It is current events in their most dramatic form that confront us with dialectical reversals that history and Hegelian philosophy can illuminate. We have seen that Hegel's first concern in separating himself from Schelling was to avoid abstraction by trying to stick to concrete phenomena and follow their dialectical movements in their diversity, without therefore needing to define this dialectic in advance (which he will do at the end of the Logic). It is not primarily a formal, preconceived method. Despite everything, his opposition to Schelling implies a rejection of immediacy as well as of a static dialectic between opposites, in equilibrium (philosophy of identity). The most general definition of dialectics for Hegel is therefore its dynamic, evolving, productive, transformative nature. As in Fichte, every action provokes a reaction, every intention (freedom) encounters resistance (external world), requiring an effort and testing its limits, but each time forming a new totality where each position in its one-sidedness collides with the opposition of the other until it has to integrate this otherness into their reciprocal recognition, resulting from the conflict. "It is only this equality reconstituting itself or the reflection in oneself in the being-other that is true - and not an original unity or an immediate unity as such". (Phenomenology, tI p17-18)
It was just before the Phenomenology that he introduced the Aufhebung, which he made the driving force of the dialectic. This term, as we know, is fundamental in its ambivalence, a negation that preserves and progresses, marking the specificity of Hegelian dialectics. It is because negation is always partial that it is productive and not only destructive. As he specifies at the end of the Logic, the partial character of negation already prefigures the final synthesis of the negation of negation, an absolutely essential moment of reconciliation, although it too must be overcome.
The fundamental prejudice in this regard is that dialectics would only have a negative result. Logic III p378
To hold firmly the positive in its negative, the content of the presupposition in the result, this is the most important thing in rational knowledge. p380
[Succeeding the first time, the immediate positive,] the second operation of the dialectic, the negative or mediated, is also at the same time the mediating one... It is a relation or a relationship; for it is the negative, but of the positive, and includes in itself this same positive... It is therefore the other of another; it is for this reason that it includes its other in itself, and that it is therefore like the contradiction, the dialectic posited of itself. p381
It is as the mediating that the negative appears, because it syllogizes in itself, itself and the immediate of which it is the negation. p383
Finally, the historical dimension will be added, so sensitive with the experience of the upheavals of that time (Revolution, Terror, Empire), universal History becoming the unifying framework for all historical dialectics (joining "The idea of a universal history from a cosmopolitan point of view" by Kant 1784). This historicity introduces into the dialectic a new decisive temporal characteristic, that of a reflexivity after the fact of self-consciousness, logic of historical learning, what Hegel calls the passage from the in-itself to the for-itself. This reflection in return on experience is ultimately nothing other than philosophy, but this time we are in a definition of dialectics restricted to knowledge and not being able to apply to all other dialectics (like what we can call a metabolic dialectic sticking to reality in the alternation between catabolism and anabolism to compensate for deficiencies and excesses).
The term dialectic covers a diversity of processes, progress and reversals that only a thought that does violence to the given succeeds in reducing to a single fundamental form that is always identical. Litt p85
Hegel's attempt to reduce the totality of the acts and creations of the mind to a one-dimensional evolution endowed with a binding logical character, met with failure and was bound to fail. p100
Beyond the observation of dialectical processes almost everywhere, to avoid confusion it is therefore essential to distinguish different kinds of dialectics that cannot be completely assimilated, whether they are distinguished by the type of negation, the field of operation or the structure of time, even if they can come together as a process of integration of the negative. Thus, despite their formal analogies, the simple passage from the immediate to the mediated, or the negation of particularity with regard to the universal, or the negation of unilaterality leading to the recognition of the other, or the resolution of a contradiction, is not the same thing. At the level of Logic alone (and Enc. §240), we have been able to distinguish a Dialectic of Being as passage into another, a Dialectic of Essence as appearing in the opposite and a Dialectic of the Concept as development (André Stanguennec). In fact, as we shall see, it is a little more complicated for the subjective logic of the concept which passes from a historicity lived in retrospect throughout history to the retrospective linear narrative of its completed development ("The progression of the concept is no longer passage nor appearance in something else but development" Enc. §161). At the end of the journey, the dialectic is no longer a difficult awareness but becomes a simple method, having only to retrace the past path (whose boredom Schelling denounces).
What we will explore here is precisely this historical dialectic, because of its importance in the Hegelian system but especially because of the retroactive temporal structure of these successive awarenesses. We will use for this Theodor Litt who underlines this retroactive character in the rapprochement with an organic dialectic where the organic totality is present at each new stage of development - although in a different mode from the historical dialectic applying only to individual or collective subjectivities. The main issue here is not to confuse history in the making, in the torments of the aftermath and of a reality that slips through our fingers, with what becomes its inevitable sequential narrative, including in the Phenomenology, as if everything was decided in advance from the beginning and giving the illusion of a calm and even exhilarating blossoming (ascension), throughout a linear time that is moving towards its end.
I had never heard of Theodor Litt (1880–1962) before. He is known in Germany primarily as a post-war pedagogue and university reformer, but he was also a philosopher of culture, advocating cultural pedagogy and dialectical thinking, particularly between the individual and society. His philosophical work does not seem to have had a significant influence; in any case, his 1953 book "Hegel. An Attempt at Critical Renewal" is almost unreferenced, and generative AIs are outright inventing its content—assuming he is talking about pedagogy as in the rest of his work, when in fact it is a reconstruction of the Hegelian system! Yet there is a close relationship between the organic dialectic he advocates and learning, illustrated by the difference between the (completed) knowledge of the teacher and the step-by-step training of the student seeking recognition, who must learn to say "I." Without any connection between them, Piaget's genetic epistemology studying child development will also see dialectics at work, among other things to learn to decenter oneself from one's own point of view in order to integrate that of others. However, if I was led to be interested in Litt, it is above all because he underlined the retroactive character of historical dialectics, after the fact on which I myself insist. As it is not found on the internet and to have them at hand, I wanted to gather these few extracts specifying this retrospective character of historical dialectics.
He begins, to distinguish himself from it, by explaining how mathematical or scientific thought isolates the elements and follows their linear path, then he opposes it to genetic or organicist thought which combines both temporal development but also the organic totality which gives a retrospective meaning to each stage of development. We could just as well say "prospective" since the totality of the organism is present from the beginning, and without which we cannot account for ontogenesis which loops back on itself - in a circularity which is not only linear and involves multiple self-re-organizations. However, he finally opposes it to philosophical thought which is reflexive and truly retrospective because it cannot account for a past stage until it has been surpassed, a passage from the in-itself (of what one did without knowing it adequately) to the for-itself which understands its meaning after the fact, in view of its consequences, without being able to know it in advance. Although it maintains a constantly recomposed totality, this time it is not given in advance, unlike organicism. The reconstruction of the previous path as a linear progression is therefore even more inadequate, which does not mean that it could be avoided - But perhaps it is to situate ourselves in an organism in the process of being made, without yet having the plan which only appears at the end? or rather a becoming subject by reflexive return on action?
We are only ever dealing with a single, unique totality which, at the point we wish to reach, presents itself to us in the form it happens to have at precisely that point. This eliminates the possibility of stopping at any point in the process and of being content with what we have acquired so far... It is by traveling the path for the second time that the subject can fully understand this part. p21
We cannot imagine the permanent actuality of the totality or the complex interplay of references, either to what precedes or to what follows, without having to recognize to what extent the image of the "path," when used to designate the philosophical approach, is insufficient, even a source of erroneous associations. Certainly, it imposes itself in an almost irresistible manner when it is a question of elucidating a chain of thoughts. And it corresponds well to reality when we apply it to an approach which, like that of mathematics, proceeds unequivocally, from "result" to "result" and which for this reason fits easily into the flow of time. But this same image obscures what it should illustrate as soon as we apply it to an approach which, like that of philosophy, while taking place in the temporal dimension, relativizes the orientation of time thanks to its constant returns to what precedes or its anticipations of what will still follow. Hegel saw perfectly well that the image of circular movement is much better suited to revealing this structure than that of the straight line suggested by the representation of the "path". A circular process which is realized in the linear progress of time: such is the form that philosophy takes in realizing itself. p22
Philosophy, too, deals with an object that develops itself in a series of successive undertakings ranging from the simple to the most complex, an object that is therefore in perfect correspondence with its own thought process, which also progresses in time and therefore has nothing else to do than to faithfully reproduce it in its own progression, the progression of the object that it sets out to understand. We characterize by this the parallelism that the "genetic" point of view implements: it starts from the origin and reaches the present by allowing itself to be guided by the temporal succession of instants. It is precisely this parallelism, so seductive for thought, that gives the genetic approach its attraction and its form of persuasion.
But it is wrong to think that Hegel's philosophy is only one more example of this genetic approach and that it would be exclusively faithful to it. We are mistaken when we believe that this philosophy, because it is constructed, as we have said, from the elementary to what is mediated, could enjoy the same advantages as the mathematical sciences in the elaboration of their content. The progress of thought which goes from the elementary to the most complex and, sometimes, from the anterior to the posterior, constitutes only the aspect of the intellectual approach which is accomplished in the foreground, in the light of what must arrive at a perfectly completed philosophical formulation; this movement, therefore, goes from station to station in the progression which the intellectual approach accomplishes for its part in time. Now this movement is not the totality which it is a question of dominating by thought. p25
Let us use an image that Hegel himself offers us to illustrate the form in which philosophical thought develops. It is the image of the process of growth that leads from bud to flower, and from flower to fruit. What makes this process capable of concretizing what occurs in the philosophical process is the fact that it too stands in a dual relationship with time. It runs through a plurality of stages that succeed one another in accordance with the order of time. But each of these stages is determined in its content as much in terms of what is going to happen temporally as in terms of what is, temporally, in its past. For the process in question is nothing other than "organic development." This means: this process is not a temporal juxtaposition of states that succeed one another at random and remain indifferent to one another, but it is the becoming of a structure that unfolds in an ordered sequence of phases that are internally related to one another. The order that inhabits this becoming implies that each of the particular phases is no less determined by what will occur from it than by what it came from. The flower is in the bud, the fruit is in the flower, as virtuality. At each instant of time, the past and the future intertwine and penetrate each other. p26
For, in order to be able to reveal the relationship between organic growth and the temporal flux, we had to, through thought, become aware of the process inherent in this growth; and, now reflecting on what has actually happened in our intellectual effort, we become aware that we have been able to conceive of the dual relationship existing between the organic process and time only because we have made our own thought work in the very sense of this dual relationship, that is to say, both in conformity with the temporal flux and in the opposite direction. When we wish to recognize in the bud what we designate by this term, we cannot be content with enumerating its characteristics insofar as they result from the previously accomplished evolution. We must also include what will emerge from it, what it tends towards by its nature. We must reveal, at the very horizon of our examination of it, what we do not yet find there, but which is already invisibly present as a germ, the flower and the fruit. If we remove this anticipation, the bud is not treated as a phase of living growth, but as a dead thing. p27
We thus truly grasp the play of thought on two successive levels: a foreground and a background. The merging of these two intellectual approaches is only possible if the thought aiming at its object has first accomplished its task naively. p32
For the very idea of such an elucidation could only emerge after thought, passing through the stage in question, had risen to a higher point of view. Conversely, this point of view could only be reached once the stage of "naive" thought had been passed through, and not by leaping over this stage in one leap. For the very essence of what one must do from this point of view lies precisely in this "return," but one can only "return" to a point where one has already been. In truth, this image of "return" misses important features of what we are seeking to elucidate. It is misleading not only insofar as one naturally cannot actually return to a past point in the temporal flow, and therefore not to a point in a process progressing through time. The image also obscures the fact that in this so-called "return" it is not the same object that is offered to us a second time, but it is the same act that is actualized again by now grasping itself in a more profound way.
Only if we take all these reservations into account can we summarize the result of our examination as follows: the two approaches, the one that progresses with the flow of time and the one that goes against it, are strictly linked to each other. Thanks to their interpenetration, the one who returns from a position he has reached later, is able to grasp what had happened at that previous stage more deeply than can the one who arrives there for the first time. It is for him that this background is revealed and fulfilled, which necessarily escapes the one who is lost in his object and who forgets himself completely in it. And similarly, if we ask ourselves about the necessity that drives thought through time from stage to stage, it is not the one who naively goes through these stages who will be able to give an answer because he has neither the capacity nor the mission to do so. It is only by looking from a higher point that one discovers why thought, at first absorbed in the object and completely obsessed by it, had to go beyond it, distance itself from it, and, reflecting on its own approach, was able to achieve that internal doubling which was foreign to naive thought. p33
We see in fact intertwined: 1) the thought which unfolds in the same direction as the temporal flow, when it aims at the becoming of the organism, 2) the thought which understands the intimate connections characterizing this becoming by detailing them from their terminal point, therefore in a direction opposite to that of time, 3) the thought which, reflecting on the two preceding ones, therefore again in the direction opposite to that of time, understands the necessity which commands the reciprocal belonging of thoughts 1 and 2. p34
The progression that goes in the direction of the temporal flow thus leads us from mathematical thought to organismic thought and then to thought that reflects on itself. p35
The subject only realizes after the fact what he has previously accomplished without then possessing a full awareness of his own action. p36 (remaining an "in-itself", that is to say that which is not yet fully known). p37
For how is one who has climbed the summit of knowledge able to penetrate the "in-itself" of one who is naively walking? [...] By following the series of stages traversed by the subject who, unlike him, does not yet know, he is in truth following the process that he himself must have accomplished, if what happens in and through the other is to become transparent to him. In this way, the difference between the subject who observes and the subject observed disappears. It is no longer this subject who observes this other, different from him, it is the subject, as such and absolutely, who, turned towards his past, consciously legitimizes the evolutionary stages that were first experienced "in-itself," without consciousness, and who thereby dissipates the obscurity still affecting this "in-itself." The "in-itself" ceases to be visible only "for us." The distinction and separation that we have maintained until now between the "we" who assume the role of observer and the observed subject, still deprived of knowledge, become obsolete. The "for-us" is metamorphosed into a "for-itself." What the subject, naively lost in its object, was only "in-itself," blindly, has now become "for-itself," for itself as knowing. And this is what Hegel expresses in his language: it is "in-and-for-itself" (Enc §24). This is the whole difference between what is present "for" the subject, that is, in the subject's knowledge, and what is only "in-itself," that is, what is not yet apprehended in the clarity of knowledge. p38
The goal is the path itself, but illuminated by knowledge. At each station on this path, the truth of the entire journey is present, even if it is only in the form that corresponds to the stage one has just reached on the journey from the "in-itself" to the "in-and-for-itself." p40
We know that the profound meaning of the retrospective reversal, inevitable for thought, lies in the fact that by it alone, by making the temporal order relative, one can ensure at every moment the presence of the whole. p56
This retrospective historical dialectic testifies above all to the radical exteriority of time, of a reality that escapes us, surpasses us and that we cannot anticipate, which gives a good account of our anxious relationship with concrete temporality but does not prevent its immediate repression due to the fact that the retrospective return to the path traveled, characterizing each awareness, can only make invisible the anguish of the negative, the test that had to be overcome, now understood. "The spirit conquers its truth only on condition of finding itself in absolute tearing apart" PhE p29. There is an absolute necessity of defeat in order to abandon one's illusions and progress. This does not prevent, paradoxically, the negativity of the concept being developed from being lost in the developed concept supposed to integrate it, and which, although it is qualified as "absolute negativity", practically cancels out the dialectic and the negative despite the contrary claims. The tragedy of existence is linked to not knowing what happens next and is lost as anxiety when we already know the end.
Thus, Litt takes the example of evolutionism (p279) as too linear in its fresco of evolution illustrating the relentless march of progress (of complexity), but one can retort that, in this presentation of the result of evolution, we have eliminated precisely what constitutes its soul: the fatal negativity of natural selection, after the fact, according to the result and the environment, most often by a brutal elimination of those who could not adapt to ecological upheavals. If in nature the simple necessarily precedes the complex, this does not make it an internal drive for continuous development up to us. The evolution of humanity itself is not the flowering of its primary potentialities (thousands or even millions of years passing without notable progress) but rather the result of catastrophic "bottlenecks", selecting rare survivors who are a little more evolved (more adaptable). It would simply be necessary to link the appearance of each species to the drama it had to go through in order to find a true non-finalist dialectic there. One might find it more questionable to take as a model, as Hegel does, the ontogenesis of the organism which, once past the selective barrier (and although ontogenesis often reflects phylogenesis), loses this historical negativity in a pre-programmed development. Organicism, where the seed already has the potential to be the plant and the fruit, where the end is given with the beginning, completely neutralizes the negative in a clearly positive "overcoming" of each stage of reproduction. Wanting to preserve the negative there is purely formal.
There is undoubtedly this organicist temptation of the Hegelian system that Litt is right to criticize in the name of philosophical (cognitive) reflexivity which must remain open to awareness after the fact - not being given "before the fact" like the organism. This is the criticism that can also be made of progressivism, sure of knowing the radiant future but which thus eludes the furies of History, History which is anything but the history of happy peoples and harmonious development. Moreover, this is what we call the lessons of History when wars and misfortunes reach us again and plunge us back into History in spite of ourselves, an admission that we actually forget them very quickly in more peaceful moments.
In fact, it is hopeless because it is not only the negative that disappears from the retrospective gaze but the historical dialectic itself, which can be said to contradict itself structurally. It is, in fact, by a necessary movement that retrospective awareness represses its historicity, just as scientific discoveries are taught in their result detached from their history (the percipiens is forgotten in the perceptum). "The realized concept, this outcome, is only the disappearance of appearance" §242. The recognized problem of the Hegelian system is that of the End supposed to close the system at the same time as the historical dialectic. We can put it into perspective by noting that the retrospective gaze, which is its heart, constitutes in itself the closure of the sequence and reconstructs each time a linear (narrative) temporality, the point of quilting always being located at the end (of history, of knowledge, of the negative), a true negation of the negation - this before being denied subsequently. It is an unavoidable closure, productive although temporary (just like scientific systems) but the difference between historical dialectics and its linear reconstruction is quite simply that no one knows what the history in the making will give whereas, for the past, it is already known. The return of the negative may be promised, it almost always comes from where one did not expect it (it is not predictable before manifesting itself). We live in this contradiction that historical dialectics live in, denying itself every time, unable to avoid re-closing past history, and swearing that this is the last war, before colliding again with material powers, community divisions and the harshness of reality that comes to disturb our comfort and remove us from private interests. Outside of these moments of collapse, the negative can probably not be faced because what matters to us is to overcome it.
A final point to discuss would be the comparison made by Litt between historical dialectics and apprenticeship, the progress of which can only be measured after the fact, but introducing the dissymmetry of the Master, who has already been through it, and the student who must pass through all the stages one by one. We see that here too we have the deceptive cohabitation of a linear training and a retrospective dialectic which cannot be assimilated to the historical dialectic which has no Master. The test of the negative also disappears in apprenticeship while we do not take seriously enough the contribution of Socrates whose dialectic was anything but innocent and had the potential to shame his interlocutors since it was a matter of denouncing false knowledge, which is much more vexing than not knowing and having to learn. However, historical dialectics also destroys our old certainties with previous closures, and if philosophy cannot lead to dogmatic knowledge, it does require denying its particularities and overcoming its one-sidedness, its prejudices and community beliefs. Renouncing false knowledge is a too-ignored dimension of historical dialectics grappling with reality and confronted with other narratives. For those who have passed under the yoke of historical time and changing fashions, it is therefore not only a question of ignorance in historical dialectics but also of defeat, guilt and remorse. We still see today how evil is not so much a product of simple ignorance as of false knowledge, their power to harm being proportional to the material (economic) powers at play, before returning to reason through the sanction of reality or the judgment of History. For new progress?
We should probably make the connection with our current events, the crossing of boundaries, the destruction of our environment, the confrontation of empires, the collapse of the left and the rise of xenophobic authoritarian regimes, the contradictions of (sexual) freedom but also the anthropological revolution of women's liberation and the opposition it provoked. We can emphasize the necessity of going through defeat but also how anti-wokeism integrates wokism and draws its contours, finally that there is no post-reality and that the cunning of reason will eventually prevail, that is to say also freedom and Law. This is not to please us but because probabilistic reality does not allow itself to be locked into our stories and our projects, contradicting us each time. Is this being too sure of the future? Perhaps, in any case for the form that it could take, surely not as beautiful as we imagine...
Jean Zin, “La dialectique historique rétrospective”, 15 June 2025
English translation by ChatGPT (OpenAI), licensed CC‑BY‑SA 4.0 (or pdf by DeepL)
