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Marx’s criticism of Hegel amounts to a criticism of both idealism and the role of abstract reason in world history. Both Marx and Hegel are committed to dialectical logic, in which a synthesis “emerges” from the opposition of a thesis and an antithesis. For Marx, however, economic realities such as the concrete ownership and operation of the “means of production”, are far more important that the abstract ideas of justice and freedom that have come down to us via the Greeks and the Enlightenment. Hegel, as we know, claimed that he was turning Kantian Philosophy on its head, and Marx in his turn said the same about Hegelian Phenomenology. Some hoped in vain that the double inversion would return us to the status quo of the Enlightenment, but the “modern spirit” of this double inversion left us in a limbo of ambiguity that in its turn was explored by later phenomenologists. With Marx, we are invited to consider an empirical sociological theory that does not engage with Aristotelian or Kantian categories or principles. We find little reference, for example, to Aristotle’s prediction that it would be the political force of the middle class that would create future political stability. Marx eschewed all forms of abstraction of the kind we find in Aristotle and Kant, in favour of a pragmatic realism based on concrete actions and processes.
Ricoeur complains that the downfall of Hegelian Philosophy came suddenly like an earthquake, but he neglects to observe that a Kantian critical Philosophy experienced a very similar fate at the hands of Hegelian Phenomenology. The spirit of these times was obviously one in which “change” was occurring at ever increasing rates. One “inversion”, however, is worth noting, and that is the reversal involved in Hegel’s abandonment of the principle of noncontradiction (so important in Kantian Logic), for the principle of contradiction which negated any thesis into an antithesis. This negation was not the negation of a proposition in a judgement, but rather the negation of a concept which would remain “incomplete” until the final synthesis occurred when the absolute actualised itself in world-history. Spirit was an important part of this actualisation or transformational process, in which the “cunning of reason” mobilises concrete passions in a process that is moving toward a kind of telos. Negation, then, becomes the key moment of dialectical reasoning, which alone is necessary in an account of the “progress” of world-history. Ricoeur points out that, for Hegel:
“The history of the world, therefore is, in essence “the expression of spirit in time just as nature is the expression of idea in space.”(P.200)
Time, on this kind of phenomenological account, possesses the property of Negation, and the Philosophy of History becomes subservient to the Spirit of History, because Philosophy, Hegel argues, always arrives on the scene too late after the actualisation of Spirit. The past, for Hegel, and for phenomenology, is also defined by Negation–it is not the present. Yet the spiritual priority of the temporal dimension of the present over the dimensions of the past and the future introduces an idea of “incompleteness” or insufficiency into these other dimensions, which then requires negation as part of their essence-specifying definitions. We ought to recall Heidegger’s reservations over prioritising the present. The present for him was defined in terms of what was ready-to hand, and what various objects in the environment could be used for ,in what he called a network of instrumentalities. What was merely present-at-hand for an observing form of consciousness was problematic for Heidegger. Acting-in-order-to do something, was his major emphasis. Defining the past in terms of not being present marginalises the power of memory to correctly recall the past in a truth-making synthesis and thereby characterises the records of our memory, namely historical texts as in some way insufficient or incomplete. It is the present that bears the burden of the real in such a situation, and this insufficiency or incompleteness is then projected onto the relation these dimensions have to reality. Hegel, in his appeal to the importance of negation, speaks of the Concept rather than the Judgement. Only the Concept of the Absolute, he argues, escapes the assignment of the specification of insufficiency or incompleteness. The Absolute, it seems is the result of a supreme “plot” of History that can not be appreciated by our human forms of consciousness. Ricoeur characterises this moment of actualisation of the Absolute in the following terms:
“historical consciousness’s understanding of itself, its self-understanding.”(P.206)
He does not, however, see any difficulty in the ambiguity of the ontological status of this understanding, namely that it is impossible to say whether the above event was something we did, or rather something that happened to us. For Aristotle, Kant and Wittgenstein, this form of ambiguity, effaces a key ontological distinction and principle in the field of action, and risks conflating the practical and the theoretical aspects of our existence. This ontological distinction is also a key element in the categorical understanding of the reality of action, as conceived in the arenas of Philosophy of Philosophical Psychology, Ethics, and Politics. The appeal to consciousness, in this context, is, of course, also problematic, given its primarily sensible nature. Ricoeur does, however, claim to leave Hegel behind in his theorising but the “trace” of Hegelian phenomenology never seems far away and haunts much of his reasoning when he engages in the marginalisation of memory, understanding and reason.