Neither Idealism Nor Materialism
 
 
 

One
________________________________________________________
The Hegel Renaissance:
Toward a Philosophical Anthropology
 
 

1. Hegel in France

The sudden prominence of Hegel among French intellectuals after World War II signified a break with traditions of thought.  French intellectuals had paid little attention to Hegel when be dominated German thought in the 1830s and 1840s.  Even a thinker like Auguste Comte, with his grand vision of the total development of mankind that in many ways paralleled Hegel's, remained ignorant of his counterpart to the east.[1] The utter absence of interest in Hegel by academic philosophers as well as by intellectuals was reported as late as 1931 by Alexandre Koyré, a historian of philosophy and of science.  Unlike Germany, England, and Italy, France had no Hegelian schools, not one recognized disciple of Hegel, and of course few serious students of Hegel in French universities.[2] Only "offbeat" intellectuals like André Breton's surrealists and a circle of young

1. Frank Manuel, Prophets of Paris (N.Y., 1965) 287.
2. Alexandre Koyré, "Rapports sur l'état des études h,égéliennes en France," Revue d'histoire de la philosophie, 5:2 (April-June, 1931) 147.  This judgment of the lack of the teaching of Hegel in French universities until 1940 is also stated by Mikel Dufrenne, the important phenomenologist, in "Actualité de Hegel," Esprit, 16:148 (Sept., 1948) 396.  The exception that confirms the rule would be Lucien Herr, who taught Hegel at the Ecole Normale as far back as the pre-1914 period.  Cf. Jean Duvignaud, "France: the Neo-Marxists," in L. Labedz, ed., Revisionism: Essays on the History of Marxist Ideas (N.Y., 1962) 314; and that H. Lefebvre and N. Gutermann had published selected translations in 1939 as Morceaux choisis de Hegel (Paris, 1939).

3

1. Neither Idealism Nor Materialism

Marxists in the 1920s paid tribute to the German dialectician.  Among the reasons suggested by Koyré for the lack of interest in Hegel were the obscurity of Hegel's writing, the strength of Cartesian and Kantian philosophical traditions, Hegel's Protestantism, but, above all, the incredulity of the French toward Hegel's "strict identity of logical synthesis and historical becoming." [3]  On the contrary for French rationalists, history was separate from reason or logic, which was eternal, outside time.  If this was the situation, how can we account for the abrupt turn to Hegel in the 1940s?

In the eyes of many converts to Hegel, the catastrophic defeat of France in 1940 had discredited liberal-bourgeois intellectual and political traditions, leaving the nation in a conceptual vacuum.  The only moral force left in France, on the eve of the Liberation, came from the Resistance movement, which had been dominated by politically progressive groups.  In the estimate of Henri Lefebvre, after the Liberation, there was no longer bourgeois thought calling itself such."[4] The experience of the war and the Resistance "transformed the basic givens of intellectual life in France: the themes of reflection, the problems, concepts, and attitudes."[5] After 1944, there was a longing for basic renewal, social, political, and intellectual.  With a combined socialist and Communist vote reaching a majority, intellectuals harbored the dream of imminent and radical social transformation.  During the hopeful but finally disillusioning post-war years, the "decisive philosophical event" was the discovery of the Hegelian dialectics There were thus direct links between the collapse of the old bourgeois world, the expectations of socialism, and the emergence of interest in Hegel.

3. Koyre, op. cit., 150.  The quotation is from Leon Brunschvicg, Le Progrès de la conscience dans la philosophie occidentale (Paris, 1927) Vol. 1, 397.
4Henri Lefebvre, "Le Marxisme et la pensée française," Les Temps Modernes, 13:137-138 (July-Aug., 1957) 110-111.
5 Ibid.., 106.
6 Ibid., 114.

4

The Hegel Renaissance

The rebirth of interest in Hegel was directed primarily at The Phenomenology of Spirit[7] and to a somewhat lesser degree at Hegel's early essays.  Intellectuals of most traditions-Catholics, Marxists, existentialists, phenomenologists and academic philosophers-read and debated Hegel, immersing themselves in a system of thought that was foreign to established assumptions.  The assimilation of the Phenomenology was particularly the point of departure for the confrontation of Marxism and existentialism.  The reading of Hegel, it was felt, could dissolve the long-standing conflict between idealists and materialists and could initiate a totally fresh direction of investigation.  The study of the introduction of Hegel into France forms a prologue to the eventual formation of a new intellectual synthesis.  The task of bringing the Phenomenology to a broad audience, of demonstrating the power and insight of this book, fell to two men: Alexandre Kojève, a Russian emigré, and Jean Hyppolite.  By themselves, these two philosophers translated Hegel, lectured on Hegel, and published lengthy commentaries on the Phenomenology, bringing to light and confronting the public with a new way of thinking and of seeing the world.  Many important developments in French thought since then derived, directly or indirectly, from the unsettling and reshuffling of French consciousness inspired by the Hegel renaissance.  The study of the Phenomenology by Kojève and Hyppolite was an intellectual source for the renewal of Marxism, for Sartre's existentialism, and perhaps even for the structuralism of the 1960s.[8]

The profound effect of the Phenomenology resounded in varied tones in the diverse corners of French intellectual life.  Yet everyone agreed that Hegel, although himself an idealist, provided a means of criticizing certain aspects of

7. Henri Niel, "L'interpretation de Hegel," Critique, 18 (Nov., 1947) 427.
8. Cf. The structuralist, Jacques Lacan, The Language of the Self, trans.  A. Wilden (Baltimore, 1968) 192-196, 218-219, 306, 308.  These references are to Wilden's discussion of the influence of Kojève's study of Hegel on Lacan.

5

1. Neither Idealism Nor Materialism

idealism.  The idealist tendency to make concepts atemporal was the chief defect for which the French found an antidote in Hegel.  The Phenomenology's emphasis on the historicity of reason and conversely the rationality of history was the source of its relevance.  Now Catholics could escape Thomism, Marxists oppose Stalinism, and existentialists combat neo-Kantianism.  The arid forms of rationalism in academic philosophy appeared feeble compared with Hegel's philosophy of alienation in history, his dialectic, his phenomenology of consciousness.  Perhaps Hegel held the key to unlock the riddles of the dualisms of subject and object, of what is and what ought to be, of history and ontology, of the individual and society, of science and-humanism, of knowledge and action.  Such, for example, was the sanguine attitude of Merleau-Ponty: "All the great philosophical ideas of the past century had their beginnings in Hegel: the philosophies of Marx and Nietzsche, phenomenology, German existentialism, and psychoanalysis; it was he who started the attempt to explore the irrational and integrate it into an expanded reason which remains the task of our century.[9]

Hegel's Phenomenology was also used to combat the recent conservatism of European social thought in the first three decades of the century.  The scientific study of society seemed to demonstrate that it was in the nature of things that democracy was an unattainable ideal, that social order required elites, coercive organizations, and irrational ideologies.  Social theory in the hands of Durkheim, Pareto, Weber, and Michels had uncovered irrationalities in modern society that tended to dim all hopes for radical democratization.[10] Pareto drew attention to the force of irrational emotions in political affairs and to the inexorable

9. Sense and Non-Sense  (Evanston, Ill.., 1964) 63.  Throughout this study, translations are my own, except where the title is given in English.  Also, all emphases are in the original, except where otherwise indicated.
10. H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European Social Thought: 1890-1930 (N.Y., 1958).

6

The Hegel Renaissance

"circulation of elites" which did not effect the strength of oppressive authority; Durkheim concluded that anomie, or moral disorientation, was the result of the influence of corrosive rationalism, the division of labor, and the demise of traditional village communities; Weber gloomily prophesied a spiritless, routinized, disenchanted world emerging paradoxically from the "rationalization" of social institutions and social action.[11] These social theorists divorced science from the practice of overcoming the ills they uncovered.[12] For  them, history was irrational; social conflicts could not be settled through rational discussion since men acted blindly or irrationally.

French intellectuals saw in Hegel an answer to the conservatism of these ideas.  Marxists and existentialists read the Phenomenology as a critique of the notion that reason and history were antithetical.  The error of the social scientists lay in their methodology and theory of knowledge.  Their idealism situated the knower outside the field of knowledge, outside history.  Merleau-Ponty complained that "Durkheim treats the social as a reality external to the individual and entrusts it with explaining everything that is presented to the individual as what he has to become."[13]  This way of seeing society as something outside the individual was common to Weber and Pareto as well.  It fails to comprehend the individual from within a network of interpenetrating interactions and ends in privileging the individual, on the one hand, and justifying social coercion, on the other.  Distant from the field of historical action, hidden behind the screen of reason, the social theorist could in history and reason beyond it. As the French

11. Cf. Herbert Marcuse, Negations: Essays in Critical Theory, trans.  Jeremy Shapiro (Boston, 1968) 201-226, for a penetrating critique of Max Weber's category of rationalization, arriving at similar conclusions.
12.  J. Freund, The Sociology of Max Weber, trans.  M. Ilford (N.Y., 1969) 85.
13. Sense and Non-Sense, trans. by Dreyfus and Dreyfus (Evanston, Ill., 1964) 89.

7

1. Neither Idealism Nor Materialism

read him, Hegel taught that if reason or the theorist were seen within history, the object of his study would not be a remote, "irrational" Other, but would become interiorized and reveal its deeper rationality.[14] The fact of hierarchies and irrational norms, from the Hegelian perspective, would appear as historical distortions within the possibility of human perfectibility, not as immutable.  Institutions and ideas that resulted from unforeseen, unintended social action would appear open to reason and to change.  Contradictions in the field of social reality would appear in their proper interrelatedness, not in dissociated opposition.  Hegel insisted on the connection of each particular to the totality, on the interdependence of apparently distinct fields of social experience.[15] What was contradictory to idealist rationality became intelligible to the historical dialectic of Hegel's reason.  This theme was prominent in the controversial reading of Hegel by Kojève.
 

2. Kojève: From Masters and Slaves to Free Workers

Alexandre Kojève, recently a high official in the Common Market, established a small but very distinguished Hegel cult at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, where he lectured on the Phenomenology from 1933 to 1939.  Some of the luminaries of French intellectual life regularly attended Kojève's classes on Hegel.  Raymond Aron, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, R. P. Fessard, Raymond Queneau, Jean Desanti, Georges Bataille, and Jacques Lacan, leading liberals, existentialists, Catholics, novelists, communists, surrealists, and structuralists eagerly initiated themselves into the new mode of thought.  It was even said that Jean-Paul Sartre himself was enrolled, although his attendance at the classes was

14. Jean Hyppolite, Genèse et structure de la phénoménologie de 1'esprit de Hegel (Paris, 1946) i, 26.  Hereafter cited as Genèse.
15. Henri Lefebvre, "Marxisme et sociologie," Cahiers internationaux de sociologie, 4:3 (1948) 56.

8

The Hegel Renaissance

not recalled.  Some literary wits, especially cold-war liberals and Communist Party Marxists, were quick to satirize the force and influence of Kojève's lectures on his students.  For example, Jean Desanti, who later "matured" to Stalinist ideology, sought to erase from his past his interest in Kojève's Hegel:

We were, at that time [1936], young Communist students.  For many of us, Marxism remained somewhat external and undigested.  Certainly, we read Marx and Engels. But we went toward them as toward masters of the past, keeping our distance intellectually in relation to their work. . . . This is why at the same time that I was repelled by the lectures of Alexandre Kojève, who stifled my old rationalist education, I found myself also disquieted and attracted.  Finding a new mystery in Reason, I broke the "theological" authority it had until then in my eyes.  It seemed to me that viewing Reason in the new way made it more human.  And since I was under the influence of Leon Brunschvicg, debating the interior difficulties of Kantianism, I did not delay in gradually moving toward the "philosophies of existence," thinking to escape through them both the aridity and the contradictions of "vulgar" rationalism. . . .[16]

Kojève is the unknown Superior whose dogma is revered, often unawares, by that important subdivision of the animal kingdom of the spirit" in the contemporary world--the progressivist intellectuals.  In the years preceding the second world war in France, the transmission was effected by means of oral initiation to a group of persons who in turn took the responsibility of instructing others, and so on . . . From

9

I. Neither Idealism Nor Materialism

that time on we have breathed Kojève's teaching with the air of the times .[17]

For Kojève, Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit was the answer to liberal-bourgeois metaphysics and politics.  The questions "Who is man?" "How did man become social?" "What are the possibilities of man's development within society?" were answered by Hegel in a revolutionary way.  Liberal-bourgeois thought, from Locke to J. S. Mill, established the nature of man abstractly, by comprehending him outside and before society.  In the liberal tradition, an ahistorical static human species rationally calculates its advantages, in perfect bourgeois fashion, and constitutes society out of its harmonious consensus.  Distorting history into a self-justifying mythology of bourgeois society, the liberal erases the complex development of humanity, leaving only its bourgeois form, and projects it onto the past.  The rational bourgeois emerges like Minerva, fully mature, and all other shapes and forms of humanity are eliminated.  Only the bourgeois, single-

17. Cited by Allan Bloom in his introduction to Introduction to the Reading of Hegel by Alexandre Kojève, trans.  J. Nichols (N.Y., 1969)  vii.
18. Kojève published very little himself.  Among his scanty publications was a review of Henri Niel's book on the concept of mediation in Hegel.  "Hegel, Marx et le Christianisme," Critique 3 and 4 (1947-1948) 339-366.

10

mindedly himself  by preserving and aggrandizing his property is truly human.[19]

In Kojève's reading of Hegel, the concepts of liberalism were adamantly denied and the basis for Marx's concept class struggle was laid.[20] The Phenomenology, in Kojève's hands, centered on a philosophical anthropology, on the self-development of man, on his self-recognition, and on his historical and temporal nature: all this is founded in the dialectic of the master and the slave.  The first "moment" of human reality, man's first structure of consciousness, is mere contemplation, simple awareness of the object, the outward thrust of consciousness toward the thing, toward exteriority, without self-consciousness. This structure of consciousness includes sensation, perception, and primitive consciousness.  The human subject is as yet not constituted; passive contemplation was insufficient for Hegel to constitute self-consciousness. Only desire, the awareness of a lack within the subject, compelled man to the recognition of his own reality, hurtling him into the drama of history, the story of the humanization of man and nature.[21] Desire had first to become not desire of an object but desire of desire, in other words, desire for the recognition of specifically human reality.  In short, for human desire to emerge, the individual had need of another individual to recognize his desire and give it homage as human reality.  Thus the momentous act that constituted man as a human species, required an interaction among men. ". . . Real and true man is the result of his interaction with others. . . ."[22] Man is thus social and also historical from the beginning.

19. Cf. C. B. MacPherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (N.Y., 1964).
20. Cf. Dick Howard, "On Deforming Marx," Science and Society, 33:3 (Summer-Fall, 1969) 358-65.
21. Alexander Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, ed. by R. Quéneau (Paris, 1947) 8-13.  In English, Bloom edition, op. cit., 3-7.  This edition omits much of the politically interesting material from the mid-1930s.
22.  ibid.,
21: in English, 15.

11
 

1. Neither Idealism Nor Materialism

The recognition of human desire was impossible without a struggle to the death between men.[23]  In order for men to recognize each other's humanity, they have to be willing to risk the loss of their physical lives.  Only when men struggled among themselves for prestige-not for self-preservation and not for property-was the desire to be human recognized as such.  Hence the first interactions among men were wars of prestige.  Hegel had here interlinked, in one unified moment, the birth of man with that of history and society.  Throughout the Phenomenology, man, history, and society were bound up with each other.  There was no abstract individual here, no isolated Robinson Crusoe through whom the specific attributes of the bourgeoisie could be projected and sanctified as the eternal nature of man.  To Kojève, Hegel ended once and for all the mistake of regarding one's own tribe, one's own nation, one's own class as the image of all mankind.  Yet there was a certain danger of glorifying violence in Kojève's account of the struggle to the death.  He came close, in places, to ontologizing this moment of the Phenomenology and veering toward fascism.

The implications of the master-slave conflict are still greater.  The struggle to the death for prestige could not, paradoxically, really end in death.  Death would simply end the relation of recognition and man would slide regressively back into animality.  The struggle had to be consummated by the establishment of permanent relations between the combatants: the victor became the Master or autonomous consciousness and the vanquished, the one who refused to risk himself in the struggle, became the Slave or dependent consciousness.  A human society was constituted of masters and slaves, of aristocrats and peasant-serfs, of rulers and ruled: this was a harsh society with no trace of the fairy-tale of a felicitous and consensual social contract.  But again, human development was not left petrified in a hierarchical society since history continued to unfold dialectically.

23. Ibid., 15: in English, 8.

12

The Hegel Renaissance

Relationships between masters and slaves are internal bonds in which the consciousness of each is shaped by the other.  The master and the slave were not social atoms, the one being "better off" and in a position of dominance, the other "worse off" and dependent.  In any relationship involving domination the humanity of both the ruler and the ruled has been mutilated and distorted.  The master was actually dependent on the slave for his status as master; both in the general society and in the eyes of the slave, the master was recognized as such only because be controlled slaves.  What is worse, the master could not achieve the recognition he originally fought for in this relationship because be was recognized only by a slave, by someone be regards as sub-human.  In Kojève's words, the master was in an "existential impasse." He needed an autonomous person to recognize his desire as human, but instead of free recognition, he received only the servile, dependent recognition of the slave.[24]

The irony in Hegel's dialectic -of master and slave comes from his insight that it was the slave who moves humanity toward a higher level of self-realization, a notion to which Marx was deeply indebted in developing his concept of the proletariat as the emancipator of mankind.  In the society of masters and slaves, the master is locked into a position in which his humanity can neither be recognized nor satisfied.  The slave is not satisfied with his position either, being oppressed and exploited by the master.  Unlike the master, however, the slave receives no prestige from his lot and is ready for "change, transcendence, transformation, education."[25] The slave is the secret of change in history and his desire for freedom from oppression is the ground of man's becoming more human.  "The complete, absolutely free man, definitely and completely satisfied by what be is, the man who is perfected and completed in and by this satisfaction, will be the Slave who has 'overcome" his Slavery.  If idle Mastery is an impasse, laborious Slavery, in contrast, is the source of all human, social, historical progress.  History is the history

24. Ibid., 25: in English, 19.
25. Ibid., 27: in English, 22.

13

1. Neither Idealism Nor Materialism

of the working Slave ."[26] Undoubtedly Kojève has here colored Hegel with his own Marxism, making him more the advocate of the working class than be might have liked.  But Kojève has done no more than elaborate the concept of the slave that Marx himself found clearly enough in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit.  In the total terror of the master's rule, the slave discovers his humanity as something denied and rejected.  In his desire to overcome this lack, be has to undergo a process of self-transformation that prepares him for freedom, and the key to the education of the slave is work.

The slave produced and the master consumed.  The slave labored without gratification, while the master's slightest whim was fulfilled without effort.  The slave was compelled to delay and to sublimate his desires.  The worker thus became civilized or bourgeois, learning to control and direct his desires and in the process achieving control over nature.  Subjectively, the working slave learned to marshal and concentrate his energies toward ends that be himself defined, while objectively he created products that confirmed his internal aims and submitted nature to his control.[27] Kojève's commentary reads:

The working Consciousness thereby attains a contemplation of autonomous given-being such that it contemplates itself in it.  The product of work is the worker's production.  It is the realization of his project, of his idea . . . it is by work, and only by work, that man realizes himself objectively as man . . . it is only by work that man is a supernatural being that is conscious of its reality; by working, he is incarnated" Spirit, he is historical "World," be is objectivized" History.[28]

26. Ibid., 26; in English, 20.
27. Ibid., 29; in English, 24.
28. Ibid., 30; in English, 25.

14

The Hegel Renaissance

In the history of European thought, Hegel's concept of work was an important turning-point,[29] one that Marx would develop further.  Aristocratic Greek philosophy, most notably in Aristotle, had denigrated work as an activity worthy only of unfree men.  Generally speaking, the Christian Churches, although attributing some value to human labor, placed work in the context of the fallen world as mans harsh penance for original sin.[30] Later, Calvin's Reformed Church looked to success in work for signs of grace, without allowing it an intrinsic value.  In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the ascetic spirit of liberalism contrasted laboring humanity favorably with an idle, parasitic nobility.  The chief exponent of economic liberalism, Adam Smith, whom Hegel read, found in work the key to the well-being of nations.  Work became a moral good for many enlightened intellectuals.  Still, for the radical wing of the philosophes, the revaluation of work derived most from its instrumental, external results, not from the process itself.  Work was rational activity that benefited society, controlled nature, and brought prosperity to the individual. -Hegel took the liberal notion further by investing work with the central quality of man's development: a free consciousness.  Not in the accumulation of money, not in technical discoveries that brought "progress," but in the creation of an object, was the essence of man, his self-determination, expressed and objectively realized.  Work overcame the Slave's fear, confronting him with a world that was open to his reason, giving him confidence in his capacity for freedom, in his ability to realize his powers of thought.  In Kojève's words, "Man achieves his true autonomy, his authentic freedom, only after passing through Slavery, after surmounting the fear of death by work performed in the service of another."[31] In sum, Kojève taught his French

29. Cf.  Pierre Naville, De l'Aliénation à la jouissance (Paris, 1957) 9-58.
30. Cf.  Ernst Troeltsch, The Social Teachings of the Christian Churches (N.Y., 1960) 1,000.
31. Kojeve, op. cit., 32; in English, 27.

15

1. Neither Idealism Nor Materialism

students in the 1930s that Hegel had developed a revolutionary social theory 32 in which the working class played a central role in the Aufhebung (the dialectical overcoming) of authoritarian society into free society, and that workers were the "absolute negation" of the world of the masters.[33]

At the same time, Kojève subsumed the separate stages of consciousness of the Phenomenology under the master-slave relationship.[34] The dialectic of man's self-transformation was tinted throughout Kojève's account by the subjective process of recognition.  Each moment of becoming did not stand equal to the others but was seen essentially as a further development of the struggle for recognition.  In this way, Kojève was able to put in relief those aspects of Hegel's thought that led to Marxism and existentialism.  We have already noted that the struggle for recognition was a source for Marx's concept of the historical role of the proletariat.  Similarly, the Kierkegaardian sense of subjectivity was highlighted in Kojève's account of the master-slave relation.  In addition, Kojève was able to assert that Heidegger's concept of man as a being-in-the-world was also fundamental to the Phenomenology.

Kojève's theme of the struggle for recognition also suited the antimetaphysical tendency of French Marxists and existentialists.  Both Marxists and existentialists could learn from Kojève's reading of Hegel that it was not necessary to posit, at the beginning of thought, a concept that captured the full presence of being because reality unfolded in time.[35]

32. The influence of Kojève was so widespread in all fields of human studies that it is pointless to make specific references.  Nevertheless, here is an example from a Sartrean literary historian, Serge Dubrovsky in Corneille et la dialectique du héros (Paris, 1963): "Hegel, for the first time in the history of philosophy, had made a systematic study of relation with the other and given it a fundamental importance . . . (92).  Cf. also 502ff for Dubrovsky's attempt to use the dialectic of the master and the slave to analyze Corneille's heroes.
33. Ibid., 33; in English, 29.
34.  Niel, op. cit., 431.
35. Koj6ve, op. cit., 162; in English, 32.

16

The Hegel Renaissance

The process of man's becoming was identified with a dialectic moving from the finite of the given to the infinite of possibility and back from the infinite to a new finitude.[36] In each epoch of history, all views were partial and incomplete.  Hence time was an open unfolding of possibilities in which each moment was both absolute and relative; absolute in relation to itself and relative in relation to the past and the future.  Since Aristotelian, Cartesian, and Kantian notions of a static absolute were discarded, the problems of freedom and determinism, knowledge and being, essence and existence were all placed on a new footing.  What is more, the nature and significance of history shifted from the sphere of accident and relativity to one of reason: for Kojève, the historical dialectic enabled Hegel to have true self-comprehension:

Hegel was the only one to understand himself as this whole, to give a correct and complete answer to the Cartesian question, "What am I?" By understanding himself through the understanding of the totality of the anthropogenetic historical process, which ends with Napoleon and his contemporaries, and by understanding this process through his understanding of himself, Hegel caused the completed whole of the universal real process to penetrate into his individual consciousness, and then be penetrated this consciousness.  Thus this consciousness became just as total, as universal, as the process that it revealed by understanding itself; and this fully self-conscious consciousness is absolute knowledge. . . . [emphasis added] [37]

36. Ibid., 364-365; in English, 130-132.
37. Ibid., 164-165; in English, 35.

17

1. Neither Idealism Nor Materialism

ment, raised by Marxists and later by structuralists, was that to the degree that man's self-awareness was distorted throughout most of history, the structures of his reality, and indeed of reality itself, could not be fixed through a study of human consciousness.  At any point in time, one should look instead at the exterior structures of nature or society to find "man"; more radically, there was no such center of reality, properly speaking, as man, self, or consciousness.  To Kojève, Hegel was able to escape these apparently anti-humanist conclusions by minimizing the significance of nature or external reality.  Thus Hegel's philosophical anthropology as presented by Kojève remained in question throughout the postwar years.  What is more, Kojève's -discussion of other sections of the Phenomenology contained tendencies more compatible with Heideggerian irrationalism than with Marx and Sartre.
 

3. Hyppolite: The Unhappy Consciousness

Perhaps even more than to Kojève, credit for the task of bringing Hegel to the French public should go to Jean Hyppolite.  A professor at the Sorbonne and then at the College de France, Hyppolite began writing articles on Hegel in the late 1930s after teaching himself - German by studying the Phenomenology.  He then published the first complete translation of the all-important Phenomenology of Spirit, between 1939 and 1941, which has become the standard text in France.  After World War II, Hyppolite continued to publish important commentaries on Hegel, beginning in 1947 with the Genèse et structure de la phénoménologie de 1'esprit de Hegel.  This work appeared simultaneously with Kojève's Introduction and was quickly established as a major study.  In 1948 be published the short Introduction à la philosophie de l'histoire de Hegel; in 1952, Logique et existence: essai sur la Logique de Hegel; and finally in 1955, Etudes sur Marx et Hegel, a collection of

18

The Hegel Renaissance

articles.  These books all went through multiple editions. In addition, Hyppolite taught Hegel to many of the thinkers who began to dominate French intellectual life in the late 1960s, among them Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Louis Althusser, and Jacques Derrida.  Bearing all this in mind, one must conclude that Hyppolite's interpretation of Hegel was a major influence on the Hegel renaissance.

Within the corpus of Hegel's works, Hyppolite directed his students to the Phenomenology, not only in his translation and commentary, but even in his work on Hegel's logic.  Subtitled "an essay on Hegel's logic," the book Logique et existence struck French readers as simply a further discussion of the Phenomenology rather than as an explication of Hegel's Science of Logic.[38]  Hyppolite taught the French to look to the Phenomenology with its magisterial unfolding of the historical shapes of human consciousness for the secret of a new philosophical anthropology. [39]

a. Self-Discovery and History

In a small book on the social and historical thought of Hegel, Hyppolite disclosed the motive for the sudden surge of interest in Hegel among the French:

For the French, Hegel's vision of the world . . . is indispensable to know.  According to Hegel, history and reason interpenetrate one another.  The absolute, without the forms it takes necessarily in history, would be "solitude without life," and it is with

19

1. Neither Idealism Nor Materialism

history that we must reconcile ourselves.  Freedom is precisely this reconciliation.  Hegelian freedom, we have insisted here, transcends the individual and his private life; it is a reconciliation of man with his destiny, and history is the expression of this destiny.  Our philosophers have thought about freedom in an entirely different way.  From Descartes to Bergson, our philosophy is a refusal of history: rather it is dualist, looking for freedom in a reflection of the subject on himself.[40]

The French reading of Hegel demanded a total, sharp break with the weakened tradition of Cartesian rationalism.  Only within the purity of reason could the Cartesian spin out, in analytic succession, clear and distinct ideas.  But the war had opened the inner sanctum of consciousness to the opacity and density of the outer world.  The turn toward Hegel was one of the paths that the French took to break with their past.

Unlike Kojève's lectures, Hyppolite's commentary on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit attempted to render the meaning of the text with as little intrusion of the author as

40. Jean Hyppolite, Introduction à la philosophie de l'histoire de Hegel (Paris, 1968) 123.  First edition, 1948.
4l. Simone de Beauvoir, Force of Circumstance, trans.  R. Howard (N.Y., 1964) 34.

20

The Hegel Renaissance

possible.[42] Restraining his personal preferences, Hyppolite slowly and methodically traced the dialectic of consciousness from simple awareness of the object to absolute knowledge, leaving unresolved difficulties where the text was unclear, hesitating to force the part into a whole based on some favorite thesis.  Hyppolite's reading of Hegel became the text for a whole generation of intellectuals who were satisfied to find in it more of Hegel than of Hyppolite.

Nevertheless, the meaning of- the Phenomenology as a whole had to be clarified at the outset.  In Hyppolite's rendering, the Phenomenology was not to be taken as a world history,[43] but as Hegel's "voyage of discovery." Similar in function to Descartes' Discourse on Method, it revealed bow Hegel formed his thought.[44] The different stages of consciousness described by Hegel did not fit into any pattern of world history; rather, they made intelligible to Hegel his own spiritual development.  The movement of consciousness, for example, from the master-slave relation to stoicism, skepticism and the unhappy consciousness was intelligible, in the first instance, in terms of Hegel's own education or Bildung.  The Phenomenology, to Hyppolite, resembled closely Rousseau's book on education (Emile) in which the individual proceeded through stages toward the complete development of his capacities.[45]

Although the Phenomenology proceeded according to the inner necessity of Hegel's personal growth, Hyppolite's Hegel did not view his own development as completely unique but as part of the development of humanity.  Hegel's self-comprehension was, at the same time, the self-comprehension of the age, and he could only comprehend himself as part of his age, as part of the era of the French Revolution and Napoleon.[46] Hence history entered into the Phenomenology as a necessary aspect of the individual's

42. Mikel Dufrenne, op. cit., 397 argues this same distinction between the commentaries of Kojève and Hyppolite.
43. Hyppolite was at times ambiguous and contradictory on this point.  At one point be referred to the Phenomenology as "the true concrete history of human consciousness." Genèse, 214.
44. Genèse, 50. Cf. also 55.
45. Ibid., 43.
46. Ibid., 50.

21

1. Neither Idealism Nor Materialism

inner self-knowledge.  History and reason were not opposites but mutually dependent.  For this reason, Hegel began, not as Descartes did, with a statement of self-evident, certain, absolute truth, but with recounting for himself and for his time all forms of consciousness that were each deeply distorted, "erroneous," uncertain, and relative.  In Hyppolite's formulation: "Hegel tries to overcome the subject-object dualism of Kant by beginning not with absolute knowledge but with the phenomenal, natural consciousness."[47] The beginning and the end of reflection was for Hegel the process of self-discovery through the history of consciousness.

In addition, Hegel introduced history into the Phenomenology through continuous allusions to previous philosophies and world outlooks.  The stages of consciousness were labeled with the names of past philosophies, like stoicism and skepticism, and references were made, more or less overtly, to Diderot's Rameau's Nephew, Kant's moral philosophy, Schiller's aesthetics, among others.  This practice, Hyppolite argued, misled readers into finding a direct parallel between the stages of consciousness and history when they were logical more than historical.  The historical references were necessary for Hegel because the process of the individual's self-discovery had to recount previous efforts:

The primary intention of the Phenomenology, as revealed in the Introduction, is the rise of empirical consciousness to absolute knowledge. . . . But this raising of empirical consciousness to absolute knowledge is only possible if one discovers in it the necessary stages of its ascension; these stages are still in it, and it is necessary only to descend into the interiority of memory by an operation like the Platonic reminiscence.  The individual, in effect, child of his time, possesses in himself the entire substance of the spirit of his time.  He needs only appropriate it, render it present again. . . .[48]

22

The Hegel Renaissance

Yet Hyppolite left a residual ambiguity in his account: if there was not a purely historical succession of forms of consciousness, then each must be possible at any given time.  Skepticism, for example, would be more than a Hellenistic form of consciousness.  In that case, Hegel's concrete dialectic in which each stage followed from its predecessor was inadequate.

b. From Substance to Subject

If the Phenomenology was not a world history, there was still a specific meaning in the movement of consciousness from sense certainty to absolute knowledge.  Hyppolite understood this as the change from "substance to subject,"[49] in Hegel's famous phrase.  Reality and man were first conceived as "thing," as substance, as in-itself; human consciousness understood both itself and the world as a series of fixed, hypostasized qualities.  Without self-reflection, humanity recognized itself only as a thing among things; spirit was substance.  The difficult, tragic story of mankind narrated the gradual "humanization of the in-itself." Hegel's "philosophy is a philosophy that conceives substance as subject, being as self. . . . Its being is the movement by which it poses itself as other than itself in order to become itself."[50]

The dialectic is the law of the movement from substance to subject.  The change from one level or structure of consciousness to another is not a flat, external juxtaposition of two different things.  The dialectic does not resemble an external succession of qualities or styles, say Renaissance, Baroque, Classic, Romantic.  It is an internal, series of self-transformations.  The dialectic captures human reality as moments of its development: ". . . one of the most profound traits of Hegelian speculation [was] to introduce life and becoming into thought itself . . . to make mobile the determinations of thought-that is, to think dialectically.[51]

49. Ibid., 82.
50. Ibid., 147.
51. Ibid., 128.

23

1. Neither Idealism Nor Materialism

In Hyppolite's reading, the most dangerous problem for man was that he had to become an object of his own knowledge in order to be himself.  Man had to pose himself, to externalize himself, to separate himself from himself, to negate himself, to alienate himself in order first to know himself and then to become himself.  To become conscious of his own reality, man had to see himself as Other; and this is possible only in a community.  "It is human history, the community of self-consciousness in their mutual relations, which confers on action its consistency and its reality."[52] Only by becoming "for-another" could man become "for-himself." The individual needed to deny the given immediacy of his consciousness, negate it, throw himself into the world of natural things and other men in order to return to himself with self-knowledge.  The apparently straightforward project of being oneself required a long series of detours and negations through which human reality finally constitutes itself.

With Hegel's concept of the dialectic, the French were compelled to recognize that the intimate, private structures of the self were a shared, communal reality.  The clearest example of the dramatic challenge that the reading of Hegel posed to the French stemmed from the denial of solipsistic individualism in the Phenomenology.[53]  Bourgeois thought normally teetered on the edge of solipsism, defining the center of the self as an individualist, cognitive capacity in which relations with other people were always secondary.  As in competitive market relations, the thought and even the existence of the other person was always problematical.  One could never be sure of what the other person thought, felt, or experienced.  The stable foundations of reality were therefore locked up in the consciousness of isolated individuals.  To Hegel, however, regardless of whether one attained intimate certainty of the other's mind or not, the other was needed

52. Ibid., 491.
53. Logique et existence, op. cit., 16.

24

The Hegel Renaissance

for the constitution of the self.  Hyppolite explained it this way:

just as the life of an individuality can only be fulfilled by finding itself in another individuality, so the desire that constitutes the self can only exist if it is for itself an object of another desire.  Thus the desire of life becomes the desire of another desire, or rather, in view of the necessary reciprocity of the phenomenon, human desire is always desire of the desire of another.  Thus, in human love, desire appears to the self as the desire of the desire of another.  The self needs to be beheld by the Other.[54]

54. Jean Hyppolite, Etudes sur Marx et Hegel (Paris, 1955), trans. by J. O'Neill as Studies on Marx and Hegel (N.Y., 1969) 162.  Cf. also Genèse, 154.
55. As, for example, in Hegel's treatment of Diderot in the Phenomenology.
56. Genèse, 374.
57. Ibid., 23 and 145.
58. Ibid., 38.

25

I. Neither Idealism Nor Materialism

c. The Unhappy Consciousness

With this vision of humanity burdened with alienation, Hyppolite was naturally led to exaggerate the stage of becoming that Hegel called the unhappy consciousness. just as Kojève found the master-slave relationship the pivotal shape of consciousness in the Phenomenology, Hyppolite exalted the unhappy consciousness as "the fundamental theme of the Phenomenology."[59] Emerging from the blind alleys and pitfalls of stoicism and skepticism, the unhappy consciousness represented the moment when man finally recognized the absolute but experienced it as a place beyond humanity.  In the most general terms, the unhappy consciousness was the dualist vision: "Consciousness of life is a separation of life itself, an opposing reflection . . . it is knowledge that the true is absent and finds itself rejected on the side of nothingness."[60] Hyppolite stretched the unhappy consciousness across the vast majority of the history of Western culture.  The Jews were "the unhappy people of history" because their absolute god, Yahweh, was an unattainable other.[61] Similarly, the subjectivity of the Christian Middle Ages as well as the Romantic sensibility suffered the unhappy consciousness, yearning for a beyond that forever escaped them.[62] In an earlier pivotal book on Hegel, Jean Wahl, a mystical existentialist, had already argued that the unhappy consciousness pervaded the whole history of man as the moment when the synthesis of any epoch broke down into a dualism.[63] Using the unhappy consciousness in this way, Wahl went on to make Hegel a Christian theologian, or a Kierkegaardian, who explained the human condition as the sad awareness of finitude over against the infinity of God.[64]

59. Ibid., 184.  Cf. also Studies, 172.
60. Genèse, 184.
61. Ibid., 185.
62. Ibid., 198.
63. Jean Wahl, Le Malheur de la conscience dans la philosophie de Hegel (Paris, 1929) 124.
64. Ibid., 51.

26

The Hegel Renaissance

Although he also saw the unhappy consciousness as prominent in the Phenomenology, Hyppolite tried to wrest Hegel from the theologians by refusing to see him as a "mystic." Wahl's thesis would leave Hegel in the grip of Christian dualism where the only point of contact between man and the absolute was a mystical union of souls.  On the contrary, Hyppolite explicated the Phenomenology as a statement of humanism, in which man incorporated the spirit of God as a human spirit much in the manner of Feuerbach's anthropologism.  Man recognized God as a human projection, but-and here is where Hyppolite differed from Feuerbach-as a necessary projection since man needed to separate himself from himself in order to become himself.  Hence an element of transcendence remained as a residual source of man's self-recognition, but it was no longer the Christian God.  In fact, Hyppolite discerned in Feuerbach's atheistic reduction of God to man merely another evidence of the unhappy consciousness: "But if Hegel appears to incline toward humanism, he rejects this complete reduction of God to man.  He maintains always a certain necessary transcendence of man.  The great sadness of man-a form of Unhappy Consciousness-is to be reduced to himself alone, to have absorbed the divine in himself."[65]  Hyppolite concluded that Hegel took an equivocal position between mysticism and humanism.

Hyppolite characterized Hegel's dilemma as the tension between a phenomenological and ontological philosophy: [66] was Hegel merely describing the transformation of consciousness in history or was he reducing history to the development of being; was he historicizing logic or imposing logic upon history?  The Communist theorist, Roger Garaudy, concluded that Hegel's mystifying idealism resulted from his attempt to account for the "necessity of the bourgeois revolution" of 1789 while at the same time "justifying it as the achievement of history." [67] For Hyppolite, however, this opposition

65. Genèse, 524.
66. Ibid., 59.
67. Ibid., 203n.

27

1. Neither Idealism Nor Materialism

between history and reason, or between phenomenology and logic, missed Hegel's achievement.  The philosopher's "absolute knowledge" was itself a historically new epoch that went beyond the contradictions of the French Revolution.  What Hegel achieved at the end of the Phenomenology was at once logical and historical: the beginning of a new stage of consciousness that would unfold in time.

According to one's temperament, Hegel might be criticized equally for having constructed a logomachy in which every event of history is reduced to a play of logical opposites or for having contaminated his logic with the accidents of history.  But either reproach implies a neglect of what is truly original in Hegel's work as one of the greatest attempts to relate the singular and the universal which in ordinary consciousness are juxtaposed without reconciliation .[68]

d. Work and Self-Consciousness

As well as to the Phenomenology of Spirit, French interest in Hegel in the late 1940s turned to the early writings from the Bern (1793-1796), Frankfurt (1797-1800), and Jena (1801 -1807) periods.  Of Hegel's varied concerns during these years, the French paid special attention to two: the idea of Christ as mediator and the critique of the liberal notion of work.  Once again the French found in these ideas further examples of the dialectical relation of reason and history as well as the ground of a new philosophical anthropology.

Catholics, of course, were most interested in the meaning Hegel ascribed to Christ.  In his early writings Hegel returned to Lessing's notion of religion as the moral education

68. Studies, 36.  Cf. also, Logique et existence, 231-247.

28

The Hegel Renaissance

of humanity;[69] be defined Judaism through Abraham's rejection of the world and his elevation of God as the transcendental otherness of man.  With Christ, however, God the absolute appeared to the disciples as partly human.  Christ mediated finite man and infinite God and be did so in time.[70] The absolute appeared to Christians for the first time as human and as temporal.  This notion of Christianity played a central role for Catholics with personalist and existentialist bents in rejecting the purely transcendent and atemporal concept of God, making possible some degree of reconciliation between them and Marxists.[71]

More important to us than Hegel's early concept of Christ was the discovery, in his lecture notes of the Jena period, of his criticism of the organization of work under capitalism.  Hyppolite, for one, drew the attention of Marxists to Hegel's remarkable comprehension of the dehumanizing tendencies of a nascent industrial and market economy.[72] Hegel had read the founding work of liberal political economy, Adam Smith's Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations before writing the Phenomenology.  The results of this reading were evident in the notebooks of the period known as the Jenenser Realphilosophie.[73] In them, Hegel sketched early versions of his system of logic, of nature, and, most significantly, of the phenomenology of consciousness.  In the section on consciousness, Hegel spelled out an extended critique of Smith.[74]  Hegel focussed on the distorting effects of bourgeois society (civil society in Smith; bürgerliche gesellschaft in Hegel) in its tendency to privatize consciousness: "As

69.  G.  Lessing, Theological Writings (Stanford, 1968).
70. Cf. Henri Niel, De la Médiation dans la philosophic de Hegel (Paris, 1945), 109.
7l.  Cf. Franz Gregoire, Aux Sources de la pensée de Marx: Hegel, Feuerbach (Louvain, 1947).
72. Cf. also, Pierre Naville, op. cit.
73. Edited by Johannes Hoffmeister (Hamburg, 1967). First edition, 1930
74. Ibid., 225-242.  In Hyppolite's commentary, cf. Introduction à la philosophie de l'histoire de Hegel, op. cit.,116-121.

29
 

I. Neither Idealism Nor Materialism

citizens of this state, individuals are private persons who have as their purpose their own interests. . . . "[75] Acting in the marketplace and in the family only to augment his private interests, the bourgeois particularized his existence, downgrading the social nature of his role.  Society then constituted itself beyond the individual, forcing his existence to become contingent.  Society acted upon him as a "natural necessity," a blind force, giving his business affairs an "abstract" character.[76]

In capitalist society work lost its intrinsic value, and became machinelike: "through the abstract character of his work, man becomes more mechanical, more indifferent, less spiritual."[77] Hyppolite's discussion of Hegel's critique of Smith is worth quoting at some length because it depicts graphically the way the French saw Hegel as the source of a renewed Marxism:

The individual "can work more," but, as Hegel says, "the value of his work begins to diminish." Nevertheless be is pushed to lengthen his hours of work, or to increase the intensity of his labor, in order to produce more, to be able to produce the means of subsistence.  After a variable lapse of time, this progress is canceled and the individual is thrown back to his previous level of life.  "Labor is then a commodity that is worth less." Here one sees how Hegel goes beyond Adam Smith, announcing the iron law of wages and in a sense anticipating Marx's analysis.  He perceives all the consequences of the division of labor.  Because of the abstract nature of labor, it becomes more and more mechanical, more and more absurd.  Of course, the stick is replaced by the tool and the tool yields to the machine, which is man's craft over nature, bending its blind forces to human purposes.  It reveals the in-itself of nature through the for-itself of man.  In his study of work and the machine, Hegel develops a new conception of finality and of theology in general.  But man's cleverness with regard to nature has repercussions for the individual man: in practice, it transforms intelligent and integral labor into a stupefying and partial labor, "formal and in-

75. Ibid., 118.
76. Ibid., 119.
77. Ibid.

30

The Hegel Renaissance

human." The humanization of nature results in the dehumanization of the laborer.  Finally, the movement of production and distribution as a system leads to "the restless search for machines and new markets, without any limit." We may say that as early as 1805 Hegel had envisaged the process of production for production's sake of which Ricardo spoke and which Marx described . . . . [78]

Although Marx had no knowledge of these manuscripts they demonstrated to Hyppolite and the French an essential continuity of direction in Hegel's dialectic of consciousness and Marx's later social theory.

Hegel did more, however, than indicate the contradictions of the division of labor and their alienating effect on work.  In these same manuscripts be formulated the outlines of something like Marx's concept of the Proletariat.  With the appearance of new, more mechanized industries, the individual worker totally lost control over the work process.  Hegel perceived that the capitalist economy prevented the creation of free workers; instead it generated -a new form of slavery.  The outcome of capitalist industrialization was the condemnation of a whole "class of men to factory and manufacturing work, work that was completely trivial, unhealthy, and without security, ending the need for skill and personal capacity."[80] Not only did the new society alienate labor; it also increased the gap between the rich and the poor.  Contrary to the expectations of Adam Smith and liberalism in general, the free-enterprise economy did not end the inequities of feudal privilege and did not establish a society with the greatest happiness for the greatest number.  Bourgeois society gave rise to a new contradiction, a new form of inequality: "This inequality of wealth and poverty created the greatest rending of the

78. Studies, 79-80.  Quotation marks indicate Hyppolite's references to Hegel's words.
79. Ibid., 80.
80. Introduction à la philosophie de l'histoire de Hegel, op cit., 120.  This quote is Hegel's, transcribed by Hyppolite from the Realphilosophie.

31

1. Neither Idealism Nor Materialism

social will, internal revolt and hatred."[81]

Although Hegel here presented the capitalist world of the post revolutionary epoch as oppressive and contradictory, be did not always maintain this radical posture in his later works, not even in the Phenomenology of 1807, where the critique of work in bourgeois society was somewhat muted.  Hyppolite noted the change in Hegel's social theory only partly.  He did take note of the conservative nature of Hegel's late work on politics, the Philosophy of Right, where hierarchical corporations were celebrated as true intermediaries between the individual and the state too often Hyppolite reduced Hegel's social theory to that found in the Jenenser Realphilosophie, where Hegel, as in the following passage, was made to sound like a Marxist before Marx.  "Society is . . . a communal effort, a transaction of each and all, the object itself; but in this object the individual becomes alien to himself.  This alienation, which Hegel identifies with objectification or the externalization of man through his labor, is a new concept which . . .enables Hegel to raise the human problem in all its complexity."[83] Yet this radical Hegel was just what was needed, for the French, to stimulate a rethinking of the Marxist dialectic.

4. Hegel, Marx, and Sartre

The study of the introduction of Hegel's Phenomenology into France in the postwar years raises the curtain on the major themes of French social thought through the 1960s.  Only the widespread influence of the Phenomenology in redirecting the concerns of French intellectuals can explain,

81. Ibid.  Again, these are Hegel's words.
82. Ibid., 121.  It has been reported that manuscripts of the Philosophy of Right have been uncovered, showing that Hegel censored his own radical positions.  This could end the argument over his conservatism.  Der Spiegel (March 26, 1973) 144-145.  For a similar viewpoint cf. Eric Weil, Hegel et 1'état (Paris, 1950).
83. Studies, 79.

32

The Hegel Renaissance

at the level of ideas themselves, the importance and interrelationship of Marxism and existentialism.

Historically, both Marxism and existentialism were born in the heyday of Hegel's prominence, in the 1840s.[84] As a young man, Karl Marx, with his doctorate in philosophy from Berlin University, was a member of a Hegelian philosophical club.  Traces of Marx's Hegelianism appeared most notably in two of his studies from the 1840s, both devoted to a critique of Hegel: one on the Philosophy of Right; the other on the Phenomenology.[85] Similarly, the first modern existentialist, Søren Kierkegaard, defined his own philosophical position through a study and criticism of Hegel.  This connection is often forgotten because these traditions rose to prominence only in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when Hegel's thought had, with few exceptions, faded into obscurity.  The common origins of both traditions were lost from sight as they appeared on the intellectual horizon from almost opposite directions.

In post-war France, the two important commentators on the Phenomenology, Kojève and Hyppolite, were steeped, in varying degrees, in both Marxism and existentialism and colored their presentations of Hegel with their own preconceptions.  Koiève had been swayed to existentialism through Martin Heidegger's Being and Time (1927); Hyppolite came to it primarily through Sartre's Being and Nothingness (1943).  Every page of their commentaries on the Phenomenology was loaded with existentialist concepts like anxiety, human reality (Dasein, étre-1à), the situation, becoming, the project.  Hyppolite gave as Hegel's definition of man the word-for-word description used by Sartre in Being and Nothingness: "Man is the being who is not what he is, and is what he is not."[86] Kojève

84. Cf. Karl Lowith, From Hegel to Nietzsche (N.Y., 1967), 237-247.
85. L. Easton and K. Guddat, eds. and trans., Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society (N.Y., 1967), "Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of the State," 1843, 151-202; and "Critique of Hegel's Dialectic and Philosophy in General," 314-337.
86. Logique et existence, 240; also cited in Genèse.

33

1. Neither Idealism Nor Materialism

was accused of existentializing Hegel and Hyppolite explicitly posited "a close connection between Hegel and contemporary existentialism."[88] Both Hyppolite and Kojève treated the various stages of consciousness in the Phenomenology as "forms of existing." In his outline of the Phenomenology appended to his commentary, Kojève labeled a long section "Concrete Existential Attitudes." In fact, one of the difficulties in understanding both commentators rests on determining whether the connections between Hegel and existentialism emerged from studying Hegel, or whether the existentialism of the commentators distorted their understanding of Hegel.

By the same token, Kojève and Hyppolite had affinities with Marxism and discovered Marxist ideas in Hegel.  Kojève was rebuked for this "error" by Aimé Patri: "M.  Kojève is . . . the first . . . to have attempted to constitute the intellectual ménage à trois of Hegel, Marx and Heidegger which has since that time been such a success."[89] The well-known account of the master-slave relation by Kojève, as we have seen, probably went beyond Hegel's intentions in depicting the revolutionary nature of the slave.  For his part, Hyppolite devoted many articles to the careful definition of the relationship of Hegel and Marx, finally collected as Studies in Marx and Hegel.  In this book, Hyppolite summarized in the following way the whole question of the trinity: Hegel, Marx, and existentialism.

Starting from the Christian teaching which gathers Humanity in the living God, Hegel had sketched a philosophy which in effect finally reduced nature, religion, and the State, respectively, to the philosophy of nature, the philosophy of religion, and the philosophy of Right.  Kierkegaard and Marx, each in his own way, showed the existential emptiness of this contemplative reduction.  But where one went back upon philosophy to religion, to an existential concept of religious man, the other pushed the critique of religion on into the critique of the social foundations of religion and of philosophy itself, which Marx called a

34

The Hegel Renaissance

"spoof of idealism." [90]

90. Studies, 101.

35