see Chapter 7). For example, it will only recognise external objects in space and cannot self- reflect with regard to the limitation and bias of its own cognitive process. It is solely focused on external manifestations of two incompatible positions and thus misses the underlying process of mutual conditioning as well as their common existential ground. It ignores the qualitative dimension of time and the ontological dimension of the hermeneutic part-whole dynamic within the self-observing mind.

The natural sciences have reduced Aristotle’s logic to a lifeless, static, and formal structure for consistent presentations of their methodology and epistemology. It has imposed an ‘objective’ procedure as the one universal standard of reason onto the human sciences. Hegel rejects such reductionism and top-down imposition and instead develops an appreciation of the mind’s own self- generating bottom-up dynamic whose conceptual structure becomes more and more interrelated as its

NEGATIVITY unfolds. There is an inner tension within the subject that determines its essential quality.

Thus even the most NEGATIVE state must be known fully before it turns into its own antithesis. In this way, the deeper, contracted layers of tension open up and produce new horizons of self-understanding.

Hegel regards the dialectic of SELF-NEGATION that he develops in his Phenomenology and later systematises in his Science of Logic and the Encyclopaedia as the essence of his whole philosophy. He provides the most extensive, general account of his dialectical method in Part I of the Encyclopaedia. The form or presentation of logic, he says, has three sides or moments (EPS I § 79). These sides are not parts of logic, but, rather, moments of “every logical concept”, as well as “of everything true in general” (EPS I Remark to § 79). He regards it not as a means to test logical propositions but rather in the Socratic sense of thinking something through in order to expose its hidden assumptions which usually turn out to be self-contradictory.

The first moment is the moment of fixity, in which concepts or forms have a seemingly stable definition or determination (EPS I § 80). The second moment is the dialectical (PS §§ 79, 81) or negatively rational (EPS I § 79) moment which expresses what remained hidden in the first moment: instability. In this moment, the determination that was fixed in the first moment passes into its opposite. Hegel describes this process as a process of “self-sublation” (EPS I § 81). The third moment is the speculative (EPS I §§ 79, 82) moment which grasps

whatever it sees as the unity of the opposition between the first two determinations. It is the positive result of the dissolution or transition of those determinations (EPS I § 82 and Remark to § 82).

Although the speculative moment NEGATES the contradiction, it leads to a specific resulting process. There is some aspect that was ignored in its one-sidedness that creates the necessity to repeat it with a new determination. The speculative moment has a definition, determination or content because it grows out of and unifies the particular characters of those earlier determinations, or is a unity of distinct determinations (EPS I § 82). As he also puts it, the result is conceived as it is in truth, namely, as a determinate NEGATION through which a new form has immediately arisen (EPS I § 79).

His dialectics is driven by the immanent nature of its own content (SL, p. 54). As he puts it, dialectics is “the principle through which alone immanent coherence and necessity enter into the content of science” (EPS I Remark to § 81).

1.4 Hegel’s law of absolute NEGATIVITY

The methodological and epistemological aim of Hegel’s Absolute NEGATIVITY is to transform the traditional categories of logic as forms of finite cognition into moments of the overall process of

NEGATION and to systematise the inner dynamic of its logic through this principle. He himself sees this task as a reconceptualisation of Kant’s transcendental procedure. The problem his new philosophy faces is that it can neither borrow its method from a subordinate science like mathematics nor base its arguments on intuition or common sense. Instead, “it can be only the nature of the content itself which spontaneously develops itself in a scientific method of knowing since it is at the same time the reflection of the content itself which first posits and generates its determinate character” (SL, p. 27).

In the Preface to the first edition of his Science of Logic, Hegel explains the reason behind his idealistic project. ‘The Understanding’ in Kant determined its content as a timeless fact, but Hegel points out that reason is essentially dynamic, i.e. NEGATIVE since its nature is to move beyond the finite determinations of the parts and thereby generate a concept of the universal whole through which it only then becomes able to comprehend the particular parts therein. The NEGATIVE, therefore, constitutes the essential quality of both, dialectical Reason and the Understanding as both help to shape the inner development of the concept whose essence must consequently also be NEGATIVE. The repeated dialectical movement between part and whole itself constitutes Hegel’s method and content of knowing. Its purity is ensured and knowledge becomes systematic when it is free from the arbitrariness of concrete immediacy. Thus the cognition of finite determinations as the ‘self-external aspect’ of the concept to be developed is only the first step in the generation of such knowledge.

For the kind of knowledge that Hegel seeks, finite determinations are merely momentary manifestations of positivity within the overall process of NEGATION. Its inner lawfulness itself, therefore, must become the primary focus of a new speculative science. In order to be able to approximate this lawfulness, the

inner dynamic of consciousness must be known as it struggles to develop a concept of truth through which it frees itself from the age-old obsession with an imaginary superhuman substance. The development of such a concept would offer a scientific path for the generation of a new kind of knowledge that distinguishes itself from the traditional, abstract categories of logic.

Hegel discovers that all finite determinations are essentially NEGATIVE and relational in character as they can only assert their existence in juxtaposition to each other. For him, the difference between finite determinations and the infinite indeterminacy of the Absolute is merely one of reference: while all finite determinations define each other through their inter-relationships, the Absolute is defined through its

NEGATIVE relation to all finite determinations as well as through its NEGATIVE relation to itself as the beginningless beginning. As the logic of Absolute NEGATIVITY begins to unfold, it generates a dynamic which repeatedly transforms immediate affirmations into more determinate affirmations (cf. Bowman 2013, p. 48). A deeper understanding of this process is the key to Hegel’s logical categories.

What distinguishes Absolute NEGATIVITY from a simple NEGATION is that it always involves a structural transformation of its constitutent elements through which a qualitatively and quantitatively new whole is being constituted. Hegel conceptualises this transformation as sublation (Aufhebung). There is always a new remainder in the dialectical process that forms the proximate condition for the next level. When this constitutive difference becomes a positive moment, it creates a supportive condition for the next moment to arise which again seeks to sublate this positivity in order to progress further towards the ultimate union between subject and object.

By making this inner dynamic within the cognising subject explicit, Kant’s notion of individual autonomy, as the ideal of Enlightenment in terms of the freedom of self-determination, is now being specified in process terms. However, Hegel emphasises that only to the degree that NEGATIVITY becomes stronger than the positive adherance to the status quo can the process of self-transformation of consciousness even begin to move in the direction of this ideal.

Being caught in its individual biological immediacy of simply ‘being’, the Idea remains immanent and undifferentiated, i.e. unaware of itself, but soon, in the second stage, it becomes more conscious and deliberate so that the Idea can now be formulated as a personal goal which is perceived to be true and good. But it is only in the third stage that the individual spirit becomes able to cognise the Idea fully as its truth that is in and for itself in which action becomes the spontaneous and congruent outflow of absolutely knowing itself.

Once the process of NEGATION is activated, it generates an increasing momentum by which all rigid determinations sooner or later dissolve. It is at this point that NEGATIVITY is seen by consciousness to

NEGATE itself. This is the heart of Hegel’s whole philosophy. From this perspective it becomes clear how Hegel was able to systematise his philosophical system into a path towards freedom.

What Hegel seeks to awaken in his reader as a rational human subject is the realisation that the biological life process within a human being from the state of preconceptual indeterminateness contains a potential to become fully self-aware through which the individual becomes fully human. Through his work, Hegel has laid out a path along which this freedom can be attained. But it is up to each reader to activate the power of NEGATIVITY within his own consciousness.

Hegel’s philosophy is an introspective and organic philosophy in the sense that it reveals the unfolding of reason within the subject which consists of successive SELF-NEGATION. In other words, Hegel’s

NEGATIVITY progresses moves from a phenomenological towards an ontological NEGATIVITY. Starting from Spinoza’s dictum that ‘all determination is NEGATION’, Hegel realises that its deeper meaning concerns the ontological lack, insufficiency, or unsatisfactoriness of any given positivity. In this respect,

NEGATION fulfills two functions: it describes the evolution of reason within consciousness and simultaneously serves as his methodological tool with which Hegel cuts deeper and deeper into the inner essence of positivity. What he finds there is that contrary to traditional logic, positivity is never self-identical. What appears as self-identical at the surface is actually not identical within itself. In other words, being dependent on sense-perception, empirical thought is misled to believe in the apparent truth of the immediately given. A deep understanding of NEGATION reveals, however, that any finite determination embodies not only positivity, but that this positivity actually consists of an infinite process of self-mediation whose essence Hegel unmasks as Absolute NEGATIVITY.

The interesting thing about NEGATION in Hegel’s sense is that when it becomes speculative, it generates a creative process that NEGATES as much as it posits, and it posits as much as it NEGATES. If this

NEGATIVE process is allowed to freely unfold in consciousness, it will not only reveal the limitations of empirical reality but even NEGATES itself so that even its own essence is seen as it really is, namely

NEGATIVE. It takes courage to fully recognise the radicality of this unfoldment and to trust that this process will dissolve itself until self-knowledge becomes fully congruent with the absolute Idea.

Contrary to empirical knowledge which is focused on its object domain, Hegel’s absolute knowing reflects the mind’s internal reflection. Speculative NEGATION is an ongoing process of self- confrontation within the subject in which inconsistencies, differences and contradictions are successively being sublated. The process of NEGATION thus moves from the external NEGATION of surface appearances to gradually deeper NEGATION until its own inner essence is seen as it is; in other words, it is a process of SELF-NEGATION of the mind by the mind. As finite realities are being NEGATED, they become otherwise by which their infinite deep structure reveals itself as empty of any positive substance. For Hegel, the infinite (Kant’s thing in itself) cannot be found apart from and beyond the finite but only within the finite itself. Accordingly, Hegel says that “each in-itself is opposite to itself”. Applied to Hegel’s logic as a whole, it thus represents not only itself but simultaneously its opposite as well; it fully comes to realise itself by successively NEGATING itself.

The term ‘infinite restlessness’, the unsatisfactory nature of reality, perfectly describes not only its constantly changing external appearances but even its inner essence. Hegel’s term for this truth is

‘Absolute NEGATIVITY’. Only through such a radical concept can the universal pervasiveness of restlessness be appropriately grasped. It implies that there is neither a definable beginning nor a definable end. This means that the finite phenomenal world has no stable foundation, which in turn leads to the inevitable conclusion that any worldly project, including Hegel’s own philosophical system, must have an open end.

From this vantage point it becomes self-evident that only a philosophy of NEGATIVITY would be able to conceptualise this restlessness as it springs forth from the central vortex of the inner dialectic of the mind itself. Restlessness is not only an external condition of human existence but inherent in the cognitive process itself. Ultimately, this restlessness is itself a manifestation of the absolute ground of being. Any philosophy that is not afraid to become fully self-reflexive will have to acknowledge that there ultimately cannot be any closed system of knowledge. The power of NEGATIVITY makes all determinations tremble. So long as the philosophical discourse avoids the discourse of NEGATIVITY it will miss the deeper significance of Hegel’s work. As the semantics of discourse sublates each new signification into an ‘other’, it constantly creates and dissolves its own outer and inner structures until finally even conceptual thought transcends itself into pure knowing. The radicality of Hegel’s speculative science is that it does not suddenly stop half-way when consciousness begins to sense where it leads, namely the total dissolution of all fixations and rigidities. What is most surprising perhaps is that this total dissolution as the realisation of Absolute NEGATIVITY is simultaneously its absolute positivity in the sense that it creates a dynamic unity of all contradictions, what Hegel calls the ‘identity in difference’.

Along this path, all isolated categories of logic (Kant’s antinomies) and their finite cognitive contents are gradually being transformed into momentary representations of self. The main problem of a formal logic is that it only deals with abstract, empirical NEGATIVITY; thus it misses the internal NEGATIVITY of its own concepts. In other words, its purposive function is to set up abstract dualisms whereas the purposive function of Hegel’s new logic is to dissolve all dualisms. This becomes clear when we understand Hegel’s intention which is that all his concepts must from the outset become self-reflective, i.e. NEGATIVE.

Within the substream of consciousness there are constant transitions taking place. Hegel’s NEGATION

OF NEGATION addresses this deep level of the mind in order to make it fully conscious. Therefore, far from being a blind mechanical NEGATION of the past, absolute NEGATION is the self-conscious form of self-mediation in the present that imbues its logic as a whole with a creative life pulse.

The process of self-reflection is grounded in absolute NEGATIVITY. The ground is the unconditioned condition in which identity and difference are united. Therefore, it is distinct from everything that is

grounded in it. While the identity of something is determined and conditioned by its difference from otherness, both gain their meaning only through the total ground. The law of the ground is the absolute principle, from where every other law of thought is derived. When the being becomes self-conscious it starts to think for itself and thereby begins to generate its own NEGATIVITY, which repeatedly creates and dissolves ever new self-related differences. This process always leads from a naive, illusory state of blind identification with external appearances towards a self-penetrating kind of knowing.

What makes Hegel’s speculative logic unique is its ability to self-reflect about the actual nature of both, objective and subjective reality (Substance and Subject) and to recognise their otherwise inaccessible deep structure. Hegel himself applies this approach to his critique of Leibniz’ and Spinoza’s substance monism, as well as to Kant’s transcendental idealism.

Hegel discovers that ‘the single substance’ as the positive Absolute contains a NEGATIVE potential that under certain conditions could generate its own self-actualising process via the contradiction between finite and infinite determinations. In order to overcome the aporia that arises out of a positivistic, i.e. static monism, Hegel develops the idea of a NEGATIVITY in the Absolute, or rather a NEGATIVE Absolute, whose formless, unconditioned ground is the field of pure potentiality.

Towards the end of his Science of Logic, Hegel envisions the process of the genesis of beings as the transition from the field of pure potentiality to the field of actuality, as follows: As all determinations are born from the absolute ground of being, they emerge through the ground’s essential NEGATIVITY, which itself is groundless, while the ground itself withdraws back into itself and thereby remains unconditioned. As its determinations become externalised they manifest as distinct forms and in their process of conditioning they begin to accumulate determined content. In their existential immediacy they appear to themselves and each other as a multiplicity without unity and begin to mix non-essentials with essentials. But this immediacy is already the first stage of reflection and gradually leads towards the process of becoming. In this way, Hegel (SL, pp. 474-478) conceives the genesis of being from an optimistic perspective, which later 19th century thinkers like Nietzsche re-evaluate in pessimistic terms as ‘the birth of tragedy’.

What remains most important, however, for understanding the ontological nature of reality in Hegel’s language, is that it is the Absolute NEGATIVITY itself, whether it is being evaluated positively or negatively, that offers a new path of understanding in which substance (objective reality) and subject (subjective reality) exist in an ontologically interdependent and dynamic world that is fully alive. At the turn from the 18th to the 19th century, this is a radically new insight into the deep nature of the universe consisting of its two sides of subjectivity and objectivity that overcomes both, the inherent paradox within Leibniz’ and Spinoza’s monism as well as the hitherto unresolved antinomies in Kant’s system.

Thus Absolute NEGATIVITY becomes Hegel’s most constructive contribution to metaphysics whose full implications are still awaiting their investigation. One reason for its continued relevance for us today is its ability to prove the utter inadequacy of any fixed philosophical or political view that misuses Hegel’s approach to justify any given state of affairs, the status quo. Absolute NEGATIVITY begins as a preconceptual process of which the subject gradually becomes aware through repeated self- confrontation in consciousness as a result of which any rigid dogmatism is successively being exposed as inadequate and unjustified.

Having identified the law of NEGATIVITY as the ultimate liberating force (Freiheit), Hegel elucidates the whole process towards its realisation. To put it simply, it is the NEGATION of any given. Hegel believes that since each human being carries this force within itself that it can achieve a stage of self- consciousness which is in and for itself as a self-liberation from an immediate, unconscious state of existence. Subjectivity, therefore, is essentially nothing but NEGATIVITY because it is the driving force within consciousness that empowers the subject’s movements. Since this force resides within consciousness, and not outside of it, Hegel’s speculative philosophy is essentially a science of the subject.

Here, Kant’s unity of apperc’ption can be seen as Hegel’s proximate point of departure from where he reformulates Kant’s subjectivity. Hegel finds that Kant was not radical enough to recognise the real potential of the transcendental unity of apperception. Hegel then dedicates his whole life to the elucidation of the hitherto unrecognised possibility of self-transformation within those very moments of apperception when the NEGATIVE force becomes activated.

Hegel’s logic of subjectivity aims to be a logic of pure NEGATIVITY. Its purity requires that the phenomenological content details of consciousness are not mixed up with consciousness as their ontological ground because consciousness itself cannot be adequately represented by any determinate content detail as such. Since consciousness is always consciousness of something, it becomes active only through a determinate NEGATION which itself is not identified with its content.

However, for Hegel it is clear that in real life, while each individual subjectivity is a particular expression of this law of NEGATIVITY, the individual nevertheless needs other individuals for its transition into freedom. By repeatedly positing itself against an ‘other’, both undergo a process of mutual NEGATION. This intersubjective dimension is highlighted in the master-slave dialectic of the Phenomenology.

In the following section, I will focus on the way Hegel conceives the ‘Absolute’ from the perspective of NEGATIVITY.

1.4.1 The Absolute

An important technical term that would need to be grasped for an understanding of Hegel’s concept of

NEGATIVITY is what he calls ‘the Absolute’. In the Phenomenology, he refers to it only NEGATIVELY in what it is not. In a sarcastic tone he says that “he Absolute is the night in which, as the saying goes, all cows are black” (PS § 16). What Hegel means by this is that the Absolute for him is not abstract universality in which all is naively assumed to be one and the same (A = A), an inert simplicity, a universal idea in non-actual form, the undoing of all determinate entities, or the hurling of them into the abyss of vacuity without further development or any justification, a hollow formalism. Rather, the true nature of the Absolute must be recognised and clearly cognised as absolutely actual. Here, Hegel takes the opportunity to challenge all habits of thought which impede philosophical cognition and only lead to boredom and indifference.

Towards the end of the ‘Doctrine of Essence’ (SL, pp. 530 f), he contrasts his NEGATIVE understanding of the Absolute with Spinoza’s, Leibniz’, Kant’s and Schelling’s ideas of the Absolute as they defined their Archimedean point of reference in positive terms. Hegel, however, points out that even, and particularly, the Absolute must be defined in NEGATIVE terms as the only way to bridge the ‘abyss’between subject and object.

Although he admits that even his notion of the Absolute is devoid of any empirical content since form has sublated itself and made itself into the empty difference of the outer and inner, but the task of philosophy is to absolutely know the Absolute where each part is absolutely identical with the whole. This task, he believes is nevertheless attainable since the Absolute is not separate from the subject but identical with it. The Phenomenology ends with the stage of absolute knowing which Hegel describes as absolutely knowing oneself in the sense of the Spirit being totally transparent and simultaneously certain that this is really the case.

This grand aphorism points at the culmination point of Hegel’s philosophy. The Idea itself becomes absolute when it reaches the end of the dialectical process where the ignorance embedded in the beginning of the stage of ‘pure being’ is healed. The driving force behind this phenomenological journey of becoming fully self-aware and self-identical with the Absolute is the NEGATIVITY.

Another feature of the Absolute is its ‘infinity’, which remains immanent within finitude. Since nothing can exist outside the Absolute, finite beings exist not apart from but within the infinite itself. In his first work, The Difference between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy (1801), Hegel goes beyond Schelling when he writes: “The Absolute is not just subject-object identity but the identity of subject-object identity as well as its non-identity” (Hegel 1977, p. 156). With this definition, Hegel points towards a much deeper truth, which is the Absolute’s inherent NEGATIVITY. Consequently, Hegel articulates the formula: the subjective and the objective are just different manifestations of the Absolute.

The result he arrives at then becomes his dictum: ‘the Absolute is not only identity, but also the identity of identity as well as of non-identity’.

The process of differentiation always arises from the Absolute and seeks to return to it at a higher level of consciousness. Thus the Absolute keeps reabsorbing all determinations back into itself. In this organic process all apparent opposites become unified. The history of thought shows that there is a dialectical movement not only between opposites but even within each part that constantly seeks to manifest itself until it becomes fully identical with the whole. Neither the parts nor the whole are ever static but are constantly engaged in a dynamic process of self-differentiation that repeatedly meanders from momentary unity to difference and from difference to another momentary unity. These unities are only apparent, momentary, and illusory because their deep structure is different. As long as the dialectic tension between appearance and essence remains so long will the NEGATIVE dynamic within create ever new determinations.

Therefore, the absolute Idea realises itself not only in outer objectivity but also within its inner subjectivity. Neither Spinoza nor Kant fully understood the NEGATIVE power inherent in the subject. Spinoza saw the subjective as just one attribute of the single universal substance which Hegel now turns around when he says that ‘it is the subject through which the Absolute gains its highest development’.

In the Preface, Hegel makes the comment that the Absolute is not only substance (the realm of necessity) but also subject (the realm of freedom): “In my view, which can be justified only by the exposition of the system itself, everything turns on grasping and expressing the True, not only as Substance, but equally as Subject” (PS § 17). This point signifies that truth is not something (substance) ‘out there’ to be appropriated by the subject, but that it is essentially the subject’s activity itself that produces truth. Hegel writes: “This Substance is, as Subject, pure, simple negativity” (PS § 18).

Hegel emphasises the subjective side of the Absolute which contains the process of its own actualisation. And this process is propelled forward by the subject’s inherent power of NEGATIVITY. Its dynamic impulse arises from within the subject-aspect of the Absolute. It contains a NEGATIVE capability that always NEGATES any temporary and specific positivity of the substance.

Hegel’s NEGATIVE ontology acknowledges the fact that the subject’s essential nature is best described as NEGATION. As long as the process of self-actualisation remains incomplete, some aspects or parts of the subject are still in conflict with each other and the whole, which is its idea. In contrast to the idea of an eternal substance that always remains identical with itself (A = A), the ontology of the subject has to undergo a process of finding its true self. Thus the initially blind, unconscious identification with the false self is not true identity (A ≠ A). For this, it is unavoidable that the subject becomes fully self- conscious. This is the goal and absolute standard for all kinds of subjective experiences. The possibility of identity can only be fulfilled by undergoing a process of purification until all forms of alienation have been overcome.

It is important to realise the actual purpose of Hegel’s phenomenological journey towards absolute knowing. Instead of accumulating a mass of positive empirical knowledge about the external world, which may be completely irrelevant for the freeing of the Spirit, Hegel’s enterprise pursues only one goal: it is the Spirit’s path towards fully realising itself by repeatedly overcoming its own limitations.

The driving force that propels this process forward is its own inner nature which is NEGATIVE. As the subject begins to sense its true nature, it begins to develop a concept of what it means to be free and then feels more and more compelled to actualise it in complete self-awareness. Until this point is reached, the subject’s knowing remains alienated by certain negative factors that distort its perception of reality. Reality always turns out to be an absolute otherness, which continuously eludes the subject’s conceptual horizon.

In the next section I will explore Hegel’s concept of NEGATIVITY through a close reading of the Phenomenology.

1.5 NEGATIVITY in the Phenomenology of Spirit

There is no independent entity in Hegel’s whole system. Thus a phenomenological path is just one direction from where the concept of NEGATIVITY can be approached. Epistemologically, NEGATIVITY is the pathway of doubt which considers the gap and disparity between subject and object in the experience of consciousness. Methodologically, NEGATIVITY is the hermeneutic-dialectic process of becoming due to the internal contradiction between being and nothing, while ontologically,

NEGATIVITY is an externalising process of absolute being. In the following five sections I will address the concept of NEGATIVITY from the phenomenological perspective as Hegel develops it in his Phenomenology of Spirit.

1.5.1 NEGATIVITY as explained in the ‘Preface’

The Preface by itself is considered one of Hegel’s major works and a major text in the history of philosophy because in it he sets out the core of his philosophical method and what distinguishes it from that of any previous philosophy, especially that of his predecessors Kant, Fichte, and Schelling.

Hegel’s approach consists of actually examining consciousness’ experience of both itself and of its objects and eliciting the contradictions and dynamic movement that come to light in looking at this experience. Hegel uses the expression “pure observation” (reines Zusehen) to describe this method. If consciousness just pays attention to what is actually present in itself and its relation to its objects, it will see that what looks like a stable and fixed form dissolves into a dialectical movement. Thus philosophy,

according to Hegel, cannot just formulate logical propositions based on deductive reasoning. Rather, it must look at actual consciousness, as it really works.

On closer examination, each shape of consciousness transforms itself into a later, more comprehensive and integrated structure. Hegel’s argument in favour of a phenomenological approach seems to him the most congruent method for elucidating his new understanding of the logic of NEGATION. This is most clearly expressed in the following paragraphs (PS §§ 2, 17, 18, 32, 37, 38, 39, 40, 42 and 59) which I am paraphrasing here:

(PS § 2): Conventional opinion gets fixated on the antithesis of truth and falsity and thus either accepts or rejects it. It does not understand the differences between philosophical systems historically as the progressive unfolding of truth. Hegel illustrates this with a metaphor from nature: As the bud disappears in the bursting forth of the blossom and the fruit supplants the blossom, they are not just mutually incompatible but rather their fluid nature makes them moments of an organic unity. The earlier forms are necessary preconditions for the later ones. This mutual necessity constitutes the life of the whole.

(PS §§ 17 and 18): The True is not only substance but equally subject. Substance is alive which is in truth subject in the sense that it is the movement of positing itself which consists of the mediation of

‘self-othering with itself’. This substance is, as subject, pure, simple NEGATIVITY which sets up the process of self-opposition as bifurcation and differentiation. This reflection in otherness within itself – not as an original and immediate unity as such – is the true. It is the process of its own becoming, the circle that presupposes its end as its goal while having its end also as its beginning; only by being worked through is it actual.

(PS §§ 32 and 33): To break an idea up into its original elements is to return to its self-moving moments. The activity of the dissolution is the power and the work of the Understanding, the most astonishing power; it is the tremendous power of the NEGATIVE; it is the energy of thought, of the pure I as it fearlessly looks the NEGATIVE in the face, and tarrying with it. This, the latent power of the subject, becomes actualised through self-determining its existence whereby it supersedes mere abstract, intuitive immediacy. This mediation is not outside of it but is this subjective process itself. Thoughts become fluid when the subject recognises itself as this inner immediacy, not as a fixed self, but as a process. Through this reframing of the I, thoughts are being purified (freed from dogmatic beliefs) and become self-moving notions as spiritual essences.

(PS § 37): The disparity which exists in consciousness between the I and its object as substance is the

NEGATIVE. This is not only their common defect but it is this defect what moves them. The NEGATIVE that some of the ancient philosophers rightly conceived as the moving principle is the self. Although the NEGATIVE appears first as a disparity between the I and its object, it is just as much the disparity of

the substance with itself. What seems to happen outside of it is really its own doing. Thus substance reveals itself to be essentially subject. When it has shown this completely, spirit has made its existence identical with its essence. It has itself for its object just as it is and the separation of knowing and truth is overcome. The study of this circular movement is Hegel’s speculative logic.

(PS § 38): Now the movement from the apparent to the true shape of the spirit in consciousness seems to be merely NEGATIVE or false. So why not start with the positive straight away? The answer to this requires that we examine the negative itself which traditional mathematical science has not allowed.

(PS § 39): True and false belong to those determinate notions which are held to be inert and wholly separate essences, each standing fixed and isolated from the other, with which it has nothing in common. But truth is not a minted coin that can be given and pocketed ready-made. One can, of course, know something falsely which means that there is a disparity between knowledge and its substance. But this very disparity is the process of distinguishing in general, which is an essential moment in knowing. But truth itself is never totally separable from disparity like dross from pure metal, not even like the tool which remains separate from the finished vessel. Disparity, as the NEGATIVE, is itself still directly present in the True as such. Yet, we cannot say that the false is a component part of it. To say that in every falsehood there is a grain of truth is to treat the two like oil and water which are only externally combined like subject and object. In their unity their otherness is not meant to be what their expression says they are.

(PS § 40 and 42): Dogmatism as a way of thinking is nothing else but the opinion that the true consists in a proposition as factual, self-evident, quantitative knowledge which can be immediately known. But this is a different kind of truth from the nature of philosophical truths. Philosophical cognition includes both, existence and essence and seeks to unite them as two distinct processes. The inner coming to be or genesis of substance is an unbroken transition into outer existence, and conversely, the genesis of existence is how it is by itself taken back into essence. This twofold rhythmic movement, by dissolving itself, constitutes the genesis of the whole.

(PS § 59): In speculative thinking, the NEGATIVE not only leads to a new positive content beyond itself but is the positive content itself, as a movement, as the determination of the content, and as the whole of this process. The result is itself a determinate NEGATION which has a positive content of its own. The most radical and revolutionary idea in Preface is ‘tarrying with the NEGATIVE’.

1.5.2 ‘Looking the NEGATIVE in the face and tarrying with it’

In the Preface, which Hegel wrote after the completion of the Phenomenology in order to give an overview of his whole system, he highlights the necessary hermeneutic attitude that a reader must adopt:

It is this power, not as something positive, which closes its eyes to the negative, as when we say of something that it is nothing or is false, and then, having done with it, turn away and pass on to something else; on the contrary, Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face and tarrying with it. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being. This power is identical with what weearlier called the Subject, which by giving determinateness an existence in its own element supersedes abstract immediacy... whose mediation is not outside of it but which is this mediation itself. (PS § 32)

Here, Hegel points directly to thepower of NEGATIVITY that the spirit must look in the face and tarry with. This is the task of the serious reader who must convert it into being, i.e. embody it. To the degree that he has actualised it in himself will he understand that it is this NEGATIVITY that constitutes the essence of Hegel’s method. It drives the whole dialectical reading process forward towards increasingly deeper levels of self-understanding. Hegel was convinced that so long as philosophy projects its understanding of reality only onto outer empirical sense-objects it would not be able to see the hidden

NEGATIVITY that equally inheres in its concepts. As Hegel is searching for the roots of this problem he tries to establish a pure science whose notion will guide and elucidate the path to conceptual non- violence.

Given the subject’s NEGATIVE self-structure which it experiences as a form of suffering in the very moment it becomes aware of it, it begins to question its existing thinking pattern. Here, Hegel relocates thecentre of power from mythological and religious hypostasations of the absolute into the self- conscious individual subject. In other words, the moment of grasping whatever appears as objective ‘truth’ must become a self-conscious subjective act, which provides both, the method of enquiry as well as its content.

In the Science of Logic (p. 68), Hegel says that to become a science of subjectivity, the inner structure of this subjective act of cognition must become the content of self-analysis. But since the nature of cognition cannot be clarified prior to its science, if it wants to be scientific, only a strictly logical exposition would be convincing, which for Hegel means that it is in harmony with the way things are and not mixed up with personal preferences and prejudices. Given this ideal, the necessary condition for theexposition of a presuppositionless beginning must be that its thought process freely unfolds and be motivated by nothing but the search for truth. Hegel uses theexpression ‘in and for itself’ to define the only necessary condition of purity in knowing as the ultimate truth of consciousness. It implies that its notional shapes (Begriffe) undergo a systematic process of purification during which all the old, encrusted, and irrational layers of consciousness give way to reason.

In other words, progress on the path of conceptual freedom must consist in the progressive sublation of all preconceived notions of truth. As long as consciousness is still entangled in the world of appearances, and busy defending traditional dogmas, it keeps moving in the wrong direction.

What this requires is a consistent phenomenological attitude. The reason for this is that it is only from within itself, i.e. without adding anything from outside the mind’s inner world that its true nature can be seen. But it is only in hindsight that this path can be verified as the last step constitutes the beginning of the science of philosophy.

In the Phenomenology, Hegel shows his uncompromising resolve (Entschluss) in the spirit of the French Revolution to free thinking from all unnecessary burdens. But instead of being just a one-off revolt that only leaves chaos behind, the path to real freedom must be based on a long-term commitment to a slow and gradual progress. Far from being a youthful outburst, a mere shot in the dark, Hegel is keen to demonstrate that his approach is grounded in a systematic methodology that shows how its inner

NEGATIVITY leads to ever higher stages of self-consciousness. This, however, becomes clear only if the reader does not just study Hegel out of an academic interest but freely re-experiences its truth in and for himself. In the next section I will describe the NEGATIVE process as Hegel conceived it in the Introduction to his Phenomenology from the initial stage of sense-certainty to the final stage of Absolute Knowing.

1.5.3 The phenomenological process as explained in the ‘Introduction’

The Introduction starts with the Cartesian and Kantian problem of what constitutes cognition. He addresses the hermeneutic paradox here that we cannot evaluate our cognitive faculty of knowing in terms of its ability to know the absolute without first having a criterion for what the Absolute is. Yet, we can only have such a criterion if we already know what we seek. On the other hand, the absolute may, after all, have been with us, in and for itself, all along and of its own volition without us being aware of it (PS § 73).

Hegel’s way of approaching this type of problem in the text is by adopting a two-way strategy: a step- by-step method of trying to bring the object into clearer focus by reflecting on the process of cognition itself. This forward movement of consciousness as the experiencerof itself Hegel observes and accompanies from the position of hindsight as if the absolute was already with him. Thus a stage of knowing is evaluated using the criterion presupposed by Hegel’s higher consciousness. At each stage, consciousness learns something new by comparing a new object with what it already knows. Hegel as the author and teacher looks at each stage from a higher vantage point while consciousness compares its actual knowledge of the object, what the object is for itself with its criterion of what the object must

be in itself. One would expect that, when consciousness finds that its knowledge does not agree with its object, consciousness would adjust its knowledge to conform to its object. However, as it turns out, both, consciousness and the object constantly change because consciousness merely mirrors its object to itself. The knowledge is inadequate only because of that separation. At the end of the process, when the object is seen for what it is, consciousness will fully know the object as its own reflection.

At each stage of development, Hegel, adds a ‘we’ (Hegel and his reader as observers). We see this development of the new object out of the knowledge of the previous one, but the consciousness that we are observing does not. As far as it is concerned, it experiences the dissolution of its knowledge in a mass of contradictions, and the emergence of a new object for knowledge, without understanding how that new object has been born.

As a teaching method, the Phenomenology starts from the sense-certainties consciousness clings to. Here we can see some parallels with Descartes’ first Meditation. For Descartes, the most immediatecertainty was that ‘I know that I am conscious’ (ego cogito), which Hegel now defines as the typical stage of a philosophical beginner. He calls it ‘natural consciousness’ because it is limited to ‘this object here and now’.

But instead of blindly following Descartes’ construction of a rational justification for the desired conclusion ‘therefore I am’ (ergo sum), Hegel gradually deconstructs thisconclusion and unmasks it as false. He shows that, once the process of this enquiry into self has been set in motion, these certainties transform themselves, of their own accord, into the insights that govern speculative philosophy. Thus phenomenological knowing far from being arbitrary and hopelessly subjective, constitutes the natural starting point for consciousness, which once set on the path, presses forward to true knowledge. Hegel also calls it ‘the way of the soul’ which journeys from darkness to brightness, not unlike Plato’s imprisoned soul in the cave metaphor (PS § 77).

Since natural consciousness directly takes itself to be real knowledge, this path has a NEGATIVE significance for it. What is in fact the gradual realisation of the notion as the highest and purest concept of itself, is only perceived to be a loss of self and its old cherished truths. The road thus becomes a pathway of self-doubt and despair. Hegel here doubts the genuineness of Descartes’ notion of scientific doubt because, for him, it requires more than rational scepticism: it must be rooted in a resolve, a total resolution not to rely on tradition, or authority, but to become totally self-reliant and generate truth only from inside itself. By fulfilling this resolution, the soul for the first time becomes competent to examine what truth is. What protects it from merely replacing the opinion of others with its own is this scepticism which it now internalises and directs against its own experiences. As it thereby overcomes its conceit, it merely wants to examine the truth, regardless of where it originated (PS §78).

The process of self-discovery, however, is not merely a NEGATIVE procedure as it simultaneously produces new results that keep generating a momentum through which the complete series of forms comes about by itself. For Hegel, this is the essence and purpose of education: consciousness must undergo a series of configurations which gradually lead up to the standpoint of pure Science (PS § 79).

Once the seed of wanting to know the truth has been planted, the progress towards this goal is unhalting, and short of it no satisfaction is to be found at any of the stations on the way. Consciousness can’t hold itself back once it gets started: it is something that goes beyond limits, and since these limits are its own, it is something that goes beyond itself, which entails its death. Hegel empathically notes that ‘consciousness suffers this violence at its own hands: it spoils its own limited satisfaction’. This violence breaks up its peaceful ignorance, and pushes natural consciousness forward:

When consciousness feels this violence, its anxiety may well make it retreat from the truth, and strive to hold on to what it is in danger of losing. But it can find no peace. If it wishes to remain in a state of unthinking inertia, then thought troubles its thoughtlessness, and its own unrest disturbs its inertia. (PS § 80)

There is an unrest and violent element in the very heart of consciousness. It is the NEGATIVITY that moves consciousness forward. This NEGATION is not an external activity but self and autonomous NEGATION.

1.5.4 Absolute Knowing as reconciliation

When we carefully comb through the Phenomenology we will not find the Fichtean triad of thesis, antithesis and synthesis as it has sometimes been misconstrued in some Marxist interpretations where dialectics is presented as a mechanistic triadic movement. There is a crucial difference between unification and identification: unification is a deliberate self-conscious act while identification is either a blind, automatic reaction that lacks precisely what is needed in reconciliation, or it is seen as theend of history.5

However, there remains some doubt as to how consistent Hegel was in his use of the word identity; whether he actually meant it as the ultimate stage of a synthesis or as a momentary phase in a larger process. As part of a process, it can be seen as a momentary movement which successfully reflects itself onto itself and thereby fulfills the necessary and sufficient condition for philosophy to finally begin as a congruentscience of consciousness.

5 Hegel was criticised by post-Hegelian thinkers like Adorno and Derrida because of his ‘final harmonious synthesis’ and the idea of an ‘end of history’ (see Chapter s 4 and 6).

Now, having shed some light onto thefinal stage of ‘Absolute Knowing’, we may be able to better understand the significance of the following quote from the Introduction. Here, Hegel wrote:

But when, [...] the result is conceived as it is in truth, namely as a determinate negation, a new form has thereby immediately arisen, and in thenegation the transition is made through which the progress through the complete series of forms comes about of itself.But thegoal is as necessarily fixed for knowledge as the serial progression; it is the point where knowledge no longer needs to go beyond itself, where knowledge finds itself, where Notion corresponds to object and object to Notion. Hence the progress towards this goal is also unhalting, and short of it no satisfaction is to be found at any of the stations on the way [...]. Consciousness […] is something that goes beyond limits, and since these limits are its own, it is something that goes beyond itself. (PS §§ 79f)

When we now go back and compare this quote to the final chapter VII (Absolute Knowing) as summarised above, Hegel’s intention may become a little clearer. On this basis, when we read the secondary literature, from the first highly politicised confrontation between left and right Hegelians up to today’s equally charged opposition between analytic and continental interpretations we can get a sense of ambivalence and evasion that since Hegel has marked Hegelianism. At times, it appears as if this unsatisfactory situation has been bypassed by assertingthe author’s own view instead of genuinely trying to re-experience and re-construct the inner logic in Hegel’s work.

On the one hand, this final chapter on Absolute Knowing is, if seen as a whole, the result of the total phenomenological journey, but on the other hand, if we look at it in detail, we will also discover that it still contains a development in itself in response to its previous subchapter (PS § 787) on ‘revealed religion’.

For Hegel, revelation is the unity of a universal essencewith the individual self which, at this stage in the Phenomenology, has already been implicitly achieved; but the religious consciousness is still caught up in ‘picture-thoughts’ of its reconciliation with its object, theessential being. Thusit remains burdened with the antithesis of a beyond, and reconciliation therefore is seen only as something in the distant future. Such reconciliation is only a feeling in the heart while its consciousness is still divided against itself.

What this means is that self-consciousness has not yet become the object of its consciousness. Consciousness is still absorbed in picture-thinking by externalising (i.e. projecting) itself and thereby positing the object as a thingas if it was in and for itself while self-consciousness already knows it to benothing but its own fabrication and thus takes it back into itself (PS § 788).

Through this NEGATION, it is neither in nor for itself anymore but only in and for consciousness, and in this way, Hegel believes that it will eventually become absolutewhen no further shape remains to be

superseded, when all the layers of substance have been penetrated; and whatever material that has been unearthed has been fully digested. The last becoming of the self-knowing spirit within one world cycle,

Hegel speculates, would be the step outside time (history) in which it reunites itself with its NEGATIVE, nature, its living immediate becoming, by externalising itself in space, which will then lead to a new world cycle – a never ending process (PS § 807). But what absolute knowing really means can only be known in hindsight, just like any previous stage that has been mastered.

The problem of knowing here is not about bringing an object, i.e. a particular content, under one’s control through standardisation and quantification and casting its non-measurableaspects (its uniqueness) into the abyss of the absolute while declaring that therein they are all the same. On the contrary, knowing is this seeming inactivity which merely contemplates how what is differentiated spontaneously moves in its own self and then, after having seen and understood this process, returns into itself.

This seems to be Hegel’s basic model of the mind, reality, and history which is reflected in the architecture of the Phenomenology as a whole as well as in almost all of its parts. Hegel applies it to a wide range of movements of consciousness in great detail until it reaches the collective level where it, as Spirit, pervades the culture of an era (Zeitgeist).

About a decade later, he then presents the same basic model in a morecomplete and systematisedform as an enlarged type of syllogism which he publishes under the title Science of Logic. Here, Hegel points out again the hermeneutic part-whole dynamic (or universal-particular dynamic) as theontological contradiction that inheres in and between all finiteand infinite concepts. In next sections I will move to the ontological prspective of NEGATIVITY mainly developed in Sciemce of Logic.

1.6. From phenomenology to ontology

In phenomenological knowing the most important thing is to refrainfrom imposing alien categories onto consciousness so that its true nature, its ontology, can be discovered. This discovery is therealisation that there is no person or ‘I’ behind knowing, that consciousness is nothing but this process of knowing itself, which, however, can only berealised within a living, i.e. embodied, self-conscious individual person. When the total spectrum of experience that consciousness undergoes has been seen and understood by the self-conscious personas thegradual dissolution of self, then its ontology will reveal itself as absolute NEGATIVITY. This Hegel demonstrates in his Science of Logic.

Here, he moves beyond the subjective perspective of the Phenomenology by introducing the concept of being as the new starting point. The domain of the Science of Logic is ontology as it starts from being.

Being for Hegel is a concept, not just a fact or given as Kant would have seen it. Moreover, Hegel refuses to define it in positive and static terms like substance and sees its essence instead as pure

NEGATIVITY: nothing. Being is not a thing in itself but rather a process between the polarities of being and non-being: becoming. Becoming is the process of self-transformation. In this way, he finds the missing dialectical link between substance and subject, spirit and nature, and thereby overcomes the old Cartesian dualism also at the ultimate, ontological level.

On this path taken as a whole, consciousness qua spirit qua subjectis not conceptualisedaslimited in the traditional way because its other, ‘being’, is seen not as a totally separate and distinct entity anymore, completein and for itself, but as a latent potentiality that also seeks its own perfection through awakening its inner force of SELF-NEGATION. Thus its destiny is to also undergo a process of self- transformation in order to become united with the self-consciousness Spirit.

By merely relying on self-observation, Hegel shows that both, consciousness and being, can discover their ultimate reality, which is their unity. The process relies purely on the unfolding of SELF-NEGATION as its highest authority. In this sense, Hegel as a process thinker moves beyond a long tradition of substance thinkers. But he also moves beyond Kant’s and Schelling’s intellectual intuition who merely relied on non-conceptual imagination when they talked about a synthesis of subject and object in the absolute which Hegel called ‘the abyss of the absolute’ where only static samemess remains.

Another important lesson we can learn from Hegelis that a subjective logic cannot be formalised into an automatic algorithm. He criticisessuch kind of thinking as lacking a clear concept of itself (begrifflos) and thus abstract. Mere difference of appearance as external opposition would not be sufficient to grasp the inner dynamic within each part and between a part and its whole, between the determinations and their ground within one’s own subjectivity.

The formal logic that it applies in its methodological apparatus is designed to conquer its object from the outside by decontextualising and redefining it in purely spatial, quantitative and ahistorical terms. Such a programme is antithetical to dialectics and hermeneutics.

One of Hegel’s famous mythological phrases says, ‘the owl of Minerva takes flight only at dusk’, which signifies the self-transitional, ie. NEGATIVE nature of time and consciousness as well as the necessity that his reader must reach a point where hesees not only what bright daylight presents to him, i.e. distinct sense objects which easily mislead one to believe that they are the total truth, but who is equally sensitised to the tacit dimension, the infinite ground, from where meaning arises. The owl of Minerva symbolises this wisdom that might dawn on him as the colourful sense objects have turned grey.

1.6.1 NEGATIVITY in the Science of Logic

Hegel’s categories of thought unfold systematically from a simple, abstract, and non-reflective state to ever more complex, concrete, and self-reflective states. Based on Kant’s syllogistic logic, Hegel applies it now to the evolution of consciousness itself as it undergoes three phases: it starts with the state of being, which progresses towards the development of the awareness of essence, and then reaches their sublation in the concept which finally becomes one with its underlying idea. In this way, consciousness is being purified by NEGATION and empowered to finally achieve its goal of full self-consciousness and freedom.

The first category considered in the Science of Logic is the pure being, simply being as such which possesses no consciousness that could arise from within itself. Therefore, being vanishes into nothingness, and vice versa. Being is existentially and logically unstable as it easily disappears into its opposite. Hegel’s system begins with absolute Nothing, which is a presuppositionless beginning. The presuppositionless beginning begins with indeterminate, simple being – the biological life force as such. It is Nothing in particular but simply being as such (cf. Houlgate 2006, p. 31). Hegel sees the nothingness in beingness as a NEGATIVE mode – the most basic state of being that is related to the absolute ground as its initial, undifferentiated manifestation.

Hegel speculates that the actual reason for being to begin to turn into its other is not because of any external influence but because of its own inner ontological imperfection. As the subsequent categories discussed in the Science of Logic reach ever higher stages of perfection, they nevertheless still remain ontologically imperfect since they can achieve only partial and provisional definitions of themselves as subject. Due to its ontological finitude each concept contains some inadequacy in relation to the archetypal Idea of itself. This difference reflects the inherent NEGATIVITY in being. It gradually develops into a more conscious and deliberate urge to move towards the fulfillment of its perceived purpose, which is to fully realise the Idea of itself.

The process of becoming is being initiated by the inherent contradiction between Being and Nothing. When the concept of Becoming begins to form it is already a sign that the Being is moving forward towards a higher stage. As its limitations are gradually Being transformed, being moves towards, and approaches its own essence. Any limitation encountered along its path signifies the being’s inherent nature of NEGATIVITY.

Once being becomes aware of the ontological distinction between appearance and essence, the gateway to further and higher ontological contradictions between identity and difference, inner and outer, cause and effect, opens up. Hegel’s point is that both, the ‘Doctrine of Being’ and the ‘Doctrine of Essence’ contain no inherent meaning so long as they are seen to exist in isolation. Both need each other as their inner ontological counterpart in order to reach the third stage. But their unity is a merely NEGATIVE unity which means that their contradictory determination keeps NEGATING the unity and tends to ruin

even the partial and momentary independence they may have gained. Therefore, initially, this NEGATIVE process turns being into a mere resemblance of its true Being. Every external reflection is mere appearance. But this self-knowledge cannot arise until the concept of Essence has formed. Once the concept of Essence has formed it further begins to differentiate itself until even essence is seen to be empty of Essence. Here, Hegel shows the NEGATIVE capacity of the absolute ground, which otherwise remains immanent: how every determinate concept that has arisen must eventually dissolve and return into its ground.

Due to its inner NEGATIVITY, there is a gap between essence and appearance but this gap is inherent in appearance itself. Mere appearance remains illusory until consciousness penetrates its essence by repeatedly confronting appearance to itself. In this way, the appearance’s non-identitity becomes obvious.

At the beginning of the ‘Doctrine of Essence’, Hegel writes that “essence is neither in itself nor for itself” (SL, p. 389). Its real character is its lack of determination, its inherent voidness. Essence can only be seen when NEGATIVITY is being activated in consciousness, which is the continuous movement of Being, “the self-sublating of otherness and determinateness”. Hegel defines Essence as reflection within itself: “Essence is being that has been sublated in and for itself; what confronts it is only illusory being (Schein). The illusory being, however, is essence’s own positing” (SL, p. 393). In short, essence is the

NEGATIVE posited as NEGATIVE (SL, p. 395). In actuality, the true nature of being is non-being since it is never fully identical with itself.

Although the dialectical process leads to increasing comprehensiveness and universality, it actually never completes itself (EPS I § 79). Dialectics contains an inner drive in the direction of the Absolute but never comes to an absolute end. Hegel believed that his method would be more or less complete and detailed because the progression is driven forward only by the subject matter itself, which is the “only true method” (SL, p. 54).

1.7 Chapter summary

From the perspective of traditional Aristotelian logic, NEGATION implies exclusion. It is based on the laws of identity, non-contradiction, and the excluded middle which says that a logical statement cannot be simultaneously true and false. It is either-or, but never as-well-as. What Hegel tries to show from his internal phenomenological perspective of consciousness, however, is that instant judgement of momentary experiences as either true or false is caught up in ‘sense-certainty’. Its underlying common- sensical logic of identity of appearance and essence is simply taken for granted. But as Hegel shows, this kind of naïve realism will sooner or later turn out to be a pre-judgement.

Looking at the object from the subjective side, cognition is a living process in which consciousness constantly undergoes changes without being able to positively identify and isolate a permanent, self-

abiding universal essence behind or within the various forms of which it becomes aware. While each appearance does constitute a finite object for consciousness which can be defined as either true or false, this represents only an initial, momentary, and thus superficial truth in relation to all its previous and future thought moments. None of these can be validated as completely true as long as consciousness has not yet attained the stage of absolute knowing. Hegel describes the stages of scepticism which also guided Descartes’ methodology as a progressive disillusionment. While Descartes had come to a premature conclusion which he stated as ego cogito ergo sum, Hegel goes deeper and realises that this cogito never really finds its self-identity; that it is left in a permanent neither-nor situation, it is neither this nor that, there is nothing, no concept, that can positively define it as it really is.

By refusing to frame his object in predefined terms, he merely tries to understand the process of change within consciousness, how consciousness produces its own objects, and comes to the realisation of what consciousness essentially is: nothing but a process of NEGATION without a self-identical subject or ‘thing in itself’ behind it that orchestrates the whole process.

By studying the process of change within consciousness itself, over time it becomes clear that it contains a dialectical development in which previous concepts, through which experiences were judged, also undergo change as they gradually become more aligned to the way things are until the pure Concept (the Notion) of the object has been attained and recognised as such.

Each new thought arises in some relation to the previous thought. Whether it confirms or opposes it, in either case, consciousness develops a clearer, more complete picture of what it saw earlier and thus relativises and contextualises previous truths. In this way it understands itself through its object which it takes to be other: in juxtaposing itself against its object, it initiates a fight in order to gain recognition.

In this way, a thought tries to move beyond its predecessor and thereby NEGATES it in some way or other. While each thought-moment is unique in some respect, it always arises in dependence on its proximate thoughts – a process which Hegel saw as a series of mutual determinations. This process never stops as long as a thought creates a sufficiently determinate condition for its subsequent thought to arise.

Along this path, Hegel points out that even a simple NEGATION is already sufficient proof that consciousness is absolutely incapable of independent and self-sufficient judgement. This is Hegel’s disillusionment with the 18th century ideal of Enlightenment that stood in the Cartesian tradition. Not having been able to break this circle of glorious self-worship, consciousness remained caught up in its own delusion.

Hegel now shows that this imagined unity which supposedly constitutes the cognising subject contains a NEGATIVE power that no formal concept can tame. So instead of trying to contain this power in a formal concept, he allows it to freely express itself and thereby discovers that it is also a positive and creative force because it always supersedes the limitations of earlier stages of knowledge. Through this

realisation, consciousness naturally moves up to a higher panoramic vantage point from where it can see more clearly the immediate and also the long-term consequences of its own actions.

By starting from the opposite direction, consciousness also realises that a determination is only possible because of the larger context against which it must assert itself. Thus part and whole, if approached from both vantage points, are seen as a totally interdependent dynamic at each and every level of determination.

Every microscopic thought-cycle that arises does so by asserting itself in relation to the previous thought which simultaneously redefines not only its predecessor but the whole experience as it is intuitively felt. It is only through such actualisation of the enfolded essence that self-consciousness manifests itself, that is, in the moment it raises its own activity into conscious thought and thereby into an antithesis, and when this antithesis is worked through it then returns into itself, i.e. it becomes latent again (PS §§ 796, 802). This movement is driven by a force that keeps dissolving all positivities until the I have been fully purified and thereby become a pure expression of absolute NEGATIVITY (PS § 799). Thus, for Hegel, there is no God and no person behind this process; the self-knowing mind merely reflects this law of SELF- NEGATION in a gradually more complete and less distorted way as it keeps polishing its mirror.

As the non-self-reflective substance which is enfolded ‘in itself’, begins to unfold and thereby turns into a conscious subject it becomes ‘for itself’. In this process, the object of consciousness is repeatedly being transformed into an object for self-consciousness until it finally merges into the pure Concept, or absolute Idea, which becomes the subject’s highest concept when it congruently reflects its object. This is the declared goal of the Phenomenology.

At the collective level, self-consciousness now seeks its consummation as self-conscious spirit (Weltgeist). Originally, its existence was metaphorically expressed through religious practice, but for Hegel, this is insufficient since it lacked a clear concept. It must turn into science because only by becoming fully conscious of itself will it rise to the status of true self-knowledge (PS § 802).

The movement of self-reflection that carries forward the form of its self-knowledge is the labour which it accomplishes only gradually through time as actual history (PS § 803). Self-reflection does not pertain to substance but to the subject as the channel through which the spirit evolves. Here Hegel explains what this labour as actual history entails, which he later elucidates in great detail in the Science of Logic:

It is not until consciousness has given up hope of overcoming that alienation that it turns to itself. This overcoming of alienation is actually a returning into itself through which it becomes self-conscious. Through observation it begins to understand its existence and in its thinking it comprehends it intellectually. At the beginning, it has expressed the immediate unity of thought and being, the unity of abstract essence. But as spirit becomes more conscious of itself, it recoils in horror from this self-less

abstract substance and affirms its individuality against it. As it becomes the subject for itself, it moves out of the immediacy of the unconscious substance, thereby turning the substance into its object and thematises it as ‘its content’. This first NEGATION is the very first reflection out of immediacy as the subject’s first moment of a gradual awakening. In being the first step on the path towards the pure I, it must set itself apart from its substance in order to see it for what it is and become conscious of it as its field of study.

But only after the subject has externalised its individuality in the sphere of culture, only then does it turn the thought of its inmost depth outwards and enunciates essence as I = I. This is the absolute expression of self-identity in which NEGATIVITY has become absolute and in this very moment, all difference between substance and subject suddenly collapses. In this moment, the I returns into the self, which is, actually, the identity of the self with itself as complete and immediate oneness. The self- knowing spirit experiences this immediate identity as a release from clinging to any of the previous shapes of itself, which assures it of its self-knowledge (certainty) (PS § 806). But still, this is not the absolutely final stage.

Having purified its notion, spirit now has become science in which the objective form of truth, its pure shape, is known by the self in an immediate unity. Knowing the pure notion of science constitutes the most basic mediation where thinking reflects and makes explicit through language the inner antithesis. Science reflects this necessity to externalise the form of the Notion because it has not yet won its complete freedom. The absolute knowing is the full realisation of freedom. The NEGATION of incompleted forms of consciousness is the path to freedom.

Chapter 2

Feuerbach’s Humanistic Critique of Hegel and Negativity

Content

2.1 Introduction

2.2 The Three periods in the development of Feuerbach’s thought

2.2.1 The first period: In defence of Hegel

2.2.2 The middle period: Redefining Hegel’s NEGATIVITY

2.2.3 The late period: Hegel’s metaphysics as a theological philosophy

2.3 The beginning of Feuerbach's independent spirit

2.4 The evolution of Feuerbach’s critique

2.5 Feuerbach’s new philosophy

2.6 Alienation and projection as Feuerbach’s mode of negativity

2.7 Chapter summary

2.1 Introduction

In this section I will concentrate on Ludwig Feuerbach’s work because it represents the most direct and comprehensive response among Hegel’s students of the 1830s and 40s. While the public debates of the Young Hegelians have been well researched from an historical perspective (see for example, McLellan

1969 and Breckman 1999), the question of how far Hegel’s concept of NEGATIVITY was adequately represented in the intellectual elite of Germany after him, for example in Feuerbach, has so far not been fully addressed.6 By their focus on the differences in personality traits in relation to the outer political issues of the time, historians seem to have over-emphasised the outer events and not fully recognised the central underlying issue of how to interpret Hegel’s category of NEGATIVITY in relation to political practice.

In the heat of the debates of the July-revolution in 1830 and its suppression by the Prussian government,

Hegel’s realisation that the NEGATION OF NEGATION usually remains hidden within ordinary thought and language, seems to have been by-passed. Hegel saw that certain historic epochs could be characterised as containing specific forms of alienation through which their inner NEGATIVITY was not only blurred and forgotten, but even actively suppressed by their positive counterforces. Having reached the peak of German Idealism and thus of dialectic logic, Hegel’s system became the object of a prolonged debate among his students which led to a new perception not only of Hegel’s key concepts like Being, Nothing, the Absolute, and NEGATIVITY, but of the ultimate purpose of philosophy itself.

Until today, this debate still has not completely subsided as some aspects of Hegel's large system are still being re-evaluated in the light of current historic events and new research. Due to its dynamic character and depth of investigation, it seems that no final conclusion can be drawn from it yet. This may be due to the fact that a reader who absorbs himself in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and Science of Logic will activate an inner potential for ever new and deeper insights. However, before approaching Feuerbach’s concept of negativity itself, I will highlight the background of Feuerbach’s criticism of Hegel in order to show how Feuerbach’s later works represent Hegel’s concept of self-consciousness in a new light, not as a self-negating process but as part of natural human existence which is characterised by the feelings of pleasure and pain.

6 For a brief analysis of Feuerbach’s attitude towards negativity, see Arthur (1983a, pp. 10-19).

2.2 The three periods in the development of Feuerbach’s thought

We can distinguish three distinct phases in Feuerbach’s attitude towards Hegel and the concept of

NEGATIVITY: his defence of Hegel against the anti-Hegelianism, his critique of Hegel in his transitional period, and finally, his break with Hegel through the formulation of his own philosophy. The aim of this chapter, therefore, is to refocus the attention on Feuerbach’s reception of negativity and to trace its development in Feuerbach’s work. Before we can evaluate Feuerbach’s position, however, we would need to gather some background knowledge about the history of the negativity attitude towards the human body as it was conceived in continental philosophy and religion since this became the central issue in Feuerbach’s critique of Christian theology and Hegel’s speculative metaphysics.

2.2.1 The first period: In defence of Hegel

Feuerbach represents his religion as ‘no religion’ and his philosophy as ‘no philosophy’. This signifies his negative attitude towards both religion and philosophy. Here, he develops an original criticism of religion which is based on Hegel’s principles, especially on the notion of the ‘unhappy consciousness’ in Hegel’s Phenomenology, but he also criticizes Hegel’s philosophy based on Hegel’s own principles.

Initially, Feuerbach reacts strongly against orthodox Hegelians who seem to have grasped Hegel inadequately, and he regards himself as a student of Hegel in general. This can be seen from the way Feuerbach, in the review for C.F. Bachmann’s Critique of the Anti-Hegel, defends Hegel’s theory of identity against Bachmann’s claim that Hegel’s theory of identity has avoided essential distinctions having reduced religion and nature to ‘Idea’. But, Feuerbach argues that differences are integral to Hegel’s theory of identity; identity is the identity of difference. Feuerbach’s ideas, ‘God eats himself” and “God digests himself”, can be compared with Hegel’s notion: the ‘Spirit negates itself’ and ‘Spirit externalizes’. In that review, Feuerbach also defends Hegel’s assertion that nature is not separate being, but otherness of Idea itself, and the awareness of nature is none other than other-being-of-Idea. Further, he defends the view that oppositions as represented in Hegel’s Science of Logic would not merely be oppositions but self-oppositions inherent in Idea itself (Wartofsky 1977, p. 149). The crucial point here is that identity in difference is the source of Hegel’s dialectics. In this Hegelian period, Feuerbach clearly identifies the difference between being human and being a mere object like a stone. In the first case, being human implies being object to itself as well as being conscious, whereas in the second case, being an object is being for other.

2.2.2 The middle period: Redefining Hegel’s NEGATIVITY

From this abstract level of thought, Feuerbach gradually moves towards a more concrete mode of being: concrete human existence, human individuality, feeling, sensation and need, which have no independent or absolute existence. Thought, Hegel’s working place, transcends the positive, sense-based level of understanding but it is the NEGATIVE capacity of understanding that Hegel particularly developed in his

Phenomenology and Logic. NEGATION, self-separation and self-differentiation belong to human beings but not to objects, because no thing can negate itself. As Spirit actualizes itself it differentiates itself from matter. Inanimate matter, however, lacks its own privacy and self-activity. In this middle period, we can see that although Feuerbach’s critique is based on Hegel’s terminology and logic but it does not reveal the importance of NEGATIVITY itself. In his Philosophy and Christianity, Feuerbach’s final defence of Hegel, he traces the difference between thought (the basis of philosophy) and feeling and fantasy (the basis of religion).

2.2.3 The late period: Hegel’s metaphysics as a theological philosophy

In his later works, Feuerbach mostly deals with the phenomenology and dialectics of religion, which governs infinite activity of fantasy and feeling. In Hegel’s philosophical sense, however, the

NEGATIVITY is embedded in the infinite activity of Spirit. Feuerbach’s critique of Hegel’s philosophy is shaped by his attack against the empiricist and orthodox Christian philosophical criticisms against Hegel. But at the end of his Hegelian period, Feuerbach considers Hegel’s idealism also as the ‘most rigorous’, the ‘most abstract’ and the ‘most rational’ form of theological philosophy (Wartofsky 1977, p. 169). The absolutization of self-consciousness is the fantasy and illusion inherited in speculative philosophy. Consequently, speculative philosophy is nothing but a ‘sleep-walking’ or a ‘drunken philosophy’. The Absolute is the objectified fantasy of a limited historical individual. Therefore, philosophy must exceed the limit of Hegelianism, and in this sense, Feuerbach rejects both Christian theistic metaphysics and Hegelian metaphysics.

In summary, we can see that at the beginning of Feuerbach’s thinking it is Hegelian and that his approach is dialectical. In this stage, Feuerbach defends Hegel against ‘incomplete’ criticisms. In his middle period, Feuerbach then gradually transforms Hegel’s abstract being into a concrete human being.

In his late period, he distances himself further from Hegel’s philosophy by categorizing it as a form of theological philosophy.

2.3 The beginning of Feuerbach’s independent spirit

The transcendental subject was depersonalised by Hegel as he developed an all pervading ontological system of thought in which the agency of change was now located within the Concept that contains a purposive dynamic of self-transformation. Having inherited a long tradition of negativity towards the human body, Feuerbach dedicates his philosophical project to an individual body-mind psychology that arises directly from its sensuous embodied nature without it being mediated by any theological or metaphysical category like God or Hegel’s Absolute.

Being quite orthodox, Hegel, however, rejected the reduction of thought to the personal level and responded by absolutising the evolution of consciousness within an ontological framework. This provoked Feuerbach to level his critique against any superhuman system of thought, particularly since such systems were prone to be misused for propagating chauvinist political agendas that forcefully tried to suppress independent enquiries into the presuppositions of knowledge and religious authority. Like Hegel himself, Feuerbach embraced the belief that it was self-consciousness that constituted the distinctive feature of a dignified human life but Feuerbach shifted the emphasis from metaphysical system building to a theory of embodied practice. For him, a personal commitment to individual autonomy had to become the priority of both, theory and practice. His passionate stance stood in direct opposition to theological and epistemological conservatism that tried to keep individual consciousness firmly locked within its hierarchical system.

While Hegelianism constituted the philosophical horizon in which Feuerbach’s thought was born, he was at no time an orthodox Hegelian who was unconditionally devoted to the master. Even when Feuerbach declares himself to be a disciple of Hegel, he is not unreservedly so. On no other philosopher does Feuerbach lavish so much praise as on Hegel, and yet to no other philosopher is his relationship as ambivalent. From the early stages of his assimilation of Hegel’s philosophy, there seems to be a strong need in him for an independent enquiry (cf. Hanfi 1972, p. 12).

For the following two years, Feuerbach absorbs himself in his Hegel studies while also attending theology lectures. Already during this time he occasionally expresses certain doubts concerning the relation between Logic and the philosophy of Nature, particularly the feasibility of the transition from the Idea to Nature.

Feuerbach’s sporadic dissatisfaction with the philosophy of Hegel assumes the form of a systematic and self-confident criticism not until his Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy in which he announces his rejection of Hegelianism. Feuerbach proceeds by showing that the two most characteristic qualities of Hegelianism are also the two of its most questionable aspects—its reliance on speculation and its drive towards systematisation.

Feuerbach concedes that there is certainly succession in history and even in nature because there is development in it. But in nature, the truth of the plant is not just the flower; the leaf equally belongs to its truth. Hence nature does not just gain its significance via its stages of development. Stages of development are indeed moments in time, but altogether these moments would form a simultaneous totality in space.

While Feuerbach regards himself as a Hegelian he reacts strongly against a group of right-wing orthodox Hegelians who seem to have misread Hegel’s intention. This can be seen from the way in which he defends Hegel’s theory of identity against Bachmann’s claim that Hegel’s theory of identity has apparently reduced religion and nature to a mere idea. Feuerbach argues that difference is integral in Hegel’s theory of identity as its identity is the identity of difference. In the same work, Feuerbach reemphasises Hegel’s assertion that Nature is not a separate Being, but merely the otherness of the Idea. The opposites in Hegel’s Science of Logic would not merely be external oppositions but self-oppositions inherent in the yet undeveloped Idea itself (cf. Wartofsky 1977, p. 149).

From this it seems that Feuerbach understood Hegel’s identity in difference as the source of his dialectics. But his search for the qualitative and purposive difference between the self-aware human being as the real subject of history and the human being as the object of history where this self- awareness is missing is motivated by a strong desire to overcome this difference not only in Logic but in real life. With Kant, Feuerbach sees the crucial difference in the fact that a human being is a dignified end in itself, whereas an object is reduced to a means that exists for others’ ends.

After developing his own philosophical spirit Feuerbach moves to the critique of Hegel developing am empirical-dialectical method.

2.4 The evolution of Feuerbach’s critique

Being confronted with the reality on the ground, Feuerbach’s initially metaphysical level of thought has now moved towards a more concrete, empirical mode of thinking that focuses on the utterly dependent existence of the real individual who is characterised by his specific feelings, sensations and real human needs. This focus on authenticity seems to have been inspired by Schleiermacher who taught hermeneutics and criticism in the theological faculty nearby. Hegel’s logic of NEGATIVITY transcended the actual sense-based experiences of the individual whose purpose was reduced to being a vehicle for the World Spirit (Weltgeist) in its journey towards freedom. Feuerbach found Hegel’s exclusive focus on the invisible principle of SELF-NEGATION that moves through and thereby dissolves all positive manifestations, including the individual, to be not only onesided but actually inhuman.

In this period we can see that although Feuerbach’s critique is based on Hegel’s terminology and Logic but in his ambition to address the problems of the empirical human being, Feuerbach now shifts his understanding of the function of NEGATIVITY in Hegel’s work towards the NEGATION of Hegel’s contradiction with reality. In his Philosophy and Christianity, Feuerbach begins to relativize the absoluteness of Hegel’s doctrine by differentiating between thought as the foundation of philosophy, feeling as the foundation of art, and the unconscious will as the psychological origin of fantasy and religion. This widening of his frame of reference from reason to art and religion shows his intuitive feeling that Hegel had gone too far in his abstraction and that a regrounding of knowledge via these three perennial themes was needed.

The Hegel’s philosophy, Feuerbach argues, is itself a phenomenon belonging to the world and must therefore reconcile itself to the modest status of being just one particular, empirically given philosophy. This was not to belittle its overwhelming greatness and significance. Feuerbach is only too willing to acknowledge that the philosophy of Hegel is distinguished from all previous philosophies by its rigorous scientific character, universality, and incontestable richness of thought. For him, Hegel is the most accomplished philosophical artist, and his presentation due to its rigor is am veritable means for

the education and discipline of the spirit. But it cannot be the total reality. As a particular expression of a particular human mind it is a phenomenon of this world and thus limited by its laws.

But apart from the general principle applied above, there are, Feuerbach argues, other considerations that make it impossible for Hegelianism to claim the status of an absolute philosophy. For one thing, it came into being at a particular point of time; that is, in a particular historical context which is defined by the definite level of thought at which mankind then stood in relation to all earlier insights. Every philosophy originates as a manifestation of its time; its origin presupposes its historical time. Anything that must presuppose something else for its existence cannot claim to be absolute.

But there is another sense in which the Hegelian philosophy claims to begin without any presupposition whatsoever – it proceeds from pure Being. In other words, it claims to start from the beginning, as such, because Being is no particular point of departure but an absolute beginning in so far as it is the precondition of all particular starting points. Thus Hegel’s philosophy starts from that which is itself the beginning.

Feuerbach seeks to demystify this claim by showing that the notion of making an absolute beginning in philosophy is itself determined by the tradition of metaphysical philosophy which, since Plato, has always sought to establish a first principle as its absolute point of departure. It is, therefore, easy to see that in claiming to begin with no presupposition whatsoever Hegel in fact felt bound by the old question as to the first principle of philosophy, which shows not only the limitedness of his philosophy but also his orthodox attitude to the tradition of philosophy. Even the necessity that self-presenting thought must constitute a complete system, is motivated by a particular desire in philosophical tradition to systematise its knowledge of reality and thus reality itself – a tradition essentially interested in formal systems rather than in reality as such.

Secondly, and more specifically, Feuerbach argues that Hegel’s Logic does not begin with real Being, but only with its concept of Being. Instead of making a real beginning, Hegel is only documenting the extent to which he is determined by the metaphysical notion of the first principle.

Feuerbach’s point is that the idea of an absolute beginning, both in the Phenomenology and the Logic, is by no means without presuppositions. The Idea is there right at the beginning of Hegel’s philosophy as its implicit a priori assumption. In beginning from immediate knowledge or pure Being, Hegel

already presupposes its fulfilment in the absolute Idea. This shows that there is actually neither a beginning nor an end as such due to the circularity of its system.

Hegel needed to find a way how to present the inner phenomenological process in a rigorous scientific manner. His ingenious solution is the SELF-NEGATION of the Idea. But as Feuerbach penetrates Hegel’s antithesis of Being and Idea he discovers that it is actually not a real antithesis because it already implies the certainty of the Idea, which means the Idea in its immediacy. The Idea cannot demonstrate its absolute truth through a real other. If Being is already the Idea, then their antithesis is only a formal linguistic one. Thus, Feuerbach concludes that Hegel’s abstract Being directly contradicts the real Being in the sense of the intellect’s concrete empirical perception. For Hegel, even abstract thinking is always determinate thinking, but Feuerbach regards Hegel’s notion of ‘nothing as an absolute self-illusion – a concept that Hegel uncritically adopted from oriental mysticism. Feuerbach calls it the ‘Zoroastrian night’ to indicate that pure being and nothing were mere fantasy constructions in Hegel’s imagination. However, for Feuerbach, Hegel did not inquire into the generic of this nothing but considered it at face value.

The price for the logical positing of a non-specific Being is the creation of a duality between ideality and reality. This refers not only to a criticism of Hegel but to the whole of modern philosophy from Descartes onwards. Its very foundation is rooted in this ‘unmediated break with sensuous perception’ and its ‘immediate taking itself for granted’. Therefore, Feuerbach insists that for philosophy to become real it must address this problem. Thought must take into account its other. But the other of thought is the sensuous reality that always already exists as ‘this-being’.

In the first chapter of his Phenomenology, Hegel does not refute the ‘here’ that forms the object of sensuous consciousness; he only refutes the idea of ‘this-being’. Thus the Phenomenology and the Logic do not begin with the ‘other-being’ of thought, but with the idea of the ‘other-being’ of thought. In so far as Hegel takes the object of his philosophy – the Absolute – for granted, is his philosophy concerned only with the forms through which the Absolute presents itself. Hegel thus carefully avoids any commitment to a critical-genetic analysis of specific content details.

The critique of Hegel’s alleged presuppositionless beginning thus becomes Feuerbach’s Archimedean vantage point through which he develops his genetico-critical method as against Hegel’s speculative method. For Hegel, all contradiction belongs only to the form of the Absolute which is posited,

according to Feuerbach, uncritically as identical with itself. The genetico-critical method does not seek to replace Hegel’s ‘Nothing’ with another more suitable object but merely examines its origin in order to determine whether it is a real object, a logical necessity, or a motive that arose within the author’s psyche. Underneath the apparently secular language of Hegel, Feuerbach sees in his absolute philosophy the same self-fulfilling prophesy at work as in theology which automatically regards all its phenomena as the workings of God.

The result of Feuerbach’s analysis is that Hegel’s concept of Nothing is merely a crutch on which he relies whenever his method is in need of a better solution: thought can never go beyond Being, because it cannot go beyond itself. Reason merely posits Being, because only this or that Being can be thought, but not the genesis of Being out of Nothing. Since an absolute presuppositionless beginning cannot be conceived by thought, wouldn’t it be more reasonable to simply accept the present reality as it is as the basis from which to begin? To posit nothing seems to be an act of absolute arbitrariness. The concept of Nothing is only a product of thought which is encapsulated in itself. It is unable to justify itself in the teeth of an antithetical reality, the real source of thought and its content. If reality never allows a nothingness to emerge then it cannot claim to be a true concept.

Here we can see how Feuerbach employs his genetico-critical method as a reality check in order to see whether a concept has its genesis in concrete, sensuous reality or not. In contrast to the whole of modern philosophy, and in particular to Hegel’s idealist-speculative philosophy, which proceeds from thought and reduces the reality of the senses to a secondary, derivative status, Feuerbach advances the idea of a genetico-critical philosophy whose logic arises directly out of lived experience as the natural ground and ultimate authority of truth. Feuerbach concludes that it would be more honorable and rational to simply begin with empirical reality as it exists in its own right as primary and autonomous, not as filtered through the lense of an absolute philosophy.

In The Necessity of A Reform of Philosophy, Feuerbach emphatically rejects any philosophy that constitutes itself only as a response to the history of philosophy, which owes its existence to a philosophical need, as for example, the philosophy of Fichte in relation to that of Kant. Such a philosophy is an internal affair of a particular school of thought and does not correspond to reality as such. Philosophy has previously built its speculative castles above and beyond the real world. For philosophy to become true and necessary it would have to respond directly to the real needs of its age.

Thought must find its genesis in real Being, and real Being cannot be derived from or dissolved in thought. The critical function of philosophy consists in ensuring that thought is not divorced from its real, natural basis. Therefore, philosophy must become the science of reality which is nature in the most general sense.

What Feuerbach sets out to achieve in Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy is the emancipation of (human) nature from its idealist-transcendent subjugation, and together with this its restoration to an autonomous, primary reality upon which he bases his anthropology, that is, his theory of the nature and essence of man. Feuerbach gives a systematic exposition of his anthropology in the Introduction to the Essence of Christianity, the work which establishes him as the liberator from the tyranny of Hegel’s system.

Feuerbach, in this critique, refocuses the attention from a disembodied Being of an unknowable past towards the embodied existence of the present Being in space. He regards Hegel’s philosophy as an exclusive philosophy of time that has bypassed the space as an equally important dimension. Thus Hegel reduced a potentially independent human being to an ‘historical ghost’ that appears in ‘shadowy moments’ of time (cf. Wartofsky 1977, p. 161). In this context, Feuerbach questions Hegel’s determinism of the dialectic movements of NEGATIVITY. Although the leaf is a precondition for the emergence of the flower, this does not mean that the leaf cannot appear simultaneously with the flower. Through this metaphor Feuerbach seeks to illustrate that the leaf and the flower can co-exist simultaneously with each other, which questions the progressive determinism of Hegel’s dialectics. This problem arises simply because of Hegel’s exclusive focus on time.

Feuerbach does not reject the dialectical process itself but merely argues against Hegel’s notion that independent existences were exclusively temporal moments in the dialectical process of NEGATION. For Feuerbach, space and time are not just formal categories of thought but essential conditions of being (Wesensbedingungen) that are objectively real. Feuerbach’s objects are not constructed in thought but are real physical phenomena. As Feuerbach turns the ‘other-ness’ of the Idea into the ‘this-ness’ of the real, Hegel’s abstract Nature is inverted and thereby sublated.

Hegel’s philosophy of nature begins with a dualism of inside and outside as synonyms for mind and matter. Thus his concept of space is ‘Being outside itself whose essential nature is its absolute indifference (Gleichgültigkeit). As spatial objects are constantly negating themselves they thereby

dissolve into time which functions as their determinate negative aspect as well as their indeterminate ontological ground.7 As such time is determinate SELF-NEGATION in action that is itself not affected by this; it is the ultimate precondition for the arising and passing of all finite phenomena and thus itself eternal and absolute.8 Hegel’s concept of matter is interdependent in relation to both space and time. Both presuppose matter while matter also presupposes time and space (cf. EPS II, pp. 41-42). This reflects the self-circular motion of the universe with its beginningless beginning and endless end. For Hegel, matter is about extension and separation in space; identity of being-for-itself and being-for- another. As Hegel puts it, “it is the identity of space and time, of immediate asunderness and of the negativity of a self-subsistent individuality” (EPS II, pp. 41-42).

By transforming Hegel’s metaphysical concept of matter into an organic concept Feuerbach develops his naturalism. As a result, Hegel’s idealism becomes grounded in the phenomenological reality of lived experience. This being Feuerbach’s historic contribution, Hegel’s focus on self-development through

SELF-NEGATION becomes secondary for him. However, since Feuerbach’s naturalism is not mechanistic but organic, it retains Hegel’s NEGATIVITY within its life process which then loses its all important function as the single underlying drive towards self-realisation. Marx recognises this shift from historicism to empiricism in Feuerbach when he labels it ‘contemplative materialism.9 While Feuerbach’s thinking is still dialectical, he underrates the importance of Hegel’s dynamic process of self-differentiation.

For Feuerbach, the real Being is constantly juxtaposed against its sense objects. Therefore, the becoming aware of sense perception is the unavoidable beginning in the process of becoming. Being is never empty as such but always already a determinate experience. Since one cannot think of something without any determination, even the idea of nothing can only be conceived indirectly through the absence of something, which is not the same as nothing. Out of this dilemma, Feuerbach in his Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy develops an intersubjective dialectic: “Dialectic is not a monologue

7 Hegel (EPS II, pp. 33-34) writes that “Negativity, as point relates itself to space, in which it develops its determinations as line and plane, but in the sphere of self-externality, negativity is equally for itself and so are its determinations, but at the same time, there are posited in the sphere of self-externality, and negation, in so doing appears as indifferent to the inert side-by-sidedness of space. Negativity thus posited for itself is Time”. 8 Hegel elaborates his concept of time both in his Phenomenology of Spirit and in his Philosophy of Nature: “Time is the Notion itself that is there (Die Zeit ist der Begriff selbst, der da ist) and which presents itself to consciousness as empty intuition; for this reason, Spirit necessarily appears in time, and it appears in time just so long as it has not grasped its pure Notion, i.e. has annulled time” (PS § 801). Hegel elaborates the negativity of time as: “But it is not in time that everything comes to and passes away rather, time itself is the becoming, this coming to be and passing away, the actually existent abstraction Chronos, from whom everything is born and by whom its offspring is destroyed” (EPS II, p. 35). 9 See Marx’ first Feuerbach Thesis.

in which speculation carries on with itself, but a dialogue between speculation and empirical reality” (Feuerbach 1983a, p. 110).

Thus Hegel’s abstract Being as such is an unreal category and must be embedded in the experiences of a sensuous concrete Being. Feuerbach’s ‘real’ dialectic of sensibility, on the other hand, is in danger of getting lost in the details of outer sense perception. As long as the cognitive process remains externalised, it cannot in itself lead onwards towards higher stages of consciousness. For that self- reflectivity of thought and language is essential with reference to one’s own inner contradictions. Having criticised Hegel’s abstract Being Feuerbach moves towards his own new philosophy.

2.5 Feuerbach’s new philosophy

Feuerbach’s Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, is his new philosophy that arises out of his critique of Hegel’s philosophy. The new philosophy is the realisation of the Hegel’s philosophy and of all proceeding philosophies – a realisation which is a negation without self-contradiction. The contradiction of modern philosophy, including Hegel’s philosophy, lies in the fact that it negates theology from an immanent theological standpoint. Feuerbach’s penetration of Hegel’s philosophy into its essentially theological core is motivated by his ambition to reveal the truth behind all superhuman systems of thought which is the desire to recast the ancient myth of genesis in contemporary language. Due to their truth claim, such systems are bound to contain some self-contradictions and are prone to be misused by religious or political fundamentalists.

The God of the Christian mythological stories negates matter as untrue being from the very outset of creation. Hegel’s solution to this perennial problem of Being is his NEGATION OF NEGATION through which true positing could eventually be arrived at. However, by viewing matter as the self-alienation of the Spirit, Hegel in fact reintegrates the ancient myth through the back door which simultaneously reinstates the age-old body-mind dualism. Feuerbach insists that for NEGATION to become real there must be some content to be negated.

Since the beginning and end of Hegel’s philosophy contain theological myths, Hegel’s philosophy while seeming to negate Christian theology in fact justifies it in rational terms. For Feuerbach, Hegel’s

NEGATION OF NEGATION is a self-contradictory construction that cannot escape its self-confirmatory circular logic. In other words, it reflects a blind spot in Hegel’s mind. Hegel’s idealism, therefore, is pseudo-theological and illusory.

However, by rejecting the beginning and the end of Hegel’s philosophy, Feuerbach implicitly also rejects its middle, which is by far the largest portion of his philosophy in which his genius is revealed. His strength lies in the fact that his concepts are dynamic as they negate themselves and thereby move towards their absolute identity (cf. Arthur 1983a, p. 16). Feuerbach, having become himself blinded by his critique, does not recognise the importance of this inner dynamic which reveals the necessary process for removing many layers of self-illusion that block the access to the mind’s true self-identity.

The ultimate purpose of Feuerbach’s critique of Hegel’s abstract relation between Being and its other is to produce the necessary preconditions for a scientific analysis of the concrete relations between the real empirical self with a real empirical other. For this to become possible, Hegel’s ontological thought process needed to be operationalised into an anthropological, social, and psychological one. This reduction, however, carries within itself the paradox that despite its claim to gain psychological insight into the inner preconditions of thought, the increasingly subtler understanding of the inner logic of desire, the master-slave dialectic, and the unhappy consciousness, for example, would have to be externalised.10 Feuerbach’s real Being fulfills its needs in dependence on others. Thus his investigation remains outside the inner self-structure of consciousness as the root condition from where all the external problems arise.

2.6 Alienation and projection as Feuerbach’s mode of negativity

Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity presents a critique of Hegel’s dialectic of self-differentiation, self- projection and self-estrangement in which Hegel’s logic of NEGATIVITY is still embedded. What Feuerbach tries to invert here is Spinoza’s idea of the self-sustaining substance from where the human subject needs to escape in order to become a self-determined species-being. This real subject needs real

10 Kojève explored the negative dimension of the logic of desire in his Introduction to the Reading of Hegel. See the chapter 6 of this thesis. Hyppolite developed the negative aspect in Hegel’s concept of the ‘unhappy consciousness’ in the Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and in Logic and Existence. See the chapter 6 of this thesis.

objects which exist outside itself while its capacity of receptivity and activity via its sensibility forms the precondition for this relationship.

The crucial question here is under which conditions Feuerbach’s concept of species-being would activate its latent power of negativity via these outer relationships since these external relations may suppress this inner potential. Feuerbach accuses Hegel of having subjectified the object and objectified the subject. In other words, he has inverted the real subject-object relationship. This was due to Hegel’s uncritical projection of subject and object into a given Absolute. The abstract relation between ‘self’ and ‘other’ in Hegel is only a human imaginary projection of the concrete relation between ‘self’ and ‘other’. Feuerbach’s accusation against Hegel’s system is the subjectification of the object and objectification of subject. In the end, Hegel’s subject remains metaphysical – perhaps a sign that Hegel was so satisfied with his theory that he did not feel the need to search for a way how to bridge the gap between theory and practice.

In Hegel’s system, the Spirit’s self-alienation is expressed via the notion of the ‘unhappy consciousness’. The dynamism in this process manifests in the transformation of desire into its opposite which is the temporary overcoming of its unhappy state in the moment of satisfaction. Feuerbach’s original point here is that the desire is being satisfied only in fantasy which is the root cause for the origin of God – a point which is later taken up and elaborated by Freud in his The Future of an Illusion.

While Hegel conceptualizes infinite capacity of the Spirit (power of NEGATIVITY), Feuerbach conceptualizes the infinite capacity of species nature, and when Hegel spiritualizes the God as Idea’s predication, Feuerbach humanizes God as man’s predication. But Feuerbach’s own phenomenology, which formulated in the sphere of religion, is further development of Hegel’s idea of self-alienation.

In his Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, Feuerbach summarises his philosophy: “The task of the modern age was the making real and making human of God the transformation and dissolution of theology into anthropology” (Feuerbach 1986, p. 5). What man does is to project his essence into God. This essence is anthropological, not metaphysical or theological. The divine being does not possess its own essence, but only a projected essence. The Christian God is none other than the abstraction of human love. Here, Feuerbach inverts the subject-predicate relation in the formation of God which results in his saying that ‘the secret of speculative philosophy is theology, and the secret of theology is anthropology’.

Through his reduction of theology to anthropology Feuerbach chases away the most fundamental human illusion. In this way, he is able to reveal religion as an alienated form of anthropology that arises out of an unconscious projection of man’s own inner qualities. As Hegel rejected the Kantian notion of the ‘unknowable thing-in-itself’, so does Feuerbach reject the ‘unknowable secret in Hegel’s Absolute’ which is God. In Hegel, the ‘unknowable thing-in-itself’ was nothing other than the subject’s own gap between its finitude and infinity, which he thought to overcome through the development of self- awareness.

For Feuerbach, the origin of the belief in God does not arise in God himself but within human consciousness. A person, who projects an independent existence into God believes that God created him. Feuerbach (1983a, p. 139) says that “The object (God) of any subject (man) is nothing else but the subject’s own nature taken objectively”. In this way, Feuerbach seeks to reclaim all the idealised supernatural qualities of man. In his Essence of Religion, Feuerbach’s project is to re-unite man with his spirit.

Through his redefinitions like ‘the essence of God is the essence of man’ and ‘to enrich the God, man has to become poor’ Feuerbach sets up an agenda for the individual being to explore himself in order to become real. But in the process he gets carried away and over-generalises his critique when he equates theological projection with the transcendent essence of Hegel’s Science of Logic. Through his passionate critique, Feuerbach loses sight of Hegel’s progressive concept of NEGATIVITY while unconsciously applying it in his Essence of Christianity as he follows Hegel’s footsteps of the Phenomenology of Spirit.

Man as the unity of thought and being is both subject and object; as such, he is necessarily always in relation with other subjects and objects. To be is to be in togetherness with others. The unity of thought and being is realised in communal being. Man can think, feel, and act only because his subjectivity is grounded in a commonly shared objectivity. The principle of sensuousness thus constitutes the being of man as both subject and object. But it also establishes the separate, independent existence of subject and object, the distinction between I and you, a distinction that is dissolved in the philosophy of identity. The single man in isolation possesses in himself the essence of man neither as a moral, nor as a thinking being. The essence of man is contained only in the community, in the unity of man with man – a unity, however, which rests on the reality of the distinction between I and you.

Hegel’s tendency to treat abstract predicates like reason, thought, consciousness etc. as if they were self-abiding ontological entities reflects the historic consciousness of his time. Feuerbach represents a new perspective on philosophising that exposes Hegel’s great art of philosophical

system building as the limitation of his Zeitgeist. Feuerbach was the protagonist of a new Zeitgeist that turned Hegel’s system from its head onto its feet. His denial of God and of the Absolute were his means to negate the negation of man.

According to Feuerbach, animals are not capable of being self-aware, for consciousness is given only in the case of a being to whom his species, his mode of being, is necessarily linked with knowledge. In being conscious, man knows himself as this conscious being. He is to himself an object of thought. And since a being who is an object of thought to himself he can also make other things the object of his thought; a self-knowing being is also an other-knowing being. Because of this range of knowing, knowledge has the character of a science. Therefore, science is the typical consciousness of species- being. The consciousness of man is not finite or limited, it extends over to the whole of nature, and the whole of nature is his object. Indeed, his consciousness transcends all finitude and reaches over to the infinite. Thus religion is man’s consciousness of the infinite which reflects his ability to become conscious of the infinity of his own being.

But before consciousness acquires a reflexive relationship to itself, man exists outside himself because his consciousness is absorbed in its object. Institutionalised religion transposes man’s essential being outside himself and thereby alienates him from his essence. The individual’s task, therefore, is to regain it within himself by becoming psychologically independent from the traditional dogma of religious institutions. The fact that God is not the realm of a separate and superior order of reality is the hidden secret of religion which remains opaque to theologists themselves; this hidden truth becomes transparent to an independent thinker who makes it the object of his thought. With the disclosure of this secret, religion loses all its content in so far as this content is recognised and appropriated by man as his own, for nothing is to be found in the essence of religion which is not there in his consciousness of himself.

The inversion of idealism into realism which Feuerbach had employed as an epistemological procedure in his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy has now acquired the clarity and decisiveness of a methodological principle. Real metaphysics would be one which does not sever itself from the subjective spirit of man, because one cannot separate the absolute spirit from the subjective spirit without being thrown back to the standpoint of theology, without being deluded into regarding the absolute Spirit as being another spirit as distinct from the being of man, without making people accept the illusion of a ghost that exists above the clouds.

Feuerbach sums up his criticism of Hegel’s philosophy by pointing to its abstractive and alienating function. Abstraction in Feuerbach means the positing of the essence of nature outside nature, the positing of the essence of man outside man, and the positing of the essence of thought outside the act of thinking. Guilty of abstraction in this sense, it has alienated man from himself, that is, it has surrendered to a being abstracted from man that which is in fact man’s own real and concrete essence. The new philosophy that takes into account the reality of man must necessarily be the total negation of speculative philosophy.

Having exposed the lynch pin of man’s self-denial, Feuerbach did not see the need any more to analyse again all the stages towards the higher levels of consciousness that Hegel so minutely described. This shows Feuerbach’s optimism that once the crucial block to self-actualisation was removed, human beings would naturally want to do the rest of the work by themselves in their own unique ways.

2.7 Chapter summary

Feuerbach regards the idea of ‘identity in difference’ as the source of Hegel’s dialectic and gradually develops his own concept of concrete, empirical and sensuous being in opposition to Hegel’s metaphysical notion of Being. In this way, he aims to turn Hegel’s speculative dialectic into a concrete empirical method. Hegel’s presuppositionless beginning becomes Feuerbach’s new vantage point from where he develops his ‘genetico-critical’ method. According to this method, space and time become not just equally important categories of thought but the essential conditions of concrete being itself.

However, this shift implies that Hegel’s SELF-NEGATION has now become of secondary importance because, for Feuerbach, negation becomes real only when there is something real to be negated. The concept of Being should not remain a metaphysical concept as it always already contains within itself determinate experiences.

In his main work, The Essence of Christianity, Feuerbach develops the idea of self-projection which he derives from the Phenomenology’s stage of the self-alienation of Spirit. This idea becomes the predominant mode of negativity within his intellectual trajectory. Through this concept, Feuerbach aims to show how humanity has been projecting its own human essence onto a religious ideal as a self-created

God. Its implication is that human essence is not metaphysical but anthropological, and that religion is in fact an alienated form of anthropology.

While this post-Hegelian development has undoubtedly been important, especially for Marx, it misses the essence of Hegel’s absolute NEGATIVITY. Feuerbach’s psychological critique of the traditional religious ideal is based only on a simple negation as it simultaneously affirms his idea of a sensuous essence of being. Although this reconstruction of Hegel’s meta-concept of NEGATION has been an important milestone for the later rise of humanistic and existential thought, it constitutes the main junction from where Feuerbach’s idea of an empirical, i.e. positive science departs from Hegel’s original idea of a speculative, i.e. NEGATIVE science of self-consciousness.

Chapter 3

Marx and NEGATIVITY: Alienation and the Negative Power of Labour

Contents

3.1 Introduction

3.2 The demystification of Hegel’s dialectic of NEGATIVITY

3.3 From idealist speculation to materialist critique

3.4 NEGATIVITY as Marx’ methodology

3.5 Alienation as Marx’ form of negativity

3.5.1 From objectification to alienation

3.5.2 The negative force within labour

3.6 Negation as the mode of changing existing reality

3.7 The power of negation in the proletariat

3.8 Chapter summary

3.1 Introduction

The purpose of this section is to critically analyse Marx’ transformation of Hegel’s concept of

NEGATIVITY as he first analysed it in his early writings and later applied in his Capital. Of central importance here are the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 as Marx’ first attempt to evaluate “the outstanding achievement of Hegel’s Phenomenology – the dialectic of negativity as the moving and creative principle” (EPM, p. 176), which Marx now differentiates and redefines via three objective forms of negativity: externalisation, objectification, and alienation that are to be superseded by the subjective, i.e. negative power of labour.

Marx’s critique of Hegel is that he only analysed the NEGATING activity within consciousness and did not go beyond its logic of SELF-NEGATION as he was entrapped in self-confirming, ontological abstractions – a tautological circle of Absolute NEGATIVITY that in real terms proved to be identical with absolute positivity. For Marx, this limitation resulted from Hegel’s uncritical belief in the concept of the Platonic Idea as containing an absolute and timeless truth.

For Marx, Hegel’s dialectic consists of an inner self-generating dynamic that constitutes outer reality. This analysis of the inner contradictions of consciousness Marx now applies to the capitalist mode of production. In the Science of Logic and the Encyclopaedia Hegel analysed contradictions at the following three levels: between concept and existence, concept and essence, and concept and reality, which Marx now redefines as dialectical tensions between form and content, appearance and essence, and existence and essence. Marx regards existence as the outer, visible level of the object and essence as its inner, invisible core. Their negativity would be embedded in theoretical critiques and in political praxis.

For Marx, critique is not merely a theoretical activity but must become political praxis as its real purpose is to negate existence in form of the present societal situation. Here we can see that Marx applies Hegel’s dialectic of the universal versus the particular and the whole versus its parts in a somewhat mechanical fashion.

In Hegel, the total system develops organically through repeated SELF-NEGATION while in Marx, change of societal consciousness is seen to result only from deliberate ongoing radical critiques. While in both thinkers, progress is based on the same pattern of objectification, negation, and supersession (cf. Levine 2012, p. 223), which for Marx, however, does not arise by itself but must be systematically promoted through political action.

3.2 The demystification of Hegel’s dialectic of NEGATIVITY

One of Marx’ main criticisms in Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right is that Hegel’s argument remains at the level of abstraction. It contains Marx’ alienation theory, which he develops on the basis of Feuerbach’s critique of religion:

For Germany, the criticism of religion has been essentially completed, and the criticism of religion is the prerequisite of all criticism... It is, therefore, the task of history, once the other-world of truth has vanished, to establish the truth of this world. It is the immediate task of philosophy, which is in the service of history, to unmask self-estrangement in its unholy forms once the holy form of human self-estrangement has been unmasked. Thus, the criticism of Heaven turns into the criticism of Earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law, and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics. (Marx 1970, pp. 131f)

Here, Marx challenges Hegel’s uncritical attitude towards criticism and identifies the hidden positivism in his writing that grasps human estrangement only as a thought form. About thirty years later, this point is most clearly expressed in the Postface of The Capital I’ s second German edition in 1873, where Marx explains his original intention to purify Hegel’s writing of its mystifications while at the same time retaining its genuine, critical elements:

I criticized the mystificatoty side of the Hegelian dialectic nearly thirty years ago, at a time when it was still the fashion. […] I therefore openly avowed myself the pupil of that mighty thinker, and even here and there, in the chapter on the theory of value, coquetted with the modes of expression peculiar to him. The mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands, by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general form of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner. With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.

In its mystified form, dialectic became the fashion in Germany, because it seemed to transfigure and to glorify the existing state of things. In its rational form it is a scandal and abomination to bourgeoisie and its doctrinaire spokesmen, because it includes in its positive understanding of what exists a simultaneous recognition of its inevitable destruction; because it regards every historically developed form as being in a fluid state, in motion, therefore grasps its transient aspect as well; and because it does not let itself be impressed by anything, being in its very essence critical and revolutionary. (C, pp. 102–103)

Similar to Kant’s transcendental subject, Hegel’s consciousness seeks to observe itself, and through this ability of self-reflection and self-criticism, it rises above itself and becomes increasingly self-conscious. The observation of consciousness by self-consciousness turns consciousness into an object. In this process, self-consciousness then becomes the actual

subject of change. The ground of absolute knowing is the unity of subject and object. Marx, however, refuses to postulate self-consciousness as the absolute historic subject because it is always already mediated by the actual life process in which it finds itself. Thus the life process itself must become the subject of history. Marx’ idea is that ‘Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life’.

Here, Marx uses the term ‘consciousness’ not simply as an instinctive, pre-reflective awareness of the world, but in a way in which man becomes aware of the actual life process in which he finds himself. He explains this point when he says that being conscious (bewusst sein) can never be anything else but conscious being (bewusstes Sein), and the being of man is the actual- life process. This life process is always specific and concrete, never general and abstract. Thus it becomes clear that Marx’ idea of consciousness is neither the rational Cartesian cogito, Kant’s transcendental subject, nor Hegel’s abstract self-consciousness. Instead, Marx uses the term in a similar way to Feuerbach which is non-abstract, i.e. sensuous, embodied consciousness, but in contrast to Feuerbach, it is also aware of the social and political conditions under which it arises, which motivates it into determinate negative action.

Hegel’s error in the Phenomenology was to mystify the actual relation between human consciousness and God, the subject and its object, critical philosophy and positive theology. Marx now develops his new concept of consciousness which is aware of the actual conditions under which it functions. Closely related to this critique of Hegel’s consciousness is his critique of Hegel’s concept of absolute Knowing as objectivity which Marx exposes as an estranged form of knowing and thus as ideological. On the other hand, Marx absorbs Hegel’s basic idea of freedom and self-determination that characterise the stage of Absolute Knowing.

By having demystified Hegel’s dialectic of NEGATIVITY, Marx formulates his own version of dialectic of negativity. In next section I will show how Marx applies his critique to the material conditions of society.

3.3 From idealist speculation to materialist critique

The radicality of Marx’ materialism is rooted in the claim that ‘saying is doing’ and ‘doing is saying’ (Balibar 1995, p. 17). Here, thinking and being are one and the same, which parallels Hegel’s phrase that ‘the rational is real and the real is rational’. It proposes only one single way to change the world which is to abolish the existing alienation since alienation, as Marx sees it, is the unhealthy root of all the social problems of society.

Marx’ materialism is quite different from the philosophical materialism of later Marxists who mistakenly attributed a materialistic philosophy to Marx’ doctrine. Marx never used the terms ‘dialectical or historical materialism’ (diamat or histomat) but only ‘dialectical method’ or ‘materialist conception of history’. In fact, Marx criticises the ancient reductive materialism and defends German idealism for having developed the methodological foundation for his materialism. Therefore, we cannot find an uncritical materialist ontology in Marx. Instead, Marx’ materialism may be labelled ‘dialectico- historical-socio-economic-objectivism’ (Kline 1989, p. 2). While Marx’ materialist philosophy grew out of Hegel’s idealism it always remained closely related to its inner dynamic of NEGATIVITY.

Hegel’s Phenomenology had such an effect on Marx that he draws most of his philosophical as well as his political-economic ideas from it. Its central vortex with which the young Marx wrestles is the ontological status of Hegel’s spirit that seeks to actualise its idea. The Idea is a fundamental category of Hegel’s ontology which manifests itself subjectively in human consciousness and objectively in social and political institutions. Hegel’s spirit is represented by the metaphysical subject whose inner thought process constitutes the essence of the Phenomenology. This becomes Feuerbach’s and Marx’ point of departure. Marx rebels particularly against the fact that Hegel had made real individuals merely bearers of this ‘metaphysical monster’, which he later explains in the postface to the second edition of The Capital:

For Hegel, the process of thinking, which he even transforms into an independent, subject under the name of ‘the Idea’, is the creator of the real world, and the real world is only the external appearance of the Idea. With me the reverse is true: the idea is nothing but the material world reflected in the mind of man, and translated into forms of thought. (C, p.102)

Here, Marx criticises Hegel’s absolutising of the idea as if it was the historic and ontological subject itself whereby the actual human subject is being downgraded to its predicate. What Marx insists on is that Hegel’s lopsided cause-effect relationship between the idea and human reality to be reversed and that the ontological structure of actual human reality to be recognised and acknowledged. Marx’ critique points out that the actual reality of the material world cannot be properly explained in a reductionistic fashion as merely the veil of an external appearance. The real world is neither an illusion nor just a thought form that blindly obeys Hegel’s simplistic syllogistic pattern of logic-nature-spirit since social-historic phenomena contain logical contradictions that defy such a simple schema (cf. Ameriks 2000, p. 264).

For example, Hegel’s ideas of economic wealth and the power of the state appear only at the non- physical level as thoughts which uncritically reflect Hegel's own alienated experiences in the form of rational bourgeois class consciousness. For Marx, economic wealth and the power of the state are real, historical entities. Hegel’s thinking is focused on the absolute spirit which manifests in art, religion and finally in philosophy. The young Marx initially also gives prominence to philosophy over social,

economic, and political realities but through Feuerbach's critique of Hegel he recognises the uncritical core in Hegel's idealism which leads him on to a materialist reinterpretation of Hegel in order to turn him from his head onto his feet.

In his Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx writes that man expresses his consciousness of the actual conflicts that he experiences in real life through his ideology. It contains the first connected account of the idea that the type of rationality that underlies the production process and thus the labour process has far reaching consequences for the whole of society:

In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. (Marx 1976, p. 3).

Unfortunately, the above excerpt has often been wrongly used to accuse Marx of reductionism, economic determinism, anti-idealism etc. without considering the Hegel’s categories like existence (being) and consciousness (thought) Marx has used. What this criticism ignores is that in this statement Marx expresses his insight that Hegel’s concept of the Idea was itself socially and economically conditioned, that it is an historic phenomenon whose foundation has to be sought not in the world of ideas itself but in the social-economic reality as experienced by him at the time. For Marx, the mode of production has a negative capacity.

Here, Marx sees outer objective reality as primary while Hegel relied on the inner dynamic of the subjective spirit as the motor of change. Both Hegel and Marx explain the transformation of the status quo, consciousness and reality, through the power of its inherent negativity whose subtle but pervasive unfolding cannot be explained by reducing it to a simple linear mechanism. The transformation that is taking place in consciousness is the result of determinate NEGATION. Marx adopts this concept and interprets it as the driving force of history which shows itself most directly in economic and technological stages of development which in turn shape the collective consciousness of societies in each respective stage. In this way, Marx adds the missing part in Hegel’s one-sided description of the evolution of the Spirit.

Hegel was well aware of the ‘cunning of reason’ in history (die List der Vernunft in der Geschichte) which is silent – a mysterious inner process. For Marx, this process is visible in bourgeois society. When the bourgeoisie maximises surplus value, it simultaneously, and unknowingly, produces its own

counter-force, which is the proletariat. It is society’s own negativity that transforms the current forms of alienation and exploitation.

Despite the cunning nature of reason, Hegel believed that history would nevertheless find ways to actualise its potential for freedom. This actualisation of freedom through mental labour is mediated via finite human consciousnesses who in turn actualise the freedom of the world spirit. It is in this mediation between the finite and the infinite that Hegel’s spirit longs to become one with its idea in the absolute. Marx regards man’s life activity first of all as physical labour which seeks to actualise the idea of what it means to be fully human. In its future-oriented process it always negates and destroys whatever turns out to be heteronomous in order to move on towards the next higher level of self-realisation. Thus Hegel and Marx share the same negative dynamic towards a better future based on two causal factors of change: mental and physical labour. Taken together as two complementary polarities between which human evolution unfolds, they appear to be inseparable. Thus neither Hegel’s nor Marx’ system would be able to stand alone as a total explanation of human history.

While Marx, unlike Engels who dealt with the insensate world of the natural sciences, focuses on the socioeconomic world, he is interested in the interdependency between man and nature. Hegel equally saw the ideal and the real not as absolute opposites but as interdependent parts of the same whole when logic turned into nature and nature into logic. For Hegel, no absolute distinction could be drawn between subjectivity and objectivity, Logic and Nature, the ideal and the real.

Marx’ attitude towards nature is closely related to Hegel’s notion of totality. It consists of sensate and insensate nature. While the actualising tendency in human sensate nature is consciously modifying the world, the non-human insensate nature is the unconscious part of the world. Both parts are an all encompassing and interdependent process. As the unconscious part of nature is being worked on by the conscious part it becomes ‘humanised’; which in Hegel’s terms means ‘spiritualised’.

According to Marx, meaning and gratification cannot be gained from within the active subjective part alone; there is a larger framework in which man finds himself and through which meaning, gratification, and fulfilment can be achieved. The outside world consists of both, insensate nature as well as other human subjects. Human nature cannot exist in total isolation at an exclusively contemplative level because even in contemplation other human beings are being imagined. Insensate nature is the materiality with which human labour interacts. In Hegel’s dialectic, Nature is the other of the Idea that turns into logic. For Marx, however, the insensate part of nature is not the negation of the sensate part. Instead, it is its essential source for its survival and historic development.

One aspect of Marx’ materialist criticism of Hegel is to demystify the dialectic of NEGATIVITY in

Hegel. In the following section I will explain how Marx applies Hegel’s concept of NEGATIVITY as his methodological tool.

3.4 NEGATIVITY as Marx’ Methodology

Marx discovers that the essence of Hegel’s dialectics is contained in the Science of Logic. But since this text does not deal with any social, economic, political or historic content as such, its essence may only be found in Hegel’s dialectic method. Thus Marx identifies Hegel’s essence as the dialectical movement of the Spirit itself, which is driven forward by its inherent NEGATIVITY.

In Grundrisse, Marx first formulates his theory of surplus value which simultaneously exposes Hegel’s notion of the ‘idea’ as a partial truth – not of consciousness itself but of a particular type of consciousness, which is bourgeois. In the Manuscripts, Marx had already described Hegel’s Logic as the epitome of bourgeois thought. Here, the ‘concept’ was Hegel’s core construct while its application to reality formed its outer shell.

Despite Hegel’s idealist metaphysical language and the fact that Hegel’s system was itself the end product of the era of enlightenment, his logic of negativity still seemed to be the best model of explanation for the new phenomenon of capitalism. Thus it transformed itself into ever new products, commodities, and money, just as Hegel’s thought was single-mindedly pursuing its own course from being to essence and to the concept.

In the most basic (onto-)logical terms, this is the movement from identity to difference and then from difference to contradiction. By applying the basic deductive pattern of Hegel’s Logic to the generation of capital, the transitions became clear, how a product appears as a commodity, how a commodity turns into money, and finally, how money accumulates capital (cf. Uchida 1988, p. 31). Here, Marx begins to translate Hegel’s qualitative categories of logic into quantitative categories of economics by which he reveals the proximity between the pre-modern and modern mindset. He shows how easy it was to transfer Hegel’s self-development of the Idea to the self-development of capital (cf. Uchida 1988, p. 20).

By studying this process of transformation in its microscopic moments as well as in its totality, Marx understood the power of negation as a creative power because it always created its opposite. As Marx (1973, p. 712) writes: “Everything that has a fixed form, such as a product, appears as merely a moment, a vanishing moment in this movement”.

In the course of development, nothing is fixed, all manifestations turn into ‘other’; non-identity and contradiction are essential moments in the understanding of this evolutionary process. It inheres in the parts as well as the whole since everything in a living system is being transformed into its opposite by which a gradually higher level of concentration is achieved.

Marx’ analytic thoroughness leads him to penetrate these movements in the generation of capital while his historic consciousness sensitises him to its overall effects on the development of the whole society. Perhaps the greatest lesson that Marx learns from Hegel here is this hermeneutic-dialectic mediation

between the parts and the whole which manifests as a series of fluid, momentary, and interdependent contradictions in the generation of capital (cf. Nicolaus 1973, p. 33).

In this transformation, negation not only posits a thing in-itself but also for-others (cf. Nicolaus 1973, p. 31). For Marx, the essence of capital has the same function. When a worker negates himself, he produces surplus value for others. The more wealth a worker produces for others, the more he negates himself.

Hegel began with the ‘indeterminate being’ and its opposite is ‘nothing’. Marx started with natural life, the life of nature, that the new industries appropriate, exploit and transform through the labour process from basic raw materials to the final product. Consumption is its opposite. Without consumption there is no production, without production there is no consumption. Production and consumption are just like the identity and non-identity of Hegel’s concept. In quantitative terms, Production must be identical with consumption which corresponds to Hegel’s identification of being and nothing. Marx’ starting point is a concrete, material process that turns into a product. When it enters the market, it turns into a commodity whose objective exchange value is not the same as its subjective use-value. In the development of Hegel’s concept there is a parallel movement from an apparent identity towards its actual non-identity as essence – an ontological unity in difference.

The Science of Logic revealed the plasticity of each of its thought moments, that an organic system needs its parts to be fluid in order to be able to turn into ‘other’ for them to function. Although the object as ‘other’ excludes the self as subject, it needs it for its own existence. Existence depends on what it excludes because each part is determined by what is external to itself. Marx writes:

The dissolution of all products and activities into exchange-values presupposes the dissolution of all fixed personal (historic) relations of dependence in production, as well as the all-sided dependence of the producers on one another. (Marx 1973, p. 156) Hegel saw that the immediate being is only an apparent truth, an illusion. There was something behind this apparent reality, an inner essence that wanted to be unleashed through the labour of the spirit which Hegel defines as determinate NEGATION. But because this labour is the labour of the Spirit, it only appears in objectified form as an ‘other’. This ‘other’ in Marx then becomes the product of industrial labour. As it is being externalised, it undergoes a metamorphosis from commodity to money to capital. It can be defined as the self-generated

NEGATIVITY within the circle of repeated returns.

The point of Hegel’s ontology, which becomes Marx’ theory of history, is that ultimately, the negative power, which has resided within the labour process as the historic subject from the very beginning, self- generates its own dynamic. Thus, Marx predicts that it will not devolve back to a more primitive

harmony with nature where use-value rules but rather that it will transcend the dualism between capital and labour and thus the existing monetary system (capitalism) itself because it is also a historical phenomenon which is subject to change.

In Hegel’s evolutionary logic, all thought categories must undergo a change process from identity to non-identity in relation to ‘other’. In his study of the interlinking circles of money and commodities, Capital and labour, Marx finds that classical economic theories could not explain this lawfulness of dialectical self-negation. Each category gains its identity only with reference to its non-identity. Capital and labour mutually exclude as well as constitute each other through their negative unity; each side emerges through the negation of the other.

In the capitalist production process, man as its original subject is being objectified – a twist that each labour unit further consolidates. Although labour is the source of capital, but under capitalist conditions it becomes its ontological other; as capital grows through the systematic exploitation of labour, labour is reduced not only to a mere means but this means constitutes a cost factor for the capitalist. In Hegelian terms, capital must negate its negation, i.e. the worker, in order to posit itself positively (cf. Arthur 2004, p. 58).

From Marx’ perspective, Hegel’s absolute spirit is no longer a separate, alien or divine power that magically supervises the production process from above but its actual inner life force that invisibly unifies all its parts into an organic whole. As Hegel’s Spirit constitutes objective reality by means of self-objectification, so does Marx’ capital constitute the objective reality by means of self- externalisation.

3.5 Alienation as Marx’ form of negativity

Although for Hegel, alienation always arises through objectification, he does not yet differentiate these terms with respect to historic conditions and their psychological and social implications. Marx discovers that each historic epoch contains its own unique forms of objectification which become more distinct, extreme, and thus alien to human nature the more the productive process becomes divided (geteilt) and fragmented (zersplittert). Here, Marx sees the level of technology and organisation that a society has developed as a result of the division of labour. For Marx, the crucial point here is that the labourer does not experience himself directly as the determining subject of his own acts anymore but only indirectly, mediated through the things he has created as the determined object of these externalised manifestations of his works.

Although in his later works, Marx abandons philosophical, anthropological and psychological terms in favour of socio-economic terms, the later concepts are directly derived and developed from Hegel’s

Science of Logic and its dialectical categories. In opposition to Hegel, and similarly to the ancient materialist philosophy of Epicurus, Marx insists that communal life does not originate from ideas but from real material needs and egoism. Therefore, alienation could not remain an abstract category of thought but must be recognised as a real phenomenon. In modern bourgeois society it already began to manifest as the most fundamental and pervasive psychological, social and economic syndrome because it inhered in all forms of mass production. Based on Hegel's stages of self-objectification of the Spirit, Marx realises that there are parallel historic forms of mediation that determine the living and working conditions of the individual against his will.

Hegel’s pre-industrial world view, having taken the absolute Spirit (God) as the ultimate subject of human history, conceived this spirit, due to the fact that it became trapped in human form, to be in a state of alienation from itself, from nature, and ultimately from God. For him, history was the necessary process through which the spirit becomes fully aware of itself and thereby overcomes its alienation.

After Hegel’s death, Feuerbach was able to expose Hegel’s God as a lopsided representation of man’s own powers projected into an imaginary ideal of himself.11 This was a paradigm shift from a religious to a secular world view which radically relativised the absoluteness of rationalist and idealist presuppositions that had dominated German and French philosophy for over two centuries.

In his Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Marx commends Feuerbach's analysis of religious alienation as it was most clearly stated in The Essence of Christianity. Then, in the Manuscripts Marx generalises the basic principle that Feuerbach found in religious alienation and applies it to the alienation of the labourer in the newly developing factories in Germany, France, and England.

As the production increases, the gap between the rich and the poor widens. Through specialisation to the extent of highly monotonous, repetitive hand movements that the worker has to perform throughout his working life, he becomes psychologically and socially impoverished:

All these consequences follow from the fact that the worker is related to the product of his labor as to an alien object. For it is clear in this presupposition that the more the worker expends himself in work, the more powerful becomes the world of objects which he creates in face of himself, the poorer he becomes in his inner life and the less he belongs to himself; it is just the same as in religion [...]. The alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labor becomes an object, assumes an external existence, but that it exists independently, outside himself that it stands opposed to him as an autonomous power. The life that he has given to the object sets itself against him as an alien and hostile force. (EPM, p. 95f)

However, alienation appears not only in the results, but also in the process of production, within productive activity itself. (EPM, p. 98)

11 For Feuerbach’s transformation of Hegel’s idea of God into naturalistic terms, see the chapter 2 in this study.

From this observation of alienated and alienating working conditions, Marx draws the conclusion that man becomes estranged not only from the process and product of his work but even from his innermost human nature as such which deeply affects all his relationships with his fellowmen. Labour in its non- alienated and non-monetary form, in contrast, is a genuine, self-determined life activity that constitutes the essence of a fulfiling human life. As a species being, man naturally wants to be free, productive, and self-aware.

For Marx, while the highest possible division of labour creates the highest possible wealth for the capitalist, it simultaneously impoverishes and alienates the detail-worker. As societies became more and more industrialised, this root problem of industrial man became more deeply entrenched, widespread and habitual until it appeared as quasi-natural.

Manuscripts contains a chapter entitled ‘Critique of Hegel’s Dialectic and General Philosophy’ in which Marx critiques the Young Hegelians, Feuerbach, and Hegel himself based on his reading of the Phenomenology.

For Hegel, the culmination of the developmental process of reason is the stage of absolute knowing, which emerges in and for itself. This knowledge is produced by a fully developed consciousness that is able to unite all opposition between finite, particular beings in an infinite, universal system by reconciling them in reason. For Marx, Hegel’s reason, despite its claim to be absolute and universal, is still alienated and false as it remains caught in a bourgeois framework through which this harmony is being defined. Since Hegel’s reason remains abstract and focused on totality, it does neither question its own historicity nor its political manifestation as the official ideology of the Prussian state. The question for Marx now is to what degree a post-bourgeois reality could be explained by bourgeois reason.

How are we to reconcile the conflict between reason and social-political reality? Are they not both historically conditioned? Hegel was concerned with ultimate ontological truth that transcends all dualities and contradictions – a magnitude that had not been reached by his predecessors. It required that epistemic consciousness itself had to transcend the very condition on which it depends: historical, phenomenal existence. Consciousness becomes unified when it frees itself from the ignorance that is contained in the world of appearances. By realising the empty essence of all appearances, subjective consciousness can, and therefore, must transcend the limitations of sense perception and become truly objective and free. This, however, can only be achieved via a radical and final discontinuity – the conscious experience of its own absolute NEGATIVITY.

In section XII of the Manuscripts, Marx acknowledges Feuerbach as the only person who was able to critique Hegel’s dialectic, especially by opposing Hegel’s notion of the NEGATION OF NEGATION as his absolute positive – a self-subsistent principle positively founded on itself. But Marx soon realises that

Feuerbach conceived the NEGATION OF NEGATION as a contradiction within philosophy only. For

Feuerbach, Hegel merely discovered an abstract, logical, and speculative principle of the historical process, which is not yet the real history of man but only the history of the act of creation. By mystifying this act of creation and by shying away from the fact that this act of creation is actually the act of self- creation through the genius of man, Hegel failed to overcome the dogmatic taboo hidden in theology and philosophy. This was Feuerbach’s brave exposure of Hegel’s idealistic secret and the necessary precondition for Marx’ work to come.

Hegel’s being blindly objectifies itself by distinction from, and in opposition to ‘nothing’ as abstract thought, which has to be transcended. Despite the Phenomenology’s negative and critical appearance, there is already implicit from the very beginning as a germ, a potentiality and a secret, the uncritical positivism and idealism of Hegel’s later works – the philosophical dissolution and restoration of the existing empirical world. In this world, nature is recognised only as man’s products, as products of an abstract mind, as entities of thought. Thus, in line with Feuerbach, Marx states:

The Phenomenology is a concealed, unclear and mystifying criticism, but in so far as it grasps the alienation of man (even though man appears only as mind) all the elements of criticism are contained in it, and are often presented and worked out in a manner which goes beyond Hegel’s own point of view. The selection devoted to the “unhappy consciousness”, the “honest consciousness”, the struggle between the “noble and base consciousness”, etc., etc. contain the critical elements (though still in an alienated form) of whole areas such as religion, the state, civil life, etc. (EPM, p. 176)

The extent to which the Phenomenology points beyond Hegel’s own point of view is brought to light by Marx’ understanding not only of the positive aspect of reason within labour but also of its negative aspect which governs both, Hegel's alienation through abstraction as well as the proprietor’s alienation through monetarisation. In both cases man is stripped off his essential human nature. The more the productive process becomes rationalised via differentiation and specialisation the less human it becomes.

Hegel’s objects appear only as entities of thought abstracted from nature and the nature of man – their real determinateness – which are being transformed until they are fully absorbed within the subject. For Marx, however, this logic is not as objective or neutral as it presents itself. Hegel’s subject always appears to be fully rational in relation to its object while seeking to free itself from alienation – its entrapment in externalised form (Entäußerung).12 Marx’ point is that Hegel was not aware that his own thinking is itself already a function of the alienated presuppositions of bourgeois society. The outcome of such alienated thinking, Marx insists, is the apparent identity of consciousness with itself, i.e.

12 English translators have referred to two German words: Entfremdung and Entäußerung, to translate the idea of alienation. Entäußerung is equivalent to the English word, ‘estrangement’, and Entäußerung signifies ‘externalisation’. Lukács’ idea is that these two words are the German translation of the English word, ‘alienation’. Marx clearly differentiated ‘objectification’ (Vergegenständlichung) from alienation (Entäußerung). For full terminological exposition of these terminology, see Arthur (1982).

absolute Knowing. Hegel’s mind is estranged from the real world thinking within its self-estrangement – blinded by the brightness of its own abstraction.

On the other hand, Marx also acknowledges the outstanding achievement of Hegel’s Phenomenology which is precisely the realisation of its inherent dialectic of NEGATIVITY as the moving and generating principle. What he finds is that Hegel first of all conceives the self-creation of man as a process, conceives objectification as a loss of the object, as alienation and as transcendence of this alienation; that he thus grasps the essence of labour and comprehends objective man – true, because real man – as the outcome of man’s own labour. The real, active orientation of man to himself as a species-being, or his manifestation as a real species-being as a human being, is only possible if he really brings out all his species-powers – something which in turn is only possible through the cooperative action of all of mankind, only as the result of history – and treats these powers as objects: and this, to begin with, is again only possible in the form of estrangement (XXIII).

Marx points out that in the final chapter of the Phenomenology which deals with the final supersession of the object of consciousness, Hegel conceives labour as the self-confirming essence of man, but only from its positive, optimistic side: labour is man’s coming to be for himself under alienated conditions. Labour, for Hegel, is abstract mental labour. Its essence is the alienated philosopher who is gradually coming to know his own mind. But Hegel’s science remains an alienated science because it can think itself only from within its own presuppositions. Its object of consciousness is nothing else but self- consciousness objectified. But objectivity is already based on an alienated human relationship as it does not fully correspond with the essence of man, self-consciousness. Therefore, the objective essence of man must supersede not only alienation but also objectivity so that man can define himself as a non- objectified human being. Man is presented here as essentially self-referring. The self, abstracted and determined for itself, is man as an abstract egoist, purely abstract egoism raised to the level of thought. The science which comprehends this is Hegel’s Phenomenology (XXIV).

For Hegel, the supersession of the object of consciousness means 1. that the object presents itself as something disappearing; 2. that it is the alienation of self-consciousness which posits ‘thinghood’; 3. that this alienation has not only a negative but also a positive significance; 4. that it has this significance not only for us or in itself, but also for self-consciousness itself; 5. for self-consciousness, the negative of the object, has a positive significance because of the fact that it alienates itself, for in this alienation it posits itself as object, or, for the sake of the indivisible unity of being-for-itself, posits the object as itself;

6. on the other hand, self-consciousness has superseded and re-absorbed this alienation and is thus objectively at home in its other being as such; 7. this is the movement of consciousness, and therefore, the totality of its movements; and 8. consciousness must similarly be related to the object in all its determinations and must comprehended it in terms of each of them. This totality of determinations makes the object intrinsically a spiritual being, and becomes so in truth for consciousness through the apprehending of each one of the determinations as self, or through the spiritual attitude to them.

Marx adopts these eight points from §§ 1 and 3 of the last chapter (absolute Knowing) of Hegel’s Phenomenology and then explains them as follows:

Re 1. That the object presents itself to consciousness as something vanishing is the return of the object into the self.

Re 2. Thinghood is an object for consciousness, its objective essence. Self-consciousness, being an abstraction of man, can therefore only be alienated self-consciousness. Alienation can only establish thinghood, an abstract thing, a thing created by abstraction, not a real thing.

In XXVI, Marx points out that thinghood is absent in independence and that it is a mere construct that is established by self-consciousness. It fixes its energy as a product and confers upon it the role of an independent real being. Man is a living, embodied, sentient being endowed with natural powers as faculties which exist in him as tendencies, abilities or drives. He is suffering, conditioned, limited like animals and plants. This means that he relates to real, sensuous objects and that he expresses his being in real objects. To be objective and to have object nature for a third person is the same. Hunger is a natural need; it requires a nature outside itself to be satisfied and stilled. A being which does not relate outside itself is not a natural, organic being, and does not share in the life of nature.

In XXVII, Marx points out that a being that is neither an object nor has an object is alone. But as soon as I have an object outside myself I am a different reality for it and thus an object myself. A non- objective being is merely a conceived being, an imagination, an abstraction. To be sentient is to experience, which means to suffer. Man as an objective, sentient being is a suffering being, and since he feels his suffering, a passionate being. Passion is man’s faculty that strives to attain the object. Being for himself, he is a species being, and as such he has to express and authenticate himself in being and thought. As everything natural must have its origin, so man has his process of genesis, which is his history - a conscious process that seeks to transcend itself.

Re 3. Since the establishment of thinghood is only an appearance, an act that contradicts the nature of pure activity, it must be dissolved. For consciousness, this negation of the object has a positive significance; by externalising itself (Entäußerung) it knows itself as the object and knows the object as itself. On the other hand, by superseding and re-absorbing this alienation consciousness negates itself

in order to come home in its other being. But as far as it results in self-confirmation of the non- objectivity of itself this supersession is not really genuine and Hegel's criticism is merely an apparent criticism. In this sense, Hegel belied his own principle of NEGATION.

Re 4. Sections XXVIII and XXIX are the core of Marx’ critique of Hegel. Here, he penetrates Hegel’s knowing as consciousness’ own activity, which is its only objective relation. In this process all the illusions of speculation are present. Thus Reason is at home in Unreason. Hegel seems to believe that man who recognises that he leads an alienated life would automatically lead a true human life. Self- affirmation, in contradiction with its conditions, would thus be the true knowledge and life. This was Hegel’s delusion which Marx exposes.

Re 5, 6, 7. In section XXIX, Marx, by following and generalising Feuerbach’s insight, makes clear that Hegel’s NEGATION OF NEGATION is not the confirmation of the true essence of being. Instead, it is the confirmation of its pseudo-essence, the denial of the possibility of transformation into a real subject. The estranged essential reality of man is merely the thought of estrangement and therefore an empty NEGATION. The supersession of the alienation is nothing but an abstract, empty supersession of that empty abstraction – the NEGATION OF

NEGATION. The sensuous activity of self-objectification is reduced to its mere abstraction, absolute NEGATIVITY – an abstraction which is considered to be an independent activity as sheer activity.

In Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, private right superseded equals morality, morality superseded equals the family, the family superseded equals civil society, civil society superseded equals the state, the state superseded equals world history. In actuality, all these are moments or modes of existence which have no validity in isolation but mutually engender and dissolve one another.

In section XXX, Marx comes to the positive meaning of self-referred NEGATION where Hegel grasps man’s self-estrangement, the alienation of man’s essence, man’s loss of objectivity and his loss of realness as self-discovery, as the manifestation of his nature, as objectification and as realisation. In short, within the sphere of abstraction, Hegel conceives labour as man’s act of self-genesis – conceives man’s relation to himself as an alien being and the manifestation of himself as an alien being to be the emergence of species-consciousness and species-life.

Then, Marx conceives the real supersession of the objective world in its estranged mode of being at two levels: While atheism, forming the cultural superstructure mediated with itself, would supersede religion which he sees to be the advent of theoretical humanism; Communism, forming its basis mediated with itself, would be the supersession of private property which constitutes the advent of

practical humanism. Only through the supersession of this mediation does positively self-deriving humanism come into being.

Re 8. Section XXXI points out that although Hegel conceived labour as man’s act of self-creation (though in abstract terms) and grasps man’s relation to himself as an alien being and the emergence of species consciousness, but this act of genesis remained a mental act due to his presupposition that the essence of human nature is self-consciousness. Since Hegel’s annulment of alienation remains at the thought level, he in fact, confirms it in reality. The movement from self-creation to self-objectification in the end returns to itself by which it becomes its own absolute and final self-confirmation. It has its end in itself, is at peace with itself, at one with its own nature. Hegel regards this dialectic movement as a divine and thus an absolute process without questioning himself as his creator, thus confusing subjectivity with objectivity.

But for Marx, this process must have a real subject, which in Hegel emerges only at the very end as its result. This subject that absolutely knows itself is the absolute Spirit, the self-manifesting idea, which are Hegel’s synonyms for God. Real man and real nature become mere predicates, symbols of this concealed, unreal man and unreal nature. Subject and predicate are therefore related to each other in absolute reversal – a mystical subject-object or a subjectivity reaching beyond the object – the absolute Subject as a process, as subject alienating itself and returning from alienation back into itself, but at the same time retracting this alienation into itself, and the subject as this process; a pure, incessant revolving within itself.

In this vacuum of abstraction, the NEGATION OF NEGATION is an abstract NEGATIVITY without any content which Hegel ontologises as a self-generated, independent activity, as activity itself. As a purely formal abstraction it appears to be neutral towards any content and thus impotent of real change.

In section XXXII, Marx says that the whole exercise of Hegel’s logic is a demonstration that abstract thought is nothing for itself. The mystical feeling which drives the philosopher from abstract thinking to intuition is the longing for a distinct content. Man alienated from himself is the thinker alienated from his being, i.e. from his natural and human life. But since his NEGATION OF NEGATION remains confirmed within the alienation, it is, at least in part, a restoration of these fixed spiritual forms as they revolve within themselves. As this abstraction experiences an increased weariness with itself, logic turns into the philosophy of nature, which as natural philosophy then becomes unmediated intuition.

In section XXXIII, Marx makes clear that nature, taken abstractly for itself, rigidly separated from man, would be nothing for man. The abstract thinker who works intuitively, intuits nature abstractly, as an entity of thought, never regarding external reality, is simply abstracting from real natural characteristics.

His intuition is, therefore, simply the act of confirmation of his abstraction, for example, time equals NEGATIVITY.

3.5.1 From objectification to alienation

Both, Hegel and Marx, deal with the process of production. According to Hegel, the Spirit produces thoughts which in turn produce reality. For Marx, the life process itself is productive which manifests most clearly in the way commodities are being produced. The level of economic organisation and technology determines the type of thoughts a society produces. Both forms of production produce specific forms of alienation which must be overcome. Although Hegel gives a detailed account of alienation but for him it remains a problem of consciousness – a self-imposed limitation that Marx finds intolerable.

Since for Hegel, man’s essence is self-consciousness that seeks to overcome its alienation, i.e. its irrationality, human evolution at the individual as well as at the collective level is nothing but the struggle towards freedom and absolute Knowing as synonyms for the ultimate realisation of reason. From this idealistic vantage point, Hegel was unable to understand alienation in real terms and to develop a critique of the real world (cf. Arthur 1986, p. 61). While Marx seeks a practical solution for the most fundamental human problem of history as manifestations of irrationality, Hegel offers a speculative solution which in effect merely proliferates further philosophical reinterpretations.

For Hegel, self-consciousness always seeks to objectify itself. At each stage of development consciousness expresses itself in a specific way that characterises this stage. This externalisation of the inner dynamic turns thoughts into thing-like objects as separate objective entities that then reflect back to consciousness their own unique nature as its non-identical ‘other’. Marx points out that Hegel here confuses objectivity with alienation as he merely focuses on the process of self-objectification (cf. Arthur 1986, p. 64).

Having penetrated this self-referring circularity in Hegel’s progression, Marx then uses this basic pattern of objectification in order to overcome it in real terms by applying it to the alienation of the subject under the capitalist mode of production. By this real externalisation of Hegel’s subject, he frees it from its idealist cage (cf. Lukács 1975, pp. 551-552). For him, it is clear that alienation is the result of the division and fragmentation of labour in the real world.

Here, it is important to understand Marx’ departure from Hegel’s interpretation of alienation. Hegel addressed the various stages of consciousness as estranged forms of reason and reduced them to an ontological problem of non-identity while simultaneously ignoring their actual historicity.

Although Hegel recognised alienation as a temporary problem of consciousness he simultaneously reduced its human significance to an unavoidable phase in the overall process

of the evolution of the Spirit.13 For Hegel, it is clear that consciousness can understand itself only through the experience of self-objectification and its resulting subjective and objective alienation. In hindsight, from the perspective of its successful transcendence, this experience takes on a positive meaning whenever it has led onwards to a higher stage in the overall evolution of the World Spirit. But in order to find itself, consciousness must first confront its apparent identity in order to discover that it is not identical with its pure essence. Thus the work involves repeated self-reflections. The more radical and honest it becomes the more it develops into genuine self-criticism which results in repeated SELF-NEGATION until the subject has been able to make the quantum leap into Absolute Knowing. For Hegel, this self-edifying process of the spirit is purely mental labour, independent and detached from the real social-economic conditions of society.

The second major aspect of his critique of Hegel’s concept of alienation, as already referred to above, is that Hegel only considers the positive side of labour from the perspective of its eventual success which bypasses the need for real externalisation. Thus Hegel’s sublation of alienation remains empty of content and remote from the rich, sensuous reality of the living individual. As a result, the whole process of liberation becomes shrouded in mystery. Because real life is reduced to an alienated thought form in Hegel, his criticism is merely an apparent criticism:

When real, corporeal man, with his feet firmly planted on the solid ground, inhaling and exhaling all the powers of nature, posits his real objective faculties, as a result of his alienation, as alien objects, the positing is not the subject of this act but the subjectivity of objective faculties whole action must also, therefore, be objective. (EPM, p. 181)

Marx then produces the decisive move beyond Hegel when he explores how economic mass production is based on the objectification and alienation of labour. As Marx develops his revolutionary social- political praxis, he discards Hegel’s idealist metaphysical language but carefully retains and reabsorbs its radical dialectic method.

In his Philosophy of Right, Hegel criticises the ethical corruption of bourgeois society and the spiritual impoverishment of the workers due to the fact that they lead a lawless and thus subhuman existence. He writes about the alienation of rabble as being a manifestation of the inner dialectic of civil society. The apolitical status of the rabble symbolises for Hegel an invert rebellion against the rich. It represents the suppressed NEGATIVITY of civil society. Here, Hegel already demonstrates that the freedom of the

13 Hegel writes (PS § 788): “but rather that it is the externalisation of self-consciousness that posits the thinghood (of the object) and that this externalisation has not merely a negative but a positive meaning, a meaning which is not only for us or in itself, but for self-consciousness itself.”

collective spirit implies the freedom of each individual person. In this sense, Marx discovers in Hegel a radical humanist and ‘secret communist’. When Hegel identifies a rationalist praxis for overcoming alienation in consciousness, Marx formulates a political praxis for overcoming real human alienation in capitalist society. In both cases NEGATION is in the centre.

3.5.2 The negative force within labour

Hegel conceived the act of self-genesis as an exclusively mental process which he saw to be quite distinct from, and independent of, external living conditions. This process becomes activated via self- objectification which leads to self-alienation, but it sooner or later inevitably results in the transcendence of this alienation at a higher level of self-consciousness. As consciousness develops further it becomes more and more unified with itself. For Hegel, this was the essence of human labour.

Marx locates the source of human labour not in consciousness but in nature, including human nature. A human being is a natural being engaged with nature in order to survive and develop. Here, Marx follows Feuerbach who saw human nature as a material species being. In Hegel’s Phenomenology, the real human being did not appear; only his Spirit appeared as an abstract being. Despite this abstraction, Hegel was nevertheless able to recognise a certain lawfulness that drives human development forward.

He defined it as the NEGATIVE capacity within consciousness, as the labour of consciousness, that is able to produce ever higher and purer forms of knowledge.

Marx derives his concept of productive activity from Hegel’s notion of NEGATIVITY within mental labour. The difference lies in his realisation that this negativity becomes activated through the self- objectification of human species power which is embedded not only in mental labour but in real, physical labour, too. Here, Hegel’s NEGATIVITY and Marx’ productive activity serve the same function. Marx, having been able to directly observe the rise of industrialisation now studies the general principle that drives this productive activity forward which leads to increasing differentiation. He realises that the alienating effect of objectification in capitalist forms of production is deliberate and unconscious. It is deliberate as it must ruthlessly follow the rational principle of profit maximisation in each of its units in order to survive and thrive within the capitalist system, and it is unconscious with regard to its overall effect on the worker, the entrepreneur, and society at large

By studying the movement of the Spirit in Hegel’s Phenomenology as it repeatedly objectifies itself in order to find itself, Marx discovers its inherent dynamic of negativity which he recognises as the general principle that guides the economic activities in each epoch of human history.

As each new stage emerges at a higher level of development in Hegel’s Spirit, so does in Marx’ economic analysis of capitalism a new product become a new source of enrichment for the proprietor while the worker is proportionately reduced to a mere means of production.

Hegel regarded productive activity from an ontological point of view as it must meditate itself within consciousness in order to become more aware of itself. Marx views the productive activity in capitalism to be not ontologically self-mediated within consciousness but rather to be historically mediated. As ever new forms of production evolve in history they all share the same determining factor which classical economic theory identified as the extent to which the division of human labour has progressed.

By carefully comparing Marx’ formulation of the negative capacity of labour with Hegel’s Preface to his Phenomenology, their parallels become visible: Hegel’s Spirit mediates itself through its NEGATIVE power within consciousness; it objectifies itself, becomes alienated, and then transcends its current state of alienation. Here the spirit’s labour is to wrestle with itself by repeatedly grasping and juxtaposing itself in order to become its own product.

Meszaros (1970, p. 19) defines the core of Marx’ work from the Manuscripts to The Capital as the transcendence of self-alienation through labour. For Marx, man as subject cannot produce anything out of nothing; he needs the other, the object in order to become productive. In productive activity it is not just the mind itself but nature that becomes his own other. Here, Marx turns Hegel’s self- transforming spiritual labour into physical labour that transforms nature.

In both cases, the transformative, i.e. negative, nature of labour is the fundamental category that defines human existence. Hegel saw this process always in the same positive light. Therefore, he was not yet sensitised to the problematic of how the mind and the body become enslaved under their own labour. Having personally witnessed and conceptualised this dimension within capitalist labour, Marx anticipates that the contradiction between wage labour and private capital would eventually be overcome by some kind of revolutionary praxis.

Marx’ last Feuerbach Thesis shows that his analysis is driven by a genuine intention to not only describe this inner dynamic from a distance but to directly engage with it in order to help transform it. Hegel, in contrast, remained aloof from the reality on the ground without realising that this aloofness was itself a form of alienation that reflected the mentality of the bourgeois middle class of his time.

Marx extends his critique and appreciation of Hegel and Feuerbach in Feuerbach Theses in which Marx identifies the negative force in real sensuous activity.

3.6 Negation as the mode of changing existing reality

About a year after the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts, Marx writes eleven Theses on

Feuerbach as a basic outline for the first chapter of the book The German Ideology. Here, Marx gives credit to Feuerbach with regard to his empirical-anthropological method of addressing

issues from the viewpoint of common experience. Given this background, Marx then formulates his first thesis:

The chief defect of all previous materialism (that of Feuerbach included) is that things [Gegenstan], reality, sensuousness are conceived only in the form of the object, or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively. Hence, in contradistinction to materialism, the active side was set forth abstractly by idealism—which, of course, does not know real, sensuous activity as such. Feuerbach wants sensuous objects, really distinct from conceptual objects, but he does not conceive human activity itself as objective activity. In Das Wesen des Christenthums, he therefore regards the theoretical attitude as the only genuinely human attitude, while practice is conceived and defined only in its dirty-Jewish form of appearance. Hence he does not grasp the significance of "revolutionary", of "practical-critical", activity. (Marx/Engels 1976, p. 3)

In this first thesis, Marx states his objections to all hitherto existing idealism and materialism. He commends materialism for trying to understand physical reality, but he criticises it for ignoring the intentional, pro-active side of the human subject that contains the power to create a new world. Idealism, at least as developed by Kant and Hegel, understood the active nature of the human subject, but confined it to the activity of thinking: the world is created through the thought categories that we impose upon it. Marx now combines the insights of both traditions to propose a view in which human beings do indeed create and transform the world they find themselves in, but this transformation happens not in thought, not through the imposition of sublime concepts, but through actual material activity, through the sweat of their brow, with picks and shovels. This historical version of materialism, which negates all existing philosophical thought as primary, becomes the foundation of Marx’ later theory of history.

Marx’ contribution to philosophy is his reframing of dialectics from an idealist method of deductive, ontological logic towards a real category of history. Feuerbach’s positive doctrine was the assertion of an unmediated unity between man and nature. He seemed to identify mediation as such with a self- contradictory thought that is placed between consciousness and its object which would deepen rather than heal the alienation between the mind and its physical manifestation, the body.

For Marx by contrast, man’s unity with nature is not just immediately given as in animals but man as a species being is characterised by his search to become self-conscious via his creations, by making his own life activity the object of his willing and thinking in order to be free. Alienated work reverses this direction when this deliberate, free life activity is reduced to a mere means for physical survival. Therefore, the determining factor for freedom is the degree to which production has been humanised. This dimension that Marx derives from Hegel’s idea of activity – an activity which develops through alienation, and the struggle to overcome it – is missing in Feuerbach who saw in Hegel’s problematic

of alienation only the self-delusion of a philosophy estranged from the real world, one which refuses to abandon itself to sensuousness.

Marx states that for man as a species being to be free requires a real historical development out of the struggle towards the self-production of the ontological essence of man. Feuerbach saw freedom only in ethical and sensual terms. Feuerbach simply posits the ‘communal essence’ of man as an empirical fact based on the individual’s need for mutual recognition against the unjustified conceptual domination of theology and philosophy. Marx acknowledges Feuerbach’s achievement of having counter-posed

Hegel’s NEGATION OF NEGATION with the positivity of the real individual who claims the right to define his own purpose in life. Thus Feuerbach’s rejection of Hegel’s abstraction is motivated by his interest in empowering the empirical person, whom Hegel’s idealist bias had reduced to the status of an ‘externality’ to be sublated.

In the second of the Theses on Feuerbach, Marx addresses this practical dimension:

The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory, but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth, i.e., the reality and power, the this-worldliness of his thinking in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking which is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question. (Marx/Engels 1976, p. 3)

Here, Marx promotes an action-oriented theory that seeks to develop a particular kind of knowledge which no longer seeks to build abstract, logical systems out of speculations but which aims at practical emancipation:

One has to ‘leave philosophy aside’ […] one has to leap out of it and devote oneself like an ordinary human being to the study of actuality[...] Philosophy and the study of the real world have the same relation to one another as onanism and sexual love. (Marx/Engels 1976 p. 236)

While the first activity is unproductive, the second one is productive because it is life enhancing. Here, Marx comes across as an anti-philosopher. Idealist philosophy started from ideas and ended in ideas. Marx insists that if critical philosophy wants to have an impact on real life it must first seek to understand real, active man who are fully involved in the actual life-process without imposing an abstract, ready-made system of ideas onto them.

When Hegel logically fused mind and reality, he actually distorted reality while blaming nature for this distortion. The locus of Hegel’s philosophy was the inner world of the mind, but for Marx, the real function of philosophy is to critically test the dominant theory with respect to its practical relevance. Since Hegel’s self-consciousness lacked an agent for political praxis, Marx seeks to replace Hegel’s self-referring consciousness with a consciousness that refers to deliberate social and political praxis. In this way, he tries to free Hegel’s speculative philosophy from its entrapment in circular reason. The

famous last thesis reads: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it” (Marx/Engels 1976, p. 5)

The change is negating the existing order. In The German Ideology, Marx, together with Engels, contrasts his new materialist method with the idealism of Kant and Hegel. His ambition is to start from ‘real human beings’, who are naturally productive, in that they must produce their means of subsistence in order to satisfy their material needs. The satisfaction of needs in turn then engenders further material and social needs, and a form of society arises that corresponds to the state of the development of human productive forces, which is characterised by the degree of the division of labour. Material life determines social life, and so the primary direction of social explanation is from material production to forms of social interaction, and hence to forms of consciousness. As the material, i.e. technological means of production develop, new modes of cooperation emerge that manifest in new organisational structures, until eventually, communism becomes a real possibility. At that point, a critical mass of people has achieved a level of self-awareness that motivates them to revolutionise society.

For Marx, the core of Hegel’s whole philosophy consists of objectification, NEGATION and sublation, a core that Feuerbach ignored. Marx here begins to absorb and fill this core with political content. The revolutionary aspect of the subject, its negative capability, neither in its abstract nor in its concrete sense, had been recognised by Feuerbach (cf. Arthur 1983a, p. 16).

The distinct achievement of the young Marx is this realisation of the NEGATIVE core of Hegel’s dialectics out of which he then develops his mature work. In Feuerbach, there is no place for the historic dialectic of negativity. But for Marx, the DIALECTIC OF NEGATIVITY is the actual revolutionary essence of Hegel’s ontology. From this perspective, we can now see Marx’ conceptual proximity to Hegel which is constituted by their common emphasis on the primacy of the negative character of productive activity. It is in this precise sense that Marx moves beyond Feuerbach’s critique of Hegel.

Since Feuerbach did not recognise the revolutionary core of Hegel’s method he could not produce a systematic approach to social-political practice. By replacing Hegel’s abstraction with his concept of sensuousness as direct, unmediated experiencing in positive communal practice, he missed the deeper dynamic of NEGATIVITY that underlies Hegel’s system.

Thus Feuerbach missed Hegel’s central methodological point: the absolute is to be conceived as both Substance and Subject. As he over-focused on the substantial aspect of species-being, Feuerbach only saw its positive side and thus overlooked the pro-active nature of subjectivity. But it is precisely this pro-active subject aspect of the Absolute which contains the power of transformation, the essential

NEGATIVITY. The NEGATIVITY is the power which opposes all determinations, and the absolute-qua- subject negates the abstractness of the absolute-qua-substance. In other words, Feuerbach simply missed the active side of German idealism. Marx makes this point very clearly in fifth Feuerbach thesis:

Feuerbach, not satisfied with abstract thinking, wants [sensuous] contemplation; but he does not conceive sensuousness as practical human- sensuous activity. (Marx/Engels 1976, p. 4)

Marx concludes that man in Feuerbach’s conceptualisation is not an independent productive force but trapped in pre-human nature (cf. Schmidt 1971, p. 27). For Marx, nature is an element of human practice. He does not, unlike Feuerbach, merely want to replace Hegel’s immaterial World Spirit with a material world substance. In order to overcome the problems of this ancient dualism, Marx rejects Feuerbach’s one-sided sensualism and emphasises the need to activate man’s whole being in order to achieve a non-alienated kind of knowledge (cf. Hook 1962, p. 274). Knowledge is generated through determined negative action; it is not just passively received, or positively produced out of nothing through mere sense perception.

As Marx formulates in first Feuerbach Thesis, his materialism has active, sensuous, practical and subjective side. In the following sections I will show how Marx absorbs and transforms Hegel’s concepts in order to formulate his own revolutionary theory and praxis while retaining Hegel’s core- principle of NEGATION.

3.7 The power of negation in the proletariat

The whole evolution of consciousness in Hegel arises and is maintained from within the negative force of this subject alone. To him, the subject’s overwhelming desire is to go beyond its object as its inner nature is geared towards the transcendence of all finite forms of identification. This kind of ambition, which we might call romantic or spiritual from today’s perspective, infuses Hegel’s otherwise highly abstract and rational process with a certain radicality and mysticism. In its absolute stage, Hegel’s imaginary subject becomes omniscient; his synonyms are the ‘absolute spirit’, the ‘self-manifesting idea’, or simply ‘God’. This final switch into the absolute Spirit in an otherwise purely logical development had a rather counterproductive effect in the sense that real men and real nature were suddenly reduced to the subject’s predicates, to human means for the self-actualisation of the Spirit (cf. EPM, p. 190).

In his Phenomenology and Science of Logic Hegel merely seems to describe a formal and logical pattern in the evolution of consciousness – a process in which the subject merely tries to actualise its latent potential. However, the deeper we delve into Hegel’s subjectivity the more we are led into an unknown and unknowable mystical realm. To be able to specify Hegel’s real intention behind this abstract logical formalism we would need to go through his total body of writing and relate it to his biography and the Zeitgeist of his time.

It is not clear, whether and to which degree Marx was actually able to adequately carry out this hermeneutic task. What Marx did see in Hegel’s pro-active subjectivity was the metaphysical ground for his own revolutionary subject, the proletariat, his notion of human labour, as well as the need for collective political action. In this sense, Marx imposed his own interpretation onto Hegel’s highly ambiguous abstractions while believing that his assessment was objective and correct, and thus scientific.

Although Marx was fully aware of Hegel’s methodology but some doubts remain whether, and to which degree, he was able to understand Hegel’s idea of the subject as Spirit. In Hegel, the function of consciousness is to actively confront and fully experience its alienation in the unshakeable belief that it will eventually overcome it once and for all. Here, the function of Hegel’s concept of labour is to penetrate all appearances in order to realise their common essence which always turns out to be empty of content and thus negative. During this process, Hegel’s subjectivity is itself pro-actively and untiringly transforming itself while all its objects dissolve into nothing. The logical end result of this whole process is that the subject becomes absolute.

Marx places Hegel’s concept of subjectivity into the hands of the proletariat. The term ‘proletariat’ became a new category of thought which evolved with the rise of industrialisation since the mid 18th century in England. It is important to realise that for Marx, the proletariat was not the working class as such but he used this term as a synonym for the critical mass that could be sufficiently mobilised to not only rebel against isolated, inhuman conditions but against the existing ‘life production’ (Lebensproduktion) itself, which meant the total activity on which society was based.

Marx envisions that it would only be the proletariat that could become the revolutionary subject as it could fully activate its power of negativity since it is not only productive in real terms but it also contains the potential power to destroy the class structure of society as such. For him, this proletariat had the capacity to overcome the contradiction between reality and thought, and eventually overcome itself by totally transforming the capitalist mode of production. True subjectivity, therefore, is realised only through political praxis – the revolutionary action of the proletariat.

The deeper reason why Marx allocates his hope in the collective negativity of a revolutionary aggregate like the proletariat seems to be based not on materialist hopes for equality, shared ownership of capital, or the struggle for power and control but rather to reconnect with a totally different quality of life, free of fear, exploitation and any kind of dehumanising threats so that the individual could actualise his potential and become truly human.

Another reason why Marx believed in the proletariat was his interpretation of the general Zeitgeist of his epoch as well as Engels’ assessment of the workers’ potential to dissolve the existing order and their apparent readiness to change themselves through self-education (Selbstveränderung). Their deepest motive for radical change, Marx believed, lay in the proletariat’s instinctive realisation that the capitalist

system had victimised and humiliated them, that they had been the ones who had to endure the most unjustified suffering, and that they had been most alienated from their true nature (cf. Balibar 1995, p. 26).

In the Phenomenology, Hegel’s subjectivity found itself in opposition to the mere factuality of individual events and even the totality of the status quo. Therefore, critical, emancipatory subjectivity represented the negative force within history which generates a dynamic of development and relativises the seeming absoluteness of the existing historical situation. In Hegel’s terms, this was the Spirit’s determined effort to overcome its objectified and alienated state of affairs.

Marx’ perspective of negativity is ontological when he interpreted and applied Hegelian insights in Philosophical Manuscripts. But Marx’ methodological insight of negativity has considerably been deployed in his later writing after reading Science of Logic.

3.8 Chapter summary

The above discussion has shown that there are some thematic and methodological similarities and differences between Hegel and Marx which can be summarised from the perspective of negativity like this: the key themes refer to the purpose of philosophy, the relationship between theory and practice, subject and object, and substance and subjectivity.

For Hegel, a critical philosophy is a purely rational process of self-confrontation. Its Idea is a function of the absolute Spirit in which the subjective and the objective side become fused. The whole process is monitored by Reason. As it increasingly becomes aware of itself, Reason falls in line with the absolute Spirit.

For Marx, however, an idealist ontology, despite its claim to be the absolute and final philosophy, is only the beginning and must move on towards a determined praxis. Even praxis has no function in and for itself apart from preparing humanity for a qualitatively very different way of life free from alienation, domination and exploitation.

Hegel’s philosophy was exclusively focused on the realisation of the ‘Idea’ of reality as it passes through three stages: from the subjective to the objective stage, and from there to the absolute stage. These stages are phenomenological/individual, sociological/collective, and philosophical/conceptual.

By observing the real socio-economic and political situation not only in Germany but also in its neighbouring countries like Britain, France, Belgium and the Netherlands, from the 1840s onwards, Marx discovers a gap between idea and reality – a gap that Hegel’s harmony thinking had not recognised. His conclusion is that Hegel’s absolute idealism was not able to adequately understand this gap in real terms with regard to the actual socio-economic situation at the time.

For Hegel, theory develops the capacity of the mind to conceive subtle conceptual incongruencies and to dissolve them through a process of self-reflection, whereas for Marx, the primary function of theory is to critically reflect on social-economic and political reality and to support a collective praxis that aims to transform this reality. Indeed, Marx’ theory negates speculative philosophy itself and instead, interprets finite phenomena as they are mediated by the whole of society. Therefore, praxis is the ultimate touchstone for the correctness of, and justification of, a truly revolutionary theory.

While both, Hegel and Marx, try to redefine Spinoza’s religious notion of substance, there is a distinct difference here. For Spinoza, substance was the ‘idea’ which is the organising principle of consciousness that he took to be the essence of reality. For Hegel, however, essence is the potential internal energy that becomes activated in the subject as it undergoes the process of self-objectification and sublation through the labour of thought. For Marx, on the other hand, substance becomes the material essence out of which the industrial labour process produces surplus value, i.e. capital.

Hegel and Marx also take different stances regarding the ontological nature and historic function of the subject itself. The self-conscious, goal-oriented subject is the wellspring of Hegel’s optimistic philosophy. The ultimate aim of the subject’s labour is to achieve absolute (self-) Knowing. Marx appreciates Hegel’s theory of labour without, however, responding to it at the same level of self- consciousness. Instead, for him, the most productive and meaningful type of labour is social- revolutionary action through which relapses into earlier forms of alienated consciousness should be prevented.

In other themes like the master-slave dialectic, history, and methodology, there are some obvious agreements between Hegel and Marx. The value we attach to these themes determines the degree to which we would classify Hegel a Marxian and Marx a Hegelian.

The subject-object relationship is the living core of Hegel’s phenomenology. Marx recognises in it the basic pattern for the relationship between the subject and the outside world of objects. For Hegel, objectivity is the outcome of the labour of reason which continues in Marx when he defines the objective world (nature) as the result of physical labour. Hegel’s phenomenology produces self- knowledge through self-objectification; the spiritual essence of its labour becomes the material source in Marx’ labour. Hegel’s activity of subjective reason projects itself onto its objects which the young Marx causally reverses in order to point out that it is actually the external objective conditions that imprint themselves onto the subjective mind.

Thus, Hegel’s self-alienated Spirit forms the root-idea of Marx’ self-alienated society out of which he then develops the content and method of his criticism. Marx uses the concept of an inverted world to grasp the material root-structure of alienation based on Hegel’s Philosophy of Right in which he already exposed the vacuity, superficiality, and exclusivity of bourgeois civil society. Marx reads Hegel’s concept of the ‘unhappy consciousness’ – a self-consciousness entrapped in egoic individuality, as a

social criticism. He regards this type of consciousness as the most fundamental alienation, the deepest neurosis of the capitalist homo oeconomicus.

The isolation, objectification and fetishisation of the individual characterises the atomistically fragmented structure of such a society. Hegel seemed to believe that the ‘unhappy consciousness’ of bourgeois society could be overcome by working through his Phenomenology as a kind of self-therapy. At the time of accelerated industrialisation in Germany, France and England, however, Marx does not find this idealistic self-help-programme adequate and sufficient anymore for a genuine transformation of the sick root structure of the relations of production. Consequently, he replaces it with a radical programme of collective social-political action without, however, abandoning Hegel’s core-principle of determinate NEGATION.

In summary, we can now see how deeply Marx was influenced by Hegel’s DIALECTIC OF NEGATIVITY. This theme can already be detected from his Epigramme on Hegel and certainly in his Economic- Philosophical Manuscripts. It can also be inferred from Marx’ exclusive reliance on Hegelian logic in his economic analysis as well as his political strategy which led him to reject Proudhon’s approach as a result of which a schism in the workers’ movement was created. Hegel’s DIALECTIC OF NEGATIVITY also shines through in Marx’ Grundrisse and continues to inform not only his style and method, but also the content of his writing right up to his mature work, The Capital.

If we placed Marx’ criticism of Hegel’s idealist concepts unsystematically in some isolated places here and there, then we could easily be misled to conclude that Hegel’s idealism and Marx’ materialism were completely incompatible and mutually exclusive forms of thought. If, on the other hand, we read Hegel and Marx from within a wider historic context of the ambition of the enlightenment to emancipate the human being from all irrational forms of domination, alienation, and exploitation, then the parallels and complementarity of their systems become rather obvious.

Marx did not merely invert Hegel’s concepts from an idealist to a materialist type as some interpreters claimed but his major achievement is that he was able to positively absorb the negativity within Hegel’s categories and thereby retain the active, subjective side of Hegel’s idealism and methodology within a materialist frame of reference. Thus, Hegel’s concept of NEGATIVITY continues to play a central role in Marx’ world of thought which he, from 1843 onwards, systematically applies in all his writing and which inheres even in his mature work, The Capital.

Chapter 4

Adorno’s Critical Theory and Negative Dialectics

Content

4.1 Introduction

4.2 Criticism as a negative force

4.3 Critical Theory as a philosophical praxis

4.4 Negativity in the Dialectic of Enlightenment

4.5 Adorno’s understanding of Hegel’s ‘determinate NEGATION’

4.6 Adorno’s Hegel: Three Studies and negative experience

4.7 ‘Negative dialectics’ as Adorno’s conceptualisation of negativity

4.8 Chapter summary

4.1 Introduction

In this chapter I am going to review the contributions of those key figures of the German war generation of thinkers in the tradition of Hegel and Marx that deeply influenced the post-war generation who as their students were keen to transform the power of Hegel’s NEGATIVITY into political praxis. The great paradox, however, that we can see in Adorno as the mastermind behind the Frankfurt School, is that despite his traumatic experience of Fascism and his commitment to the negative force in Hegel, his radical reinterpretation of the theory of liberation resulted in a retreat into a quasi-mystical realm of his negative dialectics and aesthetic theory. For him, negativity must reject all relative truths until the absolute truth is found. With truth one cannot barter. This is his uncompromising stance. As a result, the aporia between theory and praxis deepened which – in a somewhat parallel manner to Hegel – became his justification for political passivity.

4.2 Criticism as a negative force

Philosophy becomes alive when it turns into critique. Criticism is the expression of the negative force within reason that moves independent enquiries into truth forward. Most basically, thinking becomes negative whenever it negates whatever is given; thus it is geared towards a specific praxis as it confronts the specific problems of the status quo. On the other hand, critical thinking must become self-reflexive as it arises from within the whole system of the status quo. For Adorno, the German intellectual tradition was basically anti-critical. He feels their collective pressure towards constructive problem solving: critique is justified only if it is accompanied by positive suggestions how to improve the current situation. Critique that goes to the root of a problem has a negative image in the general public. It is rejected as destructive. Hegel wrote that one does not have to be a cobbler in order to be able to judge whether a shoe fits or not. On the other hand, critique itself can be misused if it loses sight of its normative foundation.

By applying critique to its own foundation, it becomes ideological. For Horkheimer and Adorno, the puzzling question arose, why the German post war generation allowed itself to be dominated by the American and Russian powers out of their free will. There was a direct link between Hegel’s authoritarian doctrine and the blind identification with those in power on the one hand and the repression of critique in a totalitarian social system on the other. Adorno thus sought to anchor his critique in a particular historical crisis.

Hegel’s governing principle of ‘determinate NEGATION’ questioned not just specific problems in isolation but in relation to the whole system while simultaneously confronting its own inner conceptual contradictions. Critique here implies a crisis of legitimation and of meaning.

Walter Benjamin’s Critique of Violence (1920-21) which was written in the aftermath of World War I, contains a programmatic statement that by taking freedom as the promise of the Enlightenment seriously, it cannot merely remain an abstract idea, a private dream, or a romantic vision, which can be postponed into an unknown future. The reality of mere facticity itself never allowed this freedom to manifest. Here, Benjamin does not primarily refer to physical violence but to conceptual violence which imposes its interpretation onto what it considers to be just and true and then justifies it as the only reasonable option. Within such a monopolistic tradition, freedom could only be conceived of as the radical negation of the status quo whose law was based not on freedom but on domination, repression, and war.

An industrial society seeks technological and economic progress and ways to legalise its material interest. It pays lip service to the freedom of its members whose realisation it postpones into an unknown future. The injustice it inflicts on its people is being justified as necessary for a better future. This logic was incompatible with the very idea of freedom. Real freedom is not gained via the gradual improvement of external material conditions which only serve to consolidate the present repressive power structure; instead, freedom requires a radical break with precisely this myth. The damage that humans have inflicted on humans and nature must stop once and for all. Freedom and justice are located on the other side of this chasm where subject and object, inside and outside, man and nature are not split and juxtaposed against each other anymore. These dualities were created by those in power to rationalise their exploitations and wars. Their ideology has presented them to be not only necessary and morally good, but natural.

By refusing to employ irrational means to justify a rational end, radical negation seeks to find the exit point at which the blind and self-perpetuating continuity of violence can be stopped. True freedom can be achieved only via radical NEGATION. Here, we can see that Benjamin’s radicalisation of Hegel’s determinate NEGATION still contains Marx’ hope of a revolution and thus an affinity to praxis. Twenty years later, his student and friend Adorno evaluates social reality in a very different way. Despite the fact that the war was over and a new world order seemed possible, his pessimism and despair affected a whole generation of students.

While each member of the Frankfurt School contributed in their specific way to the overall theory, what united them was a common understanding that the power of the negative had been immensely underrated not only by positivists but also by orthodox Marxists. As a result, the reactivation of the NEGATIVE aspect in Hegel becomes the main focus of Adorno’s theoretical work. It is motivated by the general forgetting of Hegel who “is hardly even given consideration nowadays. Instead of being subjected to criticism, he is rejected as devoid of meaning” (Adorno 1994, p. 95). This shows that criticism requires a genuine engagement and

commitment which is much more difficult to do than any offhand rejection or blind acceptance. In fact, it is the theoretically most demanding work one could imagine and as such it stands in opposition to any unreflected identification with apparent truth.

The difficulty in reading Hegel is rooted in the need to pin everything down and solidify the

NEGATIVE process of constant change into a fixed positive structure, what Adorno calls identity consciousness. It is based on the empiricists’ interpretation of Aristotle’s law of non- contradiction and the excluded middle. A closed system of logic does not allow the truth of an unresolvable non-identity to appear within itself. This then becomes the task of critique which aims to reveal the truth that has been suppressed by such a system. Thus critique invariably challenges the system’s untruth. Non-identity always shows itself in those moments of transition where something does not quite fit, where either new elements need to be brought in or old ones to be rejected in order to make these transitions possible. If a needed transition, however, does not happen and the contradiction between two polarities is not mediated anymore, a break with the past, a historic discontinuity, is highly likely to occur.

One of the outspoken traditional theorists during the post-war period of the 1950s and 60s was Karl Popper. His Open Society and its Enemies (1945/1962) is his outright rejection of Hegelianism and Marxism. It is based on an ahistorical and non-dialectical view of society as a lose collection of already autonomous, equal, and self-determined individuals. In stark contrast to this kind of self-declared ‘realism’ stands Critical Theory which says that society is a dialectical totality in which each individual is conditioned by its mediation within that totality. This difference of view led to a face-to-face meeting between some of the leading proponents of the two camps (Karl Popper and Hans Albert on the one hand versus Theodor Adorno and Jürgen Habermas on the other). It was later published under the title ‘The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology’ (1969). However, since no genuine dialogue between these two radically opposed positions was possible, the conflict was not solved but became more deeply entrenched (cf. Adorno 1976).

In response to this dilemma of non-communication among highly rational subjects, Habermas developed a Theory of Communicative Action (1981). By relocating the conditions of rationality from within the individual subject to the intersubjective sphere, Habermas renounced Critical Theory’s traditional presuppositions and moved towards a more liberal view of practical reason. He sees rationality to be grounded in the structure of discourse itself – a diagnosis that would enable a new understanding of praxis. His rationale is that today’s capitalist technological society would weaken the autonomy and rationality of the individual subject not so much through authoritarian structures anymore as it used to do until the 1960s, but through a new form of dictatorship: through the anonymous creation

of technological default frameworks into which social interaction was being channelled for easy surveillance and manipulation.

Instead of analysing the psychological, social and political status quo of society with regard to its core contradiction that reason itself contains an irrational myth, traditional theory remained focused on an outer harmony-model of communication within the overall ideological framework of a liberal ‘social market economy’. Economic growth and the creation of material wealth within a stable social system were its overriding concerns rather than the abolition of the repressive and destructive elements within reason itself.

The original members of the Frankfurt School saw in this conservative approach to the construction of a new world a disguised repetition of the old order and demanded a much more radical solution. From a Hegelian perspective, the inherent self-contradiction in society had to be identified and critiqued in order to eradicate the root of ignorance from the intra-psychic level towards the social, cultural and political level. For this, empirical research methods alone could not provide the needed insight because their inner logic was itself imbued with ideological presuppositions.

The paradox to be realised was that while an individual is being ‘socialised’ into his society he only very gradually, if at all, becomes aware of its hidden ideology. It requires a sustained effort to penetrate into one’s own unconscious structure that is suffused by the values of the collective unconscious of the society in which one lives. Only to the degree that one’s blind identification with the status quo has become conscious can one get a glimpse into the total structure of the collective unconscious.

This new psychoanalytic understanding was confirmed when the members of the Frankfurt School observed the post-war rush into external substitutes for freedom and how easy it had become to manipulate the masses. While the expected fulfilment of the original promise of the Enlightenment, which was nothing less than the liberation of the historical subject, seemed to be more in reach than ever before, on the whole, people completely ignored this real possibility of their new society. The growing wealth that the new industries were able to generate based on science, technology, and the most efficient organisational infrastructures, was proudly seen as proof for the belief that historic progress could only be achieved through the instrumentalisation of reason which had to serve the private interest of capital as it entered the world market.

This disappointing result forced the members of the Frankfurt School to become more deeply self- reflective. By identifying the minimal historical conditions for collective self-determination to become

possible, they realised that Marx’ hope that the workers would develop enough strength had become unrealistic. Having achieved small but instant material advantages, they had given up the long struggle for collective self-determination. Instead, some politicised and educated middle-class student groups seemed to be the most likely force that could develop into islands of critique within the overall positivism of society.

Altogether, these events confirmed the necessity to formulate an alternative approach to understanding the dialectic between the rigidity of power structures on the one hand and the latent danger and potential of mass psychology on the other. Therefore, an all encompassing historical social psychological meta- theory had to be generated whose foundation had already been laid through Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s joined diagnosis of The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947).

Their critique of bourgeois consciousness points out that its ignorance lay in the smug assumption that it was already free and fully self-aware. Therefore, there was no need anymore for radical liberation. It had become an outdated concept. The problem of justification of a fundamental critique was that it contained a self-contradiction: while Horkheimer and Adorno’s insights were based on historic facts, the process that produced these facts had to be rejected because it was irrational. At the same time, they were quite aware that they themselves were integral parts of this same history.

4.3 Critical Theory as a philosophical praxis

In his book Traditional and Critical Theory (1937) Horkheimer first outlines the aims and objectives of Critical Theory in the tradition of Hegel and Marx. The problem that Horkheimer identifies is epistemological: we should reconsider not merely the rationality that a scientist applies in his work, but the knowing individual in general. Unlike orthodox Marxism, however, which merely applies a ready-made template to both, critique and action, critical theory seeks to be self-critical and reject any pretensions to absolute truth. A critical social theory defends the primacy of neither, matter (materialism) nor consciousness (idealism), and argues that both epistemologies have distorted reality to the benefit of some small group. What Critical Theory attempts to do is to place itself outside of philosophical strictures and the confines of existing structures. However, as a way of recovering humanity’s self-knowledge, Critical Theory looks to Hegel and Marx for its methods and tools.

Horkheimer maintains that critical theory should be directed at the totality of society in its historical specifity (i.e., how it came to be configured at a specific point in time), just as it should improve understanding of society by integrating all the major social sciences. While Critical Theory must at all times be self-critical, Horkheimer insists that a theory is critical only if it is explanatory. Critical Theory must, therefore, combine practical and normative thinking to ‘explain what is wrong with current social reality, identify actors to change it, and provide clear norms for criticism and practical goals for the

future’. Whereas traditional theory can only mirror and explain reality as it presently is, the purpose of Critical Theory is to change it; in Horkheimer’s words the goal of critical theory is ‘the emancipation of human beings from the circumstances that enslave them’.

Since left Hegelianism and Marxism had been suppressed by German governments and grossly distorted by Stalinism in order to justify their respective forms of state monopolism, a reinterpretation of Marx via Hegel was needed for developing an adequate response to these events. In addition, Freud’s psychoanalysis had to be developed into a social theory in order to generate a more sophisticated approach to the understanding of how a highly developed culture like Germany could suddenly collapse and become so self-destructive. Critical Theory emphasises the necessity to integrate these three streams of ideas in order to arrive at a deeper analysis of the recent past and to generate the foundation for effective political praxis in the present.

Out of the vacuum of meaning, which was felt after World War II, arose a new conceptualisation of the inherent force of NEGATIVITY in Hegel. It became the fulcrum through which the past as well as the present had to be made sense of. What Critical Theory values in Hegel is that he did not try to merely describe experiences based on an abstract rationality as their common denominator. A rationality whose concepts are used as mere signifiers of objects is blind as it does not reflect on itself. Hegel penetrates the apparent truth of these concepts and reveals their inner dynamic. He shows that this inner dynamic is propelled forward through self-contradiction. This way of penetrating the solidity of appearances was, of course, not a new idea but already present in Socrates and Plato. Hegel’s unique contribution was that he raised this fact into a general principle for understanding the inner nature of concepts.

For Adorno, genuine understanding from within, which constitutes his immanent critique, has an aesthetic dimension, a mimetic approximation to the object (mimetische Annäherung, Anschmiegung an den Gegenstand). Critical insight, therefore, is not just the result of a methodology but a process in which the object’s own inner form is revealed. It is similar to art that seeks to express a content through a particular style by which its inner nature is allowed to come out. An object is not just an example of an abstract category of logic but in and for itself. The problem of a set method is that it imposes itself from above and does not allow the object to speak for itself as it really is.

This was the essential problem in Kant’s identity thinking, which is repeated in empiricism, where the object’s inner dynamic is not understood on its own terms. Its changing nature is reduced to a mere sequence of still points which misses the inner process of change since each point in time is not an absolute entity in isolation but always already both, the result of the past as well as an ongoing process of transitions in each and every moment of time. It simultaneously is and is not. Hegel uses the terms ‘identity’ and ‘non-identity’ of being here.

As Adorno’s thought process becomes more concerned with the grounding of critique in epistemology and history, a seemingly unbridgeable gap between critique and political action appeared. But it is not

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until 1966, when his Negative Dialectics is published, that it becomes obvious that Adorno had given up on the institute’s original plan to develop a theory for social transformation which could empower the students to democratise first the encrusted authoritarian hierarchies within their universities and then society at large. The personal reason for this may have been his own psychological traumatisation of the war experience, particularly Walter Benjamin’s suicide. As a result, he tended to argue more and more from the perspective of a negative utopia as his Archimedean point of truth in which critique would find its ultimate justification. For Hegel, the ultimate justification was still grounded in the lawfulness of history itself. It seemed to guarantee a teleological unfolding of the world Spirit as it was moving through individuals, nations, and eras without it being affected by their suffering. For Adorno, however, this law is not as straightforward as it presented itself even to Marx.

In the introduction to Negative Dialectics, he reveals his aporia between his theory and political praxis: ‘praxis must be a response to a correct and indeed contemporary interpretation of experience’– an interpretation that was, and still is, awaited.

Adorno, being one of the deepest Hegelian thinkers of the twentieth century, defended Hegel’s dialectic principle of NEGATIVITY and developed it further in the light of recent historical developments. The focus of his critique is directed at Hegel’s optimism, determinism, and closure.

In the bourgeois 19th century, the individual subject found itself in a heroic phase of struggle, hoping to reconcile individual freedom and social justice. Music, especially that of Beethoven, expressed this humane aspiration and marks a high point in the world’s spiritual history. The corruption of capitalism had not yet separated the artist from the ordinary listener. In the 20th century, however, ‘and ‘reifies’ the subject, turning the individual into an interchangeable unit within an oppressive economic and cultural system. As a result, serious music – that which expresses and confronts this human predicament – is condemned to be too difficult – the pursuit of a few; while light music, really a form of mass distraction and false consciousness, seeps into the subjectivity of almost everyone else.

Hegel’s logic presupposed that the historical development would inevitably reach its eventual fulfilment. Thus Reason was bound to become absolute and all irrational elements would finally be overcome. But what Adorno and Horkheimer find is that Reason keeps turning against itself as it manifests in various forms of irrationality. Thus Hegel’s teleological dialectic had to be radically revised in the light of recent historical developments.

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4.4 Negativity in the ‘Dialectic of Enlightenment’

Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s joint book, The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) is the foundational philosophical work of Critical Theory. It examines the status quo of American war and post-war society as it proudly presents itself to be the freest and most advanced industrial society of the world. In 1938, the authors take refuge first in New York, and then move to California until they finally return to Frankfurt in 1949.

In this seminal work, they reconsider the concept of the 18th century European idea of the Enlightenment that laid down the paradigm for modernism with its vision of continual economic growth based on scientific and technological advancement.

Adorno’s chapter on cultural industry evaluates the Enlightenment as mass manipulation. It becomes the basis for his critique of society’s underlying unresolved contradictions. In contrast to classical Marxian thought, his critique is not based on an economic analysis but on the analysis of culture. Here, Adorno refers primarily to Hegel, Nietzsche, and Freud. The book has had a major impact on 20th century philosophy, sociology, and cultural studies and inspired especially the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s.

One of the distinguishing characteristics of their new Critical Theory, as Adorno and Horkheimer try to elaborate it in this book, is a deep ambivalence concerning the ultimate foundation of reason, an ambivalence which gave rise to their pessimism over the possibility of human emancipation. This ambivalence is rooted in the historical circumstances in which the work is originally produced, in particular, the rise of National Socialism, state capitalism, and mass culture. The authors see all three mass phenomena as new manifestations of social domination that could not be adequately explained anymore from within the economic framework of classical Marxist theory.

State intervention in the economy had effectively abolished the tension in capitalism between the ‘relations of production’ and the ‘material productive forces of society’, a tension which, according to Marx, constituted the primary contradiction within capitalism. The market as an unconscious mechanism for the distribution of goods, services, and private property had been replaced by centralised planning and shared ownership of the means of production.

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Yet, contrary to Marx’ famous prediction (see the Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy), this shift did not lead to an era of social revolution, but rather to fascism and totalitarianism. As such, there was no longer any dynamism upon which critique could base its hope. For Adorno and Horkheimer, this posed the problem of how to account for the apparent persistence of domination in the absence of the very contradiction that, according to Marx, was the source of domination.

The problems posed by the rise of fascism with the demise of the liberal state and the market, together with the failure of a social revolution to materialise in its wake, constitute the theoretical and historical perspective that frames the overall argument of the book – the inability of the 18th century Enlightenment thinkers to detect its hidden mythological core which consists of an irreducible intertwining of reason with domination. In other words, reason itself is unable to detect its inherent tendency to dominate over nature and humans. As a result of this blindness, the enlightenment had unleashed a self-perpetuating dynamic which had become destructive (cf. Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002, p. xviii).

The history of human societies, as well as that of the formation of the individual ego, is re- evaluated from the standpoint of what Horkheimer and Adorno perceive at the time to be the ultimate outcome of this historic era: the regression of Reason into superstition and myth out of which it had originally emerged. This thesis was already put forward and ingeniously developed by Siegfried Kracauer in 1927 in his essay The Ornament of the Masses. Kracauer’s mass ornament is the aesthetic reflex of reason that the dominant economic system pursues. Adorno’s pessimistic style of writing now drastically intensifies Kracauer’s level of alienation whose phenomenology and philosophy of life are still grounded in a humanistic ideal.

To analyse the deep structure of the loss of this ideal, Horkheimer and Adorno draw on a wide variety of material including the philosophical anthropology of Marx’ early writings which centres on the notion of labour, Nietzsche’s critique of identity thinking in his Genealogy of Morals (and the emergence of a guilt consciousness through the renunciation of the will to power), Freud’s account in Totem and Taboo of the emergence of civilisation and law in the murder of the primordial father, as well as ethnological research on magic and ritual in primitive societies.

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The chapter on culture industry should be read as Adorno’s response to Benjamin’s original analysis of the problem of the reproduceability of art which Benjamin originally published in French in 1936 (cf. Benjamin 1963). Here, he defines mass production of art in spiritual terms as the decay of ‘aura’. Technological reproduction was for him not merely a neutral mass multiplication but it involved an exponential intensification of the violation of a sacred space. Adorno’s interest, however, is focused on reason’s self-entrapment which has become most obvious for him in the sphere of the mass production of art. He detects its social function in the reaffirmation of the status quo via the loss of its earlier negative, i.e. edifying, force that turned into ‘conformity consciousness’. For him, it is in the entrapment of reason itself which manifests as the dissolution of authentic experience that the key to redemption needs to be found, not outside it.

The major problematic that they address are the underlying conditions that led to collapse of the enlightenment project. As Adorno and Horkheimer (2002, p. xvi) write: “The aporia which faced us in our work thus proved to be the first matter we had to investigate: the self-destruction of Enlightenment.” This aporia then becomes their guiding motive throughout their work. It develops into a radical critique of modernism and exposes it as a myth. In relation to Kant’s optimistic programme of ‘enlightening’ the Enlightenment and Hegel’s positive view of the possibility of identity (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, p. xvi) it forms their NEGATIVE correlate. Although human history seems to evolve in the direction of the Enlightenment, there is an underlying process at work that keeps sabotaging its fulfilment (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, p. xvi). For Hegel and Marx, NEGATIVITY was perceived to be a universal and deterministic law that governs human history as well as nature. In Adorno, this view is radically being questioned via a thought process in which the destructive side of reason is seen to always override its potentially constructive outcome.

Horkheimer and Adorno reveal that the 18th century idea of Enlightenment was rather naive in the sense that it was not able to penetrate into the core of Reason itself which they found to be irrational. From the early science of the Renaissance up to the present, scientists and engineers had seen themselves in a purely rational manner. Due to science’s anti-metaphysical stance its epistemology and methodology lacked the tools to analyse its underlying model of Reason as well as its overall effect on nature and society beyond its internal verification (or falsification) process of hypothesis testing. In addition, it allowed itself to be used for irrational purposes which resulted in various forms of inhuman conditions – the very antithesis of the Enlightenment promise.

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4.5 Adorno’s understanding of Hegel’s ‘determinate NEGATION’

In the following quote from Marx, we can see this Hegelian logic that underlies the critical programme of the Frankfurt institute of social research:

The outstanding achievement of Hegel’s Phenomenology and of its final outcome, the dialectic of negativity as the moving and generating principle, is thus first that Hegel conceives the self-creation of man as process, conceives objectification as a loss of the subject, as alienation and as transcendence of this alienation; that he thus grasps the essence of labour and comprehends objective man - true, because real man - as the outcome of man’s own labour. (EPM, XXIII, p. 177)14

Here, Marx acknowledges and confirms Hegel’s dialectic of NEGATIVITY as the motor of progress and its relationship to human labour. These are the two interlocking keys through which the self-creation of man must be understood. At the same time, and in contrast to Hegel who is focused only on the inner, mental work on concepts, Marx delineates his own position by emphasising the power inherent in labour to transform the inhuman conditions in society.

For Horkheimer and Adorno, these two key aspects of Hegel and Marx had become highly problematic due to their own experience of disillusionment that the highest culture in Europe had not been able to overcome Fascism from within itself. It was this shock as well as the personal experience of having lost one’s closest friends and families in World War II that motivated this war generation of critical thinkers to deeply reflect on the historic and cultural roots of this collective trauma.

Despite its real possibility, the right life had been blocked like never before. This fuels Adorno’s resistance against the status quo of post-war industrial societies in the West as well as the East. By naming the worst and by an undiminished awareness of the negativity inherent in the present form of existence, a radically different quality of life could still be achieved. This negation of the existing negativity was Adorno’s central motive that underpins his theoretical and aesthetic work. From this basic disposition, he sought to anticipate a scenario in which the status quo could be transcended. Hope for the endangered individual, however remote, had to be grounded in this stance of determinate NEGATION.

For Hegel, determinate NEGATION is the subject’s methodological principle that permeates both, itself as well as its object. His dialectic seeks to overcome Kant’s formal dualism between content and method via the inner movement of both, subject and object as well as their interrelationship. Adorno adopts this basic logic as the guiding principle for his social critique.

Critique, however, must become critical of itself in order to avoid the pitfall of any dogmatism and irrationality. Therefore, in each stage of development, thought must not only be focused on its object but be aware of itself. This can be achieved when thought NEGATIVELY relates to itself by which it turns

14Adorno quotes this in Three Studies (1993, p. 18).

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itself into an object. Hegel’s idealism is based in the assumption that the particular, whether as a particular being or a particular concept, constitutes itself through NEGATION by which it differentiates itself from the totality to which it belongs. In this sense, it refers to the totality in a NEGATIVE way while also conceiving itself to be a distinct part of this totality. In Hegel, the nature of the particular is to seek to merge with the whole out of which it had to cut itself loose in order to become self-conscious. On a large scale, this process keeps reconstituting the totality while its moments are relative truths – gradually higher levels of consciousness that keep returning to their ground from where they originally emerged. But these moments of identity are themselves only moments which, once achieved, immediately begin to separate themselves again in order to achieve an even greater harmony between itself and the whole.

This NEGATION OF NEGATION is Hegel’s motor behind human history – the law that also governs the logic of the thought process. Each thought object is characterised by its immanent NEGATIVITY, which means that it is only in so far as it relates NEGATIVELY to all that is not. The confrontation of these immanent NEGATIVITIES is the contradiction which generates the momentum for the whole to move forward. As it keeps sublating itself, it becomes positive. This is its logically affirmative side.

Thinking turns a living human being into an object of thought which subtracts their sensual quality. Then by further penetrating the object, it loses its independence (being freely in itself) and becomes incorporated into the thinking subject (being utilised for other). Its particular uniqueness disappears as it is being subsumed under a general category. Deductive thinking always follows this basic principle of depersonalisation.

Hegel’s dialectic, however, does not just formally subsume the specific under the general but seeks to mediate it at each stage with its whole. This is his determinate NEGATION. The problematic presupposition that Adorno with Marx and Feuerbach see here is that the principle of thought is seen to be identical with the principle of being itself. It forms the basis of Hegel’s idealistic world view which says that thought determines being. This presupposition would be corrected if being was nothing but thought, or in other words, if societal conditions were indeed completely governed by reason. The reality, however, is that human relations are only to a certain extent – never completely – constituted by reason and that reason itself tends to become totalitarian if it does not become self-reflexive.

Without falling back behind Hegel’s insight, Marx, the philosophical founder of 19th century critical theory, determinately negates Hegel’s thought figure of determinate NEGATION: on the one hand, he tries to show its untruth, while on the other hand, he also tries to retain its moment of truth, albeit in a new way. Thus we can see how his early works already anticipate Adorno’s basic motive behind his criticism of Hegel. It becomes most clear where Marx, by following Feuerbach, immanently critiques Hegel’s political philosophy. By taking Hegel’s claim, to merely observe the movement of thought in order to reflect its inner logic, seriously, Marx in his penetrating micro-analysis shows that Hegel

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uncritically identified the object with its thinking subject through which he tried to constitute both. Hegel’s mistake is his confusion of subject and predicate. By presenting the subject as the ontological totality that thinks – not just as the negative principle of knowledge – it fully absorbs its object and becomes absolute.

At the end of the medieval period, nominalists showed that the individual object does not become true via a universal being that exists in and for itself. In the same way, Feuerbach demystified Hegel’s hypostatisation of the Idea.15 In other words, he exposed the notion of a substantial Idea in and for itself that constitutes itself as the subject of the world process through which all individual objects are defined as an illusion. By developing this insight into a determined negative social praxis, Marx materialises Feuerbach’s critique of Hegel’s confusion between logic and ontology.

Marx’ critique of Hegel is that he did not seek to understand the inner logic of the object and instead, merely focused on the logic of thought in order to impose it onto its objects. He mistakenly presented the self-unfolding of the concept as the self-unfolding of the object and thus reduced actual reality to a mere sequence of accidental moments of the concept in its self-movement.

In his Philosophy of Right, Hegel presented the mediation between particular and general interests within the state in purely logical categories. Marx shows that when thought is being divorced from the social-historical process of reproduction it becomes absolute by which the distinction between the concept and the object is lost. As the idea is being hypostatised to be the real power behind all things, it becomes mystified; logical categories become subjects; concrete content dissolves into forms; concepts of the state are not seen as such but as ontological terms that exist in and for themselves.

What is essential to determinate political realities is not that they can be considered as such but rather that they can be considered, in their most abstract configuration, as logical-metaphysical determinations. Hegel’s true interest is not the philosophy of right but logic. The philosophical task is not the embodiment of thought in determinate political realities, but the evaporation of these realities in abstract thought. The philosophical moment is not the logic of fact but the fact of logic. Logic is not used to prove the nature of the state, but the state is used to prove the logic. (Marx 1970, p. 18)

Adorno reactivates this critique in an historical period in which it had become obvious that Hegel's and Marx’ confidence in the historic process had become obsolete. Hegel’s bias towards the totality that had to produce itself through all contradictions in the spirit and thus in reality would subsume the individual with systematic necessity under the societal totality. The primacy of the whole is never doubted in Hegel. Instead, the objective historic tendency enforces itself even to the extent that it annihilates all particularity and individuality. In his Hegel: Three Studies, Adorno acknowledges that Hegel at least got rid of Kant’s fiction of autonomy but he critiques Hegel’s motive. His intention was

15See Chapter 2 of this study.

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not to show that the needed autonomy has not materialised yet, but that the individual’s right against the primacy of the general was nothing but an empty utopia. With Marx, Adorno says that as long as the promise of reconciliation between the self-determination of individuals and the societal totality has not been fulfilled, so long will we remain prehistoric beings. Marx assumes that the bourgeois society forms the last stage of this prehistory because it already contained the basic elements of a truly human life in terms of the emancipation of the human species as well as the material conditions for overcoming the basic antagonism between individual and society.

In the Critical Theory of the 20th century this certainty is lost. According to Adorno, the prehistory is being extended into an unknown future as long as the objective tendency of the objective forces in the post-fascist society is determined by the production of surplus value. This process has become self- perpetuating. Its consequence is that the human potential has become blocked and the subjectless totality of humanity has become a mere appendix to its machinery. With Marx, Adorno insists that identity with the whole is not realised via the sublimation of logical contradictions but rather through societal antagonisms. Towards the end of his Phenomenology, Hegel (1807) writes that nothing is known what is not personally being experienced as a felt truth. For Adorno, this truism is experienced as an overwhelming form of suffering.

This is the reason why he reverses Hegel’s famous dictum that ‘the true is the whole’ into ‘the whole is the untrue’. The concept of the whole is indispensable for Critical Theory since without it could not grasp its object, the society, at all. In this respect, Adorno reconnects with Hegel but only insofar as his critical concept of the whole presupposes its practical realisation. Only from this perspective does the false become apparent. For Marx, determinate negation is primarily a practical task, but for Adorno, this chance was missed in the period between the two world wars.

4.6 Adorno’s Hegel: Three Studies and negative experience

Hegel: Three Studies, a short masterpiece of twentieth-century philosophy, provides a major reinterpretation of Hegel and insight into the evolution of Adorno's thinking. The first study focuses on the relationship between reason, the individual, and society in Hegel. It is written in defence of Hegel against the criticism that he was merely an apologist for bourgeois society. The second study examines the experiential content of Hegel's idealism by considering the notion of experience in relation to immediacy, empirical reality, science, and society. The third study, named ‘Skoteinos’, is an unusual and fascinating essay in which Adorno lays out his thoughts on how to read Hegel. The recurring theme among all three essays is to rescue the

NEGATIVITY in Hegel’s work.

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The core problem Adorno sets for himself is how to read Hegel in a way that comprehends the work in its historical context, which allows conclusions to be drawn that may seem on the surface to be exactly opposed to what Hegel wrote but that may, nevertheless, be valid as the present truth of the work. The underlying goal, however, is to elaborate his own method of interpretation, which he calls ‘immanent criticism’. The method of immanent criticism seeks to follow the inherent dynamic of a thought process through to its (as yet) unarticulated end and then contextualises it in relation to the present historic conditions. These essays make plain the deep affinity of Adorno’s work to that of Hegel and the roots of immanent criticism can be seen here as being deeply embedded in Hegel’s own thought.

In the second essay Adorno discusses ‘The Experiential Content of Hegel’s Philosophy’, Hegel’s concept of experience and the experience presented in Hegel’s philosophy. Adorno sees these aspects as essentially interconnected and bound up with our experience of reading Hegel.

The third essay, ‘Skoteinos, or How to Read Hegel’, is in many ways the most interesting one as it takes up the question of the difficulty of reading Hegel’s works as a unique experience of engaging with Hegel. It is expressed in the statement: “The norm of clarity holds only where it is presupposed that the object itself is such that the subject’s gaze can pin it down like the figures of geometry” (Adorno 1993, p. 98).

If the clarity of our concepts is to grasp the shadowy nature of a shifting reality, if the labour of thought is to actively cast light on that reality, then thought must capture the shadows of reality rather than simply dispel them. In order to identify objects with adequate concepts, our concepts must paradoxically seek to grasp the non-conceptual as objectively real. Rejecting Wittgenstein’s maxim that “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof must one be silent” as utterly anti-philosophical, Adorno claims: “If philosophy can be defined at all, it is an effort to express things one cannot speak about, to help express the non-identical despite the fact that expressing it identifies it at the same time” (Adorno 1993, p.102).

It is this paradoxical nature of Hegel’s undertaking, of attempting to grasp in thought that which is other than thought, which gives rise to the difficult style of his works (Adorno 1993, p. 106). In these essays it is often difficult to separate Adorno’s thought from that of Hegel, the commentary from the object of the commentary, but this is as it should be if the two stand in the kind of relation Adorno claims.

Adorno defends Hegel’s NEGATIVE essence against an early reconciliation attempt. Instead of trying to move beyond Hegel, he develops Hegel’s unity of identity and non-identity further. While Marx saw in Hegel’s notion of labour the foundation of his social critique, Adorno reclaims its original Hegelian meaning as ‘the labour of the Spirit’ which then becomes his theory as well as his praxis. The spirit’s

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identification with labour had a purely positive meaning in Hegel but Adorno activates its dormant quality of negativity through his dialectic of non-identity.

Reading Hegel through Adorno then becomes a lesson in negative experiencing. For Adorno, this is not an idealistic abstraction but grounded in a very specific kind of dialectic experience in which the self- contradictory nature of a concept is being realised. The negative quality of a concept lies in the fact that it always points beyond an immediate experience. The experience itself is different from the concept and therefore has to be distinguished from it. A concept remains abstract and thus powerless as long as it merely labels an experience from the outside by creating a distance and then subsuming it from above.

The dialectic of determinate NEGATION, in contrast, is not a detached abstraction but based on the experience of powerlessness.

Through the dialectic of identity and non-identity the tension between negation and affirmation is increased without being able to dissolve it into something positive. By staying with this impasse in full awareness without identifying with either side of the contradiction, or by pretending to find a solution, the reader learns to remain both, their NEGATIVE as well as their inwardly torn unity. It leads to an almost unbearable despair – the same aporia that Adorno himself experienced. This is Adorno’s radicalisation of Hegel’s determinate NEGATION and his method of ‘immanent critique’ by which he shares his own experience and guides the reader into the inner core of Hegel.

For Adorno, immanent critique is the only genuine method of understanding Hegel, and by extension, Adorno himself. It implies a radical rejection of all those attempts that try to leap onto a ready-made solution like Popper’s positivism, Husserl’s phenomenology, Kierkegaard’s existentialism, or the dialectical materialism of classical Marxism. Adorno counteracts this tendency to seek shortcuts with his concept of the ‘non-identical’.

Hegel’s idealism moved from an original identity of subject and object via their separation towards their final reunification in the absolute Spirit (Adorno 1993, p. 3). In Hegel, this process of SELF-

NEGATION suddenly stops when it reaches its fulfilment in the Absolute. For Adorno, there is neither a happy end, nor even an end at all. The Absolute is not created by cutting it off at the end of all negation but by the realisation that it always already contains all possible negation within itself. He warns the reader not to slip into this unconscious tendency to hypostatise an absolute and then turn it into a fetish.

The Phenomenology of Spirit started with the subject and in its self-generated progression it absorbs all concrete contents into itself until it becomes fully objective. The Science of Logic, on the other hand, starts with ‘Being’ which is the objective principle of his science (Adorno 1993, p.12). Hegel’s subject- object dialectic consists in the subject’s repeated self-objectification which constitutes his whole science.

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Kant’s dualism of subject and object had imprisoned the subject within its own constructions. Hegel’s contribution is to offer a path on which his subject can be freed (Adorno 1993, p. 8). He develops Kant’s synthetic unity of apperception into a dynamic subject-object totality in which the ‘mystery’ behind Kant’s synthesis is being revealed. Adorno’s point is that Hegel’s totality is not a final synthesised unity in which NEGATIVITY suddenly becomes positive. Instead, its antagonistic nature is preserved within the whole. Once the negative nature of the whole is seen, it becomes clear that there cannot be a final solution.

His final essay on Hegel is entitled ‘Skoteinos, or How to read Hegel’. Skoteinos means darkness or obscurity. It belongs to an extra-conceptual and non-analytic sphere of thought which seeks to protect itself from any kind of conceptual violation. It deliberately retains its ambiguity in order not to become displaced and instrumentalised. Its function is to counteract the pervasive tendency to solidify an essentially fluid process by jumping into blind activism.

Hegel’s system sought the identity of subject and object in order to reach the Absolute. For Adorno (1993, p. 27), however, the historic possibility for their reconciliation has become extremely remote. In the preface to the Philosophy of Right, Hegel’s conceptualisation of the status quo was rather blunt when he made the notorious statement that the real is rational and the rational real. This does not fit into the logic of the Phenomenology (Adorno 1993, p. 28). Hegel’s philosophy is essentially a NEGATIVE process which critiques any positivity. Adorno’s aphorism that “everything that exists deserves to perish” is his sarcastic reply to Hegel (Adorno 1993, p. 30).

4.7 Negative Dialectics as Adorno’s conceptualisation of negativity

In his Negative Dialectics (1966), Adorno tries to systematise his earlier writings based on a critical review of Hegel’s positive notion of totality. He concludes that “the whole is untrue”, not merely because the thesis of totality, being the principle of domination inflated to the absolute, is itself untruth; the idea of a positivity that can master everything that opposes it through the superior power of a comprehending Spirit is the mirror image of the experiences of the superior coercive force inherent in everything that exists by virtue of its consolidation under domination. This was the truth in Hegel’s untruth (ND, p. 87).

Adorno’s immanent critique shows that Hegel’s system was a system of conceptual domination from the perspective of the subject which imposes itself onto its object without realising that it also depends on the condition that it is not empty of content. Since the thinking subject depends on its body as its physical foundation for making contact with the world, it is never really autonomous. The conclusion Adorno draws from this is that the subject cannot rule over its own existence. It is condemned to remain

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an inextricable part of its own mind-body duality and the duality between society and nature, which makes its suffering even worse.

Adorno views Hegel’s whole as fully absorbing all its parts without remainder and sees this logic to be the model for totalitarian systems in which the individual is being fully absorbed into the whole. Being blindly identified with it, he loses his individuality. Adorno sees this danger not only in fascist dictatorships, but also in the free modern society of America. Its new technologies have made mass production possible as cheap copies of the original for mass consumption. The overall effect of this cultural industry of capitalism is that the loss of quality in the object invites the subject to equally lose its qualities in order to fit into an all-pervasive model of reification. Wherever Adorno looks he finds the same pattern. Being overwhelmed by the coercive power of normality, the individual feels compelled to surrender to it. In other words, he begins to accept manipulation as ‘normal’ and turns himself into a cheap copy of what he could become if he lived in a truly authentic society that would promote his uniqueness. Thus he ends up being a totally manipulated consumer, a mere puppet in the system, who has learned to be grateful for the cheap substitutes that it provides for momentary satisfactions.

Since total systems also depend on their individuals for their own survival, they cannot afford to completely destroy their members. But this collective madness was precisely what Adorno observed: the system does not seem to care about its own long-term survival since nobody seems to really understand how a rational system can become self-destructive, or who is ultimately responsible for it. The history of systems, particularly of very large and thus anonymous organisations, shows that it has its own life cycle. There is a turning point from where it begins to destroy itself. Freud showed that this death instinct is already inherent from the very beginning.

The consequence of this is that no system can guarantee the possibility of freedom anymore for its individuals. Each individual must constantly be on guard by not allowing himself to be sucked into a mass psychosis. Thus Adorno reveals that it is the system itself that is now seen to be the enemy. While the individual depends on it for his growth and survival he, at the same time, must try to become as independent of it as possible and fight back whenever the system has intruded too far into his private life – a danger that is always lurking in the background. This awareness creates an existential crisis in which the individual is thrown back onto himself. He can neither just run away from his system that has become all pervasive, nor does he feel powerful enough to change it from within. In order to maintain his existence, the individual goes into partial hiding. On the surface, he tries to function as a ‘normal’ member while inwardly he rejects and hates the system and thus his own life. He creates a split within his own self and learns to lead a double life. Thus the neurotic personality type was born.

While the system presents itself as rational it simultaneously hides its irrational core. Therefore, resistance, for Adorno, means not to blindly identify with the whole anymore. There is no guarantor of

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freedom except the individual who has taken refuge in himself. The power of the negative must be preserved through non-identity with the whole.

Adorno then develops his negative equivalent of the Hegel’s idea of the Absolute – a metaphysical concept of the whole through which the individual hopes to find redemption. He calls it ‘utopia’ which is the negation of what exists from a higher perspective; it requires an absolute discontinuity. It cannot be mediated anymore since a certain utopia depends on utopia not actually existing. Once utopia is realised, it can no longer be utopia. For him, this utopia was the only niche left from where to view the troubled world. It was too precious to be abandoned and forgotten in positive attempts to reach it. His political passivity may thus be explainable from this ultimate point of reference which is his positive commitment to an ideal that defies all predefinitions – a subtle and fragile purity that easily becomes lost in the blind automatism of gradual improvements. The louder, brighter, and more efficient the whole system functions on the surface, the deeper this utopia, as the ontological other of what is, is being suppressed. Therefore, it must move deeper into the unconscious in order to protect itself from annihilation. Thus Reason is forced to remain immanent as long as the ignorance that inheres in phenomenal consciousness of everyday reality dominates the life of the whole.

For Adorno, Hegel’s dialectic is a dialectic of the subject that seeks to conquer its object. Against this Hegelian tendency, Adorno juxtaposes his negative dialectics from the perspective of the object: objects do not completely dissolve in the concepts but always leave a remainder (ND, p. 5). The remainder, excess, or leftover, does not allow the process to end in a total identity of object and concept. There is something in the object which resists conceptualisation. Although this remainder appears as something qualitatively different, it is unclear what it exactly is. It is a moment where our understanding fails. It slips through the net of symbolisation. “What is, is more than it is. This ‘more’ remains immanent, as that which has been pushed out of it. In that sense, the non-identical would be the thing’s own identity against its (enforced) identification” (ND, p. 161).

By claiming the realism of its objects based on either propositional truth conditions, statistic probabilities, or the axiomatically presupposed congruence of signifier and signified, logical empiricism tends to suppress or ignore the object’s unique nature, its non-identity. The limitation of this kind of ‘identity thinking’ is due to its unwillingness of become genuinely self-reflexive. The rationality of its cognising subject is always already presupposed. Thus the thought categories employed in this ‘identity thinking’ are themselves left unexamined. As a result, its methodology lacks the required tools to understand the object from within itself.

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Adorno’s immanent critique employs the concept of Mimesis as a closer approximation towards the object without, however, being able to positively define it. The final reconciliation (Erlösung) between subject and object would be the end of epistemology. By not dogmatically claiming any identity, the process of understanding the object must continue. For Adorno, the illusion of Idealism was the acceptance of an autonomous, self-sufficient thinking subject as the source of knowledge. This was Kant’s fallacy of constitutive subjectivity which still inheres in Hegel (Jarvis 1998, p. 152).

The base of Kant’s critique was to present an inquiry into the conditions of the possibility of pure experience. But Kant’s formal logic was riddled with static antinomies. This became Hegel’s point of departure. By relocating Kant’s dualisms within the cognising subject and by showing their self- contradictory nature, he assumed that the dynamism that this would generate could eventually overcome all dualities in a totally unified consciousness. What he could not yet see was that this consciousness was itself the product of its time – that it constituted an idealistic bourgeois mindset whose paradigm remained unconscious. This individualistic and idealistic paradigm radically changed with Marx as he redefined it in social and materialistic categories with a real content (cf. ND, p. 158). Thus Adorno’s meta-critique goes back to Kant and Hegel and searches for the limitations that inhered in their concepts. (cf. Jarvis 1998, p. 155).

Thinking without purity or identity is Adorno’s approach. He criticises the possibility of pure reason, pure concepts and pure intuitions. For him, there is something in the object, which always resists conceptualisation. This experience is a determinate NEGATION in which he experiences a conceptual inertia. He calls it the non-identity of the object. He sees dialectics as an epistemological experience in which the object cannot be fully conceptualised; it contains an element which keeps eluding the rational mind.

Non-identity is the secret telos of identification. It is the part that must be salvaged; the mistake in modernist thinking is that identity has been taken for the goal (ND, p. 149). The task of dialectical thinking has always been to expose this assumption as inadequate. In this sense, its nature has always been NEGATIVE. Dialectics is commonly regarded merely as an external method which does not pertain to the subject matter itself, having its ground in the conceit of the subject that compulsively needs to conquer its object (cf. SL, p. 56).

Adorno radically critiques this modernist epistemological project which unselfconsciously regards itself to be entitled to usurp the object in a final non-contradictory synthesis. Instead, he defends the object’s inherent right to remain unconquered. This must become a fundamental principle of epistemic thought. For Hegel, the whole is still true; it is the subject’s own self- objectified essence that consummates itself through its development (cf. PS § 20).

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For Adorno (2005, p.55), however, the whole has become NEGATIVE: “Das Ganze ist falsch” (The whole is false). As his interdisciplinary approach deliberately blurs the boundaries between logic and real life, this epistemological insight then becomes a moral statement: Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen. (There is no good life in the false one), implying that as long as the society as a whole is corrupt, then its members are bound to become corrupted, too.

Minima Moralia (1951), is Adorno’s ‘sorrowful science’ (a pun on Nietzsche’s gay science) in which the necessary conditions for a good life – the central theme of both the Greek and Hebrew roots of Western philosophy, are no longer available. From the perspective of hindsight, i.e. the experience of Fascism, Stalinism, and American mass culture, Hegel’s Phenomenology and Logic where the absolute is presented in a positive light as the dialectic ground of being and non-being, appears to be out of date.

‘The whole has become untrue’ also critiques Hegel’s statement in the Philosophy of Right that ‘the real is rational, and the rational real’. Adorno’s radicality here lies in the universal generalisation of his references as a critique of any self-perpetuating social system whose rationalism infiltrates the individual to the point where he becomes an appendix to the system. Here, he radicalises Marx’ statement that the labourer has become an appendix to his machine. In Adorno, even during his leisure time, the individual is being absorbed by the system. Ironically, in 1969, when Adorno died, Germany saw the most liberal government it ever had with Willy Brandt as Bundeskanzler and Gustav Heinemann as President.

For Adorno, the modern tradition that defines history in positive terms reflects the ego’s instinctual drive to create a better future – the same desire that drove Hegel’s Spirit forward. Adorno’s anti-system challenges, at a meta-level, the traditional view of history, including the history of dialectics, as a continuous process of gradual improvements – a bourgeois fantasy that the utopian socialists still shared with capitalists. History, however, consists of a series of discontinuities, a repeated sisyphean effort without ever achieving the final goal.

As a re-examination of the foundation of critical theory, Negative Dialectics tries to redefine dialectics for an era in which philosophy, which after Hegel seemed obsolete, lives on because the moment to realise it was missed. Its central notion suggests that the original sin of thought lies in its attempt to eliminate all that is other than thought, the attempt by the subject to devour the object, the striving for total identity. This reduction makes thought the accomplice of domination. Negative dialectics aims to ‘rescue’ the object not through a naive epistemological realism but through a thought based on differentiation, paradox, and the logic of disintegration. Without a revolutionary working class, the

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Frankfurt School had no one to rely on but the individual subject. But, as the social basis of the autonomous individual receded into the past, the dialectic based on it became more and more abstract through which it finally lost its link to the people on the ground.

Adorno employs Benjamin’s statement that “only because of the hopeless is hope given to us”, to uplift his ‘dialectic without identity’ onto a superior moral ground while his negativity becomes imbued with feelings of guilt. The actual force of history is the non-identity between subject and object on the one hand and their non-identity with the whole on the other. It is this unsolvable difference that constitutes the life of the individual and the whole. Here, Hegel’s purely logical process becomes filled with emotional content through which Adorno’s negative dialectics turns into a moral argument that is loaded with feelings of guilt about the past.

His concept of guilt is the awareness of what has irretrievably been lost in life. For him, this is the ethical dimension of negativity which arises from the experience of contradiction: “My thought is driven to it by its insufficiency, by my guilt of what I am thinking” (ND, p. 5). Negativity is the place where reason fails. It is the philosophical reflection of the unconscious experience of guilt and debt. Pain and negativity contain the moving principle of dialectical thinking (cf. ND, p. 202). Suffering is a condition for truth (cf. ND, p. 18). It is caused by over- identification. “The non-identical is not to be obtained directly, as something positive on its part, nor is it obtainable by a negation of the negative. This negation is not an affirmation itself, as it is for Hegel” (ND, p. 158).

While Adorno recognises the power of NEGATION in Hegel’s dialectics he deduces its ontological, methodological, epistemological and even political implications. However, Adorno’s concepts like identity theory, final synthesisation, or totalitarianism have no real basis in Hegel. They cannot be attributed to Hegel as they are antithetical to the very idea of Hegel’s phenomenology and logic. Hegel’s absolute is not static but dynamic which means that there is no end point in Hegel as Adorno wrongly conceived since Hegel’s spirit unfolds within a hermeneutic circle as an organic, evolving system, not in a linear fashion with a fixed beginning and end. As this process unfolds in the subject itself it becomes more and more self-aware and thereby feels empowered to lift itself out of the earlier stages of ignorance. In this sense, Hegel’s NEGATION OF NEGATION does indeed lead to annihilation; what becomes annihilated, however, is not the subject itself but only its ignorance which results in a genuinely positive state of complete self-awareness.

Adorno’s Negative Dialectics, with all its intellectual and emotional complexity, is a reflection of Adorno’s own inner complexity that becomes activated through his reading of Hegel. In this sense, he indirectly verifies Hegel’s system as that which brings out what still remains non-identical in him. In

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his Minima Moralia, Adorno admitted that his life had been damaged. From his damaged past, he creates associations between Hegel’s total system and the totalitarian state in which the individual subject is socially, psychologically, and finally, physically being annihilated.

Hegel still presupposed a psychologically fairly healthy subject that moves towards the positive as it becomes more and more self-aware and free. For him, NEGATIVITY is creative as it leads to ever higher levels of insight by which existing limitations and distortions in consciousness are gradually being worked through. Adorno’s reading, however, presupposes a traumatised subject – a damaged past that he himself could not come to terms with. This trauma revealed itself whenever he wrote from his own abyss of sheer endless associations of corruption and destruction. In the following example, he associates Hegel’s absolute NEGATIVITY with Auschwitz:

Genocide is the absolute integration. It is on its way wherever men are leveled off— “polished off,” as the German military called it—until one exterminates them literally, as deviations from the concept of their total nullity. Auschwitz confirmed the philosophy of pure identity as death. The most far out dictum from Beckett’s End Game, that there really is not so much to be feared any more, reacts to a practice whose first sample was given in the concentration camps, and in whose concept—venerable once upon a time—the destruction of non-identity is ideologically lurking. Absolute negativity is in plain sight and has ceased to surprise anyone. (Adorno 1973, p. 362)

4.8 Chapter summary

Adorno’s idea of aesthetic truth-content presupposes epistemological and metaphysical claims that he systematises in his penultimate magnum opus, Negative Dialectics. It tries to formulate a philosophical materialism that is historical and critical, but not dogmatic. Alternatively, one could describe the book as a meta-critique of idealist philosophy, especially of the philosophy of Kant and Hegel (Jarvis 1998, p. 148-74; O’Connor 2004). Adorno says that the book aims to complete what he considered to be his lifelong task as a philosopher: “to use the strength of the (epistemic) subject to break through the deception (Trug) of constitutive subjectivity” (ND, p. xx). This occurs in four stages:

First, a long Introduction (ND, pp.1-57) works out a concept of philosophical experience that challenges Kant’s distinction between phenomena and noumena and rejects Hegel's positive construction of the absolute Spirit.

Part One (ND, pp. 59-131) distinguishes Adorno’s project from the fundamental ontology in Heidegger’s Being and Time.

Part Two (ND, pp. 133-207) works out Adorno’s alternative with respect to the categories he reconfigures from German idealism.

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Part Three (ND, pp. 209-408), composing nearly half the book, elaborates philosophical models. These present negative dialectics in action upon three key concepts: a moral philosophy of freedom, a philosophy of history (world spirit and natural history), and metaphysics. The final model of metaphysics “tries by critical self-reflection to give the Copernican revolution an axial turn” (ND, p. xx). Alluding to Kant’s self-proclaimed second Copernican revolution, this describes Adorno’s ambition to finally overcome the deception of constitutive subjectivity.

Like Hegel, Adorno criticises Kant’s distinction between phenomena and noumena by arguing that the transcendental conditions of experience can be neither so pure, clear-cut, and distinct from each other as Kant claimed. As concepts, for example, the a priori categories of the faculty of understanding (Verstand) would be unintelligible if they would not be able to relate to something that is non-conceptual. Conversely, the supposedly pure forms of space, time, and causality cannot simply be non-conceptual intuitions. To be able to experience these as such we would have to have a concept about them. What makes possible any genuine experience cannot simply be the application of a priori concepts to a priori intuitions via the schematism of the imagination (Einbildungskraft). Genuine experience is made possible by that which exceeds the grasp of logic and sense perception. Adorno does not call this excess the thing-in- itself since this would imply the Kantian framework that he criticises. Rather, he calls it ‘the nonidentical’ (das Nichtidentische).

Adorno’s concept of the non-identical marks the difference between his materialism and Hegel's idealism. Although he shares Hegel’s ambition to work towards a speculative identity between thought and being, between subject and object, and between reason and reality, he denies that this identity has already been achieved in a positive fashion. For the most part, this identity has occurred negatively as a false identity. That is to say, logic has imposed identities and unities upon its objects by suppressing or simply ignoring their uniqueness, difference and diversity. These impositions are being imposed by a social system that seeks the standardisation and simplification of complex truths in order to quantify values for its markets. In other words, this type of thinking is driven by the economic exchange-principle. It turns essentially non- quantifiable qualities into quantities in order to gain one common denominator for everything. Hegel’s system sought the identity between identity and non-identity while Adorno insists on the non-identity between identity and non-identity. This is the essence of Adorno’s negative dialectic which rejects the affirmative character of the formal universalising claim of logic (ND, pp. 143-61).

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Adorno does, nevertheless, seem to accept the heuristic necessity of conceptual identification as an initial approximation towards truth. Under current societal conditions, thought can only have access to the non-identical via conceptual criticisms of this identification (What belongs to the sphere of the non-identical may also turn out to be not identical with itself - which points at an endless regress at the micro-level towards an absolute non-identity). Such criticism consists of ‘determinate NEGATIONS’ that point out specific contradictions between what thought claims to be a fact versus that which is ultimately true. The epistemic function of determinate negation then is the attempt to conceptualise what cannot be positively defined.

But the motivation and means for Adorno’s negative dialectic are not simply conceptual. His epistemology is materialist in both regards. It is motivated by the overwhelming experience of human suffering – the pervasive fact of unreason that counters Kant’s pure reason. Here, despite his criticism, Adorno shows his proximity to Kant. In this respect he did not see the self-corrective function of suffering that inevitably leads Hegel’s Spirit towards Absolute Knowing as insight into the necessity to reconcile itself with nature. Humanity in its ignorance tends to reject this wisdom by reversing the ascent towards self-awareness. This wilful turn against its own inner nature constitutes the original alienation, the original sin as it leads to the darkening of the light of reason.

Adorno, like Marx, externalises this alienation by locating its original cause in societally mediated forms of suffering that imprint themselves onto human consciousness. But he still arrives at a similar conclusion as Hegel, which is the necessary condition for truth realisation: the dialectic experience of NEGATIVITY through which the truth of suffering as non-identity is given its voice in order to speak for itself. Subjective suffering is objectively true because it weighs heavily upon each and every individual subject without exception (cf. ND, PP. 17-18).

Critical Theory expresses this truth via the ‘mimetic’ experience, which remains unrecognised and thus unacknowledged by the ordinary, societally sanctioned logic of syntax and semantics. Therefore, new forms of artistic and linguistic presentation (ND, pp. 18-19, 52-53) are needed that include non-traditional, unscripted relationships among established concepts. By taking such concepts out of their established framework and by rearranging them in new interdisciplinary constellations around a specific theme, philosophy could unlock their dynamic that otherwise would remain hidden within objects. In this indirect way, that, which exceeds the usual classifications imposed upon them, may become audible or visible (ND, pp. 52-53, 162-66). This is what Adorno himself seems to do as his style of speaking, writing, and

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music is intended to congruently reflect this insight as it arises in the very moment of experiencing it.

What unifies all of these desiderata, and what most clearly distinguishes Adorno’s materialist epistemology from idealism, whether Kantian or Hegelian, is his insisting on the ‘priority of the object’ (der Vorrang des Objekts), (ND, pp. 183-97). Adorno regards as idealist any philosophy that is based on identity-thinking between subject and object and thereby assigns constitutive priority to the epistemic subject. In insisting on the priority of the object, Adorno makes three claims:

First, that the epistemic subject is itself objectively constituted by the society to which it belongs and without which the subject could not exist;

Second, that no object can be fully known according to the methodological rules and procedures of identity thinking;

Third, that the goal of thought itself, even when thought forgets its goal under societally induced pressures to impose identity on objects, is to honour the non-identity of the object in its difference from what a reductive rationality declares them to be. Against empiricism, he argues that no object is simply given because a particular phenomenon becomes an object only in relation to a particular subject. But more fundamentally, subjects as well as objects are historical manifestations and therefore never fully identical with themselves at any one point in time.

Under current conditions, the only way for philosophy to give priority to the object is via its critique. While negative dialectics recognises the non-identity between thought and object it nevertheless must carry out the project of conceptual identification. The function of dialectics is to develop an awareness of this paradox. To think is to identify, and thought can achieve its conceptual truth only by identifying. So the ignorance of appearance (Schein) as complete identity is embedded within thought and conceptual truth itself. The only way to break through this deception is through immanent critique. Everything that cannot be fully quantified is qualitatively different; it resists conceptualisation by showing up as a contradiction. The contradiction is the non-identical under the dominance of conceptual identity; the primacy of the principle of contradiction in dialectics tests the heterogeneous against unitary thought (Einheitsdenken).

The necessity to think negatively is forced upon Critical Theory as long as a fundamentally antagonistic society imposes its false identity onto its individuals. To be able to expose its inner

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antagonism, and thereby to point towards a possible solution, is to think against common sense – in other words, to think negatively. In this way identity cannot be ascribed neatly to either thought or reality. Instead, a self-reflective and mindful relationship between concepts and objects needs to be cultivated.

Critical Thinking as negation is fragile and precious. It is at this subtle level that a transformation of consciousness must happen. It requires a society that would no longer be driven by gross antagonisms, a way of thinking that would be rid of the compulsion to dominate through conceptual identification. The object’s unique qualities would be free to flourish in and for themselves. Despite the possibility of contemporary society to alleviate at least the grosser forms of suffering, like physical and verbal violence, it nevertheless perpetuates it. “In view of the concrete possibility of utopia, dialectics is the ontology of the false condition” (ND, pp. 11).

Under the right conditions, however, even the need for conceptual violence would not arise anymore. Such conditions would be similar to what constituted Adorno’s happy childhood. It would end the war between humans and nature, among humans, and within human beings. But since it has been lost, it can only be deferred as something unattainable now. It is typified in the 19th century bourgeois ideal of the autonomous artist who in his creativity is able to recapture his lost paradise – a romantic reconciliation that Adorno could only negatively define.

In the end, Adorno had little to do with the dialectic of liberation and the capacity of NEGATIVITY to transform the status quo through political praxis. His great genius contained the potential to activate the negative power in the post-war generation but it sadly ended when his own students turned against him as his attitude had become as rigid as the rigidity that he attacked. The task of empowering the next generation in its struggle for self-determination was left to Herbert Marcuse who proactively supported the student movement during the 1960s and 70s in America, France, and Germany.

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Chapter 5

Heidegger’s Ontological Difference and Destruktion of Metaphysics

Contents

5.1 Introduction

5.2 Heidegger’s relation to Hegel in his development of thought

5.3 The place of Hegel in Heidegger’s ‘Destruktion’ of metaphysics

5.4 Heidegger’s interpretation of Hegel’s concept of time

5.5 Hegel’s infinity of Spirit versus Heidegger’s finitude of Being 5.6 Heidegger’s critique of Hegel’s concept of experience

5.7 Heidegger’s version of Hegel’s concept of NEGATIVITY

5.8 Ontology or theology?

5.9 Chapter summary

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5.1 Introduction

In this chapter I will discuss the nature of Heidegger’s interpretation of Hegel in general and then focus on Heidegger’s critique of Hegel’s NEGATIVE concepts of experience, time, finitude and NEGATIVITY in particular. Since Heidegger’s approach lies outside Hegel’s frame of reference, and indeed, of metaphysics in general, his concepts emphasise aspects that are generally regarded to be incompatible with Hegel’s specific terminology which makes a comparison between these two thinkers rather difficult.

Heidegger attempts to turn away from his so-called ‘ontic’ questions about beings and towards ‘ontological’ questions about Being. In this way he wants to reconnect with the most fundamental question of what it means to be and thereby rediscover our original being that dwells within us. This unique, unmediated experience he calls ‘Ein-kehr in das Er-eignis’, entering into our own true self by jumping into the abyss of Ereignis.

Heidegger argues that beings are fundamentally structured by their specific temporality (of past, present and future) in relation to time in general. He emphasises the importance of authenticity involving a truthful relationship to our origin as a ‘thrownness’ (Geworfenheit) into an already existing world with its long history and culture which means that we never start our life, and by extention, any project in life, from zero. Here we already get a sense of the fundamental uniqueness of Heidegger’s philosophical approach which represents a radical challenge – perhaps even more radical than Nietzsche’s – not only for Cartesians and analytical philosophers, but for Hegelians as well.16 Since both Hegel and Heidegger are original philosophers who founded their own traditions with their respective philosophical paths and ontologies, comparative studies between these two thinkers in particular are prone to misunderstandings and misrepresentations. But since Heidegger himself sought a direct confrontation (Auseinandersetzung) with Hegel in his magnum opus Sein und Zeit (1927) and in his lecture series on Hegel in 1930/31, we may be able to analyse the key terms that he himself selected for his critique.

5.2 Heidegger’s relation to Hegel in his development of thought

Although Hegel’s philosophy is not the main concern for Heidegger’s philosophical enquiry, over a period of nearly 40 years, from 1916 to 1958, he is again and again referring to Hegel. This brings us to Heidegger’s specific engagement with Hegel’s philosophy which is contained in the following lecture series:

16 While Heidegger’s interpretation of Hegel has emerged as a counterpoint to Lukácsian Hegelian Marxism, Herbert Marcuse, having been a student of Heidegger, tried to develop a Heideggerian form of Hegelian Marxism. For the French poststructuralist critique of Hegel, however, particularly for Deleuze, Foucault and Derrida, Heidegger’s ontology of Being has been very influential (see the next chapter in this thesis).

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1. In 1910 and again in 1914, Heidegger becomes interested in Hegel and Schelling. 2. In 1919 and 1921/22, he gives lectures on Hegel’s History of Philosophy. 3. In 1925/26, he gives lectures on Hegel’s Science of Logic. 4. In 1927, he lectures on the ontologies of Aristotle and Hegel. 5. In 1929, he lectures on German idealism based on the Hegel’s Preface of the Phenomenology of Spirit. Here Heidegger gives prominence to Fichte over Schelling and Hegel. 6. In 1930/31, he lectures on Hegel’s Introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit. 7. In 1938/39 and in 1941 he writes an essay entitled ‘Negativity: A Confrontation with Hegel approached from Negativity’. 8. In 1939/40, he lectures on Hegel’s Metaphysics of History. 9. In 1942/43, he returns to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and writes the essay ‘Hegel’s Concept of Experience’. 10. In 1955/56, he lectures on Hegel’s Science of Logic, particularly the ‘Logic of Essence’. 11. In 1956/57, he lectures on Hegel’s Science of Logic, particularly with reference to the beginning of science. 12. Then in 1957, Heidegger writes his final essay on Hegel entitled ‘The onto-theological construction of metaphysics.’

In these lectures, Heidegger shows his proximity to Dilthey’s philosophy of life (Lebensphilosophie) and Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics which had helped him to distance himself from the formal systemic ideal of Neo-Kantianism, as Heidegger acknowledges in Being and Time (cf. Gadamer 1994, pp. 22- 24). Heidegger’s novel ideas about ontology required a total Gestalt formation, not merely a string of logical arguments, in order to demonstrate his fundamentally new paradigm of thinking. He adopts the hermeneutic circle as a useful tool for the articulation and realisation of these ideas (Nelson 2014, pp. 109-28). The remarkable point of Heidegger’s reading and teaching of German idealism and Hegel is showing that Heidegger is much closer to Kant than to Hegel, and Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant is radical than Hegel.

5.3 The place of Hegel in Heidegger’s ‘Destruktion’ of the history of philosophy

With Hegel, Heidegger views the horizon of the living spirit as essentially temporal, that is, historical. The world view that he seeks, however, is far removed from Hegel’s theory which largely abstracts from the real life of the individual. Heidegger is convinced that we can understand ourselves only by critically reviewing our cultural history and thereby becoming aware of how deeply our present way of

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thinking and perceiving is predetermined by a long line of predecessors. He calls this reflective stance Besinnung.

For Heidegger, just like Hegel, the history of philosophy gains its continuity and unity through reference to a timeless truth (das gemeinschaftliche Unvergängliche) which is necessarily formed in and through time. Heidegger writes that the past would remain unthinkable if thought would not be able to transcend its own time frame. However, Heidegger does not understand the present as the reality of an absolute Spirit and a totally transparent self-consciousness but views the history of philosophy as ongoing subjective attempts to think and experience the Absolute (GA 1, p. 408).

Thus, Heidegger’s starting point is neither that of Kant’s noumenon nor Hegel’s Absolute but a third perspective on the ‘in itself’, a mystery which Hegel’s Phenomenology made its very point of departure. For Hegel, the ‘in itself’ is not an ultimate truth out there at all but merely a potential content that has not yet become real within consciousness. Thus the ‘in itself’ is not yet related to the world of appearance but rather constitutes the beginning of a movement of the Spirit comprehending itself.

But where does the NEGATIVITY as the moving force of the Spirit’s development, its conditio sine qua non, come from? For Hegel, it is the temporal ‘not yet’ of the future and the ‘no longer’ of the past. Thus time becomes the condition of the dynamic possibility of movement in contrast to merely static contradictions in which Kant had been entangled. But time for Hegel was neither the ancient Chronos who devoured his own children, nor a linear sequence of isolated Newtonian events. Instead, the subject’s inner dialectical process through which any kind of content could arise, would constitute its own time.

Then the next question comes: how can time mediate this process? For Hegel, the self is not just Substance but also Subject which brings the self in relation to time since the development of self- awareness is an activity that happens gradually over time. This process will continue as long as the Spirit has not yet grasped the pure concept of itself, i.e. has not yet become totally transparent to itself.

As long as there is a residue of non-being there remains a NEGATIVE relation to being and thus time (cf. PS, section VIII, Absolute Knowing, and see the first chapter of this thesis).

Heidegger now develops his own approach in Being and Time. He refuses to frame his philosophy within a closed system of logic and instead gives priority to a specific psychological question that the concrete living individual must answer in order to disclose the mystery of Being within himself. He focuses on the liveliness of philosophical contemplation which for him is characterised by its uniqueness in the present moment with its personal quality of engagement. In ‘Letter on Humanism’,

Heidegger writes that “the essence of Dasein is existence” (Heidegger 1998, pp. 250f), that indeed, only Dasein ex-ists. He understands ex-istence here etymologically as ‘ek-sistence’, that is, as a standing out. Thus his discussion of ontology (the study of Sein) is rooted in an analysis of the individual’s existential mode of being (Dasein).

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Against Hegel, who tended to dismiss the empirical individual’s perspective for its blindness with regard to the perception of totality, Heidegger remphasises the basic hermeneutic structure of the living spirit when he says that unique individual acts are always interwoven with the general and only together do they form a living and meaningful unity (GA 1, p. 410). Thus the individual not only carries a subjective validity but this also always contains a generally valid objective truth. The reverse also applies: what is generally valid can only be verified by an individual. Here, Heidegger juxtaposes the uniqueness, and even the sacredness of the living individual against Hegel’s absolute Being based on the conviction that the individual is the only channel through which being can be approached.17 The individual’s repeated attempts to verify being are very distinct experiences which need to be recognised and acknowledged (GA 1, p. 409).

Heidegger describes this modern mind set as objectified, insecure and disorientated and contrasts it with his simple medieval hero whose whole life is dedicated to only one goal: to achieve a union with God. This reads rather like a nostalgic cultural critique of the young Heidegger who is longing for a more meaningful life than what the post-traumatic World War I era was able to offer. When we compare this with his mature work we can see that the same underlying attitude prevails: antimodernism, anticivilisation, irrationalism and serious doubt about the Enlightenment claim of individual autonomy and maturity – the absolute antithesis of what Hegel believed.

Having experienced two world wars, Heidegger had a nightmarish vision of the Western world heading for total annihilation and profound nihilism (the rejection of all religious and moral principles), which, ironically, would provide the existential intensity necessary for the revelation of being but only in so far as its magnitude would be perceived as a profound crisis of meaning: the West could turn into a wasteland populated by tool-using brutes, characterised by an unprecedented ignorance and barbarism in which everything would be permitted. By seeing this situation as reaching the edge of an abyss it would enable humanity to comprehend being more profoundly and primordially than the Pre- Socratics (Gillespie 1984, pp. 148-151).

But already in his early writing, Heidegger is aware that his medieval hero cannot be the model for the future anymore. He knows that the past could only be accessed under certain conditions which the current mass culture rejects. What he believes to be still possible and necessary, however, is – for those few people who are prepared to engage in his programme – to conceptually ground philosophy in a reevaluation of medieval spirituality. This would require the cultivation of an open attitude of empathic understanding towards our cultural inheritance (GA 1, p. 408). If the past were totally different from the present this would be impossible. But since there is a commonly shared truth (ein gemeinschaftliches

17 Seeing himself in a theological and ontological tradition, Heidegger does not speak of ‘human beings’ but simply of beings in relation to being.

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Unvergängliches) that constitutes the basic structure of the living spirit, it should in principle still be possible. For Heidegger, this basic structure manifests itself within the historic individual.

What Heidegger finds admirable in the medieval hero is his fine disposition towards careful listening to the unmediated inner life of subjective experiencing with its immanent context of meaning which is free from the modern obsession to operationally define the concept of the rational subject (GA1, p. 401). For him, this reevaluation of the medieval hero has become necessary because the present is not at all superior to the past as commonly taken for granted. There is no automatic progress from the past to the present and from the present to the future. Instead, philosophical work requires a constantly renewed effort and this effort must consist of a careful listening to the inner life of the subject (GA 1, p. 196).

Heidegger regards Kierkegaard as, by far, the greatest philosophical contributor to his own existentialist concepts of anxiety (Angst) and temporality (Zeitlichkeit).18 He feels inspired by the uncompromising way in which Kierkegaard laid out the importance of the subjective relation to truth, the temporality of existence, and the importance of a passionate affirmation of being in the world.

In contrast to Kierkegaard, however, Heidegger envisions the function of philosophical enquiry not like a ladder to be discarded once the philosopher is ready for the leap into faith. Instead, a genuine philosophical enquiry would itself reveal the basic structure of consciousness which could open a door towards the unknown. Heidegger sees the history of philosophy as being filled with such seriousness of attitude which is not dissimilar to the medieval spiritual quest.

Here, it becomes clear that Heidegger has indeed shifted the relation between philosophy and history from the general to the specific, from abstract logic towards concrete personal experience. The Hegelian thought model was geared towards the opposite direction: the sublation of the specific and the individual into the general and the Absolute. Now Heidegger emphasises that philosophical thought always arises out of a specific historic life context and that the opportunities for clarification are increased the more deeply the philosopher understands the uniqueness of this context.

Heidegger concludes that time is the horizon of Being: “time temporalises itself only as long as there are human beings” (Heidegger 2000, p. 89).

For him, the most important principle here is to ask about being which he traces back via Aristotle to Parmenides. In Parmenides, Sein and Denken is identical. This point was largely forgotten by the metaphysical tradition extending from Plato to Descartes, a forgetfulness of being (Seinsvergessenheit) which extends via the age of Enlightenment to our modern science and technology.

18 See Dreyfus (1991, Division I).

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The result of this period is his magnum opus, Being and Time. In this work, Heidegger investigates the question of being by asking about the being for whom being is of central concern. Heidegger names this being Dasein, and he pursues his investigation through a hermeneutical approach in which a sequence of reinterpretations produces an ever more illuminating comprehension of being.19

It was Heidegger’s original intention to write the second half of the book, consisting of a ‘Destruktion’ of the history of philosophy – that is, the transformation of philosophy by retracing its history – but he never completed this project. His philosophy is founded on the attempt to conjoin what he considers two fundamental insights: the first is his observation that, in the course of over 2000 years of history, philosophy has attended to beings (including the world itself), but has forgotten to ask what being itself is.

Heidegger opens his magnum opus with a citation from Plato’s Sophist indicating that Western philosophy has neglected being because it was considered obvious and thus not worth questioning. Heidegger’s question of being is an historical one which in his later work becomes his concern with the history of the forgetting of being which he experiences as a loss of the dignity and sacredness of beings. It requires that philosophy retrace its footsteps through a ‘deconstruction’ of the history of philosophy in order to find its true tradition.

The second intuition animating Heidegger’s philosophy derives from the influence of Husserl’s interest in describing immediate phenomenal experiences. For Heidegger, experience is always already situated in the world and in ways of Being. Husserl emphasised that all consciousness is ‘intentional’ in the sense that it is always intended ‘towards’ something, and concerned ‘about’ something. Now Heidegger shifts Husserl’s focus on scientific phenomenology to an existential enquiry by stressing that all experience is grounded in a basic attitude of ‘care’. He thus describes experience from the perspective of the being for whom Being has become the central question.

Heidegger criticises the generally abstract and metaphysical character of analysing human existence from the detached perspective of a rational Cartesian subject – an inauthentic attitude which still inheres in Kant and Hegel. In the course of his existential analytic, Heidegger argues that Dasein that finds itself thrown (geworfen) into the world as a vast network of entities, is exposed to a wide spectrum of possible involvements which all end in death. Out of the awareness of their temporality, beings feel compelled to live self-responsibly which is the basis of Heidegger’s notion of authenticity as the antithesis of half-heartedness or the thinking in numbers.

19 In everyday German, Dasein means existence. It is composed of Da (here/there) and Sein (being). Dasein is transformed in Heidegger’s usage from its everyday meaning to refer, rather, to that being for whom Being matters. In later publications Heidegger writes the term in hyphenated form as Da-sein, thus emphasising the distance from the word’s ordinary usage.

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Since both of these two observations are essentially concerned with time they belong together. That Dasein is thrown into an already existing world and thus into its mortal possibilities does not only mean that Dasein is an essentially temporal Being; it also implies that the description of Dasein should be carried out in terms inherited from its own tradition. For Heidegger, unlike for Husserl, philosophical terminology could not be divorced from the history of the use of that terminology, and thus genuine philosophy cannot avoid questions of language and personal meaning. The existential analytic of Being and Time was thus intended to be only the first step in Heidegger’s philosophy, to be followed by the ‘dismantling’ (Destruktion) of the history of philosophy, that is, a transformation of its language and meaning.

The challenge of Dasein is to open up to the dimension of Being and to maintain this level of awareness even while encountering the general oblivion of Being in our culture. The modern era has lost this basic openness which means that we do not question anymore our technological rationality; we are at best only partially, occacionally and superficially aware of how we are constantly recreating an ever more ‘perfect’ algorithm in which we are imprisoning ourselves while falsely believing that this would be real progress in the service of humanity.

Accordingly, Heidegger’s main philosophical target is uncovering the question of Being and how it differs from beings: ontological difference. Hegel’s philosophical target is understanding the inherent

NEGATIVITY in Being: Nothing in Being and its Becoming.

In the following subsections, I am focusing on the nature of Heidegger’s engagement with Hegel and examine whether his critique is genuine. I will concentrate first on Heidegger’s critique of Hegel’s concept of time as it relates to both temporality and negativity.

5.4 Heidegger’s interpretation of Hegel’s concept of time That Heidegger should reject Hegel’s way of philosophising is not surprising given his efforts at a ‘destructive recovery’ of the Western tradition of philosophising. For him, Hegel represents the conclusion and thus the most radical form of Western metaphysics – a tradition that has, according to Heidegger, covered over the importance of the question of Being and has thus denied to itself the possibility of any authentic engagement with it.

For Heidegger, Hegel’s assumption that philosophy must be scientific and his notion of an allegedly historic, and at the same time God-like, Spirit are manifestations of the degree to which man has become alienated from the mode of Dasein. Heidegger’s remarks in the concluding pages in Being and Time contain his earliest critique of Hegel’s notion of time, where Heidegger, unfortunately, glosses over its full complexity (cf. Surber 1979, pp. 358-377).

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In the last chapter of Being and Time, Heidegger points out that Hegel considered the nature of time at the opening of his Philosophy of Nature in a discussion on space, time and movement under the title of ‘Mechanics’ and continues from this to expound his view of time from these sections. The various comments on time by Hegel throughout his works can be divided into two groups: those which deal with the general nature of time in his system, and those which deal with special, naturphilosophische aspects of time. It is methodologically illegitimate to reduce Hegel’s understanding of time under the latter and to subsume the more general discussion under the more special. In addition, Heidegger reads

Hegel’s dialectical movement from space to time only via a simple formal NEGATION and thus misses the significance of the NEGATION OF NEGATION as well as the special relationship between time and Spirit that Hegel had brought out. Hegel’s idea of time in Philosophy of Nature is: Space is quantity immediately existent, in which everything remains the same, even the limit has the mode of remaining, time (on the other hand) is precisely the existence of continual self-annulment, it is the NEGATION OF NEGATION, the NEGATION relating itself to itself.

Only on this formal basis, which could be questioned whether it is the most appropriate or even significant characterisation, Heidegger says in that does Hegel set up a connection between time and the spirit through which can be mediated the fact that the spirit falls in time (BT, pp. 394-395). This, however, hardly does justice to Hegel since it shifts the concrete problematic involved onto a different track that Heidegger is himself concerned about: the fall of the Spirit in time. The problem with this kind of interpretation is that Heidegger reads his own agenda into Hegel’s text and thus misses Hegel’s actual intention: to clarify the innermost nature of time and Spirit, as well as their relationship. Heidegger’s idea is that time is the concept itself definitely existent and presented to consciousness in the form of empty intuition; hence Spirit necessarily appears in time.

Thus the Spirit appears in time because time is a Begriff and has the formal NEGATION OF NEGATION conceptual character. But Hegel qualifies this general dialectical structure with a specific emphasis here: time is ‘der da-seyende Begriff’. By merely reading the common conceptual formal structure Heidegger misses this point why Spirit can and must fall in time, namely that time is always already ‘da’. In other words, time is intrinsic to the existential mode of being; time is intrinsic to Dasein.

There is another mediation between Spirit and time which Hegel clearly suggests in several places, although he did not elaborate the idea. Time is the pure self in external form, apprehended in intuition, and not grasped and understood by the self, it is the concept apprehended only through intuition. Here Hegel indicates a direct relation between the Spirit’s self and time where time is not merely an intuition- form of the self but the self itself as intuited.

As elaborated in Philosophy of Nature time is the same principle as the I=I of pure self-consciousness, but the same or the simple concept, still in its complete externality and abstraction, as mere becoming intuited – the pure being-in-itself, as simply a coming-out-of itself. The relation between self and time

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here is specified further and involves a deeper and more intimate connection than a formal dialectic structure as NEGATION OF NEGATION.

The manifest (daseyende) character of time is treated by Heidegger less as intrinsic to Dasein and more as merely present (vorhanden) when he writes time as present and therewith external of the spirit, has no power over the concept, rather the concept is the power over time. Here, Heidegger merely connects the power of the Spirit with the power of time as external to the Spirit (BT, p. 396).

Hegel’s view is rather that the power of the Spirit over time lies in the growing intimacy and direct conceptual relation between the two through which time is included in the Spirit. Thus it is not through time as external but rather as internal to Spirit through which the Spirit’s sway over time is mediated. For Hegel, all finite things are temporal, limited and transient which is their negative factor. The finite does not, like the Begriff, contain the total NEGATIVITY, although it does indeed have this hidden quality as its universal essence in it, but being one-sided, it does not exist in accordance with its own universality and thus is subject to the power of NEGATIVITY. The Begriff as I=I is the absolute

NEGATIVITY and freedom, and thus over time. When we recall that time follows the same principle as I=I, we see how the sway of the Spirit over time is mediated through this ideational link.

Heidegger misses this apriori internality of time in the Spirit when he reads: “Time must be able to receive spirit, as it were. And spirit must in turn be related to time and its essence” (BT, p. 392). Time must so to say be able to absorb the Spirit. This is the problem of a selective reading approach as it does not give full justice to the total interdependency of Hegel’s concepts. Heidegger’s analysis reveals only the most general conceptual similarity with regard to the appearance of the Spirit in time where more importantly, time is always already ‘daseiend’ within the Spirit (cf. Trivers 1942, pp. 162–168).

Concequently, Heidegger complains that the origin of time remains completely hidden in Hegel, whereas Hegel, although insufficiently elaborated, clearly locates the origin of time – as everything else – in the Spirit. Not having been able to detect the depth dimension of Hegel’s concepts, Heidegger merely juxtaposes time against Spirit and thus externalises their inner relationship when the spirit ‘falls’ into time through a simple NEGATION.

The onto-phenomenological meaning of the fall into an abyss and the Spirit’s self-realization therein becomes Heidegger’s central concern from where he later critiques the West’s technological mindset, whereas Hegel’s concern was the heroic return of the Spirit – a rather traumatic Odyssey of a gradual coming home to itself.

Heidegger points out that objective means of measuring time like clocks and calendars are unable to help us realise the human significance of time. Objective means distort the real meaning of time as time can only be perceived via specific life events (Harman 2007, p. 26). This perspective of time is derived from Husserl’s notion of ‘Internal Time Consciousness’,

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which Heidegger had edited himself as Husserl’s assistant. The core of Husserl’s phenomenological approach to time was ‘consciousness of time’, which has to be distinguished from time itself.

Heidegger criticises the scientific reduction of time into an infinite series of static ‘now-points’ – a radical distortion which turns lived time into a linear uniformity of impersonal events. In this fundamental way, science transformed the living experience of time into a purely logical and abstract concept which, unfortunately, has been blindly adopted in present day ordinary perception: the future is the not-yet-now, the past is the no-longer-now, and the present is the now that runs from past to future at each passing moment.20 In his own approach, Heidegger strongly emphasises the importance of the present moment: although beings can only live in the present but they tend to project their presence into the future. In other words, beings for whom the question of Being matters want to turn their lives into a lifelong project. He claims that this experiential aspect was ignored by Hegel.

Hegel had presented time in relation to the historical development of the Spirit. In his critique of Hegel, Heidegger now replaces Hegel’s evolution of the Spirit with his own concept of time based on Dasein. Thus he contrasts his own existential and phenomenological approach to the temporality of Dasein against Hegel’s dialectical historical conception of the evolution of the Spirit. This shift is motivated by his claim that Hegel distorted the phenomenal structure of human temporality. Temporality had already become a central concept in Heidegger’s thought when he distanced himself from Husserl’s project of the investigation of internal time-consciousness. Heidegger stresses the central importance of finitude and the primacy of temporality over Husserl’s focus on intentionality from which he derived the meaning of ‘to be’ (Dahlstrom 1994, p. 244).

For Heidegger, temporality remained unthought, not only in Husserl and Hegel, but in the whole history of Western metaphysics. His project now is to reveal Being through time. Beings are in time which means that they are finite beings. Death is the actual horizon of all beings. Being alive means to be moving towards death. This aspect of time lies outside Hegel’s frame of reference. Heidegger’s reference point, in contrast, is not any objective study of subjectivity

20 The theme of chapter VI of Being and Time is ‘Temporality and within-Timeness as the Origin of the Vulgar Concept of Time’.

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but the subjective horizon of Being itself. Being can only exist in time; it is always bound up with time:

If Being is to be conceived in terms of time and if the various modes and derivatives of Being in their modification and derivations, and in fact to become intelligible through the consideration of time, then Being itself – and not only beings that are ‘in time’ – is made visible in its ‘temporal’ character. (Heidegger 1996, p. 16)

Here, it becomes clear that Heidegger sees temporality – and by extention, historicality – as foundational for beings. With this emphasis he distances himself from Husserl and also from Hegel and the Western tradition of metaphysics. He places finite subjective knowing in direct opposition to Hegel’s absolute Being which is infinite and absorbed in Absolute Knowing.

Probably because of Dilthey’s influence, Heidegger accuses the Western tradition of forgetting the human dimension of time while busily engaging in superhuman metaphysical speculation. For Heidegger, even metaphysics is just another form of escape or distraction from the possibility of fully being here into forms of busy-ness or modes of ‘doing’. Thus Heidegger becomes the main proponent of a fundamental critique of Western culture, including its philosophical tradition, that always prioritised lofty, superhuman ideas over our most immediate and fundamental concern: how to live fully in the here and now, which Heidegger simply calls Dasein.

In general, Hegel and Heidegger give considerable importance to the categories of time, but from opposite perspectives.21 According to Hegel, history is the self-manifestation of the absolute Spirit which realises itself in a dialectical process and materialises itself in particular forms. In this process, time is an externalisation of essence. Hegel writes: “Time is the negative unity of self-externality” (EPS II, p. 34). Everything comes to be and passes away in time.

Finite determinations perish in time while NEGATIVITY, the idea and the spirit are immanent in the dialectical process itself which is over time. His point is that a sole focus on the finite would create a one-sided, narrow, and thus distorted picture:

21 For a critical discussion of the comparative study of time and dialectics between Hegel and Heidegger, see Stambaugh, (1991).

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The dimension of time, present, future and past are the becoming of externality as such, and the resolution of it into the differences of being as passing over into nothing, and of nothing as passing over into being. (EPS II, p. 37)

In this dialectical process of Becoming, NEGATIVITY is its moving force. Time is not just seen as a linear process that determines the events of history but rather an expression of NEGATIVITY itself. Contrary to Newton’s mechanistic concept of time as an independent and constant entity, Hegel’s ontological subject determines its own time. In other words, time is its externalisation and thus a function of the subject’s representation. According to Hegel, the circular movement of nature is a purely spatial reality which remains unaware of itself; whereas progress belongs to the Spirit as it seeks to free itself from this circle. In non-human nature there is no progress at all, only blind repetition. Since space is eternal and empty there is nothing in it that could produce a higher reality; whereas each and every stage of the absolute Spirit, which is non- spatial, contains something new. In Hegel’s philosophy of history, time is the result of the development of the Spirit which is activated through its inherent NEGATIVITY. Since time is a function of the Spirit it must be structurally similar to it. Hegel thus defined its deep structure as the NEGATION OF NEGATION. Time exists only insofar as it continually negates itself (Stambaugh 1991, p. 32). This shows that Hegel saw time not in spatial terms as a container in which everything is taking place, coming to be, and passing away; but rather, he saw time itself as coming to be and passing away.

Heidegger’s critique is that this formulation of time would merely be a ‘logical’ conceptualisation without any real consequences; that the NEGATION OF NEGATION of space would merely be a speculative exercise (BT p. 394). Hegel’s characterisation of time in terms of ‘now’ was ‘intuited becoming’, an ‘objective presence’ which is presented in idealistic terms. The problem that Heidegger sees here is that there is no place for real ‘coming into being’ and for ‘passing away’. Hegel’s definition of time as the NEGATION OF NEGATION would be a formalisation of nows in its most extreme form. His presentation of time as abstract

NEGATIVITY and self-differentiation completely bypasses the phenomenological account of human temporality. Therefore, Hegel’s dialectical exposition lacks the actual ground of Being (BT, p. 394). The structural identity of Hegel’s time and Spirit would be empty of meaning, a merely formal-ontological statement which has resulted in the opposite of self-actualisation: the utter obliteration of temporality (BT, p. 396). As a result of this critique, Heidegger

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develops his existential analysis of Dasein in which he proposes a concretisation of existence and temporality.

Although Heidegger’s critique is important but it seems to refer only to paragraphs 254-258 of Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature. If this is true then it remains not only a partial and decontextalised critique but also one which does not recognise the significance of this identity of time and Spirit which Hegel refused to break up.

Another problematic point in Heidegger’s critique is that he attributes the phrase ‘NEGATION

OF NEGATION’ to the Phenomenology which actually appears in the Encyclopedia. Neither does Heidegger refer to the evolution of historic consciousness as the essence of Hegel’s work. Even though his criticism is based on Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature, Heidegger does not consider the absolute NEGATIVITY that is embedded in the dialectical relationship between space, time and matter. Hegel’s understanding of time cannot be separated from his notion of the self- conscious Spirit in its historical development. Unlike Heidegger, Hegel offers a dialectical exposition of time through the concept of mediation whose declared aim is to actually overcome the limitations of formalised concepts, including formalised dialectics itself. In the Philosophy of Nature to which Heidegger’s critique refers, Hegel did not develop the idea of the historic Spirit.

It would have been more accurate to analyse Hegel’s concept of time from within its overall context of both, the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Philosophy of Nature. Thus we can conclude that Heidegger's critique fails to formulate an adequate picture of Hegel’s concept of time as he gains only a limited understanding of Hegel’s total philosophy in which the historicity of the evolving Spirit is the central theme.

5.5 Hegel’s infinity of Spirit versus Heidegger’s finitude of being Heidegger’s 1930/31-lecture series on the Phenomenology of Spirit addresses the problem of finitude. Human existence is characterised by its finitude; it signifies the contingency of our existence. The problem of finitude is the antipode to the infinity of Hegel’s absolute Spirit. Heidegger’s point is that being is lived time which at the level of each individual existence is finite. Thus Being and time represent the movement towards an absolute ending for the living individual.

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From this perspective, it becomes clear that Hegel’s concept of infinity is one of Heidegger’s main critiques against Hegel. Heidegger’s claim is that this finitude can neither be avoided nor reduced to a peripheral significance. Finitude (Endlichkeit) is a synonym for death; it is not a conceptual but the actual limit of our existence. Therefore, original time is finite (BT, p. 331). Philosophy itself is an expression of this fact of life; it is the unsurpassable horizon of Being human which implies the incompleteness of all our work.

Accordingly, for Heidegger, the concept of time that Hegel derived from his notion of infinity is of secondary importance. But from Hegel’s point of view, it is infinity that is inscribed in the question of being. For him, all finite beings are contained in this infinity of Absolute Knowing. Heidegger writes:

The problem is that of infinity. But how can in-finity become a more radical problem than that of finitude? It is a question of the not and the negation whereby the not-finite must, if it can, come to truth. In our obligation to the first and last inherent necessities of philosophy, we shall try to encounter Hegel on the problematic of finitude. (Heidegger 1988, p. 38)

Here, Heidegger counters Hegel for trying to overcome the history of the ontological tradition. Hegel’s infinity of Being, according to Heidegger, does not relate to real beings at all. It is this relationship that is Hegel’s problem which must again become the guiding principle of philosophy.

As Dasein is intrinsically temporal, it is finite. Thus disclosure itself is finite. Both, human beings and the object world are temporal, partial and incomplete. From this position it seems inconceivable how “the infinity of Absolute Knowledge determines the truth of being” (Heidegger 1988, p. 75). For Hegel, the finite is involved in an infinite process of sublation which generates the power of the dialectical movement.

Heidegger distinguishes between a subjective and a logical grounding of infinity: Hegel’s Phenomenology is his subjective grounding while Logic is his logical grounding (Heidegger 1988, p. 77). Instead of this double-grounding, Heidegger points out that infinity is phenomenally necessarily grounded in the subjective aspect. Here, he sees the Hegelian self- consciousness in the Fichtean sense: “Self-consciousness as subject knows consciousness as

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its object. Heidegger’s Fichtean formulation of self-consciousness is the condition of the possibility of objectivity.22

Heidegger’s aim is to overcome the Hegelian subjectivity by an existential analysis of Dasein. However, his existential analysis fails to consider the dialectics of dependence in Hegel’s approach, especially the dimension of the unhappy consciousness, the role of human desire, the struggle for recognition and the master-slave dynamic. These aspects are modes of

NEGATIVITY inscribed in the Hegelian Subject.

For Hegel, self-consciousness is not the final stage of the Spirit’s development but a still incomplete stage of the absolute Spirit because self-consciousness represents the finite in the infinite, and its purpose is to completely overcome its otherness. Hegel sought to reveal the internal contradictions within the finite subject by emphasising its struggle to overcome its limitations. While Hegel explored the dialectical mediation between finitude and infinity, Heidegger describes a non-dialectical unmediated path for the finite being to realise its original oneness with infinite Being.

In the section of the ‘Doctrine of Being’ in the Logic, Hegel gives an exposition of the relationship between the finite being and the infinite, absolute Being. The finite being is seen to be determined which implies the existence of an infinite determining power. Hegel’s dialectic unfolding occurs within this duality as it develops in the direction of a non-dual state of self-consciousness which he describes as Absolute Knowing.

In Aristotelian logic which has become our ordinary way of thinking we spontaneously make an absolute distinction between the finite and the non-finite. In this simple NEGATION infinity is posited against finitude. This presupposes the existence of two separate worlds. In Hegel’s dialectic, however, there is only one world whose internal dynamic is determined by the way how infinity inheres within the finite. As Hegel writes, “the self-sublation of this infinity and of the finite as a single process - this is the true or genuine infinite” (SL, p. 137). This implies

22Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is Heidegger’s largest project on Hegel which is based on his lecture series at the University of Freiburg in 1930-1931. But Heidegger’s treatment covers only a few selected topics in Hegel’s Phenomenology such as sense certainty, perception, force and understanding and self-consciousness which are close to Heidegger’s personal interest in phenomenology. The interesting and probably unintended side-effect of his attention to Hegel is that it helped to reanimate Hegel’s Spirit for his students.

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that both the infinite and the finite are negated and transcended together in an infinite process. Infinity absorbs the finite into itself and vice versa. Here, infinity and finitude are not considered as being external to each other but as a single complex interwoven dynamic. In next section, I will move to one of Hegel’s concepts that Heidegger directly examined.

5.6 Heidegger’s critique of Hegel’s concept of experience

One of the standard critiques of Hegel, first formulated already by the ‘young Hegelians’, concerns the apparent contradiction between Hegel’s dialectical method and his system. While Hegel’s method approaches reality in its dynamic development, discerning in every determinate form the seeds of its own destruction and self-overcoming, his system endeavours to render the totality of Being as an achieved order in which no further development is in view.

This contradiction between the logical and the historical acquires a deeper radical underpinning through Heidegger: what he tries to outline is a more fundamental ontological frame that is both the source of Hegel’s dialectical systematising, and is, simultaneously, betrayed by this systematising. The historical dimension is here not simply the unending evolution of subjective life; it is also not the life-philosophical opposition between the young Hegel trying to grasp the historical antagonisms of social life and the old Hegel compulsively steamrolling all content with his dialectical machine, but the inherent tension between Hegel’s systematic drive of notional self-mediation (or sublation) and a more original way of describing the contradictions in which the ontological subject is entangled.

From a temporal perspective, the root of what Hegel calls ‘NEGATIVITY’ is our awareness of the basic conflict between the present and the future: future is what is not (yet), the power of NEGATIVITY is ultimately identical with the power of time itself, a force that corrodes every rigid identity. The proper temporality of a human being is thus not that of linear time, but that of engaged existence: a man projects his future and then actualises it by way of a detour through past resources. This ‘existential’ root of NEGATIVITY is obfuscated by Hegel’s system that abolishes this future-orientation and presents its entire content as the past ‘sublated’ in its logical form—the standpoint adopted here is not that of an engaged subjectivity in the present, but of Absolute Knowing from the detached perspective of hindsight.23

What Heidegger endeavours to formulate is an unresolved tension or antagonism in the very core of Hegel’s thought that remains unthought by Hegel – not for accidental reasons, but by necessity, which is why, precisely, this antagonism cannot be resolved or ‘sublated’ through dialectical mediation.

23 A similar critique of Hegel was deployed by Kojève and Hyppolite. See the chapter 6.

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This is based on Heidegger’s vision of temporality by the engaged subject: his radical assertion of finitude as the unsurpassable predicament of being human. It is our awareness of finitude and the resulting realisation that the desired future cannot be built which throws us back onto the present and determines our basic dualism between finitude and transcendence. Thus Heidegger tries to decipher the unthought felt dimension in Hegel through a close reading of Hegel’s notion of the ‘experience’ (Erfahrung) of consciousness from his Phenomenology of Spirit.

Heidegger reads Hegel’s famous critique of Kantian skepticism – we can only get to know the Absolute if the Absolute already in advance wants to be with us – through his interpretation of parousia as the epochal disclosure of Being: parousia names the mode by which the Absolute (Hegel’s name for the Truth of Being) is already disclosed to us prior to any active effort on our part, i.e., the way this disclosure of the Absolute grounds and directs our very effort to grasp it – or, as some theologians have put it, you wouldn’t have been searching for it if you had not already found it.

Why is Hegel unable to see the proper dimension of parousia? This brings us to Heidegger’s next reproach:

Hegel’s notion of NEGATIVITY lacks a phenomenal dimension. He fails to describe the felt experience in which

NEGATIVITY would appear as such. Hegel never systematically exemplifies the differences between the terms rejection, NEGATION, nothing, ‘is not’, and so forth. Hegel’s dialectics just presupposes its own phenomenological- ontological foundation; the name of this ground is ‘subjectivity’. Hegel always already subordinates NEGATIVITY under the subject’s work of the NEGATIVE, to the work of the subject’s conceptual mediation/sublation of all phenomenal content. In this way, the total experience of SELF-NEGATION is reduced to cognitive dissonances during the moments of self-mediation. Its unspoken but presupposed phenomenal foundation is not a secondary feature, but the very enabling feature of Hegel’s metaphysics of subjectivity: the dialectical logos can only function against the background of this preconceptual mystery.

There nonetheless is one phenomenal mode in which NEGATIVITY can be authentically experienced: suffering. The path of experience is the painful realisation that there is a gap between what Hegel calls ‘natural’ and ‘transcendental’ consciousness, between the subjectively felt experience and consciousness itself: the subject is ruthlessly deprived of a natural foundation for its being, its world view must repeatedly collapse on its way to the other shore of Absolute Knowing. When he speaks about ‘transcendental pain’ as the fundamental mood (Stimmung) of Hegel’s thought, Heidegger expresses an immediately apparent truth for the living individual which is not just a passing mood but a structural disposition to life and death: anxiety. Here, Heidegger follows a line that begins in Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason. There Kant acknowledges emotional pain as the only a priori emotion: the emotion of the pathological ego being humiliated by the injunction of the moral law.

What Heidegger misses in the Hegelian ‘experience’ as the path of despair (Verzweiflung), however, is a detailed phenomenal description of the actual abyss of this process: it is not only the natural consciousness that is shattered, but also the transcendental ground against which natural consciousness experiences its inadequacy and failure – as Hegel put it: if what we thought to be true fails the measure of truth, then this measure has to be abandoned.

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This implies that, even for Hegel, the subject’s experience is the ultimate touchstone of truth. Although Hegel points at this abyss as inherent in the dialectical process but he fails to explore its actual emotional dimension.

The repeated disappointment and disillusionment of having to realise that every object encountered turns out to be different from what it appeared to be at first is the transcendental pain of consciousness. The lack of any definite standard of truth keeps throwing the subject back onto its own painful experiences by which its sense of self which the subject is constantly trying to repair is undermined again and again, until it eventually disappears as a separate self. How the subject is dealing with these self-shattering experiences in real terms is simply missing in Hegel.

This is why Heidegger has some serious doubts about the authenticity of the Hegelian experience (Erlebnis) and why he thinks that it is subsumed under the ego’s conceptual machination (Machenschaft): at the level of lived-experience, consciousness sees its world collapse and an ever subtler new perspective of the world appear as seemingly endless layers of distorted perceptions are being shed one after another. Hegel understood reflection on experience mostly in a metaphysical- ontological, not a subjective-psychological sense (cf. Heidegger 2015, p. 60), but he is not consistent in this as he occasionally refers to everyday experiences as well. But on the whole, what Hegel’s subject experiences is the newness of its objects and their turning into other as a dialectical movement. It is the ‘abour of the concept’ that consciousness exercises on itself as both, subject and object (cf. Heidegger 2015, p. 82).

Only from the safe perspective of hindsight, that of having already attained absolute knowledge, does the dialectical analysis render visible how new worlds emerge as determinate NEGATION of the old ones, as the logical outcome of each encounter. Heidegger believes that Hegel’s subjective experiences of the opening to ever new content, are overlaid by a hidden masterplan, which is his own conceptual work that, from the very beginning, has already predetermined the subject’s fate within a ‘perfect’ system. By merely following a given algorithm, the subject has already lost its subject-nature and is degraded into an object, which for Heidegger, is the same logic that modern technological systems impose onto beings today.

Another problem with this masterplan is that it is written in a language which is not geared towards a genuine understanding of self and other. When the distress in subjective experience is ignored and forgotten, the machination of beings becomes totalitarian and nihilistic. Heidegger’s concern is whether the subject remains enslaved by this ‘path of despair’ (Heidegger 2015, p. 79) or whether it is being empowered to find its own unique way, or alternative routes, into the freedom of Being. Another problematic aspect here is Hegel’s total lack of any genuine engagement with the other, his construed subject only encounters its own cognitive process and the results of its own conceptual monologue similar to Leibniz’ windowless monad. 24

24 In support of Hegel, Žižek criticises this reproach by pointing out that it ignores how both sides, the phenomenal ‘for itself’ of the natural consciousness and the ‘for us’ of the conceptual work, are caught in the groundless abyss of repeated vertiginous losses. The ‘transcendental pain’ is not only the pain that natural consciousness experiences, the pain of being separated from its truth; it is the painful awareness that this truth itself is elusive.

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Now, looking at Heidegger’s interpretation in more detail, we will notice that he refers to Hegel’s original title of his Phenomenology as ‘Science of the Experience of Consciousness’, but later, Hegel simply called it the Phenomenology of Spirit. In the 16th paragraph of the Introduction, Hegel wrote: “Because of the necessity, the way to science is itself already science, and hence, in virtue of its content, is the science of the experience of consciousness” (PS § 88).

He defines experience as the movement of consciousness between two moments of knowing which cannot be harmonised in a final synthesis. One moment is ‘in-itself’ and the other ‘for consciousness’. Their difference creates an inner dynamic that propels consciousness forward. As the ‘in-itself’ becomes an object ‘for consciousness’, it becomes a new in-itself. New objects keep emerging because of the lack of knowledge in each stage. In this way the subject accumulates experiences by which it moves in the direction of wholeness. Its consciousness is the interplay between the simple act of knowing something and the self-awareness of this knowing: I know and I know that I know. The experience is the forward movement of consciousness against its old self. Thus wholeness or the absolute is the projected end result of consciousness’ own inner work.

Heidegger interprets this ontological difference as ‘the beingness of beings’: being an object of consciousness is the essence of the Being of all beings. All being is objectness of ‘consciousness’ (Heidegger 2015, p. 61).

When Hegel says that ‘the Absolute is already with us’, and ‘cognition is the ray of the Absolute that touches us’, Heidegger says that Hegel does not say anything new in comparison to other metaphysicians like Plato etc. Hegel’s contribution is to have established a final unconditional principle which he posited as the first principle (Heidegger 2015, p. 64). Hegel’s self-consciousness is the outcome of a long history whose modern development started with Descartes’ search for the absolute foundation of knowledge based on unconditional self-certainty which was further elaborated by Kant’s transcendental grounding of knowledge. What Heidegger finds in Hegel is the completion of that process: the self-grounding knowledge grounded in unconditional self-consciousness.

In a typical Platonic way, Hegel presupposed the presence (parousia) of the Absolute and the Absolute discloses itself through the possibility of Absolute Knowledge (Sinnerbrink 2007, p. 77). The way in which Heidegger reads this section is to reduce Hegel’s concept of cognition into an automatic function of the ‘presence’ of the absolute will. The knowledge of the essence of Absolute Knowing knows itself already as Absolute Knowing, and for Hegel, the cognition of the Absolute would not be ‘a means’ but ‘the cause’ of the appearance of the Absolute in various stages. Hegel’s metaphysics would, therefore,

(cf. Žižek, ‘Hegel and Heidegger’. This paper was originally presented at the conference ‘One Divides Into Two: Negativity, Dialectics, and Clinamen’, held at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry Berlin in March 2011).

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be nothing but the self-presentation of the absolute itself (Heidegger 2015, p. 65). All progression and transition from one stage to the next is always already predetermined by its goal. Thus Hegel’s phenomenology comes down to a ‘self-presentation’ (Selbstdarstellung) of knowledge. Heidegger’s conclusion is that Hegel’s phenomenology presents the self-expression of the Being of beings; it is nothing but consciousness-in-itself confronting itself which is a modern version of Plato (Heidegger, 2015, p. 70).

Hegel writes that natural consciousness is not yet real knowledge. It is a pathway of doubt and the way of despair. But according to Heidegger, real knowledge would always represent beings in their beingness which truly represents phenomena in their appearance. Here, Heidegger claims that Hegel understood Being in a narrow sense as mere being. Hegel’s whole system, however, is a stage model, an evolutionary process of becoming through history. In other words, the transcendental Being becomes a historic Being.25

Perhaps the most important section of Hegel’s Introduction is PS § 80, in which he writes:

Thus consciousness suffers this violence at its on hands: it spoils its own limited satisfaction. When consciousness feels this violence, its anxiety may well make it retreat from the truth, and strive to hold on to what it is in danger of losing. But it can find no peace. If it wishes to remain in a state of unthinking inertia, then thought troubles its thoughtlessness, and its own unrest disturbs its inertia.

Heidegger responds to this paragraph by doubting that Hegel actually realised the existential abyss when his consciousness remained at the level of conscious thought. He rejects Hegel’s description of how natural consciousness is being shattered as it must repeatedly face its own inadequacies and failures. In this paragraph, Hegel describes how natural consciousness has to go through one painful experience after another, again and again, which according to Hegel inevitably leads to its dissolution and gradual transcendence. It signifies the painful awareness that truth (the whole) itself is never completely available. This was Hegel’s way of describing the abyss of the dialectical process from the perspective of the experiencing subject.

Hegel writes about the self-contradictory nature embedded in the dialectic of consciousness: “Consciousness simultaneously distinguishes itself from something, and at the same time relates itself to it” (PS § 82). Heidegger interprets this as consciousness ‘in-itself’ would make fake distinctions that are not real distinctions. Hegel’s consciousness would merely be caught up in imagined ambiguities. For Heidegger, the problem of ambiguity is a problem of representation: “two determinations – knowledge and truth, being ‘for’ and being ‘in-itself’ – occur everywhere immediately in consciousness in such a way that they themselves are ambiguous” (Heidegger 1969a, p. 90).

25 Xiaomang explores in detail how Heidegger distorts Hegel’s dialectic in Hegel’s Concept of Experience. See Xiaomang (2009).

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Here, Heidegger does not seem to grasp the radicality of the tension involved in Hegel’s concept of antagonism when he reduces it to the problem of ambiguity of representation. The concept of ambiguity is a problem within formal logic. But here, Hegel’s discussion of the concept of antagonism does not remain limited to formal logic but seems to reach an existential significance as it repeatedly challenges the self-identity of consciousness. Although a particular moment of consciousness follows its predecessor in a seemingly smooth sequence in Hegel’s writing, this does not mean that it is a flat or linear sequence of thought within a fixed structure of consciousness. As the intensity accumulates in Hegel, there is a qualitative progression which leads to insights like quantum leaps in the consciousness of the reader. This is the direct result of the inner restlessness that is systematically being activated by

Hegel in order to reveal the structure of NEGATIVITY, which is the non-identity of consciousness, at the deepest level.

Heidegger’s interpretation does not seem to take the subjective dimension of Hegel’s inner antagonism of consciousness seriously when he rejects it as an unconscious passive adjustment to a seemingly objective reality. Hegel’s consciousness seems to be undergoing a genuine structural change as it experiences itself as suffering which Hegel understood to be the only, and thus a necessary, path. Hegel’s description of the dialectical tension in the human mind was his way of exploring phenomenal experiences of the cognising subject at the time – a form of mental suffering which for Hegel was caused by the fact that it has become alienated from itself through externalisation. For Hegel, there was no difference between experience and dialectics since the dialectical movement of consciousness is being experienced in consciousness. Here, Heidegger seems to say that Hegel’s dialectical phenomenology should be classified as a particular type of phenomenology.

5.7 Heidegger’s version of Hegel’s concept of NEGATIVITY

According to Heidegger, there is a way of thinking of nothing that is presupposed by Hegel which is the origin of the most basic sense of NEGATIVITY. Evaluating the force of this criticism is a daunting task, given the inherent difficulty of the topic, the time gap of a century between the two authors, and their different conceptions of philosophy. But we may nevertheless try to understand Heidegger’s basic criticism.

Heidegger believes that metaphysics completed itself with Hegel’s metaphysics of subjectivity as the spirit of the will. Being the completion of Platonism it surpasses all previous philosophical systems. Heidegger sums it up like this: “Even since Hegel’s death (1831), everything is merely a countermovement, not only in Germany, but also in Europe” (Heidegger 1973, p. 89). At the same time, Heidegger sees himself as the only philosopher who has been seriously trying to overcome metaphysics, including Hegel’s system, in an historical confrontation with the whole history of Western philosophy.

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In such a gigantic project, Heidegger’s ambition is to challenge Hegel’s thought process and his system as a whole. His main critique refers to Hegel’s concepts of ‘Nothing’ and of ‘Absolute’ as Hegel’s most confusing terms. With this kind of selective enquiry, Heidegger forms a new approach of interpreting Hegel.26 His intention is to elucidate the ontological ground on which Hegel erected his system.

According to Heidegger’s interpretation, the energy of Hegel’s Absolute comes from its NEGATIVITY.

For him, NEGATIVITY is the ‘genuine’ aspect in Hegel which can be detected through a special way of reading. It requires a sensitisation to the unspoken dimension of his work: absence, hiddenness, loss and gaps. For Heidegger, all these terms point at the forgotten aspect of Being. Hegel’s dialectical thinking is absorbed by thought and logic which Heidegger now seeks to ground in the preconceptual dimension of the ‘unthought’ (das Ungedachte).

From a Hegelian perspective, this seems to be nothing other than the NEGATIVITY embedded in thinking, which is the origin of NEGATIVITY itself. But from Heidegger’s point of view it is a radically new exposition of NEGATIVITY which aims to disclose the metaphysical presuppositions of Hegel’s concepts.

For Heidegger, ‘unthinking’ or ‘clearing’ (Lichtung) aims to uncover the layers that conceal the unthought origin (den verborgenen Ursprung) of metaphysics. Here, he reformulates a medieval model of Christian mysticism which seeks to unravel the ‘mystery’ embedded in the concealment of Being.

Heidegger’s reflection (Besinnung) on the history of occidental thought is based on his most fundamental question: ‘What is Being?’. This must become the essential reference point for our own existence because true communication can only emerge from this vantage point. Only by continuously seeking an answer to this question can beings realise who or what they truly are. This kind of questioning needs a lot of practice until it becomes a way of life. Since people in the West have lost contact with Being, they have also lost contact with themselves as well as with reality in general. As a result, Being has concealed itself from our consciousness.

In his later writing on technology, Heidegger (1949) specifies this critique. He insists that thinking must clear up misconceptions about the actual purpose of human life. In this way, a new foundation and a new method of engagement must be developed. What tends to be forgotten in our highly dualistic age of technological rationality is that it arose out of Descartes’ subject-object logic. A religious life in the etymological sense of re-ligio, on the other hand, seeks to re-connect with our origin which transcends this logic and points beyond the crude certainty of our senses. Our thinking today is framed by technology because we are increasingly being surrounded by machines. If we became aware how much

26 Heidegger’s ‘Negativity: A Confrontation with Hegel approached from Negativity’ (1938-39, 1941) was drafted for oral presentation. It is unclear whether he actually practiced the way of working expounded in this text.

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we have already become like conditioned machines ourselves, we would do everything to find ways how to master this technology and not remain enslaved by it.

Heidegger’s engagement with Hegel is motivated by his desire to clarify Hegel’s mysterious term ‘Nothing’. He suggests to transform it into an unmediated and profound experience of ‘clearing’ similar to Kierkegaard when he describes his existential a-byss (Ab-grund) (Heidegger 2015, p. 12). As we become aware of it we move closer to the unmanifest ground of Being which is experienced as a shock.

The contemplation of the nature of this experience becomes Heidegger’s new style of ontological engagement. It consists of a NEGATIVE process of undoing or ‘clearing’ – a systematic contemplative process of dissolving the solidity of all concepts in order to un-conceal the mystery of being. In this process hitherto unreflected entities are continually being negated and cleared as obstacles to reaching further down to the ground of being. The mental state of Dasein represents such a clearing as its basic attitude is that of a genuinely open disposition to life. His critique is that conceptual thought has completely failed to acknowledge its inability to make sense of the preconceptual ground of Being and to unravel its mystery. The challenge for Western philosophy is to embrace this problem which has always been lurking in the background of its history. By giving prominence to the unthought origin of philosophy via a phenomenology of nothing Heidegger hopes to be able to break this taboo.27

In his inauguration lecture at Freiburg in 1929, Heidegger formulated the question ‘why is there something rather than nothing?’ which leads him to the question of ‘what is Nothing?’. It attains the status of a new ground for all genuine enquiries. In his answer, he refuses to accept Nothing as a merely logical entity because it requires a leap (Ur-sprung) out of all preset formulas and into an original mode of thinking and Being (Heidegger 2000, p. 7). Out of this clearing, Dasein arises as its net result: the self-conscious presence of Being. He addresses this theme again in his Introduction to Metaphysics during the summer term 1935.

Hegel had emphasised the power of NEGATIVITY in the dialectical process of history which tends to dislocate human existence. Now Heidegger’s contemplation of nothing has an emotional intensity which haunts human existence.28 It does not remain an abstract concept anymore which could be approached from the safe distance of a detached observer since it is now being experienced as annihilating the self of the observer as well. This is Heidegger’s existential shift from a conceptual to a

27 From this basic consideration Derrida developed a ‘metaphysics of presence’. Having retraced the origin of Western metaphysics, Heidegger acknowledges the mystery of absence in which Being is to be found, which for him is also the way out of metaphysics. This is the meaning of ‘Destruktion’ in Heidegger which Derrida turned into ‘deconstruction’. Derrida discovered that in the modern history of Western philosophy, ‘presence’ has been given prominence over ‘absence’. Presence has usually been understood in a Cartesian sense as the presence of self. Essence, existence, substance, consciousness, subject, God, Spirit etc. are all synonyms for the metaphysics of presence. Deconstruction is the critique of this commonly held notion of presence. See also the chapter 6. 28 Derrida’s French pronunciation of ontology sounds like ‘hauntology’, a deliberate play with words with reference to Heidegger’s understanding of anxiety.

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more fundamental preconceptual nothing. Nothing is not merely a metaphysical concept which exists above or beyond Dasein but is a synonym for the unknown, for non-existence, and for death which Heidegger identifies as the source of anxiety (Angst) that haunts modern man.

In other words, anxiety as the raw state of Dasein is the human condition in which the negative dimension reveals itself. The experienced anxiety in Dasein confronts us with our non-existence, an experience which radically changes our outlook in life. It arises out of the feeling of not having a home or refuge in this world.

The possibility of NEGATION already presupposes nothing (Metha 1971, p. 83). Nothing is the result of having cleared everything, even Hegel’s essence. It is the erasing of our common sense of reality and language and thus lies beyond a merely cognitive grasp. For Heidegger, it is the necessary precondition for entering the gateway to the revelation of Being. It should be clear that neither nothing nor being is to be treated as an object in an empirical sense because they are the two most fundamental ontological categories out of which the possibility of Dasein arises.

It is a personal experience or a series of life-changing events which lie beyond conceptual thought. In the state of anxiety nothing is all encompassing; one feels totally engulfed by it. In Hegel’s system,

Nothing appears as the logical result of the NEGATION of Being, as Non-Being, and remains at the conceptual level without addressing the existential and affective challenges for the individual subject, whereas in Heidegger’s approach it is the existential question of either being or nothing which haunts the individual.

In Heidegger’s essay ‘Negativity: A Confrontation with Hegel approached from Negativity

(1939/1941), Heidegger critically reviews not only Hegel’s concept of NEGATIVITY but a whole range of NEGATIVE expressions from a range of sources. This essay is based on his lecture series on Hegel’s Science of Logic. It consists of 20 subsections which represents Heidegger’s general outline of Hegel’s concept of NEGATIVITY. Since his critique is not an immanent Hegelian one, Heidegger merely uses Hegel as the most prominant example in the history of Western metaphysics.

Neither Hegel nor Heidegger uses the notion of nothing merely to signify the ordinary semantic usage of NEGATIVES but to emphasise its ontological importance. For Hegel, “Being, the indeterminate immediate, is in fact Nothing, and neither more nor less than Nothing” (SL, p. 82). Nothing is complete emptiness, the absence of all determination which is empty of content. But in actual thinking and intuiting, Nothing takes on a certain meaning. In other words, Nothing comes into existence within our intuitive world of thought.

For Hegel, the truth is always in the process of transition from Being to Nothing and vice versa (SL, pp. 82–83). In this movement the one vanishes into the other. Hegel understood the essence of this dialectical process of becoming as the overcoming of both, Being and Nothing. Nothing is neither

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distinct from Being nor its other. Their unity in difference is the source and further determination of the movement of thought. The disappearing and reappearing of one category in and out of the other at ever higher levels of consciousness lies at the heart of Hegel’s dialectic.

In Hegel’s system, each and every concept is continually undergoing an internal dialectical movement. The nature of the dialectical movement is the cognitive “grasping of opposites in their unity or of the positive in the negative” and the “inner negativity of the determinations as their self-moving soul” (SL, p. 56). Absolute NEGATIVITY is the “innermost source of all activity, of all animate and spiritual self- movement” (SL, p. 835).

Heidegger rightly identifies this NEGATIVITY as the energy in Hegel’s thought, as the moving power of consciousness, and he correctly observes that Hegel’s entire system, including all its concepts, are imbued with this NEGATIVITY. As Hegel’s self-knowing subject absorbs and transforms all earlier philosophical outlooks it reaches the highest vantage point imaginable.

Despite Heidegger’s acceptance of Hegel’s NEGATIVITY as the engine behind his dialectical philosophy, he criticises the point that Hegel needed to fabricate the NEGATION OF NEGATION as a methodological crutch in order to reconfirm his positive ideal of Absolute Knowing. From the perspective of phenomenological practice, however, such a construction would be artificial and unnecessary because

Nothing as the NEGATIVE absolute could not be sublated anymore since it would already be identical with absolute Being. Having fully experienced the abyss of Nothing, there is no further clearing to be done for the concrete individual. Heidegger, seeing himself as the spokesperson for the concrete, living Being, seems to have launched his critique of Hegel because of his suspicion that Hegel might have been more concerned about a watertight construction of his logical system than his subject’s SELF- NEGATING experience of Nothing (Heidegger 2015, p. 37).

If, however, the energy of the SELF-NEGATING NEGATIVITY would still inhere in Hegel’s Absolute, even at the most subtle level, then the possibility of absolute self-identity in a final synthesis could not arise. There would not be any ontological difference between beings and Being – the fundamental presupposition on which Heidegger grounded his whole philosophy.

If Hegel intended so show that the historically engaged subjective Spirit’s inherent NEGATIVITY will never come to rest by any means whatsoever even as it reaches the level of the so-called Absolute then this would have radical implications for ontological and theological metaphysics as a whole. In other words, if the inner dynamic of NEGATIVITY does constitute the essence of

Hegel’s whole system then it would be the Absolute itself. Hegel’s SELF-NEGATING

NEGATIVITY would not only precede all positive grounds but also erode all static preconceptions of a final and complete Absolute. There would neither be an absolute beginning nor end in Hegel’s system, i.e. definite entry and exit points in and out of the hermeneutic

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circle, and this seems to be the case given his hermeneutic understanding of evolution. Hegel’s gap lies precisely between the unthought and the thought which cannot be dialecticised and resolved through a final synthesis. This is the task of self-realisation in which Hegel’s subject is involved as it approaches the abyss inherent in the dialectical process, what Hegel called

‘SELF-NEGATING NEGATIVITY’ or ‘NEGATION OF NEGATION’.

5.8 Ontology or theology?

Heidegger’s final confrontation with Hegel is his ‘onto-theological construction of metaphysics’. He points out that metaphysical thinking is determined by the difference between Being and beings. For him, the relationship between Being and beings is simultaneously ontological and theological. In ancient Greece as well as during the medieval period, human beings (onta) saw themselves in relation to their God as the supreme Being (theos), and they defined this relationship as the ontological difference that had to be overcome for achieving a meaningful life. The breakdown of this relationship was reflected in the separation of theology and philosophy as academic disciplines which coincided with the time of Descartes. But ontology has always been rooted in the theological thought that “the Being of beings is represented fundamentally in the sense of the ground as causa sui” (Heidegger 1969b, p. 60).

This is Heidegger’s onto-theological reference to the medieval concept of God which he wants to think and experience directly through increasing the intensity of Dasein but not through Hegel’s path as a gradual conceptual approximation towards the Absolute: “Being is the absolute self-thinking of thinking. Absolute thinking alone is the truth of Being [...].” (Heidegger 1969b, p. 43). Here Heidegger draws again on the mystical tradition of Augustine and Duns Scotus and distances himself from Hegel’s secular platonic tradition of the enlightenment regarding ‘the Idea' as the highest form of Being.’ However, Hegel’s God or the Absolute is dynamic which unfolds in the world through the process of

NEGATION. This is Hegel’s NEGATIVITY emphasised in system. Heidegger misses this NEGATIVITY, and claims only the difference as difference.

5.9 Chapter summary

In this chapter I have presented some of the main points of Heidegger’s confrontation (Auseinandersetzung) with Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and Science of Logic as he first formulated it in his magnum opus, Being and Time, and later taught in his lectures on Hegel at Freiburg university. I have considered Heidegger’s eclectic interpretations of Hegel’s notions of temporality, experience, finitude, metaphysics, the Concept and Being as instances in which he misreads Hegel’s absolute

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NEGATIVITY as a logical ‘construction’. What is important in this discussion is to distinguish Hegel’s original intention from Heidegger’s ‘destruction’ (De-struktion) so that a less biased assessment of Hegel’s relevance for us today is not being prevented from the outset.

Heidegger claims that Hegel’s notion of time is an extreme example of the abstract punctuality of the ‘Now’ in the experience of sense-certainty. The Phenomenology (PS §§ 90-110), however, shows that this is simply wrong.

According to Heidegger, Hegel’s determination of time as the NEGATION OF NEGATION is the most radical version of the Aristotelian conception of time, but also the most levelled down conception of temporality in Heidegger’s originary, existential-ecstatic sense. What Hegel intends here is to show the possibility of the historical actualisation of the Spirit in time by going back to the identity of the formal structure of Spirit and time as the NEGATION OF NEGATION. This is the decisive point where Heidegger misreads Hegel: the identity of time and Spirit as sharing the same logical structure would also be their reduction to an empty ‘formal-ontological’ abstraction that obliterates originary temporality. For Hegel, it is precisely this reduction that makes the actualisation of the Spirit in time possible.

Heidegger also discusses the essence of the Hegelian Spirit as the Concept (Begriff) which he defines as ‘the very form of thinking that thinks itself: conceiving itself as grasping the non-I’. He interprets this as the Fichtean difference between the ‘I’ and the ‘non-I’. The Concept thus has the formal structure of the NEGATION OF NEGATION. The absolute NEGATIVITY of the Concept, for Heidegger, gives ‘a logically formalised interpretation of Descartes’ cogito me cogitare rem’. In other words, the Concept comprehends itself in self-consciousness: it is the ‘conceivedness of the self-conceiving itself’, the self as it can authentically be, namely as free, a universality that is just as immediately ‘individuality’.

In the Phenomenology, Hegel defines the Concept of self-consciousness as comprising three interrelated negative moments: the universality of the pure undifferentiated ‘I’; the particularity of the mediation through the sensuous object of desire; and the concrete individuality of the reflective movement of recognition between self-conscious subjects (PS § 176). While Heidegger accounts for the first moment (the abstract self-identity of the ‘I’ as I=I) and the second moment (the particularity of self-consciousness as desire), he has no account of the third moment (concrete individuality articulated through intersubjective recognition). Indeed, Heidegger’s failure to account for the NEGATIVITY in all three moments simply repeats the limitation of Kant’s and Fichte’s views that Hegel seeks to overcome.

In this sense, Heidegger remains stuck at the level of simple NEGATIONS according to an abstract, ahistorical formalism. Hegel’s Phenomenology depicts this process as a recollection of the historical- dialectical experience in which spirit recognises itself within ‘comprehended history’ as a process without which absolute spirit would remain ‘lifeless and alone’ (PS § 808).

By emphasising the parallel between the formal structure of self-consciousness and the Concept, Heidegger’s Cartesian interpretation fails to comprehend the interdependent hermeneutic structure of

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Hegel’s account, i.e. those concrete historical conditions that make possible the determinate NEGATION of this formal structure. Spirit as the actualised Concept must appear in historical time, not simply because of the formal structure of the NEGATION OF NEGATION shared by time and Spirit, but because finite consciousness remains dependent on objective and absolute spirit for its concrete self-identity in otherness. Thus Heidegger fails to do justice to the NEGATIVE power of Hegel’s speculative thought for Hegel claimed to have overcome the dualism between substance- and subject-metaphysics within the speculative metaphysics of Spirit.

Heidegger’s next engagement with Hegel occurs in the 1930/31 lecture series on the first two chapters of the Phenomenology of Spirit, a reading that is centred on the problematic of finitude. This theme is deepened in the later (1942/1943) commentary on the ‘Introduction’ to the Phenomenology, the essay entitled ‘Hegel’s Concept of Experience’ published in his book Holzwege in 1950. In his lectures on the Phenomenology, Heidegger explicitly situates his critical dialogue with Hegel in the context of the post-Kantian metaphysics of the self-conscious subject. There his confrontation with Hegel is based on the cross-over between Hegel’s concept of the infinity of Spirit versus his finitude of Being in which Heidegger continues his Destruktion of the history of ontology.

With Hegel, infinitude becomes a more significant problem than finitude, since the interest of speculative reason is to suspend all antinomies within the rational totality of absolute NEGATIVITY. Heidegger understands the project of post-Kantian idealism to consist in the systematic attempt to overcome the object-dependent knowledge of otherness in favour of the absolute knowledge of speculative reason in the sense of a no longer ‘relative’ or object-dependent self-knowledge. By ‘detaching’ itself from the relativity of sense-consciousness, the knowing subject becomes aware of itself as self-consciousness.

Heidegger’s interpretation of consciousness thus rests on the assumption that the entire phenomenological exposition adopts the standpoint of Absolute Knowing in the sense of a detachment that has absolved itself from any dependency on external sense objects. Phenomenology would thus be characterised as ‘the absolute self-presentation of reason (ratio, logos), whose essence and actuality Hegel finds in absolute Spirit’.

Another decisive aspect of Heidegger’s misinterpretation of the Phenomenology is the claim ‘that Hegel presupposes already at the beginning what he achieves at the end’, namely Absolute Knowling. This dismissal of the organic self-educative process of consciousness is maintained in the essay ‘Hegel’s Concept of Experience’. Heidegger rejects other interpretations of the Phenomenology because, they would fail to comprehend the ontological meaning of the Phenomenology as the self- presentation of the Absolute in its presence (parousia) to us.

This interpretation is sharply at odds with numerous explicit statements in the text: Hegel describes the phenomenology as a ‘ladder’ to the standpoint of science (PS § 26), as an ‘education’ of the individual

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consciousness which repeats the formative path of universal Spirit as though ‘in a silhouette’ (PS § 28), a ‘path of doubt’ or even ‘path of despair’ (PS § 78), and as the ‘detailed history of the education of consciousness to the standpoint of Science’ (PS § 78). In insisting on Absolute Knowing as the absolute presupposition of the Phenomenology, Heidegger simply ignores Hegel’s hermeneutic claim that the Absolute as a result is also the (NEGATIVE) ground of the whole process of its own becoming.

In Heidegger’s reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology, the need to overcome the self-alienation of the unhappy consciousness becomes the need to overcome the objectifying thinking of ontic consciousness in order to return to the parousia of the Absolute. In search for a recovery of the forgotten positive

‘experience’ of the originary question of Being, Heidegger ignores the NEGATIVITY of the historical experience of spirit. Instead of Hegel’s NEGATIVE dialectic of spirit we have Heidegger’s perennial forgetting of Being. Heidegger’s critique thus remains fixated on his philosophical meta-narrative that is dedicated not in the freeing of the subject but ends in the nihilism of modern technology.

Heidegger claims that in the Science of Logic, Hegel took his concepts of NEGATIVITY as well as of the Absolute simply for granted without explaining how both arise out of ‘Being’ and ‘Nothing’. Thus Hegel’s beginning, process, and outcome are always already presupposed from the outset. Here, Heidegger questions the logical link between the end of the Phenomenology, i.e. Absolute Knowing, and the beginning of the Science of Logic, i.e. pure being as the absence of determinacy where the subject has become one with its object and all difference has disappeared, and by implication any ground for a real NEGATION. In other words, Being’s unconditioned state - an ever present physis that Western metaphysics has always presupposed - amounts to absolute emptiness from where nothing could ever arise. Heidegger suspects that Hegel's ontological presupposition of ‘unconditioned thinking’ (die Gedachtheit des unbedingten Denkens) as the source of knowing would always already presuppose the identity between subject and object. Therefore, Hegel’s intention was to ultimately dissolve (auflösen) everything, including nothing and NEGATION, into an absolute positivity of Being.

Given this assumption, Heidegger could only read Hegel’s absolute NEGATIVITY as a conceptual ‘crutch’ with which Hegel justifies his logic.

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Chapter 6 French Philosophy, Hegel and NEGATIVITY

Content 6.1 Introduction 6.2 The unhappy consciousness 6.2.1 Wahl’s existential dimension of the unhappy consciousness 6.2.2 Hyppolite’s ontological dimension of the unhappy consciousness 6.3 The logic of desire, the struggle for recognition, and the master-slave dialectic 6.3.1 Kojève’s redefinition of the master-slave dialectic 6.4 Existentialist and Phenomenological Critiques of Hegel 6.4.1 Sartre’s ‘Other’ 6.4.2 Merleau-Ponty’s hyper-dialectic 6.5 The Spectre of Hegel in Structural Marxism 6.5.1 Althusser’s Spinozian critique of Hegel 6.6 The Philosophy of difference

6.6.1 Derrida’s ‘Différance’ versus NEGATIVITY

6.7 French Psychoanalysis, deconstruction and NEGATIVITY 6.7.1 Lacan’s split subject

6.7.2 Žižek’s Hegelian and Lacanian reformulation of NEGATIVITY 6.8 Malabou’s ‘plasticity’ as negativity 6.9 Chapter summery

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6.1 Introduction

20th century philosophy in France evolved through several distinct phases from phenomenology via existentialism, to structuralism and post-structuralism. It also includes a reformulation of Marxism based on structuralist and psychoanalytic concepts. The first generation of French philosophers stood under the influence of the ‘three Hs’: Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger. The second generation formulated another set of ideas during the 1960s based on the so-called ‘three masters of suspicion’: Marx, Nietzsche and Freud.29 Among these philosophers, Hegel’s work has been most influential on French philosophy. Hegel can be described as the most haunted figure in the entire history of French philosophy.

Initially, in the 1930s, Hegel was regarded by French thinkers as merely one of the German romantic philosophers, and due to their focus on scientific progress, Hegel was neglected. In addition, since classical Marxist interpretations failed to explain some of the modern and postmodern phenomena in France, a new reading of Hegel was felt to be necessary. Thus after the end of World War II, a deeper understanding of the problems of modernity was sought via Hegel. This phase lasted until 1968, the time of the student uprising in France. After this time, modern developments were reinterpreted as antithetical to Hegel’s ideas.

The key terms that mark these stages in the evolution of the total philosophical discourse in France are the construction, negation, deconstruction and then the reconstruction of Hegel. In general, the French discourse is based on Hegel’s universal concept of NEGATIVITY and its more specific forms of determinate NEGATION. Its main proponents are Jean Wahl, Alexandre Kojève, Jean Hyppolite, Jean- Paul Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Jaques Derrida Jacques Lacan, and recently Slavoj Žižek (although Žižek was born in Slovenia, he represents both French and German philosophical traditions), and Catherine Malabou. Since these philosophers have specialised on individual idiosyncratic expressions of negativity within their special fields without, however, trying to interlink their programmes, it has become increasingly difficult to find a conceptual core- or umbrella-term that would integrate all these specialisms, except perhaps, Hegel’s meta-concept of NEGATIVITY.

In contrast to the universalised abstractions that scientific categories of explanation superimpose onto their objects from an external objectivist perspective, Hegel’s concept of NEGATIVITY addresses the inner subjective process of the experiencing subject itself which he identifies as both, concrete and universal. Through the analysis of certain symptoms of modernity, Hegel’s notion of concrete

29Descombes (1980, p. 3) uses these two expressions: ‘the three Hs’ and ‘the three masters of suspicion’ to delineate 20th century French philosophy.

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universality that inheres in his concept of NEGATIVITY becomes more differentiated. The notion of concrete universality was discussed by Hegel via a distinct cluster of themes that he analysed in his Phenomenology; it consists of the unhappy consciousness, the master-slave dialectic, the struggle for recognition, and the logic of desire. When Hegel universalises the concept of negativity, the readings by the French Hegelians have focused on particular clusters of negativity that have manifested in society. Derrida tries to replace Hegel’s NEGATIVITY with his notion of ‘différance’ based on Heidegger’s ‘Destruktion’ of ontological metaphysics.

6.2 The unhappy consciousness

After World War I, the first generation of French philosophers begins to define its basic mood through Hegel’s concept of the unhappy consciousness. Here, Wahl lays the foundation for the following generation.

6.2.1 Wahl’s existential dimension of the unhappy consciousness

Wahl’s Le Malheur de la conscience dans la philosophie de Hegel, becomes the first work to address the concept of the unhappy consciousness within French academia. Its initial reception was controversial as it challenged the traditional view of Hegel, but eventually, it had such an impact on a number of thinkers that it led to a Hegel renaissance in France.

Based on Hegel’s early religious writings and his Phenomenology of Spirit, Wahl highlights the existential dimension of the unhappy consciousness. The idea of the unhappy consciousness (das unglückliche Bewußtsein) appears in the self-consciousness section in the Phenomenology of Spirit after the section on the master-slave dialectic. For Hegel, “the Unhappy Consciousness is the consciousness of self as a dual-natured, merely contradictory being” (PS § 206), and he frames this basic contradiction in the terminology of Christian theology.

About a century after Hegel, Wahl upgrades the status of Hegel’s concept of the unhappy consciousness to a general existential level and applies it to the whole of the phenomenological process within the experiencing subject. He claims that the fundamental characteristic of

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human beings is a feeling of self-alienation which in Hegel’s work remains a psychological stage of development within the collective consciousness of a particular historic era.

While Hegel was convinced that the collective Spirit would eventually overcome its unhappy state, Wahl now argues that this unhappiness cannot be overcome by speculative reason since it points at the basic constitution of human consciousness itself. Being influenced by Kierkegaard, Wahl critiques Hegel’s treatment of the uniqueness of individual existence as inadequate because he did not examine its accidental and contingent conditions. Thus Wahl distances himself from Hegel’s belief in universal reason under which Hegel had subsumed all differences and oppositions in order to build a unified system of thought.

For Wahl, the repeated personal experiences of separation and division keep the basic human desire for unity unfulfilled. This leads to frustration and alienation, which, according to Wahl, does not originate through contact with external reality because its roots are much deeper. He discovers that it is inherent in the structure of consciousness itself.30

For Hegel, this insight was a realisation of the experience of NEGATIVITY itself. He understood the dialectic of this NEGATIVE experience as a paradoxical development: it tends to move towards unity and simultaneously undermines it. Each NEGATIVE experience in turn generates a new impetus towards a more complete and stable unity which again breaks up into a new duality. Hegel saw that there is a latent power deep within consciousness that generates the subject’s striving for unity by driving one mental category into another at ever higher and subtler levels of self-awareness. Hegel originally started out by trying to understand this pattern behind his religious experiences. He believed that although reconciliation would in principle be possible, it could, however, exist only for a short moment before it again would fall under the sway of dialectical restlessness. Given this unresolved ambivalence, Wahl now seriously doubts that thought and being would ever be able to establish a final synthesis via reason.

30Alexandre Koyré comments that the self-divisions of consciousness identified by Wahl were already implied by Hegel’s notion of the Concept (der Begriff). Therefore, the restlessness of the unhappy consciousness should be understood as just one particular aspect of the overall restlessness and temporality of being itself. Along this line of reasoning, Koyré seeks to transform Wahl’s tragic consciousness into a negative anthropology of the temporal structure of human existence and defines it as ‘a being which is what it is not and is not what it is’. Human nature is never static but a continuous process of becoming other. This contains not only a negative aspect as emphasised by Wahl, but also a positive potential to consciously transform the world. Although history will never reach a final endpoint, a happy reconciliation, but self-negation and self-transcendence are, nevertheless, the necessary conditions for the possibility of history.

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Wahl realises that “every affirmation of consciousness comes to naught” and that “consciousness becomes aware of itself as absolute negativity” (cited in Baugh 1993, pp. 426f). The repeated vanishing into nothingness of all finite determinations leads to frustration because the sisyphean effort for inner and outer peace is never fulfilled. Here, Wahl sees two competing sides in the person of Hegel: the pan- tragicist versus the pan-logicist. As Hegel historicises his own experience of frustration it comes to represent the painful self-division of consciousness of his epoch.

Wahl finds that the deeper truth of Hegel does not lie in the dialectical logic of the Encyclopaedia but in the tragic nature of the dialectical process itself (cf. Baugh 2003, p.24). He concludes that the hope for reconciliation of consciousness with itself and with objective reality is nothing but a self-created illusion – merely an instinctual resistance to this brutal truth. Since the self is constantly dividing and opposing itself, the unhappy consciousness is not just a specific historical or psychological stage of immaturity as represented in the Phenomenology but rather a manifestation of a NEGATIVE power inherent in the mind itself which keeps reproducing divisions. This perspective on Hegel’s concept of the unhappy consciousness becomes the key for Wahl’s interpretation of the entire Phenomenology. As Wahl summarises his insights, “in what does life consist if not in separating itself from itself, transcending itself in order to return to itself? Separation resides in the notion of man himself” (cited in Baugh 2003, p.4). Wahl thus radicalises Hegel’s original understanding of the essence of subjectivity as SELF-NEGATION. The cause for the suffering experienced in consciousness is its internal dualism which generates the motivation to move forward towards wholeness while simultaneously sabotaging it.

There is a latent tendency in human consciousness to split itself just before it reaches a stage of fulfilment; and this becomes activated as soon as something particular is juxtaposed to the universal, a finite form to the infinite, a self to its other. Psychologically speaking, this is the essence of existential suffering because there does not seem to be a way out of it. Otherness keeps reemerging because even the absolute Spirit is not totally free from it. This means that even within the Absolute there resides a residue of insecurity. While Hegel focused on the Christian idea of the unconditioned universality of God, he reduced the unhappy consciousness of humanity to just a developmental phase. Wahl now reverses this relationship by emphasising the singular, individual and contingent condition of human existence over the Absolute. This is his Kierkegaardian critique of Hegel’s totality by which he sets the scene for the next generation of existentialist philosophers that focuses specifically on the unsatisfactory nature of consciousness itself.

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6.2.2 Hyppolite’s ontological dimension of the unhappy consciousness

As he develops Wahl’s analysis of the unhappy consciousness further, Jean Hyppolite’s interpretation comes to dominate the Hegel renaissance in France. Key members of the intellectual elite that he influences are Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, and Balibar. His French translation of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit appears in 1939, and his commentary on the Phenomenology of Spirit emerges in 1947, named ‘Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. In 1952, he writes another key text, Logic and Existence, which had a seminal effect on what was to become known as post- structuralism.

Through his study of Heidegger, Hyppolite gradually moves towards an ontological history of being while retaining Wahl’s unhappy consciousness as the main issue in the Phenomenology. Hyppolite argues that self-consciousness constitutes subjective truth; it discovers its own self as the experiencer of pain. This is the NEGATIVE dimension of self-consciousness which always fails to reach a stable unity within itself (Hyppolite 1974, p. 190). Because of this, the possibility of realising a truly human life is prevented from its full actualisation.

For Hyppolite (1974, p. 191), “this feeling of disparity within the self, of the impossibility of the self coinciding with itself in reflection, is indeed the basis of subjectivity”. But he also emphasises the humanistic idea of the power of human agency in changing the social and historic conditions. Loss, pain and mental suffering are inherent characteristics of individual human subjectivity as well as of the collective historical movement towards freedom. This is Hegel’s pan-tragedy which underlies his pan- logic. The tension of oppositions at the heart of being requires mediation which he seeks through Marx (cf. Roth 1988, p. 35).

Hyppolite writes: “To be a subject is to be conscious of this disunity and restlessness at the heart of subjectivity, while also being conscious of the desire to overcome this restlessness and attain a repose of unity” (Hyppolite 1974, p. 195). The restlessness and dissatisfaction of self-consciousness are manifestations of this NEGATIVE force that always fissures the possibility of a total integration and fulfilment of subjectivity. Consequently, for Hyppolite, so long as the unhappy consciousness remains a potent factor in history, difference and NEGATIVITY are prevented from becoming fully sublated into a final synthesis.

After having read Heidegger’s critique of philosophical humanism, however, Hyppolite’s humanistic and tragic reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology changes. As a result, Hyppolite advances a Heideggerian appraisal of being which surfaces in his 1952-work, Logic and Existence where he writes:

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This text of Hegel concerns real negativity that which exhibits itself in human existence and in life, as well as logical negativity that which turns speculative thought into an absolute reflective life …the issue is specially to discover whether Hegel has more or less transformed an ontic negativity into an ontological negativity, a real opposition into a logical contradiction. (Hyppolite 1997, p. 106)

In Logic and Existence, Hyppolite examines the concept of NEGATIVITY in language where each term gains its meaning by its difference from the other and what it is not; he discovers that the power of

NEGATIVITY becomes activated not only in human life as a whole but also in its symbolisation through language (Hyppolite 1974, p. 104). Thus he makes a distinction between empirical NEGATION and speculative NEGATION.

Moreover, he categorises Hegel’s concept of NEGATIVITY as ‘ontological NEGATIVITY’ in a double sense. Firstly, he confirms Spinoza’s dictum that ‘all determination is NEGATION’ which refers to the ontological impossibility to totally define human existence in positive terms. And secondly, he points out that the continual repetition of self-NEGATIONaccumulates a gradually increasing authenticity of subjective expression (Hyppolite 1997, p. 106). While empirical thought tries to measure objective differences and positively defines them in terms of identity, it simply bypasses the internal dimension of difference which for Hegel was essential. According to Heidegger, ontological thought must be differentiated from ontic thought because it embodies these negative moments as they are being mediated in an infinite process. This leads Hyppolite to the statement that speculative NEGATION negates as much as it posits, and it posits as much as it negates.

This kind of knowing and understanding reflects the internal reflection of the human mind. Speculative

NEGATION is a continual process of self-reflection because its function and purpose are to sublate its non-reflective elements through confrontation. In other words, internal NEGATION consists of a perpetual process of SELF-NEGATION. Finite determinations keep negating themselves and in the process turn into their opposites. Therefore, the infinite is not separate from and beyond finitude but inseparably intertwined with it as each ‘in-itself’ produces its own other. Hegel tried to show that this process of NEGATION leaves a positive residue behind which has a creative value.

In Logic and Existence, Hyppolite also addresses Hegel’s notion of desire. He defines desire as ‘the power of the negative in human life’ (Hyppolite 1997, p. 27). Unlike Hegel, Hyppolite tries to peel off the theological coating of the unhappy consciousness and to identify unhappiness as the real motive behind the Phenomenology. The mental state of unhappiness is itself the condition that generates the desire for change. Thus in their own specific ways, Wahl and Hyppolite upgrade the status of Hegel’s unhappy consciousness from a particular historic to a universal ontological problem. According to them, it does not just characterise an early stage of the total phenomenological process; it is the general

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ontological condition of 20th century human existence par excellence.

In the next section, I will explore Hegel’s logic of desire and how Hyppolite and Kojève deal with this concept.

6.3 The logic of desire, the struggle for recognition and the master-slave dialectic

The discussion so far has already made clear that the Hegelian subject is not a self-identical egoic subject as simply assumed in Descartes, Leibniz, Kant and Fichte. For Hegel, its NEGATIVE essence is characterised by its unfulfilled desire for self-identity. He seems to have identified an ontological rupture deep within his own structure of consciousness when he wrote: “self-consciousness is desire in general” (PS § 167). The ontological status of desire is, therefore, its NEGATIVITY. So long as consciousness is governed by NEGATIVITY in whatever form, the subject cannot achieve closure.

Although Hegel’s system has been described as total, systematic, complete and self-sufficient, its unresolved NEGATIVITY within the absolute makes it an open system. Without investigating the question whether the identity theory of subject and substance really belongs to Schelling or Hegel, some French philosophers have proposed the possibility of a final synthesis in Hegel’s system.31

Hyppolite redefines Hegel’s concept of the Absolute as a dynamic structure of temporality within which the subject’s destiny is predetermined to move towards death:

This life is disquiet, the disquiet of the self which has lost itself and finds itself again in its alterity. Yet the self never coincides with itself, for it is always other in order to be itself. (Hyppolite 1974, p. 250)

Here, the dissatisfaction of desire fulfils basically the same function as Hegel’s determinate NEGATION, which Hyppolite regards as synonymous with the structure of human consciousness in general. Self- negation of consciousness does not just happen at the moment of death but becomes activated in the very moment a desire arises in the mind.

31Adorno (1973) has diagnosed Hegel’s totalising and harmonious synthesis as a failure of dialectics. In his Negative Dialectics, he formulates his theory of non-identity against Hegel’s apparent identity thinking. See chapter four of this thesis.

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6.3.1 Kojève’s redefinition of the master-slave dialectic

When Alexandre Kojève (Alexander Koschewnikoff), reads Hegel’s historicist philosophy of consciousness developed in the Phenomenology through Marx’s materialist ontology and Heidegger’s temporalised ontology of Dasein, he produces a new and idiosyncratic interpretation of Hegel. His thesis on the logic of desire, the struggle for recognition and the master-slave dialectic becomes most influential for the entire French post-war tradition. His interpretation of the master-slave dialectic has a great influence on Jacques Lacan’s ‘mirror stage-theory’.

Kojève considers the struggle for recognition as a general principle throughout history which he derived from Marx’s idea of class struggle and Heidegger’s concept of the finitude of Dasein. He saw the desire for recognition, power and authority as the main drive behind the master-slave dialectic which propels history forward. Kojève specifically emphasises the existential dimension of Hegel’s struggle for recognition because only through such a struggle, self-consciousness is born. But unlike Hegel, Kojève feels the need to separate spirit from nature in order to explain his hypothesis that the inner structure of human desire would be different from animal desire. While animal desire aims towards natural objects, human desire, which is always mediated by other’s desire, is geared towards non-natural objects beyond the sensory realm. Essentially, it is an act of negation of the immediately given reality. In fact, all action is negating and all negating is active. By thus turning an outer reality into one’s own inner reality the desired Non-I is being assimilated.

Here, the Fichtean dualism between the I and the Non-I moves from an epistemic to a psychodynamic and inter-subjective level as it engages with others’ desires. When Kojève (1980, p. 6) analyses the deep structure of desire itself he finds that, ‘human history is the history of desired desires’. But if desire is ultimately its own object for its own sake – a desire in-and-for itself – and history the story of unsatisfied desire then a final ontological satisfaction seems to be impossible. Here, Kojève seems to contradict himself again with respect to his ‘end of history’-hypothesis. This problem becomes most significant with respect to the human desire for recognition and power which, according to Kojève can become so strong that it overrides the instinctual desire for self-preservation.

Hegel formulated his original thesis of the master-slave dialectic and the idea of recognition as “self- consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another; that is, it exists

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only in being acknowledged” (PS § 178). Kojève universalises this concept: the winner of recognition needs the loser even after a struggle for recognition in order to satisfy his desire for continued recognition. On the other hand, the slave must simultaneously suppress his desire for freedom and recognition in order to survive:

He must give up his desire and satisfy the desire of the other: he must ‘recognise’ the other without being ‘recognised by him’. Now ‘to recognise’ him thus is ‘to recognise’ him as his Master and to recognise himself and to be recognised as the Master’s Slave. (Kojève 1980, p. 8)

This asymmetry constitutes the historic condition for the arising of self-consciousness in both of them. While the slave works with animal desire for self-preservation, the master, on the other hand, enjoys the fruits produced by his slave’s labour. The master treats the other as a slave and thereby establishes a hierarchy; he separates himself from and behaves differently to his slave. Conversely, the slave by behaving like a slave, saves the other as his master and thereby manages to save his own life.

The master, however, is always haunted by his fear of losing control over his slave. He gives a very conditional recognition to his slave which makes it impossible for him to receive a genuine and unconditional recognition from his slave. Although the master’s desire for genuine recognition from his slave is continuously frustrated, he cannot just stop the slavery because by this he would immediately lose his status of a master on which his security and self-identity, however fragile, depend. Thus he keeps reinforcing and expanding this blind dynamic by monopolising his power. This is the condensed and potentially explosive energy hidden underneath the inter-subjective master-slave dialectic. However, despite his insight into the deep structure of desire, Kojève still believes that the struggle between two adversaries will come to an end:

But if the struggle of ‘thesis’ and ‘antithesis’ is meaningful only in the context of their reconciliation ‘synthesis', if history (in the full sense of the word) necessarily has a final term, if man who becomes must culminate in man who has become, if desire must end in satisfaction, if the science of man must possess the quality of a definitely and universally valid truth  the interaction of Master and Slave must finally end in the ‘dialectical overcoming’ of them. (Kojève 1980, p. 9)

Under favourable historic and psychological conditions, the slave may be able to overcome his enslavement through emancipation. However, the equal recognition as the ‘end of history thesis’ violates the dialectical principle of self-contradiction as formulated in Kojève’s own work. In Hegel’s original system, we can neither find a final reconciliation, synthesis, and end of history thesis nor a

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positive anthropology of the master-slave dialectic, only an intersubjective self-consciousness; these seem to be Kojève’s own idealised projections.32

For Kojève, the end of history is reached when knowledge has become absolute, when the identity of subject and object, thought and being, and the end of adversary have been achieved. However, despite Kojève’s antidialectical evaluation of the possibility of an ontological harmony, his innovative Hegel interpretation remains influential for French philosophy. This influence is due mainly to the fact that he has been able to express and apply the deep onto-psycho-logical dynamic of desire and the struggle for recognition within the collective unconscious for various historical stages. In short, he saw desire, action, negation, recognition and reciprocity as the essential conditions of the possibility for a truly human life.

For Kojève, the creative process of negativity is activated as and when humans transform nature by generating a synergy with their naturally given environment. The essence of this synergy manifests as an awareness of the self and the non-self; as this awareness becomes aware of its NEGATIVE essence it becomes constitutive for its subjective reality:

Thus, all action is ‘negating’. Far from leaving the given as it is, action destroys it; if not in its being, at least in its given form. And all ‘negating-negativity’ with respect to the given is necessarily active. But negating action is not purely destructive, for if action destroys an objective reality, for the sake of satisfying the desire from which it is born, it creates in its place, in and by that very destruction, a subjective reality. (Kojève 1980, p. 4)

Perhaps after a reading of Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of the Enlightenment, Kojève similarly tries to detect how and at what point reason turns into madness and he suspects that Hegel also came close to it when his Phenomenology reached the stage of Absolute Knowing. This is the paradoxical nature of reason and Hegel was not immune against it, just like Kojève himself.

There is a dark and irrational dimension within reason itself and under certain conditions, this side becomes predominant in psychology and history. For Kojève, freedom is ontologically NEGATIVE; freedom is realised as a dialecticalNEGATION. In order to negate there must be something to negate, which is always necessarily an existing given.

32Arthur (1983b) explains that Hegel’s master-slave dialectic does not relate to material labour or physical masters and slaves in a feudal society. He argues that the master-slave dialectic has an educative effect on the spirit. It should be contextualised within the spirit’s development of self-awareness; its significance does not lie in the material inequality between the two but in their shared spiritual context. For Hegel’s original meaning of the master-slave dialectic and some mistranslations of the concept, see Cole (2004).

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Kojève regards Hegel’s Naturphilosophie to be infected with an original sin which must be jettisoned because for him, there is nothing NEGATIVE in the world outside human action. Consequently, Kojève’s approach becomes a dualistic ontology; the word ‘being’ cannot be applied in the same sense to both man and nature. Unlike man, nature has no history. Therefore, Hegel’s nothingness is applicable only to human action. After a human act, nothing will be the same anymore. In contrast to a historical Being, the identity of a natural being never changes. When he defines the historical Being in NEGATIVE terms and the natural being in positive terms, he seems to follow Dilthey’s distinction between the natural and the human sciences a century earlier and in fact humanises Hegel’s concept of NEGATIVITY. While

NEGATIVITY and difference rule history, nature is ruled by identity. However, having reinforced the classical dualism between man and nature, freedom and determination, Kojève’s dualist ontology avoids the beginning and end points in Hegel’s system: how Nothing becomes Being and Being becomes Nothing, how identity turns into difference, and self into not-self which shows that he could not grasp the essence of Hegel’s absolute NEGATIVITY.

6.4 Existentialist and Phenomenological Critiques of Hegel

In this section I will consider how two existentialist and phenomenological thinkers deal with Hegel’s concept of NEGATIVITY. Both of them have Marxist background, and understand the applicability of Hegel to develop Marxist discourse.

6.4.1 Sartre’s ‘Other’

There is no evidence that Sartre attended Kojève’s Hegel seminars in Paris, but it seems that his reading of Hegel is influenced by Kojève’s master-slave dialectic and the unhappy consciousness. Based on the insights of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology and Heidegger’s ontology of Being, Sartre critiques Hegel’s idealist phenomenology because, for him, there is no place for ‘the Other’ in Hegel’s phenomenology. Sartre’s claim is that the existential Other negatively relates to my consciousness.

In his magnum opus, Being and Nothingness, Sartre deals with Hegel in ‘The Existence of Others’ in the first chapter of part III in which he writes:33

33For Alain Badiou, there are three modes of understanding the human subject in Hegel: 1. The individual as simple being consists of organs, cells and particles. For Hegel, this is the in-itself. 2.The individual as a self- conscious being that exists not only in-itself but also for-itself. 3. The individual who exists with the expectation to be recognised by others. Sartre calls this for-other. See Badiou (2017).

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Thus Hegel’s brilliant intuition is to make me depend on the Other in my being. I am, he said, a being for-itself that is for-itself only through Another. Therefore the Other penetrates me to the heart. I cannot doubt him without doubting myself since “self- consciousness” is real only in so far as it recognises its echo (and its reflection) in Another (Sartre 1958 p. 237).

Unlike Descartes’ reductionist exposition of the cogito where human existence is presented as an isolated cognising subject that juxtaposes itself against its object, human reality is such that it simply cannot avoid encountering other consciousnesses. Individual human existence is inextricably related to another. For Sartre (1958, p. 222), “the Other is the indispensable mediator between myself and me”. The relationship between my consciousness and the Other is existential rather than epistemological. My consciousness, as a being-for-itself, is intimately related to the Other. The existence of the Other in relation to my being is the fundamental existential and ontological problem of being itself (Sartre 1958, p. 223). Here, Sartre conceptualises the NEGATIVE relationship between my consciousness and the existence of the Other. He defines the Other as ‘the self that is not my self’, and he views its negativity as the constitutive structure of being Other:

The Other is the one who is not me and the one who I am not. This not indicates a nothingness as a given element of separation between the Other and myself. In- between there is a nothingness of separation. This nothingness does neither derive its origin from myself nor from the Other, nor is it a reciprocal relation between the Other and myself. On the contrary, as a primary absence of relation, it is originally the foundation of all relation between the Other and me. (Sartre 1958, p. 230)

Here, Sartre implies that my self-consciousness is determined through the exclusion of the Other, while the Other is also the mediator of my identity through recognition. In a Kojèvian sense, this involves a struggle for life. By focusing on Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, Sartre (1958, p. 237) says that “in order to make myself recognised by the Other, I must risk my own life”. Being-for-Others is the necessary condition for being-for-myself.

Sartre (1958, p. 238) also detects an apparent reduction in Hegel’s approach from an ontological to an epistemological level. In Hegel, knowledge becomes the measure of being; the Other turns into a mere object of knowledge. Sartre’s point is that Hegel’s automatic identification of Being with knowledge has led to an unjustified epistemological optimism. By assuming a harmony between the individual subject with the rational whole, Hegel simply by-passed the plurality of individual differences. In other words, there is no evidence that Hegel’s ontological totality would automatically absorb the multiplicity of individual consciousness.

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Here, it seems that Sartre misinterprets the essence of Hegel’s Phenomenology. Hegel’s intention behind the phenomenological development of self-consciousness and the desire for recognition is not about the intersubjective generation of epistemic knowledge between self-conscious subjects but rather an elucidation of the dialectical nature of the intersubjective master-slave dynamic. It seems clear that Sartre’s reading of the unhappy consciousness is filtered through Heidegger’s notion of temporality (see chapter 5).

In contrast to Kojève, Sartre sees in the unhappy consciousness the impossibility of totality.34Subjective consciousness never becomes fully self-conscious; there will always remain an ontological estrangement. Therefore, a total unifying synthesis would be practically impossible. Human reality is constituted by its unhappy consciousness which cannot be overcome by another mode of consciousness. Thus, Sartre’s Being and Nothingness and his Critique of Dialectical Reason promote a dialectic without totality.

6.4.2 Merleau-Ponty's hyper-dialectic

In the same vein, Merleau-Ponty expresses his ambivalence towards Hegel’s totality while also acknowledging his great influence on his contemporaries:

All the great philosophical ideas of the past century – the philosophies of Marx and Nietzsche, phenomenology, German idealism, and psychoanalysis – had their beginnings in Hegel; it was he who started the attempt to explore the irrational and integrate it into an expanded reason which remains the task of our century (Merleau- Ponty 1964, p. 63).

While Merleau-Ponty absorbs many dialectical insights from Hegel, he simply bypasses the third moment in Hegel’s dialectics. This avoidance strategy leads to a hyper- dialectic similar to Adorno’s negative dialectics (see chapter 4). Hyperdialectics is a dialectic without a recognition of totality; it represents the inherent instability of thought. Dialectics invites pluralistic dimensions and it is a relationship between the visible and the invisible. Merleau-Ponty’s dialectic emphasises the unavoidable ambiguity of human existence, the tension between freedom and facticity, self and the other, body and the world and the visible and the invisible.

34 Sartre’s idea of the ‘impossibility of totality’ can be compared with Adorno’s idea of ‘non-identity’. See the chapter 4.

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His idea of the invisible signifies the concept of negativity as a counter-concept against positivism, rationalism, the Husserlian phenomenology, as well as the Cartesian-Kantian dualism. In contrast to Sartre’s Being and Nothingness he wants to preserve the Hegelian- Marxian heritage.

The invisible is the condition for the possibility of the visible; the invisible is always implicit within and behind the visible. The invisible represents a hidden depth which allows things to unfold over time. The invisible is not the negation of the visible but its other dimension just like the unconscious which is the hidden power behind conscious activity. The visible gains its force from invisible relations. Its meaning always includes contingency and ambiguity.

Merleau-Ponty tries to conceptualise the idea of a ‘Hegelian existentialism’. For him, Hegel represents an immanent logic of human experience in all sectors of life. Hegel’s thought is existentialist in the sense that it reflects back on the individual’s self-responsibility. Man modifies and alters his life project within the larger historical process until he has gained subjective certainty which he finally equates with objective truth (Merleau-Ponty1964, pp. 65-66). Until the last stage, man is deprived of this moment. This is the price he pays for his humanity (Merleau-Ponty 1964, p. 67). All consciousness is inherently unhappy. But by integrating death into his consciousness, man deepens his awareness of life. Whereas the young Hegel concentrates on the experience of death, the older Hegel prefers to speak in abstract

NEGATIVE terms; his terminology in the Phenomenology moves from experiential to logical categories.

Death is the NEGATION of all given, and consciousness of death is the awareness of the universal. We cannot conceive nothingness without being, and there is no being without nothingness.

In line with his anti-positivism, Merleau-Ponty critiques the confrontational and objectifying manner of subjective relationships. Subjects tend to turn each other into objects; I become an object under the gaze of the other. Each consciousness merely seeks the death of the other. I discover myself in the other just as I discover consciousness of life in the consciousness of death (Merleau-Ponty 1964, p.68). But because Hegel transformed death into a higher form of life, his system does not lead towards pessimism. Conflict presupposes a reciprocal relationship, a common humanity. Mutual recognition is the condition of the possibility of intersubjective conflict.

Similar to Adorno, Merleau-Ponty rejects the reduction of being into thought, the absorption of a sensible multiplicity into a conceptual totality as he warns against the dogmatic use of Hegel’s dialectic in Marxism and existentialism. Instead, he proposes an open-ended pluralistic and ambiguous hyper- dialectic. His influence on the next philosophical generation, particularly Deleuze and Derrida, becomes noticeable as they also criticise this totalising trend in existentialist and Marxist projects.

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Against Sartre’s existentialist Marxism and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological Marxism, Althusser formulates a structural Marxism which rejects all the Hegelian elements in Marxism. In the next section I will deal with Althusser as he formulates a strong anti-Hegelianism in French philosophy which considerably influences Derrida’s anti-Hegelianism.

6.5 The Spectre of Hegel in Structural Marxism

In stark contrast to the previously mentioned philosophers, Althusser completely discards Hegel and replaces him with Spinoza. In this way, he tries to avoid the whole issue of subjectivity and negativity and instead seeks objectivity and positivity in Marx’s texts. His project is to reformulate Marxism against Hegelian, Existentialist and Stalinist interpretations. Although in his youth he studied Hegel’s philosophy, but later he opposes the whole 20th century Hegel reception in France.

6.5.1 Althusser’s Spinozian critique of Hegel

In Althusser’s 1947-essay Man, That Night, he particularly opposes humanistic, existentialist and historicist Marx interpretations. He understands Hegel’s concept of NEGATIVITY as being typical for his young age; there is a night which gives birth to light. Man himself is a gap in being.35 In referring to Sartre, Althusser says that “History is simply the triumph and recognition of man’s nothingness”. In the same essay, he attacks Kojève’s contribution to French Hegelianism:

Kojève calls 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. (Althusser 1997, p. 171)

35Althusser reads Hegel’s idea of ‘night of the world’, which is one of the main references to the concept of negativity, in a different way: “The profoundest themes of the Romantic nocturne haunt Hegel’s thinking. Yet Night is not, in Hegel, the blind peace of the darkness through which discrete entities make their solitary way, separated from one another for all eternity. It is, by the grace of man, the birth of Light. Before, Nietzsche – and with what rigour – Hegel saw in man a sick animal who neither dies nor recovers, but stubbornly insists on living on in a nature terrified of him. The animal kingdom reabsorbs its monsters, the economy its crises: man alone is a triumphant error who makes his aberration the law of the world. At the level of nature, man is an absurdity, a gap in being, an ‘empty nothing’, a Night. We see this Night, as Hegel profoundly says, when we look a human being in the eye: a Night which turns terrifying the Night of the world that rises up before us […]. (Althusser 1997, p. 170).

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By criticising Kojève, Althusser points out that man is a void in the being who triumphs over being. For Hegel, he claims, totality is the kingdom, not merely of nothingness (of the Subject), but also of being (of Substance). Hegel’s totality is simultaneously Substance and Subject. Kojève’s mistake is that he detaches the Subject (human negativity) from totality. Kojève emphasises only the becoming- Substance of the Subject, which is only one aspect of totality. The other aspect, becoming-Subject of the Substance, the production of Spirit by concrete nature, which is the production of man by nature, and the objective side of the totality Kojève has missed. According to Althusser, Hegel has been misunderstood for one hundred and fifty years because these two aspects of Hegel have not been placed in proportion. Kojève has “cut Hegel in two, as one would an apple, and to give up any idea of putting the two halves back together” (Althusser 1997, p.172). If we want to reveal the Hegelian totality, we must remember Hegel’s idea that “Substance is also a Subject”, and therefore, totality is the reconciliation of Substance and Subject which coincides in absolute truth. How can we understand

Marx if we neglect, as Kojève does, the objective, that is the substantial, aspect of Hegel’s NEGATIVITY?

In his 1950-essay, ‘The Return to Hegel: The Latest Word in Academic Revisionism’, Althusser summarises the Hegel revival in France and exposes its ideological aspect. With the imperialist crisis, the bourgeoisie experiences a tragedy which is expressed in philosophy. The mystified dialectic represents the tragic concept of this crisis. Hyppolite’s and Kojève’s new mode of dialectics serves to justify violence and war. In effect, it universalises violence, and makes the struggle for prestige and the struggle into death the basis of the human condition. Unconsciously, they project the problem of their own class onto the Hegelian myth.

There we have the latest word in this bourgeois resurrection of Hegel. The themes that bourgeois philosophy finds in Hegel are coincidentally the myths the bourgeoisie needs in its desperate struggle in order to arm and disarm people’s consciousness (Althusser 1997, pp.182-183).

The return to Hegel is a desperate attempt to combat Marx in specific form; it is a representation of imperialism’s final crisis: a revisionism of a fascist type. In his books, For Marx and Reading Capital, Althusser battles against those Hegelian themes that Marx himself addressed in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. Here, he distinguishes between ideological and scientific themes and places the social totality against human essence. The contradiction that he sees between essence and social conditioning gives birth to his ‘epistemological break thesis’ (1965) which draws a sharp line between the ideological young Marx and the scientific mature Marx. The Hegelian and Feuerbachian themes in the Manuscripts would contradict the historical materialism of the mature Marx.

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For Althusser, Marx’s German Ideology signals Marx’s farewell to Hegel.36 Here, Althusser directly counters Sartre’s existentialist Marxism which he summarised in A Critique of Dialectical Reason and Search for Method.

In his books For Marx and Reading Capital, Althusser replaces Hegel’s totality with Spinoza’s structural causality and develops his concept of ‘overdetermination’. For him, a simple contradiction is always overdetermined because each situation has always more than one determining factor.

In place of Hegel’s totality, Althusser reformulates Spinoza’s idea of totality as structure. The structure, as a whole, is decentered, and its elements are not determined by a single essence as he understood it in Hegel’s system. And this concept of a structural totality would fit best into Marx’s mode of production. In rejecting Hegel’s teleological notion of historicity, Althusser emphasises the structuralist view that history is a process without a subject. The notions of subjectivity, essence, and alienation he interprets to have been part of a bourgeoise ideology. Both, Hegel’s universal subject and the existentialist individual subject presuppose a proactive subject as their essence; both are idealist categories that

Marxist philosophy should avoid. Instead of NEGATIVITY and subjectivity, Althusser tries to universalise positivity and objectivity (substance). His anti-Hegelian Marxism should be read as his response to Sartre’s existentialist and Lukács’ Hegelian Marxism.

In the next section, my attention is given to the ‘philosophy of difference’ that challenges Hegel’s concept of NEGATIVITY.

6.6 The Philosophy of difference

In the second half of 20th century French philosophy we see a shift from a philosophy of identity towards a philosophy of difference. It radically questions the possibility of laying a solid foundation for philosophy and science, whether epistemologically or ontologically, as well as the possibility of identifying the essence of consciousness. In this context, Descartes’ and Husserl’s philosophies have been categorised as philosophies of identity; and even Hegel has been accused of having developed a philosophy of identity. While Descartes’ ambition was to establish a solid identity at the very beginning of his enquiry, Hegel tried to reach an identity at the very end of his phenomenological journey.

36 Alfred Schmidt, in his History and Structure, criticises Althusser’s thesis of an epistemological break in Marx. According to him, no such break has been found in Marx’s texts; instead, there is a continuity of a Hegelian theme throughout his intellectual project. Schmidt develops the idea of a materialist Hegel reception. In addition to Schmidt, a materialist Hegel reception can also be found in the Soviet Marxist Ivald Ilyenkov as well as in the Czech Marxist Karel Kosik.

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The best-known 20th century philosophers of difference are Levinas, Deleuze and Derrida. Two important predecessors for their philosophy of difference were Nietzsche (master-slave asymmetry) and Heidegger (ontological difference). This group of philosophers takes an anti-Hegelian stance in their respective philosophical spheres which Žižek nowadays tries to refute. I am focusing only on Jacques Derrida here as his approach is more closely related to Hegel than Deleuze’s and Levinas’.

6.6.1 Derrida’s ‘Différance’ versus NEGATIVITY

Derrida proposes ‘a radical attitude of differing’ as a non-totalisable negativity which he differentiates from ordinary differences. For this he coins the term ‘différance’. It becomes his fundamental principle through which he aims to linguistically and structurally reframe the whole history of philosophy, particularly Hegel’s philosophy, wherever it tends to totalise its frame of reference. For this reframing he coins the now widely used term ‘deconstruction’, a symbiosis of construction and destruction. In contrast to logo-centric systems of thought that are structured around a centre from which they unfold, he develops the concept of a functional, de-centred locus:

Henceforth, it was necessary to begin thinking that there was no centre, that the centre could not be thought in the form of a present-being, that the centre had no natural site, that it was not a fixed locus but a function, a sort of non-locus in which an infinite number of sign–substitutions came into play. (Derrida 1978, p. 280)

Derrida points out that this logo-centrism is itself based on phono-centrism which means that it has privileged an oral tradition as the channel through which logo-centric systems have been propagated. This tradition highly values physical presence and the spoken word which is overlaid with an unquestionable meaning as a guarantor of truth. Derrida refers to this as ‘metaphysics of presence’. Not only thought but whole societies have been constructed around this central myth. The Christian God, Reason as the key concept of the Enlightenment, Plato’s or Hegel’s Idea, Spinoza’s Substance, or Freud’s unconscious function as such centres.

In ‘Structure, Sign, and Play in the discourse of the human science’, Derrida (1978, p. 279) emphasises this focus on a centre: “The centre is at the centre of the totality, and yet since the centre does not belong to the totality (is not part of the totality) the totality has its centre elsewhere”. The entire Western philosophical discourse is characterised by a logo-centrism that signifies the centrality of its logos as the single rational logic which is based on the spoken word:

The history of (the only) metaphysics which has, in spite of all differences, not only from Plato to Hegel (even including Leibniz) but also, beyond these apparent limits,

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from the pre-Socratics to Heidegger, always assigned the origin of truth in general to the logos; the history of truth, of the truth of truth, has always been – except for a metaphysical diversion that we shall have to explain – the debasement of writing and its repression outside ‘full’ speech. (Derrida 1976, p. 3)

A logical structure always calls for a centre as a fixed principle. The problem with this fixation is that it does not exist; it is only present to itself. Every entity, whether signified or really existing, is present to itself and presented as self-sufficient. This imaginary centre constitutes the presence of a metaphysical ground. Presence is a prime value for logo-centrism. The imagined presence of a centre works as the guarantor of any signification. Essence, existence, substance, and subject have all been presented as independent, self-subsisting centres. This can be seen in the Cartesian cogito, the Kantian transcendental ego, the Husserlian transcendental subject, the Levinasian Other, the Heideggerian Being, and the Hegelian Spirit.

Derrida questions the ontological status of this foundation of thought and language as he points out that speech is nothing but another form of writing. In both, speaking and writing, words come out one by one; they have to be placed in space and delayed in time. For this he distinguishes between the terms to differ and to defer. Neither speech nor writing can escape from the processing of differing and spacing.

The resulting meaning is not fully present to itself. It is like a flickering, an alternating between presence and absence. Reading is the tracing of the constant flickering of this process. An identity of meaning, a meaningful identity is constructed through the interplay of differences. His term Différance (fr.différer) signifies this interplay between the two meanings of to differ and to defer, to make different and to postpone:

THE VERB “to differ” [différer] seems to differ from itself. On the one hand, it indicates difference as distinction, inequality, or discernibility; on the other, it expresses the interposition of delay, the interval of a spacing and temporalising that puts off until “later” what is presently denied, the possible that is presently impossible. Sometimes the different and sometimes the deferred correspond [in French] to the verb “to differ.” This correlation, however, is not simply one between act and object, cause and effect, or primordial and derived. (Derrida 1973, p. 129)

To deconstruct means to expose the textual quality of différance. Although a différance is left out from the text, it is a part of the text itself. The preliminary feature of a text is its undecidability. Because of this need to supplement one text with another text, meaning is constantly displaced. This is the science, the inner logic, or the grammato-logy of texuality. Its difficulty lies in our inability to clearly demarcate between intra-, inter-, and extra-texuality. Although a text attempts to represent a reality beyond itself by signifying something else, according to Derrida (1976, p. 158), in actuality, there is nothing outside

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texts. In relation to Hegel, Derrida distinguishes his différance from Hegel’s difference:

Since it is still a question of elucidating the relationship to Hegel – a difficult labour, which for the most part remains before us, and which in a certain way is interminable at least if one wishes to execute it rigorously, and minutely – I have attempted to distinguish différance (whose marks, among other things, are its productive and conflictual characteristics) from Hegelian difference, and have done so precisely at the point at which Hegel, in the greater Logic, determines difference as contradiction only in order to resolve it, to interiorise it, to lift it up (according to the syllogistic process of speculative dialectics) into the self-presence of an onto-theological or onto- teleological synthesis. (Derrida 1981, pp. 43f)

Here, it seems that Derrida focuses on the ‘Doctrine of Essence’-section in Hegel’s Science of Logic: “Difference in itself is self-related difference; as such, it is the negativity of itself, the difference not of an other, but of itself from itself; it is not itself but its other.” (PS, p. 417). Derrida’s différance seems to be fixed on one particular mode of Hegel’s absolute NEGATIVITY while Hegel’s speculative philosophy opposes any fixed mode. Thus Derrida’s critique does not consider Hegel’s unity of contradictions, identity in difference, inner and outer, form and matter, or spirit and nature (cf. Boer 2011, p. 596).

In his book, Of Grammatology, Derrida tries to show how linguistic differences are the effect of différance beyond de Saussure’s fixed hierarchical difference between signifier and signified. Différance produces two modes of difference: arbitrary difference in linguistic meaning and the irresolvable difference between opposed terms like essence and appearance, inside and outside, nature and spirit. Hegel’s distinction between abstract and absolute negativity represents the above mentioned modes of difference. While abstract NEGATIVITY produces external differences, absolute NEGATIVITY produces internal differences; absolute NEGATIVITY works through self-determination and self- actualisation in spirit which becomes the absolute principle in Hegel’s philosophy. For Hegel, the concept of difference is a poor ontological category embedded in abstract NEGATIVITY. To overcome this incompletion, Hegel suggests absolute NEGATIVITYwhich establishes the unity of contrary determinations. When for Hegel the difference as ontological opposition emerges from the NEGATION of unity, Derrida takes oppositions as the result of negating an irresolvable difference.

Thus Derrida’s différance does not allow any reconciling trend in Hegel’s difference, and it destabilises any opposition. Différance breaks the economy of Hegel’s concept of NEGATIVITY, and he develops his concept of différance to understand Hegel’s dialectic more deeply. For him, Hegel’s logic is the final philosophical effort founded on the generative process that creates differences and oppositions. However, according to Derrida, Hegel’s differential philosophical system fails to understand the inherent instability that generates differences. Unlike Hegel’s dialectic, différance decides at once the

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conditions of the possibility and impossibility of truth.

For Derrida, there is no unified subject because it is constituted only in the moment it divides itself. Hegel had resolved this problem of duality by the movement towards an absolute subject. Derrida, however, believes that the subject cannot create a reconciliation with itself because différance itself would be the actual fundamental ontological category, not the subject.

However, the fact that Derrida does not differentiate Hegel’s progressive subject and its inherent negativity from the static subjects of Descartes and Kant, or even Fichte, makes his reading of Hegel questionable. Derrida takes Hegel’s Spirit, the self-present subject, to be the all-consuming sublation.37 In contrast to Derrida’s reading, however, Hegel’s subject does not have a stable self-presence but is merely a momentary result of an overall process which has no fixed identity over time. Its dynamism comes from its inherent NEGATIVITY.

Derrida directly refers to Hegel in the following works: ‘From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve’ (1967), ‘The Pit and the Pyramid: Introduction to Hegel’s Semiology’ (1972), and Glas (1974).38 Derrida’s essay on ‘Violence and Metaphysics: An essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas’, puts forwards a Hegelian perspective for the deconstruction of the primacy of ‘the Other’ in Levinas’ ethics.

In his Phenomenology, Hegel represented the relation between self and the other as a relation of reflection. Violence and conflict are inherent not only in external relations but already within the experience of self-consciousness. Derrida writes: “Hegel himself recognised negativity, anxiety or war in the infinite absolute only as the movement of the absolute’s own history, whose horizon is a final pacification in which alterity would be absolutely encapsulated, if not lifted up, in Parousia” (Derrida 1978, p. 129).

Derrida points out that Hegel’s NEGATIVITY cannot be overcome. Hegel takes difference as NEGATIVITY that can be dialectically superseded because pure difference can only be established with reference to identity. Derrida finds that all of Hegel’s concepts are an interplay between identity and difference. In this insistence on difference, Derrida seeks a way to go beyond Hegel.

Derrida’s 1967 essay, ‘From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve’ discusses the problem of ‘overcoming’ Hegelianism in response to George Bataille’s method of moving

37 For a defence of the Hegelian subject against Derrida and Bataille, see Krahn (2011).

38 For the excellent elaboration of Derrida’s Glas, see Bernett (1998).

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beyond Hegel’s system by using Hegel’s concepts. Derrida elucidates how Bataille presents an ‘unreserved’ Hegelianism to exceed the systematic unity and closure in Hegel and admits that Hegel’s inner consistency renders the anti-Hegelian discourse rather futile because his reason encompasses itself as well as its other simultaneously. As he examines Bataille’s critique of Hegel he tries to reveal the ‘blind spots’ of Hegel’s system, what he calls ‘the sphere of non-meaning’ like non-sense and absolute negativity which become the foundation in Derrida’s deconstruction: the search for absent, undecidable and repressed elements in Hegel’s system. Against Hegel’s speculative difference, Bataille introduced the concept of absolute difference which marks the difference between restricted economy and general economy. Derrida’s idea is that Hegel’s general writing based on general economy would expose Hegel’s metaphysical closure and blind spots.

In opposition to French post-structuralism, French psychoanalysis positively accommodates Hegel and the concept of NEGATIVITY. The next section will analyse the French psychoanalytical reception of the concept of negativity and how psychoanalysis questions Derrida’s deconstruction-project of Hegel.

6.7 French Psychoanalysis, deconstruction and NEGATIVITY

While Althusser relied on a structuralist model in Marxist political economy, his contemporary, Jacques Lacan, interprets the libidinal economy of the individual and society from a structuralist perspective of psychoanalysis based on insights gained from Hegel’s Phenomenology. He locates the dialectic of

NEGATIVITY at the very heart of human subjectivity. Interestingly, Althusser was not against Lacan’s psychoanalysis, but vehemently against Hegel’s idealism. Although Hegel did not develop a formal theory of the unconscious, but in his Encyclopaedia, he uses the metaphor of a nightlike abyss to describe the unconscious process.39

6.7.1 Lacan’s split subject

Having integrated Hegelian insights in psychoanalysis Lacan says that everyone is a Hegelian without realising it. Lacan was immensely influenced by Kojève’s master-slave dialectic and logic of desire. For Lacan, desire is stronger than reason; it always undermines and breaks up its logical coherence. This explains the discontinuities within human consciousness. These internal contradictions cannot be healed by a dialectical synthesis. The subject itself is an insoluble paradox.

39 For an extended elaboration of Hegel’s idea of the unconscious, see Mills (2002). For psychoanalytical insights of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, see Macdonald (2014).

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Lacan juxtaposes this insight into the subject’s unconscious dynamics with Sartre’s transparency of consciousness and the primacy of the ego in American cognitive psychology. Before Lacan, Hegel had criticised Descartes’ cogito as well as Kant’s and Fichte’s transcendental ego. Through his reading of Hegel and Freud, Lacan realises that the self is not a unified and complete system at all but rather full of internal contradictions. The ‘Lordship and Bondage’-section in the Phenomenology becomes his core idea. Against Descartes’ ego cogito ergo sum, Lacan formulates his counter- statement: “I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think”. This self-estranged paradox originates from the following idea in Hegel:

Self-consciousness is faced by another self-consciousness; it has come out of itself. This has a twofold significance: first, it has lost itself, for it finds itself as an other being; secondly, in doing so it has superseded the other, for it does not see the other as an essential being, but in the other sees its own self. (PS §179)

This quote makes clear that for both, Hegel and Lacan, the self-estranged consciousness is the key to understanding subjectivity. Lacan also takes Kojève’s notion of desire on board: ‘desire is human only when one desires the desire of the other’. This externalisation of consciousness refers back to a lack within the subject. The tragic is that this desiring cannot be satisfied by any determinate object. Lacan sees the root of this problem in the permanent loss of the prohibited libidinal object which is not just other, but mother. This amounts to Freud’s unconscious fear of castration as the inability to be reunified with one’s mother. All desiring of libidinal objects is thus nothing but a search for substitutes of this original desire.40 This unconscious libidinal energy is so strong that it overrides all rational projects of the conscious mind.

But this endless desiring of others as substitute mothers shows that human subjectivity is essentially intersubjectively constituted. It has no positive essence within itself which could compensate for its loss of the mother. It is like a wound that never heals. Similar to Freud, Lacan sees the subject split into three aspects. He names them ‘the symbolic’, ‘the imaginary’ and ‘the real’.

The real is the most fundamental dimension which is constituted by a lack; via the symbolic and imaginary dimensions the subject strives to fill this lack. This lack functions as the unsurpassable horizon of negativity for any signification which also is its condition of possibility. The problem with this dimension of the real as essential negativity is that it cannot be directly represented by any signification. Therefore, in order to escape the anxiety-provoking effects of the real, imaginary and symbolic realities as substitutes are constantly being sought which leads to excesses.

40For a psychoanalytic study of how a paternal figure structures subjectivity and desire, see Dor (1998).

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There remains an unsolvable tension between the real and its imaginary and symbolic substitute identifications because, as Lacan (1979, p. 49) says, the “real is that which always comes back to the same place, to the place where the subject, in so far as he thinks, where the res cogitans, does not meet it”.

This irreducible play acts as an ontological horizon for all signification and identification. The dialectic between subject and object is a dialectic of impossibility. However, there is one important difference between Hegel’s and Lacan’s dialectics. Whereas Hegel’s subject becomes increasingly self- transparent, psychoanalysis has shown that the logic of desire remains opaque for the majority of the people. Therefore, no final synthesis in the form of Absolute Knowing can ever be hoped for in society. The deeper psychological process of self-splitting cannot be understood through the Hegelian model of sublation. Sublation is doomed to remain a romantic longing. According to Lacan, Hegel was not able to fully penetrate the opacity of consciousness. His notion of ‘the cunning of reason’ was still cognitivistic in the sense that the subject instinctively knew what it wanted from the very beginning. There is an inner clarity and determination within the Hegelian subject about its original intention and it is systematically been carried out without any relapses in an almost mechanistic fashion.

The Lacanian subject, however, does not know what it really wants and thus cannot satisfy its deepest desire. This problem of the logic of the unconscious is absent in Hegel’s Phenomenology. Absolute Knowing through the subject’s unity with the Absolute remains impossible as long as unconscious desires are ruling the subject’s choices. Although Hegel did discuss unreason as madness which tends to destabilise the universal order in the very heart of reason, but he had no doubt that reason would eventually prevail. Lacan now flips this order around and finds an unconscious logic within unreason which expresses itself via dreams, madness, or slips of the tongue. While Hegel explored the power of negativity as a universal concept within the self-conscious mind, Lacan locates the concept of negativity in the unconscious through a rereading of Freud.

6.7.2 Žižek’s Hegelian and Lacanian reformulation of negativity

Žižek has been regarded by continental thinkers as a major contributor to the Hegel renaissance of the 20th and 21st century. Because of Žižek, Hegel’s concept of NEGATIVITYhas recently gained a tremendous influence on philosophy, theology, the theory of ideology and film studies. His philosophical articulation is centred around two axes: German Idealism and Psychoanalysis. In German idealism, he refers to Kant’s defence of the Cartesian epistemological cogito, Hegel’s dialectical concept of subjectivity as NEGATIVITY, and Schelling’s naturalistic understanding of NEGATIVITY. In Psychoanalysis, he regards Lacan’s return to Freud, particularly his concept of the death drive, as most

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significant. For Žižek, Hegel’s dialectics and Lacan’s ‘logic of signifier’ are two versions of the same matrix (Žižek 2002, p. xviii). While for German idealism, the subject’s cogito was constitutive, in Žižek’s theory it is accountable for an uncountable madness.

As Žižek constructs a conceptual bridge between Hegel and Lacan, he focuses on subjectivity as negativity, which he interprets as ‘madness’ or in Hegel's and Schelling’s terms as ‘the night of the world’.41 By exploring the subject’s dark side, the dialectical process accelerates, particularly in its most disruptive and negative moments.

Žižek’s massive project of mediating between Hegelianism, Marxism, and Psychoanalysis becomes possible only via the concept of negativity as their most fundamental common denominator. To find the most appropriate expression of negativity for various contexts, he invents a wide range of synonyms such as the Lacanian real, enjoyment (Jouissance), parallax, gap, lack, rupture, ontological incompleteness, wound, excess, absence, ontological failure, death drive, indivisible remainder, extimacy, vanishing mediator, etc. All these expressions are based on two important Hegelian concepts: ‘the night of the world’ and ‘the tarrying with the negative’:

The human being is this Night, this empty nothing which contains everything inits simplicity—a wealth of infinitely many representations, images, none of which occur to it directly, and none of which are not present. This [is] the Night, the interior of [human] nature, existing here—pure Self—[and] in phantasmagoric representations it is night everywhere: here a bloody head suddenly shoots up and there another white shape, only to disappear as suddenly. We see this Night when we look a human being in the eye, looking into a Night which turns terrifying. [For from his eyes] the night of the world hangs out toward us. (Hegel 1983, p. 87)

This passage, according to Žižek, represents both the Freudian unconsciousness and the Lacanian real. Their union led to the birth of Žižek’s radical negativity. For Žižek, Hegel’s experience of ‘the night of the world’ was a necessary precondition for Schelling’s concept of ‘the pure night of the self’ which signifies that reason cannot be accessed without the prior experience of madness. The title of one of Žižek’s most influential books, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology, relates to Hegel’s corresponding passage from the Phenomenology:

The life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It winsits truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself. It is this power, not as something positive, which closes its eyes to the negative, as when we say of something that it is nothing or is false, and then, having done with it, turn away and pass on to something

41For Žižek’s articulation of German Idealism and Lacanian psychoanalysis, see Johnston (2008).

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else; on the contrary, Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being. This power is identical with what we earlier called the Subject […]. (PS §32)

This passage implies that subjectivity develops through a NEGATIVE relationship with itself because a positive and lasting self-identity cannot be found: instead, it is nothing other than its otherness. Thus Žižek (1999, p. 31) concludes that the subject must be seen to be synonymous with the power of negativity: “It is the destructive power of undermining every organic unity”. Consequently, the same applies to any organic social structure (Žižek 2012, p. 282).

For Hegel, NEGATIVITY is constitutive for the ontological subject. This was his key realisation that underlies his whole Phenomenology in which any apparent solidity of any particular constellation within and without dissolves (Žižek1993, p. 91). Kant naively assumed that the thing-in-itself, or God, positively existed beyond the realm of phenomenal experience – a belief that Hegel destroyed once and for all when he stated that beyond phenomena there was nothing because the thing-in-itself only existed as pure NEGATIVITY.

Žižek emphasises this point when he writes that “the limit between phenomena and noumena is not a limit between two positive spheres of objects, since there are only phenomena and their (self-) limitation, their negativity” (Žižek 2012, p. 282).

If this includes Hegel’s totality, then the dialectical process could only generate a fissured, incomplete, or at best, a fragile and momentary wholeness. For Žižek (1989, p. 30), the radicality of Hegel’s

Absolute lies in the fact that it only refers to nothingness and radical loss. If this is true, then NEGATIVITY will always remain a threat to the status quo because it cannot be annihilated or even sublated into a lasting synthesis (Žižek 2012, p. 449).

This line of argument should not to be confused with Adorno’s critique of non-identity because he attributesa subject-object identity and a final synthesis in the Absolute to Hegel’s Phenomenology, which, according to Žižek, was not intended by Hegel (see chapter 4). Despite Adorno’s critique of Hegel’s system building, Žižek sees in it a living revolutionary spirit. As Žižek writes, “There is no absolute subject. The subject ‘as such’ is relative and caught in self-divisions” (Žižek 1989, p.89). Žižek’s version of a critical Hegelian theory emphasises that Hegel had abandoned from the outset any hope in a final dialectical synthesis. Its precursor he identifies in the negative essence of Kant’s subjectivity within his transcendental apperception which is the condition of the possibility of knowledge that cannot be objectively known. This same line of argument Žižek (1993, p. 23) finds in Freud’s psychoanalysis.

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On this basis, he then reads the history of NEGATIVITY backwards and finds a lineage between Hegel, Schelling, Freud and Lacan which started with Hegel as the proto-psychoanalyst. In this way, he develops a new understanding of Freud’s concept of the ‘death drive’, which he believes to be synonymous with Hegel’s absolute NEGATIVITY. This link had been missed by Adorno (Žižek 1989, p. 192).

According to Lacan, human beings are subject to only one drive, which is their death drive. It keeps reproducing a perennial resistance against any final, harmonious synthesis (Žižek 2012, p.132). Therefore, Lacan concludes that the psychoanalytic subject cannot be conceived in positive terms; it remains decentred and dislocated.

The insights that Žižek derives from Lacan seem to be consistent with Hegel’s essence. For Žižek, the ontological nature of the Hegelian-Lacanian subject is best described by its absence of closure. The subject as such remains incomplete, which means that it still has not found its way to actualise its declared goal which is come home to itself and thereby fulfil its historical mission. For Žižek, the subject’s real essence is this inner antagonism and inability to complete its journey. This new reading of Hegel through Lacan forms the core of Žižek’s critical theory. His Critical Theory is based on three core concepts that he adopts from Lacan: ‘the real’, the ‘objet petit’ (fantasy object or object of desire), and ‘jouissance'’ Through these concepts, Žižek tries to overcome the unresolved issues of the Frankfurt School. Žižek (1993, p. 36) defines the real as follows:

The Real designates a substantial hard kernel that proceeds and resists symbolisation, and simultaneously, it designates the left-over, which is posited or produced by symbolisation itself.

The real is inherent in the traumatised subject and forever eludes the subject’s cognitive grasp. Žižek then compares Lacan’s real with Hegel’s Absolute Knowing and concludes that it is this real that prevents a harmonious synthesis in the subject because it contains the death drive as radical negativity. And he finds this irreducible negativity in the real to be highly applicable to the analysis of contemporary culture.

According to Žižek (1993, p. 3), the trauma of the original loss of the thing and the resulting inner void must be compensated and filled by fantasy objects. While the enjoyment of commodities itself is extremely short just like a catharsis, it needs to be repeated again and

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again. But the fantasy myth of enjoyment contains some magic which has mass psychological power; it can trigger the unconscious desire as it promises obscene enjoyment. This is the rationale that Lacan tried to conceptualise beyond Freud’s classical formulation of his pleasure principle. He called it jouissance (enjoyment); gaining satisfaction through suffering (pleasure- in-pain) via excessive, addictive consumption that is propelled by an unconscious fantasy.

For Žižek (1989, p. 32), Marx’s classical interpretation of this ‘symptom’ of late capitalism confirms Freud’s concept of the unconscious as synonymous with desire itself. Although the masses show certain behaviour symptoms, this does not explain their underlying cause why people prefer their suffering over freedom. Žižek tries to find an answer to this problem, which is that people in the 21st century still behave in self-destructive ways. His idea is that although subjects do know how things are, they still behave as if they do not know. Through Freud’s concept of the unconscious as desire he elucidates Marx’s critique of commodity fetishism and finds that it is the comfort, enjoyment, and pleasant feeling, however superficial and momentary, that people derive from the accumulation of commodities. A commodity is a fantasy object which serves as a substitute for the lack of subjective meaning and security. As Marx’s concept of surplus value explained the accumulation of capital, so does Lacan’s concept of surplus enjoyment try to explain people’s emotional bondage to the capitalist system. As long as people derive their identity through their symptoms and cling to them, they are not going to change the existing order.

Contrary to Derrida’s deconstruction-project of Hegel, Lacan's and Žižek's psychoanalytic approach to Hegel seeks to positively reconstruct the idea of negativity. Catherine Malabou, one of Derrid’s students, identifies Hegel’s mode of NEGATIVITY as ‘plasticity’.

6.8 Malabou’s ‘plasticity’ as negativity

Malabou’s The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectics, leads Derrida to reevaluate his own reading and critique of Hegel. By writing the preface to Malabou’s book, Derrida says that ‘Hegel is a thinker of the future’. Malabou derives her notion of plasticity from Hegel’s idea of the subject as plastic and then develops her concept of a plastic reading of dialectics. She claims that it was Hegel who fully developed the modern notion of human subjectivity. The term ‘plastic’ has a double connotation: first, it is the capacity to receive a

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form, and secondly, it is the capacity to produce a form (Malabou 2005, p.9). Originally, in his Aesthetics, Hegel used the word ‘plastic arts’ in his discussion of Greek art and sculpture. Then, in his Science of Logic, he also develops the idea of ‘philosophical plasticity’. On the one hand, philosophical plasticity signifies the philosophical attitude and behaviour of a certain philosopher, on the other hand, it applies to philosophy itself, the rhythm in which speculative philosophy unfolds. For Hegel, plasticity appears where the universal and the particular mutually inform each another (Malabou 2005, p. 11). In speculative truth, the relation between subject and predicate is characterised by plasticity: any fixation passes over into its dissolution (Auflösung) (Malabou, 2005, p. 12). The dialectical process is ‘plastic’; it is the main force behind the metamorphoses of Hegel’s thought. The idea of plasticity is highly compatible with

Hegel’s idea of NEGATIVITY. Malabou’s The Future of Hegel thus promises a future for Hegel beyond Derrida’s deconstructive critique.

6.9 Chapter summary

In summary, we can see that Hegel’s influence on 20th century French philosophy developed into a major event in which many prominent French philosophers share their unconventional insights via different pathways of thought like Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Husserl and Heidegger. From 1929 onwards, the Hegel reception in France circulates around three main concepts that Hegel formulated in his Phenomenology of Spirit: they are the unhappy consciousness, the master-slave dialectic, and the logic of desire. All three conceptual complexes can be seen as specific forms of negativity. Wahl and Hyppolite focus on the unhappy consciousness, Kojève elucidates the master-slave dialectic while the logic of desire forms the background of both, the unhappy consciousness and the master-slave dialectic. In the following generation, Marxist philosophers like Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Louis Althusser critically engage with Wahl, Hyppolite and Kojève by developing new directions of discourse which contain both, Hegelian as well as anti-Hegelian ideas.

Wahl, Hyppolite and Kojève focus on particular modes of negativity in a classical idealist fashion by working with Hegel’s original concepts whereas the next generation shifts the discourse from Hegel’s idealist phenomenology towards an existentialist phenomenology. This widens the inner subjective experience to include Husserl’s concept of intersubjectivity. Merleau-Ponty proposes a hyper-dialectic viewpoint which criticises the totalistic and synthetic trend of Hegelian NEGATIVITY. Althusser and Derrida break with the Hegelian tradition and thus with Hegel’s negativity. Jacques Derrida replaces

Hegel’s concept of NEGATIVITY with his philosophy of différance which refers to the concept of negativity without, however, accepting Hegel’s inner NEGATIVE dynamic and positive results.

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Lacan’s work is based on Kojève’s interpretation of the master-slave dialectic and the logic of desire.

It integrates Hegel’s concept of NEGATIVITY into a psychoanalytic reading of Hegel. In response to the last group, Žižek returns to Hegel and challenges the anti-Hegelian camp. His influential interpretation signifies Hegel’s continued relevance even after the deconstructive readings of Althusser’s post- structuralism. Malabou’s recent work on plasticity in Hegel confirms his haunting effect on 21st century French philosophy by linking his negativity to the recent American brain research programme.

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Chapter 7

British and American Hegel Interpretations

Content

7.1 Introduction

7.2 Hegel and negativity in British idealism

7.3 Russell’s and Moore’s rebellion

7.4 From analytic to post-analytic philosophy

7.4.1 Pippin’s reading of Hegel through Kant’s transcendental unity of apperception 7.4.2 Brandom’s negation as ‘material incompatibility’

7.4.3 McDowell’s Hegelianised Kant and Kantianised Hegel

7.5 Chapter summary

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7.1 Introduction

Historically, we can distinguish three main phases of British and American Hegel interpretations: the first group has been classified as British Idealism which dominated 19th century British universities up to the beginning of the 20th century, particularly by Scottish philosophers who worked at Cambridge and Oxford. The second group evolved from Russell’s and Moore’s anti-Hegelian criticism which led to the formation of the analytical school of philosophy that subsequently gained prominence throughout the 20th century in the English speaking world. But since Sellars’ challenge of Russell’s ‘myth of the given’ in 1956, analytic philosophers began to realise that they had reached an impasse which could not be resolved from within analytic philosophy itself. A new group of American philosophers, consisting Pippin, Brandom, McDowell and others, have therefore been trying to overcome this problem by integrating certain parts of Hegel’s philosophy into their analytic-pragmatic programme.

More particularly, their interest in Hegel seems to be limited to those sections that can be grafted onto a pragmatic Kantian reading of judgement. This strategy, however, requires that Hegel’s logic of

NEGATIVITY be reintegrated into an Aristotelian framework that seeks to explain human behaviour in exclusively naturalistic terms. Such kind of selective utilisation of root concepts from Kant and Hegel had its forebears in British Idealists who responded to an earlier impasse that had occurred due to some outdated utilitarian and empiricist dogmatic beliefs. While this helped to fix some fundamental metaphysical inconsistencies within British philosophy, it simultaneously limited a deeper engagement with German Idealism from within its own philosophical, cultural and historic context.

Hegel believed that the best ideas would arise through deep contemplation and critical self-reflection, not by copying and recasting others’ ideas at the surface level of semantic logic. For him, the truth is not to be found in the words or empirical objects themselves but by deeply understanding the spirit that inheres in and between them. Therefore, a true science would have to become self-reflective, i.e. critical of its own presuppositions, procedures, and concepts (cf. Hegel’s Phenomenology, chapter B: Independence and dependence of self-consciousness: Lordship and Bondage). In other words, a methodology that seeks to explain the functioning of the human mind more adequately than the Cartesian dualism of subject versus object that still inhered in post-Kantian philosophy must be able to reflect on the nature of its concepts and then not shy away from adapting them if necessary.

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Whenever we recognise a habitual pattern of text-mining, i.e. of extracting and recontextualising certain textual elements as a pragmatic-semantic shortcut to a deeper hermeneutic-dialectic engagement with Hegel, this critical attitude seems to be missing. Due to the highly suggestive nature of Hegel’s writing, the axiomatic rejection of psychological and cultural-historical interpretive approaches makes analytic Hegel scholars particularly vulnerable to projecting their own agenda onto his texts and to rationalise this semi-conscious procedure in defence of their paradigmatic world view.

By not taking things at their face value anymore (cf. Russell’s myth of the given) as consisting of well- defined problems and an equally well-defined strategy to tackle them, we are moving from ‘sense- certainty’ via ‘perception’ to a gradually deeper ‘understanding’ and thereby develop our consciousness. Hegel applied this approach even to the formulation of a philosophical problem and saw that it could not be separated from its particular historical and cultural context in which it arose. If we apply this idea to our own understanding of analytic philosophy then we can see both as historically conditioned phenomena

Thus Hegel’s approach may, after all, help the analytic tradition to come to terms with its unfinished past, and thereby achieve a deeper understanding of its current discourse. As long as analytic philosophy appears to itself as if it happens within a timeless, culturally and psychologically vacuous space it has not yet become self-reflective, a necessary condition for understanding Hegel’s phenomeno-logical method.

Because of Kant’s compromise with Hume, he limited the function of reason to the perception of sense phenomena – a half-way position that analytic philosophers have found far more acceptable than

Hegel’s uncompromising phenomenological ontology of NEGATIVITY. Thus there is a tendency within post-analytic philosophy to Kantianise Hegel and to limit his concepts to an epistemological problematic, which has prevented a deeper appreciation of Hegel’s dialectical logic of NEGATIVITY. Analytic philosophy started precisely because this complex of issues had not been recognised.

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7.2 Hegel and negativity in British idealism

British idealism, although a very diverse movement, is generally marked by several broad tendencies: a belief in an Absolute (a single all-encompassing reality that in some sense forms a coherent and all-inclusive system); the assignment of a high place to reason as both the faculty by which the Absolute’s structure is grasped and as that structure itself; and a general refusal to accept the Cartesian dichotomy between thought and object. Instead, reality is seen as consisting of thought-and-object together as a coherent unity, which has sometimes been interpreted to also imply an identity.

Although these idealists adopted some of Hegel’s terminology, and sometimes even a dialectical style of writing, they were not necessarily Hegelians since they did not embrace Hegel’s new logic in a systematic fashion on which an understanding of his central notion of NEGATIVITY depends.

Russell and Moore, who were educated in the British idealist tradition, launched their attack against it, the movement lost its support in the new generation and soon faded away. Mure may have been the first British philosopher who in his Retreat From Truth was able to criticise Russell and Wittgenstein from an idealist point of view (cf. Mure 1950).

In this section, I will briefly review some of the early British idealist philosophers with respect to their general lack of understanding of NEGATIVITY in Hegel: Stirling, Caird, Bradley, and McTaggart.

The first notable British Hegelian philosopher was Stirling who in his The Secret of Hegel (1865) argues that Hegel’s secret could be found in Kant’s a priori categories which are based on the formal presupposition that the universal determines the particular. As this aspect was made absolute, it turned into an extreme position that particularly Caird and Bradley represent. The Absolute was seen to be a unified whole, an organic totality above and beyond the individuals who comprise it; it had a life of its own. This focus on totality became the source of major metaphysical and ethical problems as it blurred all distinctions. Hegel’s Absolute Spirit was simply taken to be synonymous with the Christian concept of God – a radical simplification that diverted the attention away from a deeper dialectical engagement with Hegel’s NEGATIVITY.

Caird assumed the existence of a higher unity beyond divided and fragmentary individual existences. He understood Hegel’s concept of the ‘Absolute Idea’ to represent this unity. According to Caird, Hegel’s idea of the emergence of self-awareness through self-confrontation originates from the

Christian message ‘die to live!’ (cf. Herzog 2013, p. 169). It implies that NEGATIVITY is evil which must first die before positive living becomes possible.

Bradley was particularly interested in the Absolute. For him, the immediate knowledge of appearances is relative to the Absolute while the Absolute, representing ultimate reality, would transcend all appearances. He saw absolute reality to be non-relational which, however, could only be understood through relations between appearances. Since the Absolute exists beyond reason, it cannot be known by reason; it is a supra-rational unity. Bradley writes: “The universe is one in this sense that its

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differences exist harmoniously within one whole, beyond which there is nothing” (Bradley 1968, p. 127). Phenomena as mere appearances will always remain contradictory while they contain an essence which actually is nothing. Reality, therefore, must be one, not as excluding diversity, but as somehow including it in such a way as to transform its character. Since the Absolute cannot contradict itself, it transcends all differences (Bradley 1968, p. 213). Through a careful reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology, however, we will discover that Bradley’s exclusion of NEGATIVITY within the Absolute is contrary to Hegel’s own understanding of it (see the last section of this chapter).

McTaggart was perhaps the most notable of British Idealists since he represents the transition away from speculating about the Christian concept of the Absolute to an emphasis on the individual which has some parallel ideas with Feuerbach. Although his work is highly idiosyncratic, his focus is clearly on a new definition of the Hegel’s Absolute as a synthesis of opposite categories in which the lower categories are partly altered and partly preserved (McTaggart 2000, p. 9). In spite of his criticism of earlier forms of Hegelianism, McTaggart still adhered to the belief in the ability of a priori thought to grasp the nature of ultimate reality, which for him is the Absolute Idea.

In his Commentary on Hegel’s Logic (1910), McTaggart (1910, p. 4) accordingly emphasises the possibility of a synthesis. Dialectics is a process in which lower categories are being reconstructed into higher ones. The lower categories have no independent existence as such because their inner contradictions tend to transform them into higher categories. What makes the lower categories low is their partial and one-sided grasp of reality which is being repeatedly challenged by their opposite categories. Their antithesis leads to successive reconciliations. Only the highest synthesis is real and concrete and completely rational. All categories, apart from the highest, contain an inner essence which transforms them from within. Therefore, finite reality is incomplete in comparison to infinite reality:

Thus the first and deepest cause of the dialectical movement is the instability of all finite categories due to their imperfect nature. The immediate result of this instability is the production of contradictions. (McTaggart 2000, p. 11)

McTaggart sees imperfect categories to be always returning to the concrete unity to chase away their own contradictions. The imperfect and irrational are part of the perfect and rational universe. He identifies negativity as the driving force within this dialectic when he writes that “every positive assertion has meaning only in so far as it is defined, and therefore negative” (McTaggart 2000, p. 15). Dialectics does not reject the law of contradiction; rather, reality is characterised by an inherent self-

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contradiction which is the cause for the dialectical process to unfold. For McTaggart, however, NEGATION is only of secondary importance compared to the ultimate synthesis.

7.3 Russell’s and Moore’s rebellion

Analytic philosophy emerged as a movement at the very end of the nineteenth century when Russell and Moore launched an attack on their teachers’ idealist presuppositions and ways of reasoning, particularly Bradley’s and McTaggart’s.

Russell’s early Essays on the Foundation of Geometry clearly show McTaggart’s influence (Russell 1997, p. 82). Here, Russell views geometrical concepts to be inherently contradictory. Although he presents himself to be a ‘full-fledged Hegelian’ (Russell 1952, p. 42), his texts show a rather superficial understanding of Hegel (cf. Rockmore 2005, p. 43). In fact, his theory of geometry was more Kantian than Hegelian. At the end of 1898, Moore and Russell suddenly begin to oppose Kant and Hegel as the progenitors of British Idealism through McTaggart’s Studies in the Hegelian Dialectics.42 They oppose not only the idea of interconnectedness that McTaggart had emphasised in his Studies but also several key issues in Bradley’s idealism.43 In Problems of Philosophy, Russell (1980, p. 82) later on presents Hegel as a metaphysician whose philosophy he classifies as ‘ontological holism’ without, however, investigating the NEGATIVE dimension in Hegel’s ontology. He does, nevertheless, trace the inherent incompleteness in Hegel’s thinking when he writes:

This essential incompleteness appears, according to Hegel, equally, in the world of thought, if we take any idea which is abstract or incomplete, we find, on examination, that if we forget its incompleteness, we become involved in contradictions; these contradictions turn the idea in question into its opposite, or antithesis; and in order to escape, we have to find a new, less incomplete idea, which is the synthesis of our original idea and its antithesis. This new idea, though less incomplete than the idea we started with, will be found, nevertheless, to be still not wholly complete, but pass into its antithesis, with which it must be combined in a new synthesis. In this way Hegel

42In Russell’s autobiography, he remarks: “McTaggart was a Hegelian, and at that time still young and enthusiastic. He had a great intellectual influence upon my generation, though in retrospect I do not think it was a very good one. For two or three years, under his influence, I was a Hegelian” (Russell 1967, pp. 83-84). As he further notes, “Moore, like me, was influenced by McTaggart, and was for a short time a Hegelian. But he emerged more quickly than I did, and it was largely his conviction that led me to abandon both Kant and Hegel (Russell 1967, p. 85). 43For the debate between Russell and Bradley, see Candlish (2007).

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advances until he reaches the ‘Absolute Idea’, which, according to him, has no incompleteness, no opposite, and no need of further development. (Russell 1980, p. 83)

Here, Russell considers Hegel’s Absolute Idea as a non-contradictory, complete synthesis in line with

McTaggart. Thus he also misses Hegel’s crucial point which is that due to its inherent NEGATIVITY, even the Absolute Idea is not a final, harmonious synthesis in which all contradictions come to rest.

For some mysterious reason, Hegel’s understanding of NEGATIVITY has hardly ever been fully appreciated in the English-speaking world. Even Russell’s and Moore’s criticism of British Idealism did not deal with Hegel directly. In the early analytic period of Moore, Russell and Ayer, British Idealism was caricatured and misinterpreted based on an emotional dislike against the dense writings of Kant and Hegel. Neither Moore’s Refutation of Idealism (1898), nor Russell's various pre-1930 philosophical works, ever actually seriously addressed even British Idealism in any detail.

According to his own writing, Russell experienced the break with idealism as a shedding of ‘dry logical doctrines’ into which he had been ‘indoctrinated’. As he tells it, it was his work on Leibniz that had led him to the topic of relations and there he discovered a thesis at the heart not only of Leibniz’s metaphysics but also of the systems of Spinoza, Hegel and Bradley. This thesis he termed the ‘axiom of internal relations’. Its content was that every relation is grounded in the natures of the related terms which was ultimately based on Leibniz’s statement that every proposition attributes a predicate to a subject, which Russell interpreted to mean that every fact consists of a substance having a property.

This idea that it was the adherence to the subject-predicate structure of the Aristotelian categorical judgement, and the syllogistic logic based on it, that was at the heart of the idealists’ metaphysical ‘errors’ became the commonplace of Russell’s various accounts. Thus, in 1914, he writes:

Mr Bradley has worked out a theory according to which, in all judgement, we are ascribing a predicate to Reality as a whole; and this theory is derived from Hegel. Now the traditional logic holds that every proposition ascribes a predicate to a subject, and from this it easily follows that there can be only one subject, the Absolute, for if there were two, the proposition that there were two would not ascribe a predicate to either. Thus Hegel’s doctrine, that philosophical propositions must be of the form, ‘the Absolute is such and such’ depends upon the traditional belief in the universality of the subject-predicate form. This belief, being traditional, scarcely self-conscious, and

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not supposed to be important, operates underground, and is assumed in arguments which, like the refutation of relations, appear at first such as to establish its truth. This is the most important respect in which Hegel uncritically assumes the traditional logic. (Russell 1993, p. 48).

This criticism of the faulty inner logical structure of Bradley’s and, by extension, of Hegel’s philosophies was meant to highlight the general philosophical significance of Russell’s new system of logic: the first order predicate calculus with ‘quantification theory’ ultimately based on a propositional– rather than, as with Aristotle, a term-logic. This new logic Russell derived from the work of Frege.

But Russell’s characteristic reaction to idealism seems to have been not so much to deny its central axiom and replace it with a new one, but simply to assert its opposite – to replace the axiom of internal relations with that of external relations. Having become convinced that the Hegelian arguments against this and that were invalid, he notes, “I reacted to the opposite extreme and began to believe in the reality of whatever could not be disproved” (Russell 1959, p. 10).

Thus in opposition to the monism which resulted from the axiom of internal relations, Russell opposed an atomistic pluralism. As Monk points out, Russell was fond of referring to the monistic idealism derived by his teachers from Kant and Hegel, as the ‘bowl of jelly’ – view of the world to which he came to oppose his own ‘bucket of shot’-view (Monk 1997, p. 42). Russell’s policy of believing everything the Hegelians disbelieved gave him a naive pluralistic ontology. In his realism, Russell was clearly influenced by Moore who also had started out as an idealist under Bradley’s influence but had turned against him to shake off his dominance (Hylton 1990, pp. 118-24).

Moore’s criticism was directed mostly to what he took to be Kant’s and Bradley’s denial of the independence of facts from knowledge or consciousness, and in its place construed judgement as the mind’s grasp of mind-independent concepts, regarded as the constituents of the propositions constituting the world.

Bradley just seems to repeat Kant’s rejection of any notion of ‘intellectual intuition’ as a form of cognition of which finite human beings were capable. For Kant, the only immediate representations of which we humans are capable were ones based on our sensory, causal interaction with the world, and these could only be given epistemic status by being made the contents of non-conceptual forms of representation (intuitions) to which further general representations (concepts) could be applied. To see

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ourselves as capable of knowing things in themselves, unmediated by our sensory affections, was to attribute to ourselves the God-like powers of an infinite, disembodied mind, the powers of pure intellectual intuition. This step beyond Kant and Bradley to something like intellectual intuition was precisely the step that Moore and Russell took

The other major factor at play in the years around the turn of the century in the development of the new philosophy was, of course, Russell’s rapid assimilation of the radical changes in logic and mathematics that had been developing in continental Europe for two decades. These ideas gave him crucial tools for developing an analytic logic of relations needed for his work on mathematics and with which he could oppose the ‘axiom of internal relations’.

As Hegel had suggested, myths are more than sets of mistaken beliefs about the world, they are cultural products which play constitutive roles in the formation and maintenance of individual and group identities, exemplifying and reflecting back to their members the shared fundamental norms and values that bind them together as a group. It would be unrealistic to think that philosophers were free of such influences. Russell felt compelled to distort Hegel’s image so that his own philosophy of logical atomism could correct it. (Watson 1993, pp. 95-109).

Philosophers may be just as prone to defend their distorted or mythologised ‘truth’ as members of any other social group if they do not develop a critical self-awareness. In contrast to the Russellian creation myth with its simple opposition between his analytic philosophy and German Idealism, the actual picture is much more complex. Many of the different strands that have been woven into analytic philosophy throughout its history can be characterised just as much in terms of their affinity to Kantian and Hegelian idealism as they have been in terms of the radical opposition by Russell and Moore.

It is clear now that Moore’s early critique of British Idealism referred to Kant’s idealistic presuppositions, not to Hegel’s. His insistence on clarity became an important principle in the new analytic theory of language. But clarity must not become a fetish at the expense of meaning or profundity. The problem of misunderstanding is amplified when one philosophical tradition is transplanted into a different cultural context and language. Suddenly, what was common sense in the culture of origin does not make sense anymore in the new context. A whole range of misunderstandings suddenly arose which have still not been disentangled. Often, as has happened in the past, the more

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explanations that are added and overlaid over the original problem the more complicated and contracted the whole matter becomes.

Russell’s caricaturing of idealism was so successful at a rhetorical level that generations of analytic philosophers, who were trained to ignore cultural and historical categories, uncritically accepted it. Such an attitude is expressed in the general dismissal of Hegel’s prose as full of ambiguities not worth the time and effort to spell out in more detail what his essential insights were all about and to develop them further.

Looking back from the 21st century, however, we see enough historical evidence in the changes within the sciences themselves to incline towards Hegel’s understanding of the plasticity of consciousness and its NEGATIVE, dialectical structure rather than Kant’s, even when it comes to epistemological problems. But, as metaphysical readers of Hegel claim, his true significance goes beyond epistemology; it is based on his discovery of the NEGATIVE structure of the root of conceptual thinking itself which amounts to an ontological paradigm shift.

7.4 From analytic to post-analytic philosophy

After decades of negating Hegel’s conceptual influence on philosophical thought, post-analytic philosophers have recently shown a new interest in Hegel. This may be an indication that Hegelian themes and concepts have been recognised as fruitful to contemporary analytic debates but also that attempts have been made to read Kant and Hegel from an American neo-pragmatist perspective. In this section I will introduce the three most prolific post-analytic writers that somehow refer to Hegel’s

NEGATIVITY: Robert Pippin, Robert Brandom and John McDowell.

7.4.1 Pippin’s reading of Hegel through Kant’s transcendental unity of apperception

Having been a student of Dieter Henrich at Heidelberg in the 1960s, Pippin has distanced himself from common American misrepresentations of Hegel and presents him as a non-rationalist metaphysical idealist philosopher whose intention was to complete Kant’s critique of traditional metaphysics through

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an anti-empirical, anti-naturalist, and anti-rationalist discourse (Pippin 1989, p. 6).44 He interprets the relation between Hegel’s Concept (the Notion) and reality as a version of Kant’s transcendental unity of apperception. Therefore, a thorough understanding of Kant’s critical idealism would be an indispensable precondition for understanding Hegel’s true intention. Hegel had always relied on Kant’s exposition of the constitutive role of the subject in experience. But Hegel apparently lost his path when he rejected Kant’s absolutely unknowable thing-in-itself and tried to transform the transcendental subject into an Absolute Subject. As a result, Hegel felt compelled to mystify Kant’s search for clarity by constructing a speculative identity theory (Pippin 1989, p. 17).

Pippin (1989, p. 36) regards the transcendental unity of apperception as the supreme and original principle of all human experience because it forms and conditions all possible appearances. Hegel’s progressive self-determination and final actualisation of the Absolute Idea would run towards the doctrine of apperception. Pippin (1989, p. 37) says that Hegel expressed the a priori status of the

Concept as a dialectical movement of consciousness which he expressed as the self’s NEGATIVE relation to itself:

The I is now this subjectivity, this infinite relation to itself, but therein, namely in this subjectivity, lies its negative relation to itself, diremption, differentiation, judgement. The I judges and this constitutes it as consciousness [Ich urtheilt, dies macht dasselbe zum Bewusstsein]; it repels itself from itself; this is a logical determination.

Pippin does seem to recognise this NEGATIVE relation to itself as the core of Hegel’s idealism because any possible relation to objects is defined by the Concept. In the absence of the Concept there is no such relation. Experience is possible only when the Concept is dialectically revised.

But then Pippin expresses his doubt about the purpose behind such a development. His answer is that without the idea of the Concept’s self-determination no one can enter the Hegelian system. Whereas the unity of the concept can be understood through the unity of apperception, the heart of Hegel’s logic, his doctrine of NEGATIVITY, could be understood only in terms of the way how the subject both unifies and negates this unity. Pippin (1989, pp. 39f) does recognise the inner felt deficiency as the root of

NEGATIVITY. Self-refutation due to a felt self-deficiency is intrinsic to any conceptual position in Hegel. Pippin (1989, p. 94) admits that his interpretation of the Phenomenology depends heavily on a

44 This idea follows Hartmann’s reinterpretation of Hegel’s logic in terms of Gilbert Ryle’s non-metaphysical ‘category theory’. See Hartmann (1972)

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skepticism which motivated Hegel’s work. The task of the Phenomenology is to realise the untruth of any appearance in order to overcome it. The whole phenomenological journey is propelled forward by this self-doubt.

For Pippin, Hegel’s skepticism is based on the subject’s realisation that its Concept is always incomplete:

It [substance] is as subject, pure simple negativity, and thereby the dissolution of the simple, or the opposing doubling (or any simple) which is again the negating of this indifferent diversity and its opposing; only this self-restoring sameness [Gleichheit] or reflection in otherness within itself - not the original or immediate unity as such is the True. (Hegel quoted in Pippin 1989, p. 10)

Pippin then traces the origin of this NEGATION in Kant’s NEGATION of the possibility of immediate knowledge whether it is a phenomenal givenness or an intellectual intuition. This NEGATION is bound up with self-mediation - an apperceptive requirement for the possibility of experience. Subjective

NEGATION, therefore, is a necessary condition for knowledge which leads to antinomies that, however, cannot be overcome from within Kant’s own framework. Therefore, a second NEGATION becomes necessary for resolving the basic opposition of reflection (Pippin 1989, p. 105) – the NEGATION OF NEGATION – in which he sees Hegel’s contribution.

Hegel considered the notional element of consciousness as an intrinsically generated activity. Each shape of consciousness in the Phenomenology is fundamentally incomplete and SELF-NEGATION. The problem of determinacy is always a problem of NEGATION; immediate determinations vanish as soon as they have determined their object. To express this point, Pippin quotes an early passage from the Hegel’s Phenomenology (PS §§ 95f) in which consciousness becomes aware of deception in perception: “The now does indeed preserve itself, but as something that is not Night; equally it preserves in face of the Day that it now is, as something that also is not Day, in other words, as a negative in general.”

The Phenomenology then proceeds to section B which inevitably leads to the ‘unhappy consciousness’, a stage in which consciousness cannot come to rest because it is driven by desire, and even the desire to overcome desire itself. As consciousness becomes increasingly aware of itself, it realises that the state of desire is actually nothing but a state of SELF-NEGATION. The self realises that it repeatedly tries

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to constitute itself but always ends up NEGATING itself – a process in which the self simultaneously negates its relation to the world.

Hegel diagnosed this unsatisfactory state of affairs as a sickness which Pippin, however, waters down to an epistemic problem in Kant. Hegel saw all mental states as ‘shapes of the spirit’, momentary reflections of an inner formless essence. But Kant assumed that there was a solid, unchanging, positive essence – the thing in itself – behind all these unsatisfactory states.

Pippin seems to believe that the Spirit constantly tries to transform negative moments into positive ones by flipping over from inner to outer, from self- to other-consciousness (Pippin 2011, pp. 2-3). He understands these moments to be epistemic moments of apperception. As consciousness negates external appearances, it simultaneously tries to anticipate what its object could be. Thus, Pippin does not want to define consciousness in purely negative terms because he wants to keep his hope for reconciliation alive.

In the section on Morality, Hegel points out that as long as moral self-consciousness merely tries to fulfil a duty it will remain mired in pretence and hypocricy; there would be no hope for reconciliation

(PS § 631). Implicit in this NEGATION of moral hypocrisy, however, is a new shape of spirit – conscience (Gewissen) – that gives up the various antitheses that characterise the moral world-view (PS § 637). Hegel describes conscience as a unified state of mind that regards its own inner voice to be absolute. Thus it is intrinsically motivated as a lawgiver onto itself (es ist sich gewiss) which it knows to be universally valid due to it being generally recognised as such (PS § 640). But within conscience there is still another layer of consciousness which Hegel labels ‘beautiful soul’ – a consciousness whose wounds are healed through confession and forgiveness. If successful, such an experience would leave no scars behind (PS §§ 668f). Having lost any interest in the outer world, the beautiful soul withdraws into itself and remains submerged in absolute self-consciousness.

Pippin (2011, pp. 49f) reads this section to be the proof for his view that the ultimate purposive function of determinate NEGATION in Hegel is to turn itself into moral positivity. He reduces the function of

NEGATIVITY here to those apperceptive moments in which a judgement is being made. In judging, one negates an unacceptable NEGATIVE aspect and also rejects indifference as a morally unacceptable stance in order to validate a new finite content (by denying P one implicitly affirms P).

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Pippin presents Hegel’s NEGATIVITY here as a rejection of an unacceptable epistemic content and thus misses the inclusivity of the positive within Hegel’s overall dialectic of NEGATION. This position may be justifiable if we read an individual’s absolutely pure conscience (das absolut reine Gewissen) as

Absolute NEGATIVITY, which is fully conscious and thus immediately certain (gewiss), independent of whether this is generally recognised as such by a community of conscientious persons (cf. PS, §§ 632- 655). In this case, the moral genius who knows his inner intuition to be correct, takes himself to be the lawgiver in and for himself. (cf. Kant’s discussion of beauty as a purified moral consciousness in his Critique of Judgement). But what distinguishes Hegel here is that he moves beyond Spinoza, Kant, Fichte, and Schelling when he unmasks further layers of consciousness (PS §§ 655-671): Consciousness becomes absolute and free only when it also learns to let go of its introjected Christian concepts, particularly the concepts of a separate self and a God (from PS §§ 655 onwards, including the whole of the chapter on religion).

Instead of suspending the Cartesian juxtaposition of subject and object by simply ‘casting the differences back into the abyss of the Absolute’ as in Schelling’s theory, Hegel’s new, and more mature, understanding is that oppositions do not presuppose a perfect, unified Absolute in which they are dissolved. Instead, having understood the logic of absolute NEGATIVITY as the law of self-dissolving, he trusts that in their own time they will disappear by themselves. Absolute Knowing consists in this egoless activity, a seeming inactivity which merely witnesses how what is differentiated spontaneously turns into nothing, a simple becoming, at peace with itself (PS §§ 20, 491, 587f): “Universal freedom, therefore, can produce neither a positive work nor a deed; there is left for it only negative action [...]” (PS § 589).

Although Pippin addresses some Hegelian issues, parallel to contemporary continental Hegelian philosophers, he remains committed to reading Hegel’s concepts through Kantian eyes. While elucidating the subjective side in Kant that greatly influenced Hegel, he neglects Spinoza’s metaphysical influence (substance) on Hegel (see Stern 2016). By Kantianising Hegel’s ‘Doctrine of the Concept’ he made it his Archimedean point of departure for all of his reading of Hegel. To me, however, the actual starting point of Hegel’s logic is the moment in which his ‘determinate Being’ begins to engage with its own inner power of NEGATIVITY and thereby becomes increasingly conscious of itself. This process-conception of consciousness was missing in Kant (see also Johnston 2014, pp. 377f).

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7.4.2 Brandom’s negation as ‘material incompatibility’

Brandom presents a similar approach to Hegel as Pippin, although along a semantic-pragmatic pathway which is also based on a selection of certain textual elements from Hegel’s Phenomenology while silently refusing to take Hegel’s attempt at a fundamental reform of logic and metaphysics seriously.

Here, I will mention only Brandom’s account of determinate NEGATION, which for me is particularly problematic because he treats it solely as a relation of exclusion, while consciously leaving out the positive aspect of determinate NEGATION, which is easily recognisable in Hegel’s writings. He thus does not differentiate determinate NEGATION from a NEGATION that is not simply a rejection, but has a positive content of its own, and somehow includes that which is negated as part of Hegel’s organic holism.

What is striking in Brandom’s (2009) discussion of Reason in Philosophy is that he rarely refers to Hegel directly but mostly to his own American pragmatist friends, particularly to rational choice theorists. From Hegel’s own idealist German perspective, however, we could say that Brandom’s examples remain within the sphere of Verstand as simply the human capacity to reason by drawing inferences and conclusions based on common sense premises. He thus already misses the self-critical aspect of Vernunft that characterises Kant’s critiques.

The aim of the age of Enlightenment was to develop a concerted programme towards freedom from all dogma, based on reason (Vernunft), which Kant transcendentalised into self-critical reason (his Copernican Revolution). Hegel discovered, however, that Kant’s critiques still contained traditional Aristotelian categories whose implications Kant had not sufficiently examined. To become a science, philosophy must, therefore, adopt a meta-critical attitude by not taking anything for granted. It would have to become aware of, and let go of, all inherited assumptions about thought and being. Vernunft, therefore, must reach a self-critical meta-perspective through which its categories and concepts as its tools can be tested with regard to their appropriateness for understanding the nature of mind itself.

Applied to the starting point of a scientific enquiry, what this means is that it must be freed from implicitly held presuppositions since everything that follows from it is coloured by it. Thus Hegel is determined to examine the thinking process as such and begins (in contrast to 20th century

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phenomenologists like Husserl and Heidegger) with the conceptually simplest possible, i.e. indeterminate, shape that natural consciuousness is capable of: ‘being’.

What is interesting here is that in his Phenomenology, Hegel’s intention is neither to defend his own philosophy nor to guide consciousness in a certain direction but to merely confront natural consciousness with itself and thereby allow it to discover from within itself what it takes for granted

(its certainties) – a phenomenological approach that, due to consciousness’ inherent NEGATIVITY, inevitably and irreversibly leads to a gradually deeper self-understanding as the ideal condition for a genuinely scientific attitude (PS §§ 5, 53 – 58). This, however, requires that consciousness must remain open to new kinds of experiences, whatever they may be, and not close down when it becomes weary of this unpredictable process. What this means for the reader of the Phenomenology is, that they must already have reached a certain level of maturity to be able to value its lessons. Self-education for Hegel is this process of purification of consciousness that a serious reader of his would be prepared to undergo (PS §§ 28, 78).

The self-critical meta-perspective and phenomenological attitude of non-interference mentioned above seem to be missing in Brandom since he does not question but justify the foundations on which he constructs his own methodological approach to interpreting Hegel. In addition, he simply imposes his own agenda onto Hegel’s texts and presents it as more rational than Hegel’s. He does not have any doubt that by giving a list of what a determination excludes and includes it will resolve those contradictions that Hegel could not resolve. This pragmatic procedure he calls ‘rational reconstructing’ (Brandom 2002).

In contrast, Hegel’s NEGATIVE dialectical reason is reflected in each and every determinate NEGATION which establishes a new, but still incomplete, speculative unity of opposites on the way to Absolute Knowing. This is one of the most distinctive – and perhaps least understood – characteristic of Hegel’s thinking because it moves beyond the classical Aristotelian law of non-contradiction that still governs Brandom’s understanding of the unity of apperception.

In Making It Explicit (1994), Brandom presents his self-certified programme as a post-Sellarsian inferential approach. With this he wants to fill in the details of what Hegel left unsaid or only said in metaphors. His ambition is to overcome the dualism between scientistic determinism and platonic speculation. Central to his approach is his concept of experience as a human achievement during which

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people make judgements and develop concepts through inferences. Then he applies his concept of inferential activities and incompatibilities in his interpretation of Hegel’s determinate NEGATION that he publishes in an article under the title ‘Untimely Review of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit’ (2008).

For Brandom, Hegel’s Phenomenology is basically a harmony model for dialogic consciousness between an I and a Thou. It becomes fulfilled when there is a ‘reciprocal recognition’ between two people in a communicative situation in which alienation is overcome and transparency of intention is achieved. This for him is a positive definition of absolute knowledge. It involves a commitment to and explicit sharing of one’s concepts, which for him was Hegel’s basic idea of the Concept. He sees the tragic aspect of the Phenomenology as consisting of trial and error but ultimately, any failure in understanding would turn into a renewed effort as an intersubjective and reciprocal learning process.

In an article published online 8 July 2008, entitled ‘Georg Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit’, Brandom not only breaks Hegel’s terms determinate NEGATION and ‘mediation’ down to ‘material incompatibility’ plus ‘material consequence’ but even subsumes Hegel’s ‘idiosyncratic’ terms under his own and thereby misleads the uninformed reader to assume that he is their original author: “Hegel’s idiosyncratic terminology for material inferential and incompatibility relations is ‘mediation’ and ‘determinate negation’” (Brandom 2008).

This is not just an innocent rephrasing but part of Brandom’s programme to present American pragmatism as superior to German Idealism (“Mr. Hegel, apparently innocent of Anglophone philosophy, [...].”). Brandom further reduces Hegel’s determinate NEGATION to a problem of modality which signifies a cognitive dissonance in relation to the empirical world between appearances and ultimate reality or absolute truth (Kant’s thing-in-itself) which Brandom redefines in a Cartesian manner as a conceptual problem of representation through semantic mediation. His treatment of determinate

NEGATION ultimately boils down to the rather trivial formula: “where there are relations of incompatibility, there will also be relations of consequence”. Consequence here implies Hegel’s skepticism about Kant’s theory of representation.

To him, Hegel’s aim was to distinguish determinate NEGATION from Kant’s formal-logical NEGATION as mere inconsistencies by making it applicable to both, thought (the cognitive process) and things (facts) themselves. Hegel’s meta-concept of ‘The Concept’ would thus include states of consciousness as a purely natural causal sequence within that process: It articulates the sense in which anything

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(thoughts, facts, properties, conceptual contents) can be determinate: by strongly contrasting with, precluding, excluding, other determinates. On the objective side, that means that how things are is essentially also a matter of the structure of its modal relations to what it makes impossible and what it makes necessary. On the subjective side, it means that commitments could be understood as determinate in the context of the functional role they play in the process of acquiring and revising commitments.

Brandom admits that his difficulty in understanding Hegel’s determinate NEGATION is his mixture of traditional logic with the dynamic categories of movement. For him, Hegel’s determinate NEGATION is Janus-faced because it combines subjective and objective aspects that point in opposite directions. On the subjective side, the normative aspect of the determinate NEGATION is pragmatic; it’s obligation is to move forward, change, and develop. On the objective side, determinate NEGATION is a material incompatibility that mediates the relation between pragmatics and semantics via the exclusion of logical inconsistencies based on the faculty of judgement and a commitment to a rational scientific discourse. By giving examples only from the natural world and by applying physical laws of nature to the functioning of the mind, Brandom confirms his anti-psychological and anti-ontological belief in scientific progress.

According to him, Hegel wants to understand two objects in consciousness simultaneously: one is the first in-itself, the second is the being-for-consciousness of this in-itself. The new object contains the nothingness of the first; it is what subjective experience has made of it. Thus the negative process is driven by a mutually exclusive and incompatible epistemic process.

The second object is the negation of the first one. The movement from the first object to the second one by means of negation is from misrepresentation as a commitment to a material incompatibility to a new commitment towards a less distorted representation which, when recognised, becomes a new norm. The original commitment to an incorrect representation of reality is typically characterised by not being represented in awareness ‘as an appearance of reality’ but simply ‘as reality’. His scientific optimism is grounded in his belief that each misrepresentation is a necessary prerequisite for an ultimately successful path to absolute knowledge.

By recontextualising Hegel’s inner struggle for absolute self-knowing into a temporary problem of cognition on the path towards (the modernist myth of) a totally explicit definition of truth, Brandom misses two core aspects that characterise Hegel’s method: First, Hegel’s tacit dimension which requires the art of hermeneutic reading that keeps the whole of his work in the back of one’s mind while focusing

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on the details (which includes a grasp of the dialectic-part-whole dynamic of at least the core concepts that one wants to understand), and secondly, the actual nature of the inner struggle towards freedom from one’s own conditioned consciousness to which Hegel wants his reader to commit, which goes far beyond Kant’s formalism. The danger in reducing a whole to its constituent parts (or even only those parts that fit one’s cultural and personal bias) and in trying to make these parts fully explicit, i.e. absolute, is that one loses sight of it. Hegel warned against this danger by insisting:

The True is the whole. But the whole is nothing other than the essence consummating itself through its development. Of the Absolute it must be said that it is essentially a result, that only in the end is it what it truly is; and that precisely in this consists its nature, viz. to be actual, subject, the spontaneous becoming of itself. (PS § 20)

Brandom seems to have, from the outset, abandoned this understanding of the whole which in Hegel manifests in the subject’s determination to negate its false self. He only considers those examples from the Phenomenology that are most remote from this struggle. Brandom’s pragmatic interpretation thus seeks to dilute the radicality of Hegel’s concepts for a merely epistemic continuation of an essentially pre-critical Kantian discourse.

In other words, by transforming Hegel’s psychological, historical and ontological dimensions that inhere in his key concept of determinate NEGATION into cognitive-linguistic and pragmatic categories, Brandom reduces Hegel’s phenomenological experiences to a merely inferential problem of perception or apperception, a subset which not only misses the true significance of Hegel’s work but he remains, perhaps willfully, unaware of the implications of this methodological reduction. If a reader would take

Hegel’s NEGATIVITY seriously it is bound to become the most haunting of all his concepts because it promises the possibility, if not of freedom, but at least of a radical change of consciousness and not just a semantic analysis of apperception within an ahistorical and ethically neutral frame of reference.

I conclude that for me, Brandom’s reconceptualisation of Hegel’s determinate NEGATION replaces the actual level at which Hegel tried to make conscious the inherent NEGATIVITY embedded in the dialectical struggle for absolute self-awareness with a semantic model of the human mind. In the Preface to his Phenomenology, Hegel makes his intention clear when he uses the expression ‘the tremendous power of the negative’ to describe its energy within the ‘I’.

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Here, in his Preface, Hegel describes in non-ambiguous terms what it takes to move beyond misconceptions about the human mind. He refuses to instantly disclose his personal truth in neat didactic terms because he does not want to preempt what his reader must go through for his mind to become ready for a paradigm shift, or rather a whole series of paradigm shifts. In order to reach the stage of freedom from misconceptions, the so-called ‘I’ must purify itself and become transparent to itself. Absolute Knowing at the individual level implies that one undergoes a gradual process of purification which requires that one must overcome the various layers of alienation or conditioning which can, however, only in hindsight be seen clearly as it was, namely a complex of partial, distorted, and simply mistaken views.

The above quote also makes clear the different levels of analysis in Hegel and Brandom. For Brandom, progress of knowledge occurs through dialogically clarifying incompatibilities in the approximation towards intersubjective truth which for Hegel remains only an apparent truth (abstract immediacy) as long as it does not address its own mediatedness which usually remains repressed in ‘natural’ consciousness. Brandom reads Hegelian contradictions to be due to the insufficient accumulation of positive details about one’s own and the other’s subjectivity rather than the inherent ontological power of the NEGATIVE within the dialectic of individual and collective consciousness.

‘In Defense of Hegel’s Madness’ (2015), is Žižek’s critique of Brandom’s book A Spirit of Trust: A Semantic Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (2013/14) as a ‘domestication’ of Hegel’s speculative concepts such as self-relating, determinate NEGATION, and mediation. With the psychoanalytic expression ‘Hegel’s madness’ Žižek refers to the irreducible speculative core of Hegel’s philosophy which, for Žižek, cannot be made fully explicit because it lies beyond the grasp of traditional Aristotelian logic. By reducing and decontextualising Hegel’s interwoven dialectic, Brandom simply ignores their inner cohesion and mediatedness which forms a living dynamic structure.

7.4.3 McDowell’s Hegelianised Kant and Kantianised Hegel

Few works of analytic philosophy published in the last few decades have attracted as much attention as McDowell’s Mind and World (1994). It can be compared with Richard Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) in terms of opening up to the wider influence of non-analytic thought. Both works have located the core themes of analytic philosophy within the larger picture and have tried to bridge the analytic-continental gap.

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McDowell sees Hegel as having brought out and developed the good side of Kant, who had almost managed to supersede traditional dogmatic metaphysics, ‘but not quite’. While Kant challenged the empiricist’s myth of the given, it was a challenge that still contained residual commitments to the myth itself: the Cartesian problem of how to relate a subjective substance to an objective reality.

McDowell advocates that the way to correct what is unsatisfactory in Kant’s thinking about the supersensible is to embrace the Hegelian image that the conceptual is unbounded on the outside. Scientific naturalists share with Kant the view of the mind as being separate from nature – a view that McDowell rejects. Both Kant and the scientific naturalists think of concepts as existing within and structuring the contents of a bounded realm, the realm of subjectivity, which stands opposed to the objective realm. For Kant, the objective is the realm of the supersensible or noumenal which is beyond the reach of the human mind, even when its reach is extended by the natural sciences.

Here, McDowell agrees with Hegel’s critique of the Kantian supersensible realm and finds it to be translatable into a pragmatic path beyond the antinomy of a narrow scientific naturalism versus a nebulous idealism. Aristotle’s criticism of the supersensible in the form of Plato’s theory of ideas had led him to a new way of thinking about methodology, as a result of which he replaced Plato’s method of deduction based on universal ideas with his own scientific analysis and induction.

Thus, McDowell moved from paradigmatic analytic thinkers such as Frege and Russell to a kind of middle position between Kant and Hegel. Standing in the tradition of Donald Davidson and Sellars, McDowell seems to be advocating a Hegelianised Kant and a Kantianised Hegel within analytic philosophy. By rejecting a non-conceptual given as well as a Platonic ontology, he seems to seek a diplomatic compromise between Kant and Hegel without losing the generic character of freedom in understanding in the sense that he critiques empirical theories of perception that merely deal with technical details and miss the underlying root problematic, i.e. the necessary conditions for self- knowledge to become possible at all. Any judgement requires concepts but the type of concepts we have adopted and believe to be true depends on the level of consciousness that we have reached in our experience. From this middle position between Kant and Hegel, McDowell criticises Brandom’s neglect of Hegel’s a priori critique of Kant’s reduction of philosophy to the epistemological domain. For Hegel, science was merely dealing with external appearances, given shapes, spatial intuitions, which for him, did not yet constitute experience.

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McDowell sees this unmasking of Kant’s logic of the a priori (das natürliche Bewusstsein) as pre- scientific and illusory to be Hegel’s first determinate NEGATION which leads him to further, subtler, and more specific acts of unmasking. For Hegel, conscious human experience (Erfahrung) is essentially purposive because he regards the process of becoming increasingly self-conscious to be driven by a quest for freedom from the biological determinism of unconscious being with its merely reactive stance to appearances. As consciousness progresses through the NEGATION of appearances, it develops in the direction of self-understanding in and for itself above and beyond the mere awareness of sense objects. The rules of logic on which scientific knowledge rests suddenly turn out to be only relatively true in dependence on psychologically, culturally, and historically conditioned ways of conceptualising reality and not at all fixed by purely formal, timeless, and universal laws of nature as previously believed.

This is ultimately due to the fact that consciousness, by its very nature, always seeks to transcend not only its current concept of sense objects but even its concept of itself. Its evidence on which it relies is that it becomes increasingly aware of what it unconsciously took for granted earlier on, i.e. a clear-cut duality of mind versus world. This, however, leads to an ontologically unavoidable insight that McDowell seems to avoid: by virtue of being conscious of itself as a continual process of transcending its boundaries through SELF-NEGATION, human consciousness also becomes tired of itself, frustrated with its inability to leap directly to the stage of absolute, unconditional freedom and happiness. If intensified further, it inevitably leads to disillusionment not only with its sense objects but also with itself. Thus individual consciousness eventually has to let go of its self-identity as a separate self. In other words, by purging itself of its self, individualised consciousness may ultimately become one with the universal spirit as its essence which is ‘in and for itself’ (PS § 438). However, Hegel’s intention is to merely report this lawful unfolding, its inner logic. There is no mastermind or God that directs it.

McDowell points out that Hegel, in his Encyclopedia, says that this problem was not well conceived in Aristotle’s merely formal analysis of the different kinds of soul. Neither was Kant able to conceive this fundamental problem of consciousness because only an informal, phenomenological approach, i.e. the internal, self-reflective observation of consciousness as a living process in the very moment it arises, individually and collectively, would be able to do that.

Therefore, McDowell concludes that the very fact that there is an ongoing and unpredictable change happening in consciousness shows that there cannot be any ontology as such. He does not want to see that the absolutely necessary condition for any change that arises within finite consciousness is its

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negative relation to an infinite ontological background as indeterminable essence, substance, or substrate which must also be alive.

Among the various figures of the generally post-positivistic period of analytic philosophers after the Second World War, the one whose work promised some type of reconciliation with the idealist tradition was the American philosopher Sellars. In the course of his influential lectures delivered at the University of London in 1956, Sellars openly admitted for the first time that a Hegelian theme informed his work. As it turned out, however, Sellars had only combined Kantian elements with scientific realism – an approach that Hegel would have rejected. Nevertheless, he planted the seed that was later to grow into a fruit-bearing ‘near Hegelian’ tree, and in 1994 two books were published which came to be regarded as among the major works in analytic philosophy, despite the fact that each made only a handful of references to Hegel: McDowell’s Mind and World and Brandom’s Making It Explicit. The remarkable feature shared by these works is the acknowledgement given in each one to the continuing relevance of the philosophy of Hegel. Both portrayed him as providing the solution to the theoretical impasse that afflicted late 20th century analytic philosophy – a view essentially unthinkable from Russell’s and Moore’s perspective.

For both, McDowell and Brandom, the path to Hegel is via Kant’s innovations. Kant’s views concerning the active contribution of the mind in giving conceptual shape to the world as known could be ‘domesticated’ within analytic developments through a positivist a priori because Kant was believed to have caged the dragon of idealism into the traditionally accepted framework of empiricism.

Hegel, however, had let this dragon out of the cage when he renounced Kant’s effort to tie the mind to the empirical world and thereby unleash the ‘monster’ of absolute idealism. Yet, both McDowell and Brandom argue that modern philosophy must follow Hegel’s move beyond Kant because it is from Hegel, and not Kant, that one can learn how to reconstruct a coherent philosophical enterprise in the wake of Sellars’ exposure of Russell’s myth of the given.

A revival of interest in Hegel in the 1970s had already been signalled by the appearance of Charles Taylor’s impressive book Hegel. While Taylor’s reading of Hegel assimilated much of his rich social and political thought, the book was still premised on the impossibility of taking seriously Hegel’s new logic of NEGATION (Taylor 1975, p. 538).

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Perhaps the most systematic and influential new approach was presented by Pippin in his 1989 book Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness. Here Pippin, drawing on the work of a generation of post-Second World War German Hegel scholars, presents Hegel as a post-Kantian philosopher unencumbered with any bizarre ‘spirit monism’ of the type found by Taylor. Pippin’s Hegel is a thinker who furthers Kant’s critique of traditional metaphysics and extends Kant’s anti-naturalist strategies. He sees Hegel’s project merely as the completion of Kant’s, similar to Klaus Hartmann who saw in Hegel’s logic a new ‘category theory’ (Hartmann 1972).

McDowell’s version of Hegel’s idea of the identity of mind and world is his claim for the completely conceptual content of experience. His fundamental idea is that what is taken in in experience cannot be regarded as a mass of atomic and unconceptualised singularities - as bare this-ness. Rather, what is received in experience is always an already conceptualised such-ness, that is, something which has the categorical form of an Aristotelian substance.

The other path from Sellars to Hegel, is exemplified in the work of Brandom. In contrast to McDowell’s path, it is a form of Hegelianism characterised by an inferentialist account of conceptual content. This version of Hegelianism is a rationalistic approach to the language games of assertion and justification and based on the American post-positivist phase of analytic philosophy of Quine, Davidson and Rorty.

Both, McDowell and Brandom, try to explain the roots of Hegel’s key notion of determinate NEGATION through Aristotle’s (term-) logic.

7.5 Chapter summary

In the analytic tradition, Hegel’s dialectical logic has been condemned mainly for its apparent dismissal of the law of non-contradiction, but against this view, Brandom, like some earlier analytic interpreters of Hegel, portrays Hegel as affirming, rather than denying this fundamental law. 45

45 Recently, however, logicians such as Graham Priest (2002) have appreciated Hegel for his percipient views about logical systems capable of tolerating contradictions. Priest (2002, p. 7) says "Hegel, above all philosophers, understood the dialethic nature of the limits of thought." (See chapter 7 in Redding (2007)

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In the process of being reflected upon, Hegel’s objects undergo a type of change that cannot be thought of as merely limited to the properties of substances which maintain an underlying identity. This type of change already constitutes a contradiction for Hegel, and it is expressed in his law of contradiction – the claim that ‘everything is self-contradictory’.

Analytic philosophers interpret this claim to be a consequence of Hegel’s employment of ‘heterogeneous’ logics in relation to his cognitive context. Thus they cannot understand to which metaphysical logic he was actually committed. Given Hegel’s claim for the identity of thought and reality, contradiction cannot be limited to simply thought, it must also be a genuine characteristic of the world itself. Thus Hegel’s ontology claims that everything is essentially self-contradictory – a radical claim that analytic philosophers have found impossible to accept.

Hegel’s seemingly most metaphysical claim about the necessarily subjective nature of infinite substance, is his unique insight into what he had regarded as the most problematic metaphysical feature implicit within ancient and modern forms of thought. Rather than advocate a NEGATION of metaphysics, Hegel refashions metaphysics around the primacy of his new understanding of NEGATIVITY.

To me, there are three contentious issues that seem to underlie the non-metaphysical Hegel interpretations. The first issue concerns Hegel’s relationship to Kant within a post-Kantian idealist tradition in which Hegel lived. (To distinguish his own position from his German predecessors as well as Berkeley’s subjective idealism, he preferred to use the term ‘absolute idealist’ for himself). I believe that an understanding of this social-historic context is an important prerequisite for entering the thought world of Hegel’s classic-romantic epoch in which he grew up. Closely related to this problem area is Hegel’s methodology, especially the dialectic-hermeneutic part-whole dynamic which reflects not only his own style of writing but that of many of his contemporaries as well.

What distinguishes Hegel from his contemporaries, however, is the third aspect which is his NEGATIVE ontology of philosophical consciousness as the essential insight that drives the inner dynamic logic of his Phenomenology. These are perhaps the three most fundamental themes that would need to be recognised as necessary conditions for becoming able to approximate Hegel’s actual intention.

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A post-analytic reading tends to approach the first problem by focusing on Kant’s synthetic unity of apperception as the seed concept from which Hegel’s whole philosophy apparently evolved. Thus it claims an unbroken continuity from Kant to Hegel and thereby misses Hegel’s most valuable contribution to philosophy: the absolute NEGATIVITY that inheres in his concepts.

The second issue refers to Hegel’s hermeneutic-dialectic part-whole dynamic which has been approached by Brandom (2008) from Wittgenstein’s notion of the normative context of intentionality. Here, Brandom seems to simply ignore the methodological question of appropriateness of reframing the original cultural context in which Hegel operated. By turning Hegel’s implicit metaphorical meanings into non-ambivalent explicit definitions within a timeless framework of semantics he seems to adhere to the Cartesian belief in the possibility of independent objective knowledge. In this way, he bypasses Hegel’s cultural and historical understanding of the evolution of concepts.

This leads to the third and most controversial issue of Hegel’s NEGATIVE ontology which is generally rejected by pragmatist readers as an unacceptable metaphysical a priori stance. Pragmatists tend to be instinctively repelled by metaphysical claims that human consciousness cannot simply be reduced to the level of cognitive and semantic dissonances within the epistemic domain. While the earlier British idealists tended to overemphasise Hegel’s Absolute as an organic whole, analytic philosophers went to the other extreme by studying only the constituent parts of external relations and thus ignored the internal contradictions within consciousness. It seems that post-analytic philosophers are currently searching for a middle path between these two extremes.

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Conclusion

Having reviewed Hegel's meta-concept of Negativity as it has been repeatedly reinterpreted in post-Hegelian and anti-Hegelian traditions in Germany, France, and the Anglo-American context, we can now conclude that while Hegel's Geist has undergone tremendous changes in appearance over the last two centuries it has never completely disappeared from the academic discourse. Rather, we have seen that it has been remerging again and again outside traditional –isms like Marxism, Existentialism, Deconstructivism, and even Post-Modernism – a unique phenomenon that points to its anarchic, untamable, and unpredictable essence. While this aspect of Negativity is most frightening, it is simultaneously pure creativity, always fresh and self-generating; it not only works in and for itself but even on itself (cf. Hass 2014, Hegel p. 10).

The more deeply we understand its power the more we can trust that it will eventually also sublate the century-old analytic-continental impasse with its metaphysical and non- metaphysical camps, and through it, a new way of reading Hegel is bound to emerge, through which a new Hegel may become visible. But here lies the peculiar challenge in Hegel-studies which is that Hegel seems to negate himself through the different ways of reading him. The elusive paradox of Hegel's NEGATIVITY is that we can neither preserve its truth in any one form nor can it exist outside form.

Schleiermacher saw it - like Hegel - as an eternal, rhythmic oscillation between two polarities that moves through both, subject and object, spirit and nature (cf. Schultz, 1968). While the Phenomenology studies this process from the perspective of subjective spirit, Hegel's Science of Logic and Philosophy of Nature also investigate the same Negativity, but from the objective side.

So what does it mean to turn to Hegel again, if it is not a re-turn to the same old Hegel that we once knew as the Hegel of an absolute system or a doctrinal Hegel? How can we understand Hegel beyond positive definitions without simultaneously negating him? How can we let the NEGATION in Hegel remain alive? The answer seems to be that we need to cultivate a new way of reading as an art form that keeps renewing itself in the very process of conceptualising so that it never becomes stale. This is the ongoing paradox in which a hermeneutic reader is

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engaged. In order to keep Hegel's spirit alive within ourselves we would need to go back to the early Hegel of the Phenomenology and reactivate what he and his contemporaries were trying to overcome: the formal rigidities of clinging to the outdated dualistic Cartesian polarities of subject-object, self-other, mind-body, nature-freedom etc. The fact that many contemporary thinkers are returning to Hegel today suggests that Hegel himself was operating in this kind of spirit of neither-nor.

When we realise that reality cannot be caught in any form of ontological proposition because no proposition is entirely 'in and for itself', the interpretive dilemma appears not just to be confined to a methodological problem, but is rather concerned with a more fundamental question - the question of how to approach reality conceptually within an 'appropriate' frame of reference and in a more differentiated way that speaks to different readers differently.

The broad reflection on the validity of methodology, that is, the meta-methodological discussion, has emerged as one of the main issues in the postmodern period. Here, especially the modern positivistic methodology has been criticised along with its postulation of a complete object of interpretation, which is believed to be finally discovered. For the positivistic scholar, the indubitable certitude of his object justifies his positivistic methodology. Its scientific rationality in turn seeks to confirm the complete understanding of the object.

Being able to recognise this self-serving methodological circle, reason that has become self- conscious does not simply serve a particular interpretive method but goes directly to the underlying theoretical root problem of how we understand and define the interpretive object. Hegel's exhaustive NEGATION of all positive conceptualisations of reality implies that there is no such thing as an inherently self-abiding object that keeps its persistent identity through time. What needs to be noted here is that this applies not only to metaphysical concepts but even to our ordinary daily experiences.

When conceptualised in traditional Kantian terms, a phenomenon would be perceived as a distinctly separate object in space with unchanging identity, and this illusory conceptualised image of the phenomenon is in turn identified by the understanding with the phenomenon itself. Hegel emphasised that there is no such thing that has an independent self, that is, a fixed and unchanging identity. This does not mean that phenomena are not conceptually describable;

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even with no determinate and permanent identity, for practical purposes, phenomena may still be expressed in conventional concepts.

Broadly negating ontologically antithetical categories such as 'existence and non-existence', 'identical and non-identical', indicate the fallacy of a positive ontological antinomy that is inherent in the process of substantiating the object through imagination. The substantialised object in return solidifies the conceptualising process. But NEGATIVITY, just as any other conceptual category, has no positive essence as such.

If the negative approach is the only way of interpreting metaphysical reality, then the attempt to express this reality should not end up in the nihilistic extreme of ceaseless negations of what reality is not, because each and every negation creates its own positive result. The notion of an empty essence does not refer to mere nothingness or non-existence as the opposite meaning of being or existence, as has wrongly been seen by Berkeley. Instead, it represents their status beyond such ontological dualities so that even NEGATIVITY itself must eventually be given up as a descriptor of such reality. In fact, the negation of the falseness of any appearance whatsoever, including how essence appears to us, should not imply that in some other superhuman realm a positive essence may, after all, nevertheless inhere for the same reason that an essenceless substance does not mean nihilism.

The negation of essence, or, in other words, the double-negation of self, rather leads to a dynamic causal relationship between concepts which provides us with the ground on which we can establish a new kind of understanding of existence, which is existence without an ontological Self. On the basis of the realisation that what NEGATIVITY ultimately means, not adhering to the label itself, we may finally see that only a dialectic-hermeneutic approach would be able to adequately describe its ontology within its part-whole dynamic. Here, it may be interesting to remind us that the young Schelling shared the same insight with his friend Hegel when he said that "the concept of self arises through the act of self- consciousness, and thus apart from this act the self is nothing." (Schelling cited in Hass, 2014, p. 12). Here the characteristic feature of German Idealism is most clearly expressed as it insists that the mind is the generative force not just in the understanding of reality but even in its ontological constitution. But it was only Hegel who was able to fully realise the source that drives this act forward; and he fittingly named it 'Negativität'. Only he saw that for consciousness to be free from dogmatism – a shared concern of all Kantian and post-Kantian

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thinkers - this NEGATIVE force would need to be seen as and how it operates behind the surface of sense-perception and the false dualism of I versus Non-I, and only on this path would, ultimately, the meta-conceptual unity of subject and object be seen.

Now one of the central themes that what 20th century metaphysical Hegelians have tried to understand through their reading of Hegel is a new phenomenon typical for post-industrial societies which did not exist in Hegel's time: that the unificatory power of consciousness has not increased through economic and technological progress but rather decreased. Here we have reached the opposite polarity of the 19th century Hegelian focus on the Absolute and on synthesis. The degree of the disintegration of 20th century consciousness has shown itself in extreme forms such as self-alienation, narcissistic personality disorders, and a pervasive loss of meaning. It reflects the general sickness of modern rational society which particularly French existential philosophers have thematised as 'malaise'. This is a development which seems to be stuck at the stage of the Unhappy Consciousness in Hegel's Phenomenology. Through his reading of Freud's 'death drive', Lacan called it 'fracture' - a manifestation of the self-destructive power of the NEGATIVE. But as the Hegelians presented in this thesis have shown, there is a much wider range of reasons why Hegel has returned (see table in Appendix).

Having identified the particular differences among some of the most prominent Hegel scholars, we may ask whether there is a common underlying bond that unites all these different approaches to reading Hegel. Can a common core-motive still be found and formulated despite the trend to diversify Hegelian themes that could offer a more integrative and genuine Hegelian discourse? It's core-motive that - although mostly unrecognised - unites all of these approaches seems to be the fact that modern consciousness is based on an illusory concept of individual freedom that stubbornly refuses to come to terms with the fact of the negative essence of self. The more this negative essence is being intuited the more it is fearfully being suppressed by substantiating dualistic structures – a perennial war against oneself as well as Hegel's truth of the NEGATIVE nature of self. In other words, the capitalist propaganda of unlimited enjoyment of self has led to ruthless and ongoing exploitation of whatever is conveniently defined as 'non-self', without understanding that it always backfires since this so-called other as non-self is also part of the same hermeneutic circle as the ground on which the existence of both, self and other, depends. Only when this false dualism is seen will Hegel's NEGATIVITY not only intellectually but

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wholeheartedly be accepted as the a concept of freedom without relapsing into blind patterns of dogmatic conceptualisations.

For Hegel, the purpose of the phenomenological journey is to see and deeply understand the true power of NEGATIVITY within subjective consciousness. When it is seen as it really is, then simultaneously all objective phenomena are also seen for what they ultimately are. This, interestingly, does not lead to unhappiness and bondage, but rather to freedom from clinging to false dogmatic concepts of self versus reality. If there was no NEGATIVITY, even in the Absolute, nothing would arise or pass away; there would be no change and therefore no life.

Given the NEGATIVE self-referring essence of reality then, it is through the interdependent part-whole relationship, its internal circle of self-mediation, that the concept of the NEGATION OF NEGATION gains its purposive function and meaning as a concept of freedom. It cannot therefore identify a distinct and lasting positive essence, only momentary positive manifestations of form. As each of Hegel's NEGATIVE concepts is defined not independent of, but rather in dependence on, the state of its other, the causal relationship between the two is a mutual conditioning process with a simultaneously deconditioning effect in which both the concepts of subject and object are stripped of their false layers of appearance.

The difficulty in describing reality in affirmative ways may then be explained this way: Even though concepts do not have their substantial referents, the affirmative use of concepts in describing ultimate reality is still to be legitimised because the concepts are able to maintain their valid meanings within the interdependent relationship between them. Since there is no such thing as a positive substantial existence, the concepts, although seen as referring to it, do not represent ontologically any particular object. Since the relationship exists between the provisionally established concepts, the concepts do not have to be dismissed as nothing even without their referents. If the former negation of substantial existence is to be conceived as 'non-being', while the latter affirmation of the relationship as 'not-non-being', these negations appear as two interrelated onto-logical polarities along a spectrum from 'being' to 'non-being', both of which are sharing the same essence, which is their inherent process-nature of becoming otherwise. In this precise sense, being is always already nothing, neither this nor that.

The double-nature of concepts in Hegel is their representing conceptual reality without any positive ontological connotation. Even if designated as the 'nature' of reality, it does not

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indicate something that exists independently with its own self-nature, it merely indicates its function in dependence on its predicative web of determinate relations within the overall dialectical process.

Based on the realisation that 'substance' is ultimately nothing but a negative process within each subject, the notion of conceptual freedom then implies that the illusory nature of positive concepts and the resulting psychological disillusionment has been worked through. The paradoxical structure of the 'negative nature of nature' induces the reader to notice that it is the inner process of self-transformation, not its literal meaning or external shape that he should pay attention to.

On the other hand, Hegel positively tries to show that causal relationships between phenomena can and must be established even though each of the phenomena has ultimately no independent substantial identity. But again, it is only through the principle of NEGATION that this causal relationship gains its valid meaning. An essenceless essence connotes first of all an inner NEGATIVE self-relation which inevitably must then show itself in all its outer relations as well.

At this point arises a new and practical problem - the problem of interpretation itself: when it comes to the reading of Hegel, we should consider the fact that any interpretation is necessarily conditioned by a complex mix of factors which is itself interdependently conditioned, which means self-referring within a particular frame of reference, a hermeneutic circle. This relativity or self-referentiality of language within its own circle of meaning has become one of the major issues in the postmodern discourse since Derrida (see chapter six), which in Hegel's terms is the problematic of 'in and for itself' of textuality.

While this relativistic aspect in Hegel's logic explains the causal inter-relationship of phenomena through the notion of a 'contingent unfolding', the ontological position perceives its logic through the principle of 'negative essence' as its ultimate reference point. Therefore, while the former perspective inevitably reproduces an endless proliferation of phenomenological and historic narratives, the latter pursues to advance towards the principle itself (as the principle that there is no such thing as a positively determining principle) which points beyond this process of self-mediation as an ongoing process of conditioning.

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Even an organic interdependency belongs to provisional interpretations at the level of dependently arising determinations, not as a positively systematised definition of NEGATION. In other words, this relationship merely refers to the phenomena built upon the principle of change, which itself is not directly revealing the truth of substanceless substance itself.

How can we understand the meta-conceptual level of NEGATIVITY then? To put it in another way, how are we able to see the truth and not just the finger pointing at it? It is in this context that the hermeneutical leap into 'non-linear' logic becomes unavoidable. To reach a truly phenomenological insight into the inner nature of reality, the understanding must allow the distinct boundaries of the traditional logical concepts to open up so that they can freely assimilate the self-contradictory dialectical process within themselves. Only such a self-transforming logic is alive and will lead to the realisation of the truth of Absolute NEGATIVITY – a methodological path whose sole purpose is to transcend itself. It had always been exemplified by some classical paradoxical metaphors of mythology which Hegel tries to uplift into the self-conscious dialectical-hermeneutic process of the pure Concept. This process is based on the principle of determinate NEGATION which generates from within itself new types of concepts that gradually peel off all positive layers of apparent truths until only the purified essence of NEGATIVITY itself remains – a pathway that Kant himself had touched upon for a while in his first critique but whose consequences he had shied away from when he produced his second edition. Thus it was left to Hegel to make the decisive leap beyond the traditional conceptual framework of logic and to allow himself the adventure of a free dialectical imagination beyond dualistic concepts.

The didactive function of his new type of concept is to deliberately create a conceptually impossible situation for the reader who cannot settle in any particular positive ontological stance anymore as he is led to the condition of ontological suspension. The conceptual tension that the logical contradiction between Hegel's and the conventional logic brings up inhibits the reader from staying complacent about either of the two systems. This is the most direct path to the conceptual dilemma of not being able to make a positive choice between either this or that logical system, or to fabricate some kind of a compromise between them. Here, any type of theoretical explanation through a positive conceptual system of meaning fails. Thus what remains are only self-contradictory concepts which always lead the reader back to the 'neither this nor that'-position - an absolute opening (Offen-barung) - free from any preconceived notions of truth. If and when the reader is ready to embrace it, Hegel believed that he will then

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be led to the ultimate direct experience of Absolute NEGATIVITY, which for him is the experience of Absolute Knowing in which all dualities are finally seen as mere appearances.

For Hegel, the path to this ideal consists of a NEGATIVE hermeneutic whose sole task is to unmask all positive definitions of truth as preliminary, insubstantial and thus unreal; its wisdom is contained in the Notion that directly points to its own NEGATIVE ontological essence. On the other hand, the exhaustive contemplation of this selfless essence in turn legitimises a positive hermeneutic of causal interdependent relationships through which this path becomes practicable. In retrospect we can now see that when hermeneutics replaces positivism, reading becomes most productive. As the reader moves from an exclusive focus on content details towards an awareness of the process of reading itself, he begins to recognise that his object-domain is known not merely through silent observation but from the concepts that he forms about them through reading. This makes plain that the thing itself is actually nothing but a textual representative, a signifier, for some imagined entity.

Through repeated immersion in the texts, the author's words become alive. It sensitises the reader to a tacit dimension of experiencing how words and phrases resonate within him. This makes him aware that a text can be approached in different ways through which reality appears in a new light. Such a non-mechanistic approach logicians tend to relegate to the realm of aesthetics. But a reader will become truly self-reflective only when he opens up and conceptually embraces even logic itself as nothing but a form of representation.

A hermeneut is concerned with making visible what academic training renders invisible. Each text consists of several subtexts which a perceptive reader can access if he is prepared to step outside the conventional academic formalism and trains himself to read 'between' the lines. Developing such a way of seeing is precisely what Hegel intended in the first chapter of the Phenomenology: the shift of perception from a literal to a symbolic understanding. Such an altered perception produces a fresh way of relating to reality which suddenly appears as three- dimensional because it's NEGATIVITY when activated in self-awareness always leads from an initial preconceptual sense-certainty via conceptual rationalisations to meta-conceptual experiences.

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For the rationalist, contradiction is an indication of at best an anomaly and at worst a syllogistic error; for the critical reader, however, it is a sign of progress towards a more differentiated way of understanding reality. Since Descartes, scientists have been trained to look outwards, to exclusively focus on their object domain in order to conquer it – a process during which one tends to forget oneself, not questioning whether one's thoughts, motives and instruments are really as pure and objective as the theory presupposes. Only in exceptional instances have scientists turned their gaze upon themselves and systematically practised disciplined self- reflection, or even questioned the paradigm in which they perform their research.

This paucity of self-awareness has become common in the human sciences as well as they have uncritically adopted their procedures from the natural sciences that deal only with non-self- conscious objects. The failure to reflect upon the way we construct our so-called 'objective' reality inevitably leads to projections not only of our taken for granted presuppositions but of the unconscious structure of subjectivity. By systematically studying texts based on hermeneutic principles, however, we begin to see how they mirror the author's as well as our own NEGATIVITY.

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Appendix Overview of how Hegel's ontology, method, and some key themes were addressed by some of the prominent Hegelians and Anti-Hegelians

In this table, I have extracted some of the key points of Hegel in relation to 19th and 20th century Hegelian and anti-Hegelian thinkers in order to give a rough overview. Unfortunately, several other important Hegelian philosophers who have something important to say about Hegel's Absolute NEGATIVITY I could not include in this table, for example, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Georg Lukacs, Jean André Wahl, Jean-Paul Sartre, George Bataille, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Alexandre Koyré, Louis Pierre Althusser, Alfred Schmidt, Ivald Ilyenkov, Karel Kosik, Gilles Deleuze, Emmanuel Levinas, Herbert Marcuse, Alfred North Whitehead, John Dewey, Charles Taylor, Markus Gabriel, Francis Fukuyama, and several others. Thus this table should not be regarded as representative of Hegelianism or anti-Hegelianism but only be used for an initial familiarisation of some of the ways, Hegel's negative ontology, hermeneutic dialectic method and key themes have led to a rich tradition of creative thinkers in their own right.

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Hegel's German French American Anti-Hegelians Metaphysical Metaphysical Non-Metaphysical Ontology, Hegelian Tradition Hegelian Tradition Hegelian Tradition Method,

and Feuerbach Marx Adorno Hyppolite Kojève Lacan/ Pippin McDowell Brandom Russell/ Heidegger Derrida Themes Zizek Moore

Ontology Rejection of Yes, but Yes, but Unhappy Idiosyncratic Yes, and Against Regards Interpretation Mis- Ontological Radical any externalised as radicalised: the consciousness combination of further Taylor's spirit Hegel's of determinate understanding difference negation of The logic of disembodied social-historic loss of the as a universal Hegel's, Marx's, developed into monism, sees unmasking of negation of Hegel's between Being both, Absolute speculative forces possibility of a ontological and Heidegger's psychoanalytic Hegel's work Kant's apriori through Absolute and and beings as epistemology Negativity ontology reconciliation problem ontology; social critique as a as the Aristotle's term of Absolute foundational and ontology negativity as continuation beginning of a logic as Negativity of identity creativity of Kant's series of material project negations incompatibility Method Applies Hegel's Materialist Negative Negativity in Applies the Psycho- Non- Redefining Post- Against Direct, De- Dialectic/ Dialectic to his Dialectic as Dialectic of language, onto-psychoanalytic metaphysical Hegel's law of positivistic hermeneutic/ unmediated construction Hermeneutic genetic-critical class struggle, individual vs. dissatisfaction logy of desire dialectic of scepticism contradiction school of inter- mystical and enquiry into self redefinition of society, of desire as to historical individual based on in neo- Quine, dependent experience differance of Part-whole Hegel's idealist immanent determinate stages vs.global Henrich and Aristotelian Davidson and part-hole of one's own any system Dynamic concepts critique negation capitalism Hartmann terms Rorty dynamic true self thinking

Themes Unconscious subjective and The non- from existential intersubjective The logic of Kant's unity of Middle Post- Anti-Hegelian De-struktion Linguistic Self- Projection of objective identical object, to master-slave desire as self- apperception position Sellarsian atomistic (Abbau) of reframing of consciousness, human essence negativity of the loss of the Heideggerian dialectic, drive negation as central for between Kant- attempt to positivism of metaphysical the history of Master-Slave, into the labour vs. Marxian 'humanism' for power and based on understanding Hegel and overcome sense-date ontology for philosophy, recognition, Absolute as capital subject, authority Hegel, Marx, Hegel analytic- Russell's' a new particularly desire self-negation aestheticisation Freud, and continental myth of the ontology of Hegel's of revolt Nietzsche philosophy given'. Being totality Reason vs. Emphasising Fragmentation, Ahedonic Loss of the Struggle for Paradoxial Rylean Rethinking the Semantic Fregean Anti- Critique of Pleasure the sensuous instrumentali- consciousness, Hegelian self- recognition as nature of reformulation scientific inference of propositional Cartesian, Western body as sation of reason dialectic of identity the most basic reason as of Hegel's concept of conceptual logic and anti- logo- unmediated Enlightenment principle madness speculative nature through content. mathematics subjectivist centrism reason Hegel Self-alienated Anti-dogmatic, Externalisation, Critique of Self-reflection Capitalism as Pleasure Interpreting Critiques Rational Trust in Emphasising Postmodern Spirit (culture) suspicion of objectification, mass culture, as self- the final stage principle American Brandom's choice theory scientific germanic critique of vs. nature any Absolute alienation Culture negation in history (juissance) mass culture neglect of H's progress culture and independent industry through Hegel critique of tradition thinking science Morality vs. Personalisation Capitalist Nietzschean Self- Self-consciousness Collective The function Relativisation Normative, Common Revival of Nietzschean Ethics of the subject, morality of critique of consciousness develops through narcissism and of negation is of rules of contractual, sense ethics, Medieval critique of relativisation of competition Judeo-Christian as subjective struggle mass to turn into logic as dialogic inter- anti- thought morality/ Hegel's moral morality truth consumerism (moral) cultural subjectivity psychologism meaning conscience positivity products

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