The difficulty in writing about Hegel

In our previous post we promised to undergo a study of Hegel's Logic. Although we have in fact finished reading the Logic, what we noted was the difficulty of writing about this work. This is a result of personal inadequacy, although we wanted to say many things, we could not state anything that we considered really important.

Hegel's philosophy, if we are to do justice to his thought, cannot be considered separately from the history of philosophy. He considered philosophy and the history of philosophy to be essentially the same thing.The stages arrived at by thought in the course of the Logic all have analogies in the history of western philosophy, and Hegel himself draws many of these analogies - between the stage of pure Being and the philosophy of Parmenides, between that of Becoming and Heraclitus, the stage of Being-for-self and the One and Many to atomism. 

Most significantly, the all important transition in the Logic from the absolute substance to the Concept, the leap from necessity to freedom, is also a sublation of the system of Spinoza (And again it is Hegel himself who notes that the stage of the absolute substance corresponds to Spinozism, and the sublation of this to the sublation of Spinozism).

Lacking the full range of philosophical resources to do justice to Hegel, we nevertheless found ourselves drawn to writing about him. Rather than engage in this systematically (a style which would suit the personality of Hegel), we preferred to do it more sporadically and freely (a style which suits our own personality).

We also find ourselves as a matter of course always drawn back inexorably to Marx, and particularly again to Capital. We feel compelled to explore more deeply the interconnections between the Logic and Capital in as thorough a manner as possible, but this involves more work, and more reading of Marx, which takes time.

At present we do have a specific plan to write on a certain aspect of overlap between Marx and Hegel, on which more later.

What is the nature of Hegel's Logic?

We have decided to embark on a study of Hegel's Science of Logic. We will be reading from the translation by George di Giovani published in 2010 by Cambridge University Press.

The first question that presents itself to us is, what type of book is it exactly that we are reading? After all, Hegel's Logic is neither a textbook of logic, nor metaphysics in the traditional sense.

It seems that we cannot answer this question satisfactorily merely from our preliminary readings of the text. Hegel himself tells us that "knowledge of [Logic] only emerge[s] as the final result and completion of it's whole treatment." (pp.23) We can merely recite a few preliminaries.

The subject matter is thinking. Or more specifically, we are told that we are to examine "conceptual thinking." From a survey of the table of contents we gather that what this means precisely will only be made fully clear to us in the third part, when we will be given the doctrine of the concept. So again, we are instructed to be patient - the full nature of the process itself can only be appreciated once we have already completed it.

The introduction first presents us with a picture of knowledge. In this picture, the truth is something outside thinking, an object for the consideration of a subject. The truth of thought consists in it's adhering to the nature of the object, but since thought is presupposed to be something entirely alien to it's object, it cannot actually represent the latter truly. What it produces in fact belongs solely to it's nature, and so the object remains as an unknowable thing-in-itself.

This picture should be familiar to us, it is the philosophy of Kant, the results of which were given to Hegel's generation to content with.

In contrast to this, we are told that traditional metaphysics had a higher point of view, inasmuch as it began from the standpoint of the unity of thinking and the thing to be thought.

But then onto the scene comes the Understanding.

Understanding it seems is a crucial dramatis personae in the dialectical drama. It abstracts, separates, and remains fixed in these separations. "The understanding determines, and holds the determination fixed." (pp.10)

But as it determines, it finds that it's determinations come into contradiction with each other. At this point, the critical philosophy of Kant and his followers retreats. Reality cannot possibly contradict itself. So, goes the sad tale, they gave up in despair. Since our attempts to grasp the thing-in-itself are contradictory, they cannot possibly succeed. We must retreat from metaphysics.

But where Kant left off, our great dramatic hero - dialectical reason - begins.

Dialectical reason is negative, it recognises contradiction and negates it. It is the negation of the self-negation of the fixed determinations which arise in the course of the activity of thinking. As such a negation of the negation, it is at the same time positive. Unlike skepticism it does not retreat in despair, but moves ever onward in it's progress towards the absolute.

Absolute knowledge is the standpoint from which the opposition between consciousness and it's object is completely resolved. It is the standpoint reached by us in the course of Hegel's prior work, the Phenomenology of Spirit. At this point, however, it is not our part to discuss this work.

Kant's philosophy, it seems, was one of despair. It left us with an unbridgeable separation between subject and object, between consciousness and the thing-in-itself. And it left us with contradictions that, while banished from the realm of reality, were left for the subject.

Hegel's philosophy rises above the separations and contradictions, it begins from the standpoint of absolute knowledge, and proceeds through dialectical reason. Proceeds to what though? To truth. A truth which is "the exposition of God as he is in his eternal essence before the creation of nature and a finite spirit."

And here the modern mind is bound to despair. Hegel's philosophy stands revealed as theology. What then, is it's interest to us?

From the subjective side, the profound influence that Hegel had on the history of thought cannot but provoke us, if we wish to gain insight, to study his work.

But I think there is something deeper.

Hegel conceived his Logic as the science of thinking. But this thinking is not something static, it is a form of activity, it produces thoughts. This is why it is possible for the discipline of philosophy, for example, to have a history. Although it would appear at first sight that the history of philosophy contradicts it's concept, since it is concerned with truth, and truth is something which it seems should not have a history, but be valid in any time and place, it is actually entirely in it's nature that it should be so.

Onto the scene jumps Marx. 'Activity' is not just the production of ideas, he tells us, it encompasses a much greater variety of things. In the first place, of course, the production of material life, and also of human social relationships (since production is always social production). Only after humanity has secured for itself a basic level of development of it's productive forces can it afford for one part of it to concern itself solely with mental labour - the production of ideas, and in fact this production is always bound up with material production (vulgar economics is in many ways merely a compendium of the ideas produced by the capitalist in the normal progress of his life).

In fact production, human activity as such, is not something which occurs in the misty realms of the absolute idea. It is a process of metabolism, through which human beings regulate their relationship to nature. It always has a natural and material basis. This is the meaning of materialism.

It is not the materialism of Helvetius or Holbach, in which human beings appear as passively determined by their environment. It is a materialism which has taken on board the active side, which, as Marx notes in his famous Theses on Feuerbach, was developed by idealism, however abstractly.

The assurances of analytical philosophy, that Hegel's contradictions are meaningless, his system a form of mysticism, cannot reassure us communists, who have grasped the reality of separation and opposition as it exists in contemporary life. If Hegel's philosophy is mystical, it is only because we live in a world in which everything is mystified, where the relationships between human beings take on the prosaically real appearance of relationships between things.

In such a world, the separation of subject and object appears as the separation between human beings, whose life essence is their activity, and the means of realising their activity. The subjects have become objectified, and the objects personified. Human physical existence has become a commodity, and the objects which humanity uses to produce it's material life have become personified in the figure of the capitalist.

If Hegel tries to rise above this world of separation and contradiction through pure contemplation, we cannot bemoan him the effort. He saw the problem, however obscurely refracted through the lens of speculative philosophy. This is the basis on which we retain interest in Hegel today, and the basis on which we commit ourselves to a study of the great drama of dialectical reason.

We know the what, and for ourselves also the why. All that remains is the work itself. This Hegel tells us is divided into two essential parts, the 'objective' and the 'subjective' logic. The former is divided into the doctrines of being and essence, and corresponds to some extent to what was formerly understood as ontology. The latter is the doctrine of the concept. All of this, we are told, will only be fully understood at the end of the journey. Let us begin.

Notes on Money Part I: Notes on the Value-Form

Marx notes in the preface to the first edition of Capital, that chapter one, and particularly the section on the value-form, will probably constitute the most difficult part of the whole analysis for the reader. If the history of Marxism shows us anything, it shows us that he was probably overly optimistic about the difficulties presented by the rest of his work to his readers.

Nonetheless the section on the value-form is both singularly peculiar and generally overlooked. That this is so can be seen from a recent book on the empirical workings of the UK banking system. In a chapter on the history of monetary theory we read Marx listed alongside the classical economists Ricardo and Mill, who viewed money as merely a veil over commodity exchange.

In A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx explicitly warns us against seeing money as a mere technical instrument, cunningly devised to work around certain inconveniences which arise in the process of direct barter. Money is, of course, on Marx's account, a commodity. And it would seem to make sense to say that it does arise from more basic forms of the exchange relationship. It is not money as such, after all, that makes commodities exchangeable with one another, but their quality of being the products of human labour in the abstract.

But to express this quality of being the products of universal labour, their must be a 'form' appropriate to the 'content' of value. This form is the value-form.

The value-form is, in essence, the relationship between one commodity and another. The first chapter of Capital begins with the relationships between commodities, which are related to one another as equivalents. It finds lying behind this character of equivalence, their circumstance of being the products of abstract labour. But the form in which this initially presented itself now requires analysis.

The general development of the value-form is tripartite. We begin with the simple relationship of commodity to commodity. Then this expands, revealing an endless world of commodity relationships. Finally all commodities relate to one commodity in particular as the general equivalent. When a precious metal, in particular gold, is established as the general equivalent, we have the money form, which is in essence no different from the general form. The latter develops from the expanded form, which in it's essence is merely the multiplication of the simple form.

The analysis of the simple form of value is therefore the most important and difficult part.

We begin with a simple equation, x linen = y coats.

The first thing that is done is to separate the expression into two 'poles', the relative and equivalent forms. These poles have the character of being both inseparable and mutually exclusive. They mutually condition one another, linen can only take the relative form because coats, on the other hand, take the equivalent form and vice versa. But precisely because linen takes the relative position, it cannot function as equivalent.

We should be familiar with the general conception of a relationship of two sides, in which both are inseparable and mutually condition one another, yet also exclude each other. It is the general character of the relationship between wage-labour and capital. Capital can only function as such because it finds labour-power on the market as a commodity, and the labourer is only a wage-labourer because they have been separated from the objective conditions of realising their activity, and are confronted by the latter in the form of capital.

The mutually excluding aspect of the relationship may seem somewhat arbitrary in the simple value-form. We can just as easily flip the equation and express the value of coats in the value of linen. This constitutes a general defect of this form of value.

The commodity, as a use-value, is the physical existence of the commodity, it's body. The commodity can only express itself as a value in the body of another commodity. A commodity is the contradictory unity of use-value and value. We see that this is further developed in the form of value, in the separation into relative and equivalent poles. The relative form is the body of the commodity, which expresses it's value in terms of an equivalent. The equivalent is the other, in which value must be expressed.

Marx develops four pecularities of the equivalent form. These are (1) that a concrete use-value becomes the form of appearance of value (2) that concrete labour becomes the form of appearance of abstract labour (3) that private labour becomes the form of appearance of directly social labour (4) that the fetishism of commodities reaches a new height in the equivalent form.

Here we will briefly note the similarities between this part of the analysis, and the philosophy of Hegel. In Hegel's philosophy, particulars have no existence, no reality as such, except as incarnations of the absolute. What is rational is real, and what is real is rational. Similarly, in positing a particular thing as equivalent to another in exchange, this particular thing becomes the form of appearance of value. The result of a concrete labour process becomes the form in which the commodity reveals itself as the product of human labour in the abstract.

"This inversion (Verkehrung) by which the sensibly-concrete counts only as the form of appearance of the abstractly general and not, on the contrary, the abstractly general as property of the concrete, characterises the expression of value. At the same time, it makes understanding it difficult. If I say: Roman Law and German Law are both laws, that is obvious. But if I say: Law (Das Recht), this abstraction (Abstraktum) realises itself in Roman Law and in German Law, in these concrete laws, the interconnection becoming mystical." (The Value-Form)

This suggests in a preliminary way the unique power of the dialectic in understanding the laws of motion of bourgeois society.

Previously we noted that in the simple form of value, the exclusiveness of the two sides can seem somewhat arbitrary, since it is just as easy to subjectively consider things the other way around. This expression of value is also limited in that it only embraces two particular commodities. These difficulties force us to move from the simple to the expanded form.

The expanded form is essentially what it says, an expansion of the simple form. Whereas before we merely had two commodities, now we have an endless wealth of commodity relationships, each expressing their value in terms of all the others. This prompts a comparison with the Hegelian notion of a 'bad infinity', a merely endless repetition of a finite series. In contrast to this, real infinity "consists in being at home with itself in its other, or, if enunciated as a process, in coming to itself in its other." (Encyclopaedia Logic, Being)

In contrast to the bad infinity of the expanded form, the general form of value is the real infinity of the world of commodities. The whole world of commodities finds the adequate expression of their values in an other, a commodity excluded from the rest and standing apart from them. The precise nature of this commodity makes no odds, at a certain point in history it appears that cattle performed this function for example. The precious metals however, with their qualities of uniformity and infinite divisibility, in general prove the most adequate substance, hence the money-form.

Since the money-form is only established at first in the fact that all commodities measure their value in terms of money, the first determination to be examined is money as a measure of value. But this ideal determination also implies the possibility of actual exchange, and the function of money as a means of circulation. Finally as the unity of these two moments, we have the fully developed concept of money as universal wealth.

The section on money introduces for the first time, the possibility, though no more than the possibility, of crises. We have seen that money is merely a development from the nature of the commodity itself, as the contradictory unity of use-value and value. Hence, the possibility of crises actually derives itself from the commodity as such, the cell-form of bourgeois society.