November 07, 2004

another kind of thinking

What happens when thinking reaches a standstill in the present? And just goes round and round in a circle. Should we then remember past suffering to help us understand what disturbs us in the present?

A familar picture of the present. It is marked by a bad modernity---the bad and existing modernity of rational abstraction and the calculating, instrumental rationality embodied in our suburbs, shopping malls, and media. This is a modernity characterised by the domination of a narrow scientific rationality in intellectual life and the bureaucratic rationalization of our practical life to ensure the indefinite economic (capital) expansion. This has led to a radical disenchantment in which people are stripped of their power to rationally motivate and guide our practical orientation.

A Frankfurt School picture of a bad modernity based on the Enlightenment's principles of number, calculability, abstraction, utility, equivalence and identity.

What then of the past? Can it act as sign post for the present. Can we take our ethical bearings in the present from the suffering in the past? Can the gaze of remembrance illuminate the wildly leveling-off of progress in a neo-liberal modernization devoid of any remembering?

Max Horkheimer:


"Past injustice has occurred and is done with. The slain are really slain…. If one takes the idea of open-endedness seriously, then one must believe in the Last Judgment….The injustice, horror, and pain of the past are irreparable".

Since the Last Judgement is theology we forget the horrors of settler capitalism in Australia, or the suffering of the 1930s Depression, and move on. There is little point in dwelling on the past by remembering the dead. What's done is done.

Doing that kind of sober analysis is the role of a philosophical critique, which demystifys the historical narrative of a nation. Ideology critique removes the fog and spin to lay things clear before our eyes. There is a kind of historical repression or forgetting built into this ideology critique that strips us naked of historical clothing and ethical life. That kind of Frankfurt School discourse has an old-fashioned air, and it is marked by the failure of philosophy to reflect on its own failure and its own complicity in a bad modernity.

Is philosophy closed to hope? What of the idea of redemption? Can philosophy give voice to what has been rejected, discarded and dumped as unworthy in a bad modernity? Can it redeem the broken promise of modernity?

A philosophy of refuse that gives voice to the residues of freedom and happiness?

Walter Benjamin:


"The corrective to this way of thinking lies in the conviction that history is not only a science but also a form of remembrance. What science has "established" can be modified by remembrance. Remembrance can make the open-ended (happiness) into something concluded and the concluded (suffering) into something open-ended. This is theology; however, in remembrance we have an experience that forbids us from conceiving history fundamentally atheologically, even though we would hardly be able to write it in theological concepts that are immediately theological."

This leads to a weaving or piecing together what history has broken to bits through a remembrance; a remembrance that involves narrative reconstitution and our recuperation (healing?) though a public hearing of the testimonies of the victims.

The South African Truth in Justice Commission is an example of this.

It isn’t that the past that casts its light on the present as the historians often tell us; or that the present casts its light on the past as the economists intone; rather, an image is that in which the past and the now flash into a constellation." This is an image is that in which the residue of the past still lives, "bathed in new air."

An illustration. The image of the collapse of the World Trade Centre on 9/11. Investment bankers and workers running for the lives amidst the dusty air. In those images we remember the modernist promise of utopia embodied in the towering US glass and steel skyscrapers of New York. That promise was irrecoverably lost in the piles of steel and glass that was then called ground zero.

The promise is a residue of the past. It---an ethical life worth having---is a promise that still lives.

Update:8 Nov.

There is a tacit ethical thinking in the above that says yes to what is good and no to what is bad. It says yes to the promise of modernity and no to the horrors of modernity. Yet, this different kind of thinking rarely explicitly discusses ethical theory, thereby leaving the ethical principles remained opaque, despite the promise of modernity referring to social justice, freedom and emancipation. There is an ethical vacuum on the left.

From what I can make of academic left on this issue those amongst the post-Marxian Left with Kantian sensibilities followed the pathway opened up by Habermas’s discourse ethics. Others looked to deconstruction for an alternative, and Simon Critchley’s The Ethics of Deconstruction (1992) filled the gap, with its replacement of Derrida’s formal “other” for Emmanuel Levinas’ phenomenology of the “Other” as a human face and site of infinite responsibility.

Deconstruction was seen to offer ethical guidance in its advocacy of anti-essentialist identity politics, and it was cited for normative justification in postmodern versions of feminism, queer theory and cultural studies.

What is forgotten in this different kind of thinking is the old Greek idea of the good life well lived.So we are left with the ravages of emotivism: "values" are understood as synonymous with subjective feelings. However “real” a thing it is that people hold certain “values,” the larger fact, according to this view, is that there is no objective basis for human opinions, which are themselves indistinguishable from tastes and feelings.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at November 7, 2004 05:10 PM | TrackBack
Comments

If I understand you correctly (the wording is a bit out of my league), you write about dealing with pain, in and outside of a theist context.
Arguably, I might not know anything about philosophy, but I know that when feelings are involved, it's a matter of psychology, or at least that's my choice of interpretation.

Discussing the "exorcism of pain" is somewhat pointless and counterproductive. In matters of feelings, the existentialist quest for "authenticity" is the only relevant ideology I know of. (In the context of the assumption that the mind, if left to its own devices, via authenticity and sincerity towards the self, would heal itself, which is not the case for an entire plethora of psychiatric pathologies)

If your "core self" is life-affirming and you let suffering pass "through you", if you can be that committed to authenticity, then nothing in the content of your feelings is to be feared.

Regarding your comment on 9/11, you must be joking, right? It will take a lot more to quench our common desire for profit, for self-asserting, for self-expression. We are all capitalists now, for better or worse. It would be horrible and unlikely that Europe, for example, would settle in the idle retardation of theism, slowly wasting under the burden of gratuitous philosophizing about things that never existed.

Posted by: Gabriel Mihalache on November 7, 2004 06:07 PM

Gabriel,
I've rewritten the post to try and make it easier to understand. It's a confused post because I'm working these ideas out.

What I done is to shift the emphasis from the individual to the nation by linking to the South African Truth in Justice Commission.

It is that kind of historical remembrance of pain and suffering (eg., Auschwitz) that I'm referring to.

Why so? Because of the wide disenchantment with a rationalized moral reason in our consumer culture. This replaces our experience of others as unique and vulnerable individuals with an impersonal, “externalist” appeal to laws (Kant, human rights, rule utilitarians ) and putatively universal norms (justice or utility). The primary failure of these universalists ethics in contemporary life is that they do not enable us to think and relate responsibly to concrete particulars in our ethical life.

Consider me visiting a sick friend in the hospital. The deontologist (Kant) or utilitarian says that in doing so I must be guided by a commitment to honor the moral law or universal rule, rather than by the actuality of my friend and her suffering. So I go to the hospital because of the moral law rather than because of my friend’s suffering.

Thus both Kant and the utilitarians drains ethics of the blood and passions of life and replaces them with cold universal norms. Something has gone amiss. Hence the disenchantment.

And yet there is a deep concern for ethical issues whether on the right or the left based on an acute awareness that we live a damaged life. So how we locate or seek the genuine ethical responsiveness that we hunger and often express in an public language emptied of the thick moral concepts that once made a substantial ethical life possible.

Some, such as Adorno, argue the genuine ethical responsiveness must be sought for in the repressed margins of society – particularly in the private sphere.

I think that 9/11 undercuts that 1940's account.

Posted by: Gary Sauer-Thompson on November 8, 2004 08:09 AM

Gary

I really appreciate your comments about an "ethical vacuum" on the left. But I wonder whether Derrida's (or Critchley's) turn toward politics and theology really offers a plausible alternative to the conservative concern with "family values?" I live in the United States and the results of the last election have really given me pause. I am very pessimistic about what opportunities exist for broadening the discussion of values, or what constitutes "eudaimonia" in the modern context.
The focus of the post-election commentary is that the "media elite" and the democrats just do not get mainstream America's "moral concerns" (narrowly defined of course). This seems to reconfirm that a large part of the United States is not receptive to issues of social justice or cultural pluralism.

Posted by: alain on November 9, 2004 08:35 AM

Alain,
well, you know the conservative answer to that one. We have heard it so often, I quote:

"...we are rapidly approaching a Godless, valueless society in which "power ethics" or the "political rationalism" of humanism is replacing the Judeo-Christian ethical base of traditional morality. The roots of our present dilemma go all the way back to the secular humanism of the fifteenth- and sixteenth- century Renaissance, and the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The idea of the sufficiency of human reason grew stronger during these periods, continually challenging Judeo-Christian values in an increasingly sophisticated way. Humanity was placed at the center of the universe, rather than God."

The academic left has even gone further and dumped humanism for power. Nietzsche is to blame etc etc.

A more sophisticated diagnosis is offered by Erin O'Connor

On this big picture stuff I pretty much accept the grim narrative found in Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue. The main thesis is that the project of Enlightenment thought--to produce a rational ethic that would have to be accepted by any rational being no matter where or when they lived---has failed.

We have lost contact with the ethical thought of the ancients and so we swim in the sea of emotivism. Each individual is free to do what feels good at the time.

An instrumental reason is unable to define ends, it can only give means. When the question is asked: "what is human life for?" this reason is dumb.

If current analytical philosophy is unable to tell us there is something amiss (ie., what Nietzsche & Adorno understood deeply--to the core of their being), then continental philosophy is trying to get by with a few minimal ethical resosurces. Adorno is a classic example.

Instrumental reason (in its scientific and bureaucratic forms cannot help us to maintain personal relationships.The failure of the rationality of these two traditions (laboratory and office) to support communities that care for the members of those communities or for the environment in which they live, gives rise to a deep and pervading sense sense of ethical crisis.

The resulting crisis of society and the environment requires a different rationality, the rationality of the kingdom of the church. In step the fundamentalists withe the ready made rationality of maintain or retrieve the rationality of the premodern church whilst using instrumental reason as a weapon in their politics.

Posted by: Gary Sauer-Thompson on November 10, 2004 09:23 AM
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