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Chaturanga

~ statecraft, strategy, society, and Σοφíα

Chaturanga

Tag Archives: Self

Riflessioni: The Limits Of Liberalism

28 Tue Oct 2014

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in India, South Asia, Theory & Philosophy

≈ 1 Comment

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Alasdair MacIntyre, Aristotle, Émile Durkheim, Charles Taylor, cognitive psychology, community, Daniel Bell, dharma, Ferdinand Tönnies, Gemeinschaft, Gesellschaft, Herbert Marcuse, individualism, John Rawls, liberalism, Michael Sandel, Neelly Bellah, Philippa Foot, purushartha, rasa, Robert Nozick, Self, society

Everyone is a Liberal these days – classical liberal, social liberal, neo-liberal, left liberal, economic liberal, conservative liberal…the variations go on. Despite the variations, all these flavours of liberalism are held together by the common belief in the rational individual as the atomic unit of socio-political existence. The Age of the Individual was ushered in by the Enlightenment, its emphasis on rationality and empiricism fuelling the birth of modernity and giving a fillip to individual rights. The seductive appeal of a universal ethic based on reason was difficult to resist, particularly in Europe where the Church and its excesses had eroded faith in the Christian brotherhood of man.

However, the pendulum finally swung the other way and several critiques of liberalism and its cult of the individual began to be voiced by the early 20th century. Sociologists such as Ferdinand Tönnies and Émile Durkheim warned that the individualism of liberalism threatened the integrity and cohesion of a society, making the famous distinction between Gemeinschaft (community) and Gesellschaft (society). This work was carried further after the Second World War by the thinkers such as Herbert Marcuse, Daniel Bell, Charles Taylor, Michael Sandel, Neelly Bellah, and Alasdair MacIntyre.

The opposition to liberalism occupies three spaces: the ontological that disputes claims made about the autonomous Self, the political that challenges the rights of the individual over the community, and the social that questions the value or even possibility of an individual not rooted in a mesh of traditions, duties, and relations. At first glance, it might appear that emphasis on the family over the individual originates in Eastern societies but criticism of the liberal foundation has no geographical boundaries. Furthermore, opponents of the liberal ethos are as likely to be secular as they are to be religious.

Perhaps the most obvious salvo at liberalism comes at its tendency to universalise a moral code. Liberals who espouse abstract ideas of justice and fairness meet fierce opposition from traditionalists who view these values as necessarily embedded in the traditions and history of a people and can vary by place, time, and context. The primary focus of this line of argument, a tad unfairly, is John Rawls and his landmark work, A Theory of Justice. Rawls does allow for the possibility that liberalism may not be exportable to all places at all times and accepts the possibility of justifiable non-liberal regimes but nonetheless considers these inferior and worthy only of toleration, not emulation.

The failure of other ideologies like fascism, communism, and theocracies have only buttressed liberal notions of the polity and society. However, an interesting critique has come from the revival of virtue ethics: the purpose of the good life is eudaimonia, an end achieved only by the appropriate balance of intention, will, emotion, habit and capabilities. As such, eudaimonia is flexible not only by culture and time but also by person. Neo-Aristotleians such as Alasdair MacIntyre, Philippa Foot, and GEM Anscombe argue that purpose of life cannot be separated from the process by which it is achieved and in doing so, revive the ideal of reciprocating local communities whose members play socially given roles and are made intimate by their shared ends.

Unfortunately, Aristotle never envisaged the gigantic scale and complexity of modern cities and states when he wrote about ancient Greek society. What may have worked for a polity of at most 100,000 voting members – and a population of approximately a million – cannot scale up to accommodate nearly 20 million Mumbaikars or over a billion Chinese. In these circumstances, liberals argue, the impersonal liberal system better manages human organisation than particularised communities.

Of course, the question arises whether liberals actually think that the individual self is created ex-nihilo, outside of any social context. As Aristotle argued, the man who can live outside society is either a beast or a god. Similarly, three of the four Hindu purusharthas – dharma, artha, kama – are intrinsically social and only the fourth – moksha – leaves the individual to himself and his relationship with the gods. To be fair, this accusation applies more to libertarians like Robert Nozick far more than it does liberals like Rawls. No matter, the point still holds in that the liberal virtue of unrestrained individual choice trumps the wishes and traditions of the community.

The liberal argument for individual choice rests on the desirability of normative self-determination, meaning that everyone should have the right to make his or her own decisions to secure for themselves the optimal conditions for leading fulfilling life that cherishes the values they hold dear. These choices may be made by an individual taking into account his or her own valuation of tradition and community. Liberals fervently oppose the notion that government endorse communitarian wishes over personal choice, thereby defending a system of rights, powers, opportunities, and self-determination for the individual. There is an interest in periodically questioning traditions, liberals argue, and reviving or abandoning them. This is particularly true for groups who have experienced prejudice against them.

While there are pragmatic reasons to accept these liberal arguments, their solutions run into difficulties in cases where traditional identities also form the core of one’s identity. For example, an oppressed woman might still hold on to traditional understandings of what it means to be a good wife or mother and an attempt to liberate her from her situation may cause irreparable psychological damage; similarly, it is still quite common in India and Asia for people to take care of their aging parents despite familial discord. This is because, as cognitive psychologists tell us, people neither think nor behave as atomistic individuals despite their abstracted arguments for the same. Their emotions are value judgments about the world and how it should be: one takes satisfaction not in the political and social liberty of a man but his success in leading a meaningful life. Whereas the assertion of rights was once confined to matters of essential human interest, a strident rights rhetoric has occupied contemporary political discourse. The cult of the individual, together with materialism and the desire for instant gratification, have left little room for reasoned discussion and compromise between community and individual.

Properly understood, the communal critique of liberalism is not over ossified traditions but about the solutions proffered by liberals that disrupt traditional bonds of kinship, duties, and authority, thereby fuelling the atomistic tendencies of modern society. Several liberal ideas have contributed to the erosion of social responsibilities and important means of social cohesion and communal life. The invisible hand of the free market has also undermined family life and been a questionable influence on politics at best. The rehabilitation of greed fostered a utilitarian ethic that encroached into social and intra-community relationships that had previously functioned on a sense of reciprocity, duty, and civil obligation. This trend was further reinforced by globalisation and the creation of a global marketplace.

It is neither possible nor desirable to turn back the clock; the dogmas of the quiet past are indeed inadequate to the stormy present. Liberalism, the noun and the ideology, must be tempered by a liberal – the adjective – mind. Just as the classical liberalism of the Enlightenment was a reaction to authoritarianism, arbitrary laws, overbearing communities, and rigid dogma, communitarians today are reacting to the undue emphasis on the rights of the egocentric individual. So far, few viable alternative political structures have been offered.

An interesting solution, however, comes from rasa theory in Indian aesthetics. Rasa, the Sanskrit word meaning essence, is fundamental to Indian arts, from dance and music to literature. Its principle lies in exciting emotional states in the audience and it does so by distilling the range of human emotions to a a handful and depicting them vividly. The goal of rasa is not to merely evoke a rudimentary emotional response but one of philosophical and spiritual contemplation. Though there are marked differences between the two, Ancient Greek plays also played an important social role beyond entertainment.

Exposure to great literature, be it the Mahabharata or the Aeneid, the Silappatikaram or the Divina Commedia, instills broad archetypes of human societies in the audience. Over time and with sufficient reflection, it develops empathy in audiences. Literature perhaps does this better than other forms of art because of a clearer intellectual component required in its appreciation. Qualities like empathy strengthen the cohesiveness of communities, be they of geography, profession, or memory. An empathetic society will have less need to resort to rights conferred upon its individual constituents by a centralised and universalising liberal state because grievances may be worked out at the local level. At a political level, it follows that authority must devolve to the local level and laws intruding on personhood and identity must be minimal and restricted only to the essential.

The problem in selling virtues like empathy is that they are not quantifiable and our post-Enlightenment rational minds find it difficult to grasp subjective evaluations, particularly in matters of national policy. The fear is that some sort of inequity may become institutionalised. However, liberals need to stop chasing their utopia as traditionalists have theirs and realise that there is no such thing as universal equality – innate human capabilities and preferences will never allow it.

Ancient political systems may have lost their relevance to modern society but they operated on the sound and realistic principle that people must live together as cooperative and preferably friendly members of communities; no man is an island. Ideologies that erode this foundational observation cannot improve human existence, and though we do not have a “Grand Unified Theory” of social organisation, it hardly helps if we go against common sense.


This post appeared on FirstPost on October 30, 2014.

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Searching for the Self in Modern European Thought

04 Wed Apr 2012

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in Europe, Theory & Philosophy

≈ Comments Off on Searching for the Self in Modern European Thought

Tags

Adam Smith, Adorno, amour de soi, amour propre, C. Wright Mills, Condillac, Condorcet, Constant, Dasein, Descartes, Diderot, Ding an Sich, Foucault, Freud, Hegel, Heidegger, Herder, Horkheimer, Hume, Kant, Locke, Mandeville, Marcuse, mass culture, Nietzsche, noumenon, Rousseau, Schopenhauer, Self

The evolution of the modern Self has been a convoluted process. At times, under the influence of the intoxicating ideas of the French Revolution, the humanism of Condorcet and Jean-Jacques Rousseau revived the themes lost since the Renaissance. However, the opposite trend of constricting the Self within larger categories such as race and nation occurred simultaneously. Of course, this was not seen as a restriction—as Dror Wahrmann puts it, during the late 1700s, the “ancien régime of identity” yielded to the “modern regime of selfhood,” as people began to conceive of gender, race, and class in novel ways. Identity was seen as external while the Self was internal. This debate must necessarily take place within the Western tradition. Eastern musings on the Self did not find their way to the West except through the works of a few Orientalists such as Arthur Schopenhauer. Furthermore, modernity as is understood in the West was never truly embraced by the East for various reasons. In any case, they hardly fit the trajectory of modern Western thought and would be seem artificial to incorporate.

In the beginning, there was Rene Descartes. Descartes’ Cogito ergo sum (‘I think therefore I am’), stands at the head of the modern tradition in Western thought. For the first time since the fall of the Roman Empire, the Self became central to human knowledge about the world. Such a definition had to come first; knowledge of the world had to wait until selfhood was made philosophically secure. For Descartes, the ‘I’ had to be capable of awareness (experience) as well as rational faculties, ideas which would underscore the Enlightenment. This emphasis on the Self as the origin of all experience was continued by John Locke, who believed that selfhood was created through experience. According to Locke, the experience of forming thoughts, opinions, and attitudes created an embodied personhood that was ontologically fragmented but united through the reason and reflection. For Locke, because experience varied with perspective, the Self consisted of three parts: bodily (physical), relational (to others), and reflective (mental). Thus, Locke rejects ideas of an innate moral sense, an Aristotelian essence, or a Leibnitzian monad in the formation of the Self. Across the Channel in France, Benjamin Constant echoed this line of thought. For Constant, however, the Self is not only fragmented, but it is also fluid. The only real autonomy the Self could achieve was through constantly remaking itself in the face of subjection and incompleteness. Bernard Mandeville, however, saw the Self as united not because of reason but passion and social need. Mandeville’s social/psychological theory, that the Self is formed deep in the human psyche out of inborn needs and desires, bears some resemblance to the work of Sigmund Freud about a century later. As part of the social need, Mandeville argued for the social division of labour along occupational specialties and rejected the interference of guilds in the economy. He also rejected any moral authority that presented itself as virtue and sought to manipulate the economy. Adam Smith, known more for his The Wealth of Nations, never explicitly posed a question on the nature of selfhood, but extended Mandeville’s and David Hume’s themes of passion and self-interest. Hume had argued that one could not conceive of the Self. The mind was a theatre of perceptions, and one had no idea of where these scenes are represented or the materials of which they are composed. Therefore, reflection upon the Self merely produced these secondary images and not any “true” Self. Morality, for Smith however, was also partially dependent on economics—societal happiness was necessary to individuals who hoped to maintain a stable market, and that would promote morality than any a priori understanding of the term.

French contributions to the understanding of the Self followed the works of the early British writers. As a result, much of their thinking was a response not only to the political and social situation in France but also to their English colleagues across the Channel. Many French thinkers situated the Self in language. For example, Abbé Etienne Bonnot de Condillac rooted human psychology in sense experience far more deeply than Locke, and without any spiritual component. The Mind can gain independence from sense-experience only through language. Language is required to express oneself, and once this faculty has been achieved, people are then capable of recalling previous experiences. The formulation of their pasts with a language gives them control over their memories and experiences. Thus, language and the reflection made possible by it are the source of all human intellectual progress. Strong parallels can be drawn between Condillac and Ferdinand Saussure and Jacques Derrida, who extend Condillac’s theses in their projects. Denis Diderot, another French Enlightenment thinker, worked hard to separate morality from religion, thus creating the basis of the Self that was entirely divorced from metaphysics and undoing much of Augustine’s work. Relying upon the innate physical organisation of individuals as the basis of morality, Diderot believed that the desire for power was natural. Therefore, the prevalent social hierarchy was a structure of domination and dependency, not a beneficent system.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau furthered this hypothesis by arguing that man was a noble savage by nature, but was corrupted by society. Human beings have diminished their own natural potential by pursuing the unnatural demands of class, religion and ambition. If only they were able to liberate their true nature, they would free themselves of the suffering they now endure. Human beings should therefore recover the sanctity and promise of the individuality with which they were born. As Rousseau wrote, amour de soi, or positive self-love, was converted to amour-propre, or pride, by interaction with society. Unlike British thinkers, and even most French thinkers, Rousseau’s individual reawakened his own individuality by traveling inwards, away from external dialogue, by withdrawing into the natural self and contemplating his own divinity. These ideas reoccur frequently in Western intellectual history, the most recent rebirth being in the form of the Frankfurt School in Europe and C. Wright Mills in the United States.

In Germany, Johann Gottfried Herder, the father of the German Romantic Movement, situated the Self in biology. To realise oneself, he argued, one must realise the vast system of interactions that is the universe. Herder believed that reason is not the life-force by itself, but is closely associated with it. Therefore, language and education, the products of human rationality, were the instruments of the development of the Self. Thus, for Herder as well, language determined thought. Philosophers after Herder chose to analyse the ‘I’ for itself, rather than to approach it through linguistics or social relations. Immanuel Kant, for example, organised the idea of selfhood around autonomy: the Self achieved freedom by following the self-made laws of its own rational nature. Before it does anything, however simple, the self must think. What it thinks of at this primal stage is itself, which it conceives to be a unity: it is self-conscious. Therefore, in order for us to be in any contact with the world, we must have an awareness of ourselves, and a sense of unity of self. Such selfhood was universal in that all rational individuals were equally capable of achieving it. However, before being able to think of anything, the Self must think itself. The self, then, is the feeling of connection or consistency between all your perceptions. In a sense, there existed multiple selves—transcendental, empirical, and practical/moral—all in a unified state. “I” referred to all three selves. Thus, there remained a unity of consciousness. For Kant, subjectivity can only have content through awareness of the world. What we experience is a continuous stream of mere representations. These representations are not our faculties but the products thereof. Primary amongst these faculties, is a sense of ‘I,’ the noumenon, or as Kant called it, the Ding an sich. The I-in-itself is the foundation on which is built the rest of our individuality, tempered by sense perceptions, thought, and language.

G.W.F.Hegel, another German philosopher, attempted to solve the dualism many others had created before him, specifically Kant, in seeing the Self as material and spiritual simultaneously. Hegel posited that the Self was at once individual and universal—that the individual was merely part of the larger universal cognisance. The Self as individual was restricted to the body, but as the universal, the Self transcended every particular form of existence.

Nietzsche’s concept of the Self was based on his famous dichotomy between Apollonian (rational) and Dionysian (emotional) nature. Nietzsche believed that for full self-realisation, one must step outside this material framework. Schopenhauer agrees with Nietzsche’s assertion and continues that it is causality that restricts us to a pre-reflective level. As Schopenhauer would explain, subjectivity is imprisoned within material experience, not outside it. At another level, Schopenhauer is criticising Kant’s vision of the Self—how is it possible to unite, Schopenhauer asks, a transcendent Self with the Self that is created through sense-perception if it is not possible to step outside of a material framework? The answer, according to Schopenhauer, is simply that we cannot. Simply put, Schopenhauer rejects Kant’s dichotomy between phenomenon and noumenon. For Kant, the noumenon was the Ding an sich, but Schopenhauer saw it as the Will. In essence, Schopenhauer argues that we participate in the reality of an otherwise unachievable world outside the mind through will. We cannot prove that our mental picture of a world outside our reality corresponds with our understanding of reality by reasoning. Will however, allows us to partake in this discourse. Martin Heidegger was perhaps one of the first figures who displaced the human subject from the centre of debate. Heidegger noticed that philosophers from Descartes onwards had seen the human interaction with the world as dependent on a localised and self-aware recipient of experiences called the subject. They had not, however, looked beneath the structure of subjectivity to an even more basic and fundamental issue: what does it mean to be? With this theoretical concept, Dasein, Heidegger was able to do what Nietzsche was not, to step outside the perceived material centre of discourse. Heidegger posited that although humans had an important role in history, human-world (subject-object) relations were not necessarily dependent upon human consciousness. There could be nothing more fundamental than the fact that we are. Furthermore, Heidegger did not see the separation of man and world in the neat Cartesian manner as those before him did. Dasein is constituted by the fact that it is in the world and belongs to it, a secular monist view of sorts.

Sigmund Freud upended theories of Self that had preceded him by challenging the identification of the self with the rational processes of the conscious mind. The Freudian model of the inner Self begins with the premise that the division of the psychical into what is conscious and what is unconscious is the fundamental premise of psychoanalysis. This division posits a binary split in the mind, suggesting a state of conflict that is built into the human psyche. From the above, it appears that a tension of opposing forces is built into the Freudian paradigm. The first set of opposing forces, the conscious and the unconscious, create a primary split, followed by the division of the unconscious into the superego and the id, and the parallel split between the repressed unconscious and the preconscious. Thus, for Freud, the question was not simply the Self but the fragmented Self.

The later work of Michel Foucault seems in many ways antithetical to that of Freud and Nietzsche, since the latter two posit the existence of the individual subject who exercises power or on whom it could be exercised, while for Foucault, there is seemingly no subject who creates power, although there is motive for its creation. In framing his inquiry thus, he envisioned a Zarathustra-like transcendent self that was non-reflective. In his studies of power relations, Foucault was then able to investigate how a body was able to serve as an instrument of power, usually as a historically specific internalised norm. Self-reflexivity was a dangerous trap that imprisons us in a set of practices and routines that are determined for, rather than by, us. Thus, power relations are both intentional and non-subjective and there is no power that is exercised without a series of aims and objectives. But this does not mean that it results from the choice or decision of an individual subject. Furthermore, he later notes that the individual is not the vis-à-vis of power; it is one of its prime effects. Consequently, Foucault thinks of power as intentionality without the subject, such that power relations are intentional and can be described without being attributed to particular subjects as their conscious intentions.

In the post-World War II era, the Frankfurt School has received much attention. Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, and Max Horkheimer, among others, addressed the problem Foucault had set himself: the swallowing up of the subject. The rationality of Western civilization, its positivist notion of progress and science, enslaves nature but to whom? This group of thinkers sees no force that will enable the subject to emancipate himself. Adorno insisted that the subject was still for-itself, but no longer in-itself. The self-sure subject is taken over by the hypnotism of mass culture.

The question, “when did the modern Self come into being?” immediately mires us in the ontological minefield of questions such as, “what is modern?” “what is Self?” and “what is the point of actualisation?” The process by which the perspective was shifted from the divine to the individual is explained above. Of course, it is impossible to present a full study of intellectual developments and influences within the scope of one blog post, but the milestones are briefly presented. The debate on the Self shifted from the Self’s ability to reason and interact with the world, to a primary agency by which it was self-aware, to Being itself, to an internal split in the nature of self-awareness, and finally to the self-deluded entrapment of the Self by reason. Needless to say, the development is neither so straight-forward nor chronologically neat, but the modern Self, whatever that means, was formed in the fires of this age-old debate.

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