The Future of Liberation:
Sheltering in Plato’s cave in an age of apocalypse
Philip GoodchildNovember 2010 – paper presented at Durham University
An apocalyptic age
The future of liberation must respond to three distinctive features of our era. First there is the collision between economy and ecology: the immense global transformation of human life and production in the twentieth century, under the ideals of capitalist, social democratic, and socialist models, has reached fundamental limits set by ecological, economic and energy crises that are only just beginning to manifest themselves.1 Once overall growth is no longer possible, wealth is only to be obtained at the expense of others. The predatory nature of our collective quest for material wealth starts to manifest itself once economic contraction is met with the transfer of wealth to the elite few alongside expulsion from productive society of the many. Disaster capitalism extends dispossession just as it intensifies the opportunity for neo-liberal market reform in the name of recovery.2 The problem for the global underclass is no longer colonial conquest, class power, or institutional normalisation, but the felt absence of money, modernity, society, security, and the means of production and nutrition. This dispossession is nihilism as a political condition, not as a belief system. It consists in existing outside the social production of value and recognition: one counts for nothing.
Previous models of liberation have been able to appeal to the ‘power of the poor in history’:3 the poor have been attributed the potential for economic power, since, as labourers, they have constructed all the wealth upon which the modern world is built; the poor have been attributed the potential for political power, since, through their large numbers, they are capable of joining together to overthrow oppressive regimes; the poor have also been attributed an epistemic privilege: they are those who can declare the truth about power out of their experience of oppression, or they are those who are free from ideology insofar as their own class interests coincide with the interests of justice, or they are
those who can transform the world through the creative and inventive powers which they alone possess, since the disciplined exercise of power by the powerful is merely sterile and oppressive for the powerful themselves.4 Now, on the contrary, the most socially significant invention is the work of the elite, and it is the second distinctive feature of our era: the financialization of culture, securitization of debt, and the invention and proliferation of trading in derivatives. Those who profit from speculation can make money by shorting the markets just as easily as by investing: there is a disengagement of economic power from the production of wealth. Currency speculators profit from instability. What this amounts to is the ‘end of politics’: political decisions have to serve the interests of financial capital first, rather than the interests of the people, for without financial stability there is no economy for the people.5 In disaster capitalism, elected governments are blackmailed into transferring wealth from the majority to the wealthy elite simply in order to preserve a temporary stability. Social control is most effective when it operates through debt – an obligation to the wealthy elite. As a result, the poor lose all privileged access to economic power, political power, and even to truth: one has no experience of the essence of capitalist power if one is excluded from capitalism.
This brings me to a third distinctive feature of our era: an eclipse of truth. This is more than the predominance of the chatter of lies, propaganda, and interested opinion in public discourse. More fundamentally, the management of information has replaced understanding. For understanding concerns intrinsic relations such as limits, conditions, proportions, interdependence, continuity, the interrelation of means and ends, and judgements of significance or decisiveness, whereas in the management of information extrinsic relations govern the exercise of thought. Truth may still be available – at a price –but only once it is uprooted from its appropriate setting in life and brought to market. We still occasionally hear the cry of the afflicted, but we ask: how much does it cost? We still count the magnitude of our unpayable debts, but we ask: who will pay the blood sacrifice that will underwrite these possible losses? We may still design our own programmes of research, but we ask: will the results show value for money? This eclipse of truth is the end of philosophy. It is over half a century since an apocalyptic tone came to prominence in philosophy through the work of Martin Heidegger: if the initial burden was the rise of historical consciousness, then the prophesied end of philosophy was positivist science:
metaphysics is replaced by the empirical sciences, by a psychology, sociology, and cultural anthropology of knowledge, culminating in a restriction of the use of language for the exchange of news and information.6 The prophecy of the end of philosophy is fulfilled when reason is situated directly within the market-place, demanding payment for its services, promising career advantages for those it teaches, while demonstrating with hard evidence the economic or cultural impact of its research: presentation takes over from interior reasoning. The danger, here, is that reason itself becomes unreflective and unthinking, reproducing established habits, presuppositions, concepts, grammatical structures, and evaluations, pausing to reflect on its inner constitution only in order to manage reason more efficiently and profitably – replacing the liberal arts with marketing courses, philosophy with sophistry, and eclipsing the Western tradition of humanistic reflection from the ancient Greeks, through the scholastics, the Renaissance and Enlightenment. Public discourse comes to be shaped by dissimulation, manipulation, over-simplification, resentment, greed, narrow-mindedness, self-satisfaction or self-justification in its every statement, blocking all access to wisdom. The inevitable consequence of such a pollution of public discourse is war followed by an environmental, cultural and spiritual desert: modern humanity has too much power for this to be exercised without discipline.
In short, we live in an apocalyptic age: the end of modernity, in the surpassing of ecological finitude by economic growth, discloses our illusory quest for the infinite; the end of politics, in the emergence of a society disciplined by debt, discloses our illusory quest for disengagement; the end of philosophy, in the substitution of appearances for intrinsic reasons, discloses our illusory substitution of the extrinsic for the intrinsic. These are our three great illusions: infinitude, disengagement, substitution. Each is expressed through material, social and epistemic practices. At what level should we initiate liberation? My concern today will be solely the liberation of thought.
A case could be made that philosophy is the safeguard of human freedom. For if our environmental, economic and cultural worlds are determined primarily by how we think, and only subsequently by what we think, then all power passes through thought, and thinking otherwise is the essence of liberation. Thus liberation would be conceived as liberation from oppression, injustice, ignorance and illusion. If liberation from oppression may be conceived as the freedom to access and employ physical, social, and educational
resources required for human flourishing without fear of external appropriation or restriction, then such liberation may be conceived, in turn, as dependent on liberation from injustice, as freedom of political representation to ensure that the cries of body and soul are heard and interests are met. Political liberation, in turn is dependent on liberation from ignorance and delusion, so that one speaks, struggles and acts in one’s own interests and against one’s own oppression. Liberation from delusion, in turn, requires the liberation of truth so that it may germinate and grow in its own proper elements of reason, attention, and insight. So is philosophy to be regarded as the source of liberation?
Now the foundational myth of philosophical liberation is given in Plato’s allegory of the cave: a prisoner, whose vision has been restricted to moving shadows on the wall, escapes his chains, flees the cave, and finally sees objects themselves in direct sunlight. The time has come to consider seriously whether this escape from constraint, detachment from others, and fulfilment in vision does not embody precisely the practices of infinitude, disengagement and transposition from which we need liberation. Do we need liberation from the quest for liberation that has been embodied in Western philosophical, scientific, economic, and perhaps even theological practices? This ‘epistemological’ problem of liberation is, in truth, a religious problem articulated by St Augustine in his Confessions: when we love the truth, do we love what we take to be true, or do we love the truth that judges and illuminates the falsehood of our prior thinking?7
Can we conceive the practice of liberation differently even within the allegorical terms of Plato’s cave itself? For in the allegory, the illusion of moving shadows derives from the fact that the prisoners were chained and could not move, and the fire in whose light the shadows are projected is itself concealed behind a wall, leading to a transposition in which the two-dimensional and colourless shadows seem real, while the concealed servants carrying the shapes seem imaginary. Then the task of liberation is to break the chains of illusion, move around the cave and touch its walls, discover the fire as the source of projection, greet the servants and form a union to discuss their workload and under-utilised potential. It is by moving the mind, discovering its limits, forming new alliances, and overthrowing illusions and appearances that truth comes to germinate in the soul.
The nature of modern illusion
Yet does our modern rational age, with its devotion to objectivity, liberty, wealth, and reality, still dwell in a cave? Have we, who tolerate only light and clarity, replaced substances with shadows? Well, it is all down to our source of light. The foundation of human politics on material interests projects four kinds of shadows which arise from the way in which such interests are brought into consciousness and counted as socially significant. Material interest is made significant via money:
Since money is the value through which all other values are measured for the sake of agreement and contract, it becomes the basis for theoretical knowledge. Values are measured in terms of prices, so they are measured in terms of costs of replacement or substitution, even though many things in life cannot be substituted for or replaced. We do not count things themselves, but only money, projecting the shadows of our own collective desires – a shadow of objectivity derived from substituting the extrinsic for the intrinsic.
Since money is required to repay debts, and meet all other obligations, it becomes that which is most in demand, the supreme value through which all other values may be obtained, the principle guiding practical conduct. Values are measured in terms of money to be spent, so they are measured from the point of view of one who has money to spend, as if he procures whatever he wants or needs by spending, even though the goods and services will in fact be provided by others – a shadow of liberty derived from a quest for the infinite.
Since securities, financial derivatives, and even money itself are created as debts, then each asset is someone else’s liability. Even investment assets, such as land, commodities, property and shares, are priced by speculation, so that their value is supported by the amount of debt people are willing to undertake for them. Asset values are measured by an anticipated rate of return, an increase in the liabilities of others, even if this involves consuming the basis of material production – a shadow of wealth derived from disengagement from production.
Such economic behaviour is constrained by competitive selection, so that only those who profit by living out of the preceding illusions in a cave of shadows prosper and grow, while those who live by touch excluded, or are martyred by exploitation, then
it is no longer tyranny that rules the people, but an autonomous, self-positing system of evaluation. Since money is created as debt, and debt must be repaid in the form of money or more debt, and debt becomes the supreme principle of theoretical knowledge, practical conduct, and mutual trust, then this perspective of evaluation is not chosen but imposes itself – a shadow of reality.
The extremity of our predicament is this: when objectivity, liberty, wealth and reality are shadows themselves, we cannot simply escape the cave and return to the sunlight. Simone Weil once remarked that the chain in the cave is time – or rather, that we can only look at one thing at a time.8 She also considered that the stuff of which the world is woven is time, and yet the present and the future are only woven together in thought.9 So the world is woven of time, our lives are woven of time, and our contact with reality only takes place in the binding of time. Then our chains set us free. If illusion is to be conceived as a loss of contact with reality,10 then escape from time – into a realm of ideas, a recollected golden age, or even into a separate present – is the essential falsehood.11 But the conception of good, by contrast, necessarily involves an orientation to the future that binds us: ‘Such states of mind invest the future with the consistency of the past, of the present, of the fait accompli.’12 This points to a new conception of reality, of truth, of liberation as at once future and as bound or woven. She wrote: ‘Reality represents for the human mind the same thing as good. That is the mysterious meaning behind the proposition: God exists.’13 Thus this conception of reality as essentially temporal is also a conception of reality as essentially intrinsic or spiritual: Weil calls it ‘transcendent’.14 Yet, at the same time, spiritual reality is merely a binding to the future, an orientation. For if we can only spend our time by paying attention, if time itself is pure expenditure and sacrifice, if our lives are essentially bound towards death, then all we can do is liberate a future utopia, a binding of the course of time, in which we will not participate: truth itself excludes the coherence of our own understanding.
This, then, is my proposal on the future of liberation. My proposal is threefold:
1. After the end of modernity, liberation is no longer a matter of detaching the human subject from the constraints of nature; after the end of politics, liberation is no
longer a matter of disengaging some subjects from the tyranny of others; after the end of philosophy, liberation is no longer a matter of liberating opinion from ideology and superstition. On the contrary, only the impersonal element in humanity is worthy of attention and liberation:15 the coherence of the psychophysical organism, in dependence on its proper environment, with its own necessities, needs, demands, and drive for growth; yet also the human soul, with its own necessities, needs, and demands, in dependence on its own proper environment, consisting in the vitalising powers that can be loosely conceived under the headings of truth, beauty, justice, compassion and intimacy. The specific differences of culture, personality and identity are secondary to the sources that nourish body and soul. This impersonal element is also the spiritual element: if oppression, in global credit capitalism, derives from how we think about money, property, people, knowledge, and justice in the universal light of debt – and specifically the way our attention is captured by infinitude, disengagement and extrinsic appearance – then spiritual liberation compels our attention back to finitude, engagement, and the intrinsic.
2. Spiritual liberation, as the essence of material and political liberation, may be conceived as an apocalyptic awakening: the old order passes away, and only the new order counts. In this transition, the mind orients itself away from the present to the future, overturning all the foundations of our current thought. For if what is intrinsic is not present in appearance, the mind must wait for the intrinsic order to be disclosed. Such waiting is enacted through overturning and transposition.
3. The vehicle of intrinsic meaning is not the proposition but the promise or prophecy. One only has intimations of truth. Truth is not something that can be seen, or disclosed through evidence, argument, or exposition in relation to a material and historical context. Valuable though such activities may be, they do not reach the intrinsic. For far from truth being that which can be established or managed by the mind, truth is that which acts on the mind to reorient attention and thought. Truth touches and resists the mind; it compels it to move, think and engage; it is intrinsic to the operation of the mind itself. Let me give an analogy: in human life, when the shield of courtesy is dropped, there are encounters, whether loving or violent,
promises exchanged, opinions disclosed, matters said, books read, that change the course of a person’s life irrevocably, for better or worse, without you having the freedom to determine what happens to you. The promise of truth operates likewise: it shapes consciousness, captures attention, makes one wonder what it would be like if that promise were true. If the mind ceases to think and becomes solid and immobile when it clings to a given view in anxiety over internal or external threats, it is by contrast emboldened to move, think, explore and forge alliances when it takes its bearing from germs or promises of future insight.
Apocalyptic visions of philosophical liberation
To liberate truth we need germs or prophecies that act on the soul. Let me illustrate these proposals with some apocalyptic remarks of relevance to a political philosophy of religion. It is the liberative power of the apocalyptic structure that interests me here. If one attempts to relate these remarks to history, they seem extreme and unwise; if one explains them in line with their author’s philosophies, then they can take on a manageable sense. Yet neither procedure is my purpose here: I wish to explore how matters might change if we view things in their light. For example, Weil explained that the aim of a spiritual reading is ‘not to see God in all things; it is that God through us should see the things that we see.’16 Likewise, our aim is not to see the truth in all things, in the way that money recognizes the soul of value in all things, but that through us a truth may address the things that we see. It is a matter of orienting our attention in the light of an insight or prophecy.
The first is from Friedrich Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo, ‘Why I am a Destiny’:
I was the first to discover the truth, in that I was the first to sense – smell – the lie as lie … With all that I am necessarily a man of fatality. For when truth steps into battle with the lie of millennia we shall have convulsions, an earthquake spasm, a transposition of valley and mountain such as has never been dreamed of. The concept politics has become completely absorbed into a war of spirits, all the powerstructures of the old society have been blown into the air – they one and all reposed on the lie: there will be wars such as there have never been on earth. Only after me will there be grand politics on earth. –17
Grand politics is conceived here as a war of spirits: one of the stranger transpositions of valley and mountain enacted here is to wrest politics from its foundations in material interests so as to suspend it from the sky of a cosmic battle of spirits, of perspectives of evaluation. Materialism and idealism alike are inverted: instead of seeing things in terms of their participation in reality or the good, one sees things in terms of their evaluations of what is real or good. Such an apocalyptic statement appeals to no ground or evidence: one cannot really ask whether it is true or relevant, for it claims that all previous foundations were lies. It is only meaningful if it discloses something – a spirit, a way of seeing, a perspective of evaluation. It proclaims that such spirits are decisive.
Another apocalyptic remark comes from one of the few fragments of political writing penned by Søren Kierkegaard, in response to the revolutionary events of 1848:18
Until now, tyrants (in the form of emperors, kings, popes, Jesuits, generals, diplomats) have been able to rule and govern the world at a crucial moment, but from the time the fourth estate19 is established – when it has had time to establish itself in such a way that it is properly understood – it will become manifest that only martyrs are able to rule the world at a crucial moment. That is, no human being will any longer be able to rule the generation at such a moment; only the divine can do it, assisted by those unconditionally obedient to him, those who are also willing to suffer, but they are indeed the martyrs. In an older order, when the crucial moment was past, an orderly secular government took over, but from the moment the fourth estate is established, it will be seen that even when the crisis is over, the governing cannot be done secularly 20
Here is a prophecy of the overcoming of force, not by reason or by consensus, but by sacrifice. This apocalyptic vision of the liberation of the multitude from direct rule is also accompanied by an extraordinary transposition of politics:
At some time, when the purely convulsive seizure is over and the epoch of political ministries is past, blood will no doubt be demanded again, more blood, but blood of another kind, not that of the sacrifices slain by the thousands, no the more costly blood, that of single individuals – of martyrs, those mighty ones who are dead, who accomplish what no living person accomplishes who has people chopped down, not
even if he had them chopped down by the thousands, what even those mighty dead ones did not accomplish as living contemporaries but accomplish only as dead: to compel a raging crowd into obedience, simply because the raging crowd was allowed in disobedience to slay the martyr.21
This prophesied transposition of defeat into victory, once direct seizure of power is no longer possible, is accompanied by a transposition of politics: instead of the individual tyrant ruling the masses, the masses rule themselves through their response to their individual victims.
What is at stake here is the nature of decisive power. Nietzsche and Kierkegaard’s remarkable prophecies – one proclaiming the power of the Antichrist, the other proclaiming the power of Christ – have a strange resonance: both attack modern Christendom and its secular successor. Both anticipate power in the insubstantial, yet both remain abstract, insubstantial, disembodied, future – mere seeds – until we find a political field where they may germinate and grow a determinate meaning. If Nietzsche prophesies that it is the spirit, the way of seeing, evaluating, and thinking that is decisive, then it is in the field of the politics of thought that his intervention finds its proper application. The ‘lie’ he detects here is the predominance of a ‘will to truth’, where a Platonic model of truth as vision of form underlies even the simple exercise of correctly designating a material object. His prophecy is most relevant to the nature of illusion in our time. For illusion does not derive from error, from mistaking the true and false, even if it results in errors. In Plato’s famous allegory of the cave, the illusion of moving shadows derives from the fact that the prisoners were chained and cannot move, and the fire in whose light the shadows are projected is itself concealed. If the task of philosophy is to break the chains of illusion, discover the source of projection, and describe objects in a different light, this is an apocalyptic transformation of thinking insofar a new source of orientation and meaning replaces the old and makes the illusions fade. The truth of such a transformation is proven by the encounter with a third dimension and with colour that is made visible as soon as the mind is able to move. The task of philosophy becomes liberation through moving the mind, using it as an organ of groping experimentation and discovery.
Kierkegaard’s account of the establishment of the ‘fourth estate’ may also find its appropriate application in the politics of thought. For once objectivity, liberty, wealth and reality are established as principles, then there is no possibility of any aristocracy of noble and virtuous thinking being able to rule the multitude: such pretensions to virtue lack evidence and results; they can only be subject to suspicion and derision – even philosophy is martyred once more in the current age. Yet thinking remains a practice, and one that must be managed. Following the end of politics, when direct government is impossible, trust and value – and even money itself – are created by those who proclaim that they will stand surety for debts. In our contemporary age, it is the debtors who compel the raging crowds into obedience – whether these debtors are individuals, financial institutions or governments – by means of the promises they offer to sacrifice their labour, profits or income – their economic lifeblood – to the production of wealth. In response, the multitude contract obedience through taking on their own debts.
A similar transposition has taken place within the politics of thinking: opinions are no longer formed by the weight of substantial evidence; instead, one owes it to one’s opinions to find the evidence that will justify them. In the eclipse of truth and the reign of sophistry and opinion, truth itself is sacrificed for the sake of justification. The nature of illusion, in contrast to error, is that it belongs to the imagination alone, and never runs up against contradictions or boundaries.22 It demands an unlimited field of application: it expresses an infinite demand. Since it has no weight or value of its own, its importance can only be measured by the sacrifices it demands, such that sacrifices already incurred become an argument for further sacrifices.23 The truth attributed to an illusion is an expression of the demand to prove its truth, a demand measured by the activity and time already devoted to it. The illusion of objectivity demands blood sacrifice: as Weil once explained, ‘superstition, under cover of an abstract vocabulary, has revenged itself by invading the entire realm of thought.’24 The only substance we find in abstract illusions is that which we have sacrificed for the sake of them. It is our own thinking activity that keeps our thought in chains. The liberation of thought
The prisoners in Plato’s cave were immobilised such that their sole activity was vision of shadowy images. It is not merely in our mass-media society that we are immobilised by the spectacles presented to us: in a similar vein, the entire history of Western thought has been dominated by the priority of a theoretical attitude in which matters are presented as forms, as ideas, or as ‘the outward appearances in which beings as such show themselves’.25 The content of thought takes precedence over its own activity: ‘everything is only as it is known’.26 According to Plato’s explication of the Socratic principle, ‘virtue is knowledge’, a virtuous life is possible only through knowledge. This is the theoretical attitude that underlies metaphysics, science, propaganda, and common sense alike, and it is precisely the Platonism that Nietzsche sought to reverse with his ‘revaluation of all values’.27 Now when Kierkegaard posed the Socratic question ethically, ‘can virtue be learned?’28, the task was no longer one of theoretical vision but of inward appropriation. Here we have another reversal of Platonism, even if one that is also an appropriation. Instead of the essence of virtue being conceived in terms of truth, the essence of truth is conceived in terms of virtue. It is the enactment of thinking, and how it relates to its content, that are set free from the theoretical model.29 As soon as we distinguish between the enactment of thinking and its content, however, we are drawn to a more fundamental distinction between two kinds of enactment: imagination and attention. Where imagination projects its own desires, interests and reasons, forming shadows as representations, attention is receptive to the action of the object itself. Where imagination forms thought in its own mind, attention forms thought in cooperation with the matter. Instead of exerting an unlimited claim to persist in being, the content of attention is temporary and finite. It has a point of application, an orientation, a pertinence, and a finitude: it loses sense and reason once attention is directed elsewhere. So if the freedom of attention, of how thought spends its time and experiences its duration, is the liberation of thinking, such thinking cannot be indifferent to its object. The sovereignty of imagination is replaced by respect for what matters: philosophical thought must direct its attention to that which is most significant, decisive, or the reason as to how things come to be the way they are. Such reasons are not immediately evident in the outward appearances of things. Thus the theoretical attitude has a problem in trying to infer reasons. Instead, it often tries to discern what remains stable while the viewpoint changes, as when deducing the existence of a cube that can never be seen all at once from its faces. But this is to treat reasons as though they were
extended matters; it is to confuse the forming of reality with a formed reality, to substitute the extrinsic for the intrinsic.
All this indicates a fuller reversal of Platonism, one that excludes the coherence of the thinking subject. A final apocalyptic remark by Weil, may prove illuminating here: Truth – Among men (except in the supreme forms of saintliness and of genius?) that which gives the impression of being true is almost necessarily false, and that which is true almost necessarily gives the impression of being false.30
Weil appropriates Platonism as far as possible, regarding reality as transcendent since we are only given appearance.31 Yet this appropriation is taken as far as reversal: ‘Joy … is the feeling of reality. Beauty is the manifest presence of reality. That is the very thing, and not anything else, which Plato speaks of – τò όν.’32 How does the impression of truth conceal a falsehood? This strange proposition allows for an exception to dominant impressions: those who can read the truth in contrast to its usual impressions can do so by virtue of the fact that genius is understood here as humility in thought. For when thought is treated as though it should behave like matter, it is used to exert force: each opinion and intention seeks its ‘place in the sun’;33 it seeks to assert its right, in a tone of contention; its judgements are also condemnations of other possible thoughts. While there may be a time for thought to exert force, make judgements, and condemn evils, this is not the activity by which thought will be emancipated from its own chains. Where a false thought will seem true because of its intrinsic force, it loses through its exercise of force upon other thoughts its singular point of application that gave it pertinence, and from which its reason arose. It is the force of thought that extends a thought from attention into imagination, and renders it blind. When judgements condemn possible thoughts, they condemn the shadow of thinking and not the substance: the characteristic of force is that it turns anyone who is subjected to it into a thing – it kills, it removes the life.34 Even when it is simply a matter of the encounter between one thought and another, force is pitiless to its victim while intoxicating for those who benefit from its power.35 Humility, by contrast, sets aside the force of opinion in order to pay attention to reality. Where opinion attempts to decide the matter itself, attention allows the decisive matter to form thought.
Then why should a truth give the impression of falsehood? What is decisive here is the conduct of thought. Reasons are not usually evident straightaway – it will take time to discern what is decisive. The mind, at first, grasps nothing, and faced with a void, is tempted to fill it up according to preconceived desires, or through a sense of balance according to preconceived principles. It fills the void with images or outward appearances; it cannot test to see if its principles are pertinent. In this respect, the imagination is essentially a liar.36 By contrast, Weil explains that truth is only obtained after enduring the void: ‘To love truth signifies to endure the void and consequently, to accept death. Truth is on the side of death.’37 It is a matter of submitting motionless to the impulse, and no longer seeking a compensation in imagination: ‘one ceases to read a false translation of it outside.’38 In this respect, all truth is apocalyptic: it only arrives after the shattering of opinion. It is fundamentally egalitarian, since it can only be accessed through the demolition of the point of view.
The nature of these ‘spiritual truths’ of reason is that by affirming them one destroys them, because they are not true on the plane on which they are affirmed.39 They have to be enacted according to their nature and level, not affirmed or represented. As Weil says, one experiences evil by refusing to accomplish it, but one only experiences good by accomplishing it: error is to be represented but not enacted, while truth is to be enacted but not represented.40 All thought has to be interpreted, both in relation to that object to which it properly pertains, as well as in relation to the level or reasons that gave rise to it. Yet a faithful reading has to be an appropriation or re-enactment of the thought, perhaps finding a new pertinence and a new meaning in the process. Even the same words can be commonplace or extraordinary, depending on the manner in which they are spoken, and the depth from which they arise.41
How, then, are we to elevate thought, or at least give it some depth? How are we to think according to that which matters, which has most significance, which is decisive? The clue is to be found in contradiction or apparent falsehood: strangely, only contradiction is the criterion of reality, for there is no contradiction in what is imaginary.42 We live inside products of the imagination, whether individually or collectively, until we run up against resistance from reality itself. We are trapped in a cave of illusion until we feel ourselves up against some solid resistance in the dark, but out in the sunlight we wander completely
astray. Only the body in its resistance to our desire and imagination grounds us in reality. Such resistance, whether in affliction or in the failure of desire, presents the opportunity to wait and look up. As Weil puts it, ‘Evil is the shadow of good. All real good, possessing solidity and thickness, projects evil. Only imaginary good does not project it.’43 What possesses solidity and thickness, in the human person, is not some imaginary concept of right or liberty, but the source of our thoughts and feelings, a point in the heart that cries out against oppression, ‘Why am I being hurt?’44 It is this coherence of soul and body that seeks liberation. In a strange way, therefore, the evil of affliction is the criterion of the real. This is not because evil itself is metaphysically prior to good: on the contrary, evil discloses what already exists, but it discloses it in an inverted form. One can infer what is decisive only indirectly: ‘that which is in every way superior reproduces that which is in every way inferior, but transposed.’45
Conclusion
Nietzsche proposes that we attend to a politics of spirits rather than a conflict of judgements about good and evil; Kierkegaard proposes that the most effective political strategy is one that renounces and embraces its own persecution and death; Weil proposes that in our actual encounter with suffering and contradiction we see transposed images of what is real. None of this makes sense in worldly politics. Yet perhaps worldly politics itself makes no sense: there are only bodies and spirits. In the politics of spirit, such apocalyptic principles may be our only condition of access to the truth. The quest for infinitude is replaced by the resistance and contradiction that our bodies and souls offer to our thought. The practice of disengagement is replaced by a thought that only bears in meaning in its domain of pertinence and from the level from which it arises. The substitution of the extrinsic for the intrinsic is replaced by an apocalyptic transposition which excludes the coherence of common sense. And if our lives are ultimately constrained by how we think, and thus how we understand and orient ourselves in the world, then perhaps only the truth may set us free.
Thinking is neither a solitary activity nor one over which we may possess sovereignty. Thinking is at best a spirit that we may entertain. Thought is constrained when we mistake it for opinion, a fixed vision of shadows, or when it is illuminated by a fire extrinsic to
thought. Yet the reversal that appropriates Platonism is to make the cave our home: there is no need to escape into sunlight for there is enough reality inside the cave itself – even the shadows are real. Even in the cave of the modern university, where reason is structured by income and debt, by infinitude, disengagement and substitution, promises can still be made, bonds can still be forged, and thinking may still be provoked. Of course, we need to dig out other caves, institutions of the soul, where dispositions to attend to what is pertinent, to intrinsic bonds, and to provocative promises can be cultivated in the dark like mushrooms. Of course, we need to undermine the trenches of global credit capitalism by building alternative economies that operate by inclusion rather than exclusion. Yet the logic of binding or inclusion is a logic of thinking or spirit: it is the most complex, subtle and difficult thing in the world. It is a problem that neither the Earth nor nature has yet solved. Yet if, during the course of this paper, you have at any moment felt included in thinking through a problem, or you have found thought provoked – whether in agreement or disagreement, or you have felt any intimation of the possibility of thinking otherwise – then liberation may still have a future.
References:
1 New Economics Foundation, Growth Isn’t Possible (London: New Economics Foundation, 2010)
2 Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine (London: Penguin, 2008).
3 Gustavo Gutièrrez, The Power of the Poor in History (London: SCM, 1983).
4 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000).
5 David Rothkopf, Superclass: How the Rich Ruined our World (London: Abacus, 2009).
6 Martin Heidegger, ‘The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking’, in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (London: Routledge, 1993) 434.
7 Augustine, Book X.
8 Simone Weil, The Notebooks of Simone Weil, trans. Arthur Wills (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1956) 37.
9 Weil, Notebooks 26.
10 Weil calls this ‘evil’: Notebooks 28.
11 Weil uses the language of ‘sin’: Notebooks 28.
12 Weil, Notebooks 351.
13 Weil, Notebooks 365.
14 Weil, Notebooks 361.
15 Weil, ‘Human Personality’, Anthology ed. Sîan Miles (London: Penguin, 2005) 74.
16 Weil, Notebooks 358
17 Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), 126-7.
18 The apocalyptic structure of Kierkegaard’s thinking has been elucidated, in parallel to that of Karl Marx, by Jacob Taubes in Occidental Eschatology, trans. David Ratmoko (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009).
19 Here meaning the masses; not Burke’s notion of the press.
20 Søren Kierkegaard, Supplement to ‘Two Ethical-Religious Essays’, in Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (eds), Without Authority (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 214.
21 Supplement to ‘Two Ethical-Religious Essays’, 214.
22 Weil, Lectures on Philosophy, trans. Hugh Price (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978) 219.
23 Weil, ‘The Power of Words’, Anthology 240.
24 Weil, ‘The Power of Words’, Anthology 242.
25 Heidegger, ‘The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking’, Basic Writings 444.
26 Heidegger, Philosophy of Religious Life 27.
27 Thomas H. Brobjer, ‘Critical Aspects of Nietzsche’s Relation to Politics and Democracy’, in Hermann W. Siemens and Vasti Roodt (eds), Nietzsche, Power and Politics (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008): 205-30.
28 Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985) 9.
29 Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Fragments, trans. David F. Swenson and Walter Lowrie (Princeton, NJ: Princeton, 1968) 181; see also Heidegger, The Phenomenology of Religious Life 43.
30 Weil, Notebooks 121.
31 Weil, Notebooks 361.
32 Weil, Notebooks 360.
33 Levinas draws on Pascal’s expression: ‘Ethics as First Philosophy’, in Seán Hand (ed.), The Levinas Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989) 82.
34 See Weil, Notebooks 183.
35 Weil, Notebooks 191.
36 Weil, Notebooks 160.
37 Weil, Notebooks 160-1.
38 Weil, Notebooks 202.
39 Weil, Notebooks 163.
40 Weil, Notebooks 269.
41 Weil, Notebooks 220.
42 Weil, Gravity and Grace, trans. Emma Craufurd and Mario von der Ruhr (Abingdon: Routledge Classics, 2002) 98.
43 Weil, Gravity and Grace 102.
44 Weil, Anthology 72.
45 Weil, Gravity and Grace 102.