Before Good and Evil

Before Good and Evil (a non-moral reality)

            A generally overlooked aspect of Engels’ social evolutionary schema that closes the circle around its dynamic if not its scale, is the absence of a God concept in what he refers to as ‘primitive communism’. Marx later writes, ‘for the communist man, the idea of God cannot occur’. That is to say, even the very idea of a God becomes impossible in the communist mode of production. For Engels, the cultures of the social contract were to be the model of the relations of production in what remains today an hypothetical communist society. In his schematic, the quirk occurs late in the day, almost as if it were a plot device, necessary because, after unrolling a tight tapestry of human history and prehistory alike – and for the first time, making a connection between them without regressing into either metaphysics or flirting with outright bigotry – the reader finds the climax requires the usual suspension of belief. While this is fine for commercial fiction, it is not so fine for philosophy. That the means of production do not change from the Bourgeois mode of production to that of communism more than implies that capitalism is communism bereft of pre-capitalist symbolic formations.

            This is not, on the face of it, an insoluble problem in practice, only for the model. It is somewhat difficult to believe that neither Marx nor Engels were aware of this tipsiness in an otherwise reasonable ‘model of’, but this is precisely the point here: if Engels strove to create a ‘model of’, Marx desired rather a ‘model for’. Given the challenge of transforming the same model from one to the other, it is perhaps unsurprising that the logic of the dialectic abruptly drops off just when one would expect to see its culmination. A literary scholar once suggested to me that a failed novel is the worst thing, but a failed philosophy is but a work in progress. While such a sentiment is itself reasonable, the key is to continue that work. Let’s reexamine the connections between the origin and the destination in Engels, in order to clarify both the motive and thence the rationale for constructing it the way in which he did.

            ‘Primitive communism’ is the less romantic version of Rousseau’s social contract. It becomes even less sentimental in Durkheim’s ‘mechanical solidarity’, and downright Third Reichish in Malinowski’s diaries, not intended for publication, wherein the ‘savages should all be obliterated’. Yes, living-in with a bunch of superstitious morons would likely get old, as the famous ethnographer discovered for himself, but then again, this was precisely the point of Marx and Engels when they dedicated their corpus to a demythology of modern man. In the nineteenth century, when social evolutionary schemas were all the rage, Darwin’s revelations only fostered a deepening of the sense that what one saw regarding ‘progress’ was not merely cultural, but had to do with the ‘species essence’, as Marx has it. This post-Enlightenment problem was not quite overcome even in the work of some of the greatest of its revolutionary thinkers, including Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger. For each, there is a point wherein metaphysics, the idea of Man, capital ‘M’, creeps back in. From a purely authorial point of view, this is a subjective reaction to becoming over-enamored with one’s own ideas. This is the more easily solved aspect of the problem. Less simple is the aspect which lies at the discursive level: from Aristotle to Foucault, metaphysics, in its broadest sense and most distanciated case, re-presences itself. At the far end, ethics does not manage to sever its umbilical cord to metaphysics, and at the near end, the archaeological structures of discourse, their ‘evenements’ and their orthographies, trend trundling into the same. It appears that it is not an easy thing, at all, to overcome the idea of the ideas.

            Yet for the vast bulk of our species’ tenure on this planet, and presumably, for all of the millions of years before this, wherein our hominid ancestors rusticated, metaphysics didn’t, equally at all, exist. This is the perduring strength of Engels’ understanding: the original human condition provides all of the symbolic clues necessary to convert capitalism into communism. A cosmology without gods, a cosmogony of transformation, and an apolitical polis; what more could one ask for? This was humanity not beyond good and evil, but rather before.

            Gauguin and D.H. Lawrence were liberated by this discovery, but Malinowski was apparently appalled by it. Even so, one would have to more minutely distinguish the types of societies each of these European interlopers lived in, in order to more fully appreciate the implications of Engels’ own work. Melanesia is not Eden, though Polynesia appeared to be a closer approximation thereof. And Mestizo Meso-America, however sunny and sexy when compared with a paranoid and ultimately also delusional Interwar Europe, could only be compared with subsistence social organizations, at a stretch, in the remotest village conditions. Rousseauist romance aside for a moment, Engels was himself the polar opposite of any sentimentalist, having disowned his father, a great capitalist and solemn Protestant Bourgeois, and thence studying the working conditions in the heart of industrial England, producing the first ever full-fledged ethnography in 1845. No romance here, one would suspect, but even there, even then, Engels did find his life love, rescuing a 12-year-old girl from the mills and later marrying her when she ‘came of age’, to use a period expression. In a word, Engels cut a rather more heroic figure than the dreamy Rousseau, embittered Lawrence and escapist Gauguin. For the feminist, Engels was able to do so because he had also shed the misogynist contraptions of his forebears and peers alike. Marx was unable to claim the same for himself, we would suggest.

            However this may be, what is certain is that Rousseau’s image of the ‘noble savage’ itself cut two ways. Was it then the savagery or the nobility that evolutionary discourse would favor? In Nietzsche, they appear to almost become the same thing, and thence in Freud as well; hence the ongoing problem of repression. Darwin, on his part, seemed aloof to the distinction, which may well be par for the course for the harder sciences; ‘it is what it is’, could be an empiricist motto. But all of this discursive hand-wringing in the face of human history comes just before 1859 and thenceforth in the implicatory interregnum between Darwin’s ‘Origin’ and his 1871 ‘Descent’. Afterwards, handwringing gives way to head-shrinking.

            Metaphysics, as a projection of human aspiration, served equally well as a set of ideals as it did ideal conditions; it proposed, in its diverse contents cross-culturally, that while humanity actually lived like this in the present, in the future it could live like that. At first, even death was but a metaphor. One needed to shed the human being which I am in order to ascend to the new culture. There is thus an exiguous, but still continuous, connection between the exhortations found in Gilgamesh to those of The Will to Power. In a word, my life as it is and how it has been, is but a shadow of either what is to come, or what it should be. The discursive rendering of the saint, metaphysics as morality quickly came to define not only the standard of ideal conduct in the world – and this as a role model, a ‘model for’; which in turn suggests that the dialectic should have been able, if left to its own internal logical device, overcome any flaw in Engels’ schema, since in metaphysics we do have a general example of what once was merely a ‘model of’ transmuting itself into a ‘model for’ – but as well the rubric by which one, indeed, anyone, could attain such an ideal. These are the timeless codes, from Hammurabi to the Decalogue, which connote a space transcendent to history, a space which is not a place and which can be simply called ‘Time’. In this, metaphysics reinvents the absence of history which was, forever and ever, the condition of our species and its direct predecessors.

            The timeless time of the social contract was attractive to Engels both as a model of a society which endured in spite of itself and its own serious limitations, as well as politically; as a model for the re-creation of a similar set of relations of production which would, in their own way, withstand the test of historical time. Communism is thus granted the status of an Eden-in-practice. Like any utopian scheme, Engels’ dialectical materialism presents its terminus as at the least indefinite, and in this, aspires to bring the metaphysical metaphor to ground. That we have not yet been able to slough off the ‘old gods’ of pre-capitalist symbolic forms, does not slay the utopian loyalist but rather summons her to further heroics, discursive or otherwise. In our own day, climate clamor, identity ideology, gender genuflection, and hysteria in the face of the facts of human history fashionably dominate popular discourse regarding the future, however indefinite it may be or yet become. Not that Engels’ was himself either an ill-considered thinker or a person who dwelt in the clouds, quite the opposite. But any time one ‘gets an idea in one’s head’, as it were, the deeper meaning of such a phrase comes to the fore in light of the represencing of metaphysical aspirations, this time at a very subjective level. It allows us to mistake the personal for the political, the ideological for the theoretical, even the factual for the fanciful. It blinds us to both the vicissitudes of historical time – our conception thereof does not admit to there ever being a ‘forever’, either in the distant past or the projected future – as well as the evidence, fragmentary and yet possessed of its own miracle: that even in the fossil record of quasi-timeless geological time, there is still change, albeit glacial. The toolkit of Homo Erectus showed almost no alteration over a span of up to two million years, but, in the end, it was transformed, as more sophisticated proto-humans arose. This cannot possibly be called a memory, but only a fact. In this, we learn that experience has a too-intimate effect upon us; through it alone we are become bigots, the deniers of worlds.

            What Engels did realize, before the logical slippage, was that too great a cleaving to models of meant a more challenging effort regarding models for. There is no sign, in running through his evolutionary model, that anything unexpected was to occur. Marx noted, perhaps more to himself than to anyone else, that capital presented the most liberating possibility of any human condition theretofore, simply because there was not only the vast potential of its industrial-technical means of production, but there was also, and for the first time, social mobility built into the system itself. Romantic pseudo-history has culture heroes flung to the top of antique societies, but these figures are exceedingly rare. Whether or not Capital can overcome the metaphysics it has inherited from the social organizations occurring in history between the bookended communisms remains to be seen. Social mobility itself cuts both ways. That one can improve one’s subjective lot also means that one can sabotage it. And when an entire culture history ‘breaks bad’, it is the great plot device of an ideology to glorify the implausible in order to suppress the impossible.

            G.V. Loewen is the author of over 60 books. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

Holus Bogus

 Holus Bogus (The ‘all’ is a fraud)

            The call to the whole is the anathema of the call to conscience. Associated with Das Man in Heidegger, at the very best it collectivizes care, allowing each Dasein the same shadow of a more general entanglement. For to be distracted by this or that, or by this person or that person in the anonymous ‘open space of the public’ is something which is alongside Dasein’s own being-present. But what if one cannot find egress, at all, from an omnipresent non-being which takes for itself the worlding of the world? It is the this situation which deprives us of our situatedness, mine ownmost life, if you will. Just as does the fact alone deprave facticity, belief unmake the one who wills, and hexis make a mockery of praxis, so too does the all overtake Dasein’s ownmost; what is closest to us takes on the guise of only what is nearest. My thrownness could thence be anywhere, for all has been made the same thing by the all. I am no longer myself, but nor am I an other who, as her own Dasein, entails meaningfulness face to face with mine own. Heidegger never fails to use this phrase, ‘face to face’, common enough but now placed in a serious, though not fatal, confrontation with both itself and with the other. But if all are the same thing, no such perspective can be had. And yet I too can speak for you, for I and thou now also have been collapsed in a false dialectic. This is the ontology of the evil of evil.

            Ricoeur famously enjoins us to understand the evil of evil as ‘fraudulency in the work of totalization’. His examples are the church and the state, as these are institutions the humankind which present themselves as the all in all, and demand not merely our obedience but also our worship. It would seem as well the singular selfhood, developed in direct contraposition to both, and at the very moment the state had overtaken the church in the historical position of and as ‘the all’, is as well at risk for a similar fraudulency. Simmel notes more than once that while we do change over the life course, and even our memory cannot vouchsafe the singular consistency of any one life, let alone on behalf of others, nevertheless we do continue to exist as a being who has made its own history over against History proper, and carved out some minute niche of ‘personal’ culture over against the tradition. More profoundly, each of us is tasked with confronting that same tradition, in an hermeneutic dialectic which does not fall for the fraud of the all. We are at once the apex of several existential dialectics: 1. Self and other uplifted into mine ownmost being; 2. Memory and anticipation uplifted into the living present; 3. History and Zeitgeist synthesized by presence ‘itself’; 4. Habit and improvisation made into innovation; 5. The waking self and the unconscious coming together as a contemporaneous consciousness; 6. Anxiety and the call to conscience metastasizing themselves into Sorgeheit; 7. Reason and imagination combining in a unique intelligence, human consciousness itself, and so on. Let us take each of these, briefly, in turn.

            1. I am not the all in all, neither by myself nor, and of especial caution in our time, with others seen as ‘the’ others. On the one hand, I must negotiate the generalized other, both as its willing vehicle – ‘voluntarily’ in Weber’s sense of social cohesion – but as well as an individuated agent sometimes opposed to it, through the development of an ethics based upon personal experience but also an understanding of the looking glass self; how I imagine others perceive me. In order to accomplish each of these reflexive tasks, I must eschew thinking of myself as only what I have previously believed to be mine ownmost, or my closest-to-hand.

            2. Memory knows the past more precisely than can anticipation know the future, but it may not always be as forthright. For the future is unknown in an open manner, and memory can be standoffish pending my acts or their absence. ‘Memory yields to pride’, Nietzsche cautions, but surely not in all cases. Sometimes the two are co-present, as when we are proud of something we have done or something we have avoided doing. Elsewise we may be unsure of the outcome of an act, as its playing out remains ongoing, so neither pride nor memory can grasp complete hold over what is nonetheless, past, and thus past redux. Anticipation is limited, though not shuttered, by prior events; we do not tend to ‘unexpect the expected’, as anyone undertaking critique must do. The living present is just that; a kind of amalgam of partial memory – both biased and incomplete – and only an incipient openness lensed through the anticipatory stance, or instanciation.

            3. Beyond ourselves, but nevertheless both perceived and indeed endured, are the ‘times’ themselves. At once the moment ‘in’ history as well as the cultural atmosphere which can both enlighten and shroud such a moment, we are inside the manifolds of what has been bequeathed to us as a culture, while at the same time once again coming face to face with the ‘spirit of the age’. How aged, how spirited, cannot be decided on my own, without the syntagmatic temporality that belies the Now and yet also generates it more or less continuously, as Husserl speaks of in his densely parsed analysis of ‘internal time consciousness’.

            4. Akin to Zeitgeist itself, habitus rests beyond our individual vision and indeed our control. It is not constructed of a hundred personal habits, but rather imposes itself upon us as a kind of habituation. Even so, force of habit, so-called, cannot make its way against all comers. The unexpected, or at least, less predicted, does happen from time to time. In this, we are reminded of our fuller humanity as generalists and improvisers. The great skill of adaptation sees us through time and again. Of course, there is always the next experiment, both in discourse and in life. As improvisers we are closer to Dasein’s authentic being-in, but as mere habituants, we have fallen within a specifically fraudulent entanglement.

            5. Contemporaneity means more than mere coincidence. We are yet unsure of the chronology of specific sequences of Traumdeutung. Most will agree that dreaming, when recalled at all, is often simply a caution about physiological functions which have, over the course of sleep, become imminent and thus must wake us in order to be solved in conscious action. Similarly, though more of a resolution, anxiousness or other forms of concern – though yet not, whilst remaining unconscious, concernful being – requires of us a just as conscious, though much less automatic or habitual, action, in order to come to some sort of self-understanding, either about what it is we are actually concerned about, or more deeply, and thus more analytically, some aspect of our character that is awry. But the timing of these processes, from the metaphoric dream-state to the pragmatic waking act, varies greatly. The so-called ‘recurring’ dream suggests a pressing engagement with one’s past, for instance, and perhaps precisely due to the fact that we are replaying personal interactions which befit only the past, and never the present let alone the future. The unconscious is characteristically and regularly offended by such prolapsed inaction on our parts. To be truly contemporary, the self must unite the awkwardly communicated and even absurdly theatricalized insights of the unconscious with a reflective and reasoned Selbstverstandnis.

            6. Concernful being, once present, in its turn is the summit of care and anxiety, taking the most fruitful elements of both in their specific instances and even instants – this ‘instant instance’ is for the phenomenologist a sign of instanciation – that have as their hallmark an insistence about them, impresses us with how much concern they can generate on our part in response to them. These are no mere phobias, nor will they be too liable to repression, becoming neurotic, unless we summarily ignore all instances of the call to conscience, which very few of us truly do. Dasein’s ethical compass does not misdirect, but it does require us to read it off, much as does a dream remembered. The advantage of anxiety over dreams is that it can take hold of us fully, without undue interpretation or dramaturgical analysis, and while we are awake. Of course, to be awake and ‘awakened’ are sometimes two different things and not only this, as well often opposed to one another, for the normative living-on within that which is closest to us and that which is alongside of us often gets in the way of reflective, fully conscious, understanding. Selfhood in its authentic moment is thus also charged with calling a halt to the quotidian, as an immediate and compassionate response to the call of conscience itself.

            7. Finally, we have elsewhere already said much about the unique, if unquiet, confluence of human reason and human imagination. Akin to memory and anticipation, reason is reflective upon experience, and thus mostly concerns what is referred to as the past, or more simply, as ‘past’, and done with. But only in the unreasoned sense is this past complete. We reopen it, in almost cliché fashion, and it becomes part of the living present, even spilling itself onto the opening space of the futural, enacting part of what we can understand Husserl examining as the present process of the future in its making, or its ‘futurity’. Selfhood, ‘sovereign’ in its ideal sense, apart from any ‘evil of evil’, reaches reasoned reflection while trailing imaginative alternatives and ‘projects of action’ which, in their turn push that same self to further experience and thence reflection both. Here, more than at any of the other dialectical apexes, I am closest to the species-being or ‘species essence’.

            But even at this point, I am not the all, not ‘whole’, and not merely another within the whole. These seven dialectics, and there are presumably a few others to be noted, prevent any sense that I can be fully aware of each of their dynamics and for all occasions and experiences that I will have over the life course. Simmel’s late holism of a human life is to be regarded more as a rubric – however I shall change, I am yet, in the presence of the present-being, still myself, still my self – and not as an existential synthesis. If we are able and willing to unmask the fraudulent totality in institutions, however historical and vast, then we should also take the same phenomenological lens to our own beings. The self-examined life is as it stands very much worthy of life; it is we who must attain the same marque as is already and always imbedded in the human project itself.

            G.V. Loewen is the author of 59 books in ethics, religion, aesthetics, education, health and social theory, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.