Andrew Schmookler devised an interesting thought experiment that is pertinent here. The experiment is known as the parable of the tribes. (Schmookler 1984). The experiment imagines a group of tribes living in close proximity. Each tribe but one chooses to live in peace. The existence of one tribe that is willing to use violence to achieve its ends is enough to end the way of peace. Despite being the majority, the peaceful tribes find they can no longer live in peace. One is defeated and destroyed by the aggressive tribe, a second is conquered and subjugated. To escape the aggressor, a third tribe flees to some remote and inaccessible place. If the fourth wishes to survive, it will have to defend itself against the aggressor by likewise having recourse to violence. ‘The irony is that successful defence against a power-maximising aggressor requires a society to become more like the society that threatens it. Power can be stopped only by power.’ (Schmookler 1984: 21).
There are, then, four possible outcomes: [1] destruction, [2] subjugation, [3] withdrawal, and [4] imitation. ‘In every one of these outcomes the ways of power are spread throughout the system. This is the parable of the tribes.’
All but one of the tribes seeks peace and has no desire to exercise power over its neighbours, yet the existence of a single aggressive tribe willing to use violence to obtain its ends is sufficient to ensure that violence will eventually prevail, no matter the different responses of the other tribes. The parable of the tribes expresses the tragedy of the human condition. The parable suggests that the best intentions of the vast majority of people will always be undermined by the self-maximising, self-centred violence of the few. The existence of a single non-cooperator will result in situations in which there is no right course of action with respect to maintaining a peaceful way of living. Every option available to the tribes involves the loss of moral principle.
Schmookler thus concludes that ‘power is like a contaminant, a disease, which once introduced will gradually but inexorably become universal in the system of competing societies.’ (Schmookler 1984: 22). A single act of violence by one tribe is sufficient to begin a destructive cycle of reprisal and counter-reprisal until all tribes are dead, subjugated, lost or contaminated or dead. Power as self-seeking violence or coercion, as an influence that forces people to act against their will and against principle, corrupts us all. In the context of games theory, we need to discover ways of extending and entrenching cooperation, identifying and eliminating free riders, encouraging the will to cooperate and deterring defection.
The experiment suggests the view that only power arrests power.
It is well known that no question played a greater role in these debates than did the problem of the separation or the balance of powers, and it is perfectly true that the notion of such a separation was by no means Montesquieu's exclusive discovery. As a matter of fact, the idea itself - far from being the outgrowth of a mechanical, Newtonian world view, as has recently been suggested - is very old; it occurs, at least implicitly, in the traditional discussion of mixed forms of government and thus can be traced back to Aristotle, or at least to Polybius, who was perhaps the first to be aware of some of the advantages inherent in mutual checks and balances. Montesquieu seems to have been unaware of this historical background; he had taken his bearings by what he believed to be the unique structure of the English constitution, and whether or not he interpreted this constitution correctly is of no relevance today and was of no great importance even in the eighteenth century. For Montesquieu's discovery actually concerned the nature of power, and this discovery stands in so flagrant a contradiction to all conventional notions on this matter that it has almost been forgotten, despite the fact that the foundation of the republic in America was largely inspired by it. The discovery, contained in one sentence, spells out the forgotten principle underlying the whole structure of separated powers: that only 'power arrests power', that is, we must add, without destroying it, without putting impotence in the place of power. For power can of course be destroyed by violence; this is what happens in tyrannies, where the violence of one destroys the power of the many, and which therefore, according to Montesquieu, are destroyed from within: they perish because they, engender impotence instead of power. But power, contrary to what we are inclined to think, cannot be checked, at least not reliably, by laws, for the so-called power of the ruler which is checked in constitutional, limited, lawful government is in fact not power but violence, it is the multiplied strength of the one who has monopolized the power of the many. Laws, on the other hand, are always in danger of being abolished by the power of the many, and in a conflict between law and power it is seldom the law which will emerge as victor. Yet even if we assume that law is capable of checking power - and on this assumption all truly democratic forms of government must rest if they are not to degenerate into the worst and most arbitrary tyranny - the limitation which laws set upon power can only result in a decrease of its potency. Power can be stopped and still be kept intact only by power, so that the principle of the separation of power not only provides a guarantee against the monopolization of power by one part of the government, but actually provides a kind of mechanism, built into the very heart of government, through which new power is constantly generated, without, however, being able to overgrow and expand to the detriment of other centres or sources of power. Montesquieu's famous insight that even virtue stands in need of limitation and that even an excess of reason is undesirable occurs in his discussion of the nature of power; to him, virtue and reason were powers rather than mere faculties, so that their preservation and increase had to be subject to the same conditions which rule over the preservation and increase of power. Certainly it was not because he wanted less virtue and less reason that Montesquieu demanded their limitation….
How well this part of Montesquieu's teaching was understood in the days of the foundation of the republic! On the level of theory, its greatest defender was John Adams, whose entire political thought turned about the balance of powers. And when he wrote: 'Power must be opposed to power, force to force, strength to strength, interest to interest, as well as reason to reason, eloquence to eloquence, and passion to passion’, he obviously believed he had found in this very opposition an instrument to generate more power, more strength, more reason, and not to abolish them. (Arendt 1979: 151-152).
I want to examine the idea of freedom as based upon will, conviction, commitment and identification in relation to the principle of self-assumed obligation. This is the idea, central to liberal democratic political theory, that human beings are obligated – and motivated – only by those laws that they have themselves had a hand in making. I am developing the idea of freedom in terms of agency, an expression of power, and an assumption of responsibility. Human beings may be considered free to the extent that they can identify and be in control of their actions and their consequences. Achieving a repersonalisation which brings freedom and responsibility requires that we build social and political structures which are based upon the principle of self-assumed obligation as opposed to obedience. The dull compulsion at the heart of the modern rationalised, bureaucratised world is based upon social structures and organisations which proceed ‘without regard for persons’. We need to make that regard for persons central to our social and political life.
The principle of self-assumed obligation is central to determining the nature of the relationship of the citizen to political authority, usually the state. Carole Pateman notes that there is an increasing tendency for theorists to argue that political obligation is owed primarily not to the state but to fellow citizens. Whilst many of these theorists continue to assume that the state does have a justified claim on its citizens, the argument that obligation is something citizens owe to each other undermines this assumption. This does not undermine the case for political authority as such, but it does force us to question the nature of any political institution or organisation which claims to represent the citizen body. As Pateman states, ‘the question cannot be avoided of why and on what grounds, if obligation is owed to fellow citizens, it must also be assumed that it is justifiably owed to the state.’
The idea that citizens owe obligation to each other entails that, in pooling and giving effective expression to their sovereign power, citizens are capable of constituting their own political forms. This approach allows us to make a distinction between government, as an expression of popular sovereignty, and the state, as an instrument of coercion. The former expresses the principle of political obligation, the latter expresses the fact of political obedience.
For Pateman, it not surprising that theorists have begun to argue in this way. ‘The logic of the voluntarist arguments that look to everyday interactions of citizens, and to benefits and participation, is that, if obligations are assumed in this way, they are owed to fellow members of institutions and fellow participants in social practices.’ Pateman points out that this raises an important question about what counts as ‘political’ obligation. Even more than this, though, it raises an important question as to the nature and locus of political authority. Following Pateman’s reasoning, we can reappropriate ‘the political’ and public life and distinguish government from the state.
If ‘political’ obligation is owed to fellow citizens, then a sharp break must be made with liberal-democratic theory that insists that it is the state that is the locus of the political and the object of political obligation. The view of political obligation as owed to fellow citizens derives …. from a perspective that takes seriously the idea of self-assumed obligation as a political ideal. This raises again the fundamental question of why, if self-assumed obligation is as important as 300 years of liberal argument assures us it is, we should not assume all of our obligations for ourselves and organise our political life on that basis.
The principle is capable of an extension beyond political life. If self-assumed obligation is crucial to freedom and legitimacy, then it ought to be extended to all areas of the common life, into our social and economic lives rather than being restricted to the political level. The principle contains a demand for a substantive freedom and equality, going beyond their formal expression at the political level. If self-assumed obligation is crucial to legitimate forms of power and authority, binding, motivating and obligating individuals in common purposes, then it should be extended throughout the whole of social life, replacing the ‘dull compulsion’ of social and economic processes and restoring responsibility and personality to the world.
Pateman notes that theorists of the liberal state have only one convincing response to this challenge. ‘They can argue that participatory democracy is not empirically feasible; the liberal democratic state is the best we can do.’ But that response comes with implications that are fatal to the liberal position. ‘The answer implies that voluntarism is irrelevant to political life. Although we are capable of assuming obligations in our everyday life, the activity has no place outside the private sphere. It is, in short, to admit that the noble liberal ideal of individual freedom and equality and its corollaries of self-assumed obligation and the vision of social life as a ‘voluntary scheme’ can only be very partially realized.’ Frankly, the situation is even worse than that. For, far from assuming obligations according to the voluntary principle in our everyday life, human beings are subject to what Marx referred to as ‘dull compulsion’, a situation which Weber characterised as a bureaucratisation and instrumentalisation that proceeds without regard for persons. However formal it may be, the liberal state is the only place where the principle of self-assumed obligation exists, upon which the legitimacy of the state rests.
Pateman’s challenge is for liberal democracy to live up to its ideals, or recognise their hollowness. ‘If political theorists dismiss the possibility of participatory or self-managing democracy, they should stop pretending that the freely created relationship of political obligation is involved, because this relationship is an integral part of a political ideal now admitted to be out of reach. Instead, they should argue directly that, given the empirical necessity of the liberal democratic state and the advantages that it has over other existing forms of political system, there are good, but non-voluntarist, reasons for political obedience.’ This means explicitly repudiating notions of obligation in favour of a stark recognition of the reality of obedience. It means abandoning notions of freedom based upon notions of choice, reason, will, responsibility, instead embracing a contemporary version of Plato’s hierarchical organic functionalism, knowing one’s station and its attendant duties, what Rawls referred to as a natural duty of political obedience. If we find this unpalatable, we may have recourse to something like Plato’s ‘noble lie’. But maybe that is how the principle of self-assumed obligation functions now, as a claim to democratic self-representation that is denied by the facts of political life. In short, we have both social and political obedience, but we legitimate the coercive social order by reference to the representative state as an ideological project.
And there are, of course, political theorists who present a utilitarian account of the relationship between citizens and the liberal democratic state. The reason why I have ignored this obvious competitor to voluntarism in my argument should now be clear. No matter how economical an argument utilitarianism can provide, or how appropriate it may appear, utilitarian arguments .. are arguments for obedience, not obligation. However, theorists are unlikely to argue only in terms of ‘obedience’ instead of ‘obligation’, for this would strip the liberal democratic state of a major portion of its ideological mantle. It would be to recognize that central liberal ideas, if taken seriously, lead beyond the liberal-democratic state.
Pateman 1989: 68-69
In effect, Pateman confronts the liberal democratic social order with the ideal of self-government and participation contained in its own principles, but denied by its practices. Liberal democracy either realises its principles, and thereby transcends itself, or it abandons its principles, and thereby loses legitimacy. I argue for the realisation of the principle of self-assumed obligation. I argue for its extension throughout the social order as a condition of achieving freedom and assuming responsibility, as a condition of repersonalising and remoralising the world.
I will now examine Weber’s characterisation of rationalised capitalist modernity as a social order that proceeds ‘without regard for persons’. My purpose is to expose the lack of will, agency, consciousness, purpose, and responsibility at the heart of modern social relations, valuing the principle of self-assumed obligation as central to a repersonalisation that combines autonomy, authenticity and authority.
For Max Weber:
it is decisive for the specific nature of modern loyalty to an office that ... it does not establish loyalty to a person, like the vassal's or disciple's faith in feudal or in patrimonial relations of authority. Modern loyalty is devoted to impersonal and functional purposes.
Weber 1970: 199
The ‘objective’ discharge of business denotes business proceeding according to calculable rules and ‘without regard for persons’. As Weber argues:
'without regard for persons' is also the watchword of the market and, in general, of all pursuit of naked economic interests. A consistent execution of bureaucratic domination means the levelling of status 'honor'. Hence, if the principle of the free market is not at the same time restricted, it means the universal domination of the 'class situation'.
Weber 1970: 215
There is something emancipatory about exchanging ties of personal dependence for an objective dependency of all equally. But it remains a dependency. And, on the basis of bureaucratisation as theorised by Weber, that dependency appears irrevocable. Marx criticised the distinction between the formal freedom and equality of citizens at the abstract level of the state and the substantive unfreedom and inequality at the level of civil society. That contradiction between abstract and concrete serves as a critical tool in Marx. But to confirm universal objective dependency at the level of the state, replacing an obligation which citizens choose and give consent to with obedience is to extinguish the critical potential of the principle of self-assumed obligation. Relations based on rational universal law are an advance on personal relations based on birth and privilege. Weber thus accents the key metaphor of the level playing field. The characteristic principle of bureaucracy, he argues, is
the abstract regularity of the execution of authority, which is a result of the demand for 'equality before the law' in the personal and functional sense - hence, of the horror of 'privilege', and the principled rejection of doing business 'from case to case'.
Weber 1970: 224
Marx wrote of the need for law 'to hold good for everybody (Marx and Engels 1846a: 329-30). This is a case for 'rational' law, law as universal. Except that Marx is under no illusions as to the autonomy of the law here. He condemns ‘the illusion that law is based on the will, and indeed on the will divorced from its real basis—on free will.’ (Marx GI 1999: 80-81).
This juridical illusion, which reduces law to the mere will, necessarily leads, in the further development of property relationships, to the position that a man may have a legal title to a thing without really having the thing.
Marx GI 1999: 81-82
Marx, in short, did more than demand the realisation of some rational ideal contained in political or juridical principle. He related any such principle to wider social relations. And here is where the bigger problems lie.
Max Weber made Marx's separation of the workers from their means of production a general category in the modern rationalised world. Weber extended the range of separations within the social order to theorise a general alienation, human beings being separated from their means of control throughout the whole of their social life. Weber argued that it is only in 'the complete depersonalisation of administrative management by bureaucracy' that ‘the separation of public and private' spheres fundamental to the capitalist economy comes to be realised 'fully and in principle' (Weber B 1991:239). This 'general' separation 'is the common basis of the modern state, in its political, cultural and military sphere, and of the private capitalist economy' (Weber ES2 1978:1394), generating bureaucratisation and centralisation in place of self-assumed control and responsibility. The result is a depersonalised world that deprives human beings of their freedom. Human beings becomes passive functionaries of processes that operate outside of their conscious, creative agency and will. This general separation is therefore an anti-democratic force which us inherent in rationalised modernity, confirming Marx's identification of the state and capital as alienated social powers blocking democratisation.
That the principle of self-assumed obligation at the heart of the liberal democratic state should come to have a formal, even fictional, character should come as no surprise. For Weber, the development of the modern state 'is a complete parallel to the development of the capitalist enterprise through the gradual expropriation of independent producers' (Gerth and Mills ed 1991:50). It should come as no surprise, then, that the dull compulsion that Marx noted as operating within the capitalist economy should come to be expressed as a political obedience at the state level. The separation of the producers from their means of production is one of a series of 'separations' within modern social organisation (Weber 1968:39). That this includes the expropriation of 'the means of politics' and the material means of administration from people (P 1994:314 315) exposes the hollowness of the principle of self-assumed obligation at the core of the liberal democratic state. Weber refers also to the separations of officials from the means of administration, of workers from the means of production, of intellectual workers from the means of mental production, of soldiers from the means of violence in the army (Weber S P 1994:279 281 314 315/6; Turner 1993:177; Sayer 1991:135; Turner in Gerth and Mills ed 1991:xxiv). The 'means of operation' in all spheres are 'concentrated by means of a bureaucratically structured human apparatus' (Weber S 1994:281). It follows from this that we live in a social order that is fundamentally lacking in responsibility in the sense of will, moral purpose and commitment. It is a world in which function has replaced purpose. Such an order proceeds ‘without regard for persons’; it is an order in which conformist bureaucrats are capable of following rules and routines to produce great evil and destruction. To avoid this, we need to recover responsibility throughout social life; we need to recover will, purpose and consciousness, a sense of owning our actions and their consequences.
Weber notes the extent to which the separation at the heart of rationalisation effectively denies democracy. For Weber the 'concentration of the material means of operation' entails an increasing 'socialisation' which 'inevitably means increasing bureaucratisation' (PG 1994:147). On the basis of depersonalisation, democratisation entails the 'levelling of the governed in opposition to the ruling and bureaucratically articulated group, which in turn may occupy a quite autocratic position, both in fact and in form' (Weber B 1991:224/6 231). The principle of self-assumed obligation contains the ideal of the governed coming to take an active share in the act of governing. In contrast, political obedience is based on the separation of the government from the governed, both in fact and form. This confirms the lack of initiative and responsibility that individuals have in their social existence. In alienating their creative labour, workers becomes objects of the production process; in alienating their political subjectivity, the demos become objects of political administration. Their sovereign power is revealed to be illusory. In these circumstances, political obligation as something we voluntarily assume in recognition of our collective interests is an ideal contradicted by the real. Political obedience is concomitant with economic compulsion.
Weber rejects the idea of subjecting relations of authority to the elective principle as Utopian (Weber B 1991:229). Once it exists, the bureaucratic apparatus of authority cannot be overthrown. The bureaucratic 'machine' 'makes "revolution", in the sense of a forcible creation of entirely new formations of authority, increasingly impossible, especially when the apparatus controls the modern means of communication .. and also by virtue of its internal rationalised structure' (Weber B 1991:230). Bureaucracy is the most effective form of organisation for complex industrial societies (Wright 1978:184), it is an instrument of power (Wright 1978:185). Those in control of the bureaucracy have effective power. The principle of self-assumed obligation is merely an ideological cover for elite control in these circumstances. We have obligation in principle, but obedience in fact.
Far from being a solution, Weber makes democratisation itself a force for further bureaucratisation: ‘the great state and the mass party are the classical soil for bureaucratisation' (Weber B 1991:209). In his essay on socialism, Weber that 'it is the dictatorship of the official, not that of the worker, which ... is on the advance', and ends with the question: 'Who would then take control of and direct this new economy? On this point the Communist Manifesto is silent' (Weber 1978: 260, 262; R S 1994:70 292). Weber concludes that a rational socialism would be a 'house of servitude', the perfection of the 'severance' which characterises capitalist modernity, not at all its negation. The argument ‘so much worse, the better’, will succeed in generalising the worse, extinguishing the better for good. The universal democratic community promised by the principle of self-assumed obligation is thus realised as an 'inescapable universal bureaucratisation' (Weber S 1994:279). Weber argues that 'in large states everywhere modern democracy is becoming a bureaucratised democracy’ governed by 'paid officials' (Weber S 1994:279). Unable to identify any way of seeing how voluntarism and personality could be preserved, Weber saw the descent into a monocratic bureaucratised society as inexorable, predicting that the 'bureaucratisation of society will encompass capitalism too, just as it did in Antiquity' (Weber 1983:159).
Weber places a heavy emphasis upon bureaucracy as irrevocable, 'indestructible' and 'inescapable' (Weber 1968:987; PG 1994:146 156 159), subjecting individuals irrevocably to 'the objective force of an apparatus operating autonomously above their heads' (Habermas 1989:307). Fitting the contours of a repressive modern rationalisation, Weber’s realism explicitly abandons the 'rational' concern to put human affairs on a moral footing. Instead of a view of human beings joining together to assume conscious control of their common affairs, there is a bureaucratic regulation which exercises an external, coercive control.
The state is thrown back into the arbitrary exercise of power from which the principle of self-assumed obligation had offered an alternative. As the characteristic institution of the liberal social order, the bureaucratic institution cannot resolve the problem of coercion and cannot find a moral standard to justify the exercise of power (Unger 1984:172). We remain confined within the constraints of a coercive social order. Even worse, social coercion is extended to political life, with obedience replacing obligation, resulting in a new form of dependency in which the bureaucratic interest replaces a public interest formed by popular consent. With respect to the normative concern with human ontology and its realisation, a central concern of the tradition of ‘rational freedom’ I defend, bureaucratic forms stand condemned for denying opportunities for human growth and self-development, subordinating persons to things, and failing to satisfy the essential need to be human (Unger 1984:174; Ehrlich 1996:63; Bottomore 1985:27). Instead of radicalising the principle of self-assumed obligation to create a self-governing social order, the denial of personality, responsibility and agency is confirmed in a thoroughly rationalised social order. An externally imposed rationally regulated action replaces communal social action (Habermas 1991:341/2), systematically eliminating subjectivity, autonomy and agency from everyday life. Instead of a cooperation engendered by freely choosing individuals in their relations, there is a standardisation and uniformisation expressed through the refinement of discipline, surveillance and regulation, the domination of administrative personnel and the increasing instrumentalisation of the individual in an increasingly formalised life (Weber P 1994:314; Sayer 1991:144; Turner 1993:207; Stauth and Turner 1988:49/50; Schroeder 1992:114/5). Instead of self-government there is a 'a strictly regulated, reserved self-control' on the part of individual subjects (Weber 1974:173).
Where there is life, there is hope. Where there are hopes, there are dreams. Where there are vivid dreams repeated, they become goals. Goals become the action plans and game plans that winners dwell on in intricate detail, knowing that achievement is almost automatic when the goal becomes an inner commitment. The response to the challenges of life—purpose—is the healing balm that enables each of us to face up to adversity and strife. (Dennis Waitley).
None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free. (Goethe).
‘Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least.’ (Goethe).
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
To explain what I mean by voluntarism and why I place such emphasis upon it, I’d like to introduce the argument of philosopher and neurobiologist Owen Flanagan.
Accept that (as best we can tell) everything that happens has a set of causes that make it as it is; then proceed to distinguish the voluntary and the involuntary, the free and the unfree, in terms of the kinds of causation or causes that distinguish them.
Aristotle championed the voluntary-involuntary distinction long before there was a conflict between the Cartesian image of mind and agency and the scientific image. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle drew the involuntary-voluntary distinction this way: ‘What is involuntary is what is forced or is caused by ignorance. What is voluntary seems to be what has its origins in the agent himself when he knows the particulars that the action consists in.’ What Aristotle had in mind was something like this: An action is involuntary if it results from some sort of compulsion against which effort and thinking are impotent, or if the agent in no way knows or grasps what he is doing.
The distinction between voluntary and involuntary, then, relates to causality and action and distinguishes the free from the unfree. Freedom denotes a situation in which an action is voluntary, to the extent that it originates in an agent who knows and grasps what s/he is doing. Unfreedom denotes a situation in which an action is involuntary, in that it follows some form of compulsion, the agent does not know what s/he is doing. A voluntary act, then, is based on an intelligent or moral involvement on the part of the agent. Flanagan notes here:
Notice that our legal system diminishes the degree to which a person is culpable for a crime in accordance with Aristotle’s formulation. If an individual is ignorant of the difference between right and wrong, or compelled to do what she does by insanity, a brain tumor or a gun held to her head, she is not considered legally responsible for her act; at least she is less culpable that if any of these situations did not obtain. One other point: I am focused on agency here more than issues of responsibility. Many say that if the scientific image is true then our practices of reward and punishment and/or the justification for these practices will need to change significantly. Probably true, and all for the good.
‘Voluntary action involves the agent’s knowing what action he is performing, and acting from reasons and desires that are his own.’ This is possible if an agent is conscious and if consciousness has some causal efficacy. And it does.
Mother Nature put me in conscious touch with some of my most salient desires, hopes, and expectations. When I see what I want and/or need and judge it to be choiceworthy, I adjust some circuitry (thanks to how I am designed, what I have learned etc) to do what gets me what I want. These actions are voluntary. We call actions ‘voluntary’ when we think about means and ends and act in accordance with our thinking (or could have).
Flanagan 2007: 32-33
Owen Flanagan describes human beings as ‘embodied conscious beings’ participating in a Space of Meaning.
We are embodied conscious beings engaged in high-stakes psycho-poetic performances. The quality of our lives, indeed whether our lives are meaningful or not, depends in significant measure on how we participate (to speak platonically) in the spaces of art, science, technology, ethics, politics, and spirituality. These six spaces are members of the Goodman set I call the Space of Meaning Early 21st century. We cannot opt entirely out of the Space of Meaning Early 21st century if we want to live meaningfully. No one – not even someone who chooses to live ‘off the grid’ and succeeds at doing so in the sense that he does not pay utility bills – can (or wants to) escape living within the constraints of a culturally available Space of Meaning.
Flanagan’s argument is premised on Aristotle’s conception of human beings as social beings, beings who need others and society in order to individuate themselves. We need society and we need culture in order to develop.
Our nature as social mammals requires us to find meaning in a culturally available Space of Meaning or not at all. It is possible, of course, to find one’s time and/or place unsatisfactorily and to attempt to relocate in the past or to attempt to create new ways of being or thinking. Such relocation is commonly fantasized and sometimes succeeds. Nonetheless, relocation – backward or forward – requires moving from the Space of Meaning into which one was raised to another.
Whereas most sets are still life, the Space of Meaning Early 21st century is dynamic. Each member space of art, science, technology, ethics, politics, and spirituality is a complex of theory and practice. Each is layered, is nested, contains multiple members itself, and is ever-evolving, and thus so too is the whole set. Each member space differentially accumulates its own past and sheds parts of its past (possibly to re-appropriate them later). And each space interacts with itself and the other spaces in multifarious ways. The modes of interaction and intersection within each member space and across the Space of Meaning Early 21st century as a whole range, at any given time, from harmonious to non-harmonious. At the social level, there are reasons of communal stability to want the relations among the spaces to be toward the harmonious side. At the individual level, harmony is favoured for reasons well explained by the theory of cognitive dissonance (Festinger 1957). At the group level and at the individual level, the spaces do constitutive work. Intersection with these spaces, participation in them, makes, in some measure, the community and its members who and what they are.
Flanagan 2007: 37-38
[Wheeler – the participatory universe
The most significant developments in science have resulted from asking the right questions. In the words of Werner Heisenberg, ‘What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.’ And this is why perceptions matter. Our way of thinking shapes the questions we ask. How we think and what we think about, how we perceive the world, affects reality at a very deep and fundamental quantum level, informing and modifying the underlying fabric of the universe in the process. Philosophy begins in wonder, stated Plato, and what we wonder about alters the way in which reality presents itself to us. The world we see is already in some way humanly objective, shot through will human meaning, will, consciousness and purpose. For Kant, the conceptual apparatus of the human mind shapes the reality we see. With the questions we ask and the procedures we apply in order to find answers, we create the reality of our experience. When we ask questions of nature, we assume the existence of a world outside of ourselves, an objective reality that exists independently of what we can think and say about it. Kant wrote of the world of ‘things in themselves’. Rather than revisit the debate between realism and nominalism, I’d just like to put these observations in the context of environmental ethics in light of climate change. Encroaching environmental threats are reminding us that there is a nature that is independent of us. To this extent, the objective reality studied by natural scientists does exist. The problem, however, relates to our attempts to understand this reality. Our knowledge of the external world is our knowledge of the external world, not that external world in itself. And that is as much as we can know. My point is that the objective reality we study is always in some way a humanly objective reality. The creative universe is an ongoing reality, not just continuously unfolding in the sense of a revelation of immanent potentialities but also a world in the process of always being created, speaking to and from something within ourselves. Stuart Kauffman writes of reinventing the sacred, and we can indeed ‘divinize’ the universe by learning to recognize the values, purposes and meanings at the heart of ‘objective’ reality. It matters not just that we question but that we ask the right question. In the words of theoretical physicist John Wheeler, ‘the question is what is the question?’ What does the universe reveal to us? ‘No question? No answer!’ Asking the right question at the right time is crucial in getting the right answer.
Heisenberg compares holding on to the idea of an objectively existing world to the belief that the earth is flat: ‘The hope that new experiments will lead us back to objective events in space and time is about as well founded as the hope of discovering the end of the world in the unexplored regions of the Antarctic.’ ‘Objective-worlders’ are like ‘flat-earthers’ in clinging onto a belief in an objective reality that is an external datum, a belief inculcated through training and reinforced by habit over centuries. Wheeler considers that we are ‘sleep-walking’ to the extent that we fail to recognise the extent to which we are influencing the results of our experiments. Beyond physics, the human species in general is sleep-walking to the extent that people continue to believe in the idea of a reality that inherently exists separate from ourselves as an external, objective datum. That objective world model is itself a construct, a projection which reflects a particular stage in human psycho-spiritual development. The most important thing to note is that human beings are creative agents in this development.
‘It is, perhaps, symptomatic of an unease about the present state of the argument about the relationship of the citizen to the liberal-democratic state that there is an increasing tendency for theorists to advance a rather startling argument. They argue that political obligation is owed primarily not to the state but to fellow citizens. It must be added that they also assume that the state does have a justified claim on its citizens – but their own argument begins to cut the ground from under this assumption. The question cannot be avoided of why and on what grounds, if obligation is owed to fellow citizens, it must also be assumed that it is justifiably owed to the state.
It is not as surprising as it may appear at first sight that theorists have begun to argue in this way. The logic of the voluntarist arguments that look to everyday interactions of citizens, and to benefits and participation, is that, if obligations are assumed in this way, they are owed to fellow members of institutions and fellow participants in social practices. … this raises an important question about what counts as ‘political’ obligation. If “political” obligation is owed to fellow citizens, then a sharp break must be made with liberal-democratic theory that insists that it is the state that is the locus of the political and the object of political obligation. The view of political obligation as owed to fellow citizens derives, as I have argued, from a perspective that takes seriously the idea of self-assumed obligation as a political ideal. This raises again the fundamental question of why, if self-assumed obligation is as important as 300 years of liberal argument assures us it is, we should not assume all of our obligations for ourselves and organise our political life on that basis.
Theorists of the liberal state have only one convincing answer to that question. They can argue that participatory democracy is not empirically feasible; the liberal democratic state is the best we can do. If that answer is given – and it is implicit in many discussions of political obligation – the consequences need to be spelled out. The answer implies that voluntarism is irrelevant to political life. Although we are capable of assuming obligations in our everyday life, the activity has no place outside the private sphere. It is, in short, to admit that the noble liberal ideal of individual freedom and equality and its corollaries of self-assumed obligation and the vision of social life as a “voluntary scheme” can only be very partially realized.
Furthermore, if political theorists dismiss the possibility of participatory or self-managing democracy, they should stop pretending that the freely created relationship of political obligation is involved, because this relationship is an integral part of a political ideal now admitted to be out of reach. Instead, they should argue directly that, given the empirical necessity of the liberal democratic state and the advantages that it has over other existing forms of political system, there are good, but non-voluntarist, reasons for political obedience. Rawls’ notion of a natural duty of political obedience, or a contemporary version of “my political station and its duties”, may commend themselves for this purpose. And there are, of course, political theorists who present a utilitarian account of the relationship between citizens and the liberal democratic state. The reason why I have ignored this obvious competitor to voluntarism in my argument should now be clear. No matter how economical an argument utilitarianism can provide, or how appropriate it may appear, utilitarian arguments .. are arguments for obedience, not obligation. However, theorists are unlikely to argue only in terms of ‘obedience’ instead of ‘obligation’, for this would strip the liberal democratic state of a major portion of its ideological mantle. It would be to recognize that central liberal ideas, if taken seriously, lead beyond the liberal-democratic state.’
Carole Pateman, The Disorder of Women: Democracy, Feminism and Political Theory, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1989: 68-69