Over the last couple of weeks, David, of Indifaith, has written a series of posts responding to my characterization of the history of philosophy as a series of attempts to think immanence (here, here, and here). I have been impressed by the openness and interest with which David, a pastor, has approached this discussion, and am genuinely grateful for his probing questions that have helped me to further clarify my own positions. As I recall, Voltaire somewhere or other has a short little essay describing an encounter he had with a Quaker. As is well known, Voltaire, that sparkling giant of the Enlightenment, was certainly no friend of religion and often leveled his acerbic wit at various forms of religious dogmatism, hypocrisy, superstition, and brutality. Yet Voltaire went away from this encounter with nothing but praise for the virtuous nature of the Quaker and his quiet and unassuming inward religious belief. In this exchange, David has comported himself in a similar fashion.
The remark that set off this entire discussion occurred in a thread responding to a passage I had quoted by Guattari, where his sounded remarkably close to Badiou in his critique of postmodernism (the entire exchange can be found here). Responding to some questions by David, I there wrote:
In a number of respects, I draw my distinction between theology and philosophy from Jean-Luc Marion who rigorously tries to define the limit of philosophy. I differ from Marion in holding that theologies that posit transcendence ought to be left behind. I read the history of philosophy as the history of attempts to think immanence. These attempts can be deployed in a variety of ways, can be more or less successful, and the question of whether or not immanence has ever been fully thought is entirely open. By immanence I understand the thesis that we don’t need to refer to anything beyond, or to any intervention outside the world, to explain the world or to account for value. Consequently, when Thales says “all is water”, he is appealing to a principle of explanation that is strictly immanent to the world and is breaking with mythos or narrative explanations of the world such as those found in Greek mythology. To complicate matters more, we can have ontological forms of immanence and epistemological forms of immanence, and various combinations of the two. An account is epistemically immanent if it rejects any form of appeal in establishing a conclusion that cannot be arrived at through reason or some form of experience. That is, epistemological immanence rejects any appeals to privileged esoteric experiences, revelation, etc. Ontological immanence would be the principle that there are no causes outside of natural causes.
I don’t think I’m so much excluding poetry from this project (though philosophy and poetry are distinct), as questioning your characterization of poetry as the articulation of the sacred. Certainly a number of poets would themselves take issue with being characterized as Rilkean. The case of theology is complex. Professional theologians mean so many different things by theology, that it’s difficult to make generalizations. Descartes, for example, would fit the criteria of epistemological immanence in his proofs for the existence of God as his conception of God and proof for the existence of God is not premised on any revelation or esoteric experience, but proceeds through reason in a way that all can repeat. His position does not meet the criteria of ontological immanence, as he conceives God as being outside nature or transcendent to being. Spinoza, and Whitehead’s conception of God as I understand it, do meet the ontological forms of immanence. If these are theologies then they fall within the scope of philosophy. The moment a theology appeals to revelation, whether in the form of sacred texts, the authority of a prophet or man in the form of God, or esoteric, non-repeatable experiences, that theology is no longer in the domain of philosophy, though it can certainly remain of interest as a phenomenon to be studied by the psychoanalyst, sociologist, or the anthropologist.
The concept of “immanence” is relatively new in the history of philosophy (as I understand it, it appears in various scholastic philosophies, but really doesn’t come into prominence as a central theme until Deleuze and Badiou), however, the more I’ve thought about it since initially making this assertion, the more I’ve become convinced that a number of moves in the history of philosophy immediately gain clarity if situated in terms of the problem of immanence. Take, for example, Plato’s Meno and Phaedo. It will be recalled that Plato famously argues that learning is recollection. That is, to learn is not to acquire new information from the outside given to us by a teacher– elsewhere Socrates will refer to himself as a midwife of knowledge, i.e., he does not bestow or give knowledge but only asks questions that allow a person to recollect knowledge they already have –but rather to learn is to recollect an unconscious, innate knowledge. Every beginning philosophy student is baffled by Plato’s theory of learning. Indeed, it is likely that a number of Plato scholars are themselves baffled by Plato’s theory of recollection (as can be seen in the way that it is quickly swept under the rug as but a moment in Plato’s thought). However, as soon as we situate Plato’s theory in terms of the problem of immanence, its motivation suddenly becomes clear. Recall that for Plato, knowledge is not a knowledge of this or that particular thing, but a knowledge of forms, essences, or universals. The problem is that we nowhere encounter forms in sensible experience. This comes out clearly in the Phaedo, when Socrates is discussing the Identical. We never see anything identical in the world. All things differ in some respect or another. Consequently, the story goes, we could not have learned about the identical from experience. Yet we have knowledge of the identical. As Socrates reasons– almost as a proto-Kantian –we could never recognize two things as being the same if we did not first (a priori) know the form of the Identical. Knowledge of the form precedes knowledge of any particulars. So 1) we have the concept of the Identical, and 2) we did not learn this from experience. The grammar of philosophy stipulates that we cannot appeal to authority (“because I said so!”) or revelation as a ground for knowledge. Consequently, we must account for this knowledge in some other ways. The theory of recollection or innate ideas! What marvelous conceptual gymnastics to maintain immanence! What magnificent conceptual creations!
We can see the history of philosophy as a series of attempts to preserve or think immanence. Some of these attempts are more successful than others. Some are more interesting than others. If Deleuze and Guattari are led to describe Spinoza as the “Christ of philosophers”, then this isn’t because Spinoza was a prophet or divine, but because Spinoza went furthest in thinking ontological immanence, or a way of explaining the world that relied on no intervention from anything outside the world, history, or nature (certainly this claim can be disputed). The history of philosophy will therefore be a history of strategies for thinking immanence. Empiricism would be one strategy (whatever is immanent to sensation). Rationalism will be another (whatever is immanent to reason). Transcendental idealism will be yet another, and phenomenology yet another. Each of these strategies generates its own unique problems– like Plato’s problem of learning arising out of the immanence of the forms to thought and their absence to experience –and it would be possible to write a “cartography” of the history of philosophy that charted the problems that emerged as a result of particular drawings of immanence and the conceptual gymnastics and inventions that result as a function of these problems. Some day I would like to work through all of this in much the same way that Marion attempted to work through the problem of givenness in Reduction and Givenness, in hopes of arriving at a point where I could pose the problem of immanence. For immanence itself must be accounted for in terms of immanence, and cannot be treated as a transhistorical form floating about outside the world.
In this connection, David writes,
My only point drawing attention to equations and eggs is that they are assumed to function in a static therefore repeatable manner. I am not convinced this is the case in human relationships and therefore needs to be accounted for in any political theory. I am of course all for careful and reflective observations of human social behaviour.
No disagreements here. The significance I was aiming at with my examples from mathematics and boiling eggs wasn’t their universality, but rather that we have access to these things without having to rely on narratives or stories. We can know these things regardless of whether we are Greek, American, Chinese, Hindu, etc. For instance, arithmetic exists the world over in some form or another, in more or less advanced states, yet we would be tremendously surprised to discover that two groups of people with no communication whatsoever had created, say, baseball.
However, as David here point out, inquiry must be tailored to its object. We already begin to approach this with the case of boiling eggs. The point at which water boils is not universal, but rather depends on other factors such as air pressure, altitude, etc. I have tried to develop the concept of constellations to talk about these sorts of things
Compare a mathematical equation with an armadillo. The value of x for 2x + 4 = 12 is going to be the same for all times and places, independent of context, history, psychological idiosyncrasies, etc. However, if we wish to understand living organisms, we can no longer make these kinds of generalizations. Rather, we have to look at the way the organism fits within a particular constellation such that this constellation is not a global or universal logos, but a local logos or structure with a history, and its own immanent organization that cannot be generalized to other cases. We shouldn’t speak of logos, or a universal law underlying all being, but rather of logoi, or divergent and differing patterns of organization. A good example underlining this point would be the last great meteor impact that wiped out most life on earth. The life that returned subsequent to this event was radically different than the sort of life that existed prior to this event. The lesson to take away from this story is that there aren’t “laws” of life similar to say the Newtonian laws of physics. Rather, we have highly local “logics” (where “logic” here refers to patterns or organizations) that look more like what we refer to as customs than necessities– Customs and styles of matter. Another example would be language. Languages each have their own immanent structure of sounds, their own pattern. We cannot know a priori what this structure of language will be for a particular language because the patterning of sound is differential (it is determined in terms of relations to others sounds that may or may not be present in another language).
Life and language are not universal or particular (where the particular is the instantiation of a species, form, or essence), but is rather singular. However, contrary to Hegel, the singularity of these things in now way precludes our ability to map and comprehend these things, nor does it require any special revelation. In this connection, I think biology is again an excellent example. An organism is always problematic in the sense that it is a solution to a problem within the world. Yet there are many ways of solving one and the same problem. Thus, fur and sweat are one way of solving the problems of heat and cold. There is a frog in Canada, the Eastern wood frog, that solves the problem of cold in another way. When freezing temperatures are reached, the frog itself freezes, effectively dying (there’s no brain or heart activity). When heat returns the frog de-thaws and comes back to life. . . The Christs of the animal world.
Here we have different solutions to one and the same problem. We can transfer this way of thinking to cultural formations. In certain regions of India people eat off a banana leaf with their fingers. Here, of course, we use silverware. The lack of universality involved in these customs doesn’t undermine their intelligibility, nor prevent us from collectively deliberating about these things. I think this is, perhaps, one of the key points about philosophy– It’s only requirement is that of open-ended deliberation with others.
Philosophy begins with the other, the stranger, or the person who does not come from the same cultural background as ourselves. It begins from the standpoint of difference and is an attempt to solve the problem of difference. Philosophy tends to appear in periods of cultural crises– philosophy, by no means, always exists –where traditions have broken down, and we’re no longer able to rely on shared narratives to coordinate human action and the understanding of the world. This is why philosophy is always an affair of the city, rather than the countryside (even when the philosopher lives in a rural region like Heidegger), because the city is a community of strangers, of people coming from all sorts of different backgrounds. This difference in background, this otherness, suspends the possibility of assuming the existence of shared mythos or narratives, requiring the invention of other interpersonal technologies, other ways of grounding social relations.
I think this aspect of philosophy tends to get obscured because of the “book form”. Today we tend to encounter philosophies in the form of books and articles. The book is itself a problem of time, distance, and otherness. Books surmount space and distance, allowing encounters with an absent other that is not present. Leibniz writes his New Essays on Human Understanding, responding to Locke’s Essay point by point. He is in dialogue with Locke even though he’s never met him. We are led astray by Descartes’ Meditations. There it seems that Descartes is simply reflecting privately on what he can know, seeking to ground his knowledge. We forget that the Meditations begin with a letter to the Church, and that he’s perpetually looking for those things that can be repeated. He is constantly with the other. Everything is a Platonic dialogue, even Husserl’s wretched attempts to think the other in the Cartesian Meditations. Unlike Plato, we just forget to add the names of the interlocutors. The difference, then, is that where other stances begin with a certainty, a conviction, such a thing is, for philosophy, a perpetually receding horizon that is only ever approached asymptotically without ever being reached.
Larval Subjects . 
September 7, 2007 at 12:12 pm
Great post, as per usual! A minor point when you say:
contrary to Hegel, the singularity of these things in now way precludes our ability to map and comprehend these things
This sounds like a fairly common Hegel myth — that Hegel says or is otherwise committed to the unknowability of individuals. This is actually a position that Hegel himself attacks in the Phenomenology (in Perception, if I recall rightly). Perhaps you have something else in mind though.
September 7, 2007 at 12:48 pm
Thanks for your ongoing feedback on this matter. I am outside the walls of academia and can only pursue this as more of a “hobby” and so I appreciate outposts such as this in the blogopshere where my thinking can be challenged. I certainly tread a little more carefully now around such terms as transcendence and immanence.
I appreciated your final statement in this post.
The difference, then, is that where other stances begin with a certainty, a conviction, such a thing is, for philosophy, a perpetually receding horizon that is only ever approached asymptotically without ever being reached.
I was not sure if you were assuming the same type of conviction or certainty as Descartes when he spoke of his proofs as “such a kind that I reckon they leave no room for the possibility that the human mind will ever discover better ones.”
In my final response on my blog I brought up Dostoevsky. Here was the quote I was looking for in Crime and Punishment. This in many ways characterizes how I approach life and social theory.
Environment is the root of all
evil! A favourite phrase. And the direct consequence of it is that if society is organized on normal lines, all crimes will vanish at once, for there will be nothing to protest against, and all men will become righteous in the twinkling of an eye. Human nature isn’t taken into account at all. Human nature is banished. Human nature isn’t supposed to exist.
They deny that mankind, following the lines of historical development to the very end in
a living way, will at last be transformed into a normal society. On the contrary, they
maintain that a social system, emerging out of someone’s brain, will at once organize
mankind and transform it in an instant into a sinless and righteous society. . . . They don’t want a living soul! A living soul makes demands, a living soul scoffs at mechanics, a living soul is suspicious, a living soul is retrograde! The sort of soul they want may smell of carrion, and it may even be possible to make it of rubber, but at least it is not alive, at least it has no will, at least it is servile and can be guaranteed not to rebel! . . . Human
nature wants life. It has not completed the living process. It is too soon to be relegated to the graveyard. You can’t jump over human nature by logic alone! Logic can only foresee three possibilities, but there is a whole million of them!
I am not assuming that this quote directly critiques (or even opposes) your work but I believe it remains helpful to involve this perspective in such a conversation.
September 7, 2007 at 1:03 pm
Thanks Tom. I was thinking in particular of Kierkegaard’s critique of Hegel with regard to how existence falls out of the picture and is replaced by the concept. I do think there’s something to this critique. The first moment in the Phenomenology, sense-certainty, shows how it is impossible to say what we intend with regard to sensual-immediacy. In the shift from sense-certainty to perception, the phenomenological subject comes to recognize that what initially appeared to be a deadlock is in fact a solution: that it was the universal we were after all along.
September 7, 2007 at 5:20 pm
Sorry, I should clarify what I meant by using the Descartes quote. When I began reading your work I was under the impression that you were looking for a type of articulated solidity that reminded me of Descartes’ confidence. This last post helped clarify how you perceived the role of relationship (dialogue) in philosophy.
I’ll have to think more about your use of Hegel (“the universal we were after all along”)
September 7, 2007 at 6:39 pm
I’m not endorsing the position of any particular philosopher, but trying to draw attention to a particular way of thinking. The reference to Descartes is only useful as a way of approaching the difference between how a philosopher might approach questions about divinity versus how notions of divinity are thought about in terms of the ‘revealed word of god’ (it’s notable, for instance, that Descartes’ God has no personal characteristics). Similar points could be made by appealing to Hume, who certainly is cynical about the possibility of certainty outside of mathematics, and who evaluates all judgments about the world in terms of probabilities. I’m not sure what you’re referring to as my use of Hegel. I refer to Hegel but I don’t take myself to be using Hegel or endorsing his positions.
The issue here isn’t one pertaining to an opposition between the universal and the particular, where the universal is mapped on to philosophy and the particular is mapped on to religion. There are, of course, philosophers who endorse the existence of universals (Plato, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Husserl, and many others). There are also philosophers that are highly skeptical of whether universals exist or whether we can know them (Hume, Dewey, Deleuze, and many others). What is at issue is not the content of these various philosophical positions, but a particular way of approaching questions of morality or ethics, politics, aesthetics, being, knowledge, and so on. My tendency is to side with the Hume-Deleuze camp, emphasizing the singularity, inventiveness, and non-generalizable nature of emergences within being. The only rule of the game is that the philosopher cannot appeal to a myth or a story to develop his points. Other than that, the positions one takes, the sorts of ontological or metaphysical commitments one endorses (does God exist? Is everything individual? are there universals? is there a soul? is everything material? etc) are fair game. For instance, based on the claim that all knowledge arises from sensation, Hume convincingly shows that we cannot have knowledge of universals or distinguish between genuine cause and effect relations (necessity) and mere habits. He shows how skepticism is internal to knowledge itself. Kant then comes along and tries to show how our knowledge of necessity comes from something other than sensation or experience: the categories the mind imposes on sensation. No appeal to stories is made in either of these instances to ground these positions. Similarly, when a hermeneut like Ricouer or Gadamer interprets a sacred text, they suspend all questions of whether the events depicted in these texts are true or metaphysically substantial, and instead simply examine the relationship of the text to other texts, history, internal sign-systems, etc. This too would be an example of one proposal of immanence.
September 7, 2007 at 6:54 pm
Or to clarify, skepticism is a philosophical position premised on immanence as well. The issue isn’t certainty versus uncertainty. Indeed, one of the central problems here is that there is too much certainty among the believers, based on a text alone. The skeptic, by contrast, would perpetually emphasize that what is epistemically available does not warrant such and such a set of conclusions. For instance, in the case of Hume, the fact that I once observed an egg turn hard when boiled (or always observed such a thing happening in the past) in no way establishes that it must happen this way for all times in the future. The reason for this is that I do not observe the relationship of necessity between these two events (the egg being placed in water and then the egg turning hard), rather I only observe one event following another. For this reason, from the standpoint of sensation, I am unable to ultimately distinguish between events that just happen to follow one another without any internal connection, and events that necessarily follow one another with an internal connection. Again, Hume, in his arguments, is appealing to nothing save what is given in experience. This is the real issue: what is given? It could also be said that the history of philosophy is a history of debates over what is given, with each philosopher making different proposals and drawing out the implications or consequences of those proposals. The referent of a story is not given, entailing that it has a rather low degree of epistemic warrant (hearsay).
September 7, 2007 at 7:14 pm
Yes, sorry about the Hegel comment I got my wires crossed with your reference. Much too much for me to chew on right now. How many words per minute can you type? :)
I will definitely give your comment about the “the only rule of the game” some more thought. Truth apart from the appeal to story? I tell you I don’t like it. But now I certainly better understand why you are coming from that position with respect to views on polis and policy.
September 7, 2007 at 8:17 pm
I think part of the issue also revolves around how stories are being used. Plato, for instance, constantly creates myths throughout his dialogues. However, it seems to me that Plato’s use of myth is closer to Jesus’ use of parable, than an appeal to a story to demonstrate the truth of a claim. That is, the myths function as an example that allow a particular structure or set of relationships to be discerned. The truth of the myth is irrelevant, in this usage. The activity is similar to, say, referring to Kafka’s Trial to illustrate a point about bureaucracy. We all know that Joseph K is a fictional character and that he exaggerates the functioning of bureaucracy, but nonetheless the Trial is able to illustrate certain things about the law, legal institutions, bureaucracies, how we experience guilt, and so on. Such an appeal is very different than appealing to Moses climbing a mountain and encountering God to ground prohibitions against homosexuality as issuing from god’s law.
September 7, 2007 at 11:21 pm
You say “The value of x for 2x + 4 = 12 is going to be the same for all times and places, independent of context, history, psychological idiosyncrasies, etc. ” Certainly, you are here on the side of science and of that paragon of immanence, Spinoza who finds, typically, in the model of Mathematics that which as the paradigmatic “third” form of knowledge (Prop. 40, Sch. 2) which is mathematic — the place where he perhaps most influenced Leibniz’s Characteristic, and we find something of the privilege of the matheme in Deleuze, Lacan, and — most evidently — Badiou.
But is this consistent with what I take to be the central character of the immanent which is that there is nowhere else and nothing that has a right to see itself a transcendental criterion, a “still point in a turning world”? Certainly, scientists like the apodicticity they assert and you seem to share for all time and place, an assertion of a digital norm “beyond question” that grounds the simulations of the experimental on the rock an immaterial and ahistoric certainty.
But doesn’t this smack of the transcendental, of something unflowing? If formula of abstract expression are changeless then can they be being understood immanence itself? The mode of the mathematic, like parody, seems a little rigid, a little self-righteous. Are such mathematic “givens” rather — to get to your context — blindly faithful commandments, rules of self replication –“lossless” — which are nothing more than rigid modes used on their occasions as Procrustes his bed? Perhaps, Badiou’s event is to be inverted.
September 7, 2007 at 11:29 pm
Yes, I’ve worried over precisely this problem with mathematics, but I can’t bring myself to claim that mathematics doesn’t have these characteristics. This, then, would be one of those situations where a problem emerges as a function of how immanence has been posed or formulated. I don’t have a solution to this problem, but in the sole case of mathematics I am also unwilling to historicize in the way I do with other phenomena.
As for this: The mode of the mathematic, like parody, seems a little rigid, a little self-righteous. Are such mathematic “givens” rather — to get to your context — blindly faithful commandments, rules of self replication –”lossless” — which are nothing more than rigid modes used on their occasions as Procrustes his bed?
No. But that’s a nice bit of rhetorical footwork.
September 8, 2007 at 12:27 am
Kierkegaard is not so much opposed to immanence as he is to a monistic tendency in all philosophizing–from Plato to Hegel and beyond–that would dissolve the tyranscendence-immanence dialectic in favor of one over the other.
Since we do become, we exist, we can’t stop that flow of time and reach any transcendent point above time. Still, we are moving towards some point, a telos. The issue is that humans, in Kierkegaard’s understanding, are essentially dualities, infinitude-finistude, possibility-necessity, etc.
Hegel wanted to dissolve the duality and rise above existence–as an existing being. This for Kierkegaard is impossible.
The situation is such that the transcendent–the infinite–transects immanence at various points in human existence. For Kierkegaard, these points often come in terms of crises, what psychologists might call identity crises, though the identity here has a transcendent resting place.
September 8, 2007 at 3:41 pm
As for the movement from sense-certainty to perception, I take it that the object of Hegel’s attack is a certain inadequate conception of individuality. So, I think that Hegel presupposes that we do have knowledge of individuals but that this is only explicable given a certain approach to individuality — one that rejects the implicit notion that we can know objects divorced from grasping their (universal) properties. The relation between a thing and its properties is dialectical (insofar as both universality and particularity are essential moments of individuality) and as such I fail to see that universality gets privileged in Hegel’s account of empirical knowledge. If it is at this level that Kierkegaard’s objection is targeted then his route seems a more dangerous prospect insofar as it seems to me to ultimately risk a degeneration into a Jacobi-like position with the attendant obfuscations of haecceity, faith and pure immediacy. Against this, I see Hegel fighting the good anti-mystical fight (not to mention providing a better metaphysical account of the structure of the object).
Of course, there is a sense in which universality does get privileged in Hegel’s account of experience, and at which accusations of hyper-rationalism are more warranted, but this is at the level of Erfahrung — the kind of experience that the Phenomenology as a whole deals with, concerning the proper ordering of logical categories in our encounters with ourselves, others and the world at large. This is to be distinguished from our ordinary perception and coping-in-the-world though, although the more explicitly epistemological topics in the early stages of the Phenomenology can make this a little tricky.
September 9, 2007 at 6:36 am
Kierkegaard has no ontology of the thing per se. While Heidegger fleshed out the ramifications of Kierkegaard’s existence communication, he also abstracted it in ways that Kierkegaard would have disagreed with profoundly. For Kierkegaard, the type of immediacy that refers only to the sense-perception is perhaps not even possible in a human being, only animals. In this he may be following Aristotle.
On the other hand, a life of immediacy, wherein a person related only to sensations and the life of the senses via imagination is positioned in what Kierkegaard calls the aesthetic sphere. It is a non-ethical state of life that lives momentarily and without purpose. The step into ethics and morality occurs when the aesthete experiences a despair so great that s/he seeks to reconstruct him/herself in relationship to others.
Despair is a state within which a distance between social norms and the life of the senses can be put into focus. The individual finds a psychological distance between him/herself and their environment. In some ways, this mirros Hegel’s dialectical insights. But for Kierkegaard there is no aufhebung–there is a leap, a qualitative shift that requires will and passion, as well as intellectual insight.
September 10, 2007 at 10:36 am
Thanks for that cynic librarian.
I have some reservations when you draw a contrast between Hegel and Kierkegaard, saying, “for Kierkegaard there is no aufhebung–there is a leap, a qualitative shift that requires will and passion, as well as intellectual insight.” Perhaps that would do as a description of Kierkegaard’s conception of some of the differences between himself and Hegel, but it seems to ignore aspects of Hegel’s avowed position (although Kierkegaard might demur when it comes to how the project actually plays out). The problem is that Hegel explicitly calls his phenomenological project a ‘path of despair’. I think J.M. Bernstein is correct when he takes this as a sign of the ‘erotic’ dimension to the phenomenological project — the way in which it is no good for us to be disinterested observers of the intellectual trials of consciousness, rather we must also be thoroughly emotionally invested, with our desires being bound up with those of each mode of consciousness and each form of the world that Hegel treats. Thus, I think Hegel would agree that it is not enough to achieve an intellectual insight and so it is crucial to be passionately engaged too. Even the Kierkegaardian motif of the leap is reflected in many accounts of Hegel, where we cannot be ‘sure’ of subsequent stages of consciousness before entering them — that the grand march of reason towards absolute knowing is only discernable retrospectively. For this very reason, that as experienced, the uncertainty hanging over the journey of consciousness would bring this erotic dimension along with it. ‘It is quite true what philosophy says: that life must be understood backwards. But then one forgets the other principle: that it must be lived forwards.’ one might say. (Obviously the rest of that passage — “Which principle, the more one thinks it through, ends exactly with the thought that temporal life can never properly be understood precisely because I can at no instant find complete rest in which to adopt the position: backwards.” — is also relevant here too as to whether we can reach the standpoint of absolute knowing. But I think the original point stands nevertheless.)
September 11, 2007 at 12:53 am
Tom, Thanks. There’s a lot to the notion that Kierkegaard often draws too many contrasts between what he perceives as Hegel’s position and his own. He takes the Danish Hegelians’ writings as those of Hegel, which might not be true all the time.
The idea that life can be lived backwards is a position that Kierkegaard associates with Plato and many others of the monistic tradition he’s out to demolish. While he gives a lot of credit to the Platonic system, he’s more amenable to the anti-systematic approach of Socrates.
The presupposition of living backwards is that the answer is somehow already given, we just need to find it–back there, in the origins, in prehistory, or perhaps in something given bio-psychologically. Why Kierkegaard thinks that Hegel buys into this way of looking at the answers to life is that he puts so much emphasis on starting and ending the system. Where you start will determine where you end. It also seems true that Hegel’s evolutionary process is geared so finely with the historical that it is in that process itself that resolution will come.
Kierkegaard’s also very critical of the idea that you can write a “system” that explains where it’s going and where it’ll end while you are a simple, existing human being. You can’t get outside of time, as it appears Hegel often gives the impression you can.
Despair: no doubt Hegel understood this in terms that Kierkegaard would find amenable. Yet, again, the emphasis is one where Hegel finds the resolution to despair. Kierkegaard would see the despair as ongoing and never resolvable in this life, at least. Hegel does give the impression that once the historical process ends, then there will be no more unhappy consciousness. Or do I draw the wrong conclusions here?
As far as the “erotic” is concerned–well, that’s something that a quasi-Platonist like Kierkegaard would find is prejudiced toward the physical. He might point out that there are many forms of love and passion for the Other, not just the erotic.
September 11, 2007 at 11:57 am
One thing that Hegel wants to avoid is a philosophical account that appeals to the notion of an endless striving (like Fichte’s restless ego, ever propelled towards the ‘ought’ but never finally reaching it either). In keeping with this, I think that the problem of despair is resolvable for Hegel, that we can more-or-less overcome our alienation from ourselves, others and the world at large, so long as we comport ourselves in the right way with the support of the right surroundings. (Some readers of Hegel, like Zizek, would probably disagree with this.) As such, for him a temporal solution is possible, but this is one that must be fought for and is not simply a matter of the historical process coming to an end. It is not as if there is some momentous ‘end of history’ that could somehow be a substitute for a position outside of time, being some sort of halfway house between the temporal and divine — an aevium intersecting both the saeculum and the nunc stans. Partly, the solution will include a historically cultivated realisation that we cannot escape history — a realisation that, theoretically, we will only be at home in the world given a rejection of extra-temporal transcendence, and the production of an ‘erotic’ sensibility that stops yearning for such transcendent relations. (‘Erotic’ as I think Bernstein wants to use it, and certainly as I do, is meant only to pick out the dimension of desire, rather than anything especially sexual.) So, in a sense, Kierkegaard and Hegel seem to agree that there is no getting outside of time so far as lived human existence goes; but they take rather different conclusions from this.
As for the criticism that Hegel’s project is guilty of some sort of onto-genetic fallacy, where the answer to problems is already present in their origins, that depends on how the role of history is conceived within Hegel’s system. I think often too much weight has been placed on a certain understanding of Hegel as thoroughly historicist. However, the ‘evolutionary process’, as you put it, is not merely, or even mostly, historical: Hegel tracks conceptual movements, ones that have their own distinctive ‘logic’ (i.e. set of norms and relations). They ought to be situated and treated with reference to their historical instantiation (including our passionate investment in them), but are not exhausted by their empirical conditions — that is, the way they happen to have arisen historically. When taken this way, the criticism about uncovering their ‘origins’ seems weakened. That is, if the question of origins is a conceptual question as well as a historical one, the sense in which the answers are somehow implausibly preset loses some of its worrying character. For undertaking a conceptual analysis of those categories in some sense instantiated in the world as well as employed in approaches to the world that leave us alienated would seems an eminently sensible approach in working out why such problems arise and what is to be done about them. The sense in which the solution is always-already there in the genesis of the problem takes on a rather different tenor here which strikes me as less perniciously mechanical and implausible.
September 12, 2007 at 5:52 am
Tom, Your comments deserve much more attention than I am at present able to give them. Please accept my sincere apologies (and regrets) for this. I will try to get to them on the morrow.
In the meantime, I wish to suggest that Hegel does not see philosophy in any other way than as science. There’s little love of any kind involved. Since I am no Hegel scholar, I must rely on others to point this out. Merold Westphal (who says there’s no reason at all to see Kierkegaard as “simply” anti-Hegelian), for example, quotes the following in his essay on Hegel and Kierkegaard:
It is this notion of system, according to Westphal that Kierkegaard found so disturbing about Hegel and his followers.
Many scholars have shown significant affinities between Hegel and Kierkegaard, if only negatively, ie, as background for Kierkegaard to forumulate his own thought. I must admit that for some time I was influenced by Hegel’s aesthetic theory as well as his philosophy of history. I acquired some of this via secondary sources, mostly Milosz and Marx, though I did read Hegel unsystematically and “creatively.” But I never acquired a systematic knowledge of his works that a concentrated study brings.
September 13, 2007 at 11:51 pm
Tom, I don’t think that the question about where we start in philosophical analysis of the kind undertaken by Hegel involves that fallacy. I do believe that Kierkegaard is correct when he sees Hegel seeking the answer to questions in terms of a retrospective instead of an open future. This involves the notion that humans somehow contain the answer in themselves.
As far as fallacies go, I haven’t worked out the details of this analysis yet, but there are strong similarities between many of Kierkegaard’s arguments against Hegel’s theory of motion and Schopenhauer’s accusation that Hegel commits a fallacia non causae ut causa or “fallacy based on a cause that is not a cause.”
In essence this form of fallacy conflates the definition of a thing and the proof of its existence, “the ground of knowledge with causality.” Quoting Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics (I, 13), Schopenhauer writes
In numerous places, Kierkegaard discusses what he calls Hegel’s “category mistake” when it comes to mixing existential and logical categories. But like I said, I haven’t worked out the fine points of this yet.
September 18, 2007 at 4:56 am
If each concept and commodity has its own tale of evolution then multiple interpenetrating histories are always in operation. A trivial saying like, “where there’s smoke, there’s fire” points to an involution from which histories, conflated or conflicting, ensue.
April 24, 2012 at 1:08 am
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