An Insatiable Dialectic: Essays on Critique, Modernity, and Humanism 1443852929, 9781443852920

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An Insatiable Dialectic

An Insatiable Dialectic: Essays on Critique, Modernity, and Humanism

Edited by

Roberto Cantú

An Insatiable Dialectic: Essays on Critique, Modernity, and Humanism, Edited by Roberto Cantú This book first published 2013 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2013 by Roberto Cantú and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-5292-9, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-5292-0

To Marshall Berman (November 24, 1940-September 11, 2013)

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Roberto Cantú Part One: Critique and Modernity What is Critique? ....................................................................................... 24 Richard J. Bernstein, New School for Social Research, New York Afterword: All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, 2010 .................................... 36 Marshall Berman, City University of New York Cross-Cultural Hermeneutics after Hegel .................................................. 44 Joseph Prabhu, California State University, Los Angeles Essay on Postmodern Culture: A Consideration of Values and Commitments ...................................................................................... 58 Andrew Renahan, Concordia University, Montréal, Canada Part Two: Humanism and the Humanities Intercultural Humanism: Idea and Reality ................................................. 70 Jörn Rüsen, Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities, Essen, Germany Eugenics, Humanism and Frank Yerby’s Plantation Romance ................. 88 Ewa Luczak, University of Warsaw, Poland Not Human Enough: Levinas and a Call for New (Old) Humanism ....... 104 Zlatan Filipovic, University of Gothenburg, Sweden Dialectic of the Animality and Humanism of Depth ............................... 121 Frank Weiner, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University Marxian Humanism: From the Historical Viewpoint .............................. 140 Hongmei Qu, Jilin University, China

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Cold War Humanism and Beyond: Postmodern Subjectivity and Humanist Literary Critique in Rorty and Eggers .............................. 155 Anthony Hutchison, University of Nottingham, United Kingdom The Future of Humanism: Despair, Transcendence, Hope ...................... 168 Dennis Rohatyn, University of San Diego, California Part Three: Traditions and Global Modernities Experiencing an Uneven Global Modernity: Globalization and the Dramatic Monologue in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger ....... 180 Bidhan Chandra Roy, California State University, Los Angeles Aging and Dependency in Sweden’s Welfare Services ........................... 196 Katarina Andersson, Umeå University, Sweden A Dialogue with Nietzsche on the Concept of Moral Responsibility ...... 216 Ana Carolina da Costa e Fonseca, Federal University at Porto Alegre, Brazil Contributors ............................................................................................. 227

INTRODUCTION ROBERTO CANTÚ CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, LOS ANGELES

The past is not a straight line, but a sphere. The line knows no mystery. —Thomas Mann

The contributors to this book set a new benchmark for the study of Western cultural history with their critical studies of the political and philosophical significance of modernity, critique, and humanism in the West as well as in non-Western nations. The book’s attention to this triple Western legacy confirms its enduring command over peoples’ imagination and their inflamed debates throughout the modern world. This book includes comprehensive analyses of this conceptual triad from diverse global perspectives--Brazil, China, India and, among others, Poland, Sweden, and the United States—therefore from different, distant, and at times conflicting political and philosophical foundations. Three arguments bind these studies: first, that modernity, critique, and humanism do not have one essential meaning nor a singular place in history but, on the contrary, resurface periodically over time in moments of crisis and transition, and according to an internal process of cyclic decline and darkness, followed by “renaissances” in which criticism is a continuous underground current with fertile results.1 Secondly, that Western 1

In the prelude to Joseph and his Brothers, ominously titled “Descent into Hell,” Thomas Mann reflects on humanity’s remote origins and points to the Tower of Babel as a key myth that explains the confusion of tongues, scattering of peoples, and emigration to unknown places, but found in other lands as well, for instance “the great pyramid of Cholula, whose ruins reveal dimensions that certainly would have had to rouse anger and jealousy in King Khufu.” See Joseph and His Brothers, trans. John E. Woods (New York: Everyman’s Library, 2005): 23. Humor and anachronisms aside, Mann’s intent is to press the reader to reflect on the moments of cultural “renaissance” that emerge in human history out of apparently new historical foundations, but which are really the return of the past in the guise of the renewed present, defined by Mann in individual terms as “the

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Introduction

civilization is not a mere continuation of idealized cultural features associated with Europe’s origins in Antiquity. Third, that after two world wars in the twentieth century, and in light of the current conflicts between the West and the Islamic East, Western civilization faces the challenge of re-inventing itself once again—and no longer as the planet’s only modern civilization. According to essays by Joseph Prabhu and Anthony Hutchison, it’s time for the “great conversation of mankind,” and a “planetary humanist consciousness.”2 In spite of its different historical modalities, critique has been fundamental to Western civilization’s development, reaching its major crisis in the twentieth century on three fronts: first, in the work of philosophers such as Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre who expressed their contempt for modern democratic liberalism; second, in Nazi fascist politics that were bluntly anti-democratic; and third, in the Soviet promise of a new world order, proclaimed prior to the Second World War and during the Cold War. The essays in this book take notice of these previous conflicts in Western history and focus on current global challenges and concerns. Critique—the middle term—is thus inextricable from humanism and modernity. The interrelationship is defined by Octavio Paz as follows: “Differentiating itself from ancient religions and phenomenon we might call imitation or devolution, a view of life, that is, that sees the task of individual existence as pouring the present into given forms, into a mythic model founded by one’s forefathers, and making it flesh again” (98). 2 The essays included in this book are the revised and often expanded versions of papers presented at the international conference on Modernity, Critique, and Humanism, held at California State University, Los Angeles, on February 12-13, 2011. The conference originated in email communications with Oliver Kozlarek, a German philosopher with a teaching post at the Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás Hidalgo (Mexico). To help us in the organization, I invited two friends and colleagues to join us: Michael Calabrese, a leading scholar in European classical studies, and Bidhan Chandra Roy, a rising theorist in the areas of globalization and South Asian narrative fiction. The conference was a gratifying and productive project, with participating speakers and panelists representing 37 universities from countries such as Australia, Brazil, China, Sweden and, among other nations, Mexico, Poland, and Turkey. To view the conference program, with photos of keynote, featured speakers, and panelists, visit the conference weblog: http://conferencemodernitycritiquehumanism.blogspot.com/ Similar questions on periodization, historical continuity and change were the thematic drive behind the Conference on Mesoamerica, held at Cal State L.A. in the spring of 2009. For more information on this conference, see Tradition and Innovation in Mesoamerican Cultural History: A Homage to Tatiana A. Proskouriakoff, eds. Roberto Cantú and Aaron Sonnenschein (Munich: Lincom Europa, 2011).

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metaphysical principles, criticism is not an absolute; on the contrary, it is the instrument to unmask false absolutes and denounce abuses.”3 Criticism’s “unmasking” functions during times of totalitarianism as well as in eras of dogmatic repression, as elaborated by Charles G. Nauert in relation to a new sense of history during the Renaissance: Because of their unique new conception of history as a constantly changing succession of human cultures, humanists established themselves as critics, reformers, restorers of a better past. In differing ways and degrees, but always with the dream of creating a better future by capturing the essential qualities of Antiquity, humanists such as Petrarch, Valla, Machiavelli, and Erasmus pioneered in defining the role of the intellectual as conscience, gadfly, critic.4

The book’s essays develop arguments closely related to its title, thus with an emphasis on the alleged historical emergence of Western civilization from a Greco-Roman heritage (humanism); on the Enlightenment (critique); and the French Revolution (modernity), producing glimpses of the scope and significance of postmodernity as a transitional moment heading beyond the temporal limits of the historico-cultural periods in question, and with critique in the leading role, acting directly on unresolved (or irresolvable) contradictions.5 The idea itself of an insatiable 3

Octavio Paz, Itinerary, trans. Jason Wilson (New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1999): 40. Charles G. Nauert, Humanism and the Culture of Renaissance Europe, second edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006): 223. My emphasis. Nauert adds: “The true function of humanism in European history was not to shape some new philosophy called ‘humanism’ but to act as an intellectual solvent, striking down traditional beliefs of all kinds” (205). 5 This is essentially Fredric Jameson’s commentary on Piet Mondrian’s quest toward abstraction and his “resolve to dissolve” what cubism had left standing. Jameson focuses his attention on Mondrian’s last work, Victory Boogie Woogie, in which solutions were discarded one after another for fear of bringing the work of art to its inevitable conclusion. Thus the work is left unfinished at the time of Mondrian’s death “as a tragic relic of the insatiability of the dialectic, which here ends up destroying itself.” See Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic (New York: Verso, 2009): 35. Thinking back to the function of the “dialectic” in Leon Trotsky’s book Their Morals and Ours (1938), Octavio Paz adds a relevant point: “Dialectic was the other name for the god of history, society’s driving force in perpetual motion, never static, veritable holy ghost. To know its laws was to know history’s direction and plans,” Itinerary (50). Assessing Trotsky’s thought prior to his 1940 assassination in Mexico, Paz writes: “[Trotsky] was more and more locked up in himself. He died in a jail of concepts. That was how the cult of history’s logic finished” (51). Mondrian’s unusual preference for the ongoing 4

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dialectic that constitutes the driving force or spirit behind modernity, critique, and humanism runs parallel to Hermann Broch’s contrast between art and kitsch, the former defined as “perception of the universe” and “increased knowledge,” and the latter as that art which is only imitation and thus represents what “is already known,” with an “aesthetic effect as its only goal.”6 The problem of perception, self-criticism, and increased knowledge defines much contemporary art and literature in the United States, illustrated in Cormac McCarthy’s The Sunset Limited. This novel in dramatic form spotlights a national racial divide embodied in two characters who instead of a name are known only by the color of their skin, White and Black, the former a professor who clarifies the reasons behind his attempted suicide: “The things I believed in don’t exist anymore. It’s foolish to pretend that they do. Western Civilization finally went up in smoke in the chimneys at Dachau but I was too infatuated to see it. I see it now.”7 The irony is compounded when one realizes that these two human beings, strangers to each other, are brought together thanks to Black’s humanitarian intervention on behalf of White’s life in spite of their racial and class differences. McCarthy’s play, with its clear demarcation of the crisis of Western civilization in the ovens and ashes of Hitler’s extermination camps, unfurls its conceptual intent in an ironic dialogue between two persons whose lives have been shaped by racism in the United States, therefore with Nazism as a historical palimpsest.8 creative process over artistic completion, as described by Jameson, and Octavio Paz’s reflections on the dialectic and Trotsky, led to the title of this book. 6 Hermann Broch, Geist and Zeitgeist: The Spirit in an Unspiritual Age, edited and translated by John Hargraves (New York: Counterpoint, 2002): ix. 7 Cormac McCarthy, The Sunset Limited: A Novel in Dramatic Form (New York: Vintage Books, 2006): 27. My emphasis. It is difficult to empathize with White’s inclination toward suicide if one does not read into such an explanation (chimneys at Dachau) a response to lingering racial problems in the social fabric of the United States. But there are other responses to similar situations: for example, Thomas Mann’s opening essay (“Sixteen Years”) in Joseph and His Brothers: “The story came into being under the awful tension of a war on whose outcome the fate of the world, of Western civilization, indeed of everything in which I believed, appeared to hang—of a war with such dark prospects at the start […] a war whose cause I constantly felt called to serve with my words” (xxxviii). 8 Regarding Germany’s anti-Semitism before Hitler, consult Theodore Adorno’s In Search of Wagner, trans. Rodney Livingstone (New York: Verso, 2005). I cite from Zlavoj Žižek’s foreword: “In dealing with Wagner’s anti-Semitism, we should always bear in mind that the opposition of German true spirit versus Jewish principle is not the original one: there is a third term, modernity, the reign of

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Evidently, a political and moral critique of Nazism continues to be a source of lessons on ethics and personal choices. McCarthy’s drama returns to the idea that Western civilization is being destroyed from within, that is to say, inside the United States. Such a crisis is not perceived as a declining bourgeois humanism, or as the failure of the Soviet project for a new world order; it thematizes the crisis as dating back to the chimneys at Dachau’s concentration camp. The conflicts engendered by modernity were a major concern for a generation of German political thinkers, classical scholars, and novelists such as Hannah Arendt, Werner Jaeger, and Thomas Mann. These writers exiled themselves or narrowly escaped from Hitler’s reach, finding a safe haven in the United States and leaving record of their own ideas regarding critique, modernity, and humanism. Thomas Mann’s claim in Death in Venice that for artistic greatness to be acknowledged or to have any kind of impact there must first be “a hidden affinity” between the destiny of a writer and that of his or her generation acquired historical reality in the 1930s: it would serve as a prophetic stamp on the members of Mann’s own generation and their shared opposition to Nazism. The Nazi death camps remain the one human catastrophe of the twentieth century that shook the foundations of Western civilization, with humanism as the first to quake and tremble.9 Reflecting on humanism and Western civilization’s alleged cultural continuity, Hannah Arendt developed her critique in the context of the dawn and dusk of modernity, politically clocked from the French Revolution to Nazism: [E]ver since the great failure of the French Revolution people have repeatedly re-erected the old pillars which were then overthrown, only again and again to see them first quivering, then collapsing anew […] so that ultimately the public order is based on people’s holding as selfexchange, of the dissolution of organic bonds, of modern industry and individuality […] modernity—this abstract, impersonal process—is given a human face, is identified with a concrete, palpable feature […] the Jew which gives body to all that is disintegrated in modernity” (x-xi). 9 See Thomas Mann, “Death in Venice,” Death in Venice, Tonio Kröger, and Other Writings, ed. Frederick A. Lubich (New York: Continum, 1999): 102. While Mann, on first impression, ties his idea of generations to the notion of a shared historical sensibility, parallel to ideas developed by José Ortega y Gasset in relation to generations and their role in history, one can better understand the intellectual climate of the era if one recalls Hannah Arendt’s replacement of the idea of “generation” with the category of “contemporaries,” thus opening the affiliation synchronically to persons living in different ages (such as Lessing), but bound by similar historical conditions and attitudes. See Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (New York: Harvest Book, 1993):17.

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Introduction evident precisely those ‘best-known truths’ which secretly scarcely anyone still believes in.”10

To underline her idea of “dark times” as the end of an age and the possible rise of a very different time that demands new ways of thinking, Arendt portrayed European humanism as patently unprepared for the Holocaust, therefore as conceptually unreliable, metaphorically ineffective, and “in danger of becoming irrelevant.”11 To fully understand Arendt’s judgment, one must recall that her generation was shaped for the most part by three political realities: Nazism, exile as statelessness, and the memory of humiliation and dispossession, thus turning critique and narration into fundamental acts. [A]s long as the meaning of the events remains alive—and this meaning can persist for very long periods of time—“mastering of the past” can take the form of ever-recurrent narration. The poet in a very general sense and the historian in a very special sense have the task of setting this process of narration in motion and of involving us in it…for we too have the need to recall the significant events in our own lives by relating them to ourselves and others. (1993: 21)

Arendt’s claim that human suffering as an event must be told and perceived retroactively, therefore “experienced a second time,” relies on the reader’s own recognition through indignation and just anger in narratives of human misfortune that might be read as tragedies in the Aristotelian sense in which the reader-spectator recognizes herself or himself in the suffering that has been dramatically narrated. This generation’s critique of fascism and Hitlerism is a constant feature in the work of major German and Austrian writers of the era, from Thomas Mann to Stefan Zweig.12 Seen in this light, Werner Jaeger’s ground10

Arendt, Men in Dark Times (11). Arendt sums up her era and generation as follows: “the intellectual and political monstrosities of a time out of joint” (17). 11 Quoted in Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982): 222. 12 The emotional shock and disbelief is narrated by Stefan Zweig in a passage that underscores the rising mechanization of war and informational media: “You knew in advance from the newspapers and cinema newsreels about the new and terrible arts of technological destruction, you knew that huge tanks crushed the wounded in their path and aircraft blew women and children to pieces in their beds, you knew that a world war in 1939, thanks to its soulless mechanization, would be a thousand times worse, more bestial and inhuman than any earlier war mankind had seen. None of the generation of 1939 believed in a just war with God on their side any longer, and yet worse, they did not even believe in the just and lasting peace that it

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breaking Paideia, published in 1939 while he was teaching at the University of Chicago, should not be narrowly read as a scholarly study on ancient Greece alone, but as a critical denouncement of Germany’s fascism and of its willful mockery of a Western tradition that, implicitly in Jaeger’s work, remains as the only hope for Germany’s grace and redemption. Jaeger’s idea of humanism was based on education—paideia for the ancient Greeks, and Bildung for Germans--and on a conception of the political and ethical standing of the (Greek) individual: When compared with the ancient East, they [the Greeks] seem to blend with those of modern Europe. Hence it is easy to conclude that the Greek ideal was the modern one of individualistic freedom […] And it is difficult to refrain from identifying that new conception with the belief—which Christianity did most to spread—that each soul is in itself an end of infinite value, and with the ideal proclaimed during and after the Renaissance, that every individual is a law to himself […] Roman civilization and the Christian religion each made some contribution to the question, and the mingling of these three influences created the modern individual’s sense of complete selfhood.13

Ancient Greece is not always depicted as the “cradle of Western civilization” by the generation that Zweig associates with the year 1939. Thomas Mann, for instance, does not intend through his work to restore a better past, opting instead for a “new humanism” that would question and demystify the ideological foundations of Hitler’s notions of purity and supremacy of an Aryan race, thus embracing not only the positive results of miscegenation but also a fusion between the East and the West, a thematic constant in Mann’s novels and novellas from Death in Venice (1913) and The Magic Mountain (1924), to the tetralogy Joseph and His Brothers.14 The multi-ethnic and worldly sweep in Mann’s work found was supposed to usher in.” See Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday, trans. Anthea Bell (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013): 249. 13 Werner Jaeger, Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, Vol. I, trans. Gilbert Highet (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973): xix. 14 In Mexico, Thomas Mann’s novels were read by Octavio Paz and Carlos Fuentes with interest and admiration. The attention given to Mann’s range of ideas, to his critical stance on major international questions, and to the style and polished language of his novels, are keenly remembered by Fuentes and Paz in their writings. In his autobiographical essay, written five years before his death, Paz recalls his interest in Mann’s modern aesthetics and radical politics: “Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain [inspired] many of our arguments […] naïve parodies of the dialogues between the idealist liberal Settembrini and the Jesuit communist Naphta,” Itinerary (34). Carlos Fuentes sums up his memory of

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points of agreement with his impression of the United States after his selfimposed exile from Nazi Germany, paraphrased in part by Donald Prater: [T]he American nation was on a better road to restore mankind’s dignity in a new humanism than could be taken on the ancient continent of Europe […] New York’s amalgam of races, languages, and types well represented by La Guardia, the Italian half-Jew with an adopted son from Sweden. “It is the only true world city, a humanly free country, and could, I believe, absorb even us…One could become an American, and maybe one should.”15

Could Cormac McCarthy’s drama and its ruminations on Nazi Germany and the West trigger fresh thinking in an era of renewed xenophobia within the United States and conflicts with the East? Can one read the narratives of the German generation of 1939 and recognize oneself in its tragedy? The illusion was not to hope for a life of harmony and without contradictions, but to question dogma and the ideological slogans that continue to obstruct the ideals of humanity on a global scale. Thomas Mann’s “new humanism” led to his optimism and hope: [T]he democracy of the West—however outdated its institutions may prove over time, however obstinately its notion of freedom resists what is Thomas Mann as follows: “[He] literally shaped the writers of my generation. From Buddenbrooks to the great novellas to The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann had been the securest link in our Latin American literary connection to Europe […] to our young Latin American minds, Mann was already what Jacques Derrida would later call ‘the Europe which is what has been promised in the name of Europe’.” See This I Believe: An A to Z of a Life, trans. Cristina Cordero (New York: Random House, 2005): 325. 15 See Donald Prater, Thomas Mann: A Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995): 225. Quoting from Mann’s diary (entry of 26 June 1930), Prater discloses the following statement by Mann: “Humanism is humiliated or dead. Consequence: we must establish it anew” (176). These German writers, thinking of home while in exile, carried their nation on their backs and hearts. In The World of Yesterday, Stefan Zweig summarizes the mood and desolation of the Gemanspeaking emigrant fleeing from Nazi Germany: “Every form of emigration inevitably, of its nature, tends to upset your equilibrium. You lose—and this too has to be experienced to be understood—you lose something of your upright bearing if you no longer have the soil of your own land beneath your feet; you feel less confident, more distrustful of yourself. And I do not hesitate to confess that since the day when I first had to live with papers or passports essentially foreign to me I have not felt that I entirely belong to myself any more. Something of my natural identity has been destroyed for ever with my original, real self” (438).

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new and necessary—is nonetheless essentially on the side of human progress, of the goodwill to perfect society, and is by its very nature capable of renewal, improvement, rejuvenation, of proceeding toward conditions that provide greater justice in life.16

An Insatiable Dialectic: Essays on Critique, Modernity, and Humanism contains 14 chapters. The book is divided into three parts: Critique and Modernity; Humanism and the Humanities; and Traditions and Global Modernities. The first part opens with the anticipated question “What is Critique?,” posed and elaborated by American philosopher Richard Bernstein according to the historical moments in the question’s pre- and post-Hegelian tradition. Instead of charting a history of the concept, Bernstein’s objectives are threefold: (i) to ask what one can learn from this tradition; (ii) to sketch Marx’s intellectual formation; and (iii) to question what can be learned from Marx about critique in our current global situation. Bernstein elaborates on how critique always challenges the status quo, thus its relentless spirit of questioning, discerning, and judgment. Understood as negation, critique is “affirmation, and a passing beyond,” thus a historical process moved by the praxis of freedom and Marx’s idea of changing a world defined by human suffering and injustice. In Bernstein’s words: “What was disturbing to the young Marx has its equivalent today.” With lessons learned from the past, however, one must be watchful of mindless activism (“this is the temptation that needs to be resisted,” Bernstein warns us), and of the passive or active nihilism of people who either assume nothing can be done about the situation, therefore withdraw from the world, or else, like the Tea Party members, are vociferous about what they are against but never constructively express what they are in favor of. Bernstein’s conclusion casts a brighter light on the concept of critique and its relentless function in our daily lives: “Critique is a resistance against nihilism—whether passive or active. It always seeks the type of understanding that will motivate persons to act to overcome injustices and ameliorate suffering. Critique is an open-ended, self-critical process.” The next essay corresponds to Marshall Berman’s “biography” of his book All That is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (1982). It is an account of how the ruins of the South Bronx—the concluding focus of critical reflection in his book—are renewed and made livable by urbanites determined to rebuild their neighborhoods. Berman’s account of 16

Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn as Told by a Friend, trans. John E. Woods (New York: A Vintage International, 1999): 358.

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the many translations of his book to world languages—Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Farsi, to name a few—and of the keen and enthusiastic receptions in countries undergoing modernization (or preparing for it), is told in a language that is concrete and animated, and in a style usually found only in poets and novelists. Berman’s book represented to many of us an admirable illustration of the interdisciplinary in academic scholarship thanks to the impressive combination of reflections on Goethe’s Faust and the tragedy of development; on Baudelaire and modernism in the streets; Pushkin, Gogol, and Dostoevsky in Russia, and—moving from the world to the United States—on the South Bronx and its fate under Robert Moses. Of the human rights he lists as fundamental to a democracy, Berman underlines one that frequently embarrasses, in his view, academic and other tight-hearted writers: namely, the right to love and the freedom to marry across all lines—racial to religious. His references to the 1967 Supreme Court case Loving vs. Virginia are a critique of the repression of love across racial barriers in the United States. Joseph Prabhu’s essay, “Cross-Cultural Hermeneutics After Hegel,” opens with a paradox: at a time when people around the planet are at arm’s reach thanks to electronic communication, “a sense of mutual respect and appreciation of people” has been left behind. Prabhu claims that crosscultural hermeneutics opens paths that lead to different cultures, but with epistemological and moral-political conditions. He illustrates the problem with Hegel’s Eurocentric and thus “orientalist” representation of India. Why Hegel at this late date? Because he legitimized with the authority of his philosophical stature the denial of rationality and human dignity to people in India—not to mention peoples in China, Latin America, and Africa—who were viewed as close to nature, childish, passive and submissive, hence “ready for conquest.” In Prabhu’s judgment: not a strong point in favor of European Humanism. Hegel’s narrow and misleading understanding of India and, by extension, of non-Western civilizations, is also questioned by Prabhu with references to the work of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and especially to post-colonial theory, “designed to undo the ideological heritage of colonialism, not only in the decolonized countries but also in the West.” Inspired by Michael Oakshott’s notion of the “Great Conversation of Mankind,” Prabhu finds reason for optimism in the global proliferation of alternative modernities and the possibilities for cross-cultural and thus global conversations. Andrew Renahan’s essay closes the first part with a study of the debates within postmodernism, fully displayed by critic Steven Connor’s contentious differences with theorist Ihab Hassan whose willful intent to appropriate a universalist aesthetic for postmodernism is perceived by

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Connor to be in full concert with the “values and commitments” native to Western thought practices. Renahan takes the reader through the different modernist and postmodernist theoretical applications as these find expression in three areas: the visual arts (the paintings of Jean-Michel Basquiat), architecture (with Charles Jencks as the main opponent of the “international” style of Le Corbusier), and literature (with Salman Rushdie and Gabriel García Márquez as exemplars of postmodernist literature that questions the alleged “universality” of Western civilization). But just when we think that Renahan will favor postmodernism, he segues, identifies himself as a member of a rising “generation” of theorists, and favors waiting for “an emergent contemporary theory” that will correspond to “the dynamism of the present, while expressing a critical consciousness attuned to the dual coding of history.” A second surprise: Renahan’s critical quest is after bigger game: to challenge Fredric Jameson’s celebrated definition of the concept of the postmodern as a failed attempt to think of the present historically in an age that has become oblivious to history. Renahan’s imaginary debate with Jameson acts as a spur to our interest to return to the latter’s theoretical distinctions between postmodernism, on the one hand and, on the other, modernism, modernization, and modernity. Absent in Jameson’s language when he wrote his book Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) is a key term in Renahan’s periodizing argument: “postmodernity.”17 The second part of this book draws our attention to “Humanism and the Humanities,” opening with an essay by the renowned German scholar Jörn Rüsen who argues in favor of the notion of the “intercultural” as an idea and reality for a humanism appropriate to our globalized world. The sweep of Rüsen’s argument starts with reflections on the world’s conflicting cultures, the growing postmodern sentiment in favor of alternative modernities, the emphasis on relativism and, among other symptoms of globalization, the normative critiques of the Western tradition that, as Rüsen reminds us, are the entrenched mental strongholds of Western universities. Rüsen’s counter-argument develops in a sequence of bulleted and numbered sections that summarize the three moments of humanism as a concept in the West, from classical antiquity to modern times. As will be evident to the reader, Rüsen’s is a comprehensive critique of humanism and a call to rethink it in its inclusive, intercultural, and universal possibilities, thus not associating it with the “illusionary relationship to classical antiquity.” An inclusive humanism, Rüsen argues, 17 See Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991): 303-304.

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must face vital problems such as the growing social inequalities in the world, the right to earn a livelihood, the right to human dignity and, among other ends, for the conception of new ideas regarding our relatedness to nature. In terms of the growing violence in the world, Rüsen refers to the Holocaust as the twentieth century’s “historic signature” and adds: “only a humanism which can meet the challenge of these crimes and can look into the face of the Holocaust is feasible for a future-directed orientation of human life.” The arguments against post-colonialism, postmodernism, and the growing relativism in academic circles are welcome points for debate in this bold and stimulating essay. The ideological aberrations of racism in the twentieth century, generally veiled under the pretenses of science and the proposed “breeding” of a humanity with a higher and purer racial traits, found a home in Hitler’s Germany and in other unexpected countries, one of them being the United States. In her essay, the Polish scholar Ewa Luczak outlines the general background of the science and discourse of eugenics—a term coined by Francis Galton, the nephew of Charles Darwin—and its claim that the origin of humanity had been a dual process in which most people descended from apes while others had non-ape ancestors and thus belonged to a separate species that had inherited the “good germ plasm.” Surprisingly, the discourse of eugenics seduced the imagination of artists and intellectuals who flourished during the first decades of the twentieth century, among them Jack London and T.S. Eliot. Such an ideology of racial supremacy—and the moral obligation not to interbreed with inferior races—is studied in detail by Luczak, both in the work of scholars as well as in the impact of eugenics in the popular imagination of Americans. Eugenics thus resulted in a national identity: “American” became a racial category that excluded U.S. ethnic groups from nationhood and civil rights. After studying these “anti-humanist” and anti-democratic postulates in American eugenics, Luczak focuses on Frank Yerby’s The Foxes of Harrow (1946), a novel published shortly after the defeat of Hitler’s Germany. Luczak’s analysis and interpretation of The Foxes of Harrow is insightful, and a critique in high form of Yerby as a writer of popular novels who had one readership in mind: not blacks necessarily, but a reader who felt racially superior to others and who might have a moment of recognition in the unexpected fate of the protagonist— Stephen Fox, the Irish immigrant, whose own peripeteia shifts from racism to the discovery and embrace of Otherness. The essay closes with a citation from a speech by Martin Luther King, therefore confirming Frank Yerby as a literary precursor of the civil rights movement in the United States.

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The essay by Zlatan Filipovic is a close reading of the philosophical work of Emmanuel Levinas whose family, for the most part, were murdered in Nazi death camps. Levinas himself suffered incarceration and, after his freedom, questioned the fundamental premises of Western humanism, such as rationality, freedom, and the autonomy and dignity of the subject. Filipovic explains that for Levinas, to be called to Goodness is to be for the other person, to acknowledge his vulnerability, his mortality, and the ethical choice of one-for-the-other. The hypocrisy of the humanist project, Levinas claims, is the subject’s right to self-assertion as a means to exploitation and imperialist might that lead directly to colonial aggression. Humanism, writes Filipovic, “has not risen to the true height of what it means to be human.” In Levinas’s reflections, the self emerges as being only through the Other, therefore the “I” is transformed into the “Here I am.” As expected, Levinas’s thought returns critically to Nazism and its emphasis on a “community of blood” where biology displaces spirit as the essence of the Other. Paraphrasing Levinas, Filipovic observes that “the impossibility of escaping one’s own skin to save it, the unpardonable fact of being riveted to oneself, is the absolute horror of racism.” The emphasis cast on compassion and the suffering of others is not new in Levinas; in fact it is a reflection on fundamental premises of the Enlightenment by way of Rousseau for whom, in Arendt’s words, “the human nature common to all men was manifested not in reason but in compassion, in an innate repugnance, as he put it, to see a fellow human being suffering” (1993: 12). Levinas’s call for a “New(Old) Humanism” is therefore a philosophical exhortation for a continuation of Enlightenment ideals that have since been disfigured or forgotten by the imperial ontological law of “one’s right to be.” “With regard to the other,” Levinas adds, “I am always indebted. The ethical demand is always insatiable, which is also the root of its infinity” (my emphasis). Levinas’s call for human solidarity based on an ethical commitment to others—is this possible in a world such as ours? Filipovic admits that what Levinas proposes is difficult, but affirms “this does not mean that one is free to give up trying.” But what if the Other comes to us in the form of an animal, let’s say a horse or an ape with inferior germ plasm, thus in its full embodiment of Nature, and by the animal’s breathing, fears, hunger, and mortality reveals a kinship with humans? Such a possibility would take Levinas to an unexpected level of Otherness. In his essay, Frank Weiner takes the reader through a dialectic of animality and humanism of depth, weaving his argument with allusions to artists, philosophers, and scientists—thus adding depth to his essay. Weiner’s argument grounds itself on two

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Introduction

philosophical paths, either away from or toward humanism: Martin Heidegger, who rejected humanism, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who embraced it. Weiner, however, has a third, non-Western, figure in mind— Matsuo Basho--who will cross the barriers separating Being from Nature, thus constructing a cross-species phenomenology for artists “to be one with nature.” Weiner pays close attention to Heidegger’s anti-humanist philosophy, one that positions humanity as possessed by language and temporality, whereas the hallmark of animality is impoverishment in language, captivity in its own atemporal environment, therefore unable to form a world. No doubt thinking of Basho, Weiner acknowledges the contradiction between Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty and, face to face with the Otherness of a luminous Nature, Weiner reaches for a dialectical option: “The crossing of the two tracks of perception, if this is at all possible, may reside in the individual willing to confront a life face-to-face with others [after all] we are the animal that confronts face-to-face.” Hongmei Qu’s essay represents Marxist research flourishing in the contemporary Chinese academy. It is a tightly-argued critique of the controversies between Marxist humanists and scientific Marxists, in itself a history of conflicting interpretations of the labyrinthine meanings of “humanism” in the Marxian philosophical tradition. The polemics are defined by evident ideological demarcations: on one side, those who favor the young Marx whose early writings are read as a critique of the suffering and inhuman conditions in which an oppressed humanity toils under capitalism; on the other, the scientific Marxists who question bourgeois morality and prefer to emphasize Marx’s revolutionary ideas in relation to social change within history, viewing humanism as naïve and with an “unproblematic conception of language and consciousness,” thus prone to the “illusory belief in the autonomy of human beings as thinking subjects.” Qu’s critique contains various levels of complexity that open lines of reasoning with three deft gambits: (i) a critique of the four contrasting interpretations of the relations between Marxian philosophy and Humanism; (ii) a historical account of the three past phases in the centurylong history of interpretations of Marxian Humanism, from the 1890s to 1990s; and (iii) Qu’s demonstration of her proposed “rereading” of historical materialism, a hermeneutic that simultaneously acknowledges the humanist dimension it tacitly carries within, unbroken in Marx’s “newbrand of thinking” that regrettably was ignored by later generations who proposed unsatisfactory or degraded interpretations. Qu calls her analysis of Marx’s New Humanism “from the historical viewpoint”—in other words, instead of focusing on Marx in his “humanist” and early years, or on the mature and “scientific” Marx, Qu looks for the historical point from

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which Marxist moral theory originates: “only when the originality and revolutionary change in Marxian philosophy is discovered can we find an effective way in interpreting Marx’s moral theory.” This “originality” corresponds to Marx’s definition of the relationship between man and nature: men, as opposed to animals, are defined by Marx by their conscious life activity (labor). In Qu’s words: “Men can be distinguished from animals only when they begin to produce their means of subsistence.” If what Marx cared most about was human subsistence, it remains to be seen if Marxian philosophy will set the limit for a growing and economically powerful China in this century. However, when one considers the rigorous analysis and historical scope of Qu’s study, it is evident that her work will be an important contribution to the controversies that conceivably will persist in China and elsewhere over Marxian Humanism and moral philosophy. Anthony Hutchison’s essay overlaps with Qu’s when read in a worldhistorical setting—in other words, beyond party ideology or national interests and phobias—and is analyzed under the light of the Cold War relations—relentlessly tense and at times at the brink of war--between the former U.S.S.R., China, and the United States. More specifically, Hutchison’s study of Cold War humanism traces the uneven fate of American pragmatism and the history of the ideological divisions among Western philosophers, particularly in the Anglo-American tradition, from the McCarthy era in the early 1950s to its most recent incarnation in the postmodern subjectivity and humanist literary critique embodied in the work of Richard Rorty and Dave Eggers. In good dialectical mode, Hutchison locates the philosophical differences in the United States between American philosophers Richard J. Bernstein and Rorty, with the former portrayed as a critic of postmodern intellectual currents in the United States. Those of us who saw Bernstein’s agile mind as he gave the keynote lecture at the 2011 conference, and while he engaged different speakers and panelists throughout the two-day discussions, will see with interest Hutchison’s portrait of Bernstein as a powerful voice against a postmodern aesthetic that emphasizes “play,” ludic self-fashioning and, in Rorty’s case, indicative of a “politically regressive nexus of Reagan era cold war politics and late twentieth-century post-foundational philosophy.”18 18

For a remembrance of Richard Bernstein during his early career see Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl. Of interest is the reference to a 1972 conference in Toronto devoted to the work of Hannah Arendt, with only four speakers invited, among them Richard Bernstein (“Arendt knew and respected highly”). At this conference, held during the peak of the war in Vietnam, a debate ensued on the topic of the political engagement and activism of political

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Introduction

Hutchison’s analysis of Rorty’s work and of Eggers’s novels is detailed and illuminating, with references to cold war fears of Western civilization being destroyed by communism, followed by his criticism of the corporatesponsored “multiculturalism” in the neo-liberal age of globalization, and his commentary on Egger’s proposed “planetary humanist consciousness.” This latter point is utilized by Hutchison to close his study with impartiality and sound judgment, stating that in spite of their romantic inspirational “American liberalism,” Rorty’s and Eggers’s choice of solidarity with the pain and humiliation of the poor, with the homeless, and with the world’s undocumented workers and resident aliens who are criminalized through xenophobic language and ethnic profiling, are valuable aspects in their work. Solidarity in Egger’s narrative “is created,” Hutchison asserts, “by an imaginative act rather than discovered as a consequence of abstract reflection.” Such concerns in regards to postmodernity and a cold war mentality correlates with Jameson’s argument that the Western tradition lacks the blueprints for utopian projects and the conceptual frameworks for “the discovery or invention of radically new social relations and ways of living in the world.”19 Hutchison’s point is clear: there is no need to demonize the opposition; the right to voice differences of opinion is fundamental to a democratic and free world, a principle forgotten from the McCarthy era to the protracted Cold War of the Reagan administration. We find no mention of the current conflict between the Islamic East and the West and its impact on U.S. writers and intellectuals, and yet the new Cold War with a religious emphasis whirls in our imagination as we read Hutchison’s discerning essay. The second part of this book, topically assigned to “Humanism and the Humanities,” concludes with an essay by Dennis Rohatyn, a scholar who seems to have read it all and whose writing style is an ardent blend of theorists such as Arendt. Young-Bruehl notes that “Arendt was on the defensive in the discussion,” but that she collected herself and responded: “I think that commitment can easily carry you to a point where you do no longer think“(451). In the essay that opens this book, Bernstein refers to Marx but seems to be recalling Arendt when he states: “Marx was a severe critic of what he took to be mindless activism, the urge to do something about changing the world without any careful forethought about what we are doing.” 19 See Fredric Jameson, “Notes on Globalization as a Philosophical Issue,” The Cultures of Globalization, ed. Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi (Durham: Duke UP, 1998): 62. In an attempt to make sense of the aggressive and triumphant technological colonization of the globe, Jameson offers the following diagnosis: the Age of Information is one of “advertisements and publicity, of postmodern marketing […] rather than the return of startling reports from remote places” (56).

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satire in the British tradition (note the references to Pope and Swift), of the oracular and apocalyptic language of the Book of Revelation, and a rapid sequence of mental fireworks. Rohatyn’s tongue is biblical and radically perplexing. He is a wiser and older Rimbaud who believes in the derangement of the senses as a first and necessary step toward academic detoxification and mental hygiene. His target is “Humanism” and he kicks it with fury and distracted concentration, an unmistakable clue that he is at home in the humanities. From these pillars and tradition he demystifies the being and time of one German philosopher: “Heidegger said, ‘only a God can save us.’ But there is no God—and if there were, Heidegger would be in big trouble […] we remember him for all the wrong reasons. Better to worship nothingness than to follow or obey ‘Der Fuehrer’—better no god than a false one.” He then takes a glance at the academy and utters: “The end of the world is the ultimate angle, as well as a way to get a grant…but so long as it funds an endowed chair in Apocalypse Studies it postpones our tenured date with the dean or de devil.” After a few more on-the-spot brainstorming and barbs, he asks the reader: “Can the rest of us do better, and not just on paper?” Read the last word in the title of his essay: Rohatyn remains hopeful. The third part of this book, “Traditions and Global Modernities,” is launched by Bidhan Chandra Roy with an analysis of Aravind Adiga’s award-winning novel The White Tiger (2008). Three levels of analysis should be of interest to the reader: first of all, the interpretation of White Tiger as a parable of the new India in the emerging genre of narratives of globalization; secondly, Chandra Roy’s survey of controversies this novel has generated in India and abroad, some hailing it as a critique of the false images of Bollywood and of the hype of India’s economic miracle, while others condemn it as inauthentic and offensive in its portrayal of the average Indian. Ignored in these polarized interpretations, Chandra Roy argues, are the generic features, such as the dramatic monologue, that make it possible for Adiga’s novel to represent the lived experience of globalization from the perspective of Balram Halwai, the novel’s protagonist who belongs to the underclass in India’s caste system. From this vantage point, Balram’s narration acknowledges India’s economic development, while also alluding to “the social fabric of corruption, inequality, and poverty upon which the novel shows it to be based.” And third, the interpretive demands and the level of critical engagement that The White Tiger requires from the knowing reader, such as the novel’s “ideological doubleness” contained in Balram’s limited perspective, on the one hand, and the novel’s broader and more complex representation with global implications, on the other. Among other forms of reader

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Introduction

engagement is the possibility of sympathy and compassion toward Balram, an identification that would result in the reader’s “self-recognition.” Chandra Roy’s essay is a breakthrough example of recent interdisciplinary criticism in South Asian literature and globalization, advocating the notion that the critique of global modernity in The White Tiger brings to the reader’s awareness “a world of interdependency in which the Indian underclass, transnational English speaking readers, Indian state and multicultural companies are interconnected in complex ways.” One of these ways of living in the world is humanity’s inevitable aging and the growing need for elderly care. The essay by Katarina Andersson on aging and dependency in Sweden’s welfare services is part of a large interdisciplinary project funded by the Swedish Research Council. Andersson addresses the problem of a growing population among the elderly in Sweden, and the challenges to traditional moral principles, such as dignity and respect, under the neoliberal policies established in the 1990s in Sweden that emphasize time-efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and the view that old age is merely a health problem and a question of public expenditure. Andersson discusses to what extent the increase in the elderly Swedish population has resulted in immigrant care workers being hired to do the job traditionally described as female work, with low wages and status, and inferior levels of formal education. The result is that both care workers and the Swedish elderly feel part of an underclass and with a deep sense of stress and frustration. However, there have been some positive results: the UN General Assembly resolution in favor of care, selffulfillment, and dignity. This part of Andersson’s essay is the result of case studies from which she draws an important lesson: organizations understand their function as economic and not as ethical or subject to the “morality-first” approach; on the contrary, Andersson argues that “we humans are not fully autonomous and need to be understood as being in a condition of interdependence.” This point leads to Andersson’s distinction between social rights and human rights, with the former associated with citizenship, and the latter with all persons, including the Swedish elderly who insist on the moral responsibility of care organizations, and who thus expect to be treated as human beings and not as an economic hazard. Andersson refers to the Human Rights Act as one that contains momentous implications for the elderly and immigrant labor, both in Sweden and abroad: “Human rights are moral claims defined by the shared vulnerability of all humans…[I]n a global context, a new consciousness of human rights is growing; however abstract these universal principles may be, they are gradually being transformed into generalizable norms.” Andersson laments, however, that in spite of positive legislation, the

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handling of care for the elderly is “extremely vague” because companies manage to evade public responsibility by transferring it to individual care workers and to those who are supposed to benefit from care services. The book closes with an essay by Ana Carolina da Costa e Fonseca on the concept of responsibility in a synchronous dialogue with Friedrich Nietzsche. This dialogue is conducted through close readings of the latter’s writings and Fonseca’s shared situations with Nietzsche across time and space. To begin with, the question of internal as opposed to external conditions of responsibility is posed, in that order, as either personal or institutional (e.g., religion, state laws), and both as sources of moral values. Fonseca argues that Nietzsche revolutionized our understanding of this contradiction between Church and State with two fundamental changes: one, that human beings must be the creators of their own values (not the state); second, that human beings are rational animals in the sense that they are governed by contradictory impulses: reason and instincts, mind and body, psychology and biology. The pre-Freudian aspects are implicit in Nietzsche’s analysis leading to the ironic argument that the laws justify themselves with the lie that their “purpose is to improve humanity,” while reducing people to a “herd morality” and hypocrisy. Fonseca draws from Nietzsche one inference: the legal is not always moral. The illusion of legalized morality and a moral humanity is illustrated with a reference to Aristippus, a student of Socrates who allegedly stated: “If all the laws were revocable, we would continue to live in an identical manner.” Fonseca compares this passage with Nietzsche’s The Gay Science (1882), where he urges readers to purify their opinions, construct new tables of value and laws of their own, and thus to recreate themselves. In her imaginary dialogue with Nietzsche, the point is made that with time people lose the faculty to create their own tables of value and laws, hence his urgent call for human beings “to have internal criteria that serve as a guide for their actions.” Fonseca’s essay will gain in readability in the context of the book’s essays by Marshall Berman (see his references to Brazil’s protracted attempts to become a democracy); the cultivated cynicism of Dennis Rohatyn regarding “morality,” and the essay by Ewa Luczak on the “improvement of humanity” through eugenics. Fonseca clarifies that her reading of Nietzsche is not “a description of the way events occur in the world,” meaning that her dialogue focuses at the level of the nation: Brazil could thus be understood in the context of the 2010 presidential elections that resulted in the Workers’ Party defeating the Social Democratic Party in a controversial political climate; Nietzsche’s Germany, during the age of Bismarck, with its German nationalism, anti-Semitism, and cultural philistinism, furiously contested

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Introduction

by Nietzsche. If Lessing was Arendt’s “contemporary,” Nietzsche is Fonseca’s. To pretend that legislation at a global or cross-cultural level will effectively curb human passions and instincts would be, according to Fonseca, the equivalent of entering the world of fiction and the lives of characters in a novel, say by Aravind Adiga or by David Eggers. Fonseca’s essay thus reveals its true intent and conditions of readability: the dialogue is by implication a national critique—Nietzsche’s Germany, Fonseca’s Brazil--and thus with rules that play out locally and not globally. A postmodern Nietzsche. As works of ground-breaking criticism, the fourteen essays that compose this book can be read as a variant of an ancient myth, as a poetics, and as a revolutionary event: in other words, as the symbolic cipher of a dismembered god (Osiris), and of a will to reassemble the mutilated parts; or, as the number of lines in a Renaissance sonnet, celebrated for its symmetry of form and its conceptual rigor; or, as Bastille Day. In Carlos Fuentes’s novel Terra Nostra (1975), 14 July 1789 is not a one-time event in linear time, nor just a French holiday, but a revolutionary human constant in which the date is associated with modern ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity that have defined democratic aspirations in countries around the world. Fuentes transforms Bastille Day—and number 14—into an archetypal date in the history of the West and the Americas, from the reign of Tiberius (with the Crucifixion allegedly taking place on the fourteenth day of the month of Nisan), and the conquest of Ancient Mexico, to the fateful encounter of Celestina and Polo Febo on 14 July 1999 in Paris, a city crowded with contingents of pilgrims and monks who converge on the City of Light to await the end of the world and its darkest night. The opening and closing scenes in Terra Nostra are depicted in a cinematic atmosphere of night and fog that puns on the documentary Nuit et Brouillard (Alain Resnais, 1955), a film that takes the viewer to the grounds of Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek, death camps built in Poland by orders of Hitler’s regime. In Terra Nostra, humanity’s history is interconnected, with glimpses of our fraternity appearing brightly and punctually every July 14. Carlos Fuentes would have agreed with Thomas Mann: the past is not a straight line, but a sphere; the straight line knows no mystery.20 I thank the anonymous reviewers of these essays for their valuable comments and suggestions. To the contributors I leave testimony of my admiring appreciation and unwavering gratitude for their patience and 20 This phrase serves as the epigraph to my introduction and has been taken from Jacob and his Brothers (151).

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collegial cooperation during our many email communications throughout the editorial process. A special thanks to Carol Koulikourdi and Amanda Millar at Cambridge Scholars Publishing for their professional advice and thoughtful assistance in all editorial matters. Lastly, but close to my heart: I thank my wife Elvira and our children Victoria, Isabel, and Roberto for uncomplainingly waiting for me to join them in family activities while I remained entranced, during late-night evenings, musing over the Tower of Babel in Cholula, or dreaming of An Insatiable Dialectic: Essays on Critique, Modernity, and Humanism. The dream’s wish has been fulfilled.

Works Cited Arendt, Hannah. Men in Dark Times. New York: Harvest Book, 1993. Broch, Hermann. Geist and Zeitgeist: The Spirit in an Unspiritual Age. Edited and translated by John Hargraves. New York: Counterpoint, 2002. Cantú, Roberto and Aaron Sonnenschein, eds. Tradition and Innovation in Mesoamerican Cultural History: A Homage to Tatiana A. Proskouriakoff. Munich: Lincom Europa, 2011. Fuentes, Carlos. Terra Nostra. Trad. Margaret Sayers Peden. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1976. —. This I Believe: An A to Z of a Life. Trans. Cristina Cordero. New York: Random House, 2005. Jaeger, Werner. Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture. Vol. I. Trans. Gilbert Highet. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973. Jameson, Fredric. Valences of the Dialectic. New York: Verso, 2009. —. “Notes on Globalization as a Philosophical Issue.”The Cultures of Globalization. Eds. Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi. Durham: Duke UP, 1998. —. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991. McCarthy, Cormac. The Sunset Limited: A Novel in Dramatic Form. New York: Vintage Books, 2006. Mann, Thomas Mann. Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn as Told by a Friend. Trans. John E. Woods. New York: A Vintage International, 1999. —. Joseph and His Brothers. Trans. John E. Woods. New York: Everyman’s Library, 2005. —. Death in Venice, Tonio Kröger, and Other Writings. Ed. Frederick A. Lubich. New York: Continum, 1999.

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Nauert, Charles G. Humanism and the Culture of Renaissance Europe. Second edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Paz, Octavio. Itinerary. Trans. Jason Wilson. New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1999. Prater, Donald. Thomas Mann: A Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth. Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982. Zweig, Stefan. The World of Yesterday. Trans. Anthea Bell. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013.

PART ONE: CRITIQUE AND MODERNITY

WHAT IS CRITIQUE? RICHARD J. BERNSTEIN NEW SCHOOL FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH, NEW YORK

The title of my paper “What is Critique” may sound presumptuous. And indeed, it would be presumptuous if you thought that I (or anyone) could answer this question once and for all. My goal is somewhat more modest, but no less important. I want to take a look at the history of this concept—especially as it emerges in the eighteenth century, is canonized by Kant, and transformed by Hegel and Marx. My primary objective is to raise the question of what we might still learn today from this tradition rather than giving a history of this concept. Let me begin with some of the observations of Reinhardt Koselleck who has written a history of the concept of critique in modern times. I have some strong disagreements with the way in which Koselleck tells the story of the rise and consequences of critique, but his famous book, Critique and Crisis, provides a good starting point for my inquiry. He reminds us that the word “criticism” (French critique, German Kritik) derives from the Greek țȡȓȞȦ, which means differentiate, discriminate, judge, decide. In the Greek usage, it frequently has a juridical meaning as in the judgment or decision of a court. Although “criticism” and “crisis” have the same etymological origin, “‘criticism’ moved away from the originally corresponding word ‘crisis’ and continues to refer to the art of judging and to discrimination.” In the eighteenth century the concept of critique begins to take on a life of its own. To understand the context for the concept of criticism, Koselleck goes back to the emergence of the Absolute State that introduced a sharp distinction between politics and morality. Appealing to Hobbes who sought to prove a solution to the seemingly endless religious wars, the State was seen to have the primary responsibility for protection and security of its subjects. Victor Gourevitch gives a succinct summary of Koselleck’s account of the origins of the modern order. The specifically modern order which was established by the middle of the seventeenth century redistributed the public space into two sharply separate domains: that of political authority proper, the prince or the State; and the strictly subordinate domain of the subjects, the domain which at

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about the same time came to be known as society. In Professor Koselleck’s view this ordering of sovereign and subject is given its clearest theoretical formulation by Hobbes. Hobbes fully recognized that such an ordering entails the strict subordination of the claims of individual morality to the requirements of political necessity. He argues for it none the less, on the grounds that ‘the state of man can never be without some incommodity or other’, and that the ordering of sovereign and subjects which he proposes makes for fewer incommodities than does any other. For it at least permits subjects to lead secure, commodious, and hence decent and just lives. (Koselleck vii-viii)

If this interpretation of Hobbes (and the emergence of the Absolute State) sounds familiar, there is a good reason. We find basically the same claim made by Carl Schmitt who significantly influenced Koselleck. But what is particularly fascinating about the story that Koselleck tells is how this strict dichotomy between the “separate domains” of state politics and private morality begins to break down. What had been marginalized as the domain of private morality eventually proved to be the Achilles heel of this sharp dichotomy between state politics and private individual morality. We find the beginnings of the growth and rapid spread of critique in this marginal space. Critique initially thrived in such apparently “politically innocent” domains of biblical criticism and art criticism. But eventually by the eighteenth century it turned into explosive political critique. Koselleck documents the role of the Masonic lodges and the Republic of Letters in bringing about this transformation. He shows how the boundaries between individual morality and politics were eventually and dramatically broken down. Koselleck writes: It is inherent in the concept of criticism that through it a separation takes place. Criticism is the art of judging; its function calls for testing a given circumstance for is validity or truth, its rightness or beauty, so as to arrive at a judgment based on the insight won, a judgment that extends to persons as well. In the course of criticism the true is separated from the false, the genuine from the spurious, the beautiful from the ugly, right from wrong […] To understand the peculiar significance of criticism in the eighteenth century it is necessary to show the evolution of the critical factor in its conflicting relationship with the State, and then to pursue the gradual development and the growing claim of the critical factor on this State. (103-104)

We can already see that, given this emerging sense of the meaning of critique, why Kant characterized his philosophy as Critical and why he names his three major works “Critiques.” For Kant sought to elaborate a

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What is Critique?

critique of human knowledge, morality, and aesthetics. And it is Kant who epitomized the spirit of his age when he wrote: [T]o criticism everything must submit. Religion through its sanctity, and law-giving through its majesty, may seek to exempt themselves from it. But they then awaken just suspicion, and cannot claim the sincere respect which reason accords only to that which has been able to sustain the test of free and open examination. (Preface to Critique of Pure Reason.)

Kant never wrote a “Critique of Politics.” Although strongly influenced by Rousseau and an admirer of the French Revolution, he did not believe that there is a right to political revolution—the right to overthrow the State. Despite his celebration of critique he did not translate critique into political praxis, although argued that there are norms that ought to guide political practice. To see the explicit relation of critique and praxis we have to follow its development in Hegel and Marx. Hegel became the supreme practitioner of what has been called “immanent critique.” When Kant writes his Critiques, history does not play an essential role. The Critique of Pure Reason is intended to delineate once and for all what is the character of human knowledge and what are its limits. To the extent that Kant’s critical project is successful, it reveals what is true about the nature of knowledge and experience regardless of history. The same is true for the other critiques. The grounding of morality in practical reason is true of all time—past, present, and future. In some of his late writings, Kant begins to anticipate Hegel. This is not the place to rehearse Hegel’s sharp criticism of Kant’s neglect of the essential role that historical development plays in philosophy and human development. But Hegel enriches our understanding of critique in his dialectical account. Although critique always contains a negative moment, it is never merely negative or oppositional. Hegel makes a sharp distinction between abstract negation and determinate negation. Abstract negation corresponds to what we might call the vulgar sense of critique—where it is taken to mean merely making negative points—merely telling us that something is to be rejected as false or wrong. But for Hegel, immanent critique requires understanding the truth that is immanent in the phenomena—or to use the Hegelian term—immanent in the “moments” of the development of Geist. And this comprehension—this begreifen—involves at once negation, affirmation, and a passing beyond. When we, for example, read Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, we follow the stages—the Gestalten—from sense certainty to absolute knowledge. At each stage Hegel’s seeks to bring forth the truth and the falsity of the Gestalt—what it contributes to the development of Geist and what are its limitation that require us to

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move on in our journey. We can call this an immanent critique because by rigorously taking seriously the claims made at each stage we can expose internal tensions and contradictions. Hegel characterized this movement as a highway of despair because at the very moment in which we think we have achieved satisfaction, we discover once again a deep contradiction that necessitates movement beyond. For Hegel the logic of contradiction is the logic of history itself—not a logic that we impose upon history. History may appear to be random and contingent but there is an inner logos (which may not be apparent to the participants) but which nevertheless manifests itself. And in the realm of what Hegel calls objective spirit, the logic of this historical development is the actualization of concrete freedom. The young Marx was infatuated with Hegel and his disciples—the Young Hegelians. I want to follow some of the stages in Marx’s own rapid development because I think we can still learn about the meaning and function of critique for our own time. Let me begin with the moving, passionate, and revealing letter that 19 year old Marx wrote to his father after completing two years of university life. In 1837 he writes about a turning point in his life. The letter is filled with human feeling, a review of his studies, and his love for Jenny von Westphalen. But I want to emphasize Marx’s report of his growing dissatisfaction with the Kantian distinction of the “is” and the “ought” and why he was attracted to Hegel. He writes to his father: “Particularly I was greatly disturbed by the conflict of what is and what ought to be, a conflict peculiar to idealism.” He tells us: “Setting out from idealism—which, let me say in passing, I had compared to and nourished with that of Kant and Fichte—I hit upon seeking the Idea in the real itself. If formerly the gods had dealt above the world, they had now become its center” (1967: 42, 46). What precisely is Marx saying here? Kant enshrined the distinction between the “is” and “ought.” This is the basis for his moral philosophy. We can never justify moral judgments by simply appealing to what is— whether it be appealing to human nature, history or any empirical experience. Morality itself is grounded in pure practical reason. This is the basis for our normative concept of what we ought to do. The Categorical Imperative, the supreme principle of morality has an independent source in pure practical reason. And today we are still the inheritors of this split between the is and the ought. Overcoming this split became a major concern of the German Idealists including Fichte, Schelling and, especially Hegel. Hegel argued that by drawing such a sharp dichotomy between the is and the ought, we virtually condemn ourselves to the impotence of the ought—the impotence of the normative. Yes, we can sketch all sorts of schemes about what ought to be –a preoccupation that still obsesses philosophers—but how do

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these normative schemes relate to the concrete historical reality—to what is happening in the “real” world? This disparity and conflict is what troubled the 19 year old Marx. And he suggests that with Hegel we find the overcoming of this dichotomy. This is what he means by seeking “the Idea in the real.” By the Idea here, Marx is referring the Hegel’s Begriff that is actualized in reality. What Hegel and the Young Hegelian seemed to promise is an overcoming of the is-ought dichotomy, a way of understanding grasping history where the gods that dealt above the world are now understood to be at the very center of this world. This means that in the world itself we can discover those conflicts and struggles that lead to the concrete actualization of freedom. Marx soon became a member of the Doctorenklub, the discussion group of the young radical Hegelians. Marx tells his father that he had previously “read fragments of Hegel’s philosophy and had found its grotesque melody unpleasing.” But now he “wished to dive into the ocean once again but with the definite intention of discovering our mental nature to be just as determined, concrete, and firmly established as our physical—no longer to practice the art of fencing but to bring pure pearls to sunlight” (1967: 46-47). And indeed Marx did plunge—reading Hegel day and night. In a short time he seemed thoroughly immersed. And yet Marx, who was always engaged in selfcritique, never was fully converted. Marx’s early encounter with Feuerbach provided him with the weapons to critique Hegel’s political philosophy. Feuerbach had seen in Hegel the attempt to liberate man from the alienation immanent in religion. He argued that speculative philosophy failed to transcend this alienation. He proposed a transformative method for reading and interpreting Hegel. According to Feuerbach, Hegel took thought to be the subject and concrete existence to be the predicate. Man, according to Feuerbach, is part of nature. What was needed to bring out the “truth” implicit in Hegel’s philosophy was an inversion of Hegel—one that discerned that Hegel’s narrative of Spirit (Geist) is to be properly interpreted as the development and liberation of concrete human beings. This “key” for interpreting Hegel had an enormous appeal to Marx and he uses Feuerbach’s “transformative method” for comprehending and critiquing Hegel’s philosophy of State. We might say that Marx’s own materialism dates from his early immanent critique of Hegel. In 1844 (1968), he wrote: Feuerbach’s great achievement is: (1) proof that philosophy is nothing more than religion brought to and developed in reflection, and thus is equally to be condemned as another form and mode of alienation of man’s nature; (2) the establishment of true materialism and real science by

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making the social relationship of “man to man” the fundamental principle of theory; (3) opposing the negation of the negation, which claims to be the absolute positive, the self-subsistent positive positively grounded on itself. (316-317)

Once Marx made his breakthrough in developing the weapons to critique Hegel, his eyes were open to a new reading of Hegel—a reading that brings us closer to his understanding of critique and its relation to praxis. The Phenomenology [of Spirit] is thus concealed and mystifying criticism, unclear to itself, but inasmuch as it firmly grasps the alienation of man— even though man appears only as mind—all the elements of criticism are implicit in it, already prepared and elaborated in a manner far surpassing the Hegelian standpoint […]The great thing is Hegel’s Phenomenology and its final result—the dialectic of negativity as the moving and productive principle—is simply that Hegel grasps the self-development of man as process, objectification as loss of the object, as alienation and transcendence of this alienation; that he grasps the nature of work and comprehends objective man, authentic because actual, as the result of his own work. (320-321)

Much later in 1873 in the afterword to the second edition of Das Kapital, vol. 1, Marx wrote: My dialectical method is not only different from the Hegelian, but it is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life-process of the human brain, i.e., the process of thinking, which, under the name of ‘the idea’ he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of ‘the Idea. With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected in the human mind, and translated into forms of thought. (Quoted in Avineri 40-41)

We might even say that Marx’s early critique of Hegel is the type of immanent critique that could be written only by someone thoroughly immersed in Hegel. One of the earliest references to the proletariat occurs in Marx’s Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. And it is clear that the way in which he thinks of the proletariat as a universal class is heavily in debt to his transformation of Hegelian categories. A class must be formed which has radical chains, a class in civil society which is not a class of civil society, a class which is the dissolution of all classes, a sphere of society which has a universal character because its sufferings are universal, and which does not claim particular redress because the wrong which is done to it is not a particular wrong but wrong

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What is Critique? in general. There must be formed a sphere of society which claims no traditional status but only a human status, a sphere which is not opposed in particular consequences but is totally opposed to the assumptions of the German political system; a sphere, finally, which cannot emancipate itself without emancipating itself from all other spheres of society, without therefore, emancipating all the other spheres, which is, in short a total loss of humanity and which can only redeem itself by a total redemption of humanity. This dissolution of society, as a particular class is the proletariat. (Avineri 59)

Although Marx initially shared the views of Feuerbach and the other Young Hegelians, he quickly grew dissatisfied with them. And in part, his growing dissatisfaction was that they were “play acting”—they acted as if their intellectual critiques of religion and philosophy would by itself radically change the world. Marx himself was working toward a conception of critique that would relate it to praxis—where praxis means acting to change the world. What was disturbing to the young Marx has its equivalent today. There is plenty of academic criticism—even radical criticism. We can be shrill about the pernicious effects of globalization and the disastrous consequences of neo-liberalism, but rarely do these critiques seem to connect up with genuine praxis—with really doing something to bring about change. It is fascinating to see how Marx was changing—sometimes from month to month in his search for a proper understanding of critique—and critique related to praxis. In an early exchange of letters with Arnold Ruge, Marx declares: “Freedom, the feeling of man’s dignity, will have to be awakened again in these men. Only this feeling, which disappeared from the world with the Greeks and with Christianity vanished into the blue mist of heaven, can again transform society into a community of men to achieve their highest purposes, a democratic state” (206). And he concludes this letter on an upbeat note. “It is up to us to express the old world to full daylight and to shape the new along positive lines. The more time the events allow for thinking men to reflect and the suffering men to rally, the better will be the product to be born which the present carries in its womb” (211). A few months later, Marx writes: “Even though the construction of the future and its completion for all times is not our task, what we have to accomplish at this time is all the more clear: relentless criticism of all existing conditions, relentless in the sense that the criticism of all existing conditions, relentless in the sense that the criticism is not afraid of its findings and just as little afraid of the conflict with the powers to be” (212). In the same letter, he says:

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[W]e do not face the world in a doctrinaire fashion with a new principle, declaring, ‘Here is the truth, kneel here!’ We develop new principles for the world out of the principles of the world. We do not tell the world ‘Cease your struggles, they are stupid: we want to give you the true watchword of the struggle.’ We merely show the world why it actually struggles. (214)

If Marx had simply stopped here, today he might have been as forgotten— as are the other Young Hegelians. But Marx felt the need to dig deeper--to get at the roots. Consequently, we see how Marx moved beyond his colleagues; he moved from the critique of religion and philosophy to the critique of politics to the critique of political economy. Critique for Marx is not a matter of simply condemning; it requires concrete understanding. And critique is not merely an intellectual activity; it must speak to the actual suffering, injustice, and needs of human beings. “Theory is actualized in a people only insofar as it actualizes their needs” (259). Marx, like Hegel, did not believe that human beings are primarily motivated by conscious rational considerations. Nor are they simply motivated by normative ideals about what ought to be. Human beings are motivated by their passions, their aspirations, and their hopes; critique must speak to these passions and these concrete needs. Unless critique achieves this, it degenerates into idle speculation. As he declares in his second thesis on Feuerbach: “The question whether human thinking can reach objective truth—is not a question of theory but a practical question. In practice man must prove the truth, that is, actuality and power, thissidedness of this thinking” (401). * * * I have been sketching the intellectual formation of Marx, but my primary intent is to draw out what we today might still learn from Marx about critique. If I were focusing exclusively on Marx, I would argue that the all too popular dichotomy of the presumably early humanistic philosophic Marx and the later “scientific” is a misleading myth. Of course there are differences, especially when Marx began the serious study of political economy and capitalism. But any careful reader of the Grundrisse and even Das Kapital will see how early themes are both appropriated and transformed. I sometimes have the nightmare that Marx, for all his brilliance was only “half right.” Let me explain. I do not think that there is anyone who matches Marx in his deep understanding of the rapacious dynamic of capitalism. Of course, he could hardly anticipate what sometimes seem like inexhaustible resources of capitalism to recover from

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“crises”—including the so-called recent “financial crisis.” He understood the constant imperative for economic growth and how the dynamic of capitalism inevitably has a global reach and transforms the entire world. Frankly, I find little in the recent discussions of globalization and global capitalism that was not anticipated by Marx. He even understood the ways in which global capitalism weakens and undermines the autonomy of sovereign states. It would not surprise Marx to learn that financial decisions made in cyberspace can dramatically change the everyday lives and increase the suffering of millions of people throughout the world. Marx was convinced that ultimately the crises and contradictions of capitalism would lead to the conditions of generating a class—the proletariat -- that would transform capitalism; that would create what he called in his early writings a “truly human society.” So what I mean by the nightmare that Marx was half right is that he well understood the enormous destructive potential of capitalism and the way in which it would increase the difference between the rich and the poor, but that he was wrong in his claim that this would inevitably lead to a revolutionary praxis that radically transforms capitalism. Although Marx always sought to be sensitive to the specific historical conditions and events—and even envisioned the possibility of nonviolent revolution--he always thought that a capitalist society will eventually destroy itself; it will produce a class— the international proletariat—that becomes the agent of revolution. He did not anticipate what seem to be the inexhaustible internal resources of capitalist societies to reinvent themselves and to overcome their internal crises. So what I mean by the nightmare that Marx was half right is that he well understood the dark side of the potential self-destructiveness of global capitalism but was wrong about the emergence of an international class that would bring about a new type of classless society. There was a famous group of French anti-Stalinist Marxists who adopted the name “Socialism or Barbarism” from Rosa Luxemburg. My nightmare is that only half of this disjunction is right—barbarism. So where does this leave us with critique. Do we have to abandon this too with the other aspects of Marx that we can no longer accept? I don’t think so. To use Isaiah Berlin’s expression, Marx was a hedgehog. For all his sophistication and complexity he was focused on understanding the origins, dynamics and collapse of capitalism and how the proletariat would eventually transform capitalism into a new society. Today we need to be more fox-like. Talk about the revolution—the revolution that will completely transform capitalism is irresponsible. This is not the world in which we live today. But there is plenty of injustice and human suffering throughout the world—and much of it is caused by the very dynamics of

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capitalism that Marx probed. When I say that we need to be more fox-like, I mean that we have to be more flexible, pluralistic and self-critical; but no less adamant in a commitment to critique. What then can we still learn from Marx about critique? The first point that I want to emphasize is –as I have already indicated—that “relentless criticism” does not mean merely indulging in what Hegel called “abstract negation.” Critique doesn’t accept the status quo. It searches for those dynamics and movements that can alleviate suffering and correct injustice. This requires the type of comprehension that is radical in the sense that Marx used this term—getting at the roots. Marx was a severe critic of what he took to be mindless activism, the urge to do something about changing the world without any careful forethought about what we are doing. This is a temptation that needs to be resisted. I also think that one of the greatest weaknesses in the Marxist tradition has been a failure to take fallibilism seriously. All critical claims, especially those that claim to get at the roots need to be subject to open fallible criticism. There is the danger of slipping into the ideological conviction that someone—the intelligentsia, the experts, the leaders, or the party has the “true” and “correct” understanding which has to be imposed on passive subjects. Such an approach—which was all too common in “really existing” communist societies has had cruel and devastating anti- democratic consequences. There is no incompatibility between radical critique and a healthy sense of the fallibility of critique. This is why critique itself must always be open to critique—including Marx’s own critique. The second point, which is just as important and perhaps even more relevant today is the idea that critique must seek to address persons in order to motivate them to act. In the heady days of the 1840s when there was so much ferment, we can well understand why Marx believed that radical critique would lead to revolutionary praxis. We might cite another example where critique and praxis were closely related. I am thinking of the early days of the civil rights movement in the United States. It wasn’t simply that critics were emphasizing the injustice and the gross disparity between professed ideals of equality and the horrendous effects of discrimination. What emerged was a form of critique that spoke to the deepest emotions and passions—a critique that aroused a deep sense of injustice and motivated people to act, to protest, to demonstrate. The point that I am making about critique as both involving critical understanding and motivation is similar to the point made by Habermas. In Knowledge and Human Interests, he compared critique to the type of analytic insight that sets off a process of depth self-reflection. He singled out two features that I have been stressing of this depth self-reflection:

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What is Critique? First, it includes two movements equally: the cognitive, and the affective and motivational. It is critique in the sense that the analytic power to dissolve dogmatic attitudes inheres in analytic insight. Critique terminates in a transformation of the affective-motivational basis, just as it begins with the need for practical transformation. Critique would not have the power to break up false consciousness if it were not impelled by a passion for critique. (234)

Habermas, in this passage, points to one of the most troubling problems that we confront today. My colleague, Simon Critchley, has spoken about the “motivation-deficit” that plagues many contemporary liberal societies. We may look back at times in history when revolutionary aspirations griped people to act. But today, although there is a great deal of anger and discontent, there seems (at times) little motivation and even less effectiveness in bringing about progressive change. Perhaps the most recent dramatic instance is the so-called world-wide financial crisis of 2008. This caused enormous suffering throughout the world, but there has been little motivation and less substantial change in the type of conditions that caused it. If we think of a crisis in its classical sense—a critical turning point—then to speak of the “financial crisis” is a misnomer. Except for a few minor and inconsequential adjustments to the financial system, nothing has really changed. There is virtually no evidence of collective motivation to bring about the type of changes that might avoid the damaging consequences of unfettered capitalism in the future. I do not want to underestimate the significance of this prevailing “motivational deficit.” But I also want to warn against drawing the wrong conclusion. Critchley speaks about two common reactions: passive and active nihilism. The passive nihilist withdraws. He or she thinks that nothing can really be done about the situation. It is too complex, too rigged—so the best thing to do is to cultivate one’s own garden (or make one’s personal fortune). “The active nihilist also finds everything meaningless, but instead of sitting back and contemplating, he tries to destroy this world and bring another into being” (5). Passive and active nihilism can take a variety of forms. We can see strands of both in our everyday political lives. Think of all those who were discouraged after the presidential election of 2008 with its high rhetoric of “change” and “hope” and have lost interest in politics. There is a strand of active nihilism in the anger expressed in the Tea Party movement insofar as it is far more vociferous in expressing what is against than in articulating constructively what is for. The politics of diffuse anger is a politics of nihilism. Critique is resistance against nihilism—whether passive or active. It always seeks the type of understanding that will motivate persons to act to overcome

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injustices and ameliorate suffering. Critique is an open-ended, self-critical process. It is always a task to be confronted—an Aufgabe. Critique seeks to correct the prevailing motivational deficit and to achieve a “transformation of the affective-motivational basis.” Critique presupposes a tough-minded type of hope—not a sloganeering or sentimental conception of hope. I want to conclude with what I take to be one of the best succinct characterizations of the type of hope that critique presupposes. Hope implies a deep-seated trust in life that appears absurd to those who lack it […] the worst is always what the hopeful are prepared for. Their trust in life would not be worth much if it had not survived disappointments in the past, while the knowledge that the future holds further disappointments demonstrates the continuing need for hope […] Improvidence, a blind faith that things will somehow work out for the best, furnishes a poor substitute for the disposition to see things through even when they don’t [work out]. (Lasch 81)

Works Cited Avineri, Shlomo. The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968. Critchley, Simon. Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance. New York: Verso, 2008. Habermas, Jürgen. Knowledge and Human Interests. Boston: Beacon Press, 1971. Koselleck, Reinhart. Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988. Lasch, Christopher. The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics. New York: Norton, 1991. Marx, Karl. Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society. New York: Doubleday, Anchor Books, 1967.

AFTERWORD: ALL THAT IS SOLID MELTS INTO AIR, 2010 MARSHALL BERMAN CITY COLLEGE, CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK

Dedicated to Shellie Sclan In Memory of Jerry Cohen, 1941-2009 This book has been an adventure, maybe the great adventure of my life. Over three decades, it has had more intense reverberations than anything I’ve ever done, reverbs around the corner, reverbs thousands of miles away. At times I’ve taken it for granted, nourished by it without noticing it. Other times I’ve had to stand up and fight for it. Still other times it’s threatened to crush me. But all the time, it’s been intensely there. It’s been through plenty of history, and it has helped me become part of the history of places whose history I never knew. When I first conceived All That Is Solid, I imagined it in a very large way: a vision of modern life with global scope, a cosmopolitan perspective that could embrace not only my neighborhood but the whole world, and that could help empower men and women everywhere. At first, in the early 1980s, it got a couple of enthusiastic reviews, but it didn’t seem to have much impact on anyone. The book’s first publisher, Simon and Schuster, placed it in an ominous category of being: “Indefinitely Out of Stock.” This was a limbo that no one could penetrate. (I couldn’t even get the book to use in my classes.) It was only after a couple of years of nasty exchanges, and threats of lawsuits, that my agent Georges Borchardt pried the book loose. Now it was “out of print,” but at least I had “the rights”; now there was a chance the book might have a future, might make it into the world after all. Then, in the mid-1980s, even as I felt ignored—in a way writers often feel--my book was getting discovered across various oceans. It appeared in a wide range of places: the UK, Italy, Sweden, Spain, Mexico, and Brazil. The buzz in Latin America was especially striking. For years, Latin American intellectuals had rejected the whole “modern” paradigm as an

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ideological weapon of the USA or of “the North.” But in All That Is Solid, a great many Latin Americans seemed to find a vision of the modern that they felt was about them. This led to my visit to Brazil in the summer of 1987. It was an uncanny time. I was, in Andy Warhol’s phrase, famous for fifteen minutes. Reporters met me at the plane, people stopped me on the streets, motorists honked their horns, strangers phoned me late at night. Everything I said seemed to evoke thunderous applause. I was acclaimed by people all over Brazil’s social order, from mayors and state governors, to shop stewards from the Metal Workers Union (Lula’s union), to uniformed cooks and kitchen workers in my Sao Paulo hotel—a man in a kitchen uniform knocked on my door, asked me to come down, I spoke for a few minutes, and signed books I could tell had been seriously read; to a jazz singer who stopped her set to point me out; to a potter who rushed out of his shop and gave me a beautiful bowl “to say thank you.” Day after day, I did nothing but talk about everything; people asked for more, and I was happy to give. And I had so many exciting conversations with total strangers. On one panel, after explaining the Russian Revolution, I was asked to explain my dream life: did I have dreams in Brazil? How did they compare with my dreams in the USA? (Later, on the plane home, I saw the answer: My whole month in Brazil had been a dream.) Once, on a radio talk show, I asked why Brazilians liked me so much. The moderator said that Latin America was used to Marxists who wore black suits like Jesuits and condemned everything; I was a Marxist who thought critically, but I wore color and celebrated love and happiness. A man from the audience added something: “You give a great commercial for freedom of speech.”This phrase puzzled me, but before long I got it. For Brazilians, this was a time of hope. They were coming out of the shadows, after years of “dirty wars.” They could walk through the streets, without fear of being killed. Friends and children had stopped disappearing. Free speech was just coming back. My book was full of talk, I was saturating the air with more talk. Could I be helping people talk again? That was what the man meant. It was a thrilling idea. Brazil then was caught up in something, it was in the process of becoming a modern and a democratic place, and my book and I went with the flow. It was a good flow to be part of. Brazilians didn’t all like me. I spoke critically of Brasilia, and of its designer, the architect Oskar Niemeyer. In one of the national papers, the next day, the headline said, “Niemeyer says, BERMAN IDIOTA.”

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Brazil was a thrill, but it also had a happy afterlife. The tummel over there helped convince American publishers that my book could have a future here. American Penguin brought out a paperback in 1988, including a Preface (sadly dropped from Verso’s New Edition) that features Brazil and Dostoevsky. Like the UK’s Verso edition, the American Penguin has had limited but steady sales, over three decades. In the 1990s and 2000s, through the modern magic of translation, the book reached into some very different places: Portugal (whose Portuguese, I am told, is very different from Brazil’s), Turkey, Iran, Poland, China, and back into Brazil, where there was a new translation just a couple of years ago. My book has been around, part of a global culture, for thirty years. Back in the USA the book made some nice things happen. Film-maker Ric Burns, after reading my New York chapter, brought me into the seven-hour documentary History of New York that he was creating for PBS. It was a terrific series, the best visual project I’ve ever been involved in. Over the years it has run in repertory, it plays a big role in recurrent PBS fund drives, and it gave me a whole new identity. I still get stopped in the streets or on the CCNY campus or honked from trucks by people who know me only as “Berman the urbanist…that character on TV.” But most of all, I talk to schools, all over the USA, all over the world. Schools are where I’m at home, and schools seem to be where people are most at home with me. The nice things and the nasty things people say about the book haven’t changed much, though much of the world has turned upside down. I try to talk across genres (which means, in schools, across departments); to show literary people how deeply modern literature, or at least a lot of it, is embedded in urban reality, and to show architects or planners how their projects and paradigms grow out of already developed cultural discourses and myths. When I talk with urbanists, they want most to talk about Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses, polar stars of my chapter on New York. They are fascinated with the turbulent years when suddenly, in New York and other American cities, men and women began to think and act like citizens, and an urban public came into being. I was there for all this, and I love to tell the story; it still sounds fresh and vital. What stopped Robert Moses in his tracks was a great wave of collective learning. Americans came to see their cities could not be taken for granted, they were mortal and vulnerable, they needed to be nurtured and cared for, and ordinary people had the capacity to grasp the idea and act it out. In New York and other cities, despite their many polarizations, the horizon of empathy expanded: people came to see the point of keeping other people’s neighborhoods alive, even if they didn’t like the people and would never go to their

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neighborhoods or share their life. The 1960s featured millions of ordinary people who not only loved their cities, but thought like citizens. As this public developed, the Lebensraum for imperial bureaucrats shrank fast. When Moses died in 1981, he had come to feel, like so many of his victims, displaced. But it was amazing, uncanny, that this should have happened. How come it happened? Is there anything that could make something like it happen again? I don’t know the answers—you could say, the answers are blowing in the wind—but just to explore the questions is an education for us all. Alongside my stories of modern progress and growth, there looms a vivid story of modern collapse and desolation: the ruins of the South Bronx. In the 1970s, I walked through those ruins obsessively, as if trying to penetrate to some mystical core. My quest for a core of meaning inside the ruins is one of the forces that drives All That Is Solid and gives it life. But later, as years went by, I came to feel the ruins were too much for me, and I stayed away. I never thought it would change in my lifetime; I couldn’t imagine how. But then it was 2005, I was riding the “el” to the Bronx Zoo with my son and his class, passing directly through where I knew the wreckage was, I stood up, craned my neck, braced myself, and-THE RUINS WERE GONE! In their place, as the train rode north, I saw ordinary apartment houses, trucks unloading, kids on bikes, old people on folding chairs—the whole shmeer of everyday modern city life. “Look!” I said to the teachers on the train with me, “it looks like an ordinary city.” They said, “Well, isn’t the Bronx an ordinary city?” I noticed then how young they were. When “The Bronx [was] Burning!” these girls weren’t even born. Now, it looked like nothing special—and yet, miraculous. The South Bronx today is a great story, a fine instance of the resilience of modern cities, and of modern men and women, who have the capacity both to commit urbicide and to overcome it; to reduce their whole environment to ruins and to rebuild the ruins; to turn apocalyptic surreality into ordinary nice urban reality where any of us could feel at home. The other group that has paid All That Is Solid special attention are the writers and critics from English and Comp Lit. departments on both sides of the Atlantic. They have especially enjoyed my take on Baudelaire, on the connection between metropolitan life and inner life. I have had many happy hours “doing” Baudelaire, bringing out his romance of a city of crowds, vibrating with mutual fantasy and desire. Baudelaire imagines a new form of writing that is also a new form of urban development, and also a new form of democratic citizenship, and also a new way of being fully alive.

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But English and Comp Lit departments were also the source of some pretty nasty attacks. People would denounce the universality of my horizon. They would say I was “imposing modern values” on cultures that “have different values”. These cultures—sometimes particular ones, geographically or religiously or ethnically defined, sometimes all cultures —were portrayed as innocent, and I was a kind of cultural rapist violating their innocence. It got weird: critics took whatever features of modern life most disturbed them, and spoke as if I was making those things happen. Rage against my book often went with a reification of “tradition”: as if all the cultural, religious and political traditions in world history were alike; or as if they were uniformly benign; or as if people simply are whatever tradition they grew up with—are orthodox Jews, are Nordic farmers, are Sicilian fishermen, are devout Communists--and if they come to think differently, or secede from their parents’ world, or fall in love with the wrong people, or if they get the wrong ideas, it is only because outside agitators (like me) have messed their minds up. For years I worried, How can I please these people? It took me awhile to get it: Forget it. It’s all part of a Culture War that has been going on since the Enlightenment. One of the weirdest facets of modernity is all the cultural energy that gets poured into a hopeless quest to get out of modernity. Dostoevsky’s “Legend of the Grand Inquisitor” prophesies the growing power of this quest. It is a primary source of the romance of totalitarianism--fascist, Stalinist, fundamentalist—that drives so much of twenty-century history. (And, alas, twenty-first century history as well.) All That Is Solid makes me a participant in this world conflict, not an innocent. So, I realized, I shouldn’t get upset when emotional violence is aimed at me. Lately my book has been getting trashed by leftists who say it’s not left enough. I see modern bourgeois society as a mix, full of contradictions, creative as well as monstrous; such a vision, one recent critic says, marks me as a “collaborationist.” This sounds a lot like what some of Marx’s attackers on the left--Proudhon, Bakunin—used to say about him. Are they playing that song again? If he could take it, I can. One great leap forward in the history of the worldwide left is the breakdown of Leninism, with its romance of “the vanguard,” and its contempt for democracy, civil liberties, and the people. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 is one important symbol of this change. But even before that, within left institutions, times were a-changing. Nelson Mandela, while he was still a prisoner at Robben Island, was convinced (so he said) by Joe Slovo, a lifelong communist and fellow leader of the ANC, that a free South Africa would have to have a full separation of

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powers, a constitutional court that could overrule the legislature, and a bill of rights. It is clear today, as it should have been all along, that the left is committed to human rights. I’m glad I can pass the word on. One human right that seems to embarrass academic and political writers, who often leave it out, but that real people know is crucial to living a good life in the modern world, is the right to love. I have written about love (see Gretchen and Faust in Chapter One, and see The Politics of Authenticity), but not enough; I will write about it now, in my old age. Love is not just an accessory of meaning; it is central to what human life can mean. Ideas of love go back into ancient times, but for most of history it has been understood as a privilege—even though an often tragic one-available only to a privileged few. A prime meaning of modernity is that the horizon of love opens up to embrace everybody. In Goethe’s Faust, Gretchen, a girl who does housework and childcare, is transformed by love into a tragic Mensch. In Mozart’s Magic Flute, performed in the revolutionary year of 1791, the lovers are comic: the bird-catcher Papageno and his beloved Papagena, who rejoice in their commonness, threaten to steal the show. Once people have seen and heard them—and some of Mozart’s loveliest music is theirs--talking about love as a human right will seem perfectly natural. But what social conditions will it take? Here are a few: crowds of metropolitan density, where strangers can encounter each other and sometimes become loving couples; sexual freedom, where lovers can not only feel joy but learn intimacy, and discover each other in depth; freedom to marry, across the lines of class and religion and ethnicity, to make love the basis of lives that will carry life on. Freedom to marry is a crucial issue. It suggests that Romeo and Juliet is our first modern play; and Bernstein and Robbins’ musical West Side Story brings the tragedy home. Jane Austen’s novels are all about this; so are Shalom Aleichem’s stories, “Tevye and his Daughters,” and the 1960s musical drawn from them, Fiddler on the Roof. I have spent my working life in a school and a city that, in the late twentieth century, have filled up more and more with immigrants. Our CCNY cafeteria is an amazing microcosm of the world. Yet many of the students in it have grown up in families and neighborhoods that are closed and exclusive, steeped in sexual and religious and ethnic taboos, walled off from the world. Love blooms where it will; but for couples, especially for women, who dare to “cross the lines,” the tragic potentialities are real. (Hear the stirring song by Tracy Chapman “Across the Lines”.) Still, sometimes Papageno and Papagena overcome: you can see them together on Saturdays, shopping in markets or malls, exhausted but radiant, with strollers and kids in colors never known to man.

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A great hero of love died not long ago: a black woman named Mildred Jeter Loving. She and her husband Robert married across the lines in the 1950s. The state of Virginia did all it could to destroy them; it focused its wrath particularly on her. But she pressed their case, and years later, the Supreme Court, in a thrilling decision, Loving v. Virginia (1967), destroyed all the barriers to marriage between blacks and whites. Some of these barriers are older than the USA itself; Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act goes back to the 1630s, not just to slavery, but to the earliest days of European settlement of the New World. Attorney General Bobby Kennedy and Chief Justice Earl Warren deserve great credit for making this case happen. But the real heroes were the Lovings themselves, Papagena and Papageno confronting the dragons of a potentially free but still malevolent state. The Loving complex of ideas may soon become the constitutional basis for Gay Marriage. If that happens, it will be a great victory for the Right to Love. Whether it happens or not, it will remind us that even in the most advanced countries in the world, modern rights are something men and women have to fight for. Early in the 2000s, a grad student who came from the advertising business said he was glad to be reading a book that “has legs.” I liked the idiom, which denotes products, including cultural products that have a shelf-life longer than other products. But I see now the term has another, richer meaning: the capacity to carry a product into regions the producer never dreamed of. This happened to my book a generation ago in Brazil, and now, in the 2000s, it has happened in Iran. Typically for our century, much of it has happened on the Internet. Early in the twenty-first century, I started getting e-mail letters from Iranians. They introduced themselves; some told me they hoped they could speak their real names, but not yet; others, apparently younger, seemed more direct; two or three were young women. They said All That Is Solid was circulating in Farsi in bootleg form, and they all had found it a source of inspiration. In the early 2000s it came out as a book, an elegant forbidden book. Last year I got one in the mail. Some of my Iranian correspondents came from newspapers and magazines, all vulnerable; others were from Iran’s remarkable samizdat film industry. Some had been imprisoned and tortured. They shared a hatred for the theocratic police state, but some of the older writers also said they felt guilty for what happened to Iran in 1979. Then, they had disastrously “got it wrong.” Now, they hoped to have “a chance to get it right.” Thirty years in a police state had given them “some idea what freedom means.” One man said, “Maybe now Iran is ready to be modern.”

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In 2008-09, messages from Iran grew more explicitly political. A liberal politician, who had been in prison for ten years, called me: would I please meet him and “explain the separation of church and state”? (I was glad to.) A woman editor asked, could I tell her readers “the meaning of the Bill of Rights.” (The government soon closed her paper.) I was thrilled to be doing political theory in such an urgent situation, and proud that imperial America still had something real to teach the world about being free. Late in 2008, I got a message from Iran that the stream of messages I was getting from Iran would probably stop soon. (Indeed, it did.) The state was getting more adept at censoring the Internet. And “It is not that we have forgotten you. It will mean we are in prison. BUT WE WILL COME OUT.” And then, in the summer of 2009, there they were, with a million people like them, out in the streets of Tehran, forming The Green Wave. And this time, unlike 1978-79, there were women in the crowd. (A crucial thing to look for, in mass photos: Are there women in the crowd? Are women taking initiative? Are men accepting their presence? Crucial signs of promise.) Someone asked me, wasn’t I worried that my book “was being used for political ends”? I said I would be thrilled if the people out there, or their friends, could use me. An editor of a paper later seized asked if I had any advice; I said, The streets belong to the people, Stand up for human rights, Stay alive. I will be happy if I can help anybody to see all this, to be there now; and even happier if my work, and many other people’s work, and the Green Wave itself, will turn out to be part of some great onward flow. We may have seen it in 2011, in the events of what people have called “the Arab spring.” None of us know how the people’s struggles will turn out. But after so many years when experts assured us—not only experts in the West, but experts in their own countries—that these people had neither the desire nor the capacity, it is a thrill to see them stand up. And sometimes, we can see, there are women in the crowd. May 2011

CROSS-CULTURAL HERMENEUTICS AFTER HEGEL JOSEPH PRABHU CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, LOS ANGELES

It has become a truism to say that we today live in a global world. Thanks to the marvels of technology, time and space have been contracted and shrunk and developments in the farthest corners of the world impact us in our living rooms. The internet, jet travel, and immigration have all brought us closer together, at least in the sense of physical proximity, but such a proximity does not necessarily betoken a deeper understanding and acceptance of one another. On the contrary, globalization has also produced covert imperialism, savage ethnic tribalisms, and religious fundamentalisms that alienate and exclude people from circles of acceptance and respect. In general, it is fair to say that globalization has thus far taken a largely economic and technological form, but that cultural, and spiritual globalization, at least in the limited sense of mutual respect and appreciation of people who have physically been brought closer together, has lagged far behind. It is in this particular context that I want to place cross-cultural hermeneutics. Cross-cultural hermeneutics is the attempt to traverse cultural boundaries and enter the horizon and worldview of another culture, sometimes quite foreign to our own. We know from Heidegger and Gadamer that we understand because we are already in a hermeneutic circle. But how do we understand something that is foreign to our circle? If a Westerner attempts to understand the various meanings of the Indic word dharma, which is variously translated as law, duty, right, rite, way of life, etc., it quickly becomes apparent that the word has meaning only within a cosmological-moral framework that is quite different from the social world of the modern West. We are involved here in a meaningholism that requires us to understand a social whole alongside any particular concept and to deploy a whole-part dialectic, where each sheds light on the other. Raimon Panikkar defines the particular hermeneutic required in the case of cross-cultural understanding as a diatopical

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hermeneutics, because we are trying to bridge the distance between two or more cultures which have different horizons of intelligibility (topoi) and different worldviews. There is a whole set of epistemological and moralpolitical conditions for such understanding, which I hope to elucidate in this chapter. I shall do so, however, through three historical epochs, three historical moments in the trajectory of cross-cultural hermeneutics. The point of this historical exercise is to illustrate, negatively, by default as it were, the requirements both formal and material of cross-cultural hermeneutics. I want to begin by showing a few aspects of Hegel’s encounter with India.

Hegel’s Encounter with India Hegel deals with India most fully in his Berlin period from 1818 to 1831, and particularly in the lecture series that he repeated often on the philosophy and history of religions, aesthetics, law and society, and world history. By this time of course in his development, his own philosophical position has been worked out to his satisfaction and there has been some debate as to whether Hegel approached Indian philosophy and culture in a completely a aprioristic manner. As I hope to demonstrate, he clearly approached his study of India with philosophical and political axes to grind, but being the thorough and rigorous thinker that he was he felt he had to take account of and absorb the ever more detailed and complex material coming his way thanks to the work of German and English Indologists. I shall abstract here from detailed considerations of a depth hermeneutic of Hegel’s views of India given that I am using Hegel here primarily for illustrative purposes. Perhaps the best way to encapsulate his critique of Indian tradition is to provide a reference from his work which, I think, gives a succinct indication of his views. [F]or the most well developed form of Pantheism we may refer to the Indian religion. This full development is characterized by the fact that the absolute substance, the One itself, is conceived of as existing in the form of thought as distinct from the accidental world. This religion accounts for the relation of man and god, and being pantheist it does not isolate the One in pure objectivity which metaphysics…does. It is important to emphasize this peculiar subjectivization of substance. Conscious thought does not simply make this abstraction of substance, it is itself that abstraction, it is that One which exists by and for itself and which is this substance. This thought is known as a force which creates and sustains the world and changes its individual modes of existence. This thought is called ‘Brahman’ and exists as the natural consciousness of the Brahmins and of others who achieve the complete extinction of the manifold contents of

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Cross-Cultural Hermeneutics after Hegel consciousness, of all emotions and sensual and intellectual interests and reduce everything to the complete simplicity and emptiness of substantial Oneness. In this way this thought, this abstraction of man in himself is conceived of a great force […] this force unfolds itself wildly by transforming itself into its opposite. We are faced with uninhibited lunacy where the most ordinary presence is immediately raised to the rank of the divine and the one and only substance is conceived of in a finite form which may dissolve itself as quickly as it has been conceived of. (1988: 260-262)

In this one passage we see the thrust of Hegel’s criticisms of Indian philosophical theology. 1. In Hegel’s terminology Indian thought remains “substantial” and has not advanced to the crucial stage of “subject,” that of selfconscious subjectivity. Rather, there is a “peculiar” subjectivization of substance, an abstract combination and mixing up of the two categories, rather than a dialectical mediation. As a result, the proper relation of the Infinite and the finite, God and man, has not been articulated. The Infinite has not posited the finite as its dialectical other, nor does the finite affect and play an essential role in the constitution of the Infinite 2. Indian pantheism, therefore, is a wild, inherently unstable affair, continually swinging from the monism of the One to the polytheism of the many, from the abstraction of Brahman to the dissipation of this abstraction into its opposite “where the most ordinary presence is immediately raised to the rank of the divine.” 3. India, says Hegel elsewhere, is the land of dream and fantasy, and not of reason, incapable of the analytic distinctions and dialectical subtleties which have been accomplished only by the “hard European intellect.” India, for Hegel, exhibited the same tendencies in the spiritual development of mankind as a whole as the mental condition of a man dreaming, just before he awakes. 4. As a result, it is inappropriate here to talk of a rational freedom in history. The practical consequences of this lazy dreaming is the escapism inherent in Indian yogic and religious practice where practitioners “achieve the complete extinction of the manifest contents of consciousness’ and take refuge in the “emptiness of substantial Oneness.” With reference to political life, Hinduism is irredeemably a religion of unfreedom. Hence we find Hegel writing:

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In India the primary aspect of subjectivity—viz., that of the imagination— presents a union of the Natural and Spiritual, in which Nature on the one hand does not present itself as a world embodying Reason, nor the Spiritual on the other hand, as consciousness in contrast with Nature […] Freedom, both as abstract will and as subjective freedom is absent. The proper basis of the State, the principle of freedom is altogether absent. There cannot therefore be any State in the true sense of the term […] Hindoo political existence presents us with a people, but no State […] Whatever may be called a relic of political life in India, is a despotism without a principle, without any rule of morality and religion: for morality and religion […] have as their indispensable condition and basis the freedom of the Will […] In the case of such a people, therefore, that which we call in its double sense, History, is not to be looked for […] For history requires Understanding—the power of looking at an object in an independent objective light, and comprehending it in its rational connection with other object […] The Hindoos on the contrary […] exhibit the contradictory processes of a dissolution of fixed rational and definite conceptions in their Ideality, and on the other side, a degradation of this ideality to a multiformity of sensuous objects. This makes them incapable of writing History. All that happens is dissipated in their minds into confused dreams. (1956:160-162)

Instead of the rational determinations characteristic of the state, we have “Oriental despotism,” a term applied to Asian politics originally by Montesquieu but “deduced” as the necessary character of a people who, in their propensity for dreamy fantasies and uncontrolled imagination, lack objectivity and a rational will and therefore invite the capricious and arbitrary rule of omnipotent autocrats. Given the panlogism of Hegel’s system the two critiques, metaphysicalreligious and political, are reducible to a basic philosophical point with ramifications in many different areas—the lack of dialectical mediation in Indian thought. The Indian mind, given as it is to dream and imagination, is incapable of the analytical distinctions and categorical differentiations so amply displayed in European thought. As interesting as the philosophical diagnosis, however, are the rhetorical images in which it is expressed. India is variously presented as being in a delirious opium bliss, escapist, childish, feminine, passive, and submissive, a country ready for conquest. Its place on the panorama of world history is that of an archaic, primitive culture now wholly absorbed and superseded within mature European civilization. It is instructive to probe into the epistemological strategies underlying such a harsh negative verdict. There are perhaps four interrelated features of Hegel’s orientalist narrative, which from this perspective I wish to highlight: 1) Hegel’s unquestioned and triumphalistic Eurocentrism; 2) his stance towards

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otherness and difference; 3) the temporal and spatial distancing of Indian culture and its consignment to an archaic past; and 4) the particular relation of the knower to the known. 1. Hegel’s Eurocentrism: I think I have said enough already to make good this charge. What is fascinating, however, in as rigorous a thinker as Hegel is to observe the way in which such Eurocentrism is both explained and legitimated. Logical system and historical development are perfectly fused in Hegel’s thought. Philosophy, therefore, not only has a history, it is its own history, so that the sequence of philosophical systems in history mirrors advances in logic. Absolute Spirit, both the telos and the ground of Hegel’s system, is both all-comprehending and in the process, selfcomprehending, the self-transparency thesis just mentioned, and this consummation is modern Europe’s unique achievement. The sun may rise in the East but it sets in the West, and it is from the West that the Owl of Minerva spreads its wings. Hegel was by no means unique in this Eurocentrism, a posture adopted by most of the thinkers of his time, although he alone provides a logicohistorical explanation and justification for such Eurocentrism. That should not be surprising if one considers the balance of economic, political, and cultural power at the time. This Eurocentrism has at least two distinct though related aspects: first, the denial of rationality, self-determination, and ultimately of humanity itself to non-European peoples; and, second, an essentialist idea of human nature and what it means to be human which supports such a denial. The ascription of barbarism and primitiveness to Asian people is a form of historical social Darwinism culminating in white, European, man, where all three predicates, though not explicitly spelt out, represent quite obviously an equation of particular notions of rationality, freedom, and culture with “humanity” and “human nature” as such. 2. Hegel’s stance toward otherness and difference. The irony of such Eurocentrism in Hegel’s case is that he is reputed to be a philosopher of difference, whose dialectic is driven by the negativity posed by alterity. As many commentators from Kierkegaard and Adorno to Levinas and Derrida, more recently, have pointed out, however, the other as other with her own agency and self-understanding is not seen in her irreducible exteriority, but rather aufgehoben and reabsorbed within the self-identity of Spirit. Consequently, as Levinas has expressed it succinctly, alterity has no singular metaphysical standing outside what is ontologically the same, it is simply a “moment” within the logic of “the Same”: “Hegelian

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phenomenology, whose self-consciousness is the distinguishing of what is not distinct, expresses the universality of the same identifying itself in the alterity of objects thought and despite the opposition of self to self” (1969:36). This relentless Identitätslogik, to use Adorno’s term, to distinguish what is not ontologically really distinct, is clearly displayed in Hegel’s treatment of India. On the one hand, from a historical and cultural standpoint, Hegel wants to make the spiritual distancing as great as possible: “The European who goes from Persia to India observes, therefore, a prodigious contrast. Whereas in the former country he finds himself still somewhat at home . . . . as soon as he crosses the Indus . . . he encounters the most repellent characteristics pervading every single feature of society” (1956:173). On the other hand, however, these threatening differences are not allowed to stand and, from an ontological standpoint, are brought within a unitary and linear, evolutionary history of Absolute Spirit and consigned to a primitive stage of such a history, now altogether surpassed. The primitiveness is conveyed most powerfully by the image of childishness and dreaminess, which images in effect deny his Indian other full selfhood. Nor is much hope provided for change in the future because of the temporal and logical irreversibility of Spirit’s march through history. 3. The temporal and spatial distancing. It is no accident that Hegel conjoins geographical and temporal distancing in his classification of “Hither” and “Farther” Asia. In his phenomenology of world religions, Persian and Egyptian religions are placed in the category of “transition from Natural to Spiritual” religions, that is, as embodying some aspects of self-conscious subjectivity, whereas the religions of China and India are firmly placed in the category of the “Natural,” dominated by notions of “substance” rather than “subject.” And with this categorization goes a certain historical revisionism in that the Chinese and Indian civilizations are treated as the oldest ones in order to fit in with his particular narrative of world history. Of course, the countries of Africa and Latin America are from his point of view “off the map,” so to speak, and treated as “nonhistorical” in contrast to “the pre-historical,” a distinction which India and China have: The Persians are the first Historical People; Persia was the first Empire that passed away. While China and India remain stationary, and perpetuate a natural vegetative existence even to the present time, this land [Persia] has been subject to those developments and revolutions, which alone manifest a historical condition. (1956:173.)

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Johannes Fabian, in his book, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object, describes this particular historical differentiation as the “denial of coevalness,” by which he means both a chronological and qualitative distancing (1983:31). It is a useful distinction because it allows us to distinguish the pastness of the Greeks, say, from that of the Indians and Chinese. The former is a primarily chronological matter because the Greeks, for all their pastness, still share the same thought-world as Europeans, whereas the latter spans not only temporal distance, but also a cultural divide, an alienness that has to be both explained and neutralized. 4. The particular relation of the knower to the known. What I wish to highlight here is what Foucault calls the “episteme,” the mode of knowledge and its structuring by power relationships. This is not at all the same thing as the biases that a person or a culture has vis-a-vis another, which from a structural point of view would count as more epiphenomenal. In other words, depth-hermeneutical analysis here acquires a specifically epistemic focus. Three points may perhaps be made here in summary fashion. First, in terms of social ontology, the relation of knowing subject and known “object” is not an equal or symmetrical one, even though, given that they are both subjects, intersubjective communicative understanding would seem to be normative. Hegel, as we have seen, denies subjectivity to Indians in their “natural vegetative state.” The European knower is presented as rational, self-conscious, and objective, while Indians are portrayed as irrational, dreamy, and subjective. It follows, second, that the European’s knowledge of Indians is superior to the Indians’ own selfknowledge, which, to the extent that they have any, must be inadequate and unscientific because it is irredeemably subjective, immediate, and insofar as it lacks mediating principles, essentially empty or confused. Except for the religious classics that he read in translation, Hegel’s reading about India and Indian philosophy in particular was confined solely to the commentaries written by Europeans. He does not seem to have read a single Indian philosopher even in translation. The same is true for Hegel’s first-hand knowledge of Indian art, which in his extensive writings is confined to two actual instances of art. That did not stop him from waxing eloquent about its many deficiencies as a vehicle of Spirit. Finally, Hegel seriously believed that Indians were incapable of ever acquiring such knowledge for themselves. Rather, his discourse is confident of its power to represent India, to interpret and explain it not only to the West, but to Indians themselves. Hegel would have been in full agreement with Marx’s

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statement expressed in a different context: “They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented” (1972:28).

The Post-Colonial Moment Two events above all mark the great change between Hegel’s era and ours: first, the political independence won by former colonial states, matched by a self-assertion that challenges the representations of their erstwhile masters; second, what has been called “the politics of difference,” the challenging of long-established cultural and political hegemonies and dominant worldviews, practices, and institutions. Questions of race, ethnicity, class, and gender are now seen as crucial elements in the deconstruction of hegemonic views and attitudes. These two conditions obviously have a lot in common: they represent the empowerment of hitherto subjugated and marginalized groups in their struggle against entrenched establishments. Together they set up what I am calling the post-colonial moment. Post-colonialism is a dialectical concept that marks on the one hand the struggle against colonialism in all its different forms, political, economic, military, and cultural, in the quest for independence and sovereignty, and on the other hand, the grim realities in a new imperialistic context of economic and sometimes cultural-political domination. Postcolonial critique marks the stage where the political and cultural experience of the marginalized peripheries of the world ruled by the West could be developed into a more general theoretical position that could be set against Western political, intellectual, and academic hegemony. Postcolonial theory is designed to undo the ideological heritage of colonialism, not only in the decolonized countries but also in the West. What is attempted in nothing less than a decolonization of the Western mind, a deconstruction of the forms of thought, sensibility, and imagination that led to colonialism in the first place, and perpetuate its continuation. This necessarily involves a decentering of the intellectual sovereignty and dominance of Europe and a critique of Eurocentrism, that is, the assumption that the Western point of view is normative and thus is authorized to speak for the rest of the world. The interrogation and decentering of Western knowledge involve among other tasks reappraising its links to colonialism and racism, challenging the forms of Western history represented as an ordered, evolutionary narrative that subsumes and consummates all other histories of the world, questioning the literary and cultural canons for their exclusion of writings that have not stemmed from the metropolitan center and developing a dialogic space for the encounter of Western and non-

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Western cultures as equal partners. It names the activities by which new subaltern histories, new identities, and new conceptualizations of the world—transnational rather than Western—are fashioned, and seeks through them to redress current imbalances of power, wealth, and resources in the pursuit of a more just and equitable world. When we subject the absolutistic, monological, and ethnocentric worldviews of Hegel to post-colonial critique, a space is created for other agencies and voices. Pluralism is not, however, sheer plurality; the mere fact of differences and diversity, but rather the problem raised when these different voices debate and contest value judgments, truth-claims, and representations. Who gets to represent whom, under what conditions, and for what purposes? How are such representations structured methodologically, epistemically, and morally? What is the relationship between power relations and the production and reception of knowledge? What happens to the problematics of truth and validity when considerations of power and rhetoric are introduced? Due to space limitations, I cannot examine these questions in this chapter. What I can do in this setting is to return to the four features earlier picked out in Hegel’s orientalist narrative and indicate briefly how a post-colonial ethos problematizes them. 1. Eurocentrism. The kind of explicit Eurocentrism purveyed by Hegel is now happily a thing of the past and I doubt that it has many serious (by which I mean to be taken seriously) defenders. Of course, at a factual level there still continue to be nativists and xenophobes, racists and imperialists, about whom I do not need to remind you, but at a philosophical level the debate has shifted to a different terrain. On the one hand, there are formalists and transcendentalists like Habermas and Apel, who, in different ways argue for a universal conception of reason or reasonableness, at least as a way of structuring the public space within which different claims and assertions are raised and validated. On the other, there are more contextual and hermeneutically minded thinkers like Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Stephen Toulmin, who countenance culture-specific and culture-relative notions of reason. This is admittedly to frame the debate very crudely and simplistically, but it may suffice to show that what passes for universal even at the formal transcendental level hides a certain Eurocentrism that needs to be deconstructed. There is not much sensitivity to the problems thrown up by cultural pluralism in Habernas’s communications-theoretic idea of public reason, which even as a formal procedural notion seems to me to go at once too

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far and not far enough. It goes too far because only certain kinds of “reason,” namely, those of a discursive, argumentative kind are allowed within the communicative arena, either ignoring or subordinating the numerous other modes of communication, affective, gestural, and essentially practical as against theoretical, by which humans relate to one another. This faith in the world as an academic seminar is touching, and to us philosophers perhaps flattering, but, given the real conflicts of the world, not very persuasive. It does not go far enough, however, because the prior and difficult work of establishing sufficient inter-cultural communication to see the reasonableness of radically other beliefs and cultures is short-circuited. The problem of inter-cultural understanding is not one that can be bridged by these approaches, especially when one considers cultures where reality is thought to transcend phenomenological and conceptual orders, without necessarily invalidating them at their appropriate level. The difficulty is one of trying to bridge the distance between radically different and incommensurable worlds, that is, worlds which lack a common set of rules by which statements can be understood and their truth value assessed. The great challenges of inter-cultural communication are still ahead of us as political and economic power moves in the next decades to East Asian countries. The root problem is political and has to do with asymmetries and imbalances of power, which shape and structure the production and reception of knowledge. Until those imbalances are corrected, the study of non-European cultures is going to be consigned to the field of “language and area studies” on the assumption that they have little to contribute to mainstream philosophy and social science or hermeneutics. 2. Otherness and difference. Again, at least in theory, we have moved a long way from the Identitätslogik of Hegel in the direction of at least acknowledging differences that are irreducible to the “logic of the Same.” The rise of both hermeneutics and deconstruction has brought home the lesson that it is only in genuine encounter with what is alien and other that we can gain understanding both of the others and ourselves. The other, as Levinas has put it, is an “other with an alterity that is not formal, is not the simple reverse of identity, and is not formed out of resistance to the same, but is prior to every initiative, to all imperialism of the same. It is other with an alterity constitutive of

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the very content of the other,” and thereby irreducible by definition of the Same (1969: 38-39). Such irreducibility means that gaze is now met by gaze, narrative by narrative, and criticism by countercriticism. The empire, as Salman Rushdie has put it, writes back. Of course, given the asymmetries of power, much of this writing is done by authors trained in the West who are often as distanced from their own cultures as their Western colleagues and speak a language that is often quite removed from the struggles and concerns of the truly marginalized. But it is a step in the right direction. 3. Temporal and spatial distancing. Many of the ploys adopted by Hegel—or relegation to an archaic past, supersession and absorption within a developmental scheme, the pushing to the margins those seen as radically different—are now seen through. More and more, the methodological norm in cultural and social studies is, as expressed by Fabian, “[t]o meet the other on the same ground, in the same time” (1983:43). The acknowledgment of genuine difference and the different forms of relativism it has spawned no longer allow for the developmentalism that culminates, as Ronald Inden has expressed it, in Homo Euro-Americanus. And finally, 4. The relation of the Knower and the Known. Here, too, the new pluralistic climate has demonstrated the illegitimacy of many of the moral and epistemic assumptions underlying Hegel’s project. (i) Where Hegel treats the other as ultimately an object, a pluralistic orientation demands an intersubjective methodology, where others are seen as subjects in their own right and not just as phases of an evolutionary scheme. (ii) Intersubjectivity demands that those described be able at least to recognize themselves even if they do not always agree with the description provided. (iii) Where they do not, they should be allowed to contest the description on their own terms, instead of being forced to speak a particular privileged language. (iv) Genuine intersubjectivity also disposes of the pretension of omniscience often couched in terms like “scientific,” “universal,” and “necessary.” Of course, the special problem of inter-cultural hermeneutics in contrast to intra-cultural hermeneutics is precisely the bridging of the large gap between cultures, especially if we see cultures epistemically as

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providing the horizon within which reality is seen and worlds constructed. Here, where a real encounter and interaction is called for, it does not seem to me useful to go transcendental, as Habermas and Apel, for example, tend to do. Instead of laying down transcendental conditions, which in any case are fluid, it seems to me more helpful to think seriously about actual cross-cultural dialogue. By what rules should the dialogue be structured? They have themselves to be negotiated in the encounter, rather than being specified a priori as preconditions. The laying down of transcendental conditions is all too often a hedge against and an escape from the messiness of open-minded dialogue. It is a remnant, in milder form, of the same intellectual colonialism that Hegel practiced.

The Global Moment We may think of Hegel’s hermeneutics as a hermeneutics of supersession and triumphalism with its suggestion that while the sun rises in the East, it sets in the West and it is from the West that the Owl of Minerva flies. The question of conceptual standards and criteria for the evaluation and comparison of diverse cultural traditions has been adjudicated by the course of history in favor of the West. Thus it is the historical responsibility of Europe to provide the context and the categories for the evaluation of all traditions and cultures. A full century later Edmund Husserl will claim in The Crisis of the European Sciences that the Europeanization of all foreign peoples is the historical destiny of the world. According to Husserl, Europe alone can provide other traditions with a truly normative framework of meaning and understanding because Europe uniquely, thanks to its heritage from the Greeks, has true “philosophy” and a universality beyond “merely empirical and anthropological” cultures such as the Chinese and the Indian. It is not surprising therefore that when these and other countries in the Third World got their independence, these long-established hegemonic world views were challenged in the work of post-colonial thinkers like Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Cornel West, Lucius Outlaw, and others. Gaze is now met by gaze, narrative by narrative, the former colonies talk back to the imperial center. There is now a hermeneutics of suspicion and contestation that prevails. Nevertheless, the more perceptive critics of post-colonial theory have observed that these writers still operate in a largely Westernized setting under conditions shaped by Western modes of discourse. Hence, the reference in their theorizing to Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Antonio Gramsci, and Jürgen Habermas but very rarely if at all to Abhinavagupta, Nagurjana, Sankara, and Ramanuja among

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ancient Indian thinkers or even to Gandhi, Tagore, or Aurobindo among the moderns. The post-colonial critique is largely a reactive stance responding to modern Western claims. The late indologist and philosopher Wilhelm Halbfass poses one of the central questions that post-colonial discourse has to face: The medium, the framework of any dialogue seems to be an irreducibly Western one. But is this factually inescapable “universality” the true telos of mankind? Could it be that the global openness of modernity is still a parochially Western European horizon? Or has Europe itself somehow been left behind by the universality which it had inaugurated? […] In a sense Europe itself has been “superseded” and left behind by the modern Westernized world. It is certainly no longer the master of the process of “Europeanization.” The direction of this process, the meaning and value of “progress,” the significance of modern science and technology have become thoroughly questionable. The doubts and questions [about the direction of the modern West] which had already been raised by the Romantics, by Schopenhauer and others…have become much more urgent. The search for alternatives now appears as a matter of life and death.(1988: 440)

The Great Conversation of Mankind It is not sustainable any longer to have a hermeneutics of supersession as with Hegel or a hermeneutics of suspicion or contestation as in the postcolonial moment. We have entered into a new age—the global age— where we need to create a new hermeneutics toward what Michael Oakshott once called the “Great Conversation of Mankind” (37). This new hermeneutics will be a hermeneutics of true intersubjectivity between subjects who share a basic equality and on that basis can attempt a genuine dialogue where Buber’s I-Thou dialectic is reciprocally deployed, that is, the I-Thou positions change and each partner in this dialogue is sometimes an “I” and at other times a “Thou.” The need for such a dialogue is provided by the critical global situation in which we find ourselves. All the urgent problems that plague us today—environmental degradations, hunger and poverty, the spread of terrorism, the threat of nuclear weapons, sustainable development, and peace and security—are global problems which require the global wisdom of mankind. No longer will the particular perspective of single cultures be sufficient to solve these global problems. This new situation in the history of mankind will call forth at least two responses: (i) a diachronic dialectic of tradition and modernity and the search for alternative modernities as one sees in the thought of Gandhi,

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Aurobindo, and Tagore, to mention the most consequential of twentieth century Indian thinkers, and (ii) a true cross-cultural conversation in a synchronic space. These two dialectics and interaction may go some ways toward initiating the global conversation that Oakshott heralded.

Works Cited Fabian, J. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. Halbfass, W. India and Europe: An Essay in Understanding. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988. Hegel, G. The Philosophy of History. Trans. by J. Sibree. New York: Dover Publications,1956. —. Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. Lectures of 1827. Trans. R. Brown, et al., and edited by P. Hodgson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Husserl, E. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Trans. D. Carr. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970. Levinas, E. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Trans. A. Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969. Marx, K. “ The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” in The Marx-Engels Reader. Ed. R. Tucker. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1972. Montesquieu, C. de. The Spirit of the Laws. Trans. A. Cohler et al. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Oakeshott, M. Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays. New York: Liberty Fund, 1991.

ESSAY ON POSTMODERN CULTURE: A CONSIDERATION OF “VALUES AND COMMITMENTS” ANDREW RENAHAN CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY, CANADA

In Steven Connor’s volume, Postmodernist Culture, he takes the literary theorist Ihab Hassan to task for failing to meet the challenge of rethinking “the role of criticism within an expanded and complex postmodern sphere of values and commitments” (234). This rebuke is casually laid out in the midst of Connor’s warning against Hassan’s desire to enshrine a postmodernist system of literary criticism in place of the modernist paradigm. Connor’s objection rests with Hassan’s belief that a postmodernist critical theory could be constituted in a “new universal frame” (ibid). The object of Connor’s concern, the concept of a unitary system, is a common target of postmodernist critique. What is uncommon are the grounds upon which Connor indicts Hassan’s project as untenable and, crucially, irresponsible. Beyond merely attacking Hassan through a post-structuralist argument insisting on the impossibility of a closed “universal” system, Connor finds fault with Hassan’s avoidance of a seeming moral or ethical responsibility. Connor suggests that there exists a set of “values and commitments” native to the body of Western thought and practices that are corralled, often contentiously, under the term postmodernism. This assertion represents a salient point in my own research into the amorphous topic of postmodern culture. I have returned to this passage in Connor’s work several times to consider toward what exact “values and commitments” Connor intends that Hassan orient his project. Unfortunately, and perhaps conveniently for Connor, he provides no coda of postmodernist standards to elucidate the basis of his moral condemnation of Hassan’s “universalizing” pretentions. Despite Connor’s lack of clarification, I contend that his statement nevertheless opens up an important plane of discourse. In the absence of a defined set of “commitments and values” in Connor’s own critique, I will endeavor in the course of this essay to establish the character of the set of

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responsibilities that attends to the fluid category of postmodernism in the West. Toward this end I will examine the manifestation of postmodern practices in the visual arts, architecture and literature. Through a varied analysis I will assemble a limited, yet coherent, framework for understanding the ethos of postmodernist practices and theories. A central element in my analysis will be the articulation of the historical tension between postmodernist and modernist “values.” This dialectic is crucial to my project as it evinces how postmodernism and modernism exceed the strict bounds of temporal periodization, which relates to a central tenet of my argument wherein I posit that these categories represent competing perspectives in the West pertaining to notions of history, meaning and power. In the realm of the visual arts I will explore Tim Woods’ compelling description of the dynamic signification expressed in the paintings of JeanMichel Basquiat. The feature I wish to highlight being the resonance of Basquiat’s fractured canvases with Derridean notions of différance and the usurpation of essentialism. To provide a modernist contrast to Basquiat’s de-constructionist drive I will outline the modernist ideal of autonomous presence, and what the tension between the two connotes for relationships of power. From the canvas I will turn to the building block. Through the discipline of architecture, I will inquire as to how a postmodernist ethos might consider the place of history in the praxis of the present. Surveying Charles Jencks arguments against the modernist “International” style, I will delineate the ramifications of his demand that buildings fit the context of their location. This section of my essay will take up the importance of language in postmodernism and its function contra modern architecture, to communicate to a particular public through regionally intelligible symbols. Finally, I will explore the construction of meaning in postmodernist literature as a prism through which to criticize the modernist fetish for literary realism. Here I will examine Ian Gregson’s argument pertaining to the ways in which modern norms of race and gender are destabilized by postmodernist forms of magical realism, which employs a critical genre of irony and paradox as instruments of destabilization. In the conclusion of my essay I will weave together the “values and commitments” expressed through the various forms of postmodernist culture. I will evince how the adversarial character of these “values” in relation to their modernist opposites (i.e. autonomy, disengagement and universalism), all contribute to what I would like to call a postmodernist ethos. With this framework at hand, I will address Fredric Jameson’s charge that postmodern society is “incapable of dealing with time and history” (117). Commensurately, I will venture my own argument

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concerning what postmodernist “values and commitments”, and their relation to Western historical thought, intuits for the shape of concerns in contemporary Western theory. To pretend that there exists a clear, bright line between a school of painting deemed modernist and a rival one called postmodernist would be to fall prey to the temptation of a binary retrospective. While it would make the task at hand much less complicated to state that everything between 1900 and 1960 constituted modernism, and everything thereafter postmodernism, it would not reflect the complicated character of the actual production of artists in the West. There is no facile recourse to the historicist view of linear periodization. There is an overlap in both time and inspiration between the two, evinced by the commensurate emergence of minimalism and pop art in the 1960s intertwining modernism and postmodernism in the same period. Nevertheless, there are distinctions that can be made to tweeze apart the two styles on the basis of ideology. These distinctions have to do with the attendant values that underlie the works. Modernist painting is, in many respects, one of the most faithful material expressions of the Enlightenment ideal of rational autonomy. In the same way that the rational individual is assumed to be capable of full selfpresence/awareness, so too is the modernist painting imagined as projecting an “absolute self-absorption…absolute self-identity” (Connor 91). The term which best describes this attitude is “univalence,” intuiting both monolithic presence and meta-perspective. Thus, the preponderance in modernism of style elements such as two dimensional, flat painting and the aversion to representative allegorical features which risk the suggestion of an outside influence. Hence, as in radical individualism, modernist painting operates on the premise of unified agency. In contrast to the values of presence and autonomy elicited by modernist “univalence” there emerged a mode of painting that sought to exceed the strict two-dimensionality of the modernist-bounded canvas. This “multivalent” method embraced all the style elements that modernism eschewed, such as explicit allegorical references, the inclusion of written words in the vernacular, and the surrender of the claim to metapositioning. This was not, however, a simple romantic reaction to the austerity of the modernist aesthetic. There is a clear value argument made in this work aimed squarely at the ideals of modernism. Thus postmodernist painting attacks the notion of autonomy and presence so embedded in modernism through a flaunting of modernist convention and orthodoxy. Jean-Michel Basquiat exemplifies this visual rhetoric through his mixture of text, representation and allegorical reference. Tim Woods characterizes this as a “pervasive editing…a perpetual struggle to

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articulate and clarify signs. The emphases and crossings-out indicate a continual mutation of signs and meanings, as they refuse to remain still and be easily defined” (141). With Basquiat, we are a long way from the self-mastery and meta-presence of modernism. Woods’ analysis of the effects of Basquiat’s work evokes a strong and obvious resonance with the concepts of différance and erasure theorized by Jacques Derrida. Contra the modernist assumption of possessing unmediated access to the moment of its own production, postmodernists like Basquiat explicitly surrender the ideal of control over what is expressed through their painting. Whereas “modernist painting is about painting” (Connor 1989: 93), postmodernist painting is about painting as well as the contexts (cultural, political, economic) within which it is produced. The singular value of rational selfpresence esteemed by modernist painting is fractured by Basquiat’s deferral of any cogent or unified scheme. By juxtaposing often incommensurate elements such as text and cartoon, Basquiat “problematises meaning through unresolved conflicts, discontinuities and reversals, as well as producing a dehierarchization of aesthetic elements and substances” (Woods 143). As I stated above, the intent of this pluralistic rhetoric is not only to defy modernist orthodoxies to cause a sensation amongst the cognoscenti of Western art, at least not entirely. Rather, I argue that the strategies evoked by the postmodernist style of Basquiat indicate a lucid critique of the form of power relation established in modernist works. The idealization of the atomistic painting created by the autonomous painter inscribes a form of modernist metaphysic wherein power is concentrated in the absolute self, and its mirror, the absolute canvas. This is a hegemonic form of power wherein the meaning of the work is closed through the reification of the moment of its production. In short, dialogue with modernist art is impossible as it is “oblivious of its beholder” (Connor 91). Basquiat’s style usurps any claim to essential meaning, as he breaks up the canvas into a mosaic expressing the paradox of a seemingly inter-connected field of differences. Thus, while the moment of its material production does cease, the possibility of its inscription with new meanings never closes. Basquiat replaces modernist “obliviousness” with postmodern attentiveness. His paintings express the clear awareness of an audience and the intent to engage with that audience as interlocutors. Thus the modernist commitment to the value of autonomous creative agency and essential, static meaning is directly challenged by the postmodernist commitment to the value of interrelatedness between both style elements, and the painter and the public. The value at stake here is that of power. The choice is between a modernist hierarchy of absolute author(ity), or the

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postmodernist orientation towards an ethic of pluralism, both in the production of, and the reception to, the work. The field of architecture and architectural criticism constitutes a central locus of tension between the most explicitly strict espousals of modernism and postmodernism. In the wake of the First World War, Europe saw the emergence of the Bauhaus school which articulated a forceful argument for the construction of a new “buildingscape” inspired by the modernist ideals of functionalist form and universal application. The values of modernist architecture were at the forefront of the Bauhaus manifesto articulated in 1919, which Connor describes as eliciting a “renewed faith in the rational” (76). With Europe lying in ruins in the wake of two world wars, the modernists argued strongly for an architecture rooted in a “new unity of art, science and industry” (ibid.). The goal was to develop a building style that communicated a universal sense of beauty in function and the purity of a genre of homogeneous orthodoxy. Le Corbusier, a central figure in the movement, claimed that this “International” style could be universally deployed regardless of the particularities of place. The modernists sought to expunge unnecessary decorative elements as they saw these as indulgences detrimental to the design of “democratic housing and business quarters for a mass population” (Woods 93). Meeting force with force, the critics of the modernist style advocated just as fervently for an alternative vision of architecture. Interestingly, the parties in this debate often seem to assert themselves in a fashion that seeks to make a claim to a moral high ground. Perhaps nowhere else in the modernist/postmodernist dialectic are the arguments for and against so unabashedly value driven. This is evinced most powerfully in the response of Charles Jencks to the modernist movement. Jencks’ critique of modernist architecture, which at times veers into outright denunciation, revolves around two key values associated with the postmodernist vision of what Jencks considers communicative architecture (6). The first is a notion of historical reference through the use of allegorical decorative elements which invoke the past through metaphorical allusions. When executed well these elements should position the building in the historical consciousness of its social context without falling prey to either simple revivalism, nor the abstraction of historical character. Secondly, postmodernists such as Jencks emphasize the importance of intelligibility with regard to the language of architectural design. Specifically attacking the “International” language of Le Corbusier’s Universalist program, Jencks calls for a mode of “dual-coding.” In this paradigm the symbolic language of a building addresses both its indoctrinated audience, architects, and its quotidian users: the public. Despite its democratic

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pretentions modern architecture was exclusively the province of the professional designer. Jencks argues that architecture must also speak in the “vernacular, towards tradition and the commercial slang of the street…and a particular way of life” (8). Hence, postmodernist architecture rejects both purity and universalism in order to embrace responsibility to the particularities of location, culture, and history. In making this value argument Jencks cites the modernist debacle of the Pruitt-Igoe Housing project, built in St. Louis in 1955, as both the apotheosis of modernist architectural values, as well as the site of their ultimate demise. Jencks is not asserting that modernist architecture ceased to be practiced after the destruction of this ill-fated project in 1972. Rather, he is claiming that the ideals of modernist design, as represented by the Bauhaus manifesto, are no longer tenable in the aftermath of this failure. Jencks construes the building plans of the modernist architect Miner Yamasaki as predicated on the notion of “rational substitutes for traditional patterns.” The concept being that “its Purist style, its clean, salubrious hospital metaphor, was meant to instill, by good example, corresponding virtues in the inhabitants” (9). While the design won professional awards, the actual site fell into disrepair as the inhabitants abandoned it as uninhabitable. The complaints did not pertain to the sheltering function of the buildings, but rather to the sterility and anonymity of the site, meant to convey civility and calm in the most chauvinistically paternalistic manner. These elements were ultimately “at variance with the architectural codes of the inhabitants” (ibid.). What is elucidated by this example is the defeat, in Jencks’ eyes, of the modernist ideology of a moral purity born of uniform function at the hands of quotidian resistance rooted in what Jencks contends are the postmodern values of hybrid historicism and local intelligibility. In literary terms we might cast the modernist vision of architecture as advancing a metanarrative, while postmodern architecture agitates for a concept of myriad micro-narratives. I will return to the subject of the postmodern commitment to history in the conclusion of my essay. At this point, however, I will accept Jencks’s assertion that the past can be invoked in a lyrical fashion that skirts parody. Using the notion of a playful, yet critical, attitude towards history and experience I wish to further examine the difference between the values attached to a postmodernist concept of narrative in relation to that of modernism. In the realm of literature the labels modernist and postmodernist are often ascribed to the same writer, such as James Joyce, for instance. However, I contend that there exists a fairly salient demarcation between the two categories with regard to the commitment to realism. Tim Woods

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supports this view in his assertion that, while postmodernist writers did not share in any conventional methodology there was, nevertheless, a “common purpose, which was to challenge the psychological realism in modernist fiction” (50). Modernist literary narrative was inspired by the values of the rational representation of reality through the reification of time into space. Thus, the modernist narrative claims to be a totalized object, completely closed off to the vagaries of time, its meaning immemorial. This allows the modernist auteur to “run together the time of epic with contemporary time, or to view history and human life as an endless series of cycles…to defeat transience, by bending it into pattern” (Connor 124). The values at stake in modernist literature revolve around a foundation built upon a teleological narrative drive towards totality. The modernist aesthetic is marked by the attempt to achieve this telos through the use of narrative strategies negating difference, paradox and change. Postmodernist writers are driven by the desire to usurp the modernist ideal of profound and static meaning, and unseat the auteur from her/his privileged position. Postmodern literature evinces “a mistrust of the idea of depth, the idea that the inconstant spray of phenomena conceals secret and universal principles of truth.” (Connor 122). Hence, in postmodern literature a commitment is made to an ontological conception of reality in which the indeterminacy of time is always at work upon the narrative. This effectively eschews the modernist metaphysic of the auteur as giver of deep immutable meaning/truth. Apprehended in the postmodern framework the text remains open to interpretation, which intuits a dynamic conception of meaning. The most powerful form of postmodernist assault on the auspices of modernist realism derives from the group of writers deemed magical realists. It is no coincidence that this style of postmodernist writing counts amongst its practitioners some writers based in, or having a strong connection to, former colonial sites. This narrative model is characterized by the hybridization of the mundane and the fantastic, throwing the normative Western narratives of essentialized meanings of race, gender, and progress into crisis. These writers express a commitment to substantive understanding over universalized truth: “The continual effect of magical realist writing is to call into question the boundary between truth and fiction, so that the presence of ideology shaping the depiction of truth is repeatedly interrogated” (Gregson 74). The claim made by magical realism is not that modernism has it wrong and postmodernism has it right, but rather that narrative shapes meaning and the illusion of a true, timeless narrative always threatens to entomb actual people and cultures in false naturalisms. By deploying incredible elements into a narrative that in all

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other respects adheres to the Western norm of realism, writers such as Gabriel García Márquez and Salman Rushdie leave paradoxical gaps in the coherency of their stories. Consequently, readers of works such as Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, or Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Dance with Snakes, are jarred into engagement with the text in an effort to interpret the meaning of the aporia which haunts the narrative. However, as aporia there is no essential truth to be found. Instead, the intent is to spur the act of questioning which can “reveal the constructedness of cultural norms which have established themselves so powerfully that they have come to be experienced as not cultural at all, but inevitable and natural.” (Gregson 23). Thus, a form of critical postmodernist irony emerges wherein the most venerated mode for the dissemination of modernist truth, the realist narrative, becomes the vehicle of its own deligitimation. There is a strong critical attitude evinced by postmodernist painters, builders and writers working in response to their opposite number in modernist styles. I contend that this attitude, while certainly not uniform, is, in important ways, oriented towards a tentative assemblage of postmodern “values and commitments.” I have demonstrated how Basquiat short-circuited the unified canvas of modernist atomism through the juxtaposition of heterogeneous symbols. Likewise, I have presented Jencks’ call for the foregrounding of socio-historically relevant design elements in architectural languages. Finally, I have conjured up the power of paradox in magical realism to de-legitimate the staid naturalism of Western deterministic narratives. These forms do not share any overarching program, yet they do articulate remarkably similar values. One value consists of the acknowledgement of the dynamic character of perspectives always already informed by the limits of experience. Another, demands a commitment to the awareness of the inevitability of historical positioning, leading to the notion that local intelligibility necessarily overrides the hegemonic desire for universality. These goods constitute what I contend to be the outlines of a postmodernist ethos. This raises the question: what purpose is this ethos intended to serve? As proposed in the introduction of this essay I will turn to the consummate critic of postmodernism, Fredric Jameson, in order to arrive at an answer to this question. He indicts postmodernism (writ large) as a manifestation of Western culture’s dependence upon the opiates of consumerism and fantasy to avoid dealing with the realities of “time and history” (117). This argument firmly discounts the possibility that postmodernism is allied to anything remotely resembling an ethos of “values and commitments.” However, as my survey of these three genres of postmodernist thought and

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practice has shown, the importance of “time and history” is central to the impetus for the works. The distance between Jameson and postmodernism occurs over the character of the “time and history” at stake. For Jameson, “time and history” exist in a materially determinable fashion. This is evinced by his fear that postmodernism heralds the “disappearance of a sense of history, the way in which our entire contemporary social system has little by little begun to lose its capacity to retain its own past” (125). Jameson’s diagnosis of “historical amnesia” (ibid.), betrays his own modernist valuation of our society as possessing a real, true and essential history/past. Thus, in this paradigm postmodernism does indeed fail to uphold a normative “sense of history.” However, if the character of history is conversely viewed through the prism of postmodernist values, then it becomes clear that postmodernism does indeed deal with “time and history.” The difference between the two rests in the way that postmodernism deals with “time and history” by, at turns, de-constructing linearity, de-naturalizing cultural categories, and re-inscribing the preimminence of local intelligibility. However, Jameson’s critique does confront those of us engaged in contemporary theory with the limitations of postmodernist discourse and practice derived from an obsessive antagonism to modernism. This is fast becoming a weight upon current work. This burden consists of the near parochial orientation of postmodernist critique towards modernist ideologies. In this respect, the possibility of my generation of theorists taking up the postmodernist banner is increasingly thrown into doubt. I am not terrorized by the modernist aesthetic in the same way that postmodernist artists and theorists were. I recognize the importance of the “values and commitments” expressed in postmodernist theory and practice, and I seek to incorporate them into my own work. However, I do not see the value in continuing to “tilt at the windmills” of the modernist menace. Such a gesture would simply perpetuate the fiction of modernist/postmodernist binarism. The hybrid character of experience so compellingly articulated by postmodernist artists renders me incapable of ignoring the integral ways that modernist aesthetics necessarily intermingle with postmodernist values in my own perspective. Thus, I am confronted by the realization that the dichotomy between modernism and postmodernism, while crucial to my own cultural history, cannot act as the sole source for addressing the problems and concerns native to my own time and context. My hope is that the concept of a postmodernist ethos, outlined in this essay, will help to discern the critical character of an emergent contemporary theory. This theory must be at home with the

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dynamism of the present, while expressing a critical consciousness attuned to the dual coding of history, as both actual and imagined. Contemporary Western theory must negotiate the differences between modernism and postmodernism in a more nuanced fashion, while giving substantive consideration to the myriad other aesthetic and conceptual traditions that continue to inform our “values and commitments.”

Works Cited Connor, Steven. Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to theories of the Contemporary. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1989. Gregson, Ian. Postmodern Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Jameson, Fredric. “Postmodernism and Consumer Society.” In The AntiAesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster. Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983. Jencks, Charles. The Language of Postmodern Architecture. London: Academy Editions, 1977. Moya Castellanos, Horacio. Dance with Snakes. Trans. Lee Paula Springer. Frankfurt: Tusquets Editores & Literarische Agentur Mertin, 1996. Rushdie, Salman. Midnight’s Children: A Novel. New York: Knopf, 1984. Woods, Tim. Beginning Postmodernism. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999.

PART TWO: HUMANISM AND THE HUMANITIES

INTERCULTURAL HUMANISM: IDEA AND REALITY JÖRN RÜSEN INSTITUTE FOR ADVANCED STUDY IN THE HUMANITIES, ESSEN, GERMANY

1. Why Humanism? One of the most urgent challenges for the cultural orientation of today is the encounter of different traditions and world views in the globalizing process. There is a need for global principles in organizing human life according to the global trends in all dimensions of human life. Nearly everybody is confronted with problems in economy, politics, social life and environmental issues which demand global solutions. At the same time the power of being different in understanding and interpreting these problems is unbroken. Moreover, it is even increasing since long-lasting universal cultural patterns of understanding man and world are losing their plausibility. Main trends of Western thinking, which have shaped the features of the modern world, have met radical criticism. Alternative traditions have been brought to the fore and claim for recognition. The well-known slogan “Provincializing Europe" (Dipesh 2000) indicates the new problem: where now is the empire when it is no longer the West? A province is a part of an empire, otherwise the slogan has no meaning. There are some candidates for this empire lurking behind the corner, but nobody knows what they will bring about and whether they are able to shoulder the responsibility for tackling the global dimensions of human life today. The Western domination in intellectual life–including the scholarly life in the humanities and social sciences–has been radically challenged, but what alternatives have become visible? The criticism of the Western tradition in modernization and modernity is universal and fully accepted, if not even created, in the West (at least its strongholds are Western universities). But when this criticism has done its work, what modes of thinking are able to replace the outdated ideas and ideologies of modernity and their legacy of enlightenment?

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What we need in understanding our time is a mediation of universality and peculiarity in thinking: a synthesis of commonality and difference in organizing our lives. How can we keep up our identity-forming cultural peculiarities and, at the same time, contribute to the solution of problems from the part we share with all other human beings despite their otherness in traditions, mental attitudes, and modes of thinking, and in many other dimensions of human life? In order to find the answer to this question, we can't simply leave our roots and step out of the historically pregiven circumstances of our lives in favor of a new intellectual standpoint, which may bring us closer to the others. We even have to realize that cultural differences have caused a dividing force in intercultural communication: by ethnocentric tendencies in the cultural process of identity formation they play a destructive role preventing transcultural understanding and working together in finding an answer to the urgent problems of our globalizing world. This brings me to the theme of humanism. For a long time humanism was intellectually completely outdated: its radical destruction by Nietzsche in theory and by social Darwinism, the effects of imperialism, and totalitarian ideologies in practice had had a thoroughgoing effect. The relevant comments of Heidegger (1976)1 and Foucault (1974) may serve as smashing examples up to our days. But as a proverb in German says, “Totgesagte leben länger” (people who were declared dead live longer), humanism recently has gained a growing importance in the intellectual discourses on cultural orientation.2 The main issue and starting point is the question how to handle diversity and difference in human life as it has obviously gained a growing power by migration, the effects of internet communication, general changes in politics, and severe religious conflicts? How to overcome the power of ethnocentric tensions in intercultural understanding? Humanism offers an answer to these questions. There is a simple reason for it. Being a human being is common to all people; it defines their commonality, and at the same time, it is realized in a multitude of life forms and their historical changes. This is exactly what humanism in its modern form has done: thematizing the common ground in human life and its values and norms, and at the same time recognizing difference and variety as a manifestation of the cultural nature of humankind. Can the tradition of humanism be revitalized as an approach to a cultural orientation, which may be able to synthesize universal 1

English Translation: “Letter on ‘Humanism,” Martin Heidegger, Pathmarks (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 2 A German example: J. Nida-Rümelin, Humanismus als Leitkultur. Ein Perspektivenwechsel (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2006).

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principles of human conduct and peculiar life-forms? In my paper I will try to give a positive answer to this question.3

2. What is Humanism? a) Three Steps of Historical Development Humanism is not a clearly defined concept. It emerged in the West and has influenced non-Western discussions since the end of the nineteenth century4 but its meaning widely varies. Therefore it is useful to give a short historical account of its developments. Three steps have to be discriminated: (i) its roots in classical antiquity, (ii) its first establishment in early modern history, (iii) and its modern form since the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century closely related to the intellectual movement of Enlightenment. Its modern articulation is not limited to intellectual life but can be found in fine arts as well. (i)

3

In classical antiquity, mainly in the stoic philosophy, most of the basic terms of humanistic thinking were articulated, like human dignity (dignitas hominis), and natural law (lex naturae) applicable to every human being. There was no systematic theory, which combined these concepts into a coherent idea of the human nature and could be picked up in later times. Nevertheless, highly effective ideas were brought to life, which later on could play a decisive role in humanistic thinking (Cancik 2011). These ideas had an anti-realistic status, placing the value of humanity against the inhumanity in political and social life. In this idealistic form it could be used to criticize established forms of political domination and social inequality. No wonder that the revolutionaries of the late eighteenth century developed an imaginary of their visions of a new and humane life and made intensive use of the symbols of the Roman republic.

My argument is based on different publications which are first results of a research project on “Humanism in the Era of Globalization – An Intercultural Dialogue on Humanity, Culture, and Values,” which took place at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities at Essen, Germany, from 2006 till 2009, and was sponsored by the Stiftung Mercator. See Rüsen, J and Henner, L. eds. Humanism in Intercultural Perspective. Experiences and Expectations. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2009. 4 An example: Zhang, K., 2010. “Inventing Humanism in Modern China.”Traces of Humanism in China. Tradition and Modernity. Ed. C. Meinert. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2010: 131-149.

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(ii)

Early modern humanism, which originated in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in Italy and spread all over Europe. It referred to classical antiquity and directly brought it into the intellectual awareness of the educated elites. This reference opened up a new space for intellectual discourses. It took place in the form of specializing disciplines, the humaniora (forerunners of the academic disciplines of the humanities) centered around philology. It was pursued by a new type of intellectuals, the humanistas –people who were competent in interpreting the literary legacy of antiquity. Their representative figure is Erasmus von Rotterdam (1465-1536). Their discourse remained in the context of Christianity, but within this context it gained a liberal mode of argumentation against scholasticist dogmatism. The best example of this new space for liberal discourses is the fight of humanists, started by Johannes Reuchlin (1455-1522) against an attempt of the church to establish an anti-judaistic trend in the official doctrine of the church and accordingly to erect tribunals of the inquisition in Germany (Reuchlin, 1511).

(iii)

Modern humanism, finally, emerged at the end of the 18th and the beginning of the nineteenth century. It was an essential part of a general revision of the basic concepts of understanding the human world.5 It belonged to the late Enlightenment and presented an idea of the cultural nature of humanity, which initiated new ways of historical, political, and educational thinking (at least partly) still effective as a tradition in the humanities, in higher education and in political culture. Here for the first time (in Germany) we find the term Humanismus (Cancik and Vöhler 2009). I will mainly refer to the German case, but its main ideas can be found throughout Europe.6

b) Main Trends of Modern History I will analyze this modern humanism as a starting point for a Western contribution to the intercultural discussion on chances and limits of 5

The best documentation of this change is the encyclopedia Geschichtsliche Grundbegriffe. Ed. Brunner, O. Conze, W. and Koselleck, R. Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland. 8 vols. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta Stuttgart, 1971-1997. 6 The French case is brilliantly presented by T. Todorov, Imperfect Garden. The Legacy of Humanism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).

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humanism in the orientation-crisis of today. But before I present an idealtypological description of this humanism I would like to present it as a result of a complex historical development in the West. In the light of this development a more systematic explication will get the shape of historical experience thus indicating the problems of its future perspective. In order to present Western humanism in this way, I would like to distinguish nine different tendencies, each of which is inter-related to all others in a very complex way.7 The first tendency is an anthropologization in the procedures of cultural orientation. It is man him- and herself, who makes sense of the world. This goes along with a second tendency, namely that of a secularization. The cultural principles of practical life have an innerworldly status. (This is a result of very severe and bloody wars between different Christian denominations, culminating in the Thirty Years’ War in Middle Europe [1618-1648], which caused the loss of about 30% of the German population.) A third tendency is a universalization of humankind across all different cultures and times. This universalization has been realized by a growing knowledge of the variety and changeability of human life forms. It had an empirical and a normative dimension: empirically it covered the whole realm of historical and anthropological experience, and normatively it attributed basic values to all human beings (in principle). In a very dialectical interrelationship humankind became at the same time naturalized and idealized. The human body could be treated as a part of nature, whereas the human mind was strictly distinguished from nature by ascribing to it a non- or even a super-natural quality. In the German language this quality was conceptualized by the term “Geist.” It meant a synthesis of mentality and spirituality with a creative force of bringing about the human world as essentially different from nature. It is the essential force of all cultural activity and its results in the variety of human life forms in space and time. This variety has received its specific cognitive form by a fundamental historization. Humankind was put into the frame of a universal development, within which the unity of humans is realized by the diversity of cultures. Thus humanity became individualized. Every single person and every social community were understood as a unique manifestation of humankind. The cognitive procedure of understanding differences, as it

7

For more details see J. Rüsen et al, eds. Enzyklopädie der Neuzeit. Vol. 8: Manufaktur-Naturgeschichte (Stuttgart: Metzler 2008): 327-340.

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dominated the methodical rules of research in the emerging humanities, is based on this principle of individualization. A specific tendency molded the articulation and reception of fine arts. By aesthetization it achieved a special realm and function in the cultural dimension of human life, liberating the power of imagination from all constrains and limits. Finally, the understanding of human life emphasized its potentialities. The cultural nature of humans is not fixed, but a matter of development and change. Educating humans as a process of cultivating them towards their own humanity therefore belongs to the core elements of modern humanism. It is symptomatic that in the German language the term "humanism" emerged in the public sphere as a title of a book on education (Niethammer 1808). As a result of these different tendencies and their complex and even conflicting interrelationship, an idea of a humanized humanity represented by every single person and social community as well was developed. Humanism is nothing but an elaborated form of this idea.

3. The Modern Concept of Humanism In a more systematic perspective humanism can be described as a pattern of thinking about the different dimensions of human life and their cultural regulation. This pattern is based on an anthropological argumentation centered on the principle of human dignity. Both issues– anthropology and dignity–are clearly articulated by Immanuel Kant. He said that in every cultural orientation of human life three basic questions have to be answered: What can I know? What shall I do? What may I hope for? And he added–in a typical expression for modern thinking –that all three questions can be summarized into the decisive single one: What is the human being (1800: 29)? According to Kant an answer to this question has to recognize the fundamental cultural quality of every human being: that he or she always is more than only a means to the purposes of others, but a purpose within him- or herself. Kant called this being a purpose within him-or herself (in German: Selbstzweckhaftigkeit) human dignity.8

8

“Man as a person, i.e., as the subject of a morally-practical reason, is exalted above all. For such a one (homo noumenon) he is not to be valued merely as a means to the ends of other people, or even to his own ends, but is to be prized as an end in himself. This is to say, he possesses a dignity (an absolute inner worth) whereby he exacts the respect of all other rational beings in the world, can measure himself against each member of his species, and can esteem himself on a footing of

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Based on this anthropological foundation humanism is a necessary spiritual and mental ferment of civil society culturally based on secular universal values, like freedom of speech, rule of law, equality before the law, religious pluralism in the framework of a universal morality, representation of the dominated in the institutions of domination, and so on. So humanism has a political dimension. It criticizes feudal forms of political domination and social life, and puts political domination under the rule of law in the form of human and civil rights. Humanism is clearly directed against and opposed to any authoritarian form of political domination.9 In its social dimension humanism claims for civil equality against the superiority of nobility and later on (in its socialist specification) against any attempt of social suppression. In its intellectual dimension humanism tackles an idea of humankind which addresses the empirical and normative universality of humankind within and by its cultural diversity and changeability. Thus it promotes the categories of historicity and individuality in understanding the human world. With these categories it shapes the scholarly work of the humanities and their hermeneutical strategies of understanding cultural diversity and historical change in the form of methodically ruled cognitive processes of research. In this dimension humanism fundamentally opposes any form of dogmatism and fosters free and unlimited discourses as a medium for discussing any issues of common interest.10 By its anthropology humanism has a strong impact on education in a wider sense of human self-cultivation (Bildung). Every person should have a chance to develop his or her abilities in a holistic way, so he or she will represent the cultural creativity of the human mind under the specific conditions of his or her life in an individualistic manifestation. Humanistic education opposes any utilitarianism which instrumentalizes human

equality with them." Kant, I. 1797. Metaphysik der Sitten, A 93 (English translation: http://praxeology.net/kant7.htm; 9.5. [2011]) 9 In the German case this is paradigmatically documented by Wilhelm von Humboldt's political manifesto: Ideen zu einem Versuch, die Gränzen der Wirksamkeit des Staats zu bestimmen from 1792 (English translation: Humboldt, W. v., 1854. The Sphere and Duties of Government [The Limits of State Action] London: John Chapman.) (http://oll.libertyfund.org/index.php?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3 Ftitle=589&Itemid=99999999; 9.5. [2011]) 10 Edward Said has radically criticized the Western form of understanding cultural differences, nevertheless he has praised this humanism (and indeed, it is a precondition for his critique). See E. Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).

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development by enforcing social utility at the cost of creating an independent personality. Finally one should not forget that humanism had a special relationship to fine arts: it sets it into an unlimited autonomy of free expression against pregiven rules of formation, dependent upon political and social interests. Fine arts gets a cultural place in human life as a necessary condition for realizing human freedom and self realization.11 This humanism is a multifaceted realm of ideas. But what about reality? Nobody can deny that since the end of the eighteenth century the life form of a civil society with humanistic elements like the principle of human dignity has been established in many countries, mainly –but not only–in the West. This life form has its limits and it is permanently endangered by a lack of common sense. But in general its world-wide attraction is evident and its practical impact is widening. Political humanism has been realized in many modern constitutions and their references to human and civil rights. Its humanization of political domination has received many backlashes and perversions, but nevertheless, we can observe a general historical trend to its widening and deepening. Social humanism from its very beginning had to confront its idea of civil equality with new class formations and with strong tendencies of delimitating the lower classes from the benefits of civil society like the new institutions of education. A special problem of social equality was the exclusion of women from political rights and social independence; but in the long run civil society is overcoming the unbalanced relationship between the sexes. A special problem has emerged from the humanistic principle of individualism; rather easily it could lead to a weakening of social responsibility and solidarity so that it still has to complement itself by fundamentally recognizing the inter-subjective dimension of human personality. Intellectual humanism has been established in the theoretical and methodical constitution of the humanities and social sciences–as long as they work with hermeneutics as a cognitive strategy to come to terms with cultural diversity and difference. Its principles of recognizing differences had to fight against nationalistic biases. And in an intercultural perspective it still has to be applied and enforced against strong ethnocentric tendencies in forming cultural identity. 11 In the German humanistic tradition this is paradigmatically documented by Friedrich Schiller's letters on the aesthetic cultivation of humankind (Ueber die aesthetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reyhe von Briefen 1795, Stuttgart: Cotta (English translation: On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letter [http://www.bartleby.com/32/501.html; 9.5. [2011]).

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Educational humanism finally made its way into higher education. But at the same time it established limits of social access. This is evident in the case of the German humanistic gymnasium. However, not only here elitist attitudes were confronted with the universalistic approach of general education. The idea of focusing education around the idea of a free personality is still under pressure in the name of social utility.

4. Limits and Self-Criticism I would like to bring this tradition of Western humanism into the current intercultural discussion on how to meet the challenge of globalization on the level of transculturally valid principles of cultural orientation. In order to do so, it is necessary to sharpen our view on its limits and realize its self-criticism. I have already indicated some of these, but they should be listed up in a more systematical way: Politically and socially modern humanism has its limit in the unsolved problem of securing a social status for being a full member of a civil society. Without the social status of a person who can earn his or her own livelihood all the advantages of human dignity can't be fully evolved. Additionally, modern humanism has to face the danger of a growing social inequality and as consequence a dissolution of common sense. Intellectually modern humanism finds its limits (a) by not sufficiently being aware of human inhumanity, (b) by its illusionary relationship to classical antiquity, (c) by keeping ethnocentric elements in its idea of humanity and universal history, (d) by a limited concept of reason, and (e) by the highly problematic relationship of humans to nature. These five points need a short explanation:12 (a) Classical humanism is aware of the potentials of every human being to become inhumane, to suppress, to subjugate, to instrumentalize and to de-humanize other human beings. But in the framework of its idealistic anthropology and theory of history, this potential of inhumanity was covered and not systematically taken into account. Instead, its followers believed in progress as a long-lasting historical process of humanizing human life-conditions. Herder, for instance, said in his 12

In the following presentation I make use of a part of a text, which will be published elsewhere (“Temporalizing Humanity–Towards a Universal History of Humanism.” Exploring Humane –Intercultural Perspectives on Humanism. Ed. J. Rüsen, et al. (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2011).

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philosophy of history: “The course of history demonstrates that by the growth of true humanity the destructive demons of the human race have really dwindled” (1784-91: 588f.). After the crimes against humanity culminating in the Holocaust, which gave the 20th century its historic signature, such optimism has become impossible. Only a humanism which can meet the challenge of these crimes and can look into the face of the Holocaust is feasible for a future-directed orientation of human life (Rüsen 2008). (b) The classical humanism had to demonstrate that its idea of humanity was a realistic one. This was done by a constitutive reference to classical antiquity. The humanists from the late 1eighteenth to the early twentieth century believed that in this specific time–mainly in classical Greece–the fulfilment of the ideas of a humane life form was achieved. We know that it didn't, and that the historical reason for the feasibility of humanism was a great illusion. (c) The classical humanistic concept of a universal history pretended to give place for cultural differences in the course of history without the prejudice of Western superiority. Nevertheless, this humanism had to place itself into the course of history, and by doing so it could not avoid privileging the Western civilization, although its criticism of Western imperialism is evident, mainly in Herder´s thinking. Yet if we take just one look at the characterization of Africans in the anthropology of this time (for instance in Kant’s anthropology), we can see the part of ethnocentrism which is still in effect. (d) Post-colonialism has brought about a radical criticism of the Western concept of reason. It has interpreted this concept as a means of domination subjugating all other forms of intellectual life, which follow different ideas of the human mind and spirit. Classical humanism has made use of the concept of reason. But it did not simply reproduce the attitude of governing the world inherent in the modern concept of reason. Instead, humanism has given it a hermeneutical potential thus opening it up to a new awareness of the variety and difference of human forms of life. It is, however, still an open question whether this potential of understanding is really free from any will of domination, and whether it sufficiently opens up a space for recognizing those forms of human life which are not committed to this kind of reason. (e) One aspect of the problematic character of the Western concept of reason lies in its way of shaping the human relationship to nature. It is the form of an unconditional domination. Today the catastrophic consequences of this relationship have become evident. Western humanism has not completely confirmed and legitimated this attitude of

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domination. Yet, its idea of human relatedness to nature has been rather vague. In the dim light of this ambiguity, traditional Western humanism has proved unable to develop an idea of what a humane relationship between man and nature is like (Rüsen 2006). The intellectual development in the West after the formative period of modernization showed a growing renunciation from the tradition of humanism in spite of several attempts for its renewal. The most prominent representative of this anti-humanism is Friedrich Nietzsche. This renunciation culminated in the idea that man becomes subjugated under non- or super-human instances like the superman, the “to be” or anonymous structures of social or mental life. This was the end of the anthropological turn; man became “decentered” in the philosophical interest in understanding the world. In politics we can observe similar trends of weakening and discrediting the tradition of humanism: there was–if at all–only a weak protest against the power of inhumane political movements like fascism and communism. On the contrary: communism even could claim for the tradition of humanism and ascribe “real humanism޵ for its suppression and liquidation of social formations and movements which did not fit into its idea of historical progress (Scherrer 2011). In recent times two intellectual movements substantially contributed to the marginalization and dissolution of humanism: a) postmodernism negated any approach to universal values, and b) postcolonialism accused the Western idea of modernity of legitimating the suppression of nonWestern countries. Humanism has been criticized as a means for political domination and for robbing other people and cultures of their dignity of self-determination. (It is another question whether this criticism itself did not make use of humanistic principles, thus confirming humanism in its turn against it.) The fascinating success of biogenetics and brain-research supported, finally, a new attempt to replace the culture-centered modes of thought (which includes humanism, of course) by nature-centered ones.

5. A New Approach with an Intercultural Intent Any approach to revitalize humanism for a new intercultural understanding has to begin with a clear distancing attitude: it can’t use the Western humanistic paradigm of humanity in its historical peculiarity as a parameter of intercultural comparison. Neither can it be looked at as an aim in the future perspective of intercultural communication. This would be an epistemological as well as a political mistake. It would only support non-Western suspicions of a continuation of Western intellectual

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domination and therefore could not lead to a transcultural agreement on basic values and principles of coming together in understanding the common cultural nature of man and of the power of being different. But on the other hand, the ethics of humanism--on the level of principles, and not so much on the level of historical experience concerning their practical use–can be understood as a solution of synthesizing commonness and diversity of humanity, which may meet the problem of cultural orientation challenged by globalization. In many Western countries and in non-Western countries as well, basic elements of this ethics have been established in the life form of a civil society, where different traditions can be lived by their followers in a peaceful way. The universality of dignity and corresponding ideas of humankind and humanity can be adapted into historically different contexts. Here they can unfold their mental and spiritual attractiveness for contributing to the tendencies of humanizing humans in all dimensions of their practical lives. Humanistic principles are, of course, not at all a privilege of Western history. They can be found and strengthened in many other traditions as well (Meinert and Zoellner, 2009; Huang, 2010; Meinert, 2010; Longxi, 2010; Reichmuth, Rüsen and Sarhan, 2010). Vis-à-vis this historical fact, the question has to be raised: What keeps and brings these different traditions together without dissolving their diversity? The answer to this question is one of the most urgent issues of the humanities and social sciences of today. I would like to propose a twofold strategy: (a) by a decomposition of the Western paradigm into single elements, which can be found everywhere, in different culture-specific constellations; (b) by a conceptual frame of integrating this variety of humanistic approaches to practical life. Such a concept would not dissolve the variety of cultural manifestations of these approaches in favor of one single universal idea, instead it would keep them up by their integration. For this purpose we need a new philosophy of history which opens space for historical pluralism and addresses the unity of humankind at the same time. (a) The following basic elements of a humanistic worldview should be taken as necessary contributions to an inter-culturally valid idea of coming to terms with the demand of synthesizing the unity of humankind and the variety of its cultural manifestations in the realm of historical experience: x an outstanding position of the human being as a source for cultural orientation; this includes the idea of an essential dignity of every human being;

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x

an equality of every human being in respect to his or her essential dignity; x a fundamental reference to the term of otherness in understanding the human existence and the conceptualization of the human self; x a clear distinction between the individual and the social community, within which he or she pursues his or her life; x a relationship of the human being to an exuberant dimension of life, understood as a point of reference beyond the pre-given circumstances and conditions of practical life; x a recognition of the changeability of human life-forms as a chance for establishing humane life conditions; x an emphasis on education dedicated to the idea of moral responsibility and an ability to pursue one's own life according to universal values. (b) The variety of life forms in time and space can be historically brought into an order, which emphasizes this unity and difference at the same time. The basis of such an order are anthropological universals. They are the roots for humanism in the cultural nature of humankind, and they form a frame for temporal change and regional indifference. I would like to outline this cultural anthropology of humanism in the following way: 13 In all cultures at all times and places in the world human life is morally regulated by a clear distinction between good and evil and related principles of human conduct. The ability for such a distinction and its application to human agency presupposes a certain idea of what it means to be a human being: humans are defined as persons; they are individuals with a physical and psychic continuity. As such they are responsible for what they do or fail to do, at least on the level of everyday life. This responsibility furnishes every human being with the quality of dignity (as we would express it in our modern language). This “dignity” demands respect and recognition in all social contexts of life. This idea of a substantial moral quality of every human being is based on another anthropologically universal quality of humans, namely the ability to change one‫ތ‬s own views of perception and interpretation by taking over the perspectives of others. The humanistic idea of “dignity” of man is anthropologically rooted in the human ability of making decisions in the tension between good and evil and in the ability for empathy. This anthropological quality demands forms of human cooperation, which, 13

I mainly refer to C. Antweiler, Mensch und Weltkultur. Für einen realistischen Kosmopolitismus im Zeitalter der Globalisierung (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2011). English translation in preparation.

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across all cultural differences, are important for the social organization of human life. Out of these roots grows the tree of human culture with its numerous branches and leaves. Therefore the cultural anthropology of humanism needs a historical addition and complement so that it may be possible to identify humanism in the main trends of universal history Thus humankind may finally become the face of history. The philosophical outline of such a universal history is very abstract, but I think it is necessary for being open for the richness of historical experience and at the same time for the purpose of giving this richness an encompassing meaning. Universal history can be philosophically conceptualized as a process of humanizing humankind. This process is evident and can easily be made plausible in respect to historical experience by a threefold periodization. The first period is that of archaic societies. They are the oldest ones. In the framework of a humanistic philosophy of history they can be generally characterized by their cultural definition of what a human being is, namely: only the people of one's own community own this quality. The people living beyond one's own sphere of life are not perceived as humans; they are lacking essential elements of one's own humanity.14 The second period is that of axial-time societies. The term “axial time” implies a fundamental change in human worldview.15 It goes along with changes in the other dimensions of human life as well, of course. Taking all these developments together one can speak of the new life form of socalled “advanced civilizations.” They came about at different times in different places (but roughly between 600 BC and 600 AD). As life forms they share essential elements, qualities and factors, which define their epoch-making historical novelty. For the purpose of my argumentation the most important quality in this change is the universalization of the idea of humankind. Now not only one's own people are humans with their special

14

Klaus E. Mueller had characterized this excluding particular universality of being a human being in archaic societies with the German term Eigenweltverabsolutierung (setting one's own world as absolute). Consult K.E. Müller, Menschenbilder Früher Gesellschaften. Ethnologische Studien zum Verhältnis von Mensch und Natur (Frankfurt am Main: Campus 1983):13-69. 15 The following part is mainly based on the work of Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, ed. The Origins and Diversity of Axial Age Civilizations (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986); see also J.P. Arnason, et al., eds. Axial Civilisations and World History (Leiden: Brill, 2005). And O. Kozlarek, et al., eds. Shaping a Human World – Civilizations, Axial Times Modernities, Humanisms (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2011).

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abilities, but (principally) all the other members of the human race are endowed with this quality as well. The evolutionary step of axial times brought about an increase in transcendence and in subjectivity. Both together give humanity a new cultural shape. From the perspective of humanism this shape indicates an increase in humanity. The moral quality of being a human becomes humanized. A very telling example for this axial time humanism is Confucianism and its moral principle of ren (benevolence) (Huang 2010; Meinert 2010). Morality bears its own universalism, expressed by the “golden rule.” In both respects humanity broke the constraints of ethnicity.16 This is expressed in central statements of the different axial time religions (we call them “world religions” to characterize their new universalistic approach). In the Christian relationship between the single individual and God all differences among men vanish;17 and it is possible to say that the killing of one single human being is an attack on humankind in general.18 The third period is that of modernization and globalization. The step to modernity took place all over the world. It was taken under the strong influence of Western culture, but above this it was more and differently practiced than only a process of Westernization. To describe it one should follow the proposal of Shmuel Eisenstadt (2000)–one of the most prominent representatives of axial time theory–and speak of “multiple modernities޵ instead of one single unifying modernity (Sachsenmaier and Riedel 2002). This can be done on the level of philosophy of history since the change to this epoch is a change in the logic of the already achieved (multiple) universalisms in understanding humanity. I think that we can identify a lot of factual and theoretical evidence of the specific character of modernity as a shift from exclusive to inclusive universalisms in understanding humankind. 16 It is important to note that “evolution” does not mean that the older forms of cultural orientation dissolve and vanish. They remain in very different manifestations, including vast regions of the subconscious. But they change their place in the framework of culture. Ethnicity in modern time, for example, is different from ethnicity in archaic societies. 17 Most characteristic are the word of St. Paul: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female, for ye are all one in Christ Jesus" (Gal. 3,28). 18 See Quran 5,32: “We decreed for the Children of Israel that whosoever killeth a human being for other than manslaughter or corruption in the earth, it shall be as if he had killed all mankind, and whoso saveth the life of one, it shall be as if he had saved the life of all mankind.޵

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An established and encompassing paradigm of this inclusive humanism is not yet in view. But single elements of it can already be identified. A universalistic dimension of understanding humankind has already been established in the previous epoch of axial times I can’t see any reasons for giving it up in favor of any kind of relativism. (Relativism may be useful to criticize dogmatic universalisms, but vis-à-vis the globalization process; it would be an intellectual hands-up in the clash of civilizations. Yielding to it would forsake the efforts of solving intercultural tensions to the power game of politics.) But what about the problematic inclusive character of this universalism? How can its historically pregiven logic of exclusion be changed into a completely contrary one? We can find signs and examples of a historical process of establishing inclusive universalisms in conceptualizing and understanding humanity. To my mind one of the strongest indications for this is modern Western humanism and the growing interest in its achievements. Though this humanism has its shortcomings, which I have listed up above, its strong merits can't be overlooked: it has brought about ideas of inclusiveness, which could be inter-culturally accepted.19 But this would only mark a beginning of the common way with all the limits and failures we now know about. It is a question of intercultural communication today whether these failures and shortcomings can be overcome and how an inclusive idea of humanity can profit from non-Western traditions and their applications to the problems of cultural orientation all people of today do share.

Works Cited Antweiler, C. Mensch und Weltkultur. Für einen realistischen Kosmopolitismus im Zeitalter der Globalisierung. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2011. Arnason, J. P. Eisenstadt, S. N. and Wittrock, B., eds. Axial Civilisations and World History. Leiden: Brill, 2005. Brunner, O. Conze, W. and Koselleck, R., eds. Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland. 8 vols. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta Stuttgart, 2009.

19

See the contributions of Dipesh Chakrabarty, Muhammd Arkoun, and Longxi Zhang in Rüsen, J and Henner, L. eds. Humanism in Intercultural Perspective. Experiences and Expectations. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2009.

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Cancik, H. and Vöhler, M., eds. Humanismus und Antikerezeption im 18. Jahrhundert. Vol. 1: Genese und Profil des europäischen Humanismus. Heidelberg: Winter, 2009. Cancik, H. Europ-Antik–Humanismus. Humanistische Versuche und Vorarbeiten. Ed. Hildegard Cancik-Lindemaier. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2011. Chakrabarti, D. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 2000. Eisenstadt, S. N.. „Multiple Modernities.“ Daedalus 129/1, 2000. Eisenstadt, S. N., ed. The Origins and Diversity of Axial Age Civilizations. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986. Foucault, M.. The Order of Things. An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Pantheon, 1974. Heidegger, M.: Brief über den "Humanismus". Gesamtausgabe, I. Abteilung: Veröffentlichte Schriften 1914-1970. Vol. 9: Wegmarken. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1976. English Translation: “Letter on ‘Humanism.’” Pathmarks. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Herder, J. G. Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2010. Huang, C. C. Humanism in East Asian Confucian Contexts. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2010. Kant, I. 1797. Metaphysik der Sitten, A. 93 (English translation : http://praxeology.net/kant7.htm [9.5.2011]) —. Logik. Trans. R. S. et al. New York : Dover, 1974. Kozlarek, O. Rüsen, J. and Wolff, E., eds. Shaping a Human World– Civilizations, Axial Times, Modernities, Humanisms. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2011. Longxi, Z., ed. The Concept of Humanity in an Age of Globalization. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2010. Meinert, C. and Zoellner, H.-B., eds. Buddhist Approaches to Human Rights. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2009. Meinert, C., ed. Traces of Humanism in China–Tradition and Modernity. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2010. Nida-Rümelin, J. Humanismus als Leitkultur. Ein Perspektivenwechsel. Munich: C.H. Beck, 2006. Reichmuth, S. Rüsen, J. and Sarhan, A. eds. Humanism and Muslim Culture: Historical Heritage and Contemporary Challenges. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2010.

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Reuchlin, J. Recommendation Whether to Confiscate, Destroy and Burn all Jewish Books. A Classic Treatise Against Anti-Semitism. Translated, edited and with a foreword by Peter Wortsman. New York: Paulist Press, 2000. Rüsen, J. and L. Henner, eds. Humanism in Intercultural Perspective. Experiences and Expectations. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2009. Rüsen, J. “Humanism and Nature–Some Reflections on a Complex Relationship.” The Journal for Transdisciplinary Research in Southern Africa 2/2, 2006. —. “Humanism in Response to the Holocaus-Destruction or Innovation?” Postcolonial Studies 11/2 (2008), 191-200. —. “Temporalizing Humanity–Towards a Universal History of Humanism.” Exploring Humanity–Intercultural Perspectives on Humanism. Ed. J. Rüsen et al. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2011. Sachsenmaier, D. and J. Riedel, eds. Reflections on Multiple modernities: European, Chinese and Other Interpretations. Leiden: Brill 2002. Said, E. Humanism and Democratic Criticism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. Scherrer, J. Die pervertierte Macht der Menschlichkeit--Humanismus in der Sowjetunion. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2011. Todorov, T. Imperfect Garden: The legacy of Humanism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. Zhang, K. “Inventing Humanism in Modern China.” Traces of Humanism in China: Tradition and Modernity. Ed. C. Meinert. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2010:131-149.

EUGENICS, HUMANISM AND FRANK YERBY’S PLANTATION ROMANCE EWA B. LUCZAK UNIVERSITY OF WARSAW, POLAND

In a play Fie, Fie, Fi-Fi performed in 1914 by Princeton Triangle Show, one of the protagonists, a 30-year-old woman named Cover, sings about her father, a physician and eugenicist, replacing her parts with artificial substitutes in order to improve her body; she cannot but complain about her new metal chest and fireproof toes. This satirical and disturbingly contemporary reference to the eugenic program of improving the human stock does not merely manifest the power of eugenic discourse to spark the imagination of such ambitious Princeton undergraduates as Francis Scott Fitzgerald, who wrote the lyrics to one of the play’s songs, “Love and Eugenics” (Kevles 1995: 58). It also demonstrates the concern of the artistic world with the eugenic agenda of actively changing the definition of what is human to the point where one tampers with the autonomy and physical integrity of the human being. The science of eugenics redefined the concept of human and narrowed its conceptual scope, all in the name of progress. American literature of the first four decades of the 20th-century could not but react to this conceptual masquerading. Frank Yerby’s popular best-seller The Foxes of Harrow (1946) is an example of a late recognition of the vestiges of the eugenic thought in the American popular imagination. The novel toys with eugenically disguised humanism only to dismantle it at the book’s ending and to display it for what it was: a ruthless and self-assured victory of the super-human over the human being. If the scholarship on the history of the eugenic movement in the U.S. consists of dozens of volumes, the list of publications on the eugenic imagination in American popular culture and literature is less extensive. This relative scarcity of academic scholarship may be accounted for on two grounds: the first is the troubling realization of the power of eugenics to infiltrate nearly all manifestations of creativity at that time. As Daylanne K. English argues (2004), eugenics appealed to thinkers and

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artists coming from both left and right, and it was generally viewed as “progressive ideology, one with the widely shared, utopian aim of improving the national or racial stock by conscious intervention” (18). Telling the story of the presence of eugenics in popular literature may turn into a monumental attempt to tell everything and thus, nothing. A fear of falling into the trap of mastering the history of literary eugenics, which is ridden with inconsistencies, and by nature is resistant to any attempt at ordering it, may have functioned as a critical disincentive. Another reason may be the difficulty in reconciling the eugenic agenda with the traditional belief in the power of humanist discourse in the American intellectual and literary production of the first four decades of the twentieth century. The troubling discovery of the conflict between notions of fraternité and eugenic rhetoric disturbs the picture of the preSecond World War progressive America. The hesitancy to probe the depth of American popular involvement with eugenic thought, to the point where it ceased to be merely an opinion but became an ideology that transfixed numerous American minds, may have its explanation in the fear that such a discussion would challenge assumptions about the rise of the modern American nation and culture. And the power of American eugenics seems to have resided exactly in the nation’s ambition to reconfigure traditional cultural and national values. In the United States of the 1920s, liberal bourgeois humanism, along with Christian humanism, was dwindling into popular sentimentality and unreflective charity. The famous Scopes trial of 1925, in which general science teacher John Scopes, supported by The American Civil Liberties Union of New York, challenged the States of Tennessee’s ban on the teaching the theory of evolution in public schools provoked the anger of Christian fundamentalists while drawing enthusiasm of those who demanded a more science-oriented society. Driven by a desire to verify fallacies regarding the origin of man, the eugenic thinker Henry Fairfield Osborn advised the Scopes’ faction (Regal 2002: 160). Eugenics offered a rigorous language that stood in opposition to the pervasive antiintellectualism of the time. It was seen as part of a larger scheme aimed at the correction of misunderstandings of the position of man in the world and his role in it. The scientific status of eugenics undoubtedly contributed to its popularity. Francis Galton, the nephew of Charles Darwin, who is credited with introducing the term, insisted that eugenics denotes an objective investigation “of the conditions under which men of a high type are produced” (1883). Eugenic thinkers remained faithful to this dictum and, whenever possible, employed the language of rationality, statistics and

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scientific evidence. In his The New Decalogue of Science (2005), Albert Edward Wiggam positioned himself as a rational and detached observer of the human world, driven only by an agenda of debunking sentimental fallacies of religious discourse. Even though in his The Rising Tide of Color (1920), Theodore Lothrop Stoddard every now and then displays an emotionalism related to his concern for the future of Western civilization, he makes sure to incorporate simultaneously into his narrative evidence from psychological tests carried out in the American army after WWI and among post-war immigrants to the U.S. Another eugenic thinker, Henry Herbert Goddard, devoted his book The Kallikak Family: a Study in the Heredity of Feeblemindedness (1916) to the psychological and, according to him, detached study of what he believed was a degenerate American family. In the introduction to his study, Goddard defends his work against the charge of intellectual manipulation and stresses that “the present study of the Kallikak family is a genuine story of real people and the results presented here come after two years of constant work” (14). Objectivity and a neutral tone of dispassionate scientific investigation were to be a guarantee of the true and absolute nature of eugenic findings. Additionally, these features were to protect eugenic logic against the emotionalism of opponents, who wished to discredit the new science with its inherent antihumanism. The faith in the power of the rationality of eugenic discourse to explain the human world was in keeping with a conviction in the value of progress and the improvability of the human being. Eugenicists regularly expressed belief in the unlimited future potential of humanity, capable of endless genetic development under desirable conditions. In his enthusiastic endorsement of the logic of eugenics, Wiggam (1923) argues that man is not a “helpless victim of the passing education, philosophy and theories of pedagogy” since “in the germ cell, from which every man is born, there are resident those mighty personal forces by which he can rise in well-nigh environment, and, within the limits of human freedom exclaim: ‘I am the master of my fate, I am the Captain of my soul’” (2). Wiggam’s assertion offers a convenient marriage of the American ethos of unerring individualism and of what Hannah Arendt identified as a Darwinian belief in “the indefinite possibilities which seemed to lie in the evolution of man out of animal life” (1979: 178). It is necessary to underline that eugenic literature of that time is frequently torn between two contradictory impulses: at one extreme, it is permeated with visionary optimism; on the other, however, it surrenders to an apocalyptic tone echoing Arthur de Gobineau’s “law of decay” or Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West. The tradition of coupling race

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thinking with the language of decay fell on fruitful historical ground: there was World War I, perceived as the unnecessary loss of the most creative genetic stock, as well as the outbreak of the Soviet Revolution, which proved to eugenicists that Western Civilization was becoming “selfdestructive” (Wiggam 1923: 2) and that humanity faced the “supreme crisis of the ages” (Stoddard 1920: 300). The combination of visionary language and the rhetoric of decay helped usher in the discourse of moral responsibility and public duty. Eugenicists stressed that they toiled out of their sacred duty to save Western civilization, which needed responsible humans to put it back on the right track. The logic of responsibility was additionally sustained by the traditional juxtaposition of the world of chaotic nature with the ordered world of human consciousness. Human consciousness with its attributes of reason and imagination, was naturally predisposed to master the wild matter of nature. In a clever twist, probably to defend itself against criticism, the rhetoric of eugenics lavishly incorporated some of the language of liberal secular humanism: after all, trust in the rationality and improvability of the human being, as well as the rhetoric of moral responsibility and the insistence on the power of human consciousness to structure the world, are the staples of the language of the Enlightenment. Thus, eugenics worked within an older philosophical framework and used warped humanist argumentation to advance its own agenda. Eugenic courting of the rhetoric of the Enlightenment led to what looked like an insoluble dilemma. On the one hand, eugenic discourse celebrated the power of the man, capable of aiding nature and even mastering it through the action of a powerful human-hyper agency. Conceptually, however, eugenics was grounded in Darwinism, and had to acknowledge the animal nature of the human being and what appeared to be his inherent biological determinism. Eugenicists found themselves trapped in a well-known dualism, which Paul Sheehan (2002) describes as “a sense of belonging” to nature and a “sense of separateness” that “has been passed down first through Western theology and through philosophical humanism” (26). As human beings are “both a part of nature, and apart from nature” (26), American eugenics had to squarely face the question: are humans animals that happen to have human consciousness or conscious creatures who happen to share their physicality with the animal world? Eugenicists found the way out of this dilemma by echoing the logic of Puritan predestination, which was in keeping with the tone of the jeremiads that they so freely applied. According to this logic, if human consciousness is capable of rising over the animal world and restoring

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order to the endangered human world, it is the consciousness of the chosen ones. The link with the natural world was assumed to be stronger for some than for others, exactly the way it was for the early Puritan visible saints, who set themselves apart from the carnal men. The rhetorical strategies used to defend the unequal distribution of the human gene varied. Osborn insisted that “all races were separate species” and Nordic Whites were descendants of a non-ape ancestor, unlike other races (Regal 2002: 169-173). In contrast, Stoddard did not bother with the question of origins but insisted that the good germ plasm had not been distributed equally among humans and thus some were more “human” than others. Even though he was not using the Nietzschean term Übermensch, he coined the term “Underman” for those less generously equipped by nature (Stoddard 1922: 23). In this way, rather than giving in to the eugenic desire to turn “man into a god”, Stoddard changed “man into a beast” first (Arendt 1979:179). The introduction of the possibility of being less or more affiliated with pure, unthinking nature led to the rejection of the basic premise of the Enlightenment and of American democracy — that all men are born equal. The questioning of men’s equality is such a fundamental tenet of eugenics that it is worth quoting Stoddard’s explanation at length: The idea of “Natural Equality” is one of the most pernicious delusions that has ever afflicted mankind. It is a figment of the human imagination. Nature knows no equality. The most cursory examination of natural phenomena reveals the presence of a Law of Inequality as universal and inflexible as the Law of Gravitation. The evolution of life is the most striking instance of this fundamental truth.” (1922: 30)

The consequence of the belief in the inherent inequality of human beings is a rejection of intra-racial couples, miscegenation and charity for the “feeble-minded” as fundamentally detrimental to human society, which lives in accordance with the natural “process of differentiation” (Stoddard 1922: 30). Another implication is stress on the unknowability of humans, as their inequality precludes similar mental capacities, as well as the rejection of a further sanctity of humanist liberalism: of the autonomy of the human being. In the eugenic scheme of things the life of the human being is bound up with heredity; it is the genetic pool that assigns the man a certain role in society best enacted at the level of the family. The human being’s individual needs are rendered secondary to the responsibility he has to the improvement of human civilization. Thus, his individual agency is overridden by the communal or, in eugenic terms, racial identity. Eugenics becomes the science of better breeding of the few in the name of

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a global future for few: it spells out the desire of those who consider themselves to be the descendants of the Nordic men to re-conquer the world gradually slipping out of their grasp. Theories of human inequality radically affected the way the American nation was conceived of in the years prior to WWII. According to Walter Benn Michaels (1995: 9), if at the end of the 19th century “American” designates “a set of social and economic conditions” and assumes some commonality and universality, after the rise of eugenic argumentation and nativist modernism in the 1920s, “American” came to describe an identity “that existed prior to and independent of those conditions,” and thus excluded those who did not share the same biological inheritance. This new American identity meant a step toward the British tradition of inheritance (Arendt 1979: 176) but was a regression from the ideals of American democracy, which in the 18th century formulation that “all men are created equal” insisted on a radical break with the ideals of the “aristocracy of birth.” As such it officially sanctioned the breach between American ideals and the practice of denying equality to the blacks, Native Americans and other ethnic minorities. Today, when we are familiar with the practical results of the implementation of the “law of nature’s differentiation” in the American South or the Republic of South Africa, equipped with the knowledge of the abuses of eugenics under the Nazi regime and aware of the postwar critique of the limitations of the Enlightenment project, we can see through eugenic duplicity. It is obvious that, even though it posed as objective investigation of facts, eugenics was riddled with logical inconsistencies and intellectual shortcuts. Moreover, it sacrificed the human being on the altar of science, which was turned into a magical rite to assure prosperity for the future. Eugenic discourse was that of an inherent masquerade – it wanted to be seen as humanism without acknowledgment of the Other, a move rather contradictory in its intentions. Due to its selectivity, eugenic “humanism” became a form of metaphysics devoid of reference to the real world of human experience. It became humanism without humans.

Eugenics and Literature The inherently deceptive character of eugenic discourse may not have been so evident to those trapped in its clutches, when it was still considered a respectable science. As Michel Foucault (1978: 140-141) argues, the discourse of “bio-power,” which includes the discourse of eugenics, and aimed at policing human sexuality, has developed a series of discursive practices which were designed to veil intentions. It has resorted

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to the logic of common good and life enhancement and thus, made any attempt at criticism either obsolete or increasingly difficult. As a result, bio-power has been frequently and unwittingly interiorized by the victims of the discursive regime. No wonder that literature and culture of the first four decades of the 20th century found itself under the spell of eugenics. It is true that the radical type of negative eugenics, aimed at eliminating racially and intellectually undesirable human stock from the human society was frequently questioned, if not openly denounced by progressive thinkers. Nonetheless, the idea of improving society through genetic selection frequently took hold of the artistic imagination. In one of his essays, T.S. Eliot explicitly acknowledges his eugenic fascination: “The human race can, if it will, improve indefinitely—by social and economic reorganization, by eugenics, and by any other external means possible to the science of the intellect” (1932: 78-79). Writers such as Jack London, Erskine Caldwell and William Faulkner constructed fiction heavily informed by eugenic polemics. Influenced by David Starr Jordan, through his animal tales, London was exalting the “germ plasm” of the human racial leaders (Reesman 2009: 44-45). Caldwell focused on the problems attending the lives of the feebleminded “white trash” in the South (Currell and Codgell 2006: 120-140), whereas Faulkner addressed the issue of Southern domestic degeneration and miscegenation (Currell and Codgell 2006: 164). Armed with his admiration for Nietzsche’s distrust of common sense that is inimical to life, the influential social and literary critic, H. L. Mencken (2010), went even further in his adoption of some of the eugenic logic. Although he was highly critical of the eugenic belief in the possibility of mass production of “absolutely first rate men” (502), he adopted a eugenic tenor when, aggravated by the multiplying numbers of New Deal beneficiaries, he recommended that the poor should be paid for voluntary sterilization (1937: 408). Mencken’s divided mind on the issue of eugenics is not a solitary case but rather characteristic of a broader intellectual tendency. Taking note of the increasing presence of the “feeble-minded” and the poor, due to the rise of post-Depression welfare policies, and affected by post-World War I and post-Soviet Revolution millenarianism, as well as a belief in the sterility of Western civilization, American writers and thinkers were rendered vulnerable to the rhetoric of eugenics. The book Unnatural Selections: Eugenics in American Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (English 2004) has brought to light one of the most surprising seductions of eugenics: the science of “good breeding” managed to leave its imprint on the intellectual debates and artistic

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production of African-American thinkers and artists. For example, the progressive and socially revisionist thought of W. E. B. Du Bois prior to WWII retained some of the eugenic polemics. In “Miscegenation” (1935), Du Bois advances a scathing critique of those who oppose inter-racial blending. Simultaneously, however, he cautions against too hasty amalgamation of diverse groups. In his argument, he utilizes the phrasing of eugenics: If a poor and ignorant group amalgamates with a large and more intelligent group, quickly and thoughtlessly, the results may easily be harmful. There will be prostitution and disease, much social disorganization, and the inevitable loss of many human values by both groups. The lower group will tend to lose its self-respect and possibility of self-determination in its eagerness to reach the standards of the higher group; and it may disappear as a separate and more or less despised entity. The higher group will tend to lower its standards, will exploit and degrade the lower group, and fall itself into crime and delinquency, because of the ease with which it can use the lower group. (Sollors 2000: 471)

For anyone familiar with Du Bois’s work of that time, it is obvious that by “lower” and “higher” groups he meant different classes rather than races; nonetheless, his appeal to caution with respect to inter-group liaisons cannot but evoke eugenic concern with undesired human crossbreeding. While Du Bois in 1935 expresses distrust of socially irresponsible amalgamation, other black thinkers, such as the poet Jean Toomer and the satirist George Schuyler, employ the eugenic argumentation of social engineering to battle the eugenic theory of the inequality of human beings. Both writers endorse the theory of “hybrid vigor” which was grounded in a belief in the socially and hereditary beneficial consequences of inter-racial and cross-class liaisons. Otherwise distrustful of Grant and Stoddard, whom he mercilessly attacked for their obvious racism, Schuyler implemented the logic of the positive eugenics of cross-racial mixtures in his literary work, a satirical novel Black No More (1989). Even though his subsequent novel, Black Empire (1991), serialized under a pseudonym in the Courier, warned against the totalitarianism of negative eugenics, even among blacks, Schuyler retained some level of belief in positive eugenics in his personal life. Seeking proof of the supremacy of the progeny of hybrid marriages, he went as far as parading his extremely gifted daughter, a product of his marriage to a white woman. This engagement of African American intellectuals in eugenic debates can be seen as an attempt to inject their own voice in the midst of heated and frequently skewed polemics about the definition of the human being and his place in the natural and political world. Not for the first time in

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American history did blacks have to battle discourse which was either excluding them from the human family or relegating them to its margin. Not for the first time did they have to utilize the logic of the mainstream discourse to dismantle its ideological assumptions. Eugenic language, tropes and imagery were appropriated to lay bare the inherently in-human agenda of eugenics. The polemics of African Americans dealing with eugenics on eugenic grounds may testify to their persistence in facing reality. Rather than arguing neutrally for their humanity, they decided to confront the powerful ideology of eugenics on its own territory.

Frank Yerby, Eugenics and Humanism The life of black writer Frank Yerby spells out the story of his involvement with the bio-power of eugenics. Himself the product of a couple of generations of inter-racial breeding, he refused to identify with a clear racial denomination believing that it flew in the face of human autonomy to chart one’s own life. In an interview with James Hill, he provocatively argued: Regarding my original heritage, I think my Seminole ancestors were wonderful guys. They fought like hell, but they were never defeated. My Irish ancestors got drunk a little too often, but they weren’t bad people or evil. My Scottish ancestors were stingy bastards. My Haitian ancestors burned every plantation on the island in a single night. My French ancestors took along their wine, and they were skirt-chased and so forth. My black ancestors were slaves. What ancestors are you talking about? Which one am I denying? (1995: 233)

Needless to say, such an assertion failed to win him recognition from writers who emphasized their Afro-centric origins. The fact that from the mid-1950s, Yerby was living the life of an expatriate in Spain, where he was churning out costume novels heavily modeled on Southern romances did not increase his popularity among African American post-civil rights critics and writers, despite his phenomenal popular success in the 1940s and 1950s. He himself cynically insisted on producing apolitical, socially irrelevant literature confident that “people have the right to escape occasionally and temporarily from life’s sprawling messiness, satisfy their hunger for neat patterns, retreat into a dreamlife” (Yerby 1959: 149). However, I would insist that despite its conventional structure and transparent formula, Yerby’s fiction carries with it a subversive element. In fact, his first novel, The Foxes of Harrow, enters the discursive field of eugenics and addresses the grave issue of eugenic anti-humanism.

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The fact that Yerby chose to work on The Foxes of Harrow in the wake of his failure to make his name as a writer of short fiction is not without significance. Prior to the publication of The Foxes of Harrow, Yerby had many years of intensive writing behind him. His short stories—both those that were published, such as “Health Card” and “White Magnolias,” and those that remained unpublished, such as “Danse Macabre,” or “Land of the Pilgrim’s Pride”—deal with racial issues, segregation in the South or problems with cross-racial understanding. They were written with the intention of correcting American reality and expressed trust in the power of artistic imagination to shape the human world. Some of them are experimental and contain the structural element of unpredictability, thus affirming the priority of the human voice over the mechanism of the conventional form of the genre. However, the fact that most of them were rejected by publishers led Yerby to revise his artistic aims and strategies as a writer. His decision to imitate the formula of a Southern plantation romance, one of the most conventional genres in post World War I American literature, may be seen as a victory of the mechanistic or deterministic over free creativity. One could argue that, resorting to the argument of Paul Sheenan (2002), it was a triumph of “machine” over “the voice” in literature, and thus the vanishing of “the human.” This view is endorsed by those who refuse to allot creativity to highly mechanistic and conventional genres, which rely on imitation of narrative formulas. Subscribing to the rhetoric of Andrew Ross from his No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture (1989), I would argue, however, that even the most mechanical genres of popular culture contain the space for rebellion. In fact, they emulate the typical and stereotypical while simultaneously injecting an element of ambivalence and hesitancy. Thus, they both endorse the mainstream and are capable of showing no respect. Yerby’s The Foxes of Harrow seems to be engaged in the logic of mechanical imitation on one hand and the act of transgression on the other. On the surface it reads like a banal Southern version of the narrative of the American Dream of material success. The protagonist, Stephen Fox, is an impoverished Irish immigrant, who, thanks to his ingenuity and hard work, rises to wealth and fortune and establishes the powerful family of the Foxes in antebellum Louisiana. The perfectly structured narrative, with clear chronological development, is revealed in a highly conventional way. The baroque language is replete with hackneyed phrases typical of plantation romances. However, the novel’s conventionality is deceptive and hides its desire to subvert the eugenics it appears to endorse.

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Stephen Fox seems to be the perfect embodiment of eugenic dreams. He has Nordic looks and the narrator, incorporating the eugenic conviction of the correspondence between physiognomy and moral characteristics, frequently elaborates on Stephen’s red, unruly hair and his powerful, pale, masculine body. Stephen’s determination to succeed as well as his superior intelligence render him a perfect example of the superior race, naturally predisposed to rule and conquer others. Moreover, the man expresses his breathtaking conviction in his superiority and higher humanity. He refers to blacks as “apes” and thus enacts Henry Fairfield Osborne’s belief in humanity’s dual genesis. His decision to marry a most beautiful aristocratic woman with skin “as fair as a Scandinavian” (79), whom he compares to “a good filly” (42), is in accord with the eugenic imperative to breed with the best genetic material possible. Fox’s dream upon arriving in Louisiana is in fact an imitation of the eugenic ideal future, which was heavily inspired by the myth of American destiny, American exceptionalism, as well as white American imperialism. Stephen’s thoughts upon reaching New Orleans encapsulate the dreamy and eugenic character of the whole novel: That was it, Stephen thought. To live like this—graciously, with leisure to cultivate the tastes and to indulge every pleasure—a man must be free of labor. Leave the work for the blacks. Breed a new generation of aristocrats. Yes, there was no doubt about it. New Orleans had it all over Philadelphia, which he called home since he came to America. (23)

In Yerby’s novel, the process of growing a generation of American aristocrats is aligned with the rise of the Harrow’s new mansion. The constructed house, the description of which takes up many pages of the novel, is like the newly established family: grand, perfect and white. The eugenic dream of perfection seems to be the key to Yerby’s novel: the immaculate organization of the narrative, the faithful imitation of the genre of the plantation romance as well as the construction of characters noted for their racial beauty, intelligence and exceptionalism have the potential of turning the novel into a piece of perfect and melodramatic fiction. Seen from this perspective, the fact that the novel enjoyed such a wide following in the 1940s may be proof of the bad literary taste of the popular reader or that reader’s rabid racism. Even though it is obvious that the novel catered to the tastes of Southern ladies, on numerous occasions it departs from its generic conventions, which paradoxically may have increased its readership. Despite the nearly complete identification with the eugenic dream of perfection, on several occasions the novel challenges perfectionist

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assumptions and saves itself from banality. Yerby complicates the narrative introducing unpredictability or plain contingency. Frequently it is chance, rather than rational planning that pushes forward the lives of the characters: Stephen meets his future wife by a mere accident and his fortune relies on one of the most unpredictable human activities: gambling. It is also by chance that he meets his future mistress, Desiree. In the same way that chance takes over the narrative, the reader becomes less and less sure of the predictability of the characters and their actions. The Fox family is subject to calamities, betrayals and mutual accusations. The fruit of what was to be the perfect marriage of Stephen and Odalie, his white-skinned wife, turns out to be a morally questionable Southern racist of lower intelligence than Stephen. At the end of the novel, the narrative tears down what it erected at the beginning. The image of the perfect plantation of the Foxes ruined by the events of the Civil War leaves no doubt as to the narrative intentions. If contingency is among those elements that make our lives human, we could argue that by stressing the presence of chance in his novel, Yerby “humanizes” his narrative. Superseding the mechanical in favor of the human, he also displays the limitations of the eugenic dream invoked in the novel. He depicts it as the raving of the white man who seeks total mastery over the human world. The eugenic vision is rejected for its failure to live up to the real world. Additionally, as the narrative points out, the physical world is characterized not only by contingency but also by hybridity. The seemingly perfect Fox family, which evokes the domestic ideal from eugenic fairs popular in the 1920s and 30s, is juxtaposed with inter-racial family. Falling in love with Desiree at one of the octoroon balls in New Orleans, Stephen impregnates the beautiful mulatto. Rather than becoming a degenerate exhibiting regressive characteristics, the offspring turns into a handsome and intelligent young man, while the passionate relationship between Stephen and Desiree contests the belief in the degenerate character of inter-racial liaisons. As a matter of fact, despite its surface acceptance of the Southern myth of white racial superiority, the novel celebrates hybridity. The narrative shows how the logic of hybridity and multiplicity eventually wins over the artificial world of unknowability, racial essentialism and separation. Stephen not only finds fulfillment in a relationship with a woman of a different race, but is himself an Irish bastard, born out of wedlock on the old continent. Additionally, he is unwittingly attracted to various forms of mixtures in biology and social life. He admires Creoles, who are descendants of French and Anglo-Saxon immigrants to Louisiana, is fond of a Palomino, a horse of rare coating resulting from cross-breeding, and is

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a loyal friend to Mike Farrel, the captain of a schooner and a member of a lower class, whom eugenicists would disqualify as either “feebleminded” or “degenerate.” By questioning the value of perfection in the human world over that of contingency and hybridity, Yerby dismantles another staple of eugenic anti-humanism: that of human inequality. The fact that Stephen ceases to treat blacks as belonging to a different species and finally acknowledges the humanity of all people living in the South is the case in point. His move away from the eugenic rhetoric of white superiority results in his critique of the war with Mexico in 1846, and the anti-slavery and antisegregation stand after the Civil War. When he is in his 50s, Stephen is approached by his daughter with a question about the character of the American nation; he gives an answer which prioritizes the logic of common equality: Never upon earth has the poor man, the commoner, had such freedom; never has there been so much respect for the essential dignity of mankind. The kings and captains revile it because as long as it exists their empires of exploitation, misery and degradation totter, and men everywhere have hope. (258)

Initially appealing, the outburst, however, has its limitations. Echoing St. Jean de Crévecoeur’s utopian fascinations with the American political system in his Letters from an American Farmer, Stephen is well-meaning but blind to the limited scope of the freedom described. When Stephen’s daughter Julia, who at that point is accorded the role of his conscience, provocatively asks, “Even Negroes?” (258), Stephen is not prepared to give a satisfactory answer. He mumbles something about exceptional black men “who will take their part in the nation” (259), but is aware of lack of courage to endorse fully into the ideal from the Declaration of Independence. He admits, “It was one thing to begin a line of thought, but quite another to follow it to its logical conclusion” (259). It is Meredith, a Northern white, who gives Julie the answer that her father failed to provide: “They are all children of God, no less than we! And the blackness of their skins cannot hide His image. They are our brothers whom we permit to be sold like cattle” (303). Meredith’s outburst is given additional prominence when one considers that the words are spoken by a young officer of the Union Army who is dying of his war wounds. The abolitionist utterance informed by Quaker religious fervor is constructed around the metaphor of the family. This shift away from a concept of American family based on heredity and common blood to one grounded in social bonding, solidarity and friendship deals the last heavy

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blow to the logic of nativist eugenics. The prioritization of the role of affiliation in the human world over that of filiation is probably the most radical achievement of Yerby’s novel. Having drawn attention to the totalitarian and racially essentializing nature of eugenic humanism, Yerby never goes as far as to question secular or Christian humanism. While critiquing the abuses of humanism, he does not reject it wholeheartedly. The author still retains what in retrospect may look like an old fashioned trust in the power of the human voice to change the universe. We could argue that Yerby’s persistence may be precisely the evidence for the existing anti-humanism: Yerby was caught up in a prison house of humanist discourse the way pre-war intellectuals were seduced by the power of eugenics. Whatever the explanation, Yerby wishes to retain the concept of man believing that it may strengthen the plight of blacks. In his intellectual tirades, the slave hero Inch, who rather than being reduced to the emasculated stature of Uncle Tom from Uncle Tom’s Cabin, is also given a prominent voice in Fox’s narrative, frequently resorts to the Enlightenment rhetoric of equality and human autonomy. In Yerby’s fictional world, Inch’s reliance on the concept of man is so strong that taking it away from him would make the black man vulnerable to the perverse eugenic logic of anti-humanism. Inch needs some conceptual framework in which “man” figures prominently, due to his, and Yerby’s conviction that if “you don’t have a man any longer—you’ve got a thing” (269). Yerby’s insistence on the preservation of humanist rhetoric codified in the Declaration of Independence, is proof of the subversive potential of The Foxes of Harrow. Offering itself at first as a confirmation of nativist and eugenic ideals, the novel leads the unsuspecting reader into regions far removed from the territory of Theodore Stoddard or Madison Grant. Cunningly, it introduces a vision of mankind in which the biological family is replaced by the family of friends. In this way it joins those works of popular culture of that time which undermined what they supposedly preached and thus softened the average reader hardened by the language of eugenic science. Unwittingly, Yerby’s best-seller prepares the reader of the 1940s for the rhetoric of the 1960s with its dream of the “sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave-owners (…) sit[ting] down together at the table of brotherhood” (King 1991: 219).

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Works Cited Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: A Harvest/HBJ Book, 1979. —. Men in Dark Times. New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1983. Childs, Donald J. Modernism and Eugenics. Woolf, Eliot, Yeats, and the Culture of Degeneration. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Currell, Susan and Christina Codgell, eds. Popular Eugenics: National Efficiency and American Culture in the 1930s. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2006. Eliot T.S., “Commentary,” Criterion, 12.46 (Oct. 1932): 78-79. English, Daylanne K. Unnatural Selections: Eugenics in American Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: an Introduction. Vol.1. New York: Random House, 1990. Galton, Francis. Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development. London. Macmillan and Co., 1883. http://books.google.com/books?id=0BdjGirCpugC&printsec=frontcove r&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false Goddard, Henry. H. The Kallikak Family. New York: Norwood Press, 1912. Hill, James L. “An Interview with Frank Garvin Yerby.” Resources for American Literary Study 21 (2), (1995): 206-239. Kevles, Daniel J. In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2004. King, Martin Luther Jr. The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1986. Mencken H.L. Prejudices. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002. —. “Utopia by Sterilization,” American Mercury 41 (1973): 399-408. Michaels, Walter Benn. Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1995. Reesman, Jeanne Campbell. Jack London’s Racial Lives: a Critical Biography. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 2009. Regal, Brian. Henry Fairfield Osborn: Race and the Search for the Origins of Man. Ashgate: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2002. Ross, Andrew. No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture. New York: Routledge, 1989.

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Schuyler, George S. Black No More. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1989. —. Black Empire. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1991. Sheehan, Paul. Modernism, Narrative and Humanism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Sollors, Werner. Interracialism: Black-White Intemarriage in American History, Literature, and LawOxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Stoddard, Lothrop. The Rising Tide of Color against White WorldSupremacy. New York: Charles Scribner, 1920. —. The Revolt against Civilization: the Menace of the under Man. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1922. Wiggam, Albert Edward. The New Decalogue of Science. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1923. Yerby, Frank. The Foxes of Harrow. New York: The Dial Press, 1946. —. “Why and How I Write the Costume Novel.” Harper’s Magazine (October 1959): 145-150.

NOT HUMAN ENOUGH: LEVINAS AND A CALL FOR NEW (OLD) HUMANISM ZLATAN FILIPOVIC UNIVERSITY OF GOTHENBURG, SWEDEN

The only absolute value is the human possibility of giving the other priority over oneself. —Emmanuel Levinas, Entre Nous

We have never been so brutally shaken by the maelstrom of our own history as in the last century, which promised emancipation and possibilities of infinite progress but brought on unprecedented bloodshed, devastation and loss of human life that have come to question the very meaning of humanism and the value of its merits. Humanism is often assumed to stand on the firm basis of rationality and autonomy of the subject. Its meaning seems to articulate the very development of the West from its Greco-Roman origins through the Renaissance, the Hellenic ideals of the early German Romanticism and the rise of secularism in the nineteenth century to the present-day values of liberal democracy. The notions of the autonomy of human reason, of free agency and integrity of the subject, seem supported not only by the critical heritage of the West but also by its firearms, by the violent history of its military and economic power whose might we have witnessed in the last few decades, marked by wars of aggression always relying on the justifying causes of freedom and dignity of the human being. These notions, together with the rear-guard systems of thought that back them up and that are distinctive of the imperialistic claims of the West, are in Levinas called into question. Might is called to justify itself, to account for itself and renounce its prerogatives for the sake of the vulnerability of the other person.

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To be human, in Levinas, is to be called to Goodness, “such that the other counts more than myself.”1 Freedom of the subject, as he suggests further, “is not the source of all right and meaning,”2 but rather the possibility of self-sacrifice and being for the other person. Elected by Goodness, one is “sobered up” to responsibility that for Levinas is manifested as the-one-for-the-other, as substitution even unto death. Humanity in me, as we shall see, is not what reaffirms or ensures the spontaneity of my being, but what calls it into question, what exposes the prejudice of my freedom and my self-righteousness. As a human, I discover myself not as an agent but in passivity, as pure for-another, as radical generosity of the Ego. The other person’s vulnerability, his mortality, comes as the effraction of my being, of my rights, and exposes the injustice of my selfish will. True humanness seems, in fact, to demand more than my capacity in Levinas. I am thus never responsible enough, I am never human enough. The presence of the other person, the unabated pathos of his need and vulnerability, reveals me to my own shame, to selfeffacement and indiscretion of my own presence. For there is a supplication to freedom that precedes mine and to respond to it is to be human. In this paper, I will point towards a certain inadequacy of liberal humanism to respond to the anxieties of human existence and questions of human relations, insofar as the rights and freedoms of the individual are usually already presupposed in such relations as the rational and unquestionable cornerstones of the notions of justice, equality, solidarity and political existence. It is in the context of Levinas’s writing that the shift from “rights” to “responsibilities” I will consider is most acutely articulated and where a call for new humanism that, as we shall see, is older than all the permutations the inheritance of its concept may have endured, emerges as a call to a renewed critique and a need for vigilance against the abuse of humanity in the very name of humanism that is all too readily appropriated to justify violence and questionable political projects. In this context, Levinas can also be seen as a powerful voice of a postEnlightenment critique both of the notions of freedom and autonomy of the subject that are put in question in the responsibility for the other person but also in terms of the humanist pre-critical naiveté about “the human nature” that is based on the metaphysics of the unified subject. Self1 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1969): 247. Hereafter cited as TI. 2 Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1985): 122. Hereafter cited as EI.

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relation and integrated consciousness are broken in Levinas by the infinite incumbent responsibilities for the other that devolve on the subject like an insolvent debt one can never settle in good conscience. The self with all its resources is here in a “permanent deficit,” as it cannot acquit itself of its obligations. The humanity of man, as Levinas argues in Humanism of the Other,3 is not defined by rationality or subjectivism of freedom, it is found instead in absolute humility and subjection of my freedom to the vulnerability of others. Indeed, for Levinas, the subject itself is constituted as singular or unique by an assignation of responsibility it cannot escape. The fact that no one can respond to the distress of others in my stead is what so imperially consigns me to my identity. My ipseity is thus structured as a response to the need of others. Being a response, the others are there before me and my assertion or declaration of subjectivity is already indebted rather than autonomous, determined by the other to whom and for whom I am accountable. The critique of humanism that is implicit in Levinas, however, does not testify so much to its failure as to the hypocrisy of the humanist projects based on reason, integrity, autonomy and the dignity of the subject, its naive rights of freedom and self-assertion often appropriated by the discourses of exploitation and used as a shameless pretext for virile imperialism and colonial aggression. Instead, for Levinas, it is as if humanism has not risen to the true height of what it means to be human and it is the status and meaning of this question that has been clouded by the liberal humanist projects based on the spontaneity of the subject as the creator of all meaning and the animating force of history. Liberal humanism, as Catherine Belsey writes in The Subject of Tragedy, is “laying claim to be both natural and universal.”4 It is sustained by its institutional commitment to safeguarding the spontaneity of the human agency and self-determination of the subject. This would be the mainstay of modern liberalism that has come to replace and signify the meaning of humanism today: The common feature of liberal humanism, justifying the use of the single phrase, is a commitment to man, whose essence is freedom. Liberal humanism proposes that the subject is the free, unconstrained author of meaning and action, the origin of history. Unified, knowing, and 3

Emmanuel Levinas, Humanism of the Other, trans. Nidra Poller (Chicago: Illinois UP, 2003): 27. Hereafter cited as HO. 4 Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama (London: Methuen, 1985): 71.

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autonomous, the human being seeks a political system which guarantees freedom of choice. Western liberal democracy, it claims, [is] freely chosen, and thus evidently the unconstrained expression of human nature. (Belsey, 8).

It is this concept of subjectivity as autonomous and free, which has dictated the meaning of humanism and historical progress since the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, that Levinas calls into question. Commitment to freedom, for Levinas, reaffirms only the natural inclination of any being to care for its own being, ensuring its own perseverance in being. This is the imperial ontological law of the conatus essendi, of one’s “right to be,” that reigns in the natural world. But, for Levinas, what defines humanness is the capacity to defy the conatus, to reverse the course of nature by committing oneself for the sake of another without concern for one’s own being, committing oneself beyond one’s being, in compassion of being for the other before oneself. For it is not enough to be; it is in our capacity to exceed the limits of our being and the imperial egotism of our needs and be better than being. Humanism is not a rear-guard work of freedom, as it were, it is what, in Levinas’ terms, abrogates the self-serving interests of freedom and the egotism of the conatus. Whenever subjectivity is cornered and stripped of its attributes, its social and cultural significations, its contingency, we might say, it relies on the notions of the biological and the natural to justify its claim on the world. It retracts back to its “essence” that it sees in its perseverance in being at all costs. The sole matter of its concern and its obligations becomes its struggle to be and what is left is the barbarism of the fittest. Indeed, in this time of political discontent, of general bankruptcy of the Western value systems whose dominance is rightly called into question, and the increasing fragmentation of the social bond, no longer able to offer any unified articulation of subjectivity, one of the currencies that always seems available to reaffirm our impoverished sense of identity and belonging is what Levinas, in “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism,” calls “the biological.”5 With “the notion of inevitability it entails,” the biological becomes not just “an object of spiritual life” but its very essence. “The mysterious urgings of the blood,” writes Levinas, “the appeals of heredity and the past for which the body serves as an enigmatic vehicle,” can organize a vicious racial rhetoric capable of stirring the most elementary passions. “Man’s essence lies no longer in freedom but in a 5

Emmanuel Levinas, “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism,” trans. Seán Hand, in Critical Inquiry, Vol. 17 (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1990): 69.

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kind of bondage… Chained to his body, man sees himself refusing the power to escape from himself” (69, 70). The impossibility of escaping one’s own skin to save it, the unpardonable fact of being riveted to oneself, is the absolute horror of racism. Political ideals become reduced to and consecrated in “the community of blood” (70) that one is defenceless to escape. In racism, the priority of biology over spirit is total and when the biological becomes the essence of subjectivity, the self is without recourse. It is no longer able even to repent or expiate itself, to wash away its sin, that is to say, its skin. In a time when such attitudes are proliferating everywhere, Europe in particular, in good conscience, and when self-interest in the guise of freedom has become a virtue that defines human subjectivity, the concern for the other person—his dignity and his uprightness—becomes not only an exigency of all thought but a call to Goodness. For, biology is not a destiny of man; it is rather that which reverses the course of its inevitability. Insofar as man is capable of self-sacrifice, of setting aside the imperial selfishness of his own needs and the freedom of his will for the sake of others, the natural law of conatus essendi, of persevering in being at all costs, that is at bottom the law of the free market and competition, cannot be what defines the essence of humanity. It is not, in other words, in the sovereignty of freedom that we find the source of the human agency but in responsibility for the other person that calls this sovereignty to account. It is this concern for the other person prior to any consideration of my freedom that for Levinas constitutes the supreme dignity of human subjectivity. Our ethical commitment is where we recognize ourselves as human. Humanism in Levinas is thus always burdened by the anguish and torture of bad conscience, of not having done enough to relive the distress of others, of never being human enough. This is because, as Jacques Derrida says in Aporias, “one must avoid good conscience at all costs.”6 Derrida’s imperative alerts us to the possibility of ethical somnolence and atrophy of our own humanity that, in complacency of good conscience, no longer feels the disturbance of the other who approaches me in need and whose suffering comes as an effraction of my right to inner repose. The disturbance I feel at the approach is the consciousness of my own injustice. In bad conscience my freedom comes to feel the prickly shame and arrogance of its own prerogatives.

6

Jacques Derrida, Aporias, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1994): 19.

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Derrida’s work, in particular his later writing, as we know, is very much indebted to Levinas and his idea of ethics as a disinterested concern for the needs of others without any consideration of reciprocity.7 In Levinas, the submission of the Ego and the tyranny of its rights that dictate its existence to the needs of others is unilateral, expecting nothing in return. The self is put out of the equation. Ethical commitment, in other words, is not an economy that in the end benefits the Ego; it exceeds all economic relations of exchange because it is purely for-the-other. This being-for-the-other of the Ego is the dawning of humanity in me, the birth of subjectivity. Humanism as responsibility for the other beyond myself or my being thus becomes what is eminently human. But it is not heroism in its glorifying recognition of man and his capacity for occasional greatness; Levinas defines humanism rather as “the most humble experience of the one who puts himself in the other’s place, that is, accuses himself of the other’s illness or pain” (HO, 62). Humanism is the compassion of being that is better than being and its entitlement to freedom. The other in all his vulnerability—in the very fact that he is mortal—solicits my being better than I am, my being open beyond myself and the concern for my own being towards Goodness. The other’s frailty and destitution, which Levinas often refers to as the frailty of “the stranger, the widow and the orphan”8 in order to alarm us to the essential precariousness of the human condition that for him is universal, calls me and the freedom of my Ego into question because I am not doing enough. Levinas wants us to sober up from intoxication with our own being that prevails and dictates our existence and recognize in the other person a supplication to freedom that surpasses our rights. Humanism of the Other, a collection of three essays by Levinas published in the latter half of the 1960s, could be seen as a response both to structuralism where “all that is human is outside… and everything in me 7

Cf. Jacques Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 2001); The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1995); Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault & Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999); Of Hospitality, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000); Acts of Religion, Ed. Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2002); Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault & Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2004), to name a few where Derrida’s powerful ethical landscape of the wholly other, of unconditional hospitality, of politics and of infinite justice unravels against the backdrop of sometimes explicitly Levinasian themes. 8 Cf. Totality and Infinity (77, 78, 215, 244, 251).

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is open” (HO, 62) but also to Heidegger and other existential conceptions of man that privilege freedom and the isolated Cartesian subjectivity in the attempt to account for the humanity and dignity of man. That “existence precedes essence,” as it does for Sartre, does not mean that man, in the complete absence of foundation, is condemned to his freedom without any available excuse or alibi. For there is something older than his existence, something prior to the Ego and the question of his freedom or nonfreedom for Levinas, and that is the presence and existence of the other, already calling me to justify myself and, in this justification, constitute my subjectivity. The “I” asserts itself first in and by the recognition of the claim the other makes on me, that is, in my responsibility. For Sartre, man is always in the making insofar as he chooses his own essence; for Levinas, the other and my responsibility for his mortality are there prior to the question of my freedom. For Sartre, to recognize anything prior as incumbent upon man’s existence is to be self-deceived or in “bad faith” that only dissimulates “man’s complete liberty of commitment,” as he writes in his famous lecture Existentialism and Humanism.9 For Levinas, the subject first comes to itself in the movement of bad conscience, one could say, where the claim of the other is already incumbent upon subjectivity as responsibility that precedes free commitment. The “I” is not an “I,” for Levinas, that asserts itself in freedom, but a “Here I am,” he says, thus already constituting itself as a response to the call of the other.10 “Here I am” is the dawn of subjectivity for Levinas. The subject is constituted as a response, unique and individuated precisely because no one can answer in its stead, irreplaceable thus in its responsibility and not in the expression of its freedom or its spontaneity. The subject is not an “Ego” or an agent acting upon the world in order to appropriate it according to its needs, but a “me,” an object in the accusative, already responsible and under obligation. As Levinas writes in Entre Nous: “Human subjectivity, interpreted as consciousness, is always activity. I can always assume what is imposed on me. I always have the capacity to consent to what I submit to and to put a good face on a bad situation. Thus, everything happens as if I were at the beginning; except at the approach of

9

Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism, trans. Philip Mairet (London: Methuen, 1948): 61. 10 “The word I,” says Levinas, “means here I am, answering for everything and for everyone.” Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1998): 114. Hereafter cited as OB.

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my fellowman.”11 The approach of the other signifies the deposition of my originative status and my authorship. However, my agency and my power are interrupted in the approach of what is essentially powerless. My need to secure the resources that shore up and solidify my continuing capacity to act, that is to say, my freedom in all its claims, is suspended in the approach of another who disarms me and all my resources by his vulnerability, by the strange force of his frailty. The other, as we have said, approaches me not as another will to dominate, as a force in the struggle for ascendancy that follows the natural law, but as poor and destitute, as one without support or shelter, and it is his poverty that overpowers me. It is the suffering and mortality of others that obligate me. This strange authority that can halt an approach of armies but that itself remains without power is the force of ethical resistance. Here, in the approach of my fellow human being, who comes not as a force opposing my freedom but as an ethical resistance that can offer no resistance and that puts itself radically in my power, Levinas continues, “I am recalled to a responsibility never contracted,” a responsibility I have never freely consented to, in other words, but that still imperially obligates and that is “inscribed in the face of an Other.” The face, for Levinas, what is most open and defenceless, puts a stop to the conatus and announces my humanity as responsibility. It is in the face, where my power is absolute because of the utmost exposure and nakedness of the face, that the natural law, which instigates war and oppression in order to secure the freedom of my being, reverts to charity of being, to its originary humility and compassion. It is the face of the other that reveals my humanity to me. “Nothing is more passive than this prior questioning of all freedom” that the face of another signifies. “It is an event that strips consciousness of its initiative, that undoes me and puts me before an Other in a state of guilt; an event that puts me in accusation—a persecuting indictment, for it is prior to all wrongdoing—and that leads me to the self, to the accusative that is not preceded by any nominative” (EN, 58-59). To be human is to be a persecuted subject under obligation, to be exposed to the exorbitant ethical demand. But it is this “fact of exposing oneself to the charge imposed by the suffering and wrongdoing of others [that] posits the oneself of the I,” for Levinas. To be me, in other words, is to feel the weight of the world that I support. The subject, says Levinas in his uncompromising terms, “is the one who, before all decision, is elected to bear all the responsibility for the World” (EN, 60). 11

Emmanuel Levinas, Entre Nous: On Thinking-of the-Other, trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav (New York: Columbia UP, 1998): 58, emphasis added. Hereafter cited as EN.

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It is time, therefore, for the ego cogito to be brought to account, to own up, to justify itself, to acknowledge all others on whose suppression its own freedom is based. Responsibility in Levinas’s terms, is “prior to all free engagement” (HO, 52). One is “elected” to Goodness before being free, before positing oneself as integrity and inviolable sovereignty of the person that the modern conception of humanism demands. Man, writes Levinas, [U]nderstood as an individual of a genus…persevering in being, like all substances, has no privilege that would establish him as the aim of reality. But man must also be thought from the responsibility more ancient than the conatus of substance or interior identification, thought from the responsibility that, always calling on the outside, precisely disturbs that interiority; man must be thought from self putting himself despite himself in the place of everyone… from the condition of hostage, hostage of all others, who, precisely others, do not belong to the same genre as me, because even for their responsibility I am, in the last analysis and from the beginning, responsible. (HO, 68)

Subjectivity, as a result, far from being the integrated consciousness of the ego cogito that masters the world, discovers itself in accusation from the outset and, for Levinas, it is constituted as “the impossibility of evading the assignation of the other without blame” (OB, 109). This is what Derrida in Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas calls “subjectivation,”12 the articulation of subjectivity in subjection, which, of course, questions the very possibility of liberal humanism that finds the dignity of man in the sovereignty of his freedom, rather than subjection, and in the supreme value of intentional consciousness associated with the will of the individual. Consciousness in ethics is not a movement of knowledge into a possession and mastery of the world. In ethics, the Ego loses his sovereignty and responds to the call of Goodness where the other counts more than myself. Now “good conscience” would destroy the very rectitude of the ethical movement where subjectivity is stripped of itself and of its self-assertion, and exposed to the other. Levinas even talks about the skin being turned inside out, the opening of subjectivity as “the stripping of the skin exposed to wound and outrage” (HO, 63). In other words, ethical consciousness is pure passivity, deeply traumatised by the other’s dereliction and exposure to wounding. It is sensitivity itself, vulnerable to the needs of others. Levinas thinks of it in visceral terms even as “hemorrhaging” for the other’s suffering (OB, 74). 12 Jacques Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault & Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999): 56.

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Humanism, for Levinas, is thus the responsibility for others that is older than the freedom of the subject or integrity of the Ego, “more ancient than the conatus of substance or interior identification.” For prior to “consciousness and choice,” he writes, “before the creature collects himself in present and representation to make himself essence, man approaches man” (HO, 67). Man is first moved to alleviate the need and destitution of the other, the other’s vulnerability and exposure to death— these are my responsibilities that are unilateral and absolute; they are not subject to the contingency of cultural significations for Levinas but rather foundation for all thought. This excessive concern for the other in Levinas can be articulated as a persistent demand for human solidarity that permeates his thought and that, in view of the last century and the searing wound its cruelties have left on the human psyche, appears to be the only exigency and justification of thinking. It is not ontology that Levinas sees only as “a philosophy of power” (TI, 46) and a primitive form of naturalism but ethics that is the foundation and basis for all thought. Ethics with its exorbitant demands opposes the naturalism of ontology and the perseverance in being of each being; it demands rather an escape from being and the horror of its truth and a projection towards being-for-the-other. It is in this for-the-other or “substitution,” as Levinas calls it, “where responsibility is said to the utmost” (HO, 75), that humanism can reclaim its meaning as care for the needs of others. However, the absolute primacy of the other in human relations, the other whom Levinas sees as “the Most-High” (TI, 34) and as pure transcendence that resists appropriation and cannot be reduced to a set of representative attributes without violence, implies also a profound questioning of our notions of solidarity and human relations. If my subjectivity is taken hostage by the vulnerability of the other prior to my freedom of commitment then human relation that liberalism assumes is founded on reciprocity is what Levinas implicitly puts in question. There is an originary asymmetry in ethical relation that for Levinas begins in the face-to-face encounter where the other’s vulnerability that the face immediately signifies precedes the concern for my own being and becomes the gravity of my being. This asymmetry that makes the other matter more than myself is also given as the very uprightness of the other person whose height signifies a transcendence I cannot equal or reduce to my categories. The asymmetry signifies obligation or immediate assignation of responsibility that otherwise would have to be imposed upon the relation it in fact constitutes. This originary inequality of human relation whereby the subject is elected to responsibility before commitment is

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the very origin of charity and justice: “The equality of all,” writes Levinas, “is borne by my inequality, the surplus of my duties over my rights.” And this “forgetting of self” and my rights in the face-to-face is what first “moves justice” (OB, 159). For Levinas, equality is not enough. It is only a temporary respite from the natural hostility and imperialism of the Ego trying to persevere in its being and ensure the freedom of its own enterprise. This equality is nothing but an arms race or a militant equilibrium gathering momentum and ready to flare up in violence and madness whose devastating power we have witnessed in the destruction and suffering of the last century. In other words, equality based on freedom and reciprocity as the political fate of man rather than on justice as the infinite responsibility for the other— infinite because it is for-the-other beyond my being—is, to evoke Levinas, “the path of peaceful violence, of exploitation, of slow death… [now] substituted for the passion of war” (EN, 30). Levinas demands infinitely more than equality of political justice and its institutions. Indeed, politics and equality come after the more ancient modality of justice that begins in the absolute charity of the Ego without reciprocity, an originary movement of consciousness towards the other without the economy of calculated returns or restitution. Without this infinity of justice or “ethical peace,” which can never be fully instantiated in body politic because this would sanction oppression and to which the political remains forever unequal, there would be no inspiration for politics to change what is, to be better than being.13 Where subjectivity of the Ego is affected by the needs of others to the point of substituting itself for their suffering in expiation, the passage from power politics that dominates our existence towards Goodness and beyond the political opens up. And it is in this space that humanity finally recognises itself. This would not be equality of recognised rights or a provisional ceasefire based on “pure security and non-aggression, which guarantees everyone their position in being,” and which rationality imposes to limit the violent nature of the conatus, but precisely humanity of the human that is “non-in-difference itself:” Non-in-difference that must be understood not as the neutrality of some disaffected curiosity, but [as] the “for-the-other” of responsibility. Response—a first language; primordial goodness which hatred, in its 13 This would be what Derrida in Adieu identifies as “a messianic politics” (74) or “the prophetic ideal” (78) in Levinas that overtasks the political with a commitment to be better than being, and that demands “political invention” (79). It is a question of ethical commitment that goes beyond the political, opening it thus to the possibility of transformation.

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attentions, already presupposes. Love without concupiscence, in which man's right assumes meaning; the right of the beloved, that is, the dignity of the unique. (EN, 194)

For the other before myself, or my non-indifference towards the other who remains other, who in each case is unique and cannot be synthesised to a common concept of identity, of ethnic, cultural or other belonging that would do away with dignity and rectitude of the ethical commitment, is the primordial meaning of social being. It is love that burns with unconsummated desire that, as Levinas says elsewhere, “nourishes itself on its own hungers” (EI, 92), because the other is never possessed in satisfaction but remains an alterity irreducible to my interiority and beyond my grasp, and in that it does, is my inspiration. What inspires must be other than me, that which keeps me open beyond my being. And if my subjectivity first emerges in my responsibility for the other person that surpasses the comfort of my being and freedom that reaffirms it, then subjectivity is not integrated or unified but cut open from the outset by the commitment it can never assuage without fault. In other words, humanity that no longer feels “the torsion of a complex,” as Levinas puts it, whenever it excuses suffering is no longer human (OB, 87). The meaning of intersubjectivity or human relation lies then “in a nonindifference of one to another, in a responsibility of one for another, but before the reciprocity of this responsibility, which will be inscribed in impersonal laws, comes to be superimposed on the pure altruism of this responsibility inscribed in the ethical position of the I qua I” (EN, 100). What is important here is the fact that the ethical relation is originary, not biology or naturalism of the conatus that would prevail in the bellicose state of nature prior to the social contract. This implies that what is most human, that is to say, when all the accouterments and predicates of being have been phenomenologically reduced, what is exposed as the bare bone of humanity is responsibility for the other as the “pure altruism” of the will. “It is prior to any contract,” Levinas continues, that would specify precisely the moment of reciprocity—a point at which altruism and disinterestedness may, to be sure, continue, but at which they may also diminish or die out. The order of politics (post-ethical or preethical) that inaugurates the “social contract” is neither the sufficient condition nor the necessary outcome of ethics. In its ethical position, the I is distinct both from the citizen born of the City, and from the individual who precedes all order in his natural egotism… (EN, 100)

Equality, in other words, is imposed to limit the infinite responsibility that precedes it in the ethical approach where the I, or “ipseity” as Levinas

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says, “is a hostage” (OB, 114) of the other’s vulnerability, irreplaceably called to respond and unable to shirk. Human relation is originally unequal. There is a gradient of answerability for all to subjectivity that is prior to humanist and political projects of co-existence and that is all too often overshadowed by the grand eloquence and the humanist rhetoric of freedom, of rights, and the human will as the unconstrained author of history. For Levinas, humanism is not human enough and his critique is a reflection of the failure of humanism to surpass the subject or individual and look for meaning in the approach of others: It is “the idea of subjectivity—unto substitution—responsible for all others and, consequently, the idea of defense of man understood as defense of the man other than me, [that] presides over what is called in our day the critique of humanism” (HO, 69, emphasis added). In Levinas, the questioning of the integrated notion of the subject, usually identified with critical posthumanist discourses of psychoanalysis and (post)structuralism, is motivated by a different departure from ethical obligation as “the idea of subjectivity unto substitution,” being for the other and expiating for another’s suffering, that is to say, by the compassion of being that opens the subject under responsibility from the outset. Liberal humanist projects grounded in the subjectivism of freedom and naïve fundamental rights of the individual are often used as a rhetorical alibi for the imperialistic ambitions of the West in order to secure access to untapped natural and strategic energy resources, or to ensure hegemony in the opening markets. Humanism, after all, has always been an empty signifier looking for another victim. This humanism that continues the grand narrative of progression and self-emancipation and that is driven by pure interest and vitalism of the conatus is what Levinas’ critique of humanism puts in question as the basis of contemporary discourse on humanity. This calls for a new—but older—humanism where to be human is to be sobered up to a responsibility that goes all the way and beyond the naturalism of being, where my fear and concern for the other is the gravity stronger than the fear for my own being. For what is it that defines our humanity? It is, once again, not our nature but precisely our ability to reverse its course. “My place in the sun,” as Levinas is often fond of quoting Pascal, “is the beginning and the prototype of the usurpation of the whole world” (EN, 231). This is what I am recalled to in the approach of the other and what reveals my humanity beyond my freedom and my right to be. “This way of understanding the meaning of the human,” continues Levinas, “the very dis-inter-estedness of their being… [begins by] thinking above all of the for-the-other in them, in which, in the adventure of a possible holiness, the human interrupts the pure obstinacy of being and its

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wars (231). It is thus my humanity that questions the prejudice of my freedom and the self-righteousness of my projects. To be human is to find oneself contested by the vulnerability of the other that reveals me to my own shame and indiscretion of my own insistence on being, of “my place in the sun.” The human in me reveals me on tiptoe, so to speak, “as being without daring to be,” says Levinas (EN, 143). This happens even as an everyday occurrence in that visceral, primitive flinch of a nerve that makes us avert our eyes in shame whenever a homeless person appears in our way, whenever we look elsewhere or do whatever we can to avoid his haunting eyes because they traumatise our self-assured legitimacy of being and reflect the burning wound of our shame. It is this shame, in fact, that reveals the originary impossibility of Narcissus, or, which amounts to the same thing, subjectivity under obligation. The responsibilities that devolve on the subject are too much to bear, they tear the subject apart—and this is what Levinas in Otherwise than Being calls the anarchic origination of subjectivity, where Goodness that elects me as a subject under obligation “does not proceed from any initiative of the subject” (OB, 166). Prior to my freedom or initiative there is already a supplication to freedom of the other that first moves me. The self in ethical relation is both anarchically dispossessed and disempowered by a resistance of what is, in fact, absolute vulnerability, and this is what constitutes “the adventure of possible holiness,” referred to earlier, that puts a stop to my power because of Goodness where the other matters more than myself. The point is that the conatus, the ontological epic of subjectivity in its struggle and effort to be, is not what justifies our right to be and what constitutes the meaning of our existence. The ethical is prior to this. Ethics trumps ontology, it is in spite of ontology, it can reverse its course through the possibility of substitution and self-sacrifice. Goodness, structured as the-one-for-the-other calls for self-sacrifice; which is also why Goodness is infinite or beyond being. This is why in Levinas, the other’s death is the first death, because my commitment to the other is infinite, which simply means beyond my being.14 To be human today is to be torn apart by increasingly disparate demands that constantly call for revision of our responsibilities. But this also means that the inherited concept of humanism is somehow insufficient to meet the specific requirements of our time. What Levinas 14

“It is for the death of the other that I am responsible to the point of including myself in his death…The death of the other: therein lies the first death.” Emmanuel Levinas, God, Death, and Time, trans. Bettina Bergo (Stanford, Cal.: Stanford UP, 2000): 43, emphasis added.

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offers is difficult. Subjectivity that consumes itself like cinders in order to respond to the destitution and vulnerability of the other, and not because the other’s demand is powerful but precisely by virtue of his vulnerability. “The uprightness of the face of the other”—the face being the birth of ethics for Levinas, is also the “uprightness of an exposure to death, without defence,” as Derrida notes in Adieu (121). It is the other’s frailty, in other words, that brings down the might of empires to its knees. “I am responsible for the other in that he is mortal,” writes Levinas (GDT, 43). It is the precariousness and mortality of the other that sobers me to my responsibility, not his power. The humanism that Levinas offers is a subjection to the helplessness of the other before any commitment to the truth that might constitute him. It is a subjection to the foreigner who is there before me and whose face, in its very destitution and nakedness, in its openness to assault, “to wound and outrage,” in Levinas’ more visceral terms (HO, 63), commands me and makes my freedom ashamed of asserting itself. The other’s face, as we have seen, is also what ex-poses me beyond the limits of my being, insofar as my responsibility prevents me to close in upon myself as a complete subject. To be responsible is to discover oneself contested and summoned to respond, to give account, to justify oneself. Where one could be a spectator, one becomes responsible and this is how responsibility and the exorbitant demand of ethics that constitutes our humanity calls into question the autocracy of the ego and the dominance of the subject. In the end, for Levinas, to be human is to say “Here I am,” which is a saying with inspiration, as he claims. He defines “the human” as “the return to the interiority of the non-intentional consciousness, to bad conscience, to its possibility of fearing injustice more than death, of preferring injustice undergone to injustice committed, and what justifies being to what guarantees it” (EN, 148). Subjectivity is for-others. And, in that it is, subjectivity is also, and by the same token, the recognition of its own insufficiency before the commitments that devolve on it—I am never responsible enough, I am never human enough. The more responsible I am, the more just I am and the more guilty I feel. With regard to the other, I am always indebted. The ethical demand is insatiable, which is also the very root of its infinity. So what is it that makes us human? What is it that we all share, if not precisely our mortality, our vulnerability. Responding to the face of the other, says Judith Butler in her reading of Levinas, means being “awake to what is precarious in another life, or, rather, the precariousness of life

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itself.”15 Humanity that rises up to the very dignity of its name responds to this precariousness that manifests itself as a call to peace in the very epiphany of the face. Vulnerability of others, their mortality, is my visceral concern. This is what we share, our helplessness. Because beyond all subject positions, all stances and assertions, all our ambitions, our vanities and declarations, the ego is, first of all, vulnerability. “The ego,” says Levinas, “from top to toe and to the very marrow is—vulnerability” (HO, 63). Vulnerability then would be, perhaps, what reveals us to one another as human. It certainly points to a world that is better than ours, more human, perhaps a world we cannot achieve, but this does not mean that one is free to give up trying.16

Works Cited Belsey, Catherine. The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama. London: Methuen, 1985. Derrida, Jacques. Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault & Michael Naas. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999. —. Aporias. Trans. Thomas Dutoit. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1994. Levinas, Emmanuel. Entre Nous: On Thinking-of the-Other. Trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav. New York: Columbia UP, 1998. —. Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo. Trans. Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1985. —. God, Death, and Time. Trans. Bettina Bergo. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000. —. Humanism of the Other. Trans. Nidra Poller. Chicago: Illinois UP, 2003. —. Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1998. —. “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism.” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 17. Trans. Seán Hand. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1990. —. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1969. 15 Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), p. 134. 16 As Richard A. Cohen writes in his introduction to Humanism of the Other: “Responsibilities are infinite, even if humans are insufficient for them. Rather guilt than guile, rather responsibility than risibility [...] In the words of Rabbi Tarfon, from Pirke Avot: ‘It is not incumbent upon you to complete the work; yet you are not free to desist it’” (xxxvii-viii).

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Sartre, Jean-Paul. Existentialism and Humanism. Trans. Philip Mairet. London: Methuen, 1948.

DIALECTIC OF THE ANIMALITY AND HUMANISM OF DEPTH FRANK WEINER1 VIRGINIA POLYTECHNIC INSTITUTE AND STATE UNIVERSITY

Philosophy is really there to redeem what lies in an animal’s gaze. —Theodore Adorno

Introduction: Towards a Metaphysics and Phenomenology of Depth A productive tension exists in twentieth and twenty-first century metaphysics and phenomenology between the ideas of animality and humanism. Rather than viewing these as antithetical forces, this essay seeks a lived dialectic residing in-between animality and humanism. On one hand there is Martin Heidegger’s metaphysical rejection of humanism and, on the other, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological embrace of

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I would like to thank Vic Moose, a Blacksburg Virginia based writer, for his close and helpful reading of an early draft of this essay. In a number of discussions he offered productive comments and specific readings among the widely scattered body of literature related to the subject of depth. It is to him that I credit the phrases “mortality avoidance” and “life after depth.” Associate Professor Steve Thompson, Chair of the Graduate Program in the School of Architecture + Design at Virginia Tech shared many invaluable insights on the relationship of man and animal, as well as, on the question of depth. His suggestion to study Bernini’s sculpture “Anima dannata” was most helpful in putting an image to the tension between humanism and animality. His comments about the luminosity and saturation of flat-screen computer images and the dead photo-realism of the “hard copy” were invaluable. Danielle Bersch, a graduate thesis student in the School of Architecture + Design at Virginia Tech provided remarkably insightful editorial comments on a late draft of the essay. Lastly, I would like to thank Roberto Cantú for his efforts and all the individuals involved in so graciously hosting the 2011 Conference on Modernity, Critique, and Humanism at California State University, Los Angeles. Opening photograph (above) by Prof. Frank Weiner, Kyoto, Japan.

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humanism. Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty actively engaged the question of animality in vastly different directions–the former towards the language of Being and the latter towards the ontology of Nature. This essay will also examine what stands at the root of these varying positions with respect to humanism and animality, and how do they relate to the question of depth.

In the Renaissance there was a re-discovery of how human beings live in political space. Through the techniques of perspective a feeling for depth could be expressed with great subtlety. The development of perspective gave an appearance to humanism in both painting and the “politics of the piazza.” A human world of depth was legitimized, so to speak, through the research on perspective by individuals such as Alberti, Brunelleschi, Piero della Francesca and Albrecht Dürer. In light of the long arc of the inventions of the Renaissance on perspective and spatiality in general the question becomes: what is the spatiality of Being for Heidegger, or of Nature for Merleau-Ponty? For the purposes of this essay, depth will be taken to mean a poetic understanding of Cartesian extension, and as a form of ontological profundity. In this way depth as dimension and depth as profundity are inseparable. Discoveries in twentieth century biology about animal life become important to Heidegger’s and Merleau-Ponty’s thinking about animality and its relation to human life. In the research of the biologist Jakob von Uexküll the spatial environment of animals was studied with a new delicacy. The unbridgeable gap between man and animal, given its most eloquent expression in the thought of Nietzsche, was later challenged by

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the unified theories of Being and Nature that Heidegger and MerleauPonty put forth. Heidegger sought to expand his notion of Dasain (the Being of beings) taking into account animality. Merleau-Ponty attempted to expand his ideas on the carnality of human Being in a perceptual world to include the natural wildness of animal life. Heidegger’s primacy of the essence of Being under the call to language made other questions, including the question of humanism, of secondary importance. Merleau-Ponty’s privileging of the existence of perception, in particular, the priority given to the sense of depth redirects philosophy towards a reconsideration of humanism. The question of depth seen in this context suggests there may be a dialectical relation between the metaphysics of depth and the phenomenology of depth. Metaphysics seeks the animality of depth at the risk of bracketing out its humanism. Conversely, phenomenology seeks the humanism of depth at the risk of bracketing out its animality. Heller-Roazen has written, “even when human nature and animal nature have been most strenuously distinguished, a region in which they cannot be told apart has continued to recur” (2007: 92). Perhaps depth is part of this indistinguishable region of crossing.

Humanism and Animality Humanism, when seen in the best light, is the scholarship of learning. Humanism turns whatever is deemed “proper to man” into a course of study (Giustiniani, 1985: 168). Given the frequent associations of the term humanism with the Renaissance in Italy during the Quattrocento, it is important to realize “whereas the term ‘humanism’ does not occur in Renaissance documents, the term ‘humanist’ appears quite frequently during and after the last decade of the fifteenth century, and it clearly denotes the professional teacher or student of the studia humanitatis, the humanities” (Kristeller, 1962: 21). The cycle of humanist studies included grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history, and moral philosophy, and excluded natural philosophy, metaphysics, medicine, mathematics, theology and jurisprudence (21). For Giambattista Vico a humanistic education would be framed by human wisdom (sapienza), prudence (prudentia) and eloquence (eloquentia). In Vico’s thought about humanistic studies the rhetorical capacity of language makes wisdom speak (Pinton and Shippee, 1993:1-9). The exclusion of classical metaphysics from humanism, operating in the thought of Merleau-Ponty, is an inheritance from the Renaissance humanist tradition, or what could be termed a dephilosophizing philosophy. Humanism is not a philosophy per se but has philosophical implications particularly in relation to the idea of existence.

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Lyotard claims that behind a consideration of what is proper to man there is also its “other,” the impropriety of the “inhuman” as evidenced in the incessant post-modern drive for research and development at all costs. In its darker aspect humanism, and even the human, can administer us in ways we may not be aware (Lyotard, 1988/1991). Massimo Cacciari sees in figures such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Robert Musil, and Adolf Loos a form of the human he terms, borrowing a phrase from Nietzsche, a posthumous people (Cacciari, 1980/1996). For Cacciari modern society is haunted by the visage of these ghostly presences. Martin Heidegger in his “Letter on Humanism” articulated a complex tension between animality and humanism. In this letter he turns the language of humanism against itself. He writes that humanism does not set the humanitas of man high enough and allows man to forget a responsibility to shepherd Being. The metaphor of the shepherd is significant in that it shows how enmeshed the lives of man and animals are at the level of Being. In the work of the shepherd Being itself is domesticated like an animal. Heidegger writes of humanism’s failure to see the proper dignity of man and its misinterpretation of the Greek idea of animal rationale—“that rising presence that can make appear what is present” (1954/1968: 68). Is man the animal that can make depth present? For Heidegger man is not so much a “rational animal,” the Latinized form of an older conception, but rather in the original Greek sense of an animal possessing language–and through language presence is made present. More precisely man is an animal possessed by language rather than the possessor of language. Animals are those beings not imprisoned by the house of language or the dilemma of living a bifurcated life of words and deeds. Heidegger’s letter is a questioning of humanism’s brazen rejection of the fundamental animality residing in human beings. This rejection is in part due to humanism’s privileging the political over the metaphysical. In the absence of metaphysical considerations animality no longer remains a primary defining quality of the human whether this be rational or political. For Heidegger any humanism that does not see questions of Being as primary is not humanism. In his lectures of 1929/30, Heidegger made a distinction between the essence of man and animal in terms of comportment towards a world, and behavior within an environment (Buchanan, 2008:65-114). To paraphrase Heidegger, the world to which man comports himself is manifestly open whereas the environment in which animals behave is girdled or encompassed. The humanity of the human rests upon an enigmatic openness towards the temporality of Being. The animality of animals is

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grounded upon an atemporal environmental captivity. Animals, we think, are not self-consciously and ecstatically touched by time (Buchanan 111). The absence of temporality, a hallmark of animality, is an impoverished condition of absorption in and by the environment. The persistence of a temporal horizon for man allows worlds to be formed and things to exist in the world. The animal in Heidegger’s thinking is “poor” in the world and this poverty is its environment, whereas man has the potential and responsibility to exceed the world by forming it and being entranced in a profound manner by things in the world. The question of depth understood within the horizon of time can be considered as one of environment or world and the possible rapport between the two. Are there three modalities of temporality: environmental, world, and the union of the two? One of the primary influences for both Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty for the idea of animality is the work of the biologist Jakob von Uexküll (Buchanan). Uexküll posited the existence of a perceptual effect-space of animals contained in a bubble. This bubble formed the environment or Umwelt (2010). For Heidegger the Umwelt of the animal could be contrasted to the Welt (world) of the human. Here questions of language and etymology become woven into consideration of Dasein and the being of animals. Merleau-Ponty took the thought of Uexküll towards a reconsideration of Nature and the notion of an explosion of the carnal aspects of Being into a unified whole.

The Anima of Depth and Breadth Both man and animal share a respiratory soul and are beings that breathe. We are pneumatic creatures (Sloterdijk 2011). The act of breathing is like inhaling and exhaling depth itself. Breathing is the most existential human action. The words we speak give voice to depth whereas animals have a primordial relationship to the air they breathe. The “call of the wild” is neither mute nor unintelligible. In the absence of rationality these calls are all the more meaningful and profound. In Berlin Night, the architect John Hejduk poetically described the profundity of the respiratory soul when he wrote: “I will tell you why I like the air I breathe, of course it keeps me alive, but there is a more important reason. It is because when I breathe the air in I breathe in all the sounds from all the voices since the beginning of time….thoughts escaping from the soul through the voice into the air which I breathe” (18).

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The ideas of animality and humanism are joined by the existence of soul or anima. When we say a lion is fierce or a fox is cunning we give them soulful characteristics and qualities. In this way we claim they possess a sensate soul. Ferocity and cunning are in the air they breathe. Humans and animals breathe in depth, and depth breathes in them. Depth is carried along by an animate wind, while simultaneously an animate depth carries the wind along. Depth is trumpeted silently with little outward signs. Perhaps it is not the wind that blows but depth itself in the guise of the wind. This trumpeting is the “sublimity of [a] silent transference” (Hejduk 18). There is an originary inhalation, and a terminal exhalation, in the first and last breath a human or animal takes. Two emotive motions seated in the depth of the soul bound mortality. This soulful motion takes place in depth and is the trace of depth’s existence like a permanent wind we barely perceive. On a cold winter day we can see our respiratory souls entering and departing our mouth and nostrils – like hot air filling and expelling from a balloon. A horse’s soul is present in its nostrils on a cold morning and that presence is depth. The nobility and heroism of the equine soul is best captured by Theodore Adorno’s hauntingly beautiful line–“Horses are the survivors of heroes” (Jäger 89). Paolo Uccello painted this idea in his famous battle scenes where horses literally fall to their demise in precise perspectival depth. If only animals could tell us what they know about depth we would be witness to extraordinary insights beyond the limits of our perception. We would, to borrow an idea from Thomas Nagel, be able to transcend inter-species barriers and construct a cross-species phenomenology of the subjective character of experience (Nagel, 1974). It is ironic that animals could know depth better, yet are able to tell us less. One only has to watch a deer move through a stand of rhododendron to see a remarkable spatial acuity and natural sense of depth without the accoutrements of culture. The animality of the human is best captured in the idea of the animal rationale and the idea of man as potentially a most intelligent animal en-framed by logos. The dialectically charged phrase “animal rationale” contains the seeds of both the union and division between animality and humanism. Heidegger writes man is a peculiar: [C]ombination of animality and rationality. But to Nietzsche, neither the nature of animality, nor the nature of reason, nor the essential unity of the two, is as yet determined....Therefore the two domains of being, animality and rationality, separate and clash. This rupture prevents man from possessing unity of nature and thus being free for what we normally call the real. (1954/1968: 68)

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For Nietzsche the clash was an unbridgeable abyss and the cause of a profound animus. This animus is perhaps best captured in a remarkable sculpture by Gianlorenzo Bernini entitled “Anima dannata” or “Damned soul.” This sculpture was influenced by the humanist writings about movements of the soul reflected in human gestures and mimicry. The disarrayed hair of the “Anima dannata” is emblematic of the absence of intellect and an expression of the latent animality that resides in the human soul (Posèq 168). In the Renaissance man was distanced from such metaphysical questions and was re-defined as a princely character in search of social dignity and political standing. In a sense the Renaissance was a wager against animality for humanity. The promise of humanism has never been fulfilled and remains an unfinished project not unlike Marxism. Merleau-Ponty’s humanistic phenomenology was strongly influenced by Marxism. Merleau-Ponty takes up the theme of humanism in a number of writings, particularly in his essay “A Note on Machiavelli,” and relates this to Marx’s political philosophy (1960/1964a: 211-223). The somewhat informal character of the title suggests that it is an aside in terms of the general thrust of his philosophy. However, Merleau-Ponty’s thoughts on the phenomenology of depth do not bracket out the political and historical spheres and, on the contrary, bring such considerations into the conclusive phase of his investigations. Political ideas such as class-consciousness are raised at the end of the Phenomenology of Perception under the subject of freedom. So one could say perception ends in freedom and freedom begins in perception. Freedom is understood as a uniquely human style or manner of being situated in the world grounded by historicity and futurity. The manner of man is freedom. Freedom is the perception of the pattern of humanity’s existential style in all its openness and indeterminacy. The structure of freedom is an individual’s specific consciousness of living within the more general field of sociality and institutions. This milieu is aptly seen by Merleau-Ponty as an atmospheric halo worn by the individual. One thinks here of the haloes above the figures in Masaccio’s painting of the “Tribute Money” in the Brancacci Chapel in Florence. Merleau-Ponty terms our involvement in the world an “inextricable tangle”: “Taken concretely, freedom is always a meeting of the inner and outer – even the prehuman and prehistoric freedom with which we began and it shrinks without ever disappearing altogether in direct proportion to the lessening of the tolerance allowed by the bodily and institutional data of our lives” (1962: 454). In his view an effulgent upsurge of freedom depends on our capacity to develop a phenomenology of the statistical. This shining of freedom

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counters the de-humanizing concept of probability by relying instead on the steadfastness of the particular thing or individual actually existing and concretized in a moment of time. Freedom stands irrefutably in a way that statistics are incapable of standing. In retrospect Merleau-Ponty underestimated the violent character of statistics and how its methods in and of themselves serve to countermand the soul of any life. An overreliance on statistics serves to make our life flat and soulless. Merleau-Ponty’s inclusion of politics provides his phenomenological studies a political reach relative to questions of the consciousness and acquisition of human freedom within social settings. His situated phenomenology is political. The reaching back to Machiavelli, Hegel, and Marx grounds Merleau-Ponty’s studies of perception amidst a historicalpolitical consciousness. The thickened embodied space of MerleauPonty’s philosophy of perception is imbued with a humanistic character. In other words, the politics of humanism is not bracketed out of phenomenological considerations, as it is in the enmattered thought of Husserl. For Merleau-Ponty politics becomes perceptible and something that is felt bodily in the spatiality of depth. He was in a very real sense a humanist of depth.

Animality of Depth To paraphrase Aristotle: the function of man is an activity of soul in accordance with reason. It is the activity of soul that gives reason its depth. Rarified reason is tempered by the soul, reason’s essence. Aristotle’s shorter works on the natural science of animals are collected under the title The Parva Naturalia. They are implicitly and explicitly grounded by his work on the human soul known as De Anima. In the opening chapter of The Parva Naturalia, entitled De Sensu, as translated by W.D. Ross, Aristotle writes: “Having now definitely considered the soul, by itself, and its several faculties, we must next make a survey of animals and all living things, in order to ascertain what functions are peculiar, and what functions are common to them. What has already been determined respecting the soul must be assumed throughout” (436a). Aristotle establishes a compelling analogy between human beings and animals at the level of the soul and its affectations, such as passion, gentleness, fear, pity courage, joy, loving and hating. These affectations are immaterial formed essences. In the opening passage of De Anima, Aristotle writes that knowledge of the soul is the most honorable and precious of all knowledge. Throughout De Anima he offers a number of possible answers to the question “What is soul?”

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“[I]n some sense the principle of all animal life”. “[T]he first grade of actuality of a natural body having life potentially in it.” “[T]he definitive formula of a thing’s essence.” “[T]he cause or source of the living body.” (McKeon, R.,1941: 535, 555, 561 )

The simultaneity of actuality and potentiality is the hallmark of a sentient soul. This idea is best captured by the Greek word entelecheia, meaning continuing in a state of completeness or being at an end. Entelecheia is thought to be a playful punning, after the style of Plato, of the Greek work entelecheia, meaning continuity or persistence. Entelecheia superimposes completeness upon continuity (Sachs, 2005). It is as if Aristotle might have written at the outset of De Anima the sentence: What has already been determined respecting animals, must be assumed throughout with respect to humans. The book on the soul and the books on animals appear to be one continuous discussion. Following upon Aristotle’s definition of man as animal rationale, the definition of an animal could be an irrational man or a human not possessed by language. Consideration of the human soul gives depth to Aristotle’s study of animals and his search for the attributes belonging to all animals. Of these general attributes he lists sensation, memory, passion, appetite, desire, pleasure and pain. He then sets out four pairs of activities common to all living things and peculiar to some species of animals; waking and sleeping, youth and old age, inhalation and exhalation, life and death. These four pairings seem to define the very conditions of a soulful mortality. In every sense of the meanings of the word depth, we are born into depth and die out of depth. Vico’s two basic human institutions–birth and burial–all poetically occur within senses of depth. Vico’s formulation verum ipsum factum, the true is controvertible to the made or only that which we make can be true, is grounded by the idea of depth. We make in depth and cannot make otherwise. If truth for St. Thomas Aquinas is the adequatio of thought and thing, depth for Merleau-Ponty is the inhabitation of thought and thing. Making is about the search for the true within the lived experience of depth. Human institutions within which things are made are institutions founded in depth. Depth is an institution, perhaps the first inaugural institution upon which all other institutions are grounded. Such institutions are fundamentally originary rather than traditional. It is not possible to have an authentic institution lacking depth. The word depth taken in a non-spatial sense means thought having a foundation or ground. One could say that the project of phenomenology, relevant or not to our current situation reveling in surface and scripting, is

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to give depth and perhaps even more importantly profundity back to philosophy.

Humanism of Depth It may at first seem a somewhat odd alliance Merleau-Ponty makes between his thought and Machiavelli’s. The reputation of the sheer ruthlessness, or what Merleau-Ponty describes as a misread “immoralism” attributed to Machiavelli’s thought seems to be the antithesis of MerleauPonty’s more accommodative thought; however, it is certainly ambiguous whether the perception Merleau-Ponty speaks of has a moral dimension. Machiavelli deals with the politics of collective life and Merleau-Ponty with the phenomenology of perception. In both cases there is an avoidance of accepting dogmatic principles of a stagnant Idealism, whether it be moral or otherwise, in favor of a nuanced concern for acting and doing. Merleau-Ponty is attracted to Machiavelli’s “radical humanism” because he senses an understanding that humanity is “alone in its order” and its actions unfold historically rather than by chance or fate. He further appreciates the need for a morality that is peculiar to politics and one that may curiously appear to value cruelty over compassion. For MerleauPonty humanism is: “A philosophy that confronts the relationship of man to man and the constitution of a common situation and a common history between men as a problem, then we have to say that Machiavelli formulated some of the conditions of any serious humanism” (1964: 223). How can humanism in Merleau Ponty’s sense of the term relate to the questions of depth? Is there a politics of depth? The Italian piazza is a particular manifestation of how a perceptual space can simultaneously be a political space (Caniffe 2008). The topographical wedges demarcated on the floor of the Campo in Siena, Italy, are representations of familial political powers. Each wedge exerted pressure upon the others in the raucous communal life of medieval Siena. In this democratic space the pressure (political and spatial) can be read, perceived, and felt. As the Italian piazza becomes more explicitly perspectival in Gubbio (Piazza Grande), Vigevano (Piazza Ducale), and Pienza (Piazza Pio), political space is given a new definition (Borsi and Pampaloni, 1975). There is an intertwining taking place in these spaces in which it is impossible to separate political life from perceptual life. The well-known paintings of “Ideal Cities” hanging in Berlin, Baltimore, and Urbino depict a seamless joining of perspectival and political space. The history of Italy since the Renaissance is the history of the politics of perspective. Political

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and perspectival space have frequently, in a less than Ideal fashion, mixed like colliding weather fronts.

Poetics of Depth Is there a relation between depth and poetics? Is this relation artificially produced or naturally existent? The unity of artistic creation and nature is at the heart of the question of depth. In the work of the artist a fusion occurs between artifice and nature. The Japanese haiku poet Matsuo Basho writes in The Records of a Travel-worn Satchel: [A]ll who have achieved real excellence in any art, possess one thing in common, that is, a mind to obey nature, to be one with nature…. Whatever such a mind sees is a flower, and whatever such a mind dreams is of the moon. It is only a barbarous mind that sees other than the flower, merely an animal mind that dreams other than the moon. (1966: 71-72)

The first lesson for the artist is, therefore, to learn how to overcome such barbarism and animality, to follow nature, to be one with nature. A key to attaining this difficult unity is in understanding how depth can be technically known and emotionally depicted. In 1845, Honoré de Balzac, in part of what would become La Comédie Humaine, published a short story about depth called “The Unknown Masterpiece.” The story contains important lessons about the existence and significance of depth for the artist and poet. The action of the story begins with a young man nervously entering Master Probus’s studio. This studio is a room where “daylight did not reach the black depths of the corners of the vast room” (1899:8). Much of this short story revolves around a Master offering his views about a painting representing Marie the Egyptian. In the ensuing discussion depth is described as a kind of warm breath emanating from the soul of the painter that animates a painting and gives it a sense of palpitating life. To depict depth one must feel the air blowing around things, the blood flowing through the veins of human figures, and a sense of the motion of life. The young man learns that the geometric construction of perspective is a necessary but not sufficient condition to capture a sense of life. A figure painted without a sense of depth is “cold as marble” and not touched by the “heavenly flame.” Through his characters, Balzac tells us that in painting perspective technique may be perfect but there can still be a lack of the feeling of depth. In a memorable line the Master says “In order to be a great poet it is not enough to know syntax” (1899:10). The formal and syntactical nature of perspective needs the supplementary but crucial ballast depth

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provides. If perspective is a “symbolic form” as Panofsky theorized, the appearance of the symbol only becomes visible in depth. Balzac writes “Life and death contend together in each detail: here it is a woman, there a statue, and there a corpse” (1899:10). There are two Renaissance paintings, The Dead Christ in the Tomb (1521-22), by Hans Holbein the Younger, and The Dead Christ (c.1480), by Andrea Mantegna, in which depth itself is lapsarian (from the Latin lapsus, to fall). In viewing these paintings we witness not only humanity’s but also depth’s fall from grace. In highly compressed spaces and times that are table-like and coffin-like, there is a poetics of depth that is striking–so little room, so much depth. In the paintings it is difficult to untangle depth as an epiphenomenon of perspective and depth in relation to the dead body of Christ. This is not simply any body but the body of Christ that in the Resurrection rises upwards to the heavenly kingdom. The phenomenology of depth and the theology of depth are intertwined. If depth exists at all in these paintings there seems to be little of it and that is why we can sense depth’s existence. Christ is not depicted in a room but in a highly condensed space–a kind of original depth before depth. It is a depth just larger than a body but barely large enough to constitute a room. It is a depth just past the boundary of the body. The purposive spatial crowding reminds one of the works of the sculptor Anish Kapoor where the sculpture is larger than the room it occupies (2009). The figure in both paintings of the dead Christ makes us believe that after life there is no depth, or that life is the presence of depth and death is its absence. Kristeva reminds us through the character of Prince Myshkin in Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot that viewing the painting by Holbein the Younger can cause one to literally loose one’s faith (Kristeva 1987/1989:107). The loss of faith and the extinguishing of depth are fundamentally related. This is why mourners tend to rely on faith after the loss of a loved one. One tends to turn towards the solace of religious faith in moments of monumental loss. Here the primordial apriori intuition of space as depth is related in a fundamental way to the idea of the weight of anguish and the burden of sorrow. Depth is in a neo-Kantian sense a fundamental mode of causality, perhaps even more fundamental than space or time. Depth is transcendental sorrow.

Gravitas of Depth There is a claustrophobic lack of breathable atmosphere in the paintings by Holbein and Mantegna that presses down heavily upon the wings of depth. The paintings are laden with the heaviness of air. This

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unbearable weight of depth is intensified in the presence of the corpse of Christ ( Jean-Luc Nancy, 2008). Here the invisible gravitas of perspective is present. Depth is the gravitas giving existential weight to perspective. Perspective in itself is without weight–a legitimate construction without force. The up-and-down of depth constitutes and grounds the in-and-out of perspective. Perspective is a technique and depth is a phenomenon. Techniques can be taught, phenomena cannot. Phenomena rise and fall. If perspective is a symbolic form it is because depth grounds and skies perspectival techniques of symbolization. Our eyes can sense the weight not only of the corpse of Christ but also of the atmosphere itself. Perceived space is a weighted phenomenon. If perspective for Dürer is a seeing through, what is the medium that refracts the seen through? To draw a perspective is to forget about the truth of depth and cut through it. Perspective operates unwittingly in an atmosphere laden with depth fundamentally meteorological in nature. In this sense depth has a color and temperature that is remarkably specific to particular places and times. Is there a meteorology or science of depth and might this science of depth be aesthetics itself?

Science of Depth In this sense one might recall the first and still employed classifications of clouds established by Luke Howard in his “Essay on the Modifications of Clouds,” published in 1803 (Slater 1972). In reading this book, Goethe became fascinated with how its author was able to bestow “form on the formless and a system of ordered change on a boundless world” (Slater 120). What is true for clouds may also be true for depth to an even greater extent. Goethe in a poem dedicated to Luke Howard writes that in Howard’s study of clouds he “grips what can not be held” (120). Goethe himself saw in the various shapes of clouds “rolling elephants, menacing lions, camels that became dragons and armies marching to their dissolution” (Slater 133). Goethe ascribed to the phenomenon of clouds a feeling of animality rendered sensuously visible. In observing clouds, both Howard and Goethe were like an animal at one with nature–a Naturmensch (133). Goethe’s scientific observations on weather ground phenomena in tellurian or earthly terms (Miller 1988) are a result of the meeting of two forces amidst the rarefied matter of air—the attraction (gravity) and the force of warmth (expansion). These two pressures are mutually determined correlates. Goethe’s observations on weather suggest that the phenomenon of depth may also have a telluric and gravitational dimension. A balloon

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inflated with air contains a miniature cosmic atmosphere. Watching a balloon inflated with helium float upwards through the sky is an image of depth passing through depth where two atmospheres are divided by the thin tympanum of a rubber wall. Here depth is decidedly vertical, reminding one of the original Greek meanings of the term meteorology as the study of that which is “high in the sky.” Depth was looked up at, not through. Our modern world-view reductively reduces depth to a horizontal phenomenon. The movement of a submarine in deep ocean water or of a jetliner high in the sky is a dance of depth. It is also on some occasions a dance of death. Depth and death go hand in hand. Depth is a kind of cabin pressure without the cabin. Depth is the perception of pressure either physical or psychical. This condition of pressurization is also present in the meandering of soap bubbles caught in a gentle wind. A child blowing soap bubbles is able to naively experience the intoxicating charms of depth. The magical spell of depth follows us through life and into death like a macabre dance.

Postscript: animality and humanism Thus, man has in his skull two hollows which are never filled up…these hollows are the remains of the animal skull, which are found on a larger scale in inferior organization, and are not quite obliterated in man, with all his eminence. —Eckermann, Words of Goethe.

Even a partial and cursory look at the historiography of the relationship between the ideas of animality and the human demonstrates a wide divergence of views. Goethe saw man as one plant among thousands and one that comprises all the diverse forms of life on earth. What for Goethe was a natural morphological unity became for Nietzsche in Thus Spake Zarathustra an unbridgeable abyss between the animal and the superman. As much as one desires to construct a dialect of animality and humanism, there is a real possibility the two terms comprise a philosophical “empty set” and there is no middle term. However, this emptiness is not without significance. In the mathematics of set theory an empty set is a set without members, but a set nonetheless (Jech 2009). An empty set philosophically considered presents a quandary because the emptiness of the set does not deny the importance of its existence. This may be the case with the set animality and humanism, which stands as a prime example of a phenomenological empty set.

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Animality may be innate in all beings, however humanism, spawned by a desire to know, is primarily acquired through education and may not be innate. One is born an animal and becomes a humanist. The weakness of humanism is its incapacity to remember and face animality and its monsters. It is not a case of the superiority of humanism over animality but rather the possibility that humanism is a re-visioning of the primal visioning of animality. Animality is a first draft of perception followed by a second draft - humanism. These two drafts constitute a still developing parallelism of perception rather than a unity. The crossing of the two tracks of perception, if this is at all possible, may reside in the individual willing to confront a life face-to-face with others. The consummation of our face-to-face existence through space and in time is best exemplified in the congress of sexual union. Language, perception and sexuality are heightened by the acknowledgment of what can be termed “mortality avoidance.” In the act of perception we momentarily elude our mortality through a poetics of elision. We see sublimely with our eyes shut making the confrontation with our mortality indirect rather than direct. Such poetic acts momentarily suspend our mortality and are redemptive in Adorno’s sense of the term. Heidegger reminds us that we are the animal that confronts face-to-face. He adds that in our face-to-face existence we have a capacity to think and this call to reason is the perception of what is and what ought to be. This intelligible and sensible confrontation is perception and provides a way to construct the dialectic between a metaphysical animality of depth and a phenomenological humanism of depth–what could be termed the bios of depth. Depth may be a bridge between the bios theoretikos (vita contemplativa, contemplative life) and the bios politikos (vita activa, active life)–a distinction at the heart of the thought of Hannah Arendt (1958). In The Troubadour of Knowledge, Michel Serres seeks a phenomenal reconciliation between the right-handed and left-handed. One turns the other into a cadaver of sorts through incipient neglect simply dragging the other behind. In the mistaken and absolute division of right and left the possibility of a carnal directionality is rejected through the elimination of one or the other primary directions. If humanism is on the “right,” and animality on the “left,” there may be a region or chiasmic crossing of these two directions of perception. This chiasma is the threshold between the bodies and brains of animality and humanism. Merleau-Ponty leaves the door open to the importance of depth as the most existential and profound dimensions of space, a door we seem to be slowly closing like the lid on a coffin. This leaves open three related questions: is there “life after depth,”

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Photograph courtesy of Prof. Steven Thompson, Villa Rotunda, Vicenza Italy, Andrea Palladio

can there be life in the absence of profundity, and can there be depth in a flat-screened world? One possible way to address these questions is to develop physical correlates capturing the luminous and saturated qualities of the flat-screen images of the computer display. The loss of depth in our

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digital age is due to our inability to convert digital luminosity and saturation into physical luminosity and saturation. This would lead to a new understanding of depth–like a thin slice through a painterly shadow.

Works Cited Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958. Buchanan, Brett. Onto-Ethologies: The Animal Environments of Uexküll, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Deleuze. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008. Basho, Matsuo. The Narrow Road to the North and Other Travel Stories. Trans. Nobuyuki Yuasa. London: Penguin Books, 1966. Boris, Franco and Gino Pampaloni, eds. Monumenti D’Italia: Le Piazze. Novara: Instituto Geografico De Agostini, 1975. Cacciari, Massimo. Posthumous People: Vienna at the Turning Point. Trans. R. Friedman. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1996. Caniffe, E. The Politics of the Piazza: The History and Meaning of the Italian Square. Hampshire, England: Ashgate Publishing Ltd, 2008. Dennett, D. Consciousness Explained. New York: Little Brown and Company, 1991. Giustiniani, V. R. Homo, Humanus and the Meanings of ‘Humanism’. Journal of the History of Ideas, 462:(1985): 167-195. Heidegger, M. What is Called Thinking? Trans. J. G. Gray. New York: Harper & Row, 1968. —. Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings. Ed. D. F. Krell. New York: Harper & Row, 1977. Hawes, L. Constable’s Sky Sketches. Journal of the Warburg and Courtald Institutes. 3, 2 (1969): 344-365. Hejduk, J. Berlin Night. Rotterdam: Nai Uitgivers Publishers, 1993. Heller-Roazen, D. The Inner Touch: Archaeology of a Sensation. New York: Zone Books, 2007. Ives, G. B., trans. The Novels of Honoré De Balzac. The Human Comedy, Philosophic Studies, Vol. III, Philadelphia: George Barrie &Son, 1899. Jäger, L. Adorno: A Political Biography. Trans. S. Spencer. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. Jech, T. “Set Theory.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2009 Edition. Ed. Edward N. Zalta. Retrieved on May 30, 2010 from

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Kapoor, Anish. Annish Kapoor: Memory. Exhibition Catalog. Guggenheim Museum. New York: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 2009. Kristeller, P. O. “Studies on Renaissance Humanism During the Last Twenty Years.” Studies in the Renaissance, 9 (1962):21. Kristeva, J. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. Trans. L. S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989. Leatherbarrow, D. “Space in and out of Architecture.” Architecture Oriented Otherwise. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2009. London, J. The Call of the Wild. New York: Macmillan Company, 1903. Lyotard, J.-F. The Inhuman: Reflections on Time. Trans. G. Bennington and R. Bowlby. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991. McKeon, R., ed. The Basic Works of Aristotle. New York: Random House, 1941. Merleau-Ponty, M. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. C. Smith. London: Routledge & Kegan, 1962. —. Signs. Trans. R. C. McClear. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1964. Miller, D., trans. Goethe: Scientific Studies. Vol. 12. Suhrkamp Edition in 12 vols. New York: Suhrkamp Publishers, 1988. Nagel, T. “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” Philosophical Review,83:4 (1974): 435-450. Nancy, Jean-Luc. Corpus. Trans. Richard A. Rand. New York: Fordham University Press, 1973. Posèq, Avigdor W. G. “On Physiognomic Communication in Bernini.” Artibus et Historiae, 27:(54): 161-190. Ross, W. D., ed. The Works of Aristotle: Translated into English. (XI Vols.). Volume III. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1931. Sachs, J. “Aristotle: Motion and its Place in Nature.” The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved November 18, 2009, from

Serres, M. The Troubadour of Knowledge. Trans. S. F. Glaser and W. Paulson. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1997. Slater, A. W., F.R.S., F.R.S. Luke Howard. Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London. 27: 1 (1972):119-140. Sloterdijk, Peter. Spheres: Bubbles, Volume 1. Trans. Wielan Hoban. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2011. Uexküll, Jakob von. A Foray into the World of Animals and Humans. Trans. Joseph D. O’Neil. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.

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Vico, Giambattista. On Humanistic Education: Six Inaugural Orations, 1699-1707. Trans. Giorgio A. Pinton and Arthur Shippee. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993.

MARXIAN HUMANISM: FROM THE HISTORICAL VIEWPOINT HONGMEI QU JILIN UNIVERSITY, CHINA

The relationship between Marxian Philosophy and Humanism is a vital problem in Marxist research. Disputes on this topic have never ceased after Marx’s death. The intellectual history of interpreting Marx’s humanist theory is full of twists, turns, and controversies. The reason for this is twofold. On the one hand, Marx himself produced such a multitudinous body of writing that has confounded those seeking coherence in his work. His ideas on Humanism were mixed with his ideas regarding other issues. And most perplexingly, Marx changed and broadened his scope of philosophical inquiry during his lifetime. Commentators dispute with each other on the questions mainly about (i) whether there exists a break or shift in Marx’s thought; (ii) if so, how many shifts can one identify in Marx’s lifetime; and (iii) which period is typical in expressing Marx’s views on Humanism. Accordingly, Marx’s Humanist theory was interpreted in quite a number of ways. All of them may boil down to the problem of continuity or change in his thought. Diverse interpretations make research on Marx’s moral philosophy richer and more colorful, and, at the same time, more intricate and puzzling. In this essay, I begin by illustrating four kinds of interpretations concerning the relationship between Marxian philosophy and Humanism in the history of Marxist research. Then, I argue that the fundamental reason for the controversies among different interpretations is that they hold different ideas regarding Marx’s material concept of history, and that it is only from the historical viewpoint (a philosophical viewpoint originated from historical materialism) that Marx’s philosophy can be understood in the sense of Humanism. I do so through rereading Marx’s literature on Humanism and Historical materialism, and by reconsidering the theoretical logic of Marxian thought. I then conclude that we can arrive at a kind of new Humanism from Marx’s thought with the principle of historical viewpoint.

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I. Four Existing Interpretations on Marxian Philosophy and Humanism The first interpretation comes from Marxist Humanists. They believe that Marxian philosophy is a humanist theory that is shown in his critique on the inhuman conditions that men suffer under capitalist exploitation, as outlined in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (EPM). And they believe that Marxian Humanism has the same character as mainstream humanism of the Kantian and Hegelian sense. Eugene Kamenka, for instance, argues that "Marx’s mature writings notoriously eschew any direct consideration of ethical and philosophical questions; it is in the early writings and private drafts that we can find the key to his ethical views and their puzzling place in his mature beliefs" (1962: 11). In Kamenka’s view, the distinction between freedom and alienation was the ethical leitmotif of Marx’s philosophical and political development, which was consistent over his lifetime. History is the process of transcending alienation constantly, and it is also the process of approaching true freedom (that is, Communism) gradually. Hence, Kamenka proposes that there should be two demerits in Marx’s view. One is Marx’s prediction of a future society. Kamenka argues that it is right for Marx to insist that socialism be born out of capitalism, but that he is wrong in believing that Communist society is the result of the catastrophic collapse of capitalism. In fact, "Communist society springs from the very ideology fostered by capitalism" (1962: 8). The other demerit is Marx’s rejection of morality in his later writings. Kamenka explains that in the German Ideology (GI), Marx proclaims his materialist interpretation of history and rejects philosophy and morality as an ideology, a subordinate guaranteed by the economic foundation of society, which leads to a radical break in the development of his thought. Kamenka believes that, after the break, Marx is not as sapient as he was in his early work, and the servile character of morality in Marx’s idea prevents it from operating in the development of human society as a positive element. Hence, Kamenka suggests that we should not pay much attention in thinking about Marx’s thought as a whole, that Marx’s later theory should not be an organic part of his real contribution to philosophy. Different from the Marxist Humanists, Scientific Marxists insist that Marx constructs a revolutionary view of social change with the science of history, viz. historical materialism, which paves the way for Marx’s later works, especially, the three-volume Capital in a thinking mode of

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Anti-humanism. For example, Louis Althusser believes that the most important character in Marxism as a science is the efficacy of a structure in relation to its elements, and that Humanism is a naive and unproblematic conception of language and consciousness. Althusser argues that the real stage-directors, viz. the relations of production, are non-human, objectified structures, but that the Marxist Humanists reduce the social relations into human relations, which makes Humanism unproblematic, meaning nothing but an illusory belief in the autonomy of human beings as thinking subjects. Based on such a principle, Althusser proposes that Marx’s entire body of work is not a coherent whole, but contains an epistemological break between the earlier humanistic writings and the later scientific texts. To him, it is obvious that there is a difference in problematic or theoretical framework between the two groups of writings divided by the break. That is, the young Marx propounds an ideological view of humanity’s alienation and eventual self-recovery, strongly influenced by Hegel and Feuerbach; while the later Marx discloses a science, a theory of social formations and their structural determination. Althusser asserts that it was with the GI that the sudden departure happened. Marx constructed a revolutionary view of social change with the science of history, viz. historical materialism, which paved the way for Marx’s later works, especially, the three-volume Capital. Despite "its emerging from the ideological and philosophical elements, this science differentiates with them once it came into being" (1974: 110-111). The science of history can provide objective knowledge and produce proven theoretical results which can be verified by scientific and political practice and are open to methodical rectification. By assigning primacy to Marxist science, Althusser dismisses radically any form of non-scientific thought—subsumed under the concept of "ideology"—including the pre-scientific thought of Marx himself, which is expressed in his early work as "Humanism". These two opposing understandings have resulted in a stalemate. If one thinks that Marx’s contribution to human knowledge is historical materialism, one must admit that Marx is non-moralist; while if one thinks that Marx is a moralist who cares much for the suffering of the proletariat, one has to deny the significance of historical materialism. That is the famous problem of the "two Marxes" where the later Marx is different from the earlier Marx, therefore that Marx’s theory of historical materialism is in opposition to his humanist theory. Here comes the so-called Marxian moral paradox, viz. the antinomy between his theory of human essence in his earlier years and his later

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viewpoint on historical materialism, the conflict between his moral condemnation of class exploitation in the EPM and his judgment that morality should be abjured as an ideology in the GI in 1845. Anyone who is about to talk about Marxian Humanism has to find a method of reconciling the aforementioned contradiction and pose his way of reconciling the conflict between humanism and materialism in Marx’s thought. The third interpretation is a moderate one that tries to fit Marx’s later theory into his earlier humanist theory by undermining the materialist foundation of historical materialism. Since 1956, some Humanist Marxists, namely several in the former Soviet Union, the Praxis School in Yugoslavia who were flourishing in the 1960s, and the Analytic Marxists whose heyday was the mid of 1970s, have been attempting to reconcile the aforementioned two polar viewpoints and have proposed a possible way of uniting the two stages in Marx’s thought. For example, Svetozar Stojanovic, a member of the Praxis School, proposes that as a kind of Humanism, Marxism is a science based on a philosophical viewpoint of praxis. His attempt to reconcile the principle of freedom and that of determinism is by asserting that the strong "necessity" – a kind of historical Determinism – Marx advances in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy is untenable. Instead, he reads Marxism into a weaker and more passive "necessity" in predicting historical development, and emphasizes that philosophy on human beings is just the philosophy on the world and its history. 1 George Brenkert also proclaims directly that Marx’s moral theory is part of his scientific views, that is, historical materialism is Marx’s meta-ethics. Brenkert reinterprets historical materialism by reinstituting its foundation and recomposing the content of the modes of production. Labor capacity is one of the most important elements in the productive power, which includes skill, training, expertise and experience, scientific and technical knowledge. Besides these, Brenkert adds morality and values to the list, because he insists that one’s moral structure and valuable judgments function in one’s work in similar way to that of the scientific knowledge and training that one receives in preparation for said work (Brenkert, 1983: 36). Obviously, the unity of Humanism and historical materialism to the Praxis Members is at a price of giving up the materialist character of 1

See Svetozar Stojanovic’s essay of "A Tension in Historical Materialism" in Mihailo Markovic and Gajo Petrovic (1979: 63-80).

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Marxism, and Brenkert’s reinterpretation on historical materialism somewhat departs from Marx’s original aim too. Most of the interpretations belonging to the third kind are unsatisfactory in understanding the relation of Marxian Philosophy and Humanism in light of the following questions: Is Marx a humanist? If so, what kind of humanist theory might his philosophy be? The fourth kind of interpretation is a moderate one, too. But it is different from the third kind because, on the contrary, it is a method that tries to absorb Marxist Humanism in the sphere of historical materialism. There was a considerable discussion on humanity, Marxist Humanism and human alienation in China after the end of the Cultural Revolution. Given that during the Cultural Revolution, the CCPC placed too much emphasis on the need for people to understand Collectivism, the Chinese people lost their dignity and value as individuals. The discussion was a kind of reflection and reconsideration on the significance of the Cultural Revolution. In this sense, the discussion was similar to the Marxist research carried out in the Former Soviet Union and Eastern European countries in the 1950s, which was in opposition to Stalin’s Unitarianism and Terrorism. The discussion lasted about 6 years, but reached no final consensus. In 1984, Wang Ruoshui published an article titled A Defense of Humanism in Wen Hui Bao. He proposed that there should be humanist theory in socialist society by arguing that Humanism is not only the ideology of the Bourgeoisie. Also in 1984, Hu Qiaomu as the representative of CCPC published an article titled On Humanism and the Problem of Alienation, in which he criticized Wang Ruoshui’s idea and insisted that the main duty for Marxists was to oppose Bourgeois Humanism and Human Alienation. After that, the great debate died down gradually. However, one conclusion left from the discussion is instructive. Some scholars believe that there are two sides in the meaning of Humanism. On the one hand, Humanism is the Ideology of the Bourgeoisie in the sense of World View and Viewpoint of history; on the other hand, it is possible for Humanism to be united with Marxism only as a kind of ethical principle and moral rule. That is, if we regard Marx’s early humanist theory only as a kind of ethical principle, it could be compatible with Marx’s theory on materialism and also valuable as a contribution to the progress of the socialist society. In this sense, it is called “socialist humanism.” Such a viewpoint does not resolve the paradox between Marxism and Humanism but only serves to make things more complicated. This being the case, how can a humanist principle under it stand without the real significance of historical materialism being revealed?

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In my view, the disputes regarding the relationship between Marx’s philosophy and Humanism, or in other words, on how to understand Marxist Humanism, are due to different positions and thinking modes on Marxian Philosophy and Humanism itself. Therefore, the most important thing for one who seeks to express his viewpoint on Marxist Humanism is to clarify the position in which he understands Humanism and Marx’s philosophy. This is an idea that I derived through historical research. After a serious examination of the history of interpreting Marxian Humanism, I realize that only when the originality and revolutionary change in Marxian philosophy is discovered can we find an effective way in interpreting Marx’s moral theory. In the early phase of the history of interpreting Marxian Humanism (1890s-1930s), both the revisionists (headed by Eduard Bernstein) and orthodox Marxists (headed by Karl Kautsky) realized that historical materialism played a leading role in the thought of Marx; but both of them regarded historical materialism merely as economic determinism that sees the development of social history as a spontaneously natural process in which economic element plays a key role. Accordingly, although they held different attitudes regarding the absence of the idea of morality in Marx’s thought, both of them believed that Marx was a non-moralist, and, therefore, that there is no moral element in Marx’s thought. In my analysis, it is because both of the schools read Marx’s thought into a kind of positive science, a scientific law that is always valid for interpreting changes in human society, but immiscible with subjective experience that Marx is understood as a social scientist rather than a moral philosopher. In the following phase (1930s-1970s), most theorists realized the danger of consolidating Marxism into a rigid doctrine. With some important works written by Marx in his early life being published, a break in Marx’s thought was realized and the debate on Marx’s moral philosophy was polarized by the Marxist humanists and the scientific Marxists. I think that the fundamental reason for the controversies between the scientific Marxists and Marxist humanists is that they share different concepts of philosophy. For the scientific Marxists, philosophy is a science at the highest level, analyzing the concepts and methods of specific sciences with the tools of formal logic. So what the philosophers are concerned with is the knowledge of the world (that is, epistemology). For these Marxists, this means that the foundation of Marxism is dialectical materialism which is enriched with the methodological and logical progress made by contemporary epistemology. Scientific Marxism privileges the economic works of the mature Marx, Engels, and Lenin, in

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order to throw light on their scientific nature and their agreement with scientific philosophy. The scientific Marxists make Marxism more scientific by eliminating all its coarse, unacceptable elements, and reconciling it with science, so that it is as rational as possible and in agreement with both common sense and the methodological requirements of contemporary epistemology. However, members of the humanist school think that philosophy should deal above all with man and human action; it is inspired by the tradition of classical German philosophy and other philosophical currents as well as phenomenology and existentialism. So the Marxist humanists pay more attention to Marx’s theory of human nature in his early works, because it is in these works, especially in the EPM, that Marx elaborates the process of human nature’s alienation in capitalist society and its recurrence in communist society. Based on different viewpoints in philosophy, the two schools received only part of Marx’s thought, because in their eyes, the humanist tendency in Marx’s early works is contradicted with the scientific content in his later works. Therefore, both of them admit that Marx was a partly moral philosopher, that is, that the young Marx was a moralist. Where they differ is merely that the Marxist humanists stick to their preference for Marx as a moralist, while the scientific Marxists appreciate Marx’s scientific spirit as expressed in his later writings. In the third phase (1970s-1990s), the contemporary Marxists attempted to solve the moral paradox in Marx’s thought from different viewpoints. But most of their methods were eclectic. In my idea, there is no difference between integrating Marx’s later theory into his humanist theory by undermining the materialist foundation of historical materialism and absorbing Marx’s early humanist theory into the sphere of historical materialism by regarding Humanism as a kind of ethical theory, because the two methods share the same premise, that is, Marx’s early humanist theory and later materialist conception of history are reconcilable. But according to my study, the research in the first and second phases already shows that Marx’s early Humanism and later historical materialism are totally different, which can’t be put in one sphere. Therefore, the research in the third phase is not a progress but a degradation. With such a research background, I conclude that the possibility of a successful interpretation of Marxian Humanism relies on a suitable perspective that can reconcile Humanism and historical materialism. More importantly, I find that with the development of research on Marx’s contribution to philosophy (especially on his theory of historical materialism), a way of solving the so-called Marx’s moral paradox is

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getting clearer. That is to say, a philosophical viewpoint based on Marx’s theory of historical materialism is the key to solving the puzzle between Humanism and historical materialism, and Marx’s thought can be considered in the sense of Humanism only when we get a humanist dimension in the logic of historical materialism.

II.

Marx’s New Humanism: from the Historical Viewpoint

The aforementioned insight, however, can only be used when the real sense of historical materialism is grasped. Drawing from the flourishing outgrowth of Marxist research in the contemporary Chinese academy, I argue that in Marx’s materialist concept of history, there is not only a scientific understanding of social law presented, but also a new kind of viewpoint on philosophy and the world. With the foundation of historical materialism, Marx puts forward a revolutionary understanding of the mode of philosophical thinking in which a humanist dimension is entailed. Both the rereading of Marx’s works and the reconstructing of his theoretical logic indicate the same presupposition: Historical materialism, as Marx’s new concept of philosophy and world view, is a fresh starting point in the research of Marxian Humanism that illustrates Marx’s opposition to traditional materialism and idealism. By rereading Marx’s literature, I argue that in the year 1845 Marx achieved a revolutionary change in philosophical principle and a great turning in examining relations between materialism and Humanism. There is a shift between the EPM and the GI. This is, however, neither in the sense of a methodological break pointed out by Della Volpe, nor in the sense of an epistemological break argued by Althusser. It is an extraordinary revolution in the development of Marx’s understanding of the relationship between Humanism and Materialism. The Marxist humanists did not realize this shift, so they only endorsed Marx’s humanist critique in the Manuscripts of 1844. This was done in response to the feeling that the materialistic idea in the GI had been developed into a vulgar determinism by the orthodox Marxists. The scientific Marxists had a similar prejudice: they thought that Marx’s break was a rupture from Feuerbach’s Humanism to Anti-humanism. In my analysis, Marx manages to solve the puzzle between Humanism and Materialism with historical materialism founded in the GI. Let me demonstrate with a comparative analysis of the two writings.

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In the EPM, Marx interprets historical phenomena with the theory of human nature, which in essence does not exceed the boundaries of traditional philosophy. We can read this from the following two aspects. Firstly, Marx overestimates Feuerbach’s viewpoint. Marx believes that Feuerbach’s materialism is able to solve the puzzle between humanism and materialism. Marx comments that one of Feuerbach’s great achievements is "the establishment of true materialism and of real science, since Feuerbach also makes the social relationship of 'man to man' the basic principle of the theory" (1964: 172). Then, what is Feuerbach’s viewpoint on materialism and humanism? Feuerbach’s aim is to build up a new humanism within a materialistic structure in order to overcome the deficiency in the crude materialism of the French mechanists and Hegel’s idealist humanism. On the one hand, Feuerbach opposes the Hegelian concept of human essence (namely the theory of self-consciousness) with a naturalist materialism. He remarks that in Hegel’s philosophy, self-consciousness is the highest abstraction for the whole mental activity, departing from its products as an independent subject. From a sensualist perspective, Feuerbach emphasizes that man as a natural being is the most sensible and sensitive animal in nature, therefore corporeal sensuousness is the essential difference between man and the animal. Such an idea is greatly similar with the French materialist school. On the other hand, Feuerbach attacks the French materialists as an unconscious idealist conception of human essence. He argues that the essential difference between man and the animal is consciousness, and that "strictly speaking, consciousness is given only in the case of a being to whom his species, his mode of being is an object of thought" (Feuerbach, 1972: 97). Such an idea is similar to Hegel’s. Thus, starting from a sensualist and naturalist materialism, Feuerbach reaches an idealist conclusion on human essence. We can see that from one side Feuerbach does not reach a truly materialistic level when understanding man, nature, and the relationship between man and nature; from the other side he can’t escape an idealist tendency in his humanist idea. Secondly, Marx explains social history from the theory of human essence. Marx argues that "conscious life activity distinguishes man immediately from animal life activity. It is just because of this that he is a species being" (1964: 113). According to such a concept of human essence, Man as a species-being shall regard his life as the object of his conscious activity, but alienated labor changes the logic as follows: man, because he is a self-conscious being, makes his life activity, his being, only a means for his existence, which is inhuman and has estranged man from his nature.

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Private property for Marx is "thus the product, the result, the necessary consequence, of alienated labor, of the external relation of the worker to nature and to himself" (1964: 117). In this sense, Communism is "the positive transcendence of private property, as human self-alienation, and therefore as the real appropriation of human essence by and for man" (Marx, 1964: 135). Since Marx can’t unite the materialistic idea based on Naturalistic philosophy and the humanistic idea based on abstract human nature, the antinomy of materialism and humanism which puzzles philosophers preceding Marx for many years can’t be solved by Marx, either. But in the GI, Marx interprets man and his activity on the basis of human subsistence, which indicates that Marx does not go down the same road as his forerunners, but sets up a new-brand of thinking in philosophy. We can also read this from two aspects. First of all, Feuerbach is one of the major German philosophers criticized by Marx and Engels in the GI. Marx and Engels state that Feuerbach "posits 'Man' instead of 'real historical man'" (1998: 44). Therefore, as far as "Feuerbach is a materialist he does not deal with history, and as far as he considers history he is not a materialist. With him materialism and history diverge completely" (Marx and Engels, 1998: 47). From this assertion, Marx set up a neo-materialistic theory in the GI. Secondly, in the GI Marx explains the appearance of alienation, and the theory of Communism with the starting point of the real life of man. Here, alienation is no longer a theoretic starting point which can be used to interpret other concepts, but a common phenomenon in capitalist society that warrants explanation. Marx reconsiders his early idea on human essence. He admits that it is improper to conceive the individual, [A]s an ideal, under the name “Man,” because in this idea, the whole process which we have outlined has been regarded by them as the evolutionary process of “man,” so that at every stage “man” was substituted for the individuals existing hitherto and shown as the motive force of history. (Marx and Engels, 1998: 97-98)

In Marx’s idea, the reason for the whole process of history being conceived as a process of the self-estrangement is that "the average individual of the later age was always foisted on to the earlier stage, and the consciousness of a later age on to the individuals of an earlier"(Marx and Engels, 1998: 98). Marx develops a mature idea regarding the understanding of human history. In his idea, the conception of history relies on the real process of production, especially the material production

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of life itself (1998: 61). In such an idea, the theory of alienation and rehabilitation of man is abandoned. Marx proposes that there are two practical premises for the abolition of alienation: the great mass of propertyless humanity and an existing world of wealth and culture (Marx and Engels, 1998: 54). Both of the conditions presuppose a great development of productive power, which itself implies "the actual empirical existence of men in their world-historical, instead of local, being" (Ibid.). Therefore, Communism now is "not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call Communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things" (Marx and Engels, 1998: 57). From the new starting point, namely, man under the social and historical conditions, Marx built up a set of new philosophical principles. What Marx achieves here is a kind of philosophy on human subsistence, viz. a social materialism which can be only understood explicitly in history. Furthermore, historical materialism is some kind of scientific theory concerning issues of social being and social consciousness, which solve the antinomy of materialism and humanism successfully. By reconsidering the theoretical logic of Marxian thought, I contend that aside from the ostensibly scientific theory, there is also an important philosophical principle latent in this framework of thinking. Before Marx, most of the materialists and idealists shared the same idea in regard to the conception of history. In their eyes, the final aim of historical change can be found only in the changeable consciousness of human beings. However, Marx tells us that the real basis of history is the material production of human life. In order to explain why the production of material life is necessary to men, a presupposition is needed. What Marx proposes is "the existence of living human individuals" (1998: 37). In Marx’s view, it is the first premise of all human existence and all history. With this premise, Marx develops a new conception of history which is a philosophical foundation for his materialistic interpretation of social history. I shall explicate the premise of historical materialism under two main areas. First, the premise that "Men must be in a position to live" is the ultimate cause of social history from a philosophical standpoint. In Marx’s idea, Men can be distinguished from animals only when they begin to produce their means of subsistence. This is because of men’s "physical organization and their consequent relation to the rest of nature" (Ibid.). Marx believes that men are conditioned by their physical organization, and thus have to work with tools in order to live. The necessity of human labor

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is, therefore, deduced from a prerequisite both in theory and in practice, viz. men’s subsistence. From this premise, Marx establishes a material basis for human history, because "by producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual material life" (Ibid.). Based on the development of the material production, Marx further concludes that "definite individuals who are productively active in a definite way enter into these definite social and political relations" (1998: 41). The forms of social relations are therefore determined by the production. Hence, Marx enables a materialistic interpretation of social history from this premise. Second, Marx’s premise is also an axiological and humanistic principle in understanding men themselves, which is in opposition to the abstract conception of human nature. In this aspect, Marx achieved a dramatic change in the tradition of German philosophy. He explains human nature and its historicity from the basis of social history, in other words, from the subsistence of human beings, not vice versa. In the GI, Marx’s major task is to oppose German philosophy, because "the Germans judge everything sub specie aeterni [from the standpoint of eternity] (in terms of the essence of man" (Marx and Engels, 1998: 488-489). In German philosophy, (i) the essence of man is presupposed as an existing thing, a supersensible thing; and (ii) human activity and enjoyment are determined by human essence. Unlike the German philosophers, Marx proposes a reversed relation: it is the activity of men which conditions their nature. Marx’s logic is as follows: (i) given the fact that "life involves before everything else eating and drinking, housing, clothing and various other things" (Marx and Engels, 1998: 47), men in essence are to satisfy their subsistent needs: it is the first and most important value for men on the one hand; and, on the other, it is also men’s ultimate and eternal value, because the existence of men is the biological premise for men as subjects who make valuable judgments. (ii) From the same premise, Marx insists that the development of consciousness should be merely reflections and echoes of men’s real life-process, so it is the material life which determines consciousness, not vice versa. (iii) Based on the premise of men’s subsistence, Marx also gets a method to interpret the fundamental cause of the law of social development. In opposition to Max Stirner, Marx argues that "the development of an individual is determined by the development of all the others with whom he is directly or indirectly associated", and that "the history of a single individual cannot possibly be separated from the history of preceding or contemporary individuals, but is determined by this history" (1998: 463). In this sense, the objectivity of social development comes from two aspects. On the one hand, objectivity comes from the

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direct interaction of different individuals living in the same society. Each individual has his own will which is different or even in conflict with that of the others. The final result of the interaction of different individuals does not follow any individual will, but satisfies their common interests, viz. their interests of subsistence. The result is objective to an individual because it is an external power that he is not able to change but to come to terms with. On the other hand, objectivity comes also from the indirect association of the later generations with their predecessors. In Marx’s view, when men begin to create their own history, they are not free to choose their productive force, because the productive force as the product of precious activity is an existing force that they have to accept, meanwhile, their productive relations as the interrelation of one to one that happens in the process of production, is assuredly determined by the acquired productive force in the beginning, even though with the development of their productive force, there may be a new kind of the productive relation engendered. Hence, every later generation has no choice but to exploit under the circumstance handed by the preceding generation. Within this, the actual performance of the former supplies the latter with a starting point of social activity, but it also conditions the activity of the latter as an objective status. Thus, the relationship of social being and social consciousness is actually the relationship of man to man, both among the contemporaries, and between the successive generations. With such a method, Marx overcomes the obstacles of the old materialism, including Feuerbach’s. Marx’s conception of history is thus not only about the law of social development, but also about the philosophical principle of human subsistence. The aforementioned two sides rely on each other. With the above two kinds of justification, historical materialism in Marx’s thought is never a result of conflating the theory on history with the theory on materialism. That is to say, Marx’s philosophy is neither the sum of dialectical materialism as a world view and historical materialism as a concept of history, which is the position held by orthodox Marxists, nor the mixture of philosophical theory on man and scientific law on history, which is insisted upon by some western Marxists. Rather, it is the dialectical unification of materialism and humanism in history. In this sense, the unification of materialism and humanism in history, which is based on the new kind of thinking, is actually a unification of history’s human and scientific dimensions in which the ideality of human values and the reality of man’s subsistence fuse together, and the necessity of historical law and the aim of human life are explained by one concept. I call this new concept of philosophy informed by historical materialism the

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“historical viewpoint.” The historical viewpoint means that Marx starts a fresh way of interpreting relations between man and nature, and between man and man from the perspective of social history. It is a new set of philosophical principles which derives its starting point from the real man and his subsistence. Firstly, the historical viewpoint illuminates the revolutionary change that Marx achieves in the understanding of man. From the historical viewpoint, man’s subsistence takes on its historicity, which concretely is about the condition, process, and sociality of human subsistence in which the essence of man changes with the change of his material foundation in reality. That is, the character of human nature is not definite, ready-made, or eternal. Man in Marx’s eye is created and changed with the development of history. Although Marx admits the superiority of the external world to man and the existence of a common character in man, Marx is not too concerned with this aspect. What Marx cares most about is human subsistence and its diversity. In Marx’s idea, the relation of spirit and matter can reach its unity only in history. Likewise, only in history can human subsistence and its reality and diversity present themselves. The common character of human beings does not deserve too much attention because of its inability to shed light on man’s real life. I therefore emphasize that only in history can the interactions between man and nature, and man and man be understood, Man’s natural attributes and social attributes in a single entity, and nature and history which are apart in Feuerbach’s philosophy without dichotomy any more. Secondly, the historical viewpoint is useful in solving the paradoxes in Marx’s humanist theory and in understanding its significance. By reexamining the significance and position of historical materialism in Marxian philosophy, we find that it is historical materialism that is key in solving the aforementioned paradoxes. Throughout his life, Marx always paid much attention to the inhuman conditions that man was faced with in his real subsistence, but since Marx changed his concept of philosophy in the GI, he reached a totally different level in understanding man and his subsistence. Hence, it is unwise to assert Marxian humanism by denouncing historical materialism as a theoretical degradation in the development of Marxian thought according to the humanist idea expressed in his earlier years, nor is it suitable to highlight the scientificity of historical materialism by eliminating the humanistic dimension in Marx’s thought. From the historical viewpoint, Marxian humanism is neo-humanistic in understanding man, which helps to solve the paradox of two Marxes, and suggests that Marx’s moral theory is about the theoretical

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evaluation of the moral condition of particular social institutions. To sum up, based on the philosophical principle of human subsistence outlined in historical materialism, we can evaluate Marx’s theoretical change correctly, explain Marx’s moral theory reasonably, and advance the research of contemporary ethics to a higher degree.

Works Cited Althusser, L.P. Essays in Self-Criticism. London: NLB, 1974. Brenkert, G.G. Marx’s Ethics of Freedom. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983. Feuerbach, L.A. The Fiery Brook: Selected Writings of Ludwig Feuerbach. Trans. Hanfi, Z. New York: The Anchor Books, 1972. Kamenka, E. The Ethical Foundations of Marxism. London: Routledge and Kegan, 1962. Markovic, M. and Petrovic, G. eds. Praxis: Yugoslav Essays in the Philosophy and Methodology of the Social Sciences. Dordrecht/Boston /London: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1979. Marx, K. H. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Trans. M. Milligan. New York: International Publishers, 1964. Marx, K. H. and Engels, F. German Ideology. New York: Prometheus Books, 1998.

COLD WAR HUMANISM AND BEYOND: POSTMODERN SUBJECTIVITY AND HUMANIST LITERARY CRITIQUE IN RORTY AND EGGERS ANTHONY HUTCHISON UNIVERSITY OF NOTTINGHAM, UNITED KINGDOM

In his most recent book, the philosopher Richard Bernstein explores and expands on his previous characterisation of the twentieth century as the “pragmatic century” (2006). The latest in a string of impressive works of philosophical synthesis dating back to the 1970s, The Pragmatic Turn makes a convincing case for the continuing power and influence of themes first developed by the classical American pragmatist philosophers at the turn of the twentieth century (2010). The alternative conceptual frameworks and modes of inquiry developed by Charles Sander Peirce, William James, and John Dewey at this time, Bernstein argues, find ongoing expression in the critiques of Cartesianism and antifoundationalist philosophical currents cultivated by a raft of later thinkers. Pragmatic impulses and themes, Bernstein observes, can be found in the work of those such as Martin Heidegger and Jürgen Habermas, operating within the so-called “continental” tradition as well as that of other philosophers such as Wilfrid Sellars and Robert Brandom more closely linked to an Anglo-American analytic tradition whose methods and understanding of the discipline are often regarded as antithetical. This effort to bridge what undoubtedly remains a well-entrenched divide, is an admirable one but Bernstein’s thesis also challenges accounts by intellectual historians of the development of pragmatism and American philosophy more generally in the twentieth century. Pragmatism is commonly viewed as having undergone a decline (roughly beginning in the post-WWII period) followed by a “resurgence” or “revival” (roughly dated to the final decades of the century). For historians such as John McCumber and Louis Menand, this narrative is best understood with reference to the Cold War. In Time in the Ditch: American Philosophy in the McCarthy Era (2001), McCumber explains the rise of analytic philosophy and the demise of pragmatism and other currents in the US as

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the result of early Cold War institutional pressures. The impact of McCarthyism by the early 1950s had prompted resistance within higher education to philosophy departments open to socially oriented branches of philosophical inquiry. The climate was much more convivial, McCumber claims, to the specialised, often dauntingly technical and relatively apolitical imperatives of analytic philosophy. Analytic philosophy, he therefore contends, presented no obvious challenge to the status quo. In The Metaphysical Club (2001), Menand points to the emergence of a broader Cold War- inflected intellectual culture inimical to pragmatism’s emphasis on the contingency, provisionality and fallibility of ideas. In these circumstances it is unsurprising that pragmatism should give way to the conviction politics and philosophical certitudes demanded by liberal as well as less liberal forms of anti-communism. By extension, once this cycle had run its course, pragmatism was fated to return. Menand’s study thus closes abruptly with the claim that “once the Cold War ended, the ideas of James, Peirce and Dewey emerged as suddenly as they had been eclipsed” (Menand, 441). These arguments concerning the history of pragmatism and its status during the Cold War can provide valuable assistance in understanding both the origins and character of the humanism that underpins the philosophy of Richard Rorty that is commonly perceived as having mobilised this revival. Some consideration of Rorty’s political and literary reflections during the 1980s, moreover, can not only serve to expose certain limitations in the “cold war” reading of pragmatism’s history but also illuminate the fashion in which ostensibly “postmodern” expressions of humanism in the West remain within boundaries demarcated during the Cold War. The aim here is not necessarily to criticize such expressions wholesale (indeed their potency and relevance should be evident in relation to certain scenarios). Nonetheless, one design will be to develop some understanding of the meaning of the type of postmodern humanism Rorty’s work might be said to represent. In doing so, the ultimate objective is to begin outlining the contours of a humanism capable of tackling some of the issues such “cold war humanism” fails to adequately address. On one level Rorty’s humanism is premised on familiar theoretical terrain in political terms, being premised on the classical republican and liberal division between private and public. More controversial is the way Rorty maps the idea of the “philosophical” on to the private and the “political” on to the public sphere. In a 1987 exchange in Political Theory, Richard Bernstein contends that Rorty’s distinction between the “political” and the “philosophical” is self-serving, a means of confining “radicalism” to a private, philosophical realm. This is the “human, all too human” realm

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within which “foundational” conceptualisations can be exposed and interrogated and stands in contrast to a “political” domain where such scepticism is less welcome. As Bernstein notes, there is an irony here: For he [Rorty] does not clarify what constitutes ‘the political’ or how one is to evaluate critically competing political arguments. He writes as if something extremely important depends upon labelling controversies about liberalism as “political” rather than “philosophical.” This is why I think Rorty is actually perpetuating the sort of fruitless debates that the classical pragmatists sought to dismiss. (1987: 547)

Chief among the other tendencies in Rorty’s work Bernstein draws attention to is what he describes as an “aesthetic” strain that privileges the ideas of “play” or jouissance picked up from deconstructionist accounts of language and semiotics. Such strategies are transplanted into a social vision premised on ludic self-fashioning, social-minded tolerance and a rejection of the “seriousness” that underwrites the Western philosophical tradition. At the heart of Bernstein’s critique is the idea that Rorty’s fundamental division between philosophy and politics, itself latched on to a similarly sharp distinction between private and public, is unsustainable. The impulse towards “demarcation” evident in such a move is precisely the sort of “prioritisation” strategy that Rorty has so consistently exposed and rejected in his commentaries on the Western philosophical tradition. Bernstein notes how such rigid demarcation strategies in the realm of politics lead to the same type of “ahistorical essentialism” Rorty is so keen to criticize in the work of philosophers. This is evident both in Rorty’s persistent use of the collective pronoun and in the paucity of definition that attends his frequent invocations of “liberal democracy.” Rorty’s dependence on a notion of “reflective equilibrium” that appears to operate chiefly at the level of “common intuition,” Bernstein argues, simply “substitut[es] a ‘historical myth of the given’ for the ‘epistemological myth of the given’ that he has helped to expose. He speaks of ‘our practices’, ‘our’ tradition, the ‘consensus’ of a particular community as if this were simply a historical given.” Bernstein then claims: “if one is to appeal to a historical consensus or a tradition then let us be wary of making it into something more solid, harmonious, and coherent than it really is” (1987: 551). Having taken Rorty to task for his refusal to critically engage with Marx and Foucault’s structural critiques of bourgeois liberal society, Bernstein then reflects upon the postmodern spin Rorty seeks to give his own self-proclaimed “bourgeois liberalism.” It is at this juncture that Rorty’s ideas are located within a striking set of Cold War reference

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points. After noting the controversial parallels identified by Jürgen Habermas between the postmodern theorists of the 1970s and 1980s and the young conservative proponents of the nineteenth-century counterenlightenment thought, Bernstein draws our attention to Peter Dews’s subsequent attempt to Americanize the analogy. Dews’s introduction to a 1986 collection of interviews with Habermas notes how the “end of ideology” thesis advanced by Daniel Bell, with its stress on the “prerational” nature and compensatory function of “grand narrative,” looked both back and forward to the critiques of modernity mounted by postmodern thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Jean François Lyotard (1986: 6). Bernstein situates Rorty diachronically within this lineage of postmodern intellectual currents but also seeks to position Rorty’s ideas synchronically within what he sees as a historically specific and politically regressive nexus of Reagan era cold war politics and late twentieth-century post-foundational philosophy. Rorty, he claims, combines the unreflective liberal politics redolent of the early cold war era, with the same “playful celebration and invention of new language games and vocabularies” that can be found in the work of postmodern philosophers such as Lyotard. The result, he concludes, is “one step forward, two steps back…an odd mixture of avant-garde ‘radical’ postmodern playfulness and what looks like oldfashioned cold war liberalism.” Bernstein then goes on to forge the link between Rorty’s politics and his philosophy in a manner that is even more striking in this context. This fresh line of attack intensifies the cold war frame of reference by re-articulating the issues in the type of metaphysical and psychologistic terms that recall the fraught intellectual antagonism of the early cold war era: Why does Rorty think that philosophy amounts to little more than the worn-out vocabulary of “bad” foundational discourse? So much of his recent writing falls into the genre of the “God that failed” discourse. There seems to be something almost oedipal—a form of patricide—in Rorty’s obsessive attacks on the father figures of philosophy and metaphysics. It is the discourse of a one time “true believer” who has lost his faith. (1987: 557)

From this vantage point it is apparent that the more general political context within which such accusation emerged was hardly itself detached from cold war imperatives. The re-sharpening of ideological divisions at the geo-political level by the mid-1980s, formalized in the so-called “Reagan Doctrine,” led at least one contemporary analyst to speak of a “second cold war” (Halliday, 1983); the shift is also widely accepted

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among contemporary historians of the period (Gaddis, 195-236; Westad, 331-63). The fact that Bernstein also invokes the legacy of John Dewey in this exchange is also important. Clearly, contra Menand, pragmatism was alive and well before anyone, including Richard Rorty, was anticipating the end of the Cold War. Quite the opposite in fact: “Not only is Soviet imperialism a threat,” Rorty maintains in his reply to Bernstein , “but time seems to be on its side…it seems likely that the next century will see a steady extension of Moscow’s empire throughout the Southern hemisphere” (1987: 556). More recently, in a generous but also critical appraisal, published shortly after Rorty’s death in 2007, Bernstein pays tribute to what he describes as the former’s “deep humanism,” locating its source in F.C.S. Schiller’s contention that “Pragmatism…is in reality only the application of humanism to the theory of knowledge”(2008, 22). This seems a shrewd assessment in so far as pragmatist arguments such as those advanced by Dewey and Rorty can be characterised by their refusal to appeal to nonhuman sources of authority for their credence. Both Dewey and Rorty also often published in outlets directed at broad readerships on matters of public concern. Equally, in doing so they frequently gave both direct and indirect expression to their pragmatist philosophical positions in recognisably humanist terms. Yet we would also do well to note the ways in which their forms of pragmatist humanism were also shaped externally by the broader political forces of their respective times. Dewey remained an anti-communist of some conviction who, unlike many other liberals and socialists in the 30s and 40s, refused to flirt with Trotskyism or remain uncritical towards Stalin’s repression of political dissent. By the time the cold war had begun to manifest itself Dewey was steering a narrow political path within an increasingly polarised liberal political culture. In the final years before his death in 1952 he remained deeply sceptical of the types of “fellow travelling” liberalism epitomised by Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party during the 1948 election and equally suspicious of the emergent redbaiting climate that resulted in the rise of Senator Joseph McCarthy. The intellectual historian Robert Westbrook’s description of Dewey’s politics at this time as a species of “cold war socialism” (487-495), might equally be applied to Rorty in the 1980s. As was the case with Dewey, Rorty’s hostility to communism was aligned with a principled commitment to the redistribution of wealth and power in the United States. In many ways the humanist politics and (by extension) the human rather than truth-centred philosophical orientation of both men was understood against the counter-example provided by inhuman totalitarian regimes

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devoted to social orders built around political-philosophical abstractions. The Soviet Union, its satellite states and their sympathisers in the West were regarded as posing a threat—sometimes direct, sometimes less so— to the democratic institutional structures that pragmatism both privileged and pre-supposed. This is not to say that Bernstein and other critics are incorrect when they chastise Rorty for his “strong” readings of Dewey. Nonetheless, the postmodern ironist mode that increasingly came to distinguish Rorty’s neo-pragmatism from its more somber precursors shouldn’t prevent us from recognising the continuities and overlap evident in what might be understood as the “cold war humanism” of both figures. By the end of the 1980s, beginning in works such as Contingency, irony and solidarity (1989), Rorty increasingly began to turn away from philosophy per se and towards literature as an alternative source of philosophical meaning and inspirational liberal politics (1998). To be sure some of this mapped on to Rorty’s controversial adherence, outlined in this same work, to a strict division between private and public spheres. The private, for Rorty, constituted the realm of the personal and the aesthetic, and the public, that of the social and the political. The novels of Marcel Proust and Henry James, for example, like the philosophical thought of Nietzsche and Heidegger, is best understood for Rorty as a means of cultivating the private mind, enabling us to re-imagine ourselves, whilst those of Orwell and Dickens, like the thought of John Stuart Mill and John Rawls, has a social referent and can best assist us in re-imagining our societies. Rorty describes this as “part of a general turn against theory and toward narrative” prompted by a recognition, along similar lines to that laid out by Jean-François Lyotard a few years earlier in La Condition Postmoderne, “of our having given up the attempt to hold all the sides of our life together in a single vision, to describe them with a single vocabulary” (1989: xvi). The novel is the privileged form in Rorty’s schema but it is quite striking that he appears more interested in discussing works of fiction he takes to be more socially oriented. In the context of a lecture given at the University of Hawaii in 1989, which begins by imagining how a Western civilization destroyed by nuclear war might be remembered in 2500, Rorty stresses the centrality of the social novel. Such future generations, he speculates, will view “the novel, and particularly the novel of moral protest, rather than the philosophical treatise, as the genre in which the West excelled” (1991: 68). Dickens is the representative figure here but the claim, in addition to deploying Heidegger as the foil recruited from the realm of philosophy, also draws heavily on Milan Kundera’s The Art of the Novel. Kundera celebrates the playful, democratic, anti-essentialist

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spirit of fiction which, in Rorty’s view, testifies to the fact that “the novel does not have a nature, but only a history” (1991:77). Kundera, a Czech author blacklisted by the communist authorities after the release of his first novel The Joke (1967), published The Art of the Novel in 1986 after a decade of exile in France. It is thus easy to see how his experience of communism and the resolutely non-playful, nondemocratic response of the Soviet Union to the Prague Spring might have informed his interpretation of the genre. If we turn to Rorty, however, we can also detect something of a pattern in the twentieth century novels of “moral protest” he draws inspiration from. The most extensive literary discussions in Rorty’s later work focus on novels heavily shaped by the intellectual climate of the early cold war era. Among these are prime representatives of the sub-genre of anti-totalitarian literature that emerged at this time such as George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948) and Lionel Trilling’s The Middle of the Journey (1947) (Rorty, 1989:169-188; 2007: 56-69). However, even a text such as Nabokov’s Lolita (1955), which Rorty studies at length and reads as an examination of private rather than public morals (1989: 141-168), has been read by several critics as an anti-totalitarian “study in tyranny” thereby questioning the tenability of the distinction (Amis, 2006:36-37; Nafisi, 2001). The literary critique Rorty advances in these instances centers on an idea he takes to be central to the modern liberal tradition but one that might more precisely be viewed as part of a comparatively recent moral tradition of cold war liberal humanism. This may well explain why Rorty takes Judith Shklar’s understanding of liberals as those who believe that “cruelty is the worst thing we do” (Rorty, 1989: xv; Shklar, 1982) to be so definitive. “Cruelty,” of course, like any abstract noun, is an elastic concept stretching from the most obviously cruel practices such as torture and enslavement to forms of exploitation such as the treatment of many women in the sex industry or the low-wage employment of illegal migrant labour. Dickens and the nineteenth century context aside, Rorty seems to be most pre-occupied with the former, more explicit forms of persecution and cruelty commonly associated with twentieth-century totalitarian regimes. The particular philosophical and political frames that shape Rorty’s humanism, however, are not simply relics of earlier mid and late twentieth-century moments. Rorty’s articulation of new postmodern modes of subjectivity in the 80s and 90s—modes that nonetheless continue to be shaped by liberal values gestated in the early cold war era— retains its cultural purchase into the twentieth century. In many ways, for example, it might be said to presage the modes of literary humanism

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evident in the work of contemporary US writer Dave Eggers. The popularity and influence of Eggers’ work, as well as his copious activities as a publisher, editor and publicist for several foundations and charities, has led one critic to describe him, in not altogether hyperbolic terms, as a “one man zeitgeist” (Hamilton, 2010). It is thus notable that his output over the past decade should exhibit some of the same politicalphilosophical scaffolding found in Rorty’s late work. Eggers’ first book A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius relayed the story of a man in his early twenties left to care for his twelve year old brother after both their parents die within a few months of each other. A kind of metamemoir, the text can be read as the attempt of an overly self-reflexive contemporary consciousness to negotiate human tragedy. In addition, at one point, an extended metaphor is provided as a means of conveying the type of loose, self-transforming subjectivity that recall’s Rorty’s definition of the ironist as “the sort of person who faces up to the contingency of his or her own most central beliefs and desires” (1989: xv). “These things, details, stories, whatever,” Eggers writes: [A]re like the skin shed by snakes, who leave theirs for anyone to see. What does he care where it is, who sees it, this snake, and his skin? He leaves it where he molts. Hours, days or months later, we come across a snake’s long-shed skin and we know something of the snake, we know that it’s of this approximate girth and that approximate length, but we know very little else. Do we know where the snake is now? What the snake is thinking now? No…The skin is no longer his, he wore it because it grew from him, but then it dried and slipped off and then he and everyone could look at it. (Eggers, 2000: 215-16)

Such anti-essentialist visions have often been built into twentieth century critiques of a humanist tradition premised on a stable—and invariably male and Euro-American dominated—understanding of human subjectivity. Subsequently, nonetheless, Eggers has taken the bold step of publishing two novels that confront the challenge of representing the experience of figures not only marginalized but actively persecuted within their respective societies. If A Heartbreaking Work embraces the recognisably American voice of the postmodern philosophical ironist at ease with the contingent character of their beliefs and desires then Eggers’ more recent work turns towards the third, more political Rortyan theme: solidarity. Rorty roots his understanding of “solidarity”—political in so far as its expansion signals “moral progress”—in an anti-essentialist account of human subjectivity. The concept of “cruelty” is, once again, crucial in this context.

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But that solidarity is not thought of as recognition of a core self, the human essence, in all human beings. Rather, it is thought of as the ability to see more and more traditional differences (of tribe, religion, race, customs, and the like) as unimportant when compared with similarities with respect to pain and humiliation…That is why [...] detailed descriptions of particular varieties of pain and humiliation (in, e.g., novels and ethnographies), rather than philosophical or religious treatises, were the modern intellectual’s principal contribution to moral progress. (Rorty, 1989: 192)

What is the What (2006), which has been described by Eggers as a “fictionalized autobiography” (cited in Giles, 2008), relays the life story of a young Sudanese refugee, Valentino Achak Deng. After suffering years of persecution in his country of birth and displacement in UN refugee camps, Deng comes to the United States only to be exploited in low paid work and, worse, assaulted and robbed in his Atlanta apartment. Eggers’ Zeitoun (2009), by contrast, is a work defined as non-fiction that nonetheless has the same powerfully under-stated moral tone and impressive narrative momentum. The book’s subject is a successful middle class Syrian-American businessman who runs his own property and building maintenance company in New Orleans. Caught up in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina as he attempts to protect his assets, Abdulrahman Zeitoun is incarcerated without explanation in Camp Greyhound, a makeshift detention center, eerily reminiscent of Guantánamo, constructed by shadowy law enforcement agencies at the city’s bus station. In its carefully measured descriptions of the way in which the gross mismanagement of national security and natural disaster intertwined to seal Zeitoun’s fate in this way, Eggers’ work is a terrible indictment of the George W. Bush administration. The refugee figure in Eggers, particularly in What is the What, is seen as an especially potent means of understanding subjectivity in the type of ironist terms outlined by Rorty. Deng, for example, speaks of a certain sort of “skin-shedding,” that is, how the refugee both chooses but is also often forced or pressured to assume new names, often several at the same time: “the nicknames…the catechism names, the names we adopted to survive or leave Kakuma [the Kenyan refugee camp]” (Eggers, 2006: 260). In these contexts of “refugeedom” (literal or figurative), of course, such emphasis on “contingent” identities can only be seen as problematic. Eggers, however, re-frames such contingency in What is the What by linking the narrative to a series of African-American addressees. Deng’s story is relayed via the conversations he imagines conducting with various characters he fleetingly encounters as an itinerant worker in the modern metropolis. The implication is that these characters need to know Deng’s

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story not only to understand him but also to understand their own lives (or “stories”) as they intersect with his—in crime scenes, in city hospitals, in leisure society workplaces. These figures range from Michael, a surly child left to watch over Deng when he is tied and bound by his assailants in his apartment to Julian, a hospital orderly and Iraq war veteran to Dorsetta, a middle class black woman who uses the gym where he is employed. Both Eggers’ most recent books are humanist accounts of the need for cross cultural connection at both national and global levels. Deng’s story closes with him addressing the reader: “I speak to these people and I speak to you because I cannot help it. It gives me strength, almost unbelievable strength, to know that you are there. I covet your eyes, your ears, the collapsible space between us” (2006: 535). Zeitoun’s ordeal ends when a missionary dispensing bibles man agrees to contact his wife. He is unable to sleep that night, overwhelmed by the simple fact that: “There was a man in the world who knew he was alive” (2009: 267). This betrays some of the existentialist sensibility, if not the political despair, of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), the working title of which was The Last Man in Europe. Zeitoun’s isolation, powerlessness and persecution at the hands of a malign state prosecuting war seemingly without end also reflects the plight of Winston Smith, the central figure in Orwell’s novel. From this evidence it is clear then that Eggers’s humanist literary critiques, like Rorty’s, operate within the type of war-torn “third world” and/or neototalitarian scenarios rendered familiar by real and imagined scenarios of the cold war era. There are legitimate questions here about the meaning and reference of such depictions in a post-cold war era where cruelty can often take less explicit forms, frequently manifesting itself in contexts shaped by neoliberal policies with greater and greater global reach. In particular, as Walter Benn Michaels has provocatively noted, such policies promote cruelty not so much on the basis of discrimination as on the basis of exploitation (Michaels, 2007). It is obvious that discrimination—whether directed towards race, gender, sexuality and political opinion—has been and remains at the heart of all totalitarian and authoritarian regimes but, at least in democratic societies, these problems have been steadily addressed via political action .and remedial jurisprudence over the course of the twentieth century. Significant progress has undoubtedly been made though much, of course, remains to be done. With the rise of neoliberalism at the end of the twentieth century and the relative drop in living standards of the working and middle class during the same period, the same can hardly be said of exploitation in the West. Cruelty can take many forms; in any case,

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it surely must be regarded as a feature and effect of government policies that encourage perennial increases in wealth among the super-rich as they continue to ensure that ever greater sectors of society are forced into exploitative low wage employment and welfare-to-work schemes. Nonetheless what might be viewed as a humanism with certain cold war ideological origins also extends into domains that undermine the possessive individualism, social atomisation and corporate sponsored multiculturalism of the neo-liberal era. One key animating idea, more than any other perhaps, that renders both Eggers’ and Rorty’s humanism indispensable is that of “solidarity.” This can be seen in terms of the “collapsible space” bridging the gap between variegated peoples that Deng champions in the final pages of What is the What. In addition it is Eggers’ literary innovation that might be said to have produced new forms of intersubjective meaning and the first feint contours of a “planetary humanist” consciousness of the type delineated by Paul Gilroy (2000: 327356). Eggers, it must be said, has undoubtedly proved adept at formulating the type of new genres Rorty called for that enable new description: “meta-memoir,” “fictional autobiography,” and so forth. As a result these fresh structures help us comprehend and contextualise the “kinds of suffering being endured people to whom we had previously not attended” (1989: xvi). As with Rorty, Eggers’ solidarity is created by an imaginative act rather than discovered as a consequence of abstract reflection. Ultimately both draw on a powerful but sometimes frustratingly under-defined tradition of romantic “inspirational” American liberalism within which Rorty has already been situated (Bernstein, 2003). Whilst this liberalism is often robust and self-critical enough to acknowledge, as the patriot Zeitoun is forced to during his detention, that the US is “not a unique country” (Eggers, 2009:263) it endures, as it is ultimately a faith-based credo. After finally being released, Zeitoun would seem to return to this romantic understanding of American civil religion. This understanding continues to be rooted in the promise of individual and collective re-birth amid the drama of the continent’s climate and landscape. However, as Jackson Lears has noted, in addition to these sources, by the turn of the twentieth century such sentiment was greatly complicated by the spiralling “creative destruction” economists from Marx to Schumpeter have associated with modern capitalism (Lears; Harvey, 2010: 42). Zeitoun’s final Whitmanesque reflections, and his story more generally, would seem to encapsulate much of this inspirational liberal humanist sensibility: “And so he builds, because what is building, and rebuilding and rebuilding

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again, but an act of faith? There is no faith like the faith of a builder of homes in Louisiana” (2009: 324-25).

Works Cited Amis, M. Koba The Dread: Laughter and the Twenty-Million. London: Jonathan Cape, 2002. Bernstein, R.J. “One Step Forward, Two Steps Backward: Richard Rorty on Liberal Democracy and Philosophy.” Political Theory, Vol. 15, No. 4, 1987. —. “Rorty’s Inspirational Liberalism.” Richard Rorty. Eds. C. Guignon and D.R. Hiley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003: 12438. —. “The Pragmatic Century.” The Pragmatic Century: Conversations with Richard J. Bernstein. Eds. S.G. Davaney and W.G. Frisina. Albany: SUNY Press, 2006: 1-14 —. “Richard Rorty’s Deep Humanism.” New Literary History, Vol. 39, No. 1, 2008. —. The Pragmatic Century. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010. Dews, P. ed. Autonomy and Solidarity: Interviews with Jürgen Habermas. London: Verso, 1986. Eggers, D. A Heartbreaking Work of Stagggering Genius. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000. —. What is the What: A Novel. San Francisco: McSweeney’s, 2006. —. Zeitoun. San Francisco: McSweeney’s, 2005. Gaddis, J.L. The Cold War: A New History. New York: Penguin, 2005. Giles, P. “Planetary American Literature”: Jonathan Franzen and Dave Eggers, Issue 5, 2008 [online] Available at http://www.interlitq.org/issue5/paul_giles/job.php [Accessed 23rd May 2011] Gilroy, P. Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. Halliday, F. The Making of the Second Cold War. London: Verso, 1983. Hamilton, C. One Man Zeitgeist: Dave Eggers, Publishing, and Publicity. London: Continuum, 2010. Harvey, D. The Enigma of Capital and the Crisis of Capitalism. London: Profile Books, 2010. Kundera, M. The Art of the Novel. Trans. from the French by L. Asher. London: Faber and Faber, 1988. Lears, J. Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America 1877-1920. New York: HarperCollins, 2009.

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Lyotard, J. F. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. from French by G. Bennington and B. Massumi. Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1979. McCumber, J. Time in the Ditch: American Philosophy in the McCarthy Era. Evanston IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001. Menand, L. The Metaphysical Club. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001. Michaels, W.B. The Trouble With Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality. New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2007. Nafisi, A. Reading Lolita in Tehran. New York: Random House, 2003. Rorty, R. “Thugs and Theorists: A Reply to Richard Bernstein.” Political Theory, Vol. 15 (1987), No.4. —. Contingency, irony, and Solidarity. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989. —. Heidegger, Kundera, and Dickens. Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical PapersVolume 2. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991: 66-82. —. The Inspirational Value of Great Works of Literature. In: Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought In Twentieth-Century America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998:125-140. —. Philosophy as Cultural Politics: Philosophical Papers, Volume 4. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Shklar, J. “Putting Cruelty First.” Daedalus Vol 111, No. 3 (1082): 17-28 Westad, O.A. The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Westbrook, R.B. John Dewey and American Democracy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991.

THE FUTURE OF HUMANISM: DESPAIR, TRANSCENDENCE, HOPE DENNIS ROHATYN1 UNIVERSITY OF SAN DIEGO

In 1975, at Hannah Arendt’s funeral, Hans Jonas paid tribute to her enduring legacy: “she has set a style of inquiry and debate which will ensure that no cheap formula for the human predicament will pass muster, so long as her example is remembered” (Dietz, 2002: 120). Unfortunately, even the best of us succumb to the very condition we seek to prevent. Arendt fell victim to semantic fate: thus the catch-all-22 phrase “the banality of evil,” a prime example of the evil of banality. Humanism—the word, the concept—runs a close second. We talk about it as though we knew what it meant, but we don’t have a clue, or else (strangely enough) we suffer from a surfeit of clues. For some it’s about saving the earth, for others, saving souls, and for still others, saving what’s left of the curriculum. Renaissance humanism sounds nice, but does anyone read Pico, besides a handful of medievalists with a vested interest in saving (or salvaging) the Ptolemaic (Thomistic) world-view? To the religious right, humanism is their sworn enemy; but the atheists they attack (and defend against) are all either scientists or pragmatists— in either case, on the wrong side of C.P. Snow’s infamous “two cultures” divide. What does that leave, except Alexander Pope’s “the proper study of mankind, is man” which is both trite and sexist, but far from obsolete. Quantum mechanics ups the Augustan ante: for every observer knows that to be is to be perceived, conceived, and received. The most objective of all disciplines is subjective—blurring all boundaries, erasing the distinction between I and It, making the world whole yet fragmenting it entirely.

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I thank Roberto Cantú for his enthusiasm, encouragement and forbearance, and fellow panelists, especially Tony Hutchison, for their wit, insight, and scholarship. That entails an untoward consequence, reversing polarity within a comic cosmic field.

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Pope’s aphorism reestablishes geocentrism, a narcissism of the intimately impersonal, privately public spheres: running on alternating au courant cycles, the more harmony changes, the more the medieval realm persists beyond the naïve limits the panglossian Encyclopedists prescribed. The Dark Ages turn into dark matter, black holes of empty inner and outer life, inky cloaks giving no protection against the undiscovered country. There’s nothing to discover, except that the philosopher has no cloaks. It follows that doesn’t need any help. On the contrary: Kant’s fabled Copernican revolution shows once and for all that the only thing we can ever know about “nature,” including ours, is how we describe (classify, explain, symbolize, or talk Dantesque rings around) it. Hence reality is reduced (equivalent) to our conventions (intuitions, categories), to our complex mental and linguistic apparatus. From Kant to Quine is but a single step. Having taken it, we wonder how to resurrect humanism. To paraphrase Billy Wilder, echoing Thales, I wonder if (and how) we can wonder (Fred MacMurray, teasing and enticing his femme banale, Barbara Stanwyck, in “Double Indemnity,” 1944). For the essence of humanism (echoing Sartre’s own post-WW II blues, and the demons who inspired it) is that life has no essence. That is, there’s nothing “outside” us, except for nothing that outlasts us, except death, and nothing that matters, except knowing that. That’s as existential as it gets, not ‘cause it’s an ism but ‘cause it is what it is—or isn’t. Even Kant realized this, yet teased us by distinguishing between what he called transcendent and transcendental. Emerson and Thoreau (among others) took the bait, but they were just kidding themselves. So was Kant. Hegel deftly united history and divinity, reconciled time with eternity, wedded suffering to salvation: yet even his acrobatic syntheses couldn’t turn dialectical lemons into real lemonade. Feuerbach, Marx and even Josiah Royce simply stopped trying: you can’t fool all the philosophers all of the time. When Pascal said that God is dead, his report was both premature and exaggerated. When Nietzsche said it, it was belated and understated. Let me restate this: When Lincoln spoke at the dedication of the new military cemetery at Gettysburg, PA (19 November 1863), he meekly foretold that “the world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.” So he lied, but it was a noble lie, as opposed to false prophecy. For everyone remembers Lincoln’s remarks; but who can name a single soldier who died in battle, on either side, except for Civil War buffs, professional historians, and a small number of living descendants of the participants? Lincoln’s words are immortal. The 46, 286 who died in combat, and were wounded,

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captured or missing are not. Was Lincoln guilty of mock modesty? Or did the Word become flesh, as it did a century later, when Dr. King spoke at the Lincoln Memorial? More cynically, but aptly, was Lincoln’s speech a Proustian moment, or just a Kodak? Did it transubstantiate us, so that “these dead shall not have died in vain,” or is it just a verbal gesture, as empty as metaphors themselves? Is the “discursive body” a body, as in William James and Merleau-Ponty, or just discourse, as in Kafka or Judith Butler? What about writers themselves? Is the body of their work real, or fictive? Or is that a false premise or dichotomy, too? I feign, therefore I am. To be is to be deceived. QED. The fact that you are reading all this routs my unmethodical doubt, much as it once did when Dr. Johnson, hearing of Bishop Berkeley’s immaterialism, kicked a nearby stone, deducing “I refute him thus.” But what if you’re not sentient? As Groucho soothingly consoled an anxious young comic, “don’t worry about the audience. Nobody’s there.” But that’s precisely the problem that humanism confronts: that nobody’s there—hence no One to confront. (The days of Abraham bargaining with the Almighty, or of Y--h answering Job out of the whirlwind, are long gone, myths that lie like ruins before a disembodied gaze). We’re just talking to ourselves (“conversation,” as Rorty has it). Even when we disagree, that proves nothing, except that we’re here now, or for the moment. Mental masturbation may not be solitary, but as a group activity it is still fruitless, perishable, and circular in more ways than one. That leaves us right back where we started: sans essence, sans transcendence, sans all. Heidegger said, “only a God can save us.” But there is no God— and if there were, Heidegger would be in big trouble. Unlike Gettysburg’s thousands of forlorn warriors, we remember him for all the wrong reasons. Better to worship nothingness than follow or obey “Der Fuehrer”—better no god than a false one. And that’s no big lie. Besides, the troops acted; Heidegger merely thought, and prided himself on (moral and political) passivity, as though ontological aloofness were a virtue. Whereas, Dr. Johnson did both: he thought and acted, matching his words to his deeds in a single fluid (if not graceful) arc. We envy his sense of identity: his monism, if not his logic. There was a spark of humanism to ignite (and illuminate) the world! But it was for nought. For in the next breath, Hume dismantled the self, leaving us with “bundles” of perception, tied to nothing but fragile memory and the succession of instants—as evanescent as time itself, a shotgun marriage between St. Augustine and the Buddha. Fragmented, self-estranged, Humpty Dumpty becomes Bob Dylan’s multiple, conflict- ridden, all but mutually exclusive selves (Todd Haynes, “I’m Not There,” 2007): artful,

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alert, and androgynous, yet available only on stage, screen or video laserdisc: signifying everything to others, but (like Heidegger’s Das Man) nothing to himself. “He’s a real nowhere man.” Now, like the Beatles, he’s got his own music company. The lonely crowd is no place to be, the more so when it engulfs us all in its frenzy. You can always bowl alone, but habits of the heart die hard— especially when you can’t even play with yourself, because you don’t know who you are, or wanna be. Mirror, mirror on the Berlin wall, who is the most gullible, self-deluded of us all? Even William Faulkner failed to convince us that “the poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.” Brave new words, uttered at a moment when chaos was imminent, and universal annihilation looked inexorable. But (with hindsight): prevail over what? The lost virginity of the nuclear dynamo? The moral wasteland of McCarthyism? Dilsey (Faulkner’s “mammy” heroine, who survives the Compsons’ decline and fall in The Sound and the Fury (1929), and is the source for Faulkner’s professed faith in humanity) endured. Indeed, unlike segregation, she prevailed. She saw things through, while seeing through the color line. Can the rest of us do better, and not just on paper? The poet’s voice is necessary, but far from sufficient. In an alienated world, even an alienation effect won’t do the trick. If “only a God can save us” then we’re licked. As William James recognized, in the wake of the Pequod, God saves those who shipwreck themselves. It’s the same story, from here to Alhambra (and back): as Sisyphus said, keep rolling. Sounds quixotic, but then, better to lose your illusions and maintain your ideals than to lose your ideals and maintain all your illusions. The whole point of praxis is (as Dr Faustus learned) to unite words with deeds, sacred to profane: to restate the formula, action without imagination is blind; imagination without concerted action is empty. Thus, after due deliberation we hasten to our appointed, if not anointed, tasks. We may not be equal to our humanistic calling. But it is more than equal to us. I don’t want to end on a nihilistic note. For one thing, it’s self-refuting: those who can’t believe in anything, not even in unbelief, will soon be hoist on their own eristic petard (Gorgias’ trilemma: nothing exists; even if it did, no one can grasp it, and even if you did grasp it, you can’t tell or explain it to anyone), or (like Frege) run afoul of Russell. They can kvetch their way to an infinite regress, but the only sure cure for logorrhea (chief symptom of Hamlet’s five-act, seven-year itch of antic melancholy) is giving it a rest— and the sound of silence. Second, as Kierkegaard knew, nothing is more enjoyable (especially for decadent intellectuals) than to wallow in despair: to go to the limit, if not surpass it, in Romantic defiance and mock self-

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abnegation. And we sure love to wallow. We even make a career out of it, going from one class (or conference) to another, playing Chicken Little (or Cassandra, or Jeremiah) with abandon, unaware of the traditions that grip and guide our anti-messianic zeal and make our voices in the wilderness, the acts of ventriloquism we perform, rise into a chorus, if not a choir, to whom we preach imminent disaster in a spiritual desert. Even scientists can join the Armageddon bandwagon, be it Herman Kahn, the club of Rome, or Jared Diamond. The end of the world is the ultimate angle, as well as a way to get a grant. The end of the world is nigh, but so long as it funds an endowed chair in Apocalypse Studies it postpone our tenured date with the dean or the devil. (I like running a high-class numbers of the beast racket; I just haven’t invented one.) I’m not saying there’s no reason to worry about the future, or that gloomy tunes like Thomas Malthus, Rachel Carson, Barry Commoner and Paul R. Ehrlich were all wet. Skepticism beats naïve, sugar-coated optimism (or invincible ignorance) all to hell. If my choice is between purgatory and Polyanna, I’ll take purgatory, and be purged. As Martin Amis recollects his father Kingsley’s reaction to learning that young Amis was writing about nuclear weapons: “Ah, I suppose you’re ‘against them,’ are you?” Cheers for Scrooge: humbug is humbug, be it PC, New Age, or fundamentalist cant. But why go from one extreme to another, to be left alone in the middle of nowhere? Even Muriel Rukeyser can’t live for an instant minus the “masks” she peels away, or divested of the “mythologies” she (like Shiva) creates only to destroy. The more we disenchant the universe, the more we reenchant it—or resurrect the unburied dead. Since this all sounds strange, though its rhetorical ground is (I fear) far too familiar, I’ll rephrase it: we barely survived the Holocaust. Are we now about to die (slowly) from pollution, overpopulation, endangered species, and the ravages of (economic) globalization? Is genocide merely a prologue to ecocide? If so, what can humanism do about it, except groan in histrionic horror? It’s not up to scholars to decide what to do—for that they have experts, the scientists (and bureaucrats) who court the abyss, in the name of progress, or whatever shibboleth (idol of the tribe) pays all the bills. But even that tells us something, in our barren, impotent, obsolete humanistic rage. As Hume said in regard to sentiment, without betraying any sentimentality: “’tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.” He spoke righter than he knew, righter than his (un)reasonable wrong. For the dirty little secret of our shabby little lives is that we don’t want them to end: bald and insignificant as they are, with bad scripts written for

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(but not by) us, utterly beyond our control, and with no definite end, except in each individual case, we strut and fret our hour upon the stage, and then disappear, not knowing how the story or plot turns out, not having any hint or a clue as to the denouement or climax, or even whether there’ll be one: bad jokes about asking Mrs. Lincoln “how she liked the play” speak to this form of self-spite, of suicidal Schadenfreude, amidst ineffable violence; ribald gallows humor, footnotes to the “epic tragedy” of an epoch that still scars us. Moreover, that Lincoln was murdered by an actor in a theatre during a show is pure farce, something that no Broadway or Hollywood producer would invent, or finance, though Lincoln’s ghost would chuckle at the surreal spectacle of his demise, from the comparative safety of a reserved seat in the undiscovered country). When it comes to wishing we were dead, or never born, we have Sophocles and Frank Capra (“It’s a Wonderful Life,” 1946) to thank (or to blame). Yet we don’t wish that—not really— if we did, we wouldn’t say it. Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we’d better shut up. But who wants to do that, unless (paradoxically) that’s the last word? So we agree to differ, following the Framers, and (like Tocqueville, J.S. Mill, Charles S. Peirce, or Karl Popper) we make fallibility the only infallible principle. That’s called democracy, aka the open society, mutual tolerance. Alas, that’s still no aid to a quest for immortality. That’s why we never stop chattering: even if no one can hear, or ease us over the edge. Like most obiter dicta, mine are writ in water, not carved in stone or etched in silicon. What blessing, since most words, like most people, don’t merit even modest posterity. Dr. Kevorkian may demur. But even he wants us to heed his words, to pay attention, so that, like Willy Loman, his death of sales battle fatigue shall not be in vain. Triste tropes are ubiquitous: yet in their disquieting way, they give us hope—which is what humanism is about (thus guarding against myths, lies, half-truths, self-deception, and BS). Yet by staring into an abyss, we avoid it, at least until the next crisis (Prohibition, the Cold War, the War Against Terror) summons our energies and ambitions, and we lurch from one apocalypse to the next, redoubling our effort when we’ve lost our aim, recalling Pogo’s maxim: “we have met the enemy, and they is us.” Not a cliché— yet. Our enemy is intangible, impalpable, which is why we go to such lengths to personify it. It’s our shadow, forever made and unmade in our own shifting yet constant image. Striving to make the Word flesh, to incarnate it, we risk turning flesh into mere words. If (and when) that happens, the Logos dies a hard death, never to rise from the grave. Religion becomes ritual, appeals to “community” empty piety, the Gettysburg Address and “I Have a Dream” morph into kitsch, hype, false

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nostalgia, props for demagogues. To be sure, reactionaries have no monopoly on hypocritical nonsense. Everyone is susceptible to the seductive satisfactions of sanctimonious self-righteousness, as the late Spiro Agnew might say (apostles of doom are an inclusive, not exclusive, bunch). My warning embraces the arrogantly humble messenger of bad news: that means me. As I am in danger of preaching the gospel of humanism, if not to the converted then at least to the dismayed and distraught, I will end this sermon on surmount with a story. We hear so much about Egypt these days, amid the struggle to lead both ourselves and the Middle East out of totalitarian wilderness (though it remains to be seen in prime time whether the third world is at last safe for democracy, or only for Visa and Master Charge). Yet things could be worse—and worst. When Rommel’s panzer tanks were devastating North Africa, it appeared that Hitler had the upper hand, not just there but everywhere. Eventually, the worst of all possible worlds was averted, albeit narrowly. For the losers, there was neither savor nor savior. Except legend, which, though it be apocryphal has that Nibelungen ring of truth. As Montgomery captured El Alamein, an embittered Nazi General (not Rommel, but a name lost to posterity) peered through a pair of field glasses (binoculars), pondering impending defeat. Gauging his remaining strategic options, he said to no one in particular: “the situation is serious, but not quite hopeless. Overhearing him, a private intoned, “Nein, Mein Commandant, the situation is quite hopeless, but not at all serious.” Even a Nazi court jester merits a tiny medal, not for inherited indifference, jaded fatalism straight from Hitler’s Straussian beer hall (“Gluecklich ist, wer vergisst, dass es nicht zu helfen ist”). If we take Goedel’s (second) incompleteness theorem seriously (and we can’t ignore or disavow it without reducing arithmetic to absurdity), there are undecidable (i.e., probably unprovable) sentences in every (deductive) system, no matter how elegant, axiomatic and rigorously constructed. Notbing could be more deflating, or more precise in its humbling reflexivity—and as the solution to David Hilbert’s “tenth problem,” a challenge he posed to his colleagues at the International Congress of Mathematicians (Paris, 1900). The “international” part failed. It is sobering to think that in 1931, two years before Hitler’s brand of fascism began its fatal reign of (t)error, an Austro-Hungarian savant from the same city as the monk who became the “father” of modern genetics (Gregor Mendel), so much abused by the Third Reich, showed once and for all (sic) that the last Word is that there is never a last Word, not even in math, let alone in art, politics or religion. So we must keep talking, even if no one is listening: for dialogue has a life of its own, even as aborted monologue. Only the will to discourse” can triumph over the will to

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power, to make the inessential and superfluous the only things worth preserving and cherishing, till body and soul depart. Even soliloquy is an ontological imperative: the alternative to communication is death. Talk is cheap: but the remedy for the inhuman condition is (as Hume divined) beyond measure, infinite, priceless (for everything else, there’s usury laws). Materialists like Feuerbach capitulate to half-truth, grimly insisting that “all theology is anthropology.” Whitman is our better half, sacralizing the word as flesh, life as holy, each of us as god. (Ginsberg howled at a full Moloch moon, but never matched Walt’s perfect pantheism.) All anthropology is theology. That’s not wishful thinking, or even profound projection. It’s the stuff of life, the mind of the body politic. Who needs God, as long as we vow to confront (not antagonize) each other in Karl Jaspers’ solemn yet “joyful strife” of love? As Ben Franklin declared to Socrates and Habermas at Independence Mall, “we must all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.” There’s solidarity for you, in all its contingency, irony, and sheer fragility. Or, as Rodney King delicately pleaded, starring in an improvised but wellrehearsed (and oft-repeated) live on tape LA Freeway production of No Exit, “Can’t we all just get along?” There! I’ve succumbed to sheer platitude: to amor mundi, if not amor fati. Here in the midst of the crumbling superstructure of the nightmarish dream machine, what else do you expect? In a city of quartz, where every dawn is a day of the locust, I can only repeat what the Messiah revealed to Cecil B. De Mille on the set of God-forsaken Sodom and Gomorrah, next to Schwab’s, on Hollywood and Vine: “What a way to go!” (J. Lee Thompson, 1964). Luckily, we needn’t choose between annihilation and anomie, opt for apocalypse now or happiness never. Instead we can take slight solace, if not constant comfort, from knowing that even Einstein only got it half-right: if the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible, then surely the most comprehensible thing is that it’s incomprehensible. Just ask Dostoievski: or the nearest undertaker. The glow-worm shows the matin to be near. Thus it’s time for my disappearing act. Again the word dies to its own life, just as every death is the death of a whole world. Let’s drink to that. Belly up to the bar for a round, in the saloon of eternal recurrence, leaving future Fuehrers frozen in pipe dreams of pure negation, the chill hell of death. Anyone who cares to join me is welcome, just so Clarence can get his wings, when “the better angels of our nature” depart, headed for yon cosmic field of redemptive dreams. (I thought that one was easy, but nobody plays ball anymore, except to serve mammon. But even a field trip to an ancient, preColumbian mound will evoke the same nostalgia.) Just beware the

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Jabberwocky: sufficient unto the lecture is the learned doctor thereof. Before this Fool stumbles into the stormy night, leaving Nuncle alone upon the heath, recall the wisdom of a Renaissance humanist, who deflated dogmas and despots with ease and ardor: “perched on the loftiest throne in the world, we are still sitting on our own rump.” Like Montaigne, we must be fanatically unfanatical, dodging both vanity and self-pity, Preacher Man (Ecclesiastes) and the Snow Job, saving our skins from a fatal case of hubris. In the beginning is tragi-comedy, yet after all the becoming in no time, the joke is still on us. That’s why there’s no argument against laughter (just ask Swift, Voltaire, and Orwell). So before my windmill stops tilting, I better light out for the old I-10 West territory, lest the last logos of civilized Pollyanna start gainin’ on me. The rest is silence—and vice versa. And so Goodnight, Ms. Katholou, whoever you are.

Works Cited Amis, Martin. Einstein’s Monsters. New York: Vintage Random House, 1990. Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Penguin, 2006. Basler, Roy P., ed. Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (1831-1865). 9 Vols. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers U. Press, 1953. Boswell, Samuel. Life of Johnson. R.W. Chapman, editor. New York: Oxford U. Press, 1998. Dietz, Mary G. Turning Operations: Feminism, Arendt, and Politics. New York: Routledge, 2002. Faulkner, William. “Speech Accepting the Nobel Prize in Literature.” Text + audio, at http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/williamfaulknernobelprize address.htm Feuerbach, Ludwig. The Essence of Christianity. Trans. George Eliot. Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 1989. Frankfurt, Harry. On Bullshit . Princeton, NJ: Princeton U. Press, 2005. Furtwangler, Albert. Assassin on Stage. Brutus, Hamlet, and the Death of Lincoln. Urbana: U. of Illinois Press, 1991. Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40). Eds. David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton. New York: Oxford U. Press, 2000. James, William. Writings, 1902-1910. Ed. Bruce Kuklick. New York: Library of America, 1987.

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Kierkegaard, Soren. Kierkegaard’s Writings. Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1992. Matiyasevich, Yuri V. Hilbert’s Tenth Problem. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993. Pais, Abraham. Subtle is the Lord. The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein. Second edition. New York: Oxford U. Press, 2005. Webb, Judson C. Mechanism, Mentalism, Metamathematics: An Essay on Finitism. Boston: D. Reidel, 1980. Whitman, Walt. Whitman: Poetry and Prose. Ed. Justin Kaplan. New York: Library of America, 1996. (Incl. “Leaves of Grass,” 1855 and later eds.) Wills, Garry. Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992.

PART THREE: TRADITIONS AND GLOBAL MODERNITIES

EXPERIENCING AN UNEVEN GLOBAL MODERNITY: GLOBALIZATION AND THE DRAMATIC MONOLOGUE IN ARAVIND ADIGA’S THE WHITE TIGER BIDHAN CHANDRA ROY CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, LOS ANGELES

Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger (2008) burst upon the literary scene by winning the Booker Prize for its first time author and, in so doing, stirring considerable debate in Europe, India and the United States The novel itself centers upon the story of Balram Halwai who is at once a criminal, murderer, Bangalore entrepreneur and rhetorically skilled at justifying his motives. As a child growing up in impoverished rural India, Balram began life in the "Darkness," a world of landlord and peasant. When he escapes to the "Light" of the cities, it is into a world of servants, masters and extreme inequality, where "never before in human history have so few owed so much to so many" (Adiga 149). Because upward mobility and social advancement in such a world can only be achieved by patronage and corruption, the dramatic tension of the novel hinges upon Balram’s decision to step outside of the conventional moral code of the “rooster coop” and defy the destiny laid out for him in a society defined by Indian religious tradition and the caste system (Adiga 149). For Balram, this decision results in the murder of his master, the theft of money and escape to Bangalore where he becomes part of India’s new entrepreneurbased economy-a “white tiger” by his own estimation. Such a plot allows Adiga to tell the story of not only India’s recent economic transformation, but also the social fabric of corruption, inequality, and poverty upon which the novel shows it to be based. The White Tiger’s critical representation of the “new India” and, in particular, its representation of it from the perspective of a member of India’s underclass, has led to fierce critical debate following the novel’s publication (Adiga 125). While reviews and criticism of the novel are

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numerous and varied, Akash Kapour exemplifies a common line of debate in his review for The New York Times. On the one hand, Kapour argues the novel is a parable “of the new India” that is “far removed from the glossy images of Bollywood stars and technology entrepreneurs, representing a penetrating piece of social commentary, attuned to the inequalities that persist despite India’s new prosperity” (Kapour 2008). From this perspective, the novel “correctly identifies—and deflates—middle-class India’s collective euphoria,” over the new globalized India that has emerged in the last twenty years (Kapour 2008). But on the other hand, the novel is also seen to lack a “balanced perspective,” and “feels simplistic: an effective polemic, perhaps, but an incomplete portrait of a nation and a people grappling with the ambiguities of modernity” (Kapour 2008). Other reviewers, such as Amitava Kumar, writing in The Hindu, take this line of critique further by claiming the novel gives an inauthentic view of India whose representation of “ordinary people” is “not only trite but also offensive” (Kumar 2008). From this latter perspective, the novel is seen both as reductive as a work of literature and myopic in its view of “a new, transformed India” (Kumar 2008). While there is certainly evidence to support both readings of the novel, what is often absent in such analysis is a nuanced examination of stylistic choices that Adiga makes in The White Tiger and their significance to representing the experience of globalization from the perspective of India’s underclass. In response to this oversight, what I hope to demonstrate in this essay is that use of a prose version of the dramatic monologue enables Adiga to represent a narrative of globalization that shows a world deeply integrated through economics and consumer culture, yet not culturally homogenized. In contrast to the distant, impersonal “blue world” images of the “global village” that have proven popular in corporate, as well as certain literary representations of globalization, The White Tiger gives voice to what Anthony Giddens has called the “in-hereness of globalization” (Giddens 1994: 95). More specifically, the extent to which dramatic monologue emphasizes the interiority of Balram’s experience of globalization, as well as the interpretative demands that the genre places upon the reader, forces the reader to play an active role in evaluating Balram’s narrative and, in so doing, encourages the reader to reflect upon his or her place in a world of complex connectivity. Such an intimate narrative of globalization fosters a sense of interconnectedness between Balram, as a member of the Indian underclass, and the privileged readership of the novel: a sense intensified by Adiga’s particular use of narrative voice that vacillates between the familiar and unfamiliar to its English speaking, transnational audience.

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Issues of Form: Globalization and the Dramatic Monologue Use of the dramatic monologue as a literary term can be traced to the Victorian period, where it was used to characterize the poetry of Robert Browning, a writer who continues to dominate the genre to this day. Although there is debate amongst critics over how to define the dramatic monologue as a literary form, in general it is conceptualized as a text that has an auditor (present or implied in the text), that stresses the interior, psychological dimensions of the speaker and that requires the reader to play an active role in completing the dramatic scene.1 As Glenn Everett argues, this means that the reader is invited to participate in the drama by imagining that he or she is present in order to infer what the speaker really did as a character, while rarely being offered conclusive proof. J. Hillis Miller, amongst others, situates this ambiguity of the form within the uncertainty of the historical moment in which the dramatic monologue emerged, arguing that its rise is bound to the late Victorians decline of belief in absolute values and the erosion of a stable position from which to speak (Everett 1991). More recent critics have tended to emphasize the dramatic monologue’s qualities of ambiguity, process and incompleteness as a form that anticipates the preoccupations of postmodern culture. These general qualities of the dramatic monologue make it well suited to the complex themes addressed in The White Tiger, although Adiga’s use of the form differs from its traditional usage by incorporating elements of the epistolary novel. On the surface, the novel appears to be a series of letters to the Chinese Prime minster Wen Jiabao, produced over a span of seven days that begins with Balram declaring that the narrative is for the desk of “His Excellency Wen Jiabao…From the desk of: The White Tiger” (Adiga 1). Shortly after this address, however, Balram explains that he does not write but “dictates these letters,” thereby explaining the oral, conversational tone of the novel. In this respect, the novel leaves unanswered whether it is a series of monologues recorded by a Dictaphone, or computer, to be sent at a later date to Wen Jiabao, whether

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Although the dramatic monologue first emerged as a poetic form, the dramatic monologue was greatly influenced by the character development, language and narrative aspects of the novel, prompting Oscar Wilde to quip that ‘Meredith is a prose Browning, and so is Browning. He used poetry as a medium for writing in prose." (Lehman 14) Conversely, following Browning, the dramatic monologue became an influential influence on the novel and, in particular, the development of the “stream of consciousness” narrative mode used by Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, amongst others.

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it is a verbal monologue that will never reach its audience, or whether it is simply an imagined, interior monologue in the mind of Balram. In any of these instances, what is clear is that rather than comprising a series of written letters, the novel is a sequence of oral monologues delivered by Balram, alone in his office, to the imagined auditor of Wen Jiabao. Recognition of the novel’s particular use of the dramatic monologue is important because it is suggestive of how the electronic media influences the ways in which people now communicate, and offers an initial point of entry into understanding the relationship between the novel’s theme of India’s experience of globalization and its form. Of particular significance in this respect is the connection between the popularity of the dramatic monologue in contemporary Anglophone poetry and “the rise of the global electronic media” that Glennis Byron makes in Dramatic Monologue (Byron 138). Discussing the frequent absence of an auditor in contemporary poetry, Byron suggests [T]hat this is partly related to the way in which developments in media technology generally have gradually affected the dynamics of speaker/auditor relationship in our society. With radio and television an audience can be addressed without being present, something which has intensified with the advent of the internet, where, in various “chat rooms”, totally fictional personae can be constructed and presented. (Byron 144)

The connection between the decline of face-to-face auditors in contemporary dramatic monologues and the sorts of dematerialized electronic communication that Byron identifies in contemporary society is supported in The White Tiger by the pervasiveness of the electronic media in Balram’s narrative. Most notably, Balram knowledge of Wen Jiabao comes from radio and television (‘All India Radio announced, “Premier Wen Jiabao is coming to Bangalore next week”), he frequently interrupts his narrative to comment upon something he hears on All India radio (“Can you hear that Mr. Jiabao? I’ll turn it up for you,”Adiga 251), or “a song from the latest Hindi film” (Adiga 207), and ends the novel by identifying his email address (“[email protected],” Adiga 276). The effect of these numerous references to electronic media is to suggest that the framing of his monologue as an address to Wen Jiabao is a function of imagining his story as a response to media discourse. In particular, Balram regards his monologue to represent an alternative narrative of the “new India” to the official narrative that Wen Jiabao will participate in during his visit to India, which unfolds “in front of a TV camera” and that tells “you about how moral and saintly India is” (Adiga 2). In this respect, the novel shows that Balram’s contextualization of his

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life story and identity, as well as the global frame against which he defines it, is strongly influenced by his experience of the electronic media. However, the success of The White Tiger does not rest solely upon addressing how global communication networks shape identities and lives in the contemporary world (which after all is a theme taken up in much more detail in numerous other novels), but upon who gets to represent their experiences within it. Consequently, the issue of voice is at the heart of the novel, of which Adiga comments in an interview with Eric McHenry: I was motivated by the desire to capture a particular voice—the voice of the Indian underclass, which is perhaps 400 million strong, and which is largely invisible in Indian literature and cinema. Where they are represented, it’s in stereotypical ways: as weak, ultrareligious, humorless figures who beg for the middle-class reader’s pity and protection. I’ve noticed that a sense of humor and the capacity for vice are privileges accorded only to the middle class in literature and cinema from this country. I wanted to challenge that mode of representation of the poor— and of India (since India is still substantially made up of poorer people. (2008)

Adiga is aware of the challenges that face a writer from a privileged background and educated at Oxford and Columbia university’s representing “the voice of the Indian underclass,” and his use of the dramatic monologue is an important aspect of achieving this objective because of the sense of doubleness implicit to the form. In the most obvious instance, this sense of doubleness is evident in the narrative voice of the monologue in which the author, shaping the monologue through the literary and language choices that he or she makes, is present in the voice of the fictional character. The effect of this double voice is, as Alan Sinfield points out, that we experience the ‘I’ of the poem as a character in his own right but simultaneously, sense the author’s voice through him (Sinfield 1977). Adiga draws attention to this sense of double voicing in The White Tiger’s opening sentence by pronouncing, “Neither you nor I speaks English, but there are some things that can be said only in English” (Adiga 1). This paradoxical announcement offers a humorous way of foregrounding Adiga’s role as the author of the novel and exposing the illusion of the text as a work of fiction. Adiga goes on to elucidate his decision to use English to give voice to a character that cannot speak English in the following way: English is neither truly a language of poorer Indians, nor is it truly alien to them. Once I decided to write in English, and write about a member of the

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Indian underclass—in his own voice—I wanted to establish one thing right away: a narrator like the one I’ve chosen would not be speaking in English or thinking in English — but I, as a writer, assert that I can capture the range and flavor of his thoughts and ideas, the full texture of his personality, in my book. He will not be speaking in pidgin or broken or lower- class English; he will be speaking in a language with all the majesty and power that the spoken word has throughout India. (Adiga interview 2008)

The detail with which Adiga defends his choice of narrative voice here is telling and reflects the extent to which critics of the novel have attacked it in various ways for its lack of “authenticity”-a point I will return to in more detail later. More importantly at present, however, is recognition of how a second sense of the dramatic monologue’s doubleness is crucial to understanding Adiga’s critique of the new, globalized India. In this second aspect, there is an ideological doubleness between Balram’s limited perspective as a character and the novel’s broader perspective. The distance between these two perspectives enables Adiga to show how Balram is caught up in, and has internalized, large portions of the social discourses that the novel as a whole, challenges. On the most obvious level, Adiga uses this doubleness to ironic effect in Balram’s repeated bigoted comments about Muslims, women and various other groups. The effect of these comments is, as Sneharika Roy points out in “The White Tiger: The Beggar's Booker” (2009), part of Adiga’s strategy to make the “knowing reader” point out the flaws in the “naïve narrators” judgment (Roy 59). On a more structural level, the distance between Balram’s account of the new globalized India and Adiga’s critique of it is implicit to the plot of the novel. At the end of his narrative, therefore, Balram’s assessment of his narrative as an “amazing success story” (256) because he has escaped from the system that has oppressed him his whole life (“I’ve made it. I’ve broken out of the rooster coop,” Adiga 275) remains in tension with his dependency upon the corruption of the Bangalore police, the late nights he spends alone in his office, his fear of being arrested and, perhaps most tellingly, the “entrepreneurs curse” of having ‘to watch his business all the time” (Adiga 5). There is then, a distance between Balram’s representation of himself as “The White Tiger,” who unlike the white tiger in the Delhi zoo, “can’t live the rest of my life in a cage” (Adiga 239), and what he unwittingly reveals about his life that suggests he has accepted the social discourse of the rooster coop more than he admits. In other words, Balram can only imagine “success” within the parameters of oppression, corruption and exploitation that he sought to escape and, therefore, whether he has really

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“broken out of the rooster coop,” or simply found a more comfortable form of imprisonment within it, is a question that the novel leads the reader to decide (Adiga 275). Such doubleness implicit to the dramatic monologue places considerable interpretive demands upon its readers. Consequently, much of the literary richness of the form comes not only from the details of the narrative that are revealed to us by the narrator, but also from what the audience must read between the lines. While this observation is true of all dramatic monologues, the specific interpretive demands that the genre places upon the reader take on their own significance when we consider the audience of The White Tiger and the effect that Adiga intends the novel to have upon it. Adiga elucidates this intended effect as follows: You are not asked to accept Balram Halwai’s story, and indeed I believe there is internal evidence within the novel to challenge some of Balram’s more extreme views on Indian society. But you are asked to hear his voice—the humor, insolence, agnosticism, cynical intelligence, and above all, his power to enter your middle-class world (even if, perhaps, you live in the U.S.A. or Europe or China) and disrupt it. (Adiga interview 2008)

Use of the dramatic monologue is important in helping Balram’s voice to “enter” and “disrupt” the transnational “middle-class world” that Adiga describes because of the active role it requires of the reader that Robert Langbaum notes in his influential work about the dramatic monologue, The Poetic Experience (1957). In analyzing Browning’s “The Last Duchess,” Langbaum argues that the absence of an authorial voice in the dramatic monologue invites reader response and creates a tension between sympathy for the speaker and moral judgment. While Langbaum’s work has been questioned following developments in feminist, poststructuralist and postcolonial thought that destabilize the monolithic nature of his universal reader, his emphasis upon the importance of the reader nevertheless remains influential. Consequently, more recent critics have moved away from making Langbaum’s universalized claims about the reader and toward analyzing the range of reader responses that dramatic monologues invite. For example, John Maynard argues that the silence of the auditor in a dramatic monologue is a literary device used to hook the reader and provoke reader participation. Therefore, while the auditor may remain silent, it is the reader who is provoked to “break into our own noisy response” (Maynard 74). For Maynard, it is not, as Langbaum argues, that we need to identify a particular response that the text generates in a reader, but rather that we need to “explore the range of response–experiences–the

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poem generates” (Maynard 76). The question for the critic, therefore, is not how to conceive of a universal effect that the text has upon an “ideal” reader, but rather to “read the reader” (Maynard 77), to ask why, in the absence of any authoritative, guiding voice do we see what we do in the narrative. In this respect, an interesting feature of the dramatic monologue is its ability to contextualize the reader: to force the reader to think what social and cultural conditions shape what he or she sees in the narrative in order to make sense of it. Thinking of the dramatic monologue in this way is crucial to reading The White Tiger and, in particular, thinking through how the novel might disturb the “middle-class world” of the transnational readership that Adiga identifies. Following many of Browning’s morally ambivalent characters, Balram is both oppressed and a ruthless murderer, both charming and exploitative. Like the Duke in “My Last Duchess,” therefore, Balram is precisely the sort of character that Langbaum argues elicits a tension of sympathy and moral reprehension in the reader. Yet if we take this sort of analysis a step further and ask the sorts of questions that more recent critics like Maynard posit, we begin to ask why and on what grounds are judgments of sympathy for Balram, or moral reprehension of him made, and how do such judgments enable him “to enter your middle-class world?” Is Balram the product of a corrupt Indian society? A corrupt neoliberal world? A criminal? A liar? A victim? What cultural and social assumptions make possible such judgments? And what might possible reader responses to these questions tell us about the experiences of our current phase of global modernity?

Representing the Experience of Globalization in The White Tiger In order to attempt to answer these questions, we need to move beyond a conceptual discussion of the dramatic monologue and begin to examine more specifically how Adiga uses the form to address the theme of globalization in the novel. On the most obvious level, Balram’s monologue is framed as a counter voice to the narrative of India’s “economic miracle,” against which Balram claims to tell the “truth” about Bangalore’s global outsourcing industry (Adiga 2). Balram’s narrative challenges neoliberal celebrations of the Indian economy by detailing a shadow economy behind the “outsourcing companies that virtually run America now” (Adiga 3). What Balram’s story reveals is that if talk of India’s new economy is dominated by its technological development that now makes it a significant player in the global postindustrial economy, then Balram’s experience of this new economy in Bangalore remains

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decidedly embodied and local. Indeed, from the experience of the class of workers that drive, cook, clean and generally service India’s new generation of call centre workers and software engineers in the novel, the new, global postindustrial economy appears much the same as the old one. One important outcome of the Indian underclass experience of the postindustrial economy represented in The White Tiger is that it offers a very different representation of worker exploitation to middle class accounts of globalization by writers of South Asia and its diaspora. For instance, Balram’s experience of the global economy contrasts sharply to Hari Kunzru’s character in Transmission, Arjun, who is a middle class computer programmer. Arjun is an example of an Indian postindustrial worker who manages to get access to the affluent Silicon Valley labor market through a rather dodgy recruitment company that gleams off much of his income, and transforms him into a reformulated indentured laborer in America. Eventually, however, Arjun gets a good job, works much harder than his American counterparts only to get laid off in the following manner: Mr. Mehta, as I understand it there are no indicators of short-term recovery. It’s a sector-wide trend. This is what our public relations team has been trying to underline to investors. It’s not just Virugenix, it’s across the board. And Mr. Mehta, that’s the take home for you too. You shouldn’t see this as a sign of personal failure. You’re a valuable individual with a lot to offer. It’s just Virugenix can no longer offer you a context for selfdevelopment. (Kunzru 97)

Kunzru is adept here at representing a perceived opacity of the relations and structures of the global economy through the turgid corporate language that surrounds Arjun’s dismissal. Such opaque language and reasoning leaves Arjun confused and later alienated from the corporate world for which he had held such hope. What Arjun is unable to fully come to terms with in the passages that surround his redundancy is that his dismissal is not the decision of his boss, or his company, but the distant forces of the global economy. Here direct relationships between identity and economic production are destabilized by globalization and postindustrialisation, serving to conceal the relationship between workers and production. It is, in the emailed words of Darryl, the head of Virugenix, “NOBODY’S FAULT” (Kunzru 97). Such dematerialized email exchanges between Arjun and his employer erode the sort of direct relationships between owner and worker that we see in The White Tiger. For Arjun, there is simply no one to protest to, no tangible symbol to resist

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and no way to situate his own individual place within this world of ‘sector wide trends’ hidden behind unfathomable public relations rhetoric. In contrast to Arjun’s inability to identify an “enemy” within the new postindustrial economy responsible for his exploitation, Balram in The White Tiger remains highly aware of whom he considers his oppressors to be. Central to this awareness is Balram’s ability to contextualize his experience of oppression within a historical narrative of Indian servitude that predates British colonialism (“first the Muslims then the British bossed us around,” Adiga 18), and has its roots in Vedic mythology. Thus Balram poses the question to his absent auditor: Do you know Hanuman, sir? He was faithful servant of the god Rama, and we worship him in our temples because he is a shining example of how to serve your masters with absolute fidelity, love and devotion. These are the kinds of gods they have foisted upon us, Mr. Jiabao. Understand, now, how hard it is for a man to win his freedom in India. (Adiga 16)

Balram’s experience of servitude within the India caste system means that unlike Arjun in Transmission, who has not had such an experience, Balram sees the “new” globalized Indian economy as a reformulation of a long history of servitude, leaving him to conclude that in “1947 the British left, but only a moron would think that we have became free then” (Adiga 18). For Balram, therefore, the idea of neocolonialism is not derived from the complex theoretical formulations currently debated within postcolonial theory but from the observation that, while the identities of the oppressors may have changed, the social position of the Indian rural poor has not. It is insights such as this that have led critics such as Kapur to comment that Balram’s perspective of the “new India” ‘correctly identifies—and deflates—middle-class India’s collective euphoria’ over Indian economic success (Kapur 2008). Consequently, a significant contribution of the novel toward representing India’s current experience of global modernity is that it challenges both the ephemeral view of the global economy that Arjun’s experience in Transmission suggests, as well as the official narrative of India’s economic success that often elides the experience of the Indian underclass. Nevertheless, if critics such as Kapur are often attuned to how Balram’s experience of the “new India” challenges certain narratives of globalization, what is frequently overlooked is how the novel sets about doing so. Put simply, while the content of the novel is frequently discussed, its form is not. Addressing this oversight is important because the novel’s narrative mode is central to the relationship between its representation of Balram’s experience of globalization and the Adiga’s

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intended effect of this upon the reader. A useful entry into exploring this relationship is the novel’s representation of global consumer culture. Consider for example the following discussion of Pizza Hut between Balram and his employers, Ashok and Pinky: ““Ashok,’” she said. “Now hear this. Balram, what is it we’re eating?” I knew it was a trap, but what could I do? – I answered. The two of them burst into giggle. “Say it again, Balram.” They laughed again. “It’s not piJA. It’s PiZZa. Say it properly.” “Wait- you’re mispronouncing it too. There’s a T in the middle. Peet. Zah.” “Don’t correct my English, Ashok. There’s no T in pizza. Look at the box.” I had to hold my breath as I stood there waiting for them to finish. The stuff smelt so awful. (Adiga 131)

While the perception that the globalization of multinational brands such as Pizza Hut and Starbucks has homogenized and, for some, Americanized the world, the representation of how such brands are experienced in their local contexts indicates that ubiquity and cultural homogenization is not necessarily the same thing. For Balram, Pizza Hut is a signifier that is beyond his cultural knowledge and his experience of it only serves to reinforce his subaltern status as Ashok and Pinky torment him because of his mispronunciation of the word Pizza. By contrast, for Pinky and Ashok, their preference for Pizza serves a class marker that distinguishes them from Balram and identifies them as part of a transnational, Englishspeaking elite. Indeed, so important does the cultural capital associated with Pizza Hut appear in this exchange that it leads to considerable debate between who has the best command of the word Pizza and, consequently, the American consumer culture it represents. For a Western and, in particular, American audience, such engagement with mundane symbols of global consumer culture, within an Indian context, provide a tension in which the familiarity of Pizza Hut as a brand is set against the unfamiliarity of what it signifies to Balram, Ashok and Pinky. This tension between the familiar and unfamiliar in the representation if global brands such as Pizza Hut is intensified by Adiga’s use of the dramatic monologue and the particularity Balram’s voice: a voice, as Adiga describes it in a recent interview, as not using “pidgin or broken or lower- class English,” but rather “a language with all the majesty and power that the spoken word has throughout India” (Adiga

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interview 2008). This choice of voice produces a relationship between speaker and author that, as Charles Ferrall points out in Modernist Writing and Reactionary Politics, “is much like that between a ventriloquist and his dummy” (Ferrall 78). For Ferrall, the effect of this relationship between speaker and author is that “as with ventriloquism there is always something uncanny about the dramatic monologue” (Ferrall 78). Consequently, if Adiga’s representation of global brands produces a tension between familiarity and unfamiliarity to Western readers, then this tension is intensified by the “uncanny” nature of the narrative voice it is represented by.2 While I am not claiming that this sense of the uncanny produces a uniform response in English- speaking, Western readers, I am suggesting that we must recognize it as an important aspect of achieving Adiga’s goal of the text entering the “middle class world” of its readers. It does so, because rather than appear as a distant other, Balram’s experience of global modernity is at once familiar and strange to the reader, enabling his character to implicate the reader in his story. This sense of implication is reinforced by Balram’s frequent address of “you” that, as Maynard suggests, in the absence of an auditor’s reaction, provokes “the reader provoked to “break into our own noisy response” (Maynard 74). One of the most significant examples of this narrative technique with respect to the theme of globalization is Balram’s explanation of the murder of his boss toward the end of the novel that asks: But isn’t it likely that everyone who counts in this world, including our prime minister (including you, Mr. Jiabao), has killed someone or other on their way to the top? Kill enough people and they will put up bronze statues to you near Parliament House in Delhi –but that is glory, and not what I am after. All I wanted was the chance to be a man- and for that, one murder was enough. (Adiga 273-274)

The italicized address of “you” is particularly important here, because the silence of Wen Jiabao as the auditor of this passage leads the reader to take on this role, complicating any moral judgment that the reader might make of Balram. Is the reader, like Wen Jiabao complicit in state-sponsored murders called by another name? How does the reader judge Balram’s decision to murder in order to pursue the same middle class dreams that the reader might aspire to? Or is Balram’s narrative the unreliable story of a criminal attempting to justify his actions? To be sure readers will

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For a detailed discussion of the uncanny and literature see Nicholas Royle’s, The Uncanny (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003).

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respond to such questions in diverse ways but the point I am making is that the narrative address of the text encourages the reader to contextualize his or her self: to think on what grounds do I respond to Balram’s story? On what grounds do I judge his actions? And how do my own ideological assumptions inform such decisions? The texture of the language that Balram uses to address the reader–its educated reasonableness – plays an important role in deepening the sort of reader engagement I have been discussing, because Balram’s voice bears the mark of the transnational English speaking class that consume global bestsellers like The White Tiger. Consequently, Balram’s voice does not sound like a distant member of the Indian underclass, removed from the English-speaking world of the novel’s audience, but rather a voice whose strange familiarity to its audience enables it to “enter and perhaps disturb” their middle class worlds (Adiga interview 2008). Conceiving of Balram’s voice in this way provides a different reading to a wide range of critics who evaluate his voice in terms of its “authenticity.” For example, Ativama Kumar writes in the Hindu Times, “for a novel that is supposed to be a portrait of the ‘real’ India, The White Tiger comes across as curiously inauthentic. Is it a novel from one more outsider, presenting cynical anthropologies to an audience that is not Indian?” (Kumar 2008). Similarly, Sanjay Subramanyam in the London Review of Books claims that Balram’s voice is characterized by a “jangling dissonance of the language and the falsity of expressions. This is the voice of a posh English educated voice trying to talk dirty, without being able to pull it off” (Subramanyam 9). While such criticism is perhaps not surprising given Adiga’s background, the extensive range of critics that evaluate the novel on the grounds of its verisimilitude overlook the double voicing inherent to the dramatic monologue, which is an important aspect of the novel’s aesthetic strategy for addressing Balram’s experience of global modernity. Recognition of the doubleness of Balram’s voice is so important because it is a voice that does not encourage oversimplified sympathy for Balram’s character, but something more powerful: identification. The distinction is significant, because as Mark Currie points out in Postmodern Narrative Theory (2011): “Sympathy amounts to little more than a feeling of goodwill toward a character. Identification suggests self-recognition” (Currie 43). Currie goes on to explain that unlike sympathy, identification “touches my own subjectivity in a more profound way, because I have seen myself in the fiction, projected my identity into it, rather than just made a new friend. This gives fiction the potential to confirm, form or transform my sense of myself” (Currie 43). In the context of The White Tiger, this distinction between sympathy and identification takes on a new

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significance because it points to a way in which Adiga’s fictional representation of globalization differs from its representation in other discourses and, perhaps most significantly, the global media. Susan Moeller in Compassion Fatigue (1999), for example, argues that the American media covers the news of global war, famine and disease in such a way as to produce compassion fatigue, leading Americans to tolerate rather than understand and engage with the complexities of such issues. In contrast, the interiority of the dramatic monologue and the familiarity of Balram’s voice, render his monologue of violence, corruption and injustice less distant from the reader’s everyday life experiences. Thus when Balram claims in articulate, rational English, “all I wanted was to be a man. And for that one murder was enough,” the reader is forced to respond to this statement by negotiating between their identification with Balram as a character, their sympathy for his situation, evaluation of his reliability as a narrator, as well as the moral judgment of his actions (Adiga 274). In the absence of an authoritative narrative voice that offers conclusive proof, evaluating these aspects of the novel forces the reader to play an active interpretative role in the narrative, preventing the sorts of reflexive responses of sympathy that Moeller identifies in media representations of human rights issues and Third World suffering. To think of The White Tiger narrowly in terms of verisimilitude or “authenticity” is, therefore, to overlook the interpretive role that its form requires of the reader and the importance of this to the broader context of representing the Third World poor within current Western discourses. Bringing these ideas together suggests that representing the experience of global modernity through the interior monologue of Balram gives a different view of globalization to the distant “blue world” images, popularized by corporate and technological representations of globalization.3 Certainly, this bird’s eye perspective of globalization has sparked the imagination of a number of novelists of South Asia and its Diaspora, such as Hari Kunzru, who have similarly emphasized what Anthony Giddens has called the “out-thereness” of the globalization process while overlooking its “in-hereness” (Giddens 1994, 95). In contrast, The White Tiger slices into globalization from the interior of one character, connecting transformations in Balram’s local and intimate worlds of everyday experience to the vast systemic transformations of globalization that has transformed the Indian economy. The view of our current phase of global modernity that emerges from this perspective is a

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For example, the distant blue world images represented by Microsoft’s worldwide telescope or Google Earth’s logos.

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world of interdependency in which the Indian underclass, transnational English speaking readers, Indian state and multinational companies are interconnected in complex ways. It is not, therefore, that members of India’s rural poor, such as Balram, sit outside of global modernity, but that they experience it in a different way to both cosmopolitan elites like Pinky and Ashok, as well as the novel’s English speaking audience. In contrast to orientalist or exoticized representations of India therefore, the novel’s engagement with consumer culture challenges the image of India fixed in an ancient mystical past by showing it to be part of the same globalized world as contemporary America, experiencing it in different ways. In representing these differences, the power of the novel rests in large part upon its form, which draws the reader into the narrative and forces he or she to evaluate Balram’s claim that murder represents the only way for a member of the Indian underclass to achieve the liberal idea of individual freedom that neoliberal globalization ostensibly promises.

Works Cited Adiga, Aravind. The White Tiger. New York: Free Press, 2008. Byron, Glennis. Dramatic Monologue London: Routledge, 2003. Currie, Mark. Postmodern Narrative Theory. London: St Martin’s Press, 1998. Everett, Glenn S. “‘You’ll not let me Speak’: Engagement and Detachment in Browning’s Monologues.” Victorian Literature and Culture, 19 (1991): 123-142. Ferrall, Charles. Modernist Writing and Reactionary Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Kapour, Akash. “The Secret of His Success” New York Times Book Review. Nov 7th 2008. January 25th 2011.

Kumar, Atitava. “On Adiga’s The White Tiger” The Hindu Literary Review Nov 2nd 2008. January 25th 2011.

Kunzru, Hari. Transmission. New York: Plume, 2005. Giddens, Anthony. “Living in a Post-traditional Society.” Reflexive Modernization. Ed. Giddens, Anthony et al. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994: 56-109. Langbaum, Robert. The Poetic Experience. New York: Norton, 1957. Lehman, David, ed. Great American Prose Poems. New York: Scriber, 2003.

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Maynard, John. “Reading The Reader in Robert Browning’s Dramatic Monologues,” Critical Essays on Robert Browning. Ed. Mary Ellis Gibson. New York: Hall, 1992: 69-78. McHenry, Eric. “Driving Pinky Madam: An Interview With Aravind Adiga.” Columbia Alumni Magazine. 2008. 29t January 2011.

Moeller, Susan. Compassion Fatigue : How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War and Death. London: Routledge, 1999. Roy, Sneharika, “The White Tiger: The Beggar's Booker.” Commonwealth essays and Studies. 31.2 (2009): 57-68. Sinfield, Alan. Dramatic Monologue. London: Methuen, 1977. Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. “Diary: Another Booker Flop.” The London Review of Books. Vol. 30 (21). 6 November 2008: 42-43.

AGING AND DEPENDENCY IN SWEDEN’S WELFARE SERVICES KATARINA ANDERSSON UMEÅ UNIVERSITY, SWEDEN1

Introduction Aging societies have become a global phenomenon that poses a challenge to contemporary welfare institutions in the Western world (cf. Bengtsson 2010; Motel-Klingebiel 2006). The question of ‘Who will care for the elderly?’ has become an urgent worldwide matter for economists and politicians. The demographic changes are described as a threat to the welfare systems’ abilities to finance pensions, healthcare and elderly care (Bengtsson & Scott 2010). However, in the context of expanding global markets and capitalism, the role of governments in providing for the most vulnerable citizens, such as elderly people, has been weakened through the reduction of public welfare programs. Consequently, globalization tends to increase inequities, not only in terms of access to money, but also access to care (cf. Hochschild 2000). A major barrier to collective responsibility for care is the present political reality. Neoliberalism, which may be the strongest political ideology of today, defends the free market and economic efficiency, which further transform the privatization of caretaking from a moral commandment into an economic imperative (McCluskey 2002). Altogether, this raises fundamental questions about society’s obligations and about the rights of elderly citizens to healthcare and social support in old age (Putney et al. 2007). Care is a fundamental but nevertheless a devalued aspect of human life. Care involves an ethical practice of complex moral judgments, and aspects such as dignity and respect need to be reflected on in the care 1

The research has been made possible thanks to my postdoctoral grant at Umeå Centre for Gender Studies (UCGS), and a grant from the Swedish Research Council. Special thanks to Naomi Scheman, Hildur Kalman, Erika Alm, and Elin Kvist at UCGS, for valuable comments on the manuscript.

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relation. Furthermore, care also needs to be understood as a political concept, because the practice of care is a political ideal; morality and politics constitute a set of intertwined ideas, and the practice of care describes the qualities necessary for democratic citizens to live together (Tronto 1994). In a Swedish context, which is our focus in the present article, the global trends in the politics of care are similar, but still distinctively different. Sweden can still be regarded as a universal social democratic welfare state, the main reliance on the state involving the production of care services. Thus, care is a social right and is mainly financed through tax revenues (Bergh 2010; Edebalk 2010; Isaksen 2010). Nevertheless, the Swedish welfare system has undergone extensive changes since the 1990s. These changes have been influenced by neoliberal politics aimed at reducing the cost of public elderly care. Economic efficiency, freedom of choice and individual rights are core concepts of politics and are emphasized in public elderly care. What do these concepts actually mean, and how and in what way are they materialized in care work and understood by individuals who are closely connected to and involved in care? The aim of the present paper is to discuss and analyze the meanings of freedom of choice and rights, dignity and respect as well as autonomy and dependency in the Swedish public elderly home care services from the perspective of care recipients and care workers. Thus, the study takes a humanistic approach by focusing on individuals’ lived experiences of public elderly care and the way in which they account for the care relation.

Public Elderly Care in a Nordic and Swedish Welfare Context Traditionally, care work is coded as female work and is dominated by women workers; the job has low status, poor pay and requires only low levels of formal education (cf. Dahle 1997; Johansson 2002). Today, however, we are facing a society and a public elderly care sector that are much more diverse than they were only two decades ago (cf. Edebalk 2010). Both immigrant care workers and immigrant elderly people have increased in numbers. The Swedish labor market is highly segregated and immigrants are overrepresented in less qualified jobs, such as in care work (Hjerm & Schierup 2007). Lately, the lack of manpower in the care sector has become a problem that has caused a constant search for new manpower reserves, and immigrants have consciously been recruited to the care work sector of public elderly care. Today, these demographic changes

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pose further challenges to public elderly care and the provision of care in most Nordic countries.

The Discourse of Efficiency Public elderly care2 is one of the largest and most rapidly changing welfare institutions in Sweden, but also one of the least prestigious. Over the past two decades, new ways of organizing care work have been adopted, mainly influenced by New Public Management (NPM) ideologies; public elderly care must be more efficient and reduce its costs. As a result, various market solutions for care provision have been introduced (Andersson 2007, 2008; Blomberg 2004). The municipalities have been given increased autonomy to organize elderly care, and among its other consequences, this shift has led to a search for new ways of organizing elderly care more efficiently. Elderly people in need of care and support must apply for it, and a care manager must perform a needs assessment in line with the Social Service Act (SFS 2001:453) and the political guidelines of the municipality. Thus, in many respects, care is standardized, because the guidelines often specify what kind of care intervention to include or not include, and sometimes even how the care is supposed to be provided (help with shopping once a week, walking assistance once a week for 30 minutes, etc.). For instance, certain kinds of house work are not included in the care services provided by the municipality. Although the care is subsidized, care recipients have to pay for the care, depending on their income. Consequently, the number of elderly people receiving public care services has decreased.

Freedom of choice, a way to strengthen individual rights and increase quality of care Along with the discourse of efficiency, freedom of choice and individual rights are emphasized. In January 2009, the Act of Free Choice (SFS 2008:962) was implemented within healthcare and social services in order to regulate the public procurement of healthcare and social assistance. Thus, in order to meet national political demands for free choice for elderly citizens, many of the Swedish municipalities have increased the private care alternatives. The outcome of free choice is 2

The term “public” refers to society’s provision of care, in contrast to private care, which is provided by the family. Hence, public elderly care also includes private companies, because all performed care is supported by the public taxation system.

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described in positive terms; by letting elderly people choose between competing care companies, individual rights are strengthened and better quality of care is automatically assumed to be achieved. Furthermore, it is assumed that the range of different employers will improve the working conditions for care workers and, consequently, that better care will be given to elderly citizens (SOU 2007:037). Within the Swedish context, freedom of choice is closely connected with the privatization of care work. Here, privatization means outsourcing; private care companies as well as the municipality’s own company compete on a so-called quasi-market of care in order to be contracted to provide care (cf. Le Grand & Bartlett 1993). In municipalities that have adopted “customer choice” in accordance with the Act of Free Choice (SFS 2008:962), elderly in need of care have the right to choose between the different care companies. If they are dissatisfied with the care services, they have the right to change company. Thus, in theory, competition means that the companies have to provide care of outstanding quality in order to be chosen. In the neoliberal politics of public elderly care, freedom of choice is rhetorically highlighted as a prerequisite for quality of care, and is claimed to be in the best interest of the elderly. Thus, the assumption is that if the care recipient is seen as an active customer with free choice, individual rights will be strengthened and influence over care will automatically be achieved in the care relation. The goals and outcomes of free choice are, however, vague, and elderly citizens are seen as a homogenous and active group that will benefit from free choice and strengthen their influence over care. The right of free choice is questionable, however, and one may ask how far-reaching such free choice really is. For instance, is it possible to assert one’s rights in the private sphere of the home when one is dependent on public elderly care services?

Dependency and Autonomy Being old and dependent on care in today’s modern welfare societies is often connected in many respects with increased insecurity and vulnerability. What does it mean to be old and dependent on public elderly care? Historically, the assumed and rather respected status of dependency in old age in earlier times has shifted in modern times toward the ideal of independence and autonomy across the life course (Daatland 2009). In the early 1990s, social representations of old age in modernity emphasized the degree of freedom of individuals to organize life and social care in old age (von Kondratowitz 2009). In the modern welfare institutions of today, old

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age is constructed mainly as a health issue and a matter of public expenditure through the use of the ‘activity discourse’ in relation to old age. Although this activity discourse–in which the elderly are seen as active independent citizens capable of choosing for themselves–may be of some good for individuals, it is above all socio-political interests that are involved. Furthermore, by emphasizing individual activity, such a shift may also place all of the moral responsibility on the individual (cf. Jolanki 2009). But societies have a tendency to mythologize the concepts of independence and autonomy, even though these ideals are unrealistic (Fineman 2002). Instead, we humans are not fully autonomous and need to be understood as being in a condition of interdependence (Tronto 1994). This shift in focus toward independence, regardless of age and frailty, needs to be critically examined: What do freedom and independence mean in the context of welfare cutbacks that involve reducing the cost of public elderly care? Dependency and care for the elderly raise fundamental issues concerning the relation between the basic institutions of the state, the market and the family and their respective responsibilities for care (Fineman 2000). At the beginning of the twenty-first century, political and economic changes are pushing the family and caretakers even further away from both the market and the state (Fineman 2000, 2002; McCluskey 2002). Above all, however, care is and should be the collective responsibility of society, and the problem of dependency will not be solved by the market (Holstein 2007). Dependency is a universal aspect of the human condition, but it is still a rather unrecognized fact that is mainly relegated to the family. The ideological construct of family and its gendered form is essential to maintaining the representation of the autonomous and independent individual, by pretending that it is not a public problem. The rhetoric about the family’s function ignores the nature of individual dependency and masks the costs of the necessary care of dependents – a form of care work mainly performed by women. Therefore dependency must be perceived as both universal and inevitable (Fineman 2000, 2002; Tronto 1994).

Care as a Private Virtue of Care Workers? In theories on caring, the caring relation has been discussed as ethically basic, and subjective experience is emphasized. According to Nel Noddings, the care relation is ontologically basic, which means that we recognize the human encounter and affective response as a basic fact of human existence (1984:4). To care for someone is to be ethically responsible, and that means to go beyond moral reasoning and principles,

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something that organizations tend to diminish; therefore, according to Noddings (1984), organizations cannot be ethical. However, this form of care as a private virtue, as emphasized by Noddings, has been criticized (Tronto 1994). According to Joan Tronto, this “morality-first” approach is devastating, because care also needs to be politically contextualized. Care as a moral idea is not broad enough and cannot solve the problems of distance, privilege and inequality in care work practice. Furthermore, care workers need conceptions of rights in the care work they provide (ibid.). Nevertheless, from the very start in the 1980s, when theorizing care work, the understanding of the value of being ethically responsible as a private virtue has been idealized and transferred into the practice of public elderly care in Sweden. In the research, care as a specific rationality of mutuality is discussed, and proficiencies such as empathy, closeness and warmth, which are symbolically coded as essentially feminine, are emphasized (Wærness 1984, 1999). In this sense, the foundation of care work in public elderly care rests on the private virtue of the (female) care workers, rather than on the public organization. Care workers’ moral obligation to the dependent elderly often means complying with their wishes and is also seen as a way of balancing the inherent asymmetrical relation that exists between the superordinate carer and the subordinate care recipient (Wærness 1984). However, being a care worker is also an exploited and vulnerable position. Interestingly, this “morality-first” dimension of care work has lately been accentuated in national directives on care by focusing on dignity and respect (SOU 2008:51; SOU 2008:126). Although this directive is a way of strengthening care recipients’ rights to be treated with dignity and respect, it can also be seen as a way of placing the responsibilities of care on the individual care workers. Furthermore, it is still unclear how and in what way this goal of dignity and respect is supposed to be achieved and claimed.

What is a Right in Elderly Care and for Whom? Having a right may refer to human rights or to citizen or civil rights. Citizen rights correspond to a set of duties or obligations, while there are no such duties connected to human rights. Human rights are moral claims defined by the shared vulnerability of all humans (Turner 2006). It is nevertheless difficult to enforce human rights, as there is a complex relation between the state, the social rights of citizens and the human rights of individuals. Still, in a global context, a new consciousness of human rights is growing; however abstract these universal principles may

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be, they are gradually being transformed into generalizable norms (Benhabib 2004). What is to be considered a right in elderly care is far from clear, and the ways in which one can claim one’s rights are very unclear. In Sweden, elderly citizens generally have the right to healthcare and social assistance, which are mainly provided for by the state, but relegated to the municipality, although the right to care is conditioned by a needs assessment. In some municipalities, the right to choose or to change the company providing care when one is dissatisfied is implemented. But what if there are only bad alternatives to choose from? In such a context, does this mean that the elderly are individually responsible for the quality of care? In other words, by strengthening the individual’s right to choose are we revoking public responsibility? Still, most rights in elderly care seem to concern citizen rights, where the corresponding duties are a matter of acting according to political guidelines for the application procedure, making a choice and so on. The human rights of dignity and respect are far vaguer, and how these rights can be claimed is unclear; perhaps such claims are impossible?

Dignity and Respect as Human Rights Dignity and respect are key principles of the Human Rights Act and should be incorporated into service planning, such as in elderly care. Principles of older persons have been adopted by the UN General Assembly (Resolution 46/91). The principles are formulated with regard to independence, participation, care, self-fulfilment and dignity. “Older persons should be able to live in dignity and security and be free of exploitation and physical and mental abuse; be treated fairly regardless of age, gender, racial or ethnic background, disability or other status, and be valued independently of their economic contribution” (Resolution 46/91). In January 2011, in the Swedish Social Service Act (SFS 2001:453), dignity and respect were legislated as a way to strengthen elderly people’s influence over care. Furthermore, all care should be permeated with respect, integrity and self-determination, and the need for care (how and when it is provided) should be designed and accomplished by taking into account the care recipient’s wishes, according to the same act. Still, the care is only provided after a needs assessment carried out by the care managers, who also have to follow the political guidelines of the municipalities. How this is supposed to be handled, however, is extremely vague and could be seen as yet another way to shift the public

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responsibility for care over to the individual care workers and care recipients. Even if dignity and respect have been legislated in public care, a main question in this context is to what extent dignity and respect are attended to and how these key principles are interpreted and perceived by care workers and the dependent elderly. In recent years, when elderly care has been performed within the framework of economically rational practice, very little time and space seem to be left for care workers to comply with dependent elderly people’s needs and wishes (Andersson 2007, 2010). Thus, there seems to be a paradox between the goals of increased influence over care and providing cost efficient care, a paradox that will affect how individuals respond to the principles of dignity and respect. Today, when freedom of choice is on the political agenda, and understanding dependency, individual rights and responsibilities appears to be even more complex, the individual’s lived experiences would seem to be a necessary perspective.

A Case Study of the Swedish Elderly Home Care Services: The Local Context In the investigated municipality, one of the bigger towns in Central Sweden, a new organization was implemented with a strong emphasis on freedom of choice, in accordance with the Act of Free Choice (SFS 2008:962). The elderly person is addressed as a customer, and all information on elderly care is clearly directed to senior citizens as active members of society (cf. Lister et al. 2007). There is, for instance, information on the right to choose one’s care company and information on the results of a marketing survey directed to elderly citizens who have public elderly care. In the municipality, a special information service office has been established to provide senior citizens with all kinds of information. Also, on the local website, the same information is available. In a document, “the senior guide, guidance to support and activities in the municipality,” a good and meaningful life is emphasized and is characterized as including security and independence. The municipality’s responsibility is to provide for a good life. Also, everyone has a responsibility to plan in a responsible way for their old age and to pursue a sound lifestyle. It is assumed that having control over one’s life increases one’s chances of leading a good life during old age. At the beginning of my fieldwork in spring 2008, the new organization was not fully in place. Also, a new system of measuring work-time was gradually implemented in the municipality starting in July

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2008. This computer-based system required care workers to log in and out at the care recipients’ homes via cell phone, and thus the time spent with the care recipient was measured. The phone also functioned as a key to open and close the door. Summing up, there was a large number of changes taking place in the municipality, and a great deal of uncertainty among care workers and care recipients.

Methods and Empirical Material The empirical material discussed here is part of a larger multidisciplinary project,3 the overall aim of which is to theoretically and empirically explore and analyze dimensions of power and influence, from political governing to care work practices in public elderly care. Surveys, qualitative interviews and observations have been conducted with multiple actors within the organization, such as politicians, care managers, supervisors, care workers and care recipients. Here, however, analysis of the qualitative interviews with care workers and elderly clients dependent on care is emphasized. Eight elderly women and two elderly men were interviewed, and the group of care workers consisted of eight women, of whom two were immigrants, and five men, of whom three were immigrants. Most of the interviewed care workers were employed by the municipality’s own company, except for two female care workers and a retired male care worker who worked extra hours in a private company. However, it seemed to be very difficult to engage the care workers in the interview study. To me, they appeared to lack interest and to feel that the interviews would be too time-consuming for them. It even seemed to me as if some of them were afraid to talk; they were evasive and said they had nothing important to add, and referred to the workplaces’ guidelines on “customer choice.” Moreover, the supervisors did not allow the interviews to take place during working hours. All in all, it was difficult to engage care workers, especially male care workers and care workers with non-Swedish ethnic backgrounds. This micro-level analysis looks at the discursive meaning of individual experiences of care work (cf. Potter & Wetherell 1987). How and in what ways do the elderly care recipients talk about their needs, how do care workers talk about the care work in general, and how are experiences of influence in the care relation perceived by the different interview subjects? 3

“Power and influence in elderly care: Structural conditions and individual expressions”, funded by the Swedish Research Council (Dnr. 421-2007-7231).

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Two analytical themes have been identified as central to understandings of the experiences of care, rights and the meaning of free choice: time and the home. How and in what way can the interviewees’ expressions of the care relation be interpreted in terms of (human) rights, and how are dignity and respect achieved?

Consequences of the Time Measurement System: Failure to Organize for Time Most of the interviewed elderly women were between eighty and ninety years of age, and they seemed to be rather unaware of the new organization of care as such. However, they had noticed some changes in how the care workers reported the time spent in their homes. “Now they write down everything in a book and enter it in their cell phones, every minute when they are here, and then you pay” (Female care recipient, B0032:4). It was striking that even though some of them were discontented with the home care service they had been receiving, they would not complain, they told me. In contrast, one of the elderly women in her seventies did complain as she was very discontented with the care workers and their lack of respect, how the supervision was organized, and how the system for measuring time functioned. Also, she was aware that her complaints were received negatively by the care workers. I have my rights and as long as I don’t demand more than my rights, which I pay for, then I have the right to get that. And as I’ve pointed out before, I don’t request more than what I’ve been granted and am entitled to. And all I want is that, and that it works out all right in practice. (Female care recipient, C033:4)

Being a diabetic, she needed breakfast at a certain time, which she had to explain to the care workers constantly. Still it did not work out, so instead she cancelled the breakfast help altogether. She had received help for just over a year, and during that time, the home care services seemed to work arbitrarily, she continued. Even though she complained, it did not help much. Being on time was of the utmost importance to the care recipients, but most of them would not complain, they repeatedly told me during the interviews. The two male care recipients, who were younger, also expressed themselves negatively when referring to the home care services and the organization of time. The newly retired man had had a work-related accident thirty-five years earlier and had been dependent on home care services ever since. The other man was wheelchair-bound and suffered

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from an injury he had sustained a year ago; since then he had received help from the home care services. The worst thing, I believe, is the arrogance in the way they handle the care; they can’t keep their promises regarding time agreements, for instance. It has something to do with an inability, a kind of incompetence in the ingredients of care somehow, when it comes to language, and how to look after a home. They don’t actively see their own responsibility in this. (Male care recipient, A0044:8)

This man was very discontented with the home care services, and repeatedly referred to the inconveniences associated with the care workers’ inability to be on time. “It is dishonorable and disrespectful, not to call me if they’re late” (A044:4). Because he works part time, he has explained the importance of being on time, for example that he sometimes has appointments at the school where he works. Often, care workers are sent to him who cannot speak Swedish very well, which further aggravates his need for intimate care in the mornings. The other man had had help from home care services for a period of thirty years, and he commented on the extensive changes he had experienced. Earlier, he could just press the alarm button when he needed help, and within minutes they would come running. Nowadays, he makes a weekly time schedule for the help he needs instead of contacting the home care service offices. I never contact the office because they always get it wrong and my time schedule works, as long as no one loses it and that happens quite often. Then they don’t come in time: ‘I had no idea that you should be helped now’, they say. If I’m going to a meeting somewhere, or to a theater, then it’s a catastrophe for me. (Male care recipient, A0048:3)

This man pointed out that with some of the care workers, the responsible ones, everything works out just fine. However, the major reason for all the mistakes that occur is the lack of resources, which ultimately is a political problem, according to him. The whole idea of freedom of choice is just political propaganda. “In the local press, one of the politicians said that the home care services have never been better than today, but they did not ask me. In the end, it is the performed care that counts”. (Male care recipient, A0048:6) As these quotations reveal, freedom of choice does not seem to include the right to contract for the time at which home care services will be performed, as this was difficult to accomplish in care work practice. Even for the recipients who did complain, it did not help a great deal. According

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to the Social Service Act (SFS 2001:453), however, care should be performed by taking into account care recipients’ wishes and needs, also regarding questions of when and how.

Lack of Time for Care Most of the care workers expressed a kind of helplessness regarding the statistics they had to face at almost every staff meeting, statistics indicating they were not profitable enough. Also, many of them mentioned time pressure and the changes that had resulted in more administrative work. One female care worker who worked in the evenings said: There’s a lot of work with the technical equipment; we use the cell instead of keys and writing things, so we forget about the elderly. The first thing you do when you come into their home is write down what you do and do not do, and then before we leave, we have to write again. And I think it’s sad, because the elderly can see that we don’t have the same time anymore. (B0028:1)

She further explained that care managers often make promises to the care recipients regarding scheduled time. If there are ten care recipients who want food service at six o’clock in the evening, then it is impossible to accomplish, and according to her, the care managers promise too much. Sometimes the elderly person has to wait for at least half an hour, and sometimes unforeseen things happen, for instance, if someone has fallen or taken ill. It seems as though there is not enough time for care, although the new system for measuring time was introduced to benefit the care recipients by encouraging the companies to spend more time with the care recipients. Now the companies get paid by the municipality for the time spent in the homes of the care recipients. According to the supervisors, in order to get by economically, they have to spend at least 75 percent of the time in the elderly people’s homes; according to the care workers, this is difficult to do. This is not a routine job. Every day is different and there are a lot of tasks to do other than spending time in the care recipients’ homes, such as detail planning and scheduling, documentation and writing reports and transportation between the different care recipients. The politicians do not understand: they think this is an easy job, but it’s not. (Male care worker, D0040:6)

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One female care worker in one of the private companies noted severe stress in the work situation, which she referred to as a structural problem, because there is not enough time to do a proper and dignified job. “When you come home, you’re physically, psychologically and emotionally drained, and you still haven’t had time to provide the care service with dignity and respect” (A0055:2). This woman was very upset with the time measurement system and the disrespect that was evoked in the care situation: At first I was shocked, but eventually you get used to it; it’s part of the culture of the home care services. You enter their home and say ‘Hi’ and I know there is no time to ask her how she feels because if she says: ‘I’m not feeling well’, there’s no time for me to sit down and listen, and she knows that. She will probably answer ‘it’s all right’, even if it’s not. You can tell, it’s not all right, it’s eleven o’clock and she is still in bed, or she hasn’t eaten in two days. Something isn’t right, but she knows that we come and go quickly. (A0055:3)

Time or rather lack of time is something that has always been described as a problem within public elderly care (Andersson 2007, 2008; Christensen 1997; Davies 1989; Johansson 1989; Szebehely 1995; Wærness 1999). Although time has been made very concrete when it is measured by a cell phone connected to a computer program, the problems connected with time–which is money–still remain, as we could see in the above examples. For the care workers, it meant being controlled and disciplined by the computer program and being individually responsible for the time spent or not spent with the care recipients. Furthermore, the stress and the helplessness that some of the care workers experienced resulted in an inability to uphold the principles of dignity and respect in relation to the care recipients and their needs. Apparently, thanks to the new system for measuring time, the economy of the companies had become the guiding principle for the care work. However, time is necessary for care work; nevertheless, time is constantly at stake and sometimes it is even lacking in the care workers’ daily work situation.

Individual Needs and Influence in the Home: Care and an Unsolvable Dilemma The modern ideology of the home as a shelter for privacy and control has its roots in the nineteenth century. The home is significant for many elderly people, and being and feeling at home means behaving and

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managing as they wish and is a source of independence (Twigg 1997). In public care, however, the dual function of the home as a private living space and as a workplace makes work within elderly home care services highly problematic in many respects. How far should privacy and the care recipients’ individual rights be taken, and to what extent can care workers claim their rights to a decent working environment? This constitutes an almost unresolvable dilemma of the home, which has been discussed in the literature (cf. Evertsson & Johansson 2008). Thus, being dependent on public care brings this dilemma to the fore. One female care recipient had had a stroke three years ago, and now she was very dependent on care and needed care at most times of the day to be able to get out of bed, go to the toilet and so on. I’m trying to get used to being dependent on care, but it’s different. This is not like living in an ordinary home; I’m dependent on care and that makes a difference. I know there are problems with the economy of the municipality, but the care workers do their best, and I shouldn’t complain. (Female care recipient, D0035:2)

Being dependent on care in one’s own home often means a loss of control of the home as a private sphere. As this woman states, being dependent on care meant that she had to get used to the fact that life changes, and the privacy of the home with its connotations of independence had to be reconsidered (Evertsson & Johansson 2008; Twigg 1997). Another woman in her nineties said that she would try as long as possible to be independent, although she had been in contact with the home care services for a short period of time. She had heard from friends who used to get help from home care services that there were different care workers coming all the time, and often it felt like having a stranger in the home, someone whom they had never met before. “But I will try to manage by myself as long as possible, but it feels a bit strange to think about it. And why do they change the staff all the time. Is it because you’re not supposed to get attached to a specific care worker?” (A0046:2). As this quote reveals, there are common understandings shared among the elderly that may function as a cautionary example of the home care services. Nevertheless, according to the care workers, not all elderly care recipients have the opportunity to decide their living arrangements and not all of them want to stay at home. “It can be very difficult to find another solution for other care arrangements such as residential care. Also, this can take a long time to find, since there aren’t enough places” (Female care worker, C0029:14). Some of the care workers had reflected upon the meaning of giving care in somebody’s home:

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Aging and Dependency in Sweden’s Welfare Services [T]hey live there, it’s their home, of course, and you can’t enter their home and decide how things should be. But at the same time, there must be some limits. We have a person who smokes and she knows that we are coming at nine o’clock, but she still smokes. Many of us can’t stand the smoke, but she says: ‘this is my home’. Of course, but she could show some consideration. (Female care worker, B0028:7)

Obviously, working in someone’s home is not an easy task for the care workers either. This care worker further declares: “Either they are stepping on our toes, or we are stepping on theirs” (B0028:8). Although most of the care workers felt that care recipients should have the right to decide in their home, this is not easily accomplished, which is illustrated by the above quotes. The rights to self-determination and influence over care do not seem to be applicable in the actual care work practice (SFS 2001:453). The right to be treated with respect In the political rhetoric of freedom of choice and in focusing on the care recipients and giving them the status of a customer, as in the investigated municipality, one might ask whether a customer’s rights in his/her own home should be a matter of conflict. After all, as a customer, it is assumed that you have the power to decide for yourself. Asserting one’s rights seemed to be gendered with regard to the way in which care recipients talked about the care they received. Most of the women did not complain or claim any rights to choose, whereas the men more specifically asserted their supposed rights in the care relation. The men in these cases were younger and lived an active life, which could be a reason for their claims. However, previous research has shown gender differences regarding distribution of care; male recipients are advantaged in public care and given more help, because they are not expected to be able to manage certain tasks, such as household work (Andersson 2007). Regarding intimate care such as help with showering, one female care recipient did not always approve when male care workers arrived, but she did not say anything. “One has to get used to the way it is, and I don’t know if you can refuse a male worker. I’ve never tried that” (C0034:1). Another female recipient said that she had no problems with telling the care workers when she was discontented with something, but she had never refused to let any of the care workers enter her home to help her, as it would be too embarrassing for her. In contrast, the male care recipients did not seem to have similar problems with stopping any of the care workers who came to help them, which could sometimes be necessary for various reasons, according to them.

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Generally, male immigrant care workers find language harder and understanding hygiene, but at the same time, some of my best helpers are male immigrants. I’ve had some Swedish female care workers that I’ve stopped from coming to my home. I only got nervous having them around me. (Male care recipient, A0044:3) They talked to me in a way that people typically do when they talk to old people or to children, ‘let’s go have a wash, shall we?’ or ‘see, you’re such a good boy, Peter’. I mean, not even an old lady with dementia wants to be addressed as if she was a child. (Male care recipient, A0044:13)

Asserting one’s rights as an old dependent citizen is not always selfevident, not even in the private sphere of the home. As became evident when analyzing the care recipients’ views about their rights in their own homes, they felt that respect was very important, while at the same time respect was often missing in care work practice. Although some lack of respect could be traced to cultural diversity, in cases of misunderstandings regarding hygiene, for instance, this was far from the rule. Clearly, however, the elderly did not refuse to let the care workers enter their homes, except for the man who was still working. This acceptance of the care workers, even though most of them complained to me, can be interpreted as an expression of interpersonal respect, of seeing the encounter with the care worker as a reciprocal relation (Noddings 1984; Wærness 1984). It could also mean that the care recipients were frightened to assert their rights because they feared being punished, or perhaps they were just unaware of their rights (Lister et al. 2007). However, given the way they talked, this acceptance is most likely connected to showing respect for the individual care workers. As these examples reveal, everyone agreed that showing respect is vital, and the care workers thought it was important to respect the care recipients’ wishes and rights in their homes. However, this was not easily accomplished. How can a vague feeling of being overlooked be verbalized into a claim of one’s right to be treated with respect? And should people have the right to refuse help from someone with different cultural beliefs and religious expressions, one might ask (Jönson 2007)? As became evident in the analysis, within the context of home care services, it did not appear to be easy for the elderly care recipients to assert their rights, particularly the fundamental rights of dignity and respect. Dependency on care in the home implies a vulnerable situation and a loss of privacy and control for the care recipients, even when living an active life. Furthermore, most of the recipients also felt loyalty toward the care workers, which made it hard for them to complain.

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Conclusions Globally, nationally and locally, political changes in the direction of increased effectiveness and economical rationalization of care have worsened the conditions for providing care for the elderly. In modern societies, the construction of old people as active citizens reflects strong sociopolitical interests. The neoliberal context, which emphasizes freedom of choice and individual rights as a customer and seeing care as a commodity, also tends to eliminate the relational and moral aspects of care. Recently in Sweden, dignity and respect in social elderly care have been legislated (SFS 2001:453). Yet, how these goals are to be fulfilled remains unclear. The investigated municipality had adopted the ideas of a free market and freedom of choice, claiming they would be in elderly citizens’ best interests. It seems as though the neoliberal understanding of dignity and respect that is embodied in free choice and individual rights, however, in fact transforms actual dignity and respect into something else. In other words, dignity and respect are lost precisely through the terms in which they are supposed to be realized – by presuming that the elderly are in a situation different from their actual situation, that of being in need of care. Given how individual rights actually worked in practice, there was no clear distinction between moral and citizen rights (Turner 2006). Furthermore, it was not clear to the care recipients what a right was or what rights they had, except for knowing about their right to receive the care that had been assessed and granted by the care manager. For the care recipients, it seemed difficult to claim their right to influence the time of care provision and to demand privacy in the home, something they regarded as most important for their ability to feel more secure and independent and to act that way (Evertsson & Johansson 2008; Twigg 1997). One of the male care recipients did stop some of the care workers from coming to him, but he was younger, a man, highly educated and still working, which further reveals that care is conditioned by gender, age, class, ethnicity, etc. Thus, in the two most important areas connected to care – time and the home – it was difficult to claim any rights. These difficulties seemed to increase with dependency. Experiences of inconveniences and disrespect were expressed by most of the care recipients, but usually they blamed the organization of care, not the individual care worker. The care workers too expressed disrespect in the care relation, either in relation to stress and lack of time or to the unresolvable dilemma inherent in working in someone else’s home. They also attributed these inconveniences to structures in the organization of

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care. However, this must be seen in a broader context, beyond the dual relation in the care situation. Otherwise, by clinging to the individual’s ethical responsibilities, such as in the “morality-first” approach described and criticized by Tronto (1994), as a basis for public elderly care – a form of care work that is mainly performed by women – public responsibility for the dependent elderly tends to be diminished. From the political horizon, however, the shift in viewing the elderly as passive receivers of dependency in old age to viewing them as active autonomous consumers seems to be vital to creating more efficient and cheaper elderly care. However, by creating the autonomous consumer, we ignore the fact that dependency is universal and inevitable (Fineman 2000, 2002; Tronto 1994). Following the whole conceptualization of free markets in the municipality, one still has to ask what the care recipients’ rights actually are when they feel they have been treated disrespectfully. If they are seen as care customers, with depersonalized individual responsibilities, will it ever be possible for them to claim their (human) rights of dignity and respect? It would seem clear that being old and dependent on care are not the best conditions for asserting one’s rights; therefore, the question of the rights of the elderly to dignity and respect must be raised continually.

Works Cited Andersson, Katarina. “The Neglect of Time as an Aspect of Organising Care Work.” Care Work in Crisis. Reclaiming the Nordic Ethos of Care. Eds. Henriksson, L., Høst, H., Johansson, S. & Wrede, S. Lund: Studentlitteratur, 2008. Benhabib, Seyla. “Kantian Questions, Arendtian Answers: Statelessness, Cosmopolitanism, and the Right to Have Rights.” Pragmatism, Critique, Judgment. Essays for Richard J. Bernstein. Eds. Seyla Benhabib & Nancy Fraser. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004. Bengtsson, Tommy, ed. Population Ageing. A Threat to the Welfare State? The Case of Sweden. Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, 2010. Bengtsson, Tommy and Scott, Kirk. “The Ageing Population.” Population Ageing. A Threat to the Welfare State? The Case of Sweden. Ed. Tommy Bengtsson. Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, 2010. Bergh, Andreas. “Towards a New Swedish Model?” Population Ageing. A Threat to the Welfare State? The case of Sweden. Ed. Tommy Bengtsson. Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, 2010. Daatland, Svein Olav. “How to Balance Generations: Solidarity Dilemmas in European Perspective.” Valuing Older People. A Humanist

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Approach to Ageing. Eds. Ricca Edmondson & Hans-Joachim von Kondratowitz. University of Bristol: The Policy Press, 2009. Edebalk, Per-Gunnar. “Ways of Funding and Organising Elderly Care in Sweden.” Population Ageing. A Threat to the Welfare State? The Case of Sweden. Ed. Tommy Bengtsson. Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, 2010. Fineman, Martha L.A. “Cracking the Foundational Myths: Independence, Autonomy, and Self Sufficiency.” American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy, and Law, 8, no 1, 2000: 13-29. —. “Masking Dependency: The Political Role of Family Rhetoric.” The Subject of Care. Feminist Perspectives on Dependency. Eds. Eva Feder Kittay & Ellen K. Feder. Lanham, Maryland: Rowan & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2002. Hochschild, Arlie Russel. “Global Care Chains and Emotional Surplus Value.” Global Capitalism. Eds. Will Hutton and Anthony Giddens. New York: The New Press, 2000. Holstein, Martha B. “Long-Term Care, Feminism, and an Ethics of Solidarity.” Challenges of an Aging Society. Ethical Dilemmas, Political Issues. Eds. Rachel A. Pruchno & Michael A. Smyer. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2007. Isaksen, Lise Widding, ed. Global Care Work. Gender and Migration in Nordic Societies. Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2010. Jolanki, Outi. “Talk about Old Age, Health and Morality.” Valuing Older People. A Humanist Approach to Ageing. Eds. Ricca Edmondson and Hans-Joachim von Kondratowitz. Bristol: The Policy Press, 2009. Jönson, Håkan. “Is it Racism? Skepticism and Resistance Towards Ethnic Minority Care Workers Among Older Care Recipients.” Journal of Gerontological Social Work, 49, 4, 2007:79-96. Le Grand, Julian and Bartlett, Will. Quasi-Markets and Social Policy. London: Palgrave Macmillan Press Ltd., 1993. Lister Ruth, Williams, et al. Gendering Citizenship in Western Europe. New Challenges for Citizenship Research in a Cross-National Context. Bristol: Policy Press, 2007. McCluskey, Martha T. “Subsidized Lives and the Ideology of Efficiency.” The Subject of Care. Feminist Perspectives on Dependency. Eds. Eva Feder Kittay and Ellen K. Feder. Maryland: Rowan & Littlefield Publishers, Inc, 2002. Motel-Klingebiel, Andreas. “Quality of Life and Social Inequality in Old Age.” Ageing and Diversity. Multiple Pathways and Cultural Migrations. Eds. Svein Olav Daatland and Simon Biggs. Bristol: The Policy Press, 2006.

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Noddings, Nel. Caring, A Feminine Approach to Ethics & Moral Education. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984. Potter, Jonathan and Margaret Wetherell. Discourse and Social Psychology. Beyond Attitudes and Behaviour. London: Sage Publications Ltd., 1987. Putney, Norella M., et al. “The Family and the Future. Challenges, Prospects, and Resilience.” Challenges of an aging society. Ethical Dilemmas, Political Issues. Eds. Rachel A. Pruchno and Michael A. Smyer. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2007. Tronto, Joan C. Moral Boundaries. A political Argument for an Ethic of Care. New York: Routledge, 1994. Turner, Bryan S. Vulnerability and Human Rights. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University, 2006. Twigg, Julia. “Deconstructing the ‘Social Bath’: Help with Bathing at Home for Older and Disabled People.” Journal of Social Policy, 26, 2 (1997):211-232. Von Kondratowitz, Hans-Joachim. “The Long Road to a Moralization of Old Age.” Valuing Older People. A Humanist Approach to Ageing. Eds. Ricca Edmondson and Hans-Joachim von Kondratowitz. Bristol: The Policy Press, 2009. Wærness, Kari. “The Rationality of Caring.” Economic and Industrial Democracy. Vol. 5 (1984):185-211.

A DIALOGUE WITH NIETZSCHE ON THE CONCEPT OF MORAL RESPONSIBILITY ANA CAROLINA DA COSTA E FONSECA HEALTH SCIENCES FEDERAL UNIVERSITY AT PORTO ALEGRE, BRAZIL

A theory of responsibility requires that the conditions under which someone can be held responsible—the internal conditions of responsibility —be discussed. There are also external conditions that stem from how the various institutions organize a society and establish themselves as a source of moral values, consequently establishing the manner in which humans should behave to be considered responsible. The reading of Nietzsche's work shows us two fundamental changes in the concept of responsibility. The first alteration makes the concept of responsibility more widespread because it is then demanded not only in the external environment, not only for others beyond the self, but also by the agent itself. Nietzsche demands that human beings become creators of their own values and that they evaluate their own conduct morally, and as such, he declares that human beings are responsible for both the values they create and follow. The second alteration restricts the sphere of application of responsibility due to a new conception of human beings. Traditionally, human beings are seen by philosophy as rational animals, who should, at least in some situations, impose control over their actions through reason. Nietzsche, on the other hand, describes man as a being whose fundamental faculties, instinct and reason, are in constant conflict, with a tendency for instincts to predominate over reason. By recognizing that there is a part of human beings which varies from person to person, which is unknown to us, over which there is no control and is determined biologically and psychologically, Nietzsche reduces the sphere of the external demands that stem from the concept of responsibility. The requirement for behavior according to the externally determined values without effective adherence to the values contained in this sphere are equivalent to the weakening of the internal sphere of the requirement for responsible behavior and results in a process of de-responsibilitization.

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This is not to affirm that absolute subjectification would result in the dissolution of the concept of responsibility. To the contrary, the absence of subjectification constitutes the concept of non-responsibility. The perception of a double movement, one which expands while at the same time reduces the concept of moral responsibility, as well as the perception of the growing non-responsibilitization of human beings in the world come from the ideas present in Nietzsche’s work, yet he does not represent them in this way. The philosopher wove threads without saying that a labyrinth should be used. I use them as a guide through the labyrinth of the concept of moral responsibility. The ideas found in this paper come from Nietzsche; the way in which they are presented, however, is the original contribution herein.

The weakening of the concept of responsibility External sources for values–religion, laws–weaken the concept of responsibility because they do not demand that human beings be responsible for the value attributed to the moral values. The recognition of the influence of instinct on human conduct weakens the concept of responsibility because it limits the attribution of responsibility to the agent. The weakening of the concept of responsibility arises from the fact that something is not under our control either because we ascribe the origin of the actions or the evaluation that we make of them to an entity we have created, as for example, with the creation of God and legal institutions, or because we are motivated, in part, by forces that, to some extent, are uncontrollable, such as human instincts. In the first case, humans create a mechanism to be understood as being less responsible. Second, one of the human traits, the instincts, makes us less responsible. We now turn to an evaluation of these two aspects. Platonism, law, morality, and religion are ways of abdicating strength and one’s self by demanding that human beings conduct themselves in accordance with externally imposed values and, as in the case of Christianity, the prescribed values are ones which deny life by establishing a type of weak human being as ideal. Only by denying one’s own strengths is it possible to act according to a herd morality.1 It is not sufficient, 1

According to Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil, “Christianity is Platonism for ‘the people’,” that is to say it is a simplified version of Platonism, without the sophisticated metaphysics of Greek thought, and, therefore, it is easily understandable by all. In the original: “denn Christenthum ist Platonismus für’s ‘Volk’” (Kritische Studienausgabe–KSA, v. 5:12). This is the kind of metaphysics

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nonetheless, to only identify the weakness of the human soul. One must understand why the herd morality has been so successful throughout the history of mankind. Why was the tragic spirit supplanted by the Socratic spirit? The moral genealogist must be the one to ask about the meaning of creating concepts that turn human beings into herd animals. “What meaning have those lying concepts, those handmaids of morality, ‘Soul’, ‘Spirit’, ‘Free will’, ‘God’, if their aim is not that of physiological ruin of mankind?”2 (Ecce Homo, “The dawn,” 2). Humanity is ruined physiologically because moralities that require the transformation of humans into herd animals establish a kind of must-be that imposes the alteration of prevailing forces in each human being. The human being stops being a creator in order to act as others act. Reactive forces predominate. According to herd animal moralities, good is, by definition, what is according to the will of others. The noble human being establishes good him/herself. The resentful human being establishes good in opposition to the other. For the resentful human being, others are bad and he or she is, to the contrary, good. The other can be another type of human, or an entity created by human beings, who may exist physically or metaphysically, such as God and legislators. In these cases, the source of moral values is mainly external. Many leave the responsibility for assigning value to moral values in the hands of God and lawyers, both of which are human creations; the former imposes values by referring to a supernatural entity, and the latter imposes values by requiring adherence to the values imposed by a legal system. In these cases, the rules are followed due to the fact that authority is attributed to their origin not because of adherence to what they impose. Similar to God, legal systems are an external source of the agent that attributes moral values to actions. The prescription of one group of moral values over another aims to improve humanity. In both cases, one refers to justice–either man’s or God’s–if there are actions that are in disagreement with what has been established. The requirement for responsibility lying exclusively in the legal arena, without the requirement for adherence to the proffered moral values, results in moral non-responsibility.

that is consistent with herd morality, even if it is sometimes disguised in an apparent erudition. The reference to the “cattle scholar” is in Ecce Homo, “Why I write such good books,” 1. In the original: “gelehrtes Hornvieh” (KSA, v. 6: 300). 2 In the original: “Welchen Sinn haben jene Lügenbegriffe, die Hülfsbegriffe der Moral, ‘Seele’, ‘Geist’, ‘freier Wille’, ‘Gott’, wenn nicht den, die Menschheit physiologisch zu ruinieren?” (KSA, v. 6:331).

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The punishment imposed by the law can be seen as a way of punishing the agent, either to punish it, educate it, improve it, or it can be seen as an example, so that others will not do what led to the punishment. For Nietzsche, the imposition of values and the punishment of those who do not behave according to the established values have a dual purpose: to improve humanity, which is understood as turning human beings into herd animals, and to transform a punished agent into an example so that others will not commit acts for which they would be equally punished. So that punishments can be imposed, prohibited actions should be established and known. When the Church and the State are separate, when God is no longer seen as the only source of moral values, and when human beings are still not creators of their own values, there is a moral vacuum that must be filled. Therefore, there must be an external source of values. [F]or if God, in the Christian sense of God, has disappeared from his place in the supersensible world, he always holds his own place, despite being a place that has become empty…The empty place must be occupied again and substituted by something, the God that disappeared from it. New ideals are erected.3

The legal system4 is one of these new ideals. Given the lack of an absolute foundation for the distinction between good and bad, and given the impossibility of certainty in relation to the judgment of human actions, human beings created a way of attributing responsibility to the agent for 3

In the original: “Wenn nämlich Gott im Sinne des christlichen Gottes aus seiner Stelle in der übersinnlichen Welt verschwunden ist, dann bleibt immer noch die Stelle selbst erhalten, obzwar als die leer gewordene. [….] Die leere Stelle fordert sogar dazu auf, sie neu zu besetzen und den daraus entschwundenen Gott durch anderes zu ersetzen. Neue Ideale werden aufgerichtet.” Martin Heidegger, “Nietzsches Wort ‘Gott ist tot’,” Holzwege (225). 4 The legal system’s function is to guarantee that equality before God can be imposed on all, including those who do not fear God. Before juridical law, as before God, we are all equal. Such equality makes us non-responsible. As such, according to Nietzsche, the weak human being will always postulate an equality, which in fact, does not exist, “The populace, however, blinketh: ‘We are all equal.’/ ‘Ye higher men,’ – so blinketh the populace –, ‘there are no higher men, we are all equal; man is man, before God-we are all equal!’/ Before God! - Now, however, this God hath died…” (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part four, Of the Higher Man.) In the original: “Der Pöbel aber blinzelt ‘wir sind Alle gleich.’/ ‘Ihr höheren Menschen–so blinzelt der Pöbel–es giebt keine höheren Menschen, wir sind Alle gleich, Mensch ist Mensch, vor Gott–sind wir Alle gleich!’/ Vor Gott! Nun aber starb dieser Gott” (KSA, v. 4: 356).

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their actions and judging the appropriateness between required and practiced behavior. The legal institution and attributing the task of judging human actions to some are the result of creating legislative and judicial powers, respectively, which are the institutions that are charged with establishing what is just in a given society. The pretense that what is just legally is equivalent to what is just morally no longer exists. Nevertheless, this is still an external form for the agent that attributes value to moral values and, as such, despite appearances, is in fact the requirement of a certain type of responsibility, that is, the responsibility to conform, faced with a legal system that, likewise, generates non-responsibility. The justice we have established through a legal system does not necessarily entail changes in human beings. To the contrary, according to Nietzsche, it only punishes those who do not behave according to what has been established so that this punishment serves as an example and, as such, discourages others from behaving in disagreement with what is prohibited legally. The law, according to Nietzsche, does not target the individual, who can be improved, but all of society.5 Punishment and reward were created targeting utility and this utility consists of either inhibiting or encouraging others, those who are not punished or rewarded, to act according to what has been established and, as such, human beings become predictable and, because they are predictable, they also become reliable. The excuse given for the imposition of punishments or rewards is the intention of improving humanity. From a non-Nietzschean perspective, improving human beings means taming them so that they can act in society according to the expectations of other human beings. From a Nietzschean perspective, the “improved” human beings were, of course and only, weakened. And their responsibility was diminished because they are no longer the source that attributes value to moral values. Because he considers human beings to be less rational than the philosophical tradition considers them to be, Nietzsche reinserts instincts – a constituent element of the human being – in the philosophical debate and accepts the burden of taking human beings to be less responsible than 5

Deontological ethics establish the duties of individuals and lead towards groups of individuals who Nietzsche calls herd animals. Nietzschean ethics, on the other hand, are ethics that are directed towards each individual. Autonomy, in the Nietzschean sense, requires that human beings create their own values. The only imposition of Nietzschean ethics is that human beings must be creators. It is this same requirement that is given according to the type of human each one is, that is, according to each one’s limitations.

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would usually seem desirable, if science confirms that we are motivated, in large part, by our instincts or other biological dispositions. The nature of human beings, according to Nietzsche, is not fundamentally reason, but rather instinct. Because of this, the concept of responsibility is weakened. If human beings act not only according to the dictates of reason, but largely due to the pulsing inside oneself, and if the pulsing is not always controllable by reason, that is, if there is a sphere of action that is not under our control, in these cases, therefore, we cannot be held responsible for what we do.

The Strengthening of the Concept of Responsibility If before Nietzsche the “best way to fool humanity is through morality”,6 the understanding of Nietzschean thought, and the consequent recognition that morality is used as a mechanism to manipulate human beings and that human beings are the source of the value of moral values, results in the weakening of morality and the strengthening of each individual’s responsibility due to his/her own morality. While Nietzsche liberates human beings from the ancient shackles of morality, he also condemns them to a truly frightening post. We can no longer take ourselves to be creators of moral values. Along with the burden, Nietzsche offers us a bonus: a method for the moral evaluation of values and actions according to the ethical interpretation of the eternal return of the same. When evaluating human actions, Nietzsche asks the agent to assess how it supports the idea of repeating the same action infinite times. “How much truth can it support, how much truth does a spirit dare? For me, this became, more and more, the correct measure of value.”7 (Ecce Homo, Foreword, 3.) This is the weight of endless repetition, the way the agent bears the action it performs, not the action itself, that should be evaluated. The ethical interpretation of the eternal return of the same, which attributes a weight to each action, which is “the heaviest of weights” (The Gay Science, 340), is an affirmative way to evaluate actions. To evaluate the value of the actions, the agent must ask itself if it would like to perform each of its chosen actions, assuming it were living the same life exactly the same way infinite times. With every choice, it would attribute the weight of the possibility of an action and its consequences being relived countless 6

In the original: “Die Menschheit wird am besten genasführt mit der Moral!” (KSA, v. 6: 220). 7 In the original: “Wie viel Wahrheit erträgt, wie viel Wahrheit wagt ein Geist? das wurde für mich immer mehr der eigentliche Werthmesser” (KSA, v. 6: 259).

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times. By affirming each action, the agent, and only the agent, can attribute a moral value to its own actions. By subjectifying moral evaluation, Nietzsche does not make the concept of responsibility weaker nor does he make it disappear. Subjectification makes the concept of responsibility even stronger because the responsibility ceases to arise from an external attribution of values and starts to arise from the value that the agent attributes to its own actions. For Diogenes Laertius, there is an episode in the life of Aristippus, a sophist who was Socrates’ student. “When he was asked what advantages philosophers have, Aristippus answered: ‘If all the laws were revocable, we would continue to live in an identical manner.’”8 This response simultaneously reveals the idea that human beings could live without laws, that is, without a legal system, which is understood as a group of juridical norms that are related in certain contexts, as well as the idea that philosophy, when it is considered to be a theoretical discourse according to which a way of life should correspond, thus indicating to human beings how to conduct themselves. At the end of the 19th century, Nietzsche presented a “fundamental thought: ‘I bow only to the law that I myself have given, in small as well as great things’”9 (Daybreak, 187). In Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, Nietzsche is talking about himself. Later, he determines, for himself and for others: “[L]et us confine ourselves, therefore, to the purification of our opinions and appreciations, and to the construction of new tables of value of our own: – (....) We, however, would seek to become what we are, the new, the unique, the incomparable, making laws for ourselves and creating ourselves!”10 (The Gay Science, 335). To determine that human beings are creators of their own values means to determine that philosophy should be conceived of as a way of life which corresponds to a theoretical discourse, that is to say, a philosophy should be a theoretical discourse that serves life. With the loss of philosophy as a way of life, the idea of internal responsibility is also lost. 8

Laertius, Diogenes. The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, II: 68. In the original: “des Grundgedankens: ich beuge mich nur dem Gesetze, welches ich selber gegeben habe, im Kleinen und Grossen’” (KSA, v. 3: 160). 10 In the original: “Beschränken wir uns also auf die Reinigung unserer Meinungen und Werthschätzungen und au10 Laertius f die Schöpfung neuer eigener Gütertafeln [....] Wir aber wollen Die werden, die wir sind–die Neuen, die Einmaligen, die Unvergleichbaren, die Sich-selber-Gesetzgebenden, die Sichselber-Schaffenden!” 9

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If in external judgment a lie as well as an error in judgment can cause the avoidance of the repetition of conduct that is not in accord with established norms; on the other hand, in internal judgment the one who makes the judgment knows the motives and the action such that they can be judged unequivocally. Law exercises its role of maintaining social relationships in harmony and requires that externally everyone conduct themselves according to the states’ norms in line with the process laid out in the legal system itself. No social sphere requires that we behave responsibly internally. If all the laws were revoked, contemporary human beings would not have criteria for conduct, since, nowadays, internal criteria for responsible conduct have not been established. The comprehension of philosophy as a way of life, as a spiritual exercise, has been lost. Moreover, we live in a society in which moral values have less and less importance as criteria for evaluating actions. Nietzsche perceives the process of de-responsibilitization, and, therefore requires that human beings become responsible for the creation of their own values once again (The Gay Science, 335). The requirement that human beings create their own values means that human beings act in a responsible manner in accordance with personal, internal, and moral criteria for evaluation. The creation of means for external responsibilitization is related to the loss of the internal sphere of requirements for responsible conduct due to the nonconsideration of philosophy as a way of life. I take up the question posed to Aristippus again. Some individuals conduct themselves according to laws and others do not. If all laws were revoked, human beings that act in accordance with the laws only because they are laws would not continue to act in the same way, since many of the laws are not in accordance with their conceptions of morality. Those who do not conduct themselves according to the laws also would not continue to behave in the same manner, since without an external limit, even though it is not very efficient, their behavior of constant disrespect in relation to other human beings would tend to be aggravated. The creation of institutions that would establish criteria for conduct and that require that human beings act according to these criteria would eliminate the internal sphere requiring responsible behavior, with only the external sphere of control remaining. The crisis of institutions means a crisis in the external sphere that requires responsible conduct. Nevertheless, with the internal sphere eliminated, human beings would not know how to behave. External criteria become essential for human beings because there are no more internal criteria. Nietzsche criticizes the institutions that favor the disappearance of the internal sphere since they favor the disappearance of this sphere and not

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because of their role in the world. The problem, for Nietzsche, is not in having institutions but in the fact that human beings do not become creators, including of these institutions. Nietzsche urges human beings to have internal criteria that serve as a guide for their actions.11 The Nietzschean requirement that human beings create their own values does not entail the negation of the need to follow values created by society to regulate the actions of the human beings that are subjected to a determined legal system. To act the same way after revoking all laws means, according to Aristippus’ answer, acting internally responsible. Nietzsche’s philosophy consists of an attempt to turn the act of philosophizing into a way of life once more, such that the answer to Aristippus’ question would be the same if it were responded to by either classic or contemporary thinkers. Becoming internally responsible is a spiritual exercise and results in the strengthening of the concept of responsibility, since it eliminates the possibility of the mere appearance of agency according to acquired moral values only as a result of the fear of the consequences if one does not conform to what has been imposed. In disagreement with the imposition of values by others, Nietzsche demands that human beings create their own values. Creating one’s own values means taking and following them as one’s own, that is, autonomously. It is not necessary that everyone create values, in the sense of inventing what does not yet exist, but each must make the values his/her own. By creating our own values, we are responsible for the values that are created. Nietzsche’s requirement becomes even more poignant when we realize that the external imposition of moral values makes us nonresponsible by not requiring consideration of the values followed nor adherence to these values. Just the appearance of conduct according to

11

Bernard Williams recognizes morality as a peculiar institution in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. His peculiarity is not in the fact that it is a human creation, but in the fact that it is something that is constitutive of human beings. The argument reappears in Morality. One of the consequences of morality being constitutive of human beings is that there is no need to escape morality since it is not possible to escape one’s self. Therefore, “[t]he moral law is more exigent than the law of an actual liberal republic, because it allows no emigration, but it is unequivocally just in its ideas of responsibility” (178). We cannot escape from responsibility, even if others do not attribute responsibility to us because we cannot escape from ourselves and since responsibility is a part of morality and morality is constitutive of human beings; in a certain sense, responsibility is also an essential part of being human.

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externally imposed moral values is sufficient for someone to be considered good from a moral standpoint.

Two Remaining Problems There are two issues that still need to be mentioned. If we conceive of human beings as the source of moral values, we do not have a metaphysical criterion to justify that one set of moral values is better than another. We just need to choose one form of life as better towards achieving a possible society with possible human beings. That which we want to be justifies giving value to one set of values over another. We cannot avoid the need to some control over society. Nietzsche is not an anarchist. The problem consists of deciding what form of control this will be. We are irredeemably responsible for the value of the values, including the value of the values that comprise legal decisions. But we must live with human beings who value actions differently. A paradox, therefore, is understood: to recognize that human beings are the creators of moral values and to affirm that human beings should consider themselves to be creators seems to lead us to conceive of society as a collection of individuals who consider themselves to be creators and who act as such, and therefore, could not exercise any control over such creators, as this would eliminate an essential aspect of human nature that Nietzsche desires to be positively valued. The external imposition of values would not be justified morally because it is contrary to the concept of human nature as essentially creative. In addition, a superficial reading of Nietzsche's work suggests that the philosopher believes that responsibility is an illusion because some of the elements that are essential to be able to assign responsibility to someone, such as freedom and will, are illusions. Nietzsche would be an advocate of strict causal determinism, would accept the consequences denied by the Stoics in the ethical sphere, and the eternal recurrence of the same would only be a metaphysical account of how events occur in the world. If Nietzschean ethics were only metaethics, it might not be difficult to conceive of him as a determinist. Nietzsche would be only analyzing moral theories that evaluate human actions and prescribe behavior, even if the possibility for human beings to behave in a different way did not exist. Moral evaluations of actions and theories would only be the evaluation of the actions of fictional characters. Human judgment does not alter the actions of fictional characters, that are not free and who do not have the free will to judge themselves morally because they want to know if they should be the object of praise or censure.

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A Dialogue with Nietzsche on the Concept of Moral Responsibility

If we take the eternal recurrence of the same as the metaphysical description of the way events occur in the world, in the moral realm, only metaethics would be possible. Our lives would be like the lives of fictional characters and the only possible moral evaluation would be the same type we make of the lives and actions of these characters. A metaphysical description of the eternal recurrence of the same seems to deflate the possibility of a moral philosophy beyond metaethics. To maintain the understanding that at least part of Nietzsche’s ethics is indeed a normative ethics, one needs to explain how Nietzsche conceives of the events taking place in the world, that is, one must describe the Nietzschean metaphysics which could be compatible with normative ethics. However, investigating the compatibility between Nietzschean ethics and metaphysics is a problem to be discussed in another paper.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Katarina Andersson is a doctor and senior lecturer in Social Work, and has recently finished a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Umeå Centre for Gender Studies (2009-2011). Her main research interests are different aspects of power and influence in areas related to public elderly care. Marshall Berman received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1968, and has also received degrees from Columbia and Oxford Universities. He helped found the Center for Workers’ Education at CCNY. He is member of the editorial board of Dissent, and has written on cultural history and criticism in the New York Times, Village Voice, Dissent, The Nation, and New Left Review, among other publications. He is the author of All that is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (1982), Adventures in Marxism (1999), On the Town: One Hundred Years of Spectacle in Times Square (2006), and The Politics of Authenticity: Radical Individualism and the Emergence of Modern Society (2009). Richard J. Bernstein is Vera List Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research. His M.A. and Ph.D. degrees are from Yale University, where he taught for seven years. In 1989 Bernstein was honored as the Vera List Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research, where he also served as Chair of the Department of Philosophy, Coordinator of the New School’s Psychoanalytic Program and, most recently, as Dean of the Graduate Faculty. He has been Visiting Professor at several universities in the world, such as Hebrew University, the Catholic University of America, and Frankfurt University, among others. In his productive work as a teacher and researcher, he has authored 17 books, among them: Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics and Praxis (1983); The New Constellation: The EthicalPolitical Horizons of Modernity/Postmodernity (1991); Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question (1996); The Abuse of Evil: The Corruption of Politics and Religion since 9/11 (2005) and, among other titles, The Pragmatic Turn (2010). The title of his forthcoming book is “Violence: Thinking Without Banisters.”

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Contributors

Roberto Cantú was born in Guadalajara, Mexico. He is Professor of Chicano Studies and English at California State University, Los Angeles. His publications are in the fields of Latin American, Mexican, Mexican American, and Mesoamerican literatures. He is the Project Director f the annual Gigi Gaucher-Morales Memorial Conference Series. In 2010 Cal State L.A. honored him with the President’s Distinguished Professor Award. Bidhan Chandra Roy was born in Britain of an English mother and Bangladeshi father, and received his PhD in English Literature from the University of London. He has published articles and book chapters on Hanif Kureishi, V.S.Naipaul, Christopher Isherwood, Muslim identity and literature, Buddhism and literature, literary representations of South Asian ethnicity, and cultural representations of 9/11. His forthcoming book is titled “A Passage to Globalism: Globalization, Identities and South Asian Diasporic Fiction.” Zlatan Filipovic teaches English Literature at the University of Gothenburg and University of Jönköping, Sweden. He has a PhD and a Master of Research in English & Comparative Literature from Goldsmiths, University of London, with a focus on deconstruction, poststructuralism and ethics. He has an MA from Uppsala University, Sweden, in Philosophy. Ana Carolina da Costa e Fonseca is Professor of Philosophy at the Fundação Universidade Federal de Ciências da Saúde de Porto Alegre, and Faculdade do Ministério Público, Porto Alegre, Brazil. Qu Hongmei is currently an associate professor in the Department of Philosophy, Jilin University, China. Her research interests include Marxist Philosophy, Kantian Philosophy, and Greek Ethics. She was sponsored by China Scholarship Council in the years of 2005-2007, and holes a master’s degree in philosophy from Leiden University. She received a PhD degree from Jilin University in 2008 with a dissertation titled “Reflections on the History of Interpreting Marx in Moral Philosophy.” Qu was a visiting scholar at the Harvard-Yenching Institute in the years of 2010-2011. While staying at Harvard University, she worked on a project titled “The Impact of Kantian Cosmopolitanism on Contemporary Political Philosophy.”

An Insatiable Dialectic: Essays on Critique, Modernity, and Humanism 229

Anthony Hutchison is a lecturer in American intellectual and cultural history at the University of Nottingham, UK. He is the author of Writing the Republic: Literature and Morality in American Political Fiction (Columbia UP, 2007). Ewa B. Luczak is Associate Professor at the Institute of English Studies, University of Warsaw, Poland, and Vice President of the Polish Association for American Studies. She is the author of How Their Living Outside America Affected Five African American Authors: Toward a Theory of Expatriate Literature (2010); co-editor of Czarno na bialym: Afro-amerykanie którzy poruszyli Ameryke (Black on White: African Americans who Challenged America, 2009); Mosaics of Words: Essays on the American and Canadian Literary Imagination (2009); In Other Words: Dialogizing Race, Ethnicity and Postcoloniality (2012), and coeditor of a Polish book series devoted to eminent American writers of the 20th century and 21st century. Luczak has been awarded numerous prestigious grants, such as Fulbright Fellowship at UC Riverside (19961997); UCLA (2007-2008), and a Kosciuszko Foundation Fellowship at Johns Hopkins University (2012). She is currently working on a book project on the use of eugenic discourse in American literature prior to WWII. Joseph Prabhu is Professor of Philosophy at California State University, Los Angeles and has been a Senior Fellow at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard University and at the Martin Marty Center of the University of Chicago. He was the past President of the Society of Asian and Comparative Philosophy (2008-2010), Member of the Board of Trustees, Council for a Parliament of the World’s Religions and, among other affiliations and duties, the Program Chair for the Melbourne Parliament (2009). Prabhu is currently working on three books: “Liberating Gandhi: Community, Empire, and a Culture of Peace”; “Human Rights in Cross-Cultural Perspective”; and “Hegel, India, and the Dark Face of Modernity.” Andrew Renahan is currently completing his Doctorate in the Philosophy of Religion at Concordia University in Montréal, Québec Canada. His focus is on moral philosophy and the intersection between religious and secular languages in a Wittgensteinian framework. His dissertation, entitled “From Authenticity to Accountability: Re-Imagining Charles Taylor’s Best Account Principle”, advances an interpretive critique of

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Charles Taylor’s moral philosophy incorporating elements from gender theory, phenomenology, and Levinasian ethics. Dennis Rohatyn is Professor of Philosophy at the University of San Diego. His numerous publications include Two Dogmas of Philosophy (1976), The Reluctant Naturalist (1986), and Philosophy/History/ Sophistry (1999). Jörn Rüsen is Senior Fellow at the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut (Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities) at Essen, Germany, and Professor emeritus for General History and Historical Culture at the University of Witten/Herdecke, Germany. In 2010 he received an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Lund (Sweden), and in 20092010 he was Visiting Chair Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences, National Taiwan University. In 2008 he was awarded the Order of Merit from the State of Northrhine Westfalia, Federal Republic of Germany. From 2006 to 2009 he was the head of the research project on “Humanism in the Era of Globalization— An Intercultural Dialogue on Humanity, Culture, and Values” at the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut (Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities) at Essen. During his long career Prof. Rüsen has published numerous articles and books on the following fields of research: theory and methodology of history, history of historiography, strategies of intercultural comparison, intercultural communication in modern societies, and humanism in a globalizing world. Frank H. Weiner is Professor of Architecture and Design at the College of Architecture and Urban Studies in Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. He received the first prize awarded in 2006 by the European Association for Architectural Education (EAAE) for his article "Five Critical Horizons for Architectural Educators in an Age of Distraction."