Beyond philosophy-or beyond anti-philosophy?

The value of this book lies in its passionate affirmation of human freedom. Ute Bublitz never ceases to stress that freedom is not something which we HAVE; it is something which we ARE. Our ability to shape reality through conscious, purposeful action defines FREEDOM as our very essence. At the same time, the ability to create a world of our own making enables us to impose conditions, codes and concepts which RESTRICT human freedom.

As Bublitz puts it, "The whole of our life is a contradictory process. Freedom, essential humanity, our very selves, with all our powers and capacities, create the opposite: un-freedom, inhumanity, a world which constantly tramples underfoot our dignity, crushing our capacity for true community and beauty. The general reality in which we all live, which we perceive and experience, and the continuance of which we assure by our own actions, contradicts the essence of the human being" (p. 6).

This problem comes most sharply into focus in the struggle for freedom itself. How many revolutions tried to overthrow the old, but ended up creating a new set of narrow and oppressive social structures and moral codes? How many freedom struggles tried to redefine what it means to be human, but ended up forgetting about the freedom of others-be it of a different race, nationality or sexuality? The closer we come to the affirmation of our essential being as FREE subjects, the more directly we confront the problem of creating conditions which can narrow the content of freedom itself. As Bublitz puts it, "our ESSENCE exists in the face of its denial."

HAS PHILOSOPHY FAILED?

The central theme of this book is that philosophy has failed to come to grips with this problem. Philosophy, she argues, can explain the NECESSITY and REASON for the existing world, but it cannot provide an explanation for how and why to change it. Philosophy tries to RECONCILE thought with existing reality: "Philosophy's task is to demonstrate truth, revealing what is necessary in the way we live...when philosophy demonstrates that this necessity is something that HAS to be, it puts a seal onto the lock of our prison...with the liberation of humanity from the power of abstraction, philosophy will have lost its reason for being" (p. 110).

Bublitz does a good job showing that Aristotle's philosophy tried to RECONCILE thought with reality-as seen in his defense of slavery. Her case is far weaker when it comes to Hegel.

Bublitz takes Hegel's famous statement, "what is reasonable is actual, what is actual is reasonable," to mean that his entire thought is a philosophic rationale for existing conditions of unfreedom. She writes, "To be 'reasonable' means to be of reason, to have the property of reason. To be 'actual' means to be part of the general makeup of the world, to be the opposite of a contingency. What is actual has the laws of reason acting within it. Actuality carries out the purpose of reason, which is ACTIVE. The principle of reconciliation states that, whatever the subject matter, we can only think on the assumption that both the reasonable and the actual are THE SAME. What governs our reality MUST be reasonable, MUST HAVE the character of reason" (p. 14).

THE IDEA WITHIN REALITY

Bublitz's view rests upon a misreading of Hegel. Hegel was not claiming that reason and reality are IMMEDIATELY identical. To presume that they are identical is to equate the Idea of freedom with what Hegel called "the untrue being of the objective world." Hegel instead was saying that the unity of reason and reality is the result of a PROCESS. Through "the labor, patience, and suffering of the negative" the presence of reason in reality is realized through the NEGATION of the "untrue being of the objective world."

Hegel's point is that it does no good to assert, as did Kant, that reason and reality OUGHT to unite; one must instead discern the elements WITHIN reality which contain the Idea. While the realm of appearance or "untrue being" is indifferent to the Idea, reality itself is not. The Idea is contained WITHIN reality, even if only implicitly and under the surface. It is in THIS sense that Hegel writes, "It must be held that whatever IS actual is only in so far as it contains and expresses the Idea" (SCIENCE OF LOGIC, Miller trans., p. 756).

Bublitz is right that for Hegel "thinking has to discover reason IN the world; the notion has to be grasped WITHIN the manifold, not as removed, abstracted from it" (p. 92). She errs, however, in assuming that this necessarily involves a RECONCILIATION with existing reality. For the young Marx, Hegel's concept pointed in a very different direction-to the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. Marx followed Hegel in holding that the Idea of freedom exists WITHIN reality; reason must have a BEARER within actuality in order for it to be REALIZED. That bearer, Marx held, was the proletariat. Through the proletariat's negation of "the untrue being of the objective world" the Idea of freedom would be REALIZED in a new society.

It is true that in the final analysis Hegel reconciled himself with existing society. The root of the problem is found in his dehumanization of the Idea. Hegel conceived of the SUBJECT of the dialectic as disembodied thought, not as live men and women. Disembodied thought, even when posed as an absolute, cannot by itself overcome the antithesis of reason and reality. Faced with an inability to surmount the contradiction, Hegel resigned himself to accommodation with existing structures.

THE DIALECTIC UNCHAINED

Marx did not turn his back on Hegel upon discovering this central defect. On the contrary, his engagement with Hegel became all the deeper. By following Hegel's approach of discerning the Idea WITHIN reality, while avoiding Hegel's defect of restricting the Subject to thought alone, Marx unchained the revolutionary implications contained within the Hegelian dialectic.

Those revolutionary implications have exerted a pull on the mind of humanity ever since. German Marxists and Russian Populists, French Existentialists and African revolutionists, U.S. Marxist-Humanists and Latin American Liberation Theologists have all in one way or another been drawn to Hegel's dialectic as "the algebra of revolution." You would never know that from reading Bublitz, however, who sees Hegel as only about reconciliation. Have all the others simply misunderstood, or has Bublitz missed something?

The problem may lie not only in Bublitz's reading of Hegel but in her attitude toward actuality itself. Though she powerfully projects the need to reject all forms of dehumanization, commodification and unfreedom-which she calls "the power of rejection"-her examples of resistance, while moving, are of isolated individuals, not of masses in motion. One gets a sense of a "great refusal" on the part of the individual to conditions of unfreedom-yet little sense of how it is worked out in a collective social movement. The failure to pinpoint a subjective agent or force in society as the negative factor for transcending the given seems to cut away the ground for seeing the revolutionary role that can be played by a PHILOSOPHY OF LIBERATION.

Yes, we are ruled by "abstractions"; yes, philosophy has often served as the vehicle of their rule by explaining the necessity of what is, instead of what can be. But do not throw out the baby with the bathwater. The presence of the Idea in reality through a social subject which strives to think through and realize the abstract idea of full-blown freedom opens up the space for the birth of emancipatory forms of life which annul the false abstractions of bourgeois society. Here is where what Marx called "the power of abstraction" becomes a matter of life and death urgency.

Where does Bublitz's wholesale rejection of philosophy, on the grounds that Hegel's limits disclose the nonviability of philosophy PER SE, leave us by the end of her book? The conclusion is rather thin: "Only art can rescue human freedom from within these narrow walls of normality. For only in artistic creativity is human making free making" (p. 171). This after writing, "In our world, people are dealt with like things; and for that no wisdom is required...when the human belief, the belief in the other person, has become so immensely difficult to maintain, free creation takes refuge in the making of things" (pp. 128, 137).

TOWARDS PERMANENT REVOLUTION

Where then do WE go with the basic question which informs Bublitz's book-namely, how, given our freedom to define ourselves, do we not chain ourselves to false definitions of what it means to be human? This question, it seems to me, is precisely what compels a turn to philosophy-not a philosophy of "reconciliation," but one so imbued with negativity that it is negative even in regard to its own assumptions and concretizations. What is needed is a philosophy that is SELF-NEGATING in not allowing any particular definition or concretization of freedom to be outside the realm of re-examination, redefinition and critique. The philosophic source of that dialectic of ABSOLUTE negativity, of course, remains Hegel. His thought will surely survive this latest attempt to bury him.

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