In an interview originally published in 1971, answering a question concerning one of the main motifs of his works, Derrida declared that ‘if there were a definition of différance, it would be precisely the limit, the interruption, the destruction of the Hegelian “relève” wherever it operates’ (Derrida Reference Derrida and Bass1981: 40).Footnote 1 While this opposition to Hegel by no means distinguishes him from other French thinkers of his generation, Derrida's originality, in this regard, lies in the fact that he explicitly understood this confrontation to be of crucial importance for his own thought and accordingly engaged in a life-long discussion with Hegel. Deleuze, Levinas or even Foucault, for example, were staunch critics of Hegel as well, but none of them ever seems to have been willing to articulate this criticism in a significant dialogue.
Since it is thus permitted to think of différance as an effort to deconstruct Hegel's ‘relève’, coming to terms with Derrida's project in general requires understanding his perception of Hegel: why the former thought it so necessary to oppose the latter's philosophy and how exactly he deemed it should be done. One question that needs to be answered in this regard is that of the extent to which such a reading of Hegel was mediated through Heidegger, whom Derrida names with remarkable consistency as the principal source of his own effort to subvert the tradition.Footnote 2 Indeed, when Derrida speaks of différance as the ‘destruction’ of Hegel's Aufhebung, it is already apparent that his approach to Hegel is indebted to Heidegger's program of a ‘destruction’ (Destruktion) of the history of ontology.Footnote 3 So what does Derrida's reading of Hegel owe to Heidegger? In this paper, I shall investigate this question and the genesis of Derrida's reading of Hegel more generally by looking into the interpretation which can be found in the 1964–65 lectures about Heidegger: The Question of Being and History (Reference Derrida2016).Footnote 4 In the process of commenting on Heidegger, Derrida produces extensive remarks about Hegel which document the early elaboration of his perception of the author of the Phenomenology of Spirit and shed new light on the question of Derrida's interpretation of Hegel.Footnote 5 Here, I will focus more specifically on Hegel's conception of experience, which Derrida likens to Heidegger's understanding of the historicity of Dasein. As will become clear, however, this question involves the way Derrida presents the relationship between the two thinkers throughout these lectures.Footnote 6
But first, we must ask ourselves why Hegel is so important to Derrida in this context. I will then look into the reading Heidegger gives of Hegel's concept of experience. Derrida draws on this reading in order to show, first, that Heidegger and Hegel are strikingly close to one another and, second, that Heidegger's thinking of ‘ek-sistence’ nonetheless constitutes a radical departure from Hegel's thought. Examining Heidegger's interpretation will consequently allow for a twofold revision of Derrida's appreciation of Hegel: I will show, first, that Hegel and Heidegger are not as indistinguishable from one another as Derrida initially contends; second, I intend to demonstrate that there is however no need to set their thoughts as strongly at odds with one another as Derrida ultimately does in these lectures, and so that it is problematic to reduce Hegel's thought to the metaphysics of presence.
I. The critical status of Hegel in the 1964–65 lectures
Derrida's purpose in these lectures is to explain the unity of the question of being and of history in Heidegger's thinking. In this process, it is striking that Hegel's philosophy is used again and again as a point of contrast in order to exhibit Heidegger's original undertaking. But why does Derrida need to contrast Heidegger particularly with Hegel and why does he claim that ‘it is in the difference between Hegel and Heidegger that our problem is situated’ (QBH: 7)?
The form of Derrida's reference to Hegel, in these lectures, is a very definite one. Indeed, Derrida almost always insists, first, that Heidegger's position is virtually identical to Hegel's, and, second, that Heidegger's thought is not for that matter merely repeating Hegel but rather submitting his philosophy, along with the metaphysical tradition as a whole, to an unprecedented subversion. For instance:
Heideggerian destruction is not Hegel's ‘recollecting’ refutation. It is distinguished from it by a nothing, a slight trembling of meaning […]. Heidegger says nothing else after the Hegelian—that is, Western—ontology that he is going to destroy. […] The difference between […] Hegelian Erinnerung and Heideggerian destruction, is thus as close as possible to nothing [… is but a] slight, flimsy, almost immaterial […] displacement. (QBH: 9)
As Derrida systematically remarks, the difference between the two thinkers, which ‘could appear to be null’ is nevertheless ‘decisive’ and that ‘Heidegger is not saying anything different’ should not ‘leave us with the illusion that […] Heidegger is saying the same thing’ (QBH: 9, 18, 37). Nothing distinguishes Heidegger from Hegel, in other words, but nothing distinguishes them nonetheless. The nature of the difference between their thoughts, as we can see, is somewhat similar to the ontological difference itself. Being can just as little be separated from beings or entities, as it may be reduced to them. Likewise, Derrida often claims, ‘Da-sein is not man’ but this ‘does not mean that Da-sein is something other than man’ (QBH: 88). Perhaps this analogy between the way Derrida expounds the difference between Hegel and Heidegger, on the one hand, and Dasein and man, on the other hand, is no coincidence but results from the general point Derrida is trying to make about Heidegger.
As I indicated, Derrida's chief concern here is to elucidate the historicity of the question of being. As a consequence, Derrida strongly emphasizes the positive character of Heidegger's ‘destruction’ of the history of philosophy. Being itself is not a being; still, it is no other than the being of beings. Notwithstanding the ontological difference, therefore, being itself is no other than its manifestation in history—be that history the history of the metaphor or of the dissimulation of being. Heidegger's ‘destruction’ of the tradition, Derrida insists, thus cannot be merely secondary with respect to the analytic of Dasein but must rather be viewed as a necessary and insurmountable task which positively performs the investigation of the meaning of being.Footnote 7 Doing away with the tradition altogether or dismissing it once and for all through a definitive critique would amount to disregarding being itself as it has manifested in history. In other words, this would be nothing short of another dissimulation of being—another metaphysical metaphor.Footnote 8 It is thus necessary that the positive investigation of the meaning of being coincide to some extent with a discussion of the history of philosophy. According to Derrida's interpretation, therefore, Heidegger's Auseinandersetzung with the tradition can never end because Heidegger must let the ontological difference resonate from within the very dissimulation of being with which the tradition coincides.
Furthermore, it is remarkable that Hegel is presented throughout these lectures as the philosopher who ‘fulfils’ the tradition ‘totally’ or with whom ‘the epoch closes on itself’ (QBH: 18, 152). Hegel's philosophy, Derrida says, ‘could well’ have been the ‘absolutely last philosophy’ (QBH: 4).Footnote 9 If Derrida always comes back to Hegel in order to clarify Heidegger's own procedure, and places constant emphasis on the precarious nature of the difference between the two thinkers, then, it is because the question of being is always already a historical one. The question of being cannot but involve a confrontation with the tradition: indeed, as Derrida explains, since the dissimulation of being is essential to being itself, the question of being must be seen as essentially inseparable from the destruction of the metaphysical tradition. It must therefore always remain a destruction of the history of ontology, in Derrida's view, and since Hegel is taken to have summarized such a tradition, the question of being will never overcome Hegel's philosophy or say anything else than what was said in that philosophy.Footnote 10 This indifference nonetheless distinguishes the destruction from that which it destroys, just like being, while no other than the being of which it is the being, may not be reduced to any being. When he discusses the historicity of the question of being, therefore, Derrida needs to insist both that Heidegger's thought confirms Hegel's philosophy in an essential sense and that it radically distances itself from it at one and the same time.Footnote 11
The perplexing status of the difference between Hegel and Heidegger, in these lectures, thus results from the point Derrida is willing to make about the historicity of the question of being. If this is true, then it is worth looking at the exact nature of such a difference, as Derrida reproduces it.
II. The ambiguities of experience
The most significant discussion of Heidegger's departure from the tradition, in these lectures, concerns the critique to which Heidegger submits the privilege of presence in metaphysics. This is what Derrida calls the ‘Root of the problem’:
Everything—everything: that is, not only this or that gesture of the destruction of Metaphysics but the totality of the destruction and the meaning that directs it as a whole—everything is played out around the meaning of the Present and the privilege accorded by the whole of philosophy to the present. Philosophy, what Heidegger wants to transgress, is in its entirety a philosophy of the Present, privileges the Present. (QBH: 137)
The aim of Heidegger's distinctive effort is thus to ‘solicit’ the privilege of the present in metaphysical thought (QBH: 138).Footnote 12 In the process of elaborating this point, Derrida explains once more that, in spite of the deep and striking similarity of their positions, it is crucial not to lose sight of the radical shift that takes place between Hegel and Heidegger. In what follows, I intend to put to the test Derrida's general procedure when dealing with Hegel and Heidegger's relationship, and to challenge the idea that the two philosophers are as close as Derrida makes them in the first place. By the same token, however, I would like to question the radical difference which Derrida conversely insists there is between them. Let us first reconstruct the context of this debate between Hegel and Heidegger over experience.
II.i. Ek-sistence and the limitation of presence
By conceiving of time as a series of moments through which one passes as through successively present points, metaphysics, Derrida explains, reduces being to presence. Derrida stresses that it is not Heidegger's intention to contradict such an understanding of being. The certainty that ‘any experience is only ever lived in the present and that everything of experience that comes about, everything that appears in it […] is present’, he says, is the very ‘self-evidence of self-evidence’ (QBH: 139).Footnote 13 To think of presence as the most original determination of time and as the sole meaning of being, however, is to overlook the originary nature of finitude. One of the major results of Heidegger's phenomenological analyses in Being and Time, Derrida argues, is that birth and death, albeit never experienced and as such never present, are not limits for a duration of time within which our being would be encompassed merely, and to which the latter would be indifferent. Time does not, as it were, ‘happen’ to a pre-existing subject; nor does it present itself as an object. On the contrary, it is on the basis of finite temporalization or ‘ek-sistence’—the fact that Dasein is its past and, likewise, necessarily relates to its death (QBH: 143)—that something like consciousness or experience, and thus presence, opens up to us in the first place. In so far as it rests on the necessary illusion that presence is the primordial determination of being, philosophy as a whole is fundamentally a metaphysics of presence (QBH: 143). But as insurmountable as it is, the determination of being as presence is itself limited. It is produced and made possible by a past and a future which can never be reduced to a past- or a future-present. Derrida quotes Heidegger:
Dasein does not first fill up a vorhandene (present) path or stretch “of life” through the phases of its momentary realities, but stretches itself along, erstreckt sich selbst […], it stretches itself along [it is its path] in such a way that its own being is constituted beforehand as this stretching along. The “between” (the Zwischen) of birth and death already lies in the being […] of Dasein. (QBH: 148–49)
It is on the understanding of this ‘between’ which constitutes the movement of historicity, Derrida argues, that Heidegger departs most remarkably from Hegel. At first sight, he writes, the two are nevertheless indistinguishable from one another: ‘Hegel too says that the in-between, the movement of passage, defines historicity—the dia and the dialectic as experience of consciousness itself—is the historicity of consciousness’ (QBH: 148–49). Derrida quotes from Heidegger's reading of the introduction to the Phenomenology in ‘Hegel's concept of experience’ (Heidegger Reference Heidegger, Young and Haynes2002: 138):
In this ambiguity, consciousness betrays the fundamental trait of its essence: at the same time, to be already that which it is not yet. Being in the sense of being-conscious, consciousness (Bewusstsein), means: to reside in the not-yet of the already, and to do this in such a way that this Already presences in the Not-yet. This presence is in itself a self-referral into the Already. It sets off on the path to the already. It makes itself a path. […] Consciousness, as consciousness, is the movement of consciousness, for it is the comparison between ontic/pre-ontological knowledge […] and ontological knowledge. The former exerts its claim on the latter. The latter claims that it is the truth of the former. Between (dia) the one and the other, is the articulation of these claims, a legein. In this dia-logue, consciousness ascribes truth to itself. The dialegein is a dialegesthai. (QBH: 149)
When, in Being and Time, ‘the in-between is mentioned as the already of the not yet and the not yet of the already’, Derrida concludes that ‘never is Heidegger so close to Hegel’ (QBH: 149). Before we come to what Derrida terms the ‘apparently subtle’ but nonetheless ‘decisive’ (QBH: 149–50) difference between the two thinkers, let us take a closer look at the interpretation of Hegel upon which these claims rest.
Derrida remarks that this interpretation he quotes from Heidegger constitutes an ‘unexceptional and uncontroversial paraphrase of Hegel’ (QBH: 149).Footnote 14 Now, it is quite clear that Heidegger's intention, in ‘Hegel's concept of experience’, is not to produce any paraphrase. Rather, in the interpretation he unfolds, Heidegger writes, ‘the language of thinking, which has grown on the basis of its destiny, calls what has been thought in other thinking into the clarity of its own thinking, in order to release the former into its own essence’ (Heidegger Reference Heidegger, Young and Haynes2002: 117). What Heidegger means to do in his reading of Hegel, in other words, is to uncover certain basic presuppositions that lie at the heart of the Phenomenology. By releasing Hegel's thought ‘to its own essence’, Heidegger intends to unveil that on which Hegel's phenomenological project secretly rests. Only this can explain that, in the passages Derrida quotes, Heidegger speaks of consciousness, in the Phenomenology, as riven in two and as being nothing indeed but this ‘in-between’ which constitutes the ‘dialogue’ of ‘ontic/pre-ontological knowledge’ and ‘ontological knowledge’. Both Heidegger and Derrida know full well that Hegel himself never conceived of consciousness as ‘ontic’ or ‘ontological’ knowledge. It is therefore quite surprising, at first sight, that Derrida should describe this passage of Heidegger's commentary as a paraphrase. How close is Heidegger to Hegel, here, exactly? In order to answer this question, I will give a brief account of Hegel's understanding of experience before turning to Heidegger's commentary.
II.ii. Experience in Hegel's Phenomenology
Hegel's Phenomenology is the ‘exposition of how knowledge makes its appearance’ (PhG: 49/60). It shows, in other words, how ordinary or natural consciousness is introduced through its own movement to the standpoint of science. Science or, if one prefers, real knowledge, thus may not be presupposed in phenomenology: ‘here, where Science has just begun to come on the scene, neither Science nor anything else has yet justified itself as the essence or the in-itself’ (PhG: 52/64). So how is consciousness to move out of its natural standpoint into that of science? In the introduction, Hegel argues that this unfolds on the basis of an ambiguity (Zweideutigkeit) and of a comparison (Vergleichung) taking place in consciousness itself and based on the following distinction:
the distinction between the in-itself and knowledge is already present in the very fact that consciousness knows an object at all. Something is for it the in-itself; and knowledge, or the being of the object for consciousness, is, for it, another moment. Upon this distinction, which is present as a fact, the examination rests. (PhG: 54–55/64–66)
Hegel's point, here, is a simple albeit counter-intuitive one, and can be expounded in various ways. To know an object, quite generally, is not to have a mere idea of it. Implicitly, the claim to know an object means that one understands the object as it is in itself. The knowledge I have of the object is not mine only but it is the truth of the object. Upon closer inspection, however, Hegel argues that the selfsame claim to knowledge entails a moment opposite to this. When I know an object, in fact, that which I know is precisely just that: an object. Hegel plays on the word Gegenstand in order to emphasize that the object as such is something standing before me and thus defined by its being for consciousness. The object is not known as it is in itself only, it thus turns out, but it is known as it is for consciousness. No matter how consciousness proceeds—naming ‘concept’ the moment of its knowledge, that is, of what is known in so far as it is for consciousness, and ‘object’ the moment of the ‘in-itself’, or the reverse—there is no way around it: since both of these moments fall ‘within’ consciousness or since it is consciousness itself that distinguishes between the object as it is in-itself on the one hand, and the object as it is for consciousness on the other hand, consciousness cannot escape the realization that what it takes to be in-itself is not in-itself after all but ‘was only an in-itself for consciousness’. This ‘being-for-consciousness of this in-itself’ will then constitute consciousness's new object, the new in-itself which consciousness will relate to. This new object is what Hegel calls the truth of the first object or consciousness's experience thereof (PhG: 53–55/64–67). Experience, for Hegel, therefore consists in a ‘reversal of consciousness itself’ or in the ‘dialectical movement’ it ‘exercises on itself’ (PhG: 55/66–67).
II.iii. Heidegger's interpretation of experience
In his commentary of this passage of the introduction to the Phenomenology, Heidegger highlights the ‘ambiguity’ of consciousness:
Natural consciousness is the immediate knowledge of an object which it holds to be true. At the same time, natural consciousness is a knowledge of its knowledge of the object, even if it does not refer itself explicitly back to this knowledge… (Heidegger Reference Heidegger, Young and Haynes2002: 130)
This can indeed be taken as paraphrasing Hegel's text. At this point of his interpretation, however, Heidegger introduces a vocabulary which, he explains, although foreign to Hegel's introduction, nonetheless suits to some extent the distinctions therein at work. Let us quote at length:
With due caution and with the requisite caveats, a difference may be adduced regarding the differentiations established by Hegel, a difference that was mentioned elsewhere earlier. Because natural consciousness goes directly to the object as a being, as well as to its knowledge of the object as a being, and because it remains constantly with them, natural consciousness may be called ontic consciousness. The term “ontic” is derived from the Greek τὸ ὄν, the being that is; it means that which concerns beings […]. In fact, in keeping with its ambiguity, the ὄν as that which is is already gathered together with regard to its beingness (Seiendheit). It is ontological […]. The ambiguity of the ὄν identifies that which is present as well as the present.Footnote 15 (Heidegger Reference Heidegger, Young and Haynes2002: 131–32; translation slightly modified)
Heidegger then gives an ontological dimension to the ambiguity of consciousness Hegel describes, likening it to the ambiguity of the Greek τὸ ὄν: Hegel's phenomenology, he continues, is ‘the comparison, explicitly carried out by ontological consciousness, of ontic and pre-ontological consciousness’ (Heidegger Reference Heidegger, Young and Haynes2002: 134). Heidegger's intention is obviously not to produce a scholarly commentary of Hegel's introduction. In the course of his interpretation, he does not clearly equate the ontological terms he uses with the distinct moments of consciousness we find in Hegel. Still, with due caution, it can be understood that what is compared, in ontic or pre-ontological consciousness, are the two moments of natural consciousness, the ambiguity of which Heidegger just referred to, namely that consciousness is both conscious of its object and conscious of itself—and thus conscious of its own consciousness of the object. But to what does the ‘ontological consciousness’ refer, in Heidegger's analysis?
Throughout the introduction, Hegel explains that, given the aim of phenomenology, it is crucial that its realization be conducted with no presupposition and that the development of consciousness unfold out of the contradiction resulting from the comparison of the two moments found in consciousness alone: that of its knowledge of the object as it is in-itself and that of this in-itself in so far as it is an object, that is, as it is for consciousness or knowledge. The comparison itself, for Hegel, cannot lie outside of consciousness: ‘since both’ of its moments are ‘for the same consciousness, this consciousness is itself their comparison’ (PhG: 54/64–65). The development of consciousness, then, is internal to the uneducated, natural consciousness itself, and ‘we’ need intervene only in so far as it is necessary that we actively keep ourselves from intervening in such a development (PhG: 54/65). As Kenley R. Dove notes, ‘no one has seen more clearly than Heidegger that “our contribution” consists in the act of restraint in the face of the appearance of experience, that “our contribution” is the omission of all contributions’ (Dove Reference Dove1970: 635).
In his interpretation, Heidegger indicates on the one hand that consciousness is ontic/pre-ontological—it is conscious both of itself and of its object as ‘a being’, Heidegger says—and, on the other hand, that the Greek ὄν from which the term ‘ontic’ is derived refers to ‘beings’ but is at the same time ‘already gathered together with regard to its beingness’ or is ‘ontological’. The natural, ontic or pre-ontological consciousness is therefore itself ambiguous and not ontic only but also ontological: it has itself ‘already gathered the object into its objectivity and is therefore ontological consciousness’ (Heidegger Reference Heidegger, Young and Haynes2002: 133). It seems, therefore, that the ontological consciousness undertaking the comparison Heidegger speaks of can be no other than natural consciousness itself. On this hypothesis, natural consciousness would thus be both that within which the comparison takes place—i.e. that which contains the two moments of the comparison—and that which undertakes the comparison: as Heidegger repeatedly points out ‘consciousness critically examines itself’.Footnote 16 Moreover, identifying ontological consciousness with natural consciousness explains why Heidegger says both that consciousness is the comparison of ontic or pre-ontological consciousness undertaken by ontological consciousness, and that consciousness is ‘the comparison of what has been represented ontically and what ontologically’ (Heidegger Reference Heidegger, Young and Haynes2002: 133; my emphasis). If natural consciousness is ontic consciousness, and if ontological consciousness is in fact no other than natural consciousness, the comparison of ontic consciousness with itself amounts to a comparison of ontic consciousness and ontological consciousness.
To recapitulate: in the introduction to the Phenomenology, Hegel describes consciousness's phenomenological development as a dialectic internal to the latter. Natural consciousness, says Hegel, is ambiguous in that it contains two moments which, at the same time, are both for the same consciousness and are thus one. The dialectical movement of consciousness or its experience, Hegel argues, results from the comparison of these two moments, a comparison which is undertaken by consciousness itself. Now, Heidegger gives an ontological dimension to this ambiguity of consciousness. Because consciousness represents its object as well as its knowledge thereof as ‘beings’, it can be said to be ‘ontic’. Consciousness is ambiguous, however, since, in being ontic, for Heidegger, it must also be ontological. Consciousness, moreover, is the comparison of ontic and ontological consciousness. Since this comparison is undertaken by natural consciousness itself, and since natural consciousness is ambiguous and therefore both ontic and ontological, the comparison of ontic consciousness to ontological consciousness can be understood to be performed by ontological consciousness itself.
It is not clear, however, whether this reading agrees or disagrees with what follows in Heidegger's interpretation. In the passage quoted above by Derrida, for instance, Heidegger writes that ‘Consciousness, as consciousness, is the movement of consciousness, for it is the comparison between ontic/pre-ontological consciousness and ontological knowledge’. But he also writes that ‘Consciousness is consciousness in that it is the dialogue between natural and real knowledge’ (Heidegger Reference Heidegger, Young and Haynes2002: 138). And, still further on in his interpretation, Heidegger explains that phenomenology is ‘a dialogue between ontic and ontological consciousness’ (Heidegger Reference Heidegger, Young and Haynes2002: 151). Not only is thus the comparison of consciousness now interpreted in terms of a ‘dialogue’: Heidegger also implicitly identifies this comparison with a dialogue ‘between natural and real knowledge’.
Now, real knowledge, in Hegel's introduction, unambiguously refers to what Hegel also calls ‘science’ or ‘absolute knowing’ (PhG: 49/60). Whereas our first conjecture was that Heidegger's ‘ontological knowledge’ was to be equated to Hegel's ‘natural consciousness’, experience, according to Heidegger, actually consists in a comparison of ontic and ontological consciousness in the sense of a dialogue between natural consciousness and absolute knowing. Given what was said about the presuppositionless nature of phenomenology, for Hegel, this might come as a surprise, for how can natural consciousness be elevated to the standpoint of absolute knowing through an immanent motion if such a movement already presupposes a dialogue with absolute knowing? Since it is not ‘educated’ yet, consciousness cannot know that absolute knowing is absolute knowing but trusts to its own immediate certainty only (PhG: 48–50/59–62). Notwithstanding this apparent difficulty, there are reasons why consciousness's phenomenological development may to some extent be said to consist in a dialogue between natural consciousness and real knowledge.
First, if it is true that the whole point of the Phenomenology is to introduce natural consciousness to science and, therefore, that the phenomenological development of consciousness only makes sense in so far as consciousness has not yet reached absolute knowing, it must be acknowledged that natural consciousness, for Hegel, is in itself absolute knowing. Phenomenology, in this sense, is merely the realization of consciousness's own essence, and absolute knowing is the truth of consciousness. In its progress towards the former, the latter thus merely learns with growing clarity what it ‘always already’ is. Our first hypothesis concerning the identity of Heidegger's ontological consciousness was in fact not so far off the mark: to the extent that natural consciousness is in itself absolute knowing, it can be said that ontological consciousness qua absolute knowing is no other than natural consciousness. The experience of consciousness as a comparison of ontic and ontological consciousness can in this sense be described as a dialogue between natural consciousness and absolute knowing, that is, between what consciousness is for itself and what it is in itself. This, at least, is what Hegel implies when, early on in the introduction, he writes that the absolute is ‘already with us, in and for itself’ (PhG: 47/58; translation modified; see Heidegger Reference Heidegger, Young and Haynes2002: 97–98, 100, 103).Footnote 17 That consciousness is in itself absolute knowing does not mean, however, that it actually is absolute knowing itself already. The fact that consciousness is in itself absolute knowing means, rather, that it is not absolute knowing itself. The absolute, for Hegel ‘is essentially a result […] only in the end is it what it truly is’ (PhG: 11/15). The identification of immediate, natural consciousness with absolute knowing is thus strictly limited. As far as absolute knowing is not posited in consciousness, or as consciousness is not yet for itself absolute knowing, the aspect of consciousness according to which it can nonetheless be said to be in itself absolute knowing belongs, then, to what Hegel elsewhere refers to as an ‘external reflection which has already gone through the whole of the exposition, therefore knows the sequence of its developments in advance and anticipates them before they are brought on by the matter at issue itself’ (WL: 34/50).Footnote 18 Moreover, in the case of absolute knowing, the problems associated with identifying what something is in itself to what it is actually posited to be for itself are actually more salient than in other cases. In the Phenomenology, sense certainty may be said to be in itself perception; similarly, for instance, self-consciousness may itself be said to be in itself reason. Since these various shapes of natural consciousness phenomenologically derive from each other without fully undermining the form of natural consciousness, the continuity between them may be emphasized to some extent. But if it is true that natural consciousness, likewise, is in itself absolute knowing, there seems to be a radical difference between this latter case and the former ones, since, once it reaches absolute knowing, natural consciousness ceases to be consciousness at all and divests itself of its form. In so far as it can be said to be absolute knowing, in other words, natural consciousness is thus no longer natural consciousness.Footnote 19 On the whole, therefore, it is only with strong reservations that experience, in phenomenology, can be said to consist in a dialogue of natural consciousness and absolute knowing, if by that it is understood that the comparison Hegel describes of the two moments internal to consciousness is a dialogue between what natural consciousness is for itself and what it is in itself.
There is, however, a further sense in which the experience of consciousness can be described as a dialogue of natural consciousness and absolute knowing. As Hegel explains, experience consists in the ‘dialectical movement which consciousness exercises on itself’ in so far as ‘the new true object issues from it’. This ‘new object’, which itself defines a corresponding new shape of consciousness, thus ‘shows itself to have come about through a reversal of consciousness itself’ (PhG: 55/66–67). At this point of the introduction, however, Hegel highlights that
This way of looking at the matter is something contributed by us, by means of which the succession of experience through which consciousness passes is raised into a scientific progression—but it is not known to the consciousness that we are observing. [… It] is just this necessity itself, or the origination of the new object, that presents itself to consciousness without its understanding how this happens, which proceeds for us, as it were, behind the back of consciousness. Thus in the movement of consciousness there occurs a moment of being-in-itself or being-for-us which is not present to the consciousness comprehended in the experience itself. (PhG: 56/67–68)
This part of the text appears to stand in open contradiction with Hegel's insistence, earlier in the introduction, that to us—though Hegel does not explain who we are—is left merely the task of ‘looking on’ (das reine Zusehen) (PhG: 54/65). This passage has thus led to diverse hypotheses on the part of the commentators.Footnote 20 For our present purpose, however, it will be enough to understand that the development we find in the Phenomenology can be considered to unfold in two ways. On the one hand or considered ‘from above’, as Philipp Schwab writes, it exposes ‘the journey of spirit to itself, in the course of which the individual shapes pre-figure spirit, so to speak, and only purify themselves as they develop into spirit. Here, the outset is in what is spiritless.’ On the other hand, phenomenology can be considered ‘from below’ or ‘from its beginning’, that is, as ‘the experience of consciousness, which, in its progress, is driven beyond itself’ (Schwab Reference Schwab2010: 117; my translation).
So far, we have focused on the latter standpoint. But the former is no less valid: it is that from which the Phenomenology claims to have been written, as it were. Having reached science, the philosopher looks back on the path that has led him to that point and is able to understand it as a consistent development. In this sense, the philosopher or the narrator of the phenomenology acts as a guide for the reader, leading him from one shape of consciousness to another.Footnote 21 This is not to say that phenomenology should not be seen as the development of the dialectic inherent to natural, non-philosophical consciousness. But such a dialectic is ‘rendered explicit’ by the phenomenologist (Houlgate Reference Houlgate2013: 27).Footnote 22 When Heidegger speaks of phenomenological experience as a dialogue between natural consciousness and real knowledge, then, ‘real knowledge’ refers to the perspective of the philosopher, and the development of consciousness can be said to result from a comparison of natural consciousness and absolute knowing in so far as the writing of the Phenomenology results from the philosopher's retrospective examination of natural consciousness.
A problem arises, however, once we realize that whereas Hegel used the term ‘comparison’ to refer to the comparison of the two moments internal to natural consciousness, Heidegger, as we saw, seems to speak of experience indifferently as a ‘comparison between ontic/pre-ontological knowledge and ontological knowledge’, as a ‘dialogue between natural and real knowledge’, and as a ‘dialogue between ontic and ontological consciousness’. In other words, Heidegger tends to conflate the comparison of the two moments of consciousness—that of its certainty and that of its truth, or that of its knowledge and that of its object—with a dialogue between what he describes as two different consciousnesses—natural consciousness and absolute knowing. This would suggest that Hegel's ‘comparison’ and Heidegger's own conception of the dialogue of consciousness are one. In Hegel's text, however, the comparison takes place between the two moments of consciousness, not between natural consciousness and absolute knowing. It is true that such a comparison is rendered explicit by the phenomenologist, and this makes it possible to speak of the experience of consciousness as a dialogue between natural consciousness and absolute knowing. But Hegel's text does not allow for the comparison taking place within consciousness to be equated with its elucidation by the philosopher. Now, when Heidegger refers to the ‘ambiguity’ he sees as the ‘fundamental trait of’ consciousness, in the passage Derrida quotes, one might think he is referring to the two moments of consciousness analysed by Hegel. Heidegger had remarked on such an ambiguity in his interpretation of the twelfth and thirteenth paragraphs: ‘In the nature of consciousness knowledge and object are sundered, and yet they can never be separate’ (Heidegger Reference Heidegger, Young and Haynes2002: 131). As we determined, however, what he has in mind, in fact, is a second ambiguity: that of consciousness, in so far as it is involved in a dialogue with real knowledge or what it is ‘not yet’. In his commentary, then, Heidegger does not deal with one ambiguity only but with two. It is true that the end of Hegel's text is itself rather elliptical and that this makes the introduction somewhat ambiguous as a whole. But Heidegger's implicit shift in what is to be understood by ‘ambiguity’ tends to confer some ambiguity to the word itself and to obscure the meaning it had for Hegel in that text.
If we turn to our first question, then, Derrida's conclusion that Heidegger and Hegel almost share the same understanding of the ‘between’ of consciousness must be qualified. The dialectic of consciousness, in Hegel's view, can to some extent be said to cause it to stretch itself out in a dialogue between what it not yet and nonetheless already is.Footnote 23 But it cannot be understood to rest on such a dialogue alone. True, the philosopher serves as a guide for experience, and natural consciousness is in this sense involved in a dialogue with absolute knowing. But the new object which gives rise, in each section of the Phenomenology, to a new shape of consciousness, ‘must arise out of the course of the experience described—and not qua described, but through itself’ (Dove Reference Dove1970: 622).
More broadly, Heidegger's introduction of ontological concepts in his commentary of Hegel's introduction is itself questionable: for instance, it leads him to claim that ‘ontology unfolds as the “science of the experience of consciousness”’ (Heidegger Reference Heidegger, Young and Haynes2002: 150). ‘The safest generalization about Heidegger's essay’, Kenley R. Dove thus remarks, ‘is that it uses the PhG “Introduction” as a touchstone for elucidating some important elements of his own fundamental ontology.’ In other words, he continues, ‘it can be singularly misleading if taken literally as a commentary on the PhG. For the PhG is not an ontology (Hegel's Logik may be properly spoken of as his ontology); it is a phenomenology and can only be understood if it is read as such’ (Dove Reference Dove1970: 636–37).
The passage Derrida quotes from Heidegger's interpretation of Hegel is therefore problematic and cannot be described as a paraphrase. More than Hegel's, it is rather Heidegger's interpretation of Hegel's concept of experience which is strikingly close to the ‘between’ of birth and death which ‘already lies in the being of Dasein’, according to Being and Time. It therefore seems that Hegel and Heidegger are perhaps not as close to one another as Derrida claims. But taking Hegel's specific procedure into account equally makes it possible, as I would like to do now, to re-examine the sharp distinction Derrida simultaneously insists on making between the two thinkers. Let us, then, turn to the conclusions Derrida draws from Heidegger's account, and to the way Hegel is portrayed throughout these lectures.
III. Hegel and the metaphysics of presence
Following the recurring pattern examined above, Derrida first highlights the similarity between the two thinkers before remarking that, while Hegel's account is based on the concept of experience, Heidegger's thinking of historicity rests on ‘ek-sistence’. What does this mean?
No longer saying experience, that signifies refusing to make of consciousness the form of this progression, and refusing to make consciousness the form of this progression is refusing to see it occur in the form of presence and as a prescribed progression, a progression to which is prescribed that it progress toward absolute presence, toward the parousia of absolute consciousness, absolute knowledge as absolute self-consciousness and being absolutely with itself—that is, toward a presence in which once again death is gathered up in Presence. If one considers that Presence is merely one determination of being, however privileged it be, well, to replace the notion of experience with that of ek-sistence-to-death is to destroy that determination and begin to shatter the epoch. (QBH: 149–50)
We now understand why Derrida considers the question of experience to be so central to Heidegger's debate with Hegel as well as with the tradition in general. Hegel's limitation to experience, in the light of Heidegger's ‘solicitation’ of metaphysics, means that the former fundamentally belongs to the Cartesian epoch of representation. Hegel thus remains an onto-theologicalFootnote 24 thinker or, in Derrida's words, a philosopher of consciousness who ‘always determines being as a whole as voluntarist subjectivity’ and teleologically assigns being to the Idea or to God (QBH: 8, 18). Above all, since Derrida takes this concept to contain Hegel's understanding of history,Footnote 25 this limitation to experience corresponds to Hegel's incapacity to question the Aristotelian conception of time as well as the traditional ‘dominance of the now’ (QBH: 210). Hegel's thought, that is to say, belongs to the metaphysics of presence. It cannot be done justice here to such massive criticisms.Footnote 26 Still, what was said about Heidegger's reading of Hegel makes it necessary to raise certain questions. Is Hegel ultimately a philosopher of consciousness? And if such a characterization were unacceptable, on what grounds should Hegel's thought be said to be so radically different from Heidegger's after all? Why should Hegel necessarily be viewed as a philosopher of presence?
Both Derrida and Heidegger tend to speak of absolute knowing, as ‘absolute consciousness’ (QBH: 149; Heidegger Reference Heidegger, Young and Haynes2002: 149). In point of fact, however, this expression cannot be found in Hegel's introduction and can in itself scarcely make Hegel's intention intelligible since absolute knowing, as Hegel understands it, is precisely a knowing which has overcome the opposition of certainty and truth or of subject and object which defines consciousness as such. Absolute knowing, that is, has overcome the representation of the relation of thought to being as precisely just that: a relation—that is, a relation of substances essentially distinct from one another. Consciousness, for Hegel, is but another word for such a representation. Absolute knowing or science, as Hegel describes it in the introduction to the Phenomenology, is what happens when ‘knowledge no longer needs to go beyond itself, where knowledge finds itself, where concept corresponds to object and object to concept’ (PhG: 51/62). When Hegel writes that consciousness will ‘arrive at a point at which it gets rid of its semblance of being burdened with something alien’, he means, then, that once it has reached absolute knowing, consciousness no longer is consciousness at all, strictly speaking. Consciousness essentially distinguishes itself from its object. Once this distinction is overcome, therefore, consciousness itself is abolished.Footnote 27 The Phenomenology can in this sense be viewed as a comprehensive critique of consciousness i.e. of the subject-object relation. And since the experience of consciousness unfolds out of consciousness itself—which is thus always ‘natural consciousness’ in some sense—this critique is the self-critique of consciousness. In a very essential sense, conversely, this means that objectivity itself is radically undermined in absolute knowing. The pure concepts of the Logic, for instance, are no longer objects of thought, properly speaking, but pure thought thinking itself and freely developing in its own element. None of this is to say that subject and object play no role whatsoever in Hegel's philosophy.Footnote 28 Hegel famously claimed that the ambition of his system was to demonstrate the necessity of ‘grasping and expressing the True, not only as Substance, but equally as Subject’ (PhG: 10/13–14). And in spite of what we said, Hegel himself describes absolute knowing as ‘pure self-consciousness’ (WL: 29/43; my emphasis). Qua absolute knowing, however, pure self-consciousness is but the overcoming of the defining opposition of consciousness to its object. That is to say: pure self-consciousness no longer has the form of consciousness but is rather the result of the eradication of that form and of the traditional and metaphysical opposition of subject and object. Given that the nature of absolute knowing is to undermine the distinction which defines consciousness, it simply cannot be assumed that Hegel is a subjectivist thinker of consciousness, reducing being to objects (QBH: 18, 115, 132, 138, 144).
When Derrida claims that Hegel's concept of experience ‘prescribes’ to consciousness a progression ‘in the form of presence’ towards ‘absolute presence’, he is following Heidegger's interpretation, according to which Hegel's Phenomenology is concerned with ‘experience thought metaphysically’, that is, with ‘the beingness of beings, which is determined as subiectum on the basis of subjectity’ (Heidegger Reference Heidegger, Young and Haynes2002: 140, 138). Both Heidegger and Derrida thus understand experience to function as a presupposed general frame making phenomenology unable to question the understanding of being as presence. The result of experience, in the Phenomenology, however, is the undermining of consciousness, not the confirmation of the understanding of being it presupposes. As we have seen, Heidegger describes phenomenological experience in terms of a dialogue of natural consciousness and real knowledge. But in speaking indifferently of absolute knowing or of the result of consciousness's phenomenological development as ‘ontological’ or ‘absolute’ consciousness, as Dove remarks, Heidegger ‘fails to see that the concept of Spirit is inexplicable in terms of consciousness or its ontic and ontological modalities of experience’ (Dove Reference Dove1970: 640). It is true that the form of consciousness's progression is predetermined: natural consciousness, in phenomenology, ‘journeys through the series of its own configurations as though they were the stations appointed for it by its own nature’ (PhG: 49/60). Such a progression, however, does not essentially confirm a predetermined understanding of being but results in absolute knowing. Phenomenology shows, in other words, that in holding fast to its own form as well as to the presuppositions attached to it, consciousness realizes it must let go of that form. Contrary to what Heidegger claims, the ‘we’ Hegel speaks of at the end of the introduction—i.e. the philosopher who has already reached the standpoint of science—‘cannot be understood as a mode of consciousness’ (Dove Reference Dove1970: 638, 636). If, therefore, ‘we may agree with Heidegger that the PhG presents us with a dialogue’, it is on the condition that ‘the protagonists are not the ontic and ontological modes of consciousness’ experience. They are rather consciousness and Spirit’ (Dove Reference Dove1970: 640).Footnote 29
Now, since Derrida himself scarcely distinguishes Heidegger's criticism of Hegel as a thinker of consciousness from Heidegger's criticism of Hegel as a thinker of absolute presence, it is unclear whether, and in which sense, Hegel can still be said to be ultimately a thinker of presence, ‘telling a story in the language of metaphysics, which […] prevents him from transgressing the onto-theological closure’ (QBH: 196).Footnote 30
On the contrary, taking Hegel's critique of objectivity seriously makes it possible to see it as an important concern he shares with Heidegger. Just like, for Heidegger, ‘the mode of access to the being of beings is not to speak “about” it, but consists in a certain kind of letting’ (de Jong Reference de Jong2020a: 392),Footnote 31 Hegel stresses that ‘Logic has nothing to do with a thought about something which stands outside by itself as the base of thought’ (WL: 29/44). Although, of course, the ‘letting’ that is at stake in Heidegger's thinking cannot be directly equated with the self-movement of the content Hegel exposes in the Logic, the two thinkers thus express their critique of objectivity in similar ways. Interestingly, Derrida never notes this similarity between them, in our text.Footnote 32 My contention is that the reason for this is that he interprets the relation of Hegel and Heidegger from an exclusively Heideggerian standpoint. And while this is not true of all his other works on Hegel, perhaps it is not of no consequence for them.
IV. Conclusion
In the 1964–65 lectures, we have thus seen that, basing his appreciation on Heidegger's problematic reading, Derrida rather presupposes than shows that Hegel is a philosopher of presence. This text cannot be taken to express the fullness of Derrida's own reading of Hegel, however.Footnote 33 Rather, it aims at elucidating and is therefore necessarily entwined with Heidegger's own interpretation of the tradition. To be sure, Derrida himself notes that the Hegel to whom he is referring and whose philosophy he is contrasting with Heidegger's merely reflects a ‘literal and conventional Hegelianism’ (QBH: 175). As a conclusion, I would like to consider briefly the further development of Derrida's own interpretation of Hegel and ask whether or not it retains the Heideggerian orientations we examined.
In the years following these lectures, Derrida will not cease to discuss Hegel and on key topics he will show that his reading cannot be reduced to the one investigated here. In Of Grammatology, for instance, having stated that, in Hegel's thought, the ‘horizon of absolute knowledge is the effacement of writing in the logos, the retrieval of the trace in parousia, the reappropriation of difference’, Derrida insists that Hegel is nonetheless ‘also the thinker of irreducible difference’. Hegel can be understood to have been ‘the last philosopher of the book’, and yet he is nonetheless the ‘first thinker of writing’ (Derrida Reference Derrida and Spivak1998: 26). This trend is apparently confirmed in other works. In his response to Heidegger's critique of Hegel in Being and Time, Derrida shows that ‘however it is determined, Hegelian Being no more falls into time as into its Da-sein, than it simply departs from time to enter parousia’ (Derrida Reference Derrida and Bass1982: 53). Even as he was thus turning Hegel against Heidegger, however, Derrida clearly retained the most decisive feature of Heidegger's assessment of the tradition and of Hegel in particular: ‘past and future are thought as attenuating affections overtaking the presence which is known to be the meaning or essence of what is (beings). This is what will not budge from Aristotle to Hegel’ (Derrida Reference Derrida and Bass1982: 52). Derrida thus continued to perceive Hegel as one of the principal defenders of the metaphysics of presence.Footnote 34 And indeed, even in Glas, a work of quite unconventional Hegelianism to say the least, Heidegger's understanding of dialectic as a ‘play of the already and the not-yet’ remains a powerful device in Derrida's reading.Footnote 35 Perhaps this was Derrida's way of confirming what he had warned about in the lectures about Heidegger: namely, that ‘the very movement by which one wrests Hegel from conventionality is a Heideggerian gesture’ (QBH: 196).
