Old Criticism

Feuerbach, Ludwig. “Provisional Theses for the Reformation of Philosophy” (from Stepelevich ed, The Young Hegelians)

The essay is basically a critique of Hegel. Feuerbach say, “the method of the reformatory critique of speculative philosophy in general does not differ from the critique already applied in the philosophy of religion. We need always make the predicate into the subject and thus, as the subject, into the object and principle. Hence we need only invert speculative philosophy and then have the unmasked, pure, bare truth” (157). I wonder, idly, if anyone has ever presented a ‘queered’ Feuerbach. Seems like it wouldn’t be that hard to do.

The major critique of Hegel, after it is established that he hasn’t, formally, moved at all from theology, is that he rejects in every case things in themselves as they are (to import a phrase), or in Feuerbach’s words, the exoteric, for the esoteric. Meaning is always far away from what is. The meaning of the world is found in the posited negation of the world, which itself is in fact only ever what we as human beings bring to it. That is, “the night which it [philosophy] supposes in God in order to produce from it the light of consciousness is nothing but its own dark, instinctive feeling for the reality and indispensability of matter” (161). The result of this critique, which follows from defining theology as the study of God imagined as the unimaginable, and Hegelianism as a re-iteration of theology, is basically the injunction to take what is, what is least philosophical, as the basis for philosophy. Put philosophically, “Being is subject and thinking a predicate but a predicate such as contains the essence of its subject. Thinking comes from being but being does not come from thinking. Being comes from itself and through itself” (167). Or, in a poetical language, “Look upon nature, look upon the human being! Here right before your eyes you have the mysteries of philosophy” (168).

Now, the ‘gesture’ of this philosophy is depressingly familiar. The new philosophy will be the negation of academic philosophy. It will be of ‘our time.’ It will begin with being as it is. (Of course one must be careful not to, as I want to do, project a future phenomenology and its consequences onto this: ‘the world as it presents itself’ or the already mentioned ‘things in themselves as they are.’) Having tried to ‘go into’ Hegel first through the Phenomenology, it does seem to me that this is startlingly naïve, that as much as one would like to reject and dismantle Hegel’s system, one must deal, as he did, with the always-mediated nature of reality. We do not have ‘being.’ We just have some kinds of mediated representations of it. A strong phenomenological position would meet the objection, but isn't presented here. Art, I suppose, is marshaled as evidence that such a theory isn't necessary--the inadequacy of that evidence from my point of view is no doubt an index of the historical distance between 2010 and 1840.

A similar objection would meet Feuerbach’s assertion at the end of the text that “All speculation about right, willing, freedom, personality without the human being, i.e., outside of or even beyond the human being, is speculation without unity, without necessity, without substance, without foundation, and without reality. The human being is the existence of freedom, the existence of personality, and the existence of right” (170). It seems that he really means the physical, empirical (as it were) human individual. I’m not unsympathetic to this position, but it does seem inadequate.

This text is full of interesting aperçus that might or might not be significant, that can’t really be evaluated without reading more. I get the sense that they are generated often enough by the stated method of predicate-subject reversal. I’ll end with one, “whatever the human being names and articulates, it always articulates its own essence. Language is thus the criterion of how high or low humanity’s degree of cultivation is” (169). Which is a fine argument for not allowing Microsoft Word to tell you what is grammatical and what is not.

The Cold War and Political Philosophy

A few years ago, for a class, I read Michael Burleigh’s Earthly Powers (2005), which is a history of the conflict between and commingling of religion and politics in 19th century Europe. The fundamental argument of the book is that 20th century totalitarianisms are really ‘secular religions,’ or ‘political religions,’ or simply fundamentalisms. Whatever one’s terminological preference, the argument is that revolutionary politics of the left and right—1793, 1917, but also 1933—must be understood in terms also used for religious fundamentalism. Burleigh’s book is a popularizing history, and I don’t judge it harshly. Still, I found and continue to find this interpretive framework rather shallow. Burleigh invokes in his introduction a number of the early interpreters of the totalitarianisms of the 1930s—many with direct experience of these forms of politics. The most philosophical among the writers he cites is Eric Voegelin. Recently, hoping to break a sort of intellectual circle I’d fallen into expressing certain things in my dissertation writing, I read Voegelin’s short essay Science, Politics & Gnosticism (1959, 1968). I have just finished an earlier, slightly longer essay, The New Science of Politics: An Introduction (1952).

I read the second text because I found the first one enormously frustrating. In Science, Politics & Gnosticism, Voegelin spends a great deal of time castigating various thinkers, but most especially Marx, for conducting an enormous, elaborate, “intellectual swindle.” Marx’s whole body of work, Voegelin, argues (or perhaps simply asserts) is one long denial of reality. Many of Voegelin’s specific analyses are elegant, and great erudition is evident in places. Yet at no point in this text is it explained how Voegelin himself has such clear access to truth that he can say with confidence, outside of dubious textual evidence that Marx isn’t interested in ‘reality,’ that Marx is entirely wrong? The whole text is negative—an attack on gnosticism.

The New Science of Politics (and we should certainly note the definitive article) is not nearly so negative. Indeed, I wish I had started there. Voegelin’s argument is much more subtle and thought-out than it would seem to be, based on the anti-Marx screeds of the later text. Essentially, Voegelin believes that science and truth originate in personal, individual, experience. He is, we might say, a methodological individualist—although I get the sense that he would reject these terms. History cannot be the bearer of truth in a Hegelian or Comtean sense because it is outside of experience. On the other hand, crucially, individual experience is certainly in history, and has a history. This is important because while it is typically gnostic to build one’s politics upon a philosophy of history (the Christian apocalypse, the Communist paradise, the advent of the Superman), all political philosophy implies a vision of history. The relevant truth of personal experience here is the experience of transcendence. Certain historical events—most importantly Greek philosophy and Christian theology—opened the soul to transcendence. Another way of saying this is that until Greek philosophy, truth and the socio-political structure and tradition were inextricable. Philosophy ‘arrived’ after the real unity of the Athenian polis was broken because with the dissolution of the social structure, it seemed necessary to find a new source of truth. Philosophy, then, and especially political philosophy, is a truth that stands in opposition to the established order of society. Of course, Greek philosophy was relatively limited in its psychic impact. Christianity, on the other hand, eventually penetrated quite deeply into the population of the areas under its political control. This penetration is, for Voegelin, the transition from antiquity to the middle ages. It is also, crucially, the rise of a new kind of truth. Experience becomes more complex because the dimension of the transcendent has been opened. Voegelin is willing to say that this constitutes a kind of individuality that had not, previously, existed. This new form of experience brings with it new sorts of problems. In particular gnosticism, which he understands as a psychological response to the uncertainty generated by the opening to the transcendent. Gnosticism in the Middle Ages took the form of Christian chiliasm, arrived at something like a high point with the total dominance of vulgar positivism around 1900, and exists in the middle 20th century as, on the one hand, liberal progressivism, and on the other, Communism.

I do not expect to be durably interested in Voegelin. However, I think it would be interesting to approach his work as I understand it by trying to specify and contextualize three of his basic concepts: experience, the individual, and truth. Obviously, these three concepts are closely related. We can even express their relation in a restrictive sentence: truth is established only in individual experience. I would suggest, in an offhand way, that Foucault’s perspective on the generation of subjects and truths would be useful. Martin Jay’s Songs of Experience would, I think, be at least the beginning of a useful contextualization of Voegelin in terms of 20th century European ideas of truth. Similarly, Jerrold Seigel’s Idea of the Self might do the same for Voegelin’s fairly aggressive individualism. There is, I know, a certain amount of historiography on interwar writing on gnosticism. It would also be interesting to know more about Voegelin compared to Leo Strauss—for instance, to put Strauss’ book on natural right next to The New Science of Politics. If Strauss provides a contextually similar comparison, it seems to me that the most interesting recent comparison might be with Jacques Rancière’s work on politics as the partition of visibility. The New Science is, at least nominally, about the idea of political representation. Certainly, Rancière’s distinctions between the archi, meta, and para-political could all interfere in interesting ways with Voegelin’s analysis of pre- and post-philosophical political thought.

For the moment, I will file Voegelin away with my notes on him as a figure with whom I disagree deeply, but who does manage to have a perspective much at odds with my usual way of thinking. This is no doubt because I am myself totally compromised by gnosticism.

Science as Religion

There is a common rhetorical practice of comparing something, a form of politics, or of literary criticism, to a religion. The comparison is always pejorative, and always works because no one is every sure what religion means. The word stands for whatever sort of foolishness is to be indicated at any particular moment. So it is under advisement that I say that I have decided one can, in fact, talk about science as a religion in the 19th century.

Two books have brought me to this point. Ernest Renan’s L’avenir de la science, and Claude Bernard’s Introduction à l’étude de la médicine expérimentale. The first was written in 1848-9, and not published until the 1890s. It represents the record of a sort of conversion experience for which, I am certain, an analogue or description could be found in James’ Varieties of Religious Experience. Renan kept the manuscript with him, and mined passages and ideas from it over decades as, in fact, the progress of events stripped from him the transparent faith in the power (or perhaps efficacy) of critical, which is to say scientific, investigation. ‘Science’ meant something very different to the readers of this book in 1895 than it did when the book was written. It was indeed partly to remind people of that past that Renan had the thing published. At that time, reasoned investigation of man and nature seemed a force able to pull down the great wall of superstitions surrounding society and allow Humanity to enter the realm of its full potential. This messianic form of Enlightenment was not at all uncommon in the first half of the 19th century (no doubt “messianic Enlightenment” is not a great way of describing it, but I think the sense of continuity with Enlightenment projects of the previous century is must be retained). Renan describes the overwhelming experience of criticism, of the sense that a tool has been put into one’s hands that is able to dissolve nearly everything that one believed to have been solid. So this messianic Enlightenment is not only a social program, but a kind of emotional experience and discipline.

Here is the link, or rather the contrast, with Bernard’s Introduction, that makes the two books interesting together. Renan was a man of letters, but at a time when philosophy and literature and science and history could all still be boxed together. Bernard, in fact older than Renan, was professionally formed as what we, today, would call a research physician. His Introduction, published in 1865, comes toward the end of his life. If science is a messianic faith for Renan in 1848, ready at any moment to alter the world radically, it is for Bernard a way of living within the realm of appearances. Doubt and modesty are at the core values of Bernard’s experimental scientist. What I find most compelling is how effectively Bernard encloses this doubt within a higher faith. The very condition of existence of the scientist is faith in the absolute determinism of the physical world allied with the realization that this determinism will probably never be fully understood; faith in actual absolutes, doubt and modestly in the claims one makes on, for, and toward them. This is a recipe for living. If Renan’s young scientist is not exactly arrogant, it is only because he is himself too crushed by the power of reason. Bernard’s scientist, on the other hand, has never said anything that he knows to be absolutely true, and is ready to submit every opinion to the criteria of experiment and reason.

The intellectual position of the two scientists is similar. They are both committed to the practice of true knowledge about the world, which is governed by immutable laws that are in principle knowable. Their emotional, or perhaps subject, positions are radically different, as are the relations they imply between the scientist and the rest of the social world. For Renan it is the scientist’s duty to proselytize in the cause of reason. Bernard’s scientist is, it seems to me, unlikely to be very interested in engaging with society. No doubt this difference could be ascribed to their respective vocations: Renan was an historian above all, and Bernard a physiologist. Yet we can imagine without difficulty a Bernardian social-scientist. Let us put this differently: Renan’s scientist is, it seems to me, outside the problematic Max Weber describes in “Science as Vocation,” whereas Bernard’s scientist is firmly within it. Emotionally, however, Bernard’s scientist is the more firmly grounded. He or she (Renan’s science is strongly gendered—Bernard’s is not) is able to find a firm footing only on that which floats between two absolutes that are, in themselves, not graspable; on the one hand, there is the absolute determinism of the objective world, to which we have only relative access, on the other hand there are the absolutes of our subjective existence, to which we have access, but which we cannot bring into the objective world other than partly.

Renan and Bernard both describe modes of comportment determined by one’s understanding of a reality that is somehow at once beyond this world and within it: reason. Their conception of reason and its presence in the world is, I think, similar. The ‘conclusions,’ or modes of comportment, they draw from this same reason separate them. Why do I say this makes 19th century science like a religion? Because the two writers belong in different tents within the same house, because they draw inspiration, emotional sustenance, and rules for living from the same source, but differently. That this constitutes a religion (rather than a sect) is evidenced by the difference itself.

Jennifer Hecht, in The End of the Soul, describes a group of free-thinking atheists in early Third Republic France who, she says, erected a certain kind of science in the place of religion to the extent that they have recreated Catholic burial rites in the form of autopsy procedures. This is the Society for Mutual Autopsy. They pay dues. They have meetings. When a member dies, the society removes that person’s brain and performs an autopsy on it to further science. Hecht takes as evidence that this is a recreation of religious rites that they continue to perform autopsies even when there is no possible scientific benefit. Although Hecht’s functionalism bothers me (she seems to assume that there are a set of basic human needs, and that Catholicism having been removed, a new procedure must be found to fulfill these needs), the historical situation she describes seems to warrant her assertion that the ceremonies of Catholicism, and their emotional meaning, were transferred to these ‘scientific’ procedures, so that, we might say, the meaning of the ritual became dissociated from its significance.

Hecht may point to her atheists as enacting a religion of science, but it is neither Renan’s nor Bernard’s. To allow the emotional significance of the autopsy procedure to over-run its scientific importance would be, for both, to have replaced science with superstition. It would mean leaving the house of science. So I would suggest that Hecht’s atheists are really still Catholics, something like inverted versions of Charles Maurras, who supported Catholicism for political reasons while refusing ‘belong’ to it himself.