Eternity is not an abstraction from time, it is not something existing before or after time (then eternity would become just one of the moments of time). Kant's view of time as receptacle engulfing everything as in a flowing stream is incorrect, according to Hegel. The only reason that things are in time is that things are finite and not the other way around. Time is the process of actual things themselves.

The Now, for Hegel, acquires supreme significance, as it is to be distinguished from the individual Now, which perishes when uttered. Duration is all the individual Nows and the sublations of this process (of things which do not endure). Eternity as absolute timelessness is different from duration. There is no natural time in eternity, Time is its Notion, and as every Notion, is eternal, it is the absolute Presence. Duration is only a relative sublating of time, while eternity is infinite. What is not in time is that in which there is no process. The universal, as law, also has a process within it and lives only as a process , but is not part of the process ( is different from one moment of the process), it contains its two sides, and is itself processless. Being phenomenal, law is in the time-process, but in their Notion the excluded differences are reconciled and co-exist in peace again. The Spirit, holds Hegel, transcends time, it is eternal, in and for-itself, and is not part of the time-process, because it does not lose itself in one side of the process. The individual is on one side a genus, but it is separated from the universal as well, and as such it is only one side of the process, and is subject to change: it falls into time.

Present, future and past are the dimensions of time, and as such are the becoming of externality, where being passes over into nothing, and nothing passes over into being. The Now is the vanishing of these differences into singularity. The present is exclusive of all other moments and continuous in them, it is the vanishing of being into nothing and of nothing into being. The abstract moment of the past and the future are negative, while the Now is an affirmative unity of what has been and will be negative. But this being is itself abstract, it vanishes into nothing. In Nature, moreover, holds Hegel, being does not come to a distinction of these dimensions as existent, they are in subjective imagination, in remembrance and fear or hope. The past and future of time are being in Nature as space, for space is negated time. The dimensions posit for intuition the Notion of time. Time is becoming in its reality. The abstract moments of the unity, in which becoming is as the whole, are posited under different determinations, which are again a unity of being and nothing; but they are also distinguished. The difference is only that of coming-to-be and passing away.

In the Past being is the foundation, the beginning; the past can be natural history of the world, or natural events, but each has the characteristic of non-being added to it. And in the Future this is reversed: non-being is the foundation, the first determination or starting point, and being comes later.

The Present is an indifferent unity of both, neither are determinant; the past is not and the being of the Now is the non-being of, and the non-being of its being is the Future. The Present is this negative unity: the non-being of the being, where the Past is replaced by the Now, and the being of non-being, which is contained in the Present, is the Future. Only the present is, Before and After are not. The Present is a result of the Past and contains the Future: it is eternity as true Present.

Why are space and time the negative unity of externality, according to Hegel? The distinction of objective and subjective consciousness confronting space and time does not really apply to them. If these determinations were applied to space and time, the former would be abstract objectivity, while the latter would be abstract subjectivity. Still, time and space are the simple Notion in its uttermost externality and abstraction - they are intuited mere Becoming, pure being-within-self as sheer coming-out-of-self. What does this mean?

The external, or outer, for Hegel, is not always opposed the internal, or inward. If two things are external, this means they are indifferent to each other, intrinsically unconnected and independently alternate. Nature is other and external to Spirit, and is therefore, other and external to itself, spread out in space and time. The internal concerns the realm of Spirit: the Spirit has inner life, which is contrasted with its Dasein, its determinate being, viz. its body exterior. On the other hand, the internality of the Spirit is also contrasted with the outerness of the external world. Sometimes the internal is identical to the "in-itself", which needs to be realized and revealed. Internality is consciousness.

Inner and outer are correlative opposites - the internal essence of a thing and its outward appearance. Each, then, logically involves the other. The inner essence of actual things must correspond or have the same content as their outer or their appearance. The inner may have different meanings: on the one hand it could be the undeveloped potentiality of a thing, on the other hand, as essence, the inner means the core of a thing, which is fully developed - like the essence of nature or its inner purposes. It seems that in cases like the latter inner and outer cannot differ, like in the fully developed entity of nature, where its inner may not be at the surface, but is in principle accessible to observation and thought. Space and time are self-external or outside themselves, because they are the sensory and nature, and not simply external to human being.

Why are time and space defined as pure Quantity? Are not time and space (being the Notion) rather pure Quality? In his “Logic”, Hegel equates Quality with determinacy, determinateness (the Quality of a judgment is positive, negative or infinite). Quality is the being-for-itself, determining the entity of a thing. While a thing can lose its property and remain itself, it cannot lose its quality and endure the loss. Quantity, on the other hand, is being related only to itself and not to anything else, and Quality passes into Quantity when it becomes an atom or a unit, which in turn generates other atoms or units alongside itself. Quantities for Hegel are discrete or continuous, and either extensive or extensive.

Space and Time are for Hegel mathematical, and mathematics deals exclusively with Quantity. The Quantum, or the qualified something, involves a limit and Quantitative Infinity consists of the endless overcoming of the limit. A Quality is bounded by something different from itself. Quality emerges when the ratio between two variables remains constant, and Quality is the emergence of the enduring feature for an entity, within the sphere of Quantity, whose characteristic it is that is can be increased or decreased endlessly. When space and time are treated mathematically, they lose some of their peculiar pattern and become a matter of logic. These objects are treated in mathematics purely quantitatively. Time can be expressed in configurations only when Understanding has frozen it and reduced its negativity to the unit. Mathematics is the science of Understanding, the science of finite determinations of magnitude, it should not, according to Hegel, be mixed with the Notion, which is of a quite different nature.

Time, therefore, would be only a unit, variously combined and linked, and, in as far as applied mathematics is concerned, according to Hegel, time is connected with the theory of motion, but applied mathematics is just an application of pure mathematics and not an immanent science. Thoughts are not to be adequately expressed through the medium of numbers and spatial figures, especially when thoughts are complex, and the fluidness and ambiguity of the Notion can only be represented by an explanation.

Space can turn into time and time - into space: space is within itself the contradiction of indifferent assuredness and differenceless continuity, the pure negativity of itself , and the transition, first of all into time. Similarly, time is the immediate collapse into indifference, into undifferentiated assuredness or space, because its opposed moments, which are held together in unity, immediately sublate themselves.

This way, holds Hegel, the point as a negative determination of space is posited and concrete within itself through the total negativity which is time; and the point, being concrete this way, becomes Place. The negative of space is time, and the positive being of the differences of time is space. The unity of space and time is expressed as their transition of one into the other. The Here is the same time as the Now, for it is the point of duration. The unity of Here and Now is Place.

Place is at first space and time as posited contradictions in themselves, and then becomes the posited identity of space and time. Place is spatial singularity, spatial Now and immediately it is indifferent towards itself at this place, it becomes the negation of itself, it is indifferent as this place, it is another place altogether. One place only points to another place, and so sublates itself and becomes another, and then the differences are sublated themselves: Place is the universal Here. There are three different places: the present place, the place to be occupied, and the place vacated. The vanishing of the dimensions of time is frozen. The infinite Notion is where the Here is, for time is posited within its own self. At the same time there is only one place, the universal of these places, which is unchanged - it is duration, existing in accordance with Notion.

The vanishing and the self-regeneration of space in time and time in space Hegel calls Motion. Motion is the immediate unity of Time and Space, where Time has real existence through Space, and Space is first differentiated by Time. The velocity, the quantum of Motion is Space in relation to a specific Time elapsed. Space and Time obtain actuality in Motion. Motion is a process in which time posits itself spatially as place, but in which place is indifferent as well spatially and is immediately posited as temporal. But the process does not end here, because this becoming is itself the collapsing of the contradiction, and this way Matter arises as the immediately identical and existent unity of space and time.

Matter is the transition of the ideality into reality, from the abstract into the concrete, and time and space give the beginning to reality, which appears as matter. In a way space and time, which are empty and indifferent to what fills them are filled with matter from outside. Matter is at the same time itself space and time in their identity, material things are essentially spatial and temporal. This way a brick, holds Hegel, does not kill a man just because it is a brick, but brings about such result only by virtue of the velocity it has acquired; that is to say, the man is killed by space and time. If Motion is the process, the transition of Time into Space and Space into Time, Matter is the relation of Space and Time as a peaceful identity. Matter is the first reality, existent being-for-self, it is not just an abstract being, it is the positive existence of Space, which is at the same time the first real limit in Space. Matter as well has a moment of its negativity, and this is the repulsion of matter. But since these different matters are one and the same, matter is essentially the negative unity of this separated being-for-self and is therefore continuous.

Why are Space and Time for Hegel bad infinities? Then, why are they absolute negatives? Space and Time (as well as numbers) require an infinitely large that is actual, rather than potential. There were two problems, connected with the infinite, according to Hegel:

First, if the infinite is distinct from the finite, it must be limited by the finite and is thus finite, rather than infinite. Therefore, the infinite cannot be distinct from the finite, but rather it involves the finite as an aspect, or "moment" of itself.

Second: an infinite progress or regress is vicious, self-defeating and intellectually incoherent (then can humanity have a goal which it ought to strive for, but cannot attain in finite time). In reality, when we proceed through an infinite series, we only reach a finite segment of it, never the infinite itself. Therefore, for Hegel, the infinite is not genuinely infinite, an infinite series contains its finite terms and is not sharply distinct from them.

The bad infinite of the Understanding is distinguishable, for Hegel, from the true infinite of Reason, which involves the finite rather than contrasts with it, and does not go on forever. The bad infinite is represented by a straight line, infinitely extended at both sides, the true infinite - by a circle, which is finite in a way, but not bounded. The circular structure contrasts the infinite advancing from one thing to another. True infinity is often seen as the negation of the negation: the finite is the negative, which is in turn negated to produce an affirmative; the spirit or self-consciousness, which is not limited by its other, but at home in it or logic itself, where thought has itself as its object and does not depend on a limiting other: the absolute idea includes all the thought-determinations that appear in the “Logic”. The negation of the negation is, in this case, in the adoption of a creed that includes all others and does not negate them, but only their claims to exclusivity or their negations of each other. This type of double negation, for Hegel, is infinity (in contrast to bad infinity, where there is an endless procession of finite entries, each of which negates its predecessor).

The main application of true infinity is to the universe as a whole where God cannot be distinct from the world, because then both God and the World would be two finite entities and could not be self-explanatory or self-sustaining. The world cannot go forward and backward forever: It must have a self-contained circular form . Thought about the world cannot be distinct from the world, because the thought and being would both limit each other. That is the reason thought is identical to the world (but also in a different form), and it too is circular. The Notion, then, is as infinite as the world, and God must be the logical structure of the World.

Space and time are bad infinities for Hegel, who does not suggest explicitly that space is circular, so that movement in straight line should return to its starting point in the end. At the same time Hegel does hold that circular motion is the spatial or subsistent unity of the dimensions of time.

Rectilinear motion is not Motion in and for itself, but Motion in subjection to an Other in which it has become a predicate or a sublated moment. The restoration of the duration of the Point, as opposed to its motion, is the restoration of Place as unmoved. But this restored Place is not immediate Place, but Place, which has returned out of alteration, and the result and ground of Motion, as forming a dimension, i.e. as opposed to the other moments, it is the center.

This return of the line is the circle; it is the now, before and after, which have closed together in a unity in which these dimensions are indifferent, so that before is actually after and vice versa. It is in circular motion that the necessary paralysis of these dimensions is first posited in space. Circular motion is the spatial or subsistent unity of the dimensions of time. The point proceeds towards a place, which is its future, and leaves one, which is the past; but what it has left behind is at the same time what it still has to reach: it has been already at the place which it is reaching. Its goal is the point, which is its past; and this is the truth of time, that the goal is not the future but the past.

This way Hegel comes close to Nietzsche, reviving the old idea of Pythagorus that time is circular in the endless recurrence of exactly similar events, which can even be numerically identical. History, for Hegel, is a process towards a goal, it is not an eternal return. But is history going to an end and is it going to a bad infinity, even if we cannot know how it will come to be and must remain in the true infinity of the present? Some of these questions are considered in Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Spirit”.

VI. Hegel's Dialectic and Consciousness

“The philosopher’s stone is at the end of a rainbow,
and even if we could reach it, it would turn to dust in our hands.”
R.Bambrough, “Reason, Truth and God”.

In Hegel’s world, as in Heraclitus’, everything is in flux; Hegel believes, with Aristotle, that the Ideas or essences are in the things in flux and they are self-developing, emerging and self-creating. They move towards a self-realizing and self-realized final cause in itself, this final cause being the Absolute Idea or the Idea. Each of the stages has preceding ones, from which it originates. Similar to Plato, Hegel sees the state as an organism with a conscious, thinking essence that is its reason or Spirit. Like Heraclitus, Hegel believes in the unity or identity of opposites and their dialectical progress, which are the main ideas of Hegel’s dialectics.

In his “Critique of Pure Reason” Kant has shown in the antinomies that when leaving the field of experience, our speculation can have no scientific status, since to every argument there is an equally valid counter argument. For Hegel it is in the nature of Spirit that it must contradict itself; it is in the very essence of all rationality that it must work with contradictions and antinomies, for this is just the way in which reason develops. Reason’s development proceeds dialectically in three parts: a thesis – an antithesis – a synthesis (which is a unity of opposites on a higher level). This forms the dialectic triad. Everything is in flux, even essences. Essences or ideas develop and their development is self-moving and dialectical. The latest stage of every development is reasonable, good and true, for it supersedes all previous stages.

Heraclitus had maintained that there is a hidden reason in history; for Hegel history is the development of something real, therefore something rational. The evolution of the real world, of which history is the most important part, is identical with a kind-of logical operation or with a process of reasoning: history is the thought-process of Absolute Spirit or World Spirit, it is a manifestation of that Spirit, a kind of dialectical syllogism. The first of these steps is Oriental despotism, the second - is formed by the Greek and Roman democracies and aristocracies, and the third, the highest, according to Hegel, is the Germanic Monarchy. Spirit has no past, no future, but is essentially now; the present form of the Spirit contains and surpasses all previous steps.

In the “Phenomenology” Hegel maintains that to the question “What is the Now?” we reply, for example, that now is nighttime. . . Yet we look again at the truth we have written down, look at it now, at this noontime, and we shall have to say it has turned stale and become out of date. Now stands for a particular, present moment, it is ambiguous because the present is always changing. The trouble is that by writing it down the content of the “now” has gone – the mere recording of a datum of experience cannot be an adequate reference since something, not given in sensory experience, is required. With time, we make a necessary reference to before and after, which is not permissible from the standpoint of sense-certainty.

For Hegel, something similar happens with the “here” – we point to a tree then turn and it is a house. Can we conclude that Hegel is denying the possibility of making any intelligible unique reference to particulars on the grounds that whatever we refer to with the words “here”, “now” and “this” cannot be isolated because of the world and the particulars in it are in a state of flux and can never be arrested? Hegel’s argument is based on the Heraclitean thesis that one cannot step twice into the same river, since time and matter are never at rest. Loewenberg views language as essentially a naming process, albeit an inadequate process. He states:

“ An instant intuition simply does not endure long enough to permit its datum to be directly indicated: the datum indicated is but a datum of another intuition. How point to an intuited datum without freezing the intuition entertaining it? “

It would follow that Hegel is saying that our ordinary concepts of “here” , “now” and “this” are somehow inexact – but this is not Hegel’s position at all. “Here” Hegel treats as a proper name for a datum of sense and “now” as a proper name for a unit of time. Space and time can be interpreted as a series of “heres” and “nows”.

The “this” as a proper name means pointing is logically prior to the universal, to a framework of mediations, holds Hegel.

“. . . The This of sense, which is “meant”, cannot be reached by language, which belongs to consciousness, i.e. to what is inherently universal.”

Having failed to find satisfaction in the objective account of the foundations of language, the inquiry focuses upon the subjective account. Philosophical doctrines easily pass into their opposites (as sensory realism passes into idealism and solipsism). Whenever one points when one says “This, here, now”, we can always ask “What, where, when?” . But words and gestures are incomplete outside a culture, which presupposes a highly complex learning system. Hegel is close to Wittgenstein’s view that words have a meaning only within a context of a system of rules. But this is opposite of the claims of a self-consciousness to whom pointing and gestures are the grounds upon which the edifice of language is built, since it now appears that we cannot have the grounds without the language.

Kant argued that we can never see reality as it is; for we can only comprehend our experiences within the frameworks of space, time and causation. Space, time and causation are not part of reality, but the necessary forms in which we grasp it, therefore we can never know things as they are independently of our knowledge. But for Hegel the examination of knowledge can only be carried out by an act of knowledge. To examine this so-called instrument is the same thing as to know it. But to seek to know before we know is absurd as the wise resolution of Scholasticus not to venture into the water until we had learned to swim. Therefore, the only possible approach to knowledge is an examination of consciousness from the inside as it appears to itself – the phenomenology of mind. Hegel starts from the most primitive form of consciousness, with certainty at the level of sense-experience or sense-certainty, which simply records the data received by our senses, the knowledge of the particular thing present to our senses, without any attempts to order or classify the raw information received by the senses. It cannot describe experiences, it is aware only of what is now present to it, it is the certainty of the “this”, “here” and “now” without any conceptual schemes involving space, tie or categories, it is just the direct awareness of the object as it is.

As mentioned above, to utter this knowledge is to become incoherent. For Hegel sense certainty cannot be expressed in language at all, because sense certainty is knowledge of the pure particular, while language involves bringing something under some more general label. “Now”, “here” and “this” are universals as well as they do not express the pure particular. For Hegel, therefore, knowledge is impossible without universal concepts. What about proper names? Is it to be assumed as well that everything should be put into words?

For Hegel the irrational or holding an opinion on something is not knowledge in so far as it is not brought into the open. It can become knowledge if it is brought into the open. So the next form of consciousness actively attempts to create some unity and coherence out of the raw data of sense experience: it is the emergence of self-consciousness. Hegel maintains that the distinction between perception and understanding is in that in perception consciousness classifies objects according to universal properties and in understanding consciousness imposes its own laws on reality. Talking of laws Hegel has in mind Newton’s laws of physics and the universe based on them, so “gravity” and “force” are not things in reality, but constructs made by our understanding to grasp reality. The understanding consciousness does not see constructs for what they are, but takes them as objects to be understood.

Consciousness is trying to understand its own creations, it has itself for its object. Consciousness has, therefore, reached a point at which it can reflect upon itself. This is when the desiring mind emerges. Self-consciousness, for Hegel, cannot exist in isolation – to form a proper picture of itself it needs a contrast, an object from which to differentiate itself. I can only become aware of myself if I am also aware of something else that is not myself. But this external object is also something foreign to consciousness, an opposition to it. There is a peculiar love-hate between self-consciousness and the external object and it comes to the surface in the form of desire – a wish to possess; not destroy, but transform into something that is mine and thus strip it of its foreignness. Self-consciousness finds that to realize itself fully it must set about changing the external world and making it its own. Desire expresses that self-consciousness needs an external object, and yet finds itself limited by anything that is outside itself. It is a constantly unsatisfactory state of self-consciousness. The only way a solution is reached is by making the object of self-consciousness another self-consciousness that cannot be simply negated as an external object. This is when the master-slave dialectics emerges: two self-consciousnesses and each needs the other to establish its own awareness of itself. What does it require of the other? For Hegel it is an acknowledgement or recognition, “being self-assured”.

Self-consciousness seeks to become pure, to show that it is not attached to mere material objects. By seeking to destroy the other (in a way) to show that self-consciousness is not dependent on the body of the other and risking its own life, self-consciousness shows it is not attached to its own physicality. Therefore the relationship is combat and not a peaceful mutual recognition. It is better to regard it making explicit what was already implicit. In this sense in proving a theorem I do not make it true, I only show it was true all along. Therefore no demonstration is needed. The victor realizes the other self-consciousness, and this is vital to it. No destruction takes place, but a dependency. The relationship is ruler / ruled, which is not a stable condition for the master’s need for acknowledgement is in need of another independent self-consciousness.

The master has failed to achieve the recognition it required. The slave as well has no recognition, but shapes and masters the material objects on which he works, making his own ideas into something permanent, an external object. Through this the slave becomes more aware of his own consciousness, for he sees it in front of him as something objective. In labour – whatever kind that is – the slave discovers that he has a mind of his own.

Here the Phenomenology becomes more historical as Hegel brings in a section on Stoicism as bridging the gulf between master and slave. The retreat into one’s consciousness gives freedom: in thinking I am free because I am not in another, but remain simply and solely in touch with myself; and the object, which for me is my essential reality is my own existence. For Hegel the essence of this consciousness is to be free, on the throne or in chains. Hegel talks of skepticism after stoicism and then of the “unhappy consciousness”. The unhappy consciousness is a form that existed under Christianity, or for Hegel also “the alienated soul”. The master-slave dualism is concentrated into one consciousness, but the two elements are not unified. Self-consciousness aspires to be independent of all material, but is part of the material world in that it has desires, pains and pleasures that are real to it. Therefore it is divided against itself.

What the unhappy consciousness does not realize is that the spiritual qualities of God it worships are in fact qualities of its own self, therefore the unhappy consciousness is an alienated soul, as it has projected its own essential nature into a place for ever out of reach and one which makes the real world it lives in seem miserable and insignificant. Hegel sees all human history in the development of mind. Ancient Greece, the Roman Empire, Enlightenment, the French Revolution are similar to his writings in “The Philosophy of History”. They are stages in the progress of mind towards freedom. The Phenomenology is devoid of a sense of time and place. The abstract freedom of the French Revolution leads to its opposite, there is no further development shown in the Phenomenology, but mind moves into the moral view of the world advanced by Kant, Fichte and the Romantics, then to the religious state of mind and finally to absolute knowledge itself, which is achieved by philosophy. In the Phenomenology there are no references to the Prussian State. For Hegel absolute knowledge and freedom are inseparable. Freedom is in the ability to choose, uncoerced by other people, social circumstances or natural desires. All human history is the necessary path of the development of human mind. Freedom is in having a free mind. Mind must be in control of everything else and know this. Freedom is in rational choice, which is to follow reason (this is the essential nature of mind). Mind controls everything when everything is rationally ordered. Reason is for Hegel inherently universal. Particular minds are linked because they share a common, universal reason: they are aspects of something inherently universal, namely mind itself. To be free is to know, be fully aware of the rational and therefore universal nature of one’s own intellect. This self awareness is absolute knowledge.

Absolute knowledge – the goal of the Phenomenology – is linked with the goal of history being the consciousness of freedom. Self-knowledge is both a form of knowledge and basis for Hegel’s concept of freedom. Why is self-knowledge absolute knowledge? Absolute knowledge is knowledge of the world as it really is (not just appearances). Ultimate reality is the mind. The raw information received by senses was meaningless until it was brought under a conceptual system, produced by consciousness. Consciousness had to shape, classify, order intellectually externally before knowledge was possible. “Material objects” do not exist independently of consciousness, but are constructs of consciousness, involving concepts like “property” and “substance”. At the level of self-consciousness, consciousness became of the laws of science as laws of its own creation, so mind had itself as the object of its scrutiny. Consciousness began to shape the world practically as well as intellectually. Self-consciousness culminated, for Hegel, in the discovery that reason is sovereign over everything.

Hegel begins by tracing how the mind knows reality and in the end watches mind as it constructs reality. Absolute knowledge is reached when mind realizes that it seeks to know itself. Mind understands there is nothing beyond itself. Then it knows reality as directly and immediately as it knows itself. It is at one with it. Absolute knowledge is mind knowing itself in the shape of mind, it is when mind understands that reality is its own creation and there is no “beyond” for it to know. There is only one reality as there is only one mind (for Hegel it could be some kind of cosmic consciousness, maybe). Individual minds exist together, or they do not exist at all (as knowledge can exist as knowledge only when communicated: the necessity of language rules out the idea of an entirely independent consciousness).

VII. Hegel's Dialectic and it's Criticisms

“ It is the ways into philosophy that are the most interesting part of the subject;
for it is the course taken at the outset - in the first steps taken from
ordinary ways of speaking to the extraordinary things which philosophers
habitually say - that determines the whole of a thinker’s theories.”
R.M.Hare

Out of Hegel’s critiques maybe it is Theodor Adorno’s attempt to produce a “materialist” conception of his final major work of philosophy, the “Negative Dialectic”, that helps understand Hegel’s texts better. For Adorno, the experience, which underlies a discourse, leads beyond the surface structure: “Only those thoughts are true, which do not understand themselves” , which means that only those thoughts are true, which contain an “experience that extends beyond the immediate awareness based on them.”

Like Hegel, Adorno rejects the assumption that philosophical discourse participates in a world of neutral, independent semantic entities. Believing language draws its cognitive value from experience and that this experience can be shown to have a social character, Adorno holds that an analysis of the nature of philosophical experience - the “criticism of content” - will contribute to the argumentative practice of philosophy and also reach beyond it to social reality; yet it will do this in a way quite different from “positivist” sociology of knowledge :

“Sociology of knowledge fails in the face of philosophy, substituting its social function and conditionedness by interest for its truth content, not entering into that content’s criticism, but acting indifferently towards it. “

Adorno’s stress on experience gives his reading of Hegel an advantage, for it leads him to appreciate the “necessary first-handness” of Thought. He believes that Hegel misidentifies the nature of experience on which the system’s functioning is based in taking it to derive from the subject’s participation in a purified realm of Absolute Knowledge. Adorno challenges not the structure of the system, but the conception of experience on which it rests. This is not only an acceptance of the structure of the dialectical movement and a rejection of the conception of experience, which operates it. There are two reasons for that.

In the first place Adorno thinks that Hegel’s misidentification of experience underlying the speculative movement leads to inconsistencies in his perception of the movement’s structure, the most significant part of which is that Hegel contemplates the intrinsically critical movement of the dialectic with a “negation of the negation” – an unjustifiable affirmation. This way Adorno only intends to endorse a part of the dialectical movement. In the second place Adorno misunderstands the enterprise being carried out in Hegel’s system, so that the conception of dialectic he has differs from the one at work in Hegel’s texts.

The two fundamental criticisms, which Adorno makes of Hegel’s conception of experience, are logically connected . In the first place the transition to materialism is a result of the claim that Hegel misidentifies the real nature of the synthesizing source, the origin of order and universality, which underlies the movement of the system, or Geist (Geist being between “mind” in everyday English and “Spirit” in the Hegelian thought). Adorno writes: “The World-Spirit is, but it is no such thing.” Adorno here is not making the banal Marxist criticism that Hegel mistakes for mind what is really matter. Interpreted epistemologically, this would amount to the claim that Hegel imputes processes of the knowing subject, which are in fact features of the mind-independent reality. But the dialectical development of thought provides the structure of reality, and, because it encompasses both thought and reality, there is no way to play one off against the other. Materialism for Hegel is reductionist metaphysics, which accounts for reality without having to admit developmental or teleological qualities. For Adorno, however, the Idealist misidentification consists in the failure to identify Geist as society:

“ Beyond the philosophy of identity’s magic circle the transcendental subject may be deciphered as society, unconscious of its own self.”

For Adorno, society is not to be understood in the affirmative way in which Hegel understands Geist. The Idealist view of Geist is the theoretical embodiment of a false society, one whose structure subjects its members to domination.

“ The World-Spirit is, but it is no such thing. It is not Spirit but, rather, the negative, which Hegel shifted off it and on to those who have to bow to it. . . ”

Society is constituted by alienated social labour as a system of exchange relationships, which represent a mechanism of compulsion – a false subject – in relation to the individual subjects. Idealism conceals this subject’s true, negative identity. Creating the illusion that Geist is autonomous, Idealism functions as part of the dominant ideology. The division to mental/manual labour gives rise to the illusion of autonomous Geist. Idealism’s refusal to see Geist’s origin in labour distorts the concept of Geist itself, according to Adorno.

For Adorno the second fundamental criticism of Idealism is the transition to Non-identity. If the model of mental activity is labour, and labour requires a substratum, then the claim of Hegelian system to operate from a point where thought is independently productive – is an illusion (as Geist conceals its origins). Adorno holds that Geist is always only the subject pole in a relationship, which requires an objective material. For him Geist’s specific feature lies in that it is subject, not a whole.

Adorno denies the primacy of the subject, meaning not only that man is to be seen as an element in natural order. The dualistic structure of Geist makes the idea of a purely conceptual discipline appear as an impossible self-contradiction , as it undermines any attempt at an Absolute-Idealist ontology (since all concepts are intrinsically related to the non-conceptual). But although concepts originate in the domination of nature, Adorno does not restrict them to this instrumental function. Concepts, language can be turned against domination , like the case with Heidegger who takes on a position beyond the difference between subject and object. For Adorno, the concepts themselves incorporate the tension between their subsuming function (the “compulsion to identity”) and their intrinsically dynamic and expressive power.

Adorno describes these subsuming functions as “archaisms” in a way that recalls Nietzsche’s criticism of the classificatory intellect. For Nietzsche, classification incorporates the Platonic myth that all cognition is a form of repetition – in effect, recognition. Adorno calls such functions “relics of the static thought” For Hegel thought underlies experience. Adorno rejects the idea that “contradictions”, as moments within the dialectical movement, are constitutive parts of the structure of reality, which it is philosophy’s task to develop in thought:

“The contradiction is not that which Hegel’s Absolute Idealism inevitably transfigured it to – no Heraclitian essentiality. It is the index of untruth of identity, of the resolution of what is conceived into the concept.”

The non-identical cannot be acquired immediately as something positive according to Adorno, nor can it be acquired by negation of the negative. Adorno rejects both – the Absolute Spirit (Subject) and the reduction of meaning processes to determine natural processes, and stumbles across Transcendental Idealism’s dilemma: the problem of the relation of meaning processes to their material substratum. The object is given to be known only so far as it is given through concepts. We cannot step outside our cognitive processes to compare what is given in them to the object “as it is in itself” – to determine the “error” of concepts. How can conceptual thought itself provide the standards for its own criticism? Adorno does not give a satisfactory answer to these questions.

Adorno uses the concepts of mediation and reflection (inherited from Hegel). “Mediation” gives conceptual expression to the relationship between transcendental and empirical phenomena: meaning processes and their material substrata. It is not treated in Husserl’s tradition as a relationship between two orders of explanation. Adorno rejects such division so a relationship needs to be found between the two spheres of the single social process (the transcendental and empirical realms of phenomena) and in particular – to explain how the two poles of the labour process – meaning-conferring activity and raw material – are related. “Mediation” is his term for such non-causal relationship.

“Reflection” is Adorno’s term to explain how this “analysis” is possible as part of thought’s rational progress towards non-subsuming knowledge of its object. “Reflection” is language’s own power of determining the effects of its synthetic, conceptual activity. Together, “reflection” and “mediation” express Adorno’s interpretative conception of philosophy. Adorno attempts to draw on Hegel to solve the twin problems of Idealism: how the transcendental interacts with (or supervenes on) the empirical, and how that transcendental activity may be rationally interpreted. But within Hegel’s system “transcendental” and “empirical” are part of a single world-process emanating from the Idea, a process reproduced by the generative activity of the notion. Some Hegelian concepts – like Geist and Begriff – were completed in Adorno’s text, but others, like “mediation” and “reflection” are just the opposite, they produce difficulties in his text.

For Hegel thought underlies experience, experience does not provide the starting-point in the sense of being “raw material” for philosophy. Adorno states:

“Goethe’s proposition that everything which is complete of its kind points beyond itself, is canonical in Hegel”

Adorno’s “Critical Theory” seeks ways to achieve a resolution for Hegel’s system’s paradox. The concepts of method and system draw a distinction between Hegel’s method and the system in which it is lodged, a distinction between rationality of the method and the attainment of an ultimate standpoint. Therefore we can reject Hegelianism while retaining a dialectical view on rationality. This view was attacked by Louis Althusser that the extracted dialectic remains Hegelian (not Marxist). But how “extract” a dialectic?

It is possible only by violating Hegel’s own conception of dialectic. This is a problem Hegel points out in the Introduction to “The Science of Logic.” For Hegel:

“In every other [science] the object of which it treats and the scientific method are different from one another. The object is in the system of truth – truth also being the final result it is the Science’s own identity where knowledge in every moment is brought out of itself as its last element and its completion. Method cannot be separated from philosophical procedure.”

Dialectic is to be understood as immanent critique, as a “law unto itself” implying debate, dialogue. Therefore dialectic refers not to absolute principles, but has the ability to deal with objections on their own terms in a discussion. There is an affinity with Gadamer’s description of dialectic as a “reflective movement” – it is his student Rudiger Bubner who holds the view that the rationality of dialectic consists of the willingness to engage alternatives on their own terms. Therefore dialectic is methodologically open (it takes the ground-rules on which it operates only insofar as these could be justified in the debate with the alternative conceptions of the philosophy it criticizes) and autonomous (aiming to generate binding principles from its own resources).

In Hegel’s texts we can find strong support for this and specifically in the chapter on notion (Begriff) in “The Science of Logic” – especially in Hegel’s treatment of Spinoza as a way of philosophy to deal with alternative systems, which are not to be simply rejected as false. Alternative thought systems are rational enterprises though they are imperfect, according to Hegel, and are more than merely subjective. The true system includes these “lower” standpoints within itself by establishing a common ground with them, ergo participating in their assumptions. Immanent critique yields a positive result – this is the concept of determinate negation. “Formal philosophy” only grasps the first aspect of this dialectic (the negative and critical part). The result is not merely negative. Negation in the course of dialectic is positive and Hegel calls this claim a “logical proposition”, which while being a tautology is the feature of true philosophical procedure.

Therefore, negation is not “of nothing” but of a determinate matter it dissolves; and that, from which it results, is contained within the result. Negation is a process, which must adopt itself to the contours of whatever it is that is to be negated (the object of thinking, asserting or negating, which is like shaping wax – which always leaves a new shape – rather than unraveling a knot in a piece of string – which by no means leaves a new knot when we have finished).

Kuhn and Feyerabend deny that new theories are “better” than previous ones. As Popper points out: it is one thing to give refutation a heuristic role in the establishment of new theories, but quite another to give it a logical role. Positive results stand in need of justification (the process of Hegel’s immanent critique, perhaps). Is the claim that immanent critique leads to positive results itself supposed to be the positive result of an immanent critique? (This is self-supporting, therefore unacceptable, as it would establish itself by means of an assumption, which would be denied by any consistent Kantian). Hegel states: “ Kant’s dialectical presentations in the Antinomies of Pure Reason do not merit great poise when scrutinized.”

The argument of the Antinomies follows a structure that can be outlined as below:
a) If a genuine empirical property is intelligibly applicable to an object, then either the object in fact has that property or it does not;
b) In the case of certain intelligibly applicable properties, there are objects of which it can be established that they must both have and lack that property (the denial of either can be shown to entail an absurdity);
c) Such properties are therefore of a special kind – they are cosmical rather than empirical.

Kant says that the Antinomies are not applicable in the standard way. The thinker must be challenged on the basis of his or her own assumptions. Which of Kant’s assumptions could be challenged, really? Hegel has no reasoned objection to the structure of the argument. His criticism is that it is insufficiently strong to reach positive conclusions he sees dialectic as requiring. If we treat the law of Excluded Middle as “dogmatic presupposition” then we can reject (a) which logically rests on it. But then our conclusion will go weaker as the distinction of Kant’s weak argument (the distinction between empirical and cosmical results) will be removed. Immanent critique gives us no clue as to what stronger version of (a) would be needed in order to lead to the desired strong outcome in (c).

Jurgen Habermas argues that Hegel does not establish his philosophical position against Kant via a procedure of immanent critique. To argue this he focuses on the way Hegel rejects the Kantian enterprise of epistemology – rather than accepting “the critique in which epistemology inevitably ensures itself”. This way Hegel only radicalizes “the mistrust expressed by the critical philosophy, which is the modern form of skepticism.” What starts out as immanent critique covertly turns into abstract negation. Habermas wants to retain “abstract negation” for his own Critical Theory.

Habermas misinterprets Hegel as Habermas’s account of determinate negation identifies it with the phenomenological path taken by the self-development of consciousness. This can be contrasted both with strictly logical relations between antecedent and consequent and with causal relations. “ A form of life that has become an abstraction cannot be negated without leaving a trace, or overthrown without leaving particular consequences.” For Habermas determinate negation involves the progress through forms of life. Only where there is unity between theoretical and practical can the continuity between antecedent and successive states be guaranteed, so that the latter are really the outcome of the former. Hegel clearly states the logic depends not on dealing with “forms of life” but, to the contrary, it deals with what has left the “externality” of consciousness behind:

“ Consciousness is Spirit as concrete knowledge, caught up in externality… Consciousness, being Spirit in appearance, which has freed itself from the immediacy and external concretion, becomes pure knowledge which gives itself as its object those pure essentialities as they are in and for themselves.”

It is doubtful Habermas’s position represents a model of rational progress. The analogy between rational progress and the psychoanalytic process is misleading. Psychoanalytic enlightment is a process of disillusionment. The subject is brought face to face with his or her (false) beliefs in the hope that in challenging them the subject will become free to pursue goals effectively, rather than continuing to pursue them in a way distorted by persistent (because unconscious) illusions. Disillusionment is quite unlike any model of the progress of knowledge. Rejection of a false piece of theoretical knowledge is different. Cognitive progress does not consist in rejecting false theories only, but in extending knowledge by means of better ones.

Habermas’s determinate negation fails to provide an account of generation of new and better content (as progress). For Popper refutation consists in confronting a theory with a logically incompatible observation. But from a body of sentences (theory and observation), which contains a contradiction, anything can be deduced. Therefore refutation can be at best a heuristic device for suggesting better theories, but not a logical one for inferring them.

In Hegel’s Phenomenology the forms of consciousness, which lead to Absolute Knowledge are shown to be a rational, necessary sequence. Each form must show itself to be the result of the previous one until the final, completed form is reached:

“The necessary progression and interconnection of the forms of the unreal consciousness will by itself bring to pass the completion of the series.”

Yet, by what right is each form to be taken to the result of the previous one? John Plamentar develops this charge: Hegel, he holds, provides no explanation why the progressive development he claims comes about. What Plamentar misses is the point that for Hegel the logical exigencies of the development of consciousness do make themselves felt in the minds of the members of community. The deficiency of a state of consciousness makes itself felt directly, and its significance and progressive role is not apparent. But why do not the breakdowns of forms of consciousness constitute an adventitious sequence but go together to make a single, progressive movement? Why do we say the deficiency experienced by the members of the community relate to the new form of life, which replaces it in such a way as to make this later stage into a fulfillment of the former one? The consciousness’s progress is intelligible “for us” in a way it cannot be for itself while undergoing the process. The way to science, the Phenomenology, is itself (for Hegel) already science. The Phenomenology is concerned with a double process of development, and, in the first place, this is the development of the consciousness under observation. But this observing consciousness is itself not static. In the process of observing the development, which has been implicitly accomplished, it becomes transformed itself. What is familiar to it, in the form of common consciousness, is comprehended, and made a matter of genuine knowledge.

The transition undergone is not from ignorance to knowledge. We have already implicitly acquired the Scientific consciousness, which the Phenomenology is out to deduce. But we are not yet fully aware that we have acquired it. The task of Phenomenology is to bring this unconscious knowledge to full knowledge. The formative process of Spirit is completed when it allows to presuppose this is a fact of history, rational history.

Can immanent critique be made to yield positive results? Proof procedures, which only yield full perspicuity ex post are, in Hegel’s view, characteristic of the mathematical sciences and insufficient for the purposes of philosophy. Hegel thinks that the reason why considerations given in the Introduction cannot justify the Science is that they attempt to justify in advance what can only be justified retrospectively. Hegel claims that the Science is rigorous ex ante. How does this come to be?

The answer might be given in terms of Russell’s distinction between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description. The first is something experienced, acquired at first hand. The second is discursive. The ability to understand Scientific discourse is a practical ability , but the account given of that practical ability (in introductions) would be like knowledge by description – it tells us about the understanding of the discourse, but does not give us the experience of understanding itself. Determinate negation received no independent justification to persuade the resolute skeptic in his own terms.

“The true form in which the truth exists can only be as its Scientific system” – holds Hegel. Truth requires a system and exists at the point of completion of the system and what precedes it is only partial, but not adequate. How is this point obtained? To criticize Hegel is to claim that the system does not attain validity at its point of completion. But to criticize from any point other than the point of completion violates a crucial presupposition of the system itself – “post festum paradox”.

Marx and Engels drew consequences from this paradox leading them to the rejection of philosophy as an autonomous enterprise in favour of a science, which was to move “from earth to heaven” – ergo one would not operate immanently within the sphere of philosophical validity, but would give a scientific account of the sphere itself. Then is historical materialism beyond criticism? What is scientific as basis for it and where are these standards derived from and else what is the view from which criticism can be made?

For Kierkegaard this dilemma implies a transfer of attention from theology as a universal rational activity to the experience of Christianity with rational grounds opposed to philosophy’s universalizing efforts to capture it. Nietzsche’s response in “Twilight of the Idols” is that philosophical rationality is not to be refuted (for in its own terms it is irrefutable) but to be overcome by a resolute, destructive will. The consequences of the paradox is to call rationality itself into question and challenge philosophy as an autonomous discipline.

In “Truth and Method” Gadamer writes:

“ Polemics against an absolute thinker has itself no starting point. The Archimedean point from where Hegel’s philosophy could be toppled can never be found through reflection. . .”

Gadamer is not sympathetic to explicit anti-rationalists and Marxists who try to refute Hegel via “appeal to immediacy”. The appeal to immediacy, whether of bodily nature, or of the “Thou” making claims on us, or of the impenetrable factualness of historical change, or of the reality of the relations of production – has always been self-refuting in that it is not itself an immediate attitude but a reflective activity. To disarm the paradox Gadamer has recourse to the Heideggerian thesis that, in the progress of thought, “revelation” or “disclosure” and “concealment” go together. This amounts to a rejection of the possibility of attaining the point of completion; ever-new concealments renew the task of the reflective movement.

The Frankfurt school (Critical Theory), unlike “orthodox” Marxism, aims at more than a “reading” of intellectual phenomena as economic forces and class antagonisms where they originate. Can they arrive to account of this phenomena by a process of immanent critique? Hegel’s negation is a procedure, which adapts itself to the contours of the object and such negation, as already mentioned above, leads to positive results.

There exist logical means for generating new content in the course of the process of refutation – which is at the heart of Popper’s attack on Hegel’s dialectic. Karl Popper claims that refutation consists in confronting a theory with a logically incompatible observation. But, he points out, from a body of sentences (theory and observation), which contains a contradiction, anything can be deduced. The difficulty here is in the claim that immanent critique produces a positive result. Hegel merely means a positive result over Kant’s, rather than taking Kant’s conception in its own terms (as his official doctrine prescribes).

VIII. Mikhail Bakhtin on Time, Space and Polymorphism

The Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin accepted Einstein's theory of relative time and space and was familiar with Lobachevsky's geometry when he come up with a theory of "the chronotope of time and space". Bakhtin made the conclusion that we live in a universe of heterochrony (ðàçíîâðåìåííîñòü), where time and space vary in qualities. He held that there exists an incommensurable multiplicity of viewpoints, where it cannot (as opposed to Hegel) be said anymore: this and that and the theory of polymorphism.

Polymorphism is connected with the author’s resignation of his own viewpoint in favour of putting forth other possible viewpoints, but not only this: there is an entirely new relationship between author’s own and all the “external” truths of others, so that the author remains active in a dialogical way. On the example of Dostoevsky’s novels, Bakhtin shows that Dostoevsky often interrupts, but never destroys other voices, never finalizes another’s voice as if it were his own, e.g. from his own consciousness. This idea of polymorphism emerges in connection with three events from Bakhtin’s perspective.

The first is that Dostoevsky manages to create live figures that are independent of him and with whom he has equal rights. He cannot end these figures because he has found what personality is (in contrast to what is not).

The second is that in Dostoevsky’s work we can see the emergence of a self-developing idea (that is connected with the problem of personality).

The third is that in Dostoevsky’s characters there is a dialogism – as a special way equal characters interact – e.g. characters with equal rights and with equal in their meaning consciousnesses.

Bakhtin holds that Dostoevsky speaks of the impossibility of the existence of one single consciousness. I have self-consciousness and I become myself only when I open up towards another being and with this beings help. What is important is not what takes place internally in one’s consciousness, but what takes place on the border between one’s and another’s consciousness, at their seam or points of connection. Bakhtin maintains that Dostoevsky created a new genre of novel – a polyphonic novel and that we may speak of a special kind of polyphonic creative thinking, which is wider than anything concerned with a novel-type. Dostoevsky, according to Bakhtin, has found a new creative world-vision that is adequate to Einstein’s views with his multiple systems of accounting.

Bakhtin views Dostoevsky’s polyphonism from another perspective as well. After analyzing thoroughly the word in the author’s novels, he comes to a conclusion that this is an equally-directed dialogical world, which intrinsically has two voices. There is no constant, dead, closed, unanswerable, already delivered its last meaning word in Dostoevsky, all around there is a crossing, harmony or interruption of sentences of the internal dialogue of the heroes. Everywhere there is a certain set of ideas, thoughts and words, which is given through several voices that cannot be united, resounding in a different way in every hero: polyphonism becomes inevitable, turning into a principle of author’s creative thought.

Speaking of the relative freedom of Dostoevsky’s heroes in his polyphonic novels, Bakhtin maintains that for Dostoevsky it is not important who the hero is in the world, but what the world is for the hero and for his own or her own self. With the construction of his novels, the author does not tell us things about the hero, but together with the hero, conveying a feeling of the hero’s autonomy and freedom where personality is known through the means of a dialogical communication. Only heroes who have their own ideas about the world (heroes-ideologists) can participate in an equal dialogue with the author. Doestoevsky needs special ethical types of heroes to talk with – even if they are sinners – Doestoevsky has “made up” these heroes as co-authors of his novels and that is not in the sense of authors who “know everything” in literature. These heroes create their own lives as a novel in literature. They are romantic thinkers, and to live is to create a novel in literature of one’s self , as young Dostoevsky believed.

Prior to this the typical way to depict reality was the illusory multiplication of this reality (by inserting time into time), a reality where the time of a dream can last 70 years while actually amounting to two minutes of dreaming (this way indicating time’s relativity). A dream resembles death, and the motive of challenges coming from short-termed death is an element of the myths about heroes. To see life as an illusion is typical for the crisis of the Renaissance. Life seen as a dream or a theater was a popular thing in the 16th Century: it is life that is a dream and death is waking up from it for a higher reality. Romantic literature as well often shows life as a dream, an illusion or a daydream, using fantastic and dream compositions (or memoirs or jokes – things that give dual meanings to the threads of events). Dostoevsky usually begins with hero’s confessions – Dostoevsky begins together with the hero, then makes a step back and criticizes the hero, but never becomes a moralist. He discloses the ethical and aesthetical dissonance position of the hero – the point where the hero goes wrong (or ceases to be in tune). Where the hero begins – the author ends (usually in seeing a catastrophy).

The novel has as if two points of reference; only “polyphonic heroes” see visions or dreams. Polyphonism has to do with the relativity of time and the special function of the dreams heroes dream. The poetics of events is often the inversion of causes and consequences ( for example when it is said that night comes from silence and not the other way about). In a way this is letting the hero build his own world – in which he will not be able to live. Dostoevsky surrounds his heroes with a sea of suffering: the heroes’ fate begins to mean something only when contrasted with the bitter and wise tale of the author, which comes in the philosophical end of the novel. This way Myskin is at the same time a hero and the author of the “mystical novel”, he not only fights fate, but he “cures” events, he wants to escape the scary outcome of things, he is trying to turn around the self-evolving characters in the novel, which break away from his power. Bakhtin holds that Myskin relates to people as to his own personages; Myskin is not permitted to forsee anything, as everything comes to be exactly the way he suspects it.

Myskin is responsible for every thought he has, even for his dreams. The hero has a fantastic-symbolic side to him, which is dissolved in the objectivity of the realistic storytelling. Prince Myskin encountered an evil world and attempted to change it, but could not. The cause for this failure lies in the world’s wickedness and in the fact that in the 19th Century the good is not sure of itself. Its aesthetical failure is a necessity for the transfer into the ethical reality. Dostoevsky made his own creative process, which takes the symbolic form of the illusory lives of his heroes, the main content of his novels. The shocking reality of the subjective thread of events and its collapse can be explained with Dostoevsky’s assigning to his own heroes his own skepticism and punishing them with his own sufferings. At the same time the hero is the author of his own fate – of his own unhappiness. The fate of the hero depends on the hero’s choices and on the strength of his character; forcing people t odo good is worthless. Dreams are the source of the heroes’ subjectivity, their objectivity coming from their suffering – in the form of sickness, jail or death, with Christ serving as an example of the highest point of suffering on earth.

Perceiving of the novel as of a dialogical partner (in the literal sense) is one of Bakhtin’s findings. The main point in Bakhtin’s philosophy is the idea of dualism: the connection between the “self” and the “other” and their ethical border. The “other” is “I”, where in the end personality serves some idea and “ideologism” is as an idealistic type of consciousness where the “I” is the same as the “other” and it borders on one’s absorption with otherness or on one’s naive individualism.

Aesthetical consciousness is dualistic, holds Bakhtin, it is the “consciousness of consciousness”, ergo it is a form of one or another aspect of the self-other relationship. The monological principle is the merging of the author and the hero until they become a single self-expressing whole, where the author surpasses the hero or the hero – the author, which is given through confessions or is revealed in the authority of another (like a bioagraphy).

Bakhtin’s main heroes are Dostoevsky and Rablais. There are two voices in Bakhtin’s dialogism – “I am” and “thou are”. The “I” does not coincide with itself, it is related to something external and big, it does not have “inner territory” and realizes itself only when sharing its experience with the “others”: “I-for-myself”, “I-for-the-others””, “the-others-for-me”. The same applies to the “other”. My connection with the other is not “theoretical”, but comes through an event; it is not “ideal”, but “dialogical”, because the truth of the relationship is bigger than the “I” or the “thou” – it lies between them.

From the perspective of linguistics there exist three forms of verbal statements: monologue, dialogue and polylogue. A polylogue is a combination of dialogue and monologue, their mixture. The category of polyphony has been interpreted in a philosophical key. The characteristics of the polyphonic storytelling are an “episode” in the development of literature and culture. There is a multiplicity of “voices” (or ideas brought in through the heroes), which have equal rights and there is their dialogical referring to one another.

For Bakhtin Dostoevsky’s voice as an author’s voice is included in the chorus of the other “voices”. Dostoevsky’s daydreamer hero merges with his act of seeking for something “stable” and “common”. The heroes and the author are involved in a dialogue with one another – a dialogue, which cannot be final, as in “this” reality one cannot get rid of one’s own “shadowy” voices in full without leaving behind “paths” back. Polyphony is a wish or a will to this kind of dialogue, where the “I” escapes into a real “other” and this way acquires for the first time “auto-identity”, like the special in Dostoevsky’s writings status of Christ, who carries a meaning of another reality, which cannot ever be a part of the game of reflections and replacements.

The dialogism of Bakhtin is when the “I“ becomes an “I” in the process of everyone’s treating it as an “I”. Just an “I” is impossible, its being is unthinkable without a “thou” and the “I” exists only because there exists an “other” for whom my “I” is a “thou”. The dialogue is a key in studying a culture and it broadens human consciousness. Any human thought is born and formulated in the process of dialogical relations. The mutuality of the problems generates dialogical relations. The basis for these relations is the externality of the subjects and their excess of vision in connection with each other. This brings about activity, generates facts, givenness (events) and acts, and as well the givenness (the events of being) of the existence of the subjects. The dialogical relation is a relation of meaning in subjects’ speeches, expressed in the categories of “I” and “other”.

The dialogue is a classic form of spoken communication, the unit of which is speech, through which relatively finalized meaning is transmitted to another being as an answer to a question. The meaning is a value of being, a reflection of the world in a word, and it contains a question. The question is the relation of the one who does not understand and if the one addressed does not understand as well – things look bad, but there exists an alternative – the ones who do understand. The dialogue about the meaning is a dialogue in the sphere of values. Words want to be heard, understood, they want to be responsive and to respond in giving answers and so on ad infinitum. Words are part of a dialogue, which does not have a finalized meaning (but could be physically ended).

Bakhtin, who had been studying the levels of understanding, has meant by them states of consciousness (the body dimension, the soul and the spirit). If for Hegel art is one of the stages of the self-consciousness of Spirit, which has only one aim: art as an object of knowledge, Bakhtin maintained that art cannot be understood only through the idea of knowledge in full – that is absolutely conclusively. And while Kant understands the aesthetical as a particularity, Bakhitin understands it as a totality, which is expressed only through the communication of people. Bakhtin understands the dialogue as a universal method for people’s investigation of the problems of personality and culture, which are connected with understanding.

Understanding is dialogical, it is the attempt to acquire knowledge about the “other”. In understanding Bakhtin saw the following relations: between a subject and a subject, between a subject and an object and between an object and an object. The dialogical relation is based on the relation towards the “other”. The image of the “other” can be understood only in a dialogical relation with the “I”. For Bakhtin the dialogue is a relation between the “I” and the “other”, it is the human conversation of two equal personalities. Bakhtin saw personality through the prism of personality’s relation to the other. It is necessary to be able to be the “other”, to feel the “other” for what the “other” is, to be able to put oneself in the place of the “other”, e.g. to feel empathy.

Personality is in essence dialogical, only through the dialogue with the “other” can personality express itself and know itself, because it is only the “other” who permits the “I” measure its own self, because in the dialogue every person exists and another-for-oneself. The world and the self can be known only in the dialogue.

According to Bakhtin, the mutual object of all humanistic knowledge is the “expressible and speaking being”. In behavior the human being stands not only before law, but before something greater – as a personality I am born not when I acquire knowledge or come to know, but when I act through my knowledge on another human being. I become I for-the-other and through-the-other. This social orientation in Bakhtin is mystical, it is in person’s relation to other worlds. The ideal chronotope (time-space) of the “other” is the chronotope of the “other world” because only in the case of our contact with creatures from other worlds can we guarantee their unquestionable and full “otherness”. This is the relation of person to God, expressed in chronotope, which means a “relative viewpoint” from which the author looks upon the world.

The polyphonic novel, according to Bakhtin, is a multiplicity of independent and non-unified voices and consciousnesses, a real polyphony voices, every one of which has equal and full value. It is in the interaction of object and audience. The dialogism of I-another, I-thou, voices, texts, meanings – is a totally new event in the realm of being and it does not give an answer to the ontological question directly or definitely. The “final” ontological reality for Bakhtin is the “absolutely free” human consciousness itself. But Bakhtin speaks as well of the independent and objective life of meanings – the forgetting, reemerging and never ending final meaning processes as the life of culture in big time (which puts an end to the version of Bakhtin’s subjectivity), of the stubborn meaning directedness of life, which a writer must consider , of the seeking for the word, which is bigger than the author himself; Bakhtin held that he himself can only be a personage, but not the author . The theme of dialogue as the meeting point of equal in their freedom, value and mainly in their attempt and ability to understand another consciousness is a main theme in Bakhtin, for whom to live is to take part in a dialogue .

IX. Mikhail Bakhtin's Existentialism: the Problem of Time

There is similarity between Bakhtin, Heidegger and Sartre, especially in relation to their thoughts on the central problem, wich existentialism posits – the problem of time. The philosophy of Bakhtin – admitting the value of each individual personality and its multi-dimensional being along with the idea of polyphonism as a way to organize the reality in the creative process – it is based on the possibility of modeling polyphonic situations, which go beyond Dostoevsky’s poetics and are connected with human existence in general. From here emerges the aim to see in the dialogical conception of Bakhtin a universal system. The two main concepts in Bakhtin’s philosophy are “other” and “dialogue”. This permits personality be representaed not as an abstract notion, but through typical for the musical terminology metaphors and “accords” – personality/life, author/creation, hero/novel in polyphony, in order to be able to grasp the real voice of being, the entire being, a being that is greater than the human existence, that is not a particular of a part, the voice of the whole and not of a single personality among all .

Even though for Bakhtin time is a phenomenon that is not only existential, but historical, social and creative as well, he viewed time in relation to creative time, which is expressed as a way of reflecting and understanding human and historical temporal relations and as a relation between the “greater” human time (of historical processes) and the “smaller” time of personality. Dostoevsky’s writings focus on creative and biographical time – and specifically on crisis time. In a well established through life inner space, far away from the edge, people live a biographical life in a biographical time, they go through childhood and youth, get married, give birth to children, grow old and die. Dostoevsky passes through this biographical time as well, but on the edge and in the square there is only one possible time – crisis time, where an instant is equal to years, decades, even to “millions of years” , as it is in “Ñîí ñìåøíîãî ÷åëîâåêà” (“The Dream of a Funny Man”) .

For Dostoevsky, according to Bakhtin, the time of prison and the time of play – are both, for all their differences – the same types of temporality, which resemble the time of the last moments of consciousness before a death sentence is carried out or a suicide takes place, close to the time of crisis in general. This all is time on the edge, it is not biographical time, which is lived in internal spaces that are far away from the edge . In this relation to time Bakhtin sees the methodological basis for creating the polyphonic novel. This is similar to Hiedegger, who has maintained that it is temporality and specifically the finality in time that gives meaning to human existence. That is why time has to be approached as the most essential characteristic of being. Philosopher’s task is to find the relation between being/time/personality.

Time is internally connected not only with existence, but with human existence. Its meaning can be disclosed only in relation to personality. Time, that is experienced by a human being, Hiedegger calls “temporality” and refers to it not as a way of human existence, but as existence itself; it is viewed as if it had its own source in the finality of personality, whose life is enclosed between birth and death. Temporality is always “ours” and “in us”. For Bakhtin biographical time is one of the characteristics of human time, for Heidegger any being in time is biographical. Public time for Heidegger signifies the common time a being shares with others, it is independent of personality. The present is the time of eternal presence, the future is connected with concerns, fears and anticipation; it gives real existence the essence, a being’s realization of its historicity, finality and freedom. It is possible only in the face of death, in the perception of existential fear. Bakhtin calls this “crisis time”.

In Sartre temporality is given through “nothingness”, which is the source of temporality. The human “I” (being-for-itself) gives temporal dimensions to its existence. The temporality in the world is seen as something that has come to be only through personality, only as a characteristic of the sensitivity of the human soul. As Bakhtin, Sartre is interested in the relation between the past and the future. Time arises in the process of the perpetual staying away of consciousness from identifying with its own self. The human “I” exists in the form of three temporal states – the past, the present and the future. They are the separated moments of a primary synthesis, which personality carries out.

This is the reason that the past, as well as the future, cannot exist outside of its relation to the present. It is always someone’s past. The past for Sartre always comes to be seen as the present, but only it is such a present, that expresses the past. The present for Sartre is only an instantaneous “now” or “nothingness”, which helps the human being to acquire a relation towards the past or the future. The future comes into existence only along with human existence, as a “project” of the future, where the past can become something through filling up ”nothingness”. But the future can never come to be realized, as at the moment of realization it becomes past. The real future is for Sartre the possibility of such a past, which the “I” protracts within itself and which is an extension of reality in itself. That is why the criterion of freedom is the projected by consciousness future and not the real present. The future is not regarded in relation with the possibility of its turning into present. The more time becomes egocentric time, the more reduced are the historical perspectives. The human being understands time only through projection and sees it as an interval, which makes a distinction between its current state and the possible and desirable states.

Existentialists are well known for their bringing psychological dimensions into their investigations on time. Bakhtin was able to approach the problem of time through the wider perspective of time in the novel, giving broader historical and cultural analysis. He operated with the notions of time – carnival time, good time, crisis time as well as time that is cyclic, biographic, great and small – but he always held in mind their coordination with social and historical time. The connection between the past, present and future in human history, according to Bakhtin, is reflected in the subjective aesthetical and ethical visions and the complex perception of personality of the many-sided relations between events and the stages of the historical process.

The problem of time and space as categories of the work of art along with the methods for analysis of the reality of an art work are the full spatial and temporal organization of the novel, which Bakhtin calls “chronotop”. Chronotop is all the spatial and temporal characteristics, merged into a concrete synthesized whole. Chronotop is based on the unity of time and space, expressed in the translation of spatial characteristics into temporal forms for the temporal arts and in the translation of temporal characteristics into spatial forms – for the spatial arts. The organization of the art forms differs from the organization of the natural forms. Every work of art is an entity along with other entities and at the same time a “quasi-entity” whose spatial and temporal organization is not physical any longer. Not all parmeters of the the physical time and space have the same meaning – in painting they are extended in space and in music – in time. The chronotop, according to Bakhtin, brings together the meaning of the work of art.

Chronotop as a concept arises for the first time as “the forms of time and chronotop in the novel” in 1937-1939. As an example from the natural sciences is given the notion of the time-space continuum from Einstein’s physics with a mention about the biological interpretation of chronotop. A remark is made as well that the author, in contrast to Kant, speaks of time and space not as being transcendental, but as forms of the actual reality itself.

In literature chronotop has genre significance, the genre of a literary work depends on the chronotop. Chronotop is a type of reality that is typical of a given genre. It is presicely chronotop that forms the structure of events and actions of heroes, is an arrangement of laws, which permit or prohibit one or another development of the story. The genres (of the novel) with their chronotopes come one after another and are the chain of point through which literature relates to actual chronotop, that is social existence. The chain expresses the growing similarity between the chronotope in literature and in actual being. In 1973 Bakhtin writes that the literary work of art is the most complex construction of different chronotopes, which are related through a dialogue, and which takes meaning beyond the borders of the actual work of art – into the realm of the author and reader. In this case chronotop permits one see behind every work of art the emotional attempt of a given culture, the structure of the aesthetical meanings of mental reality.

The author, for Bakhtin, must take a position in the world that places him or her “beyond” things – in order to understand the otherness: the questions that we ask are “our” questions, but the responses we receive are the responses of “another”. Bakhtin’s innovation is in putting value from the self onto the other. The “I” and “thou” are topics of human relations and the essence of human personality is not what goes on in that personality’s internal life, it is not in the isolation of personality’s self-consciousness, but in the inescapable, specific relation to the other, to the “thou”.

In his paper “Ê ýñòåòèêå ñëîâà” (“Towards the Aesthetics of the Word”) Bakhtin says that every cultural act essentially lives on the border: in that is its seriousness and meaning; if it is taken aside from these borders, it looses essentiality, becomes empty and loses importance, becomes vain and dies. If things become enclosed within the borders of a text, Bakhtin would be against this process as his approach is dialogical and voices in a dialogue are heard in everything.

In his “Towards a Philosophy of Action” Bakhtin maintains that responsibility is a characteristic of the ethical being, and is called “no alibi in being”. This category is taken from the philosophy of law. I exist and I take part in existence in an exclusive and unique way, I occupy in this exceptional existence an exceptional and only of its kind, irreplaceable, and non trasparent for any other being space. The exceptional quality of the presented existence is vehemently obligatory. This fact of my “non alibi” in being, which lies at the bottom of my very concrete and unique responsibility of action, is not recognized or known by me, but is acknowledged and ascertained.

For Bakhtin responsibility is firstly possible at the point where there is an acknowledgement of the fact of being of a unique personality from within, where this fact becomes a center of responsibility, at that point where I take responsibility for my own uniqueness and for my own being. The principle of “non-alibi in being” is the inner outline of being, the autonomy and sincere partaking in being, it is the responsibility of uniqueness and it is something that could be shattered, because one can renounce it by trying to prove ones alibi in existence, one can become an imposter .

Bakhtin pays attention to the wrongful lack of coincidence between culture and life – to the gap between common alibi and the past, present and future (the shortage of memory), forgetting that personality is the “only possible value center”. Bakhtin sees the entire human life as a continuous action. Action is human being’s way of existence in life, a way to express vitality and personal value through the duration of life. Every human action expresses personality’s conscious attitude to its own self and towards other people with whom that personality encounters through action.

This relation is necessarily experienced, as everything that happens to human beings, touching beings’ thoughts and feelings. Action, expressing the vital relation of the personality who commits this action towards his own self and others, reveals hidden, intrinsic and intimate spiritual sides of the human being. The emotionality of spirit becomes apparent when disclosed through affective reactions, emotions, feelings and will, which appear as the result of action and play a motivating role as well as a role on the level of action/lack of action when certain type of behaviour occurs, which is regarded by personality as an appropriate and necessary behavioural response.

X. Bakhtin and Hegel

Bakhtin and Hegel are different in that their basic concepts rest on different conceptual constructions. Hegel’s philosophy has an anti-antropocentric character. The way truth is achieved and essences of the object are revealed is by removing the thinker from the thinker’s subjective characteristics and focusing on the objective logic of the object. Transcendental philosophy implicitly contains an axiom that the consciousness of a separate personality can and must lie beyond the characteristics of this personality and be separated as pure essence, which can exist according to its own laws, independent from the concrete empirical reality. The meaning borderlines of Hegel’s philosophy are outlined archetypically by the idea of “pure reason”, which imply the principle of “pure observation” – the presence of an independent from personality knowledge ability, that is free from a direct carrier. It supports an abstract knowledge essence, which knows the world in a monological way through absolute generalizations.

Bakhtin’s convictions belong to another philosophical tradition. For Bakhtin the “coordinating system” cannot any longer remain the view where any true statement is not related to a human being, but is an addition to some unified systematical-monological context. For Bakhtin the new social and cultural value becomes the dialogue and the polyphony of meanings. Hegel takes the presented above and beyond existence absolute knowledgeable substance as a point of reference, while Bakhtin assigns this status to being itself, being that is taken as an event, a unified meaning continuum, which dialectically falls into pluralistic positional phases.

For Hegel all anthropological questions are in reference to the problem of reflection and personality is a function of its own thinking ability. The greatest self-realization of personality, where “essence” and “existence” come closest together, according to Hegel, is the theoretical activity of the abstracted from any life concreteness thinker, who looks upon the world from the height of completely summarized logical schemes. For Bakhtin the architectonics of the real world is not thought, but experienced. One cannot live in a theoretical world and cannot have responsibility for one’s actions; it is devoid of any dialogism, and this means devoid of experiences and life. The road to knowledge lies somewhere else: to “understand” an object means to understand one’s responsibilities towards this object, to understand the concrete human personality in terms of the context of that personality’s social background. In Hegel we see a negation of subjectivity, in Bakhtin – subjectivity’s dialectical doubling up, a passage to polyphonic intersubjectivity.

There are similar moments in Bahtin’s and Hegel’s philosophies: developing the theme of dialectics of consciousness, Bakhtin speaks of the contrast between the “I” and the “non-I”, which permanently recur inside the same consciousness during a lifetime. The road of “I” in its self-formation as “for itself” lies through the empirical “other”. The intersubjective context, which arises in the process of communication, is important not so much or that much for its informative function, as for its role in forming consciousness through reflection and being reflected in it. There is something similar in Hegel’s view – in the “Phenomenology” self-consciousness is in itself and for itself because it exists in itself and for itself for another self-consciousness. This identity of doubling for Hegel is multidimensional and has many meanings. Every consciousness is a middle term for another consciousness: self-consciousness can be itself as a separate entity only when there exists another separate entity. This means that both Hegel and Bakhtin had the same in mind when they talked about consciousness becoming a whole only when mediated by another consciousness. Human being is viewed as a being of dual nature, there is another consciousness that is genetically connected in the structures of its subjectivity and is constantly present in the subject in action. There are a lot of similar moments, but the differences of the paradigms as well as the historical and cultural differences of traditions are evident.

1996-1998

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