Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche. Henri Lefebvre
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supersession. Third triad: need, work, enjoyment, or rather, satisfaction. Fourth: the master, the slave, the victory of the slave over the master, a victory that transforms him into the master’s superior, superseding him. Fifth: prehistory, history, post-history. And so on. As for Marx, his triadic schema modifies but preserves the Hegelian schema, taking it (according to Marx and Engels) to a higher level – affirmation, negation, negation of the negation – which accentuates the role of the negative.26 The developed communism of the future restores primitive communism but with ‘the full wealth of development’. Private property of the means of production supplanted the collective possession of these means (the land), but will give way to a social possession and management, hence collectives and automatic machines. Even Marx presents a bourgeois Holy Trinity: capital, land, labour (profit, rent, wages). And so on.
Oddly enough, the positivism that opposed any philosophical speculation adopted the triadic schema. According to Auguste Comte and his famous law of three stages, the metaphysical age followed on from the theological age, and the scientific age will replace it.
As for Nietzsche, if we accept that he identifies himself with his spokesman Zarathustra, he also adopts the triadic schema: ‘Three metamorphoses of the spirit do I designate to you: how the spirit becomes a camel, the camel a lion, and the lion at last a child.’ The camel demands the heaviest task, the most onerous law. The lion seeks to win its freedom and assert itself, by finding itself, by becoming capable of creating; it has faith in itself and in its future. The child is innocent and forgotten, a beginning, a game, a self-rolling wheel: joy. Zarathustra said this while staying in a town called The Pied Cow. Did Nietzsche have in mind the quest for the Grail (the absolute), and Percival (Parsifal) whose story tells of his youth, purity and even simplicity of spirit? After Merlin (divine/diabolical) and Lancelot (man and superhuman) comes the Spirit-child.
Why not apply to our own triad Hegel-Marx-Nietzsche the same triadic model? Hegel would be the Father, the law; Marx, the Son and faith; Nietzsche, the Spirit and joy! Such an application does not hide its parodic intention …
Why this reflection or retrospection on triads? Because nothing guarantees the eternity of this model. Will it not also suffer obsolescence, exhaust itself? Should we today, after detailed examination of the triads, not reject this schema and supersede it, either by Aufheben or by Überwinden? Or else leave it only a share, perhaps the sacred/accursed share, of ‘our’ reality or our understanding?
Does this appreciation (also for the moment at the stage of a tactical hypothesis) lead to a return, recourse to the substantialist (absolute unity) or binary model (formal oppositions, non-dialectical contrasts and dualities)? This is neither obvious nor probable. More likely we shall have to adopt a different route: an approach that takes account of a greater number of moments and elements, levels and dimensions, in brief, a multidimensional thought. Will this maintain, in contrast, that thought, by taking account of greater numbers, loses itself in too great a number of parameters, variables, dimensions and flows? Not necessarily!
8) The ensemble of categorical assertions posited by Western logos is surrounded by a network of problems. Among these, that of cognition emerges and deepens, abyss and mountain. Philosophy raised it in the late eighteenth century, and from then on it formed part of the theoretical situation in Europe. Previously, in Cartesian thought, in the critical project associated with the Encyclopédie that arose in France, and in the empiricism and positive science that emerged in England, no doubt appeared as far as knowledge was concerned. The critique of religion and the political regime was pursued in the name of cognition. Logos was questioned but was not itself put in question.
The scene changed with Kant’s critical philosophy. ‘What is it to know [Qu’est-ce que connaître]’? This simple question ravaged questioning thought. From this time, it would pursue its path no longer by seeking the absolute (the mythic Grail), but instead the answer to the question of understanding. The horizon changed. This ravaged thought would hesitate between rationalism and ‘classical’ humanism, a humanism that received its formulation from Goethe, and romanticism, itself dual: either reactive or revolutionary.
Unfortunately, philosophy and professional philosophers restricted the problematic of understanding to make it more precise, so that it would belong to their ‘discipline’ which was tending to become a speciality. They saw science as an incontestable process, an activity both sufficient and necessary. A reduction that reduced philosophy to epistemology, a meticulous sorting between acquired knowledge and uncertain representations. From Kant on, philosophy put the problem of understanding as follows: ‘Where are the limits of knowledge, either provisional or definitive? How can these markers be crossed? How can we know (connaître) more and better: more knowledge and more certain knowledge …’
Philosophy like this sidestepped the wider problem, the real question of understanding: ‘Knowledge is necessary, but is it sufficient?’ What is cognition worth, not in terms of results – conceptions, methods, theories – but as activity? Various responses were immediately proposed: the sufficiency of knowledge was countered by the notion of a necessary and insufficient knowledge, and that of a necessary non-knowledge: cognition was referred beyond or below itself, to intuition, ‘learned ignorance’, or pure and simple faith.
Who formulated the problematic of understanding in its full scope? Goethe. Not in Werther or Wilhelm Meister,27 but in Faust, in other words, a tragic play rather than a novel.
This play (hardly stageable, particularly the second part) opposes living to cognition. Faust, who knows all that could be known in his day, belatedly perceives that he has failed to live. For his happiness and unhappiness, he is visited by the demonic principle: the absolute Other, the accursed of God, who knows what Faust does not know, who possesses the secret of living: passion, delirium, madness, crime, in a word, evil (sin). Mephistopheles (with the authorization of his hierarchical superior, the eternal Father) allows Faust to pass through the ordeals of living after having undergone those of knowing. He leads him to Gretchen, the woman still passive, beauty (the beautiful object), but able to suffer and complain, and then to Helen, the active woman, still more lovely, but more ungraspable. The old triptych God–man–devil is joined by a fourth character: woman. She differs equally from the eternal virgin and the eternal mother. She is duplicated: victim and servant of sensual pleasure (Gretchen); queen of beauty, joy and delight (Helen). The eternal feminine is revealed only by way of initiation and ordeal.
To the great question that opens like an abyss on the path of ‘modern man’, Goethe gives only a poetic response: all that happens is only symbol, hieroglyph, and only the eternal feminine calls and shows the way of redemption. This is how the great Western idea pursues its course, that of absolute love as a counterpoint to logos. This great image runs right through the West, from the medieval romances down to Le Grand Meaulnes, where it dissolves in the pallid moonlight of the beautiful soul. Unless it rebounds …
Still in Goethe’s lifetime, Hegel divinized knowledge. For him, the negative places itself in the service of positivity: absolute knowledge. And we could interpret the demonic in Goethe (Mephistopheles) as an accentuation of the negative, given that its role remains ambiguous. For Hegel, then, God is the concept, the concept is identified with divinity. The concept of history and the history of the concept coincide. From nature emerges logos, the word: then nature and word (science and consciousness, language and logic) unite in the recovered spirit, absolute spirit. God-knowledge and history converge in the state. Absolute spirit, logos as principle and end, is ultimately defined as a philosophical trinity: concept (father), becoming (son), state (spirit). And Kierkegaard was not wrong to rail sarcastically at the speculative Good Friday by which the god in three persons incarnated in history climbed the Golgotha of dialectical ordeals to reach the glory of the last judgement (as pronounced by the philosopher).
With Hegel dead, Hegelianism disintegrated. What a strange situation European thought found itself in after Hegel and Goethe, after Kant and Schopenhauer! At first with the Young Hegelians, then after them, Marx hesitated between knowing and acting. He retained the project of constructing an imprescriptible knowledge, resistant to all refutation and reaching the essence of society (bourgeois, capitalist), but he took up the Promethean-Faustian formula: ‘In the beginning was the deed.’ He maintained