Comment On Avineri

Abstract

h T IS CERTAINLY QUITE TRUE, as Professor Avineri has said, that Hegel abandoned classical distinction between reason and passion and replaced it with contrast between rational and irrational. Hegel was not concerned with constituent elements of human psyche, but with actions, and these are judged to be either particular and subjective or general and public. Passion and reason are both manifest in human activity, especially passion, since without it no one would ever act at all. What this meant was nothing less than a transformation of philosophical thought. Its implications were perhaps even more complex and extensive than Professor Avineri has suggested, and therefore merit some further attention. Since phenomena of human mind are actions, even philosophy ceases to be contemplative. It is a passionate activity, a participation in truth, and truth itself is the bacchanalian revel where no member is sober. The model of knowledge is no longer changeless, calm certainty of mathematics and syllogistic logic, but turbulence of tragic drama. Philosophy also is now creative as it re-enacts morphogenetic process, from confused beginning to d6nouement when final character of whole of knowing is revealed. Reason, if it enters into this at all, comes only at end, with quiet recognition that it all Political Theory, Vol. 1 No. 4, November 1973,?(D1973 Sage Publications, Inc.