PANDEMONIUM BOOKS & PUBLICATIONS.
Merida, Venezuela, 1999. COPYRIGHT: Franz J. T. Lee.
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CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
HISTORY OF REASON
(Part
I )
Introduction
"History" a n d History
Anything, anyone, any relation, any process, as identification, as level, is one sided, is uni-lateral, is oblique, is skew; it is neither perpendicular nor parallel; it is only straightforward and it never deviates; it is simply uni-que. However, this only applies to something that only is: for example, das Vaterland, la Patria, the Establishment, the status quo, in one word, that what is generally known as "History". When something exists, as differentiation, as level a n d degree, it is a n d exists, i.e., it exists manifold, polique. This specifically applies to what we understand by History.
Surely, as Patria, History
is, but this is not its only level of being; it is much more
than this. However, what concerns us here is mainly the particular existence
: "History" (Patria) a n d History. This is a definite form
of our existence , it reveals the "History" a n d History of
Reason, the ideological, superstructural reflex, reflection of Labour,
of Capital, of contemporary Globalization. In the following chapters
we will elucidate the original historic philosophical traces of Reason
in the Patria and eventually we will illuminate the "Total Eclipse of Reason"
(Horkheimer) in the Patria, in "History", as the latter is taught in contemporary
schools, colleges and universities.
Patria
and Labour
Labour is the and relation, the and relation of the Patria, in the Patria. Sometimes this specific patrian non-relation is simply called alienation. Again, this is just one non-relation among zillions of others. Please notice that Labour and Alienation are just two different words which describe the very same type of relation, the relation at rest, in repose, at peace with itself, of World Peace, of Death! Like all beings, -- cosmic beings, patrian beings, historic beings, -- labour or alienation have various levels; for example, another "higher" level of Labour is Capital, in other words, in our terminology or methodology, Labour a n d Capital. This does not imply that Labour or Capital has any differentiation, any " a n d - relation"; the above Diagory is simply our analytic instrument to indicate that at a certain level the essence of the Patria is Labour, and at another level a n d degree, the Patria exists within History as Capital ; viz., as Capital a n d History.
For us, and only for us, Capital exists
here differentiated as Labour
a n d Capital. In this way, as
level, we can identify the Patria or Labour, but we can also identify Labour
or Capital, Labour and
Capital; furthermore, we can even differentiate
Labour a n d Capital, as Level
a n d Degree. We can also think about
many other relations, depending on what precisely we are analysing. Because
we are a n d exist also in the
Patria, in "History", the above is quintexistential for our very own identification
a n d differentiation, especially when we are adopting the patrian
spatial a n d temporal parameters,
in order to explain the transsystemic "History" a
n d History of Reason in the very Patria. Of course,
we will deal mainly with the Western, Christian, Civilized Patria, where
Reason was born, was reflecting
primitive accumulation of Capital,
where it reflected different modes of labour, of production. Because we
are describing transhistoric
relations, we will not necessarily
stick to formal-logical spatial and temporal parameters, we will not move
in zigzag fashion, will not
think in tactic, in tictac mode.
Darwin, Engels and Leakey
What did Charles Darwin reveal in "The
Descent of Man" (1871)?
He discovered that the patrian Man
descends directly from the apes, across the ape-men and man-apes! What
a "discovery" my Country Apes, then You a n d I, and
All Of Us fell, also our religious delirious fantasies concerning the "Crown
of Creation"!
Marx and Engels were soberly fascinated
by Darwin; Karl (Charles) Marx even wanted to dedicate Capital, Volume
Two, to his "comrade in name", but not "comrade-in-arms"; but this was
a bit too much for the "fittest survival" of Charles Darwin! Then, Engels
in his work, "Dialektik der Natur" (1882), elevated Man to the "Highest
Blossom of Nature"; this was surely "a step forward", away from the divine
ex nihil, nihil fit. However, nobody as yet noted what "ex
nihil", what "ex" trialogically really meant. Engels stated that Labour
was the Earthly Creator of Man, and not God! He did not realize trialogically
that Labour, that Production, that Alienation precedes all Gods, Men-Gods,
God-Men, id est, transvolves towards Creation. However, what interests
us here is the fragmentary work of Engels annexed to his "Dialectics of
Nature": The Part Played by Labour in the
Transition from Ape to Man.
"Labour Created Man Himself"
Let us see what is the very first thing that Engels explains to us:
"Labour is the source of all wealth, the economists assert. It is this – next to nature, which supplies it with the material that it converts into wealth. But it is also infinitely more than this. It is the primary basic condition for all human existence, and this is to such an extent that, in a sense, we have to say that labour created man himself."
Engels actually confirms that our Creator
is not "Our Father", is not God, also not Mother Nature, but Labour itself.
We are the "Children of
Labour" ; for our social benefit, Labour
converts the "material" of Nature into "wealth".
In the above quotation, there are two
more significant things
to note: firstly, the "infinitely
more than this" principle, and secondly, that Engels speaks about "human
existence", and not
about "human being". Of course, Engels
wrote his article on the transhistoric level of "natural science"
of his "time"; many facts, even those which he had used in the "Dialectics
of Nature", had become "outdated" and obsolete; yet we are not interested
in the appearance forms or the phenomenological aspects of his theory.
Of greater importance are the far-reaching epistemological comments with
regard to Labour, to Man, to "History". Now, let us see how the British,
imperial, bourgeois Leakey, who probably did not even read this fragmentary
article, meets the German, socialist, proletarian Engels in human evolutionary
affairs.
Homo Zinjanthropus – African Adam
It is of great interest what the famous British anthropologist, archaeologist and prehistorian Dr. Louis Seymour Bazett Leakey had to tell us about his discoveries in the Olduvai Gorge of present day Tanzania in Africa, especially about the first primitive tool-user whom he had identified in 1959.
For Leakey, the only way to find the
"missing link" between "ape"
and "man", between homo kenyapithecus
or homo neanderthal
and homo habilis or homo
sapiens sapiens , was to discover which homo
was working, was labouring. It happened to be homo habilis
or homo zinjanthropus who according to radio-carbon dating had evolved
in Africa some 2 to 3 000 000 years ago. If this should be true, then,
of course, Man -- young or old -- is
ancient, obsolete, moribund already, then we could understand his current
Thanatos drive, his agonizing self-destruction, his inexorable cosmic,
ontic, nihilist transvolution.
Next to the fossils of these age old
ape-men or men-apes tools were
found, but only homo zinjanthropus
alias habilis alias sapiens alias lupus
had developed, had reproduced or improved his tools, in other words, had
evolved technical skills or productive technology. Hence, Labour was decisive
for Leakey to determine when exactly our "forefather", the African Adam,
had evolved; in this way, the bourgeois ideologist totally agreed with
the scientific socialist Engels, that Labour had produced Man.
This was not something
good or bad, normative or cultural,
not even "right" or "wrong";
it was/is/will be simply a natural-social
non-relation, and this type of alienated relationship, ab ovo,
is quintessentially Man, is his Cosmic Being. In this sense, he is only
a being, a human being, he does not exist at all, he is a non-existential
Man. Thus, as exploiting, dominating, discriminating, military, ruling
man, he will drive anything and everything on earth out of existence, including
himself.
This is his transhistoric task, his
telos, his "happy end"; at present, this he is doing fine.
Of course, to develop tools, not only
manual labour is necessary; the
sine qua non is intellectual
labour. In his manuscript, Engels had
formulated this as follows:
"Thus the hand
is not only the organ of labour, it is also the product
of labour.
...But the hand did not exist by itself. It was only one member of an entire,
highly complex organism. ...First comes labour, after it, and then side
by side with it, articulate speech. ... The reaction on labour and speech
of the development of the brain and its attendant senses, of the increasing
clarity of consciousness, power of abstraction and of judgement, gave an
ever-renewed impulse to the further development of both labour and speech."
In a somehow complex way, Engels is
explaining to us the origin of
physical and intellectual labour, and
the role of speech or language, as tool, to express consciousness, the
"power of abstraction", in nuce: thinking. He also underlines
the dialectics between "hand" and "brain", between the two sides
of Labour. Surely, that what is developed as "thinking" and "thought",
as "theory" or "philosophy",
will be the non-side of affirmative
physical work, will be non-affirmative intellectual labour; logically,
formal-logically this
necessarily had to develop as such,
has to serve production, "survival", accumulation, wealth, greed, avarice,
egoism, money, capital, profits. If not, then long ago intellectual labour
surely would have been useless, would have had neither use- nor exchange-value,
would have gone straight into the feudalist, capitalist sewerage system.
Obviously, neither Darwin nor Marx, nor Engels, nor Leakey questioned the very essence of Labour, of Man. Here Labour, which is obviously Alienation -- in the sense that it progressively becomes an egoistic, arrogant process, a brutal "struggle for the survival of the fittest" of all evolutionary creatures -- becomes the most glorified thing under the sun, the "Holy of Holies", the "Holy Cow".
However, this is not only a transmutation from ape to man, an evolutionary dialectical leap, it produced and still produces a fiendish, perverse, social relationship towards Nature, towards all species on this planet. It produces Labour, which exploits, dominates and discriminates; it creates itself, Man, the Patria, Capital, "Reason", "History". Ergo, Neither God Nor Nature produced Man. Labour produced Man and Man produced Labour, thus Man produced and still reproduces Himself: He is his own Creator, is Alienation per se. The Transcendence of his Creation we are witnessing at present; it is called Globalization, Galactization.