Defending Objectivity: Essays in Honour of Andrew Collier

Defending Objectivity

Andrew Collier is the boldest defender of objectivity – in science, knowledge, thought, action, politics, morality and religion. In this tribute to Andrew, his colleagues acknowledge the influence he has had upon them. They show that they have been challenged by his thinking and, in turn, offer challenging responses to him. This wide-ranging book covers key areas with which defenders of objectivity often have to engage. Sections are devoted to the following: • • • •

• • •

The ‘Objectivity of value’ – are things of value in the world, independently of the labels we subjectively attach to them? ‘Objectivity and everyday knowledge’ – do our workday practices possess an objectivity which our theories do not, or vice versa? ‘Objectivity and materialism’ – does that which is materially based have a special claim to being objective? ‘Objectivity in political economy’ – is the moral dimension systematically distorted in economic and social theory and can such a claim be substantiated? ‘Objectivity and reflexivity’ – can we reason and reason reflexively without undermining the very objectivity we seek to defend? ‘Objectivity, postmodernism and feminism’ – can these common attacks upon objectivity remain coherent or are they necessarily self-undermining? ‘Objectivity and nature’ – is appreciation of nature or advocacy of deep ecology dependent upon the objective value of the natural world?

The diverse contributions range from social and political thought to philosophy, reflecting the central themes of Collier’s work. Margaret S. Archer is Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick. She is a Trustee of the Centre for Critical Realism. William Outhwaite is Professor of Sociology at the University of Sussex. He is an associate editor of the European Journal of Social Theory.

Critical realism: interventions Edited by Margaret Archer, Roy Bhaskar, Andrew Collier, Nick Hostettler, Tony Lawson and Alan Norrie.

Critical realism is one of the most influential new developments in the philosophy of science and in the social sciences, providing a powerful alternative to positivism and postmodernism. This series will explore the critical realist position in philosophy and across the social sciences. Critical realism Essential readings Edited by Margaret Archer, Roy Bhaskar, Andrew Collier, Tony Lawson and Alan Norrie

Rational Choice Theory Resisting colonisation Edited by Margaret Archer and Jonathan Q. Tritter

The Possibility of Naturalism (3rd edition) A philosophical critique of the contemporary human sciences Roy Bhaskar

Explaining Society Critical realism in the social sciences Berth Danermark, Mats Ekström, Jan Ch. Karlsson and Liselotte Jakobsen

Being and Worth Andrew Collier Quantum Theory and the Flight from Realism Philosophical responses to quantum mechanics Christopher Norris From East to West Odyssey of a soul Roy Bhaskar Realism and Racism Concepts of race in sociological research Bob Carter

Critical Realism and Marxism Edited by Andrew Brown, Steve Fleetwood and John Michael Roberts Critical Realism in Economics Edited by Steve Fleetwood Realist Perspectives on Management and Organisations Edited by Stephen Ackroyd and Steve Fleetwood After International Relations Critical realism and the (re)construction of world politics Heikki Patomaki

Capitalism and Citizenship The impossible partnership Kathryn Dean Philosophy of Language and the Challenge to Scientific Realism Christopher Norris Transcendence Critical realism and God Margaret S. Archer, Andrew Collier and Douglas V. Porpora Also published by Routledge

Routledge studies in critical realism Edited by Margaret Archer, Roy Bhaskar, Andrew Collier, Nick Hostettler, Tony Lawson and Alan Norrie. Marxism and Realism A materialistic application of realism in the social science Sean Creaven Beyond Relativism Raymond Boudon, cognitive rationality and critical realism Cynthia Lins Hamlin Education Policy and Realist Social Theory Primary teachers, child-centred philosophy and the new managerialism Robert Wilmott Hegemony A realist analysis Jonathan Joseph

Realism and Sociology Anti-foundationalism, ontology and social research Justin Cruickshank Critical Realism The difference it makes Edited by Justin Cruickshank Critical Realism and Composition Theory Donald Judd On Christian Belief A defence of a cognitive conception of religious belief in a Christian context Andrew Collier In Defence of Objectivity and Other Essays Andrew Collier Realism, Discourse and Deconstruction Edited by Jonathan Joseph and John Michael Roberts Critical Realism, Postpositivism and the Possibility of Knowledge Ruth Groff Defending Objectivity Essays in honour of Andrew Collier Edited by Margaret S. Archer and William Outhwaite

Defending Objectivity Essays in honour of Andrew Collier

Edited by Margaret S. Archer and William Outhwaite

First published in 2004 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004. © 2004 Margaret S. Archer and William Outhwaite selection and editorial matter; individual chapters the contributors All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested. ISBN 0-203-43397-1 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-67979-2 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0–415–338239 (Print Edition)

Contents

Notes on contributors Foreword

xi xv

PART I

Encounters with Andrew Collier 1

A considerable realist: a personal and intellectual tribute to Andrew Collier

1

3

ROY B H A S K A R

2

Losing the plot

14

RU T H M E RT T E N S

PART II

Critiques of counter-objectivity 3

Objectivity, postmodernism and biographical understanding: Andrew Collier on R.D. Laing

31

33

R AY M O N K

4

Objectivity and phallogocentrism

48

D O U G L A S V. P O R P O R A

PART III

The objectivity of value

61

5

63

The objectivity of value ALISON ASSITER

viii 6

Contents Commerce and the language of value

75

JOHN O’NEILL

7

Restoring the moral dimension in social scientific accounts: a qualified ethical naturalist approach

93

A N D R E W S AY E R

PART IV

Objectivity and everyday knowledge

115

8

117

Objectivity and the growth of knowledge M A RG A R E T S . A RC H E R

9

Practical knowledge and realism: linking Andrew Collier on lay knowledge to Karl Popper on the philosophy of science

129

J U S T I N C RU I C K S H A N K

10 Being and knowledge

143

J O N AT H A N J O S E P H

PART V

Objectivity and materialism

159

11 Towards objectivity: from Kant to Marx

161

J O LYO N A G A R

12 The contradictions of capital

183

C H R I S T O P H E R J. A RT H U R

13 Understanding objectivity in a material world P H I L WA L D E N

199

Contents ix PART VI

Objectivity and reflexivity

211

14 Reason and its own self-undoing?

213

ALAN MONTEFIORE

15 Intentional and reflexive objectivity: some reflections

226

W I L L I A M O U T H WA I T E

PART VII

Objectivity and nature

237

16 Realism about the value of nature? Andrew Collier’s environmental philosophy

239

T E D B E N TO N

17 Objectivity, experience and the aesthetic of nature

251

K AT E S O P E R

Index

261

Contributors

Jolyon Agar teaches political theory at Queen’s University, Belfast. His most recent publication is ‘G.A. Cohen’s Functional Explanation: A Critical Realist Analysis’ (Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 2003). His current research focuses on the connection between Bhaskar’s critical realism and dialectical critical realism and the relationship between the philosophies of Kant, Hegel and Marx. Margaret S. Archer is Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick and her main interests are in social theory, specifically in both understanding and explaining the linkage between structure and agency. She is a past President of the International Sociological Association. Her latest book is Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation (Cambridge University Press, 2003). Christopher J. Arthur taught philosophy at the University of Sussex. His publications include Dialectics of Labour (Blackwell, 1986) and The New Dialectic and Marx’s Capital (Brill, 2002). Alison Assiter is Assistant Vice-Chancellor at the University of the West of England and Professor of Feminist Theory; her publications include Enlightened Women (Routledge 1996) and Revisiting Universalism (Macmillan, 2003). Ted Benton is Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex. His interests include biology, the environment and philosophy of science. He has recently published Philosophy of Social Science (with Ian Craib; Palgrave, 2001). Roy Bhaskar is the founder of the Centre for Critical Realism. His books include The Possibility of Naturalism (Harvester, 1979), A Realist Theory of Science (Leeds Books, 1975), Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom (Verso, 1993) and The Philosophy of Meta-Reality (Sage, 2002). He is currently Visiting Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in Social Science (SCASS). Justin Cruickshank is a lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the University of Birmingham. His research deals with the tensions within critical realism concerning ontology and epistemology, the notion of canonicity in

xii

Contributors sociology and the relationship of pragmatism to social thought. He is the author of Realism and Sociology (Routledge, 2003).

Jonathan Joseph studied philosophy at Southampton under the supervision of Andrew Collier. His PhD has been published as Hegemony: A Realist Analysis (Routledge, 2002). He has also published Social Theory: Conflict, Cohesion and Consent (Edinburgh University Press, 2003) and has edited Realism, Discourse and Deconstruction (with John Roberts; Routledge, 2003). He teaches in the Department of International Politics at Aberystwyth. Ruth Merttens tutored at London University in the 1970s, after which she became a teacher. She now specialises in Primary Education as well as currently directing the Hamilton Maths and Reading Projects in Oxford. Her areas of academic interest remain at the intersection of theology with practice – educational, political and moral. Ray Monk is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southampton. He has written biographies of Wittgenstein and Russell, and is currently writing a biography of the physicist, Robert Oppenheimer. Alan Montefiore is an Emeritus Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford. He is now Visiting Professor at the Centre for European Philosophy at Middlesex University. He is also President of the Wiener Library in London and of the Forum for European Philosophy, and is a past Chairman of the Froebel Educational Institute. He has published books on moral philosophy, the University and political commitment, contemporary French philosophy, the political responsibility of intellectuals and the relationship between the causal description and explanation of goal-directed behaviour. He is currently working on aspects of the relations between personal and cultural identity and hopes to produce a book on his reading of Kant. John O’Neill is Professor of Philosophy at Lancaster University. He has written widely on the philosophy of economics, social and political theory, environmental philosophy, and the philosophy of science. His books include The Market: Ethics, Knowledge and Politics (Routledge, 1998) and Ecology, Policy and Politics: Human Well-being and the Natural World (Routledge, 1993). William Outhwaite is Professor of Sociology at the University of Sussex. His research interests include the philosophy of social science (especially realism), social theory (especially critical theory and contemporary European social theory), political sociology, and the sociology of knowledge. He is the author of Understanding Social Life: The Method Called Verstehen (Allen and Unwin, 1975), Concept Formation in Social Science (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), New Philosophies of Social Science: Realism, Hermeneutics and Critical Theory (Macmillan, 1987), and Habermas: A Critical Introduction (Polity Press, 1994).

Contributors

xiii

Douglas V. Porpora is a sociologist who is Professor and Head of the Department of Culture and Communication at Drexel University, Philadelphia. His latest book is Landscapes of the Soul: The Loss of Moral Meaning in American Life (Oxford University Press, 2001). Andrew Sayer is Professor of Social Theory and Political Economy at Lancaster University’s Sociology department. His books include Realism and Social Science (Sage, 2000), and he is currently working on moral economy. Kate Soper is Professor of Philosophy at the University of North London. Her publications include What is Nature? (Blackwell, 1996) and To Relish the Sublime (with Martin Ryle; Verso, 2002). Phil Walden completed a PhD under Andrew Collier’s supervision in 2002, entitled ‘The Rise, Decline and Revival of Dialectical Materialism’. He has just taken up a post at Ruskin College, Oxford.

Foreword

This Festschrift was conceived in the Spring of 2003. The principal aim was, of course, to present Andrew Collier with a tribute to the enormous affection in which he is held by all who know him and to the enormous influence which his remarkably creative and original work has had over a wide readership. The publication, in June 2003, of Andrew’s important volume of essays, In Defence of Objectivity, gave a clear focus to the project; contributors were provided with a copy of the title essay, and many of the contributions refer explicitly to this book. A special seminar in the Critical Realism series, held on a beautiful Midsummer’s Day, enabled contributors to present preliminary versions of their arguments and to hear Andrew’s characteristically generous and witty responses. Six weeks later, final versions were in, and Routledge generously accelerated the production of the volume. Andrew Collier was born in 1944 and studied philosophy at the University of London. After temporary jobs at Warwick and Sussex, he taught at Bangor for fifteen years, moving to Southampton in 1988 on the closure of the Bangor philosophy department. He has quietly but steadily built up a major reputation as one of the UK’s leading realist and socialist philosophers, and his work on realism has succeeded in making accessible even the most difficult parts of Roy Bhaskar’s work. Andrew is an enormously widely read and wide-ranging thinker, equally at home across a wide range of topics in social and political thought as in philosophy. These essays reflect central themes in his work, notably in realist philosophy and in socialist and ecological thought. His early and continuing interest in existential psychoanalysis and motifs of encounter and self-forming is reflected in a personal memoir by Ruth Merrtens which we have placed alongside Roy Bhaskar’s. Since Andrew has produced a boldly unfashionable defence of objectivity, Ray Monk and Doug Porpora examine the merits of social science, whose objective is to produce objective knowledge, in comparison with two currently fashionable alternatives – poststructuralism and postmodernism. Next, one of Andrew’s most challenging arguments, put forward in Being and Worth, is for the objectivity of value, in the strong sense that values are inherent in the nature of things and are not matters of human orientations to them.

xvi Foreword Alison Assiter provides a critical discussion of this argument, whilst John O’Neill takes up the falsely objective de-moralisation of language in economics and Andrew Sayer defends the need to restore a moral dimension to social theorising and analysis. In the following section, Margaret Archer, Justin Cruickshank and Jonathan Joseph address Andrew’s approach to the theme of everyday knowledge. In their different ways, these contributions focus upon the relationships between theory and practice in the development of knowledge, and whether both kinds of knowledge make claims to objectivity which necessarily imply realism. In the fifth section, Joly Agar, Chris Arthur and Phil Walden trace questions of objectivity through Marxist materialism. Penultimately, Alan Montefiore and William Outhwaite explore in different ways the theme of reflexivity in the theory of knowledge and in contemporary social and cultural theory. Finally, Ted Benton and Kate Soper discuss aspects of Andrew’s theorisation of nature, and thus return to the central issue about the objectivity of value, raised at the beginning. When the idea of a Festschrift was first mooted with Andrew, his response was that he didn’t think he was a sufficiently eminent subject. We hope that this rich and coherent array of papers serves to convince him about the extensiveness of his intellectual influence, the wide appreciation of his academic integrity, and the personal affection felt for him by his colleagues. Margaret S. Archer and William Outhwaite August 2003

Part I

Encounters with Andrew Collier

1

A considerable realist A personal and intellectual tribute to Andrew Collier Roy Bhaskar

My personal experience of Andrew can be divided into five phases, which I will dub: 1 2 3 4 5

the right-thinking radical philosopher; walking in the rain to Balfern Street; arson in Altenburg Gardens; revelations in Brahmes Hall; the unfinished business of the Southampton Synthesiser.

I will start this memoir by recollecting some of my experiences of Andrew in these ‘five phases’, and then use this to lead briefly into a short résumé of his intellectual achievement. But when I say ‘intellectual achievement’, a word of caution is necessary. For Andrew is no mere intellectual and his intellectual concerns always follow from his practical engagements in life. We shall see how he gradually developed a comprehensive realist philosophical position, which could comprehend the unity and totality of life, in a still-evolving system which is a form of differentiated realist monism. This is a totality he exemplifies in his own life, itself a totality he always feels free to draw on in the theoretical articulation of philosophy.

The right-thinking radical philosopher (1977–1983) I first began to notice the name ‘Andrew Collier’ when reading the journal Radical Philosophy in the mid-1970s. In the pages of this journal could be identified an Andrew rather different from, but recognisably continuous with, the one we know today. An unabashed polemicist and partisan, a kind of revolutionary Leninist in philosophy, he wrote about all the pressing concerns of his day: about social mores and personalist liberal philosophy, about hedonism and amour de soi, about existentialist psychoanalysis and radical politics. Above all, he wrote in defence of the possibility of objectivity and even of its possibility in epistemology, as well as within philosophy – then under attack from the quarter he referred to disrespectfully as ‘Hingis and Horsa’ [Barry Hindess and Paul Hirst]. I began to notice very nice references to my work in his pieces. I thought to

4

Roy Bhaskar

myself, ‘This is a very right-thinking person: I must get to know him.’ Sooner or later we spoke to each other on the telephone (while I believe he was about to commence a tutorial with a student on my work) and arranged to meet. Before we could actually keep our date, we had bumped into each other at a radical socialist meeting and so initiated a phase of meetings in London and elsewhere. Andrew has nicely recorded in his book Critical Realism: An Introduction to Roy Bhaskar’s Philosophy, that my initial meeting with Rom Harré was a case of ‘intellectual love at first sight’. It was similar between Andrew and myself. Our meetings would range over almost every aspect of philosophy and life which seemed relevant to us then, though it is significant that we never discussed religion or spirituality. Indeed, I did not know that Andrew was a devout Christian until the mid-1990s when I explicitly began to articulate my so-called ‘spiritual turn’ in philosophy, in a project in which he, alongside Margaret Archer and Doug Porpora in particular, was to explicitly join me. However, it was significant that despite the omission of any religion or theology, he was already writing over a wide field. Thus his first book was on R.D. Laing and his working papers often made reference to important but little known thinkers such as John Macmurray. However there is no doubt that his principal, one could say his dominant, though not perhaps ultimately determinant, intellectual concern was with the articulation of a scientific realist position which would uphold the objectivity of a social science, especially, but not only, in politics. In this context in the mid-1970s it was natural to take as one’s point of departure the work of the French Marxist philosopher, Louis Althusser. And it was an engagement between the Althusserian and transcendental realist and critical naturalist philosophies that was the topic of his brilliant first major book on the terrain of contemporary philosophy, Scientific Realism and Socialist Thought, on which I will comment further below.

Walking in the rain to Balfern Street (1983–1987) The next phase of Andrew’s life saw him as a principal in the development of the emergent institutional structures and forums of critical realism, as well as earning a reputation as a leading interpreter of my thought. Indeed, he, together with William Outhwaite, who played a parallel role, were friends, interpreters and fellow catalysts in the emerging networks of critical realism. The three of us, together with our mutual friend and critical realist, Ted Benton, came to meet in my house in Battersea for a two-week-long series of discussions. This ultimately culminated in the first of the standing conferences on realism and the human sciences at the University of Sussex in 1984. For the first of these sessions, Andrew was coming up by train from Southampton1 to Waterloo. William and Ted were already ensconced in my kitchen, a tape recorder had been assiduously tested, coffee was simmering and the three of us were already ardently talking politics, philosophy, the philosophy of politics and the politics of philosophy. It was pouring with rain in a quasi-torrential downpour, when Andrew’s apologetic knock was heard at the door. I invited him in to join the bustling activity, passing

A considerable realist

5

him a cup of coffee while William coached him in the intricacies of the recording device and Ted briefed him on the formal agenda for our first session. Andrew slipped naturally into this scene and after about ten minutes, it seemed to me that it would be right to begin our deliberations proper. I asked Andrew if there was anything in particular he wanted to say before we started, expecting no doubt some item to be put on the agenda. Speaking standing (he had yet to sit down) and now, as to my horror I noticed, dripping from his already prematurely balding head, he asked: ‘Do you think I could have a towel?’ He had walked all the way from Waterloo to my house in Battersea in the torrential rain! Andrew was a phenomenal walker. He rarely used public transport, except for long-distance trips, and could not drive. In his days in London he would regularly walk (on business) twenty or more miles a day, he went on long walks of two or three days’ duration (and sometimes more) and only in later days did he begin systematically to substitute the bicycle. This was not primarily for ecological reasons, nor at all, I think, to keep himself fit, but mainly out of the joy and delight he took in the activity itself and especially in being at one with nature. It could also be said that Andrew would never knowingly take a shortcut when a longer route was possible. Thus, I remember him walking from his home to our lodgings in a student hall in Southampton at the time of the 1991 conference there and then marching us briskly every morning through one mile or so of forest until we arrived at the designated venue for the day’s sessions. On the last evening of these conferences, when it was customary for us all to go for a regulation ‘tandoori’ meal, he would always argue persuasively that there was no way any number of taxis or cars or other arrangement of the local transport services could get us there commodiously. The heated discussion would inevitably be terminated by Andrew leading the contingent of critical realists along at his brisk pace by foot! The discussions the four of us had in Balfern Street were typical, in a way, of the flavour of many first conferences. The discussions then would proceed each day from abstract philosophy through to the methodological problems of the social sciences and thence to the practical details of political transformation. They embraced friendly gossip and reflection about the nitty-gritty of the political events of the day and politicised daily life – between which there did not seem to be a vast difference. Nevertheless, we made good progress and eventually sowed the seeds for The Realism and Human Sciences Conferences, from which were to flow the Centre for Critical Realism, the International Association for Critical Realism, Alethia and the Journal for Critical Realism, the ‘Critical Realism: Interventions’ book series and much more. In the 1980s, these conferences also became a focal point for the international permeation and interdisciplinary spread of critical realist ideas, and an exchange of people, information and ideas, which included such initiatives as the setting up of the Bhaskar List on the Internet. The conferences themselves were quite exceptional. They were unique in that the participants were concerned neither with personal career advancement nor such other typical conference activities as ‘getting laid’, but rather

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Roy Bhaskar

with the systematic attempt to understand, explore and enjoy ideas, in the context of each other’s company, oriented to a determined pursuit of the truth. Each year, miraculously, at the end, a new city and a new group of volunteers would take on organising the next year’s conference. Andrew, William and myself would almost always participate in this activity, but there was no formal hierarchy and critical realism began to thrive and prosper. To these conferences, Andrew would come as a dedicated critical realist and hedonist, limiting himself assiduously to a maximum of, say, two sessions out of a possible eleven, but participating enthusiastically in the all-night-long discussions and investigations we were pursuing.2

Arson in Altenburg Gardens (1988–1994) This was an important period for Andrew, which saw his own reputation consolidated and critical realism flowering. It witnessed the publication, as already mentioned, of Scientific Realism and Socialist Thought, concluding his engagement with the Althusserian current in Marxist philosophy, and the bulk of his work for Critical Realism: An Introduction to Roy Bhaskar’s Philosophy, which was eventually published in 1993. At the same time his Socialist Reasoning prefigured his published interest in ethics and in theological, or more properly, spiritual concerns, as revealed in Being and Worth and his sequence of four books on various issues dealing with realism in religion, especially Christianity. It is significant that Andrew always took his concerns with the burgeoning development of critical realism, through its ethical, dialectical and spiritual phases, in directions to which he felt himself committed, for example, Marxism, ecologically sensitive socialism and Christianity, as concrete exemplifications of the more general direction of his thought. Just as he was to seek to embody the ideal of the unity of theory and practice, so he sought always to unify in his writings and his talks a unity of the abstract and the concrete. It is this quality, together with his refusal to disdain personal examples from his own life or experience, which gives so much of his writing and speaking its honest, direct and down-to-earth character. Andrew has always worn his heart on his sleeve, and walked his talk in philosophy, never hiding his own values and preferences, which gives his own work its superficially ‘easily contestable’ character. My relationship with him in this period was still (as it remains) that of a very good friend. Indeed, he would often stay at my place on his frequent trips to London. I got to know Heather and his son Adam during this time too. Indeed, on one visit of the three of them, for a lunch party at which my late friend, Roy Edgley, doyen of the radical philosophy movement, and his wife, Liz, were also present, Adam was caught playing in the garden with a set of sticks and matches with which he was about to set fire to the house. He must have been about seven at the time and I always teasingly refer to him to Andrew as the ‘little arsonist’. On a later occasion, probably some five years on, at a party in the grounds of Brahmes Hall, Adam was to be seen instructing Tony Lawson’s daughter in the elementary facts of anatomy!

A considerable realist

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Revelations in Brahmes Hall (1994–2000) It was during this period that the Centre for Critical Realism was born out of meetings in my office in St Peter’s Street, between our long-suffering accountant and constitutional adviser, Mike Jellicoe, and the founding trustees. These were, besides Andrew and me, made up of Margaret Archer, Alan Norrie, Tony Lawson and Sean Vertigan. We were a little bit later to be joined by Nick Hostettler and, in a representative capacity (as the editor of Alethia and the Journal for Critical Realism), Mervyn Hartwig. Alan Jarvis, who led the Routledge team in setting up the ‘Critical Realism: Interventions’ and the ‘Routledge Studies in Critical Realism’ series, is another who participated in these discussions. In those days, we had a very full agenda for our meetings. Assuming there was no public seminar or meeting, we would start at 12:00 noon on the CCR business, accompanied by a round of sandwiches (or two), coffee, tea and biscuits. With the formal business completed, ideally around 4 o’clock, we would then adjourn to the ‘Camden Head’ in Islington, where we would have booked a room for a group discussion or seminar. One of us would always open a discussion on some matter of intellectual and practical concern to critical realism. Then, at around 7:00 p.m., we would move on to a choice Italian (most often the ‘Portafino’, known to us affectionately, after its head-waiter, as ‘Stefano’s’) or occasionally to an Indian restaurant and often the party would only break up when last trains had to be caught. Islington had been, of course, Tony Blair’s borough and was full of yuppies and other trend-setters. In this company, Andrew was known affectionately by Stefano as one of my ‘builders’. Andrew has indeed always been a great builder. By now he was acknowledged as a canonical exponent of at least the first three (transcendental realist, critical naturalist and explanatory critical) phases of my work. But it was also notable that he wrote probably the best-informed initial introduction to my Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom in Radical Philosophy, though his enthusiasm for this phase was probably less than for the ones that preceded and immediately succeeded it. Of course, he was also becoming known now as an important contributor to the growing body of critical realist scholarship in his own right. Thus, in Scientific Realism and Socialist Thought, he introduced the distinction between structure and structuratum. The same structure can be manifest in many different structurata, and the same structuratum may manifest a plurality of structures. Structure is a universal; structuratum, a particular. Similarly, in Being and Worth (1999) he was to seek to supplement the theory of explanatory critique with the beginning of a theory of objective value, which he called for in his review of Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom. Indeed, we could say that the four keys to Andrew’s work are structural realism; the objectivity of value; the primacy of the whole; and Christian belief. By the end of this period the first two had been securely consolidated and the second two were beginning to emerge in to view. By the time the Centre for Critical Realism was established, I had already become subjectively convinced of the necessity for a spiritual turn in philosophy. Margaret Archer shared my enthusiasm and it was not long before Andrew

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joined us. Doug Porpora, too, was enthusiastic about this development. In talks in the middle and late 1990s, I began systematically to articulate this position, which first culminated in the publication of From East to West in 2000. Over the preceding eighteen months or so, the four of us met at my home in Suffolk, Brahmes Hall. Here, as we were working through issues in the philosophy of religion and spirituality, we came to see the need for a conscious recognition and affirmation of the role of spirituality, first in our activity of discussing it, and second, more generally, in all the practices of our everyday life.

The unfinished business of the Southampton Synthesiser (2001–) These years saw a quickened tempo of production for publication in Andrew’s life, as books and manuscripts, half-finished in drawers, were rapidly completed, in the wake of Andrew’s ill health, and published. So far, four books defending objectivity in religion, alongside Andrew’s defence of objectivity in science, social science and ethics, have found their way into print. Let me just rehearse what was the central claim of those of us who promulgated the spiritual revolution in critical realism. The critical realist trinity of ontological realism, epistemological relativism and judgmental rationality, which applied in science and to ordinary material objects, was to apply here too, as it had been shown (at least in Andrew’s and my eyes) in ethics. To put it bluntly, we could ask whether God existed or not, as this was a legitimate question from a critical realist perspective. Moreover, if God is real, this is clearly compatible with a number of different interpretations or manifestations of him/her/it. And once an interpretation or manifestation is accepted as authentic, then issues about the rationality of religious practices can also be legitimately asked. That is to say, ontological realism about God not only went hand in hand with epistemological (and social) religious tolerance, but also paved the way for a consideration of the rationality and indeed the authenticity of any given religious practice. The radical move of treating God as a scientific object was to make possible the view that Andrew expounds in On Christian Belief, namely that religious belief ‘is not something unlike any other kind of belief, but is cognitive, making claims about what is real, and is open to rational discussion between believers and nonbelievers’.

Standing back I now want to summarise the significance of Andrew’s work. If there’s anything which is distinctive of his initial critical realist engagement with Althusserian epistemology, it is his accentuation of the element of structural realism. The structures which Marx, like other scientists, talked about were real in principle and real independently of any account of them – hence, the continuing theme of objectivity in his work. Now, there are two significant features to this structural realism. The first consists in the fact that structures are in themselves real, so belonging to what I had characterised as the intransitive dimension of science or

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the re-nascent science of ontology. Conversely, the neo-Kantian wings had only recognised the epistemic structuration of a science or form of thought, a structuration which, of course, it could not itself consistently uphold. The second significant feature is that this is not a dualism of knowledge and being. The distinction between knowledge and being was necessary in order to revindicate ontology which had been denegated (that is, denied while in the very act of its being inexorably expressed) in what I characterised as ‘the epistemic fallacy’. This was not a dualism, but rather what could be called a constellational monism, insofar as knowledge was itself part of being, so that being constellationally overreached the distinction between any one knowledge and its being. Thus everything was to be conceived as pertaining to ontology or reality, including beliefs, and therefore errors, contradictions and also, I later argued, negation, and also of course values and God. Now putting structural realism and constellational monism together we can develop the idea of the alethic truth of a thing, that is the reason why it is the way it is. I have claimed that this conception resolves almost all the standard problems and issues in western philosophy from the time of Plato and Aristotle on, until contemporary times, including, for example, the problem of induction. Thus if there is a reason why emeralds are green, independent of any particular emerald being green, namely its possession of an electronic structure which differentially reflects light of a certain wavelength, then all emeralds must reflect green light. That electronic structure is the alethic truth of the fact that needs explaining. Given that alethic truth, it is not possible for emeralds to behave in a different way. This conception of alethic truth enormously deepens our understanding of objectivity. It is presaged on the four-fold analysis of truth which I essayed in Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom, as involving fiduciary, epistemic, expressive and alethic aspects. This takes us to what I have called the second key to Andrew’s philosophy – the objectivity of value, and indeed of the whole sphere of subjectivity. The extension of realism to ethics means that there is a real answer to the question of what is valuable or good or right or wrong for any agent or species, in a situation or context. An agent may of course get the answer to his ethical questions wrong, but the fact that these beliefs are part of the very unitary system in which the facts that ground them exist means that a dialectical tension will be set up. Then, gradually, the agent will be led to approximate to a greater reflexivity or to the unity of theory and practice in his behaviour. Thus values are part of the totality they describe, and subjectivity is part of an overarching objectivity. By the same token, God is part of the same reality that man is, if he is relevant to it at all. For if there is some relevance or causal connection, then God is in relevant respects part of the same cosmos or universe as man. If he is not part of the same cosmos or universe, then he can not have any effect on this one. To put it another way, as soon as we allow that God has or may have some effect in this world, then he is ipso facto part of it. Thus whether or not God is regarded as immanent in man, on this account, he is necessarily immanent in being.

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Moreover, since God is part of one single reality, a universe which constitutes this world, the properties attributed to God or the divine must constitute or be continuous with the most fundamental level of our being, what I have called our ground-states. Such properties must be implicit or enfolded in us and, for a ‘believer’, our role in life may then be seen as to explicate or articulate them, or promote or allow their articulation in the world – in a project which some medieval theologians called ‘theosis’ or the maximisation of the presence of God in the world. These properties must at the very least include consciousness, which also gives grounds for what is, in effect, a view of matter as a synchronic emergent power of consciousness – alongside the view of consciousness as a synchronic emergent power of matter.3 Thus, we have a surprising series of results, not all of which Andrew would necessarily agree with, namely that: the relevance of God presupposes His immanence within being. In turn, this entails that human beings must at the very least have some features or properties which are continuous with or analogous to His (the assumption of a universe presupposes unity). And, indeed, it follows that they must really share, actually or transfactually, implicitly or proleptically, some features or properties of His (unity presupposes a moment or respect of identity). The respects in which human beings are the same as God are precisely those which constitute the most fundamental level of their being, what I have called their ground-states, threaded together with the ground-states of other beings within the cosmic envelope. It is this level of being for human beings from which all other levels and phases of their being are emergent. Andrew is thus committed to a very radical form of realism indeed, in which the unity of theory and practice can be fully displayed and potentially achieved. Indeed, from this perspective, it can be argued that it is something that must eventually be achieved, since the consistency of the properties of being to its ground-state is the one basic norm which can never be lost. Certainly, it can be said that if a being sets itself any objective inconsistent with its most fundamental level or ground-state, then it will necessarily fail. And the process of emancipation or freedom can then be conceived as one of the dis-emergence or shedding of strata and aspects of our being inconsistent with our ground-states, and the flowering of our ground-state potential in the totality of our lives. As I have already said, it is not clear that Andrew would agree to all these implications. Be that as it may, there are certain problems in Andrew’s formulation of his objectivism, which I have characterised as a constellational monism. First, there is the question of hearsay. This assumes enormous importance in Andrew’s later work, though he was already thoroughly familiar with the concept from Macmurray’s writings very early on (when it acted as an important corrective to the dominant and complacent empiricism). He says in In Defence of Objectivity (p. 216) that ‘we must acquire second-hand knowledge before we have the wherewithal to produce first-hand knowledge’. He goes on to say:

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that this applies to lay as well as scientific knowledge is suggested by three facts: (I) The huge bulk of our knowledge is and remains pure hearsay: All knowledge of times before we were born and places we have never been to, and most knowledge about our own time and place as well as all lay reception of scientific knowledge. (II) Hearsay precedes other knowledge … (III) When we do see for ourselves, we do so in ways made possible by what we have been told. The contrast between hearsay and non-hearsay knowledge (or belief) is, I think, a residue of an atomistic empiricism in Andrew’s thought. Non-hearsay knowledge will eventually collapse to a point of immediately intuited certainty, which by the same logic will vanish. What this neglects is the social world in which our knowledge is actually constituted, and the totality of our life experience in terms of which we can check it. Thus, there would be something very wrong in holding that our knowledge of 9/11 was hearsay. Rather we can say that 9/11 was constitutive of our experience when it happened and is still a significant feature of the epistemic and social world in which we live. This in turn raises a more general problem which runs throughout Andrew’s declension of critical realism – or rather it is more of an imbalance. We could say that Andrew’s account of the transitive dimension of knowledge and science is underdeveloped in comparison with the intransitive or objective side. While it is true that there is nothing irreal about the subjective, the particular way in which some subjective item, such as an experience, a piece of knowledge or a meaning is actually fleshed out is all-important. Thus the subjective realm must itself be seen as objectively constituted as a totality in process and actually experienced or lived by the agents whose subjectivity it is. If the problem of hearsay begins to indicate a weakness in Andrew’s current philosophical position, one which is rooted in the under-elaboration of the transitive epistemological or subjective moment in knowledge, I think it can equally be said to be overly Spinozist, accentuating the whole at the expense of the part. He tends to leave out the subjectivist, Leibnizian (monadic) moment, in which we must see the whole (implicitly enfolded) within each part. This is consistent with the reality of each part as also external to each other and the reality of the whole as itself external. Moreover, on this conception, we can see that each part depends, for its exact constitution and in its concrete singularity, upon the whole. Thus we can retain the idea of the primacy of the whole. Moreover, if ground-states are partially or indeed wholly constituted by consciousness (implicit or explicit), what ultimately distinguishes any concrete singularity is what amount of or level of the whole it is conscious of, i.e., its consciousness or more exactly its self-consciousness.

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So, on this perspective, all change is immediately or ultimately to be analysed as a change in consciousness. Third, and related, it is very difficult for Andrew, or so I think, to uphold the reality of change. Any change must involve an element that is ex nihilo and not just de novo, that is the presencing, production or appearance of something new, which was not there, and the absenting, elimination or disappearance of something old, which was there. To deny irreducible novelty and demise is effectively to view all change as being the result of different quantitative combinations of the same unchanging elements – or atoms. And so we have the resurgence again of a residual atomistic empiricism, manifest both ontologically and epistemologically (as in the aporia of ‘hearsay’). In effect, there is a tendentially static element in this system, as the universals tend to collapse into abstract analytical universals in respect of differentiation, diversity and other qualitative considerations, besides novelty, becoming and emergence. As things evolve in time, in the world of becoming, properties which were implicit, enfolded as potential or co-present, in the order of being, also unfold or manifest themselves in the order of becoming. Finally, Andrew is faced with a problem in relation to sustaining, as he wants to do, the duality within the non-dualism described as the unified whole or ontology. This is that this whole, if it were really to be permeated by a single unbreachable duality, namely that of knowledge and its being, could no longer be described as a whole, since that polarity would shatter it, reverberating endlessly wherever it was seen. Unless subject and object melt or shade into each other, and become one, we have not non-dualism but dualism. The only way around this is to accept a vastly enlarged role for non-duality in the activities of knowledge-constitution and everyday life. The moment of alethic identity (and anamnesis) which, in my books on Meta-Reality, I have described as being the heart of creativity, is actually the kernel of any scientific or other dialectical process. It is of course, I have been arguing, in relation to knowledge and the epistemological moment that Andrew has a problem – from a tendential epistemological over-naturalism in his earlier works to the current aporia of hearsay. And it is knowledge, in the couple being–knowledge, which we normally see as the one that is changing. Hence, the difficulties I have been making for Andrew in relation to subjectivity, change and knowledge (including hearsay) are interconnected. Corresponding to an understanding of non-duality as constitutive of everyday life, through various modalities of transcendental identification, complemented by an understanding of non-duality, in its form as the ultimatum or ground-state of all beings, and non-duality as the deep interior of all experience and phenomena – we need to explicitly and philosophically thematise the primacy of unity and identity over division and difference. Together with this goes the irreducibility of the subjective moment of ‘I see it’, in all epistemic processes. This can of course be objectively verified by our seeing whether the being has acutally, as we say, ‘got it’ – and the irreducibility of the implicit and enfolded and of change and becoming in the world as we know it. In the world

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of becoming, only a monadology, not an atomism, is consistent with real development and change or differentiation and variety. In virtue of the range of his achievements and interests, at the colloquium in honour of his on Midsummer’s Day 2003, I compared Andrew’s achievement to that of Aquinas, and demanded more of him. For me he has been a good friend and a wonderful human being, dedicated to the true spirit of critical realism, which is the unity of theory and practice in practice, and which entails a dialectic in which one integrates the totality of one’s experience into a unified view. This I have called complete reflexivity and we are truly privileged to have such a fine example of this dialectic in practice as Andrew has displayed in his life and writings – which are still unfinished.

Notes 1

2

3

Andrew’s part of the Philosophy Department at Bangor, which had an excellent reputation for Welsh philosophy, had been moved to the University of Southampton. This was to prove enormously costly for Andrew, since he had to move (in the wake of the ‘Thatcher cuts’ and rationalisations), with his wife Heather and little son Adam, from a five-bedroom house in Bangor, from which he could see both the sea and the mountains, situated a stone’s throw from the university in the most idyllic rural circumstances (to which, I am afraid to say, he never succeeded in enticing me), to an expensive city in the south of England, leaving behind him the many friends he had in Wales and his erstwhile rural bliss. I should just mention two of those participants who played key organisational roles, who were particularly close to Andrew and who are unable to contribute to this Festschrift: John Lovering, who organised a wonderful conference at the School of Urban Studies in Bristol in 1989, and Maureen Ramsey, who organised the conference in Manchester in 1990. See my Reflections on Meta-Reality, London, New Delhi and Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2002, p. 212.

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Losing the plot Ruth Merttens

The moral good is not a goal, but an inner force which lights up man’s life from within. The important thing is the source from which the activity springs and not the end toward which it is directed. (Berdyaev 1937) There is no way to peace. Peace is the way. (Muste 1967) We are the inmates not begetters nor masters of our lives. (Steiner 1989)

In this short essay I hope to tell two stories – one persuasive and the other evocative. First, I want to help us understand that it is not just necessary but essential that we, all of us, collectively and individually, objectively and subjectively speaking, ‘lose’ the plot. Second, I would like to evoke the story of my personal, ongoing philosophical and literary conversation with Andrew Collier. I say ‘literary’ because, as I reflect on the thinkers whose work has underwritten our discussions, I realise that they perhaps belong more to the canons of literature than to those of philosophy. No matter. Three terms will weave this particular narrative and, as always, will import their own particular baggage – in a (possibly futile) attempt to curtail this embarrassment of connotation, I offer a definition of each for the purposes of this essay.

Narrative I am taking this as a sequence of events or actions, viewed from reflection, appreciated from a (sometimes contrived) distance, ‘pulled’ as Sartre has said, from an end point. ‘To narrate is to re-live, from the standpoint of a finished position’ (Tambling 1991). It is important to my purpose that both the ‘end’ and the ‘distance of the narrator’ are implicit in, and complicit with, this notion of narrative.

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As if there could possibly be such things as true stories; events take place one way, and we recount them the opposite way. You appear to begin at the beginning, ‘It was a fine autumn evening in 1922. I was a solicitor’s clerk at Marommes’. And in fact you have begun at the end. It is there, invisible and present. And it is the end which gives these few words the pomp and value of a beginning. … The end is there transforming everything. For us, the fellow is already the hero of the story. … And the story goes on in reverse, the moments have stopped piling up upon one another in a happy-go-lucky manner, they are caught by the end of the story which attracts them, and each of them in turn attracts the preceding moment. (Sartre 1965 [1938]: 62) It is also important to recognise the extent to which, as Barthes famously suggested, narrative is fundamental to human society. The narratives of the world are numberless. Able to be carried by articulated language, spoken or written, fixed or moving images, gestures, and the ordered mixture of all these substances; … narrative is present in every age, in every place, in every society; it begins with the very history of mankind, and there nowhere is nor has been a people without narrative. (Barthes 1977) And, as we shall appreciate later in the essay, narrative may also be said to be correlative with personhood. Steiner’s dictum that ‘man is a language animal’ might equally well have identified the ability to narrate as constitutive of our shared humanity. Through narratives, we ‘give order to the world’ (Bakhtin 1984). We shape the chaos of primeval experience into the patterns and structures of life. Myths, fables and legends may have structured the lives of those in pre-historical societies, but De Certeau points out that the narrativities of modern life bring about an even greater organising function. Captured by radio as soon as he awakens, the listener walks all day long in a forest of narrativities from journalism, advertising and television, narrativities that still find time, as he is getting ready for bed, to slip a few final messages under the portals of sleep … these stories have a providential and predestinating function: they organise in advance our work, our celebrations and even our dreams. (De Certeau 1984: 84) Narrative in this essay, then, will be taken as a basic human activity, fulfilling a need to impose structure on, and derive pattern from, subjective experience, and therefore intrinsically linked to the requirement that our lives are meaningful. Narratives also allow us to ‘cast nets north of the future’ (Celan)1 and to envisage possibilities for what has not yet occurred. In this sense, narrative may be described as teleological, as pointing beyond itself. Without narrative, humankind would turn forever on ‘the treadmills of the present’.

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Story Although ‘story’ and ‘narrative’ are often taken as correlative, it is useful in this essay to impose a distinction. I shall take a story to be something we make up, a recount, no more and no less. The personal and indeed subjective element here is crucial. Stories are experience recounted, passed on from person to person, from mouth to mouth. There is always, therefore, in all stories, and especially in our personal recounts and anecdotes, the element of ‘fiction’. Walter Benjamin in ‘The Storyteller’ points out that the dissemination of information has introduced the requirement of ‘plausibility’ into the stories we tell each other. Although the basis of modern information is often no more exact and certainly no more ‘grounded’ than were the legends of prehistory or the accounts of the miraculous deeds and events of medieval times, nevertheless the demand for ‘realism’, for the plausible, has proved inimical to the art of true storytelling. ‘If the art of story-telling has become rare, the dissemination of information has had a decisive share in this state of affairs’ (Benjamin 1970 [1955]: 89). Benjamin draws a distinction between stories and explanations: Every morning brings us news of the globe, and yet we are poor in noteworthy stories. This is because no event any longer comes to us without being shot through with explanation. In other words, by now almost nothing that happens benefits storytelling; almost everything benefits information. Actually, it is half the art of storytelling to keep the story free from explanation as one reproduces it. (1970 [1955]: 89) Stories then embody neither the teleological structure of narrative nor the causal explanation and goal-orientated physiognomy of plot. Stories, in the sense identified here, are neither ‘pulled by their ends’ like Sartre’s narratives, nor structured by cause or effect. They are certainly fictions and, as such, are both subjective and personal, inescapably driven by unconscious as well as by both intended and unintended motivation, largely unacknowledged by listener and speaker. This in no way repudiates their function, and nor does it nullify their effect. Stories are both psychologically necessary and emotionally indispensable to a shared existence.

Plot Plot embodies the notion of an organised and sequenced narrative, structured according to a purpose or goal. For Aristotle, plot was the ordered arrangement of incidents; for Forster it was the narrative of events with the emphasis on causality; ‘the pattern or structure in the arrangements of events giving rise to causal explanations and goals’.2 No longer does the pattern emerge through the conscious or unconscious motivations that drive the narrative sequence. We now have a goal – a series of ‘if …, then …’ causal propositions, which direct and coerce the various and diverse elements of the narrative. Plot implies authoring,

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and the question as to whose narratives are being thus authored, or further manipulated, and in what directions, for what multifarious and unacknowledged purposes, remains always to be answered. It is the necessary conjunction of the goal and the authoring, the espousal of the ‘cause’ inextricably coupled with the purposeful manipulation of activity, that I am terming ‘plot’. I wish to convey the sense in which the ethical dimensions of this seemingly ‘natural’ (i.e., taken-for granted and thereby rendered ‘invisible’) modus operandi are rarely explored or highlighted, still less critiqued. It is my intention to insert a warning, no less needed for running orthogonal to the direction of western progress, as to the effects of this obsession, political and personal, with sustaining the ‘plot’; I wish to plead for ‘losing the plot’. This includes, though it also exceeds, a complete rejection of the idea that the end justifies the means. And I am not alone in this concern. The quotation at the start of this essay asserts exactly this point and continues as follows: It may be said that the ‘means’ that a man [sic] uses are far more important than the ‘ends’ which he pursues, for they express more fully his spirit. If a man strives for freedom by means of tyranny, for love by means of hatred, for brotherhood by means of dissension, for truth by means of falsity, his lofty aim is not likely to make the judgement of him more lenient. I actually believe that a man who worked for the cause of tyranny, hatred, falsity and dissension by means of freedom, love, truthfulness and brotherhood would be the better man of the two. (Berdyaev 1937: 103)

Down memory lane I wept as I remembered, how often you and I Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky. (Cory 1858)

My conversations with Andrew Collier started with a shared love of two writers, Lawrence and Sartre. Looking back, and with the benefits of hindsight, it is interesting how these two certainly embodied particular aspects of this antipathy with ‘plot’. Lawrence, particularly in his four greatest novels, and in much of his poetry, encapsulated for us at that time a sense of passionate fusion – both of one person with another, through intimacy and through loving sexual congress, and also of the union of this poor forked creature with the natural world which supports it. The loss of the narrative of the ‘individual-I’ in the narrative of the ‘other-Thou’; the concomitant loss of ‘self ’ in this fusion attained through sex and intimacy, were both part of an acknowledgement of the blurred nature of the age-old distinction between self and other. Much later in my academic history I came to understand how this sense of merged or joint subjectivity was echoed in other, more theoretical, fields of enquiry.

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Ruth Merttens The very being of man (both internal and external) is a profound communication. To be means to communicate. … To be means to be for the other, and through him for oneself. Man has no internal sovereign territory; he is all and always on the boundary. (Bakhtin 1984)

The elevation of sex, and indeed passion, as the locus of this out-pouring of self into other is not, of course, exclusively Lawrentian, although Andrew and I were by no means exceptional at the time in our recognition of Lawrence’s assimilation of a philosophical position roughly summarised as anti-dualistic (in a Cartesian sense) and anti-individualistic (in an Enlightenment sense) within an aesthetic of overt physicality. We perhaps appreciated, without fully understanding why, the excesses of Lawrence’s abandonment of the only-then-contested, previouslyassumed superiority of the mental over the physical, his capitulation not to the economies of the bourgeois agenda or the protestant work ethic, but to the wonder of passionate sexual union and his refusal to surrender feeling to calculation. Two decades later I was to encounter Bataille, who espoused a similar philosophical position, although embedded, at least in his fiction, in a somewhat different aesthetic. The main thing is the moment of violent contact when life slips from one person to another in a feeling of magical subversion. … In a general way, what comes into play in physical or psychological eroticism is the same feeling of magical subversion associated with one person slipping into another. … What fusion brings into me is another existence. It brings this other into me as mine but at the same time as other. (Bataille 1988 [1961]: 45) With Lawrence as with Bataille, I discovered then, and only appreciate now, the sense that it was neither ethically nor emotionally desirable to construct the selfimposed distance from the action that enables the authoring of a plot. It was the substance of the activity itself which could and should lead the endeavour. Desire makes you its victim – stripped of the identity imposed upon you by social/cultural discourse, there is nothing within which you can contain or preserve yourself. … Desire throws identity into turmoil. You cannot buy your way out. (Bataille 1957: 73) I read Sartre with Andrew, and in his writing, especially in Being and Nothingness, a similar dizzying precipice presented itself. We discovered ourselves to be, in the words of Laurie Lee, ‘affronted by freedom’. We were (or at least I was) captivated by the idea that there was no escaping the choice, to do or not to do, to speak or not to speak, and, most importantly, to be or not to be the creation one wished to become. All our lives, up until this point, we had imbibed

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with our mothers’ milk the idea that we each had a certain ‘character’ or nature; an essentialism all the more thoroughly pervasive for being largely unrecognised and certainly unremarked. By contrast, in existentialism, particularly in Sartre and Heidegger, there was certainly no escaping the responsibility of being. And in both it is ‘being for-itself ’ or Dasein (being-there), that is, intentional consciousness, upon which the rest is predicated and which attains an authentic ‘being-in-the-world’ only in the recognition of nothingness (néant) at the centre. It was this characterisation of the outward and directed turn of being, the intentionality of consciousness, which, for me at that time, defined what is specifically human. It was as if, aged nineteen and standing at the threshold of so many possible experiences, I needed to confront this miracle for the first time. Children wake up and find themselves here, discover themselves to have been here all along. They wake like sleepwalkers, in full stride; they wake like people brought back from cardiac arrest or from drowning: in media res, surrounded by familiar people and objects, equipped with a hundred skills. … I woke in bits, like all children, piecemeal over the years. I discovered myself and the world, and forgot them, and discovered them again. … I noticed this process of waking, and predicted, with terrifying logic that one of these years not far away I would be awake continuously and never slip back, and never be free of myself again. … I never woke at first, without recalling, chilled, all those other waking times, those similar stark views from similarly lighted precipices: dizzying precipices from which the distant, glittering world revealed itself as a brooding and separate scene – and so let slip a queer implication, that I myself was both observer and observable, and so a possible object of my own humming awareness. (Dillard 1987: 11) Alongside this re-assertion of the intentionality of consciousness and the miracle of self-awareness, we found in the existentialists’ thinking a determined effort to acknowledge the ‘gap’ at the core of ‘being’ itself. Sartre’s ‘Nothingness’ and Heidegger’s ‘Nichtigkeit’ are the source of our being, the cause of our ‘thrownness’. Reading Lacan many years on, I was reminded of all our conversations about this ‘gap’ or lack which is structured into the very notion of a conscious being. Freud’s discovery, Lacan informs us, is that ‘man is not completely in man’. There is a lack of ‘meaning’ creating a gap between what we say and what is said, as well as heard. Meaning is replaced, inevitably, by signification. Lacan repeatedly designates this ‘lack of meaning’ as the only meaning that humans have. What is between people, the inter-human, is given over to the medium which shapes and re-directs it, to cultural significance. Later in this essay, in an effort to ‘join the dots’, I shall hope to show how many of these themes re-surface in our discussion of means and ends, plot and narrative. This ‘lack’, structured into the heart of being, embodies a radical turn from an essentialism which precludes choice, and toward a recognition of the other. The writings of Lévinas and Berdyaev, in their different ways, enable us to

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move toward an affirmation of the responsibility of solicitous being – true authenticity entails active involvement with others. In a similar vein, the relation of self-to-other which we first explored in the writings of Sartre and Heidegger all those years ago, leads to the conviction that the desire to construct the plot must be abandoned in favour of the recognition that it is the substance of our everyday activity which matters, which counts, morally as well as philosophically, and which, in the final analysis and as the kids say, is ‘where it’s at’. Graham Greene had been a favourite of mine before I met Andrew, but it was in our discussions that I came to realise that for Greene there was always the unwanted third: ‘The Third Man’, the third force (The Quiet American), the third party (The End of the Affair), the uninvited guest at the feast – namely God. Underwriting every one of Greene’s books was this haunting presence; a presence at once fearful and familiar, comforting and yet strange. Greene spoke often of the gamble, the wager. Quoting Pascal, the lonely and intelligent policeman Vigot in The Quiet American gently chides the reporter who wishes to remain on the sidelines, ‘disengaged’ from life – and also from the necessity of choice. ‘What a gambler you could be, Vigot. Do you play any other game of chance?’ He smiled miserably, and for some reason I thought of that flashy blonde wife of his who was said to betray him with his junior officers. ‘Oh well,’ he said, ‘there’s always the biggest of all.’ ‘The biggest?’ ‘Let us weigh the gain and the loss,’ he quoted, ‘in wagering that God is, let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing.’ I quoted Pascal back at him – it was the only passage I remembered. ‘Both he who chooses heads and he who chooses tails are equally at fault. They are both in the wrong. The true course is not to wager at all.’ ‘Yes, but you must wager. It is not optional. You are embarked.’ He went sadly on. ‘You don’t follow your own principles, Fowler. You are engaged like the rest of us.’ (Greene 1955: 152) To remain ‘outside’ is not an option. Like Sartre, like Lawrence, Greene forces his characters into choice, into life. But for Greene it is not the choice which is the problem, it is the relation with God, and thus with each other. For Greene – and the universal metaphor here is potent – once the existence of God is accepted, the rest follows: the responsibility of the face-to-face encounter, the political imperatives of hunger, suffering and justice, the ethical aesthetic of pity and love, and, crucially, the very possibility of a guarantee of meaning itself. When writing of his conversion to Catholicism in ‘A Sort of Life’, Greene evokes precisely the fear, perhaps terror, of this particular step outwards onto the shifting sands of belief, where afterwards no terrain is ever same.

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I didn’t disbelieve in Christ – I disbelieved in God. If I were ever to be convinced in even the remote possibility of a supreme, omnipotent and omniscient power, I realised that nothing afterwards could seem impossible. It was on the ground of a dogmatic atheism that I fought and fought hard. It was like a fight for personal survival. … In the first confession, a convert really believes in his own promises of repentance. … I took the name of Thomas, after St Thomas the Doubter, not Thomas Aquinas, and I remember very clearly the nature of my emotion as I walked away from the cathedral. There was no joy in it at all, only a sombre apprehension. I had made the first move with a view to my future marriage, but now the land had given way under my feet and I was afraid where the tide would take me. Even my marriage seemed uncertain now. Suppose I discovered what father Trollope had once discovered, the desire to be a priest. … At that moment it seemed by no means impossible. Only now, after more than forty years, I am able to smile at the unreality of my fear and feel at the same time a sad nostalgia for it, since I lost more than I gained when the fear belonged irrevocably to the past. (Greene 1972: 166) Conversations with Andrew about Greene led to his presenting me with a volume by Nicholas Berdyaev, The Destiny of Man (1937). The epigram on the title page gives the hint of the character of both the author and the book, ‘It is sad not to see any good in goodness’ (Gogol 1846). Later, I was also to acquire and read his autobiography Dream and Reality in which Berdyaev repeatedly disclaims the title of ‘theologian’, and describes himself as a religious freethinker, orthodox by background and in aesthetic taste. Certainly the notion of freedom is central, not only to his writing but to his life. The details of his biography bear witness to the number of situations, academic and social contexts, or communities in which Berdyaev has been able to maintain only a peripheral connection because of his passion for freedom. Any form of dogmatism or authoritarianism is alien to him; he resists fiercely the temptation to create and sustain an ‘insiderness’ to any religious or political movement, precisely because of his passionate rejection of ‘the outsiderness’ that will inevitably result for others. This extends to a huge dislike of any form of Nationalism, and also to a radical impatience with the Russian émigré movements in both pre-war Paris and post-war Britain. ‘To be frank, I dislike the very term “foreigner” or “alien” with all its evil undertones and overtones, and I cannot put myself in the position of distinguishing human beings according to their nationality’ (Berdyaev 1937: 265). Berdyaev was the final, and most influential, of the writers that I discussed with Andrew in the long watches of the evening, before the demands of professional and personal life cast us too far adrift for such conversations to be more than spasmodic. It is not, perhaps, coincidental that the work of this Russian existentialist philosopher knits together into one rich fabric all the strands I have since identified in Lawrence, Sartre, Heidegger and Greene. Berdyaev starts and

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ends with the divine presence, and with the implications of this for our relations with each other. The existence of evil is not so much an obstacle to faith in God as a proof of God’s existence, a challenge to turn towards that in which love triumphs over hatred, union over division and life over death. … God is freedom; he is not Lord but Liberator. God never operates through necessity, but always through freedom; and he never forces recognition of himself. Herein lies the mystery of religious experience, and I see no evidence for it except the possibility and the reality of freedom. Every denial of freedom was for me a calling into question of my deepest and most fundamental Christian conviction. (Berdyaev 1950: 177) For Berdyaev, God is not only presence in the world, the guarantor of meaning and truth, he is also spirit. This is to say, God acts – but not within the order of, as Berdyaev puts it, ‘objectified necessity’ but within freedom itself. For Berdyaev then, this precludes all notions of God as ‘powerful’ in any human or social sense. ‘God has no power: he has less power than a policeman. Power is a social and not a religious phenomenon’ (1950: 179). It follows not only that we should eschew all misapprehensions such as the notion of a ‘power for the good’, but also that in our search for truth we must look elsewhere. It is not in following the ‘cause’ or in pursuing the ‘aim’ of high-minded Christians, or anyone else for that matter, that we will find goodness. It is rather in the humdrum daily activity of life-with-others, in, to quote Joyce, the ‘epiphanies of the ordinary’, that God’s will is done.

Unashamedly partisan In approaching the ‘great teachers of humankind’ I find myself spontaneously applying this test: Do they recognise that morality itself can be a source of evil? I don’t just mean that a false moral code can cause evil, as none will deny. I mean that morality, pursued in the wrong way, pursued that is, for its own sake, or with ‘ultimate concern’ can be just as destructive a sort of idolatry as pursuit of power, money, etc. The world’s greatest philosophers – Plato, Aristotle, Kant – all fail this test. Among those who pass it are St Paul, Luther, Spinoza, Blake, Marx, Freud, Barth, Berdyaev, Tillich; in general, innovating Christians or lapsed Jews. (Collier 2003)

We started this essay with some definitions – narrative, story and plot. The essay itself is a kind of story, although it would fail on Benjamin’s criteria of trying to keep a story ‘free from explanation’! I have recalled – in this more public forum – the litanies of past academic commitments, which I have aligned alongside all the conversations which took place around those originary and seminal discov-

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eries. Andrew was an important part of these conversations, and, concomitantly, a part of the discoveries too. So, the ‘story’ of this piece of personal history. But what of the plot? Although I love the story, and although I accept the necessity for the narrative, I would plead, as the title suggests, that we ‘lose the plot’. The plot is the part where we assign causes, posit goals, assert aims. Producing a plot suggests that we place ourselves in the position of ‘author’. It follows that we are ‘outside’ our own moment-by-moment activity, driving the action. We are more interested in the posited goal than in the now-ness of the ‘doing’. We justify a ‘bad’ thing now by a promise of a ‘good’ to come. Alternatively, we assert a ‘greater good’, a larger-than-this-moment law, by appeal to which our uncharity or selfish satisfaction may be cancelled or even affirmed. Tony Blair and George Bush repeatedly justify their actions now with reference to ‘the-good-to-come’.3 Irrespective of whether that ‘good’ will ever arrive, or even of whether the envisaged outcome is indeed a moral ‘good’, the argument is, as Berdyaev points out in no uncertain terms, a thoroughly bad one – ‘If a man strives for brotherhood by means of dissension, for truth by means of falsity, etc. … his lofty aim will not save him.’ Furthermore, we learn that the law will not, indeed cannot, save us. The gospel puts sinners and publicans above the Pharisees, the unclean above the clean, those who have not fulfilled the law above those who have fulfilled it, the last above the first, the perishing above the saved, the ‘wicked’ above the ‘good’. This is the paradox of Christian morality which the Christians have found it hard to accept. … They imagine that the Gospel denunciations refer to the Pharisees who lived in the distant past, and themselves join in denouncing them as villains. But in truth those denunciations refer to us who are living today, to the morally self-righteous. … Why is it better to be a sinner conscious of his sin than a Pharisee conscious of his righteousness? … The Pharisees stood on the confines of two worlds, at the dividing line between the ethics of law and the ethics of grace and redemption. The impotence of the ethics of law to save from sin had to be made manifest. One can fulfil the law down to the smallest detail – this was precisely what the Pharisees did. Then it appeared that perfect fulfilment of the law does not save, does not lead to the Kingdom of God. The law sprang up as a result of sin, but it is powerless to free man from the fallen world. It is powerless to conquer sin and cannot save. (Berdyaev 1937: 130) I want to argue for a change in orientation. We should cease to worry so much about goals or intentions. As the old adage has it, ‘The road to hell is paved with good intentions’ – having meant well may matter to us, but it is equally unlikely to matter to the person who suffers as a result of our actions or, indeed, to St Peter. It is the here-and-now of our moment-by-moment speech and action that counts. We do not and should not have to produce a ‘plot’; it is enough for us that we tell our own stories truthfully and faithfully. For one thing,

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although we have a responsibility for our actions and our speech, we cannot, as Foucault points out, be aware of all their effects. ‘We can know what we do, but we cannot know what what we do does.’ However it would be a mistake to believe that this change in orientation from ‘plot’ to story, from ‘goal’ to activity, gets anyone off the hook. It makes matters harder not easier. Berdyaev is not arguing that we may disobey the law. It is impossible to wait for a gracious regeneration of the world to make human life tolerable. Such is the correlation of law and grace. I must love my neighbour as my self, this is the way to the Kingdom of Heaven. But if I have no love for my neighbour, I must in any case fulfil the law in relation to him and treat him justly and honourably. It is impossible to cancel the law and wait for the realisation of love. Even if I have no love, I must not steal, commit murder or be a bully. (Berdyaev 1937: 131) Neither am I suggesting that we have no responsibility for what happens as a result of what we do. Some effects are not only foreseeable, they are inevitable. And although we are not required to produce a ‘plot’, it is necessary to be faithful to what we know to be true. ‘I am the Way, the Truth and the Life’ (John 14, vi). We shall explore the moral implications of this notion of faithfulness below. The above argument certainly incorporates a whole-hearted refutation of the notion that ‘the means justifies the ends’ either in relation to political agendas or in relation to legalistic or personal ethical dilemmas. However, it does not stop there. The change in orientation suggested prompts a concomitant transformation of our relation to one another. Harkening back to the mention of Lévinas when we discussed Heidegger’s ‘solicitous-being’, we can see in this orientation of immediacy, in this focus upon being-here-and-now in action and speech, that it is an ontological rather than a psychological relation which constitutes the distinction between self and other. The I–Thou relation consists in confronting a being external to oneself, and recognising it as radically ‘other’. This recognition of otherness is not to be confused with the ‘idea’ of otherness. To have an idea of something is appropriate to the I–It relation. What is important is not thinking about the other, even as an other, but of directly confronting it and saying ‘Thou’ to it. Hence a real access to the otherness of the other does not consist in a perception but in thou-saying and this is at once an immediate contact and an appeal that does not posit an object. … The I–Thou relation therefore, escapes the gravitational field of the I–It in which the external object remains imprisoned. (Lévinas 1958: 67)4 This not only gets us out of the Sartrean circle of difficulty raised by the threat the Other poses to my freedom (and I to his) through interpellating me as ‘an initself ’, it also directs attention to the whole notion of responsibility which, for

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Lévinas, suggests that our relation to the other is quintessentially ethical. The I–Thou meeting does not take place ‘within the subject’ but rather in the ‘realm of being’. It is the meeting itself, the ‘betweenness’ which functions as what he terms ‘the fundamental category of being’. Further, it is the presence of ‘Thou’, of the other, which implies a ‘word’ which is addressed directly to me and which therefore requires a response. It is impossible to remain a spectator of the Thou, for the very being of I–Thou, the meeting of self/other, depends upon the ‘word’ addressed to me. And, Lévinas argues; ‘only a being who is responsible for another being can enter into dialogue with it’. Alterity then, is structured into the heart of being. For Lévinas it is precisely this I–Thou meeting which reveals the presence of God. ‘I and You and the Third who is in our midst. And only as a Third does He reveal himself ’ (Lévinas 1972: 247). But it is in describing this meeting with the Other that Lévinas really shifts our attention to the ethical centre. We are called into question by the Other. ‘The Other calls me, summons me, begs for me, and in so doing, recalls my responsibility, and calls me into question’ (Lévinas 1984: 83). He evokes the ‘face of the other’, and constantly reminds us of the immediacy of this encounter, which is the original passage to being and also to freedom. This summons to responsibility destroys the formulas of generality by which my knowledge of the Other re-presents him to me as my fellow man. In the face of the Other, I am inescapably responsible. … By this freedom humanity in me (moi) signifies … the anteriority and uniqueness of the non-interchangeable. (Lévinas 1984: 85) This sense that it is the actual encounter with others that is at the heart of the ethical dimension to our lives resonates with the previously expressed change in orientation from ‘goal’ to ‘activity’, in other words, with the abandonment of the plot. Letting go of the idea that justification for actions is produced through an appeal to something beyond us, an end posited with reference to a greater good, compels an alternative economy of motive and posture. Rather than contrive a plan or a set of reasons produced from the standpoint of a spectator upon the action, we are required to generate an ongoing fabric of morally justifiable action and speech – morally justifiable not from the viewpoint of an observer, not with reference to an ‘end’, but rather in the immediate context of our faceto-face encounter, our responsibility to and for the other. In the literary parlance of narrative and story, it argues an accent upon ‘content’ rather than ‘plot’. The ‘content’ of our lives may be described as the multiplicity of actions, words, events and occurrences which can only ever be viewed partially and subjectively, through the twin lenses of prejudice and position. It is in this sense that some thinkers have wished to represent life as a text, although as Julian Barnes reminds us, ‘Books say: she did this because. Life says: she did this. Books are where things are explained to you. Life is where things aren’t. I’m not surprised some people prefer books’ (Barnes 1984).

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Keeping on top, morally speaking, of one’s day-to-day activity would be a laudable practice, if only it were remotely possible. However, the reasons which make it not so have nothing to do with the theory – rather they are wholly contingent upon circumstance. In almost any given and immediate situation it is not actually difficult to know what the ‘good’ thing to do or say is – nor is it likely to be particularly debatable. This is not to deny that moral dilemmas exist, nor that they should not be recognised as such and faced. But it is to point out that morally uncertain situations are in a minority in my life and in those of most people. Often I know very well what I ought to do, or how I ought to respond. The obstacles are not moral but practical and personal. I may be too busy or too lazy (or both) to greet my partner or children as they come home, but this does not mean I am not aware of the moral imperative that I should express my love more frequently and less ambiguously. I just don’t do it! I am not suggesting that ceasing to place means before ends, or losing the plot, will immediately produce a moral regeneration of daily practice – ‘if only’, as my children say. What I am arguing is that it allows the focus of our ethical attention to be where it should be – on the small details, the daily ‘content’ of our lives, rather than on the grand plan. Susan Sontag wrote, ‘I am a writer, yes? You know that I write every day. But I might not write tomorrow. From tomorrow I might never write again. I am a writer because I write. I do not write because I am a writer.’ It is in exactly this sense that Berdyaev argues that true freedom consists not in fulfilling the law or in chasing a greater good, but in creating new realities and new values. We are good – or bad – insofar as we make good or bad choices in each and every moment of each and every day. Our intentions are, unfortunately, only one part of this – and not the most important part either. Similarly, the law may or may not be on our side, but it will not save us. As a free being man is not merely a servant of the moral law, but a creator of new values. … Man is called upon to create the good and not to fulfil it. Creative freedom gives rise to new values. The world of values is not a changeless realm rising above man and freedom; Man is free in relation to moral values, not merely in the sense that he is free to realise or not to realise them. … Man can choose to co-operate with God, to create the good and produce new values. (Berdyaev 1937: 57) Finally, it should be acknowledged that there is a real presence throughout this essay – as in a Graham Greene novel – of a third party. The stories, and my whole persuasive endeavour, are predicated upon the presence of God, upon the Pascalian wager on transcendence. I make no apology since it is, at the end of the day, my story, and my responsibility is simply to tell it faithfully. But it is not only a personal or private story which requires this presence; arguably any narrative, to be sensible (able to be made sense of ) or legible (able to be read ), to be meaningful at all, necessitates the same. The start of George Steiner’s book, Real Presences, proposes just this.

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We still speak of ‘sunrise’ and ‘sunset’. We do so as if the Copernican model of the solar system had not replaced, ineradicably, the Ptolemaic. Vacant metaphors, eroded figures of speech, inhabit our vocabulary and grammar. They are caught, tenaciously, in the scaffolding and recesses of our common parlance. There they rattle about like old rags or ghosts in the attic. This is the reason why rational men and women, particularly in the scientific and technological realities of the West, still refer to ‘God’. This is why the postulate of the existence of God persists in so many unconsidered turns of phrase and allusion. No plausible reflection of belief underwrites His presence. Nor does any intelligible evidence. Where God clings to our culture, to our routines of discourse, He is a phantom of grammar, a fossil embedded in the childhood of rational speech. So Nietzsche, and many after him. This essay argues the reverse. It proposes that any coherent understanding of what language is, and how language performs, that any coherent account of the capacity of human speech to communicate meaning and feeling, is, in the final analysis, underwritten by the assumption of God’s presence. (Steiner 1989: 3) I have argued that we abandon the plot, that we stick with the narratives because we have no choice – narratives being the ways in which we give order to the chaos of experience – and that we tell our own stories in all their subjective and ‘fictional’ particularity. I have suggested that this will enable a focus upon ‘content’ rather than purpose, means rather than ends, activity and not goals. And, in an even more dangerous turn from the discursively constructed subjectivity of the post-modern era, I believe that it is not necessary to return to the essentialism I discarded all those years ago upon reading Sartre in order to espouse a view that there is a moral ‘substance’ to this ‘content’, the sum of activity in our lives. I want to explore this notion of substance, which may be seen as akin to the ‘substance’ which underwrites a text – and which makes it impossible to argue that an infinite number of interpretations may be generated. An interpretation, to be useful or sensible, rests upon a notion of faithfulness to the text. We all know – and can argue – that some interpretations, whether of history, or of a book, poem or film, or of a sequence of actions and words in our lives, are ‘unfaithful’, perhaps deliberately so. They run orthogonal to the direction of truth in the text. I am suggesting that it is this ‘direction of truth’ in the content of the text which may be termed ‘substance’. And we may extend this notion of substance to our lives by considering that a mini-section of life can always be considered as a ‘text’. Once an utterance or an action, or a sequence of utterances and actions, have occurred, they remain ‘on-hand’, so-to-speak, to be discussed, scrutinised and interpreted by ourselves and others.5 If the meaning of inter-human communication is underwritten by the assumption of God’s presence, then I would argue that, in a similar vein, there is a truth embodied in texts of all description, including those ‘texts’ which constitute retrospective analyses of aspects of our lives. This truth may be aligned to the

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‘substance’ of the text. This is in no sense a return to the propositional truth of representational theories of language. Rather, it is to assert a limit to interpretation, ethical as well as epistemological, whether the texts are creative artefacts or parts of our lives viewed post-hoc. To attend to this substance is to interpret it in a way which runs with the weave of truth in a text, rather than against it. The former may be described as ‘faithful’. Thus, my son Wilf gives me an account of something his older brother Fred has done. This sequence of actions and words is woven into a ‘story’ by Wilf, and it will be more or less faithful as a story, i.e. it will run either with or counter to the substance, the weave of truth in the text. Of course there are many competing agendas – Wilf ’s desire to get Fred in trouble, to get ‘his own back’, Fred’s desire to ‘put Wilf in his place’, to avoid trouble, and so on. And there are, or may be, at least as many competing ‘stories’. But some are faithful to the substance, and some are not, whether or not this faithfulness is recognised, consciously or unconsciously, by any of the participants. Once we accept that this notion of substance applies as much to a set of episodes in our lives, although we can only view these as spectators (as indeed others do), as it does to any other text, we have a means of accounting for and producing the moral ‘charge’ which is inextricably a part of such retrospection.

To conclude … In the eighteenth century, God was wheeled in to underwrite reality. Dear Sir, your astonishment’s odd: I am always about in the quad. And that’s why the tree Will continue to be, Since observed by Yours faithfully, God. In the twentieth century He was drafted on side to guarantee the presence of meaning between us (Steiner, Lévinas). But in the twenty-first century perhaps a greater challenge is to persuade each other – and hence our politicians – to trust God with the plot and to leave it to Him. Our responsibility is the ‘content’, the day-by-day activity, the ‘means’. If these choices are moral, I believe we can trust God to take care of the ends.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5

Paul Celan, quoted in Steiner 1989. E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel, quoted in Tambling 1991. On 20 July 2003, Tony Blair addressed the American people with a speech in which he claimed that ‘Whatever the truth about the weapons of mass destruction, History will applaud us’, in relation to the invasion of Iraq. All the references to Lévinas’s works are taken from writings reproduced in The Lévinas Reader edited by Sean Hand and the page numbers given refer to this text. Dates refer to the original paper. See Shotter 1993b: ch. 1, pp. 20–25 for a fuller explication of the ‘tool-text’ ambiguities in language.

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Bibliography Bahktin, M. (1981) The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Emerson and Holquist, Austin: University of Texas Press. —— (1984) Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. Emerson, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Barnes, J. (1984 ) Flaubert’s Parrot, London: Picador. Barthes, R. (1977) Image-Music-Text, trans. Heath, London: Fontana. Bataille, G. (1988 [1961]) Guilty, trans. Boone, Venice, CA: Lapis Press. —— (1973 [1957]) Literature and Evil, trans. Hamilton, London: Marion Boyars. Benjamin, W. (1970 [1955]) Illuminations, trans. Zohn, London: Fontana/Collins. Berdyaev, N. (1937) The Destiny of Man trans. Duddington, Geoffrey Bles, London: Centenary Press. —— (1950) Dream and Reality trans. Lampert, Geoffrey Bles, London: Centenary Press. Collier, A. (1999) Being and Worth, London: Routledge. —— (2001) Christianity and Marxism, London: Routledge. Cory, W. (1858) Heraclitus (translation of Callimachus Epigrams 2) in Ionica. De Certeau, M. (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkeley: University of California Press. Dillard, A. (1987 ) An American Childhood, New York: Harper and Row. Flower-MacCannell, J. (1986) Figuring Lacan, Beckenham, Kent: Croom Helm. Greene, G. (1955) The Quiet American, Harmondsworth: Penguin. —— (1972) A Sort of Life, London: Bodley Head. —— (1983) Monsignor Quixote, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Hand, S. (ed.) (1989) The Lévinas Reader, Oxford: Blackwell. Heidegger, M. (1967) Being and Time, trans. Macquarrie and Robinson, Oxford: Blackwell. Lawrence, D.H. (1999) The Rainbow, Harmondsworth: Penguin. —— (1999) Women in Love, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Lévinas, E. (1958) “Les Cahiers de l’Alliance Israelite Universelle CXIX 25–7” in Sean Hand (ed) The Levinas Reader, Oxford, Blackwell. —— (1967) ‘Martin Buber and the Theory of Knowledge’, in Paul A. Schilpp and Maurice Friedman (eds) The Philosophy of Martin Buber, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —— (1984) “Transcendence et intelligibilite” in Sean Hand (ed) The Levinas Reader, Oxford, Blackwell. Lévinas, E. (1989) The Lévinas Reader, ed. Sean Hand, Oxford: Blackwell. Muste, A. (1967) The Essays of A.J. Muste, Indianapolis : Bobbs-Merrill. Sartre, J.P. (1965 [1938]) Nausea, trans. Baldick, Harmondsworth: Penguin. —— (1948) Existentialism and Humanism, London: Methuen. —— (1969) Being and Nothingness, trans. Barnes, London: Methuen. Shotter, J. (1993a) Conversational Realities, London: Sage. —— (1993b) Cultural Politics of Everyday Life, Buckingham: Open University Press. Steiner, G. (1972a) Extra-Territorial, London: Faber and Faber. —— (1972b) On Difficulty, Oxford: Oxford University Press. —— (1978) Heidegger, London: Fontana. —— (1989) Real Presences, London: Faber and Faber. Tambling, J. (1991) Narrative and Ideology, Milton Keynes: Open University Press.

Part II

Critiques of counter-objectivity

3

Objectivity, postmodernism and biographical understanding Andrew Collier on R.D. Laing1 Ray Monk

As a defender of lost causes, Andrew Collier is surely without equal in contemporary philosophy. In his latest book, In Defence of Objectivity, he describes himself as ‘a Bhaskarian in theory of knowledge, a Spinozist in philosophy of mind, a Kleinian in psychology, an Augustinian in ethics, a Lutheran in theology, and an eco-Trotskyist in politics’ (Collier 2003b: 127). To find a defender of any of these positions at a present-day philosophy conference would be a fairly rare event; to find a defender of all of them could mean only one thing: one has met Andrew Collier. In his very first book, R.D. Laing: The Philosophy and Politics of Psychotherapy, Collier set his face defiantly against the dominant trends in his own discipline when he announced: ‘The appearance of the sciences of historical and mental processes, associated with the names of Marx and Freud, defines the task of philosophy in our time as I see it.’ He went on: Misconceptions which stand in the way of the extension of knowledge on the basis of these sciences must be cleared away. This involves clarification of the method and structure of these theories, and the refutation of claims by the Canutes that they are unscientific or inappropriate to their specific objects. And this is precisely what most philosophers do claim. (Collier 1977: viii) Since 1977 the reputations of Freud and Marx have taken such a battering that the depiction of their detractors as ‘Canutes’ looks almost quaintly inappropriate. Who now believes that Marxism and Freudianism are sciences? Well, Andrew Collier for one. In his latest book, Marx and Freud are repeatedly named as scientists whose discoveries are paradigmatic of what Collier calls ‘counterphenomenal knowledge’, that is, knowledge, which, because it contradicts appearances, can perform a liberating function. Neither society nor the mind is as they appear to be and, if we want to free ourselves from enslaving deceptions about them, Collier still believes, we should acquaint ourselves with the ‘knowledge’ that the ‘sciences’ of Marxism and Freudianism have uncovered. Given the way that intellectual tides have turned, nothing more Canute-like can be imagined. But, from Collier’s point of view, it is even worse than this. For

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those tides have brought with them not only (what I consider to be) a healthy scepticism about the scientific status of Marxist and Freudian theories, they have also washed up what I, along with Collier (and most of the ‘Canutes’ referred to by Collier above), regard as a deeply pernicious form of scepticism: postmodernism. In resisting this tide, Collier stands shoulder to shoulder with the very traditionalists (those described in the above quotation as ‘most philosophers’) against whom he had so resolutely set his face twenty-five years ago. Though the discipline of Philosophy has, thank heaven, remained relatively untouched by postmodernism, we have watched aghast as our colleagues in adjacent disciplines in the humanities and the social sciences have adopted the most facile and intellectually barren forms of relativism and subjectivism imaginable. The truth of those theories that Collier holds so dear in the ‘sciences of historical and mental processes’ has been denied, not because those theories fail to meet some specified criteria for science, nor even because of a more general claim that no theories of human society or the human mind could possibly be scientific, but rather because the notion of truth itself has become unacceptable. In the postmodern world, there are no theories, no knowledge and no truth; there are only ‘narratives’, stories, the fictionality of which is assumed, whether these stories are those told by physicists about quarks or those told by astrologers about sun signs. Of course, this means that on one important point, the postmodernists and Andrew Collier are in agreement: Marxism and Freudianism do indeed have the same epistemic status as the natural sciences. However, where this means that none of them provide us with any more truth than does (say) witchcraft, Collier is surely right to reject any comforts that this agreement might bring. In academic life, particularly in interdisciplinary seminars and conferences, we are subjected to this kind of nonsense on a daily basis, but it is surprisingly difficult to find direct statements of these absurd doctrines in print. Postmodernist literary theorists, sociologists, historians, etc. very rarely state these views directly in their published work, still more rarely do they argue for them. Rather, they are just assumed in the things they do write. This is presumably why, though Collier repeatedly criticises postmodernism, he hardly ever quotes from published work to illustrate the views he is attacking.2 Criticism on this point stung him, in his essay, ‘Critical realism and the heritage of the Enlightenment’, to make the following prefatory remarks: when I am stimulated to write polemically against a prevalent idea, it is almost always in live discussions in seminars or conferences or pubs or political meetings that are the stimulus. I am arguing against positions that I have heard put forward, often by people that I didn’t know and have never met again. For this reason my polemics are scant in attributions or textual references. Nevertheless, I think the positions criticised are at any rate close to positions typical of much postmodernist literature, as well as of much contemporary intellectual conversation. (Collier 2003b: 47)

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In order to confirm that the views Collier has heard in seminars, conferences and pubs are actually representative of postmodernism (and are not, e.g., teasing, provocative statements made in the heat of the moment), it is instructive to see what is written in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy under the heading ‘Postmodernism’,3 an entry written by Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth (1998: 587–590), who clearly sees herself as sympathetic to the postmodernist movement (the views she attributes to postmodernists are not – as one might initially think – given with the intention of ridiculing the movement, but rather with that of presenting it in a favourable light): Although diverse and eclectic, postmodernism can be recognized by two key assumptions. First, the assumption that there is no common denominator – in ‘nature’ or ‘truth’ or ‘God’ or ‘the future’ – that guarantees either the One-ness of the world or the possibility of neutral or objective thought. Second, the assumption that all human systems operate like language, being self-reflexive rather than referential systems – systems of differential function which are powerful but finite, and which construct and maintain meaning and value. (Ermarth 1998: 587) It is a little difficult to know what the first assumption, as expressed here, amounts to and whose views it is intended to challenge. Has anyone ever believed, for example, that there is a ‘common denominator’ that guarantees ‘the One-ness of the world’?4 I have trouble understanding what this might even mean. And when she says that there is no common denominator that would guarantee ‘the possibility of neutral or objective thought’, does she intend us to understand that neutral or objective thought is, in fact, impossible? Of course, its impossibility would not actually follow from the fact that there is nothing to guarantee its possibility. It would seem, however, that she does indeed believe that postmodernism has shown objective thought to be impossible, this being a consequence of the second assumption, the denial of the possibility of reference: The view that all systems are self-contained and largely self-referential has a radical implication that either alarms or inspires – the implication that no system has any special purchase on Truth and, in fact, that it is impossible to establish a Truth. This implication goes beyond the recuperable relativism of the nineteenth century to unrecuperable difference in the twentieth. Where relative systems could still cohabit in the single world of modernity, postmodernity involves the recognition that, to a large extent, one’s relative systems construct the world. In short, that the world is not One; that words like ‘truth’, ‘nature’, ‘reality’ and even ‘human’ are weasel words because they imply, falsely, that an autonomous world of meaning and values exists, and that it transcends all finite and mutually exclusive human systems and somehow guarantees them. Postmodernism denies absolute status to any

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Ray Monk truth or nature or reality. The question always remains – what truth, which nature, whose reality? (Ermarth 1998: 589)

Her use of the qualifying phrases ‘largely’ and ‘to a large extent’ is rather unsettling here, because it entirely undermines her argument. If systems are only largely, but not entirely, self-referential, then it would certainly not follow that it is impossible to establish a truth (since truths might be established using those parts of the system that did manage to refer to something outside it). Likewise, if it were only true to a large extent, and not entirely true, that one’s systems construct the world, then it would not follow that the assumption of the existence of a world that transcended that system is necessarily false. I think these qualifying phrases have to be understood as a stylistic tic, characteristic of people who are convinced that nothing is true in an unqualified, ‘absolute’ sense (not even the proposition: ‘nothing is true in an unqualified and absolute sense’). An advantage of this stylistic tic is that self-referential paradoxes are avoided5 (if ‘nothing is true in an unqualified and absolute sense’ is true in an unqualified and absolute sense, then, clearly, it is false); the disadvantage is that an unbridgeable gap opens up between premise and conclusion. Nevertheless, it is fairly clear what some of these conclusions are: language is self-referential (words do not refer to things in the world, but only to other words); so are all other ‘systems’ (I take her to include in this: science, philosophy, religion and all political theories); truth is always relative to a system, and therefore objective knowledge, knowledge of reality, is an illusion. In her concluding paragraph, Ermarth suggests that ‘postmodernism offers both a new freedom and a new constraint’: The emphasis on the constructed nature of all knowledge and projects means that, because they have been invented, they can be changed; there is, morally and socially speaking, no ‘nature’ of things. On the other hand, the fact that with our languages we inherit so much of our beliefs and values ready-made means that we are much less original and autonomous than modernity suggested, and we express agency more locally, more collectively and less heroically than modernity allowed. (Ermarth 1998: 590) In other words, we cannot arrive at a true view of the world, nor can we change it; we are, however, free to re-interpret it as often and in whatever way we like. Nothing further from Collier’s notion of liberating ‘counter-phenomenal’ knowledge could possibly be imagined, and, if one wanted to identify a philosophical position that embodied everything that Collier’s latest three books – Being and Worth, In Defence of Objectivity and On Christian Belief – are campaigning against, one would find it in this encyclopedia article. Is there any point in arguing against a view as transparently silly as postmodernism? For example, would any purpose be served by pointing out to

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Ermarth that her use of the word ‘fact’ in the passage quoted above is inconsistent with the general position she claims to believe? For, if something is a fact, and we know it to be such, have we not succeeded in establishing a truth? And, has she not previously told us that it is impossible to establish a truth? She could, of course, escape this inconsistency by claiming that this fact, like all others, is part of that invented ‘knowledge’ she claims to be subject to endless change. But, if this is so, how does it provide any kind of ‘constraint’? If we feel constrained by it, why do we not simply change it? The answer, of course, is that if it is a fact that with our language we inherit much of our beliefs and values, then we can’t simply change that fact because we are constrained by it in the very act of transforming it. And that means that it is not true that because all our knowledge was once invented it can therefore be changed right now. Postmodernism is so enmeshed in contradictions, so committed to denying what is obviously true and to asserting what is obviously false, that one is driven to doubt whether anybody actually believes it. As Andrew Collier (2003b: 135) says, the notion that facts are objective is denied ‘only ever by academics in their studies’. Outside their studies, the views of postmodernists would be regarded not as a philosophical position but as symptoms of psychosis. And yet, postmodernism has had, and continues to have, a lamentable influence on the way humanities and social science subjects are studied and taught at our universities. When, as I often do, I attend interdisciplinary conferences on biography, I am routinely told that biography is a form of fiction, that selves are created by the words used to describe them, that any claims by biographers to objectivity are illusory, and so on. An illustrative, if particularly grotesque, example of the kind of thing with which one has to deal if one engages with contemporary academic reflections on biography is a book called Interpretive Biography by Norman K. Denzin, a professor of sociology. This book, which was published in a series with the misleadingly austere title, ‘Qualitative Research Methods’ and which is widely recommended to undergraduate students, brings to bear on the subject of biography all the assumptions and conclusions of postmodernism as described by Ermarth, announcing them (with unconscious irony) as if they had the status of definitive truths. ‘Students of the biographical method’, Denzin (1989: 25) declares, ‘must learn how to use the strategies and techniques of literary interpretation and criticism. They must bring their use of the method in line with recent structuralist and poststructuralist developments in critical theory’. What this means in practice is accepting – without any argument whatsoever – the following dicta: Derrida (1972) has contributed to the understanding that there is no clear window into the inner life of a person, for any window is always filtered through the glaze of language, signs, and the process of signification. And language, in both its written and spoken forms, is always inherently unstable, in flux, and made up of traces of other signs and symbolic statements.

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Ray Monk Hence there can never be a clear, unambiguous statement of anything, including an intention or a meaning. (Denzin 1989: 14) as Derrida (1981) argues, the principle knowledge of (and about) a subject only exists in the texts written about them. Sartre proclaims the existence of a ‘real’ person, Flaubert. However, … the linguistic concept of person or subject in language only refers to the person making an utterance, as in ‘I am writing this line about persons’. My referentiality in the above line is only given in the pronoun I. My personhood is not in this line. The pronoun I is a shifter, and its only reference is in the discourse that surrounds it. … My existence, or Flaubert’s, is primarily, and discursively documented in the words written about or by them. (Denzin 1989: 20) When a biographer purports to be giving the ‘real’ objective details of a ‘real’ person’s life, he or she is, in fact, creating that subject in the text that is written. To send readers back to a ‘real’ person is to send them back to yet another version of the fiction that is in the text. There is no ‘real’ person behind the text, except as he or she exists in another system of discourse. (Denzin 1989: 22) to argue for a factually correct picture of a ‘real’ person is to ignore how persons are created in texts and other systems of discourse. (Denzin 1989: 23) Sartre found the Flaubert he wanted to find by positing a ‘real’ subject who lurked inside his so-called ‘fictional’ texts. But this distinction between Flaubert’s two texts, his first person accounts and his fictions, cannot be allowed. All of Flaubert’s writings were fiction. There were (and are) only multiple versions of his subjectivity. (Denzin 1989: 66) As we write about lives, we bring the world of others into our texts. We create differences, oppositions, and presences which allow us to maintain the illusion that we have captured the ‘real’ experiences of ‘real’ people. In fact, we create the persons we write about, just as they create themselves when they engage in storytelling practices. (Denzin 1989: 82)

To try to sum up: when we refer, say, to Gustave Flaubert, we are referring, not to a real, objectively existing individual, but rather to a fictional character, one who has created his (fictional) self through the writing of fiction, by which we mean, not only the novels he wrote, but also his letters, essays, memoirs, etc. (since ‘All Flaubert’s writings were fiction’). When Sartre writes a biography of

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Flaubert, he, too, is writing fiction and the subject of his biography is not a real person whose existence is independent of Sartre’s text, nor is it even the fictional character self-created through Flaubert’s fiction; no, it is a (presumably different) fictional character created by Sartre. To think otherwise – to think, for example, that the facts of Flaubert’s life are quite independent of Sartre’s book and that, in writing a biography of Flaubert, Sartre has a duty to remain faithful to those facts – is to ignore the insights of ‘recent structuralist and poststructuralist developments in critical theory’, particularly those of Derrida, who has shown us that (‘as a matter of fact’, one would be tempted to say, were it not so ludicrously inappropriate) all language is so unstable that we never succeed in uttering any truth-claim about anything. Of course, it follows from this entirely general thesis that Derrida is writing fiction when he discusses the nature of language, and that Denzin is writing fiction when he analyses Sartre’s biography of Flaubert. All one can do in the face of such ‘multiple subjectivity’ is pity the poor ‘students of the biographical method’ who ‘must’ learn these lessons. Denzin’s choice of Sartre’s biography of Flaubert as an example is not, of course, arbitrary. For Sartre’s purpose in writing his long, unreadable and exasperating life of Flaubert was precisely to demonstrate the opposite of Denzin’s view: that one can present an objective account of the details of a person’s life and, in doing so, add, not just to literature, but also to knowledge. The preface to The Family Idiot describes it as a ‘sequel to Search for a Method’, its subject being: ‘what, at this point in time, can we know about a man?’ Sartre’s answer to this question is: quite a lot. What do we know, for example, about Gustave Flaubert? Such knowledge would amount to summing up all the data on him at our disposal. … The fragments of information we have are very different in kind: Flaubert was born in December 1821, in Rouen – that is one kind of information; he writes, much later, to his mistress: ‘Art terrifies me’ – that is another. The first is an objective, social fact, confirmed by official documents; the second, objective too. (Sartre 1981: ix) Sartre’s aim in writing his biography of Flaubert was to demonstrate that, using (his version of) Marxist sociology, together with (his version of) Freudian psychoanalysis, a complete, exhaustive account of a person’s life could be written, one that presented, not a view of the life but the view of it. It is therefore no coincidence that the two kinds of information that Sartre identifies correspond to the two kinds of ‘science’ the defence of which constitutes the task of philosophy as seen by Andrew Collier. On the one hand, we have historical facts – the time and place of Flaubert’s birth, for example – and on the other we have facts about Flaubert’s mental life – that, for example, he found, or claimed to find, art terrifying. If, then, we take ‘the appearance of the sciences of historical and mental processes, associated with the names of Marx and Freud’ as seriously as Collier does, might the result of clearing away the ‘misconceptions which stand in the

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way of the extension of knowledge on the basis of these sciences’ be that we see the possibility of writing biography scientifically? Or, to pose a question which, if not identical, is clearly closely related: can there be a science of persons? This is the question at stake in Collier’s fascinating, career-long engagement with the work of R.D. Laing. My own view on this question is a Wittgensteinian one: biography is not, and cannot ever be, a science, and neither can the understanding of people. I say this while siding with Sartre and Collier on almost all the points at issue between them and the postmodernists. I reject wholeheartedly the notion that biography is a branch of fiction, and I agree with Sartre that both the historical details of Flaubert’s life and his ‘inner’ mental life are matters of objective fact. However, where I disagree with Sartre is over his claim that a single, definitive, unifying biography of a person is possible. I believe that, even if all the facts of a person’s life could be established, there would still be room for several different ways of looking at that life, several different possible ways of writing the biography, and that these different possible biographies could all be faithful to the facts, and equally ‘objective’. Sartre raises this issue in the preface to The Family Idiot. ‘We have no assurance at the outset’, he writes, ‘that such a summation [as the one alluded to in the quotation given above] is possible and that the truth of a person is not multiple’. Referring to Flaubert’s expressed feeling that art terrified him, Sartre writes: ‘we can draw no conclusions about the sense and import of this feeling until we have first established whether Gustave is sincere in general, and in this instance in particular’. Do we not then risk ending up with layers of heterogeneous and irreducible meanings? This book attempts to prove that irreducibility is only apparent, and that each piece of data set in its place becomes a portion of the whole. Of course, if you ask a Wittgensteinian how there can be two or more legitimate ways of looking at something even when the relevant facts have been agreed upon, he or she will most likely start talking about ‘gestalt switches’, ‘aspect seeing’ and ‘seeing as’. I am no exception to this, though I am aware that, to Andrew Collier, such talk is like a red rag to a bull. In On Christian Belief, he dismisses the importance of ‘gestalt switches’ in the following paragraph: It is perhaps worth mentioning in passing the unhelpfulness of one metaphor often used to give credibility to a non-cognitivist reading of paradigm shifts: the gestalt switch, like Wittgenstein’s celebrated duckrabbit. Because with gestalt switches we can make sense of the phrase ‘seeing things differently’ without seeing different things, we assume that this can be made sense of in other contexts too. But gestalt switch pictures are a very special phenomenon; they require an expert draughtsman to do them well – a Dali or an Escher; and they are only possible because of the conventions (not recognised by all cultures) for representing three dimensional objects on a two dimensional surface. Elsewhere in life, there are nothing like gestalt switch pictures, and ‘seeing things differently’ can only mean seeing different things. (Collier 2003a: 56)

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I disagree with this. It seems to me that the multiplicity of different ways of seeing the things around is an ineradicable and widespread feature of our lives. We can read a poem, listen to a piece of music, study a facial expression first one way and then another, without changing our views about the facts of the matter. One might be inclined, in many of these cases, to describe what we experience as seeing something different, rather than as seeing the same thing differently, but, after all, it is the same poem we are reading, the same piece of music we are listening to and the same face we are looking at. And, when we see first the duck and then the rabbit, in that case too we might describe ourselves as seeing something different. That is part of Wittgenstein’s point: that we see something different, even when what we look at is the same thing.6 Consider, for example, what happens when we ‘get’ a joke. For example: Q: A:

What, according to Dr. Freud, comes between fear and sex? fünf.

To understand this joke, we have to change the aspect under which we hear the two key words in the question: first, we hear them as ‘fear’ and ‘sex’, then as ‘vier’ and ‘sechs’. It is not the case that one of these is the correct meaning; rather, the joke requires both to be correct and for us to be able to switch from one to the other. It is important to recognise, as Wittgenstein (2001 [1958]: 195) does, that ‘seeing as’ is not characteristic of all seeing (we do not see the cutlery in front of us on a dinner table ‘as’ a knife and fork – we simply see a knife and fork). Nevertheless, it is equally important, I feel, to recognise that it is nothing like as rare as Collier suggests. Irreducible ambiguity is not, as the postmodernists would have it, a ubiquitous feature of all our experience and all our language, but it is, nevertheless, a fairly widespread phenomenon. Of course, to recognise this is not to give up on objectivity. There is a huge difference between saying that there are two correct ways of seeing something and saying, with the postmodernists, that there are no correct ways of seeing things, just lots of different ways. From the fact that there is more than one way of being right, it does not follow that there are no ways of being wrong. It is impossible to write a definitive biography, but it is certainly possible to write a misleading and distorted biography. That the same phenomena can be seen in a variety of different ways is central to R.D. Laing’s understanding of the status of his investigations into schizophrenia, as he makes clear in the first chapter of The Divided Self (1965). ‘Man’s being’, he writes there, ‘can be seen from different points of view and one or other aspect can be made the focus of study. In particular, man can be seen as a person or thing.’ Illustrating his point with precisely the kind of gestalt switch drawing that Collier suggests above is ‘a very special phenomenon’ (not the duck–rabbit, but the almost equally familiar two faces–vase picture), Laing goes on:

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Ray Monk Now, even the same thing, seen from different points of view, gives rise to two entirely different descriptions, and the descriptions give rise to two entirely different theories, and the theories result in two entirely different sets of action. The initial way we see a thing determines all our subsequent dealings with it. Let us consider an equivocal or ambiguous figure: [here he reproduces the two faces–vase drawing] In this figure, there is one thing on the paper, which can be seen as a vase or as two faces turned towards each other. There are not two things on the paper: there is one thing there, but, depending on how it strikes us, we can see two different objects. … Now, if you are sitting opposite me, I can see you as another person like myself; without you changing or doing anything differently, I can now see you as a complex physical–chemical system, perhaps with its own idiosyncrasies but chemical none the less for that: seen in this way, you are no longer a person but an organism. … There is no dualism in the sense of the co-existence of two different essences or substances there in the object, psyche and soma; there are two different experiential Gestalts: person and organism. … One acts towards an organism differently from the way one acts towards a person. The science of persons is the study of human beings that begins with a relationship with the other as person and proceeds to an account of the other still as person. For example, if one is listening to another person talking, one may either (a) be studying verbal behaviour in terms of neural processes and the whole apparatus of vocalising, or (b) be trying to understand what he is saying. (Laing 1965: 20–21)

Though this passage seems obviously crucial in understanding Laing’s conception of what he was doing in The Divided Self, Collier never once quotes it, discusses it, or even mentions it, despite the fact that he devotes many pages of his book on Laing to a discussion of Laing’s meta-psychology during which he quotes liberally from the first chapter of The Divided Self. ‘To many of us who read Laing’s works in the 1960s’, Collier (2003b: 203) writes, ‘they came as a revelation, and a liberating revelation.’ This, surely, is true, but as to what, exactly, people found liberating about Laing’s work, Collier and I have very different impressions. My impression is that what people found liberating in Laing’s work was precisely the gestalt switch described above: the conscious decision to see schizophrenics as people rather than as malfunctioning organisms. What is impressive about Laing’s early work is his determination to understand the patients with whom he came into contact, to see meaning in what they said, rather than dismiss their utterances as the product of a diseased mind. For the first time, it seemed to many, the voices of schizophrenics were being heard and taken seriously and, in a world of straitjackets, padded cells, insulin treatment and ECT, this seemed a humane and positive development. Of course, it did not lead to a better understanding of the causes of

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schizophrenia, or to anything that would either cure it or even alleviate its symptoms, but it did do something to combat the tendency to treat the insane as if they were somehow less than human. And, to that extent, despite the excesses of the ‘anti-psychiatry’ movement to which it gave rise, the work of Laing was indeed a liberating revelation. So much for my impression. Andrew Collier’s impression is very different. For him, what was liberating about Laing’s works was that: ‘They explained much that had seemed inexplicable and they were liberating quite simply by virtue of their explanations’ (Collier 2003b: 203). What he found impressive about Laing was not his humane determination to see schizophrenics as people, but rather his scientific achievement in revealing the counter-phenomenal reality behind the phenomena of mental illness (for: ‘The knowledge or understanding that liberates is necessarily that which is counter-phenomenal, contrary to appearances’ (Collier 2003b: 204)). ‘The human world too has its structures’, Collier (2003b: 205) insists and, just as Marxism reveals the structures of society – not as they appear, but as they really are – so Laing’s work revealed the structures of families, structures which, it is implied, go some way towards explaining the causes of schizophrenia. In families, ‘people appear differently to others than to themselves and differently again to different others’ (Collier 2003b: 206), and so a series of contradictions appear. Laing’s achievement, according to Collier (2003b: 206) was to ‘liberate the participants (or at least the victims) of the [family] group, by supplanting the various appearances with a more adequate – more objective – understanding of the group’s structure’. Armed with this objective understanding of the family structure, the contradictions among the beliefs held by the family members can be resolved, not by granting equal validity to every point of view, but, on the contrary, by sorting out the true beliefs from the false ones, thus moving from illusory appearances to objective reality: Micro-social contradictions can be resolved only by an understanding that disproves at least some of the beliefs it starts by describing. It is a matter of moving from appearances to the counter-phenomenal realities underlying them. (Collier 2003b: 206) The rather idiosyncratic view of Laing’s work that emerges from this analysis is this: Laing investigates the family of a schizophrenic, discovers a complicated structure of contradictory beliefs, and liberates the family from the tensions that gave rise to schizophrenia by distinguishing reality from appearance in such a way as to demonstrate that some beliefs held within the family are in fact false. It would seem to follow from this that the cause of schizophrenia is lack of objectivity! Not surprisingly, Collier is dismayed to find in Laing’s later work an explicit attack on what Laing calls ‘the objective look’, which, in Collier’s words, is ‘the look that goes beyond appearances and uncovers the counter-phenomenal reality behind them’ (Collier 2003b: 207). ‘To the purely objective point of view’, Laing

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writes, ‘everything is an object’. Collier sees in this no more than a confusion. ‘Of course knowing objects is not knowing people,’ he writes, ‘but no reason is given why we cannot also know people in a way that is objective in the usual sense – that is, independent of the knower’s subjectivity’: One could, of course, have knowledge of people considered purely as objects – their weight and spatial location, for instance. But there is no reason why equally objective facts, such as whether they love each other, should not be known as well. One is reminded here of Sartre’s insistence that Flaubert’s fear of art was an objective fact. Both are, in my view, correct; there are objective facts about a person’s ‘inner’ mental life, and there is nothing, in principle, to prevent us from knowing those facts. To acknowledge this, however, is not to dismiss Laing’s point about ‘the objective look’. Laing’s point, I take it, is not that there are no objective facts about people considered as people. Rather, his point is that to see someone as a person is to take a certain attitude towards them. As Wittgenstein (1958: II, iv, p. 178) once put it: ‘My attitude towards him is an attitude towards a soul. I am not of the opinion that he has a soul.’ Likewise, the doctor who looks at a patient as an organism is not of the opinion that the patient is nothing more than an organism. In The Divided Self, Laing puts it like this: The clinical psychiatrist, wishing to be more ‘scientific’ or ‘objective’, may propose to confine himself to the ‘objectively’ observable behaviour of the patient before him. The simplest answer to this is that it is impossible. To see ‘signs’ of ‘disease’ is not to see neutrally. Nor is it neutral to see a smile as contractions of the circumoral muscles. (1965: 31) Quoting with approval Dilthey’s remark: We explain by means of purely intellectual processes, but we understand by means of the cooperation of all the powers of the mind in comprehension. In understanding we start from the connection of the given, living whole, in order to make the past comprehensible in terms of it. (Laing 1965: 32) Laing makes it clear that his concern is not to explain schizophrenia, but rather to understand schizophrenics, a difference he describes in terms of a gestalt switch: To look and listen to a patient and to see ‘signs’ of schizophrenia (as a ‘disease’) and to look and to listen to him simply as a human being are to see and to hear in as radically different ways as when one sees, first the vase, then faces in the ambiguous picture. (1965: 33)

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‘I think it is clear’, he adds, ‘that by understanding I do not mean a purely intellectual process. For understanding one might say love. … One cannot love a conglomeration of “signs of schizophrenia”.’ Laing’s remarks on ‘the objective look’ in The Voice of Experience, then, are not an aberration, or a departure from his previously held views; they are entirely of a piece with the views he expressed in his very first book. I agree with Andrew Collier that Laing’s work got worse as he got older, but I do not see this deterioration in the terms in which Collier describes it.7 The liberating, counter-phenomenal explanations of the family origins of schizophrenia that Collier wishes to see in Laing’s early works are, in my view, simply not there. Laing’s concern, throughout his career, was not to explain, but to understand and to describe. He did not claim to be unearthing the reality behind the myriad of conflicting appearances, but rather to be describing a way of looking at reality to which the ‘objective look’ is necessarily blind and, thereby, presenting an alternative way of seeing schizophrenic patients, one that is precisely, and crucially not ‘independent of the knower’s subjectivity’. In R.D. Laing: The Philosophy and Politics of Psychotherapy, Collier wrestles repeatedly and at length with the suggestion that Laing’s work is essentially descriptive rather than explanatory, concerned with reasons rather than with causes, but he always stops short of accepting that this is so, preferring to see the suggestion as highlighting a possible mistake that Laing is in danger of making, rather than as an accurate description of what he is doing. Recognising that Laing has, if nothing else, ‘accomplished a very valuable descriptive task’, Collier (1977: 41) refuses to accept that this could possibly be all that Laing’s purported ‘science of persons’ amounts to: His writings have an important place in the literature to which one should turn if one wishes to understand what it is like to be schizoid or, so far as such understanding is possible, to be schizophrenic. Such description is invaluable from a scientific point of view as well as from that of therapy itself or of a layman’s attempt to understand himself and his fellow creatures better. However, it is not itself science; a biography or a novel might serve the same purpose. Here, I think Collier has hit the nail on the head, only he has drawn the wrong conclusion from what he has correctly analysed. Laing’s descriptions of the inner lives of schizophrenics are closer to biography than they are to science, and the conclusion to draw from this is not that we must seek the justification for the word ‘science’ elsewhere in Laing’s work and see his resistance to ‘the objective look’ as an aberration; rather, we must see his use of the phrase ‘science of persons’ as an aberration. If our interest is in explaining schizophrenia and finding a cure for it, then we would be well advised to look at schizophrenic patients in the same way in which we look at cancer patients – that is, as organisms – and try to find an organic cause for the illness.8 However, if our interest is, as Laing’s was, in understanding

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the mind, the soul, of the schizophrenic person, then the tools of medical and biological science are of no use to us and we would be better off adopting the approach of a biographer. Of course, as Laing came to realise (his use of the phrase ‘science of persons’ was short-lived), this means that what we engaged in is not, and cannot be, a science. This does not mean, contra the postmodernists, that we have to accept that we are engaged in writing fiction, but it does mean that Andrew Collier’s hopes of finding in Laing’s attempts to understand schizophrenics an ‘extension of knowledge’ on the basis of the ‘science’ of Freudian psychoanalysis are misplaced. In insisting on the scientific status of Laing’s ‘explanations’ of schizophrenia, Andrew Collier has been defending, not so much a lost cause, as a cause that never was.9

Notes 1

2

3 4

5

6 7 8

Though this essay is critical of Andrew Collier’s reading of R.D. Laing, I would like to emphasise here how much, over the eleven years I have been his colleague, he has commanded my respect and admiration. In the many conversations I have had with him, I have learned a great deal, not only about philosophy, but also about the astonishingly wide range of topics covered by his immense learning, including: the Trotskyist groups of the 1960s, the history of Wales, medieval methods of calculating the calendar, the finer points of English grammar, and the correct way to use the phrase ‘brought to fruition’. One of the few exceptions I have found is in Critical Realism, where Collier (1994: 97–101) discusses the work of Richard Rorty, who, he says, is ‘often regarded as the main representative of “postmodernist” philosophy in the English-speaking world’. Even here, however, only two quotations from Rorty are given and, in any case, Collier’s concern in these pages is not to criticise Rorty himself but to summarise the criticisms of Rorty made by Roy Bhaskar in his book, Philosophy and the Idea of Freedom (criticisms with which, of course, Collier entirely agrees). Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. 7, pp. 587–590. I suppose, with quite a lot of straining, one could use phrases like this to describe the thinking of neo-Hegelians like Bradley and McTaggart, and perhaps even of Hegel himself, though one would struggle somewhat to specify what in their thought corresponds to the notion of a ‘common denominator’ as used by Ermarth. Not that this passage avoids paradox altogether – with or without its qualifying phrases. For example, if we know, as Ermarth suggests we do, that the proposition ‘an autonomous world of meaning and values exists’ is false, then surely its negation (‘an autonomous world of meaning and values does not exist’) is true, thus showing that it is not, after all, ‘impossible to establish a Truth’. See Wittgenstein 1958: Part II, section xi, p. 196: ‘The expression of a change of aspect is the expression of new perception and at the same time of the perception’s being unchanged.’ As I see it, the deterioration in Laing’s work is not characterised by a withdrawal from objectivity to subjectivity, but rather by an increasing – and increasingly vehement – refusal to admit that schizophrenics are ill. -I realise, of course, that Laing resisted this view, but I think he was wrong to resist it and that what is insightful in his work is entirely consistent with it. To say that we have to look at schizophrenic patients as people if we want to understand them does not entail that we cannot switch gestalts when our interest is in identifying an organic cause for their condition. When we listen sympathetically to what a drunken

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man is saying we do not have pretend that he is not drunk, and neither, when we listen sympathetically to a schizophrenic person, do we have to pretend that he/she is not ill. I would like to thank my colleagues Maria Alvarez, Aaron Ridley and Graham Stevens for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this essay.

Bibliography Collier, A. (1977) R.D. Laing: The Philosophy and Politics of Psychotherapy, Hassocks: Harvester. —— (1994) Critical Realism: An Introduction to Roy Bhaskar’s Philosophy, London and New York: Verso. —— (2003a) On Christian Belief: A Defence of a Cognitive Conception of Religious Belief in a Christian Context, London: Routledge. —— (2003b) In Defence of Objectivity, London: Routledge. Denzin, N.K. (1989) Interpretive Biography, London: Sage. Derrida, J. (1981 [1972]) Positions, trans. A. Bass, London: Athlone. Ermarth, E.D. (1998) ‘Postmodernism’, Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. 7, London: Routledge, pp. 587–590. Laing, R.D. (1965) The Divided Self, London: Penguin. Sartre, J.-P. (1981) The Family Idiot, vol. I, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wittgenstein, L. (2001 [1958]) Philosophical Investigations, trans. E. Anscombe, Oxford: Blackwell.

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Objectivity and phallogocentrism Douglas V. Porpora

In his In Defence of Objectivity, Andrew Collier (2003: 19) asserts that ‘the first and central use of the word “objectivity” is to refer to what is true independently of any subject judging it to be true’. Thus, for Andrew, the concepts of truth and objectivity are closely connected. What is true is what is objectively the case independent of our saying so. Conversely, what is objectively the case is what we can truthfully assert to be the case. The idea that there is a truth and an objective reality independent of what we may take reality to be is what Derrida refers to as the ‘metaphysics of presence’. It is a view, Derrida argues, that is ‘logocentric’, privileging language, truth, and logic. And since language, truth, and logic are, following the thought of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, innately phallic, the metaphysics of presence is not only logocentric but phallocentric as well. We thus arrive at the word that postmodernist feminism (see, for example, Butler 1990: 16; Cornell 1995a) uses to characterise the metaphysics of presence: ‘phallogocentrism’. While language is perhaps inescapable for all of us who theorise, to continue believing today in logic, objectivity and truth is to be phallogocentric. Phallogocentrism, it follows, is what Andrew is urging us to uphold. In this paper, I will not defend Andrew or objectivity against the charge of phallogocentrism – at least not directly. Instead, for the sake of argument, I will accept the charge. What I will try to show is that whether a commitment to objectivity is or is not phallogocentric, we cannot do without it. The ‘we’ here includes feminism. It, too, must commit itself to objectivity. Discourse’s need for objectivity is not something I will try to establish philosophically. Instead, for once, I will remember that I am a sociologist and seek to demonstrate the point empirically. I will do so, moreover, in a way that demonstrates I have learned something from postmodernist feminism. I intend to offer a discourse analysis. Specifically, I intend to analyse the discourse of a debate among several major feminist theorists. The debate’s discursive style, I will argue, aims to escape the foundationalist truth claims of phallogocentrism without really doing so. Instead, the style succeeds only in erecting uncontested counter-foundations that serve – with less epistemic warrant – as truth surrogates. Truth surrogation is not the only problem. In the discourse we will examine, claims and claimants are not

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detached as they routinely are in phallogocentric discourse. The result is a level of acrimony that effectively shuts down reasoned contention. Such discursive features, I suggest, are ultimately disabling to the feminist movement. Accordingly, I suggest, feminists should not cede objectivity to men as a distinctly phallic construct. The debate to be examined was originally sponsored in 1990 by the Greater Philadelphia Philosophy Consortium. It brought together Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler, and Nancy Fraser to discuss the relation between feminism and postmodernism. The debate subsequently appeared in a special issue of the journal Praxis International. After that, the debate was republished in German as a book, including, in addition to the original papers and a new contribution by Drucilla Cornell, the reaction of each author to what the others had written. Finally, in 1995, a somewhat altered version of the collection, introduced by Linda Nicholson, appeared in English as the book Feminist Contentions. The debate opens with Benhabib reacting to three theses that another prominent feminist thinker, Jane Flax (1990), had previously identified with postmodernism and, which, indeed, most of us in social theory would identify with the postmodern movement. These postmodernist theses are: the death of the coherent subject; the death of encompassing historical narratives; and the death of metaphysics. Benhabib arrives at the debate to argue that the human subject, narratives, and metaphysics are not yet dead and, moreover, cannot die. She argues that the feminist movement itself needs to retain the concept of coherent subjects who oppress and who suffer from oppression; that feminism needs to write macrohistories of that oppression; and that it needs to do so in ways that are truthful, that is, in ways that can be shown to correspond to how things objectively are. Benhabib’s first paper is followed directly by Butler’s. Displaying what Fraser (1995a: 65) describes as Butler’s ‘characteristic genius for insubordination’, Butler, like a guerrilla army, simply melts away from the intended scene of engagement. She professes not to know what postmodernism is. ‘Who are these postmodernists?’ she asks (Butler 1995a: 35). ‘Is this a name that one takes on for oneself, or is it more often a name that one is called if and when one offers a critique of the subject, a discursive analysis, or questions the integrity or coherence of totalizing social descriptions?’ By dubiously going on to suggest that ‘postmodernism’ was invented first as a term of abuse by ‘paranoid’ defenders of foundationalism, Butler effectively aligns Benhabib with the forces of reactionary oppression. Butler’s paper is followed by Fraser’s, which is a remarkably even-handed attempt at feminist mediation. The antithesis, Fraser argues, between Benhabib’s modernist critical theory and Butler’s post-structuralism is a false one. There is, instead, a middle ground. Finally, Cornell’s first paper, aligned more with Butler than Benhabib, presents an independent defence of Lacan’s importance to the feminist movement. So ends in brief the first round of debate.

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What becomes particularly striking about the debate is the acrimony it goes on to produce. In a note to her first contribution, Benhabib (1995a: 31) says that the process of public disagreement has ‘strained personal loyalties and friendships’. In her second piece, Benhabib (1995b: 111) describes herself – herself and not her arguments – as having been ‘taken to task’ by Fraser’s critical comments, and she bristles (1995b: 120, n. 4) at Butler’s charge that Benhabib’s response almost ‘willfully’ misreads what Butler had written. Fraser (1995b: 169, n. 6) in turn accuses Butler of misunderstanding – or misreading – her own comments. Cornell’s (1995b: 145) second piece expresses a dream, shared with Butler, of not being ‘branded’ postmodernist. It goes on (Cornell 1995b: 146) to accuse Fraser – Fraser, and not her argument – of failing to understand the importance of unconscious motivation. Butler (1995b: 127), finally, remarks that, ‘in the end, I find the work of this volume to be saddening’. What happened here? As I said in the beginning, my theory is that the acrimony is tied to what I call the ‘hyper-situated’ nature of the discourse. To see this, however, I first need to contrast it with a more phallogocentric form of discourse.

Claims and claimants in phallogocentric discourse As Andrew puts it, objectivity refers to what is true independent of any subject’s saying so. Implied is an independence of claims and claimants. In phallogocentric discourse, claims are detached from claimants for independent evaluation in critical space. In this sense, claims in critical space are evaluated precisely as the often lampooned ‘view from nowhere’. Of course phallogocentric discourse recognises that claims are always advanced from one site or another, always in this way reflecting a particular perspective. However, as Andrew says, to the extent that a claim is meant to be objective, it is meant to reflect the object it is about and not the subject viewing it or the site from which it is viewed. Thus, from a phallogocentric perspective, the truth status of a claim is independent of its origin and can be examined separately. However much a claim may have issued from resentment or from a position of power, it may, nonetheless, be true. There is a place in phallogocentric discourse for genealogical analysis, but that analysis must also vindicate its own claim to truth and will always carry more weight if the claims at which it is targeted have independently been shown to be false. In phallogocentric discourse, the truthfulness of a claim may in part be evaluated in terms of its effects. If a claim affords successful predictions, for example, its truth status is enhanced. Yet, just as a phallogocentric discourse detaches the evaluation of a claim from its claimant, so, too, does it detach the evaluation of the claim from its practical or political effects. In phallogocentric discourse, it is not in itself an argument against the truth of a claim that it has an effect judged adverse from one or another political perspective. Again, in phallogocentric

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discourse, the analysis of political effects is something that carries weight only after the truth of a claim has independently been called into question. Talk of truth and objective reality immediately gives rise to a lot of confusion about ‘foundationalism’. Fraser (1995a), for example, writes that ‘social criticism without philosophy is possible, if we mean by “philosophy” … ahistorical, transcendental discourse claiming to articulate the validity for all other discourses’. If this is what Fraser means by philosophy, then even a phallogocentrist can grant philosophy’s death. Of course, Fraser has essentialised philosophy by equating it with positivism. As Andrew is at pains to point out, we who are committed to objectivity do not believe we already are in possession of all truths about all objects. Instead, truth is generally not where we begin argument but where we hope to arrive at the end. How exactly do we arrive at truth? In phallogocentric discourse, we arrive at truth – at least provisionally – by what Janet Moulton (1983) describes critically – without, however, rejecting it – as the ‘adversarial method’. In the adversarial method of phallogocentric discourse, no claim is privileged. All claims can be contested – whether or not they actually are. Phallogocentric discourse progresses through conjectures and refutations. In phallogocentric discourse, a claim is judged true not a priori but only on the basis of an argument for its truth and, more importantly, on the survival of that argument against counter-argument. It is precisely through their survival of contestation that claims are judged true. Even then, in phallogocentric discourse, the judged truth of a claim is always provisional. A claim judged true is one that rests on the best argument so far. But the argument is never closed. It can always be reopened, in which case, reexamination is necessary. Understood in this sense, phallogocentric discourse is philosophy and is science. Of course, on this rendering, the adversarial method of philosophy and science is farther from the positivist foundationalism of Popper and Hempel and closer to the methodological anarchy of Feyerabend. All – even the criteria of truth – are always up for grabs, always contestable. On this view, science and philosophy are already the falibilistic, revisable, open-ended form of discourse called for by Flax, Nicholson and Fraser. Although we need to distinguish between the truths we hold provisionally and truth per se, our provisional truths are often close enough. While all claims can be contested, the contests that result may be decidedly unequal. Some truths are backed by sufficiently strong arguments so as continually to defend their titles against contenders. Where it is precisely the strength of argument that makes a claim incontestable, we do not privilege that claim by calling it true. That truth status has not been ascribed but, rather, earned. It is relativism, rather, that privileges weakly defended claims by a priori ascribing to them, independent of argument, a status equal to the most powerfully defended claims there are. Whether we would speak of truth or not, Habermas has argued that truth is an ineluctable validity claim of all intelligible discourse, down to the single proposition. That in itself is a truth claim. If Habermas is right, and even Butler

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implicitly concedes that he is, then we should expect to see truth claims surface even in discourses that renounce claims to truth. That prediction, I now hope to show, is borne out in the postmodernist discourse of Feminist Contentions.

Claims and claimants in postmodernist discourse Whereas in phallogocentric discourse, there is a disconnection between claims and claimants, the discourse in Feminist Contentions is – in conformity, perhaps, with feminist standpoint theory, hyper-situated – so much so as at times even to undermine the wider significance of the debate. For example, in her introduction to the volume, Linda Nicholson is at pains to assure us that the volume is not representative of feminist theory in general. Although she does not put it quite so laboriously, Nicholson wants us to understand that the volume represents only four white women; four white women from the United States; four white women from the United States who are in the academy; who, within the academy, each represent only a particular tradition within particular disciplines. If that does not yet make the point, Nicholson (1995: 1–2) further denies that the volume represents even ‘a state of the art discussion of “the relationship of feminism and postmodernism” ’. What then does the volume represent? If the views of these women have no wider significance, then what justified their being brought together in the first place? What justified the republication of their debate, first in German and, then, again in English? Nicholson (1995: 1) at least describes each of the four women as a ‘powerful theorist’. ‘Powerful theorist’ is a delightfully ambiguous phrase. Does it just acknowledge that these women are theorists who are powerful in the academy, whose voices are important because of their power? Are we, as we surely could, to subject the ‘repetition’ of this debate in the public forum to genealogical critique? Surely, Nicholson does not mean the phrase ‘powerful theorists’ in this way. Nicholson means to indicate, rather, that these are women whose theoretical insights are powerful. The problem is that by so hyper-situating the debate, Nicholson disavows the only way we have of making sense of this theoretical power. If, as claimed, these women truly do offer us powerful insights, then those insights should be about some object and should be objectively defensible independent of the voice that first uttered them. In that case, it should not matter whether the insights are offered from the United States, by academics, or by women who are white. While a phallogocentric disconnection between claim and claimant is needed to justify the impersonal significance of the debate – to make it more than just a power play in its own right, this phallogocentric disconnection is precisely what the debate’s discourse disavows. Butler in fact offers us a hyper-situationist theory of the subject as a construction of linguistic performatives. For Butler, it is not enough to accept a symbolic interactionist account in which we become human subjects by our acquisition of language. According to Butler (1995a), the

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symbolic interactionist account still leaves an ‘I’ that is intact prior to any individual discursive encounter. But if (pace Butler) there is no pre-discursive ‘I’ in this strong sense – not only no I prior to discourse in general, but no I prior even to any individual discursive encounter, then our entire identities must be reconstituted de novo in every linguistic encounter. Essentially, that is what Butler maintains. As Butler (1995b: 135) puts it, that ‘an “I” is founded through reciting the anonymous linguistic site of the “I” (Benveniste) implies that citation is not performed by a subject, but is rather the invocation by which a subject comes into linguistic being’. What Butler’s Lacanian position implies is that in the single linguistic encounter, the claimant himself or herself is constituted as an I by the very claims he or she makes. If that is so, then in discourse, we cannot attack a claim without simultaneously attacking the claimant. To counter a claim is to threaten the entire identity of the one who made it. Butler’s position represents an extreme. Yet, in Feminist Contentions, the debate as a whole is likewise characterised by a principled refusal to separate claims and claimants. Claims are instead regarded as identifying standpoints of the claimants. Thus, the same point applies to the debate as a whole: claims cannot be attacked without simultaneously attacking the identity of the claimant. Attacks not just on claims but on claimants are reflected in the very personalised nature of the critiques that are offered. Fraser, for example, offers Benhabib the usual prefatory applause for a ‘clarifying’ and ‘fruitful’ approach, but then goes on to criticise not Benhabib’s argument but Benhabib’s conduct of the argument. According to Fraser (1995a: 61), Benhabib does not use her own approach ‘to fullest advantage’. Instead, says Fraser (1995a: 61), Benhabib’s ‘reasoning wavers’. Benhabib herself is described as ‘ambivalent’ (1995a: 62) about and ‘shrinking’ (1995a: 63) from a position previously offered by Fraser and Nicholson. Finally, Fraser (1995a: 65) says Benhabib has ‘unnecessarily polarised’ the debate with false antitheses. Butler, in her second essay, entitled ‘For a Careful Reading’, suddenly breaks with poststructuralism to assign her own work a univocal meaning capable of being misread. And in fact, according to Butler, that univocal meaning has been misread and deliberately so by both Fraser and Benhabib. Departing just as suddenly from her prior claim that ‘there is no doer behind the deed’, Butler is sufficiently privy to the doer behind Benhabib’s deeds to know that that doer has actually ‘chosen’ (1995b: 134) to misunderstand Butler’s always clear prose. Cornell (1995b: 146), meanwhile, knows that Fraser herself ‘fails to understand how unconscious motivation … must be part of any critical social research program’. No wonder this debate ended in acrimony. From a phallogocentric perspective, the acrimony appears to be a structural consequence of the discursive style itself, a discursive style that makes no separation between claim and claimant. It also does not help that claims tend to be evaluated in terms of their effects rather than their truth. Perhaps if feminists are to continue debating with each other, a return to a more phallogocentric discourse is in order.

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Now as soon as I attribute the acrimony to the discursive style of postmodern feminist debate, you, dear readers, might start thinking that while something must have caused the acrimony, it may not necessarily have been the cause I suggest. You might start wondering whether, even in phallogocentric discourse, there are not times when debate among men also ends in acrimony. Alternatively, perhaps, the acrimony was caused by the Philosophy Consortium’s very imposition of an adversarial frame on what otherwise might have been a congenial conversation among women. If you were thinking something along those lines, you have taken the bait. You have detached my conjecture from me and treated it as a view from nowhere to be examined independently. And by weighing the truth of my claim, you have further affirmed the possibility of our arriving at truth. Should my conjecture about the acrimony be refuted, this I who is me will not disappear. Contrary to what Butler suggests, my conjecture is quite incidental to who I am. Even I can detach the claim from myself, treat it as a view from nowhere, and adopt a posture of scepticism towards it.

Truth and truth surrogation Notice that my larger claim – that feminist debate needs to return to phallogocentric discourse – only follows if my initial claim is true about the source of the acrimony in Feminist Contentions. We can press the implications of a truth in a way that we cannot press the implications of mere conjecture. This distinction between the relative importing power of truth and conjecture is largely deserted in the discourse of Feminist Contentions. In that discourse, truth lurks as an absent presence that dare not speak its name. And yet, for any conversation to move forward, it must mark and build on what it has established so far. If what a conversation establishes is not truth, then truth-surrogates at least are needed. In Feminist Contentions, conjectures often covertly surrogate for truth. Cornell (1995a), for example, tells us that there is no one truth of women’s situation. Instead, feminist consciousness-raising just represents endless attempts to reimagine and re-symbolise the place of women. Cornell herself likes to re-imagine women’s place in Lacanian terms, which she variously describes as ‘important’ for or even ‘crucial’ to the feminist movement. Why is Lacan so crucial? Because, Cornell (1995a: 86) explains, Lacanian psychoanalysis gives us a method to examine the ‘unconscious fantasies that have become so much a part of us that we cannot imagine reality without them’. We need to stop Cornell here. How do we know that unconscious fantasies have become so much a part of us that we cannot imagine reality without them? If there were no question that these fantasies exist, then Lacan’s address to them might well be important. But the very existence of these fantasies is itself a posit of the Lacanian analysis held up as the method for uncovering them. Although Cornell does criticise certain aspects of Lacan’s approach, she never questions its basic premises. She does not even acknowledge their questionability.

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Instead, Cornell gives us an extended and actually very helpful exposition of Lacan’s complicated thought, by the end of which it is entirely forgotten that the truth status of it all remains conjectured re-imagining. Thus, in a speech act that in this discourse is strangely valorised, Cornell simply announces her ‘insistence’ (1995a: 87) on the need for social theory to incorporate psychoanalysis and the unconscious. Effectively, through extended exposition, Cornell transforms Lacan’s conjectures into a foundational surrogate for truth. Although I lack the space to demonstrate it here, in Gender Trouble, Butler (1990) performs exactly the same manoeuvre of truth-surrogation to make Foucault similarly foundational. In both cases, permit me to insist, the manoeuvre is a sleight of hand. Extended exposition is not the only manoeuvre of truth-surrogation at work in postmodernist feminist discourse. There is a second manoeuvre that, again, Cornell and Butler both perform. The manoeuvre begins with a conditional of the form ‘If a then b’ and then goes on to insist on the importance of b without ever establishing the truth of a. This time, I will illustrate the manoeuvre from Butler’s Gender Trouble. Immediately ensconcing Foucault as an uncontested foundation, Butler (1990: 2) begins by saying not that Foucault claims or argues but that Foucault ‘points out’ ‘that juridical systems of power produce the subjects they subsequently come to represent’. Butler (1990: 2), then, offers us the following conditional: ‘If this analysis [Foucault’s] is right, then the juridical formation of language and politics that represents women as the “subject” of feminism is itself a discursive formation and effect of a given version of representational politics.’ What Butler means is that if Foucault is right, then the category woman is an effect of discursive power. The conditional may follow, but is Foucault right? The phallogocentric reader now expects Butler to establish that Foucault is right so as to pursue what logically follows. Butler, however, ignores this step to insist immediately on the importance of what follows from Foucault’s being right. ‘The question of the subject’, Butler (1990: 2) says, ‘is crucial for politics, and for feminist politics in particular, because juridical subjects are invariably produced through certain exclusionary practices.’ Although Butler still has not established that human subjects are produced in this Foucauldian way, she, nevertheless, goes on, ‘It is not enough to inquire into how women might become more fully represented in language and politics. Feminist critique ought also to understand how the category of “women”, the subject of feminism, is produced and restrained by the very structures of power through which emancipation is sought’ (Butler 1990: 2). Although the name of truth is absent in this discourse, the place of truth remains and is now occupied by Foucault. Yet, the phallogocentric reader, ever wary, remembers that Foucault’s claims are neither self-evident nor uncontested outside this discourse. Thus, in a book-length manuscript, the phallogocentric reader expects to see somewhere a defence of Foucault’s position against rival points of view. That expectation is disappointed. Although Butler (1990: 16) does acknowledge the existence of a rival literature, she just tells us simply and quietly that ‘it is not examined here’.

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Part of the persuasiveness of such manoeuvres rests on postmodernist feminism’s pragmatic grounds for adjudicating claims. Fraser (1995a: 64) explicitly rejects ‘discourse aspiring to the God’s-eye view of foundationalist thought’ in favour of what she calls a ‘postmodernist, pragmatic, fallibilistic mode of feminist theorising’. I am sympathetic to Fraser’s position, but, too often, what postmodernist, feminist pragmatism comes to mean is that claims are adjudicated not on the basis of their truth but in terms of their consequences for the feminist movement. Thus, where Lacan and Foucault are criticised and revised, they are often criticised and revised not because their claims have independently been shown to be false but because their unrevised claims are considered to be unhelpful to feminist critique. Fraser (1995b: 165), herself, criticises Cornell’s view of a single, ‘phallogocentric symbolic order’ largely on the grounds that it is a totalisation that ‘erases conflicts of interpretation, discursive struggles, and the differential positioning of different women, all of which are crucial to feminist theory’. Yet, Cornell’s position could still be objectively true even if it has all these adverse affects on feminist theory. Naively to assume otherwise is to court a danger Andrew specifically warns objective thinkers against: wishful thinking. Just as phallogocentric discourse evaluates the truth of a claim detached from its claimant so does it evaluate the truth of a claim detached from its alleged effects. From a phallogocentric point of view, truth is no respecter of either persons or consequences. Truth may reside on one side of a dispute rather than another, but that needs to be established independently of the interests in contention. Although, with the exception of Benhabib, the disputants in Feminist Contentions all attempt to ward off truth as something unholy, truth continues to manifest its absent presence. Truth manifests itself in Fraser’s accusation that Cornell provides a totalising viewpoint, deleterious to the feminist movement, and in Fraser’s complaint that Benhabib and Butler both erect false antitheses. Fraser’s charges here are ordinary, phallogocentric truth claims, positioned precisely as the God’s-eye view Fraser disavows. God’s-eye truth manifests itself, similarly, when Fraser (1995a) repeatedly asks of both Benhabib and Butler whether what they claim is really the case. In Gender Trouble, Butler (1990: 3) (repetitively) describes foundationalism as a ‘fiction’ and as a ‘fable’, but what do the words ‘fiction’ and ‘fable’ mean when there is no correlative concept of truth? When in Feminist Contentions, Butler says it is a ‘fantasy’ to think of the human subject as its own point of departure, what exactly is the epistemological difference between that fantasy and Cornell’s Lacanian re-imaginings? Is it just as Trotsky puts it in Their Morals and Ours that they have their fantasies and we have our own? Our utter inability to do away with the objectivity Andrew defends is most vivid in Butler’s (1995b: 133) accusation that Benhabib literally misquotes her. Whereas Butler had written of ‘the doer behind the deed’, Benhabib, Butler says, misquotes her as writing ‘the doer beyond the deed’. It is unclear that anything hangs on this misquotation other than establishing a minor sloppiness on Benhabib’s part. The charge, nevertheless, stands as a truth claim. As such, the

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charge carries force only to the extent that it does in fact represent the objective, God’s-eye view of reality. The interesting thing – apart from Butler’s resort to such phallogocentrism – is that the charge of misquotation is a claim, the God’s-eye truth of which we can establish with almost complete certainty. Because my own sympathies are so much with Benhabib in this debate, I confess I did not want this charge of misquotation to be true. Well, I said, maybe Benhabib was just paraphrasing Butler, in which case, Butler has no grounds to complain. That is how I wanted the truth to turn out. However, as Andrew (Collier 2003: 185–186) points out, ‘wishful thinking is still an error which we try to avoid, not a process which we can accept with a good conscience’. I felt myself epistemically obligated, therefore, to face the objective facts whatever they were. Are there objective facts in this case? Well, when I looked back at Benhabib’s paper, there, sure enough, on page 21 was the phrase ‘the doer beyond the deed’ in quotation marks and attributed to Butler. Although my eyes may deceive me, every time I look – or think I do, the misquotation remains the same. I assume it will be so for anyone. Thus, however much I would have it otherwise, I am actually more convinced of the truth of Benhabib’s misquotation of Butler than I am of the truth of the theory of evolution – and I am pretty convinced of that. That Benhabib misquoted Butler appears to me practically and timelessly incontestable. There is then not only a reality independent of what we think or want, but also a correspondence with that reality that our claims can sometimes achieve – and achieve almost indubitably. What have I tried to establish about the discourse of Feminist Contentions? I have argued that, out of principle, claims in this discourse are not detached either from their claimants or from their consequences. I conjectured that the acrimony ending the debate was partly due to this non-separation of claims and claimants so that an attack on claims becomes an attack on the claimants who make them. Although I think there is something to this conjecture, I do not think I have proven it. My ultimate concern, however, was more fundamental. There is in the discourse of Feminist Contentions a principled evasion of the matter of objectivity and truth, which Andrew Collier defends. Because I believe this principled evasion is deleterious to the feminist movement, I have tried to offer a reverse deconstruction, a deconstruction of deconstructionism, to show that in it too the repressed returns. I have tried to show that even in the postmodern discourse of Feminist Contentions, the conversation cannot proceed far without marking and building on something truth-like. Thus, if truth and reality are repudiated, something more suspect comes to stand in their place. I tried to show how in this discourse the place of truth is taken by what I call truth-surrogates. Even then, I have tried to show, plain old ordinary truth claims keep returning. We cannot long repress the matters of truth and objectivity. Why do truth and objectivity matter? Are they just some male obsessions? I do not think so. As I tried to illustrate in the case of my own conjectured relation between the acrimony of the debate and the way it was conducted, the

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implications of a truth can be pressed in a way that we cannot press the implications of mere conjecture. In the end, it is perplexing why feminism would even want to surrender truth to men. Surely, the objective truth of women’s situation is that women continue to be oppressed and devalued. Truth, then, is something that belongs to the feminist side. Of course, for truth to belong to the feminist side, feminism itself must adopt a more rigorous attitude toward the truth. If there are important ways in which women today are still oppressed and devalued, there are also oppressions and devaluations that are only imagined. Feminism is not served by just proliferating new and interesting critiques without also asking whether those critiques are objectively true. Where warranted and unwarranted critiques are countenanced equally, the mixture only dilutes the case for changes that are warranted. The objectivity Andrew Collier defends is embraced by feminists from the critical realist perspective. It should become a desideratum for the feminist movement as a whole.

References Benhabib, Seyla (1995a) ‘Feminism and Postmodernism’, in Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell, Nancy Fraser and Linda Nicholson, Feminist Contentions, New York: Routledge, pp. 17–34. —— (1995b) ‘Subjectivity, Historiography, and Politics’, in Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell, Nancy Fraser and Linda Nicholson, Feminist Contentions, New York: Routledge, pp. 107–127. Butler, Judith (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York: Routledge. —— (1995a) ‘Contingent Foundations’, in Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell, Nancy Fraser and Linda Nicholson, Feminist Contentions, New York: Routledge, pp. 35–48. —— (1995b) ‘For a Careful Reading’, in Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell, Nancy Fraser and Linda Nicholson, Feminist Contentions, New York: Routledge, pp. 127–144. Collier, Andrew (2003) In Defence of Objectivity, London: Routledge. Cornell, Drucilla (1995a) ‘What is Ethical Feminism?’, in Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell, Nancy Fraser and Linda Nicholson, Feminist Contentions, New York: Routledge, pp. 75–106. —— (1995b) ‘Rethinking the Time of Feminism’, in Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell, Nancy Fraser and Linda Nicholson, Feminist Contentions, New York: Routledge, pp. 145–157. Flax, Jane (1990) Thinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism in the Contemporary West, Berkeley: University of California. Fraser, Nancy (1995a) ‘False Antitheses’, in Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell, Nancy Fraser and Linda Nicholson, Feminist Contentions, New York: Routledge, pp. 59–75. —— (1995b) ‘Pragmatism, Feminism, and the Linguistic Turn’, in Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell, Nancy Fraser and Linda Nicholson, Feminist Contentions, New York: Routledge, pp. 157–172.

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Moulton, Janice (1983) ‘A Paradigm of Philosophy: The Adversary Method’, in Sandra G. Harding and Merril Hintikka (eds), Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science, New York: Kluwer, pp. 149–164. Nicholson, Linda (1995) ‘Introduction’, in Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell, Nancy Fraser and Linda Nicholson, Feminist Contentions, New York: Routledge, pp. 1–16.

Part III

The objectivity of value

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The objectivity of value Alison Assiter

Throughout his work, Andrew Collier offers a consistently anti-idealist and antipostmodern agenda in philosophy, which is resistant to fashion. In his early years he was a regular contributor to the journal Radical Philosophy, presenting nononsense defences of a materialist and realist epistemology against the critiques offered by the Althusserians and the post-Althusserians. In one of his relatively early articles, for example, he defended epistemology against the attacks on the subject promoted by some of the post Althusserians (Collier 1978). (The title of his recent book, In Defence of Objectivity (2003), echoes that of this early work, ‘In Defence of Epistemology’.) He also offered a balanced view of Sartre’s Marxism against those who would either see Sartre as an ‘individualist’, who was irrelevant to the class struggle, or see Marxism as offering nothing to the philosophers (Collier 1976). In the middle years of his life, he excelled as the clear and cogent presenter of the ideas of Roy Bhaskar and other transcendental or critical realists, offering perspicacious accounts of Bhaskar’s early works in the philosophy of science and social science. Indeed, he remained a loyal defender of Bhaskar’s writings even when the latter moved into broader territory – into, as the title of one of Collier’s reviews of one of Bhaskar’s recent works has it, ‘negative thinking’ (Collier 1995: 36). For example, in his book Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom (1993), Bhaskar moved from his specific interests in philosophy of science and social science into more general philosophical territory, and developed the concept of real absence. Real absences, according to Bhaskar, can have causal effects. For example, the absence of Vitamin C in a person’s diet can cause scurvy. Collier refers to Sartre’s discussion of Pierre’s absence in Being and Nothingness. For Sartre, there are absences because there are people. Collier points out that it is because Sartre is expecting to meet Pierre in the café, that Pierre’s absence is noteworthy. This is an absence that is significant. On the other hand, Collier indicates other ‘absences’ that do not have such significance. For example, it does not make the same sort of sense to refer to the absence of Wellington or Napoleon who happened not to be in the café at the time (Collier 1995: 36). Latterly Collier has continued his defence of objectivity. Whilst Collier has been a significant voice in challenging the vagaries of relativism and value pluralism, he has not couched his work specifically in terms of such challenges.

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Instead, he seeks to clarify the meaning of key concepts such as the notion of objectivity. He regularly refers to figures in the history of philosophy, sometimes little-known thinkers, such as John Macmurray, in order to illustrate and clarify points he wishes to make. In his recent discussion of the nature of objectivity, Collier seeks to debunk some myths that surround the notion of objectivity and the views that have been attributed to critical realists on this matter. One myth he notes is that objectivity is infallibility. Put like that, it invites the retort: surely nobody believes precisely that! However, he points out that many of their detractors accuse critical realists of believing in a complete and final account of what is true, which we could in principle possess. Rorty, for one, has referred to a God’s-eye view of reality and claimed that realists purport to possess it. However, Collier insists that realists are also and always fallibilists. Indeed, he puts the point more strongly: ‘belief in objectivity entails and is entailed by, the fallibility of our judgements’ (Collier 2003: 140). I am not certain that I believe this strong claim of Collier’s, since it seems to me that nothing is entailed about the fallibility or otherwise of our beliefs about the world by claiming that those beliefs pertain to something independent of the believer. However, he is certainly right to challenge the claim that there is a connection between realism and infallibility.

The objectivity of value I would like to concentrate on one aspect of Collier’s writing: his notion of the objectivity of value. I think that this highly controversial and unfashionable view of his is tremendously important. However, there is one issue, appreciated by his ‘early self ’, which I believe is obscured by his ‘later self ’. In his article ‘On the Production of Moral Ideology’ (1974), Collier discusses Althusser’s essay, ‘Ideological State Apparatuses’ (Althusser 1971). There, Althusser raises the questions: How does the capitalist system ensure the reproduction of the conditions that make for its continuation? Why do individuals comply with the requirements of the capitalist mode of production? These questions might be put in an alternative language were they to be raised today. Lara, for example, has written of the ‘imaginary’ – the collective awareness a group might have of its group identity or group cohesion. She writes of ways in which forms of the imaginary can be subverted or changed, and of the way in which New Social Movements have begun to do this (Lara 1998). In the above article, Collier articulates a view that both draws on and claims critical distance from the Althusser of the ‘Ideological State Apparatuses’ essay. He argues, contrary to Althusser, that the most significant ideological state apparatus is in fact the workplace itself, and not, as Althusser had argued, those apparatuses that appear to be more clearly focused on the production of ideological forms, such as the school or the church. The reason for this, Collier argues, is that in fact, if one looks at the school, the most important ‘ideological’ message that is conveyed is subservience on the part of the pupils to the ‘power’ dynamics of the school. This, he writes, has far more important and lasting

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effects than the content of the information conveyed to the pupils through the curriculum. The most effective medium, for Collier, therefore, for conveying these relations of domination/subordination, is the workplace itself, since it is in the workplace that people really learn about power dynamics. (Personally I am not certain whether this is in fact the case. Habits learned in childhood are deeply formed in a way that later patterns are not.) Collier believes that the ‘ideological values’ conveyed in the workplace are connected to moral theories such as that of Kant. Presumably, this is insofar as both presuppose that the agent – embodied in the worker – is a free, rational being. In turn, and long before this notion became fashionable, Collier saw this emphasis upon the rational being as entailing a clear distinction between humans and other animals, and an implicit claim that morality need have nothing to do with nonhuman animals. He is critical, as am I, of this particular view of morality. Instead, Collier maintains (in the same article) that ‘true’ moralities have to do, in some important respects, with ‘our’ natural natures and with their needs’ satisfaction. I am not sure that either he or I would use such expressions today (i.e. ‘true’ morality as opposed to ideologically based morality) but, to my mind, this moral premise remains extremely significant. The claim that there is a ‘true’ set of moral imperatives and the claim that this set derives, in some manner, from our natural natures is one with which I would concur. These two claims seem to me to be both broadly true and to be ones of whose pertinence ‘the later’ Andrew sometimes appears to lose sight. Broadly the reason why the claim about our natural nature is so important is that no person can do anything at all unless her basic needs are satisfied. In this respect, the satisfaction of basic needs is, in Keith Graham’s words, a ‘constraint of precondition’ (Graham 1996). Because the satisfaction of needs is so crucial, in my view, these needs ought to be satisfied, and there is a moral obligation to ensure that the needs of all are satisfied. I have spelt out this argument in my recent book (Assiter 2003). Indeed, in my view, there are specific moral obligations that arise from this perspective on natural needs that constitute a challenge to the pluralistic premise of much contemporary liberal political theory. I therefore believe that Andrew’s continuing commitment, in his books Being and Worth and In Defence of Objectivity, to a robust defence of objectivity in the domains both of ‘fact’ and of value, is very important. In his latest book, he puts the point in typical no-nonsense fashion: These two judgements – that facts are objective and that values are objective – which I have introduced as examples, in fact carry widely differing credence. The former is doubted by Feyerabend and by some postmodernists, but only ever by academics in their studies. It is generally accepted by plain men and women, and by academics when they are not posing as such. The second is doubted by virtually all twentieth-century thinkers and by non-academics as much as by academics. I hold both. (Collier 2003: 135)

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Values, for Collier, have no less of a claim to objectivity than facts, and he is of the view that both positivism and existentialism are misguided in this respect. The former relegates values to the status of the ‘merely’ subjective, whilst the latter celebrates the non-objective status of value. Both claims, he considers to be wrong. I should like to spend a little time discussing this issue, dwelling in particular on the question of the objectivity of value, and the cognitive status, accorded by Collier, to value judgements. Collier argues: (a) that morality is ‘about’ emotions; (b) that emotions can be rational or non-rational; and (c) that emotions are rational to the extent that they correspond to the ‘way things are’. The transition from an irrational to a rational emotion is a matter for the intellect. Realism about value is the capacity to behave in accordance with the nature of the object. One example offered by Andrew is the following: fear of mice is irrational; once I see the irrationality of my fear, I will cease to have it. He argues further that the tendency to expect the worst is a vice that is cognitive in nature. What makes an emotion appropriate or not is the nature of the object of that emotion. Fear, for example, involves an idea that the object is dangerous. Whilst I believe that the overall and unfashionable claim that value is objective is an extremely important one, I also think that Andrew may have lost sight of the reason why it is so important. It seems to me that his ‘early self ’ was aware of this reason. In the remainder of this article, I will spell out where I think that ‘the later’ Andrew is wrong about value and why I think he is wrong. I have two queries, one minor and one less so. First, fear does not invariably involve any kind of belief that the object of the fear is dangerous. Fear may not even have an obvious object. My son, for example, for a long time was afraid to go to sleep. He did not know why. Eventually he came to the view that his fear had been connected in some complex way to a burglary that had occurred some years earlier. But a deeper analysis of the cause of his fear may connect it to the fact that I – his mother – had started working away from home at approximately the same time as the burglary had occurred. The object of his fear may therefore indirectly have been the absence of his mother. But it is not the case that my son would ever have claimed that he was afraid of the absence of his mother. Simply persuading him, as Collier might suggest, that he should not be afraid of a hypothetical burglary – the immediate object of his fear – would not have allayed his fear. In other words, emotions and their causes seem to me to be somewhat more complex than Collier’s analysis allows, on the face of it. More importantly, it seems to me doubtful that morality is exclusively, if at all, ‘about’ emotions. Instead, I would maintain that a crucial part of morality concerns ‘objective’ facts about needs. The second query is more major, although I do not think that it need be insurmountable. Many modern ethical theorists argue that ethics is concerned with providing the principles to guide a decision-making procedure, by suggesting what one ought to do in cases of moral conflict. Take, for example, Sartre’s famous dilemma faced by the young man who has to choose between staying at home to look after his mother or joining the French forces and going

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to war. His dilemma is a classic one and is faced in a different form by Antigone. Hers was the choice between obligations to family and friends and obligations to king and state as a citizen. One might put the following question to Andrew: how does his approach to morality help to resolve these kinds of problems? It may be that Andrew would say that he would not want to couch his discussion of ethical issues in these terms. My own view is that if we use our reason in relation to such significant moral matters, we will eventually be able to discern our obligations towards one another in these matters – precisely because these obligations arise from our possession of common natures.

The scope of ethical issues I would like to discuss further two concerns about the form of Andrew’s recent defence of the objectivity of value. The first relates to the scope of ethical issues and the second to their nature. Collier would like to extend the notion of value inhering in an object, rather that in a valuing subject, to a whole range of possible objects beyond humans and animals. Thus, he claims, even rocks ‘have’ value; a rock possesses a tendency to continue in its being (that is a conatus, following Spinoza). One can ascribe some sort of ‘value’ to a rock, despite the fact that it is not alive, because of this tendency to continue in its existing state. Collier then follows Augustine in offering a hierarchy of value, with physical objects in the lowest position and human beings in the highest. With regard to physical objects such as the rock, one should simply appreciate and love their being. Collier states that it seems to him to be a matter of ‘verbal convention’ where on the scale of things one draws the line underneath that which has value (e.g. the atomic or molecular constituents of objects, which are themselves objects). On the contrary, I would argue that it should not be a matter of verbal convention where the line is drawn, but that some rationale should be provided for the locus of the line. To my mind, one needs some sort of rationale, explaining what it is for something to have value and in what the objective good consists. Plato, for example, presented an account of the objectively good which transcended the empirical world. Good lives were to be guided by the Form of the Good. Aristotle too, insofar as he can be read as a universalist, outlined an account of the Good which applies to all, independently of the location of any particular individual. He proposed a conception of the Good for Man, deriving from his list of virtues, which was historically invariant. O’Neill (1996) points out that, although for many contemporary political theorists, ‘virtue’ and ‘justice’ have diverged, with the former being associated with particularists, and the latter with universalists, both Aristotle and Plato offered standards of both virtue and of justice, whose observance would constitute that good. In this sense, Aristotle’s ‘man of practical wisdom’ was intended as a description of any and every one of us and thus as a description of what it means for a human being to ‘have’ value. Many contemporary liberal universalists reject their predecessors’ reliance on metaphysical assumptions, and rely instead upon a minimal conception of reason. It is because we humans are reasoning beings that we are moral agents

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or beings that ‘have’ value, to use Andrew’s language. Their particularist critics argue that universalists implicitly draw in more than they are entitled to in describing this minimal notion. Implicitly, they refer to ‘white men’ or to white western men, or to some other grouping that they represent as universal. In other words, to use Andrew’s language, they purport to ground their view of value in something ‘real’ but, in fact, they fail to anchor it in something truly universal. It seems to me that the early universalists were right to attempt to ground their notion of reason and their account of what it is for something to have value. Instead of this ‘something’ being metaphysical, however, I believe that common human nature provides the sort of foundation required for an appropriate universal view of certain ‘goods’. I have spelt out this argument in my recent book. Andrew, it seems to me, implicitly held a version of this account in his earlier writing, that is lost in his later work. Since ‘the recent’ Andrew’s view of the scope of value seems both counterintuitive and odd in describing physical objects as having value, some rationale needs to be offered for their inclusion in the category of objects with value. Andrew claims that the rock has value in the sense of having the right to continue in its being. But why should the rock not be used to make some useful object? If every physical object had a right to continue in its being, then no tools could ever be created and no work could be undertaken. If the rock were to be volcanic, would it, according to the Spinozist perspective defended by Andrew, then have the right to explode and possibly destroy human and animal life in the process? Collier, in these circumstances, would no doubt argue that the rock does not have the ‘right’ to do this, since the place of the rock in the chain of being is more lowly than that of the animal or the human. But does the volcano therefore have the ‘right’ to destroy other physical objects? Is the grass in my garden in a parallel position to the rock? Does it have the ‘right’ not to be cut? Collier cannot, without contradiction, extend this kind of right to both the bindweed that is killing my rose and to the rose itself. It is not entirely clear to me whether Collier would suggest that all physical objects have the same kind of value. To him, do naturally occurring objects have a higher value than manufactured objects? What kind of value does a nuclear bomb have, for example, or a kitchen sink? The former can be used to destroy vast numbers of lives as well as physical things; the latter is useful, and serves a particular purpose, but the person who uses it may wish, at some point, to replace it with a different sink. How would ‘loving’ the sink and appreciating its value be spelt out? There would seem, in these circumstances, to be nothing the sink could claim in favour of its not being replaced. If the sink is in perfectly good condition, then there is a clear sense in which it has value, but the value is only instrumental – it has a use value and an exchange value. It is not these kinds of value, however, that Andrew is interested in. However, would Andrew wish to extend the line further to include the value of negative entities like the nonappearance of Pierre? Does every non-existent thing have value as well? In what sense does it do so?

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If the type of value in question involves moral concern or moral obligation, in what sense can one have a concern or an obligation towards a physical thing? Having a moral obligation towards some ‘thing’ presupposes that such a ‘thing’ stands in a certain kind of relation to the person having the obligation; the ‘thing’ has somehow induced the obligation. I might have inter-personal obligations for all sorts of reasons, ranging from the person having helped me out and my wanting to return the favour, through to that person simply being in need, and thus my incurring an obligation to give help. However, that range of relations does not apply to any relation possible between a person and a rock. The rock can neither act towards me in such a way as to impose an obligation on me, nor can it have needs that I am obligated to fulfil. The rock has no subjectivity and therefore cannot take cognisance of its feelings. In the philosophical tradition, moral value is ascribed either to acts carried out by people or, for Aristotle in particular, to people of a certain character. Rocks can neither act in a moral way nor can they ‘be’ moral. Furthermore, I can have only one kind of obligation towards an animal of a non-human species. It is very unlikely that an ant, for example, will be in a position to act towards me in such a fashion that I can incur an obligation to it. However, the ant might well have needs that I should satisfy. Thus, in my view, a case has to be made out for the claim that any ‘thing’ has value. It is not enough that the object simply exists for it to have value. For me to have any kind of obligation towards anyone or anything, then that person or thing has to have shown itself to be either deserving of my obligation or needing me to act in a certain way towards it. If, for example, someone is starving, then I believe there is an obligation (on someone) to satisfy that person’s need for food. This obligation is present even if the needy person has not entered into any moral or causal relations with the one who has the obligation. However, this claim of mine is a strong one, and there are many who would argue that I cannot have an obligation towards anyone or anything unless there has been some sort of prior moral or causal relationship between us. The epistemic and ontological claim, made by Bhaskar (1975) and other critical realists, that purely physical things existed and acted in the world before there were any human beings around makes perfect sense to me. For him: ‘realism is the theory that the ultimate objects of scientific inquiry exist and act (for the most part) quite independently of scientists and their activity’ (Bhaskar 1989: 12). But the extension from the claim that physical things existed before human beings to their having value independently of human beings seems to me to be considerably less plausible.

Being as such This brings me to the second of the two issues I would like to discuss. Collier writes that it is important to attach value to existing beings, to value things and people for what they are. He stresses the importance of valuing things for what they are and not for what they might become or might be at some future date.

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Drawing on Augustine, he writes that he has no duty to bring about some ideal man or woman in the future, only to try to ensure that life is good for those who live now and for those who might live in the future (Collier 1999: 69). I think that this is a very important corrective to those theories of morality that stress that the person who is valued is the person as rational being or as citizen of some democratic polity. On the contrary, it resonates with the views of those feminists who have stressed the importance of a relational conception of morality that concerns itself with the here and now and with caring for real people in their complexity and their variety. However, some of the criticisms of ‘care’ theory, as it relates to feminist ethics, bear on matters here. Is care necessarily such a good thing? If someone is a heroin user and killing themselves, then they may require some careful discussion of the pros and cons of what they are doing rather than straightforward care. Do love and care of themselves help if someone is starving and needs food? Doesn’t this person need more than care? Should we care equally for Hitler, Bush, a psychopath and Mother Teresa? Should each of us value each of them equally? Furthermore, it has been argued that care could constitute a form of tyranny, if the carer does not seriously attempt to engage with and understand the person to be cared for (Narayan 1995). If one does not allow the ‘other’ sufficient scope for the development of an independent personality, then care, of itself, may not be the right action. Nevertheless, it is not quite people as they are, without any qualification, who should be valued according to the Augustinian perspective as adumbrated by Collier. It is, for him, ‘being’ as ‘being’ that is to be loved, but this being is inherently virtuous. It is not clear to me what Andrew means by this inherently virtuous being. If he means that each is a virtuous being in the Aristotelian sense, then I would have reservations for a different reason. It is not obvious to me that those specific Aristotelian virtues are the right ones. In any case, a rock cannot be virtuous in Aristotle’s sense. It is also not clear to me how the view that we love each being as a ‘virtuous’ being fits with the view, advanced in his chapter ‘The Worth of Human Beings’ in Being and Worth, that it is important that each being should be loved for what it is. Each being, he claims there, should be loved in a different way, in accordance with its particular nature. The ‘complexity and specificity’ of each individual being should, he says, be recognised’ (Collier 1999: 91). I should like more elaboration of what he means by this notion, and of the claim made in the following chapter – that the criticism that this allows one to ‘love’ evil people rests on a misunderstanding of what is meant by ‘evil’. It seems to me not possible for one person to love everyone. It is also unclear, without further discussion, why I should love everyone. I am unsure what such a notion would mean. Perhaps, in some respects, Andrew’s perspective resonates with the feminist view that, in gaining knowledge, we should recognise our own embodied, embedded identity, and attempt constantly to engage with other perspectives. We should, on this outlook, metaphorically travel the world – engaging with other positions, where our own outlook is continually tested and modified (Seller 1994). We should aim, in this fashion, really to understand the

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other; to arrive at an authentic understanding of the other. Indeed, Collier’s outlook also resonates with the view of Taylor, that I should recognise the authenticity of the other (Taylor 1989, 1991). However, the question arises in relation to each of these perspectives: on what grounds are others owed these rights? How do we differentiate between worthy and not so worthy life projects? How, on Collier’s premises, can we differentiate authentic from inauthentic life projects? How can we love each person equally for their ‘being’ at the same time as recognising their complexity and difference from one another? There are some ‘others’, whose values are such that it is inappropriate for me or for anyone to empathise with them – the Nazis come to mind as one clear example. How do we decide which ‘others’ to take seriously? Whose ‘being’ or ‘what’ kind of being should we love? The ‘earlier Collier’ would, I think, have held a different view. I have argued (Assiter 2003) that it is not really loving every other for what they are that matters, rather what matters is that every other has basic needs that must be satisfied before anyone can do anything at all. In Andrew’s chapter, ‘The Worth of Human Beings’, there is a hint of the earlier writer. Andrew writes that everyone has the right to the ‘bare’ necessities of life: ‘the list of necessities will include in the first place things without which one cannot have health, such as sufficient food, protection against the weather, an environment without harmful pollution, and access to medication when ill’ (Collier 1999: 96). However, as it stands, this view does need more elaboration, for there are many who have questioned (a) the extent to which it is possible to satisfy needs of this kind; (b) whether these needs are genuinely universal or not; (c) what kinds of moral obligation flow from this kind of claim and whether or not an ‘infinity’ (Levinas) of possible obligations is generated, all of which cannot possibly be fulfilled. Moreover, prioritising these kinds of basic needs is a different matter from valuing each person for their authenticity as a being. Instead, it involves valuing each and every person because each one of them is a being with natural and basic needs. A related reservation I have about Collier’s latest defence of the objectivity of value is that following his claim about the natural natures of human beings is a quite separate view about the importance of the plurality of value. Collier writes: Differences between different sets of virtues and duties may be entirely rational, since they may derive from the same ordered love of being under different material and social conditions. For in different kinds of society, appropriate to different stages of human history and even different geographical environments, different duties may need to be observed, and to an extent different virtues cultivated. This kind of moral diversity is neither arbitrary nor a matter of one code being right and the other wrong, but a matter of different practices being the best way to love in one set of conditions from those that are best in another. (Collier 1999: 92)

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Indeed, Collier goes on to write that even within the same society there may be a range of moral codes that are not intrinsically better or worse than each other. For some reason he writes ‘this sort of pluralism may be particularly in place in the sphere of sexual ethics’ (Collier 1999: 92). I am not sure why he believes that pluralism is more appropriate in this sphere than in relation, for example, to the differing views about abortion very strongly held by a white, Anglo-American feminist, versus those equally strongly held by a woman living in contemporary China, forced to abort or abandon her second-born child. My more fundamental question is, why pluralism? It seems to me that a belief in pluralism in relation to value may be incompatible in the end with the objectivity of value and with Andrew’s very strong claim, with which I concur, that values are objective. If values are objective, then there is a right set of values and a wrong set. Perhaps no one as yet has discovered this right set of values, and that explains the existing plurality of views about value. However, in just the same way that epistemic claims are true or false by virtue of the way the world is, so value claims are true or false by virtue of the way human beings are. Crucially, they are natural beings with natural needs. Equally crucially, there is a difference between the fact that there may ultimately be one true set of moral values and the fact that, in the present world, there is a vast range of disparate values. In other words, moral monists must also be fallibilists about moral beliefs. Just as, according to Collier, scientific objectivity is about making discoveries about the way the world is, so too objectivity about value is about making discoveries about values. Therefore, it seems to me that the very strong claim articulated by Collier to the effect that value is objective sits oddly with his further claim that what is morally right and wrong can vary from society to society and even within societies. If value exists objectively in some agent-neutral fashion, then there surely must be a right and wrong way of valuing things and either the capitalist or the socialist, to take one of Collier’s examples, is wrong.

Maternal issues Before I conclude this piece, I would like to raise one other issue. There is a separate and quite different kind of difficulty with Collier’s Augustinian perspective. According to the Augustinian perspective on being, woman is so made that she is designed by nature to procreate. She is the passive receptacle of the male seed; she is ‘selfish’ and ‘sinful’ if she refuses her destiny. One example of her refusing her destiny would be to engage in non-procreative sex. On the Augustinian view, abortion is a sin against God in defiance of a woman’s nature. There is, indeed, underlying some exponents of the contemporary ‘right to life’ viewpoint, a view analogous to this Augustinian outlook. From this perspective, women who have abortions have been accused of ‘murdering’ their own children. Whilst Andrew places the religious overtones of the Augustinian view in brackets, and whilst he would no doubt wish to propound a rather different perspective on the ‘being’ of woman, nonetheless, his view is liable to lead to a

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kind of unidimensional view of the self and of personal identity. Motherhood might become a state of being rather than a social role. Since I maintain that human beings gain their personhood and subjective sense of identity through interactions with others, the notion of a ‘true being’ suggests a static and possibly reductive model of the self that might lend itself to these kinds of conservative conceptions of being. Personhood, on my alternative view, is a process; it is not static. A relational concept of personhood requires self-awareness on the part of each of the parties to the relation. It is difficult to see how any of this can be the case if a person is a ‘being’ with a static nature. In my view, even as a natural being, a person exists as part of a polity with others similarly placed. To conclude, I believe that Collier’s resolute defence of the objectivity of value against opposition from all quarters is courageous and right. I also concur with his early view that the notion of human beings as natural beings is vitally important in any ‘true’ moral theory. However, I am a little more sceptical about two of Collier’s further claims. I am sceptical about his desire to extend the range of valued objects to physical things as well as to human beings and other animals. I also have some doubts about the view that people should be valued as ‘beings’. If he had qualified this claim, such as to be about people as natural beings, then it would have accorded with my own view. However, Collier is to be admired for consistently defending a series of views that have gone against the grain of fashion.

Bibliography Althusser, L. (1971) ‘Ideological State Apparatuses’, in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Articles, London: New Left Books. Assiter, A.. (2003) Revisiting Universalism, Basingstoke, Palgrave. Bhaskar, R. (1975) A Realist Theory of Science, Leeds: Leeds Books. —— (1989) Reclaiming Reality, London: Verso. —— (1993) Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom, London: Verso. Collier, A. (1974) ‘On the Production of Moral Ideology’, Radical Philosophy, 9, pp. 5–15. —— (1976) ‘Alienations’ (review of Chiodi, P., Sartre and Marxism, trans. Kate Soper, Harvester, 1976), in Radical Philosophy, 15. —— (1978) ‘In Defence of Epistemology’, Radical Philosophy, 20 (Summer), pp. 8–22. —— (1995) ‘The Power of Negative Thinking: Review of Roy Bhaskar, Dialectic, the Pulse of Freedom’, Radical Philosophy, 69, pp. 36–39. —— (1999) Being and Worth, London: Routledge. —— (2003) In Defence of Objectivity, London: Routledge. Graham, K, (1996) ‘Coping with the Many Coloured Dome: Pluralism and Practical Reason’, in D. Archard (ed.), Philosophy and Pluralism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lara, Maria (1998) Moral Textures, Feminist Narratives in the Public Sphere, Cambridge, Polity Press. Lennon, K. (1997) ‘Reply to Longino’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume LXX1, p. 38. Narayan, U. (1995) ‘Colonialism and its others: Considerations on Rights and Care Perspectives’, Hypatia, 10: 2.

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O’Neill, O. (1996) Towards Justice and Virtue, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Seller, A.(1994) ‘Should the Feminist Philosopher Stay at Home?’ in K. Lennon and M. Whitford, Knowing the Difference, Feminist Perspectives in Epistemology, London: Routledge, pp. 230–249. Taylor, C. (1991) The Ethics of Authenticity, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. —— (1989) Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Commerce and the language of value John O’Neill

As a good atheist I want to start from a passage in my favourite book in the Bible, Ecclesiastes: ‘Cast thy bread upon waters: for thou shalt find it after many days’.1 The translation is from a version which as a good Catholic atheist I was brought up believing should be treated with some scepticism, the King James Bible. However, the translation offers a fine expression of a metaphor about the goodness of giving and the value of reciprocal relationships. Given all that Andrew Collier has given us over the years, it is a remark that I hope finds application to his own work, that in this book I hope he finds at least something in return, and that in this paper the ideas do not return in too soggy or stale a state. This paper is a reflection on a number of themes in Andrew Collier’s work on the relation of commerce and the language of value from which I have a learned a great deal. I want to start that reflection with another translation of the passage from Ecclesiastes that I have just quoted. As part of its attempt ‘to present the Biblical content and message in standard, everyday, natural English’2 the same passage is translated by the American Bible Study for the Good News Bible as follows: ‘Invest your money in foreign trade, and one of these days you will make a profit.’3 The differences between the translations are striking. A metaphor about the goodness of giving and the value of reciprocal relations is re-written in the unadorned language of market exchange and self-interest. The result is both descriptively and normatively objectionable. The shift in translation is inaccurate – it involves the conflation of quite different kinds of acts and relations. It is pernicious – it renders as universal acts and relations that are specific to the market and it impoverishes the ethical language which we use to speak of such acts and relations. If it were the case that the new translation was required to make any sense of the original in ‘standard, everyday, natural English’, then so much the worse for the way we understand and speak of our relations to others. Fortunately, it is not completely so. I take it that these inadequacies in the revised translation are fairly obvious and it is certainly not my purpose in this paper to engage in details of Bible translation. What I rather want to explore is something about the way we talk of ourselves and our relations to others that the contrast the two passages illustrates so dramatically – the way statements about the human condition are presented in the language of commerce. In so

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doing I will be taking up the claim that Andrew Collier defends in his essay ‘In Defence of Objectivity’ that a commercial ideology permeates modern philosophy (Collier 2003: 149–151). I think this claim is true and Andrew Collier’s formulation of that claim in his previous writings and in conversations has very much influenced my own thoughts on the subject. In this chapter I examine some of the uses of market metaphors to describe the human character and condition in modern economic, political and ethical theory. In the first section I outline a shift that has occurred in the language of economics, from a thick Augustinian language of vices and virtues that survives into the classical economists of the eighteenth century to the thin value-neutral language of modern professional neo-classical economics. In the second section I argue that far from offering a value-neutral language that improves the objectivity and explanatory power of economic theory, the shift has led to an increasingly impoverished theoretical basis for understanding the social world which has given spurious plausibility to the claims made for economics to offer the language and explanatory principles that are able to unify the social sciences. In the third section I argue that the shift in language leads not just to a decline in the explanatory power of economic theory, but also to a normative loss in its account of human well-being. It involves an indefensible form of subjectivism that loses the critical content of the concept through its failure to acknowledge a gap between a person’s belief about what it is for her to live well, and what in fact it is for her to live well.

Augustine, economics and the language of self-interest Thus by means and help of … commerce all necessaries for this life are supplied without intermixing charity with it. So that in states where charity has no admittance, because true religion is banished there, men do not cease to live with as much peace, safety, and comfort, as if they lived in a Republic of Saints. (Nicole 1997: 3) There is by now a large and fairly imposing line of economists from Adam Smith to the present who have sought to show that a decentralised economy motivated by self interest and guided by price signals would be compatible with a coherent disposition of economic resources that could be regarded, in a well defined sense, as superior to a large class of possible alternative dispositions. (Arrow and Hahn 1971: vi–vii) If ‘rational economic agent’ is defined to mean ‘person who pursues monetary gain in preference to all other aims’ its corresponding term in ordinary English is not its homonym, but ‘moneygrubber’. (Collier 1990: 118)

Contrast and compare the following sets of questions:

Commerce and the language of value 77 1 2 3

Is there a universal tendency to avarice in all persons? If avarice is a universal disposition in all persons can a good social order be constructed? Is avarice conducive to individual well-being?

1* Is there a universal tendency in all persons to maximise their own expected utility? 2* If there is a universal disposition to the maximisation of personal utility could a good social order be constructed? 3* Is the pursuit of the maximisation of personal expected utility conducive to individual well-being? The first set of questions has a long history in the Augustinian tradition of political thought (Deane 1963). To those questions at least one strand of Augustinian thought answers roughly as follows: to the third question, ‘no’ – avarice, the insatiable appetite for worldly things is a source of human unhappiness; to the first question, ‘yes’ for we are fallen creatures; and to the second question also a qualified ‘yes’, an earthly political order of sinners is possible and indeed has to be constructed on the basis of the assumption that we are fallen beings. The second set of questions has a much shorter history. They are not questions that economists have asked ‘ever since Adam Smith’: Smith asked different questions. They rather define part of the project of modern welfare economics in the neo-classical tradition and within that tradition the answer to all three questions is, with some qualifications, ‘yes’: the positive answer to the first question is an axiom defining the rational economic agent; the positive answer to the second is a basic theorem of welfare economics – ideal markets issue in Pareto optimal outcomes; a positive answer to the third question is more contentious – there are economists who want to distinguish ‘utility’ and ‘welfare’4 – but in most economic textbooks on the new welfare economics it is taken to be true in virtue of the fact the terms ‘utility’ and ‘well-being’ are interchangeable, so that to maximise personal utility is to maximise well-being. There are parallels between the questions, and in their more popular expositions neo-classical economists sometime shift into more Augustinian turns of phrase. Not only are there are parallels between the questions, there is a historical story to be told about the relation between them: the Augustinian passage from the seventeenth century Jansenist, Pierre Nicole, that opens this paper, is a distant ancestor to the passage from Arrow and Hahn that follows. The claim by some Jansenist theorists that it is through commercial society that an earthly social order of sinners can be constructed was at least the start of the thought about the virtues of commerce that is developed in classical and neo-classical economics. It is a story to which I will return briefly later. However, while there are parallels and historical connections, there is a clear shift in the language in which the questions are put and answered. It is that shift in the vocabulary of the debate that will concern me here. My concern in examining this shift, I should state at the outset, is not to endorse either the Augustinian questions or the

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answers. It is rather to show how the shift in language gives undeserved plausibility to contentious explanatory and normative claims in social theory. What is the nature of these changes in language? Some of the changes involved occurred only in the last century. The concept of ‘utility’ in economic theory has over the last hundred years shifted from a substantive to a formal interpretation, and in so doing has moved in an increasingly subjectivist direction. In the last century and early in this century, the term ‘utility’ carried a commitment to a substantive account of welfare, which was subjectivist in content. ‘Utility’ is defined in terms of subjective states. In Jevons ‘utility’ is defined in hedonistic terms (Jevons 1970: 91 and passim), and in Marshall and Pigou it still refers to some psychological state, an ‘affection of the mind’: the strength of preferences for a good, measured by a person’s willingness to pay for their satisfaction at the margin, is an indirect measure of subjective states (Marshall 1962: III.iii.1; Pigou 1920: 24). In the modern textbook the relation between preferences and subjective states disappears.5 The term utility is defined in terms of a preference ordering. The account is purely formal in the sense that it says nothing about the content of preferences – only their structure. It makes no assumptions about the constituents of human well-being. It is however subjectivist in a deeper sense: it is committed to a subjective determination of well-being. What is good for a person is determined by what they desire. There is no gap between what a person thinks is good for them and what is good for them. I return to this feature of the modern definition of utility later in the chapter. Another feature of this formal account of utility that is sometimes remarked upon is that in itself it makes no assumptions about the egoism or altruism of agents, or their proclivity to avarice or generosity. That individuals are concerned to satisfy a consistent set of preferences under budget constraints does not imply that agents are egoists in any strong sense of the term. It all depends what preferences they have. As Hahn and Hollis (1979: 4) put it, the definition of utility rules out neither Ghengis Khan nor the saint. Much economics does assume, however, that individuals are ‘self-interested’ or ‘egoistic’. The notion of individuals maximising their utility retains its Benthamite self-seeking sense. However, of significance here is a second and earlier shift in terms of the debate between Augustinian questions and their modern counterparts, namely the language of egoism and self-interest itself. An under-discussed feature of discussions of egoism and altruism is the very recent origin in European languages of many of the concepts we use for selfinterested dispositions and behaviour (Price, 1988). The term ‘altruism’ was coined by Comte in the mid-nineteenth century. The term ‘egoism’ along with many other concepts to describe self-seeking dispositions emerged in the mideighteenth. While the concepts of private as against public ‘interests’ is older, the concept of ‘self-interest’ in its modern usage to describe economic advantage is likewise one that emerges in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Hirschman 1977, especially pp. 31–42). Now clearly, the late arrival of the terms does not necessarily indicate the late arrival of the dispositions they

Commerce and the language of value 79 attempt to capture: much of the behaviour that we now call ‘egoistic’ and ‘selfinterested’ has a much longer history. However, what does change are the terms of description. There has been a shift away from the use of specific virtue and vice terms such as avarice, ambition, pride, envy, vanity, vainglory, conceit and the like in which the political economy of the seventeenth and eighteenth century is still often framed, to a more sober language of ‘interests’, ‘preferences’ and ‘utility’ in which the language of economics and rational choice in the nineteenth and twentieth is almost entirely framed. Eighteenth century economics lies in the cusp of the two languages. Much eighteenth century economic writing is still largely written in the language of vice and virtue. In Mandeville’s work for example it is the vices such as avarice, prodigality, pride, envy, vanity, folly and fickleness which have unintended beneficial consequences (Mandeville 1988: I, pp. 25, 100ff). Mandeville directly inherits the Augustinian themes of the Jansenists that fallen men without charity and driven only by self-love can live together in peace. The claim that commerce is a key institution through which peace is possible is already to be found in Jansenist texts. It is evident in Nicole’s restatement of the Augustinian claim that opens this section of the paper. However it is not only in writers who write directly under Augustinian influences like Mandeville that the language of virtue and vice persists. It still pervades the work of the classical economists such as Hume and Smith, who were critical of Mandeville.6 In the work of Hume and Smith the language of the interests and the languages of passions is used interchangeably. Consider, for example, the characteristics that Hume takes to be universals of human nature: ‘Ambition, avarice, self-love, vanity, friendship, generosity, public spirit’ (Hume 1975: VIII, p. 65). The term ‘self-interest’ is used interchangeably with two different concepts on this list – ‘avarice’ and ‘self-love’ – and each use carries a distinct sense. Hume often uses self-interest interchangeably with avarice, the love of gain or avidity, ‘the interested affection’, most notably in Book III of A Treatise of Human Nature. Thus understood, self-interest is central to Hume’s account of the conditions for commercial society. The passion of avarice, avidity, the love of gain is for Hume the foundation of commercial society: ‘it is more easy to account for the rise and progress of commerce in any kingdom than it is for that of learning. … Avarice, or the desire for gain, is a universal passion, which operates at all times, in all places, and upon all persons: But curiosity, or the love of knowledge, has a very limited influence’ (Hume, ‘On the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences’, 1985: 113). The problem of avarice for Hume is that it is both universal and destructive of society. ‘This avidity alone, of acquiring goods and possessions for ourselves and our nearest friends, is insatiable, perpetual, universal and directly destructive of society’ (Hume 1978: III, part II, section II). As such it must be controlled, but neither our benevolence for strangers, nor more importantly any of the other passions – vanity, pity, envy, revenge, etc. – are able to restrain it, the former because it is too weak, the latter because they are not constant. The only constant passion that is able to restrain the love of gain is that passion itself: ‘There is no passion, therefore

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capable of controlling the interested affection, but the very affection itself, by an alteration of its direction. … [T]he passion of self-interest … itself alone restrains it’ (Hume 1978: III, part II, section II). The self-restraint that the passion of self-interest exerts upon itself is the condition for the rules of justice and commerce. Thus goes Hume’s argument in A Treatise of Human Nature and in this context ‘the passion of self-interest’ is being used in a narrow sense to refer specifically to the love of gain in contrast with the other passions. However, Hume uses the term ‘self-interest’ not only to refer to the specific passion of avarice, but also, especially in Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, in a more general sense interchangeably with the concept of self-love.7 The use is common in the eighteenth century. Butler for example uses the phrase ‘self-love and interestedness’ understood ‘to be an affection to ourselves, a regard to our private good’ (Butler 1983: IV.11). The concept of self-love is the one single older term that might be thought to do some of the work of the more recent term egoism. Indeed it is not uncommon to find commentators using the terms egoism in discussions of classical texts that employ equivalents of the English term self-love and employing the distinction between egoism and altruism to describe the contrast drawn between self-love and benevolence. What is meant by ‘self-love’? In both classical philosophical and biblical texts the concept of self-love is used in both a narrow negative sense and a wide nonnegative sense. Thus Aristotle claims that while it can be used to describe both a narrow pursuit of ‘the biggest share of money, honours and bodily pleasures’, and is commonly thus understood, proper self-love incorporates wider attachments: the virtuous are proper self-lovers (Aristotle 1985: IX). In Biblical texts, the concept is sometimes likewise used in a narrow negative sense to describe various vices of character – covetousness, pride, an absence of filial obedience, etc. (Timothy 2, 3) – and sometimes in a neutral or positive sense, most notably in the commandment ‘love thy neighbour as thyself ’ (Leviticus XIX, 18; Luke X, 27; Matthew XIX, 19; XXII, 39). The distinction between improper self-love in the negative sense and true self-love runs through Augustine’s texts.8 It is later stated with particular clarity by Aquinas: ‘Love of self is common to all in one way; in another way it is proper to the good; in a third way it is proper to the wicked’ (Aquinas 1952: II.II.25.7). The first refers to the desire for self-preservation, the second to self-love that is founded upon a proper conception of what it is to flourish as a human being, the third self-love founded upon a misconception of human flourishing. The negative use of the term self-love is that which is taken up in the writings of Jansenists such as Nicole, where self-love (l’amour-propre) in a narrow sense is taken to underlie commercial society. Something of these classical distinctions survives into the eighteenth century writers in the contrast between ‘immoderate’ or ‘excessive’ self-love and ‘reasonable’ self-love (Butler 1983: II.9). The distinction is central for example to Butler’s influential arguments for the compatibility of self-love and benevolence. A dispassionate and reasonable understanding of our interests requires that we should not be over-concerned with ourselves (Butler 1983: IV.8). Thus ‘immod-

Commerce and the language of value 81 erate self-love’, love of self to the exclusion of other affections, is contrary to a person’s private good. ‘Immoderate self love does very ill consult its own interests; and how much soever a paradox it should appear, it is certainly true that even from self-love we should endeavour to get over all inordinate regard to and consideration of ourselves’ (Butler 1983: IV.8). The paradox allows Butler to conclude that the call of benevolence, acting for the sake of others, is not contrary to self-love: ‘there is no peculiar contrariety between self-love and benevolence, no greater competition between these than between any other particular affections and self-love’ (Butler 1983: IV.12). Implicit in the last remark is Butler’s more general point that self-love is a second-order affection that presupposes more specific passions and interests to give it content: The very idea of an interested pursuit necessarily presupposes particular passions or appetites; since the very idea of interest or happiness consists in this, that an appetite or affection enjoys its object. It is not because we love ourselves that we find delight in such and such objects, but because we have particular affections towards them. Take away these affections, and you leave self-love absolutely nothing at all to employ itself about. (Butler 1983: preface.37) These uses of ‘self-love’ in both narrower and broader senses are also still acknowledged by Hume. Thus he notes, with criticism, its narrow and pejorative use: ‘Avarice, ambition, vanity and all passions vulgarly, though improperly, comprised under the denomination of self-love’ (Hume 1975: 221). In contrast to that account, Hume echoes Butler’s claim that self-love in its proper sense is a second-order affection that is parasitic on first-order passions (Hume 1975: 253–254). Hume, Butler and other eighteenth century economists such as Smith, however, stand on a cusp of a change in the language of political economy from a language that employs specific virtue and vice terms, such as avarice, ambition, vanity, along with the more general concept of self-love, to a language exclusively of self-interest, egoism and the maximisation of expected utility in which virtue and vice terms largely disappear. Is there anything of significance in this shift in language? Does it matter? One possible answer is that it does not. Price (1988), for example, argues that it is simply a paradox that the recent terms which describe universal self-seeking dispositions have arrived so late in history. Had the terms had a longer history earlier theorists such as Machiavelli would have agreed with the assertion that human action had an egoistic or selfish character. This response is not I think satisfactory. The shift in language, like the Good News Bible translation of Ecclesiastes, fails on both descriptive and normative grounds. The language it offers is descriptively impoverished and gives a spurious plausibility to attempts to universalise a particular economic conception of the human agent. The language is normatively deficient, involving a form of subjectivism about well-being which does not allow for sufficient distance between a person’s belief about what it is for her to live well, and what in fact it is for her to live well, and hence undermines the critical content of the concept.

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Rational choice and universal economics There is only one social science. What gives economics its imperialist invasive power is that our analytical categories – scarcity, cost, preferences, opportunities etc. – are truly universal in applicability. (Hirschleifer 1985: 66) [O]bjectivity is not neutrality. … As has been pointed out before, if you take a series of descriptions of an event – millions of people died; millions of people were killed; millions of innocent civilians were massacred – then assuming all are true, each is more objective and less neutral than the last. It is more objective because it gives a fuller account of what occurred, excluding more misconceptions; and it is less neutral because it paints what occurred in a more gruesome light. (Collier 2003: 139)

One argument that might be offered for the elimination of the older language of vices and virtues is that it offers a more value-neutral language that is appropriate to a properly scientific social science. The shift from the language of avarice to the language of self-interest and the maximisation of utility strips descriptions of their normative connotations and hence allows for more objective and factually accurate descriptions of the social world. However, as Andrew Collier notes, the conflation of objectivity with neutrality is a mistake. It can be the other way around, that it is as one moves away from neutral descriptions that one arrives at fuller and more objective accounts of the social world. In this section I want to suggest that this is true of the shift in the language of economics away from that of virtues and vices. It has lead to an increasingly less adequate account of the social world that has given spurious plausibility to the claim that economics is a social science that is universal in its scope. Consider for example the claims made by public choice theorists about the universal applicability of the concepts and assumptions of economic theory to all human behaviour: ‘the economic approach provides a valuable unified framework for understanding all human behaviour’ (Becker 1976: 14). If individuals act as rational self-interested agents in the marketplace, ‘the inference should be that they will also act similarly in other and nonmarket behavioural settings’ (Buchanan 1972: 22). In particular, against the ‘conventional wisdom’ which is taken to hold ‘that the market is made up of private citizens trying to benefit themselves, but that government is concerned with something called the public interest’ (Tullock 1970: v), the public choice theorist claims that the same assumptions about the agent should apply in both. Specifically, the axioms that characterise the rational self-interested agent in economic life should be taken to apply also to the explanation of the behaviour of bureaucrat and politician in their political activities. Much of the initial plausibility for these claims stems from equivocations that terms such as ‘self-interest’ and ‘maximising expected utility’ allow. One reading is

Commerce and the language of value 83 to take them to be used in a narrow sense to refer to specific motivations that drive accumulation – the passion for gain or avarice. The assumption of selfinterest in general equilibrium theory amounts to an assumption of non-satiation: given a choice between a smaller and larger bundle of commodities, the agent always chooses the larger (Arrow and Hahn 1971: 78; cf. Haussman 1992). Even if this claim is true of market actors it is not obvious at all that such motivations are universal. The older language of vices and virtues was clearer on the differentiations of different motivations in different settings. The classical economists, such as Hume and Smith, in part because they were concerned with the conditions in which commercial society could emerge at all, were less likely to assume that avarice was a motivation that operated in all social settings. Thus, for example, a central problem that Hume, like other classical economic theorists, was concerned to address was the specification of the conditions for the existence of commercial societies, both objective and subjective. Consider Hume’s remarks about the incompatibility of absolute monarchy and commerce: Commerce, therefore, in my opinion, is apt to decay in absolute governments, not because it is there less secure, but because it is less honourable. A subordination of ranks is absolutely necessary to the support of monarchy. Birth, titles, and place, must be honoured above industry and riches. And while these notions prevail, all the considerable traders will be tempted to throw up their commerce, in order to purchase some of those employments, to which privileges and honours are annexed. (Hume, ‘Of Civil Liberty’, 1985: 93) In traditional societies, ‘birth, titles and place’ are defined as the object of one’s interest: to sacrifice them for money would be a sign of vulgarity. At the limit the prince, driven by the desire for glory, could throw away all goods for its sake. The theme runs through Hume’s The History of England. Typical is his censure of Richard I: Elated with hopes of fame, which in that age attended no wars but those against the infidels, he was blind to every other consideration; and when some of his wiser ministers objected to this dissipation of the revenue and power of the crown, he replied, that he would sell London itself could he find a purchaser (Hume 1983: I, p. 380) In conditions of absolute monarchy, the passion for fame could subdue the passion of self-interest. For Hume, successful commercial societies require not just the redirection of the ‘interested affection’,9 but also conditions in which it is not subdued by countervailing passions.10 Whatever the adequacy of Hume’s claims here, and my purpose is not to defend them, they at least have the advantage of allowing a clearer statement of the ways in which in different social settings different motivations will operate.

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In practice public choice theorists do not assume constancy of motivations across different institutional settings. Once the utility functions assumed in different social settings are unpacked, public choice accounts are far more traditional than is normally supposed. In the political domain, for example, the individual is taken to be driven by ambition, not avarice. Bureaucrats aim to maximise the size of their bureau budget, since that is correlated with their utility understood in terms of personal promotion and advancement (Niskanen 1973: 22–23). Politicians offer goods to different interest groups since they aim at power. In other spheres such as science, the utility function is defined in terms of the desire for recognition, and so on. As the institution changes so does the utility function that is invoked.11 Far from offering a more objective account of the nature of the social world than older virtue and vice terms, reference to ‘self-interest’ or ‘maximisation of expected utility’ disguises the diversity of motivations and possible conflicts between them that are explicit when the language of avarice and ambition is employed. Vice and virtue terms describe dispositions of character to involve specific desires and feelings towards par-ticular objects: ambition, for power; avarice, for material gain; vanity, for recognition or glory. As such the older terms such as avarice, vanity, ambition, and pride describing dispositions of character are clearly associated with differ-ent institutional settings. Hence, they render more clearly conflicts between different motivations that are associated with institutional conflicts than do the more neutral terms of ‘self-interest’ and ‘maximisation of expected utility’. The plausibility of the public choice claim for the universality of self-interest as a motivation across different institutions draws much of its strength from an equivocation between the narrow sense of the term as it is used in explanations of market behaviour and a wider sense in which it appears in the basic axioms of neo-classical theory. It is possible for the defender of the claim to retreat to a general sense of ‘self-interest’ or ‘the maximisation of expected utility’ in which it is understood as the pursuit of preference-satisfaction, given some constraints of consistency on preferences. However, thus understood, the claim that the assumption of self-interest can be generalised to explain behaviour in different spheres may well be true, but it begs the explanatory questions. Self-interest in this general sense has the same logical attributes that Butler notes of ‘self-love’ understood in its broad sense. The concept refers to a second-order motivation that is parasitic on prior first-order motivations. Without some specification what a person takes to be in their interests or what their preferences are the concept is empty. Appeal to ‘self-interest’ without reference to the prior motivation will be explanatorily inert. Once these are specified appeal to self-interest begs the explanatory questions. In different institutional contexts an individual’s conceptions of their interests will shift. In particular in non-market institutional spheres, interests and preferences will differ from those expressed in markets. Hence, where markets are introduced into non-market spheres the consequence will often be a shift in persons’ conceptions of their interest. The shift is evident not just in the transition from pre-commercial to commercial society, but also in the shifting boundaries of markets within modern market economies. For example, the interests of the scientist in institutions that follow the norms of Mertonian

Commerce and the language of value 85 science will not be the same as those of a scientist in institutions governed by commercial norms: a self-interested act in the former – publishing a novel result in a peer-reviewed journal – might be an altruistic act in the latter in which a patent rather than publication is the object of an individual’s interests.12 The shift from the thick virtue and vice concepts of the Augustinian thread in economic thought in the eighteenth century to the value-neutral language of interests and utility in the modern economic textbook has not been the occasion for an improvement in either the objectivity or the explanatory power of economic theory. Rather the opposite: it has rendered economic theory less sensible to the differences of motivations in different social spheres. As such it has been the basis of erroneous claims about the universal applicability of the assumptions about the behaviour of agents in the market sphere to all others.13

Subjectivism, objectivism and the human good And when we value something, say the New Forest, that valuing is a judgement about the New Forest – that it has value – not about some mental process of ours that could be inspected in isolation from the New Forest. One discovers the value of the New Forest by going to the New Forest, not by describing a set of human preferences. (Collier 2003: 138) Again the most mathematical of the social sciences, economics, is also the most subjective, because it reduces values to purely subjective preferences, and because it prefers arbitrary mathematical models to realistic non-quantitative ones. (Collier 2003: 141) But all that are blessed have what they will, although not all who have what they will are forewith blessed. But they are forewith wretched, who either have not what they will, or have that which they do not rightly will. Therefore he only is a blessed man, who both has all things which he wills, and wills nothing ill. (Augustine, De Trinitate 13.5.8)

I opened this paper by comparing the questions ‘Is avarice conducive to individual well-being?’ and ‘Is the pursuit of the maximisation of personal expected utility conducive to individual well-being?’ In the Augustinian tradition the answer to the former question is no. The answer to the second question is, in the tradition of modern economics of both neo-classical and Austrian traditions, yes. As I noted earlier, well-being is defined in terms of utility, ‘utility’ in terms of the satisfaction of preferences. Well-being consists in the satisfaction of preferences, the stronger the preferences satisfied the greater the improvement in welfare. Modern economic theory is committed to a strong form of subjectivism that renders human well-being a matter of the satisfaction of preferences. Subjectivism about what it is to live well can come in many varieties and it is important to distinguish this modern form of subjectivism from earlier classical

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hedonistic theories. Classical hedonism of the form defended by Epicurus is a subjectivist view of the content of well-being. Well-being consists in having the right subjective states, of the experience of pleasure. It is not subjectivist about what determines the content of well-being. It holds that it is true that pleasure is what is the ultimate good for people even if they do not believe it to be. Classical hedonism is objectivist about human well-being in the sense that Andrew Collier, I think rightly, takes to be the basic sense of objectivism: ‘The first and central use of the word “objectivity” is to refer to what is true independently of any subject judging it to be true’ (Collier 2003: 134). Since it is objectivist in this sense, it can and does hold that many people make mistakes about the goods of human life. For example, from misidentifying the goods of life they mistakenly fear death and desire posthumous honour even though the former cannot be an evil in itself and the latter cannot be a good. Preference satisfaction theories of well-being are not, or at least need not be, subjectivist about the content of well-being. What is good for people is a matter of what they desire and it is false that people desire only pleasure. Preference satisfaction theories are rather subjectivist in the more basic sense that what is good for a person is a matter of what that person thinks is good for him. They are subjectivist about the determination of well-being. What is of value for me is determined by what I value. What is good for me is determined by what I actually desire or believe is good for me. Alan Wood claims that this doctrine concerning the subjective determination of the good is a peculiarly modern one (Wood 1990: 55). The claim that it is entirely new would I think be false. The passage from Augustine’s De Trinitate which opens this section is a response to the thesis of subjective determination, specifically to the claim that since people want different things – Epicurus pleasure, Zeno goodness – we simply define a person’s good by what they desire. However, I think Wood is right that its status as the commonplace view is peculiarly modern. Classical accounts of the human good were objectivist – the truth of a claim about what is good for human beings was not simply a matter of what they judge is good for them. A feature of subjectivist accounts of well-being that simply defines well-being in terms of the satisfaction of preferences is that they leave no room for error. One consequence is that the distinction between different forms of self-love that, as I noted above, runs through classical discussion becomes indefensible. If an individual desires ‘the biggest share of money, honours and bodily pleasures’ and he gets them, then his life goes well. The space for critical reflection on the very possibility of a mistake about the constituents of a good life disappears. However, that looks plainly implausible. It defies the common observation that people can get what they want and be worse off than before. While there are some that are willing to defend a crude subjectivist view of well-being, most defenders of subjectivism recognise it will not do. The defender of a more sophisticated subjective determination thesis will allow for the possibility of error by identifying the constituents of well-being not with what people in fact value, but what we would value were we fully informed and competent to make requisite judgements. Wellbeing can be identified with the satisfaction of fully informed preferences. Hence for example Griffin’s definition of utility: ‘ “utility” is the fulfilment of informed

Commerce and the language of value 87 desires, the stronger the desires, the greater the utility’ (Griffin 1986: 14). The position allows for the possibility of mistakes, but still holds that whether something is good for a person depends on ultimately on what they would want or value. What is good for us is still determined ultimately by our preferences. This position is still however unsatisfactory. It fails to acknowledge the different ways in which informing a person about an object can affect their well-being. The subjectivist account is consistent with some roles that information can play in a person identifying a mistake about what they desire, in particular where information concerns whether an object that a person currently desires in fact satisfies other given preferences that person has. A person has a settled preference for some fast-food burger, which unbeknownst to him is full of fat and carcinogenic. Were he fully informed about the food he would no longer prefer it, given he had some settled preference for good health which has priority over a preference for a somewhat dubious gastronomic pleasure. This role for information is quite consistent with the informed preference account of well-being. However, informing a person can also act in other ways to form or reform her preferences which are less easily rendered consistent with a subjectivist position. Thus, education often isn’t a question of telling you about an object so that it fits current preferences, but altering preferences by pointing to features of the object that make them worthy of being preferred. This point is a version of the one made by Andrew Collier in connection with the New Forest in the passage quoted at the start of this section. A person who has a strong preference for the vertical pleasures of climbing gritstone on the largely treeless hills of Northern England may have little appreciation of woodland, grassland, bog and heath and no preference for their company. However on being taken on a cycle ride and walk in the New Forest by a friend his preferences may change. The friend tells him something of its history as a site of social conflict from its original appropriation as a deer hunting area by William the Bastard. He makes him aware of the dappled light, the texture of lichen and bark. He indicates something of the variety of life it contains. The person emerges with his preferences changed as a lover of woodland and heath.14 The experience is commonplace. It is what most education is about and it is how education, both formal and informal, mostly deeply develops our well-being. However, welfare here is increased not by fitting objects to current desires, but by forming those desires for their object. This educative role for information is inconsistent with the subjective determination. Talk of informed preference is a disguised way of talking about objective determination. Indeed, the point is summarised well by Griffin in his own presentation of the informed preference account of wellbeing: What makes us desire the things we desire, when informed, is something about them – their features or properties. But why bother then with informed desire, when we can go directly to what it is about objects that

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As Andrew Collier notes, ‘one discovers the value of the New Forest by going to the New Forest, not by describing a set of human preferences’ (Collier 2003: 138). Resistance to an objectivist account of our well-being also however has a political dimension which is related to the employment of subjectivist accounts of well-being in defence of commercial society. A worry about objectivism is that it leads to some form of authoritarianism or paternalism. If what is good for someone is independent of what they believe is good for them then doesn’t this entail there is a justification for some informed central authoritative body over-riding individuals’ own aims and desires about their lives? Doesn’t it lead to a form of ‘dictatorship over needs’ characteristic of some of the most clearly objectionably features of the centrally planned economies of Eastern Europe (Fehér et al. 1983)? Three points I think need to be made in response to this quite proper concern. The first is epistemological. To reiterate a point that Andrew Collier makes forcibly in ‘In Defence of Objectivity’, objectivity is not infallibility (Collier 2003: 140). That it is an objective matter about what goes to make a person’s life go well or ill does not entail that there is some committee of experts with incorrigible knowledge of that matter. Furthermore, while no one has incorrigible knowledge of their own good, it is generally true that individuals often have knowledge of the particularities of their own situation that is unavailable to distant strangers. There are epistemic limits to the knowledge of particular human needs that any planning central committee might have, and the recognition of those limits is quite consistent with the objectivity of claims about human well-being.16 Second, to defend an objectivist account of human well-being does not entail that what people want is irrelevant to their happiness. Thus it is possible to argue, as does Augustine in the passage quoted at the start of this section, that if a person does not get what they want they will be unhappy. Or as more modern liberals have put it, there is an endorsement constraint on what makes a person’s life go well. One cannot improve an individual’s life by supplying resources that are by some objective criterion valuable to the individual, but which are not in the lights of the conception of the good life recognised and accepted by that individual: a person’s life cannot go better in virtue of features that are not endorsed by the individual as valuable (Dworkin 1983). The point is an important one. There is a particular form of the ‘dictatorship over needs’ which fails to acknowledge that point, that assumes that one can improve people’s lives by giving them what they need whether or not they believe that to be so. However, as Augustine also notes, that endorsement is a necessary condition of a good life does not entail that it is sufficient. That people are unhappy if their desires are unfulfilled does not entail they are happy if they are. A person can will something ill. The third point is that the development and exercise of the capacity to make autonomous choices about

Commerce and the language of value 89 one’s life is itself a part of the human good. One reason why the endorsement constraint has the force it has is to do with the value of autonomy for us as beings with capacities for self-reflection and judgement about what is and is not of value. To live a life according to values we do not endorse or accept is not to lead our own lives. However, that point itself is consistent with an objectivist account of what makes our lives go well. Autonomy is a good of human life, given the kind of creatures with the capacity for rational choices that we are. Moreover there are reasons to suppose that a defensible account of the value of autonomy itself calls upon the objectivity of certain values. What makes autonomous choices so tough is that values are not a matter of decision, but of discovering what is of value. The difficulty of making choices between different values only makes sense if we assume that we can be mistaken. Nothing in an objectivist account of well-being commits one to a paternalism or an authoritarian dictatorship over needs. What it does commit one to is the claim that a good social order requires forms of social association in which individuals are able to reflect properly upon and educate their preferences both through practical engagement with objects of value and theoretical reflection. And what an objectivist account of well-being does undermine is the rather direct form of argument for modern market society that is to be found in both neo-classical and some forms of Austrian economics that runs roughly as follows: (1) well-being consists in the satisfaction of an individual’s preferences; (2) market economies are that institutional arrangement of economic life that best meets the satisfaction of individual consumer preferences; hence (3) a market economy best improves human well-being. There are good reasons for doubting the second assumption of this argument, most notably those concerned with inequalities in the distribution of wealth. However, even were it to be true the first assumption should in any case be rejected. While it may be true that those whose preferences go unsatisfied may be unhappy, it does not follow that if preferences are satisfied they will be happy.17 The critical import of the concept of well-being or welfare depends upon the possibility of maintaining a distance between what it is to live well and what a person believes it is to live well. In this chapter I have examined a shift in the language of economics that is akin to a Good News Bible account of the human condition. The effect of that shift, I have suggested, is to render a spurious plausibility to the attempt to present specifically market relations and motivations as universal and to undermine an account of what it is to live well that provides part of the basis for critical reflection on commercial society. Good News Bible accounts of human life in the end blind us to the existence of alternatives to market society. Indeed they render non-market orders even in our own societies invisible. Different forms of reciprocity other than market exchange disappear from view. For those of us still committed to the project of developing an alternative to a modern capitalist economy, there is a need to criticise those forms of subjectivism that, as Andrew Collier has noted, are a consequence of the ways in which commercial society affects our ways of seeing and understanding the world and through which that form of commercial society is sustained.

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Notes 1 Ecclesiastes 11.1, The Holy Bible: Authorized King James Version (London: Collins, 1957). 2 Good News Bible (Glasgow: Collins, 1976), foreword. 3 Ecclesiastes 11.1, Good News Bible (Glasgow: Collins, 1976). My thanks to Paul Lancaster for pointing out this translation. 4 Samuelson, for example, interprets the shift to a formal definition of utility as ‘a steady removal of moral, utilitarian, welfare connotations from the concept’ (Samuelson 1938: 344). Hence his comment: ‘any connection between utility … and any welfare concept is disavowed’ (Samuelson 1937: 161). Broome makes similar divorce of the concepts without the commitment to positivism (Broome 1991: 65). If that line is taken then the answer to our question 3* should not be a straightforward yes – no immediate conclusions about welfare follow from the results of modern economics about the relation between ideal markets and utility. 5 I discuss the shift in detail in O’Neill 1998b: ch. 3. 6 For the criticisms see Smith 1982: VII.ii.4; Hume, ‘Of Refinements in the Arts’, 1985: 280. 7 See for example Hume 1975: 174, 178. 8 For a detailed discussion see O’Donovan 1980. 9 In the Treatise Hume approaches the problem by way of consideration of the institutional principles for the ‘stabilisation’ and ‘transference’ of property and the possibility of mutual promising through which the passion of self-interest is taken to be redirected to control itself (Hume 1978: part II, sections III-V). 10 See also for example Hume’s comments on the effect of commerce on making ‘the love of gain prevail over the love of pleasure’ (Hume, ‘Of Interest’, 1985: 301). 11 See O’Neill 1994 for further discussion. 12 For a more detailed discussion see O’Neill 1990; 1992; 1998b: chs. 11–12. 13 For more detailed development of the arguments in the last two sections see O’Neill 1998a, 1998c. 14 Andrew will hopefully recognise something of my own visit to the New Forest in his company a few years ago. 15 Griffin has since moved in the direction of endorsing this objection (Griffin 1991, 1996). 16 I discuss these epistemic arguments in more detail in O’Neill 1998b: ch. 10. 17 I develop this argument in more detail in O’Neill 1998b: ch. 4. It should be noted that the defences of commercial society in the classical economics of Smith and Hume do not rely upon any such direct relation.

Bibliography Aquinas, T (1952) Summa Theologica, Chicago: William Benton. Aristotle (1985) Nicomachean Ethics, trans. T. Irwin, Indianapolis: Hackett. Arrow, K. and F. Hahn (1971) General Competitive Analysis, San Francisco: Holden-Day. Becker, G. (1976) ‘The Economic Approach to Human Behavior’, The Economic Approach to Human Behavior, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Broome, J. (1991) Weighing Goods, Oxford: Blackwell. Buchanan, J. (1962) Calculus of Consent, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. —— (1972) ‘Towards Analysis of Closed Behavioral Systems’, in J. Buchanan and R. Tollison (eds), Theory of Public Choice, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Butler, J. (1983) Five Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel, ed. S. Darwell, Indianapolis: Hackett. Collier, A. (1990) Socialist Reasoning, London: Pluto. —— (2003) In Defence of Objectivity and Other Essays, Routledge, London.

Commerce and the language of value 91 Deane, H. (1963) The Political and Social Ideas of St. Augustine, New York: Columbia University Press. Dunleavy, P. (1991) Democracy, Bureaucracy and Public Choice, New York: Harvester. Dworkin, R. (1983) ‘In Defence of Equality’, Social Philosophy and Policy, 1, pp. 24–40. Elster, J. (1986) ‘The Market and the Forum: Three Varieties of Political Theory’, in J. Elster and A. Hylland (eds), Foundations of Social Choice Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fehér, Ferenc, Agnes Heller and György Márkus (1983) Dictatorship over Needs: An Analysis of Soviet Societies, Oxford: Blackwell. Griffin, J. (1986) Well-Being, Oxford: Clarendon Press. —— (1991) ‘Against the Taste Model’, in J. Elster and J. Roemer (eds), Interpersonal Comparisons of Well-Being, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —— (1996) Value Judgement: Improving Our Ethical Beliefs, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hahn, F. and M. Hollis (eds) (1979) Philosophy and Economic Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Haussman, D. (1992) ‘What are general equilibrium theories?’, Essays on Philosophy and Economic Methodology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hirschleifer, J. (1985) ‘The Expanding Domain of Economics’, American Economic Review, 75, 6, pp.53–68. Hirschman, A. (1977) The Passions and the Interests, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hume, D. (1975) Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, Oxford: Clarendon Press. —— (1978) A Treatise Of Human Nature, Oxford: Clarendon Press. —— (1983) The History of England, Indianapolis: Liberty Press. —— (1985) Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, Indianapolis: Liberty Press. Jevons, W. (1970) The Theory of Political Economy, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Mandeville, B. (1988) The Fable of the Bees or Private Vice, Publick Benefits, Indianapolis: Liberty Press. Marshall, A. (1962) Principles of Economics, 8th edn, London: Macmillan. Nicole, P. (1997) Of Charity and Self-Love VI, in E. Hundert (ed.), The Fable of the Bees and Other Writings, Indianapolis: Hackett. Niskanen, W. (1973) Bureaucracy: Servant or Master, London: IEA. O’Donovan, O. (1980) The Problem of Self-Love in St. Augustine, New Haven: Yale University Press. O’Neill, J (1990) ‘Property in Science and the Market’, The Monist, 73, pp. 601–620. —— (1992) ‘Altruism, Egoism, and the Market’, Philosophical Forum, 23, pp. 278–288. —— (1994) ‘Preferences, Virtues and Institutions’, Analyse & Kritik, 16, pp. 202–216. —— (1998a) ‘Against Reductionist Explanations of Human Behaviour: Rational Choice and the Unified Social Science’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume LXXII, pp. 173–188. —— (1998b) The Market: Ethics, Information and Politics, London: Routledge. —— (1998c) ‘Self-Love, Self-Interest and the Rational Economic Agent’, Analyse & Kritik, 20, pp. 184–204. Pigou, A. (1920) The Economics of Welfare, London: Macmillan. Polanyi, K. (1957) The Great Transformation, Boston: Beacon Press. Price, R. (1988) ‘Self-Love, “Egoism” and Ambizione in Machiavelli’s Thought’, History of Political Thought, 9, pp. 237–261. Samuelson, P. (1937) ‘A Note on Measurement of Utility’, Review of Economic Studies, 4, pp. 155–161.

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Samuelson, P. (1938) ‘The Empirical Implications of Utility Analysis’ Econometrica, 5, pp. 344–345. Smith, A. (1981) An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Indianapolis, Liberty Press. —— (1982) The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Indianapolis: Liberty Press. Tullock, G. (1970) Private Wants, Public Means, New York: Basic Books. Wood, A. (1990) Hegel's Ethical Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Restoring the moral dimension in social scientific accounts A qualified ethical naturalist approach Andrew Sayer

Introduction As a social scientist I have long been troubled by the lack of recognition in contemporary social science of what might be termed the moral dimension of social life. In much of recent social theory, action is assumed to be either merely interest-driven, or habitual, or a product of wider discourses and institutions. Often it adopts a sociologically reductionist account of actors’ motives and actions, in effect, saying ‘they would say/do that, wouldn’t they, given their social position’, which is in contradiction with the first person accounts which actors (including social scientists) offer for their own behaviour, which involve justification rather than sociological explanation. Actors’ rationales or normative dispositions are discounted – either altogether, or by reducing them to conventions or features of discourses. Even those social theorists who, like Durkheim, invoke morality a great deal, often concentrate on its effects in reproducing social order, reducing it to mere convention backed by sanctions. This gives no insight into its normative force, and hence why it should matter so much to us. The idea that ethics or morality1 is simply ‘what we do round here’ will always be unconvincing, producing an alienated view of actors as mere dupes that misses what they care about and why. Positive, including positivist, social research can of course treat actors’ moral concerns as social facts, but the effect of the expulsion of normative thought from modern social science tends to mean that the normative force of those moral concerns is not analysed, thereby reducing them to apparently arbitrary conventions. Hence, the attempted barring of values from science that has occurred over the last two centuries has been accompanied by an expulsion of reason from values, and the rise of the view that values can only be subjective, not objective. More recently, post-structuralists have adopted what Habermas has termed ‘crypto-normative’ stances, both abolishing the subject and refusing normative valuation while surreptitiously appealing to the readers’ normative values by using terms such as ‘domination’, ‘oppression’, ‘racism’, etc., without justifying these evaluative descriptions. This treatment of actors as mere products and bearers of discursive conventions and the discounting and evasion of moral judgement is not something theorists or anyone else can live.

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Andrew Sayer Moral judgment is what we ‘always already’ exercise in virtue of being immersed in a network of human relationships that constitute our life together. Whereas there can be reasonable debate about whether or not to exercise juridical, military, therapeutic, aesthetic or even political judgment, in the case of moral judgment this option is not there. The domain of the moral is so deeply enmeshed with those interactions that constitute our lifeworld that to withdraw from moral judgment is tantamount to ceasing to interact, to talk and act in the human community. (Benhabib 1992: 125–126, emphasis in original; see also Habermas 1990)

Nor can subjectivist and relativist approaches to morality be adhered to in practice. In engaging in arguments about ethical matters, we can hardly avoid appealing to common standards and to objective or independent circumstances, rather than merely to our own individual preferences or those of our community. To reduce morality to no more than personal preference or arbitrary discursive convention would be to render incomprehensible both the inherent seriousness of moral issues and the way in which we (including post-structuralists when off duty) argue about them. But while it is easy to identify the performative and theory–practice contradictions involved in these positions, it is much more difficult to provide an account which does justice to lay normativity, one which acknowledges both the validity and the fallibility of lay ethical values, which tells us where such values come from, what encourages or discourages their development, and from where their force and legitimacy derive. This paper offers some suggestions towards this end, as regards ethical dispositions or moral sentiments and how they might be understood. It proposes a ‘qualified ethical naturalism’ which acknowledges both the intransitivity or otherness of human social being, its scope for both flourishing and suffering, and its possibilities for extensive cultural mediation, diversification and development. In other words it seeks to do justice to actors’ ethical dispositions or moral sentiments and hence contribute to the restoration of the moral dimension to social scientific accounts. This ethical naturalism is less ambitious than the moral realism advocated by Andrew Collier in Being and Worth (1999) but very much in keeping with his arguments in In Defence of Objectivity (2003). In trying to restore the moral dimension, I have turned to ethical theory, and to classical social theory, in which normative and positive thought were not separated and in which the conception of society as a moral order was more common. Being particularly interested in normativity and economic activities, or ‘moral economy’, Adam Smith has an obvious appeal and part of this paper amounts to a response to his work on moral sentiments. This, I will argue, is highly sophisticated and implies a realist view of ethics, albeit a ‘thin’ form of realism that needs supplementation to prevent it lapsing into emotivism or conventionalism.2 At the same time, attempting to bridge the divide between social science and moral philosophy also exposes weaknesses on the latter’s part. Just as positive

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social science has neglected the normative character of social life, so moral philosophy tends to pay insufficient attention to positive matters regarding the nature and context of moral concerns in everyday life. Typically, it tends to individualise the explanation of good and evil, as if the problems of the world were merely a product of bad moral decisions.3 I shall argue that the causes for much evil and suffering derive from particular forms of social organisation, though not independently of individuals, and that the scope of ethical theory needs to expand to consider these. From the point of view of a social scientist wanting to understand the moral dimension of social life, much ethical theory is too purely normative, too reduced to abstract reason and hence too alienated from recognisable actors embedded in recognisable social settings to provide much insight. It might offer good reasons for philosophers, or indeed others, to approach ethical issues in a particular way, but this might be quite different from how people think and act (Glover 2001: 295). Of course, at one level this is only reasonable, insofar as the purpose of moral philosophy is openly normative, and lay ethics are imperfect.4 For example, Rawlsian theory offers an imaginative and original normative approach to certain ethical issues, but it does not pretend that people think in this way. But even if we accept this radical normative purpose, and thus a certain distance from how things are, there must be some connection between the positive and the normative: ‘[E]thics must be grounded in a knowledge of human beings that enables us to say that some modes of life are suited to our nature, whereas others are not’ (Wood 1990: 17).5 A normative ethics which took no account of what kind of beings humans (or indeed other species) are would be an absurdity. On the one hand, moral philosophy has to take account of human capacities (many of which exist in potentia) and limitations, on the other it is of little use if does not help us see how, within those constraints, we could not come to lead better lives. As Jonathan Glover remarks, the attribution of ethical dispositions to people as part of their ‘humanity is only partly an empirical claim. It remains also partly an aspiration’6 (Glover 2001: 25). Equally, any positive account of social life needs to acknowledge that actors are evaluative beings, for whom normative questions are generally more important than positive questions. In this sense, the normative is an important part of the positive. Part of the socialisation of social scientists involves learning to forget the peculiarity of prioritising positive questions about the social world, but this often comes at the cost of neglecting the importance of normative questions to actors.7 From a positive or explanatory point of view, the obvious realist question about the moral dimension of social life would be: what is it about humans and human society that makes us have moral concerns? Any good answer to such a question would have to go beyond invoking our capacity for language and meaning making and deal with what it is that makes us care about anything. Thus, an adequate account of the moral dimension of social life needs an understanding of the nature of the subjective experience of it. As Charles Griswold puts it: ‘Ethical life cannot be rightly understood when what is indispensable for

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it – the subjective standpoint of the actor – is downplayed’ (Griswold 1999: 53) This is not a license for a subjectivist view of ethics; on the contrary it is a necessary component of realist or naturalist views of ethics. Moreover, actors are also of course objects as well as subjects of moral concern. Consideration of this dual nature is necessary for answering our realist question, what is it about people that makes them capable of moral concern? Without an understanding of lay subjectivity, ethics is reduced to a philosophical genre. While some conception of the nature of human being must be at least implicit in any ethical theory, if it is left implicit there is a danger that it will be inadequate. Thus, for example, many ethical theories ignore the fact that a significant proportion of social relations occur not between adults but between adults and infants, and hence they propose as universally appropriate actions which might be harmful for such cases – most obviously liberal theory. Any normative moral theory has somehow to balance the vulnerability and the material and psychological dependence of individuals on others and their capacity and need for autonomy. The kinds of dependence and autonomy and the balance between them varies between different societies, so that the development of subjects itself varies too – with different mixtures of good and bad effects. However, although the universal human capacity for cultural diversity is highly distinctive, humans are not so plastic that just any imaginable form of culture and society can be lived with indifference, without pushing against any limits, without making any difference to whether they flourish or suffer. Some forms of culture and society are more detrimental or beneficial than others. The diversity of cultural forms does not disqualify or relativise ethical theory but just presents it with more difficult judgements. The social character of life is also central, not only abstractly but in terms of the difference made by concrete forms of social organisation. When philosophers ask how we should live or what is the good life it is tempting to think of this in individualistic terms and as a matter of reasoning how one should act. However, of course, in practice the good life does not depend simply on making the right decisions, on thinking well about how to live, but upon the constraints and enablements, including discourses or world views, of particular forms of social organisation. Finally, we need to be aware of the fact that the philosophical standpoint can lead one to project onto lay actors the exceptional rationalist, contemplative stance of philosophy (Rawls’ ‘plans of life’ is an extreme and slightly comical example). As recent social theory has shown, particularly that of Pierre Bourdieu, this overlooks the practical character of everyday life, and the extent to which action is habitual, embodied, partly non-discursive and done largely ‘on automatic’ (see especially Bourdieu 2000; Crossley 2001). Although this point is exaggerated by Bourdieu (Sayer 2004), it is important to be open to it. I shall suggest ways in which this can be acknowledged, that is how restoring the moral dimension can be done through the concept of ethical dispositions, and by taking emotions seriously. Conscious reflection is still acknowledged but supplemented with a recognition of the habitual. In other words I shall argue that we

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need to adjust the relations between concepts of reason, emotion and habit in a way which counters the tendency to render them as opposites.

Ethical dispositions: emotion, reason and habit While there have been important developments in realist philosophy and social theory on the relations between emotion and reason (Archer 2000, 2003; Collier 2003), I shall argue that in seeking an adequate understanding of the moral dimension of social life, it is important to consider embodiment, dispositions and habit too, in order to avoid an overly rationalistic concept of action. Moral philosophy inevitably tends to exaggerate the role of reason in moral life, for the simple reason that it is itself the application of reason to the subject, though this overrationalisation is a common failing or occupational hazard of the social sciences too (Bourdieu 2000). I shall first summarise some of these developments and then suggest how they might be related to ideas of dispositions and ‘habitus’. At the same time as the role of reason in everyday action has been exaggerated, the meaning of ‘reason’ has itself often become attenuated, at worse, to the application of deductive logic and to instrumental rationality. This is most evident in contemporary economics, but sociologists such as Weber have reinforced it too (MacIntyre 1985). This attenuation has frequently been coupled to a complementary attenuation of concepts of emotion and habit, so that they are de-rationalised. When we say things such as ‘we have reason to be angry’ (because someone has deceived us, slandered us, or whatever), we don’t mean merely that we have a logical argument for being angry,8 or that being angry is a means to an end. Rather, citing such reasons also indicates that reason can be related to needs, desire,9 commitments and practical matters of welfare. As Margaret Archer’s recent research shows, people’s internal conversations include thinking and worrying about their commitments, weighing them up in a way which involves a kind of practical reason or substantive rationality, and dealing with the valuation of ends and concerns themselves, not merely means towards them (Archer 2003). Attenuated, alienated conceptions of rationality are complemented by derationalised conceptions of emotions in emotivist, subjectivist and relativist treatments of value or valuation. These have become popular in lay thought as well as philosophy. Not the least of the deficiencies of these approaches is that they render unintelligible the seriousness with which we argue or reason about values and moral issues (Collier 2003; Midgley 2003). As Andrew Collier notes, while many are attracted to such views when discussing ethics in the abstract, when challenged to consider particular problems that arise in everyday life, they invariably abandon this and argue that x (itself ) is good or bad. Realists have challenged such de-rationalised views of emotions, arguing that emotions have a cognitive aspect, providing ‘unarticulated commentaries’ on matters that are important to actors, with regard to the physical world, practical action and social relations (Archer 2000, 2003; Collier 1999, 2003; Norman 1998; Nussbaum 1986). Thus one might feel sad as a result of illness, failure to

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carry out some practical task, or unfriendly treatment by others. In all cases the emotion is about something independent. Of course, reflexivity allows the self to become an object of such commentaries, and for some moral emotions, especially shame, their object is primarily internal (Sedgewick and Frank 1995). Emotional responses may be mistaken – a possibility deriving precisely from the independence of their referents. It is possible where the object is internalised for them to take on a self-fulfilling character (for example, self-contempt for lack of confidence leading to further loss of confidence). Even in such cases there may be grounds for arguing that the resulting emotion (low self-esteem) is falsely based and hence unwarranted (the individual underestimates the goodwill of others). Moreover, fallibility does not counterpose emotion to reason for the latter is fallible too, and emotions can also successfully direct us towards objects such as selfish or violent behaviour, which exist independently of the spectator. Our survival depends on this kind of reference being successful at least for a substantial part of the time. The fact that emotions normally have a palpable physical expression does differentiate them from reason, but these expressions are intelligible and rational rather than inexplicable – the cringe of fear, the curl of the upper lip of contempt indicating physical distaste, and so on (Sedgewick and Frank 1995). As Raymond Williams observed, thoughts can be felt, and feelings can be thought (Williams 1977). While the capacity for some emotions seems to be innate, others exist in potentia and are developed contingently through social interaction. The acquisition of a capacity for or disposition towards particular moral emotions or sentiments regarding particular practices is the product of a practical learning process depending on both these primary emotions and contingent forms of socialisation. This learning process is partly subconscious and non-discursive, like the learning of practical skills, through which we achieve a ‘feel for the game’ (Bourdieu 2000; Crossley 2001). Through practice, through the repeated experience of social interaction, ‘ethical dispositions’ become part of the structure of dispositions oriented to the individual’s habitat and position within the social field that Bourdieu termed the habitus.10 This is not to say that there is no conscious reflection involved in their acquisition. Just as one has to think and concentrate in trying to learn how to return the ball at tennis, even though the skill is a practical, bodily one rather than a matter of learning a description, so the acquisition of ethical dispositions may involve reflection on what emotions are telling us during particular social episodes, which of course can then modify the emotional response. The reflection is both about the object and our emotional response, mediated by reference to the responses of others. As dispositions, they enable us often to respond immediately to some situation without having to reflect on it. At the sight of an adult beating up a child, we would expect an observer to be horrified, and we would have doubts about the character of anyone who had first to reflect on whether it was good or bad. Ethical dispositions can therefore be ‘intelligent dispositions’. Hence, someone who has formerly been indifferent to sexism can become sensitised to it through being challenged by others and through learning and reflection, developing embodied

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dispositions towards it, so that their responses to instances of sexism do not have to await further reflection. An implication of the intelligent character of ethical dispositions is that while there are grounds for distinguishing ethical dispositions embedded in the social relations of communal life from formal moral norms, they need not be seen as antithetical; it may be possible for norms to be internalised as dis-positions. Conversely, some formal norms may be largely formalisations of common dispositions. There can also, of course, be unethical dispositions – for example, to be cruel, selfish, vain, and so on. How far these develop depends, like ethical dispositions, on the nature of socialisation or everyday moral education, including the discourses and reasoning available to and contingently drawn upon by actors. Once acquired, (un)ethical dispositions have some inertia, but their strength depends on the seriousness of the concerns which are their object and the frequency with which they are activated. The mode and context of their activation can recursively change dispositions, making actors more, less, or differently ethical. Some experiences, like blood donation, may be ‘consciousness-raising’, while others, like a night out with the lads, may be ‘consciousness-lowering’. In either case the process of change is likely to take place through small steps. For example, in the negative direction, people may find that minor immoral acts may pave the way for the sanctioning of major ones, though they may realise, usually too late, that they have crossed a moral boundary (Glover 2001: 35).11 That our capacity for unethical as well as ethical action is nurtured or stunted by our involvement in particular social practices and situations in contexts rarely of our own choosing, is often ignored by normative moral philosophy, but is crucial for any critical social science and philosophy. It raises the question of how, given that we are obviously capable of both evil and good, each of which may bring good or bad consequences for individuals, the good is preferred on the whole. Moral philosophy’s dominant individual focus leads us to neglect the fact that in practice, both ethical and unethical behaviour tend to have clear social causes,12 though of course this is not a determinism, for individuals may sometimes reflect on such causes and override them. I shall return to these issues later. For now I want to enlarge on the social context of (un)ethical action via the work of Adam Smith.

The virtues of Smith’s analysis of moral sentiments One such study of the morality or ethics in context is Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1984 [1757]). One of the virtues of this is that it adopts a ‘bottom up’, empirical approach (Griswold 1999), analysing moral sentiments and judgements through examples so that one can appreciate what the objects of the particular moral sentiments in question are. Smith achieves this with considerable insight, sensitivity and nuance. He also takes human imperfections – our capacity for immoral sentiments and acts – more seriously than do many philosophers. His account incorporates a social psychology in which moral sentiments

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and acts arise from an ongoing process of moral education and regulation through interaction with others. Individuals are analysed as thoroughly social beings, not merely continually situated in social relations or influenced by them, but continually needing others and their approval, and being alive to their welfare. (They are thus far from the asocial, autistic figures assumed by contemporary mainstream economics, sometimes through appeals to egregious misrepresentations of Smith’s work.) Smith’s analyses of moral sentiments are therefore always set within the context of individuals’ real and imagined relations to others. He begins with an empirical claim concerning the universal human capacity for (developing)13 ‘sympathy’, defined not as commiseration or compassion but more broadly in terms of ‘fellow feeling with any passion whatever’ (1984 [1757]: 10 [I.i.1.5]).14 We can infer that while this capacity is partly hermeneutic, it is also partly pre-linguistic. Like a realist, Smith refers to the objects of moral sentiments, which in many of his examples are the sentiments and experiences and situations of others. While we have a capacity for understanding others’ situations and responses and for having similar feelings to theirs, Smith insists that this understanding is fallible, and that just as a representational discourse is a different kind of thing from what it represents, so the emotions that we experience when we observe others’ experience are not, and indeed cannot ever be, identical to theirs. Smith’s imputation to individuals of a certain capacity to distinguish good from evil derives from a twofold relation: to the object and its properties, and to others and their responses of approval or disapproval. Individuals stand in need of the approval of others and continually monitor their own and others’ conduct. In reflecting on how to react they invoke the imagined judgement of an ‘impartial spectator’. This does not imply a god’s-eye view, but the fallible view of an imagined other. Nor does it imply a demeaning ‘hypodermic’ model of actors passively absorbing discursive constructs, but some degree of deliberation and discrimination, though as we have argued, in many familiar situations responses may have become largely spontaneous products of learned intelligent ethical dispositions. Like any kind of knowledge, moral judgement is social and it is epistemologically and psychologically, and sometimes socially and politically, difficult for us to decide to act in ways which are at variance with the views of others, though not impossible. One of the ways in which the moral failings of individuals are restricted is by the regulative effect of the approval and disapproval of others (real and imagined), and of course this same mechanism is crucial for our moral education. Thus, Smith’s account of this regulative effect provides a sociological but not sociologically reductionist explanation of the acquisition and development of moral sentiments. At the same time, the analysis of how actors consider the responses of real and imagined others provides an element of universalisation. Unlike some moral theories, however, it locates this as a tendency inherent in everyday social interaction instead of treating it simply as an abstract principle. Smith’s insistence on individuals’ need of others, on the socially embedded character of judgement and action, together with his discussions of moral senti-

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ments such as benevolence and compassion and his criticism of self-love, suggest that while he also famously noted the importance and value of self-interest, at least with regard to market exchange, he saw our imaginations and our most intense cares as connected to the good of all. This implies a fundamentally eudaimonistic rather than egotistic orientation, though as we shall see, this can be overridden, with mostly undesirable consequences, in certain kinds of social context which promote the latter (see also Nussbaum 1996: 48). While the most striking feature of The Theory of Moral Sentiments is its systematic and subtle analysis of how individuals make moral judgements within interpersonal relations, it also addresses another kind of relationship – namely how particular forms of social organisation tend to encourage particular kinds of moral sentiment, good or bad. The most famous example which concerned Smith was the way in which commercial society tended to promote vanity, and the elevation of the pursuit of praise and prestige over the pursuit of praiseworthy action. Again, to acknowledge that the kinds of social relations we grow up among influence the kinds of people we grow up to be is not to deny that anyone can resist their influence, but to recognise that it may sometimes be too much to expect. To return to the matter of lay moral judgement itself, Smith appears to waver between realist and conventionalist views.15 Although he could be taken to be proposing a purely conventionalist view of the good – the good is merely whatever the community approves of,16 or what spectators find ‘agreeable’, which might also suggest an emotivist view of moral sentiments – he mostly rejects such conclusions. While he argues that this approval or disapproval is itself fallible, it is often warranted, because it is in keeping with the nature of the action or situation being evaluated: ‘Originally, however, we approve of another man’s judgement, not as something useful,17 but as right, as accurate, as agreeable to truth and reality’ (1984 [1757]: 20 [I.i.4.4]). However, this realist point is immediately compromised when he continues ‘and it is evident that he attributes those qualities to it for no other reason but because we find that it agrees with our own’ (1984 [1757]: 20 [I.i.4.4]) – implying a subjective or conventionalist view of truth. Smith’s most clearly realist argument is his insistence on a distinction between praiseworthy acts and acts which are praised, arguing that a praiseworthy act is not, contra sociological reductionism, simply any practice which happens to be praised, but one which is good or worthy even if it is not praised.18 Moral acts are not merely ones which are conventionally approved but acts which are done regardless of whether they receive approval, in fact even, in exceptional cases, in the face of disapproval. The behaviour of those who hid Jews from the Nazis in the Second World War was moral despite the fact that their behaviour brought them not merely disapproval but considerable risk. Thus, sociologically reductionist, conventionalist accounts of morality merely reproduce the mistake that the praiseworthy is no more than what happens to be praised.19 Smith also described virtues in non-conventionalist ways; for example, he considered benevolence, and the restraint of selfishness as ‘constituting the perfection of human

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nature’ (1984: 24 [I.i.4.4]) implying it is necessary for us to flourish, which points to an ethical naturalism, a point to which I shall return. As to just what constitutes praiseworthy behaviour as an object, aside from whether it is praised, Smith is somewhat vague, and he tends to rely on appeals to the particular examples he works from rather than making general claims. In any case, the above argument does not say enough because of course many acts which are carried out in the face of disapproval are not moral but immoral, indeed that is why they are despised (though again, they are not immoral because they are despised). It is at this point that we need to go beyond Smith and consider ethical naturalism.

Ethical naturalism As a theory of the nature of ethics I am proposing what might be termed a qualified ethical naturalism. It is ethically naturalist in that it considers that the very meaning of good or bad cannot be determined without reference to the nature of human social being. As a first cut, we can say that the meaning of good and bad ultimately relates to human needs and human capacities for flourishing or suffering. This is not merely a matter of ‘values’ or ‘subjective opinion’, or of pleasure and pain, for it concerns objective matters – objective in the sense of being independent of what particular observers happen to think.20 Like ‘needs’, the categories of ‘flourishing’ and ‘suffering’ transcend the positive–normative divide. It is a qualified ethical naturalism because it also acknowledges that these capacities are always culturally mediated and elaborated, in three ways: 1

2

3

Cultural influences upon our environment condition bodies in certain ways – for example to be tough or soft, violent or passive. While these influences may be articulated discursively they are also produced physically through action and materials. Human needs and capacities for flourishing or suffering are always interpreted in various ways by particular cultures, so that the same circumstances will be interpreted differently, though not just any interpretation is likely to accepted. For example, to some extent socially produced suffering may be legitimised as natural, and perhaps be accepted as fate by the dominated, but not just any suffering can be coped with or legitimised, and therefore resistance is always likely. Further, some kinds of goods and needs are indeed wholly culturallydetermined and relative, so that their satisfaction also influences whether members of particular cultures flourish (for example, the need of Muslims to pray). These goods are both defined and valued by particular communities as part of their norms, and they are internalised (to varying degrees) by their members in their commitments so that individuals identify with them and give meaning to their lives through them. Hence many morali-

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ties and their associated ethical sentiments apply primarily to those inside a particular community, and not or less so to other communities. Many will want to say that human flourishing and suffering are ‘socially constructed’, not merely in the sense that people construe them in different socially available ways (which critical realists would accept), but in the sense that there is no human essence, so flourishing and suffering, morality and immorality are no more than what particular cultures happen to construct or ‘constitute’ them as. This tends to accompany a relativist view of ethics, so that, for example, there are no independent grounds for deeming female genital mutilation to be unethical (see Nussbaum 1999 for critiques of such absurdities).21 However, even the third kind of culturally specific needs presuppose natural human qualities not available to most species or objects and so are not entirely independent of any naturalistic preconditions. Socialisation cannot possibly ‘go all the way down’ as Rorty argued, for socialisation presupposes an organic body with particular powers and susceptibilities not possessed by objects, like planks of wood, which cannot be socialised (Geras, in Archer 2000: 41). Bodies can be socially modified but always within limits. This qualified ethical naturalism attempts to accommodate both the wondrous variety of human cultural forms and elements which seem to be common to all (Nussbaum 1993).22 While there are universal human needs these are always culturally mediated – though within limits – and in addition there are wholly culturally produced (but naturally enabled) needs. This capacity for considerable cultural diversity is an essential feature of human beings, involving issues as fundamental as sexuality, identity and cosmology.23 As a second cut, we need to note that actors’ concepts of the good and the bad and their understanding of human flourishing and suffering are, like all understanding, formed in terms of available schema or discourses, which in turn are embedded in cultures. They are fallible, though again it would be absurd to imply that they are all entirely mistaken (since this would involve theory–practice contradictions and make simple survival incomprehensible, indeed impossible). Strong versions of social constructionism collapse the difference between understandings and what they are about or of, and hence can make no sense of the fallibility of beliefs, for they assume that what is thought must be, so that understandings always successfully construct the world as they imagine it, and social wishful thinking always works. (The opposite idea – the belief that ideas can be perfect reflections of the world – is little better.) Of course, cultural practices do construct or attempt to construct social life in their own image, but how far they are successful depends on how they relate to the properties of the objects they manipulate and address, including people, which are not the product of wishful thinking but are ‘other’. While it might seem easy to accept that cultures can be wrong about human physical capacities for flourishing (for example promoting foods which cause heart disease) it is perhaps harder to accept this might be true of the more culturally autonomous practices of the kind referred to in (3), which seem to be

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more self-confirming. Cultural discourses provide commentaries on the extent to which cultural practices enable flourishing and suffering, more simply on what is good for us, and to the extent that conformity to such beliefs helps one be accepted as a member of a community, their claims have a self-fulfilling character: those who conform may flourish more than those who rebel. But such discourses may be deeply ideological, encouraging the oppressed to embrace and value their position as worthy, for example, encouraging full-time housewives to embrace domesticity, dependence and subservience to their husbands. At the same time, discourses, belief systems or cultures are usually rich enough to provide ways of questioning their own beliefs. Thus, one doesn’t have to be a non-westerner to see that many beliefs about what constitutes flourishing in the west are mistaken. The complexity, unevenness and (increasing) openness of real societies tends to invite actors to compare situations of relative flourishing with other situations of oppression and to question why what is possible in one sphere is not in another; for example why values of equality have not been extended to gender relations. The fallibility of any discourse, practice or ‘social construction’ is a product of the independence or otherness of the materials (including personal, social and discursive materials) from the concepts their users may have of them, and this otherness can often be detected. As stratified beings, that is simultaneously physical, chemical, biological, psychological and social beings, we can be affected by different kinds of suffering on different levels: physical sickness; socio-psychological pathologies resulting from culturally produced double-binds; and social contradictions (for example, the development of money as an end in itself rather than a means to an end). There may also be feedbacks from one level to another; when capitalism (social level) makes you sick it does so via its influence on the psychological and biological levels. However, to acknowledge the fallibility of popular conceptions of the good and of morality is not to suppose that there is only one best way of living. As Nussbaum (1999) and Collier (2003) argue, it is possible, indeed necessary, to acknowledge the remarkable cultural diversity of human societies, and that there is more than one way in which flourishing may be achieved. Societies are open systems. It is therefore quite consistent to argue both that cultural, including moral, values are fallible, providing mistaken ideas about what constitutes flourishing, and hence produce physical suffering, psychological damage, and limitation of human powers, and that in principle different cultures could provide different but equally successful forms of flourishing. This is not to underestimate the difficulty of assessing what constitutes flourishing or suffering, but we can make some discriminations between them. Clearly it requires us to assess what human social being involves and what is distinctive about it. Thus, recognising the human capacity for agency and creativity and need for stimulation, all people have not only certain basic needs regarding ‘beings’ (such as food and shelter, and a healthy environment), but also a need for access to diverse activities or ‘doings’ (Sen 1999). As Aristotle argued, flourishing is assisted by full, active use of capacities – which is why

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the deprivations of prison really do damage people; ‘the more enjoyable activities and the more desirable pleasures arise in connection with the exercise of greater abilities involving more complex discriminations’ (Rawls 1972: 426n). There are many actually existing kinds of being and doing and many more possible ones, but it is by virtue of our stratified nature that it is possible, notwithstanding this cultural diversity and openness, to speak of ‘basic needs’ without falling into ethnocentrism (Nussbaum and Sen 1993). Flourishing and suffering are typically unevenly distributed. As social beings, the extent to which particular individuals flourish or suffer depends on their relationship to others, on social structures and on embedded distributions of power which enable, constrain and provide interpretations of their lives. Some individuals or groups may flourish at the expense of others or may suffer in ways that help others flourish. In other words there may be localised possibilities for flourishing for some, which, though better than some alternatives, are inferior to other social arrangements that allow flourishing to be more of a positive sum game. The ideal would be a society in which the flourishing of all is the condition of the flourishing of each individual. However, the very existence of local secondary optima, and material conditions such as the spatial segregation of the dominant and the oppressed, reduce pressures to work towards more inclusively beneficial forms of social organisation. One of the impediments to better forms of society is therefore the fact that the eudaimonistic impulse can be met tolerably well from the point of view of people’s well-being locally, and sometimes at the expense of others who are, or are imagined to be, remote.24 In proposing this qualified ethical naturalism I am trying to avoid two main pitfalls: (1) An over-extended naturalism which grounds ethics in ahistorical bodies. This ignores cultural variety and historical change, and hence the openness of human development – the fact that we can become many more things than we have been or currently are. We might be able to become more – instead of less – ethical than we are now. In addition, social change may pose novel moral problems: for example, new forms of technology (e.g. reproductive technologies), social association (e.g. global neoliberalism) and developments in social thought25 (such as animal rights arguments). Ethics cannot be reduced to a matter of authenticity in relation to a primordial human nature, though as we argue neither can it be wholly divorced from human nature. Human nature allows us to be cruel and violent as well as kind and caring, and therefore even when dealing with universal human characteristics we need to distinguish between what constitutes flourishing and suffering. We need to avoid both a naive objectivism – in which these matters are simply self-evident and not culturally interpreted – and various forms of idealism that falsely assume that whatever is culturally interpreted is solely the product of culture. This confuses mediation and interpretation with production, and supposes that creativity or ‘construction’ can occur out of nothing, regardless of the properties of the materials used in construction. Our qualified ethical naturalism avoids this kind of reductionism, by acknowledging the openness of social systems, the fact that humans can come

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to live in many more ways than they have so far. In developing those new ways they will acquire new culturally emergent powers, and create and discover new ways of flourishing – and suffering. Consequently, ethics must allow a creative dimension, albeit not creation out of nothing, as if there were no natural limits and enablements, as seems to be implied in some of Foucault’s work (Foucault 2000), but creation through the use and development of existing materials. There therefore need be no conflict between an ethics of authenticity and an ethics of creativity.26 Nor need there be any conflict between this concept of the pursuit of the good as one of discovery in the dual sense of discovery of what already is and of what could be, and the concept of objectivity as defended by Andrew Collier (2003). We learn through social experimentation what is objectively possible and what objectively expands human flourishing. That social experiments, such as those of state socialism, Talibanism or global neoliberalism can go horribly wrong, is precisely in keeping, rather than in contradiction with, the idea that what constitutes human flourishing is an objective matter, in the strong sense, that is, one independent of ‘social construction’. (2) Various forms of relativism and idealism, which treat norms, including morality, as purely a matter of convention, as nothing more than ‘what we do round here’. The relative success of various norms or arguments is interpreted in a sociologically reductionist way, being attributed wholly to matters of social positioning, socially-granted authority, performance and confidence, and power and luck. This is often coupled with refusals of normative argument and, indeed, through a sociological reductionism which reduces the internal force or validity and veracity of arguments to matters of social authority and power. Such approaches run into three related problems. First, they cannot articulate why anything is progressive rather than regressive – why, for example, racist resistance to liberalism is not progressive while anti-racism is (each, after all, involves different ideas about ‘what we do round here’). Second, they involve a performative contradiction (why argue or reason so carefully for a position which denies argument or reason any force?). Third, they involve theory–practice contradictions (when crypto-normative writers are wronged in everyday life, they don’t complain by merely appealing to ‘what we do round here’, or by pulling rank, or using force to gain revenge; they usually explain to the person who has wronged them why their actions were wrong or unfair, and they expect them to ‘see reason’ (arguments and evidence), not merely authority or power). These three problems all derive from a more basic one in social science: a common but often unnoticed inconsistency between third person accounts of behaviour which explain it wholly in sociological terms (‘they would say/do that, given their social position’), and first person accounts of behaviour which use justification (‘I do that not because of my social position but because I believe – and am willing to argue – that it is the best thing to do, given the nature of the situation’). Ironically, there is a complicity here between sociologically reductionist accounts of the effectivity of discourse and the belief of populist politicians and media that political argument reduces to a matter of confidence, style and conviction.27

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An a priori assumption that all societies or cultures are completely different and incommensurable would be as dogmatic as an assumption that they are no different. (It would also render inter-cultural communication inexplicable.) Just how much difference and similarity there is among them is an empirical question, and existing evidence suggests both extraordinary differences and overlaps and similarities. (Nussbaum 1993, 1999)

Social structures as objects of moral concern I noted earlier that Smith correctly recognised that moral and immoral sentiments and behaviour tended to be encouraged or discouraged by particular forms of social organisation, and that his concerns about the damaging effects of markets were consistent with this recognition of social influences. I now want to draw out some critical implications of this approach regarding contemporary moral philosophy’s tendency towards individualistic approaches which neglect the evaluation of social structures. Acknowledging the importance of social influences on individual behaviour enables us to see that it is no accident that instances of evil or anti-social behaviour tend to be concentrated in particular places or institutions, for they are induced by problematic forms of social organisation involving inequalities of power, material deprivation and various forms of discrimination and refusal of recognition.28 In this way Hobbesian and violent behaviours are often induced by absolute deprivation and refusal of recognition, coupled with expectations raised in the wider society regarding levels of consumption and desirable lifestyles, including gender models (Gilligan 2000). Many of these formative processes are multilateral and highly self-reinforcing in character; it becomes difficult for individuals not to behave in a Hobbesian manner if the majority of their community are already doing so.29 The young men of the Chicago black ghetto interviewed by Loic Wacquant make it clear that if they were not suspicious of others and prepared to use force, indeed sometimes to treat attack as the best form of defence, they would be sure to end up as victims (Bourdieu et al. 1999: 130–167). Of course, such social conditions do not wholly excuse antisocial individual behaviour, for individuals might be expected to reflect on and override such influences, but again, this is often a lot to expect. In such cases, critical concern should be focused on the whole situation rather than simply on individual conduct. In everyday life, people tend to resort to individualistic explanations, assuming that if there are local concentrations of anti-social behaviour there must simply be local concentrations of evil people. In this way, political objections are defused and diffused into moralistic condemnation of individuals. However, much of moral philosophy, with its focus on individual action and its neglect of social contexts, offers little challenge to this view.30 The standard questions in practical ethics tend to concern what individuals should do, not what kinds of social organisation should exist. Thus, for example, problems concerning inequalities of wealth are often reduced to the question of whether the

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affluent should give money to the absolutely poor, not how poverty comes to exist in the first place and whether the mechanisms that reproduce it should be allowed to persist (e.g. Singer 1993).31 It tends to imply that the proper response to poverty is for the well-off to do X, even though it is clear that poverty is caused by Y (structures of exploitation and domination) rather than the lack of X. This prioritisation of questions of what the individual should do in the face of social circumstances such as entrenched inequalities has tended to give moral philosophy a bad name in social science, for encouraging a diversion of concerns which are properly political into moral or moral matters, and what Weber scathingly described as: [T]hat soft-headed attitude, so agreeable from the human point of view, but nevertheless so unutterably narrowing in its effects, which thinks it possible to replace political with ‘ethical’ ideas, and to innocently identify these with optimistic expectations of felicity. (Weber, cited in Bellamy 1992: 216) This polarised (and partly unfair) response is complemented by a kind of amoral libertarian socialism which values political struggle in itself and lacks any justification for its goals other than power itself. Hence, in addition to overcoming the divide between positive social science and normative moral philosophy, we need to overcome the divide between matters of individual morality and political concern about social structures.

Conclusions I have argued that we need to relate ethical dispositions or moral sentiments both to the kinds of beings we are – social, embodied beings located in various societies or communities – and to what it is that makes people not merely respond to conditions but discriminate among them. Individuals are both vulnerable and hence dependent on others, and are capable of having dominion over themselves to some degree, of seeing themselves as ends and not merely means for others. We are dependent on others not only in terms of needing their care as infants or in ill-health or needing their products through the division of labour, but in terms of recognition and the public, shared nature of many forms of flourishing. We are vulnerable to losses and susceptible to benefits because we have things we care about and with which we identify, whose enhancement or loss affects our well-being (Frankfurt 1998; Norman 1998; Nussbaum 1986). If we were not beings who were capable of caring, needing, lacking and desiring we would lack much reason to seek or resist anything. Reason on this view is not mere logic. When we say we have reason to do some thing, we do not mean merely that we can produce a piece of reasoning but that we have a need to do it. At the same time, to appeal to reason is to refer to standards and circumstances which are not reducible to our desires or preferences but are independent of them, hence objective, and are intersubjectively verifiable, at least in principle.

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An adequate understanding of the moral dimension of social life needs to draw upon both social science and moral philosophy, indeed to ignore the boundary between them. It needs to recognise the rational, cognitive aspect of moral sentiments while acknowledging that they can be based on embodied ethical dispositions as well as introspection. It needs a strongly social conception of the formation and exercise of moral judgement, though without lapsing into sociological reductionism that renders morality as no more than ‘what we do round here’. It needs to consider not only what are the proper objects of moral concern but also what it is about human beings that enables them to be subjects (and also objects) of moral concern. In other words it needs to provide a moral psychology, ideally one that goes far beyond Smith and deals with the development of moral sensibilities from birth. An understanding of the subjective aspect of the moral dimension of social life in no way licenses a subjectivist view of morals but is in fact a necessary component of an adequate realist analysis. In these respects, Adam Smith’s sophisticated analysis of moral sentiments offers a good starting point, illuminating the fact that we are evaluative social beings, aware that others are spectators of our own behaviour or could be, as we are of them. However, it is only a start. For example, with regard to its moral psychology, an analysis is needed of the processes by which infants grow up to become moral individuals. He also fails to resolve the tensions between conventionalist or emotivist views of values and realist views. For this we need an ethical naturalism, albeit one which is qualified to take account of the reality of cultural diversity and innovation. This is compatible with realism and with Andrew Collier’s analysis of the nature of objectivity, although its claims are more limited and modest than those of strong versions of moral realism, as advocated, for example, in Being and Worth, which require us to accept that being itself is good (Collier 1999). I have argued for the restoration of the moral dimension to social science’s descriptions of social life, partly by drawing upon the insights of moral philosophy and some of the classical social theory that predated the divorce of positive and normative thought. At the same time, I have noted the limitations of contemporary moral philosophy in terms of its individualistic tendencies. Taking the social influences upon individual behaviour seriously requires us to evaluate social structures themselves as proper objects of moral concern, thereby uniting the moral and the political instead of allowing moral deliberation to have individualising and depoliticising effects. I am sure that this is consistent with Andrew Collier’s enduring concern not only with morality but with the search for a socialist society.

Acknowledgement My thanks, with the usual disclaimers, to John O’Neill for comments and suggestions.

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Notes 1 I shall use the terms morality and ethics interchangeably, while recognising that there is a difference between formal norms and dispositions relating to an ethos, which some authors use the two terms to distinguish. 2 Though I do not want to misrepresent Smith, my main purpose in referring to his ideas is not to produce either an authoritative account of his moral philosophy, but to use and adapt certain elements that might help us understand the moral dimension of social life. 3 Critical realism is an exception here for its analysis of structure and agency and of explanatory critique enable it to avoid individualism and voluntarism (Archer 2000; Bhaskar 1979; Collier 1994). 4 For instance, everyday thinking is patently inadequate for dealing with matters such as responsibilities towards distant others and future generations. 5 Behind a veil of ignorance, we might be encouraged to consider such questions, indeed Rawls’ arguments regarding primary goods presuppose them. 6 This identifies the weakness of simple dichotomies of the positive and the normative with respect to ethics. 7 While empirical researchers are often exasperated by their interviewees’ tendency to interpret positive questions normatively (for example, when they ask questions about class), they should sometimes pause to reflect on the extraordinary nature of their own tendency to bracket out normative questions. 8 Anti-naturalists would refuse such a possibility by denying that it can ever entail ought. This is not only flawed in its own terms, as Bhaskar has demonstrated (Bhaskar 1979), but it argues on the wrong terrain, for it misidentifies relations between substantial processes, such as being assaulted, insulted or deceived, and the consequent effects on one’s well-being and state of mind, as logical relations between statements. 9 This also implies that reason itself has ‘shoving power’ (Archer 2003; Collier 2003). 10 However, as Smith suggested, individuals’ ethical dispositions seem to vary less according to their social position than do their aesthetic dispositions, presumably because of the greater role of universalisation in the formation of the former (Smith 1984 [1757]; Sayer 2004). 11 This is a tendency taken advantage of in military training: for example, novice soldiers are made to alter their ethical disposition towards violence through bayonet practice. 12 For a compelling analysis of the social causes of individual violence see Gilligan 2000. 13 This should be unpacked to distinguish innate capacities from acquired capacities. Exceptional conditions may inhibit the acquisition of certain of the latter, such as severe deprivation of contact with others in childhood. One of the complexities is that we have to deal with capacities which contingently (but often almost invariably) develop from pre-existing capacities as emergent powers, and in which that development depends on environmental factors. Thus, a capacity for language use presupposes but is not reducible to certain non-linguistic preconditions. Likewise, moral imagination – the capacity to imagine the consequences and implications of actions – may be restricted or extensive. 14 While many commentators have overlooked this point, and thus imagined a contrast between the ‘sympathetic’ individuals of The Theory of Moral Sentiments and the supposedly merely self-interested individuals of The Wealth of Nations, it has to be said that Smith does sometimes use ‘sympathy’ in the more common sense. It is important to note that the common idea that there were thus two Smiths has now been overwhelmingly refuted by intellectual historians (Winch 1978, 1996; Griswold 1999; Weinstein 2001). 15 Several commentators have noted this. See Griswold 1999, for an overview.

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16 This is a common view in sociology (MacIntyre 1985: 115). It raises interesting questions about what sociologists do when they mark essays or referee each other’s papers, and how they argue. 17 In addition, he is clearly rejecting a utilitarian account here (see also Griswold 1999: 244). 18 This argument has antecedents in Aristotle, and is further developed by MacIntyre through his distinction between internal and external goods (MacIntyre 1985). MacIntyre cites the work of Goffman as an example of this sociological reductionism. It is analogous to the conventionalist view of truth favoured in recent sociology of science. In both cases it seems to encourage a view of detached superiority on the part of the sociologist, a view which is at odds with its absurdity. 19 In the terms of critical realism, this involves what Bhaskar terms an ‘epistemic fallacy’ in that it transposes ontological matters into epistemological ones (Bhaskar 1975). 20 See Collier 2003 for a brilliant analysis of the multiple meanings of – and confusions surrounding – objectivity. 21 This also tends to involve an ‘upward’ reduction of the biological to the social through a denial of ontological stratification and emergence. Another component is a dogmatic anti-essentialism, which typically argues, illogically, that because gender and identity have no essence, nothing has any essence, and which imagines that to impute essences to things is to deny that they can change or assume different contingent forms according to their associated accidental properties (Sayer 2000). 22 It is interesting that the beliefs and practices of ancient Greece can, without contradiction, be drawn upon to illustrate both points. 23 It is both a generative essence – generating cultural variety – and a diagnostic essence, that is a characteristic which is distinctive in humans, though some degree of cultural variety has been found in other higher animals too (see Sayer 2000: ch. 4). 24 Likewise, from the perspective of an ethical theory based on the need for recognition, this can often be met locally, within particular groups, which may at the same time deny, and indeed depend on, the denial of full recognition to others (Wood 1990: 93). 25 Of course these three things tend to be connected – new technologies involve changes in social relations and ways of thinking. 26 It is not only absurd to call, as Foucault does, for an ethic of creativity that is not based on truth about desire, life, nature or body (Foucault 2000: 262), as if these would prevent creativity and new discoveries; it is also dangerous to call for an ethics which disregards the affordances and limits of human social being. 27 I recall attending a seminar on the impact of discourse which took a sociologically reductionist and crypto-normative line on this topic. It was held on the day on which Britain and the United States committed themselves to invading Iraq, and the speaker made a derogatory aside about the government’s stance. While the remark was, in my view, quite justified, it undermined the whole thrust of the talk in appealing to the lack of internal force in the government’s arguments rather than to the social position, authority and habitus of politicians. 28 This is not to deny that unethical behaviour is possible in more favourable circumstances too, though even then, one suspects, there would be a social or social psychological dimension to their explanation. 29 See also Glover’s analysis of ‘Hobbesian traps’ (Glover 2001). 30 An important exception is the large volume of work on markets (e.g. O’Neill 1998). 31 Critical realist emphasis on explanatory critique allows more attention to be given to the social causes of problems. However, as I have argued elsewhere (Sayer 2000), critical realism has only just begun to consider ethical theory (e.g. Collier 1999), and as yet offers little help in deciding just what are problems and why.

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Bibliography Archer, M.S. (2000) Being Human, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —— (2003) Structure, Agency, and the Internal Conversation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bauman, Z. (1993) Postmodern Ethics, Oxford: Blackwell. Bellamy, R. (1992) Liberalism and Modern Society, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Benhabib, S. (1992) Situating the Self, Cambridge: Polity. Bhaskar, R. (1975) A Realist Theory of Science, Leeds: Leeds Books (2nd edn, Brighton: Harvester, 1979). —— (1979) The Possibility of Naturalism: A Philosophical Critique of the Contemporary Human Sciences, Brighton: Harvester. Bourdieu, P. (2000) Pascalian Meditations, Cambridge: Polity. Bourdieu, P. et al. (1999) The Weight of the World, Cambridge: Polity. Collier, A. (1994) Critical Realism: An Introduction, London: Verso. —— (1999) Being and Worth, London: Routledge. —— (2003) In Defence of Objectivity, London: Routledge. Crossley, N. (2001) ‘The Phenomenological Habitus and its Construction’, Theory and Society, 30, pp. 81–120. Foucault, M. (2000) Michel Foucault: Ethics, ed. P. Rabinow, London: Penguin. Frankfurt, H.G. (1998) The Importance of What We Care About, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gilligan, J. (2000) Violence: Reflections on Our Deadliest Epidemic, London: Jessica Kingsley. Glover, J. (2001) Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century, London: Pimlico. Griswold, C.L. Jr (1999) Adam Smith and the Virtues of Enlightenment, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Habermas, J. (1990) Moral Consciousness and Communication Interaction, Cambridge: Polity. MacIntyre, A. (1985) After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2nd edn, London: Duckworth. Midgley, M. (2003) Heart and Mind, revised edn, London: Routledge. Norman. R (1998) The Moral Philosophers, 2nd edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nussbaum, M.C. (1986) The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —— (1993) ‘Non-relative virtues: an Aristotelian approach’, in M.C. Nussbaum and A. Sen (eds), The Quality of Life, Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 242–269. —— (1996) ‘Compassion: the Basic Emotion’, Social Philosophy and Policy, 13, 1, pp. 27–58. —— (1999) Sex and Social Justice, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nussbaum, M.C. and A. Sen (eds) (1993) The Quality of Life, Oxford: Clarendon Press. O’Neill, J. (1998) The Market: Ethics, Information and Politics, London: Routledge. Rawls, J. (1972) A Theory of Justice, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Sayer, A. (2000) Realism and Social Science, London: Sage. —— (2004) Moral Dimensions of Class. Sedgewick, E.K. and A. Frank (eds) (1995) Shame and its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sen, A. (1999) Development as Freedom, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Singer, P. (1993) Practical Ethics, 2nd edn, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smith, A. (1976) An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. E. Cannan, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. —— (1984 [1757]) The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. Weinstein, J.R. (2001) On Adam Smith, Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.

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Williams, R. (1977) Marxism and Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Winch, D. (1978) Adam Smith’s Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —— (1996) Riches and Poverty: An Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, 1750–1834, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wood, A.W. (1990) Hegel’s Ethical Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Part IV

Objectivity and everyday knowledge

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Objectivity and the growth of knowledge Margaret S. Archer

Introduction The following debate with Andrew marks one spot of turbulence on an otherwise smooth flight. What is at issue is the relationship between practical and theoretical knowledge. Both of us accept that these two types of knowledge are different in kind; we agree that they interact and we assert that each can advance valid claims to objectivity. The issue between us concerns the more limited question about how practical and theoretical knowledge contribute to one another’s development. It is thus a debate about the process or processes by which objective knowledge develops. Why is this issue of importance to realism? The reason is not merely because critical realism makes claims about the nature of reality which would be nonsensical if they did not also claim to be objective. This is true of any theory. For example, social constructionists hold society to be made up of inter-subjective meanings, but they are also maintaining this to be objectively the case. Although relativism undermines their social ontology, it does not prevent their aim from having been to make a true statement about the nature of social reality. Like the Welshman asked for the route to Snowdon, a realist would reply they were starting from the wrong place – not that Snowdon was an undesirable destination. Instead, because critical realism is in the business of maximising the warranted assertions which it can make about reality, it is supremely concerned with objective knowledge. These assertions are always provisional because our knowledge is always fallible, but our interest is in minimising our fallibility through correction and testing. Then, we can improve upon our ontological assertions, because what we hold reality to be can never be indifferent to what we discover about it. In other words, realists believe in the progress of knowledge. Without such progress, ‘judgemental rationality’ would stand still and could not make further inroads into ‘epistemic relativism’. Hence the significance of this debate about the processes by which knowledge develops – because without the growth of knowledge there would be no growth in substantive realism itself, such as realist social theory. Andrew and I are agreed that the objective of knowledge is objectivity. The root question, to be examined in this paper, is whether or not there is one source

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of such knowledge, or do practical and theoretical knowledge represent two different and irreducible sources of it? Because epistemology matters, I will be accentuating the differences between us on this matter. Whilst we both endorse the primacy of practice in the ontogenetic and phylogenetic development of knowledge, I maintain that practice remains pivotal to knowledge development in general, whilst Andrew tends to give theoretical knowledge pride of place in this process of development. We have rehearsed these arguments and counterarguments together on various occasions, with give and take on both sides. I trust he will forgive me if I present the bare bones of these exchanges for those who did not take part.

On the ‘objectivity of everyday knowledge’ In a short section of his book In Defence of Objectivity (Collier 2003: 210–223), Andrew distinguishes ‘lay knowledge’, which stands for tacit, embodied and skilled know-how (not folk wisdom), from ‘theoretical knowledge’, which is discursively formulated. He also wants to vindicate the objectivity of both forms of knowledge, without assimilating one to the other – as empiricists did by construing the two as being matters of ‘just looking’, that is making similar appeals to sense data. So far, there is no difference between us. However, as a philosopher, Andrew is more concerned to resist the denigration of ‘theoretical knowledge’, exemplified in the thought of Heidegger and Macmurray. As a social theorist, I am more exercised about the denigration of ‘practical knowledge’, exemplified by Bourdieu’s work which held it to manifest the poverty of ‘fuzzy logic’, typical of the poor themselves. In other words, Andrew and I do start off feeling that we have opposite things to defend. Nevertheless, we both want to maintain that ‘practical knowledge’, to use my own term (Archer 2000), and ‘theoretical knowledge’ are (fallible) sources of objectivity and we seek to give a realist account of them. Since both of us also accept that these two types of knowledge are different in kind, then we each have to give an account of the relations between them. It is our accounts that differ. Even here, the difference takes place within overall accord. Andrew’s characterisation of ‘lay knowledge’ accords it exactly that robust objectivity which I defend for ‘practical knowledge’ – and for present purposes, the difference in terminology is unimportant. Thus he writes that practical experience entails ‘reality-testing’ because ‘it provides access to the reference of concepts of which hearsay only teaches us the sense’ (2003: 216). ‘Hearsay’ stands for the way in which most of us receive most of the theoretical knowledge we possess – a shorthand term that I find unobjectionable because such is precisely the status of my understanding of electricity, despite my familiar use of light switches. Andrew agrees that theoretical knowledge pre-supposes practical knowledge (or hearsay presumes experience) because unless we understood the relation of the entities or mechanisms that theory uncovered to those that we are used to operating and being affected by, we could not grasp the theoretical point. Nevertheless, it is here that our difference begins. I think that Andrew both

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subordinates practical knowledge and makes it dependent upon theoretical knowledge for its development (not its origins). He does so for two reasons, and I will disagree with both of them in a moment. Before that, it is important to ask what turns upon rendering practical knowledge subordinate to and dependent upon theoretical knowledge. Since the aim is to give a realist account of both kinds of knowledge, it follows that if the theoretical can be shown to be superordinate, then only one such account is needed. That is the reason why Andrew says, ‘this will lead me into a discussion of hearsay and the means of testing and correcting it; this seems to me to be the central issue in the theory of knowledge’ (2003: 211). However, because I dispute the dependence of practice upon hearsay, then I must also disagree with this ‘one step’ method for securing the objectivity of both kinds of knowledge. If I deny that this is the central issue of epistemology, then it is incumbent upon me, but not on him, to show how each independently necessitates realism. I accept this implication and the challenge. However, I will put forward only arguments intended to support the independent claim of practical knowledge to objectivity, because I am in agreement with his account of theoretical knowledge per se.

Theoretical and practical knowledge – precedence or independence? To begin with, it is necessary to clarify what is meant by the subordination and dependence of practical knowledge, which I am attributing to Andrew – and why his reasons for doing so are found wanting. First, he seems to put forward a deficiency model of practical knowledge, as follows. Question: why do we not simply make do with the vast store of tacit knowledge that is implicit in our everyday work, and ignore theoretical knowledge? Answer: because the origin of theoretical knowledge lies in practical breakdowns for which theory provides the repairs. That was also the response common among American pragmatists. However, Peirce was unique in maintaining that to see problems where others did not was a sign of mental sophistication. In other words, no breakdown was needed for practical knowledge to furnish its own growing tip that thrust through theoretical ground. Later on, I will argue that Peirce was correct and give examples of the development of increasingly sophisticated skilful practices – occurring without breakdown or extraneous theoretical borrowing taking place. His second argument, which underpins the dependence of practical knowledge, is a longer one about the historical relationship between the two forms of knowledge. Here Andrew points to an entirely different phenomenon from ‘breakdown’, namely, that much of our now tacit, technical skill ‘was once learnt by being spelt out and communicated in words by someone else’ (Collier 2003: 214). As we familiarise ourselves with such instructions, to the point where they become embodied know-how, we forget that our tacit skills were once someone else’s hard-won theoretical knowledge. Consequently, what seems to us common sense is not acknowledged to be, in fact, second-hand theory. The final and crucial move is to make yesterday’s ‘hearsay’ into the prerequisite for today’s practical and skilled

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knowledge. Hence, ‘If knowledge is produced by means of knowledge, we must acquire second-hand knowledge before we have the wherewithal to produce first-hand knowledge’ (2003: 215). Three ‘facts’ are offered to substantiate this proposition, but I do not find any of them incontrovertible. To begin with, Andrew states that ‘the huge bulk of our knowledge is and remains pure hearsay’. Yet, there always have been, are now and ever will be crucial tracts of our embodied and our practical knowledge which must be recapitulated anew by every living and functioning human being. Here, Andrew and I agree that these unmediated encounters between the way we are made and the way the world is constituted are crucial to our being recognisably human and realising many of our potentials. Prosaically, which of us was ever taught to lean into the wind or to incline ourselves forwards when going up hill and backwards when going down? These unmediated encounters are equally crucial to our capacity to acquire language (Collier 1998) and thus to understand hearsay. But if we are agreed on this, why should there be any limits to the new knowledge which can be acquired in this theoretically unmediated manner throughout life? There are not, and I do not think that Andrew is saying there are: I take him to be making only an empirical generalisation. But what about that generalisation – the ‘huge bulk’ he assigns to hearsay knowledge? Phenomenologically, we may feel this ‘bulk’ to be the case, but is it really so? Undoubtedly, there has been a secular explosion of theory and we are acutely aware of the specialised theoretical knowledge of others on which we depend – without the need for slogans like ‘the information society’. But, there has also been a parallel explosion in material culture, from computers to every kind of technology and gadget, upon which this so-called ‘information age’ depends. These are novelties, and if our children pick up computing more quickly than we do, this is not because of parents’ or teachers’ say-so. Moreover, most of us recognise that it is usually quicker to fiddle around with a new appliance than to consult the book of instructions. Nowadays, jobs change rapidly in their skill requirements and in many cases the upgrading of skills, as in secretarial work, has little to do with increased theoretical mastery. Indeed, it could even be argued that both at work and in everyday life we are all increasingly pressed to become practically adept in areas that we do not theoretically understand – from on-line booking and texting to using telephone menus and digital sources of entertainment. There is little hearsay to help us with this quotidian reskilling. At the moment, in writing this paper directly onto the screen, I am practising in order to break the typewriting habits of a lifetime – but there are no verbal tips to help. In short, I simply do not know how it is possible to make a quasi-quantitative statement about what the ‘huge bulk’ of our knowledge is. Andrew’s second argument is that ‘Hearsay precedes other knowledge. First we are told about things, then we discover them’ (Collier 2003: 215). I suppose what he has in mind here are indisputable examples, such as (babies apart) that we have all heard about Australia before we visit it. However, is this an acceptable factual assertion about the development of knowledge in general? In the

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context of our present argument, this statement denies that practical knowledge develops without the intervention of theoretical hearsay. This I would challenge by reference to the growth of practical skills themselves, where it seems to me that matters are precisely the opposite way round from in the above proposition. Phylogenetically, our direct relations with nature regulated human practice (its use and misuse) without verbal mediation. There, I think we both agree. However, natural relations not only supplied feedback on error, they spurred us on to improvements and rewarded our improvement. Better eye–hand coordination brought the reward of catching more fish or game and developing a better swimming style enabled us to traverse greater distances and get to safety more quickly. My contention here is that it was precisely from bodily experimentation in nature that the theoretical attitude itself was born. If the ice cracked and we got a ducking, or the liana broke and we fell, this did not foster simple aversion (stimulus–response), but rather a heightened awareness that there was ice and ice and fibre and fibre. In turn, this was midwife to the theoretical attitude of tapping-and-testing or hanging-and-feeling. Yet, this domain within which practical knowledge is elaborated retains its autonomy from discursive theory. What is felt through the foot and fingers is known by them and translates badly into words. We can tell someone to ‘tap and test’, but have insuperable difficulties in conveying the feel of the tap which indicates that it is safe to cross the ice. I maintain that the same remains true of skilled practice today. If anthropological speculation is too tenuous to challenge the proposition that ‘hearsay precedes other knowledge’, let us introduce a concrete example of the autonomous growth of knowledge in the practical domain. The development of navigational systems based upon our embodied ability to maintain a ‘sense of direction’, in conjunction with environmental cues and clues, has been well documented amongst desert nomads, American Indians and Australian Aboriginals. The most sophisticated exemplar of how this promoted a growth within practical knowledge is Polynesian navigation by ‘dead reckoning’ around 1500 BC – and accurate to a distance of 2,000 miles. Eurocentric history usually begins the story only 200 years ago, with Captain Cook’s exploits, in an era of naval instrumentation derived from theoretical science, which is to start the story back to front. As Keith Oatley (1977) describes it, Polynesian non-instrumental navigation was a complex system involving knowledge of the relative locations of 50–100 islands and the rising and setting positions of 32 stars, which constituted a natural compass system. That this represented a growing body of knowledge was witnessed by its artefactual codification – charts made with pebbles and sticks in the Marshall Islands and memorised through mnemonics. In this way, it was nosing into theoretical knowledge and discursive instruction. Andrew’s third argument is a continuation of the second, and it intensifies the dependence of practical skills upon discursive knowledge. ‘We are largely taught through language how to “see for ourselves”. … When we do see for ourselves, we do so in ways made possible by what we have been told’ (Collier 2003: 215). Here, I think we have two disagreements, one about the nature of the two kinds of knowledge – practical and theoretical – and the other, deriving from it, about

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the relations between them during the teaching and learning of skills. In conceptualising the nature of practical knowledge, I depart more radically than he does from the European logocentric tradition by viewing practical knowledge as intrinsically non-linguistic. Practical knowledge comes in chunks or stocks rather than in linear sequences like sentences, it is stored by being embodied in the seat of our pants rather than in the declarative memory, and it may be accessed by all of our senses, not just by the auditory system. Thus we respond to music, take up the rhythm of a dance and savour wine or cooking, without using some counterpart to the alphabet or sentence string. It follows from this divergence between us that we also disagree about the place of discursive knowledge in acquiring practical skills. To me, becoming skilled in any area is quintessentially a question of ‘catching on’ – whether the practice is riding a bike or a horse, driving a car, acquiring a nose for wine, a feel for using a tool or an ear for music. This would still seem to be the case even if verbal instruction were present. Thus, the driving instructor may say ‘let the clutch up as you press the accelerator down’, but don’t most tyro drivers stall the car frequently before the indescribable moment when they suddenly get the feel for synchronising the movement of the two pedals? Once you have ‘got it’ these are the skills that, as people say, you never forget. However, Andrew and I have an empirical dispute here because we use the identical example to illustrate our different points of view. As a child, he learnt to ride a bike by following the instruction to ‘turn the way you’re tipping’, whereas I ‘caught on’ through using the bike as a scooter and coasting with the right foot on the near pedal and the left ready to touch ground when tipping threatened. Since there is no reason to suppose we are not both telling the truth and supposing we are both remembering more or less accurately, do instances of this contrary kind simply cut off the discussion? Not entirely, because I could still insist that hearsay does not necessarily precede the acquisition of practical knowledge. But that would only invite an investigation of individual (psychological or perhaps physiological) differences, whereas what we are trying to resolve is a question about the relationship between two forms of knowledge. What I can proffer in support of my own case – for the independence of practical skill from verbal mediation – is evidence from the brain-damaged, where the hippocampus is affected and with it the declarative memory. In such cases a subject may be unable to say or remember that she possesses a skill which she can nevertheless readily exhibit (see Rose 1992). Because all knowledge is conceptually formed, what this seems to point to is that skilful practice is inscribed throughout the body without being discursive in form and therefore capable of articulation. However, this is not decisive because Andrew agrees that embodied knowledge is indeed the end-state; what he is denying is its direct or verbally unmediated acquisition. Do we get any further in this argument about precedence between the two forms of knowledge by leaving our first bikes behind and talking about the highest levels of skilled performance? At first it seems not, because again we use the same example (of musical virtuosity) to opposite ends. I stress the great

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divide between apprenticeship and scholarship, see the Masterclass as a place where ‘the words run out’ and the talented gradually, but inarticulately, refine their ‘feel for music’ through living in it (Archer 2000: 170–171). Andrew takes a different tack and, without minimising the difficulty of doing so, maintains that the singing teacher must somehow put it into words if she is to teach others. Here, he agrees that this often means asking the pupil to do something that she literally cannot do, such as ‘sing from the top of your head’ (Collier 2003: 40–41). It is not part of my argument to deny the meaningfulness of such instructions. In every field where language is being stretched one could give a send-up like Peter Ustinov’s sketch of the Masterclass; and advice like ‘go with your horse over the jump’ sounds plain daft, until you know what it means to get ‘left behind’. However, it is central to my argument to ask how such instructions can be effective. How can the pupil even imagine how to go about singing ‘as though’ from the ‘top of her head’? As a hopelessly untalented singer, I cannot – from which I conclude that prior skilful practice is a predicate of following the instruction. More importantly still, how does the teacher know that the appropriate phenomenal feel to produce the desired effect is captured by those words? Only by being thoroughly familiar with that feel – which makes the practical skill prior to the quest for words, as the very notion of searching for words implies. Indeed, Andrew states at the beginning of this example, ‘First of all, a singing teacher is or has been a singer herself. She knows what it feels like’ (Collier 2003: 40).

The growth of knowledge Theoretical knowledge → practical knowledge The foregoing has been leading up to an assessment of the process by which knowledge develops – knowledge that can claim to be objective. As has been seen, both Andrew and I locate the dynamics of growth in the relationship between theoretical and practical knowledge. The difference between us is that he regards this as a one-way relationship, in which development is led by theory, whilst I argue for a two-way relation and for the independent contribution of practical knowledge to the common stock. This difference comes to a head in his following statement. ‘Tacit knowledge may be prior in a hundred and one ways; nevertheless, theory is the growing tip of knowledge. Without it, tacit knowledge stagnates. Any attempt to downgrade theory relative to tacit knowledge is necessarily conservative’ (Collier 2003: 213–214). I want to challenge this general proposition without being charged with conservatism. However, let it be clear that I fully agree in regarding theory as a powerful growing tip of knowledge. What I contest is the exclusivity claim which accords this role solely to theory and the subordinate clause, that without the injection of theory then practice is condemned to stagnation. Indeed, where the ‘theoretical knowledge → practical knowledge’ relationship is concerned, Andrew and I seem to conceptualise it in very much the same way – one that is

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far from universal. Neither of us sees abstract knowledge or pure science as having a direct impact upon practice. Why should it? As Andrew argues, it is in areas where people have well-developed practical knowledge that they are least likely to be theoretically deceived (Collier 2003: 218) – and what purports to be theoretical knowledge has often been wrong. My own line is to query what could reasonably induce people to jettison a proven working practice in favour of a theory whose relevance to their concerns is unclear. Instead, both of us maintain that in order to have an impact upon practice, theoretical knowledge has to make a detour through applied science or technology to demonstrate its worth. In short, we reject ‘the assumption that abstract knowledge can be used to explain concrete particulars without passing through the stage of concrete analysis’ (Collier 2003: 219, 37–45). Thus the impact of new theoretical knowledge on practice is both indirect and delayed. The initial effect of a novel theory is to undermine the old theoretical bases underpinning established practices. What it does is to show that the premises of practice are ill founded. However, although the theoretical import is that the practice should be abandoned, because the new theory does not tell us what to do instead, it is a poor pragmatic reason for jettisoning an established practice whose practical utility remains unassailed. Thus, for discursive theory to act as the growing point of practice, a second stage is involved, where new theories enter the practical order, but only through their application as successful additions to material culture. This pays their admission fee. Applied science and technology are the artefactual modes of transition from discursive to practical knowledge. Let us return to an earlier example. If we think of formal celestial navigation, at least two of its necessary theoretical components long pre-dated it. First, the notion of a spherical earth set in a Copernican planetary system challenged the ‘flat earth’ basis of Polynesian-type ‘dead reckoning’, but this certainly told no one of a better way to navigate a boat. Interestingly, the second component, the development of an elaborate theory of spherical trigonometry, appeared purely propositional and of little interest to the practical explorer. It was only when these two elements of discursive knowledge were combined into accurate instruments, such as chronometers and sextants, that the superiority of a navigational practice, which enabled a ship’s position to be established anywhere on the earth’s surface within about a mile, then encouraged its adoption. In other words, applied discursive knowledge is only considered to be an advance when it can accomplish everything that previous practices enabled, plus some additional practices (Archer 2000:182–184). Practical knowledge → theoretical knowledge This relationship is the source of our differences about the growth of knowledge. To begin with, I want to maintain that there is an arrow working in this direction. I am far from sure that Andrew would disagree, rather than regarding it as being of much lesser importance than the arrow running in the opposite direction.

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What I have in mind at the moment are those cases where skilled practice and tacit knowledge set problems for theoretical understanding. By cracking them, theoretical knowledge is advanced. Such cases are not derisory in importance. For example, western medicine does not simply co-habit with various ‘alternative’ forms; science can also explain and extend the benefits of certain forms of homeopathy. Equally, archaeology would not even exist if its theorists did not accept the challenge of theorising past practice through examining artefactual remains. Of course, theoretical knowledge is not always enriched because practice is fallible too. My father told the story of visiting a small, traditional factory with the highest reputation for its tempered steel. During the tempering process, workers were found beating the steel with boughs of heather and assured him this was integral to excellence. The chemical analysis of heather pollen did nothing to substantiate the claim, nor did the abandonment of the practice detract from the quality of the product. Old wives tales can turn out to be tittle-tattle, but that is precisely Andrew’s point about the need to test and to correct hearsay. My point is not to argue that the arrows linking practical and theoretical knowledge are equally strong in the two directions. It is rather to maintain that practical knowledge does grow ‘by itself ’, rather than stagnating, that the tacit sets problems that theory cannot crack, and that therefore skilled practice represents an autonomous domain of knowledge. In other words, sticking to diagrammatic representation, there is an independent arrow pointing from growing tacit skills to the growth of knowledge. If I can justify this, then I will also have to justify the objectivity of this kind of knowledge independently, because of rejecting Andrew’s ‘one step’ procedure. So be it. The case for the independent growth of practical knowledge entails three points that will be made very briefly. First, I take it that in many (though not all) areas of skilled practice, such as singing, wine-tasting, golfing or cabinet-making, no one is going to deny that there are varying levels of expertise, that some practitioners are truly outstanding, or even that proficiency itself is (discontinuously) pushed forward. It would be hard to dissent universally because in some such areas these statements can be supported by direct observations – who consistently wins golf tournaments or how many seconds have been clipped off running the mile? Of course, it remains open to journeymen of suspicion to explain these facts away by bribery or steroids. Nevertheless, private practice in DIY is enough to convince most people that some jobs would be much better done by a skilled carpenter. Second, if we do seek to acquire and develop a skill, we may well accept that proficiency requires practice but also (and without contradiction) seek theoretical guidance. In other words, we turn to books or to instructors – which are both forms of ‘hearsay’. The first few chapters or lessons can be very profitable to the beginner, but the point arrives where the words become stretched and verbal communication is largely metaphorical – as in the earlier Masterclass. Yet matters get worse. As has already been seen, communication within the Masterclass requires shared practical experience to act as a bridgehead for the metaphors to convey meaning. What happens when the common reference point

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is exceeded is that hearsay becomes incomprehensible without the relevant practice. There are ‘theoretical’ terms which make sense amongst proficient practitioners but which make no sense to the less advanced or are subjected to an impoverished ‘mistranslation’. In wine-tasting, ‘length’ or ‘balance’ are probably incomprehensible and ‘bouquet’ is likely to be taken simply as ‘smell’. Similarly, in religious practice, the feeling of ‘sinfulness’ is usually incorrectly construed by non-practitioners as one of ‘wrong-doing’ and ‘detachment’ as an attitude of ‘unconcern’. An interesting example of such misconstruction is provided by Rom Harré who lists ‘accidie’ (approximately ‘spiritual listlessness’) as an extinct emotion (Harré and Gillett 1994) – which tells us that he is alien to religious practice. Third, when discursive incomprehension or impoverishment sets in, is anything to be done? Yes, for those who are motivated to press on towards proficiency. But this means a return to practice and to the long haul that constitutes apprenticeship or discipleship. What is acquired there is practical virtuosity, where the ‘feel’ for the task is virtually incommunicable and thus can only be developed in practice itself. Through immersion or embeddedness emerges a tacit sense of the things to be done – a sense which allows of appropriate improvisation rather than mere imitation and is the hallmark of virtuosity. It involves a creative response because our ‘feel’ means that we live in that medium, take our prompts from it and can ‘play along’ with others who do the same. In short, when skilful knowledge defies either verbal formulation or understanding and progress towards proficiency requires a return to practice itself, then theoretical knowledge cannot be its growing point. Therefore, the methods for testing and correcting hearsay do not work for practical knowledge and cannot secure its objectivity.

Conclusion: on the objectivity of practice In that case what does secure the objectivity of practical knowledge? Can a realist account of it be given? The objectivity of skilled and tacit practice often seems to be cast in doubt because realists frequently turn empiricist in relation to skilful practices. This seems to be rooted in confining realism to theoretical topics, rather than accepting its thoroughgoing applicability to everyday activities. In short, for some, realism does not ‘go all the way down’. Whilst sense data may be crucially important in everyday life, nevertheless quotidian practice does not mean that everyone similarly situated and in full possession of their faculties has the same experience. For instance, at a wine tasting enthusiastic amateurs will not ‘have the same experiences’ as a sommelier; so why is it reasonable (rather than snobbish) to follow his advice in our purchases? Perhaps because we accept that at a dégustation there is a proper set of tests, such that if a wine taster detects too much tannin, then there are chemical tests for its measurement. However, the Meilleurs Sommeliers du Monde did not become such by following analytical chemists around and assimilating their findings into embodied knowledge. Nor is their role confined to such, for they will also evaluate ‘balance’,

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‘bouquet’, ‘heaviness’ and ‘length’, which are qualitative assessments. When the lads at the Lagavulin distillery pronounce that this malt is best drunk when it is 16 years old, they are not making a skilled judgement that can be checked by the analytical chemist; the only test is their agreement, which is based upon experience itself. No single experiential report is auto-veridical, but it is scrutinised against an accumulated tradition of practice by the highly proficient. Given that the reliability of all tests is imperfect, this workable degree of inter-subjectivity amongst the virtuosi suffices in practice for practical knowledge. Nevertheless, how does this secure the objectivity of skilled practice? Are the judgements of the virtuosi not just another form of ‘hearsay’, thus bringing the argument round full circle? And, in that case, what prevents their pronouncements from merely being matters of social consensus? The response is that it is not the inter-subjective agreement of proficient practitioners which counts, but rather their shared proficiency. What they say collectively is only warranted by what each and every one of them can do. In short, being skilled is itself objective. To possess a skill is to have acquired a particular mastery over one’s body or one’s body in relation to the environment, be it natural or artefactual, animate or inanimate. It is the ability to know how to do something – whether or not one says anything at all about it. In turn, this entails a realist account of skilful practice. It employs the transcendental argument and asks what needs to be the case for a particular practice to be possible. For example, the world being made the way it is and humans being constituted the way they are, upon what does the possibility of crossing a broad, deep river (without aids or equipment) depend? The answer is a skill – the ability to swim. Nevertheless, it could still be objected that swimming is a demonstrable skill, whose objectivity relies on the perceptual criterion – which could not be invoked for (say) wine tasting. So what anchors the objectivity of the latter? In other words, what prevents the world’s sommeliers from being a selfinterested bunch of charlatans or, less cynically, just a social group upholding a particular definition of the situation? Ultimately, the answer is practice itself. If in doubt, don’t listen to them because you could indeed be buying into their social epistemology, but rather try out the practice for yourself. As Andrew puts the matter, ‘Experience in the relevant sense also presupposes realism. Experience is always the experience of something, it is always referential and makes sense only in terms of the independent reality to which it refers’ (Collier 2003: 216). Yet, ‘trying out’ involves a serious commitment where skills are concerned. It is incompatible with the attitude, ‘There’s nothing in this carry-on about wine; I once tried twenty reds and couldn’t tell them apart.’ If we do work at acquiring a skill we might still fail to master it fully, for reasons of age, ability and, in some cases, social background. However, we will learn something because we will have acquired knowledge about that at which we have failed. We will also have gained some level of appreciation of the qualities that it takes to become proficient. Both are quintessentially wordless sources

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of objectivity, which are embedded in gaining a ‘feeling’ for a practical activity. If, after years of practice, I had been able to develop a better ‘feel’ for the coordination involved, I would not now be writing this article but practising for the next dressage competition.

Bibliography Archer, Margaret S. (2000) Being Human: The Problem of Agency, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Collier, Andrew (1998) ‘Language, Practice and Realism’, in Ian Parker (ed.), Social Constructionism, Discourse and Realism, London: Sage. —— (2003) In Defence of Objectivity, London: Routledge. Harré, Rom and Grant Gillett (1994) The Discursive Mind, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Oatley, Keith G. (1977) ‘Inference, Navigation and Cognitive Maps’, in P. N. JohnsonLaird and P .C. Watson (eds), Thinking: Readings in Cognitive Science, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rose, Steven (1992) The Making of Memory, London: Bantam Press.

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Practical knowledge and realism Linking Andrew Collier on lay knowledge to Karl Popper on the philosophy of science Justin Cruickshank

Introduction It is an honour to contribute a chapter to this Festschrift on Andrew Collier’s philosophy. In this chapter my concern is with the essay from which Andrew’s recent book, In Defence of Objectivity, takes its title and, within this, Andrew’s arguments about lay knowledge. Andrew argues that empiricism sought to assimilate both lay and scientific knowledge into one (flawed) epistemology. He goes onto argue that this assimilation was resisted by philosophers of science (including Popper) who wanted to stress the uniqueness of scientific knowledge, and ‘existential phenomenologists’ who wanted to stress the uniqueness of lay knowledge (Collier 2003: 211–212). Andrew notes that these two approaches have misunderstood and despised each other, which is unfortunate, given their common rejection of empiricism and their shared emphasis on knowledge as the outcome of practical work. In his essay Andrew focuses on the existential phenomenologist philosophy of lay knowledge, and seeks to support a modified version of this, stressing that such philosophy goes awry when it becomes anti-realist and antiscience. Although there is a discussion of objectivity in relation to science, this deals with defending science from the attempt to undermine it by showing how extra-scientific factors influence outcomes. There is no discussion of the philosophy of science because Andrew believes that Bhaskar’s critical realism has provided an adequate philosophy of science, and that the task is to extend critical realism from natural (and social) scientific methodology, to the topic of lay knowledge. I take a different view from Andrew on this. I argue that Andrew’s work on lay knowledge may be read as a complement to Popper’s work on scientific knowledge. In making this argument I note the complementarities that exist between the two philosophies, note how Andrew’s work has some problems regarding his notion of objectivity (which can be overcome by taking a more Popperian approach to the issue of realism), and argue that critical realism is an untenable philosophy of scientific knowledge.

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Andrew’s argument for a realist practice-based philosophy of knowledge Defining objectivity Andrew defines objectivity in terms of what is true independently of any subject judging it to be true. In outlining what objectivity is not Andrew makes three points. First, objectivity does not commit one to a claim to be infallible, ‘[f]or one’s belief cannot be fallible unless there is something independent of the believing of it which would make it true and something which would make it false’ (Collier 2003: 140). Conversely, if we abandon objectivity, making beliefs self-referential, then we have infallibilism, as the beliefs are irrefutable (2003: 140). Second, objectivity is not based on a claim to have a God’s-eye view because beliefs are to be judged by the extent to which they are true, and not by being a definitive truth. Objectivity is therefore the precondition for any critical dialogue about the world. Conversely, debate is closed if beliefs lose their ‘aboutness’ as there is no way to adjudicate between competing claims (2003: 141). Third, objectivity does not necessarily lead to physicalist reductionism. Whilst some positions may argue for objectivity and physicalist reductionism, this is not entailed by the position Andrew seeks to defend. For Andrew, thoughts, intentions, emotions, etc., are not to be understood as epiphenomena (2003: 142). Conversely, subjectivism is held to be ‘deeply reductive’ because reality is reduced to our ideas of it. Reductionism is linked to Cartesian philosophy by Andrew. He argues that: All forms of reductionism, whether subjectivistic or physicalistic, have their roots in Descartes’ dualism: Descartes reduces everything to human consciousness on the one hand and extended matter on the other. Subjective idealism is Cartesianism with the material pole suppressed, physicalism is the Cartesian with the subjective pole suppressed. (Collier 2003: 142) Pursuing the issue of subjective idealism, or the ‘new way of ideas’, Andrew argues that once one has accepted Descartes’ division between the world and our ideas of it, then it is hard to avoid Berkeley’s conclusion that we can only know our ideas. Once the emphasis is put on our ideas then reference to anything beyond those ideas becomes problematic. So, when the question is asked concerning how we may ascertain the veracity of ideas, the answer cannot be that the ideas can be compared with their objects because, for empiricists, we can only compare our perceptions with remembered images. That is, we can only compare an idea with another idea (Collier 2003: 144). On Heidegger Showing how Heidegger breaks from the Cartesian inheritance, Andrew notes that for Heidegger:

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the world is not something external like the ‘external world’ of Cartesian and empiricist philosophy. We are our worlds. Whereas for Descartes what a person has apart from a body that makes them a person is a spiritual substance whose essence is to be conscious, for Heidegger he or she has a world, and that is what it means to be a person, a ‘Dasein’: to be in a world. … [I]n place of Descartes’ ‘I think therefore I am’, someone might summarise Heidegger’s argument as ‘I fix a shutter with a hammer, therefore I am in a world’. (Collier 2003: 176) Elaborating on Heidegger’s position, Andrew describes the three types of being discussed by Heidegger. These are Dasein, the present-at-hand, and the readyto-hand. Dasein (‘being there’) refers to our presence in the world; the present-at-hand refers to the physical world and the ready-to-hand ‘refers to the instrumental world encountered in our daily work; it is not a world of different things than the present-at-hand, but rather of the same objects encountered differently’ (Collier 2003: 177). Corresponding to the ready-to-hand, and the present-at-hand, there are two ways of knowing, which are understanding inherent in any practice and contemplative staring, respectively (2003: 178). The natural sciences, and theoretical knowledge generally, are taken to be characterised by the purely contemplative form of knowledge, rather than practically oriented looking, or ‘circumspection’. In describing what he thinks is right with Heidegger’s philosophy, Andrew states that he accepts the point that the original motivation for theoretical knowledge is found in the breakdown of pre-theoretical practice. Turning to John Macmurray’s rendering of Heidegger, Andrew notes that instead of knowledge presupposing thought, thought presupposes knowledge because it is only when the knowledge implicit in practice fails that we start thinking about how to resolve the breakdown (Collier 2003: 178–179). This brings us to a problem with Heidegger’s philosophy. If we accept the above account of theoretical knowledge then it would seem that we ought to conclude, Andrew asserts, that theoretical knowledge can correct practical knowledge, by bringing in new information, and perhaps opening up hitherto unknown regions of being. However, Heidegger and Macmurray are reluctant to draw that conclusion and Heidegger insists that theoretical knowledge is an impoverishment relative to practical understanding (Collier 2003: 179). Before moving on to Andrew’s discussion of practical knowledge a word or two has to be said about the issue of realism and idealism in Heidegger’s work. Andrew notes that Heidegger was doxographically a realist, meaning that he preferred realism to idealism in the historical dispute between the two positions (Collier 2003: 177). Heidegger draws this conclusion because he thinks it is absurd to remove the world from us. This also leads him to be critical of realism, for realism assumes that proofs of an external world are required. Andrew adds ‘I think most modern realists would agree with Heidegger that such proofs are not required, once a mistaken view of our place in the world [i.e. any Cartesian influenced view which separates the world from us] is rejected’ (Collier 2003: 177).

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Heidegger does however go on to claim affinities with idealism. This is because for Heidegger, Andrew notes, idealism ‘expresses an understanding of the fact that Being cannot be explained through entities’ (Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 251, cited in Collier 2003: 177). Andrew then speculates that Heidegger’s dislike of the term ‘realism’ may be due to his interpreting realism as the view that being is defined by a collection of things, with the present-to-hand being exhaustive of being (2003: 177). Such a view of realism is rejected by Andrew because for him, and critical realists more generally, being is to be understood in terms of relations and mechanisms that are not immediately manifest as a collection of empirical things: the real is more than the present-at-hand. Further, the claim that being cannot be explained through entities is, Andrew notes, purely negative and, if being is to be more than this, then it must be being for someone (Collier 2003: 181). This rendering of being as being for someone (or being in the world) results in the relativising of Being to Dasein. As Andrew puts it: ‘Being does not seem to be objective for Heidegger, not only in the sense which ‘objective’ acquires in existentialist polemics – value-free, atomistic, mechanistic, quantitative – but also in the straightforward sense of independent of human subjects’ (2003: 181). So, in order to make Being more than the mere present-to-hand Heidegger has to bring us in. Andrew concludes his discussion on Heidegger by saying that ‘[h]e has done more than anyone to liberate us from the spell of Descartes; but he has not freed us from the spell of Kant’ (Collier 2003: 182). Practical and discursive knowledge Building on his criticism of Heidegger and Macmurray, Andrew argues that breakdowns in practical knowledge do not lead to pure contemplation, ‘but a new kind of work with cognitive aims’ (Collier 2003: 213, emphasis added). He continues by arguing that any attempt to downgrade theoretical knowledge relative to tacit or practical knowledge is ‘necessarily conservative’ because tacit knowledge will stagnate without theoretical knowledge (2003: 213–214). Theoretical knowledge is needed to correct practical knowledge and to overcome breakdowns. Without theoretical input our practices and knowledge of the world would remain unchanged, and so theoretical knowledge has a key role to play in our practices. Theoretical knowledge is not the only form of discursive knowledge that may inform practical knowledge. Hearsay too may inform practical knowledge. Andrew argues that ‘[m]uch – though by no means all – knowledge that is now tacit, and implicit in some practical skill, was once learnt by being spelt out and communicated in words by someone else’ (Collier 2003: 214). He goes on to say that the issue of hearsay, and the means to correct it, ought to be the central question of epistemology (2003: 214). Hearsay is of central importance for epistemology, Andrew argues, because we cannot bypass ‘second hand’ knowledge and concern ourselves only with

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‘first hand’ knowledge. Andrew argues that second hand knowledge precedes (what is confusingly called) first hand knowledge, meaning that our knowledge of the world is always mediated via a background of presumptions. He gives three reasons for this. First, most of our knowledge can only be hearsay as we cannot see everything for ourselves. Second, hearsay precedes other knowledge because we discover things after being told about them. ‘We are largely taught through language how to “see for ourselves” ’ (Collier 2003: 215). Third, although we can learn from experience, we are heavily influenced by our conditioning. As Andrew argues ‘[w]hen we do see for ourselves, we do so in ways made possible by what we have been told’ (2003: 215). Moving to the issue of criticising hearsay, Andrew puts forward three grounds for such criticism. The first is logic, and he argues that mutually exclusive accounts need to be rejected. The second is experience, meaning work rather than the passive reception of images, and here Andrew argues that hearsay needs to be tested in practice. The third is suspicion, meaning explanations as to why people may believe and transmit false ideas which they could have known to be false (Collier 2003: 216–217). Andrew notes that each of these grounds has been used as the foundation of knowledge, or of an all-encompassing replacement of epistemology in the case of suspicion. Against this, he argues that logic cannot generate knowledge in the way deemed possible by the rationalists, experience is not passive reception of images, and a ‘universal sympotology’, which regards all beliefs are expressions of power, rather than being true or false, makes suspicion uninteresting, as all beliefs are formulaically explained away. Treating logic, experience and suspicion as means to correct hearsay, however, presupposes a realist commitment to objectivity, as it foregrounds the aboutness of knowledge, connecting what we think and do to what is the case. So, for Andrew, lay knowledge, in the form of practical know-how, is linked to discursive knowledge in three ways. First, hearsay, i.e. the discursive rendering of practical know-how, plays a strong role in constituting our practical know-how. It is the discursive form of lay knowledge. Second, theoretical/technical knowledge may be used to improve our practices, especially after breakdowns in practice. Third, we may distinguish practical utility from truthfulness, to correct hearsay that, presumably, had been useful up to a point, but which was erroneous in its assumptions about reality. The latter point is not really explored by Andrew, but we may note that he rejects pragmatism because it removes the aboutness of ideas, in the sense that it is more about how our ideas manipulate our world, than how our ideas correspond to a world that exists independently of us.

Popper’s philosophy of science Turning now to Popper, we can begin the exegesis by noting that Popper (1972a) rejected what he referred to as the bucket theory of mind, meaning that he rejected the view that knowledge accumulation is to be understood in terms of the mind passively receiving ideas of objects. Such a view committed what Popper referred to as the subjectivist error of defining reality to fit the mind.

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This critique was made because Popper wanted to distinguish science clearly from psychology. For Popper, scientific knowledge was not to be understood in terms of statements trying to record the ‘immediate’ impression of private sensedata. Rather, science, in the Popperian view, is to be understood as a practical trial and error process, with knowledge being developed from our mistakes, and progress occurring through the development of responses to our mistakes. The criteria used for assessing the success or otherwise of theories, would be intersubjective criteria, in the form of the conventions adhered to by the scientific community. Of course Popper was not a conventionalist, because he stressed the aboutness of theories. Nevetheless, as Hacohen (2000: 244–245) notes, he posed as a conventionalist to the positivists, arguing that methodological conventions demarcated science from non-science, and as a positivist to the conventionalists, arguing that testability and falsificationalism set limits to conventionalism. This meant replacing the bucket theory of mind with the ‘searchlight theory of knowledge’. With the searchlight notion the emphasis was on a theory’s claims about reality being tested by the scientific community via public (intersubjective) norms, rather than on trying to translate private sense data into public language. Such testing via intersubjective norms may afford us a partial view of reality, and the knowledge obtained will always remain partial given that the fallibility and openness to refutability of scientific theories means that there will be no ‘finished science’ or God’s-eye view. Using public criteria for testing we may attain better searchlights but we will not move beyond partial perspectives on reality. This approach to science meant that Popper combined an emphasis on empirical testing with an emphasis on methodological conventions or norms. In setting out his critique of the bucket theory of mind Popper was mainly attacking empiricism. He also thought that Kant’s epistemology could be described as a bucket theory of mind because the emphasis was on the contents of the mind rather than on reality. To be sure, Kant had a more active conception of the mind than naive empiricism, but still, the emphasis was on the contents of the mind. This did not lead Popper to dismiss Kant, however. Instead Popper adopted a post-Kantian position, arguing that our knowledge of the world was via fallible and changeable categories. We impose an interpretation on reality via our categories or ideas, but as we are fallible, we can and must revise these ideas. Our searchlights have to change their focus and scope. Popper regarded himself as a realist because he emphasised the ‘aboutness’ of scientific knowledge. This led him to reject logical positivism not just because of its inductive method and verification principle, which were premised upon empiricism (and were therefore subjectivist), but because it took the linguistic turn. Popper was steadfast in his rejection of the linguistic turn because the attempt to create a pure scientific language, purged of metaphysics and restricted to reporting sense data, resulted in language being detached from reality. With the linguistic turn language lost its aboutness and was restricted to reporting psychological/perceptual phenomena. Indeed, during the argument within the Vienna Circle about protocol sentences Neurath argued (to later positive regard by some post-structuralists) that any notion of correspondence

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between propositions and reality was metaphysical and therefore meaningless. In which case propositions could only contradict other propositions and not reality (see Hacohen 2000: 261–275, for an excellent discussion of this matter). A commitment to realism did not lead to a clear metaphysical position. Popper was initially wary of metaphysics (i.e. during the time he wrote the Logic of Scientific Discovery (1972b)). This was not because he was influenced by positivism, but because he was concerned that embracing any metaphysical commitment to universal laws of nature beyond our changing theories may open the door to an inductive method (Hacohen 2000: 259). Consequently metaphysics was bracketed off from methodology. Later, in Objective Knowledge (1972a) Popper stated a clear acceptance of metaphysical realism, arguing that one ought to accept the view that there is a reality beyond our ideas of it rather than the idealist view that we make reality. He held that whilst neither realism nor idealism could be disproved (as they were metaphysical positions), ‘there are arguments in favour of realism; or, rather, against idealism’ (1972a: 35, emphasis in original). His basic point here was that one had a choice between idealism or realism and, as idealism was a philosophical conceit, one ought to accept realism. Idealism was regarded as a philosophical conceit because it would render science pointless (as there was no real world to investigate), and would entail a megalomania whereby one’s ideas about what constituted good art, etc. would necessarily be correct as there would be no other criteria for assessment. (Popper (1972a: 41) notes that megalomania is the most widespread occupational disease of the professional philosopher.) Although realism has been taken to mean a commitment to the existence of universals, which is rejected by those who adhere to nominalism, Popper argued for a nominalist method, and redefined the sort of realism he wanted to attack as ‘methodological essentialism’ (2002). This basically meant that a ‘methodological nominalist’ would ask questions about how certain phenomena behaved, whereas the ‘methodological essentialist’ would ask what questions, pertaining to the definition of some essential defining feature. Popper embraced the former as it dealt with testing the predictions of theories, and rejected the latter as it was based upon trying to describe some ultimate property. For the methodological nominalist words were ‘merely useful instruments of description’ (Popper 2002: 26), whereas for the methodological essentialist words as definitions would be an explanation, as they defined the essential nature of whatever one was interested in.

Dialogue: complementarities and criticisms The first point of agreement to note is that Popper rejects Cartesian and empiricist epistemology for the same reasons that Andrew gives in his discussion of epistemological subjectivism. For both, such epistemologies define reality to fit the mind. Many other philosophers have made a similar point, and we may regard this criticism of certain types of epistemology as something of a ‘given’. The case of Kant is more of a moot point. Given Andrew’s comment (noted

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above) about Heidegger not breaking fully from ‘the spell of Kant’, it is clear that Andrew would regard Kant as a subjectivist to be placed alongside Descartes and the empiricists. Others, though, have different views. Popper, as we have just seen, sought to modify Kant’s epistemology, mixing an ‘aboutness’ in the form of empirical testing with a conventionalist emphasis on intersubjectivity, to explain how we change public and fallible categories in the course of trial and error engagement with the world. Second, Popper’s philosophy can fit in with Andrew’s claim that we need second hand knowledge to produce first hand knowledge; which Andrew says he thinks applies to scientific as well as lay knowledge (Collier 2003: 214–215). Popper would concur with this, as for him, scientific progress is built upon constructing new theories as we try to learn from our mistakes, or theoretical breakdowns. This leads Popper to say (in the context of criticising Kuhn) that: I do admit we are prisoners caught in the framework of our theories; our expectations; our past experience; our language. But we are prisoners in a Pickwickian sense: if we try, we can break out of our framework at any time. Admittedly, we shall find ourselves again in a framework, but it will be a better and roomier one; and we can at any moment break out of it again. (Popper 1993: 56) So, what we experience is a product of what we know, via our theoretical searchlights, to a large extent. There would be some tension between Popper and Andrew on this topic though. Andrew argues that ‘when we do see for ourselves, we do so in ways made possible by what we have been told. While it is possible to learn from experience that what we have been told is false, it is not easy’ (Collier 2003: 215). This claim is not surprising, given the way Andrew describes second hand knowledge. Popper would accept the first sentence of the above quotation, with regard to the searchlights we use to approach the world, but question the second. For Popper, any Pickwickian Prisoner of the framework is free to rebuild their prison. It should be said, however, that Popper is probably a bit too sanguine about scientists’ ability to change frameworks, for a whole host of reasons, concerning (legitimate) intellectual commitments to only partially refuted theories, institutional and financial constraining factors, and so forth. Nevertheless we ought to be careful about downplaying our ability to change our guiding assumptions and the perspectives that frame our understanding of the world, as putting a heavy emphasis on these may reduce their aboutness and usher in a strong form of conventionalism. Discursive knowledge, in the form of hearsay or theoretical knowledge, needs to be treated critically to avoid downplaying reality. The third point of complementarity, which follows on from the second, is the importance of correcting or criticising knowledge claims rather than securing knowledge. Thus Andrew, going against the view noted above concerning second hand knowledge, talks of ‘the methodological primacy of the pathological’ (Collier 2003: 178). What he means by this is the importance of practical breakdowns in

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pre-theoretical knowledge, for the generation of theory which will, pace Heidegger and Macmurray, enhance our understanding of being. In addition to discursive knowledge, in the form of theoretical knowledge, being used to correct practices, Andrew also holds that the form of discursive knowledge that constitutes lay knowledge, i.e. hearsay, needs to be subject to the three forms of correction noted above. Andrew does not directly discuss the correction and criticism of theoretical knowledge, and here we may draw on Popper’s philosophy. The important point to note here is that for Popper science is a trial and error process, with progress occurring through the development of new theories to overcome past mistakes and refutations. Instead of relying on private sense-data to verify theories, we rely on public intersubjective criteria to assess theories in the process of continually learning from our mistakes. As regards the issue of realism, matters become more complex. As we have seen, Popper had some doubts about engaging in metaphysics for fear of endorsing a positivist world view and methodology, but ended up arguing for metaphysical realism, saying that it was more reasonable than idealism. Andrew’s arguments about objectivity could be regarded as arguments for metaphysical realism, because he defines objectivity in terms of the independence of reality from our judgements or knowledge of it. Thus he says: ‘To say that it is an objective fact that the Earth is the third planet from the Sun is to say that this is so whether or not anyone knows or believes it, or is even able to formulate the statement’ (Collier 2003: 134). Now Andrew may object to this reading, and complain that metaphysical realism reintroduces a Kantian split between the world we know and an unknowable reality-in-itself. This would be unacceptable for Andrew because it would entail a form of epistemological subjectivism, which divorced the world from us, leaving us with knowledge claims that could not be meaningfully related to reality. Andrew’s alternative, following Heidegger, would be to argue that it is absurd to separate the world from us and to then seek philosophical proofs that reality exists. This is because our practices presume a reality into which we are situated and that, pace Heidegger, our theoretical knowledge deepens our understanding of being, by enhancing our practices. In which case, no argument need be forwarded about the existence of reality, as it is necessarily implied in the discussion of knowledge that Andrew develops. However, the trouble with this route is that it encounters the very problem that Andrew complained of in Heidegger’s philosophy. This problem is the relativising of being to Dasein, or the relativising of a putatively independent reality to our knowledge of it, as construed via our lay-practical projects or our theoretical enhancements of such projects. In Andrew’s terms we would still be spellbound by Kant. Turning from Andrew’s discussion of Heidegger, lay knowledge and what we may call ‘implied realism’, back to his initial definition of objectivity, we may note that Andrew’s definition of objectivity, which turns on objective facts existing without necessarily being stated explicitly or known, is problematic. It is problematic because it presumes that there are discrete facts and that successful knowledge claims will mirror such facts. This is not to reject the correspondence

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theory of truth because, as Andrew notes (Collier 1994: 239), it is a definition of truth and not a criterion of truth, meaning that correspondence does not imply some form of isomorphism where language directly mirrors a non-linguistic referent. Similarly, Popper (1972b) accepts the correspondence theory of truth whilst holding that our knowledge claims can only be approximations to reality. The problem is not with the correspondence theory of truth, but with the claim that it is meaningful to define reality in terms of discrete facts that successful knowledge claims will mirror. Such a position is a form of what Popper would call methodological essentialism, because the emphasis would be on knowledge claims defining certain essential properties. Instead of language being used in a methodological nominalist fashion, to describe certain events under intersubjective criteria, language would be taken as a medium for expressing the key essential properties beneath the level of mere appearances. Such an essentialist position is to be rejected because it eschews fallibilism in favour of an unwarranted metaphysical assumption that a definition has unearthed a moving force that operates beneath appearances. In this case, objectivism would commit one to an infallibilism. Rather than be the basis for an on-going, fallible and self-critical exploration of reality, a commitment to objectivism, in the way construed by Andrew, would result in a metaphysical monologue. In Popperian terms, rather than revise world three (knowledge claims as realised in books, etc.) to help us deal with world one (the physical world), we would take world three to mirror world one, with world three becoming akin to the realm of Platonic Forms. The scientist would become the philosopher-king, confusing their knowledge of putative essences with reality. To avoid such problems we may agree with Popper’s post-Kantian position. With this we could be methodological or common-sense realists, who thought that the trial and error process was about something, as it engaged with the world. We could say that whilst knowledge was developed by testing theoretical searchlights under intersubjective criteria, knowledge production was not solely a matter of construction via other discursive knowledge, as there was a role for empirical/practical input. To be sure, this would always be construed via an interpretative framework, but the framework would not be taken as self-referential: we would be ‘Pickwickian Prisoners of the framework’. If one wanted more than this, then one might turn to metaphysics and accept metaphysical realism over idealism and, whilst this may be the most reasonable choice in the metaphysical dichotomy, it could not yield any proofs. In Andrew’s terms, we would not have removed the world from us, and then tried to reunite it by seeking proofs. Instead, we would presume the world to exist as we engaged with it, and we could entertain reasonable metaphysical speculation to support this, but there would be no subjective (Cartesian) or metaphysical (essentialist) proof. A critical realist may immediately retort that this response committed the ‘epistemic fallacy’, as defined by Bhaskar. He defines the epistemic fallacy by saying that it occurs with any position which holds ‘that statements about being can always be transposed into statements about our knowledge of being’ (1997: 16). The claim is that it is fallacious to shift from questions about being to ques-

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tions about how we know being because the latter is different from the former, and so being will be misconstrued. However, if a claim about being is to be separated from a claim about how we know being, in order to stop us misconstruing being, then the former must pertain to a substantive definition of what reality is. It could not be the claim that reality simply existed independently of our representations of it as there could be no attempt to translate this into epistemological terms of reference. One could not say that the reality beyond our representations of it is to be represented as X, Y or Z. Now, if it were granted that the claim about being is a substantive claim that reality is X, Y or Z, then the injunction is to not define what we know in terms of what we know! In other words, any knowledge claim qua knowledge claim would be fallacious. Searle makes a similar point with his argument (against Putnam) that external (or metaphysical) realism cannot entail a God’s-eye view because it is an ontological claim that reality exists independent of our representations of it, and not an epistemological claim about our perspective on reality (1995: 154–155). Searle argues thus: ‘the whole idea of a “view” [such as a God’s-eye view] is already epistemic and ER [external – or metaphysical – realism] is not epistemic’ (1995: 154). In other words, to say that reality may be defined in such and such a way (rather than just saying it exists independently of our representations of it) is to move into epistemic territory. This, for critical realists, entails the epistemic fallacy and thus negates their own ontology, as it is a knowledge claim about defining what reality is. As well as noting how the formulation of the epistemic fallacy is so broad it negates critical realism, along with any knowledge claim, we may note how Popper, or a Popperian, may respond to critical realism. Popper would find such an approach to philosophy objectionable. The reason for this is that critical realism is based upon what he would refer to as methodological essentialism, given its concern to define what reality is. This would be objectionable because such essentialism would preclude a trial and error approach in favour of an attempt to terminate critical dialogue by turning to an ultimate definition. Instead of trying to improve our practices, using words as useful tools of description, words would be used to replace trial and error practices with definitions. It may be objected that for critical realism the method of concept derivation (via immanent critique) meant that the ontology was not taken to be a fixed and definitive world view, or absolutist metaphysic, but a fallible view. A Popperian rejoinder to this would be to point out that this entailed the linguistic turn, and committed one to the strange endeavour of trying to purify language on a relativist basis, holding that theories must use vocabulary X to say what reality was, when vocabulary X was not claimed to be an actual definition of reality, but an alternative to other theoretical vocabularies. Moreover, it may also be objected that, if one accepted the method of concept derivation advocated by critical realists, then, in order to be consistent and not dogmatic, one would have to hold that the vocabulary would change. In which case, one would be arguing that theories would need to be constructed using a vocabulary that, of necessity, would be replaced. This is not to denigrate any recognition of fallibilism, but it is to render

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problematic the notion of imposing a meta-theory to furnish the key concepts for the sciences, when such concepts are not actually held to be more than temporary responses to alternative theoretical vocabularies. Alternatively, one may hold that the ontology is a correct definition of what reality is, and not seek to change that, but then we come full circle back to the initial problem. One way of describing critical realism is to say that it wants to have its cake and eat it (to use an English colloquialism). That is, it wants to say that all knowledge is fallible, and that all renderings of reality are relative to conceptual schemes, which are themselves relative to other conceptual schemes. Thus the ontology derived from science is held to be the ontology implicit in scientific knowledge claims, rather than a definitive definition of reality in itself, and similarly, the social ontology is relative to the immanent critique of other social ontologies. Yet it is also assumed that the critical realist ontology is the definitive account of reality. The ontology (of emergent properties in open systems) is taken to be the one correct definition of what reality is. The task of critical realists becomes one of showing how existing theories are wrong for not conforming to this definition, and then putting forward an alternative account, with the correct definitions. Chalmers picks up on this issue. In response to Bhaskar’s discussion of natural science, Chalmers (1988) pointed out that this argument allowed for the possibility that other renderings of ontology were possible. He argued that as no claim was made to know the ultimate nature of being, alternative ontologies could be derived from scientific discourse in the present, and that as science changed the ontology rendered explicit within scientific discourse would change. In short, a plurality of ontologies was potentially possible and the development of ontological schemes would lag behind the development of scientific discourse. Bhaskar, in a rather strained passage, accepted both these points, but went on to draw the non sequitur conclusion that his account of science was ‘uniquely consistent’ with the presuppositions current within contemporary science (1998: 170). Having admitted to the possibility of ontological plurality, on the basis that all such renderings are fallible, Bhaskar claims to have the one correct rendering of the ontology held to be implicit in contemporary science. Moreover, Bhaskar must assume that this ontology is the one correct (i.e. non-fallible) definition of reality, in order to answer the transcendental question he poses. He needs to say science is possible because the world is defined as X, rather than the world can be defined in a number of ways, all of which may be contested and replaced. In which case, fallibilism and conceptual relativity are ejected in favour of the view that the critical realist ontology does actually achieve the ultimate definition of reality. To say how science is possible we leap outside our conceptual schemes to define reality-in-itself. Or, we could stick to the claims about conceptual relativity and fallibilism. If we did that though, and accepted that a plurality of ontologies was possible, then one could not answer the transcendental question. One could try and get around this by saying that the ontology may be fallible, because science may be fallible, but that the ontology was ‘uniquely consistent’ with the sciences. The ‘unique-

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ness’ argument, once shorn of its absolutism, is circular though. We would have the tautology that science is possible because the world is like X, with X being, ex hypothesi, the world view implicit in science: i.e., science is possible because the world it postulates is the world it postulates. The activity and the condition of possibility of the activity are used to define each other. Then, when science changed, another circular argument would be needed to say that the new science was possible because the world was like Y, with Y being the putative world view implicit in the new science. From this one may conclude that the critical realist philosophy of science would entail either an absolutist definition of reality, or a tautological definition of how science was possible, or an admission that there may be a plurality of ontologies which renders the transcendental task pointless. In the first case one wonders what role scientists could fulfil if metaphysicians knew what ultimate reality was beyond the level of mere appearance and, in the second case, philosophy would be worse than useless. Philosophy would be worse than useless because science would progress under its own steam, and any attempt to ‘underlabour’, by forcing scientists to use the ontological definitions rendered explicit by critical realists, would inhibit scientists from developing new world views – if they read their Bhaskar and took him seriously. Returning to Andrew’s work, we can say that the janus-faced character of critical realism is evident in his work on lay knowledge. On the one hand there is the claim that we know the world through practices which presume the world whilst, on the other hand, there is a claim about reality being constituted by discrete facts, waiting to be rescued from a useless oblivion by a handsome young definer. That is, reality is defined as the world for us, as known via our practices (which relativises being to Dasein, and which Andrew complains is too Kantian); and reality is defined as a set of discrete essences existing independently of us, with our knowledge being correct only if it takes on a isomorphic relation to the said essences (which replaces Heidegger under Kant’s ‘spell’ with Plato). So, whilst Andrew’s work on lay knowledge is different from critical realism, insofar as it is not concerned with applying a meta-theory of emergent properties in open systems, it remains trapped within the critical realist mode of theorising, which turns on saying all views are relative – but our’s are right! Andrew’s work may be used to complement Popper’s philosophy of science. We may use Andrew’s work to develop a practice-based complement to Popper’s philosophy of scientific practice, by reconfiguring Andrew’s realism. If we read, or rather re-read, Andrew’s notion of objectivity to fit the realist claims made by Popper, then we may happily accept Andrew’s work on lay knowledge. We may accept a common-sense realism, and the form of metaphysical realism defined by Popper (and Searle), without worrying that the reality we know is known via our practical engagment with it. Andrew may object and argue this is too Kantian, but it is better to be clear about being a Pickwickian Prisoner of the framework rather than a closet Kantian acting as a Heideggerian realist – or even a closet Platonist.

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Bibliography Bhaskar, R. (1997) A Realist Theory of Science, 2nd edn, London: Verso. —— (1998) The Possibility of Naturalism: A Philosophical Critique Of The Contemporary Human Sciences, London: Routledge. Chalmers, A. (1988) ‘Is Bhaskar’s Realism Realistic?’, Radical Philosophy, 49, pp. 18–23. Collier, A. (1994) Critical Realism: An Introduction To Roy Bhaskar’s Philosophy, London: Verso. —— (2003) In Defence of Objectivity: On Realism, Environmentalism and Politics, London: Routledge. Hacohen, M.H. (2000) Karl Popper: The Formative Years 1902–1945. Politics and Philosophy in Interwar Vienna, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Popper, K. (1972a) Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach, Oxford: Oxford University Press. —— (1972b) The Logic Of Scientific Discovery, London: Hutchinson. —— (1993) ‘Normal Science And Its Dangers’, in I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave (eds), Criticism And The Growth Of Knowledge, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —— (2002) The Poverty Of Historicism, London: Routledge. Searle, J. (1995) The Social Construction Of Reality, London: Allen Lane.

10 Being and knowledge Jonathan Joseph

The long essay in Andrew Collier’s latest book, In Defence of Objectivity (2003), begins with a distinction between scientific and lay knowledge. Collier mentions two twentieth-century movements, the philosophers of science – Popper, Bachelard, Kuhn, Lakatos, Harré and Althusser among others – and the philosophers of lay knowledge (or existential phenomenologists) – Heidegger, Macmurray and Merleau-Ponty. These two traditions do not fit together well, but they should not be seen as opposed to each other. As Collier says: That these two traditions have had little contact should perhaps not matter: they are fighting on different ground, one to liberate scientific knowledge and one to liberate lay knowledge from the empiricist straightjacket … they have in common that both have foregrounded the notion of knowledge as the outcome of work; the intended product of scientific work or the tacit concomitant of everyday work. But unfortunately they have often misunderstood and despised each other. (2003: 211) As an example, we can take two philosophers who most influence Collier’s own thinking – Althusser and Heidegger. Althusser, Collier notes, would seem to denigrate lay knowledge, while Heidegger is keen to assert the objectivity of everyday knowledge but in doing so denies that of science (Collier 2003: 210). Now Andrew Collier’s commitment to scientific knowledge is clear in his support for critical realism (as well as his critical support for Althusser and Marxism). But he also wants to argue that there is a place for a theory of lay knowledge in critical realism. By this he means that we need to look at nonscientific knowledge, especially that acquired by and implicit in our practical interaction with our environment (2003: 211). Knowledge is therefore not necessarily a product of ‘thinking’ but of practical activity. For existentialists knowledge comes from practical interaction with the world and understanding can be based on pre-reflective knowledge. The Scottish philosopher John Macmurray argues that knowledge is first and foremost immediate experience of things prior to expression and understanding and that it is upon this that reflection is based (Macmurray 1936: 17). He goes on to argue that reflective

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knowledge (including science) is abstract, incomplete and relative, and is a partial one-sided expression. Heidegger talks of our practical interaction with the world in terms of concern. It is concern because knowledge comes from our Being-in-the-world, from being with things and being alongside others. For Heidegger, Being and knowledge relate to issues of concern and care, but also to facticity and thrownness. Heidegger’s Being-in-the-world is objective in that we are already ‘out there’ and if the world is not external to us, this is not because it is in our minds, but because we are out there in it (Collier 1999: 81). Our Being-in-the-world is expressed through our practical relation with our environment and it is in what might be called practices that lay knowledge exists. The philosophy of science tradition would tend to denigrate this knowledge. Althusser would go so far as to see it as ideology. Nevertheless, despite privileging science over ideology, Althusser regards ideology as a necessary feature of our interactions with the world. However, is it fair to call all forms of practical and lay knowledge ideology? Lay knowledge is not merely ‘pre-scientific’ or ‘non-scientific’ knowledge, but comes from interactions with the world that scientific understanding presupposes. Ideology, especially within Marxism, tends to have a negative connotation as something false or misleading. However, while this may be true of knowledge embedded in work practices – a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay – this is not true of the knowledge needed to cook a meal or ride a bicycle or to find one’s way around a city. This essay will argue that we can combine existentialist notions of practical knowledge with structuralist (Althusserian) notions of ideology as secreted through social practices. However, it is important to see this across a range of different types of knowledge. We need to distinguish between practical knowledge (how to cook a meal) and knowledge in practices (how to earn a living, how to bring up a family). We can start with lay knowledge involved in practices and look at how, as this gets more complex, it may become more ideological. Ideology, as a necessary feature of social practice (Althusser) should be seen less as false or misleading (a secondary factor related to the type of society in which it is produced) and more as a necessary facilitation of our practice through simplifying our relations with the world. This simplification can be seen in the first instance in an existential sense as something that guides us through our complex interactions. But this carries over into the Althusserian notion of ideology as being a simplification that may mislead us or establish an imaginary relation with the world. The structure of this chapter is to look first at existential (especially Heideggerian) notions of Being and knowledge and to look at how lay knowledge has a practical basis. Second, it will examine how this may become ‘ideological’ in the sense of being inauthentic or the idle talk and commonsensical views of the ‘they’. At the same time, it will criticise Heidegger’s argument that we must turn to our individual selves to find authentic self-being – a turn which is premised on Heidegger’s denigration of the alternative route to enlightened knowledge – that of scientific explanation. In giving support to Althusser’s concept of ideology, it will be argued that his concept

Being and knowledge 145 can be strengthened by accentuating its relationship to our existential being. This allows us to understand ideology in its practical state as something that simplifies our journey through the world but which at the same time contains dangers in that it may be misleading or mystifying or open to articulation and manipulation. The chapter concludes by looking at how these two very different traditions might be brought together by critical realism and how the work of Andrew Collier and Margaret Archer has begun this much needed project. The point is not to suggest that existential views on practical knowledge and Althusserian views on ideology fit neatly together, but rather, that together they provide us with a wider scope for understanding knowledge in its many manifestations.

Heidegger on practical knowledge For Heidegger there are three fundamental kinds of being – Dasein, ready-tohand and present-at-hand. Dasein is our special condition of Being-in-the-world which forms the frame for intelligibility. Characteristic of Dasein is its understanding of being where its very being is an issue for it (Heidegger 1962: 32). The present-at-hand is like the physical world or the empirically real. The readyto-hand is the instrumental world encountered in our work. We encounter these things differently depending on our practical orientation. Knowledge derives not so much from looking or contemplation, but from practical engagement. As mentioned earlier, this practical knowledge is not merely ‘pre-scientific’ but presupposes scientific or theoretical knowledge. As Collier says: That the world of our practical concern, composed of the ready-to-hand and understood implicitly by what Althusser would call ‘knowledge in a practical state’, is necessarily both historically and biographically prior to that given by theoretical knowledge, and remains closer to us even when we have theoretical knowledge. (2003: 178) The problem, for existentialism, is that we tend to understand the world in terms of the present-at-hand or ‘everything that is the case’, rather than in terms of activities, relationships and projects. Thus we lose sight of what is important to us. As Heidegger puts it: ‘That which is ontologically closest and well known, is ontologically the farthest and not known at all’ (Heidegger 1962: 69). He therefore argues for the priority of that which is ready-to-hand rather than present-at-hand. Things in the world should be understood in terms of the possibility-to-hand. Consequently, as Collier argues, ‘Understanding is always understanding of a “for-a-sake-of-which”, that is, of a possibility for the sake of which we are engaged in that world’ (1999: 108). Understanding, therefore, is characterised by the projection of some possibility of being. For Heidegger, understanding is like a torch that sheds light on the path to that possibility as well as on the instruments to be used and the obstacles to avoid. The way that the world is disclosed is through the projection of

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some possibility of Being. Thus Heidegger talks of this disclosure as like a clearing in the forest. As Collier says of this metaphor, it is not that we are in the clearing, but rather that we are the clearing, we are our worlds. And the unifying force that organises our world is practical concern (2003: 9). Therefore the closest world to us is the work world of practical objects. This world is prior to theoretical explanations and in this sense is more authentic. It is structured in relation to our projects. Practical knowledge is often tacit knowledge that was at some stage learned. It is only when practice starts to break down that we need to go back to the manual to find out what informs our actions. Heidegger thinks theoretical knowledge originates in such breakdowns and it helps to correct our understanding. In theoretical behaviour one observes whereas in practical behaviour one acts. Heidegger argues that action needs theoretical knowledge if it is not to remain blind (1962: 99). However, although Heidegger admits that sometimes the knowledge implicit in practice is not enough, he still regards it as having primacy over scientific or theoretical knowledge. But Collier argues that if theoretical knowledge is to correct the practice, it must have access to knowledge not available in the practice or going beyond the knowledge generated by the practice (2003: 179). Contra Heidegger,1 theoretical knowledge is not secondary to practical knowledge. When the knowledge implicit in practice fails we have to start thinking. We have to stop and think in order to restore the practice. Heidegger believes that phenomenology can liberate us from wrong perceptions and make things show themselves to us. Science is not given the role of uncovering appearance and reality, indeed, as Collier notes: he tends to invert the relation as usually conceived between scientific and pre-scientific knowledge, treating scientific results, despite – or perhaps because of – the fact that they are the product of a laborious work of uncovering, as merely subjective, and as tending to cover up Being, to which knowledge implicit in everyday practice gives us genuine access. (2003: 205) Interestingly, Heidegger regards technology as a mode of revealing and unconcealment (1993a: 319). But he criticises the technological worldview for regarding reality – natural, human and cultural, as a ‘standing reserve’ or stockpile of materials for production (1993a: 322). He argues that this is part of the process whereby we forget being or that which is closest to us and turn instead to a philosophy based on calculation rather than existence. To resist this we have to reassert our existence, to stand out, to refuse to be absorbed into the system. To exist is to be in a world, but at the same time to be able to organise our world. Collier describes Heidegger’s stance on technology as ‘the right rebellion in the wrong cause’. Heidegger wrongly locates this problem in a productivist metaphysics inherited from the Greeks (Collier 2003: 69).2 But the process by which our world comes to be treated as a stockpile of raw materials for production has

Being and knowledge 147 a more modern origin. ‘The essay concerning technology’ should be a polemic against commerce and the logic of capital. However, if this is a more straightforward answer, it demands a more complex solution. Heidegger places too much reliance on our practical work–world relationships. To escape from the inauthentic nature of these relations requires more than a reassertion of existence over the technological world view. Being-in-the-world must deal with the wider social structures described by Marx and other social theorists.

‘They’ and inauthenticity Heidegger writes that Being submits itself to a world it encounters (1962: 121) and that Dasein understands its own being in terms of a factual present-at-hand. The way that our Being is related to this factual world is described in terms of our facticity, which is to say, the inner aspect of factuality and a limiting factor in our existence. This limiting factor is described negatively as ‘thrownness’. Heidegger talks of thrownness as our factual condition. We are ‘thrown’ into the ‘there’, thrown in such a way as we are ‘there’ in the world. We are thrown into our existential situation. Thrownness is the facticity of being delivered over to Being (1962: 174); it represents the gap between our facticity and our possibility. But this thrownness is not a finished fact. It is expressed as falling; it constitutes a fleeing in the face of itself. Heidegger writes that ‘temptation, tranquillizing, alienation and self-entangling (entanglement) – characterize the specific kind of Being which belongs to falling … Dasein plunges out of itself into itself, into the groundlessness and nullity of inauthentic everydayness’ (1962: 223). Dasein in its thrownness is for the most part in the manner of an evasive turning away. This we will now consider in terms of inauthenticity. For Dasein to have authenticity is for it to be something of its own, to be its own possibility (Heidegger 1962: 68). Both authentic and inauthentic modes of Being are characterised by mineness, but if the possibility of being is foregrounded, we have authentic understanding; if the world is foregrounded we have inauthentic understanding. Heidegger claims that inauthentic being does not constitute any lesser or lower mode of being (1962: 68). But it is clear that the inauthentic mode of being deprives us of ‘true’ selfhood, suppresses the personal and imposes uniformity upon us. This imposition of uniformity is related to what Heidegger calls the ‘they’ (das Man). The ‘they’ are not definite people, but the anonymous, faceless other – the crowd, the herd, the mass, the community, the multitude. We are dominated by others, by the ‘they’, but at the same time we are the ones who contribute to this and use the ‘they’ as our excuse to escape authentic being. In our everyday lives we assume the ‘they-self ’ of inauthentic Being. Dasein is a with-world and our Being in is Being-with Others (1962: 155). But: These Others … are not definite others. … What is decisive is just that inconspicuous domination by Others which has already been taken over unawares from Dasein as Being-with. One belongs to the Others oneself and

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Everyday being sees the dimming down of Dasein; the truncation of its possibilities in accordance with the interpretions of the ‘they’. The average everydayness of concern tranquillises itself with that which is merely ‘actual’ (1962: 239). Our Being is absorbed into the world and lost in the publicness of the ‘they’. Dasein falls away from its authentic self so that now: ‘Idle talk, curiosity and ambiguity characterize the way in which, in an everyday manner, Dasein is its “there” – the disclosedness of Being-in-the-world’ (1962: 219). By idle talk Heidegger means the way things have been publicly interpreted. We do not recognise those things that are most important to us and we allow our everyday self to be constituted by others. Authenticity is overcome by the self-certainty and decidedness of the ‘they’. Through its absorption into the ‘they’, Dasein gets lost in the world. In relation to knowledge, we can say that inauthentic understanding represents a form of concealment or a fleeing from the real situation. Now this can clearly be related to some notion of ideology as misleading, simplifying, or even mystifying. Like certain forms of ideology, it gives us some comfort: ‘In the face of its thrownness Dasein flees to the relief which comes with the supposed freedom of the they-self ’ (Heidegger 1962: 321). Because they represent an attempt to escape responsibility, Collier links Heidegger’s inauthentic existence, along with Sartre’s notion of bad faith, to Gramsci’s term ponziopilatismo which means to disavow one’s actions (Collier 2003: 83). We can further develop the ideological aspect of this in saying that we seek to escape into the feelings of the community. To use Gramsci again, we could say such things as the idle talk of the ‘they’ and the ambiguity of everyday discourse represent the ideology articulated by the ‘common sense’ world view. But the way out of this inauthentic being and this inauthentic knowledge is different for Marxists such as Gramsci and Althusser and existentialists such as Heidegger and Sartre. The existential option is to suggest that it is the conscience that summons Dasein from the lost-self of the ‘they’. For Heidegger, conscience comes from the depth of our own Being; it is the call of the authentic self trying to escape. Marxists would clearly look to the ‘they’, rather than the ‘I’ to become a ‘for-itself ’. For them, the answer lies in collective rather than individual acts of transformation.

Althusser and ideology We have looked at how Heidegger conceives of practical knowledge and then how this practical knowledge might come to be ideological. Now we need to look at how Althusser conceives of ideology and how the ideological is practical. The point here is not necessarily to show that Heideggerian and Althusserian notions of knowledge and ideology are comparable, but at least that they are compatible.

Being and knowledge 149 Further, it is clear that there is an existential element to Althusser’s conception of ideology that can be rendered explicit through a comparison with Heidegger’s conception of knowledge. First of all, Althusser relates ideology to our existence, or to our conditions of existence, our facticity: ‘it is clear that ideology (as a system of mass representations) is indispensable in any society if men are to be formed, transformed and equipped to respond to the conditions of their existence’ (1979: 235). Ideology is indispensable to any society since it is intimately related to our conditions of existence and it helps to represent these conditions to us. However: ideology is a matter of the lived relation between men and their world … not the relation between them and their conditions of existence, but the way they live the relation between them and their conditions of existence: this presupposes a real relation and an ‘imaginary’, ‘lived’ relation. (Althusser 1979: 233) Therefore, ideology ‘represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence’ (Althusser 1984: 36). Although the term ‘imaginary’ has negative, mystifying implications, we might also see such a claim in terms of some necessary representation that allows us to function in the world. This may be compared to a map that simplifies the world in order to guide us through it – in this sense the imaginary might be compared to existential (Sartrean) notions of hodological space and time where the world is mapped in relation to our activities. If we conceive of ideology in this practical way, then it is clearly a necessary feature of social activity. Like existential practical knowledge: ideology is as such an organic part of every social totality. It is as if human societies could not survive without these specific formations, these systems of representations (at various levels), their ideologies. Human societies secrete ideology as the very element and atmosphere indispensable to their historical respiration and life. (Althusser 1979: 232) We ‘breathe’ ideology when we carry out certain social activities. Ideology relates to human actions and these actions are organised through social practices. Ideology is essential to the functioning of these practices and is produced by them. Therefore, as Althusser puts it, ‘there is no practice except by and in an ideology’ (1984: 44). We can therefore summarise Althusser’s conception of ideology thus; that ideology is something that is secreted through social practices and that it is consequently a necessary feature of our functioning in the social world. Althusser advocates a theory of ideology in general, not of particular ideologies. Ideology, he writes, has no history: ‘it is endowed with a structure and a functioning such as to make it a non-historical reality’ (1984: 35). And the way that it operates through the various human practices in which we engage means

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that it is generally unconscious or non-conscious. For Althusser, the difference between this sort of ideology and scientific or theoretical knowledge is that ideology is not conscious of itself or is unconscious of its theoretical presuppositions (1979: 69). For this reason, Althusser draws a sharp distinction between ideology and scientific knowledge, arguing that it is only by trying to step outside the relation between practice and knowledge that we can develop a proper understanding of the social relations we are engaged in. By contrast, ideological representations ‘are perceived-accepted-suffered cultural objects and they act functionally on men via a process that escapes them’ (1979: 233). Ideology is a general feature of all societies, or like Freud’s unconscious, ideology is eternal: ‘if eternal means, not transcendent to all (temporal) history, but omnipresent, trans-historical and therefore immutable in form throughout the extent of history … ideology is eternal, exactly like the unconscious’ (Althusser 1984: 35). This unconsciousness may derive, in part, from the practical aspect of ideology that forms the basis of its eternal need. Like much practical knowledge, ideology may escape us because it is often so obvious. Ideology imposes itself on us without appearing to do so; it operates on the basis of its obviousness (1984: 46). Ideology is something that is lived rather than ‘known’. But at the same time, as has been argued in relation to practical and lay knowledge, that which is obvious still has to be learned. In his essay on ideological state apparatuses (ISAs) Althusser discusses processes of learning such as the education of children at school. Here we learn: a number of techniques … including elements (which may be rudimentary or on the contrary thoroughgoing) of ‘scientific’ or ‘literary culture’, which are directly useful in the different jobs in production (one instruction for manual workers, another for technicians, a third for engineers, a final one for higher management, etc.). Thus they learn ‘know-how’. (1984: 6) ‘Know-how’, in this sense, is a slightly more sinister version of the tacit or lay knowledge that we discussed in relation to existentialism. People also learn the rules of good behaviour, attitudes to be observed, rules of morality and rules of respect. Althusser talks of ideology in the context of the reproduction of the conditions of production, or more particularly, labour power which ‘requires not only a reproduction of its skills, but also, at the same time, a reproduction of its submission to the rules of the established order, i.e. a reproduction of submission to the ruling ideology’ (1984: 8). School, church and other apparatuses teach ‘know-how’ in forms that ensure subjection to the ruling ideology. So, historical ideology is a system of representations with historical existence in a given society (Althusser 1979: 231). Clearly the difference here is that Althusser, as a Marxist, is interpreting conditions of existence to be conditions of production. But under different conditions of production, where the production of conformity is not so biased, we can still imagine the process of teaching the kind of know-how necessary for

Being and knowledge 151 us to get on in our everyday lives. In this respect, Althusser’s ‘know-how’ is a politicised version of existentialism’s practical knowledge. Social practices require an ideological apparatus. We are inserted into practices governed by the rituals of the ISAs. Althusser writes that the ISAs are not the realisation of ideology in general, but the form in which the ideology of the ruling class must necessarily be realised (1984: 58–59). But in a way, this is how ideology in general is realised. Ideology is necessary in a general sense in order for us to function in social practices. But the realisation of this takes place through the specific ideologies of the ruling class. It is through the dominant ideology of the ruling class that the more general form of ideology is realised. The term ‘realised’ is also interesting in that it suggests that the ISAs are emergent from these general conditions. Althusser also writes that ‘what unifies their diversity is precisely this functioning, insofar as the ideology by which they function is always in fact unified, despite its diversity and its contradictions, beneath the ruling ideology’ (1984: 20). So to put this in critical realist terms, ideology exists at a general social level and is necessary to the functioning of society. But how this underlying ideology is realised is through specific apparatuses that may reflect the ruling ideology or, at least, will have their own emergent properties and form. Another aspect of Althusser’s conception of ideology is that it examines how it functions to produce subjects whose consciousness is appropriate to the social positions they occupy. One way this is done is through the concept of interpellation. We are recruited into identity positions by being interpellated or hailed. This is a process whereby people recognise themselves in a particular identity and think ‘that’s me’. Although it has been suggested that ideology is often unconscious, it does often involve this act of recognition. But it is a very limited form of recognition that represents, in fact, a form of subjection. We might again make a very limited comparison with Heidegger’s ‘they’. The process of hailing interpellates us in our inauthentic Being so that we have the excuse to deny our own responsibility by identifying with the ‘they’. In fleeing authenticity we shrink back into the ‘they’ which hails us, which we identify with and think, ‘that’s me’. However, this is a very negative conception of ideology. To conclude this section, it must be stressed that Althusser does have a more positive conception of ideology precisely because he sees that it is necessary to all human practices: So ideology is not an aberration or a contingent excrescence of History: it is a structure essential to the historical life of societies. Further, only the existence and the recognition of its necessity enable us to act on ideology and transform ideology into an instrument of deliberate action on history. (1979: 232) Because of its necessity, ideology is open to abuse. In class society it is expressed in class terms. But outside of class society ideology will allow us to live our relation with our conditions of existence in a more beneficial and fulfilling way:

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Being humans Heidegger’s work is important because it helps us to understand the nature of human existence through such issues as facticity, concern, practical knowledge, thrownness and inauthenticity. Althusser might be broader in scope in terms of outlining a social ontology of structures and generative mechanisms that go beyond experience, human existence and Being. However, a Heideggerian account of human existence might be run alongside rather than in opposition to this, so long as we realise the limited nature of Heidegger’s ontology as an ontology of our Being-in-the-world rather than of the world more generally. Critical realists are starting to notice this. There is not space here to go into a lengthy account of Margaret Archer’s recent work, but we can at least mention briefly how she might be doing a similar thing. That is, drawing on the existentialism of Merleau-Ponty and giving an account of what it means to be human or to have human Being, while recognising wider social forces that are at play. Archer’s book Being Human looks at the properties and powers of human beings and how they emerge through our relations with the world (2000: 7) and how our embodied encounters instil a sense of self (2000: 8). Surprisingly Heidegger is not mentioned in Being Human. Instead, Archer draws upon Merleau-Ponty (who Collier mentions alongside Heidegger and Macmurray as the most useful of the existentialists), and the way in which he gives us an account of the primacy of practice that relies on nothing more than our ‘ineluctable embodiment and inescapable relations with our environment’ (Archer 2000: 137). From here it is necessary to see the embedding of reasoning in natural praxis: it is through the activities of embodied practice that we develop the powers of thought at all. To do so it is necessary to demonstrate that practical action is also the source, (i) of our thinking about distinct objects … (ii) how they are subject to transfactual laws of nature which belong to them, but do not emanate from us. (2000: 146) It can be seen how Archer is insisting on the realist aspect of existentialism.3 Criticising postmodernism for its discursive irrealism she argues that ‘there is a genuine primacy of practice which yields reasoned knowledge non-discursively and which also underlies practical proficiency in the linguistic domain’ (2000: 151). Therefore realists go along with existentialists in claiming the primacy of practice over language

Being and knowledge 153 which must be seen as emergent from these practices (2000: 26). So for Archer ‘[t]he primacy of practice in conceptualising our experience is what allies realism with phenomenology’ (2000: 127). Likewise Collier sees a realist element in existentialism. Objectivity, he writes, means recognising the primacy of the object. Existentialism can help insofar as we are seen primarily as actors rather than subjects. As actors, we are ‘out there’ and our thinking is governed by that which we seek knowledge of (Collier 2003: 137). The world is logically prior to ideas and we can only define an idea in relation to that aspect of the world that the idea is about (2003: 145). Experience presupposes realism. Experience is always experience of something, and is referential insofar as it makes sense because of the independent reality it presupposes (2003: 216). It is because of the independence of reality that our theory, as an attempt to map it, can be rational or irrational (2003: 230). This constitutes an ontocentric rather than an anthropocentric relation to the things that are independent of us. Our relations should be measured in terms of truer or less true understanding of these things – not just in terms of thought, but also our emotions and actions (2003: 159).4 Finally, we have said that the limitations of existentialism should be recognised by moving from the nature of our Being-in-the-world, and how we experience this through human practices, to wider social structures and generative mechanisms. However, Margaret Archer’s recent work can be seen as pushing in the opposite direction, from wider structures to how we see ourselves, and how ‘society enters into us’ (Archer 2000: 13). The point is to see this aspect of being alongside wider socio-structural relations, but to focus particularly on that aspect of life in which we develop a conception of the self. Our self-consciousness derives from our embodied encounters and practices in the world. We discover through embodied practice the distinction between self and other and subject and object (2000: 8). We live simultaneously in natural, practical and social orders. Our emotions can be regarded as our commentaries on our welfare in the world (2000: 9). We are who we are because of what we care about. We clearly have issues of care and concern and self-worth. But at the same time, our involuntary placement as Primary Agents (our ‘thrownness’) brings us back to the role of social structures and the need to act on a wider stage.

Knowing the real Existentialism challenges the dominant epistemological basis of western philosophy by starting with being and the practical issues that arise from this. Existential phenomenologists shift attention from perception to the work that characterises our Being. Perception is situated within the context of our engagement with the world through activities or practice. Practical understanding is regarded as the most fundamental form of knowledge with theoretical understanding derived from this. John Macquarrie summarises this position as ‘I am, therefore I think’, I am in the world, I am with others (Macquarrie 1973: 94) while Collier writes that for Heidegger it is a case of ‘I fix a shutter with a hammer, therefore I am in a world’ (Collier 2003: 176).

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Everyday existence is characterised by living or dwelling. To be ‘in’ the world is to have concern for our environment since our interests coincide with those things around us. We therefore understand things through the projection of concern and it is through this concern that the world is lit up for us. Macquarrie says that to understand the world is to be able to cope with it, to know our way about, to know how it relates to our concerns, to bring things into service, to avoid dangers. This practical understanding manifests itself through our patterns of action. Theoretical understanding develops out of this, as we move from the particular to the general, from the concrete to the abstract, from the actual to the hypothetical (Macquarrie 1973: 98). Therefore, for existentialism, knowledge and truth occur in the context of personal existence. We are in the truth insofar as we are free and open to things as they are, in their un-hiddenness. In fact, since the emphasis is on experience, it is not so much that we ‘have experiences’ that may be truthful or mystifying, but that we experience things in different ways. It is our engagement with things that makes things appear to us the way they do. Since we use things in particular ways or with a particular purpose, we come to have knowledge of something in relation to our practice. This means that the knowledge we have of something may be limited by the practice that we are engaged in and that it is only if we can step outside of that practice that we can gain a wider knowledge of the processes involved. As Collier says, ‘[t]he work-world understanding of the hammer as “ready-to-hand” is indeed an appearance, not in the sense of being false, but of being partial’ (2003: 205). If we stick with Althusser’s view of ideology as secreted by human practices, then Heidegger, in particular, is useful in giving an account of practical knowledge. This does not mean all practical or lay knowledge is ideological; the most basic knowledge is simply practical know-how which, if it is partial, is so for good practical reasons. But as knowledge develops and becomes more complex it may become ideological, either as a necessary simplification, or as an outright distortion of the way things are. But to understand the basis of this we need to go back to how this knowledge grows out of our practical relations with our environment. At the same time, to know how this practical knowledge turns ideological, we need an account of the wider social forces in play. This leads to problems with Heidegger’s account. Heidegger’s argument is that we become trapped in the unthinking routine of everyday existence and that this leads to inauthenticity and a fleeing from our situation. We need to reawaken our involvement with the world through the call of conscience. For Heidegger, conscience is the call of the authentic self – trying to escape. But to escape from the inauthentic nature of these relations requires much more than a turning to the self. Being-in-the-world must deal with the wider social structures and the other agents who can help to change them. As Archer says, we need a ‘historical movement from the “Me”, which seeks to make out within the confines of the existing socio-cultural structures, towards the “We” which together seeks strategically to transform such structures’ (2000: 11). To do this we need knowledge. We need an emancipatory critique that can show

Being and knowledge 155 how inadequate or inauthentic knowledge is a product of bad practices that are themselves related to a wrong social system than needs to be changed. Heidegger’s argument that we must turn to our individual selves to find authentic self-being is a turn which is premised on a denigration of the alternative route to enlightened knowledge – that of scientific explanation and human emancipation. Another existentialist Macmurray talks of two types of knowledge, the philosophical and the scientific. The philosophical is knowledge of persons as persons and therefore as agents. This is knowledge of the personal other. Macmurray argues that the scientific is limited and abstract, turning the personal into a determinate object. For these reasons he regards scientific knowledge as limited and subordinate (1995: 40–41). But we must ask why it is that we need to abstract. Surely it is because everything is not revealed by experience and that to understand this better we are required to reveal other layers of social being. In not fully accepting this, Macmurray’s work is in danger of embracing a praxis ontology where: ‘Reality, therefore is bound up with the unity and completeness of the world in our immediate experience of it’ (Macmurray 1936: 34).5 If scientific realism tells us anything, it is that there is more to reality than this. Existentialists rightly see knowledge as derived from practices, however, they are in danger of elevating practices and experience to the most fundamental ontological level. This may tell us quite a lot about being human, but it will not tell us everything about the social world. We need to examine wider structural conditions and we need scientific knowledge to be able to do this. Louis Althusser writes that ‘ideology is a matter of the lived relation between men and their world’ but that this is not the same as the real relation between them and their conditions of existence (1979: 233). This lived relation implies, unlike existentialism, that there is a level of reality beyond that which is lived – a lived level and an underlying level. The problem with existentialism is that rather than looking at lived and underlying levels, it focuses on the lived level and contrasts inauthentic living with authentic living. There is a reason why existentialists tend to denigrate scientific knowledge, which is that they tend to ignore the underlying social structures that science attempts to uncover. The focus on practical knowledge derives from a tendency to reduce ontology to Being-in-the-world. Where Marxism and existentialism come together – in Sartre and Merleau-Ponty – it is on the basis of a praxis ontology rather than a scientific realist one. To gain a wider picture of the world we need to go beyond practice and look at structure. This is what makes us critical realists rather than just existentialists.

Conclusion: practice, knowledge and ideology Knowledge is produced through human practice. The knowledge produced is ‘practical’ insofar as it helps us to engage in that practice. However, the nature of that knowledge varies considerably according to the nature of that practice. A more straightforward practice, like finding one’s way round a building or an

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equipmental relation to a piece of machinery, produces relatively straightforward knowledge about how to do something or how to carry out a task. A more complex practice such as bringing up a family produces practical knowledge which, in simplifying our relationship to the practice, may be ideological in the sense of being partial, concealing or even misleading. It may help us to do what we want to do – such as earn money – but it may also be misleading or concealing in letting us think that we are being paid a fair wage. Heidegger and Althusser help us to understand this moving from practical, equipmental relations to more complex social engagements. As the ideological component develops, knowledge goes beyond being practical and may be articulated in various ways to serve various ideas and interests or to conceal certain social relations. If practices produce practical knowledge, practical ideology and a more articulated and developed form of ideological discourse, they may also produce another type of knowledge – that which is denigrated by existentialists and overly revered by Althusser. For science is also a practice and this practice produces both practical knowledge about the scientific practice and scientific knowledge about that with which the practice is engaged. Contra Althusser, scientific knowledge always has an ideological component due to the practical conditions of its production. Contra Heidegger, scientific knowledge can go beyond practical knowledge in seeing beyond those things that are closest to us and explaining why our practical relations are the way they are. The point is not to demarcate firmly between different types of knowledge, but to look at knowledge across its various forms and determinations. We have determined that knowledge has many different forms and effects. It is not being claimed that combining Heidegger and Althusser provides all the solutions to this question, but a comparison of them broadens the scope of enquiry and helps us to address the relations between knowledge, practice and ideology in new and revealing ways.

Notes 1 2

3

And contra Macmurray and Merleau-Ponty (science is a second order expression (Merleau-Ponty 1962: viii)). In Heidegger’s ‘Letter on Humanism’ he says that Marxist materialism says more than just that everything is matter, but introduces a metaphysics founded upon the material of labour. This essence of materialism he then links to technology and writes that the metaphysic of technü goes back to the Greeks (1993b: 243–244). Collier makes the case for why Heidegger is a realist of sorts (Collier 2003: 177; Heidegger 1962: 251). Merleau-Ponty is also a realist of sorts, saying that the real has to be described, not constructed or formed (Merleau-Ponty 1962: x). But MerleauPonty poses the relation in a rather dialectical and possibly compromising way when he says: ‘The world is inseparable from the subject, but from a subject which is nothing but a project of the world, and the subject is inseparable from the world, but from a world which the subject itself projects’ (1962: 430). Merleau-Ponty believes this transcends the dilemma between realism and idealism. Macmurray, I think, it is harder to make a case for.

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There is something of Macmurray in this – that truth and falsity lie in the relation with the things to which they refer (1935: 24). Macmurray further extends this relation to rational or irrational feelings (1935: 25). ‘All life is activity’ (Macmurray 1935: 23); ‘life is essentially concrete activity’ (1936: 36).

Bibliography Althusser, L. (1979) For Marx, London: Verso. —— (1984) ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards and Investigation)’, in Essays on Ideology, London: Verso, pp. 1–60. Archer, M. (2000) Being Human, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Collier, A. (1999) Being and Worth, London and New York: Routledge. —— (2003) In Defence of Objectivity, London and New York: Routledge. Heidegger. M. (1962) Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson, Oxford: Blackwell. —— (1993a) ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, in Basic Writings, ed. D.F. Krell, London: Routledge. —— (1993b) ‘Letter on Humanism’, in Basic Writings, ed. D.F. Krell, London: Routledge. Macmurray, J. (1935) Reason and Emotion, London: Faber and Faber. —— (1936) Interpreting the Universe, London: Faber and Faber. —— (1995) Persons in Relation, London: Faber and Faber. Macquarrie, J. (1973) Existentialism, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962) Phenomenology of Perception, London: Routledge.

Part V

Objectivity and materialism

11 Towards objectivity From Kant to Marx Jolyon Agar

In this chapter I want to show that in the writing of Karl Marx we can identify a philosophical materialism within which the grounds for what I want to refer to as genuinely objective theories of ontology and epistemology can be located. But I want also to show that this achievement owes a considerable amount to principles in the philosophy of the sciences that have striking similarities to two of his predecessors in the German intellectual tradition of critique, namely Kant and Hegel. In short, I wish to demonstrate that Marxian materialist objectivism represents a materialist inversion of Hegelian and Kantian notions of objectivity in the natural and social sciences. We should understand critique as the examination of the structure of human rationality and the limits of its claims to objectivity. Kant formulated it because he was dissatisfied with traditional and contemporary resolutions of the philosophical problem of antinomy – how are we to reconcile the domain of intuitive rationality with that of experience? How are we to account for the relationship between the process of knowledge acquisition and the objects which it seeks to understand? Traditional resolutions – such as with Plato – involved the dissolution of experience – the domain where we encounter the things which our ideas are about – and concentrated exclusively on the intuitive appreciation of ideas (what we might call a philosophical consciousness). The problem with contemporary solutions – such as that of empiricism – was that the other pole of antinomy was dissolved, reducing the mind to something akin to a blank slate where raw sense-data from matter is passively received. Kant wanted to reconcile these poles, not solve the problem by simply eliminating one or other of them and placing sole importance on the one remaining. His dissatisfaction with these earlier traditions motivated him to examine the rational structure of knowledge and what caused the errors in philosophies from Platonic idealism to empiricism. He set about positing underlying (cognitive) structures that create the conditions for cognitive experience; what there is a priori that makes knowledge possible. In this way, the intuitive pole was seen as indispensable to the process whereby we gain knowledge through experience. And so the method of critique was born. Hegel, on the other hand, wanted to restore intuition to a non-empirical status very much akin to its status within Plato and Aristotle. But, unlike them, he posited a necessary connection to experience and so the empirical/actual

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was defined as historico-cultural moments in the development of the (intuitive) philosophical consciousness. In short, Hegel wanted to dispel notions of objectivity from the domain of experience and to locate what he called ‘essences’ in a non-empirical/actual domain of pure reason. Now I want to argue that both Kantian and Hegelian approaches lead to subjectivity. But what is more important is that I also want to demonstrate that in the process of Marx’s inversion of Hegel’s method we can detect a materialist transformation of the Kantian idealist principle that experience yields knowledge of a priori transcendental structures of the subject matter of science. The end result is the formulation of a materialist critique that is genuinely objective. The first issue at hand must be to define what I mean by ‘genuinely objective’ and, for that matter, what I mean by subjectivity. Andrew Collier claims that subjectivity in our truth-claims about the world occurs when epistemology ‘loses its reference to what ideas are about, and comes to be a matter of coherence between ideas’ (2003: 144) and as a consequence ‘the objects of ideas have dropped out of the picture altogether’ (2003: 144). So we are subjective when the things about which truth-claims are made disappear from view completely. Ideas thereby lose their ‘aboutness’. Conversely, Collier claims that to be objective ‘is to refer to what is true independently of any subject judging it to be’ (2003: 134). Since the Enlightenment (and, I want to show, up until Marx) the philosophy of the sciences has been characterised by the postHumean notion that, on the contrary, objectivity consists of constant conjunctions of events that the human mind perceives in the form of impressions or raw sense-data. Now most empiricists are also aware that every philosophy must presuppose a conception of the world as being in some sense ordered – a schematic answer to the question of what the world must be like to make knowledge of it possible (Bhaskar 1978: 28–29). And so they are prepared to acknowledge the intransitivity of the subject matter of science. They defend the objectivity of empiricism by insisting that the conditions of possibility of experience have two levels – the Humean level of raw sense-data (empirical ) and the recognition that many constant conjunctions of events occur unexperienced (actual ). But actualism is itself subjective in the sense that the things which theories are about are not ontologically distinguished from the scientific activity which produces our knowledge of them. This represents the way our knowledge loses its ‘aboutness’ in the domain of science. What I mean by this criticism is that the logic of scientific experiment involves a third transfactual level whereby an ‘ontological distinction between (scientific) causal laws and patterns of events’ (Bhaskar 1978: 12; 1998: 10) is drawn. Scientists set up ‘artificial closures’ (experimental conditions) in order to isolate real generative mechanisms from others with which they interact in open systems to bring about events. In other words, scientists draw ontological distinctions between the subject matter of science (i.e. real generative causal mechanisms) and the events they generate. Now the lack of empirical regularity is due to the multi-layered nature of being – from the lowest (physical) to the highest (sociological) – where each has causal powers. This is known as the strati-

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fied and emergent character of reality (Bhaskar 1998).1 And the complex and multiform nature of inter-acting generative mechanisms means that events in open systems can only be analysed as tendencies; constant conjunctions are thus purely a phenomenon of closure. These scientific conditions involve the activation of one or more real generative mechanisms thereby making the subject matter of science empirically manifest. We do not actually see the mechanisms themselves but only ever the constant conjunctions that are produced, and we extrapolate from the latter accurate accounts of the former. And so if we accept the logic of scientific practice then events produced scientifically are irreducibly and unmistakably human activities, with the mechanisms that produce them being ontologically distinct from them. Scientific laws are about ‘things, not events’ (Bhaskar 1978: 51). Empiricists and actualists fail to take sufficient account of the reality that our experience is always of something that is external to our experiencing it. If we fail to incorporate this a priori fact about human experiences into our philosophising then we commit a fatal error which, as Andrew Collier has put it, is ‘the error of believing that experience is an object which we can inspect without reference to its objects – which makes subjectivism or idealism possible’ (Collier 2003: 138). Now, the lack of constant conjunctions in open systems means that even at the level of events the actualists have got it wrong. They posit something that doesn’t actually prevail in nature or society as constitutive of being in open systems. In so doing they enter very dangerous epistemological and ontological territory because they cannot draw adequate distinctions between scientific human activity and the things that it is supposed to discover independently of it. The latter, so to speak, ‘falls out of the picture’ and they become interested only in a type of event produced by our activity. What produces the event is lost. This is not to say that events are not real in the sense of having an ontological status. But if we say that it is only events that are real then we cannot make the necessary ontological distinction between the process that produces our knowledge and the things which our knowledge is about. The consequence of this subjectivistic error is the view of the world as made up of atomistic events. This loss of generative mechanisms means that the world becomes unidimensional and flat and so ‘ontological depth’ disappears. In other words, the world is deontologised. This whole process is what Bhaskar calls the epistemic fallacy (Bhaskar 1978: 16). And so to be truly objective necessitates drawing categorical distinctions between the domains of the empirical, actual and real (Bhaskar 1978: 56; Collier 1998: 689; Bhaskar 1993: 4–5). If we accept this then we accept the possibility that there is necessity in nature that is independent of human activity, something which Bhaskar has called natural necessity (1978: 14). To posit the world as structured and made up of infinitely complex transfactual generative mechanisms commits science to the search for the referential detachment of our conceptions about the world from the world-in-itself. We must strive to decipher more layers of this world and progress towards a greater understanding of its complex structures in the search for alethic truth (Bhaskar 1994: 24–28). Of importance to our discussion in this chapter is the fact that

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both Kant and Hegel commit the errors of what a Bhaskarian might call subjectivistic deontologicisation because their systems are dependent on actualism or empiricism. Now, as Hegel conceptualised the object as existing independent of experience (as we shall see) it might be said that he stands alongside Marx as an important philosopher who saw the errors of empiricism/actualism. However, I want to affirm what Roy Bhaskar (1994) has aptly demonstrated – that the idealist character of Hegel’s philosophical methods means that he cannot escape the spectre of Hume irrespective of the anti-empiricist truism of his criticism of Kant – that objectivity exists outside the domain of experience. It is with Marx’s materialist and (I suggest) realist transformation of Kant’s transcendentalism that Hegelian methodology is at last freed from the grip of Hume. As I have mentioned, objectivity is not simply about distinguishing intransitivity from transitivity and establishing conditions of transfactuality and natural necessity. I want to stress that we must also appeal to concepts of ontological bi- and polyvalence. This is evidence of the dialectical significance of transcendental realist concepts. Quite simply, a theory which is ontologically bivalent or polyvalent is one which allows for the notion of real negation or absence. This is an important example of how objective being consists of the non-actual and nonempirical. Real absences are important because they are integral to intransitivity/transitivity, transfactual efficacy of phenomena and emergent and stratified structures. As such, absences and negation of absences are the dialectical functioning of realist concepts in historical realities. An example of this would be what anti-capitalists regard as the existence and development of slavery in capitalism. Slavery is a positive real existent thing to be sure but it also involves a real absence – the absence of freedom. Bhaskar calls such things 2E (Second Edge) moments; the concrete forms that the essentially abstract transcendental realist and critical naturalist concepts of transfactual efficacy, emergence and natural necessity (known as 1M or First Moment) take in socio- or naturalhistorical contexts (Bhaskar 1993: 8, 53; 1994: 61, 67). Why 1M categories take a dialectical significance in 2E is because their concrete functioning involves negation and includes the category of real determinate transformative absence. Thus, subjectivistic deontologicisation also involves the rejection of ontological nonbeing or absence, an error which is known as ontological monovalence (Collier 1995: 8–9). Dialectical critical realism will be important to our understanding of how Marx’s materialist inversion of Hegelianism allows for a realist transformation of Kantian transcendentalism that has a dialectical significance, so it is worth introducing these terms here. With this task accomplished it is time to proceed to examine in detail the passage of critique from Kant through to Marx.

Kantian transcendentalism Kant’s major motivation for writing The Critique of Pure Reason was to recover the idea that real relational unities can be found in the objects that the mind perceives and experiences, an idea that, as I have said, theorists from the empiricist tradition had rejected. Eminent empiricists such as Locke and Hume

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contended that the apparent unity which goes to make up objects of our perception (e.g. a forest or a planet) was simply a plurality of independently existing elements. To gain an explanation of any such object we simply reduce everything down to its essential constituent properties. The logic of this was that it was only these properties that have an ontological status. For example, they would say that a tree is ontologically prior to a forest. In our sensate experiences the only things we take cognition of are the trees and we thus formulate simple ideas concerning them. That we also insist that we see such a thing as a ‘forest’ is false – what we are in actual fact doing is merely taking simple ideas and using them to postulate a unified object which is unverifiable because it plays no role in our experience of the world. Locke prevented taking this type of thinking to its logical conclusion – a complete dissolution of the object – by his doctrine of real but unknowable unified essences that explain why we insist in thinking in terms of conceptual unities (Locke 1975: III.vi, §6, p. 442). However, in A Treatise of Human Nature Hume rejected Locke’s quasisubstratum of real essences and insisted that the unified object was nothing more than a product of the imagination in its attempts to understand the things that the mind perceives (Hume 1978: Book I, Part 4, §3, p. 221). If we cannot know about any underlying unifying substratum intrinsic to mind-independent matter then it is impossible for it, if it even exists, to have any bearing at all on why we think, for example, that a collection of trees constitutes a forest. But this does not mean that there is anything particularly special about the way our minds organise their perceptions of elemental properties either. We do not impose a unity onto these properties nor an account of their activities (i.e. causal laws) in any sophisticated sense. Hume thought that when the mind thinks of an object it is associating together various ‘particular qualities’ or perceptions. For example, when I see something that I recognise as fire it is because I am associating together various perceptions of its heat, appearance, causal activity, etc. that I know are characteristic of that object. Now this connection is so strong that I am not aware of any transition between qualities and it is by virtue of this alone that unified objects are formed. To this end, Hume talks about the mind’s ‘principles of association’, namely resemblance, contiguity in time and place and cause and effect (Hume 1978: Book I, Part I, §6, p. 16; Stern 1996: 12). In his account ideas about how objects are constituted (relational unities) are simply reflections on how the mind takes cognition of the objects of experience after we have experienced them. Hence, by radicalising the Lockean attack on substance (by rejecting any talk of an underlying substratum) Hume dissolved ontology altogether. Kant agreed with Hume that explanations for objects and their activities were products of how the mind seeks to understand the sensate experience of elemental properties and that Lockean talk of some unknowable quasisubstratum was folly. But Kant believed that Hume had vastly underestimated the function of consciousness in this task. It does not simply organise the objects of experience after the process is completed but is actively involved in the process of their structuring and ordering (McCarthy 1988: 24–25).

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Kant asserted that there was a formal connection imposed onto objects by what he called a synthetic unity imposed onto sense-experience by the mind. In other words, experience not only involves the intuition of the senses (Hume) but also something which exists a priori and that is the condition of possibility of intuition. That something was a particular type of concept of those objects. Raw sense-data involves simply receiving representations through the faculty of sensateintuition. For Hume the explanation for how the mind constructs unity and coherence out of what it perceives lies entirely at this stage. But Kant thought that the mind could only have these representations if it had a conceptual understanding that it uses to connect together the representations it receives through sensate-experience. Kant posited two types of concept. First, we have particular concepts that enable the mind to make judgements about certain representations, for example the judgement that ‘when water is boiled it turns to steam’. But this concept is dependent on much more general concepts that are the condition of possibility of the intuitive understanding of this event and they are known as categories (Stern 1996: 19). In our example, to make the particular judgement ‘when water is boiled it turns to steam’ requires the categories of unity (so that the mind can understand the plurality of intuitions involved in observing the event of boiling water turning into a gas) and cause (so that the mind could understand why the water turns into a gas). Categories thus function to unite various concepts and their judgements and are indispensable to intuition (Kant 1998: A79/B104–105, 211). Kant’s theory that the mind synthesises the object is therefore dependent on these categories. The consequences all of this has for ontology are revolutionary, for Kant appears to place the structure of the knowable world in the mind. If the categories are central to the unity of intuition then they must be said to determine the structure of objects that are experienced. In other words, by positing a priori connections of the understanding (Kant 1998: 6; McCarthy 1988: 24) in this way, Kant was saying that the mind was actively involved in constructing reality as it was experienced and not just organising its understanding of intuitions it passively receives. Kant thus revived explanations of underlying unities of objects by placing them firmly within a constituting subject, something which Hume could not allow given the rather modest powers he gave to the mind. We can thus see how Kant developed a transcendental ontology of the subject because he places concepts of causation and unity exclusively within certain a priori capacities of the mind that it brings to its experience of the world around it and so we have a world-constituting subject. This allows science to make claims of universality because there exist the conditions of possibility of universality by virtue of the ontology of the object that the a priori synthetic structures of the consciousness allowed. And since the object of experience is ‘nothing other than the formal unity of consciousness’ (Kant 1998: A105, 231) (a phenomenological object) the object-in-itself remains unknowable (a noumenal object) and is as such bereft of structural components in itself (i.e. unity and causal powers) that would give it ontological significance. Kant in fact calls the latter the transcendental object2 (Broad 1978: 226; Stern 1996: 26; Kant 1998: A250–251, 347–348).

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And so we have a unified ontologically grounded object formulated by the mind known as a transcendental subject. Such was the Kantian approach to critique – the location of the conditions of possibility of experience in the synthesising consciousness – and it is known as the transcendental analytic. It is important therefore to understand Kantian critique as an idealistic (and I hope to show, unsuccessful) reconciliation of the poles of antinomy. By claiming that synthesis was the a priori condition of possibility of experience Kant posited an intrinsic interconnection between the process whereby we understand the object and the structure of the object itself in the sense that any possible object must conform to the conditions of possibility of our knowledge of it. This is what philosophers mean when they talk about Kant’s Copernican Revolution – the reversal of the assumption of Cartesian epistemology that our representations of the object must conform to the object-in-itself in the same way that Copernicus reversed the assumptions of astronomical science regarding the relation between the Earth and the Sun. Kant’s answer to the question of how we are to understand the relation between the object and our representations of it was not to accept the basic premises of Cartesian epistemology (Locke) nor to deny that such a relation is detectable (Hume) (Stern 1996: 13) but rather to reverse its direction. Now I want to suggest that Kant’s endeavour fails because what is involved is the collapse of the object into the process whereby we understand it. At this point Hegel’s critique of Kant is absolutely central in exposing the weaknesses of Kant’s position.

Hegel’s immanent phenomenological critique of Kant Hegel’s major achievement in his criticism of Kant was to correctly identify that the latter’s definition of the object as a synthetic unity imposed onto a plurality of simple intuitions constituted deontologicising rationalism. Hegel rejected the basic Humean assumption that was presupposed and extensively developed by Kant, namely the notion that objects were mere congeries of properties brought together by the consciousness. He wanted to revive the Platonic/Aristotelian notion of the object as immanent irreducible unity that was not at all dependent on the character of human experience. That is, the object-in-itself had an intrinsic unity that made it more than the sum of its elemental material properties. But Hegel didn’t want to get rid of sense-experience because he thought that it could help human beings come to understand non-material essences. In this regard Hegel appealed to the Aristotelian notion of the immanence of Platonic Forms. Plato had argued that unified essences consisted of non-material transcendent Forms above and beyond the world that can be experienced by human cognitive faculties. Accordingly, he displayed stoicism about the world of matter (he called it pure matter) because according to him this was not the domain where the unity of the object was to be found. Instead he argued that the understanding of objects depended on intellectual philosophical intuition known as pure reason. Aristotle, on the other hand, posited the immanence of Platonic Forms, an interconnection between matter and form known as

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matter–form composites (Bhaskar 1994: 182). Platonic Forms were actualised in experience in this account in the sense that perception of matter by the consciousness always revealed something about the intrinsic unity and essence of the object, as it was independent of that perception. And so induction became a way for humankind to gain knowledge of essences (Forms). But since the logic of induction involves the restriction of universals to the level of empirical laws (i.e. an implicit Humean-like scepticism about the possibility of knowledge disconnected from experience) Aristotle supplemented induction with the notion that ultimately knowledge of essences depended upon Platonic intellectual intuition. Thus, in the end he failed to immanentise transcendent Forms because he knew that induction taken through to its logical conclusion would lead to their dissolution. Philosophy was therefore left at the Platonic/Aristotelian fault-line (Bhaskar 1994: 5), stuck between two methods of knowledge acquisition – philosophical intellectual intuition and empirical-sensate intuition (i.e. the poles of antinomy). Hegel’s resolution involved the transformation of objective idealism (Plato) into absolute idealism. The empirical-sensate pole was given recognition in so far as the consciousness did indeed experience a plurality of intuitive sensations. But this was hardly a concession to the empiricists and Kant because Hegel did not accept their dissolution of a detectable intrinsic unity in the material world; objectivity did not depend on our experiences for its realisation but it had an ontologically primary unity (Stern 1996: 42). This was because matter was defined as merely the finite manifestation of objective unified essences that reside at the level of pure reason. Thus, the essence of a finite material object lies in something other than its appearance to us in its material form (Colletti 1973: 14). And so we have the resurrection of intellectual philosophical intuition but without the thought–matter split of Platonic Stoicism that led to the dissolution of the empirical-sensate pole of antinomy. We should therefore see the Hegelian contention that the unity of the object lies in the mind as a far cry from Kant’s transcendental subject. That the Kantian concepts and categories were synthetic meant they could not exist without sense-intuition and thus experience – their purpose was merely to help the mind deal with the plurality of perceptions. But since Hegel wanted to place objective unity in the philosophical consciousness then the object did not depend at all on experience. He argued that by tying ontology to experience Kant in fact deontologicised the world because he reduced ideas about the constitution of the object to the status of ideas concerning how we experience the world. We should understand this as precisely the sort of thing Collier means when he defines subjectivism as the error of believing that the process whereby we gain knowledge becomes an object to be studied. Nevertheless, Hegel thought that Kantianism had some promise insofar as it represented an important rejection of the empiricist claim that the consciousness passively receives data from the world and constructs unities thereafter. The foundation of Kantian critique – the notion of concepts and categories – were valuable discoveries about the mind’s function in constituting the world of experience. But Hegel wanted to radicalise critique by giving concepts and categories

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the status of ontological objective essences located at the level of pure reason; i.e. as ontological totalities that were independent of our experiences. Thus, science had the task of progressively organising the mind’s complete picture of the world provided by pure reason; that is, to make the whole that the mind already has coherent to it. Hence, there was no such thing as Kantian matter-in-itself because what we experience through sense-intuition is merely the projection of human consciousness in the historical process of its self-formation, a process that completes itself when we come to awareness of the intrinsic holistic unity of everything in what Hegel calls Absolute Reason or Spirit. Now, for Hegel Absolute Reason/Spirit means essentially an incontestable and complete idea of absolute human freedom. Each epoch is characterised by a particular idea of absolute freedom that is presented by the philosophical consciousness as eternal. The character of the material world of that epoch therefore is the representation of that infinite idea in finite matter. This meant that ontological dialectics reclaimed their speculative character reintroducing questions of intrinsic unity and wholeness to objects. Epochal change occurs when, guided by pure reason, philosophical consciousness exposes an idea as incomplete and replaces it with a more complete idea which is then posited as eternal. When I say ‘more complete’ I mean one that is closer to infinity as it exists in Absolute Reason/Spirit. This is basically Hegel’s view of the history of philosophy – a teleological progression of consciousness guided by Absolute Reason/Spirit and ending when infinite mind is reconciled to that infinite Absolute Reason/Spirit. Let us look at what Hegel is proposing in more detail. If matter is merely representations of historically progressing pure reason then it has a definite relationship with pure reason in that it is constantly developing towards unity with it; towards realising itself and Hegel calls this the dialectic of matter. Thus, the relationship between thought and matter is a natural one (Hegel 1969: 129). Reality is conceived as the logical unity of positive and negative in all things; the co-existence in a material object of its character as illusory being as a material object in which its true being or essence as pure reason or thought is reflected. As such this move represented the Hegelian response to the ascending phase of the ancient Ionian strand of dialectic (i.e. that there existed a higher reality of objective nonmaterial essences) (Bhaskar 1994: 116). This is how we should understand his claim that materiality, although not objective in itself, is nevertheless part of objectivity. In our experiences Hegel believed that we therefore could differentiate between our fallible ideas of the things we encounter in the world and their essences which transcend it completely, something which Kant could never allow for because his unified objects were products of the transcendental subject. But just as Hegel argued that he could eliminate Kantian subjectivistic deontologicising rationalism by making sense-intuition dependent on non-empirical objective essences, he also felt he could eliminate the source of Platonic subjectivistic deontologicisation – pure matter – by making pure reason dependent on matter for its self-realisation. This was the Hegelian response to the descending phase of Ionian dialectics (i.e. how essential objective unities are manifested in the phenomenal world of alienated (pluralistic) essences) (Bhaskar 1994: 116).

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Hegel hoped that by making idealism ‘self-consistent’, in which negative matter was seen as part of pure reason rather than the latter existing totally separately from the former, there would be no ‘dualistic or non-rational residues’ (pure matter). And so just as Hegel’s response to the ascending phase of dialectic eliminated the Kantian phenomena–noumena duality so his response to the descending phase eliminated the Platonic matter–being dichotomy. As Bhaskar has noted: Hegel … develop(ed) a self-consistent idealism, which, in fusing the finite in the infinite, would retain no dualistic or non-rational residues, thereby finally realising and vindicating the primordial postulate of the identity of being and thought in thought … at the same time underpinned by a progressivist view of history … the speculative understanding of reality as absolute spirit shows, in response to the problem posed by the … Ionian strand, how the world exists (and … develops) as a rational totality precisely so as (infinite) spirit can come to philosophical consciousness in the Hegelian system demonstrating this. (Bhaskar 1994: 117) Hegel thus thought that Absolute Reason/Spirit reconciled the Ionian strand with the other major strand of ancient dialectic – Eleatic – by making dialectic the logical process of reason (Bhaskar 1994: 115). As a result the poles of antinomy were also reconciled. The world was not simply what the character of our experience said it was by virtue of the non-empirical nature of objects but this did not mean that our experience yielded nothing of objectivity. With all of this Hegel hoped to establish the grounds for genuinely objective ontology and epistemology. In terms of our discussion in the introduction it was Hegel’s claim to firmly establish the ‘aboutness’ of our experience. I want to stress that this does not mean that Hegel is above reproach on the issue of subjectivism, far from it, but his analysis of the weaknesses of the Kantian version of critique provides us with an important principle – that to be sustainable, any notion of objectivity must be posited as prevalent outside the ways in which we have experiences but that these experiences nonetheless have a role in helping us to come to an understanding of it. And the logic of Hegel’s contention that what we say is objective varies from different definite forms of consciousness means that he believed that objectivity is determined by the consciousness itself (rather than by transcendentally subjective functions of it within the domain of experience) as it developed towards its fullest form in Absolute Reason/Spirit. Let me elucidate. Because Hegel’s conception of matter as something negative destroys the confidence we can have that the external objects we experience really objectively exist (or what Lucio Colletti (1973: 68) called the sensecertainty in the existence of what is immediately perceptible) the objects of our experience become fundamentally unstable. And so it is pointless to try to posit anything objective in the domain of experience itself because its function is

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simply to help the mind understand non-empirical/actual essences that reside within it. Given this, if we, as Kant does, tie objectivity to the transcendental subject then we cannot possibly sustain objectivity in any meaningful way. To be sure, Hegel recognised that experience must be about understanding objective essences that reside in the mind but these essences are not products of the mind’s synthesising representations of material objects-in-themselves that it experiences but are products of (non-empirical) pure reason. Hegel therefore wants to give consciousness its own criterion of truth measurement – pure reason – and so the objectivity of the things about which our knowledge is becomes disconnected from experience. This is known as Hegel’s phenomenological method (McCarthy 1988: 31). The problem Hegel has with the Kantian transcendental consciousness is that by virtue of the transcendental subject the object does not reside external to the moment of experience but is extrapolated from it and this is why Hegel dismissed Kantian ontology, as we have seen, as fundamentally deontologicising. Now we will see in a moment when we come to look at Marx that Kant’s principle that through our experiences we gain knowledge of objects that have transcendental a priori structures is very useful to our understanding of how the former’s inversion of Hegelian idealist dialectics establishes a genuinely objective form of materialism. This is so because we see that Hegel’s principle that essences are non-empirical/actual is evident in the Marxian idea that the objects of possible sense-perception have a priori transcendental structures that are prevalent independent of experience. And in this way Marx can get the transcendental method of critique out of the Kantian subjectivistic trap of deontologicising objectivity. We will see that this is accomplished by placing transcendental structures in a knowable transcendental object rather than subject, thereby transforming transcendental idealism into transcendental realism. Before we do I want to point out that the way Hegel commits subjectivistic errors is more complicated than it might at first seem. Pure reason is not as independent of experience as we might think. As we shall now see, Hegel cannot adequately resolve Kantian subjectivistic deontologicisation because he must have recourse to Kantian metaphysical empiricism in order to sustain it.

Hegel’s recourse to Kantian metaphysical empiricism Bhaskar calls Hegel’s unification of finitude and infinity in a theory of unity-indiversity spiritual constellational monism. (Bhaskar 1994: 121). The dependence of the finite (matter) upon the infinite is known in dialectical terms as the identity of exclusive categories. But the unity-in-diversity is also dependent on the identification of these exclusive opposites – what we have already said in our discussion of Hegelian epistemology is the conceptualisation of material by empirical science known as the exclusion of mutual opposites. And we have seen that this is the descending phase of the Ionian dialectical strand. Thus, Hegel’s central logical claim, upon which his entire project of achieving a matter–thought organic unity depends, is that the identity of exclusive opposites depends upon their exclusion

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(Bhaskar 1994: 118–119), what Bhaskar calls the moment of formal logical contradiction (Bhaskar 1993: 57). Now Hegel’s dialectic consists of three moments – Understanding (U), Dialectic (D) and Reason (R). (This process is perhaps more well known as the thesis–antithesis–synthesis triad.) It is illustrated in Figure 11.1. U is the moment of the exclusion of mutual opposites (Humean) and D the moment of formal logical contradiction when we locate contradictions, anomalies or inadequacies in our experiences (Bhaskar calls this a s transform). We should understand this in Hegelian terms as the moment when our experience is yet to fulfil its function of organising (and hence reflecting) pure reason’s complete picture of the world. Finally, R is the transcendence of experience altogether (via what Bhaskar refers to as a t transform) in the positing of essences beyond material forms (Bhaskar 1994: 119). Hegel correctly contends that Kant’s principal error is that he must have recourse to the empirical (the development of a metaphysics of experience that is constrained by empiricist ontology) thereby containing his transcendental epistemology at the Humean moment. And we know that Hegel breaks from the empirical domain by positing a third level of speculative unified essences. This moment leads to what Bhaskar has called post-philosophical wisdom (PPW). We should understand this as the moment when our experience at last fulfils its function of organising the complete picture of the world produced by pure reason. For Hegel, the end of the process is represented by a return to pre-scientific and pre-empirical-sensate speculative philosophy of immanence in what Bhaskar calls pre-reflective thought (PRT). (Bhaskar refers to the return to pre-reflective thought as a u transform at PPW.) Once this has been achieved there is a transition to a period of scientific and philosophical stability at U (via what Bhaskar calls a r transform).

U

σ

D

τ

R

ρ PRT ν

PPW PRT = pre-reflective thought PPW = post-philosophical wisdom

Figure 11.1 The logic of Hegel’s dialectic Source: Bhaskar 1993: 22; 1994: 119.

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But Hegel is guilty of his own strictures against Kant in that his realised idealism cannot progress beyond transcendental subjectivity (what we have said is Hegel’s phenomenological method). There are two parts to this failure. The first part concerns the rather obvious accusation that we may level at Hegel that by equating objectivity with pure reason we lose what I have called genuine objectivity. We can say that this is Hegel’s error in his response to the Eleatic strand of traditional dialectics (i.e. the idea of dialectic as Reason) (Bhaskar 1993: 17; 1994: 116–117). His spiritual constellational monist contention that R is speculative means that questions of being are reduced to thought because the natural ultimately conforms to its notion. This is the Hegelian transfiguration of actuality onto the infinite realm, what we might call the immanentising of transcendent reality (i.e. the finite in the infinite, as we have seen). The less obvious part concerns his realised idealist response to both phases of Ionian dialectical philosophy (Bhaskar 1993: 17; 1994: 116). In the U–D–R schema Hegel correctly points out the need for D and R moments but since the theory of the identity of exclusive opposites depends upon critical science it is ultimately dependent upon what is achieved at U because we return to R only after we have completed the process that begins with U. In other words, the study of the realm of being which can only be undertaken by philosophical thought in accordance with Hegel’s absolute idealism is premised upon the process of scientific knowledge acquisition. We said above that Hegel’s dissolution of Platonic pure matter hinged upon demonstrating that Absolute Spirit depended upon finite matter for its self-realisation. This is important because Hegel believes that valid scientific laws are based on the empirical-sensate intuition of pluralities and so he advocates a speculative ontological dialectic that has as its fundamental condition a Humean moment. That is, Hegel transcendentises actuality and in so doing eternalises it (Bhaskar 1994: 121–122). As Bhaskar argues, ‘Hegel presents … the process of thinking generally, transformed into an independent subject (the idea), as the demiurge of the empirical world. … [Hegel’s] thought actually consists in uncritically received empirical data … which is in this way reified and eternalised’ (Bhaskar 1994: 126). Being is thus reduced to the conceptualisation of being starting at the level of experience. And so Hegel rationally transfers empiricist categories onto the realm that is supposed to transcend those categories. Even with the crucial third moment (R) we are unable to break free from the first Humean moment. Hegel is ultimately reliant on the empirical-sensate in very much the same way as Kant. Bhaskar argues, on the one hand, that the consequence of transcendental subjectivity is that Kant cannot sustain the knowability of the intellect (Bhaskar 1994: 204); how the a priori presuppositions of critical philosophy can be proven if they are only a function of experience the consequence of which is the reduction of objectivity to the status of discursivity. But Hegel’s ultimate reliance on the empirical-sensate means that transcendental subjectivity is simply transformed into a speculative form. And so he cannot, despite his claims to the contrary, progress beyond Kant. Just as Kant de-ontologicises the world and loses genuine objectivity, so

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does Hegel. As Bhaskar contends, Kantian transcendentalism is speculatively transfigured: Hegel’s totality is empty of non-actualised essence, as it is of essence not intrinsically related to transcendental subjectivity, indicating his failure to transcend transcendental idealism in respect of science. In effect, Hegel’s conceptual necessity is Kant’s transcendental necessity without Kant’s restricting condition, so that Hegel spiritualistically ontologically transsubstantiates the Kantian phenomenal world, without Kantian discursivity. (Bhaskar 1993: 339) I now want to conclude this chapter by discussing how Marx uses inverted forms of Hegelian essences and Kantian transcendentalism to formulate a materialist philosophy of science that can confidently claim to be genuinely objectivist.

Towards materialist objectivism – Marxian epistemology and ontology I want to start by looking at some textual evidence from Marx to support my case, a lengthy passage from the introduction to the Critique of Political Economy (1857): The concrete concept is concrete because it is a synthesis of many definitions, thus representing the unity of diverse aspects. It appears therefore in reasoning as a summing-up, a result, and not as the starting-point, although it is the real point of origin, and thus also the point of origin of perception and imagination. The first procedure attenuates meaningful images to abstract definitions, the second leads from abstract definitions by way of reasoning to the reproduction of the concrete situation. Hegel accordingly conceived the illusionary idea that the real world is the result of thinking which causes its own synthesis, its own deepening and its own movement; whereas the method of advancing from the abstract to the concrete is simply the way in which thinking assimilates the concrete and reproduces it as a concrete mental category. This is, however, by no means the process of evolution of the concrete world itself. … Thus to consciousness – and this comprises philosophical consciousness – which regards the comprehending mind as the real man, and hence the comprehended world as such as the only real world; to consciousness, therefore, the evolution of categories appears as the actual process of production – which unfortunately is given an impulse from outside – whose result is the world; and this (which is however again a tautological expression) is true in so far as the concrete totality, as a mental fact, is indeed a product of thinking, of comprehension; but it is by no means a product of the idea which evolves spontaneously and whose thinking proceeds outside and above perception and imagination, but

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is the result of the assimilation and transformation of perceptions and images into concepts. The totality as a conceptual entity seen by the intellect is a product of the thinking intellect which assimilates the world in the only way open to it. … [Nevertheless] the concrete subject remains outside the intellect and independent of it. … The subject, society, must always be envisaged therefore as the pre-condition of comprehension even when the theoretical method is employed. (Marx 1977a: 206–207)3 We can break the analysis of the passage into three main parts – the Hegelian, Kantian and what I want to call the materialist–realist moments respectively. A Hegelian logic is evident when Marx describes the ‘concrete’ as the ‘synthesis of many definitions’, ‘a unity of diverse aspects’. What Marx is arguing in this passage is that in the process of thinking – the conceptualisation of the concrete – the concrete appears as a resultant. This is the Hegelian moment in Marx’s conception of the ‘concrete’ when it is seen as the ‘synthesis of many definitions’, ‘a unity of diverse aspects’; a unity of diverse determinations in the consciousness which enables conceptualisations of the concrete and hence truth-claims to arise. These ‘many definitions’ of the concept constitute historico-culturally grounded forms of knowledge based on the Hegelian truism that ‘the concrete totality, as a mental fact, is indeed the product of thinking’. We might call this the changing forms that subjective creativity takes. The synthesis of these diverse definitions is therefore the point at which thought, by virtue of this fact that the concrete totality appears to result from the concept, seems to reformulate its own criteria of truthmeasurement thereby transforming the conceptualisation of the concrete. It is therefore the point at which science goes beyond the moment of observation and onto this essential (conceptual) reality (McCarthy 1988: 35). It is the R moment in Hegel’s U-D-R triad. Insofar as the concrete is a product of thought it is seen to be a point of arrival for epistemology, the place where the quest for truth ends because thought ‘causes its own synthesis, it own deepening and its own movement’ that results in the production of the concrete. As such, it is the PPW moment in the U–D–R Hegelian phenomenological schema. This therefore takes the process beyond the Kantian transcendental one whereby the world of perception is seen as something produced by the philosophical intellect. This is suggestive of the method of phenomenological immanent critique in that the consciousness does not explain the essence of phenomena, contra Kant, from within the domain of Humean empiricism, but rather transcends the domain of the empirical altogether. This goes contrary to Kant’s idealist contention that the process of the conceptualisation of unified and structured objects is tied to the processes whereby experience is appropriated to the understanding. We have seen how this involves the Kantian subjectivistic error of restricting the concrete as a mental category to the domain of the experience of the object. And we know that this is Hegelianism’s usefulness in exposing Kantian subjectivistic deontologicisation. We can therefore see how Hegelian dialectical epistemology overcomes the normativism necessitated by Kant’s insistence that unified objects are tied to the

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domain of experience. Epistemology becomes a fundamentally dialectical process whereby changing forms of mental categories are allowed. Nevertheless, Marx believes that in reality essences only appear to be products of thought alone whereas it is actually thought that is produced by the material world external to it. Non-empirical/actual ‘essences’ become material in this account; rather than being products of pure reason they assume a genuinely mindindependent ‘in-themselves’ character. This is the moment of Marx’s inversion of Hegel because the essences of objects that transcend the domains of the empirical and actual lie in materiality. This is an important move by Marx because it is evidence of his intention to remove the very thing that, as we have seen, ultimately ties the Hegelian account of objectivity to experience (thereby making it subjectivistic), namely its speculative character. Marx establishes the grounds for genuine objectivity by getting rid of speculative essences that, despite Hegel’s opposite intention, simply bring us back to empiricism. However, I want to suggest that Marx is only successful in this because he employs a critical method that involves defining objectivity in transcendentally realist terms. In order for Marx’s theory of non-empirical/actual material essences that are knowable through (but not reducible to) experience to deliver, then the essences he posits must have transcendental a priori structures (i.e., transcendental structures that are the condition of possibility of experience). We know from our discussion in the introduction that genuinely objective ontology must involve this type of thinking about the object. And, as we also know, Kantian transcendental critique means positing an ontologically grounded, structured and unified object by virtue of the a priori transcendental subject – the existence of which is the condition of possibility of experience. But we know that grounding what is a priori in the transcendental subject means that the object is defined in terms of the process whereby we wish to gain knowledge. The fact that Marx wants to ground reality in matter means that his object represents the materialist transformation of Kantian transcendental structures, because what makes it a condition of possibility of experience is not synthetic a priori structures of the consciousness but real structures of matter. In this way, he dissolves the transcendental subject and instead makes a priori structures intrinsic-material components of the thing-in-itself thereby reconstituting it as a knowable objectin-itself and so freeing the objects of sense perception from their dependence on the processes of human knowledge acquisition. Hence, we have a knowable transcendental object. Thus, by positing intrinsic-material a priori structures Marx has the means of making the materialist inversion of Hegelian non-empirical/actual essences genuinely independent of speculative reason and, ultimately, the domain of experience. That Marx’s ontological theory was informed by the transcendental way of viewing the object can be demonstrated in his use of retroductive techniques. Derek Sayer (1979a, 1979b) argues that something analogous to the method of Kantian transcendental analytic is evident in Marx’s works on political economy. It will be remembered that the transcendental analytic was Kant’s use of transcendental subjectivity to define the object as intrinsically tied to the way we gain

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knowledge. Marx, like Kant, worked from phenomenal forms that appeared to have an objective mind-independent existence to their conditions of possibility and specifically to their historical conditions of possibility. This is central to Sayer’s thesis: ‘It is just such an analytic, I shall argue, which furnishes Marx with the principles on whose basis he eventually constructs the scientifically adequate historical categories’ (Sayer 1979b: 109). According to Sayer’s analysis, Marx claims that a priori categories – transhistorical categories that all forms of production share – are necessary in order to identify those characteristics of specific productive forms that define them as unique (Sayer 1979b: 113). That is, without the a priori deduction of certain transhistorical categories it is impossible to identify those features of specific productive forms that are unique to them. These concepts are thus the a priori conditions of existence of phenomenal forms analogous in method to the identification of the structures of the mind in Kant’s analysis. The difference is that Marx’s structures are material and real rather than the result of a cognitive synthesis, a difference that allows him to posit transhistorical categories as also a posteriori because they could only be identified by studying various modes of production throughout history and drawing comparative conclusions from them. This is a rather big difference between Marx and Kant not least because it undermines the latter’s Copernican Revolution, enough of a difference to ensure that we could never stretch the analogy far enough to risk classifying Marx as a Kantian (Sayer 1979a: 36). But I don’t think that this is enough to deny that fairly crucial methodological similarities can be found. The importance of a posteriori analysis is simply the consequence of placing a priori transcendental structures in matter rather than in the mind, as I hope to show in a moment and, while this may shatter the foundations of Kant’s Copernican Revolution, it does not shatter the logic of his transcendental method. Let me elucidate. I first of all want to agree with Sayer’s contention that Marx used a posteriori analysis. To this end it is necessary to demonstrate that the starting point of Marx’s substantive social scientific investigations must be with phenomenal forms. For example, what all labour-products have in common is their use-value and is thus said to be the natural form of production in general and is ‘the necessary condition, independent of all forms of society, for the existence of the human race; it is an eternal nature-imposed necessity, without which there can be no material exchanges between man and nature and therefore no life’ (Marx 1977b: 50). But he only arrives at this generalisation via the study of the commodity that is a specific form in capitalist economies and so a priori categories depend upon scientific study. After identifying the phenomenon of the commodity form Marx can then distinguish its natural ahistorical attributes that it shares with all forms of labour (its use-value) from those which establish it as a definite social form (its exchange-value) (Marx 1977b: ch. 1, § 1). It is those characteristics of production in general that allow Marx to identify those characteristics of definite social forms which do not accord with them and it is in this way that he is provided with his epistemically interesting subject matter, the study of those characteristics in specific modes of production which define their

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status as specific modes (the specific forms of exchange-value) that thus constitute their socio-historical forms. It is these modes that constitute Marx’s explananda and he thus proceeds to identify their conditions of possibility, their explanans. The necessarily a posteriori character of Marx’s method means that transhistorical categories cannot be said to have any real existence independent of the particular forms in which they inhere; they are merely attributes of phenomena (Sayer 1979b: 79). In the ‘General Introduction’ to the Grundrisse (1857) Marx is clear on the matter: There are characteristics which all stages of production have in common, and which are established as general ones by the mind; but the so-called general preconditions of all production are nothing more than these abstract moments with which no real historical stage of production can be grasped. (Marx 1974: 88) And so we can see how Marx’s method depends upon precisely the use of a posteriori analysis because it is only by distinguishing ahistorical from definite aspects of social phenomena that we can proceed to uncover that which is epistemically interesting to us – our explananda – towards explaining their conditions of possibility – our explanans. What is striking in all of this is that what Marx seems to be doing here is trying to identify transhistorical characteristics that are aspects of material objects without which their historical forms and so our experience of them could not arise. It is obvious that in the process of identifying the phenomenological object he is also identifying its material conditions of possibility analogous to Kant’s a priori structures of the consciousness. However, because these conditions are intrinsically material their conditions of possibility of existence are not considered in terms of our experience of them. It is in matter rather than cognition that we find the a priori transcendental structures that provide us with the conditions of possibility of our experiencing them. And it is precisely this material nature that necessitates the a posteriori method. Freeing the object from its transcendentally subjective dependence on forms of cognition allows us to posit phenomena such as exchange-values as objectively real in a way that meets our criteria of genuine objectivity. And so we have in Marxian a posteriori transcendentalism the revival of the knowable and real (rather than ideal) transcendental object.

Materialist dialectics and the possibilities for human emancipation I want to finish by drawing some important conclusions from all of this. If Marx can be said to attribute successfully to non-empirical material objects the character of transcendentally real objects then the a posteriori techniques that this necessitates must involve a realist dialectical ontology. An analogy of this approach to objective reality can be found in the development of Bhaskar’s

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transcendentally real object into a dialectical transcendentally real object. As I said in the introduction, Bhaskar’s earlier works establish the abstract 1M conditions of transcendental realist objectivity – natural necessity and transfactuality (allowing for referential detachment and alethic truth). His later works introduce 2E, 3L and 4D categories and are the spatio-temporal functioning of the abstract 1M categories. And so it seems to me that we should see the works concerned with establishing the transcendental realist object (Bhaskar 1978) and its implications for social science in terms of critical naturalism (1998) and explanatory critique (1987) as similar to Marx’s conceptualisation of objective reality in terms very similar to Hegelian methodology and at least analogous to Kantian transcendentalism. But the very fact that Bhaskar’s philosophy of the sciences includes the Hegelian principle of non-empirical objectivity opens the possibility of developing a dialectical significance to transcendental realism which is precisely what he does (Bhaskar 1993, 1994) because we can attribute to non-empirical objective material essences the character of changing spatiotemporalities. In this regard Bhaskar is giving the transcendental object a realist dialectical character, something which Kant never wanted to do. Given his rejection of pure reason the latter dismissed the method of traditional dialectical inquiry and set about in the sections of Critique that came under the general title ‘The Transcendental Dialectic’ to tie dialectics to possible objects of sense perception only. He regarded speculative dialectics as ‘that part of transcendental logic which showed the mutually contradictory or antinomic state into which the intellect fell when not harnessed to the data of experience’ (Bhaskar 1994: 116). Conversely, that Marx posits a knowable transcendental object means that transcendental philosophy could also involve positing real dialectical material objects. Thus, just as Bhaskar (1993, 1994) arrives at a dialectical transcendental material object, so does Marx, and so we arrive at a new way of looking at the latter’s dialectical materialism. Why this is important to emancipatory social science is because it is precisely dialectics that Bhaskar (1993) refers to as the ‘pulse of freedom’. The centrality of realist dialectics to scientific projects can be demonstrated in the DREI model of scientific analysis (Bhaskar 1987: 68; Collier 1994: 163). In their search for descriptions (D) of law-like behaviour scientists retroduce (R) underlying causes for empirical events and so bring science onto a transcendental level where material causal generative mechanisms analogous in structure to Kant’s transcendental subject (but transformed into a transcendental object) are posited. This character of the transcendental object necessitates Elaboration/Elimination (E) and Identification (I), both Hegelian moments. E involves eliminating inadequate hypotheses and elaborating on accepted ones that rely on the identification (I) of the generative mechanisms that are said to offer explanations of the behaviour of the phenomenon in question. Now we see how the Hegelian epistemological dialectic (U–D–R) schema is introduced. This is because explanations lie at a level beyond the empirical, thereby giving us a dialectical epistemology that is premised upon a genuinely objective dialectical ontology; we know that this is the important contribution

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that Hegel makes to our account of objective reality and how we gain knowledge of it. And so the act of referential detachment depends upon the materialist inversion of Hegelian notions of ontological and epistemological dialectics. With the materialist transformation of these important Kantian and Hegelian aspects we arrive at dialectical ontological and epistemological processes that avoid the subjectivistic errors of these respective philosophies. By grounding theory/practice contradictions that Hegelian methodology introduces in a transcendental materialist–realist dissolution of Kant’s transcendental subject, Marxists can start talking about taking concrete physical action to remove conditions that they see as perpetuating human injustice. By seeing theory/practice inconsistencies (antithesis or D moments) in terms of transcendental realist non-empirical/actual essences, Marxists can start talking about the existence of genuinely real and objective conditions of injustice. It is in this way that abstract (1M) realist concepts involve concrete (spatiotemporal grounded) (2E) concepts of ontological bi/polyvalence. Remember that I said spatio-temporal functioning of 1M categories involves real absences thereby introducing us to ontological bi/polyvalence. As such, the concepts of bi/polyvalence function at the Third Level (3L) at which various levels of stratified being inter- and intra-act within totalities causing negations; it is the domain where real absences are created. Bhaskar posits a Fourth Dimension (4D) and it is here that real absences are negated by intentional transformative human praxis (e.g. the absenting of unfreedom in capitalism). It is only by virtue of positing transcendentally real essences that we can start talking about concrete material totalities (3L) and the possibility of (4D) transformative absenting (negating) structures that must be responsible for causing empirical outcomes in the social and political world. In short, Hegel’s conception of dialectics provides us with the means of exposing the ontological monovalence that clearly results from Kant’s suspicion of traditional dialectical philosophy. Despite this, we should be aware that Hegel’s error of conceptualising non-empirical objects in terms of speculative philosophical reasoning meant that this version of unity-in-diversity was irresolvably ontologically monovalent as well because the errors at 1M involve a commitment to the denial at 2E of real transformative absenting processes (and thus detotalisation at 3L and loss of 4D praxis). In other words, the category of absence – so crucial to the spatio-temporal functioning of 1M realist categories – is lost and so too is ontological bi/polyvalence. Thus, truth measurement – what is objectively true independent of our experience of the world – is not internal to the consciousness but exists independently of it, allowing us to take physical action to remedy conditions of existence that do not accord with objective truth and so create new concrete social conditions. These conditions are then subjected to further scientific dialectical scrutiny in a consequently expanded universe of discourse. (Bhaskar 1994: 119; 1993: 22). In all of this we should see that dialectics become genuinely objective when tied to the Hegelian notion of non-empirical essence on the one hand and the transcendentally real object on the other and I want to suggest that this is exactly what we find with Marx.

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Conclusion Hopefully I have done enough to prove that there is enough evidence that Marx, even his later works on political economy, employed a comprehensive system of thought via an inversion of Hegelian and Kantian methodological principles. The logic of Kantian accounts of the a priori structures of the object that we wish to gain knowledge of is instrumental to the exposure of the subjectivistic weaknesses of Hegel’s own account and the logic of Hegelian accounts of the independence of objectivity from experience to expose subjectivistic weaknesses of Kant’s transcendental subject. Alone, Kant and Hegel both fall foul of idealist subjectivity, but the logic of Marx’s system shows that together, and materialistically inverted, their methodologies are essential to genuinely objective ontology and epistemology.

Notes 1

2

3

I am aware that there is some controversy regarding the correct definition of Kant’s ‘transcendental object’. Broad contends that the classification of it that I have used belongs to the ‘very early stages of Kant’s critical thinking’ according to which the transcendental object was ‘the unknown cause which produces phenomena’ (Broad 1978: 226). But for our present purposes the definition of it provided by Robert Stern is as good as any and so I have retained it. Andrew Collier has shown that the stratified nature of being necessitates horizontal explanation in science – the interaction of causally efficacious levels of being in outcomes – and that emergence (e.g. that of sociological from psychological) necessitates studying the real causal powers of each level at an abstract level (Collier 1989: 60). In the Grundrisse, the passage is repeated almost word for word (Marx 1974:101).

Bibliography Bhaskar, R. (1978) A Realist Theory of Science, Brighton: Harvester. —— (1987) Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation, London: Verso. —— (1993) Dialectic – The Pulse of Freedom, London: Verso. —— (1994) Plato Etc. – The Problems of Philosophy and Their Resolution, London: Verso. —— (1998) The Possibility of Naturalism – A Philosophical Critique of the Contemporary Human Sciences, London: Routledge. Broad, C.D. (1978) Kant – An Introduction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Colletti, L. (1973) Marxism and Hegel, London: New Left Books. Collier, A. (1989) Scientific Realism and Socialist Thought, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. —— (1994) Critical Realism – An Introduction to Roy Bhaskar’s Philosophy, London: Verso. —— (1998) ‘The Power of Negative Thinking’ in Archer, M. et al (1998) Critical Realism: Essential Readings, London: Routledge. —— (2003) In Defence of Objectivity and Other Essays: On Realism, Existentialism and Politics, London: Routledge. Hegel, G.W.F. (1969) Science of Logic, trans. A.V. Miller, London: Allen and Unwin. —— (1977) The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J.B. Baillie, New York: Humanities Press. Hume, D. (1978) A Treatise on Human Nature, ed. L.A. Selby-Bigg, revised and notes by P.H. Nidditch, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Kant, I. (1998) Critique of Pure Reason, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Locke, J. (1975) An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. P.H. Nidditch, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Marx, K. (1974) Grundrisse – Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, Harmondsworth: Penguin. —— (1977a) A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Moscow: Progress Publishers. —— (1977b) Capital: A Critique of Political Economy – Volume I, London: Lawrence and Wishart. McCarthy, G. (1988) Marx’s Critique Of Science and Positivism: The Methodological Foundations of Political Economy, Dordrecht: Kluwer. Sayer, D. (1979a) ‘Science as Critique: Marx vs. Althusser’, in J. Mepham and D.-H. Rubin (eds), Issues in Marxist Philosophy: Volume 3 – Epistemology, Science, Ideology, Brighton: Harvester. —— (1979b) Marx’s Method: Ideology, Science and Critique in Capital, Brighton: Harvester. Stern, R. (1996) Hegel, Kant and the Structure of the Object, London: Routledge.

12 The contradictions of capital Christopher J. Arthur

This paper offers alternatives to orthodox interpretations of Marx in several areas. Mainstream Marxist theory reads concepts such as value, and socially necessary labour time, largely in a technical sense. But all such categories should be explicated within an account of the specifically capitalist social form of production and exchange. I will show that, in the capital-relation, labour and value are not to be positively identified with each other, but rather are dialectically interpenetrating opposites; the capital-relation is constituted as a contradiction in essence. This theoretical diagnosis of the contradictions of capitalism leads ineluctably to the objective necessity for its overthrow.

The object of Capital1 I hold that from the start the object of Marx’s Capital is the capitalist economy. This means that the circulation of commodities discussed in the early chapters is in truth the circulation of capitalistically produced commodities. Their value, and the relevant determinations of labour, are concretely constituted only in the capital relation. But it has to be acknowledged that the early chapters of Capital do not even mention wage-labourers, capitalists and the like. Why not? The orthodox understanding of Marx’s method explains this by arguing that he presents his theory through a sequence of models, that a model of ‘simple commodity production’ allows him to give a complete account of the law of value, and that the subsequent introduction of a model of capitalism allows him to demonstrate the origin of surplus-value through the specific inflection capital gives to this law of value. In opposition to this reading, the position taken here is that the order of Marx’s presentation is not that of a sequence of models of more and more complex objects. It is that of a progressive development of the forms of the same object, namely capitalism, from a highly abstract initial concept of it to more and more concrete levels of its comprehension. I shall not enter on a discussion of the historicity of ‘simple commodity production’; for there is a prior more interesting question from a theoretical point of view: does the model work conceptually? In such a case exchange at ‘value’ is supposed to take place because otherwise people would switch into the better rewarded occupation. It should be noted that this presupposes that

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everyone knows what labour is expended by others; this is a very doubtful proposition historically. However, even if it is accepted as an idealising assumption it is still true that we have nothing like an objective law operative. For the assumption is here that the only consideration affecting the choices of individuals is avoidance of ‘toil and trouble’, as Adam Smith originally argued; equal quantities of labour are always ‘of equal value to the labourer’, he claimed. This subjective hypothesis has little to do with Marx’s argument that there exists in capitalism an objective law of value which makes exchange at value necessary. If one relies on a merely subjective judgement of producers, then other subjective considerations to do with the trouble of learning new methods, or the preference for one occupation rather than another, may be operative also. Even if Smith’s fishermen noticed their working day was longer than that of the hunters with which they exchanged, they might simply prefer life on the river to the darkness of the forest. Why should there be any tendency to establish a socially necessary labour time? It is only in modern industry that competition within a branch, and the mobility of capital between branches, brings about the development of a common measure. Only in capitalist industry are tea-breaks timed to the second, and abolished entirely if possible. The heart of the matter is not an ideal type of rational economic man read back into the natural state, but the objective rationality of the system of capitalist competition. There is a stark contrast between the peasant saying ‘Time costs nothing’ and the capitalist motto ‘Time is money’. Just because there is exchange of goods produced, this does not mean any law of value governs the ratio of exchange. Price in a pre-capitalist case would be simply a formal mediation, allowing exchange to take place but without any determinate value substance being present. According to Marx the law of value is based on exchange in accordance with socially necessary labour times, but in the case of simple commodity production there is no mechanism that would force a given producer to meet such a target or be driven out of business. When all inputs, including labour power itself, have a value form, and production is subordinated to valorisation, then an objective comparison of rates of return on capital is possible and competition between capitals allows for the necessary enforcement of the law of value. ‘If the value of commodities is determined by the necessary labour-time contained in them’, said Marx in Volume 3 (1981: 180), ‘it is capital that first makes a reality of this mode of determination and continually reduces the labour socially necessary for the production of a commodity.’ If ‘simple commodity production’ is not what chapter 1 of Capital is about, what then is going on there? Marx is dealing with ‘simple’ forms to be sure; but the abstract moment of the whole system analysed is that of simple circulation, commodities being taken as given. Only after developing the categories of circulation is it appropriate to turn to the relations of production that underpin exchange relations apparent in simple circulation. The key transition in Capital is not from simple commodity production to capitalist production, but from the ‘sphere of simple circulation or the exchange of commodities’ to ‘the hidden

The contradictions of capital 185 abode of production’.2 Once this turn is taken, circulation is grasped as the sphere in which production relations are reflected. But, to begin with, circulation is not comprehended as thus mediated. Hence Marx started with commodity value as such; not because value pre-existed capital, but because ‘value … is the most abstract expression of capital … and of the production resting on it’ (Marx 1973: 776). However, just because it is thus abstracted from the capitalist totality, no finished definition of value can be given at the start; for it is to be understood only in its forms of development. Value, therefore, is concretely determined only when the commodity is grasped as a product of capital. Moreover if ‘labour’ itself is situated in the capital relation then interesting consequences follow for the status of the category that are only implicit in chapter 1. This will be the theme of the rest of this paper.

The thesis that ‘labour is value’3 is refuted I presuppose here, then, that genuine values result only from capitalist commodity production, but not from a supposed ‘simple commodity production’. That is the context of this4 and subsequent arguments. As we know, Marx insists that the secret of valorisation in production lies in the distinction between what is bought or hired, namely labour-power, and living labour, the use of labour-power employed during production. But of course the distinction between the value, and the use, of commodities is a general feature of them. It is possible, for example, to distinguish between the cost of machinery and ‘machining’, the more so with automatic machinery. Why is ‘labouring’ different from ‘machining’? With a standard commodity (such as a machine) its value is set by its conditions of production, its use-value is a known quantity, and the use made of it is of no concern to the seller. But labour is not a standard commodity because it fails on all three counts. The wage is set through class struggle in the context of the historically given level of ‘subsistence’. The contract of employment does not guarantee in advance any specific supply of service. On the contrary this too is the outcome of class struggle at the point of production; and, finally, so far from its employment being of no concern to the seller, the inseparability of the labourers from their labour-power means it is of very great importance to them. In these three ways, then, wage-labour is peculiar, and labour power is very different from a standard commodity. Therefore, with wage-labour we have not merely labour-power as a use-value, but we have a use-value which is itself inherently at odds with its social determination as a tool of capital. In its endeavour to organise production, and to maximise output, capital finds that the ‘subjectivity’ of the worker poses unique problems because it gives rise to a definite recalcitrance to being ‘exploited’ which the other factors do not possess. The other ‘factors’ of production, land, machinery, materials, enter with their productive potential given, known in advance; only with labour is productivity contestable and contested, known only in the upshot of the working day. Capital is limited by the extent to which it can enforce the ‘pumping out’ of

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labour services. The consequence of this special feature of labour is that the relation of capital and labour is intrinsically antagonistic. On this basis there is reason to speak of waged labour not so much as ‘productive labour’ but as ‘counterproductive labour’ in that the workers are actually or potentially recalcitrant to capital’s effort to compel them to labour. In the early chapters of Capital it is not yet clear to what exactly ‘socially necessary labour time’ refers. Lacking any other information one takes it in a technical sense; but once this labour time is set in the context of the capital relation it has to be seen as primarily the necessity capital is under to extort labour from the exploited, something which is informed by the balance of class forces. In this way the full implications of its ‘social’ determination are brought out. So, whereas at the start of Capital it is assumed there is no problem about objectified labour appearing as value, we now discover that this is consequent only on the success (partial and always contested) of the struggle to subsume labour under capital. Value is then implicitly a political category, its magnitude being conditioned by class struggle. This has consequences for the conceptualisation of the relation of value and labour. Any theory that conflates labour and value is bound to consider their relation in an entirely positive light; the activity of labouring is immediately identified with a value stream. The critique of capital then has to take the form of a complaint that, while there is a reflux of value to the labourers under the wageform, capital diverts part of the stream to its reservoir of accumulated value. Exploitation consists in expropriating this value. But, on my view, expropriated labour is the real content of value; it is under the value form that the specifically capitalist exploitation of labour occurs; value is constituted through capital subordinating living labour to itself. In Capital Marx (1976: 142) says that ‘labour is not itself value’; although ‘labour creates value’ it ‘becomes value’ only in ‘objective form’ when the labour embodied in one commodity is equated with the labour embodied in another commodity. ‘Only as objectified labour is it value’ (Marx 1988–1994: vol. 34, p. 91). But it is not simply a question of appearing in objectified form. Under capitalist conditions this objectification is at the same time alienation. As Marx (1973: 638) says, value ‘is the product of alien labour, the alienated product of labour’. Alienated labour produces for capital; and thus its product is not to be seen unproblematically as the expression of living labour. New value is the successful reification of living labour. This is why, for a theory grounded on the social form of the economy, ‘labour’ can be correlated with value only in a contradictory way. The distinction in Marx’s Capital between the living labour employed, and its representation as ‘dead labour’ in the value of the product, is put, even more strikingly, in Marx’s Grundrisse where labour is defined as ‘not-value’, that which stands opposed to value but on which valorisation depends.5 Value is not the social recognition of labour’s success at producing a good, but of capital’s success in producing a commodity through alienating labour to itself. Marx spells out the contradictory movement of labour into value when he writes in the 1861–1863 manuscript: ‘This process of the realisation of labour is at the same time the process of its de-realisation. It posits itself objectively, but it

The contradictions of capital 187 posits its objectivity as its own non-being, or as the being of its non-being – the being of capital.’6 By contrast with the orthodox tradition, which sees labour as something positive, issuing in something positive, namely value, then expropriated, we find that behind the positivity of value lies a dialectic of negativity.

Contrary to Marx, the thesis that labour is the ‘creator’ of value is refuted We have seen that in Capital itself Marx said that ‘labour is not itself value’. But he does allow that ‘labour creates value’. However, there is a tension implicit in Marx’s theory of valorisation. He says two things: that labour is the creative source of surplus-value, and that capital is self-valorising value. It is hard to know what ‘self-valorisation’ can mean other than that value as capital creates surplusvalue, which flatly contradicts the thesis that labour creates value. That living labour is the source of new value is something I find convincing. But I dissent from the claim that labour is the creative source of value. I suggest this phrase should be disaggregated: ‘source’ and ‘creator’ are two different things. To create surplus-value is to produce capital by means of capital.7 To be the source of new value is to be that out of which capital creates value. It is the material dependence of the valorisation process on the labour process which grounds the claim that living labour is the source of surplus-value. But source and creator should not be conflated. The source of the tree’s growth is the soil and solar energy; but does the soil ‘create’ the tree? That would be a strange way of talking. It is surely a matter of an immanent force in the tree itself that impels it to seize upon sources of nutrients so as to grow. Another example: a waterfall is the source of the power generated by hydroelectricity; but it does not ‘create’ the electricity. That is the achievement of the dynamos. Water always had this capacity, it might be said, but only when harnessed and exploited in a particular way is it the power source for the generation of electricity by the machinery. In the same way capital harnesses and exploits living labour so as to create value from this source of energy. If living labour is the source of capital accumulation, this still leaves capital’s dynamic as the creative principle. Of course it would be fair to argue that labour creates use-values. It creates – not value – but what has value. But that the surplus product is determined as surplus-value, and is indeed produced in the first place for that very reason, is not a result of living labour and its aims, but of alienated labour, of labour directed by the requirements of capital’s drive for accumulation. Again it may be proper to argue that value is nothing but reified, ‘abstract’ labour, but such a claim that labour is the ‘stuff ’ of value, so to speak, does not prove that it created it, any more than the marble created the statue. If this is so it cannot be living labour as such that originates value but waged labour, i.e. alienated labour which is reified in value. This is because what creates value is not the ahistorical labour process but that only under the rule of capital, whereby capital produces value out of its exploitation of labour.

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The orthodox interpretation of exploitation, and ‘the surplus approach’ of the neo-Sraffians, have in common an account of exploitation in the context of a struggle over the distribution of the surplus, however measured, ‘after the harvest’ so to speak. My argument is that the struggle over exploitation is primarily located in production. It is capital which ‘creates’ value and surplus-value; but it does so only through the unremitting ‘pumping out’ of labour services throughout the working day. When capital succeeds in really subsuming production under the imperative of valorisation it appears as the creator of value and surplus-value. Capital accumulation realises itself only by negating that which resists the valorisation process, labour as ‘not-value’. In short, capital is self-valorising value, while labour is negatively posited as its sublated foundation.

Capitalism is characterised by a ‘contradiction in essence’ I introduce the topic of this section with a passage in which Marx is glossing the views of the socialist Ricardians. He wrote: Ricardo’s phrase ‘labour or capital’ reveals in a most striking fashion both the contradiction inherent in the terms and the naivety with which they are stated to be identical. … It was natural for those thinkers who rallied to the side of the proletariat to seize on this contradiction. … Labour is the sole source of exchange-value and the only active creator of use-value. This is what you [economists] say. On the other hand, you say that capital is everything, and the worker is nothing or a mere production cost of capital. You have refuted yourselves. Capital is nothing but defrauding of the worker. Labour is everything. … Just as little as [Ricardo] understands the identity of capital and labour in his own system, do they understand the contradiction they describe. (Marx 1988–1994: vol. 34, pp. 393–394) It is possible to seize on the phrase ‘Labour is everything’ and treat it as Marx’s own;8 but it is clear Marx here speaks for the socialist Ricardians; it does not follow that he endorses it. In truth he does not; he regards this claim as equally one-sided as that of the bourgeois theorists who think capital is everything. Neither side has understood that there is an objective contradiction here; both claims are true, and neither makes sense on its own. By constituting labour as wage-labour, capital constitutes itself and embarks on its inherent dynamic of accumulation. This cannot be explained on the basis that ‘labour is everything’. Successfully subsuming living labour, and consistently reproducing the capital relation, capital has a fair claim to assert ‘I am everything’. That labour-power has to be reconstituted in a non-capitalist domestic sphere it can dismiss as a secondary derivative function, to be treated as a black box in the circulation of commodities. To argue that ‘Everything is labour:

The contradictions of capital 189 capital is nothing but labour’ (Dussel 2001: 196) gives inadequate attention to the concept of capital. Capital seizes living labour under the wage-labour form and reifies it in the value of commodities. In value ‘dead’ labour is the opposite of ‘living labour’. Albeit that capital is ‘nothing but’ dead labour, it has become autonomous. Marx (1988–1994: vol. 33, p. 144) says ‘Capital shows itself more and more as a social power … an alienated social power which has become independent, and confronts society as a thing’. This objective social power of capital ‘Hodgkin regards … as a pure subjective illusion which conceals the deceit and the interests of the exploiting classes. He does not see that the way of looking at things arises out of the actual relationship’ (1988–1994: vol. 32, p. 429). The capital relation is a contradictory unity. Any attempt to remove the contradiction ideologically by claiming ‘all is capital’ or ‘all is labour’ will find such a reductionist programme impossible to carry through coherently. Labour’s alienation and capital’s self-constitution are inseparable. It is of the highest importance to understand that the contradiction in the capital relation is not between capitalist and labourer (that is merely a conflict). The inner contradiction arises because both ‘capital’ and ‘labour’ have claims to constitute the whole of their relation; hence ‘capital is nothing but (alienated) labour’ and ‘labour nothing but (variable) capital’. It is often said that productive labour is the essence lying behind the appearances of value interchanges and capital accumulation. However the many passages9 in which Marx assigns productive power to capital could well lead in a contrary direction: that capital is the real subject of production. As Marx (1973: 305) said, labour appears then as ‘the mediating activity’ by means of which capital valorises itself. In sum the second view is an inversion of the first. Both views are in truth correct, although contradictory. What this means is that capitalism is characterised by a contradiction in essence. Capital’s identity with its ‘other’

variable

constant

‘dead’

labour

labour

L

C capital

living

capital

Labour’s identity with its ‘other’

Figure 12.1

Contradiction of capital and labour

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Each side claims to constitute the whole of their relation, reducing what is not identical with itself to its own other. At first sight the capital–labour relation appears as a two-place one, but each tries to represent the other as a difference within itself. Capital divides itself into constant and variable components; and it claims to absorb labour to itself in the shape of variable capital; for it now possesses that labour. Hence it understands the relation as a relation to itself. On the other side, living labour claims that capital is nothing but dead labour. It, too, understands the relation as a relation to itself (see Figure 12.1). But in reality these contradictory positings run into each other, such that the affirmation of the essence (whichever one) leads to its appearance in the mode of denial. Thus labour’s objectification coincides with its expropriation, its positing as a moment of capital; while capital’s subjectification appears as its utter dependence, not only on its personifications such as owners and managers, but on the activity of living labour. Each by being incorporated in its other becomes other than itself. Thus living labour is other than capital, but when subsumed under capital it is at the same time other than itself, alienated labour. The same thing happens to capital when it descends from the selfreferring ideality of the forms of value to struggle with the materiality of production. But of course this process of mutual othering is not balanced. The struggle for dominance is won by capital which successfully returns from the sphere of production with surplus-value, while living labour returns from the factory exhausted and deprived of its own product. Realisation of capital is derealisation for the worker. As a result of labour’s alienation, and of its subsumption under capital, the objectivity of value-positing becomes autonomous, and reflects back on the labour process as its ‘truth’. At the very same time as being still in some sense nothing but the objective social expression of labour, value achieves dominance over labour; labour is reduced to a resource for capital accumulation. This contradiction in essence is a result of the fact that the whole relation of production is inverted, that is the producers are dominated by their product (as value, capital) to the extent that they are reduced to servants of a production process originated and directed by capital. Capital as value in motion is not distinct from matter in motion shifted by labour; labour acts as capital, not just at its behest. Marx (1973: 297) says: ‘Labour is not only the use-value which confronts capital, it is the use-value of capital itself.’ This labour is absorbed by productive capital and acts as ‘a moment of capital’, he claims (Marx 1973: 364). All the productive powers of labour appear as those of capital. Marx thinks capital is productive in the sense that, through its ‘personifications’ the owners and managers, it both organises production and enforces exploitation.10 On the other hand capital is able to produce only because it can rely on its ‘agent’, the working class, whose social productive powers are ‘displaced’ and ‘transposed’ to capital (Marx 1973: 308–309). The category of value is rooted precisely in capital’s struggle with labour to accomplish this ‘transfer’ of its productive powers.

The contradictions of capital 191 Since the workers are ‘possessed’ by capital and the material labour process is simultaneously a valorisation process, the same thing has two frames of reference. But this is not merely a matter of different ways of talking, or of the co-existence of alternative realities, it is also a matter of determination, of one side informing the other with its own purposes. Capital determines the organisation of production; but the character of labour, natural resources and machinery limit it in this endeavour. Although capital is hegemonic in this respect (Marx 1973: 693), its subsumption of labour can never be perfected; labour is always ‘in and against’ capital. Albeit that the production process is really subsumed by capital, the problem for capital is that it needs the agency of labour. Even if the productive power of labour is absorbed into that of capital to all intents, it is necessary to bear in mind that capital still depends upon it. Now let us try to explain more precisely in what ways both capital and labour may claim to be ‘everything’. To be ‘everything’ implies that all relevant presuppositions must be posited as results. First, capital – to posit its presuppositions it does three things. (a) It itself produces all its presuppositions arising in commodity circulation, i.e. means of production and subsistence goods for workers. (b) It thoroughly subordinates to the value form those presuppositions, namely land and labour-power, which it cannot itself produce. This is achieved for land in the form of modern landed property available for rent. It is achieved for labour-power in so far as it takes the wage-form because it is separated from its conditions of realisation, and hence must sell itself on the market in order to have the money to purchase subsistence goods from capital. (c) It really subsumes living labour to the dictates of the machinery of production such that it acts as capital wishes. In sum, one set of presuppositions are immediately produced by capital, while the latter two are posited by capital through the mediation, respectively, of the value-form and of the factory system. Second, labour – it claims to be everything in so far as it posits the presuppositions of its own estrangement; thus it (a) produces its own wages; (b) reproduces constant capital including the factory itself; and hence (c) reproduces the capital relation. As Marx says: ‘All moments which confronted living labour capacity as alien, external powers, employing it under certain conditions independent of it, are now posited as its own product and result.’11 In sum it exists as wage labour and remains condemned to this fate because it reproduces in its (self-alienating) activity the capital relation, through submitting to its exploitation. The conclusion is that in a sense capital totalises and reproduces all its presuppositions, while in another sense this totality is itself the result of the alienation of labour.

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Much criticism of Marx (e.g. from the neo-Sraffians) is from the standpoint of the always already constituted reified system, ignoring how living labour becomes subsumed in it. But the entire sphere of the value-forms totalised as capital posits itself only in negating that which is other than capital: centrally, living labour. The result is a contradiction in essence, which develops from the more basic contradiction between value and use-value, extremes whose dialectic achieves ever more concrete mediatedness without ever reaching a final resolution. Thus already in 1844 Marx (1975: 345) draws this conclusion: ‘Labour, the subjective essence of private property as exclusion of property, and capital, objective labour as exclusion of labour, constitute private property in its developed relation of contradiction: a dynamic relationship, therefore, driving towards resolution.’

On the transformation problem Characterising capitalism as a ‘contradiction in essence’ throws fresh light on the transformation problem. In the ideality of its form capital declares itself to be the source of its own profit; all use-values it must seize upon in production, so as to generate this profit, count simply as unresisting bearers of the capital circuit. However, although the capital circuit seems merely a more complex shape of simple circulation, the phase of production-capital involves essential reference to a use-value of a peculiar kind; it is the material potential for labour to produce more than it consumes which grounds the possibility of a surplus. Marx stresses that use-value questions are here of central importance to his theory: For money as capital, labour capacity is the immediate use-value for which it has to exchange itself. In simple circulation, the content of the use-value was a matter of indifference, dropped out of the form of economic determination. Here it is the essential economic moment. (Marx 1987: 504) The capital relation is a peculiar combination of formal commodity exchange and material exploitation. Value measures capital’s success in this battle to appropriate labour to itself and as a first approximation each capital would be rewarded accordingly. Then a different relation supervenes, that between capitals themselves, so it is necessary to elaborate further categories to conceptualise this; but the fundamental relation is between capital and that which is its other and has to be subdued by it. It is through this relation to labour that capital constitutes itself as self-valorising value and it is therefore logically prior to any analysis of relations between capitals. But, as we have seen, capital claims to constitute the whole of this production relation. In so doing the true source of profit is abstracted out, and capital as such counts as fruitful. Hence all capitals demand a proportionate share in the social

The contradictions of capital 193 surplus. In so far as a uniform rate of profit obtains, which rewards all capitals equally, including those of even the most parasitic sectors, then important material differences are abstracted from, centrally the key role played by industrial capitals producing surplus-value ‘at the coal face’ so to speak. Material differences in this respect (including different compositions of capital) are ignored by capital-in-general in the formalism of its universal recognition of all sums of capital as equally worthy. The notorious ‘transformation problem’ is not primarily the site of an issue in theory. Rather than being a technical issue on the way to the determination of prices, it springs from an objective hiatus in the ontology of capital, the place where the ideal form of self-positing value collides with the material content of the capital relation. Hence the need to disguise value in production price. Marx writes: In the capital-relation what is characteristic is the mystification, the upside-down world, the inversion of the subjective and the objective. … Corresponding to the inverted relation, there necessarily arises, already in the actual production process itself, an inverted conception. (1988–1994: vol. 33, p. 72) Because of the inversion inherent to it, capital is unable to take the measure of its own ground. It becomes literally deranged, and exists in a state of denial. This hiatus is inherent to capital itself, in that its own logic cannot grasp its origin. Capital in its own self-absorption is too locked up in the value form to grasp that it is not self-constituted but rests on expropriating the energies of labour and nature.

Capital without contradictions? Because capitalism is marked by a contradiction in essence, capital (= value-foritself ) and labour (= use-value-for-itself ) are locked in a continual struggle to negate each other. But in Capital the relationship concerned is termed the capital relation. This marks the objective fact that in the bourgeois epoch the ‘principal factor’ in the relationship is capital. At present capital is winning the battle for self-assertion. It is the dialectic of capital itself which brings every aspect of the production process under its sway, proletarianises the working population, and accumulates wealth through exploiting them. (The same relationship considered from the opposite standpoint would be the relationship of waged labour, alienated labour.) If the basic separation of the worker from the object of labour is logically and historically the presupposition of capitalism, it is then posited as the consequence of the movement of capital itself. When capital takes possession of the material world of production it attempts to subsume within its own structures all otherness, including living labour and natural forces. Its success is shown in its developing wealth and power. In situating all otherness merely as a moment of its own reality, capital posits itself as a

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self-identical totality. But capital achieves this only through a continual struggle to overcome its opposite. So far I have assumed that the capital relation is structured by the internal opposition between the value form and living labour. It is interesting to consider what difference would obtain if there were no such opposition. This could be postulated on two grounds: either if workers passively obeyed capital, or if they were replaced by robots; even if the first case is empirically unlikely, it has been argued by Tom Sekine that it must be temporarily assumed for methodological reasons so as to generate a concept of ‘pure capitalism’. In my opinion, in such cases the value form could not be interpreted on the basis of a labour theory of value. Labour as a resource would have nothing special to distinguish it from waterfalls or machines; it has been shown that on a material basis it is possible to calculate the rate of ‘exploitation’ of steel and so on; labour has a special role in production only as a social reality. What then would be the content of capital? It would be its own content; instead of labourtime, the relevant determinant would be the time for which capital is locked up in production. The distinction between variable capital and constant capital would have no meaning, hence nor would organic composition of capital. Accordingly value would collapse into production price; without any ‘detour’ through ‘labour-value’ capital would become the Sraffian utopia of ‘production of commodities by means of commodities’, or, better, production of capital by means of capital. In the terms we have used capital would really appear as a self-relation. However this appearance would still be deceptive because capital has two ‘others’ which it cannot reduce to itself: the proletariat I call its ‘internal other’, Nature the ‘external other’. Nature (including now labour as a natural resource) is posited by capital as ‘raw material’ to be formed into valuable commodities; but capital’s accounting system cannot register Nature’s inherent dimensions, e.g. the finitude of all resources; hence in the long run capital will destroy its own material basis. Whether such a capitalism should still be ‘capitalism’ is a matter of definition; if capital is defined as command over labour it would not; if capital is defined as a monetary form of investing in means of production with a view to maximising returns, it would.

Fetishism and ideology Throughout this paper I continually refer to ‘capital’ acting and making claims. In face of the objection that only human beings act (albeit within the structure of capital), and only ideologists make claims on behalf of the capitalist system, I remain unrepentant. The value forms commodity, money, capital, carry with them the fetishisation of material things; these things are attributed powers (acting, claiming) properly attributable only to human beings. Fetishism may be ‘improper’ but it is objectively present; Marx (1976: 169) himself emphasised that the fetishistic categories have

The contradictions of capital 195 objective validity and are not dispelled by his critique. Social relations ‘appear as what they are’ (N.B.), ‘as thing-like [sachliche] relations between persons and social relations between things [Sachen]’.12 In taking capital to be an agent I rely on two key characteristics, first that it is structured teleologically in that its movement has an aim (a monetary increment); second, like humans, it applies a universal form (value) to instances (production and circulation of commodities). It acts without consciousness or subjectivity but it acquires this through colonising the consciousness of its ‘personification’ (Marx), the capitalist. To speak of the capitalist in this way is not to employ an ideal type for methodological reasons; rather it is the power of capitalist competition that purifies the type (the more so when the corporation as a legal person has the sole purpose of profit). The human individual is not the subject originating value relationships. Human activities are objectively inscribed within the value form. The law of value is imposed on people through the effectivity of a system at the heart of which lies capital, which subordinates commodity production to the aim of valorisation, and is the real subject (identified as such by Marx (1976: 255)) confronting us. Capital is a self-positing alienated social power, not a resource to be used by its owners as they please. In what sense is it possible to attribute ‘claims’ to truth by capital? Are not all apologetics for capital merely ideological, and in any case false? Some are, but not all. In so far as the contradiction in essence obtains, then objective reality presents two faces, which allows for two different ‘truths’ to be ‘read off ’ correspondingly. These are contradictory ‘claims’ because they are implied by two opposed social standpoints rooted in forms essential to reality. Be that as it may, I think it is certainly possible to distinguish between notions that are ‘of the essence’ and what are cast as ‘shadow forms’ (a term I take from Patrick Murray). That value is inherent to a commodity is objectively true, even if fetishistic; likewise that money is a social power is objectively true, even if a still more accomplished fetish. These notions are directly inscribed in social consciousness; there is a ‘spontaneous ideology’ secreted by these forms as their necessary correlate if social reproduction is to continue. I distinguish such forms of thought corresponding to objective structures from mere ideology, which arises from shadows cast by social forms. The paradigm case of a shadow form is ‘utility’ in the philosophical sense. This absurd category arises in the following way. A person enters a supermarket with £100 and is faced with the fact that many different baskets of goods can be bought with it and, furthermore, in at least two cases the person is unable to exercise any preference for one over the other. Now if that person is a philosopher they may speculate that this means there is an identity in the goods themselves, or in the satisfaction they give, and term it ‘utility’. This metaphysical hypostasis does not have any correspondence with reality; ordinary people reject it; and students may be disabused of it through persuasive argument. It is a mere shadow. On the other hand, that these baskets are identical as values is a reality, an objective social hypostasis. Thus we can only agree with Marx when he writes that:

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Christopher J. Arthur The apparent stupidity of merging all the manifold relationships of people in the one relation of usefulness, this apparently metaphysical abstraction arises from the fact that, in modern bourgeois society, all relations are subordinated in practice to the one abstract monetary-commercial relation. (1976: 409)

It might be thought that I am objecting to abstraction as such, but I am not. The question is of the type of abstraction. Utility is an abstraction across desire for goods, value is an abstraction across commodities; the former is (supposedly) carried out in the head of the shopper (or, worse, a calculation they would make if they were rational); the latter is carried out in practice in exchange and becomes crystallised in money, and teleologically active as capital. Capital colonises the subjectivity of the agents, and its action is the explanation of, not what has to be explained by, ‘utility’. ‘Utility’ is the subjective reflection of the levelling effect of the value form; but is then read back into a theory of human nature by the ideologist so as to provide a premise for exchange. Marx (1976: 410) says: ‘The category of “utilisation” is first of all abstracted from actual relations … and then these relations are made out to be the reality of the category that has been abstracted from them themselves, a wholly metaphysical method of procedure.’ The ‘felicific calculus’ (Bentham) of books like F. Y. Edgworth’s wonderfully titled Mathematical Psychics (1881), which looks like absolute rubbish, is in reality an absolutisation of the very real reduction to pure quantity of all commodity relations in the value form. So far from money being a disguise for these relations of subjective preferences, it is in reality the social bond that makes possible the illusion that there is something to be maximised in people’s lives. But in truth this maximising is the impoverishment of need and desire when everything has to be justified as the abstraction of itself by the ‘bottom line’. This ideology of utilitarianism may be eradicable but nonetheless commodities continue to be equatable as values even when we are persuaded of Marx’s critique of political economy.

The critique of political economy Marx said that his exploration of economic categories was at the same time descriptive and critical. I think that a theory which identifies a contradiction in essence is simultaneously a critique in that it calls for resolution. However, the nature of the interpenetration of opposites is such that a practical supersession cannot take the form of a simple abolition of one side in favour of the other. We have already seen that without the recalcitrance of labour, capital becomes something different; likewise if labour threw off the shackles of capital, its whole mode of being would require reforming. Labour as presently shaped could not ‘become everything’ for it is defined by its subordination. We have seen, with Marx, that living labour realises itself only by its derealising itself, producing its opposite, capital. Marx writes:

The contradictions of capital 197 Since the positive, dominant side of the [capital] relation is expressed in [the capitalist], he feels at home … whereas the wage-labourer, who is trapped in the same inverted notion, only from the other extreme, is driven in practice, as the oppressed side, to resistance against the whole relation, hence also against the notions, concepts and modes of thinking corresponding to it. (1988–1994: vol. 33, p. 74) But the negation of labour by capital can be reversed through a second negation only if it is conceptually separable from its subsumption under capital in the first place, only if it is possible to separate living labour from its historically determinate form as wage-labour. Production must always be socially mediated. The problem with the value-form is that it is an alienating, and alienated, mediator. Yet however highly self-mediated the value form becomes, no matter how remote from reality are certain financial instruments, the ‘topsy-turvy’ world of capital must mediate itself in the labour process. The labour process, by contrast, however distorted by the requirements of valorisation, does not in itself require its current mediation in the latter. Only this insight makes space for a necessary critical distance from the existent totality. The ‘labour theory’ of classical political economy had the merit of shifting attention from the ‘being’ of value to its ‘becoming’; however, since bourgeois economists could not take this critical distance from the object, their ‘labour theory’ remained within the capitalrelation. Only the critically adopted standpoint of living labour allows space for conceptualising the supersession of capital.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

For a fuller development of this section see Arthur 2002: ch. 2. Marx, Capital, Volume I (1976): 279–80. A common interpretation; see, for example, Mandel 1990: 20. For a fuller development of this section, see Arthur 2002: ch. 3. ‘Nicht-Werth’; Marx 1973: 295–296. ‘Economic Ms. of 1861–63’, MECW vol. 34, p. 202; copying from his Grundrisse (1973: 454). ‘Capital essentially produces capital, and it does this only as long as it produces surplus value’ (Marx 1981: 1020). As does Enrique Dussel (2001: 130–131, 190). See my review in Historical Materialism 11, 2 (2003). See the review in Arthur 2002: 48–51. Marx 1976: 1056 (Appendix: ‘Results’). Marx 1973: 451; Marx 1988–1994 (MECW 34): 200. Marx 1976: 166; the translator, B. Fowkes, is here corrected; since German has two words for ‘thing’ it is a good idea to tell us which one was used here; but only if it is the right one! Fowkes puts ‘dinglich’ where the original has ‘sachliche’ (Marx-Engels Werke vol. 23, p. 87); and then he translates as ‘material’ instead of ‘thing-like’.

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Bibliography Arthur, Christopher J. (2002) The New Dialectic and Marx’s Capital, Leiden: Brill. Dussel, Enrique (2001) Towards an Unknown Marx: A Commentary on the Manuscripts of 1861–63, trans. Y. Angulo, ed. F. Moseley, London and New York: Routledge. Mandel, Ernest (1990) ‘Karl Marx’, in J. Eatwell et al. (eds), The New Palgrave: Marxian Economics, London and Basingstoke: Macmillan. Marx, Karl (1973) Grundrisse; Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. M. Nicolaus, Harmondsworth: Penguin/NLR. —— (1975) Early Writings, trans. G. Benton, Harmondsworth: Penguin/NLR. —— (1976) Capital, Volume 1, trans. B. Fowkes, Harmondsworth: Penguin/NLR. —— (1981) Capital, Volume 3, trans. D. Fernbach, Harmondsworth: Penguin/NLR. —— (1987) ‘Original text of A Contribution to a Critique … of 1859’, in K. Marx and F. Engels, Marx–Engels Collected Works (MECW), Volume 29, London: Lawrence and Wishart. —— (1988–1994) ‘Economic Ms. of 1861–63’, in K. Marx and F. Engels, Marx–Engels Collected Works (MECW), Volumes 30–34, London: Lawrence and Wishart. Marx, K. and F. Engels (1976) The German Ideology, in K. Marx and F. Engels, Marx–Engels Collected Works (MECW), Volume 5, London: Lawrence and Wishart.

13 Understanding objectivity in a material world Phil Walden

What Collier puts forward in In Defence of Objectivity is an erudite and most welcome defence of philosophical realism against postmodernism and various other forms of subjectivism which deny the existence of an objective reality outside of our thoughts, ideas, conceptions, and theories. One of the many strengths of the book is its intensely focused attempt to present a unified argument; a refreshing change from the type of book that assumes that there is no coherence in the world and all one can do is comment on small parts. The resulting clarity of In Defence of Objectivity is reinforced by the felicitous use of examples and at times the illuminating placement of the ideas in a historical context. I find that Collier has made a convincing defence of realism. The comments that follow are divided into three sections.

The relationship between realism and materialism It is true, as Collier says, that ‘the world is independent of us and the same for everyone’ (2003: 180). However, there seems to be something more to say here. The realist can agree with Collier against the idealist that there is a reality out there beyond our ideas. But what is this reality? The dialectical materialist has a response to this question: matter. In other words, the world that is independent of us is a material world – which clarifies the material interconnection between the world that we attempt to cognise and our minds which are doing the cognising. It is necessary both for the world to be material and also for our minds to be material in order that there can be a material interconnection between them: The object, the content and the function of thought apparently coincide. Reason deals with itself, considers itself as an object and is its own content. But nevertheless the distinction between an object and its concept, though less evident, is just as actual as in other cases. It is only the habit of regarding matter and mind as fundamentally different things which conceals this truth. The necessity to make a distinction compels us everywhere to discriminate between the object of sense perception and its mental concept. (Dietzgen 1906: 68)

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This is also how Dietzgen accounts for the problem that even though there is a material basis to ontology, idealism seems constantly to arise. The difference between an object and its expression in thought can generate the idealist illusion that thought expresses autonomous reason, separate from the objects in the material world. (Thus even such a great advocate of reason as Spinoza left this idealist problem unresolved.) Realism can make concessions to idealism in this regard because it does not specify that the independent character of the world has a material content, and instead leaves open the possibility that the relation of the mind to reality is an expression of the primacy of consciousness. For to the realist, what is important is establishing the independence of reality from mind, but it is entirely possible that this independent reality could be interpreted to have an ontological character that is compatible with an idealist philosophical standpoint. Collier’s epistemological standpoint must be treated cautiously. In his view: ‘[Realists] claim that each particular belief is a claim to truth about its object’ (2003: 141). If taken to extremes, this could suggest that we all perceive objects in the same manner. This would be an absurdity. Although the material world is the same for everyone, this does not exclude our ability as individuals to have a unique and personal perspective on the material world. Indeed, if we were all to have the same perspective on the world it is impossible to imagine how philosophy, science, or even truth could exist. Nevertheless, I maintain that what enables us to have a common epistemological reference to the same world is its material content, which explains both its interconnections and the relation of the parts to the whole. These points can be clarified by reference to an example from everyday experience. If I go to the shop, what enables that process and action? It is because both the shop and my idea of going to the shop are matter that they are able to inter-relate to each other and the action is completed successfully. If the shop and my idea of the shop existed in two completely separate realms, it would not be possible for me to visit the shop (I might perhaps entertain the illusion that I had visited the shop when in fact I had not, but the falsity of this would become clear when I checked the fridge). It is a condition of my being able to visit the shop that my mind and the shop exist in the same dialectical monist materialist universe – both my ideas and the shop are forms of matter; those forms of matter interact with each other monistically (there is not a dualist separation); and there is a dialectical inter-relationship between my mind and the shop (the shop is a possible place for me to visit, and my mind is familiar with the whereabouts of the shop). So dialectical monist materialism can give an account of the intelligibility and unity of the world which neither the idealist nor even the realist can offer. The realist can say that the action would not have been possible if the shop had not been real (that is, having a real existence outside my thought processes). This is of course true. But this transcendental point about reality enabling and limiting my possibilities is not the whole story. For the shop being there does not mean that I know that it is there. In order for me to be able to visit the shop there has to be a material relationship between my ideas and the

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shop, otherwise the shop’s reality will not in itself help me. This can only happen in a dialectical monist materialist universe in which shops and ideas are in the same ontological realm in which minds can know the whereabouts of shops and in which there is a material inter-relationship between minds and shops. The distinction Collier makes between body-actual and body-cosmic is welcome (i.e. recognising that there is indeed a body-cosmic). But what defines the unity of these two realms? Collier summarises the body-cosmic as the causal interaction of humans with nature, and the body-actual is the interaction of the body with its immediate environment (2003: 9–15). According to Collier, the power of the body-cosmic is increased by any extension of the causal interaction between the body-actual and its world: ‘The more we are sensitive to the world around us, and the more we control it, the more it is part of us’ (2003: 13). Unfortunately, this fruitful suggestion about the relation between the bodycosmic and the body-actual does not specify what ontologically makes this interaction possible. The dialectical materialist – such as Dietzgen and Engels – can answer this question in terms of matter. For what the dialectical materialist standpoint can show is that human practice – or the body-actual – is only possible in terms of the possibility of humans being able to transform the material world around them, or the body cosmic (Dietzgen 1906: 124–132; Engels 1954: 62–68). Thus the body-cosmic is the objective and primary basis for the body-actual to occur. If this materialist ontological understanding is not developed, then the epistemological result can be a concession to idealism, in that the body-actual becomes the main and primary expression of causal activity, and the body-cosmic becomes considered to be a derivative aspect of the body-actual. It could be objected and argued that the body-actual is sufficient to uphold realism, in that the body-actual expresses the whole range of human activities, and so is the starting point for understanding the ontological character of the relation of the body-actual with the body-cosmic. However, such a view would amount to what Collier’s closest co-thinker, Roy Bhaskar, has called the anthropomorphic fallacy, in that human social activity is defined by a human-centredness that denies a meaningful objective relation to the wider independent reality of nature and the universe (Bhaskar 1993: 394, passim). Collier would agree with this stance of Bhaskar’s, but the problem about the philosophical ambiguity surrounding the relation between the body-actual and body-cosmic is that it creates the possibility for their relationship to be interpreted in an anthropomorphic manner. Materialism establishes a more credible conception of the body-actual and body-cosmic relation because it has an ontological starting point in the universality and objectivity of matter in motion. On this objective basis, it is possible to establish the interconnections between the primacy of a non-human body-cosmic and its relation to the specificity and dynamism of the body-actual of human society (Engels 1954: 82–88). Thus Collier’s defence of realism, without its being connected to philosophical materialism, is problematic. The thrust of my disagreement with Collier can be summed up by one word: interconnection. The word ‘mediation’ would also do, but, as this is not to be an essay on Hegel’s method, I will stick with interconnection. For example, what is largely lacking in Collier’s treatment of Spinoza’s

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notions of mind and body is a conception of interconnection. This means that Spinoza’s claims about the body-actual have a very ambiguous relation to the body-cosmic, in that ‘providence’ represents the connection between them, rather than the interconnection being between the attributes of one substance (Collier 2003: 14). Collier may be claiming that ‘providence’ is the substance, but from a materialist standpoint such a claim is epistemologically problematic and cannot establish the unity of the body-actual and the body-cosmic. Is Collier defending Spinoza’s conception of substance? Again the dialectical materialist question is: what is this substance? One should reject a crude Spinozist view that monism is merely about the mind being a form of matter just like any other matter. Rather, the dialectical materialist view is that mind is the highest expression of matter and that it interacts with the rest of matter in an extremely rich and complex manner. Ilyenkov interprets Spinoza in dialectical materialist terms: In order to disclose the really general, truly universal forms of things in accordance with which the ‘perfected’ thinking body should act, another criterion and another mode of knowledge than formal abstraction was required. The idea of substance was not formed by abstracting the attribute that belonged equally to extension and thought. The abstract and general in them was only that they existed, existence in general, i.e. an absolutely empty determination in no way disclosing the nature of the one or the other. The really general (infinite, universal) relation between thought and spatial, geometric reality could only be understood, i.e. the idea of substance arrived at, through real understanding of their mode of interaction within nature. Spinoza’s whole doctrine was just the disclosure of this ‘infinite’ relation. (Ilyenkov 1977: 60) In other words, Spinoza goes some way to establishing monism – but nature or ‘substance’ could still be an idealist product of consciousness. Not until the advent of dialectical materialism did we arrive at the understanding that nature or ‘substance’ is matter, and that matter is the basis for the interaction of mind and external reality in a way which epistemologically privileges the latter over the former. For if the interaction was left epistemologically at the point where Spinoza left it, we would indeed have a monist relation, but it could be a relation in which consciousness is epistemologically prior to external reality. The same criticism could be levelled against Hegel. Feuerbach partially corrects this error with his emphasis on materialism, but at a deeper level of epistemology he is still idealist because he places a greater weight on building humanist relations within society than he does on cognizing objective material reality. The need to do the latter in order to be fully and dialectically materialist is the starting point of Marx, Engels, and Dietzgen. In contrast to this dialectical materialist interpretation of Spinoza, and what is epistemologically necessary to overcome the idealist limitations of his concept

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of substance, Collier accommodates to the idealist view of substance. This is because the ontological unity of the monist character of substance is provided by the role of ‘providence’. Hence, Collier does not consider Spinoza’s views as being in flux, or as an uncertain materialism that is limited by a concession to idealism. Instead he seems to embrace the standpoint of idealism within Spinoza’s view of substance, as if it is not in need of philosophical improvement and clarification from a materialist standpoint. So Collier is making his own concessions to idealism and reconciling them with a realist standpoint. What is being indicated here is that realism has its own philosophical ambiguities that allow for these concessions to idealism. For what Marxist materialism is arguing, in seeming contradiction to Collier, is that it is not enough to uphold the monist conception of substance; what also has to be asked is what is the ontological content of this substance and what does it suggest in regard to the relation between being and consciousness. Collier’s approach of the body-actual and body-cosmic is undermined by similar epistemological limitations, and also requires the same materialist clarification as Feuerbach provided for Spinoza.

The character of philosophy and its limitations Collier’s charge is that modern philosophy has wrongly accepted a dualist separation of mind and body, allegedly inherited from Descartes: ‘All forms of reductionism, whether subjectivistic or physicalistic, have their roots in Descartes’ dualism; Descartes reduces everything to human consciousness on the one hand and extended matter on the other’ (Collier 2003: 142). But this is not how to understand the history of philosophy. Error and truth are in a complex relationship. Descartes was tackling an issue that had long been avoided – the nature of the relationship between mind and body (Cottingham 1986: 79–84). In defence of Descartes it can be argued that he was trying to develop an alternative to the religiously inclined medieval philosophy which located God at the centre of the universe. Descartes could not entirely break from this paradigm, which was why he developed a ‘conceivable’ dualist separation between distinct realms of mind and body (Descartes 1985b: 50–62). Nevertheless, despite these epistemological limitations, Descartes’ philosophy was a huge advance in relation to being able to conceive a world without God as the centre of the universe, and for the possibility of a human-centred reason, such as through mathematical proofs (Descartes 1985a: 290). So Spinoza was advancing on a foundation already laid down by Descartes, but in terms of rejecting any dualist inconsistencies. Kant and Hegel theorised an even richer relationship between ideas and reality, based on previous philosophical advances. Finally, Marx, Engels and Dietzgen were in a position to understand the interconnection between ideas and material reality (or mind and body) as a material interconnection. The important point to be made is that philosophical ideas do not develop in a vacuum. Descartes was elaborating his ideas in the period of the decay of feudalism and the emergence of capitalism. He can justly be considered to be at the radical forefront of the bourgeois enlightenment. In contrast, Collier seems

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to have a negative perspective on Descartes because Descartes upholds the philosophy of the subject and its cognitive powers, a stance which Collier has rejected along with most of modern philosophy. For example, Collier castigates Descartes’ view that the quantitative methodology derived from mathematics can overcome the tendency towards epistemological scepticism. Rather, the reliance on quantitative methods becomes a pretext to justify the value of the object under emerging capitalism (Collier 2003: 28). But the philosophical point is to differentiate Descartes’ durable and historical contribution to philosophy from that which represents an ideological adherence to the bourgeois class viewpoint. If this process of differentiation is not carried out we end up with a vulgar Marxist-type of reduction of the role of philosophy to the partisan justification of various types of alienated ideologies. In this context, the Soviet philosopher Oizerman has indicated the great philosophical importance of Descartes: ‘Descartes was the founder of the rationalist metaphysics of the seventeenth century and his method was the scientific method of his time’ (Oizerman 1988: 164). Thus Collier’s criticism of Descartes for allegedly launching modern philosophy down a mistaken epistemological path does not take account of how philosophy has progressed as a result of the complex interaction between changes in material reality and the attempts to understand that reality (which are also material). For what Descartes was articulating was the massive historical importance of the economic and social changes of the seventeenth century and the theoretical necessity for new scientific methods to understand these new developments. Collier is prepared to praise Francis Bacon’s empiricist methodology in this regard, and yet he is unable similarly to locate the progressive content of Descartes’ rationalism (Collier 2003: 203). This is an expression of epistemological inconsistency, in that Collier is prepared to utilise recent advances in the philosophy of science in order to critique Descartes and yet does not carry out a similar process of critique in relation to Bacon. What seems to be called for is an understanding of philosophy as a theory of knowledge, or the development of a method which can more adequately assess the merits and limitations of philosophers within their social and historical context, and thus can locate them more precisely within the progress of the history of philosophy. Collier’s criticism of modern philosophy seems to focus one-sidedly on the role of consciousness. There seems to be an insufficient recognition of the importance of the interaction of consciousness with the objective in order to explain changes in material reality. His starting point is that: ‘human beings are much else besides knowing subjects’ (2003: 134). This view is connected to the stance that: ‘Objectivity is now generally used as to mean independence of any (knowing or valuing) subject’ (2003: 133). On this epistemological basis, he contends that the object–subject relation is unsatisfactory for explaining the relation of human activity within the world (2003: 133–134). He does accept a relation of intentionality, and even a reflection of the object in the perceptions of the subject, but there is no recognition of the transforming role of the subject with regard to defining the object and objectivity. Instead:

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The attitude of objectivity involves recognising the primacy of the object. … This is so because even the phenomena of which human subjectivity is composed – experience, emotion, practice, language, value judgements, beliefs – are all object-centred and defined by their objects. (2003: 137) This epistemological standpoint is very similar to a contemplative objectivism that seems to consider all attempts by the subject to transform the object as an expression of a misguided idealism. Collier also appears to be passively accepting the nature of the object. Lukács, despite his limitations in reasoning about subject–object identity, was surely correct in arguing for a role for the subject to rebel against the object. The point is that there must be something unsatisfactory about the object which prompts the subject to consider the necessity of its transformation (Lukács 1971: 148–150, passim). Many people think that for the subject to rebel against the object it is necessary to adopt an unreflective praxis stance towards reality, trying to change reality primarily through one’s non-theoretical practice. The philosopher who argues most trenchantly against this mis-ordering and severing of practical from theoretical priorities is Adorno, who argues for an intensely serious theoretical approach to reality and a highly reflective relationship between theory and practice (Adorno 1973: 143–144, passim). Because of this Adorno is often accused of being too contemplative. Yet, Adorno is not over-emphasising contemplation – in fact he argues for the subject not to be epistemologically dominated by the object, and for the subject to play a reflective role in the relationship between subject and object. The point being made by Adorno is that if the subject attempts to know the object in a dialectical and reflective manner, then the object can be changed in a real and meaningful manner. The subject will only be able to change the object in an imaginary and delusional manner if the subject only knows the object in shallow and impressionistic terms (Adorno 1973: 66–68). In contrast to Lukács’ revolutionary optimism about the subject changing the object, and Adorno’s more dialectical and nuanced view, Collier seems to be ruling out any possibility of the subject changing the object in the context of the primacy of the objective. Furthermore, in this regard I find problematic Collier’s outright antipathy to Kant’s idea of the constructive mind (Collier 2003: 160). Instead, Adorno is more convincing in suggesting that epistemology is important and that there is a need for sympathetic criticism of Kant’s insight that: ‘understanding has rules which I must presuppose as being in me prior to objects being given to me, and therefore as being a priori. They find expression in a priori concepts to which all objects of experience necessarily conform’ (Kant 1992: B, pp. xvii–xviii and Adorno 1973: 292–293). Adorno criticises the subject-centred element of Kantianism by arguing for the preponderance of the object, but he retains and sublates Kant’s focus on the activity of the mind in its dealings with reality (Adorno 1973: 240–241). By contrast, Collier has a one-sided focus on the objectivity of the real world (a point which Adorno accepted) at the expense of theorising the active role played in cognition by the mind.

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The importance of theory and practice Collier is clearly right when he says that theory can correct a fault in a Heideggerian-type ready-to-hand practice (like driving a nail into a wall with a hammer) (Collier 2003: 179). However, by restricting his consideration of practice to this kind of mundane and unambitious ready-to-hand activity, Collier does not arrive at a theory of how theory and practice can be in a highly complex relationship and how out of such a complex relationship can emerge revolutionary change. Theory and practice are interconnected. Theory can provide an assessment which gives rise to a change in practice. Practice can falsify, confirm, or suggest a change in theory. An example would be the Bolshevik programme of proletarian revolution in 1917. This was a theory which the Bolsheviks thought, in the summer of 1917, would be put into practice by the soviets based upon the domination of the Mensheviks, and the Bolsheviks called on the soviets to do this. This theory was falsified when the soviets failed to put into effect proletarian revolution. Informed by this conservative stance of the soviets, the Bolsheviks then realised the fault in their theory – proletarian revolution could only take place if there was a Bolshevik majority in the soviets. The Bolsheviks therefore redoubled their efforts in propagandising for proletarian revolution, pressed hard for elections in the soviets, and when the elections came they were able to gain big majorities in the soviets. The proletarian revolution followed. Thus the initial theory was modified in the light of practice, and then the revised theory proved sufficiently accurate to put the original theory into successful practice. There is a bootstrapping relationship between theory and practice. However, there is a point to be made that in order to establish what constituted principled revolutionary practice, the initial and most active aspect that needed to be corrected was in the sphere of theory, and only by the modification of theory was it possible for a principled practice to be envisaged and developed. It was vital for Lenin to reject his previous theory of the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry and replace it with a perspective of ‘All Power to the Soviets’ if the concessions made by some Bolsheviks to the Mensheviks and the bourgeois government were to be overcome. Thus in order to make qualitative leaps in revolutionary practice it was necessary to make similar leaps in theory, and overcome the limitations of existing theory as the basis for meeting the political challenges of the time. Hence, theory is not in a passive role as a servant of practice, but rather theory acts as a ‘material force’ and active promoter of what is required in practical terms in order to transform the objective situation. As Lenin (1976: 212) argues in the Philosophical Notebooks: ‘Man’s consciousness not only reflects the objective world, but creates it.’ It is also important to point out that without the objective development of the soviets by the working class it would not have been possible to change the situation. Thus, theory actively promotes what is possible and overcomes any concessions to conservatism in the sphere of practice. Hegel makes a similar point in his ‘Little Logic’ in relation to the question of theoretical and practical reason: ‘the explication of the notion in the sphere of

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being does two things: it brings out the totality of being, and it abolishes the immediacy of being, or the form of being as such’ (Hegel 1987: 123). What is being indicated by Hegel is that the very theoretical clarity represented by the notion challenges the limitations of the immediacy of being and suggests the possibility of transforming the being in order to bring it into conformity with the requirements of the notion. This idealist view, which represents the primacy of consciousness for understanding the narrowness of objective reality, was materialistically transformed by Lenin into the recognition that the limitations of existing material reality produce the subjective aspiration for revolutionary change. The role of theory is to mediate between consciousness and practice, and to articulate why the content of practice is revolutionary and strives not to modify reality but to bring about a qualitative change in accordance with overcoming the limitations of existing being. In contrast to the Hegelian–Leninist view of the importance of theory in relation to the possibility of principled practice, Collier makes important concessions to the pragmatic and anti-theoretical view of the theory–practice relation. He writes: For a theory to work better in practice than another theory means this: that if we base our actions on the assumption that the theory is true, we get better results than if we base them on the assumption that the alternative theory is true. Truth in a non-pragmatically defined sense is tacitly presupposed in every use of the test of practice. (2003: 229) Now the first of these sentences is unexceptionable – theories surely are tested and confirmed or refuted by practice. But the second sentence does not follow from the first. We can see this by looking at the assumptions involved in the second sentence: 1

2

That non-pragmatism is guaranteed by the mere abstract fact that there is an objectively real world and objectively real values. However, while we can grant this objectivity, it ignores the question of the epistemology or the method we use to try to come into contact with this objectivity through our actions. That putting theories to the test of practice is the only way in which we can determine whether a theory is objectively true. The problem here is that there are many complex social theories – such as the Marxist theory that proletarian revolution is needed for human progress – which are not testable in Collier’s sense, but which can, however, be objectively evaluated by asking how well Marxism explains what is going on in the world in comparison with competing theories.

Assumption (2) is in fact a philosophical pragmatist assumption, despite the belief Collier has here that he is arguing against philosophical pragmatism. The advocacy of the ‘test of practice’ as the only way in which the relative

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validity of competing theories can be ascertained is to make concessions to the philosophical pragmatist idea that what determines the worth of a theory is whether it works or not. Yet, at least in social theory, this begs the whole question of whether or not our standards and criteria for ‘what works’ are optimal. An important philosophical problem with the pragmatic approach is that it is inclined to connect the standpoint of what works with an adaptation to what is, and therefore to reject a perspective involving a connection between the present and the striving for a better future. This is precisely why the most eminent contemporary pragmatist philosopher, Richard Rorty, rejects any possibility of connecting philosophy to the struggle for revolutionary change, because what work for him are the politics of reconciliation, reform and moderation (Rorty 1995: 203; 1999: 201–209). The question of the ontological character of social structures, and their limitations, is not posed because such a question is an abstraction in comparison to the functional utility of contemporary society. As George Novack has argued, pragmatism is the ideal philosophy of dominant ruling elites that do not want to ask searching questions about the possible systemic problems and limitations of modern capitalism (Novack 1975: 282–292). The pragmatic standpoint of privileging the present over the future means that existing practices become considered to be the only possible practices that are viable and functional. This means that pragmatists have an almost intuitive rejection of any epistemological criteria upon which another subordinate practice should be validated and encouraged. This standpoint is connected to an apathetic denial of the significance of any theoretical elaboration explaining why a subordinated practice should replace the dominant social practice. In contrast, the Marxist standpoint tries to show in theoretical terms why a subordinated practice is both explanatory and necessary because of its transformative content. Marxism shows that the pragmatists cannot establish that what is objective and true about practices is their continually changing character. What the pragmatists omit is a recognition that the process of evaluation of practices is connected to the enrichment of theories by an often lengthy debate as a necessary prelude to testing a theory in practice. For example, the Marxist theory of the necessity of proletarian revolution came into being through the exhaustive process of dissidents trying various other theories, in debate with their more conservative interlocutors, until the point at which Marx and Engels and their co-thinkers were able to formulate the necessity of proletarian revolution. Contrast this with Bakunin and the anarchists, who thought that you didn’t need a theory of insurrection, you just needed the insurrection – as if the latter could happen without the former (Marx 1977: 561–564). Thus it seems to me that Collier’s advocacy of the ‘test of practice’, as the only High Court in which theories can be judged, is neither true, nor is it in fact consistent with the Marxist theory of proletarian revolution. Collier’s account of truth contains some concessions to pragmatism. He comments: ‘[Realists] claim that beliefs are attempts, more or less successful, at objectivity, and are to be judged by the extent to which they achieve it’ (2003:

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141). This viewpoint begs a number of questions. First, it seems to be an almost dogmatic contention that objectivity is connected to practical success. What is problematical about this standpoint is the rigid view that seems to preclude any other criteria of what constitutes objectivity. Indeed, Collier’s approach could be in conflict with that of Bhaskar, who elaborates the view that what is explanatory is an important basis for differentiating and comparing theories (Bhaskar 1989: 14–15). In this context, it is possible to differentiate the ideological claims of various theories from what is objectively valid in relation to what they tell us about the ontological character of reality, both natural and social. Thus, it is possible to show that despite its ambiguous practical success, Marxism can be a valid research programme in relation to what it elaborates in terms of understanding historical development and the contemporary importance of the capital–labour relation (Mészáros 1995: 40–65). It is possible to abstract these important methodological principles and theoretical premises for research from the more disappointing, and some would suggest unsuccessful, attempts by Marxists to develop a society according to Marxist principles. In contrast, Collier’s conception of truth does not seem to allow for this level of flexibility and methodological plurality. Instead, all truth claims are to be judged harshly in terms of their capacity to generate practical success. This begs the question of whether a subordinated social agency is able to develop the possibility of social success. For example, Marx’s standpoint, that the working class is the universal class, may be explanatory in relation to understanding the structures of social reality. Nevertheless, for important specific and conjunctural reasons it has not been possible for the working class to realise its potential to be the universal class. This does not mean that it is no longer historically necessary, as an expression of structural contradictions and the possibilities of social agency, that the working class aims to act as a universal class. Indeed, this possibility is still located within the materiality and objectivity of the capital–labour relation (Mészáros 1995: 30–38). Second, Collier’s standpoint suggests that what is valid, explanatory and functional is the success of present achievements in existing societies, and so what is historically problematic is the uncertainty of a utopian and unrealistic future. This view could amount to a powerful claim for conservatism, because it is the very triumphalism of bourgeois political economy to assert that there is no alternative to capitalism (Mészáros 1995: 118–126). In other words, in contrast to the pragmatic epistemological standpoint, which tries to deny the importance of an ontological horizon beyond what works in the present according to uncritical criteria of practical success, Marxism has a historical perspective which shows the real social possibilities of what could be. This perspective has probably been articulated most cogently by Ernst Bloch, who showed that the Marxist utopia is not an expression of dreams and fantasy, but is located within real material and social conditions (Bloch 2000: 234–245). On this ontological basis, the importance of social practice is not defined by the pragmatic acceptance of the limitations of what exists, but rather practice is understood in terms of its potential for facilitating the realisation of what is possible. In this ontological and

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epistemological context, Collier’s conception of objectivity seems to be a concession to the static pragmatic approach and a rejection of the more dynamic Marxist understanding of what represents practical success. In a previous work, Collier outlined a vehement critique of utopianism (Collier 1990: 15–18). It is to be hoped that this rejection of utopianism has not been transformed into a contemplative acceptance of what is, in relation to In Defence of Objectivity’s epistemological concessions to pragmatism and the rigidities of its view of objectivism – one that does not seem to allow for the transforming role of the subject. Nevertheless, these important criticisms have to be located within an appreciation of Collier’s elaboration of a realist epistemology and its truth claims. On the basis of this substantial work Collier is indicating that realism is a coherent expression of the progress of the history of philosophy, and shows why realism is needed to advance the claims of a progressive philosophy of science.

Bibliography Adorno, Theodor (1973) Negative Dialectics, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Bhaskar, Roy (1989) Reclaiming Reality, London: Verso. —— (1993) Dialectic, London: Verso. Bloch, Ernst (2000) The Spirit of Utopia, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Collier, Andrew (1990) Socialist Reasoning, London: Pluto. —— (2003) In Defence of Objectivity, London: Routledge. Cottingham, John (1986) Descartes, Oxford: Blackwell. Descartes, René (1985a) The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Volume I, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —— (1985b) The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Volume II, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dietzgen, Joseph (1906) The Positive Outcome of Philosophy, Chicago: Charles H. Kerr. Engels, Friedrich (1954) Anti-Duhring, Moscow: Foreign Language Publishing House. Hegel, Georg (1975) Hegel’s Logic, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ilyenkov, Evald (1977) Dialectical Logic, Moscow: Progress Publishers. Kant, Immanuel (1992) Critique of Pure Reason, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Lenin, Vladimir (1976) Collected Works, Volume 38, Moscow: Progress Publishers. Lukács, Georg (1971) History and Class Consciousness, London: Merlin. Marx, Karl (1977) Karl Marx: Selected Writings, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mészáros, István (1995) Beyond Capital, London: Merlin. Novack, George (1975) Pragmatism Versus Marxism, New York: Pathfinder. Oizerman, Theodore (1988) The Main Trends In Philosophy, Moscow: Progress Publishers. Rorty, Richard (1995) Rorty And Pragmatism, Nashville and London: Vanderbilt University Press. —— (1999) Philosophy and Social Hope, London: Penguin.

Part VI

Objectivity and reflexivity

14 Reason and its own self-undoing? Alan Montefiore

It may well be that Reason with a capital ‘R’ – or, it may perhaps be better to say, the human capacity for reasoning – always ends up by getting itself into a mess – always has and always will. However that may be, it would seem that the last century has provided overall a particularly striking example of this. Of course, Reason, being what it is, always struggles to extricate itself from the mess; so it is wrong, no doubt, to speak of it ending up in one. There is and can be no conceivable end to its struggles with and against itself. Nevertheless the last century (or so) has provided what to many has appeared as a peculiarly distressing version of them, if to others perhaps a no less strangely liberating one. The story of Reason’s conflict with the emotions, or with bodily instinct, is a very old one, familiar through many different retellings. The more recent twist to this ancient story, however, is one of Reason’s own stubborn undermining of itself. This tendency towards its own self-undoing has its roots further back, of course. Or rather, for Reason is not to be thought of as a temporally situated actor upon some spatio-temporally situated stage, the evident roots of this tendency towards self-frustration are already to be discerned deeply embedded within the apparently all-too-reasonably rational philosophy of the Enlightenment. Hume was very well aware of the way in which desires or passions could run counter to each other, including ‘that reason, which is able to oppose our passion; and which we have found to be nothing but a general calm determination of the passions, founded on some distant view or reflection’ (Hume 1978: part III, section 1). As is well known, these tensions come most evidently to the surface within the philosophy of Kant, and nowhere more explicitly so than in his discussions, recurrent within the latter half of his Critique of Pure Reason, of what he calls ‘transcendental illusion’. For example: Transcendental illusion … does not cease even after it has been detected and its invalidity clearly revealed by transcendental criticism. … We take the subjective necessity of a connection of our concepts … for an objective necessity in the determination of things in themselves. This is an illusion than can no more be prevented than we can prevent the sea appearing higher at the horizon than at the shore … here we have to do with a

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Or again: We have here presented to us a new phenomenon of human reason – an entirely natural antithetic … into which reason of itself quite unavoidably falls. It … subjects it to the temptation either of abandoning itself to a sceptical despair, or of … dogmatically committing itself to certain assertions, and refusing to grant a fair hearing to the arguments for the counter-position. Either attitude is the death of sound philosophy. (Kant 1933: A407/B434) Kant himself, of course, in obedience to the principle of Reason within him, looks for a coherent way of explaining the illusions and of somehow resolving the prima facie irreconcilable contradictions into which that very Reason seems irresistibly to lead him; he tries to take the sting out of these tensions and to unmask what he sees as the illusions as being no more than simply illusory, through an insistence on his crucial distinction between appearances or phenomena, that is to say our sensory experiences of the natural order, on the one hand, and noumena or things in themselves, on the other – the underlying reality of which we cannot prevent ourselves from positing, but to the ‘concepts’ of which we can give no proper meaning and of which, therefore, we can in principle have no genuine knowledge whatsoever. The problem is, of course, that his account of the natural order as a strictly spatio-temporal and causally conditioned one and his characterisation of the realm of Reason as one of noumena or things in themselves and as being, therefore, equally strictly non-temporal, leaves him unable to give any logically intelligible account of how the two might interact – as interact they must if he is to be able to give any coherent sense to the notions of rationally guided or morally motivated action. As Kant himself puts it: ‘Transcendental freedom is thus, as it would seem, contrary to the law of nature, and therefore to all possible experience; and remains a problem’ (Kant 1933: A803/B831). Reason tells him, as it were, both that he must and yet that he will never finally be able to resolve these paradoxes. And this itself may be seen as a paradox of a higher order, as the mark of an ultimately unresolvable tension within the human condition. Kantian insight or Kantian confusion? His immediate successors, of course, finding the situation in which he seemed to have left them to be philosophically intolerable, tended either to try somehow to transcend the tensions inherent within his philosophy by showing how Reason was after all in the end ‘cunning’ enough to resolve them or, on the other and more typically Anglo-Saxon hand, to retreat to some more logically sophisticated version of what they saw, not alto-

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gether accurately perhaps, as robust Humean common sense. It was, no doubt, in the differences between these two reactions that some of the most important seeds of divergence between the so-called ‘Continental’ and ‘Analytic’ or ‘AngloSaxon’ branches of the western philosophical tradition were sown. Any attempt to follow through the historical details of this story would be far beyond the scope of the present paper. For the moment let it suffice to recall two highly significant features of it. First, if Kant, both directly and indirectly, was one of the dominant philosophical influences of the nineteenth century – and, of course, beyond it – so too, it would seem, has been Jacques Derrida in the twentieth.1 He is most probably best and most widely known for his introduction of the term and notion of deconstruction – if, indeed, one may be allowed the use of the term ‘notion’ in such a context. In its most generalised form, deconstruction may not unreasonably be understood as the work of showing how, when appropriate pressures are applied, every form of discourse can be shown to contain within itself the mutually conflicting elements of its own self-undoing. What is one to understand by this? One – tangentially Kantian, if slightly cryptic – way of putting it would be to say that the threat of antinomies is to be found lurking within every attempt at an organised body of discourse, however would-be systematic it may be, and however internally consistent it may have appeared to those who designed it. That is to say that it will always be possible to find latent within it the starting-points for lines of argument that, if developed, may be shown to undermine each other and thus, taken together, to generate contradictions; and this is tantamount to saying that all would-be rational constructions may be shown in the last resort to generate their own characteristically recurring irrationalities. (It is not clear to me that Derrida himself would construe/pursue the claims – or threats? – of deconstruction to such a completely unrestricted or generalised extent. If I have understood him correctly, he would, nowadays at any rate, regard the discourse of justice, for example, as being somehow immune to such a development.) The second point is in effect an even more general one. If the deconstructive claim is indeed in principle applicable to every form of argument or of discourse, it must equally apply – reflexively – to any line of argument that purports to support it.2 In this, its apparently self-refuting reflexivity, it resembles that other great bugbear of latter day thinking, the disarmingly persuasive claim that the validity of all points of view or pretensions to theoretical insight have to be understood as limited to the cultural or conceptual contexts within which they are expressed. There can, it would seem, be no plausibility to any general claim that all claims except this one alone are thus strictly relative or that they must inevitably be couched in language containing the seeds of their own logical undoing. To the relativist version at any rate of this seemingly paradoxical reflexivity, there would seem, broadly speaking and at first sight, to be two possible reactions, each standing in diametric opposition to the other. On the one hand, the relativists may be tempted to respond by accepting that they can no more provide any wholly context-independent justifications of their arguments, their criteria of

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validation, the senses of their key terms than can any of their opponents – that we are all indeed in the same relativist boat; but that, he may add, is, of course, just his point. On the other hand, the anti-relativist may claim – and many of them have done so with one degree of sophistication or another – that relativism’s avowal of its own self-relativity amounts in effect to its own self-refutation. In fact, neither of these responses seems to me to be altogether satisfactory. An important part of my own response – broadly speaking once again – would be to argue, first, for the impossibility of dispensing with some version or other of a transcendental presupposition of objectivity as a necessary condition of the acquisition and intelligibility of any language within which one might find it possible to communicate – including most notably the very language in which one was trying to set out and communicate this very argument. I would then seek to extend the argument to any other languages that might be encountered by showing that anyone’s ability to recognise any other sustained pattern of signs that they might come across as actually constituting a symbolic system or language must always in the last resort depend on their being able to work out at least some partial intertranslatability between that language and their own. Clearly, this condition cannot apply to anyone’s very first entry into membership of a speech community. As the infant first catches on to the acquisition of language it has ex hypothesi no already available resources into which to translate its newly (and at first uncertainly) acquired capacity for symbolisation. It is, of course, true that those who go on to acquire relative fluency in a second language do typically learn to use and to understand certain of its expressions and sentences, which they find to be strictly and obstinately untranslatable into the language from which they started, but whose meaning they are nevertheless able to explain in it. It is, perhaps, just conceivable that someone might come to learn a second language in exactly the same way as that in which they had acquired their first, that is to say, by direct interactive contact with speakers of that language and without any mediating reference to the language with which they were already familiar. (Even to begin to make sense of such a hypothesis, one would need to suppose it possible that the circumstances in which the second language was acquired contained absolutely no features for which terms of the first language might be recognisably applicable, and it is in fact far from clear that such a possibility can coherently be fleshed out.) But it is virtually impossible to see how one and the same person might properly speaking possess two distinct languages while being strictly unable to relate them in any way to each other by way of partial translation or at least by interpretive explication. And inasmuch as such passage between them must of necessity be assured, then – or so I should argue – the transcendental supposition of objectivity will apply as much to the one as to the other; and inasmuch as this is so, the wilder claims of subjective relativism may be shown to be … wilder than can be sustained. These are, certainly, arguments that call for much detailed working out before they can be made to stick. In any case, however, even if one takes them to be successful, they only deal with part of the problem. Let us assume, for present purposes at any rate, that arguments can indeed be made out to the effect that any language – starting with ‘my’ own and extending therefrom to any others of

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which I may, one way or another, learn enough to be able to recognise them as languages – must contain within its constitutive presuppositions that of an ‘objectivity thesis’. By this I mean the assumption (which I take to be, in spirit at least, characteristically Kantian) that the world which I come to grasp through the organising structures with which my language or languages provide me, is in general the way in which it is, in at least partial independence of how it may seem to me to be at any given moment. As Terry Eagleton has noted in a recent review article, ‘there are many competing versions of how it is with the world, including the Postmodern belief that it is no way in particular’.3 It is in fact quite plausibly arguable that the Postmodern belief, when formulated in this way, is basically correct. That is to say that it may very well be true that there is no one way of describing the world, or even any particular part of it, that is uniquely ‘true to the facts’, all other descriptions being ‘false’. But this should not, and indeed cannot, seriously be held to mean that no descriptions or would-be statements of fact can ever be shown to be decisively false. To take just one simple example, there are languages in which I cannot straightforwardly assert that I have just one brother without making it clear by the term that I use in formulating my assertion whether the brother in question is an elder or a younger one. But whatever the way in which I seek to describe my family situation, my assertion could be shown to be demonstrably false if it turned out that my only sibling was either an elder or a younger sister. All that the ‘objectivity thesis’ is designed to show is that it is a condition of the meaningfulness of any symbolic system that its terms can be used incorrectly as well as correctly, that (in a significant proportion of cases at least) assertions made through the deployment of its terms may in principle turn out to be falsifiable through meeting with the resistance of relevantly recalcitrant facts and that neither the correctness nor incorrectness, the truth nor the falsity in question should depend always and entirely on how the matter appears to the subject or speaker. One might perhaps sum up the situation by saying that if truth is always in some sense (conceptually) relative, falsity must at least sometimes be absolute. And this, one may add, must hold true, however otherwise relative the symbolic or conceptual system from within which the world of experience may be characterised. Arguments concerning the cultural relativity of concepts and their reflexive implications, however, are one thing. Arguments concerning the limitations of Reason and the irreducible deceptiveness of reasoned arguments, though analogous in their potentially threatening reflexivity, are nevertheless another. If rational argument is to be trusted, one may reasonably hope to show that the idea that any and every representation of the state of the world or account of its causal structure may, so long as it is internally consistent, have to be recognised (and therefore respected) as being as good as any other, belongs in effect to the psychopathology of epistemology. But what if the very criteria of rational argument, including even the Law of Non-Contradiction, are themselves to be understood as no more than culturally relative? What if any pretention to assess the beliefs of some so-called ‘primitive society’ as prima facie self-contradictory has to be acknowledged as no more than a manifestation of ‘western’ cultural imperialism? Or what, again, if

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that same Law of Non-Contradiction is to be seen as only the most centrally protected element in a continuous ensemble of propositions, those nearest the surface, so to speak, being the most directly exposed to the risks of modification or abandonment in the light of the non-propositional evidences of experience, but all of them ultimately liable to modification or even rejection, should the costs of abandoning certain of the most highly valued outer elements be judged or felt to be too high, even if the price of their preservation be that of a far-reaching readjustment of the very innermost elements of the system? Even some of the most professional and hard-headed philosophers of the century just past found themselves led at one time or another to take such hypotheses with the utmost seriousness. Peter Winch and Quine were, of course, among the most notable of these. It is at least equally significant, however, that each of them was led subsequently to retreat from such extreme undermining through cultural or logical relativisation of the Law of Non-Contradiction. For once contradiction is allowed free and unrestricted entry into a language or discursive system it can spread as might a sort of symbolic cancer, ultimately destructive of any possibility of coherent assertion, of translation from one language to another and, in the last resort, of meaningfulness itself. It may go without further saying that all such reasons as might be put forward in support of such a radical down-grading of the status of this very central principle of both rational and reasonable meaningfulness cannot but carry with them the seeds of their own dissolution. Kant himself, of course, never suggested that the ‘natural and unavoidable dialectic of pure reason’ might lead to such dire and universally disabling discursive consequences as this. On my understanding of his understanding of the matter, we are left not so much in a situation of a quite general and generally crippling inability to decide between any and every pair of prima facie mutually contradictory propositions, as in one in which we seem to be faced with equally strong sets of reasons for holding each of two directly conflicting affirmations concerning the status, structure and origin of the world, affirmations of a very high and far from everyday level of generality. Even, then, Kant, of course, thought that once we recognised the distinction between the phenomenal and noumenal realms, we should be able to see this apparent conflict of reason with itself as the dialectical illusion that it was – an illusion which we could no more dispel, however, than the traveller in the desert is able to banish what he may know to be nothing more than a mirage vision of the oasis that seems to present itself before him. No doubt, the Transcendental Idealist way of rescuing Reason from its own tendency to self-inflicted paradox gave rise in its turn to notorious puzzles of its own – in particular, of course, that of understanding how a rationally determined action can be at once self-initiated and yet, qua spatio-temporally situated event, stand in fully determinate causal relations to all other such events. Even so, Kant made it clear that he did not so much see this deeply rooted tendency of Reason to turn back upon itself as potentially destructive of all attempts at reasoning, but rather as constituting some sort of barrier or limit to the natural human drive to push the achievements of rational understanding ever deeper and further. As he put it in the last sentence but one of the

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Groundwork, ‘while we do not comprehend the practical unconditioned necessity of the moral imperative, we do comprehend its incomprehensibility’ (Kant 1948: 131); and this, he thought – at that point at any rate – was as much as anyone could fairly or sensibly demand of human reason. The deconstructive worry – not just that it is of the very nature of rational enquiry that it should lead us into making rationally unsubstantiatable claims in answer to certain rationally unsatisfiable but rationally insistent demands, but that ‘every form of discourse can be shown to contain within itself the elements of its own self-undoing’ – insinuates itself as an apparently more general and thus even more destabilising one. As in the case of Transcendental or Dialectical paradox, the suggestion is not that so-called rational arguments can never be secured as valid within the contexts of their particular construction, but rather that these contexts are always limited and can never themselves be finally secured against all possible rival overlapping contexts. If too much weight is placed on any key term or terms central to any given body of discourse, this will tend to give way to a kind of dispersal of its constitutive semantic elements, each of them straying off into a diversity of associations, all of them different and some of them in the last resort irreconcilable with each other. One may think by analogy of trying to walk through an area of marshy land, characterised by relatively resistant tufts of bog-grass interspersed with patches of waterlogging moss. If one keeps on moving as one passes from tuft to tuft, one may hope to keep one’s feet dry; if, however, one looks to rest with both feet firmly placed on one and the same tuft with all one’s weight thus resting upon it, one finds it sinking beneath one. There are no foundations on which one might ultimately rely – or, as it is often put when the question is one of analysing bodies of discourse rather than of walking through bogs, there are no ultimately first origins.4 (It is evident that the term ‘discourse’ is no more immune to the pressures of what has been called ‘dissemination’ than is any other apparently key term. To allow myself a purely anecdotal personal memory, I remember asking Michel Foucault once what exactly he understood by ‘discourse’, a term of which he had made some not inconsiderable and well-known use. His reply was that, finding himself with a need for some such general term (of art rather than of science, as it were), he had realised that while nearly all the other potentially available expressions – ‘conceptual scheme’, ‘weltanschaung’, ‘language’, ‘symbolic system’, and so on – had already acquired their own type-cast identities, the term ‘discourse’, on the other hand, still seemed to be relatively unencumbered and available; and so ‘discourse’ it was.) What I have called the deconstructive worry, then, does not so much present itself as one that calls into question the possibility of establishing compelling sequences of valid argument within particular contexts or structures of discourse insofar as they may be taken as given and the meanings of the key terms of the argument may be taken as locally stable. Rather it calls into question the stability or reliability of any such context-boundaries as such – including, of course, those of the very context within which this worry is itself raised. The implication seems to be that the choice of contexts (of discursive viewpoints, conceptual

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frameworks or whatever), from within which to characterise the world and one’s field of action within it, is simply up for grabs. But here we seem to be doing no more than return, after a set of variations, as it were, to a restatement (if perhaps in a different key) of the central relativist theme. Whatever the aspect of the world with which we may be concerned, ours will not be the only way in which it may be characterised; as the world itself is never going to come down decisively in favour of one characterisation rather than another, each may have equal claim to be true relative to the perspective from which it is proposed. What, then, may justify the suggestion that two different characterisations may yet apply to one and the same aspect of the world other than the evidently unsustainable assumption that it may be possible to identify aspects of the world independently of any and all of the ways in which they may be characterised? The answer lies somewhere in the fact that, however different the characterisations of the world by people coming from different cultural (or ideological) backgrounds may be, no one would or could remark on these differences other than on the fundamentally inescapable assumption that they do after all live in the same world. We come back once again to the facts that two different characterisations of a world – of an aspect of the world – can only present themselves as potentially rival alternatives to each other insofar as they overlap to at least some significant degree; and that overlaps there are bound to be as a necessary condition of anyone actually being able to recognise the very existence of a characterisation – a discourse, a language – other than his or her own. What all this amounts to, then, is something like this. We have to accept both that there can in principle be no one account of the way that the world is which is uniquely 'true to the facts' in a way that entails that all other accounts must be erroneous or 'false'; and that there can in principle be no chain of reasoning whose validity depends on the meanings of the key structural terms of its argument that may not be liable to slippage when attempts are made to deploy it universally across all possible identifiable contexts. We have, furthermore, to accept that these limitations hold reflexively even for the very same argument which purports to make them explicit. Nevertheless, this does not and can not mean that 'the way that the world actually is' may not always be capable of showing an account of how it is supposed to be, to be in fact incontrovertibly false - and that no matter the perspective from which that account may be proposed. No doubt, anyone really determined, or in some sense compelled, to hold on to such a would-be worlddescriptive and explanatory account, may always be able to find available within it resources enabling them somehow to 'show' that what appear to be falsifying facts are either not what they seem to be or are not really falsificatory. But if discursive communication of any sort is to maintained, sthere must always be, if not a theoretically definitive, at any rate a practically effective limit to such apparent 'resourcefulness'.Where that limit comes will depend on the essential practical needs or purposes of the person or people concerned and on how close is the bearing of the world-description in question on the nature of the outcomes that would make for the success or failure, satisfaction or neglect of the needs and purposes in question. We have to accept both that there can in principle be no one account of the

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way that the world is which is uniquely ‘true to the facts’ in a way that entails that all other accounts must be erroneous or ‘false’; and that there can in principle be no chain of reasoning whose validity depends on the meanings of the key structural terms of its argument that may not be liable to slippage when attempts are made to deploy it universally across all possible identifiable contexts. We have, furthermore, to accept that these limitations hold reflexively even for the very same argument which purports to make them explicit. Nevertheless, this does not and cannot mean that ‘the way that the world actually is’ may not always be capable of showing an account of how it is supposed to be, to be in fact incontrovertibly false – and that no matter the perspective from which that account may be proposed. No doubt, anyone really determined, or in some sense compelled, to hold on to such a wouldbe world-descriptive and explanatory account, may always be able to find available within it resources enabling them somehow to ‘show’ that what appear to be falsifying facts are either not what they seem to be or are not really falsificatory. But if discursive communication of any sort is to be maintained, there must always be, if not a theoretically definitive, at any rate a practically effective limit to such apparent ‘resourcefulness’. Where that limit comes will depend on the essential practical needs or purposes of the person or people concerned and on how close the bearing of the world-description in question on the nature of the outcomes that would make for the success or failure, satisfaction or neglect of these needs and purposes concerned. In the last resort, however, both social and physical survival depend on the ability to adapt to the way which the world shows itself to be, whatever the categories and concepts through which one culture, or world view, or another may have come to represent it as intelligibly describable. If this sounds like a return to simple common sense – or perhaps to simple common scientific sense, that no doubt is what it is. But it would be quite mistaken for common sense to feel so reassured as to relapse into complacency. The whole history of philosophy is there to teach us that scepticism concerning the existence of the so-called external world, however implausibly far removed it may seem to the philosophical eyes of basic common sense, is never finally and definitively beaten. And rationally based scepticism as to the powers and trustworthiness of Reason itself will surely prove itself to be at least equally resistant and resilient. One (philosophical) reason for this lies in the fact that the reasons for doubting the apparently universal power of Reason are curiously seductive in their appeal to Reason itself. This, however, is but one side of the story. It has become almost a commonplace to note the extent to which the last century has fallen under the influence of the great ‘masters of suspicion’, Marx, Freud and (in one of the most influential of his many possible readings) Nietzsche, all of whom, of course, had their roots firmly in the nineteenth century, but whose influence came to what may well turn out to have been its fullest flowering in the twentieth. The lesson that they all seemed to teach, each in their own way, was that the reasons that men and women give themselves for their actions can never safely be assumed to be their ‘real’ motivations, and that people are in general self-mystified. It is only too easy to see how this form of argument too can be given a reflexive and thus a selfundercutting turn. There is even a prima facie common sense version of this general

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theme of distrust of conclusive reason and subject-independent truth; for truth and conclusive reasoning, it may quite plausibly be argued, are simply matters of what works best in the majority view of the relevant community. The most influential representative of this version of suspicion of the would-be universal is no doubt Richard Rorty. But once again even his brand of pragmatism has its roots in the nineteenth century. At the level of philosophical theory, one of the most closely argued episodes of recent times in this no doubt unending struggle between reason and its would-be suicidal doppelgänger is that which is fought out in Bernard Williams’ last book Truth and Truthfulness (to which Rorty himself devoted an attentive and more than respectful review in the London Review of Books).5 The stakes, however, are by no means only theoretical. There is undeniably a certain very real sense of liberation and exhilaration to be found in casting off the ‘constraints’ of reason and in giving oneself over to the release of one’s emotions, whether in individual passion, in the forgetfulness of self that comes with the feeling of belonging, as a mere part, to a greater whole of instinctive solidarity or in those forms of self-forgetfulness that are to be found in one or other of the many techniques of self-intoxication. (None of these possibilities, moreover, is exclusive of any of the others.) There is a clearly romantic version of this abandonment of reason to passion. There is an even more clearly sinister version, one that has been exhibited and experienced far too often and on a monstrous scale over the last century. One way of reacting to what may very naturally and easily be perceived as the irrationalism of the philosophical and associated discourses of suspicion is to see them as both an expression of and, in no doubt quite unintended effect, a further encouragement to these ultimately catastrophic excesses. It is against this background that one may most naturally understand the rooted opposition to all such discourses of a philosopher such as Habermas, who has experienced what it is to grow up in such an excessive society, and his unvarying persistence in defence of an ideal of rational communication premised on the assumption that, with sufficient patience and a sufficient faith in its possibility in principle, mutual understanding may be a real practical – moral, social and political – possibility for all who are prepared to seek it. (It goes without saying that in practice such mutual understanding can never be taken for granted or assumed to be definitive or complete.) What, then, one may ask, of the prospects for mutual understanding between the philosophers of reason and those of rational suspicion of reason and ‘too much’ rationality? This is itself, however, a question-begging question to ask. It is true that, at first sight, it may in general appear to be fairly clear which philosophers are on the one side and which on the other. On the one hand, for example, we would seem to recognise a Derrida and on the other a Habermas, on the one hand a Rorty and on the other a Williams; and it would not be difficult to continue the list. But the idea that all philosophers are to be understood as belonging fairly and squarely either to one side or to the other is surely just an illusion. Kant – on my reading of him at any rate – may be seen as standing on both sides of the fence, if not at once, at any rate in unavoidable and ever repeated succession. There is the Kant of the Enlightenment, the Kant for

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whom the possession of Reason was at the very core of the essentially human capacity for autonomy and for an ever-advancing organisation of knowledge – a Reason, moreover, that demanded a rationally acceptable answer to all the questions that were of its very nature to put. Equally insistently, however, there is the Kant for whom this very Reason leads as of necessity to necessarily mutually irreconcilable answers to some of its most crucial questions, a Reason which was thus itself the source of inescapable paradox and of the self-frustration contained in the knowledge that ultimately the only attainable certainty was to be found in the knowledge of its own ineluctable limits. On such a reading, Kant, for one, is to be seen rather both as a philosopher of reason and as one of rational self-suspicion. Should one allow oneself the stylistic gloss of saying ‘at one and the same time both a philosopher of reason and one of rational self-suspicion’? To this question there can be no one clear and comfortable answer; and this for two characteristically Kantian reasons. The first is that for anyone who takes Transcendental Idealism seriously, reasoning has itself to be reckoned an inherently paradoxical ‘activity’. For reasoning, as something which one does as opposed to the structures of argument that one may hope will result, has surely to be understood as an activity taking place in the successiveness of time, moving on from whatever its starting point through subsequent stages to whatever may present itself as a conclusion. But on Kant’s account of knowledge and of the world of experience, whatever takes place in time has necessarily to be understood as standing in relations of causal interdependence with all other temporally situated events or phenomena. The Reason ‘within him’, however, is precisely that whereby man knows himself to share in the domain of autonomy and of freedom from ‘merely’ causal determination. In brief, the relations between the temporality of his embodiment and his essentially non-causal and non-temporal capacities as a reasoning agent that go to make up what Kant sees as the fundamentally dual aspect character of man lie – notoriously – at the very heart of his problematic. Thus, to characterise Kant over-simply as both a philosopher of reason and one of rational self-suspicion at the same time is to risk softening the sharpness of the paradox inherent in this double characterisation to the point of losing it altogether. The second reason may be seen as yet another reflection of the fundamental and essentially self-conflictual Kantian commitment to paradox. It is to be remembered that there is nothing half-hearted about him either in his role as philosopher of reason or in that of one of rational self-suspicion. In the first of these roles, it is impossible for him to countenance flat and outright contradictions. But to assert the positions of confident Enlightenment rationality and of already post-Enlightenment rational self-suspicion in one and the same conjunction – to maintain them at one and the same time – is precisely to commit oneself to an explicitly self-contradictory position. And this is something which Kant in the first of his two roles clearly cannot do. So the question of the prospects for mutual understanding between the philosophers of reason and those of rational suspicion of reason turns out to be in effect the same as that of the self-understanding of a philosopher such as the Kant of my

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reading. There can in principle, it would seem to me, be no one conclusive answer to be given to this question in either of its two versions. For what after all can be meant by ‘understanding’ in this sort of context? Should one be thinking of the kind of (rational) understanding whereby one may see how a given argument works and why its conclusion follows validly from its premises; or of that whereby one may grasp the nature of the causal impacts that conspire, or may be so organised, as to bring about some given state of affairs; or, again, of that understanding, more akin to a certain kind of human insight, whereby one may appreciate how and why a given human being – who may, of course, be oneself – sees and feels the world in the way that he or she does (without necessarily approving or supporting the attitudes involved)? And what might any of these have to do with what one may have in mind when speaking of people reaching a common understanding with each other in the sense of seeming at least to come to some sort of common accord? Many people must have had the experience of finding equally convincing the arguments leading to opposite and mutually incompatible conclusions and being quite unable to come to any rational decision between them. One may, moreover, find each of these incompatible conclusions to be both theoretically and practically equally attractive – it is after all an uncomfortably common and very human experience to find oneself in a position of wanting both to have one’s cake and to eat it. And although such an outcome may appear to be both theoretically irrational and practically unattainable, it may be not at all difficult to see what are the causal factors that lie behind and explain the existence of this splitminded state of affairs. In one’s own case such self-insight may exist without its necessarily having any tendency whatsoever to bring about a resolution of the conflict. Where the conflict is one between one’s own beliefs or preferences and those of another, the fact that one believes oneself to ‘understand’ both the reasons and the effective causes of the other’s beliefs and commitments would equally seem to have no necessary bearing on either one’s instinctive or practical attitude towards the disagreement. One may sympathise or even empathise while yet continuing to disagree and even to oppose, or one may strongly disapprove and feel a possibly violent antipathy, while yet refraining from any active opposition – just, indeed, as one may simply accept one’s own inability to decide between the alternatives in question or, on the other hand, feel strongly self-critical or even disgusted with one’s own rational or psychological inability to decide. Thus a Kant who had been somehow persuaded of the rational untenability of his own key distinction between the phenomenal and noumenal realms might then find himself completely stuck in the position of being unable to reject either of the mutually incompatible but apparently compelling conclusions of his various antinomic arguments; and he might indeed understand very well both just why it was that he was thus stuck and the psychological factors that might perhaps lead him, if he was forced in practice to choose, to opt for the one solution and his interlocutor for the other. But once again – though for different reasons – what he cannot in principle do is at one and the same time remain stuck in a position of both trying to reason his way forward and yet of accepting that Reason has run into its

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inevitable dead end and that it can do no more for him. Either he continues to look for rational accommodations; or he despairs of the search. Or so it might seem. In fact, of course, the Kant of my reading does do both of these things – but it could be seriously misleading to suggest that he might do so ‘at one and the same time’. What he may be said to know – however uncomfortably – at one and the same time is that he is fated always to be moving on, forwards and back; and then forwards and back again. This is not a knowledge to which he can give properly coherent expression either in the immediate temporality of his own thinking as he experiences it or in the non-temporal mode of a non-self-contradictory conjunctive proposition. It is the underlying knowledge that there are no definitive answers to be found, no ultimately objective ground to be finally secured, no absolute or ‘God’s-eye’ perspective to be attained; and yet with it also the knowledge that the existence of all of these remain as the indispensable postulate and goal of a never to be abandoned search. And if this is the unstable stable ‘position’ of the Kant of my preferred reading, it does after all provide the ground for a sort of self-understanding, even if one definitively resistant to any definitive form of articulation; and with it the possibility at least of arriving at a similar common understanding between a philosopher who has chosen to take his stand in the name of Reason and one who, at that particular moment at any rate, is committed to exposing its many possible weaknesses and deceits. For although each of them may find themselves unable conclusively to declare it, they may each of them yet share the unstatable knowledge that by the time they have turned the next corner they may have found themselves to have exchanged positions.

Notes 1 2 3 4

5

In saying this, one has not, of course, a comparable benefit of historical hindsight. In practice, of course, most deconstructionist writing avoids making general theoretical pronouncements of this sort, but applies itself rather to the detailed examination and deconstruction of particular texts. London Review of Books, 20 February 2003, p. 17, para. 2. The Bible tells us that ‘In the beginning was the word’, and certainly practising Derridians place immense emphasis on the actual words of the texts with which and on which they work. But if the concept or notion of a word is taken to include that of its meaning, then the words of a text can provide no more secure or non-disseminating foundations for their work than can anything else; and if the meaningfulness of a word as such is not to be included in the very meaning of the word ‘word’, then we are left talking of ‘mere’ physical inscriptions, the ‘merely’ contingent vehicles of possible readings. London Review of Books, 31 October 2002, pp. 13–15.

Bibliography Hume, David (1978) A Treatise of Human Nature, 2nd edn, ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge, London: Clarendon Press. Kant, Immanuel (1933) Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp-Smith, London: Macmillan. —— (1948) The Moral Law: Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, trans. Herbert James Paton, London: Hutchinson.

15 Intentional and reflexive objectivity Some reflections William Outhwaite

In section 5 of In Defence of Objectivity (2003: 166–169), Andrew Collier sketches out a distinction between two types of objectivity which leads to the centre both of his own thinking and of the issues at stake between realist and related positions on the one hand and relativistic, deconstructionist or antifoundationalist positions on the other. As Kate Soper and other contributors to this volume have noted, one of the key elements of Collier’s thinking is his stress on a selfdistancing relation to objects.1 This emphasis, paralleled by, for example, the quotations from Macmurray in section 4 of In Defence of Objectivity, or Adorno’s frequent reference to ‘what the object has by itself ’, as distinct from our subjectivistic or, worse, narcissistic relation to it, gives Collier an interesting and sensitive angle of approach to existentialist thought, sharing elements of its critique of excessive reflection and what Kierkegaard called calculation, while wishing to curb its excessively voluntaristic approach to knowledge and practice. Collier attempts to capture this tension in terms of a distinction between intentional objectivity, which is object-related in the sense of Husserl and Brentano, and a more distanced reflexive objectivity which is driven by questions, often sceptical ones, about the nature of our relationship to the alleged object, its status and the very possibility of an epistemic or practical relation to it. Objectivity in this second sense needs to be kept in its place: It is useful in showing us how intentional objectivity goes wrong – that is, how is it that our thoughts and feelings are sometimes merely subjective in the sense that they don’t correspond to their objects and are to be explained by the nature of the subject rather than that of the object? … [But] [w]hat reflexive objectivity can never be is the criterion of intentional objectivity. (Collier 2003: 168) Collier illustrates this distinction via the difference between science and the sociology of science, or between theology and religious studies. Whether the science is good science or not is a scientific question, though the sociologist may be able to explain after the event why it was good or bad, and even to suggest in advance some reasons why we might reasonably expect it to be good or bad. Similarly, the existence of gods and so forth is a question for theology, while the discipline of

Intentional and reflexive objectivity 227 Religious Studies is concerned with religious beliefs, practices and experiences in isolation from their alleged objects. ‘A sociologist of science may be a good scientist, but only by switching off the sociology; an adept at Religious Studies may be a good theologian, but only by switching off the Religious Studies’ (2003: 169). More generally, Collier suggests that ‘It is a specific feature of human practice that we can always monitor what we are doing. It is another feature of human practice that we always do things worse when we do them reflexively. A monitored activity is a badly done activity’ (2003: 169). In this brief contribution I want to suggest that, while Andrew is on to something of unquestionable importance in making this distinction, the ways in which he does so are unduly sharp, and that the relation is not so much between two mutually exclusive types of objectivity between which we can only ‘switch’, as a continuum between the wholly unreflective practice (which I might have called animal if I had not been taught not to by Andrew, Ted Benton, and others), and a reflexivity so intense that it entirely inhibits the making of claims about the world or any intervention in it.2 And contrary to the view that shifts from one kind of objectivity to another are discontinuous, I want to suggest the alternative image of a permanent oscillation between different forms of reflexive monitoring relation. If I were speaking these words to you rather than writing them, for example, I would have to pay some more or less conscious attention to my level of audibility, and I would be looking for reinforcing feedback that I had your attention. Three decades of lecturing to mostly impassive audiences does not diminish this desire for feedback, and experimental analysis of telephone conversations shows how quickly we become nervous if there is no response at all to our monologues. More complicated issues of whether I am writing this text as clearly as possible or whether I am deliberately indulging in obscurity in order to impress and bamboozle you are not so much an interruption to the writing process as its more or less permanent accompaniment. Higher-order reflections on the nature of academic debate in the early twentieth century, the status of realism as a philosophical position and the degree to which it is known in different parts of the contemporary world, and so on, are also ‘always on’ in the background, as I think about the intended audience for what I am writing. In what follows I shall illustrate this line of argument a bit more fully in relation to three major contemporary social theorists, Jürgen Habermas, Pierre Bourdieu and Anthony Giddens, whose work is paradigmatic of the very widespread use of the term reflexivity in contemporary thought,3 and I shall close with what I consider a more problematic and challenging case, that of Karl Mannheim. As I have argued elsewhere, the theme of reflection is central to Habermas’s thought, and in particular to what he has come to call a model of rational reconstruction (Outhwaite 2000). His early critiques of technocratic and decisionistic politics are based on their neglect of reflection, as is his closely related critique of positivism. ‘That we deny reflection is positivism’ (Habermas 1968: preface). The more precise language of rational reconstruction which he develops from the mid-1970s expresses the epistemic dimension of this approach, while his model

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of communicative action developed at the same time is intended to capture its practical dimension. Habermas understands his theory of communicative action not as an abstract normative theory of how we ought to behave, such as theories based on an initial decision to ‘take the moral point of view’, but rather as a reconstruction of our existing practices. As he put it in an interview, I am not saying that people should act communicatively, but that they must. When parents bring up their children, when living generations appropriate the knowledge handed down by their predecessors, when individuals and groups cooperate … they must act communicatively. There are elementary social functions which can only be fulfilled via communicative action. In our intersubjectively shared lifeworlds which overlap with one another there lies a broad background consensus without which everyday action simply could not work. (Habermas 1994 [1991]: 111–112) Formal processes of argumentation, whether in everyday life or in specialised domains of morality and politics, are the exception, ‘islands in the sea of praxis’. Habermas is therefore rejecting an approach which sees communicative action (which he distinguishes from merely self-interested or ‘strategic’ action, and from norm-conforming and expressive action) as a special activity belonging to a different realm from that of everyday practice. In stressing the pervasiveness of processes of reflection and justification in everyday life he is also rejecting the conclusions of Niklas Luhmann’s system theory, that modern differentiated societies consist of subsystems which have no common language in which to communicate. At the same time, however, we cannot simply affirm the model of individual or collective subjectivity which is based on the ‘philosophy of consciousness’ derived from Descartes and Kant, in which a subject reflects on its relation to its own representations of objects. Neo-Marxist philosophies of praxis, Habermas believes, remain limited by this perspective, while on the other hand many modern theories give up on subjectivity and rationality altogether. What is required is what he calls in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity ‘another way out of the philosophy of the subject’, one which reconstructs in a more complex intersubjective model the reflective operations previously imputed to an isolated subject or logos: ‘concrete forms of life replace transcendental consciousness in its function of creating unity’ (Habermas 1985b: 326) Although, as we have seen, Habermas rejects a simple conception of societies as subjects, his conception of ‘undamaged intersubjectivity’, in which he now attempts to render the idea of emancipation, is grounded in the life-histories, retrospective and prospective, of individuals and collectivities. ‘Forms of life, like life-histories, crystallise around particular identities’ (Habermas 1994 [1991]: 48). The universalism which Habermas upholds does not mean the authoritarian imposition of a particular conception with universalistic pretensions. As he put it in an interview in 1988 with Jean-Marc Ferry:

Intentional and reflexive objectivity 229 What does universalism mean? It means that one relativises one’s own form of existence in relation to the legitimate claims of other forms of life, that one attributes equal rights to the alien and the other, with all their idiosyncrasies and incomprehensible aspects, that one does not stick rigidly to the universalisation of ones own identity and precisely does not separate out what deviates from it, that the spheres of tolerance must become infinitely wider than they are today – all this is what is meant by moral universalism. (Habermas 1990: 153) This also means that our attitude to established structures and traditions can only be a cautious and reflective one. Habermas stressed this earlier in the same interview with Ferry: The horror [of the Holocaust RWO] took place without interrupting the peaceful breath of everyday life. Ever since then, a conscious life is no longer possible without a mistrust directed at continuities which unquestioningly assert themselves and purport to derive their validity from their unquestioned character. (1990: 150) What Habermas is offering then, is in a sense a philosophy of reflection which develops outside the limits of what has traditionally been understood by the philosophy of reflection, consciousness and the subject. It is a philosophy or a sociology for a world of the kind described, for example, by Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens, with the notion that modernity has become reflexive.4 This is a world in which individuals are increasingly thrown onto their own resources to define their own social relations – what Habermas (1990: 88) calls ‘risky selfsteering by means of a highly abstract ego-identity’. The process itself was built into modernity from the beginning and described as such by Max Weber and others at the turn of the century, notably in the concept of rationalisation. There has been a tendency to stress the promethean and world-making aspect of this process, but the ‘moderns’ captured in Max Weber’s concept of ascetic protestantism and in Lucien Goldmann’s analysis of Jansenism were also racked with anxieties and self-doubt which for theological reasons they could not acknowledge. This negative or tragic consciousness of modernity eventually developed, in Romanticism, into aesthetic and often ironical forms. The tension between these two aspects of modernity continues, and many of the earlier descriptions, with their contradictory emphases, seem to become truer than ever as modernity develops in its many and varied forms. But if Habermas’s models of communicative action and reconstruction, and their application in his theories of discourse ethics, discursive democracy and constitutional patriotism, involve reflection and reflexivity at all levels, his thinking is perhaps uncomfortably dualistic in one aspect of the way in which he theorises reflection. Habermas regularly invokes a distinction, derived no doubt from social phenomenology, between a second- and a third-person orientation or

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between that of participants and observers. In the former, we interact with the other as an interlocutor; in the latter, we move towards a more distanced interpretation or explanation of his or her behaviour. Once again, however, it seems to me that the complexities of taking the role of the other involve a complex interplay between these perspectives, to such an extent that their analytical distinctiveness is rapidly obscured, rather as the distinctness of the left- and right-eye view is effaced in stereoscopic vision. My second theorist of reflexivity is the late Pierre Bourdieu, who explicitly decribed his sociology as reflexive (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992). Although this exphasis grew stronger with time (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992), the motif is present even in early works such as Le métier de sociologue (Bourdieu et al. 1968). Here Bourdieu shows how a vigorously, even brutally, Durkheimian and Bachelardian conception of the separation of social science from everyday thought can be combined with a sensitivity to issues of reflexivity and a nondefeatist strategy for handling them. Bourdieu’s rejection of structuralist objectivism had been partly driven by an awareness of the gap between formal rules, whether located in the heads of actors or those of social scientists, and the reality of practice(s). He was, therefore, suspicious both of sociological common sense and of actors’ concepts, and also of the formal models designed to replace them. the sociologist who refuses the controlled, conscious construction of his distance from the real and his action on reality may not only impose questions on his subjets that their experience does not pose them and omit the questions that it does pose them, but he may also naively pose them the questions he poses himself about them, through a positivist confusion between the questions that objectively arise for them and the questions they consciously pose themselves. (Bourdieu et al. 1968: 65 [1991: 38]) The objectivity of science cannot be built on such shaky foundations as the objectivity of scientists. The gains from epistemological reflection cannot be really embodied in practice until the social conditions are established for epistemological control, i.e. for a generalized exchange of critiques armed with, among other things, the sociology of sociological practices. (Bourdieu et al. 1968: 109 [1991: 74]) For Bourdieu, the sociology of knowledge is not a mere specialist field of the subject but rather an essential preliminary and accompaniment to sociological investigation. Like budding psychoanalysts who have to undertake a ‘training analysis’ with an established practitioner, all sociologists, he argued, should undertake a more or less formal autosocioanalysis. It is of course no accident that Bourdieu cut his teeth in ethnographic fieldwork, where the interplay and tension between the horizons of expectations of the anthropologist and the culture under investigation are explicitly thematised as an epistemic resource.

Intentional and reflexive objectivity 231 Bourdieu’s response to ‘postmodern’ sociology and anthropology is thus that he has been long aware of these issues and drawn more appropriate conclusions than the postmodernists. He insists that his is an ‘anti-narcissitic’ reflexivity that ‘has little in common with a complacent and intimist return upon the private person of the sociologist or with a search for the intellectual Zeitgeist that animates his or her work’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 72). Such indulgences, like a concentration on the ‘poetics’ of ethnographic writing, ‘open the door to a form of thinly disguised nihilistic relativism … that stands as the polar opposite to a truly reflexive social science’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 72). This orientation can be seen, for example, in Bourdieu’s increasingly prominent statements in the 1980s and onwards about the roles and responsibilities of intellectuals, beginning with an interview with Didier Eribon in Le Monde in May 1980. In response to Eribon’s suggestion that his polemics in Le Sens pratique (Bourdieu 1980) and elsewhere come close to anti-intellectualism, Bourdieu replies with a denunciation of the closed circuits of mutual admiration and support among intellectuals which ‘make a Golden Delicious pass for an apple’ and by a summary of his more formal analysis of the class position of intellectuals as a dominated fraction of the dominant class – this ambiguous situation explaining many of the political positions they take up. But he goes on to say that their understanding of this situation gives intellectuals a certain possibility of freeing themselves from it: the privilege to be placed in conditions which enable them to work at understanding their specific and generic determinations. And thereby to liberate themselves from them (at least partially) and to offer means of liberation to others. The critique of intellectuals, if it is a critique, is the other side of a demand (exigence), an expectation. Bourdieu’s own critical interventions in the public sphere should be understood in this spirit. And in another interview (Le Monde, 14 March 1992) he suggests: There is no effective democracy without a true critical countervailing power. The intellectual is one, and of the first importance. … I wish that writers, artists, philosophers and scientists could get a hearing in all the areas of public life in which they are competent. I believe that everyone could benefit a lot from the extension into political life of the logic of intellectual life, of argumentation and refutation. Today, it is the logic of politics, that of denunciation and defamation, which often spreads into intellectual life. It would be good for the ‘creators’ to fulfil their function of a public service and sometimes of public safety. Bourdieu’s model of reflexive sociology has been enormously fruitful in his own and others’s research. Like Habermas, however, he displays a certain inflexibility in one aspect which must surely be central to any reflexive sociology; the lay sociology practised by social actors themselves. Again the psychoanalytic comparison

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is relevant: lay sociology, like lay (self-) analysis is seen as an object of suspicion and a likely source of distortion. As he and his colleagues put it in 1968: It is perhaps the curse of the human sciences that they are concerned with an object which speaks. When the sociologist believes that he is deriving from the facts the problematic and the theoretical concepts which enable him to construct and analyse the facts, he is always in danger of drawing them from the mouth of his informants. It is not enough for the sociologist to listen to his subjects, to faithfully record their statements and their reasons, for him to explain their conduct and even the reason they propose: in doing so, he risks substituting purely and simply for his own preconceptions the preconceptions of those he is studying, or a falsely scholarly and falsely objective mixture of the spontaneous sociology of the ‘scholar’ and the spontaneous sociology of his object. (Bourdieu et al. 1968: 56–57)5 Thus, as he put it in another text published in English in the same year, the anthropologist gives no credit to the representation the subjects form of their situation but, rather, tries to explain it. However, anthropological science would not perhaps deserve any consideration if it were not its task to restore the agents to the sense of their practice by unifying, against the appearances of their irreducible opposition, the truth of the lived-through significance of conduct and the truth of the objective conditions that make such conduct and the experience of it possible and probable. (Bourdieu 1968: 705) The same motivation, I think, can be seen in one of his later works, La Misère du monde (Bourdieu 1993), even though the emphasis there is much more on the spontaneous expression of their situation by his respondents. As in his earlier work, however, Bourdieu’s suspicion was directed primarily at what he called doxa, the taken-for-granted and shared assumptions of interviewer and interviewee and the false reassurance that the social scientist has captured the objective reality of the respondents. On this issue Giddens is a good deal more flexible. Influenced, like Bourdieu, both by structuralism and by the sociologies of Goffman and Garfinkel, he gives more weight to the knowledgeability of actors and to the enabling as well as constraining effects of structures. And the spread of sociological and other social scientific language into the life-world appears in Giddens’ analysis less as a methodological danger for the researcher and more as an important aspect of the reflexivity of modernity and of modern selfidentities. For Giddens: The concepts and theories invented by social scientists circulate in and out of the social world they are coined to analyse. The best and most original

Intentional and reflexive objectivity 233 ideas in the social sciences, if they have any purchase on the reality it is their business to capture, tend to become appropriated and utilised by social actors themselves. (1987: 19) This process has been described by the French sociologist Anne Mesny (1999a, 1999b) as the production of a ‘lay sociological imagination’. This of course raises the possibility of major research projects on the ways in which public discourse about the social and political world has been shaped by more academic influences.6 And while we have mostly abandoned the simple faith in the rapid translation of science into society in programmes such as Comtean or Durkheimian positivism or Marxist scientific socialism, and have been led by Foucault to a sharper awareness of the disciplinary role of academic disciplines, there seems no reason to doubt the ultimately beneficial effects of the extension of social scientific knowledge in these areas. As Marx classically put it, ignorance never helped anyone. I shall end with a discussion of one of the most problematic but tantalising attempts to enlist reflexivity into the pursuit of objectivity, Karl Mannheim’s conception of relationism which he put forward in Ideology and Utopia (Mannheim 1925). Mannheim developed his sociology of knowledge out of what we would now probably call a post-Marxist awareness of the relativity or perspectival quality of knowledge and the relativisation of knowledge-claims to their social base in classes, ethnic groups, generations, and so on. This is generally, and rightly, seen as a major stage in the development of relativistic theories of knowledge where, as in Berger and Luckmann’s Social Construction of Reality (1967), knowledge simply means whatever is counted as knowledge. What Mannheim called relationism is often presented as simply a moderating gloss on this basic message. But Mannheim, rightly or wrongly, had something else in mind. The chapter of Ideology and Utopia published under the title ‘The Prospects of Scientific Politics’ translates more accurately as ‘How is Politics Possible as a Science?’7 Here, and in the immediately preceding pages in which he presents his conception of relationism, one can see Mannheim moving towards what he called ‘a new type of objectivity’ (Mannheim 1931, 1925). This is essentially an attempt to salvage a defensible conception of totality constructed via a critical analysis of perspectival knowledge. Totality in the sense in which we conceive it is not an immediate and eternally valid vision of reality attributable only to a divine eye. It is not a self-contained or stable view. On the contrary, a total view implies both the assimilation and transcendence of the limitations of particular points of view. It represents the continuous process of the expansion of knowledge, and has as its goal not achievement of a super-temporally valid conclusion but the broadest possible extension of our horizon of vision. (Mannheim 1960 [1925] : 94–95)

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I shall not discuss here the massive volume of criticism which Mannheim’s conception attracted, from Horkheimer (1930) onwards. This has focused generally, and with good reason, on his residual idealism and relativism, his technocratic inclinations which became more prominent in his writing after his move to the UK and his notoriously problematic faith in the ‘relatively freefloating’ position of the intelligentsia. I believe however that it is possible to defend something like Mannheim’s conception of reflexive objectivity, in situations where we are concerned to understand and incorporate, rather than simply endorse or reject, a variety of different perspectives.8 Janet Wolff (1975) and Susan Hekman (1986) have shown in different ways how hermeneutics and the sociology of knowledge can be reworked into new and creative configurations. A defensible reconstruction of Mannheim’s conception would paradoxically bring him to the aspiration, if not the achievement, which his alter ego Georg Lukács attributed to Marx: Classical economics and its vulgarisers have always considered the development of capitalism from the point of view of the individual capitalist … Marx’s Capital represents a radical break with this procedure. Not that he acts the part of an agitator who treats every aspect exclusively from the proletarian standpoint. Such a one-sided approach would only result in a new vulgar economics with plus and minus signs reversed. His method is to consider the problems of the whole of capitalist society as problems of the classes constituting it, the classes being regarded as totalities. (Lukács 1923 [1971: 28–29]) In terms of Andrew Collier’s distinction, then, I suggest that a disciplined, object-centred approach is strengthened, rather than undermined, by a reflexive objectivity which is open to all alternative perspectives and accounts available and meaningfully conceivable, but which does not nihilistically reject the possibility of rational mediation between them.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6

See, for example, the discussion at the end of section 12 of In Defence of Objectivity. For a brilliant example of a strong form of reflexivity applied to the end-of- philosophy debate, see Skinner 1998. See, for example, Delanty 1997; May 1998. See Beck 1992 [1986]; Giddens 1990, 1991; Beck et al. 1994. My translation. I have retained the masculinist formulation which was still dominant at the time of writing. Mesny (1999b: 174–175) gives some examples of the translation of sociological and psychoanalytic concepts into everyday discourse. See also the special number of Anthropologies et Sociétés on ‘Savoirs et gouvernementalité (vol. 20–21, 1996). The most systematic analyses of this kind so far have been conducted in relation to totalitarian language systems in fascism and state socialism (see, for example, Klemperer 1946, 2000; Faye 1972; Thom 1987).

Intentional and reflexive objectivity 235 7 8

This was also incorporated in the title of a play put on in 1930 by Mannheim’s Heidelberg students on the occasion of his departure to a chair in Frankfurt. The original text is reprinted in Woldring 1986: appendix 2. It is interesting that Habermas, who has for a long time upheld a strong and in my view mistaken conception that we cannot understand assertions without judging their truth or falsity (or at least deciding to suspend judgement), has increasingly emphasised the narrative construction of subjectivities and ‘the incorporation of the other’. For a creative proposal to incorporate a Mannheimian approach into a ‘neoclassical’ sociology, conceived as a critical theory of contemporary capitalism, see Eyal et al. 2003, especially p. 9.

Bibliography Beck, Ulrich (1992 [1986]) Risk Society, London: Sage. Beck, Ulrich, Anthony Giddens and Scott Lash (1994) Reflexive Modernization, Cambridge: Polity Berger, Peter and Thomas Luckmann (1967) Social Construction of Reality, New York: Doubleday. Bourdieu, Pierre, J.-C. Chamboredon and J.-C. Passeron (1968) Le métier de sociologue, Paris: Mouton. Translated by Richard Nice as The Craft Of Sociology, Berlin: Gruyter, 1991. Bourdieu, Pierre (1968) ‘Structuralism and Theory of Sociological Knowledge’, Social Research, 35, 4, pp. 681–706. —— (1980) Le sens pratique, Paris: Minuit. Translated as The Logic of Practice, Cambridge: Polity, 1990. —— (1987) Choses dites. Translated as In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology, Cambridge: Polity, 1990. —— (1993) La Misère du monde, Paris: Seuil. Translated as The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society, Cambridge: Polity. Bourdieu, Pierre and Wacqant, Loïc (1992) An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, Cambridge: Polity. Collier, Andrew (2003) In Defence of Objectivity, London: Routledge. Delanty, Gerard (1997) Social Science: Beyond Constructivism And Realism, Buckingham: Open University Press. Eyal, Gil, Iván Szélenyi and Eleanor Townsley (2003) ‘On Irony: An Invitation to Neoclassical Sociology’, Thesis Eleven, 73, May, pp. 5–41. Faye, Jean-Pierre (1972) Langages totalitaires, Paris: Hermann. Giddens, Anthony (1987) Social Theory and Modern Sociology, Cambridge: Polity. —— (1990) Consequences of Modernity, Cambridge: Polity. —— (1991) Modernity and Self-Identity, Cambridge: Polity. Habermas, Jürgen (1968) Erkenntnis und Interesse, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Translated as Knowledge and Human Interests, London: Heinemann, 1972. —— (1985a) Der Philosophische Diskurs der Moderne, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Translated as The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987. —— (1985b) Erläuterungen zur Diskursethik, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1991, p. 48. Translated as Justification and Application, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993. —— (1990) ‘Grenzen des Neohistorismus’, in Die nachholende Revolution: Kleine Politische Schriften VII, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, p. 153. —— (1994 [1991]) The Past as the Future, Cambridge: Polity. Hekman, Susan (1986) Hermeneutics and the Sociology of Knowledge, Cambridge: Polity.

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Horkheimer, Max (1930) ‘Ein Neuer Ideologiebegriff ?’. Translated as ‘A New Concept of Ideology?’ in Max Horkheimer, Selected Early Writings, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993, pp. 129–149. Klemperer, Victor (1946) L.T.I., Leipzig : Reclam. —— (2000) The Language of the Third Reich LTI, Lingua Tertii Imperii: A Philologist’s Notebook; translated by Martin Brady, London: Athlone Press. Lukács, Georg (1923) Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein, Berlin: Malik. Translated as History and Class Consciousness, London: Merlin, 1971. Mannheim, Karl (1925 [1925]) Ideologie und Utopie. Translated as Ideology and Utopia, London: Routledge, 1960. —— (1931) ‘Wissenssoziologie’. Translated as chapter 5 of Ideology and Utopia, London: Routledge, 1960. May, Tim (1996) Situating Social Theory, Buckingham:Open University Press. —— (1998) ‘Reflexivity in the Age of Reconstructive Social Science’, International Journal of Social Research Methodology: Theory and Practice, 1, 1. Mesny, Anne (1999a) ‘The Appropriation of Social Science Knowledge by “Lay People”: The Development of a Lay Sociological Imagination?’, PhD thesis, University of Cambridge. —— (1999b) ‘Sociology for Whom? The Role of Sociology in Reflexive Modernity’, Canadian Journal of Sociology, 23, 2/3, pp. 159–178. Outhwaite, William (2000) ‘Rekonstruktion und methodologischer Dualismus’, in S. Müller-Doohm (ed.), Das Interesse der Vernunft, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, pp. 218–241. Skinner, Catherine (1998) ‘The “End Of Philosophy Debate”: A Social Theoretical Perspective’, DPhil Thesis, University of Sussex. Thom, Françoise (1987) La langue de bois, Paris : Julliard. Translated by Ken Connelly as Newspeak: The Language Of Soviet Communism, London: Claridge, 1989. Woldring, Henk (1986) Karl Mannheim: The Development of his Thought, New York: St Martin’s. Wolff, Janet (1975) Hermeneutic Philosophy and the Sociology of Art: An Approach to some of the Epistemological Problems of the Sociology of Knowledge and the Sociology of Art and Literature, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Part VII

Objectivity and nature

16 Realism about the value of nature? Andrew Collier’s environmental philosophy Ted Benton Among Andrew Collier’s most enduring philosophical achievements are his contributions to environmental thought, and especially to the linkage of environmental concern with socialist politics. In what follows I will focus on the ideas developed in two essays Andrew published in Radical Philosophy in the early 1990s, and his more recent arguments as presented in Being and Worth. Both the essays in Radical Philosophy were aimed at demonstrating, against a widespread prejudice among greens, the great value of the tradition of thought stemming from Marx and Engels for understanding and responding to contemporary environmental problems. Central to the arguments of these essays were, first, the concept of nature as man’s ‘inorganic body’, drawn from Marx’s early writings, and the key distinction between use- and exchange-value, as elaborated in Marx’s Capital. The first essay (Collier 1991) explored the implications of Marx’s notion of man’s inorganic body with the help of ideas drawn from Heidegger and Spinoza. This yields a concept of freedom as identical with our active and passive powers in relation to other beings, and makes sense of the idea of the inorganic body as a ‘cosmic body’, more extensive than one’s individual ‘actual’ body. But this cosmic body is common to all the beings whose interactions it sustains, and so recognising its existence requires us to take into account the effects of our individual exercises of freedom on the cosmic body we share. Directly political conclusions follow: notably a key distinction between the ‘dispersed’ freedoms of the market, celebrated in neo-liberal thought, and the ‘gathered’ freedoms of citizens able to decide to preserve or transform the world they inhabit. Under prevailing conditions dominated by the capriciousness of market forces ‘one’s freedom to live as one chooses is short term, and in any case not freedom to live in a congenial world one has collaboratively chosen, but freedom to move about in an alien world in pursuit of congenial bits’ (Collier 1991: 8). The second essay centres on Marx’s distinction between use- and exchangevalue. The discussion here aims to demonstrate an intrinsic connection between the forms of rationality associated with exchange value (‘chrematistic calculation’) and, among other things, environmental destruction. Conversely, forms of rationality associated with use-value, which recognise and value qualitative

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difference, are subordinated in capitalist societies, but provide the basis for alternative, non-destructive forms of social life. The economic interactions of market society are governed by exchange-value calculations in which qualitatively different goods are measured in terms of a single unit of value, and in which limitless accumulation is promoted. Beyond the market, prevailing moral theories such as utilitarianism, and decision-procedures such as cost-benefit analysis echo the logic of exchange calculation. Chrematistic calculation, the rationality of the capitalist market, and its moral and political off-shoots, necessarily devalue or entirely discount what cannot be assimilated to a single unit of measure: ‘Only those effects of the production process which are saleable are the product; only what costs or brings in money goes into the calculation. Hence environmental effects, among other things, are invisible’ (Collier 1994: 4). By contrast, use-value rationality involves choices between concrete, complex, multi-faceted whole ways of living: a sort of decision-making for which a mathematical calculation of ‘more or less’ is of no use. So, in the case of economic production: To evaluate a labour-process for its productivity of use-value is to evaluate it in all its concreteness and for all its effects. Effects of the process on the worker and the environment, effects of the goods turned out on the wellbeing and life-style of the community, and so on. The cost of every car produced includes its contribution to the boredom of the machinists, the slicing up of the countryside, the garagisation of cities, the pollution of the air, the likelihood of squirrels getting run over and cyclists getting broken arms, and so on. (Collier 1994: 7) Collier provides an outline sketch of the sort of institutional framework in which such decision-making might be favoured: much planning would be decentralised to local communities with ‘democratic command economies’, whilst some planning and policing would have to take place at a global level. More recently, and in particular in Being and Worth (1999), Collier has brought together and extended some of these arguments, underpinning them with a philosophically more fundamental – and contentious – ontological value-theory. I share many of his substantive judgements, and especially the environmental sensibility underlying them. Still, I remain variously doubtful, unconvinced or just puzzled by some elements in his moral ontology. If these doubts are sustained, then the question arises as to whether what we share in our substantive environmental outlook can be successfully argued on other premises. The discussion is rendered still more complex by Collier’s reliance on St Augustine’s theologically grounded moral ontology, whilst simultaneously attempting to defend its conclusions on a secular basis. However, I’ll start with what is shared. One of the great attractions of Collier’s thought is his refusal to be drawn along with the prevailing philosophical fashions. His commitment to a critical realist philosophy of science in the

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context of pervasive ‘social constructionism’ and relativism in this and adjacent fields is one striking instance of this. Still more striking, and perhaps still more provocative, is his commitment to an analogous realism about value. As will become clear, I cannot follow him in this, but I do support some of the considerations which lead him to it. We have common ground in resistance to prevailing moral relativism and subjectivism. An acceptable account of morality should have a place for reasoned discussion between rival moral standpoints or judgements. It should also have a place for moral learning and moral progress as well as for grounded judgements of moral failings and bankruptcy. Whether such an account of morality can be given which nevertheless avoids full-blown commitment to an ontology of value of the sort Collier advocates remains to be explored. Collier’s transcendence of dualistic oppositions between reason and emotion in favour of a cognitive account of emotion, such that emotions can be judged rational or irrational according to their appropriateness, or lack of it, to their objects is also persuasive. This is a good starting point for a theory of what Adam Smith called ‘moral sentiments’. More directly addressing environmental philosophy, Collier provides a deeper philosophical grounding for some of the claims made in the earlier essays – in particular his clear sense of the moral considerability of non-human beings. Until quite recently, the dominant western traditions of moral philosophy took human actors and their transactions to be the exclusive topic of moral concern. The rise of connected animal rights and welfare and ecological social movements in the last three or four decades has provoked some academic philosophers into challenging this set of assumptions. The more limited challenge has come from writers such as Peter Singer and Tom Regan who have argued for an extension of moral concern beyond the species boundary on the basis of existing moral theory (utilitarianism and rights-theory, respectively). In so far as at least some animals share morally relevant attributes with humans, to that extent it is inconsistent and unjust to deny them moral standing in their own right. In part, at least, Collier’s case for recognising the existence of value independent of human valuers seems to rely on such considerations. If other sentient beings can exhibit preferences, desires, aversions and the like, then why should we refuse to acknowledge them as, like us, bestowers of value? But there are currents in contemporary environmental philosophy which go beyond such limited, and implicitly anthropocentric (if not ‘anthroposcopic’) extensionism. Perhaps the best known of these is that deriving from the work of Arne Naess, who famously counterposed a limited, instrumental and anthropocentric ‘shallow ecology’ to his own ‘deep ecology’. This latter relied on a holistic ontology of interconnectedness of all beings, and an associated attribution of intrinsic value to all beings, human or non-human. There are clear affinities between Collier’s Spinozistic reading of Marx’s idea of nature as man’s inorganic body and the ontology of deep ecology, especially as Collier revises Spinoza to acknowledge intrinsic value in non-human beings. However, there are difficulties in sustaining the deep ecologists’ attribution of intrinsic value even to

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non-sentient beings short of some theological or broadly super-natural premises. For Collier’s most frequently cited source, St Augustine, the attribution of value, or worth to such beings is unproblematic: they are the creations of a beneficent god. Collier seeks to defend Augustine’s moral ontology without reliance on the theological premises. Again, Collier’s commitment to a non-anthropocentric moral outlook is one I want to endorse, whilst retaining some scepticism about the Augustinian moral ontology. Again, the question for me is how to do this whilst avoiding what seem to me problematic features of Collier’s own defence. A fourth area of common ground is Collier’s deeply unfashionable view of science as a non-instrumental struggle to gain ever-deeper understanding of the world – a world which, for the most part, exists and acts independently of our beliefs about it. This critical, even utopian view of science is indispensable for a rational environmental morality and politics, especially so if it is connected, as it is in Collier’s work, with the insight that this deepening of understanding has moral value in itself. As our understanding grows, so can our love and respect for the independently existing beings who are the objects of our study – whether self, society or nature. This view of science together with its moral potentialities is necessary to any critical politics which seeks to expose and contest the extent to which the scientific enterprise has today been largely appropriated by and perverted to the commercial and military objectives of corporate capital and state power. If I have a disagreement with Collier, it is with his tendency to see the appropriation and distortion as lying with the technical application of science, whereas the capture of the core scientific research agenda itself in many fields, most notably in biotechnology, is a still more sinister and intractable reality. Fifth, but with a little more ambiguity, I share Collier’s view that humans, as embedded in, and belonging to nature, nevertheless have a special status within it. This has to do with the way their historically evolved technical ingenuity has enabled them to acquire ‘super-power’ status vis-à-vis the rest of nature. It also has to do, as Kate Soper has very effectively argued, with the (contingently) unique powers humans possess, individually and through socially co-ordinated activity, to reflect upon and modify their relationships to the rest of the world on the basis of normative or prudential considerations. However, how we conceptualise this distinctive status humans have acquired is a controversial matter, and I do have continuing disagreements with Collier over some aspects of his way of doing this. Finally, there is Collier’s continuing emphasis on capitalist markets, the dynamics of capital accumulation, as the prime underlying cause of environmental destruction, and his insistence on the necessary (if not sufficient) role of a socialist transition in overcoming it. This cuts against the dominant trend in contemporary environmentalism to make peace with capitalism, as ‘the only game in town’, and to attempt a certain restraining influence and moralising of its operation. Well-intentioned as such adaptations often are, their fundamental accommodation to the chrematistic rationality of exchange values binds them to the very social forces they seek to restrain. To assign a monetary value to the

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environmental costs of, say, carbon emissions is to render them visible, even to impose them as an item in the cost structure of an industrial product, but at the same time it is to commodify them, to render them subject to the play of market forces, to allow that, if the commercial calculations so dictate, they are acceptable. So much for the agreement: and there is plenty of it! Now for an exploration of some of the doubts and confusions. The Augustinian ethics from which Collier derives his environmental philosophy is summarised particularly clearly at the beginning of chapter five. There are five main propositions: 1 2 3 4 5

All being, as being, is good. There is a hierarchy of beings – some exist in a greater degree, and so have greater goodness, than others. We ought to love beings in proportion to their goodness. Evil has no independent reality, but is privation, or lack of being. Evil comes from loving lesser goods more than greater.

As to the first, ontologically most fundamental thesis, the central question is how to defend such a claim independently of theological premises. The narrow, ‘extensionist’ recognition that non-human beings also in some cases and in some sense may be said to value objects of fear, desire, etc., will not carry the requisite metaphysical burden. Non-sentient living beings, inanimate objects, concrete assemblages of them in ecosystems, landscapes, etc., cannot be said to have values or purposes by any plausible stretch of the meaning of these terms, yet it is claimed that they possess worth, or goodness simply by virtue of their existence. Collier’s main secular justification for this thesis seems to be grounded in an analogy with the critical realist view of science. We can only make sense of various aspects of scientific practice on the basis of a distinction between the socio-cultural process of devising accounts of reality, on the one hand, and the ‘intransitive’ dimension of the independently existing and acting objects of those accounts, on the other. Similarly, the argument goes, we can only make sense of our moral sense in relation to the rest of nature on the basis of worth, or value, as an intransitive object of our valuing. Things are not made good by our valuing them, but, rather, we learn to value them because, independently of us, they have value, or worth. I’m not sure whether I disagree with these claims, or whether I don’t understand them. To say that being as being is good is, as Collier acknowledges, not to attribute moral goodness to things, since many sorts of being are incapable of moral agency. So what is meant? Is worth or value a property of things, over and above the properties established by perception or scientific investigation? This seems implausible, and does not fit well with other aspects of Collier’s philosophy. Another possibility suggests itself by way of Collier’s support for a version of moral naturalism: the view that an ‘ought’ can be logically derived from an ‘is’. The standard example in the critical realist literature is the idea of an explanatory critique: forms of social relationship can be judged worse or better

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than others by virtue of their effects on people who stand in those relationships, always with the proviso ‘other things being equal’. I find two main problems with this sort of argument for moral naturalism. In a small number of cases, to assert the factual premise but deny the moral conclusion does appear contradictory. To reject, for example, the normative commitment to truth-telling would be to be guilty of a performative contradiction, given the dependence of the institution of language itself on general obedience to the norm. However, this is not plausibly generalised very far, and for the most part morally deviant or eccentric outlooks can be sustained in the face of factual evidence without falling into logical contradictions. The intuition here is that rock-bottom moral pluralism is ineliminable. The second problem I have with this sort of moral naturalism is that other things never are equal in the practical contexts of life in which we are faced with moral dilemmas. Faced with whether to tell a dear friend that her lover is cheating on her it is not much help to know that ‘other things being equal’ it is better to have true than false beliefs. In the case of the particular belief that her partner is faithful it might be better for her not to know its falsehood, or it might be better for her to find out from another source, or it might be more important not to interfere in what is a private matter between the two (or three) of them, and so on. Most of our moral headaches come from the difficulty of making choices as between alternative courses of action each of which may be problematic, involving weighting of incommensurable and conflicting considerations. This, of course, is familiar territory to Collier, as it maps well onto his account of use-value rationality. However, it does suggest that the elementary claim that being as being is good may not carry us very far when it comes to decisionmaking in concrete situations. Part of Collier’s response to this may be his second thesis, that there is a hierarchy of beings, and therefore of degrees of goodness. I’ll return to consider that response, but first there remains the problem of what could be meant by the claim that being as being is good. Is there some connection weaker than logical implication between the being of something and its goodness? Is it being claimed that to acknowledge the independent existence of something ought to engender a certain set of moral sentiments towards it – of love, or respect, with the concomitant obligations for the way we should treat it? If this is what is meant, and sometimes it seems that it is, then it sums up a moral standpoint with which I have great sympathy. However, it would be misleading to characterise this in terms of an ontology of intrinsic value in the object. One reason for this is that, expressed as a moral standpoint, the position represents value as inhering not in the object, independently of an encounter with a (human) valuer, but rather as emerging in the course of such an actual or imagined encounter. But we know that this desirable response to other beings is not a universal – or even general – human response. More common – in our culture, at least – are attitudes of instrumental domination or outright destructive impulses. The moral sentiments Collier endorses in relation to other beings seem to have definite psychological and socio-cultural conditions. Perhaps only

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certain kinds of personal and emotional life-histories, and the availability of a set of cultural – including cognitive – resources enable the kind of respectful and loving world-openness that Collier values. If this is so, then for those who share a vision of a social world in which such values could be realised, the task is to struggle for the sorts of social relations, cultural values and personal conditions of life in which they might flourish. I’m sure Collier would have no difficulty in agreeing with this, but it seems to me that, paradoxically, his objectifying of value as inherent in the beings we might come to value runs the risk of de-politicising the project of rendering more universal what is currently the privilege of a few. Now to the issue of a hierarchy of beings, with its associated hierarchy of value. This is an important qualification of what would otherwise be an outlook very close to deep ecology. It is also a view which, as Collier rightly says, raises doubts on the part of environmental philosophers otherwise close to him, such as John O’Neill and myself. The hierarchy of being adhered to by Collier owes much to Augustine, and has echoes of the eighteenth century notion of a ‘great chain of being’. According to it, living beings are higher than non-living, while within the category of the living, sentient beings are higher than the nonsentient, rational higher than non-rational, and so on through the order of natural beings, and up the scale to god in Augustine’s version. So far as the order of nature is concerned, humans are at the apex of the hierarchy. For Collier, there are two distinct respects in which humans are superior to other beings. The first is their more extensive interaction with the rest of nature, which for him translates into greater consciousness of other beings, greater rationality and more value. The implication is that whilst we should respect, love and protect beings lower than us in the order of nature, since they, too, have intrinsic value, in cases of conflict, human interests should take priority: we should do what we can to protect the fox, but if the huntsman is injured, we should give his needs priority over those of the fox. Indeed, not to do so would be a perversion of the true order of value, and so an evil. The second respect in which Collier sees humans as superior has to do with our status as ‘rulers of the earth’. I’ll return to this thesis later, but, first, the question of the hierarchy of being. It has to be acknowledged that there is something intuitively obvious about the hierarchy. The death of an ant or a flower seems as nothing against the immense moral and metaphysical significance of death for humans. There would, indeed, seem to be a perversion of values if one were to grieve and mourn the death of a wasp in the same terms as that of a human. However, one good reason for practising philosophy is to call into question our unreflective moral intuitions: indeed, Collier’s non-anthropocentric value-theory is already at some distance from common-sense moral intuitions. Also, even if we find these intuitions confirmed on reflection, they may turn out to be sustainable other than by reliance on a hierarchy of being. One difficulty in the way of accepting the hierarchy of being as Collier derives it from Augustine is that it is called into question by modern science. It is true that the Darwin/Wallace discovery of the mechanism of organic change in

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nature was rapidly assimilated to a historicised version of the great chain of being, such that evolution itself came to be understood in the wider culture as a narrative of progression from primitive ancestral forms to ourselves (in many versions, ‘ourselves’ not as a species, but as the European ‘race’) as the crowning achievement of natural selection. Though Wallace, from the beginning, saw evolution as evidence of a principle of progress written into nature itself, and Darwin himself tended to fall in with the narrative in his later work, there is no warrant for the hierarchical ordering of organic beings in the theory. Natural selection licenses no such ‘meta-narrative’, explaining, as it does, only the longterm diversification of populations in the direction of ever-more successful adaptation to the exigencies of their ecological conditions of life. Moreover, the theory situates humans more firmly within the order of nature than does its historic predecessors, and emphasises not only our ecological interdependency with our fellow beings but also our evolutionary kinship with them. I am fond of quoting an extraordinary passage from Darwin’s early notebooks which is a startlingly condensed expression of the egalitarian implications which he drew at the point of his first, speculative arrival at the evolutionary hypothesis: Animals – whom we have made our slaves we do not like to consider our equals. – Do not slave-holders wish to make the black man other kind? … the soul by consent of all is superadded, animals not got it, not look forward if we choose to let conjecture run wild then animals our fellow brethren in pain, disease, death, and suffering & famine; our slaves in the most laborious work, our companion in our amusements. They may partake, from our origin in one common ancestor we may be all netted together. (Darwin 1987: 228–232) Of course, this egalitarian ethic does not flow logically from recognition that we are ‘all netted together’, but it seemed to Darwin a proper response, and I think it severely undermines whatever rational basis belief in human superiority and the great chain of being once had. In the particular case of Collier, there is surely something paradoxical in his adherence to a medieval ontology of nature whilst strongly advocating a realist defence of the rationality of modern science. There is also a sober materialist humility in Marx’s metaphor of the ‘organic body’, a recognition of the life-sustaining necessity of our metabolism with the rest of nature which seems to me under-represented in Collier’s reading of the early Marx. But would a ‘species egalitarianism’ require us to set the value of the life of a human at the same level as that of a fly? Whilst I don’t quite share Collier’s sense of the obviousness of the priority of the needs of the fox-hunter over those of the fox, I accept in general terms the ethical priorities he outlines. So, can these be sustained other than through the ontology of the hierarchy of being? I think they can. To regard, as do deep ecologists, the sheer diversity of beings as itself something to be respected, valued and defended is to have a sense of the significance of each form of life in its own particularity. Understood and respected in

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its particularity, rather than as a step in the evolutionary ladder, or level in the hierarchy of being, each form of life can be seen to have its own special conditions of existence and flourishing, and to have its own specific sorts of vulnerability to harms. An eye-catching title in a second-hand book shop I visited the other day was The Insects of the Cow Dung Community. For some species, life lived within the confines of a cow-pat is heaven; for others, perhaps, some more diversity might be welcomed. Anyone who has visited a zoo, or had a hand in managing a nature reserve, will be familiar with these basic points. So, how does this help? First, I think it makes sense to distinguish between the natural and also proper depth of feeling one may have about the life or death of another being, on the one hand, and one’s commitment to principles of just treatment as between different individuals. What Collier says in another context suggests he would be sympathetic to this distinction. We may care deeply about the wellbeing of a close friend, lover or relative, in a way we do not about a distant figure whose fate we learn about in the paper or on TV (there is something odd and even sinister about extreme displays of public grief at the death of such figures). There is nothing unjust about this difference of feeling – it is a consequence of the binding together of our particular lives, the sharing of experiences and of bits of history which make us part of one another. But these natural responses are, and should be, counterbalanced at the level of institutions and societies by rules of justice which acknowledge that everyone – those we know and love, no more than the ones we have never met – is equally entitled to the means for a fulfilling life. I think this can work across the species divide. It may be both natural and proper for us to have deeper feelings, in general, about the fate of our fellow humans, just as it is natural and proper for us to have deeper feelings for the fate of those we know and love within the human species. In the same way, this may be consistent with, and counterbalanced by, rules of justice which apply as between humans and other species. But here, as also among humans, the morality of rights and justice has its problems. Conceptions of justice which abstract too far from the particularities of the beings to which they are applied can be unjust and oppressive in their results. There is, for example, a powerful line of feminist criticism of such abstraction, which emphasises the implications for justice of a proper acknowledgement of difference. Equal treatment of men and women in promotion criteria, for example, effectively discriminates against women by not taking account of their more frequent career discontinuities because of child-bearing and child care, for example. But the need for a conception of justice which is sensitive to difference of need and condition among those to whom it applies is even more pressing if it is to be applied across the species boundary. Opponents of animal rights make much of the evident absurdity of giving dogs the right to vote (notwithstanding the claim by pet-food advertisers that they have definite preferences!). But this is not an argument against rights and justice in our treatment of other beings: it is an argument for a difference-sensitive practice of justice, in which justice first imposes the duty of a struggle to understand and acknowledge the particularity of the other, and then to take seriously the obligations to proper treatment which flow from that recognition.

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So, difference of treatment among different species may be consistent with a difference-sensitive practice of justice. An ontological hierarchy of beings is both unnecessary to the justification of such a view of just treatment, and would be an obstacle to it. The notion of such a hierarchy carries with it an implicit commitment to a single measure of ‘higher’ and ‘lower’, of just the sort that Collier rejects in his discussion of chrematistic rationality. This is something he seems to recognise himself, as he elaborates and defends his ontological hierarchy: ‘The hierarchy of beings is a hierarchy of complexity of natures, with different kinds of love and consequent obligations owed to each kind in virtue of their specific nature. It is not a pecking order’ (Collier 1999: 86). But what is a hierarchy other than a pecking order? Full recognition and valuing of qualitative diversity surely cuts against any attempt to rank beings in a single hierarchical order? Now to the second respect in which Collier sees humans as superior to the rest of nature. This has to do with our greater causal powers compared to other species. As we have seen, for Collier this greater capacity for interaction implies greater consciousness and rationality. It is not always entirely clear whether Collier is committed to the view that human superiority in this sense justifies our rule over the rest of nature, or whether he simply takes it as an irreversible fact that we do have this dominion by virtue of the development of science and technology. Either way, to rule over nature is not something we can decide to do or not to do. However, we do have the possibility of a destructive ‘bootboy’ rule, an inevitable consequence of the blind operation of the ‘free market’, or, alternatively, a democratically planned rule, which seeks to protect and enhance the diversity, complexity and fecundity of nature. This notion that human consciousness and rationality justifies a human project of benign rule over the rest of nature comes close to Murray Bookchin’s view of humans as nature become self-conscious. For Bookchin, too, humans have a special place in nature, capable of comprehending and shaping the course of evolution. Hitherto blind forces of natural change and diversification are henceforth to be subject to self-conscious shaping by human agency. Though Bookchin, as an ecological anarchist, polemicises vigorously against Marxism, his vision is in this respect very close to Marx’s early nature philosophy. For Marx, human ‘species being’ is distinctive in its universality – its capacity to act upon the whole of nature and to co-ordinate the life-activity of the whole species in this project. The historical vision is one in which the transition to communism entails at its most fundamental level a transformation in our relation to nature. This transformation takes the form of an overcoming of the opposition between humans and nature. But there is a deep ambiguity in Marx as to what is involved in this reconciliation between humans and nature. He describes it as a ‘humanisation of nature’, implying that the reconciliation will take place on the side of humans, so to speak. Our transformative powers will be exercised in such a way that the nature which we (re)create will conform to our values and identities: we will see ourselves reflected in nature. We might think of this as the ‘landscape garden’ version of the humanisation of nature. It left an important legacy of

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green left thinking in the arts and crafts movement, and the utopian thought of William Morris in particular. These are closely related visions of a transformed relation between humans and the rest of nature. They are clearly very different in intention and in their underlying values from the anthropocentric doctrines criticised by deep ecologists as implying an instrumental domination, or ‘mastery’ of nature. Such visions of benign rule deserve to be taken seriously and evaluated in their own right. Over large parts of the over-developed world, there are few, if any, remaining fragments of natural terrestrial habitat. Almost all remaining biodiversity inhabits ecosystems substantially or wholly modified by past human activity – whether agricultural, industrial or residential. Such species-rich habitats as continue to exist are themselves relatively small-scale and increasingly fragmented. In this context, benign rule is the only feasible option. Sites have to be managed if natural succession is not to eliminate communities of species which thrive at early successional stages. Such planned management of sites, in the context of wider market-driven ecological transformations, unavoidably involves decisions about which animal and plant communities are to be favoured. These decisions are themselves unavoidably shaped by human cultural preferences – more or less well-informed by depth of understanding of the beings whose life conditions are to be sustained or ruled out. However, to accept, as I do, the pragmatic necessity for this version of the ‘benign rule’ approach under present conditions of the overwhelming power of market forces, is not to endorse it as an appropriate philosophy for a transformed society and human ecology. Of course, large areas will of necessity be given over to agriculture, residence, production and recreation in any human future, and the philosophy of ‘benign rule’, applied more coherently and extensively than is now possible, must remain appropriate within this domain. However, beyond this domain the deep ecological vision of living more lightly on the planet, of letting nature be, of allowing things to take their course, seems to me to have much to be said for it. It expresses a certain humility in relation to the rest of nature which I would argue is plausibly read into Marx’s idea of the ‘inorganic body’, and it is consistent with the egalitarian ethic which can be sustained by contemporary evolutionary thought. Further, it expresses more fully than does the idea of benign rule the sentiments of respect and wonder which Collier himself endorses. In Collier’s version, too, an increase in human power over nature includes ‘the power to abstain from using our power, and in an ideal world that is a power we would use rather a lot’ (Collier 1999: 86).

Bibliography Benton, T. (1993) Natural Relations: Ecology, Animal Rights and Social Justice, London: Verso. Bookchin, M. (1982) The Ecology of Freedom, Palo Alto, CA: Cheshire. Collier, A. (1991) ‘The Inorganic Body and the Ambiguity of Freedom’, Radical Philosophy, 57, pp. 3–9. —— (1994) ‘Value, Rationality and the Environment’, Radical Philosophy, 66, pp. 3–9. —— (1999) Being and Worth, London and New York: Routledge.

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Darwin, C. (1987) Charles Darwin’s Notebooks 1836–1846, ed. P.H. Barrett, P.J. Gautrey, S. Herbert, D. Kohn and S. Smith, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marx, K. (1975) Early Writings, Harmondsworth: Penguin. —— (1976) Capital, Volume 1, Harmondsworth: Penguin/New Left Review. Naess, A. (1989) Ecology, Community and Lifestyle, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Regan, T. (1988) The Case for Animal Rights, London: Routledge. Singer, P. (1976) Animal Liberation, London: Cape. Soper, K. (1995) What is Nature? Oxford: Blackwell.

17 Objectivity, experience and the aesthetic of nature Kate Soper

In a development and synthesis of previous engagements with existential phenomenology and psychology, Bhaskarian realism and the ethical topics addressed in Being and Worth, Collier provides a compelling and very readable defence of objectivity in his latest book. As with all his writing, the argument is clear and forceful, its illustrative material manages to be both arresting and unassuming, and – unusually for a philosopher – there is a welcome leavening of anecdote and autobiographical reference. What I particularly liked about this work were the powerful arguments it offers for the importance of self-distancing. Against the postmodern tendency to endorse a constantly self-referencing, selfseeking and self-confirming engagement with the world, Collier reminds us of the importance of the detour via the object, of ‘reality-testing’, of the limitations and distortions that threaten epistemological narcissism, and of the forms of neglect and insensitivity to what is other to self – whether fellow humans, other creatures or inanimate being – that come with an overly subjectivist focus in ontology and ethics. Collier approaches the question of objectivity as a critical realist, an advocate of the Augustinian view that being qua being is good, and a defendant of the objectivity of both facts and values. Even though I do not subscribe to all these positions, I am enough of a realist myself, and sufficiently in sympathy with critical realism, to appreciate the force of Collier’s overall approach and to agree with much of the detail of his argument. As should be clear from the following discussion (which is centred on Part II of In Defence of Objectivity (2003)), my differences are very often points of qualification to his theses rather than outright rejection of their main message. One has to be grateful to Collier for having provided such a lucid and substantial body of argument for those, like myself, who needed to clarify and refine their own position, and to think through the implications of adhering to it in a variety of differing contexts. I shall focus here mainly on some of Collier’s remarks on nature and the implications of his position for environmental ethics and aesthetics, but I want to approach those issues by way of some more general considerations.

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What is objectivity ? First, some thoughts prompted primarily, though not exclusively, by Collier’s characterisation of objectivity in the chapter. In the opening discussion of this, Collier makes some useful distinctions, and presents a generally persuasive case for the objectivity of facts. What I missed, though – and it is my only major reservation – was any explicit recognition that objectivity, understood as a value or attribute of facts, is always so in the conception of a subject. In this respect ascriptions of objectivity are subject-dependent: to be ‘objective’ is to be objective for someone. Collier makes the point, for example, that criteria of selection for candidates for a job interview that are spelt out beforehand ‘reflect nothing but the interviewers’ subjectivity’, and that it is the qualities that candidates in fact possess that are the objective grounds for selection (Collier 2003: 132). This may be so, but it is also surely true that interviewers always bring subjective forms of assessment to those grounds, some of a kind of which they may not be fully aware, and they will also (one hopes) be disposed subjectively to be as objective as possible about the qualities of the candidates. This latter point does indeed seem to be acknowledged at a later stage in the chapter, where Collier tells us that in calling a judgement objective one is saying that it is caused by its object ‘not by some feature of its subject other than openness to the effects of the object’ (2003: 135). But openness of this kind is, I would say, itself a subjective disposition (as is, for example, a determination to ‘get at the truth’, to proceed without prejudice, and so forth), and a disposition of this kind is arguably essential to the passing of objective judgements. Judgements are not rendered ‘merely’ subjective, as Collier at one point rather dismissively seems to imply, by virtue of their reliance on subjective dispositions (2003: 136). Objective facts are so independently of judgement. The earth goes round the sun whether I or anyone else judges that to be the case. But the selection of this as an objective fact is surely humanly dependent: to be objectivity conceived of as a property of facts depends on subjective assessment. I suspect that I am here taking up a position somewhat akin to that which Collier finds ‘disappointing’ in Heidegger, and which causes him to complain that Heidegger ‘relativises Being to Dasein’ (Collier 2003: 278–279). In a muchdiscussed passage quoted by Collier, Heidegger writes, when Dasein does not exist, ‘independence’ ‘is’ not either, nor ‘is’ the ‘initself ’. In such a case it cannot be said that entities are, nor can it be said that they are not. But now, as long as there is an understanding of Being and therefore an understanding of presence-at-hand, it can be said that in this case entities will continue to be. (1967: 255) In Collier’s view, this means that it is only while people exist that we can truly say that entities would exist even if we did not, and he presents this as Heidegger making Being equivalent to ‘the world for us’. To my mind, however, this is not

Objectivity, experience and the aesthetic of nature 253 to render the world, but only judgements on its independence dependent on us (on Dasein). The issue here, no doubt, turns on what exactly Collier intends by ‘world for us’, and I shall not pursue it further here, though I shall have a little more to say on Collier on Heidegger in my discussion on nature. On the somewhat differing theme of whether being objective involves objectifying in any negative sense, Collier points out that this is by no means the case, and usefully warns us against assuming any automatic equivalence between the grammatical subject–object distinction and the ontological patient–agent distinction. But while I accept his general line of argument against the assimilation, I am not entirely convinced by the examples used in illustration of it. He asks, for instance, whether the agent of seeing is the seer or the seen, and argues that it is the seen to the extent that we accept, as we surely should, some version of the causal theory of perception. Certainly, what we see can be said to be occasioned through the causal ‘agency’ of what is seen, but the seer is surely also always the agent of the act of seeing, whatever the cause of what is seen, in the sense that he or she could choose to close their eyes or turn the other way. Likewise with the analogies from voyeurism he gives, it seems that the element of subjective agency is insufficiently acknowledged: a man, says Collier, who sees a woman undressing in a window can be prosecuted as a peeping tom, but a man who is seen undressing in a window by a woman can be prosecuted as an exhibitionist. Yet, in both cases, prosecution would depend on proving subjective intention: deliberately to watch in the first instance, and to undress in order to be seen, in the other, and this complicates using the example as any straightforward illustration of the slippages between agent and patient and subject and object (Collier 2003: 134). That said, it is important, as Collier says, not to pass thoughtlessly between the two distinctions, and I agree even more readily with what he says against eliding the ontological agent–patient distinction with the epistemological knower–known distinction. He rightly points out in this context that since the class of subjects of knowledge and the class of human beings are often deemed co-extensive, ‘subject’ becomes a synonym for human being, and ‘object’ correspondingly comes to designate what is subhuman. ‘Subjects and objects come to mean “people and things” ’ (Collier 2003: 134). But since human beings can be both the objects of knowledge and the objects of action (with no implication of this involving a degrading ‘objectification’) this alignment is misleading. Collier’s arguments seem comparable here to those of Adorno, for whom the difference between people and things is that whereas the latter can only be epistemological objects, the former can be both subjects and objects (Adorno 1978). Another comparison (though Collier might not welcome it) is with Derrida’s questioning of the co-extension of humans and subjects in the tradition of western metaphysics (Derrida 1991: 96–119, especially p. 109f ).

Science and objectivity Let me now pursue the point I make above about the interviewers in Collier’s example bringing subjective attitudes to bear of which they themselves will not

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be aware, or in a position fully to take account. I mention this because while I generally endorse Collier’s realist approach to science and much that he has to say about the importance of realism to uncovering scientific bias, he tends to present bias as essentially the outcome of commercial or other pressures to which the scientist more or less knowingly succumbs, and says little on those forms of bias or distortion that are less consciously introduced. But it would seem clear that one can seek to adopt an objective attitude to one’s studies while remaining blind to the skewing of vision introduced by the specific lens of one’s own social and cultural formation. For example, as feminist critics of science and epistemology have cogently argued, scientists have frequently, and in an important sense unintentionally, interpreted the data through a gendered optic (Harding 1986; Tuana 1989; Keller and Longino 1996; Wyer et al. 2001). This is not a matter of extrinsic pressures, or of wishful thinking trying to square the evidence with the desired outcomes, but a case of a genuinely scientific attitude being unconsciously misled by a too partial outlook. These considerations do not ultimately conflict with Collier’s form of realism, for which knowledge, as he several times insists, is neither infallible nor to be understood as making final claims about its objects. But it does, I think, complicate his implication (Collier 2003: 137) that science is pursued in detachment from any affective promptings, or that bias is always the product of a form of deceit or bad faith or cynical yielding to external influence. These points concerning the more intrinsic and unrecognised intrusions of subjectivity in scientific investigation relate to some more general reservations I have about Collier’s seeming reluctance to acknowledge the role of language and the discursive dimension in mediating our experience. Language for Collier appears to be essentially a matter of representation, a tool for the expression of ideas about a world that is said to be not only ontologically but epistemologically prior: ‘there can be no knowledge of ideas without prior knowledge of the world. And the world is logically prior to ideas, in that we can only define an idea in terms of what in the world it is about’ (Collier 2003: 145). This begs the question, however, as to whether this prior knowledge is conceived as ideas-free, and there are some indications that Collier does indeed think of it as essentially praxis, a matter of doing, rather than of thinking (2003: 146). But even practical activity and experience are conceptually mediated, and I find more helpful Collier’s expansion of his argument in terms of ‘ideating’ something rather than ‘having an idea’ of it. Thus, he writes, ‘if I know the footpath from Fritham to Linwood, then I have an idea of that footpath, but my knowledge is not of that idea but of the footpath’ (2003: 146). This is indeed a valuable distinction, because it registers clearly the fact that when we ‘ideate’ something, a footpath for example, we do so on the basis of our experience of it, but we do not think of it as ontologically dependent on that experience. However, that is surely not to suppose that our experience of the footpath is wholly ‘of it’, independently of any cultural shaping or influence. This is a point to which I will return below in discussing the nature of ‘nature’, but here, suffice it to say that it seems important to distinguish between two rather differing claims: the claim that there is

Objectivity, experience and the aesthetic of nature 255 objective knowledge (that objective knowledge is possible), a claim which I fully accept, and whose philosophical concerns are the conditions under which it is achieved; and the claim that there is an ‘objective’ access to reality (meaning by that an access unmediated by any ideas/discourse). The slippage between these two positions is responsible for what I would argue is a misleading presentation of the postmodernist claim that ‘there is nothing outside discourse’ as a contemporary form of Berkeleyan idealism. Though the postmodernist position remains problematic from a realist point of view, I think it is more accurate to say that its claim is not that there is nothing but discourse or that only discourse exists, but that there is no access to the ‘real’ other than discursively. If this is right, then the critical difference between the realists and the postmodernists concerns not the existence of extra-discursive reality but whether true claims can be made about it. Against the Nietzschean perspectivism of the postmodernists, critical realists rightly say they can.

The nature of experience and the experience of nature In defence of his strong version of objectivity (according to which both facts and values have objective status), Collier makes a number of claims about experience and emotion, relating them at various points to an environmental ethic. It is to these aspects of his argument that I now want to turn. The main burden of his argument here, if I understand it rightly, is that experiences (and emotions and beliefs) are objective in the sense of being determined by their object. Experience, in other words, is always of something, and makes sense only in terms of the independent reality to which it refers. A non-objective experience or emotion or belief is, says Collier, a ‘failed’ experience, emotion or belief (2003: 138). But one has to wonder how far this is always true in the light of what one might call ‘fictive’ experience (or to pose the question in an alternative mode, one has to wonder in what sense Collier is defining the ‘independent reality’ to which experience, etc. refers: does this include, for example, mental states?). Fantasies and imaginings are certainly experienced, but it is questionable whether they can be said to be separate from that experience, to be anything other than the entertainment of them. Perhaps it is a little odd, too, to speak of fictive beliefs as ‘failed’, when these can have such momentous consequences. Collective beliefs, for example, in such ideological ‘entities’ as national identity are very real and have real effects although they are arguably not determined by any objective entities or attributes. In Slavoj Zizek’s argument, for example, national identity or what he terms the ‘nation thing’ is believed in only because others believe in it too (Zizek 1991; Anderson 1983). I do not myself necessarily endorse this account of nationalism, but it would be interesting to hear Collier’s reply to it. The claims made about the objectivity, and therefore fallibility, of emotional and aesthetic responses are, to my mind, also rather problematic, given the extent to which they encourage us to regard emotional responses as right or wrong depending on their object. In the case of erotic relations between persons,

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for example, who is to judge what it is that makes the beloved the normatively appropriate object of the lover’s love? Can we really say that love in the case of personal relations is either ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ depending on its chosen object? Collier tells us that ‘it is appropriate to enjoy one’s friends and lover, good music, and beautiful landscapes; it is not appropriate to enjoy scenes of torture or murder’ (2003: 236). This, surely, begs too many questions. Does it imply that it is wrong to enjoy films or dramas or paintings in which torture or murder are featured, or that it is wrong to like, say, ‘bad’ music? In any case who is to say what is objectively ‘good’ or ‘bad’ in music, or to pronounce in general on these very vexed issues of aesthetic merit? What, moreover – to turn now more directly to environmental issues – constitutes a ‘beautiful landscape’ such that it can be approved as an appropriate object of aesthetic appreciation? The question is not easy to answer, not only because there are differences of individual taste, but because quite radical shifts have taken place in the prevalent social conceptions of what is beautiful in nature at any given point in time. In an important sense, ‘nature’ has here itself to be recognised as a culture-bound and culturally constructed idea. Collier rightly notes that ‘one discovers the value of the New Forest by going there, not by describing a set of human preferences’ (2003: 138). But this does not make the value entirely independent of the preferences of its assessors, for different groups of people have – and do – find it valuable in differing ways. Indeed, whereas the term ‘forest’ today usually summons for us a place of repose and aesthetic beauty, in its original meaning it is a legal term designating a protected area for hunting by the nobility. It is worth recalling too, perhaps, that the New Forest hardly counts as pristine ‘nature’, having been created by William the Conqueror through the destruction of villages previously on the land (Coates 1998: 46–47). I would stress that in making these kind of claims I am not denying that there is an independent nature both in the sense of a non-human world of causal powers and processes that are the object of scientific study, and in the sense of an objectively existing environment. The first sense obviously has some affinity with Heidegger’s concept of the present-to-hand – which Collier, in fact, refers to as ‘brute matter’, and presents as the stuff of science. However, it is not to be equated with Heidegger’s concept, since nature in the sense I intend here is not necessarily directly perceptible, and the contrast is not between a contemplative scientific way of seeing and other ways of seeing the same object, but between the physical and biological powers that are independent of, and cannot be altered by, human beings, and the ‘surface’ and directly experienced forms which are not independent of, but moulded by human activity, either literally or through cultural representation (Soper 1995: ch. 5). It should be clear, therefore, that I am also not denying the reality of the landscape as surface phenomenon independent of its discursive representation or subjective appreciation. But what I am saying, first, is that insofar as landscape is allowed to count as ‘nature’ then ‘nature’ must include much that has been handled by human beings and only takes the form it does by virtue of human intervention, often very intensive and

Objectivity, experience and the aesthetic of nature 257 over centuries. I am also saying that it is cultural influence and mediation that to a significant degree determines what makes this landscape appear as an object of aesthetic esteem, as and when it does. It is a commonplace to point out that the taste in the sublime is a late arrival, that the wild and mountainous aspects once regarded as nature’s uglier and ruder parts are often now regarded as the most subtle and beautiful, and that the attractions of pastoral and managed landscape are not what they once were (Soper 1995: ch. 7; Coates 1998: chs. 6 and 7). Thomas Hardy charts this passage very eloquently in his opening description of Egdon Heath in The Return of the Native. Hardy concludes by predicting that ‘ultimately, to the commonest tourist, spots like Iceland may become what the vineyards and myrtle-gardens of South Europe are to him now; and Heidelberg and Baden be passed unheeded as he hastens from the Alps to the sand-dunes of Scheveningen’ (Hardy 1965: 12–13). The subject–object dialectic involved in the appreciation of natural beauty is exceedingly complex. This emerges if we pursue – as I propose to do briefly here – some of the implications of Adorno’s position in his Aesthetic Theory, beginning with his claim that disinclination to talk about natural beauty ‘is strongest where love of it survives. The “How beautiful!” at the sight of a landscape insults its mute language and reduces its beauty’ (Adorno 1997: 69). The idea is arresting, and probably strikes a chord with many of us. In my own case, although I am not one to be particularly gratified by the thought that on this Adornian aesthetic I would count as a more sensitive nature lover than the more talkative, there is no question but that I do tend to fall silent when confronted by a compellingly beautiful landscape, resent having to express my appreciation for it, and am slightly grudging in my tolerance of others expostulating over it. On the other hand, I am very hard put to say why I react in this way, let alone to justify it. Adorno’s own explanation of course, if we can call it that, is that talk is ‘insulting’ to nature and detracts from its beauty. Yet, in reality landscape can sense no insults, and it is we who observe and admire it who experience any diminishment there might be of its beauty. Therefore, what Adorno would seem to have in mind here is that speech mediates, either deliberately or as an effect, that which is immediate and pre-conceptual, and thus renders conceptual – and in the process ‘betrays’ – that which is as it is, and is experienced as it is, only because it cannot be spoken. This would conform to his argument elsewhere that natural beauty cannot be copied, a point he links with his claim that the taboo on images in the Old Testament has an aesthetic as well as a theological dimension: the prohibition on imagery is itself an expression of the impossibility of creating it. On the other hand, as one would expect of a dialectical thinker like Adorno, this is not the whole of the story because he also wants to recognise that ‘pure immediacy does not suffice for aesthetic experience’, that natural beauty needs its speaker and interpreter, and is in this respect akin to art (which needs an interpreter in order to say what art left to itself is only able to say by not saying

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it). Indeed, Adorno recognises in the immediate sequel to his point about the disinclination to talk being strongest where love survives, that the experience of beautiful nature is not one that you can keep quiet about in the end – even as nature requires silence, anyone capable of experiencing its beauty feels compelled, he tells us, to speak as a way of signalling the momentary liberation it affords from the confines of the enclosure within the perceiving and representing self. The paradox is that one talks in order to register the beyond of nature to conceptualisation; one represents it in order to capture its independence of representation. Natural beauty needs to be conceptualised, but to be conceptually determined as something that is not conceptual. Relatedly, Adorno suggests that nature can act as a kind of reminder of, or utopian gesture towards, a world in which humanity would be in harmony with it. He argues, for example, that aesthetic appreciation of natural beauty recollects a world without domination. But this too is paradoxical. Not only is this a world that he admits probably never existed (so that any recollection of it could only be a fantasy), there is the further consideration that it is ‘through this recollection that experience dissolves back into that amorphousness out of which genius arose and for the first time became conscious of the idea of freedom that could be realised in the world free of domination’. Harmonious immersion in nature is incompatible with the human consciousness that comes to an understanding of freedom and desires the release from domination. Yet there is still more to the paradox, since we also have to recognise that the concept of ‘natural beauty’ is ideological in presenting as immediate what is actually mediated. In other words, we have to accept that what we are acclaiming as the ‘natural’ beauty of natural beauty is, in part at least, a culturally mediated and historically specific apperception of its charms. For a start, unlike those in that impossible golden age of harmony with it, we appreciate it as, or because it is, ‘nature’. So even as Adorno recognises the summons of the pre-conceptual in nature, and stresses – in somewhat question-begging fashion – the urge to silence that it supposedly induces in us, he also acknowledges the extent to which what is discoverable as ‘beautiful’ owes its reception as such to culture. In this, his position is altogether more complex and politically perceptive than that of the many nature lovers who also emphasise the dumb-striking and ineffable qualities of natural beauty (especially wilderness) but fail to recognise the role of culture in conditioning what they select as most ‘beautiful’ (which today, at least for Westerners, is usually the wildest parts).1 Now, on my reading of Collier’s argument on nature, he will readily agree with the Adornian stress on its pre-conceptual objectivity, but will be less happy about allowing for the dependency on subjective representation and articulation, and also resistant to recognising the historical relativity and culturally mediated quality of what we value or find beautiful in a landscape. This, at any rate, would seem to be implied by his claim that values in nature are not invented but only discovered through social and scientific changes (Collier 2003: 232–233). It would also seem to follow from his remarks that in environmental concern ‘it is precisely the value of things independent of us that is dear’ (2003: 160); that

Objectivity, experience and the aesthetic of nature 259 ‘nothing could be moving about nature were nature not something which existed in itself, independently of us, yet could be explored by us. … One could not be a Kantian and have a real feeling for nature’ (2003: 193); and that There would be no point (apart from pragmatic, technological ones) in investigating nature if it were somehow our product. No point in cosmological science or zoology, but no point either in gazing at the night sky, out in the country where it is free from light pollution, no point in being amid trees and hills and waterfalls rather than watching cartoons or television. For these things involve appreciation of what we did not make and what is independent of us, partly for its independence and strangeness. (Collier 2003: 239) To my mind, what these formulations fail sufficiently to recognise, is, for example, that ‘being amid trees and hills and waterfalls’ is, almost always, being within a humanly modified landscape; that there is no valuing of nature without a human valuer; and that we do not dispense with a reference to human subjectivity in stressing that what is valued in nature is its ‘independence’, since independently of human appreciation of that there is no aesthetic of independence. These formulations also tend to downgrade, or abstract from, the role of cultural representation in the appreciation of nature. Collier gives the impression at times that a concern with the way in which objects have been symbolised or represented is often less interesting or valid than a (supposedly more direct and objective) understanding of them for ‘what they really are’. I suspect if pressed he would want to agree that it is just as valid (and objective) for the student of culture to consider human representations and their mediation as it is for scientists to consider the represented objects in a more immediately materialistic or functional light. At any rate, I cannot see that agreeing to it would be inconsistent with his own argument. As indicated in my opening remarks, the object-oriented quality of Collier’s argument is a welcome counter to postmodernist commentary that is exclusively focused on discourse and ideas. But in defending objectivity we need also to be wary of falling into an anti-ideocentrism that underestimates the contribution that human beings and their ideas make to the world and, not least, through their art, music and literature to the enhancement of the pleasures of nature.

Note 1

And the contemporary aesthetic of wilderness is in many respects ecologically regrettable, since it encourages air flight travel to far-flung places, and has generated a very extensive eco-tourist industry that may conserve relatively untouched parts of the environment, but often only at the cost of violent displacement of their one-time human inhabitants, and exploitation of those servicing the industry. See the bulletins from Tourism Concern and Rethinking Tourism, and cf. the Guardian, 22 May 2002, pp. 8–9.

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Bibliography Adorno, Theodor (1978) ‘Subject and Object’, in A. Arato and E. Gebhardt (eds), The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, Oxford: Blackwell. —— (1997) Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor, London: Athlone Press. Anderson, Benedict (1983) Imagined Communities, London: Verso. Coates, Peter (1998) Nature, Western Attitudes since Ancient Times, Cambridge: Polity. Collier, Andrew (2003) In Defence of Objectivity, London: Routledge. Derrida, Jacques (1991) ‘ “Eating Well”, or the Calculation of the Subject’, in E. Cadava, P. Connor and J.-L. Nancy (eds), Who Comes after the Subject?, London: Routledge. Harding, Sandra (1986) The Science Question in Feminism, Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Hardy, Thomas (1965) Return of the Native, London: Macmillan. Heidegger, Martin (1967) Being and Time, Oxford: Blackwell. Keller, Evelyn Fox and Helen E. Longino (eds) (1996) Feminism and Science, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Soper, Kate (1995) What is Nature? Culture, Politics and the Non-Human, Oxford: Blackwell. Tuana, Nancy (1989) Feminism and Science, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Wyer, Mary, Donna Cookmeyer, Mary Barbercheck, Hatice Ozturk and Marta Wayne (eds) (2001) Women, Science and Technology: A Reader in Feminist Science Studies, London and New York: Routledge. Zizek, Slovoj (1991) ‘The Republics of Gilead’, New Left Review, 183. Reprinted in Chantal Mouffe (ed.), Dimensions of Radical Democracy, London: Verso, 1991.

Index

a posteriori analysis 177–8 a priori: in Kant 166–7, 173, 205; in Marx 171, 176–7 abortion 72–3 ‘aboutness’ 162 absences 63, 164, 180 absolute idealism 168 absolute monarchy 83 Absolute Reason 169, 170, 173 ‘accidie’ 126 actual body 201–2, 239 actualism 162–3 Adorno, Theodor 205, 253, 257–8 adversarial method 51 Aesthetic Theory (Adorno) 257 aesthetics 256–7 Alethia 5, 7 alethic truth 9, 163 alienation 186, 187, 189–91 Altenburg Gardens 6 Althusser, Louis: ‘Ideological State Apparatuses’ 64–5; ideology 148–52, 155; influence of 4; lay knowledge 143, 144, 145 altruism 78–9 anarchy 208 animals 241, 246 anthropology 230–1, 232 anthropomorphic fallacy 201 Antigone 67 antimonies 161, 168, 170, 215, 219 Aquinas, St Thomas 80 Archer, Margaret 4, 7, 97, 152, 153, 154 Aristotle: flourishing 104; the Good 67; matter–form composites 167–8; morality 22; plots 16; self-love 80; value 69 Arrow, K. 76 Assiter, Alison 71

Augustine of Hippo: morality 70, 240, 242; self-love 80; value 67; well-being 85, 86, 88 Augustinianism 72, 77 avarice 77, 79–80, 81, 83 Bacon, Francis 204 bad faith 148 Bakhtin, M. 18 Bakunin, Mikhail 208 Balfern Street 4–6 Bangor University 13n.1 Barnes, Julian 25 Barth, Karl 22 Barthes, Roland 15 Bataille, G. 18 Beck, Ulrich 229 being: being as such 69–72; being for-itself 19; being humans 152–3; being-in-theworld 132, 144, 145, 152; benign rule 248–9, 248–9; goodness and 243–4; in Heidegger 252–3; hierarchy of 243, 245–9; interconnectedness 241 Being and Nothingness (Sartre) 18, 63 Being and Worth (Collier) 6, 7, 36; value 65, 240; ‘The Worth of Human Beings’ 70, 71 Being Human (Archer) 152 beliefs 255 benevolence 80–1, 101 Benhabib, Seyla 49, 50, 56–7, 94 Benjamin, Walter 16 Benton, Ted 4–5 Berdyaev, Nicholas: on freedom 26; influence of 19–20, 21–2; on law 24; on moral good 14, 17, 23 Berger, Peter 233 Berkeley, George 130 Bhaskar List 5

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Bhaskar, Roy: 2E moments 164, 179, 180; anthropomorphic fallacy 201; defence of 63; emotions 110n.8; epistemic fallacy 9, 138–9, 163; formal logical contradiction 172; Harré and 4; on Hegel 170, 173, 174; ontological plurality 140–1; realism 69; transcendentalism 179–80 bias 254 the Bible 75, 80, 81 biography 37–9, 40 Blair, Tony 23, 28n.3 Blake, William 22 Bloch, Ernst 209 body-actual 201–2 body-cosmic 201, 239 Bolshevik revolution 206 Bookchin, Murray 248 Bourdieu, Pierre 96, 98, 118; reflectivity 230–2 Brahmes Hall 7–8 Broome, J. 90n.4 Bush, George W. 23 Butler, Joseph 80–1 Butler, Judith 49, 50, 52–3, 56–7 Capital (Marx): capital relation 193–4; labour as creator of value 187–8; ‘labour is value’ 185–7; object of 183–5 capitalism: alternatives to 209, 239–40; capital relation 193–4; continuation of 64–5; contradictions in essence 188–92; environment and 242–3; fetishism 194–6; ideology 195–6; slavery 164; transformation problem 192–3; without contradictions 193–4 care theory 70 categories 166, 168–9, 171 Centre for Critical Realism 5 Chalmers, A. 140 change, reality of 12 choice 66–7 On Christian Belief (Collier) 8, 36, 40 Christianity 4, 6, 7, 23 circumspection 131 class societies 151–2 coherent subjects 49 Collier, Andrew: characteristics 5, 6; Descartes and 203–4; hammer analogy 153, 154; idealism and 203; on the body-cosmic 201; on cultural diversity 104; on economics 76, 85; on ethics 97; on existentialism 153; on experience 127, 153; on facts 37, 68; on great

teachers 22; on hearsay 10–11; on Heidegger 131, 146–7, 252–3; on intentional objectivity 226; on knowledge 143; on Laing 42, 43–4, 45; on love 70; on nature 259; on necessities 71; on objectivity 82, 86, 204–5; on practical knowledge 145; on reductionism 130; on subjectivity 162, 163, 168; on tacit knowledge 123; on theory–practice relation 207; on understanding 145–6; on use-value 240; on value 68, 71–2, 85, 88; on wishful thinking 57; religion 4; selfdescription 33; significance of 8–13 commerce 83 commodity form 177 common-sense 221–2 communicative action 227–8 concepts 166, 168–9; concrete concepts 174–5 concern 154 conscience 148 consciousness: in Hegel 168–9; intentionality of 19; in Kant 165–7; in Marx 174; matter and 10; in Spinoza 202 constellational monism 9, 10 contemplation 205 contradictions 172; law of noncontradiction 218 Copernican Revolution 167, 177 Cornell, Drucilla 49, 50, 53, 54–5, 56 correspondence theory of truth 137–8 cosmic body 201, 239 critical naturalism 179 critical realism: development of 4–6; epistemic fallacy 9, 138–9, 163; lay knowledge and 129, 143; in Popper 139–40 Critical Realism: An Introduction to Roy Bhaskar’s Philosophy (Collier) 4, 6, 46n.2 “Critical realism and the heritage of the Enlightenment’ (Collier)” 34 ‘Critical Realism: Interventions’ series 5, 7 critique 161, 162 Critique of Political Economy (Marx) 174–5 Critique of Pure Reason (Kant) 164–7, 179, 213–14 culture, ethical naturalism and 102–4 Darwin, Charles 246 Dasein 19, 131, 132, 145, 147–8, 252 De Certeau, M. 15 dead labour 189–90

Index 263 deconstruction 57, 215, 219–20 democracy 231 Denzin, Norman K. 37–9 deontologicising rationalism 167 Derrida, Jacques 37–8, 39, 48, 215, 253 Descartes, René 130, 131, 203–4 The Destiny of Man (Berdyaev) 21 Dialectic (Bhaskar) 7, 9, 63 dialectical materialism 169, 178–80, 200–2 dialectics: in Bhaskar 178–9; in Hegel 179–80; in Kant 179; paradoxes 219 dictatorship over needs 88, 89 Dietzgen, Joseph 199–200 Dillard, A. 19 Dilthey, Wilhelm 44 ‘discourse’ 219 The Divided Self (Laing) 41–2, 44 Dream and Reality (Berdyaev) 21 DREI model 179 Durkheim, Émile 93 Dworkin, R. 88 Eagleton, Terry 217 Ecclesiastes 75, 81 ecology 241 economics 76–81; rational choice 82–5; subjectivism 85–9 Edgley, Adam 6 Edgley, Roy 6 Edgworth, E.Y. 196 education 87, 150 egoism 78–9, 80 Eleatics 170, 173 emancipation 178–80, 178–80 emotions 66, 241, 255; morality and 97–9 empiricism: perception 164–5; rejection of 129, 134 Engels, Friedrich 201 Enlightenment 34, 213–14 Enquiries (Hume) 80 environmental philosophy: Augustinian ethics 242; benign rule 248–9; capitalism and 242–3; experience and 255–9; man’s inorganic body 239; naturalism 243–4; value 239–40 Epicurus 86 epistemic fallacy 9, 138–9, 163 epistemology see knowledge equilibrium theory 83 Eribon, Didier 231 Ermath, Elizabeth Deeds 35–7 essences 162, 165, 168–9; in Marx 175–6 ethical naturalism 94, 102–7 ethics 97–9, 103

evil 22, 100, 108 evolution 246 excesses 222 exchange-value 177–8, 239–40 existential phenomenology 129, 153 existentialism: knowledge 143, 145, 153–5; Marxism and 155; realism and 152–3; responsibility 18–19; value 66 experience: hearsay and 133; in Hegel 161–2, 168–9, 170–1, 172–3; ideating 254; in Kant 161, 166; nature of 255–9; realism and 127, 153 exploitation 186, 187–8 facticity 147 facts 35–6, 65–6, 252 faithfulness to the text 27–8 fallibility 64, 130, 138, 255–6 The Family Idiot (Sartre) 39, 40 fear 66 feminism: justice 247; language and 55; morality 70; phallogocentrism and 48–9; postmodernism and 49; science and 254; truth and 57–8 Feminist Contentions (Benhabib) 49, 52–8 Ferry, Jean-Marc 228 fetishism 194–6 Feuerbach, Ludwig 202, 203 First Moment 164, 179, 180 Flaubert, Gustave 38–9, 40 Flax, Jane 49 flourishing 102–6 Forster, E.M. 16 Foucault, Michel 55, 106, 219, 111n.26 foundationalism 51, 56–7 Fourth Dimension 180 Fraser, Nancy 49, 50, 51, 53, 56 freedom 239 Freud, Sigmund 19, 22, 33 Freudianism 33–4, 39 From East to West (Bhaskar) 8 Gender Trouble (Butler) 55 gestalt switches 40 Giddens, Anthony 229, 232–3 Glover, Jonathan 95 God: immanence of 9–10; in Lévinas 25; proof of existence 22; as scientific object 8; in Steiner 26–7 Goldmann, Lucien 229 good 85–9; in Augustine 243–4; evil and 100; Form of the Good 67; Good for Man 67; ‘the-good-to-come’ 23; internal 111n.18; in Smith 101

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Index

Graham, Keith 65 Gramsci, Antonio 148 Greene, Graham 20–1 Griffin, J. 87–8 Griswold, Charles 95–6 Groundwork (Kant) 219 group identity 64 Grundrisse (Marx) 178, 186 Habermas, Jürgen: morality 93, 222; reflection 227–30; truth 51, 235n.8 habit, morality and 98–9 Hacohen, M.H. 134 Hahn, F. 76, 78 Hardy, Thomas 257 Harré, Rom 4, 126 Hartwig, Mervyn 7 hearsay: criticisms of 133; experience and 118–19; non-hearsay knowledge and 10–11; precedence of 119–23; reality testing 118, 125–6, 132–3, 136 hedonism 86 Hegel, G.W.F: critique of Kant 167–71; dialectics 179–80; experience 161–2; Hume and 164; in Marx 174–5; metaphysical empiricism 171–4; theory and practice 206–7 Heidegger, Martin: authenticity 147–8; concern 144; Dasein 19, 131, 132, 145, 147–8, 252; elaboration of 130–2; the ‘gap’ 19; practical knowledge 145–7, 154; theoretical knowledge 118, 146 Hekman, Susan 234 hermeneutics 234 Hindess, Barry 3 ‘Hingis and Horsa’ 3 Hirschliefer, J. 82 Hirst, Paul 3 historical materialism 33–4, 39–40 Hobbesian behaviour 107 Hollis, M. 78 Hostettler, Nick 7 human nature 79–80, 165, 90n.9 humanities, postmodernism and 34, 37 Hume, David: absolute monarchy 83; Humean moment 172; perception 164–5; reason 213; self-love 81, 90n.9; universals 79 I–Thou relation 24–5 idealism: in Dietzgen 199–200; in Hegel 173; in Heidegger 131–2; morality and 106; in Popper 135; self-consistent 170

identity of exclusive categories 171 ‘Ideological State Apparatuses’ (Althusser) 64–5, 150–1 ideology 64–5, 144, 148; in Althusser 148–52 Ideology and Utopia (Mannheim) 233 illusion, in Kant 213–14 Ilyenkov, Evald 202 ‘imaginary’ 149 immanence 167–71 In Defence of Objectivity (Collier): hearsay 10–11; lay knowledge 118; objectivity 48, 88, 226; self-description 33; strengths of 199; value 65 inauthenticity 147–8, 154–5 induction 168 infallibilism 130 infinite relation 202 intellectuals 231 intentional objectivity 226–7 International Association for Critical Realism 5 Interpretive Biography (Denzin) 37–9 intuition 166, 167 Ionian dialectics 169–70 Jansenism 77, 79, 229 Jarvis, Alan 7 Jellicoe, Mike 7 Jevons, W. 78 Journal for Critical Realism 5, 7 judgements 252 justice 67, 247 Kant, Immanuel: a priori 205; contradictions 218–19; critique 161, 162; dialectics 179; failure of 22; Hegel’s critique of 167–71; in Marx 176–7; metaphysical empiricism 171–4; noumena 214, 224; in Popper 134, 135–6; Reason 222–3; transcendental illusion 213–14; transcendentalism 164–7 know-how 150–1 knowledge: bucket theory 133–4; counterphenomenal 33, 36, 43; dualism 9, 12, 203; empiricism and 129; growth of 123–6; ideology and 144; inauthenticity 148; prior 254; a priori 166–7, 171, 173, 176–7; realism and 130–3; relativity of 34–5, 233–4; search-light theory 134, 136; sociology of 230–2; transitive

Index 265 dimension of 11; types of 155; see also hearsay; practical knowledge labour 185–8; living labour 185, 189–92 labour-products 177 Lacan, Jacques 19, 48, 54 Laing, R.D. 4, 41–6, 43–4, 45 language: acquisition of 216–17; feminism and 55; God and 27–8; instability of 37–9; linguistic turn 134–5; protocol sentences 134–5; representation and 254; of self-interest 76–81 Lara, Maria 64 law 23–4 Lawrence, D.H. 17–18 Lawson, Tony 7 lay knowledge see practical knowledge learning 98 Lenin, Vladimir 206–7 Lévinas, E. 19–20, 24–5 lived relation 155 living labour 185, 187, 189–92 Locke, John 164–5 logic 133 logical positivism 134 love 70–1 Luckmann, Thomas 233 Luhmann, Niklas 228 Lukács, Georg 205, 234 Luther, Martin 22 MacIntyre, A. 111n.18 Macmurray, John: on Heidegger 131; influence of 10, 64; knowledge 118, 143–4, 155 Macquarrie, John 153, 154 Mandeville, B. 79 Mannheim, Karl 233–4 Marshall, A. 78 Marx, Karl: a posteriori 178; essences 176; influence of 33; inversion 193; man’s inorganic body 239; morality and 22; nature philosophy 248; objectivity of 174–5; on Ricardians 188; on social power 189; use-value 190, 192; utility 196; on value 184, 185, 186–7; wagelabour 197 Marxism: biography and 39; existentialism and 155; inauthenticity 148; injustice 180; materialist objectivism 174–8; pragmatism and 208–10; as a science 33–4; structuralism 8 Masterclasses 123, 125 materialism: dialectical materialism 169,

178–80, 200–2; historical materialism 33–4, 39–40; objectivism 174–8; realism and 199–203 maternal issues 72–3 Mathematical Psychics (Edgworth) 196 matter 10, 168 matter–form composites 167–8 matter-in-itself 169 meaning, lack of 19 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 152, 156n.3 Mesny, Anne 233 meta-psychology 42 Meta-Reality 12 metaphysics 135, 139, 171–4 metaphysics of presence 48 Le métier de sociologue (Bourdieu) 230 mind–body dualism 9, 12, 203 La Misère du monde (Bourdieu) 232 modernity 228–9, 232–3 monism 202 morality 22–8; animals and 65; concerns of 241; emotions and 66, 97–9; evil and 22; habit and 98–9; ideology and 64–5; in Kant 219; naturalism 243–4; normativity and 93–7; paradox of 23; reason and 97–9; in Smith 94, 99–102, 99–102, 109, 110n.14; social structures and 107–8; substance 27; true moralities 65 Morris, William 249 Moulton, Janet 51 Naess, Arne 241 narratives 14–15 nationalism 255 natural necessity 163 naturalism 243–4 nature: experience of 255–9; idealism and 202–3; man’s inorganic body 239; man’s status 242 navigation 121, 124 necessities 71 needs 65, 88, 102–3 neo-Kantianism 9 neo-Marxism 228 neo-Straffianism 188 Neurath, Otto 134–5 neutrality 82 New Social Movements 64 Nicholson, Linda 49, 52 Nicole, Pierre 76, 77, 79, 80 nominalism 135 Non-Contradiction, Law of 218 non-human beings 241–2

266

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Norrie, Alan 7 nothingness 18, 19, 63 noumena 214 Novack, George 208 Nussbaum, M.C. 104 Oatley, Keith 121 Objective Knowledge (Neurath) 135 objectivity: definition of 48, 130, 137–8, 252–3; ethical naturalism and 109; in Hegel 170–1; myths of 64; negativity and 253; neutrality and 82; types of 226, 226–7 obligations 66–7 Oizerman, Theodore 204 O’Neill, John 67, 245 ontological monovalence 164 ontological realism 8 ontology: alternatives to 140–1; bi/polyvalence 164, 180 Others 147–8 Outhwaite, William 4–5 paradigm shifts 40 paradoxes 223 particularists 68 passion 222 Paul, St 22 Peirce, Charles Sanders 119 perception 153, 165–6 personal relations 256 phallogocentrism 50–2, 55–6 phenomenology 146, 171 The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Habermas) 228 philosophical knowledge 155 philosophy: limitations of 203–5; task of 33, 45 physical objects 67, 68–9 physicalist reductionism 130 Pigou, A. 78 Plato 22, 67, 167–8 plot 16–17 political economy, critique of 196–7 politics 4, 55, 233 ponziopilatismo 148 Popper, Karl 133–41 Porpora, Doug 4, 8 positivism 66, 93, 227 post-philosophical wisdom 172 post-structuralism 93 postmodernism: assumptions of 35; claims and claimants 51–4; contradictions of

35–6; feminism and 49–50, 55–6; in humanities and social sciences 34; irreality of 152–3; language and 217; realism and 255; ‘seeing as’ 40; social sciences and 230–1 power 22 practical knowledge: critical realism and 129; dependence of 119–23; in Heidegger 145–7, 154–5; nature of 121–2, 155–6; objectivity of 118–19, 126–8; philosophers of 143; primacy of 152–3; reality and 141; from theoretical knowledge 123–4; into theoretical knowledge 124–6; theory and 132–3, 206–10 pragmatism 207–9 praiseworthy acts 101–2 praxis 228, 254 pre-reflective thought 172 preferences 78–9, 84, 85–8 present-at-hand 131, 145, 256 Price, R. 81 ‘On the Production of Moral Ideology’ (Collier) 64–5 protocol sentences 134–5 providence 203 psychoanalysis 33–4, 39, 55 psychotherapy 33, 45 public choice theory 82, 84 pure matter 169–70 pure reason 167–71 The Quiet American (Greene) 20 Quine, W.O. 218 Radical Philosophy (journal) 3, 239 rationalisation 229 rationality, alienated conceptions of 97 Rawls, John 95, 96 R.D. Laing (Collier) 33, 45 ready-to-hand 131, 145 real absences 63 real, knowing the 153–5 Real Presences (Steiner) 26–7 realism: in Bhaskar 69; common-sense 141; criticisms of 137; emotions and 97–8; fallibility and 64; first conference 4–6; in Heidegger 131; idealism and 156n.3; materialism and 199–203; morality and 95–6; in Popper 133–5; value and 66 The Realism and Human Sciences Conferences 4–6

Index 267 reality 162–3, 200, 255 reality-testing 118, 125–6, 132–3, 136, 251 Reason: common-sense and 221–2; in Derrida 215; in Kant 213–14, 222; limitations of 217–21; morality and 97–9; passion and 222; self-undoing 213–14, 218–19; suspicion 221, 223–4 reductionism 130, 203 reflexive objectivity 226–7; in Bourdieu 230–2; in Habermas 227–30; in Mannheim 233–4 Regan, Tom 241 relationism 233–4 relativism 106, 215–16, 233–4 religion 4, 6, 7, 8, 23, 36, 40 Ricardians 188 Richard I, king of England 83 rights-theory 241 Romanticism 229 Rorty, Richard 64, 103, 208, 221, 46n.2 Routledge 7 Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy 35 Samuelson, P. 90n.4 Sartre, Jean-Paul: absences 63; bad faith 148; dilemmas 66–7; influence of 18–19; on narrative 14–15; ‘real’ subjects 38–40 Sayer, Derek 176–7 scepticism 204, 221 schizophrenia 41–6 schools 64–5 science: objectivity and 253–5; philosophy of 133–5, 242 scientific knowledge: ‘aboutness’ 162; ideology and 150, 156; in Macmurray 155; philosophers of 143 Scientific Realism and Socialist Thought (Collier) 4, 7 Searle, J. 139 Second Edge moments 164, 179, 180 ‘seeing as’ 39–40 self-consciousness 153 self-interest 76–81, 82–3, 101 self-love 80–1, 86 sex 17–18 simple commodity production 183–5 Singer, Peter 241 singing teachers 122–3 slavery 164 Smith, Adam: moral sentiments 94, 99–102, 109, 110n.14; self-interest 79; toil and trouble 184

social construction 103–4 Social Construction of Reality (Berger) 233 social practices 149, 151 social sciences: assumptions of 232; modernity 232–3; morality and 93–7; postmodernism and 34, 37, 230–1; rational choice 82–5 social structures 107–8 socialisation 103 Socialist Reasoning (Collier) 6 societies, system theory of 228 sociology of knowledge 230–2, 233 Sontag, Susan 26 Soper, Kate 226, 242 Southampton Synthesiser 8 Spinoza, Baruch 22, 201–3, 241 Spirit 169, 170 spirituality, role of 7–8 Steiner, George 14, 15, 26–7 stoicism 167 stories 16 ‘The Storyteller’ (Benjamin) 16 structural realism 7, 8–9 subjective idealism 130 subjectivism 85–9; merged subjectivity 17–18; realism and 11; subject–object distinction 253; truth-claims and 162 substance 202–3 suffering 102–6 suspicion 133, 221, 223–4 Sussex University 4 sympathy 100 system theory 228 tacit skills 119, 132 Taylor, C. 71 technology 146–7 test of practice 208 theoretical knowledge: correction of 136–7; in Heidegger 131, 146; importance of 206–10; from practical knowledge 124–6; into practical knowledge 123–4; practical knowledge and 118, 132–3 The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Smith) 99–102 theosis 10 thesis-antithesis-synthesis triad 172 ‘they’ 147–8 Third Level 180 thrownness 147, 148 Tillich, Paul Johannes 22 transcendental illusion 213–14

268

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transcendentalism: in Kant 164–7; in Marx 171; paradoxes 219; realism 179 transfactuality 164, 179 transformation problem 192–3 transitivity 11, 164 A Treatise of Human Nature (Hume) 79–80, 165, 90n.9 De Trinitate (Augustine) 85, 86 truth: analysis of 9; existentialism and 154–5; feminism and 57–8; in Habermas 51; in Hegel 180; objectivity and 48; phallogocentrism and 50–2; relativity of 217; surrogation 48, 54–8 Truth and Truthfulness (Williams) 222 understanding 145 unity-in-diversity 171–2 universalism 67–8, 79, 228–9 use-value 177, 185, 187, 190, 192, 239–40 utilitarianism 241 utility 78, 82–3, 87, 195–6, 90n.4 utopianism 210 value: ethical issues 240–1; hierarchy of 243, 245–9; as labour 185–7; labour as

creator of 187–8; law of 183–5; objectivity of 7, 9, 64–7, 67–9; physical objects and 68–9; plurality of 71–2; use-value 177, 185, 187, 190, 192, 239–40 Vertigan, Sean 7 vices 79 virtue 67, 70–1, 101–2 The Voice of Experience (Laing) 45 Wacquant, Loic 107 wage-labour 185–6, 188–9, 197 Weber, Max 97, 108, 229 well-being 85–9 whole, primacy of 7, 11–12 Williams, Bernard 222 Williams, Raymond 98 Winch, Peter 218 wishful thinking 57 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 39, 40, 44 Wolff, Janet 234 women 72–3 Wood, Alan 86 workplaces 65 ¯i¿ek, Slavoj 255