John Russon’s Infinite Phenomenology is as difficult to categorize as it is resourceful, wide-ranging and enterprising. His lucid writing weaves captivating anecdotes, vibrant thought experiments and insightful expositions of Hegel’s philosophy. Russon makes engaging connections to a flurry of other thinkers—Derrida, Deleuze, Marx, Foucault, St. Paul, Merleau-Ponty and Laing—expertly showing how Hegel’s major texts (Phenomenology of Spirit, Science of Logic and Philosophy of Right) shed light on the many facets of human experience.
The status of the Phenomenology in Hegel’s system is far from a settled question in the scholarship. The key issue is whether the Phenomenology is an absolute presupposition or a self-eliminating propaedeutic to the Logic. Russon contributes to the debate on this issue by bridging the traditionally French phenomenological reading of Hegel with recent discussions on the Logic.
He begins by situating Kantian and Hegelian thought in relation to that of phenomenology, defined as the assumption that ‘we can only describe, not account for the constitution of experience. It is given as this happening of meaning and we can describe its form, but we can never get beyond this’ (12). Russon argues that both thinkers attempt to articulate what he sees as the ‘infinite contestation’ which constitutes our ‘form of experience’ (13). This infinite contestation is the site of our exposure to the world, enabling genuine experience between independent objects and autonomous agents. The term ‘exposure’ is defined as ‘the way that we are unprotectedly in contact with an outside that defines us but that exceeds our grasp, an infinity that claims us without our having the option to refuse, a constitutive imperative to which our experience is answerable’ (14).
The first three chapters of Russon’s book take their main ideas from the first three chapters of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, additionally furnished with the author’s own examples and allusions. For example, in the first chapter Russon ties ethos—an ‘inherently conservative force’ (41)—to the temporal matrix of the body, expounding its historical achievement of openness. This openness is the inherent temporality of thinghood or identity, which Russon draws from the dialectic of the ‘now that is many nows’ (40). The general idea here seems to be that the past and the future are not existent realities, but are ‘indissociable’ dimensions of a subject that accomplishes the past and opens the future (38–39).
In the second chapter Russon creatively relates the logic of perception with the all-too-familiar joys and frustrations of love. Like Hegel’s logic of perception of a thing and its properties—whether it is a singular object or an aggregate sum of its parts—love, Russon writes, ‘is not love if I am appreciated because of my possession of independently defined parts; it is love only if my “parts” are appreciated because they are me’ (51). But this singularity nonetheless demands specificity: ‘It is precisely a mark of your failure to really love me if you do not love me in my specificity, and that means I demand of you that you appreciate me as an “also”, and not as a strictly incomparable and immeasurable “one”’ (51). These tensions between one’s uniqueness and specificity provide, in Russon’s mind, the grounds for mutual recognition in the letting go of our stifling self-control (54).
In the third chapter, Derrida’s notion of différance is compared with Hegel’s logic of the understanding and the law. Like the law, ‘différance’ Russon writes ‘never appears “as such” in that it is the unexceedable giving power that manifests itself precisely as specific particularities’ (67). He continues: ‘It is only through the actualization that the power appears, but it never appears as such—as power—but only in a limiting actuality that never equals or exhausts the power’ (67). Russon expounds the logic of being elaborated in Hegel’s Logic, arguing that, for Hegel, being is the inexhaustible possibility of what will never be fully actualized in any one being or the multiplicity of beings: ‘Being is always, in Hegel’s language, a “bad infinite”, that is, there is always another being and then another and then another, ad infinitum, beyond (spatially and temporally) any realized determinacy’ (69).
Towards the end of the book, Russon further develops themes that he had begun earlier—mutual recognition, conscience, forgiveness, openness, hospitality and oppositional determinacy—but with a focus on how these concepts are actualized in ethical, political and religious domains. Freedom, for Russon, further expands on the structure of what he takes to be Hegel’s notion of the infinite. He links this with Hegel’s logic of being: ‘being proper precisely is…the conflict of pure being and determinate being. This is what Hegel calls the infinite’ (173). Freedom, therefore, ‘must be determinacy opening itself to its beyond. Freedom…must be the event of reconciliation, of finding itself in its beyond’ (174). As such, institutions can never embody freedom, but can only ever facilitate what people themselves must embody and enact in the interests of freedom. Social-political tensions can never be overcome, but instead will always exist as interactions between self-determining exclusive communities and the possibility of their mutual hospitality and dialogue: ‘The site for justice and universality is not found in the establishment of an ideal regime, but is found in the determinacy of our actual situation of opposition’ (203).
Despite Russon’s interesting ideas and connections, there are several problems with the book. His reading of absolute knowing appears to conflict with what Hegel actually writes. One position is that absolute knowing is precisely the cessation of distinctive thinking. In Hegel’s words, absolute knowing ‘does not contain this difference [of knowledge and Truth] and the cancelling of it’ (PhG §805). Furthermore, Hegel writes, ‘The moment does not appear as this movement of passing back and forth, from consciousness or picture-thinking into self-consciousness, and conversely: on the contrary, its pure shape [Science], freed from its appearance in consciousness, the pure Notion and its onward movement, depends solely on its pure determinateness’ (§805). On Russon’s account, on the other hand, the term ‘absolute knowing’ refers to the ‘experience of ourselves as the agents of the real, as the ones who speak on behalf of the absolute: we are “certain of being all reality” in the sense of recognizing our infinite indebtedness, and recognizing that the absolute must speak here and now’ (21–22). We speak on ‘behalf’ of the absolute, qualified by being ‘agents of the real’ and by a ‘here’ and ‘now’. It is not clear how Russon makes his view compatible with what Hegel actually writes or how he responds to alternative positions.
The principle of adherence to experience and the idea that we can only describe concepts which have some sort of empirical grounding are at odds with the idea that concepts can be deduced a priori, and are therefore difficult to reconcile with both Kant and Hegel. Kant’s method of course is not merely descriptive, as it sets out the necessary transcendental conditions of experience. And Hegel, already in the Phenomenology of Spirit, does not develop its concepts based in what follows from our experience, but what follows logically in thinking about our concept of experience (with concepts in and for themselves treated in the Logic). Russon’s thesis is that being cannot be explained rationally, but is instead phenomenologically self-evident and always already determinate. This is a hotly contested issue in the scholarship, and Russon could have strengthened his thesis by spending more time elaborating on why exactly Kant’s deduction of conceptual conditions and its Hegelian equivalent—the dialectical generation of thought-determination—ultimately cannot live up to the demands of phenomenology.
To my mind, the comparison between Hegel’s logic of being and Derrida’s notion of différance does not hold up either, for Russon attributes to the category of being determinacies that it precisely does not have. Being, insofar as the argument in Hegel’s Logic is concerned, neither repeats itself endlessly nor constitutes the indeterminate background of determinate beings; being, taken absolutely, vanishes and shows itself in truth to be nothing. The ‘horizon that is definitive of being as such’, Russon writes, ‘can never appear as such: all that appears are determinate beings’ (69). I am in full agreement with Russon that being never appears as such in experience, but that does not warrant the assertion that it cannot be thought as such. Indeed, the phenomenological presupposition here is precisely what prevents one from thinking being clearly, and consequently generates the idea that being must be this non-appearing background that actualizes but is never actualized. This presupposition leads Russon to attribute to Hegel’s Logic the structure of Derrida’s quasi-transcendentalism, and to argue that Hegel’s logical categories reveal that ‘their conditions of possibility are…shown to be equally their conditions of impossibility’ (71). It would be difficult, I think, to show this quasi-transcendental operating in Hegel’s Logic as a whole. It may be that différance has analogues in the Logic, but since it is a complex concept the parallels ought to be found only in the advanced stages of the Logic, rather than the opening chapter on Being.
Russon privileges the category of infinity in Hegel because it instantiates a tension between indeterminate and determinate being which is productive and dynamic. His assertion that freedom is determinacy itself opening itself is incisive. But this may not be the best logical structure in which to ground freedom. Hegel’s concept of infinity consists basically of two elements, the infinite and the finite, and while this may logically articulate the relation of a ‘part’ to a ‘whole’, it does not explicitly feature the singular one as such; whereas the concept, in Hegel’s logic, features a tripartite structure that captures explicitly what singularity means (and which incidentally shows that singularity simultaneously completes and breaks the concept) (SL 12.49–52). Moreover, the idea that freedom must attach to a notion of a ‘beyond’ remains questionable and perhaps more foundationalist than Russon is willing to concede. If the idea is that there is a ‘beyond’ which must be combined with any determinacy, that ‘beyond’ functions as a foundational premise that is itself fixed in relation to what it grounds. The problem is that this foundational premise stands outside the determinacy it grounds and acts as an external standard, and this is at odds with the reading of Hegel’s system as thoroughly self-grounding and rationally transparent.
Given the extent to which Russon develops his own philosophical thoughts in tandem with those of other major thinkers, the reader who is not already well acquainted with Hegel’s philosophy might find it difficult to follow all these connections in the detail they demand. The book is deeper than an introductory text but not as detailed and technical as a fully in-depth study. Yet it is an excellent defence of Hegel’s relevance to contemporary phenomenology.
