9 Philosophy
Bo Harvey
Society is like a game which is not centrally directed. If it were, society would be more like ‘an army’ than a game. Laws and government are there to ensure the game does not break down.
This ‘ordinary language philosophy’ expects dissolution of philosophical problems. (Rather than solution, for these were not real problems).
If philosophical problems are understood to be conceptual, and all conceptual issues have to do with linguistic custom, close enough analysis of linguistic custom and usage entails their dissolution. There is nothing in the world itself that is problematical—much less contradictory.
Trouble arises in our way of speaking and use of concepts, and the job of the philosophy is to ensure proper use to, ‘ensure the identity and stability of the system, by preventing unorthodox moves within it.’
The true origins of philosophical problems, in other words, exist at the level of logical rather than historical genesis.
An increased faith in philosophy’s ability to change the world was constructed in the wake of political philosophy’s Rawlsian rebirth— much akin to the increased philosophical faith in the disappearance of philosophical problems by ordinary language philosophy.
Rawlsians emphasized consensus-seeking deliberation, legalistic formulations of political problems, and a focus on individual ethics in the face of the horrors of history; but they largely did not address questions regarding the role of conflict in constituting social relations, notions of power and the substantive theorisation of the state, the relation of capitalism to democracy, and the role of the history of racism and colonialism
Exactly what is ‘ordinary’ about the concept of ‘ordinary’ internal to ‘ordinary language philosophy’ might have been more obvious to its originators at Oxford than it was to anyone else. Though perhaps one can see how this ordinariness might be contrasted with the comparatively unordinary babble of foreigners—particularly if they are French. At almost the same time as the publication of Rawls’ Theory of Justice in 1971, new intellectual influences—precisely those denaturalising, anti-essentialising, and particularising ones—entered Anglo-American academies. Humanities and social science disciplines in Anglo-American universities were in many ways wholly transformed following the reception of mid-century French and German thought, despite—or, perhaps, precisely because of—the fact that this transformation took place on theoretical bases that bore little relation to the particular histories of the different disciplines which received them.
The name for this transformation has been retrospectively called ‘Theory’, but has also been termed, with varying degrees of relevance, accuracy, and redundancy, ‘critical theory’, ‘postmodernism’, ‘Western Marxism’, ‘critical Marxism’, and, now more notoriously, ‘cultural Marxism’. These are of course some of the denaturalizing, anti-essentialising, and particularising forces that uniquely under-affected political philosophy, yet out of these influences arose a conceptual vocabulary that could be used to think through much of what Rawls is now seen to have left out. The widespread influence of Foucault in cultural studies, sociology, intellectual history, literary theory, and anthropology (but not liberal egalitarian political philosophy)—particularly in terms of his theorisation of power—is but one paradigmatic example.
‘Theory’, of course, resembles philosophy insofar as philosophy is construed as a kind of meta-discipline. At the same time, it is self-evidently separate from disciplinary philosophy. This is the case even though much of what informs ‘Theory’ is itself often predicated upon critiques of what was understood as philosophy as itself a self-sufficient discipline.
It can be easy to forget that the received divisions between intellectual disciplines is largely a nineteenth-century institutional phenomenon, and whether one locates their origins to the beginnings of the ‘classical age’, the medieval university, or the European Enlightenment, the history of intellectual disciplines is more discontinuous than the stories they tell themselves about themselves.
Classical political economy ‘forgets’ the inequality subtending all bourgeois equality. In the Rawlsian social-contractual tradition, the ‘original position’ qua thought-experiment replaces the fictitious primordial condition of equal exchange, but its function is the same. In the first instance, theoretical analysis is replaced by imaginary history. In the second instance, theoretical analysis is replaced by a game. Through this lens, the ‘ideological function’ of political philosophy writ large becomes one of obfuscation. ‘We need a Marxist political philosophy’ is a thought that has spawned countless urgent re-thinkings, but one wonders whether Marx—that critic of philosophy who nevertheless saw the need to critically reflect on its forms—would have thought ‘Marxist political philosophy’ a contradiction in terms.
Harvey (2023) The Future of Political Philosophy
9.1 Cartesian Disconnect
Eddebo
I think that modern philosophy’s almost feverish quest to find its way back to reality and get out of the dreamlike shadow world of skepticism is in many ways an expression of trauma. That this fixation on one’s own self as cut off from the outside world, and the corresponding approach to the external world around us as a pile of dead, abstract and replaceable objects that we can plunder and subdue as best we like, I think we have to consider all of this as a set of unhealthy coping strategies that have emerged in a culture marked by generations of trauma.
Trauma that has to do with the enormous upheavals connected to modernity in all its aspects, not least industrialization and the radical changes in production conditions and relationships between people, and between people and the outside world, that industrialization brought about.
But this disconnect is thus in many ways the basic issue of modern philosophy.
And if we raise our perspective a little bit, we see a distinct pattern of thought from the late Middle Ages until today that is characterized by this rift between the self and the world.
Historically, this movement runs from nominalism in the struggle of universals, then via the Reformation, Bacon and Descartes to Hegel, Kant, empiricism, rationalism, and out of this ideological muddle, perhaps mainly from French utopian socialism and British political economy, then grows the modern ideologies, which then end up in an historical end point in logical positivism and existentialism as a kind of diametrically opposed set of answers to this basic problem with the world outside the self - in the end we then come all the way to secularization, to the radical dissolution of postmodernism and whatever we’re supposed to call this unique condition of our time.
John Zerzan, the American primitivist thinker, writes the following:
Since the Neolithic, there has been a steadily increasing dependence on technology, civilization’s material culture. As Horkheimer and Adorno pointed out, the history of civilization is the history of renunciation. One gets less than one puts in. This is the fraud of technoculture, and the hidden core of domestication: the growing impoverishment - of self, society, and Earth. Meanwhile, modern subjects hope that somehow the promise of yet more modernity will heal the wounds that afflict them.
A defining feature of the present world is built-in disaster, now announcing itself on a daily basis. But the crisis facing the biosphere is arguably less noticeable and compelling, in the First World at least, than everyday alienation, despair, and entrapment in a routinized, meaningless control grid.
Influence over even the smallest event or circumstance drains steadily away, as global systems of production and exchange destroy local particularity, distinctiveness, and custom. Gone is an earlier pre-eminence of place, increasingly replaced by what Pico Ayer calls “airport culture” — rootless, urban, and homogenized.
Descartes’ entire philosophy is, in a sense, one big coping project relating to man’s existential vulnerability in a time where all traditional relationships are seriously beginning to get torn apart, when the great upheavals of modernity are taking a more concrete form - even if Descartes’ thinking still confirmed reproduced this disintegration in his radical distinction between body and soul. And this obstacle that Descartes formulated and then tried to get around is thus, in various ways, taken for granted as a starting point for basically the entire philosophical and scientific work of the modern period that follows.
Hegel, he also clearly sees this civilizational trauma and tries to come to terms with the dichotomies, but then also takes the disintegration for granted. He tries to put the body, the world and the soul back together with the help of his dialectical method. And on this road it is. Immanuel Kant tries to find his way back to the thing in itself, to the unadulterated reality. Durkheim builds the science of sociology around the analysis of anomie and perceived rootlessness. Freud emphasizes how civilization is characterized by a radical “discontent with culture”. We have Kierkegaard weaving his philosophy around the concept of anxiety. Sartre’s existential desperation and disgust at the experience of being. And Marx, not least Marx, who builds most of his political and economic theory around alienation, around the condition of being alienated from oneself, one’s surroundings, and the fruits of one’s work.
Modernity is characterized by separation, and reproduces this separation in our experience of reality and ourselves.