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Harris's Paradox and Dunayevskaya's New Beginning: Can Hegel's Method Shape a New Unity of Theory and Practice?
Hegel's Ladder I: The Pilgrimage of Reason and Hegel's Ladder II: The Odyssey of Spirit. By Henry S. Harris. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997.
The Power of Negativity: Selected Writings on the Dialectic in Hegel and Marx. By Raya Dunayevskaya, edited and introduced by Peter Hudis and Kevin B. Anderson. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2002. 416 pages.1
These two recently published but very divergent perspectives on Hegel hone in on a similar problem: is there a specifically Hegelian unity of theory and practice for today's world? One perspective comes from the revered Hegel scholar, Henry S. Harris, whose Hegel's Ladder is a monumental two-volume study of Hegel's epochal work, Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). Volume one, The Pilgrimage of Reason, and volume two, The Odyssey of Spirit, are each by themselves much longer than the Phenomenology itself. The other perspective comes not from the academic world but rather from the Marxist-Humanist philosopher, Raya Dunayevskaya whose "life and work," as Peter Hudis and Kevin Anderson put it in their introduction, "represent a rare combination of passionate involvement in freedom struggles and intense philosophical exploration" (xvii). Many of Dunayevskaya's previously unpublished writings on Hegelian dialectics specifically have been included in this new collection, The Power of Negativity. The substantial introduction situates these writings within Dunayevskaya's whole body of work as well as within her thinking, in the years before her death in 1987, concerning the need to return to Hegel's dialectic in order to work out a necessary new unity of theory and practice inseparable from organization.
Harris structures the problem of a strictly Hegelian theory and practice as a "paradox." Harris's journey through Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit draws one inexorably and with exquisite detail into Hegel's presentation of the self-movement of the concept as reality itself. However, Harris emphasizes that this conclusion is possible only from the standpoint of the philosopher who, rather than participating in the unfolding self-movement of spiritual shapes, comprehends all as the "unforgetting observer" in the center of the circle of the movement. Those who act on the historical stage, says Harris, can never fully recognize the universal in their own act of creating new forms of spirit....