Date: Fri, 15 Sep 95 16:48 BST
From: WIDDER-AT-VAX.LSE.AC.UK
Subject: Re: Susan Says Here It Is, There It Isn't


Susie,

Yeah, I would disagree that Hegel "understood Geist as the agent that directs
matter toward its purposeful end."  The dialectic process is designed to get
rid of 'matter', insofar as it stands as something 'outside' the 'concept'.
That's why he opposes anything like a 'Thing in Itself' that stands behind
appearances and relationships, and why he absorbs 'matter' into the concept
of force.  And he further opposes the idea of an 'end' that is external to
what it directs.  The only method in which telos can function is as an internal
principle.  It is not an agent directing something else.

What is at issue for Hegel with regards to matter is whether there is anything
that can be said to 'escape' form.  That's how matter functioned in the 
form/matter relationship.  If knowledge was necessarily conceptual and hence
general (i.e., you know an individual object only through its general 
characteristics -- i.e., concepts of colour, mass, weight, etc.), then matter
was the unknowable substrate which made objects individual.  I can know what a
pen is but I can't 'know' this individual pen.  Insofar as it is individual,
it escapes any general categories.  I recognize the individual pen as an 
object, but I know it as a representative of a species.  What Hegel basically
argues is that this idea of final individuation is itself conceptual.  If
individuality can be treated as a 'concept', then there is no reason to posit
its unknowability.  This is why the thing-in-itself is a contradiction for
Hegel.  It posits something as fundamentally unknown.  But this is self-
contradictory -- what is it to know that something is unknown?

Deleuze on the other hand will re-introduce 'matter' as an anarchistic,
singular, differential force that escapes form.  It is the aleatory point,
the dark precurser, call it what you will.  What makes the reintroduction of
matter possible (not as billard ball-type atoms but as relational force) is
the ultimate failure of Hegel to attain closure of the concept.  Insofar as
there is something which escapes the concept (as Hegel ultimately admits in
his writings on nature, as well as basically admitting it by the end of the
PHILSOPHY OF RIGHT), there is room to once again take seriously what it means
to 'escape form'.

Hegelian negativity:  when Hegel replaces matter/essence/thing-in-itself with
the play of forces, he does so because it is impossible to separate a 'thing-
in-itself' from its relationships with other 'things'.  Actually, one of the
best explanations for this comes from a piece by Richard Rorty (Erik ought to
appreciate that) in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy.  Rorty says that if Maine
is defined by being north of New York, does that mean New York is internal or
external to the essence of Maine.  If Maine refers to New York to gain its
specificity, it cannot be treated as a separate thing relating in the first
instance to itself.  So what Hegel does (like Nietzsche and Deleuze) is make
relationships primary and essences secondary.  It is now relationships which
establish things, not things which then relate to each other.

The question then is how these relationships are to be characterized.  Hegel 
says they are negative relationships because negativity compromises the
internal/external distinction (the way it is compromised in Douglas Edric
Stanley's post with the crime detectives, et al.).  If you say 'X is not Y',
you are at once excluding X and Y, but also including them, as Y becomes
internal to X as part of its definition.  What Hegel wants to do with this
ambiguity of negative relationships is wrap these relationships into a whole
which totalizes its parts.  What the whole becomes is the process by which
things collapse into and become no more than their relationships with other
things, only to then separate themselves out into individual things.  X and
Y proceed to collapse into each other and to exclude and separate from each
other -- or so Hegel wants them to do this.

What positive difference becomes for Deleuze is non-dialectical-izable 
difference.  It is not the difference between two objects relating in the
first instance to themselves (as if X and Y were billard ball-type things
that do not depend upon each other for their specification), for that is the
type of 'positive difference' that Hegel easily dispenses with (it amounts to
simple mechanism) -- hence all the talk about positive resonance between
partial objects, etc.  It has a character of 'pure exteriority' not in the
sense that it resides outside some boundary (whether permeable or impermeable)
but in the sense that it forever escapes the processes of the dialectic.  But
it is also in the heart of the dialectic.

Anyway, that's the riff I have for now.  As for univocity -- I suppose that's
probably not all of it, though that's all I have to say about it for the
moment.

Nathan

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