Where Do We Go: Part 1.5

Before we move on to the long-awaited sequel, let’s first take a step back and look at a crucial question: Which Hegel?

Hegel, being one of the most speculative thinkers there is, both attracts and repels the loyalty of great minds. Some, like Merleau-Ponty and Žižek, see Hegel as a powerful, radical tool in philosophy that reveals the nature of nature and “appropriates” it for our own use. Others, such as Bertrand Russell and my best friend Sam, consider Hegel to be an incoherent bag of horseshit. Others in the continental school, such as Adorno, consider Hegel’s system to be one that tastelessly ingests thoughts and does nothing with them—or better, as Žižek dubbed it in his book The Sublime Object of Ideology, a system of constipation. Ideas are totalized (through sublation) at the Idea but never pass through to their actuality.

What causes this disparity? Is Hegel the charlatan that so many characterize him to be, or is he the thinker with the potential to bring about his promised Absolute Spirit? The key lies in which Hegel people see: the Hegel in flesh or the Hegel in spirit. Most of the critics of Hegel, claim the defenders of Hegel, often misinterpret what Hegel is saying: the critics take Hegel too much at the literal level and often miss the value Hegel’s system really builds. Hence, they take Hegel’s flesh and get caught up in the dry words and schemas that Hegel writes. A lively example would be Žižek’s critique of Adorno in The Sublime Object of Ideology, where Žižek says Adorno’s critiques of Hegel’s sublation as a simple aggregate of concepts (implying Hegel’s system of historical development is not “factual”; it is the subject himself that sublates the concepts, while in reality (nature) nothing is actually going on—it’s all a man’s daydream, and there is no dialectical process) miss the true nature of sublation.

Sublation, according to Žižek, is a process of reduction, allowing the subject to realize he has no control over reality’s happenings and to “release nature from the subject.” It is a Hegelian shitting, in contrast to Adorno’s constipation. In other words, sublation is the process not of totalization but of negation: it is the process where we realize the inherent negativity in things of nature. Instead of “resolving” them, the negativity remains, haunting the synthesis as material to be used for further synthesis. Therefore, sublation—the move to resolve—is not to “eat them and constipate their ideas” but to recognize they exist, to release the concepts back to nature—to shit them out so the waste can fertilize taller trees.

This is the same thing Merleau-Ponty did to Alain (Émile-Auguste Chartier) in his Adventures of the Dialectic: through clarifying the end goals of Marx and Hegel’s dialectic and our position within their system, Merleau-Ponty refutes Alain’s politics of understanding by fleshing out the definition of a politics of reason (which is essentially a Hegelian and Marxian political system). To take these “reappropriations” of Hegel is to take his spirit. Those who take Hegel’s spirit, in contrast to those who take Hegel’s flesh, are not tied to the dry schemas and concepts. They “transform” them, assigning them more appropriate and deeper meaning while preserving the essence of Hegel.

For our endeavors, we are going to take Hegel’s spirit—more precisely, Žižek’s “spirit of Hegel.” This is for two reasons: (1) his “version” of Hegel avoids making the concession that Merleau-Ponty made—we are unable to see the ultimate truth; we see what we are right now and maybe in this particular cycle—and (2) it allows us to establish a “certain future” in line with Deleuze (and the prominent idea in many other philosophies) of the radical chaos of reality and our inability to captivate it.