Judith Butler and the Anglo-Hegelians

Judith Butler and the Anglo-Hegelians

The work of the British Hegelian Stephen Houlgate can be used as an instructive foil to Butler’s work for the reason that he reads in Hegel a number of liberal political themes, and also he affirms in the latter an undying commitment to a ‘presuppositionless’ philosophy. Hegel did one better than Kant by showing that the essential categories of thought are generated out of the logical process of thought thinking itself without the intervention of any outside subjectivity. Houlgate’s claims that in the Phenomenology Hegel sets out to prove to sceptical metaphysicians of his time that, immanent to thought itself, is an underlying unity of being and thinking:

The aim of the Phenomenology is to teach ordinary consciousness —and philosophers wedded to the convictions of ordinary consciousness— that being is not simply something objective to which we stand in relation but exhibits one and the same logical form as thought itself and thus can be understood a priori from within thought. (Houlgate 2006, 146-7)

The Hegelian philosophy is a rigourous, logical and presuppositionless unfolding of the categories of thought and being and, for our purposes here, Houlgate argues that inherent to thought itself is the necessity of human intersubjectivity. Self-consciousness can only come to fruition through an exposure to another self-consciousness. Houlgate argues, that “we can achieve certainty of ourselves only when we are recognized by another whom we recognize as free in turn” (2003a, 20). His emphasis on achieving certainty of selfhood and recognition leads him to attempt to undergird Hegel with a Cartesian concern for self-certainty and bodily integrity and which promptly sets up a crucial distinction between himself and Butler that we shall now investigate.

Houlgate’s reading of Hegel also, like Butler’s, emphasizes the social component of mutual recognition, yet in addition Houlgate draws out what he sees as the Cartesian undercurrent in Hegelian self-conscious subjectivity. Houlgate argues that Hegel’s purpose in the Phenomenology is to show to the many non-believers who remained sceptical of Hegel’s metaphysical system at the time, how ordinary consciousness if left to itself reflects the very structure of being. Houlgate argues that Hegel wanted to illustrate that consciousness immanently evolves to eventually reflect reality as its very essence; although it may look as if mind is separate from external reality, as if there exists a thing-in-itself unreachable and unknowable to human consciousness, the Phenomenology seeks to put to rest, once and for all, the Cartesian subject/object dualism. The question becomes whether Hegel’s solution retains the Cartesian cogito or if Hegel’s emphasis on self-loss and alterity refuses all reference to a volitional self-sustaining subject?

Subjects of Desire

In Subjects of Desire Butler begins her treatment of the Phenomenology with ordinary consciousness and its attempt to think those objects external to itself. A consciousness that does not think the other, that does not think of something outside of itself, would not be properly thinking at all. But as soon as it goes out into alterity, consciousness seeks to move beyond the many “nows” and “heres” of immediate sense certainty. It is upon introduction of the category of Force, that consciousness is able to think beyond simple appearances and simple Understanding and grasp reality at a whole new level of complexity. Thus, for example, consciousness must move beyond immediate Understanding if it is to understand the concept of gravity. A higher order of concepts is needed in order to grasp what Butler describes as a hidden dimension of reality beyond immediate appearance yet which exerts a causal force:

[T]here is always something that is beyond the determinate, some operative negativity, that accounts for the genesis of determinate form as well as for its eventual dissolution. The notion of Force confirms that ... reality is not coextensive with appearance, but always sustains and is sustained by a hidden dimension. In order to think the object of experience ... we must relinquish faith in the kind of thinking that can take only determinate beings as its objects; conceptual thinking must replace Understanding, for only the former can think the movement between opposites. (1987, 27)

The category of Force exposes the Understanding in its utter incapacity to understand the hidden complexity of reality. Ordinary consciousness, still mired in Understanding, lacks the cognitive tools to understand the new Newtonian universe: “The Understanding consistently mistakes stasis for truth” (SD 29). This is as far as consciousness can go, it has reached its most “sophisticated development” in the Understanding. Lacking the “cognitive tools” to properly understand the phenomenon in its complexity, consciousness is unable to think the process of change, and as such Understanding is found to be wanting. It fumbles in its attempt to explain Force, it finds itself searching for the right words but comes up short, and in so doing consciousness discovers its own reflexivity: “Consciousness gives rise to self-consciousness in the bungled attempt to explain what it knows” (1987, 28).

This new apprehension now implicitly grasps the back and forth of change, of the hidden dimensions that structure reality, nevertheless it suffers from being too abstract, too theoretical, it is not a real apprehension or ‘sensuous’ connection with the external world. Rather it still feels as if there is a mind, a consciousness here, and a world ‘out there’ without any real correspondence or connection between the two. Self-consciousness must seek out an accommodation with the world in a way that not only does not detract from either subject or object, but on the contrary, strengthens each entity by incorporating their respective differences into a unity. Butler explains it as follows:

The problem under consideration is how to make the sensuous and perceptual world a difference that is no difference, that is, how to recapitulate this world as a feature of self-consciousness itself. We have seen that “explaining” the world went part of the way in doing the trick, but the solution there seemed too abstract. (1987, 32)

For Butler the subjective apprehension of the object, of the merging of subject and object into a “difference that is no difference” is nothing else but the advent of desire. Desire is that which makes the sensuous and perceptual world and consciousness into a difference that is no difference. For Butler desire is the sensuous articulation of self-consciousness in general, the sensuous enactment of the unity of consciousness with the world (33). No longer is this unity merely thought in abstract and theoretical terms but self-consciousness now properly apprehends alterity as a feature of itself: “Desire, as the expression of self-consciousness, is a constant effort to overcome the appearance of ontological disparity between consciousness and its world” (34). Desire makes explicit self-consciousness to itself.

Butler understands Hegel’s metaphysical project as tightly wrapped around the concept of desire. Desire, Butler insists, is the logical motor of the entire Phenomenology (43). For Butler on the other hand, reading Hegel rhetorically through the lens of desire offers her a way of thinking the dialectic without succumbing to common pitfalls mined by various readers of Hegel, i.e., the progress of consciousness as teleological, a dialectic that renders difference into the same etc. By incorporating desire into the dialectic, Butler wishes to open up different instances in which Hegel could possibly be read for meanings that are in excess of the strict logistics of Houlgate’s interpretation. Butler thus disagrees with those who want to claim a more modest role for desire, those who argue for its eventual supersession once self-consciousness recognizes itself in another self-consciousness. ²⁰ Butler insists that desire’s gradual sophistication is what drives the dialectic forward in the Phenomenology.

To claim that desire is simply an unsophisticated form of knowing and being in Hegel’s system is to misread the standard of truth that governs the Phenomenology generally; the gradual sophistication of desire —the expanding inclusiveness of its intentional aims is the principle of progress in the Phenomenology. (1987, 45)

Having woven desire into the threads of the dialectic, the only problem for it becomes the fact that it is indifferent to the objects that it seeks to negate. Hegel notes that this incessant requirement to garner and negate object after object does not lead to a more expansive and complex version of self-consciousness. It only leads to an empty repetition. Self-consciousness goes out into alterity and negates object after object in an endless repetition of desire that denies it any stable sense of itself. How can this be resolved? It is here, in the brief interim before the storm of Master and Slave as it were, that the originality of Butler’s reading of Hegel’s scene of mutual recognition comes to the fore.

The original self-consciousness which sees another self-consciousness ‘over there’ (roughly paragraphs 175-185 in the Phenomenology) has been subject to many interpretations. Butler herself returns to this section in a number of her later works, stressing a different variation each time. It may be no exaggeration to claim that Butler’s Hegel begins and ends with this scene of mutual recognition.

For self-consciousness to thrive and not atrophy, it is necessary that it relate to another self-consciousness. Hegel says this in a number of slightly different ways all contained within a couple of densely argued paragraphs: “A self-consciousness exists for a self-consciousness. Only so is it in fact self-consciousness; for only in this way does the unity of itself in its otherness become explicit for it” (para 177). On the next page Hegel states that self-consciousness “exists only in being acknowledged.” Up to now consciousness has been negating objects only to have desire and the object return in a repetitive loop. Consciousness is not able to maintain a sense of stability or objectivity because “instead of gradually eliminating the domain of alterity, self-consciousness confronts the infinity of determinate objects and, accordingly, the infinite insatiability of desire” (Butler 1987, 39). To put it simply, there is too much happening, desire is in danger of over-heating in its continuous pursuit of an indefinite number of objects to negate. Something is needed in order to quell this scene and put subjectivity on a more stable footing.