"Matko Soric is a PhD student at the University of Zagreb, Croatia. He wrote a book on postmodernism (The Concepts of Postmodernist Philosophy), two scientific articles (Semantic Holism and the Deconstruction of Referentiality: Derrida in an Analytical Context; Reflexivity in the Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu: Beyond Sociological Dichotomies) and a dozen of book reviews. His main areas of interest include classical German idealism and western Marxism. Currently, he is writing a PhD thesis on Milan Kangrga. An essay on Gajo Petrovi? (Gajo Petrovi?: Critical Essay) is to published this year."
MODERNIST HUMANISM OF MILAN
KANGRGA AND GAJO PETROVIĆ
Gajo Petrović and Milan Kangrga were two crucial theoretical and
logistical pillars of the Yugoslav magazine Praxis
and the Korčula Summer School. Milan Kangrga is usually regarded to be a
Hegelian Marxist with special interest in ethics, while Gajo Petrović is often
looked upon as a Heideggerian Marxist with special interest in analytical
philosophy. There is some truth to that, but there is also a certain paradox
surrounding the two. Kangrga cannot be called an ethicist, moralist or some
sort of Marxist preacher of precise normative demands, in spite of his
life-long interest in ethics. Drawing upon a wide range of classical Marxist
themes in a uniquely unorthodox way, Petrović developed his original
philosophical position which has much more in common with classical German
idealism than with Heidegger. In this text, I will try to summarize and sketch
out a couple of important and internationally still unappreciated ideas of
their philosophical legacy.
Some believe they were authentic dissidents with an important and
original contribution to a so called open or western Marxism, similar to Rosa
Luxemburg, Herbert Marcuse, Miroslav Krleža, Milovan Đilas, and partly George
Orwell, Raymond Williams, Georg Lukács, Raya Dunayevskaya and Karl Korsch. Others
claim they were unofficial theoretical facilitators in service of an anti-Stalinist
fraction of Yugoslav bureaucratic elite with the task of vindicating and justifying
the existing socialist regime. In both cases, their work remains conceptually
unexplored.
Kangrga and Petrović started their
academic career as young assistants in the wake of the II World War, at the
Department of Philosophy at the University of Zagreb. Petrović wrote his dissertation
on Georgi Plekhanov in 1956, while Kangrga finished his dissertation on Marx
and ethics in 1961. The crucial moment in the genesis of humanist Marxism and Praxis magazine was a conference held in
a Slovenian town called Bled in 1960 where the two major fractions of Yugoslav Marxists
collided. Their main point of divergence was the so called theory of
reflection. According to the reflection theory, developed by the early Lenin in
Materialism and Empirio-criticism and
reiterated by Todor Pavlov in his Theory
of Reflection, human consciousness is nothing but a necessary effect of the
surrounding matter without any causal autonomy. Our thoughts and knowledge are
a direct consequence of crude mechanical determinism. To a contemporary reader
acquainted with analytical philosophy, reflection theory might be best
represented as a rudimental Soviet version of eliminative materialism or at
least reductive materialism. On the other hand, a group formed around Kangrga
and Petrović, inspired by Hegel and early Marx, arguing that human
consciousness has a certain degree of autonomy. This group will later be known
as the editorial board of the Praxis
magazine. In the terminology of contemporary philosophy of mind, they could be
considered Emergentists.
The theory of reflection is one
version of naïve realism or direct Referentialism that explains human knowledge
as a pure reflection or mimesis of the
external world. Beside this epistemological aspect, there is a much more important
political aspect. If our mental states are necessary, and our actions are based
on our mental states, then our actions are necessary, whatever they may be.
According to the theory of reflection, human freedom does not exist, and the
course of history is inevitable. Kangrga and Petrović did not believe this to
be the case. They discarded the theory
of reflection as a sort of metaphysics, which has a somewhat special meaning
for them.
For both Kangrga and Petrović, metaphysics
is a name for any sort of perennial theory, be it of religious, philosophical,
scientific, political or economic origin, that negates radical changes of human
beings and their culture through time. What they call metaphysics resonates
with the position Nietzsche dismissed as Platonism, Heidegger as metaphysics of
presence, and Derrida as logocentrism. According to Kangrga and Petrović,
reality evolves, and so does human history, which means we should never stop being
engaged in the transformation of social
institutions. It should be pointed out that with the term metaphysics they do not designate only idealism: reflection theory
is nothing but materialistic metaphysics, a model of the universe in which
nothing essentially new can come into existence. In the discourse of Marxist
humanism, metaphysics is another name for ontological, political and historical
determinism.
My basic claim in this text is that
we should rename Kangrga and Petrović's position and term it “modernist
humanism”. Why? They were both devoted to this fundamental metaphysical claim
that Being is a process, not a state. Everything that exists is in a constant
and unstoppable flux and development, especially human beings, with the important
difference that while everything else changes itself uncontrollably, humans can
consciously create their own destiny. This abstract notion of omnipresent
change can also be found in Heraclitus, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Whitehead
and James. It is important for Kangrga and Petrović because, on the one hand,
they had a theoretical tool to disregard every pre-modern social formation they
encountered in everyday life, and on the other hand, they could idealise the future
state of the human nature.
Just like contemporary postmodernists,
Kangrga and Petrović saw human nature as a social or historical construct.
There is of course a big difference: unlike postmodernism or poststructuralism,
which breaks down the Hegelian axis of historical progress, they implicitly believed
there to be only one and universal criteria of human development. Nonetheless, for
them, the human nature remains a historical product. A fundamental distinction
they sustained throughout their entire careers was the opposition between
metaphysics and historical thinking (povijesno
mišljenje, geschlichtliches Denken)
in the case of Kangrga, and metaphysics and thought of revolution (mišljenje revolucije, das Denken der Revolution) in Petrović. Metaphysics always advocates
some universal, transtemporal, unchangeable and indestructible human essence,
while Kangrga and Petrović see human beings as products of their own age and
culture. This dispute remains present in the contemporary nature-nurture
debate, that can be seen in the naturalist evolutionary psychology of Steven
Pinker and all sorts of culturalisms typical for the humanities and social
sciences.
The theory advocated by Kangrga and
Petrović is one version of culturalism, if by culturalism we mean the theory
that inextricably links one's existence with a wider cultural context. In the culturalist
paradigm, individuals' life cannot be explained only by its intrinsic,
individual properties: proper explanation must include heteronomous historical
circumstances and fluctuating social surroundings. For Kangrga and Petrović, these
surroundings are History (die Geschichte),
material context produced and reproduced by humans. If humans create history,
and history defines future generations of humans, it is plausible to say that humans
create themselves. Just like Feuerbach claimed that God did not create men, but
vice-versa, Kangrga and Petrović claim that history did not create men, but
vice-versa. But since history is under constant change and development, so is
human nature. That is why Kangrga states this, in his speculative manner: “…Man
is not what he already is, he is what he is not, but can and should be, in
order to be.” (Kangrga, 1989b: 229). In their justified attempt to escape from
hard determinism of reflection theory, they ended up in an over idealised
humanism, purged of the most important elements of a Marxist social model,
elements that point out strict financial limits and material conditions of
human self-creation. That is why I think we should label their theory
“modernist humanism”, rather than “Marxist humanism”.
There were a couple of attempts to reconsider
the relationship of Marxism and ethics. I will mention only The Ethical Dimensions of Marxist Thought
by Cornel West, The Ethical Thought of
Young Marx by Marek Frichand, Marxism
and Ethics by Paul Blackledge, and
Marxism and Ethics by Philip Kain. As Marek Frichand states in his valuable
study, The Ethical Thought of Young Marx,
there are three possible solutions: Marxism and ethics are mutually exclusive; Marxism
and ethics are not mutually exclusive, and therefore Marxist ethics should be
created, and finally; Marxism already possesses normative demands, so, there is
no need to articulate a specific Marxist ethics. Kangrga is among those who believed
that Marxism and ethics are incompatible.
According to Kangrga's interpretation, Hegel regarded ethics to be
contradictory. Simply put, every ethical claim is based upon a state of affairs
that should be changed and replaced by a better situation. If this better state
of affairs ever occurs, ethical claim destroys itself. So, an ethical claim can
exist only due to a morally corrupt state. The essence of ethics is a gap
between ought and is, Kangrga claims: “Entire Hegel's
analysis of the moral consciousness tries to show that moral consciousness as
practice cannot and should not, in order not to contradict its essential
identity, realize what it is destined for.” (Kangrga, 1989a: 64). For Kangrga,
ethics should be straightforwardly assimilated into the realm of history. Instead
of a philosophical search for proper ethical values, we should turn to his
version of historicism, that is historical
thinking, which explains moral values in the light of their social function.
A crucial term for both Kangrga and
Petrović is practice (cro. praksa; ger. Praxis ). In my opinion, the best way to understand practice is through a culturalist
perspective. Simply put, practice is
a process of creating culture (or history) that redefines the material context of
living for the future generations. When Kangrga states that “…practice is
creativity.” (Kangrga, 1989c: 80), he is pointing out a culturalist maxim about
the arbitrary nature of social institutions. The realm of culture and history
is not deterministically encoded in the structure of universe, but freely
created by man, and therefore apt for transformation. Along those lines, Gajo
Petrović defines practice as
“…universal, free, creative and self-creative being.” (1986: 192). For Kangrga,
the possibility of practice is rooted in spontaneity; for Petrović, it is
rooted in the revolution as an underlying principle of the universe.
Petrović calls his own theory the
thought of revolution (mišljenje
revolucije, das Denken der Revolution). How come? Revolution
is not only a political, but an ontological concept as well. According to
Petrović's process-ontology, the essence of reality is radical change. This
sort of change is not a mere realization in time of pre-existing necessity, but
a moment when completely new, unexpected and spontaneous state of affairs comes
into being. Revolution as radical change is not predictable, not even from God’s
point of view. Petrović's revolution might
be compared to the notion of event in
Alain Badiou or Slavoj Žižek, a radical rupture with the material or
psychological past, and it is probably motivated by a Heideggerian notion of Ereignis, whose legacy both Badiou and
Žižek bear on.
Kangrga and Petrović have much in
common, but there are also many differences. One is the apparent difference in
style. Petrović is under the influence of analytical philosophy, so he writes
in a clear, understandable, plain, simple, downright and unambiguous manner. On
the other hand, Kangrga is under the influence of German idealism, especially
Hegel, so his style is much more jargoned. Despite that, I believe that Kangrga
had a strong intellectual influence on Petrović's thought of revolution. This effect
should be explored, not just in the context of the Praxis group, but also in a wider context of left-anticommunism and
western Hegelian and Heideggerian Marxism.
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