TRANSFORMATION 7 (1988)                                               ARTICLE
  PHILOSOPHY AND THE CRISIS IN
  SOUTH AFRICA
                                                               M A Nupen
     The memory of Rick Turner is precious to all concerned with philosophy
 and with justice in our country who knew the man or have had the opportunity
 to study his, unhappily still unpublished, work. In this lecture I want to
 re-pose, in the context of the manifest crisis in our political affairs, two
 questions that were central to Rick's life and intellectual project. The
 questions are: what can philosophy, as a discipline, contribute towards an
 understanding of our situation; and of what assistance might it be to
 individuals or groups interested in rational reconstruction?
     Since Greek times philosophy has had a central and proud concern with
 the social being of man. There is a contrary modern tradition that philosophy
 is a specialised professional activity not aimed at a wider public and not
 having intrinsic practical objectives. This tradition has, in my view
 unfortunately, many adherents amongst teachers of philosophy in this
 country. Richard Turner was passionately opposed to such removal of
 philosophy from the public sphere. He philosophised with practical intent,
 seeking to clarify the manner in which human reason might direct human
 conduct. Committed to the Enlightenment tradition of thought as essentially
critical, his project - derived initially from Sartre - was to clarify the
philosophical foundations of dialectical reason.
     The nature of this project made Turner an especially significant figure
amongst those defining strategies of opposition to the prevailing South
African system. Critical work in the social sciences in South Africa has not
benefited from continuous support and critique from philosophy - critique
which, for its own self-understanding, it always needs. Turner's early death
and the suppression of his posthumous manuscripts removed from the
important theoretical debates which raged here in the mid-1970s what would
have been a powerful voice defending the view of dialectical reason as
critique. His work will have, I believe, to be reassimilated in the coming
phases of the struggle. I hope that this lecture, which moves in the terrain of
Turner's thought, will contribute to that reassimilation.
    The diagnoses made by the social sciences of pathology and crisis in South
Africa are, at first sight, comprehensive. As a point of departure I would like
to draw on work done in defining the crisis by economists and political
scientists. Philosophy cannot proceed independently of such empirical work:
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it is dependent on it. One of my tasks today will be to specify the nature of
this dependence.
     The economist Professor Charles Simkins has argued that South Africa
need take only another generation to become an advanced industrial state.
But its progress towards that goal is now faltering badly - chiefly because of
extra-economic exclusion mechanisms. Politically controlled mechanisms
have concentrated wealth so narrowly as to limit its effective deployment and
cause high levels of unemployment. Professor Simkins draws attention to two
major consequences of this. Firstly, unemployment is 'generating
revolutionary forces which render expectations pessimistic and prejudice
transactions essential to ordinary human existence.' Secondly, 'the forces of
international competition and population growth may mean that a failure to
make economic progress now will rule out prospects of a prosperous society
for the indefinite future'.
     The crisis of motivation referred to by Simkins has been thematized by
 political scientists as a dissolution of social integration now acute enough to
 threaten the mechanisms of what are called 'systemic' integration - ie
 objective functional connections. The attempt made, since 1948, to fuse
 non-democratic modes of domination with progressive, privatized,
 industrialisation has been in overt crisis since 1984. The difficulties are the
 necessary outcome of an inner contradiction in the enterprise.
 Differentiation and privatization of production has been accompanied by an
 attempt to depoliticize the spheres of labour, production and distribution.
 The sphere of the political is supposed to play out in a symbolic realm of
 racial and ethnic identity formation and 'national independence' - a life world
 which has only tangential connection with the on-going process of
 modernisation. In consequence the system is constantly faced with dilemmas
 of having to violate normative rules of action implicit in the system. The
 reconciliation of social and systemic integration is, consequently, breaking
 down. The regime does not dispose of mechanisms with which to reconcile
 the norms and values of its members with its systemic functional
 requirements. Nothing in South Africa is called by its name. The banishment
 of the realities of class interest in the mystificatory discourse of race and the
 attempt to displace the conflict into the fictitious world of ethnic 'autonomy1
 has resulted in a widespread alienation of consciousness inured to a reality
 that is perceived, dimly, as a network of total deception. The growing
 presence of the Conservative Party reveals this truth. The party's force shows
 that we have passed the threshold of a legitimacy crisis. The next level is
 ungovernability.
      Can philosophy add to, or make special sense of, these accounts of the
 ruptures and breakdowns in our society - these morbid symptoms of what
 Nadine Gordimer in a now famous lecture called (following Gramsci) the
 'interregnum in which we live' - a time when 'the old is dying and the new
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  cannot be born'?2 Do we need any special knowledge to grasp this time,
  anything beyond what is given us by the empirically based disciplines of
  economics, political science and sociology? Gordimer thinks that there are
  dimensions of our special moral chaos grasped most signally by writers who
  have, she claims, 'some faculties of supra-observation and hyperperception
  not known to others.'
      However that may be and although I agree with Gordimer that there is a
  dimension which is not wholly illuminated in the social sciences, I do not
  think that it will be discovered by some special moral sense. Certainly
 philosophy does not claim any such exceptional judgement or ecstatic insight.
 What then does it claim? Might it be, perhaps, a meta-discipline - an enquiry
 which integrates the findings of the empirically based disciplines I have cited
  (and perhaps others such as psychology), into some kind of general theory
 of reality? Such claims have, since the time of the Greeks and down to the
 dawn of our own epoch, been made for philosophy. At the threshold of the
 modern world Hegel, who defined philosophy as 'its own time apprehended
 in thoughts', sought to make philosophy a science of the totality of
 knowledge. Such claims to systematic comprehensiveness have not been
 redeemed. Philosophy is not a meta-science that orders and situates in an
 intelligible system, a complete understanding of reality. Its claims have
 become more modest.
     Well then, once again, what are its claims? What are its data and what
 form of knowledge does it produce? For nearly three centuries now, and
 emphatically since the Enlightenment, a powerful tradition in philosophy has
 claimed for itself the status of a 'critique' of existing reality. The modes of
 this 'critique' are diverse. But common to all the thinkers of the
Enlightenment tradition (as will become evident, I have in mind especially
Kant, Hegel, Marx, Freud and the writers of the early and contemporary
Frankfurt school) is the conviction that it is a central concern of philosophy
to show, with precision, how specific formations and mechanisms of power
distort and deform human life. The proud title of 'critique' in this tradition
situates philosophy in the realm of value. The claim is that philosophy
develops a special, fundamental, kind of knowledge that enables it to
emancipate human life from distortions and coercive ideological illusions
where these constraints are systematically produced by historical and social
forces.
     This is a modern version of an old tradition. The teaching of the good life
has, since time immemorial, been regarded as the true field of philosophy.
But, since the transformation of the global economic and political systems
of capitalism, the question has become lodged principally in the political
sphere - and in a significantly new way. I should like to develop this.
     Since the Greeks the connection of human identity and integrity with the
political realm has been a concern of philosophy. Until the coming of the
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modern secular order, however, politics was always relativised by
transcendental concerns. In classical Greek thought the political was held to
reproduce the order of the cosmos and so the task of 'teoria' was to assist
the conformity of the soul to the proportions of the universe. This figure was
substantially reproduced in Christian Mediaeval Europe.
    With the transformation of traditional society by capitalism the
conception of politics as subordinate to eternal laws began to erode. The
dynamics of market society, and later of industrialisation, ruptured the
traditional religious order and restructured the life world of man as the
object of a new primacy of the economic and political. This is the foundation
of so- called 'Modernity'. The capitalist mode of production brought about
a sense that man was the subject of his own history, not its passive object;
that the conditions of life were made by man himself in the spheres of
material production and the social and political arrangements that held it in
place.
    This historical transformation embodied a complex dialectic of
emancipation and domination. The new sense of human power and purpose,
the triumph (to use a phrase of the historian Reinhart Koselleck) of the
'horizon of expectation' over the traditional 'space of experience', was
achieved at the expense of the dispossession of the majority of men and
women in Europe and in the colonial world. The capitalist order involved
a qualitatively new kind of exploitation and pursued it with a new kind of
intensity. Thus the reverse side of the emancipatory promise of industrial
society was the savagery of class struggle.
     It was to this situation that philosophy responded by redefining theory as
critique. Increasingly inscribed in the dialectic of emancipation and
 domination, the philosophy of the Enlightenment, initially concerned with
the ethical implications of secularization, became steadily politicized. It will
be helpful to trace out some of the crucial stages of this critical reflection of,
 and on, societal developments.
     In the late 17th Century (for example in Pierre Bayle's 'Dictionnaire
 historique et critique' of 1695-7) 'critique' signified a questioning of divine
 revelation in the name of reason. Freed from theology the idea that reason
 pertained to mankind's regulation of its own affairs as a free and autonomous
 agent began to take shape. Bayle sought a 'republic of letters' in which truth
 would be defined in a public arena of unconstrained dialogue. The political
 implications of this, already clear in Bayle and Fontanelle, remained
 undeveloped for half a century - held in check by the authority of the
 absolutist state. But, as the social forces which were to culminate in the
 French Revolution of 1789 ripened, the idea of critique acquired public
 force. By 1781 - ie before the French Revolution - Kant declared in a new
 preface to his epoch-making 'Critique of Pure Reason' that his was the true
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  TRANSFORMATION                                                              NUPEN
  age of critique and that both religion and the legislature must submit to its
  test.
      Kant's thought attempts a rigorous demonstration of the conditions for
  any possible knowledge - especially the conditions of human knowledge
  through which modern natural science is possible. Behind this lies an ethical
  purpose. Establishing the centrality of the knowing subject entails conferring
  on him respect as the 'founder' of such knowledge. Moreover, knowledge is
  inter-subjective. Secure scientific knowledge is possible only in a community
  of rational subjects. The idea that it is knowledge that constitutes the dignity
  of man, fused with the inter-subjective critique of knowledge conceived in
  reference to a system of cognitive faculties that included practical reason and
  reflective judgement, implied the revolutionary idea of a community of
  subjects whose rationality was both cognitive and practical. Kant's famous
  definition of the Enlightenment as 'the emancipation of man from a state of
 self-imposed tutelage, of incapacity to use his own intelligence without
 external guidance' acquires its full force in the context of the practical reason
 of a community of rational subjects.
      Now it is vital to see that this 'critical' philosophy is both the expression
 and the guardian of the most significant attempt at a transformation of the
 political structure of society in all history - viz the claim made by the French
 revolutionaries to be transforming traditional political authority into rational
 authority.
      What is involved in this claim of the emergent bourgeoisie in France? In
 order to legitimize their power the middle classes had to destroy the tradition
 of hereditary authority with its divisions into fixed 'estates'. Their immediate
 interest was the development of a commercial economy - a market unfettered
by traditional authorities and rules. The bourgeoisie as a class could only,
paradoxically enough, urge its own interest by inventing a new, allegedly
universal, form of authority. This new principle was that of legitimation
through public debate - one might almost say through publicity itself. The
absolutely revolutionary claim of the French revolution was to rule by reason,
to transform political authority into rational authority - where 'rational'
meant criticism and counter-criticism, the systematic, discursive justification
of social arrangements. The modern idea of democracy was born here in the
conviction that the people as a whole are capable of deliberating and
choosing on the basis of knowledge gained through full access to information.
The principle had been established that social arrangements were to be the
end product of the surveillance of autonomous critical thought.
     The claim was, of course, in a large measure apocryphal. The triumph of
the bourgeoisie and the coming of industrialization in Europe did not wholly
democratize the public sphere and ensure that social arrangements were
made in open debate. Society became skewed along class lines and the
economic domination of the owners of capital quickly brought about the
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 political pre-eminence of this class. The result was the internecine warfare
 of the last two centuries - a struggle whose crises are marked by the European
 revolutions of 1848 and the Paris Commune, the Russian Revolution of 1917,
 the counter- revolutions of Fascism and National Socialism and,
 internationally, the colonial wars after 1945. These watersheds of the class
 struggle show how partial and insecure the triumph of the public sphere and
 of rational authority has been. Yet the principles of public debate and
 discursively defined rationality are, it has become apparent, the guarantors of
freedom from arbitrarily exercised power in industrial society - and its only
 effective legitimation. The present efforts to rehabilitate them in the Soviet
 Union is a good example. The development of technical reason, which directs
 the realm of production, needs, as a complementary principle, practical
 discourse, practical orientation about what is right and just. This discourse
 can emanate only from the public sphere and it must proceed pedagogically
 - not technically.
      I should like to draw out what is entailed in this realm of 'praxis', of
 ethico-political discourse, which augments and corrects the realm of
 'techne', the sphere of technically exploitable knowledge.
     Practical politics, in this sense, and the 'praxis' of philosophy are closely
 interconnected. Industrial society is future oriented, constantly requiring
 hew decisions in historically entirely new situations. For this ethical discourse
 and historical orientation are essential. A critical account of how we came
to be what we are, a reflection on the particulars of our self-formative
process, is an indispensable part of any attempt at rational orientation and
planning. Throughout the industrial epoch, philosophy, drawing its strength
both from the still unresolved antagonisms of society and from the need for
clarification of practical objectives, has been a guiding and emancipatory
force.
     Early in the 19th Century Hegel provided a model for such philosophical
reflection. He showed that such reflection does not have a fixed point of
origin. There is no Archimedean point from which criticism can proceed: it
is dependent on something prior which it takes as its object. Hegel argued
this by demonstrating the need to replace the epistemological paradigm of
philosophy by a phenomenological self-reflection of mind, a tracing of mind's
becoming through the processual overthrow of the limitations entailed in
each stage of its development. Reason emerges through the dissolution of
constraints.
     In Hegel's Idealism this occurs without human intention. Marx therefore
proposed a materialist variant: the process of the self-formation of the
species replaces the autonomous unfolding of reason. But the figure is the
same: reason is a reflective liberation from coercive illusions and philosophy
acquires its force in the articulation of reason as critique. Marx called this
power to dissolve modes of consciousness incompatible with progressive life
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    TRANSFORMATION                                                            NUPEN
   'critique of ideology* and he thought, fatally, that this exhausted the realm of
   reflection. It does not. The scope of critical reason is wider - as the persistent
   and necessary attempts to ground dialectical reason philosophically, from
   Lukacs to the present day, shows. The materialist transformation of Hegel
   has not yet been completed. But it remains the real task for philosophy
   concerned with social emancipation.
       For our purposes it is enough to notice that both Marx's 'critique of
   ideology1 and Freud's use of the Hegelian model of reflection in his theory
   of psychoanalysis testify to its power. What both the Marxian and Freudian
   uses underscore is the advance of Hegel's construction over the early
   Enlightenment in taking seriously the distorted consciousness that inhibits
   development at any given moment. Such shapes of consciousness are not
   mere illusions. They are symptoms of dogmatic or retrogressive forms of life
   which need these illusions to make sense of themselves.
      It is my thesis that this model of critique is, in essence, what underlies the
  production of practical critical discourse in the public sphere of advanced
  societies. What the model expresses is the dynamic moment of self-reflection
  which makes public discourse so effective. Where society is progressive its
  own practice and self-understanding is dynamized by this model of
  reflection. By the same token where society is reactionary it repudiates the
  self-reflection which threatens to dissolve the archaic, regressive
  consciousness, to which it clings. In such societies, of course, philosophy is
  thrust back to the role of pure critique - in particular critique of the
  dissolution of the critical public itself.
      Space for such opposition is made by the persistent tendency of society
 to regress. The public sphere is always endangered, and with it rational
 historical evolution. The eruption of National Socialism shows for ever the
 vulnerability of industrial civilisation. A European regime set about reversing
 the trend of the Enlightenment. Against the principle of historical evolution
 Hitler set a-historical immutable domination (the so-called Fuhrerprinzip);
 against equality racial supremacy, and against publically defined reason the
 implacable imperatives of the biological life force and the defence of 'racial
identity1. These themes of National Socialism have been nascent in industrial
culture and made partial appearances in Europe in the 19th Century. We
must recognise this and note that National Socialism is not an episode - it is
the (as yet most acute) phase of a perennial disease. Lesser anti-democratic
regimes have shrunk back from the terrible consistency of Hitlerism. But the
intrinsic hostility to reason is quite widely spread.
     The collusion of the South African ruling classes with the categories of
race and the Fuhrerprinzip is manifest. The degree to which these concepts
have been disastrously invoked in uncoupling South Africa from the inherent
logic of societal evolution has long been apparent. But it may be that the
power of these ideologies will be even more destructive in the moment of
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their defeat than in the decades of their triumph. The, rather timid,
beginnings of an effort to dismantle the crasser features of the social
engineering of Apartheid have been carried through by government and
carefully chosen technocrats who have not seriously challenged the principle
of Fuhrertuffl. In consequence, long before racial domination is effectively
transcended a new and particularly insidious distortion of public life by
forces of modernization indifferent to public debate and democracy has
begun to take shape. This has not been widely recognised and it is only, I
want to argue, by using the philosophical model I have sketched in order to
illuminate the logic of this domination, that we can fully grasp the extent of
the pathology of the South African system and, hopefully, gain clarity about
what is involved in any attempt seriously to re-structure it. Only philosophical
reflection can go beyond the description of systematic dysfunctionality which
 the empirical social sciences can furnish. It will also show that the system will
 not easily be made functional by piecemeal adjustment but will require quite
 radical restructuring.
     The starting point of such reflection is the occlusion of the sphere of
 practical public discourse. Why has this become so critical now? After all,
 power has never been wholly legitimated by public debate, social
 arrangements have never been entirely the end product of autonomous
 critical surveillance. Most importantly, the realm of practical/political
 discourse has never had the partial autonomy which has allowed it to
 function, as in advanced industrial society, as a controlling and rationalizing
 influence. Political discourse in South Africa has always moved in the
 symbolic matrix of race, imposed by white domination. It has faithfully
 reflected power - and never developed a position from which it might
 effectively influence or challenge that power. As long as the claims of the
 masses of totally dispossessed were effectively stifled this did not upset the
 system. But now a twin weakness has appeared and the absence of critical
 public debate is becoming acutely distorting. On the one hand the claims of
  the working class are being articulated in ways (ranging from township riots
  to sophisticated trades union action) which the system has no way of totally
  controlling; on the other hand its own steering mechanisms are being
  progressively shown to be outdated - captive to dogmatized political
  imperatives which inhibit effectiveness and, above all, prevent re-structuring.
  The state apparatus, fashioned to entrench racial and class domination
  cannot reform itself from within. Its present constitution reflects its real base.
  Hence reform would have to come in response to pressure from other
  interests expressed through the sphere of public debate. In the absence of
  such debate in an antagonistic situation the state will tend to reproduce itself
  as a self-perpetuating repressive apparatus increasingly unable to reconcile
  the divergent pressures upon it.
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        And indeed this is quite clearly what is now happening. The South African
    state apparatus is now heavily involved in engineering consent in an
    environment from which open debate has been banned. The reflection on
   practical alternatives is narrowed and the state is becoming progressively less
   representative - even of the interests of its own constituency.
        However, there is a clear limit to such manipulated co-option. South
   Africa's march to totalitarianism is not unidirectional because the system has
   had (and can only have) very limited success in co-opting broad sections of
   the oppressed racial groups. For the present its power to block revolution is
   unquestioned. But the increasing production of revolutionary energies is the
   logical consequence of the stalemate. Resolution by such energies may be
   uneconomical. But whether or not there is an alternative will depend on the
  strategic behaviour of powerful groupings in the society whose continued
  existence will depend on comprehensive re-structuring. I have in mind
  groups such as the trades unions, the institutions of higher learning
  concerned with the production of technically exploitable knowledge and,
  perhaps, the planning organs of big business. These institutions have an
  immediate and direct stake in rational modernization in South Africa. And
  there is evidence that, suffering under the progressively repressive character
  of the system, they are coming to realise the indispensability of a restitution
  of democratic discourse to block the slide to military-technocratic
  dictatorship. The only thing that will legitimize their opposition in the long
  run is broad mobilisation of public support.
       It follows that such groups are, or could in their own interests become,
 vitally interested in investigation of the conditions under which critical
 debate might be re-established in South Africa. To the degree that they are,
 they will find it essential to uncover the distortions and coercive illusions of
 the apartheid state and, at its deepest level, to set free energies that have
 been systematically extinguished by the triumph of racial oligarchy. I said
 earlier that Hegel persuasively showed that there is no Archimedean point
 of criticism. There is no way of establishing rationality in South Africa other
 than by purging the system of its accumulated levels of coercive illusions and
 systematically maintained ideological untruth. There is no way of doing that
 other than by re- structuring the realm of practical discourse. And there is
no way of doing that other than by re-integrating the discourse of the
oppressed into public debate. The discourse of the oppressed is the potential
healing of the system.
      We have to learn that only unblocking the systems of communicative
action will permit re-structuring on the levels of the economy and the
administration. This is the inescapable pre-condition of any development.
The logic of development is a democratic logic. Those seeking to think it
through or to realise it will find the models provided by philosophy
indispensable.
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  •   The 1988 Richard Turner Memorial Lecture: delivered at the Univer-
      sity of Natal Durban, on 28 April
 REFERENCES
 1. Professor Charles Simians in a private communication.
2. Gordimer, N (1983) - 'Living in the Interregnum', an essay based on the
James Lecture presented at the New York Institute for the Humanities on
October 14,1982. The New York Review of Books, January 20, pp 21-29.
3. See Habermas, J (1972) - Knowledge and Human Interests (London).
4. Koselleck, R (1985) - '"Space of Experience" and "Horizon of Expecta-
tion": Two historical Categories', in Futures Past: On the Semantics of His-
torical Tune (Cambridge, MA).
5. See Habermas, J (1961) - Strukturwandel der Offentlichkeit (Neuwied/Ber-
lin); Grimsley, R (ed) (1979) - The Age of Enlightenment (Harmondsworth);
Connerton, P (1980) -The Tragedy of Enlightenment (Cambridge).
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