|
COPYRIGHT 2003 Indiana University, Purdue University of Fort Wayne
Hegel's Ladder I: The Pilgrimage of Reason and Hegel's Ladder II: The Odyssey of Spirit. By Henry S. Harris. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997.
The Power of Negativity: Selected Writings on the Dialectic in Hegel and Marx. By Raya Dunayevskaya, edited and introduced by Peter Hudis and Kevin B. Anderson. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2002.416 pages. (1)
These two recently published but very divergent perspectives on Hegel hone in on a similar problem: is there a specifically Hegelian unity of theory and practice for today's world? One perspective comes from the revered Hegel scholar, Henry S. Harris, whose Hegel's Ladder is a monumental two-volume study of Hegel's epochal work, Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). Volume one, The Pilgrimage of Reason, and volume two, The Odyssey of Spirit, are each by themselves much longer than the Phenomenology itself. The other perspective comes not from the academic world but rather from the Marxist-Humanist philosopher, Raya Dunayevskaya whose "life and work," as Peter Hudis and Kevin Anderson put it in their introduction, represent rare combination of passionate involvement in freedom struggles and intense philosophical exploration" (xvii). Many of Dunayevskaya's previously unpublished writings on Hegelian dialectics specifically have been included in this new collection, The Power of Negativity. The substantial introduction situates these writings within Dunayevskaya's whole body of work as well as within her thinking, in the years before her death in 1987, concerning the need to return to Hegel's dialectic in order to work out a necessary new unity of theory and practice inseparable from organization.
Harris structures the problem of a strictly Hegelian theory and practice as a "paradox." Harris's journey through Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit draws one inexorably and with exquisite detail into Hegel's presentation of the self-movement of the concept as reality itself. However, Harris emphasizes that this conclusion is possible only from the standpoint of the philosopher who, rather than participating in the unfolding self-movement of spiritual shapes, comprehends all as the "unforgetting observer" in the center of the circle of the movement. Those who act on the historical stage, says Harris, can never fully recognize the universal in their own act of creating new forms of spirit. The "paradox" with which Harris's encyclopedic explication of the already encyclopedic Phenomenology confronts the sojourner is that Hegel's ultimate of" Absolute Knowledge both is, and is not, a shape of consciousness' " in that the "conscious concern" of the philosopher, who alone attains Absolute Knowledge, "is to get out of the round of life, and into the still centre" (II, 764-65). As actors on the historical stage we are limited to the thinking of the "moral agent [which] is negative thinking,' because it changes the world" (II,723). Philosophy proper, however, constitutes the positive and makes it possible to achieve "self-enjoyment" through the act of comprehending that what "really is," is the self-moving concept (II, 740). One way to pose Harris's paradox is that this self-enjoyment sets a sort of limit to the activity of an otherwise totally passive, philosophical shape of consciousness--a shape of consciousness, which, in turn, comprehends the totally active power of the concept.
Harris's philosopher embodies the movement to Absolute Knowledge out of Manifest Religion. This movement, however, does not necessarily become universalized in the world of actual religion. There is not a withering away" (II, 773) of religion, as Merold Westphal claimed when he suggested that there is in Hegel an affinity with Marx, even as Westphal criticized Marx for failing to see the "emergent character of Hegel's eternity" in Absolute Knowledge. (2) For Harris, it is the philosopher who transcends the picture thinking of Manifest Religion. Picture thinking is still bound up with Christ, as the humanization of God, and his execution after which religious universals such as love, forgiveness, and mutual recognition are manifested in the whole community in the form of the Holy Spirit. Only in the philosopher's recollective inwardization (Erinnerung) of the historical journey of spirit does God, at least in any way one knows that entity, totally die and the real self-creative eternal spirit become reborn as the actual human community spirit embodied in philosophic individuals who are fully conscious of their thoroughly social core as well as their mortality. Further, at least for the philosopher who achieves Absolute Knowledge as the unity of consciousness with its object, the phenomenological movement then comes to an end. (3)
For Harris, one hardly needs to go any further than the profundity of the Phenomenology itself to get the full benefit of Hegel. A problem emerges, as Harris sees it, when Hegel returns to the world of "Real Philosophy" and experience after laboring through the truth as pure thought or logic out of the Phenomenology's result. For example, Harris agrees with Marx's criticism that Philosophy of Right's application of the" 'actual is rational' was nothing more than a rationalization even in its own time." (4) For Harris, there is a distinction within Hegel himself between this type of philosophy, which Hegel calls in the Introduction to Philosophy of Right "its own time comprehended in thoughts," and the Phenomenology's "universal comprehension of time as such" (HPS, 99-100). Harris's answer, at least within the movement of the Phenomenology, is to totally divorce Hegel's philosopher from practice. The philosopher is the observing "antithesis of the self-actualizing Begriff" (II, 724).
For an activist Marxist-Humanist philosopher like Dunayevskaya, there is certainly no difficulty accepting Marx's perspective on Hegel's Philosophy of Right. In spite of this, Dunayevskaya insists on the need to return to Hegel's dialectic "in and for itself' (278). Her work on Hegel does not have the range and depth of Harris's except in one area that oriented everything she wrote--a new view of Hegel's absolutes, especially absolute negativity, which she first laid out in general form in letters to colleagues in 1953. In absolute negativity, or second negation, Dunayevskaya saw a much needed answer to the question "what happens after the revolution"--a way for revolutionaries to go beyond first negation or opposition to the prevailing alienating reality and go to second negation or projection of a positive future in terms of Hegel's self-developing idea of freedom. In an imagined 1953 conversation with Lenin, Dunayevskaya points to the need to go further into Hegel than he did in his 1914 "Abstract of Hegel's Science of Logic," in which Lenin broke with the photocopy theory of reality that he had propagated earlier in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. The "experience of three decades" of Stalinism having transformed the great 1917 Russian Revolution into its opposite, "a totalitarian one-party state," compelled Dunayevskaya to complete Hegel's journey in the Logic (22). Absolute negativity provides a vantage point for the future after the revolution, not in the form of blueprint, but for a new beginning in the conscious self-realization of freedom once the self-development of the freedom idea is seen as a dimension of the spontaneous movement, which in many places Dunayevskaya calls "the movement from practice which is itself a form of theory."
Harris only slightly opens the door to a more activist dialectic, emphasizing that only when the philosophic science is constructed after Absolute Knowledge, it "may possibly help in social reconstruction." He alludes to Hegel's modest efforts in the unhappy time "after the fall of Napoleon," in contrast to Hegel's successors who forgot the goal of comprehension and went wholly for "social reconstruction" (II, 752). Aside from Hegel's own time-bound attempt in Philosophy of Right, Harris draws attention to the bad precedents, especially among the Left Hegelians who "thought they could use the Logic to change [the world and] ... fell back into the dialectic of action and judgment" (II, 741). On precisely this point, there seems to be a close affinity between the dedicated revolutionary Marxist-Humanist Dunayevskaya and the academic non-Marxist Hegelian Harris. Dunayevskaya criticizes Lenin for having just such a self-limiting perspective on the Science of Logic as he felt the practical Idea there resolved all contradictions (328). In this, she sees a relevant lesson for today as well as in Hegel's own time on the historic stage, especially in the realm of religion, which, in Hegel's ordering, immediately precedes his philosophic pinnacle. Beginning from the Logic as a crucial prerequisite to Hegel's return to "Real Philosophy," is it possible to glean from Hegel's own real-time efforts indications of a more universal approach to the historical agency of the philosopher through which Hegel intended to bring a new dimension to the "self-actualizing Begriff?"
The relevant section of the Logic is that in which Hegel directly connects the practical Idea to the Phenomenology's "moral agent." (5) It may be, as Harris suggests, that it is "at the level of the 'biography of God' "that one can make sense of Hegel's assertion of a correspondence between every abstract moment of the Logic and the recollection of "concrete" and therefore time-bound experiences in the Phenomenology (II, 743). If that is true, then at this rare point in the Logic, where Hegel himself makes the parallel, Hegel's own unique chapter in that biography must begin, because there is no more mention of the "divine" let alone "God." Hegel's discussion from then on almost wholly concerns method. This seemingly most abstract transition, to what Harris calls "the concept of pure thinking itself as a method [where] the last vestige of the traditional concept of God is vanished" (HPS, 103), may be more encompassing and actually more concrete for the present day, than the particular way Hegel culled the "moral agent" out of his own time for the...
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
|
Bookmark this article
Print this article
Link to this article
Email this article
Digg It!
Add to del.icio.us
RSS
