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Rebecca Crootof has a current paper on what she calls the “kill box” problem for autonomous weapon systems.  It shows just how difficult it is to translate traditional just war values and laws into an AI context.  Basically, one of the most important rules for warfare is that you try to distinguish enemy combatants from non-combatants, and only target the former.  Of course any skim of the current news will show that this rule is frequently broken, but it seems reasonable to suppose that a world where militaries felt obliged to pay at least some attention to this rule is better than one where they do not.

Enter autonomous weapons systems (AWS, = where drones are rapidly going). Drones have typically been piloted by a human, who sees the target area from a camera on the drone and then engages it to destroy a particular target.  The military problem with this process is that it requires that the weapon be in more-or-less continuous communication with its operator, and it is relatively easy to disrupt communication, leaving the weapon useless.  In Ukraine, Russia has apparently taken to attaching drones to narrow fiber optic cables, which solves the radio-jamming problem but produces new problems of range, since the drone can now only go as far as its spool of cable lasts.  A couple of weeks ago, Russia seems to have taken the step that military ethicists have long-feared: a completely AI-powered drone.  Apparently aiming at a gas station, it crashed into a wall in Zaporizhzhia and killed three civilians.

AI powered drones are immune to both communications-jamming and can fly long distances without needing a fiber optic leash.  They can be assigned a target based on picture or description, and then sent on their way to destroy it. They thus present a series of problems around whether or not they can distinguish combatants from non-combatants, since this task is hard even for humans. As Crootof puts it, “to comply with the distinction requirement, an anti-personnel autonomous weapon system would need to be able to identify a complex range of unlawful human targets, including civilians, wounded and surrendering combatants, and other protected persons like medical and religious personnel” (5).

Crootof thinks that the difficulty of this task raises a different risk:

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So it’s time to take stock and wind-up this very long thread (one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine) on Hyppolite’s Logic and Existence and readings of Marx around it (I know the title promises Foucault. That turns out to be a minor part of how this developed, but I’ll say a little something about Foucault at the end today). Here I’ll reframe the debate, and track its echoes in Althusser’s “Lenin and Philosophy” and the discussion around it; along the way, I’ll note the influence of Althusser and Hyppolite on each other.

By way of a summary, then, Hyppolite’s Logic and Existence emerged in a very specific context.  It was a context where how one read Hegel mattered for how one read Marx.  The Stalin-Zhdanov line emphasized a radical break with Hegel in Marx.  It also required that one endorse Engels and the project of a dialectics of nature.  This is clear from the examples they use to construct dialectical materialism, which involve temperature changes and other natural phenomena.  This is what it meant to find the “rational kernel” in Hegel: to see dialectics as a general way of giving an account of everything but without treating the Absolute as something transcendental.  In contrast, someone like Hyppolite (who represents an interpretation common among non-Marxist philosophers) could read Marx through Hegel, a process that involved emphasis on the earlier writings and alienation as the central Marxian insight, coupled with a sense that it was not ever going to be possible to resolve alienation.  Hyppolite thought this was an empirical proposition; Althusser thought it was a bad faith effort by the bourgeoisie to recast its own problems as human nature, but the upshot was a general skepticism in the Hyppolite camp about the ability of communism resolve alienation.

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I’m most of the way through a long series (one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight) on Hyppolite’s Logic and Existence and his reading of Marx. Last time, I started on his reading of Marx in Logic and Existence.  As I noted, although the book involves a reorientation away from the Phenomenology and to the Logic, Hyppolite’s reading of Marx does not change significantly.  I want to note four points. Last time, I contrasted (1) the positivity that Hyppolite thinks is inextricable from Marx with (2) the negativity he thinks is important in Hegel.  This time, I’ll look at (3) Hyppolite’s specific complaint about alienation in Marx, and finally (4) his concession that historicity is also a significant problem for reading Hegel, a problem that is made very apparent by his usage of Heidegger.

3. Enough with the alienation!

For Hyppolite, Hegelian negativity shows the limits of humanist alienation.  “In Marx, the proletariat is the comprehension of human alienation and this comprehension is its existence” and “if objectification were not an alienation, history would stop” (L&E, 184).  So Marx has allowed the initial positivity of “man” to generate an endpoint that was pure positivity.  But no such endpoint is possible.  This is because the human individual is always “there for others and this for-others is the limit over which his subjectivity cannot go” (184).  Judith Butler’s reading of Hyppolite on the Phenomenology is helpful: “for Hyppolite, the absolute is not an achievement as such, but the dialectic of achievement and loss, the perpetual noncoincidence of beings and, in the human sphere, the permanence of desire, the inevitability of transience” (Subjects of Desire, 83).  Here, that reading is explicitly applied to Hegel tout court.

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I’ve been pursuing a long thread (one, two, three, four, five, six, seven) on the importance of Hyppolite’s Logic and Existence, and his reading of Marx.  Doing so has involved excavating a lot of historical context, as reading Marx in particular was indissociable from both the reception of his recently published early writings and debates in the Soviet Union that were reflected in the PCF.  Moreover, though Hegel was an absolutely central figure in postwar France, the interpretation of Hegel was up in the air.  Although very prominent, Alexandre Kojève’s humanistic version was seen as problematic for a number of reasons, not least because it abandoned good-sized chunks of Hegel’s corpus to maintain the anthropology.  Clearly in the shadow of his engagement with Heidegger, Hyppolite’s Logic and Existence opened the possibility of a non-humanist, non-anthropological version of Hegel that simultaneously resisted another prominent reading, one that assimilated Hegel into religion.  Hyppolite also wrote about Marx in the late 1940s and read Marx as a theorist of alienation.

In this post and the next, I’ll discuss Hyppolite’s reading of Marx in Logic and Existence.  Although the book involves a radical re-thinking of Hegel, or at least a radical reorientation away from the Phenomenology and to the Logic, Hyppolite’s reading of Marx does not change significantly.  I want to note four points. This time, I’ll contrast (1) the positivity that Hyppolite thinks is inextricable from Marx with (2) the negativity he thinks is important in Hegel.  Next time, I’ll look at (3) Hyppolite’s specific complaint about alienation in Marx, and finally (4) his concession that historicity is also a significant problem for reading Hegel.

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I’ve been working out a reading of the Hegel-Marx relation via Hyppolite in the early 1950s.  In previous installments (one, two, three, four, five, six), I’ve tried to develop a lot of the background for why the appearance of Hyppolite’s Logic and Existence in 1953 was so important in that context.  Last time, I made some general remarks on the book and started on what I take to be some interpretive guideposts for the it.  I argued that: (1) Hyppolite wants to decenter the Phenomenology in Hegel studies. Today, I’ll add (2) The Absolute is not to be understood as a substance and (3) Hyppolite makes heavy use of a Heideggerian middle voice in his exegesis.

2. Being is not a substance. Second, the absolute subject of all of this is “being.”  As with Heidegger, what “being” means is somewhat unclear, but the essential move of L&E is here, shifting the subject of the dialectic unambiguously to being and away from “man.” Hyppolite does not want us treating being as a traditional metaphysical subject, however.  For example, he insists that one not treat being as a “substrate:”

“Absolute being reflects itself and thinks itself. Representation, which is characteristic of empirical consciousness as such, is replaced by the concept. There is no longer any substrate [C’est l’être absolu qui se réfléchit et qui se pense. La représentation, qui est caractéristique d’une conscience empirique comme telle, fait place au concept. Il n’y a plus de substrat]” (L&E 150).

Or, contrasting Hegel with religion, he emphasizes “this Logos is not a divine understanding which would exist somewhere else in another world. It is the light of Being in human reality” (178). As John Heckman notes in his introduction to the translation of Genesis and Structure, there was a significant reading of Hegel in postwar France as religious, represented immediately after the war by Henri Niel, in De la Médiation dans la philosophie de Hegel (1945) and several articles.  Hyppolite is thus partly distinguishing his reading from that. The need to do so in an anti-anthropological reading had already been signaled by Kojève, who argued in 1946 against a theistic reading of Hegel (citing Niel) that “Hegel understands and proclaims that what was called ‘God’ is, in reality, humanity, taken in the completed totality of its historical evolution” and “theology was always an unconscious anthropology” (“Hegel, Marx and Christianity,” 26).  That is, the structure of Christian thought is an abstract representation of reality, “man projected into the beyond,” but it is wrong only to the extent that it is a representation. In this sense, “the metaphysical anthropology of Hegel therefore preserves the fundamental categories of Christian theology. But can one say that the Hegelian transcendence of the spirit is anything other than the transcendence of man with respect to nature. Can one say that, for Hegel, objective-Reality is anything other than natural and human” (25)? 

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I’ve been working out a reading of the Hegel-Marx relation via Hyppolite in the early 1950s.  In previous installments (one, two, three, four, five), I’ve tried to develop a lot of the context for why the appearance of Hyppolite’s Logic and Existence in 1953 was so important in that context.  Here, I’ll start looking at L&E.  I’ll offer some general points on the text, and three basic interpretative points for making some sense of it: Hyppolite is interested in (1) decentering Hegel’s Phenomenology, (2) coming up with a way of understanding the Absolute that does not substantialize it, and (3) characterizing things in a way that recalls Heidegger’s use of the middle voice.  I’ll get to the general points and (1) today.

Recall that Lenin’s famous aphorism directed attention to Hegel’s Logic: “it is impossible completely to understand Marx’s Capital, and especially its first chapter, without having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel’s Logic. Consequently, half a century later none of the Marxists understood Marx!!” (LCW 38, 180).  Recall also that the French readings of Hegel, at least those of Kojève, Wahl and Hyppolite had been Phenomenology-centered, which tended to lead to a humanist Hegel.  Kojève in particular pushed Hegelianism as anthropology by way of the Phenomenology. Logic and Existence was Hyppolite’s development of his own Logic-centered reading of Hegel.  The consequence, as was immediately understood at the time, was to produce a non-humanist version of Hegel. 

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I’ve been working out some of the context for Hyppolite’s Logic and Existence and why it might matter for a reading of Marx (one, two, three, four).  Last time, I started a look at Hyppolite’s late 1940s reading of Marx; today I want to finish that.  Last time, I looked at (a) The line Althusser seems most bothered by – the “revision” to which Marx may be subject; and (b) the instrumentalization of the proletariat. Today I want to look at (c) Hyppolite’s priority on alienation in Marx, and (d) Hyppolite’s musings about the will to power.

(c) Alienation. What emerges quite clearly in Hyppolite is that he takes alienation to be central to reading all of Marx.  Marx’s early writings talk a lot about alienation. Hyppolite thinks that alienation is at the core of Marx’s mature work as well. He writes in the essay on Capital:

“The original idea, and, as it were, the seed of all Marx’s thought, is the idea of alienation, which he took from Hegel and Feuerbach. If one takes this notion as the starting point, defining human emancipation as man’s active historical struggle against every mode of alienation of his nature, one is then best equipped to set out the Marxian philosophical system and to achieve a structural understanding of Marx’s major work, Capital” (Studies, 130).

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I’ve been working out some of the context for Hyppolite’s Logic and Existence and why it might matter for a reading of Marx (one, two, three).  Last time, I looked at Althusser’s 1950 (anonymously published) critique of the use of Hegel in understanding Marx, an essay that seems to be particularly aggrieved by Hyppolite’s work of the late 1940s.  Here I want to turn to the offending Hyppolite essays, since one might want to know what Hyppolite said that was so horrible as to occasion such an acerbic response. Let’s look at a few things: (a) The line Althusser seems most bothered by – the “revision” to which Marx may be subject; (b) an instrumentalization of the proletariat; (c) Hyppolite’s priority on alienation in Marx, and (d) Hyppolite’s musings about the will to power.   I’ll look at the first two of these here, and the second pair next time.

All of these should be read against a background where Hyppolite leans into the Hegelian background of Marx; the essay on Capital begins by noting that “in order to understand Capital it is absolutely necessary to consult Marx’s philosophical works prior to his economic studies. Marx’s work presupposes an underlying philosophy whose various elements are not easily reconstructed” including Hegel and, sometimes in tension with Hegel and Darwin (Studies on Marx and Hegel, 126). And again:

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I’m working out a thread (part 1, part 2) suggesting that that Hyppolite’s Logic and Existence (1953), which reads Hegel through the Logic and not the Phenomenology, and thereby pushes a non-humanist reading of Hegel, mattered for the French reading of Marx, which hinged on whether Marx inherited humanism or anthropology from Hegel.  I then looked at the Soviet part of that equation, and how Stalinism required the rejection of Hegel, even as Stalin himself repressed (missed entirely?) the importance of Hegel to his own understanding of dialectics.  Here I want to continue this rather elaborate project of context-setting and say something about how this plays out in France in the person of Althusser.

Althusser’s anti-Hegelianism in the 1960s is well known and represents the gymnastics necessary to retain an anti-Hegelian view while also discrediting Stalinism, which became important after Krushchev’s destalinization program, which began with a speech in 1956.  In “Contradiction and Overdetermination” (1962) Althusser refers to Hegel’s understanding of supersession [= Aufhebung].  For Hegel, Althusser complains, “the survival of the past as the ‘superseded’ (aufgehoen) is simply reduced to the modality of a memory, which, furthermore, is merely the inverse of (that is, the same thing as) an anticipation” (For Marx, 115; I’m removing his constant italicization). 

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Last time, I started a thread on Hyppolite’s Logic and Existence (1953) and its non-humanist reading of Hegel, and how that bears on Marx interpretation.  The first step was to set some context, since Marx interpretation is always perilous, and was especially so during the 1950s, given the political demands of the French Communist Party (PCF), which were largely set by the Soviets and Stalinism.  What that meant in 1953 was to be anti-Hegelian.  I illustrated this with a passage from a speech by Georgi Zhdanov on the history of philosophy that showed both the anti-Hegelianism and the Stalinist provenance.  I promised three explanatory notes, and delivered one, which was about the selectivity of the Stalin/Zhdanov reading suppression of Hegel, which required some calisthenics around Lenin’s own engagement with Hegel.

This time, I’ll add a couple of more thoughts to situate the Zhdanov line.  To recall, he is criticizing a history of philosophy book for not emphasizing the radicality of Marx with regard to his predecessors.  Zhdanov says:

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