Category: hegel

Kant Hegel

Schroeder, Jeanne L. The Four Lacanian Discourses or Turning Law Inside-Out. New York: Routledge-Cavendish, 2008.

Being finite, we can never really know our “true” motives. In Henry Allison’s words, “[F]ar from asserting a doctrine of unqualified noumenal freedom … Kant explicitly asserts that since the intelligible character is inaccessible to us, we can never be certain whether, or to what extent, a given action is due to nature or freedom.” The pure reason that is essential to man is itself a noumenon, a thing-in-itself. Each person as an empirical individual is a phenomenon who does not have direct contact with his own noumenal, essential self. In Kant’s words, “The depths of the human heart are unfathomable.” No one can directly now his own self. “For a human being cannot see into the depths of his own heart so as to be quite certain, in even a single action, of the purity of his moral intention and the sincerity of his disposition, even when he has no doubt about the legality of the action.” Kant’s idea of a radical split between our conscious selves and another essential “true” inner self will reappear in Lacan’s rewriting of Freud in light of speculative thought. 81-82

For a Kantian, a preference is an inclination and is antithetical to morality, which must be served regardless of preferences. 83

Kant recognizes that it is precisely this impossibility of knowing and achieving the morality which is the reciprocal of freedom, that creates the actuality of human free will in the world. If man could actually see into the mind of God and know the ethical law, he would no longer be self-legislating (i.e. free). He would be submitting himself to an external force. In Kant’s metaphor, “Man would be a marionette or an automaton.” Ironically, it is man’s sin, his failure, his radical evilness, his inability to be truly free, that results in his practical freedom. As the common law tradition understands, law, as well as freedom, is a work in process.

In order for the subject to be free, she must be self-legislating, constantly creating new law. If, however she ever succeeded in the task of finishing and completely filling her world with law, it would bind her and prevent her from spontaneously creating new law. She would no longer be free.

Paradoxically, the reason the individual is able to liberate herself from nature’s causal chains, so that she might freely bind herself to the ethical law, is that every time she tries to bind herself to the ethical law, its chains slip her wrists. Man is always a moral Houdini despite himself. Lacan identifies this fundamental paradox that characterizes the moral universe as the sexual impasse. The part of personality that imagines itself completely bound by law is the “masculine,” and the part that knows that she slips away is the “feminine.” 83-84

Though Hegel agrees with Kant that the essence of personality is free will, he thinks that freedom of the Kantian individual in the state of nature could only be potential. Pure Kantian freedom is radically negative; indeed it is negativity per se.

To be completely free from bounds is to be totally lacking in content, to be a pure abstraction without individuality (i.e. noumenal). Hegel believes that in order for freedom to become actual, the individual must become concrete (i.e. phenomenal). …. Hegel thinks that this can only be achieved through intersubjective relationships with other subjects.

Consequently, because the individual rationally seeks to actualize her freedom, she passionately desires human contact. Lacan will rephrase Hegel’s sublime hysteria as “the desire of man is the desire of the Other.” 85

Kaloianov, Radostin. Hegel, Kojeve and Lacan – The Metamorphoses of Dialectics – Part I: Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and its Kojevian Interpretation as a Point of Reference for the Psychoanalytic Theory of Jacques Lacan,  Part II: Hegel and Lacan”

Mirror Stage

the process which forms the subject

Man’s desire is a desire for the desire of the other

dialectic

Bryant, Levi R. “Žižek’s New Universe of Discourse: Politics and the Discourse of the Capitalist” International Journal of Žižek Studies 2.4 (2008): 1-48. Web.

[Quoting Žižek]  There are, roughly speaking, two philosophical approaches to an antagonistic constellation of either/or: either one opts for one pole against the other (Good against Evil, freedom against oppression, morality against hedonism, etc.), or one adopts a ‘deeper’ attitude of emphasizing the complicity of the opposites, and of advocating a proper measure or their unity. Although Hegel’s dialectic seems a version of the second approach (the ‘synthesis’ of opposites), he opts for an unheard-of third version: the way to resolve the deadlock is to engage oneself neither in fighting for the ‘good’ side against the ‘bad’ one, nor in trying to bring them together in a balanced ‘synthesis’, but in opting for the bad side of the initial either/or. Of course, this ‘choice of the worst’ fails, but in this failure it undermines the entire field of alternatives and thus enables us to overcome its terms.   ( Slavoj Žižek Presents Mao on Practice and Contradiction, 2007. 12)

hegel language

Belsey, Catherine. Culture and the Real : Theorizing Cultural Criticism. 2005

HEGEL

Confronted by these arguments, which seem to go round in circles, Immanuel Kant, possibly the greatest of the Enlightenment philosophers, concluded that there must be a distinction between what we know and what exists. In Kant’s view, we can know things only as they appear to us, within a framework of knowledge that we ourselves create. Beyond the appearances, there lies a realm of thingsin-themselves, which is forever inaccessible to our knowledge. In the next generation, however, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel refused to settle for this gloomy view of the limitations on human knowledge. With the boundless optimism of the early nineteenth century about what was possible, Hegel developed a system that would impose no limits on what we are able to know – on condition that the ultimate object of knowledge is consciousness itself. Hegel’s starting point is what he calls ‘sense-certainty’, our awareness at the level of the senses of the sheer existence of things in the world. 22

It is because he stopped at this point in the argument, Hegel insists, that Kant supposed the true being of things was unknowable. Hegel’s next move is therefore crucial. He turns consciousness into its own object of knowledge. Enlightened, rational, universal consciousness is consciousness of the world as it is; the world is thus synonymous with consciousness of itself. In these circumstances there can be no failure of correspondence between consciousness and things-inthemselves. ‘Reason is the certainty of consciousness that it is all reality. . . . The “I” which is an object for me is the sole object, is all reality and all that is present’ (Hegel 1977: 140). When rational consciousness fully knows itself, becomes its own other, uniting self and other without abolishing their difference, reason reaches the level of what Hegel calls Geist. The German word has no exact equivalent in English, but is variously translated as ‘mind’ or ‘spirit’. ‘Reason is Spirit’, Hegel affirms, ‘when its certainty of being all reality has been raised to truth, and it is conscious of itself as its own world, and of the world as itself’ (1977: 263). 23

Hegel’s incorporation of the world into consciousness might alternatively be understood to erase the world as anything more than an idea, and so to abolish the real. And even if few philosophers would subscribe to Hegel’s system now, its influence is perceptible in the widespread idealism that links a number of influential cultural theorists, Judith Butler and Stanley Fish among them. 24
At the same time, the specificity of the individual self disappears too. In a move that goes way beyond Cartesian mind– body dualism, Hegel contains and erases personal consciousness within universal reason. Recognizing, like Descartes, that individual experience is prone to error, Hegel locates absolute knowledge in a universality that entails ‘the externalization and vanishing of this particular “I”’ (308). 26

It is the property of language to generalize. In an attempt to be as particular, as singular, as possible, Hegel says, I name ‘this bit of paper’, but language cannot reach the sensuous ‘this’, and since ‘each and every bit of paper is “this bit of paper” . . . I have only uttered the universal all the time’ (66).

Knowledge, then, deals in universals. It negates the particularity of sensation in favour of universality. What do we know about salt? That it is white, tart, granular . . . and these are general properties that differ from each other, while one or other of them may be shared with sugar or sand. Such knowledge is no longer single, personal, private, but shared, Hegel would say, universally. Sadly, however, there is a price to pay for the community of enlightened minds that thus becomes available. Because language constrains what it is possible to say, we can no longer say what we mean. We set out to name the particular experience, but language insists on universalizing it. “And since the universal is the true [content] of sense-certainty and language expresses this true [content] alone, it is just not possible for us ever to say, or express in words, a sensuous being that we mean.” (Hegel 1977: 60) Language allows no access to the uniqueness of things. Instead, it “has the divine nature of directly reversing the meaning of what is said, of making it into something else, and thus not letting what is meant get into words at all.” (66) 27

But there is worse to come. Language, which places things beyond reach, but which, as if in compensation, enables consciousness to know itself and to communicate with others, has the further effect of placing the self in its uniqueness equally beyond reach. Individuality has only ‘an imaginary existence’ (298). This unique self in its real existence is subsumed by a universal self that enters into a new kind of reality. Paradoxically, it is language that permits the self to exist in its difference from others. But that very difference immediately disappears again in the generality that characterizes language …

Aware of all the twentieth century taught us about the irreducibility of cultural difference, culturalism rejects Hegel’s Enlightenment conviction that absolute knowledge is possible as universal truth. It retains, however, his historicism, as well as his idealism, with the effect of erasing the real. Whatever resides outside culture is held to have no bearing on us: unnameable, it has no effects. 29

Loizidou ethics antigone

Loizidou, Elena. Judith Butler: Ethics, Law, Politics. New York: Routledge Cavendish, 2007.

a de-struktion of the way philosophy, since Plato, constituted the subject, Levinas’s critique of western metaphysics offered us an important lesson. We have learned that if we are not to regress into morality, if we are to have an ethical relationship with the Other, we are required to establish ethics as a first philosophy.

The requires a reconception of how we understand ourselves. It necessitates the deconstruction of the ego or knowing self when the Other, the one that is external to me, calls upon me. 72

In some respects, the call for this type of ethics could also be a description of moments when my ego, my self-knowledge, is reconstituted via the call of the Other, where I fail to reduce the Other to myself.  … It becomes paramount that if we talk of ethics, bereft of moralisation, we need to think of the subject as, unreflexive, not-knowing, a surprise, non-identical and particular. As is by now apparent, Levinas’s critique of western metaphysical philosophy could be comfortably directed towards Descartes and Kant.

quoting Antigone

I’d never have taken this ordeal upon myself, never defied our people’s will. What law, you ask, do I satisfy with what I say? A husband dead, there might have been another. A child by another too, if I had lost the first. But mother and father both lost in the halls of Death, no brother could ever spring to light again.  (Robert Fagles Trans.)

burying her brother … was done in honour or celebration of the particularity of her brother. Her brother, unlike a child or a husband, is irreplaceable, especially since both her parents are dead. She stresses that she would not have acted the same in other circumstances, turning her act into a singular act. Ethical subjects — subjects that act responsibly … are the ones that celebrate the singularity of the other, without reducing the other to the universal and the laws that govern this universality. It is not difficult to see how Antigone is made into an ethical heroine, given this. 81

Žižek

Zizek, The Most Sublime of Hysterics: Hegel with Lacan
This essay was originally published in French in Le plus sublime des hystériques – Hegel passe, Broché, Paris, 1999. It appears in Interrogating the Real, London: Continuum, 2005, Rex Butler and Scott Stephens editors.

The idea that one is able from the outset to account for error, to take it under consideration as error, and therefore to take one’s distance from it, is precisely the supreme error of the existence of metalanguage, the illusion that while taking part in illusion, one is somehow also able to observe the process from an ‘objective’ distance. By avoiding identifying oneself with error, we commit the supreme error and miss the truth, because the place of truth itself is only constituted through error. To put this another way, we could recall the Hegelian proposition which can be paraphrased as ‘the fear of error is error itself: the true evil is not the evil object but the one who perceives evil as such.

One already finds this logic of the error interior to truth in Rosa Luxemburg’s description of the dialectic of the revolutionary process. When Eduard Bernstein raised objections apropos of the revisionist fear of taking power ‘too soon’, prematurely, before the ‘objective conditions’ have reached their maturity, she responded that the first seizures of power are necessarily ‘premature’: for the proletariat, the only way of arriving at ‘maturity’, of waiting for the ‘opportune’ moment to seize power, is to form themselves, prepare themselves for this seizure; and the only way of forming themselves is, of course, these ‘premature’ attempts … If we wait for the ‘opportune moment’, we will never attain it, because this ‘opportune moment’ – that which never occurs without fulfilling the subjective conditions for the ‘maturity’ of the revolutionary subject – can only occur through a series of ‘premature’ attempts. Thus the opposition to the ‘premature’ seizure of power is exposed as an opposition to the seizure of power in general, as such: to repeat the celebrated phrase of Robespierre, the revisionists want ‘revolution without revolution’.

Once we examine things more closely, we see that Luxemburg’s fundamental wager is precisely the impossibility of a metalanguage in the revolutionary process:

the revolutionary subject does not ‘conduct’ the process from an objective distance, he is himself constituted through this process; and it is because the time of revolution occurs by means of subjectivity that no one is able to ‘achieve revolution on time’, following ‘premature’, insufficient efforts.

The attitude of Luxemburg is exactly that of the hysteric faced with the obsessional metalanguage of revisionism:

strive to act, even if prematurely, in order to arrive at the correct act through this very error. One must be duped in one’s desire, though it is ultimately impossible, in order that something real comes about.

The propositions of ‘grasping substance as subject’ and ‘there is no metalanguage’ are merely variations on the same theme. It is therefore impossible to say: ‘Although there must be premature attempts at revolution, have no illusions and remain conscious that they are doomed in advance to failure.’ The idea that we are able to act and yet retain some distance with regard to the ‘objective’ – making possible some consideration of the act’s ‘objective signification’ (namely, its destiny to fail) during the act itself – misperceives the way that the ‘subjective illusion’ of the agents is part of the ‘objective’ process itself. This is why the revolution must be repeated: the ‘meaning’ of those premature attempts is literally to be found in their failure – or rather, as one says with Hegel, ‘a political revolution is, in general, only sanctioned by popular opinion after it has been repeated’.

sari roman-lagerspetz

Also Moya Lloyd (2007) sees that the Hegelian themes of dialectics and of Lordship and Bondage are important to Butler, and that these themes run through all of Butler´s work. … the Butlerian ek-static subjectivity does not engage with the whole logic of Hegel´s dialectical system. In short, whereas in Hegel the encounter between the subject and the Other leads into a “higher” knowledge of oneself and the world, in Butler any new knowledge constitutes a new form of error. Butler´s ek-static subject is a subject who constantly engages in a “selfloss”. Lloyd writes, importantly, that this is due to Butler´s suspending the narrative in PhS before the journeying consciousness encounters reason or spirit. Lloyd writes that this “suspension of the narrative” is important …  Lloyd writes that Butler rejects the idea of full dialectical synthesis and that, in this sense, her work is much closer to that of Foucault and Derrida. “For she, like them, holds on to the idea of the critical force of negativity but refuses to link that force to the idea of a dialectic that retains the “power of synthesis”, in other words, she subscribes…to what what might be called a non-synthetic dialectic. (Lloyd 2007, 19) Lloyd writes that in non-synthetic dialectic, difference cannot be incorporated into identity, as, she says, Hegel had assumed. Instead, particular differences, whether historical or linguistic, are insuperable.

Kojève negativity being

Negativity is pure nothingness: it is not, it does not exist, it does not appear. It is only as negation of Identity — that is, as Difference. … Negativity is real freedom which realizes itself and manifests or reveals itself as action.  … Man as Man is not given Being, but creative Action.  To be sure, Man is also given-Being and Nature: he also exists “in himself,” as animals and things exist. But it is only in an by Action that he is specifically human, and that he exists and appears as such —that is— as Being-for-itself … And by acting, he realizes and manifests Negativity or his Difference from natural given Being. 221-222

No animal commits suicide out of simple shame or pure vanity … no animal risks its life to capture or recapture a flag, to win officer’s stripes, or tobe decorated; animals never have bloody fights for pure prestige, for which the only reward is the resulting glory and which can be explained neither by the instinct of preservation (defense of life or search for food) nor by that of reproduction; no animal has ever fought a duel to pay back an insult that harmed noen of its vital interests, juist as no female has died “defending her honor” against a male. Therefore it is by negating acts of htis kind that Man realizes and manifests his freedom—that is, of Humanity— in the natural World: Work is another. …

In Hegel, Work “appears” for the first time in Nature in the form of slavish work imposed by the first Master on his first Slave (who submitted to him, moreover, voluntarily, since he could have escaped from slavery and work by accepting death in combat or by killing himself after his defeat).

Kojève slave work

The purely warlike attitude of the Master does not vary throughout the centruies, and therefore it cannot engender a historical change. Without the Slave’s Work, the “first” Fight would be reproduced indefinitely: hence nothing would change in Man, through Man, for Man; the World would remain identical to itself, it would be Nature and not a human historical World. 51

Quite different is the situation created by Work. Man who works transforms given Nature. Hence, if he repeats his act, he repeats it in different conditions, and thus his act itself will be different. After making the first ax, man can use it to make a second one, which, by that very fact, will be another, a better ax. Production transforms the means of production; the modification of means simplifies production; and so on. Where there is Work, then, there is necessarily change, progress, historical evolution. 51

And since it was he (the Slave rt) who changed the World, it is he who changes himself, whereas the Master changes only through the Slave.

Therefore, the historical process, the historical becoming of the human being, is the product of the working Slave and not of the warlike Master. To be sure, without the Master, there would have been no History; but only because without him there would have been no Slave and hence no Work. 52

Therefore … thanks to his Work, the Slave can change and become other than he is, that is, he can —finally— cease to be a Slave. Work is Bildung, in the double meaning of the word: on the one hand, it forms, transforms the World, humanizes it by making it more adapted to Man; on the other, it transforms, forms, educates man, it humanizes him by bringing him into greater conformity with the idea that he has of himself, an idea that —in the beginning— is only an abstract idea, an ideal.  If then, at the start, in the given World the Slave had a fearful “nature” and had to submit to the Master, to the strong man, it does not mean that this will always be the case.

Thanks to his work, he can become other; and, thanks to his work, the World can become other. And this is what actually took place, as universal history and, finally, the French Revolution and Napoleon show. 52

Man is not a Being that is: he is a Nothingness that nihilates through the negation of Being.

Kojève desire for recognition the master

The man who desires a thing humanly acts not so much to possess the thing as to make another recognize his right … to that thing. 40

And Hegel says that the being that is incapable of putting its life in danger in order to attain ends that are not immediately vital —i.e. the being that cannot risk its life in a Fight for Recognition, in a fight for pure prestige —is not a truly human being. 41

Therefore, human, historical, self-conscious existence is possible only where there are, or —at least— where there have been, bloody fights, wars for prestige.  And thus it was sounds of one of these Fights that Hegel heard while finishing his Phenomenology, in which he became conscious of himself by answering his question “What am I?”  41

The Master is the man who went all the way in a Fight for prestige, who risked his life in order to be recognized in his absolute superiority by another man. That is, to his real, natural biological life he preferred something ideal, spiritual, nonbiological: …45

It was to become Master, to be Master that he risked his life, and not to live a life of pleasure.  Now, what he wanted by engaging in the fight was to be recognized by another — that is, by someone other than himself but who is like him, by another man.  But in fact, at the end of the Fight, he is recognized only by a Slave.  To be a man, he wanted to be recognized by another man.  BUt if to be a man is to be Master, the Slave is not a man, and to be recognized by a Slave is not to be recognized by a man. He would have to be recognized by another Master.  But his is impossible, since  —by definition— the Master prefers death to slavish recognition of another’s superiority.  In short, the Master never succeeds in realizing his end, the end for which he risks his very life.  the Master can be satisfied only in and by death, his death or the death of his adversary.  … Now, is it worthwhile to risk one’s life in order to know that one is recognized by a Slave? Obviously not.  And that is why, to the extent that the Master is not made brutish by his pleasure and enjoyment, when he takes account of what his true end and the motive of his actions —i.e., his warlike actions— are, he will not, he will never be befriedigt, satisfied by what is, by what he is.

In other words, Master is an existential impasse. 46

Kojève Hegel desire

Generally speaking to understand Napoleon is to understand him in relation to the whole of anterior historical evolution , to understand the whole of universal history. 34

Before analyzing the “I think,” before proceeding to the Kantian theory of knowledge —i.e., of the relation between the (conscious) subject and the (conceived) object, one must ask what this subject is that is revealed in and by the I of “I think.”  One must ask when, why, and how man is led to say “I… .” 36

Indeed, we all know that the man who attentively contemplates a thing, who wants to see it as it is without changing anything, is “absorbed,” so to speak, by this contemplation— that is, by this thing, the less he is conscious of himself.  he may perhaps talk about the thing, but he will never talk about himself; in his discourse, the word “I” will not occur.

For this word to appear, something other than purely passive contemplation, which only reveals Being, must also be present. And this other thing, according to Hegel, is Desire, Begierde, of which he speaks in the beginning of Chapter IV. 37

Therefore, to speak generally: if the true (absolute) philosophy, unlike Kantian and pre-Kantian philosophy, is not a philosophy of Consciousness, but rather a philosophy of Self-Consciousness, a philosophy conscious of itself, taking account of itself, justifying itself, knowing itself to be absolute and revealed by itself to itself as such, then the Philosopher must —Man must— in the very foundation of his being not only be passive and positive contemplation, but also be active and negating Desire.  Now, if he is to be so, he cannot be a Being that is, that is eternally identical to itself, that is self-sufficient.  Man must be an emptiness, a nothingness, which is not a pure nothingness, (reines Nichts), but something that is to the extent that it annihilates Being, in order to realize itself at the expense of Being and to nihilate in being.  Man is negating Action, which transforms given Being and, by transforming it, transforms itself. 38

… the Animal does nto really transcend itself as given —i.e., as body; it does not rise above itself in order to come back toward itself; it has no distance with respect to itself in order to contemplate itself.

For Self-Consciousness to exist, for philosophy to exist, there must be transcendence of self with respect to self as given. 39

And this is possible, according to Hegel, only if Desire is directed not toward a given being, but toward a nonbeing. To desire Being is to fill oneself with this given Being, to enslave oneself to it. … Desire must be directged toward a nonbeing —that is, toward another Desire, another greedy emptiness, another I.  For Desire is absence of Being, … and not a Being that is.