GHIA NODIA

My point of reference will be the tradition of humanist understandings of man, which begins with the Renais sance and reaches its summit in the doctrines of He gel and Ma rx. This tradition implies a movement towards the autonomy of man, towards understanding man as "standing on his own two feet."

This movement is rooted in Christian ity, which at the same time it rejects. It sees Christianity as the religion which looks upon human indi viduality as possessing something divine: the individual human soul bears in itself the "spark of divinity" and is part of the universal divine Light. Because God himself has taken on the flesh of Man, it provided a personal way to the Truth. For this reason Christianity is the religion of personal dignity and personal freedom.

However, that very aspect of Chr istianity from which its greatness derives can at the same time be the basis of its greatest temptation. If human personality contains something divine, may one not attempt to obtain the Truth without the help of God, relying solely upon one's own spiritual and intellectual strength? This is the temptation of human competition with God which would appear to constitute the principal spiritual content of the Rena issance and the Enlig htenment. This is not to say that every thinker, or even most of them, meant that they were competing with G od. Many felt themselves profoundly Christian and such blasphemy would be shocking to them, but it is a matter, not of feelings, but of a common spiritual movement.

Even the name of Man the Artist changed so that especially after Romanticism he was no longer an ordinary "man," he was called "Genius." This is not a conventional name for a very good artist, a man doing his job in the best possible way. The connection of this word to the pagan Roman pantheon was not accidental. Genius was understood as superhuman: more than man, but still less than God: semi-God or partial God, omnipotent in a certain field of activity. He possesses enough ontological energy for it to flow out in the creation of things which are perfect in themselves. Of course, they are far lesser and more simple than the Universe created by God, but inside the limits which he sets himself the Artist lacks nothing. In that field of human activity God was no longer needed--or was no more necessary than a beautiful woman is for mere inspiration. For a long time art remained the sole mode of human occupation where man could be called Creator or Geni us. But in the XIXth and especially the XXth century scientists, politicians, sportsmen and people of various other professions too could be called by this name, leaving ever less room for God as a universal superhuman instance giving significance and hope to human affairs. Geniuses stand on their own two feet.

Still, geniuses are rare, and a more democratic form of competition with God was found in rational thought or science. In this field too, God had a great advantage: He knew everything all at once with a perfect knowledge. But in the New Times it was discovered that, although man could not know everything and all at once, still some part of his knowledge could be perfect too. Descart es found the basis of that realm: Cogito ergo sum. I can doubt about everything, but there is one thing completely beyond doubt: that I doubt, that I think, that I exist as a doubting or thinking creature. My knowledge of myself existing as a thinking creature is perfect and I need no one else to help me obtain it. Thence, Descartes begins to demonstrate the existence of God, which he does only after he has shown his own existence. My knowledge of myself precedes that of God, and is more perfect. The Cogito is the beginning of European philosophy and of modern European thought altogether, for it provided a reliable fulcrum for maintaining the autonomy of human theoretical thought. The best proof of this autonomy was provided by mathematics as the most glorious achievement of human rationality. It presented a world of perfect harmony that shows itself to Man--or is constructed by Ma n--with no help from a superhuman power. Natural science could be almost as great as that if it were safely based upon mathematics. All this did not mean a mere theoretical triumph of man; because scientific truth was the greatest force ever possessed by a creature, through it Man could become the real Master of Nat ure and use its strength to his advantage. By science and technology he completely changed his life, and made it easier and more convenient. All this was achieved by Man himself, without help from anyone else.

The acme of his movement was, as I have said, Hege l's philosophy, according to which the historical development of philosophy is the way the human mind proceeds in striving after absolute truth. This aim was thought to be obtained finally in the doctrine of Hegel himself which claims to have attained a synthesis of every possible manner in which the Absolute Being has shown itself to Man: art, religion, science and philosophy itself. This synthesis leaves nothing obscure in that Being; from now on Divine Pro vidence is absolutely transparent for Human Insight: Man knows everything that God knows, or at least everything essential--and who needs God for unessential things? Hegel says his Absolute Spirit is just another name for God, but in his doctrine God melts away and his non-existence needs only to be declared, as was done by Nietzs che. Since God is dead, the whole Universe lies open before Man to show his creative strength.

This is the true triumph of humanism, and Marx's doctrine is the best instance of this triumph. For him, atheism and humanism are, as a matter of fact, the same: "atheism, being the suppression of God, is the advent of theoretic humanism."¹ The Divine Order does not exist; we need no longer await the Day of Judgment, for our only hope lies in our own creative force. Man can and must conceive himself as the Universal Being--not merely as Arti st or thinker, but as the Universal Creator of Being--for he has to do, not with God, but with Nature, and this no longer is a hostile force but a totally transparent being: his "inorganic body." His task is to create a New World worthy of being a dwelling place for such a Universal Creator. On the other hand, he must transform the human body and soul in such a way that every individual human person would be worthy of his own intrinsic universal creative essence: he must of himself create the New Man. Alienated man (alienated from his true essence) and alienated world (alienated from its destiny to be the home of free and universal persons) must be left behind. The New World worthy of the New Man is called "communism," which is the real Kingdom of Man. The human race takes the place of God once and for all: it is impossible to be more humanistic. It is significant that the main pathos of another great optimistic criticism of Christianity, by Nietzsche, was also the pathos of the New Man, which in his language was called übermensch.

After M arx and Niet zsche the common movement split in two. One stream was practical: the great endeavor to build the New World and the New Man. These experiments have shown that the striving of the human race for absolute self-affirmation leads to the emergence of totalitarian regimes and turns out to be ruinous for a great number of individual human persons. Another stream, modern Western philosophy, has led to "theoretical anti-humanism." Thus we are left with a choice between a practical and a theoretical anti-humanism.

Another humanistic current of thought gave up the idea of the strong, active, harmonious, self-reliant Man as the real or possible Master of Being and attempted to save some remnants of the classical humanistic ideal. Let Man be weak--weak man will do lesser evil--but his uniqueness, his personal freedom and the mystery of his individual inner life must be rescued and provided with a proper philosophical foundation. The best examples of this attitude are the philosophy of dialogue (e.g., Dilthey) and Sa rtrian existentialism. Having lost its inner fulcrum, the subject of Dil they's hermeneutic seeks it in another man, whose inner life ("Innerlichkeit") he reaches through interpreting the products of one's creative activity, the objects of human science. Thus, the dialogue between "I" and "you" becomes the highest value, an end in itself. My salvation is to understand you or to understand myself through understanding you. But what do I understand in this way beyond the bare capacity for understanding? What can I communicate to You besides the mere sign of recognition that we are in the same predicament? That is why Buber speaks about the third member of dialogue--God, who gives significance to the dialogue between I and you. But this means that man cannot even understand the other man without outer help, that dialogue alone cannot suffice for humanism. Hence, Sartre's was the most consistent: Man is Nothingness. We cannot say anything positive about man's being beyond its manifesting itself as some lacuna of being: Man is, but his being is the being of nothingness. From here there is but one step to "theoretical anti-humanism," namely, the same step needed after Hegel. This is the declaration of the death of Man made by Foucault.

The three doctrines mentioned can be regarded as products of the disintegration of the classical humanistic ideal. Structuralism (including structural- functional analysis) is the most direct offspring of Enlightenment rationalism. It is completely based upon the power of scientific thought and its attempts to the degree possible to integrate into the rational schemes objects which traditionally were regarded as "irrational" because of their connection with human subjectivity. It is able to obtain this end, however, only at the expense of the abolition of the dimensions of metaphysics and life, i.e., of history. Man, with his individual soul and creative faculty, is erased like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea,² as Foucault puts it.

But if the annihilation of man were merely a matter of the expansion of the positivistic mode of thinking we could not speak of a total crisis of humanism, for still we could hope that the humanist ideal would be rescued by the other, anti-positivistic trends of thought. We see, however, that the humanist ideal is destroyed by them as well. Ga damer includes his phenomenological herm eneutics within the "humanist tradition," but his attitude towards being has nothing in common with the active position of man in traditional European humanistic thought. Paul Ric oeur, in speaking about the discussion between hermeneutics and critiques of ideology as a prolongation of the dispute between Enlightenment and Romanticism, is right in what concerns the critique of ideology but wrong in what he says about hermeneutics.³

Heidegger's and Gadamer's criticism of romantic hermeneutics is a truly radical turn, for though Romanticism and phenomenological hermeneutics have common opponents in the apologists for rational thought, they oppose it from different positions. Romanticism contributed most of all to the cult of the Genius--the highest glorification of the creative force and autonomous energy of the human subjectivity. Combatting this is the main purpose of hermeneutics. Hence, before Gadamer begins the systematic account of his doctrine in "Truth and Method," he fiercely criticizes Kan tian aesthetics and first of all its theory of genius.⁴ The inner sense of the enthusiasm for history differs in Romanti cism and hermeneutics. The romantic subject needs history for distanciation from dull everyday life--it helps him to have a look at the world from the viewpoint of the totality of being. In hermeneutics, the eminent position of tradition and history opposes the autonomous ambition of the individual: I belong to history before I belong to myself; I stand in tradition and not upon my own mind.

Thus, the discussion between Enlig htenment and Rom anticism seeks the main foundation of human power in either rational understanding or in intuition, phantasy and irrational creativity. Hermeneutics rejects the individualistic anthropocentrism and humanism represented by both of these schools. Its ideal is not activity but passivity, not making but listening, not the autonomy of the subject but breaking through the shell of subjectivity in order to get out of it and to join in the dance of Being as the only way to Truth.

The last island of humanism is the critique of ideology. The end toward which it strives sounds quite traditional: "the emancipation of man," but emancipation from what? The main enemy which critical theory combats and unmasks is repressive rationality. But, according to the classical work of Hork heimer and Ado rno, Dialectics of Enlightenment,⁵ from its very beginning human rationality has been oppressive with regard to nature, because in the beginning of history there was nothing else to oppress. "Nature" implies not only external forces represented by mythological figures, but also the inner nature of man, his emotional and sensual essence. Rationality arises as a counterforce to nature not only whose intentions, but whose structure and schemes are intrinsically oppressive. Thus, even the most noble projects for building the world of human happiness, when they stem from reason, lead finally to strengthening social and spiritual repression. When our language becomes repressive communication between men is perverted, but the repudiation of reason and the foundation of a "new mythology" is still worse, since it is the way to fascism.

If reason is a necessary though negative force, then the positive ideal can be only non-rational: this is "naturalness" (Naturwüchsigkeit) which Ga damer rightly qualifies as an uncritical vestige of Romanticism.⁶ But whether a vestige or not, the main point is that such Naturwüchsigkeit cannot serve as a positive ideal, a source of light and ontological energy and a foundation for understanding the world and for a system of values. It can be only a limiting concept, devoid of any intrinsic essence and implying nothing more than being the victim oppressed by wicked rationality. Were "nature" understood as a positive principle, it itself would become a rational concept, i.e., a tool of repression and a figure of false ideology. Nature must remain only a witness for the prosecution in the trial over repressive rationality, where critical reason is the only real hero.

This is best expressed in Hegel's terms: the consciousness represented by "critical theory" is an "unhappy consciousness" that does not want to admit its misfortune. The "unhappy consciousness" in H egel's Phenomenology of Spirit is unhappy because it knows the existence and necessity of the positive ideal, but does not know the way which leads to it; that is why it becomes passive and gives in to despair. "Critical theory " is active and offensive; it behaves as if it has spiritually obtained its ideal, but this turns out to be a quasi-ideal consisting in an ability to reject any ideal. The "emancipated man" proves to be an obscure mythological figure, the essence of which lies somewhere between futile "naturalness" and total negativity.

The ontological outlook of this theory is best described by the "unsubstantiality of goodness" in contrast to the traditional Chr istian principle of the "unsubstantiality of evil." Repressive rationality becomes a kind of satanic metaphysical force which has no real opponent in the Universe, for "nature" is just a limiting concept, while critical reflexion can only unmask Satan without opposing anything real to his omnipotence. As soon as man tries to do something positive, irrespective of his good intentions he turns out to be a servant of Satan, because any real action presupposes some adoption of satanic rules. Hence, critical theory cannot pass beyond the patch of social territory accessible to satanic forces--that of barely theoretical critique.

This, however, still is not an absolute guarantee of sinlessness, because passivity can be considered as acceptance of the satanic rules of play. This is not just a theoretical contradiction, but a real one, which has put an end to the Frankfurt School: at the end of the sixties its pupils revolted against the passive position of their teachers and Ado rno had to call the police against them. This was a logical end: you can be a very radical critic but you have to admit that your existence as a critical subject is possible only thanks to definite social institutions, and not every social system would tolerate this kind of criticism. So you must either involve yourself in the real fight against this system or openly adopt it.

I speak about critical theory more than other schools of modern philosophy because this mode of thinking is quite well represented in my country. By this I mean, not the very severe criticism of our life appearing in the era of "openness" (Glasnost) in the Soviet press, but an unofficial critical attitude in past and present informal communication. The political orientation of this criticism is directly opposite to that of the critical theory of the Frankfurt School , but the ontological model at its foundation is the same: the principle of the "unsubstantiality of goodness." Its scope is not as wide as that of critical theory, but is limited by the boundaries of the Soviet Union or the countries of the communist system. This part of the Universe is considered an unrestricted reign of Satan: the more concrete names for Satan being "the party," "the bureaucracy," "the KGB" and so on.

The main point of this mode of thinking is that any real action inside this system, irrespective of the kind intentions of its subject, are doomed to be utilized by the satanic force for its benefit, because any real action inside the system presupposes the adoption of the rules on which the system is based. It is evident, then, that Satan himself cannot be the subject of good deeds and is not to be believed if he pretends to do something good. That is why, according to this attitude, in the present moment of "reconstruction" (pere stroika) or of progressive reform proposed by the government the mission of independent thought is not to help those reforms and explicate their progressive character, but on the contrary, to preserve a sober outlook, remembering that Satan always remains Satan, and to "unmask" his new and especially sophisticated ruse named "perestroika." This is not a merely "pessimist" outlook or a sober social scepticism: one may yet think perestroika will fail and for some quite strong reasons. But, I refer to a kind of metaphysical fetishism in which, like "repressive rationality" in critical theory, the KGB takes on some mystical quality.

Nevertheless, irrespective of the existence of this not-so-transcendent source of hope, our radical critic is no less tragic than is Western critical theory. For according to his own theory of the omnipotence of the satanic force, the radical critic is intrinsically spiritually bound to the reality he criticizes and can do nothing other than oppose it: both are of one flesh and blood. He hates his enemy, but the hating becomes the sense of his life. Western democracy is not something real; it is not his flesh and blood, but just a limiting concept (precisely analogous to that of "naturalness" or "the emancipation of man" in the critical theory); it is an abstract idea whose only meaning is to be opposed to that of "totalitarian ism." The best proof of this may be the "empirical transcendence" of political emigration. In the American film, "Russians Here," about Russian emigrés in the USA, one writer nostalgically recalls his life back in the Soviet Union. "Here in the USA I can publish my books," he says, "but who needs them? In the Soviet Union I could not see them printed, but I had such an attentive reader--the KGB. Life had meaning."

But let us not lose sight of our main problem. My criticism of structuralism, hermeneutics or critical theory did not mean that I have anything against struc turalist investigations of any cultural or social object, or against "understanding" in the sense of conceiving oneself as belonging to some cultural or historical tradition, or against criticizing any social reality or false ideological consciousness as radically and sharply as it deserves. I oppose only philosophical doctrines (or perhaps ideologies) which exclude human activity itself; I can study such a world only as something dead or alien to which I do not belong. I oppose hermeneutics because according to it I am obliged to accept the reality in which I live; I oppose critical theory because according to it I can only reject that same reality. Neither of these doctrines has room for the free, independent person who in any given instance can choose what he will accept, what he will reject, and what will be the object of his barely scie ntific interest.

In all the three doctrines very succinctly surveyed here man is bound intrinsically to outward reality: to social and cultural structures, to langua ge, to ideo logy, to forces that oppress him. The collective portrait of the three can be called a portrait of "theoretical anti-humanism ." This is a quite logical end of the route chosen by European humanism several centuries ago: the way of absolute self-affirmation of man at the expense of abolishing the self-sufficient meaning of any being transcending human subjectivity. This led to the greatest achievement of a democratic public order based upon the idea of formal personal freedom.

But such "theoretical anti-humanism" leads also to the dangerous state in which the world of human freedom is conceived without the human person itself. This is possible if we regard human freedom, in Niet zsche's terms, as "freedom from" and not "freedom for ." "Freedom from " does not presuppose any inner source of meaning and value: it leaves only free space for such a source. To fill that free space by some social theory is the road to slavery; to leave empty that inner space, however, is the road to loneliness, unhappiness and suicide, or to a new kind of slavery--to impersonal structures or impersonal ideology.

Only when "freedom for" is achieved, when that empty space of personal freedom is loaded with metaphysical meaning, can the person be also socially free and responsible in the full sense of the word. This requires not merely the legal or real possibility of choosing, but conditions in which his choice is meaningful. This implies an intrinsic relation to some Absolu te Being which is something more than human subjectivity.

Man is a natural and social creature who wants to satisfy his natural and social demands. But this is not enough: he strives also for T ruth, for Be auty, for Goo dness. This striving is irreducible to his natural and social demands; it goes back to some independent ontological source that is Absolute in Itself. The human person lives in a tension between these two, the Natural and the Absolute, which are unexplainable one from another. It can be a quite painful experience to live inside this permanent tension or permanent problem.

1. Karl M arx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of l944, Martin Milligan, trans. (New York: International Publishers, l964), p. 187.

3. Paul Ric oeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 65-68.

4. Hans-Georg Ga damer, Truth and Method (New York: Crossroads, 1982), pp. 39-73.

5. Max Horkhe imer and Theodor Ad orno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, translated by John Cumming (New York: Herder & Herder, 1972).

6. Hans-Georg Gad amer, "Rhetorik, Hermeneutik und Ideologiekritik," in: Kleine Schriften I. Philosophie, Hermeneutik (Tubingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1967), p. 126.

7. G.W.F. He gel, The Phenomenology of Mind, translated by J.B. Baille (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1949), pp. 251-267.