Civilization and its Fate

JON MILLS

Abstract. We may be generally suspicious of global speculations regarding the future of humanity, but in our contemporary socio-political climate of aggression, violence, and hate, prejudice and its derivatives continue to grip world attention thus subjugating any hope of their abolition to the bleak forecast of pessimism. This article addresses the role of prejudice and destruction in the process of civilization and explores the degree to which the positive significance of the negative may inform new valuation practices that in turn improve human relations and world accord. Juxtaposed to psychoanalytic anthropology, Hegel's dialectic becomes the logical model for examining the possibility of global amelioration of the pernicious forces that beset the fate of humankind.

When Einstein approached Freud on behalf of the League of Nations and asked the question: "Is there any way of delivering mankind from the curse of war?,"⁽¹⁾ Freud responded with reservation suggesting that perhaps it may only be mitigated. This is the general tenor of his anthropological treatment of humanity: until base instinct (Trieb) is sufficiently harnessed and transformed in the service of reason, our world communities will continue to be plagued by the dark marauders of our own insidious nature. Why war?--because hate and violence are "a piece of unconquerable nature . . . a piece of our own psychical constitution."⁽²⁾ With this dismal portrait of human relations, we may never come to throw our hatred down.

People are slaughtering one another all over the world in the name of religion, ethnic purity, and nationalism under the guise of freedom, justice, and social reform. Contemporary ethnopolitical warfare is raging throughout the strife-torn areas of the former Yugoslavia, the Middle East, Central Africa, Central America, and Northern Ireland where civilian populations are the primary targets of terror--marked by sadism and butchery, while women and children comprise a large percentage of the incurred human rights atrocities. Those close to the front lines of ethnic conflicts are oppressed by political violence, whether they be refugees who have lost their families in the ethnic cleansing campaigns of Bosnia and Kosovo or the killing fields of Cambodia and Laos, to Sarajevans who must dodge sniper fire everyday to run to the market to fetch a loaf of bread. When the constancy of violence and war continue to saturate our daily consciousness, we can only anticipate where it will emerge next.

To what degree will our disparate cultures be able to rise above this mode of existence, where violence becomes the right of a community, either chosen or impugned? This is further compounded by the historical fact that brutality was the driving force behind the emergence of law, which still requires the use of violence to be enforced. Can actual force be replaced by the force of ideas, or are we condemned to the perversions of prejudice? Given Freud's ontological treatise on the structure of the psyche, "there is no use in trying to get rid of men's aggressive inclinations,"⁽³⁾ they are as natural as breathing; for we can never escape from the fact that our minds are primitive. Homo homini lupus--"Man is a wolf to man."⁽⁴⁾

The real issue involves: To what degree will the will toward violence be sublimated into the higher tiers of self-conscious ethical reflection that reason can afford? We are a world divided by race, religion, ethnicity, economics, politics, and culture where strong emotional bonds fuel and sustain separation and difference among our communities. I do not wish to express platitudes, illusory ideals, or provide false hope--the evidence, the brute facticity of impoverishment, suffering, cruelty, and murder points to the most archaic configurations of psychic development that permeate our valuation practices. Within today's multicultural world community, prejudice continues to divide and polarize human relations into firm oppositions that become fortified within rigid group identifications that inform collectively shared value systems. Ethnic, cultural, and national identities are forged through prejudicial valuation practices that in some cases even legitimate heinous forms of injustice such as genocide. When collective identity is so firmly established in bipolar relation to the Other, is it possible for such valuation practices to abate under the rubric of peace? Prejudice, hate, and violence are no more likely to disappear than the reality of the external world, therefore the question becomes one of amelioration.

The Positive Significance of the Negative

As Hegel completed the final installments of the Phenomenology of Spirit, Napoleon was outside the city walls of Jena ushering in a new age--history was being transformed once again by the revolutionary currents of the dialectic. The battle of Jena may be said to parallel the very negative character of the dialectic itself, as conflict and violence pave the path toward progression. The self-generative process of the dialectic may provide us with a logical model for addressing the problem of prejudice; but unlike Einstein's bane of war, the dialectic may also be the boon for its solution, one that nevertheless retains its destructive features as it wages combat against itself.

Both Hegel and Freud offer a view of the human condition that is characterized by destruction, negation, and conflict; yet it is paradoxical that such negativity also becomes an animating force behind the elevation of ethical self-consciousness. Like Spirit which is the sublation of its previous historical moments, psychic maturation is the sublimation of primitive mental processes. Hegel and Freud would likely concede that through reason lies the hope that communities and cultures torn apart by discordant value practices can be united through collective ethical commitments. If humanity is to vanquish the pathology of desire for the optimistic voluntarism enlightened by reason, it becomes important to understand how reason itself is the knight of desire designed to transform our prejudices.

We do not have to embrace Hegel's entire philosophical system, which is neither necessary or pragmatic, in order to appreciate how his logic of the dialectic has utility for psychoanalytic thought.⁽⁵⁾ Through his logic, Hegel may be instructive in examining the construction of history achieved through negation and conquest in which further predictive possibilities for the future may be inferred. Hegel's Phenomenology personifies the drama of world Spirit (Geist) as the coming to presence of pure self-consciousness through the process of self-estrangement, identification, and self-recognition through the mediation of the other. World hero eventually achieves Truth, satiates the lack, and arrives at full self-actualization only after traversing the arduous and protracted terrain of alienation through the vicissitudes of desire. Spirit--civilization--is therefore a constant activity, pure unrest. "It is just this unrest that is the self."⁽⁶⁾ Hegel refers here to the unrest of Aufhebung, as dialectical process continuously annulled, preserved, and transcended. Hegel's logic of the dialectic involves a threefold process by which the lower relation devolves into the higher relation at once being canceled, surpassed, but retained.⁽⁷⁾ This pure activity of the dialectic is constantly evolving and redefining itself through such movement, becoming the architecture--the ground--of Geist, our shared common humanity. And the driving force behind history, behind the very process of the dialectic, is death and destruction.

Hegel's notion of spirit and that of all of history encompasses a process in which a subject is opposed to an object and comes to find itself in the object. This entails the mediation of its becoming other to itself, with the reflection out of otherness back to itself. The process of the development of the self and that of civilization is therefore a process of differentiation and integration. For Hegel, Being is characterized by an undifferentiated matrix which undergoes differentiation in the dialectical process of Becoming that in turn integrates into its being that which was differentiated through its projection, reclaiming it and making it part of its internal structure. The outcome of the integration is once again differentiated then reintegrated; unification is always reunification. Therefore, spirit comes to be what it already is, the process of its own becoming.⁽⁸⁾

Spirit as the striving for pure self-consciousness ascends toward an absolute understanding of itself and comes to a unity constituted by the bifurcation and rigid opposition that it generates from within itself. It is precisely through such opposition that consciousness brings itself into reunification. Thus, spirit in its evolution undergoes a violence at its own hands. By entering into opposition with itself, it raises this opposition to a higher unity and thus sublates (aufheben) it in a new structure. As each shape or content is confronted with radical opposition, each shape is made to collapse when its non-absolute form is exposed. Indeed, it is always driving the movement on from one shape to the next. Thus the character of the dialectic is that of negativity and conflict; it is tempestuous, feral, and dynamic. Spirit as such is the source of its own negativity as inversion and destruction pave the way for its progression forward.

There is a necessity to the dialectic that informs the internal structures of spirit, i.e. there is a certain determinism to negation. The operation of such determinate negativity comes about through the collapse of each shape. As negation of a certain content takes place, it derives a certain content from the negation. Therefore, it links shapes into a necessary progression as each form turns into a new one. However, as each form is surpassed, the experience of its alteration is that of death, its end. But for Hegel, death always leads to rebirth. The dialectic is therefore the oscillation between life and death, never separate from one another. For Hegel, spirit is always "tarrying with the negative"--confronting Death, for

to hold fast what is dead requires the greatest strength; . . . the life of spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself.⁽⁹⁾

As determinate negativity, spirit vanquishes itself as it destroys itself. It kills itself as it gives itself life. This is the "tremendous power of the negative,"⁽¹⁰⁾ staring death straight in the face, converting it into the positive. It is precisely through such negativity that there is progression, destroying itself in the service of raising itself--the positive significance of the negative.

If the dialectic becomes the logical model in its application toward a global amelioration of prejudice, then we must be able to logically demonstrate whether it has the potential to bear any fruit. We may appeal to historical facticities that trace the epigenesis of humankind and perhaps even come to the conclusion that despite all the carnage and social decay, we have evolved into more a civil and enlightened species even though human aggressivity and immorality captures the locus of our attentions everyday as a TV screams. But a historical account alone carries less predictive value, for we have no means of being able to predict with much accuracy the future contingencies that will affect the teleological progression of spirit, contingencies that always inform the mediatory interventions spirit assumes in each immediate shape it encounters. We would do better to stay on ontological ground, a ground that informs our collective anthropology; we must be able to demonstrate the internal consistency and systematic coherency of the dialectic that only Hegel's Logic can afford.

The self as well as world spirit, or what we may call the universal soul, is an epigenetic construct, thus a teleological movement that is a procreative self-articulated complex holism.⁽¹¹⁾ As a self-generative telic will, spirit is free in its encounters with the contingencies of its reality, taking into account the exigencies of its environment and the novelties of immediate experience. Therefore, spirit is not pre-designed or predetermined toward a presupposed end, but rather its end is a transformed achievement--"the logical and ontological Alpha of the cosmos, but only after it has emerged as its logical and ontological Omega."⁽¹²⁾ It emerges through the process of mediation and negotiation with the existential realities it confronts.

Our faith in the transcending power of mind over the combative regimens of world prejudice is acceptable only to the extent at which we believe in a progressive trend toward increased solidarity through collective self-conscious rationality. The level of psychic development Hegel points toward is hardly achieved by intellectuals let alone the masses, for reason is often eclipsed by the primal lure of desire. If the facts of history and human nature do indeed lean toward a steady progressive self-conscious liberation of rational freedom, then to what degree is this the result of our aptitude to bridle and sublimate our primitive proclivities for the ideals of conscience and the rational demands of a civil society? The promise of increased unity in the face of disharmony augers well for a collectively shared and constructive value system; however, the ostensive prevalence of global division and chaos saturated by prejudicial conflicts may leave us with a less optimistic interpretation of the fate of humanity. The problem of destructiveness becomes the central task of our investigation, for if Hegel is correct, it becomes the stallion of unification as it gallops toward the horizon of reason. But if our aggressive trends continue to go unchecked, Freud's admonitions of the possible extinction of the human race carries foreboding merit. It is through our analysis of the positive significance of the negative that will lead us to conclude whether philosophical psychoanalysis may genuinely offer a contribution to peace.

Psychoanalytic Anthropology

The primary significance of destruction is never so forceful as in Freud's postulation of the death drive (Todestrieb), the foundation that governs psychic development to which "the aim of all life is death."⁽¹³⁾ Negativity is always the base agitation of any organism--the destruction that constructs life--the purpose of which is to return to the original lost unity of its symbiotic state. The notion of original unity is instructive for our understanding of a principle of world harmony devoid of the more pathological instantiations of prejudice, because for both Freud and Hegel, consciousness emerges from an unconscious undifferentiated unity with its primordial nature. Just as Freud speculates on how the organic arises from the inorganic,⁽¹⁴⁾ as the general object of anthropology, Hegel traces the dialectical emergence of the feeling soul from the abyss of its indeterminations; at first unseparated from its immediate universal simplicity, it then divides and rouses itself from its mere inward implicitness to explicit determinate being-for-self.⁽¹⁵⁾

For Hegel, spirit begins, like ego development for Freud,⁽¹⁶⁾ as an original undifferentiated unity that emerges from its immediate self-enclosed universality to its mediated determinate singularity. This is initiated through a dialectical process of internal division, self-externalization, and introjection as the reincorporation of its projected qualities back into its interior. Through the complexities of mediation and sublation, spirit achieves higher levels of unification until it arrives at a full integration of itself as a complex whole, uniting earlier finite shapes within its mature universality. The need for social order, unification, and harmony are motivational factors that inform the ideal of global tranquility which prejudice and human violence threaten to deteriorate, an ideal imbued with the residue of early symbiotic conditions.

The ego ensnared in the stage of primary narcissism,⁽¹⁷⁾ as is spirit asleep in the undifferentiated abyss of its self-absorption,⁽¹⁸⁾ constitutes the psychological and ontological precursors for differentiation and development. To what degree do these conditions play in our wish for higher degrees of unity, concord, and moral self-realization? Are we to understand world spirit as "the universal brotherhood of man"⁽¹⁹⁾ that seeks absolute unity, or is this merely a wish to return to the "oceanic feeling"⁽²⁰⁾ of symbiosis like a fetus in the peaceful sea of its mother's womb? To what degree is this an illusion that preoccupies so many minds, like the parallel wish for union with God, the exalted father who shall make our home safe and free from our helplessness and pain?⁽²¹⁾ But whether these are fantasies or not, they represent moral ideals: "Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain!"⁽²²⁾--don't you dare assault my desire.

One would be hard pressed to find someone who would not value the ideal of peace, with communal harmony, accord, and cooperation marshaled in the service of social progression. But the very nature of the need for progressive unification is also dialectically opposed to destructive and regressive inclinations that derive from earlier primitive shapes of our psychic constitution we seek to act out or recover during conflict precipitated by opposition. If the desire for unification is a derivative of our original psychical ontology, then both progressive and regressive desires may be said to emanate from the same mental (symbiotic) configurations which may further possibly serve the same aim. Both seek unity or peace of a different kind and in a different form: one through the attainment of higher integrated complexities, the other a wish to return to the warm blanket of its initial undifferentiated beginning--unity is nevertheless their goal. If the drive toward destruction is responsible for both progress and regress, growth and decay, then how are we to determine which one will advance and which one will succumb to the tyranny of the other? This brings into question how the nature of negativity and destruction influence the self-preservative drives in their quest for unification and mastery.

Freud tells us of two competing forces in human nature: the will toward life and the will toward death manifested as Eros or libido, the sexual force responsible for erotic life, and its antithetical companion conceived under the drive toward destruction.⁽²³⁾ This dual class of innate drives comprise those which seek to preserve and unite and those which seek to kill and destroy, both giving rise to what may be characterized as our caring and aggressive propensities. "Neither of these drives are any less essential than the other; the phenomena of life arise from the concurrent or mutually opposing action of both."⁽²⁴⁾ Furthermore, they scarcely operate in isolation, both borrowing from the resources of the other as an accompanied or alloyed counterpart, drawing a certain quota from the other side, which in turn modifies its aim or is even used to achieve its aim.

This union between life and death is the ontological fabric of the human mind to which all other dialectical polarities arise including the universality of Love and Hate. Self-preservation is clearly an erotic impulse but it must have aggression at its disposal in order to accomplish its task; just as in love, the aggressive drive is utilized in order to gain mastery and possession over an object in which the attachment to it brings about. While the self-preservative drives stand in stark opposition to destructive ones, the two are dialectical complementarities that effect their confluence. Here we have a similar structural dynamic of the Hegelian dialectic with negativity begetting progression in the service of achieving higher aims. Just as Being is in opposition to Nothing, so is life and death, two sides of a symmetrical relation, their necessary unity.

Collective identity is based on the strength and intensity of emotional ties among its members and the mutual identification with shared valuation practices, thus giving rise to diversity, opposition, and prejudicial division between individuals, cohorts, cultures, societies, and nations.⁽²⁵⁾ The greater discrepancies such as race, religion, ethnicity, nationality, and political affiliation that bring about more pronounced forms of prejudice and contempt is not surprising. The increased enthusiasm in nationalism and separatism among our diverse peoples point toward the need to define ourselves in opposition to difference, rallying greater collective fellowship among its identified members, and thereby strengthening the cultural narcissism that hold societies together--all in the service of the self-preservative drives that align with similarity and cultural identification. In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Freud underscores the universality of prejudice:

Every time two families become connected by marriage, each of them thinks itself superior to or of better birth than the other. Of two neighbouring towns each is the other's most jealous rival; every little canton looks down upon the others with contempt. Closely related races keep one another at arm's length; the South German cannot endure the North German, the Englishman casts every kind of aspersion upon the Scot, the Spaniard despises the Portuguese. We are no longer astonished that greater differences should lead to an almost insuperable repugnance, such as the gallic people for the German, the Aryan for the Semite, and the white races for the coloured.⁽²⁶⁾

There is such a narcissism of even minor differences between individuals and cultures that the very sound of rap music blaring from an open car window could lead one so judgmatically inclined to conclude that the true meaning of culture is to be found growing in the bottom of a test tube. We are further informed by scientists that we now have the empirical means by which to measure the degree and intensity of our disgust for minor differences by observing the pupil size of an individual. It is a universal biological fact that regardless of light differences, our pupils dilate when we like something and become pinpricks when we perceive something to be a repellent.⁽²⁷⁾ It is comforting to know that when uncertain about whether or not someone is friend or foe, all you have to do is look at the center of his iris and determine if it is the size of a pinhead.

The nature of identification has its origins in early ego development whereby the child takes its parents as ideal objects who, along with their value systems, become internalized within personality formation and effect the germination of moral conscience as well as the capacities for love and hate.⁽²⁸⁾ Whether personal or collective, identity is defined in opposition to difference and identification with similarity. This structural dynamic alone may be said to account for the need for division, uniqueness, and prejudicial self-preferences as opposed to others who stand in marked difference. However, the confluence of destructive and self-preservative forces compound the nature of identifications and social relations where desire justifies murder and reason is manipulated to assuage primal instinctual urges in the service of narcissistic pursuits.

There are such countless examples of the polarization of values and ideals that stand in opposition to others that you could spend the rest of your life trying to catalogue them all. In many cases of group prejudice, valuation practices assume a form of collective identification based on a simple rigid economy. Intolerance to difference that precipitates extreme forms of violence may be said to represent a regression to our most primitive constitutions when bad (self)objects are regurgitated from the mouth as poisonous projections of evil and hatred that must be annihilated. In many cases, extreme prejudice is the product of pathological narcissism. Patriarchal value placed on male children over female children has historically led to infanticide that is still practiced today in parts of China and India. Since the Taliban took power in the government of Afghanistan, women have had to wear burqua; and have been beaten and stoned to death in public for not having the proper attire, even if this simply means not having their mesh cover the front of their eyes. After James Byrd Jr. was dragged from his feet down a rural road by a chain secured to the back of a pickup truck until his right arm and head were literally torn from his torso just because he was black, the devastated town of Jaspers Texas was greeted three weeks later by the Ku Klux Klan. Genocide continues to rip through our decade claiming innocent lives, from the Hutu's massacre of the Tutsis in Rwanda, to the Serbs mass extermination of Bosnian Muslims, to the systematic slaughter in Kosovo. While these are extreme cases, one need not look further than one's own country to confirm the ethnic and patriotic narcissism that envelopes us all.

Both Hegel and Freud stress the importance that civilization is a process. But these aforementioned events hardly resemble the mores of a civilized culture as irrational fanaticism justifies barbarity broaching the brink of insanity. Are these merely the manifestations of pathology or do they represent our crude nature tied to our animal evolutionary past? As Aristotle said: "Man is a rational animal," but rational or not, we are animals. The primitive economy of rigid identification that justifies these extreme forms of savagery has at its disposal all the unbridled resources of the death drive turned outwards. The drive toward death is transformed into the destructive drive when it becomes projected onto external objects. In this way, self-preservation is maintained by destroying extraneous threats as objects of hate are rendered impotent. "Hate, as a relation to objects, is older than love. It derives from the narcissistic ego's primordial repudiation of the external world with its outpouring of stimuli. As an expression of the reaction of unpleasure evoked by objects, it always remains in an intimate relation with the self-preservative drives."⁽²⁹⁾ Sadism, the derivative of hate, is nowhere so evident as with the deranged techniques conceived and used to torture, maim, and murder millions of victims in the Holocaust, and in the killing fields under the Khmer Rouge government, as well as in the death camps manufactured by Bosnian Serbs in the name of ethnic cleansing.

The Bosnian concentration camps were likely the most horrific human slaughterhouses, because the means of extermination were laborious and perverted, the aim of which was to produce the most excruciating amount of pain, mental anguish, and suffering possible.⁽³⁰⁾ Although it is difficult to make comparisons, the killing at Auschwitz was largely mechanized and bureaucratic, while the genocide at Omarska was emotional and personal, mainly depending upon the simple and intimate act of beating. These techniques were inefficient, time-consuming, and physically exhausting, yet they were habitually and systematically employed to intentionally demoralize and demolish, bringing warped pleasure to the guards and paramilitary units who, through their innovative means at devising methods of torture, could greatly bolster their prestige. The use of rape warfare on women--especially adolescents and children--is another such example of the chilling psychological and sociological rationale for the deliberate and systematic means of deteriorating the opposition from within their own support systems by depleting their morale, ego defenses, and will.⁽³¹⁾ Here we can see how reason is distorted under the dictatorship of narcissism. It is in moments like these that one can hear the voice of Luther--die Hure Vernunft-- "reason is the whore of humanity."⁽³²⁾ We can rationalize away anything, even our morality.

Is the death drive so intent on persecuting humankind that it will eventually bring us to ruin? The bleak forecast of the continual historical rein of terror by sick minds in positions of power and privilege may lead us to rightfully conclude that "men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved,"⁽³³⁾ rather they want to exploit, con, use, conquer, humiliate, torture, and kill. In Civilization and its Discontents, Freud writes:

The fateful question for the human species seems to me to be whether and to what extent their cultural development will succeed in mastering the disturbance of their communal life by the human drive of aggression and self-destruction. . . . Men have gained control over the forces of nature to such an extent that with their help they would have no difficulty in exterminating one another to the last man. They know this, and hence comes a large part of their current unrest, their unhappiness and their mood of anxiety.⁽³⁴⁾

It may be argued that religion and ethnicity--including race--are the main reasons for divided group identifications. Together, ethnicity and religion form the social value structures that become the macrocosm of any culture, which furthermore acquire personal and collective meaning that validates nations and keeps them together. Ethnic and religious identification is so strong that even between closely related ethnic and religious groups, rigid group identifications keep societies from embracing shared qualities simply because of minute differences that threaten cultural narcissism. When dispute over land continues to flare throughout much of Eastern Europe and the Gaza strip and West Bank, ethnicity, religion, and nationalism become more demarcated with group identifications more virulently opposed.

The stronger the intensity of emotional bonds between people, the stronger identifications become. Group identity fosters unity and progression, but it may also lead to discord and regression--the dynamic that fuels both peace and war. Group identifications are responsible for the process and advance of civilization as collective value systems govern the ideals of a community. As a general rule, any movement that encourages greater emotional attachment to others strongly militates against the loom of destruction, for love is the engendered ideal and the heart of conscience. When people are governed by conscience, reason is marshaled in service of justice and the pursuit of the ethical. This too requires an inversion of aggression that becomes the internal judge of conscience, where guilt and shame equally inform our moral choices as does reason.

Take for example two different cultural responses to involvement in World War II. Germany experiences a great deal of universal shame for their infamous role in history that fractured world order, yet they still acknowledge and remember their history, teach it in the classroom, and maintain public museums, camps, and monuments, while the Japanese still live in collective denial of their involvement in the war. The official government policy does not recognize its historical atrocities or war crimes which are prohibited from being taught in public schools. Here we have two responses to collective shame: acknowledgment with the educational concern that history should not repeat itself, and denial in the name of 'saving face.' We shall not deviate far in saying that one is a healthy response of remorse to guilt and shame, while the other is an infantile attempt to maintain a cultural narcissism where the superiority of the Japanese race is inculcated in school children every day and institutionally solidified by national identity.The Ontology of Prejudice

The polarity of the drives, the nature of personal and collective identifications, and the combative forces of social and cultural oppositions all operate within anthropological and ontological structures that give rise to civilization and the historical manifestations of prejudice. Civilization, even more so than nature itself, is responsible for most of our malaise, but it is also responsible for our remarkable advances in technology, science, medicine, human rights, and moral conscientiousness that enhance the quality of human life, most of which having occurred in our lifetime. But along with these advances have also come the technology to extinguish the entire human race. This is especially disturbing when deranged and paranoid minds have access to weapons of mass destruction. This places us in the precarious position of attempting to anticipate the possible fate of humanity, for the predictive validity of the progression of civilization hinges on whether aggression will be restricted, displaced, inverted, and sublimated for higher rational, ethical, and aesthetic pursuits.

With regards to the question of the possibility of global amelioration of prejudice, the issue becomes one of degree. Since prehistory, culture has undergone an evolutionary process of becoming that is responsible for what we have come to call civilization, our evolved contemporary valuation practices. However, like Freud observed, "uncultivated races (sic) and backward strata of the population are already multiplying more rapidly than highly cultivated ones."⁽³⁵⁾ While there are many socio-economic, political, and psychological reasons for this, they nevertheless obstruct the optimal transformation of our prejudices.

The double edge of the dialectic (as negativity resulting in higher unity) exposes us to a dilemma, for the dialectic is the ontological dynamic underlying prejudice itself. Part of the problem facing us is that prejudice is ontologically constituted in the most rudimentary aspects of human consciousness. Like the nature of the dialectic, prejudice has both negative and positive valences. While violence and destruction are the instruments of prejudice, so too are caring and love. Prejudice is not merely a negative construct; prejudice defines our valuation practices which are the Mecca of individual and communal life. Rather than conceive of prejudice as simply a pathological anomaly, prejudice is also responsible for our most revered ideals. As I have said elsewhere,⁽³⁶⁾ prejudice in its essence is the preferential self-expression of valuation. All prejudicial disclosures express value preferences. Preferences are prejudicial because they signify discriminatory value judgments that are self-referential. Preference presupposes prejudice for preference typifies the priority of determinate valuation. To prefer is to value and to value is to judge: judgments by nature are valuative. All judgments are imbued with value which presuppose self-valuation and self-interest, because valuation is a particular form of subjective self-expression. Thus, valuation is prejudicial, for it involves a relation between difference and similarity that is necessarily self-referential. Every human being by nature is prejudiced, it is simply a matter of degree.

Prejudice is a neutral psychological predisposition that forms the ontology of human subjectivity. Prejudice is an elementary aspect of conscious and unconscious life which gives rise to the self, the nature of personal identification, individual and collective identity, culture, and shared value practices. Prejudice as valuation is therefore responsible for our shared ideals as well as the deviations of abnormality and perversion. In its ideal condition, prejudicial valuation informs our social mores and ethical practices. In its larger scope, ethics is the harvest of subjective universality. As such, selfhood and culture give rise to morality that is individualistic and interpersonally bound within a psychosocial matrix of negotiation and intersubjective validation. Value determinations are the result of interpersonal mediations and identifications with collective ideals and are thus intersubjectively constructed and validated through the dialectical process of our social and cultural prejudices. The drive toward greater unity, cooperation, and peace among nations is progressively forged by the movement of the dialectic as prejudice constantly gives rise to new and higher order forms of novelty and creative complexity. These existential complexities ontologically stand over and above individual practices, for they are mediated in the face of social and cultural interpersonal forces that negotiate and intersubjectively affirm collectively shared value systems and practices over others. As with the epigenesis of the self, the process of this negotiation rests on the nature of identification. Ideals do not exist in a moral vacuum: they are created by the larger socio-cultural milieu that becomes individually and idiosyncratically internalized throughout development; yet they are always open to change and transmutation. These early internalized ideals become the formative basis of a cohesive self and social structure that remain in flux and unrest due to the dialectical unfolding of the nature of subjectivity and social relations. The parallel process of valuation in individual and collective development is constituted a priori in the larger ontological structures that make worldhood possible. Such pre-established ontological conditions provide the ideal objects of identification that are necessary for selfhood and for the emergence of values--always up for renegotiation. This emerging process of valuation gives rise to greater aporias in selfhood, social forces, socio-political drift, and international relations. However, the dialectical nature of prejudice that gives rise to civilization leads to an internal ambivalence, a dilemma it fights within itself. In this sense, values can never be fixed truths or universal essences. Instead, they necessarily materialize out of prejudice, negation, and conflict. Acquiring new life in the wake of destruction, the death of values is preserved in the ashes of history, nostalgia, and desire. As humanity elevates itself to higher degrees of complexity, so do its ideals.

From this account we may say that valuation inherently yearns for greater levels of unification and complexity. This would seem to suggest that the structurally constituted dynamic progression of the dialectic ensures that civilization will remain ontologically predisposed to seek and maintain order, accord, and social progression while allowing for a vast variance of novelty, freedom, and complexity to emerge. But with complexity and freedom come the inherent risk of individual and social regression that threaten the progressive unification and self-preservative drive toward holism. To what degree will progression win out over regression in the face of our contemporary ethnic and religious conflicts? In order to provide a more systematic and rigorously justified account of the constructive forces of civilization within the destructive shapes of worldhood, we need to closely examine Hegel's logic of the dialectic and determine if the positive significance to the negative will in the end vitiate the primitive drives that compel human relations toward destructive acts.

The Logic of the Dialectic

One of the more interesting aspects of Hegel's dialectic is the way in which a mediated dynamic forms a new immediate. This process not only informs the basic structure of his Logic which may further be attributed to the general principle of Aufhebung, but this process also provides the logical basis to account for the role of negativity within a progressive unitary drive. The process by which mediation collapses into a new immediate provides us with the logical model for the improvement of civilization. And it is precisely this logical model that provides the internal consistency to its specific application to the amelioration of the pathological forms of prejudice. As an architectonic process, spirit invigorates itself and breaths its own life as a self-determining generative activity which builds upon its successive shapes and layers that form its appearances; it therefore constructs its own monolith. It is this internal consistency that provides us with a coherent account of the circular motion of the progressive drive toward higher manifestations of psychical, social, and cultural development.

Hegel's use of mediation within the movements of thought is properly advanced in the Science of Logic as well as the Encyclopaedia Logic which prefaces Hegel's anthropological and psychological treatment of Spirit. In the Logic,⁽³⁷⁾ Being moves into Nothing which then develops into Becoming, first as the "passing over" into nothing, second as the "vanishing" into being, and third as the "ceasing-to-be" or passing away of being and nothing into the "coming-to-be" of becoming. Becoming constitutes the mediated unity of "the unseparatedness of being and nothing."⁽³⁸⁾ Hegel shows how each mediation leads to a series of new immediates which pass over and cease to be as that which has passed over in its coming to be until these mediations collapse into the determinate being of Dasein--its new immediate. Being is a simple concept while becoming is a highly dynamic and complex process. Similarly, Dasein or determinate being is a simple immediacy to begin with which gets increasingly more complicated as it transitions into essence and conceptual understanding. It is in this early shift from becoming to determinate being that you have a genuine sublation, albeit as a new immediate, spirit has a new beginning.

In Hegel's treatment of consciousness as pure thought represented by the Logic, as well as his treatment of history in the Phenomenology and anthropology and psychology in the Encyclopaedia, spirit continues on this circular albeit progressive path conquering each opposition it encounters, elevating itself in the process. Each mediation leads to a new beginning, and spirit constantly finds itself confronting opposition and overcoming conflict as it is perennially engaged in the process of its own becoming. In the Logic, the whole process is what is important as reason is eventually able to understand its operations as pure self-consciousness; however, in its moments, each mediation begets a new starting point that continually re-institutes new obstacles and dialectical problems that need to be mediated, hence eliminated.

But thought always devolves or collapses back into the immediate. This dynamic is a fundamental structural constituent that offers systematic coherency to Hegel's overall philosophy of spirit as well as its specific relevance to the problem at hand. Culture mediates opposition and conflict it generates from within its own evolutionary process and attempts to resolve earlier problems unto which new immediacy emerges. Mediation is therefore an activity performed from within society and cultural forces that in turn make new experience possible. When disparate cultures and societies are taken together as a conglomerate with endless processes within overdetermined processes, the whole movement of civilization itself becomes a logical synthesis.

Hegel sees this general structural dynamic throughout all contexts of spirit, giving the movement of spirit its logical substance. Each immediacy has a new kind of claim that tests spirit's past shapes, that which in turn must be put into practice in the novel experiences it confronts. Spirit is faced with the tussle of having to take each new immediate and integrate it within its preexisting internal structure, thus incorporating each novelty within its subsisting mediatory faculties. This structural dynamic takes into account the ubiquitous nature of contingency, for spirit is simply not just extending a part of itself as mediation that is already there; it has to incessantly vanquish each new experience it encounters in all of its freshly discovered and potentially unacquainted future environments. The ongoing process of confrontation is the burden of spirit's odyssey, with each encounter signaling a spewing forth from the unconscious well of what it has already incorporated from its past, thus defining the context for each new stage it confronts as unexpected reality.

The Infinite Progress of the Infinite Regress

Through the interaction of mediated immediacy, teleology becomes defined in each moment, with each immediacy being only a moment in the process of civilization. As spirit passes into new stages, it educates itself as it transforms itself, taking on new forms, expanding and incorporating larger aspects of its experience into its inner being. Preparing itself for its next confrontation, it guarantees there will always be a new stage. Because civilization is the self-sublation--what might not be inappropriately called sublimation--of its earlier primitive activity, the logic of the dialectic provides us with the prototype for understanding the underlying functions and power of the negative that propels civilization to overcome its increased oppositions which it generates from within itself. Because civilization generates division and opposition within itself, each new mediated immediacy allows for contingencies and complexities to operate within existing unified structures. This is the freedom of the power of the negative, for it may seek to operate within a destructive and regressive fashion rather than align with the upward current of human growth, social conscientiousness, tolerance, acceptance, and ethical progress. This further insures that there will always be pathological forms of prejudice: the thought that we could ever stop thinking in terms of difference such as ethnicity, religion, or race is simply an illusion.

Human beings will always seek separate identities (whether as individuals or as groups) in opposition to others based on the values they choose to identify with. This further guarantees that nationalism and separatist movements energized by rigid group identifications will never perish, for identity is what keeps people together; we may only hope that their pathological instantiations will abate and become marginalized to minor aberrations that fail to identify with greater collective global visions. But in all likelihood, we will only see spheres in the amelioration of prejudice determined by contingent world events. If we may offer a prediction of the future of civilization based on Hegel's logical model, then perhaps we will see many infinite progresses of many infinite regresses insofar as civilization climbs up the rungs of the ladder, it will also experience slippage, regression, and withdrawal back to earlier manifestations of its being. In this century, this explanation may be said to account in part for Hitler and the Holocaust, Stalin's gulags and reign of butchery, Pol Pot's killing fields, Saddam Hussain's gassing of his own people, the genocide in Bosnia and Rwanda, Milosevic's relentless crusade of ethnic cleansing, and more recently, the grisly 'choppings' in Sierra Leone . But as evinced by Hegel's logic as well as our empirical social advancements, given the synthetic and upwardly mobile acclivity of the dialectic, as a rule, increased ascendance and social unification overreaches the regressive withdrawal of annihilating forces.

Yet with each destruction comes a new construction of mediated immediacies that give rise to new values and social ideals. Freud's contribution is invaluable to Hegel's position because as they both maintain, negativity is the core constituent of life: death and destruction will not only be a universality in all possible future worlds, it is a necessary ontological dynamic that assures the upward progression of change, prosperity, and maturation--the very essence of the striving for our ideal possibility-for-Being.

With most of the world's continents engaged in military conflict, it may be argued (at least theoretically) that the United Nations becomes the ethical paragon for global peace and unity, and with the strong support of the United States, Britain, and NATO fighting for freedom, democracy, and human rights, social consciousness has made an advance forward. But it has done so at the cost of condemning and displacing other cultural valuation practices that imperil international security, where might becomes the right of a community in the service of the collective whole. But collective identification has its limits even among nations with focused mutual goals, which further lead to resistance stifling efforts at negotiation and diplomacy. Each nation has loyalty to its own self-interests; cultural narcissism is highly recalcitrant to outside interference pressuring political reform. This may be recently observed by the fact that despite indubitable knowledge of the slaughter and concentration camps in Bosnia, former President George Bush and his administration was not about to send U.S. troops to intercede fearing the ghost of Vietnam, a repetition the Clinton administration faced dogged by a country absorbed by its own concerns. It may be further said that the international community's failure to appropriately intervene in the Rwanda massacre as well as the question of ground troops surrounding the crisis in Yugoslavia reflects a collective preoccupation not to uncritically jeopardize the lives of its own citizens.

In these situations, collective identifications that sustain national identities ultimately serve self-preservative functions, for we are bound to identify more with our own kind than a stranger in a foreign land. The brute fact is that we value our own over others--the general principle of human life becomes an abstraction when compared to the concrete social realities each country faces. This is particularly relevant when internal division and upheaval fractures the cohesion of a country's infrastructures, such as the separatism movement in French Quebec Canada and the ubiquitous display of discrimination and racism that torment the United States. When industrialized countries such as the ones in North America are unable to shelter and provide food and clothing for their own homeless populations who die every night on the streets, they find themselves in the conundrum of determining the most optimal means of disseminating their resources. Value is ultimately prioritized under the rubric of a particular society's interests, but this often encompasses wasteful concessions to popular prejudice. It is truly sad when the American public is more concerned about where the President's penis has been rather than helping the needy through humanitarian aid. This is a fine example of Heidegger's das Man, where the herd is lost in the corrupt fallenness of idle talk and curiosity of "the they."⁽³⁹⁾

The process of civilization vacillates between dialectical moments of progress verses regress as the process itself secures and mobilizes an infinite progression with infinite points of regression. Following the logical coherency of the upward ascendance of the dialectic, we may further estimate that progress will surpass the regressive and destructive forces that tyrannize world accord. What is truly infinite about the evolution of humanity is the process itself. What we see is an infinite pattern, each side being contrary moments as each merges into the other. This pattern is genuinely infinite for it is a self-maintaining process; each alteration collapses into a new moment which is its being-for-self in its mediacy. By standing back and seeing the recurrent pattern within a new context, world spirit is enabled to effect the transition to a new immediacy that is truly sublated. Civilization, like Spirit, is always faced with the relative novelty of each new shape. Yet it approaches each new opposition not as a static antinomy doomed to stalemate, but rather as a self-contained pattern; the infinite generates new finites as a fundamental repetition of itself--a self-maintaining process that generates its own process as a dynamically self-articulated complex holism.

Hegel's odyssey of spirit may be applicable to our understanding of the trek of culture and its march over the ever increasing proliferation of human aggression. As our world confederations gain greater amity, consensus, and cohesion, the intersubjective negotiation of valuation gives rise to new novelties, complexities, and increased unity; but the more convoluted social realities become, destructive forces continue to grow in abundance. We may surmise that the insidiousness of human prejudice will recede in certain pockets of communal affiliation but flow in others as the valences of prejudice undergo the vicissitudes of transformation. No longer is the standard of culture measured by whether or not one uses a bar of soap, but rather by the values it espouses in relation to others, especially the promise to keep its aggressions in check. Now our degree of civility is to be equated by the mutual agreement not to point our missiles at one another, quite an accomplishment for decades of fear and cold war. Yet this existential reality underscores the fact that aggression will always play a part in our value practices and the ontological relations that comprise worldhood.

Advances in culture are due to the process of negotiation and mutual recognition, which leads to the mutual desire to understand, communicate value preferences, and support each other cooperatively despite vast differences that define our identities. The need for mutual recognition, validation, and affirmation of cultural values and worth leads to understanding, and in turn understanding leads to empathy and care. Despite the sinking Mid East peace negotiations and the tenuous Irish settlement where rigid religious identifications insure irreconcilable division, the process signals the human willingness to seek viable solutions in the name of peace, which is itself a productive dialectical movement. Whether they advance in peaceful resolution through mutual negotiation remains a possibility only the future can command.

When social and psychic conflict remain irresolute, the human species has the compulsion to repeat its traumas in the effort to resolve them. Like Nietzsche's eternal recurrence, the compulsion toward control and mastery may be generally attributed to the Aufhebung of cultures as civilization becomes more integrative, refined, and balanced. But as Freud points out, the repetition of destruction is a retrograde character of our species which must be harnessed and channeled into appropriate directions if we are to survive as a human race. It is in the austere face of violence and havoc that continue to pollute our globe where we may observe the pessimistic resonance of Freud's dismal conclusion that offers us "no consolation."

As long as people are deprived of the most basic needs that comprise human necessity, there will always be suffering, hate, and murder. And in the uncultivated masses that bleed world tranquility, destruction and violence will be the primary instruments of human deed with each act of aggression begetting new aggression in order to combat it. With the perseverance of peace, perhaps this cycle will culminate in a more docile set of human relations. Through mutual dialogue and the open exchange of value preferences, new ideals, conventions, and policies will emerge, even though this may in all likelihood require the aggressive encroachment on societies and cultures that fail to develop shared global identifications.

Conclusion

Hegel once said that human history is the "slaughterbench" of happiness⁽⁴⁰⁾--a progressive yet poignant achievement. But happy or not, happiness is nevertheless what we covet, what Aristotle called "the highest good attainable by action," that is, "living well" and "doing well."⁽⁴¹⁾ Some of us live well and some of us do well, but for most of the world population happiness is a foreign reality. Ephemeral moments of pleasure are not happiness: they are not the eudaimonia Aristotle envisioned. Even the satisfaction of life's simplest pleasures is often minimized, postponed, or held in abeyance for other desires that have not yet been actualized. Desire is such a complicated creature that it is responsible for generating our most detestable beastly attributes as well as our most cherished and exalted ideals. As being in relation to lack, desire seeks to assuage its anxiety, to go beyond its finite appearances and fill the hole, the lacunae in its being--simply the desire for wholeness we call peace. The nature of value inquiry is a lived existential ordeal which must endure the gauntlet of anxiety and dread that pave the successive path toward the fulfillment of human Ethos. It is this positive significance to the power of the negative that becomes the driving force behind our moral prosperity even when the dark shadow of our aggressivity and destructive inclinations loom over the sky like a black plague.

"Fundamental insight. -- There is no pre-established harmony between the furtherance of truth and the well-being of mankind" says Nietzsche.⁽⁴²⁾ Harmony is made by humankind through the call of conscience and the puissance of reason--a rational passion. And as Freud tells us, the "intellect . . . is among the powers which we may most expect to exercise a unifying influence on men--on men who are held together with such difficulty and whom it is therefore scarcely possible to rule. . . . Our best hope for the future is that intellect--the scientific spirit, reason--may in process of time establish a dictatorship in the mental life of man."⁽⁴³⁾ Is it such a Utopian expectation to think that we can subordinate our instinctual natures to the monarch of reason? Perhaps this is the true meaning of faith. For even if there are no emotional ties that exist between people, cultures, or nations, the bonds of reason conjoin us in mutual appreciation for the ought that dictates even our most irrational moments.

NOTES

1. Letter to Freud, July 30, 1932, "Why War?" [Einstein - Freud Correspondence], Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, (London: Hogarth Press), Vol. 22, p. 199. Hereafter, all references to the Standard Edition will refer to SE followed by the volume and page number.

2. Civilization of its Discontents, 1930, SE, 21, p. 86.

3. Freud's reply to Einstein, 1932, SE, 22, p. 211.

4. Derived from Plautus, Asinaria II, iv, 88; SE, 21, p. 111.

5. Recently I have attempted to show how Hegel's logic and philosophical psychology are instrumental for advancing psychoanalytic thought. Cf. "Dialectical Psychoanalysis: Toward Process Psychology," Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought, in press; "Hegel on Projective Identification: Implications for Klein, Bion, and Beyond," The Psychoanalytic Review, in press.

6. G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1807/1977), § 22, p. 12. Hereafter, all references to the Phenomenology will refer to PS followed by the section and page number.

7. Hegel's dialectic has historically been misinterpreted and grossly misrepresented by psychoanalysts and philosophers of science, most notably Karl Popper, to be a threefold relation of thesis-antithesis-synthesis. This dialectic was advanced by Fichte in his Wissenschaftslehre which referred to the process of thought and judgment; thus it is an imprecise and over-simplification of Hegel's dialectic. Cf. J.G. Fichte, The Science of Knowledge, trans. & eds. P. Health & J. Lachs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1794/1982).

8. I have discussed this process elsewhere in "Hegel on the Unconscious Abyss: Implications for Psychoanalysis," Owl of Minerva, 28:1 (Fall, 1996), pp. 59-75.

9. PS § 32, p. 19.

10. Ibid.

11. Sean Kelly provides a comprehensive account of Hegel's theory of complex holism. Cf. Individuation and the Absolute: Hegel, Jung, and the Path Toward Wholeness (New York: Paulist Press, 1993).

12. John N. Findlay, "Hegel's Use of Teleology," in New Studies in Hegel's Philosophy, ed. Warren E. Steinkraus (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), p. 93.

13. Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 1920, SE, 18, p. 38.

14. Ibid, pp. 36-39.

15. Cf. Des Philosophie des Geistes, part three of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, in M.J. Petry (ed.), Hegel's Philosophy of Subjective Spirit, Vol. 2: Anthropology, 1830/1977, §§ 388-403. Hereafter, all references to Hegel's Philosophy of Spirit from the Encyclopedia will refer to EG followed by the section number. This process is also the logical model Hegel follows from his Logic in his anthropological description of the soul, where a universal determines itself into particulars, showing how each mediation forms a new immediate which is the general principle of the dialectic.

16. For both Hegel and Freud, the inchoate ego is originally encased in a unity and is therefore modally undifferentiated from external forces--the inner and outer are fused in a symbiotic organization. Freud informs us "originally the ego includes everything, later it separates off an external world from itself. Our present ego-feeling is, therefore, only a shrunken residue of a much more inclusive--indeed, an all embracing--feeling which corresponded to a more intimate bond between the ego and the world about it" (1930, SE, 21, p. 68). For Hegel, the natural soul moves from an undifferentiated unity to a differentiated determinate being; so too for Freud, ego boundaries gradually becomes more contrasted, constructed, and consolidated throughout its burgeoning activity. Freud notes that originally an infant is unable to distinguish between its own ego and the external world as the source of stimulation and sensation. But eventually the organism comes to discern its own internal sources of excitation, such as its bodily organs or somatic processes, from external sources of sensation, (e.g., mother's touch, breast, etc.), that become set apart and integrated within ego organization. It is not until this stage in ego formation that an object is set over against the ego as an existent entity that is outside of itself. Once the ego moves from primary to secondary narcissism, attachment to external cathected (love) objects form the initial dynamics of object-relations and character development.

17. Freud, "On Narcissism: An Introduction," SE, 14, 1914, p. 100.

18. Hegel, EG, § 408, Zusätze, 2.

19. H.S. Harris, Hegel's Development: Night Thoughts (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983), p. 411.

20. See Freud on the "oceanic feeling" in relation to religious sentiment and early ego development; Civilization and its Discontents, 1930, SE, 21, pp. 64-68.

21. Cf. Freud, Future of an Illusion, 1927, SE, 21; Civilization and its Discontents, 1930, SE, 21, p. 74.

22. See Freud's discussion, Civilization and its Discontents, 1930, SE, 21, p. 74.

23. The Ego and the Id, 1923, SE, 19, Ch.4.

24. Freud's letter to Einstein, "Why War?," 1932, SE, 22, p. 209.

25. It may be argued that identity is largely the result of the identification process itself which is influenced by myriad causal and overdetermined factors that are encountered throughout our life experiences and internalized within personality formation. Along with drives and their transformations, the nature of identification accounts for much of the intrapsychic motivations, intentions, desires, and conflicts that comprise psychical and social reality. Identity, whether personal or collective, is ultimately in the service of narcissism or self-interest, thereby affecting the ideals we espouse and the valuation practices we choose to identify with over others. Despite the overdetermination of identification, the values and mores individuals and societies adopt are fundamentally the result of the complexities of narcissistic object choice, the psycho-social functions they serve, and the evolutionary demands of the self-preservative drives.

26. Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, 1921, SE, 18, p. 101.

27. Desmond Morris, The Human Species, aired July 12, 1998 on The Learning Channel (TLC).

28. Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, 1921, SE, 18, Ch.7.

29. "Instincts and Their Vicissitudes," 1915, SE, 14, p. 139.

30. Mark Danner, "America and the Bosnia Genocide," The New York Review of Books, 1997, Vol. XLIV, 19, pp. 55-56.

31. Beverly Allen, Rape Warfare: The Hidden Genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia (University of Minnesota Press, 1996).

32. This quotation is attributed to Martin Luther by E. M. Cioran in The Temptation to Exist. Also see "The Last Sermon in Wittenberg, 1546," Luther's Works, 54 vols., (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press): "And what I say about the sin of lust, which everybody understands, applies also to reason; for the reason mocks and affronts God in spiritual things and has in it more hideous harlotry than any harlot. Here we have an idolater running after an idol, as the prophets say, under every green tree [cf. Jer. 2:20; I Kings 14:23], as a whorechaser runs after a harlot. That's why the Scriptures call idolatry whoredom, while reason calls it wisdom and holiness. . . . Such wisdom of reason the prophets call whoredom." (p. 374-375).

33. SE, 21, p. 111.

34. SE, 21, p. 145.

35. Freud's letter to Einstein, "Why War?," 1932, SE, 22, p. 214.

36. The Ontology of Prejudice (Amsterdam/Atlanta: Rodopi, 1997), pp. 11-13.

37. Science of Logic, trans. A.V. Miller (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1812/1969). All references to Hegel's Science of Logic will refer to SL followed by the section and page number.

38. SL § C, 2, p. 105.

39. See Heidegger's discussion of fallenness and inauthenticity in the forms of gossip, curiosity, and ambiguity in Chapters 4-5, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1927/1962).

40. Hegel, Reason in History, the Introduction to the Lectures on the Philosophy of History, trans. R. S. Hartman (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1953), § 27.

41. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. M. Ostwald (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1962), Bk. 1, § 4, 15.

42. Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, in A Nietzsche Reader, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1878/1977), p. 198.

43. New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, (1933 [1932]), SE, 22, p. 171.