The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century

by Michael N Forster

  The form that constitutes the fundamental framework of the pure difference treated in the Logic of Essence is ‘absolute difference’, understood as ‘the negativity relating itself to itself, and hence by being self-repulsion from itself’.62 Hegel thereby highlights various dimensions of the same relation essential to the pure conceptual determinations of reflection. 1. In terms of the logic of identity, the way in which identity distinguishes itself from difference as from a form of itself. As mentioned before, both are equally moments of a unity which, in the difference between identity and difference, relates itself to itself. That is the general relational structure of all the conceptual determinations of reflection: identity distinguishes itself from difference as from its other and thereby from itself as something negated. 2. In this way the movement in which the relation of negation applies to itself and thus negates itself to become the immediacy of a new unity (negation of the negation) is identified as ‘absolute negativity’. Positive and negative should be thought of as pure relations: their determinacy consists solely in their reciprocal relating to each other. 3. Finally, this form of absolute difference becomes a meta-category for all the determinate categories of the Logic of Essence, articulating a principle that they have in themselves: the determination of being different and of relating to this difference as to their non-being.

  In Variation (Verschiedenheit) as ‘immediate difference’63 (Unterschied) things distinguished as different are related to each other only in an external way. They are in each case identities only in themselves, for they are indifferent towards each other. Their relativity amounts to a technique of comparison external to them, which is what first produces identity (equality) and difference (inequality). Since this technique is an external reflection and has nothing to do with what is distinguished itself, it can be applied to anything and everything and hence for Hegel constitutes the impoverished conception of method that is characteristic of all comparative sciences.

  Opposing (Entgegensetzung, Gegensatz), on the other hand, has in its conception of the things distinguished already realized that their relation to each other is neither external nor indifferent. What is distinguished finds in the other not ‘an other in general, but its own other facing it’.64 In this way, on the one hand, the negative relation to the other has become an aspect of self-description. On the other hand, it has here for the first time achieved an adequate determination: the thing related to what is distinguished as different is not here any old other but a specific quite determinate other, namely its other, the one thing opposed to it that alone is its determinate negation. In this way the elements of difference bind themselves together through the possessive pronoun; the elements’ identity, which is realized in difference, is now explicitly that of a self-relation.

  Contradiction (Widerspruch) as the third level brings this relation entirely within the sphere of a consciousness of difference. Positive and negative are the same: the ‘illusory being of itself in the other’ and ‘itself the positing of itself as the other’.65 Contradiction is the consciousness of the both-and-relationship of the opposition in which each thing distinguished receives both the inclusion and the exclusion of the other. It is both the case that the negative enters into the positive because the positive only has its determination in a simply negative relation to its negative and that the positive is independent in relation to the negative because it completely excludes it from itself. As Hegel puts it, ‘Opposites, therefore, contain contradiction in so far as they are, in the same respect, negatively related to one another or sublate each other and are indifferent to one another.’66 The contradictory character of the opposition is the most extreme point to which Difference develops itself. For here, Identity and Difference are pushed to such an extreme in their tension that they have to give themselves reality in their truth, and consequently in their unity, or in other words they have to overcome themselves in a determination that integrates them as moments of a unity. The passage through the conceptual determinations of reflection up to this point has thus uncovered as its result the essential principle of all being in the unfolding of the immanent self-relation of Difference. As Hegel says, ‘Something is therefore alive only in so far as it contains contradiction within it, and moreover is this power to hold and endure the contradiction within it.’67

  Having explained ‘Identity’ and ‘Difference’, it has become clear why we need to assume different logical forms of dialectic. At several points in the Encyclopaedia, Hegel refers to the different dialectical forms according to the parts of his logical system: the dialectic of transition within the ‘Logic of Being’, the dialectic of reflection (i.e. appearance in the other) within the ‘Logic of Essence’, and the dialectic of development within the ‘Logic of the Concept’.68 All three dialectic forms differ from each other by their different relation of identity and difference, which must be understood in each case as moments in a common dialectical development of the dialectic itself. In the Logic of Being the categories go dialectically out of themselves (are nevertheless only grasped through an external reflection) and turn into their opposites (e.g. Being and Nothing in the form of Something and Other), which still remain external to them as the ‘other’. Difference is thereby limited, also because Something has no knowing self-relation within the transition into the Other. In the logic of reflection, the categories produce themselves through an immanent self-relation to their other (e.g. being-in-itself (Ansichsein) and being-for-an-other (Für-Anderes-Sein) in the form of Positive and Negative), that is, they integrate their own negation by the other into the determination of their own identity. Difference is thus ‘absolute’, because the non-being within the other is the fundamental element of its own identity. In the dialectic of development of the Concept, finally, negation in the other is conceived no longer simply as essential non-being, but just as unity with itself in the other and therefore as absolute positivity itself.

  The dialectical development of the dialectic itself across the various parts of the Logic indicates that Hegel’s dialectical principle—the self-unfolding of determinations—is achieved in a concept of identity that maintains itself in a unity with its own essential negation within the otherness of the other. An abundance of individual studies in the secondary literature has explored how this principle operates in almost every part of Hegel’s system.

  33.2.5 Marx: Materialist Dialectic

  Karl Marx’s dialectic is to be found principally in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (1844), The Holy Family (1845 together with Friedrich Engels), The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), and his main work Capital (1867/1885/1894). It is not explicitly developed as a coherent systematic theory, but instead appears as a heterogeneous, fragmentary composite of his readings of Hegel. Neither does Marx develop a new logical type of dialectic by which the structure and functionality of dialectic’s relations or processes receive a new form. Rather he gives Hegelian dialectic a new functional frame in which dialectic is conceived as praxis. Marx’s dialectic takes as its starting point a question which was central during the course of industrialization, namely what causes social changes and which logical laws do these changes follow. The centre of his analysis here is Hegel’s idealistic philosophy, which Marx wanted to ‘turn on its head’. His materialist dialectic accordingly tries to explain reality-constituting contradictions at the level of the material world, and thus to understand socio-economic antagonisms as the basic dialectical principles of movement for historical development. Hence, Marx consciously distances himself from what he saw as a Hegelian idealism which in explaining history gave concepts and ideas priority over technological and economic developments. Marx was convinced that no purely intellectual ideas change and determine material relations, but that material relations (and the contradictions contained in them) change ideas, and are therefore the driving force behind world history. Hence, the famous Marxist motto that being determines consciousness: ‘The mode of production of material life conditions the process of social, political,
and intellectual life generally. It is not the consciousness of humans that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.’69 Contradictory economic, social, and technological structures alone determine social changes and form their basis. Marx replaces Hegel’s absolute idea with the material-economic process of production, that is, social labour or the productive forces of individuals in their concrete contradictory form as class relations and as socio-economic order. At the same time, Marx aims to replace the Hegelian maxim that there is only retroactive understanding of the historical process (the ‘Owl of Minerva’) with an actively intervening philosophical criticism of social relations. Only a ‘ruthless criticism of all that exists’,70 governed by ‘the categorical imperative to overthrow all relations in which the human is a debased, enslaved, forsaken, contemptible being’71 can realize dialectical philosophy’s aim of rationally transforming the world. In the development of real contradictions, the potential becomes visible for a revolutionary reorganization of society that would overcome class domination and alienated social life. Later on, German Critical Theory would rely on this idea of the practical possibilities of philosophy visible in the form of dialectical contradictions.

  Marx’s dialectic of historical praxis presents itself in the form of such a logic of real contradictions. Decisive here is that individuals themselves—as productive forces (Produktivkräfte), that is, in their essential determination as workers upon and with nature—are seen as the subjects of historical development. At the same time, however, individuals come into direct contradiction with themselves, because in capitalist society they can neither experience their social work as their own, nor apprehend themselves as the real subjects of historical progress. Their social relations, the commodities which they produce, and their own labour power thus confront them as something natural from which they are alienated and which they know only as an external force determining them: a fetish of commodity and of capital. This alienation can be sublated only dialectically where the producing individuals grasp themselves as sources and creators of the historical process, that is, where they gain the historical-social consciousness of their real role. Consciousness thereby becomes revolutionary: it aims at a social order that is no longer alienated, where social relations are determined actively, consciously, and freely.

  In his early works the young Marx tries above all to clarify the historical basis of alienation and the possibility of its sublation. The late Marx, through a renewed discussion of Hegel’s Science of Logic in Capital Volume 1 (1867), identifies capital’s negative logic in its structural function as the fundament of alienation. Marx thereby treats the Hegelian dialectic negatively, firstly by reading Hegel’s logic as a logic of alienation, and secondly by showing capital’s immanent contradictoriness and social perversion at the structural-logical level. Particularly in his Critique of Hegelian Dialectic and Philosophy as a Whole in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (1844), Marx argues that the basic problem of Hegelian dialectics is the self-objectification of Geist, or Spirit, namely ‘how the philosophical spirit is nothing but a thinking completely within its own alienation, i.e. the alienated spirit of the world that grasps itself only in an abstract way.—The logic—the money of spirit’.72 Marx applies this logic of self-externalization (Selbstentäußerung) and objectification (Vergegenständlichung) to capital itself as the centre of the capitalistic mode of production in order to show its negative dialectic of externalization and alienation as well as their possible sublation, a sublation whose logic is also immanent to capital. This negative dialectic of capital consists in capital’s illusion of adopting—as actually dead, objectified labour—the place of the productive, living substance of the process (the worker). Where social subjects act according to the ideology of the capitalist economy and social order, they treat capital (which is a mere secondary product of real productive forces) like the living origin and the moving principle of production itself. While the acting individuals are determined by capital’s economic logic, which consists solely in accumulation and objectified work, capital draws its whole mobility solely from the domination of the living labour of its producers. Capital thereby behaves like an ‘automatic subject’,73 as if it were grounded and productive by itself. As with Hegel’s logic, capital behaves ‘as the overarching subject of a…process’ and as a ‘processual, in itself moving substance’.74 It operates through the action and thinking of individuals who succumb to its logic while actually being the real subjects of the economic process that governs them. Capital is therefore the negation of living work and living nature; it undermines the true state of productive forces and, with it, human beings’ social freedom: ‘Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.’75

  At the same time, however, it is essential that ‘capital is itself the moving contradiction’76 since while it overturns, alienates, and negates the true relations of social production, it also negates itself as an actually derivative product of these true relations. Here lies the possibility of an education of social consciousness about the real-dialectical structure, a possibility of exposing the ‘despotism of capital’ as a ‘shoddy effort of our own hand’,77 and of winning back from capital self-empowerment and collective freedom. While capitalism remains—in its logic of accumulation and commodity fetishism—the negation of living individuals and living nature, it is unable to sublate and humanize itself. The positive side of the negation of the negation, already latent in capital itself, remains reserved for the revolutionary action of human beings.

  33.3 FINAL REMARK: ON THE PROBLEM OF METHOD

  Dialectic has often been equated with dialectical method, that is, on the one hand, a method that has been central to European philosophy since antiquity, one rooted in the rhetorical origin of philosophy, namely the attempt to test arguments and to resolve disagreement; on the other, a method in a speculative sense, for working out the contradictions which exist in concepts and in reality. But there are problems with the idea of a dialectic method. Above all, Hegel research has shown how problematic the idea of a dialectical method, at least in relation to Hegel, actually is. For Hegel the very idea of method is inappropriate for grasping the status of dialectical movement.78 Method, as Gilles Deleuze once wrote, ‘always presupposes the good will of the thinker‚ “a premeditated decision”’; method is like a ‘thread’ which gives us an easy way—too easy a way—in and out of the ‘labyrinth’ of thought.79 Method is, as Roland Barthes adds:

  1. a goal-directed procedure: prescribed operations to the attainment of a result…to decode something, to explain, to describe exhaustively, 2. an idea of the right way (which wants to lead directly to a goal). However, the right way points paradoxically to places where the subject does not actually want to go: it fetishizes the goal as place, and thereby avoids all the other places; method works in the service of a universal, a ‘morality’…The subject denies, for example, what it does not know of itself, its irreducibility, its strength (not to mention its unconscious).80

  Yet, for the modern thinkers who developed their own concepts of dialectic—Kant, Fichte, Schleiermacher, Hegel, Marx, and also Adorno—dialectic is neither the fetishizing of a goal nor the subordination of the living under the merely logical-universal. On the contrary, dialectical thinking is a predominantly non-instrumental, non-scientistic approach which attends to the liveliness, plurality, variety, and particularity of objects in its development of an insistent comprehension of the real. To understand dialectical philosophy as a scientific method amongst other methods undermines—by applying an externality, abstract universality and formality which are alien to it—the indispensable moment of concreteness and sensitivity to the dynamic of social being which has been an essential impulse in the advance of concepts of dialectic in nineteenth-century German Philosophy.81

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Primary Literature

  Aristotle, Topic
a, trans. E. S. Forster (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989).

  Aristotle, Prior Analytics, trans. Robin Smith (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989).

  Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, The Science of Knowledge, 1794 edition, trans. P. Heath and J. Lachs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

  [Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Grundlagen der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre als Handschrift für seine Zuhörer 1794/95 (= Gesamtausgabe, Vol. I, 2), ed. by R. Lauth et al. (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1965).]