How our religious thought remains medieval and anti-political

In medieval philosophy (which is essentially religious: Islamic, Jewish, and Christian, developing in that order and its shared ground), politics was identified with (and reduced to) governance.

This was facilitated by the fact that ancient philosophy, particularly Plato and Aristotle, made central notions like those of essence and origin that destined thought to affirm the necessity and goodness of hierarchy. But hierarchy and governance stand and fall together. Thus in a certain sense there is no truly liberal and democratic state.

Modern thinking, especially at its more bourgeois and republican, tends to make central practical rather than theoretical orientations to the world. The character of philosophy in ancient Rome contributed to this. But it has remained to free philosophy from governance. The question of the ideal state and how it can be instituted and the people and things proper to it managed, in accordance with ideas of the good life and of the transcendent authority of the divine, passes into another question which achieves its fullest, clearest form in a thought of revolution. The thinker is now situated and starts with a situation, but aims at something other than merely profiting from it to produce wealth and reproduce power. This is because the situations that matter are generic. They are general in scope and address. Thinking as clearly and rigorously as we can in order to arrive at the truths we need for what are ultimately practical purposes now becomes the task of the citizen as political actor and participant in constitutive processes. The citizens have taken over from the experts. The thinker no longer is adviser to a prince. Wherever this shift has not taken place, philosophy and thought are not truly modern.

The problem is not to access a practical orientation, as the success of American pragmatism in philosophy shows. Rather, it is to access a generic and public concern and standpoint in opposition to a private one, which can only aim at psychology and ethics, much as Hellenistic philosophy largely did. Our religions have served us very inadequately in political terms, because they remain largely medieval. They are pious and ethical, and understand being political as a vague call to action on moral grounds, with sermons serving the role of newspaper editorials. For our religions, philosophy has remained neo-medieval and for this reason they are right to no longer emphasize it. (It is forgotten that in the medieval period it was central, though this centrality was not uncontested, and after the Spanish expulsion Jewish thought turned widely to mysticism, at least in popular terms). Our modernity in philosophy begins in an important way (albeit it with numerous precursors such as Machiavelli, Descartes, and Spinoza) with Marx's famous eleventh thesis on Feuerbach. While Marx may seem to be saying that we now want not to interpret the world, as we understand it well enough, but instead to change it, the better reading is that we should be busy ourselves with interpreting it in order to change it, all the while working for changes when and how we can.

This is why, while ancient philosophy centers around ontology (theory of what is) and ethics, a position that religious philosophy is still largely caught up in, philosophy today is centrally concerned with social theory. It is driven by a sense of the primacy of the political in a way that considers the political to be outside the realm of the given and its manner of being ordered and governed. This thinking must fight for its right to exist, especially in societies like America that are so hostile generally to the free life of the mind. But the necessity of its standpoint is obvious to many people. The correlate of this necessity for people whose material life situations drive their need to think clearly, rigorously, and usefully is the impossibility for those with the standpoint of the ancien régime in thought to grasp the meaning and necessity of the standpoint their thinking excludes. Most of the work that is done in the social sciences adheres to the class standpoint (that of the professional class particularly in its managerial functions) that includes this impossibility.

Concepts like those of oppression and alienation may be inadequate, but behind their appeal lies the indubitable intuition of the inadequacy of our institutions today in light of the good and free life we can want to live. For those who share this intuition, the problem is how to understand the world we live in as best we can in order to change it. This desire I call the political. Today it is accessed mainly in two ways: through art and theory, which is applied to art; and through social and political struggles that are unpredictable and generally involve calling attention, through the media and social media and in what amounts to a popular equivalent to corporate and (policy issue) interest group lobbying of government representatives, to particular problems and demands.

What is given is not neutral in the manner of a pure facticity of being and a thinking that seeks to represent or orient itself to it in a disinterested way. Rather, what is given is, in part, an unhappy state of affairs that calls urgently to be understood well enough to transform it into a form of life that is unambiguously desirable. This means at the start that the given is not simply imaged and reproduced so as to best use it or manage its tendencies to crisis and failure. The given is given to thought to call it into question by problematizing it in some manner. This yields an idea of science as a practice of inquiry that is quite different from the popular one, which on democratic pretenses reduces science to journalism, as it tends to reduce to the accumulation of factual information, to be used by management in algorithms oriented to marketing, profits, and control of the populace, and, for ‘consumer’ users, to an archive that is all-encompassing yet essentially, in the way it is organized and presented, and its relationship to our real concerns, a huge pile of shit. When confronted by a material social world that seems so much one of ennui (it is at once boring and annoying, presenting many needless frustrations and disaffection), the appeal of a ‘spirituality’ to people so desperate for such a supplement or replacement to a “life of quiet desperation” that it seems to scarcely matter what is the content of this promise of happiness; maybe anything will do. Besides, as Margaret Thatcher famously said, “There is no alternative.” But that is not an conclusion but a challenge.