THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY
HEGEL’S UNCONSCIOUS ANTHROPOLOGY
My approach to modern philosophy is usually based on two prejudices: modern philosophy is generally anthropological; modern philosophy is essentially Hegelian.
Modern and contemporary thinkers have, in my opinion, the great limitation of not being able to see anything apart from man. This limitation is in a way justified by the fact that ‘all of us’ are human beings and that ‘all of us’ see the world from our point of view. This produces the fact that each of us not only sees ‘reality’ from our point of view, from our perspective, but to the relativity of perspective is also added the fact that in seeing we project part of ourselves into the representation and that our intellect ‘filters’ the world in a certain sense.
This is of course inevitable, the problem is to realise this human ‘limitation’ and to take it into account when analysing the world. When philosophy not only fails to realise the anthropological ‘limit’, but even unconsciously projects it into its fantastic systems, what we can generally call existentialism occurs. By existentialism I mean, in addition to the ‘proper’ intellectual current of the 20th century didactically understood, more generically all projections and all modern philosophical systems that only have man as their substance.
As I said, seeing the world beyond human eyes is impossible, but to consider the world only what man sees is even worse. Take, for example, an ordinary physical or chemical law. We can abstract all we want by saying that this law is a product of the human brain, but we cannot deny the fact that the relationship between the natural entities that respond to that law exists independently of man. Man at most produces a SYNTHESIS of what he sees, man can produce the idea that every object on earth falls downwards, but the fact that an object can fall downwards or hover upwards is independent of human reason, it is a fact that the intellect takes note of.
Existentialism in the broadest sense is therefore the kind of thinking that believes that the human synthesis comes before the fact, that the phenomenon is more important than what happens, that the ‘value’ of an object is a creation of man. For existentialism, a hammer has no meaning in itself, it has value the moment the human being decides to hammer nails into it. The independence of the world is not calculated at all, e.g. the fact that nails cannot be hammered in with a rose is not taken into consideration.
Hegel also falls into this error, but he does not realise it at all. Hegel is firmly convinced that he describes the ‘All’ and its ideal process with the dialectic between thesis antithesis and synthesis. My conviction is that the process between abstraction, particularisation and their union in the synthesis, is not at all the way in which Spirit develops in the world, nor the rational form that things take, simply the human, anthropological way of reasoning. If we see a plant, for example, we do not conceive either the simple idea in itself universal and formal of each plant, nor all its atoms, particles, etc., we see a synthesis. The way of reasoning therefore between form, substance and ‘truth’ is therefore not a universal scientific way, but simply a process of the human mind.
For all this, we can say that Hegel is the first existentialist! Let us consider the moments of his great system: the first, logic, is anything but rational and universal, in that it overcomes the principles of identity and non-contradiction by asserting that truth lies in the mediation between opposites and various baloney that demonstrate all the subjectivity of his system; the second, nature, is the simple attempt to apply the thesis-antithesis-synthesis process, the universal-particular-singular syllogism, to empirical phenomena, an attempt that fails, taking on comical connotations when it hurls itself at the theories of Galileo and Newton as being not very conceptual; the third is anthropology that emerges, since philosophy of the spirit speaks substantially of laws, ethics, art, religion and philosophy, in a word, of the abstractions of the human being. Leaving aside fascism that emerges from the idea of its rational state, its corporations, its foreign policy.
Hegel tells us, precisely in the philosophy of spirit, something very important, which shows how existentialism can be seen as a mechanical evolution of his thought. He speaks of well-being, contentment, good and evil and states that individual well-being must correspond to universal good. However, this does not always happen in everyday life and this correspondence, as reason has not yet fully developed according to Hegel, remains something accidental. I ask: Under what conditions does individual well-being correspond to the universal good? the answer is simple, this is possible in the case that only man exists! For it is evident that if only I exist, my well-being is also the good of all that exists.
The modern era, already addressed in an earlier article of mine on www.anarchaos.it, is based on the anthropological rationalism that developed with humanism first and the Enlightenment later, the economic rationalism of industrialisation, and the Hegelian rationalism of the ideal. Humanism and the Enlightenment, although they have the merit of overcoming bigoted thinking, have however transformed man into the new centre of the cosmos and elevated him to the level of a deity. Industrialisation has been a disaster, causing the pollution of the planet, the death of millions of animals, the devastation of resource-rich territories, and the intensive exploitation of workers. Finally, Hegelian idealism was the banal way in which political and philosophical dialectics developed in modernity. The biggest culprit is certainly Marx, but nevertheless most of the intellectuals of the last two hundred years have done nothing but play the role.
The modern era has had the ability to oppose dominant thought with a stupid Hegelian antithesis that is nothing but dominant thought turned upside down, all of which has facilitated the victory and strengthening of domination. Stupidly, if the dominant thought is MALE, the opposition thought must be FEMINIST; if the dominant thought is BORGHESE, the opposition thought must be PROLETARY; if the dominant thought is CAPITALIST, the opposition thought must be UNIVERSAL; if the dominant thought is INDUSTRIAL, the opposition thought must be PRIMITIVISM; if the dominant thought is CONSERVATIVE, the opposition thought must be PROGRESSIVE.
In their stupidity, almost no modern politicians have realised that the opposition between machismo and feminism, between bourgeois and proletarian, between confindustria and trade unions, between technology and primitivism, between conservatives and progressives has only strengthened the system, in the Hegelian sense, throughout; it has made it more participatory, more democratic, more extensive.
As an individualist, as an anarchist, I realise not only the anthropological fact that we are all selfish, but also that in order to satisfy our needs, we must understand the world as objectively as possible. The more objective I can be, the more knowledge I have in the service of my subjectivity.
To destroy the system, to abandon it in its regenerative oppositions, we must stop defining ourselves as feminists or masculinists, we must start defining ourselves as ANTISESSISTS; we must stop defining ourselves as bourgeois or proletarian, we must define ourselves as ANTICLASSISTS; we must stop choosing between trade unions and cond industry, but we must piss against all institutions; above all, we must overcome the dichotomy between right and left, between the conservative and the progressive in a system, because anarchy is the total destruction of the state.
Modernity is the stupid opposition of the anti-Christs. I do not believe that anarchists need to recite the rites of the state in reverse to fight it. Anarchists should go beyond mere anti-archy, to become against all archia, beyond, in indifference to all order and hierarchy, in a word, ANARCHY.
If we could go beyond mirror criticism to project ourselves into the construction of something different, and no longer simply contrary, to what the state proposes...