Emancipation After Hegel

The split into Left Hegelians and Right Hegelians obscures what I argue is the central contention of Hegel’s philosophy—that being itself is contradictory and that we have the capacity to apprehend this contradiction by thinking.

How we answer this question about the principle of noncontradiction determines how we understand Hegel’s project. Žižek puts us on the right track, but even he doesn’t go far enough in the direction of contradiction. The point is not just accepting contradiction but seeing how it drives our thinking and our actions. We don’t retreat from contradiction but seek it out.

Ideology transforms contradictions into oppositions in order to give us an enemy on which to direct the aggression stemming from our own failure. Contradictions undermine positions from within and reveal how they fail to attain self-identity through their own logic. Oppositions provide the subject with the image of a stable self-identity that obscures this failure. They are much easier to manage and much less threatening to the subject considering them than contradictions are.

The basic deception of thought that Hegel uncovers with the absolute is that thought seeks to resolve the contradictions it encounters. Rather than seeking respite from contradiction, thought finds a way to preserve and heighten the contradiction. We misunderstand Hegel completely when we view him as a philosopher who accounts for the movement of thought through the elimination of contradiction. Thought moves in order to discover a new contradiction that will prove more resistant to resolution than the previous one. The absolute is the end of this search.

But for all the importance that Heraclitus has in the development of Hegel’s own philosophy, he does suffer from the limitations of being a premodern thinker. Though Hegel contends that “with Heraclitus the philosophic idea is to be met with in its speculative form,” he also sees that he must emend the form of Heraclitus’s thought—its inability to think the concept.20 Heraclitus fails to move from the recognition of contradiction to the recognition that this is the structure of the concept itself. There is no theorization of the subject’s capacity to affirm contradiction in the philosophy of Heraclitus. This theorization becomes the starting point for Hegel’s system. Hegel interprets contradiction through subjectivity rather than reading it directly in the natural world as Heraclitus does. The subject’s ability to recognize contradiction distinguishes it from objects in the world. The act of recognizing contradiction changes the subject in a way that Heraclitus does not anticipate and that Hegel develops.

Russell presupposes both identity of the entity and of the predicate, as a result of his attempt—along with all formal logic—to understand the statement outside any sociohistorical context. Predication is far from a simple matter. Its dependence on a context is an involvement in contradiction, much as Russell would like it not to be.

For Hegel, there is no such thing as a statement that successfully expresses identity. All statements are statements of predication, even those that appear in the guise of statements of identity, because every statement refers to otherness.

I am [[nothing]] but this contradiction, this act of constantly revealing that what I am not plays a central role in my identity.

The otherness intervenes in the definition of a something to create the distinction that constitutes it. But the problem is that this otherness becomes integral to the something. Something and other have a semblance of independence that masks their mutual interdependence. As a result, the otherness is no longer just otherness, and the something is no longer a distinct something opposed to the otherness.