I said the other day that I if you’re not listening to Limbaugh that you’re missing one of the chief drivers of the election cycle and the culture in general. Limbaugh, like his political opponents, is driven by the desire to sort the world into those who are with us and those who are against us. This impulse, whether of the right or left end of the political spectrum, comes from the Enlightenment configuration of the universe. In such a universe, my liberal friends will decide on the basis of my title alone that I’m one of ‘them.’ My conservative friends will decide on the basis of my attack on Limbaugh’s understanding of Darwin as one of the two worst thinkers in history that I am one of ‘them.’
This leaves me as a permanent outsider in a universe I always wanted to fit into, and is one of the reasons that I have taken on the Enlightenment configuration of the individual’s relationship with nature as the ground of human nature itself. If someone like me, who lives an exemplary bourgeois life with two kids, a loving wife, and mortgage, can’t fit in anywhere, then (in my opinion) there’s something wrong with the system. And this is why I attack the Enlightenment model and attempt to put a better model derived from the Middle Ages in its place.
The Birth of the Individual
This is counter-intuitive given our vast progress over the Middle Ages in science. The scholastic thinker had divided our rational behavior from the ends of human life. Some were looking to reconcile reason with God, but almost all of them failed to bridge the gap. Faith in God was a priori; reason was a posteriori; and this meant that when they failed to bridge the gap, that reason had failed and left God in His place as a creator Who worked in mysterious ways. As she’s portrayed in the Roman de la Rose
This concentration on the end of life, rather than the middle, eventually made even philosophy the study of death. ‘To philosophize is to learn how to die,’ said Montaigne, quoting Cicero (XVII. That to Study philosophy is to learn to die).
But the modern world had turned philosophy upside down. She was not standing in the skies beckoning young Shelley’s to follow young Keats’ in death. Montaigne continues:
Let the philosophers say what they will, the main thing at which we all aim, even in virtue itself, is pleasure. (XVII. That to Study philosophy is to learn to die)
The ways of reason are defective and they lead us away from ourselves into a sketchy and uncertain world, but the program and processes of the individual were more immediate and so more accessible. Eventually, thinkers like Descartes brought reason into the veil of pleasure, inventing mathematical coordinates and Meditations
This process came to completion in the Enlightenment, which made a god of Isaac Newton who completed the project of shooing God out of the universe and replacing him with mathematical forces that operated (for the first time in history) without the interference of God or demons or miracles. Peter Gay quotes David Hume in his assessment of the Enlightenment,
‘While Newton seemed to draw off the veil from some of the mysteries of nature, he shewed at the same time the imperfections of the mechanical philosophy; and thereby restored her ultimate secrets to that obscurity in which they ever did and ever will remain.’ (The Enlightenment 130)
Gay continues:
It was this magnificent specimen of enlightened man—the philosophe idealized, purified, as he aspired to be—that Kant celebrated and sought to serve in his major philosophical writings. And when Kant suggested that Rousseau deserved to be called the Newton of the moral world, he was at once assigning Newton a place in the intellectual atmosphere of the Enlightenment and giving Rousseau the highest praise he could imagine. (130)
This Enlightenment reverence for science over religion is still very much alive in the thought of Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Salman Rushdie (of whom I have written before), The British Humanist Association, and the Brights Movement.
Society in the Age of the Individual
Here in brief is my reason for revering the Enlightenment view of the universe. After the scholasticism of the Middle Ages, in which only the educated had access to the avenues of power, the liberation of the human spirit for expression led the world to throw off the infame of religion for a more rational system of thought.
Under the Enlightenment system of thought, each of us has the right to make our own choices. The explosion of private expression has been the defining cause of the revolutionary spirit in modern life, whether of the more radical French Revolution, which turned from high ideals to bloodshed in a few short years, or the more conservative American Revolution. Both were built on the notion that reason alone could sustain what the belief in God no longer could. All that had to happen was for tradition to be ‘torn down’ and a rational system put in (and maintained perpetually) its place.
But this push to private spirit has been to put a lot of pressure on the collective systems to keep up with advances in the private sphere, and in brief here lies my problem with the Enlightenment view of the universe. Western civilization has gone through a series of unsuccessful polities, whether communist (which revolves around collective action rather than individual action), fascist (in which a charismatic leader leads the nation away from its individual interests to the collective action as a nation), socialist (‘in which, according the Encyclopedia Britannica, ‘property and the distribution of income are subject to social control rather than individual determination or market forces’), or the purely anarchistic (in which there no goal in view as much as there is a disgust with the status quo accompanied with a desire to change). And then there is democracy of which someone once said, ‘It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.’
Democracy has had the best of it over the long run, and of democracies America has had the best of it so far. America is a land governed by selfish individuals who give little if any thought to the system of government.
In the Enlightenment-created atmosphere our intellectual leaders are divided between two opposite poles. On the one hand, we have intellectual leaders who have lost faith in any sure the foundation of law in the natural world and speak of themselves in terms of their at least ‘knowing’ the terms on which the argument is laid. This is not to say that they have answers to the problems of their foundational ideas. It is to say only that they are in the know because they (like Socrates) ‘don’t know anything noble and good.’ Socrates, for the constant and regular reader of my blog and my books is a man who founds his doctrine of ‘nature’ on the back of ‘imaginative fictions.’
Undeterred by their intellectual hero’s profession of ignorance about what he’s talking about (since as I said in my dissertation, it’s all just a projection from Socrates’ own mind), they surge forward against their ‘enemies,’ while remaining blind to cracks in their own thought.
Those enemies are thinkers like Limbaugh, who put a ground under their thought of freedom and constitutional rights derived from ‘natural law.’ Limbaugh has changed the way that intellectuals and conservatives interact. In my youth my good and noble parents taught me that ‘polite’ people didn’t discuss religion or politics. In the 1980s, while I was hiding in my apartment reading Joseph Campbell, ‘serious’ intellectuals were deciding (by way of Marx ) that ‘politics’ were the ‘ends’ of human discourse and that to tend away from announcing one’s politics was to nevertheless make a political statement.
Since Limbaugh came into the world (the same year that I entered graduate school), this intellectual trend has become the way that everyone in America thinks. The first thing required of any intellectual or anti-intellectual is the a priori determination of whether you’re with us or against us. That test determines the intellectual content of your mind, relieving people of the (sometimes difficult) work of listening to another’s a posteriori ideas. All we have to do in this environment is to align ourselves with those that we ‘know’ are right and to dismiss those who we ‘know’ are among the unrighteous. We may not know ourselves, but we have been assured that ‘someone knows
Problems
There are problems with this Enlightenment/post-Enlightenment configuration of thought. The first has to do with the problem of knowledge. Our intellectuals don’t actually know anything about nature. Instead they are relying on a ‘fiction’ that may in fact be false (who can tell?). This turns intellectuals like Arthur Danto into a man who is secure in his beliefs that, whatever else happens, he knows that the intellectual world will continue through him and not through ignoramuses like Rush Limbaugh, Lana Turner, and Louise Brooks. It also turns him into a man who is protecting his shrinking domain from the onslaughts of the unwise while having nothing more positive to offer in return than more professions that ‘someone’ will someday know what he does not know now. Others, like Limbaugh and Louise Brooks have insights that don’t connect to the intellectual Danto. The intellectual remains secure despite his having shut out someone like Louise Brooks who is ‘actually living’ the life that the director Pabst hungers after from a safe intellectual distance and a believer like Rush Limbaugh who is living the American Dream, rather than looking (in contempt) from afar.
The Enlightenment Challenge to the Public Sphere
The individual has made great strides in the post-medieval world, but since the Renaissance political thought it has struggled to keep up with advances in individual liberty as the foundation of social structure. In the Enlightenment model, which I maintain we are still living in, we are forced in advance of hearing what others have to say on any subject to evaluate their a priori connection to our already firmly-held beliefs. This means that we are not questioning our beliefs. Our beliefs are secure. It is ‘others’ who have not had their ‘consciousness raised.’ All that is to be done is to attempt to raise their consciousness to our level. When we fail, we blame the ignorance of ‘others’ and we skip along secure in our own fenced-in backyard.
Both sides of the Enlightenment argument rely on the construction of our thought which we build on top of ‘nature.’ The environment that I grew up with was one in which nature is thought to be larger than we are as individuals. For the social thinker, the obligation of the human being is to align our human nature with ‘larger’ nature.
But this is only true if our beliefs rest on a solid foundation and not on a ‘fiction.’ And no one—not Arthur Danto nor Rush Limbaugh—can give us an answer about ‘nature’ that underlies their thought. The only distinction that intellectual like Danto will allow is one of the acknowledgment of the fact of his ignorance and of Limbaugh’s ignorance of his own ignorance.
‘Owning It’
Now whether ‘own’ in the last sentence refers to Limbaugh or Danto is one of those cute rhetorical tricks I learned in graduate school. This rhetorical device hold the key to my resolution of the Enlightenment paradox of ‘with-us-or-against-us’ thought, because it really doesn’t matter who ‘own’ refers to. It could refer to either Arthur of Rush. And this rhetorical breakage of reference prefigures my own reference as the individual as the solid center of reference that holds together things together in this system.
This is one of the reasons I distrust the America system of vaunting the individual over the oppressive structures of the state, which not only Rush Limbaugh but avant-garde thinkers like Nina Hagen have embraced. In Nina’s case, she finds herself embracing the ‘otherness’ of Christ-Budda-Goddesses
The Challenge of the Enlightenment Model of ‘Social Justice’
The Enlightenment model represents a challenge to the public sphere, because it forces us to choose between alternatives in the public sphere. But the Enlightenment model in forcing choice forces us to close off avenues of inquiry into the nature of nature. That puts a kink into the expectation that I should open myself up to the universe to experience it all, or at least as much of it as I can. We dig in to what we are accustomed to listening to and make our tastes public, at once vaunting our superior and excellent taste while daring others to disagree. This seems to be a universal condition of people on YouTube, where rappers defend their tastes as strongly as people who listen to country music defend theirs.
That’s okay in the sphere of music, because people can believe anything they want to. But if we transfer our private Enlightenment behavior into the public sphere, I find (I’m not so bold as to say ‘we’; I’m not vain enough to think anyone is listening to little ol’ me) that the enlightenment model forces out of the habit of looking to ‘nature, and into the ‘habit’ (often before we are old enough to know better) of listening to the music we’ve grown up with and decrying ‘other’ forms as alien (and probably just wrong). The same is true of politics. We turn in on ourselves and away from our ‘enemies.’ There can be no accommodation or compromise in such a privately-organized system.
Thus, in my opinion, this is a situation calling for a remedy.
Return to Aristotle
The problem with relying on ‘nature’ is that it could all be a fiction, as Plato says. But this is not the only possible answer. Aristotle argued against Plato’s ‘fiction’ in the antique world by arguing that ‘universals’ were ‘poetical metaphors.’ His work was forgotten in the years before his death on account of his not having answers to Plato’s (really clever) argument in the Parmenides.
There, Plato he reverses the temporal order of time and has a young Socrates lecturing a still younger Aristotle on the guided by an older Parmenides (oh, the delicious irony). In that dialog, Plato seems to be arguing that Aristotle’s work are not immune from the charge that they, too, were nothing more than ‘poetical metaphors.’ Moreover, because young Aristotle could not refute Socrates’ (really clever) argument about 1 = 0 (which destroys the ‘principle of identity’ on which logic rests), the works of Aristotle lay rotting in a basement for a couple hundred years, while Plato’s works flourished.
This is the basis of modern academic thought on the matter. Despite their having no solid connection with ‘nature,’ and despite their rejection of ‘the principle of identity, modern academics continue to hold to the last threads of ‘différance,’ which can be subjected to the same critique as ‘identity.’ Rather than resorting to ‘fiction,’ as they did in the ancient world (see Seneca Epistles
On my blog in the next few weeks, I will begin to address my ‘own’ answer to the problem of ‘fiction’ in literature. I do so in my firm belief that the problem of a deficient American public system, like the socialist systems of Europe, the already dead Marxist system of the Cold War, and the anarchism of the Middle Eastern terrorists, is collapsing under the weight of private concerns.
Rather than the self-satisfied answer of Rush Limbaugh to the problem of knowledge or the self-satisfied answer of the intellectual to the problem of knowledge, I believe we need a new sense of social order that does not collapse our economy and put us into second place among competitive nations of the world as we attempt to salvage our individual ‘American values,’ which someone once said ‘have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history,’ from the funeral pyre.