NOTES TOWARDS A UTOPIA
523
ing a strictly philosophical starting-point I am apriorist, i.e. close
my eyes to the conditions of the actual world and man's role
in it. My answer to such a charge would be that there is no
necessary connection between these two propositions. I would go
even further and maintain that without a clarification of basic
principles no effective hold on the empirical world is possible.
Even the most bigoted empiricist cannot dispense with first prin–
ciples, no matter how carefully he tries to hide them; and to the
extent that he uses them he, too, is a philosopher. Preaching a
new ideology is one thing; setting forth basic ideas which are then
applied to the actual present, the possible future, quite another.
Since, moreover, it will be my main business to show how these
basic ideas undergo drastic changes under the pressure of reality,
and engage in constantly new relationships, the above objection
cannot seriously
be
sustained.
Our culture is fed up with subjectivity and objectivity both.
But the fault lies not with these concepts but rather with its own
naive impatience in applying them during the last century and a
half. The basic distinction, made very clear by hoth Hegel and
Marx, is not between "seW' and "other" but between two separate
yet correlative dimensions which have to be treated dialectically,
not statically. The world of "objects" (both persons and things)
must be seen for what
it
is, potentially or actually, viz. capable of
reacting back upon us, and in this act assuming the status of sub–
jects even as we, under that same perspective, temporarily forego
our subject status and become objects. These same dimensions
subsist within one and the same individual (the individual as
"viewer-subject" and as "viewed-object"), and will subsist in
harmony unless the individual is disturbed.
In
a society like ours
no harmonious relationship is possible between the self and the
objects of this world or, by the same token, between the self
as subject and the self as its own object. Yet such a relationship
is an ineradicable wish, in everyone. This is why Utopias become
necessary.
II.
The reversal of imagination
There is no evidence among animals in their natural habitat
of "repression"-the other face of "sublimation"-but only of a)
