The Earth
is burning and dying. Capitalism is killing it. Contra Nietzsche, planeti-cide, not dei-cide, is the secular catastrophe, the most horrid crime for
human civilisation. I have sought refuge from the unbearable heat of the
norther hemisphere (36 Celsius in Taipei, 40 in Tokyo) as far north as I could
go - in Hokkaido. Refuge, not just shelter, nor sanctuary, that’s for saints or
rare species - because it is more than heat that I seek relief from. I wish
also to take a break from the madness engulfing the world. The gaping divide
between profitability (ever-growing accumulation of control over living labour
by means of dead labour) and the sustainability of life on earth is easily
gauged by the incalculable and irretrievable damage that this capitalist social
system is inflicting on our lonely planet. Small wonder that the bourgeoisie
should try to appease us with pathetic pie-in-the-sky lures of future
interplanetary travel and settlement! That is without counting all the garbage
about “artificial intelligence” when supposedly it will be robots that will
relieve us of all suffering and toil! In reality, of course, capitalism is “the
civilization of labour” because it is founded on the
accumulation of command over surplus living labour – which means, of course,
that the survival of the bourgeoisie and its accumulation of capital depends on
the perpetuation and expansion of necessary living labour!
The global
bourgeoisie is palpably hell-bent on erasing not just biodiversity, not just the
ecosphere, but also - and consequentially - the only thing that could protect
the Earth from devastation, the very fabric of anything resembling a rational
society guided by humane and progressive values. Capitalist accumulation
engenders (in the sense that it enables and requires) overpopulation, and
therefore uncontrolled consumption and destruction of natural resources. At the
same time, the global bourgeoisie promotes anti-democratic lumpen-proletarian ideologues
and propagates misinformation that make any type of rational government and
lawful order utterly impossible. The one deplorable phenomenon feeds into the
other in a diabolically spiraling, pernicious
conflagration that is simultaneously suffocating our atmosphere and
asphyxiating our minds. Here in the verdant cool of Hokkaido it is easy to
picture oneself in the robes of those mediaeval monks who retreated to the wintry
fields of Ireland, seeking shelter from the howling wind inside a rudimentary church
or monastery built with rough-hewn stone – just as Marguerite Yourcenar
imagined in one of her most beautiful essays – Le Temps, Ce Grand Sculpteur. It is to such remote places that gentler
spirits flee to escape the ravages of their crumbling civilization, braving the
inclement elements and the harsh environment, warmed by a feeble fire burning
in the somber hearth and by the fickle hope of preserving for posterity the
last remnants of the ancient wisdom that has lit their grim lives. Yourcenar
likens the experience of the monks to that of a fledgling bird that flies into
their cavernous building from a lantern in the ceiling, traverses the vault from
side to side, comforted by the brief glow of warmth rising from the log-fire
below, before exiting through a crack in the opposite wall to face the dark
cold night once more.
The bourgeoisie thrives on the
“proletariat” - on the “proles” that supply the human fodder to feed capitalist
factories. Except that this proliferation - the overpopulation and excess
labour force on which capital accumulates - is now threatening the very
survival of the Earth.
Ruling classes have always loved the mob: - after all, rulers need a mob to be
able to rule; only the existence of a mob can make possible the complementary
endurance of a ruling class. And free spirits have always wished to remove
themselves from the blandishments and the menace of rulers and mob alike. “Segui il tuo corso e
lascia dir
le genti”,
Virgil admonishes Dante at the entrance of the Inferno, just as Socrates fought
valiantly against the doxa that turned stultified souls away from episteme.
Even Kant, profound believer in the Enlightenment, had to conclude late in his
life that “just as never a straight house was erected from crooked wood” so
humanity would never meet with a happy destiny. And did not Heidegger, the
epigone of Western prima philosophia, lament that “oblivion of Being”
that had led to the “obscuration of the world” (l’obscurcissement du monde)
in his Einfuhrung zur
Metaphysik lectures held in Paris shortly
before the last World War?
To remove himself from the hurly-burly of
urban life and affairs of state, the genial Florentine Secretary, Niccolo’
Machiavelli, would retreat to his manor in the hills outside Florence to seek
sanctuary from the petty rapacity of his fellow citizens consumed by
self-interest and wholly oblivious of the interests of their polity. The
discrepancy between these two realities - private affluence and public interest
– has finally caught up with the social system of which he was an early witness
and now can be measured in the degradation of our planet and its living
conditions. (Alec Pigou, in The Economics
of Welfare, designated the degradation of the environment caused by the
pursuit of profits with the word “externalities” - almost in a sheepish attempt
to deflect the obvious conclusion that these are indeed “internalities” of the
capitalist mode of production!) Away
from the frenzied scheming of the popolo
grasso and the blind ferocity of the popolo
minuto, the author of Il Principe would
retire to his study where he could then consult his extensive library and
commune with the antiqui auctores - from Plato and Aristotle to Cicero
and Seneca – and reflect upon the “barbe
et peripetie” (barbs and vicissitudes) of human historical experience,
concluding that human life is a mix of virtus
et fortuna (virtue and fortune).
The task of reflection is always arduous
and fatidic. The thinker looks back upon the past so as to divine the future -
much as the Etruscan haruspices inspected the entrails of cattle in search of
omens and auspices. But the process of reflection is also one of removal from
the cacophony of the present - it is the A-skesis, the strenuous ascent of the
pilgrim or the visionary (Nietzsche’s ‘Uber-mensch’,
Zarathustra, retreats to the mountains) to the vantage point from which to
survey reality and peer into the horizon where the land and the sky collide. A
metaphoric ascent that can also become a descent - into Hades (Odysseus,
Aeneas) or Hell (Dante). Reflection relies much more on the intellect than on
the will - which is why prophecies are more often dark than uplifting:
”Optimism of the will, pessimism of the intellect”, was the motto launched by
Gramsci and Rolland. Dark prophecies can serve opposing causes: one is to
invite us to surrender to the inevitability of doom, and the other is to stir
us to strenuous resistance against it: “It is only for the sake of those who
have lost hope that hope is given to us”. Ironic, then, if compatible, that the
artificers of dark prophecies and the idealist seekers of a brighter future
should turn to philosopher kings (Plato) or to a Leviathan (Hobbes) or a
Principe Nuovo (Gramsci again) to lead us out of the darkness of Lethe
(forgetfulness) into the light of Mnemosyne (memory). Machiavelli turned to
“the Prince”.
II.
Gratias agamus Machiavello...qui nobis aperte et indissimulanter
proferet quid homines facere soleant non quid debeant.
With this
sonorous praise, one of the first proponents of bourgeois science, Francis
Bacon, anointed Machiavelli as one of the founders of political science rather
than ethics. For Aristotle - and certainly for Plato - politics, far from being
a “science”, was only a chapter, published separately, of the Nicomachean
Ethics. But now Bacon proposes a clean-cut distinction between the realms of
fact and values, between science and morals or ethics. The task of science,
writes Bacon in The Advancement of Learning
(De
Augmentis Scientiarum), is not to preach or to exhort or
even less to inspire “values”. Even in matters concerning human affairs, the
task of
science is neither autopsia - the retrospective analysis
(dissection) of foregone events, nor even anamnesis
(their
recollection). The task of science is mere empeiria - naked empirical
observation of facts. It is neither the Ought (Sollen) of ethics nor the
Must (Mussen) of religious commandments: it is rather the Is (Sein)
of reality described without fear or favour, sine ira et studio - “openly and without
dissimulation” (aperte et indissimulanter). The sole end of science is
Truth, the ordo et connexio rerum et idearum: every Ought, every ethical
value or moral goal, indeed, every meta-physics is just that, “beyond
physics”, and therefore beyond the scope of scientific research.
Yet,
contrary to Bacon’s obvious implication, what people actually do is
still tied to ideas and values that point them to what they “ought” or “should”
do. It is obvious therefore that the purely empirical role of science that
Bacon advocates is based on a fundamental fallacy. And that not just in the
sense (emphasised by Friedrich Hayek in The Counter-Revolution of Science)
that all sociological observation aiming to be “objective” must also - by
definition! - take into account the “subjective” views of the “subjects” (or is
that, “objects”?) it purports to observe! - But
also above all because all scientific research and observation must account for
the “values” that led the scientists themselves to research a specific area of
human endeavour or of “objective reality”, of “matter” - a point central to Max
Weber’s entire methodology of science. Not only: what Bacon also is unable to
see, right at the dawn of the bourgeois era, is the unquestionable fact that
“science” is not a neutral-objective undertaking but rather it is a specific
human activity – a praxis! - in all and for all identical to technological
fabrication and invention. For all the mythology of “science and progress”, homo sapiens has always and everywhere
been co-generate with homo faber! The fallacious distinction
between science and technology owes its unimpeded survival and propagation to
the need of sprawling capitalist industry to present its new techniques of
production as innovations based solely and entirely on “scientific truth” - and
not on the class antagonism of the wage relation.
Bacon confused Machiavelli’s
enucleation of the concept of raison
d’Etat in his magnum opus, The Prince,
with the outline of a truly “mechanistic” political theory. (On this specific
concept and its salience in the political theory of the late Renaissance with
the statolaters [Grotius, Pufendorf
to Spinoza], see F. Meinecke, Die Idee
der Staatsrason.) Whilst there is certainly a mechanistic bias in
Machiavelli’s exposition of Realpolitik,
the overriding aim of his studies was to outline a clear deontological guide to
ensure the triumph of virtus over fortuna. It is undeniable that
Machiavelli considered that in statecraft “the ends justify the means”. But the
insistence on this realism was beyond
the scope of a serious effort at a scientific political theory. For the
Florentine Secretary, human actions, far from being equiparable or capable of
being homologated with physical events, are of an entirely different nature.
Indeed, it is arguable that Machiavelli was a precursor of Vico’s “Scienza
Nuova” in that truth can only be predicated of human actions, not of physical
events, because it is only human actions (“facts” from the Latin facere, to do) that are truly knowable
by humans – for the reason that both the historical agents and the scholars
studying their actions share a common insight in the reasons that led the
agents to follow a given course of action! And this “knowledge” or science of
human activity extends to scientific research in the “natural sciences” and to
technological invention! It is this realization that led Vico to label his
theory of human history and activity “Scienza Nuova”. Not only is there not a
distinction between physical observation and historical action, but there is
also no distinction between “appearance” and “reality”: - because the very fact
that a human activity has taken place – that it is a “factum” – means immediately that it is also “true” (verum) by virtue of its having been
“done”, of its having taken place as res
gestae: - whence the famous Vichian dictum, “Verum ipsum factum” (the truth is the doing itself).
What Bacon
and his contemporary scientistic ideologues
of the nascent and triumphant bourgeoisie failed to detect, let alone
acknowledge, was the very simple reality that “science” itself has a history
- and that therefore
it changes over time in entirely contingent ways. And history tells us that all
scientific “discoveries” are human inventions
absolutely
indistinguishable from technological applications. There is no “scientific way”
of doing science: every form of scientific research is sui generis – absolutely
unique – and therefore cannot be distinguished from other forms of human action
– all of which constitute the substance and record of “history”. (On the utter fictitiousness
of “scientific methodology”, the peremptory reference is T.S. Kuhn, The
Structure of Scientific Revolutions.) Once
we look at “science”, not
as the involucre of “Truth”, but
rather as the generalisation of technical practices, we can then see much more
clearly, again, how “science” is not the repository of any “Truth” or
truths but is instead the chronicle of the standardization, the homogenization
of human activity, of “techniques” or “technologies” or “practices". (We “technologies”
or “techniques” so as to avoid the word “technology” because, like “science”, it tends to reify as an
absolute reality what is instead a human, all-too-human activity.)
It is clear
from the foregoing that Bacon was blind to the fundamental insight introduced
by Vico that “verum ipsum factum” - that “the truth” and “science” are nothing
more than the historical epitome
of human activity – one that, far from encapsulating the ultimate account of “reality” or “the Truth”, is only an incoherent and often
inconsistent set of temporary and contingent
– historical! - conventional
rationalisations of human activity. – A set of conventions as fallible and
aleatory as any other human activity. The
only “truth” is to be found in human activity with all its errors and dissimulations – precisely those
“dissimulations” that Bacon wished to eliminate from scientific research and
that form instead the very core and essence of Machiavelli’s political theory
in Il Principe! What “normal science”
(Kuhn) dismisses as error or appearance (Bacon’s “dissimulation”) is in fact
part of reality – of human reality with its contingent and imperfect structure
– which is why no amount of scientific effort and research will ever be able to
establish the definitive “Truth”. (On these themes, see Nietzsche’s On Truth and Lies (Uber Wahrheit und Luge),
and Hannah Arendt’s The Life of the Mind.)
In Karl Popper’s words, science must be falsifiable
to be scientific – and therefore it is a complex welter of “conjectures and
refutations”. Indeed, far from being elements of “Truth”, the mathematical
relations or formulae decreed by normal science are mere empirical
approximations of data or facts or events that can be correlated practically or
even statistically but whose ultimate causal connection is conceptually impossible
to establish – indeed, “meta-physical” in Bacon’s own terms. (This conceptual
impossibility was the great insight in David Hume’s scepticism, and then in
Nietzsche’s phenomenalism.)
If “Progress” there has been in human
history, this is due not to “scientific Truth” but rather to the adaptation of
specific social practices and conventions of which “science” is only an
adventitious epiphenomenon. In other words, advances in civilization – if
advances they can be called – are due not to “science” as an objective process
of discovery that has led to “progress”, but rather to a set of exquisitely
political practices and values a
component of which we categorise as “science” as a convenient label. To
understand “science” we must go beyond its self-understanding – which is the
reification of human reality as “objective Truth” – and look at it as a
“praxis”, as a social project subsumed by those social relations of production
that have sustained the scientific myth from Galileo and Newton to Stephen
Hawking. In the words of Max Weber, “Science” is merely a “Belief”, a
“Calling”, a “Praxis” – and not the encapsulation or distillation of “Truth”
(see the appositely titled Munich lecture by Weber, Wissenschaft als Beruf [Science as Belief, or Calling]). (Though laced
with excessive neo-Kantianism, Jurgen Habermas’s Erkenntnis und Interesse goes some way toward the approach we are
outlining here.)
III.
Furthermore,
the universal goal of science is to place all disparate data in a mathematical
relation to one another so as to establish not just their exact calculability
but also
their equivalence, that is to say, the homologation and equiparation of
all knowledge in exact, precise, mathematical translation and proportion. In
short, the task of science since Galileo – whose thought Bacon faithfully endorses
– is to erect a mathesis universalis in line with the divine design of
nature – indeed, of the uni-verse -
opposed to the multi-versality of the
life-world. For
Bacon – and his contemporaries Galileo and Descartes as for Mach two centuries
later - philosophical
reflection begins where scientific discovery has reached its present limits. That is why “we owe thanks to
Machiavelli for showing us openly and without deceit
[aperte et
indissimulanter] what
human beings are wont to do and not what they should do”.
The most
advanced, extensive and elaborate effort to establish such a “science” is to be
found in Descartes’s Discours sur la Methode, in terms of methodological
exposition, and in his Meditationes, in terms of the inspiration, of the
afflatus, behind it. It
is Descartes who articulated for the entire bourgeoisie what became the
scientistic credo of the capitalist era – the mathesis universalis, that
is, the infinite (i)
calculability, (ii)
reproducibility and (iii)
equivalence of all reality, human and
physical. For Descartes, no knowledge can claim the status of science unless
and until it is exactly calculable (in mathematical proportions), unless and
until it is indefinitely reproducible (as a scientific experiment), and
therefore unless it can be connected or trans-lated or trans-posed precisely
into all other reality. Descartes’s own methodological conclusions
are quite inseparable from his philosophical modus operandi. In the Meditations, Descartes describes in
careful detail how he came to excogitate his “Cartesian doubt” as the
fundamental method for scientific certainty. Having established that the very
awareness of thought is an inconfutable proof of existence (cogito ergo sum), Descartes concludes
that only those findings that have the certainty of logic and mathematics can
be treated as scientific. Yet it is precisely the formalism of this method, its
immateriality – its morbid attempt to
abstract thought from matter (the res
cogitans from the res extensa) –
that ultimately condemns Cartesian methodology to irrelevance.
In
his fallacious confusion of “truth” with “certainty” and perverse attempt to
transmute human and physical reality into mathematical equations, Descartes
ends up not with science (as even he understood it) but with empty and sterile logic! Ultimately, the immateriality of his “method” – the transcendental requirement that all
science achieve the “certainty” of logico-mathematics – led to the unbridgeable
chasm (Fichte’s hiatus irrationale) between the res cogitans (the “I” behind “I think”)
and the res extensa (the physical,
material ec-sistence in space and in time of the “I” in “I am”). Descartes’s
Ego is unfounded, both in its physical existence and in its subjective identity
or self-consciousness. (This
unbridgeable chasm prompted E. Husserl’s later contorted Cartesian Meditations. The
confusion of truth with certainty is a fallacy most devastatingly exposed by
Heidegger in his The End of Philosophy
– a work extracted from his voluminous Nietzsche.
It was Nietzsche, however, who first challenged Descartes’s cogito as part of
his thoroughgoing aversion to the French philosopher.)
Like
Galileo before him, Descartes failed to realise that what makes
physical-mathematics possible is not the “connection” or adequation of thing (body) and idea (soul) – the Scholastic adaequatio
rei et mentis, of matter and mathematics – because no such connection
exists or is possible -, but rather the reduction of all reality to empirical
data capable of being calculated mathematically under set experimental conditions.
(To illustrate, F=ma links mathematically concepts such as force and mass and
acceleration that are entirely metaphysical! The formula links our observations
as a convenient rule of thumb, but it does not prove that any such entities exist – least of all that there is a causal link between them, as the
Newtonian formula suggests.) The calculability
of these relations is subject to strict conditions that in fact reverse the
onus of proof from the perfect formula to our imperfect observations. Furthermore,
no physical experiment is indefinitely reproducible
– without disturbing the experimental conditions under which it is carried out!
Finally, far from being scientifically ascertainable, the equivalence of scientific units is entirely dependent on empirical
observation because otherwise, from pure conceptual analysis, it is impossible
by definition! (To exemplify, it is impossible to equiparate the energy needed
to boil water with the destructive effect of the energy released by an
explosion: the two events, boiling and exploding are entirely different in
their effects!) [Reification]
Yet, at the dawn of the bourgeois
era, it was still possible for Bacon to advocate and hypothesise the eventual
scientization, not just of physical events, but also of social reality. That is
why, in the words of Bacon, at least for what concerns human sciences, “we owe
thanks to Machiavelli for showing us openly
and without deceit [aperte et
indissimulanter] what human beings are wont
to do and not what they should do”.
In reality, however, Machiavelli’s own stance regarding the epistemological and
moral status of political analysis was far removed from what Bacon implies in
his fulsome praise of the Florentine Secretary. The author of the Discorsi was too steeped in the Italian
Humanist and Classical Hellenistic historical tradition to reduce and confine
his political studies to a mechanical understanding of human affairs. The
equiparation of politics and physics – and specifically, of mechanics – along Cartesian lines was a task attempted
with great genius and acumen by Thomas Hobbes – certainly not by Machiavelli. (See
C. Schmitt, “The State as Mechanism in Hobbes and Descartes” in his The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas
Hobbes.)
We can now
summarise the importance of Bacon’s novel emphasis on “observation” rather than
“exhortation” as the spring for “the advancement of learning” as being that the
obliteration of ethical-political values in scientific research (a) leads
inevitably to
the observation of “individuals” bereft of all social bonds, in particular with
regard to their behaviour as “consumers” of produced goods; and (b) this isolation turns the
individual worker into a “commodity” available for purchase by the capitalist
on the labour market “freed” from all other social bonds that may protect the
worker from capitalist exploitation. The emphasis on the “scientific” nature of
technological innovation in production serves to disguise its effective
“cheapening” of labour power in favour of the expanded reproduction of the
labour force for further exploitation - and therefore the accumulation of
capital as command over living labour through its “exchange” for dead labour
(products). (On the real subsumption of the labour process by capital see, of
course, Volume One of Marx’s Capital and, more recently, H. Braverman,
Labor and Monopoly Capital.) Hence,
the introduction of new productive technologies for mass consumption can be
disguised as a “natural” outgrowth or by-product of “neutral-scientific”
research. In reality, once all forms of social activity are subsumed by
capital, it stands to reason that all technological innovation is oriented
solely toward the accumulation of capital – toward profitability.
The need of
capitalist production is to create a “proletarian” society - one that simply
reproduces “proles” available to be exploited as “labour power”. To do this,
the bourgeoisie needs to introduce ever more productive technologies that lower
the amount of living labour needed to reproduce the proletariat - which in turn
facilitates the excessive procreation of proletarians the world over. To be
sure, these technologies are a by-product of the antagonism between workers and
capitalist “employers” or “givers of labour” (Arbeit-Geber):
capital
adopts only those technologies that (a) advance its power over workers, (b)
lower the reproductive costs of the labour force, and (c) as a result are most
“profitable”. Profitability is the measure of the power of capital to exchange
dead labour (products) for living labour (the living activity of workers).
Of course,
at the beginning of the bourgeois era, scientific research still could claim
some autonomy from capital. But the real subsumption of the labour process by
capital - once it extended to the reproduction of the entire society - meant
that technologies and their “scientific” legitimation was completely placed in
the service of capitalist enterprise and industry (cf. Weber’s “Wissenschaft als Beruf” - one of the earliest and most
powerful articulations of this complex phenomenon). Yet the real conceptual and
practical connection between early “scientific research” and commercial or
productive technologies is utterly inconfutable and undeniable.
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