Seekers of Truth - The Philosophers

Philosophers just keep on asking questions. Philosophy is about questioning, not answers. Philosophers never give solid answers. Philosophy is just a theoretical exercise with no real-world application. Right?

Wrong!

Philosophy may seem fruitless compared to more "results-based" disciplines. Philosophy may seem "airy" compared to things which give people money-tokens for doing it. But this is only because the task of the philosopher is the largest and hardest to quantify. With the theologian, the buck stops at God. With the scientist the buck stops at empirical evidence. With the politician, the buck stops at how well they can twist reality. But with the philosopher the stakes are larger and the buck stops nowhere - truth is by far the greatest category of them all. Philosophy has to wrestle not only with its problems but also with itself - what is the buck?

Just because philosophers have the greatest scope - the field of 'truth' is a big-un - that does not mean all they do is raise questions. Hegel thought he solved philosophy, predicting the inevitable end of history. Wittgenstein thought he had language all wrapped up, until he saw a Neopolitan insult someone with a hand-gesture. Leibniz had it all worked out with his monads (those tiny little soul-things), and Spinoza wrote a book about...well, everything, including the most ethical way to live. Prolific Plato wrote about every aspect of human existence, and wanted his own City-State ruled by philosopher-kings. Countless philosophers have tried their best to find truth and to influence the world with their ideas (and we might all hope, they will continue to do so into the future).

But for all its greatness, philosophy does not have the megalithic influence of a political institution - it cannot mindwash poorly educated citizens with rhetoric, or mass religion - it cannot make legions of superstitious people worship fetish-idols, or science - it cannot define itself supreme and laugh down any other form of looking at the world (insert Richard Dawkins reference here). But if philosophy could do these things, that would make it an authority, and philosophy should be an exercise against authority.

Philosophy should not triumph by its 'weight', or because people have mysticized it. Philosophy should not triumph by making people feel stupid, or inferior to its thinkers. Philosophy should triumph because people freely accept the conclusions that philosophers come to for themselves. Or, more productively, because people add to and improve existing ideas and find the methods of the philosophers the most inviting.

What is the use of it all? Philosophy is the great 'stepping back', challenging assumptions. That is one place philosophy will always be relevant - it can monitor other fields: history, science, politics, everything, revealing the assumptions and refining the goals of these disciplines.

But as a pure discipline philosophy is even more powerful. The quest for Truth is irresistible and valid beyond measure, and can transform humanity. Can you imagine post-war civilization, when all of Man adheres to a reasonable, flexible, ever-expanding method of deciding who is right and who is wrong? It is a quest too important not to undertake.

Philosophers do not all agree, and are definitely not saying the same thing. But maybe by the very pursuit of truth they are all in a kind of tacit agreement. In short, their means may be different, but their ends all the same: opening up minds to enlightenment through their intellectual contest; undertaking this epic quest which no one else truly can.

Selim Talat

Escaping the Dance of the End of History

The political scientist Francis Fukuyama famously claimed after the fall of the Communist governments in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe that human history had, in essence, come to an end. He did not mean, of course, that time had, in fact, frozen solid and that historians would not be able to write about anything after 1991. Rather, his argument was based on Hegel's idea that the history of humanity is a progressive movement with a beginning, a middle and an end. The end of history, Hegel said, is the point at which humanity reaches its apex of consciousness and hence has in it's grasp the ideal form of organising society.

For Fukuyama, the defeat of Soviet-style socialism and the triumph of Western liberal democracy inaugurated, essentially, a New Earth where freedom would reign for eternity through representative democracy and free-market capitalism. The flip-side of this assertion was, of course, that Karl Marx was wrong: the stateless society of communism where class conflict would be no more was a pipe dream, and we had no option but to embrace this joyous new world of liberty – a world of marking an 'X' on a piece of paper every four or five years and endless shopping at Wal-Mart.

Many have criticised Fukuyama's arguments, and this is not the place to attempt a point-by-point rebuttal. But I think it is clear that we haven't been living in a state of paradise since the end of the Cold War more than two decades ago. People are still going hungry, and in some cases die of starvation, even as others wine and dine at the Ritz. People are still paid poorly and housed precariously, and in some cases reduced to poverty and homelessness, even as others throw cash around and sleep soundly in mansions. People are still unhappy with their lives, and in some cases become depressed and despondent, even as others seem to be living it up and partying like its 1999.

For some, this sorry state of affairs is proof that liberal democracy is a sham, and that free-market capitalism is a scam. Yet one immediately hears shrill voices which say, “But what are we to do? Haven't we tried doing things differently, through the state, and failed?” “No,” others cry in response, “We're not talking about Soviet 'communism', but the welfare state and the 'public good'. Privatisation has led to inequality by allowing untrammeled greed to flourish! Yes, state-centric solutions can be bureaucratic and impersonal, but we don't have any other options.”

Most debates today about how society should be structured revolve around these two viewpoints. In one corner, wearing a pin-stripe suit, is liberal capitalism. In the other corner, wearing a duffel coat, is social democracy. Cheering and jeering from the crowd are more extreme versions of these two fighters, including neo-conservatives and fascists, as well as state socialists and communists. Should anything drastic happen, these observers are ready (and waiting) to join in the fray.

 

As a result, a large majority of people today feel they have to choose a side. It's either greater freedom or greater equality, either a larger role for private initiatives or a larger role for the state, either a system built on self-interest or a system built on solidarity.

What if this were a false choice? What if I told you that picking either side would not change the underlying structure of our present-day society?

Before you start thinking that I'm about to go off on some sort of conspiracy theory, let us slow things down a little. I'm not about to say these two sides are like the Galactic Republic and the Separatists in the Star Wars prequel trilogy – that is, appearing to be diametrically opposed to each other but in reality both being pawns in a game controlled by Darth Sidious. I don't believe that there's some secretive cabal running the world and playing us off each other like puppets on strings.

What I would like to suggest, however, is the different political systems that we see today in the world – together with many of those that some would like to see realised today in the world – are not as radically different as they seem. To help us dig into this proposition, the political thought of the contemporary theorist Kojin Karatani is quite instructive.

According to Karatani, the society we live in today is made up primarily of three types of human interactions. Firstly, we engage in acts of reciprocity with those whom we feel we have something in common. This could be because we have the same parents or because we have a shared interest in real ale. The essence of reciprocity is that we are willing to help each other because we consider ourselves part of a particular 'group'. Conversely, we're far less willing to help another who is not part of this group. This dynamic is the basis of the nation, which is an imagined community of people who identify with each other because they have a similar culture, history and so on.

Secondly, one segment of our society is engaged in acts of plunder and redistribution. On behalf of 'wider society', this segment collects resources – especially from those who have most – and redistributes them to those who have less. This is, of course, embodied in the state, which is an institution that claims to uphold the interests of the public in its operations.

Thirdly, almost all of us take part on a daily basis in forms of commodity exchange. This includes obvious things like shopping for groceries, but also things such as paid work, because what is being exchanged is the labour of one party for the money of the other. Such is the lifeblood of capital, which is the form of commodity exchange that, although based on the exploitation of most ordinary folk by those who own and run the businesses, claims to be founded on free exchange between equal actors.

When we take all these three forms of human interaction together, we get what Karatani calls the unholy trinity of Capital-Nation-State. All three are mutually supportive, and so when one of them is called into question – for example, by a social movement – the other two can move in to re-balance the system. Although there are moments where the respective forces of capital, nation and state clearly clash, at the end of the day the continued existence of each one is bound up with the others.

Hence, returning to the scene of the prize-fight between the Right and Left of mainstream politics, we can see how the triumph of either one only reconfigures the interconnected relationships between capital, nation and state, but does not actually challenge the basic structure of the trinity. Under the welfare state, the influence of capital is diminished, yet it continues to play an important role in the functioning of the system even as the power of the state increases. A turn towards a liberal free-market has exactly the opposite effect in that it weakens the state but strengthens capital. And when resources are scarce and the economy looks grim, the inward-looking and often violent rhetoric of the nation comes to the forefront of politics (think of Golden Dawn in Greece).

Faced with this vertigo of the three elements of the trinity dancing around us, it can seem difficult to imagine what can be done to bring about a different world. Karatani, drawing loosely from the 19th century anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, suggests that the way out is indeed to exit and transcend this system by means of a fourth type of human interaction, which he calls association.

Association involves elements of the other three forms, but goes beyond them. It incorporates the mutual aid of reciprocity, but without demanding conformity. It aims for egalitarianism, but does not coerce like the state. And it sees some good in the idea of freedom of exchange under capital, but it refuses exploitation through wage labour and usury.

What is it, then? Well, it is not a blueprint meticulously designed, nor an utopia erected in the mind, but rather the labourious and non-violent task of building alternatives to Capital-Nation-State through anti-capitalist, anti-nationalist and anti-statist forms of exchange, living together and co-operation. It is not found in sexy, youthful politics that builds barricades nor in idealistic reformers who run for public office. Rather, it takes shape in projects such as worker-owned co-operatives, Local Exchange Trading Systems, time banks, local demurrage currencies, social centres and free universities. In other words, it is – to steal some words from Marx – “the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.”

If the ongoing climate and economic crises continue to worsen, we may find the need for alternatives to Capital-Nation-State more urgent and crucial than ever. Nevertheless, regardless of what exactly comes to be, it will certainly not herald the end of history, at least not in the Hegelian sense.

Soo Tian Lee

Surrealism and Philosophy - Part II

In part I of these articles I suggested that there were several problems in understanding the links between surrealism and philosophy, certainly one problem is that of terminology. I made the claim that to an extent surrealism’s philosophical basis was Hegelian; this seems to need to be clarified, but also modified. Many surrealists, and especially André Breton, were interested in the notion of dialectics. Here is another of those problems as dialectics seems to be either widely misunderstood or very differently understood by different people. Hegel does not help as his writing style is often fantastically obscure, sometimes to the point where one could doubt if the text one is reading had actually been translated into English!

The process of dialectics is often explained rather diagrammatically thus: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Basically this means that every idea, proposition or thesis contained within it a contradiction, the antithesis. One worked at resolving this contradiction until a synthesis was achieved. However, this is not as Hegel himself explained it, and indeed he condemned this sort of formula. For him the dialectic had to move from abstraction towards becoming concrete. He certainly did think that arguments tended to contain a contradiction and unless this was resolved they would be one-sided and false. However, they would not necessarily be entirely false, the lie would contain a moment of truth, and hence it was necessary to look at the precise terms in which the argument was couched. Hegel is somewhat out of favour at present, his ideas are disputed by most postmodernists, not surprisingly in some ways, he saw a logic of history in which fundamental ideas would reach a point of synthesis at which history would end. All of human existence after that point would no longer be “history”! Clearly this is a very specific notion of what constitutes history that many would disagree with.

So, getting back to surrealism and the idea of convulsive beauty, the images of convulsive beauty (exploding-fixed, erotic-veiled, magic-circumstantial) are effectively those of a deliberately posed contradiction that cannot be resolved logically. There are many sources for this, but one immediate predecessor needs to be mentioned, Lautréamont. Lautréamont was the author of the phrase “as beautiful as the chance meeting upon an operating table between a sewing machine and an umbrella”. For Breton this was effectively the first real example of “convulsive beauty”, two objects that have no apparent relationship upon a surface that is foreign to both of them. This is difficult, if not impossible to describe entirely rationally, but clearly the idea is that there is a level of shock at seeing this juxtaposition, a sort of estrangement of sensibility. I would suggest that, rather than there being a simple lack of relationship between such objects there is something like an unfinished dialectic going on in which the different terms/objects/etc, in this case the umbrella and sewing machine will neither cancel each other out nor resolve themselves into a logical system, they create a sort of mental friction that refuses to be resolved.

Let’s go back to the passage from the Second Manifesto of Surrealism I quoted in the first part of this series: “Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions. Now, search as one may one will never find any other motivating force in the activities of the Surrealists than the hope of finding and fixing this point.”

So this seems to indicate that Breton wants surrealism to, not abandon logic, but to surpass it in some way so that the rational and irrational can be seen as two elements in a kind of “surrationalism” and even if, as some people claim, he did not properly understand Hegel, he made a very creative use of his dialectics, possibly undoing the process that Hegel envisaged! This overcoming of contradictions is to be in every part of our experience, not just within logic. The convulsive image is an embodiment of the overcoming of contradiction in one sense, but at the same time embodies the contradiction itself.

If we look at Victor Brauner’s Wolf-Table for instance, Brauner has created something that is both wolf and table, but is neither. It partakes of both natures, but they are locked into an endlessly antagonistic relationship. One aspect seems about to cancel the other out, they confront each other, struggle, but neither can win. This leads to the question: how can there possibly be a resolution to this battle? The answer is in human consciousness, in the realm of imagination. But it is important to understand that by imagination the surrealists do not mean unreality, for as Breton wrote, the imagination is that which tends to become real.

The next part will start to examine the surrealist imagination in more detail, just as soon as I write it!

Stuart Inman