For Andrea
As if you swallowed love with singing love
In his first acknowledged publication, the Differenzschrift of 1801, Hegel describes, in what for him is an unusually quick and simplistic narrative outline, the advance of Reason toward “objective totality.” The “objective totality” toward which Reason advances is not “objective” in the common sense that it is like an object already there, in a position to be stumbled upon by the subject, who may not even be looking for it; “objective totality” is not found: it cannot be founded, but must be reached; and the subject who does actually reach is extended in that act, which is the ardent work of Reason that Hegel in the Phenomenology calls “the strain of the concept.” The action of this strain is travel and stretching at once: It is both the movement of the subject, the advance of Reason toward “objective totality” and the “expansion” of the subject. This expansion is not just growth, but also inclusion: the subject expands through the work of Reason that is inseparably both ardent and “comprehensive,” in the sense that every objective “substance” that “becomes subject” remains active in the logic of self-consciousness and the advance of Reason: every object on which the right work is done is comprehended in life. Expansion itself, together with a simultaneous contraction that will be described shortly, “completes” or “accomplishes” the “objective totality” toward which the subject has advanced. The quick outline of the narrative of Reason in the Differenzschrift does not explain any of this, but just efficiently plots the essential action of the logic. The overview is rounded off in what may be the most simplistic formulation of absolute knowledge in all Hegel’s writing, virtually the bathos of shorthand. “[I]n this way,” he sums up, “the system advances until the objective totality is completed. Reason then unites this objective totality with the opposite subjective totality to form the infinite world-intuition, whose expansion has at the same time contracted into the richest and simplest identity.”
Nothing in Hegel’s writing could be simpler than this. It is disarmingly not unlike the sort of identity-tagging that is lambasted in the Phenomenology as opprobriously “schematic,” just joining up the dots or putting back together the scattered bones of a laboratory skeleton. “The system advances until the objective totality is completed.” The efficiency of this synopsis makes it hard to resist Adorno’s judgment that the ardent work required to advance Hegel’s system to its totality is also, in a crucial respect, “serene indifference,” since “nowhere in [Hegel’s] work is the primacy of the whole doubted.” The primacy of the whole is not only not doubted, but it is also capable of being posited in extravagantly simplistic logical terms. Reason unites everything objective, all the objects in the world, with everything subjective, the least wish, drive, desire, or memory, or the most hyperbolic, so that infinity is still at last where life is too: “The task of philosophy,” Hegel writes earlier in the Differenzschrift, is “to posit the finite in the infinite, as life.”
What is thus arrived at and at last comprehended in this simplistic overview of the narrative of Reason is “the richest and simplest identity.” It is not the identity of a person, but that of “the infinite world-intuition”; but perhaps as a person it is difficult to hear about this identity and not wish it could be your own, or at least that it could be possible for people. Hegel does not directly rule out people from achieving the identity that he reserves for “the infinite world-intuition,” however formidably he may multiply the conceptual difficulties of reconciling the destiny of Reason, or of the subject, with the life of just any person. It is true that “the richest and simplest identity” may not be possible for just any person to live; it may not be available for persons at all; people commonly do not infinitely expand and at the same time infinitely contract like “the infinite world-intuition,” and Hegel does not say there is another way to achieve “the richest and simplest identity.” In the Phenomenology, Hegel argues that it is the fate of substance to become the subject, as subject and object are progressively united in the comprehension of absolute knowledge. This may be a more thoroughly speculative description of how “the richest and simplest identity” is achieved, a narrative with greater conceptual power to posit the universal; but its power as speculative thinking consists in some significant and crucial measure in its ineradicable distance from a mere story of a life. The Phenomenology is not biography; what “the subject” achieves in the fulfillment of its destiny is not just what any person achieves by living. But since at the same time what any person achieves by actually or really living cannot be other than self-actualization and self-realization, so what any person achieves by being alive is always progress toward “objective totality” (for Hegel, real living is the inseparably both ardent and comprehensive effort to keep infinity within reach). What just any person does by really living must be the activity of advance, the absolute unrest and straining of the concept, that is, it must be the activity of the subject: Just any person is not and is the subject, just any finite life is not and is in the infinite, the Phenomenology is not and is biography, and not just anything or just anyone can achieve “the richest and simplest identity” and just anything or just anyone can achieve that identity, right now.
Later in his life Hegel took oblique revenge on this simplistic early formulation of absolute knowledge as “the richest and simplest identity.” In the Philosophy of Right, simplicity is belittled in its natural form as “crude,” suitable perhaps for Rousseau but not for the subject. Here Hegel again defines the task of Reason, whose “end” it now is “to banish natural simplicity, whether the passivity which is the absence of the self, or the crude type of knowing and willing, i.e. immediacy and singularity, in which mind is absorbed.” Whereas earlier it had been the fate of mind, in the shape of “the infinite world-intuition,” to be comprehended in “the richest and simplest identity,” here the simplicity that matters is natural, and natural simplicity is not comprehensive but merely engrossing. What is the relation, if any, between natural simplicity, which is crude, and the perfect simplicity of identity that is at last achieved by the infinite expansion and contraction of the subject? How is it possible to know when simplicity is natural? Perhaps simplicity is natural whenever Reason banishes it. The same action of banishing what is natural in order to achieve unity is central to Hegel’s account of marriage, which must be both love and a contract at the same time, and in both respects thoroughly ethical. In marriage, men and women must “renounce their natural and individual personality to this unity of one with the other.” Hegel then directly adds, reproducing again the essential logical motif of his thinking: “From this point of view, their union is a self-restriction, but in fact it is their liberation, because in it they attain their substantive self-consciousness.” Simplicity, when it is the last predicate of “identity,” or the most comprehensive achievement of the subject, defines the destiny of Reason, “the finite in the infinite”: “the richest and simplest identity.” Later, natural simplicity meant engrossment in crude distractions, a category that can safely be abandoned to culture, in which “immediacy” as a whole could be dumped. (This judgment on immediacy by the author of the Philosophy of Right, whom Marx in his letters called “Old Hegel,” was disastrously impressive to Lukács, who made stubborn, flexible use of it in his essays on the theory of literature, and who was driven on by the intrinsic stubbornness of the concept itself to strike stubborn attitudes about artworks whose substantial particularity could then more easily be liquidated in abstractions, and it was thereby disastrous for Marxist aesthetic theory, which wasted a lot of energy wrangling to dispute it and has perhaps never yet altogether eradicated its transparent shadow: In reality, intensity is impossible without immediacy and revolutionary subjectivity makes immediacy itself ardent.) Hegel had always been a ruthless critic of bad or clumsy thinking, and his whole philosophy requires and also relentlessly reiterates the absolute distinction between “the dry-as-dust Understanding,” an activity of mind and of the subject that has no contact with the absolute and is a mere “clinging to formalities,” and Reason or speculative thinking, which is the movement of the absolute itself. Primitively conceptualized versions of the same absolute distinction appear in Hegel’s unpublished early writings, for example in “Eleusis,” the poem written in August 1796 and addressed to Hölderlin, in which “scholars” are barred from contact with divinity, in the person of the god Ceres, for what is virtually their sin of valuing “curiosity” [Neugier] over the true “love of wisdom” (the phrase is broken across a line-ending: Liebe / Zur Weisheit: “their curiosity greater than their love / of wisdom”). This stubborn attachment to the routines of empirical consciousness is the work of the Understanding, which explains why it is that, when they “dig for words” (graben […] nach Worten: Grab is the German for grave), scholars come up with nothing but “dust and ashes” to which life will not return.1 The first page of the Phenomenology warns its would-be interpreters that there is “the way in which to expound philosophical truth” that will be found in its pages, and no other way. It is not surprising to hear him years later berate “the crude type of knowing and willing,” because he always did that; but to find that “the crude type of knowing and willing” is now “natural simplicity,” rather than the labors of intellectual gravediggers, at least hints at a metastasis in the identity of absolute knowledge, which has gone from being, at first, the perfection of richness and simplicity, to, at last, the end and activity of a Reason whose progress depends on the expulsion of natural simplicity. And yet, moments away in the same text: “Love, the ethical moment in marriage, is by its very nature a feeling for actual living individuals, not for an abstraction.” Is love then not by its very nature largely a feeling for what must be expelled, since the existence of an actual living individual who is not at least very often “natural” and “simple” in Hegel’s sense can scarcely be imagined? Hegel surely cannot mean that individuals can only be loved when in an emphatic sense they are “actual” and “living,” unless he means that love is not stability of attachment but on the contrary what exceeds and disrupts it in moments of radiant intensity and unrest. But perhaps this is really a contradiction, and the natural simplicity that must be banished in the advance of Reason nonetheless remains present and able to be loved, since it is what “actual living individuals” cannot actually live without? What just any person achieves by living is to be an actual living individual for whom love is intended by its very nature, even as nature is the very condition in which the simplicity of life will be crude and barren of reason. Any person is preferable to an abstraction, for love, no matter what the abstraction or how powerful or indispensable it may be for philosophy, or however the advance of reason or even speculative thinking as a whole may depend on it. For love, any person is preferable to the subject. But love consummated and preserved in the renunciation of “natural and individual personality to the unity of one with the other” is the love of the subject itself: what “is by its very nature a feeling for actual living individuals, not for an abstraction” is itself, as “unity,” the greatest abstraction of all, the ultimate and essential abstraction that is disclosed in all concrete universals and everything anywhere in the world. Love is “by its very nature a feeling” that is an activity of the very subject whose unity with the world is achieved by banishing “natural simplicity,” but at the same time, if anything begins in natural simplicity or in “knowing and willing” that is “crude” in the sense of “immediate” and “singular,” and indeed in “passivity which is the absence of the self,” it is love: the description of the “natural simplicity” that Hegel says must be banished is a description of the scene in which love, in the only reality we actually live, always erupts.
How is it possible to know when simplicity is natural? Perhaps simplicity is natural whenever Reason banishes it. The same action of banishing what is natural in order to achieve unity is central to Hegel’s account of marriage, which must be both love and a contract at the same time, and in both respects thoroughly ethical.
Just as speculative thinking cannot be altogether banished from Marx’s historical materialist critique, so natural simplicity cannot be altogether banished from the work of speculative Reason in Hegel’s philosophy, except in both cases by denial of the reality of love. Hegel even knows this, because he defines love as “mind’s feeling of its own unity,” and unity for Hegel must extend right back to the start of Reason’s advance, before even natural simplicity is yet possible. Natural simplicity in its totality is comprehended in the unity of mind that is felt as love, by the very action of its perpetual banishment. Baudelaire wrote that genius is childhood recalled at will, a formulation that looks crude and simplistic, and that seems to propose a virtually mechanical account of inspiration, beside the powerful speculative exploration of the contradictory relations between childhood, will, and genius in The Prelude; but the formulation captures a particular truth of poetry by the very nature of that determined, extravagant simplicity. Somehow obscurely essential to the whole substance of poetry is an inextinguishable confidence in the power of just any person to get to the end, where life and the logic of its advance to unity will at last be comprehended, since people are what love is by its very nature meant for, and since, like love, perhaps even exactly like it, poetry always erupts in the scene that Hegel calls “natural simplicity,” where, in the conscious confusion of passivity which is the absence of the self, in the immediate grip of crude knowing and willing, and in singularity of expression, in which mind is both absorbed and emptied, “the richest and simplest identity” may seem in actuality to be just any person, at least for right now, when just any other person is there too, recalled at will.
1 “Eleusis,” Werke I: Frühe Schriften, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986, 231–32. Slavoj Žižek, in The Ticklish Subject (London: Verso, 1999), 97, attempts (in his usual brisk and telegraphic style) a perverse reading of this distinction in Hegel, according to which Reason is after all nothing but “Understanding” itself “deprived of the illusion that there is something beyond it.” But for Hegel it is Reason and not Understanding that dispenses with the prop of a spurious Beyond. Understanding cannot by itself escape from the logic that posits the existence of an absolute beyond its reach. See Hegel, Faith and Knowledge, trans. Walter Cerf and H.S. Harris (Albany: SUNY Press, 1977), 56: In the philosophies of Understanding, “the eternal remained in a realm beyond, a beyond too vacuous for cognition so that this infinite void of knowledge could only be filled with the subjectivity of longing and divining.” Reason alone abolishes the beyond and extinguishes “the subjectivity of longing.” Cf. John Wieners, “Supplication,” on “the / hurts of wanting the impossible / through this suspended vacuum.” From the perspective of Hegel’s logic this poem is the lucid ventriloquism of the Understanding.