Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche. Henri Lefebvre
inherent to the analysis of practice, a finality subordinating causality and necessity. At the same time, he hesitated before the rationality that in this schema was immanent to existing society and reality. How long would the bourgeoisie survive? Would it exhaust its inherent rationality? Did this reason itself have to be broken, along with the state and property relations? Would the bourgeoisie continue its historic mission for a long time, the growth of the productive forces until the inevitable qualitative leap? Where were the internal limits of capitalism? If there is a rationality everywhere, it is also to be found in this society, which is easily qualified as absurd on the grounds of its injustice and inhumanity.
Marx posited a meaning of becoming, of history, without demonstrating it; he accepted Hegelian (Western) logos without subjecting it to a fundamental critique. Hegel’s still-theological hypothesis passed through the sieve (the ‘break’) in Marx’s thought. No more than Hegel did Marx question the origin of Western rationality, its genesis or genealogy: Judeo-Christianity, Greco-Latin thought, industry and technology. Marx was content with an attenuation of Hegelian theology (theodicy) and the epic of the Idea. Sometimes Marx and Engels came up against some conceptions that were irreducible to their schematization; for example, logic and law. Why had logic (born in Greece) continued across the Western societies and their modes of production? What relationship was there between ideologies and the dialectic? As for law, elaborated in Rome, this lasted until its renascence in the bourgeois-democratic revolution, with the Napoleonic code civil. Accordingly, the social transition to communism would not be able to do without law and laws, with the result that the triadic schema – from unconscious customs under primitive communism, through law in the course of history, to conscious custom within ‘developed communism’ – remains abstract. Equally, Marx was unable to say much about the future communist society, other than that the long transition would be punctuated by ends: end of capitalism by revolution; end of labour by automation; end of law by custom; end of state, nation, homeland, working class, bourgeoisie, a separate economy and a dominant polity, etc. Nietzsche would add to this list: the death of God and man.
One question arises when thought reflects on this path signposted by ends and deaths, as a set of reefs are signalled by crosses and shipwrecks: ‘Will not logos itself come to an end, exhausted, passed into writing and writings – even writing itself, born as it was from living speech and word?’
If Hegel maintained with incomparable vigour and intolerable rigour the primacy of knowledge as code of the ‘real’, hence the primacy of theory, system, concept (thus doing away with rifts, separations, splits and conflicts), Marx already hesitated between cognition, partially transferred to production, and creative action, practical living and experience, the key preoccupation of the famous 1844 Manuscripts. With Marx, the productive activity intended to assure doctrinal unity divides in two: a) production (manufacture) of material things, exchangeable goods, commodities, machines, in other words, means of production; b) production of social relations, creation of artworks, ideas, institutions, cognitions (connaissances), language, aesthetic objects, innovative acts. While Hegel had successfully attempted a unitary concept in the narrow context of knowledge, Marx failed in the wider framework of action. Production and creation fell apart, despite his efforts to combine them, each threatening to go its own way.
9) This is how avant-garde European thought led towards what we can retrospectively call the ‘Nietzschean crisis’. The problem of understanding had received no solution. The revolution failed in 1848 and again in 1871. What was the outcome of the rationality that Hegel had seen as immanent in the state, and Marx in social (industrial) practice? Wars. At the same moment as Nietzsche, and for quite similar reasons, Rimbaud declared that it was life that had to be changed, and love reinvented. But the proud edifice of Hegelianism bridled, outdoing in arrogance and power the Bonapartist state that had issued from the great French Revolution. Bismarck, a political strategist with great vision, understood that certain objectives of the democratic revolution could be realized ‘from above’, by consolidating the state instead of transforming it – national unity, for example. He also envisaged integrating into the national state the new class that was in the course of formation, the proletariat. From this point, Germany, which had brought the modern world philosophy, committed itself to the most pedantic historiographic erudition, to philistinism. It threatened to conquer Europe, initially through a ‘culture’ that denied civilization. The recourse to myth (Wagner) showed this decadence of Western logos, with its two aspects that were seemingly incompatible but actually mutually supporting: knowledge and power. A descent into hell began, starting with descent into the abyss of consciousness, psychism, the unconscious, will and desire – with Schopenhauer. A vain fascination, as Nietzsche said and showed …
Shameless and unheeding logos, proud of its accumulated knowledge and methods, conveyed some myths of its own. The first among these, in the name of which it exerted its worst blackmail, was irrationality: any criticism of reason would lead to unreason and an apology for violence. Whereas it is logos itself that has cruelty as its obverse side, its counterpart and counterpoint. Whereas the appeal from conceptual knowledge to a higher form of understanding has a meaning and must be heard.
Yet Nietzsche did not exhaust the list of myths, manipulations and blackmails bound up with the exercise of logos, power and cognition. He could not have known them all in his day, and some of them might have turned against him. The myth of the Titan – the modern Prometheus – who breaks the great social and political machine, a myth that exalted the modern working class, Nietzsche took up in his own way when he sought to ‘philosophize with a hammer’. Similarly, with the opposite and corollary myth of the clever little imp who somewhere disrupts a little cog in the same machine, so that it comes to a halt and stops functioning,28 the forces of negation (protest, contestation) are themselves dislocated. But this remark leads on to a different story …
10) To continue the confrontation between the members of the Hegel-Marx-Nietzsche triad, in other words, between the three dominant thoughts on the modernity that they each sought to grasp, we have to do away with political encumbrances and hypotheses. This point deserves close attention.29
a) Hegel and Hegelianism may be charged with reaction pure and simple. A rightist politics that saw itself not just as Realpolitik but as theoretically true, would be justified in Hegel by analysis of the ‘real’, of the nation and the pays réel, the necessary institutions. This would also legitimate both state and state apparatuses, along with political apparatuses in general and the predominance of the statesman over all other ‘moments’ of knowledge, culture, etc.
Now, there is this in Hegel: theorization and rationalization of the political act. There is in him the justification, along with the state, of a ‘state of things’ in which the totality of the real comes to a halt, stagnates and is blocked.
If there was only this in Hegel, would he merit the present confrontation? Would there be ground and cause for a hearing? No. First of all, Hegelianism contains, together with this theorization, the confession and denunciation of this ‘state of things’. It makes possible an analysis. Second, Hegel, who sought to be and believed himself a defender of freedom, also rejected and rebutted this extreme case: stagnation, the display of the accomplished. He conceived a compromise that would bring harmony between authority and freedom. Only the liberal state left room for its ‘moments’ and for the flexibility of its members. It alone was able to regenerate itself, re-produce itself with an inherent dynamism, a vitality both immanent and rational. For Hegel, obsolescent recourse to fait accompli, to unrestrained violence, indicated that the final equilibrium had not been achieved; it was either incomplete or had failed. If, in the last century and a half, the state has revealed its ‘worst side’, which Hegel had theorized, we cannot make Hegel’s doctrine responsible. A symptom more than a cause or a reason, Hegelianism cannot be got rid of as easily as something like the legal historicism of Savigny, for example. It can be used (and certainly has been) to justify sticking to the past, in terms of historicism, nationalism, even chauvinism. These interpretations and alterations are part of the file, but they do not prevent us compiling this.
b) The same is true of Stalinism for Marx. If there is a ‘revisionist’ ideology in relation to Marx’s thought, it is certainly this dark cloud. True, the Stalinist mystifiers launched the ‘revisionist’