Marx, when he leaped from philosophy into politics, carried the theories of dialectics into action, making political action more theoretical, more dependent upon what we today would call an ideology, than it ever had been before. Since, moreover, his springboard was not philosophy in the old metaphysical sense, but as specifically Hegel’s philosophy of history as Kierkegaard’s springboard had been Descartes’ philosophy of doubt, he superimposed the “law of history” upon politics and ended by losing the significance of both, of action no less than of thought, of politics no less than of philosophy, when he insisted that both were mere functions of society and history.
That is the essential thing: for Outsiders to stop seeing themselves as misfits and to take up their real work as evolutionary agents. To use the mind to increase the powers of the mind. To use our freedom to create more freedom. When we have done that, mankind will have taken the decisive step in its evolution and will become, as the Romantics knew we were long ago, “something closer to the gods.”
Aletheia is an ancient Greek word meaning ‘disclosure’ or ‘unconcealedness’. Heidegger traced the word ‘phenomenon’ to the ancient Greek phainesthai, meaning ‘that which shows itself in the light’. This was in opposition to Kant’s belief that phenomena were representations that our cognitive apparatus makes of the verboten ‘thing-in-itself’ – thus opening a divide between knowledge and being – and positivism’s idea of truth as scientific fact expressed in logical propositions – so reducing truth to the limits of banal prose.
But whereas knowledge of the here and now depends on our capacity to imagine what cannot but be there as much as on our perceptions of what is there, our knowledge of the past is different, since in the absence of any such entity as an observed past, the capacity to imagine the past, ‘we cannot but imagine what cannot but be there’, as Collingwood puts it, must assume greater importance.
Frontiers test ideologies like nothing else. There is no time for the theoretical. That, ultimately, is why America has not been friendly to communism, fascism, or other, more benign forms of utopianism. Idealized concepts have rarely taken firm root in America, and so intellectuals have had to look to Europe for inspiration. People here are too busy making money—an extension, of course, of the frontier ethos, with its emphasis on practical initiative.
Treitschke turned Karl Rochau’s 1853 coinage Realpolitik from a warning by liberals to themselves to heed actual circumstances into a right-wing call for the uninhibited use of national power. “The state,” for Treitschke, was not “a good little boy, to be brushed and washed and sent to school.” The state, as in Hegel’s thinking, was the most comprehensive frame of “ethical life,” the common, norm-governed life of people together in society. The frame rose from families, through law, commerce, and bureaucracy to the highest organs of state power. Hegel had divided them into crown, executive, and legislature, but Treitschke did not believe in the separation of powers.
Our task, then, is to strengthen our consciousness of ourselves, to find centers of strength within ourselves which will enable us to stand despite the confusion and bewilderment around us.
