Differences

Milbank criticizes Hegel for the philosophical “error” in his “myth of negation.”  The issue is how difference arises, the logic of difference.  Milbank points to Leibniz by way of contrast, who “conceived logic as a ‘series,’ which unfolded by infinitesimal steps such that every act of analysis of a ‘single’ thing revealed a slightly ‘different’ aspect of possibility.”  That is, difference does not arise negatively, by way of contradiction, by unfolds.

Hegel is more “conservative” in rooting his logic and his myth of negation in the principle of identity.  Given A:A, “difference cannot here result (as for neo-Platonism, stoicism and Leibniz) from analysis, or the unfolding of a series, but must imply contradiction, or denial of the ultimate identity.”  Hegel could have avoided this only by removing himself from his “panlogicism” and admitting “‘other’ identities,” but that wouldn’t do.  Difference arises from negation, a position that, Milbank points out, “coalesces nicely with the fiction of a polarity between subject and object,” which for Hegel are “comprehensive, totalizing genera” that can only relate “in terms of opposition.”

Only on the basis of this oppositional logic is Hegel able to claim that negation is “determinate negation.”  Milbank points to the master-slave dialectic to illustrate.  He concedes the insight of Hegel’s view that there is a “contradiction” in that “the master’s power can be potentially challenged through the very context that holds that power in place: namely his subjecting of the slave to labour which permits the slave to rise to greater self-reflection than is possible for his overlord.”  But what’s happening here is not an inevitable emerging of a “next stage.”

Hegel says that the slave not only reflects on the experience of labor, but also “goes on to grasp the inviolable possibility of his own thoughts,” which Hegel says gives rise to the stoic withdrawal from the world in pursuit of consolation.  But this is not really determinate negation, and only seems to be so “if one imagines that from the extreme objective pole of submission to labour and loss of freedom there arises a denial which reaches back to the pure depths of internal subjectivity.”  That is, this is determinate negation only if the Cartesian self is assumed.

Milbank rather argues that “stoicisim is a positive response which imagined such a subjectivity, whereas a different imagination [such as Marx] would have conceived instead a conjoining of labour to political power.”  Stoicism seems “inevitable” only because of the primacy of negation, an oppositional understanding of difference, and a Cartesian subject-object dualism.