Free Will and Continental Philosophy: The Death Without Meaning 9781472546494, 9781847060990, 9781441196552

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For my father, Herbert Rose; obstinately unphilosophical.

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Chapter 1

Introduction

The following pages contain a rather brief discussion of freedom and the nature of freewill. Such a statement, or the adverbial phrase at least, will surprise many readers simply because the problem – if there is one – has vexed philosophers and thinkers since the first attempts to cast a conceptual web of intelligibility over the events of the world. So to claim that such a short discussion has anything original to offer is hubristic to say the least. It is also a claim compounded by the reliance on the thought of one of the most obtuse thinkers of our tradition as evidenced by the paraphrased subtitle of the present work; that is, Hegel. Yet, there is something still to be said about freewill and an urgency implicit in the saying of it. Let us first, though, make a few remarks about the other main component of the title. If one is to talk about freewill within the context of a ‘continental tradition’, one does of course need to define that tradition. One rather lazy possibility, prevalent in much English-language philosophy, is to characterize it in terms of a contrast with analytic philosophy, as though a geographical identifier could be opposed to a methodological one.1 Such a contrast is as illogical as it is inappropriate, starting from the political prejudices contained in the word continental (since as most continentals will tell you, the correct non-anglocentric adjective would more properly be ‘mainlandic’ philosophy and many Scots and North Americans would perhaps find it offensive to learn they are nothing but an offshoot of the Anglo-Saxon race, if such a thing exists). Nor does the methodological resonance offer any real purchase on the difference since many non-Anglo-European philosophers use the analytical method and many Anglo-Saxon philosophers reject it.2 Neither does the history of ideas afford any clearer understanding of the distinction, since up until German Idealism the curriculum of established ideas and

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thinkers is almost identical in both traditions and from that temporal point on, about the middle of the nineteenth century, we exist too close to history to decide which of the many contemporary thinkers and texts may well find a place in the canon or be future examples of ‘what has been best thought and best said’ (Quinton, 2004: 37). Fortunately it is not my task – nor do I think it would be a fruitful via of research – to identify a distinction that is already perhaps irrelevant and erroneous. There is, however, an interesting bifurcation of ideas that correspond with the loose geographic and methodological commitments of the terms continental and analytic philosophy centring on the nebulous concept(s) of freewill, and it is that bifurcation which can stand in for any robust need to identify and separate two otherwise putative traditions. In other words, the present work endorses a distinction between analytic and continental philosophy only within the narrow domain of the succeeding discussion and its immediate commitments. The bifurcation which is of interest occurs between the publication of Hobbes’s radical and innovative Leviathan in 1651 and Rousseau’s reworking and reformulation of the contractarian tradition in 1762. The aporia which defines any discussion of the concept of freewill is whether to pursue the scientific rationalism of Hobbes and the tradition of reductionism and materialism that seeks to explain freewill in a way coherent and congruent with the findings and central tenets of modern science, or to embrace the Romantic humanism of Rousseau and the utopian ideal of social reconciliation. The overriding aim of the former approach is to make the concept of free-will compatible with our scientific understanding of the universe, and compatibility requires, at best, the redefinition of the concept with the consequence that notions of responsibility, accountability and rightness become problematic or different in kind from how we immediately and, so such advocates would hold, erroneously understand them; or, in the most extreme analysis, the concepts are mere chimeras, illusions and false conceptions of the unregulated human mind. The latter approach, which – for want of a better term – we now may want to identify as continental, seeks to identify freedom as self-determination, as it is the subject who determines for himself or herself the motivations on which he or she should act and, therefore, is responsible through and through. Two things ought to

Introduction

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be noted in these brief introductory remarks: one, the domains of analytic and continental philosophy no longer neatly map on to the unexamined acceptance of these two markers; and, two, there is a very real need to reserve judgement about the meaning of freewill because, although the concept freewill is being discussed in both the scientific and romantic approaches, they may well be using the same word to describe very different phenomena. Such a claim is actually more complex than it first appears as evidenced, I earnestly hope, in the pages that follow. The truly pertinent claim of Berlin’s famous essay is that the negative and positive understandings of liberty are not, as their articulation would seemingly suggest, in opposition, but rather they are based on putative commitments to deeper metaphysical conception of human nature that are sometimes (but not always!) akin to a discussion between an aesthetician and a housing officer on the worth and value of a particular urban building (Berlin, 1958). They may be using the same words, but speaking different languages. The conceptual, metaphysical difference is best captured in the previous characterization of the bifurcation: science versus humanism. Such contentious statements are offered once more only to whet one’s appetite, not to proffer substantial claims. Substantial claims must await the discussion proper which follows. And, then, the sharp-eyed readers among you will have noticed the discrepancy between the conventional spelling of ‘free will’ as two words in the title of the work and the pseudo-neologistical spelling of the concept, unhyphenated as ‘freewill’ which will be the convention that I shall continue to use throughout the text. The reasons for doing so are not yet explicit, but I hope that they will be when the reader arrives at the beginning of the fourth chapter. By way of a brief justification, I would say that to use the terms separately begs the question in terms of conceiving of a thing which has a specific property, as though that property is contingent to the thing itself: there are subjects, these subjects may or may not possess a will and this will may or may not be free. It is akin to saying that a Paul’s chair is blue; one is merely stating that a will (Paul’s!) is free. This would open up any argument to Hobbes’s challenge of absurdity: a will that is free is like a speech that is free. The real distinction must be between ‘Paul has a free will’ (a noun conditioned by an adjective), which makes it

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sound as though he could have a will which is not free or has a collection of wills of which one is free and ‘Paul has freewill’. The latter should not be confused with unquantifiable nouns such as ‘Paul has blond hair’ (hence my reason for combining the words into one). Again the will is not a collection of elements too numerous, or too liquid, to quantify. What I hope the work justifies is that to be free is a way to be, to exist, and not the possession of a property that distinguishes one particular thing from others. For this reason, I have opted for the non-conventional ‘freewill’ in order to highlight its identification with the statement ‘Paul is free’ and, hence, to talk of Paul as possessing a will with the further property of being free is to misrepresent what is metaphysically the case. Paul is, if he is a human being, freewill. The proper way to talk would be to say ‘Paul is freewill’, but that is one conventional break too far. Hopefully, talk of ‘freewill’ is enough to alert the reader to be reflective and to suspend immediate intuitions gained from their past philosophical education until such time as they bear on the argument that follows. So, we proceed from the main title to the subtitle. The quotation from Hegel which supplies the subtitle perhaps ought to be cited in full in order to further flavour the preceding comments, even if a discussion of its full import must wait till later in the argument: The sole work and deed of universal freedom is therefore death, a death too which has no inner significance or filling, for what is negated is the empty point of the absolutely free self. It is thus the coldest and meanest of all deaths, with no more significance than cutting off a head of cabbage or swallowing a mouthful of water. (Hegel, 1977: §590) Hegel is succinctly reiterating one of his recurring criticisms of the peculiarly modern understanding of freedom which arises from the deterministic understanding of the universe. Here, Hegel’s attack is against metaphysical libertarians who pit the self-consciousness against the laws of nature as existing in spite of and transcendent to material reality. As such, through the negation of determinism as the starting point, these thinkers, too, are intimately bound to it simply

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because they find it impossible to articulate freewill in any way except as the negation of materialism and its commitment to causality. The continental or romantic tradition, on the other hand, seeks to offer an alternative understanding of freedom but, for it to be convincing, it must be understood as belonging to a very different discourse and existing apart from the domain of science narrowly understood. If not, then it seems implausible and metaphysically unappealing. Immediately, for example, there exists a huge chasm between what may be called the commonsensical use of freedom – the freedom to satisfy one’s desires – and the Hegelian use, and if we believe we are in competition with a view of freewill as the satisfaction of desires then all we can seemingly offer is a desire for an arbitrary, spontaneous and above all meaningless death as the negation par excellence of the laws of nature acting necessarily and inevitably on a human being. Yet, for Hegel, such freedom is one-sided and incomplete. Not because, perhaps oddly, that it aims at death, but because it aims at a meaningless, arbitrary and futile death: the death without meaning. In its historical context, the resonance of such rhetoric also reveals that, with its nod towards the events that superseded the French Revolution, any discussion of freedom cannot be isolated from ethical and political commitments. All of which is anathema to the empirical, reductive and scientific approach of the majority of contemporary and later British thinkers who wished to isolate the problem of freewill to a specific discourse of philosophy, be it mind, metaphysics, personal identity or ethics. Much to think about in so few pages. So, let me begin with something more concrete and briefly describe what the reader will find in the following pages, as one should in introductions, in order to keep sight of both what is at stake and how what is at stake shall be pursued. The following chapter will explain better, through a brief consideration of the standard discussions of freewill, the error I believe obstructs much thinking of freewill in contemporary debate taking its impetus from the prevalent and dominant discourse of our time, viz. scientific rationalism. I should stress, and I shall again and again, that I in no way subscribe to anti-scientism, relativism or anti-rationalism. Science offers the best method and norms for a proper understanding

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of many of the objects of knowledge and phenomena we encounter in the world. The domain of objects which is best explained by science is far broader and the phenomena which are best explained by science more numerous than any other discourse, but – and here I am cautiously humble – there are limits to scientific explanation in that it deliberately (and rightly) represses the role of human interests in its method and, also, there do exist domains of objects and phenomena to which scientific method would be inappropriately applied. I believe one of these to be the discourses which depend upon the concept of freewill, or ethics broadly construed. What I have to say about reason and science is, I believe, eminently sensible and perhaps even persuasive. It is above all, a humble and non-radical claim if taken in the right spirit. The significance of examining Sartre’s engagement with Freud in the third chapter is to lay bare the modern drive to a scientific explanation of all phenomena and simultaneously to demonstrate that it is inappropriate to subscribe to reductionism if one is concerned with explaining human beings, their interests and the reasons for their actions. Hence the contemporaneous rise of materialism in psychology and existentialism in philosophy, as though they were replaying the ideal positions of Hegel’s opposition alluded to earlier. The existence of a normative agenda in Freud’s science is puzzling because it hangs uneasily with his descriptive aims and, although he attempts to reduce it to questions of health and well-being, the psychoanalytic cure consists in the patient being aware of and taking responsibility for his or her own neuroses. Freud, however, finds it impossible to reduce the concept of responsibility to a scientific explanation and also to admit that the superego is a shared, cultural unconscious that determines not only normal behaviour, but also deviant behaviour. Human action, we shall see, is about control and power conceived of as responsibility for oneself, concepts which are non-reductive and so – in some sense – primitive. Sartre’s psychoanalytic method, on the other hand, involves a commitment of care for oneself as a fundamental structure of human being, but his inability to offer a description of authentic human attitudes is grounded in an ethical misplacement of authenticity and inauthenticity due to the exaggeration of social atomism implicit in his work. Rather the authentic and

Introduction

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inauthentic distinction is mapped on to self-forming actions and actions consistent with oneself respectively. Chapter 4 offers us an alternative to social atomism taking its cue from Hegel’s already cited offhand remark in the heart of the Phenomenology of Spirit about the Terror of the French Revolution and the meaningless deaths of subjects who are at the whim of a more powerful subjectivity. The meaninglessness of these deaths is in stark contrast to his famous master-slave dialectic where one risks death for meaning and it is this meaningfulness as opposed to pure, animalistic, instinctiveness which is the mark of human action. This is the signature chapter which shows that freewill comprehended as selfdetermination is best characterized through Hegel’s theory of action which, in turn, relies on authentic recognition by an other. I shall attempt to show how an authentic attitude may be possible through the reconciliation between subjective freedom, the wants, needs, desires and projects which I have freely chosen, and objective freedom, the social structures, institutions and fabric which maintain and promote the successful attainment of the goals of subjective freedom. The alienation of one’s being is, according to Hegel, a necessary step to being free: one must share the categories and concepts appropriate to human action with one’s peers. Yet, as his critique of Kantian moral philosophy and also his commitment to immanent standards of right and good make clear, the appropriateness and reasonableness of these categories can only be judged with reference to a cultural storehouse of possible norms and meanings and not externally by putative transcendental standards. Freedom is, according to Hegel, necessarily related to the agent’s social and historical luck which is constituted by the moral fabric and institutions he or she just happens to be thrown into. However, Hegel’s theory seemingly makes it difficult to distinguish between cases of free action and cases of false consciousness. If there are no external standards of justice and right, to distinguish rational action from culturally relative action, then how can one describe one culture as better or progressive over another? In a state of advanced capitalism, such social blindness may in fact lead to the agent willing his or her own unfreedom, that is an agent who suffers from false

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consciousness. The fifth chapter will investigate one aspect of our own social fabric, its material ideality, and follow the neo-Marxist critique of Marcuse to see whether there is a solution to the problems of social alienation within the modern state in order to bring about the reconciliation required at the heart of Hegel’s (and Marx’s) ethics. The real heart of the debate between Hegel and Marx does not lie in the choice of method (dialectical reason versus historical materialism), but over the substantial claim whether or not capitalism is a means to overcome social alienation or the underlying cause of it. The sixth chapter will revisit the claim that advanced capitalism hinders human freedom by switching attention from the material ideality to the intellectual ideality it makes possible. Moving away from the negative appraisal of capitalism, we shall enquire whether, in fact, an advanced state of capitalism maintains and promotes human freedom since it makes possible a proliferation of perspectives and value systems, undermining the hegemony of the liberal world view, or whether (as Marcuse held) the proliferation of lifestyles and choice is a mere chimera and freedom is no longer possible.

Chapter 2

Science, Explanation and Dogma

2.1 The Problem of the Problem of Freewill The problem of free-will is not a problem. Such a puzzling claim needs, of course, to be unwrapped and better articulated, but the sentence embodies the tenor and timbre of this work. Let us think of it as a refrain. To explain better what I mean, I will put it differently: the problem of free-will is only a problem if one makes an assumption that, although familiar and commonsensical to us all, need not be made. It is difficult not to hold such an assumption because it is so central to the dominant thinking of our time, that is scientific rationalism and its underlying monism. But once we disclose this assumption, we shall see that the ‘problem’ is generated by a dogma that, if suspended, dissipates the central confusions, obfuscations and paradoxes. Of course, there must be cogent reasons offered to suspend the assumption. To offer such reasons, though, we must first assume that there is a problem. So, let us begin by stating quite clearly how the problem should be understood before tentatively attempting to dissipate it. First, let us ask a necessary question: why do we care about whether people are free or determined? Why, in short, does it matter? Intuitively we divide the world into agents and things: the former are to be held responsible and merit praise or blame for their existence, whereas the latter do not. And this distinction is based on freewill: agents have it and objects do not. So, the concept of freewill needs to be investigated in order to ascertain whether our cutting reality the way we do is an actual description or merely a metaphysical error (in the same way we believe the sun to set in the West is). In the following discussion, it is pertinent not to lose

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sight of the reason why one needs a concept of freewill: to distinguish agents from objects. Free-will, freedom and liberty are all central and necessary concepts in the discourses of ethics, politics, punishment and even in the realm of art and social relations. However, the concept of free-will is, on the surface and without theoretical manipulation, incompatible with the basic concept of explanation, that is causality. It is, after all, the modern dream to offer one theory, one language, to explain everything and, if there exists more than one explanation, then the aim is to reduce one of the explanations to terms of reference of the other, to reject one explanation in preference of another, or to reveal one of the positions to be the product of immature, superstitious and undeveloped thinking. So, let us begin by putting the assumption of our time in as clear a manner as possible: there is but one reality and one proper description of that reality, for which there is an appropriate language into which all knowledge statements can be translated, otherwise such statements are false or meaningless (Berlin, 1997: 80–81). Such an assumption generates the problem of free-will because it asserts that free-will and causality are incompatible and so one or the other must be rejected as false or meaningless. And since it is the latter concept of causality which is most efficacious in those sciences which generate pragmatic results, it is the former which is to be understood as problematic. Simply put, thinking on the subject of free-will and responsibility is dominated by what is best framed as the incompatibility thesis.1

2.2 The Incompatibility Thesis The incompatibility thesis is seductive for those of us with a logical and scientific bent of mind because it encapsulates so perfectly the virtues of modern explanation. First, it is simple, clear and seemingly incorrigible. Second, it is itself an expression of the prevalent mode of contemporary explanation. Simply put, it is this argument: one, if determinism is true, then no agent acts freely; two, determinism is true; therefore, three, no agent acts freely. The burden of proof of the argument rests on the second premise. Determinism is a metaphysical doctrine, that is a theory about reality, and its central tenet is

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that all events and states in the universe are the result of prior conditions and immutable laws, and that these events and states necessarily cause future events and states. It is the basis of all our scientific explanation: if you present me with a phenomenon in need of explanation, I will have satisfied your request when I can identify the cause that brought it about and the general law that relates the cause to its effect. Therefore, when you ask me why the water boils and I point to the heat under the pan and tell you that energy breaks molecular bonds so that liquids will become gas, you will be appeased in your search for understanding (more or less, if you are under five years old or a student of the humanities). And causality, for us in the modern age, is intimately related with another dogma of the modern age: determinism. Determinism, the assumption that the universe is orderly and regular, grounds all scientific explanation. So, if we are to talk in the scientific idiom – and we must if we are in the business of explaining – then we tacitly assume determinism. And our tacit assumption seemingly commits us to a theoretical endorsement of the incompatibility thesis. And so there is no problem with freewill because there is no freewill. What a short book this is. But, of course, there is a problem and it is generated by this grounding assumption. If we accept determinism, then, if I knew all the laws of the universe and the initial starting conditions, I should be able to deduce and predict the whole of history. Now, such knowledge is beyond any one person, but that does not falsify the position. The point is, if the theory of determinism is true, then it seems to undermine ethical action because if no agent acts freely, then there is no such thing as moral responsibility.2 And, so, there is a very real problem with freewill. Seemingly.

2.3 Causality and Responsibility We use the concept of responsibility in many varied discourses: we convict the criminal because he is responsible for the crime and

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excuse the innocent because they are not. We commend the great artist because he is responsible for the work and condemn the forger because he is, in some sense, unmeritorious of any acclaim. And in cases such as these we cite reasons to support our judgements: ask me why Picasso’s Guernica is a better painting than Constable’s The White Horse, and I will give you a series of reasons that stand in a normative relationship with my judgement: ‘the subject matter is more significant’, ‘the monochromatic, cubist aspect is not just a frivolous use of style’ and so on, and these reasons ‘cause’ the viewer to have the proper and appropriate response. Of course, the use of ‘cause’ in that last sentence is so widely different from the scientific use even if we tend to forget that too easily. Similarly, ask me why the thief should not be punished even if he had committed the crime and I could cite his young age, kleptomania or circumstances of necessity in order to support my judgement. Yet, in both of these examples, these are normative and not causal reasons. In both of these cases, we identify a set of normative reasons which stand in a rationally necessary relationship with the object of evaluation and not a causally necessary relationship with the object of description. So, you could agree that he is indeed young, or that he suffers from kleptomania or extenuating circumstances have played a role, but still insist that he needs to be punished. The onus would then be on you to supply other reasons for your judgement. At a push, one could agree that the shape before you has three sides, that triangles have three sides but deny that this shape is a triangle. There are no other reasons to offer for this and you would do so at the cost of your rationality, but normative reasons do not cause us to believe they merely ought to make us believe. Some reasons apparently put the requirement on us that, if we want to be counted as rational, then we ought to form judgements that necessarily follow from other judgements. And that is fine and dandy except for one little thing. Freewill concerns actions and actions are physical events in the universe and so they ought to be under the domain of causality and not normativity. All of our moral discourses, morality proper, punishment, law and even aesthetics to a large extent, rest on the assumption that an agent is responsible for his or her actions and, therefore, deserves either

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praise or blame for them. Yet, if actions are physical events then they are governed by causality and could not have been otherwise, so to use the statement, ‘He should not have stolen it’ is metaphysically nonsensical. Actions are the bridge between the normative realm of reasons and the physical realm of events and as such they should be the central focus of any discussion of freewill. Intuitively, the distinction between free agents and non-free objects cannot be as easily conceded as determinists would have us do. When the tree branch whipped by the wind slaps me in the face, I may well curse it and strike out at it, but I do so fully aware that I am committing a metaphysical error: there is nothing to be blamed, just an accident. Ditto with the computer that crashes taking my book with it or the dog that bites me. Although I may take a stick to batter all of these, I do so due to my own absurdity or irrational rage. I do so at the cost of my rationality (and do so willingly because my actions serve a quite different purpose: to release my anger or to vent my frustration). When a person, though, slaps me in the face, or turns off my word processor, or bites me, then the battering (or praise!) would be deserved and rational. And this explains a lot about whom we hold responsible and degrees of responsibility; grouping agents and objects into relevant categories: adults, non-rational adults, children, animals, those with psychological problems, etc. Free agency is central to our moral categories and our distribution of blame and praise. It seems that if determinism is true, then we may have to give up on moral theories and the whole concept of responsibility. Persons are no different from branches, computers or animals; they are but the physical site of specific accidents that we incorrectly describe as actions. Of course, that would be too hasty and we will look at a few brief attempts at making the concepts of responsibility, freewill and determinism compatible below, but the problem of freewill is sometimes expressed as a consequence of the ought implies can principle: a moral law can only be a moral law if the agent can act according to it. If I oblige you to save a drowning person 3,000 thousand miles away, then I violate this principle. If A ought to do X, but doing X is impossible then such a statement cannot be a proper obligation. The point about determinism is that, if we are not free to either X or not

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X, when I say you ought to do X it may well be impossible due to no fault of your own. The fact is either you will do X or not do X, can or possibility has nothing to do with it. In other words, being able to do otherwise is necessary for moral responsibility. Now, the determinist can just bite the bullet, shrug his shoulders and ask what the problem is. You once believed in Santa Claus and La Befana and neither of those ever existed. Hard determinists say that determinism is true and therefore all behaviour is outwith our own control and, as such, we can neither be blamed nor praised for it (at least in the ordinary sense). To such a decided stance, there is often little to say and opponents have tried in vain to play the game of the determinists in order to reject their claims: the problem of predicting actions, the lack of a theory to explain the relationship between mind and world, the hypothetical example of the Book of Life and so on. Such arguments seem just to beg the question at times and exploit what is a lack of understanding at the heart of determinism which one day may well be filled. My tack is different: if we eliminate the moral discourses broadly understood because we are no longer permitted to use the concepts of freedom and responsibility, then not only do we lose a massive explanatory power across the disciplines, we also commit a metaphysical error. However, let us first consider these others who are prepared to argue against the determinists.

2.4 Metaphysical Libertarianism One might want to agree that if determinism is true then no agent acts freely, but to assert that agents act freely. Therefore, determinism must be false. As such, one is still an incompatibilist but instead of sitting at the table marked ‘hard determinist’, one finds oneself swapping canapés with the rather magnificently styled metaphysical libertarians. Now, such an assertion begs the question against determinism, but both are metaphysical theories which require proof. They are the two opposing views of freedom and determinism and rest on a metaphysical description of reality. Seated at such a table might be thinkers such as Kierkegaard and Sartre and perhaps, if we managed to get the invitation in first, Kant.3 The former two guests can be interpreted as offering a form of radical choice whereby the

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subject exists in a special relationship to reality in that he or she can transcend the world of causes and spontaneously disrupt the chain of events. Freedom is described as the opposite to caused, viz. uncaused or spontaneous. However, such a theory cannot help us here simply because it loses sight of what is actually at stake. Spontaneity is rather meaningless: to be spontaneous means that I have to transcend my desires (causes), my characteristics (causes), how I have acted in the past (causes), in short my identity (causes). I must make the choice from nothing otherwise it is not free – there can exist nothing in the agent’s motivational set that could possibly stand in a causal relationship with the choice and so the choice must be ex nihilo as it were. Such a picture of agency is as equally damaging to the notion of responsibility as determinism: what is the difference between me spontaneously deciding what to do and flipping a coin? In both cases my action is dictated by an accident and not a motive and the agent plays no special role in the causal framework (James, 1975: 53). However, when we blame someone for doing something, we hold that he or she did it for a reason, not that he or she arbitrarily chose to do it, and that reason is somehow bound up with the person that he or she is. If I hire an exotic dancer for my octogenarian grandfather as a birthday present knowing that I am his sole heir and being fully aware of the weak condition of his heart, then I should be rightly held in disdain because my action reflects a motive that is specifically mine. I am to be held in disdain because I am seeking to profit from another’s misfortune and it is ‘me’, no spontaneous decision nor flipping of the coin, that seeks to do it. Children, for example, are arbitrary and wilful, and they are the very types of objects whose freedom is under a question mark. By negating the ‘me’, the agent, that makes the choice, I seem to negate responsibility since there was no ‘me’ which made the choice. Such free action is free at the cost of being significant or meaningful. It is the freedom of the death without meaning because agency disappears into gratuitous and wilful acts that are acts only insofar as they are events that are uncaused. Yet, the radical choice theorists might be running together normative reasons and physical causes and grouping them in the same set. Normative reasons are radically different from causes: there may be a

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reason to X, but one does not X, whereas if there is a cause of X, X happens. The interpretation of Kant that characterizes him as a libertarian would show how reasons operate over and above the desires and that the former belong to an intelligible realm of explanation, whereas the latter belong to a phenomenal or empirical realm of explanation. Desires, which are objects of the scientific world, have effects which are also objects of the scientific world. Reasons, on the other hand, are objects of the intelligible world and practically necessitate actions in a rational being. And short of properly discussing Kant, or of even offering a plausible interpretation of his thought, I shall merely add an uncontroversial caveat: these reasons are universal for all rational beings. And if this is the case, then once more agency and responsibility seem to be lost because we want to praise the particular individual for those actions he or she has performed well, yet the real judgement would be that the agent has not let anything of his or her particularity interfere with the universal functioning of reason. So, one acts in a responsible way when one acts from universal reason and one is nothing but an object (and blameless) when one obeys one’s desires. There is no space for real praise or blame or particular agents. Yet, when I rise to give up my seat to the pregnant woman on the bus, I am to be praised because I did it, because it was ‘me’ and not law or duty that brought me to do it, And it is me, and not law or duty, that deserves the praise.4

2.5 Compatibilism If the problem arises because of the desire to retain the concepts of agency and responsibility alongside a simultaneous commitment to either determinism or uncaused spontaneity, then perhaps incompatibility is only a surface phenomenon and if we were to fully comprehend the exact nature of agency and responsibility, then such an incompatibility would dissipate. In other words, all we have to do is redefine or re-conceptualize the notions of responsibility and agency. Compatibilism holds that freedom and determinism are compatible, that an agent can be free and determined at the same time. Only this will involve a redefinition of what we mean by free.5 Now there are very many species of this position, but I am going to look

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quickly at a traditional account. The basic position is that the desires, wants, preferences and passions of a man, that is those things which make him act are part of the causal chain, but the real question should be: did the agent’s character play a pivotal role in the causal chain? Take, for example, the case of Pierre who returns home to find his wife, Sandrine, being well and truly tupped by her most loathsome of friends, Jean-Claude. Pierre being a passionate Frenchman dispatches the two lovers with his handy hatchet. Compare this to Peter who returns home to find Sandra engaged in intimacy with one of her more unlikeable acquaintances, John. Peter being a rather emotionally challenged Englishman, puts down the hatchet he had been carrying, states that such behaviour is just not cricket and leaves. In both examples, the causes are the same (the experience of seeing cruel betrayal, betrayal by a man who is disliked, the presence of a possible weapon, and so on), yet the actions of the agents are different. But this is not due to the falsity of the deterministic world view, but due to the particularity of the agent playing a determinate role: Pierre is passionate, excitable and mortally jealous whereas Peter is clam, cold and repressed. Their respective characters play a causal role in the story and it seems that we have found a role for agency in descriptions of responsibility. When a car accidentally slips on the ice and kills a pedestrian, we can say it makes no difference who was driving, but in such crimes of passion it makes all the difference who exists at the focal point of the situation; the who (the agent) is the differentiating factor in cases of responsibility. If my character was pivotal in the causal chain then I am responsible since I acted freely. If it wasn’t then I didn’t and I am not responsible. So, should we just look in depth at such a picture and conclude that, since it is consistent with determinism and can find a role for responsibility in describing human actions, it is by far the best understanding of freewill? The answer is that, intuitively, we should still not be satisfied. What if Peter were more passionate or Jean-Pierre more cowardly? Then, their actions would have been different. But are they responsible for their passions or their characters? According to the compatibilist picture, the answer must ultimately be no since characters are formed by experiences of their past, the culture in which they

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were raised, genetic dispositions, etc. And the bottom line is that they could not have done otherwise than they did. Could Pierre have acted otherwise? Well, yes he could have done if his identity, wants, desires and preferences were different. Which, however, they could not have been since they are a result of a necessary causal chain. In short, he could have acted differently if he were not Pierre. The redefinition of responsibility is actually an elimination of it because on such a picture we want to ascribe responsibility to the agent, but the agent is nothing but a nexus of causal events and, so, not really an agent at all. Think about it another way as well: given such a picture, we cannot treat adults differently from children, nor humans from animals and inanimate objects because the explanation of action will always be formally identical and the differentiation of agents from things was the grounding need for a discussion of freedom in the first place. Once again we lose sight of what is actually at stake in seeking an articulate response to the problem of freewill.

2.6 The Phenomenology of Freedom And so we arrive at what is truly at stake: agency and responsibility. For in all these positions, the problem is generated by the play of these two concepts in a playground of natural science that seeks to accommodate, but ultimately expels them. Imagine once more walking home one night and a branch striking you in the face. Imagine the exact same circumstances except it is not a branch but a man who strikes you in the face. In each case, your response is different. Why? Well, with other human beings we have participant reactive attitudes (resentment, gratitude, moral indignation) which are only possible on the basis that we divide the world into things that act under their own control and things that do not. So, we apply the concept of causality to objects which do not act under their own control and we apply the concept of responsibility to those objects that do act under their own control. The former we explain, the latter we make intelligible and evaluate. And if we did not, then a whole range of discourses would become nonsensical or, at best, in error: punishment, morality, aesthetics, football commentary and so on. The world view of scientific

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rationalism, with its commitment to a coherent and unitary set of categories of understanding, is a view that eliminates these responses and makes interpersonal comprehension impossible. Now, the phenomenology of freedom can be stated in a strong or a weak version: strongly, it will act as a proof of freedom and the inadequacy of determinism (Heidegger, 1992); or weakly, it reorients the freedom/ determinism debate (Strawson, 1982). At this point in the discussion, I make no commitment to either of these versions, it is enough at this juncture to hold that whether determinism is true or not, it is inappropriate to use it as a basis of an explanatory theory of agent behaviour because we behave and comprehend one another as if we were free. Surely, though, those of a scientific bent would just ask whether it is enough to say we ought to act as if we were free since, metaphysically, we could just be in error and it would be a misdescription of what is actually real. At Christmas time, we act as if Santa Claus exists for the benefit of children, but would we want to treat ourselves like children and be bound by superstition? And here I ought to put my idealist cards on the table.

2.7 Idealism against Reductionism I shall attempt to make this as uncontroversial as possible by using the famous example of the rabbit-duck Gestalt image.

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The image exists for the perceiver as either a duck or a rabbit depending on what the perceiver himself or herself foregrounds. If he applies the category of beak, the image is a duck. If he applies the category ears, the image is a rabbit. Now, I do not want to make any grand and non-entailed conclusions about this psychological experiment, but I do want to note two things: (1) the image, as a collection of dots on a page, does not change, and (2) following (1), it must be something about the perceiver that forces the image to switch between duck and rabbit. My claim is that the mind of the perceiver is active in experiencing, and the application of different concepts (beak or ears) changes the image for the perceiver. Categories and concepts make possible the perceiver’s experience (without them he or she would just see a chaotic and random collection of dots on the page) but also limit and condition it. I call this the minimally idealist stance. So far, so Kant. In a similar way, we might want to say that we can view human agents either as physical objects in the universe (and apply the category of causality to them) or we can view them as intentional agents (and apply the concept of freewill to them). Human beings can, then, either be described as objects in the domain of physics or agents in the domain of ethics. We might want to say that both descriptions can exist side by side without contradiction, it just depends on which category the perceiver wants to apply and that will be determined by which discourse one speaks from: physics, psychology, sociology, law, politics, ethics, aesthetics and so on.6 Yet, I want to go one step further: if we are to talk about the domains of human action and influences, then the concept of freewill is just more appropriate than the concept of causality. Let us return to the image of the duck-rabbit for a moment. It is true to say that it is a duck and that it is also a rabbit, but it is not possible to say that it is a rhinoceros. I try to convince you that you ought to apply the concept of ‘horn’ to the dots, but to no avail. You just cannot see it as a rhino. The truth of the image is that it is a collection of dots on a page, so the scientist would tell us, but as a truth that is empty because all human beings would be able to see it as a duck-rabbit, so long as they know what a duck and a rabbit were. But no one would be convinced by my attempt to cast it as

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a rhino. The reason is that the concepts of beak and ears are appropriate to the object before us in a way that the concept of horn is not. Heidegger talks about this in terms of a ‘fittingness of thought’ to its object and that is quite an apt way to put it (1993: 265). The thought of determinism does not fit snugly on to the object of the human because considerations of agency and responsibility and intentional behaviour escape from its framework and destabilize it. The concept of freewill is appropriate to the object of human behaviour in a way that the concept of causality is not because it better allows us to interpret the object before us. I hope to make this rather inchoate claim more transparent as we proceed, but using ‘freewill’ as a primitive concept that grounds specific discourses, in the same way ‘cause’ grounds scientific explanation, allows us to more appropriately interpret the ‘dots’ in reality that constitute human existence. Freewill grounds a certain constellation of discourses that cannot be reduced to anything else (without losing what is essential to them): action, ethics, law, politics and so on. The proof of freewill is then of the ‘larger’ kind Mill (1986) alludes to: judgements and statements can be made on the basis of these grounding concepts that either support or undermine them. The meaningful existence of the many discourses of human endeavour support the claim that the best explanation is articulable only if human beings are free agents. These discourses and explanations exist as considerations which support our assent to the concept of freewill as an a priori ground. The scientific drive to reduce these discourses and to give a standard set of concepts that are to applied across the board is, of course, the drive of Enlightenment thought that believes there is but one description of reality and but one rationality. Such a commitment loses what is powerful in our explanations of human behaviour and is not appropriate to the sort of descriptions and explanations we seek when we try to make agents intelligible. This book is an initial attempt to show that and also support the claim that the continental tradition (from Kant onwards) has always implicitly acknowledged this plurality of perspectives and, more importantly, to show that it deserves to be treated respectfully as a contribution to the freewill debate. Now that we have the orientation and direction of the argument, it is time to reconsider one of the central figures in the continental

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tradition. Often cast as a libertarian, Sartre was for a time the proper name which stood in for the main exponent of the radical event and spontaneity. I have argued elsewhere that such a reading needs revising, but let us now consider Sartre from the viewpoint of a member of that tradition that sees the discourse of ethics as radically separate from the discourse of physics and governed by the ruling concept of freewill (Rose, 2003). To show that, we shall have to investigate him from the point of, oddly enough, psychoanalysis.

Chapter 3

Freud and Sartre: The Property of Freedom

3.1 The Context of Sartrean Existentialism By concentrating on what Sartre owes, whether implicitly or explicitly, to figures of the philosophical tradition, be it Heidegger, Hegel, Descartes, Kant and so on, it is easy to forget what his groundwork actually sought to establish. It is true that Being and Nothingness is an attempt to recast Heidegger’s early thought as an anthropology, an existentialist attempt to rebuke the interpersonal social dimension of Hegel’s work on the concept of freedom (although he would reluctantly return to this theme in his later work), an attempt to depersonalize and ‘de-essentialize’ the Cartesian cogito, and also an overt Kantian attempt to form the idealist foundations of human subjectivity. All these warring and underarticulated motivations perhaps explain both why his book is such a mess and yet still present and in print almost seventy years later. What very few commentators seem to remember, however, is that one major influence on Sartre, and perhaps a most central one for the direction and scope of his early essay, was Freud. And it was the very present and pressing theoretical need to offer an existentialist psychoanalytic account of human behaviour that, for the most part, conducts and directs the various other voices which ply for the stage in that monumental work. People lazily use Sartre as an example of a libertarian, but I have elsewhere shown this reading to be inaccurate (Rose, 2003). The direction the current chapter is to take is to reinforce my initial claim that the continental, philosophical tradition has always implicitly functioned on the basis of a split between ethics and physics; to paraphrase Kant: the former being the laws of freedom and the latter being the laws of nature (Kant, 1997: 1). Sartre, implicitly committed to this division, saw it as imperative to offer a proper and adequate existentialist psychoanalytic

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theory since this was the very battleground of the fundamental structure of human being in his day and to do so within an ethical and not scientific framework; if there exists a fundamental, psychological structure of human being, and that psychology can be best explained by the concept of freewill, then we have found the ground for a discourse of ethics that is different in kind from the discourse of physics.1 This, I controversially hold, is one of the principal aims of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. The main claim of this chapter is that human being can only truly be explained appropriately if one assumes that there exist such things as actions that construct a framework of life or being and a set of possible choices that cohere with or work their way from this original choice. Such qualitative difference in choices maps onto the distinction between authenticity and inauthenticity in Sartre, but a moral overdetermination of those terms on his part results in a misconception of the relationship between the agent and his or her culture. Psychoanalysis is the science that reveals and discloses these original choices that make an agent into who he or she truly is and, it will be argued, a commitment to materialism makes a proper understanding of human being impossible. Instead, the foundational concept of psychoanalysis must be freewill understood as care for oneself. So the idea of psychoanalysis, and Freud’s supposed failings, is a very good place for us to begin.

3.2 The Critique of Freud Sartre, in the introduction to his overlong essay, summarizes quite succinctly the basis of his rejection of Freudian psychoanalysis and, simultaneously, establishes his own position in the idealist tradition: ‘It is futile to try to invoke pretended laws of consciousness of which the articulated whole would constitute an essence. A law is a transcendent object of knowledge; there can be consciousness of a law, not a law of consciousness’ (1991: xxxi). Intuitively, we identify agents as those beings who act on intentions and objects as those beings which respond to causal necessity and if we seek to establish a law of consciousness, that is a law consistent with the physical universe, that explains our thoughts and behaviour processes, we are always – so Sartre assumes – in a position to reject such a connection. The ethical

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standpoint, for him, is prior to the scientific one because science is a choice to be or behave in a certain way towards the world. Although such an argument sounds question begging, Sartre is correct because his assumption is the very conclusion that Freud himself seems to have reached by the end of his speculative career. Any implicit scientific explanation of human behaviour can play no role in psychoanalysis because such explanation will not be effective in patient cures. Cure, for Freud, resides in the patient taking control of his or her neurotic desires and increasing the sphere of agency ever deeper into the pre-conscious realm of the mind. Let us take it one step at a time and begin by outlining Sartre’s main criticisms of any psychology derived from the Freudian framework (Sartre, 1991: IV.2.i). First, Freudian psychology holds that agency is broader than traditionally conceived and that intentions can be unconscious, preconscious and conscious and these intentions can, in turn, be reduced to more basic drives and processes of the organism. For Sartre, on the other hand, it is an error to think of the human as substance since it is human being that makes thinking possible at all and so transcends the structures of meaning and determination. The way in which we choose to exist is a way of behaving in our encounter with the world and Sartre, given his specific idealist assumptions, sees the very knowing of the world as a reflection of a stance the subject takes in relation to it. If we think of the human being already as a ‘the’, as a substance determined by deeper and ‘essential’ unconscious drives consistent with physical nature, then our experience of the agent and any subsequent articulation of the agent in an explanatory discourse will have to cohere with this original decision or choose not to at the cost of rationality. However, such rigidity will be empty and ineffectual in psychoanalytic cure since it is the particularity of the patient that grounds the neuroses. The universalistic and scientific approach of Freud’s speculative theory is at odds with the actual practice of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis recognizes that ideas can cause symptoms (so the mind causes physical effects) and that a cure resides in the patient’s awareness (and subsequent satisfaction, sublimation or repression of these ideas). Consequently, according to Sartre, the patient is the ‘cause’ of these symptoms through an act of will. But if this is the case, then the framing of a human

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being as an organism constituted by empirical drives is fundamentally incoherent with Freud’s account of cure. Second, Sartre also offers a further reason to reject the Freudian description of the mind that does not rest so deeply on his own controversial account of freedom. The notion of the censor is for him absurd: it means the subject is both aware and not aware at the same time. If an instinct is repugnant to me, I must first be aware of it to mark it as repugnant and then repress it to be unaware of it. Yet, repression was supposed to stop the instinct becoming conscious in the first place. So, it seems Freud must be committed to the existence of an empirical ‘me’ and also a deeper filtering ‘me’, but even if I am only aware of the former, I am always to be identified with the latter. These criticisms of the Freudian account overlap and seem to centre on the idea of patient responsibility. If we can find in Freud, as Sartre appears to suggest, an articulate and necessary conceptualization of responsibility and show that it cannot be reduced to a simpler, scientific explanation, then we must agree with Sartre that there is something deeply contradictory about Freudian models of the mind due to the claim that they are committed to consistency with the scientific model of explanation and its concepts and norms.

3.3 Freud: Cure and Responsibility At an early stage in his enquiry into psychological disorders, Freud was faced with a quandary. He had to either countenance the hypothesis that sexual abuse was rife in Viennese society and that even his own sister had been a victim of seduction by an adult, or to reject one of the grounding beliefs of his theory. His resulting decision was to radically overhaul his explanatory apparatus. Originally, Freud’s musings on psychological disorders had concentrated on showing that the repression of an event in early life is the underlying cause of the symptoms of the patient. For him, mental events are a combination of an idea and energy, but whereas certain ideas were repugnant to consciousness and repressed, the organism still had to channel that energy in order to discharge it. The cure of psychoanalysis resides in the discharging of this energy by revealing (or re-repressing) the traumatic event, but, if this hypothesis were to be consistent with

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his findings, then sexual abuse was almost commonplace among the Austrian middle classes. One of Freud’s most radical ideas, one which he resisted for so long, was the sexualization of infancy and the rejection of an actual event in the past causing neurosis in favour of an unfulfilled wish: the event in childhood was not fact but fantasy and this fantasy was due to infantile sexuality (Wolheim, 1981). Neurotic symptoms occur when a wish or a desire, and not necessarily a memory, is so repugnant to the agent that it cannot be admitted to himself or herself as his or her own wish or desire. The aim of psychoanalytic therapy is simply to identify the idea or wish, to raise it from the preconscious of the organism and to decide whether to sublimate it (discharge the energy in another form: the cold shower approach), to satisfy it when no harm will actually occur if taboo is misplaced, or to repress it because it ought not to be acted on (either because it will result in harm or will harm the community). The patient’s role in the whole process is to become aware of the wish which he or she finds repugnant and to re-evaluate it. But, if the organism is nothing but a collection of drives and their conflicts, and deliberation is in fact an illusion, in what sense can the ideas be ‘revaluated’? (Freud, 1935, 1964). And this was Sartre’s point and perhaps Freud’s most telling discovery: the concept of responsibility for one’s own wishes and drives, the transcending of them and their selection – in short, acts of will – are by far the most effective way to a cure. And that means responsibility is a central concept to psychology and yet remains incompatible with materialism. Of course, Freud was a doctor. In his early career, he saw all the metaphors and symbols he used as ‘standing-in’ for deep physical changes in an organism. He saw the end of his endeavours as a complete, holistic account of human behaviour compatible with neuroscience. Yet, more important than these theoretical aspirations, was the question whether or not the method is an effective cure. The speculative theories were always to play second fiddle to this overriding aim. Freud did, however, propose a tentative explanation of responsibility: as an epiphenomenon of deeper conflict between satisfaction (the death-drive) and self-preservation (the reality principle) (Freud, 1964). Because humans are social creatures, the reality principle that regulates the organism’s evasion of harm is modified through evolution into

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a ‘moral conscience’: the superego. The ambivalence that the subject undergoes when experiencing feelings of aggression towards an object of love (the father) are underpinned by the fear of losing, by one’s own actions and not external circumstances, a protective figure. Such fear of possible harm caused by one’s own wishes mutates the emotion into guilt which stalls and represses that wish to remove the object of protection (Freud, 1935). Whereas fear is the reality principle in action for the evasion of harm, guilt is the reality principle in action aimed at the goal of sociability which, at a deeper level, remains a way to evade harm. Once agents feel guilt then a whole host of desires and wishes can be associated with repugnance through society and repressed, ensuring that aggressive tendencies which could destabilize society as a whole are controlled. Making a patient responsible for Freud is, for the most part, uncovering those wishes which invoke guilt when they should not because their satisfaction would not threaten the stability of society (Freud, 1961). And so it seems that the concept of responsibility is consistent with the materialist theory after all. But, it is here pertinent to bring in one of Sartre’s reasons for rejecting the classical Freudian model of psychoanalysis: universal symbols and a fundamental, scientific structure of the mind corrupt the particular and subjective experience of the patient solely for the benefit of the therapist (Sartre, 1991: 558). Although, Freud is not guilty of this at the level of patient care, as we shall see by looking at one of his case studies, he was guilty of such a reduction on the theoretical level.2 His case histories, in fact, derive universal symbols bottom-up and not vice versa as supposed by the scientific theory. He deftly moves from scattered fragments to a hypothetical whole and back from the whole to better understand a particular fragment. In this way, truth is not manifest – as one would expect with a strict science – but is disclosed slowly and through open communication with the subject matter itself (that is, the patient). Reading the case of Freud’s wolf-man, one is struck by the essentially hermeneutical flavour of the holistic process of psychoanalysis. The assumed title of the case history itself is part of the process: the title opens up the case history and sheds light on the symptoms which afflict the patient (Freud, 1973). It is the interpretation of the phobia of wolves coupled with a certain recurring dream that forms the basis

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of Freud’s first working hypothesis. This dream and symbol find themselves related to the life as a whole of the patient. Freud details family histories and household relationships that could have given rise to the patient’s childhood phobia. Although, at one level, there is a model of causality in the drives and their physical expression, it seems that by invoking myths, life histories and dreams to make explicit the meaning of the patient’s symptoms, Freud is dealing with another level of explanation working alongside, rather than grounded in, the causal one. A dream or a symbol is not caused by the witnessing of a primal scene or the recollection of a grandparent’s fairy tale nor any universal, general unfulfilled wish, but rather, it is the individual patient who gives the whole thing a certain unity within the personal narrative of how he understands and reacts to the experiences which have happened to him. The patient’s self-understanding, however, can find no expression in the usual norms and expectations of society. Generalizations, family histories and individual experiences reveal the truth of a symptom through their interaction, and at the base of this interaction is the feeling and understanding of the subject himself which requires to be made intelligible to an audience. Such interpretative holism only makes sense if one assumes that at some level in the process of experiencing and of desiring, there exists some shadowy ‘self’ interacting in and moulding the shape and direction of this thing called ‘life’. The dream of the wolf-man and his wolf phobia act as a key to unlock that which motivates his desire. His desire is motivated in terms of a project: the project to be the sole object of paternal love. The key opens up and makes manifest the fundamental desire which motivates his behaviour. Following Freud, the patient becomes aware of his desire and can choose to act or not act upon it. He articulates his motivation, recognizes it as his own and regains the freedom to choose whether or not he wishes it as his being. In short, he recognizes that he himself is responsible for his actions. The ‘He’ that hovers uncomfortably in Freud’s case history would be excluded without question from his speculative theories, yet the cure is impossible without it whatever ‘it’ may be. For the wolf-man, the afflicting symptoms originally came from elsewhere. Psychoanalysis allows him to take them back as his own and he can then choose to deal with them. The narrative act of

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describing what one wants is a means to transparency: through articulating ourselves we describe and recognize ourselves, in short we purify our desires by choosing desires on a basis of right and wrong and not useful or dangerous. Freud is seemingly well aware that some people have greater freedom than others, depending on their level of transparency to themselves; as he says of children: In the psychology of adults we have fortunately reached the point of being able to divide mental processes into conscious and unconscious and of being able to give a clearly-worded description of both. With children this description leaves us almost completely in the lurch. It is often embarrassing to decide what one would choose to call conscious and what unconscious . . . In children the conscious has not yet acquired all its characteristics; it is still in process of development, and it does not as yet fully possess the capacity for transposing itself into verbal images. (Freud, 1973: 265–46) Freedom is not an essential characteristic of human beings, it requires the ability to transpose the unconscious wants, needs and preferences of the organism into verbal images and once they are transposed they are subject to the will of that which names them. Naming our deep desires makes us free, but that is a process and not a property. Freud’s analytic method jars sensibly with the materialist picture of man in his speculative theories. The goal of analysis is for the patient to become aware of and be able to articulate his motivating desire and the cure resides in judging either the course of action or the desire itself appropriate or inappropriate. In recognizing one’s responsibility, one becomes freer. The presentation of Freud’s theory of mind could offer no room for such an approach, and it is difficult to see how analysis fits with the bigger, scientific story he wishes to tell. His descriptions of behaviour depend upon a meta-narrative, normally in the form of myth, while ostensibly referring to a particular life of an individual as a collection of scientifically verifiable drives. In short, his theories make an action intelligible and not necessary. The object of study (the human being) is not described in terms of causes and laws, but is comprehended as acting upon reasons which are either appropriate or inappropriate. Psychoanalysis is perhaps better

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understood as a member of the Geisteswissenschaften – that is, the moral, human or social sciences – rather than the natural sciences. The doctor seeks the meaning of the act rather than the cause of the act, the latter being a key to the former and not vice versa.

3.4 Existentialist Psychoanalysis Let us remind ourselves and reorder Sartre’s criticisms of the Freudian model: the idea of the censor which filters ideas between the conscious and the pre-conscious is absurd. How can the censor be both aware and not aware of the desire unless ‘it’ exists over and above the desires and deceives itself? For Sartre, the subject is responsible for its symptoms because even repression itself is an action on the part of the will. Sartre uses this to reject the idea of the unconscious completely. Like Freud he extends the sphere of agency – we are responsible for much more than we admit – but Sartre insists that such agency is always conscious of itself even in its repressions. Following on from this, Sartre criticizes Freud’s identification of the fundamental structure of human being as an empirical model of the mind. It is not the case that situation ‘acts’ on an agent, it is rather that the agent exists as that situation: the structure of the situation, its meaning and import for the subject reveal the self-conscious will of the patient. For Sartre, the holistic method of the case histories would only have sense if the fundamental structure is a choice of will and not a state. The choice to be in a certain way rather than another way is an action or performance of a will as is the choice to exist according to one set of norms and values rather than another set. Finally, the subject has to reveal to himself and verify for the analyst the truth of the reconstruction. He or she must take responsibility for the wish and its consequences, but the materialism of Freudian analysis has no room for such a ‘he’ or ‘she’ (Sartre, 1991: IV.2.i). Sartre, though, retained certain features of Freudian analysis in his own existentialist alternative. Analysis remains the search for a fundamental structure: all objectively discernible manifestations of psychic life are symbolic references to more fundamental structures which constitute this particular person. Single intentions, wishes and desires refer to a deeper structure understood as an original choice of the

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subject to exist in a certain way rather than any other. The original choice structures the subject’s relation to himself, to others and to the world. As such, and like Freudian analysis, character can play no explanatory role as character is a product of one’s acts, not the cause of them. The analytic cure, for Sartre, resides in revealing the original choice of the subject to exist one way rather than another. If one feels tired and cannot walk on up the hill, one’s tiredness is a projection of the self of the original choice on the world. And the world is determined by such a choice: the hill is steep rather than challenging, the walk is a burden rather than exhilarating and one’s legs are in pain rather than being exercised. One’s tiredness stops one from going on, when it could just have been the obstacle to be overcome if one had made a different choice to exist in another way. And if I am what I am because I have chosen to be, then surely I can choose to be different. Responsibility, choice and agency – the constituents of freedom – lie at the heart of Sartre’s picture of human being.

3.5 Sartrean Freedom Revisited If Sartre is to be understood as a metaphysical libertarian, then the text which would support such an interpretation is The Transcendence of the Ego. Yet, that essay is an explicit epistemic enquiry into the spontaneity of theoretical reason necessary for forming judgements. It is a metaphysical tract and, although it has a part to play in his system as a whole, it is not directly concerned with the question of human being. In Being and Nothingness, the issue has changed and Sartre is explicitly interested in the consequences of his epistemic libertarianism with regard to responsibility: the agent is responsible for every act (and one must remember that knowing, too, is a species of acting for Sartre). One cannot claim that ‘I couldn’t help it’, ‘That’s just the way I am’ or ‘It’s my duty’ in order to negate one’s personal responsibility for what one has done. Any attempt to avoid responsibility, to deny one’s freedom, is bad faith and this is the morality that lies at the heart of Being and Nothingness. Bad faith is a denial of freedom, a denial of who we are, it is to deny the very dignity of humanity. The realization that the agent is solely responsible for his acts leads to anguish, the dread of being free, and anguish captures the nature of

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human being condemned to be free, knowing that he must decide and choose and that these choices are his and his alone. It is the spontaneous nature of consciousness, the ability to transcend the causal determination of the world that makes error possible, which makes room for a coherent notion of choice: for a choice to be mine and mine alone, it must not arise from a prior character, from a given desire, from the way the world is or was, or, finally, from the dictates of reason. For a choice to be authentic and free the agent must negate these constraints, and consciousness has to be spontaneous. And here is the problem: if the choice is spontaneous, is it not better understood as an event since the ‘I’ which chooses is nothingness and not identical with the empirical ego which is ‘me’? What is the difference between this uncaused event and choosing an ice-cream by lottery, that is placing my hand in a bucket of tickets with flavours written on them and picking one? Sartre himself uses such arguments against the notion of metaphysical libertarianism (1991: 436–37). Perhaps one can say in an absurd universe, there is no difference, but then Sartre has to explain the phenomenon of anguish differently, for if the ‘me’ of ‘my’ choice is nothingness, then who is responsible and who feels anguish? Who is the self which connects all the acts as mine? Freedom understood in this manner seems to lose its relationship to responsibility which is crucial for the experience of anguish I can only be concerned with the future if it is, in some sense, my future. Being and Nothingness is Sartre’s attempt to offer a resolution to the problem of identity because the subject is no longer a metaphysical abstraction employed to reveal the structures of the possibility of knowing (as it was in the earlier, epistemological essay), but it is characterized as a particular person living in the world (Sartre, 1991: 3). And what defines a person as opposed to an isolated consciousness is simply continuity over time: this series of acts is ‘me’. Thus, Being and Nothingness, in its introduction and first two parts, revises and elaborates the account of metaphysical freedom Sartre had already described in the earlier works. In parts three and four, he begins to offer an answer to the problem of continuity: the original project is a universal, fundamental structure of being human. The original project dictates that each act has a meaning in relation to a consciousness

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which is constructing itself in the face of other consciousnesses (being-for-others). The original project is human being’s fundamental desire to be something rather than nothing. However, to be something is contradictory to its own possibilities and thus the deep structure of the original choice is futile because human being is concerned with the goal of being a possibility that is fixed and given, both free and determined at the same time. Human being acts as though it were an already given unity in order to become that given unity which it cannot be. How one reacts to this absurdity determines one as a person and not a collection of fleeting and unrelated instances. Thus, psychoanalysis is the method to reveal the way in which human being exists in order to be something and not nothing: in order to be fixed, essential and free of anguish; in order to be what it is not. Sartre’s own description bears this out: The goal in short is to overtake that being which flees itself while being what it is in the mode of not-being and which flows on while being its own flow, which escapes between its own fingers; the goal is to make of it a given, a given which finally is what it is; the problem is to gather together in a unity of one this unachieved totality which is unachieved only because it is to itself its own non-achievement, to escape from the sphere of perpetual reference which has to be a reference to itself, and – precisely because it has escaped from the chains of this reference to itself – to make it be as a seen reference – that is, a reference which is what it is. (1991: 153) Continuity or personality is postulated in an account of human nature which Sartre believes is consistent with his description of consciousness: to found oneself as that being which is recognizably free through a series of acts that demonstrate this undeniably to the other. The metaphysical freedom of The Transcendence of the Ego becomes a practical freedom of the person in situation: Human reality can not receive its ends, as we have seen, either from outside or from so-called inner ‘nature’. It chooses them and by this very choice confers upon them a transcendent existence as the

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external limits of its projects. From this point of view – and if it is understood that the existence of Dasein precedes and commands its essence – human reality in and through its very upsurge decides to define its own being by its ends. It is therefore the positing of my ultimate ends which characterizes my being and which is identical with the sudden thrust of freedom which is mine. (Sartre, 1991: 443) Sartre here seems to be guilty of a rhetorical sleight of hand that cannot stand up to a rational challenge. On the one hand, we are told that human being is transcendent to the world of causes, and hence best comprehended in a domain separate from physics, whereas, on the other hand, Sartre posits a general theory of human nature to account for all structures of personality. No matter how thin such a theory is, it does apparently commit Sartre to a causal explanation of particular actions (Warnock, 1965: 126). The standard interpretation of Sartre’s work resolves this apparent conflict by simply stating that he negated the freedom of the particular individual for his account of human nature which was to eventually embody Marxist doctrine. But, there is another solution more in keeping with the aims of an existentialist psychoanalysis. The first departure for existentialism is to hold existence precedes essence: any knowledge at all (any relationship with being) is only possible if there is a subject. This is a familiar transcendental argument which one finds in Kant: the unity of apperception is proven by the fact that moments of consciousness must have an a priori unity otherwise synthesis would not be possible. If I am rational and I know that ‘All men are mortals’ and I know that ‘Socrates is a man’, then I must also know that ‘Socrates is mortal’. If Paul knows ‘All men are mortal’ and Peter knows ‘Socrates is a man’, there is no rational necessity for either of them to reach the same conclusion. Only if consciousness is present to itself throughout the rational process, can a rational process be possible at all (Kant, 1993). It is in Heidegger’s thought that this unity of apperception, which for Kant is derived from knowledge, becomes ontologically prior. If there exists an a priori unity, surely the way in which this exists determines the objects of experience and any ontology or metaphysics must begin with this: each different entity has a different way of being known, it is characterized

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differently due to the subject’s behaviour towards it. Although I say ‘I know myself’, ‘I know Paul’ and ‘I know that is a table’ with the same verb, what I am doing – and knowing is a type of doing akin to choosing the concept ‘beak’ or ‘ears’ for application to the phenomenon before me – is different in each case. And the self is constituted by its behaviour towards itself when the subject asserts ‘I know what I am’ which is the fundamental investigation of psychoanalysis. The modes of being Sartre describes are derived from this approach. Dasein – Heidegger’s substitution for the Kantian unity of apperception – is constituted by three knowing relationships understood as different activities or behaviours. One, Dasein is concerned with things: they matter because they can either fulfil or frustrate its projects or desires. This is to know things as either ready-to-hand or, in a more reified sense, as present-at-hand. Thus, the way in which Dasein exists – its projects, aspirations and motivations – is prior to knowledge of these entities. This, of course, loosely corresponds to Sartre’s being-initself. Two, Dasein is with-others in a relationship of solicitude: we share a world with other consciousnesses who also exist as projects, structuring the world as a matrix for-themselves. This loosely corresponds to Sartre’s being-for-others, but Sartre – in Being and Nothingness – is pessimistic about the possibility of authentic recognition by others and replaces Heidegger’s picture with a more antagonistic one, hence solicitude is substituted by shame. It is Sartre’s recasting of the authentic/inauthentic distinction as one of a moral choice that makes reconciliation with the other’s understanding of me impossible. Finally, Dasein cares about itself. It is immediately related to itself as that which cares who it is, what it does, and who it becomes. This is the immediate way in which one can understand Sartre’s beingfor-itself and again his emotional characterization is more prosaic: anguish. It is this last dimension of care which constitutes the ground of any existentialist psychoanalysis because it offers an answer to the question ‘who am I?’ as opposed to either ‘what is it?’ or ‘who are you?’ Of these three modes of consciousness, of knowing, the two which most closely map on to Sartre’s account are concern and care. Heidegger says that it is pertinent and useful to apply the verb ‘to be’ to being-in-itself and the verb ‘to exist’ to being-for-itself, since the

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former answers the question ‘What is it?’ and the latter answers the question ‘Who is it?’ One commits an ontological error, for Heidegger, when one attempts to know consciousness as a ‘what’ rather than a ‘who’. Cartesianism commits this error as does any account of human nature given in terms apt to a ‘what’ rather than a ‘who’, that is attempts to describe the human subject in terms of properties or as a thing present-at-hand with a fixed, eternal essence. It is the postulation of a standard form of error in reasoning, the ontological error, that grounds Sartre’s rejection of Freudian materialism. The alternative he proposes is to move from being concerned with oneself, which is an error, to care for oneself. Care for oneself is the basic structure of human being (though Heidegger would reject such a transferral of concepts). It is problematic to lift what is required from Heidegger without a proper consideration of his thought as a whole, but here we need only use him as a prop for the origin of Sartre’s thinking on a possible existentialist psychoanalytic method. One of Dasein’s modes of beingin-the-world is understanding: being-there, or existing, is a peculiar relationship to the world which is one of understanding. At one level, this is merely another formulation of the concept of freedom as transcendence or spontaneity: ‘Understanding is the existential Being of Dasein’s own potentiality-for-Being and it is so in such a way that this Being discloses in-itself what its Being is capable of’ (Heidegger, 1992: 184). Understanding is, then, an existential property and Dasein understands its possibilities as possibilities. More than this, understanding is primordial in that Dasein cannot be related to the world without comprehending it: it projects itself on the world as that which can structure the world to realize itself. Dasein understands itself as the Being which can dominate the world by its actions: its understanding of the world is as a potential tool to actualize itself as it wishes to be. The understanding that Dasein has is of tools ready-athand, the world is the possibility to create an environment in which Dasein can determine itself. And so, Dasein is responsible for that world in a very broad sense. If one bears in mind Kant’s understanding, then this will perhaps be clearer. For Kant, the understanding of the world is supplied through the forms and the categories: they structure our experience

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of the world. Since these categories belong to the world of the understanding and not the phenomenal world, it is possible to know them only indirectly through our experience of the world. Heidegger similarly posits a subject which cannot but help see the world ‘as’ something, but he does not divorce the phenomenal and noumenal worlds. Time as projection, for him, is embodied in understanding and not a prerequisite for its existence: one understands the world by projecting what will be through one’s use of it. Freedom resides in understanding for Heidegger: it creates the way of seeing the world, whereas, for Kant, freedom resided in the application of the already existing categories. Understanding is a fundamental way for a human to apprehend the world, and it hinges upon not the understanding of ‘what is’ but rather ‘how it will be’ and it is not then a passive activity, but a way of immediately participating in the world or, simply put, behaving (Gadamer, 1989: 211). Dasein projects itself on the world, creating a structure or tool complex through which it can coincide with its future possibility; thus, understanding is very similar to action: in acting one understands both the world and one’s project. Yet, the choice of the project remains seemingly accidental or given since understanding relies on pre-understanding. The agent is thrown into the world, a world of already existing meanings ready-at-hand to use. In other words, one’s form of life constructs the world of meanings for the agent. His responses to and desires for the world – the reasons of action which present themselves to him – arise from a form of life and not from free reason because, like the animal and its natural desires, that is just the kind of (social) being he happens to be. Such appropriation of values and reactive response to the pre-existing world is to exit inauthentically or to cohere to meanings and values already set in stone, as it were. However, in interpreting the world, one comes to know oneself and can, therefore, decide oneself. Freedom is not an instantaneous moment, but a laborious process: the coming to be of oneself. Those desires which are inexpressible become articulated, as Freud’s method reveals, and with knowledge of oneself, one can choose to endorse, modify or even reject one’s ongoing project; only with increasing knowledge can evaluation begin. Understanding must be accompanied by interpretation: understanding is the possibility of representing the world and interpreting it. The world is that which

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aids or abets projection towards one’s potential while disclosing one’s project, and to use it or overcome it, it must be represented. To represent the world is to see it ‘as’ something: to pass my examination I see the questions as to be answered, to go to the shops I see the road as to be crossed. My choice structures the world into a complex to achieve my end. Understanding is always accompanied by a response to the world, it is equiprimordial to it, that is both arise together. My response to the world is through the facticity of my existence: my desires, my beliefs, my instincts and takes the form of a mood. This mood, in turn, is due to my form of life and the meanings with which it constructs the world. Understanding as a primordial relationship with the world interprets the world as a structure with a meaning (Heidegger, 1992: §32). Understanding is the possibility of making oneself and the world meaningful, thus the intelligibility of someone’s acts resides in his understanding self-determination of himself and his world. In disclosing the inarticulate response (mood) one has to the world, one can overcome it as essence and recreate oneself. One can move from an inauthentic existence to an authentic one. Dasein understands the world and itself in terms of projection; conceptualization arises as an interpretation of the world in terms of this project. From this relationship meaning arises and a project becomes intelligible through its articulation as we saw in psychoanalytical resolution: the fundamental desires become known and either freely endorsed or freely rejected. Existential psychoanalysis is a process of understanding who one has chosen to be. Sartre appropriates Heidegger’s insights in his presentation of being-for-itself, which then becomes his equivalent for the Kantian unity of apperception. There has to exist an a priori unity of consciousness otherwise this particular moment of consciousness would be impossible and this a priori unity makes possible the empirical, synthetic unity which is me in the world (Sartre, 1991: 103). The original project is the attempt by self-consciousness on the part of itself to make itself identical with its unifying process which is impossible, but necessary since it is its essential structure: There is an indivisible, indissoluble being – definitely not a substance supporting its qualities like particles of being, but a being

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which is existence through and through . . . This is what Heidegger expressed very well when he wrote (though speaking of Dasein, not of consciousness): ‘The “how” (essentia) of this being, so far as it is possible to speak of it generally, must be conceived in terms of its existence (existentia).’ This means that consciousness is not produced as a particular instance of an abstract possibility but that in rising to the center of being, it creates and supports its essence – that is, the synthetic order of its possibilities. (Sartre, 1991: xxxi) Sartre’s for-itself is not an essence like the Cartesian cogito, it is an existence. If the human being is a ‘what’, a thing present-at-hand, then one can apply the category of causality to it and the paradox of freedom and responsibility arises. However, Sartre is describing the ‘who’, the fundamental way in which human being exists in the world. In other words, the metaphysical account of the for-itself is being applied to the situation. The supposed tension in Sartre’s text between a universal account of human nature and his account of uncaused freedom rests on this ontological error: to assume that there exists no distinction between the epistemic domains of physics and ethics. It is to describe the subject in terms of a thing when Sartre repeatedly asserts that it is nothing. The original project needs to be understood as a fuller elaboration of self-consciousness’s knowledge of itself. Things are, that is, have, essences: a table is x, y, z. Self-consciousness exists, that is, is free. How do I know myself as freedom? I know myself through an ethical description, as an object belonging to a domain whose fundamental concept is not causality. Anguish is the first of these concepts, but that only stands in for a more articulate conceptualization. I know I am in anguish, that this anguish reveals that I want to negate my possibilities and become a thing which is free. The original project is an elaboration of who we are and a description of the way we know ourselves and deal with our freedom. Freedom is, after all, the futile pursuit of essence, of a negation trying to negate itself. To describe Sartre as a libertarian is misleading because the spontaneous nature of consciousness is not the essence of freedom, but the precondition of choice. The freedom of consciousness is indeterminism and this indeterminism guarantees the notion of choice. In order

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for choice to be meaningful, this freedom has to be elaborated more fully as self-determination or the idea of personal freedom: ‘Thus from its first arising, consciousness by the pure nihilating movement of reflection makes itself personal; for what confers personal existence on a being is not the possession of an Ego – which is only the sign of a personality – but it is the fact that the being exists for itself as presence to itself’ (Sartre, 1991: 103). Personal freedom belongs to the domain of ethics and not physics, so the term indeterminism is already out of place and alien to the matter at hand. I am free when I am the one who chooses the content of my will (authentic), when I act on my volitions and not those imposed on me from without (inauthentic). Yet, we shall see that Sartre overdetermines the distinction and assigns freedom and non-freedom to the difference, but these should truly be understood as different types of freedom. The original project cannot be understood in terms of freedom if this means only uncaused, but it is a good characterization of the human condition if freedom as self-determination is a fundamental structure of the self, especially if the one who exists, exists in an absurd universe. Each of my acts fills me with being for which I am responsible, yet this ‘me’ can always be negated, always be overcome and ‘I’, too, am responsible for this fact. Sartre’s conception of self-determination is unique and original because it embodies the ‘necessity of contingency’: it is necessary that I determine myself but any determination is contingent since it has no ultimate meaning (Sartre, 1991: 327). My being refers only to me and this is the impossible burden of responsibility that gives rise to anguish. Anguish is, then, the first attempt at a conceptualization of freedom in the domain of ethical explanation.

3.6 Anguish and Bad Faith Agents experience anguish because they are free. If I were not responsible for all my actions, for the situation I find myself in, for the very world itself, I would – could not – according to Sartre, experience anguish. And since I do, then I am free. A rather simple proof, but it does tie into my idea of the phenomenology of freedom: human being is anguish. A situation provokes fear if there is a possibility of my life being changed from without (where I have no control) – my

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being provokes anguish when I distrust myself and am not certain of my own reactions to the situation (I am responsible for it). The best example of this is Sartre’s rather telling description of vertigo (1991: 30). One does not fear heights or falling. One is afraid of the very consciousness of the fact that the only thing holding me back from the edge, from plummeting, is an act of my own will. There is nothing else. I either leap or do not. And whatever I do, I do (in a very non-tautological sense). Anguish would simply not be possible if I were wholly determined. Freedom, then, is not an essence or a nature, it cannot be categorized, but we can offer its fundamental shape by stripping away its more common appearance. Implicit in Sartre’s account are the features of, first, spontaneity and, second, foresight. Freedom is the permanent possibility of a rupture between human reality and world and the negation of my facticity (I am not what I am). It is also the simultaneous projection of my being towards a future: the ability to structure a matrix of meanings and orientations for the will to pursue (I am what I am not). Why, though, is anguish so rare if freedom is the fundamental structure of consciousness? And if anguish is the emotional characterization of the fundamental structure of human being, what role does it play in analysis? In most cases, man is involved in a complex, viz. acts leading up to a possible already posited – and not only by me, but by others and historical structures. To exist inauthentically is to be chosen for by the situation and these structures are comforting since they exclude reflection: ‘Why should I leap when so many people – my family and my children – depend on me?’ Moral systems, religious beliefs, customary values and the attitudes of the hoi polloi, shelter us from the fact that choice is the only foundation of value: I am thrown into these values and by appropriating them, I hide from my own freedom. Our being is immediately ‘in situation’ and I am as responsible for my own unfreedom and my choice not to choose as I am for all my repressions: ‘All these trivial passive expectations of the real, all these commonplace, everyday values, derive their meaning from an original projection of myself which stands as my choice of myself in the world’ (Sartre, 1991: 39). The consciousness of freedom is the apprehension of myself as the source of my possibilities. Flight before anguish not only distracts

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me from the future, but it also attempts to disarm the past of its threat: I pretend that my past is an in-itself that can produce another in-itself, thus offering ‘me’ an excuse for my actions. Where Sartre differs from Heidegger is in his explicit morality: the authentic/ inauthentic distinction in Heidegger’s thought was a description of the way in which the subject exists. It either exists as freedom, spontaneous choice (I choose myself) or it exists as determined by the world into which it is thrown (I am chosen for). This, for Sartre, becomes the basis of a supposed ethics: one ought to be authentic since to be inauthentic is to deny freedom and to exist in bad faith. But he commits an error: the authentic/inauthentic distinction is a difference in kind between actions. The former are crucial or significant and determine the latter which cohere to the possibilities set down by the authentic actions of agents. A life, though, must necessarily be a mix of these two types of behaviour. Bad faith, however, grounds Sartre’s theory of analysis because human being is permanently in flight from its possibilities. Agents are capable of bad faith because they are capable of conceiving of themselves as in-itself. Human being is both transcendence (not what he immediately is, but a possible re-evaluation of what he is) and facticity (what I am in terms of the situation and my past, the position from which I make my choice and the value I confer upon it, but negating it is still conferring a value on it). Bad faith occurs when the subject does not co-ordinate and synthesize these two elements of his or her being. We deny our freedom in three ways: one, we change transcendence into facticity: I make myself into the fixed characteristics which the other believes I am and limit my freedom through supposed irresistible dispositions (I’m not brave; I’m shy; and so on). In such a way, I give up my choice to the facts of my past and I absolve my decision through what I am believed to be. Two, I appropriate an already given end (the social revolution, sacred history) and believe that is my purpose: I believe it is something objective worth fighting for and struggling towards (my original choice is once again made for me). Sartre calls this the spirit of seriousness. Three, I believe I exist solely as transcendence, I am not subject to the judgements of others because they judge what I am not (you don’t understand me; you have misunderstood me). I negate my choices as mattering at all:

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I wallow in my pointlessness. Sartre is no nihilist. Your choices do matter, to deny that they matter is a futile escape from this fact. The conditions which make possible bad faith are that human being must be what it is not and not be what it is. In order to persuade myself that I am courageous or that I am cowardly, I constitute a project in bad faith and it is the original choice to create myself as in bad faith which determines further actions and reactions. In other words, the subject chooses not to choose, to reject his freedom through a free original choice. He is caught up in contradiction. Bad faith is, in short, a type of being-in-the-world. It is one of the ways I exist and it is only possible if I am transcendence and facticity. Bad faith is social play. We play at being an essence in order to occupy our social role: I present myself for others in order for them to recognize me as a thing because I want to be a thing, to have a nature and to have some sort of meaning behind my acts. Bad faith limits my freedom. Analysis is the methodology to unearth the choice in order to show patients that they themselves are responsible for the symptoms that afflict them and that they are capable of choosing to be otherwise.

3.7 Shame When your mobile rings on a bus, you immediately feel the judgement of all the other passengers. You had spent ages choosing the appropriate ringtone. You wanted to change the original tune, because otherwise people would think you were a Luddite. You wanted your own music, because you are an individual. But what to choose? Something which everyone can recognize as cool, as sophisticated, but not commonplace or everyday. Not something who was trying to be cool would put on their phone because then they would know you were trying to be cool. Trying to be cool is not cool. And when the music starts, when the first bars of Paranoid begin, you curse your luck that you are surrounded by pensioners who believe you are a ruffian. All your best efforts are objectified wrongly by their hardly functioning ears. You feel shame. Sartre talks about being seen while gazing through a keyhole: caught in the act of voyeurism. He implies that one feels shame before the other

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because the other judges one and the judgement (since it is spontaneous) has no essential connection to what I am freely trying to create myself as. We find ourselves at the mercy of a Look over which we have no control and we feel shame because we are an object at the mercy of the other. It reveals so much of Sartre’s thought about other people that the other need not actually be present, that a mere rustling of trees is often sufficient to render the object that we are to our own consciousness. The Look makes me feel shame and I could not feel shame unless I were free, that is responsible for my self, and there also existed free others who judge me. It is the other who makes me exist as a ‘me’. Being for others is a necessary way in which human beings exist, and this has ramifications for the creation of values. My fundamental connection with the other is my permanent possibility of being-seen by the other, and I am responsible for myself and their interpretation of me: Furthermore my objectivity can not itself derive for me from the objectivity of the world since I am precisely the one by whom there is a world; that is, the one who on principle can not be an object for himself. (Sartre, 1991: 257) Shame and pride make me live (not know) the situation: I am an object of evaluation. Being-seen is the fundamental relationship to others and it constitutes itself as either sadism or masochism, for Sartre. I either objectify or am objectified, but there can be – for Sartre, at least – no authentic reconciliation of our judgements since to judge is to use concepts and norms that I have not freely chosen. This objectivity is constituted as the situation: an ensemble in the world with the double and inverted determination (inverted because it is constituted by my original choice, double because it determines a means-end complex that obliges me to certain patterns of behaviour). My relationship to other agents is one of struggle: my being is at stake when I act because I am free. Being-seen means I exist as myself, unreflective consciousness (transcendence). The other sees me as other and not as object. I am to be struggled with because he seeks to assert his own existence within the heart of my judgement of him. Reciprocally, I am the object the other sees and I feel shame. Shame is a confession: it reveals to me that I am this being-in-itself,

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the idiot on the bus with the Heavy Metal ringtone. The other’s look solidifies and alienates my own possibilities (whereas anguish opens them up). The other is the limit to my possibilities: ‘The Other is the hidden death of my possibilities in so far as I live that death as hidden in the midst of the world’ (Sartre, 1991: 264). He continues: To be looked at is to apprehend oneself as the unknown object of unknowable appraisals – in particular, of value judgements. But at the same time that in shame or pride I recognize the justice of these appraisals, I do not cease to take them for what they are – a free surpassing of the given toward possibilities. A judgement is the transcendental act of a free being. Thus being-seen constitutes me as a defenseless [sic] being for a freedom which is not my freedom. It is in this sense that we can consider ourselves as ‘slaves’ in so far as we appear to the Other. But this slavery is not a historical result – capable of being surmounted – of a life in the abstract form of consciousness. I am a slave to the degree that my being is dependent at the center of a freedom which is not mine and which is the very condition of my being. In so far as I am the object of values which come to qualify me without my being able to act on this qualification, or even know it, I am enslaved. (Sartre, 1991: 267) Sartre rejects Hegel’s dialectical progression from this type of selfconsciousness to a mutually reciprocal relationship because there is no universal structure of existence which will fix once and for all our relation to one another. Freedom and spontaneity undermine all attempts at reconciliation. The Look grounds us in a situation. It makes it impossible for us to deny our facticity: I am what I am for others but I am also what I am for myself, this gives human reality its particular, historical existence and the situation gives us our particularity: I am this for an other (Sartre, 1991: 282). Particularity, the historical and social ‘me’, can only be possible if there are others.

3.8 Practical Reason: Being and Care Freedom, then, if it is to serve a role in an explanatory system that relates the concepts of agency and responsibility in a way that

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competes with a materialist explanation of human behaviour, must be able to justify the claim that human beings can deny, evaluate, repress or embrace their wishes and desires as, somehow, their own. Sartre’s extrapolation of the authentic/inauthentic distinction into the realm of an axiological critique seemingly makes this impossible, but the discussion of bad faith reveals the structures of human consciousness in response to this brute fact of existence and offers a sophisticated framework for psychoanalytical understanding. In order to see how this form of analysis is relevant, let us consider the nature of practical reasoning using an admittedly rhetorical example. Imagine walking home one night to find a fox which has been hit by a car on the road. The fox is not yet dead. It is whimpering pitifully and obviously suffering. You know immediately that taking it to a vet would be futile because the fox would not survive the journey (even if its body would stay together when moved!) As you stand over the fox, you find yourself with a decision to be made. Most agents would already be confronted by the feeling of anguish, because the choice they are to make matters in a very real sense, though not for the reasons that might seem obvious. Normally, one holds that practical reasoning takes the form of doing x will enable me to achieve y; where x is an action and y is my reason for action. In this most rudimentary way, practical reasoning is nothing more than a formal principle for making intelligible one’s action (or desires) or those of the other: ‘Why did he x?’ is nearly always answered with ‘Because he wanted to achieve y.’ To attest to its formal nature, one can even analogously understand the behaviour of animals on such a model, although animals act with reasons only for us, rather than for themselves. These reasons for action are only articulated desires. As has been said these reasons can be biological or social. With the example above, it is uncontroversial to explain why some animals, including humans, flee (horror, fear) in terms of biological instincts and why some humans turn away (sensibility, disgust) in terms of social ‘instincts’. Behaviour in these cases can be understood almost immediately: when the animal or the human flees, there is no real need to ask why. Here the practical reasoning model adds nothing over and above a simple causal model of explanation and the latter ought to be preferred due to its consistency and coherence with other theories.

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However, where humans differ from animals is in being able to reflect on their reasons for action and to judge them appropriate or inappropriate. We can ask the person why they fled and we would expect them to be in a position to articulate a response, even if it is a mere repetition of the immediate inclination: ‘The scene disgusted me.’ But such an articulation is an implicit commitment to the appropriateness of one’s act: I acted as I should have done. In other words, humans ask the further question: ‘Is wanting to achieve y a good thing to want?’ The human can evaluate his or her desires and it is a necessary condition for this that he or she be able to transcend them, or to use Sartre’s phrase, know that ‘I am not what I am’ (spontaneity). One’s reason for action, although immediate, is not binding in the same way as it is for an animal. Rendering the reason for action in an inferential way rather than an immediate way makes it rational and demands that the agent ask himself or herself whether the reason for action is an appropriate one in terms of what its outcomes will be (foresight). It is to set up a motivational connection between my normative judgements and my physical actions. Here the practical reasoning model does add something over and above a simple causal model of explanation: intelligibility. The latter model is no longer to be preferred due to its consistency and coherence with other theories, because to privilege these explanatory norms would involve a cost to our rational understanding of the phenomenon before us. So, we immediately encounter the conditions of freedom in practical reason: spontaneity and foresight, and commit ourselves to an explanation of the phenomenon using concepts at home within the discourse of ethics broadly construed. My response to the above situation is an object to be evaluated and so I feel shame before others, even if none are present, that determines my actions because I know how I act will objectify my normative judgement in the world and so make concrete the ‘me’ who I am. We all know that the ‘correct’ thing to do is to kill the fox, to end its suffering, but many of us would suffer from the supposed lack of ability. We would tell others that we just could not do it, but Sartre reminds us that that, too, is a choice. And in choosing not to do anything, you are saying that it is the right thing to do. You take responsibility for it and that means implicitly justifying it to others. We feel this shame and anxiety because the fundamental

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structure of human being is care for oneself: in acting I project an image of myself, so my freedom becomes my ability to create myself as I wish to be before an other who will see me as that which I wish to be (Heidegger, 1992: 1.I.iv). To put it succinctly, I care about my reasons for action because they reflect the being which I am or am to be. My acts ascribe characteristics to me: callous, cynical, arrogant, etc. By evaluating and accepting (or rejecting) reasons for action I form an identity which is recognized as ‘me’ by others (the Look). Furthermore, in creating this identity it becomes my personal, and perhaps even unconscious, guide to practical reasoning: I solidify my character by caring about the need to form a unity. One does not act out of character unless one is ready to justify it to others. Freedom is therefore constrained by how others will interpret my acts, and what I do matters because it will be me who does it.3

3.9 Self-Forming Actions and Self-Interpretation Taylor’s (1985: ch. 2) reading of Heidegger centres on the notion of care in describing man as a ‘self-interpreting animal’ which in having an emotional response to a situation, say fear, realizes that the situation has ‘import’. With the fox before us, mood to a large extent determines our experience of it. Such a mood constitutes the primary reason for action embodied in the structure of the world which is ready-at-hand to use. For example, fear reveals that there is an element in the situation which is of relevance to one’s being: I am in danger. This is just the kind of being I am. Disgust at the dying fox is a biological hangover embodying the fear of disease and possibly present predators. This way of understanding cannot be mistaken, certain emotions as such are immediate, but can be proven irrational (or inappropriate): there is nothing to fear, your feeling is unfounded. Following this, these emotions cannot be reduced to objective features of the situation, only to the subject’s response to it: ‘. . . an import defines a way in which our situation is of relevance to our purposes or desires, or aspirations’ (Taylor, 1985: 54). These imports demand articulation: fear has to be explained as fear of something and on this level can be proven irrational (or rational). The initial response to the world is always a desire and imports

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are the articulations of these desires into reasons for action. The agent does not initially confront a world of things, his initial relationship is to reasons for action and any knowledge is constructed on the basis of these.4 A large set of these imports, however, are self-referential: shame for example. In describing why I feel shame, I refer to myself: I feel shame because of who I am. When my mobile sounds or when I deliberate about my response to the dying fox, I am aware of the ‘me’ that is doing this, the ‘me’ that will emerge from these deliberations as an object for others. These self-referential imports are the agent’s immediate relationship to the world and form the basis of what it means to be human, in feeling shame or pity an obligation is created to act in a certain way, to describe desires which it is good to have. The articulation of these imports constitutes them as values: in feeling shame, I realize that I have not acted (or could not act) as I should have done and can articulate this in terms of values. The appropriateness of reasons for action is to be discerned in relation to the situation (is this desire appropriate here and now) and one’s future identity (am I to be understood as that being which I wish to be). Sartre’s radical choice, the fundamental structure of human being, is creative freedom: when I act in response to a situation I create, affirm or deconstruct a unity or series of actions that are to be described by others as ‘me’. And the dying fox is an interesting example because it brings this consideration of evaluation in touch with a contemporary characterization of freewill: second-order desires (Frankfurt, 1982; Taylor, 1985: ch. 1, 1989). A first-order desire is the simple formula ‘I want to x’ whereas the second-order desire is the transcendence and endorsement of this desire as valid: ‘I want to want to x.’ Endorsement, though, can be two qualitatively different activities: the first is simply the rejection of a desire to increase overall satisfaction, such as not eating because one wishes to swim later in the day. Such endorsement of a desire is governed by whether or not it is consistent and necessary as part of a matrix of actions required to achieve some already chosen end. The end of the activity is already chosen or decided. It is simply and, without any moral qualification, an inauthentic action. The second type of evaluation is more interesting: whereby the desire is truly evaluated since it is articulated in terms of values. By fleeing the scene

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of the dying fox, I act cowardly and confess myself to others as a coward. The scene of the dying fox gives me the chance to affirm who I want to be, it is a situation in which I can affirm my original project to be a certain type of person, whomever that may be. It is a selfforming act since it gives meaning to the ‘me’ that hovers above all my decisions and makes certain futures possible while denying others (Kane, 2007: 19–22). It is the sort of action that determines who I am in the world and acts as a marker against which I will be measured by others. The authentic choice, the original choice, matters because it sets the agenda and determines the variables and possibles that are consistent with such and such an identity. Certain second-order desires are those which a person desires to have in an effort to define his or her being. The dying fox is an example of this sort of choice. As are, I assume, the choice of a religion, of a career, or of how one treats or understands others.5 Some are always present, some arise from moral luck. Should I kill the fox and relieve its suffering, or leave it alone and run away? Most people in such a situation would be guilty of bad faith: most would recognize that the right action would be to kill it, yet most would flee, citing supposed dispositions of character as an excuse. The point of the example is that one should choose to reject one’s immediate desire for another reason for action; that is for a value or a motivation worth having (Wolf, 1990: 49). Thus, the full formula for second-order desires reads: I want to want x because it is good. To be true to what I perceive as good, I should kill the fox. The desire to kill the fox, if it can be called such although it is the incorrect description of the action, reflects a higher motive on the part of the human and a better personality. Of course, children (and a few adults) would be unable to articulate the matter in hand so as to help them overcome the immediacy of their desire – and its simultaneous emotional expression: horror, curiosity – because they are not fully developed agents. In these cases, the will affirms itself over and above the desires which vie for satisfaction and the agent feels anguish and shame because he knows that his action will be a confession, a radical choice of who he is. Human being is the evaluation of one’s desires – choosing between them – but also the evaluation of one’s being, trying to create a certain person with specific desires and without certain others; that is, to determine

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oneself. Analysis is a process through which human being becomes responsible for himself or herself by re-evaluating the authentic, original, self-forming choices which constitute the ‘me’ in the world and set the paths of the various inauthentic actions that cohere with that identity. Authentic choices reflect the choice of who I am, and inauthentic choices are those that are determined by the ‘me’ who I offer to the world, but are not in any sense – as Sartre supposes – immoral. The Sartrean definition of freedom, however, sprang from the absence of any external values whatsoever. Values are the total responsibility of the self and are created by the act of choosing. In saying I should have killed the fox when I did not, I merely expose my selfdeception. On one level, this has to be right and by recognizing the validity of the values of compassion and other values, but not acting upon them one is guilty of that which Frankfurt (1982) terms being a ‘wanton’. A wanton is someone who evaluates his desires yet still acts upon the strongest and most immediate. I recognize the suffering of the fox and I should kill it, but I obey the feeling of horror which fills my soul and flee the scene. This is bad faith, fleeing my own ability to create myself as the person I should be. And by doing nothing or fleeing, I affirm my cowardice as a rational course of action, as my very being. Bad faith (‘I was just too weak-willed to kill it’) is a vain attempt to repress my own choice, to say it was beyond me, but I know I am responsible. Existential analysis is a reconstruction of the free choice of the individual to be who he or she is which has been hidden by the freely chosen structures of bad faith.

3.10 Action and Others Certain choices are determined within the context of a situation and a life as a whole. They can be understood and made intelligible with reference to the life of a person (inauthentic actions). Other choices are more radical, they set the terms of reference for intelligibility for the person, they create the character which will be supported or negated by a future series of acts (authentic actions). The latter kind define the project of self. Sartre’s existential psychoanalysis was an attempt to make sense of this sort of freewill in a world, of the

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existing self which is nothing but a making something of itself before others. Understood like this there is no moral import to be assigned to the distinction, but he distinguished between these acts as authentic and inauthentic and asserted that the latter will always be determined by others. However, it is also the case that the self can determine the inauthentic acts through the project of the original choice. And it may well be possible that the determination of ‘me’ in the world can be reconciled with the understanding of ‘me’ by others. Sartre thought this impossible. The radical choice or project is a fundamental structure of human being in that we all choose to be who we are, but each of us chooses for himself or herself. And some of us never admit that we ourselves are responsible for such choices. The only meaningful way to conceive the qualitative difference between such choices is in terms of a holistic method and not a causal one. Self-forming actions or radical choices are, of course, either resolvable or irresolvable. When one decides to save a drowning child rather than return home to video the programme one has promised one’s wife, reasons can be stated to support either course of action with which one can concur: avoiding an argument, not getting wet, being a hero and so on. Yet, one’s decision to save the child is absolutely intelligible and, to use a rather inappropriate idiom, a ‘no brainer’. But it remains an action which defines the sort of person who you are, and had you taken a different direction you would not be the same person. Though the choice is a self-forming act of will and crucial to the projected image of oneself, it is still easy to resolve. To record the programme for my wife is a good, in that it refers to her (and my) future evening’s happiness, therefore given my desires and aspirations it is a good. However, I should still save the drowning child because it involves another good which can compete with the desire for a peaceful evening: the value of another person’s life. Evaluation involves ranking our concepts of the good and choosing between them and this must necessarily refer one to a moral map of shared values: I assume my wife will understand why I have not kept my promise and agree with my decision. As such, in describing firstperson responses to a situation, one must project oneself into a shared understanding, that is a third-person description. For Sartre, such shared understanding is always a case of being chosen for and

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never free. This is why, for him, relationships with others are always characterized in terms of conflict.6 Yet, in the present example, there is no real conflict: I immediately concur with the judgement of the other because it is the judgement I myself would make. Reconciliation is possible and the action, the self-forming act of will, remains authentic even though I do what is expected. Authentic choices are not by their nature irresolvable, it is just that when they are we feel the sort of anguish Sartre described. The example of his student demonstrates the irresolvable nature of certain choices (Sartre, 1948: 35). In these cases, two sets of reasons for action can be articulated and both would be equally intelligible: choose to stay with your mother and be agent A in world A or choose to join the resistance and be agent B in world B. However, what Sartre seems unable to accept is that both are persons who would find a home in the shared evaluations of others. Sartre’s account of existentialist psychoanalysis probably fails due to an inherent romanticism in his work: there is but one choice to be made and then the self-image is sacrificed at the altar of the other. However, it seems that existence is not like that at all: we can go back on ourselves, change direction, and reinvent ourselves. We can also act in concert with others and their expectations. Self-forming acts do not set our life in stone even if they do set the agenda for a series of actions that will be understood only with reference to the authentic choice to be ‘me’. Self-forming actions are defeasible and I can reinvent myself radically whenever I so wish. Freedom is a process, not an event, and it is this assumption which Sartre shares with Freud and the materialist view of the universe. He sees freedom as a temporal rupture in the series of events, whereas it should truly be understood as a form of labour that structures and makes meaningful a life as a series of actions. He was never truly capable of breaking free of the explanatory domain of physics. If we think of freedom as an event in the universe, then we need to use the explanatory model we apply to events and problems that arise. If we think of freedom as a process undertaken by the self before the judgement of others (which Sartre also held), then we need to look at the point in which I become ‘me’ for others and that is through action.

Chapter 4

Hegel, Action and Avoiding the Death without Meaning

4.1 Introduction In the heart of the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel makes an offhand remark about the Terror of the French Revolution and the meaningless deaths of subjects who are at the whim of a more powerful subjectivity: The sole work and deed of universal freedom is therefore death, a death too which has no inner significance or filling, for what is negated is the empty point of the absolutely free self. It is thus the coldest and meanest of all deaths, with no more significance than cutting off a head of cabbage or swallowing a mouthful of water. (Hegel, 1977: §590) The ‘universal freedom’ of the above quotation refers to that negation integral to the Sartrean conception of freedom: the power of the subject over the world. It is the capacity of the free subject to resist all already existing structures of meanings, rules, norms and expectations and assert its own being and meaning on the world. But such an assertion is meaningless because no one recognizes the occurrence as an action worthy of consideration, it is mere wilfulness or caprice and the death of subjectivity because the other is unable to distinguish between the event as an action or the event as a mere accident. The cessation of life occurs as does swallowing water, but there is no distinction between the two ‘events’: they are mere occurrences that happen in the world. The freedom of the subject becomes its own negation: by affirming absolute transcendence, the subject cannot be distinguished from causal objects in the world because events seem just to happen rather than are

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‘meant’. Decapitation occurs as does the harvesting of cabbages. Without distinguishing acts from events and deeds from actions, there is no difference in kind and this non-distinction is a direct consequence of the non-recognition of the other as subject, as one’s peer. Actions require recognition and if one continues to view freewill as a property of an object rather than a process, then this ontological commitment makes adequate recognition of the will impossible (Hegel, 1991a: §107). The meaninglessness of these deaths is in stark contrast to his famous master-slave dialectic where one risks death for meaning, and it is this meaningfulness as opposed to pure, animalistic, instinctiveness which is the mark of human action (Hegel, 1977: §§178–196). What Hegel is at pains to stress is that freedom is dependent on the freedom of others because it is before their judgment that events which emanate from me are to be described as actions, and I am to be granted the category of subject. Self-forming actions that create the ‘me’ in the world demand that the ‘me’ created is understood and that requires the recognition of others. The claim of this chapter is that freedom is dependent on others, not (as Sartre thought) in conflict with them, nor (as perhaps Freud thought) in spite of them. Freedom relies on the recognition of the subject by the other as an agent rather than an effect of some cause and, hence, depends upon the subject being placed within an ethical narrative rather than a casual description. The discourse of action, even if in our age every attempt is made to reduce it to a special set of causal events, belongs to the sphere of ethics and not physics. The aim of this chapter is to demonstrate that action is best comprehended as a narrative discourse of ethics, rather than an expansion of the realm of physics.

4.2 Three Rival Models of the Explanation of Action Let us first begin with a quick summary of the standard explanatory models of action in play. The word ‘rival’ above should be treated suspiciously because each theory of action has as its goal a very different aim and, if one ignores the aim, then the theories do seem to be competing to explain the same phenomenon. However, it is pertinent once again to put on the table a hypothesis which is central

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to the current work: the three theories are doing different ‘jobs’ and as such are not in direct competition. In the first instance, a theory of action ought to be able to adequately identify a subset of events properly described as acts from the more general set of occurrences. We can best understand this through an uncontroversial intuition: the subset of events that are properly termed actions are those that are brought about by an agent. So, in its simplest form, a theory of action will identify those events which the agent does as actions and the standard models of action can be distinguished by the role played by the agent within the explanation as a whole: (1) an action is caused by an intention belonging to the motivational set of the agent; or, (2), the agent is understood as an expression of purposes, projects and aspirations; or, (3), the agent is understood as communicating meaning through action that ‘stands in for’ the will.

4.2.1 Model 1: empiricism The first model of action is perhaps the most familiar and has its roots in the scientific empiricism of the British tradition (Hobbes, 1982; Hume, 1978; Railton, 2003). It is mostly concerned with the explanation of action and, as such, describes actions as congruent with causal conditions where reasons play the role of causes. An event belongs to the subset of action-events if the agent’s intention plays a causal role and the agent is aware of it.1 An action is the consequence of the presence of an intention within the causal chain, and an intention is generally and most easily conceived of as a belief plus a desire. Events happen to a person unless the intention of the agent plays an efficient role in the set of antecedent causes whereby the agent does something. For example, whereas I spill the tea on my cat by accident, I throw the snowball because I want to make George cry and believe that cold, icy snow hitting the face is suitably unpleasant for a five-year-old boy. The similar analytic structure of these sentences leads to a metaphysical confusion between actions and events, but if one is able to reconstruct a desire and belief as an intention that played a casual role in bringing about the event, then they can be pulled apart. Throwing a snowball involves such a cause, whereas spilling the tea does not and I am responsible for the former, but not so for the latter.

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The standard empiricist explanation of action suffers damagingly from two immediate problems: one, an agent may be moved by beliefs despite himself; and two, an agent’s action may well be the result of an aberrant causal chain (Velleman, 2000). The former problem is best characterized by cases of coercion and addiction, whereas the latter problem involves cases such as the assassin who intends to shoot the target, but his nerves produce an involuntary spasm that pull the trigger. He kills the target. How can the standard model differentiate between this and when an assassin deliberately shoots his victim? The desire and the belief were present, but the intention played no role in the causal chain. These problems arise from a general flaw in the standard model: the phenomenology of human action involves reference to the agent, but the empiricist model reduces agency (in accordance with the dictates of scientific rationality) to a causal relationship between events and dispositions that is incompatible with a properly human account of action or, to put it another way, the explanation is inadequate because it ‘fails to cast the agent in his proper role’ (Velleman, 2000: 123). Reasons, that is dispositions and beliefs, cause an intention which causes an action, but the agent just does not feature and it is agents we hold responsible and not their beliefs and dispositions. So, reasons must effect something (viz. an agent) in order to become intentions and since reasons do not always produce the same intention in differing agents, something is missing in the causal explanation in order to make it plausible. Of course, one could cite the agents’ differing webs of beliefs as the differentiating factor in diverse responses, but it is still possible for an agent to be moved by beliefs despite himself. Cases such as coercion and addiction feature an agent who is in accordance with the standard model (‘I believe the robber’s gun is loaded and I do not want to die’; ‘I am in a state of wanting and I believe that the drug will alleviate this’), but, phenomenologically, these stories do not seem to capture the real nature of human action (Frankfurt, 1988). It makes intuitive sense to say that ‘it was not me’ or ‘I wasn’t acting on my own will’ and such statements do have a legal – if not metaphysical – resonance. Coercion and addiction have been problematic for the empiricist model since Hobbes and the only real response is to say that the model of action proposed explains, but does not evaluate the actions

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of agents in terms of intentions. Evaluation must rest on controversial doctrines such as freewill or responsibility and these concepts play no role in the explanation of action. In other words, there is no way in this simple causal model to distinguish human action or full-blooded action from animal action or non-intentional action. The phenomenology of human action involves reference to the agent and the empiricist model appears unable to articulate any entity that can actually occupy the role ascribed to agency. And once we realize that the empiricist model is interested only in simple and pure explanation, it also allows us to better respond to the problem of aberrant causal chains. Such examples are simply beside the point, irrelevant or mere oddities of reality since, if the question is not ‘Did the assassin kill his target?’ but in fact ‘Should we hold the assassin responsible for the death of his target?’ then there is no real bite to the hypothetical example. If we are interested in the evaluation of the action, then we must be interested in the agent. Just imagine a legal defence built upon such a basis and the pure irrelevance of these counterexamples comes to the fore: ‘Yes, my client wanted to kill the man. Yes, he had been paid and yes, he was pointing a gun in that direction, but the actual cause was an involuntary spasm.’ So, if one wants to have meaningful explanations of action, it seems one must begin from a primitive cause: the agent (Chisholm, 1976). The use of the agent as cause in this secondary discourse may well be unpalatable for the scientific aim of eliminating concepts and reducing discourses of explanation, but if one gives up such a commitment, then a more sophisticated discourse is required simply because the event-event model is inadequate.

4.2.2 Model 2: expressionism And hence the reason for looking at Hegel comes into view: because he is one of the few thinkers of the Enlightenment to use a method of thought opposed to reductionism. Whereas one of the aims of modern science is to reduce complex phenomena to the same explanatory level as simpler ones, Hegel’s dialectical method shows how simpler models of explanation are exhausted and inadequate when faced with more complex phenomena. Responsibility and

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coercion are problematic for event-event models of human action for this very reason: they are phenomena which demand more sophisticated conceptual discussion. One can, of course, reduce them, but not without losing something – what is peculiarly human to actions – in our explanations. In Hegel’s quotation concerned with the insignificance of specific actions brought about by ‘universal freedom’. The acts may well be free in one sense (they are brought about by a willing agent), but they are not free in another sense (one cannot recognize the acts of the agent because there is nothing in the event that allows one to distinguish between the full-blooded freedom of a human being and the arbitrariness of a savage animal). Simple intentional causality shares such a problem: the only thing that distinguishes human action is the presence of belief, but it can say nothing about the appropriateness of these beliefs. The second theory of action has its roots in the Aristotelian tradition and the notion of purposive beings: actions are seen as the expressions of an inner force of organisms. It is also often offered as the proper interpretation of Hegel’s theory of action, but I wish to show that this is only a partial understanding of Hegel’s own theory of agency (Taylor, 1975). The expressionist model, although explicitly centred on what brought the action about (the purpose of the agent), is mostly concerned with the evaluation of the agent’s intentions (these intentions are worthwhile or appropriate purposes for such and such an organism). Charles Taylor, for example, puts forward a form of Aristotelian purposiveness which, however, has an important non-Aristotelian element: self-knowledge (Taylor, 1985; MacIntyre, 1999). Actions are expressions of an organism’s telos, that is an inner force imposing itself on external reality, and are to be understood in those terms, yet with human action the purpose cannot be independent of the subject who realizes it (unlike the purpose of a plant to reproduce): ‘Rather, this life must have the added dimension that the subject can recognize it as his own . . .’ (Taylor, 1975: 15). Moreover, human subjectivity also differs because it always expresses itself in a medium and the content of one’s subjectivity cannot easily be separated from that medium: the human being’s self-knowledge is dependent on a social or intellectual life that allows him or her to comprehend it. For example, one expresses one’s ideas in language, but to think that these ideas are separable

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from the language is erroneous; one expresses the concept of beauty in painting, yet the concept cannot be separated from the medium in which it is expressed (Taylor, 1975: 82–3). To explain an action requires reference to a particular historico-spatial agent and the context and situation of the action. Taken together these consolidate the medium of action, and so a full explanation will involve a narrative description rather than a relationship between two distinct events. The agent is the central concept since to identify an action is to identify something that expresses the end or purpose of the organism as opposed to a mere event which is brought about by simple causality. Reality is divided into different kinds: agents and objects; the former have purposes or wills, the latter do not. On such a theory, the agent takes a central and necessary role in explanation because an action expresses what is characteristic about an individual in that it discloses the subject’s feelings, aspirations and projects. It may be added, I may have had an unclear prior understanding and only in acting do I truly know what I feel. When I tell my son not to study philosophy at university, only then do I realize my own resentment at a system which has frustrated my best goals and true direction in life. The purposive model possesses the advantage over the simple event-event causal model because coercion can be explained simply because it rejects the idea of clear and transparent intentions. The bank teller may think she wants to hand over the money to the robber, but that is not in line with her true wants determined by her social role. The avowal of inappropriate purposes makes this model consistent with empirically plausible accounts of human psychology and acting on intentions that are not immediately transparent (Taylor, 1975: 15–17). There are, however, two major problems with the substantial content of this theory of action (putting aside my reservations about its plausibility as a proper interpretation of Hegel for now). One, nothing in the model separates human action from animal action except the ascription of self-causation which may or may not be a real description. Taylor tells us that ‘Man as a living being is not radically different from other animals, but at the same time, he is not just an animal plus reason, he is a quite new totality; and that means he has to be understood on quite different principles’ (Taylor, 1975: 83–4).

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Such comments underline a vagueness at the heart of the account. We are told that the human is not ‘radically different’ from animals but is ‘quite a new totality’. The difference rests in the self-ascription of purposes and the identification of an intention of one’s own or not. The insistence on the difference of human beings is understandable because a theory of action is concerned with responsibility, and if we do not want to redefine the word in line with the empiricist understanding then we must rest our account on the controversial theories of freewill: agents are to be responsible for their actions because they are free when purposes are not ‘given’. Human beings are quite a new totality because they are free because they are capable of self-ascription (and hence refusal) of intentions. Yet, a purpose according to this model is a natural or social given. And that raises the problem of false consciousness: intentions can be self-ascribed and they can be in accordance with a social purpose (my duty, my role), but they could be intentions which – although, I recognize as my own – have been inculcated within me from birth in the interests of some other agent or class. By pursuing my goods, I actually further another’s and not my own interests yet do so – according to this account – freely and that is counter-intuitive. Imagine the dutiful bank teller who resists the robber at the cost of his life. A society that unreflectively celebrates him or her as heroic and identifies all citizens and bank workers as required to possess similar intentions, is puzzling to say the least. Whose interests are actually being served by such a culture? The problem arises because of the second problem with this account: its reliance on Aristotelian metaphysics. More significantly problematic for this account is Taylor’s insistence that the purposive account is wholly inconsistent with and offered in opposition to the standard empiricist model of action. The idea of telos can be mapped on to and made consistent with the idea of intentional behaviour. We can talk about the intentions of humans and animals as determined by their natures (and Hobbes (1982) most obviously does) and reduce the metaphysically problematic term ‘purpose’ with a proper causal concept (need or instinct). However, Taylor’s expressionism cannot be reduced to such a simple stance, though. He deliberately ensures its inconsistency with the category of causality by stressing the non-reductive nature of ‘purpose’. Yet, without

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the structure of causation we require a whole new metaphysics to explain the relationship between a purpose and the resulting action: how can we explain how an agent brought something about if his purpose did not ‘cause’ his bodily movements? For Hegel, both descriptions (event-event and purposive account) are shapes of the will. They are both viable discourses and not the negation of one another, unless forced to be so. A causal model must remain the formal model of any explanation or justification of an action in the idealist sense of being the formal condition of an explanation and not the description of reality. Taylor was perhaps a little overshadowed by the programme of Berlin since, for him, Hegel’s supposed expressionism is one of the strongest counter-enlightenment characteristics and hence opposed to scientific reductionism, but to stress his counterenlightenment credentials at the cost of Hegel’s own commitment to enlightenment ideals is damaging to comprehending the full Hegelian picture.2 And the two domains of explanation are consistent because of his idealism: they are domains which explain the same phenomenon differently (even if one may be more appropriate than the other). Taylor is guilty of the separation and isolation of discourses in a way similar to the understanding contra reason dichotomy in Hegel (1991a: §4A). He opposes the two theories rather than showing how the event-event model is a necessary, formal, step in the rational understanding of full, human action. And so he commits himself to a realism concerning the purposes of things whereas Hegel’s idealism allows thinking to determine the nature of things. If objects have fixed natures, howsoever understood and whether social or natural, then their freedom is freedom to express these purposes and not freedom to choose these purposes and that makes self-forming choices seemingly impossible. Freedom requires the possibility of self-forming (authentic) actions and Taylor’s account of action makes no space for these because freedom for him is coherence with either naturally or socially given ends and projects. The impossibility to step away from one’s given social nature, the medium through which I make my projects and purposes known, means that, politically, agents who act freely and agents who act with false consciousness cannot be distinguished; and, metaphysically, selfforming actions cannot be distinguished from inauthentic actions.

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Expressionism relies on a medium for expression of purposes, but it is unable to distinguish between the determining role of the medium and the degree of responsibility of the agent. One cannot be a great artist without, in some sense, being part of the tradition that defines the canon of great works, but the particular agent loses his individuality in the structures of the tradition itself and that raises the problem of being unable to differentiate between authentic action and action in accordance with what is given.

4.2.3 Model 3: hermeneutics So, we need a model of action that can account for cases of coercion and other empirical instances of non-free action that does not depend on controversial realist metaphysics. The hermeneutical model closely resembles the second, although it has one important advantage: it bridges the gap between the explanation of action and the justification by implicitly accepting the role of causality in intentional action as a formal requirement of explanation. The idea is that an action to be fully explained as an instance of ‘human’ or ‘full-blooded action’ must not just be explicable, but also intelligible and the requirement of intelligibility is the commitment on the part of the agent to a formal principle of rational recognition (and not coherence to some supposed given purpose). My action expresses something about me; it communicates my intention to an ideal other who, to use an apt metaphor, is able to ‘read’ my inner self from my outer expressions (Ricoeur, 1981). The hermeneutical theory is grounded in the assumption that an act-event is comparable to a language-event in that it is the substantiation of the particularity of a subject through a universal medium of communication. Such an approach to action, although widely different from the mainstream event-event model, is not incompatible with it. Any action has a propositional content (‘he is digging the garden’; ‘he is going to the shops’) and also an illocutionary character (‘he is promising’; ‘he is demanding’). So, when students raise their hands in class, the teacher believes that they want to answer the question and also that the children have committed themselves to responding by raising their hands. The intention still causes the physical

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event but, since such performances and also the content of these actions depend largely on the context and interaction between agents, they are – like language-events – objects open to interpretation. And since the comprehension of an agent’s action is an interpretative endeavour, we must ensure that the categories we apply to the object before us are indeed those most appropriate to reconstructing the agent’s true intention; that is, those assumptions about human behaviour we use in our day-to-day understanding of other agents must aid and not hinder the proper interpretation of the phenomena before us (responsibility, agency and so on). For example, the presence of a buzzing bee in the classroom may well change the ‘meaning’ of the act of raising one’s arm. Therefore, the theory unlike the expressionist account, is consistent with idealism and eschews any realist commitments. The parallel between act and language-event rests upon two features of actions: first, they are self-referential, that is they are to be understood as an expression of the inner motives and reasons of the particular agent who acts. Actions are events in the world akin to utterances: they are to be understood as the medium through which a meaning is expressed. Note the event-event model here is content simply to have intentions as self-ascriptions: I can recognize myself in my own intention as reconstructed by you. The hermeneutical model does not, however, commit one to the ideal of a transparent subject who is aware of what he wants and why he wants it. The true intentions of a subject may be opaque and confused, as Taylor explicitly states in his version of the second model, but the agent must be able to identify himself in the reconstructed intention. The psychoanalyst’s interpretation of our actions only becomes ‘true’ when the patient identifies himself in the given narrative. Hence, the interpretation of a person’s act to be more reliable must rest on a pre-understanding of the subject before me: an immediate friend is easy, a member of the same culture relatively easy, a member of an alien culture may well be more difficult (but not impossible). Second, the action takes place in a determinate time and space in the medium of universal categories and a substratum of meaning. The particular act is the substantiation of certain rules and concepts constitutive of the practice determined by the context of the agent. One cannot understand an

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action independent of the temporal and spatial context in which it occurred.

4.3 Hegel’s Theory of Action Of course, for the contemporary thinker, preference between the causal-event model and the hermeneutical accounts, is easy: the former is already preferred for its simplicity, and the goal must be to reduce the latter to the former (interpretation of actions must be reduced to explanation of actions by the identification of the situation as ‘causes’). For Hegel, it was different; the latter description is a better one since it has evolved out of the contradictions of the first with respect to the concept of punishment since, without the conceptual sophistication to account for differences in responsibility, the treatment of transgressors can only be rationally understood in terms of deterrence or, at best, rehabilitation in a Clockwork Orange style. The movement from crime to morality necessarily entails, in Hegel’s system, the development of the concept of an evaluative account of action and not merely a descriptive one (Quante, 2004: 39–42). My main claim in this chapter is that Hegel offers, in his mature lectures on right (1991a: §§105–140; 1971: §§503–12), a hermeneutical theory of action.3 The formal way to conceive of an action is any event for which the agent claims responsibility or identifies as his or her own (Hegel, 1991a: §115). The idea of responsibility put in play at the outset reveals what we should expect from Hegel: he is ultimately interested in the evaluation and justification of actions (moral action), and not just the explication of action (action per se). His theory of action arises from a consideration of the responsible subject. The emphasis on the evaluation of actions is consistent with the claim that Hegel is concerned with full-blooded or moral action and not just human action and is supported by the location of his discussion of action within his lectures on right. The transition embodied in the chapter on ‘Morality’ – that is the systematic developmental and historical transition from person to moral subject – arises from the requirements of abstract right and, in particular, punishment. For once an individual person has rights and a territory (covering both physical integrity and private possessions), then violations of this legal space

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require reparation. Intentional behaviour demands to be treated differently from accidental damage (a flood), the consequences of animalistic (wild savagery), immature (the infant who decides to colour in one’s favourite Persian rug) or neurotic behaviour (kleptomania) (Hegel, 1991a: §99A). The criminal is differentiated from all these other (merely) grammatical subjects due to the responsibility he bears for his own will and our treatment of him depends upon the proper interpretation of an intentional action: to what extent is the criminal responsible and what, then, is the appropriate response? The concepts of ‘Abstract right’ are inadequate to deal with the proper response to crime and even hard placed to differentiate between crime and deception (Hegel, 1991a: §103). Such evaluation requires a theory of action with its explanation of how, when and to what extent the subject is responsible for his or her actions and the ‘person’ identifies only the individual will, independent of the clan or tribe, which has a given rather than a chosen content. For Hegel, then, a discussion of morality in its broadest sense is entailed by the rights and prohibitions of ‘Abstract right’ because the discussion of action in that section is formal and at odds with his retributivist justification for punishment (Hegel, 1995: §56). If action were merely caused by the content of one’s will, then punishment could only be a form of deterrence or rehabilitation. The violence of the person who acts due to neurosis or genetic predisposition, that is the person who could not have done otherwise, is not something for which he is responsible in any robust sense. As such, the aim of punishment practices would be either to protect others from his behaviour (like building a sandbag wall to protect property from a flood) or to change the person’s behaviour (as one would domesticate an animal). But, punishment is most rationally comprehended as retribution and such a concept requires the notion of responsibility and moral desert to be rationally grounded (Hegel, 1971: §503). Hegel summarizes his theory of moral action in one dense paragraph which sets out the conditions of moral action pertaining to a subject as opposed to action pertaining to a person: The expression of the will as subjective or moral is action. Action contains the following determinations: (α) it must be known by me in its externality as mine; (β) its essential relation to the concept is

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one of obligation; and (γ) it has an essential relation to the will of others. (Hegel, 1991a: §113) The first determination (α) is familiar: one must be able to identify an intention of the agent that plays a causal role in bringing about the action. This is the formal condition of an act-event. However, an agent must act on his or her own will and not be moved to do something ‘despite’ himself or herself. Hence, Hegel adds the second determination (β). The animal has no choice but to obey its desires, neither does the small child; they bear little responsibility for their actions. Subjective freedom for them – like the person – resides in the satisfaction of the will’s desire whatever its content may be. Human action is different in that certain desires and preferences are privileged even if they are not so pressing, and these can be articulated as values. Furthermore, values need not be exclusively moral since responsibility concerns all self-regarding actions (self-interest, prudence and morality). The process of the rationalization of desires permits the recognition of the ‘good’ of the subject’s purpose, be it moral or prudential, and he perceives it not only as a desire to be satisfied (personal freedom) but a desire worth satisfying (moral freedom). And this means we can now evaluate rather than just explain an action. We identify the role of the agent’s intention in the causes bringing about the event, and then are able to say whether or not the action is properly the agent’s own if he or she wanted it to be the case (that is, posits it as a purpose). Responsibility requires that subjects self-consciously know and freely choose their purposes for the predicate ‘mine’ to be attached to the action. An explanation of action requires no real notion of freedom, but an evaluation of action does. In dialogue, the actor would admit what he did as his own good and not the good of an alien will acting through him (coercion, false consciousness, and so on). The transition from Person to Moral (in a broad sense) Subject allows one to distinguish between fully free actions and coerced actions: Particular self-determination, as the inward self-determination of the will that is for itself, and as a mode of self-determination that is

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intended to be realized, is known by the subject and is its purpose; [it is] a judgment that in its determinacy comprises universal thought. The disposition is the universality as belonging to the subject; and, as singled out and set apart on its own account, it is the maxim of the subjective will. Once right is enacted, the disposition is of no essential significance for it. (Hegel, 1995: §53) The identification of me in the action is as a self-willed unit. The responsibility of the agent resides in bringing about those purposes which are his own and trying to falter those that are not. I am responsible for actions that emanate from reasons that are my own. This is Taylor’s understanding of Hegel’s theory of action: the human is a purposive being but one whose purposes are known and endorsed by himself (Taylor, 1985). Reasons that are my own are best conceived of as purposes: purposes correspond to what the agent sees as good and the bank teller who gives money to the robber does not see this as a good even if he has a reason playing a causal role in why he gives money to the robber. He can explain why he did it, but he can – intelligibly – state that he did not want to do so because it was contrary to the obligations of his institutional role. And the Kantian resonances in the above quotation cannot be ignored: both the weak-willed bank teller who submits to the robber and the strong-willed one who does not can explain their actions in terms of dispositions (fear and rectitude respectively), but only the latter can separate a maxim worthy of moral approbation. So, the second determination, (β), is seemingly consistent with Kant and the evaluation of the agent via their intentions. The idea of intentions and obligations resonates with Kant’s good will and the voice of conscience, but Hegel does not want the idea of right to rest on the idea of the ‘otherly out there’, that is Kant’s transcendental idealism (Westphal, 1991). However, at this stage of the argument, the parallels are striking: This subjective or ‘moral’ freedom is what a European especially calls freedom. In virtue of the right thereto a man must possess a personal knowledge of the distinction between good and evil in general: ethical and religious principles shall not merely lay their

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claim on him as external laws and precepts of authority to be obeyed, but have their assent, recognition, or even justification in his heart, sentiment, conscience, intelligence, etc. The subjectivity of the will in itself is its supreme aim and absolutely essential to it. (Hegel, 1971: §503) Here, Hegel is offering his own version of the Kantian characterization of Enlightenment, and one cannot fail to see the parallel with Kant’s earlier portrayal of the spirit of his age as the ‘age of criticism’ (Kant, 1993: Aix–xi). The Enlightenment is traditionally and analogously characterized as man’s maturation (always man!), when he no longer need rely on the dictates of authority or the motivations of immediate inclination (including social character). The subjective ascription of ‘good’ or value to an end is necessary to free action for Hegel and this allows us to distinguish between free agents and agents suffering from false consciousness. Any instance of false consciousness is an asymmetrical system of recognition whereby I treat you as my equal but you, for your own interests, treat me as less than an equal. By pursuing what I imagine to be my goods, I will feel at home or not at home and my own wants will assert themselves. If I do not recognize myself in my own interests, then I am alienated (the topic of the next chapter). And the transition from Person to Subject in Hegel, a historical transformation it must be remembered, distinguishes between agents who are inauthentic and agents who are authentic. Subjects can transcend what is ‘given’ in order to ask whether or not the norms and expectations of the ‘good’ they find themselves thrown into is, in fact, consistent with their own good. Subjects can perform radical self-forming acts of will and determine the context in which their further actions can be understood whereas mere persons (to use Hegel’s own terms of art) cannot. Persons act inauthentically in the sense that their actions are already determined by what is given, be it naturally, socially or, in cases of free action, by the Subject himself or herself. Taylor’s theory of action could not truly articulate this distinction and only Subjects are fully selfdetermining. Traditionally these two determinations (α + β) have been held to be necessary and sufficient conditions for free action, yet Hegel adds

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his third determination (γ): the intention has to be capable of reconstruction by others from the objectivity of the act itself. Hegel feels it is necessary to not only retain the traditional concept of the right of knowledge, but also temper it with an objective constraint. One reason he does so is that, ultimately, Kant’s picture fails because it cannot generate purposes a priori or resolve conflicting goods, but Hegel does not introduce his famous Kantian critique here. Instead the reader is offered positive reasons for the adoption of an immanent doctrine of ethics grounded in the Hegelian concept of recognition. It is necessary that others recognize the action as one’s own. The action must express the implicit humanity (obligation) rather than appear to be a mere, immediate purpose (wilfulness) and this entails that others must concur with me and my description of the good, otherwise they will continue to treat me under the category of personhood or worse. Intention, therefore, requires recognition by others: ‘The implementation of my end therefore has this identity of my will and the will of others within in it – it has a positive reference to the will of others’ (Hegel, 1991a: §112). The first-person may be the judge of what is good, but his judgement is constrained by the interpretation of the other. The agent has to be aware that his act ought to accord with the expectations of his form of life, otherwise his intention will be either misdescribed or ignored. One way to characterize this is to say that the justification of one’s good or end involves one in the activity of reason-giving and this activity is, for Hegel, inherently social. Affirming what is substantially right and good is not a matter of external, transcendental standards independent of one’s peers, but rests on their recognition of the content of one’s will in terms of articulated and shared categories of right. There are no constraints on a will which justifies a good or a purpose to itself, one is able to convince oneself that anything may be good (Hegel, 1991a: §140R). Reasons for action require a degree of objectivity for Hegel and this is based on reasons being a justification for all agents who share my way of life rather than just for me, that is an actual reason rather than just wilfulness and, contrary to Kant, one’s role, situation and circumstances all constitute reasons for behaviour. In offering reasons, the agent knows if they are good reasons if he can convince others. It follows from this that the agent’s

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description of his intention must harmonize with the other’s interpretation of the act. A man unaware of the way in which a certain act will be interpreted, that is how his reasons for action will be reconstructed is not responsible for any offence caused (although he may still be held culpable). Reciprocally, the agent is only fully free when he is aware how his action will be interpreted. The will of others contained in one’s own will is this shared scheme of interpretation in and through which we reconstruct intentions. The rational reformulation of the initial determinations of action occurs in a later paragraph which reduces the dialectical trinity to a new symmetry of subjective and objective aspects: The right of intention is that the universal quality of the action shall have being not only in itself, but shall be known by the agent and thus have been present all along in his subjective will; and conversely, what we may call the right of the objectivity of the action is the right of the action to assert itself as known and willed by the subject as a thinking agent. (Hegel, 1991a: §120) Here we find that self-ascription of intentions, or the right of knowledge (α), is combined with the necessary element of modern moral freedom (β) into the ‘right of intention’ such that the agent will only be held responsible for those actions deliberately brought about by his or her own will, thus ruling out external causality, neurotic behaviour, coercion, deception and false consciousness. However, in order to recognize one’s intentions as ‘good’ or ‘rational’ requires the reformulation of (γ) into the ‘right of objectivity of the action’. An action is – independently of the protestations and affirmations of the agent himself or herself – to ‘stand in for’ or ‘represent’ the will of the agent in the ‘outer’ world, just as the word uttered in language is assumed to be a sincere representation of the thought and will of the speaker who is present. If the agent wishes to be understood as a free moral agent, then he or she must be aware that an action requires a commitment to the medium through which others will understand it. So, in order to affirm one’s freedom, there must exist a minimum level of expectation which must be met. If the subject’s acts are to be the expression of inwardness, then he must be

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certain that the other is going to reconstruct them faithfully. Both actor and interpreter must, therefore, share a common understanding of the way in which acts are to be rendered intelligible. The first two determinations of free action are not sufficient to justify an action because, without the moment of certain recognition of the moral will, the agent cannot be held fully and morally responsible as demanded by the retributivist theory of punishment. Recognition, it ought to be recalled, is not just granted by the struggle to death, even if that story makes stark what is at stake: I demonstrate to you that I am free over and above my desires by risking the most fundamental drive for the sake of a principle (Hegel, 1977: §§178–196). Such recognition of one’s essential rationality and humanity can alternatively be granted by marriage, whereby the agent sincerely places altruistic and universal needs over particular and egoistic ones (Hegel, 1991a: §162). Without the self-certainty granted by knowledge of the inter-subjective categories of the right of objectivity of the action, the subject would be unsure whether or not he has been properly recognized or if his intention can be reconstructed faithfully from his action. In a rational social order, the agent knows the good in question because it is made immediately available to him through fulfilling his roles in the family (parent, child), civil society (worker) and the state (citizen). And such recognition is a liberation for and not a limitation on the subject. First, the social order allows the subject to learn to resist and overcome immediate, pressing desires and so transcend the natural necessity of the organism. In other words, the subject learns to be free through acting in accordance with the expectations of collective rationality. Second, social obligations overcome human being’s immediate partiality to self and make moral action and thought possible. Through cohering to the norms and expectations of society, the agent purifies his desires and creates a second nature which makes moral action the immediate response to situations and not natural, immediate responses. Third, recognition is a liberation because – by sharing a moral framework – agents do not need to create the expectations and categories of understanding from nothing, as we would when encountering a very different culture or, analogously, if we were to create a new artistic genre. Much time and energy would be spent

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laying the foundations for understanding that very little particularity of the agent could ever be expressed (Hegel, 1991a: §149). For example, if I wish to be known as a good father, then my acts must accord with those judgements which accompany a good parent (love, generosity, discipline) and not those which are generally frowned upon (indifference, prodigality, severity). These structures are those that make self-forming actions easy (remember whether one should record the TV programme or save the drowning child) and are, therefore, liberating in that I can be who I would through coherence to a shared set of meanings that I feel ‘at home’ in. The significance of the right of objectivity of the action resides in the certainty of recognition and one’s social fabric is a liberation because it makes possible – and does not inhibit – free moral action. This is the basis of what we shall soon term ‘objective freedom’. Sartre located the authentic/inauthentic distinction on whether one acts on one’s own will or the will of others, but Hegel shows – although not yet completely – how one can act on one’s own will in accordance with the will of others. Authentic action, those self-forming actions that determine the ‘me’ in the world that then acts inauthentically in line with the possibilities generated by the radical choice, is made possible by an institutional social structure that recognizes the right of individuals to determine themselves. And that requires the objective freedom of specific institutions. The conclusions to the all too brief discussion of Hegel’s theory of action are not to be underestimated. The right of knowledge (α) is familiar from most theories of action, but the right of intention (α combined with β) makes it obvious that the moral conscience, that is the subject’s right to decide his or her good – in which values he or she feels ‘at home’ – is a necessary condition of the rational state for without it rational, free action would not be possible and Hegel’s theory of punishment would be incongruous. Hence, any institutions or practices of the state which motivated citizens without being evaluated by the standards of personal freedom would make it impossible to feel ‘at home’. The right of objectivity (γ) sets the limits and conditions of possible subjective endorsement: any deviation from the norm must be justified by familiar standards and not by an appeal to mere wilfulness. One cannot rely on an incoherent noumenal realm

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to dictate right action and good ends, but one can interrogate one’s social roles and meanings for a way to express one’s particularity through a universal medium. Here is a rather playful, but illuminating example. Without the rules of football, the determinations that dictate right action on the field of play (rules and expectations in their broadest sense), Maradona would never have been. Yet, nothing about those rules, expectations and history could have determined what was unique about him.

4.4 Why the Hermeneutical Account: Narrative and Identity The causal act-event model of empiricism reduces actions to events at the expense of any meaningful discussion of an agent, but it may well be argued that the avowed aspiration to offer a theory of action that allows for the evaluation and justification of action over and above the explanation and intelligibility of action, is already an instance of begging the question in favour of some other theory of action. So, much is probably true and the only thing that I have to add beyond once more repeating that the only reason to adopt a simpler model is faith in the persuasiveness of the theoretic-eliminative ideal of our time, is merely to ask: if a theory of action is not to be rounded up into a full theory of responsibility and evaluation, what exactly is the reason for the isolated discussion of human action as a subset of events in the universe? Why even bother with the identification of actions as a subset of events? And the answer to that is simple: because actions are events which allow us to evaluate agents as agents and not describe them as objects. So, we need to talk about agents and the causal act-event cannot meaningfully do so. One advantage of Hegel’s systematic approach is to remind his readers of the relevance and significance of studying problems in isolation so long as the overriding reasons for isolating them in the first place are not forgotten. One problem with the expressivist reading of Hegel’s theory of action was identified as metaphysical: if one is concerned with real metaphysical kinds (organisms) that act out purposes, then causal conditions no longer apply and this requires a whole new metaphysical ontology. If, however, one merely reduces causality to an idealist

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formal condition of explanation, then no massive metaphysical task need be undertaken. The causal model remains the formal standard of understanding action, but it is empty without the full hermeneutical understanding. The latter cannot be reduced to the former in the particular case only in the universal model to make it consistent with the dictates of our thinking (what counts as an explanation). We need to keep the causal model as a formal shape of explanatory theory, that is reasons for acting must constitute causes and these reasons are identified with intentions. However, in order to talk of agency, then we must somehow identify a purpose of an agent as opposed to a mere event-event relationship from which the agent falls out. We take this from the second model as well as the idea of a medium (matter, desires, language) through which actions are expressed. But in order for the two models to be congruent, we need to recast them as the third model which is both casual and meaningful. A second problem concerned freedom: if purposes can be derived from social role, is it still possible to differentiate between an agent who acts on his own interests (free) and one who acts on the interest of others believing it to be in his own interest (false consciousness)? Hegel’s right of intention as the celebration of the Enlightenment ideal of autonomy seems to be a plausible response to this problem. Hegel’s theory allows us to differentiate descriptions of actions into three differing accounts: a description that explains the action, a description that makes the action intelligible and also a description that justifies the action. Such descriptions may well replicate and overlap each other, but the intended discourses of use differ greatly: the formal description of an event belongs to the subset we term actions consistent with a scientific understanding of the universe (the formal character of actions), those actions understood as human actions and a communication of an intention (the substantial content of intentions, a sociology if you will), and finally those events which are not only self-reflective but also self-determined and hence actions with which the agent becomes the locus of our evaluative practices (morality proper, so to speak). The latter set of actions is constituted by either self-forming actions or actions which are related to an original self-forming action on the part of the agent. These are the fully free actions of a moral subject.

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We stated that actions were to be differentiated from events according to the hermeneutical model if (1) the event adequately represents the intentions of the agent and (2) the event is in accordance with the moral fabric of the agent so that it can be adequately reconstructed by the public. I use the term moral fabric in a very broad sense: it is the substratum of meanings, values, norms and expectations that exist between agents who share a way of life. Such fabric must also be influenced by the ‘situation’ that the agent finds himself in: the classroom, the everyday, the out of the ordinary and so on. (For example, pressing the pelican crossing’s button adequately represents the desire to cross the road and the agent is carrying some dry cleaning and there is a dry cleaner on the other side of the road. But such immediate analysis is only possible by an other who lives in a culture with pelican crossings and dry cleaners.) An act, therefore, needs to be congruent with both its temporal and spatial situation and also with the person who acted. The construal of how one acts is therefore based upon a shared moral fabric. These two conditions of action map on to Hegel’s right of intention and right of objectivity of the action, respectively, and offer us a new way to describe the free, self-determined agent. An agent is free when he or she acts on intentions that identify and aim to achieve his or her own good and acts in accordance with the norms, expectations and meanings of his or her moral fabric. Hegel’s theory of action allows us to structure freewill into a subjective and an objective aspect (Patten, 1999; Rose, 2007: 52–54). Subjectively, an agent is free when he or she acts on ends that are freely chosen (either through a radical self-forming action or actions that succeed from such a self-forming action). Such subjective actions though will only be possible in specific societies that allow agents liberation from immediate necessity, orthodox behaviours and other conditions. The social structure that promotes and maintains subjective freedom is the objective freedom of the agent. If the agent acts on interests which he or she cannot recognize as his or her own, then they are not free (false consciousness, coercion, addiction), but, reciprocally, if the agent acts on intentions that cannot be accurately reconstructed from the event of the action itself because it does not appropriately express the intentions, then he or she is not free

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(wilfulness, capriciousness, arbitrariness). The latter is an instance of universal freedom alluded to in the quotation at the beginning of this chapter. Note that all theories of free action involve the first condition, but Hegel’s originality and what distinguishes the hermeneutical account of action from others is the second condition of free action. The second condition of free action seems to violate freedom normally understood: if my subjective freedom depends upon a shared set of meanings, is Sartre not correct in assuming that all actions aimed at intelligibility for the other are inauthentic and hence no self-forming actions are possible? The Sartrean reservation is a very real worry, but we shall return to that problem presently in the next chapter when we look at the concept of alienation. For now, there is a pertinent need to look more closely at the way in which self-determining beings make their acts intelligible. Two connected constraints have been put on action in order for it to be identified as an instance of free action. First, one must be reasonable to one’s own projected identity whether this arises from a self-forming action or actions consistent with an original choice. Certain choices matter because they define the ‘me’ who exists in the world and determine the possibilities that are consistent with that ‘me’ as well as setting the limits beyond which a new invention of self is required. I choose to be a father, a husband, a believer, an atheist, a resistance fighter, a good son, a caring individual or a callous individual and all of these set the future possible limits of my existence consistent with that choice.4 Second, though, liberation requires intelligibility, to be sure of myself as a father I must perform as a father. To be intelligible one must be reasonable to one’s form of life, that is one must be aware of how one’s action is to be described by the third person. For ease, the first will be referred to as subjective freedom and the latter as objective freedom, but it ought to be remembered that they cannot easily be pulled apart. Why can the subject not know how to act without recourse to a shared fabric of meanings? The answer relies on the certainty that I possess that my interests are my own. For Taylor’s expressionism, one knows one’s interests because one identifies one’s organism or social role, but that requires that my knowledge of the nature of the world is true. Society guides our interests and directs our motives to

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what is appropriate and right and it is through our interaction with our culture that we purify our desires and interests, but this relies on trusting that the categories of right of our culture are rational, meaning in the interest of the subject. Taylor takes this trust for granted congruent with the Conservative tradition, believing culture to be a product of history much like the family and hence as one trusts one’s mother when she tells you to wear the seat belt even though it is uncomfortable because she is expressing your best interests and hence you learn your best interests from her.5 But if the agent trusts falsely, then he or she is used as a means-merely, to use Kant’s term, and suffers from false consciousness. For this reason, the agent must be able to interrogate and evaluate the moral fabric before him or her. And that seems to suggest that the first condition is privileged over the second and the agent has special access to his or her own best interests. According to Hegel, they do not. The reasons are subtle but convincing. Imagine the front row contenders for the role of subjectively being able to identify one’s own best interest or what is right to do: (1) a naturalism: my interest must conform with my own nature, (2) intuitionism: the human being possess a special moral faculty for picking out what is right and best to do, and (3) an agreement to a prior principle of practical reason, such as the categorical imperative or the general happiness principle. Without delving too deeply into these positions, they all suffer from monological flaws that can only be overcome through dialogue with an ideal rational participant (the moral fabric). They cannot rationally order the agent’s desires (naturalism), lead to conflict between duties (intuitionism, prior principle of practical reason) and can assert anything to be right if there are no further grounds than feeling or conviction (intuitionism). It is just empirical fact, according to Hegel, that the ordering and resolution into priorities of moral, prudential and other duties is carried out in the social milieu. And, there is no alternative to this empirical fact so the agent must ensure that his or her own interests are made possible and sustained by the moral fabric. Only then does he or she have the duty to accord with it, but this seems to return us to the beginning in a vicious circle. The moral fabric of the agent makes rational self-forming actions possible: I should save the child

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rather than return home to record the TV for my wife; I should kill the fox and so on. Of course, there will probably always be dilemmas where wilfulness must assert itself (Sartre’s student, for example), and here we just must feel anguish and commit ourselves, knowing that we will be understood, praised and/or blamed either way. Capriciousness concerns actions that just cannot be understood. Such is human being. So how, though, is one to understand the subjective constraint on action, that is the idea of being reasonable to oneself if not in terms of the subjective capacity to identify what is or is not in one’s own interest? In dealing with an isolated act, as I have done above, it is difficult to understand how this applies. However, it is in terms of identity that it makes sense. The agent must choose the intention which will best create the image of himself as he wishes to be. In the previous chapter, I described self-determination as care or the projection of one’s life towards that which one wishes to be. Care is after all, for Heidegger, only an ontic form of a more authentic living: that of one’s being-towards-death. The subject seeks to die in such a way as to disclose that being he most wishes to be. There is obviously an event of death – usually pronounced by a doctor – but this is, in itself, an ontic judgement based on scientific knowledge: the lack of a heartbeat or brain activity. Why is it that the scientific appraisal of death is ontic or a piece of inauthentic knowledge? In the same way that one’s everyday conception of time is based on the ticking of a clock: it is merely a measurement of something and not the representation of it. The true understanding of death, and why it plays such a prominent part in Hegel’s discussion of recognition and universal freedom, is that it is a conditional possibility of experience: it structures the experience of reality of the self-determining being. The truth of the matter is that death is the sole thing that cannot be experienced by the other. One’s birth, one’s acts, even one’s situation have a meaning in their objectification: a meaning which can be reproduced significantly for others and by others. The death the doctor proclaims (no heartbeat, no brain activity) is a corrupt measurement of a project that has lasted since birth. Death objectified as an event makes one’s death unintelligible, and death is not usually thought of in the doctor’s terms. When one is told of a death,

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the immediate reaction is to reconstitute the departed’s life, to confer meaning on it, to make it intelligible. One tries to grasp the life, which the subject has chosen to objectify in death, by a holistic, hermeneutic process described above: the unity of the acts confers a nature on the agent. It is the attempt to reconstruct or interpret the ‘me’ that was created through the series of actions by the departed.6 It seems that death, as an existential property is bound to selfdetermination: ‘Death is Dasein’s ownmost possibility. Being towards this possibility discloses to Dasein its ownmost potentiality-for-Being in which its very Being is the issue’ (Heidegger, 1992: 307). Death is the nearest thing to an essence for man: it is a necessity that contains within itself the essence – self-determination – described in Heidegger’s words. Death is a possibility in that I choose how to die – in living my life I know that I shall die. The end of my life is inscribed in its beginning and I act knowing the ever present possibility that my existence will come to an end. My potential consists in dying in my own fashion: structuring a life that can be interpreted as mine, even if I have ceased to be; thus my ‘life’ survives my death as a public object to be judged. It is in the structuring of my death in each and every one of my acts, that my being is at issue. For the being I wish to be must be made intelligible to the other and it must be intelligible enough to permit interpretation after one’s death. Death, in this sense, is that which claims my individuality. In Hegel, the struggle for recognition must end in one of three ways: mutual recognition, serfdom or death. In Heidegger, the notion of death is as drastic: the condition of life is to avoid the death without meaning. The death without meaning is the failure to secure a unified identity, to have people remember you as you wished to be. Self-determination is the project towards one’s death in that one wishes to fulfil that meaning which one potentially is. And this is the true definition of subjective freedom: the agent is free when he or she acts in a way consistent with a freely chosen image of himself or herself. That is what it means to be reasonable to oneself or have care for oneself. This is the unity of human life: it is the free creation of a subject – determined by free immanent choice – that is intelligible to one’s equals (in the Hegelian sense of mutual self-consciousness). Selfdetermination with its necessary relation to its death is the universal

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understanding which inhabits a man in the world from the very start; self-determining beings depend on one another by the fact that without another who is to die, my death would itself have no meaning. And intelligibility demonstrates that subjective freedom requires objective freedom to sustain and promote it. Social luck determines whether or not I can choose my career, my partner, my immediate peer group and so on; many members of societies cannot. In other words, the sum of my individual acts create a unity and ‘write’ a character. The fact that I am to act in every moment by the constraint of reasonableness – that is, the concern for my future image which others recognize in me and that which will remain after my death – creates a nature, an essence and a unity for my character. This is my identity, it is that by which I am recognized. Such an identity requires hermeneutical interpretation because it consists in the free creation of a ‘second nature’. Through action I reveal those reasons for action which immediately determine my apprehension of the world. By interpreting these actions and their intentions, I can freely choose to endorse or reject these motivations as appropriate in terms of the image I wish to create of myself (reasonableness to myself). I therefore begin to act in such a way to be understood as that which I wish to be, creating a particular identity. This identity becomes second nature to me, informing and guiding my practical reasoning through the constraint of reasonableness.7 Objective freedom still remains rather vague. Hegel, in an early text, describes the development of an immature self-consciousness thrown into a world which it strives to make its own: The world does not come to this [new] consciousness as a process as it did previously in the abstract form of something external, for it has been presented thoroughly by the form of consciousness; [the child’s] inorganic nature is the knowledge of his parents, the world is already prepared [on his behalf]; and it is the form of ideality which comes to the child. Since the world comes to the evolving consciousness as this ideal world, the problem for consciousness is to find meaning, the reality of this ideal, to find out how the ideal exists; it must realise this ideality. (1979: 234)

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The world is initially not presented to consciousness in the being of knowledge, but rather the world is a construction of reasons for action prepared for the agent by his parents and culture. Yet, these reasons can be articulated in a system of values embodied within that culture, and articulation is a form of power over oneself. The objective freedom of a culture makes possible the subjective freedom of choice through introducing an agent to the process of practical reasoning. Given human being’s ability to articulate the reasons rationality becomes embodied in social customs, these reasons for action encountered in the world do not only come from what we are, but also from that which we have made of ourselves. Humans not only have immediate biological reasons for action, but also sociological reasons for action. In the above quotation, Hegel uses the term ‘ideality’ to refer to the child’s form of life or moral, value map of the world. Social meanings are objectified in the world and the child ‘sees as’, that is in terms of these values. The child possesses the reason, meanings and values of his tradition in itself. They are ready at hand to use and constitute the child’s pre-understanding. However, as such, the child is not free; he is no better than the animal acting in accordance with reasons only because that is just the way he is: Freedom is only present where there is no other for me that is not myself. The natural man, who is determined only by his drives, is not at home with himself; however self-willed he may be, the content of his willing and opining is not his own, and his freedom is only a formal one. (Hegel, 1991b: §23A2) Like the natural man, the human being who acts solely on reasons ‘given’ to him is not free because he is not at home with himself. To be at home with himself, the content of his will must be his own. The child has to reflect on his reasons for action and endorse them as rational through articulation. The task now is to show that an agent can freely act in accordance with the objective freedom of his culture by endorsing and being at home within the determinations of his or her will. As such, we need to look at the contemporary structure of

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objective freedom and the problem of alienation: is it still possible to be free when one acts in accordance with the expectations of others? Sartre thought not, but Hegel’s theory of action has at least opened the possibility of an affirmative answer through the self-consciousness finding his or her given ideality rational or not.

Chapter 5

Marx and Marcuse: Alienation and Critical Reflection

5.1 Motors of History: Alienation and Emancipation Much has been written – and more often unreflectively repeated – about the dialectical distinction (or similarity) between Hegel and Marx (Althusser, 1990; Colletti, 1973; Fraser, 1997; Lukács, 1975). The orthodox understanding authoritatively asserts that the former thinker holds ideas to be the motors of history; that, for example, the most rational phase of history is brought about by the concept of freedom and its correlate equality working themselves out in the mind and cultures of men. The latter thinker we are often also told believes that the motor of history is the material needs and desires of classes and the structures of life that arise in the attempt to satisfy them. As an interpretation of Marx’s understanding of Hegel, it is a convincing one (Marx, 1998: 41–43). But, that is too simple a story. Hegel is well aware of the material basis of history, especially in his later writings (Hegel, 1991a: §351). It is perhaps true that in Phenomenology of Spirit, history is understood as the narrative of mind and ideas, but by the time Hegel was lecturing in Berlin he was well aware of the intimate connections between civil society, production and intellectual life. Marx, too, implicitly acknowledges the reciprocal relationship between the base and superstructure, but the economic system is primary and pushed to the fore: the material relations between men determines our ideas, our beliefs and produces our ideology (1998: 29). The point of agreement is often lost between the two thinkers, though. Marx overtly agreed with a central claim of Hegel’s: the freedom of the subject depends upon the social structure he or she inhabits. Freedom, or its social re-articulation as emancipation, is the opposite of alienation.

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Where Marx truly disagrees with Hegel is not in some odd archipelago of metaphysical islands, but on the very substantial point of whether or not bourgeois capitalism is emancipatory or alienating. The alienation of one’s being is, according to Hegel, a necessary step to being free. Yet, how can I be sure that what I objectify in the social realm is actually truly mine? One must share the categories and concepts appropriate to human action with one’s peers and feel ‘at home’ in them. The objective freedom embodied in a social order is a liberation for the subject because he or she learns to transcend immediate desires, can order desires according to a shared axiological order and, therefore, perform moral actions and can utilize this pre-existing order as a springboard for the development of a particular identity rather than labouring against others to create the framework of how his or her particular subjectivity ought to be comprehended. Objective freedom is a consequence of the dual aspects of freewill, care and recognition, because I matter and I must express my value to others, then we must share an axiological framework that defines who I am and, correlatively, what matters to me as well as how you ought to comprehend me. The objective freedom of the subject’s ideality (both material and intellectual) liberates the subject from immediate, pressing desires, from creating values out of nothing and from the labour of convincing others of the worth of these values. Yet, as Hegel’s critique of Kantian moral philosophy and also his commitment to immanent standards of right and good make clear, the appropriateness and reasonableness of these categories can only be judged within a world view and not externally by putative transcendental standards. Such a commitment makes it difficult to distinguish between cases of free action and cases of false consciousness: the feeling of ‘homeliness’ does not seem to be an adequate yardstick since one can feel it erroneously. It is for reason that, in Marx, a conceptual gap is opened between the objectification and the alienation of the will. The aporia we faced at the end of the last chapter was the simple question that, if recognition is required for freedom, if I must accept the categories of right in their broadest sense into which I am thrown, what if I have the misfortune of being thrown into categories of being which are alienating and not in the least emancipatory?

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One could, at this point, engage in an a priori investigation into the social structures of freedom, that is describe what a social whole ought to be like and what material and intellectual ideality needs to be actualized in order for the human subject to be free. However, such an attempt would be a return to transcendental philosophy whereby the subject of the Enlightenment confidently determines the categories of being, meaning and right. There would simply be no constraints or determining method that could settle such a question. So, one needs an alternative direction and, oddly for a philosophical treatise, the question could be framed as a substantial sociological one: is the material ideality of our existence, the state of advanced capitalism, alienating or liberating? This chapter follows the neo-Marxist critique of Marcuse to see whether there is a solution to the problems of social alienation within the modern state in order to bring about the reconciliation required at the heart of Hegel’s (and Marx’s) ethics.

5.2 Historical Materialism: The Necessity of a Material Ideality for Freedom Marx’s method is scientific. He tells us so again and again. He tells us it begins with empirical premises: the first empirical fact of his science is the existence of specific living beings distinguished from other organisms due to being able to produce, socially and collectively, means to the satisfaction of desires rather than satisfy their desires only immediately and directly. So, the human being’s encounter with nature is a relationship of interests and needs, and not a primordial knowing relationship. Epistemic descriptions are reifications of the subject’s immediate needs- and interests-based relationship with nature. Nature is immediately and necessarily always understood as a means for a human’s subsistence and the matter from which man creates things to satisfy these needs, that is the means for production. The relationship between human beings is also an immediate response to needs and interests, but whereas use is appropriate for nature, exchange is appropriate between human beings and these relationships between individuals creates new needs and interests, those

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of the community: ‘The exchange which originally takes place in production – which would not be an exchange of exchange values but of activities, determined by communal needs – would from the outset include the participation of the individual in the communal world of products’ (Marx, 1973b: 171). Relationships, obligations and expectations are determined by the roles we occupy within the community and one’s needs, values and ends are also a production of one’s community. Human beings have a material life as well as a living life: the material life is the agent’s existence determined by both the mode of production and that which has already been produced. So human beings find themselves not only in a physical world but also in a material world and both of these determine who and what we are: ‘What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce. The nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions determining their production’ (Marx, 1998: 37). The human subject’s self-understanding is, therefore, a product of the social productions of his or her existence. These social productions, explained with reference to economic structures, constitute the agent’s moral and conceptual framework of the world and are, therefore, what Hegel refers to as the conditions of objective freedom or what we can call the ideality of an agent’s existence. Since economic structures are artificial creations, the mind of a collective will imposed on the world, it would make sense to talk of it as the agent’s material ideality (in order to distinguish it from the intellectual ideality which ‘acts’ in the opposite direction: concepts that determine the economic and material structures of existence; a point to which Marx would no doubt object). Material ideality determines the framework in which the individual can rationally express himself or herself because it sets the axes for participation in social life. If you and I both know what role I occupy in society and how this role is related to others, then the expectations are a liberation from having to communicate how to begin to comprehend my particularity for – contrary to Marx and in accordance with Sartre – I have very much chosen to be this role. The form of relations and the material conditions of society determine individuals, their wants, preferences and axiological frameworks; it is not the needs and wants of the individuals that determine society as

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in the liberal tradition. The mode of production of a society is constituted by a set of social relations of economic roles which assign the control of the means, processes and fruits of social production to certain classes. The superstructure of characteristic class feelings, ways of thinking, myths, and so on, serve its members as the believed conscious motives of individuals, but it is in fact class that determines action. I think I act from self-interest, but egoism actually perpetuates the capitalist mode of production; I think I act from religious duty (my personal bond with God, piety), but this in fact perpetuates the feudal economic system. When the intellectuals of a class produce a value system (religion, metaphysics, ethics, and so on) for these feelings and beliefs, it becomes ideology. And ideology is (or may be) a form of unfreedom, understood as the hindering of self-realization. If I am ignorant about the true ends of my actions (when I act from supposedly religious motives, piety for example, what I am in fact doing is furthering the interests of the bourgeois class), can I be said to be free? It would seem not, simply because, all things being equal, I am doing what I would otherwise (if it were not for the existence of a specific material ideality) not do. Similarly, in obtaining a degree, you believe you are helping yourselves when in fact the real motive is to keep the unemployment lists manageable by making you invisible for three years. I am only free when my actions are self-transparent, that is I am aware of the final ends of my actions and endorse it as my good. But, it is not the case that a material ideality of the subject necessarily inhibits freedom, but rather that material idealities can come to inhibit freedom when the economic structures no longer satisfy human needs (being, for Marx and Hegel alike, free self-determination) and, so, the material ideality must be judged ultimately by whether it inhibits or promotes human freedom (Marx, 1977: 389). The material ideality of our contemporary existence is advanced capitalism.

5.3 Our Material Ideality: Advanced Capitalism Capitalism is best characterized as embodying two economic features: one, the free market; and, two, the institution of private property.

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Marx defines all modes of production in terms of the relations between classes, yet his definition is consistent with the characterization I offer. For Marx, as I have briefly stated, the relationship between the human and nature is one of immediate need and use, yet the being of the human in society encounters a world already owned. Nature belongs – in a sense – to he who uses it, but under a system of private property, nature already belongs to someone and the human being finds himself or herself alienated from the means of satisfaction of his or her interests. How does this odd situation arise? The answer is a simple inversion due to the invention of money (Marx, 1991: 485–486). The aim of exchange is to increase human goods, and money is used as intermediary to enable the exchange of perishable objects. However, in a capitalist economic system, money is no longer an enabling means of the system, but the aim of exchange actually becomes the increase of one’s capital. The end product of one’s labour is capital and not the product of the actual activity. Capital and its personification, the capitalist, dominate the labourer (living labour) through materialized labour (things already objectified by the production process) because of a claim to possession (private property) into which the worker finds himself or herself already thrown. The worker cannot use the means of production to realize his or her essence, but the means of production use the worker to perpetuate the system of private ownership which is not in the workers’ ‘true’ interests. The belief that liberation of oneself resides in the capacity to satisfy one’s desires through exchange is false consciousness. The exact false consciousness of the worker is that he sees himself as in possession of a commodity (labour power) which he can sell as a commodity on the exchange market and this false consciousness corrupts true human living in the interests of a certain class (or, more accurately, the system itself). So, the ‘legal form’ of capitalism is the free market and private property, and this inhibits the agent’s freedom in that he or she cannot meet the requirements of Hegel’s right of intention. Marx concludes (after much more argument that, here, unfortunately, we must leave to one side) that the worker is, therefore, the most miserable commodity because ‘So much does appropriation of the object appear as estrangement that the more objects the worker

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produces the less he can possess and the more he falls under the sway of his product, capital’ (Marx, 1973a: 108). Alienation is presented, for Marx, as negative, as a taking away from the worker that which is his own through a system that inhibits his or her free realization. For Hegel, as we saw, alienation is a necessary context for freedom: the social, collective system of meanings, norms, roles and obligations liberates the subject from the need to define the framework of one’s existence ex nihilo and makes moral action – as opposed to simple intentional action – possible. The question is, then, twofold: first, what does Marx understand alienation to be? And, two, is it alienation per se that is negative or only alienation under certain, specific cultural conditions?

5.4 Marx’s Critique of Capitalism The free market (in its purest and most ideal form) exhibits four features: one, property is held by individuals under a secure system of property rights; two, goods are produced for profit not by demand for the satisfaction of needs; three, all goods are distributed by voluntary exchange in the market ruled by supply and demand; and, four, free competition exists: anyone can produce and sell goods (including labour) at whatever price they like. No pure actualization of this model exists since most economies will monopolize certain industries (the military), will prohibit free exchange of certain goods (plutonium) and will run certain industries according to needs and not profit (education, health). Arguments that seek to normatively justify the free market are of two kinds: utilitarian (the free market is more efficient and creates more welfare than alternatives) or libertarian (a free market is necessary to protect the individuals right to liberty).1 Marx, of course, sees such justifications as pure ideology: the idea that what the working class wants is happiness and this is generated by increasing production is false consciousness. The expression of liberty the free market embodies is ideological: the freedom to satisfy desires, but not realize oneself in free activity. And there are obvious problems with the free market: it is wasteful and leads to unjust inequalities. Both normative reasons for the rejection

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of capitalism are implicit in Marx’s overall critique, but he needs to say why waste is bad and equality is good. And the answer to that lies in one of two criticisms of the capitalist economy: it is exploitative and alienating. For a Marxist theory to be normative it needs to show that socialist society is morally legitimate and worth aspiring to in terms of recognizable and rational moral categories, that is a socialist society is more just than, say, a welfare state or the free market as a way to distribute goods. Let us therefore begin with a central evaluative claim in Marx’s writings: Marxists reject the idea that justice is actually compatible with private property and the free market. Marxists hold that private property is inherently unjust. There are two interpretations of Marx’s critique of capitalism which justify this claim: it is exploitative and it alienates the human being (Cohen, 1988; Lukes, 1985). He himself probably veers between the two, but for the present purposes the latter is more interesting simply because the former does not evidence the claim that the free market is inherently unjust. Exploitation can, for the most part, be overcome with policies and procedures consistent with a free market and private property; all that is required is a theory of fairness that can regulate the contracts between capitalists and workers. If the workers are in an unfair bargaining position, then they are coerced into working for the capitalist and they are being exploited due to their unfortunate and undeserved position. A theory of fairness in negotiation could, then, redress the asymmetry between the workers’ and the capitalists’ respective starting position.2 It is the second interpretation that is far more pertinent to the current discussion. Marx holds that private property inhibits the development of the human being’s most important capacities and this applies equally to both workers and capitalists, so equalization or the regulation of the distribution of private property in line with principles of fairness will not be a solution as in the case of exploitation. And this is the real critique: capitalism and its superstructure (those values we believe to be binding) are harmful to human development because the subjective freedom of the agent is not satisfied. The values of the capitalist superstructure are a symptom of a deeper system which inhibits the free fulfilment of my being. And, thus, we

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come back to Hegel, because the critique holds that the norms, expectations and values that determine the behaviour of individuals, the social fabric necessary for recognition, involve a violation of the true aspirations of the human subject. Alienation takes on a negative connotation for Marx and centres on the relationship between the worker and his product and resolves itself into a critique based on the value of freedom. Objectification of the will is the neutral term and objectification requires that the product of the human’s activity (action, simply put) is the objectification of his or her will in the world and that the object (action) is recognized as his or her expression of self. Alienation, the negative connotation, differs in that the product of my activity is taken away from me and posited as not-mine (as to be bought back). In a system of private property, the alienation of practical human activity means that the object (product) has power over the worker. Man can satisfy his needs through his activity which is power over nature. However, when the means to satisfaction (his own product) belongs to someone, he needs to buy it back. To buy it, he requires money and he gains money through selling his activity for the production of objects which satisfy his needs. This is alienation of the object, whereby man sees the object of his activity as not his and alien from him. Furthermore, the activity which he sells in order to buy the object also appears alien and external to him (pursued for a purpose which is not his own). The social fabric of the agent is still a form of objective freedom in that it liberates him in the way objective freedom should, but he or she has no subjective freedom since he or she cannot feel at home in such a system because particular needs and desires are negated. The worker sells his labour as a commodity which he possesses rather than as something he is. Man in his species being is a labouring thing, in his material being he is a seller of labour; and this creates an irreconcilable tension. The idea of reconciliation is derived (via Hegel) from Rousseau. Rousseau sees free action as obeying one’s own will, but in society man is split between what he wants and what he thinks is right (values) (Rousseau, 1997, 1999). This means that he is externally governed by the structure of society. Rousseau’s solution is simple: man is free when he is governed by those laws and values he himself has chosen

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to make (a democratic state where citizens make their own laws). With Marx, man will be free when he is involved in the decisionmaking process that directs his own labour rather than constrained by an already existing system: ‘. . . it is not the worker who uses the means of production, but the means of production which uses the worker. It is not living labour which realizes itself in material labour as its objective organ, but it is material labour which conserves itself and grows by absorbing living labour to such an extent that it becomes value creating value, capital in movement’ (1990: 509). There are two ways in which the Marxian use of alienation maps neatly on to the Hegelian concept.3 First, private property alienates man from his own ends. Man differs from animals in that an animal’s essence is given. The animal acts in such and such a way because it is determined. Man, on the other hand, is conscious of his will: activity enables man to overcome the immediate desires of his will through creating a world in which he is liberated from immediate desires. Through activity man creates the world as his world (ideality). Through activity man satisfies his needs and also realizes his essence (subjective freedom). Freedom for man is to realize his essence. However, under a system of private property, labour becomes the means to live and not its goal. Activity is therefore seen as alien, a commodity which can be sold, rather than man’s essence. And, second, private property alienates man from objectified labour. The intellectual faculties of man’s being become a means for man’s being. The liberation from desire achieved through activity should allow man to realize his true, free nature. Instead, the achievements of objectified labour are seen as belonging to someone and must be bought. To buy them man must sell his labour, thus he is not freed from the need for activity in line with external determinations. Immediate, necessary and natural desires are replaced by immediate, necessary and social desires but both, equally, make transcendence impossible. Understood in terms of Hegel’s theory of action, these two can be narrowed together. The will is objectified through labour, that is action. The act is the expression of my will and should therefore be specifically mine. But, in a system of private property, I am forced to sell my labour and action so that I can live and that means my actions are an expression of the will of the buyer of my labour and not me. Actions in a capitalist

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society are objectively free but not subjectively so and, most importantly according to Marx, cannot be so. The domination by an alien will is made possible through the material ideality of capitalism. One is inhibited in freely choosing one’s ends because the economic system demands that, before I can even choose, I must alienate my will. The problem with capitalism (and this is true of both exploitation and alienation) is, therefore, that it is a relationship of power that is not justified, and a relationship of power between the social fabric of a culture and the individual and not between individuals (otherwise the capitalist would be free and Marx often reminds us that he is not).

5.5 Real Needs, Social Needs and False Consciousness If alienation in Marx’s thought is to be understood as an exercise of power and if it affects capitalist and worker alike, then, following Lukes’s schema, it is an exercise of the third dimension of power or the power to secure the consent to domination of willing subjects (Lukes, 2005). Power is most obviously exercised when a will other than my own obstructs the satisfaction of my wants in favour of his or her own through fear; the paradigmatic case would be coercion through the threat of personal harm. However, this assumes that I know what I want and am obstructed from the satisfaction of that want by the presence of potential harm, but alienation operates at a deeper level such that I want what the other will wants in violation of or contrary to what I would want were he or she not present. One can, for example, imagine a member of a specific social class who has all of his primary social goods met: rights and liberties, income, social bases of self-respect but is still unable, due to the structure of his social fabric to be fully independent and autonomous since his decisions are always made in the interests of others rather than himself. Such an agent is objectively free (liberated from immediate desire, altruistic and participating in a social life) but not subjectively free. Yet, if you were to ask him, he would be happy to tell you that he is satisfying his own desires and preferences when, it is claimed, he is not. This, broadly interpreted, is the phenomenon of false consciousness and can be understood as the enigmatic claim that culture is the

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means by which I freely consent to my own unfreedom. In Hegelian terms, false consciousness occurs when the social fabric, although familiar and homely to me, inhibits and distorts my own subjective freedom. What is crucial here is that the identification of power with overt violence determines oppression as the capacity to do otherwise if power were not operated. But, power is not only exercised when an other is present who obstructs the satisfaction of my desires and preferences physically or psychologically in favour of his or her own, but also when I do not want what I should want for the benefit of an other’s will. So, oppression is translated from overt violence to consent of the willing: I am oppressed because I do not want what I would were the exercise of power not operative. Marx’s conception of false consciousness rests on the opposition of classes, but this should not be considered a necessary condition of false consciousness. I assume that false consciousness can be present between an individual and his society. What is important is understanding false consciousness as the fostering of needs that serve a system which I have never reflected on or actively participated in, but which I just take to be good for me: . . . our mass media have little difficulty in selling particular interests as those of all sensible men. The political needs of society become individual needs and aspirations, their satisfaction promotes business and the commonwealth, and the whole appears to be the very embodiment of Reason. (Marcuse, 2002: xl) Capitalist society operates alienation from one’s real needs in that we now experience ourselves as individuals only. We pursue our interests and apply instrumental reason to the satisfaction of our own goals and projects, but we do not understand the social whole and its implicit goals. Advanced capitalism, in other words, allows for the inauthentic freedom of choosing to cohere to a limited and rational lifeplan, but not the authentic freedom of radically choosing or re-evaluating that lifeplan, the self-forming acts of will necessary for full human freedom. Within a capitalist society, we can use the system to satisfy our ends but the system makes it impossible for us to choose

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or reject our given ends. Capitalism, and this is consistent with Marx’s own thought, was once rational in that it was a material ideality that satisfied the needs and developed the freedom of individuals, but advanced capitalism no longer satisfies this rational criterion and perpetuates itself through the frustration of subjective freedom. Debord gives us a way to distinguish between early and advanced capitalism: When economic necessity is replaced by the necessity for boundless economic development, the satisfaction of primary human needs is replaced by an uninterrupted fabrication of pseudo-needs which are reduced to the single pseudo-need of maintaining the reign of the autonomous economy. (Debord, 1983: §51) Capitalist society’s apparent goal is abundance or the eradication of scarcity for the ethical end of welfare and to overcome conflicts generated by economic distribution. As a form of objective freedom, it liberates human beings from natural necessity by allowing leisure through the generation of surplus welfare, assigns roles with burdens and responsibilities, and its superstructure of broadly utilitarian ethics and family structures creates an axiological framework for the rational resolution of desire ordering. However, it could be argued that we already have enough material and wealth resources to achieve this by changing to a different model of distribution. But, in order to keep the powerful powerful, capitalism imbues its individuals with ‘false needs’ and the desire for happiness conceived of as the satisfaction of simple wants and consumption. This prevents proper evaluation of the goals of capitalist society and the critical investigation of my decisionmaking processes: agents forget that capitalism’s goal is social welfare and instead believe it to be the maximal satisfaction of particular wants. Modern society manufactures false needs in order prevent proper critical reflection on what constitute real needs. Hence we arrive at Marcuse’s concept of one-dimensional man: ‘Thus emerges a pattern of one dimensional thought and behavior in which ideas, aspirations, and objectives that, by their content, transcend the established universe of discourse and action are either repelled or reduced

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to terms of this universe’ (2002: 14). Agents’ needs, wants and projects require objective freedom for their satisfaction because agents and others must participate in a shared culture for these needs and projects to be rational and intelligible to others. However, the very structure of objective freedom of an advanced capitalist economy apparently imposes wants and aspirations on agents that they would not otherwise have endorsed and serve the goals of the system itself rather than the goals of particular agents. Hence, it seems that both Marx and Marcuse have a point: capitalism inhibits and does not maintain freedom as Hegel supposed.

5.6 Marcuse, Market Economy and Social Bad Faith Marcuse’s main polemic is Marxist in nature and, for all its faults, is interesting because it augments the social and individual forms of bad faith implicit in Sartre’s psychoanalysis which the French thinker chose to leave undeveloped. It is Marxist because he agrees that the market economy and its institutions demand the reinvestment of labour not in realizing the self, or the human being as end, but in determining human beings as means for the system’s ends. Capitalism as a form of life corrupts true human living because the individual cannot find his or her own freedom in the system because freedom within a capitalist culture cannot but be inauthentic since the roles, responsibilities and obligations of the individual are determined by the aim of the system as a whole. Freedom becomes one-dimensional or merely inauthentic: the organization of culture, the reasons for action and norms of behaviour, make it possible to answer how one is to achieve one’s goals, but at the same time make it impossible to ask whether or not it is worth achieving these goals. Care, the structure of freedom that grounds both subjective and objective freedom, is impossible because the objective freedom (‘the right of the objectivity of the action’) which is supposed to maintain and make possible subjective freedom (‘the right of intention’) is constituted by the demands and requirements of the economic organization of individuals. Capitalism’s celebration of the private sphere, of inalienable rights of the individual and the priority of freedom of choices are merely

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partial and not full human freedom because the agent cannot radically decide who he or she is to be: Thus economic freedom would mean freedom from the economy – from being controlled by economic forces and relationships, freedom from the daily struggle for existence, from earning a living. Political freedom would mean liberation of the individuals from politics over which they have no effective control. Similarly, intellectual freedom would mean the restoration of individual thought now absorbed by mass communication and indoctrination, abolition of ‘public opinion’ together with its makers. The unrealistic sound of these propositions is indicative, not of their utopian character, but of the strength of the forces which prevent their realization. (Marcuse, 2002: 6)4 According to Marcuse, the determination of human being occurs in the objective domains of economy, psychology and sociology; in short, within the determinations of social science modelled on the reductionist enterprise of scientific rationalism. These scientific discourses define the sets of possible needs and desires of a rational, biological organism and take their authority from coherence with the domain of physics. Yet, there is a political aspect to the reduction of the possibly rational projects and aspirations of human beings since these discourses of knowledge prescribe the rational desires of man which coincidentally are those very desires which perpetuate the current system of values. By doing and wanting what is expected, by cohering with the roles, norms and expectations of the capitalist society, I do what is directly in the interest of my class and indirectly in the interest of the society itself and not (necessarily) in my own interest. The supposedly epistemic authority of social discourse quickly translates into a political authority and determines the limits of rational and permissible choice. The domination of the individual by the expectations of social science violates his or her self-actualization by excluding the agent who questions his being and rejects the current range of values from the outset. Self-interpretation which invalidates the rationality of discourse, that is the recognition of the individual who experiences an attitude of unhomeliness towards his

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or her contemporary culture, becomes impossible because the social sciences describe and define human being and exclude all alternatives. The transcendence human being requires to be free is no longer possible. The charge of social bad faith is that the discourses which render man intelligible are false and so make impossible the authentic, self-forming acts of will appropriate to ‘care’.

5.7 Self-Determination and Universals Marcuse believes intellectual thought supports and imposes the systematic closure of possibilities brought about by and also seemingly required by the base structure of capitalist economic distribution and does so because it is determined by that economic distribution. One obvious question poses itself: how can Marcuse attempt to offer a critique? After all he was able to write his book and this means that if he can see that these discourses delude the agent into believing he is free, why cannot the agent himself disclose the illusion? The fact that a critique is possible seemingly undermines the very stringent proposal of pervasive false consciousness. Capitalism is a social structure which, for Marcuse, threatens the capacity of critical thought. Critical thought enables the human to put his or her being in question and hence to perform self-forming actions. The new social human being determined by the conditions of proper social science, therefore, is no longer human because he no longer possesses the capacity to make his being an issue since the validity of critical reason depends upon a thinking and speaking subject which can transcend its position within a discourse. The division of labour at the heart of capitalist economics narrows down the possibilities of human choice by the imposition of systematic needs and interests that would not otherwise be appropriated. This is clearly the case when children repeat the beliefs and attitudes of their parents, attitudes which, in themselves, may be products of a certain class perspective and historical position. The nature of this logic of domination is not dependent on the repression of human by human; it is rather due to a dependence on the objective order of things, in which human being finds his or her role (what I have termed objective freedom). The institutions,

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practices and discourses which make man intelligible – that is, those values to which he must accord to be objectively free – swallow his subjective freedom, or the freedom to recognize his end as his own. Social science and all related discourses operate an epistemological division of labour constructing a universe in which human being finds a comfortable, if false, home. The feeling of homeliness is present, but it is misplaced. One can now talk of an economic subject, a psychological subject and one can picture the objective reality of these subjects, their home if you like: the market place and the familial society respectively. Marcuse terms this ‘scientific reason’ since its dominant function is that of utility, it asks always ‘how’ and never ‘what is’. Economics asks how can subjects justify their action, that is how the subject can do what the system requires to perpetuate itself; psychology asks how it can best cure this subject, that is to make him best fit its models of understanding. Questions such as ‘What is man?’ or ‘What is psychology?’ are unanswerable on the terms of a reason which looks only to the how of the thing. Such a dominant reason leads to the death of subjective evaluation, for the human thrown into a specific discourse is incapable of questioning the values which determine his reason. Marcuse describes an agent incapable of evaluating his or her desire, accepting only the values given to him or her by the state or discourse he or she happens to inhabit and therefore an agent who is not free at all. Questioning, for Marcuse, brings into play the difference between what is and what should be, and this, in turn, relies upon transcending one’s situation, an operation that scientific reason makes impossible. It is the care for one’s own future identity makes the question of ‘What is man?’ possible or, more particularly, ‘Who am I?’ Scientific reason closes this possibility. The distinction between instrumental reason and critical reason maps neatly on to the inauthentic and authentic choice and to be free to achieve one’s ends only is not full human freedom. The agent must also be capable of choosing his or her ends and performing self-forming actions. The ‘what is’ transcends the limited rationale of the ‘how’; it questions the methodological or ideological bias of a certain discourse or institution. The possibility to question ends is the very refusal of false consciousness that Marcuse is seeking, yet the very conditions of our material ideality seem to make it impossible.

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For a subject to interrogate his or her own being involves primarily an ontological, and not an epistemological, stance. Human freedom was characterized as the being of man is such that his being is at issue or care and this question, too, is ontological. It is perhaps in this way that Heidegger’s initial project can be best understood as ontological, and the reason why the project as a whole found its origin in the question posed by Dasein.5 Marcuse adopts a similar stance in his opposition to scientific reason and he, quite revealingly, calls it dialectical thought. It is the passing of this thought which he laments and the restoration of it is essential to his critical project: the reduction of ethics to physics results in a loss of reason. Whereas scientific reason attempts to reduce the world to a set of rigidly defined operational concepts, true reason should, according to Marcuse, continue to deal with universals. These ‘universals’ constitute the possibility of free, critical thought and, consequently, proper care for oneself. Philosophy holds, as Hegel stressed, an historical commitment in that universals find their origin in a critique of the present state and its values (1991a: 9–23). Actualization is, for Hegel, the making rational of that which exists, not the creation of rational values. It involves an ‘ought’ constrained by the requirement that the new value be intelligible to those who held the former one. So, for example, a society which structures all moral experience on the basis of a cultural a priori of equality cannot conceivably deny groups or individuals rights. Yet, it is just empirically true, that progressing from the cultural acceptance of the central norm of equality to the actual equal distribution of rights, resources and responsibilities, is a long drawn out historical process. Imagine the timeline from the Levellers and social contract theorists through to the suffrage movement as a very good representation of such a process. Similarly, for Marcuse, the role of universals is found in the need to open a space between what is and what ought to be. For when one speaks of equality, one is never sure of the objective determination and one is never ready to rely upon the definition given by the majority or the media: It seems that the persistence of these untranslatable universals as nodal points of thought reflects the unhappy consciousness of a divided world in which ‘that which is’ falls short of, and even denies,

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‘that which can be.’ The irreducible difference between the universal and its particulars seems to be rooted in the primary experience of the inconquerable difference between potentiality and actuality – between two dimensions of the one experienced world. The universal comprehends in one idea the possibilities which are realized, and at the same time arrested, in reality. (Marcuse, 2002: 214) Critical thought uses the norm of equality to judge the particular institutions and practices of society. Equality cannot be defined in such a way that ethical interrogation of its meaning is put at to an end once and for all. Rather what equality, as a universal, demands is only gauged by the particular case framed by the thinking subject: ‘You say all humans are equal, but why then are certain groups denied certain rights? Is this rational, that is can a reason be given which justifies their exclusion?’ For Marcuse, though, and contrary to Marx, there is a real desire to avoid the problem with Berlin’s account of positive freedom (Berlin, 1958: 17–18). If we identify the wants and needs of an agent as real and social and state we are in a better position than him or her to understand them, then we can rightly tell that person what they should or should not do and to enforce such a judgement. Yet, that is to replace one form of unfreedom with another: The distinction between true and false consciousness, real and immediate interest still is meaningful. But this distinction itself must be validated. Men must come to see it and to find their way from false consciousness to true consciousness, from their immediate to their real interest. (Marcuse, 2002: xliv) We need to avoid the tendency to identify false consciousness only to replace it with a further case of false consciousness. The only limitation that can do this is the consent of the agent himself or herself not the pontification of a putative ideal subject who can decide the wants and needs for all subjects: Self-determination will be real to the extent to which the masses have been dissolved into individuals liberated from all propaganda, indoctrination, and manipulation, capable of knowing and comprehending the facts and of evaluating the alternatives. In other

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words, society would be rational and free to the extent to which it is organized, sustained, and reproduced by an essentially new historical Subject. (Marcuse, 2002: 256) We need a way to understand both the objective pressures of society alongside the right of the individual to know his ends which may or may not be hidden from him. False consciousness occurs when an agent desires what he would not desire if he were: aware of all the relevant information; aware of the overt and covert goals of society; and that agent, if given the opportunity, would endorse different desires (Lukes, 2005: 149). The restoration of the ethical domain requires an agent who can interrogate the ends given to him or her by their role within a specific material ideality. The restoration of the ethical domain is the possibility of true consciousness. Freedom requires the capacity to interrogate one’s being and choose those values which best express one’s particularity within a universal system. Marcuse wishes to introduce subjectivity into the picture as the endorsement of the values with the simultaneous refusal of their particular validity; that is, the recognition of their inadequacy in the face of the ideal. Universals, then, allow the subject to feel unease or disquiet in the social fabric of his or her culture, and universals are critical tools operated by the moral conscience. Demonstration of the appropriateness of reasons for action is initiated by appropriating the current situation and its values which offer a better chance of satisfying true human needs. It depends upon the binding of value and reason, or on evaluation and transcendence of the situation. However, Marcuse may well be too Kantian, because the model of self-determination he presents rests upon a distinction between theoretical and practical reason and that is a distinction which has many a Hegelian problem: Being thus robbed of all determination, this thinking, now called ‘reason,’ is set free from all authority. The main effect of Kant’s philosophy has been that it has revived the consciousness of this absolute inwardness. Although, because of its abstraction, this inwardness cannot develop itself into anything, and cannot produce by its

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own means any determinations, either cognitions or moral laws, still it altogether refuses to allow something that has the character of outwardness to have full play in it, and be valid for it. From now on the principle of the independence of reason, of its absolute inward autonomy, has to be regarded as the universal principle of philosophy, and as one of the assumptions of our times. (Hegel, 1991b: §60R) Universals are a top-down critique of the current state of social institutions. Hegel is at pains to stress that man does not possess principles which can magic perfectly rational institutions out of the air. Man must encounter an institution to actualize its rationality. The top-down critique proposed by Marcuse will result in absolute subjectivity and destruction; the right of the arbitrary will over the world and its structure: I posit equality thus. Hegel’s response to Kant was to demonstrate that one cannot generate universals but only encounter them in the world. Marcuse’s critical thought is essentially theoretical reason, that which questions the grounds of a given judgement, whereas practical reason is that which follows the rules to form a judgement.6 In Hegelian terms, theoretical reason is the realm of the understanding which abstracts and separates elements, thus it is imperfect. For him, ‘The distinction between thought and will is simply that between theoretical and practical attitudes.’ Yet, the will is a way of thinking, turning thought into action. It is, therefore, superior and the expression of reason. It is the expression of a judgement and therefore a critique in action: ‘The theoretical is essentially contained within the practical; the idea that the two are separate must be rejected, for one cannot have a will without intelligence. On the contrary, the will contains the theoretical within itself’ (1991a: §4A). Marcuse’s insistence on dividing critical thought and practical reason results in the failure of his own project. In Hegel there is progress from one level to the next because the ‘should’ is made actual and surpassed: dialectical progress makes the ought into an is. If theoretical and practical reason are separate, then the former will not necessarily act upon the latter. Marcuse’s wish to return to the unhappy consciousness, although containing the seed of liberation, is not the correct attitude. The unhappy consciousness itself leads to the scientific rationality which Marcuse criticizes: theoretical reason becomes

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ineffectual and abstract, practical reason rules action. ‘What is’ is ostracized from ‘how’ – the abstract will becomes ineffectual because Marcuse wishes to rely upon the validity of a transcendental position, outside all value systems, that can judge them from above. Such a position is untenable simply because, outside all values, one has no values with which to criticize. The universals he invokes are abstract to the point of vacuity. Marcuse’s universals are regulative categories of understanding: they make possible the critique by showing how far short the practice of ‘equality’ falls short of the ideal ‘Equality’. Yet, true human freedom demands a more active engagement with contemporary culture to overcome false consciousness.

5.8 Culture as the Possibility and Effectiveness of False Consciousness Second-order desires, the sort of desires we want to want and the kind of values we find rational, are found embedded in the social and moral fabric of our culture. Going back to the earlier fox example, we all recognize the appeal of being courageous and sympathetic, but we do so because these are the ways people expect to be in our society. So, my personal desires are tapered to suit our shared scheme of value. A theoretical call to arms demanding sympathy from the agent only demands further questions about how and what is sympathy. Questions answered by an engagement with one’s culture. So, the simple answer to the question how is false consciousness both possible and effective seems to be simply the existence of the culture we are thrown into as this determines our second-order desires. Yet, Marcuse’s universals are too vacuous to exert any real critical force on the social fabric. Courage, generosity, fortitude etc. are admirable motivations because of the luck of which society we are thrown into. In a different society, the fox’s suffering may not even have enough significance to register as a reason for doing anything at all. We reasonably expect to be praised for adhering to the expectations of others and to be blamed for transgression or divergence. Similarly, the universal of equality is accepted by all, but children are not allowed to vote for good reason (not being best placed to describe their true interests), the sort of good reasons for which a nineteenth-century man may have

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excluded women from the vote. The agreed concept of equality can do no dialectical work on its own to resolve such an anomaly, whereas historical occurrences – such as women in the First World War occupying traditional male roles – can. This split between immediate desires and desires reasonably expected to be motivating is behind Hegel’s discussion of the relationship between the subjective wants of an individual and the objective needs of his or her social being: The right to recognize nothing that I do not perceive as rational is the highest right of the subject, but by virtue of its subjective determination, it is at the same time formal; on the other hand, the right of the rational – as the objective – over the subject remains firmly established . . . since action is an alteration which must exist in an actual world and thus seeks recognition in it, it must in general conform to what is recognized as valid in that world. Whoever wills an action in the actual world has, in so doing, submitted himself to its laws and recognized the right of objectivity. (Hegel, 1991a: §132R) So, following Hegel’s terminology and the previous chapter, we can distinguish between the subjective will – the subject’s capacity to find satisfaction in his or her action and endorse his or her end as a good – and the objective will: the rational order that allows the subject to articulate, order and prioritize his or her wants and needs. A subject is not free if he is only subjectively willed because he has no way of knowing whether his wants and desires are contingent rather than rational. Observers would find it impossible to distinguish such an agent from a physically caused object. The movement from real needs to social needs can also be a liberation in that the needs no longer immediately determine the will but become dependent on the choice of the agent. Certainty and practical efficacy can only be gained when an other endorses and recognizes my motivations as the good, appropriate or correct ones. However, conversely, a subject is not free when the objective will, that is the expectations of his society, make it impossible for him or her to find satisfaction in his or her wants. This is the model of Marxian alienation and false consciousness. In our way of conceiving of the problem hitherto, subjective will is the individual’s

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personal endorsement of his second-order desires (I want to want X because I myself recognise it as a good), and objective will is the expectations of my peers that determine the rational ordering of my wants. False consciousness occurs when the values of my culture (my social needs) conflict with and silence (envelop, obliterate, annihilate and so on) my real needs so that I am unaware of the latter or, at best, see them as alien or other. This is due to my immersion in culture. Or, in Hegel’s characterization, false consciousness occurs when the objective will of society does not maintain and make possible subjective satisfaction but does, in fact, violate and transgress it to such an extent that the subject conceives and structures his wants and desires in such a way that he might say ‘I want these or I need this’ even when it is contrary to his real needs and desires of which, due to his immersion in a specific culture, he remains ignorant. The role of the agent in endorsing his goods is fundamental as the ‘highest right’ of the subject otherwise false consciousness will remain a structural possibility and we may well replace one state of false consciousness with another.

5.9 False Needs, Social Needs and Real Needs I have discussed what false consciousness is and how it could conceivably be effective, but can it be observed? Intuitively I believe examples of women or members of a certain class denying the need to be educated due to values of an alien other from which they are not independent could be used as testimony for the existence of false consciousness. But, this rests on the idea that there is a distinction between real and social needs and that the agent can be unaware of the former, but if brought into awareness of them would then endorse them as his or her own. The distinction between real and social needs, however, is somewhat difficult to articulate. For Marx, real needs are what my species being has interest in and false needs are what the economic system identifies me as wanting. However, there is nothing a priori that rules out reconciliation between these two needs and my species being has interest in collective ends. For Marcuse, vital needs can be equated with primary social goods since ‘the satisfaction of

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these needs is the prerequisite for the realization of all needs . . .’ (Marcuse, 2002: 8). On the other hand, false needs are ‘superimposed on the individual by particular social interests in his repression: the needs which perpetuate toil, aggressiveness, misery, and injustice’ (Marcuse, 2002: 7). Finally, real needs mean ‘the question of what are true and false needs must be answered by the individuals themselves . . . if and when they are free to give their own answer’ (Marcuse, 2002: 8). Again, it is not social needs per se which generate false consciousness, but specific needs within culture by other interests and wills. The proviso of being free to give an answer to the question of real needs also supposes a collective enterprise and social structures that support subjective freedom. Again, reconciliation between real and socials needs is required, rather than their opposition and exclusion. In Marx’s case we identify the needs objectively and can impose them on the subject by force (hence Rousseau’s forced to be free). But that might, following Berlin’s famous article, be replacing one form of false consciousness with another (Berlin, 1958). Marcuse seems to point towards a transcendental subject who exists free of all culture and is able to identify real needs. Yet, this seems to return to the purely subjective will which must, at best, be contingent and arbitrary (and not sure of certainty). The true reconciliation of real and social needs must lie elsewhere.

5.10 Hegel and Slavery A resolution to the reconciliation required between social and individual needs, when it is recognized that social needs are a necessary ground for the articulation of real individual needs, is to be found by returning to the origin of Marx’s theory of alienation: Hegel. For Hegel, the relationship between social and real needs is to be reciprocal, if the latter is privileged, then you have wilfulness. If the former is privileged, then you have false consciousness. False consciousness is akin to slavery: If we hold firmly to the view that the human being in and for himself is free, we thereby condemn slavery. But if someone is a slave, his own will is responsible, just as the responsibility lies with the will

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of a people if that people is subjugated. Thus the wrong of slavery is the fault not only of those who enslave or subjugate people, but of the slaves and the subjugated themselves. Slavery occurs in the transitional phase between natural human existence and the truly ethical condition; it occurs in a world where a wrong is still right. Here, the wrong is valid, so that the position it occupies is a necessary one. (Hegel, 1991a: §57A) How can a slave be responsible for his own serfdom? If we free them, then this is an act of external causality. The slave alone is capable of freeing himself since to not be a slave is to act on one’s own will – it cannot be done from outwith. This is Sartre’s responsibility taken to its absolute extreme: one is always responsible for one’s own unfreedom, one has chosen to be or not to be a slave. Slavery is the imposition of external determination on the will, but appropriated by the will. Slaves should be freed like children, through development, and this leaves them at the mercy of history because to be freed by external intervention, is to choose to be determined once more by an external will (Hegel, 1991c). One can, of course, prescribe how others ought to behave, to prohibit the institution of slavery and this may well increase the well-being of the liberated, but it leaves their wills as enchained as before. They merely swap one authority for another and remain unfree. It is obvious to see the parallels here with false consciousness: the subject oppressed by false consciousness is responsible for his or her own freedom and the distinction should not be between real and social needs but positive social needs and rationally endorsed social needs whereby I am aware of the goals of society and endorse them as my own, finding myself at home within my current society. So, instead of the autonomous, transcendental self of Marcuse, Hegel posits a proper historical subject who wins his freedom through critical self-evaluation. And that requires a social structure to support and maintain his individual freedom. The right of objectivity of the action determines both expectations of and accepted deviations from the normal behaviour of human being defined by a series of levels of identity: citizen, worker, family member, individual and so on. Objective freedom sustains my

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personal subjective freedom insofar as it makes possible free, rational determination of my particular identity. The norms of the agent in a social fabric are to fulfil his or her roles adequately, but if freedom consists solely in actions which are in accordance with one’s duties, that is one’s ‘substantial identity’, then it seems these roles exhaust my identity and I am nothing but a smorgasbord of various accepted possibilities. Nothing truly ‘me’ remains. In this way, one can be recognized by one’s peers and hence be free. Yet, this is seemingly at the expense of the ‘highest’ right of subjectivity which, if enacted in opposition to the ethical norm, can be nothing but mere wilfulness (Tugendhat, 1986). However, the historical subject thus conceived does, contrary to Marcuse and other critics of Hegel, offer the opportunity for critical thought. The concept of ‘homeliness’ derived from the right of intention requires that not only do I act on correct and harmonious determinations of the will, but that I also endorse them as my own. One cannot be coerced into acting freely, for Hegel as we have seen with the brief consideration of slavery. Moreover, within communities that are not fully rational or not even partially so, the subject cannot be free except by resisting the norms and expectations placed on him or her: When the existing world of freedom has become unfaithful to the better will, this will no longer finds itself in the duties recognized in this world and must seek to recover in ideal inwardness alone that harmony which it has lost in actuality. (Hegel, 1991a: §138 R) The right of intention must be effective on the objective order of things and is so through the necessity that the actualization of social ideality requires self-conscious knowledge: the free, rational state is not one in which the institution of slavery could exist; its rationality cannot be actualized as all persons are to be considered equals in the free, rational state (Hegel, 1991a: §§36, 155). Thus, the right of objectivity requires a subjective will capable of endorsing it; that is, finding it rational for itself and any objective freedom, material and intellectual ideality, must make possible the subjective endorsement of the aims and goals of society as a whole. The ‘what is’ cannot be hidden behind the ‘how’ as Marcuse supposes.

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By way of illustration, when a child wears a seat belt he does so to safeguard his personhood, but such a reason is rational only in itself. The child actually acts on another reason: to avoid being shouted at by his mother. As the child grows, however, he comes to realize that the reason for wearing a seat belt is to protect himself; that is, he recognizes the good as his own and so he is ‘at home’ with his social motivation. He is aware that, not only is he reasonable to his mother and her expectations, but also to himself: this is an act which is rational for him not just his mother. He now has self-knowledge of the reason and it is both in itself rational and also for him rational. Only when objective freedom makes possible the satisfaction of desires which can be freely chosen, known and transparent, is the agent fully responsible. Thus, for fully free, responsible action, the right of knowledge is required and individuals stand in a relationship to their substantial identity but remain distinct from it (Hegel, 1991a: §148). Therefore, the right of intention crucial to free action can be inflated into a form of rational legitimation. The rational system of the will’s self-determination, for modern agents, is self-conscious knowledge of the underlying necessity implicit in the customs and mores of the social and moral fabric they inhabit. To be ‘at home’ (as required by the right on intention) involves knowing not only what one does but that it is a good for oneself. It is ‘customary’ to wear a seat belt, and one wears it without much ‘selective reflection’, but, it is possible to ‘actualize’ the custom; that is, to make apparent its rationality to the knowing subject. The strong critic of Hegel’s social philosophy mistakes ‘trust’ in one’s objective order for blind faith. This difference is best illustrated by Hegel’s own distinction between reflective (the state) and unreflective trust (the family) and the possibility to articulate one’s reasons for action. If I am to save my child from drowning or, on a lesser scale, to provide for the material needs of my family, I cannot truly articulate the reason why I fulfil this role. The best I can manage is ‘Because they are my children.’ Moreover, someone who demands that I justify my reasons for these actions is simply inhuman, not in the sense of evil, but in the sense that they cannot truly comprehend what it is to be a human being. These reasons, then, are immediate and unreflective and trust in one’s family members is based on the same disposition. This is perhaps why the

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abuse of children by their parents is such a reprehensible crime: there is a certain element of inhumanity in it which horrifies us. The reflective trust in the state is open to scrutiny, though; this is the formal requirement of subjective, moral freedom. It is perfectly sensible to demand a justification of a particular law, social duty or more and why I should act in accordance with it. However, agents rarely demand justification and as such express a reflective trust in their state; its laws and institutions are open to legitimation and the state must make scrutiny by the citizen possible, but this need not be carried through every time a demand on the citizen is made. A useful analogy is differentiation in mathematics. All of us are quite happy to use the formula ‘nxn–1’, but in order for us to be certain it must be possible for us to carry out the calculation from firstprinciples. The laws of the state are a type of shorthand of the good, but which must remain possible objects of legitimation even when not perpetually legitimated. The subject has ‘trust’ in the objective social order and its rationality (Hegel, 1971: §525; 1991a: §147). The ‘trust’ of the Ancient Greeks was inarticulate and, hence, it was mere social luck that they lived in a rational state. It was a trust akin to the filial bond and they were just lucky that they had good ‘parents’. Modern social structures make possible the satisfaction of subjective freedom, rather than determining the content of subjective freedom. It is no longer a matter of ‘luck’ that we live in a rational state since without the subjective endorsement of the morally free agent, the duties of the social fabric are not actual duties (Hegel, 1991a: §138R). However, a more subtle challenge to the relationship between critical thought and material ideality would propose that, if reasongiving is inherently social as Hegel holds, then surely the tendency will be – in cases of conflict between individual good and social good – to side with the familiar and conventional. With the stronger form of the challenge, social protest is impossible and irrational, but this is to negate absolutely the ‘highest right’ of the subject. The weaker form of the challenge does not fully negate the right of knowledge: one is able to deny the determinations of one’s role when one cannot endorse its rationality. However, given that this endorsement is a social practice, protest stemming from the moral conscience is

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ultimately mute since the right of objectivity, that my actions be rational for others, implicitly commits Hegel to conservatism. The social fabric sets both expectations and the limits of possible deviations from the norm, beyond which one will be regarded as irrational or excluded from debate. Endorsement amounts to nothing more than yes-saying: the subject reflects upon his duties and recognizes that they accord with objective determinations. It appears that I am committed to conservatism: subjective freedom may be compromised by social pressure because the social nature of reason-giving means the conventional is always by default more persuasive than personal conviction. Is conservatism a sin? Conservatism may be compatible with central liberal values and does not necessarily commit one to quietism in the face of the demands of the social fabric. But, in order to resist the accusation that the form of rational legitimation here offered is nothing but yes-saying to authority, it would be worthwhile to use the oft-abused example of the poverty-stricken mother who needs to procure food for her starving child. She finds herself unable to fulfil her role without stealing and violating the system of private property. Let us assume that Hegel would see this as an instance of the ‘better will’ in an ‘unfaithful world’ (1991a: §138R). On an idealized liberal model, the standards of evaluation would be legitimated by an appeal to external values or natural rights. So, the right to life would trump political obligation since civil obedience rests on a duty to comply with political dictates as long as they protect and secure external rights and values. If they no longer do so, then the citizen’s obligation is null and void. However, for Hegel, there are no external standards of right independent of the social and historical development of ethical life (Rose, 2007: 16–29). It seems the weaker challenge has some bite: protest when contrary to customary morality is mere wilfulness. The example of the impoverished mother, though, undermines such an idle reading. The proper understanding of Hegel’s theory of action demonstrates that the role of objective freedom and its earlier, abstract cousin – the right of objectivity of the action – is to enable personal self-determination and not to thwart it. Liberation from immediate needs, independence from irrational authorities, the possibility to be self-willed and certain recognition by others are

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all requirements of self-determination and if they do not obtain, then the subject is not free. The mother is recognized as in the right when she steals because the life of her child ought to be secured and maintained by the objective structures, arrangements and practices of her social existence. Otherwise the world is unfaithful to her better will. The state, for the mother, is irrational because she cannot satisfy her roles as both mother and citizen as she would freely choose to do. She has the subjective right – the highest right – to demand that the culture make possible rational self-determination. And protest need not be limited to cases of disharmony between the spheres of ethical life. Historical examples of the need to reject the objective features of a state would include slavery and apartheid since fulfilling one’s civil role inhibits one’s personal freedom. Such institutions make it impossible for certain agents to fulfil themselves as human beings since other agents cannot recognize what they truly are: they remain identical with their role and, hence, not free. For man to be free – that is, to be at home with himself – the content of his will must be his own. For the existing social world to be actualized, then the underlying rationality of its dictates and obligations has to be known and endorsed by the thinking subject, but such an endorsement cannot be mere yes-saying. Freedom is formal when I am able to satisfy my desires, but it is substantial when I satisfy desires which are my good. Yet, this does not rule out coercion for my benefit (the child). The will is free when it is substantial, able to be satisfied and moral. Without moral freedom, the will of man is no better than the slave or the child or the agent who is unaware of the rationality of the social order (Hegel, 1991a: §26). The purely subjective will is arbitrary, whereas the purely objective will depends on ‘luck’ to have ethical content. Objective freedom is necessary for and supplements personal and moral freedom because, without the categories of the material and intellectual ideality, it would be impossible to form judgements concerning the intentions of others or oneself. Thus, the social fabric is the substantial form of the right of objectivity of an action. Reciprocally, subjective freedom interrogates and justifies objective freedom. If the subject cannot, or is obstructed from, satisfying his rational

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desires, then he is not free and responsible. He, then, has a legitimate claim against the state arising from his own moral conscience. So long as the claim is unresolved, freedom is unobtainable and the institutions and expectations of his social and moral fabric are no longer rational. The moral conscience has to remain an essential element of our contemporary material and intellectual ideality since the rationality has to be self-consciously known. Otherwise agents are merely ‘lucky’ citizens like the Ancient Greeks and children with good and rational parents. So, let us return to false consciousness and the substantial material ideality of our day. Marx believes that Hegel’s ‘better will’ is impossible because of the material ideality of contemporary society, and there are real reasons to believe that Marx has that right because capitalism determines the relationships between humans as relationships of exchange and not cooperation or recognition. I recognize you immediately as a will who wishes to impose itself on me for its own ends rather than a will through which I attain my humanity or as a will in which I find solidarity against those who make me unfree. In other words, capitalism makes impossible respect between wills which is a precondition of recognition. Capitalism seems to frustrate freedom because the social fabric of axiological articulation is derived from a precondition of asymmetrical compromise. Freedom demands that I feel at home in my social fabric and that is possible only in a social fabric conditioned by equality and respect otherwise mutual recognition just is not possible. Oddly enough, the superstructure of capitalism might be the best hope of this. For every material ideality also generates an intellectual ideality and vice versa (contrary to the staid and rigid readings of the Marx–Hegel opposition). And the intellectual ideality of capitalism does, perhaps, make possible the preconditions of freedom, viz. equality and respect, in spite of the covert aims of the economic system itself. False consciousness, like slavery, may just be a phase we have to pass through to become free. Similarly, the material ideality of capitalism may well be necessary to develop an intellectual ideality that undermines it, but without which such thinking could not have been.

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Marx and Marcuse are perhaps both guilty of confusing the social and moral fabric as a whole with civil society in a way Hegel foresaw as possible: Thus it can happen in the universal system of ethical life that the principle and system of civil right, for example, which concerns property and possession, becomes totally immersed in itself, and, losing itself in discursiveness, regards itself as a totality which has being in itself and is unconditioned and absolute. (1999: 170) The discourses which rule the subjective expression of one’s objectification belong to the sphere of civil society, the market and liberal capitalism. Hegel was well aware of this and was also eager to control the excesses of civil society (1991a: §244). Marcuse’s criticism applies to a society which allows market forces to dominate all other forms of expression and subjectivity: the laws that regulate civil society expand and eclipse the rules that govern objective freedom. Yet, if this is so, it is just to agree with Marcuse’s sociological observations. It may not be a fault with the theoretical Hegelian system, but a fact about reality and our modern world. Critical thought, though, also acts upon the material ideality and the intellectual ideality of advanced (and here it ought to be opposed to early or middle) capitalism and is the fruit of the seeds of the system itself: the thinking made possible by capitalism, its political structures and ideologies, its leisure and family structures, and its technologies may well liberate the subject from false consciousness. The intellectual ideality which develops out of capitalist economic distribution undermines the dominating aim of its material ideality. The empirical fact of this matter is, as Vattimo notes (in direct opposition to Marcuse’s appraisal of the mass media): By virtue of a kind of innate propensity for the demonic, this in turn would permit and indeed favour the formation of dictatorships and totalitarian governments capable, like ‘Big Brother’ in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four, of exercising widespread control over their citizens by the diffusion of slogans, propaganda

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(commercial as well as political) and stereotypical world views. Instead, what actually happened, in spite of the efforts of the monopolies and major centres of capital, was that radio, television and newspapers became elements in a general explosion and proliferation of Weltanschauungen, of world views. (1992: 5) But, of course, the expression of attitudes and perspectives of the media are but symptoms of a deeper metaphysical change brought about by the economic structure of capitalism which seemingly works against capitalism’s (if I am finally permitted to anthropomorphize) own drive to homogenization. That deeper metaphysical change is a restructuring of the intellectual ideality of our objective freedom from monism to pluralism.

Chapter 6

Rawls and Vattimo: Pluralism and Postmodern Liberation

6.1 That Other Tradition There is an as yet untold narrative about Italian philosophy that identifies it in much the same way as the French are rationalists (and the poststructuralists need only be understood as the continuation of this tradition), the British are empiricists and the Germans are idealists. For Italians, from Machiavelli through Vico to Vattimo (and oddly including Croce) were and are pluralists. Generalizations can, of course, only set the scene and they are easily rebuffed by the ubiquitous exception, of which Gentile must stand accused among his many other intellectual crimes. However, Italian philosophy, generally understood, has always implicitly acknowledged that – and in counterpoint to all other traditions of Western philosophy following the Socratic revolution in thought – there may well be more than one coherent and adequate answer to a single question and that truth, therefore, may not be one. Whether this was due to existing so close to the gravitational centre of orthodox thought in Rome and was a necessary counterweight to lever out some intellectual independence is neither here nor there and a sociological question which deserves attention from another quarter. What is significant is that other tradition existing on the periphery of Western thought has never truly had a problem in apprehending truth to be conditionally limited and not necessarily absolute. From the previous chapter, we noted that the real heart of the debate between Hegel and Marx does not lie in the choice of method (dialectical reason versus historical materialism), but over the substantial claim whether or not capitalism is a means to overcome social alienation or

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the underlying cause of it. The question remained unanswered and must remain so because it relies on empirical investigations that will always be burdened by methodological assumptions. Capitalism makes possible the alienation of the self and hence inhibits self-determination, but capitalism may well also be the means to our emancipation. The debate of the previous chapter is perhaps misplaced because there are two features of our culture that are often run together and confused. The status of their conceptual relationship is obscure but existent.1 Contemporary culture is commonly characterized by the inexact and useless term postmodern (Jameson, 1991). However, the argument has so far established these claims: freedom is not a property but a way of existing. That way of existing is as a self-determining agent expressed through action and that action depends on a shared moral and social fabric of meanings, norms and expectations. Hegelian objective freedom is, though, a consequence of social luck: the culture in which an agent happens to exist can help or hinder his or her free action and, as a matter of fact, we as agents exist in a capitalist, postmodern culture. We have looked at capitalism’s effect on freedom and now, obviously, we need to think through the postmodern aspect of our culture and its relationship to freedom. This, final, chapter speculates whether, as many postmodern political writers hold (Lyotard, 1984; Rawls, 1993; Vattimo, 1992), an advanced state of capitalism is necessary for human freedom since it makes possible a proliferation of world views and value systems, undermining the hegemony of the liberal world view, or whether (as Marcuse held) the proliferation of lifestyles and choice is a mere chimera and freedom is no longer possible. If capitalism constitutes the material ideality of contemporary culture, then pluralism constitutes the intellectual ideality of it and, if the word postmodern means anything at all, it is the intersection of the intellectual and material ideality of our existence.

6.2 Postmodernity and Pluralism The term postmodern already seems passé, and it is largely unhelpful in defining the nature of our culture. What appears to be a simple

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confusion, easily overcome, has to be put to one side if we are to begin talking in any philosophically constructive way about postmodernity. The confusion itself concerns nothing more than the use and abuse of names, titles and labels. Contemporary cultural theory, popular culture itself and even European and counterculture American philosophy all abound in references to the subject of the postmodern, but it is indistinguishably referred to as either postmodernity or postmodernism, and the products of its time are described as either postmodern or postmodernist. The subject of the current discussion will be postmodernity and things which are postmodern as opposed to the latter case. Is this, though, merely a case of splitting hairs, of being over pedantic? No, because this confusion of terms leads to a greater, and more damaging, confusion in the terms of debate. Both terms share the prefix ‘post’ – meaning temporally following after or on from (the first suggests an historical break with, the second a continuous, historical development – I offer both because this is a point of contention and cannot be presumed beforehand) – but, significantly, the thing which has been temporally surpassed is different: ‘modernity’ versus ‘modernism’. The latter, modernism, refers to an artistic movement which arguably spans the five decades from the late 1880s to the mid-1940s. Most famously, the movement was literary (Valéry, Mallarmé, Eliot, Pound, Joyce, Woolf, et al.), but it would be uncontroversial to add that there were similar instances of the modernist movement in the visual arts (Cubism, for one), architecture (Gaudi, Mackintosh) and film (Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin). As such, postmodernism (and postmodernist novels, architecture, etc.) is – on one level – banal, in that it is the artistic reaction to a dominant style, itself destined to become an historical style. It is the artistic representation of a certain historical epoch and the discussion of its definition, synthesis and unification belongs to the discourses of the history of art, cultural studies, etc. It is not a philosophical question in the same way that the development from, say, realism to magical realism is not interesting philosophically. However, whereas Eliot, Pound, Dali, Gaudi et al. viewed aesthetic expression as a way of revealing the truth of our existence, in a way that other discourses could not, and used all the tropes, techniques

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and flourishes as a means to reveal this truth, postmodernist artists see the notion of truth as hollow and exhausted. All those techniques become nothing but the play of style. The movement from truth to play is carried over into the philosophy of the postmodern. However, that ‘carrying over’ is in no sense necessary. Modernity, as opposed to modernism, is both a philosophical and an historical concept which would seem to refer to a deeper level of explanation. One talks of modern economics, modern social theory, modern political theory, modern thought and so on. There exist subtle interconnections between the economics, the social structure and the political and philosophical ideas of modernity that have developed from its inauguration and which have been reflected in the artistic production, particular social legislation, historical events and the cultural ideality of our age. And the ‘postmodern’ is what supersedes, comes after or replaces the modern; or so we are told. But it is the putative conflation of postmodernism and the postmodern that encourages thinkers to assert that from an age of reason and an age committed to truth, we are led to believe that our new age is one of subversion, deception, deconstruction, irrationality and play. But it is the Italian tradition which ought to teach us differently, right back to the farsighted thought of Pico della Mirandola. It is not that reason is not reliable, nor that science is just another myth. All of these are absurd and rhetorical claims rarely made by people of sense. Rather, it is a calm recognition that, just perhaps, science does explain a large set of phenomena and does lead to an increase in welfare, but it does have severe limitations: it must, by its own admission, remain silent on the question of ends and has a tendency to dismiss other forms of explanation as inferior or as Berlin states (talking about Vico, but the words could so easily relate to Pico) that in opposition to the Enlightenment ideal of one language and one method of explanation: There is no immutable structure of experience, to reflect which a perfect language could be invented, and into which imperfect approximations to such a language could be transposed. The language of so-called primitives is not an imperfect rendering of what later generations will express more accurately: it embodies its own unique vision of the world, which can be grasped, but not translated totally

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into the language of another culture. One culture is not a less perfect vision of another; winter is not a rudimentary spring; summer is not an undeveloped autumn. (Berlin, 1997: 107–8) And if we think of discourses of explanation as cultures, then the relationship between physics and ethics comes once more to the fore. When we describe the behaviour of individuals we can translate it back and forward from ethics and physics, but we cannot reduce it; both explanations are required for a full and articulate explanation of human living. And it is this recognition of the necessity of difference at the heart of identity (which so often and unfortunately falls over into a ghastly celebration) that characterizes the shift from the modern to the postmodern. It is the simple return of pluralism as a valid precondition of epistemic explanations.

6.3 Politics and Freedom Politics has everything to do with freedom. There are, of course, political translations of that word which already assume normative commitments: liberty and emancipation. However, the choice of translation is grounded in metaphysical assumptions about the nature of freedom, and politics is a policy or procedure for achieving the maximization or attainment of such freedom. The interest the current discussion has in politics is different: if the contemporary material ideality can maintain, sustain, promote, hinder or obstruct the freedom of the human subject, so too can the intellectual ideality. And that intellectual reality is, for us, postmodern, plural society because the public reason which contains all our judgements and values is no longer homogenous. Pluralism is either a hindrance or a help to personal freedom; it either makes it possible or frustrates it. Thus, the discussion of the postmodern and its pluralistic aspect is, at base, a political discussion. Hegel reminds his reader constantly of the necessity of forms of life, social structures and, in short, ‘ideality’ for the development of the free person: The several steps of this activity, on each of which, with their semblance of being, it is the function of the finite mind to linger and

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through which it has to pass, are steps in its liberation. In the full truth of that liberation is given the identification of the three stages – finding a world presupposed before us, generating a world as our own creation, and gaining freedom from it and in it. (1971: §386) Stage one is being thrown into a form of life which exists for us and confers on us an understanding of the world; it gives us a sense of objectivity that means we can make rational claims and connections. It is a world of value presupposed for us that dictates our choices, our life plan and orientations. Yet, such a world may not be my world, it may be alien to me and so, stage two, is the emergence of one’s own particular identity and the rejection, transformation or endorsement of these values through care of oneself. It is the subjective condition of freedom: can I recognize myself in the values which are applied to me by others? If not, what should my reaction be? Finally, the form of life becomes a means for the expression of the freewill of the agent in which others recognize the agent himself and not just the form of life in itself. One articulates oneself changing the very nature of that culture, and it is true engagement with one’s culture. My claim here is that, contrary to Hegel, a plural society is necessary for the ability to rearticulate and progress a culture so that it becomes one’s own culture. Our subjective freedom is aided or abetted by the concepts and ways of saying which limit our possible articulations to both ourselves and others. This is an aspect of objective freedom and is best understood as public reason: the domain in which I can rationally choose, justify and communicate the worth of my desires, aspirations and projects. And for these reasons we must now look at the dominant political ideology of our society which frames our ambitions, that is liberalism.

6.4 The Axiology of Contemporary Political Discourse2 The difference between traditional liberal political positions and their postmodern counterparts – that is, to be bellicose, between the commitment to the moral reality of liberty and equality and the affirmation of the weakening of metaphysical foundations – oddly does not lie in the political or ethical attachment to the values of liberty

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and equality themselves. Neither does it seem that the almost already passé conflict between liberalism and communitarianism rests upon a disagreement over those values one finds embodied in the political structures and institutions of the West. For all three of these ideal characters will affirm – when pushed – the desirability of the political values of liberty and equality over, say, those of harmony, order or natural hierarchy and also claim that a society which does not embody the values of liberty and equality is worse than one which does. Where these positions come apart is in the justification of these values and their consequent normative commitments. The procedure of justification commits one to public reason since, when one offers reasons for the rationality of a law or the existence of a particular institution, one normally invokes certain pro tanto political values shared by all agents: equality, liberty, respect, and so on. So, when the government imposes new employment regulations concerning the use of data in job application procedures, the reasons can be reduced to values we all share which stand in a rational relation to the new legal requirements: so, one must not ask for age, race or creed information prior to the interviewing process in order to ensure that all applicants are treated equally and no irrelevant factors influence the decision of the recruitment panel. At base is the commitment to the claim that all members of society have the liberty to pursue their chosen goals no matter what their colour, creed or any other morally irrelevant factors. These justifications occupy a special place in the agent’s set of motivating values in that they trump egoistic desires and demand recognition as justifications for others as well as oneself. The values are termed pro tanto in the sense that, at a level below philosophical reflection, (1) they are operative in the everyday practical reasoning of the agent, (2) they are immediate and not in need of explicit justification, (3) they motivate the agent over and above contingent desires, and yet, (4) can be violated if circumstances are exceptional. These pro tanto values form the framework through which intelligible choice between desires can be made by an agent. Within and among liberal societies, there may, of course, be disagreements over the relations between these and their various hierarchies, but not on the validity of the central political values themselves. However, when one asks why these values and not, as Plato might

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have held, order, symmetry, power, and so on, then the various theoretical positions will begin to separate. The main distinction between these positions does not concern the values themselves, but rather the legitimating practices employed to ground these values. When one is forced on to the philosophical level of justifying our pro tanto values over and above other alternatives, theories separate into, one, those that view these values as universal (derived from reciprocity, autonomy, or a prior principle such as the categorical imperative or the principle of utility) and, two, those that see them as derivable from the tradition and political culture of the agent (Rorty, 1983). For the liberal, these political values are universal moral values which exist independently of any particular society and can measure the justness of a particular policy or institution. The alternative is to implicitly affirm the social thesis: the individual is only who she is by virtue of the tradition which brought her into being and maintains and promotes her identity. The problem with this position is, of course, relativism: it seems to be descriptive rather than normative and liberalism’s advantage, especially in its traditional form, is that, as a comprehensive doctrine, it will support and promote the pro tanto political values since they coincide with its description of ‘true’ metaphysical reality. If human beings are able to use their reason free from coercion, then they would accept the political values of liberalism as true and its vision of society as just and fair. For the present work, the justification is that the free human subject finds himself or herself at home in the values of liberty and equality and can appropriate such values as his or her own and these values, rather than their alternatives, constitute objective freedom in that they maintain and promote the subjective freedom of the agent, that is the capacity to endorse one’s culture as one’s own.

6.5 Rawls and the Unease of Justification: From Comprehensive to Political Liberalism The traditional liberal justification of these values relies on the metaphysical position of moral realism or, at the least, a universal coherentism, and it was the uneasiness at committing to this justification in terms of truth that motivates Rawls’s transition from comprehensive

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liberalism in A Theory of Justice to his later political liberalism. As he often states: under free institutions, the only way to affirm a comprehensive doctrine is to impose it on citizens and that would be a violation of liberalism’s central principles (Rawls, 1993: IV). The main point of contention among his critics seemed to be that he had paid too much heed to his communitarian opponents and made too great a concession to the social thesis (Hampton, 1989; Steinberger, 2000; Wenar, 1995; cf. Krasnoff, 1998).3 The worry centres on his clear demarcation between two realms of values: the comprehensive and the political. The former are what has value to human life as determined by a background context of religious, ethical and metaphysical commitments on the part of the agent. Contrastingly, political values are limited in their scope, being applicable only to debates about the basic structure of society, and are freestanding, in that they can be presented independently of any comprehensive doctrine and justified with reference to a shared public culture (Rawls, 1993: I, §2; 1999e, 1999a). It is commonly held that the major factor motivating Rawls’s new position was the communitarian critique, yet there was perhaps a more influential reason that compelled the shift in emphasis: the rephrasing of the political question from a concern with justice to a concern with legitimacy. Most liberal detractors of the new Rawls were mostly – and overtly – concerned with the former of these two factors, but it is the second which best expresses the ‘postmodern’ concerns of political liberalism and is, arguably, of greater significance (Dreben, 2003). An uncritical description of the main characteristics of political liberalism would be that it respects each citizen’s freedom and equality as reasonable and rational in that state power is only to be used in ways all citizens might reasonably be expected to endorse. This embodies the central claim of liberal legitimacy for Rawls, yet he realizes, given the fact of pluralism, the use of state power cannot be justified by a comprehensive doctrine (Rawls, 1999c: 412). Rather, the legitimacy of the organs and institutions of power is derived from an appeal to the values and ideas of public reason, and these political values are supported by an overlapping consensus of comprehensive doctrines likely to provide the foundations for a stable and enduring society (Rawls, 2001: §11.1). This is the domain of public reason and

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Rawls, here, is embodying a central characteristic of liberal political theory into his new account. Free institutions give rise to a pluralism of comprehensive doctrines due to the burdens of judgements, which is the fact that practical reason is unable to definitely decide matters of ethical import and of a political nature (Rawls, 1993: II.2). In consequence, there will be disagreements over the central values, and a continuity of shared adherence to a single comprehensive doctrine, including a comprehensive liberal one, can only be maintained by the oppressive use of state power. And such use of state power would be in direct violation of central liberal commitments. So far, so familiar; but how does the distinction between political and comprehensive values allow Rawls to respond to the most damaging of the communitarian critiques? One of the most significant charges, and the one of most interest here, laid at the door of A Theory of Justice was that it is metaphysically incoherent. The self of the original position is perceived as the ideal rational agent because the procedure guarantees impartiality since the self is freed from the entanglements of social relationships and detached from any constitutive adherence to the good. But, such an agent has no moral depth, and it is difficult to see how one can be motivated to do what the rational device prescribes unless one is secretly proposing a form of Kantian ‘duty for duty’s sake’ (Hegel, 1991a: §135R). On such a model, duty just is different in kind to other motivations. Human subjects are, according to the foregoing argument, constituted by social goods and motivated by elements of their full, comprehensive identities, social entanglements and personal commitments. I am who I am because I am thrown into a pre-existing situation and have no identity outside of this from which to criticize or rationalize it. It makes little metaphysical sense to posit a rational self in an ideal position as the deciding vote, in cases of political and ethical reasoning (Sandel, 1998). Rawls believes that his restatement of political subjectivity within the theory of political liberalism is able to evade the charge of metaphysical incoherence because he does not fully detach the political subject from comprehensive commitments. Liberty and equality are motivating for the particular agent because he or she adheres to a comprehensive doctrine that views these values as substantive goods,

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but as substantive goods they cannot play the role of justifying reasons to other participants in the political arena who, given the fact of pluralism, may not share his or her comprehensive doctrine. As a particular agent, one is committed to a substantive account of the good, whereas as a political agent, one is committed to agreement on the basis of freestanding, political values which accord with one’s comprehensive doctrine. The values of the agent are justified in a threefold way. First, from a psychological point of view, these values are seemingly axiomatic pro tanto values with compelling weight belonging to the public reason of his or her society. Yet, this means that they are not necessarily motivating since they are only valuable in a public and not a private sense; that is divorced from the agent qua particular agent. Therefore, these political values need also to coincide with substantive commitments of the agent, those values derived from his or her comprehensive doctrine (one’s identity); thus, they are seen as a good and can motivate action and allegiance (Rawls, 1999a: 473fn). However, it is feasible to assume that certain political values (equality) conflict with comprehensive ones (filial loyalty). In cases such as these Rawls wants to hold that the values of public reason ought to have greater weight than those of the comprehensive doctrine, but he needs to explain why as a political agent I see the equality of fair opportunity as prior to my considered moral judgements, as a private individual, that my son really needs a career and there is a vacancy in my company. Rawls’s response becomes pertinent below, and we shall return to it in due course, but let us merely indicate the shape it takes: these political values demand obedience because these values can form a stable overlapping consensus among diverse groups which will sustain an enduring society and members of such groups will come to see this as a good if they are brought up under such institutions. Whatever the influence of communitarianism on Rawls’s thinking, the possibility of responding to these criticisms is perhaps a mere side effect of a deeper change in the orientation of his thought: from justice to legitimacy. The communitarian critiques probably only served to refocus Rawls’s question rather than reformulate his possible answers. What is truly at stake in Political Liberalism is the issue of when the power of the state can legitimately be used: sanction and

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coercion are legitimate when they can be rationally justified to all citizens. However, if one is to fully endorse the position of political liberalism, then there is no real rational preference for the liberal way of life over others. The pro tanto values of liberty and equality are political values which legitimate coercion and sanction because, in our society, they belong to the values of our public reason; that is to say, they are capable of forming the basis for a stable and enduring overlapping consensus of various comprehensive doctrines. So, when a law or policy is imposed on citizens, its legitimacy rests upon its consistency with certain unreflectively endorsed values, most notably liberty and equality. Liberty and equality are pre-philosophically compelling reasons for all citizens in a liberal state and constituent of a shared axiological fabric. Yet, whereas one citizen may hold these values because he is a Christian, another will do so because she is a Muslim. And others will hold them because they are Kantians, utilitarians and so on. Hence, the pre-philosophically shared pro tanto values are grounded in a pluralism of metaphysical, philosophical and religious commitments that are not necessarily coherent at a deeper level. However, it would not be impossible to imagine the alternative pro tanto values of, say, harmony and order also forming a stable and enduring overlapping consensus for a different society (understood as an historical and geographical development) grounded in diverse metaphysical theories (Platonism, Aristotelianism, Stoicism, Sophism, Epicureanism, Paganism and so on). And this is a possibility which Rawls admits (Rawls, 1999d). The tension which inhabits Rawls’s statement of political liberalism needs to be made explicit with reference to his robust claim that when comprehensive values and political values conflict, it is the latter which ought to be privileged. So, if the commitments of one’s religion conflicted with the commitments of public reason, the latter outweigh the former. Yet, the second level of justification of value was introduced in order to show how agents could be committed to the right since it derived from and accorded with substantive beliefs and values of their particular comprehensive doctrine. The problem of conflict seems to reverse this order of explanation and puts into question the motivational power of political values.

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Why would Rawls hold that political values outweigh comprehensive ones? This question concerns two separate issues: what motivates Rawls and what the exact nature of political value is. The motivation is simple enough to understand: expediency. Laws need to be endorsed over and above particular or group commitments of the individual otherwise the structure of society itself will become unstable when conflict arises. Society is an arena for the resolution of conflict, not the suppression of it. The description of the nature of political values that enables them, even if they are non-metaphysical, to trump comprehensive one is, however, more difficult to understand and involves two aspects. One, political values are very great values indeed, and they are not easily overridden; and two, political values form an overlapping consensus that will endure over time (Rawls, 1993: IV, §1). The relationship between these two features of political values is that the greatness of these values pre-exists their capacity to form an overlapping consensus and, as such, Rawls can deny that he is guilty of introducing the social thesis into liberal thought. Political values constitute a coherent view of the values which each particular agent brings into political participation. If one is reasonable, that is committed to mutual and reciprocal agreement, then one will recognize the role of liberal values in constraining permissible ideas of the good and, more significantly, making possible and sustaining ways of life that citizens can affirm as worthwhile. Hence, public reason constitutes a necessary aspect of objective freedom and the public reason of capitalism is liberalism. The distinction between the political and the comprehensive is, however, keenly felt when the subject is torn between values. Take the example of these two principles: I believe I ought to do the best for my family and I believe that employment positions ought to be distributed with due concern for fair equality of opportunity. They are both rational structures of a possible agent’s objective freedom. Then, my son applies for a vacancy in my company for which he is not the best candidate. The conception of the good that immediately motivates me is that I should do the best for my son, derived from my personal commitments, identity and social entanglements. However, Rawls holds that the political values will have greater weight than the

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comprehensive ones because the values of liberty, respect and equality constitute a very great public good. So, the notion of the right, in itself, cannot motivate unless it coincides with goods that outweigh my egoism or filial loyalty: the need to keep the peace, the need for a stable society, the need for me to be treated fairly in the future, and so on. Only in such a manner can we avoid the curious Kantian duty for duty’s sake. Let us reflect a little more deeply on what exactly is at stake here. When the communitarians criticized the unencumbered self of the original position, Rawls was at pains to stress it was a mere rational construct. The claim that the rational subject is able to forgo personal commitments for the sake of very great values indeed, that is political ones, exacerbates the odd Kantian psychology implicit in Rawls’s earlier work unless he can show that political values are privileged in the practical reason of the individual since the formal values of liberalism are also substantive goods which demand allegiance from subjects belonging to a liberal way of life (Rawls, 1999a: 487). And here the full problem comes into view. The explanation of why these political values are goods can take three forms. One, the historical development of liberalism has generated a way of life in which the citizens of liberal democracies feel at home and find their identity. However, if Rawls embraces this option, then it is an avowal of the social thesis, and the values of liberty and equality are right for us, but not transcendentally (to our culture) so. Two, Rawls often hints at the good of stability. Our society is able to form an overlapping consensus that will endure over time, and a stable society is a good society. So, the values of liberty and equality are justified in terms of a new value: stability. However, this is problematic for two reasons: first, the political arena seemingly becomes a sphere of compromise and this is explicitly what Rawls did not want and, second, oppressive regimes (as Hobbes well knew) can be extremely stable but are still not desirable societies, so a society cannot be merely stable but its stability has to be grounded in those values a reasonable citizen might endorse (Rawls, 1999b: 432). Three, in consequence, Rawls may want to assert that not only is our society stable, but it is stable for the right reasons. Such an assertion would rule out the problems with the Hobbesian account of stability above, but this opens Rawls up to a charge circularity since

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stability for the right reasons seems to be a stability founded on free and equal citizens and, more significantly, political liberalism comes to resemble a comprehensive doctrine and will only be enforceable through coercion (Wingenbach, 1999: 221–2).4 The choice is, then, either to admit that political liberalism commits one to an acceptance of the social thesis and hence one is unable to easily argue that liberty and equality are intrinsically more valuable than harmony and order; or one can offer a justification of the values of liberty and equality independent of a particular politicohistorical tradition, but this is seemingly a comprehensive doctrine and will lead to coercion given the fact of oppression. Rawls’s neat division of the historical origin of liberalism (the Wars of Religion) from the qualitative worth of its values is not as insignificant to his argument as is commonly held and plays a fundamental role in the relationship between the political and the embedded self with relation to practical reasoning (1993: xxiii–xxvii). The social and intellectual conditions of contemporary culture, that is the political context of liberal constitutional democracy with its irresistible tendency to value pluralism, the rational egalitarianism of post-Reformation thought and the inherent social individualism of capitalism, require a practically efficacious and theoretically compelling account of political legitimation derived from a shared value system. And only if it acknowledges the historical origin of these values, can political liberalism evade the charge of metaphysical incoherence concerning the rational psychology of the agent. Hence, the reason why pluralism and postmodernity are central to the discussion of freedom: one ought then to look at an account of postmodern reason which begins from rather than reaches this point. Any subject who seeks to legitimate a political judgement must appeal to the substantive social goods of his or her contextual identity, which – in our case – just happen to be liberty and equality, etc. These social goods constitute our ideality and allow us to be recognized as agents rather than inanimate objects or wilful spontaneities. Rawls and most liberals are loathe to do so since the problem of normativity returns: although our values can be rational to us within a specific tradition, there is no universal justification to export or compare them to values of other, alien cultures. One is forced to remain silent in the face of

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practices such as ritualistic human sacrifice and female circumcision, since although they violate liberty and equality, it may be the case that divine obedience belongs to the public reason of the other culture. Postmodern thought needs to aspire to be more than a mere descriptive genealogy of values and show why the rational agent ought to be committed to the values of political liberalism over and above those of other cultures. The subjective freedom of the agent who endorses such values as his or her own offers us the axis by which an alternative to transcendental justification is possible.

6.6 Two Kinds of Pluralism: Radical Empiricism Versus Perspectival Idealism And so we return to the Italian tradition, for the presentation of a plural intellectual ideality has always been an inherent feature of the history of ideas of that country. Contemporarily, Gianni Vattimo’s ethics of interpretation is an attempt to offer a minimally rational position consistent with truth as interpretation. The dual-faceted nature of value judgements, in that they are seemingly both practical and rational, has underpinned various modern attitudes. The tenor of scientific rationalism has been to deny the rational nature of such statements; when I state that ‘killing is wrong’ or ‘that is beautiful’ all I am doing is expressing an attitude I have towards the object in question (Stevenson, 1963). Facts are epistemologically ‘higher’ than values since the latter are not truth-apt as they express mere interests and preferences. Much postmodern thought is concerned with undermining this dichotomy by demonstrating that knowledge, too, is an expression of human interests and group preferences (Bauman, 1993). The central and repeated claim of Vattimo’s thought is that once one realizes that there is no interest-free view from nowhere, then one is liberated from the constraints of inauthentic existence (Rose, 2002). However, this distributes truth and objectivity on the same epistemic stratum as interpretation and it seems that constraints on ways of life fade away, seemingly leaving an anarchic play of power between groups and individuals in the political sphere: there is no

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reason to accept one’s own values or the values of others in any sense other than arbitrariness and pure wilfulness. Postmodern thought characterized thus is, then, the proper target of Hegel’s criticism of post-Kantian arbitrariness and is best characterized as a type of imaginative play (Hegel, 1991a: §140). Vattimo, however, attempts to demonstrate that some interpretations are, in some sense, better than others. So, instead of facts being levelled down to the status of preferences and interests, values are levelled up to the status of facts. The commitment to the responsibility of interpretation and the need for a reflective relation between the historical subject and his or her tradition resolves itself into a position which shares many of the features of political liberalism and, yet, does not commit itself to the Kantian schizophrenia at the heart of practical reason. And so I can formulate the claim at the heart of this chapter: an agent is free when he or she exists in a plural culture because it gives him or her scope to overcome alienation by the authentic appropriation of cultural values as his or her own. It is the possibility of the transcendence of immediately binding values, made possible by the plural intellectual ideality of contemporary culture, that allows the subject to endorse or reject these values and, hence, to feel properly at home in them. There seemingly exists an immediate parallel between Rawls and Vattimo which is, however, deceptive: the pluralism of contemporary society. It is deceptive because the nature of their respective pluralisms is widely different.5 For Rawls, it is a consequence of his radical empiricism: under free institutions people are able to form their own conceptions of the good and, given the burdens of judgement, it is nigh on impossible that there will be decided resolution of, and highly improbable that there will even be homogeneous agreement on, the substantive goods of a human life. One may understand this as pluralism by default; one is agnostic about the metaphysical existence of one true good, but given the limits of reason, it is unlikely – even if there were such a thing – men would be able to cognize it and communicate it to others. For Vattimo, on the other hand, the metaphysics that underpins the belief in a unitary and universal good for all corrupts free thinking by privileging the subject-object relation as

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the locus of truth. Knowledge is, by its nature, a contextual enterprise and cannot be otherwise: There are no transcendental conditions of possibility for experience which might be attainable through some type of reduction or epoché suspending our ties to historical-cultural, linguistic, categorical horizons. The conditions of possibility for experience are always qualified . . . The foundation, the beginning, the initial transmission of our discourse cannot, in other words, but be a hermeneutic foundation. (Vattimo, 1984: 152) Due to the multiplication of perspectives and the emergence of isolated and fragmented histories, there is no longer one reality to represent but many depending on those interests expressed in the knowledge discourse: the truth of the Proletarian class, of the West, of white males and so on.6 The assumption that there is but one truth and but one method or discourse adequate to its representation has been weakened leaving no discourse in a privileged position. Vattimo offers his reader a position of idealism, in the sense that objects of experience are determined in part by the conditions of experience that make them possible, coupled with perspectivisim, in the sense that the subject who interprets takes up a certain perspective (determined by interest) in relation to the object of experience that determines those conditions which are appropriate. The distinction which motivates the two presentations of pluralism has significant consequences, nicely brought out if one considers another central normative commitment of liberalism, namely tolerance. Tolerance, for Rawls, is born from a necessity to avoid suffering and war in Europe when the people had come to the conclusion that it was unlikely there would ever be any incontrovertible agreement on theological doctrine. Conflict over comprehensive doctrines is a brute fact of human existence and tolerance is one particular historical response to this problem. The value of tolerance, over generations, then becomes a very great value indeed and occupies a privileged position in the practical reasoning of the subject born and educated under liberal institutions (whether he or she be Muslim, Christian or Jew). For Vattimo, however, since pluralism is

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not an empirical condition but a transcendental condition of knowledge, tolerance is, then, an a priori normative requirement for free and sincere thinking. If this is so, then to say tolerance occupies a special place in practical reasoning is no longer required. Once one reflects, one is being tolerant. If one is intolerant, one is in error. And if one lives in a society where tolerance is made difficult or impossible, then sincere and free thinking itself is threatened and the freedom of the human subject is diminished. Tolerance is not a mere contingent historical social structure, but a necessary condition for free subjects.

6.7 Vattimo’s Ethics of Interpretation and the Rational Postmodern The goal of Vattimo’s ethics of interpretation is to show that liberal political values have a privileged role in the subject’s practical reason because when one reflects, one seeks to legitimate the ground of one’s comprehensive commitments to others. In other words, Vattimo seems implicitly committed to the claim that liberal society is necessary for human freedom because the values it embodies are those values that make free and sincere thinking possible. Over and above tolerance, one must also recognize and be aware of the contextual, embedded nature of one’s identity: ‘The main feature of an ethics of this kind is that it takes a “step backward,” takes its distance from the choices and concrete options that are directly imposed by the situation’ (Vattimo, 2004: 41). This is the recognition that those motivations and values which impinge on the agent’s practical reason in a concrete situation must be put into question in order to ensure both their validity and relevance to the matter in hand. The step back is the disentanglement of the moral self from the particular self achieved in liberalism by the divorce of the universal from the contingent. One famous way to achieve this is the heuristic device of the original position, of course (Rawls, 1971). However, the second characteristic of Vattimo’s ethics is the avowal that such a step back is not to some prior nor privileged (one might say, ‘original’) epistemic or moral position; thus, avoiding the reintroduction of the Kantian motivation schism. Ethics cannot – as communitarianism

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(being true to its Hegelian roots) reminds liberalism – prescribe from the void. One must articulate one’s values from a context or an ideality and this will always be the origin of one’s thinking or one’s evaluations. The subject of traditional liberalism is unencumbered and hence rationality is replaced by the affirmation of mere preferences or partial interests. The stepping back, for Vattimo, is not a denial of finitude: An ethics of finitude tries to keep faith with the discovery that one’s own provenance is ‘located,’ in a way always and insuperably finite, without forgetting the pluralistic implications of this discovery. I go to church with the saints, and to the tavern with the ‘guys’, as we say in Italian, and I can never delude myself that I am really standing somewhere else, somewhere loftier. Even as I am writing this philosophical paper, I am merely in another condition, which imposes certain obligations on me like any other: the particular condition of the philosopher, essayist, critic, never that of Universal Man. (2004: 44) In other words, the situation of the speaker – the voice and its tradition – is equivalent to the comprehensive values: it is impossible to negate these values and still make substantial political or ethical commitments. It is, however, possible to endorse them as one’s own if one finds them appropriate and reasonable to the matter in hand. Liberty, respect, etc., must be both formal and substantive: formal in order to make free and open dialogue possible; substantive otherwise in cases of conflict between political values and comprehensive ones, there is no reason for the former to have greater weight. Reasonableness is, for Rawls, the capacity for a doctrine to conform to the freestanding political values in an enduring overlapping consensus, whereas, for Vattimo, reasonable doctrines cannot violate the norms of free thinking. Therefore, for both of them, a universal requirement of a doctrine in order to be considered a partner in consensus is respect towards the other: ‘Respect for others is, above all, recognition of the finitude that characterizes all of us and that rules out nay complete conquest of the opacity that every person bears’ (Vattimo, 2004: 47). It is the subject, rather than the doctrine, that is

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or is not reasonable and the grounding norm is one of political autonomy, that is, autonomy independent of any metaphysical or comprehensive doctrine. And the formal requirement of this norm is to treat others with respect. Again we feel the distinction between radical empiricism and perspectival idealism come to the fore. For Vattimo, this respect is grounded in an (anti)metaphysical claim: truth is plural; whereas for Rawls it is grounded in radical empiricism and the consequences of the burdens of judgement. According to Vattimo, when a comprehensive doctrine justifies political values that all agents must accept, it is an instance of the violence of metaphysics: ‘metaphysics is violent thinking: the foundation, if it is given in incontrovertible evidence that no longer admits further enquiry, is like an authority that keeps things quiet and takes control without explanation’ (1997: 40). Such violence is nothing but what Rawls terms ‘the fact of oppression’. The subjectobject relation is only a conditional possibility of knowledge if the subject is ethically impartial and epistemologically objective, but, in postmodern thought, it is no longer a question of what is said but always who is speaking; every pretence at impartiality or objectivity is the hidden and perhaps unconscious expression of a group or individual world view which is but one truth among many. But it could not be otherwise. The ‘anti-metaphysical’ nature of postmodern thought supplies an implicit commitment to political liberalism and tolerance in a way that Rawls’s radical empiricism fails to do. One finds at the heart of Vattimo’s endeavour a coincidence between the aspirations of modernity (the refusal of blind obedience to authority) and liberalism (the values of liberty, equality, respect and tolerance): There is no foundation for subordinating oneself to a given and transcendent objective order, nor for subordinating oneself to someone who could demand obedience in the name of that order alone. In the world without foundations, everyone is equal and the imposition of any system of meaning on others is violence and oppression, for it can never legitimate itself by referring to an objective order. The only possible foundation for the predominance of an order of meaning is force. (1992: 95)

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The absence of the values of political liberalism reduces dialogue to the level of might is right where the preferences of those who are more powerful or more violent win out. Thus, it seems there is a universal commitment to liberal political values otherwise there is no way to transcendentally rule out force as a valid form of legitimacy, and this perhaps explains better why they are very great values indeed. Notice, as an overt example, the (very un-Nietzschean) claim that the end of metaphysical foundations has the consequence of entailing a commitment on the part of the subject to the norm of equality. So, equality is not brought about as a mere by-product of the Wars of Religion, or the imposition of accidental social theories, but is written into the very nature of hermeneutic truth: if there is not one truth, then there are many truths and yours – as well as mine – is on equal footing. Without the historical emergence of the modern subject, politics is nothing but games of power between interested groups and individuals. With the modern subject, politics for the first time becomes properly ethical. And that subject is made possible by the objective freedom of pluralism and capitalism. But we are not committed to the absurd claim that all interpretations are equal. If I were to describe Austen’s Pride and Prejudice as an account of the repression of homosexuality in Regency England, and I even managed to offer some textual support for such a claim (the friendship between Darcy and Bingley has no objective correlative!), it is not controversial to say that my interpretation is wrong and although, as a critic, I ought to be respected, I ought also to be corrected in my false understanding. It is akin to, casting one’s mind back to the example in the introduction, stating that the image of the duck-rabbit can also be ‘seen as’ a rhinoceros. Vattimo regulates the value of an interpretation in terms of coherence to the agent’s heritage or to that which he or she is ‘truly’ obliged: Whether or not they [the rational norms] still hold good is something to be decided in light of the criterion that, with a responsible interpretation, we take to be characteristic of whatever ‘really’ forms part of the legacy to which we feel ourselves committed. If we find this criterion in nihilism, in the dissolution of ultimate foundations and their universability (the violent refusal to have

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them questioned), then the choice between what holds good and what does not in the cultural heritage from which we come will be made on the basis of the reduction of violence and under the sign of rationality understood as discourse-dialogue between defenders of finite positions who recognize that that is what they are and who shun the temptation to impose their position on others illegitimately (through validation by first principles). (2004: 46) And of all the traditions, there is one which stands head and shoulders above all others when it comes to free thinking: liberalism. Liberalism is free thinking because pluralism (a substantial consequence of liberal structures of objective freedom) makes possible the ability to stand over and above the immediate claims of culture in a rational way since one realizes that one’s values are grounded in an interpretation of reality, but an interpretation is not mere fiction nor inconsequential, but one truth among many. When the dichotomy of truth and the expression of interests is deconstructed, one is left with neither truth nor fiction and the raising up of the epistemic status of political values with the simultaneous levelling down of the epistemic status of comprehensive values leads to a coincidence in their weight. And liberalism is the positive aspect of capitalism (though not a necessary correlate of it) because the overt and stated good of capitalism is an increase in welfare, but that this goal cannot be met beyond a certain limit by capitalism itself is only disclosed by an educated class who were previously excluded from rational discourse. It is this class that identify that the unregulated increase in surplus capital and its consequent rights, burdens and privileges must also be ethically distributed according to agreed principles rather than relying on myths of markets, hidden hands or Geist which support only (and partially) the interests of the established capitalist classes. In short, the intellectual ideality of contemporary society comes into conflict with the material ideality that made it possible. Only when the ‘new’ perspective is granted a voice is such a critique possible. Vattimo talks explicitly of a responsible interpretation of one’s own moral fabric with all its inherent values and the recognition that such values derive from a world view and not from incontrovertible, absolute truth. And the values which are to be preferred are those

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which – although derived from a particular tradition – are judged by the criteria of tolerance (the reduction of violence) and consensus (the recognition that agreement is not grounded in the legitimacy of one comprehensive doctrine over another, but in the recognition of the finitude of one’s own and the other’s position). The schizophrenic Kantian psychology which haunts Rawls’s position even in Political Liberalism can now be replaced by a horizontal embedded self produced by the value pluralism of contemporary society and regulated by the primacy of the practical (political and ethical) commitment to free thinking. Vattimo would defend the primacy of practical over theoretical reason since tolerance becomes a necessary attitude of the philosopher if he or she is to be sincere. Otherwise, his or her assertions would be prejudiced, partial or dogmatic (2004: ch. 8). If one is to engage in reflection and thinking, then one must suspend judgement on assertions until such time that their refusal or rejection is incontrovertible and any thinker who does not, is not committed to reason. This is the primacy of practical over theoretical reason and, perhaps not so oddly anymore, Jean Hampton’s criticism of Rawls, which centres on his separation of the political from the metaphysical, offers a conclusion which is very reminiscent. Respect, for her, is both a philosophical and a political commitment in the face of anti-modern fundamentalism, obedience to authority and violence in dialogue: Such respect is the foundation not only of philosophy but also of liberal society; it is that upon which we must insist if we wish to have either. One who is committed to philosophy must also be committed to remaining intolerant of others’ intolerance. To attempt to reach consensus with intolerant true believers would be to betray one’s belief in the respect that grounds one’s very philosophizing. (Hampton, 1989: 812) Like Hegel, perhaps, we can now state that we are living in the philosophical age, but, unlike him, we must not take for granted its necessary continuation. Only when the intellectual ideality of a society is structured around the cultural a priori values of tolerance, respect and equality, is the freedom of the subject to be at home in

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that culture truly possible and such a state of affairs is not in anyway necessarily entailed by history alone.

6.8 Pluralism, the Subject and Freedom Vattimo’s ethics of interpretation offers an implicit re-conceptualization of Rawls’s political-comprehensive distinction. The subject is an historical product immediately motivated by the comprehensive values of his tradition which are true if they cohere with the standard of rationality of that tradition (inauthentic existence). Yet, the hermeneutic subject is more: reason is no longer adherence to the principles which originate from a world view, but the rationality of an open dialogue between versions of truth in order to garner agreement and reduce violence (authentic existence). The aim of consensus makes possible rational self-forming acts of will that are intelligible. For such freedom, the embedded subject has to be practically committed to certain preconditions that make free and transparent dialogue possible and also rule out the violence of metaphysics. The precondition holds that a doctrine has the right to be expressed in dialogue if it meets the criteria of respect and tolerance and is aimed at consensus. These are the same conditions, more or less, that a doctrine must meet to be considered reasonable and form an overlapping consensus with other doctrines, but instead of either a genealogical justification or one based in Kantian psychology, the justification is that a doctrine must be an example of free thinking. And such free thinking is dependent on a specific intellectual ideality otherwise it is just not possible. Vattimo claims that respect, tolerance, liberty and equality are normative commitments for the subject who inhabits the fabric of contemporary society. The normative commitments of an ethics of interpretation coincide with the values of political liberalism and, moreover, explain why the political is privileged over and above the comprehensive as it supplies a rational basis – acceptable to all – for inter-cultural dialogue and radical self-forming acts of will. The hermeneutic subject is primarily ethical because the norms which oblige him or her should guarantee the absence of violence: one must be able to step back, that is not be coerced or irrevocably bound

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to one’s tradition (liberty), one must recognize the finitude of one’s position and that of others (tolerance) and one must recognise the right of all individuals to their own responsibly articulated and interpreted tradition (equality and respect). The hermeneutic values of the ethics of interpretation and political liberalism coincide and the substantive commitment of the ethics of interpretation with its implicit endorsement of the social thesis better explains why political values trump comprehensive values in cases of conflict. The concern remains, however, that this approach has ceded too much and political liberalism and its values are relevant only to a specific society, that is the society characterized by value pluralism. The challenge is to be able to state, in no uncertain terms, that certain ways of life are better than others and certain social practices are universally wrong. It seems that Rawls and Vattimo are both committed to the autonomy of the subject and its liberation, even if such a liberation is no longer a matter of the imposition of universal reason (Freeman, 2007: 361–3). The postmodern condition is, peculiarly and surprisingly, a commitment to the universality not of individual reason but of social dialogue. Vattimo affirms an implicit postmodern normativity that inverts Rawls: The task of philosophy, once it is aware of the postmodern condition, consists in articulating this pre-comprehension; attempting, or better inventing, starting from this very condition (projecting) a guiding thread for choices and plans, from individual ethics to politics. In place of the nostalgic effort, characteristic of reactive nihilism, to go back to ‘values’, it is a question of actively continuing the ‘active nihilistic’ work of the destruction of absolutes. For what reason? For an individual ethics or a political society explicitly grounded in the free choice of that which, of course always starting from the path where we already find ourselves, most certainly appears capable of liberating us from idols . . . (Vattimo, 2007: 37) The subject must begin from the comprehensive and move towards the political, that is move from the given ideality of his or her existence towards an open, secure tolerance as described by Hegel’s three

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stages of development of individual mind. For Rawls, we had to begin from the original position and then impose its conditions, slowly and stage by stage, on comprehensive commitments. The overriding norm for Vattimo is liberation from idols, from superstition, that is not from beliefs simply understood as false, but specifically from those beliefs used for political manipulation; that is, false consciousness. As such, the overriding norm is to make authentic and self-forming actions possible. The reflective and secular nature of our society is universally desirable for this reason. The privilege of liberal values does not lie in moral realism (Rawls and Vattimo agree on this), but in a commitment to one substantial good: the freedom to make one’s own choices and to make oneself in the fabric of one’s society. In other words, the objective freedom of the agent who exists in a society characterized by liberalism and pluralism makes possible and sustains the subjective freedom of the agent because the subject can reasonably endorse the comprehensive ends of varied ways of life as his or her own. The commitment has different sources: for Rawls it is radical empiricism and the belief that comprehensive doctrines have been wrong in the past and are more than likely still in error; for Vattimo, there is no one truth or way of life which is intrinsically, universally better than them all. Oddly, both commit one to a form of life that allows all interests to be expressed and considered with respect. That is, a liberal form of life.

6.9 The Value of Pluralism Vattimo and Rawls both agree that the aim of political dialogue is consensus and coherence but not truth, implicitly insisting on the notion of the other as a respected participant in discourse unless he or she is unreasonable. The values that make possible a sincere interpretation of others and oneself regulate one’s comportment to others and coincide neatly with the values of political liberalism. Such values can be derived, bottom-up, from the social and moral fabric of postmodern culture. Rawls’s political liberalism is top-down: it imposes the values of liberalism on pluralism in order to resolve conflict; whereas Vattimo’s ethics of interpretation is bottom-up: it posits the values of political liberalism as the consequence of the

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multiplication of world views. For both, the values of political liberalism are universal because they make possible a mature, reflective society which has developed to the level where it is confident enough to put into question its own beliefs and values in the face of dialogue with the other.7 Such an exercise in practical wisdom is an opening up of possibilities and the opportunity to discuss, freely and openly with the other in order for the agent to make appropriate and rational self-forming actions. Vattimo is, however, perhaps too conservative: the agent’s first obligation is to the tradition from which he speaks and, at times, his position is in danger of being nothing but a sociological description of postmodern society rather than a normative prescription of certain ethical values. The subject for Vattimo must listen to his tradition and be responsible in his interpretation of it, yet the values conferred on him or her cannot play the role of legitimation in a plural society. However, if Vattimo is guilty of making the political sphere too comprehensive, then Rawls is guilty of the opposite: his values run the risk of becoming purely formal and only substantive if they happen to coincide with particular comprehensive commitments of the agent, thus raising serious concerns over one’s allegiance to the political order in cases of conflict. The avowal of the social thesis and the affirmation of the postmodern substratum have this advantage over Rawls’s presentation of political liberalism: the normative values which determine one’s conversation with the other are aimed at consensual agreement on values that are shared and equally intelligible. Respect, tolerance and liberty are the substantial account of the good which constitutes postmodern society and therefore one can see how the political values will trump the comprehensive values in cases of conflict if one is sincerely engaged in conversation. Conversely, Rawls’s own formal rationalism is required by any contextual politics since, by divorcing the political subject who – in a sense – is autonomous and privileged in the activity of political discourse from the particular subject, he ensures that the social thesis does not undermine the normative aims of dialogue and refuses blind obedience to authority. The plural society is better than the non-plural society; the pluralist subject is better than the centralized subject of modernity because it

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makes full, human freedom possible. The hermeneutic subject is the constraint on forms of life and is so through being the kind of being which puts his being at issue: are these values reasonable to me? This question is the very structure of care implicit to a proper understanding of freewill. The free subject is the culmination of an historical process in that he or she is the apex of the Enlightenment critique, able to recognize the limitations of his or her own universal claims because of the pluralism of his or her society. Pluralism implies a certain type of subject because of the proliferation of traditions and, more significantly, the conflicts this generates, and it is this subject – rather than a certain social or institutional form – which justifies the intellectual ideality of contemporary culture. In order for me to be free, I ought to be able to act in such a way that certain decisions have a radical effect on any future description of who I am and determine new limitations to my free inauthentic coherence with that identity. The objective freedom of a plural society makes these radical choices not only possible, but intelligible to others since in a monist society radical reinvention would constitute only rejection of the values of such a society and be an instance of mere wilfulness and not immediately recognizable as an act of freewill (the death without meaning). Radical reinvention is possible simply because difference is acknowledged as a possibility and others seek sincerely to comprehend this difference. The intellectual ideality of pluralism (probably but contingently), brought about by the material ideality of capitalism, makes possible the free subject who can make both authentic, self-forming choices as well as perform inauthentic actions that cohere with and reinforce his or her freely chosen identity. Pluralism had to meet two demands: first, that pluralism is not just mere appearance when in fact the multiple forms of life are a reflection of a deeper, hidden form of life which corrupts true human living (false consciousness); and secondly, that it is not the re-emergence of the arbitrary will in which the subject has no reason for validating and advocating one form of life over any other. In response to the former, I have suggested that conflicts generated by pluralism encourage the type of reflective subject which Marcuse believed was suppressed by pluralism. Pluralism makes possible agents with the capacity for proper critical thought and capable of intelligible, self-forming acts

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of will. To the latter, I have proposed that a pluralist subject is ruled by a rational commitment, and these norms of this commitment will determine the reasonable ways of life that are permitted to join the debate. The description of the pluralist subject proposes a ‘reductive ethics’ not dissimilar to Kant’s reductive metaphysics. How can one best approximate the truth given its opacity and historical taints? Of course, implicit in Kant is the idea that one cannot but see reality in terms of substance, possibility, causality, etc. Transcendence, respect and finitude are the absolute foundation of our ethical perception. They are universal to the extent that they supply the foundations for the possibility of fully free actions and without them no such acts of will would be possible. The free subject is constituted by the transcendental conditions necessary for a life of full human freedom. And, in the final instance, an acceptance of pluralism is nothing more controversial than the recognition of a certain implicit humility necessary for philosophy. The ethical basis for truth claims is only the idea that one should not ground one’s science, beliefs, practical ethics, etc. in an unquestionable, hidden metaphysics or method; but that such a ‘grounding’ must be responsible. Responsibility is the acknowledgement that for one’s truth to best approximate the truth it must be contestable in the public sphere by another. Pluralism is the system which best substantiates public consensus. And so we have a theory of ‘progress’: actualization is the possibility of the maximum rationalization of the historical conditions which make knowledge possible. The negation and convergence of traditions is a way to better approximate ‘truth’, bringing to the fore what was rational in a surpassed tradition. In the process of making rational action, it is clear that if one’s practices corrupt true human living then they are irrational. When we recall Hegel’s three stages: one, the throwness necessary for a sense of objectivity and rationality; two, the transcendence of these values and the questioning of whether they ought to be my identity, the care of me inherent in my choices; and three, the re-appropriation or re-articulation of these values in such a way that I can be understood in my uniqueness by others; we see clearly the necessity of a specific social structure for human freedom. And that specific social structure is, contrary to Hegel,

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pluralism because only then do we have the features necessary for proper subjective endorsement: equality, tolerance, transcendence and respect. Nothing here, though, implies that such a subject will always exist (as Hegel, given his end of history thesis, would no doubt assert). The decentralized, humble subject may – if social conditions radically change – centralize itself in an absolutist tradition. The openness, respect and tolerance which characterize him may disappear if we do not struggle to keep the world plural.8

Chapter 7

Conclusion

A book is supposed to be the summation of previous research into a topic and ought to ideally act as a full stop. I cannot help thinking that the preceding pages act as a question mark. Much of the necessity for the present work was driven by the need to supply some sort of metaphysical ground for various other discussions I have put forward, all of which rely – whether implicitly or explicitly – on the assumption that human beings are free: action, legitimacy, history and social ethics. The aim of this book was simply to show that talk of such issues, taking for a given the theoretical reasonableness of the concept of freewill, should be permitted within the house of reason, rather than any hubristic claim to prove the existence of some property, attribute or way of being that either supervenes or is identified with certain beings in the universe. And just as I was to put to bed the deep metaphysics of freewill with this subtle reorientation of the debate, I find myself unsatisfied and unable to leave behind a proper discussion of this concept. What was supposed to be an ending is probably going to be a beginning when I have cleared the decks (or, more literally, the desk) of all the other half-finished and rambling articles before me. And so, I cannot help feeling that a longer and more detailed articulation of the suggestions and claims in this book is waiting to be written. Whether this be a monograph or a series of articles waits to be seen. Perhaps the best thing that can be done in a section that purports (rather disingenuously) to be a conclusion is to run over the stages of the foregoing argument in order to clarify how the whole of this book ought to cohere. The opening intuition was simply the recognition that human being can be framed in diverse discourses with differing normative commitments. On the one hand, human beings can be described as objects in the physical universe subject to the laws of physics and

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explicable in terms of causality. On the other hand, human beings are ethical beings, in charge of their own projects and responsible for their own actions. The direction of much analytical thought has been to reduce the latter to the former, whereas the claim I wished to make was the humble acknowledgement that such a reduction loses sight of what is at stake in separating actions from events in the first place. Why would we want to talk about action at all unless it was to demarcate the responsible from the non-responsible? Given idealist assumptions that are sceptical about any form of putative realism, a theoretical choice can be made between the grounding concepts that ought to be applied to human beings, and talk of responsibility and free action is just more appropriate to human being than talk of cause. As such, what we are interested in are agents as opposed to normal objects and agents are distinguished by acting on their own motivations. Sartre’s existentialism relocates human being to the sphere of ethics in response to a reductionist enterprise (Freud), but existentialism was very much a child of its time.1 It correctly identified two qualitatively different types of choices: the self-forming actions of authentic choice and the inauthentic, coherent actions that reinforced such radical choices, but privileged the former because of their absolute rejection of external determination. Such a privilege actually made intelligible existence impossible. And this seemed to undermine any rationality of choice simply because the subjective is to be celebrated at the cost of the objective. For freewill to do the work required for responsibility, action ought to be some sort of rational laboured dependence on others’ judgements and a recreation of self according to and in spite of these judgements. Mature, rational responsibility is a conversation (rather than a struggle) with others. Much like being a father. Or a son. A theory of human action must move away from the atomism of contemporary thought and take seriously the contextual nature of actions and their necessary connection with the judgement of others. Hegel’s theory of action is an example of just such a rejection of atomistic thinking, and hermeneutical theory in general offers an account of free, self-determination that is best characterized as a rational dependent process that requires the existence of certain social structures and institutions. The hermeneutical approach allows

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us to separate subjective freedom (the freedom of the agent to satisfy his or her wants, aspirations and projects) from objective freedom (the social structures, institutions, norms, meanings and expectations that maintain, sustain and promote subjective freedom). An agent is free when he or she can choose to create himself or herself as he or she would wish to be and such creation and invention can be recognized and understood for what it is by his or her peers in a shared social context of meanings and values. So, if social structures are necessary for responsible action, but these are not chosen but given to a particular agent, then one’s freedom is dependent on social luck. Your degree of freedom is dependent on the culture you are born and raised in. That may just be the way it is: some agents are freer than others just because they were lucky enough to be born in a society which maintains and promotes subjective freedom. Others may well have been born in objectively unfree societies and, hence, their subjective freedom is unduly limited through no fault of their own. However, one cannot describe what constitutes objective freedom from a priori reason, simply because there may well be more than one form of objective freedom and such an exercise may well be beyond the limits of theoretical reason. Imagine designing a kitchen for your new house theoretically and then applying it actually to the space before you. There will always be forgotten yet necessary pipes, problems with walls, gaps that although theoretically large enough cannot suffice for their purpose and then, more importantly, the actual use of the kitchen: how near the sink should the hob be? How high should the fridge be? Without actual use, the design of the kitchen is always incomplete and, without creation and existence, it cannot be used. So it is with the institutions, structures and values of culture. So, instead of prescribing a blueprint for social structures, it is more pertinent to investigate one’s own social fabric and see how it promotes or limits subjective freedom. And on the basis of this, to see whether the hob needs to be moved, or the fridge, or the colour changed. Or, in the worst instance, whether a new kitchen ought to be ordered. Our kitchen is designed with base units of capitalism and the façade of pluralism. Do these constitute objective freedom or unfreedom? (Or, more accurately, where on the scale from objective freedom to

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objective unfreedom do they rate?) Capitalism is not necessary for freedom and, following both Marx and Marcuse, is an economic system that generates false consciousness whereby the agent’s capacity to find satisfaction in his or her socially defined roles, goals and aspirations is seemingly endorsed but at the expense of his or her ‘true’ or ‘real’ interest. But, the critical appreciation of the possibility of false consciousness is, as a matter of fact, made possible by the widening of class consciousness through education brought about by the social levelling of capitalist economic distribution. No social or economic structure is necessary for subjective freedom, but some do maintain and promote it better than others. (And some may well inhibit it absolutely.) The generation of surplus wealth coupled with the rise of plural ways of life encouraged and supported by the political structure of capitalism, viz. liberal constitutional democracy, allow for a critical subject who can make radical self-forming acts of will that are recognized and comprehended as such by others who share the plural axiological fabric of his or her culture. Other economic structures may also maintain and promote it, but we cannot know this a priori. Empirically and historically Ancient Athens’ brief existence, based as it was on the institution of slavery, and mercantile, renaissance Italy, both – to differing degrees – encouraged the birth of a critical and free subject. In both these possible exemplary cases, what is common is the intellectual ideality of pluralism whereby no fixed, orthodox hegemony dominates the conditional possibilities of the creation of free narrative identities within a social context.2 Although, again in both cases, the set of possible peers – dictated by whom the agent recognizes as his (or her?) equal – was much smaller than in our contemporary age. Pluralism makes possible intelligible radical self-re-invention because others are aware of difference. Where there is no obligation to be the same as everyone else, there is the rational opportunity to invent oneself differently and define the conditions of understanding that ground one’s difference. So what does the freewill of an agent require or, to ask the question in a different way, how is it to be characterized? An agent is free if he or she is capable of acting in such a way as to satisfy his or her desires, aspirations and projects. The objective institutional structure of a society either aids or hinders such action. However, this type of action is,

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following existentialism, to be termed – without any moral import – inauthentic because the ends of one’s action are given rather than chosen. Actions are rational if they cohere with this identity and irrational if they do not. Such freedom is only partial freedom. For full human freedom, one must be able to radically reinvent the ends of one’s own will. Such radical reinvention is authentic choice or self-determination and is consistent with endorsing or choosing for oneself the goals and projects given to one by the social fabric. Selfforming acts of will set the limits of possible inauthentic action by choosing to be in a certain way rather than any other. These actions make a difference to who we are and how others see us. These two qualitative different types of willing are reflected in an agent’s care for himself or herself. Again, the objective institutional structure and the axiological framework of a society either help or hinder these types of choices. In certain cultures, radical reinvention is impossible (the sixteenth-century female who wants to act in a theatre) because the radical reinvention will not be understood as rational but either, at best, as wilful or, at worst, irrational. A society sets the limits of both inauthentic and authentic choice. A plural society makes the latter as broad as it can be, limited only by responsibility in social dialogue. So, a free agent must be able to choose his or her ends as their own and act such that these ends are satisfied. And that depends on his or her social context.

Notes

Chapter 1: Introduction 1

2

It is worth noting that, reciprocally, in many European languages the philosophical idiom identifies the analytical school of thought as ‘Anglo-Saxon’. Limiting myself solely to names already appearing in the bibliography at the end of this work, we can say that examples of English-language philosophers with differing degrees of reserve concerning the analytic method include Berlin, Taylor, MacIntyre and Rorty. An example of a non-English-language philosopher who uses the analytic method is Tugendhat.

Chapter 2: Science, Explanation and Dogma 1

2

3

4

5

6

What follows is scene setting and in no way intended as a definitive statement of the named positions. For a fuller elaboration refer to Watson (1982) and Fischer, et al. (2007). See Dennett (2003) for both a better explanation and a more thought provoking critique of our commonsense use of determinism in philosophical reflection. Putting names to abstract theoretical positions is notoriously reckless. I myself have argued against such a simple, one-dimensional reading of Sartre for example (Rose, 2003). I hope a more sophisticated appraisal of Sartre will be gained from the succeeding chapter. A much better and plausible understanding of Kant’s idealism will show that to consider his thought within the framework of the incompatibilism debate is, to a certain extent, to already misinterpret it. See note 6 below. It rarely involves a redefinition of what we mean by determined. Dennett (2003) suggests it may require a more refined understanding of being determined, but I am not yet convinced that he is not just flattering to deceive. His work deserves far more attention than a mere footnote and I sincerely recommend that the reader pick his book up when possible. Such a reading of Kant is, I believe, more persuasive than the libertarian Kant presented above. Wood (1999) reads Kant this way: freedom and determinism are ‘compatible’ because they do not conflict since they are concepts that belong to separate and non-overlapping perspectives: casual necessity governs the physical perspective, whereas rational practical necessity governs the intelligible perspective.

156

Notes

Chapter 3: Freud and Sartre: The Property of Freedom 1

2

3

4

5

6

I do hope I shall be forgiven the grammatical clumsiness of referring to human being rather than the human being. Human being is existence, it is a way of being and hence an action the gerund captures when it is not preceded by an article. If we talk about the human being, we fall into thinking of it as a thing rather than an activity, an existence. Hopefully, the rest of this chapter will make this clearer. Of course, Freud is a doctor and whether or not his speculative theories are true is incidental to whether or not his hypotheses work. In Heidegger, care is an ontic representation of the more authentic being-towards-death. The idea remains the same: when I die I am to be known by my acts and the identity that they created. Death is my ownmost possibility in that I choose my death in choosing my identity through my acts. Death is the culmination of one’s free possibilities (1992: 1.II.i). How much of this is derived from Hegel rather than Heidegger for Taylor is an interesting question. Consider these words: ‘This distinction is connected with the fact that the human import of consciousness, which is based on thinking, does not appear in the form of thought straightaway, but as feeling, intuition, representation – which are forms that have to be distinguished from thinking itself as form’ (Hegel, 1991b: §2). And here one can understand Sartre’s initial understanding of sadism and masochism as moral attitudes (1991: part 3). This is true only of Being and Nothingness. Sartre saw this as the fundamental problem with that work and spent the rest of his career attempting to describe an authenticity with Others. First, in the failed Notebooks for an Ethics and, second, more convincingly in The Critique of Dialectical Reason. On this see Flynn (1984).

Chapter 4: Hegel, Action and Avoiding the Death without Meaning 1

2

3

4

The second condition ensures that unconsciously motivated acts remain events and not possible acts of agency. Freud would disagree. It also seems to undermine the pluralism inherent in the counter-enlightenment movement as understood by Berlin (1997). There exists a lack in the literature of any deep discussion of Hegel’s theory of action and that which is available does not do justice to the complexity of Hegel’s position (Knowles, 2002, 362–63; Quante, 2004, 1). Quante’s own book goes a long way to rectifying this absence, but not far enough. I have begun an initial discussion, but real interpretative work remains to be done to evidence the implicit claim that Hegel offers a hermeneutical account of action (Rose, 2008a). It is a terrible play, but Sartre’s Lucifer and the Lord (1990) illustrates this rather well.

Notes 5

6

157

Hegel too subscribes to an historical justification of culture. I deviate from that justification in the present work, but have a sneaking feeling that it does serve a role in what is being said. I make a half-hearted promise to return to the theme in the future. To further emphasize the hermeneutic approach, consider Dilthey’s (1976) description of understanding: Thus, in this process, there arises a view of the continuity of mental life in time which constitutes the course of a life. In it every single experience is related to the whole. This continuity of life is not a sum of quintessence of successive moments but a unity constituted by relationships which link all the parts. From the present we run through a series of memories back to the point where our small, malleable and unformed self is lost in the twilight and we press forward from the present to possibilities, which are grounded in it, but, at the same time, assume vague and vast dimensions. (1976: 185) and similarly, If we read one of Shakespeare’s comedies we find the component parts of an event not only temporally and causally linked but elevated into unity according to the laws of poetical composition; this unity lifts the beginning and the end out of the causal chain and links its parts into a whole. (1976: 199)

7

But it is cold comfort for a dauber or a poetaster to console himself with the view that his inner self is full of high ideals; and when he demands that he should be judged by his intentions rather then his achievements, his pretensions are rightly rejected as empty and unfounded. Conversely, it is also very often the case that in judging others, who have brought about something fair, square and solid, we may employ the false distinction of inward and outward, in order to maintain that what they have done is only something external to them, and that their inner motives were completely different, because they acted to satisfy their vanity or some other discreditable passion. This is the envious disposition which, being itself unable to accomplish anything great, strives to drag greatness down to its own level and to belittle it (Hegel, 1991b: §140A; see also 1991a: §124).

Chapter 5: Marx and Marcuse: Alienation and Critical Reflection 1

2 3

Welfare considerations justify the free market for Smith (1976). Different substantial accounts of liberty justify the free market for Hegel (1991a), Locke (1993) and Nozick (1974). One obvious example is, of course, Rawls (1971). Alienation is actually fourfold for Marx: alienation from nature, from oneself, from one’s product and from others.

158 4

5

6

Notes

The echoes of ‘intellectual freedom’ are, however, to be met by the intellectual ideality made possible by a capitalist economic social model. As we shall see in the next chapter, and a point of disagreement between Marcuse and Vattimo, the mass media may well be a liberation rather than a closure of intellectual critique. This is purely an anthropological interpretation of Heidegger’s work and it is clear that in his later texts he did surpass the original project as presented in Being and Time. However, the original work lends itself constructively to an anthropological interpretation whether he intended it or not. This is the division as found in Marcuse. The theoretical/practical distinction in Kant is not so simple. See O’Neill (1989).

Chapter 6: Rawls and Vattimo: Pluralism and Postmodern Liberation 1

2

3

4

5

6

7 8

It is not a causal relationship. The economic and material structures of Ancient Athens, for example, made possible a pluralist intellectual ideality (for all of Plato’s efforts otherwise). Oddly, that is Hegel’s other Golden Age of freedom (almost!). Perhaps the intellectual ideality of pluralism is necessary for freedom and can be brought about by different means. However, that is too much a top-down rational imposition of the sort I wish to avoid. Sections 6.4–6.8 are an expansion, elaboration and reorientation of discussions already published as Rose (2008b). For a comprehensive list of the vast secondary material available on Rawls’s thought, please refer to Freeman (2007) and Mulhall and Swift (1996). In the present work, I cite only what is directly relevant. The inadequate mention of ‘stability for the right reasons’ does not do sufficient justice to the subtlety of Rawls’s own rather complex thinking on this issue. For more thorough and elaborate discussion, the reader ought to refer to Freeman (2007: ch. 8) and also Barry (1995). The current section gives the impression that there are only two types of pluralism: the radical empiricism of thinkers such as Rawls and Mill; and the perspectivism of thinkers such as Nietzsche and Vattimo. There is another: the ontological pluralism of Berlin which holds that there are a variety of goods in themselves and conflict arises because the social space is insufficient to actualize all of them at one moment. There may be other understandings of pluralism as well. Often, commentators reverse the causal direction concerning this point (I think even Vattimo is, at times, too lax). The mass media proliferates into different perspectives because of this underlying empirical fact, rather than discourses proliferating because of the existence of the mass media. The position is very similar to the one reached by MacIntyre (1988: ch. 18). No doubt institutional safeguards may help here, and that is perhaps where the proper and convincing justification and legitimation of liberalism lies.

Notes

159

Chapter 7: Conclusion 1

2

MacIntyre (1985) parallels the existentialism of the continental tradition to subjectivism and emotivism in the analytic tradition, all of which are phenomena of a much deeper cultural malaise, atomism. Such a comment is merely conjectural. Much historical and interpretative analysis would be required to support it that I, here, do not do.

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Index

Althusser, L. 85 Barry, B. 133n.4 Bauman, Z. 134 Berlin, I. 1n.2, 3, 10, 63, 63n.2, 103, 109, 122–3 Chisholm, R. 59 Cohen, G. 92 Colletti, L. 85 Dalí, S. 121 Debord, G. 97 Dennett, D. 11n.2, 16n.5 Dilthey, W. 81n.6 Dreben, B. 127 Eisenstein, S. 121 Eliot, T. S. 121 Flynn, T. 54n.6 Frankfurt, H. 50, 52, 58 Fraser, I. 85 Freeman, S. 127n.3, 133n.4, 144 Freud, S. 6, 24–32, 28n.2, 37, 38, 54, 56, 57n.1, 151 Gadamer, H-G. 38 Gaudí, A. 121 Hampton, J. 127, 142 Hegel, G. 1, 4–8, 23, 46, 50n.4, 55–84, 66n.3, 79n.5, 82n.7, 85–91, 91n.1, 93, 96, 98, 102, 104–5, 107–8, 109–20, 120n.1, 123–4, 128, 135, 138, 142, 144, 148–9, 151

Heidegger, M. 19, 21, 23, 28n.2, 35–40, 43, 49, 49n.3, 50n.4, 57n.1, 80–1, 102, 102n.5 Hobbes, T. 2, 3, 57, 58, 62, 132 Hume, D. 57 James, W. 15 Jameson, F. 120 Joyce, J. 121 Kane, R. 51 Kant, I. 7, 14, 16, 16n.4, 20, 20n.6, 21, 23, 35–9, 69, 70–1, 79, 86, 104–5, 105n.6, 128, 130, 132, 135, 137, 142, 143, 148 Knowles, D. 66n.3 Krasnoff, L. 127 Locke, J. 91n.1 Lukács, G. 85 Lukes, S. 92, 95, 104 Lyotard, J-F. 120 MacIntyre, A. 1n.2, 60, 146n.7, 151n.1 Makintosh, C. 121 Mallarmé, S. 121 Marcuse,H. 8, 87, 96–111, 99n.4, 105n.6, 117–18, 120, 147, 153 Marx, K. 8, 35, 85–98, 94n.3, 103, 107, 108–9 Mill, J. S. 21, 135n.5 Mulhall, S. 127n.3 Nietzsche, F. 135n.5, 140 Nozick, R. 91n.1 O’Neill, O. 105n.6 Orwell, G. 117

166 Patten, A. 77 Pound, E. 121 Quante, M. 66, 66n.3 Quinton, A. 2 Railton, P. 57 Rawls, J. 92n.2, 120, 126–46, 127n.3, 133n.4, 135n.5 Ricoeur, P. 64 Rorty, R. 1n.2, 126 Rose, D. 14n.3, 22, 23, 66n.3, 77, 114, 124n.2, 134, Rousseau, J-J. 2, 93–4, 109 Sandel, M. 128 Sartre, J-P. 6, 14, 14n.3, 22, 23–8, 31–7, 39–54, 51n.5, 55, 56, 74, 78, 78n.4, 80, 84, 88, 98, 110, 151 Smith, A. 91n.1 Steinberger, P. 127

Index Stevenson, C. 134 Strawson, P. 19 Swift, A. 127n.3 Taylor, C. 1n.2, 49, 50, 50n.4, 59–64, 65, 69–70, 78–9 Tugendhat, E. 1n.2, 111 Valéry, P. 121 Vattimo, G. 99n.4, 117, 119–20, 134–46, 135n.5, 136n.6 Velleman, J. 58 Warnock, M. 35 Wenar, L. 127 Westphal, K. 69 Wingenbach, E. 133 Wolf, S. 51 Wolheim, R. 27 Wood, A. 20n.6 Woolf, V. 121