Sustaining Affirmation

The Strengths of Weak Ontology in Political Theory

Stephen K. White

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781400823918
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Filosofia politica

In light of many recent critiques of Western modernity and its conceptual foundations, the problem of adequately justifying our most basic moral and political values looms large. Without recourse to traditional ontological or metaphysical foundations, how can one affirm--or sustain--a commitment to fundamentals? The answer, according to Stephen White, lies in a turn to "weak" ontology, an approach that allows for ultimate commitments but at the same time acknowledges their historical, contestable character. This turn, White suggests, is already underway. His book traces its emergence in a variety of quarters in political thought today and offers a clear and compelling account of what this might mean for our late modern self-understanding.As he elaborates the idea of weak ontology and the broad criteria behind it, White shows how these are already at work in the thought of contemporary writers of seemingly very different perspectives: George Kateb, Judith Butler, Charles Taylor, and William Connolly. Among these thinkers, often thought to be at odds, he exposes the commonalities that emerge around the idea of weak ontology. In its identification of a critical turn in political theory, and its nuanced explanation of that turn, his book both demonstrates and underscores the strengths of weak ontology.

Chapter One

INTRODUCTION:
THE WEAK ONTOLOGICAL TURN

A CURIOUS COMMONALITY is emerging across a wide variety of contributions in contemporary political theory. Increasingly there is a turn to ontology. This shift might initially seem a little puzzling. For one thing, ontology traditionally referred to a fairly restricted field of philosophical reflection concerned with analyzing “being” that was relatively remote from moral-political concerns. What explains the extraordinary expansion of interest? This expansion becomes doubly perplexing when one recalls that ontology was also traditionally closely connected—sometimes even identified—with metaphysics, an activity now regarded by many with deep suspicion.¹

In trying to understand the recent ontological turn, several contributing factors need to be separated. One is the shift in the meaning of ontology that emerged in the last century in analytic philosophy and philosophy of science. For most English-speaking philosophers, ontology came to refer increasingly to the question of what entities are presupposed by our scientific theories. In affirming a theory, one also takes on a commitment to the existence of certain entities.² Ontology in this general sense seems to have been increasingly appropriated in recent years in the social sciences. Thus, one frequently hears reference made to the ontology implicit in some social scientific theory or research tradition.³ One might think of such usage as a kind of ontological turn in the social sciences, but that is not what I have in mind.

The ontological turn I am referring to emerges with the growing realization that we live in “late modern” times. The sense of living in late modernity implies a greater awareness of the conventionality of much of what has been taken for certain in the modern West. The recent ontological shift might then be characterized generally as the result of a growing propensity to interrogate more carefully those “entities” presupposed by our typical ways of seeing and doing in the modern world.

One of the entities most thrown into question has been our conception of the human subject. At issue is the assertive, disengaged self who generates distance from its background (tradition, embodiment) and foreground (external nature, other subjects) in the name of an accelerating mastery of them. This Teflon subject has had a leading role on the modern stage. Such subjectivity has been affirmed primarily at the individual level in Western democracies, although within Marxism it had a career at the collective level as well. In both cases, the relevant entity is envisioned as powering itself through natural and social obstacles; it dreams ultimately of frictionless motion. This modern ontology of the Teflon subject has, of course, not usually been thematized in quite such stark terms. But the lack of explicit thematization has been at least partially a measure of modernity’s self-confidence. It is precisely the waning of this self-confidence that engenders such a widespread recourse to ontological reflection. Accordingly, the current turn might now be seen as an attempt to think ourselves, and being in general, in ways that depart from the dominant—but now more problematic—ontological investments of modernity.

Ontological commitments in this sense are thus entangled with questions of identity and history, with how we articulate the meaning of our lives, both individually and collectively. When these aspects of the current turn are brought into the foreground, it quickly becomes apparent how crucial Heidegger is to the story. He brought ontological reflection into a series of entanglements that are central to current thinking. For Heidegger, in Being and Time, the analysis of being (Sein) cannot be an exclusively cognitive matter, as it was traditionally, and still is, for much of analytic philosophy. It has to be done through an existential analysis of human being (Dasein). Ontological reflection thus becomes inextricably entangled with distinctive characteristics of human being, such as mortality and “mood” (Stimmung).⁴ Further, in his later work, Heidegger gave ontological investigation a historical dimension, insofar as he turned against the dominant, modern way of understanding human being or subjectivity and indicted the whole tradition of Western metaphysics that, in his view, had sought cognitive frameworks within which to “grasp” being conclusively.⁵

Many who have never read a word of Heidegger have been subjected to his influence through recent French philosophy. His entanglement of ontology with the themes just mentioned has been appropriated and modified in various ways by familiar poststructuralist or postmodern thinkers, such as Foucault, Derrida, and Lyotard.⁶ They have helped bring ontological reflection to the forefront of our thought, even though they are in general quite leery of any sustained affirmation of a particular ontology.

However one assesses the role of French philosophy in this regard, it is important to recognize that this stream of thought is only one of several that participate in the current ontological turn. I will be arguing that one finds similar countermodern, ontological themes in various locations across the contemporary intellectual landscape: in communitarianism, in political theory influenced by theology, in feminism, in post-Marxism, and even in some versions of liberalism itself, which is normally seen as being deeply committed to the dominant, modern ontology.⁷ In each of these initiatives, ontological concerns emerge in the form of deep reconceptualizations of human being in relation to its world. More specifically, human being is presented as in some way “stickier” than in prevailing modern conceptualizations. Answers vary, of course, as to the character of this stickiness and as to that to which the subject is most prominently stuck. It is important to emphasize this diversity in the ontological turn. When the shift is overidentified with postmodernism, the whole topic is made to appear too dependent upon what is only one manifestation of it; moreover, within that particular current, thinkers have often failed to attend sufficiently to a range of problems related to articulating and affirming the very reconceptualizations toward which they gesture.⁸

One might make the case for an ontological turn simply by pointing to evidence of the increasingly frequent use of the term ontology in the way I have just elucidated. I am going to push a bit beyond this, however, and argue something stronger and more systematic. Even though one must start by emphasizing the diversity within the ontological turn, one can nevertheless isolate a number of distinctive, common characteristics, in terms of which it is plausible to talk about the emergence of new rules for the game of reflecting upon the most basic conceptualizations of self, other, and world, as well as for how such reflections in turn structure ethical-political thought. There seem to me to be at least four rough characteristics shared by the most perceptive participants in this broad ontological shift. I want to sketch these now in a relatively abstract, introductory fashion. A fuller appreciation of what such characteristics amount to will emerge as they are displayed in the work of the theorists I examine in the various substantive chapters.

1.1. FUNDAMENTAL AND CONTESTABLE

The first commonality emerges around the question: how is one to understand the epistemological status of such contemporary efforts at fundamental conceptualization of human being? Here I want to begin by drawing a distinction between two ideal types of ontology: strong and weak. The late modern ontologies in which I am interested typically exhibit at least some of the characteristics I refer to as “weak,” whereas premodern and modern ones have more typically exhibited the characteristics I refer to as “strong.”

Strong are those ontologies that claim to show us “the way the world is,” or how God’s being stands to human being, or what human nature is. It is by reference to this external ground that ethical and political life gain their sense of what is right; moreover, this foundation’s validity is unchanging and of universal reach. For strong ontologies, the whole question of passages from ontological truths to moral-political ones is relatively clear. Some proponents do not, of course, assume that political principles or decisions can be strictly derived from their ontology; for example, there may be substantial discretionary space for the exercise of judgment. However, in contrast to weak ontologies, strong ones carry an underlying assumption of certainty that guides the whole problem of moving from the ontological level to the moral-political. But this very certainty—both about how things are and how political life should reflect it—allows such ontologies to provide what seem today (at least to some of us) to be answers to our late modern problems that demand too much initial forgetfulness of contingency and indeterminacy. Although terminology is extremely variable here, this last point could be stated thus, that strong ontologies involve too much “metaphysics.” Since World War II, there have been a number of prominent proponents of different forms of strong ontology in political theory. Such thinkers as Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin, as well as adherents to the natural law tradition, have drawn on classical Greek or Christian models in order to contest the dominant modern ontology. Contemporary philosophers like Alasdair MacIntyre have developed novel ways of carrying some of these sorts of arguments forward.⁹ But the recent ontological turn that is the primary focus of my attention has taken place largely outside of this immediate sphere of influence. My term weak ontology is intended to highlight what is distinctive about this new phenomenon.¹⁰ The thinking I am interested in resists strong ontology, on the one hand, and the strategy of much of liberal thought, on the other. The latter has generally ignored or suppressed ontological reflection, sometimes tacitly affirming the Teflon self, sometimes expressing neutrality toward it. Weak ontology finds the costs of such strategies to outweigh the claimed benefits.

One might object that the distinction between strong and weak ontology is merely a relabeling of the familiar distinction between metaphysical and antimetaphysical or postmodern views, or between foundationalist and antifoundationalist ones. This suspicion is true to a degree. But I would claim that this relabeling serves a useful philosophical purpose. My intention in developing the notion of weak ontology is to call greater attention to the kind of interpretive-existential terrain that anyone who places herself in the “anti” position must explore at some point. In short, I want to shift the intellectual burden here from a preoccupation with what is opposed and deconstructed, to an engagement with what must be articulated, cultivated, and affirmed in its wake. My delineation of the characteristics of felicitous, weak ontologies is intended as a contribution toward this goal.

Weak ontologies respond to two pressing concerns. First, there is the acceptance of the idea that all fundamental conceptualizations of self, other, and world are contestable. Second, there is the sense that such conceptualizations are nevertheless necessary or unavoidable for an adequately reflective ethical and political life. The latter insight demands from us the affirmative gesture of constructing foundations, the former prevents us from carrying out this task in a traditional fashion.

One aspect of constructing such contestable foundations involves the embodiment within them of some signaling of their own limits. Felicitous weak ontologies cannot simply declare their contestability, fallibility, or partiality at the start and then proceed pretty much as before. The reason for this is that an ontology figures our most basic sense of human being, an achievement that always carries a propensity toward naturalization, reification, and unity, even if only implicitly. A weak ontology must possess resources for deflecting this propensity at some point in the unfolding of its dimensions. Its elaboration of fundamental meanings must in some sense fold back upon itself, disrupting its own smooth constitution of a unity. In a way, its contestability will thus be enacted rather than just announced.

1.2. A STICKIER SUBJECT

I have suggested that one quality evident in the ontological turn is resistance to the “disengaged self.”¹¹ One of the key notions in weak ontology is that of a stickier subject. This notion can take a variety of specific forms, 11 as the following chapters will show, but I want to suggest that within this variety a certain style of argument is apparent. Weak ontologies do not proceed by categorical positings of, say, human nature or telos, accompanied by a crystalline conviction of the truth of that positing. Rather, what they offer are figurations of human being in terms of certain existential realities, most notably language, mortality or finitude, natality, and the articulation of “sources of the self.”¹² These figurations are accounts of what it is to be a certain sort of creature: first, one entangled with language; second, one with a consciousness that it will die; third, one that, despite its entanglement and limitedness, has the capacity for radical novelty; and, finally, one that gives definition to itself against some ultimate background or “source,” to which we find ourselves always already attached, and which evokes something like awe, wonder, or reverence. This sense of a background that can be both empowering and humbling is misconstrued when grasped either as something with a truth that reveals itself to us in an unmediated way or as something that is simply a matter of radical choice. I am borrowing the notion of sources from Charles Taylor, whose work is taken up in chapter 3. While this might appear to give the idea of weak ontology a necessarily theistic cast from the start, since Taylor is indeed a theist, such a conclusion would be incorrect. Perhaps the simplest way to demonstrate the philosophical richness of Taylor’s notion of sources is to show how it helps in the interpretation of nontheistic thinkers, something I will try to do throughout the book.

When I speak of “existential realities,” I mean to claim that language, finitude, natality, and sources are in some brute sense universal constitutives of human being, ...