www.newsandletters.org
|
|
NEWS & LETTERS,
January-February 2002
From the Writings of Raya Dunayevskaya:
Marxist-Humanist Archives
Another look at Hegel's PHENOMENOLOGY OF MIND
Editor's Note
We publish here a chapter of
THE POWER OF NEGATIVITY consisting of a discussion of what Marx considered
Hegel's greatest philosophic work—THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF MIND. The first piece
is a letter written by Raya Dunayevskaya to an Iranian colleague on June 26,
1986(1); the original can be found in the SUPPLEMENT TO THE RAYA DUNAYEVSKAYA
COLLECTION, 10769. The second piece is an Introduction to a republication in
News & Letters, May 8, 1987, of her 1960 "Notes on Hegel's
PHENOMENOLOGY," the text of which appears in Part II of THE POWER OF
NEGATIVITY. To order the book, see the literature ad on page 8. Footnotes are
the editor's except those noted as the author's. LETTER OF JUNE 26, 1986, ON
HEGEL'S PHENOMENOLOGY OF MIND Let me tell you some of the
past from a faraway age—and I'm not talking so much about Marx (much less
Marxist-Humanism), but about Hegel. Why do you suppose academics to this day
refer to PHENOMENOLOGY OF MIND as "chaotic," "very brilliant and
profound in spots," but definitely "Hegel didn't know where he was
headed"; that he didn't even have subheads once he came to
"Spirit"? It was because he didn't have
the categories worked out systematically as they were in SCIENCE OF LOGIC, where
it was nice and smooth and they took for granted they understood it; they
certainly could repeat the categories; indeed, though it took them all the way
until 1929 (having rejected the translation that was done in America by the
Hegelians in St. Louis) before they published an English translation, they then
appended a long and precise list of categories—128 to be exact—so that
anyone can repeat them if they can memorize 128 names(2). We have yet to get any serious,
full explanation of why there has been no reference to the fact that the year
before Hegel died, he felt that he should add the three final syllogisms to the
Absolute Mind. Do you know why that is? I'll tell you why. It is because we
haven't understood that PHENOMENOLOGY OF MIND (1807, not 1830) projected ground
for the Absolutes, and they haven't understood that ground because it was the
French Revolution. And Hegel was saying very passionately: "Look at what
happened in France, and we haven't even developed a single dialectical category,
and we are talking philosophy time and time again."(3) The whole philosophy
of 2,500 years has to find a new language, and here it is. Academics had no
vision then and they have no vision now. The whole truth is that between 1807
and 1831 (death) it was a matter of developing that movement, historic movement,
and that vision Marx alone saw. And he saw it because he was in a new age and
needed a new language to express the forces and the Reason of Revolution [as]
both continuity and discontinuity of the dialectic and of the new European
Revolutions (1840s). That is why a serious Introduction is really always written
at the end and is at the same time an Overview, which is what Marx was doing
from 1843 to 1883. *** INTRODUCTION TO 'WHY HEGEL'S
PHENOMENOLOGY? WHY NOW?" "The Spirit of the time,
growing slowly and quietly ripe for the new form it is to assume, disintegrates
one fragment after another of the structure of its previous world. That it is
tottering to fall is indicated only by symptoms here and there. Frivolity and
again ennui, which are spreading in the established order of things, the
undefined foreboding of something unknown—all these betoken that there is
something else approaching. This gradual crumbling to pieces, which did not
alter the general look and aspect of the whole, is interrupted by the sunrise,
which, in a flash and at a single stroke, brings to view the form and structure
of the new world." —Hegel, Preface to THE
PHENOMENOLOGY OF MIND [PhGB, p. 75; PhGM, pp. 6-7](4) The most difficult of all tasks
that have confronted every generation of Marxists is to work out Marx's Marxism
for its age; the task has never been more difficult than the one that confronts
the decade of the 1980s. We often like to quote that creatively great statement
of Hegel about the "birth-time of History" [PhGB, p. 75; PhGM, p. 6].
What is important to see is that the same paragraph that talks of the birth-time
of history and a period of transition is likewise one that speaks about the
period of darkness before the dawn. That is what we all have had to
suffer through—the darkness before the dawn. Hegel articulated both the
darkness and the dawn in the very same paragraph lucidly enough. Yet, because
this appears in the Preface to THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF MIND, it looks as if it were
written in anticipation of the book, whereas, in truth, the Preface was written
after the whole work was completed; thus, we do not realize that the
contradictory unity first became that translucent after the work was completed. It never fails that, at
momentous world historic turning points, it is very difficult to tell the
difference between two types of twilight—whether one is first plunging into
utter darkness or whether one has reached the end of a long night and is just at
the moment before the dawn of a new day. In either case, the challenge to find
the meaning—what Hegel called "the undefined foreboding of something
unknown"—becomes a compulsion to dig for new beginnings, for a philosophy
that would try to answer the question "where to begin?" This was the
reason for a new revolutionary philosophy—the birth of the Hegelian
dialectic—at the time the great French Revolution did not produce totally new
beginnings in philosophy. It caused Hegel's break with romanticism. His deep
digging went, at one and the same time, backward and forward as the French
Revolution was followed by the Napoleonic era trying to dominate all of Europe. In a word, the crucible of
history shows that the forces of actual revolution producing revolutions in
philosophy recur at historic turning points. Thus in the 1840s, with the rise of
a totally new revolutionary class—the "wretched of the earth,"(5)
the proletariat—Marx transformed Hegel's revolution in philosophy into a
philosophy of revolution. This founding of a new continent of thought and of
revolution unchained the Hegelian dialectic, which Marx called "revolution
in permanence." Just as the shock of the
simultaneity of the outbreak of World War I and the collapse of established
Marxism (the Second International) compelled Lenin to turn to Marx's deep-rootedness
in the Hegelian Dialectic(6), so it has become imperative to find that
missing link of a philosophy of revolution in the post-World War II world. A whole new world—a Third
World—has been born. Just as the East European revolutionaries rose up against
Communist totalitarianism from within that orbit, so the Third World arose
against Western imperialism. This movement from practice that is itself a form
of theory has been digging for ways to put an end to the separation between
theory and practice. It is this movement that has rediscovered Marx's early
Humanist Essays, as well as the work of his final decade where Marx predicted,
in his studies of pre-capitalist societies, that a revolution could come first
in a technologically backward land rather than in the technologically advanced
West. It has had to struggle under the whip of counter-revolution in a nuclearly
armed world. Nowhere has this been more
onerous than in the 1980s under the Reagan retrogressionism, which has been bent
on turning the clock backward—whether that be on civil rights, labor, women's
liberation, youth and education or children. At the same time that there is this
ideological pollution and the revolutionary struggle against it, even some
bourgeois Hegel scholars who opposed the "subversion" of Hegel by Marx
and by today's Marxist-Humanists have had to admit: "If Hegel has not
literally been to the barricades of strife-ridden cities, or explosive rural
focos, he has been in the thick of current ideological combat."(7) In its way, this, too, will
help illuminate why we are publishing "Why Hegel's PHENOMENOLOGY ? Why
Now?" It will have two parts. What follows, as Part I, is a study of
Hegel's first (and what Marx considered his most creative) work, PHENOMENOLOGY
OF MIND (GEIST), written as Lecture Notes for a class I gave on the
PHENOMENOLOGY in the 1960s.(8) Part II, which will follow in the near future,
will be an essay on the Hegelian Dialectic as Marx critiqued it in his HUMANIST
ESSAYS in 1844 and continued to develop it throughout his life.(9) This is seen
most clearly in Marx's greatest theoretical work, CAPITAL, especially in the
final section of chapter 1, which Marx expanded on the "Fetishism of
Commodities," in his last decade. It is there that a citation of what first
appeared in Marx's 1841 Doctoral Thesis reveals Marx's continued deep-rootedness
in Hegel.(10) NOTES 1. It was written to the
historian Janet Afary, author of THE IRANIAN CONSTITUTIONAL REVOLUTION, 1906-11
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). 2. This "Table of
Categories" is found in the Johnston and Struthers translation of the
SCIENCE OF LOGIC (New York: MacMillan, 1929). 3. Not a direct quote, but
Dunayevskaya's summary of his position in a dramatic form. 4. "PhGB" refers to
Hegel's PHENOMENOLOGY as translated by J.B. Baillie (Allen & Unwin, 1930);
"PhGM" refers to the translation by A.V. Miller (Oxford University
Press, 1975). 5. This phrase is taken from
the revolutionary hymn, "The Internationale," composed in 1871 by the
Paris Communard Eugène Pottier. 6. See "Lenin and the
Dialectic: A Mind in Action" and "The Irish Revolution and the
Dialectic of History" in Part IV—"World War I and the Great Divide
in Marxism"—of my MARXISM AND FREEDOM, FROM 1776 UNTIL TODAY.—RD 7. See George Armstrong Kelly's
HEGEL'S RETREAT FROM ELEUSIS [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978], p.
224, and my answer to his critique of my Philosophy and Revolution: From Hegel
to Sartre and from Marx to Mao in the new Introduction I wrote for the 1982
edition.—RD 8. For this study, see Part II
of THE POWER OF NEGATIVITY. 9. Dunayevskaya did not live to
complete her Part II of "Why PHENOMENOLOGY ? Why Now?" She did write a
rough draft of it, entitled "Why PHENOMENOLOGY ? Why Now? What is the
Relationship either to Organization, or to Philosophy, not Party, 1984-87?"
It can be found in the SUPPLEMENT TO THE RAYA DUNAYEVSKAYA COLLECTION, 10883-90. 10. In the section on the
"Fetishism of Commodities" in chapter 1 of CAPITAL, Marx refers to
Epicurus, the subject matter of his doctoral dissertation of 1841. |
|
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 |
