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NEWS & LETTERS, April - May 2008Philosophic dialogueWhat is epochal?Tom More's essay "On concretizing a 'Philosophic Moment'" (News & Letters, February-March, 2008) is a very helpful contribution to the question. While he touches upon a number of interesting points, I'd like to focus on his formulation: "The question Dunayevskaya was raising with such provocative urgency in her June 1 [1987] Presentation went far beyond the intramural affairs of News and Letters Committees, reaching up to a question of epoch-making world-historical importance, one that might strike us as even more urgent 20 years after 'the year of the book,' when the need to concretize a philosophically grounded alternative to capitalist society has grown even more desperate." I think this is true. What Dunayevskaya says in that June 1 Presentation is both organizationally concrete and truly profound. One can see this by looking first at her sentence More quotes, "...because philosophy has not permeated the paper [News & Letters], THEREFORE, it didn't permeate the organization." She then raises the necessity for a new kind of newspaper--more generally, one might say, a new kind of philosophic projection. She isn't bringing this up as an "ought," without having worked out ground for it. In fact, one could see that very sentence as a syllogistic summation of the contents of her 1953 letters on Hegel's Absolutes, that is, her own "philosophic moment." A syllogism of the dialectics of organization and philosophy. The very category of "philosophic moment" as it is laid out in 1987 thus becomes inseparable from that new concept of projection of Marxist-Humanism that is called for. It is the newspaper, News & Letters, that becomes the term that brings together philosophy and organization. One way to think about this would be to see the way Dunayevskaya's 1953 discussion of the final syllogisms of Hegel's Philosophy of Mind, and the Self-Determination of the Idea as "We have entered the new society," stands behind her 1987 injunction that "...the context of each person's activity and special point of concentration...will be inseparable from the meaning of that activity." The call for a new kind of newspaper is inseparable here from the effort to work out "what happens after" in the spirit of Marx's Critique of the Gotha Program. As new as this seems to me (and perhaps still "untrodden" by anyone, as More notes) it wouldn't be without precedent in Dunayevskaya's writings. I'm thinking especially of a question from Chapter 1 of her Philosophy and Revolution (1973) that has always intrigued me and never quite been explained to my satisfaction: "Is it just ontological Idealism's 'delusion' (to use an expression of Marx) that thinks it can 'absorb' the objective world into itself, or is it the ideal toward which man aims, and can it be both?" Her concept of philosophic projection, as set out in the June 1, 1987, Presentation, is one possible answer to this question, I think. In concretizing her own philosophic moment in 1987, Dunayevskaya perhaps thus spoke to such lacunae in the work of Marx and Hegel. In itself, this is profound, but at least as important is the way it can open up new ways to think about the projection of revolutionary philosophy, and the invitation to all the writers for News & Letters to re-experience that philosophic moment. That could be epochal. --Tim Finnigan |
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