Dialectics and Progress: what Hegel and psychoanalysis can tell us about the meaning of life
Progress is a common buzzword today. Organizations and political movements claim the label of “progressive”, implying that they seek social change. Meanwhile, social progress is contrasted with the notion of personal progress in the rising industry of self-help material. The question lingers as to how we might define such progress. Thankfully, both Hegel’s system of philosophy as well as psychoanalysis can give us a clue.
I: What is the dialectic?
Hegel’s dialectical method cherishes contradiction as part of the object to be analyzed. An epistemological deadlock (a failure in our knowledge) is then transposed into an ontological deadlock (a contradiction part of reality itself) through the recognition of the subject as part of the object, in its unfolding. A common misunderstanding of dialectics posits that it must always run according to the formula “thesis-antithesis-synthesis”. There is no antithesis and no synthesis, in fact. If we must use the word “thesis”, then the dialectical method seeks to show how such a thesis is alike a ticking timebomb ready to explode into its negation at any moment. There is no antithesis coming from the outside, externally, instead the thesis is “radicalized”, its implications are analyzed to the very end, it is dragged and pulled into all directions, it is being run like a movie to its natural end, all in the end to show how the antithesis was part of the thesis from the very beginning. To speak metaphorically: the thesis is like a battery that must be consumed until it “runs out”, the moment it runs out, it turns into its negation. The dialectical method seeks to consume the battery of every identity.
If we must stick to a tripartite form, the dialectic has three moments: the moment of understanding, the speculative moment and the dialectical moment. The moment of understanding corresponds to “normal” formal logic which excludes contradictions. The speculative moment is the following statement that shows the latent contradictions hidden in the previous moment. Finally, in the dialectical moment, the two previous moments are reconciled and contradiction is more obvious. In the beginning of “Science of Logic”, Hegel uses such a method to analyze the movement from being, to nothing and into becoming. We start with pure being, which has no contradictions. However, if all that there is is pure undifferentiated being, not the existence of a particular something but just pure existence in itself, then it is undistinguishable from pure nothingness. Now we arrived at a contradiction, and we are at the speculative moment where pure being = pure nothing. Becoming is the dialectical moment which reconciles the contradiction as necessary, becoming being the movement from being into nothing and vice-versa.
There is no synthesis in the dialectical moment. To synthesize would imply to eliminate contradictions. Yet, the reconciliation in the dialectical moment is a reconciliation with the contradiction. With each new sublation (“aufhebung” in German), the contradictions get harder and harder to solve. With all this in mind, Hegel maintains a teleological philosophy — the purpose of each identity is to run its course into its own self-destruction, like a ticking time-bomb ready to explode into its opposite, the dialectical method seeks to watch this movement unfold in time. Since there is teleology in Hegel’s philosophy, we can determine a notion of progress.
What differentiates Hegel from all other philosophers before him (except Epicurus) is the view that subjects seek contradictions harder and harder to solve. What drives our subjectivity, according to Hegel, is the sustainment of contradiction, not their elimination. The Phenomenology of Spirit is the bildungsroman that showcases each stage in the development of subjectivity. With each new stage, the contradictions get harder and harder to solve.
II: How psychoanalysis can help us understand Hegelian dialectics
Psychoanalysis can give us a new, easier to grasp vocabulary for this phenomenon. With the discovery of the unconscious, Freud splits the human subject in two: what we consciously wish is not the same as what we unconsciously desire. Since we may have conflicting (contradictory) desires, psychological defense mechanisms arrive in order to deal with this contradiction. The most well-known defense mechanism is repression: one of the two conflicting desires is forgotten from memory and repressed into the unconscious, thus giving the subject the illusion of self-consistency.
But this was not the end for Freud. In 1920 (“Beyond the Pleasure Principle”) he introduces the concept of the death drive. The death drive is our main source of self-sabotage. The drive has two main components: its aim and its object. Consciously, we may be led to believe that what drives us is the attainment of our objects of desire (to do what one wants). However, what drives us unconsciously is the repeated failure to obtain our object of desire. The aim of all drives is repetition. For example, a couple may consciously wish to stay together but ‘happen to’ break-up and get back together ever so often. What appears to us as fate is in fact our unconscious. What is repressed here is the wish to get back together. However, one cannot get close to someone without first pushing them away. Thus, the unconscious of the couple manufactures a reason to break-up out of thin air only to have an excuse to get back together, which is the real source of satisfaction (not staying in a relationship, but re-entering it). Todd McGowan gives another example, that of a person who purchases a new car each year:
“These rabid consumers […] are unwittingly stuck in the dynamic of the drive, which just so happens to involve driving. The consumers identify satisfaction with the new model of the car, but, after driving it for a few months, they recognize that their satisfaction doesn’t reside in this particular object. Thus, they return to the car dealer the next year for the newest model, hoping to discover a more genuinely satisfying object but encountering instead the same disappointment. There is satisfaction in the repetition of the purchases, but not in the cars purchased, which is where the consumer believes it is located. This dynamic, which can be infinitely repeated, reveals not only how contradiction informs thought but how it dominates our actions. The consumer of cars cannot recognize that the object is not really the aim because doing so would eliminate the repeated acts of consumption. Contradiction doesn’t destroy this activity but sustains it. […] It is much more the way that the subject satisfies itself — the aim of the drive — that the subject must repress.”¹
What both Hegel and psychoanalysts have in common is the belief that what drives our subjectivity is not the removal of contradictions, but their sustainment. For Hegel, the world-Spirit (“Geist”) goes through multiple stages and with each new sublation, the contradictions get harder and harder to solve until we get to the ultimate contradiction, the absolute. The final stage in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is absolute knowledge, which does not mean knowledge of everything, but knowledge of the absolute, which is the knowledge that all identity is self-contradictory. According to Zizek, “absolute knowledge denotes a subjective position which finally accepts contradiction as an internal condition of every identity”². For Freud, Lacan and other psychoanalysts, the aim of our drive is not identical with its object, and thus the subject, in their behavior, does whatever is possible in order to maintain this difference alive, to make sure that the two do not overlap.
“When we reach the absolute, we recognize that what we took as our object — the resolution of contradiction — was functioning solely in service to our aim, which was the satisfaction provided by contradiction. Contradiction itself provides a satisfaction that its resolution would dissipate, a satisfaction that stems from giving us an object to desire. When we reach the absolute, we run out of future possibilities. As a result, the hope for resolving the contradiction evaporates, and we have only desiring itself stripped of its possible realization.”³
What Hegel calls “absolute knowledge” corresponds to what Lacan calls “traversing the fantasy”. According to Todd McGowan, “The subject traverses the fantasy when it recognizes that there is no object beyond the fantasy that it might obtain. Traversing the fantasy requires accepting that satisfaction derives from the fantasy itself rather than from obtaining the object or transcending the fantasy in any way. This is exactly the shift that occurs with the move to the absolute in Hegel’s system.”⁴.
After we traverse the fantasy, we can consciously assume responsibility in what we have hitherto done unconsciously. Traversing the fantasy is simultaneous with enjoying our symptom. The subject consciously gives up the fantasy of removing contradiction, and instead seeks enjoyment out of the repetitive movement itself. Instead of choosing between opposing poles in a dialectic, the subject’s death drive keeps circling between the two, and the subject gains satisfaction out of this movement.
III: What is progress?
With our new terms, we can give a new perspective on personal and social progress, up to the meaning of life. Personal progress, from a dialectical perspective, abandons problem-solving. Therefore, the meaning of life is not to solve your problems but to create better and better problems. Progress is not when you look back on where you were 5 years ago and thinking to yourself “Remember the problems I had back then? Glad I solved them.” — instead personal progress is when you think to yourself “Remember the kinds of problems I had back then? Thank God that now I have better problems to deal with and I’m not the kind of person to have those problems anymore”. To traverse the fantasy, personally or collectively, means to move into harder and harder problems. It doesn’t get easier, instead it gets harder and we get stronger, like leveling up in an RPG.
Social progress must run along a similar line. With each new economic system, we have more interesting problems to solve. The problems are more complex and require more effort, but humanity also has more tools to solve them. The harder it gets, the stronger we become. We progress when we know that life was easier before while we were also weaker.
Traversing the fantasy collectively means to traverse ideology. This is what Karl Marx did not understand, while he imagined that after capitalism we will get rid of its contradictions and enter a communist utopia without contradictions. In the next economic system, we must progress towards one in which the latent contradictions hidden within capitalism will become even more apparent instead of disappearing. Or like Zizek better put it:
“Marx’s notion of the communist society is itself the inherent capitalist fantasy; that is, a fantasmatic scenario for resolving the capitalist antagonisms he so aptly described. In other words, our wager is that, even if we take away the teleological notion of communism (the society of fully unleashed productivity) as the implicit standard by which Marx measures the alienation of existing society, the bulk of his “critique of political economy,” his insights into the self‐propelling vicious cycle of capitalist (re)production, survives. […] Reconciliation rather amounts to a much more modest overlapping or redoubling of the two separations: the subject has to recognize in its alienation from substance the separation of substance from itself. This overlapping is what is missed in the Feuerbachian‐Marxian logic of dis‐alienation in which the subject overcomes its alienation by recognizing itself as the active agent which has itself posited what appears to it as its substantial presupposition. (…) What this also means is that communism should no longer be conceived as the subjective (re)appropriation of the alienated substantial content — all versions of reconciliation as “subject swallows the substance” should be rejected. So, again, “reconciliation” is the full acceptance of the abyss of the de‐substantialized process as the only actuality there is: the subject has no substantial actuality, it comes second, it emerges only through the process of separation, the overcoming of its presuppositions, and these presuppositions are also just a retroactive effect of the same process of their overcoming.”⁵
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1: Todd McGowan — “Emancipation after Hegel”, p. 49
2: Slavoj Zizek — “The Sublime Object of Ideology”, p. 6
3: Todd McGowan — “Emancipation after Hegel”, p. 53
4: Todd McGowan — “Emancipation after Hegel”, p. 54
5: Slavoj Zizek — “Less Than Nothing”, p. 192
