It was a small step from Kant to the philosophies of Hegel and Marx, the pair of them translating Kantian insights concerning creative human agency into the world of politics and society, conceiving the world as a self-made world.
We are talking about the objectification and alienation of human powers.
The world around us shows human powers in alien form – the state, capital, commodities, money, bureaucracy are all human creations oppressing the human creators in one form or another.
The practical reappropriation of these alien powers and their reorganisation as human and social powers enable us to find a home for ourselves in the world.
Alienation is the inversion of subject and object.
Human creators becoming ‘things’ as things acquire existential significance.
It means that reason exists but not in rational form, as technical force divorced from moral power.
The implications are spelt out by Karen Armstrong in A Short History of Myth:
‘In Guernica, humans and animals, both victims of indiscriminate, heedless slaughter, lie together in a mangled heap, the screaming horse inextricably entwined with the decapitated human figure. Even the sacrificial bull is doomed.
So too — Picasso may be suggesting — is modern humanity, which ... was only just beginning to explore the full potential of its self-destructive and rationally-calculated violence.’
Now that’s what I mean about the repression of the instincts having its revenge.
When Picasso saw the Palaeolithic art in the caves at Lascaux he remarked ‘We have invented nothing. We have made no progress in culture, although we have invented organized war on a massive scale’.
War on the scale the moderns have been waging it is not accidental. Well over 100 million human beings were killed in the twentieth century, and the world remains caught in the maelstrom unleashed by ‘The Great War’ of 1914-1918. The war to end all wars set the template for the rest of the century. What was once an aberration and an abomination has been normalised. Numbers of this magnitude can be achieved only if war – politics by another means – is pursued as a conscious end and systematic purpose. With all of their mass of means and scientific rationality, modern rational humanity has invented nothing but organised was on a mass scale. The modern world is characterized by technology, war and death. Gil Elliot declares that the scale of man-made death is the central moral as well as material fact of our time.
The institutions of the modern world are charge of vast impersonal power but are fundamentally flawed in the way they go about applying that power. The modern world is wealthy in means but bereft of ends. As the world grows in means, the institutions which govern us expand. Ultimately, means are elevated to the status of ends. These institutions rule with knowledge but without wisdom, delivering results but not meaning. With the expansion of means, institutions grow bigger, with increasing institutional and instrumental power coming to be concentrated within oligarchic structures. Max Weber referred to the bureaucratisation of the world as a functionalism that proceeds ‘without regard to persons’. Those in charge are not really in charge as autonomous beings, but occupy places and execute tasks and functions which are predetermined. The directors and executives of these modern institutions have become the new sorcerer's apprentices for the twenty-first century. They differ from previous sorcerer’s apprentices only in the scale of their means. They have all the old hubristic flaws of humanity, magnified by science and technics.
Nietzsche referred to the ‘death of God’ as a tragedy.
What he meant was that the collapse of an absolute foundation for morality – Plato’s world of Being as an objective reality - means that we must, in some way, become gods ourselves. Well, we have not become gods.
Instead we make Faustian bargains with the new gods, our powers in alien form.
Nietzsche argued that human beings should only have such powers that it can creatively live up to.
Well, in the last century we have seen means of production transformed into means of destruction, trillion dollars arms budgets and how many millions killed in wars.
This is human sacrifice to the modern gods of technology, capital, the state, instrumental power.
The sociologist Derek Sayer wrote a book called The Violence of Abstraction.
The modern world is increasingly abstracted from true realities and more and more absorbed in the manipulation of shadows and illusions. It’s alienation. And it’s self-destructive.
The wielders of this modern violence remain those elite rulers, the manipulators of images and people in Plato’s allegory of the cave.
We are constantly being told about the real world, political realities concerning business, competition, foreign policy and war.
But these are not realities, they are what are known as ‘false fixities’, imperatives not of nature but of particular institutions and systems in a particular time and place.
The issue of slavery cropped up last week. How many people here could make the case for slavery as a good thing? It was put at that time.
Which begs the question as to what we are being told now as being inevitable and unalterable but which can in fact be changed.
We are the makers of our world, by reason and by labour.
The imperatives are illusions, the shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave, perceptions of reality shaped by the elite rulers to manage and manipulate the people.
I want to end with a call to enlightenment as to the nature of reality by quoting Alasdair MacIntyre.
MacIntyre concludes After Virtue by drawing parallels between the current era and the epoch in which the Roman empire declined into the Dark Ages.
If we accept the collapse of the tradition of the virtues and the commitment to the common good and its replacement by egoism and individualism, then
‘what matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us.
And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope.
This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time.
And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament.’
Well, becoming conscious is becoming enlightened.
It’s time to realise the goal of Socrates and bring philosophy down from the heavens and make the world philosophical, see the world around us as our world, our creation, and take moral responsibility for our powers.