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freedom of/from necessity

2024-02-08

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1 | Criticism

In his book The Concept of Nature in Marx, Alfred Schmidt brings up what appears to be a crucial defect in the Idea as presented by Hegel:

How far does the Idea, so to speak, lose its dialectical character in the course of its transformation into nature? How, in view of the fact that, as ‘absolute’, the Idea is always present to itself, does it come to estrange, to destroy itself in a world of objective-material existence? These questions remain shrouded in darkness in Hegel.¹

Unsurprisingly, this criticism is not uncommon with regard to absolute idealism. There is an entrenched sentiment that Hegel is a thinker of pure necessity—of closed totality. His task is often thought to have been the cancelation of all inessentiality—of all external contradiction—and the bringing of everything into the Whole in order to realize the True. Systematic philosophy thus appears to be a leviathan that devours every moment as it torturously, through the labor of thought, makes its way to Heaven; to the Absolute.

This position toward Hegel is similarly detailed by Althusser in his aleatory materialism; in his philosophy of the encounter. Aleatory materialism is strictly against Hegel’s supposed teleological necessitarianism:

The Marxist dialectic, [Althusser] argued in For Marx, was totally different from the Hegelian one, in which history was the unfolding of Spirit and its eventual reconciliation in a higher unity.²

Or, in the words of Althusser:

If I preferred to reserve for Marx the category of the whole rather than that of the totality, it is because within the totality a double temptation is always present: that of considering it as a pervasive essence which exhaustively embraces all of its manifestations, and — what comes to the same thing — that of discovering in it, as in a circle or a sphere (a metaphor which makes us think of Hegel once again), a centre which would be its essence.³

There is an idea, then, that totality, as opposed to the whole, is a one-sided subsumption of all contingencies—and even more: the swallowing of that which is real by thought; by conceptual totality. We can see this in Althusser’s Reading Capital:

[W]e should fall…[i]nto speculative idealism if, with Hegel, we confused thought and the real by reducing the real to thought, by ‘conceiving the real as the result of thought’…⁴

2 | Bi-directionality

The most interesting part of this critique, however, is our proper Hegelian response that none of this is false, or, more accurately, that this falsity contains within it a kernel of truth. The truth therein is that, while conceptual movement is necessity, this necessity is fundamentally grounded in contingency. Moreover, while the concretion of logic appears as totality, this totality is ‘radically open’—it releases from itself all its moments. To refer back to Schmidt, it comes to “estrange, to destroy itself in a world of objective-material existence…” This is precisely because sublation is not a singular, unidirectional movement. In its sublation of the external into the internal, it presupposes (and thus posits) the liberation of the external from the internal. Its necessary movements both presuppose and posit contingency as such.

Concept is the self-moving, self-reflecting point of origin. Hegel’s position that “[t]he truth is the whole”⁵ indicates that the result of critique—here, the self-development of the system of knowledge—cannot abstractly cancel its origin. At the same time, we cannot view this self-development as a movement of pure transcendence (i.e. the rising-up of the Concept unto an ultimate climax)—or even worse: as a movement of gnosis. Dieter Henrich puts this most lucidly:

Nor should we look at [the process of self-development] only as an ascent to the highest. The process is already the highest, and, for that reason, the end of the process refers to its beginning and its course of development, just as the process points throughout to an end. This is the self-referential structure of the entire discourse.⁶

Hegel was not seeking to integrate everything into the One—into a closed, selfsame totality sans the immediacy of the mediate. Such was the project of Hölderlin, early Schelling, and a plethora of other post-festum Spinozists. For example, Hölderlin’s task was to discover the undifferentiated as such in order to posit the differentiated subject and object. His “absolute Being” is not an Absolute akin to Hegel’s in which concept comes into a mediately immediate identity (a non-identical identity) with its object, however. In fact, he argues that

[i]f I say ‘I am I,’ then the subject [I] and the object [I] are not unified in a way that no division can be presupposed without damaging the essence of that which is to be divided.⁷

This was not Hegel’s project. Hegel maintains a double-movement immanent to sublation at all levels of abstraction. The self-developing concept is akin to Janus: it moves forward and backward at the same time. Its apparent, necessary ‘teleology’ stems from the retroactive realization and depositing of the contingent.

The teleological-necessitarian reading of Hegel often draws on Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, in which he asserted: “What is rational is actual and what is actual is rational.”⁸ This is most often cited as ‘evidence’ for the existence of—not only a logical teleology—but a historical teleology in Hegel’s thought. In the context of the Philosophy of Right, it may even seem to be thinly-masked apologia for his status quo: the Prussian state. Further, he went on to assert the end of history, and, consequently, philosophy! In his Lectures on the Philosophy of History, he writes:

A new epoch has arisen in the world. It would appear as if the World-spirit had at last succeeded in stripping off from itself all alien objective existence, and apprehending itself at last as absolute Spirit… The strife of the finite self-consciousness with the absolute self-consciousness…now comes to an end… This is the whole history of the world in general up to the present time, and the history of Philosophy in particular, the sole work of which is to depict this strife. Now, indeed, it seems to have reached its goal, when this absolute self-consciousness, which it had the work of representing, has ceased to be alien, and when spirit accordingly is realized as spirit. For it becomes such only as the result of its knowing itself to be absolute spirit, and this it knows in real scientific knowledge… This then is the standpoint of the present day, and the series of spiritual forms is with it for the present concluded.⁹

This historical example is a mere example of this supposed sentiment found in Hegel’s work, but to suppose this sentiment in the first place betrays a terribly one-sided reading. To understand why, it is important to delve into Hegel’s conceptualization of cause and effect:

[C]ause and effect, however much they are taken in isolation, have at the same time no meaning each without the other; their reflective shining in each other, the shine in each of its other, is present right in them.¹⁰

The mutual interpenetration of cause and effect implies that the reflexivity of either is found only in the other. In other words, for either cause or effect to realize itself it must realize itself through its other. In his Logic, Hegel discovers that the truth of cause is effect, and vice versa. He discovers that the two are immediately immanent to one another and that, in this immanence, they are implicitly identical. Cause determines effect in a seemingly teleological manner, but effect recursively determines cause. Effect is a cause of effect, and cause is an effect of cause. Teleological necessity is thus overshadowed by the dissolution of that which is determined into that which determines. Both presuppose the other, and both are the other. What appeared as unidirectional logical necessity appears to be bidirectional, contingent, and fundamentally groundless. “[T]he contingent is the ultimate, abyssal Ur-modality.”¹¹

To return to the historical example, the new epoch, for Hegel, was the end of history. It was the ultimate culmination of history’s logically-necessary development. This is not because human development moves according to strict, immutable, or rational laws, but because one can only posit history at its end, or rather, as its end. The study of history can only occur after history has occurred. The works of Herodotus were just as symptomatic of the end of history as the works of Hegel.

Insofar as the actual is the rational and vice versa, all critique is a recursive positing of what has already happened. That which has already happened can only realize itself as actual once it has concluded. Hegel was not looking for a telos in history. He was not conceiving of history as a linear process. Rather, he understood that all one could do is study history as it had led up to the moment of one’s historicizing—as it really appears. It is only in the necessary, rational ordering of the contingent that we can posits its actuality, and this movement of rationality is conducted implicitly through the labor of thought. It happens the very moment one thinks history.

3 | Recursivity and the negative Absolute

The critiques levied by Schmidt and Althusser importantly rest on the conception of Hegel’s system as a linear process of transcendence; of one beginning with abstract objects and building up to the concrete, absolute Idea. This criticism is best represented, however, by Adorno:

In Hegel, the positive nature of dialectics – in other words, the fact that the whole, the quintessence of all negations is the positive, the meaning, reason, indeed the godhead and the Absolute – is the premise that actually sets the dialectic in motion.¹²

While Adorno vaguely comprehends the dialectic of presupposition-position, he still argues that, in Hegel, the Absolute is 1) positive, and 2) the reason (telos) of the dialectic. Adorno, while supposing that Hegel’s system is “circular”—and further, tautological—simultaneously understands Hegel’s dialectic to posit its base “meaning” as pure positivity. In order to work through the latter point, it is important that we begin with the former.

Hegel’s dialectic is more a spiral than a circle. While the end of each exposition posits the beginning, the formal immediate beginning is not the same as the purely categorical recursively-posited beginning. The movement of thought from the abstract to the concrete as in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, for instance, is the retracing of steps Spirit has already trekked. We are observing, from a transcendental perspective, what has happened absolutely immanently. Our analysis takes the form of a linear exposition, whereas the movements described are all immanent to one another and presuppose one another. ‘Tarrying with the negative’—or Spirit’s absolute disruption—concerns the fact that Spirit can maintain all of these dissident moments, at once, within one another to an absolute degree—and how Spirit shits it all out again, alienating/externalizing its immanent Being from (out of) itself. The negative is the maintenance of absolute contradiction, absolutely, assumed by cognition from the very beginning.

The immediate “beginning” of any of Hegel’s critiques is, for this reason, only a formal beginning. There really is no point of entry into the absolute self-contained immanence of totality’s mediately-immediate unity. The absolute contradiction between transcendental analysis and its purely immanent object (and the horrible impossibility of analysis that results from said contradiction) is in fact the Idea-qua-Idea. The formal beginning is problematic precisely because it is a beginning. The procession of the dialectic is truly the cancelling of the beginning as the beginning and the inclusion of (and not the abolition of) its self-concept into totality.

The Absolute, then, resides most clearly not in the triumph of analysis, but in its failure. It is not a positive telos, nor does it posit tautology. It cancels the idea of “beginning” and “end” in its miserable defeat, thus bringing us out of knowledge and into a quintessentially negative Truth.

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