Taylor Adkins, from Fractal Ontology, has graciously shared with me some advanced rough drafts of his continuing translations of François Laruelle’s work from French into English. This morning I read one of the more introductory, programmatic pieces he sent — the preface and introduction to Principles of Non-Philosophy. This outlines in broad strokes Laruelle’s notion of “non-philosophy,” which, from what I gather, is one of the central themes of his work. The work exhibits an uncommon originality in its interpretations of traditional philosophical (and extra-philosophical) problems, accompanied by a casual erudition which appeals to my tastes greatly. Personally, I do foresee problems (or at least significant obstacles) which will present themselves to Laruelle’s enterprise, which may be dealt with more or less adequacy. Given the competence and ingenuity he displays in this short piece, however, I have no doubt that he will make an honest go of it. It would be ridiculous, in any case, to demand an exhaustive treatment or solution to these problems from a work which he openly admits is propaedeutic in its function (i.e., it only aims to be “the most complete introduction to non-philosophy in the absence of its realization”).

What follows are my initial thoughts in response to this piece. I will refrain from idle speculation into those sections which exceed my topical familiarity at present, and focus mostly on some of the references and implications which I take to be most plainly evident in the text. In this way I might perform some small service of gratitude to Taylor for offering his work for discussion, contributing the occasional insights my background makes available for those who are interested. It is quite possible that my own take on what Laruelle is trying to say is mistaken; aware of this fact, I welcome criticism and correction from all sides.

Departing from the continental orientation toward questions of ontology (the logic of Being) and its differential corollary of alterity which has predominated in recent years, Laruelle grounds his exposition of “non-philosophy” in its (ontology’s) traditional rival, henology (the logic of the One). This classification is misleading, however. For Laruelle’s conception of the One is highly idiosyncratic. It differs in many respects from the object of the classical Platonic, Stoical, and Spinozistic henologies — the One(s) which philosophically ground(s) the order of appearances in their modal correspondence and community with one another.

On this point we may elaborate. Specifically, Laruelle seems to take issue with the place the One occupies within philosophies and mystical tradition, as something which is accomplished or realized through the relation of its subsidiary modes. This holds whether the One is reached by speculative/dialectical ascent (as in transcendental and Hegelian logic) or through revelation or religious vision (as in mysticism). This is why categorizing Laruelle’s thought as henological is potentially confused, because any “logic” which is thought to articulate the One cannot be conceived as literal. It can appear only in scare-quotes, since the One “is immanent (to) itself rather than to a form of thought, to a ‘logic.’”

Instead of being a mere object of philosophical and mystical discourse, a metaphysical ultimate, Laruelle therefore suggests that the One is already the Real, and constitutes the sole ground by which experience (and thus philosophy) are even possible. The inversion lies here: the One does not philosophically ground reality; rather, the One really grounds philosophy (along with every other mode of knowledge or experience). Moreover, this ground is original — which is to say that it does not follow from anything, but everything follows from it. Hence his repeated emphasis on the transcendental status of the One (the Kantian “conditions necessary for the possibility of”). These two aspects, the original and the transcendental qualities of Laruelle’s One, together form the critical points on which the thrust of his argument rides.

These may be briefly elaborated. We shall begin hermeneutically, investigating the “original” dimension of Laruelle’s notion of the One. I assert that this lies plainly in its appellation as a “[r]adically immanent identity.” “Radical” is here not taken in its vulgar sense as indicating extremity, but rather in its more basic Latin sense (derived from radix, radicalis), designating the One’s originary status as the “root” of all else. Laruelle, well-versed in Kant, is doubtless aware of this meaning of “radical,” as Kant so famously employed it in his discussion of “radical evil” in his 1793 Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone.

The “transcendental” aspect of the One appears in the threefold delineation of the “terms” which Laruelle takes it to “contain.” He describes these terms as “[1] a real or indivisible identity—the One-Real; [2] a term = X properly called, received from transcendence and which therefore is not immanent; [3] finally a term called ‘transcendental Identity,’ a veritable clone of the One which the term = X extracts from the Real.” Laruelle quickly reminds the reader that “in reality” (the way it is in-itself) the One is not reducible to any of these “terms.”† However, an elucidation of these terms is appropriate to our discussion.

The first term bears the most similarity with mystical notions of the One, akin perhaps to the apeiron of Greek cosmology (the primal, formless chaos of Anaxagoras, Anaximander, etc.). It illustrates its primordial, undifferentiated identity.

The second term obviously alludes to the crucial passage in Kant’s “Transcendental Deduction” in the first (1781, A) edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, wherein he explains the proposition “A = B” (that is to say, the relation of subject to object, the “dyad” of which Laruelle speaks) rests on the transcendental possibility of their relation = X. As Laruelle writes, this term is “received from transcendence” because it transcendentally (noumenally) grounds the relation of a subject and a predicate which appear (phenomenally) unlike. Kant describes this as a necessary postulate of reason, a negative limit which can be invoked but not positively described. Laruelle later (implicitly) chides the reflective wonder which Kant tacitly adopted from Leibniz‡ in viewing the amenability of the objective world to subjective cognition of it as justifying “the postulation of a ‘miracle,’ common sense or pre-established harmony, which dedicates philosophy to begging the question.”

The final term, as Laruelle tells us, is abstracted/extracted (“over” and “out”) from this relation (X). In this respect the One is a clone (thereby ectypal) rather than original (archetypal) because it is conditioned by our empirical recognition of the relation by which we identify it. The dyad of A = B vows “revenge” on its duality, on its mutual alienation from its other, and “resigns its desire by extracting an image from the One (of) the One where the latter is not alienated.” I suspect this refers to the Hegelian henology, and accounts for the reciprocality of its 2/3 and 3/2 “fractional matrix.” The “3” side invariably refers to the transcendentally exterior “synthesis,” while the “2” refers to the immanently interior dualism of “thesis” and “antithesis” (to use crude Fichtean terms).

It is my belief that Laruelle intends to identify non-philosophy primarily with the first of these terms, the “One-Real.” Only this term is truly original and “radically immanent.” The second term, by contrast, is based on an observation of a relation in Being and is thus ontological; the third term simply takes this ontic relation and purifies it logically. Laruelle suggests that Marxism came close to making the “discovery/invention” (a beautiful paradox) of the One-in-One or One-Real, by inverting Hegel’s idealism into materialism/realism. Still, it had fallen prey to the old Hegelian practice of scolding the “common consciousness” (only now it was “false consciousness”) as an “ideological” byproduct over which it exalted itself as a material science. Again it fell back on assigning to ordinary cognition a regrettable status as non-philosophical, or “unscientific” (to use a Leninist epithet).

Laruelle says early on that philosophy should remove itself from its elitism, reconciled with “democracy.” In granting non-philosophy some efficacy of its own (autonomy), he hopes to liberate it from its theodical subordination to the triumph of philosophical consciousness. And while non-philosophy might never be “the educator of philosophy,” it should nevertheless be understood as equiprimordial with it. In providing a genetic account (from and not to) of their ontological bifurcation from the henological One, Laruelle might help philosophy forget its vanity and see the common origins (roots) it shares with non-philosophy, whether “common consciousness” or even regional knowledges (natural sciences, disciplines).

Wieweit also hängt "Bildung" noch mit der Antike zusammen?

Ist die Ranke' - bis Delbruck'sche Konzeption der Geschichte als eines Kontinuums, das aus "Altertum", "Mittelalter" und "Neuzeit" besteht, wirklich gültig? oder hat nicht Spengler mit der These von den in sich geschlossenen Kulturkreisen mindestens auch recht - wenn er auch die geschichtlichen Vorgänge zu biologisch versteht?

Die Auffassung vom geschichtlichen Kontinuum beruht im Grunde auf Hegel, der den Gesamtverlauf der Geschichte in der "Neuzeit", d.h. in seinem System der Philosophie, kulminieren sieht.

* * *

Persönlich ist mein Verhältnis zur Renaissance und zum Klassizismus leider immer ein kühles geblieben und ich empfinde beides irgendwie als mir fremd; ich kann es mir nicht wirklich aneignen. Schreib mir mal etwas über Deine diesbezüglichen Eindrücke und Gedanken. Ob nicht die Kenntnis anderer Länder und die innere Berührung mit ihnen für uns heute ein viel bedeutenderes Element der Bildung ist als die Antike?

Fußballerisch gesprochen: Ein Pass geht auch leicht mal daneben, wenn man technisch nicht so hochgezüchtet ist wie die Portugiesen oder Spanier. Die Blutgrätsche dagegen klappt in der Regel immer, zur Not erwischt man halt nur den Gegner. Und wenn die Blutgrätsche auch nicht sehr elegant ist, natürlich, so ist sie immer noch eleganter als der Gegner, wenn er mit der Nase im Rasen landet.

Darum auch das große Erschrecken hierzulande über die Korruptionsmethoden bei Siemens. International, das war zu hören, ist das alles absolut üblich, man steckt sich eben gegenseitig das Geld in die Taschen, während alle anderen wegsehen, aber einem Deutschen darf man das nicht erzählen. Der glaubt an Anständigkeit, Aufrichtigkeit, Blutgrätsche. Zur Not jagen wir den Schlitzaugen den technischen Fortschritt mit Kampfgeist ab! Aber das funktioniert ja inzwischen kaum mehr auf dem Fußballplatz.

Ja, das Filigrane, das zweideutig Geschärfte, die klare, aber diffizile Form – das ist nicht so das Ding der deutschen Seele. Zu wenig Seele ist vielleicht darin? Die Seele ist ja eher etwas Schwabbeliges, wie ein Bierbauch. Andererseits erfinden die Deutschen (Leibniz, Konrad Zuse) das Seelenlose schlechthin, den Computer, den Automaten. Was für ein Widerspruch!

Darüber hat Gottfried Benn ja immer sehr geklagt, über die deutsche Sehnsucht nach Breiigkeit. Auch Nietzsche fand sie eher abstoßend.

Der Deutsche, dieser geborene Dunstkopf, braucht Atmosphäre, er braucht „Bildungssmog“ (Thomas Knoefel), der in dicken Schwaden um die Goethe-, Kleist- und Hegel-Büsten im Wohnzimmer wogt. „Noch eine Zigarre, mein Junge? Oder einen Schnaps?“ Der Deutsche macht seine Arbeit, die macht er ordentlich, und dann geht er in die Kneipe und trinkt sein Bier, und das macht er auch ordentlich. Ich sage das gar nicht abwertend, ich trinke selbst gerne Bier. Ich sage das nur, weil der Deutsche das Tier ist, das nicht wahrhaben will, dass es so ist, wie es ist. Ich selbst bin übrigens letztlich doch vollkommen anders. Ich komme nur nicht dazu. (Geklaut bei Christian Dietrich Grabbe.)

This is the first of a series of notes about America’s grand strategy.

Grand Strategy:   a State's collective policy with respect to the external world.  From a Trinitarian perspective, a State's Grand Strategy focuses and coordinates the diplomatic and military efforts of its People, its Government, and its Army.

America has had several strategies during its history.  We can learn much from the successes and failures of our past.  Since we desperately need a new grand strategy, let's do a quick review now.

First, North America

Our first strategy was nothing more than a primal desire to grow geographically and indusrially.  Like most -- perhaps all - Empires, the US was born in greed.  Our probes into Canada were unsuccessful, but our wars against the American Indians and proved fruitful.  (Tomorrow's note gives an excerpt from Grant's Memoirs describing the consequences of our war with Mexico -- a warning about national hubris.)

A primal strategy is a single-minded commitment to a goal, an expression of a people’s core beliefs. It is non-intellectual, with no need for theories and plans.

1. Rome conquered the Mediterranean world, driven by self-confident belief in their fitness to rule others.
2. Men like Pizzaro and Cortes conquered much of the world for Spain and Christ.
3. The British Empire was built by men like Robert Clive and Warren Hastings, whose acquisitive drive and energy brought India into the British Empire — often without instructions or even against their government’s wishes.
4. Nineteenth century Americans felt it was their manifest destiny to extend America from ocean to ocean.

We can describe these as “grand strategies”, but to do so has an element of falsity. Such intellectual analysis, based on theory, had no place in the hearts of these peoples. History also suggests than leaders cannot manufacture a primal strategy. You either have it, or you do not.

Later, the world

By the twentieth century we had outgrown this phase.  We needed a Grand Strategy befitting a superpower, thoughtful and complex.  Fortunately we had grown an intelligentsia able to provide one.

Hence WWI, and the folly of our first Grand Strategist.  President (formerly Professor) Wilson had wonderful dreams, bringing us to war in April 1917, just as the contestants were near exhaustion.  Our help extended the war by 18 months.  The resulting deaths do not seem justified by any added wisdom in the eventual peace treaty, vs. what they might have achieved without our participation.

Our conduct of WWII from 1942-1945 is often cited as an example of a ambitious and successful American Grand Strategy.  How unfortunate that we sat idle from 1938-41, when we could have prevented or minimized the war.  We entered only at the last possible moment -- when only megadeaths could end the conflict -- rather than acting before Germany had consolidated its control of the financial and industrial resources of Europe.

Any strategy whose execution includes dropping two atomic bombs deserves the adjective "ambitious."   Less so "successful."  But we won, with the aid of Russia, whose soldiers did most of the dying.  How odd that the combined effort of Russia, America, and a host of smaller powers were needed to defeat the "Axis of Three Mid-sized States."

The Cold War saw a more mature Grand Strategy by America:  Containment of the Soviet Union.  Clearly a humble strategy, formulated by men emerging from the horror of WWII, with its emphasis on alliances, modest goals, and long-term perseverance.  Our satisfaction with its execution bears little examination.  Even its author, George Kennan, grew disgusted with our implementation of his ideas.  Inciting and abandoning the 1956 revolts in Poland and Hungary.  The follies of the Korean and Vietnam Wars.  The fallacious "Domino Theory."

Worse was the emotional excess that accompanied it.  Although conceived by cool, considerate men, in the 1950s anti-communism mutated into a doctrine of hatred.  This irrationality had a malign influence on our policy makers and led to the McCarthy-era witch-hunts that so damaged the State Department and stained our history.

With communism now a menace at both ends of the Far Eastern arc, the Indochina War changed from a colonial war into a crusade -- but a crusade without a real cause.

"Dien Bien Phu: A Battle to Remember", Bernard B. Fall, Vietnam Magazine, April 2004

Containment ended victoriously with the collapse of the Soviet Union due to the USSR's hopelessly flawed economic regime -- and the Saudi Princes opening the taps to their oil wells, crashing the price of oil and bankrupting the USSR.  Note that some neo-conservatives claim it resulted from Reagan's military build-up, a textbook instance of the post hoc ergo prompter hoc fallacy.  Precedence in time does not prove causation.

Containment was a successful Grand Strategy, adequately executed.  But with cautionary lessons important to learn, especially if our next foe proves more of a challenge.

Next, humility

America grew to greatness with a primal grand strategy of geographic and industrial expansion.  This required simple but good governance, not military or strategic brilliance.

America emerged victorious, almost unopposed, from the 20^th Century due to its industrial might, the bravery and energy of its people, and its superlative internal cohesion.  This required good governance - but neither military nor strategic brilliance.

The point of this historical review is not to compare our performance with an impossible perfect ideal, but to suggest that humility is appropriate when conceiving a Grand Strategy.

And humility is desperately needed.  With no Soviet Union to fight, we need a new Grand Strategy.  Surrounded by rising powers, facing financial challenges from the aging boomers and massive foreign debts, with an economy desperately needing deleveraging and restructuring -- we need a strategy to maximizer our still-great strenghts and buy time for us to regenerate.

We have no lack of suggestions, appearing policy journals, blogs, books, academic dissertations, and government white papers.  Visionaries like Thomas Barnett propose ambitious if impractical plans.

As Hegel foresaw, this understanding comes at the end of a cycle.  Let's hope we have learned enough to lay the foundation for success in the next round of the great game.

"When philosophy paints its grey in grey, one form of life has become old, and by means of grey it cannot be rejuvenated, but only known.  The owl of Minerva, takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering."

Preface to "Philosophy of Right" by G.W.F. Hegel, 1820

Please share your comments by posting below (brief and relevant, please), or email me at fabmaximus at hotmail dot com (note the spam-protected spelling).

Other posts about grand strategy

Does America need a grand strategy?  If so, what should it be?  Answers to these questions illuminate many of the questions hotly debated about foreign policy and national security.  Here are some posts on this subject.

1. The Myth of Grand Strategy (31 January 2006)
2. America’s Most Dangerous Enemy (1 March 2006)
3. Why We Lose at 4GW (4 January 2007)
4. America takes another step towards the “Long War” (24 July 2007)
5. One step beyond Lind: What is America’s geopolitical strategy? (28 October 2007)
6. How America can survive and even prosper in the 21st Century - part I (19 March 2007; revised 7 June 2008)
7. How America can survive and even prosper in the 21st Century - part II (14 June 2008)
8. President Grant warns us about the dangers of national hubris  (1 July 2008)
9. America’s grand strategy, now in shambles  (2 July 2008) 

Click here to see a list of all posts about strategy and military theory. ]]> http://dialektik.wordpress.com/?p=12 Mon, 30 Jun 2008 09:14:56 +0000 eliram http://dialektik.wordpress.com/?p=12 2. L'identité européenne

Dans l'article consacré aux origines de l'européanisme, je différenciais deux concepts : le paneuropéanisme et l'européanisme en tant que tel. A l'origine de ces deux sentiments parfois contradictoires existe un même socle psychologique fondé sur l'appartenance au groupe et la cohérence de ce dernier. Si le paneuropéanisme édifie une identité européenne basée sur des rapports ethnico-culturels limités en soi, l'européanisme contemporain n'existe que par l'équation voulant que les volontés subjectives et individuelles s'additionnent et forment une volonté collective. Volonté qui, si on adhère à la pensée hégélienne, est aux balbutiements du droit. Ainsi, l'européanisme ne peut être qu'un sentiment identitaire : il est la cohésion d'identités multiples dont la somme des volontés édifient une perception supranationale.

Cette affirmation m'invite à revenir sur le concept d'identité et, plus spécifiquement, de l'envisager dans une dimension européenne.

L'identité d'un individu l'amène à s'interroger sur ce qu'il est et sur ce qu'il adviendra de lui. Les deux réalités physiques que sont l'espace et le temps conçoivent la perplexité même de l'être. Si l'on replace cette dimension au point de vue politique, le concept d'identité revient à se demander quelle est sa place dans la collectivité et, plus spécifiquement, à se déterminer dans celle-ci. Pour reprendre les propos d'Aron, la politique "désigne à la fois la réalité et la conscience que nous en prenons". L'identité politique ne fait qu'affirmer les propos du philosophe quand l'identité nationale les dément. Car si l'on a conscience d'appartenir à un ensemble collectif appelé "nation", cette même nation n'est pas réelle en soi. L'identité européenne (j'oserai dire l'identité nationale) n'est qu'une vague chimère pour exclure la réalité à la base de laquelle elle deviendrait effective. L'Etat-Nation, développé par l'historien Lavisse, tend à combler ce manquement en rattachant un Etat, effectif, au concept même de nation. Si le XXIe siècle démontrera ô combien cette construction intellectuelle est branlante à l'heure de la mondialisation, elle a néanmoins l'avantage de réaffirmer que les volontés individuelles et subjectives additionnées préfigurent l'Etat, pierre angulaire de la vie collective et identité en soi.

Si l'européanisme est un sentiment identitaire, il s'illustre dans une dimension éminemment politique pour reposer sur le droit et la morale aux fondements même de l'Etat. Le désaveu de populations européanistes - Français, Irlandais et Néerlandais - pour la construction européenne qu'elles ont prôné, espéré ou défendu, prouvent aux gouvernants que les drapeaux, les hymnes et les symboles ne remplacent par le projet politique. Pis, en excluant le citoyen européen du processus décisionnel, ce dernier ne peut agréer à l'Etat de fait qu'est l'Union Européenne.

Suite de l'article la semaine prochaine : l'européanisme (3)  - repenser l'Europe.

Recent academic conference on the strange fasciantion we have with train-wreck female celebrities. I haven't yet found any of the papers online, but it seems that the most interesting question would be the inseparability of desire and revulsion, approval and condemnation, particularly if we consider the media circus surrounding Spears, Winehouse et al a covert return of misogyny and conservative sexuality.

Why I Still Use Windows, by Gizmodo's Adam Frucci. I almost never agree with Frucci, but from the cult of personality that surrounds Jobs, to commodity fetishism to sheer stubbornness, I could have written this.

A robotic snake that is creepy and a bit terrifying. (I'm really scared of robots taking over aren't I?)

Arthur C. Clarke's story "The Nine Billion Names of God". Fuck aliens, supercomputers and other juvenilia- this is what science fiction should do. [via] {Update: As Matthew so rightly points out in the comments: a) this story has a supercomputer in it; b) there is nothing inherently juvenile about aliens or other sci-fi tropes. I was just shooting my mouth off for no good reason at all.}

And finally, Peter Singer on Hegel and Marx. I'll be honest, I didn't watch it all but it seems they're taking pains to emphasise the the Hegelian roots of Marx rather than the Marx's radical move away from Hegel's focus on mind and spirit.

Autobiography has become the life blood of mid-ground comic books. Sometimes the lives recalled are woven into the fabric of dramatic and horrific events of global historical importance, sometimes the events described are decidedly quotidian. In American Splendor (Vertigo, 2008 ) – which often immortalises lives of no particular consequence other than the fact that they are being lived by human beings – author Harvey Pekar rants, ““I’ve done a lot of stuff in my life I’m not proud of but at least…” and then lists such non-acts as “never got high and shot my wife in the head” and “never conned my country into a needless war to boost my ego”.

It was while reading Persepolis (Jonathan Cape, 2006) – Marjane Satrapi’s collected autobiographical tales of life in and in self imposed exile from Iran - that I suddenly realised my own life was probably going to be best evaluated by what I haven’t done. I haven’t tortured a man with a burning hot iron, or hung a woman or cut another human being into pieces. Neither have I, as Satrapi has, had a friend die during a roof top flight from armed militia nor had one’s dress sense publicly questioned by guardians of the Islamic Cultural Revolution.

On the other hand, I do remember confronting school teachers as a child much as Satrapi did. Once, my French teacher asked a young French boy to read a passage from our class text book. We were then asked to applaud him. I refused on the grounds that, of course he read the text fluently, he was French. Later labelled by the teacher as part of the “desert” of children who were slow learners, I argued that if I could understand French I wouldn’t need to be taught it and that was the teacher’s job.

Transfer such behaviour from a Welsh private school and place it in an Iranian state school during the Islamic revolution and such middle-class precociousness takes on a distinctly political edge. Satrapi’s conflicts with her teachers focus on: being taught revisionist history that seeks to forget the past, the impossibility of taking life drawing classes without looking at the male model and the Islamic fundamentalist dress codes that are hypocritically imposed more strictly for women than for men.

In her introduction to Persepolis, Satrapi gives readers a brief history of Iran. It takes us from the second millennium B.C. and the founding of the Iranian nation in the seventh century B.C. through successive invasions by Arabs, Turks and Mongolian invaders to, in one mighty bound, the Twentieth Century and Britain’s post World War Two support for the Shah..

One effect of Satrapi’s introduction is to make it seem as if Iranian history has authored Satrapi’s life, or at least given it its significance. However, I would argue that the influence is the other way round and that it is Satrapi who has taken Iran’s history and has actively made the past significant from the point of view of the here and now. But then Satrapi is influenced by dialectical materialism and I’m influenced by Phenomenological/Hegelian Marxism so I would say that [of course you would! - ED].

Persepolis is explicitly about memory. Satrapi herself offers Persepolis as a public memorial to commemorate the lives lost in that history., “I don’t want those Iranians who lost their lives in prisons defending freedom, who died in the war against Iraq, who suffered under various repressive regimes, or who were forced to leave their families and flee their homeland to be forgotten”.

But, ultimately, an autobiography is about the person writing it. As social historian Carolyn Steedman has written (Past Tenses) “In the autobiography, or in the telling of a life story in a pub…the person there, leaning up against the bar, or in another place, writing a book, is the embodiment of something completed …a human being.” Such forms of recollection can therefore be seen as a process of gathering together again the fragments of a life and turning them into a narrative with the self as protagonist and product.

Much of Persepolis is about Satrapi becoming a young woman and coming to terms with how that h
is defined for her, by Islamic fundamentalism and patriarchy and by herself. In doing so, her story stands as an example of a process that a German feminist collective have called ‘female sexualization’ (Haug et al, 1987). In part, this is the socialization of women into an identity with sexuality as it defining core. For Satrapi this requires her to overcome the norms and strictures of her Iranian up bringing. So, at a party in Vienna, she is turned off by public displays of affection and is horrified when she over hears cries of pleasure coming from her host’s bedroom- “My God, they were in the middle of……having sex!”. Next day, she finds the sight of the man in his underpants is embarrassing and comical.

Female sexualization also involves adopting ‘body techniques’ by which women attend to the training, manipulation and grooming of their bodies so that their ‘inherent’ sexuality is made visible to others. For Satrapi this process is complicated by her country’s fundamentalism which prescribes what is and is not acceptable for a woman. Satrapi details the ways in which wearing make-up becomes not an act of oppression as it would be seen by feminists at the time in the West but an act of resistance. She criticises one group of Iranian women for looking “like the heroines of American TV series, ready to get married at the drop of a hat” but then, on reflection, realises “that making themselves up and wanting to follow western ways was an act of resistance on their part.”

Inevitably, much of Satrapi’s account focuses on wearing the veil. Slight differences in the way the veil is worn become signs of resistance. Individuals also become skilled in interpreting a woman’s body beneath the veil from the way the garment hangs. So a bump at the back of a head scarf signals that a woman has a pony tail underneath. One Mullah at college even allows Satrapi to redesign the veil to fit the fashion for long, wide trousers.

Female sexualisation also involves women coming to see and evaluate themselves from the perspective of men. I imagine the feminist collective being appalled at Satrapi’s vision of a liberated self. After a page of leg waxing, hair plucking, a perm and applying make up Satrapi flirtatiously presents herself to us as “a sophisticated woman”. However, this is partly the result of the way the norms of femininity in the West, however patriarchal, act as a source of resistance to the norms of Islamic fundamentalist culture for Satrapi and her women friends.

Although the fundamentalist regime has rules governing men’s appearance, it is clear that the focus of the regime’s attention is the regulation of women’s sexuality. At a lecture on ‘Moral and Religious Conduct’, the young Satrapi stands up and confronts this hypocrisy. “Why,” she asks, “ is it that I, as a woman, am expected to feel nothing when watching these men with their clothes sculpted on but they, as men, can get excited by two inches less of my head scarf?”

For the German feminist collective memory plays a key role in the subordination of women. Women’s memories, they argue, have been colonized by patriarchal ideology. One effect of this is to forge a unity between a woman’s present, subordinate self and their childhood past by creating a false chain of cause and effect and papering over the cracks and contradictions of the life course. The collective challenge this by showing how past memories of conflict and resistance to male power can be recovered by collectively shared remembering.

Satrapi’s personal account certainly traces continuities with her childhood self. But her recollections are precisely about conflicts, crisis and personal questioning. Satrapi represents herself as critically reflective. As a child she questions all forms of authority, including God. Where she doesn’t understand situations she turns to reading Karl Marx in cartoon form and Simone De Beauvoir. She also listens to her family’s stories of political oppression and observes how they are treated.

However, there is a powerful infantilization of Satrapi’s identity at work in Persepolis. The first book (‘The Story of a Childhood’) focuses directly on Satrapi as a child but even the second volume ‘The Story of a Return’ signals a return to her childhood land. The movie makes this infantilization even more explicit. Although told in flashback while the adult Satrapi is at Orly airport, the end credits feature a snippet of dialogue between her childhood self and her grandmother. Satrapi is ever the daughter, ever the grandchild.

Satrapi’s illustrative style is also childlike, as if Studios Herge had decided to reproduce the adventures of Tintin as a series of wood block prints. Satrapi is also the author of children’s books and, at times, she casts herself as a shy child watching the adult world of sex, drugs and rock n’ roll as if it were a gang of big kids in a playground. Her dilemma is: should she join in, stand and watch or simply run away?

But this infantilization can also be seen as an ideological position. As Erving Goffman pointed out long ago in Gender Advertisements (1976) our culture often represents women as children even in the way women pose for photographs.

On one page Satrapi contrasts a group shot of her friends’ veiled public persona with their ‘fashionable’ westernized private appearance. In the public drawing one of the veiled women adopts the canted stance that Goffman sees as typical of women’s public display of submission to male authority. Although canting is a natural gesture of subordination, evidenced in the behaviour of dogs, it is human nature to invest such gestures with complex meanings.

Goffman argues that images like this are ritualised displays of that represent social norms, in particular alignments of power relations between men, women and children. Such displays dramatize alignments of power as physical alignments of, for instance, body position, between individuals of different status. Goffman calls such ritual displays in advertising ‘mock-ups’ and exploits the different meanings of the word ‘mock’ in his analysis.

To mock is a humorous act of ridicule. Women adopting this canted position in advertisements are doing so playfully. There is a humour here, evidenced by the women’s flirtatious smiles. However, mock ups are also simplified prototypes or models of behaviour to be enacted later. Like mock exams they are preparations for the real thing. Mock canting is preparatory to situations where subordination ceases to be a game.

Of course the figure of the child has often been evoked in fairy tails (The Emperor’s New Clothes) and in cultural politics (Walter Benjamin) as a position from which society can be criticised and opposed. But to criticize a political system a child would have to be particularly knowing. Satrapi might argue that she was as a child, although she humorously recaptures the rampant egotism of small children-as a child she imagines herself to be the last prophet of God and vows to banish pain from the world. Children are also powerless. While adopting the position of a child gives Satrapi critical purchase there is also little sense that she is actually empowered.

At the end of the day, we are left with an image of Satrapi dressed in black sitting and smoking. Her austere clothing part a sign of her place as an internationalized intellectual and part an Iran ex-patriot forever exiled from her homeland.

If there is one area that she does feel able to make a change then it is in her chosen life as a cartoonist. One of Satrapi’s stated aims is to challenge the way Iran, in her words, “this old and great civilization” is represented in public and discussed “mostly in connection with fundamentalism, fanaticism and terrorism.” In this, I am not sure she entirely succeeds.

Comic books have joined military intelligence reports and package holidays as one of the main ways in which those of us in the West come to know foreign lands, their history and people. Certainly, Satrapi puts a human-or cartoon face on actual Iranians an important counterpoint to the howling mobs usually seen on newsreels. Most of the people we come to know and care for in her story are her friends and family. In part, Satrapi wants her book to be a memorial as much as a memoir.

Persepolis therefore carries a self imposed burden of representation and reviewers quoted on the back cover emphasise its pedagogical role. “Persepolis will teach you more about Iran….than you could learn from a thousand hours of television documentaries and newspaper articles” writes Mike Haddon while Natasha Walter of the Independent on Sunday adds that the book condenses “a whole country’s tragedy into one poignant, funny scene after another.”

Certainly, within Persepolis’s pages, we meet individuals recognisable as human beings who appear to be just like us. In particular we meet Satrapi herself who is identifiable because, in a sense, many of her personal experiences are shared by us all: her childhood imaginings of possessing god-like powers (she imagines herself being the last prophet), her defiance of school teachers, her naughty behaviour (Satrapi owns up to having been a bit of a bully at times) and her adolescent experiences of growing pains, experiments with drugs and sex and painful decisions along the path to adulthood.

However, the autobiographical form constrains as much as it enables. Carolyn Steedman has usefully discussed the tensions between history and autobiography as ways of knowing the past. For Steedman, history is an empirical activity of checking records, triangulating data, cross referencing facts. History lies often unknowable beyond the life of the historian.

In contrast, autobiographies are phenomenological in that their contents – the people we read about, the events that occur- are granted existence and meaning by a writer’s consciousness and their use of narrative conventions from the point of view of the ‘here and now’. In Persepolis, Satrapi does give life to the Iran of her past but those granted individuality tend to be her family and friends.

The difficulty is that torturers, fundamentalists and soldiers opposing armies undoubtedly have personal stories too as difficult as it is to think of a father, for instance, branding and killing a human being by day and then going home to his family at night. Here the various fundamentalist regimes appear, as they must have appeared to Satrapi herself, as anonymous albeit not entirely faceless representatives of an oppressive regime. The effect of this is to reinforce dominant Western representations of Iran as a land in the grip of a totalitarian regime supported by a fundamentalist mass rather than to challenge them.

Satrapi’s point of view is also a class position. She makes no secret of and takes pleasure in her location among an Iranian savant guard intelligencia with links to royalty. Her resistance against the Iranian regime is therefore class inflected and we learn that Islamic Fundamentalism is supported mainly by the working and peasant classes of Iran, here represented largely as a shadowy mob.

Satrapi’s identification with her fellow countrymen is imagined (as opposed to imaginary) and I feel uneasy about the equivalence that she draws between her own personal fate – forced to leave her family- and the fate of those political activist who are killed standing up for their beliefs or who die as agents in or casualties of war. While Satrapi’s own life puts a human face on Iran it can’t stand for all Iranians.

Although Satrapi details the lives of those who resist successive regimes, it is clear that the regimes’ ideologies permeate every aspect of life, regulating the kinds of behaviour deemed appropriate in public and private. The truth on offer here is that fundamentalism; fanaticism and terrorism have pervaded Satrapi’s life and structure her personal narrative. Despite herself, Satrapi’s story paints a picture of everyday life in Iran that exactly conforms to expectations in the West.

Now that Persepolis has been made into a movie (on general release in the UK at time of writing) it may be hoped that Satrapi’s story will get wider exposure. Unfortunately the showing I went to could optimistically be described as half full except it was almost entirely empty. Of course I saw Persepolis on a blazing hot summer’s day in Brighton, Britain’s premier weekend holiday destination where families would rather be anywhere than inside.

The local Odeon has the hardest seating I have ever experienced in a cinema but they provided, in the manner of church pews and school benches, an appropriately austere position from which to view the film. Persepolis has been feited by film critics but often, I suspect, because they compare it with the offerings of Pixar and Disney.

There are some notably successful moments. The look of the film develops Satrapi’s black and white comic book drawings into dramatic chiaroscuro effects. And, when the young Satrapi’s father tells her how the British installed the Shah as an emperor, the events are played out as a kind of shadow puppet play. A scene where Satrapi is interrogated by the women’s branch of the guardians of the Islamic revolution has her tormentors veiled bodies writhe like black serpents.

Elsewhere, moments of comedy are doodled around the fairly sombre proceedings as the animation team attempt to inject the joy de vive that seems natural to animation. -through a window we glimpse Satrapi covered in soapsuds from washing dishes, her landlady’s already grotesque dog takes a joyful pee in the street etc. But these moments are few and far between and the film has the worthy, slightly pedagogical feel of one of S4C’s Animated Shakespeare shorts.

As I left the cinema an enthusiastic usher asked me if the film was good as it looked “unusual”, but I couldn’t bite my tongue and advised them to read the comic book instead.

TO HEGEL’S PROBLEM OF THE CRITERION

IN THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT

In introducing the method by which his Phenomenology of Spirit is to proceed, G.W.F. Hegel addresses the epistemological “problem of the criterion.”[1] The criterion problem, it turns out, inheres in all finite determinations of truth. For Hegel, the internal contradictions it engenders serve to demonstrate the essential inadequacy of all relative (versus absolute) forms of cognition. It thus facilitates the dialectical unfolding of consciousness as it speculatively approaches Absolute Spirit. This, put simply, is the stated goal of Hegel’s Phenomenology. Beyond examining its merely functional role in this work, however, the reader might observe the way in which the problem of the criterion directly emerges from the context of a discussion of skepticism,[2] which appears in the Introduction. Hegel’s procession from the topic of skepticism to criticism is no accident; indeed, its logic can be seen to mirror his understanding of their historical relation. Did not the historic problem of the criterion arise out of the resolute skepticisms of Pyrrho and Sextus Empiricus, after all? Comparing the remarks in Hegel’s Introduction with some of the pertinent philosophical digressions in his later Lectures on the History of Philosophy, the connection between the logical order of his argument and the history of the event may be further established. Reflexively, this then has recourse to his phenomenological treatment of Skeptical self-consciousness in the second section of the earlier work, in which Hegel dismantles its principle of one-sided negativity by applying the critical method which ancient Skepticism had itself inspired.

Our investigation can thus be understood to contain two integrally related parts. The first claims that Hegel’s movement from the issue of skepticism to the problem of the criterion in the Introduction to the Phenomenology is tacitly modeled after their historical succession. Evidence supporting this assertion will be gathered from his interpretation of Skeptical philosophy in the History of Philosophy. This part of the inquiry is thus of a hermeneutic aspect. Conversely, the second part is oriented critically (one might say “autocritically”) back to Hegel’s answer to the problem of the criterion in the Phenomenology. We will assess the way in which the distinctive brand of self-relating skepticism he develops therein is then applied to the Skeptical self-consciousness as its object, both phenomenologically and historically.

It must be noted from the start that the two parts of this study simultaneously follow from and ground one another. At first glance, the reciprocity of this relation is bound to confuse the reader. But this operation is not as confounding as it may initially seem, and demands no great dialectical rigor. To begin with, Hegel’s methodological solution to the criterion problem presupposes his high regard for ancient Skepticism’s critical enterprise, as well as his concurrent dissatisfaction with its epistemological nihilism. If he did not take seriously the implications of skepticism’s problem of the criterion, he could forego the negativity of dialectic altogether. Hegel would have no reason not to relapse into the dogmatic metaphysical positivism that held sway before the appearance of the Kantian philosophy. On the other hand, if he had not objected to ancient Skepticism’s stubborn disbelief, he would have been comfortable with its purely negative result. Hegel’s critical method, which we seek to apply back to his own system, would thus seem to require that our prior hermeneutic claim be accurate. Oppositely, however, his historical interpretation of skepticism, on which our hermeneutic is based, can equally be seen to presume the critical apparatus he develops in the Introduction to the Phenomenology. Whatever the actual order in which they fell, for the purposes of this essay their logic will coincide. As such, the consequences of each will be borne in mind throughout.

Hegel’s Interpretation of Ancient Skepticism as it Relates to the Problem of the Criterion

The problem of the criterion is perennial to philosophy. Most historical accounts trace its lineage back to ancient Skepticism, a movement whose luminary figures include Pyrrho, Aenesidemus, and Sextus Empiricus. Hegel, for his part, credits Skepticism with its official origin, though he also groups the New Academics with them as kindred spirits.[3] In his History of Philosophy, he characterizes Skeptic movement as a natural result of the prevailing dogmatisms of the day, Stoicism and Epicureanism.[4] For Hegel, ancient Skepticism can only be understood in contrast to these dogmatic philosophies. The pivotal issue, which determined the groups’ divergence, centered around the possibility of establishing definitive criteria for truth:

Dogmatic philosophy sets up a determinate principle or criterion, and indeed only a single principle of this sort. The one principle, then, can be only the principle of universality itself, and the other is the principle of singularity — in one case, the principle that thinking is the determinant, and, in the second, sensation (Stoicism and Epicureanism [respectively]). In contrast, the third position is the negation of every criterion, of all determinate principles, whatever kind they may be — the negation of representing or knowing, whether of a sensuous, a reflective, or a thoughtful sort. This is Skepticism.[5]

Whereas the dogmatists maintained the possibility for arriving at these fundamental criteria, the Skeptics vehemently denied the tenability of any such determinations. It is on this ground, Hegel writes, that “Skepticism has always enjoyed the reputation…of being the most formidable adversary of philosophy and of being invincible, inasmuch as it is the art of dissolving everything determinate and exhibiting it in its nullity.”[6] Hence, ancient Skepticism identified itself with the annihilation of all criteria for determining truth. With this went the possibility of affirmative metaphysics as such, since no foundational principle could be ascertained.

The essential program of ancient Skepticism was clearly the negation of all basic claims to truth. But how was such an annihilation possible?

In undermining the criterial determinations of the dogmatic philosophies, the Skeptics attacked them on their own grounds. Here the problem of the criterion enters in as such. Hegel marks off this approach as the most vital of the Skeptical argumentative tropes.[7] “This,” he writes, “they called the trope of reciprocity, δί άλλήλους; we can also call it the circular proof.” Essentially, the argument consists in exposing the dependence of criteria on other criteria, and the groundlessness of any criterion which claims to subsist in itself. In other words, those principles of knowledge alleged to be valid are discovered to rest on logically (atemporally) prior determinations, and can thus only be conceived as valid through them. Or, to use Hegel’s language: “Each element [criterion] is present only by virtue of the other; there is no being in and for itself.” Any truly substantial criterion would by necessity be self-referential, and would have to invoke itself to justify its own validity. To do so, of course, is logically invalid. No viable alternatives remain; one either commits the fallacy of circular reasoning by referring the criterion to itself or offers it no justification at all, in which case it constitutes a bald assertion. The temporal correlate to this lies in the determination of finite causal relationships, in which supposed causes are demonstrated to be mere effects of earlier causes. Consistently applied, such determination gives rise to an infinite regress, or a “falling away into infinity,” as Hegel calls it.[8]

This may be further elucidated by a simple example. The dogmatist, seeking to provide a solid, convincing ground for his philosophy, offers a criterion (X) as a standard against which the truth of his determinations is to be gauged. The Skeptic, unconvinced, approaches him with the question: What is your criterion for determining that criterion X is valid? Unphased, the dogmatist confidently answers the skeptic, referring him to the criterion Y, which he explains is the determining principle for X. To this, however, the Skeptic repeats his same question, only this time replacing “X” with “Y.” Several repetitions of this tends to frustrate (if not irritate) the dogmatist, who would prefer to uncritically proceed with his deductions. Instead, he is forced by the Skeptic to provide one criterion after another, each justifying the one that preceded it. Two options are available to the dogmatist: either 1) he continues to ground his criterial assertions, down the path of infinite futility, or 2) he tries to justify a criterion by appealing to itself. What is the criterion for determining that criterion Z is valid? The criterion Z is determined to be valid by criterion Z. To frame this in an even more vulgar (yet instructive) manner, we might imagine the inquisitive child taking the place of the Skeptic, repeatedly asking the question, “Why?” — to which the dogmatic adult answers, “Just because.”

Employing this method, it would seem that the Skeptic is able to render all determinate principles or criteria null on formal grounds alone. For it matters little, as we have seen above, whether the content of X, Y, or Z is cognitive (as with the Stoical “cataleptic fantasy”)[9] or intuitive (as with Epicurean sensation, anticipation, and opinion).[10] Skepticism lays bare the contradictions implicit in every dogmatic determination. It reveals the inescapable dialectic of the one and many, the universal and the particular, the infinite and finite.[11] In its critical capacity, Hegel defends ancient Skepticism, insisting that “[t]he skeptical consciousness or procedure is of great importance. For everything that is immediately accepted, but finite, it shows that it is nothing tenable, nothing secure, nothing absolute, nothing true; it shows that sensations are self-contradictory.”[12] Clearly, Hegel wants to preserve the corrosive negativity of Skeptical antiquity. At the same time, however, he must remain true to his speculative undertaking, and for this he requires that criteria be available as cognitive standards by which he can perform his logical determinations. How are these two aspects to be reconciled? How might Skepticism be sublated?

For an answer to these questions, we must (re)turn to the Introduction of Hegel’s Phenomenology. In this course of this section, Hegel discusses several distinct forms of skepticism. His own method, which he counts as one of these skepticisms, is mentioned first. He announces that the progressive “realization of the Notion” — the Spirit’s journey “through the series of its own configurations” — is nothing but “the pathway of doubt, or more precisely as the way of despair.”[13] This remark, while poetic, is rather cryptic for the moment. Its meaning can only be grasped by distinguishing it from the other historical modes of skepticism. Hegel’s skepticism must thus be kept separate from both the ancient Skepticism of Pyrrho and the modern skepticism of the liberal, individualist variety (Descartes).[14]

Regarding the difference between the ancient and modern skepticisms, a few words might be written. Hegel immediately dismisses the latter (the modern) as a facile, incomplete skepticism. It deludes itself by the consolation that it has independently investigated the foundations of its convictions, mistrusting the claims handed down to it by authorities. In the end, it vainly confirms the naïve outlook of natural consciousness.[15] “The only difference,” remarks Hegel, “between being caught up in a system of opinions and prejudices based on personal conviction, and being caught up in one based on the authority of others, lies in the added conceit that is innate in the former position.”[16] Hegel would in his later writings add to this subject, repudiating the generally uncritical attitude that modern skepticism takes toward the facts of natural consciousness. Against its more recent form he sets ancient Skepticism, as a more consistently negative epistemology.[17] The modern doubt was superficial, and stopped short of challenging our commonplace assumptions. The more radical negativity instead belonged to antiquity.[18]

While he clearly esteems ancient Skepticism over its modern counterpart, Hegel equally distances himself from its “merely negative procedure.” To adhere to this method would be to follow “just the scepticism which only ever sees pure nothingness in its result and abstracts from the fact that this nothingness is specifically the nothingness of that from which it results”[19] — i.e., ancient Skepticism. Though he does not explicitly designate this variety as its Pyrrhonian form, the allusion is obvious. Compare the line just quoted with this one from the History of Philosophy: “[Skepticism’s] result is indeed the negative, the dissolution of everything determinate, everything true, all content.”[20] Such Skepticism is the purest nihilism; it negates everything but its own negativity. It uproots every system of reason, every criterion for truth. But it soon finds itself at a dead end, unable to overcome its suspicions. “The skepticism that ends up with the bare abstraction or nothingness,” Hegel observes, “cannot get any further from there, but must wait to see whether something new comes along and what it is, in order to throw it too into the same empty abyss.”[21]

For Hegel, this is unacceptable. In order to proceed to Science, the systematic negation of criteria for truth must be conceived as yielding some positive result, as begetting new criteria which are themselves negatively determined by those that have been overcome. This is the task of his Phenomenology — to dissolve every form of finite cognition as insufficient, and to critically arrive at the speculative point “where the Notion corresponds to object and object to Notion.”[22] This alone would be infinite, absolute knowledge.

Hegel’s Solution to the Criterion Problem and its Application to Ancient Skepticism

As we have witnessed, Hegel defined his own philosophical skepticism negatively against both the ancient and modern forms. Positively formulated, he expresses his view in two ways, which generally amount to the same thing. His first alternative to the abstract, indeterminate negation of ancient Skepticism runs as follows: “[W]hen…the [negative] result is conceived as it is in truth, namely, as a determinate negation, a new form has thereby immediately arisen, and in the negation the transition is made through which the progress through the complete series of forms comes about of itself.” In other words, the skeptical negation of this or that criterion for truth must admit that it is the negation of something — “it is itself a determinate nothingness, one which has a content.”[23] Therefore, the result of the negation cannot be thought of as ontologically null, as in the barren, empty nothingness of a void. It is rather the negation of something which is, and the negation likewise has a positive reality, since it is defined by what it negates. Put simply, the negation is not that which is not, it is simply something else. Hegel’s distinction allows for his introduction of sublation as the metaphysically productive form of negation, since that which is negated is properly canceled but preserved in the thing which has replaced it.

The second positive expression occurs elsewhere in Hegel’s corpus, but not in the Introduction to the Phenomenology. Since it is given in the History of Philosophy, in direct reference to ancient Skepticism, it offers a convenient segue from the previous section into his solution:

Skepticism is the dialectic of everything determinate, and the universal, the indeterminate, or the infinite is not exalted above the dialectic, since the universal, the indeterminate, the infinite – which stand over against the particular, the determinate, and the finite respectively – are themselves only something determinate too; they are only the one side, and as such they are determinate. Only indeterminate and determinate together constitute the whole of determinacy. Skepticism is dialectic. The philosophical concept likewise is itself this dialectic, for genuine knowledge of the idea is the same negativity that is inherent in Skepticism. The only difference is that Skepticism stands pat with the negative as a result. It sticks with the result as a negative, saying that this or that has an internal contradiction; therefore it dissolves itself and so it is not. Thus this result is the negative, but this negative is itself just another one-sided determinateness over against the positive. That is to say, Skepticism functions solely as understanding. It fails to recognize that the negative is also affirmative, that it has positive determination within itself, for it is negation of negation. Infinite affirmation is self-relating negativity.[24] [my italics]

The proposition that “the negative is also affirmative” comes quite close to the general form of determinate negation. The notion of a “negation of negation” is somewhat more distinct from this other articulation. Important as this concept is for the Hegelian system, the most revealing line from the passage just cited lies elsewhere. His succinct predication, that “Skepticism is dialectic,” is perhaps the most transparent definition of ancient Skepticism’s place within his own philosophy. This brings us directly to his answer to the problem of the criterion.

Hegel equates the criterion with several terms, which he uses more or less interchangeably: the “standard,” the “essence,” the “in-itself,” the “truth.”[25] With ordinary objects of our experience, we assert that these objects have some essential mode of existence in themselves which is, properly speaking, what they are in truth. We distinguish this from the way that we merely relate to these objects, or the way these objects are or appear for us (our own certainty of them).[26] Since our own knowledge or apprehension is the object of investigation in the Phenomenology, however, “[t]he essence or criterion would lie within ourselves, and that which was to be compared with it and about which a decision would be reached would not necessarily have to recognize the validity of such a standard.”[27] Herein lays the apparent downfall of the Stoic to his Skeptical detractors. The Stoic’s criteria are shown (by the Academic Arcesilaus, among others) to be nothing more than “good reasons,” rather than truth. For his thought no longer corresponds to the object it claims to seek, but rather to the “universal principle” which is its criterion.[28] Such would seem to be the plight of all philosophy against Skepticism.

But Hegel is not so pessimistic. He unabashedly asserts that “[c]onsciousness provides its own criterion from within itself, so that the investigation becomes a comparison of consciousness with itself.” Hegel points out that what we take to be the “in-itself” or truth of the object separate from consciousness is in fact something that is posited by consciousness. The criterion for truth is “what consciousness affirms from within itself as being-in-itself or the True.” This is thus nothing but the “standard which consciousness itself sets up by which to measure what it knows.” The phenomenological inquiry which Hegel is undertaking takes a variety of Notions as objective, or as they exist for others. “But the essential point to bear in mind,” he reminds us, “is that these two moments, ‘Notion’ and ‘object,’ ‘being-for-another’ and ‘being-in-itself,’ both fall within that knowledge which we are investigating.” As a result, the phenomenologist does “not have to import criteria, or make use of [his] own bright ideas and thoughts during the course of the inquiry.”[29] Hegel is not trying to furnish us with a criterion for truth; he only asks us to observe (in a manner akin to the Skeptic) how one criterion after another fails for cognition, until an adequate orientation is reached at which point internal contradictions are no more. The only way this is different from Skepticism is that cognition does not have to start back at nothing every time its criterion breaks down.[30] Instead, it bears in mind all the shortcomings of its previous criteria.

The Phenomenology follows the criteria and their objects through their mutations in the successive forms of consciousness. The arch of its movement proceeds asymptotically toward infinite cognition. Hegel states that “this dialectical movement which consciousness exercises on itself and which affects both its knowledge and its object, is precisely what is called experience.”[31] Insofar as Skepticism is dialectic itself, it participates in this process. But its negative result is never final; it issues forth from the things which are negated, and its own negativity is to be duly negated. Or, as Hegel puts it: “[W]e have here the same situation as the one discussed in regard to the relation between our exposition and scepticism, viz. that in every case the result of an untrue mode of knowledge must not be allowed to run away into an empty nothing, but must necessarily be grasped as the nothing of that from which it results — a result which contains what was true in the preceding knowledge.”[32] Only by this procedure, by dialectic followed with speculation, may Absolute cognition be reached.

Having now reconstructed Hegel’s argument, bypassing the Skeptical problem of the criterion, we can see the way this plays out in one of the modes of consciousness covered by the Phenomenology. What could be a more appropriate testing ground than the Skeptical self-consciousness, given the trajectory of our inquiry?

Paralleling its historical development, Skepticism phenomenologically rises out of Stoicism.[33] Stoicism had tried to assert its freedom by relinquishing the ties that bound it to being. It found its locus of freedom in its own thought, which subsumes material objects and provides them with criteria for truth. Stoicism gives way to Skepticism of its own accord: “Skepticism is the realization of that of which Stoicism was only the Notion, and is the actual experience of what the freedom of thought is.”[34] Skepticism realizes that being has only negative significance for it. Its criterial principle is the same as the one held by Stoicism, “that consciousness is a being that thinks, and that consciousness holds something to be essentially important [critical].”[35] But the recognition of this fact seems to destroy the possibility of valid criteria as such, since criteria would be as arbitrary as freedom of thought would allow for. Scepticism thus understands that the criteria Stoicism claim as determinate for objective existence are only subjective (that is, thought).

Skepticism thus becomes infinitely removed from objectivity. It claims independence, but its independence is empty: “The skeptical self-consciousness thus experiences in the flux of all that would stand secure before its own freedom as given and preserved by itself. It is aware of this stoical indifference of a thinking which thinks itself, the unchanging and genuine certainty of itself.” But the Skeptical self-consciousness is quite far from the tranquility it would claim. For it only sees “a purely causal, confused medley, the dizziness of a perpetually self-engendered disorder.” The Stoical/Skeptical criterion of the truth of thought breaks down in the face of the contradictions that Skepticism embodies. Despite its pride in exposing the contradictions inherent in attempts to correspond our concepts to objects, Skepticism is unable to extract itself from its own inconsistencies.[36] Hegel lists just some of these: “It pronounces an absolute vanishing, but the pronouncement is, and this consciousness is the vanishing that is pronounced. It affirms the nullity of seeing, hearing, etc., it is itself seeing, hearing, etc. It affirms the nullity of ethical principles, and lets its conduct be governed by these very principles.”[37] The Skeptical self-consciousness therefore falls apart according to its own criterion. Its inconsistency lies in its negating every determinate thing but its own resolute negativity.

Conclusions

One might well claim that Hegel does not so much solve the problem of the criterion as he does bypass it. But this would be to miss the point. Hegel agrees with the ancient Skeptics that finite, relative forms of cognition which presume an absolute split between subject and object, self and world, etc., are doomed to failure. The criteria they provide cannot withstand their own internal contradictions. In the Phenomenology, Hegel seeks to harness all the negativity of ancient Skepticism so that he might provide a sort of negative proof for his own theory of Absolute cognition. Of course, he both constrains it (in making it determinate) and radicalizes it (by turning it on itself) as he sees fit. The dialectical skepticism which he uses is notably different in that it is productive/generative, but it is similar in that it attempts to discover the quandaries which persist in criteria belonging to finite modes of thought. His historical and phenomenological interpretations of Skepticism attest to this method.

NOTES