One of the most gratifying experiences I get from reading is discovering that a person smarter than myself has put a name to a vaguely developed concept, or coherently described an intuited idea, that has floated around in my own mind, un-categorized, incompletely articulated and stunted for lack of proper terminology. (There is probably a perfectly apt German word for this phenomenon.)The experience is doubly felicitous. First, there is the realization, "Ah, I am not alone!" Then, "Now I have the means to discuss it with others."
Philosopher Simon Critchley has provided me with just such a moment in his Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance. I will describe it bellow. First a little about the book and the circumstances that brought it into my hands.
Don't know much about philosophy: I don't remember hearing about Simon Critchley before, but in the context of an e-mail exchange about the recent election, my friend Phil Williamson, a bona-fide philosopher, sent me the book.
During the interminable campaign, Phil had taken the position of a critical, but enthusiastic, Obama supporter, while I decided to reject the narrow "mainstream" political spectrum, throwing my support behind Nader. Evidently, the viciousness of my attacks against his candidate, including an admittedly insensitive "I told you so" fusillade enumerating Obama's sins only two days after the election, led my friend to suspect me of suffering from a dark and debilitating nihilism.
Out of deep concern, he kindly sent me this slim volume, saying if I agree with Critchley, then we are essentially in agreement.
The title is compelling. Coming, though -- as it did from my perspective -- out of the clear blue, the first thing I did when the book arrived was turn it over to read the blurbs. So far so good! --blurbed by Cornell West and Slavoj Zizek, a respectable and tantalizing combination.
From the first page of the introduction, which includes the lament, "Our culture is endlessly beset with Promethean myths of the overcoming of the human condition," for example "through the fantasy of artificial intelligence," (bearing directly on a debate with another friend) I was hooked.
And that's a good thing, because Infinitely Demanding is an excellent description of what it takes to parse the dense philosopherese of the rest of the book (which is why this is only a response to the Introduction). By reading carefully I am slowly deciphering the text, but it will take longer than I thought to get through, and I will never get my head around constructions like "the unfulfillability of the ethical demand, what [Levinas] calls 'the curvature of intersubjective space', is internal to subjectivity."
Nevertheless, Critchley's ideas are exhilarating and could help further a line of my own political reasoning in an exciting direction. Before turning to Critchley, I present a brief account of this thought so I can go on to relate it to Critchley's concepts:
Strains of anarchism & the Problem of Civilization: Recently I have developed my own distinction between two strains of anarchism. I will call them negative anarchism and positive anarchism. To this, I will now add a third, inert strain: purely personal anarchism. Superficially, all these anarchisms have the same goal: the elimination of systems of domination and control. But we shall see how the first two are actually in direct opposition.
It seems that many people come to anarchism through a zealous hatred of civilization, which they find wholly irredeemable. The tree of civilization is rotten, and so are its fruits. To them, all politics are rotten, so they accuse other anarchists of being insufficiently anarchistic for advocating solutions. Technology is rotten, so they prefer an extreme Ludism, often called primitivism.
This is negative anarchism. It longs for apocalypse. Unsurprisingly, it's rhetoric is dominated by themes of destruction, since only after civilization has been destroyed can individuals breathe free and determine their own destinies. It is expressed by slogans such as "Smash the state!" and by actions such as smashing windows.
Related to this is purely personal anarchism. It can run the gamut from trying to "liberate" your own mind and letting the world go to hell, to living like a hermit, sealed off from the corruption of the world.
Finally, there is positive anarchism, which I espouse. In contrast to negative anarchism's destructiveness, positive anarchism wants to build. It doesn't want to tear down civilization and groove on the rubble, but rearrange it from the ground up, starting from where we are, using the materials (technology, science, art, philosophy) around us. Far from seeing all of this as hopelessly corrupt, positive anarchism sees it as necessary, but organized and distributed unjustly. Positive anarchism is expressed in concepts like building parallel structures and in actions like engagement in popular struggles for peace and justice.
This desire for an equitable rearrangement of civilization is bound up with what I call The Problem of Civilization. I now see this Problem as the deep structure behind Critchley's "question of justice." In a nutshell, the Problem is this: Civilization is inherently complex and so must be highly organized. Heretofore, the organization of civilization has always entailed subjugation and control of others. Is this for some reason necessarily the case, or is a just organization of civilization possible? Corollaries would be: If so, why haven't we done it by now? Why dose it seem so hard? Can we get there from here?
Implicitly, negative and purely personal anarchism answer the question posed by the Problem of Civilization negatively, while positive anarchism answers affirmatively.
Disappointment & nihilisms: Critchley sees modern philosophy as arising from "the indeterminate but palpable sense that something desired has not been fulfilled, that a fantastic effort has failed." In other words, "Philosophy begins in disappointment." Critchley focuses on two kinds of disappointment: religious, which breads nihilism; and political, which "provokes the question of justice." I am interested in both of these disappointments and their progeny. Let me consider each in turn, exploring their relation to the concepts I introduced above.
"In religious disappointment, that which is desired but lacking is an experience of faith," which leads to a crisis of meaning. In our era, with its widespread perception of liberal democracy's institutional atrophy, this crisis of meaning can manifest itself in the political realm as "active nihilism" and "passive nihilism."
"The active nihilist... tries to destroy this world and bring another into being." Examples given include Bolshevism, the Weather Underground and a non-secular version, al-Qaeda. Obviously, in the smaller realm of anarchism, active nihilism manifests as what I have called negative anarchism.
Meanwhile, "the passive nihilist simply focuses on himself and his particular pleasures and projects for perfecting himself." If a passive nihilist called himself an anarchist, he would practice what I called purely personal anarchism.
As an aside, I would like to note Critchley's characterization of the nihilist view of human nature: "[W]e are simply animals, and rather nasty aggressive primates at that, what we might call homo rapeins, rapacious animals." Interestingly, I take this Hobbesian view to be held in common by Critchley's nihilists, arch-conservatives and others who would answer the question posed by the Problem of Civilization in the negative from an argument based on human nature.
In political disappointment, meanwhile,
This political disappointment "provokes the question of justice: what might justice be in a violently unjust world?" Or, alternatively, how much justice is allowed in the world-as-we-know-it? --with, I contend, the maximum amount of justice being defined by the Problem of Civilization.the sense of something lacking or failing arises from the realization that we inhabit a violently unjust world, a world defined by the horror of war, a world where, as Dostoevsky says, blood is being spilt in the merriest way, as if it were champagne.
Crucially, as Critchley points out, although political disappointment is "acutely tangible at the present time," the feeling is very old, "and might be said to be definitional of politics from antiquity to... modernity." Apparently, he has spelled out the case for this in the Appendix, which I look forward to reading, although it is self-evident to me. As I have mentioned in an earlier post, I find traces of it in certain religious teachings, including the Gospels. In fact, it should be as old as civilization itself due to how it has always been organized.
The "motivational deficit": In Critchley's view, "the political institutions of the Western democracies appear strangely demotivating." To a reader of Noam Chomsky, Sheldon S. Wolin (Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism), and others, there is nothing strange about it. Political demotivation of the population characterizes the proper functioning of a liberal democracy according to dominant elite conceptions.
Nevertheless, Critchley is quite right that such demotivation exists. In light of this "motivational deficit at the heart of liberal democratic life," he acknowledges the powerful appeal of both active and passive nihilism. And here we get to the most exciting part, where Critchley spells out his project and provides me with the above-mentioned epiphany...
"I will be following a different path," he announces. "We have to resist and reject the temptation of nihilism and face up to the hard reality of the world....
What is required in my view, is a conception of ethics that begins by accepting the motivational deficit in the institutions of liberal democracy, but without embracing either passive or active nihilism...
In other words, it sounds to me like Critchley is doing what I would like to do, trying to develop an ethical foundation that would be a perfect underpinning and guide for a practical, non-apocalyptic, positive anarchism, which would be in permanent opposition to the state and all other forms of domination, but would follow asymptotically this "infinitely demanding" ethics as a way to avoid the nihilistic trap. In fact, this conception of positive anarchism may be the highest expression of Critchley's "ethics of commitment." In the last paragraph of the Introduction, Critchley makes explicit the anarchic essence of this ethics: "Ethics is anarchic meta-politics, it is the continual questioning from below of any attempt to impose order from above."
I can't follow exactly every philosophical argument in the development of this ethical framework, but so far, I not only agree with Critchley's project, I think if he delivers on his promise, this could be the most important book I have ever read.
Thanks, Phil.
I have just passed a pleasant few hours introducing myself to some of the work of Steven Sherman, a sociologist and prolific reviewer of left-leaning books.
