Distinctions generate meaning

"The most perfect philosophy of the natural kind only staves off our ignorance a little longer: as perhaps the most perfect philosophy of the moral or metaphysical kind serves only to discover larger portions of it." $26 from the *Enquiry*

And that's why I'm enjoying Hume.

the hard problem

L’Élève: la République a donc le droit d’intervenir dans les conditions du travail et dans le règlement des prix et des salaires?

L’Instituteur: Sans doute, elle a ce droit. Elle l’exerce au nom du Peuple. Que serait, que pourrait un industriel ou un négociant sans le travail du peuple et sans la protection de la République? La République, en assurant au commerce et à l’industrie leur liberté, acquiert par là même le droit de soumettre cette liberté à toutes sortes de conditions tirées de l’intérêt commun. C’est ce qu’on appelle organisation du travail.

L’Élève: Donnez-moi une idée de cette organisation.

L’Instituteur: Tout ce que je puis vous dire, c’est qu’elle se fondera sur deux choses: 1), l’association des travailleurs; 2) le règlement de l’industrie et du commerce par les lois de la République. Mais, c’est un sujet sur lequel je ne m’étendrai pas davantage en ce moment; il n’est pas nécessaire de vous rendre si savant. Moi-même, j’attends les Représentants du Peuple et j’espère apprendre à leur école beaucoup de choses que j’ignore.

from: Renouvier, Charles. Manuel Republican de l'homme et du citoyen. 1848. pp 23-24.

On eating too much

But Knowledge is as food, and needs no less
Her Temperance over Appetite, to know
In measure what the mind may well contain,
Oppresses else with Surfeit, and soon turns
Wisdom to Folly, as Nourishment to Wind.

John Milton
Paradise Lost, bk VII, 126-130.

Time and Critical Theory

When the shadow of the sash appeared in the curtains it was between seven and eight oclock and then I was in time again, hearing the watch. It was Grandfather’s and when Father gave it to me he said, Quentin, I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it’s rather excruciating-ly apt that you will use it to gain the reductio absurdum of all human experience which can fit your individual needs no better than it fitted his or his father’s. I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.

Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury.

I've just run through Hartmut Rosa's little summary: Alienation and Acceleration. On the one hand, I respond on a deep, intuitive level to the argument that perhaps the central experience of alienation in contemporary society--late modernity, says Rosa--stems from lack of control over time. Yet I'm unconvinced along several dimensions. First, it seems that too much of the 'acceleration' effect in which Rosa is interested can be rolled into competition. This is more of an adjustment of a Critical Theory of capitalism than a new beginning--perhaps Rosa would not disagree. And the arguments Rosa makes about the necessity that Habermasian and Honnethian (!) critical theory take account of social (political) acceleration--this makes sense. Certain examples make me hesitant: there is nothing about the traffic jam, for instance, which depends on contemporary technology. It's even a kind of pure sociological phenomenon. The final pages of the book become quite casual and essayistic in their presentation of evidence--it is no longer a reconstruction/critique of the tradition of Critical Theory, but evidence of alienation drawn from, god help us, introspection and popular social psychological publications (the introspection i'll stand behind, the social psychology may be slander). Of course, there is also the problem that Critical Theory generally has, it's all identification of a problem, at its best in brutal lucidity. And then no hope at all for the future. Certainly I am not convinced that a Critical Theory built on what I think may be called a virtue ethics has any better chance of doing this than a more conventionally Marxist one--the Marxists can at least tell us to go make revolution.

Leftist Socialism

Kolakowski, Leszek. “The Concept of the Left.” [from The New Left Reader]

How to give the Left a conceptual definition? Leszek Kolakowski begins with a quasi ontological point: “every work of man is a compromise between the material and tool” (144). This principle is as true of dentistry as it is of revolution, “social revolutions are a compromise between utopia and historical reality. The tool of the revolution is utopia, and the material is the social reality on which one wants to impose a new form. And the tool must to some degree fit the substance if the results are not to be ludicrous” (145). Utopia is the negation of a currently existing reality, but it is a constructive negation. Negation is not the same as simply destruction, “the opposite of blowing up a house is not to build a new house but to retain the existing one” (146), and thus we have the space of politics. The Left wants to build a new house, which must be done through critical negation of the existing house. The Right wants to maintain the house just as it is. The two are at loggerheads, except for the moments, tactical and never determined by ideology, when they are united in the desire not to see the house blown up.

Utopia is negation, but not only negation. It is worth giving Kolakowski’s extended definition of the term,

By utopia I mean a state of social consciousness, a mental counterpart to the social movement striving for radical change in the world—a counterpart itself inadequate to these changes and merely reflecting them in an idealized and obscure form. It endows the real movement with the sense of realizing an ideal born in the realm of pure spirit and not in current historical experiences. Utopia is, therefore, a mysterious consciousness of an actual historical tendency. As long as this tendency lives only a clandestine existence, without finding expression in mass social movements, it gives birth to utopias in the narrower sense, that is, to individually constructed models of the world, as it should be. But in time utopia becomes actual social consciousness; it invades the consciousness of a mass movement and becomes one of is essential driving forces. Utopia, then, crosses over from the domain of theoretical and moral thought into the field of practical thinking, and itself begins to govern human action. (146-7)

And this movement, this utopian moment, is an absolutely essential part of the Left. Utopias generate internal contradictions within Left movements, but “the Left cannot do without a utopia. The Left gives forth utopias just as the pancreas discharges insulin – by virtue of an innate law” (147). Just as not all of the Left is utopian, so not all of the Left is revolutionary. But the revolutionary utopia of total change is a necessary part of the Left, because it is a necessary part of significant social change, “utopia is a prerequisite of social upheavals, just as unrealistic efforts are the precondition of realistic ones” (148). You must ask for the stars to receive even a warm bed for the night. This does not mean that in all cases the most radical possible position must be taken, but it does mean that obviously unobtainable demands are an inherent part of the moral existence of the Left.

Left and Right are unavoidably relative terms. One can speak without real difficulty of the Left wing of a Rightist movement. And, indeed, the success of the Left forces it always to change, “as time passes, the Left just define itself ever more precisely. For the more it influences social consciousness, the more its slogans take on a positive aura, the more they are appropriated by the Right and lose their defined meaning. Nobody today opposes such concepts as “freedom” and “equality”; that is why they can become implements of fraud” (150). In the same vein, although we can give a very nice abstract definition of Leftness, for instance as “the degree of participation in the process of social development that strives to eliminate all conditions in which the possibility of satisfying human needs is obstructed by social relations” (150), we cannot remove the manifold contradictions and ambiguities wrapped up in such a general definition.

Rather, we must define the concept of the Left within concrete historical reality. Reality today is marked by two kinds of conflicts, “first of all, class conflicts and, secondarily, political ones” (151). The social world contains many kinds of divisions other than those of class that could give rise to conflict, and further, “classes themselves are becoming more, rather than less, complicated” (151). So, it follows that “political life cannot reflect class conflicts purely and directly but, on the contrary, ever more indirectly and confusedly” (151). And from this it follows that the Left cannot be pegged to the wishes, even the benefit, of the working class, “the Left cannot be defined by saying it will always, in every case, support every demand of the working class, or that it is always on the side of the majority” (151). The intellectual realm is autonomous from the material one, “even though in today’s world there is no leftist attitude independent of the struggle for the rights of the working class, though no leftist position can be realized outside the class structure, and though only the struggle of the oppressed can make the Left a material force, nevertheless the Left must be defined in intellectual, and not class, terms” (151).

Although Kolakowski distinguishes between capitalist and non-capitalist countries, and the utility or force of the distinction might well be worth probing, his laundry-list of positions is much the same for both. Social privilege must go, whatever its source. Colonial oppression and other forms of unequal and exploitative relations between countries must be resisted. Limitations on the freedom of speech are everywhere to be thrown off, and here “the Left fights all the contradictions of freedom that arise in both kinds of social conditions: how far can one push the demand for tolerance without turning against the idea of tolerance itself? How can one guarantee that tolerance will not lead to the victory of forces that will strangle the principle of tolerance? This is the great problem of all leftist movements” (152). In addition to fighting racism and obscurantism in the name of “rational thought,” “the Left strives to secularize social life” (152). The left is willing to use violence, willing to compromise in the concrete when it seems best, “everywhere the Left is ready to compromise with historical facts, but it rejects ideological compromise” (152). Toward reality, “it takes a position of permanent revisionism” (152), while “the Right is the embodiment of the inertia of historical reality” (153). The Left is always willing to grasp reality as it is in the hope of making it how it should be with the aid of a lodestar utopia, its “political ideology,” the Right is incapable of this and “has nothing but tactics” (153). The Left, then, is practically defined as political engagement that does not abandon ideology, so that unlike the Right, it “rejects any means of political warfare that lead to moral consequences which contradict its premises” (153). It follows from this expansive definition that it is impossible to unite into a single political movement all of the Left. There will always, practically by definition although also for practical political reasons, be splinters.

Kolakowski is of course thinking from the specific position of Poland. The Communist Party, then, is the main issue: “For a long time the division into a Party Left and Right did not exist, although some members were more or less to the left…because the Party was deprived of any real political life, because its ideology did not grow out of its own historical experience but was to a large degree imposed upon it” (154). The situation in Poland now is somewhat peculiar, “the forces of the Left stand between two rightist tendencies: the reaction within the Party, and traditional reaction. This is a new historical development, awareness of which has arisen only in the past few years” (155). About this it is pointed out that, “the New Left appeared within the movement when it became apparent that a New Right existed,” without going in to how the old Left moved Right, Kolakowski emphasizes that “it does not seem that this process was caused by the mere fact of the Left’s coming to power…it does not seem that the Left can exist only in a position of opposition, or that the possession of power is incompatible with the nature of the Left and leads inevitably to its downfall” (155). In more poetic language, “the Left protests against the existing world, but it does not long for a void. It is an explosive charge that disrupts the stability of social life, but it is not a movement toward nothingness” (156).

There are many concrete political reasons for the relative weakness of the Left, but the central conceptual reason is that it is always in danger of dissolving into mere moralism. This has to do again with the Left’s ideological commitments. The difference with the Right is definitive, “let us speak openly: contempt for ideology is the strength of the Right because it allows for greater flexibility in practice and for the arbitrary use of any verbal façade that will facilitate the seizure of power” (156). The malleability of the Right means that “it is important for the Left to have available at all times criteria of recognition in the form of attitudes toward those actual political matters which, for one reason or another, force the Right to reveal itself for what it is” (156-7). The ideological danger that faces the Left, its most difficult task, is to resolutely oppose the two kinds of Right, “the Left is in grave danger if it directs its criticism toward only one pressure, for it thus blurs its political demarcations…it must take the same clear rational attitude toward both the sclerotic religiosity of the Stalinist version of Marxism and the obscurantism of the clergy. It must simultaneously reject socialist phraseology as a façade for police states and democratic phraseology as a disguise for bourgeois rule” (157). This returns us to what emerges as Kolakowski’s central point, “the Left’s greatist claim is ideological…it is to differentiate exactly between ideology and current political tactics. The Left does not refuse to compromise with reality as long as compromises are so labeled…While the Left realizes that on occasion it is powerless in the face of crime, it refuses to call crime a ‘blessing’” (157). Put differently, “the intellectual and moral values of communism are not luxurious ornaments of its activity, but the conditions of its existence” (158). Kolakowski calls this position “leftist socialism.”

The Left, then, is a position taken in relation to actually existing society, oriented at every particular turn by utopian dreams that arise out of this reality although they may seem far from it. The Left is therefore permanent. This gives a melancholic and Sisyphean note to Kolakowski’s ending. The Left’s demands are permanently necessary, and so will often enough be defeated, “but such defeats are more fruitful than capitulation. For this reason the Left is not afraid of being a minority…It knows that history itself calls forth in every situation a leftist side which is as necessary a component of social life as its aspect of conservatism and inertia” (158). “The Left the fermenting factor in even the most hardened mass of the historical present…It is…the dynamite of hope that blasts the dead load of ossified systems, institutions, customs, intellectual habits, and closed doctrines. The Left unites those dispersed and often hidden atoms whose movement is, in the last analysis, what we call progress” (158).

Most fundamental right

This opinion piece, from the World Affairs Journal in which Pascale Bruckner defends the recent French ban on the burqua, is from a few months ago, and has doubtless been discussed elsewhere. This debate has been written about brilliantly (in very different modes, for instance, by Joan Scott and Cecile Laborde), and I haven't got anything in particular to add, except to stand back and gape at the following double-whammy:

An individual’s most fundamental right is to free himself or herself from his or her origins: Muslims should be able to leave Islam, become atheist, not observe Ramadan, or convert to Buddhism or to Christianity in the same way that Christians can fall away from their faith and shop for other forms of belief. (In fact, the French press have noted many cases of Muslim aggression against other Muslims who chose not to have children; and as for apostates, they routinely face death threats.) The burqa (or the North African niqab or the Middle Eastern hijab) is a direct challenge to the ideal of laicization since it dramatically violates the principle of equality between men and women.

An individual's most fundamental right is to be set free from their origins? This seems like a pretty clear example of the internal tensions of contemporary French republicanism coming to the fore in statements that are either obvious falsehoods or can only be taken in a radically revolutionary sense. And then there is the breathtaking association of "the ideal of laicization" with "the principle of equality between men and women." Even leaving aside the question of whether, in fact, passing a law banning a kind of clothing worn only by women is indeed forwarding this principle, the idea that French laicite means gender equality cannot possibly be more than, say, 30 years old. Certainly there was very little sense that the 1905 separation or other 3rd Republic policies to remove the Catholic Church from public life, were pursued with any acceptance of gender equality--indeed precisely the opposite is arguably the case.

Chapter One, The Philosophy of Money

As part of my continuing attempt to be more educated in classical sociology, I’m beginning to read Georg Simmel’s Philosophy of Money. I have so far read the first chapter of this rather large book. This chapter is an enormous amount of philosophical ground-preparation, about subjectivity, objectivity, relativism, and value--and then about ten pages discussing money in the vocabulary so constituted. Simmel is a frustrating writer. Yet he’s rewarding, if only for the occasional passage like this one,

All general and particular systems of knowledge meet in this form of the mutual interdependence of thought processes. If one attempts to understand the political, social, religious or any other cultural aspects of the present time, this can be achieved only through history, i.e. by knowing and understanding the past. But this past, which comes down to us only in fragments, through silent witnesses and more or less unreliable reports and traditions, can come to life and be interpreted only through the experiences of the immediate present. No matter how many transformations and quantitative changes are required, the present, which is the indispensable key to the past, can itself be understood only through the past; and the past, which alone can help us to understand the present, is accessible only through the perceptions and sensibilities of the present. All historical images are the result of this mutuality of interpretative elements, none of which allows the others to come to rest. Ultimate comprehension is transferred to infinity, since every point in one series refers to the other series for its understanding. (pg 110)

I have not yet looked at the substantial (monograph-sized) introduction to this translation, but Simmel is working within an explicitly Kantian horizon. I don’t know enough to be able to judge what he is doing more finely than that.

His treatment of relativism is satisfyingly thoroughgoing. The Comtean-Durkheimian sociological relativism that I am more used to seems always to pull up before crashing into the more serious consequences of this line of thought. Simmel is adamant, and iterates a similar point often: it is true to say that the apple is falling towards the Earth, but it is also true to say that the Earth is falling toward the apple. In a familiar (common at this moment) formulation, he says that Science “has abandoned the search for the essence of things and is reconciled to stating the relationships that exist between objects and the human mind from the viewpoint of the human mind” (101). Hi handling of norms and laws, of objectivity through relativity—all this smacks of a slightly different tradition of philosophy of science than the French that I’m more familiar with—when he discusses measurement, it seems to owe something to Fechner, but perhaps I think this because Fechner’s is one of the few theories of measurement I’ve read anything about.

He gets, at the end of the chapter, finally to a set of definitions of money,

In this sense, money has been defined as ‘abstract value’. As a visible object, money is the substance that embodies abstract economic value, in a similar fashion to the sound of words which is an acoustic-physiological occurrence but has significance for us only through the representation that it bears or symbolizes. If the economic value of objects is constituted by their mutual relationship of exchangeability, then money is the autonomous expression of this relationship. Money is the representative of abstract value. From the economic relationship, i.e. the exchangeability of objects, the fact of this relationship is extracted and acquires, in contrast to those objects, a conceptual existence bound to a visible symbol. Money is a specific realization of what is common to economic objects—in the language of the scholastics one might call it universale ante rem, or in re or post rem—and the general misery of human life is most fully reflected by this symbol, namely by the constant shortage of money under which most people suffer. (118)

The last cryptic bit is made more clear, perhaps, by this,

For money represents pure interaction in its purest form; it makes comprehensible the most abstract concept; it is an individual thing whose essential significance is to reach beyond individualities. Thus, money is the adequate expression of the relationship of man to the world, which can only be grasped in single and concrete instances, yet only really conceived when the singular becomes the embodiment of the living mental process which interweaves all singularities and, in this fashion, creates reality. (128)

No wonder it is also the symbol of our misery.

Sources of Reaction

Il existe aujourd’hui un genre de fanatisme scientifique qui menace d’être funeste à la science: il ferait tout sauter pour éprouver un explosif, il perdrait un État pour tirer des archives et mettre en lumière un document ‘intéressant’. Ce système anarchique et révolutionnaire est de source métaphysique. Il n’a rien de rationnel. Proprement il consiste à remplacer le dieu des Juifs par la Curiosité, dite improprement la Science, mis sur un autel, faite centre du monde et revêtue des mêmes honneurs que Jéhovah. Cette superstition ne mérite pas plus de respect que les autres. Bien qu’elle soit fort à la mode parmi les savants, Sainte-Beuve ou l’empirisme organisateur lui donne son nom véritable: tantôt passion féconde, tantôt pure monomanie.

Maurras, Charles. Trois idées politiques: Chateaubriand, Michelet, Sainte-Beuve. [1898]

Anti-Constitutionalism

S'ils invoquent l'exécution littérale des adages constitutionnels, ce n'est que pour les violer impunément. Ce sont les lâches assassins qui, pour égorger sans péril la République au berceau, s'efforcent de la garrotter avec des maximes vagues dont ils savent bien se dégager eux-mêmes.

Robespierre, 5 Nivôse II (25 December, 1793)