I’ve moved over to the Humanities Commons. I like to keep moving.
Things going on on Academia.
As to what these books are about …
Being at One
In this book I argue for a concept of ecological virtue as a condition for constituting a flourishing earthly commonwealth. I establish the virtues as qualities for successful living within specific social relations, putting character formation and social formation together to deliver a common control of collective forces that is based upon personal (co)responsibility. In conceiving these qualities along ecological lines, then ‘successful living’ takes shape as sustainable living in the ecological society. At this point it becomes possible to call back the old eudaimonistic notion of flourishing well. The book therefore needs to be set against the background of Owen Flanagan’s book The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World (2007), where Flanagan writes of ‘eudaimonistic scientia’, or ‘eudaimonics’ for short, which he defines as the ‘empirical-normative inquiry into the nature, causes, and conditions of human flourishing.’ Establishing these conditions in terms of the institutions, structures, practices and relations in which human and planetary flourishing go hand in hand, I seek to recover the ancient unity of ethics and politics in an ecological context, thereby outlining the contours of the Ecopolis of the future.
Plenty of the arguments in Being at One comes from MacIntyre and Nussbaum in philosophy, Flannery in ecology, Wilson in biology, Robert Wright on the non-zero sum society, (The nonzero-sum moment - our welfare is crucially correlated with the welfare of the other etc.), Stuart Kauffman on the self-organising creative universe, and many more. The originality of this thesis lies in the way these sources are brought together in an integral framework concerning the dialectic of natural dependency, moral independence and social and ecological interdependence.
Marx’s Socialism from Within, three volumes
Volume One of Marx's Socialism from Within.
Social Restitution and Metabolic Restoration in the Thought of Karl Marx
In this work I recover the ecological dimension of Marx's critique of political economy. Within the triadic framework of humanity-labour/production-nature, I demonstrate that Marx goes beyond the abstractions of 'Man,' 'Reason,' and 'Nature' to place the emphasis upon mediation. Focusing upon the alienated character of capital's second order mediations, Marx reveals the forces behind the disturbance in the 'metabolic interaction' between humanity and nature. Arguing for regulating this interchange in a 'rational way,' Marx shows what is required for the restoration of healthy growth in the relation between the social metabolism and the universal metabolism of nature.
Volume Two of Marx’s Socialism from Within
Ethics, Essence and Immanence: Marx’s Normative Essentialism
I develop Marx's socialism in terms of a concept of rational freedom. This concept holds that the freedom of each individual is conditional upon and co-existent with the freedom of all individuals. In turn I ground this concept in Marx's normative essentialist anthropology, arguing that Marx espouses an ethics of immanence in which human nature and the realization of healthy potentials for flourishing form the basis of socialism. I show that Marx's argument is infused with essentialist categories.
Volume Three of Marx’s Socialism from Within
A Home and a Resting Place: Homo Religiosus: The Reality of Religious Truth and Experience
Here I consider Marx’s relation to religion, arguing that Marx requires the existence of transcendent norms, truths and values in order to make good his emancipatory claims, checking dangers of a ‘men as gods’ delusion that engulfs the world in a universal hatred. I examine ethics in light of Nietzsche’s ‘death of God’ to show the need for a totalizing political ethics. I end with a substantial chapter on the virtuous communities of Alasdair MacIntyre, arguing that these need to be scaled up to achieve the large scale social embodiment of the good.
People ask me for solutions and strategies. I’ve done all I can to let them know what they have need of. They either don't like or disagree, which is fine. I can do the easy bit - appreciate that we are nature and that we are natural beings. Now then, how did we end up with social institutions and economic systems that have removed us ever further from our bio-ecological matrix? That's when it gets tricky. People need to ponder why E.F. Schumacher, whom they claim to love, had to write A Guide for the Perplexed to make it clear to them what he meant by a deeper, more enduring, reconstruction. People have continued to focus on the easy bit of his work, appropriate technology. To Schumacher, they remained perplexed. I don’t give easy answers. I’m tired of accumulating words on this, it’s not the right way – forming characters in the first place is far more effective than forever trying to inform heads. But, apparently, that’s prescriptive, and notions of the common good are oppressive of difference and otherness. Politically and ethically disarmed and disabled, humanity lacks the collective wit to make a common stand in a common cause.
I have an introduction to Meszaros too, and Dante, Winstanley and Mumford to come, in nice hard copy. And I need to return to Plato’s well-tempered order, just to make it clear where I’m coming from. I know where I’m going to. Wales this summer. Joel Kovel wrote beautifully on the impossibility of living on a destinationless voyage. The phrase ‘lost traveller’ he used as the title of his memoir came from William Blake. For the healing of spirit and community in our true native land.
I'll give it to you straight: Material sufficiency, virtuous action and right relationships within the form and forms of the common life, character formation and social formation proceeding hand in hand, constituted by virtuous communities of practice embedding and extending the good on ever-larger scale – either we set about reconstituting society or we don’t, we carry on with tinkering institutional and engineering approaches, dreaming of systems and strategies so perfect that no-one will need to be good or do good, our technics continuing to misfire. Communities of character, communities of practice, the happy habitus in which we teach, acquire and exercise the virtues as qualities for successful living.
And I’m drained and need a break before a change in direction. I'm off to Wales in July, across North Wales, Llandudno, then down into Betws-y-Coed. Good walking country around here, picturesque, lovely village. Then I'm off to Anglesey, Holy Island. Want to get up Holyhead mountain again, spend some time around South Stack. Then walk down and enjoy the scenery at Rhoscolyn. Looking forward to the Diggers’ Festival in Wigan, too.