This is a lengthy study that I am publishing here in short instalments. What we are proposing here by way of a critique of Hannah Arendt's conception of vita activa (active life) is a sketch of an immanentist philosophy that could form the foundation of a new politics. It seems to me that we need this most at a time when the quest for a "future city" (Gramsci, La Citta' Futura), that is to say, for a new humanist civilisation, has vanished in the fragor mundi (the noise of the world) that has grown in intensity in the last few decades - a deafening noise amplified by the recent transformations of industrial and finance capitalism, its extension to the remotest corners of the globe - and certainly not muffled by the consequent disorientation of the historical political left. Specifically, this study seeks to overcome the helpless lucus a non lucendo (fire that will not light) of more recent so-called "identity politics". If a new humanism is what we are seeking, look around...
The notions of
Nature and Reason, … far from explaining the metamorphoses… from perception to
the more complex modes of human exchange, make them incomprehensible. Because
by relating them to separate principles, these notions conceal a constantly
experienced moment, the moment when an existence becomes aware of itself,
grasps itself, and expresses its own sense. The study of perception could teach
us a “bad ambiguity”, a mixture of finitude and universality, of interiority
and exteriority. But there is a “good ambiguity” in the phenomenon of
expression, a spontaneity that accomplishes what appeared to be impossible when
we considered only the separate elements, a spontaneity that gathers together
the plurality of monads, the past and the present, nature and culture into a
single whole. To establish this wonder
would be metaphysics itself and would at the same time give us the principle of
an ethics. (Merleau-Ponty Reader,’Unpublished Text’, p.290)
As is abundantly
well known, one of the major weaknesses of the Marxian critique of political
economy is its “determinism”. In seeking to discover “the economic laws of
society”, Marx ended up reducing all
significant human activity to the “labour that is socially necessary to ensure
the reproduction of human society”. The “laws” governing the pro-duction of use
values and exchange values also govern their distribution among social classes
and thus form “the economic base” upon which all other social structures and
institutions – from the family to the state to culture at large – are founded
and that form therefore an “ideal superstructure” that serves merely to hide or
camouflage the rock-solid reality of the basic social relations of production.
This is the forma mentis of
traditional Marxism: in this perspective, it is the “material economic base”
that determines or drives the “ideological superstructure”; and it is the
combination of the two that constitutes human history. This duality of physical
realism and of spiritual idealism is yet another manifestation of the
separation of Nature and Reason, of Form and Matter, of Mind and Body, and
finally of Subject and Object, that has characterized Western thought from its
inception.
Because Marx’s
thought – his “realism” – tended to relegate all philosophy to the sphere of mere interpretation, Marxism has always
displayed a clear aversion to and insufferance for philosophical speculation
and especially the prima philosophia,
the theory of the foundation of reality itself – namely, meta-physics and
ontology. In this regard, Marx was replicating for his “critique of political
economy” what Kant had performed in the Critique
of Pure Reason, neatly separating the world into “mere appearances” and “things
in themselves”, the latter being the ultimately inscrutable “cause” behind the
former. For human knowledge to be founded on “scientific” bases, Kant proposed
that we acknowledge the strict separation of appearances in search of
explanation and the ultimate immutable reality of which they were a mere
“re-presentation” (Vor-stellung).
This is the separation (chorismos) or
“the separated principles” of Nature and Reason to which Merleau-Ponty alluded
in the quotation above – a separation or worse still an opposition (Gegen-stand, the German word for
“object”) that we must transform into a “participation” (methexis, in the
terminology of Nicholas of Cusa) in harmony with our project for a better
world.
What we find
inspiring in Merleau-Ponty’s formulation of this separation is the fact that it
states the problem in the tersest manner, and then suggests an answer together
with the reason why it is a valid answer. The problem, tersely but improperly
stated, is whether metaphysics can suggest an ethics – that is to say, whether
an ontology, a theory of reality, can
provide the “ground” not just for a “view” of reality but also for a de-ontology, for a framework or pro-ject
of action upon reality. One of the hardest things to do for people of a radical
disposition is to provide a foundation for their “convictions”, for their
intention no longer “to interpret the world, but to change it”. Yet such
foundation must be found or at least our inquiry into it (remember that the
original word for history in Greek was istorein,
to inquire) must be commenced somewhere. Marx’s Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach
betrays most eloquently his “in-sufferance” for the task of (philosophical)
interpretation of social reality and his urgency for its practical “scientific”
transformation. Had Nietzsche been aware of this Thesis, he would most probably
have retorted that “philosophers thus far have pretended to interpret the world when in reality they were attempting to change it”! For unlike Marx, Nietzsche held no illusions that
social reality could be deterministically reduced to “scientific laws” or that
“socially necessary labour time”
could ever constitute and determine “the laws of motion” of human history and
societies.
The entire aim of
our studies so far has been not merely to attempt to change the world as it is
at present by interpreting it, by “under-standing” its functioning and mode of
operation the more easily to intervene on it or at least to contrast it; but it
has been also in large part to understand the reasons behind our exertions,
behind our radicalism. We may know what to change and how to do it out of what
Daniel Guerin once called a “visceral opposition” to the status quo, but we
still need to know why we engage in “the ruthless criticism of all that exists”
if we are going to have any chance of success. Our goals need to be clear
before we set out to deploy our means. What we are attempting here is a
critical re-foundation of an “autonomist ontology” that generates its goals not
from the positing of extrinsic values but rather from the identification of the
most basic human mode of perception of reality. (Cf. M-P, end of “Unpublished
Text” synopsis in ‘Reader’.)
So far we have
employed the approach of “critique” on the road to this quest because it is
often easier to learn from the discoveries as well as the mistakes of
theoreticians and practitioners that have preceded us. But “critiques” are
necessarily “negative” in character: they are meant to de-struct rather than to
con-struct – and that is what we have done predominantly to date, except to the
degree that every “negation” often involves also “the negation of the negation”
and so, perhaps, some “positive affirmation” as well. It is obvious that our
task cannot be confined to “the ruthless criticism of everything that exists”
(Marx) because such critique would have no “meaning” unless it also had a
“purpose”. There where actions have no meaning they can also be said to lack
purpose, and vice versa. What then can be our purpose – and on what meaning can
it be founded?
This is the area
perhaps where the thought of Karl Marx leaves most to be desired, even in view
of its (again) “fundamental” importance. The most refined corrections and
improvements on Marxist thought in this arena have probably come from
post-Nietzschean elaborations, culminating especially in the Italian
left-Heideggerianism that was an offshoot of the “new left” move away from the
orthodoxy of Communist parties of the
European post-Stalinist era. Marxism may well have provided a “deontological”
guide to our opposition to the ravages of capitalist industry, morally,
ethically and then politically predicated on the notion of “the theft of labour time”. But if “labour
time” is merely the time that is “socially necessary” to produce goods and
services for “consumption”, then it is obvious that Marx has reduced the entire
“problem” of capitalism to the mere “distribution” of the “social product”. Not
only does this “critique” crumble to a mere “gripe or grudge” over
distribution, over the share of the spoils; but it also fails to challenge the
technical-scientific orientation of capitalism, its technology and science, -
the political choice of what it produces and how it produces it. Even if we agree
with Marx that a certain “quantity” of labour-time is (physically!) necessary for a human society to
reproduce itself (again, “physically”), it is still obvious that this “minimum
quantity” necessary for “reproduction” may well constitute a “necessary
condition” but not in the least a “sufficient
condition” to ensure the actual “reproduction” of a society – a process
that is as much political and cultural as it is narrowly “economic”!
The Marxian
critique also never proffered the ontological ground on which any praxis or
deontology could be founded and erected. It is fair to say that Marx was too
tied to the philosophy of the Enlightenment in its twin excrescences of German
Idealism and scientific rationalism to be able to escape the fallacies that
engulfed them both and that were exposed so virulently already by the critics
of the negatives Denken from
Schopenhauer to Nietzsche through to Weber and finally Heidegger (cf. for all,
this last author’s Letter on Humanism).
The fundamental error of Western philosophical and scientific thought has
always been to seek to identify “objectively” the purpose and meaning of action
with its “object” – to con-fuse
therefore activity with matter, the operari
with the opus, the agere with the actus and the facere with
the factum. And this con-fusion of
the quest for the “meaning” of human reality (of its “perception”) with the
“certainty” and “calculability” of it has meant that, in the words of
Nietzsche, Western metaphysics has always sought the “fixity” of Being, its
“essence”, and has neglected its “being-as-becoming”. As a result, this Western
“will to truth” (Nietzsche) has turned into a maniacal “quest for certainty”,
for the “full end” (Voll-endung) of
history and consequently of philosophy itself. This quest, however, could only
end in nihilism – that is, in the debunking of all “truths” and “values” -, and
determine what Heidegger called the ‘Vollendung’ – at once the ful-filment and
com-pletion, and therefore the ex-haustion, of the Western metaphysical
tradition. (Again, the obligatory reference is to Heidegger, Vol.2 of his Nietzsche.) Given that no “ultimate”
values can be “fixed” with “certainty”, given that “truth” can never be
identical with its “object”, Nietzsche was keen to stress the importance of
what happens in “life”, in that place that lies be-tween “the first thing”
(birth) and “the last thing” (death).
The question for
us is: if we accept with Nietzsche that there are no ultimate values or final
and definitive truths, that there is no summum
bonum, what “meaning and purpose” can we then bestow upon our lives that
will guide our living activity and that will make our political action
worthwhile? It may be said that we are a purpose in search of a meaning, a need
in search of a reason. Nietzsche’s ontology is in-comprehensible (it cannot be
grasped practically) without his notion of the Eternal Return of the Same which
is premised entirely on the interpretation of historical events as “symptoms”
or “signs” of either the underlying “health” or else of the “Disgregation” of
the instincts of freedom (will to power) of human agents. The notion of the
Eternal Return is neither cyclical (palingenesis) nor anagogical (as in the
anakyklosis), but refers instead to a novel conception of “time” as nunc stans – the “now” understood not as
a point on a “sequence” of past nows and future nows, but rather as an entirely
different “dimension” in which time is not spatialised, in which it cannot be
measured, added to or subtracted from. For Nietzsche, everything happens at
once; only in this sense does it “return eternally” and in this sense must
“fate be loved” (amor fati).
Arendt’s profound
incomprehension of Nietzsche’s transvaluation of all values is due in large
part to her inability to penetrate Nietzsche’s entirely novel interpretation of
place (Ort) as different from “time and space”! – Which is strange, because
Heidegger (whom Arendt knew…intimately, to be scabrous) elaborated it at great
length though incompletely or incorrectly in his thorough critique of the
Kantian notion of intuition in his Kantbuch,
which he meant as the second part of Being
and Time. Arendt also and rightly begins her peripatetic assessment of the life of the mind with a critique of
Kant’s epistemology (a cours force’ it
seems for most modern thinkers), which in turn she interprets as a response to
the solipsism of the Cartesian cogito.
We agree with Arendt that the mind has a life
not merely metaphorically but in the full sense of the word, materially,
because we do not accept as valid the Cartesian dualism of mind and matter – a
dualism that degenerates inevitably into solipsism given that the cogito admits and conceives of
ec-sistence exclusively as a “mental thing”
– the res cogitans as opposed to the res extensa -, and that the res cogitans must constitute an
indivisible unity (in Leibnitz’s powerful phrase, “a being must be a being”).
The mind has a life because it is “part” of life, it is within “life and the
world”: that is its “materiality”. A mind without life and the world is
unimaginable because for the mind to ec-sist it needs a life and a world in
which to be situ-ated, loc-ated, that is, it needs a site and a
locus, a “place” that is categorically distinct from our conventional notions
called “time and space”. Similarly, life has a mind to the extent that we
cannot conceive of life without an organ
capable of conceiving life – the mind, whose locus is not necessarily the brain
or the heart but again a “place”, a dimension categorically distinct from any
body organs or functions.
[Cassirer, Individuo y Cosmos, fn.57 – Nietzsche
and “inter-pretation”, no “thing” to be interpreted. Being-as-becoming, “place”
and not “time and space”.]
Pero la grandeza
del Cusano en este aspecto y su significación histórica
estriban en el hecho de que en él,
lejos de cumplirse este proceso en oposición al pensamiento
religioso de la Edad Media,
se lleva a cabo precisamente dentro de la órbita de ese
pensamiento mismo. Desde el
propio centro de lo religioso realiza el descubrimiento de
la naturaleza y del
hombre
que intenta afianzar y fijar en ese centro. El místico y el
teólogo que hay en Nicolás [56]
de Cusa se sienten a la altura del mundo y de la naturaleza, a la altura de
la historia y de
la nueva cultura secular y humana. No se aparta de ellas ni
las rechaza sino que, como
cada vez se entrega más y más a su círculo, va incluyéndolas
al mismo tiempo en su
propia esfera de pensamientos. Aun desde los primeros
tratados del Cusano es posible
seguir este proceso; y si en ellos prevalece el motivo
platónico del
chorismos49, en las
obras posteriores gana la primacía el motivo de la methexis50.En sus últimas obras se
manifiesta como
cumbre de la teoría la convicción de que la verdad, que al principio
había buscado en la oscuridad de la mística y que había
determinado como
oposición a
toda multiplicidad y mudanza, se revela sin embargo
precisamente en medio del
reino
de la multiplicidad empírica misma, la convicción de que la
verdad clama por las
calles51. Cada vez con mayor fuerza se da en Nicolás de Cusa
ese sentimiento del
mundo y, con él, ese su característico optimismo religioso.
El vocablo panteísmo no es
adecuado para designar acabadamente ese nuevo sentimiento del mundo, pues no se
desvanece aquí la oposición entre el ser de Dios y el ser del mundo, sino que por
el
contrario se mantiene incólume en toda su plenitud. Pero como
visione Dei, si la verdad de lo universal y lo particular de lo
individual se compenetran mutuamente en forma tal que el ser de Dios sólo puede
ser comprendido y visto en la infinita multiplicidad de los puntos de vista
individuales, del mismo modo podemos descubrir también el ser que está más allá
de toda limitación, de toda contracción, solo y precisamente en esa limitación.
De modo que el ideal hacia el cual debe
tender nuestro conocimiento no
consiste en desconocer ni en desechar lo particular, [57] sino más bien en comprender el pleno despliegue de
toda su riqueza, pues sólo la totalidad
del
We can see here,
in Cassirer’s account of the thought of Nicholas of Cusa, which in many ways
pre-announces that of Hegel (cf. at par.60), how the notion of “totality”
subsists even as Nicholas elevates the “participation” (methexis) of the
particular as an “a-spect”, a “view” of the “whole”. Similarly, in the erroneous
exegesis of Nietzsche’s thought (in Jaspers as in Foucault), the primacy of
“interpretation” is supposed to refer to the im-possibility of encompassing
this “totality”. But this is far from Nietzsche’s meaning! The notion of
“inter-pretation” always implies a “mediation” between the interpreter and the
“interpretandum” – “that” which is inter-preted, a mediation between the
“thing” and the “knowledge of the thing” on the part of an “inter-preter”. But
this is exactly what Nietzsche denies – the ec-sistence of a “thing” whose
“totality” or “truth” we cannot com-prehend or en-compass. Far from ec-sisting
independently of the knower or interpreter (whose ineluctable task it is to be
con-fined to “infinite interpretations” -, for Nietzsche neither “the thing” nor
its “truth” have a “totality” that can re-fer (bring back) to an under-lying,
sub-stantial “re-ality” (thing-iness or what-ness). This is the consistent
meaning of “esse est percipi” that
eluded both Berkeley and Schopenhauer – because both thought that “being” was a
function of per-ception, so that it
is the “perceiver” that bestows being
to the “perceived” – which is the true meaning of “idealism” as against
“realism”. In effect, both Berkeley and Schopenhauer conceive of “the world as
representation or Idea” in a neoplatonic sense that opposes Ideas to the “world
of appearances”. But Nietzsche and Nicholas of Cusa are speaking the language,
not of pantheism but of “immanence”, like Spinoza: they are saying that “being”
ec-sists only as appearance, as per-ception; for them, “the apparent world” has
disappeared together with the “real
or true world”. The opposition of
“real” and “apparent” worlds or being is the ineluctable outcome of the
transcendental attitude that opposes (this is the meaning of the Platonic chorismos, of the philosophia perennis) particular “beings” to “the Being of beings”
– the particular to the “totality”, the part to the whole. Note that Heidegger
(cited by Arendt in ‘LotM’, p.11) claims that with this phrase Nietzsche has
“eliminated the difference between
the sensible and supra-sensory worlds” – and in this he is clearly wrong
because Nietzsche never wished to refute “the difference” between the two
worlds: he wished instead to make a dif-ference by exposing the meaninglessness
of their “opposition”! Of course, Heidegger had every interest in “relegating”
Nietzsche to the nihilism (incomplete or complete) that he had denounced and
sought to overcome! This is the point
that Arendt herself misses completely:
“What is ‘dead’ is not only the localization
of such ‘eternal truths’, but also the distinction itself” (p.10).
And this is the
meaning of nihilism for Arendt. Yet she also is wrong: nihilism for Nietzsche
does not consist in “the elimination of the distinction or difference” between
true and apparent worlds. Nihilism is the very fact that belief in the suprasensory world leads to the
annihilation of the sensible world. The seed of nihilism is contained in the very thought of
trans-scendence – and this is a “fallacy” to which Arendt clearly and genially
points, but ultimately does not elude (see Preface, p.11). The “overcoming” of
nihilism, however, starts precisely with the overcoming, not of the distinction or difference between the two worlds, but with the real source of this
“distinction” or opposition, which is the forma
mentis that generates this distinction, with the transcendental attitude that
forms the substratum of this philosophia
perennis. This is the “com-pletion and exhaustion [Voll-endung] of metaphysics”
for Nietzsche. What Nietzsche certifies
is “the end of transcendental metaphysics” in a practical, even political,
sense. But that is not to say that a “metaphysics of immanence” is no longer
possible: on the contrary, it becomes necessary. – Because, as Arendt insists, as
do Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, “meaning” and “truth-as-certainty” are not the
same thing! (Preface to ‘LotM’.)
[Refer to
discussion of Nicholas of Cusa.]
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