Re: AUT: Negri, Hegel, etc

[rainzed rainzed <rainzed@xxxxxxxxx>]

> This question and the third question are not
> disconnected, IMO.  The
> structure of the smaller Logic is what I am basing
> part of my response on.
> In "The Three Attitudes Towards Objectivity", Hegel
> moves in a way which
> does not indicate a teleological position (first
> pointed out by Raya
> Dunayevskaya, I believe.)  That does not mean that
> Hegel does not succumb to
> telelogical positions at points.  I would argue that
> it is a contradiction
> internal to a theistic dialectic.

You seem to be implying that because Hegel understood
that the subjective exposition of the categories of
the logic could change and would never reach a perfect
representation of the absolute, then that disqualifies
his thought from teleology? This is a bit silly in my
book as it assumes that some how Hegel's presentation
was a genuine exposition of how one would unify the
categories of thought where the notion is at home with
itself, as if the reading and writing were genuinely
the movement of thoughts themselves, rather than
something judged and devised by Hegel's authorial
intentions, with a definite end in mind. Or that
moreover because the motor of development is becoming,
self-creation, rather than a pre-ordained structure,
that Hegel's own results can be dispensed with.

Hegel's thought is absolutely imbedded in its own
intended result. His intention, his end, his purpose
and the telos of his philosophy, is to universalise
this character of movement, as it is the means by
which he can posit the result as an synthetic unity
that contains - or amounts to - the process itself.

By seeing the partial as untrue, that truth could only
reside in the whole, within its result, and that this
process could take different forms and proceeds
through error(as Gadamer pointed out) - no matter the
profundity of this insight - it demonstrates clearly
that the knowledge of the logic has allready decided
upon what it sets out to prove. If this is not
teleology, then show me something thatis!

You appear to want to exonerate Hegel from teleology
because your own conception of marx is so reliant upon
the kernel of truth supposedly contained within Hegel,
on which you construe the truth of Marx. As such you
need to read Hegel against Hegel, always cosntruing
his dialectic in order to defend a reading of Marx.
This is characteristically how Raya reads the logic -
and I struggle to believe that you have read anything
of it but her commentaries on it -  as if we only need
to give voice to the Marx within it.

Needless to say this leads you to the absurd
interpretation of Hegel that somehow his thought is
neither ontological nor teleological.

The question of ontology is a case in point. hegel's
thought was not an ontology in the sense of its
classical metaphysical meaning, but the whole subject
matter of the first half of both works of the logic,
is being. It is not ontological in that it is
concerned with being as such, though this is
definitely a moment of mediation within the
exposition, it aims at the result of presenting God as
"THE being", the definitive article, to use the eaxact
words of the logic. Moreover, it is being that shines
the light of essence into itself. As Hegel argues, the
absolute is essence in prescisely the same sense that
the absolute is being -  as its truth is always the
return of being to itself through the negation of its
otherness - the interiorisation of its other, of its
negative. The structure of the logic repeats this same
formula of contradiction over and over again. (it is
for this reason that one can argue that the beginning
is contained in the result.)

BTW 'theism' has very little to do with Hegel's
thought. Theism is the idea that God intervenes within
the world, that he is its transcendental creator(as in
for instance Judaism) and is the exact opposite of
what you yourself claim to be Hegel's metaphysics, of
Gods acting self creation within the world.

 As
> such, there is the aspect
> of Hegel which is about negation as the movement of
> self-creation
> (dialectic), but its alienated form through the idea
> of Theistic
> self-creation and dialectic as finding resolution in
> consciousness, rather
> than in sensuous human social practice, which
> includes thought, hence Marx's
> comment on "practical-critical" in the Theses on
> Feuerbach.

Ditto on theism.
But don't you see that because Hegel's concern is to
arrive at the absolute through its own self-generating
movement, his only option is to configure the absolute
in idealist terms? It is only within the head that
this synthetic unity can take place, only within the
development of consciousness, that the forms of spirit
can express themselves always in the same form of the
estrangement and return of its other. The dialectic is
quintiessentialy idealist, it is only as a thought
form, that it has any effectivity - as such it is only
because of Hegel's idealism that movement in history
can be conceived in the same singular manner of the
idea's increased consciousness of itself. Marx tried
for a long time to present capital in such a manner,
as the unity of the historical and logical, but he
couldn't accomplish this, realising that the two types
of development follow different paths. Only in
idealism can you have this kind of unity. Marx
therefore settled upon using Hegel's dialectic of the
logic in his exposition of capital as a thought form,
wherein he tried to present capital's inner logic, its
determinate forms as the result of the inner necessity
of the contradictory reality of its own relations. As
we know very well, the need to include empirical
evidence (from outside so to speak) in the exposition
show very clearly that Marx was unable to complete
even this more modest goal - he could show that it was
a contradictory relation, but he could not demonstrate
simultenously the historical necessity of its
emergence as such, i.e. he presented capital in its
ideal thought- form, and even then in not a fully
consistent way, no matter how much he knew it was
nothing of the sort.



>But, IMO, Marx is
> focussed exactly on the
> dialectic as the part worth salvaging, if we re-read
> it through the lense of
> HUMAN self-creation, which is truly a massive
> inversion.  In the process,
> Marx critiques and dispenses with the aspects of
> Hegel which are not
> consistent to the dialectic because the dialectic is
> a dialectic of
> alienated practice.  The forays into teleology are
> critiqued in this move,
> since there can be no teleologies or closed systems
> within human practice.

Ditto. But Marx did not salvage this part of the
dialectic, he left it to the gnawing criticism of the
mice. What he appropriated in his mature work was the
formal characteristic of dialectic as examplar of the
self development of thought in and through
instantiation, criticsm and negation of its categories
- as a process that is characterised by its own
effectivity, as process.

The 'forays' into teleology!!! do you think that when
Hegel wrote the Logic or the phenomenology, he didn't
know that it was going to end in the absolute?

Furthermore, even in Marx's early comments on Hegel's
dialectic, he points out that the development is
'abstract' 'speculative' i.e. partial. He does not
further the implications of this insight, errouously
believing that one could substitute the category of
man, or human history, for spirit, that all that needs
to be done is return what is alienated to its proper
ground. But this is infact a nonsense. Hegel's
constructed a totality out of a partiality, hence he
absolutised an already one-sided element. This can not
be inverted or disassociated from its alienated form,
because that would be to say that the forms of the
development of a partial totality, could be translated
- without revision - into the forms of development of
the real, material totality.

> Even so, it is no accident that Marx, in the Theses
> on Feuerbach, critiques
> materialism for its contemplative attitude and
> credits idealism with having
> manifested all of the active aspects.  That one
> point already subsumes
> Hegel's critique of the Enlightenment's ontological
> stance in favor of life
> as self-creation, without denying the richness of
> Hegel's critique.

Hegel criticises the critical philosophy, for having
"divorced thought from the thing" - which is why he
thought that the old metaphysics had reached a higher
level of understanding!!!!!! READ THE LOGIC!


> > Do you think Hegel would share your dismissal of
> the
> > identity of thought and being?
>
> This is a complicated question.  I am leery to get
> into a terminology
> dispute, but in so far as I would say that for
> Hegel, thought involves the
> active process of becoming, not of 'being', I would
> say yes.

But being for Hegel IS becoming. See above.

>For Hegel, spirit
> is self-creating and
> self-realizing through non-identity, through
> contradiction and antagonism.

You recongise this, and restate it, but refuse to look
deeper into its philosophical implications: this
progression is entirely reliant upon its own
priveledged content; thought itself. What in the real
world is inimicable to this movement?

> But that non-identity does not mean that existence
> and essence are separate
> spheres (dualism), since Spirit realizes itself
> through human activity.
> Spirit cannot 'exist' separately from human
> activity.

>But Hegel's concern
> is with Spirit's self-realization, not human
> self-realization as its own
> end.

And presumably human self-realisation would be a
return to what we are, or what we were always meant to
be? I thought we didn't like teleology!!!! For
goodness sake, if we create ourselves, how can we
speak of what in essence we are? As self creating
beings, ok suppose we buy this, who is going to follow
the logic through and work out what an
non-essentialist essentialism would look like...not
me, no thanks. Where does the human essence reside
when it is estranged? In God? How can this be so, when
we know God is a fiction i.e. only our idealisation of
ourselves? - are you working on a secular idealisation
of man?

> At least, this is how I understand it at this point.
>  I am hoping that my
> re-reading will unencumber me of all kinds of
> misconceptions, which I fear I
> all-too-readily express in my reply.

Well if you are fearful of your misconceptions, and
are continuing your education in public as Hegel said
of Schelling, why be so bombastic dismissive and
authoritatively disdainful of other works in political
philosophy that do not share your (mis) conceptions?
Indeed if you looked further at the work of Negri and
Althusser on Spinoza etc, you will find that they are
trying to establish a ground for materialism which
does not require forays into "mystical" idealism in
order to make bad sense of itself. The paradox of your
probing around in Hegel to find a truth for Marx, only
exemplifies the urgency of that task.


> Hegel has to be grasped in his totality, and with
> the seemingly bizarre
> insight that his religious mysticism is very
> important to his working out of
> dialectic.

I think this answers for itself.

yours,
bananaman

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