From: "Widder,NE" <N.E.Widder-AT-lse.ac.uk>
Subject: RE: dialectic
Date: Wed, 6 Jan 1999 01:31:47 -0000 


>Could someone kind person give me some brief indication of the problem
>with Hegel's dialectic. I have never read Hegel so please bear with me >and
give an example if possible.

I doubt this will brief but here we go.

Hegel's dialectic is concerned in the first instance with trying to theorize
the possibility of a rational totality and then showing the identity between
this totality and the real.  The totality is developed through an idea of
negative relations.  Hegel works with negativity because he feels it holds
an important ambiguity:  To say that X is not Y is at once to invoke a
separation between X and Y, and to unify them, insofar as Y becomes internal
to the identity of X.  To put X and Y in a 'positive' relationship, on the
other hand, is actually to make them indifferent to one another.  Things in
a positive relationship in no way threaten (that is, negate) each other's
identities.  They are things-in-themselves that relate to each other only
contingently.  To accept the thing-in-itself would leave no possibility for
law, insofar as law is relational but with things-in-themselves relations
are never necessary.  So Hegel says that the thing-in-itself must be
conceived as a moment of a more encompassing negative relationship -- it is
the moment of independence between X and Y that is invoked in the ambiguous
negative relation.

There is no thing-in-itself, therefore all things are nothing but their
relations.  Hence Hegel says the logic of the atomistic thing gives way to
relational forces -- just as Deleuze outlines in the opening pages of
Nietzsche and Philosophy.  But given the idea of negativity, Hegel goes on
to say that we can think a totality of relational forces precisely because
if we were to posit something outside this totality, it would be related to
it and so accounted for within its schema.  To be outside or external is
precisely a negative relationship, and this succombs to the dual meaning of
negation.  The dialectical totality can in this way even account for
contradictories, X and -X, separated by an infinite distance. All Hegel has
to do is show how any X gives rise to its own contradiction, that it invokes
its opposite, and that this opposite through its negativity to X can be
synthesized with it into this totality.  This presents a movement, he says,
of being-in-itself to being-for-another and finally being-for-itself THROUGH
being-for-another.  This is the idea of the identity of identity and
difference, which Hegel claims that it is all-encompassing.

Briefly, the first three chapters of the Phenomenology show how this
totality is derived from immediate experience.  If we start with an
immediate experience -- i.e., it is now night -- and ask what is the truth
of this experience, we will find it is not in its immediate presentation.
We could, of course, reject the idea that there is a truth, but that for
Hegel would amount to a skeptical denial of truth which would be
self-contradictory (the skeptic makes a truth claim when he says there is no
truth, so he undermines himself).  If we ask for the truth of this
experience, we first find that it is mediated by universal concepts such as
Here, Now, Day, Night, etc.  Then if we seek the truth or meaning of these
concepts, we find that they are negatively related to each other, and this
gives rise to the idea of a totality of relations.  The point is that in
seeking the truth of an immediate experience, we end up with the totality as
its condition of possibility.

The remaining chapters try to show how this abstract totality is also
identical to reality.  It tries to do through a series of internal
transitions by showing how each dialectical manoeuvre yields a more concrete
idea.  The first three chapters, entitled consciousness, deal with how
conscious experience gives rise to this totality.  But since this is a
totality where the separation between subject and object vanishes, it is
also one in which the object is no longer alien to consciousness, and the
result is self-consciousness.  Self-consciousness is a more concrete term,
Hegel says, than merely abstract consciousness examining the world.  If we
go seek the truth of self-consciousness (this starts with the master-slave
dialectic and goes from there) we find that self-consciousness achieves
self-certainty when the individual is united to and no longer feels alien
with the universal.  The unity of individual and universal gets us a still
more concrete term -- Reason (think of it simply in the way in which reason
rests upon a unity between universal concepts and particulars they define).
When we seek the truth of Reason, that is, the unity of individual and
universal, we find it is in the realm of Spirit, and it is here that Hegel
enacts a cleavage between Nature and Spirit.  Spirit is specifically
community spirit, and self-consciousness is certain when the individual
feels in no way alien to his community.  The dialectic of Spirit then
proceeds to go through a history of communities, which will culminate in the
society of mutual recognition of self-consciousness.  This is a society in
which each person is recognized as individual and also part of the whole.
This reconciled society is the identity of identity and difference brought
to reality, which comes at the end of history.  (There are two more chapters
in the Phenomonology on Religion and Absolute Knowledge, but we can leave
things here for now -- for that matter, we can also mention that I am
basically leaving out the entirety of the Logic and the Philosophy of
Nature, but that would go on forever).

Anyway, as to what is wrong with the dialectic.  One of the points to note
is that the dialectic never stops being abstract.  This is Marx's central
criticism, in both his critique of the Philosophy of Right and the Economic
and Philosophic Manuscripts.  As becomes clear when looking at Hegel's
description of modern society, it is a presentation in which unity remains
embodied in a Spirit which hovers above a reality recognized to be divided
and without the means to repair itself (Hegel for example, points out the
problems of modern poverty and says there is no real solution to them).  The
fact that the identity of identity and difference remains abstract -- that
is, one-sided -- indicates precisely that it is missing some form of
difference which exceeds it.  Hence Deleuze says that oppositional logic
always misses a dimension of depth (i.e., Diff Rep, don't remember the
pages, but it's that whole riff on opposition being the inverted candle in
the eye of the ox).  To put it simply, Hegel's Concept, remaining abstract,
misses a difference outside the concept, that is difference-in-itself.  As
for why the dialectic misses that, well, it has to do with the fact that
Hegel is already committed to a spatialized notion of difference.  That is
to say, contradictories are sought to be separated by an infinite distance,
while other differences are similarly thought in spatial terms.  Time itself
is understood in terms of space, and space, you could say, becomes the
visualization of difference as such.  A large part of this, as Deleuze
points out in Nietzsche and Philosophy, rests on the fact that difference,
understood spatially, is also understood in terms of equality.  The space
that separates differences, for Hegel, is also their common measure, even if
it cannot be thought as separate from the differences themselves.  Hence,
following Nietzsche, Deleuze says it is necessary to release quantity from
quality -- the equalization of quantities is meaningless (Marx, and Adorno
and Horkheimer, by the way, also make such points).  And in rethinking the
notions of difference and spatiality, it is necessary to understand space in
new forms -- i.e., as a fold, which unites the most distant and the most
close (see the Leibniz book).

Hope this helps.

Nathan
n.e.widder-AT-lse.ac.uk