WEBVTT NOTE 11. Alienation, Unity, and the Dialectic 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:06.000 Chapter 11. Alienation, Unity and the Dialectic 2 00:00:06.000 --> 00:00:12.000 1. Origins of the Dialectic. Creatology 3 00:00:12.000 --> 00:00:20.000 Alienation to Marx bears no relation to the fashionable prattle of late 20th century Marxoid intellectuals. 4 00:00:20.000 --> 00:00:26.000 It did not mean a psychological feeling of anxiety or estrangement 5 00:00:26.000 --> 00:00:32.400 which could somehow be blamed on capitalism or on cultural or sexual repression. 6 00:00:32.400 --> 00:00:37.200 Alienation for Marx was far more fundamental, more cosmic. 7 00:00:37.200 --> 00:00:45.200 It meant, at the very least, as we have seen, the institutions of money, specialization and the division of labor. 8 00:00:45.200 --> 00:00:54.000 The eradication of these evils was necessary to unite the collective organism or species man to himself, 9 00:00:54.000 --> 00:01:03.500 to heal these splits within himself and between man and himself in the form of man-created nature. 10 00:01:03.500 --> 00:01:09.000 But the radical evil of alienation was yet far more cosmic than that. 11 00:01:09.000 --> 00:01:16.000 It was metaphysical, a deep part of the philosophy and the worldview that Marx picked up from Hegel, 12 00:01:16.000 --> 00:01:22.000 and which, through its allied dialectic, brought to Marx the outlines of the engine 13 00:01:22.000 --> 00:01:33.320 It all started with the third century philosopher 14 00:01:33.320 --> 00:01:39.840 Plotinus, a Platonist philosopher, and his followers, and with a theological discipline 15 00:01:39.840 --> 00:01:47.560 seemingly remote from political and economic affairs, Creatology, the science of the first 16 00:01:47.560 --> 00:01:48.680 days. 17 00:01:48.680 --> 00:01:54.520 We have already seen, in fact, that another allied and almost equally remote branch of 18 00:01:54.520 --> 00:02:01.640 theology, eschatology, or the science of the last days, can have enormous political and 19 00:02:01.640 --> 00:02:05.400 economic consequences and ramifications. 20 00:02:05.400 --> 00:02:12.040 The critical question of creatology is, why did God create the universe? 21 00:02:12.040 --> 00:02:18.400 The answer of orthodox Augustinian Christianity, and hence the answer of Catholics, Lutherans 22 00:02:18.400 --> 00:02:28.920 is that God created the universe out of benevolence and love for his creatures. 23 00:02:28.920 --> 00:02:33.840 And this seems to be the only politically safe answer as well. 24 00:02:33.840 --> 00:02:40.760 The answer given by heretics and mystics from early Christians on, however, is quite different. 25 00:02:40.760 --> 00:02:47.920 God created the universe not out of perfection and love, but out of felt need and imperfection. 26 00:02:47.920 --> 00:02:54.780 In short, God created the universe out of felt uneasiness, loneliness, or whatever. 27 00:02:54.780 --> 00:03:00.800 In the beginning, before the creation of the universe, God and man, the collective organic 28 00:03:00.800 --> 00:03:09.920 species of course, not any particular individual, were united in one, so to speak, cosmic blob. 29 00:03:09.920 --> 00:03:17.560 How we can even speak of unity between man and God before man was even created is a conundrum 30 00:03:17.560 --> 00:03:37.600 History is a process by which God develops his potential, and man, the collective species, 31 00:03:37.600 --> 00:03:41.040 develops its or his potential. 32 00:03:41.040 --> 00:03:47.160 But even as this development takes place and both God and man develop and render themselves 33 00:03:47.160 --> 00:03:57.160 Man is more perfect in and through history. Offsetting this good development, a terrible and tragic thing has also taken place. 34 00:03:57.160 --> 00:04:06.160 Man has been separated, cut off, alienated from God, as well as from other men or from nature. 35 00:04:06.160 --> 00:04:10.160 Hence the pervasive concept of alienation. 36 00:04:10.160 --> 00:04:18.000 Alienation is cosmic, irremediable and metaphysical, inherent in the very process of creation, 37 00:04:18.000 --> 00:04:25.440 or, rather, irremediable until the great day inevitably arrives, when man and God, 38 00:04:25.440 --> 00:04:33.200 having both fully developed themselves, finish the process and history itself by re-merging, 39 00:04:33.200 --> 00:04:39.840 by uniting once again in the merger of these two great cosmic blobs into one. 40 00:04:41.200 --> 00:04:48.480 Note first how this great historical process comes about. It is the inevitable preordained 41 00:04:48.480 --> 00:04:56.640 dialectical process of history. There are, as usual, three stages. Stage one is the original 42 00:04:56.640 --> 00:05:05.760 Man and God are in happy and harmonious unity, a unity of pre-creation, but things, particularly 43 00:05:05.760 --> 00:05:09.480 with the human race, are rather undeveloped. 44 00:05:09.480 --> 00:05:12.920 Then the magical dialectic does its work. 45 00:05:12.920 --> 00:05:19.840 Stage two occurs, and God creates man and the universe, both God and man developing 46 00:05:19.840 --> 00:05:49.840 The Theory of Money and Credit 47 00:05:49.840 --> 00:05:57.440 Evil stems from self-centeredness of individual souls, deserters from the all. 48 00:05:57.440 --> 00:06:04.600 But then, finally, at long last, the development process will be completed, and stage two develops 49 00:06:04.600 --> 00:06:12.760 its own Aufhebung, its own lifting up, its own transcendence into its opposite or negation, 50 00:06:12.760 --> 00:06:22.200 The Reunion of God and Man into a Glorious Unity, an Ecstasy of Union, and End to Alienation. 51 00:06:22.200 --> 00:06:29.640 In this stage 3, the blobs are reunited on a far higher level than in stage 1. 52 00:06:29.640 --> 00:06:34.520 History is over, and they shall all live happily ever after. 53 00:06:34.520 --> 00:06:41.040 But note the enormous difference between this dialectic of creatology and eschatology and 54 00:06:41.040 --> 00:06:44.580 and that of the Orthodox Christian scenario. 55 00:06:44.580 --> 00:06:51.200 In the first place, the alienation, the tragedy of man in the dialectical saga from Plotinus 56 00:06:51.200 --> 00:06:59.680 to Hegel, is metaphysical, inescapable from the act of creation itself, whereas the estrangement 57 00:06:59.680 --> 00:07:07.420 of man from God in the Judeo-Christian saga is not metaphysical, but only moral. 58 00:07:07.420 --> 00:07:14.900 To Orthodox Christians, creation was purely good, and not deeply tainted with evil. 59 00:07:14.900 --> 00:07:21.060 Trouble came only with Adam's fall, a moral failure, not a metaphysical one. 60 00:07:21.060 --> 00:07:27.580 Then, in the Orthodox Christian view, through the incarnation of Jesus, God provided a route 61 00:07:27.580 --> 00:07:34.520 by which this alienation could be eliminated, and the individual could achieve salvation. 62 00:07:34.520 --> 00:07:42.140 But note again, Christianity is a deeply individualistic creed, since each individual's salvation is 63 00:07:42.140 --> 00:07:43.520 what matters. 64 00:07:43.520 --> 00:07:49.340 Salvation, or the lack of it, will be attained by each individual. 65 00:07:49.340 --> 00:07:56.120 Each individual's fate is the central concern, not the fate of the alleged collective blob 66 00:07:56.120 --> 00:08:00.520 or organism, man with a capital M. 67 00:08:00.520 --> 00:08:07.160 In the Orthodox Christian schema, each individual goes to heaven or hell. 68 00:08:07.160 --> 00:08:13.980 But in this allegedly optimistic mystical view, nowadays called process theology, the 69 00:08:13.980 --> 00:08:21.400 only salvation, the only happy ending, is that of the collective organism, the species, 70 00:08:21.400 --> 00:08:28.000 with each individual member of that organism being brusquely annihilated along the way. 71 00:08:28.000 --> 00:08:34.640 Its dialectical theology, in particular its creatology, began in full flower with the 72 00:08:34.640 --> 00:08:42.200 Plotinus-influenced 9th century Christian mystic, John Scotus Erigina circa 815 to 73 00:08:42.200 --> 00:08:50.420 circa 877, an Irish-Scottish philosopher located in France, and continued through a heretical 74 00:08:50.420 --> 00:08:57.580 underground of Christian mystics, in particular such as the 14th century German, Meister Johannes 75 00:08:57.580 --> 00:09:04.140 Eckhart, approximately 1260 to approximately 1327. 76 00:09:04.140 --> 00:09:09.620 The pantheistic outlook of the mystics was similar to the call of the Buddhist theosophist 77 00:09:09.620 --> 00:09:12.780 socialist Mrs. Annie Besant. 78 00:09:12.780 --> 00:09:20.740 As Chesterton perceptively and wittily noted, not to love our neighbor but to be our neighbor. 79 00:09:20.740 --> 00:09:28.440 Most mystics call upon each individual to unite with God, the One, by annihilating his individual 80 00:09:28.440 --> 00:09:32.620 separated and therefore alienated self. 81 00:09:32.620 --> 00:09:37.860 While the means of various mystics may differ from the Joachites or the Brethren of the 82 00:09:37.860 --> 00:09:44.040 Free Spirit, whether through a process of history or through the inevitable Armageddon, 83 00:09:44.040 --> 00:09:46.500 the goal remains the same. 84 00:09:46.500 --> 00:09:54.100 Obliteration of the individual through reunion with God, the One, and the ending of cosmic 85 00:09:54.100 --> 00:09:59.200 alienation, at least on the level of each individual. 86 00:09:59.200 --> 00:10:04.620 Particularly influential for GWF, Hegel and other thinkers in this tradition, was the 87 00:10:04.620 --> 00:10:14.660 early 17th century German cobbler and mystic Jakob Böhme, 1575-1624, who added to this 88 00:10:14.660 --> 00:10:21.800 This heady pantheistic brew, the alleged mechanism, the force that drives this dialectic through 89 00:10:21.800 --> 00:10:24.500 its inevitable course in history. 90 00:10:24.500 --> 00:10:32.340 How, Burma asked, did the world of pre-creation transcend itself into creation? 91 00:10:32.340 --> 00:10:40.260 Before creation, he answered, there was a primal source, an eternal unity, an undifferentiated, 92 00:10:40.260 --> 00:10:44.700 and Distinct Literal Nothing, un Grundt. 93 00:10:44.700 --> 00:10:50.180 It was, by the way, typical of Hegel and his idealist followers to think that they add 94 00:10:50.180 --> 00:10:57.460 grandeur and explanation to a lofty but unintelligible concept by capitalizing it. 95 00:10:57.460 --> 00:11:05.500 Oddly enough, to Burma, this no-thing possessed within itself an inner striving, a nissus, 96 00:11:05.500 --> 00:11:08.820 a drive for self-realization. 97 00:11:08.820 --> 00:11:15.460 It is this drive which creates a transcending and opposing force, the will, which creates 98 00:11:15.460 --> 00:11:20.820 the universe, transforming the nothing into something. 99 00:11:20.820 --> 00:11:22.620 2. 100 00:11:22.620 --> 00:11:29.980 Hegel and the Man-God The key step in secularizing dialectic theology 101 00:11:29.980 --> 00:11:36.260 and thus in paving the way for Marxism was taken by the lion of German philosophy, Georg 102 00:11:36.260 --> 00:11:44.980 Friedrich Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, 1770-1831 Born in Stuttgart, Hegel studied theology 103 00:11:44.980 --> 00:11:50.560 at the University of Tübingen, and then taught theology and philosophy at the universities 104 00:11:50.560 --> 00:11:56.540 of Jena and Heidelberg, before becoming the leading philosopher at the new jewel in the 105 00:11:56.540 --> 00:12:01.020 Prussian academic crown, the University of Berlin. 106 00:12:01.020 --> 00:12:07.420 Coming to Berlin in 1817, Hegel remained there until his death, ending his days as 107 00:12:07.420 --> 00:12:09.980 rector of the university. 108 00:12:09.980 --> 00:12:15.080 In the spirit of the Romantic movement in Germany, Hegel pursued the goal of unifying 109 00:12:15.080 --> 00:12:23.060 man and God by virtually identifying God as man, and thereby submerging the former into 110 00:12:23.060 --> 00:12:24.060 the latter. 111 00:12:24.060 --> 00:12:36.060 Goethe had recently popularized the Faust theme, centering on Faust's intense desire for divine or absolute knowledge, as well as divine power. 112 00:12:36.060 --> 00:12:49.060 In orthodox Christianity, of course, the overweening pride of man in trying to achieve god-like knowledge and power is precisely the root cause of sin and man's fall. 113 00:12:49.060 --> 00:13:06.060 But on the contrary, Hegel, a most heretical Lutheran indeed, had the temerity to generalize the Faustian urge into a world philosophy and into an alleged insight into the inevitable workings of the historical process. 114 00:13:06.060 --> 00:13:15.060 In Professor Tucker's words, Hegelianism was a philosophic religion of self in the form of a theory of history. 115 00:13:15.060 --> 00:13:20.820 The religion is founded on an identification of the self with God. 116 00:13:20.820 --> 00:13:27.380 It should not be necessary to add at this point that the self here is not the individual, 117 00:13:27.380 --> 00:13:31.620 but the collective organic species self. 118 00:13:31.620 --> 00:13:36.820 In a youthful essay on the positivity of the Christian religion, written at the age of 119 00:13:36.820 --> 00:13:45.980 of 25, Hegel revealingly objects to Christianity for separating man and God except in one isolated 120 00:13:45.980 --> 00:13:53.260 individual, Jesus, and placing God in another and higher world, to which man's activity 121 00:13:53.260 --> 00:13:55.740 could contribute nothing. 122 00:13:55.740 --> 00:14:02.940 Four years later, in 1799, Hegel resolved this problem by offering his own religion, 123 00:14:02.940 --> 00:14:06.020 in his The Spirit of Christianity. 124 00:14:06.020 --> 00:14:13.500 In contrast to Orthodox Christianity in which God became man in Jesus, for Hegel, Jesus' 125 00:14:13.500 --> 00:14:18.060 achievement was, as a man, to become God. 126 00:14:18.060 --> 00:14:20.420 Tucker sums this up neatly. 127 00:14:20.420 --> 00:14:26.820 To Hegel, Jesus is not God become man, but man become God. 128 00:14:26.820 --> 00:14:33.360 This is the key idea on which the entire edifice of Hegelianism was to be constructed. 129 00:14:33.360 --> 00:14:38.920 There is no absolute difference between the human nature and the divine. 130 00:14:38.920 --> 00:14:43.680 They are not two separate things with an impassable gulf between them. 131 00:14:43.680 --> 00:14:50.080 The absolute self in man, the homo-numenon, is not mere godlike. 132 00:14:50.080 --> 00:14:52.120 It is God. 133 00:14:52.120 --> 00:14:59.480 Consequently, insofar as man strives to become like God, he is simply striving to be his 134 00:14:59.480 --> 00:15:29.480 The Theory of Money and Credit 135 00:15:29.480 --> 00:15:46.480 History, then, for Hegel is a process by which the man-god increases his knowledge until he finally reaches the state of absolute knowledge, that is, the full knowledge and realization that he is god. 136 00:15:46.480 --> 00:15:56.480 In that case, man-god finally realizes his potential of an infinite being without bounds, possessed of absolute knowledge. 137 00:15:56.480 --> 00:16:06.040 Why, then, did man-god, also termed by Hegel the world-self, Weltgeist, or world-spirit, 138 00:16:06.040 --> 00:16:07.840 create the universe? 139 00:16:07.840 --> 00:16:13.940 Not as in the Christian account from overflowing love and benevolence, but out of a felt need 140 00:16:13.940 --> 00:16:18.520 to become conscious of itself as a world-self. 141 00:16:18.520 --> 00:16:25.480 This process of growing consciousness is achieved through creative activity, by which the world-self 142 00:16:25.480 --> 00:16:27.860 externalized itself. 143 00:16:27.860 --> 00:16:35.380 This externalization occurs first by creating nature or the original world, but second, 144 00:16:35.380 --> 00:16:41.240 and here of course is a significant addition to other theologies, there is a continuing 145 00:16:41.240 --> 00:16:44.960 self-externalization through human history. 146 00:16:44.960 --> 00:16:52.640 The most important is this second process, for by this means man, the collective organism, 147 00:16:52.640 --> 00:17:00.520 Span's his building of civilization, his creative externalizing, and hence his increasing knowledge 148 00:17:00.520 --> 00:17:06.680 of his own divinity, and therefore of the world as his own self-actualization. 149 00:17:06.680 --> 00:17:13.560 This latter process of knowing ever more fully that the world is really man's self, is the 150 00:17:13.560 --> 00:17:20.840 process which Hegel terms the gradual putting to an end of man's self-alienation, which 151 00:17:20.840 --> 00:17:26.160 which of course for him was also the alienation of man from God. 152 00:17:26.160 --> 00:17:33.820 To Hegel, in short, man perceives the world as hostile because it is not himself, because 153 00:17:33.820 --> 00:17:35.440 it is alien. 154 00:17:35.440 --> 00:17:43.640 All these conflicts are resolved when he realizes at long last that the world really is himself. 155 00:17:43.640 --> 00:17:50.760 This process of realization is Hegel's Aufhebung, by which the world becomes de-alienated and 156 00:17:50.760 --> 00:17:53.940 and Assimilated to Man's Self. 157 00:17:53.940 --> 00:18:00.460 But why, one might ask, is Hegel's man so odd, so neurotic, that he regards everything 158 00:18:00.460 --> 00:18:04.440 that is not himself as alien and hostile? 159 00:18:04.440 --> 00:18:07.720 The answer is crucial to the Hegelian mystique. 160 00:18:07.720 --> 00:18:18.220 It is because Hegel 161 00:18:18.220 --> 00:18:19.940 and Without Limits. 162 00:18:19.940 --> 00:18:27.180 Seeing any other being or any other object exist would mean that he himself is not infinite 163 00:18:27.180 --> 00:18:29.020 or divine. 164 00:18:29.020 --> 00:18:36.060 In short, Hegel's philosophy is severe and cosmic solipsistic megalomania on a grand 165 00:18:36.060 --> 00:18:38.220 and massive scale. 166 00:18:38.220 --> 00:18:42.920 Professor Tucker develops the case with characteristic acuity. 167 00:18:42.920 --> 00:18:49.400 For Hegel, alienation is finitude, and finitude, in turn, is bondage. 168 00:18:49.400 --> 00:18:55.040 The experience of self-estrangement in the presence of an apparent, objective world is 169 00:18:55.040 --> 00:18:57.480 an experience of enslavement. 170 00:18:57.480 --> 00:19:04.640 Spirit, or the world-self, when confronted with an object or other, is ipso facto aware 171 00:19:04.640 --> 00:19:12.880 of itself as merely finite being, as embracing only so much and no more of reality, as in 172 00:19:12.880 --> 00:19:16.480 is extending only so far and no farther. 173 00:19:16.480 --> 00:19:20.880 The object is, therefore, a limit, grenze. 174 00:19:20.880 --> 00:19:27.720 And a limit, since it contradicts spirit's notion of itself as absolute being, that is, 175 00:19:27.720 --> 00:19:35.280 being without limit, is necessarily apprehended as a barrier, or fetter, schranke. 176 00:19:35.280 --> 00:19:41.720 It is a barrier to spirit's awareness of itself as that which it conceives itself truly to 177 00:19:41.720 --> 00:19:44.560 be the whole of reality. 178 00:19:44.560 --> 00:19:50.880 In its confrontation with an apparent object, spirit feels imprisoned in limitation. 179 00:19:50.880 --> 00:19:55.800 It experiences what Hegel calls the sorrow of finitude. 180 00:19:55.800 --> 00:20:02.560 The transcendence of the object through knowing is spirit's way of rebelling against finitude 181 00:20:02.560 --> 00:20:05.680 and making the break for freedom. 182 00:20:05.680 --> 00:20:11.640 In Hegel's quite unique conception of it, freedom means the consciousness of self as 183 00:20:11.640 --> 00:20:19.040 unbounded. It is the absence of a limiting object or non-self. This consciousness of 184 00:20:19.040 --> 00:20:26.640 being alone with self is precisely what Hegel means by the consciousness of freedom. Accordingly, 185 00:20:26.640 --> 00:20:32.640 the growth of spirit self-knowledge in history is alternatively describable as a progress 186 00:20:32.640 --> 00:20:36.520 of the consciousness of freedom. 187 00:20:36.520 --> 00:20:40.280 3. Hegel and Politics 188 00:20:40.280 --> 00:20:48.000 Typically, determinist schema leave convenient implicit escape hatches for their creators 189 00:20:48.000 --> 00:20:54.260 and advocates who are somehow able to rise above the iron determinism that afflicts the 190 00:20:54.260 --> 00:20:56.200 rest of us. 191 00:20:56.200 --> 00:21:01.640 Hegel was no different, except that his escape hatches were all too explicit. 192 00:21:01.640 --> 00:21:08.120 While God and the Absolute refer to man as collective organism rather than to its puny 193 00:21:08.120 --> 00:21:11.560 Money and Negligible Individual Members. 194 00:21:11.560 --> 00:21:18.280 Every once in a while, great individuals arise, world-historical men, who are able to embody 195 00:21:18.280 --> 00:21:24.400 attributes of the Absolute more than others, and act as significant agents in the next 196 00:21:24.400 --> 00:21:32.680 big historical aufhebung, the next great thrust into the man-god or world-souls advance in 197 00:21:32.680 --> 00:21:33.680 its self-knowledge. 198 00:21:33.680 --> 00:21:34.680 College. 199 00:21:34.680 --> 00:21:40.840 Thus, during a time when most patriotic Prussians were reacting violently against Napoleon's 200 00:21:40.840 --> 00:21:48.040 imperial conquests and mobilizing their forces against him, Hegel reacted very differently. 201 00:21:48.040 --> 00:21:54.120 Hegel wrote to a friend in ecstasy about having personally seen Napoleon riding down the city 202 00:21:54.120 --> 00:21:55.120 street. 203 00:21:55.120 --> 00:22:00.480 The Emperor, this world's soul riding on horseback through the city to the review of 204 00:22:00.480 --> 00:22:06.520 of His Troops, it is indeed a wonderful feeling to see such a man. 205 00:22:06.520 --> 00:22:12.400 Hegel was enthusiastic about Napoleon because of his world historical function of bringing 206 00:22:12.400 --> 00:22:16.880 the strong state to Germany and the rest of Europe. 207 00:22:16.880 --> 00:22:23.660 Just as Hegel's fundamental eschatology and dialectic prefigured Marxism, so did his more 208 00:22:23.660 --> 00:22:26.800 directly political philosophy of history. 209 00:22:26.800 --> 00:22:34.080 Thus, following the romantic writer Friedrich Schiller, Hegel, in an essay in 1795, claimed 210 00:22:34.080 --> 00:22:39.760 that the equivalent of early or primitive communism was ancient Greece. 211 00:22:39.760 --> 00:22:46.800 Schiller and Hegel lauded Greece for the alleged homogeneity, unity and harmony of its polis, 212 00:22:46.800 --> 00:22:53.080 which both authors gravely misconceived as being free of all division of labor. 213 00:22:53.080 --> 00:22:59.760 The consequent Aufhebung disrupted this wonderful unity and fragmented man. 214 00:22:59.760 --> 00:23:06.080 But the good side of the new historical stage, it did lead to the growth of commerce, living 215 00:23:06.080 --> 00:23:08.900 standards and individualism. 216 00:23:08.900 --> 00:23:15.080 For Hegel, moreover, the coming stage, heralded by Hegel's philosophy, would bring about a 217 00:23:15.080 --> 00:23:19.000 reintegration of man and the state. 218 00:23:19.000 --> 00:23:25.560 Before 1796, Hegel, like many other young intellectuals throughout Europe, was enchanted 219 00:23:25.560 --> 00:23:32.480 by the French Revolution, individualism, radical democracy, liberty and the rights of man. 220 00:23:32.480 --> 00:23:40.040 Soon, however, again, like many European intellectuals, Hegel, disillusioned in the French Revolution, 221 00:23:40.040 --> 00:23:44.040 turned toward reactionary state absolutism. 222 00:23:44.040 --> 00:23:50.160 In particular, Hegel was greatly influenced by the Scottish statist Sir James Stewart, 223 00:23:50.160 --> 00:23:56.740 a Jacobite exile in Germany for a large part of his life, whose Inquiry into the Principles 224 00:23:56.740 --> 00:24:05.200 of Political Economy, 1767, had been greatly influenced by the ultra-statist German 18th 225 00:24:05.200 --> 00:24:08.440 century mercantilists, the Cameralists. 226 00:24:08.440 --> 00:24:13.420 Hegel read the German translation of Stuart's Principles, which had been published from 227 00:24:13.420 --> 00:24:22.960 1769 to 1772, from 1797 to 1799, and took extensive notes. 228 00:24:22.960 --> 00:24:28.560 Hegel was influenced in particular by two aspects of Stuart's outlook. 229 00:24:28.560 --> 00:24:34.920 One held that history proceeded in stages, deterministically evolving from one stage 230 00:24:34.920 --> 00:24:40.880 of Change, nomadic, agricultural, exchange, etc. to the next. 231 00:24:40.880 --> 00:24:47.120 The other influential theme was that massive state intervention and control were necessary 232 00:24:47.120 --> 00:24:50.520 to maintain an exchange economy. 233 00:24:50.520 --> 00:24:55.800 It comes as no surprise that Hegel's main disillusion in the French Revolution came 234 00:24:55.800 --> 00:25:00.400 from its individualism and lack of unity under the state. 235 00:25:00.400 --> 00:25:16.400 Again, foreshadowing Marx, it became particularly important for man, the collective organism, to surmount unconscious blind fate, and consciously to take control of his fate via the state. 236 00:25:16.400 --> 00:25:27.400 And so, Hegel was a great admirer not only of Napoleon the mighty world conqueror, but also Napoleon the detailed regulator of the French economy. 237 00:25:27.400 --> 00:25:42.400 Hegel made quite evident that what the new developing strong state really needed was a comprehensive philosophy contributed by a great philosopher to give its mighty rule coherence and legitimacy. 238 00:25:42.400 --> 00:25:57.400 Otherwise, as Professor Plant explains, such a state, devoid of philosophical comprehension, would appear as a merely arbitrary and oppressive imposition of the freedom of individuals to pursue their own interest. 239 00:25:57.400 --> 00:26:05.900 We need make only one guess as to what that philosophy or who that great philosopher was supposed to be. 240 00:26:05.900 --> 00:26:12.900 And then, armed with Hegelian philosophy and Hegel himself as its fountainhead and great leader, 241 00:26:12.900 --> 00:26:17.900 this alien aspect of the progressive modern state would disappear 242 00:26:17.900 --> 00:26:22.900 and would be seen not as an imposition but a development of self-consciousness 243 00:26:22.900 --> 00:26:34.900 By regulating and codifying many aspects of social practice, it gives to the modern world a rationality and a predictability which it would not otherwise possess. 244 00:26:34.900 --> 00:26:46.900 Armed with such a philosophy and with such a philosopher, the modern state would take its divinely appointed stand at the height of history and civilization as God on earth. 245 00:26:46.900 --> 00:26:55.220 Thus, the modern state, proving the reality of political community when comprehended philosophically, 246 00:26:55.220 --> 00:27:02.580 could therefore be seen as the highest articulation of spirit, or God, in the contemporary world. 247 00:27:02.580 --> 00:27:09.300 The state, then, is a supreme manifestation of the activity of God in the world. 248 00:27:09.300 --> 00:27:12.180 And the state stands above all. 249 00:27:12.180 --> 00:27:18.580 It is spirit, which knows itself as the universal essence and reality. 250 00:27:18.580 --> 00:27:23.300 And the state is the reality of the kingdom of heaven. 251 00:27:23.300 --> 00:27:27.820 And finally, the state is God's will. 252 00:27:27.820 --> 00:27:34.100 Of the various forms of state, monarchy is best, since it permits all subjects to be 253 00:27:34.100 --> 00:27:40.780 free in the Hegelian sense by submerging their being into the divine substance, which is 254 00:27:40.780 --> 00:27:44.380 is the authoritarian, monarchical state. 255 00:27:44.380 --> 00:27:52.300 The people are only free when they are insignificant particles of this unitary divine substance. 256 00:27:52.300 --> 00:27:58.780 As Tucker writes, Hegel's conception of freedom is totalitarian in a literal sense of the 257 00:27:58.780 --> 00:27:59.780 word. 258 00:27:59.780 --> 00:28:07.060 The world-self must experience itself as the totality of being, or, in Hegel's own words, 259 00:28:07.060 --> 00:28:13.500 must elevate itself to a self-comprehending totality in order to achieve the consciousness 260 00:28:13.500 --> 00:28:14.900 of freedom. 261 00:28:14.900 --> 00:28:20.820 Anything short of this spells alienation and the sorrow of finitude. 262 00:28:20.820 --> 00:28:26.260 According to Hegel, the final development of the man-god, the final breakthrough into 263 00:28:26.260 --> 00:28:29.960 totality and infinity, was at hand. 264 00:28:29.960 --> 00:28:35.080 The most highly developed state in the history of the world was now in place. 265 00:28:35.080 --> 00:28:40.720 The Existing Prussian Monarchy Under King Friedrich Wilhelm III 266 00:28:40.720 --> 00:28:47.260 It so happened that Hegel's apotheosis of the existing Prussian monarchy neatly coincided 267 00:28:47.260 --> 00:28:49.660 with the needs of that monarch. 268 00:28:49.660 --> 00:28:56.620 When King Friedrich Wilhelm III established the new University of Berlin in 1818 to assist 269 00:28:56.620 --> 00:29:03.300 in supporting and propagandizing for his absolute power, what better person for the chair of 270 00:29:03.300 --> 00:29:26.300 The King and his absolutist party needed an official philosopher to defend the state from the hated revolutionary ideals of the French Revolution, and to justify his purge of the reformers and classical liberals who had helped him defeat Napoleon. 271 00:29:26.300 --> 00:29:32.920 As Carl Popper puts it, Hegel was appointed to meet this demand, and he did so by reviving 272 00:29:32.920 --> 00:29:41.140 the ideas of the first great enemies of the open society, especially Heraclitus and Plato. 273 00:29:41.140 --> 00:29:47.460 Hegel rediscovered the Platonic ideas which lie behind the perennial revolt against freedom 274 00:29:47.460 --> 00:29:49.540 and reason. 275 00:29:49.540 --> 00:29:53.100 Hegelianism is the renaissance of tribalism. 276 00:29:53.100 --> 00:30:00.360 Hegel is the missing link, as it were, between Plato and the modern forms of totalitarianism. 277 00:30:00.360 --> 00:30:05.800 Most of the modern totalitarians know of their indebtedness to Hegel, and all of them have 278 00:30:05.800 --> 00:30:09.880 been brought up in the close atmosphere of Hegelianism. 279 00:30:09.880 --> 00:30:15.160 They have been taught to worship the state, history, and the nation. 280 00:30:15.160 --> 00:30:20.880 On Hegel's worship of the state, Popper cites chilling and revealing passages. 281 00:30:20.880 --> 00:30:25.800 The state is the divine idea as it exists on earth. 282 00:30:25.800 --> 00:30:31.700 We must therefore worship the state as the manifestation of the divine on earth. 283 00:30:31.700 --> 00:30:35.260 The state is the march of God through the world. 284 00:30:35.260 --> 00:30:39.060 The state must be comprehended as an organism. 285 00:30:39.060 --> 00:30:44.320 To the complete state belongs, essentially, consciousness and thought. 286 00:30:44.320 --> 00:30:46.820 The state knows what it wills. 287 00:30:46.820 --> 00:30:49.960 The state exists for its own sake. 288 00:30:49.960 --> 00:30:56.240 The State is the actually existing realized moral life. 289 00:30:56.240 --> 00:31:03.860 All this rant is well characterized by Popper as bombastic and hysterical Platonism. 290 00:31:03.860 --> 00:31:09.660 Much of this was inspired by Hegel's friends and immediate philosophical predecessors, 291 00:31:09.660 --> 00:31:15.840 men like the later Fichte, Schelling, Schlegel, Schiller, Herder and Schleiermacher. 292 00:31:15.840 --> 00:31:21.560 But it was Hegel's particular task to turn his murky doctrines to the job of weaving 293 00:31:21.560 --> 00:31:27.240 apologetics for the absolute power of the extant Prussian state. 294 00:31:27.240 --> 00:31:35.800 Thus Hegel's admiring disciple F. J. C. Schwegler revealed the following in his History of Philosophy. 295 00:31:35.800 --> 00:31:42.160 The fullness of his, Hegel's, fame and activity, however, properly dates only from his call 296 00:31:42.160 --> 00:31:45.680 to Berlin in 1818. 297 00:31:45.680 --> 00:31:52.800 Here there rose up around him a numerous, widely extended and exceedingly active school. 298 00:31:52.800 --> 00:31:58.560 Here too he acquired, from his connections with the Prussian bureaucracy, political recognition 299 00:31:58.560 --> 00:32:02.440 of his system as the official philosophy. 300 00:32:02.440 --> 00:32:09.400 Not always to the advantage of the inner freedom of his philosophy or of its moral worth. 301 00:32:09.400 --> 00:32:15.300 With Prussia as the central focus, Hegelianism was able to sweep German philosophy during 302 00:32:15.300 --> 00:32:22.700 During the 19th century, dominating in all but the Catholic areas of southern Germany and Austria. 303 00:32:22.700 --> 00:32:28.780 As Popper put it, having thus become a tremendous success on the continent, Hegelianism could 304 00:32:28.780 --> 00:32:34.820 hardly fail to obtain support in Britain from those who felt that such a powerful movement 305 00:32:34.820 --> 00:32:37.860 must after all have something to offer. 306 00:32:37.860 --> 00:32:44.820 Indeed, the man who first introduced Hegel to English readers, Dr. J. Hutchinson Stirling, 307 00:32:44.820 --> 00:32:50.740 Hayek has admiringly remarked the year after Prussia's lightning victory over Austria. 308 00:32:50.740 --> 00:32:56.420 Is it not indeed to Hegel, and especially his philosophy of ethics and politics, that 309 00:32:56.420 --> 00:33:02.460 Prussia owes that mighty life and organization she is now rapidly developing? 310 00:33:02.460 --> 00:33:09.060 Finally, Hegel's contemporary and acquaintance, Arthur Schopenhauer, denounced the State Philosophy 311 00:33:09.060 --> 00:33:16.740 Philosophy Alliance that drove Hegelianism into becoming a powerful force in social thought. 312 00:33:16.740 --> 00:33:21.980 Philosophy is misused, from the side of the state as a tool, from the other side as a 313 00:33:21.980 --> 00:33:23.820 means of gain. 314 00:33:23.820 --> 00:33:31.180 Who can really believe that truth also will thereby come to light just as a byproduct? 315 00:33:31.180 --> 00:33:37.200 Governments made of philosophy a means of serving their state interests, and scholars made of 316 00:33:37.200 --> 00:33:39.920 with it, a trade. 317 00:33:39.920 --> 00:33:45.320 In addition to the political influence, Popper offers a complementary explanation for the 318 00:33:45.320 --> 00:33:52.320 otherwise puzzling widespread influence of GWF Hegel, the attraction of philosophers 319 00:33:52.320 --> 00:33:59.120 to high-sounding jargon and gibberish almost for its own sake, followed by the gullibility 320 00:33:59.120 --> 00:34:01.400 of a credulous public. 321 00:34:01.400 --> 00:34:05.940 Thus Popper cites a statement by the English Hegelian, Sterling. 322 00:34:05.940 --> 00:34:11.980 The philosophy of Hegel, then, was a scrutiny of thought so profound that it was, for the 323 00:34:11.980 --> 00:34:15.620 most part, unintelligible. 324 00:34:15.620 --> 00:34:24.540 Profound for its very unintelligibility, lack of clarity as virtue and proof of profundity. 325 00:34:24.540 --> 00:34:30.140 Popper adds, Philosophers have kept around themselves, even in our day, something of 326 00:34:30.140 --> 00:34:33.300 the atmosphere of the magician. 327 00:34:33.300 --> 00:34:38.940 Philosophy is considered a strange and abstruse kind of thing, dealing with those things with 328 00:34:38.940 --> 00:34:46.500 which religion deals, but not in a way which can be revealed unto babes or to common people. 329 00:34:46.500 --> 00:34:52.020 It is considered to be too profound for that, and to be the religion and the theology of 330 00:34:52.020 --> 00:34:55.540 the intellectuals, of the learned and wise. 331 00:34:55.540 --> 00:34:58.700 Hegelianism fits these views admirably. 332 00:34:58.700 --> 00:35:05.500 It is exactly what this popular superstition supposes philosophy to be. 333 00:35:05.500 --> 00:35:07.820 4. 334 00:35:07.820 --> 00:35:09.740 Hegel and the Romantic Age 335 00:35:09.740 --> 00:35:18.480 GWF Hegel, unfortunately, was not a bizarre aberrant force in European thought. 336 00:35:18.480 --> 00:35:25.020 He was only one, if the most influential and the most convoluted and hypertrophic, of what 337 00:35:25.020 --> 00:35:32.300 must be considered the dominant paradigm of his age, the celebrated Age of Romanticism. 338 00:35:32.300 --> 00:35:37.140 In different variants and in different ways, the Romantic writers of the first half of 339 00:35:37.140 --> 00:35:43.340 the 19th century, especially in Germany and Great Britain, poets and novelists as well 340 00:35:43.340 --> 00:35:49.900 as philosophers, were dominated by a similar creatology and eschatology. 341 00:35:49.900 --> 00:35:56.220 It might be termed the alienation and return, or reabsorption myth. 342 00:35:56.220 --> 00:36:02.420 God created the universe out of imperfection and felt need, thereby tragically cutting 343 00:36:02.420 --> 00:36:11.700 man, the organic species, off from his, its, pre-creation unity with God, while this transcendence, 344 00:36:11.700 --> 00:36:20.260 This Aufhebung of creation has permitted God and Man, or God-Man, to develop their, its 345 00:36:20.260 --> 00:36:23.500 faculties and to progress. 346 00:36:23.500 --> 00:36:30.020 Tragic alienation will continue until that day, inevitable and determined, in which God 347 00:36:30.020 --> 00:36:38.060 and Man will be fused into one cosmic blob, or rather, being pantheists, as was Hegel, 348 00:36:38.060 --> 00:36:46.220 Until man discovers that he is man-god, and the alienation of man from man, man from nature, 349 00:36:46.220 --> 00:36:53.380 and man from god will be ended, as all is fused into one big blob, the discovery of 350 00:36:53.380 --> 00:36:59.460 the reality of, and therefore the merger into, cosmic oneness. 351 00:36:59.460 --> 00:37:05.900 History, which has been predetermined towards this goal, will then come to an end. 352 00:37:05.900 --> 00:37:12.140 In the Romantic metaphor, man, the generic organism of course, not the individual, will 353 00:37:12.140 --> 00:37:15.180 at last return home. 354 00:37:15.180 --> 00:37:22.320 History is therefore an upward spiral towards man's determined destination, a return home, 355 00:37:22.320 --> 00:37:28.940 but on a far higher level than the original unity or home with God in the pre-creation 356 00:37:28.940 --> 00:37:30.820 epoch. 357 00:37:30.820 --> 00:37:35.900 The domination of the Romantic writers by this paradigm has been expounded brilliantly 358 00:37:35.900 --> 00:37:42.740 by the leading literary critic of Romanticism, M. H. Abrams, who points to this leading strain 359 00:37:42.740 --> 00:37:47.300 in English literature stretching from Wordsworth to D. H. Lawrence. 360 00:37:47.300 --> 00:37:55.140 Wordsworth, Abrams emphasizes, dedicated virtually his entire output to a heroic or high-Romantic 361 00:37:55.140 --> 00:38:02.580 argument, to an attempt to counter and transcend Milton's epical poem of an orthodox Christian 362 00:38:02.580 --> 00:38:09.460 view of man and God, to counter Milton's Christian view of heaven and hell as alternatives for 363 00:38:09.460 --> 00:38:16.300 individual souls, and of Jesus' second advent as putting an end to history and returning 364 00:38:16.300 --> 00:38:24.020 man to paradise, Wordsworth, in his own argument, counterpoises his pantheist vision of the 365 00:38:24.020 --> 00:38:33.020 the upward spiral of history into cosmic unification and man's consequent return home from alienation. 366 00:38:33.020 --> 00:38:39.060 The eventual eschaton, the kingdom of God, is taken from its Christian placement in heaven 367 00:38:39.060 --> 00:38:45.660 and brought down to earth, thereby, as always, when the eschaton is immanentized, creating 368 00:38:45.660 --> 00:38:51.620 spectacularly grave ideological, social and political problems. 369 00:38:51.620 --> 00:38:59.420 Or, to use a concept of Abrams, the Romantic vision constituted the secularization of theology. 370 00:38:59.420 --> 00:39:05.820 Greek and Roman epics, Wordsworth asserted, sang of arms and the man, hitherto the only 371 00:39:05.820 --> 00:39:08.580 argument heroic deemed. 372 00:39:08.580 --> 00:39:14.440 In contrast, at the beginning of his great Paradise Lost, Milton declares, That to the 373 00:39:14.440 --> 00:39:20.300 height of this great argument I may assert eternal providence and justify the ways of 374 00:39:20.300 --> 00:39:22.820 of God to Man. 375 00:39:22.820 --> 00:39:28.320 Wordsworth now proclaimed that his own argument surpassing Milton's was instilled in him 376 00:39:28.320 --> 00:39:35.340 by God's holy powers and faculties, enabling him, presaging Marx's yearnings, to create 377 00:39:35.340 --> 00:39:42.080 his own world, even though he realized in an unwanted flash of realism that some called 378 00:39:42.080 --> 00:39:43.740 it madness. 379 00:39:43.740 --> 00:39:49.600 For there passed within him genius, power, creation and divinity itself. 380 00:39:49.600 --> 00:39:56.400 Roth concluded that this is, in truth, heroic argument, an argument not less but more heroic 381 00:39:56.400 --> 00:39:59.320 than the wrath of Stern Achilles. 382 00:39:59.320 --> 00:40:05.000 Other Englishmen steeped in the Wordsworthian paradigm were his worshipful follower Coleridge, 383 00:40:05.000 --> 00:40:12.360 Shelley, Keats and even Blake, who, however, tried to blend Christianity and pantheism. 384 00:40:12.360 --> 00:40:17.620 All these writers had been steeped in Christian doctrine, from which they could spin off on 385 00:40:17.620 --> 00:40:22.500 from their own heretical pantheistic version of millennialism. 386 00:40:22.500 --> 00:40:26.300 Wordsworth himself had been trained to become an Anglican priest. 387 00:40:26.300 --> 00:40:31.780 Coleridge was a philosopher and a lay preacher who had been on the edge of becoming a Unitarian 388 00:40:31.780 --> 00:40:37.620 minister and was steeped in neo-Platonism and the works of Jacob Burma. 389 00:40:37.620 --> 00:40:44.180 Keats was an explicit disciple of the Wordsworthian program, which he called a means toward secular 390 00:40:44.180 --> 00:40:50.180 Salvation, and Shelley, though an explicit atheist, idolized the sacred Milton above 391 00:40:50.180 --> 00:40:55.300 all other poets and was constantly steeped in study of the Bible. 392 00:40:55.300 --> 00:41:00.220 It should also be noted that Wordsworth, like Hegel, was a youthful enthusiast for the French 393 00:41:00.220 --> 00:41:07.380 Revolution and its liberal ideals, and later, disillusioned, turned to conservative statism 394 00:41:07.380 --> 00:41:12.140 and the pantheist version of inevitable redemption through history. 395 00:41:12.140 --> 00:41:17.140 The German Romantics were even more immersed in religion and mysticism than were their 396 00:41:17.140 --> 00:41:18.660 English counterparts. 397 00:41:18.660 --> 00:41:24.060 Hegel, Friedrich von Schelling, Friedrich von Schiller, Friedrich Hölderen, Johann 398 00:41:24.060 --> 00:41:29.640 Gottlieb Fichte were all theology students, most of them with Hegel at the University 399 00:41:29.640 --> 00:41:31.220 of Tübingen. 400 00:41:31.220 --> 00:41:36.540 All of them tried explicitly to apply religious doctrine to their philosophy. 401 00:41:36.540 --> 00:41:39.140 Novalis was immersed in the Bible. 402 00:41:39.140 --> 00:41:53.140 Furthermore, Hegel devoted a great deal of favorable attention to Boehm in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy and Schelling called Boehm a miraculous phenomenon in the history of mankind. 403 00:41:53.140 --> 00:42:06.140 Moreover, it was Friedrich Schiller, Hegel's mentor, who was influenced by the Scot Adam Ferguson to denounce specialization and the division of labor as alienating and fragmenting man. 404 00:42:06.140 --> 00:42:12.540 and it was Schiller who influenced Hegel in the 1790s by coining the explicit concept 405 00:42:12.540 --> 00:42:16.080 of Aufhebung and the dialectic. 406 00:42:16.080 --> 00:42:22.220 In England, several decades later, the tempestuous conservative statist writer Thomas Carlyle 407 00:42:22.220 --> 00:42:29.980 paid tribute to Friedrich Schiller by writing a biography of that romantic writer in 1825. 408 00:42:29.980 --> 00:42:35.460 From then on, Carlyle's writings were permeated with the Hegelian vision. 409 00:42:35.460 --> 00:42:41.360 Diversity is good, and diversity or separateness is evil and diseased. 410 00:42:41.360 --> 00:42:45.780 Science as well as individualism is division and dismemberment. 411 00:42:45.780 --> 00:42:53.140 Selfhood, Carlyle ranted, is alienation from nature, from others, and from oneself. 412 00:42:53.140 --> 00:42:59.460 But one day there will come the breakthrough, the spiritual rebirth, led by world historical 413 00:42:59.460 --> 00:43:05.980 Figures, Great Men, by which man will return home to a friendly world by means of the utter 414 00:43:05.980 --> 00:43:12.100 cancellation, the annihilation of self, zelbst tutung. 415 00:43:12.100 --> 00:43:21.180 Finally, in Past and Present, 1843, Carlyle applied his profoundly anti-individualist and, 416 00:43:21.180 --> 00:43:25.580 one might add, anti-human vision to economic affairs. 417 00:43:25.580 --> 00:43:32.620 He denounced egoism, material greed and laissez-faire, which by fostering the severance of men from 418 00:43:32.620 --> 00:43:38.900 each other had led to a world which has become a lifeless other, and in severance also from 419 00:43:38.900 --> 00:43:45.300 other human beings within a social order in which cash payment is the sole nexus of man 420 00:43:45.300 --> 00:43:46.900 with man. 421 00:43:46.900 --> 00:43:52.820 In opposition to this metaphysically evil cash nexus lay the familial relation with 422 00:43:52.820 --> 00:43:57.060 with Nature and Fellow Men, the Relation of Love. 423 00:43:57.060 --> 00:44:01.540 The stage was set for Karl Marx. 424 00:44:01.540 --> 00:44:04.500 5. 425 00:44:04.500 --> 00:44:08.860 Marx and Left Revolutionary Hegelianism 426 00:44:08.860 --> 00:44:14.940 Hegel's death in 1831 inevitably ushered in a new and very different era in the history 427 00:44:14.940 --> 00:44:17.160 of Hegelianism. 428 00:44:17.160 --> 00:44:22.760 Hegel was supposed to bring about the end of history, but now Hegel was dead and history 429 00:44:22.760 --> 00:44:25.140 continued to march on. 430 00:44:25.140 --> 00:44:31.100 So if Hegel himself was not the final culmination of history, then perhaps the Prussian state 431 00:44:31.100 --> 00:44:36.220 of Friedrich Wilhelm III was not the final stage of history either. 432 00:44:36.220 --> 00:44:41.940 But if it was not the final phase of history, then mightn't the dialectic of history be 433 00:44:41.940 --> 00:44:45.300 getting ready for yet another twist? 434 00:44:45.300 --> 00:44:47.180 Another Aufhebung? 435 00:44:47.180 --> 00:44:53.860 So reasoned groups of radical youth, who, during the late 1830s and 1840s in Germany 436 00:44:53.860 --> 00:44:59.900 and elsewhere, formed the movement of young or left Hegelians. 437 00:44:59.900 --> 00:45:05.100 Disillusioned in the Prussian state, the young Hegelians proclaimed the inevitable coming 438 00:45:05.100 --> 00:45:11.780 apocalyptic revolution to destroy and transcend that state, a revolution that would really 439 00:45:11.780 --> 00:45:17.780 bring about the end of history in the form of national or world communism. 440 00:45:17.780 --> 00:45:25.020 One of the first and most influential of the left Hegelians was a Pole, Count August Czeskowski, 441 00:45:25.020 --> 00:45:35.700 1814-1894, who wrote in German and published in 1838 his Prolegomena to a Historiosophy. 442 00:45:35.700 --> 00:45:44.300 Czeskowski brought to Hegelianism a new dialectic of history, a new variant of the three ages of man. 443 00:45:44.300 --> 00:45:50.140 The first age, the age of antiquity, was, for some reason, the age of emotion, the epoch 444 00:45:50.140 --> 00:45:57.540 of pure feeling, of no reflective thought, of elemental immediacy and unity with nature. 445 00:45:57.540 --> 00:46:01.920 The spirit was, in itself, on sich. 446 00:46:01.920 --> 00:46:07.280 The second age of mankind, the Christian era, stretching from the birth of Jesus to the 447 00:46:07.280 --> 00:46:13.580 death of the great Hegel, was the age of thought, of reflection, in which the spirit moved toward 448 00:46:13.580 --> 00:46:18.620 itself, in the direction of abstraction and universality. 449 00:46:18.620 --> 00:46:25.160 But Christianity, the age of thought, was also an era of intolerable duality, of man 450 00:46:25.160 --> 00:46:31.680 Men separated from God, of spirit separated from matter, and thought from action. 451 00:46:31.680 --> 00:46:38.920 Finally, the third and culminating age, the coming age, heralded by Count Cheskovsky, 452 00:46:38.920 --> 00:46:41.440 was to be the age of action. 453 00:46:41.440 --> 00:46:47.720 In short, the third post-Hegelian age would be an age of practical action, in which the 454 00:46:47.720 --> 00:46:53.600 thought of both Christianity and of Hegel would be transcended and embodied into an 455 00:46:53.600 --> 00:47:01.240 and Act of Will, a final revolution to overthrow and transcend existing institutions. 456 00:47:01.240 --> 00:47:07.600 For the term practical action, Cheskowski borrowed the Greek word praxis to summarize 457 00:47:07.600 --> 00:47:15.160 the new age, a term that would soon come to acquire virtually talismanic influence in Marxism. 458 00:47:15.160 --> 00:47:20.760 This final age of action would bring about, at long last, a blessed unity of thought and 459 00:47:20.760 --> 00:47:28.960 and Action, Theory and Praxis, Spirit and Matter, God and Earth, and Total Freedom. 460 00:47:28.960 --> 00:47:35.160 Along with Hegel and the mystics, Cheskowsky stressed that all past events, even those 461 00:47:35.160 --> 00:47:41.380 seemingly evil, were necessary to the ultimate and culminating salvation. 462 00:47:41.380 --> 00:47:49.000 In a work published in French in Paris in 1844, Cheskowsky also heralded the new class 463 00:47:49.000 --> 00:47:56.080 destined to become the leaders of the revolutionary society, the intelligentsia, a word that had 464 00:47:56.080 --> 00:48:02.720 recently been coined by a German-educated poll B.F. Trentowski, who had published his 465 00:48:02.720 --> 00:48:06.400 work in Prussian-occupied Poznan. 466 00:48:06.400 --> 00:48:13.000 Cheskowski thus heralded and glorified a development that would at least be implicit in the Marxist 467 00:48:13.000 --> 00:48:14.160 movement. 468 00:48:14.160 --> 00:48:20.840 After all, the great Marxists including Marx, Engels and Lenin were all bourgeois intellectuals 469 00:48:20.840 --> 00:48:23.680 rather than children of the proletariat. 470 00:48:23.680 --> 00:48:30.120 If not in theory, this dominance of Marxist movements and governments by a new class of 471 00:48:30.120 --> 00:48:35.920 intelligentsia has certainly been the history of Marxism in praxis. 472 00:48:35.920 --> 00:48:41.320 This dominance by a new class has been noted and attacked from the beginnings of Marxism 473 00:48:41.320 --> 00:48:49.000 until the present day, notably by the anarcho-communist Bakunin and by the Polish revolutionary Jan 474 00:48:49.000 --> 00:48:57.160 Wachlaw Maciejski, 1866-1926, during and after the 1890s. 475 00:48:57.160 --> 00:49:02.960 It was also a similar insight into the German Social Democratic Party that prompted Robert 476 00:49:02.960 --> 00:49:11.120 Michels to abandon Marxism and develop his famous Iron Law of Oligarchy that all organizations, 477 00:49:11.120 --> 00:49:19.120 Whether private, governmental or Marxist parties will inevitably end up being dominated by a power elite. 478 00:49:19.120 --> 00:49:25.120 Tchaikovsky, however, was not destined to ride the wave of the future of revolutionary socialism, 479 00:49:25.120 --> 00:49:31.120 for he took the Christian messianic rather than atheistic path to the new society. 480 00:49:31.120 --> 00:49:40.120 In his massive, unfinished work of 1848, Our Father, Tchaikovsky maintained that the new age of revolutionary communism 481 00:49:40.120 --> 00:49:47.640 Communism would be a third age, an age of the Holy Spirit, shades of Joachism, an era 482 00:49:47.640 --> 00:49:52.200 that would bring a kingdom of God on earth as it is in heaven. 483 00:49:52.200 --> 00:49:58.480 Thus the final kingdom of God on earth would reintegrate all of organic humanity and would 484 00:49:58.480 --> 00:50:05.160 erase all national identities, with the world governed by a central government of all mankind 485 00:50:05.160 --> 00:50:09.080 headed by a universal council of the people. 486 00:50:09.080 --> 00:50:15.040 But at the time, the path of Christian messianism was not clearly destined to be a loser in 487 00:50:15.040 --> 00:50:17.240 the intra-socialist debate. 488 00:50:17.240 --> 00:50:26.080 Thus, Alexander Ivanovich Hertzin, 1812-1870, a founder of the Russian revolutionary tradition, 489 00:50:26.080 --> 00:50:32.200 was entranced by Cheskovsky's brand of left Hegelianism, writing that the future society 490 00:50:32.200 --> 00:50:36.600 is to be the work not of the heart, but of the concrete. 491 00:50:36.600 --> 00:50:41.900 Hegel is the new Christ, bringing the word of truth to men. 492 00:50:41.900 --> 00:50:48.200 And soon, Bruno Bauer, friend and mentor of Karl Marx and the leader of the Doktor Club 493 00:50:48.200 --> 00:50:54.360 of Young Hegelians at the University of Berlin, hailed the new philosophy of action in late 494 00:50:54.360 --> 00:50:59.380 1841 as the Trumpet Call of the Last Judgment. 495 00:50:59.380 --> 00:51:04.600 But the winning strand in the European socialist movement, as we have indicated, was eventually 496 00:51:04.600 --> 00:51:07.920 to be Karl Marx's atheism. 497 00:51:07.920 --> 00:51:14.500 If Hegel had pantheized and elaborated the dialectic of Christian messianics, Marx now 498 00:51:14.500 --> 00:51:22.240 stood Hegel on his head by atheizing the dialectic and resting it not on mysticism or religion 499 00:51:22.240 --> 00:51:29.920 or spirit or the absolute idea or the world mind, but on the supposedly solid and scientific 500 00:51:29.920 --> 00:51:34.160 foundation of philosophical materialism. 501 00:51:34.160 --> 00:51:39.960 Marx adopted his materialism from the left Hegelian Ludwig Feuerbach, particularly his 502 00:51:39.960 --> 00:51:45.100 work on The Essence of Christianity, 1843. 503 00:51:45.100 --> 00:51:51.360 In contrast to the Hegelian emphasis on spirit, Marx would study the allegedly scientific 504 00:51:51.360 --> 00:51:56.160 laws of matter in some way operating through history. 505 00:51:56.160 --> 00:52:02.780 Marx, in short, took the dialectic and made it what we can call a materialist dialectic 506 00:52:02.780 --> 00:52:04.600 of History. 507 00:52:04.600 --> 00:52:09.440 A lot of unnecessary pother has been made about terminology here. 508 00:52:09.440 --> 00:52:15.740 Many Marxist apologists have fiercely maintained that Marx himself never used the term dialectical 509 00:52:15.740 --> 00:52:23.360 materialism, as if mere non-use of the terms lets Marx off the hook, and also that the 510 00:52:23.360 --> 00:52:29.400 concept only appeared in such later works of Engels as the Antiduring. 511 00:52:29.400 --> 00:52:35.360 But the Antiduring, published before Marx's death, was, like all other such writings of 512 00:52:35.360 --> 00:52:42.160 Engels, cleared with Marx first, and so we have to assume that Marx approved. 513 00:52:42.160 --> 00:52:47.920 The fuss stems from the fact that the term dialectical materialism was widely stressed 514 00:52:47.920 --> 00:52:55.720 by the Marxist-Leninist movement of the 1930s and 1940s, these days generally discredited. 515 00:52:55.720 --> 00:53:01.400 The concept was applied by Engels, who, of the two founders, was particularly interested 516 00:53:01.400 --> 00:53:05.200 in the natural sciences, to biology. 517 00:53:05.200 --> 00:53:11.320 Applied to biology, as Engels did in the Antiduring, dialectical materialism has an 518 00:53:11.320 --> 00:53:14.280 unmistakably crazy air. 519 00:53:14.280 --> 00:53:20.900 In an ultra-hegelian manner, logic and logical contradictions, or negations, are hopelessly 520 00:53:20.900 --> 00:53:24.200 confused with the processes of reality. 521 00:53:24.200 --> 00:53:30.960 Thus, butterflies come into existence from the egg through negation or transcendence 522 00:53:30.960 --> 00:53:32.300 of the egg. 523 00:53:32.300 --> 00:53:35.620 They are negated again as they die. 524 00:53:35.620 --> 00:53:42.860 And the barley corn is negated and is supplanted by the barley plant, the negation of the corn. 525 00:53:42.860 --> 00:53:48.260 The plant grows, is fructified and produces again barley corns. 526 00:53:48.260 --> 00:53:53.540 And as soon as these are ripe, the ear withers away, is negated. 527 00:53:53.540 --> 00:53:59.500 As a result of this negation of the negation, we have gained the original barley corn, in 528 00:53:59.500 --> 00:54:03.980 a quantity 10, 20 or 30 times larger. 529 00:54:03.980 --> 00:54:10.740 Furthermore, Marx himself, and not only Engels, was also very interested in Darwin and in 530 00:54:10.740 --> 00:54:13.260 biological science. 531 00:54:13.260 --> 00:54:19.120 Marx wrote to Engels that Darwin's work serves me as a basis in natural science for the class 532 00:54:19.120 --> 00:54:25.320 Struggle in History, and that this is the book which contains the basis in natural history 533 00:54:25.320 --> 00:54:27.340 for our view. 534 00:54:27.340 --> 00:54:33.560 By recasting the dialectic in materialist and atheist terms, however, Marx gave up the 535 00:54:33.560 --> 00:54:40.320 powerful motor of the dialectic as it operated throughout history, either Christian messianism 536 00:54:40.320 --> 00:54:45.840 or providence or the growing self-consciousness of the world spirit. 537 00:54:45.840 --> 00:54:52.580 How could Marx find a scientific materialist replacement newly grounded in the ineluctable 538 00:54:52.580 --> 00:54:59.200 laws of history that would explain the inevitability of the imminent apocalyptic transformation 539 00:54:59.200 --> 00:55:02.320 of the world into communism? 540 00:55:02.320 --> 00:55:07.760 It is one thing to base the prediction of a forthcoming Armageddon upon the Bible. 541 00:55:07.760 --> 00:55:13.680 It is quite another to deduce this event from allegedly scientific laws. 542 00:55:13.680 --> 00:55:18.720 Setting forth the specifics of this engine of history was to occupy Karl Marx for the 543 00:55:18.720 --> 00:55:20.880 rest of his life. 544 00:55:20.880 --> 00:55:26.600 Although Marx found Feuerbach indispensable for adopting a thorough-going atheist and 545 00:55:26.600 --> 00:55:33.720 materialist position, Marx soon found that Feuerbach had not gone nearly far enough. 546 00:55:33.720 --> 00:55:38.800 Even though Feuerbach was a philosophical communist, he basically believed that if man 547 00:55:38.800 --> 00:55:44.880 If man foreswore religion, then his alienation from his self would be over. 548 00:55:44.880 --> 00:55:48.440 To Marx, religion was only one of the problems. 549 00:55:48.440 --> 00:55:55.720 The entire world of man, the Menschenwelt, was alienating and had to be radically overthrown 550 00:55:55.720 --> 00:55:58.280 root and branch. 551 00:55:58.280 --> 00:56:04.120 Only apocalyptic destruction of this world of man would permit true human nature to be 552 00:56:04.120 --> 00:56:05.780 realized. 553 00:56:05.780 --> 00:56:13.520 Only then would the existing un-man truly become man, mensch. 554 00:56:13.520 --> 00:56:19.780 As Marx thundered in the fourth of his theses on Feuerbach, one must proceed to destroy 555 00:56:19.780 --> 00:56:25.180 the earthly family as it is, both in theory and in practice. 556 00:56:25.180 --> 00:56:32.420 In particular, declared Marx, true man, as Feuerbach had argued, is a communal being, 557 00:56:32.420 --> 00:56:40.500 Gemeinwesen or Species Being, Gattungswesen, Although the state as it exists must be negated 558 00:56:40.500 --> 00:56:47.620 or transcended, man's participation in the state operates as such a communal being. 559 00:56:47.620 --> 00:56:54.700 The main problem comes in the private sphere, the market or civil society, in which unman 560 00:56:54.700 --> 00:57:02.040 acts as an egoist, as a private person, treating others as means and not collectively as masters 561 00:57:02.040 --> 00:57:11.240 and in existing society, unfortunately, civil society is primary, while the state or political 562 00:57:11.240 --> 00:57:14.120 community is secondary. 563 00:57:14.120 --> 00:57:20.760 What must be done to realize the full nature of mankind is to transcend the state and civil 564 00:57:20.760 --> 00:57:28.520 society by politicizing all of life, by making all of man's actions collective. 565 00:57:28.520 --> 00:57:35.340 Then real individual man will become a true and full species being. 566 00:57:35.340 --> 00:57:41.320 But only a revolution, an orgy of destruction, can accomplish this task. 567 00:57:41.320 --> 00:57:46.460 And here Marx harkened back to the call for total destruction that had animated his vision 568 00:57:46.460 --> 00:57:49.200 of the world in poems of his youth. 569 00:57:49.200 --> 00:57:55.960 Indeed, in a speech in London in 1856, Marx was to give graphic and loving expression 570 00:57:55.960 --> 00:57:58.820 to this goal of his praxis. 571 00:57:58.820 --> 00:58:04.320 He mentioned that in Germany in the Middle Ages there existed a secret tribunal called 572 00:58:04.320 --> 00:58:06.320 the Femgericht. 573 00:58:06.320 --> 00:58:12.480 He then explained, if a red cross was seen marked on a house, people knew that its owner 574 00:58:12.480 --> 00:58:15.160 was doomed by the fame. 575 00:58:15.160 --> 00:58:20.660 All the houses of Europe are now marked with the mysterious red cross. 576 00:58:20.660 --> 00:58:26.160 Murray is the judge, its executioner, the proletarian. 577 00:58:26.160 --> 00:58:32.360 Marx in fact was not satisfied with the philosophical communism to which he and Engels had separately 578 00:58:32.360 --> 00:58:42.960 been converted by the slightly older left-Hegelian Moses Hess, 1812-1875, in the early 1840s. 579 00:58:42.960 --> 00:58:50.420 To Hess's communism, Marx, by the end of 1843, added the crucial emphasis on the proletariat 580 00:58:50.420 --> 00:58:56.880 — not simply as an economic class, but as destined to become the universal class when 581 00:58:56.880 --> 00:58:59.560 communism was achieved. 582 00:58:59.560 --> 00:59:05.000 As we have indicated above, Marx actually acquired his vision of the proletariat as 583 00:59:05.000 --> 00:59:11.760 the key to the communist revolution from the 1842 work of Lawrence von Stein, an enemy 584 00:59:11.760 --> 00:59:17.800 of socialism, who interpreted the socialist and communist movements as rationalizations 585 00:59:17.800 --> 00:59:28.800 Marx discovered in Stein's attack the scientific engine for the inevitable coming of the communist revolution. 586 00:59:28.800 --> 00:59:35.800 The proletariat, the most alienated and allegedly propertyless class, would be the key. 587 00:59:35.800 --> 00:59:40.800 Marx had now worked out the outline of his secular messianic vision, 588 00:59:40.800 --> 00:59:47.760 Vision, a material dialectic of history with the final apocalyptic revolution to be achieved 589 00:59:47.760 --> 00:59:50.200 by the proletariat. 590 00:59:50.200 --> 00:59:54.080 But how specifically was this to be accomplished? 591 00:59:54.080 --> 00:59:55.920 Vision was not enough. 592 00:59:55.920 --> 01:00:00.920 What scientific laws of history could bring about this cherished goal? 593 01:00:00.920 --> 01:00:07.160 Fortunately, Marx had a crucial ingredient for his attempted solution close at hand, 594 01:00:07.160 --> 01:00:15.160 and the Sansemonian concept of human history as driven by an inherent struggle among economic classes. 595 01:00:15.160 --> 01:00:24.160 The class struggle, along with historical materialism, was to be an essential ingredient for the Marxian material dialectic. 596 01:00:27.160 --> 01:00:30.160 6. Marx as Utopian 597 01:00:30.160 --> 01:00:41.160 Despite Marx's claim to be a scientific socialist, scorning all other socialists whom he dismissed as moralistic and utopian, 598 01:00:41.160 --> 01:00:50.160 it should be clear that Marx himself was even more in the messianic utopian tradition than were the competing utopians. 599 01:00:50.160 --> 01:00:55.160 For Marx not only sought a future society that would put an end to history, 600 01:00:55.160 --> 01:01:02.160 He claimed to have found the path towards that utopia inevitably determined by the laws of history. 601 01:01:02.160 --> 01:01:07.160 But a utopian, and a fierce one, Marx certainly was. 602 01:01:07.160 --> 01:01:12.160 A hallmark of every utopia is a militant desire to put an end to history, 603 01:01:12.160 --> 01:01:19.160 to freeze mankind in a static state, to put an end to diversity and man's free will, 604 01:01:19.160 --> 01:01:25.160 and to order everyone's life in accordance with the utopian's totalitarian plan. 605 01:01:25.160 --> 01:01:32.160 Many early communists and socialists set forth their fixed utopias in great and absurd detail, 606 01:01:32.160 --> 01:01:38.160 determining the size of everyone's living quarters, the food they would eat, etc. 607 01:01:38.160 --> 01:01:44.160 Marx was not silly enough to do that, but his entire system, as Thomas Molnar points out, 608 01:01:44.160 --> 01:02:06.160 Marx's quest for utopia was, as we have seen, an explicit attack on God's creation and a ferocious desire to destroy it. 609 01:02:06.160 --> 01:02:19.160 The idea of crushing the many, the diverse facets of creation, and of returning to an allegedly lost unity with God, began, as we have seen, with Plotinus. 610 01:02:19.160 --> 01:02:21.160 As Molnar sums up, 611 01:02:36.160 --> 01:02:38.600 be preferable to creation. 612 01:02:38.600 --> 01:02:44.840 Short of this solution, they propose to arrange a world in which change is brought under control 613 01:02:44.840 --> 01:02:52.260 so as to put an end to a disturbingly free will and to society's uncharted moves. 614 01:02:52.260 --> 01:03:00.040 They aspire to return from the linear Hebrew-Christian concept to the Greco-Hindu cycle, that is, 615 01:03:00.040 --> 01:03:03.960 to a changeless, timeless permanence. 616 01:03:03.960 --> 01:03:10.080 The triumph of unity over diversity means that for the utopians, including Marx, civil 617 01:03:10.080 --> 01:03:15.320 society with its disturbing diversity can be abolished. 618 01:03:15.320 --> 01:03:21.840 Molnar then makes the interesting point that where Hayek and Popper rebut Marxism by demonstrating 619 01:03:21.840 --> 01:03:28.440 that no mind, not even that of a politburo equipped with supercomputers, can overview 620 01:03:28.440 --> 01:03:54.440 Marx agrees with them, but he wants to abolish the marketplace and its economic as well as intellectual, legal, political, philosophical, religious, aesthetic, components, so as to restore a simple world, a monochrome landscape. 621 01:03:54.440 --> 01:04:08.280 All well and good, but as the history of communist countries has shown, there are not many followers 622 01:04:08.280 --> 01:04:14.760 of Marx who are willing to settle for a world where no economic calculation is possible, 623 01:04:14.760 --> 01:04:21.040 and therefore where production collapses and universal starvation ensues. 624 01:04:21.040 --> 01:04:27.000 Substituting in Marx for God's Will or the Hegelian dialectic of the world's spirit 625 01:04:27.000 --> 01:04:34.040 or the absolute idea is monist materialism in its central assumption, as Molnar puts 626 01:04:34.040 --> 01:04:40.640 it, that the universe consists of matter plus some sort of one-dimensional law immanent 627 01:04:40.640 --> 01:04:42.320 in matter. 628 01:04:42.320 --> 01:04:49.760 In that case, man himself is reduced to a complex but manipulable material aggregate, 629 01:04:49.760 --> 01:04:56.040 living in the company of other aggregates and forming increasingly complex super-aggregates 630 01:04:56.040 --> 01:05:00.800 called societies, political bodies, churches. 631 01:05:00.800 --> 01:05:07.280 The alleged laws of history, then, are derived by scientific Marxists as supposedly evident 632 01:05:07.280 --> 01:05:10.600 and imminent within the matter itself. 633 01:05:10.600 --> 01:05:17.080 The Marxian process towards utopia, then, is man acquiring insights into his own true 634 01:05:47.080 --> 01:05:59.080 But this process is rife with self-contradictions. For example, and centrally, how can mere matter gain insights into its nature? 635 01:05:59.080 --> 01:06:09.080 As Molnar puts it, for how can matter gather insights? And if it has insights, it is not entirely matter, but matter plus. 636 01:06:09.080 --> 01:06:24.080 In this allegedly inevitable process of arriving at the proletarian communist utopia after the proletarian class becomes conscious of its true nature, what is supposed to be Karl Marx's own role? 637 01:06:24.080 --> 01:06:33.080 In Hegelian theory, Hegel himself is the final and greatest world historical figure, the man-god of man-gods. 638 01:06:33.080 --> 01:06:39.800 Similarly, Marx, in his view, stands at a focal point of history as the man who brought 639 01:06:39.800 --> 01:06:46.280 to the world the crucial knowledge of man's true nature and of the laws of history, thereby 640 01:06:46.280 --> 01:06:52.520 serving as the midwife of the process that would put an end to history. 641 01:06:52.520 --> 01:06:54.180 Thus Molnar. 642 01:06:54.180 --> 01:07:00.020 Like other utopian and gnostic writers, Marx is much less interested in the stages of history 643 01:07:00.020 --> 01:07:07.460 up to the present, the egotistic now of all utopian writers, than in the final stages 644 01:07:07.460 --> 01:07:14.300 when the stuff of time becomes more concentrated, when the drama approaches its dénouement. 645 01:07:14.300 --> 01:07:21.820 In fact, the utopian writer conceives of history as a process leading to himself, since he, 646 01:07:21.820 --> 01:07:26.900 the ultimate comprehensor, stands in the center of history. 647 01:07:26.900 --> 01:07:33.060 It is natural that things accelerate during his own lifetime and come to a watershed. 648 01:07:33.060 --> 01:07:39.340 He looms large between the before and the after. 649 01:07:39.340 --> 01:07:45.100 The achievement of the Marxist utopia is, moreover, dependent upon leadership and rule 650 01:07:45.100 --> 01:07:51.100 by the Marxian cadre, the possessors of the special knowledge of the laws of history, 651 01:07:51.100 --> 01:07:58.760 Who Will Proceed to Transform Mankind into the New Socialist Man by the Use of Force 652 01:07:58.760 --> 01:08:03.820 In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the existence of evil is accounted for by the free will 653 01:08:03.820 --> 01:08:05.520 of the individual. 654 01:08:05.520 --> 01:08:11.200 In monist, determinist systems, on the other hand, all history is supposed to be determined 655 01:08:11.200 --> 01:08:18.240 by fixed laws, and therefore evil can only be apparent, while really acting in a deeper 656 01:08:18.240 --> 01:08:27.720 All apparent evil must be truly good, and serves some sort of determined plan, whether 657 01:08:27.720 --> 01:08:33.200 it be the unfolding of the God-Man or an atheistic version thereof. 658 01:08:33.200 --> 01:08:40.380 Coercing people by a cadre in order to create a new socialist man cannot be evil or unacceptable 659 01:08:40.380 --> 01:08:42.660 in a just society. 660 01:08:42.660 --> 01:08:48.220 On the contrary, it is the duty of the Marxist vanguard, they who are the servants of the 661 01:08:48.220 --> 01:08:53.260 next inevitable stage of history, to impose such a regime. 662 01:08:53.260 --> 01:09:00.580 This is a duty to history, that alleged entity to which the cadre are in service, and who, 663 01:09:00.580 --> 01:09:07.320 which, is destined to judge the actions of the past, to judge them as moral or immoral, 664 01:09:07.320 --> 01:09:13.320 is either advancing the birth of the allegedly inevitable historical future or of thwarting 665 01:09:13.320 --> 01:09:14.820 such birth. 666 01:09:14.820 --> 01:09:21.960 In short, history or the cadre has the privilege and duty of judging any person or movement 667 01:09:21.960 --> 01:09:30.080 as being either progressive, that is, advancing the determined march of history, or reactionary, 668 01:09:30.080 --> 01:09:32.400 retarding that inevitable march.