I found Nietzsche’s discussion of asceticism to be particular interesting, because the more I thought about it the more pervasive asceticism is in our societies and cultures. Whether it be from people who give up technology like the Amish or the saints who spent their lives on the tops of pillars, every society has a form of asceticism. On the surface it would appear the Nietzsche wouldn’t like this thought, as he is all for expressing strength as strength. Instead he claims "the ascetic ideal springs from the protective instinct of a degenerating life.".
This does make sense in many ways. Ascetic people who voluntary give up pleasure usually see themselves stronger than the rest of society, as they can carry on without things that other people consider pleasurable. Asceticism provides a way out for the sickness that we bring upon ourselves. As we struggle with ourselves and the weak tend towards nihilism, asceticism is an instinct that arises in all cultures as a way of protecting life. Asceticism is only bad in the way that it is indicative of sickness. The ascetic ideas of the herd may not be the optimum expression of will but it is miles better than not willing anything at all.
Nietzsche is also often accused of starting a culture of nihilism so I found it intriguing how he specifically attacks nihilism as a sickness. He clearly anticipated a reaction of nihilism to his philosophy and was quick to disparage this tendency. Life cannot be seen as suffering because that leads to self-pity and nihilism. Reading Nietzsche this becomes very clear. He wants people to take life-affirming actions of the will, reaching out and grabbing power and life.
A few classes ago, we discussed to what extent Kierkegaard's authorial intentions or personal motivations affected our interpretation of the text. I'm generally of the opinion that authorial intention has little to no bearing on the meaning of a text, so somewhat predictably, I was particularly interested in section 4 from Nietzsche's third essay. Now, I think Nietzsche is qualifying his statement when he says "In such a case as this," meaning in Wagner's case, a case where an artist undergoes some sort of radical conceptual shift. Setting aside this qualification, Nietzsche argues that readers should focus on the text rather than the author behind the text (recall his preference for the deed over the "neutral substratum" of the subject): "one does best to separate an artist from his work, not taking him as seriously as his work. He is, after all, only the precondition of his work, the womb, the soil, sometimes the dung and manure on which, out of which, it grows--and therefore in most cases something one must forget if one is to enjoy the work itself" (100-1).
There are all kinds of interesting images going on in this passage, images that have echoes throughout Genealogy of Morals, and I can't give them a full treatment here. But this passage did raise another question that I've been struggling with in some form or another throughout this text. Obviously, as we've all noted I'm sure, there's some pretty racist and misogynistic stuff going on in here. How much of this is just Nietzsche the author, being a white male in the 19th century, and how much of this is Nietzsche's text? If it is just Nietzsche the author, maybe we can "set it aside" (but maybe we shouldn't). If it's the text, I tend to think we can't set it aside. Now, this is a problem I am honestly struggling with here, so feel free to help me out, though I'm not sure it's a resolvable problem. I'll point to one (though we all know there are plenty) of such troublesome passages: "A predominance of mandarins [scholars?] always means something is wrong; so do the advent of democracy, international courts in place of war, equal rights for women, the religion of pity, and whatever other symptoms of declining life there are" (154).
This is really, it seems, a two part question. First: to what extent are Nietzsche's racist, misogynistic, and (I might say) classist comments part or a result of the argument itself? In other words, are they a necessary outcome of the will to power or the ascendancy of the overman? Second: if they aren't necessary outcomes of Nietzsche's argument, how do we respond to their appearance in the text? If they are in the text (which, obviously, they are), shouldn't we account for them in our reading of the text? Even if we could say that these comments are not necessary to the argument itself, can we ignore them in our evaluation of the argument? Or, and this might be a separate question, in our evaluation of the text? I feel like this last question raises yet another question, that is, how do we separate the text's argument from the text itself, and if we can't, does every part of the text need to be accounted for in our evaluation of the argument?
We have said that Nietzsche’s goal in the Genealogy surpasses that of proposing an
account of the development of morality. He intends to question the value of our
values themselves (particularly our moral values). The one thing Nietzsche does
not question is the value of life itself. This question may be trivial. I am
not certain; but the answer will help in our understanding of Nietzsche claims.
If there is any value in life,
then it would have to lie in the will to power
according to Nietzsche. I draw this
conclusion based upon his assertion that meaning
and/or purpose is only a sign
that a will to power is imposing
itself on something (i.e. on something in the life). This implies that meaning
is variable, as Nietzsche points out. Perhaps more obvious is the implication
that meaning is determined solely by a will
to power. Thus, meaning does not exist without it.
Returning to an earlier
statement, the value in life must be in the will
to power. In this sense, life is almost—if not
entirely—equivalent with the will. Without life, one would not even have the
opportunity to will. Inverting the situation, life without a will seems odd.
This strangeness is likely just a result of my slavish mindset, yet I think the
following question is still helpful: what is life that does not will?
Plants, possibly animals, and
other organisms we do not recognize as possessing a will to power. Would life without a will include the humans of the noble value system? To include humans as
such would be to claim that these humans were not value positing creatures, or
at the very least, that they were not yet value positing creatures. Hence, life
prior to value assertions was simply devoid of meaning. Taking this into account, life as it is read
here possesses a meaning that it never possessed prior to value-positing. This is
a simple logical conclusion given Nietzsche’s premises.
What is the value of life now? I
think it can viably be any number of things according to Nietzsche. We see that a will to power determines meaning. This implies that for every
distinct will, the value in life and of every other possible object is also
distinct (though they could possess similar formulations). I am not satisfied with
this conclusion. I have a more general idea in mind. The value of life is the ability
to conceive of things as valued i.e. to posit values. This appears to be a
tautology given that value positing is made possible via the will to power… which I claimed was
almost the equivalent of life.
If life is not of value because in
it one can posit values, then what is life according to Nietzsche? Is it simply
the setting upon which the Genealogy unfolds and without which nothing would even be possible? To make such a claim would be to take certain things about existence for granted. I will not discuss that here. I think life is more important than this since Nietzsche uses life as something
like a standard with which to determine his acceptance or unacceptance of a
thing (i.e. life is not simply a backdrop). The Nietzschean stamp of approval comes from those wills (and thus
values) which are life-affirmative.
What is the importance of
life-affirmation? I pose this question in the hopes that it will reveal
In class on Tuesday we discussed the extent to
which Nietzsche’s work is merely descriptive as opposed to prescriptive, and
although I tend to agree that his endeavor is, for the most part descriptive, I
think that some of the language he uses to discuss slave morality certainly has
some elements of judgment as opposed to mere description. The acerbic manner in
which he discusses slave morality as "sickening" and
"disgusting" as well as the consequences he attributes to it, seem to
be at least as critical as descriptive. So, at the very least, we can say that
he is critically describing, if not outright judging, slave morality. Although
I agree that he is probably not saying that everyone should, or as we discussed
in class, even could, rid themselves of slave morality and take up aristocratic
morality, the fact of the matter is that many people have read it that way.
Furthermore while I see some value in looking at a text, or a philosophy,
independent of its’s author’s motivations its historical consequences, I am not
entirely convinced that we should, or even can, divorce a text from its
historical and cultural location. That being said, I am still on the fence
about these issues, and I invite discussion.
There is one other thing that has been bothering me
about Nietzsche. I really liked the first few pages of the first section in which
Nietzsche engaged in a sort of an entomologically informed historical-sociological
look at the development of aristocratic morality and its relationship with power. Then
he moved into a discussion of slave morality as coming from the subjugation of
one group within that power-laden meaning system, yet, he failed to discuss the
ways in which the slave morality was only able to become widespread as Jews and
Christians became more powerful. I mean historically, Judeo-Christian morals
did not become culturally widespread until they were incorporated into the
institutional power structure via Constantine, and later the economic and
political power of the Vatican, and even later the economic and political power
of protestant Christians in the US, Europe, and all the places colonized by
them. It is not as if slave morality, has any less of a power dynamic than
aristocratic morality.
My final
bone to pick with Nietzsche, is that he decries slave morality, in favor of a
morality which would allow for progress and the continued development of the
human race (or factions within it), yet, in looking forward, where does he look?
But backward to a morality which existed before slave morality. Should not, Nietzsche
look forward to an, as yet undiscovered, new, type of morality, one which is
entirely different from not only slave morality, but aristocratic morality as
well. However, I do not know if this is a fair criticism, because it seems like
Nietzsche sees aristocratic morality not as a type in itself, not as something
constructed and artificial, (as is the case with slave morality), but instead
as something that is natural and almost self-evident. Like I said, I am not set
in any of these critiques, they have just been floating around in my head.
Bioshock is a game which gives a possible interpretation of what it would look like for something to come after Slave Morality. I will give a summary of its prologue before asking my question.
In the world of Bioshock, Andrew Ryan understands how the slaves have duped the Good. In the world of the slaves, strength is asked to express itself as weakness. The strong are murders, the quick are thieves, the smart are blasphemers, and the creative are corrupter. With this understanding, Ryan had a city built where artists, scientists, and the strong could live away from the slaves and their world-wide slave morality. He calls his city Rapture.
At first, this city thrives with competition, but from competition came someone who would compete with Andrew Ryan. This was Frank Fontaine, a conman. He created several altruistic seeming enterprises in Rapture like orphanages and poor houses, which were in fact all used to create and collect ADAM, a substance with extreme medicinal properties like allowing for genetic re-engineering but is also addictive and leads to insanity and deformity. Exploiting the poor for good PR and medical research, Fontaine eventually reached the point to actually compete with Andrew Ryan for control of Rapture.
This led to both figures fighting for control through propaganda and other means. Eventually Fontaine uses his obedient poor people to stage a rebellion, empowering them with ADAM. These poor people, despite the power they have obtained through ADAM, are but slaves and horrid-looking. The insane artists, doctors, and inventors are some of the most deadliest denizens of this new Rapture as they have the power to make their amoral visions a reality.
Now, of course, Rapture is just a fictional world, but I think one should be concerned to what extent the Masters could sustain their world before one masters exploits the weak, causing another slave revolt, and the addiction to power turns itself against the strong, making them actually weak.
What do you think a post-slave world would look like? How long would it last? Can it only exist as a separate little haven for the strong like Rapture or must the whole world change?
In his Geneology of Morals, Nietzsche identifies the former flawed reasoning of the noble mode of evaluation. He challenges that the slave mode of evaluation, what he would say that we have today, is similar to the ideas espoused by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount ("blessed are the meek, etc. for they shall inherit the Earth.) By inverting the noble mode of evaluation, the slave mode asserts that those who are beloved by God for what the noble mode has called failings and flaws are good because they embody the "be attitudes," listed in the Sermon on the Mount.
But how does this goodness ascend upon such persons? How is Jesus a role model for goodness - or for God-ness, for that matter?
A crucified God subject, as Nietzsche has argued, is fundamentally out of order with the identity of who God is understood to be. The Christian Bible recounts Jesus as having endured much suffering and many mixed feelings about being crucified. Yet he had the free will to take his own "cup" from himself, and and did not.
Was Jesus's demonstration of strength (God) acting as weakness out of order with goodness? With these ideas of Nietzsche in mind, what do you think? Are we misunderstanding the character of God? Or, was Jesus not a satisfactory enough representation of God, or even God at all, according to the "gospel" of Nietzsche?
I
want to elaborate a little bit on a point I made in class on Tuesday. On
Tuesday, our resident child molester questioned whether strength must always
express itself as strength by bringing out an interesting example: a lion kills
his prey but then proceeds to take care of the child it has with its prey, thus
seemingly being strong but expressing weakness. The lion has shown the ability
to successfully kill prey but does not actually express that ability in its
interaction with the young animal. Thus, the lion’s action does not match his
capabilities. Seemingly, his strength does not express itself as strength. This
example led me to the point I kind of made in class, which is that this example
and examples like this really have no bearing on whether strength expresses
itself as strength. For if an animal or a person does not fully want to do
something that he or she is capable of doing, he or she is not expressing
strength as weakness. If the lion does not want to eat and kill the small
animal, the lion’s not doing so would not mean his strength is not expressing
itself as strength. On the contrary, the lion’s doing what he wants to do is a
reflection of his strength in a way. He is doing what he wants or what he thinks
is right. If a bird of prey had no desire to eat or attack the lamb, the bird’s
not doing so would mean nothing. For an example actually about people, if a
person doesn’t actually want to do something that he or she is capable of, then
he or she would be expressing him or herself as none the weaker for it. To
think of it in a different way, if every person and every animal who had
strength acted on this strength just for the sake of doing so or expressing
that strength, seemingly all humans and animals would be killing everything
they could and destroying everything they could. Then the world would be in
chaos, and it might even be the case that everyone would destroy everyone else
until there was nothing left. The question of strength expressing itself as
strength has to be about more than whether someone has in the past shown the
ability to do something; it instead has to encompass what the person wants to
do or what he or she thinks is right.
I
stand by this point, but I do have a little bit of uncertainty about it. This
all seems to suggest that there is a subject that is desiring or thinking about
an action or willing something into action. This confuses me a little bit because
a major point Nietzsche is trying to make of course is about demolishing the
concept of the subject, seemingly putting these two points at odds with each
other. I would try to resolve this by saying that these two points are still
compatible because for Nietzsche, there is no free will. Thus, while a person
may desire something or think in a certain way, whether he or she does this in
a certain way or not is not up to him or her. While he or she might desire to
do x, he or she really has no choice in the matter of whether he or she wants
to do x. Thus, he or she as a subject really doesn’t have any control over the
action. However, I’m still a little uncertain about this. What do you guys
think?
We have lost self, the singular self, in Hegel. When reason took precedence in consciousness, it lost what is most true--its undeniable (immediate) singularity. In Kierkegaard, we discover several consequences of this lost of the singular self.
The one is the devaluing of faith. We have already discussed this plenty in class. In short, as faith is regulated to the ethical sphere, the immediate paradoxical oneness between Self and Absolute is lost.
The another is philosophical suicide. Suicide is the most dramatic expression of self-consciousness for the act is for Self and what is lost is Self. When suicide is regulated to the field of philosophy, the philosopher will appeal to reason to give the Self a law against suicide. This translates the act of suicide into universal terms and what is lost is the radical singleness of the act. In other words, the philosopher has killed the self through reason much like Hegel does in his philosophical system where reason dominates.
In both Faith and suicide, the incommunicability of the act reflects this immediate self which has been lost in this era of universal reason. In Faith, one cannot speak of why they acted in faith because to do so would put a private act in terms of the universal, which would eliminate the radical singlularity essential to the act. God called Abraham, no one else. No one else can participate in Abraham's relationship with God, and yet the universal is dependent on God for its sanction.
For Suicide, the person commits an act which immediately bypasses all universal claims on him or her. If one chooses to annihilate his own life, he is acting directly with self as self and as such there is no mediation with the universal which is a relationship between self and reason. Suicide can have no reason and cannot be communicated.
So we have this radically singular self whose two basic modes, acts of faith and acts of affirming or denying life are incommunicable. Two questions for me going forward are: 1) If at base each person has an existence which is incommunicable, then how could the universal have any power in our lives? 2) How did the universal (mediated) emerge from the singular (unmediated) if one is essentially not the other?
The
beginning of class on Tuesday kind of blew my mind in a way that nothing else
in college really has. It had never really occurred to me before that maybe
what is the truest is what cannot be expressed in words. At the same time,
however, I think some variation of this idea is really what I’ve believed all
my life or at least the last few years. When I’m frustrated about some feeling
I have about the present in regards to the past, I commonly say something along
the lines of “No one understands.” It seems that no matter how much I try to
explain something about myself and my life and no matter what details I
include, I can never fully get my point across to people; I can’t express it
fully in words in a way that is comprehendible. Nevertheless, I still
throughout these situations continue to feel like what I feel is valid. Even
though I can’t communicate it, I still believe it. For this reason, our
discussion at the beginning of class was amazing to me. It gave words
(ironically) to something I think I’ve thought for a long time.
As
I said in class, this all makes sense with regards to sense-certainty. An exact
moment may not be able to be captured with just words alone. The experience of being there really is different from
hearing about something. For example, if one heard about the nature of a sunset
at a particular time and place, no matter what words were used, the words can’t
fully reproduce the sunset. Hearing about it is necessarily different from
experiencing it in that hearing about it can’t fully give one understanding of
it. Furthermore, as Dr. J pointed out, even if one experiences something at the
same time as another, his or her experience of it might be different than that
of the other person by virtue of them being different people. Because different
people are different, they may experience the same thing in different ways.
This
was all pretty interesting to me because I actually saw an interesting parallel
with Hegel’s notion that the truth is the whole. To refresh, in Hegel’s
preface, he writes, “The True is the whole. But the whole is nothing other than
the essence consummating itself through its development” (11). At this point
and a few other points throughout the preface, Hegel makes the point that the
truth of anything is not just its ending or a summary of the ending; it is the
whole thing or the whole process. This idea fits in with what I’ve just
discussed. A moment is possible inexpressible in words because that moment is
related to everything around it and moments that came before it; words can’t
gather the full development leading up to the moment. The parallel, however, is
notably clearer when thinking about the ways in which different people perceive
things. As I said before, two different people may see the same thing
differently. This is because of their different personalities or their
different previous experiences. The individual people have developed through
their lives in a way that makes a certain moment take a certain form of truth.
For this reason, a description of the moment in general terms may not yield truth;
the truth of the moment might really flow continuously from everything in a
person’s life before that moment. The truth of that moment is determined by the
development of the person’s life that came before it. In other words, the truth
is not purely a description of the moment but everything within a person
leading up to that moment. It follows that this would be difficult or
impossible to express in words. With this in mind, I think that even though
Kierkegaard and Hegel diverge from the point of sense-certainty, this general
idea of Hegel’s actually fits in well with Kierkegaard’s idea of what is the
truest.
So, I was feeling pretty good about Kirkigaurd, before class the other day, but now I don't know what to think. The idea of faith being not a dicision, not something whcih can be taken off and put on like a jacket on a spring day, but instead, an action, a struggle, a war which one wages inside of oneself, resonates with me. I can understnad and sympthethize with his project, of makign faith expensive. But I am struggeling with understanding the paradox, it still seems like any test of faith, any deep and abiding struggle to affirm faith in spite of (and a little bit because of) a malestrome of obsticles should count. As I was writing this, a metaphor occurred to me, and I wonder whether this makes sense to anybody else. If we are too see faith as a struggle, as a war which one wages witinthin oneself, would it be fair to say that. like a war. whcih might rip apart the status quo, causing the suspension of what would otherwise be "ethical," faith, as an experience with such great power, could also rip apart out status quo, could also shatter and suspend the"ethical"? Wars are experiences whcih hold so much power: physical, social, emotional, psycological that they can become the defining characteriztic of people's lives, and the defining characteriztic of a time period, setting the cultural tone for generations to come. Now if we imagine all of the sheer power of a war, collapsed into one singular momemnt of faith, it almost defies logic. If we can see how during a war, normal bonds of ethical and just, right and wrong, fair and unfair are suspended, compressed and transformed under the emence weight of war, how much more so would these things be suspended where that terrible and awsome poer to be multipliex 100 fold and experinced as a moment of singularity within an individual. I feel like this is the sort of power abraham expeirnced, and with that sort of power, your expeirnce would be utterly ripped from reality, beyond ethics, beyond universals, beyond comprehension, and translation, both absolutely real, and utterly uncommunicable.
When reading the problema, Kierkegaard’s influence on existentialism is clear. You can also see why his name Silentio for this text, as his dicussion on speech and silence becomes an essential focal point for his work. I was especially taken by the third problema and the return to the discussion of Abraham. Kierkegaard has made the point that the ethical requires disclosure. However, Abraham cannot disclose. If he speaks then he lowers himself to the ethical, creating a gulf between him and God. God’s command has been unique to Abraham. Just as if someone came up to me claiming God had spoken to him, telling him to kill his son, I would think him a murderer and would not understand. Abraham’s paradoxical situation cannot be universalized. His decisions and unique interactions with God make him unique, his decisions make his character. As he has demonstrated in his other stories, the individual sometimes has to act against the universal.
Johannes’ subsequent reference to Heraclitus surprised me but fit perfectly. As Heraclitus says that one cannot step in the same river twice, so too is Johannes saying that the individual encounters unique problems along her own path. Every situation cannot fit into a categorical imperative. But Zeno does not understand Heraclitus’s point and tries to take it further, rendering it absurd. In this way Johannes may be saying that people have distorted Hegel, rendering it too universal and absurd.
Another fascinating point is Silentio’s refusal to intellectualize faith. Unlike science, faith cannot be built upon or passed down like Hegelian conscious. Faith has to be experienced and by definition cannot be shared appropriately. Some things, like faith, cannot be communicated aptly. Communication in fact ruins and changes the very thing you would try to communicate. This idea comes way before it’s time, and you can see the influence on later existentialism to Sartre and even Derrida. The idea that some experiences may not be able to be quantified runs counter to the burgeoning industrialization that Kierkegaard was surrounded with. We too live in a world where we now map brain waves and attempt to identify scientific explanations for every conceivable thing. Kierkegaard here tries to say what almost cannot be said, in a way only Silentio, or silence can really say it. Some things cannot be communicated or studied without changing the experience and each experience is unique. While Kierkegaard may not have started this movement, he certainly brings up the issue in an extremely sophisticated manner, placing himself at the forefront of the new century of philosophy
In
understanding Kierkegaard’s position, I think we must take it as true that god
exists, that the events of Abraham did occur, and that justification is
possible through the absurd. To simply take these as baseline facts of
Kierkegaard’s analysis should be something that raises red flags in anyone’s
mind.
The most troubling and the most readily
disputable, to me, is the justification of Abraham’s position via a paradox,
via the absurd. Kierkegaard is very careful to use the word justification, a
word that does not necessarily imply any sort of rationalizing endeavor like
the “explanation” or other suitable words would suggest. Though we have come to
associate justification with rational explanation, to justify is simply to
uphold or defend something as well-grounded (i.e. as justified). It does not by
necessity require typical reasoning nor is it necessarily a true/false claim.
But I think we can say that there are degrees of justification and that some
things are more effectively justified than others. Again, it is the tendency to associate the
degree of the justification with the most rational argument. This is because we
can make connections and see most clearly through reason. Asking a human being,
who only understands itself as a human and as being via reason, to suspend the
ethical—to suspend the universal—on the basis of and with the justificiation of
paradox is to ask the human being to suspend the basis of meaning in our lives.
There is no meaning without understanding or comprehension.
There
is no wonder and amazement without understanding. In this respect, I think that
things which are truly paradoxical—what I mean to bring up here are things that
by definition do make sense, cannot be understood, are literally absurd or
equivalently miraculous—are self-undermining with respect to the human grasping
them. Nothing can be truly contradictory and at the same time be appreciated as
a wonder. No one wonder’s at the square-circle because it cannot exist. Try to
conceive of it. The wonder and appreciation that Johannes de Silentio suggests
we should possess for the faith he speaks of seems to me to be impossible. For
by holding wonder for something, we necessarily associate it with meaning and we
only possess meaning in understanding. To suggest that we can hold meaning through
paradox is simply not the case for paradox possesses no meaning. It is simply
impossible to understand, and therefore—if it is truly absurd—should lie out of
the realm of human vision.
All of this does take for granted
that reason is what is necessary for human understanding.
Saturday, March 22, 2014
Abraham's defining characteristic within the exordium: silence. Who, after all, could understand him? Why speak of his task at all? As a figure of Faith, he must look inward, toward the tension between his task and its context--God's request must be incommensurable with the context in which the request is made. By asking of Abraham something other-worldly--outside the world's norms, God places Abraham in a position of absolute isolation. God strips Abraham the crutch of communication, of community. Abraham cannot dilute his question with the input of others. To kill one's son does not even warrant consideration. To pose such a question would imply insanity, on the asker's part. How can one describe his interaction with God, when the request made contains within it an absurd, inhuman request: And God said to Abraham, "Take now thy son, thine only son, whom thou lovest, even Isaac, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt-offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of.'"So, like a knight of Faith, he collects his things in silence, then guides his horse and son, for three days, on foot the the top of Mount Moriah--all that time, battling the distance between his reality and the request. Isaac, being Abraham's only son, came after a long bout of infertility. Finally, God, his savior, grants him the son he desired for so long, only to immediately--like a capricious ass--take him away again, not by natural causes or an accident, but through a proclamation to the father. Without any other evidence, he accepts this request, alone. What kind of huberis or deference must someone possess to follow through, so resolutely, with such a request. How can someone so confidently--at least ostensibly confidently--proceed, suspending everything known before hand? If such a law were universalized, in the Kantian manner, what kind of world would come into existence? At this juncture, Abraham's decision seems absolutely in-line with protocol. Of course, this is only retrospectively the case. The observers, proclaiming such idiocy, with confidence, forget the process through which such a decision must be made. The same progression must be true of the man who hears voices for un-Gods. The structure remains the same, but one decision is worshipped while the other disclaimed.
In perhaps my favorite passage from thePhenomenology,Hegel says
that “what is called the unutterable is
nothing else than the untrue, the irrational, what is merely meant [but is not
actually expressed]” (§110). What can't be expressed by universal concepts and
communicated to another cannot constitute a truth, and Hegel seems to have
little interest in things that aren't true. Kierkegaard, like Hegel, also
associates language with universal concepts, saying that "As soon as I
speak, I express the universal, and if I do not do so, no one can understand
me" (110). But unlike Hegel, Kierkegaard seems to find these
incommunicable truths even more fascinating than communicable ones. Which is
perhaps why, on the whole, Kierkegaard takes more interest in Abraham than he
does in Hegel: Hegel (though I'm not sure I would call him a great
communicator) is a very meticulous communicator, while the story of Abraham
leaves a lot unsaid. In fact, Abraham's defining characteristic, his faith, is
incommunicable: he "cannot be mediated; in other words, he cannot
speak" (110). This seems to presuppose (and, in fact, Kierkegaard
explicitly insists on this) that there is "something" in the
individual apart from the universal--"an interiority that is incommensurable
with exteriority" (118).
This is a long way of introducing what really fascinates me
about Kierkegaard’s text: the fact that it was originally published under a
pseudonym. Perhaps Kierkegaard had more practical reasons for using a
pseudonym, but I would like to imagine that this decision has something to do
with the concept of the incommunicable and the unmediated. Maybe his anonymity
has something to do with his idea that some part of the individual is always
separate from the universal and impossible to communicate—that there are some
things about the individual that can’t be spoken. Kierkegaard’s chosen
pseudonym for this text is, after all, Johannes de Silentio. If this is the case—that Kierkegaard uses a pseudonym
because he, like every other individual, can only say so much—it actually seems
to make this text incredibly personal. These are just some preliminary musings,
but I think a sustained reading of anonymity and pseudonymity could shed some
light on incommunicability and the individual.
Marx seems to understand the world under capitalism as reducing more and more people to a base level of subsistence as they labor in a society that depends on them. If this was true, then these workers would obviously revolt against the class system which has no real force on them. The result of the revolution would be to return to a state that all people are on the same level.
I imagine Marx's post-capitalist world to be like a primordial ooze of undifferentiated human matter. Without the environmental pressures of the capitalism, the people would be reduce to the sophistication a clump of single cell organisms who subsist in the same area without accomplishing anything for one another. It is not by lack of motivation or freedom that the post-capitalist would have nothing to say for himself but rather the lack dependence relations which organized individuals without conscious design to produce something remarkable.
As capitalism becomes more sophisticated, the worker is not brought down to subsistence of the lowest of goods but to a dependence on everything produced in the society. Workers are expected to have one or more of every good the system has required of them to perpetuate itself. Books for summer reading, cable television channels, cellphones are all examples of things every citizen of capitalism participates in at some point in their life and in each case there is a willful dependency on the these goods.
This leads me to imagine capitalism as more of a multi-cellular species capable of doing more sophisticated things on a level above its individual components which can persist despite the death of individuals who originally compose it.
Like the cells of the human body which depend on each other for survival without consciousness thereof, so does each person in capitalism. For example, one person makes the product for another to package for another to ship so that another can unpackage and put on a shelf for yet another person to consume. In this whole complicated process just so one individual can consume one product, each individual relies on the person to come before and their is no need for anyone involved to know one another because they are doing their tasks to the pied piper of green. Even the employers need not know what any individual is doing in the process towards consumption as long as in the big picture profit is being made.
I only made this analogy because I think is goes further than merely distinguishing characteristics between the humanistic community of communism and alienating regime of capitalism. I think my analogy points at the future evolution of economical systems, that like multi-cellular life, we will be seeing much more of capitalism, and like bacteria pallets, communism will persist but without the higher functionality granted to a society organized under capitalism.
I am not sure how in all of this discussion about capitalism and morality I did not think of Weber. Max Weber's infamous work, "The Protestant Ethic, and the Spirit of Capitalism," attempts to understand the development of American capitalism. In the book, Weber claims that capitalism began with the protestant acetic ethic, which essentially said, "work hard, but don't enjoy luxury," and slowly transformed in a rationalization process whereby it lost its religious roots, and took on a life and a spirit of its own. Weber claimed that puritan religion, particularly Calvinist notions of predestination left people terrified and anxious. Essentially, God has already decided if you are damned or saved, and there is nothing you can do to change that designation. The thought of the time was that, there was not way of definitively knowing that one was saved, but one could look for evidence of God's favor. It was not that if one worked hard and acted right God would save one, but that hard work and good behavior were evidence of God's favor. This philosophy was also tinged with a lot of asceticism, it was considered bad to live a life of opulence, to enjoy oneself was sinful, and ultimately a sign of being dammed. This is where Weber's logic gets a bit shaky for me, but he goes on to claim that hard work plus a fear of enjoying it equals reinvestment equals more capital and more wealth. Weber understands institutions ultimately as self-perpetuating machines. So, as soon as capitalism became self perpetuating, it no longer needed the ideological support structure of the protestant ethic, in essence, it developed a spirit all its own. Rather than struggling and working hard while looking for god's favor, the originally unintentional result of struggle (money) becomes an end in itself. Weber concludes by famously describing capitalism as an "iron cage," meaning that now that the system is self perpetuating, it is very difficult to find a way out, because it has developed a logic and a moral framework all its own. In the Manuscripts, Marx claims that Political economy is a science of asceticism, and the science of morality, and when we think about it like that it begins to make sense. Dr. J claimed that capitalism does not tell us what to value but what we do value, but "we", as Marx clearly stated, are intensely social beings, we have not human nature, and if we do it is pointless to postulate about it, our We-ness is socially constructed. So by pointing out what we DO value, capitalism is really only pointing to something it placed inside of us.
During class we spent a large part discussing what private property meant to Marx. We also discussed what private property meant to us and I found myself disagreeing with the class in defining private property. Let me explain further, when I think of private property I think of any object, idea, belief, etc. that someone either claims to be their own or excludes others from claiming it. For instance, when Dr. J professed that she didn't belief it was human nature to conceptualize private property, but I found her example problematic. Specifically, when we discussed the idea of the chair and Dr. J exclaimed that she could come up with a bunch of ways to sit in the chair and use the chair without having to claim it as her own. What I find problematic is that although you may be never claiming it as private property, your actions are implicating that the chair is private (you are hiding it from others) and that it is a piece of property (your exclusive use of the chair).
When I brought up animals in the sense of private property I think I was too easily dismissed in my point. I will concede that it is nearly impossible to decipher if animals are truly conceptualizing the idea of private property, I do believe that behaviors can indicate this type of human-like behavior. To those of you who are say, "but Will, you are just anthropomorphizing these behaviors" I respond, aren't we doing the same thing when we are taking hypothetic beginning of man situations and their "in nature" responses to their environment and others?
Regardless of whether or not you agree on this point (and in some ways I don't fully believe it) isn't it easy to see that wolves protecting their kill a sense of private property? How about how dogs urinate in a certain areas as if to mark territory and familiarity? What about stories of dogs protecting their owners from threats? Or even cats placing their scents onto people and items by rubbing their bodies against them? Aren't these somewhat compelling in showing that animals (including us) are prone to claiming things? Marking things to be our own? Placing emotional importance and involvement in something/someone?
I think my biggest issue with the claim that private property isn't innately human is that I haven't really heard of a world or any society that lives without some form of private property. Propose to me a community whereby private property does not exist. And even if there were to be a freedom to trade, exchange, and just have equal rights over everything, would this prevent inequality in acquisition of goods. For instance, there may be personality differences that allow one person to be "satisfied" with little while another person will require more. Is it ok to have this inequality when it comes to the distribution and exchanging of goods in a communist society?
I was in a discussion in the car the other day about communism with an economics major and of course, since I am in this class, I brought up many complaints about capitalism. Being a liberally minded economist he agreed with the issues I brought up but he made the argument that I’ve heard time and time again: “Communism” has already failed, so clearly it is a less superior system to capitalism. I hear this argument almost every time Marx is brought up and I wonder about the efficacy of it. Many people with admit problems with capitalism such as the uneven wealth distribution but are resigned to these imperfections as they claim it is the best possible system for all it’s warts.
Although I am a history major, I am deficient in my knowledge of how exactly each communist or socialist system worked during the 20th century. However, I do know that many of these systems ended up as power in the hands of one singular leader than in the mass of the common people. The obvious examples are Stalin in Soviet Russia and even Castro in Cuba. People naturally gravitate towards such powerful figures, especially those who control the information and manipulate their persona. For example, I had an old Russian teacher who remember crying when Stalin died because he was so revered. Even though we now know how much damage he did to the Russian people, during his time he had godlike status. But I digress. The point I am trying to make is that has a true “communist” or “socialist” system ever been tried? Or has it not been tried because it is no way possible?
I do not have an answer to this question. I find most of Marx’s theories on estranged labor and communism extremely appealing. However, we have gone so far down the road in capitalism that it is hard for us to think outside of this sphere. We monetize everything, putting dollar values on what for many society would have simply been a favor, such as me coming over to watch your kids for the night. We have incorporated capitalism into our moral system, believing the poor people have less worth and are worse people than the rich. The rich are somehow better and smarter than regular people. It is almost impossible to even imagine a world without private property, a concept that Marx argues that we need to abolish. Socialism, when brought up, is always accused of being a utopia. Sure, it would be nice if life worked like that, but that would be impossible. I would like your thoughts on the possibility of a communist world. Is it even conceivable with how much we are ingrained in capitalism? Did capitalism spark the industrial revolution? Or did the industrial revolution entrench capitalism as the only workable system in our minds?
Sunday, March 2, 2014
Before you begin this reading this post, I want to direct you toward a video that was originally disseminated through upworthy.com. Youtube picked up the link, putting it here for all(ish) to see:
First, I'd simply like to applaud the architects of this film. Within a rather alacritous epoch, concision is one of the greatest swords. By combining a lucid and visually compelling aesthetic with a very matter-of-fact terminology, these visionaries tossed out a pretty compelling and resolute representation of where 'we'--Americans--are within capitalism's teleological progression. From reading Marx, these graphics shouldn't surprise anyone. The poorer are becoming more so and more numerous. The richer are becoming more so and more sparse. The epistemological gap between what we thought we knew about income disparity and how vast the income disparity actually is may be more surprising to us. Looking down into the comments section, I didn't have to go far to see exactly why that is. The first commentator said, "I don't believe in socialism, but [, I] gotta be honest, we don't live in a capitalistic society, we live in an oligarchy." Of course, we [students of Marx] all know exactly why this comment is somewhat misdirected: this is, in fact, exactly what capitalism is supposed to look like. Perhaps, as an intra-subjective group, our misunderstandings about capitalism coextend with our misunderstandings about socialism and communism. I want to take a short look at a few of the possible reasons for this pervasive mis-directed-ness.
American Atomism: Known by the more common signification, "American Individualism," American Atomism describes, negatively, the way in which the average american tends to view themselves not as a member of a collective but as an individual. Underscored by the subject's ontological framework (isolated consciousness, and all that), this vantage-point implicitly denies group responsibility and tends to ignore the causal connectedness of social spaces--town, schools, workplaces, etc. So, when an individual has success, it is their success and no one else's. Similarly, when a subject fails, it is their failure and rarely the social structures around them causing the failure. This institutionalized isolationism stems, at least in part, from the way in which America conceives its own history. Individuals colonized the Americas; specifically, individuals who shirked the status-quo in their own countries, or simply believed that hard-work and ingenuity would be enough to hurdle any obstacle. Of course, every historian knows that these anecdotes and universalized dispositions are merely aspects of the American mythos. However, time and political ambition have reified those myths into misperceived realities. The result is a systemic pathology that insists on independence while awkwardly and inefficiently relying upon governmental and communal support. The never-ending states-rights / central government debate shows the intransigence of this problem. The public's relationship to these two issues mirrors a tennis match, with their sentiments oscillating from one end of the court to the other without any apparent conviction. The failure in the analogy stems from the inability for the populous to see the transition between the two poles in the same way a tennis player sees the ball going back and forth. When one political position fails in its descent form abstraction to practical application, the populous flips out and jumps ship forgetting that they in fact voted in the very players that they now vilify. The individual's capacity to cognitively distance themselves from responsibility, in whatever way is necessary, would be worthy of applause if it didn't lead to so much misery and decay.
Ideology over Class: Given the statistics, its hard not to ask, "what the fuck?" And, "why the hell haven't the lower classes colluded to burn this mutha- down, pitchforks and all?" My diagnosis spins off from the issues stated above. As far as atomism is concerned, the white version tends not actually to be an individual belief but in fact an unconscious collective belief in the inherent goodness and betterness of whiteness. In other words, the kinds of groupings endorsed by American institutions tend to deviate away from class consciousness toward 'social issues,' like white supremacy, puritanism, christianity, et al. These fractures supersede class issues. In the mid-1950s, when the SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Committee) attempted to organize a union for factory workers in an industrial town, many of the labor leaders insisted on the meetings being segregated. Even though all these cats were in a position to benefit from class solidarity, they could not, even for their own economic benefit, suspend racial prejudice and myths of essential otherness to strike a deal (bad pun intended). A really interesting analysis of how this tendency played out in post-war France can be found in Anti-Semite and Jew.
In conclusion: we discussed, on Tuesday, whether or not Capitalism is a moral or amoral system. I am still committed to the amorality of the system's logic but I must concede that it nonetheless creates institutionalized justifications for its own economical aims and social impacts. In her post, Maggie points out that, "We brought up a few of the "moralities" which seem to result from a capitalist mentality--that the poor are underemployed because they are lazy, for example--but demonstrated that these kinds of moral pronouncements are in no way essential to capitalism." She goes on to concede, what I also believe to be true, that these don't seem to be necessary appendages to or consequences of capitalism. The more I think about it, however, the more convinced I am that, in practice, capitalism needs some kind of overarching framework that explains why so few should have so much. Within America's case, the public's belief in what ends up being a merely nominal meritocratic system combined with racial, religious, and locational differences does just this, distracts from the interrelatedness of economic, social, and political issues.
At the end of last class, we began to discuss whether capitalism should be considered immoral or amoral. In some sense capitalism is not a moral system, but an economic system, and doesn't make moral valuations. We brought up a few of the "moralities" which seem to result from a capitalist mentality--that the poor are underemployed because they are lazy, for example--but demonstrated that these kinds of moral pronouncements are in no way essential to capitalism. Certainly, a thorough identification with a capitalist mentality and lifestyle--and its attendant valorization of efficiency and condemnation of leisure--seems to foster these sort of moral biases. But, as we also mentioned, it is possible to imagine a capitalistic system that doesn't involve this sort of "moral" framework.
Despite this, I can't seem to get past my (at this point pretty deep-seated) belief that capitalism is, in fact, immoral. (Note: I wouldn't actually say immoral, but unethical, but for simplicity's sake I'm going to stick to the terminology we used in class). I understand that many of the "immoral" consequences of the capitalistic system are not essential or necessary. But as we also discussed last class, capitalism leads to an uneven distribution of goods which over time only worsens until the poor become poorer and rich become richer. This already strikes me as a morally problematic situation (to say the least). And in so far as the purpose of capitalism is to generate surplus value, the success of this system depends upon valuing commodities more than the workers that produce them, and "with the increasing value of the world of things proceeds in direct proportion the devaluation of the world of men" (71). This also seems in and of itself immoral. Or at least, it seems impossible that an economic system whose success depends on the devaluation of men could not lead to immoral consequences. Which, for me, doesn't seem much different than saying the system is itself immoral. Again, we might say theoretically, that capitalism in and of itself is amoral; but if its practical and material consequences are immoral, what good does it do to say its theoretically amoral?
Now, however convinced I am of capitalism's immorality, this issue becomes much more slippery in the context of "late" capitalism. The fact that the estrangement of labor and private property lead to the devaluation of the worker is much easier to see in the industrial revolution, where the connection between the growing wealth of the factory owners and the growing poverty of the factory workers seems almost self-evident. Factory (or property...insert any industrial means of production) owners exploit the factory workers in order to generate a greater profit for themselves--it's a pretty clear illustration of the disparity between the bourgeoise and the proletariat. But this relationship between the property-owner and the property-worker is harder to trace when a significant portion of late capitalism's surplus value is generated in very nebulous situations like venture capitalism, as we mentioned in class. In short, though the disparity between the 1% and the 99% is obvious, what causes this disparity isn't quite so obvious. This disparity isn't the result so much of actual exploitation of the 99%; rather, it seems to be orchestrated on a much larger scale, one more easily obfuscated by all kinds of finagling. Again, this is not to say I've conceded that capitalism is amoral. But it does seem that the context of late capitalism could make it easier to argue for some kind of moral exemption...even though I would argue this type of capitalism poses an even greater moral problem. How such arguments would even begin to deal with the effects of global capitalism totally escapes me.
Frankly, I'm not so sure I agree that "capitalism doesn't tell you what to value, it tells you what you do value." Capitalism does seem to provide a framework for valuing not only other people but ourselves. Sure, it doesn't force me to value commodities over other human beings, and in that sense it isn't morally prescriptive. But it does encourage this mindset, and in fact its success as an economic model depends on people adopting this mindset. It may not be a moral system, but that shouldn't necessarily permit us from evaluating certain assumptions of its system from a moral standpoint.
As
demanded by propriety, human beings often attempt to devalue the material
world. We say that life is not about material things. Usually, what underlies
this opinion is a belief, however subtle it may be, that what is important to
human being is the soul, or the
mental capability, or the possession of virtue. This belief does away with materialism.
Not only this be we often view materialism as a negative thing. When an individual appears too concerned
with material things we call that person materialistic; a word which possesses
a negative connotation. Is this belief correct? And does it help us to exist
and flourish as human beings?
I think Marx would disagree with
this belief. Marx’s theory of alienation requires a material presence.
Alienation is not transcendent, and it is not independent of the history. It
exists here in the material world. Alienation occurs through a twisted sense of
labor, and labor requires the material world to exist.
“The product of labour is labour which has been congealed in
an object, which has become material: it is the objectification of labour. Labour’s realization is its
objectification. In the conditions dealt with by political economy this
realization of labour appears as a loss of reality for the workers;
objectification as loss of the object and object-bonding […]”
This implies that the material world is very important to
us. In a sense, we can lose ourselves to it through alienation. But we also see
ourselves and flourish in some sense as human beings through labor and through
imparting ourselves to and interactions with the world around us. The kind of importance I want to show is a constant relevance of the material to the
human being. In his description of nature Marx shows this.
Nature provides the means to life in the sense of the subsistence of the human
being, and nature also provides labor with a means to life in the sense that
labor cannot live with object on which to operate. Marx describes nature as the
human’s inorganic body, and he intends this beyond mere subsistence. The higher
“order” of human being that we so
desire requires nature to operate, i.e. labor requires nature.
Thus the material is actually of
grave importance to human functions of the higher order. The reason we tend to associate negative feelings with those who have material possessions is because we recognize on
some level that we are alienated through system of capitalism. In this
alienation, we are less able to flourish as human beings, and so we envy those
who appear to us to be flourishing at the cost of our own ability to
flourish.
So my independent research in Sociology is on how
the American Dream, as a cultural narrative, foregrounds everyone in American
society, and how that foregrounding is even present in the meaning making and
motivations of activists involved in the fight against Wage Theft. Wage Theft
is a buzzword created by the labor movement to describe a set of exploitative
labor practices including failing to pay workers minimum wage, failing to
properly compensate workers for overtime, misclassifying workers as
"independent contractors," which places the tax burden on the worker,
and worst of all, complete failure to pay workers at all. Wage theft is bad all
on its own, but when we think of it through the Marxist lens, it becomes all
the more horrifying.
For Marx, the labor process is inherently
alienating because work is always forced. Workers must choose between work and
starvation, and when they choose work, they are forced to self –alienate; they
must put themselves into an object from which they, by the very nature of capitalism
(i.e. surplus value), will never receive their just compensation. Furthermore,
because their labor creates an object which, is, and will always be, alien,
they become alienated from not only their own labor, but also the object and
nature. In the hostile and hierarchical relationship between the worker and the
capitalist and in the competitive struggle against their fellow workers to find
jobs they become alienated form their fellow human beings. Finally, in existing
not as an end in themselves, but merely as someone else’s' means, while still
seeing oneself as a human universal, one is alienated from one's specifies
being.
Marx assumes that workers have a certain value, use
value; they are allowed to remain alive because they are useful to the capitalists,
and their wages are set by capitalists to allow for subsistence and the
creation of a future workforce (workers' children). We have gotten to a point
today in which there are so many people available to work, that low-wage
workers have perhaps even lost their use value. With the loss of the
manufacturing sector in the United States and a full scale shift to the
services, even more than ever, low-wage workers, working in low skill service
jobs, are almost entirely expendable to employers.
If you are familiar with ideas about "rape
culture," you may know that many theorists understand the rape as the
ultimate representation of an underlying culture of masculinity. It is not that
rapists are "crazy people" hiding in the bushes, but rather they are
simply men who represent a deep socialization and extreme externalization of an
underlying masculine culture which lionizes male power, and devalues women. I
understand wage theft in a very similar manner. We have an underlying culture
of exploitation, and in its extremes, it is manifested as wage theft. We operate
under the assumption that we live in some sort of meritocracy, and that the hierarchical
relationship of employers and employees is somehow natural and just.
Ultimately, the embedded nature of that hierarchical power structure finds expression
in all businesses, but because it is a continuum of sorts, it finds its most
extreme expressions in instances of Wage Theft.
Understood thought he Marxist idea of the super-structure,
this is merely an example of capitalism’s influence on our culture. However,
the superstructure is even more clearly defined in the wage theft example, in
the lack of enforcement for labor laws. For many employers, the threat of being
caught is so low, and the profits to be made so high, that they can exploit
workers with impunity. Many states,
including Tennessee, do not have minimum wage laws, and so much of the
enforcement burden falls on the incredibly overworked and understaffed federal department
of labor, which represents a legal system in which a worker who steals from his
or her employer goes to jail, yet an employer who steals merely has to pay a
fine and agree not to do it again. Wage theft does not simply represent "a
few bad apples," but instead a culture of exploitation, infect a study by
the National Employment Law Project has estimated that as many as 2 out of 3 low
wage workers suffers some form of wage theft every week! That seems pretty
cultural to me…
When I heard the quote "For those who look at the world rationally, the world looks rationally back," I had many different rewording go through my head. The following is an account of a solipsistic rewords of a Hegel's formula, where reason is not so much as important as unique consciousness: you look at the world and see only yourself.
To understand what this would mean, I imagine the following scenario: From upon park bench perch, you watch someone walking down the street towards you. She says hi, and you reciprocate.
According to my reinterpretation, you just greeted yourself.
It will take awhile to break it down, but bare with me.
The first thing to understand is you. I should first clarify that there are two kinds of you, and this is why you can greet yourself.
One that is first and immediate. This is the situated-you. This is the you of intent, location, and particularity. This situated-you is looking out at the world, it only has particular sense-certain experience, which I call the what it is like for you, and it is always certain of where, when, and who it is.This you is uncomprehending and incommunicable.
The second is the universal-you. This is the you of objective understanding, and it is born from the situated-you by a process of universalizing what it is like to be for you and applying it to the world as communicable concepts.
The third is the defining-you. Because universal-you is aware of the many particular situated-yous through time and space, it creates a identity that persists through change. This new you is both the definer, as it sees the world in its own terms, and it is the defined as it finds itself in the world (it is the subject that makes itself its own object). As a consequence, it can act intentionally through understanding of universals, which importantly includes acts of communicating universals.
In the park experience, universal-you are on a park bench looking at the world. Everything universal-you understands in sitting and seeing is in terms of what it is like for you because what do you have other than situated-you to understand situated-you's actions.
The second thing in the question is the someone. How do you understand her? Universal-you only has situated-you to draw upon to create experiences. The universal-you understands someone walking but by applying what it is like for you to walk on her. She becomes another situated-you in your mind, and any inadequacy between you and her may be acknowledged but it cannot be communicated because universal-you does not have access to her situated-otherness.
She is also walking down the street and towards you. This is a duality of both general terms and personal terms. 'Walking down the street' is the universal-you's perspective. It understands act as the universal walking, understood because a situated-you has walked before. It understands the direction from an abstract from the perspective of the general town or city because it has abstracted from many situated-you being particularly located, a general location.
The 'towards you' is the situated-you's perspective because only it is certain of where it is.
Next, when the someone says hi, universal-you understands the act from situated-you's relationship with the term over time. Having imposed the laws of etiquette upon your defined identity, defining-you reciprocates the greeting. Situated-you makes the noise 'hi.'
There is much more to both senses of you, but I don't have space, so without going any much further, a rereading of experience in these terms in these terms: From upon situated-you's perch on the park bench, situated-you watches something come towards it. Universal-you understands that one situated-you is watching another situated-you, who is walking down the street towards the first.
Again, this was just one way I thought about Hegel's quote. I also changed it to "People look at the world biasedly, and the world confirms that bias." Did any of you guys have rewordings of the quote and unique applications?
Friday, February 14, 2014
In
his first manuscript, Karl Marx discusses the estrangement of labor. He
explores the idea that the worker’s objects of production, which should
theoretically be a part of him or herself, becomes something alien. Even though
the significance of the object relates to the worker who creates it, society
places more importance on the product than the worker who produces it. This
leads to a disconnection between the fates of the worker and his or her
product. “The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the
more his production increases in power and range. The worker becomes an ever
cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates” (Marx 71). This basic idea
begins Marx’s critique on estranged labor. He explores how the worker’s
alienation from his or her product is tied to alienation that occurs within the
scheme of production and alienation from his species (important parts of his
argument, but not ones I’m discussing in detail here). Towards the end of this
essay, Marx gets to the point in which he establishes that the alien product
the worker produces belongs to the one “in whose serve labor is done” (78) who
necessarily is another human. This seems to imply that the worker’s work
belongs to his or her bosses or the wealthy elites of society. Marx builds on
this to critique the idea of private property, as private property is a concept
that stems from alienated labor.
This
argument, especially the parts about how the object of labor becomes alienated from
the laboring person, that labor belongs to someone else, and that the whole
process creates and serves as an indictment of private property, was especially
interesting to me given the work I’ve been doing in another class. Although in
this other class, we haven’t discusses Marx in depth, he has come up a bit.
Furthermore, some of the material I’ve explored in the other class in a sense
supports Marx’s argument, which at least seems to me to imply that private
property comes from and goes against the interest of the worker’s relationship
to his or her product. In an iconic economic essay called “I, Pencil,” Lenard
Reid explores the pencil’s “family tree.” What he finds is that no one person
creates a pencil, just in the sense that no one person creates another person
but is instead a product of families and unions. The argument is that no one
person can create a pencil. Multiple workers doing different kind of job create
the pencil. If only one of those workers was placed in a room and told to make
a pencil, he or she would be unable to. This idea is accepted today in modern
economic theory, and it provides an interesting insight into alienated labor:
Can one really be alienated from something that never really was entirely his
or her own? On another note, in the book Free
Market Fairness, John Tomasi briefly makes the point that Americans today,
even Americans in the working class, respect the riches and private property of
the rich and do not wish to do away with private property. Mt question is this:
is it possible that the conception of work that does away with estranged labor
is related to the modern view of the working class towards private property?
Though there are sections of Hegel’s Phenomenology of consciousness
where attempts to make connections to concrete humanity have been made, I
wonder if these attempts are justified, and I wonder if Hegel himself would
find these valid and proper. There is no argument that parallels between Hegel’s
descriptions of consciousness and actual human consciousness can be found, but
this is only because humans possess consciousness. Hegel does not tour the development of consciousness
as it relates to the human being, but as
it relates to itself. In other words, he examines consciousness as consciousness,
or as consciousness in general. Perhaps, then, we could make connections
between the experience of the human consciousness and consciousness in general,
but I do not think we can so far to make philosophical claims based on Hegel’s
account. At least in terms of what Hegel intends to be philosophy, which I find
to be more akin to the Science he speaks of. In this respect Hegel views the
Phenomenology as more of a preparation for Science, than actual science or philosophy
itself.
To
make this distinction more clear, we should determine the differences between
Hegel’s view of what a Phenomenology is and what Science is supposed to be. At
the end of paragraph 37 in the preface and after essentially completing a
summary of the development of consciousness Hegel says:
“With this, the Phenomenology of Spirit is concluded. What
Spirit prepares for itself in it, is the element of [true] knowing. In this
element the moments of Spirit now spread themselves out in that form of
simplicity which knows its object as its own self. They no longer fall apart
into the antithesis of being and knowing, but remain in the simple oneness of
knowing; they are the True in the form of the True, and their difference is only
the difference of content. Their movement, which organizes itself in this element
into a whole, is Logic or Speculative philosophy. “
With that, Hegel intends to
indicate a shift from Phenomenology to the consider of philosophy or Science.
The task of philosophy is to know ontology in thought, and it begins with a
unity of thought and being, or knowledge and being, or being-for-another and being-in-itself. As opposed to
Phenomenology whose aim is to study the experience of consciousness as it
develops. Phenomenolgoy is concerned with with the relation between consciousness
and its object, to examine the separation of knowing and being. In the
section on Absolute Knowing, paragraph 805, Hegel further emphasizes this difference:
“Whereas in the Phenomenology of Spirit each moment is the
difference of knowledge and Truth, and is the movement in which that difference
is cancelled, Science on the other hand does not ccontain this difference and
the cancelling of it. On the contrary, since the moment has the form of the
Notion, it unites the objective form of Truth and of the knowing Self in an
immediate unity.”
So not only do we see that
phenomenology is as I claimed, but we see that Science lacks the fundamental motivation for even considering
a phenomenology of consciousness as Hegel sees it: a difference in knowledge
and Truth. Science (or philosophy) begins with a unity of knowing and Truth (being-in-itself).
Thus, I do not think we should
make philosophy claims based on Hegel’s phenomenological account. One may say, “Well
that’s obvious from Hegel’s understanding of philosophy, but phenomenology is
merely distinct kind of philosophy as we view it today.” It is not ontology or metaphysics
for example. I say yes this is true, but even in that point, the argument can
be made that Hegel’s phenomenology is abstract and too far-removed from what we
as human beings experience. As far as abstraction goes, the most concrete
explanation Hegel provides is that of the Master-Slave, and as a result it’s
the most reference part of his text. Where this concreteness is lacking, the
text is largely ignored by the philosophical community.
And here's a cool picture of a tiger because you've made it this far in my post:
As far as what Hegel would say
about using his phenomenology in pieces and parts for the use of philosophy…
First of all he would take issue with regard to his view of the whole. Secondly,
and more surprising to me, Hegel actually claims that once we have achieved a
unity in being-for-another and being-for-itself we should simply proceed as if
we have learned nothing. Here’s the
quote from paragraph 808:
“In the immediacy of this new existence the Spirit has to
start afresh to bring itself to maturity as if, for it, all that preceded were
lost and oit had learned nothing from the experience of the earlier spirits.”
Take that as what you will... But this seems to
indicate that Hegel himself might not approve of how others have used his work.
This past Tuesday on The
Daily Show, Jon Stewart spoke to Elizabeth Kolbert about her book The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, which
addresses our role in an impending mass extinction. Kolbert notes (jokingly,
naturally) that “the really impressive thing” about our self-extinction “is
that we’re doing it without even trying.”
This segment came to mind as I was reading “Estranged
Labor,” and struck me as a particularly powerful illustration of estrangement
from “species being.” Species being implies, I think, not only an awareness of
other humans, but also a historical consciousness of the human species—an
awareness of the past and future development of the species, and a recognition
of the individual’s participation in this larger historical development. As
species beings, then, humans understand their relationship to a natural system
that exceeds their individual needs. Estrangement from the species being turns
“the life of the species into a means of individual life” and “makes individual
life in its abstract form the purpose of the life of the species” (75). This
prioritization of the individual over the species reminds me of Hegel’s Acting
Consciousness and its confusion of individual needs with universal good, though
the estranged human does not mistake his individual needs for the universal so
much as disregard the universal altogether. The human estranged from the
species places individual, and short-term, needs and wants above the long-term
development of the human species. Relationships with other humans and with
nature become means to individual ends, and perhaps become expendable in this
process.
It seems the extinction Kolbert discusses illustrates the
estrangement of the individual and the species. This estrangement enables us to
drive the world towards extinction “without even trying”; no matter how many
times we’re told about the consequences of our actions, we can’t seem to
relinquish our individual needs for the sake of the “species being” and the
environment that sustains it. Environmentalist arguments reminding us that the
continuing depletion of resources will eventually prohibit certain lifestyles fail
to reinstate the individual’s relationship to the species. In fact, this type
of argument only encourages us to curb certain behaviors so that we can
continue to use nature as a “means to individual existence” (77). Perhaps the
only way to reverse the “sixth extinction” (if we haven’t already run out of
time) would involve reorienting our relationship to our “species being.”
