The Sophistic and the Platonic Enlightenments
The claim to rationality is disputed by two rival enlightenments. They
collided in the dispute between Plato’s Socrates and the Sophists. On the one side
was a secular, Promethean, in principle a-moral enlightenment in the technology of means
to the ends of individual survival, pleasure and power, with an instrumental view of
politics. On the other was a religiously oriented enlightenment about the dialectical
ascent to moral and spiritual dimensions of reality. The first returned in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries. In my opinion Hegel’s idealist response failed to criticise
or transcend it; that task was completed by Marx.
Marx’s thought could be seen as a critical appropriation of both
the modern secular enlightenment, concerned with economic ‘Man’, and the
dialectical enlightenment concerned with the spiritual element in the human being
traditionally seen as shared with the divine, ‘Mind’. Subsequent Marxism has
almost invariably defined itself as the final development of ‘the (unique)
Enlightenment’. But Marx’s acknowledged debt to Aristotle, for instance, is
becoming ever clearer. Habermas has defined as ‘an irreversible achievement of
modernity’ the separation of morality, politics and economics. But Marx attacked that
position in ‘On the Jewish Question’ as the very essence of what was wrong with
bourgeois society. He defended Aristotle’s principle, that the human being is a zoon
politikon by nature. He held a non-hedonist, non-agonistic concept of human nature as
did Plato in opposition to the Sophists’ reductionism. He invoked old and new ideals
together in the phrase ‘the nobility of man’ shining forth from
the toil-worn bodies of the French communist workers.
The Sophists claimed that laws are man-made, to further
individuals’ interests in survival and pleasure. They also claimed that there was no
rational necessity for one person to be a slave and another a property owner, but simply
human will expressed in conventions. By nature, (i.e. in terms of pure reason, without the
arbitrary interference of will) all human beings are free and equal. This thinking away of
will and convention to arrive at the possibility of universal thought grounding freedom
and equality was an epoch-making philosophical turn. The Socratic/ Platonic/Aristotelian
tradition’s response was a justification of laws by universal reason defining the
natural good of natural kinds, such as the human, and challenging the Sophists’
conceptions of freedom and equality. This eventually developed into the Stoic theory of
the law of nature, and later into the natural law theory as it was developed by Aquinas.
For the Sophists convention was a necessary renunciation of the
infliction of harm, in the hope that in return one would not be harmed oneself. In this
Hobbesian form it recurred in the seventeenth century, grounding the Enlightenment value
of freedom as the ability without hindrance from others to pursue one’s pleasure. The
other Enlightenment value, equality, was taken as meaning that no one had a greater right
to control of resources than anyone else, and that in that area decisions would be a
matter for war, unless the belligerents adopted more enlightened means, political
bargaining. The outcome of that would be firstly the equality of formal, procedural,
abstract universality—impartiality, equality under the law, fairness, like cases to
be treated alike, as in Bentham’s ‘everyone to count for one and nobody for more
than one’—and secondly, the equality of (fair) exchange, quid pro quo,
which is also the measure of justice as desert.
The antithetical Platonic enlightenment identified the real with the
rational, and the rational with the natural, the right, the proper and the due, the just,
what ought to be. The nature of any being, for instance the human, is grasped only in a
fully adequate, rich dialectical teleological concept. Freedom is the power to
govern oneself by reason. For most in this tradition, justice as equality meant that all
resources should belong equally to everyone as part of the community. For this tradition,
philosophy is a spiritual way of life, an orientation to the infinitude of mind. It is a
necessary human good which it is the moral and political responsibility of philosophical
rulers to see that each member of the community shares in, according to ability, if only
by being enabled to live according to laws which recreate the original ideal pattern. Ananke,
crisis, may force the philosophers to take over government of the city; but they will do
this by radically changing the community’s orientation, not by continuing in the
instrumentally rational, pleasure/power-oriented politics which led to the crisis. Marx
has a significantly similar approach to the need for a purifying change of heart, getting
rid of the selfish ‘muck of ages’, if the proletarian revolution is to succeed.
Modernity
The Anglo-French enlightenment which is the main driving force behind
modern morality, economics, and politics replaced such newly-named
‘obscurantism’ with its enlightenment; empiricism, hedonism, the analytic
method, and a mechanistic, causal-explanatory concept of science (knowledge) modelled, as
was thought philosophically necessary, on Galilean physics —even, in the extreme
case, reduced to it. The result was a position very like the Sophists’. For such
scientism, reason is instrumental to desire or pleasure; ‘ought’ cannot (as it
can in the Aristotelian concept of nature) be derived from ‘is’. The way to this
had been prepared by Ockham. He rejected the Thomist theory of the rationality of the
natural moral law and of the subjection of all human to natural law, and replaced it with
the arbitrary will of God. This wide-spread position was later strengthened by the divorce
of fact and value, of nature and reason, resulting from the Cartesian theory of nature as
mechanism divorced from mind, without the traditional intermediate biological dimension.
In the Anglo-French ideology-critique the mechanism of an alleged
measurable sensation of pleasure became the source of a new morality and politics. Laws
had hitherto been the conspiracy of priests and kings to deceive and control
‘man’. There was no such thing as their pretended organic community, only a
collection of individuals each mechanically determined by his or her own pleasure. In a
claim to universality, ‘man’ must therefore be liberated to follow the laws of
nature and reason, mainly the market. There the profit-seeking of rationally and fairly
competing hedonistic egoists would ensure the only natural and rational human good, the
greatest pleasure of the greatest number. Here ‘rationally’ means, in
Hume’s thermodynamic metaphor, coolly calculating one’s interests, not being
carried away by unprofitable heated passions. That however not only demotes reason, but
raises selfish desires to a plane from which they had formerly been excluded; ‘the
rational’ had been taken hitherto to mean the spiritual, and ‘the passions’
had included desires for the pleasant or the useful, however ‘cool’ they might
be.
The mechanical view of nature entailed that the given is not the will
of God, and ‘man’is freed to dominate and direct nature according to his will
and pleasure, by his labour. The political and social are also to be mechanically
understood and controlled. Pleasures are events in nature, morally neutral. The
government’s task is a social engineering one; so to organise pleasure-seekers’
behaviour as to ensure that as many desires for pleasure as possible are fulfilled. The
market, which is an exchange of pleasures, is a paradigm case of freedom and justice (or
equality), the expression of economic ‘man’s’ will. ‘Man’ is pre-
and a-social, (a condition graphically illustrated nowadays by the independent position of
mobile global capital relative to any given state). Each individual is free and equal and
competitive with others for pleasure, property in resources, and power. The idea of common
ownership as natural and rational is rejected; even the traditional idea of ‘the
common good’ as being required by the infinitude of reason is rejected in favour of
finite, measurable utility.
Beginning with Rousseau, the religiously oriented romantic protest
against this system was an element in German Idealism. Yet in Hegel that philosophy became
the German version of the Whig interpretation of history, an accommodation to the modern
bourgeois enlightenment. In strict accordance with his own conception of reason and of
philosophy, Hegel’s thought must be its own self-interpretation by ‘a form of
life grown old’—in fact, the principles of the Lutheran revolution in
Christianity. The basis of Hegel’s philosophy of right was the security of the
individual property-owner, in a community of individualists. It was an idyllic patrician
burgher version of secular modernity, supervised by an aristocratic bureaucracy, and Hegel
had no answer to the growing problem of incorporating the ‘rabble’ of
propertyless proletarians in the emerging free capitalist market.
Marx Unites the Two Enlightenments Critically
Marx criticises Promethean justifications of the bourgeois mode of
production, as not being Promethean enough. Its ethos, production for production’s
sake, is indeed a potential source of true human wealth. But in actual fact the economic
system, the need of money to buy, and of profit to sell, is restrictive of production, for
instance in recessions and depressions due to unprofitability.
The bourgeoisie also justifies its markets (MCM’ and MM’) as
the abolition of slavery and the means of attaining the chief enlightenment values,
freedom and equality. But despite deceptive appearances, it is a new form of the age-old
extraction of surplus labour, namely wage-slavery. It is not a case of the liberals’
‘freedom, with equal freedom for others’. In its surface appearance it is that
formally; the commodities labour-power and wages are freely and equivalently (in
ideological terms ‘fairly’) exchanged. But labour-power is a unique
commodity. It is used as labour, to create more value (money-wealth) than its own
value (the subsistence wage required to reproduce it). The surplus is the property of the
buyer,—and hence legitimate user—of the commodity, namely the capitalist,
to be appropriated as profit, interest and rent. The labourer receives in wages the
equivalent of the value produced by half of his day’s labour, which can therefore be
considered paid. The other half is unpaid—and that exploitation is unavoidably
coerced by the mode of production as a totality. It follows that the system is also not
the liberals’ ‘freedom, but not to harm others’, since the capitalist is
free precisely to exploit. Freedom, even for workers, to hold antinomian opinions can,
however, be tolerated; significantly, agreement on ideals is unnecessary, since market
discipline is sufficient for social control; while relativistically agreeing to differ
over ideals helps baffle criticism.
The capitalist mode of production is also, as we have seen, not a case
of equality (justice). In terms of distributive justice there is not equality of access to
resources (means of production). Some have capital with which to exploit, others only
labour-power with which to be exploited. That primary distribution also determines the
secondary distribution, that of income: the capitalists get profit, interest and rent, the
labourer wages. That form of distribution of income is also the reproduction of the
exploitative capitalist relations of production; surplus value is appropriated as profit,
and returns as capital to further exploit the labourer. Finally, since today’s wages
come from yesterday’s profit, the worker in the final analysis works, not for an
exchange of wages, but for nothing. This is nihil pro quo, the maximum of
commutative injustice, of inequality of ‘exchange’.
However, Marx rises above narrow individualistic and moralistic
concerns about injustice in piecemeal remuneration.. He is concerned with the ontological
injustice of the system: the denial of humanity; the coerced alienation of human essential
life-activity into becoming a commodity, competing with machines and other commodities;
the deliberate prevention of a system of production for each other, one ‘worthy of
their human nature’ (Capital III).
But Marx retains basic Promethean values: technology, creativity,
change, including self-change, democracy. For Marx, however, democracy confined to a
political sphere is a diversion from the real democracy of ownership and control of
economic resources, which would need to be both participatory (at least delegational) and
international—the unity of the living human race for-itself, not of an abstract
undifferentiated ‘man’. He retains Feuerbach’s rejection as alienation of
the projection of all human excellences on to God, and the treatment of ‘man’ as
a ‘degraded, abandoned, contemptible being’, dependent on the arbitrary will of
a tyrannical God. That however is by no means a universal religious or Christian ideal:
according to Feuerbach, who claims his philosophy is ‘true religion’, the
essence of Christianity is love.
Marx also criticised idealism but in some very particular ways.
Idealism means, in its Platonic sense, judging imperfect empirical reality critically in
the light of ideals, essences which are really real. The idealism Marx criticised was the
exact opposite of that. It was Hegel’s rationalisation, idealisation,
‘transfiguration and glorification’ of empirical bourgeois ‘man’ and
the world he had created, private property and the market. It also included the insistence
on ‘self-consciousness’, the return of the intellectual I to the I. Feuerbach
had criticised this and replaced it as the spiritual ideal with the love of the sensuous I
for the Thou. Against both Cartesian distortions, the abstract materialism of Hobbesian,
Benthamite man, and the abstract idealism of the I, with its Cartesian, Kantian,
Stirnerian (later Sartrian) absolute freedom, Marx argued the other enlightenment
position—what he called ‘materialism’, namely recognition of the
causal influence (not determinism) of the environment (in Marx’s case principally
class) on behaviour and thought. This does not rule out free-will (for instance that of
the businessman Engels) in the sense of Aristotelian voluntariness, nor the criteria of
validity for thought, or science.
But Marx retains key elements of the notion of human nature in the
Platonic-Aristotelian idealist enlightenment. ‘Man’ is a ‘universal,
therefore free being’, ‘understanding things according to the laws of their
species’, and ‘creating according to the laws of beauty’. Whereas hitherto
the pretended universality of reason had been distorted owing to the exploitative nature
of class, the propertyless proletariat had no other class to exploit, and so could
genuinely be the ‘universal class’ and attain pure rationality, free of
ideology. Marx’s notions of the freedom and justice that the proletarian revolution
of classlessness would bring about are basically those of the dialectical or idealist
tradition updated to the modern world. Rational or positive freedom would be class
emancipation, classless production, self-realisation (self-creation, though not ex
nihilo), authenticity; there would no longer be any domination (rule by the stronger).
Justice (obviously in both enlightenments closely intertwined with freedom as jointly the
opposite of slavery) would be common ownership and control of resources, production for
the common good according to ability, distribution according to need rationally and
democratically agreed in institutionally encouraged good will; with the maximum of freedom
within those limits, and an ever widening choice of goods and values—a perfectionist
pluralism.
Conclusion: The Possibility of Perfectionism
Marx’s chief value, humanism, is participation in creative loving
production. ‘Supposing we had produced in a human manner .... I would have realised
that I am confirmed both in your thought and in your love’. Habermas’s settling
for justice as abstract proceduralism, which explicitly rejects Marx’s perfectionist
project, is motivated by an unwarranted scepticism about the rationality of such a value.
The difficulties inherent in rational decisions about values are often exaggerated into
claims of intrinsic general undecidability as in Satre’s famous case of the young
Frenchman who had to choose between the resistance and caring for his mother; the
preoccupation with hard cases also diverts attention from the wide agreements between
values. The same scepticism led Isaiah Berlin to his unnecessary dichotomisation of
liberty, and to the—again unnecessary—association of his notorious
‘positive’ freedom with totalitarianism, and thence to the option for the
cold-war view that ‘negative’ freedom is the only freedom. Habermas, in somewhat
parochial defence of Germany’s post-war American-style democracy, is too uncritical
of the claim that anti-perfectionism and a ‘thin’ theory of the good are its
necessary base and also that of liberalism; they are not found, for instance, even in John
Stuart Mill, whose Benthanism was moderated by the idealism of Coleridge.
The justified concern with the liberal good of what Joseph Raz calls
‘personal autonomy’ does not require retreat to a politics which is basically
one of Hobbesian confrontation. That is the posture of threatened war over ‘scarce
resources’, not of the humanist enterprise of seeking the most ideal ideal.
Disagreement over hard cases should not be allowed to engender bad laws. The view of the
human good as pleasure, and ideals as pure loss, might arguably be best served by the
market and majority voting. But Rawls argues that we must take a democratic approach also
to ideals. This is surely to misrepresent ideals, putting them in the same category
as preferences. That practice was encouraged by Hume’s calling them felt
‘sentiments’, but begun by Hobbes’s levelling ’whatever each man
desires, that is it which he for his part calleth good’. That fundamental
Enlightenment claim is factually false: human beings would not survive if they did not
distinguish the pleasant from the good, the coating from the pill. MacIntyre’s
’Enlightenment project’ has been the impossible attempt to derive the good from
the selfish pleasant, reason from will. Ideal differences, even the hardest cases such as
those over the justice of the caste-system, are differences within the spiritual. Ideals
and values such as nobility—or enlightenment—make claims to truth and goodness
which must be verified not more geometrico, but by theoretical and practical
reasoning, in dialogue. Otherwise they will be decided by war, or by the
continuation of war in the economic or political market, contrary to their nature.
It should no longer be possible after Auschwicz to seriously consider
arguments for relativism and ‘anti-perfectionism’ which depend for their
validity on considering genocide as a possible human value. Inheritors of ‘the’
Enlightenment should not use such a Hobbesian concept of rationality against
‘perfectionist’ theories of rationality, of which Marx’s—as an
inheritor of both enlightenments—was undoubtedly one.
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