The Birth of Theory

by Andrew Cole

Modern theory needs a history lesson. Neither Marx nor Nietzsche first gave us theory―Hegel did. To support this contention, Andrew Cole’s The Birth of Theory presents a refreshingly clear and lively account of the origins and legacy of Hegel’s dialectic as theory. Cole explains how Hegel boldly broke from modern philosophy when he adopted medieval dialectical habits of thought to fashion his own dialectic. While his contemporaries rejected premodern dialectic as outdated dogma, Hegel embraced both its emphasis on language as thought and its fascination with the categories of identity and difference, creating what we now recognize as theory, distinct from systematic philosophy. Not content merely to change philosophy, Hegel also used this dialectic to expose the persistent archaism of modern life itself, Cole shows, establishing a method of social analysis that has influenced everyone from Marx and the nineteenth-century Hegelians, to Nietzsche and Bakhtin, all the way to Deleuze and Jameson.
           
By uncovering these theoretical filiations across time, The Birth of Theory will not only change the way we read Hegel, but also the way we think about the histories of theory. With chapters that powerfully reanimate the overly familiar topics of ideology, commodity fetishism, and political economy, along with a groundbreaking reinterpretation of Hegel’s famous master/slave dialectic, The Birth of Theory places the disciplines of philosophy, literature, and history in conversation with one another in an unprecedented way. Daring to reconcile the sworn enemies of Hegelianism and Deleuzianism, this timely book will revitalize dialectics for the twenty-first century.

Genres: Philosophy, Theory, History, Criticism

272 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2014

Reviews

[Carl · Rating 5 out of 5]

The main argument here is that Hegel was essentially a medieval thinker, and that considering him in that way allows us to see the philosophical and theological work of the middle ages creating the foundation for Hegelian thinking and for the interrogation of language and representation that is the primary move of critical theory.

To make that claim, the book follows a reexamination of dialectics that embeds Hegel in a long tradition of medieval thinking and suggests that it is precisely Hegel’s engagement with medieval modes of thought that make his work a productive source for Marx and the later thinkers who develop dialectical thinking into theory as we know it today. The writing is very sharp, and the thinking is both clear and nuanced. Cole pays attention to the varieties of premodern dialectical thinking, which I really appreciate, and he demonstrates that Hegel picked up the particular dialectic of identity/difference in a mode that he inherited from thinkers like Plotinus and Nicholas of Cusa.

The argument asks readers to dispense with a host of received ideas about the Middle Ages and about dialectics, both, as it wends its way (rather deftly!) from close readings of Pseudo-Dionysius and Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy to comparative readings of Hegel on the Eucharist and Marx on the commodity, before showing how critical theory picked up on the dialectic of identity/difference to turn philosophy back on philosophy.

As he makes the case for rereading Hegelian dialectics based on a reading of the social and economic organization of Germany in Hegel’s moment as essentially feudal, and therefore "medieval," Cole drives at “the arbitrary distinctions between medieval and modern but also those between dialectical and anti-dialectical thinking,” writing a long arc of intellectual history that renegotiates theory’s relationship to Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, Deleuze and many others in between (xviii). The book wraps up with a couple chapters that turn more directly to recent theory. I especially appreciated the focus on the legacy established by Hegel in using medieval genres in response to modern conditions.

I'm really glad to have this book in my library and I'll be coming back to it again many times, I'm sure.

[Dionysius the Areopagite · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the case of Cole, the Hegelian reconsideration of identity/difference re: the dialectic of Medievalist Letters beginning with Plotinus, moving through Pseudo-Dionysius to Nicholas of Cusa, and onto the heart of things - it is both serendipitous and moving that this text is brought to my attention after completion of the Melville monograph (Cole begins his book with a Melvillean parable). Furthermore, Cole's work on the medieval commodity - focused in ecclesial-symbolic nucleus commodity, from Hegel's lesser addressed feudalism to its Marxian counterbalance and thoroughgoing reconstruction (Through and with the technological movement of ontic industrialism, from physiology to unconscious exchange, decay, analogous to railroad tracks sans train, with cinematic prelude regarding the Table w/ Dancing Legs); itself is an organic, ripe treasure chest of potential in regard to new directions in scholarship. For this scholar, who is currently synthesizing a doctoral dissertation, Cole's text has proven an indispensable month. As with, say, F.A. Wolff's Prolegomena, Grassi's Rhetoric, or more recently Severino's Parmenidian notion, the dialogical facticity of Geist laid out in Curtius's opening pages to European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages - the history of letters is the history of people. Its generational neglect or falling prey to temporality and trend indicates less the end than the beginning; for decay of substance is first interpretive, laid self-evident, and ultimately employed as a movement en route to new direction in methodology, pedagogy, and - for ystruly - Method in Ontology. Having finished this one look forwards to returning to copious notes; completion of initial reading gives way to the crystallization of a once-formulating outline. Thank you, John - these esoteric public notes-to-self will make perfect sense in time. I would go on but risk giving away key aspects! Ah, and now, naturally, it is time to hit the road! The Person from Porlock is here.

[Arsh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Professor Andrew Cole’s proposition regarding the history of the dialectic, perhaps in contemporary memory most closely associated with Hegel, is a rather unique one. It’s origins while referred to in the work of Plato and Aristotle, and perhaps drawing from the Socratic method itself - assume the shape and propositional form we have tended to identify with it today most readily in the work of Hegel, most tellingly perhaps in his dialectic of identity and difference.
The name Kant has for many marked the origins of German idealism, if any such name can assume for itself the position of the progenitor of a movement - yet here is where Cole offers us some distinctly singular historical criticism, tracing the Hegelian dialectic to his study of what today may be the forgotten medieval dialecticians from the so called ‘Dark Ages’.

This is interesting to me at least in two ways. The Dark Ages themselves consisted at least intellectually with the rise of a certain monastic thinking which flourished in seminaries, which themselves became centers of learning since the promotion of scholarly and philosophical studies under Charlemagne.

The other aspect which may be considered were the places of learning themselves, many of which were fort like structures often in walled cities. Indeed, the earliest monasteries were often military fortifications designed to be defended - a style of architecture recognized today as the Romanesque. It is was considerably later in the Gothic period that monasteries began resembling the churches which we see today with extravagant architectural innovations such as flying buttresses and the extensive use of stained glass.

What would this mean however for the nature of thought promoted in these seminaries which were often put to work in translation, exegesis and an often restrictive theological learning? Well to shine these problems in the light of the present much of contemporary post-structuralism’s quest to de-centre the subject was a project initiated in another historical epoch with Hegel’s rejection of the inherence of fundamental apriori categories in the subject which structure experience or representation as it were.

And yet, this was a step possible perhaps only by drawing on such a history, for the Kantian critique of British empiricism is what broke ground for the realisation that concepts cannot exist independently of their linguistic expression.

A grander picture from a distance may allow us to reflect upon a question which today is perhaps less scholastic than it has ever been for it now seems to have consequences for the very orientation which critique is to take in the coming future. Namely whether the Hegelian break from Kant is what de-totalises German idealism so to speak, by surfacing what will later come to be the philosophy of difference, or whether in thinking difference the dialectic as presented in Hegel is still capable of representing conceptual morphology forced into being by propositional circumstances; and consequently whether an older reading which once might have been an accusation of a teleological strain in Hegel is worth considering.

Professor Cole may however be admittedly less invested in such a question in favour of perhaps the more generic investigation of the break of theory from what was earlier known as philosophy, a moment which while momentus and perhaps liberatory inasmuch as the binding of the subject to maxims such as the categorical imperative were brought to question, was also perhaps a sign of the times and cannot be read in ignorance of that malaise as contemporary as it was in the 19th century which Nietzsche sought to combat - the charge of nihilism.

The relation of these historical changes to the mode of production are marked, and in his own lifetime Hegel witnessed the dissolution of the system of estates and the Napoleonic wars. A changing Europe crawling out of its medieval past and into the cusp of modernity was a processual movement which unlike the Rennaissance was not built on the mere consolidation of existing trade routes. Indeed, in terms of the economic composition of sectors this was the height of what we now recognize to be imperialism, a term which Lenin did well to demarcate from colonialism as it involved the control of an economy via financialized institutions such as banks which traded upon agreements regarding the transfer of resources in colonies.

There may also be something said about the mode of production in Hegel’s own work, for which he often received payment ‘in kind’, finding himself located in feudal townships as he travelled in search of a teaching position. His resistance to these conditions may have been hastily interpreted as a mystification of them by Marx, even if we were to recognize the break which the latter draws from Hegel vis-a-vis the structure of the commodity form and the means of its circulation, money.

This historical antagonism which marked the times in a still largely semi-feudal Germany, even as it shared borders with and witnessed the French revolution bears telling impressions in Hegel’s thought, which as Raymond William’s notes is often situated at the temporal conjunction of the ‘residual’ and the ‘emergent’.

Something that I’d like to draw attention to however is the fact that the philosopher that is Hegel very much picks up on the mode of production prevalent among the people’s he refers to, agrarian labour in Ireland for instance who were living in conditions of which even by the historical feudal standards of the time were often beneath levels of subsistence as landlords had even abnegated traditional obligations to provide for their upkeep. In this sense, regarding the question of periodisation professor Cole’s eye does notice its surfacing not merely in the form of narrative but also historical exceptions or inconsistencies which solicit a review of the transitions which may have been marked, most readily recognized in the terms ‘premodern’ and ‘modern’.

It also provides a relatively newer reader with a sense of how glib the presentation of Hegel as a purely philosophical thinker who is turned on his head as it were by the historical Marx is as a reading, and here I would propose that an investigation as to how the mode of production itself surfaces or becomes reflected as it were in Hegel’s phenomenological method of concept creation may help in rectifying reductionist or peripheral differentiations often made between him and Marx, and - why not, perhaps even shine a light on the ever so fine distinction which the likes of Andrew Cole and Fredric Jameson make between philosophy and theory.

A point of insistence however in the work before our consideration is professor Cole’s tracing of the Hegelian dialectic to forms of argument already practiced in the medieval ages, and in this sense a kind of return to a tradition which may have been overlooked at the Kantian moment. This genealogy if you will, reconstructed as they often are - names Plotinus as a neo-Platonic inspiration, and examining the historical and intellectual import of this claim and how it is made in the book taken up would be a facet which my study will tend to focus on.

Regarding the thrust of professor Cole’s own work - he registers in the introduction itself the opposition encountered in modern theory between dialectics in its various guises and the genealogical method which may perhaps better be described as a streak or form of acknowledging an obligation or debt particularly regarding inspiration; as such it may not be unlike an insistence on the authenticity of an encounter without temporal mediation via which the negative is implicated - a practice which some may occasionally hold dialectics in contempt for, especially in its more historical manifestations.

Yet he goes further in positing a common root as it were for these two practices of thought in phenomenology, which left undefined and with no real reference to historical efforts to do so such as Husserl’s eidetic reduction seems to be a term used in a rather loose sense which can be interpreted only in opposition to structuralism. A division we would do well to hold suspect given the debt and intellectual inspiration that tradition bears to dialectics, whether in the disciplines of anthropology exemplified by Levi Strauss or indeed psychoanalysis and Lacan. This is to say nothing of the efforts made to identify dialectical movements in the so called natural sciences beginning with perhaps Engel’s ‘Dialectics of Nature’ (1883) to more recent efforts such as the two volume ‘Reason in Revolt’ (1995) by Alan Woods and Ted Grant. Of most proximate interest to theory itself however at least in the contemporary interpretation of the term would be the uses to which mathematicians and philosophers drawing from set theory for instance have put formalizations to as a means of explicating dialectical structures such as exceptions, inclusions and conditions in ways that may have once been too verbose for some palates, and here we would do well to mention the name Alain Badiou.

In the first chapter Dr Cole acknowledges a way in which the great anti-dialectician, Nietzsche may yet be read as the inventor of a certain synthesization in philosophy which gave birth to the genealogical style of critique. His erudition as a philologist is noticed and how this mooring was used as the allegorical hammer to criticise contemporary (in his time) philosophical fashions. The untimely dialectic as the chapter is titled would hence seem to reflect the contrarian position which Nietzsche often sought to foreground in his aphorisms, yet a reader of them would notice that irony was the least of humours lost on him. This critique however did remake philosophy in a sense, giving it a kind of vector which broke from the scholasticism encouraged via the earlier ossification of estates, even as it used linguistic forms such as the aphorism which had long been tools in ecclesiastical learning. The radical philologist at work.

In terms of how this study of Nietzsche is to shed light on the dialectic and Hegel, professor Cole seeks to begin by disentangling what we may be referring to as the dialectic by differentiating between how it has been deployed by noted practitioners - Socrates, Plotinus, Hegel etc. The latter two whom he would seek to pair as an example of what he refers to as the medieval dialectic as distinct from the Athenian one, characterizing itself via its meditation on identity and difference, and abstract determination whose meaning is not quite clear in this introductory stage.

The supposedly pre-dialectical stage of the tragedy is laid before us via a little formal analysis. Tragedy being the genre which in its dithyrambic form is born of the pen of the lyric poet who first imagines the world in his interiority in a way in which it has not been perceived before - hence prefiguring the conditions of tragedy.

Were we for a moment to consider as a juxtaposition the other possible interpretation put forth by Deleuze for instance following Nietzsche regarding the primacy of difference as opposed to identity in Greek tragedy, then we would yet have to contend with Cole’s observation which readers of Hegel would decidedly recognize of difference being a product of an effort to produce the same, and as such a failure which yet becomes knowable in its own right, perhaps bequeathing in stead a narrative which we may yet remember as a tragedy.

A question that may be posed is whether this text, The Birth of Theory offers us something akin to a genealogy of the dialectic - tracing this as it does from its Socratic origins through to its medieval mutations, to finally Hegel and the moderns. There is some evidence for this as Plotinus is recognized to be a neo-Platonist, and his prose does reflect the antagonism which Plato sought to reconcile between likeness and difference, with likeness being recognized as a form of difference being one of the better accepted contemporary interpretations. The dialectic however, if anything definitive can be said about what may have initially been one rhetorical tradition among others has tended to because of its engine of negation as it were, driven by its encounter with difference, and its efforts to sublate its principle, has tended to resist rather powerfully any assimilationist tendency which may be isolated into a strain and in this sense is not genealogical.

Nietzsche himself however may not have had the biological import of this logic in the forefront of his mind when he insisted for example that there are no facts, only interpretations - polemically baiting the bite of truth which his philosophy may be thought of as a daring dance through, seeking to situate some nominal core which animated our passions, humors and instincts.

Returning to Plotinus however, the medieval dialectic was concerned perhaps less with likeness and difference as it was with unity and multiplicity, and here the prose seems to me the invocation of a witness or simply point of view which may possibly reconcile such contradictions, and here I may be tempted to point out that contemporary philosophy, if I may still use this word’s reference to homology and the possibility of identifying structural similarities arising from different origins does tend to point strongly to a kind of structural adaptation, if not organization taking place in the organism or perhaps institution in response to vectors in the field of its being.

Situating such efforts in the field of contemporary social science are not easy which often takes the concepts it uses for granted, having either inherited them uncritically from received doxa, of having simply incorporated what may appear new or perhaps advantageous in neighbouring discourses more invested in conceptual production itself and the study of narrative such as philosophy perhaps if not literature.

Theory then becomes a kind of screening mechanism for concepts assessing their productivity in the study of texts and contexts, a means via which we may examine briefly the lenses which colour the pictures we present to ourselves of the world, and perhaps our only way of inquiring whether the problems posed as such are indeed what they appear to be, or whether we may simply be reifying a point of view at the expense of a potential dialogue if not argument between perspectives, constituting what perhaps Habermasians may refer to as discursivity proper.

Can we, from these preliminary reflections posit what might be the basic or essential features of this movement in thought we have attempted to chart - known as the dialectic? In a rudimentary sense we can already see the effort to do this reflected in the Hegelian interrogation of the law of identity via an examining of its mode of presentation as it were - a section which even today is worth quoting: ‘‘A is' is a beginning that envisages something different before it to which the ‘A is’ would proceed but the ‘A is’ never gets to it.’ - A statement which seems to question the very form of the proposition itself, just as it echoes Xeno’s paradoxes of distance and why an infinity of halves would never make a whole irrespective of their speed of accumulation, itself an unpacking of why the fated arrow does not reach its target, or why the hare does not beat the tortoise.

But, parables from our childhood aside, there are implications which arise, which can only be read when the law of identity is displaced via some such dialectical reasoning. The most innocent of questions would be of course what is this ‘A’ which we speak of that is seemingly not itself? Recognition of a likeness that we see? And in this sense not -A? Or, if we dare - in the order of a different palpable, which is to say discernible to us giving us A is B? Identity, recognition and the process of transference are problems which will remain with us well beyond their formalisation in medieval philosophy and even into contemporary investigations in subject formation undertaken by psychoanalysis, but this may be an inquiry for another time.

Professor Cole for his part traces the difficulty which Plato had in articulating the notion of relative being, which these paradoxes hinge on. His primary categories being motion, rest, identity and difference.

The question of transition remains significant not merely in terms of the form of the proposition, of assertions or negations but also in the scope of its historicity and the sense which a work of philosophy may bequeath of the times and the means via which it was composed. The medieval scriptural tradition we learn, may have been many things - scriptural, formalistic and outmoded in ways which modernity may choose not to look back to - and yet it was there that a renewal of interest in classical learning re-arose in the western world, at least since the translation of Greek literature by the Arabs.

The practices of the archive were inextricably bound to these possibilities, and the practices of ecclesiastical learning, especially commentary and exegesis form much of the foundations of what in modernity we come to recognize as hermeneutics or criticism if you prefer.

It would also be tempting to read into the comparison laid before us by Professor Cole of Hegel and Nietzsche, and his insistence of a dialectical moment or should I say staging inherent in Nietzsche, even as early as The Birth of Tragedy between opposing principles exemplified in the allegorical figures of ancient gods such as Dionysus and Apollo. Though here we should remember that an antinomy is not yet a dialectic per se - and perhaps actually reading The Birth of Tragedy where the formation of the dithyrambic drama with its protagonists and commenting chorus which sings may better exemplify how a form emerges.

Yet to clarify a little on this distinction which is made between the dialectical, which I have described as the antinomic, and the dialectic itself - which may allude to some kind of synthesis perhaps in a new form for instance, a means of identifying this difference may be perhaps grasped earlier in recognising the nature of the antinomy at play. The dialectical relation alluded to between the Apollonian and Dionysian impulses in art for instance work to further intensify each other’s impulse, to the point where a breach in either’s integral or foundational consistency can only be read in terms of a break, subversion - perhaps of a higher principle or indeed a tragedy. The dialectic however is not seemingly fixated upon a procedure geared towards a mutual intensification of principles or of practices of accumulation for that matter, a stage whose ossification in modern society Marx crit

[Caleb · Rating 3 out of 5]

I would give the first half of this book 5 stars. Chapters 2 and 3 contain the bulk of the argument. In the Chapter 2, the author traces the roots of dialectic in Plato and Plotinus. According to Cole, Plato's dialectic (like Aristotle's) focuses too much on polarizing differences. For instance, when two opposing theses are pitted against each other, Cole argues, Plato would have us seek a contradiction in one position so as to adopt the competing position. By contrast, Cole's Plotinus is the true forerunner of Hegel insofar he constantly seeks to mediate between identity and difference. While there may be some textual support for this contrast, one wonders whether Plato has been made into a platonist, made to differ from Plotinus, at the expense of an underlying identity. For if Cole is correct would have expected each dialogue to end with some defended thesis that has survived the dialectic.

Regardless, the conceptual link between Hegel and Plotinus is quite plausible and interesting as is the comparison of the former with Pseudo-Dionysius. In a book about the influence of medieval thought on Hegel, one wishes that Cole would have included an extended chapter about the influence of Pseudo-Dionysius on Aquinas followed by a comparison of the latter with Hegel. The upshot of Chapter 2 is the Hegel is engaged in a form of dialectic that can quite appropriately be termed medieval.

Chapter 3 is easily the most interesting of the book. Here Cole convincingly shows that the Lord / Bondsman section of the Phenomenology must be read against the still largely feudal context of Hegel's Germany. Arguably this insight has many more implications than Cole acknowledges. Specifically, insofar as the relationship between the lord and bondsman is the paradigm of the absence of mutual recognition, then, arguably, Hegel's account of modern economic relationships (in the Philosophy of Right), comprising the successors to feudal arrangements, has much to say about mutual recognition can actually be embodied within a form of life.

Chapter 4 presents an interesting link between Hegel and Marx, suggesting that the the former should be read primarily as a critique of medieval social arrangements. Chapter 5, offers a misreading of the "Culture and Actuality" section of the Phenomenology. Somehow, Cole reads this as a critique of Adam Smith's notion of the invisible hand, whereas it seems clear that Hegel is actually critique the medieval social context that lacked adequate market institutions. Likewise, Chapter 6 is premised on a misreading of Hegel's critique of Schelling, from which Cole attempts to collapse the distinction between images and concepts in Hegel's work, though some of his discussion of this distinction is quite interesting.

[Paul O'Hagan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dialectics & Literary Theory

Good case for dialectics - but Western Centric - no mention of Hegel and Lao Tsu - Also the Benjamin concept of history doesn’t really get a proper look - No discussion of feminism either - Obviously a Jameson disciple

[Karl Hallbjörnsson · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very interesting book, written in a fun and engaging style.

[Macklin · Rating 5 out of 5]

best, clearest book on hegel and dialectics i've read in a very long time.