logicp_writings/collectivist_theology/Freire_Transform_Objective.md

Freirean Transformation of Objective Reality

I find it stunning to read Freire talking about how theirs is an effort to transform objective reality, particularly because those who aim for collectivist liberation from systemic oppression will always refute demands for objective reasoning on the basis of Kant's subject/object split. But they, the cake-eaters that they are, get to eat that cake too - they are historicist!

Historicist, not in the sense of being of a mature society that recognizes how its knowledge and capability depends on that of years past, but in the sense that the process of history is reasonable. This is easy to accept unconsciously, because there is no other path of history to intuit except one which follows a path of perceiving the world for a period of time, as one does.

But consciously, the idea is Hegel's (someone Freire quotes, of course), where the actual structure of reality is made up of ideas aka spirit, with reason meaning the true knowledge of concrete reality and the logical nature of reality. The fact of its natural laws, and beauty and elegance can be taken forward to include history itself unfolding. Now we have an understanding that history is itself reason, and knowledge of its unfolding includes an expectation that if that process were ever to complete it would be through a completely self conscious mind which is the entirety of reality.

And so the transformation of reality is something you get for free, in a sense, since time moves and that's the only requirement for one to observe and say that there is a history of the world. You get the ability to play this game where no one has objective truth or knowledge, but any belief that the act of your existence can cause even the slightest perturbation in one of your ass hairs is enough for you to have transformed objective reality. You are always transforming objective reality and that means you have reason.

Now you can carry this over to your desires, and imagine that any event which occurs which might affect the trajectory towards that desired endpoint can be seen as "Reasonable" (like blocking traffic for Trans Zionist or Trans Palestinian Lives Matter).

Feuerbach and Marx take this historical process of reason unfolding as ideas into an absolute idea and they say that any notion that man's existence must be in consideration of an object foreign to man himself necessarily produces the alienation of man, and that, therefore, historical process is the history of man creating himself until such time that he is man in himself. Put another way, it wouldn't make sense that the reason of history would be such that it leads to perpetual alienation of man. There is no history being witnessed by anything but man; the conditions of the world cause the alienation of man and the inability for him to pursue his life and existence in the way that he truly, through his reason, would be able to fashion freely absent the influence of his oppression.

So if the absolute were unfolding to perfection, and man is part of that existence, then even his ideas would have to eventually unfold to perfection, but a world where man is increasingly alienated would have to be an unreasonable one.

Now you have that the transformation is reality takes place, through praxis, through your action as subject, even if it's completely absent any possibility of empirical verification, that it is advancing history towards an imminent endpoint, and that this describes the telos of reality (which exists for man) regardless of whether you believe in spirits or God or just that everything which exists is matter in motion.