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Monthly Archives: April 2007

Abstract Gestures

8 Comments Posted by on April 10, 2007

Yesterday I posted a few reflections on an early reading group discussion of Hegel’s Phenomenology. Today my cold exacted its revenge for this burst of productivity, and I have found myself half-dozing, in a fog of a less-than-Hegelian kind, for much of the day. I had intended to write one unified reflection on the entire section on Consciousness, but instead find myself reduced to a few brief thoughts on sense-certainty. Somehow this seems oddly appropriate.

There’s something delightfully playful about this section. On its face, sense-certainty would seem to offer a problem for Hegel’s approach, which seeks a form of philosophy that can grasp things in their determinate specificity: sense-certainty, flushed with the details provided by the immediate encounter of specific subjects with particular objects, would seem to provide access to the richest and most concrete form of knowledge. Surely moving beyond this form of subjectivity could only ever entail a loss of determinate specificity? How does Hegel tackle this problem?

Hegel begins by reminding us that we must engage with this problem immanently, invoking only what is available to sense-certainty itself, unfolding the ways in which sense-certainty is not itself adequate to its own notion, and thus points toward the possibility for a more adequate form of knowledge. His argument takes the form of demonstrating that the true content of sense-certainty is not the immediate experience of boundless qualitative specificity, but instead a particularly impoverished form of mediation and abstraction.

Hegel presents the core of his argument, and explains his presentational strategy, at the outset:

A concrete actual certainty of sense is not merely this pure immediacy, but an example, an instance, of that immediacy. Amongst the innumerable distinctions that here come to light, we find in all cases the fundamental difference–viz. that in sense-experience pure being at once breaks up into the two “thises”, as we have called them, one this as I, and one as object. When we reflect on this distinction, it is seen that neither the one nor the other is merely immediate, merely is in sense-certainty, but is at the same time mediated: I have the certainty through the other, viz. through the actual fact; and this, again, exists in that certainty through an other, viz. through the I.

It is not only we who make this distinction of essential truth and particular example, of essence and instance, immediacy and mediation; we find it in sense-certainty itself, and it has to be taken up in the form in which it exists there, not as we have just determined it. (92-93)

The first sentence already presents the structure of the argument, by drawing a distinction between individual moments of sense-certainty, and “pure immediacy” – a distinction between essence and example. In the final sentence, Hegel defends his argumentative strategy, explaining that, while we could certainly “cut to chase” and conclude that the essence-example distinction should be rejected in favour of a concept of mediation, such a move would breach the immanent frame of the analysis. What is needed is not a critique for us, from our perspective, but instead a critique unfolded from what is given within sense-certainty, which unpacks the elements of sense-certainty to show how this form of subjectivity points immanently to its recognition of the necessity for mediation and negation.

Hegel then moves into his critique, arguing that the essence-example distinction arises immanently within sense-certainty, initially specified as the perception that the object is essential, and exists indifferent to the existence of any perceiving ego. Hegel warns once again that we must not leap directly to judgment as to whether the object exists in this form “in truth”, but must instead explore whether sense-certainty contains any immanent tensions that undermine this perception of the object (94).

What follows is a beautiful, playful series of passages exploring the nature of the object – the This of sense-certainty. Hegel breaks the This into the Now and the Here, and initially unfolds an argument predicated on a distinction between what we mean and what we can say – what language allows us to express. Like a good analytic philosopher, Hegel demands: tell me – precisely – what you mean! When is this Now? Where is this Here? Hegel argues that we will always fail to meet this challenge. No doubt we mean something determinate, but language fails us utterly when we try to capture and communicate this determinacy. Instead, what we are able to communicate is not being, but negation, not immediacy, but meditation, not specificity and concreteness, but Universality – this, Hegel argues, is the truth of sense-certainty:

To the question, What is the Now? we reply, for example, the Now is night-time. To test the truth of this certainty of sense, a simple experiment is all we need: write that truth down. A truth cannot lose anything by being written down, and just as little by our preserving and keeping it. If we look again at the truth we have written down, look at it now, at this noon-time, we shall have to say it has turned stale and become out of date.

The Now that is night is kept fixed, i.e. it is treated as what it is given out to be, as something which is; but it proves to be rather a something which is not. The Now itself no doubt maintains itself, but as what is not night; similarly in its relation to the day which the Now is at present, it maintains itself as something that is also not day, or as altogether something negative. This self -maintaining Now is therefore not something immediate but something mediated; for, qua something that remains and preserves itself, it is determined through and by means of the fact that something else, namely day and night, is not. Thereby it is just as much as ever it was before, Now, and in being this simple fact, it is indifferent to what is still associated with it; just as little as night or day is its being, it is just as truly also day and night; it is not in the least affected by this otherness through which it is what it is. A simple entity of this sort, which is by and through negation, which is neither this nor that, which is a not-this, and with equal indifference this as well as that–a thing of this kind we call a Universal. The Universal is therefore in point of fact the truth of sense-certainty, the true content of sense-experience.

It is as a universal, too, that we give utterance to sensuous fact. What we say is: “This”, i.e. the universal this; or we say: “it is”, i.e. being in general. Of course we do not present before our mind in saying, so the universal this, or being in general, but we utter what is universal; in other words, we do not actually and absolutely say what in this sense-certainty we really mean. Language, however, as we see, is the more truthful; in it we ourselves refute directly and at once our own “meaning”; and since universality is the real truth of sense-certainty, and language merely expresses this truth, it is not possible at all for us even to express in words any sensuous existence which we “mean”. (95-97)

Hegel runs through a parallel argument with reference to the Here (98). He then explores the attempt to resolve this problem through a flight from the object – which has now come to be regarded as inessential – to the ego, now regarded as the ground of sense-certainty (100-101). Here again, Hegel argues that the “I” of sense-certainty is the universal, rather than the particular, I – and illustrates how language renders it impossible for us to pick out the specific I that we mean:

The force of its truth thus lies now in the I, in the immediate fact of my seeing, hearing, and so on; the disappearance of the particular Now and Here that we “mean” is prevented by the fact that I keep hold on them. The Now is daytime, because I see it; the Here is a tree for a similar reason. Sense-certainty, however, goes through, in this connection, the same dialectic process as in the former case. I, this I, see the tree, and assert the tree to be the Here; another I, however, sees the house and maintains the Here is not a tree but a house. Both truths have the same authenticity–the immediacy of seeing and the certainty and assurance both have as to their specific way of knowing; but the one certainty disappears in the other.

In all this, what does not disappear is the I qua universal, whose seeing is neither the seeing of this tree nor of this house, but just seeing simpliciter, which is mediated through the negation of this house, etc., and, in being so, is all the same simple and indifferent to what is associated with it, the house, the tree, and so on. I is merely universal, like Now, Here, or This in general. No doubt I “mean” an individual I, but just something as little as I am able to say what I “mean” by Now, Here, so it is impossible in the case of the I too. By saying “this Here”, “this Now”, “an individual thing”, I say all Thises, Heres, Nows, or Individuals. In the same way when I say “I”, “this individual I”, I say quite generally “all I’s”, every one is “I”, this individual I. When philosophy is requested, by way of putting it to a crucial test–a test which it could not possibly sustain–to “deduce”, to “construe”, “to find a priori”, or however it is put, a so-called this thing, or this particular man, it is reasonable that the person making this demand should say what “this thing”, or what “this I”, he means: but to say this is quite impossible. (101-102)

One final step remains for sense-certainty, after this experience that positing either the subject or the object as essential undermines immediacy: the attempt to suspend the distinction between subject and object, to posit the immediate identity of both, and to view the resultant exclusionary whole as essential (103-104). To address this form of sense-certainty immanently, Hegel accepts the limitation of moving beyond language, to gestures – to pointing:

Since, then, this certainty wholly refuses to come out if we direct its attention to a Now that is night or an I to whom it is night, we will go to it and let ourselves point out the Now that is asserted. We must let ourselves point it out for the truth of this immediate relation is the truth of this ego which restricts itself to a Now or a Here. Were we to examine this truth afterwards, or stand at a distance from it, it would have no meaning at all; for that would do away with the immediacy, which is of its essence. We have therefore to enter the same point of time or of space, indicate them, point them out to ourselves, i.e. we must let ourselves take the place of the very same I, the very same This, which is the subject knowing with certainty. Let us, then, see how that immediate is constituted, which is shown to us. (105)

Yet even this, Hegel argues, will not capture the immediacy that is meant: as soon as the Now has been pointed out, it is past – and therefore revealed as situated in its relationship with other Nows; the Here when pointed out shows itself necessarily in its spatial relationship with other Heres. The point therefore does not transcend the limitations of language to pick out an immediate experience of a specific Now and a particular Here. Instead, pointing reveals itself to be a process, and sense-certainty the history of this process – and the process selects, not the immediacy that is meant, but mediation, negation and universality (106-109).

Hegel returns at the end to the issue of language, and to the gap between what we “mean” when we try to capture our experience of particular, individual, unique things, and what language allows us to say:

Those who put forward such assertions really themselves say, if we bear in mind what we remarked before, the direct opposite of what they mean: a fact which is perhaps best able to bring them to reflect on the nature of the certainty of sense-experience. They speak of the “existence” of external objects, which can be more precisely characterized as actual, absolutely particular, wholly personal, individual things, each of them not like anything or anyone else; this is the existence which they say has absolute certainty and truty. They “mean” this bit of paper I am writing on, or rather have written on: but they do not say what they “mean”. If they really wanted to say this bit of paper which they “mean”, and they wanted to say so, that is impossible, because the This of sense, which is “meant”, cannot be reached by language, which belongs to consciousness, i.e. to what is inherently universal. In the very attempt to say it, it would, therefore, crumble in their hands; those who have begun to describe it would not be able to finish doing so: they would have to hand it over to others, who would themselves in the last resort have to confess to speaking about a thing that has no being. They mean, then, doubtless this bit of paper here, which is quite different from that bit over there; but they speak of actual things, external or sensible objects, absolutely individual, real, and so on; that is, they say about them what is simply universal. Consequently what is called unspeakable is nothing else than what is untrue, irrational, something barely and simply meant.

If nothing is said of a thing except that it is an actual thing, an external object, this only makes it the most universal of all possible things, and thereby we express its likeness, its identity, with everything, rather than its difference from everything else. When I say “an individual thing”, I at once state it to be really quite a universal, for everything is an individual thing: and in the same way “this thing” is everything and anything we like. More precisely, as this bit of paper, each and every paper is a “this bit of paper”, and I have thus said all the while what is universal. If I want, however, to help out speech-which has the divine nature of directly turning the mere “meaning” right round about, making it into something else, and so not letting it ever come the length of words at all-by pointing out this bit of paper, then I get the experience of what is, in point of fact, the real truth of sense-certainty. I point it out as a Here, which is a Here of other Heres, or is in itself simply many Heres together, i.e. is a universal. I take it up then, as in truth it is; and instead of knowing something immediate, I “take” something “truly”, I per-ceive (wahrnehme, per-cipio). (110)

The final sentence is particularly important – and expresses a principle that will guide Hegel’s approach throughout: “I take it up then, as in truth it is”. Another way to express the same concept: things appear as what they are. A central implication of Hegel’s approach – this would also hold true for elements of my own theoretical work – is the contention that, searching for some essential truth behind appearance, constantly striving to penetrate the veil, we miss the opportunity to explore and unfold the significance of the qualitative character of appearance itself – and thus to capture a kind of knowledge that becomes visible only once we stop trying to overcome appearance and begin to ask, instead, why things should appear in their specific, determinate form.

Philosophy of History, Reading Group

Hegelian Fog

3 Comments Posted by on April 9, 2007

I had intended to write something during the break on The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology – a work over which the reading group discussion has tarried. When we originally met to discuss our agreed selections, I found myself repeatedly supporting my own interpretations with reference to sections of the text that fell outside our collective reading. This gave me an inequitable argumentative advantage (I wish I had a photo of the expression on L Magee’s face at the precise moment when, contesting a quite vehement and unequivocal reading LM had advanced, I read out a fairly unambiguous – for Adorno – quotation from a page that hadn’t been in sections photocopied for the group). And this caused us to decide to reconvene the following week, so that everyone could have the benefit of reading and discussing the same text…

Unfortunately, when the appointed time arrived, both LM and I were under the weather and, moreover, I hadn’t gotten around to photocopying the additional sections for everyone else (evidently, I want to keep these passages to myself…). Our meeting was thus postponed, and G Gollings impounded my text to ensure that some photocopying would actually take place. So, while I had planned to write something on Popper’s concept of science, Adorno’s concept of totality, and my own programmatic understanding of critical theory as it relates to such topics, any post on these subjects will have to wait until my text is returned.

For the last several days, I’ve taken this situation as licence to catch up on a term’s worth of stunted sleep, to read randomly and lightly and, particularly, to bombard LM with emails on any and all associations that have cropped up in my random, light readings – an action I can only interpret as some kind of particularly unfitting punshiment for the extraordinarily helpful feedback LM has been providing lately on my dissertation… But I am beginning to feel guilty for not having done any substantive writing during the break, as well as for not having done any serious reading-group-related writing in some weeks, and thought that now was perhaps the time to resume the dropped arc on Hegel’s Phenomenology.

Hegel seems to be cropping up quite often on this blog lately but, for those wanting a more specific overview of the discussion at hand, the main posts dedicated specifically to Phenomenology (not necessarily posted in this order) include mine on:

The Preface and
The Introduction,

as well as LM’s detailed post on the section on Lordship and Bondage, which provoked such a long response from me that I lifted it out of the comments and published it in a post of its own.

In addition, there have been a number of small posts, some only half-serious, and all in the form of placeholders or unresolved discussions, of which the principal include:

LM’s New Year’s Challenge,
A Discussion of Whether Hegel’s Method Is Deductive and, of course, a post on
Nothing (you know, with me, that nothing – or, more accurately, how nothing is really something – is going to have to enter into the discussion at some point…).

Quotations and citations for all posts in this series are derived from the same online source text, chosen because it allows easy reference to both English and German.

These existing posts suggest that I have left an annoying gap between the introduction and the discussion of self-consciousness – a gap into which, I suppose, some discussion of Hegel’s treatment of consciousness should now be inserted… I confess to having difficulty getting myself back into this thoughtspace – but that’s the challenge of the Phenomenology, isn’t it: getting ourselves into the thoughtspace or standpoint of particular perspectival positions? That, or I’m just mired in what LM has recently called the “Hegelian fog”.

What I thought I would do in this post is just remind myself of the issues LM and I discussed in relation to the section on Consciousness – which, from memory, were mainly (again!) reflections on the structure and argumentative strategy of the text. I’ll then try to follow up in the next couple of days with more substantive commentary on the text itself. I should note that I don’t take notes on the reading group discussions, and so have only my memory (several months old, at this point) of what we discussed. I should also note that, although I am playing off against some questions LM raised at the time, I don’t understand these positions to reflect LM’s current views – I am only recalling such positions here because they provide the easiest means for me to explain the occasion for the sorts of comments I’ll be making below.

First – from a memory that LM should correct as needed – LM voiced quite strongly the feeling that the text in these early sections was quite arbitrary – the arguments clever but, from LM’s perspective, “forced”, driven into a direction that revealed mediation and negation as necessary endpoints to every argumentative turn, the conclusions unconvincing because the path was so obviously predetermined. LM also, I think, perceived the structure of the argument to remain essentially deductive, with the notions of mediation and/or negation functioning as something like a priori concepts from which everything else was to be derived.

My position was to point to Hegel’s various stage whispers and comments on the style and argumentative strategy of the text (issues that I explore in greater depth in the posts linked above), and to argue that an immanent philosophical framework – one intended to contest the validity of subject-object dualism (while also explaining the plausibility or attraction of such an approach) – in a sense isn’t “allowed” to engage in deduction from a priori grounds. Instead, the system grounds itself through the unfolding of its own concepts – an argumentative strategy that means, as Hegel flags in the prolegomena, that the presentation will initially appear quite arbitrary, as the plausibility of the concepts can only be demonstrated by seeing what the core concepts allow you to grasp as the system unfolds.

This kind of argument is designed to react back on itself, such that starting points become less and less arbitrary as the argument demonstrates how much can be understood if the system is allowed to unfold in this exact form. As the argument unfolds, Hegel’s system gradually swallows competing modes of thought – showing that it can grasp these alternative approaches to science, philosophy, political theory and other fields – enveloping them within itself, and thus preserving their insights as it also transcends them by grasping what they cannot. Done effectively, the self-grounding character of this kind of argument cannot be refuted by a direct attack on its “ground”, as the “ground” is no longer a starting point from which the rest of the argument derives, but more like a fractal structure that drops out of the argument in each of its moments and as a whole. In this context, refutation needs to assume at least something of the form of the original system – embedding that system, too, as a plausible and yet limited perspective whose contours can be enveloped and transcended within a more powerful form of immanent critique.

Whether Hegel constructs his immanent argument “effectively” in this sense, and therefore requires such an enveloping critique in response, is something that can be explored in later discussion. I think, however, that the basic concept that immanent critique must be self-grounding in this specific sense – that all of the normative or critical standards deployed by a critique must “drop out”, immanently, from its own analysis – is a direct logical implication of the move to transcend subject-object dualism. I think that I see this point made directly in Hegel’s text, in his various reflections on the style and order of presentation. If it’s not there, I would suggest that it should be… ;-P And my assumption that Hegel is intending to create an argument in this form, structures my reading of this text.

The other point I vaguely remember making – much more tentatively – in the discussion with LM was that one possible implication of an immanent critique (and here I do not mean to suggest that this applies necessarily to Hegel’s system, although I’m interested in exploring the issue) could be an argument that the simplest, most pristine and most “universal”, concepts could only become visible, could only become available or intuitive to thought, in a quite complex context characterised by the entire constellation of relationships analysed by the theory. Unlike in a deductive system, where more complex entities are derived or built up from simpler entities, in an immanent approach the simplest entities are moments within a complex system of relationships – they exist – and only could exist, in the form in which the theory immanently grasps them – alongside and in relationship with more apparently complex entities.

This point has a number of complex implications. One is that “universals” – the concepts or ideals that seem the easiest to detach from their context, because they present themselves as having abstracted away all the specific elements of a context – are actually determinately bound to the complex context in which they are moments: they may appear to be what results when determinate content has been stripped away, but their universality is actually a determinate content of its own.

The distinction between “real” and “conceptual” abstractions, which has occasionally occupied this blog over the past several months, is related to this point: immanent universals are “real” abstractions – reflecting a determinate perspective that is generated within a particular kind of context; if we take such immanent universals and cast about with them through history, we sever their immanent character, and deploy these ideals and concepts as nothing more than “conceptual” abstractions – as mere generalisations or thought experiments. This argument thus has some implications for how we might understand how we are tempted to think about the past – militating in particular against the tendency to assume that simpler and more pristine concepts are somehow signs of some more primitive condition, earlier origin, or natural state. More interestingly, the capacity precisely to disentangle a universal from the constellation in which it arose might have some important potentials for practice – for critique in a more transformative sense than is likely implied directly within Hegel’s approach: universals whose determinate character implies they are not intrinsically bound to a particular context can have the corrosive potential to react back against the specific context in which they arose…

There are other implications (as well as a number of important qualifications and clarifications that I should probably make), but it’s getting late, and I’m intending this discussion as a means of working my way back into Hegel, rather than – at this point – as a means of diving off into my own conception of critical theory.

LM is welcome to correct my memory of our earlier discussions, or reprise and update the discussion from the perspective of the further readings we’ve done. I’ll try to write something about Hegel’s actual text in the next couple of days.

Critical Theory, Philosophy of History, Reading Group

The Social Function of Philosophy

Leave a comment Posted by on April 8, 2007

Still recovering from a cold and feeling a bit too fuzzy to write. I’ve been wanting to revisit Horkheimer’s “Traditional and Critical Theory”, and was casting about to see if there were a copy readily available online. Instead, I stumbled across his 1939 piece “The Social Function of Philosophy”.

Re-reading it, I was struck by his reflections on Hegel as an example of the unintended consequences of mobilising philosophy in the service of reaction:

In philosophy, unlike business and politics, criticism does not mean the condemnation of a thing, grumbling about some measure or other, or mere negation and repudiation. Under certain conditions, criticism may actually take this destructive turn; there are examples in the Hellenistic age. By criticism, we mean that intellectual, and eventually practical, effort which is not satisfied to accept the prevailing ideas, actions, and social conditions unthinkingly and from mere habit; effort which aims to coordinate the individual sides of social life with each other and with the general ideas and aims of the epoch, to deduce them genetically, to distinguish the appearance from the essence, to examine the foundations of things, in short, really to know them. Hegel, the philosopher to whom we are most indebted in many respects, was so far removed from any querulous repudiation of specific conditions, that the King of Prussia called him to Berlin to inculcate the students with the proper loyalty and to immunize them against political opposition. Hegel did his best in that direction, and declared the Prussian state to be the embodiment of the divine Idea on earth. But thought is a peculiar factor. To justify the Prussian state, Hegel had to teach man to overcome the onesidedness and limitations of ordinary human understanding and to see the interrelationship between all conceptual and real relations. Further, he had to teach man to construe human history in its complex and contradictory structure, to search out the ideas of freedom and justice in the lives of nations, to know how nations perish when their principle proves inadequate and the time is ripe for new social forms. The fact that Hegel thus had to train his students in theoretical thought, had highly equivocal consequences for the Prussian state. In the long run, Hegel’s work did more serious harm to that reactionary institution than all the use the latter could derive from his formal glorification. Reason is a poor ally of reaction. A little less than ten years after Hegel’s death (his chair remained unoccupied that long), the King appointed a successor to fight the “dragon’s teeth of Hegelian pantheism,” and the “arrogance and fanaticism of his school.”

And by his analysis of the role of critique in the Enlightenment, compared with his own time:

We cannot say that, in the history of philosophy, the thinkers who had the most progressive effect were those who found most to criticize or who were always on hand with so-called practical programs. Things are not that simple. A philosophical doctrine has many sides, and each side may have the most diverse historical effects. Only in exceptional historical periods, such as the French Enlightenment, does philosophy itself become politics. In that period, the word philosophy did not call to mind logic and epistemology so much as attacks on the Church hierarchy and on an inhuman judicial system. The removal of certain preconceptions was virtually equivalent to opening the gates of the new world. Tradition and faith were two of the most powerful bulwarks of the old regime, and the philosophical attacks constituted an immediate historical action. Today, however, it is not a matter of eliminating a creed, for in the totalitarian states, where the noisiest appeal is made to heroism and a lofty Weltanschauung, neither faith nor Weltanshauung rule, but only dull indifference and the apathy of the individual towards destiny and to what comes from above. Today our task is rather to ensure that, in the future, the capacity for theory and for action which derives from theory will never again disappear, even in some coming period of peace when the daily routine may tend to allow the whole problem to be forgotten once more. Our task is continually to struggle, lest mankind become completely disheartened by the frightful happenings of the present, lest man’s belief in a worthy, peaceful and happy direction of society perish from the earth.

I hope to revisit the issue of critical theory – what it is, what its contemporary role might be – very soon.

Critical Theory, Philosophy of History

Blogopalypse Now

2 Comments Posted by on April 2, 2007

Mostly Harmless is at it again – gathering together the various conversational strands of the cross-blog discussion of contemporary apocalypticism from a few months back, and adding some new voices. I had intended to try to write something new for the event, but find myself strangely too busy at the moment for the end of the world – if only they could schedule these cataclysms further in advance… Anyone missing substantive content around here lately might be interested in my original intervention into this discussion – which, like most of my interventions into cross-blog discussions, was a tangent, in this case avoiding the topic of apocalypticism altogether, but exploring a few themes relating to the connections between sociology and psychology in Adorno’s (and Sinthome’s!) versions of critical theory. Mostly Harmless provides many more links (including some to summary posts here) to earlier and later rounds of the discussion: note that, unlike me, most of the people who originally contributed to this discussion actually said something about apocalypticism in contemporary culture… Enjoy!

Conversations, Interdisciplinary, Links

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