By FÁBIO MASCARENHAS NOLASCO*
Presentation of Marcos' recently released book Lutz Müller
Apart from two books — the doctoral thesis, Sartres Theory of Negation, published by Peter Lang, from Frankfurt, in 1976, and the annotated translation of the Fundamental lines of the philosophy of law of Hegel, published posthumously by Editora 34 in 2022 —, Marcos Lutz Müller counted, from what we were able to verify, another 34 original publications, which range from the undergraduate monograph on the phenomenology of the spirit, titled Experience, path to truth?, published in 1967, until 2019, when the last two articles published during his lifetime appeared: “The dialectical contradiction and its resolution in the foundation” and “Freedom and ethics: the critical diagnosis of political modernity in Hegel”.
These 34 publications,[I] notorious for their depth and rigor in their theoretical elaboration, they have until now been spread across a myriad of scientific journals, collections, conference proceedings, often difficult to access or already out of circulation. Even in the last decades of his life, as we were able to witness a few times, a lot was required of the author to bring together such publications and make them accessible again, together, to the public — a task that Marcos Müller, if he accepted it, postponed indefinitely, or at least until the annotated translation of the Philosophy of law, where he had worked since the end of the 1980s, always with the most fruitful detours, as will be seen.
An irony of fate, a few hours after signing and sending the latest version of his “Presentation” to the finally completed great work of his scientific career to the publisher, the author began to leave us, on the night of August 12, 2020.
It was, therefore, up to us, her students, friends, and friends, with the loving and patient help of Jeanne Marie Gagnebin, to gather, type/digitize, review and offer the public again, in a format more accessible to research, these 34 texts in which Marcos documented and instantiated each decisive moment of his rare dedication to philosophy. Given such a large amount of material, some methodological-editorial decisions were adopted early in the process.
As it was always clear that it would be a collection of two or three volumes, the first decision to be taken concerned the ordering of the texts: we would simply follow the chronological order of their publication, offering the reader a faithful portrait of the continuities, deviations and resumptions of the 'ductus ascendant' that the author and his time, like natural consciousness in its tortuous path, effectively traced? Or, following the 'ductus descending', we would interfere in this chronological progress — not as a philosophical conscience, of course, but as mere editors/curators —, opening up to the reader the possibility of playing a certain kind of hopscotch with time and space, in search of an ordering of texts based on the theoretical and thematic links they establish between them?
The decision for the second option was due, above all, to its effectiveness, not only practical-editorial, but also epistemological. Let's explain ourselves. In a first attempt to divide the material, which was later confirmed in the planning of the three volumes of the collection, it was noted that a third of the texts dealt with the Philosophy of law. They contain, so to speak, the engine room where the hard work of the translator and researcher of this crucial work of Hegel's philosophy and contemporary political and legal philosophy was documented.
Another third was dedicated to phenomenology of the spiritor a science of logic and to important aspects of Marx's thought and his Hegelian heritage. The final third was composed of more general texts on Hegelian philosophy and Hegelianism, on Kant, Sartre and the Japanese Buddhist philosophy of Nishida and Dogen.
As the annotated translation of Philosophy of law was published recently, it seemed sensible to postpone the publication of texts relating to this work until the third volume. On the other hand, the editorial work with the set of more general texts on Hegel, Kant, Sartre and the Japanese Buddhist tradition, seemed to us, precisely because of its breadth, to offer more varied obstacles to the editorial preparation work that had just begun, and for this reason its publication was postponed until the second volume.
The set of texts about Marx, phenomenology of the spirit e science of logic They were easier to access, allowing work to begin more quickly. Having decided, therefore, that this set of texts would make up the first volume of the collection, we were not surprised to see, more than a mere nexus or proximity, relationships of almost monographic unity between the texts.
As editors, we have nothing to say for sure about the author's deep intentions, if such “monographs” were part of a grand plan, unfolded in hopscotch, messing up space and time.[ii] On the contrary, it may well be the case that such “monographs” are present more in our eyes than in the texts. The question remains open. We will enumerate and briefly describe below the supposed three “monographs” (A, B and C) of which the first volume of this collection is composed:
(A) Let's start with the first, whose thematic axis is Marx's thought and its developments, read from his various Hegelian heritages:
Epistemology and dialectics (1981)
Exposition and dialectical method in The capital (1982)
Preface to The negative of capital, by Jorge Grespan (1998)
Democracy in Marx: context of emergence and ambivalence of the concept (2018)
The first text of this 'Monography-A', “Epistemology and dialectics”, presented in 1978, was also the first that Marcos published back in Brazil as a professor at Unicamp. According to his own informal description, it was a “naughty review” of Jürgen Habermas’ book, Erkenntnis und Interest, from 1968, with which Marcos, on the one hand, sought to establish bridges of dialogue with the epistemological research then carried out at the Center for Logic and Epistemology (CLE) at Unicamp, at the time when its director was Oswaldo Porchat; and on the other, it sought to map the dramatic arc of the critical-epistemological discussions initiated by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno in the 1920s, unfolded by the latter throughout the positivismusstreit and, supposedly, finally consummated by the comprehensive reflections offered by Habermas in the reviewed text.
This remarkable effort aimed at internal understanding of the way in which Habermas believed, in 1968, to have indicated the path towards overcoming the diametrical opposition that had hitherto been in force between epistemology and dialectics reveals itself, however, from the perspective of regressive ductus, as a 'negative presupposition' of Marcos Müller's subsequent texts, ie, as a theoretical scenario whose conceptual nexus the author needed to reassemble for himself, only to better dismantle it later — especially the “negative” aspect of Hegel's criticism to Kant, which supposedly led Hegel to dissolve the theory of knowledge in “monological” absolute knowledge (cf., Müller, 2024, pp. 34s.).
This dismantling was necessary because, throughout the 1970s, the Habermasian project of the 'reconstruction of historical materialism' advanced by leaps and bounds in the increasingly strident condemnation of dialectics, anthropology, the philosophy of history, in short, the entire spectrum of the Hegelian heritage as a fundamental cause of a supposed positivism ofThe capital (id., pp. 43-45), and on this path he approached a certain “analytical Marxism”, pathologically allergic to Hegel and his dialectical 'mystifications'.
The second text, “Exposition and dialectical method in The capital” — undoubtedly our author's best-known essay — begins the positive dismantling of the fundamentally negative view of Habermas and analytical Marxists regarding Hegel and Marx, and this with the aim of offering a better-founded path in the course of criticism of diamat.
Marcos Müller, once again acting as a translator, not only of texts, but of concepts and theoretical contexts, then introduced into the national debate the theses of Theunissen and Fulda learned during his doctoral years in Heidelberg and Berlin. It was therefore a question of specifying, with rigor and subtlety that impressed Marx scholars in Brazil, to what extent Marx would have unavoidably incorporated aspects of the Hegelian dialectical method for the sake of writing The capital, that is, for the sake of the epistemological and historically appropriate conception of the very object of political economy: abstract work as the social basis of value and the self-valorization of value as the contradictory substrate/subject of capital.
If the young Marx of Criticism of Hegel's Philosophy of Right had accused the Logic, and especially the regressive ductus of the speculative dialectical method, as the fundamental cause of the Hegelian apologia for the sovereignty of the prince, as opposed to popular sovereignty — insight Feuerbachian/Young Marxian several times retread by the young Lukács, Adorno, Althusser, Habermas et al. —, the mature Marx ofThe capital, on the other hand, definitely does not present the development of political economy categories 'only' following the progressive ductus, historical-temporal, advocated by Feuerbachian materialism: it does not begin with the worker, the capitalist or their property, but with the analysis of the commodity form as a historical manifestation of value, which undeniably gives signs of the operability of the regressive ductus in the mode or method of presentation/exposition of the object.
Marx, thus, extracts from the ideological shell the rational core of Hegel's speculative dialectical method, differentiates and, more than that, opposes the heuristic character of Hegel's dialectic to the exclusively expository character of his appropriation of this dialectic (id., p. 66) ; and Marcos Müller, by presenting such a “turn inside out” in a rigorous and detailed way, avoiding the exhausted “expediency” (id. pp. 59s), demonstrated that this late reappropriation of Hegel did notO capital a specimen of positivism, on the contrary, gave it the instruments that, well understood, opened for (contemporary) economic science the possibility of going beyond the apology of what exists.
At the heart of this reassessment (critique) of Logic of Hegel by Marx are the Hegelian concepts of contradiction and subjectivity (of the concept) — whose more detailed explanation will occupy Marcos in 1993 and 2019, in the two final texts of the 'Monography-C' of this volume —, which are now pointed out as operators central to the “reason of capital” (id., p. 70), the struggle for power between capital and labor, and today more than ever, between capital and nature.
In the Hegelian logical idea Marx saw “anticipated”, as a real abstraction, a “speculative analogue of the law of valorization and systematic reproduction of capital”, of capital as a contradictory “automatic subject”, whose contradiction, however, given its “claim to unrealizable total domination”, is not resolved on a basis, as is the case with the contradiction in Logic by Hegel (id, pp. 72s.). This does not alleviate the notable difference between the use (heuristic and expository or just expository) of this rational core of the method in Hegel and Marx. The reconsideration of Hegel by the mature Marx does not completely suspend, but rather allows us to understand in greater depth the meaning of the young Marx's critique of Hegel.
The third text prefaces Jorge Grespan's book, The negative of capital, from 1998, result of the doctoral thesis supervised by Marcos Müller, and defended in 1994, in which it unfolds in the strictly economic detail ofThe capital the philosophical reading parameters inaugurated among us by the article “Exposition and dialectical method in The capital”. From this “Preface” it is possible to derive, therefore, in a condensed version, some of the guiding traits for readingThe capital carried out by Marcos Müller, unfolded and deepened in the Epistemology of Economics courses taught at the Department of Economics at Unicamp in the 1980s, courses that focused in particular on the concept of the “law of the downward trend in profits”.
We also find in this “Preface”, mediated by the developments produced by the student, the properly Marxian mobiles (in particular, the “logic of crisis”, id., p. 81s) operating in the true monograph that Marcos, in 1993, dedicated to the categories Hegelian concepts of necessity, modality and causality, ending the “Logic of essence”.
This is an indication, we believe, that despite the “theoretical crisis of Marxism” at the end of the 1980s, “associated with the economic-social impasses and political oppression of real socialism and, also, with a capitalist reconversion under the aegis of neoliberalism ” (id., p. 77) — crisis that led the author to a deep reflection and, in a certain sense, to an adjustment in the direction of his research, beginning then the journey through Philosophy of law e science of logic —, Marcos did not leave aside, however, research on Marx. He just carried her forward to her bottom.
The fourth and final text of this 'A-Monograph', “Democracy in Marx: context of emergence and ambivalence of the concept”, published at the end of the fateful year of 2018, seems to confirm this indication. It goes back to course work on the Critique of He's Philosophy of Rightgel which Marcos repeated and deepened throughout practically his entire teaching career — finally completed in 2018 by someone who had already gone through the labyrinth of Fundamental lines of the philosophy of law.
If the revival of research on science of logic in Germany — by Gadamer, Theunissen, Fulda, Henrich, Jaeschke et al., in a varied reaction to Heidegger's history of the forgetting of being and to negative dialectic of Adorno — opened the way for a 'new reading' ofThe capital, this reinterpretation would still be delayed and incomplete, this is what the diagnosis outlined by Marcos seems to be, without a related rediscovery of the Philosophy of law of Hegel.
The article/course in question therefore concludes the first 'monograph' of this volume not only because it is one of the last texts prepared by Marcos, but because it cuts through the previous three like a dart. In it, the author brings together, systematizes and presents the most poignant results of adequately putting into constellation these four tasks, simultaneous and codependent: renewing the reading of science of logic, Philosophy of law, da Criticism of Hegel's philosophy of law and d 'O capital.
The current and critical strengths of the Criticism of Hegel's philosophy of law, as well as its own Philosophy of law, which then seems to find in Marx's criticism not its definitive scaffold, but the concrete means of its most adequate understanding. The Marxian concept of real democracy, and its contradiction or ambivalence in relation to representative democracy, does not arise, therefore, despite the Philosophy of law, but as the realization of its own meaning, then remodeled to act critically no longer on the Prussian enlightened reformism of the 1820s (Hegel's context), but on the new world of capital, which was being established with great strides in Europe of the beyond the Rhine in the early years of the 1840s (Marx’s context).
The way was thus opened, after the detailed understanding of Hegel's Marxian critique and appropriation, to a more pertinent understanding of Hegel himself, in the sense of observing that he in a certain sense already operated — in the form of the identity and difference between logical idea, on the one hand, nature and objective spirit, on the other — with the identity and difference between logical idea and capital that Marx elaborates, with Hegel and against Hegel (cf. id., pp. 64s).
(B) The second “Monograph” that we offer the reader, in turn, has in phenomenology of the spirit of Hegel its object. Here are the texts it is composed of:
Experience, path to truth? About the concept of experience phenomenology of the spirit by Hegel (1967)
Absolute freedom between criticism of representation and Terror (2008)
Hegel's critique of the postulates of practical reason as dissimulating displacements (1998)
From 2017, the date of the last text of 'Monography-A', we jump back in an instant to 1967, when Marcos Müller, at the age of 24, published his undergraduate monograph and established himself, so to speak, in research on the Hegelian philosophy. A certain Marxist bias can be noted from the outset, particularly in the placement of the theme of inversion/conversion (Umkehrung/Umstülpung) between consciousness and science, even if still surrounded by, and already in conflict with, a certain Husserlian/Heideggerian phenomenological background — a conflict that would be unfolded in detail, ten years later, in the aforementioned doctoral thesis on Sartre.
We have here in our hands a brilliant study on an introductory and fundamental question of phenomenology of the spirit: who operates and experiences the transition from natural consciousness to philosophical consciousness? It is the natural consciousness itself that, in the progressive ductus, is it suspended beyond itself in philosophical consciousness? Or, following the regressive ductus, is it the philosophical consciousness that actually experiences the emergence of the new object and the new figure of consciousness? Is there a possible dialogue between the two, despite the difference and gap between the (restricted) sense of experience of natural consciousness and the (full) sense of experience of philosophical consciousness?
By opposing, in the manner of Kantian antinomies, both alternatives, Marcos Müller brings to light their self-contradictory and codependency, and refers them to the contradiction of the spirit with itself, which “tears up the space for experience” and “is, in its root, the experience itself” (id., p. 123). It is worth noting, therefore, that Marcos Müller, since 1967, had already approached, simultaneously, both the theme of “exhibition/presentation” (presentation),[iii] unfolded in the aforementioned 1982 article, as well as the Hegelian concept of contradiction, whose decipherment Marcos would only outline in 2015.
The second and third texts of this 'B-Monograph' offer a detailed reading and explanation of a very special sequence of subchapters to chapter VI of the phenomenology of the spirit, namely: “The truth of enlightenment”; “Absolute freedom and Terror”; “The self-certain spirit: morality”; “The moral worldview”; “The dissimulating displacement” (adjustment). This sequence presents, so to speak, the dialectic of Hegel's Enlightenment.
In “Absolute freedom between criticism of representation and Terror”, Marcos Müller retraces the threads of the cultural amalgam, resulting from the fight against Ancien Régime, which made the French Enlightenment an active vector for the reduction of all “differences and institutional determinations in the world” to “relations of utility” (id., p. 147). Against this background, it unfolds to what extent the Jacobin Terror, by radically carrying out this reduction — in particular in the unilateral suppression of the “misunderstanding about the general will”, the Sieyèsian identification between absolute freedom and universal will obtained quantitatively by the eventual vote of singulars as singulars —, and when it foundered under the force of its own internal contradiction (id., pp. 154-157), it came to objectively establish the conditions for the emergence, on the other side of the Rhine, of internalized experience (and therefore incomplete) of absolute freedom sublimated in the moral philosophy of Kant and Fichte.
The generalized leveling/annihilation of the Jacobins and Kant's “empty thought of the will” would thus share a common root, as they are based on the same epochal event, “splendid dawn”, which despite the formalism in which it came to light must having celebrated its world-historical content: the collective and indomitable self-awareness of absolute freedom, of the ability to abstract from absolutely everything, including the “deception” of modern political representation (id., pp. 150-154).
Hegel celebrates it, in his own way, exposing the contradiction of absolute freedom and its resolution, “which enunciates the logic of the sinking of revolutionary tyranny and the self-destruction of the regime of Terror” (id., p. 158s), as well as the logical genesis -phenomenological, and the self-contradiction, of the “new figure of the moral spirit” (id., p. 163). This exposition puts into practice “the experience that self-consciousness, [still] condensed in its point singularity, makes of the negativity of the universal will in its last abstraction”, its “supreme and final formation”, on the way to “full freedom” (id ., p. 159).
In this, finally, after turning the internalized, ineffective experience of Kantian moral consciousness inside out, a concrete mediation of the singular will and the universal will would be achieved, through the “autonomous development of particularity” (id., p. 162).
In the following text, “Hegel's critique of the postulates of practical reason as dissimulating displacements”, which concludes this 'B-Monograph', Marcos Müller continues where the previous text had ended — even though it was written ten years earlier. We find in it the other side of the coin analyzed in Terror.
In both texts, therefore, the aim is to present how “natural” consciousness, whether in the figure of Jacobinism or in the Kantian-Fichtean moral worldview, cannot produce/present by itself the concept implied in the actual experience. of absolute freedom, which resulted, on one side of the Rhine, Terror, and on the other, the refuge of moral self-consciousness (moralisches Selbstbewusstsein) in the hypocritical conviction of the self-certainty of a good moral conscience (Conscience).
We thus find, in both texts, a detailed analysis of two examples that sufficiently corroborate and illustrate the thesis presented in the first text of this 'Monograph-B'. Regarding the text on screen, it is, without a doubt, an unavoidable climax of the exposition of Hegel's criticism of Kant, in which Marcos documents his meticulous work, also spanning decades, with Kantian philosophy.
We are, here, on the way to considering as “real abstractions”, because they are self-contradictory, the fundamental representations of transcendental philosophy, which then reveals its truth precisely in what it displaces and dissimulates — a finding that places us, therefore, in the fertile ground of the bases of dialectical critique of (German) ideology. Marcos Müller does not go further, but his analysis prepares the understanding of the third element through which Hegel presents, following the phenomenology of the spirit, the complete arc of figures of the incomplete experience of absolute freedom, namely, the beautiful soul, prototype of the aesthetic-political action of the first German romanticism (Frühromantic).
If the epigones of this current, who were baptized into transcendental philosophy at the hands of Fichte, initially embarked on the republican-democratic enthusiasm resulting from the French Revolution, with equal ease and immediacy they converted, in force, after Napoleon's downfall, into apologists for the Restoration and defenders of the national-religious foundation of the State. It will, therefore, be through critical reflection on the failure of these three incomplete figures of the experience of freedom that Hegel will produce his own concept of social freedom, crystallized in the idea of the ethical State.
(C) The third and final 'Monograph' that we offer to the public in this volume concerns the science of logic and is composed of three texts:
The Negativity of the Absolute Beginning (2014)
The dialectical contradiction and its resolution in the foundation (2019)
The logical genesis of the speculative concept of freedom (1993)
The first of them was presented at a Congress in 2011 and deals, as the title says, with the question of the beginning of Logic. This question concerns, initially, the apparently contradictory relationship between phenomenology of the spirit e science of logic, between the path to the system and the system without assumptions; and unfolds in the circular and contradictory relationship between the beginning and the end of the Logic.
As in the first text of 'Monography-B', here we have an opening text, which at the same time introduces, contextualizes the work and provides it with a pertinent global panorama — in particular by unveiling the three forms of negativity operating in the Logic: infinite negativity, of the passage of absolute knowledge (end of Phenomenology) at the beginning with pure being (principle of Logic); abstract negativity, acting in the “absence” of passage between being and nothingness; and, by contrast, self-referential negativity, consummated in the absolute idea (end of Logic). There is an unavoidable parameter for starting any conversation about science of logic between us.
The following two texts address precisely the beginning and end of the middle part of the Logic, the “Logic of essence”, which results in a simultaneously panoramic and detailed view of this speculative heart of the Hegelian dialectical method, perhaps apart from the Logic of Hegel on which Marx focused most intensely. Identity, difference, diversity, opposition, contradiction and foundation — these are the categories presented and explained in the text “The dialectical contradiction and its resolution in the foundation”, presented at a congress in 2015.
This is the section of Logic in which Hegel presents in more detail his opposition to classical formal logic, for which “contradiction is not a determination as immanent and essential as identity”, which, for Hegel, “is only the determination of the simple immediate, of being dead”, while “contradiction is the root of all movement and all vitality”. There can be no doubt: Hegel definitely did not produce a philosophy of identity, because his own speculative concept of identity has its foundation (therefore negative) in (absolute) difference, which is the contradiction in its moment of the self.
This criticism of Hegel, however, Marcos Müller points out, “does not intend […] to eliminate or even call into question the logical principle of non-contradiction in its function as a condition of rationality and coherence of discourse, and, mainly, of argumentation philosophical” (id., p. 225). The speculative principle of contradiction does not suppress or invalidate, “it does not necessarily contradict the logical principle of non-contradiction” (id., p. 226). What Hegel criticizes is the application of this and more principles — in the form of self-evident propositions (identity, non-contradiction, etc.), isolated and presented alongside each other without worrying about their genesis or derivation — as predicates of a certain indeterminate subject.
Marcos Müller, citing Hegel, concludes: “In the form of propositions, they 'awaken being again', fall short of the essence, and cover up their own negativity, instead of being analyzed in themselves, 'in their being in itself and for si', which brings to light its derivation and its systematic chain” (id., p. 231). The focus, therefore, is not on destroying and replacing established logical principles, but on speculatively reconstructing their self-contradiction (id., p. 240), their internal logic, their conceptual genesis (progressive and regressive).
From this arise pertinent philosophical parameters for the constitution of a properly contemporary logical science, in which doors and windows are opened to the idea of a logic of movement, of process, of the continuous, of life, not with a view to a complete naturalization or secularization of logic. , along the lines of nominalists and materialists of the 21st century. XVII, but in the sense of establishing a logic that is self-referential and plastic enough so that its self-alienation or projection of itself onto its other — the side where the contents of pure logical forms are traditionally sought — does not become trapped in a “struggle for power” , does not entail a relationship of absolute domination or estrangement, but rather a reciprocal action, “being together with your other person”.
Coming to terms with contradiction, logical science reconciles itself with its content, be it beforehand ou a posteriori. It becomes, after centuries of absolutism in classical mathematics, contemporary logic. Nature, articulated by a logic whose foundation is difference and not identity, unavoidably brings into play the thought of the relational co-determination of bodies and chemical elements, and that of the metamorphosis and evolution of biological species.
The figures of ethics and the State, analyzed through the lens of this logic (or method) of contradictions, allow us to abandon once and for all ancient dogmas of classical philosophy and political economy and, as Marx did, to unfold the scientific understanding of the logic itself, self-contradictory, in the way of capitalist production. But this step forward taken by Marx has a very particular condition, mentioned above: if the contradiction in Logic If it is resolved at its foundation, the contradiction of capital necessarily remains irresolute, trapped in the struggle for power. Corollary: it is in the difference between the logic and manifestation of capital, between the presupposition and the annihilation of its principle, that the critique of political economy unfolds.[iv]
The genetic presentation of the chain, of nexuses and crystallized metamorphoses, for understanding, in propositions or fundamental logical principles, this presentation that produces the coming into being of the concept of contradiction and its resolution, puts on the table the theoretical instruments with which Hegel, when end of the “Logic of essence”, will operate the passage from essence to concept, from the sphere of necessity to the sphere of freedom. This passage takes place through the categorical series: possibility, necessity, effectiveness, substance, accident, cause, effect, counter-effect and reciprocal action — which in a certain sense reenacts, now with greater detail and content, the opening movement of the “Logic of essence".
Therefore, the second and third texts of this 'Monograph-C' mirror and clarify each other, even though they are separated by two decades. At this point, it is worth highlighting the profound importance of the text with which we close this first volume of the collection of philosophical essays by Marcos Lutz Müller.
To escape the aforementioned questions that he faced in the mid to late 1980s, Marcos, following the path opened by Theunissen, decides to spell out and explain, as has rarely been seen until today, one of the notably more impenetrable parts of the impenetrable Science of logic, and this with a triple intention: (i) to overcome the criticisms (from Heidegger, Adorno, Habermas, analytical Marxism and French post-structuralism) regarding the epistemic status of the work, and this at the point where Hegel's criticism of metaphysics culminates traditional and transcendental philosophy; (ii) solidly substantiate the idea that this is a “logic of freedom” and “reciprocal recognition”; (iii) clarify the isomorphy between the logical idea and the idea of freedom, pointed out by Hegel in the “Introduction” of Philosophy of law as an undemonstrated starting point for the critical-normative analysis of the social forms in which the spirit is objectified in history.
Therefore, in one fell swoop, an unavoidable key to understanding the heart of science of logic and the starting point of Philosophy of law. Given the almost desert scenario that prevailed in 1993, with rare exceptions, in the Brazilian and international discussion about both of these greatest works of Hegel, the true monograph that Marcos Müller published in the first volume of the magazine Analytica went completely unnoticed. He had to wait almost three decades for national and international discussions to reach their conclusion and for the text to finally become current.
It was no surprise. In the excerpt written by Marcos Müller, Hegel leaves behind the classical and modern conception of substance (id., pp. 264s) by presenting the turnaround in the relationship between 'active substance' and 'passive' — a point that also reveals, retroactively, the logical workshop of the celebrated dialectic of master and servant. With his critique of the Kantian construction of causality (id., pp. 267s), Hegel inaugurates the contemporary thought of complex, non-linear causalities, in which the counter-effect “counters-acts on the cause, reacts, suppressing it in its alleged priority to the effect” (id., p. 271) — a thought that Marx, precisely in his law of the tendency to fall in the rate of profit (well understood, of course) was one of the first to consciously share.
With the resolution of the contradiction of reciprocal action, “immediate genesis of the concept” and “the only true refutation of Spinozism” (id., p. 279), Hegel definitively leaves behind the element of identity and necessity (“Objective Logic ”), and unlocks the element of difference, freedom, recognition (“Subjective logic”) (id., pp. 288s).
The universal subjectivity of the concept, or of pure thinking, which crystallizes here and there in singular concepts, no longer has as its foundation, as in tradition, the presupposed identity (of being or of the mind or of God with oneself), but the recognition position, that is, the “substance of ethics”.
The logical concepts that Hegel talks about so much are also historical (although, in Logic, considered out of time). They are not mere metaphysical or ontological principles, in the traditional sense, but “logical structures of recognition”.
At this point we end our attempt to outline the contours of these three “Monographs” that we believe we can find among the articles, book chapters and reviews published by Marcos Lutz Müller. In a final overview, it could be suggested that they ultimately compose, moving deeper, a phenomenology and a logic of contradiction: we begin with the varied forms of appearance and reflection on the contradiction between capital and the work, which finds, whether in the contradiction between analytics and dialectics, or in the contradiction between representative democracy (modern) and real democracy (from Marx), its epistemological and political correlates; takes a step back to consider the fundamental contradiction of phenomenology of the spirit, that between natural and philosophical consciousness; and then two steps forward, with the analysis of the contradiction and resolution of absolute freedom (Terror) and the contradiction of Kant's moral doctrine (and its dissimulating displacements); until finally the question of the contradiction between the phenomenology of the spirit and science of logic (which places the contradiction between natural and philosophical consciousness deeper); then the elaboration of the very concept of logical contradiction and its resolution; and its final application towards the definitive establishment of a logic of freedom, of the subjectivity of the concept that, by freedom, when spreading over and seeking to encompass its other (nature, history), does not need to dominate it, but rather is in a reciprocal relationship with him.
In his other, he is still with himself, recognizing himself and the other as a result of the relationship, which precedes the reports. I hope this suggestion can serve as Ariadne's thread for the sake of reading this volume.
Finally, a warning to anyone who may first come into contact with the author's texts through this volume: Marcos Müller did not make things easy. His concept of didactics or explanation, in this sense, is strictly Aristotelian: explaining or teaching does not mean facilitating, but explaining the causes — and there are many occasions when the causes to be explained are themselves subtle and very difficult, and in the case of contemporary, complex in extremis.
None of these texts were written with speed, haste or ease. These are not texts that appease, but that exercise and vivify the thirst for knowledge. They do not replace or replace the sources they seek to explain in detail. On the contrary, they only provide the fundamental tools for working properly with them. It cannot reasonably be expected that it will be read with little effort. Therefore - cause![v]
*Fábio Mascarenhas Nolasco Professor at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Brasilia (UnB).
Reference
Marcos Lutz Müller, Philosophical Essays I: Between Marx and Hegel. Edited by Antonio Florentino Neto, Erick Lima, Fábio Mascarenhas Nolasco, Paulo Denisar Fraga and Verrah Chamma. Campinas, Editora phi, 2024, 296 pages. [https://amzn.to/46IYvgP]
Notes
[I] This list does not include the five booklets published in the collection Didactic Texts from IFCH/Unicamp from 1994 to 2005, containing the introduced and commented translation of almost the entire Philosophy of law (§§ 1-33; §§ 34-104; §§ 129-141; §§ 182-256; §§ 257-360). Nor do we account for the translation, in partnership with Jeanne Marie Gagnebin, of the Theses on the concept of history, by Walter Benjamin (Boitempo, 2005). The philosopher's estate also contains a series of unpublished texts, appearing to have a high degree of finishing, among which the following stand out: Husserl's phenomenological thought (1966, 26 pages); Introduction to Epistemology of Economics courses (sd, 14 pages); Hobbes and the aporia of modern political representation (sd, 15 pages); Transience (dialectic of the finite and the infinite) and impermanence (the cycle of life and death): an essay on comparative philosophy (sd, 10 pages); in addition to very detailed and organized notes on practically all the courses he taught at Unicamp. As they require more subtle editorial work, their publication is planned for a possible fourth volume of the Collection.
[ii] This “hopscotch” imposed special difficulty on this edition, since, in the first texts, Marcos Müller is based on the then classic editions of Hegel’s works (ed. Hoffmeister for the Phenomenology, ed. Lasson for science of logic and the editing of Works for the other texts), while, in the most recent texts, he makes use of the historical-critical edition of the Gesammelte Werke. In this regard, the editorial decision adopted was to restrict the momentum of the regressive ductus and leave the references almost always as they were — serving as a record, in each case, of the state of transformations that have occurred in the editions of Hegel's works and courses in recent decades; except when it came to references to Philosophy of law, which were almost always updated according to the author's translation.
[iii] “[…] the true path to truth is exposition, as it belongs to the essence of experience, while it is the experience itself that is fully consummated […].” (id., p. 137).
[iv] “The Marxian exposition reconstructs, on the ideal plane, the systematic movement of capital as different, logically, from its historical emergence and universalization and different, as a method, from its real systemic reproduction.” (id., p. 55)
[v] On behalf of the other editors of this volume: Antonio Florentino Neto, Erick Lima, Paulo Denisar Fraga and Verrah Chamma; and the digitization and technical review team: Caio Rosalles, Gabriela Malesuik, Guilherme Balduíno, Henrique Valle, Iasmin Leiros, Igor Bessa, Janaína Teodoro, Maria Clara Rocha, Natan Oliveira and Rafael Siqueira.
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