Symbolic Forms for a New Humanity: Cultural and Racial Reconfigurations of Critical Theory 9780823292714

Citation preview

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SYM BOLIC FOR MS FOR A N EW H U MAN ITY

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just

ideas

transformative ideals of justice in ethical and politcal thought

series editors Drucilla Cornell Roger Berkowitz Kenneth Michael Panfilio

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SYM B O LI C FO R M S FO R A N EW H U MAN ITY CULTURAL AND RACIAL RECONFIGURATIONS OF CRITICAL THEORY

Drucilla Cornell and Kenneth Michael Panfilio

fordham university press new york

2010

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Copyright © 2010 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cornell, Drucilla. Symbolic forms for a new humanity : cultural and racial reconfigurations of critical theory / Drucilla Cornell and Kenneth Michael Panfilio. p. cm.— (Just ideas) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8232-3250-5 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-8232-3251-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-8232-3252-9 (ebook) 1. Political science—Philosophy. 2. Symbolism—Political aspects. 3. Cassirer, Ernst, 1874–1945.—Criticism and interpretation. I. Panfilio, Kenneth Michael. II. Title. JA71.C5985

2010 320.01—dc22 2010003590

Printed in the United States of America 12 11 10

5 4 3 2 1

First edition

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This book is wholly and humbly dedicated to the ethnographic legacy and intellectual heroism of John and Jean Comaroff. The world has yet to glean the full wisdom of their erudition, always bound to revolutionary justice of the highest form.

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Contents

Preface Introduction 1

66

Transformative Revolution: Repairing the Fractured Ethical World

5

33

The Always Unfinished Project of Modernity: The Fragile Life of Symbols

4

15

The Word Magic of Being: On the Mythical Origins of Thinking

3

1

The World of Symbolic Forms: Ernst Cassirer and the Legacy of Immanuel Kant

2

ix

95

Unfree Black Labor: The Telos of History and the Struggle against Racialized Capitalism

125

Conclusion: The Work of Transformative Constitutionalism

151

Notes

177

Bibliography

193

Index

201

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Preface

In the image marking the cover of this book, Sacrifice by Mark Rothko (April 1946), interested readers should already feel their imagination provoked by the juxtaposition of colors, shapes, and symbols begging for meaning. We do not pretend to know the motivations of its creator, or fancy ourselves skilled aestheticians. But, this artwork and its title seem to dare one to name them into symbolic being. The painting seems fluorescently sublime, a flicker of our own consciousness fallen out of time. The tip of a fiery red trident cleaves through the foreground and above its trail sets a bright yellow sphere that seems to burn through the canvas itself. The background to these symbols is a thick, solid rectangular stream painted in a melancholic hue of monotony stretched to horizontal infinity. Encircling this background are amorphous shapes of fluid two-ness and one-ness dancing to a rhythm heard only in aesthetic whisperings secretly traveling through the watercolors bound to the canvas. A figuration whimsically dressed in blue watches this event on the horizon, crowned with a halo stitched to its body with an almost unnoticeable dotted line. To the right of this anonymous being is an emaciated gray brushstroke with filaments writhing at its sides, an anthropomorphic allegory of a person fledging madly in distress. It would be easy to point at the neglected, fallen gray line and remind ourselves that the absurdity of reality is taken to its zenith when the cries of the other are met with deafening silence from the world. Surely, we could figure the angelic spectator as a reminder of our own weak messianic power,

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present and turned away from our own visage; wisps of white tendrils secretly stretch from its hand against the contrast of hazy charcoal smudging in an enigmatic outwardly gesture to touch something unseen. The trident blazing across the canvas might be some primal fury mistakenly unleashed, blurredly melting the bleakish gray milieu into vaporous nothingness. Similarly, the radiating sun resists being overwritten—almost resolutely, almost in perpetuity—as spectral masses of indistinct shapes stand caught in a liminality of motion and resistance before an unknown spectacle. But, perhaps, in its entirety this artwork is a refraction of the self—the doppelgänger of our own symbolic thought standing as an open hermeneutic of possibility daring us to name ourselves in its universal symbols. In said measure, this book takes up the challenge to figure the hope of our humanity; such an act is itself one of sacrifice that compels us to see “the more,” “the might be,” and “the unnamed” of a temporality of being not yet fully painted or interpreted, but utterly pulled with a spirit of gravity toward a telos of possibility. It has become commonplace to write about the vociferous appetite of colonialism and its insatiable devouring of modern life. In this book we expand on those ideas, showing how there has been a colonization of critical theory itself, fitted with prejudices that would limit knowledge to analytic reductions commensurate with so-called Western metaphysics. Against such a monolithic force, we posit the work of the oft-neglected German Idealist Ernst Cassirer in careful textual precision to unearth his contribution to critical theory via an in-depth understanding of symbolic forms in all of their richness and complexity. Such a maneuver allows an ethical humanism to emerge that grants equal importance and standing both to the intellectual heritage of Afro-Caribbean historicism and poeticism and to the long-ignored significance of black philosophies of existence. Each of these traditions provides searing indictments against imperialist domination of the so-called Third World and return such questions of domination to the realm of critical theory against some who would deny that we are still in an age of imperialism. The focus here, then, will be an exposition on the human condition that is then expanded upon to raise, and at times answer, some of the most important questions of “what is to be done” about the global racism, sexism, and poverty that have asymmetrically infected the livelihoods and ways of life for so many people who have been rendered beneath the register of humanity.

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This book is indebted to the proverbial life of the mind all thinkers require with their brethren. Lewis Gordon and Paget Henry deserve special thanks, both for the inspiration we found in their work and their unyielding criticism that made this book better. John and Jean Comaroff were of immense assistance in thinking through the latter half of this book, and they offered precision of thought beyond measure. Maureen MacGrogan has worked tirelessly on every book written by Drucilla Cornell and is, most importantly, a dear friend to both authors. Her careful editing of this work made its less lucid moments emerge with greater clarity, and her intellectual erudition on all the topics addressed henceforth have been duly enhanced by her thoughtful suggestions. Ted Fischer improved this manuscript with his careful editing of cited material, and Erica Thurman came to our aid and helped us successfully complete the tedious job of forging a bibliography and index. Last, it must be said that collaboration is a challenging, and perhaps maddening, endeavor. However, the whole of this book was written in compassionate comradeship, integrally tying the intellectual acumen, prosaic style, and moral beliefs of each author so closely that if a single thread of an idea were removed the larger tapestry of thought would unravel. This collaboration was an equal partnership in full, complete measure. Of course, while the intellectual solace and shelter provided by these people is a debt that no one could truly repay, the authors claim full responsibility for anything in this work that stands in error. Drucilla Cornell and Kenneth Michael Panfilio Cape Town, South Africa, August 2008

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the forgotten relevance of ernst cassirer Plato, in his famous tenth book of the Republic, ends his long magnum opus on justice with a story that has left most philosophers beguiled by its deeper meaning. The “Myth of Er” is a tale that begins in utter horror and brutal devastation as Er is presumed dead—one of many fallen soldiers who lost their lives during a great battle. The body of Er is carried back home by his surviving comrades and, in typical fashion, is set atop a funeral pyre as a part of his last rites. Just as the torch is about to set the pyre ablaze, Er awakes and tells everyone that he has had a frightful, magnificent vision of the afterlife. In his travels betwixt life and death, Er stumbled upon a vibrant valley filled with wondrous sights. We are told of a whirling, swirling spindle of Necessity, which has affixed to it all of the constellations of the cosmos. Nearer to the ground we find the Morae, or three fates, carefully stringing, measuring, and cutting the threads of life that are fed up into the larger spindle of Necessity. Two portals haunt this valley—one high above letting souls into heaven and another down below imprisoning souls in hell. A small gathering of people—former souls that are coming back into existence after enjoying the pleasures of heaven or the thousand-year torture of hell— have amassed near a riverbank and are being instructed about how to choose

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the destiny of their next life. Before their incarnation, each soul may choose a livelihood of good moral character or of shallow self-interest, knowing all too well that the wrong choice will land them upon their next return to this place in spiritual rapture or torment. Some thinkers might take in this tale and its imagery only to gather the world of ancient Greece was quite a cosmopolitan city, filled with poets, scientists, and philosophers who held a veritable pantheon of views from distant cultures and places that abounded with ideas regarding the afterlife, reincarnation, and even planetary formation in the galaxy. However, there is something not only mythic about this tale but also symbolic. The three fates are symbols of time, and the whirling, swirling spindle of Necessity is itself a symbol of space; both images might lead one to think that our understanding of the universe is situated, first and foremost, in time and space. The ritual of rebirth seems to take place in a reflective moment of consciousness that reminds us to think out the consequences of our enactment of moral personality as we are commanded to choose a life before a moral law of our own making. The story that we are given through such words is itself more than just a tale; it is a symbolic formulation that touches on the whole of our human condition and being-in-the-world. Such thought-provoking renderings of philosophy were a favorite activity of Ernst Cassirer in the introduction to his works, and hopefully he would have found the interpretation offered here very much in the spirit of his own endeavors. Sadly, however, the philosophy of symbolic forms devised by Cassirer has fallen into complete neglect throughout most of the academy, including the realm of philosophy in which Cassirer was so well trained. Cassirer mainly has been remembered, and indeed is considered foundational, by anthropologists, who in their diversity to the approach of ethnography still pursue the “phenomenology of culture” latent throughout the work of Cassirer. The problem, in part, has been that Cassirer’s main work in the English language was read separately from his detailed, multivolume work on symbolic forms. An Essay on Man was reduced to a facile, optimistic humanism in which we are meant to ultimately develop some kind of comprehensive elaboration of the many diverse symbolic forms belonging to humanity. What follows in this introduction traces the major questions and ideas integral to understanding the work of Cassirer and their relevance in contemporary critical and affirmative political philosophy. The answers to such questions will be further developed in this book.

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If Cassirer is taken as merely a facile, optimistic humanist, then the whole of his work has been deeply misunderstood. An Essay on Man is but a mere taste of his deeper thinking on the way in which human beings are able to productively imagine the world they encounter through symbolic formulation. Its chapters are but a shadow of the longer engagements he offers on the symbolic forms of myth, language, history, science, and even art that appear in expanded measure throughout his four-volume work titled Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. However, An Essay on Man does offer the interested reader a situated position to make sense of Cassirer’s larger intellectual and political project. “No former age,” writes Cassirer, “was ever in such a favorable position with regard to the sources of our knowledge of human nature. . . . We appear, nevertheless, not yet to have found a method for the mastery and organization of this material.”1 The culprits of such a charge are found in all academic disciplines (ranging from science to aesthetics and even the humanities) that mistakenly cultivate a state of intellectual anarchy, promoting sharper and more penetrating means for the collection of facts about human existence, without any overarching conception of the human condition. Cassirer concludes this argument by suggesting: “Unless we succeed in finding a clue of Ariadne to lead us out of this labyrinth, we can have no real insight into the general character of human culture; we shall remain lost in a mass of disconnected and disintegrated data, which seem to lack all conceptual unity.”2 Some thinkers have dared to engage Cassirer more seriously in his work on symbolic forms. Yet for many the word “symbol” seems to carry old-fashioned eighteenth-century ideas about “word labels” in which a word stands in for a thing. Simply put, this older idea of symbolization held that a symbol encompasses an object of similar properties and pins the label of a word upon each of the images involved. This word label, henceforth, is meant to recall any one of the classes of things that carry similar attributes to what has been symbolized. But this is not at all what Cassirer means by a “symbol.” Nothing is a symbol, for Cassirer, if it is only a mark of something already given and allows us to talk about things with similar properties, able to recollect them again simply because they have been denoted by a symbol. We can only have a fuller understanding of symbolic forms for Cassirer by putting his own philosophy in proper relation to the work of Immanuel Kant in the Critique of the Power of Judgment, which reworks fundamental ideas about the transcendental imagination and the schema in the Critique

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of Pure Reason. It is enough to say now that the term “symbolic form”—and the two words must always be taken together—involves any particular form as perceived in relationship with the greater symbolic whole. Such a greater symbolic whole is, ultimately, the experience of the world with all of its richness and complexity as apprehended in the extraordinary range and diversity of how human beings act in and make sense of their world. For Cassirer, what makes humanity unique is that we are the symbolizing creatures destined to come to a world through forms not entirely of our own making but which we, in turn, work with and ultimately develop and change as we struggle to come to terms with who we are and our place in the universe. Human beings, for Cassirer, experience reality beyond mere receptor and effector systems in the biological sense and are imbued with the power of a third means that transforms the reality of human life through a symbolic system where “man lives not merely in a broader reality; he lives so to speak in a new dimension of reality.”3 Each of the symbolic forms Cassirer studied was analyzed in vast detail, which is partly why his philosophy of symbolic forms is a daunting task for serious investigation; yet Cassirer never defended the proposition that there could be a complete, enumerated list of symbolic forms. Similarly, philosophy cannot stand above such forms in order to comprehend them through an overarching conception of reason. In this sense, Cassirer also breaks with Hegel, rejecting the attempt to think along with the Phenomenology of Spirit as it culminates in an absolute knowledge that, ultimately, gives a final, ordered hierarchy to the struggle of the human spirit to know itself both individually and collectively. Cassirer was too steadfast in his allegiance to Kant, and he believed that such absolute knowledge was not possible.

judgment as symbolic form Not only does the philosophy of symbolic forms constructed by Cassirer underscore the finitude of human reason, and thus of philosophy, but it does so by challenging the dominate notions of positivism and realism. Such hegemonic approaches hold on to the notion that the project of philosophy is still about thinking “what is” and “what ought to be” by appealing to something that “is” either our deepest intuitions or our shared understandings granting us an ethical world. Cassirer, like Kant, argues instead that we should only study, and indeed can only study, forms of judgment. His addi-

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tion to Kant is that those forms of judgment are always mediated by symbolic forms. Once we free Cassirer from being identified as merely an optimistic humanist who was too often labeled an innocent idealist, then we can see how radical his challenge is to positivist and realist notions of how we think the world. It would also be wrongheaded to lump the insights devised by Cassirer under the rubric of postmodern genealogies that trace how we have been constituted by the forces of the social world that imprison our becoming. Finding solace even in the work of Stoics such as Marcus Aurelius, Cassirer contends, “life in itself is changing and fluctuating, but the true value of life is to be sought in an eternal order that admits of no change. . . . Judgment is the central power in man, the common source of truth and morality.”4 Such judgment, then, is what might bring about a free, autonomous life in the troubled times of supposed subjective collapse before the pessimism of our times. If we think with Cassirer, we see how profound his challenge was during his age and how it has become even more so today. If we dare to think of mythical language as thinking; of art as knowledge and insight leading to an objective view of things; of history as comprehensible through recollective imagination, which reads into history a regulative ideal endowed with telos and purposiveness; and of every feature of our experience as a claim to objective reality, then we are straining and stretching very far indeed the meaning of knowledge and reality.5 Are not our representations of the world symbolic, whether in myth, language, religion, art, history, or science? Are these not all like manifestations of a humanity that only comes into the world and knows that world through the mediation of symbolization? Cassirer’s answer to both of these questions stands in the affirmative. He claims that these “are the varied threads which weave the symbolic net, the tangled web of human experience.”6 It is because Cassirer stretches the very notions of knowledge and reality that he is so relevant today, particularly as he insists that there is and always will be a plurality of symbolic forms at work in the human condition. Given the claim by Cassirer of the origin of language in myth alongside the metaphoric aspect of linguistic expression, we are released from seeing myth as something that can be once and for all overcome in a world dominated by the instrumental rationality of signs. “Mythology itself is not simply a crude mass of superstitious or gross delusions. It is not merely chaotic,” insists Cassirer, “for it possesses a systematic or conceptual form.”7

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Cassirer rightfully reminds us that reason itself is not necessarily integral to language alone; rather, all derivations of symbolic form (including emotional, scientific, logical, and poetic language) stand side-by-side. When this is viewed properly, the project of universal humanism might be able to give important revision to those who would claim the nomenclature of humanity under the title animal rationale by offering the more fitting descriptor of animal symbolicum, and “by so doing we can designate [our] specific difference, and we can understand the new way open to man—the way to civilization.”8 For science, too, is only a symbolic form, and mathematics itself is subjected to the same symbolic principle. All mathematical thinking proceeds through a constructed set of relations, which are synthetic in the sense meant by Kant. Mathematics is not concerned simply with analyzing a given concept into its basic characteristics. Instead, mathematics starts from certain determinate basic relations through which we both advance and ascend to more complex relations where each new totality of relations corresponds to a new realm of objects. These mathematical objects are forms because, ultimately, mathematics is the construction of these determinate relations from which mathematical objects are formed. Mathematical objects are not higher, purer, or more objective than the world given to us in myth. They simply constitute a different symbolic form, which, of course, can have its own aesthetic beauty. We often forget in the imaginary that has come to dominate our life today that both labor and capital are symbolic forms. Indeed, as Marx tells us, the very idea of commodity fetishism turns on the insight that we have forgotten that we are the makers of capital.9 Such is the case not simply because workers make capital but because it is just one symbolic form among others for the economic organization of life. By forgetting that capitalism is a symbolic form, we fall into an amnesia where we neglect the truth that we are not destined to maintain such exploitative forms of economic relations and that there are, indeed, alternative forms of economic organization more justly compatible with the basic needs of human beings. Indeed, one of the great insights of Cassirer is that we have been captured by a naturalistic world image that has become mythic, and thus unquestionable to claims of immediate truth. In the time of Cassirer the world image that justified the inevitability of a certain form of economic organization is associated with a fundamental misinterpretation of Darwin (primarily, although not exclusively, through the work of Herbert Spencer) and his tele-

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ological understanding of biological development. The “world image,” a favorite phrase for Cassirer, is keynoted in such mistaken views. It is one in which human beings are pitted in a competitive free-for-all whereby the “weaker” are fated to be eclipsed by the “stronger” who would rise to the top of the social, political, and ethical order to take their place as the archetypal bearers of what it means to be human. These world images become mythic for Cassirer precisely because they appeal to a natural immediacy and deny that they are in fact complex forms of judgment, even if often rendered in simple-minded images. In our own present life we see this world image transformed somewhat in that we now are presented with an image of human beings as self-interested rational creatures bent on utility maximization. Our present forms of social organization are limited by this so-called natural immediate truth of how we are fated to be constituted. It is important here to note that Cassirer does not simply mean to indicate that all world images that receive mythic proportion are necessarily negative. He is suggesting that certain world images simply claiming to be the truth of our essential nature should be understood as forms of judgment that have become so hegemonic, to borrow the phrase from Antonio Gramsci, that they simply appear as natural, immediate facts about ourselves rather than what they really are: judgments. For Cassirer, both myth and metaphor can also give us affirmative world images. So it is not at all that myth and metaphor are simply being condemned out of hand. The problem arises when we forget that such world images are indeed judgments, which are always, in the way Cassirer modified Kant, symbolic forms. Cassirer’s intellectual trajectory led him to be deeply suspicious of any attempt to simply denigrate myth since it inheres for him in another symbolic form: language and its inevitable immersion in metaphor. If there is a movement toward intellectual maturity in Cassirer, then it is not toward absolute knowledge but instead toward the recognition of the complexity of the world in which human beings engage in a rich range of symbolic forms. Such a process reveals itself when Cassirer reminds us of the necessity to continue to rework and reform, to add complexity and creative ambiguity to the great symbolic forms that have arisen in our shared human development across all cultures: The work of all the great natural scientists—of Galileo and Newton, of Maxwell and Helmholtz, of Planck and Einstein—was not mere fact

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collecting; it was theoretical, and that means constructive, work. This spontaneity and productivity is the very center of all human activities. It is man’s highest power and it designates at the same time the natural boundary of our human world. In language, in religion, in art, in science man can do no more than to build up his own universe—a symbolic universe that enables him to understand and interpret, to articulate and organize, to synthesize and universalize his human experience.10

Such a call to complexity allows us to question mythic claims of natural immediacy that should instead be grasped as diverse and complex symbolic forms. To such an end, Cassirer forcefully argued that the myth of the state of nature, expressed by thinkers as diverse as Hobbes, Kant, and Rousseau, actually enhanced political thinking about what forms of social organization human beings might want to undertake so as to live in a more just world.

phenomenology of culture The phenomenology of culture that carries through the work done by Cassirer is often mistaken as innocently idealist. For Cassirer, it is important to note that what we are studying is the work of human beings. By work, here, we do not need to reduce Cassirer to only examining the work of culture. In his own words we are well reminded, “Man’s outstanding characteristic, his distinguishing mark, is not his metaphysical or physical nature—but his work. It is this work, it is the system of human activities, which defines and determines the circle of ‘humanity.’”11 Thus there is nothing innocently idealist in Cassirer’s understanding of a phenomenology of cultural forms in a double sense. First, culture is inseparable from the material world because culture, indeed, forms materiality in our symbolic understanding. Second, human activities that we think of as material also come to us through the mediation of symbolism—even something as basic as money, which we all take for granted, is a symbolic form. Cassirer, following the Critique of Pure Reason, is suggesting that there is no subject or consciousness present that is not a subject of some thing and a consciousness of some object. Without an external world, there would be no internal consciousness. In Cassirer, that consciousness is always in the making through a symbolic form that comes before us and, yet, can be reshaped by our very work within it and on it. What, then, makes this a phe-

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nomenology? Cassirer, of course, is not following Edmund Husserl here in seeking a philosophical approach to the things themselves by an elaborate process of bracketing our natural attitude to objects in the world as they present themselves to us in day-to-day life. But, following Kant, there is for Cassirer no way to get back to the things themselves. Of course, there are phenomena, but forms of judgment always mediate phenomena. That is also true for the empirical facts of science, which we can only understand in their law-like relatedness similar to the so-called facts we just discussed of economic man. The phenomenology of culture threaded throughout the work of Cassirer, then, is the study of the phenomenon of symbolic forms and the judgments that inhere in the way phenomena come to be represented to us—whether through myth or mathematics. The difficulty of this kind of phenomenology inheres in the idea that phenomena can only be known in the symbolic complexity in which they are actually represented, worked on, and lived with. One does not find in Cassirer a philosophy of abstract statements about myth; one finds instead a profound and entangled engagement with all of the best ethnography on myth for his time. If one wants to know about the phenomenon of myth, then one must locally understand the world in which myth presents itself and the world in which it is lived. In a profound sense, then, there is no philosophy of symbolic forms without this special kind of phenomenology, which, of course, is practiced by the best of ethnographers. It is not at all surprising to find that Cassirer is thought of as one of the founders of modern anthropology and was the philosophical hero of someone like Clifford Geertz, one of the great anthropologists of the twentieth century.

universal humanism and the mark of ideality But is Cassirer a relativist? Not at all. For Cassirer, human beings come into a world that is inevitably mediated by symbolic forms. This, in a strict sense, means that human beings live in a world that is marked by ideality. But we need to be clear that this mark of ideality inherent in human engagement with the world is not “idealism” in the common use of the word in which we project some ideal as an ethical, moral, or political good. The mark of ideality simply means here that there are no facts that are given without a meaning beyond themselves. Here, Cassirer is following Kant in that our

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thinking is transcendental in a very specific sense. What this means for our purposes is that we do not find that our direct experience is made up of received sensations, which we then build upon in order to have ideas that grasp the facts inherent in those sensations. The “bare givens” for Cassirer are only distinguishable as facts in the analysis of symbolic forms of judgment. Concretely, of course, we have appearances and experience. But these so-called concrete elements only come to us as already constituted by space and time and as aspects of an order of nature given to us by such a constitution. A synthetic a priori judgment, which has been one of the most difficult ideas to understand in the work of Kant, returns us to the Copernican Revolution within Kant’s transcendental idealism. For nothing “is” independent of the constructive, constitutive forms of the transcendental imagination, which are, in turn, the basis in Kant for the categories of the understanding. We are always operating within a whole—even in later work by Kant where such a whole occurs as a regulative ideal—where the connectedness of the elements as well as their reciprocal relations with each other is indeed the first original fact. A synthetic a priori judgment, then, is one in which this relatedness must be thought in order for there to be a fact at all in our human experience. We cannot look to an original datum and break it down in mere analysis. We must incorporate this relatedness in order for facts to even inhere in our sense of the world. However, we do not do this as a choice in Kant or Cassirer. In Kant, the world of constituted objects in space and time is given to us behind our backs in transcendental apperception. In Cassirer, the mediation of symbolic forms is also, in a certain sense, given to us behind our backs, touching on what Kant called “a secret of the soul.” The key difference here, of course, is not one between images and symbols in that every imagined object that appears is always in time and space. But that symbolic material, even scientific symbolic material, can always be reworked. “It is not enough,” as Cassirer put the matter, “to pick up isolated data of our past experience; we must really re-collect them, we must organize and synthesize them, and assemble them into a focus of thought.”12 In the recollection described here we glean a sense of memory, but even memory “implies a process of recognition and identification, an ideational process of a very complex sort” where time is ordered, “corresponding to that other schema we call space.”13 Such a symbolic schematization of the sensuous impressions of the world gives us experience and is one of the unique ways in which Cassirer famously

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reworks Kant, along with his elaboration of the meaning of synthetic judgments. Both the schema and synthetic judgments will be discussed at greater length in Chapter 1, but for now we just want to note the insistence by Cassirer that there should remain no significance between the constitutive and the regulative aspects of knowledge, as there is in Kant. Symbolization is not something we just impose on the world, but it is both “how we are in the world” and “who we are in the world.” The difference, then, between human beings and animals is not a question of rationality. Rather, human beings live in a richer symbolic universe. This symbolic universe is one marked by a unique human distinction between actual objects and possible objects. Indeed, Cassirer remarks that “a symbol has no actual existence as a part of the physical world; it has a ‘meaning.’ ”14 If this fundamental ability to distinguish between actual objects and possible objects is impaired by a malady of the mind or infirmity of the body, Cassirer wonders, but does not answer, if symbolic thought is even possible.15 Again, for Cassirer, Kant only became clear about this distinction between the actual and the possible in the Critique of the Power of Judgment. In this work, Kant distinguishes between human beings and other animals as well as between human beings and God by saying that ours is a derivative intelligence. In the idea of God, both thinking and making things actual are seen as one and the same process, indeed one and the same moment. Animals, and Cassirer will develop this at great length, cannot think possible objects and do not have the same sensibility of prospect and retrospect. Our derivative intelligence, however, is precisely what creates the field of possible objects, not only in practical philosophy but also in science itself. To such an end, Cassirer reminds us that in the development of mathematical discourse theoreticians “were constantly under the necessity of enlarging their field and introducing ‘new’ numbers,” which were viewed as “highly paradoxical” and for many “aroused the deepest suspicions” because they were “thought to be absurd or impossible.”16 Imaginary numbers and non-Euclidean geometry entered into the field of mathematics through the sort of derivative intelligence that can bring about a new horizon of possible objects that would enlarge a symbolic form. Cassirer was a great lover of the poet and philosopher Goethe and one of his favorite lines was “to live in the ideal world is to treat the impossible as if it were possible.”17 Cassirer argued that Rousseau invoked the hypothetical method to keynote possible objects when he sought to replace the imprisoned

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social man of the third estate with the natural man.18 Indeed, Cassirer saw the very use of the state of nature as an enhancing myth in Rousseau for the purposes of describing with all the vividness and intensity of myth what this state of nature might have entailed. But as a hypothetical experiment in the imagination it also pointed to a possible object—a world in which human beings could live more justly together. There is a specific sense, then, in which Cassirer’s interpretation of Kant emphasizes possibility, including utopian possibility. “The great mission of the Utopia,” Cassirer remarks, “is to make room for the possible as opposed to a passive acquiescence in the present actual state of affairs. It is symbolic thought which overcomes the natural inertia of man and endows him with a new ability, the ability constantly to reshape his human universe.”19

modernity and transformative revolution We still need to draw out the integral connection between the philosophy of symbolic forms derived by Cassirer and emphasize its relationship and importance to revolutionary transformation. Cassirer clearly had an ethical project, and it was one that fully recognized both the brutal crisis of World War II and a deeper crisis of how humanity had seemed to lose direction and become increasingly unable to address who are we as human beings and our place in the universe. For Cassirer, there were at least two great ethical lessons often made explicit in his four-volume work on the philosophy of symbolic forms. First, there is no clear hierarchy of symbolic forms and, as a result, no obvious hierarchy of human beings who represent the highest form of reason and the highest form of thinking. Implicit in the work of Cassirer is a way of thinking about our world—in the name of the plurality and diversity by which human beings come to know their world—that emerges as a powerful challenge to hegemonic forms of study that would place the Western world at the center of all things. This insistence on pluralism, as opposed to relativism, is itself an extremely important philosophical maneuver to free us from the sort of debate that has bogged down so much of the discussion about how we are to respect divergent forms of life and the symbolic universes they represent. Second, we come to the world in a symbolic universe where symbolization is not reducible to a subjective capacity; and as we enlarge our perspective about who we are our humanity is enhanced. Cassirer, living through the vi-

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olence of Nazi Germany and exiled from his country as a Jew, was aware of the dire fragility of our symbolic universe. Unlike Herbert Marcuse or Theodor Adorno, Cassirer did not try to critically analyze the powers of advanced capitalism that seem to flatten the symbolic universe into a onedimensional society and totally administered world. As we shall see, the pessimism of both these thinkers can be lifted, in part, through an engagement with the philosophy of symbolic forms. Nor did Cassirer, like Jürgen Habermas, attempt to salvage reason from instrumental rationality by developing an overarching conception of reason embedded in the universal pragmatics of speech. Cassirer was undoubtedly one of the first to understand the significance of the linguistic turn in philosophy. He understood consciousness as necessarily intersubjective and as representing the reality that we live together in a symbolic form. But his difference from Habermas is crucial, precisely because he does not attempt to save the project of modernity or consider such modernity the highest form of reason. We will turn to these thinkers, and their critiques, later in the book. Although these two ethical lessons alone would make Cassirer important in our postcolonial world, not the least because the thinking of possibility becomes the heart of practical philosophy, there is another aspect to the work of Cassirer that takes us back to the ideas of the great revolutionary thinker Frantz Fanon. Fanon always argued that revolution has to be a thoroughgoing cultural process in which what is at-stake is nothing less than how we symbolize a “new” humanity and how we bring into actuality a new set of social institutions worthy of that new humanity. There is, then, a symbolic dimension to revolution. But Cassirer is even more particularly important because he was one of the first thinkers to recognize the myth of the state, and with it the myth of the significance surrounding the seizure of state power as the ultimate goal of revolution. For Cassirer, the state becomes mythical when it becomes identified with a group of people who claim that they, in all their natural immediacy, are the inevitable wielders of authority and force. We not only see the myth of the state as Cassirer carefully analyzed it in Nazi Germany, but we also see it in some constructions of Lenin and the existing leaders of postcolonial states. The myth of the state remains extremely relevant for our time as we try to examine and think about the symbolic form of what we know of as the nation-state including the symbolic, legal, and ethical constitution of a people. Thus revolution can have, and usually

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does have, a mythic and complex symbolic dimension. One of those dimensions, we will argue, is the actual constitution in a postcolonial nation state. As a result, we will discuss the South African Constitution as an example across both dimensions—both as myth and as an ideal of the newly constituted people. We are, of course, not arguing that Cassirer has all or most of the answers of what we must do in a complex world to fight for the big ideals of justice, freedom, and equality—all connected to another ideal, one of human dignity. But we are suggesting that his philosophy shifts the ground from some debates that have become tired and seemingly turn us back to the same set of either/or propositions. It is in the spirit of what Hannah Arendt has called an enlarged mentality, so necessary to thinking in a complex world, that we offer a sustained reflection on Ernst Cassirer and his philosophy of symbolic forms.

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The World of Symbolic Forms: Ernst Cassirer and the Legacy of Immanuel Kant

introduction The legacy of Ernst Cassirer has been forgotten by much of the academy today. As a result, we have lost sight of the carefully devised architectonic he developed regarding the functioning and relevance of symbolic forms in the constituting, cohering sense of our symbolic worlds. To understand such a richly woven philosophic argument, one must follow Cassirer along his own trajectory of intellectual thought and engage with his unique relationship to thinkers in the tradition of German Idealism. This chapter carefully follows the ways in which Cassirer reworked the schema and idea of synthetic judgment in the work of Immanuel Kant, thus making possible a sophisticated philosophy of symbolic forms that is both regulative and ideational. Concluding this chapter is a review of the way in which language as a symbolic form operates in Cassirer through universal applicability and vivification.

schematization and synthetic judgment As mentioned in the introduction, the work of Ernst Cassirer begins as a highly original interpretation of the later work of Immanuel Kant in Critique

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of the Power of Judgment.1 Cassirer accepts some of Kant’s radical insights on critical idealism as the basis of his philosophy. As we will see, Cassirer dramatically reworks the notion of the schema in Kant as well as that of synthetic judgment. Perhaps even more importantly, by arguing that in the third Critique there is no longer a division between constitutive and regulative ideas, Cassirer undermines the long debate in Kantian scholarship about the necessary division between a law-like nature and the possibility of human freedom. To fully understand such a critical reworking of Kant, we have to review the fundamental aspects of the Copernican Revolution devised by Kant. Kant argued that the mystery of science, and more specifically an adequate explanation as to why mathematics is able to apply to our world, could not be found if one began with the idea that there were elementary facts of nature and that the scientific method proceeded from those elementary facts through induction to more abstract principles. If one began in that manner—and Kant argued that David Hume, despite being the greatest empiricist of his time, proceeded through exactly such a maneuver—then one could only end in skepticism about all scientific law. The best one could hope for is mere mathematical probabilities absent of an understanding of a law-like nature. Famously, in Hume, the imagination is passive.2 Sense impressions merely push against the mind and produce primordial images. Ideas, in Hume, are sense impressions that have lost their vividness because they are of a second order, away from the intense experience of a world that makes an impression on us. Simply put, experience imposes on us and leaves behind an impression. The imagination, then, is only a record of the force of such an impression. In contradistinction, Kant answered Hume—offering an opening to Cassirer to then explain why a symbolic form can apply to an existing world—by fundamentally rethinking the work of the imagination. In Kant, the world is reproduced by a transcendental imagination that lies behind our reason and all objects of materiality. Anything that exists, for Kant, only exists in the form of space and time. These forms are ultimately what give us a law-like nature. Kant held that there are different functions of the imagination and that the reproductive imagination has to be grasped as the basis of our world. It is important to note here, of course, that the reproductive imagination is not something that people simply engage as a capacity; it is, in a profound sense, something that is done to us. Yet without the reproduction of our world in space and time, which is what gives us our

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ability to grasp nature as law-like, there would be no explanation as to why mathematics actually applies to our world. Thus, at the heart of the Copernican Revolution is the idea that the transcendental forms of apperception give us a world in which there is a law-like nature that can be studied by science. As Kant so often repeats, experience is the first work of the understanding. To get to how understanding, and of course the famous categories of the understanding, actually grasps a law-like nature, we need to grapple with two of the most difficult and controversial ideas in Kant: the schema and the idea of synthetic judgment. Kant tells us that “thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.”3 In order to understand how we are to relate to a world given to us by intuitions, which always takes us back to the transcendental imagination, we have to grasp what Kant means by his use of the term “the schema.” On one approach to the schema, we can see it as the underlying representation in which forms of the understanding and sensuous intuitions are melded together so that they can constitute experience. While the schema compresses the categories of the understanding, it is not reducible to a category of the understanding, neither does it contain more than what the categories can supply. It is other to both because it is what makes possible an experience that is dependent on logical form and sensuous content. Yet the schema is also that which neither could yield by themselves. From this perspective, the schema might seem reducible to a medium—something that sensuous experience must move through. But a passive conception of the schema would be inadequate because it actually works on the material of sensuous intuition. If we think of the schema as doing work, then how exactly does this “mysterious power of the soul” actually operate? Here, the key is to remember that sensuous apprehension always appears in the universal form of time. The schema, then, must be a relation of the concepts of the understanding to temporal appearances. These temporal appearances are precisely what are formed into a law-like nature in which, in a profound sense, objects are spatialized by being separated from one another in a temporal order. Thus the world of nature we study and grasp under mathematics proceeds through the schematization of the relation between concepts of the understanding and temporal appearances. As we know in Hume, the problem of cause and effect was unsolvable except as a matter of probability. But, in Kant, cause and effect is a law and we can understand the law of causality as what allows us to predict the ne-

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cessity that one action will lead to a reaction. The word “necessity,” as used here, is crucial since Kant sought to overcome the skepticism of Hume. It is the schema that not only connects sensuous intuition to the understanding but also does so by ordering all temporal appearances. This primordial ordering gives us objectivity in the sense of necessity in our scientific world. Thus the schemata of the pure concepts are schemata of sensibility as well as the first realization of the categories as they give us any law-like, temporalized world. As such, the schema is not merely logical but is itself an operation inherent in the form given to us by the transcendental imagination. Kant refers, at times, to the schema as a phenomenon, but we know that phenomena, in Kant, are not the things themselves that always exist beyond our grasp. The schema is a phenomenon in that it is an active, constitutive part of our reality, even if it only sometimes appears to our understanding as a marvelous “secret of the soul.” Without the schematization of all that exists as already temporalized, there would be no adequate explanation for why the categories of the understanding are not only logical but also applicable to a world that yields mathematical objectivity of determinative judgment. If we did not have a schematized world of temporalized appearances that work through the transcendental imagination and the inevitable arising of experience out of space and time, there would be no philosophical explanation of why we have a world comprehensible by science. If such were true, we would be back with Hume in the world of probability. Those Kantians who tried to argue that Kant’s notion of the transcendental apprehension, including the mysterious schema, is nothing but vague metaphysics must look instead to the logic of the categories, which fundamentally undercut the Copernican Revolution achieved by Kant.4 Although it is beyond the scope of our argument here, it is important to note that, at least for Kant, such undercutting also undermines the possibility of any scientific knowledge that claims objectivity for its laws.5 We will return shortly to how Cassirer reworks the Kantian schema, but at this point we can grasp what Kant means by the term “transcendental”: forms under which appearances in space and time become knowable as they are schematized and able to be grasped as logical factors. A transcendental deduction shows how these logical factors are possible and how knowledge as we have it is possible. So far we have seen how Kant has shown us that nature is understood in accordance with forms of the transcendental appercep-

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tion. The content of appearances may be otherwise than these forms, but it is only as an intelligible order in the schema that they can be grasped. We do not have anything in our direct empirical experience—as if such a thing existed—to confirm that the world is ordered in any fashion that would make it law-like in nature. Even the so-called bare datum, if it is an element of knowledge, must be transcendental according to Kant’s unique sense of the term. It is only distinguishable as a moment in an overall theoretical scheme of knowledge. Everything that appears is already constituted through the schema, such that we are never are able to reach the bare datum but only schematized elements. In the very possession of experience, then, even in bare facts there is already a synthesis—a necessary relationship according to the categories of the understanding, the foremost being the law of causality. This law of causality will, in turn, be the warrant for all inferences between cause and effect. Kant attempts to provide us with a philosophical proof of how the possession of experience implies a synthetic unity of the manifold and how this, in turn, guarantees further inferences in his analytic of concepts. For Kant, certainly, the deduction of the categories was only a small part of the task, as he still had to make intelligible the complex constituting of experience and knowledge in which sensuous intuition and logical concepts along with all objects are synthesized in the imagination. Thus, the analytic of concepts had to be supplemented for Kant by the analytic of principles, which foregrounds the schema. Kant often relied on great scientists as examples of those who operated from hypothetical facts and not simply bare datum. For example, the law of falling bodies that Galileo or Newton “discovered” is not, for Kant, something derivable from empirical deduction. It can only be analyzed from within the law-like nature that explains causality. For example, when Galileo conducted his famous experiment and dropped two objects off the Tower of Pisa, he was not acting blindly without anticipating the results. For Kant, this experiment, and other such experiments of great scientists, are already guided by laws that are at the very least incorporated as the very basis of the scientific hypothesis. Hypotheses imply a law-like nature, which for Kant explains why hypotheses are often translated or articulated into mathematical propositions. Most of the laws derived by Newton, of course, are mathematical propositions. We will come back to how Cassirer reinterprets Kant, in particular his insight into the telos of nature in the second half of the

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Critique of the Power of Judgment. The way Cassirer reads the third Critique can help us understand why scientists do not remain content with the conception of some particular determinate law but want, instead, to understand all scientific laws in terms of the greater whole. Think, for instance, of the way Einstein searched his entire life for a unified field theory. For now, we want to emphasize why Kant thought a scientifically graspable reality demands synthetic judgment. For Kant, as we have seen, no thing is graspable as an experienceable object independent of the constitutive forms of time and space that organize experience according to the unity of the manifold. We are always operating within a reality constituted in this manner. Ultimately, the specificity of the connectedness of the elements through the categories of understanding are only graspable through a particular operation of the imagination that gives us facts in our world. Simply put, to understand facts as a system of relatedness demands a synthetic unity because something must be added to what empiricists would call the “bare datum of experience” for there to even be experience. We can dig deeper and sail higher into the natural world, and scientists will always strive to do so, but for Kant they will literally get nowhere and discover nothing if they do not proceed with a fundamental grasp that facts are only present in an already synthesized natural order. Famously, a synthetic judgment adds something new to an analytic proposition. To put it in more common parlance: synthesis adds on and analysis breaks down. But, in Kant, the world itself only appears at all through the working of an original synthesis rooted in the transcendental imagination. Thus, without a synthetic a priori judgment, there are no objects—and no world— which leaves us, to paraphrase the famous phrase from Hegel, “in a night in which all things are black.”

the regulative, teleological dimensions of symbol making In the first Critique, Kant was primarily concerned with demonstrating the lawfulness of nature so as to explain how mathematical propositions embedded in the new physics of his time were possible.6 But by the time Kant wrote the third Critique he was also concerned with defending and asserting the autonomy and independence of biology. Most philosophers of science, in the time of Kant and well before, had tried to force biology and physics into some type of unity. But Kant saw a dynamism in biological forms de-

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serving of its own explanation. To advance this idea, Kant fully developed the notion of a regulative ideal. First, we will examine the importance of a regulative ideal for Cassirer as it functions in biology. The ultimate significance, for Cassirer, of Kant’s grappling with the uniqueness of biology is that it opened up an understanding of how all of human knowledge could be understood through a telos of symbolic forms. As Cassirer rightfully reminds us: In the Critique of Judgment, Kant wanted to prove that such a point of view is not only justified but absolutely necessary even if, from inner methodological reasons of the system, he makes a strict distinction between this necessity and that which we must ascribe to a mathematical natural science. The necessity in the latter case has a “constitutive” significance, whereas that of the former is only “regulative”; but this does not mean that one of the two factors in the construction of knowledge can be reduced to the other and dispensed with. The concept of purpose can never be struck out of the whole of natural knowledge and absorbed into the idea of cause. For even if it is not an independent principle for the explanation of nature, still the approach to one of her most important domains would be barred without it, and the knowledge of phenomena would therefore be incomplete and defective. Kant limited the principle of purpose to this role of taking cognizance of nature, which must be distinguished from mathematical knowledge of it. We can never adequately understand organized beings and their inner possibilities, how they exist merely through the mechanical principles of nature. Here the principle of purpose functions, however, not as a mysterious power in the original ground of things but rather as a rule for gaining knowledge, so that it has at any rate a “regulative” significance.7

There are at least two key deployments of the notion of a regulative ideal found in the third Critique that were crucial for Cassirer. First, as we saw in physics, the forms of scientific knowledge function as rules by which bare datum can be represented as a series of identifiable elements in relation with one another. Nature, as Cassirer rightfully explained, seemed to give Kant a new set of problems for establishing a unity that did not constitute particulars but instead served to regulate such particulars. What Kant envisioned was a dynamic unity, the kind of unity for a phenomenon

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that develops over time and has a telos implicit in its individual form. To understand such a phenomenon, then, we project as a regulative ideal a principle of formal purposiveness in order to grasp the significance of individual form in nature. As we have seen in physics, for any law to be apprehended the whole must also be conceptual in our mind. But since all forms of nature are developmental and, in a certain sense, ever-changing, the whole we project is not underneath such forms of nature but instead regulates our approach to understanding. Again, although it is beyond our immediate discussion here, the two parts of the third Critique are held together by the way Kant introduces a new way to think about the universal and the particular in aesthetic judgment. For the purpose of biology, we project onto nature a telos that ultimately helps us grasp its route of development and its significance as one natural form fits into another natural form. In turn, this dynamism leads to the second critical aspect of the Critique of the Power of Judgment for Cassirer. Second, because we project a telos onto the natural forms that we study, the form of purposiveness itself seems to push beyond any static endpoint of study. The forms of natural phenomena seem to point to greater unity and a comprehension of how things fit together in our symbolic understanding of the world. The dynamic aspect of this unity means that seemingly ultimate laws of nature—ones proven adequate to account for the natural forms we have discovered—actually demand our search for a higher order of unity that seems to inhere in the very idea of purposiveness. The science that studies this purposiveness seeks out an ever-greater unity. The key to advances in science (in both physics and biology) is that new forms are demanded by any explanation, as the ordering of nature seems to be increasingly comprehensive and precise. But in biology the search for the whole is itself dynamic, yet in a different way, in that the wholeness of organic beings would have to comprehend our place in the universe as well. In biology Cassirer found Kant to take us to the point where the formal purposiveness that we project onto natural forms has to include the scientist who studies those natural forms. The scientist is implicit in Kantian philosophy. But there is a daring twist at the end of the Critique of the Power of Judgment that turns the question at hand toward freedom. Perhaps a nature fashioned in this way comes to us precisely so that a human creature studying nature can, indeed, grasp it.8 The higher purpose in nature and the telos inherent in it might be regulated by the special place human beings have in the cosmos, as creatures who are both a part of

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natural life and able to detach themselves in order to study it. For Cassirer, this study of nature demands a certain freedom, as we are the ones who regulate our own knowledge by the purpose we find in such knowledge. Yet our higher purpose may be that we have been granted this freedom to study nature in just such a way because it is part of a greater purpose that includes our freedom. Famously, of course, for Kant the only freedom available to a creature determined by the laws of nature is to issue a specific kind of law unto the self, a law of our own making.9 This law is autonomous in that it involves the harmonious conforming of our duty with the demands of the categorical imperative. Kant was very aware that in order to preserve freedom he had created a kind of dualism in the finite creature. As phenomenal creatures we are a part of nature and also determined by its laws. As noumenal creatures we are able to impose a formal law upon ourselves where we guide our moral action in accord with the pure form of universality. But in the Critique of the Power of Judgment Kant seeks, at least as a regulative ideal, reconciliation between freedom and nature by projecting a purposiveness of nature to create the kind of creature who could study organic and natural forms through the projection of a telos of greater unity. Such a greater unity would have to include the very human being who was free enough to study nature. Indeed, as Cassirer has pointed out, the moral image of the world offered at the end of the Critique of the Power of Judgment is one that unites teleological ideas with natural and moral purposiveness. Such reconciliation between freedom and nature does indeed demand the mediation of the imagination to project out a historical possibility that ultimately envisions the purpose of nature as the freedom of humanity. We will return to the study of history by Cassirer later in this book, but for now it is important to simply note that he was developing a central insight by Kant: History is only given meaning if we project a telos onto it that allows us to read history back from such a telos. This understanding of history, of course, follows from a fundamental insight by Kant: If there cannot be bare facts of physics, and if organic forms defy static apprehension demanding the projection of purposiveness, then we should certainly have to grasp history through the projection of a telos. Ultimately, for Cassirer, Kant’s approach to biology unraveled the relationship between constitutive and regulative ideals as well as revealing the dualism between freedom and nature. It is important to note that this is indeed

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a very strong reading of Kant, but it is one that directs Cassirer toward his more comprehensive understanding of symbolic forms as being comprehensible through a projected horizon of possibility. If Cassirer first grasped the significance of formal purposiveness in biology as a deepening of what Kant meant by a regulative ideal, then he ultimately comes to take such an understanding as the entire basis of his philosophy of symbolic forms. Cassirer has, indeed, given us a new twist in suggesting that critical theory for Kant is teleological at its very core.10 For Cassirer, Kant’s move in the third Critique was to break down the full significance of the constitutive, regulative aspects of knowledge. It has become commonplace to argue that freedom can be found in the iterability of linguistic meaning, so that we can never be fully determined by social construction.11 But, for Cassirer, there is a much deeper meaning to freedom that inheres in the way he overcomes the dualism in Kant. All symbolic forms point to a horizon of possibility inherent in the regulative ideal that marks them as a form of knowledge. In every symbolic form there is an “I standpoint.” However, a part of any symbolic chain is always also other to such an I standpoint even as it is marked out by it. In every symbolic form the I standpoint, as a judgmental possibility, is expressed differently. There is, however, an I standpoint—and for Cassirer, freedom is always integrally tied to the freedom to judge—in all symbolic forms. Such an I standpoint is not a unique development true only of the modern European subject, according to Cassirer: Every kind of symbolic formation works in its own way and with its own aim toward such a pure sense of the I, which is specifically distinguished from a mere ego-meaning. This sense of the I appears in language most characteristically where it is able to achieve the kind of expression most adequate to it, where it sharply and clearly distinguishes the “is” of the copular—which expresses the validity and stability of a pure relation—from assertions of mere existence, assertions about spatial and temporal Dasein.12

Judgment in all forms testifies to a subject not lost among the phenomena of any so-called empirical world, even if it is ultimately a part of a world of symbolization. Outside of the symbolic form, there is no subject and there is no world. But Cassirer gives a new meaning to how the I standpoint, and

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the practice of judgment that inheres in it, always takes us back to the distinction between the actual and the possible. Symbolic form in Cassirer only coheres as it points beyond itself to a horizon of possibility, even if that possibility will be comprehended differently in different symbolic forms. The objects we denote are only perceived in the first instance through our whole previous experience of the world revealed in a symbolic form. Thus, for Cassirer, nothing is truly a “symbol” in his sense of the word if it is only a mark of something that is already given and merely allows us to recall it again. For Cassirer, our being-in-the-world is integrally tied to the projection of possibility, including the possibility of an I standpoint inseparable from the mark of ideality that we must carry with us as finite creatures. The space of judgment is part of the breakdown between the constitutive and the regulative, the free and the natural, and it is inseparable from the form of symbolization in which such judgment becomes comprehensible. This allows us to claim our freedom and to assume our responsibility. To understand the way we express our lives in symbolic form with others, we must turn next to how language was viewed by Cassirer.

the vivifying, universal applicability of language It is not surprising that Cassirer began his four-volume magnum opus Philosophy of Symbolic Forms with a book dedicated to language. Cassirer uses three dimensions to distinguish symbolic forms, explaining their coherent formation: significance, representation, and expression. These three dimensions are used as an organizational tool throughout all of his discussions on different symbolic forms. Significance, for Cassirer, is crucial for understanding his conception of language; it is the possession and ability to work with an established set of symbols. Symbols are established by both the history and the convention behind their meanings so that these symbols come to have universal applicability for those whose lives are embedded in a particular symbolic form. In language it is this universal applicability that allows human beings to designate an object that can be repeatedly recognized as the same. Universal applicability also returns us to the importance Cassirer places on the distinction between actuality and possibility. Universal designation, then, allows us to expressively name and designate objects even if they are not present before us. To draw out the significance for a human being of a designated world of universal names, Cassirer movingly tells the story of how Helen Keller became

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mesmerized by a world of objects that arose before her even in her blindness and deafness as she was finally able to give those objects names. According to Cassirer, a human world arose for Helen Keller only when she was able to master the art of naming and grasp the universal applicability that inheres in language. For Helen Keller, famously, “water is water is water.” Said differently, we are able to learn what water means with all of the experiences we have with water, ranging from putting our hands under a faucet to running across the falling tides coming in from the sea. Water can operate in many different ways for human beings, yet we are still able to grasp it as a universal object. For Cassirer, the capacity of objects to have a name of potential universal applicability is one of the main, outstanding characteristics of human language. Linguistic designation not only gives us a world in symbol but also provides an experiential relationship to the world in the actuality of everyday living. This means that different languages that name objects with the status of universal applicability are indeed representing different things in the world. What is important for Cassirer is not the designated world per se or the way words actually function as names; rather, Cassirer aims to explain how human beings who speak different languages actually live in different and divergent worlds of both actual and possible objects. Despite the vast differences in the representational fields in which we live as human beings, such fields always occur in language as a symbolic system with universal applicability. For example, the Inuit language may indeed have more than thirty different names for snow, making our reality of snow seem lackluster in comparison. The key for Cassirer is the general function of the architectonic form of human language, which, of course, includes universal applicability. However, such universal applicability is only one of the primary functions of language; the second is what Cassirer calls “vivification.” Cassirer reminds us that the architectonic form of language vivifies so as to allow language to make an individual sign speak the whole of the world to those wielding a particular language. It is both universal applicability and the vivifying power of language that allow human beings to translate for one another their representational fields of experience even as they live in different worlds of symbolic form. The possibility of translation emerges through a constantly negotiated struggle to come to terms with the designation and significance of words vivified in other languages. Images, for Cassirer, are given, but symbols are created; the two, of course, always work together since, for Cassirer, it is the symbol and not the schema that is the

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active mediating form connecting sensuous reality with a meaningful world of experience. How we “see” is within a field of vision given to us by symbolic form. Could those of us who speak English ever “see” a rich diversity of objects that we now only see as snow? Could we learn to “see” the world differently by embedding ourselves in the language of the other? Cassirer would respond in the affirmative: For, on the one hand, speech is here the vehicle of any world perspective, the medium through which thought must pass before it can find itself and assume a definite theoretical form; but, on the other hand, just this sort of form, this definite perspective has to be presupposed, in order to explain the particular character of any given language, its special way of seeing and denoting.13

It is not only the inherent flexibility given in the infinite malleability of symbolic forms understood as always opening into a horizon of possibility that would make such a feat of translation possible. Those who wish to pass over such a linguistic bridge must open themselves to new ways of envisioning and experiencing the world. They must allow their own habits of living to be interrupted in order to enter the divergent worlds offered in other languages. Through his careful analysis, Cassirer contributes to the continuing debate of commensurability and incommensurability, suggesting that by grasping architectonic forms of language we can not only understand how human language designates objects but also come to respect that languages actually create different worlds. By struggling with our own experience of the enabling, and also limiting, power of the form of designation in which we live, we can potentially open ourselves to the worlds of others. For Cassirer, universal applicability and vivification certainly give us a world of designated objects, but one that is living and filled with metaphoric richness. Designation and versatility, in turn, allow human beings to abstract relationships between objects so that only relationships are left as the focus of symbolization. Symbols, then, can be brought into a relational system, such as mathematics, that is then further abstracted from our world of designated objects and the rich field of metaphoric transference. It is the versatility of symbolization that Cassirer often refers to as the free-ideality of language, allowing human beings to not only abstract between

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the relations of symbols but also reflect on the meaning of those symbols and by so doing on the architectonic form of language. Reflection is broadly described by Cassirer as the power to isolate and focus upon certain elements of objects while excluding other elements of objects. This process of reflection is an imaginative act that is close to the bracketing that Edmund Husserl calls us to in his phenomenology. We bracket, or reflect, so as to change our focus from our natural attitude. Such a reflection not only allows us to think abstractly but also to detach ourselves from our habits of seeing, allowing us to see things differently and think about things differently as we ultimately give new meaning to the relationships which have now been put into a different focus. We are enabled by our human power of symbolization, yet in another sense we are limited by it. As Cassirer put the matter: Man cannot escape from his own achievement. He cannot but adopt the conditions of his own life. No longer in a merely physical universe, man lives in a symbolic universe. Language, myth, art, and religion are parts of this universe. They are the varied threads which weave the symbolic net, the tangled web of human experience. All human progress in thought and experience refines upon and strengthens this net. No longer can man confront reality immediately; he cannot see it, as it were, face to face. Physical reality seems to recede in proportion as man’s symbolic activity advances. Instead of dealing with the things themselves man is in a sense constantly conversing with himself. He has so enveloped himself in linguistic forms, in artistic images, in mythical symbols or religious rites that he cannot see or know anything except by the interposition of this artificial medium. His situation is the same in the theoretical as in the practical sphere. Even here man does not live in a world of hard facts, or according to his immediate needs and desires. He lives rather in the midst of imaginary emotions, in hopes and fears, in illusions and disillusions, in his fantasies and dreams. “What disturbs and alarms man,” said Epictetus, “are not the things, but his opinions and fancies about things.”14

Thus, for Cassirer, symbolic forms give us a tangled web of human experience, which can always be rewoven. That is to say, even if symbols are given to us they also can be remade, not only through reflection but also through the metaphoric transference in vivification.

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With an understanding of universal applicability, vivification, and versatility, Cassirer reminds us that even within the frame of universal applicability any object we denote with a word is only experienced in the first instance in light of the whole previous experience of a world already revealed to us in language. In the case of Helen Keller, what arises when she can use language is not simply the object of water but an entire human world she now shares with others who speak that language. An object, then, is inscribed “in meaning” in this shared world of experience. When Helen Keller breaks into language she is finally able to connect to other human beings and is no longer shut off from their world. There is always such a shared whole in the remaking of any particular given, even through metaphoric transference, that implies we see likeness where we once saw unlikeness since the givens of our world only take on meaning in the relationship of our shared context of experience. For readers more familiar with Ludwig Wittgenstein, Cassirer is emphasizing that linguistic meaning arises only in a form of life and that any language game makes sense only within that form of life. Wittgenstein focused on how we make sense to each other. Cassirer is certainly interested in how we make sense to each other in a shared form of life. But given how crucial the distinction between actuality and possibility is in his thinking of symbolic forms, he is also interested in how human beings open up translatable channels to one another and give significance to new possible symbolic worlds. Again, Cassirer retains the core of the Kantian conception of consciousness even as he reworks it. For Kant, consciousness is the holding of the many contexts of experience together in unity. But for Cassirer, this synthetic unity is no longer given to us in the transcendental imagination alone because the images of that imagination are always mediated through symbolic forms. Symbolic forms express the meaning of experience in and through the repetition of the same content, which is, however, always represented against a projected whole, including the horizon of possibility. Here we return to the other dimensions of symbolic forms: expression and representation. Particular symbols, and words in the case of language, are full of meaning conferred upon them by the totality of experience already represented. This is why Helen Keller gleefully realized that when she could wield the word “water” there was a whole world waiting to be discovered, one she knew could be at her fingertips. The symbolic, however, does not hold solely to the image or content taken as representative or expressive of meaning. It pertains no less to the forms in which meaning is intelligible such that we

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are, in a deep sense, provided with an intelligible world only as part of a form of life given to us in our language. Our images are symbolized in order to know anything at all, and these symbols are completely intermeshed with the phenomenon of our selves. There is no object outside of language as a linguistic form, and yet the word becomes a sensuous reality when it vivifies such objects. This basic symbolic function can travel in an infinite number of directions, and language understood as a symbolic form embodies all such directions. Meaning is realized, revealed, changed, and enriched in human consciousness. This consciousness, in turn, always unfolds in a world of representations that seemingly give us a world that makes sense, yet it is one in which sense can be broken and meaning can be remade. Cassirer was one of the first thinkers to argue that it is this symbolic work in all of its dimensions that marks us as uniquely human. But we are human in a continuum with other creatures. Cassirer was one of the first thinkers to recognize the complex intellectual processes through which animals relate to the world. Animals, according to Cassirer, are capable of grasping signs— particularly more advanced animals—and indeed they can also use signs to express themselves to one another. Humans, of course, also use language for expression. The difference that Cassirer wants to emphasize takes us back to the three organizing dimensions of symbolic forms—representation, expression, and significance. Cassirer was a careful reader of the writing and research on animals during his lifetime. Because animals can express themselves and grasp rudimentary signs, they have a sense of identity and, as Cassirer suggests, also a rudimentary sense of spatialization and perhaps even temporalization: If by intelligence we understand either adjustment to the immediate environment or adaptive modification of environment, we must certainly ascribe to animals a comparatively highly developed intelligence. It must also be conceded that not all animal actions are governed by the presence of an immediate stimulus. The animal is capable of all sorts of detours in its reactions. It may learn not only to use implements but even to invent tools for its purposes. Hence some psychobiologists do not hesitate to speak of a creative or constructive imagination in animals. But neither this intelligence nor this imagination is of the specifically human type. In short, we may say that the animal possesses a practical imagination and

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intelligence whereas man alone has developed a new form: a symbolic imagination and intelligence.15

The key difference, for Cassirer, is that animals do not experience significance in the same way as human beings. As we have seen, for Cassirer, significance begins with an established set of principles. Symbols, as we have also seen, must be established first through conventional meaning so that they come to have universal applicability for those fluent in a given language. It is this universal applicability that allows human beings to designate an object that can be recognized as the same object, and this process can be engaged repeatedly even when the object is absent. The images animals have, according to Cassirer, are triggered by receiving information from the concrete world. They cannot, in other words, move from the abstract to the concrete. Again, to return to the example of Helen Keller, in the English language the word “water” can operate in many different ways in the experience of human beings. Yet we are still able to give significance to water as a universalizable object. Animals, on the other hand, have a different experience of wetness and are incapable of expressing “wetness” outside of their practical experience of wetness because they do not have the symbolic system to designate it as one object separate from their experience of it. Given that animals have a rudimentary sense of identity, including likes and dislikes, they are able to express those likes and dislikes in accordance with wetness as a concrete experience. We have all seen the visceral, abject reaction by cats, most of them at least, if one of their paws gets wet. Cats may even remember to avoid an object associated with a particular experience of wetness. The difference is that this wetness can never be abstracted into a world in which water exists in its many forms. Again, this distinction takes us back to what Cassirer steadfastly believes makes us uniquely human. We are not only able to recognize water in its many different forms, but we are able to turn water into a metaphor so as to create a possible world of new objects and meaning. Animals live in a much more literal world of significance and simple representation. What has been said about animals is certainly enough to justify giving them rights, at least of a particular order. We can see how the insistence by Cassirer that human beings are symbolic rather than rational takes us out of some of the endless debates that insist on our rationality as a primary condition of humanity.

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conclusion Cassirer anticipated what has been called the linguistic turn in philosophy. Speech as we live in it, language as we write with it, and the form of life we share with others through such symbolic forms clearly turn us to an intersubjective field of meaning. It is Cassirer who first reworks Kant’s notion of consciousness as fundamentally intersubjective in that consciousness only proceeds through a shared symbolic universe. We also need to remember that for Cassirer, unlike some other philosophers who made the linguistic turn, it is never simply how we make sense to each other that needs to be explained. Language is one symbolic form, and it provides one way we are marked by an ideality through which we are able to live in the world differently than other creatures. That mark of ideality is what always keeps us open to possible new worlds that we can both envision and struggle to actualize. Cassirer, following his own interpretation of Kant, is in the end more interested in the possibility that his philosophy of symbolic forms keeps open than the explanation of how sense and meaning are made. Language, as fundamental as it is for Cassirer, is only one of many possible symbolic forms in which human beings come to know their world, live in it, and make sense of who they are and what they can become.

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The Word Magic of Being: On the Mythical Origins of Thinking

introduction Some might claim that despite the deep commitment to pluralism inherent within the philosophy of symbolic forms devised by Cassirer, we are still given an understanding of the human condition rooted in concepts birthed from Western philosophy. Denotation of the mythic human condition from within such a hegemonic framework, despite its progressive intentions, conceptually reduces the actual realities of people that exist in symbolic forms so seemingly different from our symbolic world. However, one needs to remember that Cassirer followed the writings and research of various anthropologists who were foremost and progressive given their time of study, and such research became the very matter of abstraction by which Cassirer defended that myth, too, is a symbolic form—alive and well in the worlds of the so-called other, but also in Western civilization. What unfolds in this chapter is a careful exposition following the ways in which Cassirer traced out the same powers of symbolic formation we previously encountered in the last chapter within mythic thinking. Nowhere in his studies does Cassirer explicitly label the archetypes of mythical thinking with Western concepts, but, as we will see, he stands mesmerized by them in a way that calls him to

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see the same human subject immersed in the world of myth as one can find walking down any “modern” street.

the struggle for pluralism Cassirer develops a complex, multilayered account of the origins of language that follows several attempted studies in practical anthropology outlining various examples of the unfolding of mythical forms, which correlates to mythical thinking. In turn, such work is used by Cassirer to show the long evolutionary development of language and human thinking as inexorably bound up and integral to one another. In no way is Cassirer trying to invoke an imagination of a primitive, indigenous past that must fully develop out of its mythic character in order to come into discursive language, and by way of corollary discursive thinking. Instead he reveals that the shared symbolic chain giving rise to a world of myth bears the same intelligibility as any symbolic form. This chapter aims to carefully detail the ways in which mythical thinking emerges for Cassirer in Language and Myth, tempered throughout for the purpose of keynoting our phenomenological coming into being through such forms. One might wonder why we primarily focus on the later work by Cassirer in Language and Myth. In the preface to the second volume of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Cassirer stands closer to Hegel in his understanding of phenomenology as a dialectical account of how the human spirit finally comes to know itself by reflecting on its past forms. In this text, it would seem that Cassirer, following Hegel, is studying mythico-religious consciousness only in order to dialectically grasp it as a step in the ladder of self-consciousness that finally understands its own mission in the higher forms of thinking we associate with modernity. What is commonly called the sensory consciousness, the content of the “world of perception”—which is further subdivided into distinct spheres of perception, into the sensory elements of color, tone, etc.— this is itself a product of abstraction, a theoretical elaboration of the “given.” Before self-consciousness rises to this abstraction, it lives in the world of the mythical consciousness, a world not of “things” and their “attributes” but of mythical potencies and powers, of demons and gods. If then, in accordance with Hegel’s demand, science is to provide the

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natural consciousness with a ladder leading to itself, it must first set this ladder a step lower.1

Indeed, Cassirer in the preface to this text goes so far as to suggest that the only way to keep myth from returning in our thinking is by grasping its place through dialectical reason. Otherwise, any attempted banishment of myth in a positivist theory of knowledge will fail in its very goal of separating the modern world of positive science from myth. “For knowledge does not master myth by banishing it from its confines. Rather, knowledge can truly conquer only what it has previously understood in its own specific meaning and essence. Until this task has been completed, the battle which theoretical knowledge thinks it has won for good will keep breaking out afresh.”2 In this discussion Cassirer seems to be worrying, primarily, about how to avoid the infringement of mythical thinking on scientific thinking by deploying the “phenomenology of spirit” of Hegel. Of course, there are tensions within the second volume of Philosophy of Symbolic Forms given that the goal of the entire project is to show that mythico-religious reality is itself a form of thinking, and it often uses some of the same categories of scientific thought even though it uses them differently. For example, Cassirer takes causality as present in both science and myth: Science is content if it succeeds in apprehending the individual event in space and time as a special instance of a general law but asks no further “why” regarding the individualization as such, regarding the here and now. The mythical consciousness, on the other hand, applies its “why” precisely to the particular and unique. It “explains” the individual event by postulating individual acts of the will. Even though our causal concepts are directed toward the apprehension and specification of the particular, although in fulfilling this purpose they differentiate themselves and complement and determine one another, nevertheless they always leave a certain sphere of indeterminacy surrounding the particular. For precisely as concepts they cannot exhaust concrete-intuitive existence and events; they cannot exhaust all the countless “modifications” of the general rule, which may occur at any particular time. Here every particular is indeed subject to the universal but cannot be fully deduced from it alone.3

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One can find Cassirer constantly reworking his thoughts on symbolic forms and even verbatim repetition of his key passages throughout all of his works, as he is struggling to bring humanist intellectual precision to bear on his understanding of the material. The content in Language and Myth seems more carefully phrased since he had by this time already finished his own phenomenology of knowledge and gleaned the critical insight that “to depart from the specific conditions of theoretical-scientific knowledge is not altogether to leave the realm of form. We do not thereby sink back into a mere chaos; rather, an ideal cosmos once more surrounds us. . . . And from this results a new and essentially broader aspect under which to investigate and evaluate perception itself.”4 The task, then, within Language and Myth is utter devotion to the respectful tracing out of the past (and certainly myth in the present) so as to learn its deep connection with the modernity of our times. Indeed, as Cassirer, quoting Hermann Usener, tells us: Only through devoted preoccupation with the spiritual traces of vanished times, that is to say, through philological research, can we train ourselves to feel with the past; then gradually sympathetic strains may be set in motion within it so that we find in our own consciousness the threads that link ancient and modern time. . . . It would be a sad pass for human knowledge if detailed research ipso facto fettered the mind and prevented it from seeking a synoptic vision. The deeper you delve, the more you may expect to be rewarded by general insight.5

Such devotion to “philological research,” or a historical study of the relationship of symbolic forms to language, is a stark contrast to contemporary analytic philosophies of language that would purport a knowable, logical, and scientific character to the forms of discourse before us that appear as natural and inherent. Instead, such a genealogical tracing back into vanished times aims to unearth the origin of human consciousness as it can be gleaned from basic, primordial practices of speech—alive and well in all times and all cultures, even the here and now of Western society. That is to say, such an investigation and reflection, for Cassirer, is not one that means to cement the idea of mythico-religious practices in a particular fashion as if it could be linked to an actual group of peoples within history and geography. Such a reflective enterprise is meant to grasp the formational

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principles inherent within the human experience of symbolization. To quote Cassirer: To know and understand the peculiar nature of mythico-religious conception not only through its results, but through the very principle of its formation, and to see, furthermore, how the growth of linguistic concepts is related to that of religious ideas and in what essential traits they coincide—this requires us, indeed, to reach far back into the past.6

Such cultural study, then, is the very intellectual matter by which Cassirer attempts to think about the importance, operation, and philosophy of symbolic forms. Such a view is akin to the way Cassirer saw Kant take up the topic of religion, suggesting “even a religion ‘within the limits of pure reason’ as conceived and worked out by Kant is no more than a mere abstraction.”7 The analysis, then, that Cassirer provides on myth is always profoundly embedded in the study of the mythical world itself. We only come to know the symbolic form of myth from within an attempt to move within mythical thinking and to encounter mythical reality through its divergent forms. Thus, what can be stated about a mythical form is integrally tied to how mythical thinking symbolizes the world. Cassirer relates the essential insight of critical philosophy to such a challenge by suggesting, “It seeks the categories of the consciousness of objects in the theoretical, intellectual sphere, and starts from the assumption that such categories must be at work wherever a cosmos, a characteristic and typical world view, takes form out of the chaos of impressions.”8 To claim an origin for language in mythical thinking is a peculiar notion to most people studying the world from within a limited conception of rationality and a strong sense of what would constitute an adequate conception of language. Myth, religion, magic, and the supernatural are all ideas that seem to keynote already in our minds a sense of ignorance, fiction, and superstitious character. However, the mythico-religious under reflective investigation does not consist of the spellbinding murmurs of a witch doctor. Rather, Cassirer is always investigating myths and simultaneously rendering them as part of an intelligible, constitutive cultural phenomenology—one that turns us to how phenomena are formed through a unique field of symbolization that also gives us specific processes of judgment capable of symbolically organizing relations between facts as already constituted in the mind

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upon our mutually constructive encounter with the world. The question for Cassirer throughout his investigation becomes, then, how can we as beings inevitably shaped by symbolic forms also vivify ourselves in symbolic form? Further, what does it mean to be a being whose creative activity is not only sustained by a symbolic field but also changed and remade by human beings who live, work, and think within that form? Admittedly, Cassirer does indeed rely on actual ethnographic studies to give examples for his understanding of mythic imagination; certainly, many of these studies have been challenged by subsequent anthropological research. However, his point is not to perform a historiography of cultural transmission and transformation of language. Always throughout Language and Myth Cassirer echoes his belief that “the original bond between the linguistic and the mythico-religious consciousness is primarily expressed in the fact that all verbal structures appear as also mythical entities, endowed with certain mythical powers, that the Word, in fact, becomes a sort of primary force, in which all being and doing originate.”9 To that end, Cassirer is clear that the product of a mythico-religious investigation is a way to hermeneutically glean the way in which human beings—within all cultural spheres across and throughout time—remain the source of valuation and are only able to reveal reality in symbolic measure, whereby the objects of the material world are themselves fused with our forms of symbolic consciousness. As Cassirer put the matter: Such conceptions are not culled from a ready-made world of Being, they are not mere products of fantasy which vapor off from fixed, empirical, realistic existence, to float above the actual world like a bright mist; to primitive consciousness they present the totality of Being. . . . Man lives with objects only in so far as he lives with these forms; he reveals reality to himself, and himself to reality, in that he lets himself and the environment enter into this plastic medium, in which the two do not merely make contact, but fuse with each other.10

Such a plastic medium is not a call to mere relativism that would demote reality to myth in any simple sense. Rather, we are called by Cassirer to fathom the world in a pluralistic array of symbolic possibility. Indeed, the universal humanism at play in Cassirer is itself suggesting that human beings are uni-

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versally symbolizing creatures. For Cassirer, all symbolic forms—pluralistically conceived—reveal the way schematic thinking inherent within human consciousness can utter even a single word in a way that is constitutive of an entire regulative worldview. If we are to traverse a past that is not of history but of the origins of thinking and language in general, then we must abandon our predilections for determining and demarking language in contemporary means and, instead, grapple with the way in which Cassirer is claiming that symbolic consciousness is somehow also bound to the mythic. The term “myth” deserves some deeper reflection and understanding. For Cassirer, we too often see myth as “something conditioned and negotiated by the agency of language” and as nothing more than “a basic shortcoming, an inherent weakness of language.”11 Such an inherent weakness is often identified as a seeming metaphoric residue that language is unable to shed. Cassirer agrees that language cannot shed the residue of metaphor and, therefore, all thinking will never effectively banish myth. But for Cassirer, this is not unwelcome but simply part of our coming to terms with the richness of both myth and language as symbolic forms and the integral connection that will always remain between the two. One ought to remember, “All linguistic denotation is essentially ambiguous—and in this ambiguity, this ‘paronymia’ of words lies the source of all myths.”12 The use of the term “paronymia” suggests that language is itself derivative and any modern conception of our discursive thinking is rooted in its primordial connections to our inevitable, natural means for symbolizing. Cassirer also suggests: Mythology is inevitable, it is natural, it is an inherent necessity of language, if we recognize in language the outward form and manifestation of thought; it is in fact the dark shadow which language throws upon thought, and which can never disappear till language becomes entirely commensurate with thought, which it never will. Mythology, no doubt, breaks out more fiercely during early periods of the history of human thought, but it never disappears altogether. Depend upon it, there is mythology now as there was in the time of Homer, only we do not perceive it, because we ourselves live in the very shadow of it, and because we all shrink from the full meridian light of truth. . . . Mythology, in the highest sense, is the power exercised by language on thought in every possible sphere of mental activity.13

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Here, mythology is invoked as a power of language whose shadow we live in during the course of anonymous activities of everyday life. Given the impossibility of language ever becoming commensurate with thought, we know that the remainder between the divided two must take on some symbolic form of approximation. Symbolic forms, then, are organs of reality giving objects visible presence in reality as intellectual apprehension operating organically in a relationship of mutual limitation and enhancement.14 The investigation of mythic thinking, for Cassirer, is a purposive project that grapples with the primordial powers of human symbol-making, which, in Language and Myth, is traced out along five dimensions. At each subsequent stage in hermeneutically evaluating these types of mythic thinking Cassirer returns faithfully to keynote: Word and mythic image, which once confronted the human mind as hard realistic powers, have now cast off all reality and effectuality; they have become a light, bright ether in which the spirit can move without let or hindrance. This liberation is achieved not because the mind throws aside the sensuous forms of word and image, but in that it uses them both as organs of its own, and thereby recognizes them for what they really are: forms of its own self-revelation.15

There is, then, a libratory element to the writing about symbolic forms and myth for Cassirer, one that is always using the idea of myth to come back to the question of the origin and functioning of human consciousness that retains power over valuation of the world and posits itself in relation to the forms of life it conceives among the bare facts of material existence. We are concerned, here, with how our minds interact with reality, all the while knowing that the world can only come to us in symbolic form. “It is not mere mediation,” Cassirer suggests, “but action which constitutes the center from which man undertakes the spiritual organization of reality.”16 There is an activity of being where inner and outer life are fused in the mythical world ordered by a magical omnipotence with unlimited sway over the “translation and transposition of the world of subjective emotions and drives into a sensuous, objective existence.”17 Miscounting myth through a prejudicial disdain for anything outside of discursive description, as some chimerical entity that would bleed the world into mere relativism, is a fundamental mistake to which Cassirer remarks:

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But when we reduce it to its philosophical lowest terms, this attitude turns out to be simply the logical result of that naïve realism which regards the reality of objects as something directly and unequivocally given. . . . This illusion may be ever so finely wrought, and flit about us in the gayest and loveliest colors; the fact remains that this image has no independent content, no intrinsic meaning. It does indeed reflect a reality—but a reality to which it can never measure up, and which it can never adequately portray. . . . And it seems that all other processes of mental gestation involve the same sort of outrageous distortion, the same departure from objective reality and the immediate data of experience. For all mental processes fail to grasp reality itself, and in order to represent it, to hold it at all, they are driven to the use of symbols. But all symbolism harbors the curse of mediacy; it is bound to obscure what it seeks to reveal. Thus the sound of speech strives to “express” subjective and objective happening, the “inner” and the “outer” world; but what of this it can retain is not the life and individual fullness of existence, but only a dead abbreviation of it.18

Cassirer, though, remains aware that this viewpoint can indeed collapse into an analysis of what “modern skeptical critics of language have drawn: the complete dissolution of any alleged truth content of language, and the realization that this content is nothing but a sort of phantasmagoria of the spirit.”19 To such a possibility Cassirer asks whether concepts are nothing more than “formulations and creations of thought, which, instead of giving us the true forms of objects, show us rather the forms of thought itself.”20 We must remember, though, realist thinkers too—of the sort Cassirer designated as such—take up mythic assumptions “as their solid basis for all such explanations, the so-called ‘given,’ which is thought to have some definite form, some inherent structure of its own. They accept this reality as an integrated whole of causes and effects, things and attributes, states and processes, of objects at rest and of motions, and the only question for them is which of these elements a particular mental product such as myth, language or art originally embodied.”21 The spurious character of such a hegemonic approach to the study of language from the vantage point of logical discourse is self-evident, as the analysis of reality along logical dimensions of objective semblance do not themselves factually precede language but are themselves initiated by language. This ultimately “introduces the great spiritual

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‘crisis’ in which the permanent is opposed to the transient, and Being is made the contrary of Becoming.”22 The project, then, is not one of combating different systems of symbolic articulation but instead aims to abandon the task of calculating meaning through some logical abacus extraneous to symbolic form itself. Rather, the task is to take note of the ways in which language itself is not merely a facsimile of some higher imagined form but is, instead, a seeing of the “spontaneous law of generation” inherent within all symbolic forms—including everything from scientific inquiry to aesthetic practice—that each is more than mere allegory and, more properly, a set of symbolic forms with the force that “posits a world of its own.”23 Such work bears no immediate relief, nor can it be contained in any one attempt, but must occur as a “progressive activity of relating separate notions or sense impressions with each other, and then gathering up the resultant wholes into greater complexes, until finally the union of all these separate complexes yields the coherent picture of the totality of things. The will to this totality is the vivifying principle of our theoretical and empirical conception.”24 Simply put, the capacity of naming precedes any intellectual understanding of phenomena, as sense impressions must themselves be posited “into a mental world, a world of ideas and meanings. All theoretical cognition takes its departure from a world already preformed by language; the scientist, the historian, even the philosopher, lives with his objects only as language presents them to him.”25 Thus, the projection of a phenomenological world, for Cassirer, must be able to find shelter in our transcendental imagination—a space that certainly has the capability for naming the objects of the world along the conditions of a given worldview, but must also have fostered such an ability to consciously engage in the activity of naming. In Language and Myth Cassirer discusses five forms of mythic thought, which are each linked to the self-revelation of human consciousness: momentary deities, special gods, functional gods, supernatural power, and mythic metaphor. In total, these symbolic dimensions articulate the development of human beings as symbol-making creatures from the realms of actuality to possibility within the symbolic world of myth. That is to say, the continuum of language traversed is one in which we are first able to understand the phenomena of the world as they simply appear to us and then slowly to become symbolically apprehended in a way that allows the force of such grammar to productively imagine the world toward a realm of possibility functioning as a regulative ideal. The peculiar condition of reflective free-play, Cassirer tells us as he cites Herder, is itself the origin of speech.26

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Where Enlightenment thinking may suggest that speech is simply invented, such a claim ignores the fact that our faculty of reflective reason demands differentia as a “basic power of the soul.”27 Thus, we are meant to note that the difference between languages is “not a matter of different sounds and marks, but of different world conceptions.”28

the mythical origins of thinking Turning to the five trajectories of mythic thinking outlined by Cassirer— momentary deities, special gods, functional gods, supernatural power, and mythic metaphor—we can begin to trace out how such world conceptions are possible at all. Momentary deities, as Cassirer recounts the idea, occur in the moment where a human being is confronted by something basic—fear, hunger, pleasure, or some fleeting, vanishing mental content—and the experience is objectified. To be sure, the experience, here, is receptive and not necessarily at first entirely generated. Such deities do not personify any force of nature, nor do they represent some special aspect of human life; no recurrent trait or value is retained in them and transformed into a mythico-religious image; it is something purely instantaneous, a fleeting, emerging and vanishing mental content, whose objectification and outward discharge produces the image of the “momentary deity.”29

However, this experience is not at all foreign to us. Cassirer carefully remarks that we can see such an activity present in the context of life in ancient Greece when people reified Wealth, Feasting, Honor, or Chance.30 One could easily extend, but not encompass entirely, the analysis made here to the commodity fetishism Marx describes in the first volume of Capital where capitalistic relations imbue objects of the commercial world with a divine status that seems to pathologically consume our consciousness such that the world outside of the commodity ceases to exist in a momentary capacity. What we find is an investment in an objective experience that is taken in as sensible intuition and given limited, transitory symbolic form in the moment at-hand. Such a phenomenological immediacy is one where “thought does not dispose freely over the data of intuition, in order to relate and compare them

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to each other, but is captivated and enthralled by the intuition which suddenly confronts it.”31 The weight of the sensible present carries with it, for Cassirer, a sense in which the world itself has been annihilated and subsumed by immediate content. It might seem as though one is spellbound by the experience at-hand where consciousness itself is filled with such an immediate experience, leaving nothing outside of what is materially rendered in the form at-hand. Indeed, there is a sense in which one has become possessed by the impression under consideration, expressed in an “utmost tension between the subject and its object, the outer world; when external reality is not merely viewed and contemplated, but overcomes a man in sheer immediacy, with emotions of fear or hope, terror or wish fulfillment: then the spark jumps somehow across, the tension finds a release, as the subjective excitement becomes objectified, and confronts the mind as a god or daemon.”32 It is in this moment of objectifying the immediate experience and transfiguring it into “god” or “daemon” that one sees first the mythic character of our phenomenological encounter with a fleeting experience of magnitude that would render the whole of consciousness enthralled with a sensible impression. When reflectively considered, this impression sparks a tensionfilled release where we see the emergence of projective power of the soul. However, Cassirer notes that this projective power of the soul and its sense of an “I” hangs in a precarious balance: But precisely this immediate identification of I and reality involves a peculiar dialectic in which the original relationship is reversed. The enhanced feeling of self which seems to express itself in the magical world view indicates actually that at this stage there is as yet no true self. Through the magical omnipotence of the will the I seeks to seize upon all things and bend them to its purpose; but precisely in this attempt it shows itself still totally dominated, totally “possessed,” by all things. Even its supposed doing amounts to undergoing; indeed, all its ideal powers, the power of words and language for example, are at this stage seen in the form of demonic beings and projected outward at something alien to the I. Thus the expression of the I that is here achieved, and also the first magical-mythical concept of the soul, are totally confined within this intuition. The soul itself appears as a demonic power which acts upon man’s body from outside and possesses it—and hence possesses the man himself with all his vital functions. Thus precisely the

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increased intensity of the I-feeling and the resulting hypertrophy of action produce a mere illusion of reality.33

Such a projective power of the soul is channeled into the objectification of the experience at-hand and the production of the momentary deity. Where the productive element of symbolic form arises, we have, also, the allusion to the possibility of reproductive imagination in the “I” that forms as a projective power of the soul. Mythic language and thinking begins with intuitive, creative form and upon further elucidation we will see that myth and language originate in such momentary experience and unfold toward enduring conceptions integrally tethering both in a primordial role in the symbolic formulation of a constitutive, cohering sense of the world. Next, Cassirer recounts the role of special gods, where one encounters the objects of the world in repeating human activities linked with “ordered and continual activities of mankind.”34 The scheduled occurrence of human activities such as planting and plowing do not consume our conscious understanding of the world in a totalizing sense such as with momentary deities but, instead, are limited to a specialized, departmentalized area of human life. At rest are the momentary flashes of fleeting sensation that would consume the projective power of the soul, and the “I” behind such a power; instead, the symbolic world is constituted through activities that stretch that projective power of the soul across time such that we have an enduring conception of the self. At this juncture, Cassirer notes, human beings experience the world in symbolic form such that: Man ceases to be a mere shuttlecock at the mercy of outward impressions and influences; he exercises his own will to direct the course of events according to his needs and wishes. This course now has its own measure and periodicity: at definite intervals, in uniform cycles from day to day and month to month, human activities repeat themselves and are linked with invariant, permanent effects.35

The experience, then, of a special deity is one in which human beings are separated from mere immediate exigency and become independent beings following self-made laws in form and continuity.36 Deities, which can be seen as the internalization of symbolic form giving expression to the sensible intuition of apprehended relations to objects of experience, represent the way in which

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we encounter the phenomenal world. Here, in the encounter with special gods, Cassirer is noting the ways in which mythico-religious form is taking on more definite form and objective power. Next, Cassirer continues this analysis in the idea of functional gods, in which each related practical performance of human activity has a patron. The relation between special gods and functional gods is somewhat blurred in the writing of Cassirer, as he moves quickly from identifying the former and soon after relating the importance of the latter. While special gods might have been invoked in particular instances of planting and plowing, functional gods come to life in the regular activity of agriculture more generally. Cassirer provides an example when suggesting: To a Roman life meant active life. And he had the special gift of organizing this active life, of regulating and coördinating all its efforts. The religious expression of this tendency is to be found in the Roman functional gods. They have to fulfil [sic] definite practical tasks. They are not a product of religious imagination or inspiration; they are conceived as the rulers of practical activities. They are, so to speak, administrative gods who have shared among themselves the different provinces of human life.37

Thus, within myth, there is an emphasis on activity and symbolic form. These gods serve in a bureaucratic capacity, giving image to the routine occurrence of the multitude of activities that have become expected in human life. But the ascension of such gods in the mythical world is no simple feat and must first be imbued with symbolic powers through the act of naming. As Cassirer remarks: Whenever a special god is first conceived, it is invested with a special name, which is derived from the particular activity that has given rise to the deity. As long as this name is understood, and taken in its original sense, the limits of its meaning are the limits of the god’s powers; through his name the god is permanently held to that narrow field for which he was originally created. . . . The word has become a proper name—and this connotes, just like the given name of a man, the conception of a personality. Thus a new Being has been produced, which contin-

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ues to develop by a law of its own. . . . This god is now capable of acting and suffering like a human creature.38

Mythical thinking, then, has arrived at the representational plateau whereby the power of naming has emerged in a strong sense within our symbolic expression, and deities are cast in anthropomorphic fashion, each imbued with the capability of experiencing human sentiments. Indeed, what also emerges under functional gods is a sense of personality and permanence—contrary to, but certainly reliant upon, the fleeting symbolic expression that originates with momentary deities. Again, Cassirer is tracing out these philological conceptions in order to grasp the philosophical dimensions of how through symbol making we are able to generate increasingly complex and pluralistic forms of human experience. To quote Cassirer: The same function which the image of the god performs, the same tendency to permanent existence, may be ascribed to the uttered sounds of language. The word, like a god or daemon, confronts man not as a creation of his own, but as something existent and significant in its own right, as an objective reality. As soon as the spark has jumped across, as soon as the tension and emotion of the moment has found its discharge in the word or the mythical image, a sort of turning point has occurred in human mentality: the inner excitement which was a mere subjective state has vanished, and has been resolved into the objective form of myth or of speech. And now an ever-progressive objectification can begin. In the same measure in which the autonomous activity of man extends over a widening sphere, and becomes adjusted and organized within that sphere, his mythical and verbal world undergoes a progressive organization and ever more definite articulation.39

Here, the progressive organization of the world is one in which we find enhancement, enrichment, and complexity added to our capacity for symbolic formulation. The mythical image, then, is one in which the spark of conscious reflexivity continues to engage the objects of experience in profound configurations and relations that, at the same time, speak to the agentive persistence of a thinking subject that both receives the world and, indeed, judges the world. Cassirer draws this out further, suggesting:

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And here, too, the development of language appears to be the counterpart of the development which mythical intuition and thought undergo; for one cannot grasp the true nature and function of linguistic concepts if one regards them as copies, as representations of a definite world of facts, whose components are given to the human mind ab initio in stark and separate outlines. Again, the limits of things must first be posited, the outlines drawn, by the agency of language; and this is accomplished as man’s activity becomes internally organized, and his conception of Being acquires a correspondingly clear and definite pattern.40

Equally important, is realizing the way in which mythic thinking along these dimensions has functioned to demarcate the limitation of thought itself in its receptivity of the world, such that our sense of symbolic forms is not merely a matter of taking discourse as simple imitations of a world of facticity; instead, we are drawn to the mimetic character of our symbol making, which both enables and limits the unfolding of Being. Tracing out such an evolutionary statement, Cassirer suggests: All writing begins as a mimetic sign, an image, and at first the image has no signatory, communicative character. It rather replaces and “stands for” the object. In its beginnings writing also belongs to the magical sphere. It is a magical instrument by which to gain possession of certain things and ward off hostile powers: the sign that a man impresses on an object draws it into the sphere of his own efficacy and removes foreign influences. The more the writing resembles what it is intended to represent—the more purely objective it is—the better it fulfills this purpose. Long before the written sign is understood as an expression of an object it is feared as the substantial embodiment, as it were, of the forces that emanate from it, as a kind of demonic double of the object. Only when this magical feeling pales does man’s attention turn from the empirical to the ideal, the material to the functional. From pure picture writing there develops a syllabic and ultimately phonetic system in which the initial ideogram, the pictorial sign, has become a pure significatory sign, or symbol.41

There is, then, perhaps a “language” to the symbolic dimension of the functional god. In the naming of the enduring, patron activities of the world, a

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thing has been mimetically isolated and is filled with the power of a demonic double. Such functional gods come about in symbolic form in the movement from less concern over the empirical material and, instead, keynote more strongly the functional ideal. Breaking with what has been a following of the work of Usener, Cassirer delves next into the idea of supernatural power and finally into his own articulation of mythic metaphor. In mythic thinking the concept of a supernatural deity is one in which we develop a sense of a power that “permeates all things and events, and may be present now in objects, now in persons, yet is never bound exclusively to any single and individual subject or object as its host, but may be transmitted from place to place, from thing to thing, from person to person.”42 A sense, here, emerges that the world is embedded in the Word. There is a “mythical field of force” whereby language is imbued with potency in not merely the deities representing human experiences (momentary or enduring) but in actual artifacts and actors of existence. Such artifacts (texts, vessels, or tools) or persons (magicians, priests, or warriors) stand beyond and outside of everyday life and seem endowed with the aura of a “mythical field of force.” Such, Cassirer tells us, is the embodiment of symbolic form according to myth, in the power of the word: The act of creation is no longer designated by a single material image; now the creator uses no instrument other than the power of his will, which is concentrated in that of his voice and his word. The word forms the power which produces the gods themselves, which produce the heaven and the earth. Once language and word are thus conceived as instruments of world creation, the act of creation itself acquires a new, purely spiritual significance. Between the world as the aggregate of physical-material things and the divine power contained in the creator’s word an immediate transition is no longer possible: the two belong to separate regions of being. The relation which religious thinking nevertheless demands between the two must accordingly be an indirect relation, dependent on definite mediating links and leading through them. In order to create and express this relation a new dividing line must be drawn through being as a whole; the physical existence of things must be given as its foundation a new purely ideal form of being.43

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At play, then, is an ongoing animation of symbolic forms that leaves the realm of named activity and operates as a power within the objective manifestation of day-to-day life that can be touched, manipulated, and even taken up in conversation. Such, Cassirer remarks, is a “notion of a ‘power’ in general, able to appear now in this form, now in that, to enter into one object and then into another; a power that is venerated for its ‘holiness’ as well as feared for the dangers it contains.”44 Working with an older and perhaps outdated concept of “mana” in the Melanesian religion, Cassirer attempts to speak to the symbolic potency of that which is imbued with extraordinarily effective powers in the sense of what he means by the supernatural: For not everything animate, nor everything spiritual possesses mana, but only that which, for one reason or anther, is endowed with heightened, extraordinary effective powers; and moreover, mana may belong to mere things, if they exhibit some rare form that excites the mythic imagination, and thereby rise above the realm of everyday experience. It appears, therefore, that the idea of mana and the various conceptions related to it are not bound to a particular realm of objects (animate or inanimate, physical or spiritual), but that they should rather be said to indicate a certain “character,” which may be attributed to the most diverse objects and events, if only these evoke mythic “wonder” and stand forth from the ordinary background of familiar, mundane existence.45

It is quite impossible to reduce spiritual deities to nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, or any structural categories of logical grammar, because they represent—among other things—the struggle of human beings to wield symbolic grammar (pluralistically conceived) in the naming of the world through symbolic forms. It may be that this mode of thought appears contrary to our logical sense, but it should be considered “a mental attitude of conception” where objects of mythical character are brought into existence.46 While such mythic thinking may indeed introduce a conception of the godhead, simultaneously we see the power of symbolic formulation emerge as an impulse whereby we seek a concept of Being conceived in terms that are not limited, rooted in a mere name or particular manifestation.47 We have been brought to a stage where the richness of our symbolic vocabulary not only touches momentary and enduring experiences but also becomes manifest in the

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ability to productively think the day-to-day experiences of life, begging the question of how we are able to achieve a sort of mythic thought that might ignite the spark of a productive imagination. Before continuing, it is important to take note of the way Cassirer distinguishes between religion and myth. Throughout most of his work he invokes the concept of the mythico-religious in which the two are wedded; however, Cassirer does make one crucial distinction between myth and monotheistic religion important to our discussion. It is often argued that the difference between myth and religion is a qualitative leap forward from the former to the latter in the history of human time. The great monotheistic religions are taken as infinitely more rational than the world of myth. But, for Cassirer, there is no such qualitative chasm separating the two, even though, consistent with his own philosophy, he tries to distinguish the monotheistic religions in their particularity from polytheistic religions. For Cassirer, the central focus in monotheistic religions becomes almost entirely dramatic in the battle between good and evil. Cassirer uses the example of the special relationship between Odysseus and Athena to underscore this point. The gods and goddess stand in for special characteristics, and in their relationship to mortals they bestow upon their favorites a particular archetypal gift. For example, when Odysseus returns to Ithaca and is not sure of his location, Athena appears to him in the form of a shepherd. Athena has already bestowed upon Odysseus a special gift: the ability to use deception to negotiate his way out of trouble. Odysseus tells the shepherd, which is Athena in disguise, a spurious tale full of deceit about his identity and travels. Athena looks upon Odysseus with great pride, as it is she who has given him his sharp wit of deceit. As we saw earlier, something like mana can be used for good or evil. But, in the monotheistic religions, the question of good winning over evil becomes almost the sole focus. Cassirer argues that no religion can ever cut loose the relationship between nature and human beings. In the world of myth, the natural order in all of its abundance demands an equally rich order of gods and goddesses. Nature is respected for its law and lawfulness. In myth, human beings had to work with their gods or goddesses in order to achieve a desired end. Agency was necessary for the desired end to be achieved. But within the realm of religion, agency takes on a particular ethical meaning in the monotheistic religions. It becomes, instead, a struggle for righteousness. The sympathy of the whole, which Cassirer attributes to mythical feeling and thought, is

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itself understood in a sense of ethics and morals. What Cassirer denies is that this evolution takes place at the expense or destruction of mythical thought: We may infer from these examples what religious evolution really means. It does not mean the complete destruction of the first and fundamental characteristics of mythical thought. If the great individual religious reformers wished to be heard and understood they had to speak not only the language of God but the language of man. But the great prophets of Israel no longer spoke merely to their own nations. Their God was a god of Justice and His message was not restricted to a special group. The prophets predicted a new heaven and a new earth. What is really new is not the contents of this prophetic religion but its inner tendency, its ethical meaning.48

A crucial aspect in this focus on righteousness was the limitation of taboo. Taboo, in mythical thought, carried the danger that it could spread a terrible infection uncontrollably if it was violated. The monotheistic religions do not simply break from taboos but connect them with the struggle for righteousness. In a system of taboo, according to Cassirer, duties are almost entirely negative. A taboo indicates a thing that should not be touched, and the danger of violation was the spread of uncleanliness. Taboo, in a sense, was foundational to social order and covered almost every aspect of life. What the monotheistic religions do in their struggle to overcome the comprehensiveness of a system of taboo is that they effectively transform it and limit it to religious obligation. Again, to quote Cassirer: It was impossible for religion to abrogate this complex system of interdictions. To suppress it would have meant complete anarchy. Yet the great religious teachers of mankind found a new impulse by which, henceforward, the whole life of man was led to a new direction. They discovered in themselves a positive power, a power not of inhibition but of inspiration and aspiration. They turned passive obedience into an active religious feeling . . . but they detect, on the other hand, a more profound sense of religious obligation that instead of being a restriction or compulsion is the expression of a new positive ideal of human freedom.49

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This religious obligation, as it demands that human beings struggle to become righteous, actually carries within it a kind of freedom. The struggle between good and evil in every person implies the possibility of choice. Finally, in his conception of mythic metaphor, Cassirer discusses the way in which what has been previously established allows for the creative ideational free play of symbolic forms in the positing of a productive imagination of the world. Language, through metaphor, operates between that which is infinite and that which is indefinite, allowing determinate ideas to arise out of indeterminate notions fashioned into finite determinations— such is a movement of language with freedom and creative power.50 The source of metaphor in mythic imagination is indeed integrally connected to the previous forms of mythical thinking whereby we are able to render our relational experiences to objects in momentary, enduring, named, creative, and now totalizing ways to construct nothing less than a productive image of the world through symbolic form. Mythic metaphoric thinking may represent, simply, the denotation of thoughts through resemblance of betwixt objects akin to the transmutation that must occur from thought or experience into speech.51 However, mythic metaphoric thinking also invokes a sort of complexity keynoted in “the principle of pars pro toto.”52 The idea here is that metaphoric language grants us the power of metaphoric thinking where the utterance of a single symbolic form initiates the imagination of a symbolic totality conceived of as a constitutive symbolic world. “Whoever has brought any part of a whole into his power has thereby acquired power, in the magical sense,” Cassirer remarks, “over the whole itself.”53 Cassirer remarks that ceremonies such as rain making involve the power of a particular object, such as when a canteen of water is poured out over the parched earth. Such an act carries a magical force over the symbolic understanding of the elements for those who live in such a symbolic world. The emphasis by Cassirer on the power of the part to call forth the whole as a matter of mythic metaphor does indeed turn the whole of his investigation into one in which a thinking, reflective subject emerges with command over symbolic forms and the production of the symbolic world. Also, we are left knowing that language as symbolic form operates in its individual parts within the larger symbolic whole. Each utterance, each gesture, each articulation of symbolic content in our lives does indeed keynote particular and universal understanding—one where we live in communion with the objects of experience as they can only carry meaning in the symbolic world itself.

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the word magic of being It is only now, after unveiling the mythical origins of language, that Cassirer boldly moves to suggest that: Language and myth stand in an original and indissoluble correlation with one another, from which they both emerge but gradually as independent elements. They are two diverse shoots from the same parent stem, the same impulse of symbolic formulation, springing from the same basic mental activity, a concentration and heightening of simple sensory experience.54

Myth, like language, operates in an ideational realm; however, Cassirer reminds us that such illumination can indeed be contrasted by the “darkness” of what myth and language censor by creating verbal-mythical centers of symbolic force, leaving us without relation to that which is rendered beneath the threshold of meaning. No single system of symbolic formulation, then, can be all-encompassing of the world. It is within metaphoric thinking that we have any possibility for language; without the ability to move symbolically between any part of speech and the systemic whole, grammar becomes bankrupt and we fall into mere verbal “conceiving” that would compress sense impressions into supposed actual essences. However, the power of metaphoric thinking allows one to postulate from within a symbolic world the possibility of what might exist beneath or beyond any threshold of meaning. Thus, within language, as integrally bound to myth, the symbolic world can never be totally flattened or eclipsed in any form or fashion. It is because of the mythic origins of language that one can indeed recollect the momentary, enduring, named, creative, and totalizing aspects of symbolic formulation in order to diversify, translate, and enrich the symbolic world. There is, then, a sort of word magic at play in our very being in the world. For Cassirer, in word magic “only what is related somehow to the focus point of willing and doing, only what proves to be essential to the whole scheme of life and activity, is selected from the uniform flux of sense impressions, and is ‘noticed’ in the midst of them—that is to say, receives a special linguistic accent, a name.”55 Such naming occurs only through symbolic expression, yielding the possibility of prospect and retrospect. Distinctions regarding the human activities of any given symbolic world are not merely

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“made” in the mind but are actually fixed in consciousness and guarantee “what has been culled from the total sphere of consciousness, does not fade away again when the spoken word has set its seal upon it and given it definite form.”56 Of course, the power of such word magic carries tremendous significance in the realm of myth and religion where the Word (as creation) is integrally bound to the idea of the highest Lord (as creation).57 The Word, though, is not merely a tool or instrument of the highest Lord, but is the very source granting meaning to “Being and the order of Being.” Within word magic, then, we see an element of ontico-fantasy in symbolic formulation, which not only makes our means for symbolic expression intelligible but also pushes against such a system of expression toward the uninhibited free-play and ideality of metaphor. “As the Word is first in origin, it is also supreme in power. Often it is the name of the deity,” Cassirer explains, “rather than the god himself, that seems to be the real source of efficacy. Knowledge of the name gives him who knows it mastery even over the being and will of the god.”58 Word magic fixes something with a name such that it is itself in Reality, making it such that “the potential between ‘symbol’ and ‘meaning’ is resolved; in place of a more or less adequate ‘expression,’ we find a relation of identity, of complete congruence between ‘image’ and ‘object,’ between the name and the thing.”59 In ancient Egypt, Cassirer remarks, the physical body was thought to travel in death both in the company of a double and also its name. The Inuit, similarly, believe that a human being is bound together in three parts—body, soul, and name.60 Thus, to be able to mimetically interact with myth bound by word magic, to encircle it and reconfigure its archetypal narrative and what it renders below the obvious threshold of meaning, means to change the fundamental understanding of reality within a symbolic world. That is to say, any advance of culture bringing about new practical relations and activities in human life will be reflected in the shifting of symbolic forms. As Cassirer notes: If altered conditions of life, the changes that attend the advance of culture, have brought men into a new practical relation with their environment, the concepts inherent in language do not retain their original “sense.” They begin to shift, to move about, in the same measure as the bounds of human activity tend to vary and efface each other. Wherever, for any reason, the distinction between two activities loses

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its importance and meaning, there is wont to be a corresponding shift of verbal meanings, namely, of the words which marked that distinction.61

When human beings realize the physico-magical power of the Word— having traversed the long journey through the combined momentary, enduring, named, creative, and totalizing dimensions of the projective power of the soul encountered in mythical thinking—then the world itself is configured into being through the organon of the mind in symbolic form. Such a world, though, is not solipsistic but is filled with the presence of others where the subjective assertion of a “me” occurs through the recognition of a “thee” by society. And, as Cassirer tells us: It was a long evolutionary course which the human mind had to traverse, to pass from the belief in a physico-magical power comprised in the Word to a realization of its spiritual power. Indeed, it is the Word, it is language, that really reveals to man that world which is closer to him than any world of natural objects and touches his weal and woe more directly than physical nature. For it is language that makes his existence in a community possible; and only in society, in relation to a “Thee,” can his subjectivity assert itself as a “Me.”62

Thus, it is only with others that language (mythic or discursive) holds any power in ascribing meaning to reality through symbolic forms. The world in myth we share with others may indeed be a world where the naming of gods and daemons correspond to the asymmetrical designation of who is granted inclusion in the register of humanity. But if word magic is a substantive being and power in the first instance, then its origins cannot be simply neglected but, rather, must be embraced. Word magic always carries its original force of substantive being and power to both create and recreate the world in symbolic form. Certainly, the reconfiguration of myth is a precarious task. It is one in which we delve into the very symbolic world that has given rise to that which demands reconfiguration in the utopian possibility for reaching out to other symbolic configurations of the world in the struggle for justice. However, as we encircle such myth and recast meaning we are always adding (in the way of synthesis) complexity, diversity, and plurality to the world. The constant struggling of language to move beyond itself and

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bring to life such being and power is what Cassirer refers to as the importance of the hypostatization of the Word: And yet, this very hypostatization of the Word is of crucial importance in the development of human mentality. For it is the first form in which the spiritual power inherent in language can be apprehended at all; the Word has to be conceived in the mythic mode, as a substantive being and power, before it can be comprehended as an ideal instrument, an organon of the mind, and as a fundamental function in the construction and development of spiritual reality.63

Cassirer certainly recognizes the profundity of mythical thought through its own life. The power of word magic itself develops from a primary source of being to an ideal instrument of the mind that is able to create and reconfigure the symbolic reality of our world. Such is not a facile task, nor is it one that can be accomplished through mere gestures to relativity. Instead, the whole of the mythic world must be taken up and read in its own context and also alongside the utopian potential that it can be other to itself in a reconfiguration of what is always possible. What is the significance of Ernst Cassirer and his understanding of myth for contemporary philosophy and politics? As we have seen for Cassirer, myth is inseparable from the metaphoric aspect of language. There is a profound sense, then, in which we can never simply be done with myth in a world that has become fully transparent to rational construction. As Roland Barthes once wrote, “The best weapon against myth is to perhaps mystify it in its turn, and to produce an artificial myth; and this reconstituted myth will in fact be a mythology.”64 There is a sense, then, in which seemingly unchanging dramas of human life lend themselves to mythology. For example, there are certain myths of women that continue to have a hold on the modern imagination. Indeed, Simone de Beauvoir eloquently wrote that the reduction of woman to the other of man tends to bury her under myths that are seemingly unshakable and deny her full humanity: The women of today are in a fair way to dethrone the myth of femininity; they are beginning to affirm their independence in concrete ways; but they do not easily succeed in living completely the life of a human being. Reared by women within a feminine world, their normal destiny

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is marriage, which still means practically subordination to man; for masculine prestige is far from extinction, resting still upon solid economic and social foundations.65

For de Beauvoir, the first step of feminism is to dethrone such myths as the only way to return woman to humanity. For de Beauvoir, myths of the feminine are incoherent because, ultimately, they represent nothing other than the feminine as the negation of human freedom: The free woman is just being born; when she has won possession of herself perhaps Rimbaud’s prophecy will be fulfilled: “There shall be poets! When woman’s unmeasured bondage shall be broken, when she shall live for and through herself, man—hitherto detestable—having let her go, she, too, will be poet! Woman will find the unknown! Will her ideational worlds be different from ours? She will come upon strange, unfathomable, repellent, delightful things: we shall take them, we shall comprehend them.” It is not sure that her “ideational worlds” will be different from those of men, since it will be through attaining the same situation as theirs that she will find emancipation; to say in what degree she will remain different, in what degree these differences will retain their importance—this would be to hazard bold predictions indeed. What is certain is that hitherto woman’s possibilities have been suppressed and lost to humanity, and that it is high time she be permitted to take her chances in her own interest and in the interest of all.66

Myth inheres in metaphor and thus we can never annul our relation to the former in order to work with the latter. Myths, as Barthes reminds us, can only be reconfigured and not simply belied. Any effort to fully rationalize myths so that they are forever tamed carries within it a profound danger that they will be more profoundly reinscribed, since their hold on the imaginary is now lost in a silence that does not allow an artificial mythology to reconfigure the powerful images of mythic figures.67 In an extraordinary novel, Njabulo Ndebele grapples with the seemingly contradictory aspects of the myth of Penelope. As he tells us, Penelope is the ultimate figure of the faithful wife. She waits for her husband for nineteen years, rejecting all her suitors. When Odysseus finally returns he slaughters each of them for daring to pay suit to his wife, despite his own long series of

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infidelities during his travels. If Penelope is to take on a new suitor because the fate of her husband was uncertain, then her new marriage already begins with an imprisoning paradox. As Ndebele ponders this myth, Penelope is expected to give unwavering fidelity to her new husband. But, of course, the problem is that the new husband knows their marriage only occurred because of her infidelity to Odysseus. As Ndebele describes the difficult situation for the woman who waits: “Surely she is in an untenable position. She is called upon to be unfaithful as a precondition to being faithful to a new partner. She is trapped in a social law: a woman must show unwavering fidelity to her husband, whoever he is.”68 The problem for the woman in waiting who does marry a potential suitor is that her new husband will never trust her fully and, instead, will seek greater efforts to control her. As de Beauvoir makes clear, Penelope is not admirable in her own right and neither are most mythical woman figures. Instead, she is admired because she grants ease to the nervous imaginary of men. It is just easier for men, insecure as they are about whether or not they are truly the fathers of their own children, to celebrate eternal fidelity in the figure of Penelope so as to assuage their fear-ridden anxieties. For Ndebele, this mythical figure has particular resonance in South Africa because so many men were fated to leave behind their homes and so many women were fated to wait. And so, Ndebele gives us an artificial mythology, in the best sense of the word, by imagining four descendants of Penelope. The first descendant loses her husband first to the gold mines and urbanization and finally to a new family. This descendant finally breaks with Penelope and goes looking for her Odysseus. But she does not find him, and when she returns she then continues to wait even as she remembers another route, another way of existing with her loss: to begin the search. The second descendant loses her husband to the exciting possibility that he will be the first black doctor trained abroad from their township. For a long time, she does not believe she is waiting because she holds on to an image of herself as always about to leave. She works hard to support her husband when he loses his fellowship and expectantly awaits his return only to later realize that he will never send for her to join him. Two men precede her husband in becoming the first doctors from the township. In the tenth year of the absence of her husband she finds that she is pregnant. When he finally returns twelve years after first leaving he accuses her of infidelity and abandons her in order to marry a nurse. It is only when she becomes

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pregnant that this descendant realizes that she had indeed begun to wait. The hope of her departure to join her husband dimmed before her own longing, which finally led her to fall into the arms of a longtime suitor and family friend. The third descendant loses her husband to the struggle against apartheid. She calls herself “patience.” She had indeed patiently waited for her husband to “sow his wild oats” before getting married. One day he simply disappears, and she hears from him only to learn that he is in Cuba. Finally, he returns but only to be imprisoned. The third descendant begins her dutiful period of waiting for his release. But when he is let out of prison he does not come home; instead, he files for divorce. As he claims a prominent place in the new South Africa, he becomes the symbol of nonracialism because his new wife is a white woman. When the third descendant berates him for his new marriage to a white woman and the birth of his newborn “colored child” he responds with a long lecture on the meaning of the identity of color. He makes it very clear that he wants nothing to do with her. She is caught between no longer waiting and a profound sense of powerlessness in that she does not want to give up her anguish, which also doubles to confirm her love. She tells us that she is “fine, but insane.”69 The final descendant is a woman who constantly puts up with the infidelity of her husband. Over time, the corruption of his character by his constant philandering takes its toll and he loses his well-paying job. This descendant ended up taking care of her husband even unto his death. She was the faithful wife, but because she put up with his infidelity she knows only too well that she too is suspected of cheating. So, what are these four descendants to do? Ndebele has them meet in a room together and they begin a game. The game (Ibandla) is one in which they actually attempt to understand themselves as descendants of Penelope and describe their unique pain as the figure who waits: Is it possible that our four descendants, as instances of thought turning into desire, can find themselves together in a room? Why not? The intangibility and randomness of imagination permit them absolute mobility. In this universe our descendants travel wherever they want, taking whatever shape they want, listening to whatever wanders into their ears. In these random journeys they take, they are subject to one requirement:

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to resist the urge to break out of the confines of thought into full desire. They strain at the writer’s leash, wanting to assume individuality of character. But the writer must hold on to the leash, and hope it won’t choke them; that they will learn to enjoy the movement between the end of the leash and the hand that holds it.70

The game is one in which they will address the most famous woman who had to wait in public: Winnie Mandela. But, of course in terms of the myth of Penelope the myth of Winnie is exactly the opposite. She is the unfaithful woman. The game, then, is to find the woman behind the myth and to give her full recognition. At each one of these meetings the women share tea and scones, but most importantly they share the way in which they had been buried by the mythology of the woman who waits. One of the descendants wanted to bring a fifth person into Ibandla, appealing through a letter to Winnie Mandela. For Winnie, of course, had to wait in public unlike the other four. All the women join in sharing their stories with Winnie, and now included in their game she responds back to them all: Your voices have been coming at me in the last few days. I mean coming at me, girls! You’ve been pounding in my ears every night, leaving me awake in the dark for hours, listening to you. Although you have told me your names, who are you, in fact? Who are you, whose voices have taken my thought on unanticipated journeys? Where are you, you who come to me like music? An invisible thing which yet has visible effects. Sound moves bodies. How does sound affect the chemistry of the human body in this way? I remember Nelson’s voice in those days! His mere sigh overwhelmed me. There’s this way of his when he says “Er-r!” while organizing a thought before expressing it: it used to kill me! The marvels of sound!71

Of course, this is an imaginary Winnie who promises to appeal to the Winnie outside the confines of the book. But this imaginary Winnie gets to tell her story of waiting, anguish, and pain. She is no longer depicted as the woman addressed as the bad wife of the mythic man who finally came home:

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It remains for me to seek the most appropriate way to continue with this game. What will it be? It suggests itself in the logic of these reflections. I think I know what I’ll do. It is this: I too, Winnie Mandela, will speak to Winnie. I’ll write to her. Address her. I’ll plead with her, cajole with her, charm her, scold and rebuke her, interpret her, ask her to answer all your questions, and respond to your insights, if she can remember them all. I, Winnie Mandela, holding on to my precious space of anonymity, will speak to my namesake. Bizo!72

And, indeed, we actually hear the imaginary Winnie doing her best to understand the waiting of the real Winnie Mandela. The imaginary Winnie cannot help but observe how Nelson Mandela turns Winnie into something he can observe and try to understand with a detached wisdom that seems to have nothing to do with the passionate love they supposedly shared. Mandela writes in his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, how motherhood and marriage were difficult for Winnie and how he did everything he could to support her and keep her from falling under his shadow. That Mandela gets the last word upsets the imaginary Winnie: But then, he ultimately wins, on another terrain. He wins, as he always does, through his gift for summative wisdom. Yes, the towering presence of his maturity in the privacy of your home, and his public dominance, did cast a shadow over you. It was from this position that he could make observations about you that ring with the authority of wisdom. So it was when he speaks about your adjustment to “married life and motherhood”; and so it was, many years later, when he summed up the meaning of your absence from the bedroom. He always pronounces like an oracle.73

The Winnie who can finally tell her story takes a kind of journey with these other women. Indeed, it is this Winnie who, if the book ever makes it to publication, wants to make sure she gets a copy. The group decides to go on a trip, and much to their surprise they run into a woman on the road. In a certain sense these five women, as Winnie reminds all of them, are actually just figures for so many more who are also on the same journey through their figurative sides:

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Winnie laughs in only the way that she can. “But you are Albertina, Veronica, Ntsiki, and Urbania,” she says. “You’re even more. You are millions of other women who are on this journey with you. Like me, they tuned in to your conversations and have remained forever with you. You are four voices whose stories resonate not with identical experience, but with affirming familiarity.”74

The woman they meet on the road with her bright auburn hair insists on joining the Ibandla. They question her, asking who she is, and she replies by explaining that after nineteen years of waiting for her husband she decided to depart and wander endlessly. The women then realize that the actual Penelope of mythic tale is in their very presence. Penelope explains the purpose of her endless wandering: My journey follows the path of the unfolding spirit of the world as its consciousness increases; as the world learns to become more aware of me not as Odysseus’s moral ornament on the mantelpiece, but as an essential ingredient in the definition of human freedom. I travel around the world to places where women have heard of me, attempting to free them from the burden of unconditional fidelity I placed on their shoulders. I’ve come to join you briefly on your holiday trip, you women of South Africa, to affirm it for what it is: a signal gesture by five women who are finally at peace with themselves and the world. I sought only to meet you and honour you.75

The Penelope who travels and affirms new relationships between women is no longer the Penelope of the myth but is instead reconfigured. She no longer represents the waiting woman but instead the women who take on a pilgrimage, sharing with each other new ways of loving and being in the world that allow them to travel outside of the shadow of men. There is, of course, no end to this journey. Why tell this story through Penelope and her descendants? It is precisely because it is Penelope and the figure of her in myth that heightens the intensity and gives new significance to the suffering of these women. They come to understand and recognize themselves in this great mythic figure of the feminine. By so doing, they reinvent themselves. The Penelope who finally

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appears in the artificial myth is the one who now represents pilgrimage rather than waiting. It is Penelope refigured who gives body to the figure of the pilgrimage. Who better to break the myth than the one who has represented the waiting woman for centuries? The “so it was” and “so it will be” that determine the future of the waiting woman are now seen differently, as they are seen from the perspective of the waiting women themselves. The way beyond myth, then, is to retrace the circle that seemingly encircles us. One way that we can do so is through the retelling of myth. This, of course, does not mean that all myths are ripe for reconfiguration; but it does remind us of the power of such retelling as one way to spin a different thread into the tapestry of mythic figures and at the same time free them from their integral connection with the reality of how women must live. Ndebele has given us a powerful retelling of a mythic figure through pondering this figure and her descendants so that a new mythic figure of feminine pilgrimage can come into being.

conclusion Cassirer, by way of closing his book Myth of the State, invokes the creation story of Babylon. Marduk, the highest god, had to slay the serpent Tiamat and other dragons of darkness before he could begin his task of making the world. Having bound the dragons, Marduk took the limbs of Tiamat as the matter by which he gave shape and order to the entirety of the cosmos and the birth of human beings. Cassirer carefully contemplates this epic tale of creation and reflects on its primal charge: “The word of Marduk is eternal; his command is unchangeable, no god can alter what proceeds from his mouth.”76 We are being told that the world before us is itself made from the material of the previous myth. By extension, that previous world of myth cannot be fully annulled for it is from that world of myth that we have the world today. As Cassirer phrases the question at-hand: But the mythical monsters were not entirely destroyed. They were used for the creation of a new universe, and they still survive in this universe. The powers of myth were checked and subdued by superior forces. As long as these forces, intellectual, ethical, and artistic are in full strength, myth is tamed and subdued. But once they begin to lose their strength

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chaos is come again. Mythical thought then starts to rise anew and to pervade the whole of man’s cultural and social life.77

Thus, myth carries a staying power throughout our lives and within our symbolic forms, giving shape to the world no matter how much we may try to sanitize it from our presence. Indeed, myth is ever-present and may be able to be reconfigured. The question, then, that will arise in the next chapter is: How are we to look at the always unfinished project of modernity and its use of enlightenment akin to negative powers of myth as a form of domination and deception?

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The Always Unfinished Project of Modernity: The Fragile Life of Symbols

introduction We have seen how the power of symbolic forms gives rise to our very understanding of the world, whether in myth or language. But what happens when the societies we live in attempt to monolithically obliterate the richness, diversity, and complexity of a world enhanced by a plurality of symbolic forms? Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno proffer a careful examination in which enlightenment has been bled of its progressive aspirations and mistakenly rendered into a myth perpetuating global domination and deception. Herbert Marcuse, similarly, develops a critique that takes note of the ways in which life in the advanced industrial world has been symbolically flattened into a one-dimensional logic that keeps a totalitarian system of administration in place such that our spheres of economy, politics, and society fuel a larger system of warfare having us “dancing before death.” Both critiques capture the catastrophic state of the world under the throes of capitalism and colonialism. However, as we have seen already and will continue to see in forthcoming chapters, they castrate too quickly the way in which symbolic forms can never be rendered completely impotent. Even the making of the world from the matter of both actual and possible symbolic forms always carries a contagion for revolutionary change. Jürgen

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Habermas contends that the release from such an ethically shattered world is one of communicative action, where universal pragmatics itself inherently arises from discourse and offers a reconstructive science of reason situating the ideal speech situation in the rudiments of everyday speech and understanding. Such a voluminous argument is taken up only to contrast Habermas’s collected essays in The Liberating Power of Symbols with Cassirer.

enlightenment without illumination Famously, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer give us an archetypal image of enlightenment. Odysseus dares to travel through the realm of the Sirens, winged creatures with knowledge of the past and future that sing for the return of Persephone.1 Everyone knows all too well that hearing the cry of the Sirens will lead to death: a rotting of the flesh under the trance of the spirit. But Odysseus has machinated a clever gambit. After filling the ears of his crew with beeswax, he is tied to the mast of his ship. The Marxist analysis becomes almost self-evident. The crew toils as the proletariat, whose surplus labor is extracted in excess, allowing Odysseus the bourgeois indulgence of enjoying the song of the Sirens. Systematic domination emerges, revolutionary imagination atrophies, and human beings have become machines operating under the rhythm of automaticity.2 Of course, famously, it is women who are the temptresses, and their otherness must be resisted. Here, Odysseus is also the symbol of male rationality that allows itself to only toy with the other, and rationality is the instrumental reason that he deploys to fulfill his own desire to hear the Sirens but not surrender to their temptation. Thus, from the beginning we see reason reduced to instrumental rationality and pitted against the other of feminine sexual difference.3 Of course, this feminine sexual difference tempts us in the sense of taking us out of the rational world. The tale of Odysseus is but the beginning of further questions about the way in which enlightenment disavows its own teleological character (one that can never come into full practical achievement) and persists as the negative embodiment of myth fostering domination and deception. For we are under the influence of an impossible, and perhaps spellbinding, position where dialogue on enlightenment has been foreclosed precisely because the so-called other of reason cannot be addressed because she is too terrifying. If we are to critique the myth of enlightenment with its triumphant instrumental rationality, then we have fallen into defending the

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barbarity of times past. At the same time, we all know too well that if we defend this mythical enlightenment then we are promoting barbarity of times present. “In the most general sense of progressive thought,” Horkheimer and Adorno pronounce, “the Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty. Yet the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant.”4 One need only read the daily news in order to grasp such a statement—an experience filled with a vertigo of being bombarded with more information than one could ever process, yet not gleaning any understanding as to why our age seems to reign as the harbinger of its own destruction (environmental destruction, perpetual war, and economic collapse). Nature has become, under a mythic conception of enlightenment, the object of our technical mastery, yet it has also been reified as a subject making us the objects of productive efficiency. “Ruthlessly, in despite of itself, the Enlightenment has extinguished any trace of its own self-consciousness. The only kind of thinking that is sufficiently hard to shatter myths is ultimately self-destructive.”5 The self-destructive contagion within the sort of thinking that would purport to shatter the myth of enlightenment is what comes under review in the Dialectic of Enlightenment. Such a text is useful for understanding the challenges we face in our world today where a certain version of the Enlightenment as full rationality aims to take over as the reigning symbolic form throughout the world. It is a critique giving due warning to the ways in which the symbolic form of such full rationality has taken on a mythic, unstable character whose demise will double with the collapse of our own species being. However, such rationality, according to Horkheimer and Adorno, deserves a careful definition: In both the pregnancy of the mythical image and the clarity of the scientific formula, the everlastingness of the factual is confirmed and mere existence pure and simple expressed as the meaning which it forbids. The world as a gigantic analytic judgment, the only one left over from all the dreams of science, is of the same mold as the cosmic myth which associated the cycle of spring and autumn with the kidnapping of Persephone. The uniqueness of the mythic process, which tends to legitimize factuality, is deception. Originally the carrying off of the goddess was directly synonymous with the dying of nature. It repeated itself every autumn, and even the repetition was not the result of the

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buried one but the same every time. With the rigidification of the consciousness of time, the process was fixed in the past as a unique one, and in each new cycle of the seasons an attempt was made ritually to appease fear of death by recourse to what was long past. But the separation is ineffective. Through the establishment of a unique past, the cycle takes on the character of inevitability, and dread radiates from the age-old occurrence to make every event its mere repetition. The absorption of factuality, whether into legendary prehistory or into mathematical formalism, the symbolic relation of the contemporary to the mythic process in the rite or to the abstract category in science, makes the new appear as the predetermined, which is accordingly the old.6

The world is seen, then, in monolithic fashion as an analytic judgment that can be formulaically apprehended as the factuality of existence under the banner of an enlightenment that fails to admit its mythic character. However, this rationality as encompassing the entire world is not an abstract notion or a politically empty pursuit. Symbolic forms, as we have seen, require some vehicle by which they are expressed. As a conception of this sort of full rationality “chases itself around the whole of the world,” its means for travel— both within and outside of its boundaries—are the instruments and ideology of capitalism and colonialism. Enlightenment was meant to be an idea whereby human beings dared to know the world through their own understanding. However, the separation between scientific understanding and moral reason defended by Kant was hijacked through an unruly neglect of moral personality and exclusive focus on technical practice. As Horkheimer and Adorno remind us: With the formalization of reason, to the extent that its preferred function is that of a symbol for neutral procedures, theory itself becomes an incomprehensible concept, and thought appears meaningful only when meaning has been discarded. Once it is harnessed to the dominant mode of production, the Enlightenment—which strives to undermine any order which has become repressive—abrogates itself.7

A peculiar, uneasy, chimerical transformation has taken place. Reason has been deified by modern thought, and genuflection demands no questioning about its original creation but instead compels devotion through ritualistic

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practices of so-called rational economic development and expansion. Science is bled of telos and morality replaced by calculated efficiency such that “in contradistinction to the categorical imperative and all the more in accordance with pure reason, it treats men as things—as the loci of modes of behavior.”8 The problem, then, also becomes one of how we are to recover a sense of our thinking selves in such an ethical shattering of the world. For Kant in the third Critique, nature could be imagined and given purposiveness through a telos that allows for the emergence of human freedom; synthetic judgments allow for the building up of understanding within the schema that treats science as a symbolic form. However, analytic judgments, absent of self-knowledge of their synthetic counterparts, mistakenly treat science as an object to be reduced into mere techne¯, which belies the fundamental Kantian insight that nature is a construct of finite human reason. In the instance of the latter, without the enactment of the former, nature has become a figure of human alienation that we must control. The result, as Horkheimer and Adorno lament, is a world where: in thought, men distance themselves from nature in order thus imaginatively to present it to themselves—but only in order to determine how it is to become dominated. Like the thing, the material tool, which is held on to in different situations as the same thing, and hence divides the world as the chaotic, manysided, and disparate from the known, one, and identical, the concept is the ideal tool, fit to do service for everything, whenever it can be applied. And so thought becomes illusionary whenever it seeks to deny the divisive function, distancing, and objectification. . . . But while enlightenment maintains its justness against any hypostatization of utopia and unfailingly proclaims domination to be disunion, the dichotomy between subject and object that it will not allow to be obscured becomes the index of the untruth of that dichotomy and of truth. The proscription of superstition has always signified not only the progress of domination but its compromise. Enlightenment is more than enlightenment—the distinct representation of nature in its alienation. In the self-cognition of the spirit as nature in disunion with itself, as in prehistory, nature calls itself into account; no longer directly, as mana—that is, with the alias that signifies omnipotence—but as blind and lame.9

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Domination has become a superstitious signification of progress and the ultimate compromise of its utopian promises. The world, then, is not one that is seen for the richness, diversity, and plurality of possible symbolic forms but only the unassailable logic of so-called Enlightenment. If the world is imagined monolithically through the symbolic lens of a full rationality of the sort being critiqued by Horkheimer and Adorno, then we do not have the access to thinking or some other basis by which we might project mimetic alternatives to counter this ordering of the world: The ratio which supplants mimesis is not simply its counterpart. It is itself mimesis: mimesis unto death. The subjective spirit which cancels the animation of nature can master a despiritualized nature only by imitating its rigidity and despiritutalizing itself in turn. Imitation enters into the service of domination inasmuch as even man is anthropomorphized for man. The pattern of Odyssean cunning is the mastery of nature through such adaption. Renunciation, the principle of bourgeois disillusionment, the outward schema for the intensification of sacrifice, is already present in nuce in that estimation of the ratio of forces which anticipates survival as so to speak dependent on the concession of one’s own defeat, and—virtually—on death. The nimble-witted survives only at the price of his own dream, which he wins only by demystifying himself as well as the powers without.10

Indeed, the world is statically conceived in a rigidity whereby any posed alternative already signals its own death. The call to mimetic reconfiguration without any means to appeal to symbolic form outside of full rationality carries a deeply pathological, infectious logic of progress absent of morality and guided by a reason hijacked by technological efficiency. For the strong ordering of the world as full rationality carries with it a basic material problem: How are the starving workers of the world to feed themselves in an exploitative system of capital-making (one that also alienates the thinking mind and reifies economic value and social relationship through an inversion of the categories of subject and object) and at the same time reconfigure the symbolic understanding of the world according to ethical alternatives? One must adopt, in part, the dream of the world of full rationality in order to successfully negotiate its labyrinthine passageways—passageways one is required

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to traverse in the making of bare subsistence. Such sacrifice becomes mythically demanded from enlightenment as a matter of survival. Yet such sacrifice is more than material deprivation and, indeed, involves denial of our subjective self. Upon his return from the Trojan War, Odysseus, searching for supplies, enters the cave of the Cyclops Polyphemus, who returns home alongside his flock of sheep and flings a huge boulder before the entrance of the cave in order to trap the trespassers.11 Odysseus gives Polyphemus strong wine, and the giant, in a drunken stupor, asks the man before him his name. “Odysseus,” as a name, carries a double meaning: “Udeis” translates as both “hero” and “nobody.” Odysseus announces himself as the latter rather than the former. While the giant is passed out, the crewmembers sharpen his club and roast its tip to a fiery ember in order to pierce the single eye of the sleeping, drunken Polyphemus. The now-blind giant screams out to others of his clan for help, and when they ask who has caused him harm he responds by saying “nobody,” which leads his clan to assume he has gone insane. Tied to the bottom of the sheep, Odysseus and his crew escape the next morning when the flock is let out of the cave to graze. To escape the Cyclops Polyphemus, Odysseus maneuvers an act of linguistic cunning and takes on the nonidentity of Udeis. If the Sirens and Cyclops represent for Horkheimer and Adorno mythic entities of superior force, inevitable ritual, and even legal character,12 then we are being told through the tale of Odysseus that we must disavow ourselves into a state of being a nonentity in order to successfully navigate the system of bourgeois bureaucracy and domination serving as the parallel to these mythic entities in their critique of enlightenment. The culture industry is indeed to blame for this frozen position of asymmetrical sacrifice of our material and psychic selves in the service of a larger industry of domination and destruction. As Horkheimer and Adorno remark: A technological rationale is the rationale of domination itself. It is the coercive nature of society alienated from itself. Automobiles, bombs, and movies keep the whole thing together until their leveling element shows its strength in the very wrong which it furthered. It has made the technology of the culture industry no more than the achievement of standardization and mass production, sacrificing whatever involved in a distinction between the logic of the work and that of the social system.13

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Standardization and automation is not just a matter of what is made on an assembly line but also involves the making of atomistic social relations that are produced alongside the making of capital. The entire social fabric of advanced industrial life is woven with the thin threads of digital gadgetry, advanced weaponry, and commercial images that not only distract as commodity fetishes in their immediate consumption but also eclipse the economic and political system of capitalist, colonial domination spreading unilaterally throughout the world. Aesthetics, then, is sublimated to the activity of production and enforcement of class hierarchy, such that: In the culture industry this imitation finally becomes absolute. Having ceased to be anything but style, it reveals the latter’s secret: obedience to social hierarchy. Today aesthetic barbarity completes what has threatened the creations of the spirit since they were gathered together as culture and neutralized. To speak of culture was always contrary to culture. Culture as a common denominator already contains in embryo that schematization and process of cataloging and classification which bring culture within the sphere of administration.14

The aesthetic barbarity inscribed in this analysis is one in which the myth of full rationality and productive efficiency has swelled to behemoth-like proportions and eclipsed the seeming possibility for any other symbolic understanding of the world. Indeed, the logic of the culture industry has been fused with our schematic classification of the world of objects denoted in the productive imagination as the world of facticity. The embryo of such symbolic formulation is not just a matter of naïve consumption but of dogged obedience to a totalitarian system of administration that produces and reproduces a world of grotesque class division through sensuous repetition, immediacy, and imitation. The expression of a monolithically conceived full rationality as symbolic form is both empty of truthful content yet, at the same time, overflowing with instrumental demands. As Horkheimer and Adorno tell us: Language based entirely on truth simply arouses impatience to get on with the business deal it is probably advancing. . . . Its very vagueness, its almost scientific aversion from committing itself to anything which cannot be verified, acts as an instrument of domination. It becomes a

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vigorous and prearranged promulgation of the status quo. . . . It skillfully steers a winding course between the cliffs of demonstrable misinformation and manifest truth, faithfully reproducing the phenomenon whose opaqueness blocks any insight and installs the ubiquitous and intact phenomenon as ideal.15

A sort of plasticity emerges whereby the objects of the culture industry operate in a double sense. First, the objects are vague instruments of domination encountered in the use-value prescribed by the symbolic world-at-hand. Second, the objects are also ubiquitous representations of phenomena ideally projecting the inner logic of the symbolic world under full rationality. For example, the artifacts of the culture industry, such as clothing, makeup, and even cosmetic surgery, carry an immediate use in plastic transformation of the body as a projective landscape attempting to mirror an impossible-toachieve sense of social beauty. But these objects and their phenomenological use also simultaneously point to the larger logic (both somatically and psychically) of the ideal dominating the world: a full rationality that would render human beings into commodities in a bought, conquered world of capitalism and colonialism. As Horkheimer famously said in his essay on materialism and morality: “At no time has the poverty of humanity stood in such crying contradiction to its potential wealth as in the present, at no time have all of the powers been so horribly fettered as in this generation, where children go hungry and the hands of the fathers are busy churning out bombs.”16 To be sure, Horkheimer and Adorno have issued an intellectually provocative critique of the way in which the forces of purported enlightenment have indeed turned into mechanisms of domination and deception. What we have gleaned from Cassirer in this book so far provides us with a means of escape from any monolithically conceived, world-encompassing symbolic form of full rationality. One should remember that Cassirer bravely suggests that any symbolic form made from the very matter of myth in the remaking of the world can never fully obliterate the former in the making of the latter. That is to say, remembering back to the conclusion of Myth of the State, if myths (either of the old world or the world of enlightenment) have been taken as the dragon that the great god Marduk slays in order to make the world anew, then we have the very matter by which to mimetically reconfigure new, possible symbolic formulations. The state of advanced capitalism

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makes it more than a mere challenge to accomplish such a feat in the face of a logic of bare survival. However, it is hyperbole to suggest the impossibility of such change in the face of a long twentieth century that has seen the colonial worlds turned upside-down by transformative revolutionary practices that indeed take the challenges of labor seriously. We have also seen ongoing vertical dramas of revolutionary transformation working to annul the ways in which racism itself has become a symbolic form alongside of its capitalist and colonialist corollaries. Such, as we will see in the next chapter, is the power of symbolic forms to aid in the call for transformative revolution.

the one-dimensional world Herbert Marcuse, too, critiques the symbolic form of advanced industrial society, suggesting “the more rational, productive, technical, and total the repressive administration of society becomes, the more unimaginable the means and ways by which the administered individuals might break their servitude and seize their own liberation.”17 We are told of a pervasive onedimensional logic, claiming “[a] comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom prevails in advanced industrial civilization, a token of technical progress.”18 Life, then, follows a certain type of all-encompassing logic—a way of thinking that limits the imagination from other ways of understanding, perceiving, and living. Marcuse argues that such one-dimensional thinking socializes people to believe in false needs, “which are superimposed upon the individual by particular social interests in his repression: the needs which perpetuate toil, aggressiveness, misery, and injustice.”19 The situation is of the order of an aesthetic catastrophe whereby the surrounding world operates under the reins of advanced industrial logic at odds with both the productive and reproductive capacities of our very imagination. Surpassing such onedimensional logic requires instead that we be able to rely on our imaginative capacities in the space for aesthetic reflection to tease out the multiplicities, ambiguities, and contradictions within such a world. Advanced society, then, only advances in its forms of total administrative control and repressive containment of revolutionary thinking; we are left with a flattening out of symbolic means to even think ourselves in the throes of a one-dimensional society that has our critical sensibilities distracted with comfortable, ambiguous forms of entertainment that could never double as meaningful human leisure. There is no relaxing reprieve from the onslaught

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of the Warfare State that would have us “dance in the face of death.” The actuality of the world in supposed fact and the possibility of its future becoming have been fused into an unhappy sublimation: the happy consciousness of so-called freedom of choice embedded in commodification. The mode of symbolic operation, here, is one of “rational irrationality.” Society has advanced to an age capable of providing sustenance and shelter for all people, but it provides instead to the masses baseless commodities of false need: We are again confronted with one of the most vexing aspects of advanced industrial civilization: the rational character of its irrationality. Its productivity and efficiency, its ability to increase and spread comforts, to turn waste into need, and destruction into construction, the extent to which this civilization transforms the object world into an extension of man’s mind and body makes the very notion of alienation questionable. The people recognize themselves in their commodities.20

For Marcuse, such recognition of the self in commodity form carries its own aesthetic character, one of “democratic domination aesthetics,” where choice among produced goods and services doubles as a sense of symbolic articulation of the self.21 Television channels offer the semblance of difference in imitative programming, brand names colorfully present the same product in different packages, and yet these commodities are all often owned monopolistically through a parent company of a different name. At stake, for Marcuse, is the fact that “the physical transformation of the world entails the mental transformation of its symbols, images, and ideas.”22 As a result, the flattening out of the symbolic articulation of the self and the symbolic world leads to “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 to terms of this universe. They are redefined by the rationality of the given system and of its quantitative extension.”23 The world becomes one in which “there arises a universe of administration in which depressions are controlled and conflicts stabilized by the beneficial effects of growing productivity and threatening nuclear war.”24 Such a universe of administration carries both material and symbolic consequence. The looming threats of perpetual war rhetorically framed with no end in

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sight are very much linked to the sustained productivity of the economy. Labor itself is the vehicle to make and end war within the larger sphere of the global economy: a syllogism where the combined double proposition inductively arrives at compulsory domination. The bankrupt state of such a one-dimensional society is lamented by Marcuse for its failure to give space to a reflective imagination capable of thinking and enacting meaningful civil protest: Now it is precisely this new consciousness, this “space within,” the space for the transcending historical practice, which is being barred by a society in which subjects as well as objects constitute instrumentalities in a whole that has its raison d’être in the accomplishments of its overpowering productivity. Its supreme promise is an ever-more-comfortable life for an ever-growing number of people who, in a strict sense, cannot imagine a qualitatively different universe of discourse and action, for the capacity to contain and manipulate subversive imagination and effort is an integral part of the given society.25

One might suggest that the increasing automation of production yields the means by which human beings are no longer cognitively taxed from the toil and drudgery of strict manual work, and are instead tasked with more facile duties that do not render our living labor empty of the energy necessary for sustained thought and reflection. However, the world of automation is one in which mental fatigue replaces physical fatigue. Whereas workers before automation were the actual machines making capital and held the power of strike to end the process if it became a matter of their self-negation, now automation transforms workers into mere professional operators that upon striking find that the machine, and with it capital making, still continues functioning.26 For Marcuse, the realm of culture (commercial and aesthetic) has also been flattened out, and the liberatory impulses of the latter have been folded into the commodification of the former. The two forms have been liquidated into the established order of society, which ingests such emaciated commercial content in the form of mass reproduction: Today’s novel feature is the flattening out of the antagonism between culture and social reality through the obliteration of the oppositional,

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alien, and transcendent elements in the higher culture by virtue of which it constituted another dimension of reality. This liquidation of two-dimensional culture takes place not through the denial and rejection of the “cultural values,” but through their wholesale incorporation into the established order, through their reproduction and display on a massive scale.27

The concern Marcuse shares for this flattening out of culture along the lines of one-dimensionality is that radical aesthetic works, such as surrealist paintings or symbolist poetry, are consumed. As a result, we lose their liberatory power, which resided in that “what they recall and preserve in memory pertains to the future: images of a gratification that would dissolve the society which suppresses it.”28 Indeed, the power of such radical aesthetics was that it did very much constitute a different and more just symbolic reality, and the loss of such symbolic forms makes society dominated under one-dimensionality mute to speak with a voice of radical change. Such radical works, for Marcuse, also carry power because they provide a tension between actuality and possibility that is insoluble, placing itself in another dimension where the given reality shows itself as that which it is. Thus it tells the truth about itself; its language ceases to be that of deception, ignorance, and submission. Fiction calls the facts by their name and their reign collapses; fiction subverts everyday experience and shows it to be mutilated and false. But art has this magic power only as the power of negation. It can speak its own language only as long as the images are alive which refuse and refute the established order.29

Marcuse, quoting Paul Valéry, puts the matter at-hand in its strongest terms when we are reminded that “poetry performs the great task of thought: the effort which makes live in us that which does not exist.”30 Radical aesthetics, then, promises to fracture the flattening symbolic form of one-dimensionality and give us the fragments of thought imagining a future possible world not compromised by the established order of today. The trouble, for Marcuse, is that the creation of new institutional arrangements administering onedimensional society along multiple, interconnected fronts (culture, politics, economy, and warfare) have made the expression of new, more just symbolic forms difficult, if not impossible, to envision, let alone realize.

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Totalitarianism is not a political reality of impossible proportions but a system of operation. There is a fragile life to the world of symbolic forms. They can be maligned, broken, and forgotten but also reconfigured, repaired, and recalled. Marcuse, though, would remind us that we suffer from “a genuine ‘translation’ of hypostatized universal into concreteness. . . . The hypostatized whole resists analytic dissolution, not because it is a mythical entity behind the particular entities and performances but because it is the concrete, objective ground of their functioning in the given social and historical context.”31 Thinking the origin of language can offer no simple escape by reflecting on the signification and combination of objects through words since they emerge, instead, from the whole of a symbolic form.32 We are left with the chance effects of a Great Refusal, both from within and outside of the one-dimensional society. Marcuse at least sees the possible beginning to the end of such logic in the Great Refusals of those embattled at the height of the civil rights movement, when their minds and bodies turned into a force that denied the very game of one-dimensionality and its resulting domination and deception. But, as we will see, such great refusals are alive not only within our society but also throughout the world where people have refused the symbolic form of racism that is a part of the very matter making up colonialism and capitalism. At the end of his treatise on onedimensional society Marcuse quotes the famous line from Walter Benjamin reminding us, “It is only for the sake of those without hope that hope is given to us.”33 The state of the world, in symbol both actual and possible, has perhaps arrived at such a stage of looming devastation that we deserve the status of being without hope and, therefore, must cling ever more tightly to the hope that inheres in the power of symbolic forms and, indeed, the possibility of revolutionary transformation.

the trouble with reconstructive science As is well known, Jürgen Habermas believed that his predecessors, particularly Horkheimer and Adorno, had trapped themselves in a fatal pessimism because they were caught in the “philosophy of consciousness.” This is not an obvious claim since both Horkheimer and Adorno spent a lifetime addressing the distorted relationships between human beings brought on not only by modernity but also capitalism, which commodifies subjectivity and, indeed, consciousness. For Habermas, the real problem is that they continued to

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think in terms of a world in which subjects are confronted by objects. Therefore, they succumbed to the very instrumental rationality that they sought to criticize. Simply put, there is no way out of a world eaten up by instrumental rationality if one can only think in its terms, which, for Habermas, are inseparable from the great Copernican Revolution of Immanuel Kant. In a certain way, although Habermas would never concede this point, he is very close to Heidegger in his critique of his predecessors. Kant preserved our freedom only by creating a world of objects that stood against us (Gegenstand ). These objects stand against a finite human reason. The very finite condition of such reason imposes onto those objects a law-like structure. The result, for Heidegger, was that vindication by Kant whereby the laws of physics turned nature into something that could only be graspable as the mathematical. Because the free subject now stands over and against objects reduced to the mathematical, Heidegger turned away from the critical philosophy of Kant. Instead, Heidegger pursued his searing indictment of how we had fallen away from who we truly are as the Shepherds of Being.34 Habermas responds to the entrapment he reads in Dialectic of Enlightenment with a philosophy of language; indeed, a first philosophy of language. But we must continue to stress that this is just the reading given by Habermas to the philosophical dilemma of his predecessors. Because another way of reading Dialectic of Enlightenment is as an artificial mythology 35 that gives us a powerful account of the degeneration of the ideals of the Enlightenment and due critical warning of its pervasive, exploitative character. Such an analysis is one that could only be judged as “aesthetic” in the broad meaning of the term, akin to the sense of the aesthetic one finds in the third Critique. As we have seen, one of the central differences between Cassirer and Habermas is that Cassirer is explicitly a third Critique Kantian. In the third Critique Kant broadly defines the aesthetic so as to develop a new idea of reflective judgment that is not restricted to the scientific knowledge of determinative judgment defended as philosophically possible in the first Critique. Briefly described, reflective judgment as defined by Kant is shown in the following: If, then, the form of a given object in empirical intuition is so constituted that the apprehension of its manifold in the imagination agrees with the presentation of a concept of the understanding (though which concept be undetermined), then in the mere reflection understanding and imagina-

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tion mutually agree for the advancement of their business, and the object will be perceived as purposive merely for the power of judgment, hence the purposiveness itself will be considered as merely subjective; for which, further, no determinate concept of the object at all is required nor is one thereby generated, and the judgment itself is not a cognitive judgment.— Such a judgment is called an aesthetic judgment of reflection.36

Here, we just need to emphasize that Habermas does not give philosophical significance to the aesthetic in the third Critique. Under the first philosophy of language defended by Habermas, the aesthetic is simply one of the parasitic forms of language in which human beings express themselves; it has no philosophical status as an alternative to determinate judgment, one that emphasizes a new relationship between the universal and the particular, the constitutive and the regulative. Habermas’s ultimate aim is to provide a unified conception of reason allowing him to answer his predecessors who he has diagnosed as being trapped in instrumental rationality. There are at least three elements of this program, which can be merely sketched out here, entailing: (1) a theory of the origins of language, (2) an elaboration of speech act theory as it entails a community of competent speakers, and (3) a philosophical conceptualization of the connection between communicative action and the freeing of the lifeworld from its colonization by the medium of systems such as economics and money. Simply put, for Habermas, modernity is characterized by the historical unraveling of the connection of all human practices in a shared lifeworld, one that Habermas argues was predominant as a form of integration in so-called traditional societies. We add the caveat “so-called” because Habermas defines traditional societies in a circular manner and without careful ethnographic precision. A traditional society, for Habermas, is one in which all forms of human practice are integrated in a shared lifeworld. Habermas is not joining the ethnographers who have worked so carefully to define a “traditional society.” Such ethnographers have carefully shown the complexity and tensions between diverse aspects of relationships in such societies, such as morality, religion, and ethics.37 A modern society, for Habermas, is one in which the strategic action institutionalized through money and other instrumental means of power become increasingly separated and even dominate over the communicative action that takes place against the background conventions of the lifeworld.

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For Habermas, then, we begin our attempt to resolve the philosophical dilemma of his predecessors by distinguishing between strategic action and communicative action, systems organization (a form of association coordinated with strategic action) and the lifeworld (which is always given to us in a linguistic medium but cannot be objectified as a whole). That the linguistic medium can never be objectified as a whole was a central insight of Heidegger and Wittgenstein. Although Habermas shares their conviction that all meaning takes place in a linguistically mediated lifeworld, he argues that this in no way refutes his attempt to establish a formal pragmatics connected to an ontogenetic learning program of speaking competence. Of course, both Wittgenstein and Heidegger would have profoundly disagreed with Habermas, and suggested instead that once he had discovered the insight that we are a part of a language game we can never fully comprehend, then the effort to develop a first philosophy of language would inevitably falter and collapse. To quote Habermas on his conception of the linguistic mediation of the lifeworld: With its categorical organization and grammatical prestructuring of the background consensus of the lifeworld, language makes a contribution to this enabling of rational behavior. In reaching understanding with one another about something in the objective world, communicative actors always already operate within the horizon of their lifeworld. No matter how high they climb, the horizon retreats before them, with the result that they can never bring the lifeworld as a whole before them—as is possible with the objective world—and survey it as a whole. It is no coincidence that this Being-in-the-World, as analyzed by Heidegger, can be illustrated by the strange semitranscendence of a language that, although we can use it as a means of communication, is nonetheless never at our disposal: we always operate through the medium of language and can never performatively—so long as we speak—objectify it as a whole. In this way, the lifeworld, which is itself articulated in the medium of language, opens up for its members an interpretive horizon for everything that they experience in the world, about which they reach understanding, and from which they can learn.38

Here, Habermas has a large intellectual chasm to cross that does not seem traversable. For, indeed, one of the central lessons we have gleaned from Wittgenstein is that we should refute rational reconstructions of language because they

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are simply impossible. The upside to such a declaration, of course, is that if we cannot fully rationalize language, including scientific language, then the world cannot become fully consumed by any form of rationality since all forms of reason are in language. Putting these matters aside, let us turn to Habermas and the specific challenges facing his reconstructive science. First, Habermas must show that a first philosophy of language is still possible. Second, Habermas must defend a reconstructed community of competent speakers as inherent in the illocutionary force of everyday language. Third, Habermas must then argue that this form of communicative action is actually prior to all of the parasitic (to use his phrase) uses of language. Fourth, and most importantly, Habermas must show that communicative reason can resolve the horrifying realities of modern life critiqued by his predecessors—a modernity that his communicative reason is based in and desperately seeks to defend. This is an enormous undertaking and certainly not one that the great philosophers of speech acts—J. H. Austin and John Searle—would have pursued in their philosophy of language. Habermas defines the task of universal pragmatics as one that seeks to reconstruct universal conditions of mutual understanding and thus provide the basis for a unique form of action known as communicative: The task of universal pragmatics is to identify and reconstruct universal conditions of possible mutual understanding (Verständigung). In other contexts, one also speaks of “general presuppositions of communication,” but I prefer to speak of general presuppositions of communicative action because I take the type of action aimed at reaching understanding to be fundamental. Thus I start from the assumption (without undertaking to demonstrate it here) that other forms of social action—for example, conflict, competition, strategic action in general—are derivatives of action oriented toward reaching understanding (Verständigung). Furthermore, since language is the specific medium of reaching understanding at the sociocultural stage of evolution, I want to go a step further and single out explicit speech actions from other forms of communicative action. I shall ignore nonverbal actions and bodily expressions.39

Habermas argues that inherent in our day-to-day speech is a form of action that succeeds if the “utterer” makes a validity claim and the “hearer” only has to say “yes” or “no” while not being coerced by anything other than the

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force of the better argument under their own self-reflection on the claim being made. Although Habermas speaks of this as a universal pragmatic, it is not obviously translatable for what he defines as a so-called traditional society in which certain forms of authority would inhere in the status of the speaker. If the speaker is a god who commands your assent, then it is obviously not a good idea to refuse. Unlike Karl-Otto Apel, Habermas is not making a transcendental argument but one that implicitly turns on an ontogenetic learning process in which speech has been freed, at-least enough, from what Habermas would designate as irrational aspects of the lifeworld. Though, as we have seen through Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse, the modern lifeworld is indeed filled with irrational institutions that make such an ideal communicative scenario difficult to imagine as anything other than utopian. But Habermas is not defending a utopian ideal. Instead, Habermas is reconstructing a science of language as the grounding of day-to-day communication. As Habermas himself suggests: The speaker would like the addressee to accept what is said as valid; this is decided by the addressee’s “yes” or “no” to the validity claim for what is said that the speaker raises with his speech act. What makes the speech-act offer acceptable are, ultimately, the reasons that the speaker could provide in the given context for the validity of what was said. The rationality inherent in communication thus rests on the internal connection between (a) the conditions that make a speech act valid, (b) the claim raised by the speaker that these conditions are satisfied, and (c) the credibility of the warranty issued by the speaker to the effect that he could, if necessary, discursively vindicate the validity claim.40

Habermas follows, at least partly, Apel in his arguments against Wittgenstein. For Apel, language is not only transcendental in that it gives us the limits of our world and is, therefore, a condition which human beings can never escape. Apel also argues that the reason we can never have a private language is because there must be some kind of transcendental language game operating as a model for all language games. This transcendental language game, then, is connected to another transcendental ideal: The transcendental language game logically implies an ideal community of speakers. There is a weak developmental thesis in Apel that goes against Wittgenstein, and certainly against Cassirer, which is that proper linguistic usage always takes us

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back to some conception of different stages of linguistic competence. Thus, slowly, we move to understanding language itself as a series of communicative competencies, and through this process of abstraction we achieve an evergreater possibility of elaborating and coming closer to the ideal of the community of competent speakers who know themselves in such regard. The semitranscendental aspect of the pragmatic use of communicative speech (or in the parlance of Habermas the formal aspect) relies heavily on how Apel construes the normative conditions of reaching understanding in an ideal community of competent speakers. The two, though, have very different conceptions of the infinite ideal of the linguistic community. The yes or no inherent in every engagement between speakers carries within it a certain kind of ideal community, one, however, that has implications that go far beyond what Apel imagined as a self-reflexive grasp on who we are as speakers. For Habermas, the conditions of reaching understanding foreshadow the community we can hope for as inherent in the modern world in which communicative action has been freed enough from all traditional forms of being that block this kind of action as a free-standing action: The aim of reaching understanding (Verständigung) is to bring about an agreement (Einverständnis) that terminates in the intersubjective mutuality of reciprocal comprehension, shared knowledge, mutual trust, and accord with one another. Agreement is based on recognition of the four corresponding validity claims: comprehensibility, truth, truthfulness, and rightness. We can see that the word “Verständigung” is ambiguous. In its narrowest meaning it indicates that two subjects understand a linguistic expression in the same way; in its broadest meaning it indicates that an accord exists between two subjects concerning the rightness of an utterance in relation to a mutually recognized normative background. In addition, the participants in communication can reach understanding about something in the world, and they can make their intentions understandable to one another.41

When the yes or no exchange becomes bogged down in disagreement, then there are certain idealizations that arise—what Habermas calls “idealizing suppositions”—that allow the conversation to continue. For Habermas, if the conversation is to persist as part of a communicative action, then it must be guided by these idealizations.

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To draw out what this means: When two scientists disagree, some would say they appeal to the conventions of science as it is practiced in a given historical period. Others, such as Charles Sanders Peirce and contemporary physicist Lee Smolin, have argued that sometimes the conventions of scientific practice need to be questioned because they govern against the ideal presupposition of truth. Smolin, in a sense following Peirce, suggests that scientists must reflect on the ideals inherent within the scientific community.42 Thus, the ideal conditions of truth always turn us back to an ideal ethical community of inquirers who can indeed reflect on the practices of their disciplinary undertaking. In Peirce and Smolin, these ideals are just that: ideals. These ideals pull the community of inquirers toward self-reflection because they provide a critical standard for that community. We know that Habermas was deeply influenced by Peirce but this is not the kind of process of idealization and reflection to which Habermas wants to appeal. Habermas wants to make the much stronger claim that there are idealizing suppositions actually inherent in the pragmatics of illocutionary speech that seek not only to “say something” but to “do something”; thus, as we argue with one another, and remain true to the yes or no inherent in the basics of an utterance addressed to a hearer, we potentially bring about a state of affairs in the world and among ourselves. For Habermas, all other forms of language are parasitic on the pragmatic use of speech in which the illocutionary force of language is taken as predominant over the perlocutionary usage of language precisely because these idealized forms of argumentation are inherent only in the pragmatic use of language. Social order is presented in the modern world as a network of cooperation that inheres in these suppositions of argumentation. But it is also context transcendent in that it does not depend on any set of ethical norms established by an actual community and takes us only to the suppositions of argument itself. Habermas hopes to accomplish a great deal of work with these suppositions of argument in that they purportedly give us a postmetaphysical idea of cooperation true to the “bright” side of modernity and provides us with an alternative to the strategic action associated with the “dark” side of modernity. Thus, Habermas argues that he has developed, through his notion of communicative action and rationality, a postmetaphysical alternative to conceptions of truth and justice that also allows criticism of any local community because it relies on nothing other than the idealized suppositions of everyday speech.

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Habermas has always described his ethics as one of suspicion because modernity is defined as that which must generate all the structures of rightness out of itself without any appeal to tradition. Of course, anyone familiar with Hegel in the Phenomenology of Mind remembers that the striving for fully rationalized self-generation and a new ethical world without foundation is not only scary but fed the idea of the terror.43 If someone appealed to anything good about anything in the already existing world, then they were labeled counterrevolutionary and their fate was death. Cassirer warned against the same danger in his Myth of Babylon. But for Habermas we are fated to be modern precisely because traditional forms of integration have completely broken down. Thus, we are left in his world picture, a phrase that would not please him, with no other possibility but an ethics of suspicion because ethics must be self-grounding. Such grounding must arise only in the idealized presuppositions inherent in communicative understanding. This ethics rose up against the world of money and other instrumental mediums, which are organized as systems. These systems operate against the lifeworld, which carries within it in the pragmatic use of speech, and the formal and ideal suppositions of argumentation just described. There is a deep sense in which the picture of world history held by Habermas turns on an ontogenetic notion of development, for obviously speakers in a traditional society are not free to say yes or no to the better argument. In a certain sense there had to be the disintegration of the interconnectedness of relationships in the lifeworld in order for us to be free, or at least free enough to say yes or no based only on the force of the better argument, for it is only that force alone which is allowable in argumentation. Habermas has often vacillated on the exact methodology by which to defend an ontogenetic learning process by which modern subjects come to be a certain kind of speaker who can participate in illocutionary acts in a particular kind of way; he can, however, never free the formal understanding of universal pragmatics as reconstructive science from this ontogenetic learning process. To quote Habermas: How strong do the essentialist assertions of a reconstructive linguistics regarding the psychic reality of reconstructed systems of rules have to be? Chomsky’s maturationist assumption—that grammatical theory represents exactly the innate dispositions that enable the child to develop the hypotheses that direct language acquisition and that process the

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linguistic data in the environment—seems to me too strong. Within the reconstructivist conceptual strategy, the more plausible assumption that grammatical theory represents the linguistic competence of the adult speaker is sufficient. This competence in turn is the result of a learning process that may even—in a manner similar to cognitive development or the development of moral consciousness—follow a rationally reconstructible pattern. As Bever suggests, even this thesis can be weakened to allow for restrictions placed on the acquisition and application of grammatical rule-knowledge by nonlinguistic perceptual mechanisms or nonlinguistic epistemic systems in general, without surrendering the categorical framework of a competence theory.44

The strong argument within a reconstructive science of language by Habermas is that Adorno and Horkheimer failed to note what Habermas “sees” as reason always already salvaged from its instrumental use because of the very suppositions of everyday speech. There has been a great deal of ink spilled criticizing the grand project to salvage reason through formal pragmatics and, by so doing, pointing out the positive conceptions of modernity as always within our reach as competent speakers; however, there is simply not room for us to make an addition to such debates within the framework of this book.45 Since we are focusing on the work of Cassirer, what follows is a contrast between the differences in the two projects, and we argue that the much less ambitious project by Cassirer is both ethically and philosophically preferable to Habermas. But before turning to Cassirer, we want to stress our agreement with David Rasmussen that there is a fundamental tension between the emancipatory purpose in Habermas’s scientific turn and, with it, his attempt to reduce critical theory to a reconstructive science. We must remember, for Habermas, it is not just a reconstructive science of language that interests him but much more importantly that this reconstructive science can be used to salvage modernity from its encompassment by instrumental rationality. As Rasmussen explains the contradiction: If we were to take the larger project in its best sense it would appear that the attempt to secure the primacy of communication in the philosophy of language is undercut by the distinction between system and lifeworld—because that distinction restricts major areas of human

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social experience from formation through processes based on communication. Yet that restriction, as indicated by the concept of system and material reproduction, conflicts with the idea that all linguistic phenomena have their originary form in communication, precisely because in terms of the social system only some phenomena can be classified under the rubric of consensus. Hence, the argument which supports the distinction between system and lifeworld, are at odds with one another. The desire to secure the primacy of the emancipatory in the former context (language) is undermined by the attempt to restrict the emancipatory in the latter (society).46

Habermas himself was an admirer of Cassirer, and indeed recognizes that he overcame the dualism that lies at the heart of at least one understanding of the transcendental philosophy of Kant. To quote Habermas: The intersubjectively shared domain of language, which is both energeia and ergon, creative rule and creation, possesses a distinctive kind of objectivity: language puts its stamp on the awareness of speaking subjects and also provides them with a medium for the expression of their own experiences: “Language is effective and autonomous from the objective point of view precisely to the extent that it is exploited and dependent from the subjective standpoint.” The contravention of grammatical rules reveals the stubborn reality of language, over which no one can claim control as if it were private property; on the other hand, language does not imprison subjects, but endows them with powers of free productivity, which even include the possibility of revising and creatively renewing the vocabulary of world-disclosure.47

For Habermas, however, the problem with Cassirer is exactly where we think we find his greatest strength. As we have seen, for Cassirer, there is no examination of a symbolic form in all of its richness and fullness except from within a symbolic form. But this charge is not perspectivism, or at least not in the sense of the term as used by Habermas. Habermas charges that if every symbolic form were truly closed in on itself, then there could be no commensurability between symbolic forms. But, to argue that we need to examine a symbolic form, as it has its own logic and meaning, in no way creates enclosed monads of symbolic forms. For Cassirer, language always carries

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within it a metaphoric possibility and, thus, there is always a free ideality within language. This ideality means that to a certain degree, at least, we are always in touch with the vast array of symbolizations that make up our human world. Thus, in a sense, we are never closed in, as Habermas seems to think. Indeed, Cassirer emphasizes that it is precisely the architectonic function of language that allows for the possibility of translation as it emerges through a constantly negotiated struggle to come to terms with the designation of words vivified in other languages. The inherent flexibility given in the infinite malleability of symbolic forms operates as a bridge between the worlds of different languages; and, indeed, other symbolic forms demand that those who wish to pass over such a linguistic bridge open themselves to how material signs vivify the world differently in diverse languages and symbolic forms. What Habermas is missing here is that it is not simply the universal applicability inherent in the architectonic function of language but also its versatility that inheres in the capacity of language to name at ever-higher levels of abstraction. It is also the metaphoric power of language that allows us to see likeness and sameness; what may be seen as different and oblique simply posits a different symbolic world. Thus, Cassirer is not a perspectivalist as Habermas accuses him of being; rather, Cassirer simply insists that the human creature is one marked by ideality and a richness of symbolic formulation unknown to any other creature. Habermas uses a famous example that Cassirer often used: one can interpret a line in many different ways. Habermas mistakenly suggests: Marc-Wogau refers to an example which Cassirer employs many times, according to which we can interpret the same line in different ways, depending on which symbolic form takes the leading role. We can see it as an ornament or a phenomenon of style, or as the symbol of a religious cult, or as a sine curve, and so forth. It is clear that the identity of the sense impression, as the point of reference of the different interpretations, can only be maintained when this impression is endowed with the significance of a reality “in itself,” independent of all interpretation. But Cassirer would then have to concede precisely that metaphysical separation of matter and form which he rightly wishes to avoid because of its contradictory consequences. On the other hand, he cannot give up on the premiss that there is a unity of reality within the

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multiplicity of perspectives. For as long as symbolic forms alone provide objectivity and validity, then they must all refer to the same reality. Today we would formulate the problem by saying that Cassirer cannot assert both of the following at the same time: that the different symbolic languages are incommensurable, and that they can nevertheless be at least partially translated into one another.48

Ultimately, Habermas is making the criticism that because of the perspectivism of Cassirer he must root the unity of reason in an extramundane mind. But Habermas has simply missed the central message of the philosophy of symbolic forms, for Cassirer is rooted in integral insights from Kant’s third Critique. We have seen that Cassirer undoes the distinctions between the constitutive and the regulative, the free and the necessary; and, perhaps most importantly for Cassirer, it is only through the third Critique that we come to grasp what makes us uniquely human: the ability to distinguish between actuality and possibility. There is a unity of reason to be found in Cassirer, but not as a constitutive rationality inherent in communicative action. The unity of reason, following Kant in the third Critique, is a regulative ideal that is projected outward and never reached. Respect for that ideal, as an ideal, demands that we explore the richness and depth of each symbolic form. Therefore, we can indeed come to terms with the ways in which each one of us can understand a line differently. There is no ontogenetic learning process in Cassirer that prevents a mature mathematician who can see a line from the perspective of the geometry of Euclid from also understanding its central importance in myth as a staff with divine authority. Nor is it necessary for a scientist to debunk the line grasped as the symbol of a religious community because such groups have not reached the formal pragmatics of language. The reduction by Habermas of the aesthetic to a parasitic form of language perhaps blinds him to the significance, for Cassirer, of Kant’s broadly construed notion of reflective judgment in the third Critique. But, without grasping that Cassirer is a third Critique Kantian, any reader of his work will be led astray. Here, we can read Cassirer himself as to how the unity of symbolic forms must always remain a regulative ideal: Here philosophical thinking must not content itself with a premature solution; there is nothing it can do but resolutely take this very contra-

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diction upon itself. The paradise of immediacy is closed to it: it must— to quote a phrase from Kleist’s article “On the Marionette Theater”— “journey round the world and see whether it may not be open somewhere in back.” But this “journey round the world” must really embrace the whole of the globus intellectualis: we must seek not to determine the nature of theoretical form through any one of its particular achievements, but rather to keep its total potentialities constantly in mind. And since any attempt simply to transcend the field of form is doomed to failure, this field should be not merely touched upon here and there but traveled from end to end. If thought cannot directly apprehend the infinite, it should at least explore the finite in all directions. The following investigations undertake to show that a coherent unity obtains, beginning with the ingenuous expressive value of perception and representative ideas—particularly those of space and time—and extending to the universal significations of language and theoretical cognition. The nature of this coherence can only be designated and made known by following its growth and through this growth discerning that, diverse and even contradictory as its separate phases are, it is nevertheless governed and guided by one and the same fundamental spiritual function.49

Cassirer, given his own philosophy of symbolic forms, could not give a definition of modernity as that which generates truth claims and rightness out of itself. We come to a world already embedded in a web of symbolic forms, and our freedom is not through self-generation but through the versatility and vivification that are a part of symbolic forms. If Habermas is becoming increasingly worried about utopianism, Cassirer profoundly argues that utopian thinking inheres in the rich symbolic world of human beings. Indeed, he emphasizes the role that utopia and world images of utopia have played in the philosophy of the Enlightenment itself. “The great mission of the Utopia,” Cassirer remarks, “is to make room for the possible as opposed to a passive acquiescence in the present actual state of affairs. It is symbolic thought which overcomes the natural inertia of man and endows him with a new ability, the ability constantly to reshape his human universe.”50 Maturity in a symbolic world, for Cassirer, offers us several critical and ethical lessons. The first, and we wish to underscore this emphatically, is that utopian thinking is how we as human beings continuously enrich our sym-

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bolic world. Therefore, we utopians have nothing to be ashamed of even as we seem to go up against the powerful world images of advanced capitalism in which human beings are portrayed as cynical, self-interested creatures bent on risk minimization and wealth maximization. For Cassirer, the world image of his time that mistakenly reduced human beings was that of a misguided Darwinism, one still found in certain strands of social biology. In a certain sense, then, the respect for utopian thinking is connected to another ethical message in Cassirer: respect for the plurality of symbolic forms as integral to the Kantian ideal of humanity. There are times when Cassirer speaks as if there was a certain development in modernity as it allows for greater self-reflexivity. But this is a weak strain in the larger philosophy of Cassirer, which ultimately always takes us back to his original reading of the third Critique. The answer to instrumental reason is that technological rationality, and certainly the larger scientific universe, is merely one symbolic form of the world among so many others—sometimes divergent, occasionally overlapping, and always infinitely complex. Cassirer was well aware that our symbolic world could be drained of the richness that inheres in the metaphoric capacity of language—drained but never completely emptied. If there is maturity and learning in Cassirer, then it resides in what Hannah Arendt called “the enlarged mentality” that she, too, read into the third Critique.51 The twist, à la Cassirer, is that we not only learn to see the world from the perspective and position of others but also must learn to respect the inevitable plurality of symbolic forms. Such respect demands that we view symbolic forms from within their own logic and not unilaterally condemn them as irrational through comparison. In our postcolonial world we clearly need the enlarged mentality that inheres in the work of Ernst Cassirer. There is no finished project of modernity, but there is always the unfinished project for any symbolic creature of creating a more just world. For among other things we are the creatures who can dream and envision that just world.

conclusion There is no magical answer that can erase the concern held by Marcuse about how our world has lost its symbolic richness to the one-dimensionality of political, economic, and social industries of commodification that give rise to a sphere of total administration. Yet we must not surrender in the

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struggle for Great Refusals the power of symbolic forms to create a new dimension of reality in a future world that has dissolved the forces of repression emaciating our material and ideological lives today. There is no overarching concept of rationality that one can wield to slay the domination and deception that Adorno and Horkheimer illustrate in their evocation of the mythic character of enlightenment that has sorely dragged human beings down into a nightmare world of instrumental rationality. An artificial mythology such as that offered in Dialectic of Enlightenment has to be judged for its aesthetic and ethical power to warn us as we stand teetering on the precipice of destruction. For the world is much larger than what we designate as so-called advanced industrial societies and much richer in its symbolic character than what has been frozen in time as the archetype of modernity. We are faced, then, with several new questions. Are symbolic forms only a matter of ideas or do they carry some sort of material force? In what ways has blackness and Africa been made to stand in as the archetypal figure of irrationality, as the other of Enlightenment? Must our thinking of decolonization begin with an inherent respect for the plurality of symbolic forms? And, then, what sort of symbolic power (both material and ideational) must inhere in transformative revolution.

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Transformative Revolution: Repairing the Fractured Ethical World

introduction If we cannot repair the fractured ethical world brought on by the more insidious components of modernity through a reconstructive science, then what sort of meaningful ethical restoration could be found in a respect for the plurality of symbolic forms for a world fraught with the widespread devastation of colonialism and capitalism? This chapter begins by revealing the ways in which the colonial legacy was parasitically infected with a white consciousness that established itself through a symbolic form of antiblack racism. Here, we turn to the work of Steve Biko to relate the ways in which white consciousness not only fashioned a system of Grand Apartheid in South Africa but also forestalled and sought to destructively inhibit the creation of a black consciousness as a way of being that ethically restored the imago of blacks subjugated under colonialism. Next, this chapter examines in depth the work of Paget Henry and extends the notion of revolution beyond the acquisition of state power and toward a reconstituted humanity in a triple sense. First, we must resist the ways in which any notion of being-in-the-world outside of Western imperialism is demonized in the image of Caliban while simultaneously enforcing the legitimacy of conquerors as heroes akin to Prospero. Second, if both the

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colonial situation and revolutionary movement are embedded in forms of violence that persist in the fracturing of individual imagos and loss of the richness of symbolic forms, then perhaps we require an engagement with the still-living, never utterly eclipsed spiritual traditions and philosophical practices of the Afro-Caribbean. Third, a bridge must be constructed bringing together both historicist and poeticist schools of thought into creolized dialogue in the ongoing symbolic form of transformative revolution.

the fractured ethical world The writings of Steve Biko carry salience across time. Writing on death, Biko tells us, “You are either alive and proud or you are dead, and when you are dead, you can’t care anyway.”1 Indeed, echoing and enhancing the mantra of philosophers before his time, Biko reminds us that life is integrally tied to justice, and death is far worse than our mere bodily decay but is an existential state where we have truly failed to be proud of who we are in the world. Not only did his words help forge black consciousness for millions of South Africans, in tandem with his persistent work to negotiate away from the brutality of apartheid and toward a future state of democratic equality, but his ideas live on with great meaning far after his own tragic death. Life today needs more than ever to grasp the ways in which racism has indeed become a symbolic form pathologically present in capitalist, colonialist makings of the world. Indeed, while the last chapter may rightly take note of the ways in which the life of symbolic forms is fragile, threatening to shatter the ethical relations of society according to the monolithic advancement of a world of so-called transparent rationality, such is a description of life for those under the protective shield (though dominating and alienating) of colonialism and capitalism. The figurative underside of such brutal powers is a world in which those powers are fed by the symbolic form of antiblack racism. Related to the idea of black consciousness to be discussed in the next chapter, Biko gives us an all-too-familiar and powerful critique of the consequences of white consciousness. Following Lewis Gordon, we can see the ways in which white consciousness is itself a symbolic form of antiblack racism.2 Against the totalitarian system of apartheid, Biko is always suggesting that the necessary antithesis to such a thesis is one of combined black struggle against the racism that would render blacks mere prey to the animal

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of colonialism.3 But what exactly is the white consciousness of apartheid and its connection to racism as a symbolic form? Biko, famously, established the SASO (South African Student Organization) and BPC (Black Community Programs) as ways to ignite the spark of black consciousness, encouraging solidarity among blacks against the emaciating view of white consciousness that would otherize blackness in a double sense. Blackness is made an abject reality of blacks as being not white enough, and whiteness is the imaginary of whites only being white enough in comparison to blacks. With a stylized rhetoric and power of purpose that echoes “Letter from Birmingham Jail” by Martin Luther King Jr., we are reminded that one of the fundamental problems with white consciousness, from the liberal side, inheres in its stalling effect and lethargy toward meaningful change. The white conservatives control government and the white liberals are playing their old game. They are claiming a “monopoly on intelligence and moral judgment” and setting the pattern and pace for the realization of the black man’s aspirations. They want to remain in good books with both the black and white worlds. . . . They vacillate between the two worlds, verbalizing all the complaints of the blacks beautifully while skillfully extracting what suits them from the exclusive pool of white privileges.4

White consciousness, then, begins with a double-sided affront of stagnation: the vociferous force of apartheid entrenched in ongoing social, political, and economic domination by white conservatives and a sense of guilt mixed with tepid reform working to soothe white liberals from feeling embarrassment before the “problem” of apartheid and black peril (swart gevaar). But is it merely that Biko wants to segregate the movement of black consciousness? The answer is complicated, and evolves throughout his writings. On the one hand, Biko rightly questions interest by whites who would join the movement of black consciousness with a limited spirit of righteousness and would invite blacks over for tea and scones, but who would see abandoning the use of segregated facilities and “defying and denouncing all provisions that make [them] privileged” as unrealistic.5 Yet, on the other hand, the crux of black consciousness is grounded in the ultimate, united standing against the pervasiveness of white racism and toward a “quest for true humanity” that would eradicate the combined economic, political, social, and

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religious underpinnings of apartheid in order to give the world “a more human face.”6 Biko wishes to speak of black consciousness as both a state of being and a teleology toward a new humanity, but he also points to the wrong of apartheid given meaning and force by the idealization of whiteness, which casts a long colonial shadow of antiblack racism as a symbolic form. “One cannot be a racist,” Biko explains, “unless he has the power to subjugate.”7 From that position, one should be appalled by the anomaly of whites that were “presumptuous enough to think that it behooved them to fight the battle for the blacks.”8 The underlying critique here is one of wrongful presumption in the apartheid structure and even in liberal protest that treats blacks like the children to white parentage. The logic unfolds to suggest that whiteness is a form of hegemony that is eclipsing the reason and being of blacks to engage in the world as capable, unique persons with dignity. Whiteness instead takes on a parasitic image of symbolic form. In this context, whiteness is parasitic because it requires, both in domination and reformation, the subjugation of blackness to the irrational authority of whiteness. Blackness is only deployed, under such white consciousness, in order to impose possessive and libratory domination in the form of racial neutralization. As Biko explains, there is a “superior-inferior white black stratification” in which in all relational contexts—leader/citizen, teacher/student, preacher/worshipper—“a settler minority [imposes] an entire system of values on an indigenous people.”9 The system and symbol of white consciousness and antiblack racism is indeed deep and complex but inheres around a constant denial of ways in which the ethical has been maligned and broken. As Biko explains: White society collectively owes the blacks so huge a debt that no one member should automatically expect to escape from the blanket condemnation that needs must come from the black world. It is not as if whites are allowed to enjoy privilege only when they declare their solidarity with the ruling party. They are born into privilege and nourished by and nurtured in the system of ruthless exploitation of black energy.10

Indeed, there is no debt that can be settled cheaply against the apartheid of the past that is still alive in the present. The entirety of the symbolic formulation of the world at the time when Biko wrote literally siphoned off black

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energy in a ruthless exploitation that was then alchemically transmuted into privileges that both nurtured and enhanced the white world. Today that black energy flows through the existing state even after the legal dissolution of apartheid, for it was the basis on which the entire edifice of the colonial, capitalistic world fashioned its institutions, both materially and ideologically. The pervasive parasitic character of white consciousness and antiblack racism is not only manifest in the specter of apartheid but in the very bricks forming buildings and books lining the shelves of libraries, where the whiteness of urban architecture and recorded knowledge carries legitimacy because of its opposition to the black way of life and blackness as non-being. The solution posed by white liberals is a politics of ongoing, patient integration. Such a maneuver requires the denial of the black world as symbolic form and perpetuation of a white consciousness under the euphemism of plurality without pluralism. Biko is clear that much of the struggle against white racism is the way in which forms of blackness have been obliterated by the call to modernity. Community organization, religious worship, and systems of economy have all eclipsed ways of being in the world that was blackened by the myth of white consciousness. To quote Biko: The myth of integration as propounded under the banner of the liberal ideology must be cracked and killed because it makes people believe that something is being done when in reality the artificially integrated circles are a soporific to the blacks while salving the consciences of the guiltstricken white. It works from the false premise that, because it is difficult to bring people from different races together in this country, achievement of this is in itself a step towards the total liberation of the blacks. Nothing could be more misleading.11

Indeed, such integration can only lead to the age-old tactic of divide and conquer, one that appeared in so many forms during apartheid in South Africa. Perhaps none was as devious as the emergence of the Bantustans. The strategic result of trying to preserve blackness and at the same time mindfully continue white dominance emerges in the development of the Bantustans. This machinated move by the government aimed to turn back the proverbial clock to the times before colonial settlement, when groups of people who lived as Xhosa, Zulu, or Tswana would be given land to live out

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their “lives” in redistribution areas like the Transkei or KwaZulu. But the project was suspect, as Biko remarks: Bantustans present a gigantic fraud that can find no moral support from any quarters. We find that 20% of the population are in control of 87% of the land while 80% “control” only 13%. To make the situation even more ridiculous, not one of the so-called “Bantustan nations” have an intact piece of land. All of them are scattered little bits of the most unyielding soil. . . . Not one of the Bantustans have access to the sea and in all situations mineral rights are strictly reserved for the South African government.12

The symbolic imposition of the white imagination against blackness is almost too evident. The politics of redistribution should strike terror in any mind and be read as a synonym for containment, division, and dependency. However, the critique is not just one of geography but also of economics and politics. The lands were not favorable to agricultural or pastoral work, and the finances of such lands were “locked up in the hands of the Bantu investment co-operative which though meant to be non-profitmaking, is reputed for its exploitation of the aspirant African traders and industrialists.”13 Despite being subsidized by the government and allowed the tax-free sale of their products, wages for workers were depreciated to less than one-third of what one would normally find in urban areas. On the political front, Biko reminds us that “the same people who are guilty of the subjugation and oppression of the black man want us to believe that they can now design for blacks means of escape” when the intentions were clearly to devise “arrangements to be able to control such ‘ambitious natives.’ ”14 To be clear, Biko is writing about the formation of such places, and the analysis here is not meant to extend to what they have become. All places and people are dynamic, change, and take on new meanings. Yet Biko strongly frames the complete counterfeit origins of the Bantustans: At first the whole idea of separate development was rejected by the entire population. . . . It was seen by the blacks naturally as a big fraud calculated to dampen the enthusiasm with which they picked the cudgels in the broader political fight for their rights in the country of their birth. People who took part in it were roundly condemned by everybody

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as sell-outs. . . . They were clearly seen as people who deliberately allowed themselves into an unholy collusion with the enemy.15

Biko adds that the leaders of the Bantustans are themselves very much aware of the way in which the government has systematically limited their efficacy. Still, such passionate struggle, fighting spirit, and courageous determination, Biko warns, is akin to the danger of accepting an unloaded gun from your enemy who has another one that is loaded and, then, challenging him to a duel.16 The ultimate danger, though, is that “these tribal cocoons called ‘homelands’ are nothing else but sophisticated concentration camps where black people are allowed to ‘suffer peacefully.’”17 The symbolic form of antiblack racism within apartheid succeeds in multifold ways through its endeavors of containment, dependency, and division that would fracture not only the ethical relations within society but also the solidarity at the heart of black consciousness. Biko opposed, strongly, “struggle being tribalised through the creation of Zulu, Xhosa and Tswana politicians by the system” because it watered down both black solidarity and the realization that black “kindness has been misused” by the whites for so long, turning any black who agrees with the government into an “exemplary native” and, at the same time, any opponent of the Bantustan system as one who would indirectly “exonerate the country from the blame that it is a police state.”18 In a long court transcript in which black consciousness was put on trial after the minister of justice banned a rally being held by the SASO and BPC supporting Frelimo as the de facto government of Mozambique, Biko is forced to explain the presence of antiblack racism within ordinary, anonymous activities of everyday life.19 Biko tells us that the whole of the black material world is fashioned differently, “the homes are different, the streets are different, the lighting is different, so you tend to begin to feel that there is something incomplete in your humanity, and that completeness goes with whiteness.”20 There is, then, a materiality to the symbolic form of antiblack racism we have been unearthing throughout this chapter. The idea of whiteness as parasitically reliant upon the existence of blackness as normatively empty fractures both the psychic and somatic world at-hand. The material conduits by which blacks are made to navigate everyday life (housing, sustenance, and artifacts of need) proffer no more than the slim possibility of bare survival alongside many different dangers that make living to the next day a miracle. Still, the obvious differences between the ways in which whites

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traverse the world against the asymmetry of life for blacks signals some sort of incompleteness. The schism between the two, the perceived incompleteness, is also a fracturing of the ethical that brings to bear both the subjective and objective maladies stemming from a white consciousness that demands ordering the world according to the symbolic form of antiblack racism. Black theology becomes an important, recurring theme in the writing of Biko for power exists both in space and time, and the latter is where the temporal power of religious authority and stories about our value as human creatures have, broadly speaking, infected the idea of the holy with a pervasive antiblack racism. If God is continuously presented in the image of whiteness, then the task of salvation is a brutal logic of acculturation meant to strip blackness from the bodies and minds of the so-called native. Also, the stories of the Christian Bible, for Biko, continue to reassert a mythic symbolization of racism and fail to take up the proverbs that would speak directly to black life. Biko wonders of the Christ who would chastise those who would trade the money made in the image of Caesar in the holy temples. And, he asks, what of the liberation narratives captured in Exodus? These are the means by which we can negate the anthropomorphizing of God as a white man beyond mere complaints of theodicy. For, if God is white, and no creature can attain such omnipotence, then blacks are fated to abjection and whites to measure their divinity in relation to those who would be seen as fallen through the color of their skin.21 Black Theology, then, is meant not merely to reverse the claim by inventing God as black but to create a teleological suspension of divinity that restores the transcendental to divinity, a realm by which we might be able to think the quest for a new humanity. Such a new humanity continues to call out for pluralistic space for symbolic forms of African tradition and also for kinder versions of existing Western traditions. Combined, Biko is giving us, among other things, an intimate understanding of the way in which the ordering of apartheid by white consciousness is itself dependent on the pretense of moral efficacy that denies that racism pervades every aspect of day-to-day life and cannot simply be willed out of existence by moral condemnation. The myth of racial superiority, however, lingers in that moral condemnation. Cassirer, too, takes note of the way in which the nation-state has embedded in it symbolic forms of racism integral to its logic of modernity. Germany during the Third Reich manifested itself on the symbols of “hero worship” and “racial separation”

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abundant in the works of Thomas Carlyle and Joseph Gobineau, respectively. The result is the all-too-familiar horror of World War II and the brutal battle between imperial powers that each harbored its own myths of white racial superiority. Indeed, we should not forget that alongside the horrible tragedy of the Holocaust that brought about the demise of tens of millions of people, the United States was also waging a war against race on its own soil.22 Cassirer notes, then, that myth in the modern state has undergone a transformation from creative free play integral to the human condition toward machinated orchestrations of totalitarian control: Myth has always been described as the result of an unconscious activity and as a free product of imagination. But here we find myth made according to plan. The new political myths do not grow up freely; they are not wild fruits of an exuberant imagination. They are artificial things fabricated by very skilful and cunning artisans. It has been reserved for the twentieth century, our own great technical age, to develop a new technique of myth.23

The result is a transvaluation of our ethical beliefs under a strict adherence to the magical words, which themselves come with new rites, rituals, and practices of worship likely “to lull asleep all of our active forces, our power of judgment and critical discernment, and to take away our feeling of personality and individual responsibility than the steady, uniform, and monotonous performance of the same rites.”24 We have clung to myths in the modern world and wielded their magical words with undue care or concern for the ways in which the larger politics of the state, veiled with sanitized words like enlightenment, colonialism, and capitalism, also bear the force of the myth of white superiority. Those who would be otherized by the aims of the state have, already, been blackened in form, distanced from the possibility of living in a symbolic world different from the pursuits of the dominant order. The stalling force of such a negative manifestation of myth, Cassirer laments, is a resurfacing of fatalism: a divination of our ways of being in the world as somehow symbolically locked away from transformation and now caught in the cold, calculated belief that we are of an era of so-called political science.25 Cassirer recognizes that the use of such myths in political science is hardly any “positive” science and will most likely be looked back upon by future generations as a chemist would view an alchemist or an astronomer

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would consider an astrologer. The concern, as we have seen previously in Chapter 2, is not with the use of myth. Indeed, mythic thought is as rich a symbolic world as any other in the view of Cassirer. But the looming way in which our tower of progress is built seems to cast an obliterating shadow on the symbolic worlds of others throughout the world: We are building high and proud edifices; but we forget to make their foundations secure. The belief that man by the skillful use of magical formulae and rites can change the course of nature has prevailed for hundreds of thousands of years in human history. In spite of all the inevitable frustrations and disappointments mankind still clung stubbornly, forcibly, and desperately to this belief.26

Thus, the world of modernity too has its own pervasive use of magical words that render possibility mute and the factuality of life at-hand as the dominant discourse. As we have seen, much of modernity carries with it various mythical thoughts grounding its colonial conquest and capitalist expansion under the operating rubric of a myth of racial superiority. The obvious intervention is one of revolution, a turning of the very symbolic world ordering our relations of being not merely against itself but toward some new horizon. For some, such revolution has indeed been fashioned through the practice of nonviolence; yet for others, the violence of armed struggle resulted when the masses were already viewed as such refuse that the martyrdom of peaceful acts would be written off as mere trash. However, Frantz Fanon opens his famous The Damned of the Earth27 with a powerful observation that deserves deeper thought. We are told, “Decolonization is quite simply the replacing of a certain ‘species’ of men by another ‘species’ of men.”28 Obviously, Fanon is not implying any simple notion of a biological species in this call to arms. Also, it would not make sense for Fanon to be asking for a mere figurative sociopolitical reversal that would turn the white world upside-down into a black world. But perhaps, given his own familiarity with the work of Karl Marx, we are being asked from the beginning of this provocative work to decolonize the world by advancing the coming into existence of a new “species being” that can wield its productive powers to bring about a new humanity. Otherwise, the revolutionary aims that follow in this brilliant book will indeed end in recolonization rather than decolonization. No one can forget the famous last chapter mark-

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ing a close to The Damned of the Earth where we see the violence manifest in both colonialism and revolution persist in the fractured imagos of those that suffer because “the war goes on; and we will have to bind up for years to come the many, sometimes ineffaceable, wounds that the colonialist onslaught has inflicted on our people.”29 As we shall see in this next section, such violence demands symbolic mediation, psychically and somatically, in the entire ongoing transformative revolution that one battles against in an ethically fractured world. One aspect of that symbolic mediation is the imaginative recollection of Afro-Caribbean spiritual and philosophical thought, which is crucial to the full recognition of the traumatic shattering of the ego that colonialism imposes on those it so brutally subjugated. Biko often echoed a need to turn to spiritual resources that whiteness had foreclosed as it eclipsed the value of black symbolic forms of life. Afro-Caribbean spirituality and philosophy, then, explicitly returns and recenters such traditions to the thinking of revolution.

against the traumatic voiding of the self Paget Henry, in his extraordinary book Caliban’s Reason, makes one of the most powerful calls for mutual engagement between the mythical and poetic aspects of human life with the more conventional historicist project of development toward freedom in the socialist economy. Caliban’s Reason engages the ominous themes of colonialism rampant throughout The Tempest, the last play written by William Shakespeare. Those themes are taken up as an artificial myth that can help us give image to the tragedy of what Western imperialism has done not only to the identities of the Afro-Caribbean but also to the very intellectual project of politically engaged philosophy. For Henry, there is no neutral political philosophy. Rather, such ideas are heavily weighted with a colonial heritage in which the magic words of Prospero condemned Caliban to the level of monstrosity; his supposed babbling is both senseless and something that must be tamed, contained, and silenced. Thus, Henry describes Afro-Caribbean philosophy as necessarily embedded in the larger discourse and society of the Caribbean and alongside the ongoing struggle to end slavery and achieve freedom: Looked at concretely, Afro-Caribbean philosophy is just such an internally differentiated and intertextually embedded discourse. Its formation and

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current structure reflect the imperial history of the cultural system that has housed the larger discursive field of Caribbean society. Consequently, many of the original features of our philosophical and other discursive practices have been shaped by the colonial problematics and contours of our cultural history. Within this imperial framework, the original contents of Caribbean philosophy emerged as a series of extended debates over projects of colonial domination between four major social groups: EuroCaribbeans, Amerindians, Indo-Caribbeans, and Afro-Caribbeans. The discursive productions of the first group were contributions to the creating of hegemonic situations through the legitimating of colonial projects. The production of the other three groups was attempts at destroying EuroCaribbean hegemony through the delegitimating of their colonial projects. This was the imperial communicative framework within which Afro-Caribbean philosophy emerged, a framework that always embodied an unequal discursive compromise.30

Henry describes three major periods in the development of African and Afro-Caribbean philosophy. The first phase (1630–1750) was strongly rooted in traditional African thought and the great African spiritual traditions that came to the new world with the slave trade.31 These spiritual traditions, known in their different formations as Vodou, Candomblé, and Santería (for example), carried with them philosophical positions that Henry powerfully argues remain extremely relevant to any postcolonial project of freedom. The second phase (1750–1860) is Afro-Christian, which involves a battle between Christian moralism and the African spiritual traditions. The third phase, for Henry, begins in 1860 and continues to the present. During this phase we see the split of Afro-Caribbean philosophy into two main traditions: historicism and poeticism. The former (representative of figures like C. L. R. James and Frantz Fanon) is allied with various formulations of the project of socialist revolutionary transformation and development, while the latter (representative of figures like Wilson Harris and Sylvia Wynter) takes seriously creative, reconstructive approaches that delve into the richness of the Afro-Caribbean spiritual world. One of the major contributions made by Henry is the way he puts these traditions in dialogue with one another because they are both necessary for recovery from imperialism onto a restored ethical world. It is only with a creolization of these two traditions that Caliban is finally able to emerge sym-

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bolically whole beyond the monstrous image imposed relentlessly on him by an imperial order. That image of Caliban as monster is one that has driven the rich spiritual traditions and philosophical positions of the Afro-Caribbean out of the realm of reason, creating a hierarchy of core (colonizer) and periphery (colonized) systems of cultural accumulation and disaccumulation. There are five distinguishing characteristics for how peripheral cultural systems come to be marked as peripheral.32 First, imperial conquest demands the need to claim hegemony and legitimacy for the conquerors. Colonial violence has been fitted with many legitimating discourses, particularly in the second stage of colonial philosophical development under the terms of “civilizing” Christianity. The state, then, in order to legitimate itself, actually depends on the production of symbolic forms that in a deep and profound sense invert the world: unethical oppression is defended as moral necessity. Second, leading from the first, competing African systems must be completely delegitimized; imperialism must foster a colonial asymmetry of legitimate knowledge by creating a slighted canonical reading of Afro-Caribbean spiritual and philosophical traditions that renders them as something that must be overcome as an impediment to so-called civilization. Third, the battle to dismiss Caliban from the realm of reason and civilization leads to resistance; one way the state intervenes is not only to train an intellectual elite committed to Western notions of reason but also to deprive the local traditions of both support and legitimacy. For Henry, there comes to be a dynamic divergence between local centers of cultural production and what are seen as the legitimate Western sites of culture. Fourth, these peripheral systems, which are systematically underdeveloped by the state apparatus and imperial educational system, are drained of cultural support for the development of the individual ego. The crisis of ego identity is brilliantly described in all of its shattering impact by many of our great Afro-Caribbean poets and writers, including the musical prodigy Bob Marley. Fifth, racialization is what ultimately turns the dominant cultural system into a peripheral outlier; Caliban is transfigured into a monster and Prospero rises to the position of the Faustian conqueror who, as we know, ultimately only gains his power by selling his soul to the devil. To quote Henry: In particular, these perceptions of Afro-Caribbeans amounted to a radical dehumanization that reduced them to the biological level. This biological reduction was also a radical deculturalization that shattered both

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self and world and also made the African’s capacity to labor very visible to Europeans. However, this was no ordinary capital/labor relation. Faust, the capitalist developer, was here metamorphosed into Prospero, while his racialized worker was transformed into Caliban. This “Calibanization” of Africans could not but devour their rationality and hence their capacity for philosophical thinking. As a biological being, Caliban is not a philosopher. He or she does not think and in particular does not think rationally. In the European tradition, rationality was a white trait that, by their exclusionary racial logic, blacks could not possess. Hence the inability to see the African now reinvented as Caliban, in the role of sage, philosopher, or thinker. In short, this new racialized identity was also the death of Caliban’s reason.33

In this mythological universe, there could be no such thing as African philosophy because it is literally rendered invisible as Prospero becomes identified with the civilized, the rational, the mind, the logical, and the spiritual. Caliban, by abject inverse of such a racial binary, is rendered into the primitive, the violent, the irrational, the prelogical, and wholly determined by uncontrollable fleshy desires. The first step, then, for Henry, in any attempt to define the uniqueness of Afro-Caribbean philosophy, begins with the salvaging of African philosophy from its invisibility; for, indeed, Caliban does have reason even if it is veiled by myopic imperial prejudice. Henry discusses the significance of the Yoruba spiritual traditions and the corresponding African philosophical ideas associated with them in what he defines as African existentialism. To be sure, African philosophy answers all of the big questions from ontology to existentialism to ethics to epistemology. The cosmogonic ontology of many of the great African spiritual traditions is that gods create us, and the spatial and temporal dimensions of our lives are inseparable from the creative power of the gods. Again, to quote Henry: The ontological claims of traditional African religions are quite explicit. Both the origin and persistence of being are conceived in terms of the “causality” that binds creature to creator. This image of creative divinity that is analogous to that of the creative individual, becomes crucial for the cosmogonic framing of African ontology. Within this framework, existence is primarily the creative work of deities and ancestors. It is their creative project. The created world is theirs to make, regulate, and

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unmake. The conceptual and rational elaboration of this idea by sages was the work of traditional African philosophy. The results can be seen in the conceptual elaborations of the notion of the creator.34

As Henry and others such as Lewis Gordon have pointed out, many of these African spiritual traditions turn time back to the past: toward the space of divine creation and our relationship with the ancestors.35 These myths of origins, however, do not simply suggest that the gods control everything and we are simply at their whim; rather, we are led toward something that is beyond ourselves in the realm of those who have come before us. Our challenge as an individual is always about becoming who we truly are, which is inseparable from understanding the creative power of the deities as well as the ultimate cosmogonic unity of our universe. In African spirituality the process of becoming for human beings demands that we understand, first of all, that we are all in a chain of being; such an understanding yields the knowledge that we have a special place in that chain of being that is uniquely our own. Spiritual crises of ego development always drain a human being of their full creative power. These crises demand that people find a way back to their own destiny and, therefore, their place in the universe. In a certain sense, then, crises of the ego demand that one go through a process to achieve harmony with their okra (soul). Such a harmony includes its own set of relations with ancestors and deities, and even with the dualities that inhere in the binaries of language generally. However, in a racialized context these relations are interrupted by the distortive activities imposed by Western imperialism that would imbue monstrosity into the image of Caliban. Henry writes that there is a different understanding of ego crises, and a very rich one, that inheres in African existentialism: Particularly important for the discursive development of African existentialism are the states of regulatory negativity that individuals in varying states of subexistence will inevitably experience. In the African case, what is distinctive about these negativities is their spiritual nature. They are negations, voidings, sanctionings, or underminings of some aspect of the ego by its deities and ancestors that leave it exposed to experiences of nonbeing. The greater the adversity experienced by the ego, the greater is the spiritual ignorance or the Yuruguan revolt that is internal to its

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self-creative process. Thus personal failures, ego collapses, and other such difficulties were seen as spiritual interventions whose primary purpose was to shake the ego out of its ignorance or to end its revolt. Consequently, the inner resistance or blockages that individuals encounter in the course of their lives are not seen as arising from childhood difficulties in family relations, as Freud would suggest. Family relations are not the locus of “the primal scene” of ego genesis in African existentialism. Rather, it is to be found in the complex set of relations linking the human ego to its deities. In other words, African existentialism is based on spirituo-analysis, rather than a psychoanalysis of ego-formative problems. These disconfirming experiences constitute some of the tragic possibilities in the cosmogonic challenge of ego existence. Their weight often leaves the ego feeling overpowered and unable to rise and engage in its normal self-maintaining activities. An individual whose ego is in such a state feels an anxious uneasiness about the fate and future course of his or her life that motivates a seeking for help.36

The soul crises, in the great Yoruba traditions, do not simply turn on sophisticated techniques that help the ego remove itself from its day-to-day embeddedness in choices, including bad choices that may have led to spiritual confusion.37 A bad choice, in African existentialism, is one that drains the individual of their life power (ashe). Indeed, people are not merely left to themselves in the great African spiritual traditions. A divination will try, of course, to diagnose the crisis at-hand and how a person has lost their way from their destiny. But this is done, even if one is not a member or an initiate in the larger tradition, through a set of ritual cleansings in which some of the most profound, traumatic dislocations imposed on the ego from slavery and imperialism are allowed to be recognized in all of their violence. A ritual cleansing can go on for many days, as long as is necessary. The person who is being cleansed is surrounded by loving members of their community under the guidance of the spiritual leader. The community will bathe them, dance with them, sing with them, and engage in many other acts of touching and loving the traumatized body that are meant to help individuals once again get in touch with themselves. An existential crisis, then, is not one where you are left to lay on a couch and talk about traumatizing family relations. Instead, people are put into a context in which the traumatized ego can overcome imposed dissociation by

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immersing themselves in the most primordial acts of human contact and being put in the hands of others who will help them on their way to their true destiny. No one becomes a member of such a spiritual community without going through ritual cleansings because trauma is not seen as something that people can overcome simply through talking; rather, it demands both metaphorically and literally that people be reconnected to both themselves and the larger cosmogonic unity that bequeathed life to the world. Of course, in some slave societies many slaves did not know their parents and did not have names. A residue of that history remains in most variations of Yoruba. The result of ritual cleansing for members and initiates involves discovery of patron Orishas, which are deities that, on one level, represent many aspects of the human soul. Although the Orishas are related to nature—Yemaja to the ocean, Oyá to the wind, or Osain to the forest, for example—they also have a connection to different ways in which we are related emotionally with others and ourselves. Once members of the religion discover their divine parents they will have their own particular destiny, which is different than someone who has different deities as parents. Their psychic journey is now given greater shape because they must balance these creative powers in themselves and they know what their own conflicts are since they are related to the powers of the deities who are their spiritual parents. But such a divination also gives a full initiate the chance for a second birth where they return, in a way, to childhood, going back to a time when one is reborn and completely dependent on others. A Madrina (godmother) or Madrino (godfather) will literally feed and care for new initiates as if they were children. By contrast, much has been written about traumatic disassociation and how traditional psychoanalysis cannot always reach comprehensive recovery and communal integration because traumatic disassociation symptomatizes in the body. Ultimately, the primary ethical dimension involved in such traditions is to both support individual human beings in defining their own path and, at the same time, support the community so that it can reach a condition of harmony where the exhaustive disorder of violence is not allowed to drain either the individual or the community from the promotion of its vital force. For Henry, this spiritual tradition is not simply one of ritual cleansing practices but is also a part of African philosophy. Henry powerfully argues that Afro-Caribbean epistemology has two dimensions. First, there is the rational dimension of day-to-day activities such as planting or trading. These

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activities are guided by something very close to the rationality of techne¯ where people make judgments about what is working or not working and how it can be improved. But there is also a second epistemological dimension of the ritual practices we just discussed, including the experience of possession, which takes one out of oneself. In a certain sense, then, the epistemological dimensions of experience with the beyond take us back to African existentialism because the resolution of a soul crisis has to do with whether or not the vital force of the person is returned and if they are on a path of life that supports their creativity. African existentialism and epistemology turn on a knowledge of a beyond that is inseparable from the ego having to come to terms both with its own limitations and how it is constituted by otherness, but also how that otherness is not some abstract god but part of a revelation of who that person really is: The primary technique of interrupting or bypassing the ego used by traditional African religions is the trance state. This is a state of altered or nonego consciousness that is induced by drumming and dancing. Both the behavior and awareness of individuals are different in this state. But most important, the individual’s body is open to being “possessed” or taken over by a deity who may speak or act through this person. These spiritual takeovers are resisted by the normal ego, making such direct experiences inaccessible to individuals who are unable to momentarily suspend ego function.38

The world beyond, as different and possibly other, comes into contact with the lived practices of people; the poeticist tradition, as we will see, recovers and develops this rich African spiritual tradition as crucial to the recovery from the damaged egos left behind in the wake of colonial violence. But first we must explore the respectful and critical engagement with the historicist tradition articulated by Henry.

the dialogic engagement onto creolization No one is more respectful than Henry to the great philosophers C. L. R. James and Frantz Fanon. C. L. R. James was one of the first Afro-Caribbean Marxists and for him, like most Marxists, both the human collective project

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and the individual project was the struggle for democratic socialism. Time was always understood as toward the future and as what was to become the new society of freedom. The “I” could find itself in this project and struggle for freedom: “I am” because “I am” in the struggle. Of course, the historicism of C. L. R. James also analyzed how certain categories of being come about because of the imposed relations made in the history of the colonial setting. To quote Henry: However, it is through his ontology that James’s historicism can be most effectively located. As ontology, history was the primary medium of human self-formulation. In its dynamism, James saw the important formative or constitutive powers shaping human development. History and not spirit or nature was the creative womb in which the human dimensions of existence emerged and developed.39

There is always, then, a telos implicit in the writing of C. L. R. James. The self develops through a revolutionary identity that is always pointed beyond individual ego formation precisely because it is embedded in a history it did not make. Such history is not part and parcel of the African cosmogonic unity: what is other to us is our historical situation. Henry is a strong historicist and remains committed to the Marxist project and to a democratic socialist society. The point here by Henry is that C. L. R. James, like so many intellectuals trained in the words of Prospero, implicitly and sometimes explicitly accepted Western categories of the modern and the premodern. Thus, as he suggests: What are we to make of these differences in the ontological significance attributed to history? Afro-Caribbean philosophers have accounted for this change in their thinking from the cosmogonic to the historicist primarily by reading it in terms of the modern/premodern oppositions of European discourses. This particularly African cosmogonic view has not been assessed as an independent formation. It has been put in a general category and dismissed as part of the premodern past. But since European categories of modern and premodern have been invested with so many anti-African connotations, these categories need to be reassessed and the questions asked again.40

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Even Fanon, who devoted so much of his writing to the dreadful existential voiding of the ego imposed by racism, remained ensnared by his own inability to find sources of resistance to the profound soul crisis of the black man and woman in African philosophy. For, Fanon tells us: I feel in myself a soul as immense as the world, truly a soul as deep as the deepest of rivers, my chest has the power to expand without limit. I am a master and I am advised to adopt the humility of the cripple. Yesterday, awakening to the world, I saw the sky turn upon itself utterly and wholly. I wanted to rise, but the disemboweled silence fell back upon me, its wings paralyzed. Without responsibility, straddling Nothingness and Infinity, I began to weep.41

Henry explains that Fanon was unable to tap into African existentialism precisely because of the contempt for African philosophy in which he was trained. Fanon turns, instead, to European existentialism as the best explanation for why the black man or woman is unable to exist in a world that does not respect their otherness. Therefore, the ego turns in on itself due to the complete collapse of the ethical relationship in a racist society. In a certain sense, the armed struggle is absolutely necessary because it is only through that struggle that self-assertion is possible for the Calibanized black man and woman. Thus, the armed struggle had both an individual and a collective dimension. The individual asserts himself or herself by taking up the gun and thus forcing himself or herself on the white other as exactly that: another subject. They are no longer objects to be manipulated, used, and thrown away. However, the struggle is not only about the seizure of state power but also an attempt to end the situation in which the ethical relationship is impossible. Lewis Gordon has written brilliantly that the revolutionary politics of Fanon are necessary for the reestablishment of an ethical order since such an order must exist between two human beings.42 Thus, it is a politics in the name of the restoration of ethics, and only with this restoration would come the rise of a new humanity. Indeed, Fanon was a profound humanist, but one who clearly saw that human beings could not be morally assertive in a racist world in which black men and women were thoroughly Calibanized. Henry is, of course, deeply respectful to the continuing relevance of Fanon and honors him greatly as playing a major role in reversing the ways

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the African tradition has been delegitimized. Thus, Henry is only criticizing Fanon on the specific level in which he was trained to overvalue the so-called modern civilizing culture of oppression that at least gave him the language to think the situation at-hand. But, as Henry points out, if the words belonged to Prospero the experience was Afro-Caribbean: Although I am of the view that Caliban can say something new and original in the language of Prospero, my point is that Fanon’s specific philosophical formulations did not have the weight or critical mass to break the underlying binary that disenfranchised African philosophy and inhibited the emergence of a distinct regional philosophy. This failure says nothing about the quality or originality of Fanon’s philosophy, but it says a lot about the discursive authority that it had to overcome. Fanon did not turn to European existentialism because there was no African or Afro-Caribbean existentialist discourse. Rather, it was because he was unable to break the spell of Calibanization that the tradition had cast over it. If African and Afro-Caribbean cultures have supported viable egos, then they must have found discursive solutions to the “gravitational” pulls of nonbeing. Fanon’s failure to recognize and appropriate these discourses was indicative of the power of the tradition.43

Henry points out that the limits of the historicist approach in AfroCaribbean philosophy, in part, inspired its poeticist response. Wilson Harris and Sylvia Wynter among many others have developed a poeticist philosophy in constant dialogue with the African tradition. In a certain and specific way, Harris reworks the idea of cosmogonic unity by arguing that not all of the world images we have available to us come to us simply through conscious creation. It is not that Harris is not concerned with ego collapse under colonialism; rather, what Harris seeks to show us is that there are traces of a universal consciousness that go back to the great myths of cosmogonic unity on which we draw upon when we continually reinvent and reimagine our world: A final set of very important metaphors that Harris uses to describe universal consciousness in relation to the worlds of self, society, and nature are derived from quantum mechanics. Each of these is treated as a quantum layer with its own laws, while consciousness holds the keys to their

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unity, interpenetration, and transcendence. This quantum view of consciousness is most systematically developed in The Radical Imagination. There Harris stresses the connections between quantum levels that are available to consciousness but often remain hidden on specific levels. Thus on the ego level, a rose is a rose is a rose. From the perspective of consciousness, “a rose is a particle is a wave.” Or, from the point of view of the ego, a table is an object we put books on. But from the quantum perspective, a table becomes a tree, the tree becomes the forest and the forest “is the lungs of the globe and the lungs of the globe breathe on the stars.”44

The crisis for Harris in terms of any ego is that it must face its dynamic relationship with what is outside of itself. Part of the drama of African existentialism is that we need to control our own Faustian urges and find our unique place in the chain of being with the ancestors and deities. The ego, for Harris, tends to close itself in as a defensive measure to protect its own self-assertion. This closing in of the ego is ultimately disturbed by the regulatory negations of otherness from which no ego can escape, at least not in the African existentialist view. Consciousness of this otherness is close to being identified as consciousness per se in Harris. It is close both to Fanon in that we become aware of who we are by facing that there is no closure of the “I.” In the battle to stay conscious the ego must open itself to what is beyond. This, for Harris, is done through an appeal to mythopoetic logic: During the ego’s apprenticeship, it is exposed to the mythopoetic logic that governs the archetypal perspective of consciousness. Mythopoetic logic is paradoxical and partial, rather than syllogistic and universally sovereign. “Myth teaches us that sovereign gods and sovereign institutions are partial, partial in the sense that they are biased, but when they begin to penetrate their biases, they also begin to transform their fear of the other, of others, of other parts in a larger complex of wholeness.” Exposed to this mythopoetic logic, the straightjacketed ego is made to encounter the internal contradictions it is concealing, or experience new dimensions of reality that break the spell of its circular selfsufficiency. In other words, in the mythopoetic light of consciousness, the ego discovers the partial nature of its most sovereign universals.45

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For Harris, the ego that is pulled out of itself is not done simply through the experience of dread in which the “I” of consciousness reaches beyond the limits of its own enclosed ego and knows itself as something that “is not” and “is more” than an enclosed “me.” For Harris, the transcendence of the self is not expressed through Western language but through the tradition of Vodou: As a result, the African spaces in Harris’s ontology are not modern, literate, and Pan-African as in the cases of James and Fanon, but rather traditional in orientation. African thought is represented in Harris’s poeticism primarily through Afro-Caribbean creole formations such as Vodou and limbo. In Vodou ceremonies, Harris sees the dancers as “courting a subconscious community.” When the dancers enter the trance state, they become “a dramatic agent of subconsciousness.” These views of the ego in the light of its spiritual displacement are the primary contributions of the African heritage to Harris’s poeticism. Both are ego-critical discourses in which the ego/spirit relationship is not only explicitly thematized but also serves as a founding analogy.46

Through the experiences of otherness and reconsolidation that is offered by Vodou, Harris believes that we can return to an open-ended textuality of consciousness, which is tied to the deeper idea of unity and life found even in the world images that we give meaning. Harris offers us an archetypal response rooted in African existentialism that breaks open the enclosed, frantic ego of the “me” and returns it to a poetic understanding of an “I” that finds its meaning not through self-generativity but in the poetic remaking of the textuality of consciousness. This poetics is not just for the individual to recover from a crisis of psychic investment in a defensive enclosed ego, but it is also a poetics of action. For Harris, then, it is not simply psychic recovery that matters, but that through the fabric of the imagination we develop new ways of being human that are action-oriented and are not limited to the historicist position that social change is enough for recovery from colonial violence: Poetics usually refers to strategies of symbolic and textual production, in particular to the ways in which concept, word, image, trope, plot, character, and other structural components of a work of art are brought

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together to create new meanings. But, for many authors, poetics is much more than the strategies by which meanings are produced in texts. It is also an ordering of meanings that is capable of shaping human behavior. In other words, when poetically constructed systems of meaning are internalized, their rules of formation, transformation, and deformation become a grammar of human self-formation and motivation. This action-orienting potential of poetics has been important for the Caribbean poeticist tradition. Harris shares this emphasis, and hence it is not the distinguishing feature of his poetics.47

Crucial to Harris’s poeticist revolution is its explicit engagement with the richness of the African philosophic tradition. Henry strongly argues that this engagement is not only necessary for a fuller and richer tradition of Afro-Caribbean philosophy, but it is also an absolutely necessary step in healing reason from its Faustian mythology. To do so, Henry engages with the work of Habermas, offering five critiques. To lay the foundation for his critique Henry notes that Habermas himself grapples with how ego formation takes place with its other: However, it is the fourth version of the communicative model of ego genesis that Habermas chooses. It is of course the version with the three interrelated dialectics that are rooted in the distinct practices of symbolic representation, work, and interaction. In these dialectics, subjects lose and subsequently find themselves through the media of language, instrumental action and communicative action. As a medium of self-formation, language—particularly its powers to name and represent—makes possible a discursive interrupting of the prior continuity between the emerging ego and the world of nature. Like language, instrumental action inserts a technical mediation between the immediacy of human needs and their satisfaction from the natural environment. Finally communicative action disrupts the immediacy of interactive needs by the discursive insertion of a dialectic of mutual recognition between them and their satisfaction by other human beings. For Habermas, it is these three discursive/communicative disruptions of states of continuity or immediacy that make possible the emergence of the ego and give it the capacity for agency and autonomy. Given this conception of ego genesis it is not surprising that communication plays a

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more prominent role than self-reflection. The Husserlian ego that is unified by self-reflection is seen as an abstraction from this more concrete communicative framework. Thus, it is within the latter that self-reflection finds its proper place in Habermas.48

We have already reviewed (in Chapter 3) the notion of communicative rationality developed by Habermas that would, potentially, protect the great ideals of modernity from their obliteration by technological reason. For Henry, reason via Habermas in its so-called infinite, self-generative ideal of itself is very much Faustian. As such, it obliterates its other, and that other, for Henry, is mytho-poetical thinking. Habermas systematically refuses to recognize this other and, indeed, Henry charges, using the words of Sylvia Wynter, that he liminalizes it. For Wynter, for the other to be liminalized means it is to be reduced to a category of chaos that must be overcome and reshaped by a rationality that imposes form on it and yet is completely other to it. What Henry shows us is that Habermas profoundly describes myth in a failed, incomplete way. First, Habermas claims that myth is totalizing and, second, that it cannot penetrate the surface of things. To answer both of these charges, Henry takes us back to African existentialism to show that indeed African philosophy does penetrate the surface: This discourse penetrates the surface of the ego and reaches its existential depths. In principle, analogical extensions of mythic discourses of the ego are no different from the analogical extensions of semio-linguistic discourses that are so characteristic of the present period in the West. Consequently, the latter are subject to similar kinds of errors that will vary with the level of research capability and the social stock of knowledge. These errors have not created insurmountable barriers to depth for semio-linguistic discourses, so why should they for mythic discourses?49

Third, according to Henry, and we agree with his analysis, Habermas argues that mythic thought necessarily confuses different domains of existence such as nature and culture. Part of this confusion is what Habermas takes to be an inappropriate extension of the discourse of deities as subjects who spiritualize the entire world of objects. Henry makes an extremely important observation here that relates back to our discussion of one-dimensional man

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in that this confusion over levels of existence is not simply a problem in myth—although the order of subject and object is reversed: However, as suggested above these types of errors are not peculiar to the mythic thought. At the paradigmatic level, it is the same kind of error that characterizes the one-dimensionality of modern technocratic reason. Instead of imposing a discourse of the subject onto objects, it imposed a discourse of object onto subjects. In the process, significant differences between these two domains are leveled. Objectivist discourses often remain on the surface of the ego and seldom reach its existential depths. Those dimensions of subjectivity that resist assimilation are declared illusory and hence nonexistent. These “fatal prejudices” were at the core of Husserl’s explanation of the eclipse of spirit by scientific objectivism. Moving in the opposite direction mythic thought tends to subjectivize and hence conceal the technical dimensions of objects. In both cases, the errors of paradigmatic overextension are of the same type. If Habermas wants to exclude mythic thought from the domain of rationality on these grounds then he will also have to exclude technocratic and scientistic discourses.50

Fourth, Habermas claims that mythic thought must be sociologically interpreted in terms of kinship systems. This position is certainly not in keeping with the large amount of ethnographic work done on mythic thought. But Henry wishes to emphasize a different aspect of this contradiction in Habermas. If myth can be sociologically reduced to something determined by kinship relations, and if that knowledge based in such kinship relations is systematically determined by them, then Habermas is in contradiction doubly. First, Habermas is in contradiction with his own insight that the superstructure distinction in Marx is not an adequate explanation for the production of knowledge.51 Second, and the most important for Henry and his critique of how mythic thought is liminalized, is that the speech acts of a Vodou priest for example can never be addressed directly. They have indeed been Calibanized. They can be understood but there is no dialogue that can take place. If no dialogue can take place, then this would necessarily be an instance of distortive communicative reason. The ugly side of modernity is something that has to do not only with the dominance of instrumental rationality but also with the complete shattering

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of the ethical relationship by imperialism and slavery. If modernity is to be defined as self-generative and must find its norms only in itself, then it has eclipsed the notational equality of different worldviews integral to the lives of so many throughout the world. Lastly, Habermas relies on thinkers and ethnographers who insist that myth is a closed and rigidly centered form of thought, one that has little or no place for the subject. Indeed, the autonomous ego arises for Habermas in the disintegration of the interconnectedness of the traditional world; the ego becomes other to itself in its immersion in both a technocratic and communicative world that shapes it. As we have seen in our discussion of Harris and Fanon, there is nothing uniquely modern about the decentralization of the ego from its surrounding circumstances. Henry argues that there must be a fourth epistemic world whose primary interest is the domain of spirit or inner nature; therefore, the existential understanding of the generation of the modern ego by Habermas is not nearly as rich as the one provided by African and Afro-Caribbean existentialism.52 For Henry, the ultimate dilemma is that there is a mythic hole in the discursive economy of Habermas that is integrally bound to the liminalization of myth. Thus, in spite of the critique offered by Habermas regarding his predecessors, there is a hold from Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno in the Dialectic of Enlightenment that he cannot overcome: This is why the mythic critique of Western rationality carried out by Adorno and Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment still echoes strongly in spite of Habermas’s critique of this work. If my liminal explanation is correct, it suggests that the exclusionary practices behind the one-dimensional tendencies of Western rationality could also be liminal in nature, that there is indeed the possibility of a parallel between the technocratic exclusion of self-reflective or communicative rationality and Habermas’s exclusion of mythic rationality.53

Henry suggests that the project of overcoming the one-sidedness of technocratic reason for Habermas must find an ally in mythical thinking; yet Habermas has systematically refused such an ally. Indeed, Habermas clings ever more powerfully to the one-dimensional advancement of learning processes in which modernity can only solve its own problems on its own terms despite its suspect history. The reconciliation that certainly inspires

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the project undertaken by Habermas between human beings in an ethically restored relationship cannot be met without completely rethinking the work of myth and its rationality. To quote Henry: In sum, the crucial point that emerges from this liminal underside of Western rationality is that Habermas needs the reconciliatory rationality of myth as an ally. He needs the special powers of this rationality to overcome the bad-faith strategies that empower the blind one-sidedness of the project of technocratic reason. This existentially empowered onesidedness is an important source of the exclusionary practices of technocratic reason that Habermas wants to explode. Reconciliatory rationality disrupts and transforms the immediacy of the bad-faith strategies of the ego that produce these countercommunicative results, hence Habermas’s need to transform this liminal other into an ally. Finally, even with selfreflective and reconciliatory rationalities as allies, the institutional powers of technocratic reason would enable it to resist these challenges. Consequently, there remains the need for a countermobilization of the Marxian type that is institutionally oriented.54

Henry has argued throughout his book that the processes of creolization have not proceeded as quickly in philosophy because of the Calibanization of African philosophy. Henry defines creolization: Such a creolizing of Caribbean philosophy must begin with the subterranean plunges of the type suggested by Glissant. At these depths, African and Afro-Caribbean philosophies must be freed from the legacy of invisibility and entrapment in the binaries of colonial discourses. With their visibility and legitimacy restored, this philosophical heritage must be allowed to find its own equilibrium in the processes of semiosemantic hybridization that have creolized other discourses. In this creole framework, the African discourse of fate should find a place in any discussion of Afro-Caribbean existentialism. However, this inclusion would be related to its ability to reflect the existential realities of Afro-Caribbean people. In other words, its inclusion would not be the result of the repressive authority it had accumulated over other discourses.55

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We may seem to have wandered far afield from the work of Ernst Cassirer. However, it is the philosophy of symbolic forms Cassirer developed that provides the space for creolization in a manner that remains impossible for communicative rationality. Cassirer, even without the richness of current ethnographic research, would have completely disagreed with the simplistic reading of mythical, practical rationality offered by Habermas. Thus, Cassirer would be an easy ally for a reconciliatory process of reason that engages with the importance of African philosophy as it is not and will never be removed from its mythic resources. This, of course, does not mean that there cannot be critiques of myths. Henry aims to show that the historicist who is rooted much more in the European traditions of Marxist thought and the poeticist drawn to the content of actual African philosophy and spiritual traditions must engage in a dialogue so that the much-needed reconciliation between the two can take place. Our point here is that Cassirer is completely compatible with the necessary process of creolization that could bring the historicist and poeticist together in Afro-Caribbean philosophy. However, we agree with Henry that any philosophy of symbolic forms is never enough. We need the historicist struggle for socialism. Of course, if socialism is to be thought of as an ethical ideal, it too will demand not just a set of economic institutions but a new way of thinking about our humanity.

conclusion Biko certainly draws out the way in which the colonial legacy of apartheid is imbued with violence that lives on far after its supposed legal end. The revolutionary end to such colonial imperialism tacks on its own manifestations of violence to such disaster. However, for Henry, both the historicist project of socialist development and poeticist traditions of Afro-Caribbean philosophy and spirituality proffer a powerful possibility of combined material and psychic recovery when brought forth in the dialogical spirit of creolization. We are left, then, with the need to transform and resymbolize the very meaning of blackness. Yet even as we think of what needs to be transformed we are returned to a poeticist lesson, which is that the liminalization of both black thought and black values actually leads to the eclipse of the horrific wrong in colonization

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and enslavement. Thus, in the next chapter, using the example of South Africa, we will attempt to resymbolize the wrong of apartheid and examine the history of South Africa under the narration of black unfree labor. This, of course, brings into focus what colonization has actually done to the black majority in South Africa but also points us to what must be done if unfree black labor is finally to be freed from the brutal chains of exploitation.

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5

Unfree Black Labor: The Telos of History and the Struggle against Racialized Capitalism

introduction More than 350 years of unfree black labor continues to haunt the new South Africa. The neoliberal capitalism that has emerged as dominant is indeed a part of the lineage of such a history, but now it changes and expands the reach of struggle against global antiblack racism. The work of South African economist Sampie Terreblanche is evoked throughout this chapter to carefully trace the major historical developments of racialized capital in South Africa and its dire political, economic, and ideological effects. What is shown is that the combined history of South Africa is indeed a history of black unfree labor, a term that triply keynotes the depth of oppression and superexploitation fueling the larger system of apartheid. Ernst Cassirer, then, is reviewed on his understanding of the way in which a telos is always implied in any positing of history. Doubly, this allows us to read the way racism as a symbolic form has infected the colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism still evident after apartheid and to suggest alongside such an analysis why we must continue to fight for a reading of history under the regulative ideal of humanity. It is crucial to name the wrong in apartheid not as mere political exclusion but, instead, as systematic subordination and exploitation since the naming of such a wrong obviously has

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profound implications for what must be put right. Concluding this chapter is a development of the conceptual and political meaning of black unfree labor, and the reflective, teleological inverse of what such a concept points us toward: free human being.

the struggle against racialized capitalism During violent uprisings in the townships of South Africa in May 2008, a photograph appeared in numerous South African newspapers. The image was ominously labeled Shadowy Force, and depicted three young black men in a liminal form. They appear resolute in militant stances and frightfully bear arms. The photograph was taken in the early or late hours of the day such that the twilight faded their faces to near invisibility. These men are meant to be emblematic of the violence occurring at that time in South Africa, and their figuration is implicit as the doppelganger of black masculinity. The uprisings themselves have been largely written off under the rubric of xenophobia, but they truly bear greater complication as a moment of desperation amid the grotesque levels of poverty and racism still present in the lives of blacks even after the creation of the “new” South Africa. We see these men as a ghost-like phenomenon in that they are indistinct in their embodied humanity. There is nothing that shows them as human beings; they only appear as black threats against a white background. As Lewis Gordon has insightfully stated, “in anti-black societies, to be black is to be without a face.”1 Here, all the fear of the black man is constantly put before the public. Indeed, this very photograph was reproduced over and over again in the newspapers. Its reproduction is part of a profound imaginary of black masculinity; to the degree that we can see their embodied humanity, we do so only through a portrayal of their bodies as deployed in the mode of violent attack. As Frantz Fanon tragically described his own reaction to the projection of this terror onto him, “ ‘Mama, see the Negro! I’m frightened!’ Frightened! Frightened! Now they were beginning to be afraid of me. I made up my mind to laugh myself to tears, but laughter had become impossible.”2 As we know from the movements of “the poor” in South Africa, young black youths among others who are poor have been trying to speak for many years in their protests against neoliberal capitalism, and they have been ignored by the government. Their resistance is not counted as having significance, let alone rendering a symbolic challenge to the system of racial-

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ized capitalism that continues in South Africa. In a sense then, there is an ironic truth in the photograph. The horrible poverty that over half of all South Africans endure on a daily basis is paradoxically blacked out by the bright light of the so-called neoliberal miracle of the new South Africa. There is, then, nothing “new” about this photograph. Indeed, there is something “old” about this photograph, something dialectically bound to the more than 350 years of black unfree labor that served as the edifice of colonialism, imperialism, and now capitalism in South Africa. The following is only a brief summary of the history of racialized capitalism in South Africa, highlighting the measures that rendered the majority of the population unfree, sometimes in the most profound sense of actual slavery. South African economist Sampie Terreblanche summarizes eight periods of unfree labor patterns manifested in South Africa since 1652: Slavery in mainly patriarchal households; The indentureship (inboekelingskap) of Khoisan children in the households of Trekboere in the Cape Colony during 18th century, and of African children in the households of Voortrekkers in the two Boer republics in the 19th century; The system of Lord Caledon of indentured labor or compulsory inboekelingskap applicable to almost all the Khoisan (1809–28); A first version of black labor repression: a system designed for the employment of coloureds (formerly Khoisan and slaves) and Africans as cheap and docile contract workers in the agricultural sector (1841–1974); A second version of black labor repression: a system designed to turn Africans still living in the native reserves into cheap and docile migrant labor for the gold mining industry (1894–1972); Discriminatory measures institutionalized from the end of the 19th century onwards to protect white (and mainly Afrikaner) workers against competition from the already proletarianized, and therefore cheaper, black workers (±1870–1979); A third version of black labor repression: a system designed for the employment of Africans still living in “native reserves” or “Bantustans” as cheap and docile migrant laborers in the manufacturing industries in urban areas. This system was institutionalized during the

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apartheid period by the “native” laws of Dr. Hendrik Verwoerd (1952–86); and, The growing unemployment of blacks (especially Africans) in the formal sector of the economy since 1960, and their growing underemployment in the informal sector. This can be regarded as the eighth unfree labor pattern applicable to blacks.3 The dreadful story of such proletarianization can be summarized rather simply. By the end of the nineteenth century, both in the Cape and in Natal, many black peasants had established economic independence and were effective and successful farmers. The mercantile elite in South Africa had previously favored peasantization and retribalization; only a controlled number of black workers were allowed into the proletariat. But in the late 1880s, both white farmers and the new gold mine companies experienced a massive shortage of black labor. There was an alliance between the white employer class of agricultural farmers, mining companies, and construction companies to politically muster massive state intervention in order to break down the independence of the black peasantry. In 1894, the infamous Glen Grey Act became law, which was a predecessor to the Land Act of 1913. The Glen Grey Act created a native reserve in the Cape that allowed some blacks to receive eight-acre allotments that they were forbidden to sell, subdivide, or augment. At the same time, every family was compelled to pay a hut tax and every male who did not sell his labor outside the area within a twelve-month period was forced to pay an additional labor tax. As Terreblanche has powerfully argued, the Glen Grey Act implemented a procedure of deliberate and systematic debt enslavement of workers, and yet the labor shortage in the mines remained. The South African Native Affairs Commission concluded around that time that mines, farms, and industries of South Africa were short about 300,000 workers. The commission concluded that the best solution to the problem was one that would guarantee that Africans remained on the peripheries, completely unable to support themselves. In 1913, the Land Act was passed establishing that Africans could no longer own land outside of the native reserves, which made up 8.3 percent of territory in South Africa. Of course, throughout this period there was much resistance to these horrendous acts on the part of the black peasants; however, the onslaught of the government succeeded in establishing a migrant labor force that could not possibly survive on the reserves with any

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sense of economic independence. The justification for paying wages below the level of bare subsistence was rationalized by the belief that blacks had an alternative source of income. This, then, is superexploitation in the classic sense meant by Marx. Workers were not paid a wage that allowed them to sustain their living labor. To discipline the workers, they were forced to live in all-male mining barracks and were separated from their families. To quote Terreblanche: Under the Land Act, more than a million [Africans] were abruptly proletarianised. At that stage, the African population was about 5 million. The structural domination of whites over blacks created by the Land Act is clearly demonstrated by the fact that the real wages of African workers in mining and agriculture did not increase between 1910 and 1972. The migrant labour system made it possible for the mining industry to justify average wages below the bare subsistence level on the grounds that jobs in white areas were merely supplementing Africans’ basic economic life in the “native reserves.”4

In 1912, the South African Native National Congress, which was later known as the African National Congress (ANC), was founded to protest against the disenfranchisement of blacks by the Act of Westminster. In a certain sense, the Land Act, combined with the Act of Westminster, began an intensified process of radicalizing black workers. Yet for most of the nineteenth century, white Afrikaners were able to find land and did not have to enter the proletariat. The proletarianization of Afrikaners was in good part the result of social dislocation during the Anglo-Boer War.5 Once whites had entered the workforce, there were two steps that the Botha-Smuts government undertook to control the labor force. The first consisted of repressive measures aimed at making African labor cheap and rendering it powerless to organize under the Native Labour Regulation Act of 1911. Black workers were once again, as they have been in the past, subjected to Masters and Servants Acts, which meant that they could not quit their jobs and they were prohibited from striking. The Pact government of J. B. M. Hertzog and F. P. H. Cresswell consolidated the segregationist measures promoted by Cecil John Rhodes that included the Glen Gray Act. The Pact government became notorious for four policy initiatives: the Civilized Labour Policy, the Wage Act of 1925,

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the Mines and Works Amendment Act of 1926, and the Native Administrative Act of 1927. In accordance with the strengthened “coloured bar,” which favored both white and coloured workers, the Hertzog government transferred about 8,000 jobs from blacks to whites; consequently, its aims were more segregationist than repressive. The Civilized Labour Policy allowed a wage board to actually prescribe minimum wages for white and black employment. This “civilized” part was to keep white wages higher than those of blacks but low enough that whites could actually be hired in industrial jobs. The Native Administration Act of 1927 advanced the power of the Native Affairs Department to control the native reserves, co-opt chiefs, and regulate African workers from the reserves as they entered into the proletariat. The Pact victory of 1924, although it was certainly built on the policies of its predecessors, clearly promoted white supremacy for its own sake, and thus considerably strengthened the racial aspect of capitalist exploitation beyond those measures required for superexploitation. By 1934, when Hertzog joined with Smuts to form the fusion government, the relationship of cooperation between state and capital was further consolidated. What we have described so far has nothing to do with the fantasy of market-dominated liberal capitalism. The state employed a heavy, visible hand during every step of economic development. To quote Terreblanche: In 1936, amid riches “beyond the dreams of avarice,” the real wages of both white and African mineworkers were lower than they had been in 1911, and remained at that low level until 1946. The huge profits of the gold industry and the sharp increase in government income—used to “create” the industrial take-off—were therefore attained at the cost of both white and black labour. How could the costs of white and black workers increase only slightly from 1932 until 1940, while the economy grew at a rate of almost 6 per cent a year? As regards white labour, the Industrial Conciliation Act of 1924 had “co-opted” and “depoliticised” it so effectively that it had lost not only its militancy but also its industrial bargaining power. At the same time, it was as important for the Fusion government (1934–9) as it had been for the Pact to look after the interests of unskilled urbanised poor white Afrikaners.6

The ANC did indeed fight against the Hertzog regulations and the removal of black African voters from the common roll. But they paradoxically re-

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mained committed to liberal values while a greater number of whites became consumed by segregationist ideology. It is only with the creation of the ANC Youth League in 1944 that the ANC began to change toward a more radical direction. In 1948, the National Party came to power and was the first to express horror about the dangers of oorstroming (black swamping). Although proletarianization meant some degree of urbanization for blacks, the barracks were meant to keep blacks both separate and disempowered. From out of the fear of oorstroming grew the idea of Grand Apartheid by Hendrik Verwoerd. It was in the course of building Grand Apartheid that the government further developed repressive measures against African workers, particularly influx control, which would still allow for the needs of the gold-mining industry while further entrenching territorial segregation. Part of the institutionalization of Grand Apartheid was the creation of the Bantustans—the black homelands—in which blacks would only be allowed to have political roles under a structure of containment. Here, we began to find an important split between “insiders and outsiders” within black Africans. Africans who had section 10 rights were allowed to claim residential status and were separated from those who were “foreigners” squatting on the lands illegally. Tribal Africans, as they were often called, were only given seventy-two hours to find a job. Those who did not leave were criminalized, but of course even workers with section 10 rights had to carry passes. In a certain sense, then, migrant workers were themselves criminals just for being out of the native reserves for more than seventy-two hours. This criminalization of black masculinity simply for being present has had an overwhelming impact on the connection between crime and black masculinity in the new South Africa. As mentioned earlier, Fanon brilliantly describes how the terror of a black man marks him as a criminal long before the law of any nation-state actually designates him as such. The majority of black South African women remained in the rural areas, and for the most part, those who were urbanized had section 10 rights. During the 1950s and 1960s, the ANC fought against all of these repressive measures with greater intensity and success. “The Defiance Campaign” led ANC members to confront the discriminatory laws that were imposed against them with the aim of getting arrested. This demand for basic civil rights was met with extreme repression by the apartheid government. The response of the ANC was to organize a Congress of the People held at Clip-

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town, south of Johannesburg, in June 1955. The outcome of the congress was the famous Freedom Charter. Of course, part of what prompted militancy in the urban areas was the forced removal of millions of Africans under the Group Areas Act. However, what followed these events were liberal democratic struggles in the 1960s by the ANC. Later, the ANC engaged in more radical challenges to the system of apartheid, which ended with the imprisonment of Nelson Mandela, the banning of the ANC, and the exiling of ANC leaders who were not imprisoned. The endless attempts to control black urbanization had a horrific impact on the lives of Africans who lived either in the townships or squatter camps. As Terreblanche explains: Influx control deprived millions of Africans of the barest minimum of social citizenship. Government spending on education, health, housing and social security for urban Africans deliberately minimised so as not to “attract” more Africans to the cities. As in the case of the mining industry, the migrant system for employment in the manufacturing sector was also based on the supposition that “welfare services” for migrants were supplied in the “reserves.” . . . The fact that African wages as a percentage of white wages declined from 1950 to 1970 in both the manufacturing and mining industries (despite the economic deterioration in the “native reserves”) shows clearly that the migrant labour systems—in both industries—became considerably more exploitative during the first 25 apartheid years.7

But the Bantu system, and particularly the Bantu Affairs Administration Boards (BAABS), which played a major role in the control of the townships, led to further divides between black “insiders” and “outsiders.” Illegal workers squatted outside the organized townships, which often resulted in conflict between the more urbanized workers and the tribal squatters. Ultimately, this violence erupted in the early 1990s between the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP)—the party of the “Zulu homeland”—and the United Democratic Front that primarily associated with the ANC. This was not a battle between Zulus and Xhosas (although it became extremely violent and thousands were killed) but between different political visions of the future and intense competition over scarce resources. Such violence erupted, in particular, when these resources were controlled by corrupt patronage systems that favored

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Zulus who remained attached to the party of Zulu homelands. One extremely significant part of the history of the Bantus is the idea of a Bantu education, which severely limited the black majority from having access to decent education. As such, Terreblanche explains, “As recently as 1982, total spending on African education was less than half that on white education, despite the fact that the African population was more than 4.5 times larger than the white population.”8 The rebellion against this system came to a head in the Soweto uprisings of 1976. Blacks were finally allowed to join unions but only in the 1980s. The illegal strikes that preceded the recognition of the right of blacks to join unions in the 1970s had considerable effects, not only on the so-called liberalization of the economy but also on its structure as the unions throughout the 1980s became extremely militant. The manufacturing sector moved toward increased capital intensity in order to free themselves from dependence on militant black workforces. The struggles in the late 1980s and early 1990s did indeed render the “government ungovernable.” The result, of course, is that after protracted negotiations between the competing parties, a new constitutional dispensation was established and with it the birth of one of the most jurisprudentially demanding and ethically progressive constitutions in the world. Yet, sadly, in closed-door meetings in 1993, the fate of the economy was decided as the ANC elite pulled away from its socialist orientation and from its own Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP), which was prepared primarily by economists working with the unions. A span of more than 350 years of systematic racialized capitalism cannot simply be addressed by neoliberal policies. The larger global demands of neoliberalism require the opening of South Africa to global capitalist incursions by eliminating tariff barriers; yet, such tariff barriers might well have been necessary to create labor-intensive industries that could actually help solve the massive unemployment in the new South Africa. Indeed, the so-called restructuring of the economy has been a complete capitulation to neoliberal norms.9 First, under Growth Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) strategies, the privatization of certain state-owned assets increased considerably. Privatization has been strongly opposed by the unions and goes in the opposite direction of resolving the deep-seated structural crisis of racialized capitalism, giving even more power to the corporations within civil society. Second, the government policy of black empowerment has been restricted to a privileged minority who basically accept the neoliberal

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agenda. Third, restructuring under GEAR is itself the reinforcement of the First World capitalist enclave. As we have seen, the corporate response of the “Commanding Heights”—as the leading corporations in South Africa colorfully call themselves—to effective labor mobilization in the 1970s and 1980s was to detach themselves from unskilled black labor and indeed even more skilled organized labor. The result has been the continuing deterioration of black opportunities in the modern capitalist sector of the economy. Thus, what GEAR produced was an economy dualistic in nature, a mainly whitecontrolled modern sector in opposition to a black underdeveloped informal sector. Currently, over 50 percent of the black population lives in dire poverty in South Africa. The structural nature of labor markets means that social mobility for poor blacks to move into more skilled jobs in the capitalist enclave is nearly impossible. Terreblanche summarizes the situation rather cogently: South Africa’s economic problems are far more serious in 2002 than they were in 1994. The capitalist enclavity and the global orientation of the economy are far more developed than in 1994, and the marginalisation of lumpenproletariat in the informal sector far more complete. Many corporations and individuals have “escaped” into global capitalism, and can no longer be regarded as being fully part of the South African economy. Ironically, some of the corporations that have won permission to move their main listings offshore are among those which accumulated their wealth by plundering both South Africa’s natural resources and its black labour force during the period of colonial and racial capitalism. It seems as if, since the early 1990s, at least some corporations have followed a clever “master plan” that has enabled them to detach themselves from South Africa and from possible intervention by the new government. If this has indeed been their secret strategy, they have succeeded spectacularly—but once again to the detriment of the victims of the systemic exploitation in which the corporate sector played a central role for so many years.10

As Terreblanche effectively argues, there remains a systematic barrier to such economic integration. Thus, we see that black workers are not the problem, but rather the systematic inheritances of racialized capitalism, working within neoliberalism, are to blame. By locating the problem as a system of racialized capitalism, we can see the situation of black workers differently and thus un-

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dermine the stereotypes that enforce the dire poverty of the majority of the black population.

the telos of history Terreblanche explicitly states that he is narrating history from a particular point of view, telling the history of South Africa from the standpoint of unfree black labor. The task for Terreblanche has been to “explore South Africa’s modern history mainly from the perspective of unequal power relations and unfree labour patterns.”11 Such an investigation traverses many intellectual paths, bringing to life “the histories of power domination (political, economic, and ideological) and land deprivation” to help unfold the “drama of unfree black labour over the past 350 years.”12 The other side of this history is an exploration of what Terreblanche calls “historical power shifts” in South Africa. Terreblanche, following Alvin Toffler, distinguishes between two kinds of power shifts: (1) a transfer of political power and (2) a deep change in power that transforms the very nature of power. Terreblanche, working from a reading of Max Weber on the three dimensions of social systems, tells the story of unfree black labor as it is related to shifts in political, economic, and ideological power. Thus, in order for a power system to shift, it must effectively take control of all three aspects of the pyramid described by Weber. Terreblanche describes three major power shifts: Dutch colonialism during the second half of the seventeenth century, British colonialism during the first half of the nineteenth century, and British imperialism during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. All three historical periods imposed different external power constellations on South Africa. However, in contrast to these three external power shifts, Terreblanche argues that there were three internal power shifts that did not have the same ability to achieve a complete change in who controlled the state and social and civil society. First, the early Voortrekkers (Dutch pioneers) could not really defeat the African tribes in the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. They needed the foreign imposition of the British with their greater military might to thoroughly defeat those indigenous to the land. Second, in like manner, the post-1948 MP Party perpetuated the social stratifications and modes of production of the preceding period. If, however, it did not succeed in an ultimate shift in power in the sense of Weber, it did succeed in intensifying

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the exploitative nature of the already existing labor pattern of black unfree labor. The third internal power shift is of course the post-1994 transition purportedly from the political power of whites to the thoroughgoing transformation that would change the nature of power itself promised by the ANC. Therefore, for Terreblanche, there has not been in South Africa the desperately needed change of power that would change the nature of power itself. In other words, although blacks now hold political power, they have succumbed to the dominant relations of neoliberal capitalism that were passed on to them by the preceding government and they have also become ideological props in defense of such neoliberal capitalism. Thus, as Terreblanche concludes: If we take as our point of departure the dismal socio-economic legacy bequeathed to the new government in 1994 by the five racially based systemic periods described earlier, the question arises how deep and how comprehensive the change towards a new power constellation ought to be before the major problems confronting the new South Africa can be effectively addressed. We believe the political power shift of 1994 will remain ineffective not only until an ideological paradigm shift takes place towards a social democratic approach, but also until another structural shift empowers the “democratic” part of the new politico-economic system vis-à-vis the “capitalist” part.13

In all of these power shifts, the structure of unfree black labor is superficially changed. But one thing remains the same: the unfreedom of black labor. The history developed by Terreblanche implies an explicit telos. Terreblanche symbolizes the condition of black labor as unfree through the eight periods of history where unfreedom has been always pointing to the corollary of freedom. The constant questioning of freedom is built into the history being told to us by Terreblanche, who is always reminding us that a transformation in the nature of power itself must take place if black workers are to be free. Ernst Cassirer developed the great insight that all forms of human knowledge, from science to history, must be governed by an implicit telos that organizes the observations or events divulged by the scientist or historian. As Cassirer reminds us, it is impossible to reduce historical thought to a kind of science of man:

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Here we are not moving in a physical but in a symbolic universe. And for understanding and interpreting symbols we have to develop other methods than those of research into causes. The category of meaning is not to be reduced to the category of being. If we seek a general heading under which we are to subsume historical knowledge we may describe it not as a branch of physics but as a branch of semantics. The rules of semantics, not the laws of nature, are the general principles of historical thought. History is included in the field of hermeneutics, not in that of natural science.14

As we have written throughout this book, Cassirer is a third Critique Kantian in that he believes all knowledge is regulated by the ideals around which they are organized. It is not, for Cassirer, that a historian is simply writing fiction. Surely, people live and die, bounty and famine affect our yields, and societies have risen to the zenith of transformative justice and the nadir of dreadful genocide. The historian, however, is not simply collecting all of the factual matter about such events, though such methodological diligence is key for Cassirer; rather, the historian is weaving the story of such events into what Cassirer, citing Goethe, says must be an “imagination for the truth of reality.” That is to say, the productive imagination must take up those carefully catalogued events rendered from sensible intuitions through schematic understanding of human experience. Such a feat of archival narrative, indeed, is eventually organized through a regulative ideal and thereby projects a telos onto history. For instance, when a “natural disaster” occurs, obliterating a community under the fury and wrath of a tempest, we make choices about how to describe the event. Is the destruction really a natural disaster, attributable to the wicked chance of Fortuna? Or is the event a “human disaster,” due either to our failure to build cities harmoniously with the planet or because of those who neglected to come to the aid of their brethren in the aftermath? As Cassirer points out: But even though we cannot deny that every great historical work contains and implies an artistic element, it does not thereby become a work of fiction. In his quest for truth the historian is bound by the same strict rules as the scientist. He has to utilize all the methods of empirical investigation. He has to collect all the available evidence and to compare and criticize all his sources. He is not permitted to forget or neglect any

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important fact. Nevertheless, the last and decisive act is always an act of the productive imagination. In a conversation with Eckermann Goethe complained that there were few men who have “imagination for the truth of reality.”15

Thus, there is an inevitable ideality in any historical writing, for we never arrive at the simple reality of events. The historian necessarily molds reality into a new shape, giving it the ideality of recollection.16 Historical method, then, is recollective imagination. There is, for Cassirer, within such an ideality of recollection a need to constantly preserve the telos of history through ongoing remembrance, lest the regulative ideal it purports becomes forgotten and lost to the ages. This sort of work is itself an intellectual synthesis, which may at times “incessantly reconquer” the world of culture through such a constitutive act. Thus, how we read history is not an objective encounter as a distanced spectator but is instead an active, subjective molding and shaping of the world from the plateau of time present upon time past under the suggestion of what is yet to come in the future. Time is integrally linked in such an act, and the telos of history is the binding thread. Again, to quote Cassirer: Material objects maintain their existence independently of the work of the scientist, but historical objects have true being only so long as they are remembered—and the act of remembrance must be unbroken and continuous. The historian must not only observe his objects like the naturalist; he must preserve them. His hope of keeping them in their physical existence can be frustrated at any moment. By the fire which destroyed the library of Alexandria innumerable and invaluable documents were lost forever. But even the surviving monuments would gradually fade away if they were not constantly kept alive by the art of the historian. In order to possess the world of culture we must incessantly reconquer it by historical recollection. But recollection does not mean merely the act of reproduction. It is a new intellectual synthesis—a constructive act. In this reconstruction the human mind moves in the opposite direction from that of the original process.17

This inescapable moment of ideality that inheres in all human activity, including the work of the historian, is what makes history inseparable from its

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projected telos. Such a telos is a regulative ideal, one of many that can be culled forth, including the important ideal of bringing the past to life for new generations. For Cassirer, part of the telos of history is one of the major ways in which human beings come to know their experiences in the world through symbolic form. As Cassirer tells us, “History as well as poetry is an organon of our self-knowledge, an indispensable instrument for building up our human universe.”18 However, it is important to remember that since Cassirer is a third Critique Kantian the inevitable telos is regulative and not constitutive of historical knowledge. As we have seen throughout this book, Cassirer undoes the distinction made by Kant between constitutive knowledge and what is regulated by ideals. Truly, even science proceeds through acts of the imagination that are regulated by a telos of compounding comprehension on the field of scientific endeavor. For Einstein, that telos was some underlying unity of the universe that could be ultimately found in a unified field theory. Einstein, as we know, was never successful in the full development of that theory, but it was a regulative ideal within much of his later research. In like manner, Cassirer points out in his discussions on Darwin that there is not only a history of science but also a biology that has a historical dimension in its edict of evolution. Again, to quote Cassirer: Darwinism broke with this long tradition once and for all. The historical, barely tolerated previously, was not actually to supplant the rational, for there is no rational explanation of the organic world save that which shows its origins. The laws of real nature are historical laws, and only through their discovery is it possible to escape a bare logical schematism and get back to the actual causes of phenomena.19

Thus, the theory of evolution properly understood is also a regulative ideal for biological science. It should in no way be turned into a dogma such as in social biology that would wield the idea of evolution to purportedly show how human beings are factually constituted through misnomers on what is meant by the survival of the fittest. For Cassirer, these approaches offer dogmatic world images that ultimately undermine the kind of rich, dynamic scientific endeavor involved in the regulative ideal of evolution discussed by Darwin. Thus, because of his allegiance to the third Critique, Cassirer rejects traditional Marxist and Hegelian notions of history in which we are constituted,

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in a strong sense, as human beings through the unfolding of spirit or through the mighty battles of class struggle. Such a view is both similar and different from notions of genealogy developed by Michel Foucault. At times, Foucault wrote as if he were actually telling us the story of a constitutive chain of causality explaining how we come into being in a particular social and historical context. At other times, Foucault seems clearly aware that all genealogy begins in an act of fabrication and involves a molding and shaping that has implicit in it a telos that organizes the narrative as a regulative ideal. This is rarely the language of Foucault, but it appears in this spirit in his later writings.20 History may indeed mark us, but it does not bind us; the regulative ideal behind any telos leading history can always shift like the needle of a compass toward a new narrative direction. Ultimately, history can only be understood through aesthetic judgment in the unique sense meant by Kant. Thus, it would be a profound mistake to think that this book or Cassirer is suggesting that there is an actual telos in history that constitutes human beings in relations of destiny. With these ideas in mind, we want to return to the topic of unfree black labor in which the regulative ideal throughout such a history shared one thing in common: black labor remained exploited and unfree even if the form of exploitation itself evolved over time. For Terreblanche, the failure by the ANC is precisely one that failed to secure the promised power shift that would, indeed, end the more than 350-year history of black unfree labor.

black unfree labor How does one give symbolic form to over 350 years of exploitative, colonial racism masquerading as the history of South Africa? What words, images, stories, or formulas can evoke any reasonable understanding of such history? If we simplify the matter and evoke the term “servitude,” then we have fallen short of recognizing the agentive presence of a subject behind black consciousness. If we call out against slavery, then the legal definition blurs the debilitating social, political, and economic effects of state domination at work. If we claim bondage, then we have no recourse to consider the meaning of freedom outside of entering into the dynamics of a free-market system. Perhaps, then, Terreblanche unknowingly coined with great insight the triple phrase we need to philosophically unpack: “unfree black labor.” What follows considers the idea of unfree black labor in three movements.

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The “unfree” in the term unfree black labor requires us to meaningfully know freedom, which can be gleaned from the capabilities development work of Amartya Sen and the carefully drawn-out philosophy of Lewis Gordon. The “black” in unfree black labor is a matter of understanding black consciousness as the way of life that would break the shackles of racial bondage imposed by the racist state in the sense meant by Steve Biko. The “labor” in unfree black labor demands that we return to Marx in order to understand the crippling effect of superexploitation. Amartya Sen has famously worked from within the discipline of economics and social philosophy to argue that the development of human capability is integral to any question of freedom. The development of human capabilities must be defended, protected, and enhanced if anyone is to live a free life based on their own functional achievements. To be clear, “development” in this sense is not at all synonymous with so-called democratic projects of imperial control. Indeed, Sen is clear that there can be no enumerated list of human capabilities but that such endeavors must be collectively determined within a given community. Often, Sen discusses economic, social, and political factors in his concern for the ways facets of our lives function as limitations to such freedom. Thus, grotesque poverty, systematic exclusion, and forms of tyranny are concerning for Sen in the ways they inhibit our achievement of capabilities. There is nothing in Sen that reduces the call for such development to particular, enumerated conditions that mirror freedom as a vision of Western, liberal principles.21 Instead, we must see, as Sen explains, that any impoverishment of the world is itself an experience that deprives the capability of human beings to live in this world according to a freedom of their own collaborative creation.22 The activity of developing our capability for achieving human freedom is very much a way we might try to address the ideality of our freedom in the wake of a catastrophic situation of our own making. Today, most economists argue that we need only properly price everything as a commodity in the market, obliterate barriers to free trade, and allow people to buy interests in those commodities, which might range from created goods to natural resources to abstract concepts. However, Sen, in contradistinction, would suggest that we must developmentally provide all people with the very means that represent “substantive freedoms—the capabilities— to choose a life one has reason to value.”23 Because markets are actually

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human creations, and not objectively determined entities, it is within our power to change the way such markets work. It is also within our power to determine that people have a basic right both to the realized functioning of their freedom and to make reasoned decisions about their free development according to a just capability set.24 Of the two terms, the former refers to what we actually accomplish in our life while the latter suggests the range of how we are able to choose the enactment of our material human capacities for various valued activities of life. Of course, one might object that people are responsible for the development of their own lives including the development of the capability set that will influence their realized functioning. However, to quote Sen: A child who is denied the opportunity of elementary schooling is not only deprived as a youngster, but also handicapped all through life (as a person unable to do certain basic things that rely on reading, writing, and arithmetic). The adult who lacks the means of having medical treatment for an ailment from which she suffers is not only prey to preventable morbidity and possibly escapable mortality, but may also be denied the freedom to do various things—for herself and for others—that she may wish to do as a responsible human being. The bonded laborer born into semislavery, the subjugated girl child stifled by a repressive society, the helpless landless laborer without substantial means of earning an income are all deprived not only in terms of well-being, but also in terms of the ability to lead responsible lives, which are contingent on having certain basic freedoms. Responsibility requires freedom.25

The provision of basic material and ideational needs that would allow people to come into being as self-determined thinking and acting subjects surely is a necessary precursor to any enactment of freedom and ethical responsibility. There is a materialist vein in the work of Sen that is deeply concerned with the distribution of goods in society in a way that would allow people to achieve material stability based on their own freedom. However, the material concerns throughout this text require some sort of teleological critique that would take notice of the ways in which distribution is itself a part of the larger system of capital making, which Karl Marx carefully explains is itself always integrally tied into production, exchange, and consumption. Finding

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freedom in simply one dimension will not succeed unless it also follows from the other three dimensions. The ideal of humanity given to us by Marx is one in which freedom itself is bound to the experience when communism as an ideal overthrows the chicanery of the enslaving, alien power known as the world market. For Marx, such a collective feat of revolutionary solidarity “can be expressed again speculatively and idealistically, that is, fantastically, as ‘self-generation of the species’ (‘society as the subject’), and thereby the consecutive series of interrelated individuals can be conceived as a single individual which accomplishes the mystery of generating itself.”26 The regeneration of the species restores society to a realm of subjects giving value to its objects and relationships at-large. Such is a necessary teleology that could aid Sen in thinking development within the pursuit of a regulative ideal. Without such a regulative ideal the progressive spirit of Sen can, perhaps, become possessed by those who would impose alternative ideals of racialized capital that has guided our historical understanding of market economics for far too long.27 Lewis Gordon adds to the work of Sen by suggesting that we need to meaningfully figure our social, economic, and political worlds in a way that promotes fuller options rather than mere choices.28 Too often rhetoric under the banner of neoliberalism suggests that human beings are granted the choice to live out their lives under seemingly democratic forms of advanced capitalism. However, Gordon draws our attention to the reality that much of what we see as options is really just a matter of selecting between a limited set of choices: A peculiar feature of the social world is that some practices and institutions can become so calcified that they function no differently than would a brick wall. That is, just as one cannot go through a brick wall without force, some social institutions function similarly. Those are options. They are either material reality or function as material functions of reality. There are choices that are isomorphic with options, but when options are exhausted, choices can continue on how to relate to the exhaustion of options.29

Upon the exhaustion of meaningful options in our attempts to stand out and emerge in a life of our own making in community with other people,

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the maddening isomorphic depletion of options into a realm of mere choice ends with what Gordon calls implosivity: the asymmetrical realization in a racialized system of capital where one has been rendered beneath the threshold of humanity, a very real limitation that would purport the options of blacks as always far beneath the unlimited horizon preserved for whites. Truly, Gordon remains slightly wary of the work of Sen, given that many of the problems that have plagued the dispossessed throughout history have been a result of the recalcitrant imposition of economic and political forces. Still, Gordon admits sympathy with the work of Sen, offering a similar, though different, account of freedom from within the traditions of phenomenology and existentialism. If we are to think about freedom, then we must consider the very meaning of existence; such a term carries a double etymological origin and “means ‘to stand out’ or ‘to emerge.’ It is another way of saying that if one does not stand out, even to one’s self, it is as though one were not there. To exist, then is vital to every human being; it is what it means to live.”30 Such living resonates deeply with the idea of a regenerating species being. Surely, the material world must be made and shared so that people have more than the bare subsistence of survival. But we must remember the way Kant spoke of freedom as theoretically unprovable and animated through practical reason. There is no way to definitively prove that one is free or, by inverse, unfree. Rather, we must understand that “when we think ourselves as free we transfer ourselves into the world of understanding as members of it and cognize autonomy of the will along with its consequence, morality.”31 When we project ourselves into this imagined other world we encounter a suspended teleological projection, one that offers a regulative ideality where “the footpath of freedom is the only one on which it is possible to make use of our reason in our conduct.”32 In the work of Biko, black consciousness carries a special meaning, and it must be drawn out carefully in order to appreciate its fullness of spirit: Black Consciousness is an attitude of mind and a way of life, the most positive call to emanate from the black world for a long time. Its essence is the realisation by the black man of the need to rally together with his brothers around the cause of their oppression—the blackness of their skin—and to operate as a group to rid themselves of the shackles that bind them to perpetual servitude.33

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The call, here, is one of radical solidarity as a way of life. Indeed, for Biko, one has to internalize the ethical demand of racial equality and at the same time externalize its truth in all of our everyday activities—publicly, privately, and, of course, within the state. Against the totalitarian system of apartheid, Biko is always suggesting that the necessary antithesis to such a thesis is one of combined black struggle against racism that would render blacks mere prey to the subjugation of colonialism.34 Such a call to solidarity carries with it a message of coming to consciousness because “the blacks are tired of standing at the touchlines to witness a game that they should be playing. They want to do things for themselves and all by themselves.”35 Already, we can see that Biko imagined the practice of black consciousness as a means to the full, developed capability of all people to influence, enjoy, and change society. Such an understanding is not one where suffering takes a position of primacy at the expense of developing a fuller notion of what it means to be human. “We do not want to be reminded that it is we, the indigenous people, who are poor and exploited in the land of our birth. These are concepts which the Black Consciousness approach,” Biko explains, “wishes to eradicate from the black man’s mind before our society is driven to chaos by irresponsible people from Coca-cola and hamburger cultural backgrounds.”36 Indeed, the founding documents used by all of the organizations that Biko was pivotal in establishing precisely state that, “Being black is not a matter of pigmentation—being black is a reflection of a mental attitude.”37 Again, we must understand black consciousness as not only a mental attitude but, more important, as one that leaves behind scientific notions of race through genetics or semblance. Thus, the “black” of black consciousness is about seeing the truth of all people as human beings and that each person holds inherent dignity and power of purpose. As Biko explains: It becomes more necessary to see the truth as it is if you realise that the only vehicle for change are these people who have lost their personality. The first step therefore is to make the black man come to himself; to pump back life into his empty shell; to infuse him with pride and dignity, to remind him of his complicity in the crime of allowing himself to be misused and therefore letting evil reign supreme in the country of his birth.38

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To be clear, black consciousness is both about being black and more than being black. Biko strongly suggests, “Merely by describing yourself as black you have started on a road towards emancipation, you have committed yourself to fight against all forces that seek to use your blackness as a stamp that marks you out as a subservient being.”39 The struggle for such emancipation, the movement beyond being stamped as subservient by white supremacy, demands an ongoing fight against all the forces of oppression. Much of those forces can be seen through obvious material asymmetries in society, but some of those forces also take shape in the realm of consciousness. The project, then, of black consciousness is also one of conscientization: We try to get blacks in conscientisation to grapple realistically with their problems, to attempt to find solutions to their problems, to develop what one might call an awareness, a physical awareness of their situation, to be able to analyse it, and to provide answers for themselves. The purpose behind it really being to provide some kind of hope; I think the central theme about black society is that it has got elements of a defeated society, people often look like they have given up the struggle. Like the man who was telling me that he now lives to work, he has given himself to the idea. Now this sense of defeat is basically what we are fighting against; people must not just give in to the hardship of life, people must develop a hope, people must develop some form of security to be together to look at their problems, and people must in this way build up their humanity. This is the point about conscientisation and Black Consciousness.40

The struggle to defeat hopelessness by beating back the world-weariness of hardship toward consciousness about the phenomenological trappings and ways out of racialized capital under Grand Apartheid, demands the selfdetermined understanding of not only a new black man or woman but also, a new humanity. Such a new humanity may indeed be made through the work of black consciousness, but the writing of Biko, over time, extends this project to include all those that would give up their racially distributed privileges and take up, in all matters of their being, the fight for equality and freedom. Anyone who dares to completely resist the system of racialized capital is al-

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ready blackened against the mark of a fantasized whiteness. Surely, we are not suggesting, and neither would Biko, that a white person can in any simple way become black as a matter of identity or position within a society of structural racialized prejudice.41 But, what we are suggesting is that the idea of blackness within black consciousness taken up in the work of Biko is not one that can merely be understood through Manichaeism; rather, black consciousness is the willful formation of a new humanity that would annul the racialized world altogether through a projected regulative ideal giving us a new telos out of the history of racialized capital. Last, we are reminded by Marx that a condition of superexploitation emerges when capitalism no longer operates under fair assumptions and strips workers of the bare subsistence necessary to keep alive their living labor. For Marx, labor under the system of capital relations does not provide workers with wealth or dignity, but instead it provides the bare subsistence necessary to survival within the system: What he obtains from the exchange is therefore not exchange value, not wealth, but a means of subsistence, objects for the preservation of his life, the satisfaction of his needs in general, physical, social, etc. It is a specific equivalent in means of subsistence, in objectified labour, measured by the cost of production of his labour. What he gives up is his power to dispose of the later.42

However, when the capitalistic system fails to provide for workers as we saw in the history of inequality of South Africa outlined by Terreblanche, superexploitation emerges. That is to say, black workers were grossly unpaid for their work under the assumption that they had a secondary economic system within the “homelands” that informally provided for their means of subsistence. However, such an informal economy did not exist in any strong sense. Nor, if it did exist, would the situation be any less than superexploitation since the system of racialized capital still failed to meaningfully provide wages of subsistence to workers. Colonialism and imperialism are both notorious for their abuse of superexploitation and resulting failure to ever manage any reparation of redemption for such a wrong. Indeed, the living labor of African workers was siphoned off to fuel the very system of racialized capital that made the colonial situation possible in the first place. Biko, as reviewed in the last chapter, was right to be suspicious of liberal solutions to

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oppression through apartheid given that such liberals were themselves raised, nurtured, and thrived on the very privileges that came about through the draining of the creative force and living labor of black workers during centuries of exploitation. However, throughout our discussion of black unfree labor we have been returning to Marx and an understanding of what such a systematic draining means in a deeper philosophical and political sense. The draining of the ethical, creative force of human beings is often rendered invisible to most people; but such a siphoning is the depletion of our very means for building, restoring, and reconfiguring the symbolic form of our world—both the material and ideational development of the basic needs of people and the flourishing of their capability freedom along the lines of a regulative ideal of a new humanity. For Sylvia Wynter, echoing Foucault, history and more specifically economics are organized under epistemes, which are tied to knowledge constitutive goals represented as frameworks basic to the survival of a group. To borrow an example made by Wynter, the reigning episteme of the Aztec religion was that of maintaining the flow of creative energy between all life forms. Medieval Europe, alternatively, founded itself in the promise of religious redemption. In the modern age, for Wynter, the search has been for some rational redemption even in the movements of socialist battles for the control of the state and economy. Any episteme for Wynter creates its liminal other. Crucial for Wynter is the demonstration of precisely how oppression is connected to liminality. The goal for Wynter is not simply exposure, however, but is more political since Wynter remains committed to the historicist project of liberation. Paget Henry succinctly describes the power of Wynter’s use of liminality and its relationship to the failure to achieve a new way of being human: Wynter’s approach to this postcolonial crisis is to subject its development ideology to an epistemic analysis, exposing in the process its counterproductive entrapment in the liminal categories of the Western episteme. This analysis suggests that the constructing of development projects in the language and discourses of the colonizer places severe limits on their originality. In Wynter’s view, this enmeshment of development thinking in the episteme and culture of the colonizer blocks the emergence of new social orders in these societies. To achieve such new orders, it is necessary

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to reject not only specific ideologies but also the founding episteme of the colonial project. Without such an epistemic break, the capacity for original and independent thinking will remain severely limited. These constraints on originality are further compounded by the fact that within the epistemic schemes of European colonial projects the colonized were redefined through the liminal categories. Inheriting these schemes also means internalizing liminal modes of self-definition and selfrealization.43

Wynter is deeply suspicious of the binaries of development and underdevelopment as being completely bound in an episteme that has liminalized all people of color as others of horrible exploitation. Along with economic practices, we need to radically decolonize our governing epistemes including many socialist projects of development. As we have seen, the project Sen pursues can be freed from an episteme that liminalizes the Third World as hopelessly immature with the only hope for maturity arriving in the adoption of neoliberal capitalism. For Wynter, the other to the homo economus of neoliberal capitalism is the black other. Yet, it is not simply enough to free those who are now blackened; rather, we must continue to evoke a vision of humanity in which no one group is liminalized and there is no further need for blackening. By suggesting that there is a regulative telos in history, we are in no way undermining the horrors of the twentieth century. Wynter follows Walter Benjamin in showing us how certain historical projects, even those that were purportedly rooted in progressive movements, have tragically become additions to the pile of wreckage seen by the Angel of History.44 As Benjamin recounts such an image, the angel has spread its wings and is looking toward us yet spies out of the corner of its eye a tragedy of the past that cannot be ignored. It is indeed a catastrophe of the highest magnitude, of which subsequent catastrophes continue to pile upon this original foundation. This angel, representing the weak messianic power inherent in all human beings, stands motionless but aware of the original catastrophe. It is an image burdened with guilt for both what the angel has noticed and the stillness that has become its prison. The angel of history stands motionless because “a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm,” Benjamin tells us, “is what we call progress.”45 The novelty of

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such progress is simply a reinvention of the old that ossifies our being, historicizing tragedy with the promise of being aligned with those who would usher forward the next coming epoch without attending to the ailments needing repair in the previous generation. The angel of history is showing us that the sort of grandeur we live in today is very much only possible because of the continued wreck of catastrophes that has bequeathed to us the many privileges of life that come with living in empire, which Benjamin calls “the style of revolutionary terrorism, for which the state is an end in itself.”46 Instead, we are called to awaken to our deeper ethical obligation to enact a symbolic form of transformative redemption: both material and ideal. Without such redemption we are not ever living free but simply living freely atop the catastrophic suffering of our fellow human beings. If we examine this image from afar we are, metaphorically speaking, objects made by the context of an original catastrophe of suffering playing master over our subjective experience of the world. The only solution to such slavish relations, following Hegel, is to perform the sort of work of redemption that would authentically expand our lived consciousness of freedom. In a certain sense, the history Terreblanche offers of South Africa, and certainly his history of the failure by the ANC to transform power relations, can be read as a history of wreckage: a wreckage that forms the foundation to a vain tower of so-called progress atop the graves of those who died by the hand of racialized capital. Yet, with the idea of black unfree labor as a symbolic form, one that can be read through history with a telos, we are always pointed toward the reflective, regulative inverse that emerges: free human being.

conclusion As we will see in the next chapter, however, even if the free human being is always a regulative ideal we are still always called in the struggle for justice to negotiate meaningful change with actual institutions, including constitutions that seek transformation in the name of that ideal. “There is always something about a negotiation that is a little dirty,” Jacques Derrida cautiously reminds us. Yet still we are told that “to negotiate in the name of purity . . . is another proposition that must be negotiated.”47 We will turn, in concluding this book, to the meaning of the substantive legal revolution in South Africa as at least part of the struggle to create an ongoing, transformative constitution onto justice.

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In drawing this book to a close we will defend the necessity of revolution, which has been undermined, in part, by poststructuralist critiques charging that revolution comes to us within an inevitably totalizing discourse. To speak of revolution always returns us to our previous discussion of the historicist project in post-colonies where the question of the nation-state and socialist transformation cannot be avoided. Throughout this book we have defended the need for a strong poeticist project to accompany the transformation of ourselves and our envisioning of the world alongside our relations with other people. Indeed, the fear of revolution is rooted in the recognition that novelty itself is a capitalist production. Understanding the recollective, reimagined past, then, is crucial in trying to unravel such fear. Hannah Arendt brilliantly wrote that revolution always combines novelty with a restorative moment of an ethical world that has been purportedly lost. This book finds its conclusion in reflections on the South African principle of transcendence in the idea of uBuntu, which has been defended by Justice Yvonne Mokgoro as not only the spirit of the South African Constitution but also, perhaps more sweepingly, the spirit by which we might enter into a new humanity. Despite compelling critiques about the fetishization of law, we will argue that the South African Constitution holds tremendous

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symbolic force because of its promise for justice through transformative constitutionalism.

the promise of revolution The landscape of the academy today is filled with critiques suggesting the dream of the socialist revolution turned into an inevitable nightmare. Why, so the argument goes, was this outcome inevitable? If you read Francis Fukuyama, for example, the inevitability necessarily results in the idolization of the state.1 Ernst Cassirer would call this the “myth of the state,” a totalizing determination of all social relations in the name of the proverbial good. Thus, in order to realize socialism, the state must be mythologized— not as the representative or participatory organs through which the people speak but as a site of control over the rowdy masses that would disrupt the necessary work of the state in delivering social goods. For instance, in his early writing, Michel Foucault feared that socialism and the gulag were necessarily intertwined.2 Although there are many different poststructural critiques of socialist revolution, we want to paint them with a broad brush to bring out the primary elements they share. Famously, Marxism made the claim that even if history operates behind the backs of individual human beings and their individual projects, it is ultimately human beings that are the agents of change. In a certain sense, the ascension of the proletariat to the position of a class-for-itself is precisely what can finally render transparent the creative elements involved in human activities, including in the realm of production. The proletariat exemplifies a humanity that now knows itself as the creative agent of history, one that can bring about a new state of social relations such as in socialism. This notion of a creative self constituted through the collective entity of the proletariat and struggling for a new humanity is often flatly rejected by poststructuralist critiques. Instead, we are reminded that there is a conscious enmeshing that actually constitutes human subjects in the semiotic aspects of our languages. Famously, Jacques Derrida said that language proceeds by encompassing us in a series of binary oppositions and that their hierarchical ordering and systematic functioning is what makes language possible (male/female, right/wrong, or old/new).3 These systemic categories and binary encodings are what make up the human subject, and they constitute social interactions in our thinking

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and acting in the world. Derrida argued that these binaries cannot be neutralized and that often a movement of reversal is necessary to open up the dynamism of signifiers embedded in the rigidity of language. Thus, by deconstructing the rigidity of language, textualities are open to a new semiotic play. Derrida never thought that deconstruction was an end-in-itself and his later writing continuously emphasized the ethical moment inherent in the deconstruction of the binaries of language.4 In fact, Derrida went so far as to insist that we could never be free of the “Specter of Marx.” He called for a new international that would confront the horrors of the twentieth century by creating a new world of socialism through political negotiation fighting against the dominance of neoliberal capitalism.5 To this end, Paget Henry succinctly describes the poststructuralist suspicion of revolution that does not share with Derrida the need to return to Marx and takes deconstruction as an ethical end-in-itself: Given the preference for difference, discursive totalities like all other constructions of sameness or identity are suspect for the poststructuralist. The unity and coherence that these totalizations offer are seen as forced and hence both oppressive and illusory. They are discursively produced or forged with the aid of metaphorical and analogical tricks that establish equalities and identities between things that are unequal and different. For example, are the identities between the workers of the world established by the Marxian notion of commodified labor real or illusory? Are there not real differences like race and gender that such a universal category suppresses? Thus discursive totalities can only be false totalities because they generate identities and equalities through the unacknowledged suppression of real differences. For the poststructuralist, all such universalistic or totalized constructions are discursively authoritarian; hence they should be deconstructed, and the suppressed differences given their play at the price of the totalized formation.6

It is not a simple identification between totalizing discourses and totalitarianism that inspires the poststructuralist critique of socialist revolution. However, the undoing of the notion of a creative subject of history and the suspicion of grand narratives of a different world undermine the project of

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radical transformation in that it becomes suspicious of notions of the new as inseparable from a brave new world. Another aspect of the fear of revolution is embedded in what Jacques Lacan called specular doubling, a sort of suspicion echoed in the work of Julia Kristeva.7 Specular doubling involves a misidentification that dislocates the relationship between self and other because it seeks to be that other. Thus, for example, if a child seeks total identity with his or her mother, then this drive to be “the other” requires the obliteration of all differences that are not consistent with the idealized image of that mother. The wound, here, is that the self actually seeks to be this idealized other that does not actually exist as idealized. These misidentifications derive from the primary narcissism of the subject. The ego becomes divided and, by so doing, it becomes a specular double both in the idealized self and as the shadowy remainder making up the ego. Since the other is not truly present, we are left with an intrasubjective impasse. For someone like Lacan, revolutionary action often carries within it this kind of specular doubling in which the revolutionary hero becomes the ideal that all comrades must themselves become. Just as they must turn themselves into this ideal other, all who disagree with that other are branded counterrevolutionaries. Disagreement is not allowed in this process of specular doubling, and those who would engage with active political disagreement must be pushed under or killed for they are denying that the specular relationship is real. In a certain sense, specular doubling leads to what Ernst Cassirer in his long discussion of Thomas Carlyle calls “hero worship.” According to Cassirer, hero worship is necessary in order to fend off the chaos of history and the looming specter of revolution. In this sense, only the great hero can restore and maintain moral order: Carlyle saw no other escape from the subversive influence of these ideals than by the return to hero worship. He declared hero worship to be the only thing that can save us from decay, ruin, and complete anarchy. Nevertheless there is a fundamental difference between Carlyle’s hero worship and Gobineau’s race worship. The former tries to connect and unify; the latter divides and separates. All of the heroes of Carlyle speak the same language and stand for the same cause—they are all “the inspired speaking and acting texts of that divine book of revelations whereof a chapter is completed from epoch to epoch, and by some named History.”8

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It is interesting to note that for Carlyle, certainly as Cassirer reads him, hero worship is necessary to ward off the fanatical demands of justice. These demands purportedly become fanatical precisely because of specular doubling, if we follow Lacan, which fundamentally misidentifies the struggle for justice with the struggle of internalizing the idealized other. But, as Frantz Fanon tells us, there must be another dimension to such misidentification in our racialized world in that the idealized other is usually a white other. However, when the revolutionary that is idealized is black, we end in a tragic attempt to free ourselves from a deeply internalized trauma. Our ability to project an ego into the world has been completely undone by racist denial of the self-assertive capacity of such an ego. This, of course, does not mean that we should ignore the problem of specular doubling even with the caveat added here by Fanon. Black cadres can seek a way out of their own internalized self-contempt and the trap of seeking freedom from the plague of ego collapse under identification with this idealized other of hero worship that comes to stand in for the ego of the individual. For, as we have seen, the entire poeticist dimension of Afro-Caribbean philosophy uses African resources to tackle not only the problem of specular doubling but also other forms of misidentification and traumatic voiding of the ego without arguing that these serious dilemmas, particularly as they were imposed on the colonized subject, undo the possibility of revolution. Indeed, as Fanon tells us, a new man and woman can arise only in the process of a revolutionary struggle allowing collective forms of self-assertion that, on the practical level of living in the world, undoes the traumatic voiding of the ego brought on by colonized subjectivity. With the poeticist addition we are to realize that even collective action is not enough, and we need to constantly struggle to realign ourselves so as to recover from the soul sickness of colonialism against specular doubling, totalizing authoritarianism, and the general distortion of intersubjective relations. There is no teleological finality in the poeticist struggle, which is by definition an ongoing process that can never come to an end in any simple seizure by a party of the apparatus of the state. These poststructuralist critiques, particularly of the sort associated with Lacan, should be seen instead as dire warnings that constantly remind us of the need for the poeticist struggle to combat the voiding of the ego. Yet, as Henry reminds us, the horrific realities of advanced capitalism and its continuing oppression of the people of the world leaves the majority of people living today without any meaningful alternative except to live out

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lives of dire poverty and deprivation. As Henry argues, the failures of any effort to build socialist nations forces us to question what kind of nationbuilding progressives should engage in: We have clearly failed our first course in modern nation building. We have left largely unanswered the exam paper on the national question. But this is a required course. We cannot move forward without passing it. Unlike Gilroy, we cannot really afford to go postnational. So we are going to have to take it again. This time our aim must be for a larger and more unified political community, which offers its citizens better administration, better development prospects, and a higher quality of political life.9

We cannot simply avoid the question of the nation-state by arguing that globalized capitalism has undone the sovereignty of the state to the point where the seizure of state power would be rendered irrelevant because states are ultimately controlled by organizations such as the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. Instead, we need to rethink both the state and the communities between states, such as the European Union and the African Union, so as to respond to these ever-powerful institutions that are, of course, largely controlled and dominated by the Washington Consensus.10

the work of transformative constitutionalism In a recent article by John and Jean Comaroff, the question of the fetishization of law as it relates to the building of new nation-states in postcolonies has been directly addressed. Their complex argument is that neoliberal capitalism has a massive impact on the possibility of politics, leaving us in a world of competing interests in the scramble to enter the capitalist game. Indeed, as they point out, criminal activity is often inextricably connected to sanctioned business practices of neoliberal activities whose accumulation of capital coincides with brutal oppression and exploitation. Such scrambling for the resources that remain in Africa has often created alliances between capitalists and criminalists: These neo-colonial quests, which have reaped huge returns at the intersection of outsourced and outlaw economies, blur the line between

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profit and plunder. While not strictly part of the “parallel” global economy, they interfere with indigenous means of producing wealth, recruiting local functionaries, brokers, even warlords, to facilitate their enterprises, often by extremely questionable means. As we write, investigators in the United States and Nigeria are looking into allegations that a number of international companies, including a Halliburton subsidiary—paid hefty bribes to secure the contract to build a $4 billion liquefied-natural-gas plant on the oil-rich West African coast. All of this exacerbates the unrest associated with many parts of the postcolonial world and renders murky the geographies of crime and violence that configure popular perceptions of that world. Lawlessness often turns out to be a complex north-south collaboration.11

Thus, law becomes fetishized for several reasons. First, there is no crime without rules to break, and even criminals need order so as to set up a realm of operation. Again, to quote the Comaroffs: Law and lawlessness, we repeat, are conditions of each other’s possibility. As a motorcycle-taximan in Cameroon told Janet Roitman, “So that the system can continue to function properly, it’s important that there are people in violation.” Conversely, criminal profits require that there are rules to be broken: without some modicum of border control, there can be no smuggling, just as the legalization of drugs would inevitably reduce their market value. Also, twenty-first century kleptocrats commit grand larceny as much by deploying legalities—by enacting legislation in order to authorize acts of expropriation—as by evading them. Money, as we have said, is also to be made in the aporias of regulation, perhaps the best examples being the “flex organizations” of the former Soviet bloc, which mobilize shadowy networks that are neither illicit nor licensed and exploit gaps in the peal code to redirect public resources into private hands; or a range of questionable new cyberoperations that accumulate wealth in the lee of the law, compelling the United Nations to take a lead in subjecting them to international convention.12

But, as we have seen, law also becomes fetishized because it is the only way in which interests can be expressed and conflicts can be resolved. What might have been translated into political struggles, then, turns into claims of

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tort as everyone seeks to vindicate their own interest in the larger neoliberal capitalist world: Since the dismantling of the wall that marked the end of the Cold War—and, with it perhaps, the ideological monopoly over the political exercised by the modernist nation-state—law has been further fetishized, even as, in most postcolonies, higher and higher walls are built to protect the propertied from the lawlessness, even as the language of legality insinuates itself deeper and deeper into the realm of the illicit. “The Law,” uppercase again but not now as a Nigerian criminal alias, has become the medium in which politics are played out, in which conflicts are dealt with across otherwise incommensurable axes of difference, in which the workings of the “free” market are assured, in which social order is ostensibly erected and the substance of citizenship made manifest. . . . “Lawfulness,” argues Roger Berkowitz, “has replaced justice as the measure of ethical action” in the world. Indeed, as the measure of a great deal of action beyond the ethical as well.13

Even the proliferation of constitutions can be traced back to this fetishization of law. In part, the Comaroffs point to an enchanted faith in constitutionalism. Faith is enchanted because in a certain sense such constitutions promise a new beginning: As Bruce Ackerman puts it, “faith in written constitutions is sweeping the world,” largely because, in many places, their promulgation marks a “new beginning,” a radical break, at once symbolic and substantive with the past. And with its embarrassments, its nightmares, its torments. What is more, the “constitutional patriotism” that often accompanies such new beginnings, Paul Blokker notes in a discussion of Eastern Europe, envisages a democratic “political culture” erected on “popular sovereignty, individual rights, and association in civil society.” Civil society little troubled in its imaginings, we might add, by the criminal violence within its walls.14

Although we believe that the critique being made by the Comaroffs about the enchantment of constitutionalism is powerful and important, we want to underscore that constitutionalism is also about the promise of a new be-

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ginning that is itself essential. The promise of a new beginning implies a telos toward a new world of human relations away from the brutality of the past. For us, therefore, enchantment does not quite grasp the seriousness of the promise of transformation implicit in the constitutional projects of the postcolonies not only in Africa but also in South America. So, although we agree that there are dangers in the fetishization of the law, a substantive revolution, which itself moves through law, does give law necessary standing for the possible symbolization and embodiment of revolutionary change. Further, these kinds of constitutional projects, only when they are explicitly ethical projects, provide a purpose to law that seeks to regulate all of the former laws in accordance with the moral and ethical demands of the new dispensation. That is to say, we need to embrace both analytic understandings. The critique proffered by the Comaroffs rightly points us toward the ways in which imperialist neoliberal politics may indeed hijack the authority and sovereignty of the people enshrined in the powers of the state. At the same time, we must hold on the practical possibility of transformative constitutionalism as a project capable of ushering forth, in some measure, the work of justice integrally tied to the activities of the state and work being done on the ground in thriving social movements. Perhaps, to take the necessary critique further, we should note that faith is enchanted because unless there is a meaningful struggle to create a truly different state in the sense meant by Biko and Fanon, then these constitutions remain abstract in the bad sense meant by Hegel. Abstraction in Hegel is “bad” because the constitution becomes an empty promise of a just world as it runs up against the brutal realities of neoliberal capitalist systems that make a mockery of justice for so many people struggling for the mere possibility of survival. The abstract emptiness of such constitutions is filled with content that substitutes and doubles as legitimacy for neoliberal capitalism. As the Comaroffs have often pointed out, actual postcolonies are made up of partial sovereignties or what they have called “polycultural claims” on the larger state that undermine a certain ideal of the state as being the ultimate site of self-sufficiency and complete mastery of its people. This, of course, could be thought of as all to the good in that it undermines the dangerous aspect of the myth of the state that Cassirer believes characterizes most totalitarian systems. For Cassirer, the myth of the state is inseparable from an artificial use of magic words and enforced social rights that constantly

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seek to reinscribe the myth that the state is everything and the individual is nothing: To illustrate this point I content myself with one striking example chosen at random. I understand from the Glossary that in recent German usage there was a sharp difference between the two terms Siegfriede and Siegerfriede. Even for a German ear it will not be easy to grasp this difference. The two words sound exactly alike, and seem to denote the same thing. Sieg means victory, Friede means peace; how can the combination of the two words produce entirely different meanings? Nevertheless we are told that, in modern German usage, there is all the difference in the world between the two terms. For a Siegfriede is a peace through German victory; whereas a Siegerfriede means the very opposite; it is used to denote a peace which would be dictated by the allied conquerors. It is the same with other terms. The men who coined these terms were masters of their art of political propaganda. They attained their end, the stirring up of violent political passions, by the simplest means. A word or even the change of a syllable in a word, was often good enough to serve this purpose. If we hear these new words we feel in them the whole gamut of human emotions—of hatred, anger, fury, haughtiness, contempt, arrogance, and disdain.15

For us, this undoing of the myth of the state as the site of mastery through claims of polyculturalism may actually serve, ironically, a project of a different kind of nation building that would neither deny the nation state as an imagined entity nor evacuate it as an important site of contest. The Comaroffs have made a compelling argument for how neoliberal capitalism entangles us in the fetishization of law, obscuring the work of justice and undermining the feasibility of political struggle. Yet we want to defend the Constitution of South Africa as rooted in a transformative promise of justice that is integral to its substantive revolution. A substantive versus procedural (or full) revolution is a distinction made by Hans Kelsen. In the latter revolution, all forms of the previously existing legal institutions are demolished from the order that is overthrown. In the former, the entire legal system of the previous era is not entirely obliterated but is completely transformed such that the basis of the new legal system is the primary ethical and moral force of the Grundnorm undergirding the new society. Justice Laurie

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Ackermann has powerfully argued that section 10 of the Bill of Rights of the Constitution actually points to a moral ideal grounding all the rest of the legal rights of the new South Africa in that “everyone has inherent dignity and the right to have their dignity respected and protected.”16 For Ackermann, what is crucial is that everyone has inherent dignity as both a moral ideal and an ethical activity. Ackermann has explicitly defended dignity through the work of Immanuel Kant, who roots our dignity as an ideal attribution of our humanity since we can all lay down a law for ourselves.17 The only law compatible with our freedom is the categorical imperative as it seeks to create a realm of ends. Thus, for Ackermann, dignity is the Grundnorm of the entire constitution.18 Indeed, interpreted in this way, if dignity were to be denied to any group of people for any reason, then the entire constitution would collapse in its promise of justice. Therefore it would be rendered the kind of fetishized abstract document that would lose its claim of being rooted in the promise of a substantive revolution.

the possibility of ethical life This is not to say that the Constitution of South Africa is without problems or emblematic of an achieved utopian state. Rather, there are two points we want to emphasize here. First, we must understand the constitution as a substantive revolution inseparable from the work of justice. We use the word “work” because in Kant the struggle for justice and freedom is always, precisely, a “struggle”: In the exposition of his own theory Kant always warns us against a fundamental misunderstanding. It is not gegeben but aufgegeben; it is not a gift with which human nature is endowed; it is rather a task, and the most arduous task that man can set himself. It is no datum, but a demand; an ethical imperative. To fulfil this demand becomes especially hard in times of a severe and dangerous social crisis when the breakdown of the whole public life seems to be imminent. At these times the individual begins to feel a deep mistrust in his own powers. Freedom is not a natural inheritance of man. In order to possess it we have to create it. If man were simply to follow his natural instincts he would not strive for freedom; he would rather choose dependence. Obviously it is much easier to depend upon others than to think, to judge, and to decide for

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himself. That accounts for the fact that both in individual and in political life freedom is so often regarded much more a burden than a privilege. Under extremely difficult conditions man tries to cast off this burden. The new political parties promise, at least, an escape from the dilemma. They suppress and destroy the very sense of freedom; but, at the same time, they relieve men from all personal responsibility.19

Second, we have to read the constitution through the promise of justice. Crucial to such an understanding of the constitution is that it is so often described as a bridge away from the violent past to a transformative future of justice. This work of justice can be understood as one of the many necessary ways of disrupting authoritarian identifications. But, in a certain sense the constitution as a substantive revolution also disrupts the previously formed identities of the old order that were immersed in a complex legal structure in which each person had their place in the larger racialized hierarchy. There was of course a powerful racialized myth of the apartheid state as the only way to protect the white race from black swamping (oorstroming). The myth of the apartheid state becomes immersed in the myth of the totalitarian race, to use the telling phrase from Cassirer; and it is precisely this totalitarian racialized world of the past that the transformative character of the present constitution must turn away from in its aspiration to the ideal of justice embodied in the struggle toward the future ideal. Cassirer uses the work of Gobineau to show how the myth of the totalitarian state is inseparable from the corresponding myth of the superior totalitarian race. As Cassirer considers the matter: The superior races can only know that they are and what they are worth by comparing themselves with those other races that are crouching servilely at their feet. Their self-confidence cannot be complete without this element of contempt and disgust; the one implies and demands the other. From this point of view Kant’s famous formula of the categorical imperative becomes a contradiction in terms. To act only on that maxim, whereby we can at the same time will that it should become a universal law, is impossible. How can there be a universal law since there is no universal maxim? An ethical maxim that claims to be valid for all cases is valid for no case; a rule that applies to anyone applies to no one. It is a mere abstract formula that has no equivalent in the human and historical world.20

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Thus, it should not be surprising that the politics of a different state, advocated by both Fanon and Biko, was always a state that would be freed from the legal identities of the colonial world. This different state would be both a different state of being human and a different state as a political institution, one born out of the substantive revolution. The promise of difference is that it would be other to a legal system rooted in the mythology that apartheid was necessary for the safety of whites and that anything that promoted that safety was right. Yet, as we have seen, both Biko and Fanon promise instead a new humanity that would come with this revolution. Some would say that constitutions are inherently conservative documents, trying to preserve some founding moment of the past and its ideality for a time long since gone from the world. Formalists, then, try to interpret the master rule of recognition behind such constituting power and its secondary rules of application in cases of adjudication.21 Certainly in the case of the United States this is very much the way in which legality has unfolded in declarative gestures back to the intentions of the so-called founding fathers. However, the South African Constitution is explicitly a transformative constitution, meaning that it coheres away from the brutal past of apartheid and founds itself in the ongoing attempt to fulfill the promises of dignity, equality, freedom, and justice as such ideals are rendered intelligible to us in the carefully crafted judgments developed by the Constitutional Court. Indeed, less than fifteen years after apartheid, the judges of the Constitutional Court of South Africa have demonstrated in their judgments a level of ethical accord and jurisprudential sophistication far beyond what is commonly found in the legal realm. Dignity, with its integral connection to freedom, may represent the richest Western conception of an ethical humanity that still heeds the call and the commitment to justice—both as an ideal and practice—in that law as the moral realm of external freedom does not seek legitimacy in some outside principle whether it be the rule of democratic legislatures, the social fact of presupposed agreements on secondary norms, or even some ideal community of dialogue. Freedom and dignity so understood are the grounding norms of the new South Africa because such an ethical conception of humanity is the only true hope to stave off the moral draining of law. In contradistinction, we are too often given cynical realist interpretations of law as either arbitrary balancing of interests, depending on who has more power, or some kind of rationalized scheme of utility maximizing actors

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who only agree to put down their guns because that is a necessary step toward greater maximized self-interest. What role does a constitution have in our thinking about symbolic forms and transformative revolution? If the constitution is an ongoing enactment of transformative revolution, enabled and enhanced both in the judgments of the courts and in movements on the ground, is it, then, merely a symbol of promise, a symbol of possibility, or a symbol of justice in teleological suspension? The Constitution of South Africa is all of these symbols, but not in any simple sense. To advance the matter further, one should ask: What of the South African Constitution and its entanglement with the liberal paradox?22 On the one hand, we have one of the most ethically demanding and jurisprudentially sophisticated constitutions rooted in the best of liberal values that sets the height of humanitas on par with the aspirational reach of dignity, equality, freedom, and justice as ideals. On the other hand, such a constitution must grapple with questions of plurality and answer affirmatively in what ways indigenous values and ideals can come to share in the juridical force building the new South Africa. On both levels, the Constitution of South Africa has operated, through the judgments of its Court, as a new choreography of legal thought and practice that has animated both dignity and uBuntu in its consideration of some of the most complex social, political, and economic issues. The Constitution of South Africa is, then, a symbolic form of revolutionary promise, not only as aspirational pursuit but in actual practice. However, to fully appreciate this argument it is necessary to engage more substantively with the meaning of uBuntu. In uBuntu human beings are intertwined in a world of ethical relations and obligations with all other people from the time they are born. The social bond, then, is not imagined as one of separate, atomistic, individuated livelihoods; instead, the ethical, political, and moral inscription on each of us by all other people is fundamentally drawn from the fact that we are born into a language, a kinship group, a tribe, and a nation. But, this inscription is not simply reduced to a social fact. We come into the world obligated to others and, in turn, these others are obligated to us. It is a profound misunderstanding of uBuntu to confuse it with simple-minded communitarianism. It is only through the engagement and support of others that we are able to realize a true individuality and rise above our biological distinctiveness into a fully developed person whose uniqueness is inseparable from the journey

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to moral and ethical development. Ifeanyi Menkiti captures this in the following passage: In the stated journey of the individual toward personhood, let it therefore be noted that the community plays a vital role both as a catalyst and as prescriber of norms. The idea is that in order to transform what was initially biologically given into full personhood, the community, of necessity, has to step in, since the individual, himself or herself, cannot carry through the transformation unassisted. But then what are the implications of this idea of a biologically given organism having first to go through a process of social and ritual transformation, so as to attain the full complement of excellences seen as definitive of the person? One conclusion appears inevitable, and it is to the effect that personhood is the sort of thing which has to be achieved, the sort of thing at which the individuals could fail. I suppose that another way of putting the matter is to say that the approach to persons in traditional thought is generally speaking a maximal, or more exacting, approach, insofar as it reaches for something beyond such minimalist requirements as the presence of consciousness, memory, will, soul, rationality or mental function. The project of being or becoming persons, it is believed, is a truly serious project that stretches beyond the raw capacities of the isolated individual, and it is a project which is laden with the possibility of triumph, but also of failure.23

If the community is committed to individuation and the achievement of a unique destiny for each person, the person in turn is obligated to enhance the community that supports him or her; such support is not simply an abstract duty that is correlated with a right, but it is a form of participation that allows the community to strive for fidelity to what D. A. Masalo has called “participatory difference.” For Masalo, this participatory difference recognizes that each person is different, but also that everyone is called on to make a difference by contributing to the creation and sustenance of a humane and ethical community. The great African philosopher Kwasi Wiredu has extended this argument by developing it to include a principle that he has called “sympathetic impartiality.” That is to say, we seek to imagine ourselves through the lives of all others as beings like ourselves within the register of humanity.24 For Wiredu, the principle of sympathetic impar-

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tiality demands that we develop in association with others who are a part of our cognitive and moral training throughout the development of our personhood. The problem, then, of how we can develop such a connection through otherness is explained by the fact that we are ethically intertwined with others and therefore they are in a profound sense part of ourselves. This point is elucidated by Justice Langa in MEC for Education: KwaZulu-Natal and Others v. Pillay and Others: The notion that “we are not islands unto ourselves” is central to the understanding of the individual in African thought. It is often expressed in the phrase umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu which emphasises “communality and the inter-dependence of the members of a community” and that every individual is an extension of others. According to Gyekye, “an individual human person cannot develop and achieve the fullness of his/her potential without the concrete act of relating to other individual persons.” This thinking emphasises the importance of community to individual identity and hence to human dignity. Dignity and identity are inseparably linked as one’s sense of self-worth is defined by one’s identity. Cultural identity is one of the most important parts of a person’s identity precisely because it flows from belonging to a community and not from personal choice or achievement. And belonging involves more than simple association; it includes participation and expression of the community’s practices and traditions.25

This point is further encapsulated by Masalo when he states that “human nature is community based. Their cognitive and moral capacities are developed by and in the context of their sociality.”26 We can understand, then, that our ethical relationship to others is inseparable from how we are both imbedded and supported by a community that is not outside each one of us, but is inscribed alongside each of us. The inscription of the other also calls the individual out of himself or herself back toward the ancestors, forward toward the community, and thereby brings about relations of mutual support for the safeguarding and enhancement of the potential inherent within every person. The famous Zulu phrase umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu literally means “a person is a person by or through other people.” We have seen however, that this does not imply any simple notion of communitarianism or of social cohesion. Each one of us is called to be-

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come our own person and also at the same time to realize and support an ethical quality of humanness in all others. Although other people support me, and an ethical action is by definition ethical because it is an action in relation to other people and their being-in-the-world, it is still up to me to realize my own personal destiny and to become a person. Thus, it is humanity, and not just my community, that is at stake in my ethical action. If I relate to another person in a manner that lives up to uBuntu, then there is at least an ethical relationship between the two of us. And, of course, if we relate to others around us, through both participatory difference and sympathetic impartiality, then we will have helped to create an ethical, and by obvious extension human, community. The concept of a person in African jurisprudence is an ethical concept. A self-regarding or self-interested human being is one that not only has fallen away from his or her own sociality with others but also has deeply lost touch with their being as an ethical human. One crucial aspect of doing justice by other people is that we, who are participating in an ethical community, help that individual maintain, defend, and at times restore their ethical relations individually and collectively. Thus, cohesion and harmony are not the ultimate good because they must always be submitted to the work of justice. Again, to quote Murungi: Certainly, in Africa, but not only in Africa, personhood is social. African jurisprudence is a part of African social anthropology. Social cohesion is an essential element of African jurisprudence. Areas of jurisprudence such as criminology and penology, law of inheritance, and land law, for example, focus on the preservation of and promotion of social cohesion. This cohesion is a cohesion that is tempered by justice. Justice defines a human being as a human being. Thus, injustice in Africa is not simply a matter of an individual breaking a law that is imposed on him or her by other individuals, or by a collection of individuals who act in the name of the state. It is a violation of the individual’s duty to him or herself, a violation of the duty of the individual to be him or herself—the duty to be a social being.27

Critics of uBuntu have argued that uBuntu is a form of social cohesion that denies what we have just called participatory difference and, worse yet, is inherently hierarchical and patriarchal.

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These critics make the mistake of reducing uBuntu to an ethical ontology of a purportedly shared world. What is missed in this criticism is precisely the activism inherent in participatory difference. This activism is inherent in the ethical demand to bring about a humane world. uBuntu clearly has an aspirational and ideal edge; but there is no end to the struggle to bring about a humane world and the work to become a person in that humane world capable of making a meaningful impact toward justice. Yet, uBuntu must not be misunderstood as merely a regulative ideal in the sense meant by Kant. In Kant, the great ideas of reason, including the Kingdom of Ends, can only be represented as aesthetic ideas. A more contemporary example can be found in the aesthetic idea of the veil of ignorance by John Rawls. The veil of ignorance can be interpreted as a configuration of the noumenal self and, indeed, the noumenal self as a legislator in the Kingdom of Ends.28 But such great ideas, though they can be represented as aesthetic ideas, always remain other to what is possible precisely because in Kant there are limits to the accomplishments of theoretical reason. It is through practical reason that we try to configure the demands of a moral world that is always other to what is possible. It must remain so because of the split in ourselves between the noumenal and phenomenal aspects of being finite creatures; yet, we can indeed guide ourselves by those aspirations drawn out in the best aesthetic representations of a moral world. In African jurisprudence, as we have tried to suggest here in our brief summary, there is no split between the phenomenal and the noumenal. Therefore, uBuntu is not, in the strict Kantian sense, a regulative ideal. uBuntu is materialized in ethical actions and, more specifically, in the enactment of justice between individuals in conflict alongside a community in need of ethical repair. This enactment, then, materializes a more humane world. Mabogo More brings together the different aspects of uBuntu in his own profound and yet succinct definition: In one sense, ubuntu is a philosophical concept forming the basis of relationships, especially ethical behaviour. In another sense, it is a traditional politico-ideological concept referring to socio-political action. As a moral or ethical concept, it is a point of view according to which moral practices are founded exclusively on consideration and enhancement of human well-being; a preoccupation with human welfare. It enjoins that what is morally good is what brings dignity, respect, contentment, and prosperity

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to others, self and the community at large. uBuntu is a demand for respect for persons no matter what their circumstances may be. In its politico-ideological sense it is a principle for all forms of social or political relationships. It enjoins and makes for peace and social harmony by encouraging the practice of sharing in all forms of communal existence.29

As a result, doing justice under uBuntu does not make a rigid distinction between civil and social-economic rights. Again, to remind the reader of John Murungi’s powerful statement: “What is essential to law is what secures human beings in their being.”30 In an essay by George Carew, the author makes a strong argument that in African traditions there can be found a strong commitment to what he defines as deliberative democracy and direct face-to-face participation.31 Deliberative democracy is essential in new African states, which are premised on the need for political, economic, and social transformation. Carew states: Deliberative politics, as I have argued, emphasizes dialogue and mutual consideration and respect as the base on which citizens can come to an understanding about the public good. Thus the practice of this form of politics would presuppose that transformation in a way has occurred in such attitudes as are envisaged by, say, liberal egoists, who hold that politics is only about self-interest and the market. But how exactly might such a transformation occur? What crucial move or moves could lead to the moralization of social relations?32

As we have discussed earlier, uBuntu does indeed moralize social relations. It is through dialogic participation that human beings both develop their own personhood as well as create shared representations of reality that allow a common world and, in modern language, the development of the notion of the public good. Thus, for Justice Mokgoro, part of the building of democracy, certainly in the deliberative sense alongside the rainbow heritage of South Africa, demands that no voice is silenced or group excluded in the effort to create a new South Africa and its shared public world. One accusation against uBuntu is that it is not specific enough as an ethical or moral ideal to be used as the groundwork of a modern Constitution that gives form to the meaning of respect for dignity. But uBuntu as an

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ethical, political, and ideological concept is always integral to social bonds. uBuntu, in a profound sense, encapsulates the moral relations demanded by human beings who must live together in sociality. As we have seen, it implies both a fundamental moralization of social relations, and this moralization of social relations is forever changing. Thus, the actual demands of uBuntu must remain dynamic since uBuntu is inseparable from both our present relations to people and also the relations that emerge between all people as societies shift, evolve, and transform through the zeniths and nadirs of events in human history. The aspirational aspect of uBuntu is that we must strive together to achieve a public good and a shared world so that we can harmonize our individual interests. It is the embeddedness of uBuntu in our social reality that makes it a transformative concept at its core. But this transformation can never be far away from the moralization of social relationships. It would have been absurd 500 years ago to put forward the argument that uBuntu demands access to electricity, since electricity did not exist as it does today. Now, however, it is not at all absurd to make such an argument. Indeed, electricity is integral in securing a human life in modern society. Again, we turn to Murungi’s definition: “law secures human beings in their being.” Thus, law in the sense of doing justice does not separate civil, social, and economic rights. All are necessary for the protection of our humanity in the moral sense that is echoed in the judgment by Justice Mokgoro. In any society there is always conflict, and people are inevitably wounding each other in their engagements. So there can never be any end to the dialogue about what justice means in a given context. In South Africa there has been a traumatic disintegration of the relations between people. The particular devastation of colonialism leaves a gaping wound in the social bond. For restoration or redemption to truly occur, we must acknowledge our inevitable exposure to that wound and the need for entering a healing process. At stake in our own engagement with each other in the new South Africa is our own ethical humanity; for the wound is not abstractly present but buried deep within each one of us. Thus, we become human only in our relationships alongside other people. There is, then, a call to participate in the dialogue of what restorative justice might mean. In the cases we will soon discuss in brief measure, the call to restorative justice has demanded reformulations of constitutional and private law. But it is not, of course, simply judges who are called to do justice. Indeed, we are all called toward justice. In Makwanyane (1995), Justice Ackermann and the rest of the Court give

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the value of life, as seen through both dignity and uBuntu, primary importance against the death penalty, suggesting: Our new Constitution, unlike its dictatorial predecessor, is value-based. Among other things, it guarantees the protection of basic human rights, including the right to life and human dignity, two basic values supported by the spirit of ubuntu and protected in Sections 9 and 10 respectively. In terms of Section 35, this Constitution now commits the state to base the worth of human beings on the ideal values espoused by open democratic societies the world over and not on race colour, political, economic and social class. Although it has been argued that the currently high level of crime in the country is indicative of the breakdown of the moral fabric of society, it has not been conclusively shown that the death penalty, which is an affront to these basic values, is the best available practical form of punishment to reconstruct that moral fabric. In the second place, even if the end was desirable, that would not justify the means. The death penalty violates the essential content of the right to life embodied in Section 9, in that it extinguishes life itself. It instrumentalises the offender for the objectives of state policy. That is dehumanising. It is degrading and it violates the rights to respect for and protection of human dignity embodied in Section 10 of the Constitution.33

That is to say, the humanness enshrined and protected in the Constitution of the New South Africa is simultaneously informed by both dignity and uBuntu. Such ideals or values operate both as a limitation and enablement in that they limit the actions of the state as a matter of negative freedom guarding against dehumanization but also, at the same time, they secure a sort of positive freedom that demands the aspirational achievement of what such humanist ideals purport. The latter point becomes evident in Khosa (2004). Generally speaking, this case considered whether or not permanent residents were entitled to the same socioeconomic welfare rights as citizens. Justice Mokgoro argued that one is a person before being a citizen in South Africa, and that the rights issued by the state are integrally tied to the former and not the latter: The respondents averred that citizenship is a requirement for social benefits in “almost all developed countries.” That may be so in respect of

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certain benefits. But unlike ours, those countries do not have constitutions that entitle “everyone” to have access to social security, nor are their immigration and welfare laws necessarily the same as ours.34

The general welfare of personhood finds itself enshrined and defended by considerable dicta whose holding demands that all permanent residents are a part of the country and deserve, therefore, the protection of the rights enshrined for all people. Distinctions, then, are not made creating a hierarchy of personhood based on political categories of citizen or noncitizen, but instead we find that all people, seen through the lenses of dignity and uBuntu, are integral to the humanity being forged in the ongoing evolution of the state. In Dikoko (2006), Justices Sachs and Mokgoro render traditional, positivistic notions of harm in cases of defamation away from questions of mere financial liability and instead take a stand on the need for restorative justice.35 Justice Mokgoro brilliantly connects the issue at hand with the idea of uBuntu, which is not explicitly stated as a constitutional ideal but has been figured, at times, as a way in which the ideal of dignity is given shape in the context of a given conflict: In our constitutional democracy the basic constitutional value of human dignity relates closely to ubuntu or botho, an idea based on deep respect for the humanity of another. Traditional law and culture have long considered one of the principal objectives of the law to be the restoration of harmonious human and social relationships where they have been ruptured by an infraction of community norms. It should be a goal of our law to emphasise, in cases of compensation for defamation, the re-establishment of harmony in the relationship between the parties, rather than to enlarge the hole in the defendant’s pocket, something more likely to increase acrimony, push the parties apart and even cause the defendant financial ruin. The primary purpose of a compensatory measure, after all, is to restore the dignity of a plaintiff who has suffered the damage and not to punish a defendant. A remedy based on the idea of ubuntu or botho could go much further in restoring human dignity than an imposed monetary award in which the size of the victory is measured by the quantum ordered and the parties are further estranged rather than brought together by the legal process. It could indeed give better appre-

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ciation and sensitise a defendant as to the hurtful impact of his or her unlawful actions, similar to the emerging idea of restorative justice in our sentencing laws.36

Here Justice Mokgoro offers a judgment that provides the chance to pursue restorative justice that repairs the relations within the larger community and that gives ethical field of force to our communal being. In the judgment, Justice Sachs works alongside such an argument through a careful reading of dignity as that which cannot be defined by mere price: There is a further and deeper problem with damages awards in defamation cases. They measure something so intrinsic to human dignity as a person’s reputation and honour as if these were market-place commodities. Unlike businesses, honour is not quoted on the Stock Exchange. The true and lasting solace for the person wrongly injured is the vindication by the Court of his or her reputation in the community. The greatest prize is to walk away with head high, knowing that even the traducer has acknowledged the injustice of the slur. There is something conceptually incongruous in attempting to establish a proportionate relationship between vindication of a reputation, on the one hand, and determining a sum of money as consumption, on the other. The damaged reputation is either restored by a higher award, and less restored by a lower one. It is the judicial finding in favour of the integrity of the complainant that vindicates his or her reputation, not the amount of money he or she ends up being able to deposit in the bank.37

In both judgments, we are met with a revolutionary outcome, one that revolves on the legal conception of harm, which has always been integral to the fetishization of law, turned upside-down into a view of the world constituted both by the ideals of dignity and uBuntu. In these brief reviews of select cases among many others worth consideration, are we given mere conservative formalism or transformative jurisprudence? The South African Constitution at the moment of its inception did not explicitly provide for the right to life, the right of personhood before citizenship, or a non-monetary–based conception of reparation in instances of defamation. But it does signal to ideals given power through transformative constitutionalism that are meant to not only inform our understanding of

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the constitution but also promise to change the way we live our lives in our varied social communities. Thus, the Constitution of South Africa is a moral document, one with ideals that give justices an evolving symbolic framework by which to reflectively mediate the problems of a postapartheid society aspiring, always, alongside a set of teleological ideals. As Justice Ackermann has described the teleology inherent within the constitution: But the ultimate fate of the Constitution, a bridge with a very long span, will not be decided by the jurisprudence of its courts alone, however devoted and inspired that may prove to be. A transforming Constitution such as ours will only succeed if everyone, in government as well as in civil society at all levels, embraces and lives out its vales and its demands. It will only succeed if restitutional equality becomes a reality and basic material needs are met, because it borders on the obscene to preach human dignity to the homeless and the starving. This must, however, be achieved in a manner consonant with the human dignity of all. We are, after 10 years, only at the end of the beginning.38

Thus, the centrality of freedom understood as the possibility of harmonization follows because only such a freed humanity can aspire to a shared ethical practice of justice. It is fidelity to such practice that can fuel the teleological, interpretative approach of the South African Constitutional Court to a future that is always away from the violence of the past. What is particularly interesting about the South African constitution, as least as it has been interpreted by Justice Mokgoro, is that this substantive revolution did indeed at least partially restore and recognize the South African principle of transcendence in uBuntu. Thus, there was a substantive revolution, but one that is profoundly rooted in traditional African values, ideals, and a way of life that survived despite the brutality of apartheid. In a series of important judgments Justice Mokgoro has defined uBuntu as the ethical defense of what it means to be human, but one that encompasses almost all of the fundamental bill of rights.39 It is this spirit of uBuntu that guides the substantive revolution that constitutes the new South Africa. Indeed, it is this transcendent principle of humanity that even circumscribes sovereignty. For as Justice Mokgoro reminds us in the Khosa case, in South Africa one is a human being before one is a citizen. Thus, judgments forbidding the death penalty, offering guest workers socioeconomic rights, and

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constituting harm as a matter of active repair and not financial compensation were all argued and advanced through an intersectional use of both dignity and uBuntu.40 The ideals of dignity and uBuntu are not one and the same, but substantively their use by the Constitutional Court demonstrates the ethical translatability of each through the other in the bridging of supposed different worlds into an evolving polyculturalism pointing to a shared humanity being discovered in an actual quest for a new humanity.

conclusion “The modern concept of revolution,” Arendt explains, “is inextricably bound up with the notion that the course of history suddenly begins anew, that an entirely new story, a story never known or told before, is about to unfold, was unknown prior to the two great revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century.”41 However, Arendt also reminds us that there is an interesting complexity impregnated within the very idea of revolution demanding a new beginning. For, as she points out, certainly many of the great revolutionaries such as Thomas Paine believed that something was being restored in an act of revolution such as inalienable rights. But it was Hegel who famously reminded us that the new can become its own myth and that the act of self-assertion in revolution comes to be its own mode of force that ultimately gets separated from the substance of the new revolutionary society. In such a failure, there is nothing other than self-assertion, which can easily fall into the trap of specular doubling. Because no one can live up to the ideal of the perfect revolutionary, the danger emerges whereby one comrade after another must fall from the pedestal of purity and ultimately to the guillotine. Still, we have a principle that is embedded in the substantive legal revolution that took place with the passage of the Constitution. It is a principle that does not bolster the myth of the state as the site of self-sufficiency or mastery. Indeed, the state is there for humanity. Human beings are not the servants of the state. In the example of the South African Constitution we have a disruption of the misidentification both with the revolutionary party and with the state as the embodiment of the party’s revolutionary perfection. The Constitution understood in this way, through uBuntu, both belies one notion of sovereignty that is integrally tied to the myth of the state and at the same time it serves as a resisting point to authoritarian identifications. It is not surprising that leaders who aspire to make themselves as individual

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persons the embodiment of the revolutionary state find in this understanding of the Constitution a profound enemy. We, of course, are only too aware of how fragile this Constitution is because, as Cassirer reminds us, the work of justice is indeed difficult. Such work demands the transformation not only of each one of us but also of the social and economic order of existence. Arendt famously argued that revolution was about freedom and not about the social question. But in the best of the Marxist tradition dignity is integrally tied to freedom in that each one of us should be able to realize our dreams in the actualization of our lives. As Ernst Bloch once said, worthy of the last word to the enterprise of this book: Happiness and dignity, the concerns emphasized on the one hand by social utopias and on the other by doctrines of natural law, for so long marched separately and sadly never stuck together with the priority of human care and support, and the primat of human dignity: It is more than ever necessary that along with the concrete heritage of social utopian thought, an equally concrete program of the citoyen be recognized. It is more necessary than ever before that even the differences in the international fields finally be recognized as functionally related and practically surmounted. This thanks to the certainty that there can be no human dignity without the end of misery and need, but also no human happiness without the end of old and new forms of servitude.42

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Notes

introduction 1. Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1944), 22. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid., 24 (emphasis in original). 4. Ibid., 8. 5. See generally, Drucilla Cornell, Transformations (New York: Routledge, 1993), chap. 2; Cassirer, Essay on Man, pt. 2, chaps. 7–11. 6. Cassirer, An Essay on Man, 25. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid., 26. 9. See generally, Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin, 1992), sec. 1, chap. 4. 10. Cassirer, An Essay on Man, 221. 11. Ibid., 68. 12. Ibid., 51. 13. Ibid., 50 and 51, respectively. 14. Ibid., 57. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid., 59. 17. Goethe, “In der Idee lebhen heisst das Unmögliche so behandeln als wenn es möglich ware,” in Sprüche in Prosa, “Weke” (Weimer ed.), vol. 42, pt. 2, 142; cited in Cassirer, An Essay on Man, 61.

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Notes

18. Cassirer, An Essay on Man, 61. 19. Ibid., 62.

1. the world of symbolic forms: ernst cassirer and the legacy of immanuel kant 1. Throughout this book, we refer to the works of Immanuel Kant in the following fashion. The “first Critique” is equivalent to Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason. ed. and trans. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1999). The “third Critique” is equivalent to Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. and trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Mathews (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 2. See generally, David Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature, ed. David Norton and Mary Norton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), vol. 2, part 2, sec. 6; and vol. 3, part 3, sec. 2. 3. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 193–194 [A51/B75]. 4. See, for instance, the works of the Marburg School, such as Herbert Cohen, Kants Theorie der Erfahrung (Berlin: Dimmler, 1885). 5. See generally, Thomas Nagel, The Last Word (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); here, we are given a sophisticated form of realism that says we can have knowledge of an objective world without reliance on the transcendental imagination. But there are many working scientists, as well as philosophers of science, who argue that we need more than what realist philosophy can give us and fall back either to Kant or Leibniz. For example, Lee Smolin in his pathbreaking works The Life of the Cosmos (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) and The Trouble with Physics (New York: Mariner Books, 2007) argues that some metaphysical principles (if by that we only mean principles that connect our reality to the law-like appearance of nature) must be supplied if we are to answer the basic question of why mathematics applies to nature. 6. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, ed. and trans. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 7. Ernst Cassirer, The Problem of Knowledge: Philosophy, Science, and History since Hegel, trans. William Woglom and Charles Hendel (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1950), 121–122. 8. See generally Paul Guyer, Kant’s System of Nature and Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), chap. 8.

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9. See generally, Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. and ed. Mary Gregor (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 10. See generally Guyer, Kant’s System of Nature and Freedom, chap. 8. 11. For works on iterability, see generally, Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1999), chap. 4; Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 307–330. 12. Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, 4:99. 13. Cassirer, Language and Myth (New York: Dover, 1953), 31. 14. Cassirer, An Essay on Man (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1944), 25. 15. Ibid., 33.

2. the word magic of being: on the mythical origins of thinking 1. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 2, Mythical Thought, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1955), xvi. 2. Cassirer, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, 2: xvii. 3. Ibid., 3:48. 4. Ernst Cassirer, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 3, The Phenomenology of Knowledge, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1957) 60–61. 5. Cassirer, Language and Myth (New York: Dover, 1953), 21, citing Hermann Usener in Götternamen: Versuch einer Lehre von der religiösen Begriffsbildung (Bonn: n.p., 1896). 6. Cassirer, Language and Myth, 23–24. 7. Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1944), 25. 8. Cassirer, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, 2:29. 9. Cassirer, Language and Myth, 45. 10. Ibid., 9–10. 11. Ibid., 4. 12. Ibid., 4. 13. Ibid., 5. 14. Ibid., 8–9. 15. Ibid., 99. 16. Cassirer, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, 2:157. 17. Ibid.

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18. Cassirer, Language and Myth, 6–7. 19. Ibid., 7. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid., 12. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid., 8. 24. Ibid., 26. 25. Ibid., 29. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid., 30. 28. Ibid., 31. 29. Ibid., 17–18. 30. Ibid., 18. 31. Ibid., 32. 32. Ibid., 33. 33. Cassirer, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, 2:157–158. 34. Cassirer, Language and Myth, 19. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid., 35. 37. Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1944), 97. 38. Cassirer, Language and Myth, 20–21. 39. Ibid., 36. 40. Ibid., 37. 41. Cassirer, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, 2:238. 42. Cassirer, Language and Myth, 63. 43. Cassirer, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, 2:210–211. 44. Cassirer, Language and Myth, 63. 45. Ibid., 65–66. 46. Ibid., 66–68. 47. Ibid., 73. 48. Cassirer, An Essay on Man, 103. 49. Ibid., 108. 50. Cassirer, Language and Myth, 81. 51. Ibid., 87–88. 52. Ibid., 92. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid., 88. 55. Ibid., 38. 56. Ibid.

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57. Ibid., 44–45. 58. Ibid., 48. 59. Ibid., 58. 60. Ibid., 50. 61. Ibid., 39. 62. Ibid., 61. 63. Ibid., 62. 64. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Noonday Press, 1972), 135 (emphasis in original). 65. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley (New York: Random House, 1974), xxxv. 66. Ibid., 795. 67. For a more intensive treatment of feminine myth and writing, see Drucilla Cornell, Beyond Accommodation: Ethical Feminism, Deconstruction, and the Law (New York: Routledge, 1991), chap. 4. 68. Njabulo Ndebele, The Cry of Winnie Mandela (Claremont, South Africa: David Philip Publishers, 2003), 3. 69. Ibid., 28. 70. Ibid., 35. 71. Ibid., 85. 72. Ibid., 92. 73. Ibid., 96–97. 74. Ibid., 117. 75. Ibid., 120. 76. Ernst Cassirer, The Myth of the State (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1974), 297. 77. Ibid., 298.

3. the always unfinished project of modernity: the fragile life of symbols 1. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1969), 32–37. 2. Ibid., 35. 3. Drucilla Cornell, Beyond Accommodation: Ethical Feminism, Deconstruction, and the Law (New York: Routledge, 1991), chap. 6. 4. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 3. 5. Ibid., 4. 6. Ibid., 27. 7. Ibid., 93.

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8. Ibid., 86. 9. Ibid., 39. 10. Ibid., 57. 11. Ibid., 57–62. 12. Ibid., 58. 13. Ibid., 121. 14. Ibid., 131. 15. Ibid., 147. 16. Max Horkheimer, “Materialism and Morality,” in Max Horkheimer: Between Philosophy and Social Science: Selected Writings, trans. Frederick Hunter, Mathew Kramer, and John Torpey (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995), 35. 17. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press, 1991), 6–7. 18. Ibid., 1. 19. Ibid., 5. 20. Ibid., 9. 21. Ibid., 65. 22. Ibid., 66. 23. Ibid., 12. 24. Ibid., 21. 25. Ibid., 23. 26. Ibid., 25. 27. Ibid., 57. 28. Ibid., 60. 29. Ibid., 62. 30. Paul Valéry, “Poésie et Pensée Abstraite,” in Oeuvres, edition de la Pléiade (Paris, Gallimard, 1957), vol. 1, 1333; cited in Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 67–68. 31. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 207. 32. Ibid., 212. 33. Ibid., 257. 34. Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, ed. David Krell (New York: Harper Collins, 1993), 245. 35. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Noonday Press, 1972), 135 (emphasis in original). 36. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 23 (20:221). 37. See, e.g., the works of Clifford Geertz, who was himself a great follower of the work of Ernst Cassirer in the development of his ethnographic ideas,

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Local Knowledge (New York: Basic Books, 1985) and The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1977); or, the careful work of John and Jean Comaroff in Of Revelation and Revolution, vol. 1, Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991) and Of Revelation and Revolution, vol. 2, The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). 38. Jürgen Habermas, On the Pragmatics of Communication, ed. Maeve Cooke (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998), 335. 39. Ibid., 21. 40. Ibid., 316–317. 41. Ibid., 23. 42. See, generally, Lee Smolin, The Life of the Cosmos (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) and The Trouble with Physics (New York: Mariner Books, 2007). 43. See, generally, G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 294–363. 44. Habermas, On the Pragmatics of Communication, 41. 45. For a review of the major argumentative threads regarding this point, see generally, David Rasmussen, Reading Habermas (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1990), 38–55. 46. Ibid., 54. 47. Jürgen Habermas, The Liberating Power of Symbols: Philosophical Essays, trans. Peter Dews (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), 14. 48. Ibid., 20–21. 49. Ernst Cassirer, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 3, The Phenomenology of Knowledge, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1957), 40–41. 50. Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1944), 62. 51. See, generally, Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).

4. transformative revolution: repairing the fractured ethical world 1. Steve Biko, “On Death,” in I Write What I Like, ed. Aerlred Stubbs (Chicago: University of Chicago University, 2002), 152. 2. Lewis Gordon has developed the idea of antiblack racism throughout his prodigious work, which is invoked throughout this chapter in the spirit of

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Existence in Black: An Anthology of Black Existential Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 1997), 70: Antiblack racism calls for causal explanations and typifications that come to their conclusions, figuratively and literally, in the lynch mob trailing behind bloodhounds in pursuit of a black body. The pursuit is Manichean in purpose; it is an effort to weed out the pollution of blackness from the purity of whiteness. It is also, in its essence, theodicean. For in such a world, blackness functions as an aberration that has to be explained without blaming the system in which it emerges. The system of antiblack racism is lived as a self-justified god in its institutions and its inhabitant’s flesh. Emersed in itself, it can only see its faults as “contaminations” of the system. As a consequence, the bloodhound pursuit of a black body takes on a logic premised upon an identity relation between fact and value. The system is fact; it is “what is.” It is absolute. Whatever “is” is what ought to be and hence ought to have been. The inferior Other becomes a fundamental project for the establishment of the Superior Self, whose superiority is a function of what is.

3. Biko, “The Quest for a True Humanity,” 90. 4. Steve Biko, “Black Souls in White Skins,” in I Write What I Like, ed. Aerlred Stubbs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 21. 5. Biko, “Black Souls in White Skins,” 23. 6. Biko, “The Quest for a True Humanity,” 98. 7. Biko, “Black Souls in White Skins,” 25. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid., 24. 10. Steve Biko, “White Racism and Black Consciousness,” in I Write What I Like, ed. Aerlred Stubbs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 66. 11. Ibid., 64–65. 12. Steve Biko, “Let’s Talk About Bantustans,” in I Write What I Like, ed. Aerlred Stubbs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 82–83. 13. Ibid., 83. 14. Ibid., 83 and 84, respectively. 15. Ibid., 81. 16. Ibid., 85. 17. Ibid., 86. 18. Ibid. 19. Lewis Gordon, working from an existential reading of the sociology of Alfred Schutz, develops the idea of oppression taking form in our everyday, anonymous activities of life in Existence in Black, 74:

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Alfred Schutz speaks of anonymity as the mundane ability to stand for another in the realm of understanding. Anonymity both wipes away and preserves the very notion of a private language and epistemological privilege. In this regard, anonymity is restricted to a form of universality of human presence, where the rules qua rules are expected to apply to all human beings. Implicit in anonymity, then, is its own limitation. There is a dialectic of private life in virtue of a public life that is so mundane that it ceases to function as a general concern of any one else. When concern emerges, it is in terms of recognizing an individual’s uniqueness, that although one can stand in another’s place as a human being, one cannot stand in the place of another’s life.

20. Steve Biko, “What Is Black Consciousness?,” in I Write What I Like, ed. Aerlred Stubbs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 101. 21. See especially the work of Lewis Gordon and the enigmatic proposition of theodicy in Bad Faith ad Anti-Black Racism (New York: Prometheus Books, 1999), 144. 22. See, for instance, Ronald Takaki, A Different Mirror: A Multicultural History of America (New York: Back Bay Books, 1993); the first part of the book reminds the careful reader of the persistent effects of the 1790 Naturalization Act, which marked conditions of citizenship through whiteness and was not repealed until the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952. Additionally, chap. 14 documents the various inconsistencies between fighting a war against racism abroad when there was a war on race being waged at home. 23. Ernst Cassirer, The Myth of the State (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1974), 282. 24. Ibid., 284–285. 25. Ibid., 290–292. 26. Ibid., 295. 27. Lewis Gordon argues that the title, often translated as Wretched of the Earth, is better figured in this way because “a damned people are not identical to a wretchedness”; Gordon, Disciplinary Decadence: Living Thought in Trying Times (London: Paradigm Publishers, 2006), 89. 28. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 35. 29. Ibid., 249. 30. Paget Henry, Caliban’s Reason: Introducing Afro-Caribbean Thought (New York: Routledge, 2000), 3. 31. Ibid., 5–6. 32. Ibid., 10–11. 33. Ibid., 11–12.

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34. Ibid., 29. 35. Gordon, Disciplinary Decadence, 73 and 75. 36. Henry, Caliban’s Reason, 33. 37. One of the authors, Drucilla Cornell, is a member of a Candomblé house, and she has added to the descriptions offered here through her many experiences. 38. Henry, Caliban’s Reason, 42. 39. Ibid., 52. 40. Ibid., 58. 41. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 140. 42. Lewis Gordon, Bad Faith and Anti-Black Racism (New York: Prometheus Books, 1999). 43. Henry, Caliban’s Reason, 84. 44. Ibid., 96. 45. Ibid., 102. 46. ibid., 103. 47. Ibid., 104. 48. Ibid., 172. 49. Ibid., 182. 50. Ibid., 182. 51. For a discussion of the limits of a Marxist explanation for a production of knowledge, see Jürgen Habermas, Theory and Practice (Boston: Beacon, 1973), chap. 4. 52. Other critics have also emphasized that Habermas does not develop a rich enough existential understating of the self in its relationship to otherness; see, for example, Martin Matustik, Specters of Liberation: Great Refusals in the New World Order (New York: SUNY Press, 1998). 53. Henry, Caliban’s Reason, 187. 54. Ibid., 194. 55. Ibid., 88–89.

5. unfree black labor: the telos of history and the struggle against racialized capitalism 1. Lewis Gordon, “A Phenomenology of Biko’s Black Consciousness,” in Biko Lives!: Contesting the Legacies of Steve Biko, eds. Andile Mngxitama, Amanda Alexander & Nigel C. Gibson (New York: Palgrave, 2008), 90. 2. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 112.

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3. Sampie Terreblanche, A History of Inequality in South Africa, 1652–2002 (Durban: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2003), 11–13. 4. Ibid., 262. 5. Ibid., chap. 8; the following paragraph is a summary of this chapter in brief, ellipsed form. 6. Ibid., 276–277. 7. Ibid., 319–320. 8. Ibid., 398. 9. Ibid., chap. 11; the following paragraph is a summary of this chapter in brief, ellipsed form. 10. Ibid., 431. 11. Ibid., chap. 1. 12. Ibid., 6. 13. Ibid., 21. 14. Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1944), 195. 15. Ibid., 204. 16. For more on the recollective imagination, see generally Drucilla Cornell, Transformations (New York: Routledge, 1993), chap. 2. 17. Cassirer, An Essay on Man, 185. 18. Ibid., 206. 19. Ernst Cassirer, The Problem of Knowledge: Philosophy, Science, and History since Hegel (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press), 178. 20. See, for example, the difference in approaches Michel Foucault takes in Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (New York: Vintage, 1988) versus The Order of Things: An Archaeology of Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1994). 21. Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (New York: Anchor Books, 1999), chap. 2. 22. Ibid., chap. 4. 23. Ibid., 74. 24. Ibid., 74–76. 25. Ibid., 284. 26. Karl Marx, The German Ideology, in Karl Marx: Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, ed. and trans. Loyd Easton and Kurt Guddat (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 430. 27. See also Drucilla Cornell, Defending Ideals: War, Democracy, and Political Struggles (New York: Routledge, 2004), chap. 4, esp. 74.

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28. Lewis Gordon, Disciplinary Decadence: Living Thought in Trying Times (London: Paradigm, 2006), 100–106. 29. Ibid., 104. 30. Ibid., 103. 31. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, ed, and trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 58 [4:453]. 32. Ibid., 60 [4:455]. 33. Steve Biko, “The Quest for a True Humanity,” in I Write What I Like, ed. Aerlred Stubbs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 91–92. 34. Ibid., 90. 35. Steve Biko, “Letter to the SRC Presidents,” in I Write What I Like, ed. Aerlred Stubbs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 15. 36. Biko, “The Quest for a True Humanity,” 91. 37. Steve Biko, “The Definition of Black Consciousness,” in I Write What I Like, ed. Aerlred Stubbs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 48. 38. Steve Biko, “We Blacks,” in I Write What I Like, ed. Aerlred Stubbs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 29. 39. Biko, “The Definition of Black Consciousness,” 48. 40. Steve Biko, “What Is Black Consciousness?,” in I Write What I Like, ed. Aerlred Stubbs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 114. 41. For a more in-depth discussion of identity, position, and identification, see Drucilla Cornell, Between Women and Generations: Legacies of Dignity (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), 98. 42. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Penguin Classics, 1993), 284. 43. Paget Henry, Caliban’s Reason: Introducing Afro-Caribbean Thought (New York: Routledge, 2000), 134. 44. See Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 257 [ix]. 45. Benjamin, Illuminations, 257–258 [ix]. 46. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Elland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 4. 47. Jacques Derrida, Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, ed. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002), 13–14.

conclusion: the work of transformative constitutionalism 1. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1993).

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2. Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Vintage, 1984). 3. See generally, Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998). 4. See generally, Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority,’ ” in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, ed. Drucilla Cornell, Michael Rosenfeld, and David Gray Carlson (New York: Routledge, 1992); For a longer engagement on the ethical turn in deconstruction, see Drucilla Cornell, Philosophy of the Limit (New York: Routledge, 1992), chap. 4. 5. See generally, Jacques Derrida, Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, ed. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002). 6. Paget Henry, Caliban’s Reason: Introducing Afro-Caribbean Thought (New York: Routledge, 2000), 238. 7. See generally, Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992); for a more in-depth engagement with this work see Drucilla Cornell, Beyond Accommodation: Ethical Feminism, Deconstruction, and the Law (New York: Routledge, 1991), chap. 2. 8. Ernst Cassirer, The Myth of the State (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1974), 243. 9. Henry, Caliban’s Reason, 272. 10. See generally, Noam Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2003); and Naomi Kline, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007). 11. John and Jean Comaroff, “Law and Disorder in the Postcolony: An Introduction,” in Law and Disorder in the Postcolony, ed. John and Jean Comaroff (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 8. 12. Comaroff, “Law and Disorder in the Postcolony,” 21. 13. Ibid., 22. 14. Ibid., 23. 15. Cassirer, Myth of the State, 284. 16. Constitution of South Africa, section 10 (1996). 17. Justice Laurie Ackermann, Buzani Dodo v. The State, CCT (South Africa) 01/01, paragraph 38. 18. For instance, see Justice Laurie Ackermann, Ferreira, CCT (South Africa) 5/95, paragraph 48, when he writes: In Makwanyane O’Regan J pointed out that “without dignity, human life is substantially diminished” and pronounced the prime value of dignity in the

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following terms: “The importance of dignity as a founding value of the new Constitution cannot be overemphasised. Recognising a right to dignity is an acknowledgement of the intrinsic worth of human beings: human beings are entitled to be treated as worthy of respect and concern. This right therefore is the foundation of many of the other rights that are specifically entrenched in Chapter 3.” I agree with these views. O’Regan J also pointed out, rightly in my view, that “[the] recognition and protection of human dignity is the touchstone of the new political order and is fundamental to the new Constitution.”

19. Cassirer, Myth of the State, 287–288. 20. Ibid., 236. 21. See generally, H. L. A. Hart, The Concept of Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 22. Such a problem follows the work of John and Jean Comaroff, “Reflections on Liberalism, Policulturalism, and ID-ology,” Social Identities 9, no. 4 (2003): 449. 23. Ifeanyi Menkiti, “On the Normative Conception of a Person,” in A Companion to African Philosophy, ed. Kwasi Wiredu (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 326. 24. See reference to Wiredu’s concept in D. A. Masalo, “Western and African Communitarianism,” in A Companion to African Philosophy, ed. Kwasi Wiredu (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 496. 25. Chief Justice Pius Langa, MEC for Education: KwaZulu-Natal and Others v. Pillay and Others 2007, 51/06 (CCT), paragraph 53. 26. D. A. Masalo, “Western and African Communitarianism,” in A Companion to African Philosophy, ed. Kwasi Wiredu (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 493. 27. John Murungi, “African Jurisprudence: Hermeneutic Reflections,” in A Companion to African Philosophy, ed. Kwasi Wiredu (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 522–523. 28. To quote Rawls himself on the veil of ignorance from Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 27: “As a device of representation its abstractness invites misunderstanding. In particular, the description of the parties may seem to presuppose a particular metaphysical conception of the person; for example, that the essential nature of persons is independent of and prior to their contingent attributes, including their final ends and attachments, and indeed their conception of the good and character as a whole.” Also, see discussion in Drucilla Cornell, Moral Images of Freedom (Landham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 11–37. 29. Mabogo More, “South Africa under and after Apartheid,” in A Companion to African Philosophy, ed. Kwasi Wiredu (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 156–157.

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30. John Murungi, “African Jurisprudence: Hermeneutic Reflections,” in A Companion to African Philosophy, ed. Kwasi Wiredu (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 525. 31. See George Carew, “Economic Globalism, Deliberative Democracy,” in A Companion to African Philosophy, ed. Kwasi Wiredu (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 460. 32. George Carew, “Economic Globalism, Deliberative Democracy,” in A Companion to African Philosophy, ed. Kwasi Wiredu (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 463. 33. Justice Laurie Ackermann, Makwanyane 1994, 3/94 (CCT), paragraph 313. 34. Justice Mokgoro, Khosa, CCT(South Africa) 12/03, paragraph 54. 35. David Dikoko v. Thupi Zachararia Mokhatla, CCT (South Africa) 62/05. 36. Justice Yvonne Mokgoro, Dikoko v Mokhatla, paragraph 60. 37. Albie Sachs, Dikoko v Mokhatla, paragraphs 109–110. 38. Laurie Ackermann, “The Legal Nature of the South African Constitutional Revolution,” New Zealand Law Review 4 (2004): 678–679. 39. For instance, see Justice Yvonne Mokgoro, Makwanyane 1994, 3/94 (CCT) at paragraph 308 when she writes: Generally, ubuntu translates as humaneness. In its most fundamental sense, it translates as personhood and morality. Metaphorically, it expresses itself in umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu, describing the significance of group solidarity on survival issues so central to the survival of communities. While it envelops the key values of group solidarity, compassion, respect, human dignity, conformity to basic norms and collective unity, in its fundamental sense it denotes humanity and morality. Its spirit emphasises respect for human dignity, marking a shift from confrontation to conciliation. In South Africa ubuntu has become a notion with particular resonance in the building of a democracy. It is part of our rainbow heritage, though it might have operated and still operates differently in diverse community settings. In the Western cultural heritage, respect and the value for life, manifested in the all-embracing concepts of humanity and menswaardigheid are also highly priced. It is values like these that Section 35 requires to be promoted. They give meaning and texture to the principles of a society based on freedom and equality.

40. See, for instance, the following cases respectively: Makwanyane 1994, 3/94 (CCT); Khosa 2004, 12/03 (CCT); and Dikoko 2006, 62/05 (CCT). 41. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin, 1965), 28. 42. Ernst Bloch, Natural Law and Human Dignity, trans. Dennis Schmidt (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), 208.

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Index

Ackermann, Laurie, 161, 171, 189, 191, 193 Act of Westminster, 130 Adorno, Theodor, 13, 66–67, 121, 181, 193, 197 aesthetics, 4, 73, 76, 78; radical aesthetics, 78 African National Congress (ANC), 129; Youth League, 131 African philosophy, 108, 109, 111, 114–15, 120, 122–23, 190–91, 199 African Union, 156 Afro-Caribbean historicism, x, 106 Afro-Caribbean philosophy, 105, 106, 108, 115, 118, 122–23, 155, 197 Afro-Caribbean poeticism, x, 106–7 Angel of History, 149–50 Anglo-Boer War, 129 animal rationale, 6 animal symbolicum, 6 animals, 11, 30–31 anthropology, 11, 34, 167 anti-black racism, 95, 96, 98–99, 101–2, 125, 183–84, 196 apartheid, 60, 95–102, 124–26, 128, 131–32, 145–46, 148, 162–63, 174, 190 Apel, Karl Otto, 84–85 architectonic forms of language, 27, 31, 42–44, 106 Arendt, Hannah, 93, 151, 183, 188, 191, 193 art, 3, 5, 8, 28, 41, 78, 117, 138, 160 artificial myth, 57, 105 Austin, J. H., 83

automaticity, 67 Bantusans, 99–101, 128, 131, 149, 185, Benjamin, Walter, 79, 149, 188, 193 Biko, Steve, 95, 96, 141, 183, 188, 196 biology, 20–24, 93, 139 Black Community Programs (BPC), 97, 101 black consciousness, 95–99, 102–3, 140–41, 144–47, 150, 184–86, 188, 196 black peril (swart gevaar), 97 black unfree labor, 124–25, 127–28, 135–36, 140–41, 148, 151, 186 Bloch, Ernst, 176, 191, 194 bracketing, 9, 28 Caliban, 95, 105–9, 115 Caliban’s Reason, 105, 108, 185–86, 188–89, 198 Calibanization, 108, 114–15, 120, 122 Candomblé, 106, 186 capability set, 142 capitalism, 6, 13, 66, 69, 74, 79, 93–94, 103, 125–50, 153, 155–56, 186, 189 Carew, George, 169, 191 Carlyle, Thomas, 103, 154, 155 Cassirer, Ernst, x, 1–57, 64, 67, 74, 80, 84, 87–93, 102–3, 123, 125, 136–40, 152, 154–55, 162, 176–83, 185, 187, 189–90 citizenship, 132, 158, 171, 185 Civilized Labour Policy, 129, 130

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202

Index

colonialism, 66, 69, 74, 79, 95–97, 103, 105, 115, 125, 127, 135, 145, 147, 155, 170, 183, 194–96 colonization, x, 94, 104, 123–24 Comaroff, Jean, 156, 183, 189–90, 194 Comaroff, John, 156, 183, 189–90, 194 commodity fetishism, 6, 43, 73 communicative action, 67, 81–83, 85–86, 91, 118–19 communitarianism, 164, 166, 190 consciousness, 8, 29–30, 32, 34–40, 42–44, 63, 77, 79, 88, 95–99, 101–2, 115–17, 140–41, 144–47, 150, 165, 183–85 Copernican Revolution, 10, 16, 18, 80 Cornell, Drucilla, 177, 181, 186–90, 194–95 cosmogonic unity, 109–11, 113, 115 creolization, 112, 122–23 Cresswell, F. P. H., 129 critical theory, x, 2, 24, 37, 80, 88, 194 Critique of the Power of Judgment (Third Critique), 3, 11, 20, 178, 182, 197 Critique of Pure Reason (First Critique), 8, 178, 197 culture, 2–3, 7–9, 55, 72–74, 77–78, 107, 115, 119–20, 138, 148, 158, 172 culture industry, 72–74 Damned of the Earth, The, 104, 105 Darwin, Charles, 6, 93, 139–40 De Beauvoir, Simone, 57–59, 181, 196 deliberative democracy, 169, 191 Derrida, Jacques, 150, 152–53, 179, 188–89, 195 Dialectic of Enlightenment, 68, 80, 94, 121, 181, 197 dignity, 14, 98, 145, 147, 161, 163–64, 166, 168–69, 171–76, 189–91 Dikoko (2006), 172, 191, 195 discourse, 11, 36, 41, 48, 67, 76–77, 104–5, 107, 115, 117, 119–20, 122, 148, 151, 153 dualism, 23–24, 89 economics, 81, 100, 143, 198 effector system, 4 ego, 24, 105, 107, 109–10, 112–19, 121–22, 154–55 enchanted faith, 158–59 enlarged mentality, 14, 93 Enlightenment, 43, 65–74, 80, 92, 94 episteme, 148, 149 epistemology, 108, 111–12

equality, 14, 96, 121 Essay on Man, An, 177–80, 183, 187, 194 ethics, 146–48, 163–64, 174, 191 ethnography, 2, 9 European Union, 156 existentialism, 96, 108–12, 114–22, 144, 186 experience, 4–5, 8, 10, 16–20, 25–29, 37, 43–45, 47, 49, 53–54, 63, 68, 78, 82, 89, 109, 112, 115, 117, 137, 141, 143, 150 exploitation, 6, 80, 89, 98–100, 124–25, 129–30, 132, 134, 136, 140, 145, 147–49, 156, 157 expression, 5, 24–25, 29–30, 44–48, 52, 55, 73, 78, 83, 85, 89, 162 Fanon, Frantz, 13, 104, 106, 111, 114–17, 126, 131, 155, 159, 163, 185–86, 195–96 feminism, 57–58, 63–64, 67, 197 fetishization of law, 151, 158–60, 173 finitude, 4, 23, 25, 53, 70, 80, 168 Foucault, Michel, 140, 148, 152, 187, 189, 195 freedom, 14, 16, 22-25, 52, 53, 58, 63, 70, 75, 77, 80, 92, 105–6, 132, 136, 140–44, 146, 148, 150, 155, 161–64, 171, 174 Freedom Charter, 132 Fukuyama, Francis, 152, 188, 195 functional gods, 42–43, 46–47, 49 Galileo, 7, 19 Geertz, Clifford, 10, 182, 196 German Idealism, x, 15 Glen Grey Act, 128 Gobineau, Joseph, 103, Goethe, 11, 137–38, 176 Gordon, Lewis, 96, 109, 114, 143–44, 183–86, 188, 196 Gramsci, Antonio, 7 Grand Apartheid, 95, 131, 146 Great Refusals, 79, 94, 186, 198 Group Areas Act, 132 Growth Employment and Redistribution (GEAR), 133–34 Grundnorm, 160–61 Guyer, Paul, 178–79, 196–97 Habermas, Jürgen, 13, 67, 79–91, 118–24, 186 Harris, Wilson, 106, 115–18, 121, 196 Hegel, 4, 20, 34–35, 87, 139, 159, 175, 178, 183, 187, 194, 196

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Index Hegemonic, 4, 7, 12, 41, 106 Heidegger, Martin, 80, 82, 182, 196 Henry, Paget, 95, 105–9, 110–14, 118–23, 148, 153, 155–56, 185–86, 188–89, 197 Herder, Johann, 42 Hertzog, J. B. M., 129–30 history, vii, 3, 5, 23, 25, 39, 51–52, 87, 104, 106–7, 113, 121, 124–25, 127, 133, 144, 135–40, 144, 147–50, 152–53, 170, 186 Hobbes, Thomas, 8 Holocaust, 103 Horkheimer, Max, 66–74, 79, 84, 88, 121, 181–82, 197 humanism, x, 6, 9, 38, 182, 197 humanity, x, 2, 4–6, 12–13, 23, 31, 56–58, 74, 93, 95, 98, 101, 102, 114, 123, 125–26, 143–44, 146–49, 151–52, 161, 163, 165, 167, 170, 172, 174–75, 184, 188, 191 Hume, David, 16–18, 178, 197 Husserl, Edmund, 9, 28, 119–20 I-standpoint, 24–25 Ibandla, 60–61, 63 idealism, 9–10, 15–16 illocutionary speech, 83, 86–87 imaginary, 6, 11, 28, 58–59, 97, 126; productive imagination, 3, 16, 42, 45, 51, 53, 67, 73, 137–38; reproductive imagination, 16, 45, 75 imaginary numbers, 11 imperialism, x, 105–7, 109, 110, 123, 125, 127–35, 147 implosivity, 144 instrumental rationality, 5, 13, 67, 73, 80–81, 88, 94, 120 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 156 judgment, 4–5, 7, 9–11, 15–18, 20–25, 68– 70, 80–81, 97, 103, 140, 163–64, 170, 173–74; aesthetic judgment, 22, 81, 140, 197 justice, 1, 14, 52, 56, 75, 86, 96, 101, 137, 150–52, 158–64, 168–74, 176 Kant, Immanuel, 3–12, 15–32, 37, 69–70, 80, 89, 91, 93, 127, 139–40, 144, 161–62, 168 Keller, Helen, 25–25, 29, 31 Kelsen, Hans, 160 Khosa (2004), 171, 174, 192, 199 Kingdom of Ends, 167

203

knowledge, x, 3–6, 11, 18–19, 21–23, 35–36, 67, 80, 88, 99, 107, 109, 120, 138, 178, 186; constitutive knowledge or ideals, 11–12, 16, 18, 20, 23, 24, 81, 91, 139; regulative knowledge or ideals, 5, 10–11, 15, 21–25, 39, 42, 81, 91, 125, 137–40, 143–44, 147–50, 168 Kristeva, Julia, 154, 189 Lacan, Jacques, 154–55, 197 Land Act of 1913, 128 Langa, Pius, 166, 190 Language and Myth, 34, 38, 40 law of causality17, 19 law-like nature, 16–17, 19, 51, 80, 191, 193 Lenin, 13 lifeworld, 81, 82, 84, 87–89 liminality, 119–23, 126, 148–49 linguistic expression, 5, 24–25, 29–30 linguistic turn, 13, 32 magic, 37, 40, 44, 48, 53–57, 93, 103–5, 159 Makwanyane (1995), 170, 189, 191, 198 Mana, 50, 51, 70 Mandela, Nelson, 61, 62, 132 Mandela, Winnie, 61, 62 Marcuse, Herbert, 13, 66, 75–79, 84, 93, Marx, Karl, 6, 43, 67, 104, 112–13, 120, 122–23, 139–41, 147–48, 152–53, 176–77, 187–88 Masalo, D. A., 165–66, 190 mathematics, 6, 9, 11, 16–17, 27, 178 Melanesian religion, 50 Menkiti, Ifeanyi, 165, 190 metaphor, 5, 7, 27–29, 39, 42–43, 49, 53–55, 57–58, 90–93, 111, 115, 153, 191 metaphoric power of language, 90 metaphoric transference, 27–29 mimesis, 48–49, 55, 71, 74 Mines and Works Amendment Act of 1926, 130 modernity, 13, 34, 36, 79, 81, 83, 86–88, 92–95, 102, 105, 119–21, 181, 183 Mokgoro, Yvonne, 151, 169–74, 191 momentary deities, 42–43, 45, 47, 49–50 morality, 2, 4–5, 9, 23, 52, 69–71, 74, 81, 88, 97, 100, 102, 106–7, 115, 144, 154, 159–61, 163–66, 168–71, 174 More, Mabogo, 168, 190 Murungi, John, 190 Myth of the State, 8, 13, 64, 84

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204

Index

mythic metaphor, 43–44, 49, 53 mythico-religious consciousness, 35–39, 43 mythology, 5, 39–30, 57–59, 61, 80, 94, 118, 163 Native Administration Act of 1927, 130 Native Labour Regulation Act of 1911, 129 natural attitude, 10, 28, 50 natural immediacy, 7, 13 natural man, 12 naturalistic world image, 6 Nazi Germany, 13 Ndebele, Njabulo, 58–60, 181 necessity, 1, 2, 7, 11, 18, 21, 39, 107, 151 neoliberalism, 133–34, 143 Newton, Isaac, 7, 19 non-Euclidean geometry, 11 objects, 6, 9–11, 16–17, 19–20, 25–27, 30–31, 37–38, 41–43, 45, 47, 49–50, 53, 56, 68, 73–74, 77, 79–80, 114, 119–20, 138, 143, 147, 150 Odysseus, 52, 58, 63, 67, 72 one-dimensional society, 66, 75–79 Orange Free State, 135 Orishas, 111 Osain, 111 Oyá, 111 parasitic form of language, 81 paronymia, 39 pars pro toto, 53 participatory difference, 165, 167–68 peasantization, 128 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 86 Penelope, 58–61, 63–64 perlocutionary speech, 86 personality, 2, 165, 167, 169, 172–73, 191 phenomena, 9, 21–24, 37, 41, 46, 74, 89, 139, 168 phenomenology, 28, 34, 37 Phenomenology of Spirit, 4, 34–35, 183 phenomenology of culture, 2, 8–9 Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, 3, 4, 9, 12–15, 24, 32–35, 91, 92, 123, 179–80, 183 Plato, 1 pluralism, 33–34, 99 polyculturalism, 160, 175 positivism, 6, 35, 103 postcolonial, 13–14, 106, 157 poverty, x, 74, 126, 127, 134–35, 141, 156

proletariat, 67, 128, 130, 134, 152 Prospero, 95, 105, 108, 113, 115 purposiveness, 5, 22–24, 70, 81 racism, x, 75, 79, 95–99, 101–2, 125–26, 145, 183–86 rationality, 5, 13, 31, 67–69, 71, 73–74, 76, 80–81, 83–84, 86, 88, 91, 94, 96, 108, 112, 119–23, 165 reality, ix, 4–5, 13, 18, 20, 26–28, 35, 37–38, 40, 41, 47, 55–57, 64, 77–79, 87, 89–91, 94, 97, 99, 116, 137–38, 143, 169–70, 178 reason, 4, 6, 8, 12–13, 16, 35, 37, 43, 67, 69–71, 75, 80–81, 83–84, 88, 91, 93, 98, 105, 107–8, 118–23, 142, 144, 168 receptor system, 4 Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP), 133 reconstructive science, 67, 79, 83, 87–88, 95 relativism, 12, 38, 40 religion, 5, 8, 28, 37–39, 55, 81, 111–12, representation, 5, 17, 25–26, 29–30, 47–48, 74, 118, 168–69, 190 retribalization, 128 revolution, 12–13, 75, 79, 95–96, 104–6, 118, 150–55, 160–64, 174–75 Rhodes, Cecil John, 12, 75, 79, 106, 150, 154, 159, 176 Rothko, Mark, ix Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 8, 11–12 Sachs, Albie, 172–73, 191 Santería, 106 schema, 3, 10–11, 15–19, 26, 39, 70, 71, 73, 137, 139 Searle, John, 83 Sen, Amartya, 141–44, 149, 187 sensuous impressions, 10 sexism, x significance, 25, 26, 29–31 sirens, 67, 72 skepticism, 16, 18 slavery, 105, 110, 121, 127, 140, 142 Smolin, Lee, 86, 178, 198 South Africa, 59–60, 63, 124–28, 131, 133–36, 140, 147, 150, 160–61, 169–71, 181 South African Affairs Commission, 128 South African Constitution, 14, 151, 163–64, 173–75

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Index South African Native National Congress, 129 South African Student Organization (SASO), 97, 98, 101 space, 2, 10, 16, 18, 20, 25, 35, 42, 62, 75, 77, 92, 102, 109, 117, 123 space of judgment, 25 special gods, 42–43, 45–46 specular doubling, 154–55 speech, 13, 27, 32, 36, 41–43, 47, 53, 67, 81, 83–88, 120 speech acts, 83, 87, 120 Spencer, Herbert, 6 spirituality, 2, 36, 40–41, 56–57, 92, 96, 105–12, 117–18, 123 state of nature, 8, 12 Stoics, 5 strategic action, 81–83, 88 supernatural power, 43, 49–50 symbolic forms, x, 2–10, 12–15, 24–25, 27–29, 32–36, 38–40, 48, 50–53, 55–56, 65–66, 69, 71, 75, 78–79, 89–96, 102, 105, 107, 123 symbolic universe, 11–13, 28, 32, 137 symbolic world, 33, 42, 45, 53–56, 74, 76, 92–93, 103–4 symbols, ix–x, 2, 10, 25–31, 41, 137, 164 sympathetic impartiality, 165, 167 synthesized natural order, 20 synthetic judgment, 10–11, 15–17, 20, 70 synthetic unity, 19, 20, 29 taboo, 52 techn¯e, 70, 112 technocratic reason, 120–22 teleology, 98, 143, 174 Terreblanche, Sampie, 125, 127–30, 132–36, 140, 147, 150, 187 third estate, 12 Third Reich, 102 time, ix, x, 10, 16, 18, 20, 22, 45, 69, 92, 102, 109, 113, 138 Toffler, Alvin, 135 totalitarianism, 66, 73, 79, 96, 145, 159, 162 traditional society, 81, 84, 87 transcendental apperception, 11, 17

205

transcendental imagination, 3, 10, 16–18, 20, 29, 42, 178 transformative constitutionalism, 152, 156, 159, 162–64 transformative revolution, 12, 75, 94–96, 105, 164, 183 Transvaal, 136 trauma, 105, 110–11, 155, 170 ubuntu, 151, 164, 168–74, 191 understanding, x, 2–4, 7-8, 10, 16–18, 20–21, 23–25, 33, 36, 38–39, 42, 53, 57, 68–71, 80, 82–83, 85, 87, 89, 91, 109, 117, 121, 137, 140–41, 143–46, 151, 159. 161–62, 169, 173, 176, 185, 190 unified conception of reason, 81 universal applicability, 15, 25–27, 29, 31 universal pragmatics of speech, 67, 83 Usener, Hermann Karl, 36, 49, 179 utopia, 12, 56–57, 70–71, 161, 176 Valéry, Paul, 78, 182 Verwoerd, Hendrik, 128 vivification, 15, 26–29, 92 Vodou, 106, 117, 120 Wage Act of 1925, 130 warfare state, 76 Washington Consensus, 156 Western, x, 12, 33, 36, 95, 102, 105, 107, 109, 113, 117, 121–22, 148, 163, 190, 191 white consciousness, 95–99, 102 Wiredu, Kwasi, 165, 190, 191 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 29, 82, 84 word labels, 3 word magic, 33, 54–57, 179 World Bank, 156 world image, 6–7, 93 World War II, 12, 103 Wynter, Sylvia, 106, 115, 119, 148–49 Xhosa, 99, 101, 132 Yemaja, 111 Yoruba, 108, 110–11 Zulu, 99–101, 132–33