I would like to thank Julia Stege for offering what is surely one of the more publication-worthy letters to find its way to these pages in recent months.

Truly it’s encouraging to read such things, rather than the adolescent paeans of gratitude from a student excited by editorial discussion of his favorite rock group.

However, while I appreciate the philosophic substance of the response, I suspect it betrays something of an absence which may have profound consequences—not only in the realm of abstract philosophizing, but in human terms as well.

Specifically, my so-called “threat” (I hope I didn’t actually frighten anyone!) to “go back to Kant” was not intended as seriously as it was taken—that is, it was not intended as a judgement on the history of thought.

It certainly does not represent, the characterization by Stege notwithstanding, a “disdainful” dismissal or abandonment of the “Hegelian tradition.”

I could in that instance have spoken as easily of Aristotle, Plato, or Goethe or Hesse.

I would like to offer that I am not and have not at any time been opposed to “the anti-war movement as a whole.”

I was in sympathy with the spirit of dissent and dissatisfaction that animated it, if not always with the terms of its expression, which left much to be desired.

Not all distinctions are made to be transcended.

I am refreshed, however, to see that Marxists and the faculty of articulate speech are not, after all, mutually incompatible.

But it seems to me if Marxism is to be a humanism, then perhaps care must be taken with regard to the Hegelian “dialectic that transcends the division between subject and object” and its tendency to equate the “real” and the “rational.”

This turn of thought has in the past and can in the future be abused to “justify” the most horrible atrocities against human beings in the name of “progress,” or “the future,” or “perfection” or “humanity”—or in the name of Marxism itself.

It might even seem that most of the fertile ideas behind your “movement” come not from Marx, but from Hegel, who discussed “alienation” in 1807, nearly 40 years before Marx.

Maybe you should call yourselves the “Hegelian Humanist Forum” instead: as long as you want the authority of a philosopher, you might as well get a real one.

And by the way, what in the world does it mean to speak of Kant as an “empiricist?”

Michael David Scully

Senior

Philosophy