Micro and Macro Philosophy: Organicism in Biology, Philosophy, and Politics (Value Inquiry Book, 353) 9004439072, 9789004439078

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Micro and Macro Philosophy: Organicism in Biology, Philosophy, and Politics

Value Inquiry Book Series Founding Editor Robert Ginsberg Executive Editor Leonidas Donskis† Managing Editor J.D. Mininger

volume 353

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/vibs

Micro and Macro Philosophy: Organicism in Biology, Philosophy and Politics By

Thorsten Botz-Bornstein

leiden | boston

Cover illustration: Image by Jan van Waarden. The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2020944431

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 0929-8436 ISBN 978-90-04-43907-8 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-44042-5 (e-book) Copyright 2021 by Thorsten Botz-Bornstein. Published by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. Koninklijke Brill NV reserves the right to protect this publication against unauthorized use. Requests for re-use and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill NV via brill.com or copyright.com. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents Acknowledgements  IX Introduction  1 1 The Switch to the Organic  1 2 Micro- and Macrocosm  2 3 Kitsch Philosophy  4 4 Micro–Macro in Biology  4 5 Anti-modern “Microisms”  5 6 Organic Science or Alchemy?  8 7 Micro Philosophical Counter-movements  10 8 The Philosopher and Philosophy  15 9 The Future of Philosophy  16 1

Organicism in Biology and Philosophy  17 1 Organicism in Biology  17 1.1 Machines and Organisms  22 1.2 Structures and Functions  23 2 The Absent Structure  26 3 Monism  28 4 Derrida  30 5 Emergentism  32

2

Organicism vs. Totalitarianism  35 1 “Things Fall Apart”  35 2 Organicism vs. Creationism  42

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Philosophy and Culture  47 1 The Universal and the Local  47 2 Philosophy in a Decultured World  50 3 Philosophy and Non-philosophy  56 4 Civilization and Culture  57 5 World vs. Global  64

4

Micro Philosophies  67 1 European Micro Philosophies  68 1.1 Gilles Deleuze  69 1.2 Michel Foucault  72 1.3 Jean-François Lyotard  74

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2 3

Cultural Studies  75 The Fear of the Total  77

5

Universalism and Racism: From Herder to Hegel  81 1 Unipolar vs. Multipolar  81 2 Hegelian Universalism  84 3 Cosmopolitan Universalism  88 4 Nationalist Philosophies  93 5 Provincial Philosophy  95

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Micro and Macro Philosophy  99 1 The Micro and Culture  99 2 Organic Traditions  101 2.1 Plato’s Cosmology  103 2.2 Herder’s Cosmology  108 2.3 Arthur Koestler  111 2.4 Niklas Luhmann  113 2.5 Other Western Organic Philosophies  116 2.5.1 Hermeneutics as a Biological Science  117 2.5.2 Wittgenstein’s Organic Lebensform  122 2.6 Non-Western Organicism  125 3 Philosophy and Religion  127 4 Philosophy and Deculturation  129

7

Memetics: The Evolution of Signs  134 1 Semiotics and Evolution  135 2 Memetics and Genetics  139 3 Memetics and Aesthetics  141 3.1 Replication and Imitation  142 3.2 Memetics and Mimesis  144 3.2.1 Semper’s Materialist Memetics  146 3.2.2 Anti-Darwinian Aesthetics  148 4 Memetics and Lifestyle  149

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Philosophy and Thought  154 1 Systematic vs. Non-systematic  155 2 Philosophy, Theory, Thought  157 3 Philosophy and Life  160 4 Thought and Life  162 5 Thought in Minority Philosophies  164

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The Future of Thought  167 1 Thought in Non-Western Cultures  167 1.1 Thought and Democracy  168 1.2 Non-Western Thought in the West  169 1.3 Thought in Japan and China  171 1.4 Thought in Africa  172 1.5 Arab-Islamic Thought  172 2 Historicity  177 3 Reconsidering Ethnophilosophy  180 4 Non-Western Micro Philosophies  183 5 Future Philosophies  184 5.1 Analytic-Continental  184 5.2 Pragmatism  185 5.3 Contemplative Philosophy  186 6 Towards a Philosophical Reculturation  189

Conclusion  192 Bibliography  195 Index  215

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Acknowledgements Section 4 in Chapter 4 and parts of Chapter 8 have been published beforehand. The section in Chapter 4 (Civilization and Culture) roughly corresponds to the article “What is the Difference between Culture and Civilization? Two Hundred Fifty Years of Confusion” published by the Comparative Civilizations Review in Spring 2012 (issue 66). Chapter 8 (Memetics: The Evolution of Signs) uses material that has been published as “Can Memes Play Games: Memetics and the Problem of Space” in the book Culture, Nature, Memes: Dynamic Cognitive Theories (edited by T. Botz-Bornstein, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press). Parts of Chapter 7, sub-Section 2.5.2. on Wittgenstein’s Organic Lebensform have appeared in the article ‘The Dream of Language: Wittgenstein’s Concept of Dream in the Context of “Style” and “Lebensform”’ in The Philosophical Forum 34:1, 2003. I thank the editors for having granted the permissions to ­reprint revised and extended versions of these pieces.

Introduction 1

The Switch to the Organic

This book is an attempt to revive awareness surrounding the notion of organicist philosophies and its associated micro/macro ways of thinking. I use the micro– macro pattern as a paradigm and search the history of philosophy for organic constellations. Philosophy must be established as a discipline capable of f­ acing the problems of our time, many of which are micro–macro problems. Though the book’s main purpose is to examine philosophies from a meta-­philosophical angle, I also criticize those cultural phenomena to which these philosophies are related. I venture not only into the history of organicism in science or emergentism in philosophy, but also into problematic presentations of algorithms, creationism, or certain types of cosmology. Richard Dawkins depicted organisms as blindly programmed entities (“survival machines”) whose only purpose is to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. The environment selects independently from organically established micro–macro constellations. Against this, a micro–macro perspective holds that life ancient Greek philosophy, reflections on macrocosm itself is not a property of the matter of a system, but rather of its organization. dna is not a rigid structure, but it requires activation from without. dna is only functional when it is embedded in an already organized context. Based on these premises I show why our thinking should switch to the organic. The Internet, whose development so decisively influenced the most recent stage of globalization, enables new forms of knowledge distribution, which philosophy, as well as all other human sciences, must attempt to grasp conceptually. For example, much information is spread through memes. The meme is a memory item or a portion of information stored in the human brain able to develop cultural networks through replication (to use a scientific term) or through mimesis (to use a term from the philosophy of art). The difference between replication and mimesis is decisive for the argument that I develop. A certain group of people accepts the same memes. Why did they accept them? Because they were exposed to them more often than to others or because they found them convenient? These explanations are insufficient because they work in parallel with the digitalization of living matter through genetic programming that many biologists criticize at present. It places “the entire explanatory burden on a relatively stable, epistemically tractable entity: a onedimensional digital code that can be replicated, modified, and transplanted

© Thorsten Botz-Bornstein, ���1 | doi:10.1163/9789004440425_002

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Introduction

from one individual to another” (Nicholson 2014b: 164). A new technocracy of algorithms propelled by a neoliberal civilization of excellence deals with either the micro or the macro but cannot think the world dynamically through a micro–macro process. Is philosophy well equipped to examine those episodes that are so typical of the twenty-first century? I analyze notions like equilibrium, health, cosmopolitanism, and universalism. Can these phenomena be understood as cultural alternatives to a universalist philosophy? A whole body of work – often embedded in the field of Cultural Studies – deals with philosophical topics no longer under the heading of philosophy but of “Thought.” Does Thought contain a micro–macro dynamic? I examine Thought genres such as “French Thought,” “Feminist Thought,” minority philosophies like gay and lesbian philosophy, and African American philosophy. In Thought, micro and macro elements are permitted to interact, which can spark new relationships between philosophical thinking and culture. Thought is disconnected from the tradition of coherent and self-sufficient system building, which is why Thought can more easily appear as decentered, eclectic, open, and multipolar. These are the topics discussed in this book. Eurocentrism, from which Western philosophy has no doubt always been suffering, will not be traced to an inherent racism or colonialist ambitions in the first place, but rather to philosophy’s intrinsic incapacity to unfold its thoughts following a micro–macro dynamic. The root of universalism is not eurocentrism, but the root of eurocentrism is abstract universalism. The refusal of non-Western philosophical ideas by Western philosophers is due to the perception that any philosophical thought influenced by culture – no matter if East or West – is less philosophical. However, culture is necessary for thinking if we want to follow the logic of the micro–macro. 2

Micro- and Macrocosm

In ancient Greek philosophy, reflections on macrocosm and microcosm provided meaningful interpretations of the relationship between the universal and the particular. In sociology, the word microcosm is still used to identify small groups of individuals whose behavior is typical of a larger social body by which the microcosm is surrounded. In economics, macroeconomics is the study of the economic system as a whole, whereas micro economics studies the economic behavior of individuals or small groups. In these sciences, the micro–­ macro relationship functions as an analytic tool and has shaped the disciplines’ theoretical approaches. Strangely, the words “micro or macro philosophy” are

Introduction

3

absent from academic discourse. One reason is that most of the time, philosophy is inscribed in a civilizational structure that finds micro time and micro space inadequate. One will use the word macro only when there is also the micro. When everything is macro, nothing will be designated as macro. The other reason is that philosophy has difficulties designing a dialectics of micro and macro in agreement with solid scientific and political structures. The micro–macro dichotomy is strongly related to the universal-particular dichotomy whose relationship will become clear in this book. For much of its history, philosophy has refused the micro and engaged in the formulation of macro structures. The insistence on universality is more inveterate than the insistence on nationalisms, culturalism, or pure micro thinking. Philosophy is universalizing and tends to erase national and cultural differences. Philosophy is more macro than micro because its abstract and conceptual nature is supposed to transcend cultural distinctions. This is not only the view of logical positivists, but an anti-micro attitude has been incorporated into Western philosophy from the beginning. “Philosophers always pretend to speak in the name of universal reason independent of socio-cultural and historical contexts,” writes Franz Martin Wimmer (2002: 13). Not only the Vienna Circle, but also Descartes and Husserl created methods able to circumvent traditions and cultural coinages. Husserl explains in his Crisis of European Sciences how the rationality that first appeared in Greece, and which became a guiding principle for all European philosophy, was not Greek but universal (Husserl 1970: 121–22). Neither Socrates nor Plato or Aristotle spoke as Greeks but rather as thinking individuals able to spell out universal truths. Philosophy searches wisdom, and the way to wisdom is universal and should not be limited to localities. As a result, cultures – which are always rooted in localities – are neglected. Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and Epicurus were not trying to define the human in relationship to, for instance, the city, but rather, they were universalists trying to define the human in relationship to the entire world. Aristophanes, in his comedy The Clouds, laughs at Socrates because he – like most other philosophers – is more interested in the universe than in his own city, the city of Athens. In many of those early Greek cosmopolitan visions, equality matters more than difference. Just like most of their successors, early philosophers were attracted by the universal and neglected the individual and the contingent. This includes universal truths, universal rights, or universal education. Modern Western universalism traces its roots to these early foundations. In literature the development was different. In the nineteenth century, with the increase of globalization in commerce and culture, national literatures moved to the foreground reflecting Goethe’s early concern with German national literature’s ability to retain its specificity. This remained valid until much

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Introduction

later. Deleuze and Guattari explain in their book on “minor literature” how a writer might like to explore “linguistic Third World zones by which a language can escape” (1986: 27) in order to find “his own point of underdevelopment, his own patois, his own third world, his own desert” (18). “Marginal literature” is a topic of interest for comparative literature whereas “marginal philosophy” is a topic not for philosophers but for anthropologists. Since its inception, philosophy participated in a civilizing process aiming to replace individual beliefs with universal principles. In literature, the resistance to this civilizing process can be stimulating and inspiring but it seems to make little sense in philosophy. What would be a “philosophical Third World zone”? “All politics is local,” said the archetype of American politics, Tip O’Neill. In philosophy, the local will most probably be dismissed as communitarian or, in more alarming cases, as provincial. Philosophy dismisses the communitarian and the provincial because they are not universal. Also, philosophy has rarely worried about its own globalization; the opposite of globalization, which is anti-global nationalism, was no alternative anyway. Unlike “national literature,” the term “national philosophy” has negative connotations. In most cases, philosophy strove to create a transnational body of work on a universal scale. 3

Kitsch Philosophy

In some cases, philosophy insisted on the micro. Counter-movements opposing the macro did and do exist and we will look at some in this book. Unfortunately, most of the time the occupation with micro truths turned out to be rather unhealthy for philosophy; it would push philosophy into the niche ­normally inhabited by nationalist ideologies. There are reasons to call this ­micro philosophy a sort of kitsch philosophy. The parallel with kitsch principles in art is indeed elucidating. In art, the exclusive concentration on micro elements (“the shiny,” “the gorgeous,” “the very sad event”) leads to kitsch. Real art needs – beyond its occupation with personal micro problems, folk cultures, and ­instantaneous enjoyment – also an extension towards universal values, thoughts, feelings, and interests. The same is true for politics, ethics, and philosophy. 4

Micro–Macro in Biology

Modernity, as it follows the guidelines of efficiency and precision, has difficulties dealing with micro inputs. It has difficulties coordinating the micro with the macro. In modern life, time and space are supposed to be universal and

Introduction

5

functional. The entire process of modernization can be seen as a macro process depriving social phenomena of its micro aspects. After World War ii, organic aspects were entirely neglected, and this was true not only in philosophy, but also in biology. In the twentieth century, modern biology has a preference for either micro or macro. Consequently, several authors argue that biology lost the notion of organism. So do Augros and Stanciu in their book The New Biology: Discovering the Wisdom of Nature. According to Nicholson, biology’s epistemological focus “shifted to sub-organismic entities (like genes) on the one hand, and to supra-organismic entities (like populations) on the other. The category connecting them, that is, the organism as a whole, fell between the cracks of biological enquiry” (Nicholson 2014a: 347). This is surprising because biology is the science of living organisms, so how can the organic get lost? Cybernetics, information theory, and computer science produced a “genocentric view of life” (348) unable to account for the micro–macro dynamic animating living phenomena. Very often, the result was genetic determinism. All this made biology – as strange as this sounds – “inorganic.” At present, biology witnesses the return of the organic. An awareness that “understanding the whole requires studying the whole” (352) leads biologists to the identification of organizing principles. Whereas the twentieth century will be remembered as the century of the gene, the twenty-first century will be remembered as the century of the organic. This book attempts to establish the plausibility of an organicist perspective in philosophy. 5

Anti-modern “Microisms”

During the last roughly two-hundred years, philosophers launched a certain number of micro philosophies. This first happened in the context of anti-­ Enlightenment movements, and then, at the end of the twentieth century, in the flourishing of “anti-modern” ideas. Examples of the former are the various Pan-movements emerging from around 1850 onwards in (mostly Eastern) Europe. Another example would be the creation of ethnophilosophy in Africa about a hundred years later. After these came the “anti-modern” turn generating so-called “postmodern” philosophies that were thriving particularly well in Europe in the 1980s and 1990s. These philosophers suggested strategies of deconstruction; fragmenting subjects, methods, and ideologies into tiny micro units. Most of these philosophies originated in France, but they had a continuing impact on the humanities internationally. What all those philosophies – from early Pan-movements to “poststructuralism” – have in common is that they concentrate only on the micro and neglect the macro or are even hostile towards the macro. In the worst case, macro

6

Introduction

v­ isions of the human and of society will be demonized by drawing a link between macro perspectives and totalitarian politics. Few thinkers had the ambition or the courage to establish organic relationships between the minor and the major, the province and the center, the micro and the macro. Both the micro and the macro have positive and negative properties. The macro can be materialistic, scientistic, impersonal, but it can also be linked to progressive developments. The micro can be spiritual, local, and personal, but it can also be nationalistic, isolationist, and culturalist. As mentioned earlier, in general, in the history of Western philosophy, the exclusive concentration on the macro has been the bigger problem. Unsurprisingly, the most recent stage of this development, so-called “modernity,” is a pure macro phenomenon. Following the universal guidelines of efficiency and precision, modernity has difficulties dealing with micro inputs. The entire process of modernization has been submitted to what Immanuel Wallerstein called the “rhetoric of universalism,” which is just another name for the rhetoric of the macro. Wallerstein notes that this language “has been sometimes theological and sometimes derived from a secular philosophical worldview” (Wallerstein: 1). The micro is concrete and individual. The micro is the cultural. Consequently, the process of modernization has often been described as a macro process depriving social phenomena of culture. According to John Tomlinson, modernity is “technologically and economically powerful but culturally weak” (Tomlinson 1991: 174), and Brett Davis holds that “modernity radically displaces us; it strips us of our local roots and relocates us in a progressively homogeneous space of technological and economic calculation” (Davis 2010: 116). The micro introduces concrete cultural contents into the more universal macro structures. Modernity has always been eager to develop a “concept of a science that was outside ‘culture’, that was in a sense more important than culture,” writes Wallerstein (77). That said, while the micro is always culture, culture is not merely micro. Culture is rather an organic phenomenon always evolving in close contact with macro structures. “Modern man” has difficulties grasping this sophisticated definition of culture. What role can philosophy play in the twenty-first century? Will it join the generalized universalism (as it used to do most of the time for centuries)? Or will it switch to ethnophilosophy and postmodern fragmentation? I argue that universalist cosmopolitanism and egocentric culturalism are not the only alternatives. Western philosophy has created a false dichotomy that has repercussions on politics and culture. Instead, our thinking should switch to the organic. The subordination of the micro to the macro in the modern age has produced positive results in many areas, but in general, it is more problematic

Introduction

7

than beneficial. This becomes most obvious in the twenty-first century where culture, the typical micro element, leads an increasingly precarious existence. In a neoliberal environment, the importance of culture is contested. A “deculturing” attitude has become most obvious in the field of education of which philosophy has traditionally been a part. During the last fifty years, a neoliberal spirit has introduced “scientific” macro methods like quality monitoring, quality reporting, and quality measuring in all domains. In modern education, content-oriented quality tends to be buried under a heap of quantitative studies representative of the macro. The roots of this development are diverse, but much of it can be traced to the scientification of the human sciences that began after World War ii, which favored universal standards for everything. The loss of the micro is tragic because the micro contains culture. Since culture is important for the formation of identities and the self-determination of individuals, the loss of the micro has political implications. Most of the time, “antimicro” policies of Western modernity are “anti-cultural” policies coming with a political agenda. Consequently, outside the West, the “anti-micro” can easily be perceived as imperialist. Alejandro Valega explains that “from a Latin American perspective, cultural destruction is sustained by the Western modern philosophical project” (Vallega: 145). Western modernity (Western philosophy) and imperialism appear as compact wholes and any resistance tends to become a cultural resistance. Vallega continues: “The emphasis on culture is crucial here, since more often than not culture is overlooked out of concern with economic imperialism or philosophical issues” (145). Western politics is filled with the power-discourse of universalisms, and the Western philosophical discourse has often – sometimes perhaps unconsciously – supported those universalist ambitions. Above that, philosophy has a “natural” bias towards universalism because it is arguably the most theoretical d­ iscipline among the human sciences. Theories are general and universal by nature. Does philosophy have to be universal? Or should philosophy simply disregard the existing power structures and turn to the micro? Is the destiny of philosophy to create more and more counter-movements in the form of ethnophilosophy and postmodern fragmentation? I believe that there are better alternatives. Philosophy needs to be redefined as an organic discipline, which means, first of all, that it needs to be redefined as a cultural discipline. Only a cultural view can establish an organic kind of universalism. Contrary to what the proliferation of nationalisms and culturalisms during various époques might lead us to suspect, to be “cultural” does not mean to be enclosed in a hermetic sphere. Instead, it means to be open towards other cultures (though not open in the sense of being universalist). Universalism is

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Introduction

closed-minded whereas culture creates an opening towards the other. It is ­perhaps even the precondition to any openness. I can be open towards the other only when I see myself as culture. When I see myself as science and absolute, universal truth, no opening is possible. My next reflex would instead probably be to impose my absolute truths on others. It is this constellation that S. Tagore alludes to when writing that “only one who has a profound knowledge of one’s own tradition can be a cosmopolitan” (1078).1 He continues writing that “my tradition can expand to include elements from other traditions in the flow of cultural history” (2008: 1077). Culture should be a kind of force because, compared to politics and religion, culture is open by nature. Philosophy has too often feared this openness. 6

Organic Science or Alchemy?

Most of the time in the history of philosophy, we had only two options: a universalist cosmopolitanism that only recognized universal values such as human rights on the one hand, and egocentric nationalism, particularism, and culturalism on the other. Is there only either macro or micro? Such dichotomies could only arise on the grounds of a philosophical tradition that had already lost sight of the organic at a very early stage in its development. The either micro or macro proposition is a false dichotomy, but most of the time, philosophy took this dichotomy for granted. Early analytic philosophy even turned it into a caricature when insisting on the logical impossibility of organicism. At the beginning of the twentieth century, G.E. Moore wrote that “the principle of organic unities (…) is mainly used to defend the practice of holding both of two contradictory propositions, wherever this may seem convenient” (Moore 1903 [1968]: 16). It is true that the idea of organicism is to maintain two positions at the same time. However, its aim is to put them in meaningful micro–macro relationships. Moore is, together with Russell, Frege, and Wittgenstein, one of the initiators of analytic philosophy. Much of the difficulty that philosophy has with organicism is contained in Moore’s innocent observation. At present, biology reconsiders organic models, and this book discusses possibilities of how a micro/macro model can be reinstalled in philosophy. Plato developed thoughts on macrocosm and microcosm in his late work, the Timaeus in the context of an organicist cosmology. Micro and macro are interdependent: the order of the small always reflects the order of the totality 1 Saranindranath Tagore develops these thoughts in the context of a modern interpretation of Rabindranath Tagore.

Introduction

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and vice versa. But, Plato’s reflections in the Timaeus had little impact on the history of Western philosophy. Even within the body of Plato’s own work, they are unusual and difficult to coordinate with his prevalent universalism. In general, Western philosophy preferred to concentrate on Plato’s Theory of Forms. The Theory of Forms describes the world not in terms of a living organism, but through abstract concepts regulated by a hierarchical structure. As the philosopher is striving towards reason, those abstract concepts become more and more universal. Plato’s abstract utopianism and elitism became guidelines for Western philosophy. Other sciences (economics, sociology, or urbanism) had more use for the micro–macro dynamic. How can the micro and the macro be brought together? The word “organism” (“organismus” in Latin) was used in the Middle Ages and appeared later in physiological writings. The organism as a concept expressing a micro–macro relationship became popular especially in Germany, where several philosophers, writers, and naturalists used it. Among them were Herder, Hamann, Goethe, Schiller, Hegel, Novalis, Oken, Alexander von Humboldt, Carus and Ritter (Cheung 2006: 332). Leibniz, Nietzsche and Schelling could be added. However, in later periods, Western philosophy had relatively little to say about organic relationships between the micro and macro. It has not been explored in aesthetics or ethics.2 Apart from Moore, who thinks that micro and macro cannot be brought together for purely logical reasons, philosophers often appear dumbfounded when confronted with the question. Sometimes they make modest suggestions. Those who adhere to universalist cosmopolitanism might admit that pure universalism is indeed a little bland and lacks the more colorful culture of the individual. Martha Nussbaum expresses this view when recognizing that the “less colorful” cosmopolitism, which loves only humanity and not one’s country, is less attractive for many people. Still she recommends not going for the micro alternative, which is, in her view, nationalism. Though nationalism caters to the desire for belonging, it remains inherently dangerous. Reason and the love of humanity are always the better options (Nussbaum 1996). Robert Pinsky comments that Nussbaum fears the eros of patriotism as she is unable to “imagine a counterbalancing eros of the cosmopolitan” (Pinsky: 85). Are all

2 There is micro and macro ethics in medical science, but it remains a relatively modest attempt occurring only in a particular area of bioethics. Macro ethics refers to the ethical issues dealing with the utility and management of health resources whereas micro ethics deals with the complete process of interactions occurring between the doctor and the patient. Micro and macro are used to structure the ethics of everyday clinical practice. Traditional bioethics is found to be too macro (representing “the view from the outside”) whereas micro ethics attempts to offer a view from the inside (see Mandal et al. 2015).

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Introduction

emotions dangerous? Appiah points out that a “patriotic emotion” is pride (Appiah 1996: 26) and asks whether one can be as proud of one’s cosmopolitanism as one is of one’s nation. Nussbaum looks for a compromise: offer universalism with some colorful, “erotic” and sentimental input. This summarizes the typical stance of the liberal intellectual as it runs parallel to the idea of propagating capitalism with selected social benefits. The macro structure itself is not supposed to be changed into something more organic. Is it not possible to fully consider the micro (the culture, the eros, the pride, the sentiment) and still remain reasonable and respectful of humanity? Immanuel Wallerstein (whose systems-theory is basically a macro approach) formulates the same question like this: is it not possible to handle the “tension between the need to universalize our perceptions, analyses, and statements of values and the need to defend their particularist roots against the incursion of the particularist perceptions?” (Wallerstein: 48–49) Veit Bader presents a related list of questions in his review of Nussbaum’s book: (1) how to combine reason and history, the universal and the particular, the political and the ethnic-cultural; (2) how to combine reason and passion; (3) how [make to work] the presumed transformation of parochial into global obligations and allegiances (Bader: 383). Bader does not answer any of these questions but points to solutions that have been tried in the past and failed. Among those are an “appeal to common liberty” or the “love of the common liberty of one’s people.” Thinkers have done a lot of “juggling” (Bader) with the big and the small, but rare are those who dared to refer to the concept of the organic. Often this biological metaphor was equated with “alchemy” (according to Bader, this is a frequently used metaphor) from which one must immediately distance oneself because “one does not trust the patriotic alchemy of passions” (388). In this book, I want to reinstate organicism as a philosophical approach incompatible with alchemy, and I do so in parallel with the work of a new generation of biologists. 7 Micro Philosophical Counter-movements Throughout the history of philosophy, the universality claim did not sit well with many thinkers, and adverse positions were formulated either by questioning the possibility of universal thought or by defining micro positions. Let us start with the first counterargument. It is obvious that philosophy is not as universal as it pretends to be. Even the most universalist philosophical position contains traces of micro components. Even Plato and Aristotle were

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Greeks and could not have entirely eliminated local influences from their thinking. This fact is of course more likely to strike somebody who comes from a completely different culture such as Chinese or African. No philosophy can be truly culturally neutral. Everything philosophers attempt to demonstrate has to be conceptualized with the help of words coming from a certain language, and languages are tied to cultural, social, and historical contexts. Ethnophilosophy developed this line of thought in the most radical fashion. Second, once this is admitted, the unified picture of only one philosophy makes little sense and it becomes necessary to admit multiple poles of truth. This was recognized very early on. In the thirteenth century, European philosophy became remarkably open-minded, pluralistic, and diverse as it expanded its original cannon and encouraged students to learn from Jewish and Muslim thinkers. A multitude of truths appeared more realistic than a closed and dogmatic system. However, this new “cultural realism” did not last long. It would soon be replaced with a scholastic form of “idealism” that was more rigid than anything that had ever existed before. Scholasticism forced philosophy into the dogmas of religion, asceticism, and theosophy. In the Middle Ages, the “philosophy vs. culture” paradigm, already flagrant in Greece, became stronger than ever: poetry was free and lyrical whereas philosophy was scholastic. Philosophy was not supposed to be influenced by culture, but instead had to spell out universal truths. At the beginning of the Enlightenment, the philosophical horizon would widen once again. Voltaire learned about Chinese culture from Jesuit writings and expressed his high regard for Confucian thought. A certain “sapientia sinica” entered European philosophy in the eighteenth century (see Gadamer 1995: 267). Strangely, such openness would never become the trademark of the Enlightenment but rather the trademark of its opponents. At the end of the eighteenth century, the “democratization” of thought and the commitment to philosophical locality migrated from the agenda of the Enlightenment to that of Counter-Enlightenment philosophers. Johann Gottfried von Herder, who is part of the latter group, explains in his opus magnum Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man (1784) that peoples and not political movements are central participants in the creation of world history and asks for a shift from the macro to the micro. In another text, Herder famously insists that “every nation has its own center of happiness as every sphere has its own center of gravity” (Herder 1784: 509). Herder reacts against French (but also German) Enlightenment universalism and cosmopolitism. As a result, he prioritizes cultural unity and ethnic identity. However, Herder never uses the purist language of nationalism. He does not oppose civic and political liberties but develops, on the contrary, a cultural nationalism determined by a struggle for political liberty. It is

12

Introduction

important to point out that for Herder, the nation preexists the state whereas today’s liberal thinking tends to assume that the nation is an arbitrary, imagined community. Only a handful of thinkers, like Appiah, dare to give back to the nation a powerful meaning: “Nations matter morally (…) for the same reason that football and opera matter – as things desired by autonomous agents, whose autonomous desires we ought to acknowledge and take account of even if we cannot always accede to them” (Appiah 1996: 28). Herder condemns conquest and imperialism, which is why his thoughts would later be absorbed by European national liberation movements like Pan-Slavism and even by ethnophilosophy in the 1960s. Herder’s focus on the micro forced philosophy to open up towards culture. Unfortunately, this new openness would not last long and would soon be replaced with a new closedness. Herder’s views were challenged by a newly invented “Greek bias” spreading though German universities. Philosophy was declared to be Greek, and any reflection not connected to the Greeks could not be called philosophy. Against all evidence, philosophy was said to be independent of non-Western sources, and the non-West was seen as non-philosophical. Anti-cultural universalism reconquered philosophy. It was mentioned above that only a cultural attitude can avoid closedness. In Germany around 1800, it becomes clearer than ever that anti-cultural attitudes and closedness are causally linked. Anti-culture always means anti-­other. To understand Indian philosophy, it is necessary to have at least a basic understanding of Indian culture. For those Enlightenment philosophers – most of whom were Kantians – any occupation with non-Western cultures was out of the question. As pure marco-ists, they tended to advance on more abstract levels. Instead of engaging with Indian or Chinese culture, they preferred to take some Greek doctrine and declare it universal. Despite the historical weakness of these arguments, German mainstream philosophy took the unified “Greek” discourse for granted. The model of a multicultural mosaic of truths that had been modestly outlined only a couple of decades earlier by Herder, Schelling, and the Schlegel brothers, became more and more unthinkable. There is a vicious circle. The negation of culture entails the negation of multi-culture; but the negation of multi-culture will only reinforce the refusal of any culture in philosophy. However, the problems revealed by Herder were not entirely forgotten. Hegel, in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, re-asks Herder’s questions though arguably without providing convincing answers. In the History of Philosophy Hegel writes: “What are we to make of the phenomenon that philosophy, supposedly teaching of absolute truth, has appeared restricted, on the whole, to a small number of individuals, to particular peoples, at particular

Introduction

13

times?” (VGP26/LHP: 12)3 Hegel’s arguments as well as the above Greek bias will be discussed in Chapter 5. Herder was not influential in his time, but his thoughts would have an important impact on philosophy many years later: they led to the creation of a whole range of micro philosophies. They influenced the establishment of PanSlavism4 as well as Pan-Africanism (see Appiah 1998), and later also ethnophilosophy (Hountondji 2004: 534). Ethnophilosophy is arguably the most outspokenly “micro” philosophy ever. Ethnophilosophy flourished in Africa from the 1960s until the 1980s and represents the most radical contestation of philosophy’s claim to universality. It began with the Belgian missionary Placide Tempels’ book on “Bantu philosophy” (Tempels 1945) and developed a tradition emphasizing philosophies’ local roots. In the 1960s, Alexis Kagame carried out research on the oral history, traditions, and literature of Rwanda, and the Kenyan John Mbiti undertook massive field work on traditional African religions. Given its culturalist tendencies, ethnophilosophy would soon be accused of enclosing truth within an ethnic group. Most famously, Beninese philosopher Paulin Hountondji charged that ethnophilosophy reiterates Eurocentric caricatures because it denies Africans’ capacity to think as independent individuals (Hountondji 1996; see also Oluoch 1998: 68–71). In the Socratic tradition, thinking as an individual is extremely important. Implicit in Hountondji’s reproach is the assumption that the ethnophilosophical approach depicts Africans as incapable of thinking universally, that is, abstractly. Only the individual can think abstractly while ethnic groups are unable to do so. This typically Greek argument will be discussed below. Ethnophilosophy was found to be too micro and not macro enough. During the following decades, ethnophilosophy became the embarrassing “other” of mainstream philosophy. However, ethnophilosophy is far from being the only representative of philosophical anti-universalism. Micro philosophies flourished particularly well after World War ii on the European continent, especially in the 1980s. During this period, the opposition to macro structures was propelled by a general criticism of scientism, universalism, eurocentrism or simply all centrisms. Internationally, these European ethnophilosophies were much better tolerated than their African counterparts. Poststructuralist as well as postcolonial philosophy shifted Western thought away from universal and “totalitarian” structures and pleaded for more micro oriented avenues. The 3 Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie is abbreviated vgp and its English translation Lectures on the Philosophy of History is abbreviated lph. 4 A chapter in Herder’s Outlines on the Slavic nations (Sixteenth Book, published only in 1791) had a strong impact on the self-awareness of the Slavs.

14

Introduction

World War ii experiences of totalitarianisms had made any consideration of totalities suspicious. Anticolonial revolutions in Africa, Asia, and Latin America had further impacts on this kind of micro thinking. Feminism was on the rise too. Via an uncannily coordinated movement, postwar philosophies in various places of the world deconstructed wholes, most of the time in the name of the liberation of the individual or the regional. French philosophers especially began designing their own European ethnophilosophy declaring, always in response to the specter of “totalitarianism,” philosophy to be purely regional. Michel Foucault contrasts, in a conversation with Gilles Deleuze, the regional with the totalitarian and insists on the necessity to revive “local and regional (…) practices and not totalitarian [totalisatrices]” practices (Foucault and Deleuze 1974). The Deleuze-Foucault exchange will be discussed in Chapter 4. Guided by a fear of “the total,” post-structural philosophies began to deconstruct all metaphysical and historical heritages. They criticized traditional dualistic and monistic ontologies, which is laudable in many respects. However, they did not show any ambition to design organic alternatives based on micro– macro thinking. On this point, post-structuralism is not very different from analytic philosophy. Though analytic philosophy is looking for universal truths, in at least one sense its methods overlap with those of post-structuralism: on both sides of the channel, philosophies are splitting up totalities. Much of Continental philosophy deconstructs while analytic philosophy “analyzes.” Etymologically, “to analyze” is to “split apart.”5 Both analytic philosophy and poststructuralism forget that organicism and macro monism are not identical. Organicism (sometimes also called holism) does not merely emphasize the priority of a whole over its parts.6 The organic unity of Plato’s cosmos (in the 5 Lysis (preceded by the prefix ana), comes from the Greek lyei, which means “loosening” or “to unfasten.” 6 Jan Smuts introduced the term “holism” in his Holism and Evolution (1927) and defined it as the tendency in nature to produce wholes that are greater than the sum of the parts through creative evolution. Smuts wanted to wrench genetics “away from the hard mechanical conceptions which dominated Biology more than a generation ago” (5). However, he did not emphasize the relationship of the organism with the environment, which differentiates his holism from the organism of, for example Kurt Goldstein who was formulating similar thoughts in medical science (see Chapter 2). In the philosophy of mind, holism often appears under the auspices of holism, emergentism or Gestalt. It is also possible to differentiate holism from organicism because the former believes that a whole is prior to its parts. This in itself can also be seen as a mechanical conception (see below in this chapter). Both organicism and holism can be contrasted with two other views: atomism and molecularism. Smuts develops something like the stoic idea of organic geographical development in practice. Smuts was foremost a South African politician (he served as prime minister of the Union of

Introduction

15

Timaeus) is bound together by an underlying metaphysical will, but this “metaphysical will” is not totalitarian because it is determined by micro components. 8

The Philosopher and Philosophy

It is necessary to describe in this introduction the relationship between the individual (the philosopher) and the universal philosophical discourse. Above I presented Hountondji’s argument that ethnophilosophy denies Africans the capacity to think as independent individuals (Hountondji 1996), which ­implies – at least indirectly – that Africans are incapable of thinking universally and abstractly. Western philosophy has always held that its abstract truths can be best explored by an individual mind and not by a cultural or ethnic group. Truths are discovered by exceptional minds, which are mostly owned by philosophers and scientists. According to this logic, philosophical truths must be found by an individual mind, but once they are found, they are not individual but universal and valid for everybody, which is a paradox. Only because Socrates and Plato were not thinking as Greeks, but as individual rational beings can their truths be considered universal. Had they been thinking as Greeks their truths would not be more universal but less universal. The paradox that the truths fabricated by individual minds are more universal than those fabricated by groups becomes very acute with the rise of globalization. In a less globalized world, many different individual minds could be allowed to spell out truths. In a globalized world, the Socratic pattern is bound to work towards standardization. Why should there be several different minds and not only one? If truth is universal, different truths spelled out by individuals are not required. As a result, truth is formatted in the most culturally neutral way until it fits everybody. Standardization leaves no regional or communitarian middle ground between individual ratio and universal truth, between the good of the locality and cosmopolitanism, between the micro and the macro. In philosophy, this process of standardization advanced at a rapid step. Since philosophy South Africa from 1919 until 1924 and from 1939 until 1948). His political views had much in common with his philosophy as developed in his Holism and Evolution. Biographer F.S. Crafford points out that for Smuts, “small units must develop into bigger wholes, and they in their turn again must grow into larger and ever-larger structures without cessation. Advancement lay along that path. Thus the unification of the four provinces in the Union of South Africa, the idea of the British Commonwealth of Nations, and, finally, the great whole resulting from the combination of the peoples of the earth in a great league of nations were but a logical progression consistent with his philosophical tenets” (Crafford 2017: 140).

16

Introduction

is theory to begin with, it has no difficulties standardizing its approaches. Simon Critchley notes that “you can go to a conference in Macedonia or Poland or South America, and people will have a common theoretical language” (Critchley: 73). This helps communication, but will it not lead to an impoverishment of thought? Because the search for truth proceeds from the individual to the universal and skips the communitarian middle ground, it creates a further paradox. Normally, universalization should lead to unity. However, universalization, just like globalization, does not unify humanity. Nor are the individual philosophers that Critchley met in different countries unified among each other. Universalization makes them only more dependent on each other, but apart from that, universalization rather keeps them separate. What is needed is organic unification, but this kind of unification always happens on a more local level. As long as such a cultural unification does not take place, globalization and universalization will lead to nationalism, which signifies the most radical separation. This is a fact: globalization goes hand in hand with the creation of ethnic patches all over the world, and these patches are getting smaller and smaller. 9

The Future of Philosophy

What role can philosophy play in a landscape of universalisms with occasional patches of micro culture inserted? Should it participate in the generalized deculturation game and only provide culturally neutral thinking skills taught in Critical Thinking classes? Is the philosophy teacher a “thinking coach” providing training? Or are they supposed to transmit some kind of culture? And if yes, which culture? Is analytic philosophy the philosophy of the future because it is more decultured than Continental philosophy and thus better prepared to function in an environment of abstract excellence? Or should we still insist that philosophical thinking is more than an inventory of culturally neutral skills, and that it always unfolds in concrete cultural situations? It follows from the above pages that the philosophy teacher should play a cultural role. In neoliberal economies, environments of abstract excellence without any cultural connotations have become more and more dominant. Philosophy should not imitate these culturally neutral discourses of excellence but define itself as a cultural product. For this purpose, philosophy needs to become organic.

Chapter 1

Organicism in Biology and Philosophy 1

Organicism in Biology

Organicism has never been very popular in philosophy, biology or anywhere else. Organic architecture has existed for more than a century, but it subsists in a niche constantly at odds with the world of internationalization (see BotzBornstein 2017). Organicism goes against modern civilization, although this does not mean that it did not occasionally succeed in modernity. In general, in modern times of universalism, the organic is left aside and what is put forward is the mechanic. Sometimes, the organic even adopts negative connotations, in which case it will be associated with deterioration and decay. Cristian Lo Iacono has shown that social change has often been described as a process of rotting just because society is organic and does not follow universal rules. Iacono sees this as a “classical element of reactionary social philosophy of the organism. Social changes are described in the language of organisms: society ‘decays’” (Iacono 2016: 22, my trans.). The idea that the organic is just decay became prominent at the peak of modernity, most excessively through the Futurist veneration of the machine. For Marinetti, the organic is fake and lazy whereas the machine is straightforward and working towards the more authentic life of truly modern beings. Russian futurist Vadim Shershenevic declared that a poem could consist of one single image or of an indefinite series of images because “the combination of these images does not follow an organic principle but a mechanical one” (Lawton: 210). Head futurist Marinetti did not appreciate the idea of “organic flow,” such as is found in dance, but preferred the “accentuated the technical concept of interruption, well demonstrated by his (and Bragaglia’s) ‘Cabaret Epilettico’ (1922–23)” (Brandstetter: 181). Three decades or so earlier, Ruskin had condemned the machine precisely because it can make only “inauthentic things” and “dead things” (see Trilling: 127). For Ruskin, the organic was authentic because it has a great life force whereas the machine was dead. Futurists saw things exactly the other way round. After World War ii, not only philosophy, but even biology began neglecting organic aspects. Though organicism was well known at the time, it was rarely considered. Before World War i, biologist Hans Driesch addressed, in his introduction to The Science and Philosophy of the Organism, Goethe’s dictum “Dann

© Thorsten Botz-Bornstein, ���1 | doi:10.1163/9789004440425_003

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Chapter 1

hat er die Teile in seiner Hand, fehlt leider nur das geistige Band.”1 Driesch regrets that ordinary physiology indeed does not offer us much more than the parts. But is there anything besides them, is a specific motor act of an organism as such anything in itself, is it not merely a sum or aggregate? It seems to me that this is the central problem of motor physiology; in other words, it seems to me that the question about the “wholeness”; of the act of moving must come up at the beginning of the analysis. (Driesch: 6) Driesch was convinced that biological development does “not follow the lines of ordinary physiology” (6). He would later abandon the vocabulary of biology to turn to highly metaphysical elaborations. His organicism has been termed ‘neovitalism’ (see Wolfe 2014: 17). Kurt Goldstein made another attempt to push forward organicism in science. In 1934, Goldstein publishes his The Organism: A Holistic Approach to Biology Derived from Pathological Data in Man, which takes a holistic view of the organism but differs from other holists in his stress on the intimate relation between the organism and its environment. Goldstein does not yet invoke the idea of emergence but remains mainly inspired by the “figure-ground principle” of Gestalt-psychology. In any case, he develops a holistic or noetic approach to the behavior of the organism as a whole that transcends the analytic method of natural science insisting that “to attempt to understand life from the point of view of the natural-science method alone is fruitless” (Goldstein: 15). Isolated data acquired by the dissecting method of natural science cannot ­explain living matter: “As soon as we attempt to grasp them scientifically, we must take them apart, and this taking apart nets us a multitude of isolated facts that offer no direct clue to that which we experience directly in the living organism” (Goldstein: 27). Another organic aspect of Goldstein’s method is that for him “life” is composed of both living and non-living matter, which somehow runs counter the usual understanding of organicism. Organicists hold that a proper understanding of living organisms, broadly construed, differs fundamentally from the understanding of non-living things. They typically oppose mechanistic or reductionist views of living things (see McDonough 2016b). For Goldstein, the question, ‘In what does living matter differ from nonliving?’ presupposes that we have already separated the two. We stand in the presence 1 “In his hand he only has parts but unfortunately the spiritual link is missing.”

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of a multiformity of material that is scientifically undefined. This material is simply the world around us, in which certain phenomena immediately stand out as ‘living’, without revealing to us the why and wherefore of this characteristic, or even challenging an inquiry concerning it. ­(Goldstein: 26) A similar organic criticism of science emerges at the same time in philosophy. Roy Wood Sellars attempts in the early 1920 to formulate an “evolutionary naturalism” that he contrasts with realism or the common understanding of naturalism. Sellars criticizes the “old naturalisms (…) that founded themselves upon the results of the exact sciences alone, [and were] leaving out the levels of organic and social behavior. [Evolutionary naturalism] meets the momentum of spiritualism by the counter energy of the modern realistic movement” (R. Sellars: viii). Sellars sees conventional naturalism as “a naive materialism, positivism, the mechanical view of nature, or the bias of the physicist to reduce the whole world to facts of physics and nothing more” (5). This materialist view has created a false dichotomy of either naturalism or vitalism. Sellars’ evolutionary naturalism offers a new alternative. For Sellars, “naturalism sought too blindly to reduce or disintegrate… It was dominated almost entirely by the exact sciences with their stress upon quantities. And it did not enough recognize the reality of mind and of those human organizations and events for which mind is pivotal” (16). After World War ii, the Viennese organicist and critic of reductionist NeoDarwinism, Ludwig von Bertalanffy, attempted to establish organisms as dynamically stable open systems. Together with Paul Alfred Weiss, Bertalanffy advanced the idea of a processual understanding of life, which culminated in his works on “General System Theory” and his “Theory of Open Systems,” both of which were published in the 1950s. Bertalanffy distinguishes the thermodynamics of living systems from the closed systems of physics. For Bertalanffy, “organisms exhibit the properties of life not because of some special peculiarity of these compounds, but on account of the heterogeneous system into which these compounds are articulated. There is no ‘living substance’ because the characteristic of life is the organization of substances” (Wolfe 2014b: 48). Such organic theories remained unpopular. Arthur Koestler tried his best to explain the importance of organic approaches to a larger public. In his popular work The Ghost in the Machine, published in 1967, Koestler supported ideas very similar to Driesch’s and Bertalanffy’s. Koestler outlines some “pillars of unwisdom” summarizing all erroneous beliefs that biology should have avoided but unfortunately didn’t: that evolution is the result of random mutations; that organisms are passive automata controlled by the environment; and that

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Chapter 1

the only scientific method worth that name is quantitative measurement (Koestler: 4). Today, Koestler’s “pillars of unwisdom” overlap precisely with the paradigms of genetics that have become increasingly popular from the 1970s onwards. Postwar biology decides to concentrate on what came to be called the Machine Conception of the Organism (mco). In recent times, a new biology attempts to reintegrate organic views. Contemporary biologists find that genes do not directly control developmental processes and that dna sequences cannot entirely explain how genes interact within larger constellations. The dna is not simply the “brain” of an organism acting autonomously. As a result, biologists suggest a more processual theoretical perspective called “Developmental Systems Theory.” The inside and the outside, the micro and the macro, maintain dynamic relationships. A certain section of cognitive science parallels this decentralizing pattern, suggesting that the brain might not function like a computer. Psychologist Robert Epstein from the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology in California notes that for more than half a century, psychologists, linguists, neuroscientists and other experts on human behavior have been asserting that the human brain does in fact work like a computer (Epstein 2016). But whereas computers operate on symbolic representations of the world, the brain is influenced by the environment, the body, and other external forces. Epstein attempts to establish an organic view of cognition. Most bothersome is the information processing (ip) metaphor, which is, according to Epstein, slowing down neuroscience. In reality, information like songs or poems are not “stored” in the brain but “the brain has simply changed in an orderly way that now allows us to sing the song or recite the poem under certain conditions.”2 Epstein quotes from Steven Rose’s book The Future of the Brain (2005), where the author shows that a snapshot of the brain’s state is “meaningless unless we knew the entire life history of that brain’s owner – perhaps even about the social context in which he or she was raised.” Epstein concludes: “We are organisms, not computers. Get over it.” Processual theoretical perspectives were able to change the above-described mechanic perceptions of life. Several paradigm shifts were responsible for these changes in biology. In the twenty-first century it had become obvious that

2 Already in the 1970s, Howard Bursen, in his Dismantling the Memory Machine (1978) and Norman Malcolm, in his Memory and Mind (1977) criticized the idea that information is mechanically “stored” in the brain and later mechanically activated.

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(1) living organisms differ from machines. (2) macro processes like evolution cannot be understood by looking at either genes (micro) or populations (micro). (3) molecular models offer a reductive view of life. Biologists working during the first half of the twentieth century found the first assumption especially premodern and “metaphysical.” Today such views are rehabilitated. Developmental Systems Theory effectuates a decentralization of biological processes that had become most centralized between 1970 and 2000. In the 1970s, Richard Dawkins had depicted organisms as blindly programmed entities (“survival machines”) whose only purpose is to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes (see Dawkins 1976: xxi). Here the environment selects independently of organically established micro–macro constellations whereas a micro–macro perspective holds that life itself is not a property of the matter of a system, but of its organization (see Nicholson 2014a: 354). In the philosophy camp, Daniel Dennett (1995) supported the idea of organisms as machines blindly following the laws of natural selection: genes evolve according to selection and the organism itself has no explanatory role to play. The organism = machine equation became known as the mco. However, the mco is not the work of postwar science but rather emerged much earlier. It goes back to the natural philosophy of Descartes, whose machine model of the body (the “bête-machine” argument) would become a largely accepted metaphor (or scientific fact) in subsequent centuries. Arthur Koestler would later call it “the slot-machine model” (xiii) of biology. In Part V of the Discourse on Method (1637), after having established that animals have no reason, Descartes defines animals as machines in which nature acts according to the disposition of their organs. Humans are not considered to be machines because humans have a soul, which is impossible to admit for animals; but this is the only distinction. The soul argument is very telling because it shows that Descartes formulated his conception of mco in a religious context. The animal is a machine, but the human is more than a machine because the human has a soul, which establishes a link with God. The transcendent soul exists separate from the machine-like body, which establishes the famous Cartesian dualism. This initial mco position would be constantly expanded on and reinforced. One hundred years after Descartes, Julien Offray de La Mettrie, in his book Man a Machine (L’Homme machine, 1747), extends Descartes’ organism = ­machine argument from animals to humans. La Mettrie no longer sees the idea of having a soul as a distinctive mark of humans; instead, the soul (or the mind) is merely a sophisticated organization of matter in the brain.3 Much of the 3 It is worth mentioning that one year later La Mettrie published Man, a Plant (L’Homme, plante).

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mind concept current in contemporary cognitive science remains based on this assumption. John Searle, for example, rejects Cartesian dualism by suggesting that consciousness is a purely biological phenomenon. Conscious processes are biological processes (Searle 1999: 53). This position can be called “biologism” (coined in parallel with physicalism), which holds that everything that can be said about the living world can be said in the language of biology. It is a typical example of reductionism as it reduces “higher” and still mysterious phenomena to lower-level and better understood phenomena in order to explain them. Mental processes are believed to supervene on physiochemical processes in the brain. The human is superior to the animal but not because it has a soul. La Mettrie’s mechanistic materialism caught on in biology and other fields. Later, it would even become important for Marxist materialism. Karl Popper discusses La Mettrie’s claim in relation to evolution and finds that the “man-machine doctrine, which suggests that there is no clear distinction between living matter and dead matter, has perhaps more defenders than before among physicists, biologists, and philosophers; especially in the form of the thesis that man is a computer” (Popper: 224). Already for Descartes, the mco was more than a metaphor. In his short unfinished treatise, The Description of the Human Body, Descartes identifies the body as a machine – empirically and not metaphorically – when explaining the meaning of “the entire machine of our body” (Descartes 1998: 171). The heart is an engine whose heat causes the body to move, the blood vessels are pipes, etc. The mco is a scientific reality. Descartes is also fully aware of the determinism linked to this conception and accepts it. For example, he believes that one day we will be able to deduce from the full knowledge of the seeds the future shape and structure of the entire organism (1998: 200). 1.1 Machines and Organisms Recently, biologists found that the mco “is impeding rather than enabling further progress in our comprehension of living systems” (Nicholson 2014b: 162). Just like the ip (information processing) metaphor slowed down neuroscience, the mco slowed down biology. A new generation of biologists begins retrieving the organic component of living matter. What is the difference between a machine and an organism? First, there are undeniable parallels. Both the machine and the organism are systems obeying laws, and both contain parts that are structurally different from the whole, but which interact with the whole. A first difference arises with regard to the purpose. The work of the machine benefits an external purpose whereas the organism’s only purpose is its own survival. Organisms are self-generating systems and maintain their own

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o­rganization. Nicholson says that organisms are “intrinsically purposive” whereas machines are “extrinsically purposive” (2014b: 163). The autonomy of the organism is further reinforced by the fact that organisms are self-­organizing and self-regenerating systems. The parts produce each other, maintain each other, and generally exist by means of one another (Nicholson 2013: 671). This does not mean that organisms have a central (“interior”) organization. On the contrary, ‘externalism’ is an organicist concept and it is used as such in analytic philosophy (see below).4 “Extrinsically purposive” means that the system does not merely serve its own interest but works towards an end that is external to itself. Externalism has nothing to do with being “extrinsically purposive.” Externalism is a feature of the organic. Externalism suggests that “organismic parts only acquire their respective identities qua parts as the whole progressively develops” (Nicholson 2014b: 163).5 Organisms are open, decentralized systems with transitional structural identities. They are open to the future as well as to the environment. The parts can change while the organization of the whole remains the same. In an organism, a change of the whole influences the parts, whereas in a machine, parts (genes, molecules, atoms) are changed to influence the whole. Nicholson explains that this is the difference between designing and breeding: “Thus, whereas the designer (such as a watchmaker) manipulates parts to affect the properties of wholes, nature (like a breeder) manipulates wholes to affect the properties of their parts” (2014b: 170). All this explains the difference between a living and a non-living system. 1.2 Structures and Functions The intrinsically purposive view requires a special approach towards evolution. It is impossible to see evolution as a chain of “problem solving” instances. To solve a problem implies that there is an external purpose. What purpose does an animal have to evolve from a non-bird into a bird? Are wings the solution to a problem? Not being able to fly cannot be seen as a problem. Flying might bring advantages, but it does not necessarily solve problems. To say that evolution solves a problem represents a circular reasoning. Consequently, Lewontin writes in his article “Biology as Engineering:” “If wings are a solution to the problem of flight, they are an example of a problem being created by its 4 Many analytical philosophers will probably not see the concept of externalism as an organic concept. McDonough explains in his “Heidegger, Externalism and Mechanism” (1995) the position of analytic philosophy concerning externalism. 5 This pattern also suggests the notion of “backwards individuation” as it is used in analytic philosophy. See McDonough 1993, in particular Part ii.

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Chapter 1

own solution” (Lewontin 1996: 8). Evolution does not follow external purposes, but the evolution of organisms is intrinsically purposive. It follows that organisms have no functions. To be functional always means to be functional for something external. Organisms contradict the utilitarian concept of the function that strives to enhance particular elements (or the well-being of a person) in view of a certain purpose. Organicism offers a more Kantian concept of the autonomy of the parts. In the organism, only the parts “function,” and they do so for the purpose of the organism. No other design is required. In contrast, the machine needs a designer. The reason is that in a machine the parts are temporally antecedent to the whole, which is not the case for organisms. In a machine the parts need to be put together by a designer. The functions of the machine belong to the original design of the machine and are ascribed by the designer of the machine in advance (Nicholson 2013: 672). The organism develops in relationship with the whole. Nicholson holds that in an organism, the whole came first and then came the parts. In a machine, the parts came first, and the whole was installed later in order to establish and preserve the unity of the system (674). This distinction might be slightly unfortunate because it reiterates the reductive holist view that a whole is prior to its parts. It has been explained above that this in itself can be seen as a mechanical conception that does not contribute to the understanding of organic wholes. We find it in Proclus, and early analytic philosophy doubted that a whole can first exist without the parts. However, for didactic reasons and in order to make the difference between organism and machine as clear as possible, we can accept Nicholson’s distinction. More important than saying what came first (the whole or the part) is that in an organism, the structure of the whole is always determined by the structure of its parts, which does not occur in a machine. In a computer, the software does not influence the hardware or the execution of the entire program whereas organisms can modify their structure autonomously. In an “organic computer” (if that could exist) the program and the hardware would constantly change while the system is running, whereas in a machine, software and hardware remain distinct. In a machine, the hardware “serves as a channel that facilitates the exchange of materials as fuel is converted into waste. An organism, in contrast, changes wholly and continuously as a result of its metabolizing activity” (Nicholson 2018: 146). The software/hardware distinction still echoes what Descartes wanted to establish in the first place: the soul/body dualism. Nicholson writes: “the computer has an immaterial ‘soul’ (the software) that governs the operations of a material ‘body’ (the hardware)” (2014b: 164). Today many biologists attempt to use truly organic models to explain developmental differentiation. Organisms are dynamic. dna is not a rigid structure,

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but it functions within a system where it requires activation from without. In 2009, the Baylor College of Medicine published a note in Science Daily announcing that “dna is Dynamic and has High Energy: Not Stiff or Static as First Envisioned.” The authors point out that Nobel laureates Crick and Watson’s rigid double helix, which is the first model of dna, is merely a “stiff snapshot of idealized dna” (Baylor College). Recently Jonathan Latham wrote in Independent Science News that “dna is no master controller, nor is it even at the center of biology. Instead, science overwhelmingly shows that life is self-organized.” Biology has created a story in which dna is the origin of organisms. Scientists use highly active verbs such as “controls,” “governs,” and “regulates” to defend this centralized vision. However, dna-centric models lead to genetic determinism, and dna “is not the language of God. It is not even the language of biology” (Latham 2017). More radically, Patrick Bateson defends development theories when analyzing the impact of the organism on the descendants: “The capacity of the organism to adapt to challenges from the environment can set up conditions that affect the subsequent evolution of its descendants. Moreover, molecular events arising from epigenetic processes can be transmitted from one generation to the next and influence genetic mutation” (Bateson 2012). dna is not a one-dimensional code, but it is “only functional when it is embedded in the context of an already present, intricately organized cell” (Nicholson 2014b: 164). It is perfectly possible to use a model from hermeneutic philosophy and say that dna is like a metaphor receiving ever new meanings according to the context within which it is evoked. Paul Ricœur explains in his La Métaphore vive (confusingly translated as The Rule of Metaphor) that metaphors have their own “metaphorical truth.” Metaphors are not “dead” formal language games existing on their own, but “the metaphor is the rhetorical process by means of which the discourse liberates the power of certain fictions to re-describe reality” (1975: 11). Metaphorical truth is a pivotal concept in Ricœur’s philosophy. Such ideas that see the organism as capable of producing meaning have also been developed by Georges Canguilhem in his La Connaissance de la vie (1952). Evolution is not unfolding gradually. Development is a dynamic and heterogeneous process similar to a game, which does not just follow rules but activates single elements in ways that cannot be predicted. Evolution also accommodates influences from the environment because genetic material is sensitive to external conditions. Another suitable analogy is art. Just like art, organic development does not simply execute programs. Enrico Coen, in his The Art of Genes (1999), suggests that the establishment of a new genetic reality follows the lines of artistic creation and interpretation. Artistic production is certainly a good analogy when describing the process of evolution. However, François

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Jacob’s idea of “tinkering” makes the process even clearer. Still clearer is Koestler’s image of the “stutterer” who deconstructs the fluid narrative: “Evolution no longer appears as a tale told by an idiot, but rather as an epic recited by a stutterer” (Koestler: 158). Evolution does not proceed along the programmatic rules of engineering, but it advances like a tinkerer who does not know exactly what he wants and how he will go ahead. In his “Evolution and Tinkering” (1977) Jacob writes that coincidences and improvisation are more important than the plan of an engineer. Since there is no “correct” way to assemble the parts, there is no correct way to disassemble the wholes either. At the same time, tinkering is not completely random as the tinkerer constantly reflects the detail against the whole. Just like art, tinkering is an organic activity. The raw genetic material is random but not the organic process. For Alex Rosenberg, genetics provides a chaotic picture of nature and he compares it with a stack of phone books: “A stack of books with just numbers and without names or punctuation between them” (Rosenberg 2001: 282). This is the material, but organic connections arise between those elements. Any grammar is not preestablished but evolves organically. 2

The Absent Structure

Organic models of development (as opposed to the mco) can provide new insights in the various fields of the human sciences. Organic models contradict “development thinking,” which is, according to Jan Pieterse, “steeped in social engineering and the ambition to shape economies and societies, which makes it an interventionist and managerialist discipline.” It involves “telling other people what to do – in the name of modernization, nation building, progress, mobilization” (Pieterse: 182). Opposed to development thinking are the “postdevelopment view” and “anti-management.” Instead of working only on external universal structures like human rights, gender equality, political correctness, and efficient economic models, one should also consider internal structures like happiness, the value of certain cultures, or the advantages of micro economies. The organic can produce coherence between the external (human rights) and the internal (happiness). Organicism has many opponents. In philosophy, the opposition to organicism is strongest in the analytic tradition. This is mainly because analytical philosophy began with Russell’s reaction against Hegel’s organicism, amply exposed in My Philosophical Development (1959: 31–32). One can go further. Analytic philosophy has always loathed not just the organic but living matter as such. It has not only directed its forces against organic biology but against

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biology in general. “Analytical philosophy has generally allied itself with the inorganic sciences,” writes Richard McDonough (2004: 307).6 Nonetheless, one of the best explanations of the concept of organicism comes from analytic philosophy. In The Concept of Mind, Gilbert Ryle refers to the “organization” of a university in order to explain the idea of an “absent structure” through which single elements are held together organically. The most important point is that the structure is absent and that it is not spelled out empirically. Somebody visits Oxford University. After having seen the colleges and the library, a visitor claims that he has not seen the university. Ryle explains that the university is only the way in which the colleges, laboratories, etc. are organized; it represents the structure of several single elements, but there is no physical building representing the university. Ryle’s organic model works in parallel with the structure of a game, which Ryle uses to clarify his point: “A foreigner watching his first game of cricket learns what are the functions of the bowlers, the batsmen, the fielders, the umpires and the scorers. He then says ‘But there is no one left on the field to contribute the famous element of team spirit’” (Ryle 1989: 18). The team spirit is the organizational quality present in the form of an “absent structure” holding together the cricket game. Were it present, the entire game would be turned into an absurdity; and it would be equally absurd to claim that the team spirit is a dictatorial institution limiting the players’ liberty and that therefore the team spirit needs to be deconstructed. The university does not exist empirically, just as the essence of the game manifests itself only in the form of an absent concept. The idea coincides with Umberto Eco’s interpretation of the structure as an always absent phenomenon which “does not exist as such but is a product of my operations oriented in a certain direction” (Eco 1983: 48, my trans.). The unifying structure should not be spelled out in concrete terms. When the structure is not an equilibrium or an absent center, but when it has become a central notion with concrete, empirically established qualities (like a program), then the structure can indeed become the basis of religious or nationalist fanaticism. Determinism instead of free evolution will be the next step. Do organisms really exist or are they “ontological go-betweens” by ­definition, as believes Charles Wolfe. According to Wolfe, the organism is neither an empirically present phenomenon nor a merely theoretical assumption but settles between both. It is a “concept which plays a series of roles” (Wolfe 2014: 1). One 6 Early analytic philosophy’s aversion to organicism and the organic is a complex and nuanced phenomenon. This becomes clear when considering that Russell described Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World (1925) as “the most valuable philosophical contribution of recent years […] which is of the highest interest and importance to biology” (Russell 1930: 179).

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reason for its empirical non-existence is that the organism shifts between the biological and the social. However, Wolfe claims that the ontological uniqueness can be defended “on a biological basis as well” (Wolfe 2014b: 39). The gene “seems like a construct, since it can no longer be thought of as an inherently stable, discrete stretch of dna that encodes information for producing a protein” (41). Stability only lies in the system as a whole and not in the gene, which begs the question: what “is” the gene if neither the whole nor the part can be ontologically established? Wolfe thinks that most Continental biophilosophy bluntly asserts the existence of organisms whereas analytic philosophy asserts only the existence of atoms, molecules, or selfish genes. The best approach would try to connect both and be a go-between. Reality can be grasped only through an approach that unites analysis and philosophical contemplation and views the gene as a game. This position emerges from Ryle’s observations, and it will be better explained in Chapter 7. In cognitive science, centralizing positions tend to be attributed to (the program of) the brain, which is supposed to put order into language (see below). However, because external (cultural) influences in the creation of language and cognitive patterns are consistently avoided, the desire to centralize produces a reductive mco conception of both the brain and cognition. Against this, Dupré and Nicholson insist that “structures are not simply given, but instead reflect the stability of functional activities, which are themselves maintained by stable structures” (Dupré and Nicholson: 25). Biological theory has expressed the phenomenon of the “absent structure” by insisting on the relationship between structure and function. The two “represent different yet complementary ‘ways of seeing’ the processual reality of living systems: one emphasizing stability and the other emphasizing dynamicity” (25). Again, these thoughts go back to Bertalanffy, according to whom “the old contrast between ‘structure’ and ‘function’ is to be reduced to the relative speed of processes within the organism. Structures are extended, slow processes; functions are transitory, rapid processes” (25). Structure expresses the maintenance of function, and function expresses the maintenance of structure. Any description reducing phenomena to structures or functions is abstract as it sees the world in terms of space but neglects the temporal dimension contained in processes. A structure is merely a cohesive whole built up of distinct parts while a process is a series of events creating a flow of results. 3 Monism Descartes separated body and soul. Subsequent philosophers have – s­ ometimes desperately – tried to bring body and soul together again. Such ­movements can

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be summarized under the name of monism. The term ‘monism’ was coined by the German Enlightenment philosopher Christian Wolff in 1712 in his Logic (also called Deutsche Logik). It was also during this period that the term ‘organism’ became popular designating the kind of organization displayed by living beings in contradistinction to the kind of organization exhibited by machines (see Nicholson 2014b: 354). Wolff believed that all phenomena are held ­together by one unifying principle or that they are manifestations of a single substance. Just like his contemporary La Mettrie, Wolff rejected the Cartesian dualism of mind and body. And like La Mettrie, he reverted to monism. However, contrary to La Mettrie’s monism, Wolff’s monism is not of a purely mechanistic kind but organic. In the history of Western philosophy, the fact of concentrating not only on single elements but on a larger whole or a more comprehensive unity has often been rooted in the desire to transcend mere analysis and to engage in contemplation. Philosophical views of unity occur most explicitly in monism. Monism traces everything that exists back to a single source. The most obvious source of monistic thinking is the philosophy of the pre-Socratics, but Neoplatonism can be considered monistic, too. Plotinus saw an ineffable transcendent god, which he called ‘The One’ of which subsequent realities were supposed to be emanations. From The One emanates the Divine Mind (nous), the Cosmic Soul (psyche), and the World (cosmos). In the English-speaking world, monism was carried on by Neo-Hegelians such as T.H. Green, Edward Caird, and F.H. Bradley. It remained relatively important until around 1900 but lost its popularity due to the emergence of analytic philosophy. Positivists like Carnap and Ayer “ridiculed the whole question [of monism] as incoherent mysticism” (Schaffer 2010: 31). Bertrand Russell had a special problem with monism because he disliked organisms. Organisms cannot be reduced to chemistry and physics, and the – in his view – “organic” philosophies of Aristotle and Hegel represented “a barrier to scientific progress.” For Russell, “scientific progress has been made by analysis and artificial isolation” and it is therefore “prudent to adopt a mechanistic view as a working hypothesis” (Russell 1948: 34–36). All this shows, as concludes McDonough, that “analytical philosophy, from its inception, has been hostile to organicism” (McDonough 2004: 207). One problem is that in the above reflections, monism and organicism tend to be equated. Though monism has a rich and varied heritage traceable to Parmenides, Plato, Plotinus, and Spinoza, in Russell’s and Ayer’s time, monism was often reduced to a philosophy that affirms the mechanical conception of a whole that is prior to its parts. Russell writes in an article tellingly called “The Philosophy of Logical Atomism:” “I share the common-sense belief that there are many separate things; I do not regard the apparent multiplicity of the world as consisting merely in phases and unreal divisions of a single indivisible

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­Reality” (Russell 1985: 36). Similarly, A.J. Ayer claims that “the assertion that Reality is One, which it is characteristic of a monist to make and a pluralist to controvert, is nonsensical, since no empirical situation could have any bearing on its truth” (Ayer: 146). Monism was reduced to a mechanical conception. This mechanical principle, which is not contained in organicism, exists, but it has its own, separate tradition. Schaffer traces it to the Neoplatonist philosopher Proclus who says in his commentary of Plato’s Parmenides: “The monad is everywhere prior to the plurality (…). In the case of bodies, the whole that precedes the parts is the whole that embraces all separate beings in the cosmos” (Proclus: 79). Early analytic philosophy’s opposition to monism becomes more understandable when considering these circumstances. How can the whole exist without the parts? The debate on organicism turns into a metaphysical discussion about the existence of the world. Instead of being really debated, the idea of the organic is led ad absurdum. When the cosmos is established as fundamental and prior to anything, we create precisely those dichotomies that organicism is trying to avoid. Nicholson writes about organisms: “There can be no activity if there is no being to begin with, [but] the processual nature of organisms requires that we relinquish this principle” (Nicholson 2018: 153). Organic philosophy believes that “Being is neither ontologically nor temporally prior to activity, as the very existence of a living being is only possible by means of continuous activity” (ibid.). Alternatively, Schaffer, in his article, defends a more genuinely organic view of monism when writing: “I will defend the monistic view, so interpreted: the world has parts, but the parts are dependent fragments of an integrated whole” (Schaffer: 32). Neither organicism nor monism could do away with the myth of the machinebody. Instead, the mco would serve as an inspiration for various other scientific metaphors, all of which were seen as reflecting concrete realities: mechanism, machinery, program, design, control, feedback, regulation, switch, input, output, efficiency… (see Nicholson 2013: 670). Culturally, all these terms are inscribed in a typically modern framework. The “genetic program,” a metaphor borrowed from computers suggested by Jacob and Monod in the 1960s, turned out to be arguably the most successful one in biology in modern times. However, even if the program has been extended and modified by identifying enhancers, promoters, activators, and repressors, it still remains a mechanistic program. 4 Derrida A positive example of an “absent structure” has been developed by a French philosopher whom I want to exempt from the ethno-micro tradition that

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b­ ecame mainstream in France in the 1980s, and which will be analyzed in Chapter 5. This exceptional philosopher is Jacques Derrida. Though arguably “officially” more deconstructive than all other twentieth century Continental philosophers, Derrida spells out an absent totality similar to the “absent structure” described in section 2.1 above. Derrida insists on the interrelatedness of things that he refers to as différance (“differing”). Derrida is an organic philosopher deconstructing both micro and macro by putting them in relationship; and like Ryle, Derrida refers to a game or to the act of playing: As soon as it comes into being and into language, play erases itself as such. Just as writing must erase itself as such before truth, etc. The point is that there is no as such where writing or play are concerned. Having no essence, introducing difference as the condition for the presence of essence, opening up the possibility of the double, the copy, the imitation, the simulacrum – the game and the graphè are constantly disappearing as they go along [vont sans cesse disparaissant]. They cannot, in classical affirmation, be affirmed without being negated. (Derrida 1981: 157/French 180–81) It is true that Derrida uses the play metaphor as a deconstructive device. However, every game represents an organic totality. The team spirit and the rules (at the moment the game is played) are erased since the players are not selfconsciously following rules. They are not self-consciously employing a team spirit, etc. And yet, the totality of the game, which is what the team spirit and the rules actually enable, does exist. The team spirit (or the style of the game) is a fluent phenomenon incompatible with mco models. Machines have neither (team) spirit nor style. The team spirit or the style corresponds with what Nicholson describes as a “continuous flux:” “An organism naturally maintains itself in a state of continuous flux in which there is a permanent breaking down and replacement of its constituent materials. This is the process characteristic of living systems we call metabolism” (Nicholson 2013: 672). Derrida’s totality is not based on closed systems, but on differences between concrete items, which is an intrinsically organic approach. Derrida opposes metaphysically established, linear, hierarchical structures; but he does not fall into the trap of micro philosophical relativism. Despite his opposition to Plato, Derrida’s philosophy remains compatible with Plato’s organic structures described in the Timaeus, where the cosmos is formulated as an organic unity bound together by an underlying metaphysical will. The features of this world-organism are irreducible to its material-mechanical composition because the rational characteristics of the cosmos are caused by a structure that is non-material.

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Plato calls this underlying structure a “world soul” (Timaeus, 30b; Laws, 896e–899a), which cannot be empirically established by measuring the micro elements. Just like universality for the Greeks, the world soul is not merely a collection of facts. In biology, organisms play a role “through their metabolism, their activities, and their choices – in defining and partly creating their own ecological niches” (Nicholson 2014a: 350). To draw a parallel with the human sciences, one can say that an organic view rehabilitates concrete cultural environments and even subcultures. Both the micro and the macro vision are abstractions. In both science and philosophy, only an organic approach can render reality as it really is. Organic philosophers and scientists hold that a proper understanding of patterns underlying living organisms helps understanding other phenomena. Organicists retrieve reality because they see the living being as a “self-organized integrated system” (Nicholson 2014a: 354). For philosophy, an organic approach requires the anchoring of thought in a cultural situation. Philosophical truths must reflect cultural (micro) realities that will remain linked to a larger macro discourse. The cultural micro discourse has an autonomous power; it is not steered by a metaphysical superpower. But at the same time, such discourses make sense only within larger wholes. Singular cultural elements do not float randomly in a sphere of relativism. Diverse micro discourses are held together by a macro rationality that makes each local discourse recognizable as philosophy and not just as folk culture elements or local wisdom. 5 Emergentism Within analytic philosophy, the organic alternative to mechanism is emergentism, which has clear micro–macro traits (see Passmore 1966: 271). Emergentism is usually traced to the British nineteenth century philosophers Alexander Bain, George Henry Lewes, and John Stuart Mill, and is traditionally understood as an alternative to reductionism (McDonough 2020). I sketched above various ways of overcoming the Cartesian mind-body dualism (exemplified by La Mettrie, monism, or Searle). Emergentism is a very sophisticated approach serving the same purpose, as Peter Simons writes: “For anti-dualists who are queasy about the idea that the mental reduces to the physical, emergence seems a good third way: at some suitable stage of organic complication the mental emerges from the physical” (Simons 2008: 78). According to Simons, the word “emergent” was first employed to design a theory able to negotiate

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between mechanism and vitalism (81).7 The motivation of many organicists is to find a middle path between substantive vitalism on the one hand and mechanism on the other. Simons finds this definition in Lewes’ Problems of Life (1875). Emergentism holds that certain kinds of wholes, notably organisms, are “greater than the sum of their parts” (Nagel 1979: 380). In parallel to what biologists hold today about organic life, emergentists believe that “most wholes have contingent parts, and wholes of a certain kind exist typically not just because of having certain parts, but because the parts are in a certain configuration or set of relations amongst themselves” (Simons 2008: 84). Simons himself adopts an organic position (at least in my understanding) when writing: “I subscribe to the view that the totality of being is a single connected whole, the natural world” (78). Emergentism reached its peak in Britain when Neo-Hegelianism sought new horizons for British philosophy by exploring monism. Emergentism resembles another organic theory, Gestalt theory, which believes that the human mind is not entirely independent of the parts, but still more than simply the sum of its parts. This opinion was forcefully expressed by Kurt Koffka, the founder of Gestalt psychology (see Koffka 1936: 677). The Gestalt concept is roughly contemporaneous with emergentism and British monism. It bears a link with analytic philosophy through Christian von Ehrenfels who introduced the concept of Gestalt. Von Ehrenfels was a member of the School of Brentano and worked with Mach’s theory of sensation of melodies and spatial shapes (Ehrenfels: 1890).8 An earlier idea of Gestalt can be traced to Goethe and David Hume. In both Gestalt theory and emergentism, the emphasis is not on the abstract rules of cognitive processes but on the concrete organization of those processes (see Stadler and Kruse 1994). To appear as a Gestalt, each component must be considered a part of a system of dynamic relationships. In a similar vein, emergentism finds that an organism’s characteristics cannot be reduced to purely mechanical structures. Of course, this is an ontological problem, and not merely a scientific one, which makes its discussion in analytic circles sometimes awkward. The 1920s were the peak time for emergentism. Apart from Whitehead’s Process and Reality one can quote Samuel Alexander’s Space, Time, and Deity (1920) and C.D. Broad’s The Mind and its Place in Nature (1925). 7 It led to the formulation of functional vitalism, associated with the Montpellier School of the end of the eighteenth century, which envisages a relation between part and whole and views parts as “little lives” that participate in the life of the whole organism. It also led to attitudinal vitalism, found in Goldstein. Attitudinal vitalism is the view that there is something special about life that makes one adopt a certain vital standpoint towards it (see Wolfe 2011). 8 Gestalt Theory influenced Wittgenstein (see McDonough 2016).

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However, just like Neo-Hegelianism, emergentism was not successful: positivism, physicalism, and reductionism would take over the largest part of the English-speaking philosophical scene. Much later, emergentism would become important again, first with the work of Joseph Margolis (1978, 1986, and 1987) and, more recently, with Clayton and Davies’ The Re-Emergence of ­Emergence (2006).

Chapter 2

Organicism vs. Totalitarianism 1

“Things Fall Apart”

Philosophies considering the micro without losing sight of the macro (and vice versa) do exist, and I characterize them in this book as organic. The suggested organic micro–macro philosophy develops a hermeneutic alternative by rethinking the ideas of synthesis and of dynamic forms. Though marginal, organic philosophy has a long tradition. The word ‘organism’ was coined right after 1800 to designate the kind of organization displayed by living beings in contradistinction to the kind of organization exhibited by machines (see Nicholson 2014a: 354). Machines are totalitarian whereas living organisms are not. Furthermore, organicism is attached to the idea of unity. In a contemporary context, this makes it different from “postmodern” (post-structuralist) philosophies, which are infatuated with fragmentation. Of course, the paternalistic dangers that postmodern thought and critical philosophy see in organic philosophies are not entirely unfounded. Organicism becomes totalitarian when it is centered and mechanic. The mechanic is the classic opposite of the organic. Already in 1809, August Schlegel contrasted, in his lectures on architecture, the organic with the mechanic and criticized that the latter imposes rules upon material irrespective of the quality of this material (A. Schlegel 1845 [1963], Lecture xvii).1 In the early nineteenth century, philosophers developed organic theories destined to combat mco conceptions. Oswald Spengler writes that for Goethe, “the world-as-mechanism stood opposed to the world as organism, dead nature to living nature, law to form” (1917: 25). Though in his writings on morphology Goethe enters the field of the natural sciences, morphology’s relationship with physics remains for Goethe one of indifference at best. He finds all mechanistic explanations unconvincing and reproaches Newton for picking up just one element from the variety of nature and using it to ­explain a large variety of other phenomena (see Goethe 1840: 50; and BotzBornstein 2006: 172). Newton’s approach is atomistic and disregards the larger wholes that Goethe intends to grasp with his morphology. Since the beginning, organicism has had to face two kinds of criticism. Some find organicism too micro, while others find it too macro. Since most organic philosophies are strongly linked to cultures, it is often the former. This pattern 1 The lectures were published only after his death.

© Thorsten Botz-Bornstein, ���1 | doi:10.1163/9789004440425_004

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is flagrant in modernity whose tendency is to leave the micro behind and to concentrate on the universal. However, the contrary does also happen. Many modern philosophers hate the organic because it is too macro. Organicism refers to unity, and unity can signify authoritarianism, communitarianism, or God. In philosophy, much of this criticism comes from the analytic side, and often it has been interesting and justified. However, this criticism tends to overlook organicism’s main purpose, which is to be neither micro nor macro but to bring both together. Obviously, unity and totality can be understood in various ways. Adorno and Horkheimer, for example, write in their Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) that the Enlightenment is always striving towards totality and that Western society is determined by this “totalitarian” ambition: “Enlightenment is totalitarian” (1944: 4). Paradoxically, Enlightenment is also based on the project of overcoming all totalitarianisms. These authors’ understanding of the Enlightenment is complex: though it fights totalitarianisms, it also imposes its own universal standards on everything. The Enlightenment is totalitarian in the sense of universal and universalizing. Of course, the anti-Enlightenment is no less totalizing. Michael Walzer has formulated the double bind structure that makes both microism (nationalism) and macroism (cosmopolitanism) totalitarian: “The crimes of the twentieth century have been committed alternately, as it were, by perverted patriots and perverted cosmopolitans. If fascism represents the first of these perversions, communism, in its Leninist and Maoist versions, represents the second. Isn’t this repressive communism a child of the universalizing enlightenment? Doesn’t it teach an antinationalist ethic?” (Walzer: 127) Organic philosophy, as it combats mco universalism, can be seen as a remedy to both kinds of totalitarianism. However, this option has rarely been considered. Paradoxically, the organic tends to be understood not as a remedy but as a subtype of the totalitarian. Karl Popper uses not only the word “holist” but also “organic” in the sense of “closed.” For him, organic is the antonym of open and liberal, and he contrasts organic totalitarianism with liberalism (Popper 1966: 80). The reason for this is organicism’s striving for unity and macro dimensions. Of course, this is, first, a complete misunderstanding of the organic, and second, it disregards enlightened liberalism’s own aspirations towards universalism’s total unity. In most contexts, the organic has had conservative and anti-modern connotations. The organic tends to land us not only in the realm of the anti-­ modern, but also in the sphere of the non-modern non-West. In Chinua Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart (1958), the effect of modernization on Nigerian society is that the community no longer acts, in the words of the author, “like one.” Unity is lost and local forms of culture fall apart. The “one” has been

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d­ econstructed away by modernity. In many non-Western societies, from Africa to China, harmony between the individual and the multiple remains important, and identity is achieved by considering oneself a part of a larger whole. “Indigenous norms below the Sahara are often captured by the maxim ‘A person is a person through other persons’ or sometimes ‘I am because we are’,” writes Thaddeus Metz (2017: 444). A “real person” is “often construed in terms of their capacity to relate to others in certain, social ways” (Metz: 2017b: 137). For the modern micro mind, all this is totalitarian. The modern micro mind insists on the freedom of the individual and desires more liberal social structures. To some extent, organic philosophy is responsible for these misunderstandings of its own nature. Organicism has often misrepresented itself. Some critics of modernity put forward the organic and they admire in organicism precisely its consistent striving for totality. Often, organicists value the organic as a romantic notion capable of establishing harmony between elements. So did the American conservative art critic John Canaday, who praised the nineteenth century French academic painter and representative of bourgeois realism ­William-Adolphe Bouguereau. Canaday found that Bouguerau’s works are “so completely, so absolutely, all of a piece. Not a single element is out of harmony with the whole; there is not a flaw in the totality of the union between conception and execution.”2 However, today, Bouguereau “is almost certainly the painter whose work is most often associated with the kitsch label” (Kralik 2017), which is no coincidence. Kitsch establishes a monolithic and totalitarian aesthetic unity of expression usually lacking sophistication and differentiation. Nuances are not allowed because they would fragment the unity. Kitsch aesthetics converts organicism into a simplistic and straightforward idea of totality. The reverse process, which plays out synthetic unity against analytic fragmentation and perceives anything that is “whole” as kitsch, does also exist. Musicologist Joseph Kerman has shown that in European musical theory, the organic played an important role from Bach to Wagner as critics often marveled “at the way works such as Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony seem to grow from a single theme as though from a Goethean Urpflanze” (Kerman: 316). Until the nineteenth century, synthesis was more important than analysis. This definitely came to an end around 1900 when tonality began to slip. “Unity” became a negative feature because unity is founded on harmony and tonality. In an article called “How We Got into Analysis, and How to Get out,” Kerman explains that with Schoenberg and atonal music, analysis moved to the foreground of 2 Quoted in Solomon 2004: 75. Solomon quotes from Canaday’s Mainstreams of Modern Art.

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musical production with the result that unity was totally lost. To be organic became an outdated and conservative feature. Somehow, it was kitsch. The matter can be clarified by referring once again to the distinction between the organism and the machine. In the machine, the macro represents a totalitarian structure, which is not the case in organisms. It is wrong to say that the body dictates the heart what to do. Nor does the heart dictate the body what to do, but the relationships between the individual and the general are far more complex. True, both organicism and totalitarianism look at the “total,” but they do so in different ways. To understand the difference between organicism and totalitarianism intuitively, one can compare the organic architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright with fascist architecture. Real organic thought circumvents the trap of totalitarianism. Totalitarianism and extremism are incompatible with the gist of organic thought because the former rely on centralized ideas, forces, and symbols, which is not the case for organicism. Contrary to common understanding, having a center is not a necessary condition for organic structures. The most important component of organic phenomena is not the center but the equilibrium. Organicism does not want to centralize but to balance. Only when organic constellations are conceptualized to extract terms like “God,” “essence” or “national style” from elements that do not necessarily contain such central notions do they become totalitarian, or what I have called “compulsively organic” in my book on organic cinema (Botz-Bornstein 2017: 51, 64–69). In this book I took the cue from Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, who explained that the “national aestheticism” of the Nazis – who saw the state as an organic machine – is due to a compulsive interlinking of national identity and an organic concept of culture (Lacoue-Labarthe 1987). Correspondingly, Charles Wolfe distinguishes between a foundational and a heuristic center and concludes that the former leads to “biochauvinism” related to vitalism: A question arising in reaction to this research is the extent to which philosophically it is committed to a non-naturalistic concept of organism as organizing centre, as a foundational rather than heuristic concept – or possibly a “biochauvinism,” to use Di Paolo’s term. He does not define it, but we can imagine that biochauvinism would be the present-day, naturalistic form of what was attacked by the Vienna Circle and others as vitalism. (Wolfe 2014b: 39) In aesthetics, kitsch represents a “compulsively organic” motion desperately looking for unity and often leaning towards naturalism. In science, philosophy, and religion, compulsive organicism is called dogmatism. Peter Park describes

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the development of this paradigm when analyzing the history of philosophical education: “A penchant for systematic unity leads the scientific dogmatist to find a single principle that can explain everything and unite all subordinate hypotheses. Such a system, being the product of one mind and not of the agreement of minds, is not susceptible to critique” (Park: 59, my italics). Again, we are presented with the Socratic obsession with universal truths that can only be formulated by individuals and not by groups. This time, this intellectual attitude leads to dogmatism; and since it is “one mind,” it can easily lead to totalitarianism. The compulsive search for unity bypasses the more hermeneutic project of harmonizing facts with cultural ideas of, for example, what is good, true, and beautiful in certain cultural contexts. Scientific dogmatism forces micro facts to fit into macro systems. Consequently, Claude Lefort speaks of the “totalitarian form,” which can appear organic because it “seems to institute itself without divisions, which seems to have mastery of its own organization, a society in which each part seems to be related to every other and imbued by one and the same project of building socialism” (Lefort 1986: 284). The most important word in Lefort’s quotation is “seems.” Real organicism offers the right mixture of the universal and the individual, of the formal and the “vitalist,” of rules and creativity. As mentioned in Chapter 2, in a modern context, the “center” can also be established as a neural center, which happens in neuroscience and cognitive science. The idea is that the brain controls the organism (see Wooldridge’s Mechanical Man, 1968). This view, which has influenced other sciences, is just as reductive. In opposition to this view, I hold that mental states are not produced by a center but are individuated by reference to items in the environment. The brain is not a dictator. In analytic philosophy, emergentism has produced a valid criticism of these mechanical models of cognition, and in continental philosophy such criticism goes back to Hegel, Goethe, and Dilthey. Hegel designed a particular metaphysical concept of becoming through which conflicting opposites are constantly dialectically integrated into ever newer unities. This integrative process applies to nature as much as to history. Through these processual developments, nature and history constantly differ from themselves. In analytic philosophy of mind, organic models of cognition are also called externalism or anti-individualism (see Burge 1979), which indicates that the center has been “externalized.” The center is now simply the life surrounding the individual. Externalism holds that philosophy should not merely describe the mechanisms of unfolding phenomena but explain their organic development. In philosophy of science, this anti-mechanistic presentation of nature is called processualism, process philosophy, or process ontology. Like

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e­ mergentism, process ontology combats reductionism, which is present, for example, in molecular biology. However, as mentioned earlier, science has mostly found the implementation of organic approaches difficult. It is much easier to establish a central position and to explain the entire system from this position. Wittgenstein writes in Lectures and Conversations that scientists “want merely to see what is and have nothing to do with what ought to be” (lc: 28). He shows that this necessarily leads to a mechanical vision of nature. The emerging organic order is not what ought to be but rather what could be. Does science want to depict the world as it could be (and eventually is) or does it merely want to draw a mechanically correct, artificial conception of the world? Philosophy and science must account for dynamic evolution and organic developments. Essences are not natural givens produced by a control-center but emerge over time within an environment. The tendency to interpret the organic as mechanistic is well established in European thought for another reason. It can be traced not only to Descartes, but also to French scientific cosmology from the first half of the nineteenth century. In France, philosophers eagerly worked on the empirical establishment of the perfect overlap of nature (with its individual manifestations) and God’s universal law, and they did so by using astronomy. During the eighteenthcentury Enlightenment, the idea of mathematical order was separated from life and ascribed to lifeless matter (see McDonough 2020). Pierre-Simon Laplace, in his Exposition du système du monde (1813), transformed the correspondence of the regularity of planets and political order into an allegory basing politics on nature, that is, on something organic (see Rancière 2002: 10). The theories of the socialist utopian Charles Fourier are another example of this mechanic form of organism. In his Théorie de l’unité universelle (1822–23), Fourier translated the laws of heavenly harmony into social order (see Rancière: 12). Fourier saw radical passions as a “libre essor” (which is a sort of mechanic élan vital) through which human civilization would necessarily become harmonized with nature. This harmony was supposed to be attained via an intrinsic striving for unity, or what Fourier also called unitéisme. Fifty years later, the revolutionary thinker Auguste Blanqui developed similar ideas. In his L’Eternité par les astres (1872), Blanqui presented a theory of eternal return based on astronomical speculations. In summary. one can say, with Richard McDonough, that “until the 18th century Enlightenment, some kind of organicism was the dominant philosophical view in the West, and that the mechanistic program (embodied in our own modern ‘cognitive science’) tracing to the 18th century Enlightenment is, in fact, the distinctly minority view in the Western tradition” (McDonough 2006: xxi). Apart from the fact that it is absurd to base politics or civilization on nature, these philosophers committed a further mistake when interpreting the

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­ niversal order of nature as a static fact and not as an emerging system. The u universal order is constantly challenged by individual interpretations. These philosophers were wanted to reinstate the harmony between microcosm (the human) and macrocosm (the universe) in a way similar to what Plato had expressed in the Timaeus. However, Plato’s unity of the cosmos cannot be achieved by following the rules of a program. McDonough rightfully points out that “the conceptual priorities in Plato’s organic cosmos are the reverse of those of the scientific cosmology that emerged in the 17th–18th centuries in Europe” (McDonough 2017: 77). According to today’s standards, Blanqui’s inductive method is weak but, surprisingly, this scientific cosmology did not give rise to mysticism and ­irrational speculations. In the history of philosophy, it is not linked to the Romantic quest for an immanent spirituality, which sees nature as the mirror of a ­human-centered cosmos. This tradition is rather German. Blanqui’s theories became important for the emergence of the very scientific doctrine of positivism. Positivist Auguste Comte strove to transform the power of scientific laws into spiritual powers able to guide society (Comte 1851–54). What all these cosmological theories as well as positivism have in common is that they are not dynamic but representative of mechanical, non-organic models of holistic phenomena. Laplace occupies a special position in this context. He established deterministic mco views not only in astronomy but, in parallel, also in biology. One year after his Exposition du système du monde Laplace published his Philosophical Essay on Probabilities (1814), which contained a chapter on probabilities in natural philosophies. “Laplacian” began to connote in science the fact that results are predetermined and predictable because natural phenomena follow machine-like, static rules. Laplace was an Enlightenment philosopher and his main purpose was to abandon imaginary causes such as magic and astrology and to explain the world through the “great laws of nature” (1814: 9). Discoveries in mechanics and geometry had enabled such inductions. The materialistic and mechanistic view of humans imagined by La Mettrie had prepared these operations. The similarities between Laplace and La Mettrie in the field of biology are reinforced by another parallelism. La Mettrie announced (already in a way reminiscent of Bergson) that a unity of judgement, reasoning, memory could be contained within a single concept of imagination (La Mettrie 1747 [1865]: 67). Very similarly (and much more famously), Laplace dreamt of an intelligence which could comprehend all the forces by which nature is animated and the respective situation of the beings who compose it (…), it would embrace in the same formula the movements of the greatest

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bodies of the universe and those of the lightest atom; for it, nothing would be uncertain and the future, as the past, would be present to its eyes. (Laplace 1814: 4/French: vi) This all-embracing spirit reflects much of the determinism we find today in modern genetics. Genetics has the ambition to reveal the secret of life in the form of a gene code penetrating a living matter. Consequently, twentieth century physicist Erwin Schrödinger traces this attitude to Laplace: In calling the structure of the chromosome fibers a code-script we mean that the all-penetrating mind, once conceived by Laplace, to which every causal connection lay immediately open, could tell from their structure whether the egg would develop, under suitable conditions, into a black cock or into a speckled hen, into a fly or a maize plant, a rhododendron, a beetle, a mouse or a woman. (Schrödinger 1956: 22) Schrödinger held that the gene is the cell’s brain because the gene is an architect’s plan and a builder’s craft in one. That said, Schrödinger always insisted that he does “not intend to explain life” (49) and that he was against the idea that the “hereditary crystal” could contain the “riddle of life.” This was rather suggested by Max Delbrück in an essay contained in an earlier edition of Schrödinger’s book. The essay (1937), entitled “Preliminary Exposition on the Topic ‘Riddle of Life’,” included a discussion about the nature of viruses. The deterministic scientific endeavors that were taking place in France in the first half of the nineteenth century (e.g. Laplace) provoked a variety of counter-reactions. Organicism and monism emerged in various places at precisely this period. Comparative philosophies combining Eastern and Western thought in at least some ways surfaced in Germany. In Eastern Europe and elsewhere, virulent cultural micro movements like Pan-Slavism and Slavophilism launched culturalist visions of philosophy. These counter-movements contradicted a well-established universal cultural and political order as well as a scientific order relying on dualism. 2

Organicism vs. Creationism

The above-described circular reasoning, which postulates that evolution is a problem-solving process, implies that the problem is known in advance though it can only be seen afterwards as a problem. This circularity leads to a paradox. Though post-Darwinian biology did everything to evacuate traces of a divine

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power from evolution and to attribute evolution entirely to natural selection, the most important question remained unanswered. Nature takes care of the problem’s solution but who decides what the “problem” is? If everything evolves towards an optimal solution, and evolution is solving problem after problem, the idea of a designer can perhaps not be avoided. Nicholson writes: “Though [evolved organisms are] products of natural selection rather than divine creation, they are still viewed as optimally designed machines” (2014b: 168). Natural selection itself becomes like a watchmaker. However, this clearly overestimates the capacities of selection, which advances more like a tinkerer. Adaptionism assumes that natural selection selects optimal parts to make the organism function. The problem is that first, as has been explained above, there are no functions, and second, that the traits of the parts develop independently of any design. The root of this misinterpretation is, of course, the mco and the refusal to acknowledge the intrinsic workings of the organic. In reality, science has no access to an absolute truth independent of evolutionary development. Spelling out such absolute truths is not the business of science. All that science can do is offer more or less likely hypotheses. To attribute Godlike qualities to natural selection misrepresents evolutionary development. The problem is as old as Western philosophy itself. Plato was already skeptical of the atheistic view “that the world order has arisen by chance and necessity from the blind working of lifeless powers in the bodily elements. That the world should have a body without a soul is as impossible as that it should have a soul without a body,” writes Cornford (1935: 59). According to Plato, the patterns of the organic world (created by a demiurge) could not be entirely random but should follow stable and eternal rules. Something must precede the manifestations that we see, and Plato calls this preceding order “the soul” (Laws x: 896a). Consequently, Cornford writes: “All motion must have its source in a self-moving thing, which is precisely the definition of soul” (Cornford 1935: 59). The false dichotomy permitting either a random micro order or a pre-­ determined macro order designed by natural selection has, of course, been picked up by various religious movements. If there is design (even if it is a ­design implemented by natural selection), somebody must have written the program. When the evolving structure is not an equilibrium or an absent center, but rather represents concrete, empirically established qualities, the initial natural structure is likely to adopt religious dimensions. If we are dissatisfied with random order, we search for a single principle invented by one mind. Why does nature have an internal order in which micro patterns are replicated on a macro level? If we don’t believe in organic development and emergence but in static facts held together by an abstract order (a program), we must assume

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that this universal order has been created by a designer with God-like powers. The problem is, once again, the mco conception: mco epistemologies lead to creationism. This is, of course, no surprise. Even Descartes thought of God when creating the bête-machine metaphor. In such religio-scientific contexts, emergentism and models of organically developing evolution are unacceptable. The world was created in six days, it did not emerge. God did not simply let the program run and watch how software and hardware evolve on their own. He must have had a plan to begin with, and even if we accept evolution, evolution must follow this divine plan. Evolution is not random. The universe remains a machine that God switched on once it was completed. Creationism is an example of extrinsic purposiveness. The machine is organized, assembled, and maintained by an external agent. Creationists find in the mco the rhetorical ammunition they need “to dress up their belief in a supernatural being with a guise of scientific respectability” (Nicholson 2013: 676). Michael Behe, a biochemist and author of numerous books defending Intelligent Design, claims that some biochemical structures are too complex to be explained by evolutionary mechanisms (see Nicholson 2013). Naturally, Behe refers to machines in his explanations, which have designers. He concludes that all living systems must have designers. The syllogism goes like this: Prem. 1: All living things are machines (false) Prem. 2: All machines have designers (true) Concl.: All living systems have designers (false) This is logically coherent, but the problem is the false first premise, which leads, when added to the second premise, to a false conclusion. Behe’s rhetoric replicates Descartes’ points made in the Discourse Part V where Descartes writes: “Yet I did not wish to infer from all this that our world was created in the way I suggested; for it is much more plausible that from the beginning God made it as it was to be” (Discourse: 45). There is one difference with Behe though. Descartes contends that one day, more research might reveal other causes: “But because I did not yet know enough to speak about it in the same way as I did about the rest, that is to say, by proving effects from causes, and showing from what facts [French: “semences” = seeds] and by what process [“de quelle façon”] nature must produce them, I contented myself with the supposition that God formed the body of a man” (45). Behe does not believe that one day more research might reveal other causes. This was also the opinion of some of Goethe’s misled followers, the German Naturphilosophen, who assumed that Goethe’s archetypes are patterns of divine design that existed

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since the day of creation. Schelling even advanced a metaphysical ordering of plants and animals (see Engelhardt: 312–13). The desire to attribute selection to God is due to a nostalgia for scientific determinism that began with Descartes and dominated the entire nineteenth century like a dogma. In the twentieth century, quantum mechanics and the work of Heisenberg disproved Laplacian determinism. Substance metaphysics, which relied on corpuscular ontology since Newton, was now reconceptualized via statistics and complex mathematical procedures. Quantum field theory introduced relativity by considering energy in terms of processes unfolding in time space. All this was very efficient. However, it did not eliminate determinism but rather shifted determinism to a subliminal level. Even Einstein kept an emotional attachment to determinism when uttering his famous phrase “God does not play dice.” Einstein believed that the chaos and randomness that science perceives is only the surface of what we see, and that deep underneath, there must be a well-determined reality known only to God. Stephen Hawking contested Einstein’s claim and maintained that God does play dice: “Even God is bound by the Uncertainty Principle, and cannot know both the position, and the speed, of a particle. So God does play dice with the universe. All the evidence points to him being an inveterate gambler, who throws the dice on every possible occasion” (Hawking 1999). God is a gambler and a tinkerer, and he is certainly not an engineer or a designer. And, for both the gambler and the tinkerer, coincidences and improvisation are more important than a plan. Hawking’s position comes closer to existentialist visions of humans thrown into a non-sensical situation with which they have to cope, one way or the other. The design is imperfect, or it might even be equipped with a built-in error or deficiency, which will lead the human race to extinction. This is how existentialist writer Arthur Koestler qualifies the human condition when noting in his book on organicism the “streak of insanity which runs through the history of our species, and which indicates that somewhere along the line of its ascent to prominence something has gone wrong” (Koestler: xi). This self-destructive predisposition has also been described as The Fall or as death instinct. ufo religions like the Raelians adhere to the “design by default” solution. Raelians are an interesting example as they refuse creationism but still put a strong emphasis on design. Raelians find Darwinian natural selection too random and are disturbed by the vision of chaos suggested by the idea that creation is just a myth. But they also reject the idea of God because it is supernatural and unacceptable in a modern age. When creation is unlikely but evolution too random, design becomes the only alternative (see Botz-Bornstein 2017b). Design is also nobler and more creative than François Jacob’s “tinkering.” Designers are not lost in details like the tinkerer but they always control the

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“whole picture.” The designer’s approach is also more “organic” than that of the engineer. In this sense, designers are naturally closer to creators. They are also freer than engineers because they are less bound by material conditions and can let their imagination flow. At the same time, they master and respect the totality of style. Their expressions are not entirely random since they cannot produce just anything they want. In French, prominent fashion designers are called “créateurs.” Creationism – and this concerns even the hybrid forms of creationism suggested by some New Age sects – is looking for the organic. However, since it cannot refer to processual and evolutionary models that perceive development in terms of emergence, it must revise the idea of design and combine it with supernatural powers.

Chapter 3

Philosophy and Culture 1

The Universal and the Local

It has been said in Chapter 1 that the micro is concrete and individual, and representative of culture. During the last two-hundred years of Western civilization, the micro has been neglected because the process of modernization is mainly a macro process. Culture is local, and society, behavior, or truth, must be evaluated independently of local culture if the evaluation is supposed to be rational. How does philosophy, which is – most of the time – a progressive movement striving to overcome traditions, handle culture? What is the relationship between philosophy and culture? This chapter tries to answer these questions. Modern architecture can decide to incorporate something earthly, regional and experiential in its expressions; philosophy will rarely be caught dealing with local truths. In architecture, form is allowed to follow climate; in philosophy, reason is supposed to follow not climate but the strict rules provided by reason. Philosophy must be neutral, and “disinterestedness” is one of philosophy’s most typical obsessions. Huntington Cairns writes that the suspicion of “disinterestedness” is as old as philosophy itself: “Philosophy is disinterested or it is not philosophy. When ideas are manipulated for personal ends, for class or group interests, the name for this in Plato’s day was sophistry. It was against this that his dialogues were directed” (Cairns 1961: 16). To an important extent this means that philosophy must be culturally disinterested. Local cultures or communities are suspected of corrupting truth. According to Robert Bernasconi, “philosophers tend to associate the reference of philosophy to culture with the specter of relativism” (Bernasconi 2002: 567). Of relativism or of something worse… Personal interest, group interest, and corruption are the more despicable options. However, philosophy has not always been value-free or been regarded as value-free. Far from it. Values like the good and the beautiful have always existed in philosophy and in the humanities, and, once they were negotiated within philosophical traditions, they were accepted. That’s the difference between philosophy and science. In philosophy, the support of values is supposed to be rationally or scientifically grounded and not guided by personal interests or group interests. This requirement makes the above culture q­ uestion

© Thorsten Botz-Bornstein, ���1 | doi:10.1163/9789004440425_005

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tricky. When I support a philosophical argument because the conclusion follows from premises grounded in my culture, am I guided by group interests? Presumably not, but this is admittedly a thin line to walk, which is why in the history of philosophy, many philosophers decided to stay away from culture altogether. In modern times and in more political contexts, we call the program of disinterestedness “ideological neutrality” or sometimes also “political correctness.” Value neutrality is important for any science striving to spell out universal truths. This concerns the human sciences which are increasingly imitating the methods of the natural sciences. Ideological neutrality is often seen as an absolute requirement because without it, universalist ambitions lose their credibility. The loser will always be culture. Wallerstein writes that it became necessary to present universalism “as ideologically neutral and as unconcerned with ‘culture’” (Wallerstein: 77). Ironically, this universalism would later become instrumental for the legitimization of the distribution of power, which is, most of the time, a matter of group interest. After World War ii, the humanities began to more and more consistently follow the methods of the natural sciences. The most striking change of paradigms was the insistence on quantification. As a result, the good and the beautiful no longer had a place in the human sciences; the good and the beautiful will now rather be quantitatively determined using hard science approaches. This phenomenon, which characterizes the human sciences in the twenty-first century, is not merely a modern invention but is grounded in the philosophy of universalism that came to the West from ancient Greece. Jean-Michel Muglioni writes about Socratic philosophical culture, which already Aristophanes liked to criticize: “In ethics, law and politics there is something – like in ­mathematics – that is not related to culture. Man is able to think universally and, as a consequence, his social link does not need to be conceived as a contingent consensus based on the fact that some humans happen to have the same education, the same interests or the same level of poverty” (Muglioni: 440). Muglioni talks about ethics and politics, but similar patterns occur in aesthetics. In the Enlightenment, the need for cultural disinterestedness became even more unconditional. In an influential eight-volume manual of the history of philosophy called Lehrbuch der Geschichte der Philosophie und einer kritischen Literatur derselben,1 the radical Kantian Johann Gottlieb Buhle (1763–1821) from the German University of Göttingen presented his view of philosophy as 1 Manual of the History of Philosophy and its Critical Literature, 1796–1804, further referred to as Manual.

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a discipline that must be radically separated from culture. Peter Park has drawn attention to this author who also wrote a six-volume historical work called Geschichte der neueren Philosophie seit der Epoche der Wiederherstellung der Wissenschaften,2 which was translated into Italian and French. In the Manual, Buhle criticizes that “previous historians ‘did not correctly, precisely, and distinctly establish (…) the concept of philosophy and (…) the purpose of the history of philosophy, and mistook its true domain’, [which] is why the discipline, in its current state, is more ‘literary’ or ‘cultural history’ than history of philosophy” (Park: 17). The idea of culture as a force undermining the scientific nature of philosophical examinations persists in modern times. It persists despite the shift towards micro philosophy that took place in much of Continental philosophy in the late twentieth century. In general, a reconciliation of rational thinking with regional traditions appears like the squaring of a circle. Randall Collins writes in his The Sociology of Philosophies: Intellectuals are people who produce decontextualized ideas. These ideas are meant to be true or significant apart from any locality, and apart from anyone concretely putting them into practice. A mathematical formula claims to be true in and of itself, whether or not it is useful, and apart from who believes in it. (…) Philosophy has the particularity of periodically shifting its own grounds, but always in the direction of claiming or at least seeking the standpoint of greatest generality and importance. (Collins 2009: 19) Because of its intrinsic desire to decontextualize, philosophy has developed a strong mistrust towards the local. As mentioned in Chapter 1, while local literature can be charming, “local philosophy” remains a dubious term, similar to “local science,” and this constellation has never really evolved. Any reference to the ethnic or cultural aspect of philosophy is still as challenging as it used to be in the 1800s: it requires a reconciliation of the Enlightenment with regional traditions, which is a quasi-impossibility. This concerns even more the localities that are far away from our own (Western) culture. Local philosophy will perhaps not be categorically dismissed as bad philosophy (most of the time simply because one does not have enough knowledge about it). But it remains almost unthinkable to use Chinese, Japanese, or Indian concepts in a mainstream philosophical article. The Japanese Kyoto School exists since the 1920s and has created interesting concepts, many of which were even formulated in proximity with Western categories of thinking. In spite of this, the Kyoto School 2 History of More Recent Philosophy since the Reestablishment of Sciences, 1800–1804.

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has not had much influence in the international philosophical world. Despite its impressive international distribution among specialists, it remains local. Similarly, Saranindranath Tagore points to the Indian notion of atman, which is, according to him, “replete with phenomenological resonance that could have been sufficiently interesting to the pioneers of phenomenology” (S. Tagore 2017: 532). It has not been used by Western phenomenologists. The decontextualizing, anti-local tendency is less pronounced in other human and social sciences. East-Asian sociologists have considered indigenous concepts such as bào (Chin. reciprocity), biàn (Chin. change), guānxì (Chin. interrelation), kèqì (Chin. politeness), miànzi (Chin. face), amae (Jap. message expanding and message accepting needs), enryo-sasshi (Jap. restraint-guessing), en (Jap. predestined relation), omoiyari (Jap. altruistic sensitivity) (see Alatas 2010: 244). These scholars do not practice anthropology but deal with local concepts in sociology on an international level. Though the Japanese amae or omoiyari could have a considerable analytic potential in (Western) ethics or philosophical analysis of otherness, such concepts enter the international philosophical discourse only very reluctantly or not at all. There are reasons to consider local components in philosophy and the social sciences, and four arguments support the re-contextualizing ethno-practices: (1) Certain local realities are so different that they require equally local methods and theories. (2) To consider local knowledge traditions and cultural practices as potential sources of philosophical concepts decreases academic dependence on the “world powers” of thinking and offers more intellectual and academic freedom. (3) Once local methods and concepts have been developed, they can be introduced into mainstream sciences and enrich mainstream philosophy and widen its discursive boundaries. (4) In the best case they can help to shed a new light on mainstream concepts. Comparative philosophy has always attempted to do this. John Maraldo (2013), for example, uses Japanese philosophical sources as a lens to bring into sharper focus the qualities and biases of Greek-derived Western philosophy. 2

Philosophy in a Decultured World

Does philosophy really need to be universal in the sense of being disconnected from concrete cultures? Or is philosophy even cultureless by nature? If yes, what discourse can it produce in a world that is increasingly dominated by

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culturally neutral forces? Since the end of World War ii, the civilizations of industrialized nations underwent a development of deculturation, which is mainly due to globalization and the corporatization of institutions. The most obvious example of such a process of deculturation took place in education. Bill Readings explains in his book The University in Ruins (1996) that today any appeal to virtues and values anchored in local cultures has become difficult. In a globalized environment, universities cease offering qualitative contents referring to culturally specific things or ideas but prefer to function via a contentless idea of “excellence.” Readings shows that the deculturation of the university began in America because American society is a contractual community. In the USA, “American culture” could not be seen as an end of education because here “the idea of the nation is always already an abstraction [and] excellence can thus most easily gain ground” (Readings: 33). Knowledge needed to be disconnected from culture. Readings’ observations bear parallels with developments in various other domains, for example in religion. French scholar of Islam, Olivier Roy, analyzes in his book Holy Ignorance (2013) the relationships between fundamentalist religions and traditional cultures and finds that the separation of religion from culture – brought about by secularization – isolates religion from culture. In the last twenty years, religion has been ­ submitted to an anti-cultural campaign of purification: “Secularization and globalization have forced religions to break away from culture, to think of themselves as autonomous and to reconstruct themselves in a space that is no longer territorial” (Roy: 2). It is true that all so-called World Religions claim universal truth and separated their truths many centuries ago from the cultures in which they originated. However, in spite of this universality claim, most religions remained linked to cultures and were normally practiced in proximity with corresponding cultures. Fundamentalism cut this culture link and defined religion in terms of pure truths entirely independent of specific cultural contexts. This pattern of deculturation is reinforced in globalized corporate economies by the application of increasingly impersonal mechanisms of evaluation and standardization. In a globalized world, vast areas of society are deterritorialized to the point that they can conceive of themselves as independent from local political and cultural constraints. It has become easier than ever to believe in pure truths unmediated and unfiltered by cultural components. Not only religion but also management (even the management of education) is dominated by decultured monitoring, measuring, and quantifying methods. These methods are believed to be scientific though often they are often only pseudo-scientific. Just like religion and education, the corporate world of the twenty-first century is penetrated by a naïve objectivism that has discarded all

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cultural references. The belief that truth must be abstract and decultured fuels projects aiming at the total mathematization of human behaviors: the algorithm is the most obvious example of this. An algorithm recommends items for sale not on the grounds of my cultural (religious, ethnic, class, gender) identity but because of my preceding choices. These choices have been scientifically quantified in the most “culturally neutral” fashion. The knowledge gained from these calculations is considered superior because it is not contaminated by relativist cultural values.3 It is easy to attach the phenomenon of the algorithm to the above discussion of organicism in science. Algorithms are extrinsically purposive because our personal choices are determined by a certain external purpose (that is, by my profile). However, one could imagine a much better option: my profile could develop organically, as it would, following Nicolson’s principle of organicism: “Parts only acquire their respective identities qua parts as the whole progressively develops” (2014b: 163). In algorithm culture, “the whole” is mathematically established and thus rigid. The fact that the whole profile is based on my individual choices does not make the process organic. I do not see the whole, I do not develop my identity with regard to a whole but am only given preselected choices (based on my own choices) by a system. This system is “the whole.” In the end, am drowned in micro elements while a mysterious macro force (the whole) is doing the selection for me. This is not an organic process; on the contrary, algorithm culture is one of the most obvious examples of mco organization. There is another problem. The absolutization and deculturation of knowledge can easily lead to its trivialization. Christopher Lasch has traced such a line of trivialization in the works of psychologists. While Freud tried to answer “big questions” that were often already discussed in ancient myths, later psychology moved “into the measurement of trivia” (Lasch: xiv). Knowledge about the human psyche will be split into small bits of information. Philosophy underwent a similar development. The result is the loss of culture. David McNaughton, in an article called “Why Is So Much Philosophy So Tedious,” criticizes that, though “philosophy can and should deal with important issues” (McNaughton: 5), “much philosophy appears to engage with trivial problems” (6). Narrow specialization is one of the causes of such sterility. Much philosophy is indeed a “pyrotechnic display of ingenious argumentation” (McNaughton). It is all form and no content. As they are working within their specialized field, the philosopher recognizes their own preferences and their own jargon. The pattern of reinstating one’s own convictions is perfectly paralleled by the 3 See Botz-Bornstein 2019 on these questions of deculturation.

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above-described algorithm culture propagated by neoliberal economies. The narcissistic reiteration of one’s own preferences and one’s own jargon is intensified by the fact that it has become more and more time consuming to keep up with one’s own micro field’s current literature. Approaching completely different topics or traditions has become increasingly difficult. The pressure to publish quickly makes philosophical adventures or appreciations of the “bigger picture” quasi impossible. Finally, it prevents the philosopher from seeing cultural connections with their own milieu, for example by looking for journals to which the author feels culturally linked. Georgette Wang writes: “Government policies pushing for publications in top-tier international journals are a major factor in alienating researchers from their own social cultural milieu” (2011a: 70). Add to this the fact that philosophical training has more and more become a preparation for doing philosophy and nothing else. According to McNaughton, philosophy departments produce “work that is indeed competent, professional, subtle, and technically clever, but which adds little, if anything, to the sum total of human knowledge worth having. How does the structure of the profession have this effect? Philosophy is now a vast industry” (5). In the end, the philosopher is enclosed in precisely those narcissistic behavior patterns that Lasch analyzed in the late 1970s when describing the misfits of an emerging neoliberal world distinguished by the inherent narcissism of a new manager culture. Nothing could be further removed from the old concept of “philosophy as a way of living” as it was once propounded by the ancient Greeks, and which was highlighted for the last time by the French specialist of Neoplatonism Pierre Hadot (1995). Some academics manage to survive by retreating into a niche and trying to ignore the neoliberal landscape around them. However, by and large, philosophy could not avoid being submitted to the standards of neoliberal excellence. Narcissists like competition. Since every narcissist wants to be the best, scorekeeping becomes the central occupation of administrators. Most universities are firmly plugged into the quantification culture of excellence, which is neoliberal economies’ grand specialty. But indexation only means that the mainstream (the macro) gets broader and broader, finally leading to the neglect of two micro components: (1) local environments and (2) new perspectives. By now, philosophy has been entirely integrated into this global administrative current. “Policies in many Asian nations push for research output that is geared to the interest of Social Sciences Citation Index (ssci) journals rather than that of the local academic community, or the community outside the ssci reign,” writes Wang (2011b: 256). How much cultural influence is possible and permitted in a philosophy working within a globalized world where even religion and education manage

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to define themselves as deterritorialized social activities, independent from local cultural constraints? Since the end of World War i, societies underwent a process of scientification in practically all domains, and the scientification of academic philosophy advanced in parallel. Analytic philosophy is the most obvious result of this development. A large part of philosophy’s deculturation can be attributed to the big pushes towards professionalization that occurred in American Ivy League universities in the 1920s and 1930s (see Kuklick 1977: 452–53, 480). In reality, it began much earlier. Already Nietzsche had accused academic philosophy of being submerged in philological technicalities, which he summarized under the term “antiquarianism.” As a result, Nietzsche’s contemporaries classified his works as non-scientific and accused him of obtaining his wisdom “mainly through intuition” (Wilamowitz-Moellendorf 1969: 129). Philosophy is concerned by the push towards deculturation for another reason. More than any other humanist discipline, philosophy is very abstract to begin with. Other human sciences do at least provide information about something, but what does philosophy provides information about? Philosophy could very often appear as a discipline that “merely” analyzes and remains detached from concrete cultural realities or sometimes even from any sort of reality. The analyzed phenomena often only concern philosophy itself. The danger of deculturation is thus more flagrant in philosophy than in any other human science. Another intriguing fact is that the deculturation pattern does not contradict the spirit of the Enlightenment but goes hand in hand with it. The Enlightenment is universalist because its basis is rationalism, and the principles of reason are universal. They should not be corrupted by particular contingencies, such as cultural affinities. Western philosophy is firmly committed to this Enlightenment tradition. According to Richard Rorty, philosophy became what it is “by successively distinguishing itself, self-consciously and insistently, from theology, natural science, and literature” (Rorty 1989: 333). This had immense advantages, but what got lost through the distanciation from theology and literature was philosophy’s existential orientation as a way of being. Once philosophy was cut off from culture, truth could be defined in purely abstract and universal terms. In modern civilization, deculturation is preprogrammed, and globalization accelerates this process. Culture is territorial whereas globalization is not a cultural movement but based on the ambition to establish large-scale abstract structures. That’s why the results of globalization can often appear as “nonculture.” The products of McDonald’s or “fast food culture” are prominent examples of such a non-culture. It is true that, as mentioned in Chapter 1, cultural revivals or subcultures have been celebrated on a regular basis ever since, but

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they could never revert the civilizational process of universalization but only punctually contradict it. Protest movements usually attempt to shift civilization from macro to micro, but they do not try to create an organic micro–­macro process able to integrate both (local) culture and (global) civilization. At its very beginning, Western philosophy had a variety of other options. We encounter a more appropriate understanding of the organic not only in Plato’s Timaeus but also in the Greek world in general, most strongly pushed by the Stoics. According to Muglioni, ancient cosmopolitanism is grounded on an implicit micro–macro thinking: “the universality as it was understood by ancient cosmopolitism relates to the distinction between man and citizen, which means, for example, that a man can win against a legal or political system. One single mind is able to judge a whole country in the name of a universal demand. This is the reason why the universal is never a fact” (Muglioni: 440). This cosmopolitanism comes amazingly close to the one that Goethe had in mind when speculating, not about global politics, but about global culture or “world culture.” More precisely, he speculated about world literature (Weltliteratur): “Goethe hoped that the age of world literature would be an era of international exchange and mutual refinement,” writes David Damrosch. Goethe lived two thousand years after the ancient Greeks, and he formulated the concept of world literature in response to the rise of national literatures on the one hand, and the French way of unifying civilization on the other. For Goethe, an international elite should “champion lasting literary values against the vanities of narrow nationalism and the vagaries of popular taste” (Damrosch: 1). Furthermore, it is significant that the idea of world literature was launched by Goethe, who was an early champion of organic thinking in the natural sciences. In modern times, this idea of cosmopolitanism has lost its organic meaning and has become mechanico-universalist. Seeing the universal (the universe) as a fact – a mistake that the Stoics managed to avoid – was precisely the mistake committed by French cosmologists like Laplace and others (see Chapter 3). These French philosophers were the contemporaries of Goethe (Laplace is born in the same year as Goethe), but their ideas of the universal (the universe) were very different. Cosmopolitans like Goethe and the Stoics see the universal as constantly challenged by individual interpretations; it should not be established in a mechanistic fashion but be seen as a process as it emerges and evolves organically. The universal, as Muglioni insists, is not a fact. In general, the Western mind decided to stick with the universalism of Laplace, Fourier, and Blanqui, and neglected organic components. In political thought, the result is a mechanic form of cosmopolitanism: a universalist variety of cosmopolitanism that completely discards the local.

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Philosophy and Non-philosophy

Should philosophy be pure or should it also include its “cultural other,” what Bruce Janz would call its own “non-philosophy”? Some believe that philosophy has never been pure. Derrida states that philosophy “has always been bastard, hybrid, grafted, multilinear and polyglot” (Derrida 1996). He might be right, but this does not mean that philosophy has always been cultural in the sense of happily embracing its non-philosophical cultural other. Janz discusses the idea of “non-philosophy,” which he takes from the Nigerian philosopher Theophilus Okere, who believed that any philosophy remains indebted to the cultural background against which it has been developed. Heidegger has a Christian “non-philosophical” grounding and even Plato is dependent on Greek religious thought. In On our Way to Language, Heidegger himself judged that his early theological origins prepared him for the philosophy that he was going to produce later (see Heidegger 1959: 91). “In each case, something must precede philosophy to provide the basis for universal reasoning,” writes Janz (2010: 15). Similarly, McNaughton believes that the best philosophy (especially ethics and philosophy of religion) is “enriched by a wide, reflective, and imaginative experience of literature, politics, art, and science” (7). Of course, as writes Bernasconi, “once it is recognized that all philosophies draw on pre-philosophical experience, the old dream of a scientific philosophy is ausgeträumt, it is exhausted” (Bernasconi 1997: 191). Some sociologists have attempted to present philosophy in a decidedly cultural light, for example, by viewing it through the prism of cultural diversity. Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of the “philosophical field” (Bourdieu 1991), which represents an ethnographic environment by which philosophical texts are surrounded, is such an attempt. Randall Collins’ above-mentioned The Sociology of Philosophies, which links philosophical ideas to social locations, follows a similar aim. However, neither Bourdieu’s The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger nor Collins’ monumental (over one thousand pages long) book has had much impact on philosophers’ thinking agendas. One reason is that seeing philosophy in terms of external social and cultural contexts smacks of determinism. Philosophy also actively determines society and culture, and philosophers do not like to be locked into a conceptual determinism. That said, neither Bourdieu nor Collins are determinists. About what does philosophy philosophize? If it philosophizes about subjects that are of interest only to itself, it is no wonder that it becomes all form and no content. Does it philosophize about its cultural other? Okere (1983) holds that philosophy always needs “non-philosophical” material because it does not have its own material to philosophize about. This non-philosophy can

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be culture or religion, but also science. “What would it mean to rethink the collective nature of African society, sometimes understood as Ubuntu?”4 asks Janz. He points out that “that too might be seen as non-philosophy, at least in the sense that it is rooted in cultural experience and praxis before it is theorized” (Janz: 12). Of course, “raw cultural material” needs to be theorized and philosophically formatted. Culture is non-philosophical because it contains irrational, unreflective, and contingent elements. The problem with ethnophilosophy was that the formatting or the philosophical process of universalization did not go far enough. Even if we agree that philosophy needs culture, this does not mean that culture and philosophy are the same thing. Okere concludes that Tempels, as well as Kagame and Mbiti “were unable to start the philosophical task because they were confusing culture with philosophy” (Janz: 16). Everything is a matter of balance. If the ethno remains merely ethno, it will not be philosophy. After all, philosophy is universalizing: it “has the impulse to master its places, to subject them to its rational gaze and render their subtleties intelligible” (11). When the universalizing process goes too far, philosophy neutralizes the cultural spaces from which it emerged. In the worst case, the non-philosophical parts will be neutralized through quantification and trivialization. Then those bits of extra-philosophical discourse will be broken down “into logical atoms and reconstructed in some technically acceptable form” (McNaughton: 8). Concrete experiences will be reduced to abstract formulas and algorithms. 4

Civilization and Culture

The discussion of philosophy’s cultural contexts requires a clarification of the distinction between civilization and culture. This distinction is complex. It crystallizes most clearly in the German language where the former always tended to refer to material, technical, economic, and social facts while the latter referred to spiritual, intellectual, and artistic phenomena. The German usage of Zivilisation alludes to a utilitarian, outer aspect of human existence, which remains subordinated to Kultur. Kultur represents a conceptualization of spiritual, intellectual and artistic phenomena. It stands for individual or collective human expression instead of abstract systems. Correspondingly, the German intellectual tradition perceives culture as the “real” essence of humans, society, and their achievements, whereas civilization could easily be seen as the external appearance of cultural productions. As mentioned earlier, 4 Ubuntu means humanness in the Nguni languages of southern Africa.

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Herder’s cultural nationalism grew in opposition to (mainly French) cosmopolitanism and the push towards cultural assimilation. Herder expressed his political views in the context of German regionalism (Kleinstaaterei) contrasted against French civilization, which dominated the lifestyle of the German aristocracy. The French “civilisation” was the culture of universalism that the German educated class was required to adopt. Herder’s insistence on a more ethnic Kultur connotes a condemnation of conquest and imperialism. Therefore it is not incompatible with cosmopolitanism. The latter point emerges from Kant’s reflections on cosmopolitanism. Kant acted within the same regionalist German political environment as Herder and his considerations of the culture-civilization problem manifest similarities with Herder’s. In his “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View,” Kant reduces civilization rather disparagingly to “social grace and decorum” or to a “simulacrum of morality” (“das Sittenähnliche”). Morality should have a cultural content in order to be philosophically valuable. More on Kant’s and Herder’s ideas on civilization will follow below in this section. It is also important to note that Goethe, who was, like Herder, a member of the Weimar Classicism, and reacted to the same political conditions by suggesting a new cosmopolitanism symbolized by the idea of World Literature. The distinction between culture and civilization caught on in Germany and France but much less in England. The French began, under German influence, using the word culture as a synonym for everything that can be acquired through education, especially manners and arts whereas civilisation would be used in a more general and supra-national sense. The Germans were more radical. They narrowed down the term Kultur until it denoted very personal and individual expressions linked to art and philosophy. This distinction between culture and civilization continues to make sense until today and in philosophical writings – not only German ones – it is used correspondingly.5 Terry Eagleton, for example, takes the old distinction for granted when writing about the global situation: “The line runs between civilization (in the sense of universality, autonomy, individuality, rational speculation, etc.) and culture if we understand by this all unreflected loyalties and spontaneous convictions” (Eagleton 2008: 46). Most English-speaking thinkers decided to remain on the side of civilization. Anthropologist Edward B. Tylor explains in his book, tellingly called Primitive Culture (1871, later changed to The Origins of Culture), how culture as a 5 For more on the difference between culture and civilization see Botz-Bornstein 2012.

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“primitive” phenomenon, can be overcome through civilization. For Tylor, ­civilization represents the more advanced stage of humanity. These late Enlightenment impulses emphasizing universalization have influenced the ­culture-civilization distinction ever since. In the end, it became mainstream on a global scale. Civilization progresses whereas culture does not. The idea of a progressing culture is obviously nonsensical. It is nonsensical to say that Haydn’s music is “better” than Bach’s. Haydn is not more creative, more sensitive or more profound. Culture “stands still” and simply asks to be contemplated. It changes but it does not want to be evaluated within a universal grid of progressive evolution. Another way to express this is to say that culture is more organic than civilization, which is precisely why it is possible to admire “less evolved” art in its own right. The organic is self-sufficient and does not depend on progressive structures (civilization). Ernst Gombrich (1971) has demonstrated the impossibility of tracing the evolution of art in the form of an ascending movement starting with schematic primitivism typical of non-Western cultures and ending with high culture. Sometimes the concept of progress has been applied to art, for example in the Renaissance. However, in this case the purpose was to interpret earlier art from a limited perspective as a precursor of the present in order to overrate one’s own achievements. Elsewhere (1975: 12) Gombrich proposes the scholastic dictum individuum est ineffabile, which means that the individual cannot be captured by universal concepts. Progress is a universal norm disregarding individual achievements. Because of its stable nature, culture can provide identities. Slavophiles in the nineteenth century used the German word Kultur to describe ethnic identity. Petr Struve, a Russian economist with Slavophil tendencies, writes that Kultur is “the conscious creation of an environment assuring the individual’s and the society’s unrestrained search for identity” (quoted in Pipes 1970: 19). The refusal to consider philosophy’s cultural conditions is rooted in the persistent belief that philosophy is an activity constantly transcending the regional. This belief is supported by one of the most basic paradigms of Western civilization: the striving for universality. The latter is not merely an Enlightenment premise but has deeper roots. Anthropology from Montaigne to Levi-Strauss has shown that our thinking, once it is conceived from the point of view of the “other,” is local and contingent. Both I and the other have cultures and all cultures are “right” in their own way. Civilization attempts to overcome this contingency. Lévi-Strauss (1967 [1949]) identifies civilization with modern societies, distinguished by tensions and social conflicts, which he contrasts with cultures in the sense of “primitive” societies, which, from a modern point of view, are “settled” as they lack both history and progress. This distinction

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b­ etween culture and civilization became important for most postwar French anthropologists. Civilization overcomes ethnic culture. Most generally speaking, humanity’s civilizing mission has brought about the destruction of local and ethnically related empires. This is also obvious in the realm of thought where individual beliefs tended to be replaced with moral principles of universal application; and those who did not follow the call remained “uncivilized,” that is, communitarian. At some point, African culture could be declared “communitarian by nature” (see Masolo 2001: 212). Culture is standing still whereas civilization is constantly in movement, bringing together different cultural groups. Conflicts arise from these encounters, and these conflicts can only be resolved by introducing more civilization. In this sense, civilization is unifying. Civilization does not split up ethic groups but brings together disparate peoples eventually enabling the creation of a new universal human community housed under the umbrella of a world civilization. The most recent achievements resulting from this civilizing process are the creation of the United Nations and the European Community. However, it has already been explained above that unification through universalization is often counterproductive. The single parts remain separate and split up even more in order to contradict universalization and globalization. Though universalism and civilization believe to unify, in reality they create ethnic patches all over the world. These political structures owe more to Laplace’s universalism than to the cosmopolitanism of the Stoics and Goethe. Cultures do not follow the Laplacian approach towards unification, but they naturally follow a cosmopolitan one. First of all, cultures are self-sufficient and, most of the time, they do not move unless they are “dynamized” through progressive civilizational influence. Cultures moving around and invading other cultures do exist; but such a behavior is not typical for cultures. Most of the time, in culture wars, there is a civilizational (political) agenda behind those cultural invasions. It is therefore wrong to say that civilization unifies and that culture splits up. Universalization does not lead to organic unity but to a formal unity. The single parts might become dependent on each other, but they remain otherwise separate. This very often produces a counter-reaction to the universal. The single parts split up to contradict universalization and globalization and start competing with each other. Cosmopolitan (cultural) unification follows a completely different scheme. Culture does not unite through invasions (military, political, psychological), but it unites because the other is understood on a cultural basis. Existing cultural identities can be maintained, but similarities with other cultures are recognized, too. This is the organic version of cosmopolitanism. Culture and the emphasis on cultural particularities

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alone do not lead to nationalism. Nationalism emerges rather when single cultures are submitted to globalization and universalization. My hypothesis is supported by Norbert Elias who finds that civilization, as opposed to culture, has always had an “expansive” character. Civilization always embraces a forward moving process. It generalizes and plays down cultural differences, which is one of the reasons why this concept has been so successful since the Enlightenment (Elias 1978: 5). Civilization is abstract while culture is concrete. Culture has an increasing intension because it depends on the concrete sense or on the concrete connotations of phenomena. Civilization works towards an increasing extension, referring to and denoting more and more things. Cultures are particularistic and “slow” as they do not erase but establish differences between more or less stagnant phenomena. Culture delimits and exists only through this delimitation. Being the expression of a people’s or a nation’s individual characteristics, the term culture is conceptually powerful only as long as it excludes most phenomena from itself. Though cultures evolve and create hybrids, any extremely liberal and “open” idea of culture is useless unless “acculturation” is supposed to mean colonization, that is, the imposition of one culture upon others. Again, this is most likely to happen in cooperation with some “civilizing” process. And even when such an “opening” takes place, the culture will not be open in qualitative terms but only “open” in terms of quantity. All these are reasons why the definition of culture became increasingly narrow throughout history. Very often in history, civilizational progress would herald the death of national cultures. In the past, their disappearance would be enthusiastically celebrated, for example in an English parliamentary paper from 1847 where the writer exults: “Let the Welsh language die fairly, peacefully and reputably. Attached to it as it were, few would wish to postpone its euthanasia” (quoted in Hobsbawm 1990: 36). Hobsbawm also quotes the Czech born Austrian philosopher Karl Kautsky who was convinced that “national languages will be increasingly confined to domestic use, and even there they will tend to be treated like an old piece of inherited family furniture, something that we treat with veneration even though it has not much practical use” (ibid.). True, cultural revival movements were launched about the same time and have been launched ever since. Pan-Slavism is such an example, and many similar contemporary movements could be quoted. However, these cultural revival movements are not part of the powerful progressive movement of civilization, they are not produced by civilization but merely go against it in a punctual fashion. Does philosophy want to adhere unconditionally to the progressive paradigm of the Enlightenment or should it rather inhabit a position beyond the above-described civilizing process? Against all odds, the “philosophy against

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civilization” paradigm has been inaugurated by none other than Kant. Kant turns out to be closer to Herder than is generally assumed as emerges from his essay on cosmopolitanism entitled Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View (1784). The book was published three years after The ­Critique of Pure Reason, which brought Kant considerable fame, but still four years before his book on morals (Critique of Practical Reason). Kant suggests that ethics be determined almost in parallel with art because the standards of ethics – like those of art – make sense only within concrete cultures. Therefore he suggests excluding morality from the general civilizational flow: We are civilized – perhaps too much for our own good – in all sorts of social grace and decorum [bis zum Überlästigen zu allerlei gesellschaftlicher Artigkeit und Anständigkeit]. But to consider ourselves as having reached morality – for that, much is lacking. The ideal of morality belongs to culture; its use for some simulacrum of morality [das Sittenähnliche] in the love of honor and outward decorum [in der Ehrliebe und der äußeren Anständigkeit ] constitutes mere civilization [and] is restrained to its influence on manners, as seen in the principle of honor, in respectability of deportment. (Kant 1784: 391/Engl.: 7, trans. modified) Kant is – together with Herder – the first ethnophilosopher because he goes against an ingrained tendency of philosophy’s cultural neutrality. This is surprising because Kant’s version of cosmopolitanism is often described as the prototype of universalism. However, here, in his most famous writing on the topic, Kant contrasts “fast” civilization with “slow” culture when suggesting that “states waste their forces in vain on violent self-expansion, and thereby constantly thwart the slow efforts to improve the inner culture of the way of thinking [innere Bildung der Denkungsart] of their citizens.” Therefore “nothing in the way of a moral order is to be expected” (391, trans. modified). Kant’s essay appeared in the same year as Herder’s book Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man). The German title of Kant’s essay is “Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in Weltbürgerlicher Absicht.” The titles are similar and so are the ideas of these two most famous philosophers hailing from the historic Prussia region. Kant, who is twenty years Herder’s senior, supports a concept of morality (which is, after all, what any philosophical ethics should attempt to establish) anchored in concrete cultures, and this constitutes a parallel with Herder. According to Kant, “the people” make not only history and politics but also morality. Of course, Herder is more radically relativistic when describing, in another

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text that had appeared ten years earlier, civilizations as manifestations of “frigidity and elegance” to which he opposes the real virtues of culture: What has become of those virtues and dispositions to honor and freedom, love and courage, courtesy and word of honor? We have become shallow and barren and are building on sand! However, this may be, give us your piety and superstition, your darkness and your ignorance, your turmoil and crudeness and, in exchange, take out “light” and skepticism, our frigidity and elegance, our philosophical enervation and our human misery. (Herder 1913: 527–28) For both Herder (who attacks in the above writing progressive concepts of history) and Kant, morality is not achieved through civilizational expansion, but must to grow slowly and on a cultural ground. Kant is also one of the few philosophers since Plato to emphasize the intricate relation between parts and the whole. In his Critique of Judgment (1790 [1951]) Kant describes living beings as self-organizing systems because their parts reciprocally produce one another in accordance with the organization of the whole. This is Kant’s organicism. Kant criticizes the metaphysical idea of external purposiveness, current in the eighteenth century, which holds that everything exists to serve a purpose. In §65 of the Critique of Judgment, while defining natural purposes, Kant shifts from the vocabulary of means and ends to that of wholes and parts. Wholes and parts are interdependent within an organism and shape each other. There is no “exterior,” divinely grounded economy of nature. The pattern that Kant describes is a sort of inverted externalism. Herder develops a unique organic philosophy of history that will be amply discussed in Chapter 6. Kant’s culture-based ethics is original, but his ethnophilosophical ambitions go even further. According to him, Plato’s mistake was that he “abandoned the world of sense” and ventured “upon wings of ideas beyond it, into the void space of pure intellect.” As a result, he made no “real progress” (Introduction to The Critique of Pure Reason: 19/6). Kant’s thoughts, when viewed in the general context of the history of Western philosophy, are highly unusual. Normally, in philosophy, inherited concepts are supposed to be overcome through critical thinking, which means that, first of all, the philosopher must become aware of the arbitrariness of all beliefs rooted in local environments, including their own beliefs. This is most obviously expressed in Hegel’s selfconsciousness (see below Chapter 6), but it continues into modernity. Antonio Gramsci writes, in a Hegelian fashion, that the pre-philosophical man had a “practical activity but no clear theoretical consciousness of his practical

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a­ ctivity, which nonetheless involves understanding of the world in so far as it transforms it” (Gramsci 1971: 333). Only once the level of mere practice has been transcended and thinking has become truly “philosophical,” is it possible also to theorize about one’s own culture. 5

World vs. Global

Two-hundred-fifty years after Kant, the philosophical landscape has not essentially changed with regards to culture and civilization. If Kant saw a “void space of pure intellect,” we can say that now it has been extended into many other areas, such as education and religion, for instance. As has been pointed out in Chapter 4, both education and much of religion refuse to reflect their truths against particular cultures and traditions. It is difficult to overstate the gravity of this situation. The cultural “something” has even been lost in globalization itself and even for globalization if we follow the thoughts of the Franco-Greek philosopher Kostas Axelos. Axelos describes a “worldless” process of globalization that has lost its subject because culture, which is the only power able to provide an opening towards the world (a world), has been diminished: Globalization names a process which universalizes technology, economy, politics, and even civilization and culture. But it remains somewhat ­empty. The world, as an opening is missing. The world is not the physical and historical totality; it is not the more or less empirical ensemble of theoretical and practical ensembles. It deploys itself. The thing that is called globalization is a kind of mondialization without the world. (Axelos 2005: 27) Globalization abolishes the world as it transforms the world into a globe. Goethe, Herder, and Hegel could still speculate about world literature and world history, but this makes no longer sense when the world is merely a physical globe on whose surface civilization is spreading in all directions. When cultural particularities are lost, we must describe, as Kostas Axelos does, the world as a “worldless” globe. For Axelos, “the world” is accessible only when the process of globalization leaves “an opening” through which we can see not just the global-universal but also cultural particularities. “Can one be a citizen of the world without there being a world state?” asks Amartya Sen (116). I would like to amend the question like this: “Can one be a citizen of the world without there being a world?” On the civilized surface of a worldless globe we will find neither world literature nor world history but only global literature and global history. The

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same is true for cinema. Denilson Lopes, in his essay “Global Cinema, World Cinema,” speaks up in favor of a renewed concept of “world cinema” in contemporary cinema studies. Rather than representing a mere process of Hollywoodization or cultural leveling, Lopes sees the “world” in world cinema as “an aesthetic challenge” (2014: 483). This shows that the world, as a cultural concept first launched by Goethe, remains important. Over the centuries, the concept of world literature has been criticized because of its germanocentric tainting; alternative terms like “littérature universelle” or “general literature” have been suggested (Etiemble: 87). However, “world literature” proposes a peculiar understanding of the world as it opposes world to globe. It sees the world as an organic event and thus clearly dismisses mechanical globalism or universalism. It goes against the spirit of the mco. The world is an organism whereas the globe is a machine. This is why globalization cannot be combatted with localization. Putting more micro elements into the macro machine does not make the machine organic. What we need is a special process that can be called “worldization,” which implies the re-culturation of the globe. On the civilized surface of a worldless globe we can designate some distinct areas as “first world” or “third world” and we can permit each of them to produce their own literature, cinema, and philosophy. However, this is not the idea of “world” (cosmos) in the Goethian or Stoic sense. That the idea of world has been misunderstood becomes clear when considering that in the last thirty years, the word “world” in world cinema or world music has adopted a completely different meaning. Being opposed to globalization, one uses “world” in a way that does not change the global system (from globe to world) but merely escapes it. World does not here address the world in its totality but only that part that is believed to be more ethno-cultural, that is, more micro. In this sense, world cinema simply signifies “rest of the world cinema.” One will not bother to “worldize” the remaining parts, which are the global, American, or Hollywood parts. The – what is considered – “non-cultural” part will simply be excluded from the more cultural (ethno-cultural) world. The macro will be excluded from the micro. In the end, the ethno-cultural “world” can conveniently be called “Third World,” despite the fact that most recently, this concept has lost its pertinence because of the economic advances of a large part of the non-Western world. Splitting the world up into different parts and giving numbers to each one is contrary to Goethe’s intentions. He was trying to think a cosmopolitan world of culture. The Stoics wouldn’t have come up with the idea of a “third world” (third cosmos?) either. Lopes observes that “the rhetoric of Third Cinema is insufficient for constructing global cinema as a mechanism for opening up to the practices and objects of other cultures” (483). Similarly, in France, the old concept of world

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literature recently reemerged due to Pascale Casanova’s book World Republic of Letters (1999). The book attempted to cancel old universalisms and suggested “a galaxy of micro mondes in translation, in which the role of hegemonic societies in the management and mediation of literature was curtailed” (Apter: 349). However, this is no organic “worldization” but simply a switch from macro to micro. Just like earlier micro movements, it ignores the organic meaning of the world as a cosmopolitan concept. On a worldless globe, absolute truths are established technically by means of universal standards, laws, and norms. On a worldless globe, Aristotle’s’ “good life” would be rebranded as “excellent life,” following global standards. These shifts can even be supported philosophically. However, philosophy should stop pursuing its Socratic flight of pure reason that Kant described so clearly and so early in the introduction to The Critique of Pure Reason. It should define its own position in opposition to the scientification that turns the world (cosmos) into a globe and begin creating a real world philosophy or, to use the words of Saranindranath Tagore, it should attempt to “give world philosophy its ontological status” (S. Tagore: 539). The cultures and communities within which philosophies are embedded are not closed entities. For Gadamer, for example, their horizons can even fuse. S. Tagore writes that “the act of recognition does not generate closures in accordance with unity but seeks the widening of a tradition” (S. Tagore: 538). This means that truths do not become local (as opposed to global) only because the philosopher considers the cultural environment. The experience of truth is not reduced to parochial micro dimensions, but the horizon always aspires to a wider validity. The horizon is indeed a good metaphor for the macro.

Chapter 4

Micro Philosophies Micro philosophies flourished particularly well in the 1980s on the European continent. They were propelled by a generalized criticism of scientism, universalism, eurocentrism, logocentrism, and other centrisms. Anti-globalization movements attempted to deconstruct universalisms by fighting for political decentralization, by undermining economic liberalization, and by trying to produce a renewed understanding of local (cultural) truths that center around individuality and diversity. Minorities such as gays and lesbians demanded their rights. For these groups, “the universal is a contested term” (Butler: 46). On top of all this, multiculturalism, which was a relatively new phenomenon in Western societies, brought the question of culture back to the foreground. Most often, multiculturalism is understood as “micro culturalism.” Within this new cultural sphere, all branches of philosophy (even epistemology) developed their own micro strategies. Ethno-scientists strove to unveil the cynical, colonial powers of scientific value-neutrality (see Bandyopadhyay and V. Shiva 1988). In even extremer cases, feminists acted against “male sciences” (see Harding: 39). As could be expected, universalist counter-movements would soon challenge these micro philosophies in a rather provocative fashion, for example by asking “whether lesbian and gay people ought properly to be included in ‘the human’ and whether their putative rights fit within the existing conventions governing the scope of rights considered universal” (Butler: 46). Micro philosophies speak out against the Platonic hierarchies contained in the Theory of Forms, against Aristotelian substances, and other irreducible essences. Substantialism as represented by Parmenides was marked by the conviction that permanence is always more fundamental and more real than change. The fathers of Western philosophy adopted this substantialism. Plato’s realm of eternal Forms or Ideas as well as Aristotle’s essential Forms became the core principles of Western metaphysics. Late twentieth century micro philosophies combated this metaphysical heritage. To some extent, they were right in doing so. However, the fight against centrisms rarely led to organicism or externalism. It rather led to the analytic splitting up or to the deconstruction of universalisms. The aim was to emphasize differences and not universal agreement. Next it was important to emphasize that all “differences will be nonhierarchically understood” (Nussbaum). Nussbaum has produced her own modern, democratic version of cosmopolitanism constantly insisting that democracy knows no hierarchies. Going

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further, she believes that this non-hierarchical democracy is a true recipe for cosmopolitanism: it leads to a world of “world citizens.” For Nussbaum, in a cosmopolitan world there are no hierarchies: “The crucial question for a world citizen is how to promote diversity without hierarchy. Liberals are committed to diversity but also to equality” (Nussbaum 1996: 138). How will this equality be reached? The answer is simple. Once totalitarian universals are split up into micro particles, universal human rights will automatically ensure that all those particulars be treated as equal. The problem is that the particulars themselves do not seem to have been granted any power in this process. Particulars (nations) have their cultures and their communities. They should be happy to have been granted the right to live in those cultures and communities by the universalist cosmopolitans. Are they allowed more cultural power in a global context? No, the mere splitting up of hierarchies and the replacement of the hierarchical structures with universal structures of human rights and equality is not supposed to grant cultures power in a global context. On the contrary, this equalizing cosmopolitanism ties into the general tendency of deculturation that began dominating the world in the twentieth century right at the moment when micro philosophies emerged in Europe. The problem remains constant. The patchwork of micros does not create a world but rather reinforces the universalist structure of the globe. The socalled world citizen is merely a decultured, deracinated global citizen enjoying human rights and equality, and helping herself – if she has money – to the delicacies of various micro cultures that are spread out in front of her in a non-­ hierarchical order. But there is no coherent, organic world structure. Sooner or later this “globe” will split up into small parts and produce self-enclosed, provincial citizens who will be even more disconnected from the world, though they will always remain strongly connected to the globe, when, for instance, when enjoying the commodified products of the globalized economy. 1

European Micro Philosophies

The “differences without hierarchy” model is a clear example of micro ­philosophy. And the above-described abstract, equalizing universalism supports those micro models. Examples of Continental micro philosophy are ­multiple, and I will present here only four: the philosophies of Deleuze, Foucault, Lyotard, and Cultural Studies. All four represent complex and often ambiguous phenomena, and it is relatively difficult to extract a clear “micro line” from these discourses that have been developed over decades. Still, I think it is

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­ ossible to characterize these philosophies as micro philosophies for the simp ple reason that they tend to lose sight of the macro. Furthermore, what all have in common is that they see the individual as a fact. I quoted above Jean-Michel Muglioni’s finding that “the ancient Greeks saw the universal never as a fact” (Muglioni: 440). While macro-ists see the universal as a fact, “postmodern thinking,” with its refusal of totality and an unreflected drive toward fragmentation, inverts the modern pattern and describes individual elements as a mere facts. From an externalist or hermeneutic point of view, this micro approach is a fallacy as it is merely an inversion of the macro approach. It does not manage to think organically or, as Gadamer would say, “oikoumenically.”1 1.1 Gilles Deleuze In his Difference and Repetition, Deleuze not only criticizes the use of universal concepts but also explains that attempts to overcome provincial truths usually result in the provincialization of the universal. Though Plato, Descartes, and Kant wanted to get rid of cultural prejudices, in the end, they fell back on their own prejudices just by refusing prejudices in general. This reasoning runs in parallel with that of postcolonial thinkers like Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000) and Molefi Asante (2010) who explain that European history no longer embodies a “universal human history” but is merely one of many micro histories. Deleuze classifies everything as micro: because of systematic enclosures, even universalists fall back on their own prejudices. Everything, even the universal, is individual prejudice. Deleuze designs a theoretical model able to express this situation. Together with Felix Guattari, Deleuze establishes micro relativism through the concept of the rhizome. The rhizome is supposed to provide a straightforward critique of modern philosophy’s universalist approaches and of an entire tradition of metaphysics. Rhizomes have no beginning and no end: they begin in the middle and rely neither on transcendental laws (roots) nor on abstract models of unity. Rhizomes have no hierarchies. They are entirely de-centered and are composed of infinite micro processes of variation and expansion. This makes the rhizome different from the “structure.” The rhizome develops non-dichotomous configurations in which profound metaphysical structures are absent: “Every rhizome contains lines of segmentarity according to which it is stratified, territorialized, organized, signified, attributed, etc. as well as lines of deterritorialization down which it constantly flees. There is a rupture in the rhizome whenever segmentary lines explode into a line of flight, 1 The world “oikoumene” is Greek for the “inhabited world” (see Gadamer 1995: 271).

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but the line of flight is part of the rhizome” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 9; French: 16). The rhizome synthesizes free development and unity within one e­ xpression. It evolves through coherent schemes of repetition and circularity without ever culminating in one central point. In this sense, the rhizome is anti-totalitarian par excellence as it consistently refuses the vision of the whole. It is never a totality but merely an expression. In a conversation with Michel Foucault entitled “The Intellectuals and Power,” Deleuze suggests: “Who speaks and who acts? It’s always a multiplicity, even inside the person who speaks or who acts. All of us are small groups [groupuscules]. Representation no longer exists, there is only action, action of theory [de l’action de théorie], action of praxis in shifting relations, [des rapports de relais] or networks” (Deleuze and Foucault 1972: 3, my trans.). Theories resist totalities. For Deleuze, all theories (including his own) are micro theories, and the only real philosophy is micro philosophy. Philosophy is intrinsically micro. The advantage of theory is, according to Deleuze, that it “cannot be totalized, it multiplies itself and it multiplies others.”2 Deleuze even holds that “theory is inherently against power [la théorie par nature est contre le pouvoir]” (5). These statements about the concept of theory are surprising in the light of Husserl’s more Platonist definition of theory as a totalizing activity. For Husserl, theory strives for constant growth through perfection (Husserl: 280). Even more, theoria is a master concept invented by and owned by the Europeans and the ancient Greeks; and all other philosophies must be classified as non-theoretical. Deleuze sees theory completely differently: it is the anti-totalitarian movement par excellence. Though the non-dichotomic configuration of the rhizome formulates an interesting opposition to totalitarian macro approaches, its total refusal of macro structures makes any dialectics between the micro and the macro impossible. The rhizome flourishes by employing a plethora of particles (signs), but those particles are not held together by an organic micro–macro structure. Instead of tackling the problem of unity philosophically, Deleuze escapes into the realm of relativism of everyday life where everything is micro. It is thus not surprising that anti-organicism becomes one of Deleuze’s most fundamental philosophical principles. Deleuze’s anti-organicism constantly deconstructs unities and totalities. Deleuze openly declares to be not interested in organic constellations because he deems the organic to be totalitarian. Philosophical discourse needs to reach beyond totalities in order to retrieve a life force extant in the micro and absent in organic structures. Deleuze believes in anti-­totalitarian micro elements present in the form of pure cultural forces; and the r­ hizome 2 “La théorie, ça ne se totalise pas, ça se multiplie et ça multiplie” (4).

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expresses such forces. The rhizome is a micro force spread out on a macro plan that will never appear as such, and which will therefore never become totalitarian. It is thus not surprising that of all possible interpretations of the organic, Deleuze adopts the most negative one: the organic signifies the process of rotting and decay. In a famous interview contained in Pourparlers Deleuze explains in an almost Futurist fashion: “This is the power of inorganic life, that which can take place in the line of drawing, writing, or music. Organisms die, not life. There is not a single work that indicates a dead end [sans issue] to life, one that doesn’t trace out a pathway between the stones. All that I wrote was vitalist, at least I hope” (1990: 196, my trans.). When emphasizing and adhering to vitalism, Deleuze comes close to organic thinking, but he will never give in to the temptation of describing the world in an organic fashion. Deleuze’s approach is highly unusual because in the recent history of organic thinking, the organic has often been used as almost synonymous with the vitalist. For example, early twentieth century biologist Hans Driesch appealed to the principle of organicism precisely in order to salvage vitalism. He believed that the machine conception of the organic (mco) loses sight of the vital. In his The Science and Philosophy of the Organism, Driesch attempts to prove the existence of vitalist impulses to contradict mechanical descriptions of living matter (1908: 118–49) and highlights the necessity of organicism. Driesch held that an entity is organic if it is animated by a vital entity. Deleuze’s aversion towards the organic is consistent throughout his philosophy. For example, he never bothers exploring the organic in film theory despite the fact that his thoughts on the movement-image and the time-image have some natural affinities with the organic (see Botz-Bornstein 2017). Just like in the above-described case of the rhizome, Deleuze comes close to the organic but never explores it. In his two volumes on cinema, his main intention is to shift cinema theory towards the concrete, away from the abstract “crystal-­ image.” The organic could be very interesting for this purpose, but it is not conceptualized further. The organic remains for Deleuze a synonym of “structural.” When the organic is mentioned it mainly represents unity (see especially Cinema i, Chapter 4).3 For example, the action-image is an “organic representation in its entirety” (151). In this sense, Deleuze finds Eisenstein “organic” because his representation “includes spatial and temporal caesuras” (152). Here the organic simply represents a unity that can most comfortably be dealt with in the context of montage. Deleuze does not explore the organic philosophical tradition in any area. He never uses an organic micro–macro dynamic as a 3 The word appears one hundred-fourteen times in Cinema I and thirty-four times in Cinema ii.

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c­ ritical tool. Organic unity remains metaphysical, authoritarian, totalitarian, and “fundamentalist” in the sense of “foundational;” or, as it does to Futurists, it simply means decay. 1.2 Michel Foucault It was mentioned above that Western philosophy is inscribed in a civilizational structure that finds micro time and micro space inadequate. Poststructuralist philosophy elevates the micro (in the form of theory, philosophy, or rhizomes) to the status of a vitalist power able to deconstruct totalitarian “organic” structures. In an uncanny way, this reflects Bertrand Russell’s “Philosophy of Logical Atomism” (see above Chapter 2). However, a supplementary problem arises: microization leads to an “indigenization” of philosophy, or to what Deleuze and Foucault refer to as “multiplication” in the sense of an (irregular) multiplication of micro elements. Since the advantage of theory is, according to Deleuze, that it “cannot be totalized,” as a result, it necessarily “multiplies itself and it multiplies others.” But what exactly does the “multiplication of the other” or the “microization of the other” mean? “Microization” turns philosophy into anthropology, and this procedure has usually been imposed by the West on the non-West. As a matter of fact, the “microization” of the non-West is a colonial tradition. For a long time, the non-West was permitted to play only a micro role and nothing else. This is true for philosophy and theory as well as for other areas. Microization has rarely led to the non-West’s integration into a larger international (Western) macro system but rather to its increased marginalization. Immanuel Wallerstein has crystallized this paradox in his book European Universalism (2006) where he points out that most efforts to indigenize communication and social scientific studies have played into the hands of Orientalism, Eurocentrism, and fundamentalism. The link with fundamentalism is not vain. Few people have embraced postmodern micro philosophy more enthusiastically than Michel Foucault, who went to extremes when supporting the Iranian Islamic revolution in 1979. Foucault recognized in this upsurge of non-Western spirituality an interesting, vitalistic micro approach that intellectuals should support internationally. Even more, Foucault suggested that the “political spirituality” of the ayatollahs should now replace Western universalism (see Foucault’s essay in Afary and Anderson 2005: 209). The relativism resulting from this anti-totalitarianism is not organic but simply microscopic. Foucault believed that discourses always operate in relation to power (Foucault 1980), and that any such power must be deconstructed. Foucault shares this belief with many post-World War ii liberals: totalities must be split apart. While such analyses of the relationship

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b­ etween power and discourse are not entirely false, they should not lead to anti-foundationalism. Habermas attacked Foucault’s anti-foundationalism on precisely this point and urgeed all philosophers to withdraw from such radical avant-garde thinking. In a lecture entitled “The Critique of Reason as an Unmasking of the Human Sciences: Michel Foucault” (contained in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, 1984), Habermas criticizeed Foucault’s micro (anti-macro) approach as well as his frantic search for irregular structures: Hence Foucault wants above all put an end to global historiography that covertly conceives of history as a macro consciousness [Makrobewußtsein]. History has to be dissolved, not indeed into a manifold [Mannigfaltigkeit] of narrative histories, but into a plurality of irregularly emerging and disappearing islands of discourse. The critical historian will first dissolve false continuities and pay attention to ruptures, thresholds, and changes in direction. He does not produce teleological contexts; he is not interested in the large causal chains; he does not count on syntheses and rejects out of hand principles of articulation such as progress and evolution… (Habermas: 251/Ger.: 295) Habermas provides his own reading of the above-mentioned conversation between Deleuze and Foucault. He sees that Foucault rejects, like Deleuze, all concepts recognizing history as a totality and that he finds even “reconciliation” or sublation (Aufhebung in the Hegelian sense) totalitarian. In the “chaotic” (Habermas’ expression) and kaleidoscopic multitude emerging from this picture there is no space for general (übergreifende) meanings. According to Habermas, the only macro explanation that Deleuze and Foucault are ready to use (and they do this quite comfortably for practically everything, according to Habermas) is the will to power that emerges in multiple shapes throughout history (Habermas: 249/German: 297–8). Habermas believes that the deconstruction of history via a critical historiography represents Foucault’s alternative to Heidegger’s as well as to Derrida’s projects of deconstruction of the metaphysical tradition. I agree. However, in any case, Heidegger and Derrida are more organic. Heidegger never denied general meanings contained in Being: Being does always have an extension towards the world through a person’s particular way of being-in-the world.4 Similarly, Derrida does not deny general 4 Being is organic. See Chapter 10 of McDonough’s Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (2006) the problematic aspects of Heidegger’s ethics and politics that can be traced to his ­organicism.

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meanings emerging from play. Derrida’s organicism has been explained in Chapter 2. 1.3 Jean-François Lyotard Another anti-organic poststructuralist philosopher is Jean-François Lyotard, and it is no surprise that Lyotard became a critic of Habermas in the context of organic philosophy. Lyotard accuses Habermas of having fallen victim to a Hegelian nostalgia for “the whole and the one,” or simply to a “transcendental illusion” sparked by the desire to effectuate a “reconciliation between language games.” In the Appendix to his seminal The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard joins the Deleuze-Foucault chorus and calls for a war against the terror of any kind of systematicity and totality. He urges philosophers to “activate differences” (1984: 81–82). Post-structuralist philosophy of difference should deconstruct universal structures by generating more micro philosophies. In particular, Lyotard wants to deconstruct the grand narratives of modernity based on universalism. Lyotard links organic philosophies, especially Hegel’s philosophy of spirit and hermeneutics, to authoritarian movements like Marxism or capitalism. In the introduction to The Postmodern Condition Lyotard writes: “I will use the term modern to designate any science that legitimates itself with reference to a metadiscourse of this kind making an explicit appeal to some grand narrative, such as the dialectics of Spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or working subject, or the creation of wealth” (xxiii). The result is a micro philosophy that classifies all totalities as obscure and amorphous entities whose purpose is to govern others and/or to blur the limits between the rational and the irrational. The postmodern condition becomes emblematic of the rejection of all universalizing traditions because those traditions have been marginalizing the micro for centuries. Plurality needs to be reestablished through localization. However, as has been shown above, this thinking is based on a paradox because, so far, most efforts to depict the micro as self-contained entities have led to the provincialization of the micro (more on the provincialization of micro philosophies will follow in Chapter 6). Micro thinking has led to new editions of Orientalism. By celebrating cultural diversity and by challenging the cultural hegemony of traditional Western “majority” groups, these academic movements reiterate the pattern of ­ethnophilosophy. African philosophy became marginalized through ethnophilosophy. Beyond creating a certain awareness, this neo-ethnic microization McDonough connects Heidegger with the emergentist strand of the organicist tradition and holds that Being and Time is a “version of emergentist organicism” (xxiv).

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never attempted to find a micro–macro alternative. It merely deconstructed. In philosophy, the result is most often an unsatisfying relativism. Exchanges between the micro and the macro will – if at all – only be recognized when the body of relationships between large and small is clearly designed as a mechanistic device. The latter paradigm is still inspired by above-described scientific cosmology of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and it is known as the mco in biology. 2

Cultural Studies

Another micro approach has emerged in the form of Cultural Studies in which many Continental philosophers find refuge. Cultural Studies originated as a critique of capitalist relations in the human sciences. Accordingly, Frederic Jameson believes that Cultural Studies is “what Goethe long ago theorized as ‘world literature’” (Jameson 1986: 68). Though I sympathize with the Cultural Studies approach in general, I find it problematic that “culture” is here often understood as “low” culture, popular culture, or subculture. This alone contradicts Goethe’s idea of World Literature. Injecting elements of “low” culture or subculture into the academic discourse is insufficient for methodological reasons. At first, the rejection of macro canons of beauty as well as the rejection of natural laws or norms of the good was refreshing. It is also in agreement with a general tendency of the humanities as they have been practiced for centuries: “The humanities prefer essentialist particulars (as against scientific universals),” writes Wallerstein (75). Positions against the white and the West were relatively exciting, at least when they were new. Equally laudable was Cultural Studies’ decision to discuss abstract problems within social contexts. The relativism emerging from this field of studies can be attached to the hermeneutic tradition of Herder and Dilthey who found that every cultural perception is equally valid. However, if Cultural Studies really strives to have a philosophical basis it must be more than an anthropology of popular culture, or what Allan Bloom has called “cultural materialism.” In the case of cultural materialism, culture is not attended to as a micro–macro phenomenon. Bloom criticizes Stuart Hall’s relativism in particular because it “establishes culture as a quality emptied of any essence as the drug culture, the rock culture [or] the street-gang culture” (Bloom: 184). That said, there is no reason to suppose that the only alternative to “drug culture” is cultural elitism à la Matthew Arnold. A provocative switch from high to popular culture sparks no veritable micro–macro approach. However, only the micro–macro option is truly philosophical. Cultural Studies must

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produce a more sophisticated mixing of high and low causes. Bob Dylan’s recent Nobel Prize in literature has been cause for both celebration and debate as it signaled a crossing of high and low art, insinuating that a popular art form can be a medium in and through which some of our deepest reflection occurs. The insistence on the micro (the popular) is laudable but the macro is important, too. Stanley Cavell, another micro philosopher, had pointed out that interferences between high art and low art are the quintessential mark of American culture, especially of its two great original art forms: jazz and film. Culture studies as well as Cavell’s “philosophy of minor genres” are micro approaches sparked by a hatred of the elitist, totalitarian macro discourse. Both Cultural Studies and Cavell owe much to leftist ideologies of the 1960s for which, according to Christopher Lasch, “higher education and ‘culture’ should not in any case be ‘desired by the mob’” (Lasch: 135). Scholars like Douglas Kellner have been trained in philosophy but engaged in the practice of Cultural Studies at an early point of their careers. Still, Kellner believes that “few have reflected on the philosophical dimension and the role of philosophy within the project” (Kellner 2008). As a matter of fact, the existence of Cultural Studies owes much to an intrinsic aversion to philosophy. Being taught in the UK in the so-called “new universities” (former polytechnics), students of this new discipline have “frequently been suspicious of philosophy as just the sort of elitist and canonical discourse that the work of cultural studies should challenge” (McQuillan 2013: 695). The new universities attracted those who were traditionally excluded from the academy, such as adult learners and working-class students who found academic philosophy too elitist. Still, McQuillian insists that “cultural studies is only effective as thought and as an institutional incursion when it works at the frontiers of philosophy and theory” (698). In other words, Cultural Studies should never be too micro but remain open towards the macro. The bridging of high/low culture distinctions has been important for the rise of British cultural studies. Cultural Studies’ research agendas could spread out vertically (high-low) as well as horizontally by embracing the most “exotic” cultures. Cultural Studies are transdisciplinary and “subvert existing academic boundaries by combining social theory, cultural analysis and critique, and ­politics in a project aimed at a comprehensive criticism of the present ­configuration of culture and society” (Kellner). For Simon Critchley, Cultural Studies is precisely what philosophy should be: “A meditation on the meaning of culture – a meditation on culture.” Critchley sees that philosophy is often lacking this ‘culture input’: “What I see as definitive of philosophy in the continental tradition is a concern with culture and cultural formation, which means that philosophy on this model becomes a historically sensitive, contextually

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sensitive discipline, which is concerned with giving a critique of actually existing praxis, actually existing states of affairs” (Critchley: 59). This does not mean that Cultural Studies solve all of philosophy’s metaproblems. After all, McQuillian has entitled the above-quoted article “Why Cultural Studies is the End of Thinking.” The main problem with Cultural Studies remains that it is more micro than macro. Cultural Studies entered the academic market at a time when “shares in the philosophical interests of high theory have fallen sharply” (McQuillian: 695), which indicates a potential lack of universalization in Cultural Studies. Cultural Studies highlights topics that were traditionally excluded by philosophy; however, this does not mean that it will necessarily replace philosophy. If Cultural Studies has the ambition to be recognized as a new way of doing philosophy, it will face the same criticism that ethnophilosophy had to face many years ago. Cultural Studies is a weak anthropology deconstructing metaphysics without offering a real micro–­macro dynamic. Linked to Cultural Studies is postcolonial theory, which evolved out of critical engagements with colonialism. Post-colonial scholars are most often of non-Western origin. However, overall, postcolonial theory is more engaged with French high theory than regular Cultural Studies. The mix of literary scholars, historians, political scientists, anthropologists, etc. creates an affinity with Cultural Studies. Dominant Western “universal” theories are critiqued, and various indigenous “micro” theories are developed. Postcolonial theory is a powerful mode of analysis, especially since it does not entirely reject “high theory” (and it has been criticized for precisely this reason by more “micro”minded scholars). 3

The Fear of the Total

Most of the above philosophies are crypto-ethnic discourses supported by leftist-liberal politics eager to challenge the cultural hegemony of traditional “majorities” that it believes to be totalitarian. There is a suspicion, especially of the state, and philosophy (theory) is seen as a regional force able to fight against a power that is always universal. “A theory is the regional system of this combat,” says Foucault in the above conversation with Deleuze, thus joining Deleuze’s original position. Still it would be simplistic to characterize liberal leftist thought as simply anti-totalitarian. In reality, the relationship of Western postwar philosophical culture with both the micro and the macro are more complex. One problem is that political unity can come in many colors. It can come in the form of an ideal community of people sharing existential and cultural

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meaning; but it can also come as an enforced “unnatural” unity. Further, it can come in the form of a community created on the grounds of a political ideology where loyalty to the state is more important than simple consensus. Very often the fear of unity is the fear of totalitarianism. This, in turn, will be linked to the fear of the state. Anthropologist Michael Taussig has coined the term “state fetishism” and anti-state fetishism is a recurrent symptom in liberal circles during the later phases of modernity. Anti-state fetishism can be directed against various phenomena. In Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651) the fetishized state appears as an aura of power, but it can also appear as the Hegelian vision of the state “not merely as the embodiment of reason, of the Idea, but also as an impressively organic unity, something much greater than the sum of its parts” (Taussig: 111–12). Taussig is skeptical of organic totalities and concludes: “The coming together of reason and violence in the State creates, in a secular and modern world, the highness of the big State” (116). Anti-state fetishists fear the highness of the big State because it is so uncannily macro. Taussig links a “peculiar sacred and erotic attraction, even thralldom, combined with disgust” to the state (111). It is the same ambiguous attraction that the State holds for its subjects.5 The fear of the macro is most understandable when it is directed against powers of centralization. Throughout the history of European political philosophy, unity did indeed often mean centralization. Centralization goes back to Hobbes who hated the micro and pleaded for the macro. “The People” must always be one and should not speak through a plurality of voices. In De Cive (1642), Hobbes writes: “The People is something that is one, having one will, and to whom one action may be attributed” (Chap. xii, section viii). Multiple voices are not allowed. The Italian philosopher Paulo Virno comments this Hobbesian position: “Before the State, there were the many; after the establishment of the State, there is the One-people, endowed with a single will. The multitude shuns political unity, resists authority, does not enter into lasting agreements, never attains the status of juridical person because it never transfers its own natural rights to the sovereign” (Virno: 23). Virno speaks of Hobbes’ hatred of multitude, which is another way of saying that Hobbes disliked the micro. Multitudes must converge into a synthetic unity, otherwise the state is in danger: “The multitude, for Hobbes, is inherent in the ‘state of nature’; therefore, it is inherent in that which precedes the ‘body politic’” (Virno: 22). According to the Leviathan, unity means that people must reduce all their wills to “one will” (of the state). This must be done with popular consent. In a political 5 Taussig derives this from Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s analysis of German fascism in The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944).

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commonwealth, “men agree among themselves, to submit to one man, or an assembly of men, voluntarily, on confidence to be protected by him against all others.”6 This is not organic but totalitarian. However, the organic (the micro– macro dynamic) will not be entirely forgotten in this totalitarianism. In the end, the state is not the highest One but must recognize an order higher than itself, which is called the “state of natural liberty.” Nature (read: the organic) is introduced into the totalitarian system to give state power its final form and potency in relation to the multitude of people. The social contract is not artificially (inorganically) imposed by the elites but becomes a natural phenomenon because the government by consent gives heed to the liberty that people enjoy naturally. This can be called pseudo-organicism, and there is a double bind in the system. Whoever is against the macro is against nature because the macro pretends to be organic. The state is a supreme empire “naturally” supported by the people through consensus. This hijacking of the organic made many political thinkers after Hobbes suspicious of any talk of unity. As a result, as soon as organic unity is evoked, the specter of “central state materialism” blocks all further reflections. The emergence of a unifying meaning out of the chaos or darkness of human multitude (human life) is found absurd. Anti-unity tendencies can be most strongly felt in post-World War ii liberal democratic thought. Twentieth century political experiences reinforced the fear of the total. Fascists saw the state as a higher ethical and universal reality; this would not raise the prestige of state-macroism. As a result, liberalism’s leftist branches attempted to deconstruct any form of state-authoritarianism. They tried to find a real multitude in language, intellect, and races, all of which were seen in opposition to the One (that is, to the State). In reality, the picture is more nuanced. As Virno points out, not everybody wants to sing “melodies in the post-modern style (multiplicity is good, unity is the disaster to beware)” (Virno: 25). For certain reasons, the idea of “the many” or of “multitude” could also provoke uneasiness, even among liberals. As a matter of fact, liberal thought, too, remains impregnated by the idea of centralized states as well as by a modern concept of sovereignty. Even more, much of the leftist branch of liberalism remains rooted in democratic-socialist thought, which must, at least in some sense, take the “unity of the people” for granted. In the end, socially and politically, Western postwar liberal societies lean towards the macro and neglect the micro. Of course, this is not always obvious. Sometimes the macro–micro relationship will be replaced with the dichotomy of the “public vs. private” or with the dichotomy of the “collective vs. ­individual.” 6 Leviatan, Chapter xvii: Of the Causes, Generation, and Definition of a Commonwealth (Hobbes 1957: 71).

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This seems to retrieve an organic dimension of society, but in reality, it merely privatizes the micro and excludes it from the public sphere. Often the micro is silenced by being called archaic. sIn the end, the micro will take on “the slightly ghostly and mortifying features of the so-called private.” This is how Virno describes the modern economy of the multiple (24). Paradoxically, this position is not so different from Hobbes’ ideology of the One. At the same time, Virno believes that in the post-Fordist economy, the One, just because it is no longer the state, will not necessarily clash with the multitude. In a modern context, the macro can redefine the micro and the many can be thought of as “the individualization of the universal, of the generic, of the shared experience” (24). These suggestions must be characterized as organic.

Chapter 5

Universalism and Racism: From Herder to Hegel 1

Unipolar vs. Multipolar

Most of the history of philosophy has been working towards an ideal of ­deculturation, which became particularly strong during the age of the Enlightenment. Culture is originally communitarian, and philosophy has little use for communitarian truths. Most of the time, the macro was more important than the micro, but one exception is found in Herder. As a counter-Enlightenment philosopher, Herder encouraged the existence of “philosophical communities.” His cosmopolitanism granted equal respect to all human beings, which becomes clearest in the second, third, and fourth parts of his Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man published in 1784, 1787, and 1791 respectively.1 Peculiarly, during the same period, philosophy (especially in Germany) took a strong turn towards Eurocentrism. By 1800, philosophy was officially established as an exclusively Greek project, and Western philosophy curricula remain shaped by this “historical accident” until today. Why was this a historical accident? Herder’s adversary, the Jena-based historian of philosophy Wilhelm Gottlieb Tennemann, as well as the anti-Kantian Dietrich Tiedemann, challenged the longstanding view that the ancient Greeks had drawn on Eastern philosophical sources. The writings of these relatively minor philosophers would change the development of philosophy. Tennemann was already opposed to Herder in other academic fields and also completely rejected Herder’s conception of history. Another factor lay in Johann Gottlieb Gerhard Buhle’s simultaneous attempts to separate philosophy from culture. They have been described in Chapter 4. These movements, that attempted to establish philosophy as a discipline distinct from cultural history, created the backdrop for the pro-Greek exercises that strove to make philosophy more “scientific.” This step is unusual, be it only because it is so radical. Since the Renaissance, it had been common to see Jews, Egyptians, Zoroastrians, Chaldeans and other non-Europeans as the world’s first philosophers. But these philosophers overturn this multipolar conception. Tennemann’s Geschichte der Philosophie (an eleven-volumes project whose publication began in 1798) as well 1 Maraldo states that Herder himself “asserted that the Greeks borrowed nothing of their philosophy from other sources” (Maraldo 2013: 25). I could not find evidence of this in Herder’s writings.

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as Tiedemann’s Der Geist der spekulativen Philosophie von Thales bis Sokrates (1791), attempt to show that philosophy is purely Greek and not dependent on extra-European influences. A few years earlier, the important historian and anthropologist Christoph Meiners, who was, like Buhle, based in Göttingen, explained that Africa and Asia must be excluded from the history of philosophy. Meiners was, like Joseph-Marie Degérando (see below in this Chapter), one of Europe’s first comparative anthropologists. But he was also an early adept of scientific racism, and his widely read book Grundriß der Geschichte der Menschheit (1785) arguably influenced Hegel (see Park: 76–82). Of course, another decisive driving force of this “Hellenization” of thought was the Enlightenment ambition to separate philosophy from religion. Tennemann strongly criticized the Church Fathers who still relied on revelation. Still another reason for this push towards “Greekness” was the Enlightenment ideology of universalization. Husserl writes in the already quoted passage from The Crisis of the European Sciences that “only in the Greeks do we have a universal (cosmological) lifeinterest” (279). Husserl admits that there is a “plethora of works about Indian philosophy, Chinese philosophy, etc.” but finds that they cannot be “placed on a plane with Greek philosophy” because they are “merely different historical forms under one and the same idea of culture.” The Greeks have theory, which makes them macro by definition, whereas all the rest is micro. Seen from this angle, Tennemann’s and Tiedemann’s moves no longer appear as unusual but rather emerge from an environment that consistently attempted to narrow down the cultural breadth of philosophy. Before Tennemann, Lutheran theologian Jacob Brucker’s history of philosophy, a six-volume work written over two decades, provided ample, though very negative, accounts of non-Western “philosophy.” Again and again, Brucker insists that the non-West does not produce philosophy. The Historia critica philosophiae, a mundi incunabilis ad nostram usque aetatem deducta (1742–1767) was written in Latin and may be the work of a compiler with not much philosophical spirit (see Park 14–25), but it has been claimed by many, including Victor Cousin, to be the most reliable history of philosophy before Tennemann’s History of Philosophy. The first volume of the series appeared in German (the rest remained in Latin). This 550 pages long first volume devoted to the origins of philosophy (Erste Anfangsgründe der philosophischen Geschichte) insists on Greek superiority and calls, echoing the ancient Greeks, all other philosophies barbarian: “The Greeks were the first who rendered knowledge about happiness and truth in the form of a sophisticated scholarly structure (kunstförmiges Lehrgebäude)” whereas the “others” transmitted wisdom merely through proverbs and tales: “If we understand by philosophy just any knowledge useful for the truths serving happiness, like what happens through tales or the transmission from

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­ arents to children, then we can indeed ascribe philosophy also to those barp barian peoples” (Brucker 1751: 8). Brucker justifies his view by giving brief descriptions (three to four pages for each) of non-European philosophies. Adam is not a philosopher because he relied on revelation and had no truly philosophical reflections. Jewish philosophy has sages and prophets but no philosophers. Zoroastrianism is not well enough known and we might even doubt its existence. Indian philosophy is more a lifestyle than a philosophy. The Arabs had only superstitions, dream interpretation, and poetry, and the same goes for the Phoenicians. The Egyptians might indeed be called the first philosophers, but we do not have enough information to verify whether this is true. Brucker also mentions the “Mohren,” which refers to Africa, and points out that there had probably been contacts between India and Africa. He continues with sections on Libyan and Roman philosophy. In Rome, philosophy was not very popular. Regarding the Celts and their druids, he explains that a scholar (Gelehrter) is not yet a philosopher (philosophum). The “nocturnal” (mitternächtige) peoples such as the Scythians and Thracians are too mystical. The tone changes on page forty-three with the beginning of a chapter on Greek philosophy. In all those non-European accounts, Brucker politely acknowledges the wisdom and ethical value of their traditions; but they simply cannot be called philosophies. The problem Brucker addresses is far from trivial and occupies philosophers to this day. Hans-Georg Gadamer believes that the “concept of philosophy is not yet applicable to the great answers given by the high cultures (Hochkulturen) of East Asia and India to those same fundamental questions of mankind that philosophy in Europe has been asking again and again.” Gadamer does not say whether this is good or bad, but he merely states this as a fact, and he is right. Even today it remains arbitrary whether we call “the talk of a Chinese sage with his pupil ‘philosophy’, or ‘religion’, or ‘poetry’” (Gadamer 1995: 268). Gadamer wants to adapt philosophy to the new oikoumene (environment) in which non-European cultures have increasingly become neighbors to European cultures. Brucker’s book was written fifty years before Tennemann’s History of Philosophy. On the one hand, Tennemann merely follows Brucker’s orientation. On the other hand, by 1800, many things had changed. Within the cultural context of the early 1800s, Tennemann’s Eurocentrism can come as a surprise. It goes against a new philosophical multipolarism that was emerging in Europe, especially with of the arrival of various Sanskrit texts. Scholars now had more knowledge about India than during Brucker’s time. The early 1800s were marked by an – admittedly romantic – search for the spirit of the Orient, leading to the Oriental Renaissance supported by Schelling, the Schlegel brothers,

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and other German thinkers. This new orientalism necessitated extensive engagements with Indian philosophy (see Schwab 1984 and Sedlar 1982), a task that some thinkers would take up enthusiastically. Friedrich Schlegel even attempted, in his On the Wisdom and Language of the Indians (1809), to integrate Hindu philosophy into the philosophical canon of his university. Ways to philosophize in a comparative fashion surfaced in France when Joseph-Marie Degérando designed a model of comparative philosophy to treat “each system of philosophy as a complete organism, whose characteristics were inextricably linked” (Park: 34). Unfortunately, Degérando, like Meiners, Tiedemann, and Tennemann, excluded Africa and Asia from the history of philosophy. The same is true for Goethe and his followers, who established a list of “civilized languages.” A Hungarian follower of Goethe, Hugo von Meltzl, developed a “decaglottism” of civilized languages, which included German, English, Spanish, Dutch, Icelandic, Italian, Portuguese, Swedish, French and Latin. Literatures in all other languages were considered folk literatures (see Etiemble: 88). 2

Hegelian Universalism

Tennemann’s and Tiedemann’s attempts to “Europeanize” philosophy can be understood as counter-reactions to the remarkable opening of European thought towards the East. Such openings were manifest during the last decade of the eighteenth century. As a result, anything that can be said about philosophy, culture, as well as East-West relationships during this time, is ambiguous. In around 1800, philosophy was simultaneously open and closed because the micro–macro situation had become complex. There clearly is a turn towards culture, but this turn does not lead to a liberalization of philosophy in the sense of a “world philosophy” that parallels the idea of Weltliteratur, a term Goethe would coin soon afterwards. Both Herder and Goethe are examples of Counter-Enlightenment thinkers – the former an early one, the latter a late representative of this intellectual tendency.2 On the one hand, Herder’s cultural relativism, though positively received in some circles, did not catch on in the world of European philosophy. Various attempts to liberalize and internationalize philosophy met with strong opposition. On the other hand, a certain cultural turn in philosophy cannot be denied. The philosopher who becomes emblematic of this ambiguous attitude that is current in the first decades of the nineteenth century is Hegel. Hegel, who is firmly embedded in the tradition shaped by his idealist predecessor Herder, 2 Herder died twenty-nine years before Goethe.

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found new ways of expressing the old tensions between the universal and the multipolar. Hegel strives to lead philosophy back to culture, which is always particular; but he also has strong universalist ambitions. The exceptional status of Hegel becomes obvious when he is compared to Brucker, Tiedemann, Tennemann, Meiners, Buhle, and Degérando. Hegel’s project reflects the new circumstances of his time, and his solutions are more original than those of his predecessors. Philosophy is torn between opening and closing reflexes, it is torn between micro and macro approaches. This results, first, in the paradoxical combination of Enlightenment and counter-Enlightenment forces that had occupied the philosophical scene in the generation before Hegel. Second, and more interestingly, the micro–macro becomes sublimated in the form of hermeneutic, dialectical conceptions like Geist or Weltgeist. In the early 1800s, the “opening” reflexes are still relatively strong. At the time when Goethe’s term Weltliteratur becomes famous through his conversations with Eckermann, Hegel lectures on the philosophy of “World History” in Nürnberg. In 1809, in his “End of the Year Speech” delivered as the rector of the Egidien Highschool, Hegel explains that “the aim of philosophy can only be reached when it grasps world history and the history of philosophy, thus capturing ‘its time in thought’. The highest level of objective Spirit represents world history” (Hegel 1809: 10, my trans.). What exactly is this Spirit he refers to? Spirit is undeniably a cultural phenomenon, and Hegel always uses the concept in this fashion. This means that Hegel reimports cultural concreteness into a philosophy that had become very abstract, especially under Kant’s influence. According to Hegel, Spirit is always the Spirit of a certain nation or region. In this sense, his philosophy provides an at least temporary relief from the pressure of deculturation, from which philosophy had been suffering during the preceding decades, through the abstractions imposed by the Enlightenment thought. When Hegel speaks of a “Spirit of a people” he clearly presents a more cultural conception of philosophy as he considers local presuppositions. Spirit is not simply a macro phenomenon. The “problem” is that Hegel’s macro ambitions are at least as strong as his micro ambitions. As Hegel said in his high school speech: “The highest level of objective Spirit represents world history.” Naturally, this individual-universal philosophy is bound to become entangled in its own paradoxes. Which individual culture has the right to claim universality? Here, the system can easily become racist. While it is true that Spirit must always appear as the Spirit of a certain culture or a certain epoch, the problem is that only some nations are able to produce this Spirit. Not all Geists are equal. The maximal flourishing (“höchste Blüte”) of one Spirit that only some can attain is superior to all the others.

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Retrospectively, the Hegelian acculturation strategy looks like a strange mirage because the concrete Spirit of a people or the Spirit of a nation is simultaneously supposed to be universal. In the end, Hegel’s philosophy of Spirit does not follow the lines of a Herderian philosophy of diversity and multiculture, but rather of a philosophy of universality incorporating an obscure concept of hierarchy. Some, such as Africans, cannot reach the required level of spirit. The reason is that these peoples experience their cultures in an unreflected and unconscious way without an awareness of their individual culture within a universal context. In other words, they do not have a micro–macro perspective, and therefore they have no Spirit. In the introduction to his Lectures on the Philosophy of History Hegel writes: In Negro life the characteristic point is that consciousness has not yet attained to the realization of any substantial objective existence [noch nicht zur Anschauung irgendeiner festen Objektivität] – as for example God, or Law in which the interest of man’s volition is involved and which he realizes as its own being. This distinction between himself as an individual and the universality of his essential being, the African in the uniform, undeveloped oneness [unterschiedslosen Gedrungenheit] of his existence has not yet attained. (Hegel 1956: 93/German: 1832 [1986]: 5)3 Africans are nonspiritual because they are merely individual, whereas the Spirit of German culture is simultaneously micro and macro, individual and universal. One reason is that German culture is not a local product to be only “consumed” by Germans. But the German Spirit is not just a universal phenomenon like, say, fast food, either. It has not been produced as an abstract, cultureless, universal structure. First, it is universal because it has reached its “höchste Blüte” (highest flourishing) and is therefore – similar to what happens to ­civilization – desirable also to other cultures. But second, the precondition for 3 Most of the texts contained in the Lectures on the Philosophy of World History are transcriptions of Hegel’s lectures and no full English translation has ever been produced. The first edition established by Hegel’s son Karl lacked much of the material that was discovered only later. The above passage, which comes from a lecture held in Berlin, does not appear in Brown and Hodgson’s translation of the Lectures (Oxford University Press, 2011). I quote it from Sibree’s translation, which appears in Hegel’s Philosophy of History (and not in Lectures on the Philosophy of World History). However, I suggest translating “Anschauung irgendeiner festen Objektivität” rather as “intuition of a fixed objectivity” and not as “substantial objective existence.” I also suggest translating “unterschiedslose Gedrungenheit” as the African’s “undifferentiated compact state” and not (a rather strange solution) as “undeveloped oneness” and will use those expressions accordingly.

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this universalization is that “the people” recognize themselves not merely as individuals but as essentially universal, too. This is how Spirit becomes universal, and according to Hegel, Africans never went through this process. It f­ ollows that the Spirit of African culture is not as civilized as that of German culture. Africans remain on the level of the natural (general) soul, which is not yet ­Spirit. Their natural soul is still an unconscious Spirit determined (or at least strongly influenced) by its environment (see Enzyklopädie [1830] Bd. 3 § 391). The African Spirit remains rudimentary and only the (self-reflexive) awakening of the ‘I’ could push their souls towards the transcendence of the natural world and towards Spirit. Spirit must be reached using a dialectical method. Spirit begins with a low stage of itself and gradually reaches self-fulfillment: “While still a ‘substance’ (i.e. a physical soul) the spirit [‘mind’ in this translation] takes part in the general planetary life, feels the difference of climates, the changes of the seasons, and the periods of the day, etc. This life of nature for the main shows itself only in occasional strain or disturbance of mental tone” (Philosophy of Mind §392; see also Stace: 328–38; 438). In the beginning, Spirit is unreflective and close to common sense. The philosophical mind, however, is aware of its own subjectivity. When the soul has become Spirit, it is no longer natural and not merely a “feeling soul,” but has become thought and subject-for-itself. This kind of consciousness, which is Spirit, requires that the soul moves through the above stages from substance to subject. Africans do not have this philosophic mind. Nor do the “Slavic nations” (under which Hegel also groups Hungarians and Albanians). Consequently, they do not enter the domain of world history. We see a strong contrast between this position and what Herder wrote about the Slavs some fifty years earlier. In his Outline, Herder used the example of the Slavs to show how cultures can form an organic system, an idea that would later empower Pan-Slavism (see below in this chapter). Hegel writes in The Philosophy of History that “this Slavic section does not come into the domain of history just as the Eastern does not, which is turned so inwardly into itself even in the most modern times” (1832: 422). This is racism, but one has to admit that it is a very complicated kind of racism. It is not the more common kind of egocentric racism that neglects the other simply because the racist has no interest in the outside world. Despite the obvious criticism that Hegel’s positions deserve, it is equally obvious that Hegel is concerned not only with culture as such but especially with the culture of the “other.” This he still shares with Herder. There are a few more substantial resemblances. First, Hegel is interested in the nation as an organic phenomenon. When he writes in the Philosophy of Law that “the state as an organism is a self-enclosed unity, which develops its own distinctions and its

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own life within itself” (436), we hear an echo of Herder who saw every nation as an autonomous system having “its center of happiness within itself” (Herder 1877–1913: 509). While it is true that Hegel writes about the state and not about the nation, the organic description he delivers is remarkable; this is not a pseudoorganicism à la Hobbes (see Chapter 5) that declares a social contract “natural” because it grants people the liberty that they enjoy naturally. Second, Hegel is also interested in the culture of the other. As a matter of fact, the question Hegel asks in the Lectures on the History of Philosophy could come from an introduction to ethnophilosophy: “What are we to make of the phenomenon that philosophy, supposedly teaching of absolute truth, has appeared restricted, on the whole, to a small number of individuals, to particular peoples, at particular times?” (1837: 26/Engl.: 12). Robert Bernasconi is right when highlighting Hegel’s main concern, which addresses the “conundrum” of universal truth spelled out by an individual mind. It is indeed a conundrum, and few philosophers have recognized the problematical character of this Western paradigm as clearly as Hegel: “To restrict philosophy to a few peoples and to trace it back to a single source threatens to compromise philosophy’s claims to universal significance” (Bernasconi 2000: 202). Hegel is concerned with localities but insists on viewing them within holistic frameworks. For example, in the Philosophy of Mind he writes that “diversity descends into specialties that may be termed local minds − shown in the outward modes of life and occupation” (§394). Philosophy cannot stay with those localities, however, and internationalization or globalization are no alternatives either. Hegel does not believe in effective international authorities. Real universalization in the Hegelian – and also ancient Greek – sense means that individual facts be brought in agreement with the reason of world history, which can only happen through an alternation of the individual’s consciousness. 3

Cosmopolitan Universalism

The universal as it was understood in Plato’s Timaeus and by the Stoics is not identical to the global as it manifests itself today in globalization. The ancient universal used to be “cosmological” and the word cosmopolitanism is derived from this early understanding. There is a notable link between the cosmopolitanism of Goethe and Hegel and the cosmopolitanism of Greek philosophers. Just like Goethe and Hegel, the two contemporaries who become, at some point of their career, obsessed with an alternative concept of “the world” whilst looking at political and economic globalization, Stoics were confronted with the phenomenon of globalization when old xenophobic Athens gave way to

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the empire of the Hellenistic period. In both cases, thinkers were confronted with a more complex cultural environment. The Stoics, following the lead of Diogenes who claimed to be “a citizen of the world,” developed the idea of the kosmou polites (world citizen). We all dwell in two communities – the local and the human community. Nussbaum correctly calls the Stoic cosmopolitan model “organic” (Nussbaum 1996: 10). The Stoics borrowed from earlier cosmological ideas (especially from Heraclitus), but we find corresponding cosmological ideas also in Plato’s Timaeus. As shown above, Plato develops thoughts on macrocosm in the context of cosmology and explains that the individual has access to the idea of the whole through their consciousness. This is not very different from Hegel. All these thinkers suggest a concept of a “universal” that is different from our present idea of the “global” as it appears in globalization. Globalization is not more than the generalization of certain particularisms (for example, the spread of hamburgers all over the world or the priority of scientific measuring over all other kinds of measures). Furthermore, the global is very much determined by the market whereas the universal is an ideal of the cosmopolitan human. Universalism or cosmopolitanism mean that the individual citizen lives in accordance with the law of the city as a whole; but this is a whole that the individual constantly helps shaping. Globalization tends to be fought with the creation of more and more particularisms. However, the multiplication of particularisms (which will probably be immediately marketed for profit within the global economy) does not actually combat globalization and rather reinforces it. What is needed is a universal in the original cosmopolitan sense issued by the ancient Greeks. In the Timaeus, Plato speaks of the “ascent,” which means that man is not bound, as other living creatures are, to his environment but is able to see the earth as a “world” (cosmos). The world differs from the globe as much as it differs from the environment. The world is a matter of consciousness while the environment and the globe are merely material. To connect this to our discussion on the mco, we can say that the world is an organism whereas the globe is a machine. Animals are part of an environment, but they are not aware of it and will never see their environment as a world. They do not understand the meaning of their own place within the whole. Humans are potentially cosmopolitan beings because they can – through the Platonic ascent – contemplate the world and understand its cosmological meaning. Globalization reduces humans to animals. The Stoics’ thoughts are reminiscent of Hegel who holds that real Spirit is not merely ecological or biological (limited to sensation, appetite, the personal and the subjective), but that it is always an absolute Spirit, which is neither

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subjective (personal) nor objective (the state). Spirit is infinite, which once again clarifies the difference between the cosmological and the global. Spirit is the manifestation of mind and intelligence, but this intelligence is not manifest in an individual nor is it only manifest in an objective way. Spirit is philosophical since philosophy represents the final unity of subjectivity and objectivity. With Hegel we are moving from anthropology to phenomenology. Spirit is similar to Plato’s “world-soul” (Timaeus, 30b; Laws, 896e–899a), which is an underlying structure that cannot be empirically established by measuring the micro elements. For Hegel, the soul is not yet Spirit but merely an unconscious Spirit determined by its environment (see Enzyklopädie [1830] Bd. 3 § 391). However, already this proto-Spirit (the soul) knows an inside and an outside. In his Logic, Hegel defines the “actual soul” as the unity of the inner and the outer: one half of the soul is its universality, the other half retains a cultural content (1830 [Logic]: 291). Hegel’s solution to what Bernasconi called the conundrum of “a universal truth spelled out by an individual mind” is Spirit. Spirit brings together the micro and the macro, the local and the universal. This paradoxical definition of “concrete universals” entails that the universal be contained within its particular manifestations. However, to achieve this act of unification, Spirit cannot be just consciousness: it must be self-consciousness. Spirit is absolute and universal, but at the same time it is not passive: “It makes itself its own deed, its own work” (1832: 73) and by doing so it becomes self-reflective. Again, Hegel believes that non-Western countries do not have this self-consciousness. It remains strange that racist positions can emerge from this self-reflective Spirit whose formation so much depends on an awareness of the other. Hegel begins with Herderian multiculturalist questions and ends with a peculiar kind of Eurocentrism. He begins with organicism and ends with racism when saying in his lectures on history: “The Negro represents natural man in all his wild and untamed nature. If you want to treat and understand him rightly, you must abstract all elements of respect [Ehrfurcht] and morality and sensitivity – there is nothing remotely humanized in the Negro character” (1832: 93/German: 122). What is much worse is that Hegel’s own curious development of thoughts that moved from openness to closure is reproduced on a larger scale by German philosophy during the first half of the nineteenth century. In the world of German philosophy, the nineteenth century begins with the Schlegel brothers’ interest in Sanskrit studies and an opening of towards the East, and it ends with Schopenhauer’s purely racist statements expressed in Parerga and Paralipomena where the misanthropist thinker writes:

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The highest civilization and culture, apart from the ancient Hindus and Egyptians, are found exclusively among the white races; and even with many dark peoples, the ruling caste, or race, is fairer in color than the rest, and has, therefore, evidently immigrated, for example, the Brahmins, the Inca, and the rulers of the South Sea Islands. All this is due to the fact that necessity is the mother of invention, because those tribes that emigrated early to the north, and there gradually became white, had to develop all their intellectual powers, and invent and perfect all the arts in their struggle with need, want, and misery, which, in their many forms, were brought about by the climate. This they had to do in order to make up for the parsimony of nature, and out of it all came their high civilization. (Schopenhauer 1851: Vol. ii, Section 92) Hegel is racist but the important difference between his cosmopolitan-based racism and self-enclosed racism (of which Schopenhauer’s statement is an example) should never be forgotten. First, Hegel’s universalism is informed by reflections on the other and therefore open to modifications. Second, despite his nationalist agenda, Hegel’s philosophy shows no traces of purism. He never comes off as a philosopher of identity, simplicity, and purity. No matter whether we consider God, the nation, or culture, Hegel remains a philosopher of hybridity, marginality, and difference. Everything is relational, dynamic, and therefore also decentered and open to renewal. In other words, micro and macro are always interdependent, which creates an organic perspective that remains intrinsic to all of Hegel’s philosophy. The micro–macro perspective constantly fractures absolute ideas by using the prism of culture, history, and their concrete embodiments. Such a view does not permit purism. Unfortunately, it does not lead to an affirmation of pluralism either, because that would represent, to Hegel, the dead end of relativism. Still, the absolute Spirit always remains composed of individualities. It does not refer to an absolute truth in a fundamentalist sense. The above argument is confirmed by the fact that Hegel very much criticizes purism in other cultures because he recognizes that they are based on abstract ideas. For example, the Orient has freedom, but this freedom is unrestrained, immediate, and “natural.” Only the West has “ethical freedom.” What does that mean? The West does not only have freedom but is also able to reflect upon the nature of this freedom. The West can understand the state as something universal and rational, and at the same time, it can understand the state as the expression of an organic development of all elements in society. A similar selfreflexive understanding occurs in religion. In Christianity, God is not just a

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power transcending the temporal world, but God is realized through Jesus and the Holy Spirit (1832: 206). This means that God is not just an absolute unity but a self-reflective unity. Jews and Muslims know God “only as the most high, unknowable, and transcendent being” (1830 [Logic]: 214) but do not reflect this God against their own (individual) existence. In Christianity, this self-­reflection does not lead to chaos or a “confused intermixture of finite, and Absolute.” The latter would rather be the particularity of Hinduism, as Hegel explains in the lectures of aesthetics (1835, i: 334–35). The Christian God produces – or is – an organic unity by subduing chaos. Hegel sees Spirit as a cultural phenomenon able to prevent religion from going straightforwardly towards absolute truths. Hegel criticizes “purist,” abstract, decultured religions, which know God only as a pure substance and which reduce him to empty absolutes. There is a strong resemblance between this critique and the most recent critique of fundamentalism that has been formulated by political scientist Olivier Roy (see Chapter 4). When Hegel criticizes that a certain type of religion depicts God as void of all determinate predicates, this is paralleled by Roy’s description of fundamentalism as isolating religion from culture and thinking of itself as autonomous, thus negating the territorial and cultural space in which it is embedded (Roy 2013). For Hegel, the Islamic God is a “purely intellectual object of worship” (Philosophy of History: 357), and he concludes that this abstract, decultured nature of worship makes Muslims fanatical. What he criticizes is that here subject (religious thought and religious culture) and object (God) do not form an organic whole, but that cultural subjectivity is entirely absorbed by the object. I do not believe that Hegel’s appreciations of Islam and Hinduism are correct (they are simplifications), but his general analysis of the emergence of anti-cultural purism is highly instructive in our times. An unmediated striving towards universality leads to purism and fundamentalism. Pure particularity leads to enclosure and a lack of self-reflexivity. Hegel never advocates universality without particularity. M.A.R. Habib concludes: “A person’s character does not exist apart from its expressions in a series of particular actions. Nor, for Hegel, does God or the Absolute idea exist except in its various embodiments in human history. The same is true of reason: it is always embodied in human communities and institutions” (Habib 2017: 147). When Hegel deals with rationality and self-consciousness, he sees both as historical phenomena. Categories are not the same for all people (as Kant still assumed) but they develop within cultures and histories. After his move to Jena, Hegel puts all this in the context of a world philosophy (already announced in his high school speech) supposed to conceptualize the world as a whole.

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Nationalist Philosophies

Until the post-World War ii period, much of European philosophy applied nationalist agendas when working on culture. In the nineteenth century, some thinkers were interested in “philosophical cultures” but did not follow Hegel’s paradoxical and fluid scheme of universal particulars when establishing national identities. They were too micro. In its early days, psychology attempted to indigenize thought and designed special methods leading to the emergence of indigenous psychology and cultural psychology. The latter was also called psychological anthropology (see Wang 2011b: 255). Such scientific models that try to trace the distinctive psychologies of cultures face the danger of generalization. These ethno-psychologists would have been well advised to incorporate Hegel’s reflections on the universal into their interpretations. This is even truer for cases where the ethno-analysis moved into the terrain of philosophy. The early German ethno-psychologist Wilhelm Wundt, (1832–1920) in The Nations and their Philosophies (1915), classifies the philosophies of different nations into groups. From a modern point of view, Wundt’s project manifests various problems. First, the “national philosophies” he chooses for his analysis are limited to Italian, French, English, and German (in this chronological order to reflect the historical development in which philosophies flourished). Here he remains submitted to a nineteenth century paradigm that dominated philosophy and literature. He mentions neither American nor Russian philosophies, nor philosophies of minor European nations, let alone non-Western philosophies, even as the latter should arguably be of interest for an ethno-psychologist. Wundt’s selection even goes against the grain of his own principles. In his ethno-psychological works he dismisses the focus on major nations as the approach of “older folk psychology” whose aim “was a characterization of peoples, and its greatest emphasis was placed on those cultural peoples whose civilization is of particular importance to us – the French, English, Germans, Americans” (Wundt 1916: 1). Beyond the nationalist tendencies to which Wundt’s work is submitted – it was written during World War i and this is particularly apparent in the preface and the final chapter – the book reads almost like a regular introduction to a history of philosophy. The only difference comes in the form of some sentences in the introduction where philosophy is declared to be “the expression of the spiritual character of a people” (iv) able to crystallize the values of a national culture. While this can sound like a valuable ethno-approach, in the end, the descriptions of cultures remain limited to a few mentions of Weltanschauung, moral drives (sittliche Triebe), and popular soul (Volksseele). The English

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have their puritanism and practicality, the Italians have fantasy and affect, and the French have rhetoric and wit. Since the project aims to highlight the achievements of leading philosophers, French philosophy is limited to Descartes. It is, of course, questionable whether Descartes really represents the French Volksseele. An elaboration of La Mettrie, Maine de Biran, or Victor Cousin would definitely have more efficiently captured the character of French philosophy. Wundt refers to his French contemporaries only in a lengthy presentation of Jean-Marie Guyau’s ethics, which interest him as a psychologist. He also mentions the philosopher Alfred Fouillée, author of L’Évolutionnisme des idées-forces (1890). But considerations of Victor Cousin that could have led to Bergson (who had already published five important books by that time) and Bergson’s contemporaries such as Ravaisson, Boutroux, or the emerging Maurice Blondel, are absent though they would have presented a more authentic account of French “philosophical culture.” It is true, the philosophies of the above writers were less influential than Descartes’, but they were original and marked by culture. Wundt’s book is not without wit and he hits the point in many cases, but in the end, he produces a stale version of Hegelianism: German idealism is declared superior for reasons that are partly derived from Fichte’s nationalism. There is another problem with Wundt’s The Nations and their Philosophies. While the national philosophies of big nations he presents may well be inscribed in their respective cultures, in reality, they have always been fleeing from their cultural cradle because their real ambition was to establish general truths (and, in parallel, the superiority of those truths). Their particularism is always a particularism qua universalism. The Renaissance, Descartes, British Empiricism, and German Idealism are no local traditions but come closer to scientific systems that are only very vaguely – if at all – impregnated by local cultures. There is no ambition to use philosophy for the establishment of group identities or communal identities. Between 1800 and World War ii, many “minor” philosophies emerged in European countries, but they would soon manifest the same problems that can be observed in Wundt’s work: they were nationalistic. In the nineteenth century, many philosophies go through phases of national revivalism, like, for example, Polish national philosophy or the already-mentioned Pan-Slavism. In Germany, philosophy began playing an important role in the “nationalization” project of the newly founded nation, too. The above-mentioned “Greek bias” came to be used in an even more consistent (or more ruthless) fashion. Nationalists emphasized links between the ancient Greeks and what they believed to be “German culture,” which would make Germans distinct from Latin peoples. The state created new classics departments with an aim to establish this truth.

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More than ever, philosophy was used for the promotion of cultural particularisms. Tiedemann’s, Tennemann’s, and Meiner’s ideas were rationalized on a political and administrative level. Pan-movements did not eliminate or alter the nationalist-cultural elements flagrant in many “major philosophies” but simply imitated those elements in their own ways. Polish national philosophy is distinguished by its messianic version as it focuses on the special role of Poland and the Polish nation in the world (cf. Wolenski 2012). Once again, we have a conundrum. On the one hand, philosophy has joined local cultures. But on the other hand, like for Hegel and many others, the main purpose of this retrieval of culture is to affirm one’s own superiority. Pan-Slavist thought makes ample use of Herder, and it is no surprise that in the twentieth century Herder’s relativistic writings would be used for similar nationalistic purposes. The Prussian philosopher would be used in Germany to support nationalism during World War ii. The respectable literary scholar Benno von Wiese contributed a chapter to a book entitled The German Element in German Philosophy (Das Deutsche in der deutschen Philosophie, 1942), which was edited by Nazi philosopher and specialist of racial theories Theodor Haering. Von Wiese’s chapter is on Herder, and the author lengthily explains that “language nationalizes knowledge” (“Sprache nationalisiert Erkenntnis”). 5

Provincial Philosophy

Today, nationalist accounts of philosophies have become rare in the Western world, but one thing has not changed since Hegel and Wundt: few people care about non-Western philosophy and equally few care about minor philosophies such as the philosophies of Poland or Slovakia. Philosophy pursues universal truths and those truths are created in a limited number of centers. It has been established above that historically, philosophy always strove for Zivilisation more than for Kultur. Even today it is questionable whether a philosophical argument establishing a truth that is valid only in Japan, but not in England, offers philosophically valuable insights. The worst that can happen to philosophy (probably more than any other academic discipline) is to be called provincial. Universal truths are fabricated by the center, and the center tends to be disrespectful of local culture. Those who refuse to participate in the universal discourse will have to put up with the stigma of provinciality. Provincial philosophers are despised as they have limited knowledge about what happens in the center and have little influence on decisions made in the center. In the best case, they are allowed to apply the fragmentary knowledge that has been

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reached down to them by the center, but they are not supposed to criticize or alter it. “If you are from the center, you should create, for you have the right to do so,” writes the Polish philosopher Leszek Nowak in an illuminating text on provinciality. “If you are from a province, you should know better not to be a smart aleck and [simply] apply what has been created in the center. If you are from the gray area, you can try to improve (but not change!) ‘central theories’” (Nowak: 63). Communication between the province and the center goes one way or does not take place at all. This pattern weakens the province but strengthens the center. For the province, ignorance is a drawback while for the center ignorance about what is going on in the province is a sign of power. This logic can be traced to various sources. Interestingly, Franz Martin Wimmer sees this “expansive centrism” reflected in the Christian gospel: “By ‘expansive centrism’ we understand the idea that the truth about something or the optimum of a certain way of life has already been attained and, therefore, it has to be disseminated everywhere. Such an idea can be read from the Christian gospel” (Wimmer: 56). The provincial will stand for uncivilized, non-functional, conservative, and irrational behavior while in the center, “true faith, definite knowledge, and objective progress reigns supreme. [The periphery is] ruled by paganism and superstition, backwardness and underdevelopment. It is the task of the center to expand and supersede, ultimately, to eliminate everything else. This leads to the imagination of a monologic process, a proclamation of salvation in a religious sense, and of prosperity and happiness in a secular sense” (Wimmer: 57). Pronounced anti-provincialism and anti-localism have a long tradition in philosophy. Philosophical schools – like other schools – rarely wear the name of regions but most often of cities: there are the Milesian School, the Heidelberg School of Neo-Kantianism, the Frankfurt School, the Oxford Calculators, the Prague School, the Moscow-Tartu School… Philosophies cannot be provincial because the provincial exists for itself and is not – or only very loosely – inscribed in a larger civilizational structure. Provincial truths do not necessarily accord with universal rules defined by the center. The provincial is contingent, and contingency has always been the enemy of science. Philosophy is supposed to develop along necessary lines determined by reason; and this reason is defined in the center. The term “provincial” is harsher than the term “local” because it stands for almost absolute insularity and isolation. While local culture can be defended to some extent, nobody will defend provinciality. The provincial philosopher writes in a provincial language and publishes in journals that are not distributed universally. He will probably not have equivalent material resources to pursue his research either. Since the universal takes place in the center, the mere fact of using a local language (and not one

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of the two or three existing universal languages) makes any provincial philosophical work automatically less scientific. The center’s truths are not necessarily more powerful culturally, but they are definitely more functional and more universal. At the same time, culture remains an instrument of empowerment. A province pretending to be culturally strong is a threat as it weakens the universalizing power of the center and potentially inverts power relationships. According to Nowak, provincial philosophers have no right to create. If the province does manage to create, the center will most probably hurry by and claim the invention for itself. Next it will erase the stigma of the provincial. Bruce Janz writes accordingly: “There is a kind of erasure of the source of ideas once they enter into the Great Conversation, it no longer matters whether the ideas originated in Africa or somewhere else. They are now ‘universal’ ideas, and everyone henceforth assumes that their provenance came through the West” (Janz: 13). In the cosmopolitan center, local cultures are overcome or sublated to become generally valid truths. The Internet is supposed to alter this situation, but in reality, it merely reproduces it. First there is the language issue. When you publish in a “provincial” language, even the Internet will not be useful for the promotion of your texts. Second, in google rankings the center still appears at the top of the list while the province is relegated to the where nobody bothers to scroll. While big data processors and algorithms pretend to foster the rights of minorities, in reality, search machines are governed by the “attention attracts attention” principle. As a matter of fact, the Internet has worsened the situation for the province because now there are fewer excuses for being provincial. Also, the stain of provinciality is much more visible than it used to be. In the past, local institutions of learning could be satisfied with a local prestige. Today, they are asked to compete with the whole world, and the loser will be declared provincial. Their provincialism is declared not to be due to geographical coincidences but due to their own faults. This “meritocratic” principle that excludes the province from the center is ancient, and Wallerstein describes it like this: “If particular zones of the world or strata within the system had fewer rewards than other zones or strata, this was because they had not acquired the objective skills that were available to anyone” (Wallerstein: 78). How can this system be criticized? The most radical critique of this state of affairs will declare that the center is merely another province. Logically, when everybody is micro, nobody can be discriminated against. Dipesh Chakrabarty and Molefi Kete Asante are forcing this agenda. Chakrabarty, in his book Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, describes European history as no longer embodying a “universal human history” (Chakrabarty 2000: 1). Instead he sees concepts like “citizenship, the state, civil

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society, public sphere, human rights, equality before the law, the individual, distinctions between public and private, the idea of the subject, democracy, popular sovereignty, social justice, scientific rationality” as merely provincial (4). It was shown in Chapter 5 that Deleuze’s and Guattari’s micro philosophy of the rhizome effectuates a similar provincialization of the universal. Plato, Descartes, and Kant are products of their own prejudices. Chakrabarty is a historian belonging to the movement of “subaltern studies,” which represents a genuine micro approach in historical science and sociology. Subaltern studies attempts to re-interpret colonial experience from the point of view of ordinary people, such as peasants. Instead of excluding them from the modernization (colonialization) process, ordinary people are identified as a vital part of this process (see Ranajit Guha 1983). However, when he states that the West is just another province and that everything is micro, Chakrabarty must be suspected of Occidentalism. Classifying Europe as a marginal zone replicates Orientalism in an inverted format. As mentioned in Chapter 5, Molefi Asante undertakes a similar step, suggesting that knowledge of the early Greek thinkers upon whom “so much of the Western intellectual structure rely – namely Socrates, Plato, Aristotle – creates, among other things, a cultural hierarchy of knowledge that seeks to promote its narcissism as universal” (Asante 2010: 22). According to him, these thinkers are not universal but merely individual-provincial. Again, this is a radical micro interpretation of the history of Western philosophy and therefore an example of Occidentalism. Chakrabarty and Asante want to challenge simple certainties about universalism and thus transform the world system by concentrating on the micro. However, paradoxically, they do so by shifting the analysis from one macro system (Orientalism) to another macro system (­Occidentalism). Formally speaking, the East declaring the West to be provincial is no different from the West declaring the East to be provincial. ­Wallerstein correctly notes that “what we have not yet done is achieve any consensus on, indeed a clear picture of, an alternative framework – one that would permit us all to be non-Orientalists” (44).

Chapter 6

Micro and Macro Philosophy 1

The Micro and Culture

Despite the interest that some of the above organic philosophies could sometimes spark, for mainstream philosophy, micro–macro oriented philosophical approaches remain exotic to most philosophers. One problem is that most of these organic philosophies are strongly linked to specific cultures: they are too micro and lack macro. “Macro over micro” has been the maxim since Plato, but this tendency has become even stronger in the last three centuries. Modernity (until the “postmodern” wave kicked in) leaves the micro behind and concentrates on the universal. Progress, civilization, and rationalization are pure macro movements. Consequently, philosophy is principally a macro narrative, or, as Saranindranath Tagore puts it, global philosophical culture remains a “grand narrative” (S. Tagore: 531). It is true, as mentioned earlier, that local cultures could celebrate their revivals on a regular basis. However, these revivals (such as nineteenth century pan-movements, various poststructuralist philosophies, or ethnophilosophy) were merely counter-movements contradicting the modern macro flow without attempting to convert it into a micro–macro dynamic. Reculturation adds color to the blandness of modern life and perhaps also some sophistication. But in purely modern contexts, reculturation is not supposed to produce new philosophical knowledge. Most philosophy considers micro knowledge inadequate. Truly organic philosophical alternatives are limited. Other disciplines maintained a closer relationship with Greek micro–macro logic. In sociology, the word microcosm is used to identify small groups of individuals whose behavior is typical of a larger social body. The micro–macro concept is also current in architecture and urban planning. The micro level of an urban situation is representative of a cultural entity that is integrated into a more functional, universal structure. Many architects and urban planners deem it necessary to consider both the micro and the macro. The science in which the micro–macro discourse has survived best is economics. Macroeconomics is the study of the economic system as a whole while micro economics studies the economic behavior of individuals or small groups. By establishing relationships between micro and macro, the micro/macro analysis discovers the same patterns reproduced on all levels, from the largest to the smallest scale. Inflation is a national macro phenomenon, but it also raises the prices of individual goods and thus

© Thorsten Botz-Bornstein, ���1 | doi:10.1163/9789004440425_008

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has an effect on individuals and businesses. The micro/macro scheme in economics follows the ancient Greek interpretation of microcosm and macrocosm as organisms reflecting each other. Referring to the micro makes sense only as long as one also refers to the macro and vice versa. Not only must micro and macro be coordinated, but they must also be understood as organisms that correspond with each other. This pattern reflects the general economic sphere. Occasionally, modernity does criticize the macro, especially when it has become decadent, such as when it no longer works in the service of knowledge and civilization, and instead leads to non-knowledge and the decline of civilization. “McDonaldization,” as analyzed by George Ritzer (1993), is the most outstanding symbol of such a “bad” macro in commercial culture. But most of the time, even in these cases, the alternative suggested will not be some form of organic thinking. What is put forward tends to be either a pure micro approach or a new macro structure. Most revolutions move from macro to macro. Communism criticized capitalism, but not in order to convert it into a micro– macro movement, but rather to replace capitalism with an even more rigid macro structure. Leftist movements countered imperialism with proletarian internationalism or with mechanical forms of “cosmopolitanism.” Another possibility is to suggest a micro plan that is equally purist. Religious fundamentalism represents such a purist affirmation of micro cultures. Benjamin Barber’s “Jihad vs. McWorld” pattern vividly describes the clash of micro versus macro. A locally oriented “jihad” clashes with a busily expanding and universalizing “McWorld” capitalism. The micro and the macro are unable to form organic relationships. The micro–macro way of thinking avoids clashes in the style of “Jihad vs. McWorld.” It never designates a province but will rather use the word “periphery.” A periphery is always the periphery of a center whereas the province can exist on its own. The province is provincial simply because it exists in isolation from the center. The province is a micro that has lost all contact with the macro. There are several reasons to suggest that philosophy should shift its inveterate center-province template towards a more organic micro–macro template. The first reason is that the micro aspect contains culture – at the very least, it contains more culture than the universal, whose aim has always been to overcome individual cultures. Considering the micro goes against the grain of modernity. Modernity finds micro time and micro space inadequate because it deems that time and space ought not be cultural but instead needs to be functional and rational. Rationalization contradicts the micro–macro dynamic. The lack of a micro–macro dynamic becomes most obvious in the modern obsession with algorithms.

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­ lgorithms are dynamic functions that can appear organic because they comA pute big data composed of small data that influence each other. Individual acts are quantified and used to influence other individual acts. In some ways, algorithms replicate the idea of a living system similar to the Greek cosmos. Microdata float inside a huge data macrocosm. However, algorithms only simulate life and culture, they are not real life but merely artificial reproductions of life. The computer engineer has taken the position of Plato’s demiurge as he creates a living and intelligent universe able to function on its own. The universe (the computer program) is an artificial construction whereas the cosmos is living. The program is static and engineered: it is a machine. Plato’s rationalism (by which Western civilization is permeated) has found a strange way of incorporating an organic model into a purely rational, mechanic structure. It has integrated an “organic” pattern into an artificial reality that follows the rules of rational formalisms. The algorithm is a typical case of the mco (machine conception of organism) and, since Darwin, it even dominates biology. According to Dennett, “Darwin had discovered the power of an algorithm. An algorithm is a certain sort of formal process that can be counted on – logically – to yield a certain sort of result whenever it is ‘run’ or instantiated” (Dennett: 50). 2

Organic Traditions

In this book, I suggest rethinking the universal-local relationship by referring to the concept of the micro–macro that emerged in Antiquity. In ancient Greek philosophy, macrocosm and microcosm provided meaningful insights to the relationship between the universal order and the small order. The big and the small, the major and the minor were seen as linked through organic relationships. The small order was always the order of the human. Huntington Cairns explains, in his introduction to Plato’s Collected Dialogues (1961) how the ancient Greeks believed “that Reason, the logos, is nature steering all things from within. In this approach nature is neither supernatural nor material; it is an organic whole, and man is not outside nature but within it” (Cairns: xxi).1 The Greek view is that the world is orderly and alive. Francis Cornford has shown in his From Religion to Philosophy that the tendency to view the world as a ­living thing is rooted in the early Greek notion of nature; physis is closer in meaning to ‘life’ than to ‘matter’. In this sense, nature has a vitalist aspect: 1 George Conger in his Theories of Macrocosms and Microcosms (1922) gives a good overview of organic philosophy in Antiquity.

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Statically conceived, Nature means the system of all phenomena in time and space, the total of all existing things; and the ‘nature’ of a thing is its constitution, structure, essence. But it has never lost its other, dynamic, side – the connotation of force, of primordial, active, upspringing e­ nergy – a sense which, as a derivation shows, is original. (Cornford 1965: 73) The root of this thinking is thus vitalism, but it muted into organism. The ­pseudo-scientific vitalist ontology assuming mysterious forces is not maintained as such, but the emphasis is put on the system that remains living because of the energy it receives from nature. We can also observe explicit micro–macro patterns in pre-Socratic (or prePlatonic) thinkers such as Heraclitus, Anaxagoras, and Empedocles. For the pre-Socratics, the all-symbolizing One was most often nature; for Thales the unity was water, and for Anaximenes it was air. Via thoughts on nature, these philosophers delivered often fascinating accounts of micro–macro relationships through which they attempted to explain the cosmos. Their explanations could be scientific, rhetorical, or metaphoric. The first Greek attempts at exploring the cosmos scientifically and philosophically operate with the analogy of the micro and the macro: if two things have certain properties in common on a small scale, then they might also have those same properties on a cosmic scale. Very common is the analogy of the human soul and the cosmos. According to Giannis Stamatellos, “analogy is a pattern of thought that underlies the first attempts for an explanation of the cosmos” (Stamatellos: 181), which is why Thales’ and Anaximenes’ thoughts represent the “first incidences of inductive reasoning” (182). Much of what later philosophy would classify as “preSocratic materialism” had actually been drafted in the form of micro–macro analogies. The Western reflex to classify such analogies as materialism shows, once more, its incapacity to appreciate organicism. It is dominated by the mco. How could those Greek thinkers who believed matter to be alive be materialists? Richard McDonough explains that “Anaximenes did not hold that air is the basis of all things in the same sense, or for the same reasons, that a modern materialist might hold such a view. He views air as breath and sees air as the basis of all things because he sees the world as a living thing and therefore wants it to breath.”2 The same goes for Heraclitus who, “by stressing that fire is the basis of all things, did not mean that fire is the material out of which all

2 McDonough (2010) establishes this with reference to Robinson 1968, Robin 1996, and Cornford 1966.

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things are made. His fire is an ‘ever living’ fire” (McDonough 2010). Fire symbolized change and the fact that everything is in constant flux. Pythagoras, who exerted a great influence on Plato, also saw the world as a breathing living being, and in Pythagoras’ thought we find strong micro–macro patterns. For example, Pythagoras’ definition of music is based on a micro–macro analogy as “terrestrial music is seen as a reflection of its heavenly counterpart at the micro level” (Nosko-Koivisto: 267). Inka Nosko-Koivisto explains that “in Pythagorean thought, music is understood as a part of the hierarchical cosmos, which is based on analogy. Thus, music is a reflection of its heavenly counterpart. Pythagoreans assumed that motions of the celestial bodies produced melodies, while terrestrial music produced by man-made instruments was thought to imitate this heavenly music” (256). Heraclitus’ sentence, “It is wise to listen, not to me but to the Word, and to confess that all things are one” (Heraclitus: 471), published as a fragment in his “On the Universe,” suggests an organic view of the world approaching the limits of logical thinking. How can all be one? Heraclitus moves away from dualistic systems of thought (from an either micro or macro) without landing in simple macro monism. In modern terms we can say that he does not erase difference but rather challenges us to think something prior to both identity and difference. Modern biological theory uses Heraclitus’ stream of life (stm) ontology to combat the prevalent mco paradigms. Organic life should be understood as a flowing stream and not as a machine. More precisely, “in machines there is a specific ‘inflow’ and a specific ‘outflow’. In organisms everything flows” (Nicholson 2018: 146). Constant change is held together by a stable macro system determined by changing micro elements. In general, Western philosophy did not adopt the Heraclitean doctrine of universal flux, and instead chose its antithesis suggested by another set of preSocratics: Leucippus and Democritus. Their atomism describing indivisible and unchanging material micro elements provided the basis for western substance metaphysics. 2.1 Plato’s Cosmology Plato is certainly not the first person who comes to mind when thinking about organicism. However, a certain aspect of his philosophy does yield insights into micro–macro thinking. Though considered marginal by Western philosophical tradition, Plato’s ideas in the Timaeus reflect a general cultural paradigm that was current in Greece, – described by both Cornford and Cairns above – by which Plato was affected to some extent. Plato presents an organicist cosmology in the Timaeus, and other developments of organic thought occur in the Philebus, the Statesman, and the Laws. In these texts, Plato depicts

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an organic universe endowed with a stable structure and an intrinsic value. According to Carone, “the Laws can be seen as the culmination of the story about the relation of humans to the cosmos that started at least with the Timaeus” (Carone 2005: 22). In the Philebus (28d–30d), Plato distinguishes ­between an elemental body and a rational soul and notes that both human beings and the universe are submitted to this dual aspect: “Fire, for instance, exists in us and also in the universe,” and all living beings “derive nourishment and all that from the universal fire” (Philebus 29c). Inspired by philosophers like Anaxagoras, Plato concludes that the body is composed of the same elements as the universe (29e) and that, finally, the universe is ruled by mind (30d). Through its connection with the individual, the universe is not merely a static system but an intelligent organism. Organicism is the position that the universal is not static and abstract but orderly and alive and “living” because it is animated by minor elements. In this sense, according to Plato, the demiurge creates a living and intelligent universe. In the Timaeus, Plato outlines a “supreme originating principle of Becoming and the Cosmos” (29e) and concludes that the Cosmos “resembles most closely that Living Creature of which all other living creatures, severally and generically, are portions” (30c). The structure of the human being parallels that of the universe, which is how God “brought it into order out of disorder” (30a). Few philosophers have been interested in Plato’s cosmology; the focus in modern scholarship has always been on Plato’s ethics. Philosophy neglected Plato’s organic system and turned its interest towards Plato’s Theory of Forms, which describes the world not in terms of an organism but in terms of hierarchically ordered abstract concepts. Micro- and macrocosm were linked to “mystery and magic in Greek and Greco-Roman philosophy” and to “speculations similar to Babylon and Egypt” (Conger: 24). When Whitehead suggested in his 1927 Gifford Lectures (republished in Whitehead 1978) that Plato’s philosophy is akin to a philosophy of organism, this was highly unusual. The idea was difficult to accept for several reasons. First, assumptions about a “living” cosmos are highly extravagant. A dynamic cosmos is alien to modern thought. Equally extravagant is the link between ethics and astronomy. French scientific cosmology could not be repeated in the twentieth century. Third, it is not clear that Plato really speaks in his own voice in Timaeus. It is possible that he presents the organicist cosmology as a probable story or as a myth about humans living at the center of a perfect cosmic organism in whose image they have been created. The distinction between mythos (which is originally related to the gods) and logos (reasoned speech) is essential for the definition of philosophy, and Plato’s potential myth needs to be regarded with suspicion. Fourth,

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the organic worldview expressed in Plato’s late cosmological work conflicts with Plato’s earlier utopian and elitist writings on politics, in which the ­development of culture and science is presented in a hierarchical fashion as a development from lower to higher. How can the relativism expressed in Timaeus be integrated into Plato’s overall thinking? A.E. Taylor writes in his A Commentary on Plato’s Timaeus (1928) that “it is a mistake to look in the Timaeus for any revelation of the distinctively Platonic doctrines” but that the Timeaus is Plato’s exposition of the thought of an imaginary “fifth-century Italian Pythagorean who was also a medical man, that it is, in fact, a deliberate attempt to amalgamate Pythagorean religion and mathematics with Empedoclean biology.” Plato would have presented all this for didactic reasons and “it does not follow that any theory propounded by Timaeus would have been accepted by Plato as it stands” (Taylor 1928: 18–19; see also Cornford 1935: vi-vii). Taylor recognizes that the organic-cosmological position is indirectly historically connected to Plato’s own position; but it does not simply reflect his own philosophy. I do not agree with Taylor’s interpretation. Some scholars attempted to steer a middle course suggesting that “organic” does not necessarily negate any superior “Platonic” principle. They found that though the Timaeus describes the world (cosmos) as a created living being, it is still possible to see the organic world as created by a demiurge following an eternal pattern (for a list of those scholars see McDonough 2010), and this eternal pattern can even be compatible with Plato’s Forms. The problem is reminiscent of what some creationists do with evolution (see Chapter 3). When a micro order is found too random because it is not guided by a superior principle, organic development is equipped with a divine plan. When the existence of a pre-determined macro order is denied natural selection becomes the great watchmaker. These are attempts to bring together God and evolution. Similarly, it is possible to argue that the demiurge creates the universe “not ex nihilo, but from a preexisting state of disorder, trying to make his product resemble the eternal model of the Forms” (Carone: 29). According to Cornford, Plato supports these ideas: “That the world should have a body without a soul is as impossible as that it should have a soul without a body” (Cornford 1935: 59). The difference with creationism is that in Plato’s philosophy the superior intelligence is not God. It is not an external agent but an internal agent, which is compatible with the philosophy of organicism. The demiurge is seen as a sort of nous (intellect), which leads to the conclusion that “god is not separate from the universe, but tantamount to the world-soul” (Carone: 43). God represents the essential feature of rationality, but it is not the rationality of a designer but rather the rationality of the universe itself. This rationality is changing and submitted to organic development.

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This organic world view does not contradict Plato’s own rationalism by equating reason with God. Instead it makes perfectly reasonable statements about relationships between individual acts and large-scale organization. The life of reason runs in parallel with the life of the macrocosm, which is ruled by intellect. This is not irrational but simply suggests an organic form of rationality. Carone writes: Plato is making a point about the large-scale effects of human actions within an interconnected universe where whatever happens to a part affects the whole. Precisely because the universe is organic, the apparently narrow effects of human actions have in fact repercussions throughout the whole system, and for this reason humans are allotted responsibility in the administration of the entire universe. (Carone: 22) In spite of this rational potential, Plato’s organicism was not successful. Especially modern philosophy opted against the organic form of rationality and favored Plato’s abstract approach based on the Theory of Forms. The Forms represent a perfect, eternal, unchanging world of universals. Particulars are finite, imperfect, and, in an obscure way, less real than the universals. This is the usual understanding of Plato’s Theory of Forms. The abstract and universal macro rules over the concrete and individual micro. A reevaluation of Plato’s organicism could arguably have changed the course of Western civilization. Instead, and very curiously, talk about unity, about “total” visions of man, or about an interrelated vision of the cosmos tend to be understood as the opposite of organic. On the basis of such misinterpretations, the organic would quickly be relegated to the inventory of pseudo-philosophies and New Age cults, or, much worse, to totalitarian politics. Whitehead is practically the only philosopher who, in his Process and Reality, has attempted to revamp Western philosophy in terms of his organicist outlook.3 As the vision of an animated universe was incompatible with any form of materialism, organic thought was relegated to the opposite end of the scale: to pantheism. This happened mainly during Romanticism. Materialism and empiricism proceed from macro to micro whereas pantheism proceeds from micro to macro. This becomes particularly clear in the analyses and criticisms of pantheism delivered by the Romantic philosopher Friedrich Schlegel. After

3 It needs to be said that Whitehead’s organicism is idiosyncratic, which is the reason why many Western philosophers assume that organicism just is committed to strange ways of thinking.

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acting as a propagator of pantheism for many years, Schlegel turns, apparently under the influence of his studies of the orient, into pantheism’s fiercest critic (see Messlin: 267). In his lectures entitled “Critique of Philosophical Systems” (published in 1836), Schlegel attacks pantheism by linking it to realism. In a special section devoted to the fallacies of realism, Schlegel defines pantheism indeed as realist. To be on the safe side, he also defines realism as pantheistic and concludes that both realism and pantheism are “dangerous ways of thinking” (196). Similar to what Hegel would lecture in precisely the same year about Hinduism in his classes on aesthetics, Schlegel criticizes the fact that in pantheism “the difference between God [Gottheit] and the world or nature are entirely abolished [aufgehoben]” (197). And what example does he pick to illustrate his claim? Schlegel does not criticize Hinduism, as Hegel does, but criticizes the pre-Socratics. The Eleatic school of philosophy (Xenophanes, Parmenides and Zeno) is realist-pantheist because it denies the existence of space and movement. Furthermore, both realism and pantheism are fatalistic. However, Schlegel also condemns “some religious sects, especially those found among Asian nations” who “adhere to pantheism, and some of which practice the acutest form of pantheism” (197–98, my trans.). Still in parallel with Hegel, Schlegel criticizes the purity in Oriental thinking that acknowledges only infinity. This way of thinking is the opposite of empiricism, which is why pantheism tends to appear more often in the form of a religion and not as a philosophy. Schlegel expressed what would later become a dominant paradigm in Western philosophy: organic models suggesting unity as well as “total” visions of man and the cosmos are incompatible with rationalism and empiricism. Schlegel classified these organic ways of thinking as religion and pantheism. By doing this, he sparked an “anti-totality” development that would much later culminate in analytic philosophy. More precisely, those same thoughts would resurface in Russell’s writings on the mischiefs brought about by organist views that cannot be reduced to chemistry and physics, and therefore represents “a barrier to scientific progress.” According to Russell, scientific progress can best be made “by analysis and artificial isolation” (Russell 1948: 34–36). In his Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits he criticizes the “organic view,” which suggests that “the way in which the eye deals with radiant energy cannot be understood without taking account of the rest of the body, and of the body as a single whole.” Russell defends the mechanistic view [which] holds that, if an eye is separated from its body, but preserves its structure and chemical constitution, and is provided with artificial nerves to drain away the impulses received from incident light, it will behave as it would if it were still in its proper place.” Such

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“experiments are becoming possible; for instance, frogs’ hearts can be kept beating after being extracted from the frogs. (Russell 1948: 36) This philosophy is based on the firm belief that empiricism and atomism are more suitable for scientific developments. A further “advantage” is that they are more compatible with the mco. Apart from that, such interpretations of the organic are reductive as they do not do justice to the more sophisticated cosmological model suggested by the pre-Socratics and by Plato in the Timaeus. 2.2 Herder’s Cosmology Some philosophers decided to follow Plato’s cosmological pattern. Much has already been said earlier about Herder, but it is useful to revisit him here once more to examine his original ideas on cosmology and the organic. Herder is one of the few philosophers to openly admit that organicism is attractive. In his earlier piece called Yet another Philosophy of History, Herder applies organicism to the concept of history. He dismantles progressive ideas of history and suggests an organic development of époques, all of which should be considered equal and none of which can be evaluated by using outside criteria. Ten years later, in the first volume of his Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man, Herder becomes more outspokenly organic and depicts history as an event following the rules of nature. Though the book’s subject is the philosophy of history, Herder provides a theory of history’s foundation via a vast discourse on the philosophy of nature. He emphasizes the place of the earth within the universe, which makes earthly phenomena dependent on larger constellations. The coherence of the totality is provided by “God’s celestial harmony” (1784: 17), which means that humans are organically united with the cosmos. It is true that similar ideas would become current a little later in France, mainly propagated by the writings of Laplace (Exposition du système du monde, 1813) and Fourrier (Théorie de l’unité universelle, 1822–23). However, as mentioned in Chapter 3, the latter works were written in an Enlightenment spirit and attempted to construe the universe in a purely mechanical fashion. They were not organic but rather indebted to the mco, which is why there is no contact between them and Herder. Herder’s approach can appear to be a reverse version of the Cartesian mco method. Descartes, too, wanted to bring together the animate and the inanimate (the natural and the artificial) under a single set of explanatory principles, but he did so by using a mechanistic metaphysics. Therefore, Descartes’ natural-philosophical project represents the mirror image of Herder’s philosophy of nature. Herder depicts history as an event following the rules of nature,

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but he does not merely impose the rules of the animate on the inanimate. Instead, he attempts to deconstruct the rigid rules separating the animate from the inanimate. Herder’s views need to be placed in the context of an emerging Romanticism, which refused to accept Kant’s “atomism,” that is, Kant’s division of the world into the tiniest elements. Kant’s “Copernican revolution” implies that a priori elements do not exist in the real world but are “put into it” by the human mind. As a result, nature becomes “blind material.” In the preface to the second edition to the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant suggests that nature is “blind material” that can be discovered as nature only through the intellect (Verstand) (Kant 1911: 23). The elements of nature are independent atoms not held together by any larger structure other than the one produced by the human intellect. In this way, Kant’s “Copernican Revolution” reinforces the Cartesian mco vision of living matter. The clash with Romanticism is due to these constellations. Romanticism, which attempted to see nature as the mirror of a humancentered cosmos, could not accept Kant’s anti-organic views. The most famous philosopher to criticize the overwhelming sceptic from Königsberg on this point is the idealist Friedrich Schelling. In his writings on the philosophy of nature (1794–98), Schelling, who was twenty-nine years younger than Herder, takes fault with Kant’s anti-organicism. As Herder speculated about cosmic connections and “God’s celestial harmony,” Schelling tried to re-establish nature as an organic quantity or even as a manifestation of spirit (Schelling 1967: 336). This project would last a lifetime. In his later writings on aesthetics, Schelling explains that nature is not just blind material, but that it has its particular kind of reason (Naturvernunft) and is able to organize itself (Schelling 1982: 6). Schelling calls this process of organization “evolution” (Schelling 1967: 336; see also Botz-Bornstein 2012), and also uses the terms Einheit (unity) Allheit (all-unity).4 Kant, in his long review of Herder’s Outlines, accepts Herder’s organicism to some extent and even derives from this philosophy some benefits for morality. 4 Schelling’s criticism of Kant’s mechanistic cosmology clashes with other Kantian ideas that oppose materialism and mechanism, especially in his views of human cognition. According to McDonough and others, Kant “sees cognition as akin to an emergent phenomenon in a sense traditionally opposed to mechanism.” Fichte and Hegel, but also Schelling, developed emergence-like views out of Kant, and the transformation of Kant’s views into a more materialistic and mechanistic form was initiated later, fueled by anti-idealistic ambitions, by the German physician Hermann von Helmholz (McDonough 2014: 45). See also Kauffman and Clayton who analyze “Kant’s idea of a formative self-propagating organization communicated by the whole to the parts” and apply this to biological systems (Kaufman and Clayton: 509).

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Since the organically determined human has to look upwards towards the sky, they have to “walk upright” (Kant’s famous “aufrechter Gang”). Vision becomes more important than earthly smell, which means that humans can develop a higher sense of aesthetics (Kant 1785: 49). However, in the rest of the review, Kant is highly critical of his former student’s ideas. First, he criticizes Herder’s mysticism, which he calls “metaphysics,” a critique that goes right to the heart of Herder’s organic philosophy. Herder claims to avoid metaphysics and to explore the spiritual, cultures, and the human soul from the angle of nature, that is, through the natural sciences. Kant’s main objection is that the organizing principle of nature, which Herder takes for granted, is simply not visible and measurable in the realm in which Herder pretends to find it. Therefore Herder’s approach is situated in the realm of metaphysics and not of the natural sciences: “What can be thought of a hypothesis that attempts to explain invisible forces that lead to an organization that cannot be grasped, and attempts to explain them through something that can be grasped even less?” (53, my trans.).5 Rather polemically, Kant suggests that Herder officially refuses metaphysics because he wants to appear fashionable, but that in reality, he is practicing a very dogmatic kind of metaphysics as well as speculative philosophy. According to Kant, Herder’s approach is entirely detached from the observation of nature (54) and therefore not scientific. Kant could have taken a conciliatory view and state that Herder talks about the cosmos in a cultural way and not really from the point of view of the natural sciences when, for example, dismantling progressive ideas of history and suggesting an organic development of époques. However, by doing this, he would have reinstated the distinction of the human sciences and the natural sciences that Herder wanted to avoid. Did Kant grasp Herder’s main idea? Herder’s aim is not to invert the mco but to deconstruct the distinction between nature and culture to design a truly organic approach. The idea is neither to naturalize civilization nor to describe nature in terms of civilization but to describe the culture-cosmos in an organic way. This project is relatively new. Panofsky points out that since the Renaissance there have always been two kinds of cosmology: “While science endeavors to transform the chaotic variety of natural phenomena into what may be called a cosmos of nature, the humanities endeavor to transform the chaotic variety of human records into what may be called a cosmos of culture” (Panofsky 1955: 6). For Herder both approaches are inadequate. The distinction between nature and culture – or 5 “Allein was soll man überhaupt von der Hypothese unsichtbarer, die Organisation bewirkender Kräfte, mithin von dem Anschlage, das, was man nicht begreift, aus demjenigen erklären zu wollen, was man noch weniger begreift, denken?”

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between the natural and the artificial – is the first condition of materialism, which needs to be deconstructed if we want to interpret “the World” organically. Correspondingly, in the Outlines, Herder writes that he wants to tear down the walls between the material and the immaterial (1784: 193) as well as between nature and civilization: “I am not sure that I know what ‘material’ and ‘immaterial’ mean. I do not believe that nature erected iron walls between these terms (…). I cannot see them anywhere” (193). Finally, and this was certainly the most difficult to accept for Kant, Herder also wants to draw down the walls between natural morality and non-natural morality. This is a very radical anti-Kantian claim, which Isiah Berlin has commented on in his book on Herder: Kant drew a sharp line of division between, on the one hand, individual morality, universal, absolute, free from internal conflict, based on a transcendent rationality wholly unconnected with nature and history and empirical reality, and, on the other, the disharmonies of the processes of nature, the aim of which was the preservation of the species, and the promotion of progress by competition and strife. Herder would have none of this. He found such dualism totally unintelligible. (Berlin: 232) Herder’s philosophy of history (or of nature) was not successful, at least not directly. But his philosophy of culture had more impact. His vision of local cultures as parts of an organic system (a vision he expresses in the same book in the chapter on the Slavs) ties into this organic philosophy of history. As has been shown above, it became important for the definition of several local philosophies. Every culture contains a divine essence and functions within a larger system. Every culture symbolizes the whole of mankind. 2.3 Arthur Koestler Though not a scientist but a novelist and a popularizer of scientific theories, Koester set himself the ambitious task of designing a universal organic theory supporting the existence of open systems. His theory of the “holon” is derived from biology, and especially from Bertalanffy’s ideas about dynamic equilibrium (see Koestler: 198). Koestler insists on arguments that have most recently become relevant in biological theory over the course of the twenty-first century as it is taking an organic turn. The holon refers simultaneously to a whole and a part because, as Koestler explains in The Ghost in the Machine, “wholes and parts in this absolute sense do not exist” (48). Koestler evokes the “Janus symbol of the dichotomy between partness and wholeness” (58). His entire book can be read as a popular outline of twentieth century organic theory.

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Pertinently, it can also be read as an anti-mco manifesto when he writes: “Organisms are not patchworks with one gene controlling each of the patches. They are integrated wholes, whose development is controlled by the entire set of genes acting co-operatively” (124). What is a holon? In nature, central points (nodes) “behave partly as wholes or wholly as parts, according to the way you look at them” (48). Therefore, such nodes are holons: “Every living holon has the dual tendency to preserve and assert its individuality, such as it is, but at the same time to function as an integrated part of an existing whole, or an evolving whole” (201). Koestler supports the idea that “organisms, in contrast to machines, [are] primarily active instead of being merely reactive, [and] that instead of passively adopting to their environment they [are] ‘creative’ in the sense that new patterns of structure and behavior are constantly fabricated” (198). Koestler acknowledges that in the twentieth century, these ideas were “not greeted with much enthusiasm” but were “profoundly distasteful to the Zeitgeist” (198). While the mco was “dizzy with its own success” (xii), open systems capable of maintaining themselves indefinitely in a state of dynamic equilibrium were disdainfully identified as “perpetual-motion-machines” (198). Koestler’s theory of the holon is not merely biological. It is also a social theory because in society, system-directed collective activities are potentially open to change and free choice. Individuals do not exist. Important for Koestler is the concept of hierarchy. An organism, no matter whether biological or social, “is not a mosaic aggregate of elementary physico-chemical processes, but a hierarchy” (64). Koestler’s insistence on hierarchy within diversity is interesting as it very much contrasts with contemporary liberal thought that is committed to diversity and equality and eager to deconstruct hierarchies. For Nussbaum (see Chapter 1) it is of utmost importance that in a social system all “differences will be nonhierarchically understood.” Her democratic version of cosmopolitanism knows no hierarchies because “the crucial question for a world citizen is how to promote diversity without hierarchy” (Nussbaum 1996: 138). Pure micro philosophies refuse hierarchies: be it those contained in Plato’s Theory of Forms, metaphysically established linear structures, or social strata. For Koestler, societies have hierarchic systems that are “not aggregations of elementary bits but are composed of sub-wholes branching into sub-­subwholes” (41). However, the hierarchic system is not static but organic. Koestler advances his idea of a “body social” in which “each of its sub-divisions should operate as an autonomous, self-reliant unit which, though subject to control from above, must have a degree of independence and take routine ­contingencies in its stride, without asking higher authority for instructions” (51). Within such

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a hierarchic system, human experience is not one-dimensional but “multiple, interlocking hierarchies of perception (…) provide the multi-dimensionality or multi-coloration of experience” (84). Whereas behaviorism considers static patterns of action, Koestler moves towards the aesthetic by concentrating on habit and style: “Habits are behavioral holons, governed by rules which mostly operate unconsciously. Taken together, they constitute what we call personality or style” (76). Another one of Koester’s anti-concepts is ‘atomism’ because it treats wholes and parts as absolutes. Against this, Koestler develops the organic view of a “hierarchic scaffolding of intermediate structures of sub-wholes” (49). All formal theories are attributed to “the intolerance of scientific orthodoxies and of artistic cliques, [they] all testify to the tendency to build closed systems centered on some part-truth and to assert its absolute validity” (232). Though Koestler’s main enemy is behaviorism, his attacks could as well be directed against Neo-Darwinism. Koestler pushes his contemporaries to embrace a more pluralistic understanding of evolution in order to practice a “true science of life” and not “the antiquated slot-machine model based on the naively mechanistic world-view of the n ­ ineteenth century” (xiii). “The genetic code is not an architect’s blueprint; the gene-complex and its internal environment form a remarkably stable, close-knit, self-regulating micro hierarchy; and mutated genes in any of its holons are liable to cause corresponding reactions in others, co-ordinated by higher levels” (134). When he attacks the “image of man as that of a conditioned self-automaton produced by chance mutations,” he seems to join philosophers of the twenty-first century who attack the Neo-Darwinian view of natural selection. 2.4 Niklas Luhmann A theory related to the concept of social holons is that of autopoiesis, which is the central theme in the work of the German sociologist and philosopher Niklas Luhmann. Though Luhmann worked on social themes, the compatibility of his theories with those derived from biology is obvious. Luhmann’s systems theory is another interesting example of organicism as it describes social systems as self-generating, self-reproducing, “autopoietic” entities (1984: 11; 1995: 55). Social systems are seen in terms of events, communication, environment, and interaction: “Systems steer themselves, and the political system can, strictly speaking, only steer itself. It can ‘irritate’ or ‘perturb’ other systems, but it has no immediate causal power over other systems” (Moeller on Luhmann, Moeller 2011: 24). In Luhmann’s vision of societies, there is no overarching unity but there are only distinctions and differences. Nevertheless, the entire picture can still be seen as a system. The starting point of Luhmann’s theory is a criticism

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of universalizing tendencies in Western philosophy that, to him, are flagrant, at least since the Enlightenment: The universal was conceived as pure, free of risk and in no need of ­compensation – and this in spite of all the counterevidence the French Revolution offered. The universal could appear with a claim to realization. Spirit or matter would have to take the long route of realizing the ­universal in the particular. (…) In fact, the intellectual gesture has not really been replaced; it has merely gone limp [erschlafft]. Moreover, it is hard to see how one could surpass an effort of this type. (Luhmann: 6/German: 21) Luhmann creates a theoretical tool that he summarizes as a theory of organisms able to house thermodynamics as well as the theory of evolution (7/22). This approach is reminiscent of Bertalanffy’s General Systems Theory as well as of new theories that are gaining importance in biology at present (see Chapter 2). Once organisms are not seen as mere survival machines but as active players within the selection process of genes, a “Developmental Systems Theory” (Nicholson: 350) emerges in biology. Just like Luhmann’s social theory, this biological theory understands evolution as an “autopoietic” phenomenon (Nicholson 2018: 154) because it believes that organisms “do not arise spontaneously but instead derive from previous organisms, and [that] their structure reflects the gradual consolidation, through the eons of evolution” (152). The fact that the name “Systems Theory” is used by both these new biologists and by Luhmann deserves some consideration. Let us first look at biology. In nature, genes do not directly control development processes but are controlled by developmental processes manifest in environments. This idea, which has always existed in biology, was not prominent in the twentieth century. Biology was dominated by genetics (a micro approach) or macro patterns (macro evolutions). By using either one or the other, biology was unable to account for the micro–macro dynamic animating living phenomena. Some attempts were made. Claude Bernard’s concept of the milieu intérieur, developed around 1865 (see Bernard 1957), was organic. The milieu intérieur “endows organisms with an internally defined identity” and “enables them to act on their own behalf by compensating against external perturbations in order to ensure their continued existence” (Nicholson: 355). However, such perspectives faded very quickly in the twentieth century. “Developmental Systems Theory” picks up the old nineteenth century thread. Luhmann uses a similar “biological” approach for his analysis of social ­phenomena. Habermas calls Luhmann’s theory “meta-biological” because it “starts from the ‘for itself’ [Für-sich] of organic life and goes behind it – the

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cybernetically described, basic phenomenon of the self-maintenance of selfrelating systems in the face of hypercomplex environments” (Habermas 1990: 372/German: 430). Habermas calls Luhmann’s Systems Theory meta-biological and not biological. Earlier, in his essay “Philosophische Anthropologie,” Habermas contrasted the anthropological approach of his teacher Erich Rothacker with the “biologically oriented” approach of Arnold Gehlen (Habermas 1973). Both Rothacker and Gehlen were followers of Helmut Plessner and developed the latter’s anthropological thoughts into an Allgemeine vergleichende Menschheitslehre (“General Comparative Science of Mankinds”). However, Gehlen used positive biological notions whereas Rothacker didn’t. Luhmann’s theory is thus not positivistic (biological) but “meta-biological.” A system is always influenced by other systems, as no system subsists in isolation. That said, no system is steered by universal macro structures either. This distinguishes Luhmann’s theory from those philosophies that most prominently determined the “Western” way of thinking. Luhmann specialist HansGeorg Moeller writes about Western political philosophy: “Many ‘mainstream’ theoreticians in the tradition of the Western Enlightenment, from Kant to Habermas, used to assume that politics and political institutions are the instruments by which people or human beings can control, steer, or guide society. One may trace this tradition back to Plato’s Republic” (Moeller: 25). However, the system of “the other” can only be understood vis-à-vis my own system, which means that any relationship with the other must go through self-­ awareness: “Systems cannot relate to anything else without relating to themselves and reflexively asserting themselves” (Habermas: 369/427). In other words, there is no universal truth but only an interplay of micro and macro. Systems theory rejects any conception of a perfect, eternal, unchanging world of universals (Platonic Forms) and instead concentrates on the interplay of ­finite and imperfect particulars. In economics this means that the economy cannot be planned but that it evolves. Moeller holds that while Hegel’s metaphysics attempted to transform contingency into necessity, Luhmann’s theory transforms necessity into contingency (Moeller: xi). This makes systems theory organic, if we define organicism as a theory considering intelligent constellations animated by minor elements. In societies, these minor elements are often cultural. The consideration of the other (or of the self through the other) emphasizes contingency. Luhmann’s systems approach goes against the grain of science as it is most commonly understood: normally science is supposed to create systems in order to spell out facts in terms of necessity. As mentioned earlier, anthropology, from Montaigne to Levi-Strauss, has shown that our thinking, once it is conceived from the point of view of the “other,” is not only local but also contingent. Civilization and most of Western philosophy at-

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tempted to overcome this contingency whereas organic theory attempts to confirm it. Concepts and systems create totalities within which nothing appears as coincidental. According to Moeller, at least since Hegel, science has always had this systematic character: Knowledge becomes scientific once it is systematized, once it is integrated into a coherent whole. The most decisive difference between a mere aggregate of information and a scientific system is that the former is coincidental whereas the latter is necessary. A collection of information, such as a compilation of statistical data about body temperature, is only a random collection of numbers as long as it is not understood within an overarching conceptual scheme. (Moeller: 33) Luhmann’s approach is thus reminiscent of Herder’s amalgamation of natural science and philosophy, and problems arise precisely because of this bold methodological step. Herder developed very similar ideas when depicting the nation as an autonomous system having “its center of happiness within itself” (Herder 1877–1913: 509). Herder described the history of mankind as “natural” and was immediately criticized by Kant for being a thinker producing metaphysics in disguise. Exactly two hundred years later, Luhmann faces similar criticism, this time formulated by Habermas who finds that in systems theory “the distinction between the empirical and the transcendental loses its significance” (370/428). As mentioned earlier, according to Habermas, Luhmann shifts the focus from metaphysics to meta-biology (372/430), and this metabiology can still look too much like metaphysics. The problem is that both Kant and Habermas overlook a subtle point essential to the arguments they are criticizing. Neither Herder nor Luhmann believe that culture is nature; they merely use a method inspired by organic systems when analyzing culture. They attempt to grasp the micro–macro dynamic of cultural phenomena. We all agree that history does not follow nature. Yet it is still possible to reveal organic patterns in social phenomena. 2.5 Other Western Organic Philosophies Richard McDonough sees organicist elements in Schopenhauer. In McDonough’s original interpretation, for Schopenhauer “the cosmos is an organic unity bound together by the underlying metaphysical will. The human being is an organic unity bound together by the same underlying will. Thus, the human being is a microcosm of the cosmos – with the important qualification that physics and chemistry only yield knowledge of the world and the

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human being as representation (as appearance)” (2017: 82). The twentieth century has brought forward other “organic philosophies,” all of which remain relatively marginal. The most significant one comes from Bergson who developed the idea of pure duration (durée pure) as an organic whole composed of past, present, and future. In pure duration, successive moments melt into one another and are perceived as such. They are like the notes of a tune melting into one another when we listen to music. The whole melody is an organic expression of single notes. Bergson’s élan vital is often confused with a vital entity because the expression translates roughly as “life force” However, Bergson explicitly criticizes substantive vitalism (1907, 48–49). The motivation of many organicists is to find a middle path between substantive vitalism on the one hand, and mechanism on the other, and Bergson is a typical example of this approach. His élan vital is not mechanic but he wants creative evolution. Creative means here “emergent” because the whole is greater than its parts. 2.5.1 Hermeneutics as a Biological Science Another philosophy that has kept an intrinsically organic profile is the German hermeneutic tradition which spans over two centuries. This philosophy, which developed out of interpretation theory, deals with intricate relationships between the individual and the general. It has invested its insights derived from interpretation theory into various domains ranging from philosophy of life (Lebensphilosophie) to cosmology. Already during the first decade of the nineteenth century, one of the first modern hermeneutic philosophers, Friedrich Ast, defined the organic structure of human understanding by insisting on the tension between the individual and the general. In his Grundlinien der Grammatik, Hermeneutik und Kritik (1808), Ast explains that understanding must proceed organically from part to whole: “The more I progress with the perception of the individual, the more manifest and living becomes the spirit [wird mir der Geist], the idea of the whole, which was accessible to me already in each detail [die mir schon in jeder Einzelheit entstanden ist]. The spirit unfolds in front of me” (Ast 1808: 179). Thirty years later, Friedrich Schleiermacher repeats those same insights in his Hermeneutik und Kritik when writing that “with regard to any larger phenomenon one sees the whole first and proceeds to the details afterwards” (1838: 38). Schleiermacher specifies this process by distinguishing between the totality (das Ganze) and the sum (die Gesamtheit): “In order to exactly understand the first element, one needs to have perceived the totality (das Ganze) beforehand. Of course, one does not need to have perceived it in the sense that the totality is identical with the sum (die Gesamtheit), but as a skeleton, an outline” (1838: 38).

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Similar to Herder, much of early modern hermeneutics extends its discourse into the realms of biology and cosmology. Ast writes that “external life, as a whole, emerges and vanishes. Accordingly, the forms of life change in uninterrupted movement. Each particular form has its particular life, its own birth, growth and dissolution” (Ast 1807: 5–6). This means that unity and opposition create circular movements through which the elements of universal and particular life will be combined, which can explain why humankind must be seen as united. Using the language of idealism, Ast claims that an idea always comprises the whole of reality: The unity of mankind is not merely an ideal dream. … [One should not] oppose the actual [das Wirkliche] as reality [Realität] and truth to the ideal [das Ideale] without considering that there is only one true and original life that is neither ideal nor real, because both temporal oppositions merely emerge from it [erst aus ihm hervorgehen]. Therefore the idea that comes closest to this original life is also the wealth of reality itself [die Fülle aller Realität selbst]. No: humanity really used to be such a unity and will be so in the future (Ast 1808: 180, my trans.). As a contemporary of Hegel, Ast continued Herder’s idealist tradition using the tools of hermeneutic philosophy. As a result, he was also more open towards non-European philosophies. In this respect, Ast is an exception in the German philosophical landscape of the early 1800s. According to Peter Park, Ast is among the few philosophers who were still writing histories of philosophy beginning with the Orient, and this all-inclusive tendency is due to Ast’s hermeneutic organicism. In his Outline of a History of Philosophy (Grundriss einer Geschichte der Philosophie, 1807), Ast writes that the history of philosophy “must reveal how all the forms of philosophy emerged from one Being, from philosophy itself; how each developed in its particularity, how one life flowed out of itself into multiplicity, and finally how the forms, as external life, resolved themselves and flowed back into the unity, from which they first arose” (1807: 6). Philosophy was once united but at some point, it was split into GraecoRoman “realism” and Christian “Idealism” (10–13). “Ideal realism,” a new invention in philosophy current in Ast’s own time, is supposed to bring both halves together again (19–20).6 Park recognizes the similarities between Ast’s organic 6 There is not enough space here to explain the concept of “ideal realism” in depth. According to Ast, it is the “unconditional unity of realism and idealism” (133). Ast believes that philosophy “searches the universe either with regard to its being or philosophy grasps the life of things with regard to their spirit. In this way, for philosophy the real is determined by the

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history of philosophy and Hegel’s philosophy of history (as expressed in the History of Philosophy), especially Hegel’s descriptions of the formation of Spirit. Hegel defines Spirit as “a movement passing through many developments; the totality of this series is a succession of curving back on itself; and each particular development is a stage of the whole. Although there is progress in development, it does not go forward into (abstract) infinity but rather turns back into itself” (Hegel 1971: 80/German [1837]: 111). Park concludes that “Hegel could as well have been describing Ast’s schema of the history of philosophy” (120). An even more explicitly organic vision of philosophy can be found in the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, where Hegel states that each of the parts of philosophy is a philosophical whole, a circle that closes upon itself; but in each of them the philosophical Idea is in a ­particular determinacy or element. Every single circle also breaks through the restriction of its elements as well, precisely because it is inwardly [the] totality, and it grounds a further sphere. The whole presents itself therefore as a circle of circles, each of which is a necessary moment, so that the system of its peculiar elements constitutes the whole Idea – which equally appears in each single one of them. (1830: 39 [§ 15]) The point here is that a cell is inwardly the whole organism and that the same is true of all organic parts. “The whole [that] presents itself therefore as a circle of circles,” that is, a macrocosm of the microcosm, refers to microcosm macrocosm concepts. Similar organic models dominate the output of twentieth century hermeneutics. For Hans-Georg Gadamer, Dasein (Being-there) is always implicated in the organic structures of language and culture. Gadamer draws an analogy between biological and social organisms (1976b: 32). His metaphor of play or game represents an organic model for (social) interaction and is based on Plato’s conviction that the bad life is the unbalanced life that falls short of ideal organic unity. Modern hermeneutics (which is no longer limited to the interpretation of the Bible) abandons the Romantic concept of ­Einfühlung still supported by Herder and turns away from the idea of textual ideal (knowledge or action); or, as a third option, it recognizes being and knowledge as the only elements of an original and unconditional One” (“Eines Ursprünglichen und Unbedingten;” Ast’s capitalization) (1807: 133–34, my trans.). The following quotation shows how Ast thinks the unification of ideal and real through the organic: “Durch den Staat also bildet sich der menschliche Geist zur Natur, d.h. zum realen Organismus zurück. Der Staat is die reale, zur Welt gebildete Einheit des Idealen und Realen (…) in der Sphäre des Geistes, so wie der Weltkörper (die zur Totalität gebildete Natur) die reale Einheit des Realen (Mineralischen) und idealen (Vegtabilischen) ist in der Sphäre der Natur” (134).

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subjectivity that was still a positive fact for Schleiermacher. Einfühlung had earlier become important for positivism, mainly through the work of Theodor Lipps.7 Hermeneutics abandons Einfühlung and adheres to Herder’s model of an inner state of health, which Herder designated as the “center of happiness.” In hermeneutics, stability and balance become more important than single facts or norms derived from those facts. Gadamer describes the healthy structure as a balance or an equilibrium and calls the living organism a “play of balancing factors” (“Spiel der balancierenden Faktoren,” 1987a: 271). This hermeneutics has a clear extension into biology. According to Gadamer, medical science should rebalance the existing play of elements. The play of balancing factors has a sense, but this sense cannot be grasped by relying on objective positivist approaches. Nor can one rely, in an equally positivist fashion, on subjective approaches. Gadamer refers to the Greek concept of nature, which believes that “the whole is an order which lets all movements existing in nature repeat themselves, according to firm rules” (1987b: 270). The rules are not spelled out, but they develop organically and must be grasped as such. Gadamer’s insistence on balance in his writings on medical science as well as his crystallization of ludic moments in the process of Verstehen (understanding, or cognition, to use a more modern term) anticipates the push towards those organic theories that have become more and more notable in the twenty-first century in biology. Nicholson and Dupré explain that the so-called ontological conception of biology, which “views diseases as foreign entities that enter the body and [whose] cure implies the expulsion of the intruders,” is aligned with substance ontology. It regards diseases as particular “things” existing independently of the body they infect. Opposed to this is the physiological conception, which holds that “diseases result from disturbances in the functional equilibrium of the body, and [that] their cure reflects the harmonious restoration of this equilibrium.” With the rise of microbiology, “the ontological conception became the dominant theory of disease, and so it has remained, more or less, to the present day” (Nicholson and Dupré 30). 7 Psychologist Theodor Lipps believed that a “positive ästhetische Einfühlung” is possible, which paved the way for abstract approaches in aesthetics, perception, and cognition. For Lipps the “ästhetische Betrachtung” (aesthetic contemplation) is the “abstrahierende Betrachtung” (Lipps: 377). He writes: “The aesthetic perception (…) will first abstract from all elements of the ‘presented object’ that are not immediately presented, that is, elements that are not immediately linked to the senses…” (394, my trans.). This is a more or less clear-cut outline of later positivism. Outer appearances can enter the mind of the empathizing positivist in an “unfiltered” way. In Lipps’ understanding, they are only abstractions of the world because the “purity” of the Einfühlung will always be maintained (see Botz-Bornstein 2007 on this problem).

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Organic biological theories insist on the intrinsically purposive character of organisms, and hermeneutic biological theories do the same. Medical science tends to evaluate organisms with regard to a supposed usefulness established from an external point of view. The doctor who needs to decide whether an intervention is necessary or not, looks at the “usefulness” of the intervention. However, the real sense of the biological phenomenon can only be grasped when a decision about what is useful or not has not yet been taken. Therefore, technè as a part of medical practice (Heilkunst), is not a technological discipline explaining intrinsic structures with regard to an already structuralized reality. For Gadamer, the “medical artist” (Heilkünstler) should reveal a structure that is not necessarily useful in a technical sense but rather a structure whose meaning is intrinsic. Important for hermeneutics is the distinction between technical capacity (Können) and knowledge (Wissen). Hermeneutic philosophy (and what could be called “hermeneutic medical science”) does not strive for the technical capacity to do certain things (Können), rather it wants to obtain knowledge (Wissen) (Gadamer 1987b: 247). Knowledge about the world (or about an organism) can only be found when the interpretation of the world, a text, or an organism is considered in abstraction from what is useful or practical. The physiological (as opposed to the substantialist) conception of biology that Nicholson and Dupré put forward in their manifesto holds that the cure to diseases reflects the harmonious restoration of an equilibrium. It evolves along the above hermeneutic lines. A disease is not a thing existing independently of the body it infects. It is not a substance that can be technically manipulated. Perceiving organic matter in processual terms means to consider the “particular ecological context in which the microbe finds itself [as well as] the complex and ever-changing symbiotic relation it maintains with its host” (Nicholson and Dupré: 30). These are the principles of organicism: “An organism is made from its environment and at the same time helps to construct it” (Nicholson 2018: 155). As mentioned earlier, subjectivist approaches in psychology and aesthetics that relied on Einfühlung led to positivism. The deconstruction of Einfühlung was Dilthey’s task. He deconstructed subjectivist philosophy in the realm of interpretation. The aim of interpretation is no longer the recovering of the writer’s or artist’s subjectivity; instead, interpretation has become creative, which relaunches the entire process of understanding as an organic activity in which the dialectical communication between writer and reader creates the meaning of the text. Dilthey believes that during every act of understanding, the “raw” material of a subject (a fact, an experience, etc.) is molded into the

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form that appears most significant to the person who understands.8 This means that the original fact or experience is lost and cannot be reconstructed. There is an active moment in interpretation which Dilthey’s student Georg Misch would later call “schaffende Explikation” (creative explanation) (Misch 1967: 134). This is a genuine example of what modern biology defines as internalism. The outer form is not static but changes while communicating with the “interior” elements. Gadamer calls the same process a “wechselseitige Anregung der Gedankenerzeugung [reciprocal stimulation of intellectual production]” (Gadamer 1986: 192). Hermeneutic philosophers present interpretation as a cooperation between author and interpreter. Understanding evolves organically, and organic theories in biology insist on a similar form of communication. The material parts are not eternal substances but need to be reconstructed by looking at the totality. Compare Misch’s above statement with that of the contemporary epistemologist Nicholson: “It makes no sense to identify an organism over time with the sum of its material parts, as these are constantly being replenished by the whole. The parts of an organism at any given moment are only the temporary manifestation of the self-producing organizational unity of the whole” (Nicholson 2013: 672). Nicholson contrasts this with mechanical perceptions of the organism dealing with substances where “the parts of a machine remain distinct, stable, and identifiable over time.”9 Biological models are organic because they rely neither on subjective nor objective data, but create meaning in a playful fashion from a position located within the interpretative process. 2.5.2 Wittgenstein’s Organic Lebensform For Wittgenstein, whom McDonough links to Schopenhauer, “the organic wholeness of the world belongs with the unsayable mystical” (McDonough 2007: 85). McDonough traces Wittgenstein’s organicism to Spengler and Goethe and believes that emergentism, which is an analytic version of organic philosophy, is central to Wittgenstein’s later philosophies of language and mind: “Despite Wittgenstein’s well-known opposition to metaphysics, Wittgenstein clearly endorses a doctrine of emergence, the view, that the order in our language and thought ‘arises’ out of ‘chaos’ or ‘nothing’” (McDonough

8 “Der eckige Rohstoff eines Erlebnisses wird erhitzt und umgeschmolzen in diejenige Form die er dem Auffassenden als bedeutsam erscheinen lasst” (Dilthey 1982: 101). 9 Machines built to repair themselves over time (self-repairing robots) represent an intriguing intermediary of organic and machine. No material part remains same. Nicholson does not consider this aspect.

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2004: 298).10 In his later philosophy, Wittgenstein overcomes an earlier ­atomistic-mechanical view and embraces a historicist-organic view. His concept of the “form of life” (Lebensform) sees life as not mechanistic, but organic. For McDonough, Wittgenstein’s later philosophy is therefore “a naturalistic alternative to the mainstream analytical and mechanistic tendencies in the philosophy of mind” (307). In this section, I want to elaborate on the fact that in Wittgenstein’s Lebensform there is no mechanical order because Lebensform comes closer to “lifestyle” as an organic phenomenon (see also Botz-Bornstein 2003 and 2003b). Wittgenstein’s Lebensform is not a rule to be followed, nor is it a form imposed upon us by a larger context. Lebensform does not determine the elements located “inside” itself, but Lebensform is organic development. Lebensform cancels temporal and spatial categories of inside and outside. Language, for instance, is a part of a Lebensform (pu i, 23), which means that a linguistic phenomenon such as an expression cannot be explained by simply referring to its context. The point is not, as some hermeneuticists would say, that the expression cannot be fully explained; it cannot be explained at all since the ­expression is the Lebensform. There is no outside point from which the expression could be explained. Wittgenstein says that the Lebensform appears like a “gesture” (Geste or Gebärde) representative of a cultural situation (lc note 28). We can best understand this when thinking of the phenomenon of style. The style of a language is not in the language; nor does the style determine the words. The style is the entire language and has to be taken as a whole. Accordingly, Wittgenstein writes that in Shakespeare’s works, style is the element that justifies his entire work (vb: 49). Style simply is, it is a gesture because it does not intend to produce a positive meaning (meinen). Style does not mean something, but it simply means itself. In this sense, style is an organic phenomenon appearing in front of us similar to an image (Bild). Wittgenstein’s model is first of all opposed to the kind of subjectivism that was so well established in Europe in the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. Leibniz, Hume, and Kant subordinated the object to the knowing subject. On the basis of their subjectivist philosophy, the human self could be defined as subjective, which is reductive. Furthermore, the space and the context surrounding the individual could be declared subjective, too. These philosophies are not organic but centralized. The i asserts itself over the entire world of the non-i. Wittgenstein intends to design human experience from a different point of view, a point of view that is non-subjective. This does not mean 10

McDonough partially retracts, or reinterprets, his emergentist position in his article on Wittgenstein and Gestalt Psychology (2016).

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that Wittgenstein simply reverts to objectivism. He does not look for an objective basis in language because that would again be a centralized position. As is well known, Wittgenstein sees philosophy as “a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence (Verstand) by means of language” (pu: 109).11 But this also implies that we should look neither in ourselves nor search for outside causes when trying to understand a linguistic expression. Instead, we should try to understand it like an image. The idea of the image introduces a contemplative element into Wittgenstein’s philosophy, which is very important: “What is it to follow a musical phrase with understanding (Verständnis), or to play it with understanding? Don’t look inside yourself. Consider rather what makes you say of someone else (der Andere) that this is what he is doing” (vb: 51). Within this process of contemplation, the experience of “understanding a word” depends neither on Einfühlung nor on deductive reasoning. Instead it will suddenly appear like a flash: “But we understand the meaning of a word when we hear or say it; we grasp it in a flash [mit einem Schlage]; and what we grasp like this is surely something different from the ‘use’ which is extended in time!” (vb: 138). Experiences like this are not contained in a temporal duration; the “understanding” of an expression does not produce itself through its temporally extended use. Because of those constellations we can call it an organic approach. The organic structure that interests Wittgenstein becomes very manifest when he analyzes the act of speaking. What happens when we are speaking? How is thinking involved in the process of speaking? In Zettel 98 Wittgenstein asks: “Do we say that everybody who speaks reasonably is thinking?” (“Sagen wir, es denke jeder, der sinvoll spricht?”) His point is that any “reasonableness” of speech is never produced by thinking whilst speaking. There is no central control of speech, let alone of its reasonableness, but speech, with its internal (and not just linguistic) reasonableness, emerges in the course of life in the world: “One is not usually half-astonished to hear oneself say something; and doesn’t follow one’s own talk with attention; for one ordinarily talks voluntarily, not involuntarily” (Z: 92). The words “do not come as they would if I were for example making them up (ersänne). – They come of themselves (von selbst)” (pu: 165). The “special way” in which the words are coming cannot be traced back to any causality. Speech develops organically. Linguistic consciousness is not created by thinking, but is an experiential consciousness developing organically.

11

Wittgenstein’s point in this passage is specifically that ordinary grammar misleads us into metaphysics.

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The organicist character of Wittgenstein’s philosophy becomes very clear when considering his thoughts on dreams, many of which can be found in Vermischte Bemerkungen and Lectures and Conversations. The difference between Freud’s and Wittgenstein’s concept of dream clarifies the latter’s idea of organicism. The understanding of a musical phrase functions like a flash, presenting an organic Bild in front of us. In parallel, Wittgenstein rejects the Freudian clinical and essentialist approach towards dream and suggests an alternative “descriptive” one. This means that dream has the same ontological status as style and Lebensform. Wittgenstein wants to leave the dream within the sphere of the unsayable and let it “speak” organically, that is, in its own “silent” way whereas Freud transforms the dream into language (a “dream-language”). Freud’s approach is an atomist micro approach which “decomposes” (“zersetzt,” according to Wittgenstein) the dream by destroying its “first sense, i.e. the sense of the dream at the moment it is dreamt (geträumter Traum)” (vb: 22c). The dreamt dream is an organic phenomenon. It is not a “dream machine” in which symbols are made to follow the rules of a dream language. According to Wittgenstein, the fascinating component of a dream is its “sense of authenticity” (Lebendigkeit) and its “impressiveness” (vb: 84), which can subsist independently of, or even in opposition to, any (linguistic) causality. Just like the experience of listening to a musical phrase is timeless, the dream experience is timeless (it contains no measurable time) and exists beyond any grammatical classification such as “after” or “with.” In other words, dream has an internal time structure dependent on an internal grammar following its own rules. Wittgenstein believes that dream is an end in itself and does not represent a “hallucinated wish fulfillment” (lc: 47). In other words, dreams are intrinsically purposive. The dream is not a narrative but an organic image, which perfectly concords with those organic conceptions in biology that contradict the mco. Nicholson writes: “When machines do not operate in the way we expect them to, they are deemed (by us) to be malfunctioning or defective. Organisms, on the other hand, operate according to their own norms” (Nicholson 2013: 673). 2.6 Non-Western Organicism Most other modern organic philosophies come from non-Western regions or regions situated on the margins of European and American traditions. This means that they come from the province. Monist tendencies, for example, are more common among non-Western than Western philosophies. The Western philosophical tradition is firmly rooted in substance metaphysics traceable to Plato and Aristotle. In encyclopedias of philosophy, entries on monism and unity contain far more information on Eastern than on Western philosophies.

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In philosophies from Africa to Russia,12 the theme of unity is central while it remains very marginal in the West. As mentioned earlier, Western philosophers tended to see the idea of oneness or unity as either oppressive or relativist. Consequently, organicism and micro–macro thought was often relegated to pre-philosophical or non-philosophical realms such as mysticism, the pre-­ Socratics, or New Age cults. Indeed, much organic thinking can be found in places that are relatively far removed from mainstream philosophy and in institutions that are not very prestigious from a modern point of view. For example, we find “number mysticism” in the ninth and tenth centuries, in the writings of the Islamic scholarly brotherhood called “Brethren of Purity” (Ikhwan Al-Safa).13 These thinkers suggested a system of proportions inspired by the Late-Hellenistic period but also by Eastern thought (see Panofsky: 33–34). According to Panofsky, their “harmonistic cosmology” was “not supposed to furnish a method for the pictorial rendering of the human figure, but was intended to give insight into a vast harmony that unifies all parts of the cosmos by numerical and musical correspondences” (77). For the Ikhwan, the human was a microcosm, as wrote the Basran thinker Al-Jahiz: “Man is called the microcosm, because he is capable of producing anything with his hands and imitating all the sounds with his mouth” (Al-Jahiz as quoted in Koivisto: 213). While in the Middle Ages, human proportions were usually separated from cosmological proportions, the micro–macro aspect of human proportions was revived in the early Renaissance. The humanists attributed mystical significance of cosmic harmony to artistic ideals, which became most obvious in the two aspects of Leonardo’s Vitruvian man. First, the drawing relates man to Vitruvius’ theory of architecture, as known from his work De Architectura. However, on a second level, it relates man to nature and to the cosmos: the Vitruvian man is a symbol of man’s place in the universe. Overall, the history of organic micro–macro thinking has been written on the margins of the history of philosophy. However, some reflections on unity and organic thinking influenced various fields and traditions, only some of which I can present here: – Al-Ghazali’s theory of the human archetype as an all-integrating microcosm (see his The Niche of Lights), through which he presents the cosmological microcosmic idea from the perspective of man. – Japanese philosopher Nishida Kitaro’s notion of basho (場所), which signifies “place” and defines an existentially and organically defined locality. As a 12 13

If Russia is Western or not is a difficult question. See Botz-Bornstein 2009 on this. The Brethren of Purity are the authors of the Treatises of the Brethren of Purity (Rasa’il alIkhwan al-safa’), an encyclopedia consisting of fifty-two treatises and an additional comprehensive treatise. It was written in the tenth or eleventh century c.e.

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sort of “negative space,” basho signifies the “self-determination of a field of consciousness” and is meant to be an ontological category summarizing Nishida’s Eastern version of Western intuition. Inside basho there are only singular elements which determine themselves as “pure matters.” Basho is a place in which the objective world establishes itself organically (see BotzBornstein 2004). – The Chinese notion of wen (文) is an organic structure of written language transporting the Dao, the Way (see Botz-Bornstein 2010). It can also appear in definitions of the structure of state, society and culture. – Russian philosophers living circa 1900 established original philosophies around the idea of “All-Unity” (vseyedinstvo), which represents an organic “unity in multiplicity” of all beings. This Russian tradition most probably represents the largest organic philosophical school ever. – The political concept of sobornost (spiritual community) is related to this Russian organic thought in multiple ways (see Botz-Bornstein 2005). – N.O. Lossky’s idea of the “world as an organic whole,” Bakhtin’s philosophy of the polyphonic and harmonized totality, as well as the same author’s concept of the chronotope as a “relationship of time and space” (Bakhtin 1981: 229) continued this agenda. A subgroup of the Russian Formalists even reverted to “Organic Formalism,” which was inspired by biology and supposed to be less mechanical than “regular” Formalism. In Western Europe and the USA, none of these Russian philosophies of unity had much impact. – In Chapter 10, I will briefly discuss the Bantu concept of ubumwe, which means collectivity or oneness. It leads to the definition of an organic “Bantu solidarity and their belief in the vital communion existing between members of a family, clan or even an entire tribe” (Masolo 2001: 213). – Rabindranath Tagore developed similar ideas when stating that “it is the nature of the human soul to seek a union of its particular humanness with all humanity: in this lies its true joy” (Tagore: 50). His idea of the nation is organic: “When society or the polity is hurt, the blow is felt by the extended body of each individual; if a society grows parochial in any respect, the development of each individual self is impeded” (51). The list could be continued, but it is likely to be dominated by non-Western philosophies. 3

Philosophy and Religion

In Chapter 4, I compared the purist ambitions of decultured philosophy, especially as it emerged in the analytic tradition, with religious fundamentalism. Was this too provocative? Some philosophers will respond that ­fundamentalism,

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like any religion, is still based on culture and that any scientific ambitions are merely pretentious. Religious truths are not scientific, and anyone who pretends that they are has got the whole concept of science wrong. Philosophy, on the other hand, is science and its mingling with cultural elements (or even with language) should have been avoided from the beginning. If we had managed to keep philosophy pure, we would today not have to ask absurd questions about cultural influences in philosophy. A philosophy that is free of cultural influences is opposed to religion just because it contains no culture. Who can seriously suggest comparing “decultured religion” with “decultured philosophy”? Deculturation might be bad for the former, but it is definitely good for the latter. This reasoning is incoherent. Any philosophical ambition to eliminate cultural influences in order to be “purer” is fundamentalist. Philosophy is different from science. Not all philosophy searches for universal truths, while science always does. Not all Western philosophy has been searching for truth through observation and/or reasonable reflection either. Some serious philosophers saw truth as an a priori quality revealed by God. Idealist philosophers like Berkeley, Malebranche, and Leibniz were under decisive religious influence when constructing their systems. So were Copernicus (an orthodox Thomist), Kepler (a Lutheran mystic), as well as Galileo and Newton. Leibniz, to whom everything in nature had to be explained mechanically, could not do without God. His “mechanism” represents a principle of order according to a divine mechanism and its metaphysical foundations.14 Galileo called God the Chief Mathematician of the Universe, and the convert to Roman Catholicism, Friedrich Schlegel, claimed to draw on a higher perspective or on supernatural sources and did not disagree with the notion that intellectual philosophies derive from divine revelation. Were they no philosophers for that reason? And what about non-Western philosophies, which very often have a manifest religious content? As mentioned earlier, Saranindranath Tagore deplores that the Indian notion of atman, “though replete with phenomenological resonance that could have been sufficiently interesting to the pioneers of phenomenology, loses all philosophical value because of its extra-theoretic (spiritual) use in the tradition” (2017: 532). These philosophies are religious. Nor is it a solution to treat them as if they were “normal” Western philosophies by simply overlooking the religious input. 14

See Wolfe 2014: 12. “The organism of a living being (organismus viventium) is nothing other than a divine mechanism which is more subtle than an ordinary mechanism in the infinity of its subtlety.” See Opuscules et fragments inédits de Leibniz, 16, § 13; and Die Philosophischen Schriften I (ed. Gerhard), p. 15.

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Philosophy, unlike science, should not be opposed to religion. The next question is, of course: what kind of religion are we addressing in this context? First of all, we should not include religions that see themselves as sciences able to spell out absolute truths. On the one hand, it is true that for most religions, faith is just another word for “universal truth.” On the other hand, religions are embedded in cultures, which is what they share with philosophies. Just like philosophies, religions live within the tension of universality and relativism. If a religion claims to be science and detaches itself from culture altogether (this process has been described in Chapter 4), it becomes incompatible with philosophy. However, religion as a cultural phenomenon is part of the above-­ defined “non-philosophy” without which neither philosophy nor religion can live. What does this mean for philosophy today? Does philosophy want to end up as the “modernist fundamentalism” (Inayatullah and Boxwell 2003: 20) of nonculture, scientific purity, and objectivity that religious people so often criticize when talking about “Western culture,” and which they want to combat by emphasizing their religious truths? In the non-Western world, this can take the shape of “reverse Eurocentrism,” as Rabindranath Tagore once said about the new micro philosophies of the East: “Eurocentrism continues to throw a false light on everything, while on the other side of the world for a while yet one will continue to celebrate well-meaning mediocrities for the sole reason that they celebrate the revolution, or atheism” (R. Tagore: 50). How does philosophy define the relationship between universal truth and relativism? Does philosophy want to give in to what another religious critic has called a “fundamentalist attitude to reason” (Sardar 1988: 11)? When scholar of Islam Ziauddin Sardar launched the latter expression, he spoke from the point of view of religion; however, not only religious people are attracted to this argument. John Ralston Saul finds that modern elites abandon “humanism in favor of an ideology of reason,” which leads to “violence, dictatorship, institutionalized racism, all served by science and the free market to the benefit of that handful of nation-states” (Saul 1992: xi). What place can philosophy occupy within this landscape? 4

Philosophy and Deculturation

Analytic philosophy remains most intransigent in this respect. More than any other philosophy, analytic philosophy has been marked by the above-described pushes towards professionalization that occurred in American Ivy League universities in the 1920s and 1930s. This is one reason why analytic philosophy is

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inclined to adopt a more or less non-cultural model of reason. It has been said that analytic philosophy searches for knowledge in the sense of episteme whereas Continental philosophy aspires to wisdom (phronesis) (J. Sellars: 44). Historically, analytic philosophy overcame the more European-minded cultural relativism that had been an American paradigm since around 1910, and which was spread by Franz Boas and his school. It was quickly abandoned, whereas Continental philosophy stuck to a certain relativist tradition launched during Romanticism, at a time when marginal European nations became more assertive and presented their folk elements within the context of nationalist movements. John Ralston Saul’s idea “to live with uncertainty as a creative force” originates with Herder’s suggestion that every society has its own “center of happiness” (Herder 1877–1913: 509). A hundred years after Herder, Dilthey would affirm that “every cultural system, because of its achievements, has its own structure, [and] its own regularity (…) and singular homogenous interdependences [Wirkungszusammenhänge] (…) that are determined from the inside” (Dilthey 1910, Ger.: 207/Engl.: 283). A statement by Dilthey that sounds even more organically Herderian is the following one from the same book: “Every unit of the world of the mind has its center within itself. Just like the individual, every cultural system, every community, has a focal point within itself. In it, a conception of reality, valuation, and production of goods, are linked into a whole” (Dilthey 1962: 130). This is an anthropological model, which, were it launched in biology, would be called “intrinsically purposive.” All these are attempts at creating an interactive world culture by not merely affirming the culture of the other, but also by partly negating the value of one’s own culture. Such projects must logically culminate in an intercultural philosophical project that John Maraldo has defined like this: “The activity of selfnegation creates an intercultural space in which encounter can take place and in which one’s own culture is relativized” (Maraldo 1995: 191). It is obvious that this project can only be pushed through if philosophy is seen as a cultural activity. Why is philosophy relatively rigid when it comes to culture? Some developments in intellectual history have made the integration of individuality, diversity, and culture into philosophy particularly difficult. The rise of analytic philosophy is one element. After World War ii, a liberal middle-class waged a Kulturkampf against value-oriented learning in the USA. Many saw a “scientific approach” as a solution to various social problems, and Margaret Mead’s call to “have faith in the power of science” (Mead 1942: 262) lead to the identification of scholarship with mathematics. Further, it was found that a modern, diverse, and technologically advanced society needed “the scientific attitude” as set forth (still quite modestly) in the writings of John Dewey and William

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James, and also, more strongly, in behaviorism. While the pragmatists James and Dewey formulated a distinctly processual philosophy in order to come to terms with the implications of Darwin’s theory of evolution, behaviorism assimilated psychological events to physical events and relied on observable and measurable activities. While James’ descriptions of states of consciousness can still be linked to Dilthey and hermeneutic models, the puritan revolt of behaviorism led by Watson and Skinner turned against any sort of introspectivism. The study of measurable aspects in the behavior of rats became primordial for the psychologist. Koestler, whose critique of this development occupies the central part of The Ghost in the Machine, compares this undertaking with European scholasticism in its period of decline (Koestler: 18). David Hollinger describes parallel developments in his essay “Science as a Weapon in Kulturkämpfe in the United States during and after World War ii” (Hollinger 1996: 325). Everything, including philosophy, had to be penetrated by the sober and deliberate spirit of science and mathematics. Two decades later, scientification receives a second push: professionalization and specialization in higher education are staged as counter-reactions to Russia’s successful ventures in space. During this period, rigor and scientific seriousness are emphasized in several areas of research by adopting the methods of New Criticism and Parsonian sociology, but also through the push of analytic philosophy. It is during these years that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of the correspondence of language and thought is definitively discredited. Instead, cognitive science begins describing linguistic norms as based on arbitrary conventions. In other words, the macro is played out against the micro as cognitive science emphasizes the universality of human cognition. It is true, some “micro views” of cognition, like those of Jack Goody, who suggests that different sets of cognitive processes may exist in different societies, are developed in parallel (see Le Pan 1989: 3), but, first, they remain very marginal and sporadic, and second, they are purely “micro” and do not adopt an organic perspective. The new philosophical environment, which sees “science as a weapon” and which is more and more heavily informed by cognitive science, forms a sharp contrast to everything that ethnophilosophy spells out during exactly the same period. Ethnophilosophy, as defined by Tempels and Kagame, suggests that cultures are organized around a set of philosophical principles implicit in its language, beliefs, and practices, and that thinking remains influenced by language and culture. These views correspond with those of modern hermeneutics, which holds that language and worldview (Weltsicht) always go hand in hand. Gadamer writes: “It must be language in which thinking takes place and communicates, and it is barely language when thinking hides behind and gets entangled in overcome anticipations. The language that we really speak with

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each other is the real language. (…) Every linguistic community cultivates its own worldview” (Gadamer 1995: 270 and 271). Despite the dominant cognitive and scientific turn in the humanities, micro suggestions did not remain entirely without consequences in the US. A modest counter-pole would be created. At an amazingly rapid pace, courses in African or African American philosophy were established in many – most often major – American universities. However, the classic problems attached to ethnophilosophy were far from being solved. The ethno (micro) remained captured within its own cultural system, often without communicating with other systems, and this remains true, even today. Instead of developing micro–macro approaches, one concentrates on details within one’s own field, which is in keeping with the increasingly prevalent logic of modern academia. To this day there is no “Systems Theory” à la Luhmann, nor a biology-inspired “Developmental Systems Theory” of world philosophy. Beyond that, the advancement of African philosophy in American departments turned out to be a temporary trend. According to Ogueiofor and Onah, “it already seems very long ago and there seems to be some nostalgia among some African philosophers for that period” (2005: ix). The above-described anti-culture campaigns that were launched from the 1920s onwards, not only in philosophy, but on several academic fronts, were also anti-religion campaigns for the simple reason that religion was – often naively – identified with culture. This anti-religion heritage could confirm ­scientifically minded philosophers in their belief that their discipline operates completely beyond religious paradigms. Philosophy is science, and religion is not. Ironically, this scientifically minded philosophy follows the same patterns that are recognizable in the present development of fundamentalist religions: both share the rhetoric of a scientific spirit based on the idea of deculturation. It was shown above that the deculturation pattern applies to the general cultural situation of the West and not just to philosophy. This development started after World War ii, in coordination with the scientification campaigns described in this section. Cultural neutrality became first an ideal and quickly a norm. The American obsession with political correctness has its initial impetus here. The reformulation of codes common in post-World War ii America led to an unprecedented scientification of scholarship. Jean-Paul Sartre describes, in his Situations iii, how an obsession with cultural neutrality, which would soon become synonymous with “American,” created a radical macro rhetoric that would soon bury everything still remotely smelling of micro: “The traits that characterize the American nation are exactly the opposite of the traits that Hitler gave to Germany or that [Charles] Maurras wanted to give to

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France. For Hitler (or for Maurras) an argument is good for Germany when it is German. The slightest odor of universality is suspicious. The particularity of the American is to believe that his thoughts are universal. We recognize here the influence of puritanism” (Sartre 1949: 82). It is, of course, interesting that Sartre traces this scientism to remnants of religion. One of the main arguments of the present book is that philosophy (just like religion and education) needs culture to function properly. Philosophy is by definition an impure science dependent on cultural climates. Philosophy might search for universal truths, but to do so, it must use cultural elements derived from everyday life and, first of all, from language. For the methodological definition of philosophy, this has always been a challenge. A convenient way to solve this contradiction has too often been to eliminate all cultural elements from philosophy. The problem is that philosophical reasoning cannot be based on nature alone. Philosophical truths always need to be reflected against “something” that is empirically given by society in order to be culturally meaningful. This “something” are languages, values, customs, and belief systems. However, pure ethno approaches are no alternative either. In chapter 9, I will try to design an alternative by redefining the relationship between philosophy and thought as it appears in the compound “French thought” or “feminist thought.” But first I want to look at another discipline inspired by the idea of evolution, which is potentially close to organic thought: memetics.

Chapter 7

Memetics: The Evolution of Signs The importance of organic thinking in the twenty-first century has been made clear in the above descriptions of various organic approaches in philosophy and science. There is another reason why our thinking should switch to the organic. In recent years, the organic has entered our civilization quasi through a backdoor, so discreetly that its presence went almost unnoticed. The Internet, whose development decisively influenced the most recent stage of ­globalization, enables new forms of distribution of knowledge that philosophy, as well as all other human sciences, must attempt to grasp conceptually. For this purpose, the concept of the organic is very useful. W.J.T. Mitchell, in his book Cloning Terrorism, describes how radical ideologies spread like self-­ generating cells that function independently of any centralized command. Terrorism is cloning itself: “It metastasizes, leaps over boundaries of organs in a process that is accelerated by the very systems of communication” (Mitchell 2011: xiv). We are living in the age of the organic, but often we fail to notice this. The organic spread of information follows principles derived from biology and it has its own science, which is called memetics. Similar to the approaches of Luhmann and Koestler, memetics uses biological models for the elaboration of social theories. Memetics is the study of information and culture based on an analogy with Darwinian evolution. In the last pages of The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins mentions the existence of a gene-like unit of imitation that he calls “meme” (from the French même = same), which can be represented by “tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in a gene pool, memes propagate themselves from brain to brain through imitation” (Dawkins 1976: 192). The meme is thus a memory item or a portion of information stored in the human brain able to develop cultural networks through replication (to use a scientific term), or through mimesis (to use a term from the philosophy of art). The difference between replication and mimesis is decisive for the argument that I intend to develop in this chapter. Dawkins coins a cultural theory along the lines established by genetics, which is a discipline deeply entrenched in the hard sciences. This choice is significant: it indicates a strong bias towards the mco (the title of Susan Blackmore’s book, The Meme Machine, couldn’t make things clearer) and favors replication over mimesis.

© Thorsten Botz-Bornstein, ���1 | doi:10.1163/9789004440425_009

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Semiotics and Evolution

Memetics became interesting because it represented an evolutionary and dynamic approach in the humanities that is clearly distinct from earlier static approaches related to structuralism. Though not entirely successful as a scientific discipline (the Journal of Memetics ceased after seven years’ activity, in 2005), philosophers and popular science writers like Susan Blackmore, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett, continue to develop the gene-meme analogy. The attraction memetics exercises is understandable. Blackmore’s attempts to track down a meme-gene co-evolution are fascinating, for example when she claims that “successful memes begin to dictate which genes are most successful” (Blackmore 1999: 99). Memes are constellations of signs. Traditionally, such constellations have been of interest for semiotics. Therefore, both semiotics and genetics are memetics’ ancestors. Semiotics theorizes on signs by describing communicative functions of signs within cultural systems, or, in the case of biosemiotics, within biological systems. This means that meaning is not found in the signs themselves but in constellations of signs. Strictly speaking, semioticians are only interested in how signs are transmitted (they speak of modalities) and take into account the codes that are used for such transmissions, whereas the signs themselves have no life force. By importing evolutionary patterns into the science of signs, semiotic constellations, as well as the process of signification, become dynamic. If we replace the sign with a gene, we add a vertical aspect to the horizontal vision of sign theory. We take into account vertical functions leading directly from gene to gene. The question is whether this is enough to make the approach organic. As an heir of formalism and structuralism, semiotics has often seen the “horizontal character” of its science as a problem. Most semiotics deals with signs within synchronic systems lacking vertical and historical depth. One of the consequences of this is that semiotics, like any structuralist discipline, has difficulties dealing with the phenomenon of evolution. Russian Formalism, one of the precursors of semiotics, confronted this problem very early and attempted to solve it by combining the diachronic and synchronic axes of the structuralist system. In 1927, Yuri Tynianov and Roman Jakobson forced themselves, in their article “On Literary Evolution,” to conceptualize the dynamic, evolutionary aspect of structures (Tynianov and Jakobson 1971). The authors found that any system represents a constellation of functions and interrelationships whose composition can change but whose “differentiation” remains stable. For example, a certain type of literature is horizontally related to other

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types of literatures, or to other social phenomena, each of which represents a system on its own. The problem is that on a vertical level, literatures and cultural systems do not evolve at the same pace because each literature contains different material. An equally vertical phenomenon is the creative intention of the author, which Tynianov and Jakobson name “orientation.” The evolution of literature cannot be explained horizontally as it is dependent on concrete historical material, as well as on individual creativity. Formal sciences like formalism, structuralism, or semiotics must take into account the creative life force of individual elements. The coordination of the horizontal and vertical axes concerns any science. Any science or philosophy (unless it follows the immaterialist George Berkeley who declared that signs are mind-dependent phenomena and that matter does simply not exist) faces a conundrum. The signs (or any micro elements) science intents to integrate into the formal macro grid of its system are – at least metaphorically speaking – endowed with a life force of their own. They are “living” and can alter their course in a way that is not necessarily controlled by the overall system. Systems are abstract and not necessarily able to evaluate the concrete life force of the elements they contain. It is therefore necessary to recognize that horizontal and vertical developments form organic constellations. Memetics has recognized the above conundrum and attempts to solve it by basing its theory of signs on the scientific discipline of genetics because genes determine vertical transmissions. David Hull writes: “If genes determine which transmissions are vertical in traditional gene-based selection then memes must determine which transmissions are vertical in meme-based selection” (Hull: 57). The evolution of genes denotes the descent, that is, the inheritance or filiations along an axis of vertical genealogical development, and thus tends to reduce evolution to linear causalities. Deleuze and Guattari recognize precisely this in their Mille Plateaux when describing – in a way that is typical for their anti-organic approach – the life force of “living lines:” Perhaps the novella has its own way of giving rise to and combining these lines, which nonetheless belong to everyone and every genre. Vladimir Propp has said, with great solemnity, that the folktale must be defined in terms of external and internal movements that it qualifies, formalizes, and combines in its own specific way. We would like to demonstrate that the novella is defined by living lines, flesh lines, about which it brings a special revelation. (1980: 194; French: 238–39) Keith Ansell Pearson comments: “This is to posit evolutionism as linearism. It thus becomes necessary to think of a reality that is specific to ‘becoming’”

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(1997: 187). The life force is vertical whereas signs are aligned horizontally. But Deleuze and Guattari fail to say anything about the coordination of horizontal and vertical lines. Their model is not organic but evokes a vertically evolving software without considering the horizontal hardware. In principle, the verticalization of semiotics is useful. However, if memetics simply replaces the semiotic approach with a genetic one, it will not solve the initial problem but simply turn the pattern upside down. While semiotics overemphasizes synchronization, genetics overemphasizes diachronization. A dynamic version of semiotics must be organic. Only an organic model assumes that organisms can modify their macro structure autonomously and under the influence of micro elements. In this sense, the life force contributes to organic development but avoids vitalism. One novelty introduced by memetics is the rhetorical shift from a formalist metaphorical level to a ‘reality level’ meant to embrace the real interaction of memes. While Jakobson and Tynianov were content with reflections on a dynamic grid in which signs are constantly animated by the tension between horizontal and vertical aspects of culture, in memetics the sign itself becomes genuinely dynamic. This invention is impressive, but it still does not solve the initial problem. The “living” signs (which are signs only because they exist within a system) constantly run against the system. They cannot be entirely controlled by the system. The micro constantly opposes the macro. Memetics overlooks this paradox and prefers to side with mco approaches. Considerations of micro elements within biological mechanisms (even if those mechanisms are only metaphorical) create uneasiness. However, it is not enough to declare, in a relativistic way, that the horizontal and the vertical form a harmonious picture, though this is precisely Hull’s approach when he writes: “Nearly everyone who discusses memetic transmission claims that it can be both vertical and horizontal. If parents teach their offspring something, that is vertical. Any memetic transmission that differs from this genealogical direction is horizontal” (quoted in Atran 2001). In this picture, there is no interaction (and consequently no clash) between horizontal and vertical transmissions. The reason is that the life force and the grid do not really form a whole because they have been meticulously separated beforehand. Hull uses distinct metaphors for the vertical and the horizontal, which clearly indicates that there is no organic interaction: vertical transmission functions through “genes” whereas horizontal transmission functions through “viruses.” Hull himself recognizes that this separation is open to criticism, as emerges from a conversation with Atran: In fact, as David Hull points out (personal communication), the memetics distinction between vertical and horizontal transmission makes little sense in the case of ideas. In gene-based biological evolution, “vertical” is

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defined as the way genes go. Genes usually go the way organisms go. A mother passes on half of her genes to her children. In “horizontal” transmission, a virus might pick up a gene and transfer it to a non-family member. (Atran 2001: 6) On the semiotic grid of cultural evolution, single elements (genes) influence the entire system and therefore also the horizontal transmission of viruses. In general, memetics attempts to explain vertical cultural evolution. It is inspired much more by genetics than by virology. And even if the virus makes sense as a model for horizontal cultural transmission, the life force and self-sufficient dynamic of the virus is not taken into account here, just as the gene’s own lifeforce is not taken into account. When parents teach their children something, this information can have “a life of its own.” Similarly, the gene will not necessarily be received in the same way that it was transmitted. The process of selection implies alteration. Therefore we cannot speak of a simple process of transmission. All this this is true for genes as much as for “viruses.” This signifies that a living organism is not merely the plaything of external events but that it has its own internal telos (internal purpose). Since the world-soul diffuses through the whole cosmos, this also means that a living organism is a unified whole of parts. Can memetics offer a consistent coordination of systematic horizontal and vertical lines? Can it describe evolution in a “graphic” and realistic fashion? Can it describe the dynamic process of becoming? First of all, memetics can learn a few things from semiotics. In semiotics, dynamic, horizontal-vertical approaches do exist, and this not only in the form of Jakobson’s and Tynianov’s innovations from the 1920s. Horizontal-vertical approaches were also applied when semiotics ventured into the domain of stylistics. Dynamic semiotic approaches appeared whenever semioticians were interested in style – not just as a static formal structure or as an abstract rule but also in the emergence of style. Style does not evolve but rather emerges. Of course, emergence and ­evolution are closely linked, as Peter Simons reminds us when saying that nineteenth century philosophers were “inspired by evolutionary ideas” when coining the terms “emergent” and “emergence” (Simons 2008). However, evolution and emergence are not the same. Semioticians found resources in genetic theory when trying to conceptualize the concrete organization of processes through which style appears organically (emerges). When style appears as a living reality whose characteristics cannot be reduced to purely mechanical structures, semiotics becomes “organic.” In this sense, there is indeed a “semiotic emergentism.” In stylistics, emergence means that stylistic features that are initially only implicit become

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explicit. We can look at a concrete example. Architects John S. Gero and Lan Ding are interested in stylistic emergence. In their article “The Emergence of the Representation of Style in Design” (2001) they explain how they divide designs into meme-like semantic units and reproduce them on a genetic basis. “Emergence in design is the process of making properties explicit that were previously only implicit” (Gero and Ding: 707). As architects, Gero and Ding want their method to be of practical use. Gothic is divided into “dynamic line,” “emphasis on spire,” and “structural framework using stone.” These units are determined by a certain syntax and the designers control the emergence of new styles along an evolutionary model: “An evolutionary process is then modeled to be the emergence process, which finds the executions of syntax rules that produce a style through competition, genetic engineering, and evolutionary combination” (708). This is an evolutionary process model based on genetic engineering for style representation. Style evolves hermeneutically or emerges within a field determined by individual and general forces. Memeticists tend to advertise the dynamic character of signs as a novelty, as Maurice Bloch does when writing: “The problem which anthropologists immediately recognize with memes lies (…) with a specific aspect of the theory: the notion that culture is ultimately made of distinguishable units which have a life of their own” (Bloch: 193). It has been shown above that “dynamism” in sign theory is not so new. Tynianov’s and Jakobson’s combination of protoformalism with ideas of evolution and orientation formulated a kind of emergentism. Furthermore, various systems theories emphasize the dynamic character of micro elements. When these theories are used in biology, this most probably happens in opposition to the mco. Organicists see development as a dynamic and heterogeneous process and hold that organic development does not simply execute programs. Evolution does not just follow rules but activates single elements in ways that cannot be predicted beforehand. Marginal movements in the natural sciences and in the human sciences develop organic approaches in parallel. A processual understanding of life, already announced in the early stages of Russian formalism, is thus reflected in Bertalanffy and Weiss’ postwar research on General System Theory and the Theory of Open Systems. 2

Memetics and Genetics

The problems that the new science of memetics faces have deep roots, many of which can be traced to genetics itself. The first thing that comes to mind when thinking of the mating of semiotics with a theoretically underdeveloped discipline like genetics is that in the latter discipline, rationality is covered under a

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mass of data. In genetics, the number of genes is simply so overwhelmingly large that, at present, genetics is happy to draw a map of the human genome but remains unable to grasp a system of any sort. So, why did these life force hungry semioticians – who are now called memeticists – choose genetics? Why did they not choose biology as it existed in its pre-genetic phase as a fertile partner? Why did they choose the branch of biology that is most strongly marked by the mco and practically unable to deal with organic constellations? Postwar bio-genetics abandoned a large part of the rational reflections that were typical of traditional biological approaches and became a relatively a simplistic form of empiricism (see Botz-Bornstein 2006). The next thing that strikes one as problematic about memes is that these objective elements are not seen as developing within a cultural space but rather within a space of “evolution” or “selection” that is defined on a purely abstract level. The problem is relatively well known in genetics, which lead the geneticist Sydney Brenner to urge his colleagues to “stop talking about substantive and essentialized entities that used to be called genes” and to talk instead of developments taking place “in time as well as in a complex, multileveled environment” (quoted in Rabinov 2005: 103). Dawkins affirms that “the environment of a gene consists largely of other genes, each of which is itself being selected for its ability to cooperate with its environment of other genes” (Dawkins 1976: 39). Kate Distin insists that memes are “determined more by the environment (memetic, genetic and physical) than by their own content” (Distin 2005: 205). The problem is that “environment” represents here a very limited and abstract idea that has nothing to do with a real cultural place. Brenner’s suggestion can be understood as a proposal to retrieve the “narrative” character of nature. Information about nature should not be transmitted in terms of classification, but it should engage in questions of space in the form of habitat and relation. In contrast, molecular biology, the branch that memetics aspires to follow, reduces the spatial aspect of nature to virtually nothing. There are neither bodies nor selves but only sequences of encoded genetic information residing at the “most undistinguished spot at the periphery of evolution,” according to Mark Sagoff (2005: 68). For Dawkins, organisms are blindly programmed entities that he characteristically calls “survival machines,” and whose only purpose is to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes (Dawkins 1976: xxi). However, “selection cannot take place unless some other process has already provided the pertinent variants” (Dupré and Nicholson 2018: 29). The gene/meme is not as selfish as it might appear but rather represents an organic/stylistic unity acting in a concrete space. The problem is that in both genetics and memetics, information has “lost its body” (Katherine Hayles quoted in Wolmark: 78). This parallels what ­happened

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to real persons in virtual reality. Identity is not established in a bodily fashion within (cultural) spaces, but identity is confirmed via “repeated genetic sampling” (Wolmark 2002: 81). Susan Oyama formulates the same criticism when noting that “Dennett speaks of ‘invasion of human brains by culture’, and even of ‘interacting meme-infested brains’ (not people!). (…) Actually, he defines the notion of a person by such memetic invasion and manipulation” (Oyama 2000: 196).1 All this is due to memetics’ overemphasis of the meme’s content and its neglect of the cultural context in which every meme is embedded. 3

Memetics and Aesthetics

Instead of suggesting endless shifts between horizontal semiotics and the more vertical memetics, I want to make use of another discipline: aesthetics. Since memetics neglects the spatial aspect of culture, it is also bound to neglect its aesthetic aspect. The pioneer of holism/organicism Jan Smuts regretted already in the 1920 that biology had lost its aesthetic aspect when writing that “life is placed under the rule of physical force or Mechanism (…) and thus becomes a subject province of physical science – the kingdom of Beauty, the free artistic plastic kingdom of the universe, is inappropriately placed under the iron rule of force” (Smuts 1927: 4).2 More than half a century later, memetics commits the same error and does not recognize aesthetics as one of its theoretical foundations. This is regrettable because aesthetics can show the way to the organic. In the following, I will explain how the omission of aesthetics in gene-inspired humanities like memetics has led to misunderstandings about what memetics is supposed to study: human culture. The quasi omission of aesthetics is particularly problematic with regard to one memetic key concept: imitation. It is through imitation that memetics attempts to explain the evolution of culture. Culture is supposed to advance through a process of memetic replication.3 In this chapter I want to shift the focus of memetics to aesthetics by insisting on the original sense of mimesis as an aesthetic mode of replication. Contrary to replication, mimesis is always linked to the spatial activity of play, a line of thought that is paralleled by Koestler’s theory of the holon, which aims to grasp the “multiple, interlocking hierarchies of perception which provide the multi-dimensionality or ­ ­multi-coloration of experience” (Koestler: 84) in genetics. While fighting 1 Susan Oyama refers to Dennett’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, pages 341 and 367. 2 On Smuts see Introduction n. 6. 3 On the relationship between imitation and replication see Gil-White 2008.

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against a behaviorism that considers only static patterns, Koestler puts forward the impact of habit and style in culture. True, habit and style are not entirely aesthetic, but the emphasis on style pushes the analysis towards some quasiaesthetic considerations. Koestler writes: “Habits are behavioral holons, governed by rules which mostly operate unconsciously. Taken together, they constitute what we call personality or style” (76). 3.1 Replication and Imitation One of the foremost occupations of aesthetics is an analysis of style. Style appears relatively rarely in memetic approaches. Though Dennett, Dawkins, and Blackmore talk about culture and claim to show why some cultural ideas and patterns flourish while others perish, they never allude to the phenomenon of style, let alone establish it conceptually.4 However, style is the essential structure of culture. The reason for the absence of style is that these authors do not have much to say about culture. Blackmore’s The Meme Machine does not read like a book on human culture but more like Desmond Morris’ Animal Watching. We learn about wild birds who, in 1921, adopted the skill of opening milk bottles and somehow managed to spread this “meme” to birds all over England (46). But we do not learn how the transmission of cultural styles (styles as integral and emerging configurations of memetic motifs and not merely as bits of information about styles) took place from one epoch to another when enacted by humans. Dawkins gives detailed accounts of the transmission of song patterns among birds on a certain island (Dawkins 1976: 189–90). The approach is reminiscent of early behaviorist obsessions with observable, measurable, and quantifiable phenomena, an approach that Koestler had called “ratology” because the organisms referred to are preferably rats and pigeons. Mental phenomena are rejected because they lack the measurable dimensions necessary for physical science. As mentioned above, for Koestler, “ratomorphic psychology is comparable in its sterile pedantry to that of scholasticism in its period of decline” (18). Memetics fell into a similar trap. Memeticists evoke the spreading of rumors, stories, or Beethoven’s ‘ta ta ta taa’ motif in a materialistic fashion while the stylistic or aesthetic content (activated by the environment) of a meme does not seem to arouse the memeticist’s interest. By “aesthetic content” I do not mean an explosive “genetic” power believed to be present in a meme. Rather, such a phenomenon represents

4 For the “aesthetic” side of memetics see Dennett 1990 (partially continued in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea).

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the limited “meme content” that Gil-White criticizes as reductive and which is materialistic. My criticism exceeds Gil-White’s as well as Atran’s. Atran shows that memes cannot be reduced to information because they spread much more through inference than through mere imitation. In my view, memes have an aesthetic content that emerges within a cultural place. A meme functions in culture and the contact between the meme and culture is always dynamic and playful. Memetics neglects the aesthetic content of the meme by describing the meme as a formalized and abstract act of imitation. It willfully neglects the possibility of an “inter-memal” play from which emerges the culture that we are supposed to describe. Memetics eludes the hermeneutic problem of the particular and the universal by declaring that a particular meme contains a self-sufficient, “selfish” power and that there is no methodological necessity to display and consider this power within a universal grid of synchronic and diachronic forces. The successful meme will simply be “selected” through a process of evolution, which, in itself, is not a real process but an entirely abstract idea. Dawkins describes this state of affairs when mentioning at the end of The Selfish Gene, after having insisted over and again that the gene is selfish, that the word “selfish is only a figure of speech” (196). The whole theory’s level of abstraction of becomes clear. The gene appears as selfish only because it functions within a selective environment fostering only the replication of the fittest elements. Memetics pretends that it is constantly confronting its “selfish meme” with a cultural universal that is, in reality, only a theoretical abstraction of a cultural universal, entirely dependent on the theory of the selfish meme itself. So, what are memes doing in reality? In “real culture” memes do not only “selfishly” fight against each other, but they also form configurations, which enables them to create certain styles, some of which survive and some of which perish. This idea of cultural evolution is different from the Darwinist one. First of all, by “real culture” I mean a dynamic and concrete world that cannot be thought outside the tension produced by historical (vertical) and contemporary (horizontal) conditions. Cultural evolution takes place in a space where aesthetic motives and configurations are constantly produced and reproduced in real time. Henry Plotkin writes that “if one maintains the accepted ­definition of imitation (…) then what memetics becomes is a kind of one-dimensional account of culture. It leaves out of the science the complex cognitive mechanisms that are responsible for what the social scientists see as the interesting and complicated features…” (Plotkin 2000: 76). The cognitive mechanisms that enable the evolution of culture are dependent on aesthetic constellations.

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3.2 Memetics and Mimesis What is the meaning of “aesthetic” in this context? Aesthetic alludes to the beauty or the stylistic power with which memes impose themselves onto our minds, and which leads to the copying of certain styles. To say that the surviving meme was simply easier to retain by the human brain is a big simplification. At the root of the problem is a misunderstanding of the term mimesis. First of all, mimesis not copying. Blackmore, Dennett, and Dawkins stick to the idea of evolution through replication and imitation. Distin tries to refine the idea of replication by defining it as the production of a “constant pattern of behavior” necessitating a subjective “representation of the pattern itself” (Distin: 129). Dan Sperber rejects the idea of replication of memes and replaces it with a more mutation-oriented concept of reproduction (Sperber: 102). Finally, Plotkin criticizes that “in Blackmore’s work the notion of imitation has been expanded beyond the point of meaning” (Plotkin 1993: 768). The idea of copying has been criticized by various authors, most of whom are sociologists and psychologists,5 but, so far, nobody has addressed the lack of aesthetic considerations with regard to imitation and replication. This is surprising because the word meme is clearly related to the Greek mimesis.6 In philosophy of art, mimesis means “artistic imitation” and explicitly avoids the idea of simple copying. It concentrates on imitation in the sense of artistic re-presentation. HansGeorg Gadamer has much insisted on the aesthetic character of mimesis as a classical theory of art which, for him, has an affinity with play: “The classical theory of art which bases all art on the idea of mimesis, imitation, has obviously started from play, which, in the form of dancing, is the presentation of the divine” (Gadamer 1986: 102). In culture, elements are imitated in a playful way, that is, they are figuratively enacted and receive their new aesthetic meaning only through this figuration. Gadamer concludes that (cultural) reality itself must have a playful character. In comparison to this, the imitation of memes as described by memetics makes no effort to represent such a playful memetic activity that could potentially lead towards aesthetic configurations. It is purely mechanic. For memetics, culture is a purposeful (even if the “purpose” remains unconscious) development of evolution that can be depicted – according to Dennett – as an “algorithmic process” (Dennett 1995: 48–60). If culture’s purpose is evolution, it cannot acquire a playful quality. Culture produces beauty and style through play, and memetics does not address this process. Dawkins dabbles with the most fundamental aesthetic criteria and leaves 5 See Aunger’s conclusion to Darwinizing Culture in which he summarizes this criticism (205). 6 The word comes from the Greek mimeisthai, to imitate, thus to try to be the same. Meme comes from the French même = the same.

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even leaves it open whether the “great” in art should be opposed to the “viral.” Memetics is not an aesthetics. In Chapter 2, we came across the idea of play as the possible emanation of divine power when showing that Einstein chose to stick to the idea that God is not playing dice. The link between play and God is strong because “playful art and rituals are the presentation of the divine” (Gadamer 1986: 102). Gambling is a kind of game. Coincidences and improvisation are more important than a plan. The evolution of culture is planned neither by God nor by an algorithm because, contrary to what Dennett seems to think, neither culture nor style are purposeful developments. I will give more concrete examples and explain how style “creates itself” or emerges organically in a game-like fashion, and not through a machine-like evolutionary movement. Cultural and stylistic development cannot be described in Darwinist terms. Nietzsche established the fundamental distinction between dead style and living style, the first one being merely a historical sign and the second one being a style communicating living contents (“Stil der mitteilt und Stil der nur Zeichen ist;” Nietzsche 1923: 38). Nietzsche opposes the communication (Mitteilung) of real life to the dead communication of historical signs. This means that Nietzsche believed that style can be linked to life: its communication does not need to pass, in the form of historical style, through history. The “whole style” – and not just the sign (the gene) – has a life force of its own. One should not understand this as a vitalistic conception of style but rather as an anti-mechanical one. The life-force of style is sparked and enabled by the environment. Frederic Jameson writes that “great modern writers have all been defined by the invention or production of rather unique styles. (…) However different from each other, all of them are comparable in this: each is quite unmistakable [and] once one is learned, it is not likely [that one style will be] confused with something else” (Jameson 1988: 15). Jameson holds that the strength of the writers’ style is produced through a historical process, which transforms actual artistic expressions into historical style. Yet this does not really reflect the organic situation. Jean Cocteau made a point that supports Nietzsche’s position when insisting that what we should look not for “a style” but simply for “style.” “A style” signifies the historical, formal aspect of a thing, to which we oppose “style” as a creative, organic, living aesthetic expression. At the same time, “style,” though often opposed to and attempting to overcome history, is constantly nourished by history. It maintains an allegorical communication with history, and this is a truly organic model. Present, creative style (as opposed to official, historical style) needs a certain amount of historical recognition in order to emerge. Therefore, we encounter “style” in present, contemporary works of art which, paradoxically, contradict history.

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Can memetics take into account this living and emerging style that flows out of an aesthetic play of present memes with past memes? When seen as a purely historical phenomenon, it is possible to say that style evolves but that it does not emerge. But this concerns only “a style.” What about “style”? Often “style” is not even produced as “a style” but as its contrary: as antistyle. In modern architecture, for example, Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright did not want to create a style: they sought to create anti-style. They thought they were merely producing signs. However, the signs became memes representing the “modern style of architecture.” These architects could testify within their own lifetimes that the anti-style they had created had become a style.7 By rejecting the term style they created a new style. One could explain this on the basis of a dialectics between creativity and official acceptance. However, did this anti-style not necessarily contain a certain aesthetic surplus – that is, “style” – from the beginning? It did, and this was the stylistic potential of what would later be called modern style. Style emerged, which means that it moved from implicit to explicit. The style was not already present in the form of memes, but the memes were only activated once this architecture moved into the twentieth century. And once they were activated by the environment, they could emerge as style. If we reduce this picture to that of memes merely involved in a Darwinist struggle, it becomes impossible to explain the production of style as it came into being in the above example. In other words, style can only be explained through an organic micro–macro perspective. Style (or what is “life” for biology) is not a property of a mechanic system of selection, but it emerges as an aspect of a cultural organism. 3.2.1 Semper’s Materialist Memetics Architectural memetic theories are not new. They already existed at the end of the nineteenth century in the form of Gottfried Semper’s “materialist aesthetics.” Semper tried to tackle the phenomenon of style and stylistic evolution and ran into the same problems that contemporary memetics would face a hundred years later. Egon Friedell would later call Semper’s rationalist and materialistic concept of style a “symbolism of religious, social, and political systems:” The famous architect and teacher Gottfried Semper postulated that the style of every building is determined through historical associations. A courthouse was supposed to be reminiscent of a Doges Palace, a theater of a Roman arena, the barracks of a medieval fortification. (…) Because of 7 In have explained these matters in detail in Botz-Bornstein 2006b.

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the (false) association of Middle Ages with cities, a town hall had to be gothic, and – because of an equally false association of antiquity with the parliamentarian constitution – a parliament had to be ancient. A mayor’s office had to be baroque… (Friedell 1931: 360–61). As a matter of fact, Semper was well aware of the problem, which is why he took care to establish a distinction between two distinct concepts of style. The first is the historical notion of style: “Egyptian style, Arab style, etc., (…) this part of stylistics is often the subject of art history and ethnology” (Semper 1879: 271, my trans.). But he clearly sees that there is another notion of style, the one we use when saying that “a work of art has no style” (ibid.). Semper recognizes the problem but he solves it rather hastily by reducing the latter meaning of style (in “a work of art has no style”) to pure rationality. This is similar to the method of physiologists like La Mettrie who reduced, in the eighteenth century, the soul to mere physiological processes. Semper declares that style – any style – is merely an appropriate coordination of material and function. In other words, a work has style “when the material has been dealt with in a fashion that suits its nature” (ibid.). This materialistic “Stillehre” reduces art to a mechanical product consisting of raw material and technique. We can call it a sort of stylistic mco. Elsewhere, Semper reduces style to Dennett-like algorithms when he declares: “The work of art is the result or, to use a mathematical expression, a function of any number of agencies or forces which are the variable coefficients of its incarnation” (267). This means that style as a functional coefficient is supposed to be clearly and directly determined by climate, usefulness, political and religious influence, etc. Once we are aware of the functional dependence of style, the production of style will follow purely functional principles. Semper’s style is essentially reasonable, and anybody following it is supposed to be reasonable, too. Consequently, Semper’s materialist stylistics is unable to represent the process of aesthetic mediation nor the emergence of style through play because play is not rational. Memetics as a science inspired by genetics faces the same problem. The “selfishness” of memes leaves no space for playful self-presentation. Blackmore writes that memes “will not act for the benefit of the species, for the benefit of the individual, for the benefit of genes, or indeed for the benefit of anything but themselves. That is what it means to be a replicator” (Blackmore 1999: 31). However, if memes only strive to get themselves copied, it is impossible to explain the creation or self-creation of cultural styles. These styles are more than constellations of copied memes “thinking” only of self-preservation. The pattern is not one of replication but of mimesis.

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3.2.2 Anti-Darwinian Aesthetics To introduce the idea of aesthetic play into a discussion on Darwinism is like squaring the circle. Though games are not necessarily against evolution (games can evolve) they need to be “without purpose” if they are supposed to evolve as games. An entire Western system of aesthetics is based on this principle. An entire branch of Western philosophy sees the aesthetic and the playful as “disinterested” phenomena. Aesthetic “values” need to be approached without regard for vital or practical interests. From an aesthetic point of view, positive emotions – be they moral, psychological or simply “physically pleasurable” – are not decisive for the acceptance of an aesthetically attractive meme. Decisive is the aesthetic mode of being through which the meme is presented within a certain cultural play. And this is precisely how a phenomenon like “style” can emerge. On the one hand, Blackmore’s vision of the “meme machine” or Dennett’s idea of selection as a mindless process are game-like because they are selfsufficient. On the other hand, they remain mechanical games unable to produce any aesthetic value. mco-related patterns of culture cannot explain the emergence of style because the driving force of these mechanical patterns is an abstract idea of selection, replication, and evolution. Even Distin’s gallant declaration, delivered in the conclusion of The Selfish Meme, that we should try to read memes “in terms of intellect and consciousness, desires and hope, beliefs and emotions” (206), is not able (and not meant) to establish memetics as an aesthetic discipline. Imitation is not just replication. In culture, imitation can produce results that were not necessarily contained in the culture’s “original genes.” For example, semioticians have discussed the phenomenon of cultural imitation with regard to the absorption of French culture into seventeenth century Russia. This peculiar type of “creative imitation” has fascinated Russian theorists from Nicolas Trubetzkoy to Yuri Lotman. The linguist Trubetzkoy claimed that it is impossible “for any nation to assimilate in toto a culture created by another nation (…) so that the creator of the culture and its borrower merge into a single cultural entity” (Trubetzkoy: 36). He concluded that the materialistic science of sociology pursues a false course when trying to spell out static cultural entities. Lotman reinstated this argument forty years later by using the methods of semiotics: “[In Russia] the tendency develops to find within the imported worldview a higher content which can be separated from the actual national culture of the imported texts. The idea takes hold that ‘over there’ these ideas were realized in an ‘untrue’, confused or distorted, form and that ‘here’, in the heart of the receiving culture they will find their true, ‘natural’ heartland” (Lotman 1970: 147). In “The Poetics of Everyday Behavior in 18th

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Century Russian Culture” Lotman made this point more explicit by introducing the idea of play: “The image of European life was reduplicated in a ritualized playacting of European life. Everyday behavior became a set of signs for everyday behavior. The semiotization of everyday life, the degree to which it was consciously perceived as a sign, increased sharply. Daily life acquired the characteristics of a theatre” (Lotman 1985: 70). The process cannot be explained by using the four memetic stances of “memework,” which are assimilation, retention, expression, and transmission, because, in the end, what is “transmitted” to Russia is more French than the original. The memes are involved in a complex aesthetic game that cannot be reduced to materialistic survival in terms of evolution. The game develops a dynamic of its own. The imitation emerges like a self-organizing system. Memetics reverts to earlier stages of science. Similar to memeticists who attempt to explain culture as the result of memework, Freud attempted to explain dreams as a result of dreamwork. The memework-dreamwork parallel is instructive because Freud, too, was criticized because his method so obviously neglects aesthetic components. For Freud, dream research should be used as a technical means of discovering essential facts concerning the development of neuroses, mental diseases, and other phenomena diverging from “normal” mental life. In his General Introduction to Psychoanalysis Freud presented the study of dreams as an explicit introduction to the Neurosenlehre. Aesthetic considerations were not at the center of these psychoanalytic elaborations, and Freud was outspoken about this: “The psychoanalyst is only rarely motivated to undertake aesthetic examinations, not even when aesthetics is not restricted to the doctrine of beauty but defined as the doctrine of sentimental qualities” (Freud 1922: 292). However, there is another way of seeing dreams. In film studies, it has been demonstrated that dreams can be (aesthetically) fascinating, not only because their linguistic or structural elements can be traced back to elements that exist in reality; in films, the language of dream is indeed just “another language,” and one can be fascinated by it just as one can be fascinated by language from another culture without having a particularly linguistic interest in it. 4

Memetics and Lifestyle

I want to revisit Wittgenstein’s Lebensform in this context. In chapter 6, I have shown how Wittgenstein acts against the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century subjectivism that was particularly well established in European philosophy, and which has left deep traces in our contemporary way of thinking. Through

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subjectivism the ‘I’ manages to assert itself over an entire world of the non-i. Leibniz, Hume, Kant, and many others subordinated the object to the knowing subject. On the basis of these subjectivist philosophies, the self, as well as the space in which the self is embedded, could be defined as subjective. Memeticists are critical of this procedure. For Dennett, an independent mind is a myth, and Blackmore conceptualizes the human self as a mechanical process helping memes to replicate because she suspects that a large part of our lives is lived as a lie (Blackmore: 240). In an article in The New Scientist Blackmore explains that the idea of “self” is an illusion because we are “nothing more than a creation of genes and memes in a unique environment. (…) The memes with the cleverest trick are those that persuade us that our ‘selves’ really exist. (…) The illusion of ‘self’ helps them to survive and spread” (Blackmore 1999: 44). These authors follow Darwin, who set out “to answer a relatively modest question about the origin of species, [and] described a process he called natural selection, a mindless, purposeless, mechanical process” (Dennett: 34). However, while memeticists describe “real” life as a formal process of memetic selection excluding all other subjective elements important to the definition of life, Wittgenstein uses the expression Lebensform (form of life) to refer to a “form” whose positive character escapes definition. I explained in Chapter 6 that for Wittgenstein, a certain “unsayable” or “non-materializable” quality (which he defines in Zettel and in Philosophical Investigations) constantly accompanies our speaking and thinking. This pre-linguistic thinking is neither conscious nor unconscious but develops out of an “unsayable experience.” Various German philosophers developed the Wittgensteinian notion of Lebensform into a more aesthetic notion of lifestyle (Lebensstil). Erich Rothacker even attempted to trace scientific discussions to Lebensstil, defining the latter as “man’s total answer [Totalantwort] to his condition” (Rothacker 1935: 55ff). A certain “unsayable” or “non-materializable” quality accompanies our human condition. Rothacker renders Wittgenstein’s Lebensform as a human condition comparable to the “animal condition” because the human, like the animal, “does not notice, when captured in temporary moods [Stimmungen]. Those [are] things that do not appear important for him” (1964: 87).8 The German movement of Philosophical Anthropology transformed a similar idea of “culture as ­Lebensstil” into an “Allgemeine vergleichende Menschheitslehre” (General Comparative

8 Rothacker points out that he was inspired by Wittgenstein’s Lebensform. See his “Zur Genealogie des menschlichen Bewußtseins” (p. 173) and his “Gedanken über Martin Heidegger” (p. 29).

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Science of Mankinds). Here, style becomes a biological notion whereas for ­Rothacker, Lebenstil is not biologically oriented but cultural.9 As mentioned earlier, for Wittgenstein, philosophy is “a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence (Verstand) by means of language” (Wittgenstein 1997: 109). Wittgenstein explains this by alluding to all kinds of experiences: experiences from everyday life, aesthetic experiences (especially those related to music), and the experiences of speaking and thinking. His point is that the “reasonableness” of speech is not produced by thinking whilst speaking. For Wittgenstein there are no entities such as “representations” but all there is, is a general language game. Representation must be thought of as a play of representations, and Wittgenstein mocks the idea that representations (Vorstellungen) can be “materialized:” “How does one compare representations?” (pu: 376). Consciousness is ungraspable (Wittgenstein speaks of an “ungraspable dream”), but it accompanies our speaking and our entire existence. All this is important for our discussion of memetics. What matters is not the material psychic content of representational elements that we can distinguish in culture, but rather the way in which those representations are experienced. Neither consciousness nor the meme are objects. There is no objective content in culture either, but all we have is the Lebensform within which memes are embedded. A work of art is not a subjective expression, but a Lebensform, and to understand a work of art, one must understand a Lebensform: “In order to be clear about aesthetic words you have to describe Lebensformen” (Wittgenstein 1966: 11). The Lebensform is based on a not yet materialized experience (that can also be the experience of a group of people, a state, or a nation). This experience cannot be split up into various uncoordinated language games but is organically held together by this experience. The process works in parallel with organicist biological approaches, which find that dna is only functional when it is embedded in the context of an already present, intricately organized cell. All this reconfirms my preceding evaluations of memes. For Wittgenstein, certain forms of life or certain lifestyles do not exist because some magical power traceable to human consciousness has produced items like creativity, consensus, or rules. On the contrary, a form of life can exist independently of such conscious choices. Why does a Lebensform exist in the first place? While memeticists attribute the form of life to nothing other than the competitive

9 The main representatives of Philosophische Anthropologie Max Scheler and Helmuth Plessner, whose work has been continued by Arnold Gehlen and Erich Rothacker. See above ­Chapter 6.

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struggle between memes, Wittgenstein sees those forms as aesthetic patterns arising within culture games. I am not saying that the evolutionary struggle of memes described by memeticists does not exist, but that this struggle alone cannot explain the formation of such cultural patterns. Why do these patterns exist? Because a certain group of people has accepted the same memes. Why did they accept them? Because they were exposed to them more often than to others, because they found them convenient… These explanations are insufficient. They work in parallel with the digitalization of living matter through genetic programming that has been criticized by contemporary biologists, as writes Nicholson: “It subjugates the intimidating complexity of embryogenesis by placing the entire explanatory burden on a relatively stable, epistemically tractable entity: a one-dimensional digital code that can be replicated, modified, and transplanted from one individual to another” (Nicholson 2014b: 164). There must be something in the style or in the cultural game that is attractive. At the same time, the driving force pushing the whole pattern into a certain stylistic direction cannot be contained in a single unit called meme either. The style of a cultural pattern crystallizes itself in an aesthetic way: it cannot be contained in one of the game’s elements in the form of a stylistic dna code. To believe this boils down to “memetic animism,” a term that can be coined in parallel with the “genetic animism” pointed out by Nicholson: the “attribution of causal agency to genes that they simply do not possess on their own” (Nicholson 2014b: 164). The style exists only because it is realized in a cultural game, or in a form of life. It can also – and probably will – be activated by a cultural game. By considering this dynamic interplay of systems and elements, we combine horizontal and vertical aspects of cultural phenomena. The processual or organic idea that something which did not exist beforehand came into existence through play is certainly the most difficult one to swallow for materialists of all colors, not only for Darwinists. Already Koestler wrote that “the idea that organisms, in contrast to machines, were primarily active instead of being merely reactive (…) was profoundly distasteful to the Zeitgeist” (Koestler: 198). Still, I am convinced that especially in culture, development and “evolution” do proceed that way. Koestler wanted to see organisms as “creative in the sense that new patterns of structure and behavior are constantly fabricated” (198). In real life, we encounter many paradoxical constellations of cultural reproduction whose dynamic transgresses the logic of imitation. For example, Edith Halberstam has shown that “postmodern culture” abounds with “inverted dominating narratives” represented by “sequels that precede prequels, actor presidents, films that precede novelizations, infomercials, docudramas…” (Halberstam: 4). Memetics, as a typical example of the

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“naturalization” of culture has difficulties explaining such phenomena because it reduces cultural events to information (which can only be imitated). It ­“dynamizes” these elements retrospectively by inscribing them into a Darwinian system of evolutionary selection. However, genes cannot create style and memetics should not foist a model of genetic transmission on culture.

Chapter 8

Philosophy and Thought Ethnophilosophers believe that thinking is always influenced by language and culture. They see philosophy as a thinking process embedded in cultural spheres. When philosophy has this cultural meaning, it can also be called “Thought” as it is used, for example, in “French Thought.” The word “Thought” is then used in the sense of “informal philosophy.” It is partially removed from scientific notions like method. Thought represents philosophical culture from the outset. In this chapter, I examine whether a redefinition of the relationship between philosophy and Thought can lead to a new redistribution of micro and macro elements. What is the difference between philosophy and Thought? First, philosophy is an institutionalized activity usually practiced by officially acclaimed philosophers, while thinking can be practiced by everybody. Well, almost everybody. It’s certainly better to have a university degree – and preferably not in the natural sciences but in the humanities – to be taken seriously as a “thinker.” Though Thought, as it is understood in “French Thought” (and which I decide to capitalize), is different from mere “thinking” it clearly does have more democratic connotations because thinking is less elitist than philosophizing. Philosophy comes out of philosophy departments while “Thought” is most often produced by academics in humanities departments other than philosophy, or also by writers when they are thinking in more systematic or more abstract fashions. Most philosophers do not produce Thought, but their work can be perceived as Thought or be transformed into Thought. Very often, philosophy becomes Thought: sociologists, literary scholars, anthropologists or much of the “general public” are inclined to approach “French philosophy” as “French Thought.” What happens during the shift from philosophy to Thought? Philosophy as a pure, more or less self-sufficient discourse mainly destined to produce other philosophical discourses, becomes “impure” as it enters in closer contact with culture and real life. By becoming Thought, philosophy comes closer to a “way of thinking.” Philosophy produces philosophy whereas Thought is only thinkable through its application in the more concrete fields of the humanities. I am not saying that philosophy cannot be applied to the real world; but when it is applied, it will most probably look like what is in the humanities called “Thought.”

© Thorsten Botz-Bornstein, ���1 | doi:10.1163/9789004440425_010

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Systematic vs. Non-systematic

To some extent, the pattern that opposes a relatively self-sufficient philosophy to a more “applicable” form of Thought flows out of philosophy’s own history: for a very large part of its existence, Western philosophy was systematic. “The True is actual [wirklich] only as a system,” writes Hegel in his preface to The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807: 22). For Hegel, in the non-systematized world, truth can exist only as a potentiality. In the non-systematized world, facts are determined by contingencies whereas inside systems, truth can become actual [wirklich] as opposed to potential because systematization turns truths into necessities. For Hegel, actuality is different from appearance, which is always contingent and irrational. The problem is that “systematic,” as it is understood in many sciences, is mechanic. Machines are mechanical systems and when Wittgenstein, in Z §608, refers to “the system” of neural impulses, he refers to a mechanical account belonging to “the systematic.” However, real life is not systematic but organic. Persons, for example, do not function within systems in this sense, i.e., mechanical systems, but emerge or evolve within organic constellations. That’s why their Lebensform cannot be reduced to a system. “To be a person is not to be a complex physical object or machine,” writes McDonough. “Rather, persons are essentially actors in an emerging cultural world in this non-trivial sense (where ‘emerging’ carries some serious ontological weight)” (2004: 319). Goethe held that “nature has no system” (“Morphology,” 1817: 50). In a system the center and the periphery are fixed while in an organism those constellations constantly change. A system is composed of things whose order is dictated by a universal rule. In contrast, Plato’s cosmos is not a collection of facts or things: it is a dynamic world soul (Timaeus, 30b; Laws, 896e–899a). The features of this world soul are irreducible to its material-mechanical composition. The soul is not a system. The obsession with systems is a late consequence of Descartes’ natural philosophy, which brings together the animate and the non-animate and reduces the organic to machines. Spengler calls this worldview the “morphology of the mechanical,” which created laws and causal relations that are called “systematic” (Spengler: 100). Systematization will be applied not only to science but also to history, culture, and social life. Until relatively recently, a philosopher’s stepping out of the curriculum of systemic thinking could be seen as a provocation. The obsession with systems results from the imperative of universality, which is one of the topics of this book and to which philosophy has been submitted for the largest part of its existence. Philosophical knowledge is not supposed to represent punctual

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i­nsights or punctual hints at wisdom. Literature, art, proverbs, and “folk philosophies” offer such punctual insights, but philosophy is most often supposed to impress us with universal claims, usually constructed by a master thinker. The obsession with systems became extremely strong around 1800, just as German academics attempted to squeeze all philosophy into a Greek framework. The insistence on the non-existence of Indian or Chinese philosophies is partially the result of such “systematic” ambitions. The system confirms itself and excludes the rest. It is thus consistent that Hegel denies a little later the possibility of a “concrete” system of Oriental philosophy. The existence of a system of Oriental philosophy would have been not only inconvenient but also incoherent (see Park: 130). Around 1800, things change, at least in some geographical areas. Systematic relationships between Kant and Aristotle are established in a perfunctory fashion and subsequently criticized by Friedrich Nicolai (see Park: 146). In France, Victor Cousin criticizes, in the introduction to his French translation of Tennemann’s Manual, the systematic character of philosophy, which he sees as most successfully overcome by Tennemann’s eclecticism. Most philosophers of his time, so Cousin claims, “continue to move around in the circles of those worlds of systems which destroy each other” (Cousin 1829: vi). Cousin suggests liberating the philosophical contents from those systems to create a superior philosophy that will be called non-systematic eclecticism. However, to free ourselves from those systems, we first need to understand that none of the systems, which were transmitted to us mainly from the seventeenth and ­eighteenth centuries, is absolutely true. We need to consider other cultures and other points of view. Cousin urges the philosopher to “descend from his throne, to appear in the brawl (mêlée), to assert his rights in this brawl and to do so in the sweat of his brow. In the end he should be just one opinion among others” (xvii, my trans.). Cousin attacks the fanaticism of those who believe they have an exclusive opinion. The new model philosophy of the nineteenth century is eclecticism. Paradoxically, Cousin’s choice of Tennemann as the champion of this new philosophy limits eclecticism to Europe, which somehow goes against the grain of Cousin’s own principles. In his Leçons (1829b) Cousin presented all philosophical schools, including the non-Western ones, and by doing so he turned out to be more open-minded than Brucker and Tennemann. Despite the success of Tennemann’s Manual, Cousin’s call for eclecticism would not be heard beyond the Rhine. On the contrary, according to Park, eclecticism became an endangered philosophy in Germany as “increasingly only one system was being presented to students” (146). This had a perverse effect. Eclectic philosophy became the business of popular philosophers

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(­ Popularphilosophen), also called “Philosophen für die Welt,” whom Kantians tended to ridicule because they lacked coherence or were “syncretic,” meaning that they amalgamated all schools of thought and cultures. The most famous of these philosophers is Christian Garve, who attracted the ire of Schlegel because of his apparent lack of philosophical rigor. For the lack of better words, Schlegel would call him a “philologist.” Later Schlegel coined the term “Garvian,” which stood for a superficial, uncritical philologist without historical consciousness and who is always prone to undue enthusiasm (Schwärmerei) (Schlegel 1981: 35). More lenient critics described Popularphilosophen as methodological skeptics wary of the current Kantian philosophy. “Garvians” were simply not convinced that Kantian systematic philosophy had provided rational foundations of knowledge and morality (see Park: 19). There is another way of looking at the Popularphilosophen. It seems that they were practicing what would later be called Thought. Thought is disconnected from the tradition of coherent and self-sufficient system building, which is why Thought can more easily appear as decentered, eclectic, open, and multipolar. If Thought is systematic, the system comes closer to Luhmann’s open “systems.” One of the topics of this book is the relationship between philosophy and culture. The difference between philosophy and Thought ties into this theme because both Thought and philosophy maintain different relationships with culture. Once again, I do not equate Thought with thinking. However, the fact that thinking is a “popular” activity plays into the definition of Thought. There is an undeniable conceptual resemblance between Thought, as it is understood in “French Thought,” and “thinking,” and this resemblance needs to be considered. How somebody thinks is determined by his/her culture, while in supposedly value-neutral sciences, cultural influences are deemed negative and need to be restricted. Philosophy is a quasi-science, though it works not only in the realm of scientific, but also social and cultural phenomena. It has been shown above that the relationship between philosophy and culture is a troubled one. The fact that a separation of philosophy from Thought was possible in the first place is due to this troubled relationship. 2

Philosophy, Theory, Thought

Heidegger walked away from philosophy. According to Gadamer, “at the end of his life, Heidegger went as far as no longer using the word ‘philosophy’ because it seemed to him like an unsolvable task to lead the metaphysics founded by the Greeks, the form of conceptual thinking founded by Plato and Aristotle,

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towards new future horizons” (Gadamer 1995: 268). Could Thought have opened new horizons? Roughly speaking, philosophy is abstract and universal while Thought is more concrete. Theory is situated somewhere in between. Bernard Crick, who has been reflecting since the 1960s upon the difference between philosophy, thought, and theory, writes that “political thought is always a product with particular cultural roots but with a universal human relevance” (Crick 2012: 277, note 1). This goes for political Thought as much as for any other Thought. What distinguishes philosophy, theory, and Thought, is the level of abstraction and universalism with which each one is practiced. Compared with philosophy, Thought is closer to “opinion.” In his 1967 article “Philosophy, Theory and Thought” Crick viewed “political thought” in the sense of “political opinion.” Thought and opinion are immediate and concrete while political theories “are concepts as to how social and political order adheres;” and political philosophy “is the most abstract expression and the most general” (278). Of course, in our present terminology, “French Thought” differs very much from “French opinion.” Thought is more structured than opinion and often it almost overlaps with theory. However, despite this shift towards theory, Thought remains less formal and less abstract, and is also less officially sanctioned (by academics and university departments) than philosophy. Some found it necessary to conceptualize the difference between theory and philosophy. Luhmann contrasts theory with philosophy by saying that the former is able to integrate contingent elements from real life into itself, and above that it can even deal with irony. Contrary to philosophies, theories are not as strongly affected by systems. Even if systems are used (as in Luhmann’s case), theory manages to remain open: “Systematic theory, as opposed to traditional systematic philosophy, is antifoundationalist; it does not attempt to prove its necessity, but to explain its own contingency. In this way, unlike ‘serious’ philosophy, theory implies an ironical attitude toward itself” (in Moeller: 6). Luhmann’s concept of theory comes closer to Deleuze’s idea of theory as something that “cannot be totalized, it multiplies itself and it multiplies others” (Deleuze and Foucault 1972: 34). As mentioned earlier, for Deleuze “theory is against power by nature” (5). This is just one way of seeing theory. Husserl suggests the contrary when defining theory in the most rigid way, as a philosophical meta-narrative (see Chapter 5). Husserl also uses theory as a universalist notion signifying the essence of Western philosophy. According to Saranindranath Tagore, Husserl’s theory is extremely rigid as it excludes everything, including, for instance, a spiritually charged notion like atman because this Indian term is not theoretical enough. To conclude: the status of theory in the history of philosophy is unclear, which is one more reason to appreciate the term Thought.

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Thought is more open than theory. Thought comes closer to culture, and Thought as a concept is used correspondingly in academic language. When the University of Wisconsin launched a series of “Studies in American Thought and Culture,” the use of the word “Thought” instead of “philosophy” was certainly not coincidental. “American Philosophy and Culture” would not have represented such a smooth compound because, obviously, the link between philosophy and culture is less self-evident. To understand the relationship between theory and philosophy, it is instructive to look at the example of “film theory.” In film studies, film theory passes as a para-philosophical discipline distinct from “philosophy of film.” Film theory can be part of philosophy, though not every theoretical reflection on film is philosophical. Sometimes, parts of film theory and philosophy overlap, but even then, an important difference remains. Just like philosophy, film theory develops concepts, but those concepts tend to be less abstract than philosophical concepts (see Botz-Bornstein 2011). Typical philosophical concepts are belief, causality, the self, and choice, while typical film theory concepts are narrativity, diegesis, mimesis, genre, and authorship. A significant part of film theory is even limited to the analysis of technicalities or texts. Here it is very similar to literary theory, which offers reflections on authorship, narrative, and genre. These analyses most typically do not receive the label “philosophical” unless they are embedded in an explicitly philosophical context. “Film Thought,” should it ever exist, would be a compilation of everything theoretical that has ever been said about film, even when it is expressed in more informal ways. This further clarifies a part of the difference between philosophy and theory. There are, of course, other ways of seeing the philosophy-theory relationship and the resulting contradiction needs to be discussed. Especially analytic philosophers tend to give different accounts of the problem. Peter Simons believes that theory is more abstract than philosophy because it “sees no need to answer to extra-textual tests” as “the text replaces reality, and the pursuit of truth takes a back seat” (Simons 2001: 307). Simons could mean “theory” in the way it was understood by Husserl, but given the context of the discussion from which this statement is taken, Simons presumably has obtuse continental theory in mind. He correctly notes that the latter is often advertised as “Thought.” Observations like Simons’ arise within the context of the continental-analytic divide of philosophy that will be addressed below, but it can already now be said that such considerations are narrow. For such writers, any theory or Thought is synonymous with continental philosophy, while analytic philosophy is “real philosophy” simply because it is opposed to theory and Thought (both of which are misconstrued as obtuse theory). First, this is a s­ implification.

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Second, the idea of self-referential theory as a model for Thought contradicts the more plausible definition of Thought as an “open philosophy.” The simplifying classification of Thought has been forged in reaction to obtuse continental philosophies that have hijacked “Thought” for their own purposes. Still, it is interesting that Simons sees Continental postmodern “theory” as disconnected from reality. It shows that micro philosophies have to face the same criticism as macro philosophies. The narcissism present in formalized academic philosophy, which has been amply criticized in Chapter 4, is equally – if not more – manifest in post-structural theory that is deemed to be unconventional and less tied to academic rigor. An analysis less ideologically colored than Simons’ will formulate the relationship between philosophy and theory differently. The main difference is that philosophy is only what certain people (philosophers) are thinking, whereas theory, in Crick’s understanding, is “merely” theory and not yet philosophy. It thus settles between philosophy and thought. It is useless to oppose philosophy to theory because any philosophy works with theories. However, philosophy does not stay with those theories. For long periods during its history, philosophy used to subsume them into systems. Though this is no longer obligatory, certain formal requirements remain valid. Even if philosophy is no longer necessarily systematic, it is expected to remain attached to the history from which it has emerged. It is expected that a particular philosophy be attributed to a certain system, even if this system is only vague. Historically, when talking about “Idealism” or “Realism” it is assumed that different philosophical productions can fit into an abstract overall mold. That this idea has never been entirely abandoned becomes clear when looking at the efforts expended to fit the productions of postwar French philosophy into classifications such as “poststructuralism” or “postmodernism.” These classifying impulses are hangovers from the systematic tradition. For Thought, this systematic character is less obligatory. “Postmodern Thought” can be very heterogeneous whereas “postmodern philosophy” alleges that all philosophers who fall into this category have something essential in common (which is definitely not the case). It can be concluded that Thought represents a more informal accumulation of theories. 3

Philosophy and Life

Much has been said in Chapter 4 about the difficulties of producing phi­losophy in a decultured world. Too much philosophy is technically clever and perfect in formal terms but lacks (cultural) content. Specialization, ­industrialization,

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and narcissism are “academic diseases” that will kill philosophy if they are not contained. Philosophy practiced in the form of empty professionalism is also concerned with excellence, that is, with an abstract concept to begin with. According to Cornel West, this professional philosophy is opposed to “the concrete, the particular, the existential, the suffering beings, and the loving beings that we are and can be” (West 1998: 33). I want to extend these thoughts by further analyzing the relationship between philosophy and life. Some find that in academic philosophy, the idea of philosophy as a concrete way of life, led by knowledge and wisdom, is definitely dead. It came to an end in the nineteenth century when philosophy began forming a close relationship with science, and when the Greek idea of philosophy as a pursuit of happiness was mostly discredited. In European philosophy, the idea of philosophy as a pursuit of happiness was still adopted by early Christian thinkers who were attracted to a monastic lifestyle. However, already then, the pursuit of happiness in philosophy collided with Scholasticism. John Sellars reminds us how in the Renaissance, a non-philosopher like “Petrarch attacks the scholastic Aristotelians of his day because, unlike Socrates and Cicero, he thinks that they teach him nothing about how to live” (Sellars: 44). In the nineteenth century, philosophy became definitely “scientific” and it has remained so ever since: this conception of philosophy is now so entrenched that, unlike what happened in the Renaissance with Petrarch, few people would now criticize philosophy for its scientism and for its lack of contact with real life. In the twentieth century, the abovedescribed American post-World War ii Kulturkampf against value-oriented learning, which installed “scientific approaches” in all disciplines, as well as the wave of professionalization and specialization that traversed the Western world during the Cold War, killed the idea of philosophy as the pursuit of happiness almost completely. Furthermore, globalization and the resulting culture of quantification made it difficult for academic philosophy to remain a discipline that “trains you to understand the world in which you live better, and so enables you, and others, to live better” (McNaughton: 7). According to McNaughton, “we are in danger of abandoning that conception and leaving ­professional philosophers no time and no incentive to put that wisdom into practice, to engage in other worthwhile activities” (7). The idea that today’s academic philosophy no longer represents a way of life has been most famously formulated by Pierre Hadot who held that “ancient philosophy proposed to mankind an art of living. By contrast, modern philosophy appears above all as the construction of a technical jargon of what is philosophy as a way of life reserved for specialists” (Hadot 1995: 272). Hadot sees Greek philosophy as a way of life because this philosophy is led by argumentative reason without ­reason being an end in itself. Reason must always function in the service of

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spiritual progress. According to John Maraldo (2013), it is this concept of r­ eason that also enables philosophy to accommodate Asian and other non-Western philosophies. Ancient Greek philosophy is not necessarily a way of life in of itself (although Pythagoras and Plato might identify with this idea), but it rather aspires to discover the good way of life. The problem clearly touches upon the micro–macro dynamics that is the topic of this book. Hadot’s “ancient philosophy” is a micro experience in the sense of a spiritual activity through which personal experience can unfold within a larger macro context. This intellectual activity, which is both micro and macro, is supposed to lead to happiness. Philosophies that are opposed to this conception will most probably simply follow or imitate the macro. In the modern world, this means that they will look at rankings and follow global academic trends. Or they will retreat into an intellectual micro niche where they will not do philosophy but merely appear to the world as cultural, anthropological, and folk-like. According to the ancient wisdom highlighted by Hadot, neither the one nor the other approach leads to philosophical happiness. Philosophy needs two things. First, according to Cornell West, philosophy needs to deal with “the concrete, the particular, the existential, the suffering beings, and the loving beings that we are and can be” (West 1998: 33). Second, it also needs to reflect those experiences against the screen of the universal or the cosmos. Cultural Studies, as it developed in Great Britain, as well as its more recent reedition in the USA, comes therefore closest to “Thought” defined as an alternative to specialized philosophy, especially since Cultural Studies is frequently eager to adopt non-Western topics of research. However, as shown above, very often the philosophical (and perhaps the spiritual) input is lacking. Cultural Studies cannot be called the new “philosophy of life.” 4

Thought and Life

In the eyes of all the above-quoted thinkers who are critical of modern academic philosophy, philosophy, the queen of sciences, has become a trade hovering not only above the other sciences, but also above everyday life and culture. It is therefore possible to argue that Thought remains closer to a “way of thinking” that is able to enter different discourses “from below,” simply because it has kept a more intimate contact with (certain) culture(s). Thought is thus closer to a “way of life.” For instance, “French Thought” is fed by what the general public believes to be the particularities of French culture or of the “French way of life:” French Thought is liberal, revolutionary, intellectual, and inclined

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towards stylistic sensitiveness. “French philosophy” does not have the same connotations. Thought can also be linked to certain regions. However, the region covered should not be too large nor should the time span covered be too extended. Still, it must appear as a distinct entity: the term “European Thought” would be too broad a term while “Continental Thought” is more acceptable because it refers to an academically established substance with limited spatial and temporal extensions. “European Thought” is too extended, not only in terms of space, but also in terms of time, as it reaches from antiquity to the present. Thought can be linked to the culture of a certain geographical region or to supranational sections of populations. “Feminist Thought” is supposed to be a theoretical examination of the world as determined by a way of life believed to be suitable to women. It is not called “Feminist Thought” because it spells out truths that are only of interest to women. Truth is not either male or female. The truths of “Feminist Thought” are general enough to spark everybody’s philosophical (theoretical) interest. In this sense, Feminist Thought follows an intrinsic micro–macro pattern whereas Feminist philosophy could be criticized because it seems to suggest that truth is either male or female. At least, that’s what follows if we apply the critique of ethnophilosophy to feminist philosophy. Feminist Thought simply suggests that a healthy input of “women’s culture” can create a sound synthesis of formal thinking and life. All this shows that Thought’s link to a certain way of life remains important in the contemporary use of the term. In order to produce Thought, it is not enough to be connected to an academic field, but the discourse also needs to be connected to a certain culture or subculture. This is why there is no “Film Thought:” the word “theory” is here more suitable. “Film Thought” (coined in parallel with Feminist Thought) would signify that the way philosophers think about film has created its own discourse. But this is not the case: “film” is neither a culture nor a subculture. To see film as a culture or a subculture, one has to refer to certain films from certain regions. Thought is also different from Applied Philosophy. What matters to the latter are merely the consequences that philosophy has on the world, whereas in Thought the pattern is flipped: the world has repercussions on philosophy. This is particularly important for philosophies that are closer to Thought “by nature.” Lawrence Thomas explains that feminist and African American philosophies share certain life experiences: “A remarkable affinity exists, I believe, between female and African American experience. At least, both traditions take seriously the importance of being morally constituted through the other” (Thomas 1992: 118). The case of African American philosophy will be explained below. At the moment, it matters to insist that the cultural link so important to

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Thought is not a “practical” one, in the sense of a concrete application of philosophy to culture. All the above-mentioned Thought-like philosophies are shaped by their cultural environment. Finally, it needs to be affirmed that the impact or attraction of a given culture must be strong for a genuine “Thought phenomenon” to be produced. Some philosophies cannot be transformed into Thought. For example, there is no “English Thought,” simply because English philosophy can hardly be conceived in terms of a “local culture.” For a similar reason there is no “American theory.” Theory, in this context, must be a theory of something (American theory of politics, for example). Theory cannot simply be the presentation of how this nation “thinks.” At the same time, the culturally colored Thought must remain philosophical and maintain a relatively universal character: French Thought is not meant to be consumed only by French people, just as feminist Thought is not exclusively aimed at female readers. A sense of universality must persist, but it will be reached via local cultural components. Philosophical expressions, on the other hand, tend to move more straightforwardly towards the universal. 5

Thought in Minority Philosophies

Since philosophy should not be exclusively about universal truths, maybe we should listen to minority philosophies? Unfortunately, things are not that easy. As mentioned earlier, one of the earliest resistances to philosophy’s inveterate ambition to both deterritorialize and be deterritorialized was ethnophilosophy. Ethnophilosophy was discredited mainly because it was believed to be too cultural-particularistic and not universal enough. It was a local knowledge system, a set of beliefs, a tradition, or a body of wisdom, but not philosophy. Could “Ethno Thought” have been a solution? Surprisingly, philosophies functioning in the name of minorities other than ethnic minorities are permitted. Examples are gay and lesbian philosophy. Are their truths only valid for gays and lesbians? Do they produce a gay knowledge system? Obviously not. Just like the above-mentioned feminist philosophy, gay and lesbian philosophy seems to have been understood as “Thought” – as opposed to an imperatively universalist philosophy – from the beginning. Otherwise it would most probably have been submitted to the same criticism that killed ethnophilosophy, which was found to be too micro and not macro enough. The same is true for African American philosophy. Here the implicit push towards “Thought” is even stronger. Furthermore, the “American” in the title as well as the highly political connotations attached to this philosophy saved it

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from the dangers of ethnic self-enclosure. As an ethno-political phenomenon, African American philosophy is more akin to “Marxist philosophy” than to “ethnophilosophy,” which is why it could from the beginning be understood as “Thought.” African American philosophy is determined by certain life experiences taking place within a certain culture; however, it is not only about culture and thus not mere ethnophilosophy. The political aspect, constantly striving for more universal insights, remains important, which is why it is called philosophy. Large American philosophy departments hesitate to create teaching positions for Chinese philosophy, to the point that some call American philosophy departments “resolutely Eurocentric” (Garfield 2017: xviii),1 but they have chairs for African American philosophy. The reason is not only the larger presence of African Americans in the country. There is also a large Jewish minority in the US, but Jewish philosophy is mainly taught in departments of Jewish studies. Jewish philosophy is too culturally determined and – even worse – there is a dominant religious input. Some universities, such as California State University, have created departments of Pan-African Studies or Africana studies. Here, the reasons are political. In the late 1960s, these departments were founded in direct reaction to the civil rights movement. However, this was a temporary trend. As mentioned earlier, at the moment, there is a “nostalgia among some African philosophers for that period,” as Ogueiofor and Onah confirm (2005: ix). Surprisingly, there is no “Third World Philosophy” though there are “Third World Literature,” “Third World Theology,” and “Third World Cinema.”2 This means that philosophy departments do not develop in parallel with Comparative Literature departments, which expanded their traditional world literature canon beyond the West. David Damrosch writes: “Often relegated in the past to lower-level undergraduate curricula, world literature surveys and debates on world literature are now becoming an integral part of comparative literature curricula at all levels of undergraduate study and at the graduate level as well” (Damrosch: 2). However, even in literature an essential distinction subsists. World Literature has created considerable enthusiasm in North American 1 Cf. van Norden 2016: “Among the top 50 philosophy departments in the U.S. that grant a Ph.D., only four have a member of their regular faculty who teaches Chinese philosophy: Duke University, University of California at Berkeley, University of California at Riverside and University of Connecticut. (…) In contrast, every one of the top 50 schools has at least one regular member of the philosophy department who can lecture competently on Parmenides, a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher.” 2 Enrico Dussel’s philosophy has been called “Third World Philosophy” (Moreno Villa 1998). However, very tellingly, “Third World Philosophy” always needs to be put between quotation marks.

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l­ iterature departments, but even in these departments, the field of theory had been excluded from the wave of globalization. Revathi Krishnaswamy wonders “why studies and the enthusiasm over ‘World Literature’ in America had not generated as much interest in ‘world poetics’ or ‘world literary theory’” (Krishnaswamy: 135). It seems that literature can be Eastern but that theory has to remain Western. This is a paradox: one would think that the abstract content of theories aiming to spell out universal truths would adopt the prefix ‘world’ much more easily than literature. Yet, there are still no “world theory” classes. The academic conditions of African American philosophy and – though only recently – Latin American philosophy are relatively good in the US. However, even with regard to the latter, some problems persist. While it seems absurd to define feminist philosophical writings as an output that can only be consumed and understood by women, Latin American philosophy struggles with precisely this question. Its geographical place has the status of an epistemological foundation, which is problematic. Sienra and Mediana describe how geographical considerations serve to exclude other participants from debates: Only those who live (and suffer) in Latin America are valid interlocutors. Why? Because context matters. How? It seems to shape the socio-mental frameworks within which understanding is possible. However, if this is the situation, how is it possible for peripheral philosophers to understand Heidegger’s philosophy properly? How is it possible for them to bring Derrida’s différance to America? (Sienra and Mediana 2012: 136) The same guidelines apply to other minority philosophies: the enclosure of philosophical truths within cultural individualisms is not acceptable. Margot Badran’s statement that “feminism is a plant that grows in its own soil” (Badran 2009: 243) links a cultural movement like feminism to the earth and space. It follows that an opening-up of this space is important for feminist philosophy as much as it was for ethnophilosophy. Ethnophilosophy was growing its own truth on its own soil too, and this was the problem. Taking philosophy towards the ethnic, the marginal, and minority cultures, raises eyebrows because it smacks of purism in the sense of cultural particularism. What is needed is a micro–macro dynamic.

Chapter 9

The Future of Thought 1

Thought in Non-Western Cultures

In literature, the democratization of Thought had already been on Herder’s agenda and it led, via Goethe’s elaborations, to the idea of Weltliteratur. Herder and the poet from Weimar were, together with Friedrich Schiller and Christoph Wieland, the most prominent members of the Weimar Classicism movement. Goethe embraced the term Weltliteratur two decades after Herder had explained, in his Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man, that peoples, and not political movements, create world history. The concept of Weltliteratur appears in several of Goethe’s essays in the early the nineteenth century. It describes the international circulation and reception of literary works in Europe, including works of non-Western origin. The term is arguably inspired by the Cynic-Stoic organic notion of the “world citizen.” Goethe sees literature no longer as the private heritage of a few cultured men, but as the work of the world’s peoples. This means that in the late eighteenth century there was a twofold revolution in literature: first, intellectuals were asked to shift their attention from the elite to the people, and then, from “our people” to the people all over the world. World literature suggests that everybody can produce literature. The world is one, and it should not be divided into compartments. Consequently, in the twentieth century, as Frederic Jameson insists, “any conception of world literature necessarily demands some specific engagement with the question of third-world literature” (Jameson 1986: 68). How does world literature rhyme with world philosophy or “world thought”? Today most people would affirm that everybody can produce philosophy. However, can everybody produce Thought as it has been defined above? A strange problem arises. Some think that non-Western nations are not even allowed to create theories but that they must import theories from the West (see above). Wang points out that “Asian cultures have become testing grounds for American theories” (Wang 2011c: 1). What do we make of this paradox? One generously grants local philosophies to the non-West, but theories remain reserved to a Western elite. There is French theory but no Japanese theory. Wang attests “a lack of indigenous perspective in conceptualizing research questions, and the absence of homegrown theories,” and lists a string of scholars who affirm this (2011a: 58). What’s the reason? Theory has a more universal pretension than philosophy. A homegrown philosophy can live on its own in its own local

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corner. But what would a homegrown theory be? Theory must “grow out” of its local niche and become a method applicable in universal contexts. The same is true – or even truer – for Thought, which, paradoxically, contradicts the above definition of Thought. In principle, Thought is more local than philosophy because of its ethnic coloring, and theory settles in between philosophy and Thought. However, when we say that the non-West has philosophy but no theory or Thought, the order has been inverted. Suddenly Thought appears more universal than philosophy. One reason is the power constellation that has been so abundantly described by Foucault. Discourses, no matter whether Thought, theory, or philosophy, always operate in relation to power simply because they produce knowledge, and knowledge symbolizes power. But why are there differences between Thought and philosophy? I will explain this below in the section on “historicity.” However, first I want to present some reflections on Thought and democracy. 1.1 Thought and Democracy It was said above that philosophy is only what philosophers are thinking, while Thought can be produced by a broader range of individuals. It would be logical to conclude that Thought can spread in a more democratic fashion than philosophy. Though Thought is not the same as popular opinion, it is supposed to be closer to (though not necessarily overlapping with) what “the people” are thinking, what they are doing, and how they are feeling. Paradoxically, this is not the case. It appears rather that the democratic character of Thought reaches down to some people, but not to all. Non-Western cultures are given the permission to produce “philosophies,” while the production of Thought remains the privilege of the West. While French Thought or theory and German Thought or theory have almost replaced French and German contemporary philosophy, Japanese Thought/theory or Chinese Thought/theory, in the sense of strong and relatively general intellectual models able to influence other Thought models, are almost inexistent. Does the West really believe that Indian, Chinese or African thinkers have the right to – or even should – use Western philosophy to develop their own philosophy, but that they should not produce something identifiable as ‘Indian Thought’ or even ‘Indian theory’? What seems to be a paradox can be explained. Thought, as it was defined in the last chapter, presupposes the (pre-)existence of a philosophical culture. This is why, in an international context, Thought remains still very much restricted to Western elites. In a way, Hegel’s above-described system is replicated. Hegel believed that spirit must always appear as the Spirit of a certain culture. However, only some nations have this culture, and only some are able to produce

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this Spirit. The maximal flourishing of Spirit remains the privilege of a few. What Hegel says about Spirit is also true for Thought. Meiners’, Tennemann’s, and Tiedemann’s campaigns to exclude African and Asian philosophies seem to perpetuate themselves on an unconscious, sublimated level to this day. The segregation of philosophy from religion (saying that Africans and Asians had religion but not philosophy) is an Enlightenment paradigm. The criteria of what is proper philosophy or real philosophy have been loosened in post-Kantian philosophy. Especially in “postmodern” times, one no longer insists on philosophy’s universality and total compatibility with science because that would be openly Eurocentric. The coherence of philosophical systems is no longer as important as it was in Hegel’s time. Everybody can have philosophy. However, subconscious a priori ideas about what is philosophy and what is not surface as soon as we attempt to define Thought in a non-Western context. 1.2 Non-Western Thought in the West Richard Calichman had to justify the title to his anthology of Contemporary Japanese Thought by pointing out that his book includes not only texts by Japanese philosophers but also by Japanese writers. Such justifications would not be necessary in other geographical regions: nobody would find an anthology of “French Thought” containing texts by French writers inappropriate. The attribution of Thought to the West and philosophy to the East can be unconscious, as may have been the case when John Maraldo named the above-mentioned article “Japanese Philosophy as a Lens on Greco-European Thought” (my italics). Bob Wakabayashi did not face this problem when editing his Modern Japanese Thought (1998) because his book contains relatively few references to Japanese philosophers but represents a study in intellectual history. Calichman and Wakabayashi might have had the ambition to lift “Japanese Thought” to the level of French or German Thought: they want to define it as a culturally distinct way of thinking that is capable of penetrating formal and informal Western ways of thinking. Though we do not know about their precise intentions, it is clear that this “Thought” has immense difficulties entering the philosophical spheres of academic discourse. ‘Japanese philosophy’ or ‘Chinese philosophy’ have more chances to do so via the medium of comparative philosophy, though even here the chances are relatively slim. The label “Chinese Thought” (for both traditional and contemporary Chinese culture) occasionally appears but works bearing this title tend to address the intellectual history of China. They are not the Chinese equivalent of French Thought or German Thought, be it only because they are far too general.

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­ nother difference is that in these non-Western philosophies, religion plays a A major role, a paradigm that stretches into modern times. ‘Indian philosophy’ represents (also, or even especially, for Westerners) more than merely philosophy: it is a holistic system including culture, art, and health issues. Often it is linked to a romantic kind of Western cultural self-criticism and, as a consequence, the “mystical” character of this philosophy is frequently pointed out (cf. Steunebrink 2014: 8). This tendency makes the label “philosophy” inappropriate in the eyes of many Western philosophers, which is why the whole project will be scheduled as Thought out of necessity. Here philosophy becomes Thought for reasons that are completely different from those stated above. It is not called Thought because it represents the right and compact mixture of formal philosophy and other intellectual productions, but rather because it simply embraces everything and even gives in to some degree of mysticism. It is a non-philosophy, but it is not called Thought because it represents a distinct way of philosophizing in proximity with culture that could enable it to penetrate Western ways of thinking. Rather, it is called Thought because one seeks to exclude this kind of discourse from the field of philosophy. In the case of Indian philosophy, this strategy has to do with anti-religious standards, which can be traced to the Enlightenment tradition. The Enlightenment is responsible for Western philosophy’s skepticism towards religion in Eastern philosophies (see above); this skepticism culminated at the end of the eighteenth century and has notably decreased since then, but it never died out entirely. To these ideas of disciplinary purity, we can add strange requirements of ethnic or cultural purity. Indian philosophy cannot be Thought because, were that the case, it would absorb non-Indian elements, which is inacceptable. Franz Martin Wimmer, a specialist of intercultural philosophy, has analyzed the Western standards of purism for non-Western philosophies: While one can read that an Indian thinker for instance of the 19th or 20th century is not an “Indian” philosopher because of Western influence, no one would imagine Heidegger not being a European philosopher, because of his reading of Lao Tze. The underlying assumption of such classifications seems to be the silent conviction that authentic and pure “cultures” will be lost under the impact of foreign influences. One wonders when and how Occidentals are supposed to have lost a comparable authenticity. (Wimmer: 10) The province must remain the province. Contamination with Western elements leads to the undue universalization of non-Western philosophical products. There are some exceptions. James Giles, in his edited volume Kierkegaard

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and Japanese Thought (2008), presents not only the Kyoto School, but also Shintoism, Pure Land Buddhism, Zen Buddhism, and Samurai culture. This reflects Thought in the above sense. As a matter of fact, in the area of Japanese studies, the distinction between philosophy and Thought became less clearcut in the West since the 1960s. Some authors began to use the terms philosophy and Thought in less consistent ways, at least when using the English language. Gino Piovesana’s Contemporary Japanese Philosophical Thought (1969) even avoids a clear decision. Though the book’s content is limited to modern philosophers, the author did not simply call his work “Japanese Philosophy.” Updated English editions of the book continue to use the original title, and a blurb from 2003 explains that this is an “introduction to Japanese thinkers and philosophical thought.” This is curious, given that the original Italian book is simply called Filosofia Giapponese Contemporanea. On the other hand, the title of Hajime Nakamura’s History of Japanese Thought: 592–1868: Japanese Philosophy before Western Culture Entered Japan (1969) makes the author’s definition of “thought” very clear. 1.3 Thought in Japan and China The Japanese case deserves to be considered further. Once again: there is a paradigm generously granting philosophy (in the sense of a freestyle imitation of Western philosophy) to the East, but, a complex mixture of philosophy and non-philosophy called Thought only to the West. This paradigm is even reinforced by special terminologies used within non-Western traditions. In the early twentieth century, the Japanese excluded Indian and Chinese philosophies from Tokyo Imperial University’s department of philosophy. Only those non-Western philosophies that had developed under Western influence could be called philosophy. Until today, philosophy (哲学 tetsugaku) refers in Japan exclusively to Western (or Western-inspired) philosophy while Eastern philosophy (including Chinese and Indian philosophy) must be referred to as “thought” (思想 shisou). Obviously, the word “thought” is here used because the cultural-religious productions of Japanese thinkers were (or are) not found “philosophical” enough (in the Western sense). Before the coinage of the word tetsugaku, Japanese (and also Chinese) philosophy was referred to as “thought” (思想). Until today, the word gaku (学), which means “study” in the academic understanding, will not be applied to philosophies practiced outside academic contexts. An exception is Zen Buddhism. Only for Zen Buddhism, both tetsugaku and shisou are possible, perhaps because of Zen’s highly “philosophical” nature. To reinforce this paradigm, philosophies of Anglo-European heritage are even referred to as “pure philosophy” (純粋哲学 junsui tetsugaku), which is very telling. However, despite this terminological separation, a true East-West

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integrative philosophy could develop very early in Japan, with the work of the Kyoto School. The Chinese borrowed the Japanese character compound 哲学 (chin. zhéxué) but did not adopt the Japanese East-West distinction. In Chinese, zhéxué is used to refer to both Western and Asian philosophy whereas thought (思想, sīxiǎng) will be used when referring to the specific philosophy of a person. It is impossible to call a person’s philosophy zhéxué. Mao’s philosophy is thus called “Mao Zedong Thought” (毛泽东思想). Just like in Japanese, sīxiǎng is a more general and less academic term than zhéxué. In spite of this more liberal definition of philosophy that the Chinese have always upheld, integrative work similar to that of the Japanese Kyoto School emerged only much later in China. 1.4 Thought in Africa The Oxford Encyclopedia of African Thought (ed. Irele et al. 2010) covers a broad spectrum of African cultural manifestations and mentions all major trends in African philosophy, political theory, and religion. It puts a strong accent on anthropological studies (especially in aesthetics). However, African Thought (just like Chinese Thought), as it is understood in such studies, is too broadly defined; it also penetrates too deeply into the histories of the regions. To let “German Thought” start with Meister Eckhart would not make much sense. Furthermore, to compare Chinese Thought or African Thought with German Thought is inadequate because the former two address the cultures of very large regions. “European Thought” (should it ever exist) from antiquity to the present is conceptually different from “French Thought” and therefore the two are not comparable. So far, African Thought, conceived as a strong intellectual model whose definition would be neither too broad nor too narrow, and which is able to penetrate, in the form of a special culture-philosophy mix, other discourses, does not exist. Instead one has African philosophy, which is for specialists and often a topic of interest for anthropologists. 1.5 Arab-Islamic Thought1 Japan excluded “indigenous” Japanese, Indian and Chinese philosophies from the department of philosophy. The Islamic academic world undertook similar 1 It remains questionable whether one ought to speak of ‘Arab Thought’, ‘Islamic Thought’, or whether one ought to use another term altogether. The first appears to exclude all non-Arab thinkers, which is problematic when such a large proportion of the individuals concerned were not in fact of Arab origin. Notable are figures such as Al Ghazali, Ibn Sina (Avicenna), Al-Razi (Rhazes), or Al-Biruni, all of whom were Persian (Iranian). Even though most of what they wrote was indeed written in Arabic, it would seem disingenuous to attribute them a

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steps, only much earlier. Falsafa means “philosophy” in Arabic, and philosophers from Al-Kindi to Averroes (ninth to eleventh centuries) saw themselves as heirs to Plato and Aristotle. As successors to the ancient Greeks, they called themselves philosophers. The problem is that falsafa was only one of many competing intellectual currents in the Islamic world. Important religious schools like those of the theologians (mutakallimun), Sufis, and Ismaʾilis existed in parallel (see Fraenkel 2017). All currents were interacting with each other, and it is thus absurd to isolate falsafa from the religious rest. Any book on the philosophy of the Islamic world must deal with falsafa as well as with non-­ falsafa. For this reason, it is useful to speak of Arab-Islamic Thought rather than of Arab-Islamic philosophy. This new term would also solve the problem of classification that still so heavily weighs on this tradition. While everybody agrees that the work of Middle Eastern medieval philosophers, scientists, and poets was more enlightened and sophisticated than that of European thinkers at the time, it has still not been decided what it should be called. Fraenkel writes: “While surveys of this philosophical tradition have become much more reliable and nuanced, they share one fundamental flaw: they are not integrated into the history of philosophy at large. They are either self-standing or billed as ‘world philosophy’ together with Indian, Buddhist, and Chinese thought” (Fraenkel 2017). The predicate “philosophy” appears then rather as an empty gesture similar to what Rorty once noted about Asian philosophy. Applying the term ‘philosophy’ to Asian books is, according to Rorty, not “more than an empty gesture, a stilted compliment” (Rorty 1989: 333). It appears that things have not evolved very much since Johann Jakob Brucker. Hegel, who thought of nationality they did not possess. The second option, ‘Islamic Thought’ would appropriately include these figures, but it can also prove awkward when figures such as Al-Ma’arri, who openly criticized revealed religions, are considered. One may argue that Islam played a dominant enough role in the thinking of individuals during the medieval ‘Islamic Golden Age’ to justify using this term, but it seems equally disingenuous, if not racist, to subsume all nonMuslim Arab thinkers under the label of ‘Islamic Thought’. An additional problem appears when we consider the wealth of Medieval Jewish thinkers, many of whom also wrote in Arabic and engaged extensively with Islam: Maimonides, for instance, was born a mere nine years after Averroes, in the same city of Cordoba, held similar Aristotelean views, and yet his name is probably not one that comes to mind when we mention ‘Arab Thought’, or ‘Islamic Thought’, while Averroes is all but the poster-child for these. An alternative to this conundrum could be to choose a new, more neutral, term, such as ‘Middle Eastern Thought’, or ‘mena (Middle East and North Africa) Thought’. But these can also prove to be problematic, as they lack the currency of the former and smell of utilitarian neo-liberalism. Faced with this problem, I have elected to simply speak of ‘Arab-Islamic Thought’, a formulation which I hope will be sufficiently neutral for the purposes of this section. In situations where other authors have used ‘Arab’ I fllow suit for the sake of consistency.

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world philosophy as a system, wanted to go beyond empty gestures and compliments. Unfortunately, he was too selective and biased in his choices. For all these reasons it is necessary to rethink the question of Arab-Islamic Thought. Tarik Sabry explains, in a long section of his Cultural Encounters in the Arab World entitled “Why Arab Thought?” that Arab Thought should be rearticulated by integrating elements from cultural studies and media studies. His analysis is interesting in the present context. According to Sabry, Arab Thought has been too “Cartesian” over the course of its history and has neglected the everyday life of Arabs: “Why would the Arab philosopher be concerned with what people say in the market?” (Sabry 2010: 25). According to Sabry, Arab philosophy should not be left to the “qualified philosopher” with his “purely theoretical/Cartesian perspective” as this philosopher cannot articulate the different aspects of Arab modernity. Arab philosophers “have ­forgotten about the world and matters concerning being” (26). Much like Victor Cousin, who, two hundred years earlier, had urged philosophers to enter the brawl of the market, Sabry calls for eclecticism; his invitation to proceed to the market place also echoes Wittgenstein’s suggestion that whenever phi­ losophizing we must “descend into primitive chaos and feel at home there” (vb: 65). Sabry uses the theoretical approach of the Moroccan philosopher Mohammed Abed al-Jabri (1935–2010) and suggests deconstructing the turāth (ArabIslamic cultural heritage) by reorganizing the turāth from within. This implies, according to both al-Jabri and Sabry, the use of Western methodology. Western methodology will provide the means to establish “a linear and orderly structure of thought” (26). Sabry’s and al-Jabry’s methods follow a micro–macro logic when tackling the reconciliation of philosophy with culture. Sabry describes the current practice of Arab philosophy as, not necessarily decultured, but as much too dependent on an elitist culture that systematically neglects popular culture and the media. He interprets this state of affairs in terms of an imperialist pattern, which leads him to an original conclusion. Under the threat of imperialism, the Arab scholar morphed from the enlightened rationalist into the traditionalist. As the newly discovered “tradition” contained many purist and fundamentalist elements from religion, the Arab philosopher became an ethnophilosopher, not because they opened themselves up to their own culture but, paradoxically, because they rejected culture and designated a dogmatic kind of religion as the only alternative capable of fighting Western imperialism. Cut off from contemporary “real” Arab culture, the Arab philosopher’s initially open-minded thought becomes dogmatic. At the root of this process is the search for identity sparked by an imperialist threat. As a result, Arab-Islamic philosophy takes a fundamentalist turn and becomes decultured,

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exactly as what Olivier Roy (see above Chapter 4) describes the deculturation of religion in recent times. It is against this background that Sabry suggests we revise the link between philosophy and “real” life/culture. Though Sabry criticizes the emphasis on elitist culture from which, in his opinion, Arab-Islamic Thought is currently suffering, in reality he criticizes a pattern of deculturation. The resemblance of this development with Roy’s scheme of deculturation in modern religion is indeed remarkable. We have a “back to culture” movement, but instead of dealing with a dynamic living culture, this Islamic intellectual tradition turns into “dogmatic culture.” Deculturation leads to the production of sterile religious traditionalism. For Sabry, this is a reason to ask for a shift from ‘Arab philosophy’ to ‘Arab Thought’. Given the media input, as well as the popular culture input, Sabry’s recommendation echoes attempts made by Stanley Cavell in the 1980s, when suggesting that theory and criticism should reflect on popular culture and its “ordinary” objects. In the West, this anti-elitism owes much to leftist ideologies of the 1960s for which cultural refinement had become suspect because, as explains Christopher Lasch, “higher education and ‘culture’ should not in any case be ‘desired by the mob’” (Lasch: 135). The bridging of high and low culture distinctions that Sabry defends for Arab Thought has also been important for the rise of British cultural studies, and it is certainly interesting that in an Arab context such policies can become a recipe against fundamentalism. Both Sabry and Cavell, though each in their own way, act against a purification of philosophy through of deculturation. However, Sabry’s version of Thought remains “philosophical” enough not to end up as a simple celebration of popular culture, subculture, or cyberculture. He does not want to replace philosophy with a shallow version of Cultural Studies. Instead, he outlines a way that nonWestern philosophy can free itself from the grip of Western philosophical elitism and produce a more authentic version of Arab Thought. The diagnosis runs in parallel with what has been explained above about Thought in nonWestern countries: too often non-Western philosophers are locked into Western elitism permitting them to produce some ethnically colored Cartesian philosophy, but they are not allowed to produce Thought in the sense of a fusion of culture and thinking. In the Arab case, thinkers are caught in a Western paradigm juggernaut that forces them to develop their philosophies in an increasingly purist fashion. Sabry urges them to overcome this paradigm and attain a new level of intellectual expression called Thought. Thought becomes the organic unity able to unite concrete cultural environments and even subcultures with “high” theory. The latter is important, as Sabry recommends the use of Western methodologies.

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Thought, in the way it has been defined in this chapter, is something modern, while philosophy is more traditional. As long as non-Western cultures remain locked in their traditional Western system of “philosophy” they will have an impact neither on “the people” nor on the thinkers residing in the humanities departments of their own regions. When this is the case, how can they have an impact on thinkers working at an international level? As “philosophies,” their productions will be exclusively studied by academic specialists of Asian or African cultures or, more likely, by the very few existing international specialists of Asian or African philosophies. In the worst case, these philosophies will be declared classics. In our university libraries, we have access to thick volumes related to non-Western philosophical classics that we read – if at all – more out of curiosity than for the purpose of academic research. At times, we might also offer these thinkers “an empty gesture [or] a stilted compliment” (Rorty 1989: 333). Or, they will be “classicized,” which means that they are simply declared irrelevant. Wimmer writes: “If there are descriptions of Chinese or Indian thought to be found in general histories of philosophy at all, they regularly are restricted to antiquity – to thinkers who seem scarcely relevant to contemporary philosophy” (Wimmer: 10). We thus discover a new concept: the “sage” as a thinker who can be opposed to the philosopher. By classicizing nonWestern works, we follow the principle pointed out by Jay Garfield: that it is more respectful to classify non-Western thinkers “as ‘sages’ than as philosophers” (Garfield 2017: xix).2 Redefining philosophy from scratch, as a mixture of thinking and culture, would avoid all these problems. It would emancipate non-Western Thought as required by Sabry. The academization of non-Western philosophy (by attempting to make it more academic and thus more “philosophical”) would not result in an emancipation, but rather in the opposite. By making non-Western philosophy more “philosophical” one (1) marginalizes the respective philosophical culture and/or (2) pushes it towards fundamentalism, as has been shown above. The cultivation of philosophy in terms of Thought is the most constructive way of coming to terms with philosophy’s universalist ambitions as well as with its age-old troubled “culture connection.” Only when philosophy’s universalist-purist ambitions (in both East and West) are restrained will philosophy be seen differently in these regions. It will no longer be seen through an elitist

2 One could of course also argue that by classifying them as “philosophers” one subjects them to a set of standards on which they cannot do well. Lao Tzu is no Socrates, but he is not aiming at what Socrates aimed at. The refusal to speak of non-Western “philosophy” might sometimes be grounded on this argument.

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Western paradigm that all non-Western nations have to aspire to. The more democratic Thought model will spark a real micro–macro dynamic. 2 Historicity Sabry describes a paradox that is worth analyzing further. How could philosophy develop towards such absurd stages where Arab philosophy could become fundamentalist because it followed the decultured paradigms of Western philosophy? This malfunctioning of academia is not simply the result of a persistent colonial rule, though Dipesh Chakrabarty attempts to reduce it to this when writing: “One result of European colonial rule in South Asia is that the intellectual traditions once unbroken and alive in Sanskrit or Persian or Arabic are now only matters of historical research for most – perhaps all – modern social scientists in the region” (Chakrabarty 2000: 5–6). In reality, the reasons to this must be looked for, not in colonialism, but in the definition of Western philosophy, which tends to block out culture, thus making the establishment of regional philosophies difficult. It is true that a large amount of racism remains attached to any attempt to declare philosophy outside the Western realm impossible. A few strategies supporting this claim have been described in the preceding chapter. They were current during the period of the Enlightenment. After the Enlightenment, the unwillingness to recognize certain non-Western philosophies as philosophies persisted, but the strategies changed. One of these new strategies can be traced to Hegel’s idea, expressed in his History of Philosophy, that non-Western man is enclosed in an “undifferentiated compact state [and] has not yet grasped this distinction between himself as the singular and his essential universality” (Hegel 1837: 56). Hegel’s racism is no longer accepted, and it is generally agreed upon that any nation can produce its own philosophy. However, can any nation also produce Thought? The African can produce philosophy in the form of an ethnically colored Cartesian philosophy, but is he allowed or able to produce Thought? We have seen that the answer is no. This means that Hegel’s system is replicated in a tortuous fashion: countries living in a “compact state” can imitate Western philosophy or design their own philosophies following the purist, disinterested, culturally neutral standards that have been laid out by Western philosophy a long time ago. However, they cannot produce Thought, because this would require an organic mixture of thinking and culture that can only be obtained when the thinker, to quote Hegel, perceives a clear distinction “between himself as the singular and his essential universality.” According to these guidelines, only countries with strong historicity can generate Thought

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as a societal self-production. Countries with weak historicity can only imitate the West or, in the best case, produce their own (provincial) philosophy, in the form of a modernized (Westernized) tradition. In other words, they have to remain micro and are not allowed to produce organic micro–macro Thought the way it has been described above by Sabry. Not all Geists are equal. To have cognition is good, but it is not enough. Real Spirit is self-reflective. A real thinker needs to have the highest type of cognition, which is the self-cognition of cognition. Unfortunately, this is only the privilege of a few. Once we distinguish philosophy from Thought, we discover that we have not moved far beyond the Hegelian paradigm that depicts Geist as a precondition for valuable intellectual production. What does it mean to say that some countries lack historicity? It is fruitful to first discuss this problem outside the context of Hegelianism. The hermeneutic term historicity (Geschichtlichkeit) is not Hegelian but primarily occurs in the works of Giambatista Vico, Wilhelm Dilthey, Martin Heidegger, and Hans-Georg Gadamer. For Vico, historicity is reality produced by humans through history. Historicity is a cultural reality with a historical dimension (see Scienza Nova 1744, sections 125, 127, 331). Dilthey always maintained this basic definition of historicity. To him, it signifies the “historical way of being of the human Spirit” (“die geschichtliche Seinsweise des menschlichen Geistes”) in the sense of an existence determined by an awareness of its own history.3 Heidegger adopted his own existentialist notion of historicity from Dilthey when explaining, in his Being and Time (1927), the historical character of the constitution of Being-there (Seinsverfassung des Daseins). Chapter 6 of Being and Time is entitled “Temporality and Historicity,” and the word Geschichlichkeit appears hundred-five times in the book. Heidegger explains that we should not search for historicity in historiography but rather strive for an ontological understanding of historicity (1986 German: 375; Engl.: 344). The existential (existenziale) construction of historicity does not see history as an object of science but recognizes Da-sein (circumstances, events, destinies) as “historical in its being” (379; Engl.: 347–48). Humans are not “more or less important atoms in the business of world history; because as humans, they are not the plaything of circumstances and events but can be aware of their ontological conditions” (382; Engl.: 350). Heidegger urges us to adopt an organic view of history. It is not an exaggeration to say that Heidegger’s “successor” Gadamer bases the entire body of his philosophical hermeneutics on this notion of historicity. 3 This existentialist or lebensphilosophische category emerges from Dilthey’s correspondence with the count of Yorck (Dilthey 1923), lengthily analyzed by Heidegger (1986) and Gadamer (1986).

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Philosophical hermeneutics transfers Heidegger’s philosophy into the realm of “understanding” as it appears in the field of the humanities. Gadamer not only claims that within every process of understanding the person who wants to understand is constantly referred back to his/her own historical position; he also claims that the interpreter has to accept this circular reference to himself as a necessary condition of a hermeneutically conditioned understanding. The interpreter should recognize that her own historical or cultural position represents a constitutive part of the process of understanding. Gadamer’s hermeneutics formulates a position strictly opposed to the doctrines of conventional historical philology, which asked for a negation of the personal point of view of the historian, in order to “duplicate” or “relive” (nachvollziehen) the historical situation from its very inside (see Szondi 1975). Gadamer’s idea of hermeneutics is thus much more radical than Dilthey’s. Dilthey recognized the impossibility of any “last foundation” (Letztbegründung) of knowledge in understanding and philosophy. However, at the center of Dilthey’s hermeneutics is still the act of an “experienced re-understanding” (erlebte Nachverstehen), which tries to grasp a “coherent part of reality” (einen realen Zusammenhang, Dilthey 1984: 71). For these hermeneutic philosophers, as well as for Hegel, human existence is only fully understandable through its own historicity. Existence requires historical awareness. For this reason, I use historicity in the present context to mean “philosophical culture,” which siginifies two things: first, that culture is necessary for the production of philosophy, and second, that historicity is not just culture lived in an unreflected fashion (like a tradition), but that it always includes cultural self-awareness. Or, to use the terms suggested by Okere and Janz, the culture surrounding philosophy is not entirely “non-philosophical” (see Chapter 4) but went through certain critical instances. In Europe this was the Enlightenment or similar philosophical movements. A culture having a strong historicity is a philosophical culture that went through stages of selfcriticism and filtered out irrational elements like mysticism and superstitions. It filtered out many – though not necessarily all – beliefs. There is no philosophy without historicity but there is no historicity without philosophy either. Accordingly, this philosophical culture, which has its own historicity, must exist before the creation of philosophy. If we use Hegel’s ideas for the purpose of the present discussion concerning the difference between Thought and philosophy, we can say that the lack of such a “philosophical culture preceding philosophy” prevents those non-Western nations, who are living in an “undifferentiated compact state,” to create Thought. In the best case, they can create philosophy (which will most probably remain provincial). For Hegel all cultural productions require historicity.

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Even in religion, one’s concept of God must be reflected against one’s own individual existence. Hegel believed that Indians were not doing this and criticized them for that reason. If this is true for religion, it must be even truer for philosophy. We see that not much has changed since Hegel. Academic philosophy (especially analytic philosophy) can be produced without historicity and Africans are allowed to engage in this philosophy. Thought, however, requires historicity. To produce Thought, the thinker must grasp the “distinction between himself as the singular and his essential universality” (I quote Hegel from his History of Philosophy, 1837: 56). Thought cannot advance in a purist, straightforward fashion that tries to grasp pure substances and culturally empty truths. The following conclusion would emerge from these reflections on the contemporary relevance of Hegel: Africans can very well produce analytic philosophy because this is a philosophy for people who live in a “compact state.” But they cannot produce Thought because this requires historicity. Why is this the case? Do African lack historicity by nature? No. Africans have been prevented from creating Thought because they were forced to comply with the purist rules of Western philosophy. Africans are caught in a Western paradigm that forces them to develop their philosophies in an increasingly purist fashion. Some Africans refused, and they ended up as ethnophilosophers. In any case, the reason is not Africans’ incapacity to transgress the “compact state” of their culture. The reason they cannot produce Thought is the overly rigid system of Western philosophy that tends to exclude any kind of culture. What should be done? First, we need to become aware of the importance of historicity and recognize that Hegel and hermeneutic philosophers were right on this point. Then we need to widen philosophy towards a Thought model. Philosophy needs to be rearticulated by integrating elements from Cultural Studies, as has been formulated by Sabry above. This implies a redefinition of philosophy as a mixture of thinking and culture. Only then will non-Western philosophy no longer be seen through an elitist Western paradigm that all nonWestern nations must aspire to. When I say “elitist,” I also – or especially – mean the above-described culture of evaluation and measurement that has become increasingly current in Western philosophy departments. It has undermined the “philosophy as a way of life” concept that was once common in philosophy, and which could still bring thinking and culture together. 3

Reconsidering Ethnophilosophy

As Western philosophy strives towards the establishment of universal truths, it is constantly deterritorialized and deterritorializing. Ethnophilosophy, which arose in a context of colonization, is one of the earliest resistances to such

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d­ evelopments. Oswald Spengler found that cultures tend to lead resistant underground existences when oppressed by larger civilizations. A self-sufficient force present in individual cultures is more powerful than anything produced by universal civilization (Spengler 1917: 33). Ethnophilosophy took this idea very seriously. There is a “culture against civilization” momentum in ethnophilosophy and, paradoxically, ethnophilosophy finds its own place in the Western tradition by insisting on this difference. Ethnophilosophy can be seen paralleling a radical stream of critique of science that has a long tradition in the West. This critique started in the West and extended into the non-West. The radical critique of science, beginning with Kuhnian criticism of scientific practices, ended with a postcolonial critique of Eurocentric rationality. Associated with the latter are feminist critiques of internal epistemological features of scientific processes. In between comes Joseph Needham’s critique of the European concept of a “divine logos,” because the European laws of nature drew on Judeo-Christian beliefs as well as on absolutism (Needham 1951: 20). Ethnophilosophy fits into this stream of thinking. Philosophy, as a highly self-reflexive discipline, has repeatedly pointed to the limits of (its own) universalism, and ethnophilosophy is doing precisely this. The “ethnic” component of ethnophilosophy is not necessarily genetic or biological. Richard Rorty writes that “one’s ethnos comprises those who share enough of one’s beliefs to make fruitful conversation possible” (Rorty 1990: 30). This is different from Masolo’s description of the community as ubumwe (oneness), in the sense of a “Bantu solidarity and their belief in the vital communion existing between members of a family, clan or even an entire tribe” (Masolo 2001: 213). Masolo complains that scientific philosophers like Martha Nussbaum “argue that commitment to any sort of collective is false” and that they “can be the source of oppression of others because they allow for the inference of unacceptable relativist moral canons” (Masolo: 225). Rorty’s option transcends the black and white scheme emerging from the Nussbaum-Masolo confrontation. As a matter of fact, Nussbaum herself has elsewhere criticized the caricatural opposition between “the Enlightenment ideals of universality” and “an ethics based on tradition and particularity” (Nussbaum 1999: 163–64). “Seeing culture” does not mean elevating unreflected habits to the status of good life. Rorty, for example, sees community as based on solidarity, shared norms, convictions, and practices that are held together within a horizon that is ever expanding. It is not only tradition and particularity. Similarly, “seeing culture” (even when it is “ethnoculture”) in philosophy is not necessarily conservative, racist, or fascist. It can even have a liberating function, and it was employed in this sense by the most leftist specimen of leftist thought that the 1960s could offer: by French Maoists, as emerges from Julia Kristeva’s writings about her excursions to China and her flirtation with “Chinese Thought:”

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If we were interested in China, it was because we had the impression that its national tradition – Confucianism, Taoism, the place of writing, the specificities of the Chinese language, the role of women in this culture etc. – could influence socialist ideology which purported to be global, and to lead it in an interesting direction. We thought that from such a springboard, whatever impasses were in existence, would then no longer be the same. (Kristeva 2006: 38; quoted in Orr: 77)4 Paralleling what Kristeva thought about the Chinese, ethnophilosophy saw truth as a certain way of life practiced by a group of people; it saw philosophical truth as cultural and believed that this could be used as a “springboard” for more important, universal reflections. While ethnophilosophy fought the deterritorialization of thought and knowledge, it attempted to reconcile Socrates’ enlightened truth with regional traditions. If we see ethnophilosophy in this way, it turns out to be more organic and not simply self-enclosing and totalitarian. The collective or the ubumwe (oneness) that Masolo mentions, and which, according to him, Western philosophers see as either oppressive, relativist, or both, does not necessarily signify “absolute truth for a limited community of people.” An organic reading transcends the sterile black and white scheme. According to Rorty, ethnos or community are not necessarily closed, but they also enable conversations. In other words, the micro can be linked to the macro. As I explained earlier, to have a culture is a precondition for cultural openness. In another text, Nussbaum insists on the micro–macro aspect of Platonic thinking as we “come through the larger only through the smaller” (Nussbaum 1996: 142). She explains that Aristotle held that in Plato’s ideal city, care should be learned in small groups, and if citizens were “asked to care for all citizens equally, [they] would actually care for none” (1996b: xii). Here, Plato’s republic does not look like an artificially constructed “socialist” enterprise, but more like a community-based state-organism. Some Latin American philosophers have tried to convert philosophy into an existentialist form of Thought (resembling a philosophical way of life), able to integrate the periphery and the center as well as the universal and the individual. Alejandro Vallega hopes that “the turn to the periphery and recognition of its living claim and force opens the door for the recovery of the cultural and existential ground for conceptual knowledge” (Vallega: 150). Vallega’s demands

4 It needs to be pointed out that the fascination with Chinese traditionalism is in stark contrast with the oppression of cultural diversity of the Chinese Cultural Revolution that wanted to implement a monochromatic socialist culture.

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read like a summary of those that Jabry expressed in his outline of Arab Thought. Vallega writes: “The rich folkloric traditions still found in Latin America’s music, oral traditions, poetry, dance, and the geometry of its ancient ruins and textiles, all offer fertile ground for nascent thought not against reason, but as the unfolding and the underside of the rational” (155). Both Vallega and Jabry suggest a micro–macro application of ethnophilosophy. 4

Non-Western Micro Philosophies

Non-mainstream philosophies need to avoid radical brands of micro ­philosophy whose most extreme expression is “ethnoscience.” Similar to ethnophilosophy, ethnoscience starts with the Kuhnian critique of science, but it concludes that, even in science, everything is local and nothing is universal. Rationality, logic, and objectivity are merely local expressions. Ethnoscience is a “micro science” approach depicting everything, including European sciences, as local knowledge systems. Once Western science is introduced into other cultures, it will be “experienced as a rude and brutal cultural intrusion.” That is the opinion of Bandyopadhyay and Shiva who offer such arguments in their article “Science and Control: Natural Resources and their Exploitation.” According to these authors, European sciences’ claims to value-neutrality (and therefore universality) are simply aimed at “disvaluing local concerns and knowledge and legitimating ‘outside experts’” (Bandyopadhyay and V. Shiva 1988: 60). Other micro sciences trod along similar paths. There is, for example, “Feminist science,” which suggests alternatives to “male sciences” (see Harding: 39). Such approaches would be difficult to swallow for scientists and philosophers of Karl Popper’s generation of who suffered under the scientific policies of the Nazis, and who “saw the world almost lost to a regime that distinguished Aryan physics from Jewish physics” (Hollinger: 332). Elsewhere in the humanities, such anti-theoretical backlashes have been noted in the form of “simplistic anti-theoreticisms” that are validated on the argument that we should not “use Western theory to understand other areas of the world” (Chow 2002: 110). David Morley judges that this is “clearly a regressive move, which depends on the unargued assumption that theory is necessarily ‘Western’ and belongs only to the West” (Morley: 126). Self-orientalization that insists on religious, cultural, or even scientific exceptionalism is not better than Orientalism. Here, too, a transformation of philosophy into Thought can be helpful, because only a Thought-oriented philosophy will reformulate the discrepancy between “ethnic” and universal truths, between micro and macro philosophy, and proceed in an organico-pragmatic – and not in an ideological – fashion.

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Future Philosophies

It has been shown that as a Western movement of civilization, philosophy is driven by an intrinsically anti-cultural agenda. This tendency manifests dangerous parallels with both neo-liberal education and fundamentalist religions. The degrees of deculturation in philosophy vary, but the phenomenon is definitely more obvious in analytic philosophy than in Continental philosophy. This is one reason why analytic philosophy has developed such a strong aversion to “Thought.” 5.1 Analytic-Continental In an oft-quoted blog post, Brian Leiter declares his hatred for Thought because it is produced by the “man of letters.” Leiter mocks “the man of letters who really is nothing but ‘represents’ almost everything, playing and ‘substituting’ for the expert.” According to Leiter, the departments of “English, Law, Political Science, and sometimes History” produce “sophomoric nonsense that passes for philosophizing” without respect for rigor and are repositories for “the world’s bad philosophy” (Leiter 2006–2008). Leiter launched his tirade, which is reminiscent of Schlegel’s nineteenth century rant against Garvian Schwärmerei (see Chapter 9), in the context of the analytic-continental rift, and it is remarkable that on blogs, Leiter’s emotional, pro-analytic outbreak has been heavily criticized by academics from the departments in question, but much less by continental philosophers. I, being a continental philosopher, actually believe that Leiter has a point. That said, to make fun of the thinker as the “carrier of culture” as Leiter does, is counterproductive because it invites philosophy to play along the deculturing tendencies of our neoliberal institutional environment. This environment loves experts and it has its own brand of technocratic rigor, and it too produces a lot of sophomoric nonsense just for that reason. The philosophical aversion for Thought can be compared with the above-described anti-cultural definitions of education flagrant in the empty expert culture of excellence by which universities are presently invaded. Tolerance towards Thought – and I mean good and rigorous Thought – is always a better option. It is impossible to describe the differences between analytic and continental philosophy within the limits of this chapter because they are philosophical, stylistic, sociological, and historical. It can even appear that the difference is not essential: as there is not much internal coherence within each of the two groups, the A/C gap will widen or tighten depending on which philosophers one decides to compare. However, there is something that pertains to the present “philosophy and culture” discussion: analytic philosophies are rarely

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i­dentified with Thought. Whereas “analytic Thought” is positively inexistent, the term “continental Thought” has been found plausible enough to be employed as a name for several book series by American university presses, one of which has existed for forty years. Compared with continental philosophies, most analytic philosophy is ahistorical. Continental philosophy’s link with real life – and therefore with culture – is often maintained by insisting on experience and – traditionally – on the process of understanding elements within culture and within history. The above-mentioned historicity, as it is used in the hermeneutic tradition, has always been central for this purpose. For hermeneutics there is even a “historicity of reason,” and Gadamer famously said that “historicity does not belong to us; we belong to it” (Gadamer 1986: 260/2004: 276). This means that our epistemic commitments are always determined by historically specific entities. The “within culture” aspect has become a principal characteristic of ­continental philosophy, not only through hermeneutics, but also – more ­generally – through Heidegger, as he was drawing thinking away from the highly theoretical contortions of Neo-Kantianism and phenomenology. Heidegger used the “life world” (which is Husserl’s expression) and not the Neo-Kantian “Faktum der Wissenschaft” as a new methodological framework. As language, temporality, and historicity moved to the center of this new philosophical inquiry, older questionings determined by theory of knowledge (Erkenntnistheorie) and theory of science (Wissenschaftstheorie) lost their importance. As a result, continental philosophy became even more cultural. Peter Simons speaks of Heidegger’s “realism” that “was robustly expressed and promised to cut through the knot of complications of epistemology to put philosophers in touch with, or rather land them in the midst of, the world” (Simons 2001: 302). Though some of this realism might be merely rhetorical, it was definitely real enough to bring philosophy closer to Thought. Hermeneutics, Habermas’ theory of communicative action, but also American pragmatism, see truth not as an abstract correspondence between things, but, more organically, as an ­experienced quality taking place within a certain culture. Of course, not everybody was impressed by the radicalism with which Heidegger questioned the ­foundations of Western philosophy. Apart from the pragmatists, the Englishspeaking world did not pick up his thread. 5.2 Pragmatism Pragmatism adopted various paradigms from the hermeneutic tradition. In his article on analytic and continental philosophy, Rorty suggests we “drop Continental and instead contrast analytic philosophy with conversational philosophy” (Rorty 2003: 22). This is not supposed to lead to relativism. Scientists or

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scientifically minded philosophers accuse pragmatic philosophers of abolishing stable entities such as “concepts” or “meanings,” saying that Rorty wants to reduce philosophy to “mere conversation.” However, conversations (if we think of Plato’s dialogues) do not necessarily go in circles (leading to relativism) but can lead to knowledge. There is reason in conversations. Pragmatism represents an interesting case in the present context because it has a clear ethno-philosophical input incorporated. Rorty writes that “the pragmatist must remain ethnocentric and offer examples” because pragmatists understand that philosophical vocabulary “cannot be derived directly from nature but only from culture” (Rorty 1982: 178). For Rorty, there is no absolutely rational life (in a Platonic sense) to philosophize about because cultural truths are not certainties but merely possibilities that “make sense.” They provide philosophical insights because the philosopher recognizes possibilities. Pragmatism, like Continental philosophy, is therefore more prepared “to live with uncertainty as a creative force,” to use an expression from John Ralston Saul. Saul suggested this formula in his Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West (1992: ix). 5.3 Contemplative Philosophy Rorty opts for the term “conversational philosophy.” My suggestion is to replace the term “continental philosophy” with “contemplative philosophy.” Contemplation is theoria, and theorein means to consider, to speculate, or to look at. Contemplation looks at the whole, or the totality, and in this sense, it is organic. Contemplation can be opposed to analysis. To contemplate does not mean to analyze but to “look at” or “gaze at.” It also means “to be aware of.” Nor does “to contemplate” mean to collect and process information about what is seen. The contemplative look experiences concrete objects and comprehends them through consciousness or – in a Hegelian way – through self-­ consciousness. In other words, to contemplate means to understand thinking, in a Heideggerian sense, as a “coming to terms with,” which creates an organic input. Awareness signifies the perception of individual phenomena within larger contexts, and the contemplative act always comes with an incorporated micro–macro relationship. According to Emile Bréhier, the contemplator “reasons, composes, and grasps relationships” (Bréhier: xvi). Contemplation is opposed to the “fast” analysis that is today increasingly relegated to computers. It is opposed to rationalization, instrumentalization, as well as to the modern impulse to make all things intelligible according to a totalizing logic. Contemplation is always a slow process because the viewer has to speculate about many possibilities, whereas information can be

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quickly quantified and rationalized. When it comes to information, speed is an advantage, whereas for contemplation, slowness is an advantage. Analysis concentrates on either micro or macro events because, basically, its task is to separate micro phenomena from their macro context. Contemplation is synthetic: it can concentrate on the micro but will always be aware of the macro. The fact that the contrary of analysis is synthesis becomes particularly obvious in continental and analytic philosophy respectively. C.G. Prado sees the main difference between analytic and continental in a respective focus on either analysis or synthesis: “Continental philosophers typically address large questions in a synthetic or integrative way and consider particular philosophical issues to be ‘parts of larger unities’ and as properly understood and dealt with only when fitted into those unities” (Prado: 10). Prado gives an account, not of pure synthesis, but of the micro–macro dynamic typical for hermeneutic understanding. In continental philosophy, the macro is always important because one tries to discuss “big questions.” Synthesis – the putting together of single elements – leads to the consideration of the whole. In other words, contemplation locates an organic web of temporal and spatial relations in the form of an immanent, self-sufficient logic. This self-sufficiency makes contemplation “simple” by definition. The logic of what is seen is not present in the form of empirical facts or abstract rules that need to be analyzed. As a counter example, Prado suggests the philosophy of analytic philosopher John Searle. Searle is “‘taking apart’ elements of consciousness, speech acts, and social institutions and seeing how they work” (10). Prado also quotes from Wallace ­Matson’s A New History of Philosophy from Descartes to Searle, where the author writes: “Analytic philosophers typically try to solve fairly delineated philosophical problems by ‘reducing them to their (…) parts and to the relations in which these parts stand’” (Prado 2003: 10). In other words, they have an mco approach. Apart from that, we are reminded of the “trivialization” theme discussed in Chapter 1 of this book. The analysis-synthesis problem is not new. Already Goethe criticized his century as a “century engaging exclusively in analysis, a century afraid of synthesis. It has taken the wrong path because the life of science should be made of both analysis and synthesis, it’s like breathing in and breathing out” (1840: 50, my trans.). In the short text “Analysis and Synthesis,” Goethe regrets that modern chemistry strives to separate what nature has united. It wants to examine nature in the form of separate elements. However, “it is not enough to observe nature by using the analytic method, that is, to derive as many ­particularities as possible from a given object” (50). Earlier, in a letter of May

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5th, 1786, Goethe wrote that “if [science] limits itself to separation, I cannot deal with it. But when it unites, or when it heightens and secures our original sentiment that we are united with nature, and when it provides deep and quiet contemplation, then I welcome science” (Goethe 1786: 423). Goethe criticizes Victor Cousin who, in the above-mentioned lectures on the history of philosophy, lauds the eighteenth century because, during this period, sciences were committed to analysis and refrained from hasty synthetizations. However, even Cousin admits that synthesis should not be entirely omitted. Contemplation looks for organic constellations that appear in the form of synthesis. Observation must find organic patterns by shifting its perspective to the whole, “otherwise micro facts remain mere aggregations, [they remain] a next-toeach-other, a with-each-other” (Goethe 1840: 52). Why do some people stick to analysis and to the isolated micro? There is a whole range of reasons. Russell thought that if bits of information are smaller and more isolated (in chemistry and physics), the information will be more accurate. This is a scientific reason, but there are cultural or political reasons, too. In post-World War ii Europe, the aversion to synthesis, the big picture, or simply any kind of “important questions” was fed by a fear of totalitarianism. Via a common fascination with the micro, various thinkers who otherwise have not much in common, joined hands. Russell and Foucault are the perhaps most prominent examples. True, Foucault says nothing against the organicism of Aristotle that Russell liked to criticize (see introduction). But both philosophers’ positions show remarkable parallels when they criticize Hegel. Foucault held that philosophy “from Hegel to Sartre has essentially been a totalizing enterprise” (quoted in Prado 2006: 21). The French philosopher feared that unless we split everything up into micro elements, the world will be taken over by macro structures. It is true that the macro can have negative effects, and this not only because of totalitarianism. Pseudo-philosophies and New Age cults produce totalizing visions of the human, garnished with interrelated visions of the cosmos and All-Unity fantasies. Further, there is a whole set of evil macro structures, most of which go often unnoticed. For example, the contemporary world is totalized through the mathematization of human behaviors in the form of algorithms. Yes, these are macro structures that need to be contradicted and deconstructed. However, the enthusiastic embrace of the micro without due consideration of the micro–macro dynamic represents no alternative. The order of the small must always reflect the order of the totality and vice versa. In philosophy, the micro–macro dynamic has always been represented by the right mixture of formal thinking and culture.

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Towards a Philosophical Reculturation

In his Philosophy Americana: Making Philosophy at Home in American Culture (2006), Douglas Anderson attempts to establish “American philosophy,” which is overwhelmingly dominated by analytic ways of thinking, as a philosophy determined by the ethno-components derived from popular music. Andersen explains that American music “is rooted in the traditional musical practices of the immigrants to the United States: blues, gospel, Celtic, folk, country, Texmex, swing, bluegrass, old-time, rock n’ roll, reggae, and, I would add, more recently, hip-hop” (Andersen 2006: ix). Such an ethno-philosophical approach to American philosophy is unexpected. When Andersen reflects in an ethnic way upon the meaning of American philosophy “under the influence of its particular history” (x), he is asking for a shift from philosophy to Thought. He attacks non-humanistic studies, which “conduct quantitative analyses of behavior” (2) and have eliminated cultural components. He also attacks American philosophers who “have been blind to a variety of representative perspectives and have left a number of needs unattended” (8). What they left unattended is culture, in the same way that neo-liberal education and fundamentalist religions decided to overlook culture and shift the focus to quantitative analyses. Andersen affirms that “philosophy cannot be effective if it merely tries to oversee culture. At some point, it must come to close quarters with the other dimensions of culture if it hopes to become visible” (18). Is the conversion of philosophy into Thought that difficult? Ethnophilosophy claimed to effectuate a shift from pure to impure truth. It was not successful because – paradoxically – mainstream philosophy perceived its insistence on ethnicity as a sort of purism. This is a paradox because, in general, ethnization turns the pure into the impure. This is even true for mathematics. According to the mathematician Bal Chandra Luitel, ethnomathematics draws a comparative picture of the evolution of math on different continents and depicts math as an “impure knowledge system” (Luitel 2013). Here, ethnicity is not seen as a sort of purism but as its contrary. If it is possible to go from the pure to the impure in math, why is this so difficult in philosophy? Maybe we need a change of perspective. A priori, the mixed and impure condition of culture is the normal situation, to the point that, strictly speaking, even the distinction between ethno and elitist culture can appear artificial. Even “European culture” was not elitist at its origin but represented a colorful mix of ethnic and official cultures. It took about eight hundred years to create the synthesis of ethno styles and high culture that is today recognized as “European Culture.” The problem is that this European culture was produced by the major cultures of Western Europe while the

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smaller cultural groups of Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, or the Celts and the Basques did not participate in this process. These smaller nations joined “European culture” only much later (some as late as the nineteenth century). As a result, since they were eagerly adapting to European high culture, they tended to be ashamed of their “ethno culture” and tried to hide it. At some point, these marginal nations would become more assertive and presented their folk elements within the context of national romanticism. Pan-Slavism is the most obvious cultural movement from that time and it even produced its own philosophy. However, even then, the folk input would remain exotic and clearly different from what was considered elitist European culture. It imitated Cartesian “high philosophy,” merely giving it an ethnic coloring. Overall, the relationships between official, mainstream, “European-white” cultures on the one hand, and “ethnic” cultures on the other, remained marked off by the historical European development described above. This pattern remained particularly strong in America. “Ethno” and “universal” continued to be seen as opposites. A hermeneutic and pragmatic way of seeing culture as based on solidarity, shared norms, convictions, and practices, held together within a horizon that is ever expanding, would never become a mainstream paradigm in philosophy, neither in the US nor elsewhere. Instead, the “ethno vs. official” paradigm became more and more pervasive. It would be repeated in a postcolonial as well as in a globalized context. The existence of ethnophilosophy can only be understood against this background. Today many nations oppose global cinema (Hollywood) to “World Cinema” (ethnic), which is a further reiteration of this ancient scheme.5 Denilson Lopez points to the conceptual inconsistency of this scheme, which works in parallel with the label of world music (see above Chapter 4). World music signifies, at least in North America, music in languages other than English: “In this vein, the expression world cinema, utilized in cinema studies in the Anglophone world, would seem to create, with no better conceptual consistency, a grab-bag category that includes any cinematic works that are not European or North American and/or that are in languages other than English, in the same way that the term world literature has been applied in literary studies” (Lopes: 481). The non-sensical distinction between “European-white” and “ethnic,” which is due to a centuries-long internal development, has become more acute in the twenty-first century. We have arrived at a point where certain cultures cannot 5 I admit that in nations with well-developed film industries like India or China, Hollywood might simply be seen as “foreign” though this is open to discussion. New production centers such as Bollywood and cultural markets in Latin America, Asia and the Middle East have yet to be conceptualized and analyzed by media studies.

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simply be seen as cultures and will be scheduled as “ethnic” with a non-cultural connotation. The case of religion clarifies what I mean. According to Olivier Roy, in the West, “Muslim religion” became a sort of ethno-religion, which means that “society is no longer ‘spontaneously’ Islamic. This is very obvious in Western Islam: what was originally ‘Muslim culture’ will become a particular ethnic culture” (Roy 1999: 18). This paradigm applies to Islamic banking or the “Islamization of knowledge” that has become a worldwide movement since the 1980s. The Islamization of knowledge turns knowledge into ethno-knowledge. Paradoxically, this is only possible when philosophy has been purified of culture beforehand. We touch upon a core problem. Instead of de-marginalizing Muslim philosophy by turning it into Thought, capable of contributing to the philosophical and intellectual pool of contemporary knowledge, the Islamization of knowledge marginalizes this philosophy even more by reducing its cultural status to a mere ethno-feature. Religion, which used to be linked to culture, but which fundamentalists aim to define as pure truth, independent of specific cultural values, becomes ethno-religion. Muslim culture as ethno culture, the Islamization of knowledge, and Islamic finance imitate the same process that had earlier proved fatal to ethnophilosophy. In the long run, it leads to marginalization. The alternative is to see religion as culture and knowledge as culture. This also provides an opening towards other cultures and keeps the religion/knowledge culturally flexible. In philosophy this signifies the transformation of philosophy into Thought.

Conclusion In this book I attempted to sketch an alternative to what still too often takes on the appearance of an unsurmountable dichotomy between universalist cosmopolitanism and egocentric culturalism. Taking biophilosophies as well as existing organic philosophies as a basis, this book has shown that globalization cannot be combatted with localization, that multiculturalism is not the same as micro culturalism, and that accepting local cultural practices as potential sources of philosophical knowledge decreases academic dependence on the  “world powers” of thinking and offers more intellectual and academic freedom. The theoretical foundations of these reflections were provided by a critical review of biophilosophies. Some biophilosophies support the wrong assumption that life develops either as a random micro order or as a pre-determined macro order designed by natural selection. However, putting more micro elements into the macro machine does not make the macro machine organic. The same reductionism and atomism that we find in science has today infested society and its institutions. Religion, education, and the corporate world of the twenty-first century are penetrated by a naïve micro objectivism that has discarded all cultural macro references. Exactly one hundred years ago, Roy Wood Sellars wrote in the preface to his Evolutionary Naturalism that naturalists “wish to make logical being and values coordinate with physical being, whereas I wish to include them in a concrete and evolutionary way” (R. Sellars: ix). Today, the belief that truth must be abstract and decultured fuels projects aiming at the total scientification of human activities; the algorithm is only the most obvious example of this. The result is a fragmented world in which any unity is lost: it creates ethnic patches within countries, cities that separate themselves from the political cultures by which they are surrounded, and academic fields that isolate themselves and split up into sub-fields. When unity is aspired to, it is established through universal imperatives such as human rights, democracy, free trade, rankings, and large supra-national networks. But this does not establish a dynamic micro–macro unity. A micro–macro vision able to see connections between the parts that emerge from within larger contexts is missing. Unity must be achieved not through Laplacian universalism but through the kind of cosmopolitanism suggested, for example, by the Stoics and by Goethe. An unmediated striving towards universality leads to purism and fundamentalism, just as pure particularity leads to enclosure and a lack of self-reflexivity. A “cosmos” or a “world” can only emerge through dynamic

© Thorsten Botz-Bornstein, ���1 | doi:10.1163/9789004440425_012

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­ icro–macro processes that are relational, decentered, and always open to m renewal. This book drew these insights from biophilosophical discussions on the Machine Concept of the Organism (mco) and concluded that the world is an organism whereas the globe is a machine. In philosophy and in society, the organic vision must always be a cultural vision. Only a cultural vision can deconstruct the inveterate either/or thinking of technology, politics and philosophy. Only philosophy and the human sciences can produce organic version of cosmopolitanism. This cosmopolitanism is linked to Herder and Kant’s concepts of history and morality which are not established through civilizational expansion, but which emerge slowly and on a cultural ground. The world differs from the globe as much as it differs from the environment. The world is a matter of consciousness while the environment and the globe are merely material. Philosophy must define its own position in opposition to the scientification that turns the world (cosmos) into a globe and begin creating a real world philosophy.

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Index Achebe, Chinua 36 Adorno, Theodor 36 aesthetics 38, 48, 110, 120n7, 141–142, 145, 148–149 African American Philosophy 2, 132, 163–166 African philosophy 74, 132, 165–166, 172 alchemy 10 Al-Ghazali 126, 171n1 algorithm 1–2, 52, 100–101, 144 All-Unity 109, 127, 188 American philosophy 159, 189 analysis 28–29, 37, 77, 107, 187–188 analytic philosophy 8, 14, 26–27, 33, 129–131, 159, 184–187 Anaxagoras 102–103 Anaximenes 102 Appiah, Kwame Anthony 10–13 Arab philosophy see Islamic philosophy architecture 126, 139, 146–147 Aristophanes 3 Arnold, Matthew 75 art 25 Asante, Molefi 69, 98 Ast, Friedrich 117–119 atman 158 atomism 14n6, 29, 35, 103, 108–109, 113 Aufhebung 73, 103 Axelos, Kostas 64 Ayer, A.J. 29 Bakhtin, Mikhail 127 balance 27, 38, 43, 57, 111–112, 120–121 Bantu philosophy 13, 127 Barber, Benjamin 100 behaviorism 113, 131, 142 Bergson, Henri 117 Berkeley, George 128, 136 Berlin, Isaiah 111 Bernasconi, Robert 47, 88 Bertalanffy, Ludwig von 19, 28 Bible 119 biophilosophy 28, 192 Blackmore, Susan 135, 147 Blanqui, Auguste 40

Bloom, Allan 75 Boas, Franz 130 Bougueureau, William-Adolphe 37 Bréhier, Emile 186 Brucker, Jakob 82–83, 156 Buhle, Johan Gottlieb 48–49, 81–82 Butler, Judith 67 Canguilhem, Paul 25 Carnap, Rudolf 29 Cavell, Stanley 76, 175 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 69, 97–98, 177 chaos 79, 92, 122, 174 Chinese philosophy 82, 165, 169–172 Christianity 92, 96 civilization 57–61, 95 Cocteau, Jean 145 cognitive science 20, 120 Cold War 161 Collins, Randall 49 colonialism 2, 14 community 4, 15–16, 36, 47, 51, 60, 77–78, 81, 89, 127, 181–182 Comparative philosophy 42, 50, 84, 169 Comte, Auguste 41 consciousness 22, 63, 86–90, 124, 131, 148, 151, 186 contemplation 186–187 Continental philosophy 14, 49, 130, 159–160, 184–187 Copernicus 128 cosmology 8–9, 40–41, 88–89, 103–105, 108–111, 117 cosmopolitanism 9, 11, 36, 55, 58–60, 68, 192–193 cosmos 14–15, 30, 65, 101, 102, 107, 193 Counter-Enlightenment 11, 81 Cousin, Victor 94, 156 creationism 42–45 Crick, Bernhard 158 Crick, Francis 25 Critchley, Simon 16, 76 cultural particularism 8, 89, 94–95, 166 Cultural Revolution 182n4 Cultural Studies 2, 68, 75–76, 162

216 culturalism 3, 8, 192 See also cultural particularism culture 7–8, 11, 47, 50–52, 57–61, 133, 141–142, 174–175 cybernetics 5 Darwinism 42, 101, 134, 152 Dasein 119 Dawkins, Richard 1, 21, 134, 142–143 deconstruction 31, 67 deculturation 50–54, 128–130, 175 Degérando, Joseph-Marie 82–84 Delbrück, Max 42 Deleuze, Gilles 4, 14, 68–71, 136–137, 158 democracy 67–68, 98, 168–169 Democritus 103 Dennett, Daniel 21, 101, 135, 144–145, 150 Derrida, Jacques 30–31, 56, 73–74 Descartes, René 3, 21–22, 44, 108 determinism 25, 27, 40, 45 Developmental Systems Theory 20–21 Dewey, John 130–131 différance 31, 166 Dilthey, Wilhelm 75, 121–122, 130, 178–179 dna 1, 20, 24–25, 28, 151 dogmatism 11, 38–39, 110 dream 125, 149, 151 Driesch, Hans 17–18, 71 dualism 14, 21–24, 29, 32, 42, 111 Dussel, Enrico 165n2 dynamics 136–139 Eco, Umberto 27 economics 2, 99–100, 115 education 7, 184, 189 Einfühlung 119–121, 124 Einstein, Albert 45 Eleatic School 107 Elias, Norbert 61 emergentism 14–15n6, 32–34, 40, 122, 138 Empedocles 102–103 Enlightenment 11, 36, 40–41, 48, 54, 177 Epicurus 3 equilibrium see balance essentialism 75 ethnoscience 183 ethnomathematics 189 ethnophilosophy 13, 74, 131, 154, 165–166, 180–183, 189

Index Etiemble, René 65 eurocentrism 2, 81, 129 European Community 60 evolution 23–25, 135–139 evolutionary naturalism 19, 192 excellence 2, 16, 51, 53, 66, 161, 184 externalism 23, 39, 63, 67 feminist philosophy 163–166 feminist science 183 film theory 158, 160 Foucault, Michel 14, 68, 70–73, 158, 188 Fourier, Charles 40 fragmentation 6, 7, 35, 37, 69 French thought 162–164 Freud, Sigmund 52, 149 Friedell, Egon 146–147 fundamentalism 51, 72, 92, 100, 127–129, 175–176, 192 Futurism 17 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 66, 119–122, 131, 144, 157–158, 178–179, 185 Galileo 128 game see play Garve, Christian 157 Gehlen, Arnold 115, 151n9 gene 20–21, 28, 42, 113, 136–141 Gestalt 14–15n6, 18, 33, 123n10 globalization 60, 64, 89 God 21, 25, 29, 36, 38, 44–45, 91–92, 104–109, 128, 145, 180 Goethe, Johan Wolfgang 3–4, 33, 35, 37, 44, 55, 58, 84, 167, 187–188 Goldstein, Kurt 14–15n6, 18–19, 33n7 Gombrich, Ernst 59 Goody, Jack 131 Gramsci, Antonio 63–64 Guattari, Felix 4, 69, 136–137 Habermas, Jürgen 73–74, 114–115, 185 habit 113, 141–142, 181 Hadot, Pierre 53, 161–162 Haering, Theodor 95 Hall, Stuart 75 happiness 11, 26, 82, 88, 96, 116, 120, 130, 161–162 harmony 37, 40–41, 108–109, 126 Hawking, Stephen 45

217

Index Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 12–13, 39, 73–74, 84–91, 119, 155, 168, 173–174, 177–180 Hegel on Africans 86–87, 90, 180 Heidegger, Martin 56, 73, 178–179, 185 Heisenberg, Werner 45 hellenization 81–82 Helmholz, Hermann von 109n4 Heraclitus 102–103 Herder, Johan Gottfried von 9, 11–12, 58, 61–63, 81, 84, 95, 108–111, 116, 130, 167 hermeneutics 35, 74, 117–120, 131, 178–179, 185 hierarchy 112–113 Hinduism 92 historicity 178–180 history 108–109 Hobbes, Thomas 78–79 holism 14–15n6 Hollinger, David 131 Hollywood 190 Horkheimer, Max 36 Hountonji, Paulin 13 humanities 7, 26, 32, 48, 54, 75, 110, 193 Hume, David 33, 123 Husserl, Edmund 3, 158 idealism 94, 118, 160 identity 11, 37, 38, 52, 59, 91, 103, 114, 141, 174 Ikhwan Al-Safa 126 imperialism 7, 12, 58, 100, 174 Indian philosophy 12, 82–84, 168, 170 internationalism 100 internet 1, 97 intrinsically purposive 23–24, 121, 125, 130 Iran 72 Islamic finance 191 Islamic philosophy 171–172 Jacob, François 25–26, 45 Jakobson, Roman 135–139 James, William 130–131 Jameson, Frederic 75, 167 Janz, Bruce 56–57, 97 Japanese philosophy 169–172 Jewish philosophy 165, 173n1 Jews 81, 92

Kagame, Alexis 13, 57, 131 Kant, Immanuel 58, 61–63, 66, 109–111 Kautsky, Karl 61 Kellner, Douglas 76 Kepler, Johannes 128 kitsch 4, 37–38 Koestler, Arthur 19, 26, 45, 111–113, 131, 141–142, 152 Koffka, Kurt 34 Kristeva, Julia 181–182 Kuhn, Thomas 181 Kulturkampf 131, 161 Kyoto School 49, 171 La Mettrie, Julien Offray 21, 41, 147 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe 38 language 4, 11, 25, 28, 61, 74, 79, 84, 95–97, 119, 122–125, 131–133, 149, 151 Laplace, Pierre-Simon 40 Lasch, Christopher 52, 76, 175 Latin America 7, 166, 182–183 Lebensform 123–125, 149–152, 155 Lebensphilosophie 117 Lebensstil see style Lebenswelt 185 Lefort, Claude 39 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 123, 128 Leiter, Brian 184 Leucippus 103 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 59 Lipps, Theodor 120n7 literature 3–4 local 3–16, 32, 47–49, 84–97, 100, 101, 111, 115, 164, 167–168, 183, 192 logic 8, 75, 103 Lossky, N.O. 127 Lotman, Yuri 148–149 Luhmann, Niklas 113–116 Lyotard, Jean-François 68, 74–75 Machine Conception of the Organism (mco) 20–22, 102, 108–109, 139–140, 193 machine 22–23, 31, 65 See also mechanic macroeconomics 99 Maimonides 173n1 Malcolm, Norman 20n2 Malebranche, Nicolas 128

218 Maraldo, John 50, 130, 162 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso 17 Marxism 26, 74, 165 materialism 19, 22, 75, 79, 102, 106, 109n4, 111 Mbiti, John 13 McDonaldization 100 Mead, Margaret 130 mechanic 17, 30, 35, 101, 141, 150, 155 See also machine medical science 9n2, 14n6, 120–121 Meiners, Christoph 82–84 memetics 134–153 metaphor 25, 137 metaphysics 45, 67, 69, 77, 103, 108–110, 116, 124–125, 157 microbiology 120 microcosm 2, 8, 41, 99–101, 116, 119, 126 Middle Ages 9, 11, 26, 147 Mill, John Stuart 32 mimesis 134, 141–144, 147, 159 minorities 2, 67, 97, 164–166 Misch, Georg 122 Mitchell, W.J.T. 134 modernity 4–7, 17, 36–37, 63, 99–100 Arab modernity 174 Moeller, Hans-Georg 114–116 molecules 1, 21, 23, 28, 140 monism 14, 28–33, 42, 103, 125 Monod, Jacques 30 Montpellier School 33n7 Moore, G.E. 8 morphology 35, 155 multiculturalism 12, 67, 90, 192 Muslims 92, 172n1, 191 Nagel, Thomas 33 narcissism 53, 161 nationalism 3, 4, 12, 36, 61, 93–94 naturalism 3–11, 16, 19, 27, 35, 55–58, 61, 91–95, 130 nature 23, 26, 33, 38–41, 43–44, 63, 75–79, 87–91, 105–111, 114–128, 133, 140, 147, 155, 181, 186–188 Nazis 38 Needham, Joseph 181 Neo-Darwinism 19, 113 Neo-Hegelianism 29, 33–34 Neo-Kantianism 96, 185

Index neo-liberalism 7, 16, 53, 173n1, 184, 189 Neoplatonism 29, 53 New Criticism 131 Newton, Isaac 35, 128 Nicolai, Friedrich 156 Nietzsche, Friedrich 54, 145 Nishida, Kitaro 126–127 nous 105 Nowak, Leszek 96–97 Nussbaum, Martha 9–10, 67–68, 89, 181–182 occidentalism 98 Okere, Theophilius 56 organic architecture 17, 38 organism 5, 9, 22–24, 35, 89, 119 orientalism 74, 84, 98, 183 Pan-Africanism 13, 165 Pan-movements 5, 94–95 Panofsky, Erwin 110, 126 Pan-Slavism 12, 13, 42, 61, 87, 95, 190 pantheism 106–107 Park, Peter 49, 118–119 Parmenides 29, 67, 107 Parsons, Talcott 131 particularism 8, 89, 94–95, 166 See also cultural particularism person 37 Philosophical Anthropology (German movement) 150 philosophy (definition) 127–134, 157–58, 162–163, 170–171 phronesis 130 Plato 3, 8–9, 15, 31–32, 42, 47, 67, 88–89, 101, 103–106, 182 Laws 32, 43, 90, 103–104, 155 Statesman 103 Philebus 103–104 Republic 115 Timaeus 8, 14–15, 31–32, 88–90, 103–104, 155 play 120, 144–145, 148 Plessner, Helmut 115 Plotinus 29 Poland 95 Popper, Karl 22, 36 positivism 19, 34, 29, 41, 120–121 post-colonial studies 76

Index postmodern 5, 74, 160, 169 poststructuralism 5, 13 pragmatism 185–186 pre-Socratics 102, 107–108 processualism 19–20, 30, 39–40, 46, 121, 131, 139, 152 Proclus 24, 30 provincial 95–96, 100 public-private 79 Pythagoras 103, 162 racism 2, 81, 87, 91 Raelism 45 rationalism 54, 101, 106–107 Readings, Bill 51 realism 11, 19, 107, 118, 160 reductionism 40 relativism 47, 91, 185–186 religion 11, 42–44, 51, 92, 127–129, 191 Renaissance 59, 110, 126 rhizome 69–71 Ricœur, Paul 25 robots 122n9 Romanticism 106 Rorty, Richard 54, 173, 176, 181–182, 185–186 Rothacker, Erich 115, 150 Roy, Olivier 51, 92, 175, 191 Ruskin, John 17 Russell, Bertrand 8, 26–27, 29–30, 107–108, 188 Russian Formalism 127, 135 Russian Futurism 17 Ryle, Gilbert 27 Sabry, Tarik 174–176 Sanskrit 83, 90, 177 Sapir-Whorf 131 Sartre, Jean-Paul 132–133 Saul, John Ralston 129, 186 Scheler, Max 151n9 Schelling, Friedrich 45, 83–84, 109, 109n4 Schlegel, August 35, 83–84 Schlegel, Karl Wilhelm Friedrich 83–84, 106–107, 128, 157 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 117 Schoenberg, Arnold 37 scholasticism 11, 131, 142, 161 Schopenhauer, Arthur 91, 116–117

219 Schrödinger, Erwin 42 Searle, John 22 secularization 51 selection 21, 43–45, 52, 105, 113–114, 136–140, 146–153, 192 Sellars, John 130, 161 Sellars, Roy Wood 19, 192 semiotics 135–139 Semper, Gottfried 146–147 Sen, Amartya 64 Shershenevic, Vadim 17 Simons, Peter 32–33, 138, 159, 185 Slavs 87 Smuts, Jan 14–15n6, 141 sobornost' 127 sociology 2, 50, 99 Socrates 3, 15 soul 21–24, 32, 43, 87, 90, 102–105, 110, 127, 147 See also world soul Spengler, Oswald 35, 155, 181 Sperber, Dan 144 Spinoza 29 spirit 85–90, 168–169 spiritualism 19 standardization 15, 51 Stoics 3, 55, 88–89 structures 23–24 style 123, 138–139, 142, 145–147, 150–152 subaltern studies 98 subculture 32, 54, 75, 163, 175 sublation see Aufhebung substantialism 67 synthesis 35, 37, 187–189 systems 136, 155–156 Tagore, Rabindranath 8n1, 127, 129 Tagore, Saranindranath 8, 50, 66, 128, 158 Taussig, Michael 78 Tennemann, Wilhelm Gottlieb 81–83, 156 Theory of Forms 9, 67, 104–106 theory 158–160, 186 theosophy 11 Third World 4, 65, 165 Tiedemann, Dietrich 81, 84 totalitarianism 13–14, 35, 38, 77–80 Trilling, Lionel 17 Trubetzkoy, Nicolas 148

220 turāth 174 Tylor, Edward B. 58–59 Tynianov, Yuri 135–139 ubumwe 127, 182 unity 39, 8, 90, 102–107, 113, 116–119, 122, 125–127 See also All-Unity universalism 2–3, 7–8, 11–12, 16, 47–51, 60, 87–89, 192 Urpflanze 37 value-free 47–48 Vico, Giambattista 178 Vienna Circle 3 Virno, Paulo 78–80 vitalism 102 Vivtruvius 126 Voltaire 11 Wallerstein, Immanuel 6, 10, 72, 75, 97 Walzer, Michael 36

Index Watson, James 25 Weiss, Alfred 19 wen (文) 127 West, Cornel 161–162 Whitehead, Alfred North 27n6, 33, 104, 106 whole-part relationship 24, 52, 62, 112–113 Wiese, Benno von 95 Wilamowitz-Moellendorf, Ulrich von 54 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 122–125, 149–152, 155 Wolff, Christian 29 world cinema 65, 190 world history 84 world literature 58, 64, 84, 166–167 world soul 32, 90, 105, 138, 155 See also soul Wundt, Wilhelm 93–94 Xenophanes 107 Zen Buddhism 171–72 Zeno 107