KRITIKE VOLUME FIVE NUMBER TWO (DECEMBER 2011) i-iii
Editorial
In this Issue of KRITIKE: An Online Journal of Philosophy
Roland Theuas DS. Pada
hilology of the future! An insult thrown at Friedrich Nietzsche by his contemporary philologist, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, whose P polemics dampened the reception of Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, is one of the reasons why philosophy should be keenly aware with the difference between the idea of doing philosophy and understanding philosophy. On the one hand, doing philosophy in the sense of elucidation and exposition falls at the border between doing philosophy and philology. On the other hand, contributing something different to a discourse is one of the ways in which philosophy is able to live on and move towards the future. On a related note, the movement of philosophy is dynamic and unpredictable, a discourse at one time may be in vogue or in fashion, only to be eventually left as archive fodder. This is not to say that what we leave in an archive is entirely useless, rather this assertion speaks more of how we should overcome the very shoulders in which we erected our own philosophical edifice. Just as Heidegger had the anxiety of overcoming Kant in Sein und Zeit, and Derrida moving beyond Heidegger’s Destruktion, we must continue to think about the future of philosophy and to maintain an invisible thread that can tie and connect other discourses and disciplines together. I am very ecstatic to present the following papers for the tenth issue of KRITIKE: An Online Journal of Philosophy. To start of with a very relevant and timely discussion of philosophy and its stand amidst the other disciplines is Jasper Doomen’s “Philosophy’s End.” Doomen discusses the impeding disintegration of philosophy by raising the question of its goals and objectives along with its problem of justifying its purpose amidst its growing specialization. Doomen concludes that philosophy is doomed to stagnation if it does not renew its focus on relevant topics that do not simply pique the interest of philosophers but also that of other disciplines. Also, in this issue we have five papers coming from the area of political and social philosophy, starting of with Peter Meurs, Nicole Note, and Diederik Aerts’s “The Globe of Globalization” as they look at globalization from the vantage point of philosophy and debates as to whether its ideal is still found within the formal boundaries of the Bildungsideal as opposed to the praxis of facticity. Meanwhile, in “Beyond Goods and Services: Toward a Nietzschean Critique of Capitalism,” Michael Killvris examines Nietzsche’s commentary on capitalism and its usual interpretation that is rooted in the argument of bourgeoisie aristocracy. He argues that the ideology behind
© 2011 Roland Theuas DS. Pada http://www.kritike.org/journal/issue_10/editorial_december2011.pdf ISSN 1908-7330
ii IN THIS ISSUE OF KRITIKE aristocracy is not based on the idea of struggle between opposing forces in history found in Marxism, rather it is based on the sense of ressentiment experienced through the pathos of distance. Killvris argues that the notion of individuality is used to de-mystify herd thinking and maintain an attitude of suspicion towards the valuation of these activities. For his part, John McSweeney, in “Finitude and Violence: Žižek versus Derrida on Politics,” presents a very interesting recount of Žižek’s critique of Derrida’s effort to reduce violence by introducing the concept of openness to ’l’avenir (the one’s to come), which is contrasted to the problem of Žižek’s notion of finitude. The paper opens up new avenues for understanding the politics of violence through the problem of deconstructive contexts, to which one’s anticipation of the difference from the ‘other’ will inevitably lead to the source of violence of the same. A rather unique take on Marxism is presented to us in David Byrne’s “The Victory of the Proletariat is Inevitable: The Millenarian Nature of Marxism.” Byrne traces the Millenarian roots of Marx’s notion of class struggle by comparing it with the struggle between good and evil in the Revelations, ultimately arguing that the theory is based on scripture rather than economics. Robery Lacey, meanwhile, in “Leaving the Stag Hunt,” contributes his take on the idea of conservatism and questions its current orientation with its disconnection from the history of Western political thought. Moreover, we have Danny Frederick’s polemic against the freedom of expression through pornography in “Pornography and Freedom.” Frederick defends the importance of pornography and argues that it is essential for autonomy, self- development, knowledge and progress. Frederick’ defends his radical claim by arguing against allegations raised towards pornography and its harm to which he raises important issues that are of consequence when pornography is suppressed. The next series of essays are roughly categorized under the area of phenomenology and epistemology. Gbenga Fasiku, in “The Explanatory Gap Argument and Phenomenal States: A Defense of Physicalism,” examines the explanatory gap argument and its failure to undermine physicalism as an explanation of the gap between consciousness and experience. The author further asserts that the gap does not necessarily diminish the truth behind physicalism, rather it is still dependent on the degree of our understanding of the human mind, the further we explore it the more that we will be able to close such gap. In “Questioning the Body,” Koshy Tharakan explores the philosophical underpinnings of the idea of the body as a framework in understanding technology, as a way of articulating the distinction between mind and body, which has been inevitably reduced through our technological perspective of the body as an integrated whole. Tharakan attempts to present an interesting distinction between “agentive body” and “symbolic body” as a way of disentangling our understanding of the body in a technological perspective. James Magrini shares his thought on the philosophy of education in “Reading Heidegger Through Huebner: The Implications of an Authentic Conception of Learning, Understanding, and “Historicity” for Contemporary
R. PADA iii
Education.” In this essay, Magrini explores Huebner’s essay on “Curriculum as Concern for Man’s Temporality” and its implications on the use of the phenomenological method in education and curriculum studies. He emphasizes the strong connection of curriculum reform to Heideggerian concepts such as facticity, historicity, and its relevance to personal and social dimensions of Dasein’s authenticity. Segun Samuel’s “Cartesiam Dualism: An Evaluation of Wireduan and Gilbert Ryle’s Refutations” considers the possibility of resolving the mind- body dichotomy in Descartes’ epistemology through the thoughts of Gilbert Ryle and Kwasi Wiredu as they argue and insist on a source of consciousness as the possible resolution to the Cartesian dichotomy between mind and body. In “Things are Not What They Seem: The Transcendentalism of Appearances in the Refutation of Reductive Naturalism,” James Trafford diagnoses the arguments raised against Thomas Metzinger’s refutation of reductive naturalism, to which interpreters have assumed to be connected to the conflation of phenomenology and introspection as a problem persisting in the idea of experience as appearance qua appearance. Trafford further argues that the anti-reductive arguments of philosophers are still going to rely on the transcendental assumption of consciousness amidst experience as its explanation, to which he concludes that both the explanda and the explanans of conscious experience be open to further theoretical revision. Finally, in “Laws of Nature and Counterparts,” Esteban Céspedes contemplates on the possibility of a different depiction of nature through the idea of nomological realism and Lewis’ counterpart theory. He argues that, instead of viewing nature as a consistent and regular phenomenon guided by ontological principles or through the arbitrary and habitual connection of ideas observed in nature, there is another perspective that will agree to the idea of the regularity of nature, but deny its connection to the existence of real natural laws. As a concluding note, I would like to thank the patience and understanding extended to us by the community of contributors and referees in the course of the journal’s transition to its new system, it is their fervent support and perseverance that make the existence of this journal possible. I would also like to extend my thanks to my colleagues, Jove Aguas, Ian Pacquing, Dean Mejos, Melanie Mejia, Marella Bolaños, Darlene Demandante, Wendyl Luna, Moses Angeles, Fleurdeliz Altez-Albela, Tracy Llanera, and Peter Mara for helping me out with the refereeing procedures. Finally, I would like to express my gratitude our Editor-in-Chief, Paolo Bolaños, for extending his trust and confidence in the task of managing this journal.
Department of Philosophy, University of Santo Tomas, Philippines
KRITIKE VOLUME FIVE NUMBER TWO (DECEMBER 2011) 1-9
Article
Philosophy’s End
Jasper Doomen
Abstract: Philosophy’s role is typically a reflective one. Yet this stance is in peril of being corrupted. Because it is being driven to specialized inquiries, the subdisciplines of which it is comprised may develop into separate fields, whose presence will then need to be justified in the same way the sciences are. This is impossible, however, given their diverging objectives. If this course of action persist, philosophy’s end in the sense of its ending is imminent, on account of its no longer having an end in the sense of its objective.
Key words: The death of philosophy, history of philosophy, science, specialization
Introduction
hilosophy’s task is at present not easily qualified. As scientific endeavors have led to results that reduce philosophical pursuits in many cases to P little more than a reflection without practical outcomes, it must reflect on its own enterprise. What is philosophy’s present role? Philosophers are typically interested in truth. The question presents itself why someone should be interested in a ‘truth’ beyond the standards1 the sciences have apparently adapted (viz., accept a theory as long as it works and no superior one is envisaged). Is the quest for ‘truth’ merely the need to solve a puzzle, or does grasping it simply provide a stable result, so that one can rest assured and need not look further? In any event, it seems difficult to find a task here for philosophy that is not exhausted by the sciences. Of course, there are questions they have not even begun to deal with – the most important ones in life, which may, ironically, be of such a nature that they cannot be answered at all –, but philosophy’s track record in that department is not impressive either, to put it mildly, philosophers providing answers without agreeing on the criteria to determine their merit. It is, then, necessary to see how philosophy’s presence may be justified. That is the question this article attempts to answer.
1 I say ‘standards’ (plural) as the social sciences and the exact sciences have different degrees of exactness (and within these categories, further varying degrees can be distinguished).
© 2011 Jasper Doomen http://www.kritike.org/journal/issue_10/doomen_december2011.pdf ISSN 1908-7330
2 PHILOSOPHY’S END
Disintegration
‘Philosophy’s end’ can be taken to mean (at least) three things. First, one may speak of the end of philosophy in the sense of its goal. Such a goal may be said to be happiness.2 This is not what I mean here. Second, the end of philosophy may be identified with the completion (‘Vollendung’) of metaphysics.3 There is a common ground with my position in this article, although I do not subscribe to this outcome. Third, philosophy’s end in the sense of its ending can be said to follow from its increasingly specialist outlook. It is this interpretation that is the focus of this article. In the case of the sciences, the same process has manifested itself. In order to be able to implement the procedures that have been developed in the field of medicine, e.g., specializations and subspecializations have come to the fore. This is an example of an external element that leads to specialization, which is exemplary for sciences’ (sub) Inspecializations. In the case of medicine, it is clear how this works: if a particular treatment (the external element in this case) becomes available, one wants to have it available, so that doctors need to master the knowledge and skills involved; as more treatments are developed, the need for specialization increases. In turn, these specialists have the opportunity to research more specifically than before, so that the process of specialization is again increased. Such external elements are apparently lacking in philosophy. In its case, conversely, specializations seem to have been prompted by ongoing debates with new viewpoints, a dialectical process if you will, although with an apparent lack of progress. ‘Progress’ is, of course, a difficult notion, but in the case of the sciences, the external elements can point out wherein it may consist (one would, for instance [ceteris paribus], prefer a medical treatment in the present day and age, with the present resources available, to a treatment in an earlier period of time). Some of the discussions that have started with, e.g., Plato, Descartes or Berkeley4 have not been concluded; those that may be said to have been concluded have received an answer from one or more sciences, whether they be psychology, physics or other sciences. This does not mean, incidentally, that such discussions are forever concluded, since scientific insights are provisory and must be abandoned once superior explanations become available, but it does mean that they are not, or at least not exclusively, considered to be of a philosophical nature anymore. Those philosophical quandaries that remain have become increasingly intricate, but have not been resolved. In fact, it may be argued that a
2 Aristotle, Ethica Nicomachea, Works Vol. 2, ed. by I. Bekker (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1960 [± 325 BCE]), 1097a, 1097b. 3 Martin Heidegger, Das Ende der Philosophie und die Aufgabe des Denkens, in Zur Sache des Denkens. Gesamtausgabe vol. 14 (Franfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2007 [1964]), 70. 4 These philosophers’ positions have emerged in intellectual contexts, of course, and have not arisen ex nihilo.
J. DOOMEN 3 philosophical issue can only be solved if a scientific response is provided.5 The question what knowledge is, e.g., has led to many characterizations, such that they may be said to testify to an increasing awareness of the difficulties involved in providing a definitive account.6 The notion of knowledge as a justified belief, e.g., has come under fire in the light of the observations Gettier has famously put forward.7 This problematization of ‘knowledge’ has in its turn led to many responses, such as the idea that knowledge is available as long as conclusive reasons are present.8 It is difficult to establish where this process (and many others in philosophy) would end. What I mean is the following. If an account is provided that seems plausible, such as the notion that knowledge is true, justified belief, but which is then (seemingly) refuted by another (supposedly superior) one, which is then itself (seemingly) refuted, at what point is the right (or ‘right’) account given? And how is one to determine this? Applied to the present example, there are those who will cling to a pre-Gettier notion of knowledge, those who accept Gettier’s arguments, and those who will provide their own alternative, without some impartial party to establish once and for all which explanation is right (in this (alleged) case not ‘right’ but actually right, since a (purportedly) objective point of view must be the case here, lest the discussion be reduced to an intellectual game, a possibility that cannot, incidentally, outrightly be dismissed). An additional difficulty is that the human perspective, from which it seems hard or impossible to escape, serves as the standard, so one seems unable to determine whether the objective perspective, presuming it exists, is reached. The most likely outcome, if a radical alternative such as Rorty’s (“[…] the notion of philosophy as having foundations is as mistaken as that of knowledge having foundations.”9) is dismissed, is that that the various positions will continue to exist next to one another, in the worst scenario even leading to subdisciplines in philosophy, just as philosophy has demonstrated from the end of the Middle Ages, culminating (so far at least) in the present era. This would not be an unwelcome development as long as there were some
5 Alternatively, an account from a non-scientific source that is not (presumably) available or even imaginable, such as those propounded by religions, may in the same way provide a solution non-philosophically, but it goes without saying that the question whether such an account is at all possible is not universally answered in the affirmative. 6 Perhaps a basic error is to presume that a definitive account, one that transcends the various approaches under the general banner of epistemology, is possible at all. These approaches are all characterized by some feature that is not shared universally (those known as ‘coherentists’ disagreeing with those whose view is dubbed ‘foundationalist’, for example, or those who present an ‘internalist’ approach with those who adhere to an ‘externalist’ outlook). This is an important issue, but not pursued here. 7 Edmund Gettier, “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?,” in Analysis, 23:6 (June 1963), 121-123. 8 Fred Dretske, “Conclusive Reasons,” in Australiasian Journal of Philosophy, 49:1 (May 1971), 1-22. 9 Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 264.
4 PHILOSOPHY’S END justification, such as in the field of medicine, whose expansion in such diverse areas as nephrology, radiology and psychiatry is due to the fact that physicians are not supposed to be able to oversee or master each treatment, as I pointed out above. The same can be said for the other sciences. It is precisely such a justification which is not a given in philosophy. In its case, there is no replacement of theories by one another, which are presumably their superiors, but a continuously ongoing accretion of new theories without an abandonment of the old. Such theories are not discarded; at most, something formerly considered philosophical is considered to be scientific once it can be corroborated or refuted on the basis of empirical data, and unless writings are lost because of unrelated factors such as natural disasters (a minor issue in a digital age), they will not become merely historically interesting, such as their scientific counterparts that are now considered outdated. In the knowledge case (and others) the question looms what it would matter which party is right. Suppose the question what knowledge is was ‘resolved’ in a way acceptable for everyone (in that they would all agree and be able to provide the evidence to support the ‘resolve’), what would be gained? It is clear that it would not matter to scientists, who may or may not use an implicit (unclear) notion of knowledge, and whose pursuits are not in the least affected by these definitional matters, as they may be called. Scientists do not have to immerse themselves in philosophy, nor are they anxiously awaiting philosophers’ debates’ outcomes before starting their own research. For philosophers themselves, it would simply mean that they would turn their attention to other matters to be ‘resolved’. Their pursuits can, then, be likened to the solving of crossword puzzles, which are no longer of interest once all the squares are filled. This is, of course, a hypothetical scenario, since, again, a philosophical issue does not seem to be resolved unless in the literal sense, i.e., when it disappears, because it has become part of a science. In time, many of the discussions in philosophy will perhaps lead to the same derision that the scholastic philosophers’ debates received from their successors. To return to the matter adumbrated above, about the necessary characteristics (or ‘essence’, to use the once popular vernacular) of knowledge, it would seem that James’s observation with regard to ‘truth’ applies (mutatis mutandis): “What difference would it practically make to anyone if this notion rather than that notion were true? If no practical difference whatever can be traced, then the alternatives mean practically the same thing, and all forms of dispute are idle. Whenever a dispute is serious, we ought to be able to show some practical difference that must follow from one side or the other’s being right.”10 ‘Truth’ is then to be approached as follows: “Purely objective truth, truth in whose establishment the function of giving human satisfaction in marrying previous parts of experience with newer parts played no rôle whatever, is nowhere to be
10 William James, Pragmatism, in Pragmatism. A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press, 1975 [1907]), Lecture II, 28.
J. DOOMEN 5 found. The reasons why we call things true is the reason why they are true, for ‘to be true’ means only to perform this marriage-function.”11 Scientists, in line with this observation, take the reverse attitude vis-à- vis ‘knowledge’ to those philosophers that do not adhere to a pragmatic outlook. Scientists need not first establish what knowledge is, so that they may differentiate between ‘true’ and ‘untrue’ statements; rather, they have their own methods on the basis of which they determine what is true and what, accordingly, constitutes knowledge. Knowledge is a result rather than a starting-point in the process. This procedural difference between the sciences on the one hand and (non-pragmatic) philosophy on the other explains why sciences can make progress12 and philosophy cannot (as I intimated above, as soon as a science provides an answer to a philosophical quandary, the issue is perhaps not to be considered philosophical anymore). As long as philosophers utilize their own notions of ‘truth’ and ‘knowledge’, they will remain confined to the conceptual prisons they have fabricated for themselves. It resembles the situation in which a scientist would introduce notions to his field of research that he can never corroborate or refute.13 Scientists steer clear of such a course of action, of course, realizing that it would be useless, a useful outcome being their goal. As long as philosophers fail to adopt the same standard, their discussions will remain seemingly relevant only for themselves, and not even that (but rather irrelevant), once they start to reflect on these discussions in addition to the topics they ponder.
Salvaging Philosophy
The critical observations put forward in section 1 should not be taken to entail that philosophy (or rather all philosophy) is useless. First, one may point to some fields of study that are not evidently without use, on account of their being aids to other fields of inquiry, such as logic and argumentation theory. Second, philosophy points out the various starting-points used in the sciences, of which their practitioners may not always be sufficiently aware, so that scientists’ critical stance may be incited. Third, not unrelated to the second point, philosophy is pre-eminently the domain to reflect on the use of enterprises such as scientific pursuits, but, more broadly, life itself. Confrontational questions, such as the one why one
11 Ibid., Lecture II, 37. 12 I have already pointed to the difficulties involved with this notion and will merely remark that a critical stance vis-à-vis the sciences is no less warranted than in the case of philosophy and that one may perhaps say that “[…] it is only during periods of normal science that progress seems both obvious and assured.” Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 163. ‘Normal science’ meaning here “[…] the research firmly based upon one or more past scientific achievements, achievements that some particular scientific community acknowledges for a time as supplying the foundation for its further practice.” Ibid., 10. 13 Thus acting against Popper’s precept that an empirical system should be falsifiable. Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (London: Hutchinson, 1962), 92.
6 PHILOSOPHY’S END should be involved in specific ambitions, or, more radically, why one should propagate or even continue to live, are not answered by the sciences, which may be said not to reflect at all. After all, scientific pursuits are usually not problematized, nor need they be: one’s objective is clear, at least roughly, and the fact that this may change in the course of the actual research does not derogate from this basic given. In fact, it is precisely this from which scientists derive the justification of their pursuits, whereas philosophers find the justification of theirs (inter alia) in their very reflection on these pursuits. The non-abating critical stance vis-à-vis anything, including scientific activities, keeps philosophy from being a trivial pursuit. This position is, however, at risk of becoming unattainable, in the light of what I pointed out in section 1. As philosophical issues become more specialized, they will become devoid of use, or even of meaning. The sciences specialize too, but in their case, this is a consequence of the external elements mentioned, a situation which does not apply to philosophy (for if it did, philosophy would no longer exist but be reduced to one or several sciences14). Should philosophy go the way of the sciences, it can no longer act as their critical observer and relativize their claims. Philosophy will, if it will continue to develop as it has over the last decade, cease to be a single discipline but rather fall apart into separate fields such as epistemology, ethics and logic. I say ‘separate’, for although these subdisciplines are of course already acknowledged, there is still a common frame of reference that unites them, even though this already seems to be faltering. This can only be maintained if one remembers why the philosophical matters that are investigated are of interest in the first place. A philosophical enterprise such as Fichte’s, which aspires to allot to philosophy the role of determining the nature of the sciences15 or a stance such as Descartes’s, who famously likens philosophy to a tree whose roots are metaphysics, and whose trunk is physics, the branches springing from it constituting all the other sciences,16 is no longer representative of the relation between philosophy and the sciences. Thinkers such as Descartes and Fichte, who devise complete philosophical systems, may have contemporary epigones, but if these should consider philosophy’s stance to be a similar one as their precursors did, they would have a hard time defending their position against
14 That this is philosophy’s path is, incidentally, pleaded by Quine, but he focuses on only part of what philosophy is, so that his analysis is too narrow to conclude that philosophy is already ‘dissolved.’ See Willard Van Orman Quine, Epistemology Naturalized, in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (New York, NY/London: Columbia Press, 1969), 75-78, 82-84. 15 Johann Fichte, Über den Begriff der Wissenschaftslehre, in Gesamtausgabe der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Werke: Band 2, ed. by R. Lauth and H. Jacob (Stuttgart/Bad Cannstatt: Frommann, 1965 [1794]), § 2 (123); cf. § 3 (127, 128), philosophy itself being characterized a science in his system of thought, by the way (§ 1 (112), § 2 (120), §3 (128)), and logic being a separate discipline from philosophy (§ 6 (137)). 16 René Descartes, Les Principes de la Philosophie, in Descartes’s Works, vol. 9–2, ed. by C. Adam and P. Tannery (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1964 [1647]), 14. His ambition also becomes apparent in the very title of another work: Discours de la Methode pour bien conduire sa raison et chercher la verité dans les sciences (original spelling).
J. DOOMEN 7 those accusing them of adhering to air castles of their own making. This is not to say that philosophy should not be engaged in a grand narrative – it may in fact be argued that this is the only way it can avoid a swift demise along the line sketched above –,17 but merely that its pretence concerning scientific enterprises must be mitigated. Possibly no less important in practice than this is the way literature is incorporated into one’s writings. Ideally, references to publications would appear only if their presence is relevant. This remark would seem to speak for itself. Yet many referees of prospective publications expect writers to include recent literature in which their subject matter is dealt with, even if such an inclusion would add nothing to the point one is trying to make, so that the publication gains nothing in import by adding such virtually mandatory ‘ornaments’ whose presence serves decorative purposes only. Such a stance needs to be relinquished if philosophy is to be kept from losing its common frame of reference (and, in the wake of this development, be annihilated).18 After all, the more one is focused on the current debates in one’s particular field, the less one is able to keep an overview (let alone to follow (globally) the developments in other disciplines), especially if such a focus leads to an inclusion of only the latest publications, the ‘classical’ books and articles serving merely as intellectual scenery. Relevant literature must be used, of course, but simply mentioning it for the sake of demonstrating that one is aware of the fact that others are involved in the same discussion is neither a productive nor a sensible course of action. In the case illustrated above, scientists are not in the least concerned about philosophers’ attempts to define knowledge, but an encompassing position that includes observations with a basis in both epistemology and the philosophy of science may alternatively be of value. Such a position is on the verge of becoming unattainable, if philosophy should indeed proceed in the same way as the sciences have. Fourth, there are fields such as ethics and meta-ethics which cannot, it seems, be incorporated in such a way into one or several sciences that they would be emancipated from philosophy, as it were.19 What I mentioned above with regard to the abundance of literature applies here, too. One must focus on the crucial issues, lest the discussions should loose their value.20 An example of such an issue is given above, viz., why one should be concerned with scientific
17 Crucially, one should, of course, not introduce such a narrative in order to salvage philosophy, which would be a most incredible way to operate. 18 I leave it to the reader to decide whether I have managed to avoid this myself and the present article has not succumbed to the same problem and must request him or her to base the judgment on the given that I have earnestly attempted to include only those references that actually contribute something. 19 From a meta-ethical point of view, problems can be raised regarding the status of some (or all) of the pivotal notions in ethics, but that does not mean that ethical questions loose their import. Since this is not the place to deal with this matter, I must limit myself here to mentioning that they must, in the light of such problems, be considered critically. 20 This carries an ambiguity in the case of ethics.
8 PHILOSOPHY’S END or philosophical issues at all (provided that they do not – immediately – lead to an increase of pleasure or a decrease of pain). Philosophy can, then, be salvaged, but only if it moves counterclockwise to the sciences, whose merit consists in ever new discoveries, which carries with it the continual need to specialize and even subdivide, whereas its presence is justified by its ability to reflect, an activity that can only remain of use if one steers clear from a similar path as that of the sciences.
Conclusion
Philosophical debates are not necessarily useless, but in order to keep philosophy from becoming a futile enterprise, it must follow its own path. This means that the consequences of far-reaching specializations must be acknowledged. Sciences are forced to follow this course, in the wake of their progression. This is not the case with philosophy, and in its case, radical specializations would even be detrimental. Its discussions would be reduced to attempts to solve puzzles whose outcomes would be of interest to no-one save those philosophers engaged in them, and even for them it would be nothing but the intellectual gratification of finding a consistent and elegant outcome that would be at stake. As long as it is still possible to avert this outcome (or, more cynically, to halt its decline), a plea for a renewed focus on the relevant issues in philosophy is in order.
Instituut voor Metajuridica, Universiteit Leiden, The Netherlands
References
Aristotle, Ethica Nicomachea, in Works vol. 2, in ed. by I. Bekker (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1960 [± 325 BCE]). Descartes, R., Les Principes de la Philosophie, in Descartes’s Works, vol. 9–2, ed. by C. Adam and P. Tannery (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1964 [1647]). Dretske, F., “Conclusive Reasons,” in Australiasian Journal of Philosophy, 49:1 (May 1971), 1-22. Fichte, J., Über den Begriff der Wissenschaftslehre, in Gesamtausgabe der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Werke: Band 2, ed. by R. Lauth and H. Jacob (Stuttgart/Bad Cannstatt: Frommann, 1965 [1794]). Gettier, E. “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?,” in Analysis, 23:6 (June 1963), 121-123. Heidegger, M., Das Ende der Philosophie und die Aufgabe des Denkens, in Zur Sache des Denkens. Gesamtausgabe vol. 14 (Franfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2007 [1964]). James, W., Pragmatism. A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press, 1975 [1907]). Kuhn, Th. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1996).
J. DOOMEN 9
Popper, K., The Logic of Scientific Discovery (London: Hutchinson, 1962). Quine, W. V. O., Epistemology Naturalized, in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (New York, NY/London: Columbia Press, 1969). Rorty, R., Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980).
KRITIKE VOLUME FIVE NUMBER TWO (DECEMBER 2011) 10-25
Article
The “Globe” of Globalization
Pieter Meurs, Nicole Note, and Diederik Aerts
Abstract: In this article, we will scrutinize what globalization actually means when you look at its praxis, not from a socio-political perspective but from a philosophical stance. This stems from a point of view that the debate and scholarship on globalization is still too often protruded by ideological and idealist arguments. These arguments posit the world as an object to think about or act upon. This thought of globalization remains stuck in formal conceptions or in a Bildungsideal rather than referring to the praxis of our being in the world. We will turn to the critical philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy to assess the condition of our existence in and forming of a global world. Following Heidegger, Nancy argues the world cannot be considered as an external object we can interpret or gain knowledge about. We will investigate what this means for a thinking of globalization.
Key words: Nancy, globalization, alterglobalization, empire
Introduction
t has been 10 years since the media first spoke about the alterglobalization movement. Dubbed as such during the aftermath of the so-called Battle of Seattle in 1999, the name more or less covers the central issue of its I 1 participants’ claims: an alternative way to globalization. Its meaning ambiguous and difficult to grasp in scientific models however, at the turn of the century, alterglobalization became as much as a buzzword as its counterpart. Even today, both still seem to remain catchall words that – be it each in a specific way – want to capture the essence of what is going on in the world. Although these concepts first and foremost seem to live a life of their own, various actors do try to claim their interpretation of the matter as the single reality. Rightfully the tenability of the meaning of the concepts is assessed in contemporary social and political theory. Most theorizing has focused on a descriptive or prescriptive account of the state of affairs of the contemporary world. Analysts have tried to frame the significance of globalization as a description of reality. Living in a globalized world would
1 Initially the media spoke of the anti-globalization movement. Since December 2001 however, the neologism alterglobalization becomes increasingly common as it describes more accurately the underlying idea of 'another globalization' and the importance of constructing alternatives. See Geoffrey Pleyers, Alter-Globalization. Becoming actors in the global age (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010).
© 2011 Pieter Meurs, Nicole Note, and Diederik Aerts http://www.kritike.org/journal/issue_10/meurs_december2011.pdf ISSN 1908-7330
P. MEURS, N. NOTE, AND D. AERTS 11 mean we live in a world that is characterized by the interconnectedness between nations and people all over the world. The world turned into a global village in which the World Wide Web serves as a meeting place. However, this description has been criticized because of the contested global nature of the phenomenon. Furthermore, globalization has been repudiated in another way as well. What is at stake in this second sense, is not inasmuch a description of current international affairs, but rather the world and its future as a normative place in which we live. Globalization thus, as a normative way we view our global living together. As such, globalization rather refers to an idea that indicates the contours and the limits of the way in which we think, understand, act upon, and relate to the world. It refers to a prescriptive account of reality. In this article, we will scrutinize what globalization actually means when you look at its praxis, not from a political or sociological perspective, but from a philosophical standpoint. This stems from a point of view that the debate and scholarship on globalization is still too often protruded by ideological and idealist arguments. These arguments posit the world as an object to think about or act upon. This thought of globalization remains stuck in formal conceptions or in a Bildungsideal rather than referring to the praxis of our being in the world. We will turn to the philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy to critically assess the condition of our existence in and forming of a global world. Following Heidegger, Nancy argues the world cannot be considered as an external object we can interpret or gain knowledge about. It rather is the space where this interpretation takes place. Interpretation of being becomes the being of interpretation. In this article, the being of the world as the space of our existence will be of key importance. We will investigate what this means for a thinking of globalization.
Globalization
‘Today, with the culmination of discussions on cosmopolitanism, global human rights and other claims to universalism, globalization remains an important topic. At its heydays in the last decade of the 20th century, globalization was claimed as the irreversible fate of the world.2 It was an irrefutable fact that the inhabitants of the world would be absorbed in a process that would make them all citizens of a world society or of a global village. No longer bound by traditional frontiers, the whole world came into reach due to the rise of new information and communication technologies, scientific innovation and the global restructuring of capital. Globalization was thought to be a fundamental shift in the spatio-temporal constitution of human existence and made many people believe – politicians, activists, academics and alike – in a new form of interconnectedness and a multi-layered system of ‘global governance’. It would bring the world a global unified world, pregnant with multilateral international institutions and organizations and a renewal of global
2 Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization. The Human Consequences (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 1.
12 GLOBALIZATION human rights. The idea of globalization implied (and maybe today still does) a suggestion of a certain unity. However, critical voices in social sciences argue the era of globalization is over.3 Globalization as a description of what is happening in international relations today seems no longer to be valid. According to the post-globalist argument, it was nothing more than the Zeitgeist of the 1990s, naturalizing and dramatizing a “tiger-leap of capitalist expansion, representing it as the unstoppable, uncontrollable climax of a universal human destiny”.4 They hold against it its so-called epochal and teleological nature and claim the events, despite of their vast social and political changes, as epiphenomenal. In this view, the global aspects of globalization are overestimated. Globalization is seen as a consequential description rather than a causal fact and as such as nothing more than a sign of the times in the 1990s, but now hopelessly outmoded. Furthermore, the claim of a decline of globalization considers the catastrophic attacks on New York and Washington of 9/11 of crucial importance in world politics and economy. If, during the last decade of the 20th century, there was any form of multilateralism and increased interconnectedness, the events of 9/11 and especially its consequences shattered this globalist idea of unity “that all societies are bound, sooner or later, to converge on the same values and views of the world”.5 National geopolitics, territorial power and its security have become primordial again and bring forth other descriptions of the global constitution, ranging from internationalization to empire or imperialism, now dubbed as new or lite.6 Rather than multilateralism, the driving forces in international politics and economy seem to return to a national, unilateral modus operandi. In this view, the significance and topicality of globalization is not only outdated, but also exaggerated. In other words, globalization as a description of a political and social reality first and foremost is an ambiguous concept.7 Its factuality is complex and as a consequence its reality equivocal. However, this doesn’t mean that the process of globalization is without influence on our everyday life. The discourse of globalization not only is a preoccupation of academics that try to frame reality in concepts and ideas. Politicians, journalists and activist also claim their account of globalization. In this case the power of globalization to
3 See Justin Rosenberg, “Globalization Theory: A Post Mortem,” in International Politics, 42 (2005), 2-74 and John Gray, “The era of Globalization is over,” in International Progress Organization (2001)
P. MEURS, N. NOTE, AND D. AERTS 13 understand reality lies in political or normative force. Held and McGrew understand this multidimensional nature of globalization by means of two principle axes of disagreement.8 On the one hand, they distinguish a descriptive, analytical and theoretical approach, resulting in a continuum of globalists versus sceptics. On the other, the second axis “concerns values and normative attachments: whether on ethical grounds globalization as political project or ideal is to be defended, transformed, resisted or rejected.”9 For the purpose of this paper, the power of globalization to understand reality does not lie in its descriptive abilities but rather in its prescriptive or normative force. At first sight then, it might seem this paper primarily focuses on the second axis. Although the heuristic of Held and McGrew offers a clarifying tool to identify and map the contours of globalization, we believe the descriptive is always already hold in check by a certain normative claim to legitimation and vice versa. As such, the differentiation into two axes fails to address the idea that the description always already bears prescriptive values within itself. It overlooks the implicit assumptions transversally present in both continua and as a consequence ignores the world as the space of globalization. It is our conviction that these implicit assumptions and an approach to the world as the space of globalization are of fundamental importance to grasp the phenomenon of globalization. In terms of Held and McGrew’s axes, this would mean an investigation into the intersection of the two axes. It implies going beyond the everyday givenness of descriptions and prescriptions and look for a philosophical horizon that exceeds these concepts. This epochal movement exposes the intertwining of the descriptive and the normative and the world as the space of globalization. This way, globalization has not as much to do with attempts to clearly map global reality or ideology, but has everything to do with everyday experience and the way we view the world, descriptively as well as normatively. In this sense, globalization rather refers to a praxis that produces meaning to understand, analyze, advocate and legitimize contemporary change. Praxis here is not understood as the opposite of theory, but as the taking place of theory. It is in this way globalization may have been of greater influence in shaping everyday life than its factual reality. What is of interest here, are the aspects and consequences of the praxis of globalization, not of its theory. Globalization as a theoretical account of reality as such isn’t repudiated, but loses its primordial claim of a truth of reality. It comes down to denouncing the claim of objectivity on a theoretical account and rendering its implicit assumptions visible. Globalization is conceived as a mode of living in a global world (but what does that mean?) rather than as a theory of today’s reality. Considered in this way, the age of globalization seems to be far from over. As praxis, globalization only seems to gain relevance. Attempts to consider certain social, economical, ecological and political concerns as global issues show this topicality. Take for example the Climate Council in Copenhagen in 2009. The issue of global warming has only gained increased global attention over the last
8 Ibid. 9 Ibid., 5.
14 GLOBALIZATION years. It is said the future of our planet is at stake and this calls for vigorous corrective policy measures on a global scale. As such, climate change is not merely a matter of temperature and greenhouse effects, but permeates the ontological conditions of our existence. Sloterdijk strikingly captures the ontological aspects of our climate in the third part of his Spheres-trilogy: Foam.10 Starting with the invention of chemical warfare of 1914-1918, he describes a history in which the problematical situation of human existence in its climate becomes ever more fundamental. Sloterdijk refers to airdesign to designate the modern technological method to condition the climate in favor of its ‘consumers’. As such, it comes, as no surprise that climate-war is a paragon of our capitalist society in which we try to secure as much as fresh air for ourselves. The importance of self-interest of the different stakeholders is probably an important reason why Copenhagen didn’t result in an agreement. However, the intention of the conference to deal with climate change globally or internationally indicates the global tendencies of the policy makers. It is global, not in the sense of multilateralism, but stretching over the full-scale world. Globalization in this way refers to a view of the global world. It has to do with the way we consider the world, act upon it, and relate to it: practice it. Globalization in this sense is nothing more than the ambition to provide a way of thinking and forming the world. Evidently, the question arises what this globalization means. How do we globalize? How are we to think and form the world? What does the world as such mean? Which world is trying to be made by the different actors at play? In what world do we live today? Or in other words: which globe is becoming global?
A world . . .
Globalization is mostly claimed as a discovery of the world by modernity. The world as an intelligible object did not only come into reach in recent history however, for already in ancient Greece and Rome there was some sort of orientation towards a global world. Whether these global tendencies were a direct consequence of the conquests of Alexander the Great in the East or if they predate the Alexandrian empire is disputable, but at any rate the expansion of the Hellenistic empire helped spreading them. According to Polybius, historian of the Roman Empire, the idea of interconnectedness between different states became more and more apparent in the second century BC.11 As such, a global animus penetrated Greek and subsequently Roman conceptualizations of socio-political and historical reality: there were empirical signs that point to the world as an organic whole and that a consciousness of the world “was changing in the direction of increasing geophysical, economical, political, social and cultural compression and
10 Peter Sloterdijk, Sferen: Schuim, trans. by H. Driessen. (Amsterdam: Boom, 2009). 11 Polybius, The Rise of the Roman Empire, trans. by I. Scott-Kilvert. (London: Penguin, 1979).
P. MEURS, N. NOTE, AND D. AERTS 15 interdependence of hitherto unrelated peoples and places.”12 The idea of a belonging to the world as a whole was a tendency initially found among ancient Greek philosophers. Although the cynic Diogenes of Sinope was probably the first to express he was a “citizen of the world” when asked what countryman he was, the classic example of this global consciousness usually is ascribed to the theory of Stoicism.13 Zeno, founding father of the Stoic school and influenced by Diogenes, was the one to theoretically elaborate the important concept of kosmopolites (kosmos meaning ‘world’ and polis meaning ‘city’): world- citizenship. In contrast with and even as a disgrace to the traditional Greek idea of citizenship, Zeno proposed a form of identity in which the state as a constitutive aspect would disappear. Central to his belonging to the world was his wish that all the inhabitants of this world should not live differentiated by their respective judicial system, but that we should consider everyone to be of one community and polity, with a common life and law. For Zeno, belonging to the world-city was a moral and ethical matter rather than a legal one and as such a challenge to the conventional law and customs of the polis. This changed with the rise of the Roman Empire. Stoic cosmopolitan philosophy had become very influential among the Roman rulers but rather than an ethical code, they saw it as an ideology for the rising empire. The way of the world became captured in a global Roman empire and its policy. It means the law of the polis was elevated to the status of the law of the cosmos.14 What is of importance here is not in as much the physical expansion of the Roman Empire and its law, but rather the increasing metaphysical impact as a consequence of this expansion. What happens, is a world that becomes more and more captured by the empire, and as such subjected to a specific meaning and set of signs. The world is no longer simply a wide world. It becomes Roman. A view or consciousness of the world first and foremost refers to a Roman belonging of the world. It provides the way in which the world is to be thought and formed. What is at stake then, is the meaning of the world. The crucial point here is the tension generated by the question ‘how do we live the world today?’. Surely, the Roman Empire collapsed in 1453, and no great ‘national’ (British, French, Austro-Hungarian, …) empire seems to rule the world today. However, this does not mean that imperialism as such has completely disappeared. What did disappear is the locus of this imperialism. In describing an empire without an emperor, it might even well be that Hardt and Negri’s book Empire is probably the most successful work to depict our contemporary
12 Robert Robertson and David Inglis, “The global animus. In the tracks of world consciousness,” in Gills, B. K. and Thompson, W. R. eds., Globalization and Global History (London: Routledge, 2006), 45. 13 Diogenes Laertius, The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, trans. by C. D. Yonge (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1853), 240-241. 14 Costas Douzinas, Human Rights and Empire. The political philosophy of cosmopolitanism (Abingdon: Routledge-Cavendish, 2007), 159.
16 GLOBALIZATION global society.15 And as such, regarding the question ‘how do we live the world today?’, with the question mark still referring to a politico-critical claim (worldview) instead of capturing a neutral theoretical curiosity, it doesn’t come as a surprise Empire is considered on the one hand as the ‘bible’ for those critical to the contemporary form of globalization and on the other hand as a crucial work to assess and understand the ongoing struggle of this alterglobalization movement. This is because the movement concords with Hardt and Negri’s appropriate elaboration of a new global form of sovereignty and wants to resist its boundless capitalist logic. According to Hardt and Negri, Empire’s new sovereignty exceeds traditional imperialist strategies and expands in all directions: “The space of imperial sovereignty, in contrast, is smooth. It might appear to be free of the binary divisions or striation of modern boundaries, but really it is crisscrossed by so many fault lines that it only appears as a continuous, uniform space. […] In this smooth space of Empire, there is no place of power – it is both everywhere and nowhere.”16 The result then, is the emergence of the world turning in a global (dis)order, a new logic and structure of rule, constituted through a capitalist system on a legal and governmental level. However, Hardt and Negri have been criticized for their understanding of Empire, especially after the attacks on the World Trade Towers of 9/11. The critique addresses Hardt and Negri’s account of the decline of the nation-state sovereignty in contrast with the US gradually becoming a global superpower. For the purpose of this paper, the thoroughness of a contemporary critical theory of society is not to be found in the appropriate location of the (dis-)locus of sovereignty (whether it is imperial without an imperialist, American, international,...), but rather in the sense that it elaborates the interwovenness of a capitalist logic (a worldview) with the way in which contemporary society functions. What is important here, is not inasmuch the specific form or (dis-)location of sovereignty, but its primordial dependence on a certain worldview. Not the place of sovereignty as such is significant, but that what is at play within this sovereignty. It is rather a matter of the implicit (and explicit) content of a certain worldview; that what is waged within the manifestations of sovereignty. In other words, given the complex descriptions of the (dis-)location of sovereignty, the question here is: what is at stake in the context of globalization that makes sovereignty and its (dis- )location problematic in the first place? Or again: the question ‘how do we live the world today’ has a focus on the what rather than on the where of the sovereignty. It is a question for the meaning the world has today. In everyday language, globalization is mostly depicted as an expanding economic process in which the free market plays an important role, either seen as a perverse fiscal discipline or as a developing-liberating power, the difference between the former and the latter simply reducible to a specific political stance
15 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000). 16 Ibid., 190.
P. MEURS, N. NOTE, AND D. AERTS 17 in the debate on (alter-)globalization. The central theme is the capitalist expansion that gradually spans every country. In this sense, globalization is mostly described by means of the three major official advocates of the liberal democracy: the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Trade Organization (WTO). After the Great Depression in the first half of the 20th century, the Bretton Woods Conference of 1944 led to the foundation of the IMF and the World Bank, as a way to prevent another global depression by means of market regulation. During the 1980s, this neoliberalism flourished under Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom. The IMF and the World Bank became the missionary institutions of its ideology.17 Together with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the transformation of the General Agreements on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) into the WTO in 1995, this not only meant the opening up of the international financial market, but also, and this is what is important here, that our contemporary form of democracy and the idea of liberal freedom were set as the advocates of this system and the necessary provisions for its existence. However, contemporary society is no mere result of the last 50 years. The premises and implicit assumptions of our liberal democracies are rooted in the Enlightenment, a crucial event in the history of modern thought and for the foundation of the modern state. Still, the assumptions of the Enlightenment discourse are interwoven in our contemporary worldview and influence the way we live. Grasped in the concepts of subjectivity and objective knowledge, the central idea of this so-called modernity is best described by Kant’s aphorism “Sapere aude!” (“dare to be wise”).18 To the Enlightenment thinkers, being wise referred to reason: rationality became the foundation of knowledge. Rational knowledge would (and is still believed to) liberate people from their self-inflicted immaturity, stimulate politico-moral self-liberation and -realization and improve scientific progress. Influenced by the dawn of the scientific era in the 17th century, with Galileo’s discoveries in physics and astronomy and Descartes’s method in logic and epistemology as its most prominent advocates, rationality and its techno-scientific method became important pillars for everyday life. Habermas, probably the most famous defender of this project of modernity, describes it as follows: “The project of modernity formulated in the 18th century by the philosophers of the Enlightenment consisted in their efforts to develop objective science, universal morality and law, and autonomous art according to their inner logic. At the same time, this project intended to release the cognitive potentials of each of these domains from their esoteric forms. The Enlightenment philosophers wanted to utilize this accumulation of specialized culture for the enrichment of daily life – that is to say, for the rational organization of everyday social life.”19 These hopes and promises rational knowledge combined with individual liberty
17 Joseph Stiglitz, Globalization and its discontents (London: Penguin Books, 2002), 13. 18 Immanuel Kant, Practical Philosophy, trans. and ed. by M. J. Gregor. (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1996), 17. 19 Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity – an incomplete Project”, trans. by Seyla Ben-Habib, in Foster, H. The anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (Port Townsend, Bay Press, 1983), 9.
18 GLOBALIZATION and universal morality and law still fits within the prevailing liberal worldview today. It fosters the belief that, given enough time, rationality and its techno- scientific method can ease and control everyday life. This is why, today, we live by a creed of makeability with the aim of a better life by means of an increasing power of man over his natural environment and socio-political evolution. It is this modernist evolution the values of the free market and of the free individual thrive upon.
. . . becoming global
Globalization is more than the mere growing importance of a certain economic system. Above all, it is the becoming global of the world, a world encompassing the whole world. This strive to know or grasp the world is incorporated within the aspirations of the Western logic or worldview. As already mentioned above, together with the liberal discourse these aspirations have their roots in the scientific discoveries and evolutions of the Enlightenment. Since the 17th century onwards, people have tried to systematically and rationally know and map the world. Every inch of the world (physical as well as meta-physical) has been surveyed. As a result, today, it doesn’t seem to be possible anymore for something to be new under the sun. Everything has been explored and inspected. In this sense, globalization not simply is a discovery of the world, but truly means the dis-covering of the world. A critical understanding of the contemporary form of globalization should be nothing other than this combination of the dis-covering of the world, together with the expansion of a neoliberal ideology. What matters, is the deep interwovenness of the expansion of the liberal world with the encompassing of the world. It is in this way globalization has to be understood: it is not just the globe that becomes globalized, but it is a certain globe that is being globalized. Today, this globe is undeniable neoliberal, modernist, and arguably maybe even Western. Up until 1989 there was no such global world, since it was clearly divided in a bipolar system of the capitalist West versus the communist East. This division disappeared with the fall of the Berlin wall, symbolic for the end of the Cold War and the collapse of a totalitarian utopia, and meant the end of the Westphalian idea, “that we live and act in the self- enclosed spaces of national states and their respective national societies.”20 With the capitalist wind blowing increasingly from the West, no longer tempered by the former literal and symbolic wall, and development agendas dropping the focus on state-centered policies, the neoliberal ideology stretched out nationally and internationally. Accompanied by an expanding third wave of democratization in newly ‘freed’ states, a thorough institutional reorganization of international politics and economy (e.g. the GATT was replaced by the WTO in 1995) found its way onto the international and supra-national level of decision-making. The Western (neo-)liberal worldview, advocated by the supra-
20 Ulrich Beck, What is Globalization? (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), 20.
P. MEURS, N. NOTE, AND D. AERTS 19 national institutions and enforced by liberal democracies, spread out over the world, penetrating every inch of the surface of the world. It is for this reason, globalization has sometimes been declared to be Westernization or even Americanization. Arguably, the world has not become Western as such, but surely Western and capitalist (but are they not the same?) discourse does lie at the basis of the anonymous system that today has come to penetrate every segment of the world. In this sense, the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy correctly grasps the crucial point of globalization when he remarks a connection between the evolution of capitalism and the capitalization of views of the world.21 For Nancy, the predominance of the Western logic in the course of history and of globalization seems evident. He considers globalization as the Western process to discover the world. And today, there is nothing more to be globalized, nothing more to discover. The discovered world has become global. It stretches out urbi et orbi.22 This formulation refers to the papal benediction and today means everywhere and anywhere. The West has made the entire world – everywhere and anywhere – its discovered world.
Which other world is possible?
The evolution of the expansion of capital has been contested various times; even recently, by the protests against the top of the G-20 in Toronto. The so-called alterglobalization movement considers the economic policies of these world leading countries, together with the ideologies of the World Bank, the WTO, the IMF as a danger to fundamental freedom and development.23 In lieu to this, they claim that people are more and more bound by networks of regulations and conditions set by the welfare state and its global market. Because of capitalism, the new points of reference have come into being that limit the horizon in which everyday life is situated: the contemporary space for self-realization gets systematically curtailed by the market The content of personal freedom seems to be specified by means of supply and demand. Individuality is absorbed in the premises and prevailing values of the free market. As such, according to the alterglobalist argument, the capitalist system is not something an individual can partake of, but something that has penetrated the personal space and offers the parameters by which one can, or rather, has to choose its own life. Individuality and identity become consumable products or lifestyles, prescribed by the corporations with the largest share of the market. “The world is not for sale” is one of the alterglobalist slogans that express this perverse consequence of the ubiquity of neoliberalism that turns everything into a marketable value with a specific price. And what comes
21 Jean-Luc Nancy, La Création du Monde ou la Mondialisation (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 2002). 22 Ibid., 13. 23 See James Arvanitakis, The Cultural Commons of Hope. The attempt to commodify the final frontier of the human experience (Saarbruücken: VDM Verlag, 2007) and Tom Mertes ed., A Movement of Movements. Is another world really Possible? (London, Verso, 2004).
20 GLOBALIZATION with a price comes with a cost. In other words, there are people who win, and there are people who lose. Rather than attaining a form of mutual interdependence by making everything valuable or salable, the result is marked by dependence. Moreover, due to the preoccupation with profit, dependence turns into exploitation. The theoretically promised equality of shares for every stakeholder turns the real life market above all in the haves and have-nots of globalization.24 Never before has the gap between the rich and the poor within societies and between the North and the South on the global level been so wide. The Western wish to eliminate trade barriers while having a more dominant position in the market only led to exploitation and consumption of the world.25 “People and nature before profit” is another alterglobalist slogan that frames this well and that, opposite to the process of globalization of profit, proposes a world of solidarity and ecological responsibility. Although there is no single unifying agenda for change, and rather a multitude of alternatives, the “desire for global democracy and the opening up of non-commodified spaces or commons” seems to be one of its commonalities.26 This means rolling back the logic of the market and its profit in favor of social justice. If it were up to the alterglobalization movement, the world would be a different place than it is today. Their slogan “another world is possible” is probably the best expression of these hopes and beliefs. And it might even well be that this dictum is the most critical or fundamental inquiry in our contemporary global situation. What matters here, is not the concrete alternative the alterglobalization movement stands for, but rather the dictum being stripped down of its politico-ideological content and offering the power of inquiry into the sheer possibility of another world. As such, the question whether another world is possible means nothing other than the question for the meaning of the world. It is a reflection upon the essence of the world. However, the point here, is that the reflections or claims of the world made in the contemporary debate on globalization, do not refer to a singular reality that exists in itself, but rather indicate the expectations, hopes and convictions of the one who utters them. Within a description of reality always already lies a certain normative account that contains implicit or explicit premises of what is essentially true or false, and as a consequence the given description can not be but contingent. Thus, if there is one thing that the variety of contemporary rhetorics of politicians, activists, international institutions, … makes clear, it is that in their aspiration to offer a description of the future or end of the world as the true reality, the world withdraws itself from these claims of truth. In itself, the meaning of the world has no entity, essence or singularity. What became clear 10 years ago during the Battle of Seattle, is not inasmuch the birth or climax of protest against the expanding international race to profit, but rather, and this is primordial for the purpose of this paper, the fact that the rhetoric of globalization allows to be adopted by different
24 Noreena Hertz, The Silent Takeover. Global Capitalism and the Death of Democracy (London: Arrow Books, 2002). 25 Naomi Klein, No Logo (London: Flamingo, 2001). 26 Arvanitakis, The Cultural Commons of Hope, 111.
P. MEURS, N. NOTE, AND D. AERTS 21 stakeholders. Globalization appears to be nothing more than a discourse in which the world is caught up by essentialist theoretical constructs. If we want to interrogate the meaning of the world, we have to abandon these essentialist claims of the world. This is akin to the philosophy of Nancy, who criticizes the figure of a cosmotheoros, an observer of the world. According to Nancy, the world cannot be conceived of as a representation.27 No theory can entirely grasp the world and as such, there is no possibility to ascribe it an essence or ideal. Nancy continues the Heideggerian critique on the modern worldview that, by means of its epistemological principles, frames the world as an image, picture or an idea. According to Nancy (and Heidegger), the world exceeds these images or pictures of the world. In Le Sens du Monde, he confronts us with this condition.28 The world withdraws itself from every essentialist regime of representations, because we are living in an epoch that can no longer offer us all the necessary points of reference in order to manage our significations.29 In this sense, Nancy even proclaims the end of the world. He does not mean the world no longer exists, but rather that there no longer is a concept or idea that can fundamentally grasp the reality of the world. Nancy contends that our present condition makes clear that the word ‘world’ is not the the name of a substantial reality in itself, but first and foremost the name of an idea or concept, completely determined by a regime of sense. What is at play there, is a powerful illusion that equates words with things. However, there is no longer a truth of the world or an objective representation. These concepts have lost their sense. Words are not equated with things. Nancy’s proclamation of the end of the world means nothing other than the end of the sense of the world or, the end of the world of sense. There seems to be no longer any sense in sense. This means we are left with a profound nihilism towards the great narratives and solutions claimed within the debate on globalization. Since there no longer can be a theory of the world, the idea that another world is possible, directs us towards the fundamental question of the meaning of that world.
The sense of globalization
In Le Sens du Monde Nancy profoundly describes the contemporary crisis of sense as the lack of an outside with relation to which sense could be represented (the cosmotheoros). The loss of such an outside (be it God, the Subject, Science...) constitutes the loss of sense. However, Nancy suggests, sense is something that exceeds this inside-outside relation, since it always
27 The understanding that the world no longer can be conceived of as a representation refers to “a world without a God capable of being the subject of its representation (and thus of its fabrication, of its maintenance and destination).” Nancy, La Création du Monde ou la Mondialisation, 38, our translation. For Nancy, this clearly means the great times of religion are over and it is this that constitutes the no longer of our condition. 28 Jean-Luc Nancy, Le Sens du Monde (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1993). 29 See also Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979); Jean-François Lyotard, Het Postmoderne Weten. Een verslag (Kappelen: Pelckmans, 1987); Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988).
22 GLOBALIZATION already is absorbed in being to the world. For Nancy, “if we are to the world, if there is being-to-the-world in general, that is, if there is world, there is sense. The there is makes sense by itself and as such.”30 The question why there is sense is replaced with the answer that there is something and it is this that in itself makes sense. Nancy summarizes this aptly by stating the world no longer has sense, but that it is sense. Wittgenstein described this fact, that the being of the world in itself is what creates sense, strikingly as follows: “it is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists.”31 The world is nothing else than sense, its meaning is nothing other than the fact that it happens. It takes place and it is this taking place, its being, what constitutes its meaning, what makes sense. As such, the world is nothing other than the praxis of sense. It does not refer to a theory or an idea. In La Création du Monde ou la Mondialisation Nancy continues this mode of thinking and elaborates in a very critical way what this confronts us with.32 Together with this work, we would like to propose to consider the process of what we have described here as globalization in a similar way. In this sense, globalization implies the becoming-world of the world – or la mondanisation du monde as Nancy would call it – refers to a praxis, rather than to a politico-moral or economical theory of the world. Instead of referring to the content or elaboration of these theories, we believe globalization indicates a horizon that exceeds rhetorical reality and starts from its openness. This epochal movement is not derived from a transcendental position, but is a consequence of the impossibility to frame a totalizing or universal view of the world still too often found in contemporary politico-moral theories on globalization. It not only exposes the contingency, relativity and limits of these theories, but the being- world of the world as well. Nancy’s Heideggerian understanding of world clarifies this:
a world is not a unity of the objective or external order: a world is never in front of me, or it would be another world than mine. But if it were absolutely other, I would not even know, or barely, that it is a world. […]. From the moment on a world appears to me as world, I already share something with it: I experience a part of its inner resonances. Perhaps this notion of “resonance” is adequate to suggesting what is at stake here: a world is a space in which a certain tonality resonates.33
30 Nancy, Le Sens du Monde, 18 (our translation). 31 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London: Routledge, 2001), 88. 32 It leads Nancy to discern globalization from mondialisation. Although they might seem synonymous, the two words reveal very distinct meanings. For Nancy, the term globalization is an already established and tainted concept with a different tonality than that of mondialisation. See Pieter Meurs, Nicole Note and Diederik Aerts, “This world without another. On Jean-Luc Nancy and la mondialisation," in Journal of Critical Globalisation Studies, 1 (2009), 31-46. 33 Nancy, La Création du Monde ou la Mondialisation, 34-35 (our translation).
P. MEURS, N. NOTE, AND D. AERTS 23
The world outside representation exposes itself as the space of our existence, the site of being and of beings as a whole. It emerges as the place and actuality of being, exposing itself as a totality of meaning as opposed to something one can have a meaning about. It is exactly this what Nancy means with the world being sense, rather than having sense. In this sense, globalization reveals the world as an existential whole with a meaningful content. Using examples as the ‘hospital world’ or the ‘fourth world’, Nancy indicates that belonging to this meaningful ensemble consists in sharing, apprehending or understanding its codes, signs and texts, even when they not made explicit or exposed as such. The sense of the world is not something outside of that world. Rather, the two are the same. World always already means sense, being part of, sharing. It is this incarnation that reveals the becoming world of the world. The contemporary discourse on globalization tends to forget that a world always already means this relation with its inner givens. The world is not something outside of us, something we can represent in one or another fairly objective economical or political theory. The world does not appear for us as a unity of the external order. There is no other (world) that can be the representation of our being. Out of the process of mondanisation, emerges the world as the only world, the space where being takes place. This is why the present understanding of globalization does not succeed in thinking the world: it does not conceive to be as always already being in a world. It forgets that the globe in globalization is the only space where being takes place.
Worldviews and globalization
In the beginning of this article, we outlined the importance of globalization as praxis of the world that produces meaning to understand, advocate and legitimize contemporary change. We tried to indicate the globality of a certain worldview, the way in which the global world is considered or pictured. Together with the philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy, we argued that this view with its mainly neoliberal, modernist, and Western tendencies carries within its core a hidden and implicit set of premises and assumptions of what is essentially true. It ascribes the world an essence or entity. It brings forth a specific interpretation of the globe in globalization and as such does not only give an answer to the question ‘in what world are we living today?’, but also outlines the premises and preconditions of that world. The world then, does emerge as a consequence based on the grounds or foundations of a certain view on that world. As such, the world stays captured within an image or idea of the world. It remains in the sphere of a cosmotheoros. With Nancy’s philosophy it becomes clear that this is a sublation of the world as the taking place of being. In its contemporary hegemonic form then, globalization as a worldview seems to forget this ontological aspect of world. It is a view that makes up the possibility of a world, rather than a world that makes up the possibility of a view. In this sense, globalization constructs the globe rather than the opposite and moreover, this construction remains
24 GLOBALIZATION primarily theoretical and as such contingent and arbitrary. As a consequence, the contemporary forms of globalization as a worldview can not offer a foundation or ground for a specific world or globe. The world in itself is groundless. As Nancy argues, the world just is. Like the rose in the famous poem of Angelus Silesius, the world is without why. Its sense or meaning are not caught up in a certain entity or essence. The world is nothing other than the open space of our taking place and exceeds every theory that closes this space. This implies the world cannot offer a blueprint or an end of globalization. However, as this world is the only space where globalization takes place, at least it can indicate the confines or define a limit in the way in which we think about this process of becoming ever more global. It does not let itself to be constructed by a certain worldview, instead, it acts as a deconstruction of that view. It is nothing other than praxis. There is a lot at stake in the discussion about globalization. With the claim of a certain worldview, the world gets reduced to a simple globe that leaves the have-nots of this world (no wonder one refers to the third or fourth world in this respect) deserted.34 We believe our contemporary situation is clouded by such a worldview. It might as well even be that it is no clear, or even conscious view, but it certainly does not let itself be limited by the world as the space of our existence. This is why the dictum of the alterglobalization movement another world is possible is imminent and crucial at hand, now more than ever. However, the focus here then, is not on the otherness of another world, but rather on the world itself or on its being.
Center Leo Apostel, Free University Brussels, Belgium
References
Arvanitakis, J., The Cultural Commons of Hope. The attempt to commodify the final frontier of the human experience (Saarbruücken: VDM Verlag, 2007). Bauman, Z., Globalization. The Human Consequences (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). Beck, U., What is Globalization? (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000). Douzinas, C., Human Rights and Empire. The political philosophy of cosmopolitanism (Abingdon: Routledge-Cavendish, 2007). Gray, J., “The era of Globalization is over,” in International Progress Organization (2001)
34 In La Création du Monde ou la Mondialisation, Nancy indicates that a world is a world where there is room for the whole world (tout le monde), for everyone: “A world is precisely that in which there is space for the whole world: but genuine space, that which makes things genuinely take place (in this world). Otherwise, this is not a “world”: it is a “globe” or a “glome,” it is a “land of exile” and a “vale of tears.” Nancy, La Création du Monde ou la Mondialisation, 34.
P. MEURS, N. NOTE, AND D. AERTS 25
Harvey, D., The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) Held, D. and McGrew, A., Globalization/Anti-Globalization (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007). Hertz, N., The Silent Takeover. Global Capitalism and the Death of Democracy (London: Arrow Books, 2002). Holton, R., Making Globalization (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005). Ignatieff, M., Empire Lite (London: Vintage, 2003). Kant, I., Practical Philosophy, trans. and ed. by M. J. Gregor. (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1996). Klein, N., No Logo (London: Flamingo, 2001). Laertius, D., The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, trans. by C. D. Yonge. (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1853). Lyotard, J.-F., Het Postmoderne Weten. Een verslag (Kappelen: Pelckmans, 1987). Mertes, T. ed., A Movement of Movements. Is another world really Possible? (London: Verso, 2004). Meurs, P., Note, N. and Aerts, D., “This world without another. On Jean-Luc Nancy and la mondialisation," in Journal of Critical Globalisation Studies, 1 (2009), 31-46. Nancy, J.-L., Le Sens du Monde (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1993). ______, La Création du Monde ou la Mondialisation (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 2002). Pleyers, G., Alter-Globalization. Becoming actors in the global age (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010). Polybius, The Rise of the Roman Empire, trans. by I. Scott-Kilvert. (London: Penguin, 1979). Robertson, R. and Inglis, D., “The global animus. In the tracks of world consciousness,” in Gills, B. K. and Thompson, W. R. eds., Globalization and Global History (London: Routledge, 2006). Rorty, R., Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979). Rosenberg, J., “Globalization Theory: A Post Mortem,” in International Politics, 42 (2005), 2-74. Sloterdijk, P., Sferen: Schuim, trans. by H. Driessen. (Amsterdam: Boom, 2009). Stiglitz, J. E., Globalization and its discontents (London: Penguin Books, 2002). Vattimo, G., The End of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988). Wittgenstein, L., Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London: Routledge, 2001).
KRITIKE VOLUME FIVE NUMBER TWO (DECEMBER 2011) 26-40
Article
Beyond Goods and Services: Toward a Nietzschean Critique of Capitalism
Michael Kilivris
Abstract: In this article, I examine an underexplored area of Nietzsche’s thought, namely his comments regarding several integral aspects of capitalism. In particular, I argue against the interpretation of Nietzsche as a bourgeois ideologue, by showing how his claims about money-making, money itself, work, workers, pleasure, and the marketplace amount to a critical view of capitalism’s essential features. In addition, I distinguish his critical standpoint from more familiar critiques of capitalism such as that of Marx, using Nietzsche’s own criticisms of socialism to propose that, in contrast, Nietzsche’s perspective vis-à-vis capitalism is what I call aristocratic. By “aristocratic” I refer to the attitude or “pathos of distance” Nietzsche possesses in relation to such things as money-making, work, and the marketplace, rather than some literal aristocracy that he supposedly defends. Finally, I offer a brief discussion of how Nietzsche’s aristocratic perspective can assist the Marxist critique today by rejecting one of capitalism’s strongest ideological supports, that is, the myth of capitalists as great individuals.
Key words: Nietzsche, Marx, capitalism, aristocratic perspective
All great things occur away from glory and the marketplace: the inventors of new values have always lived away from glory and the marketplace. – F. Nietzsche1
n this article, I examine an underexplored area of Nietzsche’s thought, namely his comments regarding several integral aspects of capitalism. In particular, I argue against the interpretation of Nietzsche as a bourgeois I 2 ideologue, by showing how his claims about money-making, money itself, work, workers, pleasure, and the marketplace amount to a critical view of capitalism’s essential features. This view differs, however, from more familiar critiques of capitalism such as that of Marx. Thus I also distinguish the socialist critique of capitalism from what I call Nietzsche’s aristocratic critique, using Nietzsche’s own criticisms of socialism as my guide. By Nietzsche’s
1 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. by R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin Books, 1969), 79. 2 I attribute this reading of Nietzsche primarily to Ayn Rand and Francis Fukuyama. I directly characterize, and challenge, their appropriation of Nietzsche in the final section.
© 2011 Michael Kilivris http://www.kritike.org/journal/issue_10/kilivris_december2011.pdf ISSN 1908-7330
M. KILIVRIS 27
“aristocratic” perspective I refer to the attitude or “pathos of distance” Nietzsche possesses in relation to such things as money-making, work, and the marketplace, which he regards not as immoral, but as beneath the values and aims of “free spirits.” In making my case, I first briefly discuss Nietzsche’s criticisms of socialism as a moral, nihilist, and populist movement originating from below, or ressentiment. This section will also serve to show how the socialist, and by implication the Marxist, critique of capitalism differs in kind from Nietzsche’s criticisms of capitalism. In the next section, I deal exclusively with Nietzsche’s attacks on various foundational elements of capitalism, drawing from his early to his last writings. Together these attacks reveal not only that Nietzsche was no apologist for the bourgeoisie, but also that he saw himself and other free spirits as above them. Finally, in a short section I discuss the implications of Nietzsche’s aristocratic critique for our own time. Therein, I propose that the Nietzschean perspective constructed herein can supplement the Marxist critique today insofar as it challenges the notion of capitalists as great individuals, an ideological belief crucial to the persistence of capitalism.
From Below: Nietzsche’s Critique of Socialism
Nietzsche appears to have two closely related problems with socialism. The first has to do with the view of exploitation as unjust and historical. For Nietzsche, such a position depends on a conventionally moral perspective, which he also considers nihilistic, in the sense of being life-denying or “anti- nature.” The second problem deals with the populist dimension of socialism. In Nietzsche’s view, not only does this make socialism a movement of the “herd”; it also explains its moral standpoint which, as in the case of Christian morality, he considers a kind of “slave morality” arising from ressentiment. In this section, I will briefly discuss these problems that socialism presents for Nietzsche, the main implication being that unlike Nietzsche’s own criticisms of capitalism, the socialist, and by extension the Marxist, critique of capitalism is one originating from below.3 The socialist critique of capitalism centers on class exploitation, which Marx, for example, explains as the extraction of “surplus value” from the laboring class by the owning class.4 The socialist not only views exploitation in moral terms as unjust, alienating, etc., but also as a historical phenomenon that can and will one day vanish. For instance, Marx and Engels espouse this position in the Communist Manifesto when they refer to the proletarian revolution
3 My primary agenda in this section is thus to provide a sense of Nietzsche’s views of socialism in general, rather than of Marxism in particular, as Nietzsche gives no signs of having engaged with Marx’s thought. Nor do I wish to reconstruct the Marxist critique of capitalism, as a step toward differentiating it from that of Nietzsche. Instead, I intend to use Nietzsche’s own criticism of socialism to reveal the basic character of the socialist, and by extension the Marxist, critique of capitalism. 4 Cf. Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I: A Critique of Political Economy, Chapter 9: “The Rate of Surplus Value,” trans. by Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1990).
28 BEYOND GOODS AND SERVICES as “inevitable.”5 For Nietzsche, both of these perspectives on exploitation – the moral and the historical – depend on conventional presuppositions that he considers within good and evil, rather than “beyond” good and evil. In the case of the moral critique of exploitation, Nietzsche argues that it assumes a normative sense of “right” and “wrong,” which is then projected onto a phenomenon that in itself is amoral. As he writes in On the Genealogy of Morals, “To talk of right and wrong as such is senseless; in themselves, injury, violation, exploitation, destruction can of course be nothing ‘wrong,’ in so far as life operates essentially—that is, in terms of its basic functions—through injury, violation, exploitation, and destruction, and cannot be conceived in any other way.”6 As for the socialist view of exploitation as historical, Nietzsche contends that it rests on a similarly traditional notion of moral perfectibility, even as it claims to be “scientific”:
… everywhere people are now raving, even under scientific disguises, about coming conditions of society in which “the exploitative aspect” will be removed—which sounds to me as if they promised to invent a way of life that would dispense with all organic functions. “Exploitation” does not belong to a corrupt or imperfect and primitive society: it belongs to the essence of what lives, as a basic organic function; it is a consequence of the will to power, which is after all the will of life.7
That socialism’s moral and historical critique of exploitation ignores the “essence” of life – the will to power – renders it nihilistic as well, according to Nietzsche. An equivocal term in Nietzsche’s thought, nihilism here means life-denying, world-slandering, or anti-nature more so than the sense of meaninglessness following the death of God. Hence Nietzsche can find Platonism and Christianity nihilistic, since both negate life or nature qua will to power, affirming its antithesis in the ideas of Being and God, respectively. Nietzsche sees a secular version of this tendency in socialism, insofar as it likewise refuses life or nature qua will to power by morally denouncing exploitation, and imagining that it can and will be overcome at the “end of
5 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, trans. by Samuel Moore (London: Penguin Classics, 2002), 233. The question of whether Marx was a moralist or a scientist or both is a source of much debate. Cf. Steven Lukes, Marxism and Morality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). 6 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. by Douglas Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 56-57. Marx too takes the position that there no objective morality, for instance in The German Ideology, when he asserts that “the ideas of the ruling ideas,” including morals, are in every epoch the ruling ideas.” Karl Marx, The German Ideology, in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, ed. by David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). However, Marx also relies on a moral framework, secular humanist perhaps, to level his critique of capitalist injustice. 7 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, ed. and trans. by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Modern Library, 1992), 393.
M. KILIVRIS 29 history.” Socialism’s aim of establishing mutual restraint from exploitation, claims Nietzsche, is “a will to the denial of life, a principle of disintegration and decay.”8 Against this denial, Nietzsche again advocates acceptance of exploitation as the essence of life or nature: “Here we must beware of superficiality and get to the bottom of the matter, resisting all sentimental weakness: life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of what is alien and weaker; suppression, hardness, imposition of one’s own forms, incorporation and at least, at its mildest, exploitation.”9 In opposing exploitation, socialism claims solidarity with the exploited, giving it a populist dimension that Nietzsche, the staunch solitary and elitist, views as an alliance with the herd. While Nietzsche’s concept of the herd does not specifically apply to the working class, an important qualification to be revisited below, he sometimes uses it when describing the would-be beneficiaries of a socialist society. Thus, as in his analysis of ascetic priests, who promote “herd organization” to ease the suffering of the “depressed,” “listless,” “weak,” “sick and sickly,” Nietzsche argues that socialists promise the “universal, green-pasture happiness of the herd” for those seeking security, comfort, and ease. In distinguishing his own conception of “free spirits” from the so-called free spirits of “democratic taste and ‘modern ideas,’” Nietzsche writes of the latter:
… only they are unfree and ridiculously superficial, above all in their basic inclination to find in the forms of the old society as it has existed so far just about the cause of all human misery and failure—which is a way of standing truth happily upon her head! What they would like to strive for with all their powers is the universal, green- pasture happiness of the herd, with security, lack of danger, comfort, and an easier life for everyone; the two songs and doctrines which they repeat most often are “equality of rights” and “sympathy for all that suffers”— and suffering itself they take for something that must be abolished.10
Socialism’s normative morality, denial of life or nature, and solidarity with the herd, make its critique of capitalism look, from the Nietzschean perspective, like one arising from below, which is to say from ressentiment. Indeed, Nietzsche often describes socialism in terms similar to those he uses when discussing Christian morality, which he proposes is a slave morality originating “out of the spirit of ressentiment.” In one of his final aphorisms on
8 Ibid. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid., 244. This passage plays on two additional similarities Nietzsche sees between socialism and Christianity: 1) their messianism, which socialism secularizes in positing a kind of heaven on earth; and 2) their aversion to suffering, which socialism is ultimately intended to abolish.
30 BEYOND GOODS AND SERVICES socialism, from The Will to Power, he characterizes socialists as “the envious,” with “poisonous and desperate faces,” recalling his reference to the Christian’s “poisonous eye of ressentiment” in On the Genealogy of Morality. Additionally, Nietzsche asserts that socialism as a whole is a “hopeless and sour affair… an attack of sickness,” much like the “slave revolt in morality” he attributes to the first Christians. For Nietzsche, then, socialism is marred by a perspective through which capitalism and capitalists can only be seen as above. As such, socialism lacks the pathos of distance from which there is never a “higher,” only a “below.” In the following section, I will show how Nietzsche’s own criticisms of capitalism are characterized by just this pathos of distance, thus making his perspective, in contrast to the socialist’s, aristocratic rather than moral, nihilist, and populist.
From Above: Nietzsche’s Aristocratic Critique of Capitalism
Nietzsche’s critique of socialism is sometimes interpreted ipso facto as an affirmation of capitalism. Hence thinkers such as Rand and Fukuyama have looked to Nietzsche for support of their pro-capitalist positions. However, while Nietzsche undeniably endorsed a class system or division of labor, he was highly critical of the remaining aspects of capitalist society, many of which are foundational. In this section, I reveal this dimension of Nietzsche’s thought by piecing together a number of his comments on money-making, money itself, work, workers, pleasure, and the marketplace. In the aggregate, these claims prove, contra Rand and Fukuyama, that Nietzsche was just as critical of capitalism as he was of socialism. Yet, unlike socialism’s critique from below, Nietzsche criticizes capitalism from an aristocratic perspective or pathos of distance. Thus I also demonstrate how Nietzsche sees himself and other free spirits as above such things as money-making, work, and the marketplace. In the case of one of the most fundamental feature of capitalism, money-making, Nietzsche was hostile from his earliest to his last writings. In Untimely Meditations, his second major publication, he writes, “Nowadays the crudest and most evil forces, the egoism of the money-makers and the military despots, hold sway over almost everything on earth.”11 Elsewhere he talks of the “hugely contemptible money economy” as well as the “harmful” effects of the “economic principle of laissez faire.” These comments come from the third meditation, “Schopenhauer as Educator,” in which Nietzsche posits the goal of society to be not the creation of wealth, but the “production of individual great men” in the specific realm of Bildung or culture (i.e., philosophers, artists, and saints). Since “that and nothing else” is humanity’s task, Nietzsche regards money-making as a force or obstacle to be overcome. Discussing the stranglehold of money-making on the pursuit of culture in his own time, Nietzsche writes the following, sounding more timely than untimely:
11 Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, trans. by R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 150.
M. KILIVRIS 31
Here there is a hatred of any kind of education that makes one solitary, that proposes goals that transcend money and money-making… Precisely the opposite of this is, of course, held in esteem by the morality that here counts as valid: namely, a speedy education so that one may quickly become a money-earning being, yet at the same time an education sufficiently thorough to enable one to earn a very great deal of money. A man is allowed only as much culture as it is in the interest of general money-making and world commerce he should possess…12
If this seems like a young, naïve Nietzsche, the later Nietzsche of Ecce Homo, his penultimate work, expresses a similar view. In reflecting therein on his Untimely Mediations, Nietzsche asserts that they “prove that [he] was no Jack the Dreamer.” The third and fourth essays (the latter is on Wagner), he claims, exalt the “hardest self-love, self-discipline” as the pathway to “a higher concept of culture,” and are thus “full of sovereign contempt” for the idols of the day such as financial “success.” Nietzsche then suggests that in describing Schopenhauer and Wagner, he was really expressing himself.13 Indeed, earlier in Ecce Homo Nietzsche writes of his own self-love and self-discipline, which was likewise remote from money-making: “But that is how I always lived. I had no wishes. A man over forty-two who can say that he never strove for honors, for women, for money!”14 To the extent that he strove for anything – in this same passage, Nietzsche shares that he “became what he was” without “struggle,” “striving,” or “willing” – it was the greatness of his heroes, most of whom were cultural figures (Montaigne, Spinoza, Goethe), and none of whom were money-makers. Nietzsche rejects money-making not just because it stands in the way of achievement in the realm of culture, but also because he sees money itself as yet another way humans attempt (vainly) to establish security. Today, those who value money see themselves, and are seen by many, as “realists.” The cliché “money talks” illustrates this view, suggesting that everything besides ensuring economic survival is just airy-fairy idealism. However, for Nietzsche, money is no less an object of idealism than the idea of God, which he sees as offering the ultimate comfort of “metaphysical solace.” Like the idea of God, money is believed to promise psychological comfort, albeit through material or economic security. Money thus becomes a kind of fortress thought to keep at bay need, want, pain, and unhappiness. Yet for Nietzsche such a fortress is undesirable, not to mention unattainable, since he sees life as “becoming,”
12 Ibid., 165. 13 “Schopenhauer and Wagner or, in one word, Nietzsche”: Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Modern Library, 1992). 737. 14 Ibid., 737.
32 BEYOND GOODS AND SERVICES which “does not aim at a final state.”15 Hence, free spirits are “full of malice against the lures of dependence that lie hidden in honors, or money, or offices, or enthusiasms of the senses.”16 Preferring to “live dangerously,” free spirits live with becoming rather than (nihilistically) against it. In chasing the illusion of security, most money-makers must spend the vast majority of their lives working. “[A] society in which the members continually work hard,” Nietzsche writes, “will have more security: and security is now adored as the supreme goddess.”17 To many, especially in the United States where the Protestant work ethic still reigns supreme (even as it increasingly intermingles with hedonism), work itself has become a goddess. It is considered an expression of strength and will-power. Moreover, it is associated with individualist notions such as self-development. According to Nietzsche, however, work has more in common with ascetic self-denial. In On the Genealogy of Morals, he puts work on par with herd organization when it comes to providing relief from self-loathing. Hence the blessing in the “blessing of work,” Nietzsche argues, is that “the interest of the suffering man is completely distracted from his suffering—that nothing enters his consciousness but activity, continual and repeated activity, and thus leaves little room for suffering.”18 He goes on to call this a “forgetting of self” and “incuria sui” (self-neglect). In The Dawn, he goes further by arguing that work “obstructs” self-development:
Behind the glorification of “work” and the tireless talk of the “blessings of work” I find the same thought as behind the praise of impersonal activity for the public benefit: the fear of everything individual. At bottom, one now feels when confronted with work—and what is invariably meant is relentless industry from early till late—that such work is the best policy, that it keeps everybody in harness and powerfully obstructs the development of reason, of covetousness, of the desire for independence. For it uses up a tremendous amount of energy and takes it away from reflection, brooding, dreaming, worry, love, and hatred; it always sets a small goal before one’s eyes and permits easy and regular satisfactions.19
Nietzsche’s disdain for work even led him to offer a solution to the problem facing “workers in factory slavery.” This comes as a surprise, since Nietzsche seems to have generally held that such workers are necessary for the
15 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 378. 16 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 245. 17 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Dawn, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking Press, 1968), 82. 18 Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, 112. 19 Nietzsche, The Dawn, 82.
M. KILIVRIS 33 sake of (high) culture. In the early essay “The Greek State,” he argues that “In order to have a broad, deep and fertile soil for artistic development, the overwhelming majority must be slavishly subjected to the necessities of life in order to serve a minority beyond the measure of its individual needs.”20 However, in a passage from The Dawn called “The impossible class,” Nietzsche presents an alternative to the “indecent serfdom” of capitalism as well as socialism. As a third way – to “protest against the machine, against capital” and the “socialistic pied pipers” – Nietzsche recommends an “era of a vast swarming out from the European beehive” in declaration that “as a class,” workers are a “human impossibility.”21 In “savage fresh regions,” they could cease caring about “the rapid rise and fall of power, money, and opinions,” and begin to focus on “inner worth,” “mastery of myself,” “beautiful naturalness,” and “heroism.”22 Here, Nietzsche posits an idea of liberation completely beyond the paradigm of labor, in which he sees socialism as still caught up. Thus, in addition to fleeing capitalist exploitation, workers would also escape the socialist belief that reforming the system, even revolution, would fundamentally change their servitude:
Phew! to believe that higher pay could abolish the essence of their misery—I mean their impersonal serfdom! Phew! to be talked into thinking that an increase in this impersonality, within the machinelike workings of a new society, could transform the shame of slavery into a virtue! Phew! to have a price for which one remains a person no longer but becomes a gear!23
Nietzsche discourages work because for him play is the more valuable activity. Counter to the self-denial of work, play allows for self-cultivation outside the confines of utility and productivity.24 Thus, play for Nietzsche is associated with Dionysian creativity rather than hedonism.25 Yet, despite this as well as his many denunciations of Epicureanism, Nietzsche continues to be misinterpreted as an advocate for hedonism, even the kind prevalent in capitalist societies today, where pleasure is tightly entangled with conspicuous
20 Quoted in Rudiger Safranski, Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography, trans. by Shelley Frisch (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2002), 74. 21 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Dawn, 82. 22 Ibid., 90. Nietzsche even urges these ex-workers to turn to philosophy and other areas of culture, which have “become a laughingstock to [them].” Ibid., 90. 23 Ibid., 89-90. 24 Here I agree with Nancy Love who, in comparing Marx and Nietzsche, argues that the former prioritizes (free) labor, while the latter subordinates labor to play: “For Nietzsche, labor for needs, even labor as a need, denies life as will to power. Life is the purposeless play of the child. Unlike purposive production to overcome obstacles, play is not a means to an end, but an end in itself. Play expresses life’s value in the moment.” Nancy Love, Marx, Nietzsche, and Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 192. 25 Play also contributes to Bildung in the sense of self-overcoming, for Nietzsche, since he holds that it is only in play, particularly Bildung qua culture, that the opposing internal forces of the Dionysian and Apollonian converge.
34 BEYOND GOODS AND SERVICES consumption. Ishay Landa reflects and challenges this view when discussing how, in the context of popular culture, James Bond can be seen as a Nietzschean hero due in part to his “refined hedonism,” for example his preference for (shaken) martinis.26 While Landa makes a case for this interpretation, he rightly points out that Bond’s hedonism is “thoroughly disciplined” and “with a purpose,” as opposed to the “aimless, un-heroic, cowardly hedonism of the rich who are characterized precisely by shunning anything resembling ‘dangerous work’.”27 However, in both theory and practice Nietzsche takes a harder line against hedonism, and by extension consumerism, than Landa admits. Theoretically, Nietzsche considers hedonism a close relative of Christianity, insofar as both seek to minimize pain and suffering. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche talks of a “tranquillizing (for example, Epicurean or Christian) medicine… the happiness of resting, of not being disturbed, of satiety, of finally attained unity, of a ‘sabbath of sabbaths’.”28 As such, hedonism violates Nietzsche’s “formula for greatness,” amor fati, which demands the affirmation of pleasure and pain, joy and suffering. Practically, while Nietzsche paid close attention to his gustatory habits, he did so in the name of strength, not pleasure. Hence, his guiding concern was, “how do you, among all people, have to eat to attain your maximum of strength, of virtu in the Renaissance style, of moraline- free virtue.”29 We also learn in this discussion that Nietzsche “abstained” from alcohol: “Alcohol is bad for me: a single glass of wine or beer in one day is quite sufficient to turn my life into a vale of misery… [I] cannot advise all more spiritual natures earnestly enough to abstain entirely from alcohol: Water is sufficient.”30 There is perhaps no better proof than this that Nietzsche did not conceive of the Dionysian in hedonistic terms.31 Neither Nietzsche’s thought nor his life can be used to justify hedonism or consumerism because they altogether transcend the realm of goods and services, that is, the marketplace. Contra Fukuyama and (especially) Rand, who see “big” entrepreneurs as realizations of Nietzsche’s free spirits and even Übermenschen, Nietzsche in fact looked down upon such people. In a section of Thus Spoke Zarathustra called “Of the Flies of the Market-place,” Nietzsche describes them as “small men,” “actors,” “buffoons,” and “heroes of the hour,” who receive glory only because “The people have little idea of
26 Ishay Landa, The Overman in the Marketplace: Nietzschean Heroism in the Marketplace (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2007), 8. 27 Ibid., 174-175. 28 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 302. 29 Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, 693. 30 Ibid., 694-695. 31 A rival example would be Nietzsche’s discussion, in On the Genealogy of Morals, of asceticism as the true nature of philosophers, Nietzsche himself included. Deleuze captures this point nicely in his book on Spinoza: “Nietzsche understood, having lived it himself, what constitutes the mystery of a philosopher’s life. The philosopher appropriates ascetic virtues— humility, poverty, chastity—and makes them serve ends completely his own, extraordinary ends that are not very ascetic at all, in fact.” Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. by Robert Hurley (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988), 3.
M. KILIVRIS 35 greatness.”32 By contrast, the true “great men,” though they rule “imperceptibly,” are the real centers around which the world revolves, not because they excel at inventing things, but because they are inventors of new values. Of course, as opposed to Rand’s claim that the “businessman’s tool is values,” for Nietzsche the creation of new values takes place beyond the marketplace.33 Hence he asserts, “All great things occur away from glory and the marketplace: the inventors of new values have always lived away from glory and the marketplace.”34 The foregoing paragraphs reveal that Nietzsche dismisses much that is essential to capitalism. Thus it cannot be maintained, as Rand and Fukuyama hold, that Nietzsche embraced capitalism and/or regarded capitalists as realizations of his Übermensch. For it has also been shown that Nietzsche saw himself and other free spirits as above such things as money-making, work, and the marketplace. Thus I call Nietzsche’s perspective vis-à-vis capitalism aristocratic. By this I mean the pathos of distance that he possesses in relation to the most important of capitalism’s defining features. In On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche defines the pathos of distance as “the enduring, dominating, and fundamental overall feeling of a higher ruling kind in relation to a lower kind, to a ‘below’.”35 It is this “feeling of a higher kind,” moreover, that distinguishes Nietzsche’s critique from that of socialists. As discussed above, the latter oppose capitalism on primarily moral and populist grounds. By contrast, Nietzsche criticizes various aspects of capitalism for being beneath him and other free spirits. To put it another way, whereas socialists take issue with capitalism’s immorality, Nietzsche condemns its tendency to foster mediocrity. In the following section, I will further address the latter claim, as well as discuss its implications for our own time.
Twilight of the (New) Idols?
It is well-nigh impossible for people today, especially in the United States, to see how anyone (much less a philosopher) could be above a capitalist. This is largely because in such societies, which are otherwise democratic, orders
32 Interestingly, Rand references this section in The Fountainhead, when Ellsworth Toohey states, “It is not our function – paraphrasing a philosopher whom we do not like – to be a fly-swatter.” Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1943), 360. 33 Ayn Rand, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (New York: Signet, 1967), 45. 34 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 79. In a more explicit statement about entrepreneurs, along with manufacturers, Nietzsche refers to them as “uninteresting persons,” excluding them from a “higher race”: “The manufacturers and entrepreneurs of business probably have been too deficient so far in all those forms and signs of a higher race that alone make a person interesting.” Friedrich Nietzsche, Gay Science, trans. by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), 107. 35 Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, 13. The terms “higher” and “lower” here refer to psychological types (i.e., “strong,” “weak”), rather than social or economic classes. Thus, one need not be a member of an actual aristocracy to have an aristocratic perspective. I make a similar point when discussing Nietzsche’s concept of the herd in the final section.
36 BEYOND GOODS AND SERVICES of rank track mainly along economic lines.36 Hence the term “elite” almost invariably refers to a certain segment of the business community, while everyone else is relegated to “average” or “ordinary.” Calling the owning class the elite, furthermore, is not just a statement of fact, which by itself is irrefutable. It is also a designation of excellence or greatness, as when financiers are described as “the best and the brightest,” for example. It is this latter sense of the word that is both revealing and problematic from a Nietszchean standpoint. For it shows that money-makers have won, or been given, the second victory of greatness; the first victory being their ownership of much of the planet. If Marxism is the protest against capitalism’s first victory, then Nietzsche’s aristocratic perspective can be said to contest the second, thus making it a strategic supplement to the Marxist critique, which remains essential as ever.37 In this section, I offer a short further discussion of the need for Nietzsche’s aristocratic critique. This leads to a more direct confrontation with Rand’s and Fukuyama’s appropriation of Nietzsche, which I reject via Nietzsche’s concepts of “last man” and the herd. Nietzsche’s aristocratic critique is needful today because capitalism’s hold on individuals is not just economic, but also psychological. In addition to being owners, the economic elite are now idols wielding a gravitational pull on the values of the broader society. These values revolve principally around money, status, and pleasure, together constituting what Horkheimer and Adorno once called the “religion of success,” which has since only intensified and spread. While the collective worship of economic success stems in large part from necessity, since in free-market economies one is either “successful” or struggling, it is also the affirmation of an ideal, insofar as success is associated with things beyond self-preservation such as achievement and greatness. Hence in the United States, “success stories” like C.E.O.’s, entrepreneurs, and until recently bankers and financiers, are not simply those who have “made it”; even more so, they are seen as heroic individuals, inspiring awe and emulation. This awe ensures the persistence of capitalism as much as private property. For, in Sartrean terms, awe is a choice which, when continually made by a vast number of people, has the cumulative effect of maintaining the dominance of the awed. So why is the decision to exalt capitalists made? It seems that apart from the noted necessity of prioritizing success, this choice stems from a deeper value judgment of the capitalist as great or heroic. Of course, such a valuation can be explained in terms of ideology or false consciousness. However, as of yet ideology-critique has been ineffective in challenging it. I believe that this is partially due to Marxism’s tendency of
36 This is not to ignore the glaring difference between formal and actual democracy, or the hierarchies based on race, ethnicity, sex, and sexual orientation. It is simply to highlight that, at least in theory, so-called liberal societies are politically democratic, but economically stratified. 37 Thus I concur with Sartre, who saw Marxism as “the unsurpassable philosophy of our time.” Jean-Paul Sartre, Search for a Method, trans. by Hazel Barnes (New York: Knopf, 1963). Yet I agree as well that existentialists – Nietzsche and Sartre himself – can be interpreted in such a way as to help the Marxist cause.
M. KILIVRIS 37 retaining the aura of capitalists by continuing to think of them as the “elite,” if a villainous rather than heroic one. By contrast, no such tendency can be found in Nietzsche’s aristocratic perspective, which refuses to grant elite status to capitalists whatsoever. To the contrary, as will be elaborated below, Nietzsche devalued such individuals to the ranks of the herd or last men. Thus a Nietzschean critique would appear to be of significant help to Marxists, insofar as it attacks a crucial value judgment (that capitalists are great individuals) upon which capitalism in part thrives. Yet, two of the most prominent voices lauding capitalists as great individuals belong to Rand and Fukuyama, both of whom cite Nietzsche as a kindred spirit in this regard. Rand claimed that Nietzsche “beat [her] to all her ideas,” one of which is that selfishness is a virtue, making the industrialist the exemplar of excellence.38 Similarly, Fukuyama proposes that capitalists embody the Nietzschean ideal of greatness by striving for more recognition than bestowed by democracy, which sees all as equal. At the very least, he argues, “The classical capitalist entrepreneur described by Joseph Schumpeter is therefore not Nietzsche’s last man.”39 However, Rand’s and Fukuyama’s positions reveal more about their own thinking, shaped by the conditions of twentieth-century American society, than that of Nietzsche. While Rand’s “ethical egoism” certainly overlaps in ways with Nietzsche’s “master morality,” her interpretation of egoism and individualism in strictly economic terms differs markedly from Nietzsche’s more psychologically and aesthetically inflected individualism; hence Rand’s great individual is the businessperson, while Nietzsche’s is the philosopher and/or artist.40 For his part, Fukuyama is unwilling to look beyond the domain of capitalism for contemporary alternatives to the last man, though he is able to entertain doubts about the connection between Nietzsche and (would-be) capitalists. Hence he also states, in apparent contradiction of the claim above,
Those earnest young people trooping off to law and business school, who anxiously fill out their resumes in hopes of maintaining the lifestyles to which they believe themselves entitled, seem to be much more in danger of becoming Nietzsche’s last men… It is hard to detect great, unfulfilled longings or irrational passions lurking
38 Anne C. Heller, Ayn Rand the World She Made (New York: Anchor Books, 2009), 42. Apparently, Rand adopted the phrase of her older cousin, who suggested she read Nietzsche “because he beat you to all your ideas.” Barbara Branden, The Passion of Ayn Rand (New York: Random House, 1986), 45. 39 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 2006), 316. 40 As her career progressed, Rand became increasingly critical of Nietzsche, particularly his call to go beyond good and evil. While this is an apt criticism, it is interesting to note that she did not turn away from Nietzsche because she saw his thinking as incompatible with capitalism.
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just beneath the surface of the average first-year law associate.41
Fukuyama thus refutes his own, and Rand’s, appropriation of Nietzsche, getting right to the heart of their mistake. For the capitalist has more in common with Nietzsche’s last man – the “most contemptible” man – than his free spirit, much less the Übermensch. The concept of the last man is part and parcel of Nietzsche’s critique of modern, mediocre man. However, it is not just, as Fukuyama generally holds, directed towards democratic (or socialist) man; it can also be viewed as an indictment of the bourgeois or capitalist. While it may seem that if anything, Nietzsche implicates the middle class in his discussion of the last man – “Nobody grows rich or poor any more: both are too much of a burden”42 – it is unclear whether he is referring here to literal wealth and poverty. Generally, he is much more wont to associate these terms with psychological states as when, for example, he asserts, “Our ‘rich’— are poorest of all.”43 In any case, there are several additional descriptions of the last man that could be construed as targeting money-makers, even the notion of homo economicus as such. For example, a reference to work: “They still work, for work is entertainment. But they take care the entertainment does not exhaust them.”44 As well, the refrain of the last man, “We have discovered happiness” suggests the industrialists of Nietzsche’s time who promised an earthly paradise of material comfort. From a contemporary point of view, this phrase brings to mind both the advertising executive and the satisfied customer, each of whom claims to have found happiness through consumption. If the capitalist can be included in Nietzsche’s theory of the last man, then they can also be considered a part of the herd, implying that the so-called elite are in fact, from a Nietzschean perspective, the “average,” “ordinary,” or “mediocre.” Above, I claimed that Nietzsche’s concept of the herd has no necessary connection to any social or economic class. Rather, it more accurately refers to a shared psychological trait, similar to Kierkegaard’s “crowd,” typified by dependency on others, particularly where values are concerned. Hence Nietzsche describes the herd-animal in psychological terms as “weak,” that is, unable to posit and live by their own values. Although the economic elite appear to have created the dominant values today – money, status, and pleasure – historically these have been associated with the “masses,” “many,” “mob,” or “multitude.” In ancient Greece, Plato and Aristotle characterized the herd as those who love money, honor, and pleasure, as opposed to wisdom. Likewise, in the early modern period, Spinoza saw “Riches, Fame, and the Pleasures of Sense” as “the objects pursued by the multitude.”45 As shown
41 Fukuyama, The End of History, 336. 42 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 46. 43 Nietzsche, Will to Power, 41. 44 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 46. 45 Benedict de Spinoza, On the Improvement of the Understanding, The Ethics, Correspondence, trans. by R. H. M. Elwes (New York: Dover Publishing, 1955), 3-5.
M. KILIVRIS 39 above, Nietzsche shares this position, even as he critiques the opposing values of asceticism. From this perspective, then, the only difference between the elite and the average comes down to having the objects of these values; the former has more of them, and the latter less. But to want the same, according to Nietzsche, is to be the same: “No herdsman and one herd. Everyone wants the same thing, everyone is the same: whoever thinks otherwise goes voluntarily into the madhouse.”46 The truly different and great individual, for Nietzsche, would thus appear to live beyond goods and services.
Concluding Remarks
In the above, I have tried to accomplish three objectives: 1) to demonstrate that Nietzsche cannot be called upon to ideologically underwrite capitalism, despite Rand’s and Fukuyama’s claims to the contrary; 2) to reveal that Nietzsche was in fact critical of key aspects of capitalism, and further, in a different manner (aristocratic) than socialism; and 3) to suggest how Nietzsche’s aristocratic perspective can aid the Marxist critique today by refusing to give capitalists the second victory of greatness, which is one of their strongest ideological supports. Hopefully, I have also shown the merit of examining this underexplored dimension of Nietzsche’s thought, which I believe has more radical potential for our time than the others. While his critique of religion and his “campaign against morality” are certainly still “untimely” in parts of the world, elsewhere (particularly the United States and Europe) they have lost much of their dangerousness. In particular, the critique of Christianity and its morality is nearing obsolescence in these societies, whose ways of life have become fundamentally secular. Hence the “madman” is no longer the one proclaiming that God is dead, but rather that God is still alive. But secularization has allowed for a new religion to rise up, one based on the ideas and values of capitalism. If Nietzsche’s thinking can also yield a critique of this new religion, then he will continue to be – like Marx – as radical as ever.
Department of Philosophy, Hunter College, United States of America
References
Branden, Barbara, The Passion of Ayn Rand (New York: Random House, 1986). Deleuze, Gilles, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. by Robert Hurley (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988). Fukuyama, Francis, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 2006). Heller, Anne C., Ayn Rand the World She Made (New York: Anchor Books, 2009). Landa, Ishay, The Overman in the Marketplace: Nietzschean Heroism in the Marketplace (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2007).
46 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 46.
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Love, Nancy, Marx, Nietzsche, and Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). Marx, Karl, Capital, Volume I: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. by Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1990). ______, and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, trans. by Samuel Moore (London: Penguin Classics, 2002). ______, The German Ideology, in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, ed. by David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). Nietzsche, Friedrich, Beyond Good and Evil, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, ed. and trans. by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Modern Library, 1992). ______, The Dawn, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking Press, 1968). ______, Ecce Homo, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, ed. and trans. by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Modern Library, 1992). ______, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. by Douglas Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). ______, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. by R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin Books, 1969). ______, Untimely Meditations, trans. by R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). ______, The Will to Power, trans. by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1968). Rand, Ayn, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (New York: Signet, 1967). Rand, Ayn, The Fountainhead (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1943). Sartre, Jean-Paul, Search for a Method, trans. by Hazel Barnes (New York: Knopf, 1963). Spinoza, Benedict de, On the Improvement of the Understanding, The Ethics, Correspondence, trans. R. H. M. Elwes (New York: Dover Publishing, 1955).
KRITIKE VOLUME FIVE NUMBER TWO (DECEMBER 2011) 41-58
Article
Finitude and Violence: Žižek versus Derrida on Politics
John McSweeney
Abstract: In a recent article, Martin McQuillan has inaugurated a vigorous Derridean critique of a “violent tone” that has recently arisen in continental philosophy, exemplified by Slavoj Žižek’s attempt to retrieve Robespierre’s notion of “Terror. This article sets out to complicate such critique, opening a new perspective on the Derrida- Žižek debate on the question of politics. In particular, it examines Derrida’s and Žižek’s respective approaches to difference and violence as differing responses to a shared problematic of constructing a consistent (immanent) politics within the horizon of a finite world. It proceeds by elaborating Žižek’s critique of Derridean deconstruction, highlighting how Derrida’s attempt to minimise violence via maximal openness to difference, within the horizon of the future-to-come, inadvertently reinscribes a minimal but problematic ontotheological trace which ironically circumscribes deconstructive openness to difference. The article goes on to examine how Žižek’s alternative construal of a purified violence and (Hegelian) self-difference ends up repeating in somewhat different terms these same problematic features of Derrida’s writings. The article concludes by arguing that each approach requires a theoretically-integrated ethos of ‘becoming other’ in which the unavoidable theoretical anticipation of difference (and the risk of invocation of the ontotheological) is ruptured by the actual encounter with difference.
Key words: Derrida, Žižek, finite world, violence
Introduction
n a recent article, Martin McQuillan inaugurates a vigorous Derridean critique of what he terms a “violent tone” that has lately arisen in Icontemporary philosophy, exemplified by Slavoj Žižek’s attempt to reclaim Robespierre’s revolutionary “Terror” for emancipatory politics, and reflected in a broader trend toward what he variously describes as a “new Political Theology,” “Theological-Maoism,” or “onto-thanato-theology.”1 Specifically contrasting Žižek’s analysis in “Robespierre, or the ‘divine violence’ of the
1 Martin McQuillan, “Extra time and the Death Penalties: On a Newly Arisen Violent Tone in Philosophy,” in Derrida Today, 2:2 (2009), 135, 144, 149.
© 2011 John McSweeney http://www.kritike.org/journal/issue_10/mcsweeney_december2011.pdf ISSN 1908-7330
42 FINITUDE AND VIOLENCE
Terror,”2 with Derrida’s scrupulous deconstruction of Kant on the question of the death penalty, McQuillan uncompromisingly exposes what he sees as the gross dangers in the former’s Lacanian conception of a political act, which, as an act upon the Real, cannot be justified within the prevailing Symbolic order, but retrospectively generates the conditions of its own legitimacy in transforming the socio-political world. Not least, he contends that such a conception of political act problematically involves “a transcendental affirmation of a non-position of pure negation,” which can dismiss any actually available political positions as “mere defence of bourgeois biopolitics.”3 One cannot negotiate with its “inhuman madness,”4 because it does not exist within the world, but occupies a position of “strict and pure terror,” which depends upon an implausibly absolute distinction between inside and outside, between personal interests and the would-be virtue of a truly revolutionary act. Against what he considers the dangerous violence of such a project, McQuillan suggests the preferability of Derrida’s “reassuringly liberal” and “even familiar and banal” politics, which is “against the death sentence, for international law and against the invasion of Iraq...critical of the state of Israel but condemns those who would see it destroyed,” and so on.5 If McQuillan’s criticisms strike at significant dangers associated with Žižek’s thought (and with the broader materialist theology of post-Lacanian leftist politics) – and I think that they do – arguably, they also leave out of the equation dimensions of Žižek’s framing of this act, which mitigate the charges against him. Indeed, McQuillan’s deliberately narrow focus upon Žižek’s violent tone inadvertently obscures, I wish to argue, a deeper proximity between Žižek and Derrida than suggested by the article’s sharp contrast of their respective politics.6 In a provocative vein, it might even be claimed that Žižek’s difficulties lie in his remaining too Derridean in his tendency to privilege a decisive ‘big-Act-to-come.’ However, it will be more precise to say that both thinkers run up against the same limit of finitude upon thinking difference, if from opposite standpoints. (Derrida’s strategy is to minimize violence, Žižek’s to purify it.) Moreover, Žižek has had good reason to suspect a minimal but problematic theological trace operative in Derrida’s messianic response to this limit, even if there are also good reasons to conclude that he has not succeeded in eliminating this trace from his own work. To do justice to Žižek and to the debate which needs to be had between Derrida and Žižek on
2 Slavoj Žižek, “Robespierre, or, The ‘Divine Violence’ of Terror,” in Maximilien Robespierre, Virtue and Terror, ed. by Jean Ducange, trans. by John Howe (New York and London: Verso, 2007), vii-xxxix. 3 McQuillan, op. cit., 144. 4 Žižek’s own expression. See Žižek, “Robespierre, or, The ‘Divine Violence’ of Terror,” xviii. 5 McQuillan, op. cit., 133, 144. 6 McQuillan, op. cit., 136. McQuillan makes clear that he is concerned only with the ‘violent tone’ that he detects in Žižek’s work and not with the expanded body of his writings. Indeed, he suggests that, in other contexts, he might well have much to say about Žižek or even find himself defending him. I wish to suggest, however, that it is only in locating Žižek’s ‘violent tone’ within the larger framework of his writings that its precise force can be understood.
J. MCSWEENEY 43 the question of politics – a debate which McQuillan importantly inaugurates7 – it is necessary to recognize that, whatever the dangers of his own solution, Žižek’s project is shaped by sensitivity to what he takes to be the violence in Derrida’s ‘liberal’ attempt to minimize violence. Moreover, his work is driven by a concern to articulate an alternative political economy of finite, immanent difference and, indeed, of violence. In what follows, the aim is to make a contribution to the Derrida-Žižek debate by identifying the common ‘problematisation’ of finite difference which underpins each thinker’s approach, with a view to grasping the stakes and dangers of their respective solutions.
Žižek’s Criticism of Derrida
Žižek’s fundamental criticism of Derrida’s messianic ethics of difference, given succinct expression in The Puppet and the Dwarf, is that it tends to reduce difference to a “pure potentiality” to come; that is, contemporary difference is subordinated to a possibility of a decisive future difference – in which the apparent impossibility of justice today is overcome.8 As is well- known, such criticism is motivated by concern about the contemporary ‘postmodern’ tendency to equivocate over the significance of present differences and thus to defer decisive political action.9 No less, it is concerned with the danger that Derridean difference-to-come (more precisely difference open to the absolute horizon of the future-to-come) is so abstracted that it is all too readily assimilated to capital’s process of abstraction of future commodity value.10 From a Derridean perspective, this might well seem like one more simplistic reading, which fails to recognize that, for Derrida, openness to the absolute future as horizon of possibility, beyond the limits of contemporary impossibilities, is the very condition of acting in the present; that openness to the future-to-come is precisely a means of not deferring action, but of delimiting an ethics of difference, so as to act even as one respects the
7 I should note that my focus is less upon McQuillan’s specific analysis and range of concerns as such than upon the questions, which his article raises, about Žižek and his relation to Derrida. 8 Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London: MIT Press, 2003), 140. In what follows, I expand, and expand upon, Žižek’s rather compressed criticism of Derrida in The Puppet and the Dwarf. By reconstructing the argument in slightly different terms and sometimes with a slightly different emphasis than Žižek’s, I seek the better to draw out its implications in more typically Derridean terms and to create a certain distance between Žižek’s criticisms and his own alternative conception of difference, through which to problematise the ‘self-difference’ of Žižek’s own work and thus to assess his proposals concerning the conception of difference as self-difference. 9 See, for example, Žižek, “The Real of Sexual Difference” in Interrogating the Real, ed. by Rex Butler and Scott Stephens (New York and London: Continuum, 2005), 314-5. 10 Žižek’s concern, in Deleuzian terms, is that deconstruction can all too readily be co- opted to capitalist deterritorialization. This theme runs through the whole of Žižek’s work. For example, see Žižek, “The Real of Sexual Difference”, 314; also, the comments on deterritorialization in Žižek, “Lenin’s Full Subjective Engagement,”
44 FINITUDE AND VIOLENCE complexities and ambiguities of one’s situation. Žižek’s criticism, however, is precisely of this nuanced Derridean ethical stance. For Žižek, Derrida’s post-Kantian stress on “the irreducible excess in the ideal concept, which cannot be reduced to the dialectic between the ideal and its actualization,” subverts his ethical, justice-oriented intention of remaining open to difference – specifically, that openness to the future to come, limits Derrida’s capacity to attend to the actual occurring differences in the present.11 Crucial, in this respect, is Žižek’s distinction between Derrida’s early conception of différance and his later notion of messianicity. Žižek’s point is that, although Derrida’s early concept of différance already depends upon the distinction between concept/representation and reality, this kind of difference is, in fact, immanently operative in highly significant ways in the texts which Derrida examines.12 Hence, Žižek can grant that early Derrida’s analysis of difference in terms of différance is adequate to the concrete “self-difference” of the reality (i.e. the texts) under examination. However, when specific instances of différance give way to a formalized notion of ‘pure difference to come’ Derrida’s work, he argues, is no longer attentive to “the pure gap which separates an entity from itself.”13 Žižek’s point is given weight by a consideration of the tensions that arise as deconstruction increasingly functions, for Derrida, as a more or less universalizable practice, via the series of its “nonsynonymous substitutions,”14 which allow it to be found anew, immanently operative in new (con)texts. First, there is a danger of prioritizing analysis of différance and its ‘(non)synonyms’ even when other forms of difference are those most crucial to a given object of study. Implicit here is the notion that continuities between différance and its ‘(non)synonyms’ tend to dominate in Derrida’s evolving analyses over the uncovering of unanticipated forms of difference, discontinuous with deconstruction, as new contexts are broached.15 Second, and perhaps even more problematically, as deconstruction deconstructs, it loses the consistency and ethical significance that it gains from being a critique of a dominant tradition. Its very capacity to critique effectively a specific modality of a tradition’s dominance (logocentrism) and to open new spaces of thought in relation to it gives a specific density to deconstructive practice and justifies it. As it takes centre stage, however; as it begins to appear a more fundamental perspective upon reality than that which it critiques, questions necessarily emerge about the deconstruction of deconstruction itself. It is not that every deconstruction, as a linguistic act realized within the logocentrism that it would critique, remains at a remove from, and thus inadequate to, the
11 Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf, 140. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid., 141. 14 Jacques Derrida, “Différance,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. by Alan Bass (Harvester Press: Brighton, 1982), 12. These nonsynonymous substitutions include différance, dissemination, negation, messianicity, machinicity, animality) 15 Arguably, this tendency is already indicated by the tension in the term “nonsynonymous substitutions” itself.
J. MCSWEENEY 45 deconstruction operative in texts. This ‘gap’ is already incorporated within the movement of Derridean deconstruction. Rather, the question of the deconstruction of deconstruction primarily centers upon the deconstructive tendency to conceive of this gap as inscribing the ‘self-difference’ of things as such, or of inscribing the most significant ‘self-difference’ of things.16 It is thus a question of how this mapping17 obscures the possibility of significant context-immanent differences, which differ decisively from the deconstructive conception of difference – hence, ironically reinscribing, in a somewhat different register, a trace of logocentrism’s obscuration of textual différance. It might well be argued, of course, that deconstruction does not exclude others’ pursuit of other forms of critique attentive to other forms of difference; that deconstruction is a specific kind of critique, with its own proper focus and concerns. The implication of Žižek’s criticism, however, is that insofar as this delimitation of deconstruction is not exercised within deconstruction itself as a moment of its deconstructive impulse; insofar as deconstruction does not incorporate an openness to that which is other than it – within it and rupturing its practice, demanding that it become other than itself, paradoxically as the practice of deconstruction, in the mode of the deconstruction of deconstruction beyond an economy of ‘substitutions’ – then, it makes a practical claim to generality, that is no less problematic for being practical. And, indeed, rather than defend deconstruction by pursuing a radical critique of its limits, which would underscore its specificity and thus its specific force, Derrida (Žižek highlights) has rather pursued the opposite strategy of protecting deconstruction from its own logic in order to preserve and extend its significance:
…as Derrida himself has realized in the last two decades, the more radical a deconstruction is, the more it has to rely on its inherent undeconstructible condition of deconstruction, the messianic promise of Justice. This promise is the true Derridean object of belief and Derrida’s ultimate ethical axiom is that this belief is irreducible, ‘undeconstructible.’18
For Žižek, then, this “belief” is not the minimal belief in the possibility of justice necessary to any ethico-philosophical enterprise, as Derrida would have it.19 Rather, he can cogently argue that it is rooted in, and a consequence
16 Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf, 141: “Derrida acts as if the choice is between positive onto-ethics, the gesture of transcending the existing order toward another higher positive Order, and the pure promise of spectral Otherness.” 17 In its anticipatory integration of that which exceeds deconstruction. 18 Ibid., 139. 19 Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone”, in Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo, eds., Religion, trans. by David Webb (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), 17-19.
46 FINITUDE AND VIOLENCE of, Derrida’s attempt to extend différance and its ‘nonsynonyms’ to serve as the decisive form of difference operative in any (con)text. Moreover, this appeal to the undeconstructible condition of deconstruction requires a subtle delimitation in advance of what counts as ethically and politically significant difference – a problem that can be seen to follow from the logic of “messianicity without messianism” itself. Messianicity without messianism refuses any positive notion of being, toward which difference points or moves. However, it maintains that the minimal condition of ethics is that justice – apparently impossible today – is, in principle, possible. The absolute “future-to-come” is the horizon of possibility of a justice-to-come and those acts are ethical that maximally maintain openness to this horizon of possibility: a structure of messianicity without content.20 By attending to différance and its (non)synonyms, by accentuating them, deconstruction aims precisely at such an openness and thus achieves ethicality. Žižek argues, however, that no less than in the case of Sartre – who jettisoned the content of the bourgeois subject, but maintained its form (the fundamentally individual, self-creating subject) – this distinction between the content of messianism and its form (messianicity) is problematic; that the form itself imposes a positive stricture upon difference, which amounts to a minimal but positive (ontotheological) claim about the nature of difference.21 The problem is that within a finite world, not (necessarily) shaped by any ontotheology, or a concomitant teleological messianism, there can be no guarantee that attending to difference so as to remain open to the “future-to- come” does justice, or the least injustice, to present difference. For instance, there may simply not be a justice-to-come that justifies such a claim. As Michel Foucault put it in his 1971 debate with Noam Chomsky, the term justice may well be a correlate of the ideological system, which produces injustice, and that any overcoming of injustice would involve transcendence of the notion of justice as well.22 Alternatively, it might be argued that there are only the specific, imperfect and, perhaps, (at least partially) mutually exclusive ‘justices’ that can be achieved in relation to specific differences within the present. This possibility would not necessarily render the ethical pursuit of justice meaningless, but would locate it within the to-be-probed limits of a finite horizon of historical meanings. Now, of course, Derrida acknowledges that he cannot know that the promise of the justice-to-come will in fact be realized:
The messianic exposes itself to the absolute surprise and, even if it always takes the phenomenal form of peace or of justice, it ought, exposing itself so abstractly, be
20 Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. by Peggy Kamuf (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), xix, 28,55. 21 Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf, 140. 22 Michel Foucault and Noam Chomsky, “Human Nature: Justice vs. Power (1971): A Debate between Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault,” in The Chomsky-Foucault Debate: On Human Nature (New York: New Press, 2006), 47-50.
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prepared (waiting without awaiting itself) for the best as for the worst, the one never coming without opening the possibility of the other. At issue here is a ‘general structure of experience.’23
The crucial point, however, in relation to Žižek’s criticism, is that Derrida’s hesitation about the prospects of justice does not qualify the form of his practice, only the degree of certainty with which he knows that his acts are ethical. Hence, Derrida’s hesitant hope in the promise of a justice-to-come effectively involves, (again) in practice – insofar as he persists in this specific hope – a minimal, but problematically positive claim about difference: that acting so as to remain open to a future horizon of possibility substantially and adequately engages the specific, concrete differences of any given context. Derrida’s explicit appeal to a “general structure of experience” is critical here. It raises the objection: if looking to the ‘openness’ of this structure leaves one vulnerable not only to the possibility of justice but to “the worst” – and there is nothing to suggest that the former possibility is greater than the latter, Derrida must insist, if he is to avoid invocation of a “positive onto-ethics”24 – then, why look to this openness as the privileged locus of a possible justice? Derrida’s appeal to a general structure of experience tends to foreclose this question, by suggesting that this general structure is the matrix of our experience and thus of any possible justice. That is, Derrida makes an implicit claim that this general structure of experience is of general (i.e. decisive) significance for the content of experience as such and for the possible experience of justice in particular – a claim, which mirrors that concerning the putative general significance for critique of deconstruction and its ‘nonsynonyms.’ And the correlate of this claim to general significance is a privileging of a certain kind of difference – the difference most open to the future-to-come – in spite of the acknowledged radical ambiguities (for justice) of this difference as it is generated by Derrida’s ‘general structure of experience’ open to ‘the worst’ no less than to justice. 25 Messianicity thus depends upon a claim about the significance of a general structure of experience and a concomitant privileging of certain forms of difference, whose ambiguities can be embraced only on the basis of this
23 Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge”, 17-18. 24 Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf, 141. 25 One might well accept with Derrida that all (con)texts are conditioned by the differings, deferrings and slippages of différance or its ‘nonsynonymous substitutions’, without thereby accepting his further position that these constitute the decisive differences within that (con)text. This was a concern of Foucault’s, in The Archaeology of Knowledge, when he sought to delineate an “enunciative analysis” that “does not mark the line that encloses the domain [of language and linguistic analysis],” but is “deployed in another direction, which intersects them.” Without naming him, Foucault is clearly concerned to counter what he considers to be the tendency of Derrida’s work to inhibit other forms of critique, by generating a “transcendental obstacle,” via the latter’s notion that, because it cannot be overcome, the quasi-transcendental limit of language ought to be the primary object of critical discourse. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. by Alan Sheridan Smith (London: Routledge, 1972), 113.
48 FINITUDE AND VIOLENCE claim. However, precisely such claims would appear to be problematic from a position of immanence within a finite world. Certainly, if there is to be an ethics and a possibility of justice, some differences must bear a greater ethico- political significance than others. Otherwise, all acts upon difference would have an ethical and political equivalence. However, Derrida’s further general claims concerning experience and his claim that one can define a quasi-formal condition, which anticipates (formally, negatively) which differences are significant, would appear to exceed the limits of immanence. And thus his claim would involve a subtle onto-theological assumption and a trace of messianism, about the relation of difference and justice. The problem can be clarified by reference to Quentin Meillassoux’s framing of the problem of contemporary thought in After Finitude.26 Meillassoux, in that work, is concerned with the possibility of breaking out of what he takes to be the subjectivism of post-Kantian correlationism – the notion that knowledge of the world is always correlated to a knowing subject; that it is not knowledge of the world ‘in-itself’ but ‘for-us’. He wishes to do so, however, without re-invoking an absolutist (or ontotheological) horizon of thought. A crux of an early stage of his argument is the manner in which the correlationist undermines the claims of dogmatists, who would resurrect an absolute principle of knowledge beyond the knowing subject, and the claims of subjective idealists, who would make the correlation itself absolute, effectively asserting that the ‘in-itself’ is identical with the ‘for-us’. In each case, Meillassoux argues, the correlationist must proceed by asserting that the factical structures of our world could be wholly other than supposed by the dogmatist or subjective idealist. We are simply ignorant of them. Meillassoux’s proposal is that, in so doing, the correlationist implicitly makes a positive claim: the condition of possibility of his denials is that factical reality has the capacity to be wholly other and that this is independent of thinking this claim. It is this capacity to be wholly other which gives Meillassoux an absolute beyond correlationism that avoids the ontotheological absolutism of either the dogmatist or the idealist.27 Derrida is not concerned with the possibility of finding an absolute as is Meillassoux. However, his problematic is not entirely dissimilar. In Meillassoux’s terms, he asks how it is possible to break out of the subjectivism of post-Kantian thought, without revoking its critique of metaphysics; that is to say, how it is possible to conceptualize difference that is not merely a subjectively preferred difference, but effects justice or at least keeps open the possibility of justice. Moreover, arguably, there is a problem with Meillassoux’s line of reasoning, and to this extent, his work inadvertently points to the ontotheological temptation that threatens every immanent post-Kantian discourse. The weak point in Meillassoux’s argument concerns his claim that the ignorance appealed to by the correlationist presupposes the positive trans-
26 Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude, trans. by R. Brassier (New York and London: Continuum, 2009). 27 Ibid., 28ff.
J. MCSWEENEY 49 subjective principle that things have the capacity to be wholly other. For Meillassoux, it is only because things have this capacity, independently of thought, that the correlationist can make an argument from ignorance. The counterpoint to this argument, however, is that the correlationist cannot step outside the specific relation between his subjective thinking and the content of this thought: if knowledge of the world is always subjective, equally, his/her subjective thought is immanent to the specific content which he/she is thinking. As such, the correlationist can only appeal to ignorance in specific instances, without being able to generalize from these specific instances. Such generalization, as would permit formulation of Meillassoux’s positive principle, would require positing a subjective position outside of the correlation to establish a principle true beyond any of its instances. Such a problematic move can be avoided only if this generalization is construed as a further specific instance of thinking, subject to the same ignorance about its more general truth – a specific correlation whose content would be a principle in relation to specific instances of thought, but not capable of being generalized to all possible cases. While the correlationist might posit the positive principle of objects’ capacity to be wholly other, he cannot know that this principle holds beyond his current thinking of it in relation to a delimited number of specific instances. In this framework, the challenge for Derrida’s resolutely post-Kantian discourse, as for the correlationist, is that his thinking of difference must be specific and immanent to the specificity of his successive analyses. The attempt to generalize from the specific ‘nonsynonymous’ negations of each act of deconstruction, to a ‘principle’ that governs the movement of ethically- effective difference as such, reinscribes a metaphysically problematic horizon of thought, even if Derrida’s ‘principle’ appears negative and minimal. Or rather, Derrida can consistently posit such a principle only if it is immanent to a specific thinking of difference. As such, paradoxically, such a principle is valid within the horizon of the specific instance of thinking – whether a specific historical or political situation, or a specific abstraction from a range of such situations. And to retain this validity, it must remain subject to transformation in relation to the possible ‘otherness’ of further actual instances of difference. A case might be made that all of Derrida’s readings follow this principle: that his ‘(non)synonyms’ are irreducible to one another; in particular, that messianicity is not a general theory, but belongs to a certain moment in his thought. However, there is arguably a greater continuity to his approach, and, even if the notion of messianicity without messianism arises as a specific proposal at a specific moment, it or some form of it – as Žižek highlights – is necessary to maintaining the ethical coherence of deconstruction as such. And indeed, this analysis remains a key part of Derrida’s work from its formulation in the mid-1990s through to his death in 2004.28 Thus, in view of the
28 See, for example, Derrida, “For a Justice to Come: Interview with Jacques Derrida (by Lieven de Cauter, 2004),” in The Derrida-Habermas Reader, ed. by Lasse Thomassen (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 259-269.
50 FINITUDE AND VIOLENCE continuities in difference Derrida’s thought uncovers, his notion of messianicity without messianism tends to exceed the limits of the post-Kantian correlation.29 In sum, then, if Derrida laudably sets out to minimize the violence of act by acting so as to remain maximally open to difference,30 the price of this strategy is, ironically, to close off openness to other forms of difference and the politics that might be associated with them. Indeed, his messianicity tends to close off precisely those forms of difference that exceed any quasi-formal anticipatory ‘principle’: difference that in its ‘pure,’ irreducible difference ruptures any such principle in unexpected ways; difference that most fully would generate the “absolute surprise” to which messianicity ought to expose itself. Transposed to the level of politics, this foreclosure can be seen to be reflected in the idealist trace of what might be termed his ‘impossible liberalism.’ Thus, for instance, even if Derrida allows for no simple democratic and rational engagement of individuals, his politics remains inscribed within the im/possibilities of friendship: “O my friends, there is no friend”31 – a politics committed to the infinite, but specific, openness to difference inscribed within the im/possible promise of liberal democracy; to the idea that its rational discursive interrogation of differences (appropriately complicated by deconstruction) is the locus of any possible justice-to-come. In a world in which liberal democracy has been shown to be all too complicit with and dependent upon a global capitalism of radical structural inequalities, Žižek can argue with some force that a politics centered upon the possibilities and impossibilities of the relation with the democratic other can scarcely be sufficient. Indeed, he can argue that its subtle foreclosure of difference (albeit in the name of openness to difference) belongs to a specific and delimited politics which, in its privileging of a ‘liberal’ paradigm, does crucial violence to wider possibilities of politics and justice.32
Žižekian Self-Difference
Žižek’s appeal, in The Puppet and the Dwarf, to a Hegelian notion of the concrete self-difference of things is not only intended as an alternative to Derridean différance but as a self-criticism, relating to the very issues of violence raised by McQuillan. At this point in his work, Žižek recognizes the problematic nature of his own early conception of political act in terms of Lacan’s notion, elaborated in his famous Seminar VII, of the Real as a quasi-
29 At the very least, “messianicity without messianism” cannot both respect the limits imposed by immanence and serve as a source of justification for deconstruction as such. 30 Derrida’s commitment to deconstruction is undoubtedly shaped by that concern. 31 Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, trans. by George Collins (New York and London: Verso 1997), 1. 32 Also instructive in this regard are the contributions of Derrida and Jürgen Habermas to Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2003). Something of the specificity, strengths, and limits of Derrida’s politics are highlighted by their juxtaposition with those of Habermas, in their respective responses to the attacks of 9/11, published in this work.
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Kantian transcendental ‘Thing’, beyond and prior to the Symbolic order of socio-political signification.33 Although The Sublime Object of Ideology, in which this conception of the Real was first elaborated, itself served as a productive specific, intervention which challenged prevailing ‘postmodern’ social and critical theory to embrace a new, unexpected post-Lacanian horizon of thought, the politics of the transcendental Real, as a theory, proved rather more problematic. Any act which would bear upon this Real could only be “tragic”: either one ultimately succeeds in acting only within the Symbolic order, leaving the transcendental Real and its deep circumscription of socio-political possibilities unchanged (so that one’s acts are always already futile from the outset), or one succeeds in acting upon the Real, but at the cost of a radical destruction of the existing social order, realized in a radical annihilation of the self (Lacan’s passage à l’acte).34 Indeed, just two years earlier, Žižek had realized that Lacan’s model of such an act, Antigone, is insufficient to the uncompromising violence of such an act. Her sacrifice of her place within the Symbolic order is only apparent, because her treasonous burial of her brother remains at the service of, and inscribes her existence within, a deeper law of the gods. In her stead, Žižek proposes the figure of Medea, whose murder of her children, means that there can be no recuperation of her act of vengeance against her husband.35 Faced with this disturbing logic, Žižek would soon come to the conclusion that the construction of the Real as transcendental Thing is not only flawed but, in fact, may be a key element of capitalist ideology, misdirecting political acts toward an impossible capitalism as phantom Thing (and thus toward an impossible act), and away from actually existing capitalism and its rather more mundane vulnerabilities to change.36 Instead, Žižek turned to an immanent conception of the Real as the internal limit of the Symbolic, such that the “not-All” of the Symbolic order, the encounter with its aporias and limits, is an encounter with the Real that exceeds, conditions, and precedes it. And this encounter with the Symbolic- Real limit immanent to things is the encounter with their self-difference: with the excess of the thing over its signification, symbolized by the excess of the materiality of the letter over its signifying force.37 Act in turn is modeled on St. Paul’s notion of overcoming the Sisyphean cycle of law, transgression and guilt via naive identification with elements of the law, attending to the Symbolic- Real letter of the law, in order to expose and undermine the operation of its superego supplement, “the Law”, which would grant it pure Symbolic
33 Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. by Dennis Porter (New York and London: Routledge Classics, 2008), 51ff; Slavoj Žižek. The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York and London: Verso, 1989), 169- 73. 34 Slavoj Žižek and Glyn Daly, Conversations with Žižek (Cambridge: Polity, 2004), 150- 1, 165-6. 35 Slavoj Žižek, On Belief (New York and London: Verso, 2001), 158 n. 24. 36 Žižek and Daly, op. cit., 70 37Ibid., 59ff.
52 FINITUDE AND VIOLENCE coherence.38 In Žižek’s reading, Paul’s act mirrors the later Lacan’s notion of feminine subjectivation, in which woman identifies with elements of the Symbolic order, apart from the social-superego supplement that would constitute them as elements of a perfectly complete signifying system. By thus identifying with the Symbolic as a “not-All” traversed by multiple Symbolic- Real limits, the feminine subject exposes and undermines the operation of these superego injunctions.39 The crucial point for the current discussion is that Žižek thus conceives of act as fundamentally within the Symbolic order, but without support from it: its significance does not depend upon the Symbolic order (and it can be justified only retrospectively in terms of the new situation it brings about). By contrast, masculine subjectivation involves identification with one’s individual “little bit of the Real” left over from one’s castrating insertion within the Symbolic order, such that a subjective act must both be entangled with and be destructive of that order. Arguably, this complex relation increases the vulnerability of the masculine subject to the subtle inversions of ideological interpellation.40 Thus, unlike Derridean messianicity (as Žižek conceives it), the Pauline-feminine act pays attention to the concrete self-difference of things, placing faith in the liberatory force of identification with a given element of the Symbolic order and its specific Symbolic-Real difference. Two related issues arise for this account, however. First, if the Real is conceived as the internal limit of precisely a non-totalized, non-unified Symbolic order, a “not-All”, then, what assurance is there that the Real so encountered is not of merely ‘local’ significance? Žižek’s formulation cannot address the question of whether a universally significant act (and thus, for Žižek, a political act) remains possible if the notion of the not-All is taken seriously, that is, if there is only an assemblage of heterogeneous elements rather than a quasi-totality. Second, if the Real is only encountered immanently within the Symbolic order at its limits, what is there to suggest that there is a pre-Symbolic Real which exceeds the limited Symbolic structuring of being in our given society and corresponds with a fullness of being, which would support enhanced possibilities of human living? There might only be the Real as articulation of the dynamic, negative limit of the Symbolic order, and the prospect merely of substituting one deficient Symbolic order for another. This is the Žižekian equivalent of Derrida’s question concerning whether there exists an ultimate possibility of justice that justifies deconstructive practices.
38 Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf, 67-9, 93ff. Such identification might involve taking literally the core democratic law about the equality of all, say, in favor of a marginalized ethnic group, refusing the supplementary social superego injunctions which typically circumscribe this equality and interpret it so as to ‘square’ it with all sorts of inequalities. This taking literally would, in turn, provoke reactions which render those supplementary injunctions visible and thus undermine their power. 39 Ibid., 67. 40 An excellent elaboration of the ideological vulnerability of the masculine subject is provided in Jodi Dean, Žižek’s Politics (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), 1-46.
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Žižek’s attempted solution to these problems has been two-fold.41 First, already beginning from The Puppet and the Dwarf, he begins to grant consistency to his notion of an unsupported act upon immanent Symbolic-Real self-difference in terms of the immanent movement of Hegelian dialectics42 Hegel, he argues, is the thinker par excellence of self-difference because the notion of dialectics involves the idea of a self-difference that “is no longer the contradiction between the undeconstructible pure Otherness and its failed actualizations/determinations, but the thoroughly immanent contradiction which precedes any Otherness.”43 Dialectics does justice to such difference by thematising its own failure to articulate this self-difference, pointing to, but not determining that difference in its specificity, via the self-rupturing movement of dialectics. Hence, the act of Pauline-feminine identification with the Symbolic-Real self-difference of elements of the Symbolic order can be thought of as a moment of a Hegelian dialectical movement.44 This process culminates in the Hegelian parallactic ontology of The Parallax View, where the Pauline-feminine act has been displaced by Bartleby’s equally immanent “I would prefer not to” and this immanent act upon the Symbolic-Real limit is given a precise ontological significance and consistency.45 Second, aware that an immanently-conceived Hegelian dialectics is only politically significant if there is the possibility of a greater fullness of Being, which its ruptured syntheses bear upon, Žižek acknowledges in The Parallax View that one cannot know, from such an immanent vantage point, whether such a “pre-Symbolic X” exists.46 However, he argues that one must assume its existence as a kind of “methodological idealism” in order to support the possibility of a political act.47 It is not difficult to see that, with these solutions, Žižek ends up deploying precisely the kind of support for his arguments for which he criticizes Derrida. In the first instance, although Hegelian dialectics, as Žižek conceives it, does not determine the content of self-difference as such, it does define a minimal, negative quasi-formal condition of such self-difference:
41 The analysis that follows is all too schematic given the scope and complexity of Žižek’s oeuvre. However, I hope that it is sufficient to highlight parallels with Derrida’s approach to questions of difference and violence. 42 Note that Žižek’s appeal to self-difference over Derrida abstract difference-to-come is thus, from the outset, not a simple return to concrete difference in-itself. Note also that Žižek takes Hegel’s Absolute in his (Žižek’s) usual non-metaphysical sense of a knowledge which is universal insofar as it repeatedly incorporates exceptional difference as a permanent rupture of its systematizations: a “bone in the throat.” Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf., 66, 130-1, 139-141. 43 Ibid., 140. 44 It is not insignificant that he has suggested that, in his recent work, he has shifted from a Lacanian reading of Hegel, to a Hegelian reading (and contextualization) of Lacan. Žižek, “Slavoj Žižek: Interview (with Sean O’Hagan,)”, The Observer,
54 FINITUDE AND VIOLENCE decisive difference is that self-difference which can be inscribed within Hegelian dialectics – within its always already ‘failed’ discourse and concomitantly precise economy of disruption and disrupted synthesis. That is to say, if Žižek does not define the content of self-difference as such, he places a positive stricture upon it by defining in advance its relation to other instances of self-difference, inscribing its form minimally but positively. In Meillassoux’s terms, Žižek posits a principle which conditions all difference, beyond specific instances in which that principle might be thought. That this quasi-formal condition involves a limiting of difference can be briefly illustrated in relation to The Parallax View. As commentators such as Simon Critchley have argued, Bartleby’s “I would prefer not to” scarcely realizes Žižek’s characteristic concern with a decisive, universally significant political act.48 Žižek’s very effort to articulate the consistency and specific significance of the act tends to circumscribe its force. This is because to specify the significance of difference is already to relate it to ‘the Same’, and to circumscribe what Gilles Deleuze would term its “pure difference.” Bartleby’s peculiar negation might give no oxygen to the ideological notion of the Symbolic order as unified “big Other”, but Žižek’s formalization delimits the relation of difference to the Symbolic order of that negation, precisely as Derrida’s generalization of deconstruction turns its specific force into a limit upon difference. Indeed, shortly after this work, Žižek turns to the Benjaminian notion of a “divine violence”, attempting to isolate the possibility of a pure violence of act which is neither that of a transcendent divine being, nor a tragic-suicidal passage à l’acte, nor again of statist sovereign violence nor that of anarchism. That is, he explicit wants to juxtapose and identify divine violence with what is conceived once more as the unsupported act “made in absolute solitude, with no cover in the big Other.”49 The difficulty with this move is that, if it rescues the immanent political act from the circumscriptions of the ontology of The Parallax View, it requires the identification of the immanent act in faith with an act of pure violence capable of transcending the problematic violences with which the world is all too familiar. The immanent act of faith, however, as immanent, is inevitably blind both concerning its universal significance and concerning whether its potential effectiveness for change is supported by the existence the greater fullness of being of the pre-Symbolic Real. Hence, the ‘simple’ naive faith of identification with elements of the Symbolic as “not All” problematically gives way to a more substantial and split act of faith: faith that this unsupported act is a universally significant act; faith that such an immanent act can constitute a pure, world-changing violence. The structure of this claim is precisely that which he diagnoses in Derrida’s thinking concerning justice: Žižek acts in the hope that an immanent act upon/of self-difference can constitute an act of decisive political change leading to enhanced possibilities of human living. Insofar as he persists in this hope, without evidence to support it
48 Simon Critchley, “Foreword: Why Žižek Must Be Defended,” in Paul Bowman and Richard Stamp, eds., The Truth of Žižek (London and New York: Continuum, 2007), xiv-xvi. 49 Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (London: Profile Books, 2008), 170-1.
J. MCSWEENEY 55
(and as shall be seen such an act has proven always to come for Žižek), this claim becomes in practice, an ontotheological claim which privileges certain forms of difference. Moreover, at this point, Žižek’s thought would appear to be vulnerable to McQuillan’s criticisms. He allows for no framework, criteria or limits which would qualify the decisive political act. In view of Žižek’s immanent framework of thought, an act could be adjudged decisive for change by its success, and, then, by definition, only from the perspective of the new situation which that act had succeeding in bringing about. Žižek, however, is too rigorous a political thinker to allow such an identification of immanent act and divine violence to be made too readily in practice. Hence, although he identifies historical acts that have constituted acts of divine violence,50 he has not identified any contemporarily occurring act or event as fulfilling these conditions. Instead, in a further mirroring of Derrida, divine violence remains a possibility that is always in practice to come. No less than in the case of Derrida, this is not simply a matter, for Žižek, of deferral of action but of an ethos governed by Samuel Beckett’s injunction to “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”51 The pure act of violence ‘to come’ becomes a means of critiquing actual acts in the present, ethically pushing them toward greater purity without ever allowing for simple valorizations of actions. As in relation to justice-to- come, divine violence ‘to come’ serves as an impossible horizon of act, which even if it cannot be attained, both locates acts within an absolutely demanding ethical horizon and underscores the responsibility to act in spite of impossibility. It is in this context that Žižek’s appeal to Robespierre’s terror ought to be read. Žižek is primarily concerned to provoke us into thinking about political acts beyond our usual, often ideologically-limited, horizons of thought. Against postmodern equivocations and poststructuralist appeals to impossibility, he is determined to confront us with possibilities of political action which no longer seem possible or desirable to us, and, indeed, may no longer be possible or desirable. However, by confronting us with radically ‘other’ possibilities (and even as he confronts us with the vista of a violent politics, he does not suggest that we naively adopt Robespierre’s viewpoint),52 he seeks to refuse any presuppositions about politics which might become a limiting transcendental condition of political possibility. As much as anything, in this analysis, Žižek confronts us with the specificity and limits of a politics which would minimize violence, by positing its ‘Other’. By pushing thought repeatedly into other spaces, he goes beyond the limit of Derrida’s messianicity, which even if it supposes “no differance without alterity, no alterity without singularity” tends to circumscribe alterity and singularity within the logic and economy of the future-to-come.53 Or, at least, he does so with respect to
50 Ibid. 51 Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes (New York and London: Verso, 2008), 210. 52 Žižek, “Robespierre, or, The ‘Divine Violence’ of Terror,” ix. 53 Derrida, Specters of Marx, 31. Žižek calls for a Derridean recognition of the violence of deconstruction: the violence necessary to make visible that “supreme” socio-symbolic
56 FINITUDE AND VIOLENCE
Derrida’s thought and, more broadly, postmodern discourse. No less than Derrida, his own efforts in offering a general description of political act as such retains, as has been seen, an ontotheological trace and a corresponding, problematic privileging of what in itself is ambiguous difference. As such, although he performs a different mode of openness to difference, finally, Žižek ends up repeating a form of that which he finds problematic in Derrida’s work.
Conclusion: The Problem of Finitude
The preceding analysis suggests that Žižek’s work, no less than Derrida’s, runs up against a ‘problem of finitude,’ that is, the problem of constructing a consistently immanent (political) discourse within and respecting the limits of a finite horizon of thought. Each seeks to delimit the kinds of act that attend to the self-difference of things so as to remain open to the possibility of justice (Derrida)/decisive political change (Žižek). In so doing, however, each, as it were, short-circuits the ambiguities of finite difference, delineating negatively and formally a privileged locus of justice/change, supported by minimal but decisive ontotheological assumptions. Derrida appeals to a ‘faith’, not simply in the possibility of justice, but in the decisive significance for the content of experience of a certain structure of experience, which allows one to privilege openness to an otherwise radically ambiguous future – a future open to ‘the worst’ no less than the possibility of justice. Žižek, in turn, appeals to ‘faith’ that the unsupported act of a certain Hegelian self-difference has both universal significance and signifies decisive change, even if by definition an unsupported act of ambiguous significance within a finite world. If Derrida is concerned to minimize violence, the price of his ontotheological appeal is action in the present that must exclude difference that cannot be incorporated within his structure of openness to the future-to-come; if Žižek seeks to purify violence, the price is an apparently infinite deferral of act (the “big Act” is always to come) as he awaits the miraculous occurrence of the immanent act which will have proven to be an act of such pure divine violence. The price for politics is, thus, either an excessively narrowly delimited political act (Derrida) or an excessively fetishized and deferred political act (Žižek). The contours of this shared problem of finitude suggests a return to Žižek’s call for a deconstruction of deconstruction capable of fundamentally specifying, delimiting and rupturing deconstruction, not so as to discredit it, but to clarify its specificity of object, scope, and force, thus contextualizing it and making room for ‘other’ difference and other forms of politics. Equally suggested is a stronger form of Žižek’s Beckettian ethics of failure which violence that is “no longer experienced as violence, since it determines the ‘specific colour’ of the very horizon within which something is perceived as violence.” Slavoj Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays On Woman and Causality (New York and London: Verso, 1995), 204) However, he considers Derridean deconstruction to remain contaminated by that which it would contest, and so it fails to attain to ‘divine violence’ or to fully grasp the latter’s economy and logic.
J. MCSWEENEY 57 would be capable not merely of preparing to ‘fail again, fail better’ (and thus tracing a locus ever impossibly-distant from its asymptotic goal), but of recognizing successful change, however, partial and ambiguous, in such failure – in the absence of a “big Act”. That is to say, if politics in a finite world cannot (and ought not) avoid determinate articulations such as those found in the work of Derrida and Žižek, there is a need to locate determinate formulations of political act as moment of a finite practice, which resists the raising of strategic privileging of certain forms of difference, in particular contexts, to the level of general ontology – a move which attempts to circumscribe the ambiguities of finite difference that is unconditioned by any ontotheological finality. As such, for instance, the “big Act” becomes a purely political imperative, a kind of heuristic within which to think and remain committed to political act in its (desired) maximal realization as radical change. Here, however, the recognition of change in (partial) ‘failure’ would constitute a refusal to fetishize “big Act” as some impossible ‘Thing’/horizon of a subsequently static world. In other words, in the case of both Derrida and Žižek, it is a matter of restoring to the notions of justice-to-come/big-Act-to- come the status of practical efforts to theorize immanently in order to act immanently – practical efforts which must be renewed, recommenced and become ‘other’, as acts induce significant (if not decisive) change and, at least partially, ‘other’ unanticipated contexts and differences are encountered. Unless ontotheological privilege is stripped from these notions, in the place of a justice-to-come or radical political transformation, the very efforts at justice or transformation will inadvertently be the source of a certain violence of the Same.
Independent Researcher, Cork, Ireland
References
Borradori, Giovanna, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003). Critchley, Simon, “Foreword: Why Žižek Must Be Defended,” in The Truth of Žižek, ed. by Paul Bowman and Richard Stamp (London and New York: Continuum, 2007), xi-xvi.. Dean, Jodi, Žižek’s Politics (New York and London: Routledge 2006). Derrida, Jacques, “Différance,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. by Alan Bass. (Harvester Press: Brighton, 1982), 1-27. ______, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. by Peggy Kamuf (New York and London: Routledge, 1994). ______, The Politics of Friendship, trans. by George Collins (New York and London: Verso, 1997). ______, “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone,” in Religion, ed. by Jacques Derrida and
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Gianni Vattimo, trans. by David Webb (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), 1-78. ______, “For a Justice to Come: Interview with Jacques Derrida (by Lieven de Cauter, 2004),” in The Derrida-Habermas Reader, ed. by Lasse Thomassen (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 259-269. Foucault, Michel, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. by Alan Sheridan Smith (London: Routledge, 1972). Foucault, Michel, and Chomsky, Noam, “Human Nature: Justice vs. Power (1971): A Debate between Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault,” in The Chomsky-Foucault Debate: On Human Nature (New York: New Press, 2006), 1-67. Lacan, Jacques, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. by Dennis Porter (New York and London: Routledge Classics, 2008). McQuillan, Martin, “Extra time and the death penalties: on a newly arisen violent tone in philosophy,” in Derrida Today, 2:2 (2009), 133-150. Meillassoux, Quentin, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. by Ray Brassier (London and New York: Continuum, 2008). Žižek, Slavoj, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York and London: Verso, 1989). ______, The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays On Woman and Causality (New York and London: Verso, 1995). ______, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London: MIT Press, 2003). ______, On Belief (New York and London: Verso, 2001). ______, “The Real of Sexual Difference,” in Interrogating the Real, ed. by Rex Butler and Scott Stephens (New York and London: Continuum, 2005), 304-27. ______, The Parallax View (Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London: MIT Press, 2006). ______, “Introduction: Robespierre, or, The ‘Divine Violence’ of Terror”, in Robespiere, Maximilien, Virtue and Terror, ed. by Jean Ducange, trans. by John Howe (New York and Lonodn: Verso, 2007), vii-xxxix. ______, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (London: Profile Books, 2008). ______, In Defence of Lost Causes (New York and London: Verso, 2008). ______, “Slavoj Žižek: Interview (with Sean O’Hagan,)”, in The Observer,
KRITIKE VOLUME FIVE NUMBER TWO (DECEMBER 2011) 59-67
Article
The Victory of the Proletariat is Inevitable: The Millenarian Nature of Marxism
David T. Byrne
Abstract: This essay shows how Marxism, despite its atheist pretensions, was influenced by Scripture, particularly the Millenarian concept presented in the Book of Revelation. Marx’s metaphysics described the world as a titanic struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. He predicts this struggle between good and evil will end in the triumph of the righteous, leading to future paradise when humanity returns to its pristine state. Marx contended it was his study of history and ultimately his discovery of the universal laws of economics that allowed him to predict the course of humanity, but I argue Marx’s real source is not history or science, but Scripture. Before demonstrating Marx's Millenarianism, this essay begins with an overview of the idea and describes how the concept was popular among German intellectuals in Nineteenth Century.
Key words: Marx, Marxism, Millenarianism, scriptures
It is, therefore, the task of history, once the other-world of truth has vanished, to establish the truth of this world. It is the immediate task of philosophy, which is in the service of history, to unmask self-estrangement in its unholy forms once the holy form of human self-estrangement has been unmasked. Thus, the criticism of Heaven turns into the criticism of Earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law, and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics. – K. Marx1
G. Collingwood contends, ‘Any history written on Christian principles will be of necessity universal, providential, apocalyptic and R.periodized.’2 Marxism could hardly be described more aptly. Guided by the materialist and universal laws of history, Marx’s sequential notion of history climaxes with the confrontation between the bourgeoisie and proletariat. This recognition that the atheist Marx’s thinking resembled
1 Karl Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, cited in The Marx- Engels Reader, edited by Robert Tucker (New York: Princeton University Press, 1978), 54. 2 R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946), 49.
© 2011 David T. Byrne http://www.kritike.org/journal/issue_10/byrne_december2011.pdf ISSN 1908-7330
60 THE VICTORY OF THE PROLETARIAT traditional religious notions is not news.3 With its Manichean view of the world, its belief in a return to paradise for humanity, its prophets who spread the good word and its sacred collection of texts, Marxism shares distinctive features with major religions. I do not intend to reinvent the wheel by interpreting Marxism as eschatology. My goal is more narrow and specific. I want to show how Marx was influenced by a particular theological notion, millenarianism. This allows us to understand Marx’s prophesy without having to rely on its seemingly faulty “scientific” nature. Specialists agree that the Book of Revelation from which the millenarian concept largely (although not completely) arises dates from the second half of the first century when Christianity was in its infancy and struggling against the Roman yoke, so Revelation gave Christians reason for hope and optimism, even in the times of deepest despair, because it promised victory for the righteous after intense conflict. It is the most sequential book in the Bible. Stages are not only implicit in millenarian thought -- clearly, this is not an age of heaven on earth -- they are explicit throughout the book. Most chapters in the Book of Revelations begin with the word ‘then,’ suggesting that the historical development occurs in distinct periods. Each pre-ordained event leads to another pre-ordained event:
Then I saw a beast come out of the sea with ten horns and seven heads…Then I saw another beast come out of the earth; it had two horns like a lamb’s but spoke like a dragon…then I looked and there was a lamb standing on Mt. Zion and with him one hundred and forty-four thousand who had his and his father’s name written on their foreheads…Then I saw another angel flying high overhead…Then I looked and there was a white cloud, and sitting on the cloud one who looked like the son of man with a gold crown on his head and a sharp sickle in his hand…Then I saw in heaven another sign, great and awe-inspiring: seven angels with seven last plagues, for through them God’s fury is accomplished.4
The arrival of the Millennium follows a period of titanic struggle between good and evil which occurs in clearly delineated historical events or stages, meaning there is a laundry list of historical events which must be completed before the New Ages arrives. Contrary to popular assumptions, the Millennium is not a final end, but rather a one-thousand year respite. After the thousand years, Satan is released from the bottomless pit. He will gather the
3 For more extensive discussion of Marxism’s relationship with religion, see Catherine R. Harris, Karl Marx: Socialism as Secular Theology (St. Louis, Mo: Warren H. Green, 1988); or Giulio Girardi, Marxism & Christianity, trans. by Kevin Traynor (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1968); or Robert G. Wesson, Why Marxism? (New York: Basic Books, 1976). 4 Rev. 13-15
D. BYRNE 61 peoples of the world for one more battle before finally being defeated during the Apocalypse, inaugurating a final era in history:
Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth. The former heaven and the former earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. I also saw the holy city, a new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘Behold, God’s dwelling is with the human race. He will dwell with them and they will be his people and God himself will always be with them [as their God]. He will wipe every tear from their eyes, and there shall be no more death or mourning, wailing or pain, [for] the old order has disappeared.5
Despite the sinful nature of man and the wretched nature of this world, Christians still have reason to be optimistic about the future. Pain and misery disappear as man returns to his pristine state. Struggle and conflict yield progress and paradise. This is the end of history.
Millenarianism in Nineteenth Century Germany
German intellectuals genuinely believed that the Kingdom of God was imminent.6 The French Revolution seemed to be the apocalyptic event that would usher in a new and better world, but its devolution into terror, war and horror meant it could no longer be seen as an apocalyptic event in which the French radicals were on the side of light. In Germany particularly, Napoleon became the anti-Christ who the Germans must destroy in to fulfill millenarian prophecy. Only by defeating the French emperor and revolting against his oppression can Germany achieve its national destiny, marking a new era in history. Deeply influenced by these events, G.W.F. Hegel’s philosophy interprets history as struggle, progress and ultimately, resolution. His biographers still debate his precise relationship with religion, but one can fairly say that although he rejected some central Christian premises, he was by no means a secular philosopher. He wrote to Fredrich Schelling, “May the Kingdom of God come and our hands not remain idle.”7 No longer could humanity wait for the millennium; creating a new world requires human activity. The Hegelian Idealist dialect, in fact, rejects the materialism of the French Enlightenment while continuing the millenarian tradition of conflict and progress: Hegel stressed ideas, specifically the conflict between ideas, as a means for progress. The history of the world is a struggle between thesis and
5 Rev. 21: 1-4. 6 See Nicholas Lobkowicz, Theory and Practice (South Bend, IN: Notre Dame Press, 1967) for more information on German millenarianism. 7 Ibid., 160.
62 THE VICTORY OF THE PROLETARIAT antithesis. Hegel’s philosophy of history includes the Oriental, Greek, Roman and Germanic stages, so in essence, his dialectical method fuses Kant’s Idealist and dualist metaphysics with Biblical notions of history, stages and prophecy. The Bible provided Hegel with a way to explain causation while integrating periodized history since history is only the battle between ideas. Hegel’s dialectal philosophy combined the notion of struggle with a periodical concept of history that concludes with mind or spirit achieving freedom. Hegel proclaims an “end of history.” Finally, it should be noted that thesis and anti- thesis are not necessarily as distinct as they may seem to be since thesis ultimately begets antithesis; the master creates the slave. Of course, Satan is nothing more than a fallen angel. He has not always been distinct, rather he emerged from God and heaven.
Millenarianism in Marx
Does Marx turns Hegel on his head, or more precisely, does he turn Biblical prophecy on its head? For Marx and his successors, the dialectical process -- the key to understanding reality -- is simply a life-and-death struggle, not between immaterial angels and demons, or between thesis and antithesis, but between classes. Hegel’s dialectic asserts two contrasting concepts vying for supremacy, yet Marx asserts the inherent darkness and light of these concepts, or classes, so Marx turns Hegel’s dialectic into a staunch Manichean philosophy, only deepening his debt to theology. Marx’s prediction of violent political cataclysm is more in accord with Biblical prophecy than Hegel who in light of the French Revolution refrained from predicting earthly Armageddon. Marx was bolder. A generation removed from 1793-1815, Marx had no first- hand experience with the political upheavals of that era, allowing him to more freely preach violence, destruction and revolution to the modern world. Revolutionary political ideas distinguish Young Hegelians like Marx because in contrast to their Idealist master, the Young Hegelians not only treat history materialistically, they view drew political consequences from Hegel’s thought. Although Das Capital is Marx’s magnus opus, the Communist Manifesto presents the clearest sketch of his philosophy of history. Written in the midst of the 1848 revolutions as chaos and violence envelope Europe in 1848, Marx predicts the dawning of the New Age, but only after good and evil confront each other. The history of the world is the history of two classes in conflict:
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a
D. BYRNE 63
revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.8
Every era, every epoch is defined by these inherently antagonist, dueling forces. All history can be reduced to a battle of good versus evil, and there can only be one winner. Thus far, all history has been the victory of the ruling or oppressing classes. Like the fall of man, sin and misery characterize the past and present world:
Within the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productiveness of labour are brought about at the cost of the individual labourer; all means for the development of production transform themselves into the means of domination over and exploitation of, the producers; they mutilate the labourer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of an appendage of the machine, destroy every remnant of charm in his work and turn it into a hated toil…”9
Whether it be the ancient, classical, feudal or modern epoch, evil prevails. The bourgeoisie, argues Marx, has created a world where ‘naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation’ reigns.10 Marx continues, ‘Not only are they [the workers] the slaves of the bourgeoisie class, and of the bourgeoisie state, they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the over-looker, and above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself…’11 The material machine and capitalist becomes the instrument of exploitation, oppression and slavery; the bourgeoisie replaces Satan and his minions who previously caused all sin and misery in the Middle Ages. Yet there is reason for hope and optimism because the capitalism system is inherently self-destructive. Believing themselves to be strong, the ruling classes are fundamentally weak. Latent contradictions will ultimately bring down the entire system. Competition between capitalists leads to the creation of monopolies that dominate the market, pushing the less successful capitalist to the rank of worker. As their numbers swell, class consciousness emerges. But the naïve capitalist works the proletariat even harder which only leads to more worker misery, and even more significantly, depressed wages. Then demand for products drops since wealth has become so concentrated in the hands of a tiny few. This leads to the crisis of over-production which Marx describes in apocalyptic terms:
8 Karl Marx, ‘The Communist Manifesto,’ in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. by Robert Tucker (New York: Norton & Co, 1978) 473-474. 9 Ibid., 479. 10 Ibid., 475. 11 Ibid., 479.
64 THE VICTORY OF THE PROLETARIAT
In these crises there breaks there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epics, would have seemed an absurdity – the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if famine, a universal war of devastation had cut had cut off the supply of every means of substance; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed.12
Unemployment reaches epidemic proportions. Riots and violence grow worse. The capitalist, fully consumed with profits, fails to recognize that his bourgeoisie world is crumbling, and that he has forged the weapons that will destroy him. In his quest to crush everyone and everything in search of more capital, those who control the modes of production have merely driven the rest of society to abject poverty. Monopolies increase as large businesses take over small businesses, but since there is virtually no one left to buy their products, the crisis of over-production ensues. Then they dump their excess products on lesser developed nations, fostering industry and capitalism in these places. This leads to wars and more violence among capitalists and capitalist nations before the system’s final disintegration. This collapse of the capitalism is highly periodized:
The proletariat goes through various stages of development. With its birth begins its struggle with the bourgeoisie. At first the contest is carried on by individual labourers, then by the workpeople of a factory, then by the operative of one trade, in one locality, against the individual bourgeois who directly exploits them. They direct their attacks not against the bourgeois conditions of production, but against the instruments of production themselves; they destroy imported wares that compete with their labour, they smash to pieces machinery, they set factories ablaze, they seek to restore by force the vanished status of the workman of the Middle Age.13
After these stages of development, the proletariat is ready to seize power:
Finally, in times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour, the progress of dissolution going on within the ruling class, in fact within the whole range of old society, assumes such a violent, glaring character, that a small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift, and joins the
12 Ibid., 478. 13 Ibid., 480.
D. BYRNE 65
revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its hands.14
Or as Marx writes in the preface to the Critique of Political Economy:
At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or -- this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms -- with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces, these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution.15
Following intense conflict and revolution, capitalism is swept away as the worker crushes the capitalist order, takes control of the modes of production and ushers in a new era in human history called socialism. The future belongs to the oppressed proletariat. The meek will inherit the earth. Yet there is still work to be done. The defeat of the bourgeoisie and the advent of socialism does not mark an end of history, but rather marks a new stage in history, specifically the socialist stage when vestiges of the old world fade away before the glorious new age of communism arrives. In practice, this means new ways of thinking, working and living. The socialist stage lays the social and intellectual groundwork for the final glorious phase of human history. It prepares humanity for the end of history, the last stage of human society, communism. The communist world bears no resemblance to the sin-ridden capitalist world because it is void of private property. It creates true human freedom as the two disparate worlds -- one which until now is merely an Ideal realm—become united:
Communism as the positive transcendence of private property as human self-estrangement, and therefore as the real appropriation of the human essence by and for man; communism therefore as the complete return of man to himself as a social (i.e., human) being – a return accomplished consciously and embracing the entire wealth of previous development. This communism, as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism equals naturalism; it is the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature and between man and man – the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence, between objectification
14 Ibid., 481. 15 Karl Marx, Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Moscow: Progess Publishers, 1977).
66 THE VICTORY OF THE PROLETARIAT
and self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species. Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution.16
Communism is a return to the initial state of man, before his association with classes, private property and misery. Paradise lost becomes paradise regained: "In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonism, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all."17 True freedom and happiness arrive not when an immaterial God’s Kingdom comes to Earth, but rather when all class distinctions vanish. S Using Biblical prophecy to understand Marxism explains one of Marx’s most famous paradoxes: if the victory of the proletariat is predetermined by history, why must revolutionaries -- including Marx himself - - so vigorously promote socialism? Marx’s universal law of economics seemingly proves that societies evolve through stages of development on their own, irrespective of human consciousness and activity, just as Medieval Man helplessly awaited the dawning of a New Age. However, although Marxism is metaphysically based on religious tradition, politically, Marx is a product of the modern era, a time when human activity supercedes God’s will. The modern Marx is simply applying ancient and medieval concepts to his world, creating tension because the two worlds are not completely reconcilable. The Renaissance marks the beginning of liberation from religious concepts by stressing human significance, agency and freedom in the world. Whereas God dominated medieval history, human protagonists dominate modern history. Creating a world where human beings have no agency runs counter to modern thinking. Metaphysically, Marx comes from a historical era where events are explained by collisions between angels and demons, but politically, Marxism is a modern work, when human beings orchestrate historical events
Conclusion
Contrary to what Marx believed, there are never any complete breaks in history. The decline of religion and the rise of science among intellectuals in the eighteenth century did not mark an end to the questions that have plagued humanity for several thousand years, such as why is there pain and misery in the world, or how do we make it better? Marx’s explanations for these questions and his prophecies are usually attributed to his ‘discovery’ of the materialistic laws of history; by observing past ages in history, Marx gained insight into the universal laws of economics and class struggle, allowing him to explain misery and predict the pristine future of society and humankind. He
16 Karl Marx, ‘Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844,’ in The Marx-Engels Reader, 84. 17 Karl Marx, ‘The Communist Manifesto,’ in The Marx-Engels Reader, 491.
D. BYRNE 67 genuinely believed that he, like Newton, had discovered universal, scientific laws that allowed his disciples the ability to accurately understand earthly events and even make predictions about the future, just as Newtonian mechanics allowed for predictions about earthly and heavenly bodies.18 I have tried to show that Biblical prophecy played an equally important role in Marx’s thinking about the past, present and future. Marx does not overthrow traditionally patterns of thinking. He merely uses more modern (specifically scientific) nomenclature. The Book of Revelation and its millenarianism provide Marx with a method that integrates history, struggle and ultimately the triumph of good over evil.
Department of History, Loyola Marymount University, United States of America
References
Collingwood, R.G., The Idea of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946). Girardi, Giulio, Marxism & Christianity, trans. by Kevin Traynor (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1968). Harris, Catherine R., Karl Marx: Socialism as Secular Theology (St. Louis, Mo: Warren H. Green, 1988). Lobkowicz, Nicholas, Theory and Practice (South Bend, IN: Notre Dame Press, 1967). ______, ‘The Communist Manifesto,’ in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. by Robert Tucker (New York: Norton & Co, 1978). ______, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, cited in The Marx-Engels Reader, edited by Robert Tucker (New York: Princeton University Press, 1978). ______, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Moscow: Progess Publishers, 1977). Puledda, Salvatore, On Being Human (San Diego: Latitude Press, 1997). Wesson, Robert G., Why Marxism? (New York: Basic Books, 1976).
18 For a humanist interpretation of Marxism, see Salvatore Puledda, On Being Human (San Diego: Latitude Press, 1997).
KRITIKE VOLUME FIVE NUMBER TWO (DECEMBER 2011) 68-83
Article
Leaving the Stag Hunt: The Conservative Denial of Collective Action Problems
Robert J. Lacey
Abstract: I argue in this essay that today’s conservatives have proven themselves radical—i.e., completely out of step with the history of western political thought—in their refusal to acknowledge the existence of collective action problems and the role government must often play to solve them.
Key words: Financial crisis, Obama, US economy, collective action
I
ominique Strauss-Kahn, the scandal-ridden former director of the International Monetary Fund, tells a revealing story in the Oscar- D winning documentary Inside Job about a dinner party hosted in the fall of 2008 by then-Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson. In attendance were a number of officials and CEOs from the biggest financial institutions in the US, and the financial crisis was the obvious topic of conversation. In a staggering moment of honesty, perhaps inspired by sheer panic, all of these men admitted that they were in part responsible for the crisis. Then, according to Strauss-Kahn, they turned to Paulson and said, “You should regulate more because we’re all too greedy; we can’t avoid it. The only way to avoid this is to have more regulation.”1 Over a year after the initial fears of widespread financial implosion had subsided, President Obama tried to make good on the suggestion made at Paulson’s dinner party. As expected, Obama faced hostility from Wall Street and the Republicans when he championed and eventually passed the Consumer Financial Protection Act in 2010. But, in that unguarded moment at Paulson’s party, the bank officials revealed not only their own culpability for the crisis but also their understanding of the system that allowed—even encouraged— their reckless behavior. A return to regulation, they conceded, was the only way to prevent banks and other institutions from acting in a way that was immensely profitable in the short term, but disastrous for the financial system as a whole.
1 Charles Ferguson, Inside Job (Sony Pictures Classics, 2010).
© 2011 Robert J. Lacey http://www.kritike.org/journal/issue_10/lacey_december2011.pdf ISSN 1908-7330
R. LACEY 69
Viewers of Inside Job learn that deregulation led to the development of securitization, a system that allows lenders to sell trillions of dollars in mortgages and other loans to investors willing to buy them. Investment banks are the middlemen who facilitate this process, combining thousands of loans to create complex derivatives called collaterized debt obligations (CDOs) and then selling them to investors around the world. As Barney Frank explains in the film, the problem with securitization is that “the people who make the loan are no longer at risk if there is a failure to repay.”2 Because lenders did not bear the risk, they no longer had the incentive to be cautious. After all, if borrowers failed to make their payments on time and defaulted on their mortgages, the investors who purchased the loan were the ones stuck with the loss. Knowing that they could immediately sell loans to investors, lenders no longer cared whether a borrower could repay and had an incentive to make as many loans as possible, no matter how risky they may have been. The investment banks, whose profits were based on the number of CDOs they sold, had the same perverse incentive. Quantity had replaced quality in the real estate loan industry. The tragedy of securitization is that it allowed lenders and investment banks to transfer risk to woefully uninformed investors. Of course, if the market had been working, investment banks would not have been able to sell CDOs so easily. Knowing that these complex bundles of risky loans were bad investments, most investors would have steered clear of them. But investors didn’t know, thanks to an unchecked conflict of interest. The rating agencies, paid by the investment banks, gave CDOs the highest investment grades, including even AAA ratings. The securitization food chain—linking borrowers, lenders, bankers, credit agencies, and investors—was infected with the blight of misinformation. Now we all know that the crash was inevitable because the entire system rested on a fatal conceit—that real estate would forever increase in value and thus was a safe bet for everyone involved, including both borrowers who were encouraged to take out sub-prime mortgages and investors who bought those mortgages in large bundles. In September 2008, the conceit was exposed as mass delusion when the economic bubble burst and nearly brought about the second Great Depression. The take-away for viewers of the film is clear: the absence of government regulation or oversight of some kind made this crisis possible, if not inevitable. Despite its well-deserved accolades for explaining the causes of the recent financial crisis, Inside Job sometimes fails to inform and educate, particularly when it draws viewers’ attention away from the systemic causes of the crisis and toward the mischief of individuals on Wall Street. Perhaps the most unfortunate distraction is the title of the film, which suggests organized criminality and conspiracy. Inside Job might be an appropriate title for a Michael Moore documentary, but the main virtue of this film, directed by Charles Ferguson, was its deft framing of the financial crisis as a systemic problem
2 Ibid.
70 LEAVING THE STAG HUNT caused by deregulation. The film is at its best when it shows that the crisis is the result of what social scientists call a collective action problem. A collective action problem can be defined as a situation where individually rational behavior yields collectively irrational (less than optimal) outcomes. Political and social theorists have long recognized the tension between individual freedom and the general welfare. A society composed of individuals serving only their own interests, even if doing so within the law and without directly violating the rights of others, can produce general results from which everyone suffers. The many actors involved in the crisis—including borrowers, lenders, and bankers—were not villains pulling an “inside job” on the financial system; they were rational individuals who clearly saw the incentive structure before them and followed their own interests accordingly. The result of their individually rational behavior was a collective disaster. It is hardly an exaggeration to suggest that the conflict between conservatives and liberals in America today arises in large part from their opposing views about collective action problems. Conservatives generally see a natural agreement between private and general interests to which government poses the gravest threat. In short, they believe that government is the cause of collective action problems. Liberals, on the other hand, find that government often represents the best chance at a solution to many collective action problems. The reason for this divergence is that conservatives only recognize a unique kind of collective action problem called moral hazard. Moral hazard is the idea that individuals will behave more recklessly or wastefully when given some kind of insurance that covers the costs. Broadly construed, insurance can be understood as any form of protection or coverage that alters a person’s behavior. For example, it has often been asserted, though never substantiated, that Volvo drivers are more likely to get in accidents. It may be the case that driving a Volvo, by reputation the safest and sturdiest car on the road, is a kind of insurance that creates a moral hazard, giving people a sense of security that makes them more careless behind the wheel. (But it’s also possible that self-selection would explain such a finding—that is, people who buy Volvos are worse drivers.) Supporters of the Tea Party have invoked moral hazard in their opposition to the bank bailout in late 2008: knowing that the US government is there to help them should anything go wrong, the big financial institutions will continue to make the kinds of risky investments that led to the financial crisis in the first place.3 The strong likelihood of another government bailout can be seen as a form of insurance that will encourage further reckless behavior on Wall Street.
3 Tea Party darling Michele Bachmann wrote the following about the bank bailout: “The moral hazard this bill creates will ripple through the entire financial marketplace. Providing banks with a bailout guarantee will perpetuate a cycle of irresponsibility, shielding creditors from taking the fall for making risky decisions and forcing taxpayers to ante up again and again.” See Michele Bachmann, “Giving More Power Where Power Is Not Due,” in the Star Tribune (10 December 2009),
R. LACEY 71
In general, conservatives are quick to identify moral hazards created by government. They oppose a single-payer health care system, for example, because they believe it will encourage the frivolous use of health care services and drive up costs. Even though a surfeit of evidence shows that moral hazard is not a major cause of rising health care costs and that single-payer and other kinds of universal health care systems are actually more efficient, conservatives insist on seeing the issue through this particular lens. In their view, it just has to be the case that when government intervenes to make a service free or affordable, people will start using it far more frequently. Meanwhile, the facts support what common sense tells us: receiving health care is so onerous to most people that, even if told the visits will be free, they won’t start running to the doctor every time they get a sniffle.4 Empirical evidence notwithstanding, it should not come as a surprise when conservatives refuse to remove their moral hazard lens. Their opposition to big and intrusive government in the area of social policy has been informed by moral hazard for quite some time. As they see it, moral hazard can explain why people receiving any kind of government benefit—such as unemployment insurance, food stamps, or welfare—might be less motivated to return to the workforce and contribute fully to the free market economy. By ensuring that individuals will not suffer the consequences of their actions, the generous welfare state gives them the incentive to remain careless and lazy. The conservative critique is not completely devoid of merit. In the wake of the Great Society the welfare state had undoubtedly produced perverse incentives that discouraged work. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, though hardly an unmitigated success, was an attempt to reinvigorate the incentive to work among welfare recipients. For more than two decades, liberals have been mindful of the conservative concern about government-sponsored moral hazard. Lest we forget, it was a moderately liberal Democrat by the name of Bill Clinton who promised welfare reform during his presidential campaign and got it passed by the end of his first term. The problem is that conservatives see moral hazard in every government activity related to social and economic policy. They simply refuse to discriminate between programs that work and those that do not. Because conservatives believe government almost always harms the general welfare, they propose reducing its size as much as possible, slashing and cutting with extreme prejudice. But, as President Obama has said in recent months, a more sensible course of action for lawmakers with concerns about wasteful spending is not to butcher government with a machete, but to operate on it with a scalpel. Liberals have a more balanced view of government intervention because they are also concerned with a type of collective action problem that conservatives completely ignore: problems of cooperation. As political
4 See Malcolm Gladwell, “The Moral-Hazard Myth,” in The New Yorker (29 October 2005), < http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/08/29/050829fa_fact>.
72 LEAVING THE STAG HUNT thinkers in the Western tradition have understood for many centuries, collective action problems often arise when government is nowhere to be seen, allowing free and rational individuals to act in ways that, though not directly harmful to others, bring distress and suffering to their community. For example, liberals tend to favor single-payer health insurance because they believe it will correct for the problems of cooperation in our current system. After Obama’s health care reform of 2010 takes full effect, assuming it is not repealed by Congress or struck down by the Supreme Court, there will still be about 16 million people without health insurance in America. Even if most of these people do not choose to go without health insurance but are priced out of the private market, they can be understood as free-riders. The problem with free-riders (or the uninsured) in a health care system is that they create inefficiencies. This is because they rarely get preventive care or routine treatment when they have minor illnesses. For most uninsured people, it is too expensive to pay for doctor visits and medicine out of pocket. This places the uninsured population at greater risk of becoming seriously ill, at which point they will be rushed to the emergency room and given expensive treatment to keep them alive. Because they are not able to pay their steep medical bills, the rest of us incur the cost with higher premiums or taxes. If everyone were insured, the system would be more efficient and thus costs would not be as high. Unfortunately, as things stand, it is still rational (and unavoidable) for millions of people to go without health insurance and avoid treatment until catastrophe strikes. The end result is the most costly and inefficient health care system in the world.5 Liberals can point to a number of other inefficiencies with the current health insurance model in the United States. While conservatives believe that the private sector is always more efficient than government could ever be, liberals know that administrative costs are much higher when private insurers expend so much time and energy competing for policy holders, especially healthy ones, and finding ways to deny policy holders coverage when they file a medical claim. It is eminently rational for each insurer to engage in these activities, but the significant costs imposed on the system are collectively irrational. Unsurprisingly, the administrative costs of health care are far higher in the United States than in any comparable country with universal coverage.6
5 The United States spent more on health care per capita in 2008 ($7,164) than any other country in the world, and its health care costs as a percentage of GDP in 2008 (15.2) were also the highest in the world. See World Health Organization, World Health Statistics 2011,
R. LACEY 73
There is a particular kind of cooperation problem to which liberals pay careful attention: externalities. An externality can be defined as the unintended consequences of a private transaction from which a third party suffers. The American philosopher John Dewey (1859-1952) argued that this third party becomes a “public” if it suffers from a private transaction “to such an extent that it is deemed necessary to have those consequences systematically cared for” by the government.7 Those of us who choke on the pollutants billowing from nearby factories, for example, constitute a “public” which asks for government regulation of the industries at fault. These industries do not want to contaminate our air; it is merely the unfortunate byproduct of doing business. Because of the costs involved, it is not rational for these industries to act in an environmentally responsible manner. As a result, government must step in to ensure that companies will do the irrational thing (i.e., eliminate or reduce their pollution output) and bring about a collectively rational outcome (i.e., a cleaner and healthier world).
II
For all their talk about preserving tradition and holding sacred the ideas and values inherited from our revered ancestors, modern conservatives are in fact quite radical. For many centuries social theorists have been searching for ways to solve various collective action problems. Political science has focused on the constructive role that government can play to ensure cooperation among self-interested individuals who, left to their own devices, would never honor their agreements with others, even though they would benefit in the long run from doing so. Yet conservatives today act as if this idea never existed. In their dismissal of problems of cooperation, conservatives ignore a central (and ubiquitous) concept in the Western tradition which political thinkers on both the right and the left have accepted for quite some time. From the right side of the political spectrum, English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) argued in Leviathan that human beings living in the state of nature—that is, without stable government—are in a constant state of war. Without a strong government imposing law and order, human beings pursue their self-interest relentlessly, leading to a precarious existence of mutual mistrust and regular eruptions of violence. In a world where human beings are not guided or restrained by an innate sense of justice or morality, said Hobbes, it is quite rational—indeed, within one’s rights—to initiate warfare against others for either gain, security, or reputation. The problem is that if each person follows this right of nature, the collective result is a “nasty, brutish, and short” life for everyone.8 For this reason, said Hobbes, the Law of Nature instructs us to seek peace whenever we can. But there’s a catch: the
7 John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1927), 15-16. 8 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (New York: Penguin Classics, 1985), 186.
74 LEAVING THE STAG HUNT sensible person knows that seeking peace in the state of nature is mere folly, for there is no reason to trust that others will lay down their arms as well. Only when an awe-inspiring sovereign makes people fear the consequences of not seeking peace more than they fear their fellow men will people heed the Law of Nature and cooperate with others. In other words, Hobbes saw the state of nature as a collective action problem that only a powerful autocrat could solve. A very different thinker who also viewed politics through the lens of collective action was Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), an enemy of autocracy and a supporter of direct democracy. Often credited for inspiring the French Revolution, Rousseau believed that only after people enter civilization do collective action problems emerge. In the state of nature, prior to the tragic fall of man into his corrupted state of civilization, human beings led solitary and peaceful lives that did not require working with others. But with the accoutrements of civilization—language, tools, property, and the division of labor—came problems of cooperation. In the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality Rousseau famously drew on the parable of the stag hunt to highlight the perennial conflict between private and general interest. In his description, a successful stag hunt requires cooperation from everyone involved. The strategy is to form a circle around the stag. If any of the hunters abandons his assigned post, the deer will get away and the entire hunting party will go hungry. Unfortunately, it is quite likely that one of the hunters will abandon this mutual undertaking the moment he sees within his reach a hare—easier prey that a person can catch on his own. Aware that others in the group may undermine this fragile enterprise in the pursuit of self- interest, each hunter has a strong incentive to search for smaller game and to violate the agreement when the opportunity arises. While cooperation would yield far better results for all, breaking from the group is the individually rational course of action. Like Hobbes, Rousseau believed that government existed to ensure cooperation in such cases. But Rousseau did not think that cooperation required the concentration of power in the hands of a single sovereign. Instead, he argued that democracy could promote cooperation far more effectively. This is because democracies do a better job of producing laws that reflect the general interest. It is important to add that, despite the diffusion of power in a democracy, its government will never hesitate to use coercion when necessary. The citizen who insists on defying the general will, said Rousseau, must be “forced to be free.”9 Though they differ greatly in their views about the distribution of power, Hobbes (the authoritarian) and Rousseau (the democrat) agree that government represents the answer to collective action problems. In addition to these two thinkers, the canon of Western political thought includes countless others who accept the premise that government interference of some kind is often required to make recalcitrant individuals cooperate with others in
9 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Basic Political Writings (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987), 150.
R. LACEY 75 their community. More recently, the study of collective action problems has become more systematic, even scientific. Rational choice theorists, for example, have used the prisoners’ dilemma and other models to formalize in mathematical terms the rational basis for violating agreements. This is what the mathematicians and formal theorists have revealed: While it is true that everyone suffers from the lack of cooperation, it is often more rational for an individual to violate agreements than to risk the dire consequences of sticking to them. Perhaps the most important thinker of recent years to comment on the issue of collective action problems is Mancur Olson (1932-1998), an economist who taught for many years at the University of Maryland. His first and most influential book, The Logic of Collective Action, is required reading for every doctoral student in political science today—and for good reason. Olson made an essential contribution to the study of groups on which social scientists from many disciplines, particularly political scientists, have drawn. He challenged the conventional wisdom accepted by most American political scientists at the time that groups will necessarily act to further their goals or interests. Before Olson, political scientists assumed that, if members of a group stand to benefit from a particular collective outcome, each person in that group would voluntarily do what is necessary to achieve that objective. As a result, the group would do everything it could to advance its interests. After Olson, political scientists opened their eyes to the reality, illuminated both theoretically and empirically, that individual and collective rationality do not always converge. Even when all of the individuals in a large group “are rational and self-interested, and would gain if, as a group, they acted to achieve their common interest or objective,” said Olson, “they will still not voluntarily act to achieve that common or group interest.”10 Why is this so? The explanation is often referred to as the free-rider problem. Rational individuals see all too well that they can still enjoy the benefits of collective action while they stay home and let everyone else in the group do the work. Even if someone stands to benefit immensely from a certain collective good, it is rational to take a free ride, to avoid paying the price. After all, some other suckers will ante up. The problem is that because most individuals make the same calculation, the group will never cohere and pursue its interests. Olson concludes that free and self-interested individuals will only pursue what is in their common interest if they are forced—or given strong incentives—to do so. Of course Olson was not saying anything new. Readers of Hobbes and Rousseau were already familiar with his argument. He was merely updating an old idea and introducing it to his largely American audience, whose naïve understanding of democracy seemed to be derived from classical pluralism. James Madison, perhaps the original pluralist, simply
10 Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), 2.
76 LEAVING THE STAG HUNT assumed that people who share a common interest would form a well- organized group in order to influence government policy.11
III
Students of politics, if at all familiar with the history of Western political thought, are in no position to deny the prevalence of collective action problems arising from the relentless pursuit of self-interest. Nor can they deny the important role that governments play in solving these problems, reconciling private interests with the general welfare. Yet this is exactly what conservatives in the United States are doing today. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, they operate under the assumption that private and general interests are naturally in harmony—that when individuals are free to pursue their own interests short of violating the rights of others, society as a whole automatically benefits. The idea that the individual pursuit of happiness is always harmonious with collective outcomes does have intellectual roots and can be found most readily in the works of Friedrich Hayek (1899-1992), the Austrian-born philosopher and economist who won the Nobel Prize in 1974. Known for his defense of classical liberalism, Hayek has enjoyed a renaissance in recent years due to the great enthusiasm for his work among Tea Party activists. Recent champions of Hayek include conservative pundits Glenn Beck and John Stossel, both of whom have spoken at length on air about Hayekian principles. It’s worth noting that Hayek has attracted supporters outside academia for quite some time. Attempts at popularizing his work date back to the 1940s when Reader's Digest published a condensed and more accessible version of his most famous book, The Road to Serfdom. In this landmark work Hayek warned that central economic planning by the government will push society down a slippery slope at the bottom of which tyranny and misery await. Hayek was one of the first thinkers to understand that unrestrained government intrusion in private (especially economic) life is the essential characteristic of all totalitarian regimes, whether they fall on the ideological left or right. The Nazis and the Soviets may have hated each other, but they shared a chilling enthusiasm for the omnipresent state. The enduring popularity of The Road to Serfdom has turned Hayek into a poster child for the conservative denial of collective action problems, even though he disavowed the conservative label and always considered himself a part of the classical liberal tradition. Central to his classical liberal thought is “spontaneous order,” the term Hayek used for “those unintended patterns and regularities, which we find to exist in human society.” He saw spontaneous order as a system or aggregate structure that is “due to human action but not to
11 See James Madison, “No. 10,” in the Federalist Papers (New York: Signet Classics, 2003).
R. LACEY 77 human design.”12 This system or structure is the unintended consequence of free individuals acting solely out of self-interest. Drawing on his understanding of markets, Hayek claimed that such systems—again, neither planned nor engineered—are more complex, productive, and efficient than anything even the best and brightest human beings could devise intentionally. His is an anti- rationalist theory in the sense that he challenged the claim that a few smart people, using their knowledge, reason and problem-solving skills, can design a system that serves the interests of all. Only out of the chaos of spontaneous individual actions can the best social order emerge. The primary role of government, then, is not to build a just social order but rather to safeguard the right to life, liberty, and property, which will allow individuals to unleash their creative and competitive energies and, albeit unintentionally and indirectly, promote the common good. Hayek did not claim to be the originator of this idea. He cited a number of intellectual ancestors, including Scottish enlightenment thinkers Adam Ferguson (1723-1816) and Adam Smith (1723-1790). The idea of spontaneous order features prominently in Smith, who celebrated what he saw as the self-regulating capacity of markets. In The Wealth of Nations, Smith wrote famously (or infamously) that each person who is engaged in economic life
intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the publick good.13
Without intending it at all, said Smith, self-interested individuals in the market often serve the “publick good”—and far more effectively than the do- gooders who act with all the best intentions. The reference to “an invisible hand” almost smacks of divine intervention, but it’s more likely that Smith was using a metaphor to illustrate the point that the public interest is usually better served, no matter how counter-intuitive or even magical it may seem, when each person cares for his own welfare. It is crucial to note, however, that most of Hayek's intellectual ancestors, including Ferguson and Smith, did not believe that the individual pursuit of happiness automatically yielded optimal collective results. For example, Smith feared the deleterious effects that unfettered markets and the division of labor would have on public virtue, making the working class stupid and ignorant—and thus more susceptible to poor moral judgment and
12 Friedrich Hayek, Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 97. 13 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 456.
78 LEAVING THE STAG HUNT unlawful behavior. To counteract this dangerous trend, he called for state- funded education.14 Even Hayek acknowledged that government would be justified in providing “security against severe physical privation” and “a minimum sustenance for all.” In a society that has achieved the level of wealth seen in developed countries, said Hayek, “there can be no doubt that some minimum of food, shelter, and clothing, sufficient to preserve health and the capacity to work, can be assured to everybody.” He also saw the utility of a “comprehensive system of social insurance,” arguing that “there is no incompatibility in principle between the state providing greater security in this way and the preservation of individual freedom.”15 These caveats suggest that the most important thinkers in the classical liberal tradition did not see spontaneous order as an absolute truth. On the whole—“frequently,” as Smith said—free markets will promote the “publick good.” But when they don’t, both Smith and Hayek argued, the government has a legitimate claim to make judicious corrections. But how could Hayek square his defense of government providing economic security with his famous slippery slope argument? Quite easily. The guiding principle of his political thought—and that of Milton Friedman’s, for that matter—was equality under the law. Hayek opposed public policies aimed at promoting equality of ends because such efforts necessitate treating people unequally, giving perks and privileges to the less fortunate and punishing those at the top of the socio-economic ladder with higher tax rates and other undue burdens.16 But he supported social insurance programs designed to manage risk, to guarantee some security in the event of catastrophic misfortune, because they do not violate the equality under the law principle. Everyone is covered by these programs and is entitled to their benefits should they find themselves in need of them. This explains why a true Hayekian could support universal health or unemployment insurance programs into which everyone paid equally but would disparage such policies as affirmative action and progressive taxation. Despite the nuances in the political thought of Smith and Hayek, modern conservatives recklessly appropriate these thinkers, along with others in the classical liberal tradition, to make the claim that spontaneous order is a universal principle. In a stunning display of intellectual dishonesty, they cling to a few thinkers in the classical liberal tradition to defend their position, misread them willfully, and ignore the rest of Western political thought. On these flimsy intellectual grounds, they favor a radical agenda of dismantling the welfare state and deregulating nearly all industries (including those responsible for the recent financial crisis). Quite cleverly, conservatives deflect attention from their own radicalism by casting liberals in this light. They often build a straw man in suggesting that proponents of reasonable government intervention in the
14 Ibid., 787-88. 15 Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (London: Routledge, 1971), 89-90. 16 See Friedrich Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 85-102.
R. LACEY 79 market favor a command economy—as if there is no difference between Lenin and Obama, between communism and liberalism. In truth, liberals do not dispute the obvious: that free markets work far better than central economic planning ever could. They merely argue that the market is a complex and occasionally flawed system. Sometimes the market fails to produce goods that society needs (e.g., affordable health care for all), while at other times it produces outcomes that society finds undesirable (e.g., pollution).
IV
Perhaps no group has a better understanding of the vicissitudes of markets than the working class. Accordingly, workers around the world have found it beneficial to organize unions and bargain collectively with their employers for higher wages, better benefits, and safer working conditions. Union membership in the United States exploded after the passage of the Wagner Act in 1935. Among other things, this law protected workers’ right to organize unions, gave the newly-created National Labor Relations Board the authority to hold elections that would decide whether workers in a particular place of employment would be represented by a union, and allowed the creation of “closed shops” in which all employees in a unionized workplace are required to join the union (including those who didn’t vote for it and don’t want to be members). By 1954, about 35 percent of wage and salary workers in the United States were union members, thanks in large part to the Wagner Act.17 It was a time of unprecedented economic prosperity and an expanding middle class. Much to the dismay of many liberals, unions represent only about 12 percent of wage and salary workers in America today.18 This decline stems in large part from the conservative onslaught against unions over the last thirty or more years. The hostility to public sector unions in Wisconsin, Indiana, and other states earlier this year is just the latest chapter in this story. Conservatives attack unions for a whole host of reasons—allegedly, they hurt businesses, impede economic growth, and create fiscal crises at all levels of government. But, as the recent debate illustrates, the main reason for the conservative opposition to unions rests on principle: they see mandatory membership as an infringement on economic freedom. Tim Pawlenty made this point recently in New Hampshire during a Republican presidential debate in June 2011. He expressed his support for a federal right-to-work law, which would weaken unions nationwide by making “closed shops” illegal. “We live in the United States of America,” he said, “and people shouldn’t be forced to belong or be a member in any organization. And the government has no business telling people what group you have to be a member of or not.”19
17 Gerald Mayer, “Union Membership Trends in the United States,” in Federal Publications, Paper 174 (31 August 2004), 12,
80 LEAVING THE STAG HUNT
Even if they draw the wrong conclusions from it, conservatives have a point. As Mancur Olson argues in his classic work, the survival of unions requires an element of coercion. He wrote: “By far the most important single factor enabling large, national unions to survive was that membership in those unions, and support of the strikes they called, was to a great degree compulsory.”20 Requiring workers to be dues-paying members of a union, to accept the terms of a collectively-bargained contract, and not to cross a picket line during a strike may have bolstered unions, but it certainly restricts the individual freedom to choose. That said, Olson urges his readers to view the issue through the lens of collective action. Conservatives refuse to accept that the benefits of these coercive measures—higher wages, better benefits, and safer working conditions for the middle class—far outweigh the costs. The truth of the matter is that the vast majority of workers want these collective benefits, but if you make it easier for them to stop paying membership dues and to cross picket lines (that is, to take a free ride), unions have a much harder time staying alive. Their survival and effectiveness require coercion, argued Olson, and this is no different from any other form of coercion that societies deem necessary for the common good. For example, governments collect taxes to finance police and fire departments and enforce speed limits to keep highways safe. No one expects citizens to pay taxes or observe speed limits voluntarily. We recognize that government must use force—or the looming threat of force—to ensure widespread cooperation. Generally speaking, democracies conform to what Abraham Lincoln called “the majority principle.” The minority cannot nullify a law simply because they don’t like it. Similarly, workers in a place of employment can vote in a democratic election to decide whether they want to be represented by a union. If the majority supports a union, the matter is settled. Everyone is a member and must accept the costs and benefits of what comes with this association. Rousseau believed that the best way to resolve collective action problems, such as the proverbial stag hunt, was to put it to a vote. Let the people decide whether coercive measures are necessary to ensure cooperation. The hunters in his example could have passed a law that somehow sanctioned those who abandoned their posts, thereby ensuring that the hunt would be successful and everyone would enjoy a healthy portion of venison. For the same reasons, some form of punishment awaits tax evaders, speeders, and others who fail to cooperate with laws passed by democratic majorities. The conservative denial of collective action problems in such policy areas as consumer financial protection, health care, environmental regulation, and labor usually rests on empty appeals to “principle” and ad hominem attacks on those who call on the power of government to enforce cooperation. In January 2011, for example, Michele Bachmann made a speech on the House
20 Olson, op cit., 68.
R. LACEY 81 floor calling Obama’s health care reform law “the crown jewel of socialism.”21 Even though Obamacare is hardly the equivalent of socialized medicine (which, incidentally, already exists in the United States for military personnel and veterans), Bachmann would rather score easy political points through old- fashioned red-baiting than debate the program on its practical merits. Unfortunately, conservative high-brows are not immune to hollow invocations of principle either. About a month before the reform was passed, political philosopher Harvey Mansfield accused Obama in The Weekly Standard of trying to avert questions of “principle” and pretending that health care policy is “beyond political dispute.” The “principle” at stake in Mansfield’s view was the following: “Should the government take over health care or should it be left to the private sphere?”22 This is a grotesque distortion and over-simplification of the issue. The reform does not turn health care providers into government employees or restrict consumer choice of providers in the private market. Mansfield also refused to address the fact that the status quo, an unregulated private insurance system, was unsustainable. While over 46 million people lived without insurance and health care costs soared at an alarming rate, Mansfield decided to sidestep substantive matters. His strategy was to deflect attention from these inconvenient truths by engaging in erudite demagoguery, peppering his essay with ominous terms that made health care reform look like a socialist enterprise. He used “government takeover,” “Big Government,” and “rational administration” several times each. This kind of coded language is used to end rather than to promote discussion. After all, “Big Government” and “government takeovers” are inherently wicked—and thus political non-starters.23 It is distressing to see that “principle” has become the tool of the political obstructionist, of the apologist for the status quo. Mansfield charged Obama with affecting “the cool of a nonpartisan” and eschewing politics in his attempt to marshal the resources of the administrative state to make policy.24 He seems to have forgotten how many political compromises were made by Obama and the Democrats in order to get the law passed. The final result was a moderate—and what many have called a watered-down—reform that comes nowhere close to socialized medicine or single-payer insurance, the two most common models in the industrialized world. President Obama and the Democrats did not get what they wanted; they did what was politically feasible. Fearful of even a moderate policy solution, Republicans were uncompromising in their refusal to meet the Democrats half-way, trying to derail reform completely on so-called principled grounds.
21 Brian Montopoli, “Michele Bachmann: Health Care Law ‘Crown Jewel of Socialism,’” in cbsnews.com
82 LEAVING THE STAG HUNT
The only way conservatives can deny the reality of collective action problems is to dwell in a world of meaningless principle. “It is your inalienable right to leave the stag hunt should you desire,” say conservatives. Never mind that most of us will go hungry as a result. Perhaps conservatives should recall what Abraham Lincoln wrote in 1854: “The legitimate object of government, is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves—in their separate, and individual capacities.”25 People cannot catch stags, pay for health care, or bargain with their employers so well on their own. But they do these things remarkably well together.
Department of Political Science, Iona College, United States of America
References
Bachmann, Michele, “Giving More Power Where Power Is Not Due,” in the Star Tribune (10 December 2009),
25 Abraham Lincoln, “Fragment on Government,” in Selected Speeches and Writings (New York: Library of America, 2009), p. 91.
R. LACEY 83
Montopoli, Brian, “Michele Bachmann: Health Care Law ‘Crown Jewel of Socialism,’” in cbsnews.com < http://www.cbsnews.com/8301- 503544_162-20028978-503544.html>, 19 January 2011. Olson, Mancur, The Logic of Collective Action (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965). Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, The Basic Political Writings (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987). Smith, Adam, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976). Woolhandler, Steffie, Terry Campbell, and David Himmelstein, “Costs of Health Care Administration in the United States and Canada,” in The New England Journal of Medicine 349:8 (21 August 2003). World Health Organization, World Health Statistics 2011,
KRITIKE VOLUME FIVE NUMBER TWO (DECEMBER 2011) 84-95
Article
Pornography and Freedom
Danny Frederick
Abstract: I defend pornography as an important aspect of freedom of expression, which is essential for autonomy, self-development, the growth of knowledge and human flourishing. I rebut the allegations that pornography depraves and corrupts, degrades women, is harmful to children, exposes third parties to risk of offence or assault, and violates women’s civil rights and liberties. I contend that suppressing pornography would have a range of unintended evil consequences, including loss of beneficial technology, creeping censorship, black markets, corruption and extensive social costs.
Key words: Pornography, freedom of expression, sexuality, human rights
Introduction
he Williams Committee1 defined pornography as sexually explicit representation which has the function or intention of sexually arousing its audience. Similar definitions have been put forward by other official committees T 2 or commissions on pornography in Canada and America. Pornography appears to have few friends in high places. Governments generally censor and restrict it. Most religions abominate it and others seem at least to frown upon it. Academics for the most part find it distasteful, if not offensive or even heinous. The “quality” news media (press and television) avoid promoting it, often speak openly against it, and almost as often call for its suppression. A myriad of influential pressure groups lobby for prohibition of at least some of it. Artists and writers are perhaps less disdainful but seem keen to make a distinction between erotica (acceptable) and pornography (unacceptable). And the word “pornographic” is very widely used as a metaphor for the excessive and disgusting, as when gory violence or someone’s eating habits are labelled “pornographic.” The opposition to pornography comes from both left and right, from avowed radicals as well as from fusty old traditionalists.
1 Report of the Committee on Obscenity and Film Censorship (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1979), 103. 2 For a synopsis, see D. Howitt and G. Cumberbatch, Pornography: Impacts and Influences (London: Home Office Research and Planning Unit, 1990), 1-5. The synopsis includes radical- feminist stipulative definitions of “pornography” in terms of images that degrade or exploit women, etc. Such revisionary definitions raise the question whether there is any pornography, that is, whether any pornography in the ordinary sense is also pornography in the revised sense. I ignore such revisionary definitions here.
© 2011 Danny Frederick http://www.kritike.org/journal/issue_10/frederick_december2011.pdf ISSN 1908-7330
D. FREDERICK 85
In spite of this repudiation by respectability, pornography is a thriving multi-billion-pound worldwide industry with millions of consumers of both sexes from apparently all walks of life. It is conceivable that the denouncers and the consumers are two separate groups of people; but one cannot help suspecting that such very general deprecation of pornography is to some extent hypocritical. It seems that, at least for some people – and perhaps for very many – pornography is a dirty secret. In contrast, I will argue that a free society without pornography is unthinkable, that an interest in pornography is not something of which one should be ashamed, and that suppression of pornography is a veritable social evil. In section 2, I defend pornography as an important aspect of freedom of expression, which is essential for autonomy, self-development, the growth of knowledge and human flourishing. I also consider the common allegations that pornography depraves and corrupts, degrades women, is harmful to children, exposes third parties to risk of offence or assault, and violates women’s civil rights and liberties. I argue that even if these allegations were true, most of them would not warrant suppressing pornography. In section 3, I argue that the common allegations are almost all false and that pornography should be recognised as a good. In section 4, I argue that suppressing pornography has a range of unintended evil consequences. In section 5, I conclude.
Freedom of Expression
A free society is, amongst other things, a society that safeguards freedom of expression, which includes freedom of speech but also covers non- verbal expression, such as images, music, sculpture, performances, fashions, styles, and so on. Since written or spoken pornography is speech and all pornography is expression, a free society is one that safeguards the freedom to produce and consume pornography – at least, provided there is not a very good reason not to do so. Freedom of expression is a prerequisite of personal development and human flourishing. Adult persons are self-conscious beings who, unless they suffer some form of impairment, are not only able but also entitled to manage their own lives, to pursue their own conception of the good life in their own way, to discover for themselves, often by experimentation, what they want to do or to be, and to seek the sorts of companions, careers and niches that they conjecture to be most propitious to their development and to the fulfilment of their aims. Thus, freedom of expression is essentially part of the freedom, due to all autonomous beings, to run their own lives in the way they see fit, subject to the constraint of not interfering with other people’s freedom to do the same.3 Sex is, for most people, a very important part of life. Whether we like it or not, we are inherently sexual beings; and for many people sexual
3 J. S. Mill, On Liberty (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), 75-140.
86 PORNOGRAPHY AND FREEDOM relationships, and their integral sexual activities, are central to life’s meaning.4 For some men and women, consuming or producing pornography is a significant part of their sexual life and enhances their enjoyment of it. Further, the experience of participating in the production or consumption of pornography, and the ideas for experimentation communicated by this medium, can contribute to the development of a person’s sexuality and personality.5 The self is a work in progress;6 and we each need the scope to discover for ourselves, by trials and mistakes, who we are and who we are capable of being. Freedom of expression is essential to this; and that includes freedom to create, disseminate and consume pornography. Many people are critical of pornography. For at least some of them, articulating and communicating these criticisms will be an important part of who they are, or of their development or aims. Such criticism is also part of freedom of expression; and it can be very important not just for the people who voice it but also for the producers and consumers of pornography, who may be prompted to reflect on their activities and to reconsider or revise them. Criticism from others is very helpful to our experimentation as it can help us to identify our mistakes and learn from them.7 So it is important that freedom of expression includes freedom to debate, to criticise and even to castigate or lambast. The protection of freedom of expression does not mean protection from criticism; indeed, it cannot do, for that would involve denying freedom of expression to the critics. It is nevertheless commonly maintained that under some circumstances considerations of public safety may legitimate restrictions on freedom of expression. We need not dispute this here. One kind of circumstance is a national emergency, such as war, when the flow of information may perhaps need to be controlled to prevent the enemy obtaining useful information. But other risks can be invoked to defend controls on freedom of expression in peacetime. The risks alleged against pornography seem to fall into five categories:
(i) it tends to deprave and corrupt those who produce or consume it;8 (ii) it degrades women by portraying them as sexual slaves or as subservient or inferior to men;9
4 Matt Ridley, The Red Queen (London: Penguin, 1994); Michael Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 (New York: Vintage, 1978). 5 Nina Hartley, “Confessions of a Feminist Porno Star,” in L. Gruen and G. Panichas eds., Sex, Morality, and the Law (London: Routledge, 1997), 196-98; Kate Ellis, et al. eds., Caught Looking (New York: Caught Looking Inc., 1986). 6 Karl Jaspers, General Psychopathology, trans. by J Hoenig and M. W. Hamilton, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1963), 761. 7 Karl Popper, “The Myth of the Framework,” in his The Myth of the Framework (London: Routledge, 1994), 33-64. 8 Obscene Publications Act (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1959). 9 Catharine MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), part III.
D. FREDERICK 87
(iii) it is harmful to children if they consume it or are used (as participants) in its production;10 (iv) it exposes third parties to risk of offence or assault;11 (v) it violates women’s civil rights and freedom of expression.12
In this section I will consider whether each allegation if true would warrant restricting or suppressing pornographic expression. I will consider in section 3 whether the allegations are true. First, if it is true that pornography depraves and corrupts those who produce or consume it, then surely it is a matter for adults to decide for themselves whether they want to engage in pornographic production or consumption, on the basis of its costs, risks and benefits. Many activities have their downsides. Most sports involve a risk of injury, even of serious injury. Casual or promiscuous sex involves risks to health and possibly to character. Many voluntary or charitable activities, for example in developing countries, involve risks to health and life. In many occupations more or less serious injuries are routine, such as soldiering, coal-mining, fishing, law enforcement, fire fighting, even typing (repetitive strain injury). Some occupations involve risks of suffering trauma or developing callousness, such as policing, the armed services or even medical work. It is also thought that all positions of power – political, bureaucratic or corporate – involve a risk of corruption. The people who engage in any of these activities judge (sometimes, no doubt, mistakenly) that despite the downsides their activities are worthwhile; and the rest of us respect their freedom to act in accordance with their judgements. How could producing or consuming pornography be any different? I think there are two ways in which it might seem to be so. The first way involves linking sexual depravity and corruption with tendencies toward crime or anti-social behaviour. This is the claim of the fourth allegation, which will be considered shortly. The second way is to view sexual depravity and corruption as in itself intolerable to society.13 But, as the people who choose it plainly do not regard it as intolerable, this amounts to imposing some people’s conception of the good on other people who do not share it. A recent UK government proposal to restrict freedom of expression said of violent pornography that it is “abhorrent to most people and has no place in our society.”14 The same could have been said, and something like it probably often was said, about images of mixed-race couples in the southern states of the USA under racial segregation. Such arrant intolerance is incompatible with the principles of a free society in which people can flourish.
10 Williams Committee, op. cit., 88-90. 11 Catharine MacKinnon, op. cit., part III. 12 Ibid. 13 Patrick Devlin, The Enforcement of Morals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), 10-17. 14 Consultation: On the Possession of Extreme Pornographic Material (London: Home Office, 2005), 1.
88 PORNOGRAPHY AND FREEDOM
Second, the allegation that pornography degrades women seems to mean that the women are degraded if they engage in the production or consumption of pornography and that pornography communicates a negative opinion of women. If the first part of this allegation is true, then it is also true that the women, as consenting adults, should decide for themselves whether the degradation is worthwhile. (If any women participate against their will, then that is a matter of force or fraud, which should be dealt with separately from the issue of freedom of expression.) If the second part of the allegation is true, then the appropriate response is to criticise the opinion communicated by pornography. Indeed, the availability of pornography could be welcomed for the opportunity it provides to explain why the view it conveys is erroneous. Further, suppression of pornography would appear to be ineffective, since its characteristic opinion could still be expressed in non-pornographic media, such as academic books, television dramas, newspapers or political tracts. It might be contended that when the negative opinion of women is expressed pornographically it is dangerous; but this is part of the fourth allegation, to be considered below. Third, if it is true that pornography is harmful to children, it is also true that alcohol, tobacco, medicines, sharp implements, and so on, are harmful to children. It is the responsibility of adults to see that children do not come into contact with these things or to see that children’s use of them is properly supervised. In the case of pornography, for example, parents may prevent children from accessing pornography via the Internet by installing content-management software or making use of the filtering options made available to them by some Internet service providers. An incursion into adults’ freedom of expression is not required. Fourth, if it is true that pornography exposes third parties to risk of offence or assault, then even if this did justify controls over the production or consumption of pornography; it would do so only where less intrusive ways of dealing with the problems are not available. But the risk of offence to people who do not wish to view pornography can be avoided by regulations concerning what can be sold where, and by unobtrusive forms of sign-posting that identify where pornography is available, so that those who want it can find it, while others can avoid it. And if pornography somehow encourages its consumers to think that perpetrating sexual assaults is acceptable, an appropriate remedy would be better sex education, not only in schools and colleges, but throughout the media, and possibly also stiffer penalties for sexual offenders. If pornography induces uncontrollable sex urges in its consumers, making them a danger to all, and to women in particular, this could be an argument for restricting freedom of expression, provided there are no alternative feasible options for countering the threat. Similarly, if the production or consumption of pornography inescapably involves violations of the civil rights or the freedom of expression of women, that could be an argument for prohibiting it, depending on the balance between the
D. FREDERICK 89 disadvantages of the violations and the disadvantages of prohibition. Whether pornography does have these effects is considered in the next section.
Pornography Inherently Bad?
In section 2, I assumed, for the sake of argument, that the allegations against pornography are true, and I argued that they would provide little, if any, ground for suppression of pornography. In this section I will argue that almost all of the allegations are false. We can consider together the allegations that people who consume or produce pornography are made depraved and corrupt or, if they are women, degraded. First, it is puzzling why this should be true of material which is both sexually explicit and sexually arousing when it is not true of material which is either but not both. Some medical texts are sexually explicit. Some scenes in mainstream cinema are sexually arousing. If neither of these deprave, corrupt and degrade, why should something which combines the features of both do so? It is possible that it does; but it would need an explanation if true. Second, since the vast majority of people do have sex, often pretty regularly, and since such activity is an important and, for many people, a fulfilling part of life, it is again puzzling why it should deprave, corrupt or degrade when it is done in front of a camera or when it is viewed. The apparently obvious explanation of this is that sexual activities are properly private, while pornography makes them public and thereby de-sensitises those who participate in its production or consumption.15 But this just begs the question: in saying that sex is properly private, the case against pornography is assumed. No reason has been given for thinking that sex is properly private. The allegation that pornography involves a violation of the civil rights and freedom of expression of women runs as follows. The negative view of women expressed by pornography conditions both men and women to see women as inferior and subordinate to men; and this shared presupposition fosters and entrenches sexual inequality, devalues women’s speech and even creates a context in which women’s demands for equal treatment are systematically misunderstood (for example, women’s opinions may be dismissed when they contradict the picture of women presented by pornography).16 However, this would not amount to inequality of rights or a violation of women’s freedom of expression. At most, it would identify prejudices that make it difficult for women to assert or utilise their rights, or to get their views taken seriously if they contradict the prejudices. The remedy for this would be a cultural change effected by changes in behaviour and opinion, and thus by making effective use of freedom of expression. Trying to effect that change by suppressing freedom of expression, on the other hand, could lead to far-reaching prohibition of opinions. For, any group that is or claims to
15 Williams Committee, op. cit., 96-98. 16 Catharine MacKinnon, op.cit., part III; Jennifer Hornsby and Rae Langton, “Free Speech and Illocution,” Legal Theory, 4:1 (1998), 21-37.
90 PORNOGRAPHY AND FREEDOM be disadvantaged could likewise demand suppression of views it deems unfavourable; and this could lead, for example, to proscription of performances of The Merchant of Venice, or films about professional women who neglect their children, or caricatures of homosexuals in nightclub routines. And creationists, flat-earthers and bigots, who have difficulty in getting their views taken seriously, would be entitled to demand the suppression of contrary opinions.17 However, the fundamental problem with the allegation about women’s rights and freedom of expression is that it depends on the allegation that pornography communicates a negative opinion of women. This latter allegation is puzzling. Why should images or descriptions of women having sex communicate a negative opinion of women, given that the vast majority of women do have sex? And why should sexual representations of males and females having sex communicate a negative opinion of women if it does not communicate a negative opinion of men? Heterosexual pornography involves women and men, lesbian pornography involves only or largely women, while gay pornography involves only or largely men. Sadomasochistic pornography may involve men being subservient or inferior to women as well as vice versa. There is no asymmetry between the sexes which is inherent to pornography.18 Perhaps the complaint is that, while this medium is in principle neutral, it is in practice used to communicate a negative message about women. If this complaint were true, it would be an argument, not against pornography, but against the current style of pornography; and the remedy would be new pornography in a different style. But the complaint does not appear to be true in any case. For, there is enormous diversity in pornographic material; and its messages depend upon the viewer’s interpretation. Further, the bulk of it appears, on the most obvious interpretation, to portray women as independent people who engage in sex because they enjoy it.19 It seems undeniable that some people are offended by pornography, but this can be avoided without suppression, as we noted above. However, the commonplace allegation that pornography leads to sexual offences is unsubstantiated, despite extensive empirical research into the effects of pornography on its consumers. The UK Home Office has commissioned two official reviews of this research, both of which have concluded that the evidence does not support a causal connection between the consumption of pornography and anti-social behaviour.20 This is not to deny the fact that some sexual offenders use pornography in the commission of their crimes. But it is also true that some of them use quotations from the Bible; that some use
17 Ronald Dworkin, “Women and Pornography,” in New York Review of Books, 40 (17), 36-42, 21 October 1993. 18 Gordon Hawkins and Franklin Zimring, Pornography in a Free Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 151-174. 19 Nadine Strossen, Defending Pornography (New York: Doubleday, 1996), 141-178; Alan Soble, Pornography, Sex, and Feminism (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2002), 13-48. 20 See references in notes 1 and 2.
D. FREDERICK 91 kitchen knives, or adhesive tape, or cigarettes, and so on. Anything may be so used. I would guess that most of us are inclined to accept the allegation that consumption of pornography is harmful to children; but this might just reflect our upbringing or prevailing cultural norms. There is no rigorous scientific evidence that exposure to pornography causes harm to children since, for ethical reasons, experiments have not been conducted. Given that sex is an everyday and pleasurable activity that the vast majority of children will eventually engage in voluntarily, it is not clear why representations of such activity should affect them adversely, unless there happened to be something unusual or disturbing about the messages contained in the material or about the circumstances in which the children were introduced to it. But, as we saw above, even if the allegation is true, it does not mean that pornography is bad for adults, it just means that children and pornography should be kept separate. Similarly, if, as seems to me more likely to be the case, participating (un-coerced) in the production of pornography harms children, that is an argument for not permitting such participation, not an argument for restricting adults’ use of, or participation in, pornography. Having cleared away the allegations that pornography consumed by consenting adults is bad, we can now briefly note several ways in which it is good. First, as the size of the industry attests, many people simply enjoy it, either intrinsically, as something to contemplate, or as an aid to masturbation, or as a source of ideas for activities to undertake with a consenting adult sexual partner, or in some other way (who knows?). Second, some people may use it in general psychological, anthropological or other academic research. Third, some may use it in research for a novel or other fiction. Fourth, some people may use it as an aid to self-understanding. All, or almost all, of us have inclinations toward, or to be interested in, various forms of offbeat sexual activity. Some of us will have no wish to engage in such activity, perhaps because we do not accept that part of ourselves. But rather than repressing it, which may be unhealthy, we can explore or examine it in a detached way to achieve a reflective self-knowledge which helps us to pursue our lives and our self-development in ways that we value.
Follies of Suppression
Freedom of expression is to be prized as a condition of a free society and of individual autonomous development. However, suppression of freedom of expression is bad not only because it denies this good, but also because it inevitably has a range of unintended evil consequences. First, specific exercises of freedom of expression often have spin-off benefits, and these indirect benefits can be valuable even to people who have no interest in the exercises of freedom of expression that led to them. For example, the high demand for pornography that can be consumed in private has driven technological developments in videotapes, DVDs, pay-per-view movie channels, interactive television, the internet, email and mobile
92 PORNOGRAPHY AND FREEDOM telephones. The result has been speedy technical advance which improved the quality and reduced the cost of these services for all users, whether they have any interest in pornography or not.21 Had pornography been suppressed, the technical innovations would have been delayed and some of them might never have been invented. Second, the denial of freedom of expression requires the creation of the machinery of state censorship and suppression. Once this machinery exists, it is a prize that is eagerly sought by all intolerant groups and individuals who are keen to impose their conception of the good on everyone else. For example, in 1992, radical feminists in Canada succeeded in getting the obscenity laws amended to outlaw materials that are degrading or dehumanising to women. The change led to an epidemic of censorship affecting primarily gay, lesbian and feminist material. In the first two-and-a-half years, well over half of all Canadian feminist bookstores had material confiscated or detained by customs.22 In democratic societies, political policies inevitably involve concessions to, or “sweeteners” for, various organised groups and influential individuals whose support politicians are keen to obtain in their bids for re-election.23 As a consequence, once censorship is accepted as legitimate in one area, it tends to be extended to further areas, and there is little predicting which further incursions into freedom of expression will be made. Third, prohibition of popular activities creates a bonanza for organised crime, as the US prohibition of alcohol in the early part of the twentieth century showed. Suppression of pornography would mean that a multi-billion- pound industry is put into the hands of violent criminals who would use their enormous new wealth to finance criminal operations. It would raise the price and lower the quality of pornography for the consumer, it would make working life more hazardous for all those involved in producing pornography, and it would substantially increase the number of people, more especially women, who are forced into that type of work. Further, as with all black markets, it would create opportunities for wealthy criminals to bribe police officers, bureaucrats and politicians to turn a blind eye to the criminal activities or even to facilitate their operation, leading to extensive “depravity, corruption and degradation” in public life. Fourth, suppressing pornography would involve a substantial reduction of social wealth. There would be a significant increase in the criminal justice costs of detection, apprehension, prosecution, and maintenance of the offenders in prison. There would be a substantial reduction in tax revenues because a huge, legal, tax-paying industry would be converted into a non-tax- paying activity, and because the people imprisoned would pay substantially less tax, not only because they are not working and spending while in prison, but also because they may find it difficult to obtain a legitimate job when released,
21 John Arlidge, “The Dirty Secret that Drives New Technology: it’s Porn,” in The Observer, 3 March 2002. 22 Strossen, Defending Pornography, 229-32. 23 Mancur Olsen, The Rise and Decline of Nations (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982); Power and Prosperity (New York: Basic Books, 2000).
D. FREDERICK 93 having spent time in prison for a sexual offence. There would therefore also be an increase in welfare payments to support these people when they are released. All these costs would have to be borne by taxpayers; and they represent public money that could alternatively have been used to improve education, health, the environment or social services.
Conclusion
Freedom of expression, including the freedom to produce and consume pornography, as well as the freedom to criticise pornography, is essential to human flourishing and a free society. Suppression of freedom of expression seems defensible, if at all, only in special circumstances where it is the least pernicious means of avoiding substantial physical harm to third parties. Some of the allegations against pornography concern only risks to those who choose to produce or consume it; and, as consenting adults, those people are entitled to make their own decisions. Some of the allegations concern the message conveyed by pornography; but a free society, as well as the growth of knowledge, demands open discussion of any opinion. It is alleged that pornography is harmful to children; but this does not distinguish pornography from many other things which are not prohibited. Some allegations against pornography concern a risk to the safety of third parties; but such risks could be combated by means that avoid suppressing freedom of expression unless, perhaps, pornography turned people into compulsive offenders. It is also alleged that the existence of pornography violates women’s rights and liberties. However, few of the allegations commonly made against pornography seem true. It has not been explained how depictions of sex can deprave, corrupt or degrade, if sex itself does not deprave, corrupt or degrade. It has not been explained how pornography can essentially convey a negative opinion of women without essentially conveying a negative opinion of men, or why there is anything wrong with the explicit and arousing depiction of sexual activity. It would not be true that pornography involves a violation of women’s rights or liberties even if it were true that pornography generally portrays women as subservient or inferior to men. But it is in any case false that pornography essentially, or even generally, conveys such a negative opinion of women. It is true that some people are offended by pornography; but they can avoid seeing it and regulatory arrangements could be improved to better enable this. However, the claim that pornography harms its adult producers, consumers or third parties is unsubstantiated. It is not known to what extent children are harmed by producing or consuming pornography; but, in any case, things can be arranged so that children have little chance of coming into contact with it, without restricting the freedom of adults to produce or consume it. Besides, pornography has many benefits as part of the sexual enjoyment and exploration of very many people, as material for research and as an aid to self- understanding and self-development.
94 PORNOGRAPHY AND FREEDOM
Suppression of pornography is therefore not only unnecessary but also inherently bad. In addition it has a range of unintended evil consequences. Like all suppressions of freedom, it will prohibit activities that can lead to discoveries which have utility in many other areas. The introduction of censorship invites and virtually ensures its extension. And suppression of pornography would lead to an extensive black market controlled by organised criminals with serious adverse consequences for all engaged in the production or consumption of pornography, as well as to widespread corruption in public life. It would also make substantial inroads into public funds which could be better spent improving the lives of the citizens.
Independent Researcher, United Kingdom
References
Arlidge, John, “The Dirty Secret that Drives New Technology: it's Porn,” The Observer
D. FREDERICK 95
Ridley, Matt, The Red Queen (London: Penguin, 1994). Report of the Committee on Obscenity and Film Censorship (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1979). Soble, Alan, Pornography, Sex, and Feminism (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2002). Strossen, Nadine, Defending Pornography, (New York: Doubleday, 1996).
KRITIKE VOLUME FIVE NUMBER TWO (DECEMBER 2011) 96-111
Article
The Explanatory Gap Argument and Phenomenal States: A Defense of Physicalism
Fasiku Gbenga
Abstract: This paper critically examines the explanatory gap argument. It argues that the argument, contrary to its aim, fails to undermine physicalism because there is, in reality, no gap in the world. The paper supports the physicalists’ response to the explanatory gap argument. It submits that the gap that exists in the explanations of consciousness is a conception, about and not an ontological feature, of consciousness (by extension, the mind). Hence, even if the explanatory gap is sustained, it proves no point against physicalism and the physicalists’ account of the nature of consciousness in the world. The paper is divided into two sections. The first section carefully articulates the explanatory gap argument. The second section argues that the explanatory gap argument fails to support the reality of a property of consciousness that is not amenable to scientific investigation and theories.
Key words: Explanatory gap argument, physicalism, phenomenal states, consciousness
Introduction
n reformulating the mind/body problem, the concept of body is enlarged to include the brain and its cognitive properties and processes; the mind is Iconstrued as consciousness or mental state, and phenomenal consciousness as its distinctive property. Given the assumed difference between the properties of the body and the mind, the question – ‘why should physical processes in the brain give rise to the experiential riches of consciousness?’ or ‘how and why phenomenal consciousness arises from physical properties and entities?’ appears to be a rhetorical way of denying the monists’ (mostly the physicalists) position that consciousness and its properties are amenable to the natural laws of the physical sciences, through which the body is explained. This, in contemporary literature, is known as the hard problem of consciousness. In its simplest expression, “the hard problem of consciousness is to fully explain phenomenal consciousness – the subjective,
© 2011 Fasiku Gbenga http://www.kritike.org/journal/issue_10/gbenga_december2011.pdf ISSN 1908-7330
F. GBENGA 97 qualitative dimension of our mental lives – in physicalistically respectable terms.”1 To address the problem, two positions, among others, are prominently held. One of these is to uphold the dualists’ assertion that any explanation featuring only physical items, relations, and processes cannot explain phenomenal consciousness. Some scholars who hold this view are David Chalmers,2 Frank Jackson,3 Joseph Levine,4 Colin McGinn,5, among others. The other position affirms the physicalists’ denial that there is such a difficulty, and that a physicalist explanation of consciousness covers all there is to explain about consciousness6. This position is supported by Peter Carruthers,7 Daniel Dennett,8 Michael Tye9 to mention just a few. The dualist position on the hard problem of consciousness is that phenomenal consciousness is a distinctive kind of property which is separate from the physical properties of the body. The dualist justificatory arguments for this position can be found in three related arguments: the knowledge argument, the explanatory gap argument and the conceivability argument. In these arguments, there is a common ground for the position that there is an epistemic as well as metaphysical gap between physicalism and phenomenal consciousness: From the premise that we cannot deduce any physical truth about our mental experience from phenomenal truth about mental experience, the knowledge argument concludes that physical properties are ontologically different from mental properties. The conceivability argument, from the ground that one can rationally conceive of the physical truths in the absence of mental truth, concludes that mental properties and physical properties are ontologically separate. The explanatory gap argument, starting with the premise that mental properties cannot be explained by reference to the same explanation of
1 Wayne Wright, “Explanation and the Hard Problem,” in Philosophical Studies, 132 (2007), 301. 2 David Chalmers, Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) and The Character of Consciousness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 3 Frank Jackson, ‘Epiphenomenal Qualia’ in Philosophical Quarterly, 32, (1982), 127-136 and ‘What Mary Didn’t Know,’ in Block Ned, Flanagan Owen and Güzeldere Güven eds., The Nature of Consciousness: Philosophical Debates (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997), 567-570. 4 Joseph Levine, “Materialism and Qualia: The Explanatory Gap,” in Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 64 (1983), 354-361. 5 Colin McGinn, The Problem of Consciousness: Essays Toward a Resolution (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1991). 6 Physicalism is the claim that everything there is in the world – including human minds – is either itself a basic physical entity or else constituted by basic physical entities. For more on the position of physicalism, see Sven Walter and Heinz-Dieter Heckmann, Physicalism and Mental Causation: The Metaphysics of Mind and Action (Imprint Academic, 2003). 7 Peter Carruthers, Phenomenal Consciousness: A Naturalistic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) and Consciousness: Essays from a Higher-Order Perspective, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005). 8 Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained (London: Allen Lane, 1991) 9 Michael Tye, Consciousness, Colour and Content (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000). and Consciousness Revisited: Materialism without Phenomenal Concepts (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009).
98 EXPLANATORY GAP ARGUMENT physical properties, concludes that that each of these properties is ontologically distinct. The focus of this paper is the explanatory gap argument. The paper supports the physicalists’ response to the explanatory gap argument. It questions the inference of ontologically distinct properties of mental states from the inability to offer a conceptual account of one kind of properties in terms of the explanation offered for another kind of properties. The paper is divided into two sections. The first section carefully articulates the explanatory gap argument. The second section argues that the explanatory gap argument fails to support the reality of a property of consciousness which is not amenable to scientific investigation and theories.
The Explanatory Gap Argument
The explanatory gap argument is the claim that certain aspects of our conscious mental life cannot be captured by any objective physical explanation. The claim is premised on the assumption that whatever physical explanation of a subjective conscious experience we might give will completely leave out a certain property of our mental life. The exact property that would be left out is what it is like to undergo the experience. This property is also referred to as ‘phenomenal property of consciousness,’ ‘qualia,’ ‘subjective quality of experience.’ For example, for a mental state, such as pain, there is what it is like to feel pain. To explain this property of pain is to explain phenomenal consciousness of pain. The point of the explanatory gap argument is that any objective causal explanation of pain, be it in biology, neuroscience, or psychology, will fail as a complete account of pain. This is because there is a property of pain, the phenomenal consciousness of pain, which the physicalist explanation of pain excludes, and this exclusion creates a gap in her explanation of pain.10 Another sense of explaining the explanatory gap argument is to argue that one of the aims of science is to explain not only how things are in nature, but also to account for why things are as they are in nature. So, if it is the case that nature is one large, lawful, orderly system, then it should be possible to explain the occurrence of any part of that system in terms of the basic principles that govern nature as a whole. However, the deepest problem of understanding nature as a complete whole is, given its feature of subjectivity, the problem of explaining and accounting for consciousness. Proponents of
10 See, for some statements of the problem, Joseph Levine, “Materialism and Qualia: The Explanatory Gap,” in Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 64 (1983), 354-361; Clyde L.Hardin, “Qualia and Materialism: Closing the Explanatory Gap,” in Philosophical and Phenomenological Research, XLVIII:2 (1997), 281-298; Ned Block and Robert Stalnaker, “Conceptual Analysis, Dualism and the Explanatory Gap,” in The Philosophical Review, 10:3 (1999), 315-360; Karol Polycn, “Phenomenal Consciousness and Explanatory Gap” in Diametros, 6 (2005), 62-52; Gilbert Harman, “Explaining an Explanatory Gap,” in American Philosophical Association Newsletter on Philosophy and Computers, 6:2 (2007), 2-3 and Michael Tye, Consciousness Revisited: Materialism without Phenomenal Concepts (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009), 237.
F. GBENGA 99 the explanatory gap argument claim that a physicalist account merely explains, at most, the structures and functions of a phenomenon, but explaining structure and function is irrelevant to explaining consciousness, because consciousness lacks objective structure and function. Therefore, no physical account can explain consciousness. The explanatory gap argument is associated in its powerful variants with, among many others, Thomas Nagel,11 Joseph Levine,12 and David Chalmers13 Let us take the lead of Joseph Levine in elucidating the explanatory gap argument a little further. A functional explanation of pain would enumerate the causal roles associated with pain. For example, we can say that pain is caused by damages to some tissues in the body; it causes us to cry ‘ouch,’ and causes some involuntary actions in us, such as instant jerking, touching or holding of the affected part of the body, etc. Moreover, Levine accepts that in cognitive science, it is possible that pain is identified with the firing of C-fibers, and this explains why pain does what it is said to do. This is precisely the functionalist or physicalist account of pain. However, according to Levine,
there is more to our concept of pain than its causal role, there is its qualitative character, how it feels; and what is left unexplained by the discovery of C-fiber firing is why pain should feel the way it does! For there seems to be nothing about C-fiber firing which makes it naturally “fit” the phenomenal properties of pain, any more than it would fit some other set of phenomenal properties. Unlike its functional role, the identification of the qualitative side of pain with C-fiber firing (or some property of C-fiber firing) leaves the connection between it and what we identify it with completely mysterious. One might say, it makes the way pain feels into merely a brute fact.14
Hence, for Levine, the causal or functional aspect of a mental state is ontologically different from the properties of the mental state: the explanation of a mental state, such as pain, cannot suffice as an explanation of the phenomenal properties of pain. Furthermore, Levine argues that we have no idea of how the qualitative character could be a property of a physical object.
11 Thomas Nagel, ‘What is it Like to be a Bat’ in Block Ned, Flanagan Owen and Güzeldere Güven eds., The Nature of Consciousness: Philosophical Debates (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997), 519-527. 12 Joseph Levine, “Materialism and Qualia: The Explanatory Gap,” 354-361 and Joseph Levine, Purple Haze: The Puzzle of Consciousness, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 6. 13 David Chalmers, ‘Consciousness and its Place in Nature,’ in Blackwell Guide to Philosophy of Mind, ed. by S. Stich and F., Warfield (London: Basil Blackwell, 2003), http://consc.net/papers/nature.html (accessed August 1, 2010) 14 Levine, Purple Haze: The Puzzle of Consciousness, 357.
100 EXPLANATORY GAP ARGUMENT
There would be a gap in such an account. He gave an example, “as I now look at my red diskette case, I’m having a visual experience that is reddish in character. Light of a particular composition is bouncing off the diskette case and stimulating my retina in a particular way. That retinal stimulation now causes further impulses down the optic nerve, eventually causing various neural events in the visual cortex. Where in all of this (sic) can we see the events that explain my having a reddish experience? There seems to be no discernible connection between the physical description and the mental one, and thus no explanation of the latter in terms of the former.”15 (Levine, 2001: 76-77). It is the lack of this connection that creates the lacuna being described as explanatory gap. However, as I shall argue in this paper, it is important to note that Levine’s assumption of an ontological distinction between a mental state, which is identified with c-fiber firing, and its properties is arbitrary. This is because, if, according to Levine, “there is more to our concept of pain than its causal role, …” it follows that what is inadequate is our conception of pain, and this failure does not suggest that mental states and their properties are separate ontological entities. I shall return to this argument shortly, but let us understand the explanatory gap argument a little more. The explanatory gap argument becomes more explicit when considered alongside with Saul Kripke’s notion of a “rigid designator.” A rigid designator is an expression which refers to or designates the same thing with respect to all possible worlds.16 For him, ‘possible world’ is shorthand for what might have been the case. He uses the term ‘possible world’ to elucidate the point that descriptions might designate more than one object but proper names designate the same object in all possible worlds. So, if terms that refer to phenomenal consciousness (or qualia) and brain properties (or brain processes) are rigid designators, each of the terms would refer to ontologically distinct processes or properties. As a result, an identity statement such as “the feel of pain’ (qualia term) is the same as ‘c-fiber firing’ (a brain term)” would be false. This is so because each of the two terms rigidly designates distinct entities or properties, and there has to be an explanation that links the two ontologically distinct entities or properties with each other. It is the absence of this link that creates the gap in the functionalist or physicalist explanation of pain. To explain the explanatory gap in another perspective, consider these two identity statements:
(a) “Water is H2O”
(b) “Pain is c-fibre stimulation.”
It could be argued that the difference between these statements lies in the kind of explanation derivable from each of them. In (a), the identification of water with H2O suggests that information about every property of water,
15 Ibid., 76-77 16 Saul A. Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980), 48.
F. GBENGA 101 such as its freezing and boiling points, its liquidity at a room temperature, its colourlessness, its transparency, etc, can be fully explained in terms of H2O. Also, in (b), the identification of pain with c-fibre stimulation implies that information about pain is explainable in terms of c-fibre stimulation. However, proponents of the explanatory gap argument claim that there is more to the concept of pain that is not explained in terms of c-fibre stimulation: “There is its qualitative character, how it feels; which is left unexplained.”17 Putting it differently, Campbell claims that “in particular, the identity statement (b) does not tell us why pain feels the way it does. The psychophysical identity statement (expressed by (b)) then leaves us with an explanatory gap that is 18 absent in the case of water and H2O (expressed in (a)). The explanatory gap argument, as it stands, has been challenged as being unsound. The reason is that the argument is based on a wrong comparison between mind and brain identity statements on the one hand and “normal” scientific identity statements on the other.19 The kinds of explanation warranted by the two identity statements (a and b) differ. Each of the two different concepts on the two sides of the psychophysical identity statement in (b), i.e., “Pain” and “c-fibre stimulation,” picks out different phenomena in two different domains: “pain” picks out a mental state, which is (traditionally) identified as a non-physical phenomenon, and “c-fibre stimulation” picks out a purely physically identifiable phenomenon and properties. In view of this, the statement that identifies pain with c-fibre stimulation is neither a fully physical nor a fully psychological statement, and such an identity statement is not normal. In a normal identity statement, such as “Water is H2O,” the two different concepts – “water” and “H2O” – pick out purely physical phenomena. It is, therefore, wrong to compare mental-physical identity statement with a normal scientific identity statement like “water is H2O,” where the entities on both sides of the identity statement are fully physical. It is understandable to expect that a normal scientific identity statement such as ‘water is H2O,’ would offer a complete explanation of water or H2O without any remainder. The point of the explanatory gap argument is that a psychophysical identity statement, such as ‘pain is c-fibre stimulation’ failed to yield a full explanation of pain or c-fibre stimulation, hence, the physicalist’s claim that the pain is the same as c-fibre stimulation is wrong. Obviously, the truth of physicalism seems to be unaffected by this reasoning. This is because given the understanding and usage of the concept of ‘pain’ as referring to a phenomenon which is different from the phenomenon referred to by the concept of ‘c-fibre stimulation,’ an identity statement expressed by the two concepts would be a suspect. However, notwithstanding this error, there is the way things are in nature, which is not affected by the way we understand and use concepts. Physicalism is a theory about the nature of the world, and it
17 Levine, “Materialism and Qualia: The Explanatory Gap,” 375. 18 Neil Campbell, ‘Why We Should Lower Our Expectation about the Explanatory Gap,’ in Theoria, 75 (2009), 37. 19 Marcel Scheele, ‘Never Mind the Gap: The Explanatory Gap as an Artefact of Naïve Philosophical Argument,’ in Philosophical Psychology, 15:3 (2002), 333-342.
102 EXPLANATORY GAP ARGUMENT asserts that the mental is physical. The truth of this assertion cannot be challenged by the way we understand and use concepts, but by examining the nature of phenomena in the world. Moreover, let us, for the sake of argument, accept the comparison of water-H2O and mental-physical identity statements. Proponents of the explanatory gap argument could argue that in the ‘water-H2O’ identity statement, given all the relevant empirical or molecular information about H2O, it seems impossible to deny that H2O are the defining characteristics of water. Hence, ‘water-H2O’ expresses a necessary truth, and we can say necessarily, what is explained by ‘water’ is explained by ‘H2O,’ thus, there is no gap in the identity statement: ‘water-H2O.’ However, the mental-physical identity statement, “pain is c-fibre stimulation” did not express a necessary truth because ‘pain’ refers to phenomenal properties that are not parts of relevant physical and functional mechanisms referred to by ‘c-fibre stimulation.’ This, therefore, further confirms the claim of the explanatory gap argument that there are gaps in the psychophysical identity statement: “pain is c-fibre stimulation.” However, I think it is possible to argue that the conclusion derivable from above is unwarranted. This is because it could be argued that the same gap noticed in “Pain is c-fibre stimulation” could also be found in the water- H2O identity statement. According to Saul Kripke, the distinction between necessity and contingency is a metaphysical distinction about how the world is. If the world could not be different from the way it is, then facts or claims about the world are necessary. If, on the other hand, the world could be different from what it is then facts or claims about the world are contingent.20 The point that the water-H2O identity statement expresses a necessary fact about the world is, however, challenged by Hilary Putnam’s twin earth thought experiment where there is the possibility of the existence of a sample of water which does not contain two molecules of oxygen and one molecule of hydrogen.21 (Putnam, 1975: 215-271). This suggests that the world could be different from what it is, and the possibility of a world where water is XYZ suggests that it is a contingent truth that ‘water is H2O.’ Thus, there is no asymmetry between ‘water is H2O,’ and the mental-physical identity statement, “Pain is c-fibre stimulation” as alleged by proponents of the explanatory gaps arguments. What to deduce from the above is, according to Mark Bradley, “… either all such cases will involve explanatory gaps, and there is no special threat to materialism (or physicalism) from the existence of qualia, or there are no such cases which involve explanatory gaps, and so materialism (physicalism) is safe” (Bradley, 2003: 4). This conclusion puts defenders of the explanatory gap argument against physicalism in a dilemma. The proponents of the explanatory gap argument could, however, argue that the conclusion poses a false dilemma
20 Kripke, Naming and Necessity, 36. 21 Putnam Hilary, Language, Mind and Knowledge (London: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 215-271.
F. GBENGA 103 and insist that there is an explanatory gap in the mental-physical identity statement. This is because, granted that the water-H2O identity statement does not express a necessary truth, the alternatives to H2O are still microphysical properties. Hence, if water is H2O or water is XYZ, the identity of water with any of these microphysical properties offers, whether necessary or not, a completely physicalist explanation of water. However, in the case of mental- physical identity statement, what is missing is something that is completely different from what a physical or functional concept or principle can capture. Therefore, it is still intelligible to argue that the water-H2O identity statement offers a complete physicalist explanation, because any variation in it can be accommodated within the physical explanation. But there is a gap in the mental-physical identity statement, because the variation in it introduces a unique property which is not found within the domain of physical or functional explanation. The basis of my challenge against the explanatory gap argument is the introduction of this unique property. Given the introduction of this unique property, two implications are immediately derivable from the explanatory gap argument. First is that the explanatory gap argument establishes an ontological gap between physical and phenomenal properties, hence the world is bifurcated into two: physical and phenomenal, and the way to solve the mind/body problem is to extract facts from the world that bridge or close the gap. The harder problem would be what kind of fact would bridge or close the gap? Empirical facts would come from and would be about the observable, physical or empirical parts of the world, and this might not suffice as facts in the phenomenal or non-physical parts of the world. Hence, physicalism would be irredeemably false. The second implication is that the explanatory gap argument establishes an epistemological gap; it is about our ability to know and conceptualize the true nature of things, and the explanatory gap says nothing about the real nature of things in the world. The answer to the question, ‘how and why phenomenal consciousness arises from physical properties and entities?’ would not depend on ontological facts or what is exactly obtained in the world, but upon the scope of our knowledge, the limitations of our knowledge claim, our knowledge and use of concepts, etc. Consequently, the explanatory gap proves nothing against physicalism as an ontological account of world. Since the explanatory gap argument cannot obviously prove that physicalism is both false and true, in what follows, more arguments are proffered to answer the following question: ‘are there gaps in the world, so that physicalism is false, or there are no gaps in the world, so that physicalism is true?’
What the Explanatory Gap Argument Proves
One physicalist position is that there is no gap in the physicalist explanation of consciousness, and by extension, of the mind, because there are no such gaps in the world, hence once the physical properties and processes of
104 EXPLANATORY GAP ARGUMENT consciousness are explained, there is no problem of explaining any phenomenal properties of consciousness, because, according to the physicalist, such properties, if they exist at all, are also physical properties. In arguing for this position, physicalists argue that experiences are fully physical, and there is no explanatory gap posed by their phenomenology, so the supposed gap is unreal. For instance, Michael Tye argues that the so-called “explanatory gap” arises largely from failure to recognize the special features of phenomenal concepts.22 According to him, phenomenal states, to which phenomenal concepts apply, are not subjective in the first person sense. If they were, they would have been distinguished from objectively observable states. Phenomenal states are not properties of the subject that has them; rather phenomenal states are observer independent properties of the world. The intuition that a phenomenal concept, for example, ‘pain,’ must refer to phenomenal states, which are subjective properties of experience, and “c-fibre stimulation” describes an objective phenomenon – is erroneous. This wrong intuition is the source of the claim that there is a gap between pain and c-fibre stimulation. Moreover, according to Tye, what is derived from the perspectival subjectivity of phenomenal states is that the phenomenal concepts that apply to the phenomenal states also share the feature of subjective perspectivity. In addition, given the perspectival nature of indexical concepts (the perspectival nature of indexical concepts is that each indexical concept such as ‘this,’ ‘here,’ ‘that,’ etc is a priori linked with the concept ‘I’ and other concepts that designate a one and only entity. So, each indexical concept incorporates a certain perspective, namely the very special, first person, independent or singular perspective); it is assumed that phenomenal concepts, which apply to phenomenal states, are also indexical concepts. Tye’s argument is that unlike an indexical concept where a specific identified entity is at the centre, what is at the centre of the phenomenal concept is not the self or any singly identifiable entity, but the phenomenal experience, which is firmly attached to objects being experienced. Therefore, irrespective of the idea of subjectivity suggested by the phenomenal concept, what the phenomenal concept refers to is not the individual using the concept, but the phenomenal state, and the phenomenal state belongs to the object of perception, not the owner of the experience.23 Once it is clear that phenomenal states are properties of, and arise from objects, and, in as much as, experience of an object is fully explained physically, it follows that phenomenal states are also explained. Since an explanatory gap exists only if there is something unexplained that needs explaining, and
22 Michael Tye, ‘Phenomenal Consciousness: The Explanatory Gap as a Cognitive Illusion,’ in Mind, 108:432 (1999), 707. 23 John O’Dea, “The Indexical Nature of Sensory Concepts” in Philosophical Papers, 31:2 (2002), 169-181.
F. GBENGA 105 as it argued, there is nothing that needs to be explained, the conclusion is that there is no gap in the world. Thus, the explanatory gap argument fails to disprove the truth of physicalism.24 However, it is doubtful that the argument above has successfully shown that there is nothing that needs to be explained. First, if, as Tye grants, phenomenal states are perceiver-independent, what then does the idea of ‘point of view’ or ‘perspectival experience’ suggest? Let us accept Tye’s characterization of phenomenal states as properties attached to objects. Thus understood, these properties are susceptible to explanation by Physics. However, the point of the proponents of the explanatory gap argument is that peculiar to the subjects that perceive an object is ‘what it feels like’ to perceive the object. This, ‘what it feels like’ is what needs to be explained and captured with a concept. The ‘what it feels like’ is, according to the dualist, a subjective phenomenon, it is, therefore, proper to expect that the concept that captures be a phenomenal concept. Thus, phenomenal concept, contrary to Tye, expresses the point of view, the perspective of the subject that has the ‘what it is like,’ and not another ontology. If this is right, then the challenge that an identity statement expressed by a phenomenal concept and a physical concept has gaps stands, because each of the two concepts picks out different kind of phenomena. There is a need for more explanation to justify an identity statement between them. Second, according to Tye, redness, the phenomenal property of red is embedded in red objects, say tomatoes, roses, etc. When I look at a rose, the redness I perceive is an intrinsic property of rose. It is what I experience when I perceive the redness of rose.25 It is on this basis that the phenomenal concept, ‘redness’ is not indexical. However, if phenomenal states are object-independent, it is doubtful that the object-dependent intrinsic property, redness, perceived as part of rose, is the phenomenal state of my experience of rose. Surely redness is the property of rose, not of my experience. Redness of rose can be given cognitive explanation, what need to be explained are the properties of my experience and not the properties of the object. In view of this, the explanatory gap argument stands. Its claim is that explaining the property of redness as being embedded in the object I am perceiving is possible, but that such an explanation will leave out reddishness, the property of my experience of redness. In response to the above, I think that the fundamental assumption in the explanatory gap argument that the phenomenal state or property, identified as ‘what it feels like,’ is subjective is derived from the idea that phenomenal concept is an indexical concept. This argument is not enough to establish the ontology of the phenomenal state as a distinct non-physical phenomenon. Truly, the idea of a phenomenal concept presupposes the existence of a phenomenal state or property, and since phenomena are ordinarily private or
24 Tye, ‘Phenomenal Consciousness: The Explanatory Gap as a Cognitive Illusion,’ 719 25 Michael Tye, Ten Problems of Consciousness: A Representational Theory of the Phenomenal Mind (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995), 145.
106 EXPLANATORY GAP ARGUMENT subjective entities as contrasted with the objective entities,26 it is correct to assume that the phenomenal state exists as a subjective entity not explainable by any physical concept. The error in this reasoning, however, is that the assumption that the phenomenal state is subjective because phenomenal concepts are used to referred to it. In this direction, it is important to note that Tye redefines his objection against the explanatory gap argument. He no longer believes that there are phenomenal concepts. He, however, reiterates his position differently. For him, the phenomenal character of the experience of red, for example, is in red. Thus, I am aware of the phenomenal character of the experience of red by being aware of red. When I introspect, my attention goes to the external quality red, and thereby I am aware of the phenomenal character of the experience of red. This suggests that red is the phenomenal character of the experience of red.27 Once a physicalist explanation of red is given, it suffices for an explanation of the phenomenal character of the experience of red. Unless the dualists have some other justification for the ontology of phenomenal states as distinct entities or properties, I think Tye’s idea that red is the phenomenal property of mental experience of redness prevents us from multiplying entities unnecessarily. Even if this particular phenomenal property of the mental experience of redness is not contained in the physicalist explanation of red, what to do is to expand the physicalist explanation of red to accommodate such a property. However, it is possible to argue that Tye’s identification of the phenomenal property of the experience of red with red is not clear. This is because given the initial definition of phenomenal state or property of a mental experience as being subjective, it follows that the phenomenal property of the experience of red belongs to the subject who has the perceptual experience of perceiving a red object, and it is not clear how an explanation of a property that belongs to a red object being perceived suffices to explain the phenomenal property of the perceptual experience of the perceiver of the red object. If this distinction between the property of an object, and property of the perceptual experience of the object subsists, it is correct to submit that ontologically the two kinds of properties are distinct, and any explanation of one in terms of the other would further justify the claim of the explanatory gap argument. This argument, as earlier pointed out, is derived from our definition and understanding of phenomenal property of mental experience as a distinct entity in the world. What really needs to be established is that there is such a property that exists in the world prior to our conceptualization. Hence, one possible defense by the physicalist is that the gap in our explanation of mental experience in terms of physical terms is an epistemological gap which does not really exist in the world. Another physicalist response to the explanatory gap argument is to argue that there is an epistemic, but no ontological gap between the physical
26 Quinton Anthony, “The Concept of a Phenomenon” in Edo Pivcevic, Phenomenology and Philosophical Understanding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 2. 27 Tye, Consciousness Revisited: Materialism without Phenomenal Concepts,138-144.
F. GBENGA 107 and phenomenal domains. Even though there is a gap between the physical or functional concepts of consciousness and phenomenal concepts of consciousness, an empirical study would reveal that the two concepts refer to only one entity or property in nature. So, the epistemic explanatory gap does not undermine physicalism. Parts of the arguments for this position are: Irrespective of the gaps in our understanding and the uses of concepts, wherein there is a controversy whether or not an explanation of concept a ‘x’ entails an explanation of concept a ‘y,’ or whether or not a complete explanation of ‘x’ leaves out an explanation of ‘y,’ the gap did not show that ‘x’ and ‘y’ are names of two distinct properties in nature. In fact, by means of empirical discoveries, ‘x’ and ‘y’ may refer to one and the same thing. Moreover, the identity between physical concepts and phenomenal concepts could be contingent. There is, however, a sort of empirical necessity that explains the identity between physical properties and phenomenal properties. It is also not important whether the truth of the statement of this kind of identity is known a priori or a posteriori. Empirical discoveries could either be a necessary fact or contingent fact. It is not compulsory that the discoveries are known a priori. A necessary empirical discovery is a fact which cannot change from what it is, but which is discovered through sense experience. An empirical discovery that is a contingent fact is a fact that can change, and is discovered through sense experience. An example of an empirical discovery which is necessary is “Water is H2O.” This is a fact about the water that, given the empirical world, cannot be different from what it is, so it is necessary; but the truth of this statement is discovered through empirical investigation. It is not known a priori. This implies that if, by virtue of our empirical investigation, we are unable to discover the truth of the statement “water is H2O”; this would not suggest that water is not H2O. When, however, our empirical understanding improves, we would discover that the statement “Water is H2O” represents the truth. In view of this, physicalists have argued that the appearance of an explanatory gap in the case of pain and c-fibre stimulation is a function of the status of scientific discovery. Given that the discoveries in Molecular Science are already advanced and considered reliable, there seems to be no gap in the explanation of water in terms of H2O. There, however, seems to be an explanatory gap in the case of psychophysical identities. This, I would like to agree with Campbell, is not because the psychophysical entities are ontologically distinct, but because the understanding of the real nature of these entities is, at present, fairly rudimentary, immature and incomplete. It is assumed that as neurology, neurosciences, neurophysiology and neuropsychology progress, and we learn more about the brain and its properties, there is every reason to expect that the explanatory gap will be eliminated.28
28 Campbell, “Why We Should Lower Our Expectation about the Explanatory Gap,” 37-38
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The position defended in this paper is that the gap that exists in the explanations of consciousness is a conceptual and not an ontological gap. The significance of this position is that it advances the efforts, in neurophilosophy29, at building a theory of consciousness where all facts and generalizations about consciousness are gathered under the rubric of science. This is what Owen Flanagan referred to as a science of the mind30. More important, the denial of an ontological gap between mental states and phenomenal states supports the monist’s (particularly physicalist) challenge of the dualist bifurcation of the mind into physical and phenomenal properties, thereby, preparing the grounds for resolving the age long mind/body problem in metaphysics and the higher form of the problem which is now rebranded as the hard problem of consciousness in contemporary philosophy of mind.
Conclusion
It must be noted that the status of the neurological, neuroscientific, neurophysiological and neuropsychological theories is a reflection of the epistemic limitation of human beings; it is, therefore, not a sufficient ground to conclude that physicalism is false. An objection to this physicalist claim, exemplified by Chalmers, is that current work on the neural basis of experience does not come close to addressing the hard problem of consciousness. Faith in the scientific approach is unjustified and blind to the philosophical nature of the problem.31 Thus, in a way, Chalmers restates the explanatory gap argument. But, it is important to note that the supposed gap could be obvious if, as claimed, there is a phenomenal quality attached to a mental state that is yet to be accounted for in any scientific explanation of the mental state. The position argued for in this paper is that given the truth of physicalism,32 then the explanatory gap argument merely sets a goal for the physicalists to offer an account of the phenomenal quality, the existence of which proponents of explanatory gap argument affirmed. This goal does not undermine nor diminish the truth of physicalism. Moreover, the anti-physicalists argument of the proponents of the explanatory gap argument could be turned around to justify the physicalism. This is by claiming that the reason for the persistent problem of phenomenal consciousness is the immature status of neurology, and other disciplines concerned with the human nervous system, and that if we
29 Neurophilosophy is the philosophical interpretation and application of neuroscientific concepts, findings and results of research experiments in neuroscience in addressing traditional philosophical questions. For further details, see Georg Northoff, “What is Neurophilosophy? A Methodological Account,” in Journal for General Philosophy of Science, 35:1 (2004), 91-127. 30 Owen Flanagan, “Prospects for a Unified Theory of Consciousness,” in Block Ned, Flanagan Owen and Güzeldere Güven eds., The Nature of Consciousness: Philosophical Debates (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997), 100. 31 Chalmers, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory, xi-xiv. 32 Physicalism is the philosophical position that everything there is in the world – including human minds – is either itself a basic physical entity or else constituted by basic physical entities.
F. GBENGA 109 are patient and persistent, further discoveries in neuroscience would one day furnish us with the answers that we seek. Owing to our limitations in neuroscience, truths about phenomenal states or properties of mental experience are not now known. But, the search for the physicalist account of the phenomenal qualities or properties of mental states is encouraged by the assertion advanced by Alan I. Leshner, the Chair of the Forum on Neuroscience and Nervous System Disorder that “the neurosciences are unquestionably among the most rapidly advancing and exciting fields of science, no matter how broadly construed.” More important, Leshner submits that:
The neurosciences are at a critical point where scientific knowledge is beginning to provide a much clearer glimpse into the underpinnings of who we are. Neuroscience has introduced new possibilities for understanding what makes us human – our mind, our selves. The ability to look into the brain of living, awake and behaving individuals and watch our minds in action is just one example of the new tools now available that could tell us a tremendous amount about our humanity and perceived individuality. This progress could be quite threatening to people’s long held values or beliefs about themselves.33
The import of the argument in this paper is to further confirm what is implied in Leshner’s submission that everything that exists, including human beings, is nothing more than a complex physical system, which is ultimately and completely explicable in empirical terms. The fact that this does not fit well into some long held values or beliefs does not refute the metaphysical claim of the physicalists that phenomenal properties of experience are part of the physical or functional properties of experience. Hence, it is safe to conclude that with the advancement of our knowledge in all kinds of neuroscience, neurology and other cognitive sciences, we might discover that the supposed gap between phenomenal states and mental states is epistemological, and does not exist in the fabric of the world.
Department of Philosophy, Obafemi Awolowo University, Nigeria
References
Block, Ned and Stalnaker Robert, “Conceptual Analysis, Dualism and the Explanatory Gap,” in The Philosophical Review, 110:3,(1999), 315-360. Campbell, Neil, ‘Why We Should Lower Our Expectation about the Explanatory Gap,’ in Theoria, 75 (2009), 34-51.
33 Alan I. Leshner, “Questions and Answers with Leshner I Alan,” in Neuroscience Quarterly, (Spring 2009), 4-5.
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Carruthers, Peter, Consciousness: Essays from a Higher-Order Perspective (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005) ______, Phenomenal Consciousness: A Naturalistic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Chalmers, David, ‘Consciousness and its Place in Nature,’ in Blackwell Guide to Philosophy of Mind, ed. by Stich S. and Warfield F., (London: Basil Blackwell, 2003), http://consc.net/papers/nature.html (accessed August 1, 2010) ______, Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). ______, The Character of Consciousness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). Dennett, Daniel, Consciousness Explained (London: Allen Lane, 1991). Flanagan, Owen, “Prospects for a Unified Theory of Consciousness or What Dreams are Made of,” in Block Ned, Flanagan Owen and Güzeldere Güven eds., The Nature of Consciousness: Philosophical Debates (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997), 97-109. Hardin, Clyde L., “Qualia and Materialism: Closing the Explanatory Gap,” in Philosophical and Phenomenological Research, XLVIII:2 (1997), 281-298. Harman, Gilbert, “Explaining an Explanatory Gap,” in American Philosophical Association Newsletter on Philosophy and Computers, 6:2 (2007), 2-3. Jackson, Frank, ‘Epiphenomenal Qualia’ in Philosophical Quarterly, 32 (1982), 127-136. ______, ‘What Mary Didn’t Know,’ in The Nature of Consciousness: Philosophical Debates, ed. by Block Ned, Flanagan Owen and Güzeldere Güven (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997), 567-570 Kripke, Saul A., Naming and Necessity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980). Leshner, Alan I., “Questions and Answers with Leshner I Alan,” in Neuroscience Quarterly (Spring 2009). Levine, Joseph, “Materialism and Qualia: The Explanatory Gap,” in Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 64 (1983), 354-361. ______, Purple Haze: The Puzzle of Consciousness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). McGinn, Colin, The Problem of Consciousness: Essays Toward a Resolution (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1991). Nagel, Thomas, ‘What is it Like to be a Bat’ in Block Ned, Flanagan Owen and Güzeldere Güven eds., The Nature of Consciousness: Philosophical Debates (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997), 519-527. Northoff, Georg, “What is Neurophilosophy? A Methodological Account,” in Journal for General Philosophy of Science, 35:1 (2004), 91-127. O’Dea John, “The Indexical Nature of Sensory Concepts” in Philosophical Papers, 31:2 (2002), 169-181. Polycn, Karol, “Phenomenal Consciousness and Explanatory Gap,” in Diametros, 6 (2005), 62-52. Putnam, Hilary, Language, Mind and Knowledge (London: Cambridge University Press, 1975).
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Quinton, Anthony, “The Concept of a Phenomenon” in Edo Pivcevic, Phenomenology and Philosophical Understanding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 1-16. Scheele, Marcel, ‘Never Mind the Gap: The Explanatory Gap as an Artefact of Naïve Philosophical Argument,’ in Philosophical Psychology, 15:3 (2002), 333-342. Tye, Michael, ‘Phenomenal Consciousness: The Explanatory Gap as a Cognitive Illusion,’ in Mind, 108:432 (1999), 705-725. ______, Consciousness Revisited: Materialism without Phenomenal Concepts (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009). ______, Consciousness, Colour and Content (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000). ______, Ten Problems of Consciousness: A Representational Theory of the Phenomenal Mind, (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995). Walter, Sven and Heckmann Heinz-Dieter, Physicalism and Mental Causation: The Metaphysics of Mind and Action (Charlottesville, U.S.A.: Academic Imprint, 2003). Wright, Wayne, “Explanation and the Hard Problem,” in Philosophical Studies, 132 (2007), 301-330.
KRITIKE VOLUME FIVE NUMBER TWO (DECEMBER 2011) 112-122
Article
Questioning the Body: From Technology towards a Sense of Body
Koshy Tharakan
Abstract: Many attempts of contemporary philosophers to reduce ‘mind’ to ‘body’ notwithstanding, where the ‘body’ is understood in the Cartesian framework, the continental philosophers in general repeatedly remind us that body has a significance that goes beyond its materiality as a bio-chemical physical substance. In “questioning body,” we wish to take up the philosophical underpinnings of the significance of body as a framework or tool to understand ‘technology’. By doing so, we are able to see the link between technology and body as more than a fortuitous relation. Relying on the writings of Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Ihde, the paper attempts to show how a “sense of body,” particularly the notion of “agentive body” as distinguished from the “symbolic body,” hermeneutically evolves from the way in which it is entangled in the technological matrix.
Key words: Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, body, technology
Introduction: Technology and Body
any attempts of contemporary philosophers to reduce ‘mind’ to ‘body’ notwithstanding, where the ‘body’ is understood in the MCartesian framework, the continental philosophers in general repeatedly remind us that body has a significance that goes beyond its materiality as a bio-chemical physical substance. In “questioning body,” we wish to take up the philosophical underpinnings of the significance of body as a framework or tool to understand ‘technology’. In the process, the paper attempts to show how a “sense of body” evolves hermeneutically. It is otiose to state that technology is the most visible thread by which the modern societies are connected with each other in their economic and other socio-cultural spheres. However, a philosophical take on technology inevitably leads us to probe our own ‘body’. The link between ‘technology’ and ‘body’ is more obvious than any philosophical arguments that purport to establish the ‘truth’ of ‘individualism’ against ‘holism’ as an ontological statement about society—‘society’ as a conglomeration of individual ‘bodies.’ Rather, as Fortunati et al. point out, .” . . [T]he body is increasingly running the risk of becoming an appendix to the machine, despite there being, as Nietzsche
© 2011 Koshy Tharakan http://www.kritike.org/journal/issue_10/tharakan_december2011.pdf ISSN 1908-7330
K. THARAKAN 113 wrote . . . more reason in the body than in our best wisdom.”1 Those who apprehend this possibility argue that, technology has become an end in itself rather than a mere means for human ends. As an end in itself, technology has succeeded in “invading the body.” Thus, Fortunanti et al. remarks:
The human body is undergoing the same processes today that nature once underwent. In fact, whereas initially technology turned to nature, today it has become very interested in the human body . . . Communication technologies have extended the boundaries of the body, increasing the capacity to transmit information. Technology has progressively grown closer to our bodies, approaching through first clothing, then synthetic clothing fibers, and finally “smart fabrics,” wearable computers, and communicative machines embedded . . . into the body.2
With the advent of the Cyborg, the technological invasion of body is complete!
Philosophy of Technology: Heidegger’s Questioning
Philosophical reflection on technology seems to be as old as philosophy itself. However, as Ihde remarks, though .” . . there is a vast literature concerning technology, rarely has it been the primary theme of philosophers . . . even within the plethora of books concerning the human impact of technology, few are concerned with the nature of technology per se. Either the literature tends to focus upon effects of technology or it may itself be technical literature.”3 Ihde himself provides an illuminating reason for this inexplicable silence on the part of philosophers:
Part of the silence concerning technology comes from within philosophy itself. Philosophy usually conceives of itself more as a type of “conceptual” engineering than as a “material” engineering. Here there is a deeper set of relationships between science and technology as they emerge both in ancient and contemporary thought in philosophy. This symptomatology points to the dominance of a long “Platonistic” tradition with respect to science and technology, a tradition which, with respect
1 Leopoldino Fortunanti, James E. Katz and Raimonda Riccini, introduction to Mediating the Human Body: Technology, Communication and Fashion (Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2003), 2. 2 Ibid., 3-5. 3 Don Ihde, Instrumental Realism: The Interface Between Philosophy of Science and Philosophy of Technology (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991), 3.
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to science and technology, turns out to be “idealistic.” . . . a “Platonistic” tradition is one which negatively judges, or at least evaluates, perception and embodiment as lower on the scale of human activity than what is presumed to be a “pure” conceptuality.4
As against the “Platonistic” tradition, the “Praxis” tradition acknowledges the primacy of a theory of action that attaches a positive value to “perception” and “embodiment.” Ihde reads Heidegger as a pioneer who belonged to the praxis tradition. Heidegger is foremost amongst the twentieth Century philosophers who reflected critically on technology. As some recent philosophers of technology note, for Heidegger the pivotal role of technology in modern society is symptomatic of a “wrongheaded attitude towards Being.”5 For Heidegger, the purpose of philosophy is to concern itself with ‘Being’. However, in thinking of ‘Being qua Being’ or the ‘being of beings’, its relatedness to man’s nature has been already implicated. So an existential analytic of Dasein must proceed from its average everydayness. The world of everyday Dasein, which is closest to it, is the environment. In the environing world, we do not encounter ‘mere things’ per se. Such things come across to us with regard to our interests. Our dealings in the world and with things in the world are by way of ‘concern’. Heidegger calls those entities, which we encounter in concern “equipment” or “tool” (de Zeug). Equipment always belongs to the horizon of a totality of equipments, their interrelatedness. There is not just a thing as ‘equipment’; rather there always exists a totality of equipments. What an item of equipment depends on the way it is related to or assimilated into the total equipmental context. In other words, an object derives its essence from its functional role as well as its actual existence. Heidegger terms the entities encountered as equipments as ‘ready-to-hand’ (Zuhanden) as against those encountered in theoretical cognition, ‘the present- at-hand’ (Vorhanden). For Heidegger, the level of ‘Zuhandenheit’ is basic and ‘Vorhandenheit’ is a second level abstraction. These are not two distinct types of ontic entities; rather it refers to a distinction in Dasein’s way of viewing the entities. When Dasein ‘views’ with circumspection the entities show themselves as ready-to-hand equipments. When Dasein adopts an attitude of merely observing, the very same entities appear as merely present at hand.6 In advocating a “praxis-perception model” for both philosophy of science and technology, Ihde emphasizes the significance of Heidegger’s “tool analysis” for philosophy of technology. According to Ihde, the decisive shift that Heidegger brought to our view may be termed as “materialist.” The “materialist” shift that Heidegger inaugurated in his Being and Time, has
4 Ibid., 5. 5 Maarten Franssen et al., “Philosophy of Technology,” in Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy
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“inverted the standard view of the science-technology relation to that of technology-science.”7 It was a long held view that technology is mere “applied science.” The standard view thus accords primacy to science construed in the “Platonistic” tradition of “pure conceptuality.” Heidegger’s famous example of hammer serves our purpose here. As the “tool” analysis shows, a hammer is not first known as an “object” having certain weight such that it qualifies as a heavy object with such and such a shape or extension. Rather, we encounter hammer as an “embodiment which extends some human activity into its pragmatic context within an immediate environment.”8 While we use the hammer, its “cognitive properties” are secondary and as an “object,” the hammer “withdraws” itself. As Heidegger says:
The peculiarity of what is proximally ready-to-hand is that, in its readiness-to-hand, it must, as it were, withdraw . . . in order to be ready-to-hand quite authentically. That with which our everyday dealings proximally dwell is not the tools themselves . . . On the contrary, that with which we concern ourselves primarily is the work.9
While using the hammer, say to drive a nail, if we cognitively attend to the hammer, then we make wrong nailing. In use, the tools possess a “dynamic” being of their own and they cease to be objects “known.” Again, the “dynamic being” of the tool is contextual. The tool belongs to a “tool- context.” In the case of hammer, it would be the nails, the wood, etc. In fact, the tool context leads to an entire environment and implicitly with it a “world.” Heidegger writes:
Any work with which one concerns oneself is ready-to- hand not only in the domestic world of the workshop but also in the public world. Along with the public world, the environing Nature . . . is discovered and is accessible to everyone. In roads, streets, bridges, buildings, our concern discovers Nature as having some definite direction. A covered railway platform takes account of bad weather; an installation for public lighting takes account of the darkness . . . When we make use of the clock-equipment, which is proximally and inconspicuously ready-to-hand, the environing Nature is ready-to-hand along with it. Our concernful absorption in whatever work-world lies closest to us, has a function of discovering; and it is essential to this function that, depending upon the way in which we are absorbed, those
7 Ihde, op cit., 48. 8 Ibid., 52. 9 Heidegger, op cit., 99.
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entities within-the-world which are brought along . . . in the work and with it . . . remain discoverable in varying degrees of explicitness and with a varying circumspective penetration.10
Thus, the ready-to-handiness of the tool opens up a wider environment and finally leads to Dasein as “for the sake of whom” the “in- order-to” structure of the tool points. As Ihde says, this “praxical perceptual” dimension of human experience is available in some way or other to all human communities. Such experience occurs both “without” science as well as “within” science. This implies that “technology” is not to be taken as “applied science,” rather “technology is broader than an explicit science.”11 “The Heideggerian inversion,” effected by the “tool” analysis makes a fundamental move in ontology as it makes “readiness-to-hand” as the basic ontological category by which entities are defined as they are “in themselves.” It is only when the “tool-hood” is broken that the “readiness-to-hand” turns into a “present-at-hand” entity amenable to a sort of “theoretical” knowledge. Thus, as Ihde observes:
This derivation of the occasion of “knowledge” makes the totality of the objects of knowledge not only derivative but special cases of human concern and activity. “Observer” consciousness is a particular development of actional, prior concerns. Thus, underneath the presumed disinterestedness of observation lies the engagement of praxis.12
In other words, technological praxis is not an application of science; rather science is now seen as “the tool of technology.”13 This inversion is explicitly stated in Heidegger’s later reflection on technology:
It is said that modern technology is something incomparably different from all earlier technologies because it is based on modern physics as an exact science. Meanwhile we have come to understand more clearly that the reverse holds true as well: modern physics, as experimental, is dependent upon technical apparatus and upon progress in the building of apparatus.14
10 Ibid., 100. 11 Ihde, op cit., 53. 12 Ibid., 54-55. 13 Ibid., 55. 14 Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, ed. by David Farrell Krell (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), 295-96.
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However, as Heidegger himself points out, the above statement only makes certain “facts” about technology. What is more significant is to grasp the “essence” of technology. Thus, Heidegger asks, “What is the essence of technology?” On first count, technology shows up as a “means to an end” and as a “human activity.” This definition of technology, Heidegger calls the instrumental and anthropological definition. The instrumental-anthropological definition, though is correct does not reveal the essence of technology as Heidegger says, “the merely correct is not yet the true.” Thus, he further asks, “What is the instrumental itself? Within what do such things as means and end belong?” Heidegger’s questioning traces instrumentality back to “fourfold causality.” Further interrogation reveals that the four causes—the formal, the material, the efficient and the final— “are the ways, all belonging at once to each other, of being responsible for something else.”15 The “four ways of being responsible” together bring forth something into appearance. According to Heidegger, even the coming of something from out of itself, physis, is also a bringing forth:
Not only handcraft manufacture, not only artistic and poetical bringing into appearance and concrete imagery, is a bringing-forth, poiēsis. Physis also, the arising of something from out of itself, is a bringing-forth, poiēsis.16
The growing things of nature as well as the products of arts and crafts thus make their presence through bringing-forth. But, bringing-forth happens only if “something concealed comes into unconcealment.” The “revealing” of the concealed is “aletheia,” the Greek term that got translated as “truth.” Thus, Heidegger’s search for the essence of technology thus shows that technology is no mere means; rather technology is a way of revealing. Technology as a mode of revealing characterizes not only earlier technologies of handcrafts. Even modern technology is also a mode of revealing, albeit a different one. As Heidegger says:
. . . the revealing that holds sway throughout modern technology does not unfold into a bringing-forth in the sense of poiēsis. The revealing that rules in modern technology is a challenging . . . in that the energy concealed in nature is unlocked, what is unlocked is transformed, what is transformed is stored up, what is stored up is, in turn, distributed and what is distributed is switched about ever anew. Unlocking, transforming, storing, distributing, and switching about are ways of revealing.17
15 Ibid., 290. 16 Ibid., 293. 17 Ibid., 296-98.
118 QUESTIONING THE BODY
The revealing, however, does not come to a standstill. The manifold ways of revealing and setting upon of the challenging-forth is gathered together under the rubric of “Ge-stell” or “Enframing.” However, Heidegger’s revealing of the essence of technology as “enframing” renders technology aporetic. As Belu and Feenberg point out:
. . . enframing is not simply a widespread “problem” we could solve with appropriate remedies, but the underlying structure of being in our time. It is ontological rather than ontic . . . However, the universality of enframing would seem to block knowledge of it. The enframed subject should not be able to understand or to have a sense of her own enframing.18
As seen above, either Heidegger’s characterization of the essence of technology as enframing is only a partial enframing and to that extent, the essence of technology is compromised or it is total enframing in which case human beings too are enframed and to that extent no theory of enframing is conceivable.19 The aporetic understanding of technology emanating from Heidegger’s questioning may be rendered less aporetic if we begin our questioning with body rather than technology per se. Merleau-Ponty, through his ontology of flesh, offers us precisely such a possibility.
Philosophy of Body: Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology of Flesh
According to Merleau-Ponty, our relation to the world is not one between the thinker and his object of thought. The world we actually perceive is not the ‘objective’ world, rather it is the world of our everyday life, the one in which we ‘live-through’. In the ‘lived world’ one deals with objects that are ‘situated’ in relation to specific human actions. In other words, it is the human body as subject of action which determinates the objects as situated in its field of action. Merleau-Ponty writes:
Our bodily experience of movement is not a particular case of knowledge; it provides us with a way of access to the world and the object, with a ‘praktognosia’, which has to be recognized as original and perhaps as primary. My body has its world, or understands its world, without
18 Dana S. Belu and Andrew Feenberg: “Heidegger’s Aporetic Ontology of Technology,” in Inquiry, 53 (No.1, 2010), 2. 19 Ibid., 8.
K. THARAKAN 119
having to make use of my ‘symbolic’ or ‘objectifying function.’20
Thus, the subject, by its very nature as embodied consciousness, right from its beginning is oriented towards the world. One’s body and the world are not to be understood as objects coordinated together by a functional relationship that objective thought establishes. The relation between my body and the world rather should be understood in terms of a real implication. Merleau-Ponty understands that subject’s interactions with the world are not primarily through the intellectual powers but through habits. When the body inhabits the space, it is done through habits and body has habits through inhabiting space. Habits and inhabiting are mutually implicatory.21According to him, the habit’s contributions to inhabiting is sedimented generalized possibilities for inhabiting and inhabiting’s contribution is pre-reflectively knowing one’s way around enabling habitual actions. As Merleau-Ponty says, the expressive spatiality is the projection of body-consciousness to another object in space. He gives the example of a typewriter’s keyboard as an instance of specific spatiality. While one types, one’s body spatiality gets merged with that of the keyboard’s spatiality. The “subject who learns to type incorporates the key-bank space into his bodily space.”22 Another example that Merleau-Ponty gives is a blind man’s cane:
The blind man’s stick has ceased to be an object for him, and is no longer perceived for itself; its point has become an area of sensitivity, extending the scope and active radius of touch, and providing a parallel to sight. In the exploration of things, the length of the stick does not enter expressly as a middle term: the blind man is rather aware of it through the position of objects than the position of objects through it. The position of things is immediately given through the extent of the reach which carries him to it, which comprises besides the arm’s own reach the stick’s range of action . . . The points in space do not stand out as objective positions in relation to the objective position occupied by our body; they mark, in our vicinity, the varying range of our aims and our gestures. To get used to a hat, a car or a stick is to be transplanted into them, or conversely, to incorporate them into the bulk of our own body.23
20 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. by Colin Smith (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), 140-141. 21 Ibid,. 304-305. 22 Ibid., 145. 23 Ibid., 143.
120 QUESTIONING THE BODY
The possibility of thus extending one’s body space to other objects through expressive spatiality, suggests a new way to understand technology. As Ihde points out, these are examples of “embodiment relations.” Such relation, Ihde notes, “are existential (bodily-sensory), but they implicate how we utilize technologies and how such use transforms what it is we experience through such technologies.” In the Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty provides a new ontology by introducing the notion of ‘flesh’. The flesh is a primal ‘element’ and both the subject and the world are born out of it. It is neither a mind nor a material substance. The distinguishing characteristic of flesh is its ‘intertwining’ relations. Using the example of one hand touching the other hand and being touched in turn, Merleau-Ponty says that the body can play the role of both the perceiver and the perceived. As he points out, there is an identity-in-difference when the two hands touch. The two hands are never, with regard to one another, “touched and touching at the same time.” The notion of “identity-in-difference” is fundamental to Merleau-Ponty’s ontological description of the visible. It is not only applicable to the experience of touch, but is relevant in the way in which the body is related to the world. Both my body as well as the world is flesh. The flesh of my body perceives the world as flesh. This new ontology negates the dualistic ontology that institutes a separation between my mind and body and between my body and the world.
Conclusion: Body/Technology
Dreyfus attempts to free the aporetic nature of Heideggerian ontology of technology by invoking marginal practices as the source of resistance to the enframing. Thus, Dreyfus writes:
. . . although a technological understanding of being is our destiny it is not our fate. That is, although our understanding of things and ourselves as resources to be ordered, enhanced and used efficiently has been building up since Plato, we are not stuck with that understanding. Although the technological understanding of being governs the way things have to show up for us, we can be open to a transformation of our current cultural learning.24
As Belu and Feenberg show, the textual inspiration for suggesting marginal practices as offering resistance to enframing comes from Heidegger’s remark in “Question Concerning Technology” that the saving power is to be
24 Hubert Dreyfus, “Heidegger on the Connection Between Nihilism, Art, Technology and Politics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, ed. by Guignon C.B. (London: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 307. Quoted in Dana S. Belu and Andrew Feenberg, op cit., 10.
K. THARAKAN 121 found “[h]ere and now and in little things.”25 However, this option seems to be doubtful as such a practice as Belu and Feenberg say remains an ontic solution whereas enframing is ontological. This perhaps necessitates a new ontology of technology and body. The ontology of flesh as well as Merleau-Ponty’s characterization of the “mutual implication” of ‘habit and ‘inhabiting’, I suggest mitigate the aporia of Heidegger’s notion of “enframing” as the essence of technology. Perhaps, what is aporetic is not the ontology of technology, but the body as flesh. To flush out the aporia of body as flesh, we may focus on the two conceptions of body available in anthropological discourse: body as “symbol” and body as the “agent.” Mary Douglas was one of the pioneers who articulated the notion of body as symbol. According to Douglas, the social situation is “replicated” symbolically by our body. The notion of “symbolic body” renders the body to be “viewed metaphorically as a text that can be “read” as a symbol or signifier of the social world that it inhabits.”26 Merleau- Ponty provides a succinct account of the “agentic body” as well as how body extends itself through technology, when he says that:
The body is our general medium for having a world. Sometimes it is restricted to the actions necessary for the conservation of life, and accordingly it posits around us a biological world; at other times, elaborating upon these primary actions and moving from their literal to a figurative meaning, it manifests through them a core of new significance: this is true of motor habits such as dancing. Sometimes, finally, the meaning aimed at cannot be achieved by the body’s natural means; it must then build itself an instrument, and it projects thereby around itself a cultural world. At all levels it performs the same function which is to endow the instantaneous expressions of spontaneity . . . 27 (italics mine)
Following Merleau-Ponty, we may thus say that technology is an “expression” of the body, an extension of the body and body is the “medium” of a technological world. This reciprocal “envelopment” of body and technology would make sense if we construe the body that extends itself not as a Cartesian res extensa but as an “embodied mind” manifested by ontology of “flesh.” In other words, technology may be now understood as extension of the “agentic body.” Such an understanding of technology as an extension of agentic body not only alleviates the Heideggerian aporia to a great extent but also projects hermeneutically the sense of the body as agentic in contrast to the
25 Heidegger, “Question Concerning Technology,” 315. 26 Erica Reischer and Kathryn S. Koo: “The Body Beautiful: Symbolism and Agency in the Social World,” in Annual Review of Anthropology, 33 (2004), 300. 27 Merleau-Ponty, op cit., 146.
122 QUESTIONING THE BODY symbolic sense of the body. The apprehension expressed at the outset, of the body being invaded by technology would be true of the “symbolic body,” whereas for the “agentic body” technology would be a tool to “extend” agency. Thus, even while technology invades the symbolic body, there remains an element of agentic body beyond technology through the power of its agency, an agency that is capable of the “saving power” that Heidegger had alluded to.
Department of Philosophy, Goa University, India
References
Belu, Dana S. and Feenberg, Andrew, “Heidegger’s Aporetic Ontology of Technology,” in Inquiry, 53:1 (2010). Fortunanti, Leopoldino, Katz , James E and Riccini, Raimonda ed., Mediating the Human Body: Technology, Communication and Fashion (Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2003). Franssen, Maarten, Lokhorst, Gert-Jan and Poel, Ibo van de, “Philosophy of Technology,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2010 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL =
KRITIKE VOLUME FIVE NUMBER TWO (DECEMBER 2011) 123-155
Article
Huebner’s Critical Encounter with the Philosophy of Heidegger in Being and Time: Learning, Understanding, and the Authentic Unfolding of History in the Curriculum
James M. Magrini
Abstract: This paper responds to the following question: “What are the issues concerned with potential educational reform that arise from Huebner’s critical encounter with Heidegger and the tradition in education and curriculum theory?” In attempting a rejoinder, I revisit Huebner’s groundbreaking essay, “Curriculum as Concern for Man’s Temporality,” which introduces the phenomenological method in education and curriculum studies, with the goal of examining in detail the underlying themes, issues, and concepts, which ground Huebner’s reconceptualization of curriculum reform, as they emerge from Heidegger’s philosophy. I show that Huebner’s understanding of Being- in-the-world in terms of the design of the educational environment, not only mirrors, but as well, embodies the flux, flow, and rhythmic dynamics of history’s “dialectic” unfolding as a temporal phenomenon, which for Heidegger represents our authentic “historizing” in the “moment of vision,” or Augenblick, and this for Heidegger is the definitive embodiment of Dasein’s authentic mode of existence as historical Being-in-the-world as Being-with Others.
Key words: Heidegger, Dwayne Huebner, phenomenology, philosophy of education
his essay engages in a close reading of the concepts that Dwayne Huebner originally adopted for inclusion in his curriculum philosophy by examining the essay, “Curriculum as Concern for Man’s T 1 Temporality,” focusing on the sources that emerge directly from Heidegger’s philosophy, including the phenomenological-fundamental-ontology of Dasein
1 Pinar writes of the essay in the following manner when outlining the history of phenomenology in curriculum studies: “Dwayne Huebner introduced phenomenology to curriculum studies in the 1960s. Perhaps his ‘Curriculum as Concern for Man’s Temporality,’ read to the 1967 Ohio State University Curriculum Theory Conference and printed in Theory into Practice, can be acknowledged as the specific event.” William Pinar, “History of Phenomenology
© 2011 James M. Magrini http://www.kritike.org/journal/issue_10/magrini_december2011.pdf ISSN 1908-7330
124 HUEBNER’S CRITICAL ENCOUNTER as it is presented in Being and Time, which will then be related back to Huebner’s work through hermeneutic exegesis and critique. Three sections form this essay: (1) Huebner’s critique of learning and knowledge within “traditionalist” and “concept-empiricist” curriculum ideology along with outlining a view of the human and world these aforementioned curriculum movements adopt in terms of Cartesian dualism; (2) The interpretation of ecstatic temporality as it emerges from Heidegger’s thought and is assimilated by Huebner into the philosophy of curriculum with the purpose of identifying the deleterious effects the inauthentic notion of time, as a linear phenomenon, has on the education of students; and (3) The critical analysis of authentic learning and curriculum design, which is related to the unfolding of what Huebner terms the “individual-world dialectic,” which consists of understanding and interpreting the world in terms of a referential totality directed toward the student’s ownmost potentiality-for-Being as a member of a learning community, i.e., her authentic historical Being-in-the-world as Being-with others (historicity).2 I conclude each section with thoughts on the potential implication these ideas might have for the present and future conception of our educational practices. Ultimately, I attempt to formalize the role Heidegger’s philosophy plays in inspiring Huebner’s authentic reconceived understanding of curriculum and the human being along with the potential impact this philosophy has for a reinterpretation and reevaluation of our conceptions of knowledge, students, and learning in education. Since this essay engages in philosophical archeology, concerned as it is with elucidating origins, it must be noted that any philosophy of education inspired by Heidegger’s fundamental ontology of Being and Time requires clarification and justification at the outset. This is because the issue of metaphysics as related to contemporary democratic education continues to be heatedly debated in the philosophy of education. We must ask: Will the attempted appropriation of Heidegger’s philosophy for the purpose of contemporary educational reform betray the original metaphysical project of Heidegger? Although a variety of responses have been offered by scholars, with some drawing decidedly pessimistic conclusions, I argue that it is not only possible to find value in Heidegger’s thought of 1927 and early 1930s, it is possible to do so in manner that remains true to the development of his metaphysical philosophy during that historical period. 3 For in 1933, within the Rectoral Address delivered at Freiburg University, The Self-Assertion of the German University, Heidegger embraces the potential of metaphysics for
in Curriculum Studies,” in Understanding Curriculum as Phenomenological and Deconstructed Text (London: Routledge, 1992), 235. 2 Huebner uses the term “historicity” as opposed to “historicality” in his essay, and this usage is consistent with Stambough’s (1996) translation of Being and Time. Macquarrie and Robinson, however, use the term ‘historicality’. Since I incorporate the Macquarrie and Robinson translation throughout, I use the term “historicality” when referring to Dasein’s authentic process of historizing as Being-in-the-world as Being-with others. 3 James Magrini, “Worlds Apart in the Curriculum: Heidegger, Technology, and the Poietic Attunement of Literature,” in Educational Philosophy and Theory (forthcoming 2012), 1-22.
J. MAGRINI 125 inspiring a sweeping reform of the system of higher education in Germany. Indeed, education at this time for Heidegger represents a distinctly and thoroughgoing metaphysical project. It is possible to marshal a defense of this claim by attending to the commentaries of Wolin and Lowith, both of whom, although disagreeing on the exact political implications of this document, identify the common metaphysical-ontological ground in Heidegger’s philosophy of education during the early and mid-1930s. As Wolin writes, Heidegger’s conception of education, as expressed in the Rectoral Address and other political writings of the 1930s, should be read as advancing “the existential analytic of Being and Time”4 in terms of the ontological-existential structures of Being-towards-death, destiny, ecstatic temporality, and the authentic notion of freely choosing to choose oneself and community amid possibilities that are at once given and inherited. Heidegger conceives the entire reformation of higher education in Germany in terms of an urgent spiritual and intellectual mission. Education, as a mode of self- assertion, must above all else draw its transcendent power from the “essence of science (Wissenschaft) in its innermost necessity […] and through science, educators and disciplines of those leaders and guardians of the fate”5 hold the promise of inspiring the authentic historizing of Dasein. Wissenschaft, as employed by Heidegger in the address, contrary to the common rendering of this German term as science, or knowledge through natural science, as stated by translator William C. Lewis, is a “central motif in his important texts from 1929 to 1935”6 and conceived by Heidegger as a special form of philosophical insight within which the “Seinsfrage (the question of Being) occupies its rightful pride of place.”7 Wissenschaft as thus defined is properly understood as both spiritual and intellectual, in terms of the special sense of a “knowing resolve [wissende Entschlossenheit] toward the essence of Being.”8 According to Heidegger, the essence of Wissenschaft, which emerges from the concern with Being, is accompanied, and indeed preceded, by a mode of attunement that inspires Dasein’s “unsheltered standing firm in the amidst of the uncertainty of the totality of being, which alone might result in an authentically transformed spiritual world.”9 Heidegger’s inquiry into the essence of education is thus grounded in the philosophical potential of our “being gripped, which must determine and attune us”10 for our ontological-historical vocation, through which we are first able to grasp and formulate the philosophical question of Being, and this for Heidegger occurs through the “the fundamental attunement of
4 Richard Wolin, The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 26. 5 Martin Heidegger, “The Self-Assertion of the German University,” in The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 30. 6 William C. Lewis, (translator’s note) The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader, 30. 7 Ibid., 30. 8 Carl Lowith, “The Political Implications of Heidegger’s Existentialism,” in ibid., 177. 9 Heidegger, “The Self-Assertion of the German University,” 33. 10 Ibid., 33.
126 HUEBNER’S CRITICAL ENCOUNTER philosophizing.”11 Heidegger is clear that in order for the system of higher education to embrace Wissenschaft, or the philosophical understanding of our ontological potential as humans, two things are necessary:
[F]irst, the teachers and students must each in their own way be seized by the idea of science and remain seized by it. At the same time however, this concept of science must penetrate into and transform the basic forms in which the teachers and students collectively pursue their respective scholarly activities.12
As will be elucidated in this essay, in relation to what has been stated above, it is possible to interpret and understand Huebner’s philosophy of education (and curriculum), which is both phenomenological and ontological in nature, as emerging from the very ground of metaphysics – specifically as defined by Heidegger in the 1929-30 lecture course, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: “Metaphysics is a questioning in which we inquire into beings as a whole, and inquire in such a way that in doing so we ourselves, the questioners, are thereby [attuned and] also included in the question, placed into question.”13
Huebner’s Critique of Traditional Curriculum Theory: Navigating the World of Present-at-Hand Entities
Huebner adopts the view that learning, taken as the organizing component around which the curriculum turns is mistaken, for it is only one component within an ensemble of unique and specific concerns that should inform the school’s curricular vision. However, it must be noted that Huebner is critical of the form of learning associated with social efficiency ideology, i.e., learning as a process of knowledge acquisition, linked with the current “scientific” trend in curriculum that demonstrates a “dependence on psychological language or the language of other behavioral scientists,”14 which engenders the bias in curriculum philosophy favoring “positivistic thought.”15 In addition to being critical of those reducing learning to the study of meta- cognition, basic cognitive processes, and the transfer of knowledge to students through ever-greater hyper-efficient strategies for processing information, Huebner is also critical of curriculum design that privileges a single form of knowledge linked with scientific thematizing, which is abstract, conceptual, and serves the instrumental purpose of preparing the student for her life beyond
11 Martin Heidegger, Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. by William McNeill (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press 1995), 9. 12 Heidegger, “The Self-Assertion of the German University, 36. 13 Heidegger, op cit., 12-13/9. 14 Dwayne Huebner, D. “Knowledge: An Instrument of Man,” in The Lure of the Transcendent: Collected Essays By Dwayne E. Huebner (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1999), 225. 15 Ibid., 225.
J. MAGRINI 127 the institution. In opposition to this limited view, Huebner sees the advantage in recognizing and embracing various forms of learning and knowledge in the curriculum. Although Huebner links authentic knowledge with know-how, this is not to say that it requires a “pragmatic or socially functional use,”16 rather he views authentic learning in terms of student participation in social activities within the classroom, which include getting along with others while engaged in heuristic learning experiences that enable the student to “discover who he is and what he may become.”17 It is possible to interpret Huebner’s authentic notion of learning, which emerges within the context of the curriculum shaped by the unfolding of the individual-world dialectic, functioning as the hub around which the re- conceived notion of curriculum turns. Huebner’s authentic notion of learning, as a process of understanding through interpretation and meaning-making, situates the student within the world of the curriculum wherein the classroom resembles the authentic world of Dasein as presented by Heidegger, i.e., a referential totality, or system of assignments and references, that we share intimately with others, which “lets entities be encountered in the kind of Being that belongs to involvements”18 to which “Dasein assigns itself,”19 thus making up “the worldhood of the world.”20 Prior to analyzing Huebner’s authentic notion of learning, it is best to unpack his critique of the epistemological-ontological views of both traditional curriculum-making (e. g., the Tyler rationale) and curriculum making in terms of concept empiricism, highlighted by emerging scientism, as the means by which to determine authentic student learning (e.g., Darling-Hammond, et al). Huebner’s general critique of learning in education is two-fold and can be traced to both Heidegger’s early phenomenological ontology of Dasein and his later philosophy relating to technology, poetic human dwelling, and the concern with authentic thinking as a meditative emersion in Being, and focuses on (1) the notion that all authentic learning might be reduced to knowledge in the form of abstract conceptualization, or scientific thematizing - calculative thought as described by Heidegger – valued for its use in manipulating and mastering objective, empirical reality, which is a view to knowledge grounded in (2) the Cartesian understanding of the human as an interiorized subject who resides at a metaphysical and epistemological remove from the objective world. According to Huebner, within education “the language with the greatest acceptance today are those governed by or are imitations of science.” 21 When learning is the focus of the curriculum within education philosophies
16 Dwayne Hubner, “Curriculum as a Concern for Man’s Temporality,” in The Lure of the Transcendent: Collected Essays By Dwayne E. Huebner, 140. 17 Ibid., 140. 18 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. by J. Macquarrie, E. Robinson (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1962), 119/86. 19 Ibid., 119/86. 20 Ibid., 119/86. 21 Dwayne Huebner, “New Modes of Man’s Relation to Man,” in The Lure of the Transcendent: Collected Essays By Dwayne E, Huebner, 23.
128 HUEBNER’S CRITICAL ENCOUNTER embracing scientific instrumentalism, it is primarily understood in terms of “abstraction and generalization.”22 Educational models emerging from social efficiency ideology view authentic learning in terms of the student’s ability to abstract “certain patterns of events from a specific situation or a series of like situations and transferring them to new situations.”23 This form of knowledge, according to Huebner, arises from the “imposition of a symbolic curtain or screen between the person or reality,”24 and knowledge of the world in this form, by means of abstract symbols and images, appears to give the human “more power in his encounter with and exploration of reality.”25 This represents for Heidegger the negative aspects associated with the privileging of scientific, or calculative knowledge, within our various modes of world- disclosure, and as expressed by Young, “the more completely the world can be ‘calculated’ the more completely it can be controlled,”26 and thus “far from being concerned to disclose the world in its ‘ownness,’ science is just another disclosure of it in the ‘work’ – suitable way, another disclosure of it as resource.”27 It is possible to understand the essence of Huebner’s critique of curriculum, learning, and knowledge by attending to what Heidegger states regarding the general relatedness of our thought to the sciences, which is determined by the “basic trait of the modern era,” namely, “that object- materiality which is established and maintained in power by the scientific objectification in all fields.”28 For Heidegger, this specific type of world-disclosure functions by way of objectifying and thematizing the world. As Heidegger indicates, when we approach entities in the world in terms of representing abstract scientific- mathematical relationships, we reduce them to a mere present-at-hand existence, or as Heidegger states, “Being-just-present-at-hand-and-no-more,”29 and such entities have their “properties defined mathematically in ‘functional concepts’.”30 The implication of this for Huebner’s analysis of education is expressed succinctly in Dreyfus’ account of Heidegger’s notion of thematizing, wherein Dreyfus concludes that one problem with this view of knowledge is that
once characteristics are no longer related to one another in a concrete, everyday, meaningful way, as aspects of a
22 Dwayne Hubner, “Curriculum as Concern for Man’s Temporality,” 135. 23 Ibid., 135. 24 Huebner, “New Modes of Man’s Relation to Man,” 23. 25 Dwayne Huebner, “Towards a Remaking of Curriculum Language,” in Heightened Consciousness, Cultural Revolution, and Curriculum Theory (Berkeley, CA: McCutchan Publishing Corporation, 1974), 38. 26 Julian Young, Heidegger’s Later Philosophy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 77. 27 Ibid., 77. 28 Martin Heidegger,(1968) What is Called Thinking?, trans. by J. G. Gray, F. Wiecks (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1968), 102. 29 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, 122/88. 30 Ibid., 122/88.
J. MAGRINI 129
thing in a particular context, the isolated properties that remain can be quantified and related by scientific laws and thus taken as evidence for theoretical entities.31
Thus, we approach entities by means of knowledge in a way that stands beyond our authentic engagement with their Being, and the so-called “bare facts” of science isolate phenomena through the “special activity of selective seeing,” and thus in a duplicitous sense, “scientifically relevant ‘facts’ are not merely removed from their context by selective seeing; they are theory- laden, i.e., recontextualized in a new projection.”32 When thematizing entities through scientific world-disclosure, as Heidegger points out, they are freed in order that we might “determine their character objectively, which means that we free them “in such a way that they can ‘throw themselves against’ a pure discovering – that is, that they can become “Objects’.”33 The production, through abstracted thought, of “isolated properties with no contextual meaning”34 provides us with a new, but “essentially meaningless, context for [present-at-hand] properties.”35 If education concerns itself primarily with a mode of learning that thematizes the content of its curriculum, and beyond, the understanding of the human being and its world, along with the things and subjects with which it deals, then it is sanctioning a form of knowing that gives rise to a limited understanding of things because it privileges a mode of disclosure that ignores the complexity and particularity of our practical and meaningful interaction with the world and those with whom we share it. As Huebner argues, when we approach the world and others “enclosed in the framework of the subject-object attitude,”36 we tend to view others as “essentially predictable, controllable,”37 as something to be “studied and known.”38 Learning grounded in abstract conceptualization, which is emphasized and favored by traditional curricular theorists and the concept- empiricists in education, removes students from the context of their involved dwelling with others and obscures, or covers over, their individuality and Being. Against this view, Huebner argues that we should not seek to encounter others “in terms of abstractions and concepts,”39 rather we should meet and commune with others through face-to-face discourse. Inauthentic education is neither interactive nor generative, and is conceived by Huebner as acting upon the student who in turn learns, or is trained, to act upon the world because he has assimilated it in knowledge, and
31 Hubert Dreyfus, Being-in-the-world: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 81. 32 Ibid., 81. 33 Heidegger, Being and Time, 414/363. 34 Dreyfus, Being-in-the-world: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I, 81. 35 Ibid., 81. 36 Dwayne Huebner, “The Task of the Curricular Theorist,” in The Lure of the Transcendent: Collected Essays By Dwayne E, Huebner, 88. 37 Ibid., 88. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid., 89.
130 HUEBNER’S CRITICAL ENCOUNTER this “leads to the proposition that there is the individual and there is a world, and that the individual develops in such a way that he has power over the world or to act upon the world.”40 Huebner’s critique of concept-empiricism sets up a world picture that is Cartesian in nature, or dualistic, which Heidegger refers to as the impoverished Cartesian world, which is sharply contrasted by Heidegger with the world in its ontological-existential manifestation that is linked with the worldhood of Dasein. The Cartesian “world” is meant as an “ontical concept and signifies the totality of those entities which can be present-at-hand within the world”41 as objects situated in time-space. In this view we are subjects merely observing the world objectively and dispassionately refraining from interfering with the sense data we are receiving from the world for fear that our perceptions might lead to a distorted and inaccurate picture of reality. Legitimate knowledge is constructed from our ideas in an atomistic manner by means of establishing connections and relations between concepts to form an accurate view of (objective) reality. To view the world exclusively in this manner misses the crucial way in which world “functions as an ontological term, and signifies the Being of those entities”42 with which educators and students are intimately involved. Knowledge, in this view, is really an interior phenomenon occurring in the closed consciousness of the individual. Ideas (representations) in the mind appear to “picture” external reality, and when there is an agreement between our mental representations and the objective world, it is said we have knowledge. This indicates that when we know the objective world, because we have systematized facts expressed through mathematical formulae or universal laws of science, as previously stated, we act as subjects who impose our wills (through knowledge) in order to command and manipulate the world. The epistemological and ontological problem that this worldview engenders for education revolves around the model for validating truth claims that it adopts, namely, the correspondence model of truth, or epistemological model for verifying knowledge, which is based on the logic of adaequatio intellectus et rei, or “the adequation of the intellect and the thing.”43 Traditional Western philosophy, and by extension educational philosophy rooted in social efficiency, erroneously claims that “the ‘locus’ of truth is assertion (judgment),”44 and the “essence of truth lies in the ‘agreement’ of
40 Hubner, “Curriculum as Concern for Man’s Temporality,” 136. 41 Heidegger, Being and Time, 93/64. 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid., (translator’s note), 257/214. The learning experiences that accompany the era of standardized, “high stakes testing” in education represent instances where knowledge (and learning) is reduced to the correspondence model of truth. The student’s subjective knowledge is linked with the objective knowledge on the test in a way where it is determined to be either correct or incorrect. To assess reading comprehension or literacy based on state mandated tests embracing the Either/Or epistemological cluster, ignores any and all notions of hermeneutic and heuristic forms of meaning-making as a valid indicators of higher-level student understanding through knowledge construction and transfer. 44 Ibid., 257/214.
J. MAGRINI 131 the judgment with the object.”45 This misinterpretation of truth is prevalent today because of the influence of the metaphysics of presence, which Heidegger traces to the origins of ancient ontology, “the decisive period” when the “logos functioned as the only clue for obtaining access to that which authentically is, and for deciding the Being of such entities.”46 The notion of thematizing introduced earlier is precisely a way of “encountering entities in-the-world purely in the way they look (eidos),”47 and looking at the world in this manner “is sometimes a definite way of taking up a direction toward something – of setting our sights toward what is [merely] present-at-hand.”48 Truth conceived only in terms of agreement overlooks the more primordial phenomenon of truth as occurrence, or happening, the moment when phenomena are first disclosed to Dasein, for as Heidegger claims, “The most primordial phenomenon of truth is first shown by the existential-ontological foundations of uncovering.” 49 This for Heidegger represents the Being of truth, as “Being-true,” which is aletheuein, or movement into the opening of truth as aletheia – or privative expression meaning “un-concoveredness”. Dasein is always “in truth” due to its disclosedness in general, its projection towards its potentiality-for-Being, which means that “Dasein can understand itself in terms of the ‘world’ and Others or in terms of its ownmost potentiality-for-Being.”50 Heidegger claims that we are also in “untruth” due to falling, which is a component of Dasein’s Being that opens it to potential deception, for even in disclosure, things can “show themselves in the mode of semblance,” for there is always the possibility that what has “formally been uncovered sinks back again, hidden and disguised.”51 The notion of primordial truth as aletheia avoids Cartesian dualism as it transcends objectivist-ontology by showing that there is no interior-exterior divide between the human and its world, for truth is not conceived at a physical-spatial remove from the human’s perspective, but rather a view to truth as openness to the letting be of beings and Being. We might imagine students and educators within the context of the world of their authentic learning as participating within the clearing and lighting of truth, in the open revelation of their potentiality-for-Being, or the unconcealment of beings,
45 Ibid., 257/214 46 Ibid., 196/154. In “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth,” Heidegger details the decisive shift in Western metaphysics when truth as aletheia was subjugated to truth as “agreement” in his somewhat controversial reading of Plato’s allegory of the cave. See Fried for one such critical account of Heidegger’s interpretation of Plato and his metaphysical doctrine of truth: “Of course, Heidegger means by ‘doctrine’ (Lehre) ‘that which, within what is said, remains unsaid,’ rather than a self-conscious teaching of the thinker: in Plato’s cave, this is the transition of truth as aletheia from unconcealment (Unverborgenheir) to the correctness of representation […] many postmodernists who owe a debt of thinking to Heidegger have also accepted this reading of Plato […] But such a Plato is not the only Plato.” Greg Fried, “Back to the Cave: A Platonic Rejoinder to Heideggerian Postmodernism,” in Heidegger and the Greeks: Interpretive Essays (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006), 157. 47 Ibid., 196/154. 48 Ibid., 88/61. 49 Ibid., 264/221 50 Ibid., 264/221. 51 Heidegger, Being and Time, 264/222.
132 HUEBNER’S CRITICAL ENCOUNTER which is never reducible to an existent state, for it is a happening, or occurrence. Truth as unconcealedness, as primordial aletheia, “is neither an attribute of factual things in the sense of beings, nor one of propositions.”52 In the midst of truth’s happening, “in the midst of beings as a whole an open place occurs, There is a clearing, a lighting,”53 and by means of this open clearing aletheia “grants and guarantees to us humans a passage to those beings that we ourselves are not, and access to the being that we are ourselves are.”54 Truth as aletheia in fact makes possible truth as agreement, it is the primordial “condition of the possibility”55 of truth as correspondence. The understanding of truth as an original event presupposes that we are always already situated in the world, immersed within our existence. This dramatically influences the manner in which we understand and discourse about the world and others. To let the world be seen in its “unhiddenness” means that we let the world come to presence in the mode of its own self-showing, in ways that are meaningful to us. Huebner’s critique of learning in social efficiency ideology is linked directly to Heidegger’s interpretation of the Cartesian world of objects, for if we are perceiving the classroom in such impoverished terms, focusing only on the objective features of the things we deal with, their present-at-hand attributes, their abiding presence, educators are missing the fact that things and people always reveal themselves in a larger context, within a context of meaningful relations, which cannot be reduced to the knowledge of things available to us by way of thematizing the world. This represents a persistent problem for educators, namely, the loss of meaningful educational experiences for students: To focus on the ‘facts’ of our educational subject-matter, those aspects of curriculum that can be efficiently mastered and demonstrated through rigorous forms of examination, pays no heed to how the content is meaningful to the student’s Being or her world. The notion of authentic meaning in constructivist terms will be explored in the final section of the essay, for it underlies Huebner’s understanding of authentic learning, which is grounded in the human being’s authentic relation to its world. As Huebner suggests:
The individual is not separated from the world, or apart from it – he is a part of it […] if a curricular language can be developed so that the educator looks at the individual or the situation together, not separately, then his powers of curricular design and educational responsibility might be increased.56
52 Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. by A. Hofstadter (London: Harper & Row, 1971), 54. 53 Ibid., 54. 54 Ibid., 53. 55 Dreyfus, Being-in-the-world: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I, 199 56 Huebner, “Curriculum as Concern for Man’s Temporality,” 136.
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The Potential Implication of Authentic Learning for Education
Inauthentic learning is concerned with knowledge that is both instrumental and of a distinct variety, namely, logical-rational-scientific, and education that lives in the shadow of positivism runs the ever-present risk of degenerating into a form of curriculum-making where technicalization and hyperrationalization dominate. The former focuses on the utility of our knowledge at the exclusion of the concern for meanings, for why we do things and why they are meaningful to us; the latter, favors the application of reason alone to our analyses of the world at the exclusion of the concern for the emotional and spiritual dimensions of our Being. Education in this view is reduced to students navigating the world of present-at-hand entities with the goal of mastering and controlling the environment and the things therein by means of the power they gain through acquiring objective knowledge. Not that educators should avoid experiences that focus on the empirically verifiable aspects of reality, but this form of learning-knowledge should not be privileged above all other ways of knowing, understanding, and intuiting the crucial dimensions of the student’s Being. Hermeneutic interpretive meaning-making should be an integral part of the learning experience in the classroom and educators should demonstrate a genuine concern for the general intangible aspects of the learner’s Being-in-the-world, which cannot be quantifiably measured or validated by means of the traditional epistemological model grounded in the differentiation between a priori-analytic and a posteriori-synthetic. Inauthentic learning situates the source of knowledge outside of the learner in the objective world. The types of inauthentic learning experiences that accompany the era of standardized, or “high-stakes testing,” in education are instances where objective knowledge is situated at a remove from the student, is then imparted to the student, for which the student is then responsible for identifying and recognizing on the test. If the student’s (subjective) knowledge is linked correctly with the objective knowledge on the test, she demonstrates knowledge. To assess reading comprehension or contribute to the determination of literacy based on a test privileging the Either/Or epistemological cluster (by means of employing the correspondence model of truth), ignores constructivist knowledge, or understanding, emerging from hermeneutic interpretation and meaning-making as strong indicators of higher-level understanding. This misses the more primordial aspects of learning through interpretive activities as process of uncovering Being, which is associated with the primordial revelation of truth, or the making-present of truth, as aletheia. Authentic education organizes learning experiences so as to encourage students to inhabit and interact with the world of the classroom in terms of being “open” to the world they encounter within the various activities that comprise their learning experience. Students should be encouraged to allow things to come to presence in truth, in the very light of their own self-showing, and most importantly, in ways that matter to them, in ways that have meaning
134 HUEBNER’S CRITICAL ENCOUNTER for their Being. Educators should resolutely pursue the formation of students by letting them be, as it were, allowing their unique possibilities for Being to shine forth. The essence of truth, and hence knowledge and understanding, should not be thought of as residing in propositions, formulae, standardized tests, or other such vehicles for packaging, transmitting, and assessing the validity of truth, all of which express the correspondence between the internal representation (idea) of the subject and the existing (real) objective state-of- affairs. Rather the essential way in which we are “in-truth” occurs through disclosure, as we are “there” in moments of authentic discovery, which is the occurrence of both students and educators actively uncovering their authentic possibilities as related to their Being within the authentic context of navigating solutions to the problems they encounter.
Huebner, Heidegger, and Ecstatic Temporality
There is yet a third aspect of Huebner’s critique of education emerging from his focus on objectivist-ontology and the epistemological reliance on logical-rational-scientific knowledge as the gold standard for learning, and that is his concern with transcending the inauthentic notion of temporality that accompanies these aforementioned educational philosophies, especially prevalent within the erroneous view wherein knowledge is thought to map both space and time. As Huebner points out, “Man abstracts from the processes of life as if his only meanings were in the spatial world not necessarily in the temporal,”57 and if this crucial issue is confused or ignored, namely, the undeniable spatial characteristics of knowledge, the educator is in danger of viewing and interacting with the world “as if it were relatively stable in time,”58 i.e., in an a-temporal and a-historical manner. Due to the misunderstanding of authentic temporality, contemporary curriculum philosophy erroneously conflates education theory, which is practical, with scientific theory, which describes, explains, and predicts, and so researchers wrongly view educational programs as having a direct, observable, and predictable application within classrooms. In distinction to this view, authentic educational theory attempts to suggest what we ought to be doing in the classroom, and as opposed to objective and disinterested, according to Huebner, it is unabashedly subjective, value-laden, and emancipatory. Huebner, taking up Heidegger’s interpretation of “ecstatic temporality,” claims that we need to embrace the view of time in which we embody our past, as heritage, and stand out in projection toward an indeterminate future, which returns to meet us in the authentic present when our authentic possibilities are opened for appropriation. Huebner’s authentic understanding of time in its relation to curriculum studies challenges the vision, design, and implementation of the curriculum in contemporary education, which is erroneously conceived in terms of a linear understanding of time.
57 Huebner, “Towards a Remaking of Curriculum Language,” 39. 58 Ibid., 39.
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Huebner links temporality with historicality in terms of Heidegger’s understanding of Dasein’s authentic comportment in the moment of vision, and thus a brief overview of the process of Dasein’s temporalizing, in addition to a few words about time as conceived by Heidegger, will assist the understanding of Huebner’s individual-world dialectic, which provides the design of the classroom’s temporal-historical environment. Huebner’s strives to overcome the erroneous conception of the student as an ahistorical subject situated within a linear conception of time conceived as a series of “now” points, unfolding in three the distinct moments of past, present and future. In this view of time, as Heidegger argues, past and future are subordinated to the present, the “nun [now] is the metron [measure] of past and future,”59 and as a result “time is always interpreted as present, past is interpreted as no longer present, future as independent not-yet-present.”60 Importantly, this leads to an inauthentic view of our historical evolution and development, for in it the dynamic unfolding of our authentic historizing is reduced to an inauthentic view wherein history is conceived in terms of “historiography,” or the scientific discipline that studies past events, cultures, and their artifacts. According to Heidegger, history, as “historiography,” is concerned with those things once present, now forever gone, and so the past is conceived as belonging “irretrievably to another earlier time.”61 This idea is linked to the understanding of human history in terms of a series of irretrievable events or moments. This engenders an inauthentic understanding of the significance of the past in relation to Dasein’s future and present, and arises as a result of its falling and its absorption in the “They-self” and the everyday ways of understanding its existence, and “allows what has passed to be only in the past, which lets it freeze in the finality of [its] rigor mortis.”62 The interpretation of time as a linear phenomenon covers over the ontological-existential significance of Dasein’s death, birth, and heritage, as thrown having-been – it’s authentic life. According to Heidegger, history happens in praxis in terms of Dasein’s historicality, which is the living event of Daein’s freedom in relation to its past in the projection of its authentic possibilities, which arise from its past as heritage. Historicality, according to Huebner, as it relates specifically to curriculum development in education, is associated with practice, and in his view,
practice as human event suggests the essentially temporal nature of man and points to the linkage of biography to history as a major educational concern. Curriculuralists have ignored such questions of destiny, finitude, and the
59 Martin Heidegger, The Concept of Time, trans. by William McNeill (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. 1992), 17e. 60 Ibid., 17e. 61 Heidegger, Being and Time, 430/378. 62 Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?, trans. by John Gray (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1968), 103.
136 HUEBNER’S CRITICAL ENCOUNTER
meaning of morality of the influence of one human being on another. 63
Huebner argues that the traditionalists and concept-empiricists in curriculum theory are either concerned with establishing goals, purposes, and objectives, which orient learning exclusively toward the future, with the specific task of determining the student’s “future behavior,” or they are locked within the static moment of the present, which leads to the failure to understand the potential for change and to realize that “human life is never fixed but is always emergent as the past and future become horizons of the present.”64 Heidegger traces the loss of Dasein’s authentic temporal Being to the inauthentic, everyday interpretation of existence in which Dasein “temporalizes itself in the mode of making-present,”65 and by locating itself in the hypostatized moment of the present (or “now”), Dasein “loses his time”66 because it fails to await the approach of the authentic future from out of its past, heritage, or having-been. This also represents the loss of Being, which emerges from a misunderstanding of Being as being present, i.e., the event of Being is conceived as “pure presence, that is, the presence that persists, the abiding present, the steadily standing ‘now’.”67 This inauthentic interpretation of Being is linked inextricably with temporality, and it erroneously views beings as standing outside of time, as independent of time, and subsequently, this view of time “sees time in the sense of a passing away.”68 Rather, an authentic temporal existence, states Huebner, remaining close to Heidegger’s notion of ecstatic temporality as it is linked with historicality, requires “inspection of the past (or the present as the already-past),” 69 along with the “identification of forms of existence or aspects of life considered worthy of maintenance, transmission, or necessary for evolution; and the projection of these valued forms into the future.”70 Huebner expresses succinctly the inauthentic interpretation of time when stating the following: “Man, has constructed his scientific view of time as something objective and beyond himself, in which he lives.”71 Such a view is opposed to the manner in which Heidegger views Dasein’s authentic relationship to time, for as he states, “Dasein conceived in its most extreme possibility of Being is time itself and not in time.”72 Time is not objective, for the duration or length of time cannot be measured scientifically by way of mathematical symbols, for time has no length. While mathematical-scientific knowledge accurately measures the medium of space, it is powerless to calculate, gauge, and represent the non-spatial medium of time, with its
63 Huebner, “Knowledge: An Instrument of Man,” 225. 64 Huebner, “Curriculum as Concern for Man’s Temporality,” 132-133. 65 Heidegger, Being and Time, 436/410. 66 Ibid. 67 Heidegger, What is called Thinking? 102. 68 Ibid., 103 69 Huebner, “Curriculum as Concern for Man’s Temporality,” 132. 70 Ibid., 137. 71 Ibid., 137. 72 Heidegger, Concept of Time, 14e.
J. MAGRINI 137 dynamic flux and flow. The future does not rush toward us as we stand in the present moment, only to disappear forever into the irretrievable void of the past. In addition, time is not linear, and neither the wall-cock nor wristwatch properly presents time, and according to Heidegger, by treating time as a quantitative phenomenon, measurable in length, in its extension, the clock attempts to show us “what” time is, but misses the more substantial ontological-existential matter of how time is, which is to say, the way in which we enact our time when living as temporal, existential beings. Our humanity, or ontological self-hood, is inextricably grounded in ecstatic temporality, wherein past, present, and future are united, indivisible, perpetually working in concert within the moment of our present. This moment of the present is the authentic moment of vision, i.e., the revelation of truth and subsequent appropriation of our authentic Being-in-the- world. It is not “present” in terms of a point that is situated between future and past. It is the moment in which the world, beings, and entities reveal themselves in ways that matter within the “there,” or disclosedness, of Dasein. As Heidegger states, this moment of vision is possible due to the convergence of past and future, and this suggests that the past circles round to meet us, “the coming [Kunft] in which Dasein, in its ownmost potentiality-for-being, comes toward itself,”73 from out of the indeterminate future, and thus the past is never legitimately gone. The fact that we have a past cannot be overlooked or skirted, as it represents our being thrown into the world in a specific and unique manner. However, the past acquires meaning only when we authentically project it into the future, and when “authentically futural, Dasein is authentically as ‘having-been,’ as its own thrown past.”74 Authenticity represents our “most extreme possibility of Being,” 75 it is a life in praxis, a temporal process of taking over our existence through interpretive decision-making, whereby we legitimize our thrown-past (having-been) in the service of making (and re-making) our future Being. Dasein’s authentic Selfhood is only to be found in the “authentic-potentiality-for-being-one’s-self – that is to say, in the authenticity of Dasein’s Being as care.”76 For Heidegger, the “primordial unity of the structure of care lies in temporality”77 and this relates to the Being of Dasein as “Care,” which embodies the three moments, or horizons, of ecstatic temporality: (1) we are always out-ahead-of-ourselves in the projection of a future, (2) we are always along side both things and Others in the world, and (3) we are always already in the world as a thrown, living being, as someone with a past, a history and heritage. When considering such a model of temporality, of which “clock time” is merely derivative, it is crucial to acknowledge that the past, which constitutes our living history and heritage, is sewn into the very fabric of our Being. The past is continually at work
73 Heidegger, Being and Time, 373/326. 74 Ibid.. 75 Heidegger, The Concept of Time, 10e. 76 Heidegger, Being and Time, 369/322. 77 Martin Heidegger The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, trans. by Michael Heim (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1992), 297.
138 HUEBNER’S CRITICAL ENCOUNTER influencing and shaping the moment of vision through its ever-attendant presence. The past serves as the source of our historical life and future; it allows us to redefine our existence by making choices on the possibilities that emerge from our heritage, which is at once the historical ground of our existence. It is possible to grasp ecstatic temporality in the following manner: In the moment of resolute openness (Entschlossenheit), the mood of Angst individuates Dasein for its death and ownmost possibilities for Being, opening what Heidegger terms, the “Situation,” or the authentic way of “Being-there”. Conceived as a temporal phenomenon, the Situation is Dasein’s moment of vision or instant of authenticity. “In the instant as an ecstases,” writes Heidegger, “the existent Dasein is carried away, as resolved, into the factically determined possibilities, circumstances, contingencies of the situation of action.”78 This is the authentic present of ecstatic temporality, when Dasein, accessible and free, projects itself into its possibilities within the factical and distinct circumstances of its own unique life. Such an authentic resolute openness to worldly encounters is only possible because Dasein, as a temporal being that temporalizes, is at once its future, past, and present as thrown-projecting Being-in-the-world. The present, which is held within authentic temporality, is the sustaining form of Dasein’s authentic choices, representing the “resolute rapture with which Dasein is carried away to whatever possibilities and circumstances are encountered in the Situation as possible objects of concern.”79 The authentic temporalizing of Dasein occurs as it projects its finite possibilities, which initiates a forward movement towards itself as resolute Being-towards-death in its ownmost potentiality-for-Being, and this movement secures a “repetition,” or authentic retrieval, of Dasein’s having-been. In coming to or toward itself, from out of its indeterminate future, as engendered by its own past, Dasein discloses the meaning of authentic Being within the instant of the present, or moment of vision (Augenblick),80 of the Situation. This ecstatic temporal process represents the letting be of Being, which represents the authentic truth of existence. Thus, when Dasein exists authentically, it experiences the world in its basic “uconcealment” – allowing that which shows itself from itself to be seen – now not disclosing beings as present-at-hand entities, or objects, but the phenomenon of world as such, the worldhood of the world, i.e., the overarching matrix of meaning and purpose structuring Dasein’s being-in- the-world, which understanding and interpretation have in great part made possible for Dasein.81 The process of temporalizing, as described above, will be
78 Ibid., 297. 79 Heidegger, The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, 287. 80 McNeill translates Augenblick as “the glance of the eye,” and prefers this translation to moment, moment of vision, or enpresenting. He writes that the German employed by Heidegger ”carries both a visual and temporal sense, conveying the momentary ‘character’ of seeing.” In line with Huebner’s rendering of Augenblick, I have retained, “moment of vision.” William McNeill, The Glance of the Eye: Heidegger, Aristotle, and the Ends of Theory (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000), ixx. 81 Huebner describes the process of temporalizing in similar, albeit not identical terms, when stating the following: “The past is finding himself already thrown-into-a-world. It is
J. MAGRINI 139 further developed as an authentic historical occurrence in the final section of the essay when analyzing Huebner’s individual-world dialectic.
The Potential Implication of Ecstatic Temporality for Education
Due to an inauthentic understanding of time, educators orient the curriculum and the learning experience contained therein toward the future, which is conceived as knowable and determinate, creating an education program wherein goals, aims, and purposes are posited in advance of the authentic experience of education in its practical enactment, and toward which students are then led. Such a strict product-process model for curriculum assumes that it can specify the student’s future behavior because it is determinate and thus predictable. In many instances, the student’s authentic possibilities are defined in advance by educational professionals residing at an external and temporal remove from the authentic unfolding of the student’s Being in the processes of learning. For example, private foundations (Carnegie Corporation) and accrediting testing agencies (ETS – Education Testing Service), situated at a remove from the classroom, represent professional organizations that are in charge of establishing the standards criteria for learning within educational institutions. This expression of the inauthentic understanding of time covers over and obscures the student’s genuine potentiality-for-Being. Whereas the authentic understanding of temporality makes possible moments of resolute openness wherein students choose to enact their authentic possibilities within a learning environment facilitating the autonomous and self-directed revelation and appropriation of their authentic possibilities for the enactment of their Being. Due to the inauthentic understanding of time, it is also possible for educators to remain locked within a view to the present, which presupposes an understanding of time where the past is gone and irretrievable and the future has not yet arrived. This represents a form of presentism in education, i.e., the current conception and inception of educational systems, institutions, philosophies, and theories are conceived as existing “in time,” and since they
having-been that makes possible the projection of his potentiality. The present is the moment of vision where Dasein, finding itself thrown into a situation (the past), projects its on potentiality for being. Human life is not futural (my emphasis); nor is it past, but, rather, a present made up of a past and future brought into the moment.” It must be noted that while Huebner certainly remains very close to Heidegger’s original interpretation of ecstatic temporality, the remark stating that we are not futural beings is inconsistent with what Heidegger indicates regarding the primacy of the future ecstases in the care-structure and the authentic temporalizing of Dasein, for the “future (ecstases) has a priority in the ecstatical unity of primordial and authentic temporality.” Heidegger claims that although all modes of temporality are equiprimordial, their “modes of temporalizing are different,” and to understand “primordial and authentic temporality” we must note that it “temoralizes itself in terms of the authentic future and in such a way that in having been futurally, it first of all awakens the Present. The primary phenomenon of primordial and authentic temporality is the future.” Heidegger, Being and Time, 378/329.
140 HUEBNER’S CRITICAL ENCOUNTER are viewed only through the lens of the present, as making-present, they assume eternal, indelible, and hypostatic characteristics, making the possibility for authentic educational reform not only a daunting task, but a fatalistic impossibility. This view of time remains blind to the crucial role that the past plays, as heritage, in the historizing process of the student, which represents her unique potentiality-for-Being as related her living past (and not merely a historical past), which is always alive with the potential for growth and transcendence, and is taken up into the authentic leaning experience, which is the convergence of past and future in the moment of vision. There are also models for curriculum-making that are situated in the present while demonstrating an unquestioned reverence for the past and its educational traditions, where change is viewed in terms of superficial improvements to a grounding, foundational form that essentially remains unchallenged and unchanged. These philosophies of education have firm roots in the thought of the past and present. When conceiving an essential education for students, in terms of a perennial or permanent curriculum, they are really imitating the past, aping the past, recreating the past in the present without attempting to reassess or reinterpret it in light of the students’ needs and wants, in terms of their unique and futural potential-for-Being. This inauthentic view of education embraces the status quo in curriculum, its content, pedagogical methodology, and assessment strategies, and in no way represents the emancipatory move beyond the current manner in which students, education, and society are conceived.
Authentic Education and the Individual-World Dialectic: Navigating the World as Temporal-Historical Being-in-the- World as Being-with Others
Huebner’s concern with temporality is more complex than simply the issue of educators, who are designing and implementing curriculum, demonstrating a concern for the unfolding of time, or taking an interest in history as a dynamic process, for these are concerns for historicist critique, and this, of course, is not what Huebner is engaged in. Rather, on a primordial and ontological level, Huebner is concerned with how we enact our authentic existence in terms of the authentic unfolding of our historical being, and beyond, he is concerned with how thinking education might be enhanced when informed by the types of ontological-existential issues that are bound up with the authentic enactment of students’/educators’ Being-in-the-world. According to Huebner, “Curricular practice is not simply the concern for the constellation of the educative environment,” it is the “concern for the human events that occur within that environment.”82 To fully grasp the significance of the individual-world dialectic, Huebner’s notion of educational “practice” must be elucidated in terms of practical human activity, which dynamically embodies the “essential temporal nature of man and points to the linkage of biography to
82 Huebner, “Knowledge as an Instrument of Man,” 225.
J. MAGRINI 141 history as a major educational concern.”83 Ultimately, it is Huebner’s notion of the individual-world dialectic that serves as the organizing philosophical force for reconceived curriculum design as inspired by thinking ecstatic temporality in relation to education. Analyzing the individual-world dialectic will reveal the kinship between Huebner’s philosophy of education and Heidegger’s thinking on Dasein’s authentic historicality. Unpacking the following quotation by Huebner reveals that Huebner’s individual-world dialectic springs from the founding ground of Heidegger’s thinking on the basic constitution of historicality, which includes, as I show, the notions of heritage, fate, and destiny as related to our authentic historizing as communal beings.
The springs or sources of temporality do not reside in the individual, but in conjunction between the individual and other individuals, their material objects, and other ways of thinking as they are objectified in symbol and operation. Furthermore these springs or sources, although again not residing in society, are nevertheless unveiled, maintained, and protected by society. Thus man shapes the world, but the world also shapes man. This is the dialectic process in which cause is effect, and effect is cause. The world calls forth new responses from the individual, who in turn calls forth new responses from the world.84
I begin the analysis by clarifying Huebner’s notion of authentic learning, which as opposed to learning grounded in abstraction and generalization is a more primordial form of knowledge, or better, understanding, through which students and educators interpret the world in meaningful ways. Authentic learning for both Huebner and Heidegger represents acts of understanding, and this form of insight, which is refined through interpretation, will provide insight into the relational character of human existence in terms of Huebner’s understanding of the individual-world dialectic, which is at once the temporal-historical happening of our Being, comprising the totality of the environmental design of the curriculum. For Heidegger, understanding is know-how, by means of which we navigate our world, and projection, or the manner in which Dasein, in its understanding, is always already-out-ahead (ecstatic ‘standing-out’) of itself in its futural projection. Dreyfus explains that understanding as know-how “makes possible skillful coping,”85 and “relates some activities as doable, as making sense, and others as not, or better, it does not recognize these other possibilities as possibilities at all.”86 Understanding is directed toward accomplishing one or another task or
83 Ibid., 225. 84 Huebner, “Curriculum as a Concern for Man’s Temporality,” 138. 85 Dreyfus, Being-in-the-world: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I, 184- 185. 86 Ibid., 184-185.
142 HUEBNER’S CRITICAL ENCOUNTER activity, “coping with the available proceeds by pressing into possibilities,”87 and the manner in which Dasein’s “coping is organized by a for-the-sake-of- which,”88 and this for Heidegger is projection. Projection, it must be noted, is always bound up with the entities with which Dasein deals, which of course includes others, in terms of understanding and possibilities. As stated, ‘know-how,’ as understanding for Huebner, is linked with doing something with our understanding, but as opposed to the functional efficacy of either pragmatic or scientific knowledge of the world, Huebner views understanding as akin to existential thought, meditative thought, where doing something with understanding might include “new exploring, more satisfying expression, deeper and more meaningful encounters with others, greater awareness of what and who [we are], and more ability to build and transform the world.”89 Understanding, for both Huebner and Heidegger, is therefore sharply contrasted with knowing as thematizing, for understanding “is not cognition at all in the sense of grasping something thematically.”90 Rather, it is linked to the “Being of the ‘there’ [of Dasein’s disclosedness],” and is “primordially existential, it means to be projecting towards a potentiality-for- Being for the sake of which Dasein exists.”91 Through understanding Dasein projects its for-the-sake-of-which, when it is open to futural possibilities that are on the approach, which acquire meaning only in relation to the significance of the structure of the for-the-sake-of-which, the towards-this, and the in-order-to of the authentic “worldhood of its current world.”92 However, this for-the-sake-of-which is not a determinative goal or end that Dasein posits in advance of its activities, rather it is a way of understanding the meaning-schemata of Dasein’s Being-in- the-world, where it “throws before itself the possibility as possibility and lets it be as such.”93 The system of relations Heidegger describes pertains to Dasein’s Being-in-the-world as a whole. As related specifically to the process of education envisioned by Huebner, the for-the-sake-of-which of learning represents the groundless, or shifting, ground of the authentic curriculum, where educational aims for student achievement are imminent within and emerge from the unfolding of the learning. It must be noted that the for-the-sake-of-which of education functions in terms of being projected within a community of learners, for no student can ever have self-knowledge or authentic knowledge of her world at a remove from interpersonal contact. Heidegger is clear on this matter when writing, “The world of Dasein is a world-with [Mitwelt]. Being-in is Being-with-others. Their Being-in-themselves-within-the-world is Dasein with [Mitdasein].”94
87 Ibid., 184-185. 88 Ibid., 186-187 89 Huebner, “Towards a Remaking of Curriculum Language,” 40. 90 Heidegger, Being and Time, 385/336. 91 Ibid. 92 Ibid., 185/145. 93 Ibid. 94 Ibid., 155/118.
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Interpretation for Heidegger, works to clarify what is ambiguously given in understanding, and is never a “presuppositionless apprehending” of things, rather all of our interpretations begin as something, in terms of Dasein’s fore-having, fore-sight, and for-conception.95 We approach the things themselves, guided in the first instance by both their uniqueness as well as a preconception of what they might be, seeking to clarify our initial veiled and unclear conceptions of them in order to eventually deepen and solidify our understanding of them. This is accomplished through hermeneutic interpretation, where our pre-understanding of things, as it were, allows us to step into the circle, or spiral, of interpretation. When things, in relation to our Being are understood, “we say that they have meaning [Sinn].”96 As we work to clarify our understanding through interpretation we produce or construct meaning, and as Heidegger claims, meaning represents “the ‘upon which’ of a projection in terms of which something becomes interrogated as something; it gets its structure from a fore-having, fore-sight, and fore-conception.”97 This form of making-meaning is precisely what Huebner has in mind when he talks of hermeneutic activity as central to the dialectic between individuals, their history, and world in terms of a confrontation, which he describes as the rhythmic continuity and change of the individual’s understanding and involvement with her world. For Huebner, hermeneutical activity is a communal art, a “way of getting at pedagogical method and interpreting what goes on in the classroom or other educational places.”98 Interpretation, as an ongoing process, is always at work in education, and “whether by asking questions, establishing written assignments, reading to the child, or pronouncing words for him,” educators are “introducing him to traditions of interpretations.”99 Huebner claims that the educational environment embodying “the dialectical forms valued by society would require three aspects or components.”100 It is possible to understand the three aspects of the individual- world dialectic transpiring within education, guided and directed by the design of the curriculum, in terms of Heidegger’s understanding of authentic historicality
95 Ibid., 191-192/150. 96 Ibid., 192/151. 97 Ibid. 98 Huebner, “Towards a Remaking of Curriculum Language,” 47. 99 Ibid., 48. Although an analogy can be drawn between all forms of student learning and the interpretive process, for example, Huebner talks of the “interpretation” involved in the phonetic exercises of children during reading instruction, this would not amount to an instance of authentic hermeneutic interpretation, for as Huebner makes explicit, the term “hermeneutic” should not be substituted for “the words teaching method,” as there are a variety of pedagogical methods at work within an authentic curriculum. In addition, it might be argued that Huebner views hermeneutic interpretation in terms other than a formal methodology and rather as a primordial way in which we are in the world, representative of our capacity and capability to search out meaning and form an understanding of our lives. However, Huebner is clear that it is within the context of hermeneutic interpretation alone that humans authentically come to know themselves, each other, and are empowered through discourse to understand and change the world and society of which they are a part 100 Huebner. “Curriculum as Concern for Man’s Temporality,” 139.
144 HUEBNER’S CRITICAL ENCOUNTER and the notions of heritage, fate, and destiny, the invariant structures that ground Dasein’s historicizing, all of which correspond to the human’s temporal Being as “Care”. Authentic education shows a concern for both the evolution of the human being as well as the community, and Huebner envisions education as the “manifestation of the historical process, meshing the unfolding biography of the individual within the unfolding history of his society.”101 Huebner claims that the ideal learning environment represents the unfolding of human temporality as historicality through hermeneutic interpretation, and is an environment that (1) calls forth a response from the student, (2) is reactive, and (3) makes possible authentic moments of vision, “when the student and/or those responsible him, project his potentiality-for-Being into the present, thus tying together the future and the past into the present.”102 The educative process conceived by Huebner should be understood in terms of Heidegger’s thinking on Dasein’s resolute historical existence, where “resoluteness implies handing oneself down by anticipation to the ‘there’ of the moment of vision; and this handing down we call ‘fate’. This is also the ground for destiny, by which we understand Dasein’s historizing in Being-with Others.”103 The curriculum as conceived by Huebner represents the authentic dwelling of students and educators in the midst of a living tradition, wherein they consider questions about what is valued, what traditions should be preserved or altered, what should remain as part of the collective memory now and in the future. This is not simply about teaching students about our past and its traditions, not simply about deciding what knowledge from our past is most valuable and therefore should be learned and passed along. Rather, authentic education represents a collective decision about what aspects of our tradition, or collective ethos, are in fact worthy to be taken up in “repetition” and projected, as authentic possibility, into the future as destiny. In order to call forth responses from students the living aspects of our heritage must be embraced, they must be recognized as forming our authentic past, for in such a view our heritage alone is worthy enough to demand and warrant a response, a rejoinder that takes seriously the responsibility we have to our own unique potentiality-for-Being. It is interesting to note that in Heidegger’s analysis of authenticity, in terms of resolute, individuated Dasein’s Being-towards-death, he refrains from including a discussion about the explicit factical possibilities that are made available to the resolute Dasein for comportment. In fact, Heidegger stresses that such an investigation “excludes even the existential projection of the factical possibilities of existence,” and so he considers where “in general Dasein can draw those possibilities upon which it factically projects itself,”104 for projecting itself on the possibility of death alone as possibility, “gives only the totality and authenticity of one’s resoluteness.”105 It is in fact from the past, as heritage, that Dasein’s factical possibilities, in terms of its
101 Ibid., 139. 102 Ibid., 139. 103 Heidegger, Being and Time, 438/386. 104 Ibid. 105 Ibid.
J. MAGRINI 145 potentiality-for-Being, first arise, representing the so-called “content” of authentic existence to which form is provided by Dasein through the autonomous enactment of its historical Being.
The resoluteness in which Dasein comes back to itself, discloses current factical possibilities of authentic existing, and discloses them in terms of the heritage which that resoluteness, as thrown, takes over […] if everything ‘good’ is a heritage, and the character of ‘goodness’ lies in making authentic existence possible, then the handing down of a heritage constitutes itself in resoluteness.106
Heritage, as authentic thrown having-been, is what demands a rejoinder from Dasein, and Huebner refers to heritage as the students’ “collective wealth,” and represent speech patterns, forms of dialogue, language of the curriculum, structural forms of various disciplines, and our collective ethos, the habituated behaviors and beliefs of a historical culture, along with “the social customs shaping interacting patterns, and the man-made things that make up much of the man’s world.”107 Within these aspects of heritage “we find the stuff for our hermeneutic and world-building arts”108 and they inform the fore- having, fore-sight, and fore-conception that the student brings to the context of interpretation, wherein memories of their collective existence are set within a “caring collectivity in which individuals share memories and intentions,”109 and through the process of learning, “form a bridge between self and other; a linkage among past, present, and future; the vehicle by which individuals, in community, arrive at mutual understanding in the conduct of their public affairs.”110 The past becomes the means by which students project their own potentiality-for-Being as historical, and the educational environment must be designed with the understanding that the past is always present as the basis for our futural projection. This relates to what Heidegger claims about heritage and “the possibility that Dasein might choose its hero”111 from out of the myriad of historical possibilities that the past has made available for potential appropriation. “For this,” as Inwood writes, “Dasein must return to the past, perhaps to its own birth, but more likely beyond. There are great philosophers, generals, statesmen, artists, saints, and lovers whose deeds and works are part of Dasein’s heritage.”112 In addition to calling forth a response from students, the educational environment “must be reactive, or else the student must question it so that it
106 Ibid., 435/383. 107 Huebner, “Curriculum as Concern for man’s Temporality,” 139. 108 Huebner, “Towards a Remaking of Curriculum Language,” 37. 109 Ibid. 110 Ibid. 111 Heidegger, Being and Time, 437/385. 112 Michael Inwood, Heidegger (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 92.
146 HUEBNER’S CRITICAL ENCOUNTER responds to him.”113 This relates directly to the unique possibilities that manifest in a way in which our “accidental” and “provisional” possibilities are “driven out” and our existence is pushed into its “finitude,” and at that instant, we are “snatched back from the endless multiplicity of possibilities which offer themselves as closest,” and this brings us “into the simplicity of [our] fate (Schicksal).”114 Dasein is aware of enacting only a limited number of possibilities, and it understands that these possibilities are approaching from out of the past as its living heritage. Fate, according to Heidegger, is determinative of Dasein’s futural projection and the authentically “historical” moment of vision. Fate is the manner in which Dasein opens the present, enacting its existence temporally as it experiences its freedom towards its authentic possibilities, and freedom arises from the limitations and finitude of its existence, and is in turn defined by the burden of its heritage. Fate is the how of comportment, the authentic enactment of Dasein’s existence as thrown- projection, as it draws possibilities from its heritage and in a decisive manner chooses among the possibilities afforded by its past, and this is the reactive aspect of the learning space. “Fate is the authentic resoluteness in which Dasein holds itself free for death, in a possibility it has inherited and yet chosen.”115 This is what Heidegger means by stating that our finite possibilities are always drawn from heritage, and in terms of Huebner’s understanding of the individual-world dialectic, it is the recognition that this reactive aspect of the learning experience happens in terms of the reciprocal counter-striving between the student and her world, for as indicated earlier by Huebner, the student shapes the world and the world in turn shapes the student. This occurs only within a curriculum design acknowledging temporality and historicality, because the reactive aspect of authentic education hinges on the emergence of the “past as part of the valued past brought into the present of the student.”116 Educators must facilitate the emergence and occurrence of moments of vision, wherein student’s authentic possibilities for their Being manifest; they
113 Huebner, “Curriculum as Concern for man’s Temporality,” 139. 114 Heidegger, Being and Time, 384/335. 115 Ibid., 435/385. 116 Huebner, “Curriculum as Concern for Man’s Temporality,” 139. It must be further stressed that Huebner’s notion of “reactive” runs contrary to the notion of “reactive” found in behaviorism and concept-empiricism, and this might be elucidated by attending to Grumet’s distinction between the behaviorist conception of the human subject and the subject as conceived by phenomenology and existentialism. The subject is not merely reactive to external stimuli, which would reduce the human to a “tabula rasa upon which the world makes its marks, a template of social conditioning.” The notion of reactive in phenomenological philosophies of education denotes “discourse,” or the confrontational dialogue between individual and world wherein the human is equipped to freely “interpret, repudiate, or reaffirm experience,” i.e., actively construct menaing. As Grumet argues, to delete discourse from the educational experience would reduce “learning to a series of reactive, conditioned behaviors best described as training,” and although this description is affirmed by the behaviorists, “it is rejected by existentialist [and phenomenologal] philosophies in their acknowledgement of commitment and human freedom.” Madeleine Grumet, “Existential and Phenomenological Foundations of Autobiographical Methods, in Understanding curriculum as phenomenological and deconstructed text (New York, NY: Teacher’s College Press, 1992), 23.
J. MAGRINI 147 must work with students in order to ready them, in moments of resolute openness, to enact their authentic possibilities, moments where the indeterminate future approaches to converge with their past, which is carried into, thereby breaking open, the authentic present of the Situation, “thus tying together the future and past in the present.”117 In light of the ground covered, it is possible to conclude that an authentic education as conceived by Huebner is one in which the design of the curriculum fosters the individual-world dialectic, which unfolds by means of hermeneutic meaning-making, informed by the student’s authentic potential-for-Being. Authentic education makes possible the emergence of the student’s authentic possibilities for establishing her historical grounding as destiny in the moment of vision; Through appropriation she enacts her authentic way of being-in-the-world as Being-with Others. The classroom is never merely a collection of individual and disconnected fates, as it is guided in advance by the fact that human existence is authentically communal. Rather, the classroom is a place of dwelling wherein “our fates have already been guided in advance, in our Being with one another in the same world and in our resoluteness for definite possibilities.”118 The design of the classroom environment within an authentic view to education sets up the solicitous context
where adults seek to influence the young, where the young influence the adults, a place where the past is presently used, interpreted, rethought, and reworked; a place of not submitting to someone else’s powers and accustomed ways but of negotiating for power in the maintaining and reforming of the public world.119
Destiny, within the individual-world dialectic, must be conceived as the ecumenical pursuit of authentic learning where the classroom represents an originary community, wherein we dwell in learning with others. In this community, students are beholden to the processes of education, as “each individual is bound up in advance to something that binds and determines each individual by exceeding them,”120 and this occurs within an atmosphere of solicitous care that unfolds through the process of interpretive meaning-making. Here, student and educator care for the communal archive of knowledge that is developing within various learning experiences, which is bound up with care for the both the student’s store of knowledge and unique cultural heritage as related to the her own unique possibility for existence, which grows and evolves within the flux, flow, and rhythmic dynamic of the unfolding of education as a temporal-historical phenomenon. When learning authentically with others, we share a like-minded sense of care for our common fate as
117 Ibid., 139. 118 Heidegger, Being and Time, 436/385. 119 Huebner, “Towards a Remaking of a Curriculum Language,” 52. 120 Martin Heidegger, Holderlin’s Hymns: ‘Germania and The Rhine, trans., William McNeill (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2004), 74.
148 HUEBNER’S CRITICAL ENCOUNTER learners. Destiny is the authentic enactment of our potentiality-for-Being as historical, when through communication and struggle we make and remake our world as a people, and it culminates in the repetition (Wiederholen), or appropriation, of a possibility from our past in a reinterpreted and renewed form, and it is only in the moment of vision that this authentic appropriation of our past is possible. Repetition might be thought of as a dialogue with the past, or as Inwood suggests that we commit to a discourse with the past and its heroes, e.g., “Alexander or Plato makes certain suggestions”121 to us through their exploits or written words, and we “make a rejoinder to them.”122 Ultimately, through communal discourse as hermeneutic interpretation, repetition becomes a legitimate possibility of our Being, and through developing and deepening our interpretations of the world, which emerge through a confrontation with the past and past-as-present, we are in the position to authentically choose to choose ourselves through communal decision-making. Although we are beholden to our past this does not necessarily require that we honor or maintain it, further still it is not simply learning or memorizing our traditions, for this would be inauthentic confrontation with the past. Rather, we are only truly beholden to our heritage when we approach the past in order to see, understand, and beyond, envision ways in which it might be reinterpreted in light of our authentic potentiality-for-Being and taken up, through “repetition” in an authentic mode of historical appropriation, which both Heidegger and Huebner understand in terms of the human being’s authentic enactment of its history through the process of historizing. As this foregoing section indicates, Huebner’s philosophy of curriculum is both phenomenological and ontological, and since it is interpretive, it is also, in the tradition of Heidegger’s fundamental ontology of Being and Time, hermeneutic. The relevance of Huebner’s introduction of phenomenology in education and curriculum studies as related to contemporary Heidegger scholarship in education can be traced to the philosophical development of such major educational theorists as Smith, Van Manen, and most particularly, David Jardine, whose writings focus on educational reform in terms of qualitative philosophical inquiry, which runs counter to empirical and social research in education and pedagogy Much of contemporary research, according to Jardine, views education as a practice wherein the privilege of theory and method reduce the student’s authentic (“lived”) social situation to “univocal terms that can be simply counted and recounted,”123 whereas authentic interpretative research, as related specifically to the hermeneutical project that we find in Huebner, attempts to tease out, interpret, and understand the intangible “evocative given in all its tangled ambiguity, to follow its evocations and entrails of sense and significance that
121 Inwood, Heidegger, 92. 122 Ibid., 92. 123 David Jardine, To Dwell with a Boundless Heart: Essays in Curriculum Theory, Hermeneutics, and Ecological Imagination (New York, NY: Peter Lang, 1998), 40-41.
J. MAGRINI 149 are wound up with it.”124 Thus, education cannot be authentically conceived as reducible to a strict methodology or “set of rules that need to be simply applied to an incident independently of the contribution that incident might have regarding what needs to be said”125 in light of the practical conditions of the lived experience of education, which proximally and for the most part, structure and guide the interpretation’s unfolding. Importantly, as related to Huebner’s invaluable contribution to Heidegger studies in education, I have intimated within this paper a recent and emerging theoretical framework for research within contemporary educational scholarship in the post-structural movement to re-conceptualize the curriculum, which harbors a wealth of untapped potential, namely, the understanding of Being-in-the-world as unfolding through the attuned practice of “embodied” interpretation, understanding, and discourse as related to the life-practice of hermeneutics, or the “hermeneutics of facticity”. In Being and Time Heidegger conceives the human being as it is always and already located within the world in a “factical” manner: “Facticity,” as Heidegger reasons, “is a definite way of Being,”126 and this implies that “an entity ‘within-the-world’ has Being-in-the- world in such a way that it can understand itself as bound up in its ‘destiny’ with the Being of those entities which it uncovers within the world.”127 Heidegger’s foregoing description of “facticity,” as employed within Jardine’s qualitative work on education, as it is filtered through Huebner’s philosophy of curriculum, suggests that the philosophy of education and the interpretation thereof must above all be performative: It must be lived and practiced in actions that are inseparable from the embodied, lived events within which our experiences of the world and others are inextricably grounded. A philosophy as outlined embracing the “factical” unfolding of education as a practical immersion in the world, located within specific settings, bound up intimately with unique individuals, understands in advance that these concrete situations of learning cannot be grasped or communicated exclusively through rational, or calculative (“theoretical”) forms of knowing, for their existential “truths” are beyond the purview of both analytic and empirical thought. Thus, contemporary educational research should show concern for the living process of education as a “kind of illuminating disclosing of life in the explicit actualization [Vollzug] of the movement of factical life.”128 In Risser’s analysis of the relationship between the hermeneutics of facticity and the human community, his philosophical claims might be related directly to Huebner’s authentic understanding of education as described in this essay. Contemporary educational research would do well to “take its departure from
124 Ibid., 48. 125 Ibid. 126 Heidegger, Being and Time, 82/56. 127 Ibid. 128 James Risser, “Philosophical Hermeneutics and the Question of Community,” in Interrogating the Tradition: Hermeneutics and the History of Philosophy (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000), 22.
150 HUEBNER’S CRITICAL ENCOUNTER factical life experience and always turn back to factical life experience,”129 and avoid practices that the attempt to transcend lived, factical experience through objective, abstract generalizations of students, educators, and the processes of learning. As Risser is careful to point out, in terms that echo Jardine, the hermeneutics of facticity is never reducible to a scheme or rigorous method (e.g., the scientific method in Dewey), for it is “neither exegesis nor an art of interpretation as in Schleiermacher and Dilthey; rather it is simply the operation of philosophy itself that catches hold of life in its activity.”130 With this understanding, in light of the ground covered, it is Huebner who inspires contemporary educational theorists to continue searching out the value in Heidegger’s early philosophy as it might contribute to the betterment of our educational practices.
The Potential Implication of the Individual-World Dialectic for Education
Authentic education, conceived as unfolding within the individual-world dialectic does not adopt the procedural method of establishing goals, aims, and purposes of education in advance of learning experiences, as is consistent with product-process curriculum design. Rather, it is possible to imagine, in line with process-product models for curriculum, the goals and aims for learning and authentic standards for education always already immanent as potential in the authentic unfolding of the curriculum in progress, e.g., the for-the-sake-of-which that education is concerned with is not a determinate, immutable goal posited in advance of the learning. In line with the phenomenological-ontology of this paper, we might imagine goals and aims emerging through a process of hermeneutic interpretation, following a spiral structure, rather than a linear design for curriculum-making, educators begin with a fore-conception, or pre- supposition, concerning goals and outcomes, but these goals and outcomes are fluid and protean in nature, they change, evolve, develop and are reworked as knowledge and understanding of the student’s needs, wants, desires, and abilities are revealed and interpreted by the educator. Although the educational aims for student achievement are set forth at the outset of the learning, they are more akin to informed suggestions, path-marks for learning, and are always subject to revision and elaboration as the educator deepens and clarifies her understanding of that which emerges from the learning experience. As follows from above, there are crucial ethical implications bound up with authentic education concerned with the manner in which we dwell in community with others. Since the environmental design of the curriculum is grounded in the understanding of temporality and historicality, i.e., the authentic heritage, fate, and destiny of educators and students, learning transpires within an inclusive, multi-cultural environment, and beyond, depends for its authenticity on educator’s embracing the inclusion of the language and cultural
129 Ibid., 22. 130 Ibid.
J. MAGRINI 151 forms of knowledge that each student brings to the context of learning. The notion of heritage as embodying our living past, the unique collective ethos of the student’s given culture, our collective ethos as members of a state and nation, the store of unique cultural possibilities that allow for the authentic projection into our future as destiny, testifies that education must avoid leveling down or excluding the diverse cultural histories and values of our students. Understanding heritage as the legitimate founding ground for our future growth and development should awaken educators to the necessity of transcending unethical and inauthentic practices and policies that socially, culturally, and linguistically marginalize students. Authentic learning within the individual-world dialectic also embodies the ethical aspects of social-based learning, where students learn from each other and indeed teach each other in a variety of ways, and is concerned with the respectful exchange of ideas in ways that demonstrate care, tolerance, and a critical conscious awareness. The communal character of the classroom includes the all-important concern for moral development and engenders learning through a process of arduous and respectful discourse, which plays out in the process of accepting, rejecting, refining, validating, and honing the various interpretations that are offered up for debate in shared moments of problem-solving, which stress self-development and group development through communicative debate. There is recognition of the strengths and weaknesses that are either beneficial or detrimental to the personal development of the self and group. Educators and students work to arrive at common, agreeable solutions to the problems they attempt to solve through a process of critical debate, which is always rooted in the ever-changing needs of our students and their historical reality, which represents an ever-renewed ethical quest for knowledge, understanding, and meaning. In addition to the student’s heritage, she also brings a vast store of intellectual and emotional experience to the learning context, which holds vast potential to make a contribution to ever-growing, ever-developing communal archive of student knowledge. Meaning is constructed within the shared horizon of “perspectives” through the unfolding hermeneutic and heuristic activities wherein student’s interpretations are composed of clusters of interpretations, and individual interpretations develop along with, and indeed because of, those with whom the student participates within the process of authentic learning. Thus, there is an all-important bridge constructed between prior knowledge, which is valued as legitimately contributing to the learning, and new knowledge. Authentic education also embraces alternative forms of knowledge in the curriculum, e.g., human wisdom, meditative thought, hermeneutic understanding, aesthetic insight, which allows educators and students to approach ontological aspects of their existence in a philosophical manner through a rigorous form of non-conceptual and non-systematic thought, which avoids the “subjectivist” trap of dualism.131
131 It is possible to associate understanding, as an alternative form of “knowing” the world, with a way of thinking that Huebner terms “human wisdom,” which is akin to meditative
152 HUEBNER’S CRITICAL ENCOUNTER
Concluding Remarks
Scientific instrumentalism in education, of which Huebner is critical, is represented in the neural psychological-physiological research focused on what teachers should know about how students learn. As indicated, Huebner views education as becoming “overly dependent on scientific modes of thought for shaping values and legitimizing actions,”132 and this affinity for scientific thought is also present to teacher-training programs, where “future teachers are exposed to the psychological and developmental knowledge of the child and man to help develop knowledge of, attitudes toward, and skills for working with students.”133 Linda Darling-Hammond claims that educators must have an awareness about students’ learning and its implications for teaching knowledge and skills, and this knowledge is gained by means of conducting scientific research in the following areas: Research on how teachers and students learn; Research on teacher learning and its affect on pedagogy and student outcomes; Research on learning conditions and teachers effectiveness in structuring and influencing learning; Research on brain development, language acquisition, and social development.134 Huebner, arguing against privileging empirical research in education, claims that the language “furthered and developed by the scientific study of the child”135 and educator ignores the more humane and philosophical issues of “the place of the adult in the child’s world, the politics of adult-child relationships, the child’s participation in the building of public worlds, and the art of interpretation about the meaning of life as people, children, and adults live together.”136 Huebner is clear that authentic discourse on education reform cannot begin until there is the serious consideration of “the individual, the society and the culture or tradition.”137 In light of these aforementioned concerns, in “Curriculum as Concern for Man’s Temporality,” Huebner focuses specifically on the need for educators to gain a basic “awareness of historicity,” which is intimately bound up with “man’s temporality and the concern for it as the focus of curricular action.”138 Huebner digs below the surface of the curriculum as currently conceived, “penetrating the realities that the everyday educator takes for granted,” and illuminates, through a phenomenological
thought, as opposed to calculative thought. What John Gray writes about Heidegger’s philosophy might well apply to Huebner’s conception of rich, fecund, and deep contemplation within the classroom, for the advance in thought that both of these philosophers seek is to “learn to think non-conceptually and non-systematic yet with rigor and strictness about the nature of Being,” within the overarching goal of avoiding “the subjectivity involved in separating human being and Being, subject and object.” Heidegger, What is Called Thinking? Translator’s introduction, xxv. 132 Huebner, “New Modes of Man’s Relation to Man,” 87. 133 Ibid., 87. 134 Linda Darling-Hammond & Bransford, Preparing Teachers for a Changing World: What Teachers Should Learn and Be able to Do (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2005), 1-39. 135 Huebner, “Toward a Remaking of Curriculum language,” 35. 136 Ibid., 35. 137 Ibid., 41. 138 Huebner, “Curriculum as Concern for Man’s Temporality,” 132.
J. MAGRINI 153 approach in thought and language, the ways the “educator has decided to live in the world and what he sees as possible futures.”139 It is interesting to note that in Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche, Heidegger concluded that Nietzsche remained a metaphysician because he failed to transcend the conceptual- linguistic constraints of traditional metaphysics. This is why Heidegger required a new and unique language to address such issues as the oblivion of Being in philosophy; Huebner also seeks out a new and unique language with which to begin, perhaps for the first time, to authentically approach the phenomenon of education by means of new ways of speaking and thinking poetically, as opposed to merely being “socialized into the existing institutions or the language generated by them.”140 It is not about educators finding or inventing new words, resorting to catch phrases, or producing new terms for antiquated educational theories. Instead, what is required in the first instance is our awakening to the primordial power of “essential” language. Huebner, writing on language and teaching, speaks of the enduring nature of language in the Heideggerian spirit and seeks to understand the poetic, originary naming power of language as it might relate to inspiring authentic reforms in education. Language is not the equivalent of expressing or verbalizing knowledge through propositions, it is not merely a system of codes, signs, symbols, and signifiers, rather in its essence, “language is neither expression nor an activity of man,”141 for language in its authentic manifestation “speaks” through us in order to, by means of essential naming, bring the “presence of what was previously uncalled into a nearness.”142 Indeed, this is how Huebner conceives language, which allows us to bring forth what is concealed into the open by naming the world for the human being. In tracing Huebner’s curriculum philosophy back to its origin or source, in relating his language and concepts to a unique way of “naming” the truth of our historical Being as related to our educational practices, I have tried to demonstrate a way in which educators might benefit through understanding Huebner’s critical encounter with Heidegger’s philosophy and draw inspiration from a reconceived understanding of education so that they might feel empowered to reconsider the ways in which they view students and themselves in terms of their own potentiality-for-Being as grounded in their historical realities, which hold the potential of offering unique possibilities for transcendence and emancipation in educational reform.
Department of Philosophy, College of Dupage, United States of America
139 Huebner, “Toward a Remaking of a Curriculum Language,” 37. 140 Ibid., 36. 141 Heidegger, Poetry, language, Thought, 197-198. 142 Ibid., 197-198.
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References
Darling-Hammond, Linda, Preparing Teachers for a Changing World: What Teachers Should Learn and Be able to Do (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2005). Dreyfus, Hubert, Being-in-the-world: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001). Fried, Gregory, “Back to the Cave: A Platonic Rejoinder to Heideggerian Postmodernism,” in Heidegger and the Greeks: Interpretive Essays (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006). Grumet, Madeleine, “Existential and Phenomenological Foundations of Autobiographical Methods, in Understanding curriculum as phenomenological and deconstructed text (New York, NY: Teacher’s College Press, 1992), Heidegger, Martin, Being and Time, trans. by J. Macquarrie, E. Robinson (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1962). ______, What is Called Thinking?, trans. by J. G. Gray, F. Wiecks (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1968). ______, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. by A. Hofstadter (London: Harper & Row, 1971). ______, The Concept of Time, trans. by William McNeill (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1992). ______, The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, trans. by Michael Heim, (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1992). ______, Holderlin’s Hymns: ‘Germania and The Rhine, trans. by William McNeill (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press). Huebner, Dwayne, “Towards a Remaking of Curriculum Language,” in Heightened Consciousness, Cultural Revolution, and Curriculum Theory (Berkeley, CA: McCutchan Publishing Corporation, 1974). ______, The Lure of the Transcendent: Collected Essays By Dwayne E. Huebner (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1999). Inwood, Michael, Heidegger (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). Magrini, James, “Worlds Apart in the Curriculum: Heidegger, Technology, and the Poietic Attunement of Literature,” in Educational Philosophy and Theory (forthcoming 2012). McNeill, William, The Glance of the Eye: Heidegger, Aristotle, and the Ends of Theory (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 2000). Jardine, David, To Dwell with a Boundless Heart: Essays in Curriculum Theory, Hermeneutics, and Ecological Imagination (New York, NY: Peter Lang, 1998). Pinar, William, Understanding Curriculum as Phenomenological and Deconstructed Text (London: Routledge, 1992). Risser, James, “Philosophical Hermeneutics and the Question of Community,” in Interrogating the Tradition: Hermeneutics and the History of Philosophy (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000). Wolin, Richard, The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998).
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Young, Julian, Heidegger’s Later Philosophy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
KRITIKE VOLUME FIVE NUMBER TWO (DECEMBER 2011) 156-165
Article
Cartesian Dualism: An Evaluation of Wireduan and Gilbert Ryle’s Refutations
Olusegun Steven Samuel
Abstract: This paper takes a philosophical look at how the views of Gilbert Ryle and Kwasi Wiredu can be used to resolving the mind-body problem located in Rene Descartes’ philosophy. The common sense account of the mind-body theory was first systematically carried out by Descartes. To him, mind and body do not only exist, they also interact. Through his notion of clear and distinct ideas, Descartes infers the existence of the mind as a thinking substance. Unlike the mind, whose character is thought, the body for Descartes is an extended thing. He insists that the point of interaction is the pineal grand, which God has worked out from the point of creation. Today, the view that body and mind interact has generated some controversies. Ryle argues that Descartes has made a category mistake by interpreting mind as a distinct substance. For Wiredu, in Akan thought system, mind does not go to constitute a person. Thus Ryle and Wiredu tend toward materialism when they argue that the source of consciousness is the brain, rather than the mind. This paper explores the claims of these philosophers: Descartes, Ryle and Wiredu. I stress that Ryle and Wiredu’s views do not resolve the Cartesian problem. The paper concludes that unless the problem of the source of consciousness is tackled, the mind-body problem cannot be adequately resolved.
Key words: Mind-body problem, category mistake, dualism, person
Introduction
he issue of mind-body is as old as the history of Ancient Greek Philosophy. This problem can be seen in the Pythagoreans as well as the T philosophies of Socratic-Platonism. The so called-mind-body problem refers to the question of whether man’s consciousness can be reduced to psychological interpretation, scientific laws or some sorts of inner disposition of a ghostly or spiritual substance. However, the postulation of a mind as distinct from the body has found supports in the worldviews of not only religious scholars, but philosophers as well. Among these thinkers that subscribe to the working of the mind, I find Rene Descartes more systematic. Thus this paper is directed
© 2011 Olusegun Steven Samuel http://www.kritike.org/journal/issue_10/samuel_december2011.pdf ISSN 1908-7330
O. SAMUEL 157 towards examining his claim that mind and body exist as two distinct substances. This paper is interested in showing the plausibility of Rene Descartes mind-body interaction, a view that has been considerably examined by scholars like Gilbert Ryle and Wiredu among other thinkers. However, I am interested also in seeking or knowing to what extend does the Akan conception of mind in Wireduan philosophy and Gilbert Ryle’s idea of category mistake address the inherent problem of Cartesian dualism. Be that as it may, I believe that a thorough analysis of the root of consciousness is imperative for the discourse of this magnitude. Therefore to achieve my aim, this paper is structured into four parts. The first part is an overview of Rene Descartes’ idea of mind and body: a view which led him into dualism. The second part seeks insight into Gilbert Ryle’s critique of Descartes along the path of linguistic interpretation, which he calls the “category mistake”. The third section looks at the problem of man’s composition in Wireduan view. Here, the characteristics of a person and what constitutes his personhood is examined. The final section looks at the issue of consciousness anew. For these sections, I seek therein, the plausibility’s of these thinkers’ positions.
Cartesian Dualism: An Overview
Rene Descartes, the father of modern philosophy, is best known for his theory of mind-body dualism, although, he appears to be more idealistic than dualistic in his idea of the self. To us, and like for Descartes, the mind and body seem to be distinct entities when we look at it via our senses, but the issue of their interactions pose a big problem not only to Descartes, but to us all. Descartes, in his popular work titled Meditation, holds that mind and body are distinct substances which interact. The mind to him can be found in a person, so also is the body. In his explanation of the self, Descartes’ assertion cogito ergo sum (I think therefore I am) establishes that human existence lies in the act of consciousness. Here, the dictum “I think”, is the major defining characteristics of human existence. However, Descartes avers that the root of consciousness is the mind, rather the brain. That is, the mind, in his understanding, is the “self”, who performs the act of consciousness such as thinking, imagining, doubting, reflecting, and willing. Against this backdrop, Descartes describes it as mental, thought and non-spatial in character. What is mental or non-spatial event? This is clearly answered by Nigel Warburton, who writes: “Mental aspects are such things as thinking, feeling, deciding, dreaming, imagining, and wishing and so on.”1 Thus Descartes posits that mental elements cannot be extended in space. The nature of the mind is therefore thought res cogitans.
1 N. Warburton, Philosophy: The Basics (London: Routledge, 1999), 131.
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Descartes, unlike radical idealists like George Berkeley, holds that aside the existence of a thinking thing (mind or the self), body also exists. To him, his body includes: his face, arms, and other members composed of bones and flesh including human’s brain. All these are, in his view, divisible, spatial and capable of being extended. Descartes writes:
By body, I understood all that which can be defined by a certain figure. Something which can be confined in a certain place, and which can fill a given space in such a way that every other body will be excluded from it; which can be perceived either by touch, or sight, or by hearing or taste.2
Descartes’ excerpt shows that the body is distinct from the mind. What this implies is that they are two distinct substances. But these questions must be asked: How do I explain a non-spatial mind being trapped in a spatial body? Is this not a language misrepresentation? Is there truly a mind? How accurate is Descartes’ claim that mind is responsible for thought? These questions do not mean anything problematic to Descartes. In his view, aside the ground that these substances are distinct, they influence each other. This agrees with our common sense worldview. For instance, If one feels like jumping up (feeling, being a mental event), the body muscles respond to the mental event (one jumps up), although, it may be granted that this may not happen in all circumstances. A good instance is when one is sick, where one desires to stand up but could not. There is to be noted here, two types of event: mental (internal) and physical (public) events. To Descartes, the point of interaction is somewhere close to the brain (the pineal gland). This interaction to him cannot be explained through the law of physics, because this will mean that we are trying to reduce the mind to the brain. This position for him will render the substantial quality of mind useless. Thus Descartes favours the Divine’s interpretation, rather than the scientific ones. He harps that he is so certain about this since God would not want to deceive him. The justification for the existence of two substances, for Descartes, is therefore based on his belief in God’s infallibility. It is therefore God that makes the interaction possible. I do not think that Descartes’ explanation of mind-body, the point of interaction (the pineal gland) and his view that mind is the source of consciousness have been clearly and distinctly conceived by him. In fact, the problem of something non-extended touching something extended seems absurd. It is therefore the attempt to resolve the problem of Cartesian dualism that Ryle and Wireduan arguments seem significant.
2 R. Descartes, “Meditations,” in Joseph Margolis ed., An Introduction to Philosophical Inquiry: Contemporary and Classical Sources (New York: Alfred. A. Knopf, Inc, I968), 279.
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Gilber Ryle’s Category Mistake: A Critique of Cartesian Dualism
To begin with, it should be noted that Descartes believes in the existence of the mind as well as the body. Writing on his account of the mind, Descartes avers:
I considered that I was nourished, that I walked, that I felt, that I thought, and I referred to all these outcome to the soul.3
The soul and the mind are taken to be the same for Descartes, and as such, one also cannot meaningfully separate the res cogitans (thinking thing, the mind) and res extensa (the extended thing, or, perhaps, the body). This is what Descartes believes to be the two parts of a person. A person therefore is a mind and a body. The self is the conjunction of a mind and a body. He also grants that the mind or soul can outlive the body. This appears to be an argument for the immortality of the soul. Gilbert Ryle’s philosophy is therefore a refutation of Descartes’ claim that a person is a mind and a body, or a duality of mind-body. For Ryle, it is better to hold that a person is a body or is a mind, but not both. What Ryle is rejecting is Descartes’ argument that a person is both mind and body. Ryle reiterates:
I am not for example, denying that there occur mental processes. Doing long division is a mental process and so is making a joke. But I am saying that the phrase “there occur mental processes” does not mean the same as “there occur physical processes”, and therefore, that it makes no sense to conjoin or disjoin the two.4
Here, it should be noted that Ryle is not in favour of dualism. He believes that the fact of consciousness can be linked to the brain. For this reason, he stresses that Descartes has made a category mistake. He describes it as the “Dogma of the Ghost in the machine.”5 What Ryle is saying here is that Descartes represents the facts of mental life as if they belong to one logical category, where in the actual sense they belong to another. That is, he misrepresents the substance responsible for conscious or mental activities. Instead of positing that the human brain is the root of consciousness, Descartes invented the mind. Ryle stresses that there is no need to invent another substance (mind).
3 Ibid., 278. 4 G. Ryle, “Descartes’ Myth” in Joseph Margolis ed., An Introduction to Philosophical Inquiry: Contemporary and Classical Sources, 316. 5 Ibid., 31.
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Thus Ryle gives some analogies to show that there is a linguistic misinterpretation in Descartes’ conception of a person. Rather than supporting dualism, Ryle favours a form of reductive materialism, where the human mind is reduced to the brain. What this means is that, instead of postulating another substance (a mind), Descartes should be made to see that a ghost cannot be in a machine. That is, to say that a mind exists as a substance will be meaningful, if and only if it is conceived as the brain, rather than something different from it. Hence it is either the self is a mind or it is the brain or body, but not mind and body. Embracing a form of materialism, Ryle argues that what is responsible for “thought,” a mental event, is the brain. Here, mental event exists, not as a distinct category, but as a product of the brain. This vision is clearly captured in J.J.C Smart’s assertion: “mental processes are brain processes.”6 But we must ask: Has Ryle’s account dealt accurately with the mind- body problem in Descartes’ philosophy? Is reductive materialism itself free from criticisms? Is Cartesian mind-body problem only a linguistic problem? Is Descartes’ notion of God also a linguistic problem? This paper shall attempt concise solutions to some of these problems or issue raised.
Kwasi Wiredu’s Conception of a Person: A Survey of the Akan Conception of Mind
What constitutes the human person in Descartes’ philosophy? How does Wiredu see the nature of a person in his critique of Descartes’ dualism? How many metaphysical elements exist in Wireduan philosophy of the mind? Can Wiredu’s account of the mind resolve the Cartesian mind-body problem? These questions are robust, and in this paper, I cannot boast to have dealt with them conclusively. However, attempt, and only an attempt; will be made toward throwing more light on them. This is not to say that this paper is only interested in amusing us, rather it is directed at some problems that assail us. To my mind, an exercise in philosophy should do more than only engaging in a descriptive course; rather a concrete effort must be taken to remove our worries, pains, difficulties and so on. Let us return to Wiredu’s philosophy of mind. Wiredu, in my opinion, belongs to another culture distinct from that of Ryle and Descartes. One may therefore be tempted to argue that his position on this matter may not be suitable for addressing this problem. Whether this is the case or not, a concise clarification of his view is needed for a comparative philosophy to attain its merit. Briefly conceived, Wiredu in his Akan Concept of Mind posits tripartite characteristics that go to constitute a person. Unlike Descartes that holds that mind and body are the only two substances that make up a person, Wiredu argues that the word “mind” which is a non-substance entity in the Akan
6 J.J.C Smart, “Processes, Sensations and Brain,” in Introduction to Philosophical Inquiry: Contemporary and Classical Sources, 320.
O. SAMUEL 161 thought does not go to constitute a person. To him, what constitutes the parts of a person include: body (Nipadua), a life giving entity (Okra), that which gives a person’s personality it force (Sumsum), blood (Mogya) and that which is responsible for one’s personality cast (Ntoro). The three major elements in a person, in Wiredu’s view, are the Nipadua, Okra and Sumsum, although Mogya and Ntoro are often mentioned in a discourse on personhood. The Okra, for him, is the most significant part of a person. He describes it as a quasi-physical entity which has para-physical qualities. What this means is that the “okra” is neither physical nor spiritual, but both in quality. Unlike the Western conception of person found in Descartes’ view, the mind, to Wiredu, is not an entity or a substance. This invariably means that only a substance can be a major element of a person. Consequently, Wiredu considers the issue of consciousness and its root. Here, Wiredu supports the materialist account of consciousness. To him, the seat of thought popularly shared among the Akans is the brain. Thus he argues that thinking cannot go on in a human being without the brain.7 Here, one may want to accept Ryle’s position that Descartes had made a category mistake for supposing that it is the mind that thinks. To strengthen his position, Wiredu informs us that certain damages to the brain will impair thought. As one may see, just as we have noticed in our daily lives, Wiredu’s explanation at this point shows clearly that there is a link between brain processes and consciousness. Since Wiredu makes a reference to “okra”, which is, “quasi-physical entity” in a person, that is, something which has both spiritual and physical properties, one may ask: Are mental events non-spiritual? If yes, what constitutes the nature of a spiritual substance? However, Wiredu; having granted that mind is not an entity, stresses that when linguistically assessed, it could be said to mean “thought” (adwene” in Akan language). Thought for him has its source, and this is the brain. He avers that it is the brain that does the thinking. This is captured thus:
As to the instrument of the mechanism of thought, it is clear from the speech of the Akans that it is the brain, ‘adwene , that has this status. They know that thinking cannot go on in a human being without the brain, the certain injuries to the brain will impair thought and that generally there is a correlation between brain activity and thinking.8
In whatever way one looks at it, Ryle and Wiredu’s arguments attack Cartesian dualism on the linguistic as well as empirical ground. However, why Ryle supports a pure materialistic account (a form of reductive materialism),
7 K. Wiredu, “The Akan Concept of Mind,” in Ibadan Journal of Humanistic Studies, 3 (October 1983), 117. 8 Ibid., 130.
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Wiredu grants that a quasi-phsical entity exists in Akan thought. The questions we must raise include: Is there a single conception of personhood that must be accepted by us? If not, how come do we see problem(s) in Cartesian philosophy? Are we justified in using the category of Western Philosophy in appraising the philosophy of the East or Africa? If not, why then the comparison? And finally, to what extent does the Akan conception of mind and category mistake of Wiredu and Ryle respectively, address the inherent problems of Cartesian dualism.
Cartesian Dualism: An Evaluation of Wireduan and Ryle’s Refutation
Descartes, Ryle and Wiredu have impressed us by their different accounts of the nature of a person. Thus there are many issues to be raised in this discourse. The issue of personal identity, the mind-body interaction problem, the problem of the source of consciousness, the view that a substance can be quasi-physical, the problem of justifying the existence of God, the issue of linguistic interpretation, the problem of reductionism, problem of immortality of the soul and so on. As we have noted above, this paper does not claim to have dissolved these problems. However, we are interested in putting forward the thesis that any attempt to resolve these conflicts must start from the origin of consciousness. We may ask: What is the root of these problems that we are confronted with? Without mincing words, this problem is the issue of consciousness. It is because Descartes does not believe that brain is the source of consciousness that prompts him to assert that it is the mind that thinks. A close look at Ryle and Wiredu’s view on this problem show that for them, the source of consciousness is the brain. As the matter now stands, it is until we have resolved this matter that we can fully deal with the above problems. To corroborate my view, J Nagel writes: “When the problem of consciousness is solved, the mind-body problem will also be solved.”9 I agree unconditionally to this submission. In fact, Nagel maintains that it is the issue of consciousness that makes the mind-body problem interesting. For me, we do not do philosophy because we want to be amused, rather we are faced with a serious task, if not solved; would render our live hopeless. My aim therefore is to contribute in resolving Descartes’ mind-body problem. Reubel Abel stresses that the mind-body problem exists because the state of consciousness interacts with the state of corporeal body.10 This interaction has not been considerably resolved by Descartes. How can something outside space relate with something in space? This, in fact, is a mistake. The mind, if even granted existence, fails immediately it is accepted that it is trapped in the body. But one may ask: Is there anything difficult for
9 J. Nagel, “What is it like to be Bat?,” in Mortal Questions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 165-166. 10 See R. Abel, Man is the Measure (New York: Free Press, 1976), 203.
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God to do? Religious people may find the Cartesian analysis useful, on the ground that God has the power to do all things. However, the atheists may not be persuaded that God exists. In fact, the construction of personhood in the Cartesian sense assumes that God exists. The justification for God’s existence which Descartes employed (an ontological argument) is limited in its persuasive intent. He sees God as the perfect conceivable being. This argument will only be persuasive to those believe that there is a need to postulate an unlimited being or a perfect being. In fact, Descartes believes that the mind exists because we have internal dispositions. One must agree that these dispositions are mental. How then could a physical brain produce them? To Ryle and Wiredu, this can adequately be answered through brain processes. To them, if there is brain damage, consciousness will cease or mental activities will stop. To us, science has done considerably well in this regard, but this is not a conclusive ground to jettison the claim that mind exists. There is a need to ask: Is there any empirical proof to substantiate that the act of consciousness is the activity of the brain? Or is consciousness a physical process of the brain? To our mind, this question can be accounted for by pointing to this or that man. However, there has been no empirical justification for this, because a close examination of the brain will not show any signs of conscious events. For example, when we feel pain, a look at the brain does not empirically show us pain. It is therefore probable to hold that another element may be responsible for this act of consciousness. This gives credit to Imant Baruss’ assertion that materialism (eliminative or reductive) cannot fully explain matter, let alone subjective experiences (internal will).11 Let us become a little more skeptical. How do we know that brain thinks? The plausible account we can give (as in the case of Ryle and Wiredu) is that (i) it is empirical (ii) language of science accounts that it does, (iii) it is experiential. This leads us to ask: Can the language of science capture everything? By everything, we mean both physical and non-physical elements. To say that everything is physical means that “X” to be physical must obey the physical causal laws, and as such, everything (X) is causally deterministic. Against this, man’s intention, will and psychological nature have shown that we are not absolutely subjected to the law of nature. This point or may lead to the conclusion that Ryle’s materialism is to be critique. This is not all, if the “okra” is quasi-physical, how does Wiredu know this? The solution is simple: Wiredu fails to observe that linguistic interpretations are socially based. If the “Okra” is in us, how can we prove its existence? Having granted that “Okra” changes its nature, the best that Wiredu could say that we may grant, is that, meaning of terms are derived through communal solidarity, and by implication, there is no universal mode of doing or acting. Hence to refute the notion of mind in Akan thought system (as we
11 See I. Baruss, “Can we consider matter as ultimate reality? Some fundamental Problems with Materialist Interpretation of Reality,” in Ultimate Reality and Meaning: Interdisciplinary Studies in Philosophy of Understanding, 16:3-4 (1993), 245-254.
164 CARTESIAN DUALISM found in Wiredu), is not the same as to say that mind in Descartes’ philosophy does not exist, otherwise Wiredu will be equivocating. Descartes and Wiredu are trading their stocks at different markets. To say Wiredu’s rejection of the mind in Akan thought is a critique of Cartesian dualism is to invariably involve oneself in an incommensurability of discourse. On this ground, mere refutation of the mind in Akan language does nothing to harm Cartesian philosophy. Maybe, we should look at the issue of Ryle’s category mistake anew. The core of this refutation is that mind should be taken out of the discourse of personhood. This brings to our mind quickly, the practice of yoga, soul-travel, day-dreaming, introspection, clairvoyance as well as telepathy. Are these activities the product of the brain? If it is granted that these activities are real, then the claim that they are the product of the brain will be baseless. However, it is one thing for us to claim that something exists, but it something else to show that they in fact do. Here, we have little competent, but there is a critical point to it. If Mr “A”, “B”, “C” and “D” claimed that they practice such activities like telepathy and clairvoyance, and provide some evidences. Are we to grant that they do? In fact, many accounts have been given in the traditional African religion to support telepathy, yet we are still skeptical to the certainty of these claims. Why? The question whether minds exist is the core of this dispute. No doubt, all have granted that the body exists. Of course, we have also granted that brain thinks. We never consider it necessary to refute these claims. The reason for this is simple: it is open to public assessment. To my mind, even if we all believe that brain thinks, we have no clear justification for this. It is not verifiable. As one may seek for a justifiable ground for ascertaining that brain thinks, it is needed to show empirical support for this. Since the standard of measurement of consciousness is openness, I doubt whether behaviourism has considerably resolved the matter. In my view therefore, the issue of consciousness is a recondite matter that scientists have not fully addressed. Until this problem is resolved, the Cartesian mind-body will be with us.
Conclusion
My attempt in this paper has been a critical evaluation of Ryle and Wiredu’s critique of Cartesian dualism. The paper opened anew the issue of consciousness as the major bane of mind-body problem. I posited that effort should be made by scientists to re-investigate this matter anew for the materialist interpretation of personhood, has not fully resolved the problem in Descartes’ philosophy of mind and body. The intents of this paper not only addressed some of the militating problems of the Cartesian dualism, but also raised are some other fundamental questions that are associated with it. However, I do not hold that these problems have been resolved whether in this paper or somewhere else, rather I flagged the course for admitting “mind” into personhood conceptual box. This, to me, would give room for linguistic plurality, in the face of modern reductionist attitude.
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It is my conclusion that there is a concrete need to examine the issue of consciousness afresh because we are wont to believe that brain thinks and mind reflects; a position which is controversial.
Department of Philosophy, Lagos State University, Nigeria
References
Abel, R., Man is the Measure ( New York: Free Press, 1976). Baruss, I., “Can we consider matter as ultimate reality? Some fundamental Problems with Materialist Interpretation of Reality,” in Ultimate Reality and Meaning: Interdisciplinary Studies in Philosophy of Understanding, 16:3-4 (1993). Descartes, R., “Meditations,” in Joseph Margolis ed., An Introduction to Philosophical Inquiry: Contemporary and Classical Sources (New York: Alfred. A. Knopf, Inc, I968). Nagel, J., “What is it like to be Bat?,” in Mortal Questions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979). Ryle, G., “Descartes’ Myth” in Joseph Margolis ed., An Introduction to Philosophical Inquiry: Contemporary and Classical Sources. Smart, J.J.C, “Processes, Sensations and Brain,” in Introduction to Philosophical Inquiry: Contemporary and Classical Sources. Warburton, N., Philosophy: The Basics (London: Routledge, 1999). Wiredu, K., “The Akan Concept of Mind,” in Ibadan Journal of Humanistic Studies, 3 (October 1983).
KRITIKE VOLUME FIVE NUMBER TWO (DECEMBER 2011) 166-184
Article
Things Are Not What They Seem: The Transcendentalism of Appearances in the Refutation of Reductive Naturalism
James Trafford
Abstract: In this paper, I will re-examine the refutation of reductive naturalism by the anti-reductionist and the phenomenologist. I want first to outline a possible way of consistently polarising the field by showing that the anti-reductionist and phenomenologist adhere, at least to some degree, to what I will call the ‘principle of appearing qua appearing.’ The exemplar of reductive naturalism that I will go on to use is the work of Thomas Metzinger, which has come under serious criticism from phenomenologists. While this criticism has often assumed that Metzinger conflates phenomenology with introspection, I think that this is simply a terminological issue that will be sidestepped in order to look at the deeper problems that Metzinger’s work poses to the refutation of reductive naturalism. I go on to argue that this refutation relies upon the transcendentalism of appearances, and can be considered to be question begging. I will then consider three possible responses to my argument.
Key words: Metzinger, reductive naturalism, transcendentalism, phenomenolgy
The Principle of Appearing Qua Appearing
ith regard to consciousness, I would like to polarise the field by promoting a unifying principle for those anti-reductive philosophers Wwho assume both that consciousness exists, and, as Ned Block puts it; that “[o]ur fundamental access to consciousness derives from our acquaintance with it.”1 David Chalmers, for example states: “I have assumed that consciousness exists […] although I can no more ‘prove’ it than I can prove that I am conscious.”2 Whilst phenomenology is most concerned with how things appear to us, I will also suppose that this is an unproblematic
1 Ned Block, “Begging the Question against Phenomenal Consciousness,” in Behaviour and Brain Sciences, 15:2 (1992), 205. 2 David Chalmers, “Reply to Mulhauser's Review of ‘The Conscious Mind,’” in Psyche, 2:35 (November 1996).
© 2011 James Trafford http://www.kritike.org/journal/issue_10/trafford_december2011.pdf ISSN 1908-7330
J. TRAFFORD 167 account of Husserlian phenomenology: for example, Husserl states that “[T]he objects of which we are ‘conscious,’ are not simply in consciousness as in a box […] they are first constituted as being, what they are for us, and as what they count as for us.”3 Such philosophers have intuition on their side, claiming that the burden of explanation would most definitely rest with philosophers such as Daniel Dennett and Metzinger to establish a significant and substantial argument to the contrary.4 Chalmers lucidly delineates the ramifications of this position: Subjective experience is where our attempt to understand the world begins, and as such, is given to us as a brute fact, whose existence is not open to question: “If it were not for the fact that first-person experience was a brute fact presented to us, there would seem to be no reason to predict its existence.”5 Now, I want to assert that there is a second and sometimes implicit premise that the anti-reductionist and phenomenologist share: Conscious experience should be understood to be the domain of appearances as such. John Searle articulates this point: “Consciousness consists in the appearances themselves. Where appearance is concerned we cannot make the appearance- reality distinction because the appearance is the reality.”6 I want to call this the ‘principle of appearing qua appearing,’ or AqA.7 Even if we accept Block’s distinction of access consciousness (AC) and phenomenal consciousness (PC), (or Chalmers’ similar distinction between psychological and phenomenal consciousness), the principle of AqA holds for phenomenal consciousness, since, for Block; “P-consciousness, as such, is not consciousness of.”8 Following the above two premises, we can suggest that two conclusions follow, one positive and one negative. First, consciousness should
3 Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations I (London: Routledge, 2001), 275. 4 David Chalmers, “Moving Forward on the Problem of Consciousness,” in The Journal of Consciousness Studies, 4:1 (1997), 9. 5 David Chalmers, “Consciousness and Cognition,” (1990) http://consc.net/ papers/c-and-c.html. 6 John Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1992), 121. Dennett’s verificationist account has been touted as also refusing the appearance / reality distinction (e.g. Glenn Carruthers & Elizabeth Schier, “Our Intuitions about Consciousness are Inconsistent,” Paper presented at the Australasian Association for Philosophy Conference, Melbourne, Australia. July 2008). However, it may be that such a view equivocates on the notion of consciousness in Dennett’s early work, since he quite clearly states: “There seems to be phenomenology […] But it does not follow from this undeniable, universally attested fact that there really is phenomenology.” Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained, (Boston: Little Brown, 1991), 336. Dennett refuses the transcendentalism of appearances, but his refusal of an appearance / reality distinction for subjective access seems most likely to be a result of his intent to disavow the Cartesian theatre in this manner. 7 The term ‘appearing qua appearing’ has been used previously by phenomenologists such as Jan Patocka, An Introduction to Husserl’s Phenomenology, trans. by Erazim Kohak (Chicago, IL: Open Court, 1996). 8 Ned Block, “On a Confusion about a Concept of Consciousness,” in Behaviour and Brain Sciences, 18: 2 (1995). However, Güzeldere and Aydede provide a fairly convincing argument against the legitimacy of Block’s distinction of AC and PC. Cf. Guven Güzeldere and Murat Aydede, “On the Relation Between Phenomenal and Representational Properties,” in Behavioural and Brain Sciences, 20:1 (1997).
168 THINGS ARE NOT WHAT THEY SEEM be ostensively defined, and taken to be an “irreducible aspect of reality,”9 as Thomas Nagel put it, an explanandum that blocks the integration of the first- person point of view into the third-person scientific viewpoint. This claim need not be metaphysical, it need simply to assert as Levine does: “[T]hat conscious experiences themselves, not merely our verbal judgments about them, are the primary data to which a theory must answer.”10 Second, that reductionism with regard to consciousness is self- refuting, since it ignores that which it would presume to explain. Depending upon philosophical allegiance, this refutation takes different forms. For example, Searle argues that: scientific reduction attempts to reveal the reality behind appearances, however, in the case of consciousness, reality and appearance are inseparable – appearance is the reality – and thus, there can be no reduction. Let us also quickly follow Chalmers who argues that:
If someone says ‘I can see that you have explained how DNA stores and transmits hereditary information […] but you have not explained how it is a gene,’ then they are making a conceptual mistake. All it means to be a gene is to be an entity that performs the relevant storage and transmission function. When someone says ‘I can see that you have explained how information is discriminated, integrated, and reported, but you have not explained how it is experienced,’ they are not making a conceptual mistake. This is a nontrivial further question.11
To reiterate the premises and conclusions of the above anti- reductionist argument:
1. Consciousness exists, and is given to the first-person in experience as a brute fact. 2. There can be no appearance / reality distinction as far as consciousness is concerned (AqA).
9 Thomas Nagel, “Conceiving the Impossible and the Mind-Body Problem,” in Philosophy, 73: 285 (1998), 338. 10 Joseph Levine, “Out of the closet: A qualophile confronts qualophobia,” in Philosophical Topics, 22 (1994), 107–26. Levine assumes both that the distinction between the experiences themselves and our reports upon them is assured, and that we have a common-sense intuition regarding what this ‘primary data’ is supposed to be. 11 David Chalmers, “Facing up to the Problem of Consciousness,” in The Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2:3 (1995), 203. Cf. Galen Strawson: “[F]or there to seem to be rich phenomenology or experience just is for there to be such phenomenology or experience.” Galen Strawson, “Realistic Monism,” in Alan Freeman ed., Consciousness and it’s Place in Nature: Does Physicalism Entail Panpsychism? (Exeter: Imprint, 2006), 6n7.
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C1. Consciousness is an irreducible aspect of the world that resists objective description.12 C2. Reductive naturalism is self-refuting.
All of the above claims are central to phenomenological philosophy, and appear, for example, in Sonja Rinofner-Kreidl’s critique of Metzinger. However, it is clear that these assertions are transcendental as far as phenomenologists are concerned. Consider Jan Patocka’s statement: “I cannot go back to what appears to explain the appearing of appearing, since the understanding of appearing is presupposed in every thesis I might make about the appearing entity.”13 There is a transcendental assertion that precludes us from explaining the appearing of appearing, since this would induce a vicious circularity in our argumentation – it would necessitate us ‘forgetting’ the very conditions upon which we are able to make statements.14 By treating consciousness as one object amongst others, we would be engaging in a performative contradiction, since it is the very dimension of consciousness that gives us access to the world in the first place.15 This argument hinges on the principle of AqA – that appearances should be accounted for on their own terms. Consider Husserl’s ‘principle of principles’:
[T]hat every originary presentive intuition is a legitimizing source of cognition, that everything originally […] offered to us in intuition is to be accepted simply as what it is presented as being, but also only within the limits in which it is presented there.16
12 Cf. Sonja Rinofner-Kreidl’s critique of Metzinger on this point, “The Limits of Representationalism,” in The Journal of Consciousness Studies, 11:10-11 (October-November, 2004), 369. 13 Jan Patocka, Plato and Europe, trans. by Petr Lom (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 24. 14 Cf. Husserl: “If certain riddles are, generally speaking, inherent in principle to natural science, then it is self-evident that the solution of these riddles according to premises and conclusions in principle transcends natural science. To expect from natural science itself the solution of any one of the problems inherent in it as such […] or even merely to suppose that it could contribute to the solution of such a problem any premise whatsoever, is to be involved in a vicious circle.” Edmund Husserl, “Philosophy as a Rigorous Science,” in P. McCormick and F. Elliston eds., Husserl: Shorter Works (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1911/1981), 172. 15 It is worth noting that the structure of this argument is similar to that made against eliminative materialism as ‘self-defeating.’ Cf. Lynne Rudder-Baker, Saving Belief: A Critique of Physicalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987) and Paul Churchland, “Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes,” in The Journal of Philosophy, 78:2, (1981), 76-90 for a fairly convincing response. 16 Edmund Husserl, Ideas pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book, trans. by F. Kersten (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1982), 44. This is also the case for weaker claims such as: “Introspective conception affords one a transparent understanding of the nature of one’s mode of consciousness.” Philip Goff, “Appearance, Reality, and the Reality of Appearance,” Paper given at Brains Persons and Society,
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Philip Goff makes a similar (though weaker) argument:
When you attend, say, to your feeling of toothache, you are conceiving of that feature of reality […] in terms of what it is like to have it. But the nature of the feeling of toothache is exhausted by what it's like to have it.17
From AqA, consciousness just is the way things appear to us – the first-person phenomenological subject – so there is an epistemic asymmetry that is ineliminable for reductive naturalism.18 It is my claim that by holding the principle of AqA, the anti-reductionist is as much of a transcendentalist as the phenomenologist. Why? Because the principle is a transcendental assertion precluding further explanation: experience is an explanandum, not an explanans, or as Chalmers puts it: “Conscious Experience […] forces itself upon us as an explanandum and cannot be eliminated so easily.”19 The refutation of reductive naturalism rests upon the transcendentalism of conscious appearances, so that reductionism regarding those appearances is rejected not just as empirically false, but as necessarily false, and incoherent. To substantiate this claim, let us turn to Metzinger’s form of reductive naturalism.
Metzinger’s Achievement
Metzinger’s work can be taken as a response to such transcendentalism in three ways: a) he provides a sub-personal naturalistic account of consciousness; b) he provides an account of our ‘seeming’ to be genuine subjects of experience; c) he argues that, in spite of this ‘seeming,’ there are no subjects of experience in the world.20 If we are to refuse the principle of AqA, the second is most important: it explains why we experience ourselves in terms of first person subjectivity as an explanandum. It is incumbent upon reductive
Milan (2006). Similarly, I would suggest that claims such as ‘experiences are immediately familiar to the subject of experience,’ and ‘we have a privileged way of knowing our own thoughts, feelings, and sensations,’ would fall under the same category. 17 Ibid. 18 Cf. Chalmers: “[O]ur grounds for belief in consciousness derive solely from our own experience of it.” David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 101. 19 Ibid., 109. As Teed Rockwell remarks, Chalmers’ ‘Hard Problem’ is in fact impossible to answer in the form in which it is formulated, since Chalmers argues that we cannot explain consciousness in terms of structure and function, yet this is precisely what an explanation consists of. Thus, for example, Chalmers defines function as: “Any causal role in the production of behavior that a system might perform.” David Chalmers, “Facing up to the Problem of Consciousness,” 202. If this is the case, then, as Rockwell notes, surely the ‘hard problem’ is not a problem at all since it in principle cannot be solved. Teed Rockwell, “The Hard Problem is Dead, Long Live the Hard Problem,”
J. TRAFFORD 171 naturalism to present a theory of why consciousness and first person experience seem to be a ‘brute fact.’ In order to achieve this, Metzinger has to account for appearances as such by making the distinction between explanandum and explanans untenable. Primarily, Metzinger argues that phenomenal experience should be understood in terms of a process of mental presentation; a physically realised process that relates a system, and internal state of that system, and a partition of the world. This process generates a phenomenal representatum, or a presentatum (the vehicle of presentation), the content of which signals a presentandum for the system. Refusing to separate vehicle and content in this way, Metzinger uses this process to outline his understanding of phenomenal self-representation as the process by which the system as a whole generates the content of a self- representational state. In this way, the system as a whole activates a self-model: a self-representatum that is a time-slice of the ongoing, physically realized process of representation. In order for this self-model or system-model to become a phenomenal self – to move from representational self-modelling to the consciously experienced phenomenal property of selfhood – there is a transparency constraint. Metzinger understands certain properties of experience to be phenomenologically transparent. In contrast to the conception of phenomenal transparency proposed by G.E. Moore, and more recently, Sydney Shoemaker and Michael Tye, Metzinger defines transparency as follows: “For every phenomenal state, the degree of phenomenal transparency is inversely proportional to the introspective degree of attentional availability of earlier processing stages.”21 Transparency is the property of mental representations that gives rise to a phenomenal model of reality. It is this ‘reality-model’ that is experienced firsthand as pre-reflectively and immediately given to the self in the experience of presence within a world. Nevertheless, transparency results from an architectonic feature of the information processing that allows for the transparent activation of this mental model, since, for example, the earlier processing stages that unify conscious content are systematically deleted from the experience of the unified global model of the world. A phenomenal representatum or, as Metzinger puts it, a presentatum is one that cannot be recognized as such by the system activating it: consequently, we experience ourselves as living in the world right now. In this respect, the relation between the presentatum and presentandum is essentially asymmetric since the earlier processing stages of representation are systematically occluded from the presentational content: phenomenal experience is a presentatum that emerges precisely as a result of the occlusion of the presentandum (the vehicle of presentation). The phenomenal experience of the self is also a form of mental content that is brought about specifically because of the deletion of earlier representational processes. So, what Metzinger calls the ‘Phenomenal Self-Model’ (PSM), is brought about by a
21 Thomas Metzinger, “Phenomenal Transparency and Cognitive Self-Reference,” in Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences II (2003), 353-393.
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‘special form of epistemic darkness’: “Phenomenal transparency in general […] means that something particular is not accessible to subjective experience, namely, the representational character of the contents of conscious experience.”22 This is the case, not only for sensory modalities and our integrated phenomenal model of the world, but also for much of our PSM, leaving us necessarily in a state of naïve realism with regard to appearings, including the appearing of the self.23 Accordingly, the seeming of Chalmers’ ‘brute fact’ becomes intelligible, since any conscious system with a phenomenally transparent self-model would, by necessity, be a naïve realist about itself. It makes sense to ask what an experience is like beyond the way it appears since the mode of presentation is phenomenally independent of how it appears to the phenomenal subject. That is to say, Metzinger’s thesis is not a kind of self-deception – the self is a particular form of phenomenal content that is not epistemologically justified since it does not correspond to any single entity inside or outside of the self-representing system.24 As Metzinger puts it: “The phenomenal property of selfhood is constituted by transparent, nonepistemic self-representation.”25 In order to show that Metzinger is not tilting at straw men by assuming that the self is substantive or non-physical, he then needs to show how category errors that have been concretised through linguistic ascription can be revised.26 This is precisely the role of the PSM as Metzinger has formulated it. If a system integrates its own operations, using mental simulations of propositional structures that could be true or false, into its existing transparent self-model, while attributing the causal role of generating these representational states to itself, the system as a whole will consciously experience itself as the thinker and subject of its own thought, and, it will make this phenomenal content available for cognitive processing.27 That is, Metzinger does not simply refuse the ineliminability of de-se-attitudes, he characteristically introduces a third-term asymmetry in order to explain the existence of I*-thoughts and I*-sentences.28 The resulting explanation consists of showing how ‘brute facts’ regarding appearances as such, and I*-thoughts, can be accounted for by showing that they rely upon representational content that is in principle unavailable because, on the level of phenomenal experience, the first-person perspective is transparent, and, as such, is epistemically unjustified content.
22 Thomas Metzinger, Being No-One (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 169. 23 That is, where presentational states are subpersonal and subdoxastic, cf. Stephen Stich, “Beliefs and Subdoxastic States,” in Philosophy of Science, 45 (December, 1978), 499-518. 24 Metzinger, Being No-One, 565. 25 Ibid., 337. 26 Cf. Patricia Churchland, “Can Neurobiology Teach Us Anything about Consciousness?,” in Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 67:4, (January, 1994) 23-40. 27 Metzinger, “Phenomenal Transparency and Cognitive Self-Reference,” 369. 28 On I* sentences and I* thoughts, cf. H. N. Castañeda, “>He<: A study on the logic of self-consciousness,” in Ratio, 8 (1966), 130-157.
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Accordingly, using the resources that Metzinger has provided us with, we are able to account for the representation of the first-person perspective, since cognitive self-reference refers to the phenomenal content of a transparent self-model. That is, the conscious cognitive subject lacks epistemic justification for the corresponding belief states about that is actually being represented at the level of phenomenal content.29 Since I would argue that Metzinger is a reductive naturalist, rather than an eliminativist, I take him to have shown, following Patricia Churchland, that “The available theory specifies not only what counts as an explanation, but also the explananda themselves.”30 As a result, both the explanandum and explanans are open to revision, including a revision of experience itself.
The Reality of Appearances
I want to argue that Metzinger’s account should be taken as a response to the attempt to refute reductive naturalism on the grounds of the principle of AqA31 I am not arguing that reductive naturalism is correct, only that it can be defended against such arguments. Now, the phenomenologist and anti- reductivist may still argue that Metzinger engages in a performative contradiction, since it is consciousness that is supposed to be the condition of possibility for all knowledge. This is the argument of self-refutation, which, simplistically would look something like this: The reductive naturalist:
i. Denies the existence of genuine subjects of experience. ii. However, he himself is a genuine subject of experience. iii. His statement that there are no genuine subjects of experience relies on him being a genuine subject of experience. iv. Therefore, he is guilty of a performative contradiction by relying on that which he attempts to deny.
This is undoubtedly a simplification: nonetheless, it is precisely the second step of this argument that the principle of AqA is supposed to uphold. It is by adhering to this principle that the argument explicitly assumes something for which Metzinger provides an alternative explanation. By showing how the principle of appearing qua appearing is central to the refutation of reductive naturalism, I hope also to have shown how and why this is a transcendental argument. The refutation is question begging since it
29 Metzinger, Being No-One, 404. 30 Patricia Churchland, “The Hornswoggle Problem,” in The Journal of Consciousness Studies, 3:5-6, (1996), 398. 31 Though Chalmer’s ‘call to arms’ is directed towards Dennett, it clearly applies to Metzinger: “Dennett […] has often stated how radical and counterintuitive his position is. So it is clear that the default assumption is that there is a further problem of explanation; to establish otherwise requires significant and substantial argument.” Chalmers, “Moving Forward on the Problem of Consciousness,” 9.
174 THINGS ARE NOT WHAT THEY SEEM assumes AqA to be true, while it is precisely AqA that reductive naturalism would both dispute and revise. What’s more, by providing an explanation for the ‘seeming’ of this ‘genuine’ subject of experience, we can contend that the argument against reductive naturalism relies upon a naturalistic fallacy, viz., that the reality of consciousness is given in experience. Thus, we can also show that the argument that reductive naturalism is self-refuting is question begging, since it rests upon an explanatory principle, which has been illegitimately construed as transcendental. Let us briefly consider another example of the refutation argument, this time found in Chalmers and Goff:
i. There is something that ‘it is like’ to be a subject of experience.32 ii. We have direct knowledge of subjective experiences from first-person access. iii. Subjective experiences are the central data that we want from a science of consciousness. iv. No third person data will express this data. C. First-person data are irreducible to third person data.
In this form, the principle of appearing qua appearing is outlined in the second and third premises. Note that while it does not presuppose incorrigibility as such, the first person is assumed to enjoy intimacy with its own conscious states, so that there could be no more reality to conscious experiences than we are able to discover through our phenomenal experience of them.33 This is just another way of saying that: “In the special case of conscious experience, appearance and reality cannot come apart […] How things appear to us just is the reality we are attending to when we attend to our conscious experience.”34 But where is the evidence for the sufficiency of appearances? The terms upon which we are allowed access to this realm of appearances as such is exactly what is presupposed: First-person phenomenology. And how could we deny that we always begin from the first- person perspective? Following Metzinger, the reductive naturalist can argue that:
i. Consciousness, the phenomenal self, and the first-person perspective are representational phenomena. ii. The first-person approach was historically but is not nomologically fundamental. iii. We naively operate from a first-person perspective.
32 On the use of the phrase ‘what it is like,’ cf. William Lycan, Consciousness and Experience (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 77. 33 The epistemic consequences of this move are briefly dealt with below. 34 Goff, op cit.
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iv. A conscious system seems to be a subject of experience when it generates experiences that include the experiences of being a subject in the world. C. Persons, selves, and subjects of I*-thoughts are unjustified appearances.
Take Chalmers’ statement: ‘Experience is the most central and manifest aspect of our mental lives, and indeed is perhaps the key explanandum in the science of the mind. Because of this status as an explanandum, experience cannot be discarded like the vital spirit when a new theory comes along.’35 As we have shown, this argument contains a transcendental component in the form of AqA. By taking experience as fundamental, there is a sense in which the anti-reductionist remains unable to give an account of why there is experience in the first place.36 The reductive naturalist on the other hand hopes to explain why consciousness and first person experience is experienced as a brute fact, denying the principle of AqA and providing an explanation for those causes and reasons of appearances that do not appear within ‘appearings.’ That is, the reductive naturalist can grant Chalmers’ distinction between the phenomenal and psychological aspects of mind – ‘thinking that q’ is not the same as ‘sensing q’ – without conceding the claim that sensing is direct and unmediated.37 Countering the principle of AqA, Metzinger shows that the positing of appearances as such is an impoverishment of explanation, since there is a sub-linguistic reality that is inaccessible to first person description: the reality of consciousness is for the most part independent of the subject of consciousness.38
A Weaker Form of Transcendentalism
There is a relevant though weaker argument that we have not yet dealt with, which suggests that even the reductive naturalist is a weak transcendentalist regarding appearances. The weak transcendentalist suggests:
35 Chalmers, “Facing up to the Problem of Consciousness,” 206. 36 Cf. Ibid., 210. 37 This is in accord with Wilfrid Sellars’ claim: “The fact that something looks red to me can itself be experienced. But it is not itself an experiencing.” Wilfrid Sellars, “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,” in Wilhelm deVries and Timothy Triplett eds., Knowledge, Mind, and the Given: Reading Wilfred Sellars’s ‘Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind’ (Cambridge: Hackett, 2000), V. 38 Of course, the attempt to distinguish between ‘thinking that q’ and ‘sensing q’ is a difficult issue in itself, and a subject that requires further elucidation, though Metzinger’s account in Thomas Metzinger, Being No-One makes a serious attempt at disentangling the associated problems. Moreover, such a distinction could be adequately parsed, it would still be incumbent upon the argument against reductivism to produce a mechanism by which ‘sensing q’ ought to be taken to be unmediated. Thanks to an anonymous review for raising this point.
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i. Reductive naturalism does not eliminate conscious appearances. ii. Furthermore, reductive naturalism necessitates the existence of those appearances as a target phenomenon of explanation and reduction. C. Conscious appearances are a transcendental condition for the possibility of reductive naturalism.
This is admittedly a very thin version of transcendentalism that only advocates that conscious appearances are necessary in order to formulate an account thereof.39 Nevertheless, if we look more carefully at this assertion, it should help to clarify more specifically the terms upon which reductive naturalism overcomes the principle of AqA. First, let us state upfront that this argument does nothing to undermine what we have said above, since the anti- reductionist and phenomenologist whose claims we outlined clearly add more properties to this weaker form of transcendentalism, primarily in the form of first-person phenomenology. Nevertheless, in the spirit of attempting to answer such a call to arms, it is incumbent upon the reductive naturalist not to simply obviate this issue by eliminating it. Should the reductive naturalist then accept weak transcendentalism, or can she show why this strategy is also question begging? The problem of weak transcendentalism is pithily described by F. H. Bradley’s claim:
[F]or nothing is actually removed from existence by being labeled ‘appearance.’ What appears is there, and must be dealt with; but materialism has no rational way of dealing with appearance.40
At first glance, the weak transcendentalist is surely correct, and since Metzinger argues that conscious appearances should not be granted ontological status, he is guilty of not answering consciousness on its own terms.41 Nevertheless, we ought to ask exactly what appearances do for weak transcendentalism. As noted above, Chalmers allows two options when it comes to appearances: either sign up to the principle of AqA, or eliminate
39 This argument is largely due to Dan Hutto, in conversation. 40 Francis Bradley, Appearance and Reality, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1930), 12. Dan Hutto reiterates the point: “Experience cannot simply be explained away. If one admits that experiences appear to exist […] then they must be accounted for. We are owed an explanation of what accounts for the fact that experiences appear to be as they are. Specifically, we must account for their apparent qualitative aspects. Thus […] to say that experiences are mere appearances hence not real does not reduce the materialist's explanatory burden.” Dan Hutto, “Author's Précís of Beyond Physicalism,” in SWIF Philosophy of Mind Review, (2000), 5. 41 Dan Hutto makes this point in relation to Dennett. Dan Hutto, “An Ideal Solution to the Problems of Consciousness,” in The Journal of Consciousness Studies, 5:3, (1998), 330.
J. TRAFFORD 177 phenomenal consciousness altogether.42 The reductive naturalist account outlined above provides an alternative to this dichotomy in order to explain appearances – the further question is whether or not explanation entails weak transcendentalism as Bradley put it. I want to suggest that that this is not the case because of two possible unstated inferences in the weak transcendentalist position. For the weak transcendentalist position to work, its exponent needs to infer either a) appearances block revision, or b) conscious appearances are a special case. Both adhere to the principle of AqA. Why? b) necessitates a limited foundationalism in the phenomenal domain, as Dan Hutto argues:
[I]t is not possible to regard experiences as properties of objects. This is primarily due to the fact that modes of presentation logically imply a subject to whom they are presented.43
This objection has been dealt with above where I suggest it begs the question when used to refute reductive naturalism. a) it attempts to block the revision of appearances: a claim which, although it seems to be innocuous, prompts the question – why would we save appearances rather than revise them? The key point here is epistemic: for the reductive naturalist, appearances themselves cannot count as knowledge and are open to revision. On our account, the reductive naturalist attempts to explain appearances, rather than ‘explain them away.’ If we go back to the principle of AqA, the point is simply that transcendentalism about appearances asserts that appearances should be taken on their own terms; appearing qua appearing as such, rather than as something else. Reductive naturalism can accept that conscious ‘appearings’ are only appearance, but this is also to say that there are no intrinsic epistemic relations of intentional content for conscious states. It looks like the weak transcendentalist is attempting to smuggle in a kind of non-inferential justification here, which is exactly what Hutto suggests, arguing that experiences are “fundamentally grounded in our non-conceptual way of being in the world,” so that “our talk of how things appear to us is not open to challenge precisely because it serves as non-inferential justification for other judgments and beliefs.”44 Experiences become the very ground of justification, since they are inextricable from our primary engagement with things. Do experiences provide a non-inferential ground of justification? Or, on the other hand, can we preserve the idea that experiences might be sub-
42 E.g.: “The main intuition at work is that there is something to be explained – some phenomenon associated with first person experience […] The only consistent way to get around the intuitions is to deny the problem and the phenomenon altogether.” Chalmers The Conscious Mind, 110. 43 Dan Hutto, Beyond Physicalism, (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2000), 99. 44 Dan Hutto, “Turning Hard Problems on Their Heads,” in Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 5:1, (March 2006), 2; 10.
178 THINGS ARE NOT WHAT THEY SEEM conceptual doxastic content, whilst also saying that they are open to revision and challenge? There is not the space to outline a full response to this problem: nonetheless, we need only to show that the reductive naturalist will provide an alternative response in order to highlight the question-begging nature of the argument. Metzinger quite clearly asserts the epistemologically unjustified nature of experiences, refusing the claim that they provide a ground for justification since they are both physically reducible and in principle revisable. Epistemologically, there needs to be a ‘justification-maker’ that does not derive from other propositional content in order for the weak transcendentalist argument to follow, a condition that makes it epistemologically appropriate for content justification.45 The anti-reductionist seems to be capitulating to the ‘myth of the epistemic given’ in its most rudimentary form. In Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, Wilfrid Sellars makes a case against the epistemic given: knowledge of the given that can be said to be autonomous or independent of other matters of fact.46 Sellars is concerned with the possibility of accounting for the existence of experiences without taking them on their own terms: his account of the myth of the epistemic given is not an attempt to eliminate ‘appearings’ as such, rather it is simply an attempt to relieve them of their status as providing an epistemological bedrock for justified belief. On Sellars’ account, the given cannot be said to provide non-inferential knowledge or epistemic justification, since it does not have the necessary means to be an ‘efficacious evidence- provider.’ The problem for the epistemic given would not disappear even if we were to accept AqA in order to talk about ‘appearings themselves’ without reference to the world. This is because, according to deVries and Triplett, the doctrine of the given requires only “that for any empirical knowledge that p, some epistemically independent knowledge g is epistemically efficacious with respect to p.”47 Indeed, the principle of AqA obscures the role the given plays since it attempts to allow ‘appearings’ to be treated as independent of other cognitive and physical structures. So, even if we accept the distinction between
45 Cf. Jim Pryor, “Is There Non-Inferential Justification?,” in E. Sosa and M. Steup eds., Contemporary Debates in Epistemology (London: Blackwell, 2004). 46 Cf. Sellars, “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,” VIII.32; also James O’Shea, Wilfred Sellars (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), 106ff. 47 Wilhem de Vries and Timothy Triplett eds., Knowledge, Mind, and the Given: Reading Wilfred Sellars’s ‘Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind’ (Cambridge: Hackett, 2000), 104-5. Chalmers argues that he is able to circumnavigate the myth of the given, but, whilst his phenomenal epistemology certainly deserves greater attention, it is enough to show that his method – introduce a new kind of justifying relation ‘constitution’ – looks like it succumb to the myth in three ways: a) Chalmers reasoning for the existence of the ‘constitution’ relation is circular – he argues that we should accept it because of the role that it plays in our epistemic activity; b) ‘constitution’ is structured in much the same way as acquaintance – Sellars’ primary target in EPM; c) its role is defined in terms of the provision of incorrigible epistemic efficacy: ‘It is the role an experience plays in constituting a direct phenomenal belief that makes that belief incorrigible, and indeed incorrigible in virtue of its phenomenological structure, and so justified.’ David Chalmers, “Mind and Modality,” in Lectures given at Princeton University (October 12-16 1998).
J. TRAFFORD 179 the psychological and the phenomenal for conscious ‘appearings,’ there is a further question to ask: how do we get from this ‘appearing’ to knowledge regarding that ‘appearing.’48 Put another way: what else would need to be in place before such ‘appearings’ could serve to justify knowledge? Sellars’ point can be made very simply: an experience or ‘appearing’ does not justify some belief or other by merely ‘appearing,’ and so the case for an epistemological AqA should not be granted. The weak transcendentalist position relies upon a ‘justification-maker’ that is independent from other propositional content. That is to say, ‘appearings’ are supposed to be in some way epistemically independent of and prior to further epistemic activity. There are two horns for this attempt to conceive of the role of ‘appearing’ as ‘epistemologically efficacious.’ On the first horn, ‘appearing’ is supposed to be non-propositional, in which case it will be epistemologically inefficacious since it is not an epistemologically appropriate condition for content justification – it cannot provide an independent reason or premise to conform or disconfirm beliefs. On the second horn, ‘appearing’ might be conceived propositionally, in which case it will not turn out to be epistemologically independent in the way the weak transcendentalist desires, and it is therefore revisable in the same way as other empirical knowledge.49 On both horns, the epistemic version of AqA attempts to provide conscious ‘appearings’ with the capacity to justify cognitive states without needing justification. Laurence BonJour summates the problem with this approach:
[I]t is clear on reflection that it is one and the same feature of a cognitive state, namely, its assertive or at least representational content, which both enables it to confer justification on other states and also creates the need for it to be itself justified – thus making it impossible in principle to separate these two aspects.50
Nevertheless, the weak transcendentalist might argue that in denying her position, the reductive naturalist inevitably ‘muddies the waters’ of the explanandum with various explanans by importing description into the target phenomenon. Josh Weisberg makes this point against Metzinger; “[I]f a theory cannot explain why the explanandum appears as it does to common sense - that
48 Ruth Millikan also makes this point, cf. Ruth Millikan, “How We Make Our Ideas Clear: Epistemology for Empirical Concepts,” in On Clear and Confused Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 95-108. Gallagher and Zahavi make this mistake in relation to philosophical phenomenology, suggesting that phenomenology does not succumb to the myth since it phenomenology is concerned with experiences rather than the relation of experiences to the world, cf. Shaun Gallagher & Dan Zahavi, The Phenomenological Mind: An Introduction to Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science, 24. 49 Cf. O’Shea, op cit., 111-112; p. 209n10; deVries and Tripplett eds., Knowledge, Mind, and the Given: Reading Wilfred Sellars’s ‘Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,’ 105-6. 50 Laurence BonJour, The Structure of Empirical Knowledge (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 78.
180 THINGS ARE NOT WHAT THEY SEEM is if it cannot ‘save the common-sense appearances’ – we do not count it as a successful theory.”51 However, the reductive naturalist as she has been defined here expects that the very practice of scientific and philosophical progress will enrich and revise the explanandum itself: conscious appearance itself will alter as theory proceeds. Moreover, claims to the opposite – that “common-sense appearances” are somehow pristine phenomena that are simply given – are open to the charge of adopting a form of idealism toward consciousness. Consequently, reductive naturalism does not fall foul of Bradley’s censure, removing something from existence by labeling it as appearance, since the explanation of the origin of those ‘common-sense appearances’ and corresponding theoretical intuitions may well completely revise and destroy them.52 The weak transcendentalist relies upon an austere version of the appearance / reality distinction which the reductive naturalist can jettison. Hutto’s argument, which claims that ‘to say that experiences are mere appearances hence not real does not reduce the materialist's explanatory burden,’ presumes that reductive naturalism will attempt to axiomatically eliminate rather than explain and revise appearances. On the other hand, the reductive naturalist can agree with Sellars that:
[E]mpirical knowledge, like its sophisticated extension, science, is rational, not because it has a foundation but because it is a self-correcting enterprise which can put any claim in jeopardy, though not all at once.53
From this we may conclude that the weak transcendentalist argument is also predicated upon AqA, and hence question begging, since the appearances it would save could not provide a neutral ground for the explanandum. Moreover, weak transcendentalism requires an epistemic argument for the unjustified inference to either the irrevisability or the special status of conscious appearances. That is to say, only if the explanandum is supposed to be transcendentally autonomous from the explanans does weak transcendentalism follow. Outlining this third response clears up some of the issues regarding the principle of AqA, with the implication that the anti- reductionist may well be forced to capitulate to some form of the given.
51 Josh Weisberg, “Consciousness Constrained: A Commentary on Being No One,” in Psyche, 11:5, (2005), 6. 52 Metzinger makes this point; Thomas Metzinger, “Reply to Weisberg,” in Psyche, 12:4, (2006), 3. This is consistent with the account of reduction proposed by Churchland; “Reduction is not a strict logical deduction of the terms of one theory to those of another, but rather that the ‘image of the higher order theory,’ or specifically, its explanatory and predictive resources, will be preserved in lower level theory.” Paul Churchland, Matter and Consciousness, 2nd Edition (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989), 49. This is in distinction to the deductive-nomological approach, e.g. Earnest Nagel, The Structure of Science (Cambridge: Hackett, 1961), 336-397. 53 Sellars, “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,” VIII.
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Conclusion
I hope to have shown that attempts to refute reductive naturalism by invoking AqA surreptiously ascribe a transcendental status to conscious appearances, and that this strategy is question begging since it imputes to the reductive naturalist concepts which are encumbered with the very assumptions which she would deny and revise. There may well be other reasons why we would want to hold a non-reductive or phenomenological position, but whatever those reasons might be, they should not be set out on the basis of such claims. As Rinofner-Kreidl and Lynne Rudder Baker have pointed out, Metzinger’s work has serious consequences for our semantic and epistemic understanding of reality. In this regard, Dan Zahavi suggests: “Why not rather insist that the self is real if it has experiential reality and that the validity of our account of the self is to be measured by its ability to be faithful to experience?.”54 However, this would effectively go full circle, arguing that the contents of our ontology should be determined by that which was presupposed in the first place: appearing qua appearing. Rudder-Baker makes this allegiance clear: “My experience of being a conscious subject is evidence that I am a subject, and this evidence overwhelms any possible evidence that I may have for any scientific theory to the contrary.”55 My aim in this paper has been to show how anti-reductive philosophers at least implicitly rely upon a transcendental assumption that precludes explanation by widening the gap between conceptual speculation and empirical study. Nevertheless, I would suggest that, instead of erecting transcendental schemas that seem designed to resist explanatory integration, both the explananda and the explanans of conscious experience ought to be left open to revision.56
Department of Contextual Studies, University for the Creative Arts, United Kingdom
References
Block, N., “Begging the Question against Phenomenal Consciousness,” in Behaviour and Brain Sciences, 15:2 (1992). Block, N., “On a Confusion About a Concept of Consciousness,” in Behaviour and Brain Sciences, 18: 2 (1995). BonJour, L,. The Structure of Empirical Knowledge (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985). Bradley, F.H., Appearance and Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1930).
54 Dan Zahavi, Subjectivity and Selfhood: Investigating the First Person Perspective (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2005), 128. 55 Lynne Rudder-Baker, “Naturalism and the First-Person Perspective,” in Georg Gasser ed., How Successful is Naturalism? (Publications of the Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society: Ontos Verlag, 2007), 24. 56 Thanks to Ray Brassier, Dan Hutto, Alex Tillas and an anonymous reviewer for comments on earlier versions of this paper.
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Carruthers, G. & Schier, E., “Our Intuitions about Consciousness are Inconsistent,” Paper presented at the Australasian Association for Philosophy Conference, Melbourne, Australia (July 2008). Castañeda, H.N., “>He<: A study on the logic of self-consciousness,” in Ratio, 8 (1966), 130-157. Chalmers, D., “Consciousness and Cognition,”
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______, “Turning Hard Problems on Their Heads,” in Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 5:1 (March 2006). Levine, J., “Out of the closet: A qualophile confronts qualophobia,” in Philosophical Topics, 22 (1994), 107–26. Lycan, W., Consciousness and Experience (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996). Metzinger, T., “Phenomenal Transparency and Cognitive Self-Reference,” in Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences II, (2003), 353-393. Metzinger, T., Being No-One (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003). ______, “Reply to Weisberg,” in Psyche, 12:4 (2006). Millikan, R., “How We Make Our Ideas Clear: Epistemology for Empirical Concepts,” in On Clear and Confused Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Nagel, E., The Structure of Science (Cambridge: Hackett, 1961). Nagel, T., “Conceiving the Impossible and the Mind-Body Problem,” in Philosophy, 73: 285 (1998). O’Shea, J., Wilfred Sellars (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007). Patocka, J., An Introduction to Husserl’s Phenomenology, trans. by Erazim Kohak (Chicago, IL: Open Court, 1996). ______, Plato and Europe, trans. by Petr Lom (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002). Pryor, J., “Is There Non-Inferential Justification?,” in E. Sosa and M. Steup eds., Contemporary Debates in Epistemology (London: Blackwell, 2004). Rinofner-Kreidl, S., “The Limits of Representationalism,” in The Journal of Consciousness Studies, 11:10-11 (October-November, 2004). Rockwell, T., “The Hard Problem is Dead, Long Live the Hard Problem,”
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Zahavi, D., Subjectivity and Selfhood: Investigating the First Person Perspective (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2005).
KRITIKE VOLUME FIVE NUMBER TWO (DECEMBER 2011) 185-196
Article
Laws of Nature and Counterparts1
Esteban Céspedes
Abstract: The events of nature are, at first glance, related to each other in a necessary way, as if they were subject to certain rules, a fact that is closely linked with the ontology of natural laws. However, there are several conflicting theories about their existence, such as the Humean view as well as realism. Mumford proposes a third way: to accept natural regularity, but deny that this is due to the real existence of natural laws. Finally, some ideas about a possible combination between nomological realism and Lewis’s counterpart theory will be considered in order to improve the first. I will defend realism about regularities as well as about laws and show that such a point of view is not only compatible with counterparts, but that it could be supported by them.
Key words: Natural law, nomological realism, modality, supervenience
Regularity without Laws
he realist conception of natural laws establishes that these are real entities in a strict metaphysical sense. They do not supervene on other most basic T entities, nor are they apparent: they are real and determine the structure of the natural world. Some of the important detailed views on realism are presented by Tooley, who argues that the truth-makers of laws must be universals,2 and Woodward, whose view consists in founding laws on causal connections between particular objects.3 According to the general realist account, natural events are connected by regularities and can be predicted by the conjunction of natural laws and particular facts. This view, also called nomological realism, which according to Mumford has two basic premises.4 The first is that the world has certain features, such as regularity, universality, objectivity, natural necessity, and so on. The second premise is that these features depend on the real ontological existence of natural laws. One may deny that these features exist, but it cannot be denied that laws exist. With regard to the connection between prediction and natural laws, the Hempel’s interpretation of explanation and prediction is quite orientating.
1 I am thankful to José Tomás Alvarado for valuable comments. This article was supported by CONICYT and by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation. 2 M. Tooley, “The Nature of Laws,” in Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 7:4 (1977). 3 Woodward, J., “Realism about Laws,” in Erkenntnis, 36:2 (1992). 4 S. Mumford, “Laws and Lawlessness,” in Synthese, 144:3 (2005), 403.
© 2011 Esteban Céspedes http://www.kritike.org/journal/issue_10/cespedes_december2011.pdf ISSN 1908-7330
186 NATURE AND COUNTERPARTS
According to Hempel & Oppenheim,5 the explanation of an event must have the following elements: (1) a set of propositions that assert the occurrence of certain events or antecedent conditions, and (2) a set of universal hypotheses or general laws. The latter have the form of universal natural laws and, in conjunction with a given set of propositions defined by (1), other events can be deduced by those laws. Without them there is no prediction and no scientific knowledge, therefore, natural laws are real entities. Here is the opposing view. According to Hume, events of nature are entirely separated, and if an event occurs after another, it is not possible to perceive any real connection between them. However, as our ideas come from impressions of sense and we have no impressions of those connections, it is meaningless to talk about them, either in the context of philosophical reasoning or in everyday context. This view is called Humean lawlessness and says that connections between events are not intrinsic to nature, but that we understand them in the form of habits. Talking about any kind of connection between events such as natural or causal laws is completely meaningless. The best formulation of the Humean conception of natural laws is the theory of Ramsey-Lewis, whose foundations are quite obvious, according to Mumford. The problem of Humean supervenience, the metaphysical basis of this theory, may be presented as follows. According to Lewis,6 the world is made, in part, by natural laws, probability and causal relations and consists of a distribution of space-time points of local qualitative character.7 Can two possible worlds differ from each other with regard to its laws without differing with respect to its local character? As argued by Armstrong,8 Humean supervenience claims that natural laws and causes supervene on states of local and particular things. This means, on the basis of local supervenience, that there cannot be any difference between the natural laws of two possible worlds, without a difference between their particular facts. According to Lewis, the supervenience of natural laws (SNL) should be read as follows:9
5 C. Hempel & P. Oppenheim, “Studies in the Logic of Explanation,” in Philosophy of Science, 15:2 (1948), 136. See also C. Hempel, Aspects of Scientific Explanation and Other Essays in the Philosophy of Science (New York: Free Press, 1965). 6 D. Lewis, On the Plurality of Worlds (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 14. 7 Naturally, Lewis also accepts Ramsey’s influence in his notion of natural laws: ‘Few would deny that laws of nature, whatever else they may be, are at least exceptionless regularities. See D. Lewis, Philosophical Papers Volume II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), xi. Not all regularities are laws, of course. But, following the lead of (a short temporal segment of) Ramsey, I suggest that the laws are the ones that buy into those systems of truths that achieve an unexcelled combination of simplicity and strength. See also F. Ramsey, “Universals of Law and of Facts,” in Foundations: Essays in philosophy, Logic, Mathematics and Economics (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. 1978). 8 D. Armstrong, “Going through the open door again: counterfactual versus singularist theories of causation,” in Reality and Human Supervenience: Essays on the Philosophy of David Lewis (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), 164. 9 Lewis, On the Plurality of Worlds, 16.
E. CÉSPEDES 187
SNL: No two worlds differ in their laws without differing in its distribution of local character and quality.
The relation of supervenience may have the meaning of either reduction,10 explanation or even implication. But the goal here is not to make an analysis of the supervenience relation. The fact is that supervenience shows a particular type of connection between two states, where one of them is more fundamental than the other and whose changes determine changes in the facts that supervene on them. 11 For this reason, according to Mumford, the concept of ‘law’ deserves hardly to be named like this in a Humean sense, where natural laws supervene on a four-dimensional physicalist basis. Mumford describes this Humean basis in five aspects:12 there are four-dimensional events, these events are fundamental, scientific theories would explain them, everything supervenes on them, and they are modally unconnected. The aspect of the empirical explainability of these events seems to be especially problematic. But that is an issue against Humean lawlessness that I am going to consider in the last sections of this paper. Because they are the foundation of everything that happens in nature, these events just happen: they are not governed by natural laws, since these are products of supervenience. Only if one takes the concept of natural law in the strict sense, i.e. as a real entity that determines the structure of the world and its events, then it can be said that the Humean lawlessness does not admit natural laws. It does not agree with any of the two premises of nomological realism, while Mumford’s realist lawlessness accepts the first condition (that regularities exist) but not the second.13 This means that the world actually has the features mentioned above, but this regularity is not due to the real existence of laws of nature. Another main difference between the realist lawlessness and the other two opposing theories is that neither of both considers the modal connections as foundation of the dynamism between events. The nomological realist uses the notion of ‘law’ in order to explain the dynamism of nature, while Humean lawlessness excludes modality in one of its premises. Modal aspects of reality may account for this dynamism perfectly if seriously. According to Mumford, natural laws (or regular relationships between physical events) should be understood from their modal character, i.e. inside the modal logic space.14 The interesting aspect in thinking of natural laws as contingent is that it enables the notion of discovery.
10 See J. Kim, “Postscript on Supervenience,” in Supervenience and Mind: Selected Philosophical Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 11 There are differences between the notions of ‘event’ and ‘fact’ that will not be considered in the present work. 12 Mumford, op. cit., 402. 13 Ibid., 406. 14 For a discussion about the ontology of modal logic space, see J. T., Alvarado, “¿Qué es el espacio ontológico modal?,” in Philosophica, 29 (2006), 7-44.
188 NATURE AND COUNTERPARTS
However, if it is absurd within realist lawlessness to ignore the contingency of laws (believing that a law is by definition always necessary), it might be also absurd to establish that all natural laws are contingent. The reason for this (returning to the previous example) is that the property of being a photon may have different causal roles in possible worlds where the common physical laws were different.15 The same photon may sometimes produce some effects at long distances very easily, and at other times, under the same conditions, it probably won’t have the same capacity. The counterparts of a single photon in the actual world could have a speed c in the possible world w1, the speed of 2c at w2 or an always varying speed at w3. This would mean a counterexample to one essential property (ϕ) as defined on counterpart theory by Lewis.16 Let the first Greek letters represent entities and ‘I’ be the binary relation that associates an entity with the world in which it exists. Let also ‘W’ be the predicate of being a world and ‘C’ the binary relation from the set of entities to the set of its counterparts:17
I will explain that example later with more detail. For Mumford, the contingency of laws is senseless and that is a perfect result in favour of realist lawlessness, since natural laws are not entities at all. They are not real, as essential or intrinsic properties are, and they are neither necessary nor contingent. The only things in nature are the regular features and relations, such as universality, natural necessity and objectivity.
Necessity, Sentences, and Properties
In order to explain the necessity of natural laws and scientific research results, Brian Ellis draws the distinction between the necessary propositions de re and the necessary propositions de dicto.18 This should be related to the difference between nominal essences and real essences. The nominal essence of something is not necessarily a natural class and is defined as a set of properties which are classified inside a language. The real essence, on the other side, is independent of language, can be discovered empirically and is what defines the kind of things, which is the essence of. The distinction between de dicto necessity and de re necessity lies, however, in the fact that the former corresponds to the modal assignment of a proposition, not to the property of a thing, which is the case for the latter. Thus, the proposition that expresses the necessity between an entity x and the property of being, e.g. a photon can be analysed as follows:
15 Mumford, op. cit., 407. 16 Lewis, “Counterpart Theory and Quantified Modal Logic.” 17 Counterparts are an alternative to the identity between objects in different possible worlds, so that the proposition ‘It is possible that x is P’ has not the meaning of ‘There is a possible world where x is P’, but of ‘There is a possible world where a counterpart of x is P.’ 18 B. Ellis, Scientific Essentialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 32.
E. CÉSPEDES 189
a) De dicto: Necessarily there is an x such that x is a photon.
b) De re: There is an x such that x is necessarily a photon.
This presents inevitably the question about natural laws and what should be their modal interpretation, for it is known that natural laws must be necessary in some sense. The problem is in what sense. Ellis argues that both de dicto necessity and de re necessity are true in all possible worlds, because their distinction lies in their natural and real basis, rather than their modal character.19 The first is based on the conventions of language, while the second does not. Natural laws correspond to a metaphysical necessity, and every proposition that is necessary for reasons other than metaphysical, may be either de dicto or de re. A de dicto necessity, for instance, ‘Every triangle has three corners’ is true by definition corresponding to language and not because the natural class of ‘triangle’ is such that its members have three corners. To reject scientific conventionalism, whose supporters assert that there are neither metaphysical necessities nor de re necessities (only de dicto), Ellis criticises the Humean conception of natural laws, because natural necessity cannot be a simple generalisation.20 The natural and metaphysical necessity of laws takes Ellis to claim a scientific essentialism; according to which causal connections and propensities of things are real and intrinsic properties of nature, e.g., that electrons have a negative charge. Scientific essentialism is also realistic about entities that are part of the constitution of nature, like the existence of electrons themselves. According to Ellis, natural laws are strictly necessary in the sense that they are descriptions that could not have been otherwise. Therefore, there is no place in his theory for contingent laws. This is a problem for Mumford, because to put aside the contingency of natural laws (if they were real entities) means also to put aside their metaphysical reason.21 Some definitions of de re and de dicto interpretations of necessity according to Lewis are going to be briefly explained in the following section, in order to make clear this problem.
Counterpart Theory
Essentialism (including Ellis’s scientific essentialism), under which entities have some properties necessarily and others contingently, can be interpreted in two ways, depending on whether the propositions are analysed as de dicto necessities or as de re necessities. There are accounts about laws of nature that
19 Ibid., 33. 20 Ibid., 43. 21 The definition of ‘metaphysical reason’ is a topic by itself and I am not going to explain it here in detail. However, it can be argued that the cause of an entity might be the best candidate if one is looking for its metaphysical reason.
190 NATURE AND COUNTERPARTS consider many intervening grades of modality, in order to solve these problems. Koslow establishes that a specific physical law narrows the members of a set of possibilities in such a way, that they can fail to have some certain functional property.22 According to Lewis’s counterpart theory, the fact that an attribute φ corresponds necessarily to a singular term ζ is the same as saying that the attribute is essential to the object denoted by this term.23 De dicto interpretations are expressed as follows:
Another reading of this formula should be: ‘For all β, if β is a possible world, there exists a unique object which has the property φ.’ A de re interpretation, on the other hand, is made by singling out an individual in the actual world (@) and then by attaching that property to all its counterparts:
This formula states that the actual world has a single object, such that for every counterpart γ of that object in any possible world β, γ has the property φ. In other words, a de re interpretation means that the property of a singular object in the actual world is essential, if and only if, every counterpart of that object instantiates the same property. This is the definition to be adopted when we are confronted with an analysis of essential features. The necessary fact, e.g. that x has the speed c, refers to the property of having the velocity c under certain conditions, an essential property of a given particle. That does not mean that the proposition ‘x has the speed c’ is true in all possible worlds. Emphasis should therefore be put on the property of that object rather than on the proposition that describes it. Stated in a language foreign to counterpart theory, the fact that having the speed c under certain conditions is an essential property of this particle means that every time this particle is involved under certain conditions, it will travel at the speed of c. Clearly, the notion of essential property can be used as a way to analyse natural laws.
Counterparts and Realism
In this section it will be argued that counterpart theory might be an alternative to the problems raised by the different conceptions of the ontology of natural laws. It should be noted, however, that to hold a modal theory supported by Lewis does neither mean agreeing with Humean lawlessness nor with the Ramsey-Lewis account. Although the notion of natural law in general can be
22 A. Koslow, “Laws and Possibilities,” in Philosophy of Science, 71:5 (2004). 23 Lewis, “Counterpart Theory and Quantified Modal Logic,” 120.
E. CÉSPEDES 191 analysed including all different sciences, I prefer to have in mind only an example coming from physics, i.e. the example of photons in vacuo. It could be criticised, on one side, either that an account about scientific laws must include all of them or, on the other side, that it should focus only on a specific area of science. For the present purposes I will stay only in physical examples, in order to satisfy the second complaint, and leave open the ideas for other branches of science, in order to satisfy the first. I think that laws are real and would like to suggest that using counterparts does not only improve the way in which laws are expressed, but also gives good reasons to believe that they exist. Counterpart theory is not incompatible with realism about laws. I admit it is hard to find a positive argument for nomological realism inside counterpart theory, but at least it is possible to consider them together. Besides, if a law about certain physical entity is expressed in terms of counterparts, we can always find a counterpart of that entity. In a certain way, the law is the condition for the natural features it describes. It might be argued that counterpart theory does not give an alternative to modal logic, but that it rather avoids modal logic. Perhaps it is right to say that it is not an alternative. I would prefer to think that in some cases it does not matter if one adopts one position or the other. Nevertheless, in order to solve certain problems, a point of view related to laws of nature must tend to prefer counterparts. In addition to what was mentioned above, according to Lewis, natural laws are propositions which, in implication with other propositions, become counterfactual conditionals (such as ‘If this entity was traveling in the vacuo, it would have a speed c’).24 If from the antecedent of a counterfactual conditional, combined with a set of general laws logically consistent, we obtain the consequent of such counterfactual, then the conditional is true. But the notion of natural law would not be something stable then, it would rather depend on the conditional. When the conditional ‘If this entity was traveling in vacuo, it would have a speed c’ is true in a possible world w1, which is within the worlds which are governed by some law of nature L, but turns out to be false in w2, then it must be assumed that w2 does not belong to the set of propositions that make L true. If there is something called “natural law”, then it is only an aspect that supervenes on singled events (four-dimensional events, counterparts, an object’s singled instants in the actual world, etc.). Hence this view is considered a form of Humean lawlessness. Given the highly contingent nature of this position, contingent on the fact that there is a point where the counterparts of a photon in particular would no longer have a speed c and would behave otherwise (would play a causal role completely different), an alternative is to say, standing on the side of nomological realism, that natural laws are intrinsic properties of objects. The problem with this, although it is a solution to the contingency of natural laws, is that it implies a strict necessity of them, giving away the modality of natural laws. It seems perfectly rational to say that there are regular features in the world and that such laws are also governing nature. The laws can be understood as essential properties of objects. However, de re interpretations do not need to rule on the same object in different possible worlds. They can be essential
24 D. Lewis, Counterfactuals (Oxford: Blackwell, 1973), 72.
192 NATURE AND COUNTERPARTS properties of an object’s counterparts. A given law L is not necessary because it governs all objects in every possible world; it is necessary for being an essential property of certain objects (or a set of objects). With regard to the theory of Ramsey-Lewis, it is nonsense to think that the regularity of nature rests solely on points in space, for it would be like saying that only the elementary particles are guided by natural laws and that, therefore, the only natural laws that are valid are the laws of subatomic physics. In addition, the postulate that establishes that science can explain and describe all special events is far from consistency, since an adequate scientific explanation needs general laws, and to explain the subvenient elements through natural laws would include the explanandum in the explanans. That is an extremely weak position, unless we think that scientific knowledge is only about descriptions, which is not the case. On the other hand, according to nomological realism of intrinsic properties, as pointed out by Mumford, natural kinds and essential properties end up being considered fundamental and as a result, you do not need the concept of natural law.25 But this is not a problem if we consider counterpart theory, where a natural law could be formulated by the following example: a) Having a speed c under certain conditions is an essential property of the natural kind ‘photon’ in the actual world and expresses the natural law ‘Any counterpart of a photon travels with a speed c.’ But this example is also valid if we replace, in the formulation of natural law, the natural kind with that object’s counterpart. Thus a natural law may be expressed simply as ‘Every photon has a speed c.’ The interesting problem is that natural laws also govern on individual objects, so that our example can be formulated as follows: b) There is a single object a in @, such that for every counterpart g of a, g has the property of having the speed c in vacuo and of being a photon.
Thus, the natural class is modified by an essential property. And that property is not just part of a nominal essence, but of a real essence. Natural laws are in fact expressed by de re necessities with the only difference that they are necessities over counterparts. In this way, laws have not to depend of the descriptions of characteristics of particular entities. However, the fact that all the counterparts of an entity travel at the speed c and are photons does not imply that all photons travel at the speed c in other possible worlds. It might happen that a counterpart g of a is ruled by a law according to which every counterpart of g is a photon but only some of them travel at c.
25 Mumford, op. cit., 406.
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Here is the problem that might arise with regard to realism if applied to singular objects: such an account would have as result (outside counterpart theory) that ‘There is an a such that a is a photon and travels at c in all possible worlds’, which is not necessarily true. That might be true inside transitive systems of modal logic (like S4 or S5),26 but we do not need transitivity to understand scientific knowledge and natural laws. In fact, transitivity could be an obstacle in this domain. If nomological realism is unified with a modal logic without counterparts, then it won’t be possible that a was a photon without having the property of travelling at the speed c, since this is a natural law that governs the singular object. But in this account, it is perfectly consistent to say that there is a possible world in which there is a counterpart of a photon that is also a photon, but does not travel at c, i.e. whose counterparts are all photons but some of them do not travel at c. These considerations try to solve certain problems raised by Mumford on nomological realism and Humean conceptions, while maintaining the real existence of natural laws. Undoubtedly, these thoughts still deserve a much more detailed and careful work than what has been done here. Some important possibly further results of this combination are introduced in the next section.
Prospective Relevance and Conclusions
This proposal maintains the existence of regularities, universality and necessary connections between events of nature. And not only that: natural laws exist in a metaphysical sense. This position differs in this respect with realist lawlessness and could be significant to analyse notions, on which scientific accounts about reality depend, e.g. randomness and determinism.27 It also solves the problem of lack of dynamism of regularities in nature. Natural laws are real (no one says lawlessness), but these are not static propositions without modality, which was the problem of the realist view mentioned by Mumford.28 Nomological realists have a demodalised world as a starting condition. In fact, the unification between nomological realism and counterpart theory remains realistic and, of course, modal.
26 What makes a modal system transitive is the axiom that establishes that ‘If a proposition is necessary, then it is necessarily necessary.’ 27 Considerations about natural laws are important in the analysis of deterministic worlds. Alvarado argues that a distinction between deterministic and nondeterministic worlds can only be made by defining natural laws as something more robust than simple Humean regularities. See J. T. Alvarado, “La noción de mundo determinista,” in Eikasia, 4:27 (2009). 28 Mumford, op. cit., 507.
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Furthermore, in this view laws do not refer only to general concepts such as “photon”, but also to single entities and their counterparts. One difficulty here is the fifth postulate of counterpart theory, witch states that ‘Nothing is a counterpart of anything else in its world.’29 If we express a law saying that ‘All counterparts of this photon travel at speed c’, we refer only to those entities that are similar to the photon in other possible worlds, but not to other photons in the actual world. This assumption, quite annoying, could be put aside along with Lewis’ modal realism, a topic that does not have to be discussed here. It is possible to analyse the refutability of theories and natural laws by using counterparts, in the sense that Popper30 establishes it: ‘There is a counterpart g of a, such that g does not travel at a speed c.’ This point is quite important to extend the theory of natural laws to the philosophy of scientific knowledge, especially if one considers critical rationalism as a plausible epistemological system. In this direction, this position might be also useful in order to solve the problem of what is (perhaps falsely) called ‘inductive inference’ by implementing counterparts to the explanation of how theoretical propositions are generalised from particular states of affairs. The propositions of the form ‘If every detected n is a photon, then the next detected n will also be a photon’ is replaced by ‘If a is a photon, then for all g, if g is a counterpart of a, then g is also a photon.’ This formula does not have to become a methodological postulate of inductionism; it is just a form of how an inductive generalisation could look like. Finally (what does not mean there are no other advantages), a decision theory can be developed by considering counterparts in the laws of nature and Lewis’s causal decision theory.31 His theory analyses, in an excellent way, some crucial problems of decision making in conjunction with modal logic and counterfactual conditionals. Nevertheless, it leaves some problems unanswered.32 Decision theory can be extremely important to understand theory change on the basis of choices made by agents, scientists, or social choices made by scientific groups.33 A very interesting problem in this field is that scientific decision making could be sometimes closer to paradoxes of rationality than to normal perfect information scenarios. This paper has presented an analysis of the philosophy of natural laws, by reviewing some important theories about it, including Mumford’s realist lawlessness. I considered then the important distinction between de re and de dicto modalities, starting from Ellis’s and Lewis’s work on this field. In the last sections there are some reflections on the possible unification between nomological
29 Lewis, “Counterpart Theory and Quantified Modal Logic,” 114. 30 K. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963). 31 D. Lewis, “Causal Decision Theory,” in Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 59:1 (1981). 32 To this sort of objections and counterexamples to causal decision theory, see T. Horgan, “Counterfactuals and Newcomb’s Problem,” in Journal of Philosophy, 78:6 (1981), 331-56.; A. Egan, “Some Counterexamples to Causal Decision Theory,” in Philosophical Review, 116:1 (2007), 93-114; P. McKay, “Newcomb’s problem: the causalists get rich,” in Analysis, 64:2 (2004); E. Céspedes, “La teoría de la decisión de David Lewis y la paradoja de Newcomb,” in Límite, 4:20 (2009), 53-68. 33 See W. Harper & B. Skyrms, Causation in Decision, Belief Change, and Statistics (Dordrecht: Ruwer, 1988).
E. CÉSPEDES 195 realism and counterpart theory. I show that Humean theory of natural laws is circular, if the constituent elements have both to explain nature and to be scientifically explained by general laws (according to the definition of explanation). Moreover, essential properties give a good model on these issues, although there are some weaknesses that could be strengthened by the inclusion of counterpart theory, without giving up the existence of natural laws.
Institut für Philosophie, J. W. Goethe-Universität—Frankfurt am Main, Germany
References
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