In Emancipation After Hegel, Todd McGowan presents ‘a new radical Hegel’ (10), one who goes beyond the opposing interpretations of Left- and Right-Hegelianism. The Left Hegelians had taken over from Hegel the dialectical method and his view of the historical development of subjectivity, while the Right Hegelians emphasized his ideas of Christianity and the state. However, McGowan argues, once one takes away Christianity and the state from Hegel's philosophy, one misses the freedom that it offers (3). More importantly, the distinction between Left- and Right-Hegelianism obscures the main argument of Hegel's philosophy, to wit, that being itself is contradictory and that one apprehends this contradiction by thinking (6). The philosophy of contradiction originates in one event, the death of God on the cross (10).
Dispensing with the infamous formula of the dialectic as ‘thesis, antithesis, synthesis’, McGowan maintains that contradiction is not the opposition of an antithesis to a thesis, but occurs when a position follows its own internal logic and exposes its inner division. Every identity constitutes itself by negating itself (12). According to McGowan, what Hegel terms the ‘resolution’ (Auflösung) of contradiction is not a synthesis but the ‘reconciliation’ (Versöhnung) with contradiction (14). The absolute is the recognition that contradiction is ineliminable (21).
Hegel has often been misinterpreted and this is not least due to his prose style. For McGowan, Hegel's obscure prose style is a product of the role that contradiction plays in his thought (40). In a chapter entitled ‘Hegel After Freud’ McGowan argues that the terms bequeathed to Hegel by Kant, Fichte, Hölderlin and Schelling were inadequate to his philosophy of contradiction (41). These were the subject, the thing-in-itself, appearances, the understanding, reason (Kant); the ego and non-ego (Fichte); the subject, object, absolute identity (Schelling); unity (Hölderlin). According to McGowan, Freud's psychoanalytic theory ‘provides a theoretical supplement for Hegel’. By conceptualizing the unconscious, Freud sees subjectivity through a contradiction that it cannot eliminate (41).
McGowan's contention in Chapter Three that ‘reason’ (Vernunft), for Hegel, is the ability to think contradiction, as opposed to the ‘understanding’ (Verstand), which limits itself to avoid contradiction (59), is less convincing. In the Differenzschrift, Hegel famously distinguishes between Verstand and Vernunft by saying that the ‘understanding’ is analytical thinking which breaks reality down into isolated elements, and that fails to bring these elements together in a harmonious manner. By contrast, ‘reason’ is the dialectical/speculative faculty which grasps the interconnections between phenomena. But, following his interpretation of Vernunft in Hegel, McGowan makes Hegel a ‘political revolutionary’:
The discovery that contradiction is actual and knowable through reason makes possible the theoretical dismantling of inequality. The structure of inegalitarian, hierarchical relations in the world has its basis in the conviction that contradiction doesn't actually exist and that, as a result, a privileged identity can separate itself definitively from what negates it. Every inegalitarian relation depends on this separation, which serves as its justification. (80)
Moreover, McGowan radically reinterprets the famous double dictum of the Philosophy of Right that what is rational is actual and vice versa. He states: ‘To say that rationality is actual is to say that actuality is contradictory—and thus not just inherently changeable but already subverting itself’ (82).
In Chapter Four, entitled ‘The Insubstantiality of Substance: Restoring Hegel's Lost Limbs’, McGowan maintains that Hegel makes ontological claims by going through Kant's critique of metaphysics. He states: ‘For Hegel, nothing simply is. Everything is also what it is not and has its identity in what negates it.’ (85). Taking Hegel's ontology seriously brings McGowan in line with such thinkers as Slavoj Žižek, Catherine Malabou and Adrian Johnston (88). McGowan claims that when Hegel says that we should view substance as subject in the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, he ‘provides a radical rethinking of the category of substance’. For Hegel, there is no substance that is self-identical (90).
In Chapter Five, entitled ‘Love and Logic’, McGowan maintains that Hegel's logic develops out of the concept of ‘love’ Hegel used in his Early Theological Writings. There ‘love’ is ‘the identity of identity and difference, a contradictory identity’ (99). Like love, conceptual thinking does not consider the relation between identity and difference as merely external (102). For McGowan, Hegel's replacement of the moral law with love was Hegel's first revolution. His second revolution was his replacement of love with the concept (114).
According to McGowan, for Hegel, ‘when the subject considers itself and other entities as simply existing in space and time, it misrecognizes contradiction as difference’ (118). This he calls ‘spatiotemporal deception’ (116). However, he says, ‘The point is not to abandon experience altogether for the life of the mind but to approach experience through the concept so that we recognize it properly as replete with contradiction’ (130).
In Chapter Seven, McGowan focuses on Hegel's Philosophy of History. He argues that the Philosophy of History ‘misleads’ (132) because it lays out a theory of progress that leads to the Europe of Hegel's day, while many are sacrificed in the name of progress (132–33). McGowan contends that it is not possible to understand what is at stake in the Philosophy of History without the Science of Logic (133). Accordingly:
History comes to an end when we recognize that we are all free, and we recognize that we are all free when we recognize that nothing can avoid contradiction, that there is no possible consistent authority to provide a ground for our identity. (142)
The Science of Logic also provides a ‘corrective’ for the idea of ‘cunning of reason’ (146). The ‘cunning of reason’ denotes that reason is the means individuals use to achieve their aims (149). McGowan argues that the ‘end of history’ does not mark the ‘end of politics’; rather, ‘it marks the beginning of political contestation in its most authentic form. Rather than struggling for freedom, subjects must now struggle for the form of life most adequate to their freedom.’ (152)
In a chapter, entitled ‘Resisting Resistance, or Freedom is a Positive Thing’, McGowan argues that there is no freedom without negation (154). However, freedom is not true freedom if it is merely resistance or rebellion (155). As he says, ‘Hegel's conception of freedom begins with negation, but it ends with the recognition that this negation must manifest itself in some positive form if the subject is to free itself completely from the external authority that it negates.’ (155) According to McGowan's reading of Hegel, ‘the freedom that identifies its own limit in the external authority reaches the point of self-determination’ (172).
In Chapter Nine, McGowan's answer to the question ‘Is Hegel a Racist?’ is negative. As he says, it is Hegel's commitment to the absolute that enables him to reject the form of racism that refuses to see the other as a subject and that treats the other as a substantial entity (188). When Hegel does appear to make racist judgements, it is because he fails to see his own particularity. In such instances, he betrays his philosophy of the absolute (192).
In the final chapter, McGowan argues that Hegel's key political idea is ‘the recognition of the inescapability of contradiction that occurs with absolute knowing’ (197). He contends that Hegel sees in the state ‘a social structure that sustains contradiction’. Specifically, ‘[t]he State is absolute politics—the political equivalent to absolute knowing or the absolute idea’ (202). It is McGowan's contention that, for Hegel, emancipation ‘occurs through contradiction, not as a result of its overcoming’ (213). This is where Karl Marx went wrong; he replaced Hegel's ‘radical political program’ with a more conservative one, as he viewed the overcoming of all contradictions in a future communist society. Therefore, contrary to the received view, Marx represents ‘a rightist deviation’ (213).
Though McGowan's argument is undoubtedly interesting, his main thesis that the core of Hegel's philosophy is contradiction can be contested. Arguably, the main idea of Hegelianism is reconciliation. From his youth until his maturity Hegel was concerned with creating a philosophy that would make humans feel at home in the world. In the posthumously published Early Theological Writings, Hegel used the term ‘life’ to refer to the inherent unity of being or existence, and the term ‘love’ to refer to the longing for reconciliation, the longing for unity with life in all its manifestations. Later, the term ‘spirit’ replaces ‘life’. Hegel uses the concept ‘spirit’ (Geist) to designate a people's consciousness and the world they lived in. Nor does McGowan accord recognition its due part. Moreover, one can question McGowan's interpretation of ‘reason’, as noted above. Further, rather than being ‘a social structure that sustains contradiction’ (202), the state is a unifying structure that contains difference.
The book discusses many themes and it is impossible to do justice to all the issues raised here. Despite the difficulty of Hegel's arguments, McGowan writes in an accessible manner, as he uses examples from everyday life to elucidate complex ideas. McGowan's interpretation of Hegel may not appeal to many Hegel scholars, but its novelty makes the book an essential read.
