ADRIAN JOHNSTON
A New German Idealism: Hegel, Žižek,
and Dialectical Materialism
Adrian Johnston, A New
German Idealism: Hegel, Žižek, and Dialectical Materialism, Columbia University
Press, 2018, 376pp., $70.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780231183949.
Reviewed by Robert B. Pippin,
University of Chicago
The current book by Adrian
Johnston continues his extensive engagement with the work of Slavoj Žižek, and
so with the question of a proper statement of a contemporary "dialectical
materialism," an issue that for both of them hangs on a proper reading of
Hegel's theoretical work. Johnston's book Žižek's Ontology (2008)
dealt with Žižek's work up until The Parallax View (2006). His Badious,
Žižek, and Political Transformations: The Cadence of Change (2009) deals
with Žižek up until In Defense of Lost Causes (2008). The current
volume deals predominantly with two works; a work Johnston often refers to as Žižek's chef
d'ouevre or masterpiece, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of
Dialectical Materialism (2012), and its subsequent restatement and
reformulation, Absolute Recoil: Toward a New Foundation of Dialectical
Materialism (2014).
On the one hand, the topic of
the current book is formulated in a way that would seem to be preaching to a
small and select choir, whoever is worried about "Which comes first, the
positivity of contingent material facticity or the negativity of a primordial
Void. Schematically speaking, I defend the former option, while Žižek defends
the latter." (p.xi) On the other hand, the engagement with Hegel raises a
number of important philosophical issues much in the philosophical news, from
the cogency of modern versions of naturalism and materialisms to the proper
critique now needed of what is at this point a depressingly totalized,
triumphant global capitalism. And there are several crucial issues of Hegel
interpretation involved. However, the approach taken in the book limits it in
other ways. It is relentlessly self-referential and self-promoting ("Žižek
and I" is a constant refrain), often self-congratulatory, and frequently
quite polemical, at times to the point of agitprop. "Anything short of
this reckoning [Johnston's own position] signals a disrespectful
underestimation throwing the doors wide open to a surreptitious replacement of
Hegel with a dummy made for exploitation by post-Hegelian ventriloquists."
(p.73) (Full disclosure: I am the main target of the chapter that concludes
with this swipe. More to come below.) Much of the polemic sounds like an
intra-party squabble about purity (as in, "who is the true dialectical
materialist"). Positions are "betrayed" (p.129); there are
charges of unacceptable backsliding, slippage from the right position (p.147)
and there is an unfortunate sectarian cast to the whole enterprise. (Žižek's
work, by contrast, is refreshingly free of these characteristics.) Johnston
seems to want mostly to call Žižek back to his better self, to offer an
"internal critique" that states the Žižekian position more clearly
than some of Žižek's own formulations.
The main issue that unites
Johnston and Žižek is the extraordinary claim that Hegel's Absolute Idealism is
actually, when properly understood, "dialectical materialism," and,
indeed, precisely the version modern critical theory now requires (that is, not
the "historical materialism" of left-Hegelianism).[1] The materialism that results is not
a reference to the putatively harmonious, fully rational, and in principle
fully intelligible nature of Newtonian mechanics but a combination in some way
of late psychoanalytic theory (the self-negation at the heart of Hegel is for Žižek
a manifestation of Freud's death drive), Lacan, and the results of quantum
physics and even string theory (or at least what are by now Sunday magazine
summaries of such bodies of knowledge.) Their main disagreement (there are
several minor ones) is what is expressed telegraphically in the passage quoted
above. Johnston wants Hegel's philosophy of nature to have pride of place in
dialectical materialism. He thinks Žižek focuses too much on the Logic and
is too wedded to a Schellingian claim that the subject-object distinction (or
the distinction between spontaneous subjectivity or freedom, and nature or
natural determinism) can be neither a subjective nor objective distinction, and
so must be some sort of "void," or "abyss," not even a
"nothing" but "less than nothing." Or in other Hegelian
terms, the substance-subject split is not a dualism per se; it is the
self-diremption of substance, its "recoil" from itself. This is not a
prioritization of substance because it is the gap, the split, the
neither-one-nor-the-other that counts as the Hegelian Absolute. These are
extraordinarily abstract terms and we stay pretty much at this level of
abstraction throughout the book. After a short Preface reminding the reader of Žižek's
understanding of the Verstand-Vernunft (understanding-reason)
distinction (no abandonment of the former in moving to the latter but a working
through of the former to reveal what it was unknowingly committed to all
along), and an introductory first chapter, there are four more chapters and a
long conclusion on drive and desire. The Introduction (1) discusses the problem
of freedom and system in German philosophy. The chapters then discuss (2) the
errors of the supposedly deflationist, subjective idealist, Kantian reading of
Hegel that Johnston ascribes, quite inaccurately, to me; (3) the problem of
contingency in Hegel's system; (4) What Johnston calls "materialism sans
materialism" in Žižek; (5) German Idealism, biology and compatibilism, and
then a Conclusion on the "(Meta)-dialectics of drive and desire."
The first, introductory
chapter will be familiar to anyone who knows the history of the growing
dissatisfaction with what could be called reason's sufficiency unto itself, or
the absoluteness and autonomy of pure apperceptive thought, in Kant and, so it
was assumed, in Hegel, a moment of dissatisfaction already visible in
Hölderlin's 1795 fragment "Urtheil und Seyn." The activity of
thinking must, it was argued, have some "ground" in some sort of pre-
or non-thought, what is prior to or a basis of thinking, out of which or in
terms of which its activity can be accounted for. Empirically unaided,
reflective pure thinking cannot be wholly self-positing as it is
paradigmatically in Fichte, but also in Kant (the first Critique is
wholly reason's critique of itself) and in Hegel's Logic (which for
Johnston, should be understood to be equiprimordial with the Philosophies of
Nature and Sprit, not that on which the latter essentially depend (p.75)).
This of course is also part of
the problem of understanding systematically the spontaneity necessary for
freedom with the causal necessity of nature. If it is a result of thought's
self-reflection that we are unavoidably committed to both positions, then we
must have an ontology, an account of the real, in which both commitments could
make sense. Johnston explains Žižek's dissatisfactions with Kant's two-world
solution, and what he proposes as his own suggestion in the following
formulation. It resonates with the summary above.
Žižek, both in Less than
Nothing and throughout his corpus, relentlessly pursues investigations
regarding how being qua being must be thoroughly reconceptualized in light of
the facts both that it sunders itself into the parallax split between
subjectivity and objectivity and that subjective reflectivity or reflexivity
continues to remain immanent, although nonetheless irreducible to it. (p.29)
Or, what are gaps in our
knowledge in Kant are "ontologized" by Žižek's reading of Hegel; they
are gaps in being. This sort of thing is a frequent refrain in the book (see
p.61, 144, inter alia; and "the gap (that separates us from the Thing) as
the Real" (p.190))[2] and I was constantly puzzled by it.
If being "sunders itself" just ends up meaning: we must deal with the
fact that being includes subjects and objects, the world just comes this way,
it has somehow resulted in this duality, then we are simply still faced with
all our problems. (How could subjects know objects? How could subjects move
objects, including a subject's body, around? How could objects be conscious? If
these are illusory problems wrongly formulated, as I think Hegel believes, the
sundering event does not help us understand why.) If "sunders itself"
is supposed to explain something, what accounts for the sundering and how
does the sundering event help us understand this "immanence" but not
"reducibility" (isn't that the old problem just restated?), and how
would that help with these problems? Simply saying: nothing accounts
for it; it, the sundering event, is pure contingency (a frequent refrain too;
it all arises out of the void), is certainly a conversation stopper, but it
does not seem philosophically helpful. The same sort of thing is said of the
"gap" between the factual and the normative. All is supposed to be
solved when we realize that the gap "is immanent to the factual
itself." (p.45) There are some positions which hold that the normative is
"immanent" in the "factual"; Aristotle's, for example, if
we want to put it that way. But the whole point there is: there is no gap. How
does it do any philosophical work simply to assert that the gap is immanent to
the factual?
More serious problems emerge
in Chapter Two. Johnston wants to criticize what he calls
"deflationary" accounts of Hegel, which he characterizes as
nonmetaphysical readings. He names a number of figures but the main culprit is
yours truly. The chapter as a whole laboriously and repetitiously undertakes to
show that Hegel was not Kant, was not a subjective but an absolute idealist,
did not revert to trying to specify the categories necessary for the finite
subject's experiencing the world, but had a metaphysical project, the goal of
which was a robust account of being qua being. I am supposed to have replaced
"absolute with subjective idealism wholesale." (p.59) None of this
has anything whatsoever to do with the position I have attributed to Hegel for
almost thirty years now. To restate the obvious: First, the only metaphysics
Hegel wants to abandon is rationalist dogmatic metaphysics. (Johnston seems to
understand this much.) No nonsensible noetic objects knowable by pure reason
alone. No souls, immaterial minds, creator God, no res cogitans, no
monads, Platonic Ideas, etc. Hegel frequently celebrates Kant's destruction of
such an enterprise ("thing metaphysics," or the metaphysics of the
"beyond").[3] But of course Hegel has
his own "metaphysics," and its closest analogue is Aristotle, not
Leibniz or Spinoza or Plotinus. Besides, any moderately awake person reading
Hegel on Kant from the Differenzschrift onwards would not need to be
reminded so tiresomely that Hegel, despite his frequently expressed profound
admiration for Kant, completely rejects what he regards as Kant's subjective
idealism. Johnston does not even mention Hegel's central concern, what he
rightly understood to be the subjectivizing element in Kant's idealism, the
pure subjective forms of intuition. And that is a telling point. Again, it is
does not need to be pointed out to anyone that Hegel asserts "the identity
of thought and being." But this has two primary dimensions. One concerns
the "logical" determinations of anything at all, specified by pure
thinking's dialectical self-determination in the Logic. But Hegel also
wants to address directly Kant's concerns with the role of pure concepts in
everything from perceptual experience to the interpretation of art works. He
wants to insist that, while a conceptual and sensible element are
distinguishable in perceptual experience, they are not separable. There is no
two-step, or "imposition" application of concepts to an exogenous
material. Perceptual experience is conceptual "all the way down." But
the obvious fact that Hegel is concerned with correcting Kant on this issue
should never be taken to mean that his "idealism" wholly consists
in a theory about the subjective conditions for the possibility of experience.
This is just what Johnston has done, and it is a gross distortion. It is beyond
me why Johnston thinks he needs to spend so many pages belaboring the
stunningly obvious point that Hegel is not a subjective idealist.
In the Logic, anyone
interested in Hegel's theoretical philosophy must take on board several
indisputable Hegelian principles, none of which I see present in Johnston's
summaries. The Science of Logic is said to be "the science of
pure thinking." Pure thinking is not (in the Logic, as opposed to
the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit) a mental event, or a subjective
activity. It is pure thinking's inquiry into what is necessary for pure
thinking to be possible, whatever or whoever is thinking. In just that sense,
it is a logic. Pure thinking is understood as primarily judging, the truth
bearer of all knowledge. Thinking is exclusively discursive, not intuitive, in
no sense a perceptual power. It is pure activity; a productive power, and, as
Hegel says over and over, it produces its own content. The object of pure
thinking, he insists, is itself. Thinking, judging, is apperceptive; in
any thinking or judging, such judging is reflective; judging is, is not
accompanied by, consciousness of judging. It is this feature that allows
thinking's self-determination, in "producing" its "Denkbestimmungen,"
thought determinations or moments (Quantity, Quality, Relation and Modality,
for example) to be simultaneously aware of what it has determined and whether
it exhausts what is required for thinking to be a truth-bearer. With all this
in play, Hegel insists unequivocally that only "now," after Kant,
logic is metaphysics.[4]
Again, none of this is a claim
about how the mind actually operates. If that were the case, and Hegel were
making a claim about the mind's nature, knowledge would be limited by its
"instrument," something Hegel had been vigorously denying since the
Introduction to the Phenomenology. In knowing itself, what pure thought
knows is the possible intelligibility, the knowability, of anything that is.
But the intelligibility of anything is just what it is to be that thing, to be
determinately "this-such" (tode ti), the answer to the "what is
it" (ti esti) question definitive of metaphysics since Aristotle. So in
knowing itself, thought knows of all things, what it is to be
anything. Again, as for Aristotle, the task of metaphysics is not to say of any
particular thing what it is. It is to determine what must be true of anything
at all (what in scholasticism were called the transcendentalia), such
that what it is in particular can be determined by the special
sciences. Or: it is to know what is necessarily presupposed in any such
specification. (Of course the Physics and the De Anima are
also philosophical sciences for Aristotle, but Hegel will have a Philosophy
of Nature and a Philosophy of Spirit, too.)
None of this is in the
slightest deflationary. On the contrary, it is a robust insistence on the
possibility of pure thinking, philosophy, with substantive results about the
nature of determinacy, finitude, essence, appearance, substance, causality,
teleology, life. And it has absolutely nothing to do with "subjective
idealism." I go on at such length because of Johnston's dismissive talk
about a "dummy" Hegel and a "phony" Hegelianism. This Hegel,
as just formulated, is of course wide open to several sorts of objections, but
the position needs to be stated properly and carefully before that begins.
Chapter Three fares a little
better but ends up again both reciting the obvious and deeply confused. It
fares a little better because Johnston is on the side of the angels in
insisting that Hegel is not a wild necessitarian. He does not think that the
existence of every object in the cosmos and the happening of every event is
necessary, could not have been otherwise; nor does he think that every event in
human history unfolds with necessity as the actualization of a fixed
potentiality. §6 in the Encyclopedia Logic settles that issue. As
Johnston rightly points out, Dieter Henrich long ago showed that Hegel insisted
on what could be called the "necessity of contingency," that there
could not be a coherently intelligible world (or free action) were there not
contingent events. But Johnston follows Žižek in also insisting on the
"contingency of necessity" and that is a much more obscure claim.
Understood one way, it is also trivially true. Once something contingent
occurs, many other possible events are necessarily precluded, and only some
possibilities are entailed. But this is then inflated into a claim that is
deeply obscure, at least to me.
Any necessity (whether formal,
real or absolute) is a subsequent result arising from or supervening on a prior
contingency -- specifically a merely possible actuality just so happening to
also enjoy being-there/existence. (p.108)
This is then glossed with a
quotation from Žižek.
Hegel is . . . the ultimate
thinker of autopoesis, of the process of the emergence of necessary
features out of chaotic contingency, the thinker of contingency's gradual
self-organization, of the gradual rise of order out of chaos. (Ibid.)
And so we return again to the
ultimate contingency, the self-sundering of being, the gap, the void, and so
forth. And this results in a world "as autojustifying and self-supporting
(that is with a base of grounded necessity) but at the same time, also 'without
why' (ohne Warum) as unjustified and unsupported (that is, with a baselessness
of groundless contingency)." (p.109) I lost the thread somewhere along the
way to this extraordinary claim. It seems to me "grounded," given
some prior actuality, but ungrounded in that the prior actuality is absolutely
contingent and so ungrounded. But if this means: if Boyle's gas law is a law of
nature then the relation it claims exist between pressure and volume is a
necessary relation; but it is contingent that there are gases at all,
contingent that there is a cosmos at all, then this hardly makes the necessity
contingent."
When Johnston tries to gloss
what this "Ur-contingency" amounts to, he suggests we think of the
entanglement of all thought with natural languages. Sapience is possible only
in language. Languages are riddled with contingencies. Therefore
"cognitive intelligence cannot avoid entanglement with and working through
incarnations of the modality of contingency." (p.88) Again, this is ether
trivially true, or, if inflated into a Big Point, unconvincing. It would be
like arguing that any actual notation expressing a well-formed formula in logic
or a valid proof is contingent (Polish notation, truth trees, standard
quantificational notation, red ink, blue paper, whatever). Therefore logic
itself, what is contingently expressed, is entangled in contingency.
No, it isn't, not in any significant logical sense. The proof is not
contingently valid.
This (the discussion of the
priority of contingency) all leads Johnston to disagree that a proper
dialectical materialism cannot be said to have any predictive power, as Žižek
claims. (For him, making sense of historical events is necessarily
retrospective.) Johnston claims that if Žižek were to pay more attention to
Hegel's Realphilosophie, he would see that there is some predictive power
in Hegel's approach; for example, that modern capitalism "will, at the
hands of the rabble, commit suicide in the not-too-distant future."
(p.119) That is news to me, and I have no idea how to evaluate such a
disagreement. Perhaps we will simply have to wait and see.
On the issue of the
"priority" of the Logic in Hegel's system: although the
equiprimordiality of all three parts of the Encyclopedia is of
crucial importance to Johnston and the source of many of his criticisms of Žižek,
Johnston, astonishingly, demurs at giving any reading of what Hegel actually
says at the end of the Logic about the transition to the Realphilosophie.
(He says he does not know if it "works" or "does not work"
and that it is all a "matter of some confusion and dissension among his
readers." (p.143)) But this does not make him hesitate in his criticisms
of Žižek on Hegel or in his own assertions about Hegel. Hegel himself, in the
Introduction of the Philosophy of Nature, described what he is doing as
investigating the "self-determination" of the concept in the
"thinking" relation to nature, first of all in physics [in seiner
eigenen, immanenten Notwendigkeit nach der Selbstbestimmung des Begriffs ].
And that "The determination and the purpose of the philosophy of nature is
therefore that spirit should find its own essence, its counterpart, i.e. the
Concept, within nature." [5] I can't see how any of that is
consistent with what Johnston asserts, and it is quite surprising that for all
his celebration of Hegel's Philosophy of Nature, he never deals with any
of it, apparently considering all of it out of date. That section of the Encyclopedia seems
to function for him only as a title.
Chapter Four expresses
solidarity with Žižek's attempt to understand a form of materialism that avoids
crude reductionism, an antiquated conception of matter, and any notion of
nature that is a "Whole organically at one with itself and its
parts." (p.137) We want a conception of nature that is
"desubstantialized qua conflicted, disharmonious, inconsistent, and so
on" (p.138) ("Mind the gap" might be a suitable subtitle for all
of Žižek's oeuvre.) But we also want to avoid a "hyperstructuralist
ontology of strong formalism" (the Badiou option which Johnston thinks Žižek
is too tempted by) as well as any "Deleuze-inspired 'new
materialisms,'" panpsychic and mystical, as well as Žižek's alternate
temptation to "the negative theology" of the void. (p.147) Johnston
thinks all this leads us to a conception of what he calls "weak or rotten
nature." At this point the jargon and metaphorical character of the
account ("rotten"?) becomes so internal to Žižekiana and Johnston
himself that I can't imagine it all being of interest to or even accessible to
non-Žižek-specialists.
The "internal critique"
of Žižek becomes even more deeply internal in the concluding two chapters, one
on a naturalist compatibilism and one on drive and desire. The main point of
Chapter Five is to present a sympathetic portrait of Žižek's position on
compatibilism, summarizing a somewhat unwieldly borrowing from Kant (Henry
Allison's Kant) and German idealism (here more Fichte and Schelling than Hegel,
although the latter's notion of retroactivity in action plays a crucial role),
Lacan, modern neurobiological research (Libet), quantum physics and some
resources of modern anglophone philosophy (Dennett). This essentially involves
a reanimation of the core of modern compatibilism (in Hobbes, for example),
with "all the freedom worth wanting" as the absence of external
constraint, but supplemented with psychoanalytically inspired psychological
detail and the metaphysical position we have seen several times before.
Ultimately, Johnston's point is mildly critical, that Žižek "so far, has
yet to stipulate what the sufficient conditions, in addition to the necessary
ones, are for the genesis of subjectivity out of substantiality."
Nevertheless, he has laid out "solid foundations for future intellectual
labors along these lines." (p.152)
The concluding chapter begins
with a discussion of "Hegel's Extimacy: The Nondialectical Ground of
Dialectics" and dives into an extended discussion of the Lacanian
distinction between desire and drive. Some of the dialectical twists are
predictable by now. Where Kant gave us the duality between rationality and
animality and so an infinite and unsatisfiable striving for moral satisfaction,
requiring the postulate of immortality, Žižek insists that for Hegel this
irreconcilable divide is already "goodness itself, goodness
incarnate." (p.192) (Even Johnston admits that this is
"debatable" as Hegel interpretation.) Human animals become human not
by liberating themselves from natural confinement and developing distinctly
human capacities (which is the way Hegel actually talks most often)[6] but by "passing through a
concentration into the more, rather than less, rudimentary (that is, the
repetitive, the narrow, the habitual, the fixed, the driven, and so on.)"
(p.195) How this would help us understand how human beings justify themselves
to each other when their actions impede what others would otherwise be able to
do is not clear to me. The process of grading Žižek on his Žižekianism continues
throughout, supplemented now by long quotations from what Johnston has written
before about psychoanalysis, Jonathan Lear, the pleasure principle and the
value of returning to Freud for a kind of post-Žižekian engagement with the
origin.
A final comment. At one point,
Johnston quotes an apt remark from a letter by Althusser, that "Hegel . .
. remains, after all, the fundamental reference for everyone, since he is
himself such a 'continent' that it takes practically a whole lifetime to come
to know him well." (p.80) That is certainly true, but it is also true that
Hegel cannot be "known well" at all if one's survey of his work is
from such a high altitude that one ends up trading in catch phrases, jargon,
arbitrary interventions in and citations from isolated texts, repetitive
formulae, and so a sectarian appropriation of a great thinker for a kind of
internal party politics. To return to Johnston's image, in that case we end up
with a ventriloquist's dummy.
[3] See
is The Encyclopedia Logic. Transl. T.F. Geraets, W.A. Suchting, H.S.
Harris. (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1991), §41A; Lectures on the
History of Philosophy in Three Volumes, transl. S Haldane and F. Simson
(London: Kegan Paul, 1896), 424; The Science of Logic, by George di
Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); 21.29; 21.48; 12.194
[4] "Thus logic coincides
with metaphysics, with the science of things grasped in thoughts,
which used to be taken to express the essentialities of the things." Encyclopedia
Logic, §24.
[5] G.W.F.
Hegel, Werke, ed. E. Moldenhauer and K. Michel. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,
1970-1), vol. 9, §246
[6] Hegels
Philosophie des subjektiven Geistes/Hegel' s Philosophy of Subjective Spirit, 3
vols., ed. and trans. M. Petry (Dordrecht: Riedel, 1978), I: 6-7. See
especially
Art by means of its
representations, while remaining within the sensuous sphere, liberates man at
the same time from the power of sensuousness. Of course we may often hear favorite
phraseology about man's duty to remain in immediate unity with nature; but such
unity, in its abstraction, is purely and simply rudeness and ferocity, and by
dissolving this unity for man, art lifts him with gentle hands out of and above
imprisonment in nature. (G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art.
Translated by T. M. Knox. 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 1:49.)
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