The Whole World Order … and the delusions of separation.
Is politics a matter of Truth, as with Plato? Or is its temper judicious, as with Aristotle? I'm just kicking some questions around loosely here. Because although we may live in a 'rational universe', reason is but one part of the human experience. We lose the rest at our peril. But ... maybe it is indeed all self-contained, the agency, the will, the motivations, beliefs, perceptions are bound up with the harmony of the true, the good and the beautiful. I would cite the work of theoretical physicists and biologists like Wheeler or Kauffman, for whom we live in a ceaselessly creative universe, with agency, will, meaning as inherent parts of that creativity, what Wheeler calls a 'participatory universe'. Understood in this way, there can be no 'regardless of all other things', insofar as values, beliefs, perceptions are on the inside of the whole order, rather than being systems, codes and inventions 'made up' on the outside, subjective preferences with no grounding in anything but a self-legislating reason.
I raise these issues in light of this article:
‘The art of changing the climate debate
‘Scientific knowledge is vital but on its own will never change our environmental behaviour. The key to that is to incorporate skills from the other side of the traditional science-humanities divide, say Trinity College academics’.
‘'Scientific knowledge is vital but on its own will never change our environmental behaviour. The key to that is to incorporate skills from the other side of the traditional science-humanities divide, say Trinity College academics.'
'Scientific knowledge is vital but on its own will never change our behaviour.'
“Climate change is a human problem,” Travis says, “and the key to tackling it is dealing with the human condition. The natural scientists have been magnificent in ringing the alarm bells, but they are not equipped to deal with human agency and human perception.”’
The article here, and the full document it contains 'Humanities for the Environment—A Manifesto for Research and Action' repay close attention. Because it looks at a slightly different issue - the status and dignity of the humanities as the things by which we order our lives. Is that quest satisfied by number alone? Depends what we mean by number. It depends what we mean by science too. At what point did fact and value part company, with the reduction of the former to meaningless matter and the latter to irrelevant epiphenomenon? Is the world of reason, logic and evidence Is the ethical component built into that world or discarded to a place outside of it?
I hold the view that modern moral theories and intellectual controversies are based upon false dichotomies and dilemmas. This begs the real question as to from where these dichotomies and dilemmas arises. Because, as much as they are intellectually false, I would argue they are socially necessary and socially produced within certain prevailing social relations. They are false views of the world deriving from a false world, ideological inversions that are accurate expressions of an inverted world.
It’s getting frustrating for me to read articles like this, because I am seeing growing recognition – and publication – on things I’ve been saying for years. I have spent too long preparing and reading – and thinking – and not enough on writing. I am resuming work tomorrow, with a strict writing timetable, and I shall keep repeating the view that we need to focus on the transition between contemplation and action, bridge the gap between theoretical reason (scientific knowledge, what we know of the reality and how we know it) and practical reason (ethics, politics and economics, what we ought to do, what we believe, norms and values, how we organise our interchange with nature). And that means getting into the motivational economy of human beings – rendering our knowledge appetitive, creating the will for action, the vision or ideal that motivates, inspires and obligates us, sustains us often against contrary facts, as well as revealing facts that are in our favour. I believe that we live in an objectively valuable world, that we are creative agents in a ceaselessly creative universe that embodies meaning, purpose, will and agency.
I am, indeed, hoping that the human race is at long, long last re-learning some very old lessons here. Lessons from Plato and Aristotle, certainly, with respect to the relation between theoretical reason and practical reason. Aristotle was a man of science, the first scientist according to Armand Leroi. He works to show the implications of biology for ethics and politics. But he is clear that ethics and politics is the field of practical reason which shapes what human beings do with their knowledge and know-how.
As an example of some very old wisdom we have lost and are now slowly re-learning, here is St Thomas Aquinas, for whom prudence is an intellectual disposition as well as a moral disposition. The point is that prudence is a disposition quite unlike knowledge. This is because knowledge is not a virtue in the truest sense defined by Aquinas, since it lacks an appetitive component. Knowledge would be a genuine virtue if it made one positively desire to grasp the true. But knowledge is not appetitive in this sense: "[H]aving knowledge does not make one want to consider the truth; it just makes one able to do so" (QDVC 7c). ‘We all know, in some sense of 'know', the difference between right and wrong. But we do not all desire to embrace this knowledge and let it guide our lives. The disposition of prudence guarantees that our intellect will attend to the relevant information we possess. Guided by the virtue of justice, the prudent person will fasten on those aspects of the situation that bear on treating others fairly and equally. Guided by the virtue of temperance, the prudent person will dwell on resisting temptation. In these cases, Aquinas describes the intellect as "following the will." The underlying disposition "more truly has the nature of a virtue inasmuch as it gives a person not just the ability or the knowledge to act rightly, but also the will to do so" (QDVC 7c). Prudence does this, not because it is a virtue of the will, but because it holds intellect steadfast in its orientation, allowing the will to act in accord with right reason so as best to pursue the ends that the virtuous person desires by a kind of second nature.’
As for dilemmas, a lot depends on how we understand and approach science.
We need to relate knowledge and now-how to prevailing social relationships.
OK, there is order, we live in the rational universe. I believe that the world is ‘objectively valuable’ rather than ‘objectively valueless’. The significance of these terms is made clear in the piece I am currently writing for a blog post and shall post below.
We shouldn’t expect science to be able to do the work of politics and ethics. At long last we seem to be treating the issue with moral psychological depth and getting into the motivational economy of human beings. The ancients made the distinction between theoretical reason and practical reason. Someone like Aristotle could show how descriptions of how the world ‘is’ and how the world ‘ought-to-be’ are connected, he was a pioneer biologist who thought biology had implications for politics and ethics.
Oceanographer Ken Caldeira has been saying some interesting things on this question in recent years.
‘The central question facing us is how to transform societies composed of self-interested people into societies composed of people who act to further the public good.’
― Ken Caldeira
Now, we can certainly state the rational case for that. I’ve been doing it endlessly with reference to any number of philosophers. Try Spinoza, ‘the more man is guided by reason, the more he is free’. I can present a clear and coherent argument of the political order for Spinoza’s rational universe. But that’s not the hard part. The hard part is messy human life, the desires, the passions, the appetites, the world of vested interests – there is no principle of non-attachment here, it doesn’t have any critical purchase, it doesn’t motivate, inspire, obligate. So that’s where I come in.
At some point in our history, the worlds of fact and value parted company. To appeal to the long-term common good under prevailing social relations presupposes a social identity that does not exist – there is no direct relations between individual self-interest and social interest. To ask individuals to sacrifice their immediate self-interest for a long-range common interest is irrational given prevailing notions of rationality. How do we rework rationality? We need new social relations that give us a social identity which makes it rational for individuals to pursue a good greater than their individual good.
As Rousseau put it a long time ago,
Rousseau asks ‘can a man live for others if he is brought up to live for himself?’ Rousseau states that a man cannot truly live for others unless he is educated to live for himself. ‘If these two aims could be united into one, we could resolve man’s self-contradictions, and remove the one great obstacle to his happiness’ (I.8-9). Living for oneself is living for others; there is a reciprocity in Rousseau’s conception of authenticity. (It’s there in the work of others too: ‘Make each one love and see himself in the others, so that all may be the better united (d’Alembert 1948:169).
‘The undertakings which bind us to the social body are obligatory only because they are mutual; and their nature is such that in fulfilling them we cannot work for others without working for ourselves. Why is it that the general will is always upright, and that all continually will the happiness of each one, unless it is because there is not a man who does not think of ‘each’ as meaning him, and consider him in voting for all? This proves that equality of rights and the idea of justice which such equality creates originates in the preference each man gives to himself, and accordingly in the very nature of man. It proves that the general will, to be really such, must be general in its object as well as its essence; that it must both come from all and apply to all; and that it loses its natural rectitude when it is directed to some particular and determinate object, because in such a case we are judging of something foreign to us, and have no true principle of equity to guide us.’
Rousseau SC II.iv
So how do we get that social identity which connects the individual and the social good, implying a moral obligation within a public order in which we work for others when we work for ourselves? As Rousseau puts it: ‘The undertakings which bind us to the social body are obligatory only because they are mutual; and their nature is such that in fulfilling them we cannot work for others without working for ourselves.’
Political obligation for Rousseau is not imposed upon human beings, as something external. Rousseau is attempting an anti-authoritarian justification of collective authority. This authority is legitimate given that it is individuals who constitute it and hence choose to obligate themselves whilst keeping the terms of obedience under continuous scrutiny and check.
How is it that we have lost meaning, purpose and value in our understanding of and in our relations to the world, to others, to our own powers?
Rousseau has some interesting things to say about inequality. Inequality is a destructive force when it compels individuals to depend on others in order to exist. In this manner Rousseau argued that wealth should be distributed so that ‘no citizen should be rich enough to be able to buy another, and none so poor as to be forced to sell himself’ (SC II.11 392).
Equality and equitable social relationships form part of the solution. Chomsky, being slightly provocative, described Aristotle as a ‘dangerous radical’ for taking it for granted that a democracy could only be realised as a fully participatory political order aiming for the common good. And to achieve that it has to ensure relative equality, ‘moderate and sufficient property’ and ‘lasting prosperity’ for everyone. Such are the social conditions of the ‘rational freedom’ I argue for in my work, an ethic which holds that the freedom/happiness of each individual and of all individuals is coexistent.
But let’s look deeper into this question.
The two intellectual heavyweights of ancient Greece were Plato and Aristotle. Let’s have a look at these.
I greatly enjoyed Armand Leroi’s book and documentary ‘Aristotle’s Lagoon’. He recognises that Aristotle was ‘the authority’ to be overthrown by modern scientists. Study nature not books was the cry of modern scientists – and Aristotle would have been the first to agree with that statement. ‘I love Plato’, Aristotle said, ‘but I love truth more.’
‘Taking things apart was the task of twentieth century biology. Putting them back together again is the task of the twenty-first century,’ says Armand Leroi.
Now then, hold on here …. as Armand Leroi makes clear, Aristotle’s achievement as a scientist was precisely to take things apart, to define and classify, organise and order. If we need to put it all back together again – insofar as a world mechanised, reduced and dissected can ever be put back together again – then we need a holistic understanding. Plato affirmed a deeper truth all along, something greater than the parts.
Allow me to quote from something I wrote a few years ago with respect to Plato and Aristotle:
‘In forcing us to confront 'apocalypse', anthropogenic global heating exposes a fault line running through our mental universe – the split between reductionism and holism. Aristotle was a great systemizer and categorizer, imposing definitions and organising the materials of the world into neat, separate boxes. The academic world is Aristotelian to the core, organising knowledge about the world into distinct departments and disciplines. There is plenty to be said for the approach. It may have been the only way our limited minds could bring the entirety of the universe within the grasp of our limited intellects. The universe is infinite, yet our cognitive resources are limited. We only have so much time, our brains can only hold so much information. So it makes sense to break things up and organise them and parcel the whole knowledge out to specialists and experts.
The problem is, we come to lose the sense of the whole picture. The earliest philosophers focuses not just on the rational approach to the universe, but expressed a taste for the mythopoetic. Unscientific, we may say, but it was a way of accessing truths that would otherwise have remained untouched, beyond the reach of our limited rational tools. The pre-Socratic philosophers, certainly, employed meta-constructs in order to make sense of their factual observations. Something of this approach carried on into Plato, the supreme rationalist, who nevertheless wrote sublimely mysterious books like the Timaeus. But even in eminently rationalist works like The Laws and Critias, Plato interwove impeccably rational accounts of prehistoric Greek climate change or natural history with a mythology that sets the facts within a morally and socially instructive context.
In this respect, Plato’s philosophy may be presented as an organic or essentialist rationalism. Plato incorporate the primal roots of Greek civilisation in his conception of creation which perceived the world to be a living organism. In Timaeus, Plato argues that the creator created ‘a single visible living being, containing within itself all living beings of the same natural order’ (Plato Timaeus, trans HDP Lee, Harmondsworth Penguin 1965:54 42-3). Plato thus offered a cosmological interpretation of the world as a single, living organism.
Desiring then, that all things should be good and nothing imperfect, the god took over all that was visible .. and brought it from disorder into order…
For the God, wishing to make this world most nearly like that intelligible thing which is best and in every way complete, fashioned it as a single, visible living creature .. with sense and reason.
The important point to grasp is that Plato expressed a holistic conception of the world. Rather than a reductionism that broke the world down into parts, each to be parcelled out to a narrow specialism, Plato saw the whole picture. Plato thus recounts how the creator made:
this world a single complete whole, consisting of parts that are wholes, and subject neither to age nor disease. The shape he gave it was suitable to its nature. A suitable shape for a living being that was to contain within itself all living beings would be a figure that contains all possible figures within itself. Therefore he turned it into a rounded spherical shape… And he put soul in the centre and diffused it through the whole and enclosed the body in it. So he established a single spherical universe in circular motion, alone but because of its excellence needing no company other than itself, and satisfied to be its acquaintance and friend. His creation, then, for all these reasons, was a blessed god.
Plato 1965:44-5
In simple terms – insofar as Plato’s views could ever be expressed simply – Plato's central theme is that hubris in human action soon comes to meet its nemesis in the shape of ecocide. Plato writes that where once Attica was a fecund landscape criss-crossed by streams and rivers, now all was arid:
There are remaining only the bones of the wasted body, as they may be called .. all the richer and softer parts of the soil have fallen away, and the mere skeleton of the land being left. But in the primitive state of the country, its mountains were high hills covered with soil, and the plains .. were full of rich earth, and there was abundance of wood in the mountains.
Plato, Critias, trans B. Jowett, Oxford, 1982, 111b,c.
Plato’s criticisms apply not only to Attica, nor only to the way that most of ancient Greece came to suffer grievous soil erosion as a result of wanton human-made development, but to a modern world bent on ecological despoliation.
The problem is that we cannot see the bigger picture. Our mentalities, our disciplinary approach to knowledge, our universities, follow in the specialising footsteps. The universal nature of the ecological crisis demand that we adopt a holistic, interdisciplinary approach, concentrating our specialist knowledge upon the one area. We are hobbled by disciplinary specialization. The meticulous attention to detail is achieved at the expense of a wider grounding, with the result that we come to know more and more about less and less until the point comes when we know absolutely everything about absolutely nothing. The more we see the detail, the less we see the whole picture. To address a universal problem like ecological crisis we need to develop a generalist overview. The strengths of reductionism and specialism are many, but the fatal weakness is the narrowed vision and reduced capacity when it comes to discerning 'meaning' and ‘life’ – apparently the universe is meaningless and the Earth lacks the qualities that meet the criteria of life. Could it be that specialists are looking so closely that they can only see the world through a squint? The question needs to be addressed because more than ever experts are being called upon to deliver knowledge in a concise and comprehensible form to ease its translation into public policy and thereby change the way we live our lives. And that, too, is a collective endeavour, that is, it requires a holistic approach.
Since the crisis in the climate system is multi-faceted and far reaching in its impact and effects, the limitations of reductionism and specialisation is becoming glaringly apparent. The consequences are potentially very serious, even fatal, for the human prospect.’
The dilemma manifests itself here …
The two key thinkers of modernity for me are Karl Marx and Max Weber (Weber himself said Marx and Nietzsche). Let’s have a look:
Karl Marx and his alienation thesis – the divorce and inversion of subject and object, the investment of objects with an existential significance that properly belongs to subjects – the reduction of all bonds and solidarities to monetary ties , commercial values and accumulative imperatives;
Max Weber and his rationalisation thesis – Weber turned the separation of the working class from the means of production into a general separation of human beings from all means of control and life.
Nietzsche and ‘the death of God’ follows from this. Nietzsche called our modern moral theories out, showing them to be empty, ‘made up’, masks for power.
Where once we had an overarching ethical framework for canalising individual behaviours and actions to a morally meaningful common end, now we have vacuous universal systems. It’s no wonder that our technics continue to misfire, that we fail to act on our knowledge, that we fail to use our know-how wisely.
Modern morality is thus a myriad subjectivisms and nihilisms, emotivism, intuitionism, situationism, contextualism … Empty. I’ve studied Kant for decades now. He was a genius. He nearly achieved the impossible in giving modernity a moral grounding. It doesn’t exist. Hence recent philosophers talking about groundless grounds. I’ve turned away from it. The idea of a self-legislating reason sounds liberatory but it merely begs the question. The only option in these circumstances is a pragmatism in which there are no pre-political truths, only a public forum based on forms of self-expression and in which individuals check each other and a workable truth emerges. Consensus, agreement, all very necessary to a viable social order. But truth?
So what was lost with the Weberian ‘disenchantment of the world’?
We lost the sense of inherent value, we lost the sense of inherent worth.
Nietzsche was right in exposing the implications of neutralism in moral philosophy. His scandal was not to announce the ‘death of God’, but to point to the gaping whole at the centre of modern moral philosophy.
We lost purpose. I shall be making the case in my writing fo
I approach life from an ancient, perennial, moral view concerning the functioning and flourishing of things. From my Being and Place website:
‘The spirituality at the core of green politics refers to the oneness and connectedness of human beings with nature and with each other. The perennial wisdom, embodied in all the great moral systems, teaches that the ultimate purpose of human life is not the pursuit of material desires and their complete satisfaction but, rather, the experience of self-actualisation in the core of one’s being that comes from becoming one with the metaphysical unity of the universe.’
‘Time out of mind it has been by the way of the ‘final cause,’ by the teleological concept of end, of purpose or of ‘design,’ in one of its many forms .. . that men have been chiefly wont to explain the phenomena of the living world: and it will be so while men have eyes to see and ears to hear withal. With Galen as with Aristotle, it was the physician's way; with John Ray as with Aristotle it was the naturalist's way; with Kant as with Aristotle it was the philosopher's way. ... It is a common way, and a great way; for it brings with it a glimpse of a great vision, and it lies deep as the love of nature in the hearts of men.’
—D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, On Growth and Form, 1942
I approach values in terms of purpose, morality and intrinsic value. To have moral values is to have a sense of good and bad. But on what do these notions rest? Are they merely evolved instincts? I have no trouble with the idea of the moral sense as evolved, not with moral particulars evolving. But I have trouble with the idea of the world as a mechanism based on a dualism of body and mind, flesh and spirit. I criticise the Cartesian disembodied mind and seek to bring the world back to its senses. Modern ethics just about makes sense in terms of the dualistic version of the mechanistic paradigm. I consider these to be false dualisms raising dilemmas that need not arise, with this rider – they are the necessary dilemmas and delusions of a particular way of understanding, appropriating and using the world (conceptually and commercially). Splitting mind and matter, reducing ‘the real world’ to matter, we no longer see ‘value’ or ‘purpose’, so they are deemed not to exist. The only value in the world belongs to human beings the valuers.
This question cannot be settled by observable facts. Nature can give examples of harmony, it can give examples of disharmony, joy, pain, suffering, take your pick. The issue is one of evaluation – what is value, where does value lie, who is the valuer?
I’m steeped enough in history to know that throughout human history, human beings have responded well to the world that enfolds and sustains them believing it is full of value and purpose.
I’ll say: man may be the measurer of all things, but he is not the measure of all things.
We lost the sense of purpose. I shall be looking to bring it back in my writing. Let’s call it a modified teleology so as not to frighten too many. Teleology is neither fate nor destiny, lines of development are frustratable. My approach is value-centred too, bringing in the work of modern philosophers on the subjective factor, human beings as morally autonomous beings capable of choice. But this indicates much philosophical work is to come. For now, let’s say that this affirmation of purpose invokes the idea that our lives have an overall direction and it is important that we should proceed according to it. (Good discussion of function, destiny and teleology in Why Think?: The Evolution of the Rational Mind by R de Sousa 2007 Ox UP)
Where does value lie? Is value something inherent in the world? Or is it we, the human valuers, who invest the world with value? The moderns have taken the latter view. But it’s all based upon this key figure of ‘separation’, separation from the world, separation between disciplines and ways of knowing, separation of human beings from each other. Specialisation, fragmentation.
In what Max Weber called ‘the disenchantment of the world’, the world is stripped of inherent meaning and means are enlarged to displace ends, reason is detached from its ethical component, instrumental rationality is extended over the world, substantive rationality loses its grounding.
Let’s define this Weberian modernisation concisely. Weber defines the processes of social rationalization in such a way as to make clear where fragmentation, specialisation, the parcelling out of knowledge, separation, and loss of meaning comes from.
(i) the differentiation of social spheres into specialized and quasi-autonomous institutions;
(ii) the growth of abstract conceptualizations of sovereignty and power, which in turn made possible the gradual development of the abstract citizen in the urban city cultures of western Europe;
(iii) the extension of formal, abstract rationality to the creation of law, the formulation of theology as a science, the transformation of architecture into a utilitarian practice, and the conversion of medicine from a manual art into an abstract science of disease entities;
(iv) the adoption of bureaucratic standards of procedure in all major public institutions;
(v) the final separation of the private (emotional) and public (rational) world within which separate mentalities or characters were to develop; and
(vi) the secularization and disenchantment of culture, producing, not a uniformity of values, but a polytheistic reality of competing perspectives without an integrating or unifying principle. In short, we can define modernity as an effect of modernization and we can define modernization a la Weber as rationalization. (From Bryan Turner, 1993 Max Weber: From History to Modernity (Routledge London and New York)
The result is that the more we come to know about the world, the less meaning it has. That is the understanding of scientific knowledge and rationality that has characterised modernity as a rationalisation. That is not the character of ‘science’ as such or a criticism of science as such – that is how science and religion/ethics, the worlds of fact and value parted company under modern social relations.
The dilemmas and delusions we face are inherent in modern social relations and will not be resolved by intellectual correction alone. I fully recognise that Weber’s point contra Marx is precisely the power of ideas and not just material interests, and I affirm that historical change is always a combination of material interests and moral/metaphysical motivations.
Diremption, dualism, division, however we want to put it, these are the terms by which countless modern philosophers characterise modernity.
‘The ignorant man is unfree because he faces a world which is foreign to himself, a world within which he tosses to and fro aimlessly, to which he is related only externally, unable to unite the alien world to himself and to feel at home in it as much as in his home.’ (Hegel).
‘I am at home in the world when I know it, still more so when I have understood it.’ (Hegel).
Where did this alien world come from? We created it. We created our own world and our own values. ‘Estrangement’ arose from the commodification of the world (Marx) or the rationalisation of the world (Weber). Where once we held ‘value’ to refer to things as ‘having value’ in themselves and ‘being valuable’ in themselves, now the value comes from the outside. Human beings confer the value. And under prevailing relations, this has been a monetary value and an instrumental value, things are valued as means to human ends. The things of the world are merely of instrumental value, on account of contributing to the value of something or someone else, they are not ‘intrinsically’ valuable for their own sakes. That distinction arises from the way we see the world, relate to it, seek to possess, use and exploit it to entirely human ends. That’s the modern revolution. That’s modernity. Liberatory in so many ways. But so disempowering in others. Jonathan Kingdon wrote a book called ‘Self-Made Man and his Undoing.’ Our undoing is to see the whole world as the self-made human world, human civilisation divorced from its ecological conditions, and to see ourselves as lords and masters in our own world. I referred to Marx earlier. Marx defined human emancipation in terms of the practical reappropriation of human powers from the alien forms of state, capital, commodity etc and their reorganisation as social powers. That points to a social self-mediation. But there is a danger here of idolatry, the worship of the products of our own hands, a world governed by a (self-made, Kantian self-legislated), Reason extended over all things. A world enclosed in Reason. Weber’s rationalisation. Was this Hegel’s Reason? Hegel’s understanding as more than knowing?
‘Hegel is to be honoured for having willed something great and having failed to accomplish it.’ (Soren Kierkegaard). The best of the moderns, in my view, are trying to piece back together a common good and a common ground rent asunder by modern social relations. Unfortunately, their Reason has all the hallmarks of an axiological extensionism, reinforcing the very rationalisation we need to counteract. That’s a sweeping statement that needs all manner of philosophical work and qualification to be clarified. I can only refer to the work I’ve already done here.
The Kantian idea of a self-legislative reason is certainly liberatory, and I continue to admire Kant’s philosophy for all the reasons I have set out over the years of studying him. But the more I studied Kant, the more I realised his universal and inter-subjective ethic presupposes the very Christian framework – (Kant’s ethic of ends, treating human beings as ends, never merely as means etc) – that was dissolving under the onslaught of the means-ends instrumental rationality of the modern capitalist relations. In time, Kant’s inter-subjectivism dissolves into a subjectivism. His notion of the ‘highest good’ lacks grounds.
What does this imply? This implies that the liberatory view that ‘we create our own values’ begs the question of what values do we create and why. We end up with Einstein noting: 'Formerly’, Einstein argued, 'one had perfect aims but imperfect means. Today we have perfect means and tremendous possibilities but confused goals' (Einstein quoted in Roger Garaudy, The Alternative Future 1975:39). The extension of means to displace ends results in confused goals. The view that ‘we create our own values’ brings about confused ends and the assertion that ‘we ought to create our own values’. And ‘ought’ implies ‘can’. It still sounds liberatory. But it is question-begging and circular and self-defeating and reducing. Here is Don Cupitt claiming that we live in an ‘objectively valueless’ world
‘Our task is to make our own faith come true by building the Kingdom of God on earth. We do it all... Ethics is not a matter of fitting into a ready-made moral order, but of designing and building a better one... We are objectively valueless, but we give each other value when we love one another. And the most rational faith to adopt and to act upon is that which leads us to value each person, each aspect of the world and our life, as highly as is self-consistently possible.’
(‘The greening of faith in a damaged world'. The Guardian, 3 October 1988).
Cupitt denies the idea of a ready-made morality in an ‘objectively valueless’ world and so urges that we have to – ought to – create our own morality. There is no moral obligation in an objectively valueless world, therefore we must create our own moral obligation … The reasoning is self-contradictory. But it is not merely an intellectual error. The error lies in the heart of the inverted, disenchanted world in which we live. The dilemmas we face may be intellectually false, but they are necessary dilemmas and delusions, in that they are inherent in modern understandings and social relations. They will not be removed by an intellectual resolution, they will need that practical transformation Marx always emphasised. The dilemmas are not ideological, they are the intellectual expression of inversion in an inverted world.
II
The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth, i.e. the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question.
Ill
The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that it is essential to educate the educator himself. This doctrine must, therefore, divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society.
The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice.
VIII
All social life is essentially practical. All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice.
Marx, Theses on Feuerbach
In my own work, I detailed how the intersubjectivism of Kant’s universal moral law was not strong enough to resist the degeneration into the subjectivism – even nihilism – of modern moral theories. In an ‘objectively valueless’ world, the Summum Bonum, the ‘highest good’ which Kant made the centre-pin of his ethical system – and which I certainly support – lacks objective grounds, but stands in need of creation by a Kantian self-legislated reason. And that. We now know, is not enough, merely a circular reason that begs the question and, in the absence of an answer (with respect to an objectively valuable world) invites dissolution into a world of instrumental rationality, utilitarianism, egoism, subjectivism – the morality of emotivism and intuitionism, mere likes and dislikes, irreducible subjective opinion, preferences, myriad ‘value judgements’, Weber’s polytheism of values, wishful thinking – with no criteria for deciding between any of the ‘values’ expressed. Hence we live in a demoralised social order with nothing better than a liberal framework that is neutral on competing notions of the good.
The dilemma of modern morality is not that modernity cannot generate its own morality. It can and does. The dilemma is that it can offer no good grounds and no good reasons for taking its moral theories seriously, and no reasons for anyone to act on these theories. We have been demoralised and disempowered. We have lost a sense of the whole, a sense of value and purpose, a way of relating our own selves to something larger.
In one form or another, our modern moralities are just so many expressions of self-interest and self-assertion. This is what I mean when I say ‘there are no good reasons’ for taking modern moral theories seriously. The only ‘reasons’ for respecting any values at all are instrumental ones, manipulate the behaviour of other individuals and/or using the ‘resources’ of nature for purely personal gain and aggrandisement. Marx was off the block quickly on this, writing in 1843, pointing to a split between the ‘unreal universality’ of the state’s political community:
'Where the political state has attained its full degree of development man leads a double life, a life in heaven and a life on earth, not only in his mind, in his consciousness, but in reality. He lives in the political community, where he regards himself as a communal being, and in civil society, where he is active as a private individual, regards other men as means, debases himself to a means and becomes a plaything of alien powers. The relationship of the political state to civil society is just as spiritual as the relationship of heaven to earth. The state stands in the same opposition to civil society and overcomes it in the same way as religion overcomes the restrictions of the profane world, i.e. it has to acknowledge it again, reinstate it and allow itself to be dominated by it. Man in his immediate reality, in civil society, is a profane being. Here, where he regards himself and is regarded by others as a real individual, he is an illusory phenomenon. In the state, on the other hand, where he is considered to be a species-being, he is the imaginary member of a fictitious sovereignty, he is divested of his real individual life and filled with an unreal universality.’
Marx EW OJQ 1975
The only problem now is that the ‘unreal universality’ of the state’s political community and citizenship at least embodied notions of ‘the good life’, however illusory and heavenly. Now, we have the neutral liberal framework with no views at all on the good, holding the ring between competing views, with no criteria of deciding between them in a demoralised and ‘objectively valueless’ world.
All value, purpose and morality have been driven from this 'disenchanted' world, and Friedrich Nietzsche blew the cover on overarching moral theories that continued claimed some universal truth or good:
‘No one is accountable for existing at all, or for being constituted as he is, or for living in the circumstances and surroundings in which he lives... He is not the result of a special design, a will, a purpose; he is not the subject of an attempt to attain to an 'ideal of man' or an 'ideal of happiness' or 'an ideal of morality' — it is absurd to want to hand over his nature to some purpose or other. We invented the concept 'purpose': in reality purpose is lacking.’
Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 1889
I firmly believe that Nietzsche was correct about morality and moral theories within modernity. He is not right about morality as such. I am in firm agreement here with Alasdair MacIntyre. In the context of this argument, Nietzsche is calling time on modern moral theories and their claims to embody a universal truth and goodness in an ‘objectively valueless’ world. But he is right only insofar as we accept the modern view that the world is indeed ‘objectively valueless’. This has been the dominant modern understanding.
As I wrote in my PhD thesis all those years ago now with respect to the claim that the world lacks intrinsic mean:
‘The fate of our times is characterised by rationalisation and intellectualisation and, above all, by the "disenchantment of the world"’ (Weber, SV 1991:155). Philosophy is stripped of its normative dimension in relation to the world. Underlining the 'queerness' of the view that such a world might contain values, J. L. Mackie questions how objective values could relate to or co-exist with those characteristics revealed by science; by what means we could come to know of them; and what possible relevance they could have to our existence (Mackie 1977:38/42).'
Mackie’s view has been the dominant one. The title of his book - Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong – says it all. Moral arguments presuppose the existence of a right and wrong. But there is no right and wrong, human being invent them. Mackie thus examines, criticises and rejects the main moral theories and proposes in their place an ‘error theory’. We are therefore charged with the task of living without value, purpose and morality altogether, a disenchanted, demoralised world is all that we have, and any attempt to anchor human life in an overarching moral theory is merely a refusal to face reality. Like the existentialists, we are charged with the exacting moral task of finding meaning in an objectively meaningless world. It's a desperate situation.
‘Every religion, practically every philosophy, and even some of science, all bear witness to the tireless, heroic and desperate effort of humanity to negate the contingency of its own existence.’
—Jacques Monod
If the world is meaningless, then the science and ethics that proclaims it so is even more so. If Mackie is right, then he is wrong – the view that we ought to create our own values has no real meaning. It avers a moral obligation in a world that lacks the grounds for such an obligation, seeing values as social constructions without grounds. All such reasoning is pointless.
Such rejections and reductions of morality are not wrong: they are right about the condition of morality within modernity. The dilemmas and delusions may be intellectually false, but they are correct in expressing a truth about the diremptive social world in which we live, the way modern social relations have emptied the world of meaning, parcelled the world – and the ways of knowing it and using it – out into various disciplines and mechanisms. If we want the ‘objectively valuable’ world back, then we need to put fact and value back together, we need to put means and ends back together, and bring our relations back within our reach and comprehension.
My view? The quest for meaning goes on, it defines us as human. Is that desperate? No.
‘In the last resort, man should not ask, 'What is the meaning of my life?' but should realise that he himself is being questioned. Life is putting its problems to him, and it is up to him to respond to these questions by being responsible; he can only answer to life by answering for his life. Life is a task. The religious man differs from the apparently irreligious man only by experiencing his existence not simply as a task, but as a mission. This means that he is also aware of the taskmaster, the source of his mission. For thousands of years that source has been called God.’
Frankl 1986:13).
God? Theism or Atheism? Is this yet another false dichotomy? The fact that this 'argument' continues century after century would seem to indicate that it is without resolution. And it is without resolution because it presupposes the very dichotomies that work to prevent a resolution in the first place.
I work with Aristotle’s concept of eudaimonia, often translated as ‘happiness’ but better understood as ‘flourishing’, ‘fulfilment’ or ‘well-being’. It’s an ancient tradition, but the likes of William Casebeer and Owen Flanagan have been influential in demonstrating its continued relevance. For both, morality is a matter of skill and practical knowledge. The point is that living a good life, which I take to be a life in an ecological society, is a matter of integrating knowing how, knowing that and knowing why. There is such a thing as moral truth, and “knowing that” is important in mooring our thoughts, actions, decisions and beliefs in truth claims concerning right or wrong, good and bad. Such things are not relative nor conditional upon assertions of power or what ‘works’. Still, ethics is a matter of practical reason, and practical reasoning is involved in enabling us to determine the shape and character of the good life.
Philosopher and neuro-biologist Owen Flanagan and his work on human flourishing and “neuro-eudaimonics” is well worth checking out. Stuart Kauffman in Rediscovering the Sacred is also pertinent in taking a naturalistic approach to the sacred and the good. Flanagan doesn’t believe in Plato’s heaven of ideal forms, but he does think that eudaimonia is to be sought in the intersection of the true, the good and the beautiful. He isn’t impressed by what people in divinity schools says about truth. Fine. Let's get beyond false dichotomies. But, beyond this, what matters is how we can make truth claims appetitive and affective, and this involves more than shedding intellectual delusions (or embracing new ones). Science is talking the language of ethics and the good life. How far are we from Kant’s necessary presuppositions of the moral life? How far is Kant from accepting ‘comforting illusions’? What’s the good life? Let’s translate it not as happiness but as flourishing or fulfilment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BahZpFDVbz4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faSYGVmQceM
http://people.duke.edu/~ojf/Ch23Neuro-Eudaimonics.pdf
Books that are well worth reading on this.
Casebeer, W. D. (2003). Natural ethical facts: Evolution, connectionism, and moral cognition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Flanagan, O. J. (2002). The problem of the soul: Two visions of mind and how to reconcile them. New York: Basic Books.
Flanagan, O. J. (2007). The really hard problem: Meaning in a material world. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Also worth reading is Reinventing the Sacred by theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman.
‘Because of this ceaseless creativity, we typically do not and cannot know what will happen. We live our lives forward, as Kierkegaard said. We live as if we knew, as Nietzsche said. We live our lives forward into mystery, and do so with faith and courage, for that is the mandate of life itself. But the fact that we must live our lives forward into a ceaseless creativity that we cannot fully understand means that reason alone is an insufficient guide to living our lives. Reason, the center of the Enlightenment, is but one of the evolved, fully human means we use to live our lives. Reason itself has finally led us to see the inadequacy of reason. We must therefore reunite our full humanity. We must see ourselves whole, living in a creative world we can never fully know. The Enlightenment's reliance on reason is too narrow a view of how we flourish or flounder. It is important to the Western Hebraic-Hellenic tradition that the ancient Greeks relied preeminently on reason to seek, with Plato, the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. The ancient Jews, living with their God, relied more broadly on their full humanity.’
‘T. S. Eliot once argued that Donne and other sixteenth-century metaphysical poets separated reason from the rest of our sensibilities. If this is true, then this fracture influences the deepest parts of our humanity. We have seen reasons why science may be limited in radical ways by the very creativity of the biosphere and human culture. If we only partially understand our surroundings, if we often truly do not know what will happen, but must live and act anyway, then we must reexamine our full humanity and how we manage to persevere in the face of not knowing. Reexamining ourselves as evolved living beings in nature is thus both a cultural task, with implications for the roles of the arts and humanities, legal reasoning, business activities, and practical action, and part of reinventing the sacred—living with the creativity in the universe that we partially cocreate. Because we cannot know, but must live our lives anyway, we live forward into mystery. Our deep need is to better understand how we do so, and to learn from this deep feature of life how to live our lives well. Plato said we seek the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. Plato points us in the right direction.
Reintegration of reason with the rest of our full humanity takes me far beyond my domain of expertise. But I believe we must try to do so in the light of the new scientific worldview I have been discussing.’
Stuart Kauffman, Reinventing the Sacred, 2008 ch 14
I am in firm agreement with Kauffman's words here. Contemporary philosophers and scientists are showing that the old existentialist dilemmas are redundant, the world is not intrinsically meaningless at all. The dilemmas and dualisms that plague modern moral theory do not arise once we see the world whole again. We do not have to be like the old existentialists, making a meaning in the world that is entirely our own.
I’m a bit pushed for time at the the moment (trying to write my Being and Place book ...), so I shall have to quote my good self again here with regard to the implications of this for the environmental cause:
‘From this perspective, environmentalism is not merely a protest against the emptying of the world of its natural resources, but against the emptying of the world of its meaning. Environmentalism is about the recovery and affirmation of inherent value, in the sense of worth as deriving from the Old English word 'woerthship', from which we get 'worship.' What values do we worship, which gods do we serve? I am therefore arguing for environmentalism as a movement that integrates material and metaphysical or spiritual motives in the quest for meaning in life. In fine, environmentalists act in defence of the cosmos as a whole, not its scenic parts. Environmentalism therefore re-unites politics and spirituality, refusing to separate out values from the public and material world in the way that has characterised our political and economic life in an age of atomistic, reductionist, scientific materialism. I think we can discern in environmentalism a profound need for a meaning and fulfilment that can only be described as spiritual, a need which transcends the materialist frame of ecology as science.’
Our predicament lies in putting back together what was once whole and has been rent asunder. We need to put the world back together again. Now … how do we manage that?
How is it that we have lost meaning, purpose and value in our understanding of and in our relations to the world, to others, to our own powers?
Getting back to what Marx understood as alienated social power – alienation as the way our creative power comes back at us and controls us as irresistible institutional and economic force – raises some difficult practical questions. The symbiotic relation of the state and capital confronts those of us seeking a wholeness in our world with a universal force of our own creation, outside of our control and comprehension - the totalising structure of the political state and the external compulsion and dynamic of the capital system. I hear Naomi Klein argue in terms of ‘capitalism vs the climate’. What does this mean? It was dinned into my head that Marx himself rarely, if ever, referred to this general notion of ‘capitalism’. He referred to capital as a process and a social relation, the capital system as comprising institutions, structures, the hierarchical division of labour, the accumulative dynamic. All of this needs to be uprooted. That is no small task at all. I would insist on the ‘alternative institutions requirement’. This holds that any criticism of a social order needs to propose an alternative that, in the least, does not suffer from the deficiencies of the system being replaced. Bad systems, like bad theories, will hang around until replaced by something better. People will not, in any great numbers, be persuaded to reject a prevailing social order, however much it falters, for the vague promises of an ideal future. To attack capital by the political means of the state is not, on Marx’s terms, to transcend alien control at all, given the dependence of the political state upon the structurally embedded private power of capital and the systemic imperatives of capital. The capital system is not and can never be a public domain open to moral persuasion and democratic choice; it is a private regime of accumulation. The power of the state is secondary and derivative. The state must facilitate the process of private accumulation as a condition of its own power and resources, its legitimacy and popularity. Thus, any genuinely emancipatory project has to be conceived as providing a structural alternative to capital's system of social metabolic, alien control. The abolition of the state, capital and of wage labour refer not to separate and distinct abolitions but are inextricably related in the same singular – and immensely difficult - project. Capital's system of alien control can only be abolished in the totality of its relations.
Marx asks the key questions.
'How is it that personal interests always develop, against the will of individuals, into class interests, into common interests which acquire independent existence in relation to the individual persons, and in their independence assume the form of general interests? How is it that as such they come into contradiction with actual individuals and in this contradiction, by which they are defined as general interests, they can be conceived by consciousness as ideal and even as religious, holy interests? How is it that in this process of private interests acquiring independent existence as class interests the personal behaviour of the individual is bound to undergo substantiation, alienation, and at the same time exists as a power independent of him and without him, created by intercourse, and becomes transformed into social relations, into a series of powers which determine and subordinate the individual, and which, therefore, appear in the imagination as "holy" powers?’
Marx, The German Ideology 1999: 104/5
I’ve always been fascinated by Marx, but maybe not in the way most people have been fascinated. I always found his writing to have a peculiar flavour. It wasn’t just what Marx said that intrigued me, it was the way he said it. It wasn’t just what Marx wrote, it's what he didn't write but clearly implied that seemed to be all-important. it was the assumptions he did not spell out clearly that struck me. Much that Marx argues for presupposes an ontology of the good that he does not take time to spell out. It is implicit in his work. Marx affirms what I can only call a ‘rational unity’ or order in the world. His case for the recovery of our common ground as against its annexation and exploitation by private forces presumes the fundamental rightness of the common good. On what is that based? Is it ‘made up’. Marx didn’t just argue for the triumph of the working class in class struggle because he loved working people. There was a point, a purpose, that transcended social division and sought unity. A unity with justice. Marx did not just argue for a cooperative mode of production. The capital system itself is based on co-operation. It matters a great deal with whom we cooperate and to what ends. Marx knew that free-riders had hijacked our cooperative instincts. There was a principle behind this class struggle, a demand for unity against class division and exploitation. Marx followed Hegel in holding that philosophy, like religion, properly understood, aims to comprehend the true nature of reality. Marx highlighted class struggle in order to bring about a social order beyond classes and class exploitation. His social peace was a peace with justice. John Rawls wrote that justice is 'the first virtue of social institutions' (1971, p. 3). But Marx and Rawls are new kids on the block. Plato argued that justice is a virtue of societies, polities, and their institutions as well as of individuals. In The Republic, Plato treats justice as an overarching virtue of both individuals and societies, so that almost every issue that could be considered to be ethical falls under the notion of justice. The Republic‘s ancient subtitle, “Concerning Justice,” or "On the Just", indicates the central theme of the book.
A close reader of Marx will notice something significant about him, something more than the obvious criticisms of ‘capitalism’ as greedy, a systemic greed based on the accumulative drive to be more precise. Marx is often presented as someone who sought a social order 'beyond morality' and 'beyond justice'. I believe his work contains a disguised ethic, going beyond codification and the 'ideological superstructure' that served to rationalise a class system, to an ethical praxis. But it concerns justice all the same. Marx demands that a theory be true, that it should possess certain qualities. For instance, he observes that the first part of Ricardo's Principles of Political Economy and Taxation gives ‘theoretical satisfaction . .. because of [its] originality, unity of basic conception, simplicity, concentration, depth, novelty and comprehensive conciseness'. (Theories of Surplus Value, vol. II, p. 169.) Clearly, Marx values these things. A reader of the volumes of Capital and the Theories of Surplus Value will be struck by the fact that Marx's principal criticisms of the classical economists do not only refer to their inconsistencies or their inability to explain specific economic phenomena, but to their lack of conceptual tidiness, clumsy presentations, the absence of analytical rigour and their messy theoretical structures.
On this reasoning, a scientific theory should meet three criteria. It should have:
explanatory power or truth;
critical coherence;
logical structure.
To discover truth requires a correct method of investigation which proceeds inexorably to a well-structured and well-presented theory. Marx himself argues that the ‘faulty architectonics’ of a theory is ‘not accidental, rather it is the result of... and . . . expresses the scientific deficiencies of the method of investigation itself.’ (Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, vol. II, p. 166, 167). This is interesting. For this idea of truth as deep insight expressed in an elegant conceptual schema suggests nothing less than the harmony between truth and beauty, and the endorsement of the rationalist belief in the unity of the true, the good and the beautiful. Marx refers to ‘freedom’ rather than ‘goodness’, he is alive to the extent to which particular interests claiming to embody ‘the good life’ cloak their interests in the general interest. He refers to the state as the illusory general interest for precisely these reasons. But I think I am right to organise my reading of this whole tradition in terms of the concept of ‘rational freedom’. I recognise that for the ancients, ‘happiness’ as flourishing was much more important than freedom. I seek the critical reappropriation of ancient truths on the ground prepared by modernity.
Marx eschews any ‘ready-made system’, but affirms ideas and ethics all the same. They are immanent in the existing world, in ‘every existing form of theoretical and practical consciousness, ‘and from this ideal and final goal implicit in the actual forms of existing reality he can deduce a true reality.’ The true, the good, the beautiful, then, are intrinsic forms of the creative, and ceaselessly unfolding, universe.
So let us agree that Marx is a ‘rationalist’ in the terms set out broadly above. He affirms the unity of the true, the good and the beautiful. How is it then that we have lost this unity? It’s the same question Marx asks in The German Ideology: how is it that human relations escape human comprehension and control and assume abstract, autonomous force against us? Take the form of an ‘unreal universality’ embodied in our political, institutional and intellectual systems?
The capital system – Weber’s rationalisation and modernisation, Marx’s alienation of social power - is vital part of the answer. Capital as a social relation and process of separation, division, exploitation is the ground upon which other modern forms of estrangement arose, and establishes the template upon which separation as the key figure of modernity rests. It is capital that gives modern institutions and economics their ‘irresistible force’ (to use Weber’s apposite phrase in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism). It is this rationalisation of the world which is the problem, separating fact and value, robbing the world of purpose and value, reducing life to meaningless matter, giving human beings no alternative but to ‘make up’ their own values, either as existentialists inventing meaning in a meaningless world or as exploiters extracting monetary value from nature’s ‘resources.
As I am writing, I am reading this article:
Brian Eno: Bush and Blair were pawns in the game
BY BRIAN ENO | 11 JUNE 2016 | NEWS & COMMENT
The system will effortlessly produce another generation of smirking Bushes and grinning Blairs
http://www.stopwar.org.uk/index.php/news-comment/2001-brian-eno
How deep do we want to go in diagnosing the fundamental moral malaise of modernity?
Not religion, not politics, not science and not technology, none of these as such and alone are responsible for the human predicament in the crisis-torn world we live in. And none of them alone are the solution. It is their separation, and the fragmentation of truths that follows, that is responsible for our predicament. We need them all together, and all of our faculties together, working in tandem in appreciation of the whole order of existence, if we are to appreciate the wholeness of the world. They have been separated from each other with the division of the world and the differentiation of its understanding into single, discrete disciplines. This is not merely an intellectual deficiency calling for a change in perception. It is a deficiency at the heart of a divided and broken social system that causes us to see the world in pieces. It is the disproportionate development of the human powers and the division of the human experience between means and ends, fact and value, object and subject that is responsible for the false dualisms and dilemmas we are presented with in our philosophizing and politicking. And failing to get out of the cave mechanics of the modern Megamachine, we end up shadow-boxing with death-dealing illusions and illusions endlessly. These are not either/or questions, as if emphasising morality means denying science, embracing science means discarding morality. This is a condition of alienation. This is the condition of fragmentation by which Weber characterised rationalisation. So long as we continue to think and act through alienated social relations, seeking Faustian bargains with the new gods of the state, industry, economic growth, science, technique, instead of seeing them as our social powers in alien form, we shall continue to approach our environmental problems through false dichotomies and dilemmas. We need to locate the diremption of the modern world in an alienated system of social production relations rather than in some abstract and ahistorical ‘Reason’. The problem is not reason, not science, not religion, not belief, none of these things. The problem is the abstraction of human understanding and experience from relations of common control and comprehension. We need to transform our social relations, structures and institutions, reject Faustian bargains, compromises with the half-world of false dichotomies, and see the world whole again. There’s a price to be paid for those Faustian bargains.
‘The ultimate measure of the awesome power, and the fundamental violence, of unfettered abstraction is to be found in the millions upon millions of nameless corpses which this most vicious of centuries has left as its memorial, human sacrifices to one or another of Weber's renascent modern gods. War itself is not new, modernity's contribution is to have waged it, with characteristic efficiency, under the sign of various totalizing abstractions which name and claim the lives of all.’
Sayer 1991: 154/5
Sayer D 1991 Capitalism and Modernity: An Excursus on Marx and Weber (London Routledge)
Karen Armstrong draws out the implications of this rational violence discussing Picasso in A Short History of Myth:
'In Guernica, humans and animals, both victims of indiscriminate, heedless slaughter, lie together in a mangled heap, the screaming horse inextricably entwined with the decapitated human figure. Even the sacrificial bull is doomed.
So too — Picasso may be suggesting — is modern humanity, which ... was only just beginning to explore the full potential of its self-destructive and rationally-calculated violence.'
Armstrong 2005: 144/5
This is why ideas matter, and why morality matters, why easing the transition from theoretical reason to practical reason matters, why addressing knowledge and know-how to the motivational economy of human beings matters, why transforming socially structured patterns of behaviour matters, why creating a social identity that connects individual good and social good matters, creating the right habitus for the acquisition and exercise of the right habits matters, why acting for the right reasons matter, why character-constitution and virtue matters… All of these things enable human beings to see through and break through the death dealing, destructive delusions and dichotomies of the politics of the cave.
‘Reason has always existed, but not always in a rational form’ writes Marx. (Letters from the Franco-German Yearbooks). How do we extract the rational core from the rationalised systems that have ossified human experience? That's the task we are faced with.
These are key ideas that will be thrashed out in my book, certainly. Maybe not in this form. Here is some thinking out loud. I want to address reason to some hard questions, get it to lose its innocence and come to terms with the world of experience. 'Separation' is the key figure of capitalist modernity, taking us away from the unity we all pursue. We can talk about the harmony of the spheres until we are blue in the face, but we need nevertheless to uproot the disharmony of our social order. In other words, we face not an intellectual problem with an intellectual solution but a social problem with a practical solution. False delusions, false distinctions, false dichotomies etc are indeed false, but express the correct truth about the diremptive world we live in.
I shall add as an appendix passages from the book I wrote on Aquinas. It covers some very pertinent ground concerning this question of reason, knowledge, morality and human behaviour.
Moral and intellectual virtue
Intellectual Virtues
Under the heading of 'intellectual virtues', Aquinas acknowledges three virtues of what he calls 'speculative intellect', and two virtues of 'practical intellect'. By 'speculative intellect' he means the mind as understanding at a purely theoretical level, and, under this heading, he distinguishes between 'understanding' (intellectus), 'science' (stientia), and 'wisdom' (sapientia). By 'practical intellect' he means the mind as understanding with a view to action. Under this heading he distinguishes between 'art' (ars) and 'prudence' (prudentia). 'Understanding' is a matter of grasping basic principles of reasoning. 'Science' is a matter of good reasoning using these principles to arrive at truth regarding different kinds of things in the world. 'Wisdom' is a matter of good reasoning concerning God. 'Art' is correct reason about things to be made. 'Prudence' is correct reason about things to be done and aims at the good of the agent. (ia2ae. 57. 2ff. in Davies 1993: 241).
‘Prudence is a virtue of the utmost necessity for human life. To live well means acting well. In order to perform an act well, it is not merely what people do that matters, but also how they do it, namely that they act from right choice and not merely from impulse or passion. Since, however, choice is about means to an end, rightness of choice necessarily involves two factors, namely a due end and something suitably ordained to that due end... For people to be rightly adapted to what fits their due end, however, they need a habitus in their reason; because counsel and choice, which are about things ordained to an end, are acts of reason. Consequently, an intellectual virtue is needed in their reason to complement it and make it well adjusted to these things. This virtue is prudence. And this, in consequence, is necessary for a good life.’ (ia2ae. 57. 5 in Davies 1993: 242-243).
Moral Virtues
The moral virtues introduce into the will the same perfections which the intellectual virtues introduce into knowledge. Some moral virtues regulate the content and nature of our operations themselves, independently of our personal dispositions at the moment of acting. This is the particular case of justice, which assures the moral value and rectitude of all operations in which ideas of what is due and not due are implied. Thus, for example, the operation of buying and selling supposes the acknowledgment or rejection of a debt to a neighbor, and depends upon the virtue of justice.
Other moral virtues bear upon the qualities of acts, considered in relation to the one performing them. Thus, they deal with the interior dispositions of the agent at the moment of acting. They deal, in a word, with passions. If the agent is drawn by passion toward an act contrary to reason, he has to call on that virtue whose particular function is to restrain and check passion; namely, the virtue of temperance. If the agent, far from being drawn into action by some passion, is actually prevented from acting by fear of danger or of effort or the like, he needs another moral virtue to strengthen him in the resolutions his reason dictates. This is the virtue of fortitude. These three moral virtues, together with one intellectual virtue—prudence—are commonly known as principal or cardinal virtues. They alone imply both the faculty to act aright and the actual accomplishing of the good act. They alone, consequently, perfectly fulfil the definition of virtue.
Gilson 1961 Pt 3 ch 1 p 263
In speaking of moral virtues Aquinas says that they are named from the Latin word mos where that means 'a natural or quasi-natural inclination to do some particular action'. (ia2ae. 58. i.) So he is thinking about dispositions which lead one to act well, and not of those which might enable one to act well only if one chooses to. (Davies 1993: 243).
‘For people to act well, it is requisite that not only their reason be well disposed through a habitus of intellectual virtue, but also that their appetite be well disposed through a habitus of moral virtue.’ (ia2ae. 58. 2; Davies 1993: 243).
‘That is to say, knowledge is not enough to make people fully virtuous or good as people…. it is not Aquinas's view that you are good just because you are clever or quick witted. You may have doctorates from Oxford and Yale, but you might not be good. You also have to act in the light of what you know, which means that you must be engaged at the level of will as well as intellect, that you must actually pursue or be drawn to what you see to be good— which, for Aquinas, is where prudence comes in again.’ (Davies 1993: 243.)
For Aquinas, prudence is more than a matter of knowledge. 'The worth of prudence consists not in thought merely, but in its application to action.' (2323C. 47. i ad. 3). Prudence is therefore practical as well as theoretical, a moral virtue as well as an intellectual virtue. The role of prudence is to charge our conduct with right reason, and this cannot be done without rightful desire. Therefore, prudence has the nature of virtue, that which the other intellectual virtues possess, but also that possessed by the moral virtues, among which it is counted. (Davies 1993: 243).
As Aquinas argues:
Prudence means more than practical knowledge. That has to do with making a general judgement about what to do, as when one sees that fornication is bad or that it is wrong to steal and so on. Even where this knowledge exists, the judgement of reason can be intercepted in a particular action so that it does not judge properly. So prudence is equally a matter of virtue because with knowledge alone someone may sin against virtue.
De virt. 6 ad. i.
Indeed, Aquinas argues that prudence is at work at the same time as the other virtues. For virtue, in general, helps us to act well and prudence is displayed by actually acting well. 'Nobody can be virtuous without . possessing prudence ... The other virtues can never be true virtues unless their seeking is prudently conducted.' (aa2ae. 47. 14.) A person can be morally good whilst lacking some intellectual virtues such as wisdom, science, and art. But a person cannot be morally good without choosing well in action. And choosing well depends on acting in accordance with prudence. (Davies 1993 ch 12).
People may be virtuous without their reason being vigorous as to everything, but merely as to those things which have to be done virtuously. And to this extent all virtuous people use reason soundly. Hence even those who seem to be simple, by their lack of worldly shrewdness, can be prudent.
ia2ae. 58. 4 ad. 2.
To two objections which claimed that one can be virtuous without prudence inasmuch as one can always get advice from others, Aquinas replies that one must be prudent enough in the first place to even ask for that sort of help and to know how to discern good advice from bad (ST 2a2ae 47.14 ad 2). He develops this point in another reply:
One person can take general advice from another about what to do. However, only the rightness of prudence enables one to sustain one's judgment rightly throughout the act itself, against all passions. Without this, there can be no virtue.
QDVC 6 ad 2
‘Prudence's task is not the strictly cognitive task of knowing the right thing to do. The prudent agent not only has that practical knowledge but is also able to focus on that knowledge at the right time, for as long as necessary. Here again, Aquinas's virtue theory meets up with his natural law theory. To a considerable extent, as we saw in the previous section, we all know what the right thing to do is. The reason we nevertheless go wrong so often is that we fail to make use of that knowledge as we should. We let our knowledge be hijacked by our passions, which call to mind other pleasant truths that, in turn, lead our wills astray.’ Pasnau and Shields 2004: 239).
This is not to remove prudence from intellect. Prudence is an intellectual disposition as well as a moral disposition. The point is that prudence is a disposition quite unlike knowledge. This is because knowledge is not a virtue in the truest sense defined by Aquinas, since it lacks an appetitive component. Knowledge would be a genuine virtue if it made one positively desire to grasp the true. But knowledge is not appetitive in this sense: "[H]aving knowledge does not make one want to consider the truth; it just makes one able to do so" (QDVC 7c). ‘We all know, in some sense of 'know', the difference between right and wrong. But we do not all desire to embrace this knowledge and let it guide our lives. The disposition of prudence guarantees that our intellect will attend to the relevant information we possess. Guided by the virtue of justice, the prudent person will fasten on those aspects of the situation that bear on treating others fairly and equally. Guided by the virtue of temperance, the prudent person will dwell on resisting temptation. In these cases, Aquinas describes the intellect as "following the will." The underlying disposition "more truly has the nature of a virtue inasmuch as it gives a person not just the ability or the knowledge to act rightly, but also the will to do so" (QDVC 7c). Prudence does this, not because it is a virtue of the will, but because it holds intellect steadfast in its orientation, allowing the will to act in accord with right reason so as best to pursue the ends that the virtuous person desires by a kind of second nature.’
‘Prudence turns out to have an interesting and complex relationship to the other three cardinal virtues (justice, courage, and temperance). Moral knowledge gets pushed to the side, overshadowed by an account of how we manage to make use of what we already know. This shows something very interesting about the relationship between Aquinas's virtue theory and his natural law theory. Moral knowledge (what the natural law gives us) is pushed to the side, not because it is unimportant, but because it is not the basis of moral evaluation. No one is more virtuous because she understands more of the natural law or sees more deeply into its far-reaching consequences. We all grasp the natural law, more or less, and we are all perfectly capable of applying it to particular circumstances. The good person is not good because she can do that better than the rest of us—she is not some kind of moral sage. Instead, the good person knows what she is looking for and is steadfast in focusing on that. The rest of us have too much on our minds, and too many desires, and we make hard what is really quite simple. The overall tenor of the theory is therefore very far from the sort of intellectualism with which Aquinas is often associated. Although it is true that wrongdoing is always the result of ignorance, it is also true that such ignorance is the product of a failure at some other level. God gives each of us plenty of information about right and wrong, not just in Church teachings and holy texts, but written into our very hearts and minds. When we go wrong, it is because we ignore all of this.’ (Pasnau and Shields 2004: 239 ff).
Virtuous Action
Human beings as rational beings are characterized by intellect and will, by virtue of which they aim at the overall good, the ultimate end. For Aristotle, it is the end or good of a process that makes it intelligible and gives a criterion for its rational appraisal. Knowing the purpose of a function (ergon, opus) makes it possible to appraise it rationally, discern whether it is well or badly done. This reasoning applies to human action as to any natural process. The human agent is unique in being rational and in acting rationally. It follows that the end or good for human beings is fulfilment through the perfection of rational activity. In this context, virtue means that the function is performed well, that human beings flourish well.
The strength of conceiving the good in this way lies in its capacity to recover moral philosophy from the intuitionism of G. E. Moore's Principia Ethica and the myriad relativisms and subjectivisms and irrationalisms it has spawned. At a time when modernity exhibited a perfection of means and a confusion of ends, to quote Einstein, the moral philosophers went missing in inaction. In this respect, moral philosophers are merely reflecting the condition of the world under a modernity characterised by the inversion of means and ends. The classic statement that the (modern) world lacks intrinsic meaning comes from Max Weber: 'The fate of our times is characterised by rationalisation and intellectualisation and, above all, by the "disenchantment of the world"‘ (Weber SV 1991:155). As the world is stripped of purpose, so philosophy is stripped of its normative dimension in relation to the world. It is in this context that J.L. Mackie’s defence of subjectivism in Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977) needs to be understood. Underlining the 'queerness' of the view that such a disenchanted world could contain values, Mackie asks how objective values could relate to or co-exist with those characteristics revealed by science; how we could come to know of them; and what possible relevance they could have to our existence (Mackie 1977:38/42).
Indeed. This cluelessness on the part of moral philosophers can be seen in a myriad of ever more arcane, obscure, even plainly irrational accounts of modern ‘morality’. Kant was right to foresee that the abandonment of morally necessary ends 'would do away with all moral philosophy'. (Kant 1964 43, Ak. 384). The good cannot be understood apart from the point of the process called good, hence the confusion and aridity of modern moral philosophy. My overall point is that what Kant describes as morally necessary ends need to be securely located in a metaphysics in which efficient causality, necessary being, first and final cause have central place. The problem with Kant is that he accepts the mechanistic universe presented by the natural scientists, a world stripped of purpose and intrinsic meaning. It is difficult, in this context, to avoid morality fragmenting into a quagmire of value judgments, arbitrary in floating free of any natural properties of a thing. Goodness and badness are just things we see or feel, an expression of our tastes or opinions, likes and dislikes. This is good means I like it. Whatever else this is, it isn’t morality, it isn’t moral philosophy. To argue that something is good means that it fulfils or performs well the purpose for which it was made.
Aquinas follows Aristotle in arguing that reason is the unique characteristic of human beings. The good performance, or virtue, of rational activity is what identifies a person as good.
Aquinas identifies three categories of rational activity.
Theoretical reasoning, the perfection of which is truth;
Practical reasoning, the perfection of which is achieved through guiding and directing other faculties (which also have natural ends of their own) to the overall good of the person;
Participated rationality, activities other than reason, such as choosing, fearing, desiring, which are rational to the extent that they come under the sway of practical reason.
These three kinds of reasoning imply the existence of three kinds of virtue identifying the human agent as good.
The Nicomachean Ethics and the second part of the Summa Theologiae are concerned to elucidate the specific kinds of virtues entailed. For Aquinas, as for Aristotle, this is an ordered set of virtues, in that some virtues more perfectly fulfil the human agent than others. (McInerny 2004 Pt 2 30-50).
We can conclude from this that for Aquinas, moral philosophy is a rational reflection on how human beings can act well in order to achieve the end they naturally desire in order to flourish well. The task is to create the moral society which enables human beings to acquire the virtues and develop the character to be able to live in such a way that they act well and thereby attain what is perfective of them. The desire for the good is natural, it is innate. In contrast to Kant, reason does not educate desire or appetite from the outside in Aquinas’ conception. There is no split between duty and inclination. Aquinas does, however, retain an active role for reason, for agent intellect. Rational reflection illuminates the notion of ultimate end – Aquinas’ conception of lex naturalis is fundamental – and establishes what things human beings must do to achieve fulfilment and perfection. The criteria for the good is to be found in our nature as rational agents.
‘Thus we arrive gradually at the notion of virtue in its most perfect form. It owes its quality of moral good to the rule of reason, and operations and passion are its matter: "moral virtue derives its goodness from the rule of reason." It is this, too, that makes moral and intellectual virtues consist in a just mean. The act regulated by a moral virtue is in conformity with right reason; and what reason does is to assign a just mean, equally removed from excess and defect in each given case. Sometimes it happens that the mean fixed by reason is the mean of the thing itself, as in the case of justice which regulates operations relating to external acts, and must assign to each his due, neither more nor less. Sometimes, on the contrary, it happens that the mean fixed by reason is not the mean of the thing itself, but one that is a mean in relation to us. It is thus with all the other moral virtues bearing not on operations but on passions. Temperance and fortitude have to take into account internal dispositions which are not the same in all men, nor even in the same individual at different times. They fix a just mean in conformity with reason, in relation to us and to the passions affecting us. It is the same with the intellectual virtues. Every virtue follows the determination of a measure and a good. Now the good of an intellectual virtue is truth, and the measure of truth is the thing. Our reason attains truth when what it says exists does actually exist, and when what it says does not exist does not exist. It errs by excess when it affirms the existence of what does not exist, and by defect when it denies the existence of what does exist. Truth, therefore, is the just mean, determined by the thing itself. And it is this very truth which confers moral excellence upon a virtue.
Voluntary acts dictated by practical reason, habits, and especially virtuous habits: these are the internal principles which regulate our moral activity. We have now to deal with the principles regulating this activity from without, that is, with laws.’ (Gilson 1961 Pt 3 ch 1 p 263-264).
"There is a third order that reason in deliberating establishes in the operations of the will." The locus of morality is human acts, acts of will directed by reason. Clarity about the human act, accordingly, is clarity about the moral order. The human agent is part of the ordered cosmos and is indeed that cosmos writ small, a microcosm.
He shares characteristics with the inanimate - he can be weighed like a rock; and with the vegetative - he takes nourishment and reproduces himself; and with the animals, sharing with them sense perception and the emotions that follow on them. Of course he is not the only thing in the cosmos that acts. Everything acts and to act is to pursue an end. Thomas accepts and endorses Aristotle's statement at the outset of the Ethics that the good is the end that all things seek. Teleology is not then a unique feature of human agents as if they were somehow inserted in a mechanistic universe from which final cause has been eliminated. Under the influence of natural science, philosophers since Kant have seen a chasm between nature and human action. Thomas by contrast sees human action as a special case of a universal fact insofar as it is undertaken for the sake of an end. What is unique to the human agents is that they are free and thus answerable for what they do. It is the good known by intellect that is the object of will. These two faculties or capacities generate voluntary action, either as the act of will itself, elicited voluntary action, or the acts of other capacities insofar as these come under the sway of reasoned will, commanded acts. Human acts and moral acts are identical.
A moral appraisal is always relevant to any human act but only some of them come under such technical appraisals. And even when they do that is never the full story about them. So the identification of human acts and moral acts stands."
McInerny 2004 Pt 2 30-50
So there are three great categories of rational activity: theoretical reasoning, practical reasoning, and participated rationality. On this basis, we would have to say that there are three kinds of virtue involved in designating the human agent good. Much of the task of moral philosophy and moral theology is spelling out the specific kinds of these generic virtues, as is clear from the procedure of the Nicomachean Ethics and the second part of the Summa Theologiae. And Thomas like Aristotle will argue that this is an ordered set of virtues, such that some more perfectly fulfill the human agent than others. We will return to this.
McInerny 2004 Pt 2 30-50
To conclude, virtuous action and a life of virtuous rational activity amounts to acting well and flourishing well as human beings. This is happiness in the eudaimonistic sense defined by Aristotle.
It is clear that moral philosophy for Thomas is a reflection on how we can act well, how we can achieve the end we naturally desire, call it happiness. The moral task is to acquire a character which enables us to maneuver through the contingencies of life in such a way that we act well and thus achieve what is perfective of us. The desire for the good is a given, that is what is meant by calling it natural. However, reflection not only reveals the notion of ultimate end, but makes clear that we must do those things which truly constitute our fulfillment and perfection. The criteria for the true good must be sought in our nature as rational agents. How do we go about finding the true guidelines for our actions?
Acting well is flourishing well, it is to achieve fulfilment and perfection, the ultimate end of happiness for Aristotle and beatitude for Aquinas.
Aristotle and Aquinas, quite a combination. I'd like to end here by returning to this 'peculiar flavour' I found in Marx's writings. In my PhD thesis, I read Marx in terms of a tradition and concept of 'rational freedom'. I traced this concept back to ancient Greece, focusing on Plato and Aristotle in particular. I also needed a substantial section on the Judaeo-Christian tradition, but reasons of space defeated me. So there was a big jump from Plato and Aristotle to Rousseau, Kant, Hegel and Marx. But I have filled the gap in other writings. My point is that Marx can be understood as standing in a line of descent from a particular way of understanding the world as a whole order, a rational order, an objectively valuable world, a world we have in common - a right order that has been torn asunder by monetary imperatives.
'Marx ... was the Aristotle of the modern age' (Terry Eagleton, After Theory, 2003, ch 6).
'The true descendant of the doctrines of Aquinas is the labour theory of value. The last of the Schoolmen was Karl Marx.' (R.H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism 1987 ch 1).
Dante Alighieri was an Aristotelian and a Thomist. Could there be a relation between Marx and Dante? Well, we know that Marx knew Dante and rated Dante highly indeed. We know that he could recite The Comedy by heart. I have always thought that there was a connection between the two, that both believe that there is a right order and a right way of doing things, that this earth could be a Heaven or a Hell according to the choices we make and the actions we take. Dante's Inferno is the hell of the capital system as a thoroughly dehumanised world. The Paradiso is the future society, what Marx called the 'truly human society', the world we can have, the better world that we know in our hearts is possible, a world that is within our grasp. Purgatorio refers to the transitional world, a world in movement in which we learn to make the right choices and come to act wisely, bridging the gap between the 'is' and the 'ought-to-be'. A world of reality-changing praxis.
'The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that it is essential to educate the educator himself. This doctrine must, therefore, divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society.
The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice.'
Marx, Thesis III on Feuerbach
We make of this world a Heaven or Hell according to our praxis - the choices we make, the decisions we take, and how we exercise freedom and responsibility in relation to each other. But this 'practice' doesn't point to some mere 'made-up' world. We don't simply create our own world. Jonathan Kingdon has a book titled 'Self-Made Man and his Undoing'. Locating Marx in this older tradition adumbrated above, I read him as arguing for not just the 'self-made' world of human creation, but for the right world and the just world and the true world. Without an understanding of the right order of things, there is no basis for a distinction between Hell and Heaven, between Inferno and Paradiso, between the capital system as a dehumanisation and communism as the 'truly human society'. Marx's praxis is infused with principles concerning the right, the real and the rational. I'll leave it there, having written extensively on this in my academic world. But it is always gratifying to read others making the same connections.
Marx in Hell: The Critique of Political Economy as Katabasis by William Clare Roberts.
'This paper examines one of the many Judeo-Christian allusions in Marx's corpus, his citations of Dante in the “1859 Preface” and the preface to the first edition of Capital. It demonstrates that Marx borrowed key features of Dante's Inferno for his own critique of political economy, and that Marx thereby situated his critical journey through economics as the heir to the Western tradition of the katabasis, the formative descent into the underworld. This undermines the dichotomization of religion and science prevalent in Marxology, and suggests that Marx must be read outside both of these traditional categories.'
“Marx in Hell: The Critique of Political Economy as Katabasis.” Journal of Critical Sociology 31:2 (Spring 2005): 37-53.
The connection between Dante and Marx is not fanciful at all.
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=HeBeAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA405&lpg=PA405&dq=dante+and+marx&source=bl&ots=ozOsC-irkt&sig=vre4eXdn2Dfd_keV80TDMxmvGjs&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwijiNW_k7PNAhUMIsAKHZ49DK04ChDoAQgdMAA#v=onepage&q=dante%20and%20marx&f=false
'Marx and Engels considered Dante as a Renaissance hero. As per them Dante was a genius poet and thinker and who was able to inspire the party with inflexible warriors spirit. Dante’s ‘Divina Commedia’ had incomparable influence on Marx. It is said that Marx had learned by heart every line of it. The introduction ‘to Capital’ testifies his deep influence of Dante. Engels called Dante a person of ‘unequalled classic perfection’ and a ‘colossal figure’.'
https://criticalaesthetics2015.wordpress.com/2015/07/16/marxist-aesthetics-summary-of-preface-to-marx-and-engels-on-literature-and-art/
"What does it matter to you what people whisper here?' Virgil asks Dante in Canto 5 of the Purgatorio. "Follow me and let the people talk." Lacking a Virgil to guide him, Marx amends the line in his preface for the first volume of Das Kapital to warn that he will make no concession to the prejudices of others: "Now, as ever, my maxim is that of the great Florentine: Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti [Go your own way, and let the people talk]." From the outset, then, the book is conceived as a descent towards the nether regions, and even in the midst of complex theoretical abstractions he conveys a vivid sense of place and motion: Let us, therefore, leave this noisy region of the market, where all that goes on is done in full view of everyone's eyes, where everything seems open and above board. We will follow the owner of the money and the owner of labour-power into the hidden foci of production, crossing the threshold of the portal above which is written, "No admittance except on business". Here we shall discover, not only how capital produces, but also how it is itself produced. We shall at last discover the secret of making surplus value. The literary antecedents for such a journey are often recalled as he proceeds on his way. Describing English match factories, where half the workers are juveniles (some as young as six) and conditions are so appalling that "only the most miserable part of the working class, half-starved widows and so forth, deliver up their children to it", he writes: With a working day ranging from 12 to 14 or 15 hours, night labour, irregular meal-times, and meals mostly taken in the workrooms themselves, pestilent with phosphorus, Dante would have found the worst horrors in his Inferno surpassed in this industry. Other imagined hells provide further embellishment for his picture of empirical reality: From the motley crowd of workers of all callings, ages and sexes, who throng around us more urgently than did the souls of the slain around Ulysses, on whom we see at a glance the signs of overwork, without referring to the Blue Books under their arms, let us select two more figures, whose striking contrast proves that all men are alike in the face of capital - a milliner and a blacksmith.'
Francis Wheen, The poet of dialectics, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/jul/08/politics
In fine, I am looking forward to William Clare Roberts' forthcoming book:
Marx's Inferno: The Political Theory of Capital.
Hardcover | December 2016 | $37.50 | £28.95 | ISBN: 9780691172903 304 pp.
Marx’s Inferno reconstructs the major arguments of Karl Marx’s Capital and inaugurates a completely new reading of a seminal classic. Rather than simply a critique of classical political economy, William Roberts argues that Capital was primarily a careful engagement with the motives and aims of the workers’ movement. Understood in this light, Capital emerges as a profound work of political theory. Placing Marx against the background of nineteenth-century socialism, Roberts shows how Capital was ingeniously modeled on Dante’s Inferno, and how Marx, playing the role of Virgil for the proletariat, introduced partisans of workers’ emancipation to the secret depths of the modern “social Hell.” In this manner, Marx revised republican ideas of freedom in response to the rise of capitalism.
Combining research on Marx’s interlocutors, textual scholarship, and forays into recent debates, Roberts traces the continuities linking Marx’s theory of capitalism to the tradition of republican political thought. He immerses the reader in socialist debates about the nature of commerce, the experience of labor, the power of bosses and managers, and the possibilities of political organization. Roberts rescues those debates from the past, and shows how they speak to ever-renewed concerns about political life in today’s world.'
William Clare Roberts is assistant professor of political science at McGill University.
Endorsements:
"Marx's Inferno is the best book of political theory I’ve read that has been written in the last five years. Interpreting Capital as an integrated whole, it takes a canonical text we all thought we knew and makes us realize we never knew it at all. This is reading on a grand scale, reading as it was meant to be."--Corey Robin, Brooklyn College and CUNY Graduate Center.
"Marx's Inferno provides an innovative reading of Karl Marx’s Capital as a work of political theory. The unifying thread of this book is the author’s conviction that Marx’s work is heavily indebted to a set of broadly republican commitments about the nature of freedom. This original idea not only illuminates Marx’s writings, but also contributes to an important area of contemporary research in intellectual history."--David Leopold, University of Oxford
http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10892.html