III
Miscognition of The Concept
Il en est de l’histoire des hommes comme du blé … Malheur à qui ne sera pas broyé.
Vincent van Gogh
The profound necessity of the content, a necessity that emerges before our very eyes in Hegel’s text and is transformed into freedom there – this eternal kingdom in which man is God for man, this real church inhabited by God-become-man, this God Himself, at once Father and Son of man, this fully realized plenitudo temporum, this Advent whose prophet is Hegel – all this is presented so compellingly and with such rigour that the possibility of its falling apart would be unthinkable, if history did not offer us the spectacle of its disintegration. Yet, from another standpoint, this uncompromising rigour shocks the sensibilities, and the extravagance of the culminating moment is all but unbearable. The mind does not easily grasp this Parousia, suddenly unveiled before it as one unveils a statue; it reacts to the compelling obviousness of the outcome as to an act of violence. The ‘sunburst which, in one flash, illuminates the features of the new world’157 is of such brillance that it burns the eyes. Ever since Plato, man has known that the face of the Truth is blinding; in Hegel’s presence, the old reflex is reactivated, and, despite itself, spirit draws back into its night, in which it can, at all events, save its open eyes. Having the sun within arm’s reach is, like the Promised Land, a childish dream: the adult believes in the childhood he goes looking for, but fails to recognize the one he finds. Thus the story in which the sun falls to pieces dispels his anxiety and assures him he was right. It is, however, a taciturn event, a decisive but mute phenomenon. Hence another sort of fear wells up amidst the silence of history: the fear of night. Spirit seeks a ray of light in the shadows it has regained, wishing to preserve the rigour of this rigour that has come undone. Garrulous, man talks, because history says nothing: he devises a discourse in which his fear is allayed by the reasons he finds for the captive event. If Hegel is a misadventure, let this misadventure be, at least, a rigorous one. Such is the meaning of the post-Hegelian projects that aim to replace Hegel with an inevitability as compelling as his own. We shall see that this reduction is not unproblematic; that Hegelian truth often draws its masters back into its grip; and that in the new slave of modern times, what is coming into being is, perhaps, freedom.
A. The Sins of the Form
The Hegelian totality as such cannot come undone: if it collapses, its parts lose all relation to its necessity, its content becomes a stranger to its form. Proving the necessity of its decomposition comes down, then, to demonstrating the mutual alienation of its content and form – to showing either the inadequacy of the form or the inadequacy of the content. So tightly-knit is this content that one is initially tempted to look outside the totality as given for the form that mediates it. Here, asserting its right to assume the obvious, the artisan’s way of looking at things exacts its revenge: unwilling to assimilate the producer to his product, it conceives the idea on the model of a piece of handwork, and sets out to find the worker. The search for the form thus becomes a quest for what created it, variously identified, as we shall see, with Hegel himself, his language, and the dialectic.
1. Hegel’s Mediation
The first attack on Hegel was indirect. As it was not possible to launch a frontal assault on the system, its creator was subjected to an attack that took the naive form of the Kierkegaardian aporia of the account and the accountant. The system was said to have only one defect, its author. Its perfection was factitious, in the noblest sense of the term: ‘perfect’ and ‘factitious’ have the same root [il y a fait dans parfait]. But the making of something reveals the maker, however discreet the latter is – and the maker is always outside what he makes. The circle the geometer traces does not drag him in by the heels, and when the day’s totals have been tallied, the accountant goes home: he is nowhere to be found in his accounts. Such, then, is Hegel’s artifice. We thought he had broken with the tradition of the Aristotelian third term, but, in reality, the break was merely verbal: Hegel shows us an absolute totality emerging before our very eyes, and the power of his discourse is such that one eventually forgets that it is he who is uttering it. He is himself the living third term which disappears in the conclusion; his silence is simply the discretion that attends rigour. The true mediator is, accordingly, outside; his genius consists in quietly taking upon himself the whole of the mediation, which, in the system, is nothing more than a shadow.
This paradox of the whole points to the classical conception of God: a totality exists only for a third party, as, even in Descartes, the rainbow exists only for the man out on a walk, or, in modern physics, a system of reference exists only for an observer.158 The absolute Third of classical philosophy is God, in whom all meanings converge. Hegel is an Evil Genius who hides his God; or, rather, he is this ‘hidden God’, and imitates, in his work, the divine Creation: ‘On the seventh day He saw that everything he had made was very good, and he rested.’ This creator’s rest is in his courses and students. And yet Hegel was not always able to contain himself. Indeed, he hardly could have: the total revelation he imparted betrayed the presence of the God within him. Even if he did not confess that the whole was his work, he surely had to allow the dignity of the Prophet [Révélateur] to shine through – as may be seen in the Phenomenology, in which he describes the thinker who comprehends the work of the unifier as der Erscheinende Gott [God manifesting Himself]; or in the Philosophy of History, in which he so thoroughly initiates us into God’s secrets that we can dispense with God. Here, then, we see the demiurge in God’s dwelling-place and on his throne; is it not the height of imposture – and skill – to pass off as God everything of the artisan’s that does not go unperceived? Is God not an alibi for Hegel, who hides behind him in his own house – so as not to be discovered outside it? Hegel cries ‘God!’ the way others cry ‘Stop thief!’ to avoid capture. But this time we have him.
The problem with these arguments is that they are to be found in Hegel himself, and are transcended simply by virtue of that fact. Hegel openly declares that he stands, not outside the totality, but in it, as, simultaneously, philosopher, child of his age shaped by his own time, and particular individual. Let us examine these three points.
Before Hegel, philosophy had not succeeded in including the philosopher in its field of reflection; it only rarely considered that possibility, and, when it did, was simply confused by it. Either it resolutely ignored the problem, as in the case of Parmenides and Spinoza, with their seamless totalities; or else it tried to come to grips with it, and ended up doing away with the whole. Thus Plato, reacting against Parmenides, destroys the Sphere from which the manifold, time, and thought have been excluded, and then attempts to find a place for the philosopher within the universe he reconstitutes. But he runs up against the insurmountable enigma of time, through which the totality escapes: the philosopher contemplates the truth he reveals, but he is a man subject to change, whose discourse passes away. Plato’s position is untenable: the philosopher is not of the world he aspires to, while his ideas are not of the world he respires in. He has access only to the in-between realm Plato calls 
, but this externality is even more inadequate than it seems, for the status of the philosopher in Plato is not the status of Plato vis-à-vis his own philosophy. This ambiguity does not dominate Plato’s thinking; it is dominated by it. It is not hard to understand the reason for that coup d’état. Without it, we would be trapped in an infinite regress; silence saves us from the argument of the Third Man. In reality, Plato too is a discreet demiurge who simply conceived a pseudo-demiurge in a totality he himself dismantled.
Spinoza falls victim to the same mischance. The writing of the Ethics, and thus the contingency (or necessity) of the circumstance that Spinozism as a doctrine made its appearance in history by way of a lens-grinder, leave no trace in any of the master’s books. Put more simply, truth is all-devouring in his system and burns an indestructible author in effigy. The consubstantiality of thought and extension (or subject and object) is a coup d’état which ensures that the thinking of this consubstantiality disappears without hope of recall from Spinoza’s philosophy. Kant, unlike Spinoza, was at pains to think his own act of thinking; but he got only as far as the abstraction of the transcendental I in a reflexive philosophy; this thought of the regression of thought involved him in an infinite regress, of which progression toward the sollen was merely the inverted image. Thus pre-Hegelian philosophers had only two alternatives: to think the totality and ignore the thinker, or to think the thinker and destroy the totality. That either- or speaks volumes, for it points up the reflexivity of the thinker and his thought, while revealing the negativity of the thinker before whom the totality breaks down. Hegel was the first to take cognizance of reflexivity qua totality and, simultaneously, of the thinker’s negativity; and he was the first to resolve this contradiction by extending negativity to the totality. He literally put the philosopher to the question, and did not rest until he had thought the significance of the question itself in the truth he announced.
He thereby revealed, to begin with, the significance of his question, by showing that the question (or the negativity of the thinker) is not something detached from the truth, but is rather bound to it by ties of blood and birth, since the negativity of thought is what generates truth. Second, he showed that developed truth, far from implying a rejection of the thinker, is in fact his fulfilment. ‘The whole includes the negative’ means that it includes the thinker. Subject and object are transformed into their truth, which is the freedom of Spirit. This truth is reality revealed, the 
of the Greeks, in which the α- ceases to be merely privative in order to become emancipatory negativity: it not only leaves its mark on the object emancipated, as one finds the mark of the potter’s thumb under the handle of the pitcher, but is transformed into and embodied in the object. In Hegel the phenomenology and the history of philosophy are thus literally the history of the metamorphosis of philosophy into truth. This is the reason that Hegel is the last philosopher, in whom the race of philosophers attains its entelechy, and the first to be on intimate terms with the Truth. He does not stand poised on the threshold, 
, living on desire alone; nor does he disappear into the substance as the painter in the Chinese tale disappears into the landscape he has painted: he circulates among the divine brotherhood, and, dwelling in the whole, dwells in his true kingdom.
Here there appears another dimension of the vacuity of Hegel’s adolescence; this dimension could only make itself felt at the end, since it represents the reappropriation of the world of the Enlightenment by its truth. The Enlightenment was brute fact for Hegel, who laboured painfully under the burden of an historical situation that was not his by choice: his youthful analyses, like his critique of religious, political, and philosophical life, were the consciousness of this servitude, which might well have seemed irrevocable. But, as we saw, Hegel did not content himself with clarifying his sense of oppression. He acquired the knowledge of his servitude in the void of consciousness, whose theoretical expression was Kant. He still had no more than a presentiment of the positive aspect of this void; he had not yet come to understand it as the reappropriation, by the truth of the age of maturity, of its historical youth. It was only in the Phenomenology – observed, that is, from the high ground of the hard-won truth – that the path was invested with its meaning by the goal, and, by the same token, that the servitude of the beginnings and the historical origins of the philosopher found their true explanation. These presuppositions had constituted neither an irremediable absolute, nor the Dasein of a void, but rather the mediation of freedom in the process of emerging. Thus history is not servitude: Hegel is not a deaf-mute become suddenly voluble, he does not pass from scorn to servility, he is not won to a conception of historical relativism – rather, he emancipates history, and emancipates himself in history in the fulfilled totality.
By way of the Sage Hegel, then, the individual Hegel is reunited in the totality with Hegel the child of his age. But we have yet to determine with precision the difficult point where the circle closes upon itself. We know all of this thanks to Hegel’s written work; but what place does this writing have in the totality? Why did the individual – the sage – Hegel feel the need to publish the Good News? Was it pure caprice, or did he merely fulfil a design of Spirit’s? And what gap did he thereby fill in this faultless Whole? Hegel answers by pointing out that the freedom which does not know itself is not true freedom, and that only the consciousness of the whole brings the whole to perfection. Well and good; but why this declaration? There is only one legitimate reason for it; it seems inconceivable to Hegel that the consciousness of the actualized whole should be unshakeable in one man and dormant in his brothers, who are ‘he himself’. Hegel’s written work is thus consciousness in its extended form, the universal Sich wissen [self-knowledge] in which Everyman recognizes himself. The printing press, Hegel pointed out, is the expansion of Spirit: his books are universality in written form, which everyone can read. In this respect, the book is also an event, like the different figures of consciousness in history, and it is a decisive event that is, for Spirit, the other face of the Spirit forged in war. Like Hegel, then, we can only regard it as miraculous that Napoleon should have completed the construction of Europe right under the philosopher’s windows, just as Hegel was completing, in his notebooks, the Absolute Knowledge of the Phenomenology of Spirit.
2. The Mediation of Language
What has just been said opens up a new perspective. If Hegel and the significance of his work are reabsorbed by the whole, it is due to the force of his arguments. But, before being meanings, those arguments are written down; they are aggregations of signs. We looked for the mediator in the person of Hegel; he vanished into the signifying totality he himself presents in words. For us, he nevertheless continues to be a mediator thanks to whom meaning comes into being and persists: the reality of the Word. At this point, the objections begin to proliferate; they run from verbalism to panlogism. When the Hegel of the Philosophy of Spirit offers us a description of the Americas as a syllogism ‘with a quite narrow middle between the two extremes’,162 or logically deduces the necessity of firearms163 and races,164 we certainly do have the impression that he has transformed a real problem into a verbal one. Again, when he proclaims the kingdom of the truly universal, and then looks back on the merely verbal universality that characterized the beginnings of the Revolution, criticizing its empty formulae and ‘paper achievements’, one wonders by what aberration he managed not to notice that he was falling into the very error he had denounced. Marx, as we shall see, did not fail to throw the accusation of logomachy back at him. More profoundly, questions of wordplay aside, one can regard Hegel’s work as a meditation upon the unity of all things in the word – as a philosophy of the Logos or Word. So considered, mediation would indeed take on its full meaning – an Hegelian meaning – in the sense that this revelation through language would be not only the Word that announces God, but God become the Word that makes all things plain. The religious implications of such a position are not hard to see; they are by no means absent from Hegel. For him, Christ or the Word is the fully accomplished totality that reconciles God and man. But, by the same token, this revelation is its own origin: the Word that finds fulfilment existed before all things, and, as St. John says, was with God, and was God. Thus the Word already was what it was to become; it was, potentially, the totality and ratio of all things, Logos in the double sense of the Greek term – Word and Reason. Is this not exactly what Hegel sets out to show in the Logic, in which he proffers us ‘the exposition of God as he is in his eternal essence before the creation of nature … [and] the truth as it is without veil’?165 Is the totality not the unfolding of the Logos? Such, in broad outline, is the basic argument of those who interpret Hegel’s philosophy as a form of panlogism, a misreading of Hegel that developed over the course of the nineteenth century, especially in France. We examined the negative aspects of this misinterpretation in chapter II. Let us go straight to the heart of the question, and try to grasp the nature of this mediation by the Word in terms of the nature of the word itself.
We need only read Hegel to discover the philosophy of language that answers our purposes. The first chapter of the Phenomenology puts before us the spectacle of our fundamental experience of the word. If it is nighttime, says Hegel, and I am asked, what is ‘now’?, I answer, ‘now’ is night, and I write down this truth. ‘A truth cannot lose anything by being written down, any more than it can lose anything through our preserving it. If now, this noon, we look again at the written truth we shall have to say that it has become stale.’166 In this miracle, we grasp the power of the word, which changes day into night; through it, the particular thing I have in mind turns into the universal I utter: ‘In [language], we ourselves directly refute what we mean to say.’167 For the word ‘has the divine nature of directly reversing the meaning of what is said, of making it into … a universal’.168 And, within this universal, I encounter nothing but the stubborn universality of words: ‘When I say: “a single thing”, I am really saying what it is from a wholly universal point of view.’169 What, then, is this extraordinary power that abolishes the particular and engenders the universal?
It is, says Hegel, the ‘negative’;170 and we learn at every turn in Hegel that maintaining a firm grip on it ‘is the most difficult thing of all’. But here, in the case of the word, we are precisely in the presence of a nothingness that persists; we would like to capture this nothingness in other words which are, in their turn, persistent nothingness. This is why, of all reflections on language, Hegel’s, perhaps, affects us the most nearly: it puts the inner self to the test, and everything we are is called into question by it, down to the very words we write. The word, then, is a nothingness that persists: this life after death is what is universal about it. The convergence may remind us that we have already seen this alliance of the universal with death – in man. Man is the being through whose agency the universal known as death is firmly maintained within life; the essence of man is, consequently, the word. Hegel notes that animals give vent to cries which express their reactions of the moment, such as rage or joy, but that they do not live on after themselves and do not elevate themselves above time. The song of the birds is immediate bliss, nothing more; it involves neither knowledge nor distantiation, and is literally lost, as is Spirit when it becomes Nature. Man, then, is a speaking animal. But the spectacle offered by the animal world reveals something more: birds do not know that they sing, nor dogs that they growl; man, in contrast, knows that he speaks, for the word creates the distance that allows him to maintain contact with everything in himself that has ceased to be. Thus, by means of the word, man reappropriates himself; that is, he reappropriates what he was in a word that is not what he is, and that he is nonetheless. Man, says Hegel, is that which reappropriates itself; he is the sole creature to say I, and to reflect, in the word, the universal he is.171
This double appropriation clarifies the nature of language. By means of the Word, man apprehends, in the word-concept, the nothingness of being, i.e., universality; by means of the word, he apprehends himself as reflected universality, i.e., as subject. In the Self, language refers only to itself; Hegel therefore says that beings without language cannot be free, since, without the nothingness of discourse, they can neither emancipate themselves from nature, nor seize their own nature. Hence freedom is a capture, a grasping of the self; it is, in other words, a Begriff, or concept, in which the identity of the Logos with freedom comes into view. The Stoics had already announced this encounter of the Logos and freedom, but, for them, the Logos was merely the law immanent in the living totality, not negativity in actu. ‘[Language] is the real existence of the pure self as self.’172
This Dasein of language is thus the body of the universal Self in its purity, that is, in its element as such, which is the immediacy of the universal. Even when it becomes the middle term in which two consciousnesses acknowledge one another, it does not designate this or that particular I, but the universality of self-consciousness. ‘The “I” is this particular “I” – but equally the universal “I”; its manifesting is also at once the externalization and vanishing of this particular “I”, and as a result the “I” remains in its universality.’173 Matters become clear once we identify thought with this universal. ‘While the brute cannot say “I”, man can, because it is his nature to think.’174 Language is therefore the empirical existence of thought in the immediacy of its universality. That is why the contradiction between language and reality bulks large for as long as the universality of self-consciousness remains an abstraction and is not actualized in the world; that is why the philosophers talk and the caravans pass, the beautiful soul protests and the prayers go up to heaven – when flattery does not assail the throne. Such is the limit inherent in every philosophical discourse, and the contradiction marking pre-Hegelian ‘ideologies’: discourse treats of a world that is not discourse actualized; the universality proper to the word is not the concrete stuff of the universe; discourse is not, in short, bei sich in the alienation of the still unaccomplished world. Hence the word seeks a resolution in itself; it seeks the mediation between itself and the world in itself, yet never produces anything more than a demiurge of words, because it only makes its way out of itself in verbal fictions. Hegel avoids this pitfall, because his discourse is at one with the fully accomplished world he describes. There substance is subject; or, to put it differently, there thought is in its own element, the word, which is freedom; it is in harmony with the world in which it rings out. There the world has literally become discourse; every term contained in it is immediately universal, as in language. In this world, men behave like words: they sustain one another, and receive their essential being and significance from others. The world, a poorly constructed language, has been transformed into Science – a well-constructed language. This provides the key to the culminating phase of Hegel’s thought: language is not a third instance between us and the world, because it is the empirical existence of universality made over into a world. Hegel’s discourse is the Speech [Parole] of the world.
But with this we have also cleared up the second point. If language does not have a mediating role, can we not say that it absorbs the world in its totality? Here Hegel falls back on the Greek insight into the circularity and negativity of words. Plato clearly perceived the bond between the word and the Idea: it is their complicity that defies time. Aristotle codified this complicity in an ontological grammar. In the face of a world caught up in a process of becoming, language creates a stable second world, a true universe, eternal and articulated, which exhausts the totality of meanings. Doubtless this insight undergoes modification: Plato later tends to look for the essence of the logical universe in a universe of geometrical relationships. But the fact remains that this silent Logos is itself the origin and end of all things, and that it is articulated, 
, as all language is. Is Hegelian Logic too not this articulated Whole that is the essence and structure of the World? Does the world not deliver up its secret in the guise of the Logic?
Here it is the nature of language that calls for attention. Language is merely the existence [l’être-là] of thought qua abstract universality, that is, the actual presence of thought for thought, the for-itself of abstract universality, ‘the I in its purity’; it is not the substance, and the world develops ‘behind its back’. The first man to speak prophesies the universal, because he pro-nounces it (this is the reason that the Word is in the beginning), but he does not know he is anticipating history; indeed, he cannot, for universality pronounced is not the actual. Or, rather, its actuality is an actuality of the word. Remarkably, Hegel maintained that languages [langues] cannot truly be said to undergo development. This implies that language [langage] as such is eternal: a language, however simple, is an organic totality, that is, a fraternal, circular world. The republic of words thus precedes that of men from all (its) eternity; the language [langage] that enters the universal state by the royal road of Science is the unvarying structure of the languages men speak [le corps immobile de la langue]. Language is simply the empirical existence of the universal as such, that is, the universal in its purity and abstraction, the other face of universality being the empirical existence of its impurity in the concrete. The true mediation of the universal is the speaking individual as a concrete figure of consciousness; Hegel is the foremost example. His discourse, qua act, is thus clearly the foundation of things; it is universality, in its freedom, speaking of itself for itself, an incantation – but this act is the living syllogism by means of which the totality completes the circuit of its own moments. Outside this syllogism, the body of words falls back into the circle of language, which is simply the existence of the universal in its purity.
The deepest meaning of the classical play on words emerges here: 
, the sign is a tomb, words are death, language is a spectre. Hegel said neither more nor less when he proclaimed that ‘the science of the pure Idea … is the abstract medium of Thought’ or ‘the system of logic is the realm of shadows’.175 Hegelian logic is cavernous: it is Plato stood on his head, the world turned topsy turvy. No longer is the Logos the body of the truth, and the world its shadow on the wall; now it is the inner shadow of the true world. Plato proceeds from the shadow to the body, Hegel from the body to the shadow, which is not recognized as a shadow until the end.176 Thus the negativity of the logic, [which] we grasped in our opening analyses, acquires, in the end, its being. For the reality of words is empirical; they are the nothingness to be found within a certain being. If logic is abstracted from everything that confers meaning upon it, we can see in what its being consists: namely, in the being of language, i.e., the articulated body of the universal in its purity. We can see, too, the nature of the anticipation constituted by language. This ‘exposition of God as He is … before the creation of nature’ is simply the universality of words soliciting the creative transformation of the world into a concrete universal. This ‘before’ is simply the in-itself of the universal in the man-who-speaks, and does not yet know that he is announcing the end of the world in his discourse. It is also creation, inasmuch as the concrete figure of language, which is man speaking, is historical man, who, by dint of labour and struggle, creates a world in conformity with his discourse, fully realizing the ultimate world whose Word is the Promised Land. The totality is an in-itself that has kept its word; the fulfilled world, when it speaks, is self-celebration. The promise has become a holy mass.c Philosophy, said Hegel, is a ‘divine service’.177
Thus we have been driven out from amongst words; they are merely the purity of the world outside the total syllogism of the absolute content. The Logos as abstract whole has its truth outside itself; Hegel clearly demonstrates the ambiguity of language, which, although it is a circle, nevertheless annuls itself as totality in Nature and Spirit. Panlogism is a contradiction in terms, because, if the Logos is in the beginning, the whole in Hegel is at the end; and, while it is indeed the case that Spirit precedes itself in words, words, as a constituted reality, have no meaning outside Spirit.
3. The Mediation of the Dialectic
We need, however, to address a point left in abeyance. If the body of language is reabsorbed by the whole, and is not a form external to it, its movement clearly seems to play a decisive part in the elaboration of the content. There would be nothing to add here, if the eternal nature of language did not also affect its movement in such a way that the Logos, not as substance but as law, appears to govern the totality. The being of language has been reabsorbed, but its inner structure persists as a silent, absolute movement that holds sway over the world. What is the relationship between this law and the world? Are we not here in the presence of a new externality of form to content? And if we call this law dialectic, is the Hegelian dialectic formal or real?
It must be admitted that nothing in the outward appearance of Hegelian thought contradicts this interpretation. If we consider the Phenomenology itself, Hegel’s most concrete and densest work, we see that, in it, consciousness is subject to a necessity which directs and shapes it ‘behind its back’.180 This necessity, comparable to Spinoza’s,181 is doubtless the necessity of the ‘for us’, and one may grant Hegel, come to the end of the process, that the ultimate consciousness is the ‘back’ of consciousness in its earliest stages. Yet it does not follow from this point of view that the ‘dorsal’ character of the Phenomenology is synonymous with its necessity. Indeed, this is ruled out if the manifestation of Spirit through the different forms of consciousness is not the manifestation of an eternal law, which can preside over the birth of consciousness only if it is already present and active. As has been very nicely said, the Phenomenology is a noumenology;182 there is an in-itself of the Hegelian dialectic, and, if we pay close attention to the avatars of consciousness, this law will ultimately reveal itself, emerging from its body as Newton’s law of gravity emerges from the apples and the stars. The Encyclopædia tells us that this law is the law of triplicity. Dialectical necessity is the law of the transformation of thesis into antithesis and antithesis into synthesis; in this schematic form, the development of the law is nothing more than its recurrence. The third term becomes the first in another set, from which there emerges a third term that generates another set in its turn. The systematic utilization of this schema, particularly in the Philosophy of Nature or the Philosophy of History, creates the impression that Hegel has reverted to a philosophy of laws, to formalism, and that he ‘manipulate[es] [the content] from outside’.183 If Hegel fell into discredit in the course of the nineteenth century, it was in large part because of the ternary formalism of the Philosophy of Nature, which did a good deal to give him a reputation for panlogism. Finally, the ambiguous formulations concerning the absolute method that Hegel puts forward in the last chapter of the Greater Logic, in which the essence of the ternary law is painstakingly spelled out, have, because they have been misunderstood, only heightened the confusion. Must we concede that Hegel lapsed into the formalism he denounced more strenuously than anyone else?
‘Formalism has, it is true, also taken possession of triplicity and adhered to its empty schema.’184 This caustic remark in the Greater Logic echoes the attack unleashed in the Phenomenology ten years before. That attack – and a very sharp one it was – was directed at Schelling. Since ‘what results from this method … [is] labelling all that is in heaven and earth with the few determinations of the general schema’,185 Hegel is moved to draw the most unflattering comparisons, involving cooks, painters, furriers, white-washers, prestidigitators, bonesetters, butchers, packers, grocers, and card sharks. It is hard to believe that he could have mustered such rhetorical resources against formalism only to restore it to full honours later. He harbours a deep aversion for this superficial knowledge, which attains only to a semblance of the concept, in the form of a law external to the content. In his view, ‘the determinateness, which is taken from the schema and externally attached to an existent thing, is, in Science, the self-moving soul of the realized content.’186 By ‘content’, we should understand, not abstraction from all empirical diversity, but the object itself, with its own characteristic determinations: ‘Scientific cognition, on the contrary, demands surrender to the life of the object … expressing its inner necessity [and] immersed in its content, [it] advance[s] with its movement.’187 More: the fact is that the only truly scientific method is the one which ‘is not something distinct from its object and content; for it is the inwardness of the content, the dialectic which it possesses within itself, which is the mainspring of its advance.’188 This text is of the first importance, for it states the profoundest requirement of Hegel’s thought, and identifies the dialectic with the content. This point bears closer examination.
Hartmann’s penetrating analyses have drawn attention to the ‘selfless devotion’ (Hingegebenheit) of the Hegelian dialectic. ‘This dialectical movement which consciousness exercises in itself and which affects both its knowledge and its object, such that the new, veritable object emerges from this dialectic before consciousness, is precisely what is called experience.’189 Citing this text, Hartmann shows that the dialectic, which is a deductive schema in Fichte, is, in Hegel, the form devotion to the object takes. More precisely, he shows that the dialectic is neither a rule nor fixed laws, because the object and its Maßstab [measure] vary over the course of the process.190 It cannot be a matter, then, of deducing the content or imposing a foreign schema on it; rather, the dialectic must emerge with its object. This experience will accordingly be, in Claudel’s apt formulation, a ‘co-birth’ [co-naissance], in which spirit’s role is the attentive self-effacement it brings to the effort of conception, die Anstrengung des Begriffs. This capture by spirit is simply the capture of the content by itself: i.e., the concept as such. Hartmann therefore quite rightly maintains ‘that we can unhesitatingly range dialectical intuition in Hegel under the rubric intuition of essence (Wesenschau)’,191 and that, pace Husserl, Hegel’s phenomenological description is Husserl’s pure description of essence.
Hartmann concentrates all his energies on bringing out this purity of the object: if the dialectic is the movement specific to it, then there is no universal dialectic: rather, every content possesses its own dialectic, and, since real objects are not repeated, the same dialectic never occurs twice in Hegel.192 All resemblance is superficial, like that between the eyes and ears of different faces. Neither the content nor the form permits us to transpose the dialectic of perception into that of master and slave, no more than we can transpose the dialectic of lordship and bondage into that of the unhappy consciousness. There is, then, a certain discreteness to objects, which finds its correlative in a discreteness of the dialectic. If the dialectic is not a law, the reason is that it does not apprehend itself as such; it lacks, says Hartmann, the moment of the for-itself. Hegel’s aberration lay in wanting to find a formula for this for-itself, a law of the dialectic; he failed to see that no rule could be laid down prior to experience, because, in experience, the content makes good its right to transform the rule itself. Hence there can be no for-itself of the dialectic for anyone but God, who causes movements in us whose law he alone knows, and who thinks himself in the experience we have abandoned.
Hartmann’s general conclusion thus re-establishes a philosophy of intuition in Hegel, with its theological implications, and does so quite seductively. But we know that Hegel is poles apart from this kind of thinking, which he himself denounced in Jacobi. Moreover, Hartmann’s difficulties are significant: as he cannot blame the dialectic for what goes awry, he affirms that there are good and bad objects in Hegel’s analyses. Thus193 the descriptions of crime or servitude are good, that of becoming is bad. Hegel must be sifted, and Hartmann makes no attempt to hide the fact that a great deal more time will be required before everything is fully clarified. This reservation is surprising, whatever the degree of genius one attributes to Hegel, for we can at least follow his argument, after all, and judge his ‘analyses of essence’ along with him. Hartmann’s uneasiness masks another problem: the nature of these essences themselves. They are not sufficiently discrete not to depend upon one another, and the mind is not free to draw them out in any direction it chooses. They strain in one particular direction, tending towards an irreducible whole, with the result that the content of intuition is unstable: it is an entity in motion. Hartmann cannot satisfactorily resolve this ambiguity. For if he acknowledges that the movement is an [Ab]hängen and not an Aufbau [a building up], that it is teleological and not summative, he fails to extricate himself from this movement to think the fully realized totality. ‘Truth is the whole interpreted from this standpoint: consciousness is neither the beginning nor the end of the process, but the process itself.’194 The totality, he says, is present in the movement, but by proxy, since the movement realizes it without reaching it.
We can, then, see the problems the two extremes lead us toward. On his own express admission, Hegel’s dialectic is not a pure form, nor can it be the content grasped in the purity of an analysis of essence; for, advancing toward its goal, the real dialectic soon eludes intuition. How, then, are we to understand the Hegelian thesis that identifies the dialectic with the content? If the content is pure movement, then either it is governed by its law, and we fall back into formalism; or else its law is internal to it, but ‘behind its back’, so that, as Hartmann says, there is no for-itself of the dialectic. There is, indeed, no extricating ourselves from this contradiction, unless we assume that, for Hegel, the content has attained to Selfhood, i.e., that the movement has been accomplished and the totality realized – and if we forget that the problem of the dialectic can only be posed with reference to the absolute content. This is not taken into account by Hartmann, who identifies the totality with the process in its unfolding, because he wants to maintain both the intuitive character of dialectical experience and its teleological incompleteness – i.e., to posit the content as both total and non-total. His hesitations stem entirely from this omission. In Absolute Knowledge, where Hegel sits in state, it is correct to say that experience rules, in a purely Husserlian sense: in the form of a pure intuition of a content that is a law unto itself. At this point, it is possible to say that the dialectic is the ‘soul of the content’, or even to declare that there is no dialectic at all,195 inasmuch as this absolute inside has no outside. But we already know that the outside of this inside is its now-mastered depth, and that the for-itself of this content is not ‘behind its back’, but at its very centre; that intuition is the concept at last arrived in its kingdom; and that the totality contains its own history. Put differently, the dialectic is not blind; it apprehends and appropriates itself in the absolute concept even as it disentitles itself there in an intuition of the absolute content.
We have, here, the two aspects of the Hegelian totality before us. In the substance, the solid, homogeneous aspect of the content and the obscurity of its soul are paramount – and in this sense there is no dialectic. In the subject, in contrast, it is the soul which triumphs, in other words, the conscious process, though still in the form of externality – and in this sense there is a dialectic, though it is a formal one. The totality is constituted through the development, accomplishment, and mutual recognition of these two aspects: in the totality, intuition and concept, substance and subject, content and form, dialectic and non-dialectic profoundly coincide. At this stage, dialecticity is the depth of non-dialecticity, the ‘soul of the content’, i.e., its own concept. ‘The method has emerged as the self-knowing Notion that has itself … for its subject matter.’196 Moreover, we know that negativity is the soul of the concept. It can therefore be said that the Hegelian dialectic is the concept of negativity, that is, negativity’s own cognition of itself; accordingly, the dialectic attains to the for-itself only in the form of human negativity, once it has acquired self-consciousness – in Hegel, who was the first to apprehend ‘this self-determination and self-realizing movement’.197 The famous triplicity is merely the self-appropriation of negativity, i.e., the negation of the negation in the third term, which emancipates and completes the first. That is why the whole of the Hegelian dialectic is contained in Hegelian negativity – which attains to the for-itself only when it has negated itself, when, that is, the concept has succeeded in apprehending itself in the final totality. Thus Hartmann did well to say that the dialectic does not rise to the level of the for-itself, given that he refused to accept the idea that the Whole might be realized. But it has to be said as well that this concept of the concept is conditioned by the homogeneity of the concept and its element, in other words, that the dialectic apprehends itself as such (= negativity for itself), once it has realized the homogeneity of its self-consciousness and its being, once the subject has become substance.
This summit once attained, the omnipotence of the ‘method’ bursts into view. For the method was the obscure law of the substance, the blind movement which propelled it toward its goal. It did not know itself; ‘the blind soul of the content’, it backed toward the light. But the method was also the negativity of the for-itself in the process of creating a totality in its own image, a totality in which the for-itself would be able to grasp itself as an internal, not an external, negativity; it wanted to see light transformed into a world. Absolute method is this method encountering itself and recognizing in itself ‘the absolutely infinite force’198 that governs the world, which has reached the plane of absolute content. This method is thus nothing but negativity which has come to itself in the totality of absolute content.
B. The Sins of the Content
If Hegel’s conception of things cannot be attacked for its form, except on the basis of a misunderstanding, the only remaining alternative is to seek the source of our critical uneasiness in the content – to attempt to determine whether this content is in fact worthy of its form, and whether it attains, in Hegel himself, the concrete universality that is its goal. We have just seen that the formal mediations adduced were factitious; in reality, these mediations are part of the inner content. It follows that the only way to explain and justify one’s reservations is to attack the accomplished content. The preceding analyses should at least have established the validity of the formal aspect of Hegel’s system by showing that its form is in no wise alien to its content. Let us now try to see if the empirical existence of the totality is indeed the fully realized form, negativity in actu, real freedom, and if the concrete is genuinely universal: if, that is, the content conforms to its concept.
There is no better way of determining this than to examine the realm in which the Idea exists in its empirical reality, in which universality endows itself with a concrete body: namely, the state. Now it is the Hegelian conception of the state that has elicited the sharpest criticisms. The Prussian bureaucracy held up to the world of the Holy Alliance as the actualization of the divine Idea! Whatever the importance of this regime and the force of the fait accompli, no-one who approached matters honestly could approve Hegel’s benediction without feeling ill at ease. The very rigour of his thought made this brainchild of Hegel’s appear all the more ridiculous. The memorable phrases in this text [The Philosophy of Right], astonishingly profound when taken out of context, ring very hollow indeed when confronted with history: it is only possible to describe what exists, the philosopher is the child of his time and cannot leap over it, the old owl that, like wisdom, takes flight at dusk – these phrases barely conceal a forced resignation. To his credit, Marx clearly articulated this feeling of ill-ease; he arraigned the content, and, in the name of Hegel himself, went to the heart of Hegel’s contradictions. Let us see where this leads.
1. The Error
Marx’s critique is contained in a manuscript that dates from 1841–42. Only the preface was published during Marx’s lifetime. The critique takes the form of a running commentary on the Elements of the Philosophy of Right, which Hegel wrote to clarify the chapter of the Encyclopædia devoted to the state, and published in Berlin in 1821.199 We propose to assemble and review Marx’s arguments here.
It is worth recalling here that the state is, for Hegel, the apex and glorified body of history, whose appointed end is to realize freedom. The state (Hegel hails its beginnings in Napoleon’s unifying cavalcades) is the emancipation of the concrete and realization of the universal: in it, the antinomy of the universal and the particular and the contradiction between lordship and bondage are not only laid to rest, but dissolved in the profound peace of the harmonious polity. In the state, man is at last at home with himself; he is neither master nor slave, but citizen; he is no longer a ‘stranger in his own land’, but finds full satisfaction in universal recognition; his essential being finds its justification in human freedom, his true native country. The state at last actualizes the essence of Spirit: ‘ “I” that is “We” and “We” that is “I” ’.202 Thus the universality of the homogeneous state lies, not outside man, but in his empirical existence itself: the citizen is immediately universal, in that he no longer needs to beware of [se garder de] a master and no longer holds [garde] his powers in reserve inside himself. He is elevated to a new dignity, and his body, gestures, and talents belong, in the exercise, to all men. Yet his freedom does not circulate in the polity the way the blood circulates in the body or the wind through the trees: it is freedom for-itself, conscious of itself and rejoicing in the knowledge of its own silent movements, the ‘spiritual daylight of the present’.203 In the state, universality is not only concrete, it is also for-itself. What is more, this transparency explains why the state is truly universal, as Hegel anticipated it would be with the coming of a united Europe, i.e., why the state alone is the unique, ultimate totality. There is only one God, and the state is the divine Idea actualized.
Let us see what remains of this vision of the state in the Philosophy of Right, and whether the empirical reality of the Prussian state is consistent with the state’s rational essence. But it is all too obvious that in the state Hegel describes, the concrete is not universal, nor the universal concrete.
The very structure of that state betrays the fact that the concrete is not universal in it. Instead of offering us a circular totality, outside which there can be no freedom, whether nascent or accomplished,204 Hegel presents us with the Prussian pyramid. Instead of equality, he gives us the hierarchy of power and command; instead of the real circulation of the Idea, the barriers represented by corporations, offices, and police forces. This structure is disturbing in itself, since, in view of the rigidity of their established positions, the high and the low cannot pretend to meet, except by reflection: the high is not the low, but is high only because there is a low. We are now sufficiently familiar with the matter to detect in this reflexivity a harbinger of alienation and servitude. The details make it abundantly clear that this is indeed what is involved: this hierarchy is, to begin with, that of the spheres of the family, civil society, and the state, which exist in close proximity and literally regard one another as strangers. There would be nothing remarkable about these differences as such if their alienation were not precisely the raw material of their hierarchization, for we know that the absolute content ‘contains its own differences within itself’, and that the absolute state cannot be inert substance or Parmenides’ monolithic mass; however, the differences must, if they are to throw off their bonds, conquer their truth in their own freedom and be posited in the totality as immediately universal. Yet, though obvious, this is not what Hegel’s opening words show us: ‘From one point of view the state is contrasted with the spheres of family and civil society as an external necessity, an authority, relative to which the laws and interests of family and civil society are subordinate and dependent.’ This dependence did not escape Marx, who notes: This ‘necessity … relates by opposition to the inner being of the thing.’205
Here we encounter the ambiguity that commands all else. If the polity has a pyramidal structure, what we will find in it is, at best, that movement from one extreme to the other is also movement back in the other direction; yet the extremes will not meet, except perhaps figuratively, i.e., as the result of a disfiguration. In other words, the movement that begins at the top and reaches the bottom does not touch the top again as soon as it starts back out from the bottom, but rather reaches it only after once again passing through all that lies in between. In contrast, it is the essential nature of the circle to be free of external mediation: something that goes all the way around it reaches the beginning when it comes to the end. The circle remains in itself throughout its unfolding, for it is always all it should be: hence it is a worthy representation of immediately universal individuality, the only possible figure of Hegelian freedom. The whole paradox of the Berlin philosophy of the state is contained, then, in the following problem: how is one to transform a pyramid into a circle, bend the Prussian back-and-forth into the circularity of universality, or, in a word, invest a given content with a meaning it lacks? Hegel adopted the only possible solution, contraband; but he failed to reckon with the customs-officer Marx, who caught him in the act of smuggling in false contents.
The externality of the structure of the state is extremely concrete. If we leave aside the sphere of the family, which Marx deliberately ignores, the Prussian polity consists of two extremes, the state and civil society, along with their middle terms, the government, civil servants, and the Chamber of Peers and Chamber of Deputies. The state is for Hegel the body and soul of the universal, but this universal, in and for itself, is not the totality: it is merely one of its moments. Over against the state stand the world of the workers and that of money, organized in the corporations and associations [les communes] of civil society. ‘Particular interests which are common to everyone fall within civil society and lie outside the absolutely universal interest of the state proper. The administration of these is in the hands of corporations.’206 This sentence of Hegel’s, cited by Marx, unambiguously expresses the essential idea: civil society finds the universal outside itself. As to the reason for this alienation, we have to strain to make it out: it has to do, first of all, with the brute fact of the Prussian state; but it is not unrelated to the very nature of civil society, which Hegel describes as a System of Needs, the unleashing of egoistic instincts, and the constantly fluctuating system of economic atomism – the very opposite, that is, of organicism. Civil society is a living contradiction, because, in civil society, universality is not an Idea, but the sum total of a number of particular needs, and, again, because universality is not for itself there, since no-one in civil society pursues anything but the small change of egoistic goals. Hegel does not acknowledge this contradiction, as Marx was later to do; he does not identify it as the essence of the content and proceed to derive the truth of the content from it. The sole conclusion he draws is that civil society is a pseudo-content incapable of finding its truth in itself; he therefore approves its attempts to find this truth outside itself, in the universality of the state. Or, if one prefers, civil society is a content that does not succeed in reaching, in-and-for-itself, the universality of its truth; it finds this universality outside itself, in the institutions of government. ‘Hegel does not see,’ says Marx, ‘that with this third moment, the “absolute universality”, he obliterates the first two, or vice versa.’207 Either the truth does indeed lie outside civil society, which is, in that case, a pseudo-content, or else it is to be found in civil society, in which case the state is a pseudo-universality. ‘In a rational organism the head cannot be iron and the body flesh. In order to preserve themselves the members must be equally of one flesh and blood.’208 This profound remark takes up the very terms employed by Hegel, who intended Spirit to be consubstantial with everything, and wanted man to find in the body politic [organisme politique], as in the first woman, ‘flesh of his flesh and spirit of his spirit’.
The falsity of the civil sphere does, however, transpire in another of Hegel’s remarks, in which he affirms that the people is not capable of attaining to the for-itself of universality. One might think that ‘the many’ would be able, if not to actualize, then at least to imagine universality and commend it to the sovereign’s attention. But this is not at all the case. ‘To know what one wills,’ says Hegel, ‘and still more to know what the absolute will, Reason, wills, is the fruit of profound apprehension … and insight, precisely the things which are not popular.’209
This double alienation from the in-itself and for-itself of universality in the people spells the end of freedom for the individual members of civil society. The individual is, in fact, alienated in his direct economic activity. To be sure, the economic sphere is a product of human labour, but it is one that men have neither sought out nor appropriated for themselves. The concept is absent from civil society; or, rather, the circle of the concept is closed behind civil society’s back. The individual who works and sells what he makes is impelled to do so by hunger alone; he merely seeks to satisfy his desires and needs. He does not know that the ruse of reason erects these needs into a system, forming a circular world: the products made by one person match the needs of another, and, in this exchange, in which each sees only what he himself possesses, unconscious egoisms are brought into profound harmony. This system is thus a universal by its nature, but it lacks the for-itself and does not attain the truth. Taking up this idea, Marx was to work out the truth of this basic, mutually compensatory interaction characteristic of economic relations by showing that the concept, i.e., the appropriation of this relation, could only consist in the revolutionary transformation of the social order. As developed by Hegel, this universal not only lacks the for-itself; its in-itself too is annulled by the mere presence of the monarch and his government. The sphere of civil society is reduced to merely serving as material for a universality imposed upon it.
That demotion is the second alienation of the individual in the Prussian state. The first, we recall, affected the individual’s for-itself, above all. Here the demotion affects man’s very being, separating the citizen in a man from the member of civil society. The artisan was not conscious that he was already, by dint of the economic activity he performed in society, engendering the universal. Consciousness of universality came to him from the state, but it affected the individual in him without attaining the artisan. The citizen of the Prussian state is not the whole man, but man self-divided, the man who puts his concrete activity aside and is endowed with a hollow attribute. ‘Consequently the citizen of the state and the member of civil society are also separated … Thus, in order to behave as actual citizen of the state, to acquire political significance and efficacy, he must abandon his civil actuality, abstract from it.’210 Accordingly, if the individual manages to enter the sphere of political activity (but this is merely an activity of delegation), and to penetrate to the heart of this new order, in which, says Hegel, the self finds total satisfaction, he learns that he has paid for his truth with his very being. He sees himself cut in two, like an apple, and discovers that there are two beings inside him. Shoemaking and the concrete existence of the shoemaker have nothing to do with the citizen-shoemaker. The truth of the citizen is emptied of its reality. The individual finds, in the state [État], not fulfilment and emancipation, but official acknowledgement of his servitude and alienation. ‘In general, the significance of the estate [État, Stand] is that it makes for difference, separation, subsistence, things pertaining to the individual as such. His manner of life, activity, etc. is his privilege, and instead of making him a functional member of society, it makes him an exception from society.’211 But, if real men find their truth only outside themselves, this truth can only be unreal, that is, can only be alienation in actu. The reality of this truth must not be its own. That is precisely what we see at the other extreme.
Let us go further: if it is not the king’s human capacities that make him king, if his virtues come from wearing the crown, his crown comes from elsewhere. Hegel says: it is the king’s by birth. We have at last come to the point. The in-itself of the king is to be born a king. Amazing, says Marx; all of us are born. ‘Just as the horse is born a horse so the king is born a king.’212 This, then, is the last refuge of the immediacy of the universal: the irrationality of natural determination. One thinks bitterly of the Phenomenology, which shows that Spirit is not a bone. Here the highest expression of Spirit is the birth of a skull. This can only be a mistake – or else it is the crown that makes it possible to smuggle the skull in under it. The Monarch is contraband. As to universality, the man decked out in it has been chosen at random: universality’s content is not worthy of it. Or, to look at the matter from the opposite extreme, this content has to pretend to be what it is not, is a universal despite itself. Therein lies the profound reason for man’s self-division: at the top as well as at the bottom, the state forces him, against his nature, to play the role of a character who swallows him up. Or, rather, what swallows Hegel up is that which, at the top, he rejects in the bottom: because he does not maintain the almost animal nature of the system of needs, but sacrifices it for the sake of an empty universality, natural brutality once again takes possession of the king. ‘In its highest functions the state acquires an animal actuality. Nature takes revenge on Hegel for the disdain he showed it. If matter is supposed to constitute no longer anything for itself over against the human will, the human will no longer retains anything for itself except the matter.’213
We can see the ambiguity of this middle term, which is not a true mediation, because it merely reproduces the opposition it set out to overcome: the antagonism is posited as factitious in its very reality. ‘This is a society pugnacious at heart but too afraid of bruises to ever really fight.’219 This fight, which Hegel will have none of, is that of the truth which fails to appear in this imaginary mediation. The Hegelian third term, the concrete totality, is here a pitiful compromise between two hostile forces lacking the courage to fight; rather than serving as a vehicle for the extremes and bringing about their accomplishment, the third term interposes itself between them, and, as it only half succeeds, remains trapped there, stuck fast in the conclusion or, rather, the debate. Hegel’s entire effort consists in presenting this juxtaposition as if it were a circle, this fictitious mediation as if it were an authentic ideal mediation. Marx exposes the fraud, and, against Hegel himself, goes back to the true Hegelian conception of the third term: the true mediation is the totality, and if ‘the Estates are the … contradiction … at the same time they are the demand for the dissolution of this contradiction.’220 The solution can only emerge from the very essence of the contradiction; the totality can only be constituted at the level of mediation. This authentic third term is, for Marx, the constitutive and legislative body representing the people, the sovereign popular assembly, the circularity of power and the masses, concrete universality animating a body worthy of it – that is, genuine democracy. The Prussian form of mediation is, to borrow a phrase from the Phenomenology, no more than a bit of wood tied onto a leg with a string.
2. The Necessity of the Error
Marx’s critique thus lays bare an astonishingly perverse situation. For the Prussian state is described for us in all its empirical brutality, and it is quite obvious that this constitutional monarchy, with its hierarchical structure, is not the circular totality of the truth. The content is not the reality of its concept; the content is false. Yet this perversion is presented to us as if it were the truth. A derivative meaning is superimposed on the concrete reality of the content, which has failed to achieve harmony with itself. What is universal in Prussia is not a mediation internal to the content, but rather a concept which, from the outside, invests its institutions with a meaning other than themselves, one that transcends and legitimizes them. ‘Thus empirical actuality is admitted just as it is and is also said to be rational; but not rational because of its own reason, but because the empirical fact in its empirical existence has a significance which is other than it itself.’221
But there is more to Hegel’s Prussian state than a simple juxtaposition of meanings; it also shows us the meaning of this juxtaposition in the obscure necessity for juxtaposition. Monarch and people coexist in pseudo-indifference, and the connection Hegel seeks to establish between them is not so alien to them that they cannot each find it in their own essential natures. It is because the people does not contain its own truth that it contemplates it in the king; it is because the king is not a real human being that he seeks his raison d’être in the people. The ‘significance which is other than itself’ that Marx exposes in this hoax is, in contrast, painfully internal: it is this significance that haunts the actual, aspires to fulfilment in the actual, and, in its very failure, anticipates its actualization. Because the people has failed to liberate the universality that lies dormant within it, and has also failed to reappropriate, as something willed by itself, the economic sphere whose law it is subject to, it experiences this universal will as a lack and projects it onto the Monarch, venerating it in him unawares. Significance is a form of compensation; such is the profound bond of Prussian alienation, which is reminiscent of Hegel’s analyses of Kantian reflexivity. God dwells amongst his Prussian people as he dwelt among the Jews – but his people knows him not. This other significance, this Heaven, is the truth of the content, which, since it does not know it, renounces the thought of reappropriating it and making it over in its own image.
It nevertheless seems as if Hegel has repudiated the force of his thought, and that, far from working towards the people’s conversion to its truth, he tries to project another meaning onto the contradiction. For, once recognized for what it is, compensation becomes a subversive, revolutionary force. It is as if Hegel had become the accomplice of the night and were trying to hide the people’s own God from it, while justifying the fact that God is hidden. Thus he hides the content’s total significance from it by perverting its real significance. He says that the state is the truth of the people, but does not show that the truth dwells amongst a people ignorant of it; instead, he affirms that the people cannot know the truth. The reason he gives is not to be lightly dismissed: how can the truth come into being amidst the economic anarchy and intellectual poverty of the worlds of artisan and burgher – how can the truth be born in a manger? And if the truth is not in the people, is it any wonder that the people has too lowly a spirit to grasp it? Hegel accordingly declares that the truth has a completely different significance. Far from emerging out of the reality of the parts themselves, far from fulfilling their own truth by revealing it to them and enabling them to recognize it at a glance, as one recognizes a father or a brother, it abruptly transforms their reality into an alien truth – one they are most unlikely ever to recognize, for now it takes great philosophical patience to make out the truth, and long preparation and training to recognize one’s brother. One cannot even say that the people trails its truth behind it, as do phenomenological consciousness or Plato’s prisoner, so that it would only have to turn around – be converted body and soul – to find itself facing the sun and the truth. The king, minister, and civil servant are always standing in front of it; moreover, their being too is consumed by a meaning that exhausts them: the king’s blood is not the meaning of the king.e Thus it is that the significance of the Prussian state remains unaffected by the power of compensation, and that people and king are stripped of their concrete reflexive meaning and invested with the ‘crown and robes of the universal’.222 The reason for the state is simply la raison d’état, a reason derived from another world which conceals the unreason [déraison] of this one.
This other world is the Idea, which, paradoxically, becomes the truth of the content’s untruth. Thus we arrive at a conception of things in which depth emerges as an evasive dimension of the concept. The meaning of the Prussian state does not lie in its essential contradiction; this meaning is not at the same level, but rather stands above it. Hegel thus reverts to the verticality of truth despite his unrelenting efforts to make truth something immanent:
Hegel’s chief mistake consists in the fact that he conceives of the contradiction in appearance as being a unity in essence, i.e., in the Idea; whereas it certainly has something more profound in its essence, namely, an essential contradiction. For example here, the contradiction in the legislature itself is nothing other than the contradiction of the political state, and thus also the self-contradiction of civil society.223
Hence Hegel’s appeal to the Idea is inseparable from his rejection of reflexive compensation. Hegel does not develop the content of the people, because, to do so, he would need only the king, not the Idea, which, for him, provides the foundation for the twofold fait accompli of people and king:
True philosophical criticism of the present state constitution [says Marx] not only shows the contradictions as existing, but explains them, grasps their essence and necessity. It comprehends their own inherent significance. However, this comprehension does not, as Hegel thinks, consist in everywhere recognizing the determinations of the logical concept, but rather in grasping the particular logic of the particular object.224
The last criticism brings the difference between the two positions into clearer focus. Hegel inverts order and value; he can assign a given content a truth that is alien to it only if he invests this content with a meaning different from its own, by making the real over into a phenomenon of the Idea.
This inversion is not only apparent in the details of Hegel’s description of the state, which is where Marx finds it, although that spectacle is by itself highly instructive: it shows us real beings emptied of their being and dressed up in a ridiculous universality, false beings loaded down with a borrowed nature that crushes them under its weight. For the disguise becomes nature, and the enduring Prussian state is nothing but this perversion stabilized: in the end, the crown makes the king, the portfolio the minister, the ballot the citizen. Disguise, then, has an essence and a meaning that are not simply the properties of masks. We can understand the perversion in its entirety only if we consider its essence, which is, on Marx’s view, Hegelian logic.
Because Hegel refers to the logic throughout, he constantly rewrites real beings in terms of their ideal-logical significance and incarnates moments of the logical Idea in beings borrowed for the purpose. The reflexive toing and froing characteristic of the level of contradiction is here replaced by uninterrupted movement between the real and the Idea, by a permanent redemption and incarnation. For Marx, the essence of this imposture lies in Hegel’s conversion of subjects into predicates. The veritable subject is concrete; Hegel transposes it into a predicate, which is only ideal. Thus universality is not a predictate of the concrete individuals of this particular historical people, their basic element and daily bread; they themselves are, rather, mere instruments of an ideal necessity that dupes and crushes them. They are not real people who are really free, but rather vassals of the freedom of the Idea, whose ways are unfathomable. The state does not belong to them, is not a Tun aller und jeder; rather, it is they who belong to the state, and owe it service, taxes, and respect. More precisely, they belong to the Idea, of which constitutional monarchy is merely the visible body. For, if they really had to do with the concrete subject who dominates them, they might succeed in gaining satisfaction from him, in compelling him to restore not only their property, but also their dignity; they might succeed in deposing the Monarch and taking back their own predicates – power, universality, freedom. Here, however, Hegel clings so tightly to his aberration that it is impossible to destroy it with the weapons he himself provides. The Monarch is simply the body of an Idea one can neither kill nor overthrow; he is himself a subjected subject, a concrete individual like all the others, compelled by the Idea to pretend to exercise power, and, like them, in its hands. The subject constituting the concrete individual in the king receives his own nature as a manifestation of the Idea from the moment of his birth. Thus it is that a text by Hegel reinstates the dualism of truth and reality that he had taken it upon himself to eliminate; the beyond once again emerges as a signifying totality opposed to the real. To be sure, this beyond is within arm’s reach, since it is nothing other than the Idea which has yielded up its secrets in Hegel’s logic. In the Philosophy of the State, says Marx, ‘we have before us a chapter of the Logic’.225
Here Marx’s analysis reaches a critical point. One can take the view that, in the system of the state, Hegel contradicts himself: ‘Here, then,’ says Marx, ‘we find one of Hegel’s inconsistencies within his own way of viewing things; and such an inconsistency is an accommodation.’226 Such an attitude implies that Hegel’s error is tacitly corrected in the thought of his critic, who judges Hegel in the name of his own vision of things. But it is also possible to yield to the fascination of the error and affirm that the system, even if it has been demolished, is as necessary to the error as the error itself. Such is the power of the content in Hegel that a perverted content overflows its limits and seeks a perverted form. The content has the form it deserves. The Prussian state is the incarnation of a logical idea worthy of it; if we reverse the terms of the proposition, we find ourselves but a short step from another, to the effect that the logical Idea could give rise to nothing but this bastard state. The perversion of the content is not happenstance or inconsistency, but rather the most consistent of phenomena: the false content emerges, in that case, as the truth of a falsified Idea. Thus it would be possible to speak of the necessity of error in Hegel; one needs to work one’s way back to this necessity in order to understand how Hegel can, in the name of the highest reason, defend the basest of monarchies.
Marx dwells on this point with a kind of vindictive complacency; applying what he says of Hegel to Marx himself, we could even say that he takes ‘pleasure in having demonstrated the irrational to be absolutely rational’.227 In Marx’s eyes, this Hegelian falsification was no accident, but a necessity:
This is the root of Hegel’s false positivism … reason [in Hegel] is at home in unreason as such. Man, who has recognized that he leads an alienated life in law, politics, etc., leads his true human life in this alienated life as such. Self-affirmation, in contradiction with itself … is thus the true knowledge and life. There can no longer be any question about Hegel’s compromise with religion, the state, etc., for this falsehood is the falsehood of his whole argument.228
Let us, then, go to the heart of the matter; to the heart, that is, not only of the logic – for the logic is only one part of the system – but of the movement by which the logic itself is posed and justified: namely, the circularity of the concept. This should bring out not only the essence of the logic, but also the reason Marx identifies it as the essence of the empirical reality of the state. The concept is characterized by its triplicity, that is, the movement by which it goes forth from itself, posits its differences, recognizes them as its own, and takes them back into itself. The differences of the concept hold a strange place in this movement: they are simultaneously posited as real and annulled as unreal. Thus their raison d’être is not to be found in them, but rather in the concept that posits them so as to reappropriate them. Considered in isolation, they are either substantial [consistant] but meaningless, or else insubstantial but replete with meaning, with the result that if the concept is allowed to operate, it has a curious effect upon them: it must annul even while preserving them. Yet, in the event, it is quite as if the concept annulled the non-meaning in the meaningless substantiality and the insubstantiality in the meaningful insubstantiality, leaving us, in the totality, with a meaningful substantiality. The substantiality is not, however, of the same nature as the meaning, which is why this promotion hardly affects it: it is quite simply confirmed, in its externality, by the meaning that crowns it. The solution is absolution.229 The Prussian state can rest easy, if its conscience ever troubled it at all. ‘The annulment of alienation becomes a confirmation of alienation.’230
But what possible reason can there be for this paradoxical security, other than the omnipotence of the concept which has quite simply produced these very differences? When we consider the question from the opposite standpoint, we see the concept affecting to externalize itself and posit differences which are, apart from its act of positing them, nothing at all, and which are therefore not real, but accidental. That is the key to the matter: one can grant absolution without a second thought, for, in the real, one only absolves shadows. Nature is annulled before it comes into being;231 like the state, it has the substantiality of a phantom. At the level of the differences themselves, doubtless neither nature nor the state appear to be painted shadows. In order to grasp the insubstantiality of their substantiality, we need to look at things through the eyes of God, who sees the differences men seek desperately to experience disappear even before they have come about. To discover this reassuring perspective, we have to take up a position at the origin of the concept, with the help of our philosophy: ‘Consequently, my true religious existence is my existence in the philosophy of religion … my true natural existence is my existence in the philosophy of nature, my true artistic existence is my existence in the philosophy of art.’232
But what do we find at the origin of the concept? ‘The pure act of positing’, which the Phenomenology of Spirit describes in abstract terms in connection with self-consciousness. ‘ “Thinghood”,’ says Marx, ‘is totally lacking in independence, in being, vis-à-vis self-consciousness; it is a mere construct posited by self-consciousness. And what is posited is not self-confirming; it is the confirmation of the act of positing.’233 This act is divine power in the true sense, which is why Marx brands Hegel’s philosophy mystical, magical, creationist. Employing a new vocabulary, and proceeding with logical rigour, Hegel merely reprised the old theological myths of emanation, in which causality concentrated in the divine being radiates outwards in concrete attributes: the concept is causa sui, like God, and the world derives from it as the modes of substance do. Hegel’s merit is to have thought the content of this mystification; his error is simply to have believed in it, without seeking to uncover its meaning.
Marx provides us with this meaning. ‘The act of positing’ is merely the abstract form, produced in thought, of a ‘real living act’,234 human labour. In the concept (or the idea of divine creation), men project the essential outlines of their substantial activity. In labour, they externalize themselves, thereby positing real, abiding differences. This externality is substantial (the mason bumps up against his wall); but the fact that it owes its existence to something else (the wall existed in the mason’s mind – as something insubstantial – before he bumped up against it) means that it is potentially reappropriated as soon as it is posited, before revolutionary appropriation actually restores the product to its producer. Such is the concrete origin of the concept, which merely thinks and apotheosizes labour. From this we can see why God is an architect, watchmaker, and gardener, and why he made the world in seven days. We can see as well why Hegel, if he correctly conceived the essence of man in labour, nevertheless conceived this essence as an act which is its own origin, whereas the labourer is a concrete being in a world that precedes and goes beyond him. Hence ‘labour as Hegel understands and recognizes it is abstract mental labour’,235 that is, labour in the element of thought. It is a form of creativity severed from its origins, emancipated from the real by virtue of its abstraction and purity; it conflates this emancipation with freedom, ascribing to itself the independence it owes to the world which made that independence possible. This liberty of thought is merely a relationship that has gone unperceived. That is why Hegel, like all philosophers, thinks in alienation: he fails to think the reality of his own liberty of thought. That is why he is literally penned up in the limitless universe he circulates in: abstraction is indeed without limit. Yet Hegel has a merit Marx does not deny: he travelled the length and breadth of the kingdom of thought, catalogued its forms, established its circularity, and distilled its essence. Rather than proffering us the classical propositions of metaphysics without any explanation of their origins, ‘Hegel substitutes the act of abstraction revolving within itself for these fixed abstractions.’236 As we know, that act is the birth of the concept.
What has just been said enables us, in turn, to understand the perversity of the Hegelian necessity that operates top-down. When the philosopher wishes to quit the realm of the Idea and regain reality, to pass, that is, ‘from abstracting to intuiting’,237 he tries to imitate, in reverse, the process that permitted him to take up a position in the abstract. He therefore leaves the realm of abstraction, yet, keeping up appearances, does not abandon his stake in it, as if an excess of liberty had induced him to consent to being. Thus the Idea ‘deploys itself freely’ in Nature; its fall is a graceful one, like that of a king voluntarily relinquishing the throne. But the philosopher only rewrites his own alienation in terms of being: because he is alienated from himself in his thought, his thought is the essence of alienation, and invests every being it lingers over with the inevitability of alienation. This explains why Marx exposes the necessity of Hegel’s error and discovers the perversion of the Idea in the content as well: in Hegel, the Idea has the content it deserves. Thus Hegel’s analysis of the state acquires, for us, a meaning that is both ridiculous and dramatic: Hegel needed Prussia so that he could seek and find his own image in it.
This brings us to a final point. The false content in Hegel points to a theoretical necessity: abstraction. But abstraction is merely the place where Hegelian alienation occurs. The various pseudo-contents sustain one another. The reason for Hegel’s aberration is that Hegel was alienated in the abstraction of his thought. The philosopher thought, but did not think the fact that he thought; he did not reappropriate, in reality, the distance he took from the world, but rather withdrew into a feigned maturity without reclaiming his origins. His childhood regained was mere childishness. If he exalted truth, he did so the way a prisoner sang in the camps: in a condition of servitude that was not himself. And when he thought and described this condition, he depicted his own countenance. We are caught, here, in the toils of a pitiless system.
3. Necessity’s Revenge
Closer examination reveals, however, that we are already familiar with this system. Before Marx, Hegel had already defined the philosopher as an alienated being, a man who thought the alienation of his own situation by way of the totality – and who therefore thought, in the form of the Idea, the alienation of the world that sustained him. This is why the content of all philosophies is the contradiction of thought, which only belatedly attains self-consciousness in the thinking of contradiction. As a result, says Hegel, philosophy, which is the self-consciousness of Spirit in the various moments of its development, and thus in its alienation, is simply the reality of the world’s contradictions translated into thought.
Accordingly, the necessity of philosophical alienation is as heavily stressed in the Phenomenology as in Marx: the contradiction of thought, which is the essence of each and every philosophy, points back to the fundamental contradiction between the philosopher and the historical world from which he abstracts himself in thinking it. This contradiction is ultimately nothing other than the self-contradiction of the world, which has not yet succeeded in overcoming its alienation; and the alienation of philosophical thinking is merely the alienated consciousness of this alienation. In the chapter entitled ‘The Certainty and Truth of Reason’, Hegel shows that, in idealism, we have the genesis of the alienation of the thinker, who withdraws from the world without saying so, and thinks it as if it were coming into being in his thought. The thinker neglects to think the path that leads up to his thought. But ‘it is along that forgotten path that this immediately expressed assertion is comprehended.’238 The defining feature of idealism is this refusal to think the genesis of the philosopher – therein resides the alienation of the thinker qua thinker. But this refusal is not without its reasons; it is simply a man’s way of defending himself against his times. By refusing to acknowledge his concrete origins, the philosopher refuses to recognize the reality of the world that gave him birth. There is a necessity to this unconscious ill humour: the philosopher rejects the world as a place in which he cannot be in harmony with himself, and thereby reveals its alienation. It is because he is not at home in the alienated world that the philosopher takes refuge in the alienation of thought, where he attempts to fashion a friendly world. It is because the thinking slave had to bear the burden of the Roman world, in which only the emperor was, in a paradoxical sense, free (in truth, chained to his own role and the Empire), that he became a Stoic, seeking, in thought, the freedom the world denied him. It is because the individual in the medieval city did not know the profound peace of the universal reconciled with the particular, that he was a Christian, producing, in theology, a harmonious image of a strifetorn world. It is because the men of the eighteenth century did not feel at home in the decadent monarchy that they retreated into the Enlightenment, in which they reclaimed, with their encyclopædic knowledge, a world they could not master. Thus we have come back round to Marx: the philosopher’s alienation is merely the spectacle of an alienated world. Or, as Hegel puts it, in the philosophies and religions, Spirit (i.e., history) thinks its own alienation.
Yet Hegel clearly saw another point as well, one Marx neglects. How is one to think the essence of philosophy, that is, the alienation of thought, without becoming the prisoner of the essence of one’s own thinking? Here the judge is judged by his own judgement; we are on a spinning wheel, caught in an infinite regress. This has been the fate of all thinkers who have tried to think their own place in their thought, as can be seen with Plato or Kant: they catch up with themselves only in God, the terminus of a race without end. Thinking alienation in the thinker can only lead to failure; the opposite would imply the negation of the essence of philosophy and the realization of the philosopher’s secret desire. If thought could really reappropriate the alienation that spawned it, and repossess in reality what it endeavours to apprehend in a figure, it would abolish the real alienation of the world and reconcile the world with itself through the power of its discourse. This childish aspiration lies at the heart of every philosophy; Marx denounced it as a kind of magic. Hegel’s grandeur lies in the fact that he consciously renounced this aspiration (at least in the Phenomenology), and demonstrated the necessity of that renunciation; he showed, in other words, that alienation can neither be eliminated in a figure, nor even simply thought as the essence of thought, before being concretely overcome in history. It is because the time is ripe, because history has been accomplished and Spirit has finally emerged as a homogeneous totality, that the thought of eliminating alienation is the elimination of alienation, that thinking about alienation is no longer alienated thinking. Hegel, says Marx, lived in an alienated world, which is why he was unable to ‘leap over his own time’; his thought is simply the alienation, translated into thought, of his alienated existence in the world. But Hegel did not claim to be exempt from the law he discovered. He merely affirmed that, in the accomplished totality, the revolutionary world had won back its alienated being, and that this advent of the Truth marked the end of philosophy, i.e., of alienated thought. Thus Hegel does not lay claim to the title of philosopher in the Phenomenology: the philosopher cannot survive the reappropriation of his alienation. The death of the philosopher is the birth of the Sage, who is the concrete figure of Absolute Knowledge. Knowledge of this sort is no longer on the spinning wheel; it not only knows its own essence, but also the essence of the truth which perishes in it, i.e., alienation – without, for all that, being caught in an infinite regress. For (as Descartes had suspected) what is imperfect cannot truly apprehend either itself or perfection; only that which is perfect knows the imperfect, because it knows itself.239
Thus Hegel not only thought the essence of the philosopher in alienation; he also posed, concretely, the condition for the non-alienation of this thought, that is, the way out that would truly enable thought to reach the firm ground on which it could be both thought and also the thought of truth in the element of truth. Finally, he did not conceive this condition as a thought – i.e., an idea to be realized, and hence something unreal; he broke out of the circle of alienation for good and all by describing the present reality of this condition. These are strong positions, and Marx, far from overrunning them, clearly seems to be captured in his turn. For if he is in agreement with Hegel, he does not seem, at least not explicitly, to have accorded the conditions of thought with thought in a concrete sense. Quite the contrary: having denounced the alienation of the bourgeois world he lived in, and having merely predicted the end of alienation in the coming revolution, he was no more able than Hegel to leap over his time, and his own truths were recaptured by what they denounced. As philosopher, Marx was thus a prisoner of his times and hence of Hegel, who had foreseen this captivity. In a sense, Marx succumbed to the necessity of the error he wished to retrace in Hegel, in that Hegel had exposed this necessity in the philosopher, while overcoming it in himself so as to engender the Sage. Marx’s error lay in not being a sage.
Or, rather, it lay in being one without saying so. It is here that Hegel takes his most spectacular revenge, by silently reconquering Marx from within. Not only does Hegel take back what is his by way of Marx’s definition of him; Hegel is the one who inspires it, and who thus inspires Marx’s truth. If Marx brings the necessity of error to light in Hegel, it is only by virtue of the presence of Hegel himself, who has become, in Marx, the necessity of the truth. Hegel is Marx’s silent rigour, the living truth of a body of thought which is too pressed by circumstances to apprehend itself in self-consciousness, but which betrays itself in the least of its movements. What Hartmann said about the Hegelian dialectic actually applies to Marx: Marxist thought lacks a for-itself. That is perhaps what Engels meant when he declared that what he had retained of Hegel was his dialectic, which is, in Hegel, merely negativity that has succeeded in reappropriating itself. He thus expressed, rather confusedly, an obscure sort of recognition: Hegel is Marx’s conscience/consciousness [conscience], and in him Marx reappropriated himself as if Hegel’s self were his own.
There can, indeed, be no mistake: as soon as we attempt to disengage the for-itself of Marxist arguments, we find Hegelian necessity again, in its most rigorous form – that of the concept.
Let us look, for example, at the content of history as Marx presents it. He begins by insisting on the given, in a way that would seem to be in contradiction with Hegel’s method: ‘the premises from which we begin are … real premises … They are the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions under which they live, both those which they find already existing and those produced by their activity. These premises can thus be verified in a purely empirical way.’240 Thus Marx makes, at the level of his own time, a phenomenological cut, and literally carries out an analysis of essence in which the content yields up its structure. In so doing, he by no means imposes a form on a content, but rather thinks out ‘the particular logic of the particular object’.241 The essence he describes, i.e., the socio-economic structure of the capitalist world of the nineteenth century, is a contradictory reality. It is given, but is not a being through-itself; rather, it is a result, which thus points to its development as its origin. Hence the given is literally externalized, and seeks its raison d’être outside itself, in the historical process. What is most remarkable here is the fact that this outside-itself is not an alien entity that miraculously confers a meaning on the content, a generous Providence that, in a sudden burst of illumination, reveals its origins. Rather, this outside-itself lies within it; the externality of the process is the inside of the content. The present displays the internalized memory of the past within itself, showing that the process has been internalized and is, therefore, the outside become the inside; the present inverts the relationship between wrapper and wrapped. Thanks to memory, the process is in the content; but, on the plane of meaning, the content is in the process. The wrapper is thus wrapped up in what it wraps up; the inside is the outside of the inside. Here Marx transforms the subject into the predicate, effecting what is properly speaking an inversion of the kind he criticizes in Hegel. The present-subject becomes the predicate of its own past-predicate; what is internal to the content is thus posited as its origin. History, qua real idea, thus reappropriates its own presuppositions; history is the true subject which endows each of its moments with meaning, impelling them to accomplish their truth, which is its truth. Thus men living in a concrete moment of history, like Marx himself in 1844, acquire knowledge of their truth only from history, that is, from the total process enveloping them, which contains both their servitude and their freedom.
Let us go further: in this form, history can be nothing more than an abstract Hegelian concept. But, for Marx, the concept of history implies a reference to the concept of labour: ‘For socialist man, the whole of what is called world history is nothing but the creation of man by human labour.’242 This is quite remarkable. We of course take it for granted that the subject/predicate inversion has been carried out, and accordingly find ourselves in the presence of labour, which is initially posited as the unity of the worker and his product (first moment); this unity is, however, still enveloped and, as it were, abstract. It is something implicit that needs to become explicit, an in-itself that must attain its for-itself, a concept that has to posit its differences outside itself and then reappropriate them. Doubtless this necessity is partially retrospective, but Marx posits it as a necessity which goes beyond the present content, anticipates its own future, and discovers its anticipatory character in, precisely, the future that it commands even before that future appears. Thus one is entitled to concentrate in the origin all the necessity that unfolds in history, and to speak, with Marx, of ‘the necessary development of labour’.243
But the original unity of labour, that is, the original unity of man and his product, develops within division or alienation (second moment). The origin of this split is the division of labour. In the original unity, the product is not separated from its producer, who consumes what he produces and produces what he consumes (this is the stage of the domestic economy without exchange). With the emergence of the division of labour, the labourer, now specialized, no longer consumes everything he produces, and, a fortiori, no longer produces everything he consumes: he buys some of the things he consumes and sells some of those he produces (the stage of the industrial and commercial economy). Thus the product is separated from the labourer; the for-itself (product) escapes from the in-itself (producer) and stands over against it in alienation.
No longer under the labourer’s control, the product acquires freedom through exchange, and the limits on this freedom are gradually pushed back until they take in the whole world: the product tends to constitute itself as a universal whose limit is the world market. It becomes an abstract totality whose essential being no longer consists in the material body of the product, but in the reflexive meaning or value condensed in money; the internal circulation of this abstract totality is free trade. This end-point is reached only after a long period of historical development. Only under liberal capitalism does the product, separated from the labourer, finally attain the extreme form of separation in the abstract universality that is money. Marx insists on the necessity of this development. Speaking of capital, he writes, ‘in the course of its formation [on a world scale] it must achieve its abstract, i.e. pure expression’.244
At the other pole, the labourer undergoes a similar adventure, which induces his further development. In the product that escapes his control, he loses his personality and possessions; even his bodily integrity is threatened. Little by little, he acquires the status of the proletarian, i.e., of the pure labourer who does not, as a rule, consume any part of what he produces, and who receives, in the form of his wages, nothing but the recognition of the necessity of his physical survival. In proportion as the for-itself of the product tends towards universality, the in-itself of the labourer tends toward the particular: vis-à-vis the law of money, the labourer is nothing but an anonymous body lost in an indifferent crowd. In the literal sense, he has nothing left but his body, that is, a purely natural determination of his particularity.
This moment is alienation, in the strictest sense. The in-itself and for-itself confront one another as strangers. The labourer’s own force has become the brutal domination of money, that is, the power of a universal master who has him at his mercy and condemns him to hard labour. The human reality of the labourer has become a worn-out body struggling against death. ‘[In their case]’, says Marx, ‘labour has lost all semblance of self-activity and only sustains their life by stunting it.’245 Yet it is not only the product of his labour which escapes the labourer’s control; the reason for his degradation also escapes him. This is the height of alienation: the for-itself of necessity is absent from it, and men cannot think their own history without invoking fatality. They submit to the domination of economic laws and their own decline as if bowing to a blind and capricious destiny. The simple clarity of labour, in which the labourer sees an obedient product coming into existence in his hands, has become the dark night of unfathomable servitude and poverty. This result of history is an immediate reality for the worker, who daily performs, in an incomprehensible, inhuman world, the simple miracle of labour, and does not understand the monstrous perversion of his gestures.
Nonetheless, if we consider these two extremes in their totality, we can see that they are already straining to meet: the universality of the economic sphere is abstract, and its abstraction marks it out for death. It is not in possession of its own law, which is only a system of chance: the force driving it toward domination is merely the provisional necessity of a happy anarchy that does not outlive its order. (This universality is merely the abstract form of economic individualism.) At the other extreme, the division of labour has created the mass of proletarians, reduced to their bodies and stripped of their souls. But it has also bound these bodies together in close dependence on the assembly line, all in the same wretched situation: particularism is transformed into its opposite in the proletariat, which is already, de facto, the real body of a soulless universality. These opposing extremes are merely the developed forms of the labour process, which creates, in contradiction, the element of the unified totality.
This is the third moment of the concept: after the original unity and ensuing division, what emerges is unity reconquered, the in-and-for-itself, the concrete universal, the identity of subject and predicate, the free, human world. The process that culminates in this result is well known. It is precipitated when the contradiction becomes acute, amidst the crisis of capitalism and the coming to consciousness of the proletariat. The proletariat grasps the significance of its alienation, which it had earlier submitted to as if to its fate, reappropriates its own nature through revolutionary action, and abolishes ‘the alien relation between men and what they themselves produce’.246 As to the power of economic forces, it is now tamed: ‘All-round dependence, this natural form of the world-historical co-operation of individuals, will be transformed by this communist revolution into the control and conscious mastery of these powers.’247 In short, the final historical totality, which marks the end of alienation, is nothing but the reconquered unity of the labourer and his product. This end is simply the restoration of the origin, the reconquest of the original harmony after a tragic adventure. The pre-eminence of the in-itself is thus restored.
Yet it is only in a formal sense that the final unity is the restoration of the original unity. The worker who reappropriates what he himself produces is no longer the primitive worker, and the product he reappropriates is no longer the primitive product. Men do not return to the solitude of the domestic economy, and what they produce does not revert to being what it once was, the simple object of their needs. This natural unity is destroyed; the unity that replaces it is human. Socialist man does not raze the factories, scrap technology, or renounce civilization and physical mastery of the world, a mastery that would be unthinkable without the division of labour: he maintains, in the form of technology and industrial concentration, the de facto universality his products had realized against man under capitalism. But he transforms it in reappropriating it, converting an inhuman universality, whose law is impersonal anarchy, into a human universality subordinated to men’s designs. As to the worker, he is no longer the worker of primitive times, and does not go back to ‘cultivating his garden’. As a rule, he continues to work in his area of specialization, but the meaning of his existence has changed: he is no longer the lone individual of the domestic economy, or the slave of an irresponsible system, but has rather, from the depths of his poverty, conquered his true nature, which is to be a human being and not mere nature. In the implicit or developed proletariat, he fully realizes his essential being, which is human brotherhood: henceforth the human race is, for him, the concrete universal which gives his life and work their meaning. And this universality is neither fate nor an imaginary beyond: man is the end of man. Marx saw the emergence of this moving truth in the fraternity of the French socialists: ‘For them, the brotherhood of man is no empty phrase but a reality, and the nobility of man shines forth upon us from their toil-worn bodies.’248
This transformation of natural into human unity is crucial, for it allows us a better understanding of the necessity of the concept. Necessity first manifests itself in details – for example, the necessity that generates a socialist humanity amidst the contradictions of capitalism: ‘Communism,’ says Marx, ‘is for us not … an ideal to which society [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.’249 But this necessity is merely a consequence we can deduce from a given situation – without establishing the necessity of that situation itself. This is the deterministic side of Marxism, and the reason that Marx so often comes in for the kinds of reproach directed at every system of natural determinism. Yet Marxian determinism has nothing to do with natural determinism in an unqualified sense. For Marxism, necessity is something more profound. The nature of the reconstituted unity reveals the significance of this Marxian necessity. Necessity in alienation is effectively enveloped by the necessity of alienation as such. For Marx, there is a positive side to capitalism; this is not a paradox, but rather rigorous thinking. Without capitalism – without, that is, alienation in its extreme form – man would have succeeded neither in transforming his material powers into something universal, nor, above all, in reappropriating, through the brotherhood of man, the universality of his essential being. Without capitalism, man would not have known that he was man, and, most importantly, would not have become man: capitalist alienation is the birth of humanity.250 We need not force the terms unduly in order to identify the fecundity of this division with the Passion of Hegelian Spirit, which does not go forth from itself by chance, but in order to appropriate its true nature, and which, in this fall, attains the revelation of a depth realized by the totality. The proletarian discovers the truth of humanity in the depths of human misery.
We may add something that follows directly from the preceding. The internal determinism or law of development of the present world is, for Marx, conditioned by another profound necessity, which teaches the present not only about its future, but also about what made it the present. Whence the ambiguity of the economic determinism in Marxism. On the one hand, it is natural, and thus brooks no appeal; one needs to know its law. At this level, [freedom] for Marx is exactly what it is for Spinoza: ‘consciousness of necessity’.251 On the other hand, this determinism is human. In other words, it is enveloped by the necessity that founds it, and has neither meaning nor existence apart from this necessity – the realization of human freedom. We cannot grasp this point, according to which natural necessity is once again assimilated by human necessity, unless we understand that this natural necessity is itself human, and that it appears to men as natural necessity because it is an alienated human necessity.
This metamorphosis occurs within labour itself. For Marx, nature is a fall: the product that falls from men’s hands and escapes their control literally becomes nature from the instant it is separated from the producer.252 At every moment, the worker accomplishes the miracle of the Hegelian Idea. The profound unity of the producer and his product gives way to division; this alienation gives birth to nature. In the alienated product, man externalizes himself, is transformed into a natural body, and, to the extent that he is unaware that the body of the product is nothing but his own body, treats what he himself has produced as if it were nature, that is, a substance that is simply given, matter in its own right, governed by natural laws and natural necessity. It is these objective laws which the theorists of the liberal economy have worked out. In the economic order, they have seen only the fatality of an inexorable determinism, one that is natural in the true sense of the word, and that reabsorbs its crises the way nature reabsorbs natural disease and deformity.
But there is a good deal more to be said here: since man endures the domination of what he himself produces, the initial relationship is inverted; man is subject to the power of natural law, which produces and dominates him. Thus the proletarian is the product of capital, which engenders him by the same natural necessity that engenders crises and then resolves them. This necessity establishes his standard of living and customs, furnishes him with his bread and his thoughts: it penetrates to his very heart, defining his essential nature in terms of his needs, and his moral code in terms of a calculus of pleasures. Ultimately, it even brings about his emancipation, since the capitalist order destroys itself and is transformed into a socialist economy by an inexorable necessity. Here alienation is carried to an extreme: the movement by which man at last attains human dignity is conceived as a purely natural necessity.
In Marx too, nature is, in truth, a ruse. Man is subjugated by what he himself produces; that is, he is governed by human forces whose ruse consists in appearing inhuman, material (in the mechanistic sense), and natural. In this sense, what Marx reveals is that the natural or purely material does not exist: nature is man in disguise, or, as Marx says, Marxian naturalism is a humanism. That is why this materialization of man has to be unmasked, why it is necessary to emancipate man, not by forcibly wresting him from the grip of natural necessity, but by inviting him to reappropriate, in nature, the obscure human freedom that has become nature.
Capitalism is man become nature: capitalism is a hidden humanity (Spirit) that must reappropriate itself. Just as Hegel’s Nature naturally produces within itself, in the form of man, the natural being who has to reappropriate it; and just as Spirit, although it is the end of Nature, is nevertheless born of Nature and in it; so capitalism naturally produces within itself, in the proletariat, the natural being who has to reappropriate it, while the proletariat, although it is the end of capitalism, is nevertheless born of capitalism and in it. That is why human freedom seems to emerge from economic-natural determinism as Spirit emerges from Nature. That is why there is something like a necessity of freedom in Marx. Indeed, this freedom born of necessity would be inconceivable if freedom were not already the truth of necessity, and if freedom did not itself reappropriate itself in the alienated form of natural necessity. If, in Hegel, Nature were not already Spirit in alienated form, Spirit would not be able to come forth from it to establish its Reign.
We could pursue these reflections. But the essential result would simply be to confirm that Marx is thoroughly informed by Hegelian truth. Moreover, Hegel is thereby illuminated from within in ways that are often unexpected, but that do him no disservice. Here is decisive proof: to return to the beginning of this debate, we have just seen that Hegelian necessity is so marked as a presence at the heart of Marxist thought that Marx could not simply combat Hegel by occasionally turning his own weapons against him: he could not, in his critique of the Philosophy of Right, establish the inevitability of Hegelian error without finding himself the prisoner of Hegelian truth. This capture was not an unfortunate and, as it were, chance occurrence – it was substantial and profound. And Marx could not have consented to it as profoundly as he did if he had not taken this seizure for the truth.
We must, however, add the following: in proportion as Marx and Engels felt, cognized, and recognized the positive role of Hegel in their own thought, they accentuated the contradiction that runs through the Philosophy of Right. Of the dialectic, triplicity, alienation, or negativity, they claimed to have retained only the form of Hegelian truth. Its specific content (Philosophy of Nature, Philosophy of Law, Philosophy of Religion) they rejected. Engels’ distinction between the good dialectic and the bad system affirmed nothing other than this contradiction between form and content. The distinction was not purely verbal, since the Prussia Hegel endorsed became the target of Marx’s fiercest attacks, conducted with Hegel’s own weapons. It is thus not the least of the paradoxes of Marxism, which has time and again accused Hegel of formalism, that it retains Hegelian form as valid, while condemning the perversion of the content.
Thus the criticism of the bad content once again directs our attention to the good form; but it is a solitary form, whose quality alienates it from the content imposed upon it. The only way to salvage this form is to abandon its carcass. Thus we find ourselves confronting Hegel’s Prussia with increased embarrassment. What is the significance of this foreign body in Hegel? If we cannot admit the necessity of this error, might there be an error of necessity in Hegel, and something like a degeneration of the Truth?
C. Countenancing the Contentf
It would seem that we have worked our way to the end of the critical undertaking by which the post-Hegelian mind attempted to dispel the vague malaise that Hegel’s all-embracing enterprise inspired in it. To Hegel’s claim to have revealed the absolute content of the accomplished totality, we opposed, to begin with, the arguments purporting to point up the defects of the form (A); proceeding point by point, we saw that Hegel’s supposedly questionable mediations, those of the Logos and the dialectic, had been intended by Hegel himself as internal mediations, that they did not exist outside the totality, and, as a result, that they ultimately found their way back into the absolute content. This return led us to a consideration of one of the most contestable aspects of the content, which we conceived as defective (B). Marx’s critique helped us grasp the perversity of the Hegelian state, but we saw that, far from succeeding in its attempt to extend the perversion of the content to the form, this critique was itself, down to its deepest levels, drawn back into the embrace of Hegelian necessity. Nevertheless, there was here no return analogous to that observed in connection with the first point: whereas the defective form made its way back into the content (A), the defective content failed to make its way back into the good form (B). Our analysis has thus enabled us to single out an apparently irreducible entity, which will henceforth present itself to us as a residual content. Here, then, is the point we need to focus on in order to cull the reasons for this malaise from Hegel himself, and finally dispel it.
Our analysis of the content (ch. II) was deliberately restricted to the level of the Phenomenology of Spirit, which presents us with a remarkably coherent body of thought: Hegel’s thinking as it stood around 1806. The Elements of the Philosophy of Right, from which we have drawn Hegel’s conception of the state, dates, in contrast, from 1821. The Hegelian perversion is difficult to understand if these dates are not taken into account. 1806 was the year of the Battle of Jena and the triumphant procession of Napoleon’s armies across Europe. All enlightened minds saw the French victories as proof that the Revolution was sweeping the whole world before it. By contrast, 1821 was meditation over an illusion, or, rather, the day after the meditation. Europe had rid itself not only of the Emperor, but of the French and the Revolution as well. The rebellion of 1813 had unleashed nationalist forces which the traditional hierarchies had swiftly moved to bring under control, and which they then subjected to the reactionary order of the Holy Alliance. Just as, in 1806, the Revolution had captivated people’s attention with its unforeseen grandeur and triumphant promises, so, in 1821, the disappointment felt by the best minds merely offered further proof that the Revolution had been crushed.
The civil servant Hegel probably had no shortage of reasons to teach the thinker Hegel the force of the fait accompli. The freedom of the professor in Jena was undoubtedly the youth of his thought, but it was also Napoleon just under his windows. The Berlin professor of 1821, in contrast, fed his freedom on memories alone, under the watchful eye of a well-informed police force and a well-entrenched sovereign whose rule he legitimized.254 We would be ill-advised to interpret the power the present had over Hegel as primarily due to a lack of courage. It is better regarded as Hegel’s acceptance of his concrete vocation, in the most rigorous sense: he would not have been faithful to himself if he had not thought the real present of history. Not being able to leap over one’s own time is not, for the philosopher, a restrictive limitation: it is not only the condition of his existence, but also accords with his will, since philosophy ‘is the thought of the real’. It is, furthermore, the site of his concrete freedom, given that the freedom which is not the freedom of the present content is merely flight to an imaginary beyond, or retreat into the void of subjectivity. Hence it is illegitimate to pit the philosopher of the Phenomenology of Spirit against the philosopher of the Philosophy of Right on this point, and to reproach the latter for the intention one endorses in the former. One cannot honestly say that the truth is deferred in the Phenomenology and comes due in the Philosophy of Right. This obvious fact, which becomes obvious in historical perspective, i.e., with the benefit of hindsight, is valid only for us. Yet such is Lukács’s interpretation of this point. On his view, the Phenomenology is revolutionary by virtue of its very incompleteness: this explains why we can derive a philosophy of action from it. In 1806, everything was in motion, and the outcome unknown. By 1821, it was known how things had ended up; everything was over. Our works and days are ended when the owl takes flight. Truth is a lifeless totality, and wisdom, as Nietzsche would later say, is nothing more than ‘crows on a corpse’. Thus there was no longer any question of hope or action; Hegel’s thinking, revolutionary in 1806, had turned conservative by 1821. This due date brought only decline [cette échéance est une déchéance].
A retrospective reading of this sort presupposes that Hegel presented his thought of 1806 as anticipation, that its truth was still to come. Doubtless certain texts are ambiguous when taken in isolation from all the others; thus the new age, which constitutes the fulfilment of Spirit, is at first only a dawn and a presentiment of the sun. Yet this early morning is more than a promise, since the sun comes up all at once over a new world.255 This glorious day is the Absolute Knowledge that closes the Phenomenology, together with its Absolute Content. Truth is in Hegel a sun that never sets – it is night abolished and the reign of light, or, better still, night become light.256 Thus if Spirit in the Phenomenology resembles a dawn, this has strictly to do with the light’s recovery of itself. The movement of things here, in the accomplished totality, is simply the content taking possession of its absolute element: ‘But the actuality of this simple whole consists in those various shapes and forms which have become its moments, and which will now develop and take shape afresh, this time in their new element, in their newly acquired meaning.’257 Hence this movement does not affect the totality as such. It is, rather, the apparent movement of the totality, which passes itself in review in the Logic: in Absolute Knowledge, the ‘difference [of the moments of Spirit] is only the difference of content’.258 At this point, knowledge [connaissance], is simply an inventory of absolute Truth. This is what permits us to say that, in the Phenomenology, the truth appears at dusk, since, in this sense, history has ended.259 But this dusk is only a retrospective image, for the evening in which thought first takes wing is the noon of Absolute Knowledge. At all events, the Phenomenology is not an anticipation or premonition of the truth, but the good news itself: time has been fulfilled, God made man, absolute content attained. But if both the Phenomenology and the Philosophy of Right signal the Advent of the Absolute in present reality, and are therefore both the truth that has come to term, how is this dualism of the truth to be understood? What explains it? How are we to conceive this double identity of reality and the truth?
Let us turn first to the Phenomenology. There can be no doubt that a number of auspicious events helped Hegel articulate, in the Phenomenology, his profoundest idea: the identity of truth and reality. If he differs from classical philosophers, it is by virtue of his understanding of events; but it is also owing to these events themselves, which, for the first time in history, prove equal to their own truth. Hegel does not conceive himself as does the Platonic philosopher, who flees this world for the heaven of the ideas; he thinks his temporal condition, and sees the maturity he announces come to fulfilment in his own time. Prior to Hegel, truth was a recourse against the real, a refuge, hidden essence, or controlling law; the real was a falling off from the true, and took the form of process, accident, or mode. In this alienation (the true estranged from the real), philosophers merely thought the alienation of the historical totality. That is what leads Hegel to legitimize their dualism: in an historical world in which the truth is estranged from reality, philosophers could think their unity only as a beyond or a contradiction. This is so rigorous a conception that Hegel himself would have been unable to break free of it by virtue of his genius alone, if history had not brought about the reconciliation he announced. Such is the true meaning of the supposed complicity of history. Before being the philosopher of the courses in Berlin, who deciphered the mystery of events, and seemed to be privy to the secrets of a complaisant history, Hegel had been the citizen of an apocalyptic age in which contradictions were resolved and the veils torn away. He was a lucky man, the chance accomplice of the Advent of the Absolute. What is involved here is not modesty. Hegel was merely the last actor in a drama that the whole of humanity was bringing to a conclusion; he was simply the voice which announced the fulfilment of the Last Days. If the totality were not being realized before his eyes, if the Kingdom of God were not being established in his times, he could not have pretended to bring heaven down to earth in his work and to herald the hitherto always thwarted identity of truth and reality. If he escaped alienation in its classical form, put the philosopher in himself to death, and pronounced himself a Sage, it was simply because the object of his philosophical consciousness had made philosophical consciousness its proper element – because, by means of the prodigious labour of history, reality had at last conquered its own element in the truth and surmounted the dualism of alienation. Truth and reality were thus brought into harmony in the historical totality that Hegel experienced: ‘The highest and final aim of philosophic science [is] to bring about, through the ascertainment of this harmony, a reconciliation of the self-conscious reason with the reason which is in the world.’260
This concrete harmony, thanks to which Hegel abolished philosophy and founded Science, is, then, fundamental, and is quite simply to be sought in the historical events of Hegel’s day. The French Revolution realized the abstract universality of the Enlightenment, abolished the monarchy, which the literature of the eighteenth century had already set tottering in the mind of the age, killed the king (where Sade saw a simulacrum of parricide, Hegel saw the abolition of Lordship – an organic social structure – and thus a potential end to alienation), and established the very opposite of monarchy in the dictatorship of the law, which penetrated, in the Terror, to the innermost reaches of people’s consciousness. Through this dramatic internalization, the Revolution at last brought about universal recognition. The revolutionary state Bonaparte seized control of was dominated by the symbolic dialectic of liberty, equality, and fraternity: fraternity was the totality in which the extreme form of subjectivity (liberty) was reconciled with the extreme form of objectivity (equality). The totality of the state was now organic, a Tun aller und jeder, was its own reason and substance. Not only was the moment of the master-slave duality annulled; so too was the abstract dictatorship of universality (Robespierre), and the very possibility of a conception of social contract like Rousseau’s, in which individuals are supposed to agree to respect a conventional structure. The will was no longer that of an individual, but of a people, in which each was freely granted recognition of his essential being and devoted himself to the common good. The Revolution organizing its regime even as it mobilized it against the outside world, transforming subjects into citizens, both juridically and in actual fact – since the Frenchman worked and fought261 – this prodigious spectacle represented, for Hegel, the Real Presence of the organic totality he had dreamt of in the Greece of his youth, and vainly sought in the historical and ideological universe of the Enlightenment. The last act of this miraculous advent was rung in when Napoleon spread the Revolution across Europe, transforming the world into concrete universality. ‘This was,’ Hegel said towards the end of his life, ‘a glorious mental dawn. All thinking beings shared in the jubilation of this epoch. Emotions of a lofty character stirred men’s minds at that time; a spiritual enthusiasm thrilled through the world, as if the reconciliation between the divine and the secular was now first accomplished.’262 It is hard for us to imagine the profound repercussions these events had on the noblest minds, who literally seemed to have been struck by a revelation. One need only think of the aged Kant suddenly uneasy in his solitude, or of Goethe prophesying the birth of a new world in the twilight of the defeat at Valmy, in order to understand how Hegel could affirm that his voice added nothing to these prodigious events beyond the consciousness of their ultimate grandeur.
Such was the basis of Hegel’s audacity. It was not the world he lived in that reflected Hegel’s own audacity back to him; it was Hegel who held up the mirror to the world’s audacity, that is, to the truth of the world. Hegelian truth is bei sich in the real, because it encounters itself in a world that has come to embody this truth. It is in this sense that Hegel supersedes idealism, as he himself says; and, if he founds absolute idealism, he necessarily founds it on absolute realism. This absolute is the third term in which absolute truth fuses with absolute reality. ‘What is rational is actual; and what is actual is rational.’263 This late pronouncement of Hegel’s acquires its deepest meaning, like most of the aphorisms of his maturity, at the level of the concrete totality of 1806. It can even be said that the whole system was built up at this level, so that, if we ignore this shaping influence and the intuition of a totality which was simultaneously real and true, it becomes extremely difficult to grasp the structure of Hegel’s thought, especially the Logic, the relation of Logic to Nature and Spirit, the dialectic, and the legitimacy of the system as form, that is, circularity. It was by invoking this profound identity between real and formal circularity that we were able to meet the objections to the effect that the form was defective. Hegel could not repudiate the idea of the identity of truth and reality, the absolute condition of the system’s coherence; if he had, it would have fallen apart. Indeed, the fact that the idea of circularity was maintained right up to the final texts proves that this identity was not an idea of Hegel’s youth that gradually fell by the wayside, but that he defended it to the end, even in the unfortunate passages of the Philosophy of Right and Philosophy of History.
The tragedy of his position lies here. To acknowledge the obvious facts about Prussia would not only have been to denounce the defective content of the Prussian state (here we will say nothing about the concrete possibility and the consequences of such a disavowal, which would have jeopardized not only the career of the individual Hegel, but perhaps even his freedom), but, above all, to undermine the system as a whole. For if there is no necessity of error in Hegel’s thought, the necessity of truth brooks no appeal. Thinking the truth of the Prussian state, i.e., thinking the essence of the defective content in terms of contradiction, would have obliged Hegel to acknowledge the dereliction of the totality, that is, the alienation of absolute content. To see in the Prussian bureaucracy and constitution a species of political formalism alien to the real people, which was forced to do real work, preoccupied by real cares, and, moreover, internally riven by economic contradictions, would have been to revive the dualism of form and content and lapse back into reflection. Hegel’s claim, however, was to have attained the subject. To admit that the worker, the bourgeois, or even the aristocrat were not citizens, that is, immediately universal and leading ‘a world-historical existence’, as Marx puts it,264 because their lives were divided between an occasional or ceremonial political existence and a daily routine of cares, work, and pleasure – to admit this simple fact would have been tantamount to denying that the individual had acquired true freedom, that the universal had become concrete and recognition universal. To acknowledge this defective content would have forced Hegel to revert to a pre-Hegelian position. It would have brought him back to the state of Fichte and Kant, and, a few details aside, to the general structure of the political world that had been the despair of his youth.
Moreover, via the state, the whole system would have been undermined. Alienation would have become the element, not only of historical reality, but also of Hegelian thought. But the circularity of the truth was predicated on nothing other than the circularity of absolute Spirit, on, that is, the reabsorption of alienation. Thus circularity itself would have been affected, and, with it, the profound inner bond of the system in which Hegel claimed to grasp the historical and ideological totality of the world. Once that bond had come undone, the system would have fallen to pieces, or, rather, the pieces would have reconstituted themselves and resumed their separate existences in a history without end; Kant himself, whose territory Hegel had so thoroughly occupied, would have regained his independence. As for the internal bond, the dialectic, if it maintained its claim to truth, that truth could henceforth only be an external one. We would have found ourselves facing either a truth distinct from reality, an internal law, or a beyond. Science would have relapsed into mere philosophy, while Absolute Knowledge would once again have become the mere love of knowledge, humbly making use of a method, discrete middle terms, ruses and demonstrations. In this ‘hunt for the truth’, the thinker would again have played his role without thinking it, would have caught the hare while forgetting the course, or forgotten the hunter in announcing the hunt.
Could Hegel have thus repudiated his own thought, destroying it with his own hands? Should he have acknowledged the presence of his own truth in the very necessity of this destruction that would have driven him with relentless logic toward his death – the reason for which would at least have been his? Should he have been born again of this reason, and re-entered a race without end, in which, thinking to take possession of himself, he could only have clutched his own shadow while suffering the ordeal of a bad infinity? Such consistency would have forced him to adopt an idealism of the Kantian variety, to deny the reality of the Idea and proclaim the untruth of reality. He would have had either to abandon absolute circularity and bow to contemporary reality, or else abandon the contemporary content so as to save, at that price, the system of absolute truth. In Hegel’s torn and divided world, it was no longer possible to keep a grip on the two extremes simultaneously.
Yet all indications are that Hegel set himself just this absurd task. He maintained, in alienation, the demand for unity; but, as alienation had once again become the element of his existence and thought, he encountered the limits, precisely, of the contradiction within which he was attempting to think unity; this unity was thus a prisoner of the contradiction it was meant to resolve. We observed an analogous process in Kant. The same thing happened to Hegel. He was unwilling to renounce his circular system and the absolute unity of reality and truth. He upheld, at all costs, the claim that this unity existed; and, as it was no longer real, it became the ideal unity, the insubstantial middle term, which Marx unmasks in the Philosophy of the State.
Hegel nevertheless clung to his original requirements. He persisted in thinking the truth at the level of the real, form at the level of content. Necessity accordingly became a ruse. In Hegel, the concept of the ruse is contradiction in actu, the necessity of non-necessity, unreason’s revenge on reason. The ruse wants victims, perpetually: once seen through, it is no longer a ruse, but disarmed naiveté. The ruse’s element is secrecy; in this sense, it is an absolute secret for its victims, and Hegel makes no bones about this when he shows that ordinary people are too limited by nature to grasp the reason at work in history. These blind men, whether bourgeois or workers, are in good company; there are others of their kind who are more illustrious, but just as obtuse. The Monarch and his officers, who are the ruse of the state, think they are privy to the secrets of the universal: their self-assurance is but one more ruse. They merely generate, by way of wars, a universality they themselves do not see, a universality that dupes them. The drama of the civil servant of 1806 had at least been a real one. The civil servant of Jena, who incarnated the universal that was Prussia, suddenly saw true universality emerging in the person of the enemy, and, recognizing it, was won over to it; the situation was perfectly clear, falsity was giving way before truth, the only conceivable debate involved questions of conscience or moral scruple; the universal was at least an honest universal. By 1821, the tragedy had turned to farce: the civil servant in Berlin could be quite sure he would never face such a crisis, and it did not so much as occur to him that, in this service, he was celebrating a mystery; his untroubled conscience was not pure complacency, but necessity, because it is in the clash between such universal causes that universal history develops its ruses. Spirit is literally hidden in History, as it is in Nature; it would be an enshrouded, buried Spirit, and absolutely Dead, if imposture had no for-itself.
Here we see the other pole of the contradiction, in which the ruse reveals itself for what it is. An absolute ruse that does not know itself to be a ruse is literally unthinkable. This is the monstrous temptation that Descartes had already rejected in rejecting the Evil Genius, in whom Hamelin rightly detected the hypothesis of the world’s absolute irrationality. There is no universal imposture, for, if the impostor imposes on himself, he is, by that very fact, caught at his own game, and the rules of the game are transformed into the rules tout court: the universal ruse cancels itself out in universal necessity. To persist as ruse, it has to preserve the distance that permits it to posit and maintain itself as such. At the limit, this awareness of the ruse is nothing other than cunning [rusé] consciousness in the pure state; in other words, Providence is ‘absolute cunning’.265 The appeal to the notion of the ruse is, accordingly, an acknowledgement of the contradiction that springs up at the level of the defective content, that between reality and truth – and this evasive solution is merely the acknowledgement that that contradiction is irresolvable.
Thus, by way of the ruse, it appears that the truth is conceived as reality’s secret, and this secret banished [refoulé] to the beyond. To be sure, Hegel, at least, is on familiar terms with God; this old-fashioned hermeticism contrasts strangely with the protestations of the Phenomenology. Hegel now asks for nothing more than good fortune, which he expects from the Monarch: let the mysteries be spread far and wide, let his philosophy become the state philosophy, since it is not possible to make the state philosophical. Hegel here follows in Plato’s footsteps, but at a goodly distance: he uses the king not to realize the truth, but to preach it. But the king has no grounds for alarm: this truth is not dangerous, it legitimates state, king, and hierarchy, and even the squalor of the present. It makes out ‘the rose in the cross of the present, and … delight[s] in the present’.266 One has to put a good face on the defective content.g Yet, while the official philosopher is at pains to impose upon the world a truth that is not one, his own truth slips away, and, as it is not at home in the end result, takes refuge in its origins. Whereas, in the Phenomenology, the historical totality absorbs and inspires all possible meanings, the order is inverted in Hegel’s last works; increasingly, it is Logic that plays the role of Spirit. The critical misunderstanding that sees Hegelianism as a panlogism has its origins in this inversion, which reproduces, within the system, truth’s retreat before the world.
This retreat transforms Hegelian unity into a contradictory totality: the system becomes the absolute truth of a content that is external to it, and that experiences its externality in its contradictions. Circularity is driven back into the element of thought, whereas reality lies outside it: the Hegelian Idea becomes a Kantian idea again, i.e., an ideal. It is, however, an ideal that has discovered its own element and recovered its origins in it: at least in thought, it is a real circularity, whereas the Kantian idea is a beyond even for thought itself. That is why this concrete ideal cannot be surpassed philosophically, and can be proposed as a guide to action. In this sense, Marx is right when he says that Hegel is the last philosopher – but he does not mean it the way Hegel did. Hegel is the last philosopher without being the Sage of the Phenomenology; he is the last philosopher because, in the form of the circularity of the concept, he wrests philosophy’s own kingdom from philosophy. All that remains is to translate Hegelian circularity into reality, to transform philosophy into a world, and, to that end, to seek in the actually existing historical world the dialectical element that will enable man to overcome alienation and render history circular. This is the Marxist transition from contemplation to action, and the transformation of history into universal history,267 i.e., the elevation of the content to the level of freedom.
But this very transition poses the problem of the circularity that exists in thought, revealing its ambiguity. For the realization of the truth is not possible if the truth is not a real anticipation, that is, an implicit universality developed by history and revolutionary action; if the realization of the truth is not, in some sort, the development of reality in its own truth. What is required, says Marx, is not to confer empirical existence upon the truth, but to lead empirical existence towards its own truth. This objective would simply seem to be the contrary of the advent of absolute content: it is up to history to conquer its own truth in concrete reality, a truth Hegel worked out only in the abstract element of thought. On this view, Hegel only reached the furthest extreme of self-consciousness in its own element; that circular extreme would thus be an allegory heralding the circular totality of the absolute content. For the empty Idea calls for a reality that is not the fruit of chance, but that, even as it realizes the Idea, legitimizes the Idea’s own element (that of abstract thought). To this ambiguity of the truth there corresponds, in Marx, the ambiguity of the real. Marx concentrates on the empirical content of his times, and thus on the concrete – the real, signifying totality. But this totality has not reached fulfilment; its significations would consequently be suspended and indecipherable if they were not already, in this contradictory state, called upon, as it were, to come into their truth. They bear their own truth within them, in an obscure necessity that demands to be thought. Or, if one prefers, they have reached the point of maturity and disequilibrium in which the revolutionary future is already visible in the present. With a modicum of attention, humankind could discern within itself the implicit universality that is destined to mature and claim its kingdom. Speaking of the communist workers, Marx says: ‘They have no ideals to realize, but to set free the elements of the new society with which old collapsing bourgeois society itself is pregnant.’268 The proletariat is this implicit universality; in its present state, it contains the future and the freedom of all humankind. It is, potentially, the circularity of absolute content.
On the one hand, no philosophical undertaking can do much more than resume and develop, abstractly, one or another moment pried loose from the Hegelian totality. Thus both Kierkegaard and the modern existentialists have appropriated Hegelian negativity in its subjective form, and contemporary philosophy has, paradoxically, constituted itself as a system on the basis of this abstract element of the system. In so doing, it has neglected the other aspect of Hegel, namely, substance. Similarly, Marxist thought has a tendency to retain the substantialist side of Hegel – objective necessity and the law of the development of history, conceived as an objective totality – a tendency to preserve, ‘at least on the ideological level’, objective negativity, while neglecting the depth of subjective negativity. Again, contemporary phenomenology seems to draw its inspiration from the ideas of a dialectical totality and an ‘abandoned’ dialectic, both very close to Hegelian phenomenological ‘experience’ – without, however, attaining circularity. Whether or not it realizes its dependence, contemporary thought has been created out of Hegel’s decay, and draws sustenance from it. Ideologically speaking, then, we are dominated by Hegel, who comes back into his own in modern philosophical endeavour; and this dependence is genuine, since it does not break free of the decay of Hegel, i.e., the transformation of Hegelian truth into ideology. Modern ideologies are reappropriated by Hegelian ideology – right down to their deliberate ingratitude – as if by their mother-truth.
This restitution would not modify the status of Hegelian truth, if the decomposition of Hegel had merely given rise to ideologies. But, to a certain extent, it has also engendered a real world in the form of workers’ movements and revolutionary action. We said at the beginning of this work that Hegel had become our world. The whole of our present problem is that this world is not only an ideological, but also a real political world. Hegel is present amongst us not only as truth, but also as reality. Nevertheless, the decomposition of Hegel no longer permits us to conceive the relationship between this truth and reality in Hegelian terms: the part of Hegel which has become reality does not coincide with the Hegelian circularity that has been driven back into ideological truth. In other words, the Hegelian necessity we have described as the Marxian for-itself is compelled to beat the same retreat in Marx himself as it does in the world. That is why the status of this necessity is so obscure in Marxism, and why Marxism both adopts and rejects it, as the notion of turning the dialectic ‘right side up’ indicates: Marxist reality accepts Hegelian truth only if it is ‘placed back on its feet’ (what would circularity put back on its feet be?). One may say, then, that, in Marxism, the real status of Hegelian necessity does not coincide with its ideological status; or, in other words, that Marxist practice [comportement], which is both real and fruitful, has not yet grasped its own structure, because it has not yet clearly conceived the place Hegelian truth occupies within its own reality. This failure draws our attention back to our own time and, even if ideologically, poses for contemporary ‘abstract’ philosophies the problem of Hegel’s status in our world. Indeed, we live in a world in which, on the one hand, Hegelian truth exceeds its purely ideological status, whilst, on the other, Hegelian reality refuses to recognize Hegelian ideology as its truth. This duality, this contradiction, invites reflection on the problem of the intellectual structure of our times.
This is not the place to examine the problem, for that would take us well beyond the bounds of our subject and competence. We would simply like to set out a number of elements that emerge from our study; they will allow us, perhaps, to adumbrate the general features of this structure.
The implications of the disintegration of Hegelianism and the contradictions of Hegel’s posterity establish a first point: the total structure of this real world is not circular, or, at least, inasmuch as the totality has not been fully realized, its circularity is not in actu: it is possible to conceive of it as truth, but it is not a presently existing reality. We are therefore condemned to a certain dualism between truth and reality.
And, with that, we find ourselves back in an intellectual structure which is in certain respects analogous to that of the immediate pre-Hegelian period, i.e., transcendentalism. Marxist practice can teach us something about this point, because of the fundamental importance which revolutionary action attaches to conditions; more generally, it can teach us about the pre-eminence of the concrete historical totality, which literally becomes the a priori condition of any undertaking whatsoever. It is one of the major themes of revolutionary praxis that it is not possible to attempt just anything at any given moment, that revolution is not to be confused with revolt, that if the ‘existing conditions’ are not favourable, any immediate action is merely dangerous agitation. The same structure emerges from scientific practice, which has a conception of a kind of necessity of discovery. Research is no longer a matter of happy discoveries that depend solely on the genius of the researcher. Rather, research and its results are subordinate to the pre-existent scientific totality as their a priori condition; they are subordinate, that is, to the organic set of hypotheses, theories, instruments and results in existence at a given point in the history of science. It is this conditioning totality that lends both revolutionary activity and scientific research their meaning; thus it appears, at any given moment, as the condition and a priori form in which every political and scientific content is cast.
However, this structure only distantly resembles Kantian transcendentalism, or, rather, sheds light on it by going beyond it. The transcendental in the political or scientific sense is at once a priori, inasmuch as it is the condition for any event, and also a posteriori, inasmuch as it is not deduced, but discovered. The necessity of the objective structure of the scientific or Marxist a priori is of the order of what modern phenomenologists call a ‘de facto necessity’. This remark will remind us of the paradox of the Kantian categories, which did not escape Hegel’s notice. The categories of transcendental logic are derived from the table of judgements; hence they are found. Thus Kant was limited by the empirical nature of the content of transcendental logic; but he did not think it. He was unwilling to recognize that the a priori was a posteriori. Had he acknowledged this, he would have been obliged to conceive the existence of an empirical transcendental, the a priori character of the a posteriori, i.e., literally, at the level of his abstraction, Hegelian circularity. He would thus have been led to abandon the notion, not of the structure of the transcendental, but of its absolute nature, that is, the idea that it is eternal. Hence he would have had to conceive time not simply as an a priori form, but as the element of all form: he would have had to think history.
That is a major advance, and we are indebted to Hegel for it. Interpreting his thought freely, we may say that history (or Spirit) becomes the absolute totality that absorbs all possible meaning. If we abandon the idea of the end of history and the eternal nature of meanings, i.e., the absolute circularity of reality, then history becomes the general element in which we move and live; it becomes the concrete transcendental, the only place in which the entities and meanings that condition and determine us come into being. But since history is not over, there is no eternal transcendental logic, but rather, at every instant, an articulated historical structure which dominates the world in the manner of an a priori, and conditions it. The reality of history resides, from this standpoint, in the dialectical nature of the structure that conditions events, but is also transformed by them in its turn. The historical totality is a concrete, dialectical transcendental, a condition modified by what it conditions. Thus scientific discovery, shaped by the totality of theories and instruments, modifies them in its turn; over the course of history, the ‘transcendental logic’ of the sciences changes as a result of the advances science makes. Similarly, the economic and political structure that conditions revolutionary action is in turn modified by it.
But one point still requires clarification. Our examples display analogous structures, but do not tell us whether the essence of the historical totality coincides with the structure of transcendental reason; whether, in other words, the historical totality and reason are homogeneous. Here too Hegel paves the way. Today we know, thanks to him, the fundamental truth that there is no reason outside the community of consciousnesses that come face-to-face in struggle for mutual recognition. In this sense, Hegel took up and thought the positive content of the Kantian reservation, which identified reason as ‘our reason’; he worked out the full meaning of that ‘our’, eschewing both solipsism and abstract idealism, by showing that reason is itself subject to the domination of the human totality, of the universe of consciousnesses in their concrete relations with one another. If Plato’s slave ultimately discovers reason in the depths of his soul, if Descartes sought reason in his solitude and yet recognized that it is something shared, it is because the nature of reason is subject to that of human interdependence, or rather because reason, in the broad sense, is the concrete structure of human interdependence. That is why knowledge of history is not a knowledge external to history; that is why temporality is not a category or a form; that is why any system of thought that would depict the I as a transcendental form, without conceiving the concrete totality conditioning all rational discourse, can only be abstract. If we must always conceive the transcendental as reason, it cannot be anything other than the organic reason of the given historical totality, that is, an element of the human structure of the world.
Thus we are brought back round to our thesis. The disintegration of Hegelianism thrusts us back into transcendentalism. But the transcendental which conditions the a priori activity (theoretical or practical) of man has, now, conquered its nature: it is the concrete historical totality. We owe this conception of history as basic element and signifying totality to Hegel. It is likewise owing to him that we are able to identify the rational nature of this totality with the nature of the human totality. But this is a truth touched on in passing and buried in the Phenomenology; Hegel himself failed to draw its major inference. To say that the historical human totality is the totality to which all else must be referred, and the a priori condition of all human activity, is a truth as abstract and empty as the domination of the transcendental I would be in Kant, in the absence of the table of categories. In the fundamental structure of the human totality, Marx gives us the table of human categories that govern our time. Capital is our transcendental analytic. Such would seem to be the significance of Marx’s work: the discovery and appropriation of the human categories in the socio-economic structure of our day.
This undertaking has to be understood in a very broad sense: because reason is the self-consciousness of the human totality, this determinate social structure is the a priori condition of all human activity – aesthetic, scientific, political, etc. Thus the present period throws into clear relief the condition of science, which, by way of the vast collective enterprises indispensable to modern research, is discovering its dependence on the industrial capacity, i.e., the economic totality, of the world. Modern ‘scientific categories’ are extremely concrete: contemporary science is dominated by the production of its instruments (the cyclotron), or the substances it experiments with (uranium, heavy water, etc.), which remind us of the effort humanity expends on work, and of its structure. Marx merely sketched these perspectives; a vast amount of epistemological research will have to be carried out to establish the table of modern scientific categories. Yet it will not be enough to produce this inventory, if we do not simultaneously attempt to determine the relation of these epistemological categories to the socio-economic categories that command them. Here, what Marxism has put forward is still embryonic. Yet it seems to lead to a conception of science dominated by the human character of scientific appropriation. When discussing experience, Kant always insisted that experience was ours; but he did not specify the nature of this ours. Contemporary science, in the Marxist conception, is marked by the tendency to seize on this ours and think it as the dominant characteristic of science. Accordingly, the essence of science would be historical, not natural, and the very object of science would be subject to the domination of historical categories. In Marxist statements about nature, the Kantian ambiguity vis-à-vis the given of sense experience reappears. Nature does not exist in a pure state; it is given only in human apprehension, which is historical (only the atolls that have surged up out of the sea, remarks Engels ironically, are purely natural). Yet the categories of science do not exhaust what is given in nature, because, without it, they would be of small use. What appears in this ambiguity is merely the contradiction between reality and truth that we observe in the disintegration of Hegelianism.
If the world of science has not been well explored, the world of politics is, thanks to Marx, infinitely clearer; and, as it is in this domain that we gain access to the basic structure of the human totality, it is there that the destiny of our times will be played out. If our information is not too inaccurate, it is at this level that we should try to define the structure of Marxist practice. Marx understood that the transcendental was history, but he did not consider it possible to think history in general, apart from the concrete content of the dominant historical totality. He therefore determined the socio-economic structure of capitalist society, positing this world as a contradictory totality in which economic categories dominated the sheer diversity of human matter. Yet he did not posit the categorial totality as eternal (as did Kant, and also Hegel, unbeknownst to himself, when he proclaimed the end of history or the validity of the Prussian state in an ongoing history). He conceived this totality as dialectical, that is, as modified by the very manifold that it conditioned. Finally, he maintained, within contradiction itself, the obvious fact of the concrete unity of the categories with the manifold in concrete labour. Kant did the same in his discussion of the transcendental imagination. But, in Kant, the totality is not dialectical. That is why this median unity is, in Kant, a mediate unity. In Marx, by contrast, the categorial dialectic makes possible the immediate unity of the labourer and his product, forged at the level of the manifold. Thus the revolutionary effort can be considered, in its entirety, as the reappropriation of the economic categories by the manifold of human matter, that is, as the appropriation of the transcendental by the empirical, the appropriation of the form by the content. That is why the Marxist movement is a materialism, arguing, as it does, the domination of matter; but also a humanism, since this matter is human matter, struggling against inhuman forms. That is why this struggle can be imagined as something other than the ‘infinite task’ of the Kantian Idea, and why the socialist state can be conceived as something other than a ‘transcendental accident’. Revolutionary action can, at least formally, conceive of the day when the human totality will be reconciled with its own structure.
These significations are nevertheless not reducible to pure determinations within the element of thought. We do not find ourselves in the transparent circularity of Hegelian truth, but in a concrete world whose significations are enveloped by concrete realities. The Marxist movement is its own signification; it is not necessarily the one it gives out as its own. The disintegration of Hegelianism is tangible even in the difficulty reality has in conceiving its own truth. If we attempt to determine the intellectual structure of this post-Hegelian world, our objective cannot be to re-establish a definitive schema. For us, the future is in the secret movements of the present content; we are caught up in a still obscure totality which we must bring into the light.
in Hegel, as there is for Descartes, enveloped in the warmth of his thought, his windows all shut tight to the winter and the war, or for Rembrandt’s deaf old man, lost in the contemplation of his stairwells. In Hegel, Jena rushes in through the open window, along with the roar of battle, the defeat, Napoleon draped in his victory, and the distant reunification of a reawakened Europe. Neither barricades nor brackets can hold up under history’s onslaught: the child who shuts his eyes thinks he has brought on universal night, like the philosopher who does not think the noonday of history, does not plunge into it and make himself at home in it. This idea kept its grip on Hegel to the end: he never abandoned the intention, which took shape, as we saw, in the early stages of his thought [conscience],