beyond or below itself, to intuition, ‘learned ignorance’, or pure and simple faith.
Who formulated the problematic of understanding in its full scope? Goethe. Not in Werther or Wilhelm Meister,27 but in Faust, in other words, a tragic play rather than a novel.
This play (hardly stageable, particularly the second part) opposes living to cognition. Faust, who knows all that could be known in his day, belatedly perceives that he has failed to live. For his happiness and unhappiness, he is visited by the demonic principle: the absolute Other, the accursed of God, who knows what Faust does not know, who possesses the secret of living: passion, delirium, madness, crime, in a word, evil (sin). Mephistopheles (with the authorization of his hierarchical superior, the eternal Father) allows Faust to pass through the ordeals of living after having undergone those of knowing. He leads him to Gretchen, the woman still passive, beauty (the beautiful object), but able to suffer and complain, and then to Helen, the active woman, still more lovely, but more ungraspable. The old triptych God–man–devil is joined by a fourth character: woman. She differs equally from the eternal virgin and the eternal mother. She is duplicated: victim and servant of sensual pleasure (Gretchen); queen of beauty, joy and delight (Helen). The eternal feminine is revealed only by way of initiation and ordeal.
To the great question that opens like an abyss on the path of ‘modern man’, Goethe gives only a poetic response: all that happens is only symbol, hieroglyph, and only the eternal feminine calls and shows the way of redemption. This is how the great Western idea pursues its course, that of absolute love as a counterpoint to logos. This great image runs right through the West, from the medieval romances down to Le Grand Meaulnes, where it dissolves in the pallid moonlight of the beautiful soul. Unless it rebounds …
Still in Goethe’s lifetime, Hegel divinized knowledge. For him, the negative places itself in the service of positivity: absolute knowledge. And we could interpret the demonic in Goethe (Mephistopheles) as an accentuation of the negative, given that its role remains ambiguous. For Hegel, then, God is the concept, the concept is identified with divinity. The concept of history and the history of the concept coincide. From nature emerges logos, the word: then nature and word (science and consciousness, language and logic) unite in the recovered spirit, absolute spirit. God-knowledge and history converge in the state. Absolute spirit, logos as principle and end, is ultimately defined as a philosophical trinity: concept (father), becoming (son), state (spirit). And Kierkegaard was not wrong to rail sarcastically at the speculative Good Friday by which the god in three persons incarnated in history climbed the Golgotha of dialectical ordeals to reach the glory of the last judgement (as pronounced by the philosopher).
With Hegel dead, Hegelianism disintegrated. What a strange situation European thought found itself in after Hegel and Goethe, after Kant and Schopenhauer! At first with the Young Hegelians, then after them, Marx hesitated between knowing and acting. He retained the project of constructing an imprescriptible knowledge, resistant to all refutation and reaching the essence of society (bourgeois, capitalist), but he took up the Promethean-Faustian formula: ‘In the beginning was the deed.’ He maintained the Hegelian ideas of a rationality underlying history, a philosophico-scientific certitude inherent to the analysis of practice, a finality subordinating causality and necessity. At the same time, he hesitated before the rationality that in this schema was immanent to existing society and reality. How long would the bourgeoisie survive? Would it exhaust its inherent rationality? Did this reason itself have to be broken, along with the state and property relations? Would the bourgeoisie continue its historic mission for a long time, the growth of the productive forces until the inevitable qualitative leap? Where were the internal limits of capitalism? If there is a rationality everywhere, it is also to be found in this society, which is easily qualified as absurd on the grounds of its injustice and inhumanity.
Marx posited a meaning of becoming, of history, without demonstrating it; he accepted Hegelian (Western) logos without subjecting it to a fundamental critique. Hegel’s still-theological hypothesis passed through the sieve (the ‘break’) in Marx’s thought. No more than Hegel did Marx question the origin of Western rationality, its genesis or genealogy: Judeo-Christianity, Greco-Latin thought, industry and technology. Marx was content with an attenuation of Hegelian theology (theodicy) and the epic of the Idea. Sometimes Marx and Engels came up against some conceptions that were irreducible to their schematization; for example, logic and law. Why had logic (born in Greece) continued across the Western societies and their modes of production? What relationship was there between ideologies and the dialectic? As for law, elaborated in Rome, this lasted until its renascence in the bourgeois-democratic revolution, with the Napoleonic code civil. Accordingly, the social transition to communism would not be able to do without law and laws, with the result that the triadic schema – from unconscious customs under primitive communism, through law in the course of history, to conscious custom within ‘developed communism’ – remains abstract. Equally, Marx was unable to say much about the future communist society, other than that the long transition would be punctuated by ends: end of capitalism by revolution; end of labour by automation; end of law by custom; end of state, nation, homeland, working class, bourgeoisie, a separate economy and a dominant polity, etc. Nietzsche would add to this list: the death of God and man.
One question arises when thought reflects on this path signposted by ends and deaths, as a set of reefs are signalled by crosses and shipwrecks: ‘Will not logos itself come to an end, exhausted, passed into writing and writings – even writing itself, born as it was from living speech and word?’
If Hegel maintained with incomparable vigour and intolerable rigour the primacy of knowledge as code of the ‘real’, hence the primacy of theory, system, concept (thus doing away with rifts, separations, splits and conflicts), Marx already hesitated between cognition, partially transferred to production, and creative action, practical living and experience, the key preoccupation of the famous 1844 Manuscripts. With Marx, the productive activity intended to assure doctrinal unity divides in two: a) production (manufacture) of material things, exchangeable goods, commodities, machines, in other words, means of production; b) production of social relations, creation of artworks, ideas, institutions, cognitions (connaissances), language, aesthetic objects, innovative acts. While Hegel had successfully attempted a unitary concept in the narrow context of knowledge, Marx failed in the wider framework of action. Production and creation fell apart, despite his efforts to combine them, each threatening to go its own way.
9) This is how avant-garde European thought led towards what we can retrospectively call the ‘Nietzschean crisis’. The problem of understanding had received no solution. The revolution failed in 1848 and again in 1871. What was the outcome of the rationality that Hegel had seen as immanent in the state, and Marx in social (industrial) practice? Wars. At the same moment as Nietzsche, and for quite similar reasons, Rimbaud declared that it was life that had to be changed, and love reinvented. But the proud edifice of Hegelianism bridled, outdoing in arrogance and power the Bonapartist state that had issued from the great French Revolution. Bismarck, a political strategist with great vision, understood that certain objectives of the democratic revolution could be realized ‘from above’, by consolidating the state instead of transforming it – national unity, for example. He also envisaged integrating into the national state the new class that was in the course of formation, the proletariat. From this point, Germany, which had brought the modern world philosophy, committed itself to the most pedantic historiographic erudition, to philistinism. It threatened to conquer Europe, initially through a ‘culture’ that denied civilization. The recourse to myth (Wagner) showed this decadence of Western logos, with its two aspects that were seemingly incompatible but actually mutually supporting: knowledge and power. A descent into hell began, starting with descent into the abyss of consciousness, psychism, the unconscious, will and desire – with Schopenhauer. A vain fascination, as Nietzsche said and showed …
Shameless and unheeding logos, proud of its accumulated knowledge and methods, conveyed some myths of its own. The first among these, in the name of which it exerted its worst blackmail, was irrationality: any criticism of reason would lead
