Marx and the Concept of Historical Time · 第 20 页

Kant’s critical philosophy cannot explain the temporalising power of practice (at least as Marx reconceives practice in the Theses), and thus is not a philosophical basis of a temporal reading of the materialist concept of history. But what of Hegel? Is it possible to take a cue from the preface to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and to claim, first, that the concept must incarnate itself in existence, become a phenomenon which can only exist through time and in space, and, second, to suggest that existence must make itself adequate to the concept? Hegel makes this assertion in his differentiation of philosophy from mathematics, in his dissociation of philosophy from the unessential, lifeless purpose of mathematics registered by the concept of magnitude. For Hegel, as against pure and applied mathematics alike, time in philosophy ‘is the existent concept itself [der daseiende Begriff selbst].’²⁸ Yet to extend this function and scope of the Concept [der Begriff] in Hegel to the materialist concept of history in The German Ideology is to overstep the bounds of what kind of ‘concept’ this concept of history is. It is to attribute an ontological (temporalising) power to what in The German Ideology is the thought of something (in this case, ‘history’), as against the attribution of this power to what is being thought (for instance, ‘history’ as practice immanent to human need). In other words, it is one thing to state that the materialist concept of history registers (or rather, as this thesis seeks to do, can be made to register) that time and space are actively produced by what is being thought by this concept²⁹, but it is quite another to declare, as Hegel effectively does, that it is because of the concept itself that there is time and space. In other words, Hegel’s ‘concept’ is not the same kind of ‘concept’ that the materialist concept of history is. There are two different kinds of ‘concept’ at work here, such that Hegel’s concept actually incarnates itself in existence and compels this existence to become adequate to it. It would seem (at least for now³⁰), then, that Hegel’s concept is not what we need: to extend the temporalising power of this concept to the materialist concept of history does not, like Kant’s schematism, provide us with the basis that we are after. There are things to be gleaned from Hegel’s Phenomenology (the constitution of movement as negativity in ‘labour’ first and foremost amongst them), yet we must, at least for now, proceed with a temporal reading of the materialist concept of history without an adequate understanding of the inherently temporalising power of sensuous human activity itself.

²⁸ G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit [1807], trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 27. ‘Time is the concept itself, that there is.’ Ibid. 487. For Hegel, this is the standpoint of absolute knowing [absolute Wissen], the pure movement of self-consciousness knowing itself as self-consciousness. Time as the concept itself is a standpoint which can only ever be taken in an open historical present. Hegel does not speak of absolute knowing as a closed or achieved content. There is, in other words, no such thing for Hegel as ‘absolute knowledge’.

²⁹ This dovetails with Haver’s argument (in specific reference to Marx’s analysis of the circulation of money in the Grundrisse) that ‘it is not merely that circulation occurs within the putatively a priori coordinates of time and space; it is more radically the case that circulation as such…determines the fact that there is time and space.’ Haver, ‘For a Communist Ontology’, 113-14.

³⁰ However, and this is the task of Chapters 3 & 4, one can make the case, as much of the literature in so-called ‘Systematic Dialectics’ has done, that Marx’s concept of ‘capital’ registers capital as the concept (in the Hegelian sense). The same cannot be said of ‘history’: it is not this kind of concept, but rather the name of something which, as we will later examine, capital is the condition of thinking.

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