Temps de lecture : 18 minutes
Verifying the historical dialectic in our current reality (and the importance of being aware of it) does not mean allegiance to everything Hegel said about it during the Empire, nor does it mean adopting a conception of the mind that is no longer tenable in the age of generative artificial intelligence. Similarly, adopting Aristotelian logic cannot mean adopting his metaphysics or his justification of a patriarchal slave system. More generally, we must abandon the illusion that a philosopher has understood everything and that all we have to do is embrace his philosophy. Great philosophers are admired for the truths they discover or the questions they ask, which makes them indispensable to know, but the paradox is that these truths are always mobilized for a final denial (of death or suffering) and an idealization of reality, so that in (almost) all philosophies, the true is only a moment of the false. Philosophical demonstrations should not be taken seriously, with their implacable syllogisms that “bound the minds and did not reach things” (as Bacon insisted). Indeed, reality does not resist thought (fiction), only action. It is therefore more than legitimate to take up Plato's truths, like Aristotle, without accepting his theory of ideas or the immortality of the soul. Similarly, if it is no longer possible to be a Marxist-Leninist communist, this does not mean that one can no longer be a Marxist in the sense of being determined by the system of production and social relations, that is, by a materialist and dialectical conception of history determined by technical evolution. For Heidegger, it is even more caricatural because, of course, being touched by Being and Time or some of the themes it addresses cannot make one accept his Nazism and his pangermanist mysticism. Each time, powerful revelations that advance the argument are supposed to ultimately make us mistake bladders for lanterns and, in the name of their logical deductions, make us believe in our absolute freedom, in a God, in life after death, in a utopian end of history, or in an illusory bliss.
So, let us repeat that what should make us adopt Hegelian dialectics is its verification in concrete terms and in the particularity of phenomena, both in logic and in history (political, moral, aesthetic), a dialectic that we undergo and cannot ignore. However, this should not blind us to the totality of the system—and in particular to the Phenomenology—and cause us to lose all critical spirit. It is even essential to deconstruct the system based on the confusion between individual consciousness and the historical spirit. As has been pointed out, it was precisely the decision to begin with consciousness that gave impetus and coherence to the writing of the Phenomenology, approaching truth and spirit as subjects rather than from an external point of view. This confusion between individual consciousness and the history of the Spirit is, however, untenable, even though the role of the individual is minimized, particularly in view of the “tricks of reason.” The dialectic of consciousness that unfolds there could be attributed at most to a kind of transcendental consciousness, to the spirit of the times (too quickly identified by Kojève as Man) or, better, to logical constraints but not to the activity of the individual, as the last paragraph of the preface makes clear. It is all the more surprising that the Introduction claims to be a science of the experience of consciousness. In his lecture on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (1931), Heidegger has no trouble criticizing, in the name of phenomenological intentionality and its noesis, the reconstruction of consciousness from its perceptions, when in fact there is always a prior understanding of the totality, of the meaning of the situation. Consciousness never begins from the immediate; it is always already there, in a situation, embedded in a history, social relations, discourses, always already consciousness for the Other and language, from the beginning and not only at the end of the journey. As Lev Vygotsky showed, child development does not proceed from the individual to the social, but rather from social discourse to the individual.
In the Philosophy of Mind of his Realphilosophie, just preceding Phenomenology, Hegel admitted this and that there is no realization of self-consciousness except in the people (the collective), yet what is appealing in his Phenomenology is that he turns it into a novel in which consciousness is supposed to be constructed in its own experience. This is again what he presents in Chapter IV, “The Truth of Self-Certainty,” where consciousness achieves socialization through “self-consciousness in and for itself when and because it is in and for itself for another self-consciousness” (p. 155), that is, “an I that is a We, and a We that is an I.” (p. 154). The first part, entitled “Independence and Dependence of Self-Consciousness,” introduces the dialectic of Master and Slave, which is the best-known part of the work but the subject of much misunderstanding. Kojève makes it the pivot of his questionable Hegelian-Marxist-Heideggerian interpretation, combining struggle and labor with the anxiety of death, but this dialectic, which has nothing historical about it, must be reduced to its fictional and parabolic nature (a subject devoid of any other characteristic than mortality and a dialectic arising from its natural (bestial) basis and its negation in law).
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