re: AUT: Progress

[chris wright <cwright@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Some responses from other places by non-Marxist Hegelians that I found
moderately interesting.

> Positivism (a bad placing of this term) would not
> be "passive" Being in Deleuze; if, for Deleuze, Being
> itself presupposes this internalization of difference.
> The difference is where "negativity" is situated.
> For the Hegelians its originary; for Deleuze it is
> derivative.

It is correct that Hegel regards the Negative as basic
to Reality -- it is not simply the opposite of Being, it
is part of Being.  That is, the Negative is the opposite
of *abstract* Being, but it is part and parcel of concrete,
Real Being.

Many materialists fail to understand Hegel here, and that
is because naive materialism, like naive idealism, is
one-sided, dualist, and ultimately Aristotelian in logic.
The dualist thinks of Being on one side, and Nothingness
on the other side.  Hegel thinks of both *together* in
concrete Reality.  Being, as such, is abstract for Hegel,
and only the Being-Nothingness synthesis (Becoming) is
the concrete.  Hegel says,

     "The being in determinate being, which
     is supposed to express the concept of
     God, is nothing else than abstract being,
     which is the same as nothing." (Hegel,
     SCIENCE OF LOGIC, 1812, trans. Miller,
     p. 113)

The first triad in Hegel's System (Being-Nothing-Becoming)
states that Being is so abstract it amounts to Nothing.
Yet for the dualist, Being is considered the ultimate
concept of all.  So this is part of Hegel's revolution.

> By rooting progress to the negative, the Hegelian isn't
> able to account for affirmation (because if law negates
> phenomena, then the negation of phenomena equals what
> exactly? Not affirmation.

That is false.  Hegel's system accounts for affirmation
in two ways:  as the abstract affirmation of the thesis,
and as the concrete affirmation of the synthesis.  That
is repeated again and again in Hegel's SCIENCE OF LOGIC.

> Being thus has this weird relationship with Nothingness
> that while being very "complete" and "totaling" can
> only be so by abstracting being's "vitality" (to use
> Bergsonian language))...

That is the materialist prejudice -- that Being is already
sufficiently rich.  For the materialist, too, Being is
Matter.  Matter explains everything for the materialist.
For Hegel, Matter itself is only a shorthand, an abstract
concept that needs to be unpacked.
______________________________________________________________________

To all==Stephen Houlgate points out that Deleuze's interpretation of
Hegel is
a distortion=He says Hegel's dialectic is not in fact based upon an
initial
external negation of the specific differences between things,and does
not
therefore constitute a flight into an abstract  world of fictional
concepts  as
Deleuze asserts.Dialectical negation for Hegel is not  something
brought to
bear on a positive premise from the outside,but is inherent  in that
premise from
the start.Accordingly in  Hegel's  Science of Logic,a thing must be in
itself the
negation of something else[which is also negatively determined] if it is
to have
any determinate characteristics and indeed be differentiated from
anything
else-at all, The notion of something real or specific which is not
negatively
determined or mediated,is precisely what dialectical philosophy shows up
to be
an impossibility.
     Deleuze  fails to see Hegel's point.For Deleuze.negation is always
either a
denial of already qualitatively specified forces,or the secondary
consequences
of the sellf-affirmation of already qualitatively specified forces,  It
is never
conceived as that which specifies and differentiates such forces in the
first
place=Affirmation and negation for Deleuse  are quite distinct.

Cheers,
Chris



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