French Hegel

From Surrealism to Postmodernism

Bruce Baugh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317827719
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This highly original history of ideas considers the impact of Hegel on French philosophy from the 1920s to the present. As Baugh's lucid narrative makes clear, Hegel's influence on French philosophy has been profound, and can be traced through all the major intellectual movements and thinkers in France throughout the 20th Century from Jean Wahl, Sartre, and Bataille to Foucault, Deleuze, and Derrida. Baugh focuses on Hegel's idea of the unhappy consciousness, and provides a bold new account of Hegel's early reception in French intellectual history.

Chapter One

The Anthropological Turn

1. THE PROBLEM OF PAN-LOGICISM

At least part of the responsibility for the widespread misapprehension that a genuine knowledge of Hegel did not exist in France prior to the publication of Jean Hyppolite's Genèse et structure de la Phénoménologie de Hegel in 1946¹ and Kojève's Introduction à la lecture de Hegel in 1947 lies in the enthusiastic response these works received in postwar France.² Later, although more knowledgeable commentators recognized the importance of the pre-war works of Jean Wahl³ and Henri Lefebvre,⁴ they nevertheless gave the impression that Hegel became known in France through his adversaries: Marxism (Lefebvre) and Kierkegaardian existentialism (Wahl).⁵ Otherwise, it was said, Hegel was unknown in France, not taught at the universities and entirely outside the mainstream of French intellectual life. In Sartre's famous words, “the horror of the dialectic was such that Hegel himself was unknown to us.”⁶

True, a certain Hegel, the Hegel of Phenomenology of Spirit, did not become known in France prior to the Marxist and existentialist commentaries that began appearing in the 1920s. Not until after 1945 did this “dramatic” Hegelianism, which centered on the theme of historical becoming through conflict, come to be seen as compatible with existentialism and Marxism,⁷ and even as encompassing and surpassing both these tendencies.⁸ Since it was this interpretation that placed Hegelianism at the center of postwar French thought, it was perhaps only natural that post-1945 Hegel interpreters would see the story of Hegel in France in terms of their own existentialist and Marxist precursors.⁹ In so doing, however, they passed over sixty years of French writing on Hegel. Until the 1920s, the French almost always understood Hegelianism to mean the “System” set forth in Hegel's Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences, which had been translated into French, albeit abominably,¹⁰ in the 1860s.¹¹ After 1945, it was easy to forget that the Hegel interpretations of the 1920s and 1930s were in many ways a reaction against this older interpretation of Hegel. Unless we bear this in mind, we cannot understand what is at issue in modern French Hegel interpretation.¹²

The transition from the Encyclopedia to the Phenomenology, which is essentially the transition from an epistemological to an historical reading of Hegel, responded to a problem which continues to vex French Hegel interpretation, namely: in what domain does the Hegelian dialectic properly apply? If the generation of French philosophers that came of age in the 1950s and 1960s found the “humanistic” or “anthropological” version of Hegel to be a mystification, we should not lose sight of the fact that the version in question was itself an attempt to correct the mystifications seen as inhering in the earlier, epistemologically oriented interpretation.

The mystification with which Hegelianism was charged, then as later, is “pan-logicism,” in essence, the forcing of all phenomena into the Procrustean bed of the System. This is the point at which the Hegelian system has been most attacked by French philosophers from the 1920s onward. Briefly, it is the problem of the extent to which Hegelian Reason, which seeks to incorporate its Other, implicitly distorts and even does violence to anything which resists or stands outside it.¹³ This criticism had been levelled against Hegel by French critics from very early on, in many of the same terms used much later by Foucault and Derrida. The attempt to limit the application of the Hegelian dialectic to human history, later denounced as humanism, aimed precisely at overcoming these objections.¹⁴

2. THE “CONCRETE UNIVERSAL” IN FRENCH EPISTEMOLOGY BEFORE 1923

Because of French philosophy's preoccupation with science in the nineteenth century, Hegel's philosophy of history was at first regarded as secondary in importance to his logic, at least as the French understood it in its Encyclopedia version. The order of the day was to create a new epistemology or philosophy of science adequate to recent scientific developments, and it was thought that Hegel's dialectical method and concept of a “concrete universal” could be used to this end. So it was that the first French Hegel interpreters, although they formed no Hegelian school such as those in Italy or England (EHPP 225), saw in Hegel's dialectic a way of overcoming the epistemological aporiae of empiricism and rationalism. Empiricism, it was thought, could not account for the logic or structures of wholes simply by generalizing from the characteristics of their component parts; to do so would be to miss precisely those properties that belonged to the whole in virtue of its being a whole—a system of relations between parts. Cartesian or Kantian rationalism, on the other hand, although it was suited to comprehending relations, utilized a static and abstract notion of reason, one eminently suited to mathematical analysis or geometry, but incapable of accounting for the constructive syntheses found in the discoveries of nineteenth-century science, such as biological evolution, electromagnetism or societal development, realities which were thought to be concrete and dynamic totalities.

Hegelianism promised a way out of this impasse by proposing a fluid and expanded reason that could grasp the concrete logic of becoming, and overcome the accepted distinctions between reason and sense, the contingent and the necessary, the particular and the universal. The aim was to grasp the singular universality of concrete and particular wholes, instead of sacrificing the concreteness of the particular to the abstract universality of the concept, or the intelligibility of the concept to the immediacy of intuition. Hegelian dialectic would allow one to grasp objects as totalities in the process of becoming, the development of which corresponds to “moments” of the Hegelian Idea, “the succession of incompletely real and incompletely intelligible theses and anti-theses, which reason unites in increasingly rich syntheses, in an ever more harmonious Whole.”¹⁵

It is easy to see why the spirit of Hegelian project, seen in this way, would attract even those who rejected the letter of Hegelian metaphysics. The neo-Kantian, Emile Boutroux, is representative in this respect.¹⁶ Boutroux admires Hegel's attempt to find a dynamic reason that penetrates to the heart of things, rather than grasping the husk of their rational form. Hegel's reason does not stand over against Being, but animates it (100) by resolving contradictions that exist in things (in subjecto) rather than in terms (in adjecto), and does this by allowing the opposed terms to “evolve” into a higher synthesis that encompasses both, rather than by cancelling out one or the other of them (95–96): “Hegelian logic wants the irrational, with the antinomies it engenders, to be the condition of the concept, of reason as a living and effective reality” (101). Instead of discarding the irrational as unintelligible, Hegel wishes to grasp it as a necessary moment of the intelligibility of the real development in things. In that way, even the apparently unintelligible—the accidental, the merely contingent, the bare particular—is brought within the scope of a principle of intelligibility that goes beyond mere conceptual analysis.

Even though Boutroux himself did not think that Hegel succeeded in “enlarging the conception of Reason,” he considered this task essential if reason were to be made sufficiently “supple” and “lively” to deal with new developments in science. Some forty years later, Merleau-Ponty concurred: “Hegel… inaugurates the attempt to explore the irrational and to integrate it into an enlarged reason, which remains the task of our century. He is the inventor of that Reason which is vaster than the understanding, which is capable of respecting the variety and singularity of psychic processes, civilizations, methods of thought, and the contingency of history, but which does not renounce dominating them in order to lead them to their proper truth.”¹⁷

Precisely this Hegel, the philosopher of reconciliation through reason and all-encompassing syntheses, would be vehemently rejected by the post-1960 French thinkers, for reasons already given by Boutroux. Hegel's reason “transcends, absorbs, transforms, in short eliminates intuition as such, just as it eliminates the accidental, the contingent, the given, the individual;” instead of a genuine synthesis of the universal and the singular, Hegel gives us a “concrete universal” which stands over against the individual, most notably in the form of the Hegelian State (105). In a truly concrete thought, the individual would not disappear, as happens in Hegel (111). But since Hegel's logic is one of synthesis, it cannot help but consider individuals only as opposed terms that will be united in synthesis, and “mutilates reality” by considering everything other as contradictory.¹⁸ So although it would be unfair to accuse Hegel of an abstract pan-logicism, or of “rationalizing the real” in the way that any conceptualizing account of reality must,¹⁹ Hegel is guilty of “a concrete pan-logicism” (105), one which leads straight to the terror of the absolute state.

This sort of charge against Hegel has become something of a commonplace over the past thirty years: a reason that seeks to be all-inclusive falsifies reality by suppressing or repressing its “other,” much as the police state achieves a certain homogeneity by repressing dissidence. For the first wave of Hegel interpreters as well, there was a strong suspicion that Hegel's expanded conception of Reason was in reality a kind of fatalism which falsified facts to fit the a priori demands of the “march of world spirit.” Nowhere was this truer than in Hegel's philosophy of history, which culminates in “Germanic” civilization, of which the final and most rational realization was the Prussian state.

Whether or not this interpretation of Hegel is a caricature is not the issue; given that it was widely accepted, making Hegel acceptable in France would require separating his logic from his odious philosophy of history. That meant, in particular, rejecting Hegel's claim that all phenomena are the product of a universal Spirit that stands behind them and rules over them, and confining his logic to making intelligible the empirical genesis of totalities, and the relations between whole and part in their development (in organisms, societies, chemical reactions, and so on.) In short, it meant abandoning the speculative side of Hegel and making him into a philosopher of science. Octave Hamelin, for example, looked to Hegel for “a principle which would be both a source of intelligibility, that is, of necessary connection, and of fecundity, or indefinitely new production,” a method of “deduction by synthesis.”²⁰ It was a matter of going beyond a reason capable only of dividing and classifying to conception of reason as productive.

Making Hegel into an epistemologist or a philosopher of method entailed a drastic reduction of the scope of Hegelian philosophy, not to mention a distortion of Hegel's intentions. Even so, French acceptance of Hegel was limited. The idea of a neo-Hegelian philosophy of science did not stand up to the onslaught of French neo-Kantian criticism of the sort meted out by André Lalande and Léon Brunschvicg.²¹ For these critics, the “concrete universal” was not a solution to philosophical difficulties, but an escape hatch, a merely verbal way of solving the problem. The very idea of “a concrete universal” was an intellectual “seduction,” based not on the requirements of science but on an irrational Romantic longing for organic unity. The truly concrete, said Brunschvicg, was nothing other than the totality of positive, empirical science, not some synthesis of thought and feeling or reason and unreason (Progrès, 397–98). Thus, for the neo-Kantians, the Hegelian idea of a “concrete universal” was not simply mistaken, but dangerous. Brunschvicg quite explicitly regards Hegel as a Romantic,²² and Romanticism as a turn away from the true path of Kantian reason, and indeed as a form of irra-tionalism. Hegel's attempt to incorporate the irrational into a new kind of Reason, Brunschvicg claimed, could only come at the expense of the genuine analytical reason of Descartes and Kant.²³ This sort of charge was not new, and was part and parcel of the then-current belief in the superiority of supposedly “rational” French culture over “irrational” German culture.²⁴ As evidence of Hegel's irrationalism, Brunshvicg pointed to the “emotional” or ”pathétique” character of Hegel's dialectic, especially in passages such as the introduction to Phe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: French Hegel and the Unhappy Consciousness
• 1. The Anthropological Turn
• 2. Pan-Tragicism
• 3. The Existential Protest: Wahl and Fondane
• 4. The Uses of Negativity: Breton and Lefebvre
• 5. Bataille: Negativity Unemployed
• 6. The Unhappy Consciousness in Sartre's Philosophy
• 7. The Persistence of the Unhappy Consciousness: Derrida
• 8. Beyond Hegel? Deleuze, Foucault, and the New Empiricism
• Conclusion: The Career of the Unhappy Consciousness in France
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index