SPIRIT, REASON, NATURE AND FREEDOM
The True Commonwealth of Gerrard Winstanley
REASON, SPIRIT, NATURE, FREEDOM
painting by Arik Brauer
WINSTANLEY, SPIRIT REASON AND FREEDOM
Outlines for a book I have planned on Gerrard Winstanley, inspirational leader of the Diggers, and one of the most remarkable writers and activists England has ever produced.
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER I: SPEAKING TRUTH TO POWER
CHAPTER 2: LIBERATION THEOLOGY – GOD/REASON/NATURE
CHAPTER 3: THE PSYCHOLOGICAL FALL
CHAPTER 4: THE SOCIAL FALL
CHAPTER 5: REBIRTH AS PERSONAL TRANSFORMATION
CHAPTER 6: REBIRTH AS SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION
CHAPTER 7: CONSTITUTING LEGITIMATE PUBLIC COMMUNITY AND AUTHORITY
CHAPTER 8 (RE)BUILDING THE HOUSEHOLD
CHAPTER 9: WINSTANLEY’S LATER LIFE – COMPLICITY WITH THE BEAST?
CHAPTER 10: WINSTANLEY’S IMPORTANCE AND LEGACY
INTRODUCTION
Criticism of Winstanley’s theology and politics – Winstanley as the epitome of the 17C revolutionary - Winstanley’s importance and contemporary relevance
The introduction of themes – ground the critique of rationalization as separation and disembodiment in transcendent norms – Winstanley’s ‘true commonwealth’ offers an alternative to the Weberian rationalization and desolidarisation characterising capitalist modernity.
The rationalization of the world as connected with external mediation and disembodiment.
Winstanley's "Spirit Reason" locates value and meaning in nature and thus avoids disenchantment and devaluation
BIOGRAPHY
Winstanley’s origins – the rejection of organised religion - puzzles in personality and politics - Winstanley relation to Quakerism - evading attempts to pigeonhole.
INFLUENCES
Winstanley’s influences – locating Winstanley in a tradition of English radicalism
Winstanley's writing style - words in action - Winstanley’s place in radical literature - legacy as radical and writer.
Winstanley’s religious roots - the theological underpinning of Winstanley’s thought. The relation of religion and politics in Winstanley’s writings – the Biblical roots of Winstanley’s communism.
HISTORICAL CONTEXT
Religious wars and reformation – the English religious sects
CHAPTER I: SPEAKING TRUTH TO POWER
Transcendent norms vs conventionalism and positivism:
‘Speaking the truth to power is no Panglossian idealism: it is carefully weighing the alternatives, picking the right one, and then intelligently representing it where it can do the most good and cause the right change.’
Edward Said
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/the-reith-lectures-speaking-truth-to-power-in-his-penultimate-reith-lecture-edward-said-considers-1486359.html
Politics and public community – ideology and the meaning of language.
Taking Speech Seriously: Winstanley, Hobbes and Marx
Words have meaning and are not merely ideological functions of power relations – the meaning of words is connected to transcendent principle as well as to power and social relations. Recovering meaning – affirming transcendent truths, norms and values against conventional and constructed standards – Plato vs the sophists.
RATIONAL FREEDOM VS LIBERTARIAN FREEDOM
The Ranters, libertinism and ‘the Beast within.’
Elaborate the principles of rational freedom as a collective and socio-relational freedom against selfish interest and the identification of liberty with licence.
Against false freedom – for a discipline that liberates through putting us in touch with our true and whole nature – true freedom – the prudence of labour and reason.
Against cynicism and libertarianism.
CHAPTER 2: LIBERATION THEOLOGY – GOD/REASON/NATURE
Responding to criticisms of Winstanley’s theology.
Winstanley and religious humanism - Winstanley in the tradition of religious radicalism.
Winstanley and biblical authority - Winstanley’s freewheeling use of the Bible and unorthodox theology – pantheism and rationalism.
The immanence of good and evil, heaven and hell. God as Spirit Reason – Heaven is not a place of glory beyond the skies - the humanising of God – Reason and agency and equality – there is no God or Devil without – the humanisation of good and evil – the power of the spirit within.
Inner and outer transformation – Winstanley’s humanist millenarianism
Winstanley as anticipating the deism and sensualism of the eighteenth century, whilst retaining a transcendent God.
The religious interpretation – transcendence as well as immanence
abolishing the kingdom of darkness - millenarian expectation - inner light but not a millenarian theology.
Winstanley’s theology – the universalist doctrine beyond notions of the elect - universalism - all saved by realisation of spirit over the letter – Winstanley as anti-elect - the resurrection within.
THE MORAL ECOLOGY OF INTERDEPENDENCE
THE COMMONWEALTH OF LIFE
Rational Freedom as a moral ecology of interdependence – Spirit Reason in each and all human beings and in all creation
The moral ecology of interdependence – co-creation.
The innovation of co-creation vs self-invention leading to enslavement to alien power in a self-made world.
THE SEED THAT GROWS IN ALL THINGS
Winstanley’s repeated references to ‘seed’ identifies a strong immanentist strain in his philosophical theology. Winstanley points to an inward light or reason, and makes constant reference to the seed that grows from within all things. His emphasis falls firmly upon a creative unfolding from within the hearts of men and women as well as from within Creation. In Fire in the Bush, Winstanley writes of man falling deeper and deeper into hell until ‘the seed or blessing rise up in him to work deliverance and then carry him back again, and lead him into ways of truth.’ He writes further: ‘they that are at liberty within, in whom the Seed is risen to rule, doe conquer all enemies by Love and patience…The seed is a multiple metaphor: it is the Biblical promise to Abraham, but it is also a saving power immanent all things, it is Christ rising in all people.
"the power of reason” as "the seed of Christ" producing freedom.
Freedom is a seed developed by the capacity to reason and by the choice to live according to the light it sheds.
The development of the seed of freedom depends on planting real seeds in the earth. Human agency co-operating with each other within a living earth. Winstanley is a digger and a sower of seed in principle and in practice. "Inner and outer freedom" is a seed that Spirit Reason is bringing to fruition in history —and through the agency of human beings. Winstanley couches the actions of human beings in terms of an inheritance carried as a seed. The practices by which community is preserved, and the principle of justice which that community embodies, are immanent in the situation of human beings, formed as a body of natural beings who require the earth for their sustenance and as a community with a common and shared inheritance as moral beings.
Spirit Reason = God/Nature/Reason – an enchanted, animate universe
Experiential and experimental knowledge from inside the ceaselessly creative universe.
GOD/REASON/NATURE
God, Reason, Nature – the internal as against the external – the inner light - a spiritualized natural law – the experience of nature.
The criticism of the Divining Doctrine - reason, spirit, nature – the natural knowledge of creation.
SPINOZA AND WINSTANLEY
Commonalities with and divergences from Spinoza
Imagination, Ideas and Freedom
Spinoza – Reason over Imagination – similarities with Blake – Winstanley’s Spirit Reason vs Imagination and Blake’s Imagination vs (dispirited) Reason.
Winstanley and Spinoza - God as Reason against imagination - Winstanley and Blake on imagination and reason
Against imagination as ‘mental hallucinations’ (Spinoza) and against self-invention that departs from sources of life, value and meaning – locating God in Nature and restoring spirit to the body – to know/experience God/Nature – embodiment and experience.
EXPERIENTIAL AND EXPERIMENTAL KNOWLEDGE
Praxis – the experimental knowledge of Christ
Winstanley’s anti-clericalism as entailing a social and political anti-elitism – against alien mediation – for the democratisation of knowledge, power and politics and against its professionalization - experience and experiment – praxis and agency – reason and spirit within - experimental knowledge.
KNOWING AND BEING – learning and living by experiment and experience as natural-rational-spiritual beings
The Second Coming is not the personal return of Christ but the rising of Spirit Reason in each person - Christ's resurrection in each person overcomes pride and restores the connection with an inner nourishment, abundance of life within and without – the rising of Spirit Reason within – the transitional social wilderness condition leading to a new relationship with God/Nature.
Natural piety as an experimental knowledge – experience and salvation for all in historical time.
Reconnection with the loving God – the satisfaction of inner need and the rejection of the thirst for acquisition, mastery and control, an urge to live by and through external objects and possession that is born of anxiety, enmity and scarcity.
The true commonwealth as a covenant between a loving God and created beings nourished and satisfied in their reverence.
The innovation of co-creation vs invention.
THE REPUBLIC OF HEAVEN AND EARTH: THE LAW BEYOND LEGALISM
An action spirituality. An enabling dream – co-creation - inciting resurrection within – internal vs external salvation – the 'republic' vs the 'kingdom' of heaven – beyond kingship and 'swordly kingly power' - to be at peace on earth and in heaven - pantheism beyond external forms - the restitution of the common earth as true religion - earth as common store/treasury.
CHAPTER 3: THE PSYCHOLOGICAL FALL
THE FALL OF ADAM
Institutional mediation, disembodiment and resentment.
The birth of the modern ego – the two Adams and psychology – the bifurcation of the human personality – disembodiment and the psychic and social conditions of embodiment.
Inner Bondage
Covetousness and private property – The social fall and the two Adams - the fall leading to dependence on the objects of (self-)creation – the two Adams (one selfish and self-regarding, the second other-regarding, expanding being through (inter-)connection with the greater whole – private property and self-interestedness – the rise of spirit Reason and the second Adam – beyond legalism - the fall and the covetous flesh - theology and economics.
The first Adam - Pride, self-love and the self-made world as a new enslavement – the prideful war against nature stems from an internal lack, a separation from the source of nourishment, and generates a slavish dependence of human beings on objects – human beings as prideful creators in bondage to their creations.
The internal moral-psychological division – inner emptiness leads to external imposition.
Reconnecting with the sources of nourishment
Rational freedom as a moral freedom that realizes the whole person in the whole society.
Rationalization as a psychological scarcity – separation from the nourishment of God/Nature.
The critique of Hobbes’ ascetic discipline – rationalization as the secularization of Protestantism - the bodily basis of Winstanley’s science and religion. The call for an embodied ethics, science and knowledge.
CHAPTER 4: THE SOCIAL FALL
Outer Bondage
THE SOCIAL FALL
Social fall through the private appropriation of the common earth - private property and social war - private property as social fall - buying and selling - social division – recovering the commons as freeing labour from the curse of exploitation - riches and poverty create each other in the labour relation – the rich depend on labour of others.
External Mediation and Alien Power
THE CRITIQUE OF ALIEN POWER
Covetousness leads to kingly power - private property leads to authoritarian rule and domination in church and state – the Norman yoke - kingly government as swordly (based on force) – for law against the mediation of lawyers - the church - anticlericalism and experience – anti-elitism and anti-clericalism.
The social fall – the division of the body – separation as the key figure – separation within the person and separation from sources of life and meaning.
The critique of alien power and control – the state and capital as alienated social power removed from the sources of nourishment and fulfilment.
The Social Fall – private property – the two Adams – class conflict as fratricide.
CHAPTER 5: REBIRTH AS PERSONAL TRANSFORMATION
The second Adam – beyond the psychic and social Fall.
Reconnection with the God as Spirit Reason within as the healing of the self and the reconnection with nature.
BEYOND EXTERNAL MEDIATION AND RELIGIOSITY
Social self-mediation vs alienated mediation – the clash between external constraints and internal law – internal (moral, social) vs external (institutional-systemic) constraint – the critique of religious mediation as external religiosity (compare with Marx’s critique of both internal and external religiosity).
RESTORATION AND REGENERATION
The new Law of Righteousness – silence as prayer and reverence – the need for fundamental change - inner and outer transformation – spiritual and social action - immanence – the power of life – the unity of spiritual and social activism.
Winstanley’s idea of God as located in nature and the body points to embodiment and enchantment, with no need to impose ‘rational’ form on ‘natural’ chaos – Winstanley avoids dualism of spirit and flesh, reason and nature – the conjunction of spirit and body forms every created thing – Winstanley proposes an alternative to the prideful shaping of self and culture. Self-invention and the idolatrous worship of self-creations originates in the prideful war of the egoistic first Adam with nature.
CHAPTER 6: REBIRTH AS SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION
[Social Transformation beyond the Psychic and Social Fall – recovering wholeness and wholesomeness
[RATIONALIZATION AND DISENCHANTMENT BORN OF DISEMBODIMENT]
Shorn of the Biblical framework, the propertied politics associated with the Protestant Ethic leads to secularisation – Max Weber and Protestant rationalization as a disenchantment of the world, in the German, a 'dis-godding', indicating the stripping of value and meaning from the world, delivering what Lewis Mumford called a 'purposeless materialism.' Recovering value and meaning - affirming the inherent worth of the world.
Winstanley’s immanent alternative to rationalization through the sharing of a common wealth.
The radical politics of a common inheritance vs the politics of possession.
The radical politics of inheritance – internal moral and social self-mediation vs the external mediation of objects.
Reciprocity and solidarity over external religiosity – the realisation of inner religiosity (Winstanley) or its extirpation (Marx)? - resolidarisation overcoming institutional mediation, disembodiment and resentment – engage extensively with Nietzsche.
THE EARTHLY COMMONWEALTH
Winstanley’s ecology – the earth as a 'common treasury' for all beings and bodies - the inner light, the soul of the world and eco-centrism – immanentism as an internal creative unfolding.
DIGGING AND COMMONING – THE COLLABORATIVE ETHIC
THE ETHIC OF COLLABORATION AND COMMONING
Digging - the call to action.
Collective labour on common earth – working together - collaboration as labouring together with love.
The Digger experiment - Winstanley’s inspiration – work together, eat bread together, declare to all abroad - the call to restore Eden -
The origins of the Digger movement – the agricultural crisis - political revolution - land use and poverty and hunger – digging as a practical and logical response on the part of the hungry, the marginalised and the poor to poverty - practical politics over millenarian expectation – the distinctiveness of Winstanley's response to social problems - digging as commoning – creative praxis and the restoration of agency - the lost and alternative revolution - the coincidence of changing circumstances and self - praxis as anti-elitism – agency of common people - practical idealism.
Digging as a covenant – voluntary submission of the ego to commonality = true freedom - the diggers' covenant as a practical alternative to the atomising market. – true religion of commoning as a conversion experience – digging as internal vs external coordination.
The utopian shift in agency takes place on the commons.
Commoning as practical alternative to rationalization – resolidarising and resolidifying against rationalistic desolidarisation.
DIGGING AND COMMONING – THE DIG
The abolition of private property and the extent of digging - Cobham digging as the tip of the iceberg - Winstanley as leader – defending against persecution and misrepresentation - the move to Cobham.
The Digger writings as an expression of libertarian communism - the Ranters - the end of the experiment – the collapse of the Digger experiment – Winstanley’s disappearance – the end of the digger commune and wage labour – the Diggers’ legacy.
CHAPTER 7: CONSTITUTING LEGITIMATE PUBLIC COMMUNITY AND AUTHORITY
The principles of political order – establishing the critical standard by which to explain and evaluate Winstanley’s Law of Freedom
.
THE REPUBLIC OF EARTH
PRINCIPLES OF PUBLIC COMMUNITY AND LEGITIMATE AUTHORITY
Principles – self-assumed obligation and the universal law – the need to crack the problem of free-riding – politics and the logic of collective action - climate change and need for collective action.
The aftermath of the Digging experiment leads Winstanley to public authority
Creating legitimate political community and authority.
Reclaiming the political and ethical commons – recovering politics as creative and collective human self-actualisation – constituting the state as a legitimate institution – constituting public community and establishing the framework for public freedom.
Common freedom, free riding, collective interest and action.
Politics and public community – the covenant defines right action.
How the Covenant Defines Right Action
Legitimate State Power
Politics and public community – theory and action – active citizenship and pluralism – making earthly need a political act.
Politics and political force – the politics of love in defence of the earth.
The assertion of human self-creation independently of God/Nature as the death of spirit, human beings become masters of nowhere, self-made man orphaned by their own powers in alien, ossified, petrified form (Marx and Weber).
The politics of love and friendship – highlighting the religious ethic at the core of Winstanley's rational freedom – holding spirit and reason together in a moral ecology of interdependence, avoiding the separation that leads to rationalization and disenchantment as the ‘dis-godding’, i.e. devaluing, of the earth.
Sovereignty and popular consent – the democratic constitution of authority – Winstanley defines a communist republicanism against a propertied republicanism.
Constituting the republican commonwealth – engagement with Rousseau and Kant.
Use Rousseau and Kant to elaborate and strengthen Winstanley’s principles – analogies between Winstanley’s Spirit Reason within and Kant’s universal law which rational beings can give to themselves. Keep the focus on Winstanley. Refer to other work for Rousseau and Kant.
THE MEANING OF DEFEAT
Defeat – coming to terms with politics, law and the state.
The defeat of the Diggers.
The diabolic politics of separation and the God of love.
Winstanley develops a citizen politics.
CHAPTER 8 (RE)BUILDING THE HOUSEHOLD
The Law of Freedom as a coming to terms with politics, institutions of governance and authority.
Law of Freedom – the transcendence of principles and the conventionality of their incarnation. Determining the terms of co-creation.
THE LAW OF FREEDOM
The architectonics of the Law of Freedom – ethical and institutional foundations – enjoyment of the earth – the critique of iniquitous social arrangements
The need to take the revolution further, uprooting kingly power in nature and not merely name.
The issue of Winstanley’s alleged shift from religion to politics – The Law of Freedom is full of religious language and symbolism – the religious dimension - spiritual regeneration beyond social and economic reformation.
The appeal to Cromwell – overturning kingly power - continuing the revolution to abolish kingly power – the need for institutional reformation.
Law of Freedom – institutional features – state and sword – citizen self-legislation – legitimate constraint.
Constituting legitimate political community and authority – Kant and Rousseau and the problem of rational freedom.
Criticism of the enclosing/totalising reason that came after Winstanley, to which he offers an alternative.
Voluntary constraint and the problem of legitimacy.
The need to rest the Law of Freedom on a stronger ethic and unity than self-legislating reason.
The problems of pride and power – modern rational freedom as self-worship.
The call to a Christian politics of loving your neighbour – and your enemy - Winstanley's consistent emphasis on the Golden Rule to do unto others as you would have done unto you, extended throughout creation.
The danger of ossifying principles – institutional inertia that petrifies rational principle and turns them into their opposite – the need to accept experiment and experience – Marx’s praxis vs blueprints.
CONSTITUTING POLITICAL ORDER
The Law of Freedom as a work of political order – beyond kingly power to self-assumed law, authority and obligation – principles and policies of political and social organisation – the rebuttal of objections – and the choice of kingly or democratic government.
THE PRINCIPLES OF LEGITIMATE PUBLIC COMMUNITY
The nature of freedom – charges of authoritarianism – the conception of freedom (rational, collective, moral and libertarian) - true freedom as sharing the earth in common – the critique of kingly power and private property – the enjoyment of the earth in common.
The everlasting law and the laws of the commonwealth – the ancient law - short and pithy laws - criticism of lawyers – law as the democratic constitution of authority.
Organisational questions – details of the plan - Winstanley’s polity - the officers
The democratic constitution of authority – extending participatory structures, public spaces and democratic forms in politics - democratic participation.
THE TRUE COMMONWEALTH
The true commonwealth – name and nature coinciding – the commonwealth as association through abolition of private property - beyond buying and selling to establish the conditions of the commonwealth - the restoration of natural equality – freeing trade from buying and selling – communism - common and private property – the economy of small-scale production - freely associated labour – democratic organisation – the commonwealth of just property – the satisfaction of needs – communism of distribution – cooperative wealth – the communist commonwealth – laws against buying and selling – laws against hire labour.
pacifism - education - crime and punishment – the mail - anti-clericalism and the church – controversies concerning the position of women and patriarchy - marriage.
Conclusion on laws and principles of political order and governance - pacifism, resistance and force – universal law and love –Winstanley’s practical utopia - utopian programme for a feasible future? - the need for a politics of love and friendship.
CHAPTER 9: WINSTANLEY’S LATER LIFE – COMPLICITY WITH THE BEAST?
[Winstanley’s legacy – the value of Winstanley’s writings
[Winstanley offers the road not taken, and which may still be taken. Recovering buried possibilities]
[disembodiment and disenchantment produce the rationalization of the modern industrial Megamachine – the separation of God from Nature and the body betrays Reason to self-creation, idolatry and self-enslavement to alien power
Winstanley’s achievement is to have attached timeless truths and experiential knowledge – learning by living and life in the ceaselessly creative universe as a co-creation.
CHAPTER 10: WINSTANLEY’S IMPORTANCE AND LEGACY
Winstanley’s impact and influence – fellowship – Winstanley’s influence on Quakerism - Winstanley, Henry George and Karl Marx - George and land tax – the cooperative labour colony of John Bellers.
Winstanley's contemporary relevance – radical political ecology – Winstanley as pioneer eco-socialist - commoning as an inspiration to today’s activists - possibilities for the true commonwealth, history and utopia – concluding thoughts.