NOTES TOWARDS A UTOPIA
521
the best method for explaining the whole complex of multiple
relationships. There is the possibility, for example, that responses
to natural objects might become less (or vastly more) important
in Utopia than those we make to man-made objects. Our re–
actions to "symbolic" objects (e.g. the Community, the Economic
System) might become more affirmative than they are now, since
the individual would no longer feel that it has to protect itself
constantly against the "institutional" world. The mirror relations
of "self-consciousness"-always fraught with great dangers to
the psychic equilibrium-might become harmless, because we
would not care any longer (or not care as much) ahout what
other individuals (or institutions) think of us as individuals. This
implies that also our interpersonal relations would have lost much
of their present tenseness and ambivalence-all energies would
supposedly be directed towards the commonweal, and it is through
this
that we would gain our principal personal satisfactions, etc.
Utopists casting about for "directive" antecedents would be
well advised to pay somewhat more attention to Hegel, Kierke–
gaard, Husserl, Sartre, and somewhat less to Marx, Freud, and their
respective affiliates, since it is among the former group that we find
men's basic relations to one another, to themselves, and to their
products most fully discussed. It is surely no slight to either Marx
or Freud to state that their efforts, while truly radical
in
their
way, did not address these fundamental topics; or when they did
address them, would do so from a rather special point of view
and with different developments in mind. The basic relations
whose examinations we urge fall properly within the province of
the philosopher. Now neither Marx nor Freud was, or considered
himself, a philosopher in this primary sense. Marx brilliantly
il–
luminated the relations of the manual and intellectual worker to
their products, as well as the relations, under a Capitalist system,
of groups and persons toward each other. He then contrasted
these relations, which he viewed not only as repressive but as de–
meaning to all the parties involved, with their purified equivalents
in the classless society of the future. Freud, on his part, showed
little interest in the relation between the individual and what he
makes
(as distinguished from what he does, rejects, or becomes
attached to) and a somewhat greater but rather specialized interest
