Who Needs a World View?

Raymond Geuss

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780674247208
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

One of the world's most provocative philosophers attacks the obsession with comprehensive intellectual systems—the perceived need for a world view. We live in a unitary cosmos created and cared for in all its details by a benevolent god. That, for centuries, was the starting point for much philosophical and religious thinking in the West. The task was to accommodate ourselves to that view and restrict ourselves to working out how the pieces fit together within a rigidly determined framework. In this collection of essays, one of our most creative contemporary philosophers explores the problems and pathologies of the habit of overly systematic thinking that we have inherited from this past.Raymond Geuss begins by making a general case for flexible and skeptical thinking with room for doubt and unresolved complexity. He examines the ideas of two of his most influential teachers—one systematic, the other pragmatic—in light of Nietzsche's ideas about appearance and reality. The chapters that follow concern related moral, psychological, and philosophical subjects. These include the idea that one should make one's life a work of art, the importance of games, the concept of need, and the nature of manifestoes. Along the way, Geuss ranges widely, from ancient philosophy to modern art, with his characteristic combination of clarity, acuity, and wit. Who Needs a World View? is a provocative and enlightening demonstration of what philosophy can achieve when it abandons its ambitions for completeness, consistency, and unity.

1

Who Needs a World View?

Et n’est train de vie si sot et si debile que celuy qui se conduict par ordonnance et discipline.

(Montaigne)

“Proletarians of all countries, unite!” People who prick up their ears and pay close attention to this, who begin to reflect on what it means to them and how they should now think, feel, and behave, have a world view. The same is true for those who have a similar reaction to “Allons, enfants de la patrie” or to “O come, all ye faithful.” A world view is not in the first instance some kind of grand scientific theory of the universe, but something that characteristically actively addresses particular people by name, telling them who they are and at the same time imposing on them an identity. In the three cases I have just cited, these identities are that of communist (seeing myself as proletarian, rather than, for instance, as merely a worker or as one of the poor), of a patriotic French citizen (rather than just a peasant from Poitou or a computer programmer from Lyon), or of a Christian (and faithful member of the flock of Christ). As these cases indicate, there are usually interconnected individual and collective aspects to this identity: to be a proletarian is to see oneself as part of a group of a certain kind. Following Althusser,¹ we might call this the “interpellative aspect” of a world view. I am addressed and stopped in my tracks by the world view, encouraged to identify myself in the way it suggests and accept the consequences.² Usually the identity one acquires by having a world view carries with it certain duties, expectations, or obligations. With the interpellation, there is often associated a historical or quasi-historical narrative and sometimes (although not always) a theory. The Christian has Heilsgeschichte, the nationalist the story of the formation, the trials, the successes, and the failures of the nation, the Communist the story of original accumulation, the transition from slave societies to feudalism to capitalism, with the prospect of a classless society in the future. This narrative gives special density, meaning, and concreteness to the identity the world view inculcates.³ Do we all have world views? Do we need them?

Béla

In the autumn of 1959, I was twelve years old and starting as a boarder in a Hungarian Catholic school not far from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The school had been set up and was run by and for refugees after the failed uprising in 1956 (together with a sprinkling of priests from the Spanish provinces of the same religious order and a handful of boys from Latin America). I was one of the two or three boys there in response to a public announcement in one of the regional Catholic newspapers of bursaries available to potential pupils who scored sufficiently well on the entrance examination. I listened attentively to Father Krigler (Béla) who was to teach us “Religion.” He began by explaining that there were really only two major spiritual powers in the world, two coherent and complete world views: Catholicism and Communism.⁴ Krigler was a Catholic priest who had been born in 1925 in the small town of Csongrad and had lived through the late 1940s in Hungary. He was anything but a Communist himself; however, he was also no fool, and he was morally fastidious enough to disdain to jump on the fashionable anti-Communist bandwagon,⁵ and take cheap shots at something which one made no attempt to understand. He repeated again and again that although some views were too frivolous or implausible even to take seriously, Communism did not fall into that category and was something one needed to understand as fully and correctly as possible, even if, as he thought one must, one had to reject it. In addition, he added, fairness required one to admit that, at that moment—unfortunately, in his view—Communism had an enormous cognitive and philosophical advantage over Catholicism. The Communist world view rested on the philosophy of Hegel, as interpreted, filtered, modified, and adapted by Marx, and was making some attempt to take account of the modern world. Catholicism, in contrast, had taken fright at the pace of social change in the late nineteenth century and tried to withdraw into itself altogether by nailing its colours to a particularly sclerotic form of late Aristotelianism, the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas. Aristotle, and also Thomas, were important systematic philosophers who had some significant strengths, but they also had one particular, and fatal, weakness. There was an Aristotelian, and thus also a Thomist, concept of “development” in the sense of biological growth—a tree grew out of an acorn, a human being was generated by two other human beings—but, history, real human history, was something radically different from the “genesis, growth, and development” which one found in the natural world. Aristotle and Thomas simply provided no conceptual tools for the theoretical understanding of history. Book I of the Metaphysics is not a counter-instance to this but a model of how not to do history (in this specific case the history of philosophy). Aristotle knows that his own doctrine is the true, “perfect (teleion) form” of philosophy, just as the fully developed tree is the perfect form which the acorn “is potentially” and is striving or aspiring to become, and in his “history” of the subject, he shows how previous philosophers are his precursors, their doctrines “leading up to” the truth his views instantiate.⁶ Nature is an unendingly recurring cycle: acorns grow into trees that produce acorns. Human history, as far as it is visible to Aristotle at all, is about similar natural developments and recurrent cycles. What is important about an acorn is that, unless circumstances are too unpropitious, it will “naturally” develop into the perfection of a tree, when the cycle will begin again. Similarly, humans are “naturally” beings who are “political”; that is, they live in city-states (poleis), if conditions are sufficiently propitious for city-states to be established. The only philosophically relevant thing to say about historical change in city-states is that there are a small number of ways in which they may be constituted (monarchy, oligarchy, democracy, and perhaps some variants on these). There will be sequences of orderly transformations of one of these constitutions into another: monarchies will be replaced by oligarchies, which in turn will give way to democracies, which in turn will break down into chaos resulting in the reestablishment of some kind of one-man rule. There will be a cycle here, as there is a cycle in the transformation of acorns into trees into acorns. That is all one can say philosophically about history.

There were, potentially, other models around for Aristotle to have tried to adapt and develop, but neither Herodotus nor Thucydides seem to have been of the least interest to him.⁷ A further possibility would have been Aeschylus’s The Oresteia, which begins in a world much like that envisaged by Aristotle: an unending cycle of murders, each breeding a desire for revenge and thus generating more murders and more desire for vengeance. However, the third play (The Eumenides), dramatises how things can change. In this play the cycle is broken and something new emerges—a court, which, by taking punishment out of the hands of individual relatives or clans, lays the basis for a very different kind of human association: the democracy. To be sure, in Aeschylus, the court is founded (and thus legitimised) by a superlatively intelligent and skilled “goddess” (Athena), who thinks it out in advance and imposes it in a single act. This is still a mythical account, but it could have been the beginning of something more. To get “real” history, one would have to de-theologise the story, disposing of the gods and goddesses and focusing on human action (in its natural and social environment). One would have had to recognise that there probably was no single act of “founding the democracy,” but a series of differing projects and actions by a number of different people and groups over time. Finally, one would have had to realise that many, if not all, of the individuals and groups involved were not, at the start, at all clear about what they were doing and would have been completely surprised by the outcome: whatever Kleisthenes intended or did in his reforms,⁸ he didn’t in any interesting sense “intend to establish the democracy”; it is only in retrospect that we can see that what he did contributed to that result.

Even if Thomas Aquinas did not read Greek and could have had no access to a manuscript of The Oresteia, he could still, in principle, instead of simply following Aristotle into the darkness, have found traces of a different and non-Aristotelian, Christian view, which had a place for history, in Augustine. Augustine did see that human history was not merely a cycle of recurrent developing (or even developing and degenerating) natural forms. The form of life in the Garden of Eden ended for good with Adam’s Fall, a human act which changed everything, just as the Incarnation, a divine initiative, again changed everything. Aquinas, however, did his best to ignore this or to force it into completely inappropriate Greek ontological categories.⁹

Hegel, in fact, was the first philosopher who fully understood that history needed to be brought into philosophy and philosophy into history. To understand the human world, you have to understand its history, and that means always being able to adopt two different points of view on past events at the same time: first, the retrospective glance of the philosopher who knows ex post facto where everything is in fact going to end up (because, in fact, it has already ended up there), but then also the views of the historical participants, who are ignorant of the future and precisely do not know what will really eventually happen. The “Introduction” to Hegel’s Phänomenologie shows clearly that Hegel sees the integration of these two perspectives as the key to understanding the human world. The cognitive superiority of Communism consisted precisely in the fact that its founder, Marx, had really understood and made this basic insight fully his own.¹⁰

Over the weeks and months of the course, Father Krigler continued: The sorts of cognitive options and positions that were on offer to us in the public sphere (that is, those that were on offer on the East Coast of the United States in 1959, three years after the uprising in Hungary),¹¹ were all just variants of “liberalism,” which was a clumsy and completely unphilosophical rubbish heap of narrow-minded prejudices, bits of wishful thinking, and random observations. Liberalism was just a particularly debased and etiolated form of ancient humanism. Whatever its historical importance, humanism in the modern world faced the insuperable objection that it was unable to give an answer to the question why it was a good idea to do the “human(e) thing.” This certainly was not obviously a worthy moral ideal, if it meant developing and exercising those capacities that were specific to humans, as opposed to animals. As he pithily and tartly put it, this would mean that killing millions of Jews for imaginary reasons would be particularly praiseworthy because no animal would do something like that.¹² This was parallel to the arguments against the Thomist obsession with “human nature” and “natural law.” An ethics could not be founded on any such notions because, as he put it, even if one granted (which he didn’t) that it made sense to think about ethics in terms of a “human nature,” the most important thing about that human nature would have to be that humans could act against “nature.”

Like Thomism, modern liberalism had no useful concept of history,¹³ and was thus completely incapable of allowing one to understand anything much about human societies, the way they really operated, and the way they changed. In addition to this, though, liberalism had two further insuperable problems. First, although it might occasionally present itself as a way of resolving conflict, it actually presupposed that society was essentially already at peace; that is, it had attained a state in which all the real vital questions of life were either settled or could be put aside for later (for a “later” that perhaps would never come). In addition, liberalism started from a particularly silly and unreflective form of individualism. It was important, Father Krigler went on, not to misunderstand this. Neither Catholicism nor Communism were actually anti-individualist. Rather, both thought that the “individual” (differently understood by each of these two movements, of course) was an important goal or telos, but also one that could only be attained through a complicated series of historical, social, and political developments and forms of training. What was wrong with liberalism was that it characteristically started from the idea of an abstract, naked “individual” who was somehow an ontological and psychological “given,” waiting out there as a normal part of the furniture of the world, and whose unfiltered and uncorrected beliefs and desires could be a source of legitimacy for action.

Both Catholicism and Communism (explicitly in Lenin and Trotsky)¹⁴ agreed that there were certain crude rules of thumb that, more or less, were accepted in most human societies: don’t steal, don’t kill innocent people, don’t use insulting language to your neighbours. They weren’t anything like strict rules because they were too “empty,” too vaguely formulated, and admitted of too many exceptions; they were also not universally accepted in absolutely all societies, but they were rough and ready expressions of some basic ways of facilitating human interaction and reducing conflict. One such principle was that, other things being equal, it was probably a good idea not to interfere with what people thought and did, unless it impinged in an immediate and vivid way on other people. One should depart from this rule only if one had a very good reason. The valuelessness of this as anything like a strict rule was indicated by the fact that “other things” were in fact never equal, what counted as a “good reason” was almost always up for grabs, and what was “vivid and immediate” for one person need not be so for others. The emptiness of most of these rules of thumb was masked to most people in most societies most of the time, because of the social consensus that existed about which dimensions were the “obviously relevant” ones along which to measure whether “other things” were “equal” and what counted as a “good reason.”

Not all social conflict was in all circumstances a bad thing: societies in which subjugated groups were making a fuss and trying to threaten the social consensus might well be thought to be in a better state than those in which the oppressed were silent and passive. Still, in any given society, if one did not wish specifically to rock the boat of existing social consensus, one might think that these moral rules of thumb (such as they were) gave you some kind of general orientation. The same might be true of the principle of not interfering with others (without a good reason). What this rule very definitely did not do, however, was give you any reason to believe that the desires, wishes, and preferences people happened to think they had, had any special or foundational status for social ethics. It was not true that people even in most cases were the best judges of what they thought. On most subjects they wouldn’t antecedently have a view at all, but would be tempted to make one up, if asked. It wasn’t true that people were themselves the best judges of what they wanted or desired. Krigler was a keen student of psychoanalysis and thought that it had once and for all put paid to any assumption of that kind. Finally, it was obvious, and had been so since the time of Plato, that people were not spontaneously the best judges of what was in their own interest. None of these questions—What do I think? What do I want? What is in my interest?—could be answered either by simply asking the person involved to express his or her opinion, or by simple empirical observation of their actions. Answering any of them required a tremendously complex and effortful, theoretically informed enquiry. The situation was even worse if one changed the question to (for instance) what is in “our” interests, which by no stretch of the imagination could be discovered by simple summation of suffrages.

Rather than taking expressed beliefs and desires at face value, both Catholicism and Communism, in contrast to liberalism, looked very seriously at the context within which beliefs and desires were formed and the possible distortions that could be and were imposed by factors beyond the control of the individuals in question. Catholicism thought the human will (and consequently also human cognition) was inherently corrupted by original sin, and Communists had complex views about the ideological distortion of belief and the mechanisms for the deformation of human desire in capitalist societies. Both recognised that this meant that one must treat actual expressions of belief and desire as material to be understood and analysed, rather than as the final word on anything in particular.

Knowing one’s own mind was not the natural state of most adults most of the time, but rather it was either a signal achievement of a few resulting from a combination of extreme good luck and enormous moral and intellectual effort (Plato), or it was an unending process that could never be completed (Augustine), or it might turn out that there was no “mind” there to know and that the illusion of unitariness dissolved under close inspection (Lacan?), or that really knowing one’s own mind was fatal (early Nietzsche)—especially in an era in which large private corporations with vested economic interests could wield such huge power to “form opinion” and shape or even generate desire.¹⁵ To act as if people whom we know to be confused, uncertain, deceived, often abused, and distracted, were the automatic and absolute sovereign experts both on their own desires and the social good, was manifest folly. It was not to “treat them as adults” or “treat them with the respect they deserved,” and it certainly did not do them any kind of favour. Rather it was a recipe for cultural degeneration, moral confusion, and political and social regression. There were, of course, certain things...