www.newsandletters.org
|
|
NEWS & LETTERS, October 2002
PHILOSOPHIC DIALOGUE
The theory and politics of regression
by Tom More In the worlds colliding today, to which the Bush
administration's answer is the drive towards permanent war, the thought is in
motion of a new crusade, a "holy cause." The President's rhetoric of a
nearly cosmic clash between the forces of light and darkness, his projection of
an "axis of evil," discloses the essentially religious character of
his own idea of history, evident from his "born again" Christianity. Islamic fundamentalist terrorists are thus not alone in
issuing FATWAS and declaring JIHAD. Standing on the brink of this new war, it is
imperative for the anti-war movement to confront and unmask religious
fundamentalism. My proposal, at this stage only a conjecture, to which I welcome
your critical response, is that Hegel can help us understand what we are up
against with his discussion of the "third attitude of thought toward
objectivity" in his SMALLER LOGIC (para. 61-78).* HEGEL'S CRITIQUE OF INTUITIONISM Raya Dunayevskaya placed much emphasis on Hegel's
"Third Attitude of Thought Toward Objectivity" (see THE POWER OF
NEGATIVITY [PON], pp. 82-84). Hegel represented the standard-bearer of this
attitude in the intuitionist philosophy of F.H. Jacobi (1743-1819), a
philosopher Hegel considered in 1812 to be "perhaps forgotten," but
whose resurgent popularity after the post-Napoleonic Restoration of 1814-15
compelled Hegel, in 1827, to develop a category devoted to the attitude that
intuitionism--the immediacy of feeling--reflected. For Hegel, the first attitude toward objectivity is
emblematically premodern--faith and scholasticism. The second attitude is
modern, i.e., Empiricism and Kantian rationalism. The third attitude presupposes
the second attitude and is a regressive movement in relation to it, inasmuch as
it "rejects all methods" and "abandons itself to the control of a
wild, capricious and fantastic dogmatism--which is loudest against
philosophy" (para. 77). Hegel characterized this third attitude as a
"backward movement" (para. 76), revealing to Dunayevskaya how
"the Hegelian dialectic lets retrogression appear as translucent as
progression and indeed makes it very nearly inevitable if one ever tries to
escape regression by mere faith" (PON, p. 332). The cult of immediate
feeling or intuition unmediated by critical thought lacks "the seriousness,
suffering, patience, and labor of the negative" (Hegel, PHENOMENOLOGY OF
SPIRIT, p. 10). In short, Hegelian dialectics makes no claims about the
inevitability of historical progress; it is quite possible to go backwards
historically as well as forward. Which direction we actually go is intimately
related to what attitudes we adopt, theoretically and practically, to the
objective world in which we find ourselves situated. And since thinking is prima
facie free, we are not necessarily fated to an attitude that happens to prevail
at some particular moment, which is why the "battle of ideas," or
theoretical struggle, has a practical and political significance. Dunayevskaya recognized that the Hegelian "cunning
of Reason" does not belong to a philosophy of guarantees. Hegelianism is
not a grand narrative of the inevitability of historical progress. In the
precarious world situation we inhabit today, there is the real and palpable
possibility that we will not go forward into the future charted by the idea of
freedom. While virtually everyone on the Left adopts the rhetoric of the
"liberation struggle," there is no assurance that an authentic
philosophy of liberation is the project of that rhetoric. NEW CHALLENGES FACING THE LEFT Let's begin by considering just what world circumstances
the Left is up against today. First, there is the shared leftist consensus that
the momentum of the world-historical stage presently belongs to a movement of
"globalization from above." Second, the counter-movement from below
and from within the globalizing centers of the U.S. and Europe had begun to
gather enormous momentum with the Seattle protests in the fall of 1999. Third, however, came September 11, 2001, and the
subsequent U.S.-led drive to permanent war, and the scenes of mass protest on
the streets of U.S. cities have for the moment visibly diminished. What NEWS & LETTERS has consistently observed is the
troubling silence of many on the Left about the very real world-historical
threat of the Islamic fundamentalism that carried out the September 11 attacks.
And so we could have predicted what N&L has also consistently observed, the
erosion in the U.S. of the momentum represented by Seattle in the immediate
aftermath of September 11, as Bush's popularity has soared. Also N&L has not failed to point out the link
between Islamic fundamentalism (the September 11 terrorist attack, bin Laden and
Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and so forth) and the third attitude towards objectivity. This logical category of Hegelian dialectics has
enormous explanatory power in directing everyone's attention to the critique of
fundamentalism, regarding which too many on the Left have been equivocal. This
reticence is easy enough to explain by a binary logic that takes U.S.-led
imperialism to be the enemy, and which therefore concludes that any force
opposed to U.S.-led imperialism is, if not precisely a friend, then a tendency
that at least merits sympathy and understanding. To the dumbed-down question, "Why do they hate
us?," there has come from some quarters the dumbed-down answer, "We
made them do it." There are a great many problems with this Manichean
thinking, but at least two are immediately relevant here: first, it imagines
that "Empire" is so overawing that spontaneous political movements
around the world could not emerge of their own accord; second, it seriously
underestimates just how vicious and reactionary fundamentalism really is. At first blush, the focus might seem to be merely on
Islamic fundamentalism as the object of critique, but it would be a dialectical
mistake to fix on the adjective and more fundamentally fail to incorporate the
noun into the third attitude toward objectivity. N&L's support of the Revolutionary Association of
the Women of Afghanistan's tour in the U.S. after September 11 bespeaks both the
universality of its feminist commitments and also its recognition that
"women as Reason" all over the world are capable of responding as
women to their own oppression, true even when the U.S. was backing the forces
that swept the Taliban into power. But there is a mistaken, particularist way to tell the
story that might go something like this: The Islamic world was subject to
imperial conquest and colonial domination from without; it did not ask for the
modernity that was imposed upon it. If not for conquest and domination, a
non-European development of Islamic civilization (the heterogeneity of which I
do not intend to oversimplify, extending as it does from Nigeria to Indonesia)
might have proceeded on its own course. CONFRONTING ISLAMIC FUNDAMENTALISM The "anti-western" sentiments that pervade the
Islamic world are therefore a function of its struggle to maintain its own
cultural identity and otherness in the face of "western" imposition.
But focusing the issue on the identity politics of Islam not only reduces
something called "Islam" itself to a monolith, but runs the risk of
obscuring a vital global kinship among fundamentalisms, the obscurity of which
would also prevent theorists from developing a more comprehensive dialectical
perspective. The better place to begin is with the notion that
fundamentalists are not "traditional" in the sense of wanting to take
people back to the past. Numerous feminists and other writers have pointed out
the ways in which the fundamentalist utopia is a modern invention. The modern
reassertion by means of dogmatism and authoritarianism of a tradition that has
already been historically eclipsed is what makes "fundamentalism" a
modern, and not a premodern, non-western phenomenon. Fundamentalist dogmatism and authoritarianism are
reactionary, and they fall under the third attitude toward objectivity because
they assert a privileged immediate knowledge of a putative truth immunized from
critical scrutiny and therefore stepping back from dialectical mediation. Since nothing can be true this way, however, the only
way such self-assertion of privilege can be maintained is through terror,
already implicit in bringing the charge of heresy (whether the terrorism in
question is an individual act, or "state-sponsored," or
straightforwardly statist). Once this understanding of fundamentalism according to
the third attitude toward objectivity comes into play, a more comprehensive
dialectical perspective opens up that discloses the essential link between Bush
and Bin Laden, and between Ariel Sharon and the suicide-bomber. That is, it is
fundamentalism per se that fosters terrorism, whether the shape of terror is the
September 11 attack, or the indiscriminate killing of Palestinian and Israeli
citizens, or the Taliban's reign of terror inflicted on Afghan women, or the
"collateral damages" that will continue to mount from the drive toward
permanent war. BUSH'S FUNDAMENTALISM The cogency of this analysis presupposes that Bush is a
fundamentalist, but that goes without saying. His administration should be
analyzed within the framework of the Christian Right's successful reversal of
the emancipatory forward ground that was gained in what seems like another age,
the 1960s. Since both Christian and Islamic fundamentalism are
thoroughly patriarchal and racist (remember Bob Jones University?), since
Christian fundamentalists now occupy the U.S. administration without apology,
and since the Left in the U.S. has at least been knocked off balance by
September 11 and its aftermath, an unequivocal critique of fundamentalism must
become a crucial element in left opposition. Many voices on the Left seem
momentarily paralyzed, having stopped short at first negation. Many working people in the U.S. are understandably put
off by a left opposition that cannot bring itself to oppose Islamic
fundamentalist terrorism as straightforwardly as the homegrown variety
represented, for example, by Timothy McVeigh. But as always in U.S. history, the
vanguard of opposition domestically can be found in the Black dimension and in
the ongoing struggles of women's liberation, where the critiques of racism and
patriarchy are most vital when it comes to fundamentalism, and where the
visionary transcendence of both is still most alive. Having mentioned "first negation," it is
worthwhile noticing that a politics that stops short here is also an
undialectical politics, bereft of dialectical mediation. But the THOUGHTFUL
rejection of dialectical mediation is tantamount to the third attitude towards
objectivity. In a recent letter, a friend wrote that the point in
Hegel's critique of Jacobi was that Jacobi's doctrine of immediate knowledge or
faith that takes whatever is found in immediate consciousness for the truth
offered a shortcut, whereas there is no shortcut. The strategy of the shortcut,
also when it is a strategy of opposition, is bound to be reactionary rather than
progressive. And so we cannot conceptualize the triumph of the
Christian Right in U.S. politics without also conceptualizing the defeat of the
"New Left" of what seems like an age ago. That Left's fascination with
spontaneity, with making it up as it went along, its activism for activism's
sake, and its deeply anti-theoretical posture (already betokening
"postmodernism") must today also be confessed to be integral parts of
its defeat a generation ago, as they will be again if the third attitude toward
objectivity is not thematized and its implications forthrightly stated for our
dangerous and precarious time. *All paragraph references are to Hegel's LOGIC, Part 1 of his ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHICAL SCIENCES (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978). |
|
Home l News & Letters Newspaper l Back issues l News and Letters Committees l Dialogues l Raya Dunayevskaya l Contact us l Search Published by News and Letters Committees |
