Concerning a couple posts entitled “The Conservative Road to Serfdom” and “Why Is Distributionism So Intolerable?“…

While I am not a Hegelian, it seems to me that much of the direction of these essay’s thinking is captured and re-entangled in a Hegelian dialecticism. The notion of internal and external in Hegel directs us to the problem of limit and liberty, control and choice. In this question, we hear the faint echo of Aristotle’s potentia in Latin and dunamis in Ancient Greek and actualitas from Latin and energeia from Ancient Greek. These relations are inscribed from origin (arche) within the prism and reduction of power relations. The nagging question in Distributionism is “who decides, I or other?” For Marx, the question framed by Marx is forced communism or the natural evolution and unfolding of communism from the impossibility of capitalism. Both of these ideologies want to claim legitimacy in and from the freedom of the individual, the enlightenment of the masses, one at a time. Those who emotionally react to the prospect of external, dominating power want to force these dialectics into an externalizing mode. Those who seek legitimacy, lay claim to the individualizing, progressing, choice of critical thinking and self-determination…’I willed it thus’. Where is the origin of external and internal in Hegel?

It is in the beginning, the Logic. It is in nothingness and freedom. Pure, abstract being is the horror, the Dread (in my hybrid use of terms). It can mean nothing, be nothing, do nothing. Nothing neither opposes or confirms, hopes or despairs, moves or un-moves. It is antithetical to life. Pure being imprisons in absolute hermetic emptiness. Freedom finds its ‘infinite’ domain or realm not as a movement to something but as a movement from nothing. Freedom is escape from nothingness, from pure Being. Freedom has no choice but to escape, mediate, and discriminate. Differance [sic, Derrida’s fault] can only perpetually recapture itself, mesmerize, fantasize, phantasma-size, symbolize in order to escape the Real (Lacan).

Morality and religion may be thought antithetical to the highly secularized concept of ‘secular’. However, morality and religion also find their origin in freedom…freedom from sin, freedom from ethical anarchy, freedom from externally imposed, ‘secular’ norms. Morality and religion are surrogates of freedom while claiming and decrying their native heritage in freedom. Only God knows, only God is absolute. Freedom reserves the space for pure being, absolute otherness to be as Holy, as the safeguard which cannot be questioned. Freedom is from foreboding dread, anxiety, torture and age-abiding hāidēs. The ingenious synthesis in universal catholicism (not as noun) is in protecting and nurturing individualism while at the same time delimiting boundaries, immovable boundaries.

Boundaries reckoned by and through time in Anaximander ground justice and truth while simultaneously exacting a cost for their transgression. Heidegger would have thought ground (grund) and un-ground (ab-grund) in a typical Greek sense as origin and lack of origin (an-arche). Hegel seems to me to be fascinated and captured by this dialectic as were the Greeks. The excess to this dialectic can only be forever and infinitely recaptured by the dialectics all consuming lust for totality. It certainly merits an authenticity and easily brings one back to its bog. Hegel evens treats us to his profound psychological insight into the ever/never ending story in the master slave dialectic. The reciprocity and inextricable bounded-ness of the master and the slave find their freedom and their nemeses in each other. The freedom of the master is limited by the ever increasing dependence on the slave for livelihood, survival, definition and grounding meaning. The infinite freedom of the master, of necessity, requires the master’s servitude and indebtedness to the slave’s grounded-ness and existence. On the other hand, the slave, chained to existence, work and production requires the promise of absolute freedom. Freedom and nothingness, infinite and finite, determination and in-determinate dance violently in the bowels of religion.

In conclusion, let me simply draw upon the riddle posed at the origin by Hesiod and the Greek muses:

Hail, children of Zeus! Grant lovely song and celebrate the holy race of the deathless gods who are for ever, those that were born of Earth and starry Heaven and gloomy Night and them that briny Sea did rear. Tell how at the first gods and earth came to be, and rivers, and the boundless sea with its raging swell, and the gleaming stars, and the wide heaven above, and the gods who were born of them, givers of good things, and how they divided their wealth, and how they shared their honors amongst them, and also how at the first they took many-folded Olympus. Tell me all of this, you Muses who have your homes on Olympus, from the beginning, tell who first of them (the gods) came-to-be.

First of all Chaos came-to-be; but then afterwards Broad-breasted earth, a secure dwelling place forever for all [the immortals who hold the peaks of snowy Olympus], and misty Tartara in the depths under the wide-wayed grounds and Eros who, handsomest among the deathless gods a looser of limbs, in all the gods and in all human beings overpowers in their breasts their intelligence and careful planning. And from Chaos came-to-be both Erebos [ρεβος, the god of deep darkness, shadow] and dark night, and from night, in turn, came-to-be both Aither [the god of upper air, the mist of bright, glowing light, home of the gods] and day, whom she conceived and bore after joining in love with Erebos. But earth first begat, as an equal to herself, starry sky, so that he might cover her on all sides, in order to be a secure dwelling place forever for all the blessed gods, and she begat the tall mountains, pleasing haunts of the goddess-nymphs who make their homes in the forested hills, and also she bore the barren main with its raging swell, the sea, all without any sweet act of love; but then next, having lain with sky, she bore deep-swirling ocean,¹

The Greeks know the dilemma and riddle posed by infinite freedom and absolute indeterminateness and all the subsequent permutations in historical dialectic and spirituality. Their answer, for the purpose of this short essay; revere, create, think, dramatize, poeticize, sculpt but never be lulled into sleep and demise by the spirit of gravity not for ‘will to power’ as Nietzsche’s oracle requires but for Desire to love, to renew, to believe, to breath in again our debt to alterity, to open once again the epoch of civilization wherein we live and move and have our being.

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¹ See my Philosophy Series 4 discussion