Mervyn Hartwig

Paradigms of Enlightenment

DEALS AND IDEALS:

two concepts of enlightenment

By James Daly.

Greenwich Exchange, London 2000. 160 pp.

1-871551-31-5 paperback

Doubtless largely by moral luck, Deals and Ideals is a very well timed book within the critical realist context. It appeared shortly after the dialectically developing metaphysical idealism of the Bhaskarian system had been rendered explicit in From East to West, and claims, not just Bhaskar, but the 'comet of critical realism' and modernity's perhaps most notorious atheist and materialist - Marx himself - for the idealist tradition of dialectical spiritual enlightenment and natural law, whose leading expositors are Plato, Aristotle and Aquinas. Together with related themes, its central stance on the human condition is very close to that of From East to West: the enslavement of humankind's free, creative and communal essential nature by capital and the ideology of having, and the necessary possibility of liberation and oneness of being - of bringing our 'existence' into line with our 'essence' - vouchsafed by the dialectical unity of the human and divine mind, and of mind and being, such that the nature [of a thing] (e.g. rational or universalising animal; creative and social producer; or indeed both) is not only what an entity essentially is, potentially or actually, but also what or how it therefore ought to be - as near as possible to an ideal example of its kind; and it determines what is good for such an entity (18).

Shorn of divinity, but not of its religious inspiration, this shared stance arguably finds a common source in the humanism of Marx, which was given clearest and most sustained expression in the early writings, but is, Daly cogently argues, the unifying motivation of Marx's overall thought. Further, it is the recent development by Bhaskar and others of an anti-mechanist, anti-positivist, realist and essentialist theory of science that now makes full appreciation of this humanism possible. Most of us have been brought up to believe that there is only one Enlightenment - the modern bourgeois, encompassing Bacon, Hobbes, Hume, Bentham, the philosophes, and Kant -, that Marx belongs to its materialist wing, and that it is the intellectual counterpart of the sun in our planetary system. Not only are there two, Daly insists, but the bourgeois enlightenment is not even unique in its own terms, or very enlightened. While some aspects of its commitment to science and technology, liberty and equality, are indeed novel and valuable, it is fundamentally a return to the tradition of Thucydides, Protagoras, and the Sophists. Virtually coeval with the rise of large-scale maritime trade in the West, and extensive commercialisation of labour in urban slave markets, it is ultimately a mercantile, materialistic tradition whose conception of rationality is in terms of deals or profitseeking, rather than ideals (the hallmark of dialectical enlightenment). Prior to the development of capitalism, it was very much subordinate to its older spiritual antithesis, which viewed it as obscurantist, and which alone held the title to enlightenment. Reinvigorated by the modern bourgeois revolution, however, it inverted the relationship and usurped the title. This was effected above all by divorcing being (nature) from mind and value, thereby 'infinitising and absolutising the finite in the same way as the Sophists had done' and breaking up 'the dialectical view of the ideal unity of all things in the infinite' (23). The notion that there is only one Enlightenment is thus an index of the thoroughness of the bourgeois revolution, and it motivates one of Daly's leading themes, a Benjaminian emphasis on the vital importance for the socialist project of recuperating aspects of the past.

Summary account

Daly's account of the two traditions is of course in terms of the ideal type, which abstracts from complexity and diversity in order to divine quintessential nature and basic principles. Even so, as far as I can judge - and I should perhaps warn that I am by no means as well versed in the western philosophical tradition as Daly evidently is - the account is rich and deft (notwithstanding that it is also hard hitting and passionate, I would say partly in virtue of this). Daly moves among the cast of major philosophers in the ongoing struggle between Socrates and the Sophists with great assurance. Here is his own summary of the account:

The two claimants to enlightenment are polar opposite orientations.

The materialistic one sees itself as this-worldly, and condemns the other as irrational because other-worldly. The spiritual enlightenment however sees itself as questing for the fullest rational [including scientific - MH] understanding of the human world in its totality, and condemns its opponent as not in fact earthy, but in essence hellish. The Platonic Socrates classifies Sophists not among intellectuals, as a rival group to philosophers, but among pimps. Aquinas classifies unjust laws not among laws at all but among acts of violence. For Aquinas, nature is law; and the nature of law is not the same as that of an act of violence. For Thucydides and Hobbes on the contrary nature is violence, and law is the product of successful counter-violence. For the dialectical Fichte the age of Hobbes and Locke is 'the age of complete sinfulness' - of Sünde, of the sundering (Sonderung) of the mind from its essential self [cf Bhaskar's concept of 'structural sin'. - MH].

The rival versions of enlightenment present systematically antithetical ontologies and epistemologies.

· Nature is seen by one as crude and chaotic, as 'mere' nature, to be dominated by […] technology, including political and social engineering; by the other, it is seen as telos, a potential to be realised, an ideal to be lived by.

· Mind is seen by one as relative, ultimately reducible to sense experience, and confined to serving the passions; for the other it includes the capacity for absolute, timeless truth, and guides human beings to their objective natural good, their ideal fulfillment.

· For the one the good is hedone, individualist pleasure, subjective and relative [Benthamite] 'happiness' […]; for the other eudaimonia, the objective communal happiness of spiritual and general well-being. · For one, individual human excellence, arete, is worldly success; for the other, it is the development of temperance, courage, justice and practical wisdom (phronesis) in the pursuit of truth, beauty and goodness.

· Freedom is for one negative, the unhindered pursuit of one's pleasures, immediate or long-term utility […]; for the other positive, self-government by universal requirements of reason, binding like those of mathematics.

· For one, justice is the equality of free citizens making political deals, that is, negotiating their other systematic equality as property owners making economic deals in a free market; for the other it is the common good, the good both of the community as community and of all members of the community equally.

Capitalism is clearly compatible with the first, but equally clearly it is opposed to the second […] (14-15)

At the time of its bid for the mantle of enlightenment, the Sophistic tradition encountered the challenge of German idealism, which took up the dialectical tradition of spiritual enlightenment, adapting it to the egalitarian and democratic pulse of modernity. Experiencing the divorce between reason and nature, fact and value, as 'a diremption of human essential being', it sought to recover 'a spiritual unity, deriving from our sharing universal mind and being united in the love of truth, beauty and goodness' (35). It was fundamentally weakened and compromised, however, by its endorsement of private property rights, acceptance of a version of 'the Whig theory of history' whereby injustice is justified by 'progress', and above all by ceding, explicitly or implicitly, the concept and understanding of nature to mechanistic materialism; even Hegel, the very principle of whose philosophy was the unity of the divine and human mind, accepted the Hobbesian account of the human 'state of nature', whereby there could be '"no idle talk about a state of natural goodness"' (36). It accommodated, in short, to the bourgeois revolution, which indeed, as Marx pointed out, was idealised by Hegel, or 'transfigured and glorified', such that 'what seems in appearance alien to me is in its depths the requirement of absolute universal self-consciousness - and therefore of mine [i.e. my own self-consciousness - MH]' (54).

Marxian redemption

Marx 'redeem[ed] the faults' (43) of German idealism's attempt to counter the Anglo-French enlightenment, and a large part of the book is devoted to arguing that he belongs squarely within the first tradition. Crucially, Marx rejected the bourgeois enlightenment's mechanistic concept of nature, enshrined both in empiricist reductionism and in idealist mind/ nature dualism, espousing the dialectical unity of being and mind upheld by dialectical enlightenment, according to which 'an understanding of nature, what is and what by right ought to be (i.e., by right reason […]), gives an understanding of the good, the right, the due, the proper, the virtues (including justice), law, rights, freedom and happiness; they form a unity of mutual implication' (18). His thought is thus at its core a recuperation of Aristotelian essentialism and eudaimonism; however, it is 'not Aristotelian in the sense of advocating conformity to a totally preordained essence' (60), rather it is dynamised and diffracted, multi-tiered and diachronically emergentist. His 'naturalism seems to involve the theory that without [the] deformations, distortions and restrictions' of class society 'human beings will naturally develop their potentiality for creative social production' (67), rejecting the 'bad infinity' of pleonexia or unlimited acquisitiveness, which Marx abhors as much as Aristotle, and which 'twins with injustice' in his condemnation of 'the "rastlos, masslos [restless, measureless] werewolf hunger of surplus-value' (19); for 'it is in the nature or essence of a mode of production that it ought to embody production from each according to ability, and distribution to each according to need' (35). Such a position is presupposed by Marx's theory of alienation; and indeed, the 'original inspiration' of his thought is 'the German idealist schema, derived from the Plotinian dialectic, of the alienation and return of Mind' (57). Albeit an atheist, Marx, as 'the inheritor of idealism', had a fundamentally religious sensibility, but without a theological commitment.1 His materialism was no 'metaphysics of matter', rather it amounted to denial of the Hegelian notion that the actual is rational or ideal; recognition of the structural conditioning by 'material' circumstances of human free will, and of the importance of production and therefore of class in history; and rejection of nature/ spirit dichotomy in favour of a naturalist humanism which, in his own words, '"differs both from idealism and materialism and […] is at the same time their unifying truth"' (112). Marx's humanism was of the Feuerbachian 'I-thou' kind, unified around the theme of loving relations of production. Far from being a moral relativist, as argued by Allen Wood and others, Marx was a moral 'absolutist and perfectionist', who condemned capitalism 'totally and critically from outside in terms of its divergence from a potential alternative, a classless productive system' based on love, trust, and 'total generosity' (128).2 Marx thus does indeed have a notion of historical progress, but it is not the bourgeois justification of evil by progress, rather the resolution of (the problem of) evil via 'the redemption of humanity' in and through practice.

Marx's thought has however been 'bourgeoisified' by Kautsky, Plekhanov, the analytical 'Marxists', and many others; that is, interpreted through the framework of the mechanistic enlightenment (which Marx explicitly condemned), such that he is seen to espouse the separation of state and economy, the determination of 'superstructure' by 'base', the divorce of fact from value, a stagist view of history as mechanistically law-governed and predictable, and so on. From this perspective much post-Marx Marxism appears as the complicit twin of liberalism, a dialectical sub-plot of the main bourgeois story, with no prospect of sublating it (cf MacIntyre 1981: Ch. 18).

Bhaskarian elaboration

Today Marx's true legacy can best be appreciated from the vantage point of the Bhaskarian vindication of emergentist ontology and natural kinds, and explanatory critique. Daly does not discuss Bhaskar's philosophy at any length, but a clear implication of his account is that Bhaskar's thought (including the spiritual turn) is no departure from, rather an elaboration and development of, the work of Marx within the tradition of dialectical enlightenment. It is unclear, however, how Daly would relate his own account of that tradition, and in particular his own evident commitment to a version of the Platonic Forms, to the swingeing Bhaskarian critique of Platonism and Aristotelianism in Plato Etc. (1994) as dialectical counterparts in the forging of the 'common mistaken problematic' of the 'unholy trinity' of ontological monovalence, the epistemic fallacy, and the 'primal squeeze' on natural necessity and empirically controlled scientific theory between rationalism and empiricism, which has dominated western philosophy to this day. Elsewhere Daly adverts to a 'possible bridge building between a realist philosophy of science and an Aristotelian essentialism', to which he invites Bhaskar's participation (Daly 2000: 12). Indications are that he would regard Aquinas as a key mediating link between the classical and modern phases of dialectical enlightenment.

Daly's wide-ranging account inevitably raises many controversial issues, only a few more of which can concern us here. It might be thought that his view of the modern enlightenment is arbitrarily restricted. There is a sense, after all, in which the bourgeois revolution gave rise both to mechanistic materialism and the romantic (antibourgeois) and idealist reaction to it, as dialectical counterparts, just as the rise of Athenian civilisation produced both Socrates and the Sophists. Indeed, in the case of the towering figure of Kant, with his dichotomies of nature and reason, fact and value, both tendencies are united in the one thinker, and most of us will be accustomed to thinking of him as the epitome of Enlightenment. On Daly's account, however, Kant's position (like that of German idealism generally, only more so) is ambiguous, with one foot in each of the two camps. Which view is correct? I would say that both are: Daly's account is a valid perspectival switch (Bhaskar 1993: 401) from the traditional view (and vice versa). The one emphasises synchrony and novelty, at the expense of continuity, as Daly shows; the other diachrony and continuity, in particular in regard to class interest, arguably at the expense of novelty (which however is acknowledged, albeit perhaps a little grudgingly).

Two enlightenments, or three?

Daly is very much aware that the dialectical tradition, like its rival, suffers from the 'distortions' of class. Its experience of community was achieved on the pedestal of slavery and other forms of formally unfree labour. It is arguably, however, less compromised by class than mechanistic materialism, which today is straightforwardly bourgeois, in that it can also be seen as a recuperation of the pre-class outlook in which communal utilisation of resources was viewed as 'a natural and rational basis for all human relations'. In endorsing the earlier tradition (minus its class distortions) and espousing certain (recuperated) feudal values (nobility, honour)4, Daly runs the risk of appearing backward looking. However, Marx himself frequently and centrally deployed concepts of nobility and honour, as Daly points out (58). Further, Daly also sometimes seems to imply that the work of Marx heralds a third enlightenment on the basis of a sublating synthesis of the two traditions, both of which he rescued from their class distortions. Doubtless such a sublation is more preservative in relation to the earlier than to the later tradition, but Daly acknowledges that Marx 'belongs to modernity' and that he is indebted to the bourgeois revolution for both his technological Prometheanism and significant aspects of his social and political thought, such as the 'standpoint of labour' (that humans make the human world) and the values of genuine equality and democracy, albeit such values only 'accidentally and deceitfully' accompanied that revolution and are radically transformed by Marx. Daly therefore seems to want to claim both that Marx belongs to the first tradition and that he sublated both traditions in a third. The paradox is resolvable in part by considering that, while the third enlightenment has already occurred at the level of theory, it has yet to become the common sense of the age; Marx can be seen as heralding a third, which has yet to be achieved in any full way. It can be resolved fully, however, only by seeing Marx either as heavily influenced by spiritual enlightenment, rather than its adherent, or as heralding a new stage of human enlightenment from within - via a dialectical development of - the earlier tradition. Daly clear favours the latter. What we have in effect is his own version, at the level of the historical movement of philosophical thought, of the 'Neoplatonic […] Eden/ Fall/ Redemption motif [… which] sees the essence of things in terms of their ideal, the Alpha of their Edenic natural perfection' (Daly 2001). Daly contends that this motif was stressed by Marx in his last writings on the fate of the Russian agrarian commune, and seems to hint that Marx's own earlier Hegel-inspired three-part dialectic of being and having - from 'primitive' communal being, to private property and class having, and the return to full selfconscious communal being - is more aligned to the Whig view of history.

Irruption of the new

That this is Daly's overall position seems above all clear from his discussion of how we can choose between the two paradigms. In an argument recalling Bhaskar's distinction between 'epistemic relativism' and 'judgemental rationalism', he insists that the choice is a rational one, notwithstanding that 'the nature and status of reason itself is at issue' - i.e. that foundationalism or Archimedianism is false:

What are necessary and possible are holistic arguments and complex judgements, evaluating the two opposing constellations of concepts, values and methods for their adequacy to our best understanding of nature and reason. However, what will seem good reasons to a Socrates will not seem good reasons to a Callicles. Rationality requires of us a spiritual value orientation; if necessary a conversion, a metanoia. This is Plato's intention, and it took all twelve books of The Republic to carry it out. (14)

What Daly has in mind, of course, is no Kierkegaardian leap of faith against reason, but a leap that is founded in reason. His starting point is that of Marx (and Bhaskar), that the human being is a 'universal and therefore free being'. Plato's and especially Aristotle's claims to the universality of their reasoning had been vitiated by the distortions of property and class. Only the propertyless proletariat of our own epoch has the potential to become a genuinely 'universal class', because it 'has no other social need than the "radical human need" […] of meeting each other, not in some version of a master and slave relation, but […] as human beings' (58). However, the facing of its 'human situation' and the realisation of its potential requires 'a new orientation, away from the pursuit of pleasure, money and power, and towards the good', forged in the crucible of revolutionary practice (third thesis on Feuerbach). This involves a Benjaminian or Levinasian 'rupture with time' and 'irruption of the new': 'a breakthrough from nothingness to totality and infinity', a transition from a state of having to a state of being prefigured in 'the divine ecstasy of the lover, the madman, the poet', a transcendence of the bourgeois enlightenment in a 'wholly other', socialist enlightenment - 'from possessive individualist propertied Hell to communal Heaven' (41, 78). Such a concept of 'conversion' or metanoia clearly has a great deal in common with the Bhaskarian concept of 'shedding' or 'letting go' our alienated existence - the 'warp' on our true natures - in the transition to eudaimonia.

Everything would seem to depend here - as, indeed, in regard to the essentialism, ideal teleology and natural ethics of the tradition of spiritual enlightenment quite generally - on the argument for the dialectical unity of the human and divine mind, for the essential unity and goodness of reality. Daly at one point seems to imply to the contrary:

Crucially, Thomas argues that reason, not will, is the basis of natural law: God wills x because it is good; x is not good because God wills it. For Aquinas's natural law philosophy, even if God did not exist, x would be desirable to a rational mind if it is good; x is not good because it is desired, willed or commanded, whether by God, the Church, 'society', the Party, or the state. (16; my emphasis)

But - without in any way querying the rejection of a command theory of law here - it would seem that, if x is good, it is so in virtue of its essential nature or idea(l), which is ultimately grounded in the nature of God. Of course, it is possible to construct arguments which ground the ontological primacy of the good in, say, the process of biological and human evolution, without invoking God (Brereton 2000; Hartwig 2000), but this only shelves larger questions concerning why things should be so. Hence here too everything would in fact seem to depend on that 'holistic argument' for the overall position, issuing in a dialectical ascent to the divine; if God did not exist, everything would ultimately fail. It is an argument that Daly develops with a passion and insight that very much commands the respect of this agnostic reviewer.

Perfectionism

Daly's embracement of Marxian (and Bhaskarian) perfectionism puts him at odds with the 'anti-perfectionist' wing of critical realism (itself dividing into 'Popperian', or reformist, and 'Timpanaroian Marxist', or revolutionary, strands), which holds that the fallibility or fallenness (or both) of humanity entails that 'it is beyond the capacity of finite beings' to order society and live their lives according to 'a universal care ethic' (Collier 2001: 113-4). Daly is surely right here, in the sense that to rule out such a shift as impossible in advance is itself to attempt the impossible: to foreclose on possibility in an open world. It is not as though a leap into the utterly unknown is envisaged; people do have the capacity, among others, to love and trust one another, to dialectically universalise, and to understand, like Vermeer's Milk Maid, that virtue is its own reward. It is early days in the development of our species' powers. We may legitimately aspire to something more than that personification of instrumental rationality, Beckett's Hamm, who opines that 'here if you were careful you might die a nice natural death in peace and comfort'. Nor are such 'ruptures with time' without any sort of historical precedent; the irruption of human selfconsciousness, religion and art seventy thousand years ago, and the transition to master-slave type society some sixty thousand years later, are perhaps at least as momentous. Nor again is it easy to see how else the planet can be saved and its seething poor achieve a life 'worthy of our human nature'. Nor does perfectionism entail that we eschew or postpone amelioration of the human condition via reform. The standard liberal charge against rationalist perfectionism (echoed by Collier 2001: 13), with its positive view of freedom as self-government by reason, is of course that it leads to totalitarianism. Daly's response is that 'totalitarian power is not reason; and reason is not totalitarian power' (104). Eudaimonistic freedom demands the fullest possible development of individual freedom and the 'holistic politics of participatory democracy', including economic democracy. While this can only be achieved on the basis that those who oppose it 'can be forced to be free' (Rousseau), the same holds true of the 'negative' freedom as freedom from constraint that is enshrined in the market: bourgeois democracy and freedom by no means came into the world by the democratic road (Trotsky), and today people continue to be 'shelled into the enforced unity' of its 'negative freedom' (58). Isaiah Berlin's problem of 'positive freedom's negating true (i.e. negative) freedom' is therefore false.

Nightingalian self-evidence

Deals and Ideals is not an easy book to read. Ranging over the whole of western philosophy, it is very closely argued and necessarily presupposes considerable knowledge on the part of the reader. Sometimes repetitive and occasionally obscure, it is more often wonderfully illuminating and incisive, as when the essence of a mode of production is said to be production according to ability and distribution according to need - something which would have 'a Nightingalian self-evidence if we were shipwrecked on a desert island instead of being the inheritors of class modes of production'. (Florence Nightingale, it is explained, 'pointed out that whatever else hospitals do, they should not spread disease' (35)). It makes out a strong and plausible case for its central themes, and, importantly for critical realists, both illuminates the Bhaskarian project and elaborates aspects of it. It can be seen as a vindication of Alisdair MacIntyre's argument that 'the crucial moral opposition [in modernity] is between liberal individualism in some version or other and the Aristotelian tradition in some version or other' (MacIntyre 1981: 241), with the important difference that, unlike MacIntyre, Daly locates the thought of Marx within the Aristotelian tradition. Even those who are not persuaded by its main theses will find in it a rich source of insight and pointed argument on rationality, relativism, nature, freedom, justice, progress and much more.

Notes

1. This way of putting it was suggested to me by Tobin Nellhaus.

2. Marx's views on morality and justice are discussed at length in Daly (1996).

3. Whereby the perfection or ideal of things is 'their matter's being limited by nothing but their form, their idea, which also gives them their proper relation to the idea of other things' (20).

Cf Collier 2001: 106-7, 123, who opts for the 'alternative' feudal values of Robin Hood. Daly agrees (1996: x) that Robin Hood was invoking the natural law tradition against the Sheriff of Nottingham.

Cf Bhaskar 1986, who looks forward to 'the dawning of a new enlightenment, a socialist enlightenment which will stand to some future order of things, as the eighteenth-century bourgeois enlightenment stood to the American Declaration of Independence, the French revolution and the overthrow of colonial slavery for which it helped to prepare the cultural ground.'

Collier is careful to say 'terror and dictatorship', rather than 'totalitarianism', since he reserves the latter term for his own apt characterisation of the ideology of late capitalism as 'totalitarian commercialism'.

References

Bhaskar, Roy. 1986. Reclaiming Reality: a critical introduction to contemporary philosophy. London & New York: Verso.

Bhaskar, Roy. 1993. Dialectic: the Pulse of Freedom. London & New York: Verso.

Brereton, Derek. 2000. 'Ontic morality and human being'. Alethia 3 (2): 21-28.

Collier, Andrew 2001. Christianity and Marxism: A philosophical contribution to their reconciliation. London: Routledge.

Daly, James 1996. Marx, Justice and Dialectic. London: Greenwich Exchange.

Daly, James 2000. Dialectical enlightenment [review of Roy Bhaskar's From East to West]. Alethia 3 (2): 11-13.

Daly, James 2001. Religious sensibility. bhaskar@lists.village.virginia.edu, 7th July (cited with permission).

Hartwig, Mervyn. 2001. 'New Left, New Age, New Paradigm? Roy Bhaskar's From East to West'. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 31 (2): 139-166.

MacIntyre, Alisdair 1981. After Virtue: a study in moral theory. London: Duckworth.