The Purloined Letter

The True Mystery Of The World Is The Visible, Not The Invisible.

Mon, 20 Jun 2011 23:45:00 +0900

This essay in the first place treats an elementary formula of philosophy, but it raises question for causal thinking and time, and, contrary to its clear appearance, eludes our eyes. Causality and time would have ever been perennial subjects of dispute in the history of philosophy. In spite of its importance, this formula, as such, would not be difficult to understand but tends to be forgotten as those mathematical formulae that boys and girls are taught in school. It can be summed up in a very short sentence as done by Geoffrey Chaucer; an ook cometh of a litel spyr. (Troilus and Criseyde: 1335) An oak grows out of a little acorn. We will not spend as much effort to catch on to this sentence as people do in general to try something entirely new of theoretical physics. But it ought to be noted that this contains a core of philosophy, which for some philosophers, e.g. Hegel is the primary key to looking into causality and time, and accounts for an integral part of the dynamical system of Hegelian dialectic. The matter which we shall pursue is on the one hand in relation to the dynamic and variable, and on the other hand leads to a theory familiar to physicists. A crucial point of this issue will become more transparent with this longer example:

Leda and the Swan

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill.
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.

Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with her power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

This is William Butler Yeats’ well-known poem, and it is clear that its vision should consist of two defining moments of mythical history. Zeus, disguised as a swan, attempted sexual assault on Leda, whose husband was Tyndareus, the King of Sparta, while Yeats sets us what tragic consequences ensued; Clytemnestra who was conceived deep in the loins was destined to be seduced and murder her husband, Agamemnon. This compound of two images will leave to the reader place for imagination. For all figures therein are a lot less designed for representation of temporal sequence, than for a kind of two-termed schematism, these two images respectively become different elements in montage, so that it should shape without verbosity a lucid contrast between the first cause and the last effect of causal chain, although the second issue at stake in this poem is that the ominous herald of crisis is beyond her reach, and it will shed light on her powerlessness; indeed it can not be denied that the future casts shadow over the facts around us, but it will constantly elude our understanding as the truth does. It, at any rate, becomes clear that what will cause the death of Agamemnon manifests itself in the loins of Leda held in the wings of Zeus. Yeats is too smart to waste words explaining unnecessary parts of temporal sequence. And it is no longer hard to apprehend that an oak is latent in a little acorn. Acorn’s potentiality accounts for the form of oak. Not only Yeats but some ancient Greek philosophers treated a variety of possible processes as latent in all occurs around us. It can be summed up in a sentence of Francis MacDonald Cornford, a classicist; And the life history of the organism as a whole seems to be directed, from the outset, by a prevision of the form that is the actual outcome. The acorn, if nothing hinders its growth, develops without fail into an oak tree. (Before and After Socrates: IV, Cambridge) By this sentence Cornford provides explanation about the philosophy of Aristotle, who would be the first to incorporate a model of organic genesis into philosophy. Indeed the philosophy of genesis is not rare, but it ought to be noted that this has nothing to make itself demonstrated in the form of time-line, but could have itself described with principles of inner power. Such an inner power is called ‘potential energy’ by physicists, although, as a matter of fact, they owe Aristotle this concept:

Aristotle’s characteristic contribution to the problem in question is the concept of potentiality. Men of science cannot get on without the notion of ‘potential energy’. Both words are terms to which Aristotle first gave currency. The recognition of potential energy keeps intact the principle of the conservation of energy, which is itself one application of the ancient doctrine that nothing can come out of nothing. The first article in the creed of science is that there must be no absolute becoming out of nothing at all, no absolute perishing into nothing at all. When the principle is applied to energy, it means that energy which ceases to exist in a manifest form must continue to exist in a form that is not manifest, but latent; it must exist potentially.

Before and After Socrates: IV

By the concept of potential energy, Aristotle would endeavor to legitimate the immortality of soul, which is a major issue at stake in Plato’s “Phaedo.” This perpetual energy conferred from one to another can account for the eternity of life activity. If you have two balls, let the one strike the another. Then the former comes into a dead stop in a certain distance, while the latter starts to run. The sum of kinetic energy before collision is equal to that after. The kinetic energy conferred from one to another is conserved. Hence it may be in a sense reasonable to say that our acts exert a little bit of influence on and engage in the dynamic system of universe. And the concept of potential energy illustrates the eternal cycle of life at times in poetry; And nothing ‘gainst Time’s scythe can make defence Save breed to brave him when he takes thee hence. (The Sonnets: 12) It is more or less clear here that Shakespeare allowed for the vital energy of human that continues the circle of life, holding against time. It ought to be noted that the eternity of life activity can be understood from the point of view of genesis as organic reproduction, whose mystery could be unlocked by looking into the present state of life, not by going back and forth further and further in time; the original cause of life must be very near-to-hand. The bearer of all things is permanently present in the facts around us, and called ‘force’ by Hegel; The kinetic process of force is not so much transitory as a process in which force, as such, maintains itself in the state of change, as what it is. (Wissenschaft der Logik II p.173, stw) It is clear that Hegel allowed for the law of conservation of energy, although that law had never been discovered in science. Indeed force, as such, is by no means phenomenal, but it gives its outward manifestations, by animating all phenomena of, e.g. nature. Force needs to be embodied in material substances. Hence it is finite from the point of view of Hegel; The finitude of mediate relations of force and its outward manifestation become visible in so far as each force is confined to and for its existence in need of something other than itself. Thus, e.g. the magnetic force is known to be a bearer particularly of iron, whose other properties (color, specific weight, relation to acid, etc.) are independent of those matters in relation to magnetism. (Enzyklopädie I: 136 additional description, stw) Force is an immutable law not only of the growing universe in which repulsive force is speculated to cause space to expand but of the dynamic system of Hegelian dialectic. And such a concept of energy is required for the portrayal of kinetic process. Hegel does not differ from Aristotle simply in holding that kinetic process has within itself an intrinsic principle of movement and change:

The discussion should have established that primary nature, in the fundamental account, is the substance of those things with a principle of process within themselves. Matter is then said to be nature by dint of its being receptive of the above, and it is because they are processes from it that productions and growth are said to be natural. And it is such nature that is the principle of process for things having natural being, in some way dwelling in such things either potentially or actually.

Metaphysics: 1015a, Penguin Classics

By the concept of potential energy that results in the actuality of the world, we can consider the reason why general principles of causality are by no means indispensable to the understanding of growth of every individual in time.

The model of genesis by no means requires any form of temporal sequence to explain how natural phenomena emerge in time, it is concerned with the distinction between the actual and the potential, that the system of Hegelian dialectic likewise allows for. And thereby this system must not be a process in time. It is not conceivable in Hegelian dialectic that what was nonexistent can present itself to us. For example, the different stages of Hegelian dialectic that categories respectively refer to are by no means organized to be temporally successive as said John McTaggart Ellis; The passage from category to category must not be taken as an actual advance, producing that which did not previously exist, but as an advance from an abstraction to the concrete whole from which the abstraction was made—demonstrating and rendering explicit what was before only implicit and immediately given, but still only reconstructing, and not constructing anything fresh. (Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic: 10) What was previously nonexistent by no means comes into existence. Long before Hegel it would be pointed to as a sentence of Heraclitus; panta rhei. A major part of Hegelian dialectic is designed not to let itself described in the form of temporal sequence. Since the potential is more or less elusive to us but gives rise to changes in our experience, our vision of the world can be clarified when we become sufficiently conscious of or pay much attention to it. Biologists, although a basic theory of biology was first formulated by Aristotle, would know that the variation of a developing organism must be implicit in it, allowing for its potentiality. It is a model of organic genesis that Hegelian dialectic allows for—Hegelian dialectic was compared to the music of Beethoven by Theodor Adorno, and it is music that creates a dynamic genesis of sound. It needs to be borne in mind, however, that the theoretical framework of potentiality can not straightforwardly put into itself the absolute lack of potentiality and vitality, namely the death. This framework scarcely suffices to arrive at what entirely accounts for the death of Agamemnon and the reason why Yeats treats the death as very near to and more or less coexistent with the birth. What exists between birth and death in this poem, at any rate, can be understood under the aspect not of time but of conduct, which is at times focused on in Aristotle’s Poetics. From his point of view of drama, act has a privilege place for itself and would have to do with a kind of active agent of change, ‘mover.’ Act is stirred up by and a visible manifestation of potential energy. And every act is not only a live production of some past acts’ potentiality but also a foundation stone of future acts. And it was taken into account by Aristotle; Again, Tragedy is the imitation of an action; and an action implies personal agents, who necessarily possess certain distinctive qualities both of character and thought; for it is by these that we qualify actions themselves, and these thought and character are the two natural causes from which actions spring, and on actions again all success or failure depends. (Poetics: 1449b-1450a) In tragedy acts contain the seeds of future developments of play and confer their energy on other. It is the full economic cycle of potentiality that Poetics allows for. Tragedy is an intricate blend of manifold forces controlling acts—when the infinite and eternal energy becomes manifest to us, it must be embodied in something finite, and at this point there appears to be a significant difference between the infinite and the finite. Hence the ambiguity of this poem is ascribed not only to the figure of Leda but to that of Swan as the title tells. Their acts do not predict, but must be a first mover toward a tragic future. The drama’s actual performance by no means allows for time, it is immediately engaged in current event, neither in future nor in past. Determined acts on the one hand account for the continuity of existence, but these effects on the other hand appear as a breakup of the chain of causality and the notion of temporal sequence that ensure the continuity of being, convention, tradition, and so on, in a word, it leads us to a question, to be or not to be. The act of determining our existence as a result can threaten our time consciousness, whose breakdown leads to the nihilation of self, and will appeal to the distinction between the potential continuity and the actual discreteness of humanity, or that between the infinitude of God and the finitude of Man. The finitude of human shines forth through the death, so that it should take an uncompromising stand against a kind of immortality, the infinite succession of human qualities. And the death appears to be a sudden interruption of the succession of human consciousness in Hegelian dialectic. It is characteristic of, e.g. epic from the point of view of Hegel:

Therefore, in this epic arises above all the consciousness, that is, one who in worship brings himself into existence, the connection from the divine to the human. Its meaning is an act of self-conscious being. This activity disturbs the peace of substance and arouses the being, so that his simplicity should be devided and exposed to the diverse world of natural and moral forces. The act is the violation of the peaceful earth, the abyss, that by the blood animates and evokes the dead ghosts who feel a thirst for life and receive it in the act of self-consciousness.

Phänomenologie des Geistes p. 476, Meiner

In this case the word worship refers to a kind of self-sacrifice. Self-sacrifice has the urge to come into an inorganic state in the death—it is, of course, a ritual performance and therefore required for community. The negation of self is a fundamental ingredient that gives rise to and resumes the process of self-consciousness. It is a law in Hegelian dialectic that the death nearly comes to us but then the passage to life opens. To die is to live; this Buddhism axiom was reiterated by Hajime Tanabe, a Kyoto-school philosopher, and central to his own dialectic. And self-sacrifice, which is a ritual act to lead itself to the death, would be seen by Georges Bataille as a prime example of the negativity of action, a fact about the philosophy of Hegel; But if man is death living a human life, man’s negativity, given in death by virtue of the fact that man’s death is voluntary (resulting from risks assumed without necessity, without biological reasons), nevertheless the principle of action. (Hegel, Death and Sacrifice, “Yale French Studies Number 78: On Bataille” p.10, Yale University Press) The act of self-negation to be liberated from the infinite causal chain of events implicitly allows for and appeals to the death, which must be the permanent end of the life of a biological organism, and one that can not be incorporated into the abstract model of genesis—although Hegel’s the dead who digs himself out of the abyss can be more threatening to the self-consciousness than death. Organic vitalism, at any rate, does not suffice to account for the whole system of Hegelian dialectic. The death will shine forth through in a determined act to gain access to the life in Hegelian dialectic as it does in Leda and the Swan. It is in fact adequately taken by Hegel into account as a particular kind of source of potential energy as organic vitality is; The living dies, and that is simply because it, as such, bears in itself the seed of death. (Enzyklopädie I: 92 additional description) And Hegelian dialectic describes causality as a recursive process that does not comply with the ordinary form of temporal sequence. In Hegelian dialectic every cause must turn back in its effect:

The cause has as an original matter the distinctive nature of absolute independence and remains against the effect, but then it disappears, in the necessity of the identity of its origin, passes into the effect. There is no thing significant and at the same time worth speaking of its distinctive content in the effect that is not in relation to the cause;—its identity is the absolute content itself; inasmuch as it is moreover the determining factor in form, the originality of cause is abolished and subsumed (aufgehoben) in the effect, in which it turns itself into an assumed one. The cause , however, does not disappear with it, and thereby the real is not only the effect. For this assumed one, as such, is in a similar way immediately abolished and subsumed, it is rather the reflection of cause in itself, its origin; in the effect the cause is for the first time real and causative. Therefore the cause, as such, is causa sui.— Jacobi, persisting in the one-sided idea of mediation, resolves merely into a formalism the causa sui (the effectus sui is the same), this absolute truth of cause. (Briefe über Spinoza, 2. Ausg., S. 416) He moreover has claimed that the God must be defined not as reasonable ground, essentially as cause; so that it does not make intelligible what he intends, he should have concluded from a thorough contemplation about the nature of cause. Similarly, from the point of view of content, this identity is present in the finite cause and its idea; rain, a cause, and wetness, an effect, are a same existent water. From the point of view of form, the cause (rain) fades away in the effect (wetness); however it follows that also the effect does—there is nothing to do without cause—, and it remains only an irrelevant wetness.

Enzyklopädie I: 153

Provided that every cause exists in its effect, it is impossible to distinguish the former from the latter, to translate causal relation into terms of temporal sequence. Rain and wetness assume in common water as their identity, that is to say, as their pool of potentiality, in other words, they are respectively a state of actuality of water. This process of causality no longer can hold the distinction between rain and wetness from the point of view of content, not of form. The identity of origin synthesizes cause and effect and is wholly self-contained. It permits Hegelian dialectic to describe causality as a process of demonstrating itself. The causal process in dialectic is recursive. For it has within itself what accounts for itself—it would be reasonable that Mamoru Takayama describes the form of causality in dialectic as functional, not as temporally successive, and the function that is self-referential, calls itself, is termed “recursive function” in computer science. Hence it is possible to treat causal process without the general notion of time. In the system of Hegelian dialectic the chain between cause and effect does not stretch along the line of time. When every cause is abolished and subsumed in its effect, the former is in a sense coexistent with the latter. Here we can come to the conclusion that the birth and the death, the beginning and the end of humanity, are treated as equally primal and coexist at the same moment, so that they should meet at the same point, that is, the present moment, and form a circular model, which is different in quality from the circle of life and which we by no means require the notion of time in order to envisage.

It is impossible to furnish a convincing view of Hegelian dialectic as long as we let thought mask the unreality of time as revealed by McTaggart; If we ask whether time, as a fact, is finite or infinite, we find hopeless difficulties in the way of either answer. Yet, if we take time as an ultimate reality, there seems no other alternative. Our only resource is to conclude that time is not an ultimate reality. (Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic: 10) Philosophy must be fundamentally concerned with what is present before us from the point of view of Hegel as well as of Aristotle. In other words, philosophy has to forbid us to treat any thing in accordance with the principles of temporal sequence, that are required to track the patterns of causality. Hence McTaggart would feel obliged to think of the unreality of time in order to provide an accurate and reasonable account of the system of Hegelian dialectic. In the process of dialectic every one must be alienated from time, with being midst the living and the dead almost like Schrödinger’s cat, a metaphor of quantum mechanics, whose focus is on the intricate relation between the particle theory and the wave theory of light, a difference between the discrete and the continuous—and causality was a major issue at stake in the case of, e.g. Niels Bohr. Although similar in some ways not only to the cat but also to the observer in quantum mechanics is Hegel’s the Spirit. In dialectic thought, a powerful instrument of the Spirit, is to interact with the dynamic reality of the world and leads to an emphatic denial of the absolute objectivity of event. By dint of reasoning, the Spirit can stir up himself deep into the fluid structure of force underlying act and existence.

The complex constellation of diverse forces, at any rate, accounts for the reality of the world, a dynamic system of interdependent conditions and influences. Those forces, it was clear not only to Hegel but also to Goethe, can be found in sensual experiences by reasoning about the visible surfaces of things.

But it ought to be noted that Goethe did not differ at all from Newton, whose optics was a main focus of Goethe’s criticism, in considering intrinsic forces for the imaginative explanations of natural phenomena. I have no time here to waste in unnecessary discussions on the relations between science and philosophy. The clearer philosophers want to make the distinction between science and philosophy, the more strongly their ignorance of science manifests itself. I prefer to listen to these wise words from Stephen Jay Gould, rather than to such philosophers; Science is not a heartless pursuit of objective information. It is a creative human activity, its geniuses acting more as artists than as information processors. Changes in theory are not simply the derivative results of new discoveries but the work of creative imagination influenced by contemporary social and political forces. (Ever Since Darwin: 25, Norton) But I feel some need to provide in order to defend Newton’s honor a brief description of the fact that he allowed for intrinsic forces giving rise to movement; It seems to me farther, that these Particles have not only a Vis inertie, accompanied with such passive Laws of Motion as naturally result from that Force, but also they are moved by certain active Principles, such as is that of Gravity, and that which causes Fermentation, and Cohesion of Bodies. (Opticks: ly. 31) Here it becomes clear that Newton should assume what can arise from and at the same time animate particles. Newton’s comprehensive view of nature rules out any inert object which does not accommodate the law of the universe, what Newton called ‘active principle,’ which can be regarded as compatible with the concept of potential energy, although Newton himself disliked the philosophy of Aristotle—Yoshitaka Yamamoto, a Japanese science historian, says, From the point of view of Newton, theses ‘active principles’ are the true cause of gravity which moves and maintains in orbit planets and comets as well as the cause which produces continuous creatures’ heart activities and circulations of blood and controls their heat retentions, that which brings heat to the interior of the earth and makes volcanoes active, that which accounts for the glare of the sun sending out warm rays to its satellites. (The Historical Development of Concepts of Thermodynamics: 1-6, Chikuma) From this point of view, there must not be any completely inert object everywhere. For all materials can activate and maintain themselves in a dynamic equilibrium by virtue of their own forces. In the light of active principle Newton never fell into the trap of regarding the universe merely as an inertial frame, so that his cosmology could have surpassed Cartesian mechanism, that even Leibniz was deeply imbued with. In case, according to mechanism, scientists suppose all the objects of the universe to be wholly passive, they will feel obliged to espouse the first impulse of God as the origin of the universe. But we have no need to trace back in time to the beginning of the universe. For the origin implicitly exists in current changes in the universe—nowadays scientists endeavor to pursue a clear vision of the infant universe, relying on proton collision experiments. Although it by no means makes an absolute denial of Christian theology, there was not God’s creation at the beginning of time from the point of view of Meister Eckhart; For the Now, in which God for the first time made man, and the Now, in which the last man will pass away, and the Now, in which I speak, are the same in God, and there is in him no more than one Now. (Deutsche Predigten, Reclam, p.15) The continuous creation of the universe does not need to have itself described with the general principles of causality, in the ordinary form of temporal sequence. In this respect, the theology of Eckhart accords with the physics of Newton. Newton’s vast influence was spilled into some generations of German philosophers, including Kant and Hegel. And Eckhart’s theology was treated with great regard by Hegel. Hence Hegel would seek to distance himself from what was commonly thought of as time as Yeats in the poem Leda and the Swan. Time is a game played beautifully by children. I espouse all Heraclitus’ views as did Hegel. When the renunciation of the notion of time turns time into a game superbly played by diverse forces involving our act and existence, it is a kind of probability theory that we may need therein.

Although the giddy madness of love tends to disregard probability, all happens to his love will appear, to his mind, fateful and laden with doom, as said Stendhal; From the moments he falls in love even the wisest man no longer sees anything as it really is. He underrates his own qualities, and overrates the least favour bestowed by his beloved. Hopes and fears at once become romantic and WAYWARD. He no longer admits an element of chance in things and loses his sense of the probable; judging by its effect on his happiness, whatever he imagines becomes reality. (Love: 12, Penguin Classics) All those who fall in love often turn out to be incapable of separating fact from fiction, although they view themselves as sane—by the way, in order to mingle fact with fiction, a number of methods have been devised in literature. Within such a genuine madness Hegel would at times have been imprisoned, although in relation to philosophy, not to love. It needs to be borne in mind, however, that philosophy does not differ at all from love in being driven by aspiration.

In philosophy aspiration was to be transcended into knowledge. In the ancient times philosophy was a scientific activity to love and seek wisdom with limitless skepticism. This creed, I believe, is not being changed. Philosophy without love is a sad, diminished thing. It is aspiration that stirs up mankind to look for things, that, however, support their preconceived notions as pointed out by Kant. Hegel risked violating one of Kantian sacred taboos, paying much regard to the ancient philosophy—although it seems to me that he did not so markedly deviate from Kant as he said:

The older metaphysics had a higher idea of thought than that which in the newer age becomes a common practice. That very underlying foundation is that only what is detected through thinking of and about things is the true truth about them, hence they are to be heightened to the point of being in rumination (Gedachte) not in their immediacy but in the form of thought. This metaphysics hence held, seeing that thought and the regulative principle of thought are not to do with a part of extraneous object but rather its nature or that things (die Dinge) and thought (das Denken) both (however our language can express a similarity between both) are to accord with one another, that thought within its intrinsic limitation and the true nature of things are to be all the same content.

Wissenschaft der Logik I p.38, stw

Things, as such, appear only through our contact with them, not as external objects independent of our mind. Thought, a spiritual work, is the best way to interact with things from the point of view of Hegel. Hence the Spirit is performative in the strict sense of the word. This peculiarity of Hegel’s philosophy will become more intelligible, if we allow for the productive power of social labor as Marxians do. »Was vernünftig ist, das ist wirklich; und was wirklich ist, das ist vernünftig.« (What is reasonable is real, and what is real is reasonable.) This passage points to the inseparable connection between the Spirit and the reality, which is in fact embodied in a Marxian doctrine. The reality of the world is supposed to manifest itself very through spiritual work in Hegelian dialectic. The constant tension and interdependency between the Spirit and the nature appear to be a system of social labor. Labor must be an integral part of the formation of the Spirit from the point of view of Hegel, and in economics it is considered not only a profitable kind of energy but also the most significant economic activity—although it has the potential liable to be exploited. Furthermore labor is in Marxism supposed to make natural sources of potential energy available, so that it should manifest those great forces of nature. And it can not be denied that labor has to be connected with nature in order to enjoy the fruit of labor. For we can arrive from many angles at the fact that it utilizes natural forces and resources. Labor must be confined to nature, and vice versa. Indeed labor can be considered an independent force, but it is too deeply entangled with natural forces to be isolated from nature from the point of view of, e.g. Marx’s Kritik des Gothaer Programms. His conceptual achievement in dealing with labor and nature was due to, needless to say, Hegelian dialectic. Although it can not be denied that Hegel’s approach to labor, as such, tended to treat it as a divine, intellectual, and spiritual activity, rather than as a physical one, as pointed out by Adorno:

In the division into physical and spiritual work the privilege of the spiritual one is, despite all counter protests, reserved more easily, but at the same time the physical one turns back in spiritual process, the physical activity as an afterimage mediated through imagination, reminded of it as usual; the Spirit can never completely wrench itself from its relation to the dominant nature. In order to control nature, the Spirit obeys her; even its prideful sovereignty is paid for with suffering. The metaphysics of the Spirit is, however, that which, as its own unconscious labor for absolute power, is the affirmation of absorption, the attempt of the Spirit reflecting on itself, in which the Spirit passes on the curse that the Spirit bows to, in which the Spirit reinterprets as a benefit and justifies this curse. This, to begin with, may cause the Hegelian philosophy to be accused of the ideological nature; an immeasurable number of overestimation of bourgeois praises for labor.

Drei Studien zu Hegel, “Theodor Adorno Gesammelte Schriften 5” p. 271-272, Suhrkamp

Indeed Hegelian dialectic leans heavily toward affirming the legitimacy of something spiritual, so that it will appear to be a forcible assimilation into the Spirit; but such a shallow view can be avoided with a critical analysis of Hegelian dialectic that Adorno provides. In the process of dialectic the Spirit needs to be reminded of physical activity, the spiritual must constantly find itself dependent on the physical despite Hegel’s treatment of the Spirit as absolute. In this respect Hegel’s view of labor and nature will appear near to Marx’s. The Spirit does not ultimately succeed in breaking the dominance of nature. And there would be Hegel’s belief in the goodness of human activity which is shown by the constant creation of the world. The world, as such, exists as a crystallization of social labor rising particularly in civil society from the point of view of Hegel. With a deep affinity for it Hegel would be blinded to pitiless aspects of capitalism. It is the grand aspiration for the ideal state of civil society that the philosophy of Hegel is in fact designed to fulfill. This aspiration would lead in a positive and negative way to Hegel’s some adherence to the democratic enlightenment ideology. And it is clear that Marx inherited from Hegel in a straight line the concept of force in order to look into labor and nature—and at the same time it was withdrawn into Marxism from the current of Aristotelianism. According to a clear rudiment of Marxism, through labor as a concrete act we are actually engaged in the practice of transforming the world. Marx scarcely differs from Hegel in detaching their thought from the reliance on any notion of pure nature by the concept of labor. It would have been impossible after the impact of Marxism to see nature as entirely exterior to the system of social labor. And the truth that labor and nature are impossible to separate lies beyond question in the outward appearance of notorious dialectical integration, that spiritual work attempts to arrive at, as well as in Marxism:

Nevertheless this deceptive identification of labor with the absolute has behind itself its convincing reason. As far as the world forms a system, it will take place very through the complete universality of social labor. This is in fact the drastic intervention, inasmuch as being already between man and nature, so then in the Spirit to be for itself, that does not admit the exterior and permit the remembrance of that which would be exterior. There is nothing in the world which does not appear solely through it. Nor does the pure nature, as such, provided that labor has no power over it, become definite very through its excessively negative relation to labor.

Drei Studien zu Hegel p. 272

It is very unlikely from an orthodox Marxian point of view that we can have to do with any part of nature that has never been interfered with human artifice. What is similar to this axiom, apart from philosophy, accounts for a distrustful stance toward naturalism in A Wife in Musashino, an adultery novel written by Shohei Ooka, although his incredulity is ascribed not to Marxism but to Stendhal who regarded love as something more than natural emotion, that is to say, a product of civilized mind, that in De l’amour the word crystallization refers to. Ooka’s point is not that literature should not have any basis in the sensory experiences of physical reality but that something artificial interferes with understanding it in an immediate way. Artificiality, that is simply a consequence of labor in capitalism, must be considered a veritable hindrance to the myth of natural cycle. Hegelian dialectic as well as Marxism is designed in a sense for a firm rejection of naturalism—Marx’s severe critique of naturalism lies in the fact that his economics dismissed François Quesney who treated economy as governed by the same principles as the circulation of blood. Indeed Hegel would often have become negligent of treating labor as an inorganic body in a clearly materialistic manner for the need of looking into economic climates, but his concept of labor would reach nearly to the level of Marx’s, except that Hegel never made a militant stand against capitalism. The materialism of Hegel, as such, will not be intelligible at first sight. One truth about the modern world echoes in Hegelian dialectic. It paradoxically manifests itself in Hegel’s attempt of absorption, revealing the people in this world as ravished by phenomenological experiences. For it is driven by an excessive ambition for the infinity of the Spirit. Hegelian dialectic, despite consisting in the intensifying feud between the spiritual and the physical and that between the artificial and the natural, seeks to solve it, calling for the total integration into the Absolute Spirit, that, however, it has been often accused of moving toward by a number of postmodernists, such as Gilles Deleuze. But, by leading to this integration, Hegelian dialectic as a result reveals as vague the distinction between labor and nature, so that the modern world should appear as a whole to awake mind to be a vast surface. This is an issue where I can agree with Leo Strauss; The problem inherent in the surface of things, and only in the surface of things, is the heart of things. (Thoughts on Machiavelli p.13, University Of Chicago Press) Here we, at any rate, will come to the conclusion that Hegelian dialectic paradoxically turns out to reveal our sensitivity to nature as backed up by civilized intelligence. It follows that Hegelian dialectic rules out the wrong assumption that we can face the crude reality. It is nearly impossible not only in ingenious works of literature but in the modern world to disentangle fact from fiction.

Indeed it is not wrong to see modern society organized on the complicated network of labor as the gentle mask to cover something savage, in postmodernists’ terms, something schizophrenic; but such an one-sided view of modernity is likely to disregard the indivisibility in the capitalistic world between the artificial and the natural. I know, needless to be said, that Anti-Oedipus was intentionally written as a figment of imagination concerning capitalism, although it seems, to me, that most postmodernism obsessives would read the book in a very austere manner as if they want to receive from it canonical admonitions. Nonetheless it seems a high time to ask whether Deleuze and Guattari afford to be accused of missing a distinctive nature of modernity latent in Hegelian dialectic. In the careful examination of the capitalistic world there is no choice but to interpret the facts around us through an apocryphal concoction, and then this world will appear, to our eyes, to be a fictitious place, however, not in any way that Nietzsche foresaw; he had little concern about political economy which had to deal with modern questions of society. Britain and British political economy which Adam Smith represented in Hegel’s time are a key to understanding Hegel’s philosophy from the point of view of Jean Hyppolite, with whom Deleuze studied philosophy for some years. Smith surely knew well that common welfare would be an artificial idea and arise out of capitalistic competition, in which an incredible number of people perpetuate the desire for comfort, pleasure, social status and wealth:

Our imagination, which in pain and sorrow seems to be confined and cooped up within our own persons, in times of ease and prosperity expands itself to every thing around us. We are then charmed with the beauty of the accommodation which reigns in the places and economy of the great; and admire how every thing is adopted to promote their ease, to prevent their wants, to gratify their wishes, and to amuse and entertain their most frivolous desires. If we consider the real satisfaction which all these things are capable of affording, by itself and separated from the beauty of the arrangement which is fitted to promote it, it will always appear in the highest degree contemptible and trifling. But we rarely view it in this abstract and philosophical light. We naturally confound it in our imagination with the order, the regular and harmonious movement of the system, the machine or economy by means of which it is produced. The pleasures of wealth and greatness, when considered in this complex view, strike imagination as something grand, and beautiful, and noble, of which the attainment is well worth all the toil and anxiety which we are so apt to bestow upon it.

And it is well that nature imposes upon us in this manner. It is this deception which rouses and keeps in continual motion the industry of mankind. It is this which first prompted them to cultivate the ground, build houses, to found cities and commonwealths, and to invent and improve all the sciences and arts, which ennoble and embellish human life; which have entirely changed the whole face of the globe, have turned the rude forests of nature into agreeable and fertile plains, and made the trackless and barren ocean a new fund subsistence, and the great high road of communication to the different nations of the earth. The earth, by these labours of mankind, has been obliged to redouble her natural fertility, and to maintain a greater multitude of inhabitants.

The Theory of Moral Sentiments: 4-1, Prometheus Books

It is nonsense to assert that the whole of civil society is a fanciful gigantic structure in order to denounce the ideologues of modernism, such as Smith. For Smith already considered it as governed by deception, as a product of imagination, despite and because of the tradition of Scottish empiricism. The right use of empiricism in political economy means not to provoke incredulity toward imaginary phenomena, but to apprehend that the world appears only to be an amalgam of real and imaginary settings. It will be much better to trace what the driving force behind such a grand work of imagination is, rather than to claim to deny it as a deceptive farce. As long as every force manifests itself in perceptible forms, we can take cognizance of it. Marx in fact looked into a driving force behind capitalism and revealed it as a rampant reductionism of labor time, that permits all the things in capitalism to be ranked by and exchangeable with money, so that he could have focused on something other than the dualism between man and nature. The imaginary grandeur of capitalism will be carried on as long as billions of people are motivated by the desire to acquire property and wealth. Communism eventually kept its great population involved in pain and sorrow, that is to say, in relentless impoverishment, so that they should have been freed from desire. That regime did a right thing in a wrong way in order to offer protection against the evil principle of the modern world, which still seems to me in some degree effectual and necessary. It will be better to employ a new political method to allow us to enjoy life without purchase. Although, unfortunately, it is unlikely that such a method will be successfully developed within the next several centuries. Nonetheless I am very communist, although somewhat inclined to sneer at my doctrine—doubt fosters a better belief. It is necessary for me to be torn between faith and doubt, hope and despair, as a master and a squire in Miguel de Cervantes’ major work; or I’m a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will. Aside from the glorious dream of communism, Smith figured out the reality of the world as inseparably combined with fictional elements in an impassive manner, about a century before Nietzsche spoke of it in an excited tone—the polite dispassion of economist and the plebeian pathos of philologist. Similarly Hegel said, however, not in the context of political economy, that the Way to the truth must lie in deceiving appearances, not underneath them: For on the one hand the Way appeals again and again as if to a being, but on the other hand to itself as to the way in which it is in untrue cognition, that is to say, to a furtive way of its being, and to its appearance, rather than to the way it is in and for itself. (Phänomenologie des Geistes, p. 55-56) The world, as such, presents itself to us by false and fraudulent means from the point of view of Hegel. But it can not be denied that Hegel had something of the same temperament to delight in a beautiful epitome of civil union as Doctor Faust.

It seems that Deleuze, a hard-lining ideologue of schizophrenia, misinterpreted a sign of madness that Hegel’s over-rationality, which would be compatible with the infinity of reason, referred to. Love-sick lunatic’s mind often appears, to himself, eminently sane and sober. He can be thoroughly conscious of the fact that too much love drives a man insane—although Hegel’s madness would be prompted by a great enthusiasm for civil society, not by the beloved. But he often lets himself be an incompetent buffoon; As you enter her drawing room, you can but clutch at a vow of silence to prevent yourself saying or doing the most unbelievably idiotic things. You can also look at her, in order at least to have some recollection of her face. No sooner are you in her presence than your eyes are affected as by a kind of drunkenness. You are seized with a mad impulse to do odd things. It is as if you had two beings, one to act and the other to reproach you for acting. (Love: 24) In other words, his mind becomes very self-referential, shaken by love. It leads to a clear dissociation of sensibility. This dissociation is the very essence of what in the case of Stendhal the word prosaïque refers to—it accounts for a characteristic feature of the literary critique of Shigehiko Hasumi who extols Ooka, although this feature, despite his outstanding presence in Japanese film and literary criticism, might not be made out by many Japanese critics. Stendhal saw Don Quixote as a prime example of the prosaïque:

Prosaic is a new word which I used to think ridiculous, since there is nothing colder than our poetry; if there has been any warmth in France during the last fifty years it is certainly in our prose.

But the contessina Léonore used the word prosaic, and I love to write it.

The definition of it is in Don Quixote and in the ‘Perfect contrast between master and squire.’ The master, tall and pale; the squire, fat and ruddy. The former all heroism and courtliness; the latter all selfishness and servility; the first brimming with moving and romantic dreams; the second a model of good behaviour, a very symposium of prudent proverbs; the one for ever fortifying his spirit with some heroic and perilous contemplation; the other mulling over some careful course of action in which he does not fail to allow meticulously for the influence of every little shameful and selfish motive known to the human heart.

When the former ought to be disabused by the non-success of his dreams of yesterday, he is already fully occupied with today’s castles in Spain.

Love: Various Fragments 10

The esprit of the prosaic consists in being torn between a romantic courage and a worldly realism. It is a clear form of self-critique that Cervantes embedded in the text. And there are Don Quixote and Sancho Panza not only in his brain but in Hegelian dialectic. An eager and guileless child and a dry and dispassionate businessman coexist in the humanity of Hegel from the point of view of Adorno. While the former as a fearless advocate for bourgeois virtues declares the absolute power of the Spirit, fueling its process of integration, the latter concentrates on the objective analysis of it, so that he should involuntarily show some signs of its inconsistent nature—incoherence can exist potentially in coherence, and vice versa. Hegelian dialectic would have a manifest masochistic tendency. Its integration and disintegration at once take place, its consistency and inconsistency are at the same time achieved, and thereby they are by no means subsequent to one another—for example, a continuous whole and discrete parts coexist in dialectical process as in kinetic process from the point of view of mathematical analysis, they are respectively a mere facet of dialectical one, they consist in an identity which treads a fine line between actuality and potentiality. For the process of dialectic does not develop in time. Analytical division of object, that is characteristic of, e.g. atomism and empiricism, was not entirely disregarded by Hegel, it is in fact part of the process of dialectic, although this process must not terminate at soul-hardened analysis:

There lies in empiricism the great principle that what is true is in the reality and must be a being acceptable for perception. This principle is the extreme opposite to what inflates reflection and treats the reality and present as despicable with the view of Hereafter, which should have its seat and being only in subjective understanding. Philosophy as well as empiricism is to perceive (§7) only what it is; it does not know such things as only should be and hence there is not.—on the subjective side, what is to be adopted is the important principle of freedom, which lies in empiricism, that the human being should see, know within the present reality what he accepts into his knowledge.—the consistent implementation of empiricism, insofar as it confines content to finitude, however, denies the supersensory or at least both insight and certainty and lets thought serve only for abstraction and formal generality and identity.—the fundamental deception in scientific empiricism is always this: empiricism uses the metaphysical categories of material, force, at any rate, of one, many, generality, infinity, and so on, furthermore, such categories advances further, as a result the forms of concluding are assumed and applied, for all that it does not know that it retains and drives itself to something metaphysical, and those categories and their connection are used in a wholly uncritical and unconscious way.

Enzyklopädie I: 33

Hegelian dialectic can not do without empirical analysis, while developing its process of idealistic integration which represents the infinity of reason—empiricism which dismisses metaphysics as an escape from physical feelings, Hegel knew, unconsciously assures and relies on the certainty of finite physicality. It does not forget being confined to current experiences, while it reveals those experiences as perceivable only through ideas, that is to say, mental phenomena that constitute an imaginary surface. Hegel gave a dynamic form to the Kantian concept of antinomy, probably making it more Aristotelian:

First by Kant the distinction between understanding and reason is made definitely clear and in the same way discerned, the first subject is the finite and conditional, whereas the second one is the infinite and unconditional. Of course it is now and already assured as a very important result that, the same as the finitude of the insight of understanding based only on experience is brought into sight, the content is called appearance (Erscheinung), but there is no need to stand unchanged at the negative consequence and diminish the unconditionality of reason only to the abstract, the identity without difference. By regarding in such a manner reason only as the stride over the finitude and conditionality of understanding, reason is hereby in fact reduced to something finite and conditional, for the true infinity is not a mere alternative to finitude, but it includes finitude as abolished and subsumed in itself.

Enzyklopädie I: 45

Hegelian dialectic on the one hand has to hold an empirical view, but is on the other hand motivated to lead to synthesis. Hegel combined Kantian antinomy with Aristotelian dialectic. The process of dialectic is, at any rate, as antinomy torn between reason and understanding, the infinite and the finite. But its dissociation is accused by Deleuze of being as a whole directed at identification:

Hegelian contradiction does not deny identity or non-contradiction within the existent in such a way that identity, under that condition or on that basis, is sufficient to think the existent as such. Those formulae according to which ‘the object denies what it is not’, or ‘distinguishes itself from everything that it is not’, are logical monsters (the Whole of everything which is not the object) in the service of identity. It is said that difference is negativity, that it extends or must extend to the point of contradiction once it is taken to the limit. This is true only to the extent that difference is already placed on a path or along a thread laid out by identity. It is true only to the extent that it is identity that pushes it to the point. Difference is the ground, but only the ground for the demonstration of the identical. Hegel’s circle is not the eternal return, only the infinite circulation of the identical by means of negativity. Hegel’s innovation is the final and most powerful homage rendered to the old principle. Between Leibniz and Hegel it matters little whether the supposed negative of difference is understood as a vice-dicting limitation or a contradicting limitation, any more than it matters whether infinite identity be considered analytic or synthetic. In either case, difference remains subordinated to identity, reduced to the negative, incarcerated within similitude and analogy. That is why, in infinite representation, the delirium is only a pre-formed false delirium which poses no threat to the repose or serenity of the identical. Infinite representation, therefore, suffers from the same defect as finite representation: that of confusing the concept of difference in itself with the inscription of difference in the identity of the concept in general (even though it treats identity as a pure infinite principle instead of treating it as a genus, and extends the rights of the concept in general to the whole instead of fixing their limits).

Difference and Repetition p. 49-50, Columbia University Press

Deleuze’s description of Hegel is more or less acceptable to me. In Hegelian dialectic the distinction between, for example, rain and wetness serves as stated above the purpose of assuming water as those identity, difference is supposed to reach the point at which it reveals itself in the harmony of identity. It can not be denied that Hegel in fact treated difference as a key ingredient of identity, whereas Deleuze as primal and primitive in his philosophy, denouncing identity. All those which serve identity are false from the point of view of Deleuze—he might treat Hegel’s madness as a kind of neurosis. Hence he claims that Hegel confuses difference itself and ‘the inscription of difference’ in identity, in other words, what I presume was previously difference. It has been often said that Deleuze overthrew the monarchy of identity established by Hegel as the basis of modern philosophy. But here we should listen to these wise words from J. L. Austin; To feel the firm ground of prejudice slipping away is exhilarating, but brings its revenges. (How To Do Things With Words: 5, Harvard University Press) Water is a ‘content,’ that Hegel says should be called ‘appearance.’ It is already very clear that Hegelian dialectic treats identity as a fictional entity. Identity is, Hegel knew without being said by Deleuze, in its original manifestation only a ‘false’ appearance that at times attracts the mind. From his point of view there is nothing that prevents those perceived by senses from being translated into the terms of idea, such as identity. Hegelian dialectic does not straightforwardly admit the immediate, it does not assume that human beings in the modern world can move into a direct confrontation with the primitive, that is to say, the crude reality of nature. For the Spirit regards as its necessary condition labor by which our livelihood is to be distinguished from the pure state of nature:

There is the view which assumes in consideration of contentment that the man in a so-called state of nature, in which he had only a so-called natural compulsion and used as the only means for his contentment what the contingency of nature immediately granted him, lived in freedom, but it still has no consideration for the momenta for release that lie in labor, which is discussed later—this is a wrong opinion, because natural compulsion, as such, and its immediate satisfaction depend on the condition that the Spirit settles down into being in nature and with crudity and constraint, and freedom lies merely in the Spirit’s reflection in itself, its distinction between the natural and its reflexes in nature.

Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts: 194, Reclam

It is clear that from the point of view of Hegel labor takes on the essential role of distinguishing mankind from the state of nature and at the same time resonates with the intermediation in dialectic between man and nature, in which the Spirit can find its reflective images in nature and cause its recursion to itself—indeed natural materials provoke the formation of ideas, but these ideas by no means make reference to certain objects in the natural world, they are in a sense works made by the mind, and it accounts for Hegel’s legitimation of spiritual work. And the recursion of consciousness, the consciousness being for itself, that is possible in civilized surroundings requires intermediacy—and identity is to be found in an artificial state of humanity created by labor, not in the pure state of nature in which there is no intermediacy between man and nature, although, since, according to structuralism, it is not hard to find ingenious applications of logic even in so-called savage culture, there might not exist the pure state of nature in history. The natural state of humanity that depends on the immediate, in Hegelian terms, remains as a being-in-itself, is to be abolished and subsumed in being-for-itself. Hence Hegel does not admit what Deleuze assumes as the difference in itself that has nothing to do with the intermediate, comes out without its representation. It ought to be noted that Hegelian dialectic is an endeavor to describe in detail the creation of the modern world, that is to be reproduced again and again by labor, regarding labor as the ground for the release from the state of nature—although Hegel’s idea of the state of nature would be more complicated than other philosophers’, it as well as his idea of animal at times points to the lack of social intercourse. The concept of labor which accounts for Hegel’s own phenomenology confines Hegelian dialectic to the civilized state of the world—crystallization would be a spiritual work, and is inherent to civilization from the point of view of Stendhal. It does not mean Hegel’s deficit. In a word, Hegel by no means assumed any sort of Hinterwelt, that is conjectured as behind this world, that Friedrich Nietzsche renounced. And, repeating Hegel’s praise of empiricism, the principle of ‘freedom,’ which mankind could achieve in their labor, belongs to the present time, residing in neither the future nor the past—it is clear here that Hegel’s critique of time should come in part from empiricism. It does not admit Hereafter, which gives those who entirely forget living within the constraints of mundanity enormous power to punish people in this world. Hence Hegelian dialectic has to focus on the intermediate, namely the present phenomena of mind. But Deleuze, instead of allowing for this convincing argument why Hegelian dialectic requires the intermediate, displays an offensive attitude toward the philosophy of Hegel. It seems that Deleuze unconsciously enthrones himself as the omnipotent who is beyond this world in order to accuse Hegelian dialectic of being based on representation. His dismissal of Hegel would be right only in the narrowest sense, it is doomed to failure in political economy, which is a key ingredient of Hegel’s philosophy. Indeed, as pointed out by Adorno, Hegel leans toward defending the idea of civil society and as a result makes a bourgeois ideologue, but it is true that his philosophy should happen to reveal to us an unavoidable problem in capitalism. It may be possible to assume such a problem from his portrayal of social labor as did Marx:

The general and objective element in labor lies, however, in abstraction, which causes the specialization of means and demand, while similarly production moves on to specialization and the division of labor comes out. The more simple the labor of individual becomes through the division, the higher the proficiency in its abstract labor as well as the amount of its production. At the same time this abstraction of proficiency and means finishes off the dependency and the correlation of mankind with a complete necessity in order to satisfy other demands. The abstraction in future will make the productive power of labor more mechanical and let man exit from and machine enter into the stage of production.

Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts: 198

Abstraction is the primal nature of labor, through which man can pass from being-in-itself into being-for-itself from the point of view of Hegel. It is in an other place supposed to create an economic and social climate of interdependency, in which, of course, there exists the discordance between private and public interest, but it contributes to the momentum for, e.g. nation—it can not be denied also in this case that identification takes place to resolve contradiction. And it ought to be noted that Hegel is capable of opening his eyes to such a degree that he could take cognizance of the transition from hand to machine production; it seems that he should understand how good economists think. Hegel found that the process of abstraction in social labor would expand the mechanization of production. Although he does not possess so detailed a picture of what ensues from the process of abstraction in social labor as Marx—he at times takes on the role of Sancho Panza, while Hegel of Don Quixote, it seems to me that the former should supplement the latter in economics. Hegel does not allow for the function of money that is a means of expressing commodities in the form of exchange value. In this modern world it is not possible without a system of monetary representation to allocate among the population our resources of labor and material—indeed every labor acts as a merchandise creator, but then it is true that he must be a consumer goods which serves as a productive power and enter to labor market for employment opportunity. While Hegel does not think of what provides the means to elevate individual works to paradigmatic status, in other words, what makes them exchangeable to create the world of commodity exchange, which accounts for the social nature of capitalism, Marx focuses on exchange value, in the form of which in capitalism any individual labor is by no means exempted from being represented:

It concludes from the analysis of exchange value that the conditions of labor setting up exchange value are social determining factors of labor or determining factors of social labor, although being social is not to exist as such but in a particular way. It is a specific kind of sociality. To begin with, the homogeneous simplicity of labor is the similarity between different individual labors, whose interrelations treat those labors lying on top of each other as the same, that is to say, through an actual reduction of labors into the same kind of labor. The labor of each individual, as far as it is represented in the form of exchange value, possesses this social character of similarity, and it puts itself only into exchange value, as far as it is compatible and connected with the labor of all other individuals.

Zur Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie p.19

The process of abstraction in social labor that constantly makes the forms of production more simple causes an unavoidable situation where different individual labors are forced to be as a whole incarcerated within similitude and analogy and appraised in the form of exchange value. Such a sociality in capitalism consists in representing individual labors in the form of exchange value to create a world of interdependency and would not be transparent in the sight of Deleuze. His critique of similitude and analogy as a result curves back toward himself to expose his lack of thinking about capitalism. The system of commodity exchange mediated by money that operates on the principle of similarity will seem in substance an imaginary system of homogenization, but it governs this world beyond question—since Hegelian dialectic operates on the principles of civil society and is consequently capitalistic, it has to confine itself to similitude and analogy. Furthermore Marx figures out what underlies the dominance of monetary economy that gets on with the process of abstraction in social labor—it might in a sense conclude from his objective view of time:

Furthermore there appears in the form of exchange value every individual labor time straight as general labor time and similarly this general character of labor isolated from other ones as social character. The labor time represented in the form of exchange value is the labor time of individual, although, without individual labor being different from other ones, all individual labors, insofar as individual labors accomplish labor alike, thereby the labor time that is required by an individual labor for the production of a certain commodity is the necessary labor time that every one will spend to produce the same commodity. It is individual labor time, his labor time, but it exists only as entirely general labor time for the reason that it does not matter whose individual labor this is. This individual labor time is expressed as general labor time, what is embodied in a general product, a general equivalent, a certain quantum of labor time; it is unconcerned with the certain form of use value in which product manifests straight as an individual product; every general product is translatable into other forms of use value, in which it is represented as other products. General product is social quantity only as such general quantity. Individual labor, in order to result in exchange value, must result in a general equivalent, that is, in representation of individual labor time as general labor time or representation of general labor time as individual labor time. It is as if different individuals put together their labor time and different quanta of labor time that they put in common into requirements are represented in different forms of use value. Individual labor time is hence in fact the labor time that society requires to represent a certain use value, that is, to fulfill a certain demand. But only the specific form, in which labor obtains social character, is here of concern.

Zur Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie p.19-20

In this case “the specific form” that Marx mentions is the capitalistic form of production and distribution, in which the division of labor develops largely and at the same time makes individual labors simple to such extent that their products could be represented in the form of exchange value in order to enter into the world of commodity trading, as if in Hegelian dialectic sensory experiences must be translated into the terms of idea, those experiences must require the intermediate, in order to reach the world of thought, but those products are meant to fulfill certain purposes of use, to have their own use values. The abstraction of individual labor into exchange value is possible with the notion of labor time, which would serve as the variable of the formulae for calculation of certain individual labor costs—the process of abstraction in labor would go along with the metaphysical reductionism of labor time and therefore with the quantification of individual labor under some conditions of modern society, which may account for the Marxian doctrine of labor value, a particular kind of value that probably concerns some ideology occurring in capitalism, but this issue is beyond my ability.

Marx’s analysis of capitalism follows in a very careful manner Hegel’s glorification of civil society and, of course, does not mistake blessing for curse—it is doubtlessly more detailed and rigorous in economics than Hegel’s, but it does not seem to me materialistic in the strict sense of the word, this analysis, as such, is not compatible at least with the particular kind of materialism that Walter Benjamin fashioned from the philosophy of Hegel. I, to begin with, have the question whether Marx could take cognizance of what kind of materialism the philosophy of Hegel has behind itself. And it will be no longer hard to catch on to of what Deleuze took no cognizance while Marx could be aware, the fact that Hegelian dialectic implies the mechanics of capitalism. As long as all the people in the world depend on monetary economy, no one could tear off or go underneath the mask of representation that capitalism puts on this world. The deepest is skin even if in capitalism. This skin is made by monetary economy in which any one could not avoid the metaphysical reductionism of exchange value, that defines the strongest norm of representation. It is extremely unlikely from Marxian point of view that any one could free himself from the curse inflicted by capitalism on humanity—hence any insanity, that is an unsolved problem of humanity, should not be considered to be beyond civilization. It is, after all, the curse of capitalism that is the limitation put on Hegel’s philosophy, which Deleuze assumes as involved with the dominant system of representation that supports, e.g. identity in Hegelian dialectic. It is clear that the social nature of capitalism which creates the interdependency of all the people in this world through commodity exchange mediated by money should depend on a gigantic system of representation. Hence it will become clear that the philosophy of Deleuze does not allow for capitalism and thereby an ideological pie in sky. Of course Hegel misinterpreted the curse to fit his praises for civil society. Hegel was optimistic and Marx pessimistic. Hegel was too optimistic to illustrate the fact that capitalism dumps different individuals into an abyss of the abstraction based on similitude and analogy, but it is certain that his philosophy should imply some pitiless aspects of capitalism, whereas Deleuze takes no cognizance of the very nature of capitalism. Those philosophers who disregard the constraints of the times will lead to delusion. It is a magical world separated from capitalism that Deleuze as a result created in order to legitimate his own philosophy. His philosophy may become tenable with the abolishment or the profound reform of money economy. In the ancient times there might have been primitive Christian communities in which believers kept themselves as far from money economy as possible as depicted in Tolstoy’s Walk in the Light While There is Light. But, unfortunately, it is nearly impossible at the present time—Deleuze, to begin with, did not allow for the capitalistic abstraction into exchange value. Hence it can be said that Deleuze virtually acted as a bogus prophet of Hinterwelt at least in Difference and Repetition. I choose to live in this world full of trouble, while esteeming the infinite, as Christ, to whom it is said the word identity implicitly makes reference in the philosophy of Hegel, rather than to judge like the Hebrew God, from the point of view of omnipotent. Nowadays it is not as easy as Deleuze thought to carry out the philosophy of Nietzsche. Needless to say, later, Deleuze endeavored to address the problems of capitalism with Guattari, but they did not display so keen a sense of the economic role of time in capitalism as does Antonio Negri—Macchina Tempo.

But in the Deleuzian critique of representation there would be still one point worthy of being noticed. Although, since his affirmation of the difference in itself rules out the intermediate and ignores the capitalistic reduction into monetary representation, in a word, it persists in something being-in-itself, thereby it is untenable. Products will not be brought into distribution, come to commodities, unless they express themselves in the idealistic form of exchange value, they are crystallized into the form of internal existence and come into being-for-itself. But there would exist some profound inconsistency in all the means of representation. Capitalism has a serious defect in its system of representation that monetary economy depends on. Although it does not matter. Indeed the capitalistic system of representation which presents to us products in a clear form has behind itself an infernal machine, but it causes economic crisis in order to compensate for its major defect, capitalism rather regenerates itself in crisis as if in Hegelian dialectic death indicates the way to life. Such issue is not new to Japanese Marxians, such as Kojin Karatani, who focuses on the asymmetric in commodity exchange mediated by money. Although I shall attempt to interpret it in a different way, that is, in a Hegelian manner. For it seems to me that Marxian economics is less different from Hegelian dialectic than Marxians think. Marx would be scarcely unorthodox from Hegelian point of view, and furthermore he may prove less radical in materialism than Hegel. As a matter of fact, it was possible with Hegelian dialectic for Marx to drag into the light the asymmetric lurking in commodity exchange, namely the difference between purchase and sale.

From the point of view of Marx the major defect in the modern form of commodity exchange based on monetary representation would be due to the discrepancy between exchange value and use value which exists potentially in commodities; as soon as the forms of production and distribution become entirely social, namely modern, Commodities, as such, now come into double-existences in which the two forms of existence standing opposite one another, in a realistic sense into use value, in an idealistic sense into exchange value. The pair of form of labor that are retained in those commodities now express one another; it follows that the special real labor is something actual as its use value, whereas the general abstract labor time obtains in those prices of commodity something to be signified in which commodities are homogeneous and only quantitative, they are different materials of the same substance of value. (Zur Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie p.53) It matters whether commodities in actuality can carry out dialectic or not, the idealistic exchange value can come to the realistic use value or not—it is clear that Marx should find a dialectical form of value in commodity. Every commodity must be represented in the form of exchange value in order to enter into market, in other words, to come into the idealistic, so that it could assess its exchange value relative to other commodities. But its exchange value does not always appear valid to purchasers, because, for example, they tend to think how much use value it will bring to themselves or whether it will make for them its use value equal to its exchange value or not. Those commodities supposed to fulfill no demand must not be bought in general. Consumers’ spending trend reflects on the changes of industrial structure, and is therefore a shaky foundation of commodity exchange. Commodities must have purchasers determine whether their metamorphosis from exchange value to use value takes place or not, commodities have to subject themselves to the arbitrary rules of purchases—it is likely that the subjectivity of dialectic is shaken by the other. Hence it can not be denied that in the process of dialectic which in commerce transfers from commodity to money, from Ware to Geld, there are some uncertain elements:

The process of commodity exchange carries out itself, therefore, in the following form of change:

Ware—Geld—Ware
W—G—W

Since in terms of material there is the movement W-W, exchange of commodity for commodity, material transformation of social labor, the process dissolves itself in this result.

W-G. The first metamorphosis of commodity or sale. The upspring of commodity’s value from the body of commodity into the body of money is, as I expound somewhere else (See Band 13, p.71), the deadly leap (Salto mortale) of commodity. If it fails, indeed commodity is not such bruised, but the owner of commodity is not well. The social division of labor makes its labor one-sided as well as its demand many-sided. That is exactly why for him his product serves only as exchange value. Although it receives in money a general, social, and valid equivalent form, and there is money in another person’s pocket. Commodity above all must be use value serving for money owner in order to pull out money, labor exerted to produce commodity must be spent in a social and useful form or prove a branch of the social division of labor. Although the division of labor is a naturally occurring organism of production whose thread is woven constantly behind the back of commodity producers. The commodity may be a product made in a new way of labor that will afford the possibility to satisfy a new arising demand or first set up a demand for itself. A function that was yesterday still one among many functions and among commodity producers of the same kind, today, may separate itself as a special business of labor apart from the connection to those functions and become independent; and that is exactly why this function supplies its partial product as independent commodity to market. The conditions may be ripe or unripe for this separation of process. The product today fulfills a social demand. Tomorrow it may be entirely or partly removed from its place by a similar kind of product.

Das Kapital. Band I p.120-121

The subdivision of production on the one hand creates a world of interdependency, providing the need for unskilled labors, but on the other hand opens new ways of production and gives rise to new demands. Hence commodities must be in competition. Today’s popular product may lose value tomorrow; Today’s man is not yesterday’s. The exchange value of this product that represents the hours of labor spent on it is more or less acceptable at the moment when it comes out of the process of production. But this exchange value will not seem good to purchasers in the near future. Products tend to decline in value as time passes because of the changes in economy. It becomes clear here that Marx’s analysis of value addresses an issue of interval, namely temporal difference. And another focal point of Marx’s analysis of the metamorphosis from commodity into money is that commodity, as such, has no ability to synthesize exchange value and use value. Exchange value expresses the signifiant quantity of labor time and supposed to be signified, in other words, to be translated into use value. But it is very likely in the metamorphosis from commodity into money that signifiant (signifier, symbolic form) does not correspond to any signifie (signified, meaning); if this metamorphosis fails, exchange value will seem only a pure symbolic form without meaning. It would result from the interval between production and distribution. Furthermore, apart from Marxian economics, it would be compatible with at what deconstructionism directs itself in general. In capitalism différance, that permits Jacques Derrida to focus on temporal difference, naturally comes from the process of production and distribution, applies in some unnatural conditions of modern society. It would be no more than a kind of consequence of capitalism.

It is reasonable, to some extent, to assume that in sale dialectic at times fails to abolish temporal sequence and demonstrate its capacity for self-reference because of the différance between the process of production and the process of distribution. Différance, to begin with, is required for a critical view of the internal monologue lying in Husserl’s phenomenology, focusing on a temporal difference, time that passes between the speaking and hearing. Husserl’s phenomenology can be treated as based on a typical version of self-reference.

Although what arises from such a phenomenon of différance, the temporal difference that accounts for the imperfect process of dialectic in sale, the movement Ware-Geld, might not be a big part of Marx’s argument, it is not clear to me whether his view of commodity exchange leans toward différance or not. He not only reveals to us the potential disconnection in sale between symbolic form and meaning—it seems that this semiotic disconnection is still dependent on the system of representation in an extremely negative way, it leads to a negative kind of semiotics. He implies those external to commodity owners, that is to say, purchasers on whose tendency sale depends on—accurately, the word “external” is not completely valid in this case, for commodity owners and money owners live on the same system of monetary representation, they are the members of the same world of commodity economy. Commodity owners succeed at sale, commodities turn their idealistic exchange values into realistic use value, if these exchange values happen to comply with other persons’ rules of value. Hence the failure in sale reveals from the point of view of Karatani that commodity owners and money owners in fact have no common principle of communication, in a word, their relationship is asymmetric. Although such an asymmetry will not discomfort commodity owners, if they sell at a fire-sale bargain price—it, however, will leave some deficits. This asymmetry affords ground for his theory of the other, that denies the system for resolving the asymmetric in communication into, e.g. the pure signifier without signified, presents the other himself as irreducible to any system. He applies the theory of the other to language activity. It is in fact not easy for seller and purchaser who face one another here and now to share the same value. The other will reveal himself to us if we fail to find a way for communication. Although Karatani would not become aware that the other appears here and now to be against any agreement with us, in other words, it does not conclude from différance, temporal difference. Success is not in question. We learn more from failure than success. For example, what the word love means for one person is not always agreeable for another; Héloïse speaks to you of love, and some ass speaks to you of his love; don’t you sense that these two things have nothing but the word in common? They are like a love of concerts and a love of music. Love of the delights of vanity offered you by your harp in the midst dazzling society, or love of a tender, solitary, unassuming reverie. (Love: Various Fragments 157) It is not often that we arrive at the same opinion on love—any one can’t help having a private opinion on it. Such a fact tends to be forgotten. But it will prove painfully true through disagreement and misunderstanding, in other words, the differences between the ways of loving.

And most love relationships are full of misunderstandings. It seems to me that love offers many good experiences which we have prepare us to face uncertainty or potential danger—love is modern as commodity exchange mediated by money is. Love is not easy not only for us but also for commodities; We see, commodity loves money, but ‘the course of true love never does run smooth’. (Das Kapital. Band I p.122) In this respect love and sale, the movement W-G, have the same meaning, and love would not be different from prostitution in a sense; Charles Baudelaire who was extremely conscious of writing for customers compared himself to prostitutes who worked on streets, who were in a sense promenaders as Baudelaire, that is to say, he thought of it as sale and streets would appear to him a world of commodity exchange—while he got them to sleep with himself. The metamorphosis from commodity into money is scarcely manipulated by any commodity owner as if love by any thing. But this is not the case with money. For money is the synthesis of exchange value and use value, it could at any time complete the process of dialectic in commerce without trouble, namely without deadly leap. Money in fact could be wholly dialectical; although gold, as such, is a realistic use value, its use value exists only as bearer of exchange value and therefore only as formal use value concerned with no real individuals’ demand. (Zur Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie p.71) Gold, that, at any rate, develops into the form of money, is used for a means of exchange, its use value is the exchange value that it represents, in this case use value as well as exchange value manifests itself as formal. It is absolutely certain that idealistic exchange value and realistic use value exist together in money, as if, according to Hegel’s own unique principle of causality, cause and effect are supposed to be coexistent at the same time. Hence money owners actually succeed at purchase, the movement Geld-Ware, if they want. The identification of use value with exchange value is innumerable times in daily life demonstrated by purchase in spite of Deleuze’s treatment of identity as false. It can conclude from the daily use of money that we easily carry out dialectic. Although Deleuzians may dispense with purchase for daily needs. You can not be to do without dialectic as long as your life relies on money. It is much more easy to put Hegelian dialectic into practice than the philosophy of Nietzsche. For capitalism permits us to make dialectic effective. And it is clear that Marx portrays in the form of dialectic the asymmetry between sale and purchase, the movement W-G and G-W, which lies obscurely in commodity exchange—it may be said in general that Hegelian dialectic does not consider the case that the process of dialectic suspends itself as sale fails, although it is not entirely true. There occurs in commodity exchange the stark contrast between complete and incomplete dialectic. It follows that Marx by no means admits the equilibrium in market between sales and purchases; Nothing can be more silly than the dogma that the circulation of commodity requires a necessary equilibrium between sales and purchases, because each sale requires a purchase and vice versa. This means that the number of actually delivered sales are all equal to the number of purchases; hence it is a plain tautology. However it should prove that seller guides his suitable purchaser to market. (Das Kapital. Band I p.127) It is not conceivable in Marxian economics that each sale should correspond to one purchase and vice versa. Modern economists, of course, raise issues of, e.g. the mismatch between supply and demand, but there would be among them a few who allow for the dialectical difference between commodity and money and between sale and purchase. They focus on various quantities, whereas Marx on what permits quantification, for example, the reductionism of labor time that underlies idealistic exchange value, introducing Hegelian dialectic into economics in a careful manner. And from the point of view of Marx any sale is not always certain, as pointed out above, because of the interval between production and distribution that the social division of labor causes. Although there is an interval also in the process of commodity exchange, accurately, between one process of exchange and another, as the following lines:

Sale and purchase are an identical act as interaction between two polarized persons standing opposite one another, commodity owner and money owner. They shape two polarized acts standing opposite one another as actions of the same person. It partly concludes from the identity of sale and purchase that commodity will become useless, if it is thrown in the alchemic vessel of circulation and comes out not as money, commodity is not sold by commodity owner, so that it is not bought by money owner. That identity furthermore implies that this process, if it succeeds, makes an interval, a part of the life of commodity that can continue longer or shorter. The first metamorphosis of commodity is sale as well as purchase; it follows that this process of distribution is an independent process; purchaser has commodity, seller has money, that is, each of them has a commodity, that holds a form of potentially circulation; whether such a commodity appears in market sooner or later, no one can sell, unless one buys from another. Although no one immediately needs to buy for the reason that he has sold. The circulation of commodity exchange leaps over the temporal, local and individual barriers of productions for exchange very through the state that it splits the here and present immediate identity between the exchange of equivalent and the replacement of different labor productions into the contradiction between sale and purchase. The processes of contradictory developments which are independent of each other form an inner unity; it just rightly means that their inner unity moves into outer contradictions. If the external independence of internal dependence, because its independence and dependence supplement one another, goes up to a certain point, it violently makes the unity effective through one—economic crisis.

Das Kapital. Band I p.127

A number of uncertainty, a lot of mismatch problems between sale and purchase, constantly occurring in commodity exchange will amount to economic crisis, that, however, as we know, clears off and discards extra products to such extent that commodity economy could recover its balance. Indeed the dialectical inconsistency inherent in commodity exchange causes economic disaster, but it as a result replaces itself with the normal process of capitalistic economy. It follows that capitalism is an everlasting structure as its own unique dialectic. That is exactly why not a few communists regard capitalism as the sole basis of creating communism. Since they know that there would be on earth no place uncontaminated with capitalism, they by no means accept the conjecture Hinterwelt. It seems that Difference and Repetition leads to a cliched theory of alienation despite its anomalous monism. We are never alienated from the world of immediacy and do not need to regain it. Nor must it be helpful to assume such a world. For it is the capitalistic world that we are born and bred in. It is necessary to find the path to communism in capitalism—similarly what can transcend Hegel must lie in Hegel. This path does not lie in the philosophy of difference in itself. For capitalism forcibly transfers us from the world of immediacy to the world of intermediacy, in which men are stirred up to achieve the abolishment and involvement (Aufheben) of being-in-itself in being-for-itself from the point of view of Hegel. The word communism will refer to some actual solution to unbridled capitalism, not to any particular constitution. Although capitalism may be an everlasting abyss that mankind end up being confined within, to be honest, I have no clue what means is the best way of countering capitalism.

Hegelian dialectic is designed to describe the modern world. Although it in fact reveals to Marx itself as the social nature of capitalism. Since it is an encyclopedic endeavor to focus on and found itself on the process of abstraction in social labor, it wishes to embody the modern age, it is as a result confined to, e.g. the forms of commodity exchange that result from the social division of labor. Hence it will seem as if dialectic should lie in sale and purchase, and therefore capitalistic economy. Commodity and money must exist as being-for-itself, namely as self-referential, they must have their reflexes on an idealistic world; the former must be represented and find itself in the form of idealistic exchange value; the latter already has the potential to synthesize its use value and exchange value, its circle of self-reference is ready for being closed and consolidated. Commodity has to turn its idealistic exchange value into the realistic use value for a person other than its owner, while in money there exists potentially the identification of realistic use value with idealistic exchange value, the abolishment and involvement of idealistic exchange value in realistic use value, in Hegelian terms, money exists potentially to be in and for itself. Although dialectic does not account for the existence of commodity and of money, on the contrary, it is true that Hegelian dialectic, as such, should result from the forms of commodity exchange mediated by money. It follows that identity is in fact not a philosophical ideal but a forced idea of existence in capitalism. The identity of commodity exchange consists of sale and purchase, the metamorphosis from commodity into money and from money into commodity. It forcibly synthesizes the incomplete form and the complete form of dialectic. This identification is fundamentally impossible. For the world of commodity exchange does not show the absolute correspondence between sale and purchase. But it is absolutely necessary in commodity exchange to achieve the identity of sale and purchase. This inconsistent adherence to identity causes economic crisis in order to sustain it and its dialectical form. And there must be in dialectic a forcible way of returning to its normal state as pointed out by Deleuze:

There is indeed a dialectical circle, but this infinite circle has everywhere only a single centre; it retains within itself all the other circles, all the other momentary centres. This reprises or repetitions of the dialectic express only the conservation of the whole, all the forms and all the moments, in a gigantic Memory. Infinite representation is a memory which conserves. In this case, repetition is no more than a conservatory, a power of memory itself. There is indeed a circular dialectical selection, but one which always works to the advantage of that which is conserved in infinite representation—that which bears and that which is borne. The selection works in reverse, and mercilessly eliminates whatever would render the circle tortuous or shatter the transparence of memory. In infinite representation, the bearer and the borne incessantly enter, leaving only to re-enter, like the shadows in the cave, and by this means they claim to have assumed themselves the properly dialectical power.

Difference and Repetition p. 54

It seems that Deleuze scarcely ignores the key point of Hegelian dialectic. The word infinite representation probably refers to the infinite world of, e.g. mental phenomenon, in which consciousness receives sensory experiences as their idealistic reflexes, namely representations, so that they should come into being-for-itself, although in fact the endless process of abstraction in capitalism forcibly turns us into being-for-itself—it will seem as if commodities represent themselves in the form of idealistic exchange value, so that they should feel the need to come to the bearers of value, they should become the symbolic forms which have in commodity exchange the duty to correspond to certain realistic use values. And infinite representation consists of the bearer and the borne—in this case, “that which bears” is mule and “that which is borne” is value, and these two words are due to Nietzsche. In dialectic the bearer wants to be laden with all kinds of value from the point of view of Deleuze; He bears everything; the burdens with which he is laden (divine values), those which he assumes himself (human values), and the weight of his tired muscles when he no longer has anything to bear (the absence of values). Also in the process of commodity exchange the bearer, namely commodity, will appear in a sense to be “the absence of values,” if it is not bought, it fails to come to any realistic use value. It is possible to consider every exchange value of commodity to be a kind of memory. It represents the labor hours that someone had spent on producing commodity. Although commodity decreases its value as time passes away, the distance between memory and the here and now reality grows. Hence the anomalous dialectic of capitalism “mercilessly eliminates” such an exceptional case through economic disaster. And, as long as we are not lost in a sweet reverie of the difference in itself, it will be easy to understand that we are inevitably involved in the dialectic of capitalism and that there are no absolute means of totally avoiding economic crisis. Although it may seem good, to Deleuzians, to attempt to eliminate all the evil conditions of modern society in order to return to the state of nature or a pure being-in-itself as not a few radical communists, such as Pol Pot. It must be, needless to say, wholly wrong. Communism had committed a number of unspeakable crimes. Those crimes would mean a terrible tragedy that a practical philosophy led not to its ideal social construct but to. I am a communist and at times feel as if I have plenty of blood on my hands. I do not want to see any more blood—philosophy involved in bloody work. So it seems necessary to take the most prudent step for the resistance to capitalism and the application of philosophy to real politics.

It seems not only that capitalism provokes a violent response to différance, which at times reveals commodity’s exchange value, a symbolic form, as without meaning, but that such a violent reaction results from the asymmetry between seller and purchaser, in which it is likely they facing one another here and now do not reach any agreement on value. Such a self-negating semiotics and the theory of asymmetry will make a two-sided portrait of, e.g. contradictions naturally occurring in commodity exchange. This portrait shows différance in terms of sequence, it reveals the asymmetric in terms of moment. The disconnection between sale and purchase will present a double signification. It may suggest a temporally epistemic antinomy.

By the way, indeed capitalism appears to be antinomic, but it can not be approached only from a Kantian perspective, but results from a dialectical contradiction, that is to say, the difference between sale and purchase, between the incomplete form and the complete form of dialectic in commodity exchange. And it is not reasonable, for example, that Karatani endeavors to separate Marx apart from Hegel in order to raise in a Kantian manner some antinomic implications latent in Marxian economics—it seems to me that Karatani does not fully address issues of time. Since capitalism tends toward an abstract monism, at times turning itself into a real force, it, at any rate, adheres rigidly to unity, such a Kantian approach will ignore the ubiquitous identification in capitalism. It can not be denied, at any rate, that differences arising in the capitalistic world are more or less confined to identity. And, it will not matter whether we succeed or fail in communication and social interaction, therefore the other will not matter, unless we want to share identity with each other. Since there must lie in the course of, e.g. loving an unswerving belief that we can arrive at unity, it is likely that we risk deadly leap, no matter what our beloveds will say; I know you know we believe in the land of love; look at me, I’m not you. In a word, there must be behind every view of the other the social nature of capitalism. The other can be found only in this modern world. The other is, at any rate, a weird notion of modern society as love is:

A woman in Madagascar thinks nothing of showing what is most carefully hidden here, but would die of shame rather than exhibit arm. Clearly modesty is largely something that is learnt. It is perhaps the only law begotten by civilization which engenders nothing but happiness.

It has been noticed that birds of prey hide themselves when they are drinking, because at the moment when they plunge their heads into the water they are defenceless. Considering what happens in Tahiti, I doubt whether we need seek further for the natural bias of modesty.

Love is civilization’s miracle. Among savages and barbarians only physical love of the coarsest kind exists. And modesty protects love by imagination, and so gives it the chance to survive.

Very early in life girls learn modesty from their mothers, who teach it very zealously, as if from esprit-de-corps; this is because women are fostering in advance the happiness of the lover they will one day possess.

Love: 26

It is not only desire, natural compulsion, that motivates modern people to love. It is no longer reasonable to remove from love inscriptions of modernity that we take for granted. We have learned many ways of loving, we are not naturally designed for loving. Love is something like artificial sweetener of life, it comes from what makes us social—although Karatani allows for sociality in a Kantian manner and would consider the other a modern notion. Of course, natural compulsion as well as nature is not something that ought to be completely controlled, but what we have evolved to be good at treating; As for the purpose of modesty, it is the mother of love; that is enough to justify it. Its mechanism is extremely simple. The heart becomes filled with shame instead of desire. Desire is thus inhibited, and desire is what leads to deeds. (Love: 26) Desire, in Hegelian terms, must be abolished and subsumed in our reflective mind in order to come to a part of love, as if natural materials are used for production through labor.

Hegelian dialectic accepts social labor as an underlying principle of its development as pointed out above—it seems that a key point of German idealism lies in the human activity of creation from the point of view of Fichte. It involves a basic form of handicraft production. It follows that Hegel treats the process of dialectic to develop into identity as if it is embodied through productive activity. And Hegel’s treatment of the process of consciousness as productive activity gives dialectic a self-referential quality:

There is the division, of which the laboring Spirit comes out, between the being-in-itself that comes to the material he treats—and the being-for-itself that is the aspect of laboring self-consciousness; this division becomes concrete in his work. The Spirit must make more effort to go, inasmuch as to abolish the division between mind and body; the former must develop enough to cover and to give form to itself, the latter to animate itself. Both sides, in which, meanwhile, they are to do more closely with one another, still confine the imagined Spirit and its circumscription | cover to be against one another; Their accordance contains within itself this contradiction between individuality and generality. Through the work these sides approach to one another, so that at the same time it happens that they walk close to the laboring self-consciousness, and this consciousness reaches wisdom in the work, as much as it is in and for itself. However what matters is only and above all the abstract sides of spiritual activity, which still knows not in itself but in works its meaning that there is a thing. Artificer still does not appear to be the whole, the whole Spirit, but remains the inner hidden quality, which, as a whole, presents itself to be taken apart into the active self-consciousness and its object for utilization.

Phänomenologie des Geistes p. 455-456

The theme of self-reference that Hegelian dialectic captures from productive activity accounts for the form of being-for-itself that, engaged in labor, no longer remains only to be in itself. And the contradictory development of the Spirit which manifests itself in the process of production must move into product. Although it would represent a triumphant affirmation not only of labor but of bourgeois ideology; Since no one can know what passed above labor, labor, righteously and wrongfully, comes to the absolute, as if misfortune comes into fortune; that is why that whole, which is in fact a part, inevitably occupies the place of truth with force in the science of phenomenal consciousness. For the absolutization of labor is that of class relationship: would the control of reign be given every single person, every labor belongs to single one. (Drei Studien zu Hegel p.272) The absolutization of labor would incline workers to the status quo and dissuade them from asserting their right—it can not be denied that the philosophy of Hegel tends to show loyalty to the regime. In the modern times labor, as such, would be an imposed form of human existence. In this world, at any rate, labor exists as an inevitable condition of life—this is a major issue for communism and therefore Antonio Gramsci attempted to propose and undertake a radical reorganization of social labor, he was an activist for Factory Council. Our life is already embedded in the dialectical cycle of tragedy. Although we will need not be far too pessimistic in this situation. Indeed Hegelian dialectic creates a fictive space, in which we must lift ourselves above physical experiences, it plunges everything into phenomena of idea; it resonates with the process of abstraction in social labor. But it can not be denied at least that this forcible absorption is an endeavor to reach for concrete objects, e.g. natural materials, that products must be made of through labor.

In the philosophy of Hegel the word artificer (Werkmeister) refers to the self-consciousness that makes attempts to reach unity through productive activity—furthermore artificer is the opposite idea to animal, that tends to be in itself and would keep itself for some reason apart from being with much opportunity to have, e.g. intercultural intercourse. The Spirit is, at any rate, confined within the cycle of self-reference. At least in the process of production dialectic can carry out itself in general with little hindrance. For dialectic will not be in serious danger, unless it enters into the process of exchange, as pointed out by Marx. The process of exchange matters after that of production, as if prostitution starts every evening when workers get home; this juxtaposition of the two scenes would be best expressed by drawing a sharp contrast between daytime and nighttime, labor and prostitution, in Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs Du Mal—and Marx’s style of writing, as such, emphasizes antinomy and would be so allegorical as Baudelaire’s. Although nowadays in certain places prostitutes are dressed up for business in daylight hours. Since product must remain unchanged in the world of commodity exchange, while it must have purchasers determine whether they buy it or not, in other words, the success and failure of this sale depend on the fluidity of consumption, it is likely that the metamorphosis in sale from the idealistic into the realistic becomes difficult. Dialectic is expected to have much difficulty in the process of exchange. Indeed in commodity individual labor time spent on its production is represented in the general form of exchange value, commodity appears in market to be what synthesizes individuality and generality. But it will become useless, unless it is accepted by the other. Commodities could be easily represented in the form of exchange value, however, by virtue of the supremacy of money, and then in a sense obtain generality, but it is not easy for them to fulfill certain use values of other individuals, to transfer from generality to individuality. Although, if products become useless in market, drop themselves from market, they will be exempt from being represented in the form of exchange value, being certain symbolic forms and therefore signified; will those products descend to mere things? On the other hand, it is likely that those commodities which are durable enough to withstand everyday use, even if they are bought and fulfill certain purposes of use for a time, will come to completely useless things. No matter whether any commodity is bought or not, it decreases its value as time passes to such extent that it will prove to be very material. And not only commodities but written words would go through the same process; The Now is night. A simple test is sufficient to prove this sensuous certainty about the truth. We write this truth immediately. A truth can not be lost even if it is written down. For a little while, we keep it. When we see the written down truth now, this midday, we as a result must say that it is vapid. (Phänomenologie des Geistes p.71) And what a man speaks of will not remain the same in his own internal monologue—that case would not be immediately clear to Derrida. What if Hegel allowed for some similar cases, in other words, what if his philosophy reached a point beyond whatever not only Derrida but Karatani considers? Although it ought to be noted that such a relentless materialization would go virtually unstoppable—to be honest, I here draw on the annoying terminology of Deleuze and Guattari.

We can have one more case of thinking about it. A number of ordinary objects around us are etched into our memories, and they, as time marches on, at times become more striking as if they have material existence. It is, as a matter of fact, captured in a poem by means of ambiguity; Paris changes! But nothing in my sadness Has moved! new palaces, scaffoldings, blocks, Old suburbs, everything becomes an allegory for me, And my dear memories are heavier than rocks. (The Swan, “The Flowers of Evil and Other Works”, Dover) In this case, Baudelaire speaks of allegory by means of a fine allegory, which provides a stark contrast between immobility and mobility; his memory keeps material surroundings unchanged in itself, while those surroundings move into the past at some velocity. This contrast would cause an acute sensation of mélancolie (sadness). His mind suffers dismemberment, torn between change and conservation. This mental dismemberment brings mélancolie to Baudelaire’s poetry. And those things preserved in memory are no longer available for any use in a practical sense and therefore at times present themselves as such, float out beyond any meaning that people once found in them. Baudelaire would have no concern for the time that had passed—it accounts for différance. He does not make a terrible mistake to assume that he could treat the time that is not present. Derrida’s concept of différance is tied to a semantic indeterminism, that was, at certain times, central to his deconstructionism as pointed out by, e.g. Hiroki Azuma. For it assumes some different perspectives ranging from the past to the present. Provided that a man can witness a thing from those different perspectives, in other words, he can be omnipresent in time, it is easy for him to allow for different interpretations of the same thing; it is likely that those different interpretations provide to him a theoretical basis for what leads to a sort of indeterminism, that, however, is what results from envisaging temporal sequence which Hegelian dialectic has to rule out. Derrida forgot a simple fact that we must stay only at the present moment. In a word, his mind stayed beyond time, not in time. No one can find any reason to accept the concept of différance at least when he thinks about memory. For it is at the present moment that memory emerges. Baudelaire stares at the relics of the era that ended years ago. Idealistic representations are not only stored as memories, but at times recalled as the mere things, from which Baudelaire collected materials for allegory; allegory must be made from dead stock. His memories sink into a petrifaction that is more than petrifaction, become “heavier than rock,” and preserved against time. In those memories there would be a vague pursuit for materialism. Baudelaire might be a more devout materialist than Marx—therefore his poetry would have attracted Benjamin. And, what if death, in terms of Hegel, endorses not only a significant difference between finitude and infinitude but such a petrifaction? It needs to be borne in mind, at any rate, that death is not only a reminder to live but leaves corpses.

Studies in the Hegelian dialectic. (Open Library)
http://openlibrary.org/books/OL7071275M/Studies_in_the_Hegelian_dialectic.
Poetics (Sparks: classic texts)
http://sparks.eserver.org/classics.html

Surrender

Mon, 14 Feb 2011 23:49:00 +0900

Mommy’s alright, Daddy’s alright, they just seem a little weird.

Surrender, surrender, but don’t give yourself away, ay, ay, ay.

Dear, Mr. Asada,

I, as I wrote to you previously, have expended so much time to trace the truth of Hegelian dialectic, in one sense, in order to cast a great deal doubt on the validity of Hume’s incredulity toward causality. His denial of causality, as such, seems, to me, more or less imperfect and ineffectual for he would have little concern about raising a simple question how philosophy can forbid us to draw on principles of causality, while the ancient Greek philosophers, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, presumably had already dealt with this problem in a fairly logical manner, and from those philosophers, I believe, the kernel of Hegelian dialectic, which would have scarcely been appreciated in the modern times, descends in a straight line. Here I put up-front into the public two paragraphs of my draft observation of this issue, which will suggest one clue as to why Hume is seen from my viewpoint as inferior in theory to such Greek philosophers:

And furthermore it is necessary to look into the true nature of Nous, which is loosely translated in general as mind, in order to distinguish this idea in quality from those other false causes which not only Socrates but Hegel has to renounce. There will be one clue as to what Socrates terms Nous in the subsequent lines: that is what he would say, and he would have a similar explanation of my talking to you, which he would attribute to sound, and air, and hearing, and he would assign ten thousand other causes of the same sort, forgetting to mention the true cause, which is, that the Athenians have thought fit to condemn me, and accordingly I have thought it better and more right to remain here and undergo my sentence; for I am inclined to think that these muscles and bones of mine would have gone off long ago to Megara or Boeotia—by the dog they would, if they had been moved only by their own idea of what was best, and if I had not chosen the better and nobler part, instead of playing truant and running away, of enduring any punishment which the state inflicts. There is surely a strange confusion of causes and conditions in all this. It may be said, indeed, that without bones and muscles and the other parts of the body I cannot execute my purposes. But to say that I do as I do because of them, and that this is the way in which mind acts, and not from the choice of the best, is a very careless and idle mode of speaking. I wonder that they cannot distinguish the cause from the condition, which the many, feeling about in the dark, are always mistaking and misnaming. (Phaedo, 98E-99B) In the argument of Socrates there is nothing automatically deducted from those false causes, sound, air, and so on. It is more or less clear that Socrates, should not feel the need to escape punishment for he explicitly regards his current conduct as rational and compatible with Nous, and, in this case, thereby it is necessary to assume Nous as inseparably intertwined with his conduct. It ought to be noted that Nous, as such, in terms of Socrates, although it can not be denied that he explicitly employs this idea as the sole ground of being, does not offer any detailed but tedious description of his activity, but is an issue relating to his practical spirit. Nor does Nous manifest itself for itself, in other words, it, insofar as isolated, by no means brings itself into existence. Nous presumably presents its various physical manifestations to us in the forms of, for instance, daily life, in which it, at any rate, has to be mediated in general by human acts to turn itself into reality, that is, in this case, Nous in spite of being the true cause of ordinary and extraordinary acts has to manifest itself wholly as effects of these acts. The true cause, Nous, is disclosed in all its effects, and it can be said that, in the framework of Nous, the cause and the effect simultaneously and paradoxically coexist in whatever happens around us, while chains of causality tend to be commonly thought of as successive. It is the mold of deconstruction of causality that Socrates, based entirely on logic, would have expended his lifetime to fashion.

And Hegel, who, as stated above, rules out any use of knowledge for purposes of deduction from principles of divisibility, which Hegel as well as Socrates denounces as false, holds that the true grounds have to be reflecting on each other, in more comprehensible terms, closely related to and dependent on each other, as a whole to bring themselves into the existence of the world: The existence is the immediate unity of the reflection-in-itself and the reflection-in-other. It is therefore an indefinite amount of existences which reflect on themselves, and at the same time equally cast light on and relate to each other, and produce a world of interdependence and an infinity of connections between grounds and beings-substantiated. The grounds, as such, are existent, with the existent being seen from many directions as grounds as well as to be substantiated. (Enc. I 123) Hegel indeed employs a slightly different method from Socrates’ in assuming the truth of the grounds, but evidently his application of the idea of ground by no means leads to any general causality theory. He, at any rate, maintains the grounds as simultaneously coexistent and interdependent with all results on them, which are not only subordinate and secondary to each other but, at the same time, first to substantiate each other, so that they should be at once and at the same moment seen as grounds—it is clear at least that we can not find therein any application of trite principles of causality, that would be often looked on as characteristic of continuous process, in the light of the idea of reflection.

That is to say, I hold that Hegel and Socrates by no means differ at least in struggling to deconstruct the law of causality, according to which, people are long accustomed to describe temporal sequences of event in the conscious mind—and theoretical applications of the forms of temporal sequence have to lead to the apophatic theology as I revealed to you, although most of philosophers would unconsciously and involuntarily have ever made this mistake, and, for instance, French postmodernists, such as Deleuze, on whom Hume’s theory has a considerable influence, with being unaware of the core of Hegel and mentioning distorted and unreal facts of his theory, would have brought about a great regression in the realm of philosophy.

It is, at any rate, unsure that postmodernism could surpass Hegel as well as the ancient Greek philosophy, although, speaking straightforwardly, I see postmodernism as a sort of sophism, which Socrates endeavored to combat, for postmodernists are unconscious of the fact that the sophistic apophaticism comes into operation unless presupposing, e.g. the unreality of time, which McTaggart requires to provide reasonable explanations of the system of Hegelian dialectic—by the way, to be honest, I am recently less motivated to confirm the eminence of Hegel than to denounce sophism as did Socrates, I am really bored when watching postmodernists mired in cheap tricks of sophism, and you surely know why the apophaticism entraps theorists into sophism, the violation of this fundamental creed of philosophy, I know that I know nothing. The daddies of philosophy, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, were more or less alright and a spiritual heir of them was Hegel, although it can not be denied that they seem a little weird in logic. It is time to surrender to them, isn’t it? You should not feel any need to give yourself away, but it is necessary to consider whether you have distorted the picture of Hegel or not.

Best,
Kim, Yi-Chul

Playtime Is Over

Thu, 20 May 2010 21:12:00 +0900

Dear, Mr.Asada.

Thank you for your short commentary on Godard’s “Film Socialisme.”

Jean-Luc Godard is passing from the story of Christ into the story of Mediterranean with a view to straightforwardly go back to the early stage of World-History of Hegel—a sign of this phenomenon was in “For Ever Mozart” close to turn out to be explicit; that movie conveyed a kind of Bildungsroman of actress to us, whereas its stage evidently passed from battlefield into seaside and the comparison between war and sea seemingly alluded to the World-History, although Godard rarely reads Hegel’s writings themselves in truth. In the perspective of Hegel, it is the Mediterranean which brought forth Christ. “Film Socialisme” is therefore an extension of his retelling the story of Christ, especially in “Nouvelle vague” and in “Hélas pour moi,” although he would have derived that story from some of Pasolini’s films, such as “Teorema”—“Socialisme” must realize something post-Pasolini in a way, however it seems to allow for the World-History of Hegel. Incidentally, not only Carl Schmitt but later works of Godard, such as “Notre musique,” led myself to apprehend the heart of Hegel, that postmodernists have ever misunderstood. It is about time to, with Godard, affirm the eminence of Hegel and his World-History. The grand story, that at times designates the World-History and at other times Marxism, will be everlasting.

By the way, Marxism might merely refer to a phase of the World-History, namely, the era of industry which caused the divergence between bourgeoisie and proletariat in the modern times. The movement of Marxism was indeed based on that divergence as pointed out by Schmitt. It seems, to me, a great deal doubtful that Marx could have effectively deviated Marxism from the World-History of Hegel in politics.

Not only Hegel but the historical lineage from Jules Michelet to Fernand Braudel partly accounts for the background of Godard’s “Socialisme” as you told; if Roland Barthes is alive today, Godard might have not offered Alain Badiou to act in the movie, for no French theorist in the late 20th century would be more conscious of the maritime than Barthes of whom one of favorite writers was in fact Michelet—however I do not yet know how Godard sets us Badiou in “Socialisme.”

Sea was monstrous in the ancient times everywhere, excluding in the Mediterranean countries, where people were inevitably thrust into a spatial revolution, they awakened to the maritime space; the Mediterranean allowed many countries to easily have intercourse with each other for trade, conquest, and piracy, due to its calmness and was the greatest highway of intercourse by water on earth beyond question. And the peoples who resided in the maritime space appeared in history and turned out to battle at the risk of their own being against the another peoples who were destined to confine themselves within the territorial. Leviathan was bound to conflict with Behemoth. It would denote one of original patterns of state of exception. The state of exception at times happens due to the discrepancy among spatial beings. Geographical conditions formed diverse molds of ideology. Therefore, the Mediterranean came to the first battle field of ideology in human history. Godard’s “Socialisme” supposedly conveys it to us that the war is not over yet. In the Mediterranean Leviathan might have never ceased to struggle against Behemoth; for instance, the Palestinians are tragically desperate to defend their own space. Sea at times supplies war.

The spatial revolution entailed the state of exception. That phenomenon followed that men tempted themselves toward sea, in the Mediterranean countries, and were unbound by land. It caused the antagonism between Behemoth and Leviathan productive of the grand story ‘World-History.’ The two legendary beasts explicitly account not only for Schmitt’s theory of history but for the World-History of Hegel—Schmitt thought of the divergence between Behemoth and Leviathan in history when he got inspiration with regard to geography from Hegel as stated in his “Land und Meer.” The World-History of Hegel, in comparison with Marx, doubtless assumes something notional as you said, but French postmodernism, on the other hand, must remain far more metaphysical and speculative than Hegel for it is devoid of geography, in other words, it by no means takes cognizance of the distinction between the territorial and the maritime when dealing with economy and history.

Marx indeed deepened the World-History of Hegel to the level of economics—subsequently, it might have made a degree of influence on John Hicks’ “A Theory of Economic History,” in which Hicks states that he owes Marx the distinctive style of social science of “Das Kapital”; additionally, this outstanding work of economic history evidently highlights the Mediterranean and depicts why the sea entailed the historical divergence between the Europeans and the Asians as Hegel’s “The Philosophy of History.” I am basically to dismiss postmodernism partly because it raises issues of economy without regard to geography. French postmodernists are by no means as geographical and materialistic as Hegel—the philosophy of Hegel allowed for the political economy of Adam Smith and his own geography was arguably derived from “The Wealth of Nations.” Needlessly to say, it is impossible without Hegel that Marx should have appeared on the scene of philosophy. It will not be meaningless to untimely style myself Hegel’s pupil in order to give a new birth to Marx. It, of course, means to repeat Marx himself. But, if necessary, I can be critical of Marx.

It is necessary to extinguish postmodernism, a worthless and illusory game of philosophy. Purge them. Playtime is over.

Best,
Kim, Yi-Chul