Sunday, October 14, 2007

Hegel and the sway of truth

Why do we have so many objections to Hegel's philosophy as too "idealistic," that is (ignoring any historical determinations of this word but rather getting at the experience of Hegel's philosophy it tries to signify), as making the world conform to a movement of thought rather than to its own movements? This is the underlying phenomenon that the critiques of Hegel by Feuerbach, Marx, Engels, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Kojeve, Sartre, Benjamin, Bataille, Blanchot, Lukacs, Lacan, Foucault, Derrida, and others react to and from which they claim their justification. In other words, in Feuerbach, Marx, Engels, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Kojeve, Sartre, Benjamin, Bataille, Blanchot, Lukacs, Lacan, Foucault, Derrida... in all these philosophers reacting to Hegel, they all levy a critique on Hegel's being too idealistic, or, to use a word of Bataille's used to characterize this experience (that Derrida takes over), too restricted--in the sense of restricting the movements of the world to its own movements, to its own "economy." Now, I would include Heidegger too, except he in a sense understands why this is so, and so can't be said to be merely "reacting" to the idealism of Hegel--even though he himself is probably the most critical of this catalogue of critics, the person that Hegel disgusted most. For it is through his determination of the essence of truth that he shows us there have been other essences or swayings of truth (Wesen for Heidegger means more like a movement of ecstatical perdurance or swaying than "nature," which it is often horribly rendered as), and particularly the sway of truth of which Hegel's "idealism" or "restrictedness" is merely the effect.
Heidegger allows us to see that for metaphysics, and I quote,"truth is the agreement of thought with the object." The history of metaphysics determines the true in this way, and thus cannot be broken with or altered without altering how truth is supposed to be the truth of agreement.
Now, the problem with this characterization of metaphysical truth is that it is not only Heidegger's. The quote just cited is not Heidegger, but Hegel in his Science of Logic (44). Hegel writes that it is "inept" to think that

truth is the agreement of thought with the object, and [that] in order to bring about this agreement--for it does not exist on its own account--thinking is supposed to adapt and accomodate itself to the object.
-Science of Logic, "Introduction," 44.

In other words, Hegel both characterizes metaphysical truth with regard to its essence and seeks to break with it, just like Heidegger. Truth shall not be the truth of agreement for Hegel. It shall be more. But before we define what it is, we must ask: is it this "more" that will make his philosophy look "restricted," or "idealistic?" Or could it merely be the fact that he is rebelling against a tradition of truth as agreement, as adequation between the thought and the object?
While this last thought is obviously--if anyone who utters it knows their Hegel and particularly the definition of truth that Hegel gives us--unfounded, wild, and stupid: for Hegel, truth is in fact even more the truth of adequation or agreement than the metaphysical tradition he here criticizes as "inept." But I'd like to suggest that maybe this last thought isn't as unfounded or wild or stupid as we'd like to think it is.
In other words, Hegel really does attempt to break with the metaphysical tradition that we now, only with the help of Nietzsche, Wittegenstein and Heidegger, have come to recognize and to an extent overcome. And this attempt in its critical gestures comes dangerously close to carrying it out. The boldness of the criticism, and the attempt to overcome it by a systematic shift in the way philosophy is done, in fact seem to make it almost impenetrable to the charge of idealism--that is, if they didn't fail. But it is this dangerous closeness, I'd like to say, that makes Hegel in his failure, appear all the more restricted--in a way he comes so close to doing what we attempt to do today that it is inevitable that a failure would seem idealistic. But who genuinely can criticize someone as idealistic who rightly is able to diagnose and to an extent displace the condition of metaphysical truth since even before Plato? Wouldn't someone who is able to do this precisely be the most realistic, most generally (i.e. not restricted) in touch with the actual as opposed to someone who sacraficed reality to his own ideas? That is what I mean.
Truth is not agreement for Hegel. As Heidegger makes clear, anyone who diverges from the tradition that affirms the opposite of this statement is destined to remain either in deep obscurity or will be cast off by the tide of reaction in favor of truth as what agrees. And yet Hegel says, "One must discard the prejudice that truth must be something tangible" (50), that is, able to be ascertained as what in an object agrees with a thought about that object.
What is truth then for Hegel? It is speculative truth: in other words, it is not only the agreement of the thought and the thing, but the identity of the thought and the thing in each other. True truth also includes certainty, the reassertion of the thought or the object as itself in its opposite, or (put differently) in its difference from itself.
Now, isn't this just more agreement? Yes. But also no. Indeed, Hegel takes his insight into the problem with truth in metaphysics and buries it in more metaphysical thinking rather than breaking with that tradition. But if one thinks speculative truth respectfully, it has the opportunity of being thought as not relying on agreement perhaps as much as a philosophy where truth is solely agreement between thing and thought. I'll leave it for others to do this.
But the fact remains, even if Hegel does even more rigorously entrench himself in a metaphysics where truth is agreement, truth is not merely agreement for Hegel. And this is perhaps the least restricted potential of the science he lays out. How can we think the possibilities of this particular unrestricted moment in Hegel, precisely when it is also the most restricted?
Truth for Hegel isn't, when thought rightly, the mere agreement of a thought and a thing. In this sense, then, truth isn't idealistic. Truth is a movement of mutual identity in otherness, truth combined with certainty, that does not require an object in the sense of an object for adequation. So it does not restrict the world to its terms. Rather, what is true belongs to truth itself in its own unfolding: truth's terms explode and generalize into a world. Insofar as one attributes a goal for this truth to come out and face the world, i.e. to agree with it, it will necessarily be misinterpreting Hegel because it will only be able to see idealistic agreement as the truth. But while truth keeps to itself, this truth will not be idealistic.
It will, of course, also be doubly a truth of agreement. But it is possible to use this aspect of non-agreement, of non-idealism as a clue to interpretation of Hegel that does not constantly submit itself to a metaphysical definition of truth for ridicule. In that vein, Heidegger and, to an great extent, Hippolyte's interpretations of Hegel do this. Kojeve, however, seeks to make Hegel work with metaphysical truth: this is why he must erase much of Hegel in the Phenomenology through his anthropological/Marxist interpretation.
Emphasizing and teasing out the self-movement of truth allows for a different version of truth than metaphysical truth to start to cultivate itself, even though it is merely this version of truth reasserted. In a sense, it is what happens when one tries to think truth as the development of what Hegel calls Geist not, in its English translation, as "Mind," i.e. as the truth of a personal, anthropological, Transcendental-consciousness/subject (for whom objects appear and must agree), but as "Spirit," as a less easily definable movement of discourse within itself. For those who know these two translations of Geist, all I'm trying to do is suggest what constitutes the difference between them, and how thinking the latter is ultimately more productive, more true to Hegel (in his conception of truth at least), and ultimately less idealistic than the former way.

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