Notes

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Author : Murray Bookchin

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[1] The notion of a unilinear social development, like the one Friedrich Engels presented in Anti-Duhring, had already fallen into considerable disrepute among serious Marxists in the first half of this century, as I myself recall. One of the most troubling problems with this notion, I should note, was the “transition” from feudalism to capitalism. For my own part, I clearly challenged the idea that capitalism was the “inevitable” successor of feudalism in Urbanization Without Cities. There I argued that capitalism, from the fourteenth century until well into the eighteenth and early nineteenth, was merely part of “a mixed economy which was neither feudal, capitalist, nor structured around simple commodity production. Rather, it contained and combined elements of all three forms.” Economically as well as culturally, an open situation, so to speak, existed that could quite conceivably have led to more benign social advances and avoided the horrors that capitalism brought into the world. See Urbanization Without Cities (originally published as The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship by Sierra Club Books in 1987; published in Canada by Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1992), pp. 198–201. In this book I consistently emphasize the significance of libertarian municipalist confederations in opposition to the state — historically as well as contemporaneously.

[2] The reason for my choice of the name conventional reason is that it encompasses two logical traditions that are often referred to interchangeably, as if they were synonyms. They are in fact distinguishable, analytical reason being the highly formalized and abstract logic that was elaborated out of Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics, and instrumental reason, the more concrete rationality developed by the pragmatic tradition in philosophy. These two traditions meld, often unconsciously, into the commonsensical reason that most people use in everyday life; hence the word conventional.

[3] I wish to voice a caveat here. I may be a dialectician, but I am not a Hegelian, however much I have benefited from Hegel’s work. I do not believe in the existence of a cosmic Spirit (Geist) that finds its embodiment in the existential world or in humanity. Armed with a cosmic Spirit that elaborates itself through human history, Hegel tended to blunt the critical thrust of his dialectic and bring the “real” — the given — into conformity with the “actual” — that is, the potential. I follow out the implications of Hegel’s dialectic along naturalistic lines. Hence my view — or my interpretation, if you like — that his project, bereft of a cosmic Spirit, provides us with a rich view of reality that includes the rational “what-should-be” as well as the often irrational “what-is.” Dialectical reason is thus ontologically ethical as well as dialectically logical; a guide to rational praxis as well as a naturalistic explication of Being.

[4] G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), pp. 2–3.

[5] G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, vol. 1, trans. E. S. Haldane and Frances H Simson (New York Humanities Press, 1955), p. 22.

[6] This article was written in September 1982 and published in 1985 in Michael Tobias, ed., Deep Ecology (San Diego, Caliph.: Avant Books, 1985). It has been considerably revised for publication here.

[7] For my distinction between environmentalism and ecology — more precisely, social ecology — see my “Toward an Ecological Society,” initially delivered as a lecture at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in the spring of 1973. It was published as an essay during the same year in Roots and WIN magazines and is now available as the leading essay in the collection of my 1970s writings. Toward an Ecological Society (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1980).

[8] This phrase is taken, of course, from Max Scheler’s Man’s Place in Nature.

[9] Joseph Owens, foreword to Giovanni Reale, The Concept of First Philosophy and the Unity of “The Metaphysics” of Aristotle (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1980), p. xv.

[10] See Martin Heidegger, Early Greek Thinking, trans. D. F. Krell and F. A. Capuzzi (New York: Harper and Row, 1975).

[11] See Gregory Vlastos, “Equality and Justice in Early Greek Cosmologies,” in Studies in Presocratic Philosophy, vol. 1, The Beginnings of Philosophy, ed. David J. Furley and R. E. Allen (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; New York: Humanities Press, 1970), pp. 56–91.

[12] Lawrence J. Henderson, The Fitness of the Environment (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958), pp. 1, 5.

[13] Vlastos, “Equality and Justice,” p. 60. Heraclitus, the least democratic of the Presocratics, does not speak of isonomia but of the “One,” which we can properly distinguish from the “Whole.” This mystical thrust already prefigures neo-Platonism, which would emphasize the transcendental and the socially elitist elements in Greek philosophy.

[14] F. M. Cornford, From Religion to Philosophy: A Study in the Origins of Western Speculation (1912; New York: Harper and Row, 1957), p. 64.

[15] Ibid., p. 84.

[16] Ibid., p. 85.

[17] Karl Jaspers, Kant, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1962), pp. 50, 51.

[18] A Kantian philosophy of subjectivity is certainly inadequate for social theory. To call for “intersubjectivity,” for example, as in Jurgen Habermas’s “ideal speech situation,” without specifying what kind of political institutions are needed to give that “intersubjectivity” rational form, tells us little about the role of “intersubjectivity” in social relations. That Habermas himself, at this writing (1994), has turned to social democracy as the best route to social rationality is evidence of the waywardness of “intersubjectivity” as a conceptual basis for social theory, analysis, and reconstruction.

[19] G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Mind, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1971), p. 315.

[20] Gregory Bateson, *Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity& (New York: E. P Dutton, 1979), p. 11.

[21] Ibid., pp. 31, 93.

[22] Arthur Koestler, Janus: A Summing Up (New York: Random House, 1978).

[23] I have explored the mechanistic aspects of cybernetics and systems theory in “Energy, ‘Ecotechnology, and Ecology,” in my Toward an Ecological Society (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1980).

[24] Morris Berman, an admirer of Bateson’s work, has carefully explored the highly authoritarian character of Bateson’s social outlook in The Reenchantment of the World (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981), pp. 280–96. I disagree with Berman’s view, however, that an anarchic ecological society follows from Bateson’s cybernetic approach.

[25] Koesder, Janus, pp. 30–34. Koestler tries to rescue the word hierarchy as an expression of “flexibility and freedom” in counterposition to reductionism, even as the term hierarchy haunts him because “it is loaded with military and ecclesiastical associations ... [and] conveys the impression of a rigid, authoritarian structure.” I will certainly not dispute this latter view.

[26] Bateson, Mind and Nature, p. 199.

[27] Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Robots, Men and Minds: Psychology in the Modern World (New York: Braziller, 1967), p, 9.

[28] Ibid., pp. 69,71.

[29] Gregoire Nicolis and Ilya Prigogine, Self-Organization in Nonequilibrium Systems (New York: John Wiley, 1977). For more on Prigoginian systems theory, see my essay “Thinking Ecologically,” elsewhere in this book.

[30] By far the best English translation of Diderotis works is Jean Stewart and Jonathan Kemp’s Diderot: Interpreter of Nature: Selected Writings (New York: International Publishers, 1936), which captures the elegance and rich nuance of Diderot’s prose that are often lost in English translations.

[31] G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V Miller (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1977), p. 49.

[32] Friedrich Engels, Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, in Marx and Engels, Selected Works, vol. 2, p. 330; quoted in Georg Lukács, The Young Hegel: Studies in the Relations between Dialectics and Economics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press; London: The Merlin Press, 1975), p. 468.

[33] See Erwin Schrodinger, What is Life? Mind and Matter (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1956). For a more detailed account of the new advances in astrophysics and biology, see my Vie Ecology of Freedom (1982; Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1990), from which a number of these passages, generally in modified form, are drawn.

[34] W.illiam Trager, Symbiosis (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1970), p. vii.

[35] Lynn Margulis, Symbiosis in Cell Evolution (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 198l). My citation of Margulis applies only to her notion that life played a role in creating the biosphere. It should not be taken as endorsing either her reductionist views of prokaryotic cells or her acceptance of the mystical Gaia Hypothesis.

[36] Manfred Eigen, “Molecular Self-Organization and the Early Stages of Evolution,” Quarterly Review of Biophysics, vol. 4 (1971), p. 202.

[37] Margulis, Symbiosis, pp. 348–49.

[38] Elizabeth Vrba cited in Robert Lewin, “Evolutionary Theory Under Fire” Science, vol. 210 (1980), pp. 885.

[39] Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life (New York: Delta, 1966), pp. 82, 90.

[40] This article was originally published in Alternatives, vol. 13, no. 4 (November 1986). It has been significantly revised for publication here.

[41] Despite some recent nonsense to the effect that the Frankfurt School reconnoitered a nonhierarchical and ecological view of society’s future, in no sense were its ablest thinkers, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, resolutely critical of hierarchy and domination. Rather, their views were clearly pessimistic: reason and civilization, for better or worse, entail “uncompromising individuals [who] may have been in favor of unity and cooperation ... to build a strong hierarchy.... The history of the old religions and schools like that of the modern parties and revolutions teaches us that the price for survival is practical involvement, the transformation of ideas into domination.” See Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972; originally published in 1944), pp. 213, 215. The power of these thinkers lay in their opposition to positivism and the theoretical problems they raised, not in the solutions they offered. Attempts to make them into proto-social ecologists, much less precursors of bioregionalism, involve a gross misreading of their ideas or, worse, a failure to read their works at all.

[42] This approach was still rather new some twenty-five years ago, when I pioneered it together with rare colleagues like Charles S. Elton. Today it has become commonplace in ecological and environmental thinking, as have organic methods of gardening.

[43] Darwin did not deny the role of animal interactivity in evolution, particularly in the famous Chapter 3 of The Origin of Species, where he suggests that “ever-increasing circles of complexity” check populations that, left uncontrolled, would reach pest proportions. But he sees this as a “battle within battles [which] must be continually recurring with varying success” (on p. 58 of the Modern Library edition). Moreover, “the dependency of one organic being on another” — typically “as of a parasite on its prey” — is secondary to the struggle “between individuals of the same species” (p. 60). Like most Victorians, Darwin had a strongly providential and moral side to his character: “we may console ourselves,” he assures us, “that the war of nature is generally prompt, and that the vigorous, the healthy, and the happy survive and multiply” (p. 62). Indeed: “How fleeting are the wishes and efforts of man! how short his time! and consequently how poor will be his results, compared with those accumulated by Nature’s productions during whole geological periods! Can we wonder, then, that Nature’s productions should be far ‘truer’ than man’s productions; that they should be infinitely better adapted to the most complex conditions of life, and should plainly bear the stamp of a far higher workmanship?” (p. 66). These remarks do not make Darwin an ecologist but are marvelous asides to a thesis that emphasizes variation, selection, fitness, and above all struggle. Yet one cannot help but be entranced by a moral sensibility that would have been magnificently responsive to the message of modern ecology and that deserves none of the onerous rubbish that has been imputed to the man because of social Darwinism.

[44] See Murray Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom (Palo Alto: Cheshire Books, 1982; Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1991), pp. 68–69.

[45] An ecological approach can spare us some of the worst absurdities of sociobiology and biological reductionism. The popular notion that our deep-seated “reptilian” brain is responsible for our aggressive, “brutish,” and cruel behavioral traits may make for good television dramas like Cosmos, but it is ridiculous science. Like all the great animal groups, most Mesozoic reptiles were almost certainly gentle herbivores, not carnivores — and those that were carnivores were probably neither more nor less aggressive, “brutish,” or “cruel” than mammals. Our images of Tyrannosaurus rex (a creature whose generic name is sociological nonsense) may be inordinately frightening, but they grossly distort the reptilian life-forms on which the carnivore preyed. If anything, the majority of Mesozoic reptiles were probably very pacific and easily frightened, all the more because they were not particularly intelligent vertebrates. What remains unacknowledged in this imagery of fierce, fire-breathing, and “unfeelingly cruel” reptiles is the implicit assumption of different psychic sensibilities in reptiles and mammals, the latter presumably being more “sensitive” and “understanding” than the former. A psychic evolution in nonhuman beings thus goes together with the evolution of intelligence. Yet confronted with the unstated premises of such evolutionary trends, few scientists would find them comfortable.

[46] This project is elaborated in considerable detail in my book The Ecology of Freedom.

[47] Hence freedom is no longer resolvable into a strident nihilistic negativity or a trite instrumental positivity. Rather, in its open-endedness, it contains both and transcends them as a continuing process. Freedom thus resists precise definition just as it resists terminal finality. It is always becoming, hopefully surpassing what it was in the past and developing into what it can be in the future.

[48] This essay was originally published in Our Generation, vol. 18, no. 2 (Spring-Summer 1987). It has been revised for publication here.

[49] This basically Marxian thesis, which all members of the Frankfurt School took for granted, is repeatedly misinterpreted, particularly in the ecology movement, when it is discussed at all. However much they opposed domination, neither Adorno nor Horkheimer singled out hierarchy as an underlying problematic in their writings. Indeed, their residual Marxian premises led to a historical fatalism that saw any liberatory enterprise (beyond art, perhaps) as hopelessly tainted by the need to dominate nature and consequently “man.” This position stands completely at odds with my own view that the notion — and no more than an unrealizable notion — of dominating nature stems from the domination of human by human. This is not a semantic difference in accounting for the origins of domination. Like Marx, the Frankfurt School saw nature as a “domineering” force over humanity that human guile — and class rule — had to exorcize before a classless society was possible. The Frankfurt School, no less than Marxism, placed the onus for domination primarily on the demanding forces of nature.

My own writings radically reverse this very traditional view of the relationship between society and nature. I argue that the idea of dominating nature first arose within society as part of its institutionalization into gerontocracies that placed the young in varying degrees of servitude to the old and in patriarchies that placed women in varying degrees of servitude to men — not in any endeavor to “control” nature or natural forces. Various modes of social institutionalization, not modes of organizing human labor (so crucial to Marx), were the first sources of domination, which is not to deny Marx’s thesis that class society was economically exploitative. Hence, domination can be definitively removed only by resolving problematics that have their origins in hierarchy and status, not in class and the technological control of nature alone.

[50] Leon E. Stover, The Cultural Ecology of Chinese Civilization (New York: Pica Press, 1974).

[51] It is a compelling commentary on their naivete that Westerners can so readily ignore oriental despotism in favor of a romantic reverence for Asian “sages.” Chinese elites perfected an exquisitely cruel ethos toward the masses, whom they not only exploited physically but degraded spiritually. That this peasantry quietistically bent its head to the yoke does not speak well for Chinese “sages.” The Tao Te Ching is an eminently political collection of passages. From the viewpoint of social ecology — which pointedly studies the social origins of a nature ideology and explores its logic — the passivity toward nature that the Tao Te Ching fostered could easily have been transposed into society, just as nature philosophy in the West has served social elites in the worst of cases, and rebels in the best. In any case, in 1989 Chinese students exhibited more interest in Western than Eastern ideals: they invoked ideals more redolent of the French Revolution than the Tao Te Ching by taking to the streets with demands for democracy and human rights.

[52] Fritjof Capra, The Turning Point (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), pp. 286–87.

[53] Ibid., pp. 287,412.

[54] Ibid., p. 288.

[55] Ibid.

[56] See Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order Out of Chaos (New York: Bantam Books, 1984), pp. 291–310. The notion of the irreversibility of time, appropriate as it may be for Prigogine to emphasize it in order to exorcize a mechanistic dynamics based on time’s reversibility, is not congruent with process and evolution; it is merely one presupposition of these phenomena.

[57] That such cosmic formulas cannot explain the foundations of either organic or social development is not an argument against “foundationalism” — that is, the view that there are explanations that can account for differentiae in the biological and social as well as the inorganic physical world. Our world has more coherence than many relativists today are willing to admit, with its different levels of unfolding and, in their scope, different foundations, degrees of possibility, subjectivity and, with humanity, reason.

[58] Capra, Turning Point, p. 288.

[59] Ibid., pp. 300,393.

[60] Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature (New York: E.P Dutton, 1979), p. 31.

[61] For a more complete discussion of nature’s fecundity and its source in species variety, see my “Freedom and Necessity in Nature,” elsewhere in this book.

[62] Human self-hatred, I may add, is not a psychological phenomenon alone; it has ugly social roots. The privileged hate not other privileged but the underprivileged, generally accusing them of “anthropocentric” vices and subjecting them to the constraints of “natural law.”

[63] 16. David Foreman, interviewed by Bill Devall, “A Spanner in the Woods,” Simply Living, vol. 12 (c. 1986).

[64] Let me make it clear that I believe that nature is neither hierarchical nor egalitarian — concepts that are meaningless unless they are institutionalized socially, which presupposes a human presence in the biosphere, or second nature. What we encounter in first nature is complementarity, the mutualistic interaction of life-forms in maintaining a nonhuman ecological community. At this biological level, complementarity is not an ethics — which is associated with reasoned behavior — but a descriptive datum related to mutualism. I used the word complementarity to denote an ethics in The Ecology of Freedom. Since that book was published, “natural law” devotees have picked up on it with minimal acknowledgment and turned it into a “law of complementarity” — a regressive use of the concept if there ever was one.

[65] I am not speaking about “dialectical materialism,” which, whatever the intentions of Marx and Engels, used Hegelian terms and concepts to formulate what was little more than a scientistic “dialectical” mechanism. My purpose is not to flesh out the skeleton of dialectical philosophy with “materialism” or a latter-day nominalist physicality, but to bring nature into the foreground of dialectical thought in an evolutionary and organismic way.

[66] G.R.G. Mure, Aristotle (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), p. 7.

[67] It is arguable whether Hegel saw teleology as an inflexible predetermination of the development of the “real” in its beginnings. Hegel’s Logic exists on a different level from the existential reality we experience in history and everyday life. Its “purified” categories are developed from each other with a “logical necessity” and, in a metaphoric sense, could be seen as a rational level parallel to the existential level from which they are abstracted. This logos, as it were, could be taken as an exemplary and thus inherently critical vision of the world in a highly subjectivized form whose “logic” yields a distinct rational conclusion, just as Plato’s domain of forms has been regarded by many Platonists as exemplary in a normative sense, as distinguished from the flawed world that we experience around us.

[68] Responsibility for the confusion about the meaning of the words real and actual is by no means Hegel’s but rather that of some of his translators The German word wirklich has a family of English meanings that include “real” as well as “actual.” Hegel was quite scrupulous in distinguishing the “real” from the “actual” in his Science of Logic, where “reality,” as he put it in his discussion of “Determinate Being,” seems “to be an ambiguous word,” while “Actuality is the unity of Essence and Existence. See the Johnston and Struthers translation, Science of Logic (New York Macmillan, 1929), vol. 1, p. 124, and vol. 2, p. 160. The problem arose whet Hegel’s famous maxim, Was vernünftig ist, das ist wirklich; und was wirklich ist, das ist vernünftig, was mistranslated as “What is rational is real, and what is real is rational.” The correct and philosophically meaningful translation is “What is rational is actual, and what is actual is rational.” The mistranslation, which rendered real and actual synonyms, conceived the Hegelian real as the actualization of the potential. The mischief this mistranslation produced in the interpretation of Hegel’s ideas is matched only by the confusion it produced in the interpretation of the maxim itself. Engels, ironically, clarified Hegel’s meaning wonderfully — albeit using real rather than actual. See his Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of German Philosophy, in Marx and Engels, Selected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970), vol. 3, pp. 337–38. I am not nitpicking here: the odium that Hegelian philosophy acquired as an apologia for the Prussian state rests in no small part on the failure to properly interpret — and translate — this famous maxim in Hegel’s Encyclopedia Logic and Philosophy of Right.

[69] G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy (New York: Humanities Press, 1955), vol. 1, p. 22 (my emphasis). Here Hegel is describing the dialectic in unknowing nature. “In Mind it is otherwise,” he is quick to add; “it is consciousness and therefore it is free, uniting in itself the beginning and the end — that is to say, intention, striving, and predetermination” (p. 22). In fact, from my viewpoint the conclusion that “Mind” is “free” could also mean that knowing beings can be wayward, idiosyncratic and one-sided, and — unlike nonhuman beings — cruel and, put bluntly, evil.

[70] Unfortunately, this has not been noticed in most commentaries on Hegel’s oeuvre, much less in philosophy generally, which seems more occupied with establishing what Heidegger means by “Being” than with other concepts of Being in Western thought.

[71] “What-could-be,” insofar as it involves organic subjectivity and flexibility, derives from the natural realm of potentiality. “What-should-be,” the unfolding of the rational, is an ethical extrapolation of individual and social potentialities, of attributes of the truly self-determining person and society.

[72] Viewed from this standpoint, there is a sense in which Hegel’s “objective idealism” was more objective than his materialist critics realized. Possibilities — that is, the actualizations of existential potentialities — are as objective as the inherence of an oak tree in an acorn. Ethically, this highly illuminating approach establishes a standard of fulfillment — an objective good, as it were — that literally informs the existential with a goal of objective fulfillment, just as we say in everyday life that an individual who does not “live up” to his or her capabilities is an “unfulfilled” person and, in a sense, a less than “real” person.

[73] Antihumanist “ethicists” actually take this argument seriously, I have been startled to learn. In biocentric ethics, reports Bernard Dixon, no “logical line can be drawn” between the conservation of whales, gentians, and flamingoes on the one hand and the conservation of pathogenic microbes like the smallpox virus on the other, which, according to one antihumanist wag (David Ehrenfeld), is “an endangered species.” Logical consistency requires that we try to rescue the smallpox virus with the same ethical dedication that we bring to the survival of whales. See Bernard Dixon, “Smallpox — Imminent Extinction, and an Unresolved Problem,” New Scientist, vol. 69 (1976). For an antihumanist position that verges on sheer misanthropy, see David Ehrenfeld, The Arrogance of Humanism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978).

[74] Bill Devall and George Sessions, Deep Ecology (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith Books, 1985), p. 67.

[75] Or else by regarding the human condition with ugly indifference. Misanthropy, indeed an inhumanity, labeled biocentrism, “deep ecology,” or population control, could provide a brutal mandate for human suffering and authoritarian state control. Ecology, on these terms, threatens to become an ideology that is cruel, not sharing or cooperative.

[76] The more one examines the literature of biocentrists, antihumanists, and “deep ecologists,” the more one senses manipulation. Their appeals to human feelings like empathy and identification are translated into “rights” that rest heavily on the historical development of humanism. Humanism involves not simply a claim to humanity’s “superiority” over the nonhuman world but, significantly, an appeal to human reason and a social ethics of cooperation. Great social movements, uprisings, and ideologies, not to speak of self-sacrificing individuals, were committed to the achievement of these monumental goals — a history that is simply effaced from much of the biocentrist, antihumanist, and “deep ecology” literature. Often, their place is taken by a nagging denigration of the human spirit, decorated with metaphors lifted from Eastern philosophy. Social analysis tends to be minimized and even deflected by a privileged and inward concern with abstractions like “interconnectedness” and “oneness” — in a society riven by genuine conflicts between rich and poor, privileged and denied, and man and woman, not to speak of “deep,” “deeper,” and the “deepest” ecologists.

[77] Moreover, despite this tendency to bifurcate objectivity and subjectivity, the two do not exclude each other. There is always a subjective dimension to objectivity, but it is precisely the relationship between the two that requires explication.

[78] Moral relativism has recently been the breeding ground of a purely functional or instrumental form of rationality, which in my view is one of the greatest impediments to serious social analysis and a meaningful ethics. “Subjective reason,” to use Max Horkheimer’s phrase from The Eclipse of Reason, on which a relativistic approach rests, has been one of the major afflictions of Anglo-American thinking, not merely within the academy but within the general public.

[79] Predicated as their self-realization is in their own potentialities, human beings nevertheless cannot do as they please, despite the assertions of “beautiful souls,” to use Hegel’s phrase, who live in an aerie of personal liberation and self-contained “autonomy.” Here, Marx was a good deal ahead of today’s individualistic anarchists who have a bad habit of disrupting serious attempts at organization and theoretical inquiry with simplistic cries of “Freedom now!”

[80] Nothing is easier, more mystifying, and more smug these days than to advance sweeping, ahistorical generalizations about figures like Hegel, Marx, and Lenin. It is evidence of the ugly intellectual degradation of our time that people who should know better make them so flippantly. One might as well claim that Stalin’s totalitarianism had its roots in Machiavelli’s so-called “Atlantic Republican Tradition” since the latter was the author of The Prince; or in Plato, as Karl Popper so notoriously did. Yet Hegel would undoubtedly have resolutely opposed Marx’s view of the dialectic; Marx might very well have disowned Lenin, as the Marxist Rosa Luxemburg and the council communists Gorter and Pannekoek did; and Stalin would certainly have imprisoned Lenin, as Lenin’s widow bitterly reproached Trotsky in 1925, after the former Red Army commander belatedly began to attack Stalin.

[81] Many of these former Marxists (particularly “New Left” students and their professors) polluted the sixties with their pet dogmas, only to “grow up” after they had “had their fun” (to rephrase a cynical expression of many Parisian veterans of 1968) and are now polluting the nineties with skepticism, nihilism, and subjectivism. The most serious obstacles to the development of an authentic New Left today are the Alain Touraines, Andr£ Gorzes, and Michael Walzers who have rallied variously to “market socialism,” “minimal statism,” or pluralized concepts of justice and freedom that are perfectly compatible with modern capitalism. The worst fate that an idea can meet is to be kept artificially alive, long after it has died historically, in the form of graduate courses at the New School for Social Research in New York City.

[82] It is easy, when criticizing scientism as an ideology, to forget the role that the natural sciences themselves played in subverting beliefs in witchcraft and superstition, and in fostering a secular and naturalistic approach to reality. I would like to think that we no longer believe in Dracula, or in the power of the crucifix to fend off vampires, or in the occult power of women to communicate with demons — or do we?

[83] See my “Introduction: A Philosophical Naturalism,” elsewhere in this book.

[84] Indeed, there may be a “logic to events,” but it would be the logic of conventional reason, based on mere cause-and-effect and the principle of identity, A equals A, not dialectical reason.

[85] See James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993).

[86] See my forthcoming book Re-Enchanting Humanity (London: Cassell, 1995), for a more detailed discussion of these issues.

[87] Ironically, it even vitiates the meaning of social anarchism as an ethical socialism.

[88] I find no solace in the notion that preliterate peoples “enjoyed” an “affluent society,” as Marshall Sahlins would have it. Their lives were all too often short, their cultures burdened by superstition and bereft of a syllabic system of writing, and they normally were at war with each other, to cite only their major afflictions, pastoral New Age images of their lives to the contrary.

[89] Indeed, even nominalistic historians who see History as a series of accidents often tacitly presuppose the existence of the “nonaccidental” (perhaps even the rational) in a social development.

[90] See chapter 11 of my The Ecology of Freedom (1982; reprinted by Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1992).

[91] I find no view more one-sided and noxious than Theodor Adorno’s dictum, “No universal history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one leading from the slingshot to the megaton bomb.” This inflated, less than thought-out pronouncement, taken together with Adorno’s commitment to a negativity that rejected sublation (Aufhebung), or social and ideological advances, was a step toward nihilism, indeed, an ugly demonization of humanity, that belied his affirmations of reason. See Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Seabury Press 1973), p. 320.

[92] I deliberately eschew the words Totality and Spirit to preclude any such suggestion.

[93] The name of another chapter in The Ecology of Freedom.

[94] G.W.F. Hegel, “Reason as Lawgiver,” in Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 252–56.

[95] Hegel for all his entanglements with the notion of Giest or “Spirit” and despite his conception of a predetermined “Absolute,” at least had the good sense to distinguish the self-development of nonhuman life-forms, for instance, from the self-development of humanity or, for that matter, society. See G.W.F. Hegel, “Introduction,” Lectures on the History of Philosophy, vol. 1, trans. E. S. Haldane and Frances H. Simson (1892; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, and New York: The Humanities Press, 1955, 1968), pp. 22–23.

[96] Present-day cosmology and biophysics, however, are coming up against phenomena whose explanation requires the flexible concepts of development advanced by dialectical naturalism.

[97] Karl Marx, “Toward a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law: Introduction,” Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, trans. Lloyd D. Easton and Kurt H. Guddat (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday and Co., 1967) p. 259.

[98] W. T. Stace’s Critical History of Greek Philosophy, for example, shows how a series of ancient Greek thinkers rounded out increasingly full but still one-sided views to produce the most advanced dialectical philosophy of their time, particularly that of Aristotle. Certainly the development of insight into the dialectical nature of reality did not end with the Greeks. Nor will it end with thinkers in our time, any more than science ended in the nineteenth century, when so many physicists thought little more could be added to complete Newtonian physics. In his history of philosophy, Hegel pointed out not only different degrees of dialectical reason, which approximated different degrees of truth (which in no way means that he was a “relativist”), but different kinds of rationality — “Understanding” or Verstand, of the commonsensical kind, and “Reason” or Vernunft, of the dialectical kind.

[99] Recently, dialectical naturalism has been criticized for committing the “epistemological fallacy,” in which a priori concepts become their own conditions of validity, rendering dialectics as such a self-validating system. This, as if dialectic naturalism were not structured around the reality of potentiality and were purely an a priori speculative form of reason. Yet these critics themselves usually use the kind of logic that employs the most a priori, indeed tautological of all concepts, the principle of identity, A equals A, in preference to dialectical reason.

[100] This view is not new for me. In The Ecology of Freedom, completed in 1980 and published in 1982, I was at pains to indicate that “the Dialectic of Enlightenment is actually no dialectic at all — at least not in its attempt to explain the negation of reason through its own self-development” (p. 272). My respect for the Frankfurt School rested largely on its insightful critique of positivism, which was the dominant philosophical fad in American universities and social theory (so-called “sociology”) in the 1940s and 1950s, and on its various insights into Hegelian philosophy. Today, these valuable contributions are far outweighed by the ease with which the Frankfurt School’s work has fostered postmodern views in the United States and Germany and by the extent to which its products, especially Adorno’s writings, have become academic commodities.

[101] Nor does a verbal paradox that contrasts seemingly related but opposing ideas, or colorful expressions of alterity, constitute a dialectic in the sense in which I have discussed it here, however much it seems to resemble formulations in Hegel and the best of Marx. Adorno’s provocative endeavors of this kind often turn out to be little more than that — provocations.

[102] Presented by the IKD’s Auslands Kommitee (Committee Abroad), this huge document long predated Socialisme ou Barbarie. The ideas that it ad vanced, however, are moot today. Extrapolating Hitler’s seeming war aims of the early 1940s — to reduce industrialized Western European countries to mere satellites of German capital and to agrarianize and depopulate the East — to the world at large, this theory of imperialism (and barbarism) argued that deindustrialization would be exported to undeveloped countries, and not, as old Marxist theories of imperialism had assumed in the prewar period, capital.

[103] Nor did we, by the late 1940s, regard the workers’ movement — indeed, “workers’ councils” or “workers’ control of industry” — as revolutionary, especially with the sequelae of the great strike movements of the late 1940s, which directly affected my own life as a worker.

[104] The notion of an “instinct for freedom,” touted by many radical theorists, is a sheer oxymoron. The compelling, indeed necessitarian character of instinct makes it the very antithesis of freedom, whose liberating dimensions are grounded in choice and self-consciousness.

From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.

Chronology :

January 02, 2021 : Notes -- Added.

January 16, 2022 : Notes -- Updated.

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