New Pioneers by Mark Henson
Metaphysical Recovery and Reconstruction
“What is to take the place of the soul- and life-destroying metaphysics inherited from the nineteenth century? The task of our generation, I have no doubt, is one of metaphysical reconstruction”.
- E.F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful
‘In ethics, as in so many other fields, we have recklessly and wilfully abandoned our great classical-Christian heritage. We have even degraded the very words without which ethical discourse cannot carry on, words like virtue, love, temperance. As a result, we are totally ignorant, totally uneducated in the subject that, of all conceivable subjects, is the most important. We have no ideas to think with and therefore are only too ready to believe that ethics is a field where thinking does no good. Who knows anything today of the Seven Deadly Sins or of the Four Cardinal Virtues? Who could even name them? And if these venerable, old ideas are thought not to be worth bothering about, what new ideas have taken their place?’
- E.F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful
I conduct little experiments on Facebook every now and then, recognizing that people will be predisposed towards the familiar and with which they agree, particularly when it is short and quick. So, as experiments go, they reveal little and resolve nothing. But I do it anyway. I just wonder if any of the acres of words I sow on social media actually take root and grow anywhere. Certain things are very noticeable. My view is that the environmental crisis we face is an existential crisis that requires character and social formation within a moral ontology of the good life. Let’s put it more simply by saying that we need to treat the environmental crisis with moral depth. So I frequently post on the great moral thinkers and philosophers in the world, Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre, Martha Nussbaum etc. Such posts receive the odd like. But no more. No engagement. They’re boring. Alongside these, I post environmental 'solutions.' And these generate much more interest. I say interest. Because it is really just people agreeing with what they already know and believe to be true. And I am left wondering why morality is treated as something ephemeral and irrelevant in environmental circles. The figure of E.F. Schumacher is very well known by these people, but I wonder how many of them really understand his argument. Everyone here knows of Schumacher’s work on appropriate scale, alternative technology and economics as if people – and planet – mattered. Yet Schumacher insisted that ‘metaphysical reconstruction’ was the key to everything. He made that point crystal clear in Small is Beautiful, and yet it was missed. So he wrote a follow up book precisely on this point, A Guide for the Perplexed. And it was ignored. These environmentalists remain perplexed, and their perplexity will prove fatal to civilization.
'The Patristic diagnosis of the decay of Greco-Roman civilisation ascribes that event to a metaphysical disease.... It was not barbarian attacks that destroyed the Greco-Roman world. The cause was a metaphysical cause. The "pagan" world was failing to keep alive its own fundamental convictions, they (the patristic writers) said, because owing to faults in meta-physical analysis it had become confused as to what these convictions were. If metaphysics had been a mere luxury of the intellect, this would not have mattered.'
- R.G. Collingwood
Metaphysics is not a luxury, but is the key to inspiring, motivating, orienting and obligation people to larger human goods. ‘Apart from metaphysical presuppositions there can be no civilisation’ (Tomlin 1947:264).
I posted a page that gave links to many fine papers on Alasdair MacIntyre’s work. It received one like. At the same time, I posted articles on Paul Hawken’s attempt to “map, measure, and model” global warming solutions in Drawdown.
The link to MacIntyre's work offers a marvelous resource giving links to some fantastic papers.
It is well worth getting acquainted with Alasdair MacIntyre, if you want to know where we are, how we got onto this diremptive terrain and how we may possibly find our place again in forms of the common life.
The post received a huge positive reaction, well over thirty likes and even more shares, and still rising. Hey, we have found our saviour! Yes, it’s the old saviour, it’s technology again. If technology was ever the solution, we would never have the problem in the first place. When will we ever come to see the moral and psychological aspects of this problem?! There’ll be no change for the better until we do, because the whole thing depends upon a change in human behaviour.
Here is how the Hawken book is described:
‘With the help of a little funding, he and a team of several dozen research fellows set out to “map, measure, and model” the 100 most substantive solutions to climate change, using only peer-reviewed research. The result, released last month, is called Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming. Unlike most popular books on climate change, it is not a polemic or a collection of anecdotes and exhortations. In fact, with the exception of a few thoughtful essays scattered throughout, it’s basically a reference book: a list of solutions, ranked by potential carbon impact, each with cost estimates and a short description.’
So what's the big change? It’s the same fact-based, cost-benefit, economistic, positivist, technocratic, vision and value free ‘pragmatism’ that has already racked up decades of failure at top level. ‘Only peer-reviewed’ research – forget the rest of us as eco-citizens and knowledge generators at work in our communities and social relations. Peer-reviewed research as the only valuable form of knowledge would rule out the people whose ideas have changed history time and again. These are technocrats going over the heads of the people, philosopher-kings and enlightened despots will do fine for them. I find it an old delusion which has now become tedious. And dangerous. We can write: ‘Nothing learned and everything forgotten’ as the epitaph of the human species.
‘Unsolved problems tend to cause a kind of existential anguish. Whether this has always been so may well be questioned, but it is certainly so in the modern world, and part of the modern battle against anguish is the Cartesian approach: 'Deal only with ideas that are distinct, precise and certain beyond any reasonable doubt; therefore: rely on geometry, mathematics, quantification, measurement and exact observation.' This is the way, the only way (we are told) to solve problems; this is the road, the only road, of progress; if only we abandon all sentiment and other irrationalities, all problems can and will be solved. We live in the age of the Reign of Quantity—which, incidentally is the title of a difficult and important book by Rene Guenon, one of the few significant metaphysicians of our time. Quantification and cost-benefit analysis are said to be the answer to most, if not all, of our problems, although where we are dealing with somewhat complex beings, like humans, or complex systems, like societies, it may still take a little time for sufficient data to be assembled and analysed. Our civilisation is uniquely expert in problem-solving, and there are more scientists and similar people in the world today than there have been in all previous generations added together—and they are not wasting their time contemplating the marvels of the Universe or trying to acquire self-knowledge: they are solving problems. (I could imagine someone becoming slightly anxious at this point and inquiring: 'If this is so, aren't we running out of problems?' But it would be easy to reassure him: we have more and bigger problems now than any previous generation could boast, even problems of survival.)’
- E.F. Schumacher, A Guide for the Perplexed
This extraordinary situation, Schumacher comments, might lead us to inquire into the nature of 'problems'. It ought to lead us back to metaphysics and the deeper questions of life. The questions which are not amenable to technological answers. But, no, these are deemed a waste of time. No wonder, then, that our technics continue to misfire. It is not a problem of technology. We have a wealth of technology, and technicians and engineers can do no more. It is in expecting them to resolve the question of ends by the use of mere means that our failures lie.
“If human vices such as greed and envy are systematically cultivated, the inevitable result is nothing less than a collapse of intelligence. A man driven by greed or envy loses the power of seeing things as they really are, of seeing things in their roundness and wholeness, and his very successes become failures”.
- E.F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful
“The cultivation and expansion of needs is the antithesis of wisdom. It is also the antithesis of freedom and peace. Every increase of needs tends to increase one’s dependence on outside forces over which cannot have control, and therefore increases existential fear”.
- E.F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful
I’ll just have to preface my remarks here by emphasising – for the umpteenth time (and in an uncantankerous way) – that I am not denigrating technologies and ‘solutions’. On the contrary, in connecting the ideal to the means of its realization, I emphasize transition strategies, implementations, practices and design. Without them, there is nothing but impotent wishful thinking, idle pipe-dreams and pious hopes that haunt the psyche. So hail the techies. There’s plenty to be done, and they give us the means to do it. I am, however, most certainly against one-sided modes of thought, action and organisation, because these do untold damage in the neglect of things that are essential to a rounded life. Again, I call for an integral perspective. It’s just that an integral perspective needs to include the political in the broadest sense of creative human actualisation, notions of the good life, morals, metaphysics and – whisper it – spirituality as undoubtedly true to human nature and the human quest for meaning. These are the parts of the whole life that interest me, and I see continually how they are either ignored as ephemeral or dismissed as delusional. It is on that devaluation that the human species will falter and fall.
I’m always a little sceptical of ‘solutions’ which are not set within a critique of political economy, connected to transitions and implementations, and set within a moral/metaphysical framework. In what form/s of the common life and to what end are these ‘solutions’ oriented and directed? I am leery of institutional tinkering and techno-fixing. Such ‘solutions’ are worthy and valuable but, considered in themselves, evade the political and moral questions, the key questions of practical reason. It is for deficiency at this level that we will fail and our technics will misfire. There is no techno-fix within existing parameters. I’ll make no predictions, for such things are facile when not allied to the means of their realisation, declarations of mere subjective states. I believe that an entirely different socio-economic order is required, that the accumulative dynamic and exponentially expansionary drive of the one that we have will transgress planetary boundaries and thereby destroy the conditions of civilised life on the earth. I would never wish to devalue ‘solutions’ – if we have problems – and we do – then we certainly need practicable, effective, efficient solutions, and let’s be thankful to those designers and planners and technicians and engineers who pioneer those solutions. We need them. But we need more. It’s not reform we need but reformation. Those who think this environmental problem is one of technological and managerial adjustments are wrong. Their solutions are necessary but insufficient conditions of resolving the environmental crisis. The danger is, that if they are seen to be sufficient, then they become evasions of and diversions from the real problem and the real solution. Institutional and psychological inertia, economic imperatives and cultural directions are stiff headwinds to struggle against and overcome. What we can do is recognize the constraints within which we are working – the constraints of existing institutions and business imperatives as well as of the planetary ecology – and see what is in our power to change. Plato’s old question of whether democracy can supply a self-limiting principle from within itself now stands in need of answering. Which is why Rousseau is so good in forcing before us the question of rejecting illegitimate constraints in order to embrace and agree to legitimate constraints. Restraint rationally accepted, a force that enables us to be free. If we don’t address that issue, and instead continue to believe that ‘solutions’ without institutional, social and behavioural change will do the trick, then we are merely tinkering around the edges of the problem, deluding ourselves that we are making a difference. We are not, we are heading for overshoot, bottlenecks, conflicts and possible extinction. That people are so keen to believe in solutions, and so shy of moral and metaphysical reconstruction and social transformation is something I find revealing, and quite depressing. We still are not treating this problem with the moral depth it requires. This is an existential crisis, no more and no less. And it goes to the heart of who we are.
‘Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts upon the unthinking.’
J. M. Keynes
‘It happens then as it does to physicians in the treatment of consumption, which in the commencement is easy to cure and difficult to understand; but when it has neither been discovered in time nor treated upon a proper principle, it becomes easy to understand and difficult to cure. The same thing happens in state affairs; by foreseeing them at a distance, which is only done by men of talents, the evils which might arise from them are soon cured; but when, from want of foresight, they are suffered to increase to such a height that they are perceptible to everyone, there is no longer any remedy.’
—Machiavelli, The Prince (1513)
The environmental crisis may now be so far gone as to be without resolution. That has always been the paradox, that by the time people come to believe the evidence of their senses and see the need for action, it will be too late for action to be effective. That’s also something that shows up the deficiencies of those who make a science-based approach based on fact the key to resolving the crisis in the climate system. By the time we have the evidence of environmental damage, it’s too like to apply a remedy. And so we are no into mitigation and adaptation, and will fail here for the very same reason we failed to resolve the climate crisis when the alarm was first raised.
Somewhere in time, we lost the importance of values and we lost a sense of metaphysics as the ordering, organising and orienting principle in human affairs. And, arguably, it was Machiavelli and his ilk who were key in this turn to a surface-level realism at the level of sense-experience. We have always needed more than such facts and evidence to deal with the challenge of living a truly human life. And it is for want of that something more that the human species will go to oblivion, armed with a wealth of material quantity and technical power. We know what we can do, but we are less than clear as to what we ought to do. And it is that disparity that will seal our fate.
So I make absolutely no apologies in expressing my coolness with respect to ‘solutions’. I welcome them, they are needed. But to the extent they encourage the deluded belief that they are enough in themselves, or the main part of what we need, they do more harm than good. They are part of the solution, and the easy part too, the mere means. The technologists, engineers and economists are the custodians of the good life, but their means are not in themselves constitutive of the good life. We are conflating living with living well. And we need more than ever to recover the conception of what it is to live well and in the process come to order, organise and orient our lives in accordance with that conception of the good. This will involve changes in behaviour. Scientists such as Stephen Emmott, Kevin Anderson, Ken Caldeira and many more have recognised this as key. And they are right. The scientists and the technologists have done all that we can expect of them. To expect them to do more is to press science and technology into fields where they are powerless. We now need to call back metaphysics, as alarming a notion as that is to those reared on a diet of empiricism and positivism. Nothing else will do – changes in behaviour, ecological conversion, voluntary acceptance of collective and individual restraint, longer time horizons, all the things that people have called for will require nothing less than metaphysical recovery and reconstruction begging – and receiving – a moral ontology of the good. With time running ever short, there will be an increasing tendency to opt for the ‘solutions’ that are already available or in the process of becoming available. And hence a tendency to put aside these other questions. And that’s the real nature of our predicament. The very thing we need to do first – establish first principles and proceed to order and organise behaviour and social action on this basis – is the very thing we will do last. Metaphysical recovery and reconstruction is the most difficult and the least immediately practical for the very reason that it is the most fundamental and most enduring.
And I will say this in defence of those who pass by morals and metaphysics in their impatience to get things done. Time is pressing. And let’s be honest, ethics is hard work. And, as one whose background is in ethics, I will have to hold my hands up and admit that modern moral theories have proven utterly useless, bankrupt, vacuous, without practical effect, socially irrelevant. No wonder ethics is ignored. Modernity can generate any number of moral theories, it just can’t give any good reasons for anyone to take any of its claims seriously. And then there is the fact that those working to correct this deficiency develop long, painstaking ethical edifices that – dare I say this – are frankly boring, so boring that they would put a glass eye to sleep. So it doesn’t surprise me that people move on quickly. There has to be movement from both directions. I’m not calling for vulgarization exactly, there is indeed a need for analytical clarity and logical rigour. But ethics has to ‘bite’, there has to be a motivational quality, a buoyancy. The fact remains that religious faith remains the best mass movement of people engaged in ethical practices the world has ever seen. Perhaps that’s the ‘mediation’ we need, a ‘poor man’s philosophy’, a philosophy for living a blessed life that is poor in spirit. “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble” (James 4:6). Pride comes in many forms, and I shall shortly be writing on Rousseau, who paid such close attention to amour-propre, vanity, and the way it leads us astray. Rousseau was right. And so too was Marx when he wrote that a ‘society of too many useful things produces too many useless people’ (Paris Manuscripts). It’s an old lesson, and every generation needs to learn it anew - the richer we become in things, the poorer we may become in our hearts.
After many years in environmental politics, I am going back to my original insights, insights I sought to bring to ecology. The way to an ecologically healthy and socially just society lies in a form or forms of the common life which practises a material sufficiency and virtuous action within rightly ordered relationships to each other and to the environing context of human life. That’s a view that St. Thomas Aquinas or St Benedict would have found worthy of support. And it’s not different from a view to be found in Kropotkin and the anarchists, Murray Bookchin and the social ecologists, or, indeed, in a thinker whom I am revisiting with pleasure and to great profit, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. I believe the future, if we are to have a future that is worthy of human dignity and potentiality, lies in a global network of local communities and regional cities scaled to human dimensions and proportions, places where people live and thrive as eco-citizens in tune with their environment.
The challenge that lies ahead of us is to scale our various communities to planetary boundaries and to join together in a virtuous commonwealth of the whole earth, locating ourselves within the more-than-human world that enfolds and sustains us. This means uprooting the economic and institutional imperatives associated with the prevailing global order and supplanting them by a communal motive in a global community network of city-republics set within an ecological regionalism, supra-national authorities and sub-national states and cities, federated, with power rescaled upwards and descaled downwards with a view to cooperatively restoring the natural biosphere to a balance with the human-made technosphere. This is the ecological transformation of ‘the political’, the Ecopolis of the future Age of Ecology, integrating all the strands recognized above. Human beings thus become active members of the earth’s commonwealth of virtue, recognising that each and all belong to the one community, a community that embraces also, with respect and reverence, the other beings and bodies of the more-than-human world, thus achieving a peaceful co-existence on the planet.
I agree with Erich Fromm that ‘our only alternative to the dangers of robotism is humanistic communitarianism’ (1956: 361). To those who would argue that my concern with character-construction and the acquisition and exercise of the virtues is elitist, moralistic (virtue signalling) and hierarchical, I would argue that I set this moral formation within a social formation, creating the right social relations and identities so that there is a direct connection between individual good and social good, ensuring that appeals to character, good behaviour and the common good are not abstract and impotent moral appeals from the outside. Those appeals come from the inside, from within the forms of the common life, a life within which we are embedded via communities of character and practice. And I would also say, whether we like it or not, there is always, in every society, a form of character construction and manipulation going on. This ‘robotism’ to which Fromm refers is the character trait of the modern Megamachine, the formation of human beings to fit and serve the operations of industrial society, the very global heat machine that is driving the planetary ecology to destruction.
So I make no apologies for revisiting my original concerns in ethics and political philosophy. I would now qualify Marx’s ideal of a ‘truly human society’ sharply in order to dispense with the anthropocentric impulse, making proper space for recognition of the more-than-human universe which is the condition for any ‘truly human’ life. There is a need for the nature that enfolds and sustains us and, likewise, there is a need for the spiritual dimension that nourishes the soul and orients us in a meaningful life. But Marx’s notions of cooperation, of a shared wealth beyond possessive and exploitative relations, the integration of town and country, the replacement of the abstraction of the state by a legitimate form of government, social self-regulation via scaled communities of many-sided, all-round, integral men and women working cooperatively within social relations and identities geared to the common good and articulating the creative expression of the human essence are ones I continue to affirm. It’s a call for a society beyond alienative and exploitative relations. Fail to put an end to those relations, and they will assuredly put an end to human society. These relations are false to life and false to nature and false to humanity. There are no solutions possible within such relations, only ameliorations, band-aids that may reassure us for a while that we are travelling in the right direction. We are not.
So is Marx’s communist society as the society of many-sided, all-round development the solution to our problems? Marx portrays a vivid picture of future harmony in The Critique of the Gotha Programme.
‘In a more advanced phase of communist society, when the enslaving subjugation of individuals to the division of labour, and thereby the antithesis between intellectual and physical labour, have disappeared; when labour is no longer just a means of keeping alive but has itself become a vital need; when the all-round development of individuals has also increased their productive powers and all the springs of cooperative wealth flow more abundantly - only then can society wholly cross the narrow horizon of bourgeois right and inscribe on its banner: From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs!’
I have argued the case for Marx at length in my work. Marx was at pains to locate his ideal within the real by pointing to the forces and means of its realisation. It remains the case, however, that the themes of the above passage are common to utopian literature. Marx has historicised utopia. We can see this as a good thing or as a bad thing, either as an admirable realism on Marx’s part, as against utopian wishful-thinking, or as an extremely dangerous moral futurism which removes moral and empirical controls and invites all manner of crimes against humanity in the name of some anonymous historical process. We should be careful of bad and bogus teleologies, of wishful thinking masquerading as historical necessity.
This theme of communism as ‘all-round’ development recurs in Marx’s work. Here is another heady passage from The German Ideology:
‘We have already shown above that the abolition of a state of things in which relationships become independent of individuals, in which individuality is subservient to chance and the personal relationships of individuals are subordinated to general class relationships, etc.— the abolition of this state of things is determined in the final analysis by the abolition of division of labour. We have also shown that the abolition of division of labour is determined by the development of intercourse and productive forces to such a degree of universality that private property and division of labour become fetters on them. We have further shown that private property can be abolished only on condition of an all-round development of individuals, because the existing character of intercourse and productive forces is an all-round one, and only individuals that are developing in an all-round fashion can appropriate them, i.e. can turn them into free manifestations of their lives. We have shown that at the present time individuals must abolish private property, because the productive forces and forms of intercourse have developed so far that, under the domination of private property, they have become destructive forces, and because the contradiction between the classes has reached its extreme limit. Finally, we have shown that the abolition of private property and of the division of labour is itself the union of individuals on the basis created by modern productive forces and world intercourse.’ (Marx GI 1999).
I have unpacked and justified these claims in my own work on Marx. The argument needs careful treatment and analysis, just to make it clear precisely what it is to be abolished and by what means and to what end.
We can trace the vision of a political community sharing goods and possessions and owning all things in common back to Plato, although it is worth pointing out that Plato’s proposals here were limited to the Guardian class only, and were meant to elaborate the principle that the Guardians have no interest other than the common good as such, that the common good is something that is disinterested, existing as an end in itself. There is a danger of missing this point, and coming to present Plato as a wild-eyed communist millenarian mystic. But the point remains that the human psyche is haunted by the memory of the lost Eden. We are out of Eden and are ontologically nostalgic for the golden age that lies in the past state of innocence. That yearning is expressed in many forms, in visions of island paradises beyond the seas, the ‘state of nature’ where everything was pure and harmonious, of a millennial realm of all things held in common in the future. In every age, this yearning for community, for sharing modelled on love, friendship and family extended to one and all, has continued to breathe new life into the 'state of nature' and inspire hopes for its possible reclaiming. The time will come when all things we draw upon in the material matrix of life would be held in common, distinctions between 'mine and not thine' would fall away, and each would be friends with all.
Aristotle began his Politics by pouring cold water on heady communist fantasies, pointing out some cogent truths. Friendship involves willing the good of a fried, and that entails commitment in helping said friend in the basic aspects of specific human goods. And that implies a specific commitment rather than some generalised commitment. A generalised commitment to all things is a commitment to nothing. A specific commitment in conditions of finite resources requires something substantial in a way that a generalised commitment to an inexhaustible multitude of alternative commitments doesn’t. All things may be common among friends, but you can give nothing to a friend when you have nothing to give, you can give something to a friend only when you have something to give. And whatever it is you give to this friend, it will be something that is not given to another friend – there can be no generalised sharing of any meaning or substance. What can be given and shared, can only be given to and shared with specific others with whom one is in relationship with. For Aristotle, the kind of love that Plato’s communism entails can only be found in close relation of friends or family, a quasi-family that, in its close relation and proximity, is able to build up over time a common stock of unconditional affection, loyalty, physical and psychological support, shared memories and experiences, tacit knowledge, warm, affective bonds, resources which those in that relationship can draw upon – giving and receiving comes within such close and active relationships. Extend these loyalties beyond such proximity, and they become thin and lose their quality. Such communism in its abstraction and remoteness becomes diluted; it is, in Aristotle’s words, a 'watering-down' of friendship, a drastic emaciation of a fundamental dimension of human well-being.
The point of this little excursion is to make it clear that metaphysical and moral reconstruction is a serious, painstaking and intricate business. There can be no short-cuts. We cannot just assert that there is a ‘common good’ for human beings, and then make an impatient grab for it. That impatient grab has been responsible for any number of political disasters in human history. We’ve waited this long, it’s as well to pay attention to the requirements of practical reason in identifying the common good and securing its conditions. We can do this with revolutionary haste, make a quick grab to possess the ideal, and thereby overlook and override its conditions and steps to ensure that we get only the monstrous form shorn of its content. Or we can do it the right way, the boring and slow way, giving us the ideal, the common good constituted by all the basic human goods and values, securing all the conditions which enable all members of the community to attain reasonable objectives for themselves in relation to others, so that they have reason to work with each other for ends that are common, uniting each and all in the all-round community capable of delivering the complete good. This gives us the common good through reasonable self-constitution, a very different notion to communism either as a direct appropriation through the abolition of private property and social differentiation or as an indirect consequences of rational self-interest.
Extending our being by extending beyond self-love is an idea we can find in Rousseau. It’s a point worth making, since the name of Rousseau routinely crops up in relation to this communist vision. Critics frequently present Rousseau in terms of this harking back to the primitive and pure communism of the ‘state of nature’, thus exposing him to the kinds of Aristotelian criticisms I made above. Actually, Rousseau is guilty of nothing so simple. His view of the state of nature is actually quite unsentimental, certainly in comparison with those of his contemporaries. Rousseau is not portraying a past utopian paradise at all, but is engaged in a critical excavation to undermine illicit readings of current, atomistic, competitive bourgeois society into the past. He is showing us the origins of our modern society in order to make us face up to our predicament. From there, he explicitly argues that we need to move forwards to the realisation of our nature, a very different notion to going back to some lost state of nature.
So I shall go back to Rousseau, and his cooperative-anarchist vision of a free humanity as something grounded in moral freedom, a choice that human beings have to make, a good that they have to will – not something written into history, not a potentiality for which we must thank capitalism, an ideal contained within civilisation that we must redeem. Rousseau doesn’t give us the ‘high road’ of modernity, he doesn’t give us Faustian bargains. He doesn’t even give us metaphysics. He loathed the word and thought it stood for all that was wrong about philosophy. He seeks to give us the voice of nature and of conscience, and excoriates enlightened philosophers who have presented the natural savage through ‘metaphysical’ principles of ‘rational justice.’ He endlessly complains about vain metaphysicians who confidently shuffle words around. But his targets are precise – vain philosophers and metaphysicians. And that makes Rousseau, despite his protestations to the contrary, a fine philosopher and metaphysician in my book. He affirmed natural man’s ‘metaphysical and moral’ character. In being endowed with free will, human beings possess the ability to pursue virtue and vice, identify good and bad and make moral choices between them, make discoveries and errors that go far beyond the commands of physical instinct. Human beings can acquiesce in or resist the information and impulses of the senses, and it is in this that human moral freedom lies. Human beings are capable of becoming conscious of this freedom. And the capacity to choose between acquiescing and resisting, remaining unconscious or becoming conscious, and acting in accordance with that consciousness, constitutes a ‘spirituality of his soul,’ something that can never be explained, Rousseau stated, by the laws of sensationalist association which govern all animals. He was a metaphysician, alright, and one of the very best. Rousseau is a deeply profound metaphysician, he gives us something much more than a list of headings and subheadings and principles and precepts in a carefully defined table – he gives us a moral psychology of great insight and subtlety. In Rousseau's Platonic Enlightenment, David Lay Williams affirms ‘Rousseau’s commitment to the central doctrines of modern Platonic metaphysics—the existence of God, free will, an immaterial soul, and transcendent ideas’ (62), considering these to be the essential foundation of his political theory. And I agree. Rousseau’s general will is not a mere conventional doctrine grounded in nothing more substantial than consent and agreement, it is founded on the ‘the transcendent idea of justice’ (95, 113). And it was on this foundation that Rousseau challenged to the burgeoning materialism of the Enlightenment, putting these Platonic notions of transcendent norms on what he considered to be the firmest possible ground, the human conscience, the ‘inner sentiment’ that is engraved in the human heart. Justice, in this transcendent, metaphysical sense, is prior to Rousseau's political principles, and hence his politics are grounded in something much more substantial than convention and consent. But Williams makes a crucial point here: whilst Rousseau’s conception of justice is transcendent and universal, and thus independent of time and place, it is also indeterminate, meaning that the proper laws or institutions for a given nation are to be determined in relation to particular circumstances (120–1). Rousseau had a deep appreciation of both universal order and particular contexts. He who wishes to judge existing governments must combine" the "positive laws of established governments" with "the principles of political right." (Emile).
Something that Rousseau didn’t care for was metaphysical speculation. 'Metaphysical quibbles and subtleties have no weight compared with the fundamental principles adopted by my reason, confirmed by my heart, and which all bear the seal of inner assent in the silence of the passions' (i. 1018). It was left to Kant to appropriate his insights here and show the limitations of reason. But note well, the metaphysics that Rousseau criticized here was that of the abstractors and detractors, the quantifiers and analysts. Rousseau's key concerns are the old concerns of true metaphysics.
Rousseau affirmed that human nature is not evil and is not irredeemably corrupted. He affirmed that human beings are capable of living in a commonwealth of fellowship with each other through each coming to identify the common good as one’s own good, seeing individual liberty as something conditional upon and co-existent with the liberty of all others, and creating relations in which, in working for oneself, one works also for others at the same time. That’s a view that embraces federalism, human scale and social proximity, love of place, rootedness, simplicity, justice, direct and participatory forms, and communion with and reverence for something that is greater than our own egos.
Rousseau didn’t care much for the hypocrisies of ‘bourgeois’ civilisation. He walked around Paris and saw a lot of ‘masks’ but declared he had yet to see a human face. Such civilisation was inauthentic. Liberals criticise him as a ‘totalitarian democrat.’ He wanted a voluntary servitude, a total alienation, so that each and all are equal and united in their impersonal dependence upon law. The alternative? The preservation of atomistic natural liberty in the social state, human beings divided from each other and divided from themselves, neither natural nor civic, in between worlds, homeless, rootless, selfish, the social world as a sphere of universal antagonism. As for his totalitarianism, Rousseau’s vision entailed extensive public spaces based upon direct and participatory forms and structures, a self-governing society of active citizens who can see, identify with and love their civic duties. Citizens of this united totality pursue their well-being as the well-being of others within the forms of the common life. Such citizens are conscientious human beings who cannot be ‘deceived by the appearance of right’ in the manner of the ‘happy slaves’ of the enlightened world, inauthentic beings who have ‘the semblance of all the virtues without the possession of any.’ Liberals don’t care for Rousseau. But, as Rousseau said, it’s not for slaves to talk about liberty. And he didn't give us the facile 'back to nature' message either, he openly said that he didn't know how some such thing could be possible, even if it were desirable. He tried to take human beings forward to their realization of their true nature in a civil state under legitimate and lawful constraint.
Putting it all together, Rousseau gives us morals and metaphysics of the highest order. He isn’t stating principles with dry precision and terminological exactitude. Instead, he is in the middle of life and all its controversies. Kant somewhere declared his need to vulgarize his incredibly intellectual and remote ethical system in order to put it back in touch with common moral reason. Rousseau is too fine a writer to be called a vulgarizer. He is subtle, complex and intricate; but he is eminently readable too, and pertinent. He shows why morality and metaphysics matter, and he shows how they matter. He isn’t dry and boring. And that makes him the perfect figure for this task of metaphysical recovery and reconstruction. Which is ironic really. Rousseau made his name as the first and the greatest critic of modern civilisation – he may turn out to be its saviour. Rousseau’s teachings reveal to us the inner abundance that is our birthright. That abundance is recoverable.
It can be done. And I shall give it a go, with Rousseau as a superb interlocutor between natural law and rational freedom. He’s quite a figure. I would present him as an anarchist who eschews individualism and atomism and instead grounds liberty and justice in a democratic conception of authority. He doesn’t like large nation states, he doesn’t like remoteness and abstraction. He likes scaled city-republics, social proximity, warm, affective ties and bonds, the moeurs, traditions and habits of the heart, religion and the patrie, love of place, the ways of the Gospel, the example of Jesus, the conscience, Alpine mountains and wooden cabins dotting the hillside. I like him. He always was the philosopher I had most affinity for, not least because he thinks philosophers who persist in quibbling and splitting hairs have somewhat missed the point, and are apt to obfuscate rather than elucidate with their verbal vanity. Grandiloquent phrases concealing poverty of thought, visions and values. Rousseau has this knack of continually bringing us to that ‘so what?’ moment – why does any of it matter? And in forcing us to face that question, he brings it all back to essentials.
I’ll leave those who continue to assert that they are not pessimists but realists in basing their assessments on facts and evidence with this lesson. My first degree is history; I am trained in accessing, assimilating and evaluating facts. I know that the facts never speak for themselves. And I know that the facts of life are never simply given. I know that facts are historical, meaning that they are not the product of some objective, external, natural datum, they are the product of human choice, action, will, struggle. Such facts of life are never merely objective, they are humanly objective. So I’ll take no lessons from ‘fact-based thinkers’ who proceed to assert some natural necessity with all the inevitably of a vengeful god. That’s no religion I care to know, and no science I would respect. In such perspectives, ‘nature’ and all manner of unthinking, inanimate natural objects and physical laws do all the acting, and there is no role whatsoever for human agency, the true agents in all of this. I quote these lines from one ‘fact-based thinker’ who derides any solutions – technical and moral – to claim we are all doomed. ‘It's Nature's choice. She does what works.’ Hogwash. There is no such choice in nature. The notion of choice is a moral quality, a quality of human agency. Nature is as Nature does, but in these words I hear not Nature as such but a reification, Nature’s revenge taken in the form of human bitterness and despair at the failure of our machine gods. It’s a bogus metaphysics, and we need the real thing, just as much as we need the real nature.
And if I learned anything from history – and I was taught well and learned a lot – it is this: that historical change is always a synergistic interaction of material facts and interests and moral and metaphysical motives. Always. The missing moral/metaphysical is always the missing material, because to lose one is to skew and unbalance the entire symbiotic relation, destroying and perverting the character of the other. For want of a true metaphysics, we are condemned to live in accordance with a bogus metaphysics, and it is that impossibility that will see our end, misplacing our hopes and misfiring our technics to the last.