Essay
July 1999
Hegel's organizational critique of intuitionism
by Ron Brokmeyer
New revolutionary impulses, from the revolt that overthrew Mobutu in Congo
in 1997 to the mass revolt in Indonesia in 1998, have arisen against the
global economic crisis of the late 1990s. Yet there is a lack of a positive
vision of the future beyond capitalism. Why is it that even mass movements
that create new organizational forms and accomplish a revolutionary
overthrow get sucked into the illusion that the immediate object
determining life-today's globally integrated production and free-flowing
global capital markets-must forever be with us?
As one way to probe into this, I want to look at one important, although
much neglected, aspect of Hegel's thought-his critique of intuitionism, or
the kind of thinking which mistakes the immediate objects determining life
for the nature of life itself. Hegel's critique of immediate knowledge or
intuition is central to his greatest philosophic work, THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF
SPIRIT.(1)
HEGEL'S PHENOMENOLOGY, 1806
Hegel's PHENOMENOLOGY was written under the impact of the 1789 French
Revolution. In 1806, as Hegel finished the PHENOMENOLOGY, he watched
Napoleon march into his city of Jena. So when Hegel writes in the Preface
to the PHENOMENOLOGY that "ours is a birth-time and period of transition
to a new era," it was very concrete.
Yet Hegel complains in the Preface that this new revolutionary impulse
doesn't mean we can be satisfied with new philosophers like F.W.J.
Schelling, who in trying to capture the spirit of the revolution, got swept
up in the bare feeling of the true as subjective self-development.
The true as subjective self-development has to be proven in all the wealth
of experience. The revolution cleared the deck of old thinking and old
fixed social categories, but Hegel warned that it was still defective, in
that the new reality issuing from it was only a bare beginning in realizing
the power of subjectivity in all the concrete ways we experience reality.
The revolution concentrated a problem in Hegel's mind. It was the problem
that even when the idea of freedom creates a new reality through a
revolutionary movement, there is the pull to relate to the new immediate
world in the manner of the naive "natural" view of things.
The naive "natural" view of things is to view objects as a positive content
standing against an external and negative consciousness. A moment of sense
certainty, for example, tells us that it is night. The problem is that
night changes to day and the truth of the statement "It is night" becomes
stale. Hegel is saying that while we naively start by thinking that night
is an external object that we gain knowledge of through sense certainty,
what we really learn, if we follow our development closely, is that the
object's truth is in our own consciousness. The concept of "now," the unity
that holds day and night together, is not outside us but is wholly within
our consciousness.
Whatever the experiences analyzed by Hegel in the long trek of the
PHENOMENOLOGY, consciousness works out the ways in which it knows the
object as itself. He characterizes the moments of development in the
PHENOMENOLOGY as circles where consciousness comes back to confront its
object anew with a deeper comprehension of its own implication in it-with a
deeper comprehension, as Hegel says in the Preface, that the true is not
only substance but subject as well. Hegel provides the ladder from everyday
experience to "Absolute Knowledge" for anyone who wants to undergo the
strenuous climb.
In the last chapter of the PHENOMENOLOGY, "Absolute Knowledge," Hegel
returns to the birth-time of history that he spoke of in the Preface,
except that this time "History, is a conscious self-mediating process," and
when Spirit "starts afresh to bring itself to maturity" it has preserved
within itself the "whole gallery of recollected previous spiritual forms."
Hegel spells this out in its final paragraph: "The goal, Absolute Knowing,
or Spirit that knows itself as Spirit, has for itspath the recollection of
the Spirits as they are in themselves and as they accomplish the
organization of their realm. Their preservation, regarded from the side of
their free existence appearing in the form of contingency, is History; but
regarded from the side of their philosophically comprehended organization,
it is the Science of Knowing in the sphere of appearance: the two together,
comprehended History, form at once the recollection and the Golgotha of
Absolute Spirit."
THE PHENOMENOLOGY REVISITED IN 1827
If we take a brief look at how history unfolded in Hegel's own lifetime and
how it led him to revisit the PHENOMENOLOGY and its abstract result, it
will be easier to comprehend what Hegel means here by recollection and
organization.
Toward the end of his life, Hegel had to deal with the popularity of the
philosophy of intuitionism or immediate knowledge. This philosophy
reasserts faith by explicitly rejecting all method. In his 1827
introduction to his ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL SCIENCES, Hegel
repeats his view from the 1817 edition of that work that he considers the
PHENOMENOLOGY to be the first part of his system of Philosophy. However,
in the 1827 edition of the ENCYCLOPEDIA Hegel added a whole new
introductory section on Attitudes to Objectivity in order to re-create a
distillation of the speculative historical perspective of the
PHENOMENOLOGY. In light of a different historic
period, Hegel explicates something new about the relation between the
self-realizing goal of freedom and the dialectic.
In his new introductory section on Attitudes to Objectivity Hegel traces
out the history of thought. He calls all forms of pre-Kantian dogmatic
metaphysics the first attitude toward objectivity. Kantian empiricism and
criticism constitutes a second attitude. Since Hegel's own dialectic was so
much a critical response to Kant's, one would think that would be the third
attitude. But 1827 was not 1806. You had the Restoration of the monarchy
and with it a growing impatience. F.H. Jacobi's doctrine of immediate
knowledge or faith that takes whatever is found in immediate consciousness
for the truth had gained a following. So Hegel included it within a whole
new third attitude which he characterized as a BACKWARD, rather than a
forward, movement.
The problem Hegel wanted to address is that there would always be this pull
back into immediate natural consciousness unless the dialectic in and for
itself was made explicit. Thus the opposite of Recollection is the
anti-dialectic. Recollection proves that it is "false...to forget that in
the very act of mediation the mediation vanishes." Hegel's whole system is
to hold fast to the vanished mediating power of the negative which
generates the new immediacy: "to show that, in point of fact, there is
knowledge which advances neither by unmixed immediacy nor by unmixed
mediation, we can point to the example of Logic and the whole of
philosophy."(2)
The reactionary return to immediate natural consciousness in the form of
philosophic faith forced Hegel by 1827 to address the meaning of that other
dimension of Recollection in the PHENOMENOLOGY -the Recollection of how
"Spirit" accomplishes its self-organization. Before we address that
directly, it is important to gain a perspective on Hegel's concept of
organization as well as how that concept was impacted by historic
developments between 1806 and 1827.
ORGANIZATION AND THE DIALECTIC
Such a perspective is needed because the prevailing view is that Hegel was
an extreme political conservative. In fact, today's Hegel scholars have
shown that he was not as conservative as most, especially on the Left,
presume.(3) The focus here is not on the traditional forms of organizations
like craft guilds and the church, which did interest Hegel, but rather on
how Hegel worked out the relationship between the overall concept of
organization and his dialectic.
While for Hegel an important manifestation of organization was the church,
he especially focused on the autonomous, self-governing, non-hierarchical
Protestant churches wherein organization would be entrusted to "general
insight and culture." As Hegel once put it, "our universities and schools
are our church" (Hegel to Niethammer, July 12, 1816). Hegel felt that
decentralized organizational forms were the best way to realize the ideals
of liberty unleashed by the French Revolution as he also fought dogmatic
and hierarchical tendencies in the Protestant church in Bavaria (Hegel to
Niethammer, November, 1807).
Even in the Restoration's early stages after 1815, Hegel remained sanguine
about the realization of the promise of liberty unleashed by the French
Revolution. Again, in Hegel's view, this realization would be accomplished
through the local democracy of self-governing churches as the wellspring of
culture and learning. When some of the modest reforms initiated by Napoleon
in Bavaria were being retracted, Hegel wrote to his friend Niethammer,
these were "ephemeral...paltry paper successes of human ants, fleas, and
bugs."
"I adhere," wrote Hegel in the same letter, "to the view that the world
spirit has given the age marching orders. These orders are being obeyed.
The world spirit, this essential power, proceeds irresistibly like a
closely drawn armored phalanx advancing with imperceptible movement..."
This image of inevitable steady progress of world spirit is often used
against Hegel without noting his many qualifications, even when he was most
optimistic. In the PHENOMENOLOGY, spirit often advances only to encounter a
more total form of a previous stage of alienation. Even more important is
that Hegel's critics fail to note Hegel's later view in the 1827
ENCYCLOPEDIA that the movement of history not only included outright
retrogression but also that the opposite of that retrogression is digging
into dialectic in and for itself. However, that was not so clear in the
first edition of the ENCYCLOPEDIA in 1817.
Things changed when political retrogression got much worse after March
1819. Karl Sand, a member of the German student movement fighting the
reaction, committed an individual act of terror, assassinating a
reactionary playwright, August Kotzebue, and thereby triggered an
authoritarian crackdown. Sand was a follower of the Jacobian philosophy of
immediate feeling through his teacher Jacob Fries. Fries extended Jacobi's
philosophy to a tendency of POLITICAL romanticism, to the idea of acting on
the basis of immediate feelings. This is not unlike some of the action
oriented, anti-theoretic tendencies among students in the 1960s. There were
many tendencies in the 1820s German student movement, which in general was
striving to modernize Germany along the lines of France. Some students were
sympathetic to Hegel.
Friedrich Carove, whom Hegel picked to be his first teaching assistant, was
one such student. Carove was rejected by the police. Hegel's second
teaching assistant, Leopold von Henning, was arrested by the Prussian
police a year later. In September 1819 the German Confederation issued the
Karlsbad Decrees which set up strict censorship and an inquisition against
religious heresy in literature and educational institutions. Hegel himself
was criticized for heresy and undermining the foundations of faith. This
was such a problem to him that the Protestant Hegel wrote to his wife that
"the Roman Curia would be a more honorable opponent than the miserable
cabals of a miserable boiling of parsons in Berlin."(4)
The key point is that Hegel saw the post-1819 political regression as a
retrogression in THOUGHT that elevated immediate faith to the truth. Though
Hegel was for the church, religion had to undergo a critique and be
transcended by philosophy in order for religion's universals to overcome
their abstract character-in order for those universals to become a
determined content in the community and in concrete experience.
The Roman Curia at least held to a system of doctrine that could be
subjected to critique. The doctrine of intuitionism or immediate knowledge
blocked critique and the possibility of transcending religion in
philosophy. In the Preface to the 1827 ENCYCLOPEDIA Hegel says that the
only way for religion to intersect with the higher form of philosophy is
for it to submit the heart's religiosity which "persists in clinging to
its...unintelligent intensity" to the "authority of spirit" and its
"intelligent expansion of doctrine."(5)
Against Jacobi who "has no other authority than personal revelation," Hegel
saw something superior in the Church which at least was disciplined by a
"copious body of objective truth, a system of knowledge and doctrine."(6)
Jacobi's immediate knowledge provided a PHILOSOPHIC COVER for the primacy
of the heart. It blocked critique because, unlike the immediate natural
consciousness as it emerged historically, this immediacy was THOUGHTFULLY
asserted.
Now the dialectic proof that immediacy emerged from mediation, the
principle of philosophy as history's "conscious self mediating process,"
could not stop with recollection of free contingent History in the
philosopher's head. Now Hegel makes more concrete what was only implied in
the last paragraph of the PHENOMENOLOGY, i.e., that philosophy must
consciously unite with organization and be its "intelligent expansion of
doctrine." Indeed, a retrogression of a thoughtfully asserted immediacy, or
intuitionism, forces the issue of explicitly making dialectic philosophy's
underlying speculative standpoint itself the basis of organizational
discipline.
Hegel was reaching for a concept of organization disciplined by the
dialectic itself which can expose the lie, through its body of thought, of
an unmediated immediacy posed by intuitionism. Only when the dialectic in
and for itself consciously comes to the fore can the path to liberation be
assured. Only then is the new recognized as belonging wholly to the
speculative dialectic moment; only then is the power of thought not lost in
any new immediacy.
What Marx did in his day and Marxist-Humanism is trying to do in ours,
without any direct "copying" of Hegel, is to work out a principle of
revolutionary organization on such a foundation, an issue which NEWS &
LETTERS will deal with more in the future.
NOTES
1. This essay grew out of last year's discussions around the 25th
anniversary of the publication of PHILOSOPHY AND REVOLUTION by Raya
Dunayevskaya. See especially the expanded 1989 edition of PHILOSOPHY AND
REVOLUTION: FROM HEGEL TO SARTRE AND FROM MARX TO MAO (New York: Columbia
University Press) with Dunayevskaya's letter on organization and Hegel's
critique of intuitionism.[BACK]
2. THE LOGIC OF HEGEL, trans. William Wallace (Oxford, 1968) para. 75.[BACK]
3. Jacques D'Hondt and others have proven this point in a way an essay of
this length obviously cannot. See D'Hondt, HEGEL IN HIS TIME, trans. John
Burbidge (Peterborough, Ontario, Broadview Press, 1988).[BACK]
4. THE LOGIC OF HEGEL, p. xx.[BACK]
5. Ibid, p. xxi.[BACK]
6. Ibid, para. 63.[BACK]
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