The Work of Philosophy: Spinoza, Hegel, and Macherey on Theoretical Practice

 

I wanted to illustrate this post with images of simple machines,

but couldn't find any I liked. I then remembered the great collection of records 

that Simple Machines put out. 

Althusser and the students and collaborators who made up his circle have perhaps never been forgiven for developing the concept of “theoretical practice.” Their critics have argued that the concept attempted to grant an importance to philosophy, seeing it as immediately practical and effective, without the need of organization or materiality. Thus reversing Marx’s famous dictum, that “philosophers have only interpreted the world.” Philosophy became a practical act in itself. To dismiss such a concept is to not only misread what is at stake in Althusser’s attempt to the think philosophy as a particular practice, as something which is both limited, as all practices are, but as something which has effects, even if these effects are only on philosophy. One of the central threads running through Pierre Macherey’s thought is an attempt to think through both the implications and conditions of theoretical practice. The problem of theoretical practice, of what philosophy is and does, runs through all of Macherey’s research from his writing on Spinoza, to the question of literature, and the history of philosophy. It also defines his particular practice, his teaching through the seminars on Philosophie au sense large, and the books on utopia, everyday life, the university, and the essay, all of which are defined by an attempt to think the conditions and limitations of philosophy as a practice. Furthermore, this reflection on philosophy as a transformative activity can be found in one of Macherey’s earliest philosophical works, Hegel or Spinoza. Read through Macherey’s later work it is possible to see Hegel and Spinoza as two different ideas of theoretical practice, of what it means to do philosophy.

 Intellectual Tools: Spinoza and Practice 

At the center of Macherey’s reconsideration of practice is not just the different philosophies of Spinoza and Hegel, but how they think about philosophy as not just a kind of practice but also as a kind of work. Both Spinoza and Hegel develop the idea of practice, or theoretical practice, by considering philosophy as a kind of work, or analogous to work. Such a statement is perhaps readily accepted when it comes to Hegel, who made “the labor of the negative” integral to his understanding of what it means to think, connecting thought to work, but is surprising when it comes to Spinoza whose “more geometrico” seems disconnected from any consideration of the work of thought for its pure logical exposition. In Hegel or Spinoza, however, Macherey demonstrates that Spinoza’s method is more akin to a process of production than purely formal or abstract logic. In the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect Spinoza makes a direct analogy of thinking and work. As Spinoza writes,

"But just as men, in the beginning, were able to make the easiest things with the tools they were born with (however laboriously and imperfectly), and once these had been made, made other, more difficult things with less labor and more perfectly, and so, proceeding gradually from the simplest works to tools, and from tools to other works and tools, reached the point where they accomplished so many and so difficult things with little labor, in the same way the intellect, by its inborn power, makes intellectual tools for itself, by which it acquires other powers ... until it reaches the pinnacle of wisdom."

As Macherey argues, this analogy stands as a sharp contrast with Descartes, who, at one point also represented thinking as a kind of labor or production. For Descartes the work of a blacksmith or other artisan must necessarily follow a method akin to Descartes own philosophical trajectory, beginning with modest tools and leaving complicated works to a distant day that might never come. As Descartes writes:

"Our method in fact resembles the procedures in the mechanical crafts, which have no need of methods other than their own, and which supply their own instructions for making their own tools. If, for example someone wanted to practice one of these crafts – to become a blacksmith, say, but did not possess any of the tools, he would be forced at first to use a hard stone (or a rough lump of iron) as an anvil, to make a rock do as a hammer ... and to put together other such tools as the need arose. Thus, prepared, he would not immediately attempt to forge swords, helmets or other iron elements for others to use; rather he would first of all make hammers, an anvil, tongs and other tools for his own use. What this example shows is that, since in these preliminary inquiries we have managed to discover only some rough precepts which appear to be innate in our minds rather than the product of any skill, we should not immediately try to use these precepts to settle philosophical disputes or solve mathematical problems."

 The same analogy has different effects. This can be seen in the trajectory of each passage. Spinoza charts a direct line from the modest beginnings of hand fashioned tools to the pinnacle of human wisdom, while Descartes takes on a more cautionary tale, warning of the impropriety of trying to settle philosophical disputes with the rough tools of the mind. As much as they differ in their ends, in terms of where philosophy arrives, they also differ in terms of how they understand their beginnings. For Spinoza we begin with the tools we are born with, as he says, “we have one true idea,” the starting process is internal to the very discovery. The idea that we begin with is both a condition and a limitation. As Macherey argues, ‘The ideas with which it is necessary to “begin” to arrive at knowing are not innate truths on which one can found once and for all an order of reasons, as if on a firm foundation; rather they are material to be worked on that must be profoundly modified in order to serve, subsequently, as the production of truths.” The difference between Descartes and Spinoza is the difference between a method, as something which is imposed as a standard and measure externally, and a production, which is developed in and through the process of its own unfolding. 

 Beyond the analogy of work, this idea of a method, that is at once produced and productive, can be found throughout Spinoza’s thought. In the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus the method for interpreting scripture does not exist prior to the interpretation, but is produced in and through it. As Macherey reminds us, the chapter of the method of the interpretation of scripture appears in the act of interpretation: it is the seventh chapter and not the first. It is through the act of reading scripture, of dealing with its tensions and contradictions, that one produces the methodological idea of treating scripture as nature. In order to arrive at the idea that “…knowledge [of Scripture] must be sought from Scripture alone, just as knowledge of nature must be sought from nature itself” we first must be presented with scripture in its inconsistencies, tensions, and contradictions. Productive transformation is not just a matter of epistemology, of how we know the world, it is also ontology how the world is produced. As Macherey argues in his five volume study of the Ethics, Spinoza’s thought hinges on the epistemic and ontological priority of the cause, or as Macherey puts it, duplicating the famous formula of Deus sive Natura, Causa seu Ratio, cause and reason are the same thing. To know, to comprehend something, is to grasp its causal conditions. If such a formulation seems too linear, too mechanical, positing a cause between every effect, one has to remember that for Spinoza it is only nature, or God, that has itself as a cause, has only one cause, everything else, all finite things that we know exist in and through the way in which they are affected and transformed by others. As Spinoza writes: 

 "That thing is called free which exists from the necessity of its nature alone, and is determined to act by itself alone. But a thing is called necessary, or rather compelled, which is determined by another to exist and to operate (ad exisdendem et operandum) in a certain and determinate manner (ED7)."

 I have followed Macherey’s suggestion for the translation of this passage, stressing that operandum be translated as operation, and not, as it is the Curley translation, as simply “produce an effect.” To operate is to operate in and through other things, this is what it means to live, think, and exist as a mode, to exist in and through its relations with others. A finite thing, a mode, is not just brought into existence by others, produced, but continually reproduces itself through its relation with others, every finite thing operates and acts through its interactions. A philosophical text is necessarily a kind of operation, a way of acting on and through its conditions. 

 This idea of philosophy as a kind of operation is not just something that Spinoza’s philosophy says, but it is something that it does. The Ethics is a book that operates in and through its conditions. This is of course contrary to the popular image of Spinoza’s thought, an image which sees him as a thinker reflecting sub species aeternitas, on the nature of reality. Spinoza’s actual philosophy is an attempt to operate in and through its conditions. These conditions include both the superstitions that are the barrier or limit to thought and the developments in mathematics, science, and even politics that make it possible to produce new thought. Sometimes Spinoza presents these two different conditions as two different forces, pitting superstition against mathematics as two different conditions. As Spinoza writes in the Appendix to Part One of the Ethics: 

"This alone, of course, would have caused the truth to be hidden from the human race to eternity, if mathematics, which is concerned not with ends, but only with the essences and properties of figures, had not shown men another standard of truth. And besides mathematics, we can assign other causes also (which it is unnecessary to enumerate here), which were able to bring it about that men would notice these common prejudices and be led to the true knowledge of things. (EIApp)."

 In this account superstition and mathematics are presented as two different types of knowledge, the former is oriented around the ends of human desires while the latter is indifferent to any ends, producing another condition of truth. Knowledge is a matter of abandoning one standard of truth for the other. 

At other times, however, the limitation is something that can be transformed in order to make it a condition for knowledge. It is also in the Appendix to Part One that Spinoza takes as his provisional foundation the fact that all men are born “ignorant of the causes of things” and “conscious of their appetites.” This foregrounding of appetite or desire as the basis of human actions is both the condition of ignorance and knowledge. When consciousness of appetites is taken as the foundation of our knowledge it becomes the basis for prejudice, for the mistaken tendency to view everything in nature as acting towards or against our ends. It is an inadequate idea that can only produce more inadequate ideas. At the same time it is possible to have an adequate idea of desire, of the role of the appetite in our knowledge. As Spinoza argues desire is the very essence of what it is to be human, writing, “Desire is the very essence of man in so far as his essence is conceived as determined to any action from any given affection of itself’ (EIIIDI). Between these two definitions, between the conscious of one’s appetite that underlies superstition, and the understanding of desire as the very essence of humanity there is the difference between inadequate and adequate ideas. The first is necessarily unaware of its conditions, taking itself as a cause, while the second not only grasps its cause, situating desire within the general striving that defines existence, but grasps this cause in its constitutive multiplicity. Desire is an essence that is fundamentally affected, or operated on, by its relation to others, and acts on others. Second, and more importantly, the difference between these two understandings of desire, between the inadequate and the adequate is itself produced in and through the method. The Ethics can be understood as a work, a production, that takes the ideas that are its conditions, the image of God, but also of ourselves, and works on them to produce a knowledge, transforming raw materials into concepts. The most famous of these is the transformation of God from an anthropomorphic image of a ruler to Deus sive Natura, god as nature, god as immanent cause, but we could also add the transformation of desire as a final cause, the appetites through which we grasp the world, to desire that understands itself as caused, as produced in and through its relations. 

 Spinoza’s philosophy can be understood as a kind of operation, a process of acting in and on what is given in order to transform it. As Macherey describes this process with respect to the fundamental vocabulary of the Ethics, 

 "Substance, attributes, modes, such as they appear in these preliminary principles, are exactly equivalent to the rough-hewn stone that the first blacksmiths needed to “begin” their work: these are notions that are still abstract, simple words, natural ideas that acquire no real significance except at the moment when they function in the demonstrations and where they produce real effects, thus expressing a capacity that they do not have at the beginning."

 To this list we could add desire (and God), these words begin as inadequate ideas, as limits as much as conditions to our knowledge, and are transformed into common notions. The Ethics puts forward and develops a kind of philosophical practice that acts on and transforms its own conditions, the superstitions and knowledge of its time, to produce a new knowledge. 

 Hegel: The Labor of the Negative 

 In Hegel or Spinoza Macherey argues that one of the unrecognized points of commonality between Hegel and Spinoza is this idea of a method that is immanent to its object. It is one of the points of proximity that Hegel does not see criticizing Spinoza for having a merely formal definition of method. Part of the constitutive misrecognition concerns the question of dialectics, and also that of end, or telos. This is what Macherey sees as the major point of difference between Spinoza and Hegel. It is a matter of a dialectic without telos or end, or what Nick Nesbitt calls a positive dialectic, against a dialectic defined by telos and totality. This opposition, or difference also passes through the way in which work functions as a figure of thought. In a text written years after the influential Hegel or Spinoza, Petits Riens: Ornières et derives du quotidien, dedicated to the problem of everyday life, Macherey turns to the particular figuration of work the defines Hegel’s idea of both the work of thought and the process of history. This reflection begins from an unlikely place, from the passage of Hegel’s Encyclopedia Logic in which the famous formulation of the cunning of reason emerges in a discussion of chemism and mechanism. As Hegel writes, 

 Reason is as cunning as it is powerful. Cunning may be said to lie in the intermediative action which, while it permits the objects to follow their own bent and act upon one another till they waste away, and does not itself directly interfere in the process, is nevertheless only working out its own aims. With this explanation, Divine Providence may be said to stand to the world and its process in the capacity of absolute cunning. God lets men do as they please with their particular passions and interests; but the result is the accomplishment of-not their plans, but his, and these differ decidedly from the ends primarily sought by those whom he employs. 

 The famous cunning of reason that defines Hegel’s reflections on history, reason, and progress, can also be understood as a figure of work, of material transformation. This is a figuration of work that is less a matter of some kind of mastery, of bending the world to one’s will, than it is of the necessarily mediative and operative dimension of work. Work is mediation. To work is to impose an object or process, a tool or machine, between myself and what I am transforming, and to use the properties of that object in place of my will, properties that are understood It is an image of work that is less Promethean, in the mythic sense, than it is Promethean in a limited sense, remembering that Prometheus gift was that of fire, a tool that needs to be tamed towards human ends. Fire works as a tool precisely because it places a chemical process, the process of combustion, between human intents, and the object being worked on. 

 To not only transform the world, but realize one’s desires, it is necessary to first subordinate oneself to it, to its processes, chemical and mechanical. It is only through this negation that the will can realize itself. As Macherey writes, "In the world, reason, in the strong sense of the word, works by insinuating itself through a ruse: all work in fact takes, as we have seen, the form of a ruse or a process of detouring [détournement] by which the subject achieves his freedom by exploiting the forms of necessity which determine the objective world." Freedom, one’s intentions, are realized through a negation of them. Spinoza and Hegel’s images of work are sharply distinct even as they cross the same fundamental set of problems and relations. What Spinoza focuses on is the beginning on the conditions for action, and with it the assertion that the process of labor has already begun, we already have the tools, the capacities to begin to produce, to transform the world. In contrast to this Hegel focuses less on the beginning than the end, the telos: What makes work and instance of the cunning of reason is that we must in some sense turn away from the end and turn towards the material process and conditions in order to realize our ends. It is the end that organizes and sustains the process. 

At first glance it would seem that while this picture of work illustrates the cunning of reason, and the work of history, it would not seem to apply to philosophy, to the work of thought. With respect to the former, Hegel’s lectures on the philosophy of history show that history uses the passions, interests, and even the idiosyncrasies of particular persons in order to realize its ends. Caesar or Alexander may have only thought only of their own interests or passions, but these passions brought about the development of world spirit. In that way they burned like fire, which in pursuing its own combustion is put to work in melting steel or cooking food. Thinking, philosophy, would seem to have no such instrumentality or mediation, in that it is the internal development of the idea. Philosophy would never go outside of itself in order to find itself. As Macherey argues, however, Hegel’s philosophy endeavors to found the internal logic, rationality, in history, politics, and culture. Philosophy is always going outside of itself in order to find the logic and rationality immanent to all thinking. Once again this is not just something that Hegel says, but something that Hegel’s thinking does. While the different figures that illustrate Hegel’s thought would seem to be contingent, the historical moments from Antigone to the French Revolution that punctuate the Phenomenology of Spirit, the social institutions from the estates to the police that shape the Philosophy of Right, and even the examples that occasionally show up in the Logic, the task of philosophy is to reveal their inner necessity, to make them all moments of the concept. As Macherey writes: 

Thus, liberty and necessity, transcendence and immanence are no longer an alternative, the one in relation to the other, but are present as the front and back of the same text, which can be read both in the language of objectivity and in that of subjectivity, languages which, from different approaches finish at the same place, which it is up to philosophy to reveal. 

 Philosophy must necessarily go out into the world, tarrying with the details of history and culture, not only to return to itself, but to transform these activities, to render them rational. It is because the cunning of reason is the same, is an act of realizing itself in losing itself, across work, history, and philosophy, that they are all intelligible, that are all part of the same process. 

 It is possible to see an even stronger contrast between Spinoza and Hegel’s representation of work than between Spinoza and Descartes. The latter illustrate two fundamental different ideas of method. For Descartes method is necessary as an external standard and guarantee of thought, while for Spinoza it is an internal production and condition of knowledge. For Spinoza and Hegel it is a matter of a different understanding of work itself. Do we understand work to be an operation, one that is governed by its conditions and causes, or do we understand work as governed by a telos, by an end that ultimately justifies and organizes the process? This is not to say that telos, ends, are absent from Spinoza’s consideration of work and its relation to knowledge. Spinoza turns to work in the Preface to Part IV of the Ethics to clarify the value and limitation of words like perfect and imperfect, good and evil, words that he dismissed as entirely imaginative and inadequate in Part I. As Spinoza argues while these terms do not reflect anything about the world, the world is not perfect or imperfect, good or bad, they do express something about our projects and actions on and in the world. 

 "If someone has decided to make something, and has finished it, then he will call his thing perfect-and so will anyone who rightly knows, or thinks he knows, the mind and purpose of the author of the work. For example, if someone sees a work (which I suppose to be not yet completed), and knows that the purpose of the author of that work is to build a house, he will say that it is imperfect. On the other hand, he will call it perfect as soon as he sees that the work has been carried through to the end which its author had decided to give it. But if someone sees a work whose like he has never seen, and does not know the mind of its maker, he will, of course, not be able to know whether that work is perfect or imperfect. And this seems to have been the first meaning of these words" (EIVP). 

All of this leads to Spinoza’s ethical revalorization of good and bad, terms that can only be understood in relation to a specific end, the desired end, of an ideal human being. While Hegel makes teleology the basis for the rationality of work, history, and thought, Spinoza relegates it to a limited and ambivalent role. Teleology, the end, may provide a way for assessing and evaluating our projects, but it only does that. It can only create confusion when applied to nature or the universe. It is fundamentally limited in its scope, applying only to human actions, and since we are often unclear of the reasons and the actions of others it is as much a source of ignorance as it is of knowledge. For Hegel telos is the condition for overcoming the limited and finite nature of any given project or endeavor, it is the end that connects all things. Teleology is the grid of intelligibility of not only our actions, which necessarily pass through other means, but activity and thought. Spinoza and Hegel’s different conceptions of work illustrate the difference of their philosophies. The former is organized and sustained by the idea of a cause, by the causal relations, while the latter is organized an maintained by the end. In a different way they mark the fundamental finitude of thinking and acting, that all thinking and acting is from a specific place, constrained by the very conditions that make it possible. For Spinoza these conditions remain both fetters and conditions, while for Hegel the limitations are all incorporated through the ruse of reason. Fire may pursue its own actions according to the chemistry of combustion, but that does not prevent it from becoming our tool and instrument, to being subordinated to our ends. 

 The Beginnings and Ends of Philosophy 

 How do these different figurations, and representations of work, return us to the problem of theoretical practice, of the work of philosophy itself. One the one hand, to contrast Spinoza and Hegel through these different figurations of work, of the transformative process, would seem to be a mistake. One of the other communalities of Spinoza and Hegel as thinkers is in their insistence on moving beyond the figural and the representative to arrive at the concept. In Spinoza this takes the form of moving from the first kind of knowledge, burdened by the imagination, to arrive at common notions, which are in the part and in the whole. As Nick Nesbitt defines this distinction, “For Spinoza, the crucial distinction between the inadequate, imaginary ideas we necessarily form from sense impressions, and common notions, is that the latter are ideas not about any given, actually existing singular thing…but about certain qualities common to all things in general.” In a similar manner Hegel argued that philosophy need to move beyond representational thought, beyond a figurative representation, in order to arrive at the level of the concept. One of the other points of overlap or intersection between Spinoza and Hegel is in their attempt to move beyond representation to comprehension. As Althusser put it, “the concept dog does not bark.” For both Spinoza and Hegel then it would seem that a figure, or an analogy, even one of work, could only be a pedagogical illustration and not an actual moment of thought. At the same time, however, for both Spinoza and Hegel, thought is intimately intertwined with work, with operation or labor as a production, that the image cannot be separated from the concept, from the practice of philosophy for both. 

 What does it mean to think philosophy as an operation? Macherey turns to this question in an essay titled “Philosophy as Operation,” an essay which could be considered a further development of both the idea of operation, developed in a reading of Spinoza, and a reflection on theoretical practice. As Macherey defines theoretical practice, 

 ‘Theoretical Practice’ is not the magical formula that would guarantee that the identity of theory and practice could be given initially: rather, it indicates a process in which operations are produced, inside which theory and practice take shape concurrently, against each other, with each other, in the sense that they are reciprocally put to work, in a movement in which it appears that there is never a pure theory, whose meaning would be limited to its stated results, nor any pure practice, innocent because it would elude the confrontation of its intentions with its effect. "

 It is also a definition that passes through Hegel, stressing, as Macherey does that the relation of Hegel or Spinoza is also as much Hegel and Spinoza, or, more to the point, Hegel Sive Spinoza. At this point the commonality, the point that links Spinoza and Hegel is their shared opposition to the classical schema which juxtaposes praxis and poeisis, one defined by freedom, and the other by necessity. As Macherey writes, 

 What distinguishes this operation from an action in general? It is the fact that it is inserted in a process, that it proceeds from an intervention that, as such, presupposes intermediaries and a point of view: in order to produce works, one must adopt the point of view of a position, one must take a position, for without doing so it is not possible to enter into a relation with a determinate content.

 An operation entails both an intervention, which necessarily has a focus and a goal, and a mediation, it necessarily acts on and through its particular conditions. As Macherey stresses, it often acts on these conditions in order to transform or alter them. What defines philosophy, is not some telos, some end that in turn makes it possible to make sense of other activities, but the fact that it is constantly examining its conditions because of its effects and vice versa. “As operation, philosophy is practice itself, in all sectors of its intervention, in so far as it puts back into question the limits inside which its activities are carried out, and thus discovers the tendentially unlimited power of its processes.” Rather than understand work, including the work of thought, as an act in which a telos an end, loses itself in order to find itself, negates itself in the mediation of necessity only to realize itself, work is a process of producing effects the exceed and transform its origins. 

 Philosophical practice, philosophy as an operation, is philosophy that is governed neither by an origin or an end. Its starting point is determined by its specific historical situation, and is at once a condition and limitation for philosophy. We can neither decide nor ground our starting points. They are the where we begin. Nor is philosophy oriented by an end, a telos, some object. The end we arrive is never the one that is intended. The act of thought necessarily transforms the end. As Althusser argued, the origin and end have to be understood as thoroughly theological problems, and as such are part of philosophy’s own beginning and condition of emergence. They are not, however, philosophical problems, or, more to the point they are not problems which philosophy can resolve. To think philosophy as an operation, as a practice, is to dispense with both origins, in the sense of foundation, and end, in the sense of telos. Without origin or end we find that theoretical practice is a kind of operation, an acting on thought with and through thought. As Jean Matthys has argued with respect to Althusser’s engagement with Spinoza, the engagement with Spinoza is less a matter of a philosophical foundation than a destruction of any foundation predicated on the given or the telos or identity of the subject. It is Spinoza, the philosopher often identified with eternal philosophical reflection, that makes it possible to understand philosophy as a practice that is never completed because it is always underway.