Philosophy and revolution, or, the mind of democracy

I believe in philosophy. Even if my essays follow like this one the intentionally loose model of Montaigne, inventor of the “essay,” more than the linear demonstration modeled ultimately on mathematical proofs that philosophy mostly clings to. But then I am a critic, and critics develop their thinking not out of itself alone but out of an object that is other and that they engage in with the desire of a love for it. I also believe in the importance of philosophy to the political. To the political as such. I believe in the necessity and importance, and the joy, of thinking philosophically as a basis for any acceptable governmentality and all politics as a contestation of the way things are, are being done, and organized, governed, or managed.

Politically, this only leaves two possibilities: a democratic form of republicanism such as we theoretically have had in the United States since 1776 and much of the world has or wants to have; this is the system of government that is still dominant and that marks the limit still of what most people are able to imagine.

This is particularly true if we recognize that Marxism's principal flaws were its inability to think the modern state, its facility for linking utopian or messianic desires to presentable actualities, its legitimating of the developmental historicism proper to the epoch of colonialism, and therefore also its inadequate theorization of revolution and of politics generally. Marxism survives as political economy, and forms a part of our knowledge of the way the world is and how it came to be this way, beginning with the rise of the bourgeoisie in some of the cities of the middle ages, and of course with roots in ancient and modern thought and the dominant religion, that which developed first against and then as the form of the empire of Rome and its particular form of ethical and governmental universality. Marxism is a scientific theory that has been largely validated as true, and as such is also a paradigm and research program. And as both scientific paradigm and ideology of what was until 30 years ago a broad global social movement of workers, peasants, and the poor, Marxism remains an important condition of philosophy.

Philosophy is thinking. It can occur in practical situations and contexts, but is done by forming propositions using concepts, defining those concepts, asking what the propositions mean, and if these are the best conceptual names and statements that we can make from the point of view of understanding in general all that which gives itself to be understood. The particular sciences, as we have known since Aristotle, attempt to understand the world, including ourselves, with regard to some particular field of knowledge and inquiry, and they produce knowledge. They also produce theories, which are applied, and that is what technology is; it uses knowledge developed through inquiry to get things done. So it is practical in the common American sense of that term, which means operational, matters of technique, matters of production including artificing, and thus also art, at least considered in 'practical' terms of finding the best techniques to say or show whatever the artist might find her- or him-self wanting to so present.

Philosophy is the art of asking questions that are meant to help us understand whatever it is we are faced with, and it does so by trying to go to the root and take the limit what it understands, to find the essence or heart of the matter.

Thus, considered radically, "What is the matter (here, now, for or with you)?" is a philosophical question.

All philosophical questions are implicitly political because they are contestations of the way things are, and politics is precisely that. All political questions have managerial analogues, which are non-political and sometimes anti-political, and part of practices that are. This is because management itself is anti-political in its essence.

Asking what is the essence of a thing is not an improper gesture that reveals patriarchal, monarchical, or aristocratic sinful dispositions. It is asking what something "is" or means. What is this?

You are in a situation and presented, as possibilities for working or abiding with them, things, persons, actions/behaviors/events, sensations and perceptions (which science treats as observations or evidence, and folk philosophies of 'common sense' as given and obvious and so beyond questioning), and statements and other uses of words.

Situations may be ones of doing something that is a manner of going on with the doing or manner of being. Or they can be enigmatical and problematic. These latter fall into two types, which are related: (a) the traumatic encounter, (b) thinking in itself and for its own sake, in a closure that brackets out practical concerns with wants, demands, and tasks, in order to dwell in a space of pure thinking. That space is the world of philosophy.

Freud links thinking to sexuality through the notion of the traumatic encounter as determining the potentialities of mind.

This is a late modern form, owing much to German romanticism and its post-Lutheran culture of Angst, of the Socratic determination of philosophy as an erotic enterprise facilitated by love encounters that are shaped by relationships of authority that are legitimated and made effective as apprenticeships. This is why the idea of philosophy as a way of life was linked to sexual encounters between a teacher and his individual student. This kind of relationship is obviously prohibited in institutions like the Catholic church with its monastic discipline for priests, and the modern school and university with their group classrooms and individual tutorials. And it is a fortiori prohibited as a consequence of feminism and other trends.

In my generation, in the 70s and 80s, the liberation of homosexuality from social exclusion, and the stigma resulting from the judgment of abnormality was widely interpreted, cynically, as a way in which individuals could be allowed, or even encouraged (as some mechanisms of capitalism tend to do), to realize in the authenticity and autonomy their own desires, with the simple caveat that:

What everyone is supposed to want is just some good fucking. Or, alternatively, a "Relationship," since our society still seems to think marriage or something like it (a "relationship" is what legally is called a common law marriage) is both a proper concern of the state and a potentiality that is normatively binding on everyone.

When Hamlet said to Ophelia that there must be "no more marriages," he was articulating the failed radicalism of his character and this play. Hamlet is a character in such of a way out of the play he is, and there is no way out. Romeo and Juliet have a similar problem: the rules of their medieval world do not allow love between strangers, but require it be part of a marriage whose real functions are about property, the obligations people have in (Judaism is clear about this) to raise descendants so that there can be a future (this is the function of having children when considered "politically"), and to reproduce the social order (the deeper and essential managerial function of marriages. Marriages or something like them and sex are not new things in Hamlet's time or ours, and a sexual liberation that was only that would deserve the treatment it gets in some great films of the 70s made by left-wing directors, Bertolucci's "Last Tango in Paris" and Yugoslav filmmaker Dusan Makavejev's bitter satire, "WR: Mysteries of the Organism." Some of this is reprised more brutally in Paul Thomas Anderson's debut 1998 hit film, "Boogie Nights." "Post coitum, animal triste": sex is sad.

The price of having sex has fallen along with other services and commodities, if you want to just get and have and do that, has fallen, remarkably and wonderfully, as a result of internet dating and the possibility now of "hook ups" and the culture surrounding this. This is what will end prostitution, just as the right-wing campaigns to abolish abortion as a way of asserting forcefully the traditional and patriarchal or familialist idea that sex is improper outside of marriage, that it "has" a "purpose" built into it (and assigned by God) that is to reproduce physically, and that women's bodies and sexualities in particular must be controlled by the state with reference to religious norms, or to norms that can only be legitimated in and by a religious discourse and enforced with the aid of its institutions. The anti-abortion movement will be defeated by the cheap and ready availability on the internet of pharamaceutical commodities that states and their medical professions and industries will no longer be able to regulate and limit commerce in. The price of seeing or making art has now fallen dramatically, and for consumers the price is approaching zero. (Does capitalism partly have in distributional terms a logic of infinity as defined in the 17th century mathematics of the calculus, which figures the infinite and the zero point as limits of a process tending towards it?)

Hamlet wants out of the monarchical world. He would renounce his title to the throne if he could only find it. In what is now often thought to be the other candidate for Shakespeare's greatest play, King Lear, such an outside does not exist, or is merely terrifying. And the price of recognizing and being true to this is silence, given the necessity of a monarchical restoration against the runaway violence of corrupt tyranny, and the general and horrifying nihilism this if unchecked can lead to, as in the colonialism that Shakespeare was quite keenly aware of along with the problems and possibilities of late Renaissance and emergent early modern absolutist forms of social order and interaction. Silence is what Cordelia assumes, saying, in what the boss can only see as troublingly dissident, that she if given the job will due her duty and no more, while her two sisters apply for the job with remarkable eloquence thinly concealing an emptiness of self-will or desire that goes with wanting nothing but their own advantage and self-grandizement; these two daughters, whose name together sounds like a dangerously virulent sexual plague, do not love anyone, and unlike Hamlet, who does not because he cannot find a suitable love object in a world reduced by self-interested monarchy to a prison, the nation itself as one; they scandalously have no regard beyond their own needs that do not include him, not only for the king their father (or the father who would be king, and unfortunately never is anything in the play but one who assumes wrongly that he can rule people with the methods designed to suit and flatter himself, or one who has deposed and whose tragic brilliance is, as in Hamlet and some other plays, to explore that deposition and its consequences. Silence is also ordered at the end of the play by the victorious party. Joyce in Portrait of the Artist as a young man speaks, conservatively, of “silence, exile, and cunning”; certainly, in his later novels he goes well beyond silence. I believe in the novel, and what in some ways is its successor artistic form, film (a point I argue elsewhere.). Philosophy changes in the modern world, and again in the 20th century, and is a very different discourse from that of any of the arts, but one we still very much need. I became a critic because it was a way of doing philosophy, since all art criticism is a way of thinking about the world we live in and that thinking is developed in philosophy. If there were a Hamlet, Part II, he could become the philosopher that he knows his fellow student Horatio to have failed to be, if less ridiculously than Polonius in his proverbial wisdom rants. Hamlet looks forward to Spinoza, and to Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx, while King Lear looks to the world of Hobbes. We know what happened in England. Indeed, the leading Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt's recent book "Tryant," effectively argues that Shakespeare prefigured and helped developed ethically a political liberalism of the kind that would triumph in England a few years after his own death.

We may be Hamlets. We want out of today's world, which still manages to be monarchically totalizing enough ideologically that "it is easier to imagine the end of the world then the end of capitalism." Which is what we must imagine, and think. Our time is out of joint. We can't set it right; that is what Hamlet fails to learn, until the very end, when he is dying, but maybe we can do something better, and much more likely of success: invent something new, though works of imagination and thinking. This is the task of all those of us artists, writers, scientists, scholars, critics, and political activists who are part of what Marx called "the general intellect." This is the task of theory today, and that is why there is so much of it.

Theory is either science or philosophy. Science is treated by technological and bureaucratic apparatuses of governance as a machine for dredging up a body of knowledge consisting of bits of facts. But that is not what science is. Science is inquiry. Far more important than verifying if an entity corresponding to a given conceptual name exists and can be exhibited as an element of "the world," considered in Cartesian terms as some objective and totalized entity, basically corresponding to panoptically surveillant managerial totalizations by functionaries or bureaucrats of the total state serving those who are positioned as masters, a paradigm that was developed after Galileo and the birth of modern science in the context of Western European colonialism, - more important than this, or more "interesting," for I believe that the French are right when they suppose that the best ideas have being "interesting" as their most important identifying mark or trait, - is to re-think the matter at hand by rethinking the entities that are understand to be involved in it as its parts, pieces, elements. Science thinks. Science thinks because it is experimental and driven by curiosity, not the will to mastery exactly. It has an openness, without which it disappears back into dogma, and so the early modern break with the medieval closed world is effaced. Philosophy is like science except that it has no presuppositions.

Philosophy takes whatever seems to be given, including a situation in which what seems to counts as important or mattering is given, and asks, what is this, what does it mean? Practical questions, like what is to be done here and now, what do we do this, how do we get what (we all know and agree) we want and need, or how do we get the job done that must be done here and that is given to us (by the bosses, or that we give ourselves together if the work group is democratically managed), - these questions are often ones that the philosophical questions are very close to, and help determine them, but philosophy abstracts from this, much as in the modern novel, the novel as a new (novel) literary form, born around the same time (as Shakespeare, Galileo, and Descartes), the turn of the 17th century, does. It effects a turning away from, a détournement, and displacement, from practical situations and habitual or thoughtful ways of dealing with them, to "worlds" of pure discourse and thought.

In the Cartesian paradigm, being is identified with knowing . The most important questions become those of what we can know (for certain). The question of God is now thought of this way, as an epistemic one: Does God exist, and if so, how do we know? An ontological thinking that is not epistemic might ask what is the form of manner of Being of God or the divine. It might ask what God is like or does or even says and wants. And if this is a question, it would not be assumed known just by reading a sacred literary text, of course.

Knowledge became crucial to management, and probability is one of its forms. It is often not understand that judgments of probability, which take their importance from business and the need to manage the future and chance, are not information about the thing but only our knowledge of it. This is an important distinction. A strategically acting manager or boss who wants to control your behavior may make various suppositions about you. Suppose that he or she wonders what is the form or nature or essence (not meaning, perhaps) of your sexual desires and dispositions. He wants to exercise social control of your behavior by identifying your likely dispositions, that is, what you might do, considered from the standpoint of what he can know. Suppose that he or she wonders if you are (a) disposed to (criminal) violence, (b) disposed to drunken irresponsibility (an 'alcoholic'), or (c) 'have' a deviant (and so interesting to him or her to identify, document, classify, record, and wonder about how to manage) sexuality. I will take up the last of these as example as it is most interesting in light of what I am discussing. By sexuality he means disposition to behave, and also imputation of a desire, which is to say a will. That imputation of will is what makes you responsible for how you do or might behave, what are your dispositions, that is, and also assigns you freedom and autonomy in a limited way in how you answer this. The freedom and autonomy, which means giving oneself the law, is limited because if he is filling out a form, and asking your sexuality, as in a census that asks your race or ethnicity, religion, etc., then he will ask if you are straight, gay, or bisexual. Those are the three possibilities. You can give different interpretations including one of your own to any of these identities, but an identity is fixed. It is what you are, and you are required in the first place to answer to that attributed identity by confessing up to having it. You may "say that you are glad to be gay," or black, or Muslim, or whatever else they have got you written up, written down, as, but an identity is a category name and it is fixed. The definitions may not be illuminative at all. The question for secular Jews of their identity and form of life has been for more than two centuries now a hermeneutical one: Of course we "are" Jewish, and that is important, it is essential, but what does it mean? The fact that such a question has no definite answer is a sign of its continuing vitality as a question, an historical fact that has had some salutary consequences as well as some more problematical ones. Now if you ask, who is a Jew, the question becomes much less interesting. Just as a Muslim, according to the Qur'an is, by definition, all and only every person who affirms the two propositions that there is exactly and only one God, and that Mohammad is his singular and absolute prophet, so a Jew, with equal convenience, is - and indeed this is a less interesting definition since God and prophecy are concepts that are much discussed and can be) simply anyone who is either (a) born of a Jewish mother (and/or father, according to Reform Judaism and those who prefer its criterial definition), or (b) who has converted to the Jewish religion (in the appropriate way set out in Jewish law, which is more less acknowledge like all religions in the general autonomy granted to them at least in American political life). This is not a definition but a set of criteria. It may seem suitably Aristotelian, but there are more and less definitional criteria of identity for an entity of any kind. It is more interestingly relevant to call human beings rational animals or beings that can speak and have language, than to call us wingless bipeds. One definition gives notions of essence, the other traits that are accidental; they may uniquely pick out the entity, as names are supposed to do (though they never quite do because naming is always based on something like a lexicon of prior and possible names usable in the language, which in today's globalized world means in any language: there are no cultural restrictions in America on the linguistic ancestry and group belonging of family or given names, except through the convention that family names normally are passed on by fathers (and/or mothers in some societies). Ok, so the social manager asks if you are gay. You can be inclined to want to have sex with or marry (love does not figure in this or need to; it is notoriously difficult to codify, and maybe really cannot be, though there are rules in every society of whom one can marry or mate with) (a) a male person, (b) a female person, (c) either or both. (D) none of the above is surely permitted though usually one of the first three answers is expected.

In general, in a managerial situation, a subjected subject person, let's call him or that, may not by the rules of discourse operative in these situations, refuse or re-write a question posed to them. Just as you cannot if being questioned on a witness stand.

Legal proceedings are under-recognized as giving the model of how most people in American society manage social conflicts and disagreements. But there is another system, with somewhat different norms. It is that of administrative governance, of rule by pure administration. We increasingly have this. Universities, governed now on a corporate business model, have only that. Government by pure administration advanced in the 20th century through revolutions and counter-revolutions, statist socialism and state capitalism, often but not necessarily in very repressive and violent ways, or involving wars, population transfers, and massacres. And it developed in the United States and other liberal democracies partly through encroachments of presidential or executive governmental power at the expense of the legislative bodies. Capitalism and its socialist variants have not required democracy or civil liberties, but have often seemed to want them and often been willing at least to dispense with them, and this is a problem. It is within this framework that we most locate the continuing relevance politically of the liberal tradition, which can be defined as seeking not to change the forms of domination or social power but only limit them, and freely assert and use their powers to get what the government and whoever it represents or whose interests it winds up serving (often partly because otherwise ignoring those interests would result in economic disadvantages consequent on the ways they are able to pursue their interests and wield the So the administrative authority asks you who you are. They can only ask this by identifying several categories and then asking what you believe your assignment to at least one of them is or must be. Probabilistic judgments play a role in business in strategic thinking in contexts involving the imperfectly predictable behavior of other actors in response to one's own, and the opportunities and risks for one's own in response to it. I can ask from the point of view of knowledge about any identifiable entity including persons, what seem to be their likely behaviors. This is a question of knowledge, realized in probabilistic judgments. They are a kind of fact with a special mathematical property. Statistical information about persons and populations has this quality. But the limit of this possibility of thinking about entities is if they do have or can have a self-determining identity or a manner of being what and as they are, and that they are, the fact that they are (that I exist is a different proposition from what conceptual name gives me identity, and these two questions have very different consequences, possibilities, and ways of being managed; administratively, one turns ultimately on the possibility of policing and war of practically calling into question the possible continued existence of the targeted person or population group. We know now much of what this can led to and has, in Europe, the Americas, Africa, and around the world. The other kind of question from a management point of view bears on the possibility of controlling the movements and dispositions to behave of the targeted persons being subjected and whose subjectivity therefore develops in that context. Practically, consider these differences: suppose a black and a white person, respectively, in America today encounter or observe a white or black person, respectively, and, being a bit prejudiced to believing things according to their fear, they wonder if that person might, respectively, assault them, or perhaps disobey. A social movement of one group might want to say "I am not your criminal," while the other could say "I am not your oppressor." We can also imagine a world without both possibilities. They may go together, and often do, and our world has a great deal of both. A statistical way of thinking on the part of someone trying to manage, say, either the situation in the conversation taking place in their office with someone who is a client, suspect, whatever, or the person walking down the street, in a place with high crime, which is itself as statistical possibility. Statistical possibilities are only potentialities of knowledge. A "racist" or a very militant and irascible poor person who fears the police and other racism, might want to say, but there is a danger here, and it applies to the population and not the person. Actually it applies to a managerial or administrative thinking that seeks knowledge and finds it in probabilistic equations -- compare today's internet companies managing behavior through algorithms. Well, prejudice actually is itself a kind of knowledge, and as Hans-Georg Gadamer showed in his book Truth and Method, everyone always has prejudices, which are not impolite and derogatory opinions about persons considered as properly belonging to certain types, but rather are opinions that are held prior to examination and that actually articulate ways in which the world of persons with bodies and minds behaving in particular ways, these are always present, and the only thing that justifies us in doubting and hopefully changing them is that they have become visible somehow, when 'normally' they might not be. What can be questioned because it is observed should be, even if we cannot question everything all the time.

Law in a common law society like England and America has a conservative character that has roots in medieval Christianity and is Platonist in essence: the truth is, like God, hidden, and is only revealed in instances of failure or breakdown (as in early Heidegger), in what is presumed to be a business society, whose self-understanding might well be a Durkheimian sociology (society is God, its norms represent the way things are and so hare true and enforceable by virtue of a necessity appealing ultimately to an idea of ‘nature.’. Law is anti-philosophical (though philosophy of law and jurisprudence need not be). It entertains no positive potentialities. There are only negative ones: sin or crime. When things go well, self-conscious willing may not be needed. In that case, us human beings or persons or whatever we prefer to call ourselves may well be considered in our sciences as essentially animals with large brains, whose behavior is manipulative. The concept of the brain is not the same as mind, since mind involves language and thinking, both of which are socially dependent, as the brain is not. Psychiatry now largely has reverted to this biological and genetic model, which was questioned and reworked on the basis of a thinking about language by Freud, and which, unquestioned, not only led to the Holocaust (among other disasters) but also is, if understand in rigorous historical fashion, is part of what made possible the Holocaust, along with other aspects of the modern Western capitalist world system. Other categories of social identity besides race came into view in the later part of the 19th century after Darwin, and these same categories were used, along with the historically novel identification of the Jews as a race, with genetics as the racist science, and these categories included homosexuals and the mentally ill. I will have more to say about the first group in a bit, and I have discussed elsewhere on this site my argument for why the concept and category of mental illness was central to the Nazi extermination project., a project that certainly had the murderous exclusion of the Jews at its center, and absolutely, but that also had a broader scope, so that we can speak of the Nazi extermination and as a general thing that can be considered as a single event and project, as it included other population groups and in a way that certainly cannot be understood on the American serial identity model (the proper citizen in America is a person who is here in the American place and of type a + b + c + … n; this is a way of constituting a set that avoids asking the question if all of its elements have any property in common. Certainly not every collection or collectivity does, and in a certain precise sense the American people and the victims of the Holocaust, respectively, simply are the collection of all the people who are or were gathered in some way or can be considered as being in the same place or situation in some sense. The only thing all the victims of the Holocaust had in common was that they were as individuals, usually consequent upon and justified by their identification as members of some social group to be excluded, there in that place and that time and subject to what happened to them all, which are experiences that subjectively included a more or less absolute degradation, demonstrating that their lives are reduced to the complete insignificance of being absolutely disposable, and this normally followed by a death carried out with others in an assembly-line fashion. Right now I am asking about questions of identity and identification, in the context of administrative logic and something that properly considered has no logic and is not a way of managing or administering anything at all, which is the practice of thinking whose official name in the West until recently was philosophy. That there is no logos, logic, reason, or explanation for what happens is a very interesting condition that I think has some very salutary and hopeful consequences that can be realized by developing them in a different way than the desperate and horribly sad way they could be developed for destructive purposes. This is a large question to be taken up another time. It is largely the question raised by the philosophy of Heidegger, and that is the reason why ‘the Heidegger question’ is an interesting one, which might be fruitful to pose, rather than being merely the opportunity for moral or moralizing judgement and exclusion from the city or republic that those who denounce Heidegger’s thought on both a priori grounds and those of capitalist democratic liberalism, which by definition excludes all philosophy at the outset.

The question of knowledge is much newer than that of being. Philosophy is ultimately the art of asking questions about whatever matters to us. It does this in a particular way that aims at rigor and completeness, even though in science at least the latter must always elude us, or at least be open to events that could cause substantial or even wholesale revisions of the paradigm.

Who am I? Is a radical question. It goes to the root. There are some other questions that are equally radical. They are all political because they involve a contestation of the way things are. That contestation is the democratic essence of politics and is also the essence of philosophy, which simply formalizes this contestation and conducts it in a space that is removed from practical considerations, which are bracketed out not so as to not think about them, and question what is being presented, but precisely in order to do that.

Radicals should be artists and intellectuals, as everyone can be. Philosophy matters. It is political. The state mostly does not need it, and the economy mostly does not. Some philosophers have succeeded in becoming civil servants of the state, laying out for us the ideologies and dogmas we should subscribe to. Marxism had a theory that was used in that way, as Christianity and Islam did before it. But philosophy is ultimately neither an aristocratic and solitary nor bureaucratic and managerial enterprise. The former was Hellenistic philosophy, Stoic, Epicurian, and then Augustinian and Christian; the latter explains the centrality in philosophy of Aristotle in the age of religion, and of Kant in that of bourgeois republicanism.

The revolution is televised and is live like theater. It is like art and criticism and theory in needing and involving theory and thinking. Art, criticism, and theory are intrinsically political, as is science. American society today is, like England and the other Anglophone settler colonial societies, so conservative because it is insufficiently republican, and to be more so it must be more democratic.

The essence of democracy often seems to be that people freely argue with one another, and this is true. The essence of democracy is that whatever is there, can be questioned. This means that the political character of a democratic society is given by the generality and pervasiveness of thinking. When people think with others, they speak, thinking out loud, not carrying out a plan or program or set of orders. Thinking has a spontaneity in this sense. The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu said that the demand politeness is always a political one, and the concession to the demand of politeness is a political concession, acknowledging the legitimacy of the superior power claiming authority. The two possible governmental regimes that are compatible with philosophy (with its generalization through the social field so that everyone is a bit of a philosopher, that is, an active thinker, both alone and with others) are democracy and anarchy. Ultimately, either everyone rules everything or no one rules anyone, and in both cases the reason this is possible and necessary is that everything can be contested and should be. Yes, somewhere and somehow; but that is a secondary matter of technique.