280 - History and Spirit: An Inquiry into the Philosophy of Liberation

History and Spirit: An Inquiry into the Philosophy of Liberation
By Joel Kovel
Boston, Beacon Press, 1991. 301 pp. $24.95.

Occasionally a book appears whose significance is as much a factor of who is writing as what is written. The publication of a book that dusts off the fallen notion of spirit and repristinates it at the center of philosophical discourse is cause for excitement in its own right. But wait till you hear about who is saying such things.

Joel Kovel is Alger Hiss Professor of Social Studies at Bard College. A secular Jew and a sharply anti-religious positivist, he studied the hard sciences in college but found them too inhuman. Reading William Blake brought about "a dazzlingly transformative experience," as he himself describes it. He shifted to medicine, got his M.D., then read Freud's Interpretation of Dreams and underwent another major transformation. He became a psychoanalyst and served as director of training for psychologists at Albert Einstein Medical School.

But his restlessness was unappeased. The Vietnam War pushed him radically to the left. He became involved in the War Resisters' League. It was there that he noticed that the Berrigans had a deeper analysis of the situation, and yet were more cheerful. The leftists he knew tended to be unhappy. Another turning point came when he went to Nicaragua in 1983. He was deeply moved by people in the religious community, especially the Jesuits. He went back each of the next three years, staying part of the time in base communities. His eyes were opened to how profoundly mistaken he had been about religion. His observations about its oppressive side were not refuted; he had simply failed to see the emancipatory side. Several experiences moved him to

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such depths that he could not fathom them. He flirted with joining the Catholic Church, but finally was unable to stomach a religion that had slaughtered so many of his ancestors.

Kovel could see that communism was falling apart, and tried to excavate deeper to the roots of both its failure and the continuing evil that it had attempted to address. This study is the result. Its significance lies in its relentless pursuit of the Hegelian dialectic through Marxism and out the other side in a new synthesis that recovers the Hegelian spirit in a Marxian matrix of concrete material things. Kovel has, thus, produced a new intellectual synthesis that recovers spirituality, not by making an end run around Marx and Freud, but by going right straight through them to recover religious reality in the heart of the world.

Marx argued that the "self is the ensemble of social relations." This proposition, true and necessary as far as it goes, is insufficient, says Kovel. Those social relations and the self that enters them are both precipitates of a primordium that comes before social causation and is the ground of our wish to be free. We come from a place before society, even if we are always directed toward society.

Freud, for his part, had as one of his prime goals the despiritualization of the world. This intent spells the futility of all attempts to develop a non-reductive psychology of religion based on Freud. He wanted to kill the Father in order to emancipate people from false dependency. But all reductive analyses require the analyst to be analyzed by means of the same reductive principles. Hence Freud must be regarded, on his own theory, as "simply" attempting to kill the vestiges of his own father's authority within his own psyche. Held up against the greatness of Freud's achievement, such a Freudian reading of Freud is absurd. As Kovel puts it,

And so the atheist Freud did have a god: logos without spirit. Hence the spiritual could be reduced to a hidden meaning of infantile life, and left at that. But this principle is only asserted, and nowhere proven. Nor can it be proven. Who could deny that infantility persists within spirituality as it does elsewhere? Anyone can see that in the rich complexity of religion, God the Father is also the father, or that the state of helplessness which arises when we contemplate our weakness in the face of the universe or society evokes in the mind a yearning for the protection afforded by parents. Similarly, it stands to reason that the situation of an infant at the breast should be one of the first occasions for spiritual experience in an individual's life. But none of this exhausts the real meaning of spirituality-indeed, it fits into that meaning and is implied by it, since for there to be transcendence there has to be something to transcend.

Human beings, says Kovel, are configured spiritually. Spirituality is an interrogation of being from the standpoint of nonbeing, but there is no discrete answer to the interrogation and therefore no prescribed spirituality. It is the questioning and not any particular answer that

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opens the door to spirituality. Spirituality is thus a continual process of discovery and struggle, enacted in this world, which is to say, in history.

The despiritualized worldview of Descartes and the despiritualized society of capitalism radically alienate us from each other and from our own selves. "No one is actually told not to have a soul. By soulless conditions is simply meant that those ways of being which are conducive to soul are not rewarded with worldly success." Spirituality is replaced by self-maximization, which means the minimization of everyone else. Power is a condition of being-over in which the dominator extracts being from the dominated. Domination is the expropriation of being. Sin (here he seizes a term calculated to make many of his secular leftist friends squirm) is the propensity to commit violence, with violence defined as a violation or disruption of the integrity of another being. Spiritual being thus requires nonviolent practice: the overcoming of violent desire.

Thesis: Hegel; antithesis: Marx; synthesis: Kovel. That dialectic lays out graphically what I regard as the profound significance of this book. Like some of the new physicists, Kovel has exposed materialism and reductionism as spiritless, life-negating, and bankrupt. This is an achievement to celebrate.

Walter Wink
Auburn Theological Seminary
New York, NY