Shortcut to the Absolute
Notes on "Who Thinks Abstractly?" and a few links to the texts that first opened and still re-open Hegel's speculative philosophy to me
A good friend recently asked where to begin with GWF Hegel’s philosophy and this challenged me to come up with a short-list of my favorite reconstructions and commentaries on Hegel’s speculative philosophy for the first time. By way of disclaimer, these choices reflect my background in ‘continental’ philosophy and my commitment to a better Marxist critique of Hegel that develops out of his reception in 20th century critical theory.
“Who Thinks Abstractly?”
First, Hegel himself:
“Who Thinks Abstractly?” — an article written in 1808 (post-Phenomenology)1 for a newspaper competition in satirical writing, there is no better text for disabusing oneself of the pre-reflective anti-Hegelianism shared by nearly every school of 20th century philosophy and social theory—from ‘continental’ to ‘analytic’ philosophy, mainstream Marxism to anti-Marxist sociology. Put dramatically (but not untruthfully), these three or so pages are sufficient to provoke an identity crisis in anyone whose work has its foundation in a disavowal of ‘Hegelian abstraction’. (By way of evidence, see Althusser’s ambivalent praise of the essay in Philosophy for Non-philosophers and Deleuze and Guattari’s reference to the essay at a crucial moment in their critique of doxa in What is Philosophy?.) In a nutshell, Hegel writes: “This is abstract thinking: to see nothing in the murderer except the abstract fact that he is a murderer, and to annul all other human essence in him with this simple quality.” It is undoubtedly, as Ilyenkov says, an elegantly ironic presentation of the irreducible concreteness of truth—a complex unity-through-difference—which can only be comprehended at the price of abandoning our moralizing fixations and one-sided abstractions. Admiringly, in the Encyclopedia Logic Hegel writes of the counterintuitive power of geometry to discover incommensurabilities and ‘irrationalities’ in its expansion of synthetic cognition: “As often happens elsewhere, so here, too, the terminology is inverted such that what is named rational is something due to the understanding [Verständige], but what is called irrational is much more a beginning and trace of what is in keeping with reason [Vernünftigkeit].”2 The rational is marked by the suspension of the reasonable and the rationalized. To oversimplify the lesson, I will suggest that “Who Thinks Abstractly?” advances two core theses of the Hegelian speculative philosophy:
(1) Though familiarity with philosophy is never itself sufficient for guarding against the tendency toward what we now call ‘reification,’ no one has to wait for philosophers to arrive to begin to think abstractly. In fact, one-sided abstraction is the essence of common-sense dualisms—viz., between finite and infinite, subject and object, ‘true’ and false, identity and difference, etc. This includes the common-sense opposition between immediacy (e.g.: first-person experience, feeling, perception, action, belief, whatever appears to come ‘naturally’ as brute fact) and mediation (e.g.: conceptualization, logical form, historical process, political struggle, social relations and institutions). As Hegel challenges us in the ‘Preliminary Conception’ of the Encyclopedia Logic: “But the Logic and the entire philosophy exemplify the fact that there is a kind of knowing that proceeds neither in one-sided immediacy nor in one-sided mediation” (§75; p. 123). The shorter formulation: experience cannot save you from abstraction because our experience itself is abstract; abstraction is no refuge from experience because abstract thought is itself an experience.
(2) The shared, self-righteous self-certainty of ‘the educated’ and ‘the everyman’ manifests not only in the pretension to have arrived already, by immediate possession, at the truth, but also in what we could call the vanity of the humble. As Hegel elaborates elsewhere, the commonplace intellectual virtues of ‘humility' and ‘modesty’ are an expression of pride, pride in our unwillingness to address the concrete in its complexity.3 Out of cloying concern for the integrity of the ‘finite’, we insist on its ultimacy against the dialectical process from which it arose and to which it will return. Out of pious deference to a transcendent infinite, we deny ourselves contact with any reality beyond our own egos. Out of craven avoidance of self-critical reflection, we reduce what’s at stake in thinking to the false choice between doctrines rooted in the substance of experience and the anemia of scholastic disputation. For Hegel, to know or even feel a limitation is to have evidence that we have gone beyond it, or even that the unlimited has thereby broken through to this side of consciousness (EL: §60; PS: §386, Zusatz.). Accordingly, lamentations about the impossibility of comprehending concrete truth—in Hegel’s example, “How am I, a poor earthly worm, to know the truth?”—turn out to be self-indulgent in the strongest sense.4 Reading “Who Thinks Abstractly?”, we meet a rogues gallery of ordinary citizens, respected scholars, eminent men, and snobbish socialites who each shelter and nourish their self-conceptions against the risk of recognizing the complexity of 19th century German social life. If the article is effective, Hegel’s barbs—about belligerent shopkeepers ready to condemn the world to hell because their eggs were insulted and the moral panic of the petty-bourgeoisie towards ‘criminal elements’ in their midst—draw a little blood from us by the last sentence. Hegel’s model of speculative comprehension? An old woman who works in a hospital who, in attending the public execution of ‘the murderer’, “kill[s] the abstraction of the murderer and bring[s] him to life for honor” by remarking, at the sight of his severed head still on the scaffold, that it was still worthy of the sunlight shining down on it.
Note: At the bottom of this post, I’ve republished Ilyenkov’s editorial preface and critical afterword to “Who Thinks Abstractly?” for a translation he made of the article in 1956.
Commentaries
T. Adorno’s Hegel: Three Studies (1963) — Despite Adorno’s occasional and regrettable relapse into the Feuerbachian cliches about Hegel’s speculative thought (e.g., the claim that Hegel subsumes reality into the concept, reduces objectivity to the absolute subject, presupposes ‘identity’ in the sense of logical equivalence from the outset of his work) that became shibboleths for Marxian critical theory for the better part of the 20th century, his Three Studies is an exceptional defense of the thesis that Hegel’s texts are anti-texts to the extent that the truth-content of Hegel’s work is intellectual experience, or the experience of the restless negativity of thinking itself that upends the Kantian division of cognition into the transcendental a priori conditions of experience, on the one hand, and empirical a posteriori experience, on the other.
J. Hyppolite’s Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1947); Logic and Existence (1952); Studies on Marx and Hegel (1955) — Teacher to Deleuze, Derrida, and Foucault, though you wouldn’t know it from their ham-fisted denunciations of the totalizing monolith of ‘Hegelian’ philosophy. Tragically underread as an expositor and critic of Hegel, Hyppolite’s lifelong work is a meditation on how Hegel’s philosophy is a dramatic inauguration of the split between existential phenomenology and structuralism (whether in linguistics, anthropology, or Marxism) that drives the central disputes of 20th century European philosophy.
Gillian Rose’s entire body of work, but especially Hegel Contra Sociology (1981). The first few pages of the second chapter are the single best exposition of Hegelian speculative thought I have ever encountered. She describes HCS best herself in the Preface to the 1995 reprint:
The speculative exposition of Hegel developed in this book still provides the basis for a unique engagement with post-Hegelian thought, especially postmodernity, with its roots in Heideggerianism. By reassessing the relation between the early and the mature works of Hegel, the experience of negativity, the existential drama, is discovered at the heart of Hegelian rationalism. My subsequent reassessments of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, which challenges the tradition of regarding them as radically nihilistic or existential alternatives to Hegel, draw on this exposition of Hegel (Dialectic of Nihilism, 1984; The Broken Middle, 1992; Judaism and Modernity, 1993). Instead of working with the general question of the dominance of Western metaphysics, the dilemma of addressing modern ethics and politics without arrogating the authority under question is seen as the ineluctable difficulty in Hegel, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard’s engagement with modernity. This book, therefore, remains the core of the project to demonstrate a non-foundational and radical Hegel, which overcomes the opposition between nihilism and rationalism. It provides the possibility for renewal of critical thought in the intellectual difficulty of our time.
For a more concise treatment of Hegel’s Phenomenology, see “The Comedy of Hegel and the Trauerspiel of Modern Philosophy,” in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: A Reappraisal, ed. Gary K. Browning (1997). pp. 105-112
Appendix: Ilyenkov’s Comments on “Who Thinks Abstractly?”
by EV Ilyenkov (1956)
Editorial
Among the works of German classical philosophy, there is hardly another one that is distinguished by such a lively, witty, artistic form as the short article by Hegel published below, “Who Thinks Abstractly?”. And although in style and manner of presentation the article rather resembles the works of Helvetius and Diderot, its content is devoted to explaining one of the central ideas of Hegelian dialectics - the idea of the concreteness of truth. To think abstractly, in thin, one-sided definitions, is easier than ever, Hegel says, the whole difficulty lies in thinking concretely, in order to understand the true essence of this or that object or phenomenon in the form and with the help of abstractions. The development of one-sided abstract definitions is only one of the moments in comprehending a phenomenon in the unity of its diversity, in its essence and specificity, in its concreteness. Real, meaningful thinking by its very nature, in terms of purpose and task is concrete. The path along which it is possible to achieve such a concrete understanding may consist in considering the history, the process of the emergence and development of the contemplated phenomenon, in revealing those many different conditions of its existence, which in their totality determined its present state. Metaphysical, including philistine, thinking is limited to one-sided abstractions, one-sided definitions, and therefore glides over the surface of phenomena, is inevitably subjective. Drawing several vivid pictures from life, Hegel subtly sneers at such a subjectivity of the “abstract” thinking of a bazaar tradeswoman, and an Austrian officer, and various people from the crowd, staring at the execution of a murderer. Such is the meaning of this little article by Hegel. Read materialistically, it will help to penetrate into the treasury of Hegelian logic, to understand the "rational grain" of Hegelian dialectics.
Afterword
So who thinks abstractly?
- An uneducated person, not an enlightened one at all
Even today, this unexpected answer may seem like a mischievous paradox, a simple illustration of that "literary device consisting in the use of a word or expression in its opposite meaning for the purpose of ridicule," which literary critics call irony. The very irony that, according to M.V. Lomonosov, "sometimes consists in one word, when a small person is called Atlant or a Giant, the powerless Samson is called" ...
The irony is really there, and very poisonous. But this irony of a special nature is not a witty play on words, not a simple turning inside out of the "usual meanings" of words, which does not change anything in the essence of understanding. Here it is not the terms that are reversed, but the phenomena that they designate suddenly turn out, in the course of their consideration, to be completely different from what they are used to seeing, and the edge of ridicule strikes just the “usual” word usage, reveals that it is precisely the “usual” and completely thoughtless use of terms (in this case, the word "abstract") is absurd, not relevant to the essence of the matter. And what seemed to be only an "ironic paradox" reveals itself, on the contrary, as a completely accurate expression of this essence.
This is dialectical irony, expressing verbally, on the screen of language, the completely objective (that is, independent of the will and consciousness) process of turning a thing into its own opposite. A process in which all signs are suddenly reversed, and thinking unexpectedly arrives at a conclusion that directly contradicts its starting point.
The soul of this peculiar irony is not light wit, not linguistic dexterity in playing off epithets, but the well-known "cunning" of the real course of life, long recognized by folk wisdom in the saying "The road to hell is paved with good intentions." Yes, the best intentions, refracted through the prism of the conditions for their implementation, often turn into evil and misfortune. It also happens vice versa: “A particle of the power of I, who wished eternally evil, who did only good,” Mephistopheles, the poetic personification of the “force of denial,” is recommended.
This is the same serious pattern that Marx, following Hegel, liked to call "the irony of history" - "the inevitable fate of all historical movements, the participants of which have a vague idea of the causes and conditions of their existence and therefore set purely illusory goals for them." This irony always acts as an unexpected retribution for ignorance, for ignorance. She always lies in wait for people climbing into the water, not knowing the ford. When this happens to pioneers, it's a tragedy. Man has always had to pay dearly for knowledge. But when the victims of this inexorable irony are people who do not know how and do not want to reckon with experience, their fate takes on a tragicomic character, because here it is no longer ignorance that is punished, but stupid conceit ...
And when Hegel suddenly cites the scolding of a market trader as an example of "abstract thinking", then high philosophical categories are used here by no means with the aim of mocking the "little man", the uneducated old woman. There is ironic mockery here, but its address is completely different. This mockery here rebounds, in the manner of a boomerang, into the high forehead of the very reader who saw in this an ironic smirk at "lack of education." Lack of education is not a fault, but a misfortune, and to mock it from the height of one's scientific greatness is hardly an occupation worthy of a philosopher. Such mockery would reveal not the mind, but only stupid arrogance of its own "education". This pose is already quite worthy of mockery - and Hegel gives himself such pleasure.
Here the great dialectician makes fun of an imaginary education, an ignorance that imagines itself to be education, and therefore considers itself entitled to judge and make judgments about philosophy without bothering to study it.
The tradeswoman scolds without pretensions to the "philosophical" meaning of her torrents. She had never heard of such words as "abstract". Philosophy, therefore, also has no claims to it. Another thing is the "educated reader", who grins, seeing "irony" in the qualification of her thinking as "abstract", - this is supposedly the same as calling the impotent Samson ...
It was he who fell into the insidious hook of Hegelian irony. Seeing here only a "literary device", he betrayed himself with his head, revealing complete ignorance in the area where he considers himself an expert - in the field of philosophy as a science. Here, after all, every “educated person” considers himself an expert. “Regarding other sciences, it is believed that study is required in order to know them, and that only such knowledge gives the right to judge them. It is also agreed that in order to make a shoe, one must learn and practice shoemaking, although each person has a measure for this in his foot, has hands and thanks to them the natural dexterity required for this business. Only philosophizing does not require this kind of study and labor,” Hegel ironically addresses such connoisseurs. Such a connoisseur discovered here that he knows the word "abstract", but about that insidious dialectic that philosophy has long revealed as part of the named category of phenomena, he has not even a vague idea. That is why he saw a joke where Hegel is not joking at all, where he exposes the exaggerated emptiness of “habitual” ideas, beyond which pretentious half-educatedness never goes, imaginary education, the whole baggage of which consists only in the ability to use learned words, as is customary in a "decent society" ...
Such an "educated reader" is not uncommon even today. Dwelling in a cozy world of stereotyped ideas with which he has grown as if with his own skin, he is always irritated when science shows him that things are really not at all what they seem to him. He always considers himself a champion of "common sense", and in philosophical dialectics he sees nothing but an insidious inclination to "turn inside out" the usual, "generally accepted" meanings of words. In dialectical thinking, he sees only "an ambiguous and loose use of terms", the art of juggling words with opposite meanings - the sophistry of ambiguity. So, they say, here too - Hegel uses words not in the way it is "accepted" - he calls "abstract" what all sane people call "concrete" and vice versa. Even quite a few scientific and philosophical treatises written over the past hundred and fifty years are devoted to such an interpretation of dialectics. And each time they are written in the name of "modern logic".
Meanwhile, Hegel is concerned, of course, not with names, not with the question of what and how should be called. Hegel himself treats the question of names and disputes about words purely ironically, only teasing scientific pedants, who, after all, are only concerned about this, setting simple traps in their way.
Along the way, under the guise of secular conversation, he popularly - in the best sense of the word - sets out very serious things that are by no means related to the “title”. These are the core ideas of his brilliant "Science of Logic" and "Phenomenology of Spirit".
“There is no abstract truth, truth is always concrete”, because truth is not a “minted coin”, which can only be put in a pocket, in order to pull it out and apply it as a ready measure to individual things and phenomena, sticking it like a label, on the sensuously given diversity of the world, on contemplated "objects". The truth does not lie at all in bare "results", but in the ongoing process of ever deeper, more and more divided into details, more and more "concrete" comprehension of the essence of the matter. But the “essence of the matter” nowhere and never consists in simple “sameness”, in the “identity” of things and phenomena to each other. And to look for this “essence of the matter” means carefully tracing the transitions, the transformation of some strictly fixed (including verbally) phenomena into others, in the end, into directly opposite to the original ones. The real “universality” that binds together, as part of a certain “whole”, two or more phenomena (things, events, etc.), lies not at all in their similarity to each other, but in the need to turn each thing into its own opposite. In the fact that such two phenomena, as it were, “complement” one another “to the whole”, since each of them contains such a “sign” that the other just lacks, and the “whole” always turns out to be a unity of mutually exclusive - and at the same time mutually presupposing - sides, moments. Hence the logical principle of thinking, which Hegel put forward against all previous logic: "Contradiction is the criterion of truth, the absence of contradiction is the criterion of error." This also sounded and still sounds quite paradoxical. But what can you do if real life itself develops through "paradoxes"?
And if we take all this into account, then the problem of “abstraction” immediately begins to look different. The 'abstract' as such (as 'general', as 'same', fixed in a word, in a 'common sense of a term' or in a series of such terms) is in itself neither good nor bad. As such, it can express intelligence and stupidity with equal ease. In one case, the "abstract" turns out to be the most powerful means of analyzing concrete reality, and in the other, it is an impenetrable screen that blocks this same reality. In one case, it turns out to be a form of understanding things, and in the other, it turns out to be a means of killing the intellect, a means of enslaving it with verbal clichés. And this dual, dialectically insidious nature of the "abstract" must always be taken into account, must always be kept in mind in order not to fall into an unexpected trap...
This is the meaning of the Hegelian feuilleton, an elegantly ironic presentation of very, very serious philosophical and logical truths.
From Walter Kaufmann’s Hegel: Texts and Commentary (1965). Note by Walter Kaufmann on “Who Thinks Abstractly?”:
In the nineteenth-century edition of Hegel's Werke, this article (Wer denkt abstrakt?) appears in volume XVII, 400-5. Rosenkranz discusses it briefly (355 f.) and says that it shows "how much Hegel ... entered into the Berlin manner. Glockner reprints it in his edition of the Werke in vol. XX (1930), which is entitled: Vermischte Schriften aus der Berliner Zeit. He includes it among "four feuilletons that Hegel wrote for local papers during the later years of his Berlin period. But Glockner admits: “The exact place of publication is unfortunately unknown to me.” Hoffmeister, whose critical edition of Hegel's Berliner Schriften: 1818-1831 (1956) is much more comprehensive than Glockner's (800 pages versus 550), does not include this article. In a footnote he says that it belongs to Hegel's “Jena period (1807/08)”. This is an uncharacteristic slip: at the beginning of 1807 Hegel went to Bamberg, in 1808 to Nürnberg; and in the first weeks of 1807, before he left Jena, he certainly lacked the time and peace of mind to write this article. Of Glockner's "four feuilletons" Hoffmeister retains only one, and that is really a letter to a newspaper, protesting their review of a new play. Hoffmeister gives no reasons for dating this article so much earlier than Rosenkranz and Glockner did. Possibly, the disparaging remark about Kotzebue (a German playwright, 1761-1819) suggests a date before Kotzebue was stabbed to death by a German theology student. That the piece was written in Jena seems most unlikely: it is so very different from the articles — and the Phenomenology — that Hegel wrote during his harassed and unhappy years in that city. But Hoffmeister could be right that it was written in 1807 or 1808.
The Encyclopedia Logic (trans. and ed. K. Brinkmann and D. Dhalstrom; 2010), §231 (pp. 296-297):
Since, moreover, geometry has to deal with the sensory but abstract intuition of space, it can specify unrestrictedly simple determinations of the understanding in space. For this reason, it alone has the synthetic method of finite knowing in its perfection. Nevertheless, it is quite noteworthy that, following this course, geometry ultimately hits upon incommensurabilities and irrationalities where, if it wants to go further in its determinations, it is driven beyond the principle of mere understanding. As often happens elsewhere, so here, too, the terminology is inverted such that what is named rational is something due to the understanding [Verständige], but what is called irrational is much more a beginning and trace of what is in keeping with reason [Vernünftigkeit]. Other sciences, since they do not find themselves in the simple framework of space or time, come up against the limit of proceeding by merely understanding (which happens to them both necessarily and often) but they have an easy way of helping themselves out of this fix. They break up the consistency of that way of proceeding and take what they need, often the opposite of what went before, taking it in from the outside, from representation, opinion, perception, or whatever it may be. In its obliviousness to the nature of its method (and that method’s relation to the content) this finite knowing is precluded from knowing that, in its progression through definitions, divisions, and so forth, it is guided by the necessity of the conceptual determinations. Nor does this obliviousness allow it to know either where it is at its limit or, if it has overstepped that limit, that it finds itself in a field where the determinations of understanding no longer count, determinations that it nevertheless roguishly continues to use in that field.
Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind, trans. W. Wallace and A.V. Miller with a Foreword by J.N. Findlay. 1971; reprint: 2000. (§386; pp. 22-24):
A rigid application of the category of finitude by the abstract logician is chiefly seen in dealing with [Geist] and reason: it is held not a mere matter of strict logic, but treated also as a moral and religious concern, to adhere to the point of view of finitude, and the wish to go further is reckoned a mark of audacity, if not insanity, of thought. Whereas in fact such a modesty of thought, as treats the finite as something altogether fixed and absolute, is the worst of virtues; and to stick to a post which has no sound ground in itself is the most unsound sort of theory. The category of finitude was at a much earlier period elucidated and explained at its place in the Logic: an elucidation which, as in logic for the more specific though still simple thought-forms of finitude, so in the rest of philosophy for the concrete forms, has merely to show that the finite is not, i.e. is not the truth, but merely a transition and an emergence to something higher. This finitude of the spheres so far examined is the dialectic that makes a thing have its cessation by another and in another: but Spirit, the intelligent unity and the implicit Eternal, is itself just the consummation of that internal act by which nullity is nullified and vanity is made vain. And so, the modesty alluded to is a retention of this vanity—the finite—in opposition to the true: it is itself therefore vanity. In the course of the mind’s development we shall see this vanity appear as wickedness at that turning-point at which mind has reached its extreme immersion in its subjectivity and its most central contradiction.
Encyclopedia Logic (§19; pp. 47-48) The first question is, what is the object of our science? The simplest and most intelligible answer to this question is that the truth is its object. Truth is a grand word and an even grander thing. If someone’s spirit and mind are still healthy, his heart must leap at once at the thought of this word. But then the ‘but’ immediately surfaces, namely whether we are capable of knowing the truth. An incommensurability seems to obtain between us as imperfect humans and the truth as it exists in and for itself, and the question arises as to the bridge between the finite and the infinite. God is the truth; how are we to know him? The virtues of humility and modesty seem to conflict with such an undertaking. – However, one also asks whether the truth can be known, merely to find a justification for trudging on in the banality of one’s finite ends. Such humility is not worth much. Such language as ‘How am I, a poor earthly worm, to know the truth?’ is a thing of the past. Its place has been taken by arrogance and smugness, and some have fancied themselves to be immediately in possession of the truth. – Our youth has been persuaded that they possess the truth (in religious and ethical matters) without further ado. In particular, it has been said in this context that all adults are wooden and fossilized and immersed in untruth. The dawn has appeared to the young people, so they say, but the older world is stuck in the muddle and morass of the everyday. In this context, the special sciences have been designated something that must indeed be acquired, but only as a means for the external purposes of life. Here, then, it is not modesty that holds off from knowledge and from the study of the truth, but instead the conviction that one already possesses the truth in and for itself. The older generation does indeed pin its hopes on the young, for it is they who are supposed to keep the world and science advancing. But this hope is conferred upon the young only insofar as they do not remain as they are, but take on the bitter labour of the spirit. There is yet another brand of modesty about the truth. This is the seeming nobleness [Vornehmheit] towards the truth that we see in Pilate facing Jesus. Pilate asked ‘What is the truth?’ in the sense of someone finished with everything, for whom nothing is of significance anymore – the sense in which Solomon says ‘All is vanity’. – Here, there is nothing left but subjective vanity. Timidity is a further impediment to knowing the truth. It is easy for the lethargic mind to say that one did not really mean to be serious about philosophizing. One also hears logic lectures, it is true, but this is supposed to leave us as we are. It is believed that if thinking goes beyond the ordinary reach of representations it moves into sinister territory, that one entrusts oneself there to a sea on which one is tossed hither and thither by the waves of thought only to land eventually back again on the sandbank of this temporal finitude that one had left for nothing at all. The results of such views can be seen in the world. People may acquire many skills and grow to be knowledgeable in many ways; one may become an accomplished civil servant and be educated in preparation of whatever one’s particular purposes may be. But it is something quite different to educate one’s mind for what is loftier and to care about that. We may hope that in our times a demand for something better has dawned on our youth and that they will not be content with the straw of superficial knowledge.
Cant seem to find the source for Ilyenkov’s comments, where is it located?