Jean Hyppolite's earlier Genesis and Structure of Hegel's
'Phenomenology of Spirit' was a commentary on Hegel, preserving Hegel in its
entirety. The intention behind Hyppolite's new book is quite different.
Investigating Logic, Phenomenology, and the Encyclopedia, Hyppolite starts from
a precise idea to make a precise point: Philosophy must be ontology, it cannot
be anything else; but there is no ontology of essence, there is only an
ontology of sense. Here we have, it seems, the thesis of this essential book,
whose style alone is a tour de force. If Hyppolite's thesis 'philosophy is
ontology' means one thing above all, it is that philosophy is not anthropology.
Anthropology aspires to be a discourse on humanity. As such, it
presupposes the empirical discourse ^/"humanity, in which the speaker and
the object of his speech are separate. Reflection is on one side, while being
is on the other.
Seen in this light, understanding is a movement which is not
a movement of the thing; it remains outside the object. Understanding is thus
the power to abstract; and reflection is merely external and formal. It follows
that empiricism ultimately sends us back to formalism, just as formalism refers
back to empiricism. "Empirical consciousness is a consciousness directed
at preexistent being, relegating reflection to subjectivity." Subjectivity
will thus be treated as a fact, and anthropology will be set up as the science
of this fact. Kant's legitimizing subjectivity does not change the essential
point. "Critical consciousness is a consciousness that reflects the
knowing self, but which relegates being to the thing-in-itself." Kant
indeed achieves the synthesis of the identity of subject and object—but only an
object relative to the subject: the very identity is the synthesis of the
imagination and is not posited in being itself. He goes beyond the
psychological and the empirical, all the while remaining within the
anthropological. So long as the determination is only subjective, we cannot get
outside anthropology. Must we get outside it, and how do we do so?
These two questions are in fact one question: the way to get
outside is also the necessity to do so. To his credit, Kant's insight is that
thought is presupposed as given: thought is given because it thinks itself and
reflects itself, and it is presupposed as given because the totality of objects
presupposes thought as that which makes understanding possible. Thus, in Kant,
thought and the thing are identical, but the thing identical to thought is only
a relative thing, not the thing-as-being, not the thing-in-itself Hegel,
therefore, aspires to the veritable identity of what is given and what is
presupposed, in other words, to the Absolute. In his Phenomenology, we are
shown that the general difference between being and reflection, of
being-in-itself and being-for-itself, of truth and certainty, develop in the
concrete moments of a dialectic whose very movement abolishes this difference,
or preserves it only as a necessary appearance. In this sense, the
Phenomenology starts from human reflection to show that this human reflection
and its consequences lead to the absolute knowledge which they presuppose.
As Hyppolite remarks, it is a question of
"reducing" anthropology, of "removing the obstacle" of a
knowledge whose source is foreign. But it is not just at the finish, or at the
beginning, that absolute knowledge is. Knowledge is already absolute in every
moment: a figure of consciousness is a moment of the concept, only in a different
guise; the external difference between being and reflection is, in a different
guise, the internal difference of Being itself or, in other terms, Being which
is identical to difference, to mediation. "Since the difference of
consciousness has returned into the self, these moments are then presented as
determined concepts and as their organic movement which is grounded in
itself." How "arrogant," someone will say, to act like God and
grant yourself absolute knowledge. But we have to understand what being is with
respect to the given. Being, according to Hyppolite, is not essence but sense.
Saying that this world is sufficient not only means that it
sufficient for us, but that it is sufficient unto itself and that the world
refers to being not as the essence beyond appearances, and not as a second
world which would be the world of the Intelligible, but as the sense of this
world. Certainly, we find this substitution of sense for essence already in
Plato, when he shows us that the second world is itself the subject of a
dialectic that makes it the sense of this world, not some other world. But the
great agent of substitution is again Kant, because his critique replaces formal
possibility with transcendental possibility, the being of the possible with the
possibility of being, logical identity with the synthetic identity of
recognition, the being of logic with the logical nature of being—in a word, the
critique replaces essence with sense. According to Hyppolite, the great
proposition of Hegel's Logic is that there is no second world, because such a
proposition is at the same time the rationale for transforming metaphysics into
logic, the logic of sense. 'There is no beyond' means there is no beyond to the
world (because Being is only sense); and that there is in the world beyond to
thought (because in thought it is being which thinks itself); and
finally, that there is in thought no beyond of language.
Jean Hyppolite's book is a reflection on the conditions of
an absolute discourse; and in this respect, those chapters on the ineffable and
on poetry are crucial. The same people who chitchat are those who believe in
the ineffable. But if Being is sense, true knowledge is not the knowledge of an
Other, nor of some other thing. Absolute knowledge is what is closest, so to
speak, what is most simple: it is here. "Behind the curtain there is
nothing to see," or as Hyppolite says: "the secret is that there is
no secret." We see then the difficulty which the author emphatically
underlines: if ontology is an ontology of sense and not essence, if there is no
second world, how can absolute knowledge be distinguished from empirical
knowledge? Do we not fall back into the simple anthropology which we just
criticized? Absolute knowledge must at one and the same time include empirical
knowledge and nothing else, since there is nothing else to include, and yet it
has to include its own radical difference from empirical knowledge. Hyppolite's
idea is this: essentialism, despite appearances, was not what preserved us from
empiricism and allowed us to go beyond it.
From the viewpoint of essence, reflection is no less
exterior than it is in empiricism or pure critique. Empiricism posited
determination as purely subjective; essentialism, by opposing determinations to
one another and to the Absolute, leads only to the bottom of this limitation.
Essentialism is on the same side as empiricism. On the other hand, however, the
ontology of sense is total Thought that knows itself only in its
determinations, which are moments of form. In the empirical and in the
absolute, it is the same being and the same thought; but the empirical,
external difference of thought and being has given way to the difference which
is identical to Being, to the internal difference of Being that thinks itself.
Thus absolute knowledge is in effect distinct from empirical knowledge, but
only at the cost of denying the knowledge of non-different essence. In logic,
therefore, there is no longer, as there is in the empirical realm, what I say
on the one hand and the sense of what I say on the other—the pursuit of the one
by the other being the dialectic of Phenomenology. On the contrary, my
discourse is logically or properly philosophical when I speak the sense of what
I say, and when Being thus speaks itself. Such discourse, which is the
particular style of philosophy, cannot be other than circular. In this
connection, we cannot fail to notice those pages Hyppolite devotes to the
problem of beginning in philosophy, a problem which is not only logical, but
pedagogical. Hyppolite thus rises up against any anthropological or
humanist interpretation of Hegel. Absolute knowledge is not a reflection of
humanity, but a reflection of the Absolute in humanity. The Absolute is not a
second world, and yet absolute knowledge is indeed distinct from empirical
knowledge, just as philosophy is distinct from any anthropology. In this
regard, however, if we must consider decisive the distinction Hyppolite makes
between Logic and Phenomenology, does the
philosophy of history not have a more ambiguous relation to Logic?
Hyppolite says as much: the Absolute as sense is becoming;
and it is certainly not an historical becoming. But what is the relation of
Logic's becoming to history, if 'historical' in this instance designates
anything but the simple character of a fact? The relation of ontology and
empirical humanity is perfectly determined, but not the relation of ontology
and historical humanity. And if as Hyppolite suggests finitude itself must be
reintroduced into the Absolute, does this not risk the return of anthropologism
in a new form? Hyppolite's conclusion remains open; it opens the way for an
ontology. But I would only point out that the source of the difficulty,
perhaps, was already in Logic itself. It is indeed thanks to Hyppolite that we
now realize philosophy, if it means anything, can only be ontology and an
ontology of sense. In the empirical realm and in the absolute, it is the same
being and the same thought; but the difference between thought and being has
been surpassed in the absolute by the positing of Being which is identical to
difference, and which as such thinks itself and reflects itself in humanity.
This absolute identity of being and difference is called sense. But there is
one point in all this where Hyppolite shows his Hegelian bias: Being can be
identical to difference only in so far as difference is taken to the absolute,
in other words, all the way to contradiction. Speculative difference is
self-contradictory Being. The thing contradicts itself because, distinguishing
itself from all that is not, it finds its being in this very difference; it
reflects itself only by reflecting itself in the other, since the other is its
other. This is the theme Hyppolite develops when he analyzes the three moments
of Logic: being, essence, and the concept. Hegel will reproach Plato and
Leibniz both for not going all the way to contradiction: Plato remains at
simple alterity; and Leibniz, at pure difference.
This supposes in the very least not only that the moments of
Phenomenology and the moments of Logic are not moments in the same sense, but
also that there are two ways, phenomenological and logical, to contradict
oneself. In the wake of this fruitful book by Jean Hyppolite, one might ask
whether an ontology of difference couldn't be created that would not go all the
way to contradiction, since contradiction would be less and not more than
difference. Hyppolite says that an ontology of pure difference would restore us
to a purely formal and exterior reflection, and would in the end reveal itself
to be an ontology of essence. However, the same question could be asked in
another way: is it the same thing to say that Being expresses itself and that
Being contradicts itself? While it is true that the second and third parts of
Hyppolite's book establish a theory of contradiction in Being, where
contradiction itself is the absolute of difference, on the other hand, in the
first part (the theory of language) and throughout the book (allusions to
forgetting, remembering, lost meaning), does not Hyppolite establish a theory
of expression, where difference is expression itself, and contradiction, that
aspect which is only phenomenal?
Source: Desert Islands and Other Texts (1953-1974)
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