This will be my third and last post today, September 30, 2009, the day my blog was born.
The left-right divide in modern politics conceals a deeper fault line in European-influenced thought. This fault line separates the two ways we engage with the world. The tension between the two political impulses can be traced all the way back to Plato’s systematic representation of the world through ideas (objectification) in opposition to the pre-Socratic’s assertion that we must first be-in-the-world (de-objectification) and only with that as our starting point can we come to terms with it. The two traditions are irreconcilable. The first stands for Representation, the second for Being; the first for knowledge, the second for freedom. The first is accused of oppression, the second of relativism.
The dominance of Platonist beliefs went largely unchallenged –or if it was challenged, as Montaigne and Hobbes attempted to do, they failed to provide something for others to build on – until Rousseau’s dissent from Enlightenment beliefs, an impassioned appeal for politics with a moral foundation. This, he said, would be possible only by being free in Nature while surrendering all 'rights' to Society. Individual rights impeded our freedom and we should willingly hand them over. It was an extraordinarily original, and to many an extraordinarily perverse, way of defining freedom. The Romantic Movement in early 19th century Europe persisted with Rousseau’s dream but the excesses of the French Revolution and the age of terror that followed had already doomed their efforts.
The Marxian hope for a 'critical' approach, a form of self-consciousness that identifies and neutralizes the oppressive power of objective truths to change our lives against our wishes and deny us our freedom, follows naturally from Rousseau’s powerful attack on systematic knowledge. All that was then needed was the arrival of the Existentialists—with their stress on the priority of praxis (the Act) over logos (the Explanation) — in the mid-twentieth century to put the pre-Socratics back in the game.
This proved to be wishful thinking though. The objectifying tradition –with science in its advance guard—has vanquished its opposition. It usurps all human experience it encounters. Even madness, long thought to lie outside the reach of objective explanation, has submitted in the face of its encroachment, as Michel Foucault showed so persuasively. No religious dogma was more successful in its hunt for heresies to expose and seize. It delivered a fatal blow to the de-objectifying tradition when it accused it of nihilism. It even took the battle to the court of public opinion where it dragged out the cultural fluidity of the Sixties and served it up as an example of a social order bereft of an anchor. When anything goes, everything goes…..out of the window, was its prosecutorial brief.
So the Enlightenment Project ((the name I shall sometimes give to the Socratic tendency to objectify the world) was back on track. Our mental representations would bridge us to a world out there. And with its return has come the search for law, set by nature and with universal validity. We must genuflect before naturally occurring patterns in some Grand Design waiting to be detected by our minds.
And this is where we find ourselves today.
