Full text of one of Aadi Arya Karthik submissions for a class at Oxford.
What, For Hegel, Is Dialectic?
It seems to me that, in Hegel, for a philosophical construct to be true, it must be self-
similar: for the presence of a substructure within the whole but not structurally congruent to it is
exactly an opposition between part and whole, a crisis which until resolved discredits the entire
apparatus. As such, an account of the dialectic is an account of negation in all its generality. In
the sequel, I will argue that this negation can be understood as critique as the Enlightenment
thinkers practice it, but, pace Jaeggi, is not reflected in psychoanalytic procedure. I will conclude
with a brief point on the difficulty of chaining together negations, as it were, in the manner
which Hegel understands as dialectical.
i.
Critique is crisis.1 That is, critique does not merely emerge in response to an objective
crisis, as proposing a way out of it; in fact, the critique has no intention toward resolution of a
crisis in any way; instead, critique manufactures crisis, forces it, by seizing onto and exploiting a
point of difficulty within or entry into a system. No crisis could come to fruition without the
existence of such a point of difficulty, a glaring one, in the way-things-are, but the presence of
such a point does not by itself a crisis make, not until a criticism targeted at that point comes to
be. (Of course, the argument may be made that the presence of such a point in the way-things-are
invites critique, and as such that in some sense the way-things-are is morally responsible, in its
imperfection, for the crisis engendered—but this does not indicate any sort of causal
responsibility on the part of way-things-are for the crisis. If one refuses a vaccine, it is not
implausible to accuse one of being morally implicated in one’s subsequent illness, but it is
certainly untrue that one caused one’s illness by that act.)
Enlightenment critique was the forcing of such a crisis in and upon the absolutist political
structure of the time: after all, there can be no crisis without a dualism between whose poles the
conflict is to play out, a dualism which was freshly articulated by Enlightenment thinkers in their
separation of a sphere of political activity from a sphere of morality. The parallel hierarchies of
government and of the “republic of letters” were not in the image of, for example, the parallel
hierarchies of the Chalcedonian and anti-Chalcedonian churches in the sixth century: for the
latter, despite their doctrinal conflicts, did not meaningfully disagree on what legitimacy
consisted in: the Chalcedonian and anti-Chalcedonian worked from the same corpus of scriptures
and texts of the Church Fathers, and both understood legitimacy as an orthodoxy with respect to
this corpus. On the other hand, the anti-absolutist thinkers of the Enlightenment, understanding
that, in the absolutist, aristocratic conception, their bourgeois class identity precluded them from
participation in political decision-making—and believing this exclusion, this comparative
illegitimacy, to be unjust—put forth and argued for the universality of an entirely different
standard of legitimacy: one asserted to be generically moral, but really one advancing a quite
specific classical liberal morality heretofore foreign. The monarch was no longer unifiedly a
monarch: he was superposition of human and sovereign, not born above but elevated, subject at
once to the laws of fellow-feeling and those of impartial justice.
In particular, it is only with Schiller, Lessing, Goethe, and their contemporaries that art
becomes critique. This is not to say that art had not been used to what might be familiarly called
critical ends before the eighteenth century; Plato was famously quite aware of the insurrectionary
(to him, distortionary) potential of literature,2 and the Iconoclasms were as much aesthetic
controversies as theological ones. But, until the Enlightenment, there was no ideology of art:
insofar as controversies involving art were political, they were already-existent political
controversies in which artists either took sides or en masse joined with one party, and never
involved any conception of the essence of art constituting its own distinct party. Schiller, on the
other hand, treated art not merely as a force of order but also as a force imposing and eventually
universalizing an order of its own making—a moral order—against the political one which to
him had proved so insufficient.
We are thus provided with a historical account of what Hegel thinks of as the “first
negation” of the dialectical process. What Hegel knows as true skepticism3 and finds present in
Sextus Empiricus but lacking in Kant is much more thoroughly exhibited in Rousseau, Voltaire,
and the like; it is an attack on the totalizing social order by means of the promulgation of a
manufactured totalizing social order—a utopia—and a new standard by which this order is
legitimate and the present order illegitimate. The crisis is directly forced by the encounter
between this new standard (i.e. system of norms) and the way-of-things to which it is opposed: in
this sense Jaeggi is right to name the instantiation of a crisis “constructivist-performative.”4
It is not difficult to read other examples of negation as forcings-of-crises, though it must
be recalled that these are always crises to which thought arrives—terminological crises, “social”
crises—rather than real ones. It is not that there is some substance called pure being which
presents itself to us as contradictory; it is that we are introduced to some phenomenon under the
name pure being, realize that this naming entails that the phenomenon is a nothing, but that the
nothingness of the phenomenon reciprocally entails its being pure being. Importantly, both these
entailments constitute the “first negation”; the “second negation” is a negation of this “adjoint”
entailing, this opposition, into a non-opposition. We see by the instability of both notions
involved that the presentation of the two as a dyad, a dipole, a duality is simply unsustainable,
has nothing to do with the truth; and so we come to a “more true” understanding of the
phenomenon involved by denying the independent existence of each pole while preserving
something of their character in a single name: becoming. In its historical context, then, Hegelian
thought reads as an apprehension of the crisis which Enlightenment critique has presented, and
an attempt to critique the duality in whose terms this crisis has played out in turn.
ii.
Jaeggi says: “the psychoanalytic conversation can be understood as a version of
immanent criticism.”5 It is clear that she intends that immanent criticism name a practice that, if
not Hegel’s own, is at very least strongly Hegelian; it is my contention that this case-study of
hers obscures Hegel in two important ways.
a. Hegelian critique must be spatially non-incremental
Psychoanalysis is spatially incremental by necessity: the analyst is analyst of an
individual subject, and not of society at large. As such, any “cure” the analyst offers the
analysand is inherently nondialectical, as it involves a concession made by the analysand to
society, and no reciprocal concession made by society to the analysand. That is, no negation of
the analysand-society polarity is accomplished, since cure simply means a reintegration of the
analysand into society, and so simply their abandoning of their own pole for the opposite one, the
position of which remains unchanging. Specifically, the Spaltung within the subject—which
Jaeggi seems implicitly to be positing as that contradiction, resolution of the crisis associated
with which is the dialectical motion, the “second negation”—is, as Lacan observed, not actually
within the subject: it is engendered by the subject’s subjection to the Symbolic order, to, roughly
speaking, the received linguistic structures (including socio-cultural and economic structures) in
which we are installed from birth, which clearly cannot be bargained with in the analyst’s office.
Only large-scale praxis, then, can hope to compel a reconsidering of the societal position—a
pulling of society away from its pure opposition to one—and thus any possibility of sublation.
b. Hegelian critique must be temporally non-incremental
More problematic is the idea of Hegelian critique as an incremental working toward some
point-at-infinity—as Neoplatonic in this vague sense, perhaps even more indicatively aligned
with Lacan’s account of our chasing-after the ever-unattainable object of desire (again, this is
very roughly put). In Jaeggi’s account, analysis is governed by the supposedly Freudian axiom
that there is “no such thing as health but only pathological and less pathological ways of dealing
with conflicts”:6 that is, analysis, to Jaeggi, presents as a continued pursuit of better health. This
is, to put it bluntly, not Freudian in the slightest—it is a point he nears a disavowal of in e.g. the
late paper “Analysis Terminable and Interminable,” a disavowal which Lacan is able to
emphatically complete—rather, it is an axiom of cognitive-behavioral therapy and related
approaches, assuming a moralizing concept of what are called mental illnesses as antisocial
behaviors to be stamped out just as crime might be. And, more importantly, Hegel is quite clear
that the dialectic does not simply motor along, transporting us from where we are to a slightly
better vantage point to one slightly better than that, ad infinitum: this, for him, is “bad or
negative infinity.”7 There is no sublation here, sublation being precisely the conceptual
attainment of the in-and-for-itself, which is not itself then input to a new negation, a new
critique; if it were, Hegel’s system would be incomplete in a way he would not miss.
iii.
This last point is the difficulty of grasping the Hegelian dialectic, its unique character: it
is not at all clear why the “second negation” should provide oneself with the right concept, with a
concept that itself cannot be negated, thus participating in and legitimizing a dialectical process
that runs off to infinity. The theoretical argument seems to me to hinge on an emphasizing of the
fact that the “second negation” is a negating of negation, contradiction itself, and so cannot itself
be pregnant with its own ensuing collapse-into-negation; however, I do not comprehend how this
stability would be practically evidenced, for example in historical applications of the dialectic. I
believe this is due to me missing something in Hegel—and it is certainly not as if I am alone in
this—and not due to some glaring omission in his system, but ultimately I cannot seem to figure
out what this missing piece would be.
——
1 The account given in this section follows Koselleck, Critique and Crisis, esp. ch. 8-10.
2 Most notably in the Republic.
3 The Encyclopedia Logic, s. 81.
4 Jaeggi, Critique of Forms of Life, ch. 6.3.
5 Jaeggi, Critique of Forms of Life, ch. 6.2.
6 Jaeggi, Critique of Forms of Life, ch. 6.3.
7 Hegel, The Encyclopedia Logic, s. 94.
Aadi Arya Karthik 