Approaching Hegel's Logic, Obliquely

Melville, Moliere, Beckett

Angelica Nuzzo

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781438472041, 9781438472058
• eBook ISBN: 9781438472065
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism

Winner of the 2020 Hegelpd-Prize presented by the University of Padova Research Group In this book, Angelica Nuzzo proposes a reading of Hegel's Logic as "logic of transformation" and "logic of action, " and supports this thesis by looking to works of literature and history as exemplary of Hegel's argument and method. By examining Melville's Billy Budd, Molière's Tartuffe, Beckett's Endgame, Elizabeth Bishop's and Giacomo Leopardi's late poetry along with Thucydides' History in this way, Nuzzo finds an unprecedented and productive way to render Hegel's Logic alive and engaging. She argues that Melville's Billy Budd is the most successful embodiment of the abstract movement of thinking presented in Hegel's Logic, connecting Billy Budd's stutter to the puzzlingly inarticulate beginning of Hegel's Logic, "Being, pure Being, " identical with "Nothing, " and argues that the Logic serves as an especially appropriate tool for understanding the sudden violent action that strikes Claggart dead. Through these and other readings, Nuzzo finds a fresh way to address interpretive issues that have remained unresolved for almost two centuries in Hegel scholarship, and also presents well-known works of literature in an entirely new light. This account of Hegel's Logic is framed by the need for an interpretive tool able to orient our understanding of the contemporary world as mired in an unprecedented global crisis. How can the story of our historical present—the tragedy or the comedy we all play parts in—be told? What is the inner logic of our changing world?

PART I

HEGEL’S LOGIC OF TRANSFORMATION

Choose one set of tracks and track a hare

Until the prints stop, just like that, in snow.

End of the line. Smooth drifts. Where did she go?

Back on her tracks, of course, then took a spring

Yards off to the side; clean break; no scent or sign.

She landed in her form and ate the snow.

Consider too the ancient hieroglyph

Of ‘hare and zig-zag,’ which meant ‘to exist,’

To be on the qui vive, weaving and dodging

Like our friend who sprang (goodbye) beyond our ken

And missed a round at last (but of course he’s stood it).

The shake-the-heart, the dew-hammer, the far-eyed.

—Seamus Heaney, from “Squarings”

Chapter 1

Thinking in Times of Crisis

Hegel’s Logic of Transformation

These queer little sand castles, I was thinking. I was finishing Herbert Read’s autobiography this morning at breakfast. Little boys making sand castles. This refers to H. Read, T. Eliot, Santayana, Wells. Each is weathertight, & gives shelter to the occupant. I think I can follow Read’s building, so far as one can follow what one cannot build. But I am the sea which demolishes these castles.

—Virginia Woolf, Diary, 1936–1941, Monday, November, 18, 1940

Prelude: After the Crisis, Telling the Story

It is a well-known Hegelian claim, at once descriptive and normative with regard to what should be taken as the activity of philosophizing: philosophy is its own present time apprehended in thoughts. This claim, however, is apparently contradicted by another, equally famous claim: in its task of comprehension of the present, philosophy comes always too late. Philosophical thinking is and is not in and of its own historical present. The synchronicity connecting thinking to the present is not perfect as they do not entirely overlap; there is an excess at once necessary and problematic that separates them; their developments unfold at a different pace. The question that this interesting predicament raises is the following: How can and how should the story of the present be told? In particular, how can it be told when the present is a situation of crisis and fragmentation that does not seem to lend itself to easy conceptualization and a straightforward narrative? How can the story of the present be told from the position of immanence, that is, while living in the present, immersed in the crisis of the present?

This book has begun by attempting to tell the story of its own shifting present many times during the years it has taken to reach its conclusion. It has always failed. As crisis followed crisis, the current one rendering the preceding one no longer relevant, what I was able to weave together was a chronicle with little meaning and even less interest, especially when considered retrospectively. Better, then, to turn to another story altogether—to the story of thinking apprehending its own time in thoughts, to the story of thinking finding its way into the present. This different story requires, at the same time, a philosophical and a poetical endeavor. It yields, at the same time, a philosophical and a poetical transfiguration of the present. Ultimately, Hegel suggests, it is “absolute spirit” that is in charge of such a story. Herein, spirit’s philosophical and poetic resources must go hand in hand. Perhaps what philosophical reflection cannot accomplish in the immediacy of the present (whereby its comprehension is shifted to a posthumous “too late”) can be disclosed by the poetic act of thinking. And reciprocally, what poetic thinking may lack in forward-looking universality, sacrificing it to the concreteness of immediacy, is overcome by the grasp of conceptual thinking. Aristotle may have been right: poetry is more philosophical than history.

1. From Today’s Present to Hegel’s Logic as a Logic of Transformative Processes

It is a truism that philosophical thinking is by no means neutral with regard to the historical reality in which it flourishes, for this reality contributes to shape it in an essential way. But the reverse claim should also be taken for granted, namely, that the historical present is intelligible to us only if reconstructed according to categories and conceptual tools that belong to a certain philosophical discourse—a discourse somehow sensitive, responsive and alive to the contemporary reality, and fundamentally relevant to it. These premises, however, taken in isolation still leave the problem of historical intelligibility wide open—among the many questions they raise is the one regarding the selection of the philosophical discourses and categories that should fulfill the task of reconstruction. Thus, in order to justify and persuasively articulate these claims, I want to bring to the fore the central point that will occupy me in the chapters that follow. My suggestion is that Hegel’s logic is the crucial intellectual tool that can help us weave the elusive stories of our own present—the stories of which we seem so much in need today. My thesis is that Hegel’s dialectic-speculative logic can fulfill this crucial function because it is what I shall call a “logic of transformation” or a “logic of transformative processes”—that is, to put the point in another way, a “logic of crisis.”

The entire discussion that ensues will be dedicated to explaining in what sense Hegel’s logic should be viewed as a “logic of transformation”—what this characterization brings to our understanding of the logic and in what sense it helps discovering and putting to use its “actuality”—as well as to specify the different types and modes of transformation. By way of introduction though, I can anticipate here two fundamental tenets that already recommend such designation as worth exploring. For one thing, if contrasted to the aims and the accomplishments of both Kant’s transcendental logic and of formal logic in the classical and modern traditions, Hegel’s dialectic-speculative logic is the only one that aims at—and succeeds in—accounting for the dynamic of real processes: natural, psychological but also social, political, and historical processes. It is a logic that attempts to think of change and transformation in their dynamic flux not by fixating movement in abstract static descriptions but by performing movement itself. By bringing change to bear directly on pure thinking, by making thinking one with the movement it accounts for, Hegel’s logic does the very thing that it purports to understand. Thereby the question of the intelligibility of actuality taken in its purely logical form becomes a practical issue or an issue of praxis as much as one of theory.1 The descriptive function that the logic claims toward actuality goes hand in hand with a fundamentally normative function that concerns the ways in which transformations are actually produced. Thereby, the doctrine that Hegel finally consigns to the Science of Logic and the first part of the Encyclopedia differs methodologically from the development staged in the Phenomenology of Spirit, which still distinguished the static, external standpoint of the philosophical “we” from the ever-changing, experiential position of consciousness. Unlike the Phenomenology, Hegel’s logic is the logic of movement itself immanently developed in its pure or purely formal structures. The only way to understand change without turning it into its opposite is to take change upon oneself, that is, to perform it. On the other hand, however, within Hegel’s system of philosophy this is also what distinguishes the logic from the Realphilosophie—the philosophy of nature and spirit. The logic offers an account (and a performance) of the structures of change independently of the question of what it is that changes, that is, it takes transformation in the constellation of its pure forms, independently of the particular contingent and empirical conditions under which it may occur.

For another thing, the development of the determinations of pure thinking staged in Hegel’s logic shows how thinking can and does change—and why it should change—the ways in which it thinks, how thinking ought to transform itself but also how thinking, in point of fact, does transform itself. Here again, the traditional descriptive aim that makes of logic the formal account of the laws of pure thinking (or, with Kant, the transcendental account of a priori concepts) is supplemented by a crucial normative dimension that prescribes to thinking its own principled transformation. It should be noted that the claim that concepts and ideas do—dialectically—change along with the view that a proof of this claim is the proper task of the logic, are specifically Hegelian claims and mark Hegel’s radical distance from both Plato and Kant (for whom, by contrast, ideas and ideals belong to an unchangeable and ahistorical order).

In sum, the transformation process with which Hegel’s logic is concerned (descriptively as well as normatively) is both the movement of reality’s dynamic transformation and the process of thinking’s own internal transformation. The task of this logic is to answer both the question of the rational intelligibility of real changes taken as changes—how transformations in nature, society, and history can be brought to concepts or understood in terms of pure forms of change—and the question of why and how thinking can and ought to change the ways in which it thinks—of itself and of the world in which it lives and acts. My contention is that these two closely interconnected sides of Hegel’s program make this logic the candidate of choice for the understanding of the present age of epochal transformations, the philosophical tool that can help us weave the much-needed story of the crises we are presently living.

Moreover, in framing Hegel’s dialectic-speculative logic as a logic of transformative processes, I intend to provide an answer to two related issues that have vexed the interpretation of this part of the system since the second half of the nineteenth century. The first issue comprises a set of different questions, and regards, in its core, the proper status of Hegel’s logic in relation to traditional philosophical disciplines. How does Hegel’s logic relate to metaphysics in general and ontology in particular? Is this logic an anachronistic reprise, after Kant, of old metaphysics and ontology; does it inaugurate a new brand of post-Kantian metaphysics; or is it rather no metaphysics or ontology at all? Alternatively, and using cues offered by Hegel himself, the logic has been viewed by interpreters as the enumeration of the successive determinations of God or the Absolute through its predicates, hence, ultimately, as a speculative theology of sort, as a new form of post-Kantian metaphysics that continues the tradition of Kant’s critique, and as no metaphysics at all.2 Another unsettled question concerns the relation between dialectical logic and epistemology. It is debated whether Hegel’s logic offers a plausible epistemology that is meant to guide the development of the other philosophical disciplines (i.e., the philosophy of nature and the philosophy of spirit) or whether epistemological concerns as such are either utterly foreign to it or condemned to fail on the basis of this logic’s speculative endeavor. Wide open and even more puzzling and intriguing are the questions that the Science of Logic’s status as a logic pose to interpreters. Does it deal with categories at all (in the Aristotelian and Kantian sense) or does it rather present thought forms abstracted from the concrete reality and such as to necessarily presuppose such reality as its condition? How does speculative logic relate to traditional formal logic (for example, in the presentation of concepts, judgments, and syllogisms that occupies its second division, the Subjective Logic)? And what is its relation to contemporary nontraditional logics (paraconsistent logic, aletheism)? Finally, with regard to its general philosophical aim, Hegel’s logic has generated readings as different as those that see its process as the speculative mystification of autarchic thinking, and most recently those that interpret it as a theory of meaning or a theory for the pragmatic institution of norms.3 On many of these questions, I will come back more or less directly at different points in the course of this study. However, it is fair for now to say that all possible answers to such questions have been attempted to date; that the decisiveness of the affirmation or denial of each question may vary but that the entire spectrum of possibilities has been covered; and, finally, that despite all this work none of these issues have definitively been settled.

In regard to this first set of issues, I have taken an indirect path. Metaphysical as well as epistemological questions will certainly come up in my discussion; yet, in my view, they are not the central—or maybe, better, the original—problem that Hegel’s logic intends to solve. All those issues depend on the answer to the crucial problem of how transformation as such should be conceptually thought and of how it can be practically enacted. What is the formal theory that answers to both parts of this problem even before the determinate conditions under which particular changes occur (natural, psychological, historical, social, political, economic) have been specified? I suggest that it is this more original concern that orients Hegel’s answer to metaphysical and epistemological problems.

Once this is assumed as the unique central issue of Hegel’s dialectic-speculative logic, it is also no surprise that such logic leads on to a philosophy of nature and a philosophy of spirit that take into account the determinate ways in which change and transformation are produced in actuality under specific empirical and historical conditions. Accordingly, my discussion will offer a fresh look at another vexing problem of the scholarship, namely, the issue of the relationship between logic and reality, or, systematically, between the Science of Logic and the Realphilosophie. With regard to this problem as well, interpretations seem to have covered all possible positions. Here again, by contrast, I shall change the terms of the question assuming from the outset that the problem, for Hegel, is inconsistent. The pressing issue—for Hegel just as for us today—is to find the logic that can account for the critical complexity of the present age and that is, at the same time, co-original in its internal development to the movement of the very reality it attempts to understand (indeed such logic succeeds in its task of comprehension precisely because it is co-original with its actuality).

In the remainder of this introductory chapter I offer an initial discussion of the status of Hegel’s dialectic-speculative logic. I am interested in the function of Hegel’s dialectic for our philosophizing in and understanding of the contemporary world. The central thesis of this book is that the abstract forms of Hegel’s logic find unexpected underpinnings in the reality of the contemporary world because they are co-original with the development of Hegel’s own historical present. To articulate this thesis, I start by raising the general questions mentioned previously: What kind of theory does Hegel offer in the first part of his system of philosophy? What kind of logic is dialectic and what are its philosophical aims and tasks? And what is this logic about, or, what kind of objects does it thematize? These questions are all indirectly addressed in a first step that frames Hegel’s logic as a “logic of transformative processes.”4 Thereby I lay the foundations for an argument that moves from the study of the modes in which transformation is logically thought to the exploration of the ways in which transformations in thinking and in reality are practically achieved and brought about.

In the next sections, I will get to the question of what Hegel’s logic is about and hence to the question of what kind of logic it is by first discussing and determining the problematic context in which it should be placed and read. In other words, I will start out by indicating the broader issues, which, I contend, lay at the heart of the development of Hegel’s dialectic from his early years.5 This will give us a peculiar perspective on the crucial aim of Hegel’s logic, and consequently will indirectly allow us to measure its distance from and proximity to the concerns of traditional and Kantian logic as well as to the problems faced by philosophy today.6 I then turn to Hegel’s idea of a dialectic-speculative logic able to overcome the flaws of the “logic of the understanding” (Verstandeslogik), the flaws that Hegel assesses precisely in relation to the objective...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Thinking Transformation
• Part I. Hegel’s Logic of Transformation
• Part II. Structures of Action: Logic and Literature
• Ending—As in Concluding
• General Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index of Names and Works
• Back Cover