Otros datos

world, that is, the shift from speculative to practical knowledge, pushes theory toward practice and away from contemplative wisdom. Modern knowledge is knowledge of ‘works’, through the knowledge of the laws of nature’s motion. Such knowledge is intrinsically tied to tech- nology. Its values are utilitarian, aimed at the reduction of human mis- ery, if not the production of happiness. Aristotelian knowledge pro- duced happiness in the soul of its possessor by reason of the nobility of the objects of its contemplation; it lifted the individual soul into the cosmic order. The uses of Aristotelian knowledge are intrinsic to its possession and its effects upon the soul. But the pursuit of wisdom leaves unsolved the problem of freedom as freedom from necessity; indeed, it presupposes the slavery of the household economy and the idiocy of its inhabitants, who are excluded from the polis and thus from philosophical and political life.17 _{Baconian knowledge puts} nature to the sovereign use of humankind, but without any other wis- dom than the necessity of humanity’s mastery of nature, which is oth- erwise the source of its miseries. The calling of modern science entails unremitting toil on the part of the scientist to relieve the misery of his or her fellow beings. In short, far from presupposing leisure, modern knowledge becomes essentially a work which is, moreover, never fin- ished and which never produces harmony in the soul of the scientist, except as a wager on progress and posterity.

We need to understand how the metaphysics of modern knowledge shapes and is in turn shaped by the modern world, its economy, its political and moral structures of the self, and its institutional orders. There are various ways of presenting the constellation of knowledge, technique, and social order which constitutes the dynamics of the mod- ern world. Our effort must be to tie together the transcendental under- standing of knowledge with the life-worlds of economics and politics— to grasp the meaning of the accumulation of knowledge, values, and power.

The problem of knowledge and values involved in the methodologi- cal success of modern rationality is sometimes expressed as the prob- lem of value-free knowledge. The Platonic philosopher’s return to the cave is a necessity because of the cosmological ties between the orders of knowledge, the soul, and the world. The philosopher’s knowledge is intrinsically responsible: it requires no felicific calculus to justify its action on society. Moreover, as wisdom, it works on souls and not on an empty nature. The dualism of humankind and nature is, however, essential to the practice of modern knowledge. The result of this dual- ism is the conquest of nature, which as a praxis treats its own transcen-

dental presuppositions as an enigma. Utilitarianism is both a meta- physics and a method for the resolution of the implications for the moral and political orders of the dominance of technical rationality. What is usually referred to as the Hobbesian problem of order derives from the reduction of substantive rationality to a deterministic theory of the conditions of rational conduct based on the model of mechanical physics. It is assumed that the ends of action are random, and that under these conditions rationality consists in the most efficient pursuit of whatever ends individuals propose to themselves. Hobbes’s so- called ‘state of nature’ is indeed a historical fiction, in the sense that it reveals the sociological preconceptions of modern civil society.18 _In Hobbes’s view, the basic problem of rational egoism is to command the services and recognition of other people, so equal in nature and ‘equality of hope’ that there is nothing to restrain them from fraud and violence in the pursuit of their own ends.

The fiction of a social contract fails to solve the question raised by Hobbes, since, as Marx later pointed out, the costs of keeping promises can be shifted onto a class which lacks the freedom to contract, and thus Hobbes’s ‘state of war’ becomes ‘class war’. The problem of order is, therefore, ultimately a problem of power, which could not be solved within the liberal utilitarian tradition. But theoretical difficulties are often patched in practice, and in this case Locke’s postulate of the natural identity of interests matched the early experience of liberal individualism better perhaps than Hobbes’s more consistent fears. Thus the problem of order came to rest in the doctrine of the natural identity of interests, until Marx demonstrated that the capitalist system of social exchange and division of labour produces a class which rec- ognizes itself only in the conditions of its own dehumanization.

The Hobbesian problem must be considered in the context of the challenge to modern knowledge raised by the collapse of the feudal community. The loss of a natural basis for community raised the ques- tion of whether it was possible to construct a community out of the principles of individualism and rational egoism. It had always appeared, from the medieval standpoint, that only chaos could result from slipping the divine anchor and allowing the passions free play. This was the fearful prospect of Renaissance and Reformation free- dom, especially once it had found in the market an infinite field for the expansion of desire and the accumulation of power. At the same time, this sudden and terrible expansion of moral and political freedom was being transformed into an orderly system of economic exchanges which in turn rested on the growth of mathematical and physical

knowledge and its applications to technology and commerce. But there is a subtle yet profound change between the ancient and medieval con- ceptions of order and the Hobbesian conception. It is a change which stems from the shifts in the definitions of truth and knowledge which occur between ancient, medieval, and modern philosophy.19

Modern rationality and its institutional organization rests on the axiom of human domination of nature, which radicalizes the subject- object split and propels knowledge toward quantification and the cre- ation of a moral and political arithmetic. Socrates, it will be remem- bered, turned away from the study of physical nature in favour of the study of human nature. In this manner Socrates raised the question of the unity of human knowledge as a praxis whose values are revealed in the effects on the soul of the kinds of knowledge pursued in a given social order. With the Renaissance discovery of the experimental method, the dramatic affinity of Western knowledge for power was revealed, unfettered by the moral universals of the ancient and medieval world. Yet to Erasmus the Baconian equation of knowledge and power appeared to be a pagan reversal rather than the intensifica- tion of the inherent logic and axiology of Western knowledge. ‘Never forget’, he remarked, ‘that “dominion”, “imperial authority”, “king- dom”, “majesty”, “power”, are all pagan terms, not Christian. The rul- ing power of a Christian state consists only of administration, kindness and protection.’20 _{Erasmus’ comment is a reflection of the crisis of} community fought out in the political and religious controversies of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In the face of the col- lapse of church unity and the rise of individual conscience, the norma- tive grounds of community could no longer be presumed upon; and yet it became clear that any particular covenant or contract was nothing more than, in Milton’s words, ‘the forced and outward union of cold, and neutral, and inwardly divided minds’. Hobbes’s concept of philos- ophy as the pursuit of clear and precise discourse on the model of geometry dictates his aim of bringing peace and order into civil life by a set of political definitions founded on sovereign authority which would put an end to the anarchy of values and opinions.

For I doubt not, but if it had been a thing contrary to any man’s right of dominion, or to the interest of men that have dominion, that the three angles of a triangle, should be equal to two angles of a square; that doctrine should have been, if not disputed, yet by the burning of all books of geometry, suppressed, as far as he whom it concerned was able.21

Henceforth, rationality is never a substantive concept based on the ‘nature of things’; the task of reason is confined to providing conclu- sions ‘about the names of things’. The standard of rationality furnished by Hobbes’s science of politics is totally divorced from the traditional sentiments and usages of reason.

This dilemma faced by Hobbes was partly owing to a failure to real- ize what other apostles of ‘scientific’ politics have not yet seen, that one of the basic reasons for the unsurpassed progress of science was that scientific discourse, unlike political discourse, had rejected not only the common vocabulary of everyday life, but also the modes of thought familiar to the common understanding.22

In the end Hobbes failed to solve the problem of order in any but an external fashion. Hobbes’s citizens live in a common, mutual fear which corrodes their private lives and leaves society dependent on the sovereign whose power can never be anything but the exercise of fiat because the civil order lacks any sense of community or constituency. The Hobbesian problem prefigures the crisis of reason of which Husserl spoke and illuminates his rejection of Enlightenment rational- ism. However, in order to appreciate the weight of Husserl’s argu- ments for social science rationality, we need to be aware of the Hegelian and Marxist critique of the utilitarian and Enlightenment con- ceptions of reason and social order. Hegel and Marx made it explicit that the metaphysics of reason determine the methodology of the social sciences, and thus the preconceptions of utilitarian economics and politics.

Hegel regarded history as a process which unfolds through living ideologies, such as the Enlightenment, utilitarianism, and the Absolute Liberty of the French Revolution. Each of these ideologies is related to a definite cultural and social reality, through which the nature of human rationality and freedom is progressively revealed. Once the Enlightenment had won its struggle with religious superstition, the question arose as to the nature of the philosophical truth which the Enlightenment was to set in its place. The truth of the Enlightenment is utilitarianism, which judges everything by its usefulness to humankind; but utilitarianism is unable to solve the dilemma of one individual’s utility to other people, which raises the problem of exploitation, insoluble within the utilitarian tradition.

characteristic function consists in making himself a member of the human herd, of use for the common good, and serviceable to all. The extent to which he looks after his own interests is the measure with which he must also serve the purposes of others, and so far as he serves their turn, he is taking care of himself: the one hand washes the other. But wherever he finds himself there he is in his right place; he makes use of others and is himself made use of.23 Marx seizes upon this dilemma in utilitarianism in a passage character- istic of his own development of Hegelian insights:

Hegel has already proved in his Phänomenologie how this theory of mutual exploitation, which Bentham expounded ad nauseam, could already at the beginning of the present century have been consid- ered a phase of the previous one. Look at his chapter on ‘The Strug- gle of Enlightenment with Superstition’, where the theory of useful- ness is depicted as the final result of enlightenment. 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. This theory came to the fore with Hobbes and Locke, at the same time as the first and second revolutions, those first battles by which the bourgeoisie won political power.24

Once the physiocrats had demonstrated the nature of the economic pro- cess as a circular flow, all that remained to complete classical political economy was to give an account of individual attitudes and motiva- tions within that economic framework. This was Bentham’s contribu- tion, although, as Marx observes, the theory of utility could not have the generality it claimed because it ignored its own institutional assumptions. For a time, the utilitarian theory of the natural identity of interests had some empirical basis in the facts of the social division of labour and exchange. It was not until Marx adapted Locke’s labour theory of value to demonstrate that it contained the working principles for the exploitation of formally free labour that the sociological frame- work of classical economics was shattered. For utility is subject to appropriation in the form of capital, which is then able to command the services of others to their disadvantage, whatever the circumstances of a formally free contract. Hence the attempt to base the social and politi-

cal order on the postulate of the natural identity of interests fails once and for all.

Between them, Hegel and Marx developed a thorough critique of the social and political foundations of utilitarian economics. Classical lib- eralism depended on the protection of a sphere in which the values of personal integrity, property, and contract could be realized as the expression of market society. But, as Hegel showed in the Philosophy of Right, in a society conceived solely as a field for market behaviour, economics cannot provide the only framework for law, if personality, property, and contract are to be preserved as anything more than instruments of civil society. The political principles of liberal utilitari- anism can only be preserved by a system of state laws based on Rea- son, which differentiates them from the laws of the market.25 _{In other} words, Hegel argues that the utilitarian conception of economic society based on economic laws grounds civil society (bürgerliche Gesellschafi) in positive but not substantively rational law. The laws of economic society and civil society are in turn distinct from the state, which is the highest stage of the realization of Reason and the ethical will.

Marx’s critique of the liberal bourgeois concept of the state, society, and individual rights is substantially the same as Hegel’s. The differ- ence is that Marx’s argument also contains a destructive critique of Hegel’s own concept of the state and its bureaucratic rationality. Marx’s critique in many ways anticipates Max Weber.26

If power is taken as the basis of right, as Hobbes, etc. do, then right, law, etc. are merely the symptom, the expression of other relations upon which State power rests. The material life of individuals which by no means depends merely on their ‘will’, their mode of production and form of intercourse, which mutually determine each other—this is the real basis of the State and remains so at all stages at which division of labor and private property are still necessary, quite independently of the will of individuals. These actual relations are in no way created by the State power; on the contrary they are the power creating it. The individuals who rule in these conditions, besides having to constitute their power in the form of the State, have to give their will, which is determined by these definite condi- tions, a universal expression as the will of the State, as law—an expression whose content is always determined by the relations of this class, as the civil and criminal law demonstrates in the clearest way.27

The utilitarian conception of society, i.e., of civil society, is character- ized by the separation of state and society which reduces the enforce- ment of law to the preservation of property and those personal rights necessary for its acquisition and alienation.28 _{Thus the utilitarian con-} ception of society enforces a radical dualism between private and pub- lic personae which is the basis for all other forms of individual and social alienation.

THE SUBJECTIVE MEANING OF THE ECONOMIC