Simon Lumsden, “Self-Consciousness and the Critique of the - TopicsExpress



          

Simon Lumsden, “Self-Consciousness and the Critique of the Subject: Hegel, Heidegger, and the Post-Structuralists”, Columbia University Press, 2014, 265pp. Reviewed by Henry Somers-Hall, Royal Holloway, University of London (2014.11.01). “Simon Lumsdens is an ambitious book that attempts to develop a new dialogue between Hegel and the post-structuralists, here represented by Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze. Lumsden sets out his aims in the introduction, which are to show that the poststructuralists have misinterpreted the nature of Hegels philosophy, and in doing so, have failed both to develop effective criticisms of Hegels thought, and to recognise affinities between their projects. After an opening chapter on Heidegger, Lumsden uses Fichtes critique of Kant to develop his reading of Hegel, before in the final three chapters returning to Heidegger and introducing the two poststructuralist thinkers to analyse their similarities and divergences from Hegel. “...Ill begin by looking at Lumsdens account of the philosophical narrative prior to Hegel, before looking at his reading of Hegel himself, and then his account of the poststructuralists, focusing on his reading of Deleuze. Lumsdens claim is that post-structuralism criticises the reflective and metaphysical character of subjectivity (1), developing a narrative that runs from Descartes through Kant to Hegel with an increasing privileging of the spontaneous transparent subject. Lumsden argues that instead, if Hegel is a metaphysician at all, his metaphysics must be conceived as fundamentally post-Kantian. (1) For Lumsden, Hegels notion of self-consciousness is not transparent, and is essentially communitarian, borrowing, albeit with substantial reworking, from Kants distinction between concepts and intuitions. It is by excising Kants original formulation of the content/intuition distinction that Hegel is able to extend reason to objects themselves, and fulfil the central Kantian insight that reason must be understood as reflectively determining its own norms by virtue of its capacity for self correction. (16) This overcomes the essentially subjective structure found in Kants model. “...His account of the limitations of Kant is developed through a reading of the immediate response to Kant, particularly Fichtes denial of the phenomenal/noumenal distinction. I want to briefly look at two aspects of Kants project, downplayed by Lumsden, that play an important role in showing the limitations of his analysis: the character of intuition in Kants project, and the importance for Kant of providing a critique of reason. “In introducing Kants distinction between intuitions and concepts, Lumsden glosses them as broadly correspond[ing] to the opposing approaches to knowledge of Locke and Leibniz, (74) with intuition, thereby adding the empiricist moment to his theory of experience. The difficulty with this gloss is that Kants intuitions (space and time) are not the empiricist basis for knowledge, but are rather the conditions for the kind of knowledge empiricism is based on. While impressions differ in degree from ideas for the empiricists, the structure of Kantian intuition differs in kind from conceptual forms. The fact that space and time are not discursive is one of the key reasons for Kants adoption of transcendental idealism, as it precludes any kind of rationalist reduction of experience to concepts. The recognition of this fundamental moment of non-discursivity is something that separates the poststructuralists from Hegel, but its importance is not addressed by Lumsden. The second issue with Lumsdens account of Kants project is his characterisation of it as the self-grounding of reason. Kants notion of critique in fact leads to a far more ambivalent relation to reason than Lumsden allows. In the transcendental dialectic of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant sets out the claim that reason operates according to rules which, while legitimate when used to organise experience, lead us into error when disconnected from experience (and hence intuition). For instance, when we consider the universe as a whole (which cannot be given in experience), we fall into antimonies of reason, able to prove by rational argument alone that the universe both has and does not have a beginning in time.... “This notion of transcendental illusion is one taken up by many of the poststructuralists, but it is something that Lumsden does not engage with.... As the paralogisms and antinomies demonstrate, Kants project is far more nuanced than simply allowing reason to ground itself. It also calls for the recognition that reason cannot function purely autonomously without falling into error. ... “Traditionally, contradiction has been a major part of the interpretation of Hegelian dialectics. If Kant is right that reason operating autonomously leads to contradiction, then Hegel can be said to bite the bullet, and to include contradiction as a real feature of the world. He writes in the Science of Logic, for instance, that the world is never and nowhere without contradiction. While Lumsden does recognise a role for contradiction, and the rejection of the logic of the understanding, his account argues that the dialectic is driven by a feeling of dissatisfaction within reason itself. The Phenomenology transitions between different accounts of consciousness and the object not because of the internal contradictions within a given shape of consciousness here. Rather, what drives reason to reject a given shape of consciousness is its sense that there is a background whole . . . in which all our norms are determined (108) that exceeds the current shape of consciousness determinations. Reason operates by making explicit these background assumptions, thus incorporating them into the conceptual scheme of consciousness itself. Lumsden sees this process as relying on a concept-intuition model, where background assumptions that are implicit and non-discursive (the intuitions) are gradually made explicit and brought into the domain of discursivity by reason. This process is ongoing, and leads to a dynamic, unstable model of consciousness unlike the account of Hegels self, which Lumsden attributes to the post-structuralists. There are a number of issues with this account that are worth raising. “Viewing the process of the Phenomenology itself as making intuition discursive leads to a number of potential problems, some textual, and some logical. First, the process of incorporation of intuitions into self-consciousness doesnt seem to capture the radical break we find with the categorial transitions of the Phenomenology. Lumsden presumably has to play down Hegels claim that consciousness is not so much destabilised as destroyed by its dialectical transitions. Similarly, for Hegel, consciousness suffers despair as it moves through the Phenomenology and discovers its worldviews to be self-contradictory, rather than appearing prior to this as reasons intimation of the limits of its present view.... Second, in making what drives reason its recognition of a broader view of the world than what is represented in its present categories, Lumsden appears to present a different origin to our categories of thought than Hegel does. Traditionally, Hegels account of categories is read as seeing new ways of viewing the world as emerging immanently from the failure of our present beliefs. While these categories may imply that our understanding of the world must be mediated by the broader community, the categories themselves are not a product of that community, but of the contradictions of a prior form of consciousness.... For Lumsden, on the contrary, our categories of thought are intersubjectively derived, (106) and form the collective human determination (105) of the community, rather than emerging immanently from the dialectic.... “Lumsdens communitarian account runs the risk of making Hegels project simply an attempt to explicate the structure of modern society. As he puts it at one point, the dialectic is an attempt to give philosophy a philosophical form that is adequate to the dynamism of modern life. This does not fix reality in any weighty metaphysical sense but simply tries to give an adequate philosophical expression of modern life. (170) Furthermore, in seeing intuition as the implicit assumptions of a whole in which thought is situated (108), we lose the character of the dialectical transitions of the Phenomenology as being genuinely creative. Lumsden renders it a process of discovery, and translation of the implicit into the explicit, rather than a creative enterprise. It also becomes a project guided by a telos that precedes it in the form of the structure of society already implicitly accepted by the subject. Both of these results form the basis for much of the post-structuralism opposition to Hegelian dialectics, which is often taken to be conservative, rather than creative, and one wonders whether this account of the self-validation of community norms might be vulnerable to the kinds of hermeneutics of suspicion found in Marx, Nietzsche and Freud.... “...Whereas Kant and the post-structuralists consider intuition (and related concepts) to be essentially non-discursive, Hegel (and Lumsden) consider them to be only accidentally non-discursive, but not inherently incommensurate with reason.... “In the critical portion of his study, Lumsden argues that both Derrida and Deleuze derive their critiques of Hegel from Heideggers critique of the metaphysics of presence. In the first chapter he briefly develops this account, focusing on Heideggers criticism of Descartes attempt to develop a purely epistemic account of our relation to the world. This short opening account of Heideggers criticism of Hegel is supplemented in chapter 4 by an extended treatment of Heidegger. In keeping with Lumsdens focus on the notion of self-consciousness, his account of Heidegger focuses on the structures of das Man, and of care. His analysis of Heidegger is relatively standard, tracing Daseins inauthentic understanding while caught in das Man through anxiety to an authentic understanding of itself as care. “Lumsden takes issue with the process whereby Dasein comes to recognise the individuality of its relationship to the world and to death. For Heidegger, this move from das Man to a concernful relationship to the world occurs through the call of conscience. As Lumsden notes, conscience has a divided structure, as while Dasein calls itself to conscience, the caller and the hearer are not the same Dasein: one is individuated while the other is lost in das Man. Lumsden claims that this model of the self is antithetical to that found in German idealism. Conscience calls itself; it does not posit, determine, or legislate for itself. . . . The call comes to Dasein in such a way (in silence) that it cannot be understood as spontaneous or self-caused, even though it issues from Dasein itself. (133)... Perhaps more important is Lumsdens conclusion that Heidegger . . . is content to let the divisions [at the heart of self-consciousness] lie. (137) The use of the word content here captures one of the central problems with Lumsdens account of post-structualism. He appears to suggest that Heideggers refusal to accept a Hegelian account of self-consciousness amounts to something like bloody-mindedness, rather than being a motivated (if potentially flawed) attempt to account for aspects of our existence such as thrownness and the intentional nature of consciousness that may rule out such an account. “...Suffice to note that Lumsden reads Derridas project of explaining the instability of the subject of the modern world as very close to Hegels own project. He accuses Derrida of tilting at windmills with his criticisms of Hegels dialectic, by taking the dialectic to be an attempt to explain the basic structure of the world. Lumsden concentrates on the Derridean category of differance, noting its quasi-transcendental role. As Lumsden notes, the singular character of differance prevents its incorporation into the dialectic. Whereas Hegel, therefore, allows the domain of discursivity to be expanded by the incorporation of intuition, Derridas singular differance is not able to provide the resources for the transformation of [the ethical life] since it is wholly other to our sense-making practices. (176) Leaving aside the difficult question of whether Derridas philosophy is capable of a coherent ethical programme, Lumsden is correct that the disagreement between Hegel and Derrida rests on whether there is something incommensurate with discursivity. Lumsden once again presents as a choice what for Derrida is a principled objection to Hegel. Derridas differance is indeed different in kind from the discursive, but this is because it is what makes possible the space of discursivity. In Positions, he writes, differance, as that which produces different things, that which differentiates, is the common root of all of the oppositional concepts that mark our language, such as, to take only a few examples, sensible/intelligible, intuition/signification, nature/culture, etc. Differance is what sets up the kinds of logical structures necessary to make sense of the world conceptually. It cannot be the condition of discursivity without itself being non-discursive. As such, differance is close to Kants transcendental unity of apperception, and is similarly prone to a transcendental illusion where discursivity is extended beyond its proper domain.... “I want to focus a little more closely on Lumsdens final reading, which is of Deleuze. His analysis sees Deleuze as heavily influenced by Heidegger in his criticisms of Hegel. He claims that Deleuze sees the origins of Hegels failures in Descartes inauguration of modern philosophy. Finally, he sees Deleuzes challenge as reinstating the singularity of sensibility against the universalist discursivity of Hegel. Each of these three claims is problematic; together they present a misreading of Deleuzes philosophy, which means Lumsdens analysis substantially misses its mark. “...In Dialogues II, for instance, Deleuze groups Hegel and Heidegger together, along with Husserl, as the three Hs, and blames them for a scholasticism worse than that of the Middle Ages... While there may indeed be an influence of Heidegger on Deleuzes thought, one would be hard pressed to make a case for it being Heideggers analysis of care. Lumsden hardly touches on the central question of Heideggers thought -- the ontological difference between being and beings. This is unfortunate, as insofar as Heidegger influences the post-structuralists, it seems to be this distinction that forms the basis for their disagreements with Hegel. “Second, Lumsden claims that the origin for Deleuze of the problems we find with philosophy occurs with Descartes (the image and moral that took hold of philosophy was -- like so many other problems in modern philosophy -- initiated by Descartes. (183)). This claim helps Lumsden to emphasise the centrality of self-consciousness in his reading of Deleuzes critique of Hegel. It is a claim that is difficult to square with the text, however. The first chapter of Difference and Repetition begins not with Descartes but with Aristotle, and the task of modern philosophy is not taken by Deleuze to be the refutation of Descartes, but to overturn Platonism.... While this may imply a criticism of self-consciousness, Lumsdens focus on self-consciousness risks taking the implication for the criticism itself. While self-consciousness is the focus of Deleuzes polemical reading of Hegel in Nietzsche and Philosophy, for instance, his more sophisticated account in Difference and Repetition instead focuses on the dialectical categories of the finite and infinite, and Hegels inability to think difference adequately. ... “Lumsden claims that what Deleuze is interested in is empirical difference (181). As he puts it, Sensations, in the way Deleuze understands them, are ‘grasped’ not as representations of objects, but rather as ‘a range of affective tones’. (185) Sensibility therefore becomes a kind of ground of thought that is prior to and other to the structures of recognition by which thought is traditionally understood. (185) In effect, Lumsdens reading of Deleuze sees him as reiterating Feuerbachs philosophical position that philosophy must begin with the concrete object, and not with the universal. This is a view Deleuze explicitly rejects, claiming that Feuerbach is wrong to consider that this exigency of a true beginning is met by beginning with empirical, perceptible, and concrete being. “Here, Lumsden misreads Deleuzes claim that he is interested in that which can only be sensed (185). By this phrase, Deleuze plays on the two meanings of sense, but he makes it clear that by that which can only be sensed, he means that which is only intimated in the sensible object (What is it that can only be sensed, yet is imperceptible at the same time?). Just as with Derrida, what Deleuze is interested in is the investigation of the non-discursive conditions that give rise to discursive thought. His criticism of Hegel, once again returning to Kant, is that thinking suffers from a transcendental illusion when it attempts to investigate its conditions, falsifying them through the illegitimate application of the structures of discursivity (the shackles of representation) beyond their appropriate domain. Thus, Deleuze takes up Kants suggestion that reason acting autonomously tends towards paralogism and transcendental illusion. Lumsden does not address Deleuzes philosophical arguments against Hegel in detail. He concludes the chapter by declaring that in Deleuzes case, the movement of global capital and trade, the shifting allegiances of modern society and politics, and the wholesale transformation of cultural life in the modern world mean that the animating German idealist concern, that a subject could be at home with itself in modern life, is a philosophical project that is inadequate to late capitalism. (216) “Such a summary risks reading Deleuzes philosophical arguments as merely sociological description, and ignoring Deleuzes own characterisation of himself as a pure metaphysician, thus missing the force of his challenge to Hegel. “Some of these limitations in Lumsdens reading of post-structuralism perhaps emerge from his assertion, repeated at several points, that there is a biographical origin (13) to poststructuralisms hostility to Hegel. Of course, philosophical disagreements always have a biographical element -- Kants focuses on Leibniz, or Aristotle on Plato because of their historical relations -- but Lumsdens claim seems more to suggest that philosophical objections to Hegel are forced, or at least secondary. Similarly, while the claim is made several times that poststructuralism does not consider the idea that Hegel could be a post-Kantian thinker, (18) and that the broad claim [for the poststructuralists] is that Hegel resolves the residual problems in Kants thought by regressing to a precritical monistic spirit (163), no evidence is provided for these claims, which are, at least in the case of Deleuze, false. There are also some strange omissions from the bibliography of Self-Consciousness and the Critique of the Subject. Lumsden doesnt refer at any point to Heideggers Hegels Concept of Experience, Derridas book on Hegel, Glas, or Deleuzes early review article of Hyppolites Logic and Existence, where he sets out the differences of his own philosophical project from Hegels. These kinds of issues together raise doubts about the success of Lumsdens enterprise in charting the interrelations of Hegel and the poststructuralists.” ndpr.nd.edu/news/53457-self-consciousness-and-the-critique-of-the-subject-hegel-heidegger-and-the-post-structuralists/
Posted on: Mon, 03 Nov 2014 19:10:08 +0000

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