Hermeneutic Communism

From Heidegger to Marx

Gianni Vattimo, Santiago Zabala

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780231528078
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Politische Philosophie

Having lost much of its political clout and theoretical power, communism no longer represents an appealing alternative to capitalism. In its original Marxist formulation, communism promised an ideal of development, but only through a logic of war, and while a number of reformist governments still promote this ideology, their legitimacy has steadily declined since the fall of the Berlin wall.

Separating communism from its metaphysical foundations, which include an abiding faith in the immutable laws of history and an almost holy conception of the proletariat, Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala recast Marx's theories at a time when capitalism's metaphysical moorings—in technology, empire, and industrialization—are buckling. While Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri call for a return of the revolutionary left, Vattimo and Zabala fear this would lead only to more violence and failed political policy. Instead, they adopt an antifoundationalist stance drawn from the hermeneutic thought of Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, and Richard Rorty.

Hermeneutic communism leaves aside the ideal of development and the general call for revolution; it relies on interpretation rather than truth and proves more flexible in different contexts. Hermeneutic communism motivates a resistance to capitalism's inequalities yet intervenes against violence and authoritarianism by emphasizing the interpretative nature of truth. Paralleling Vattimo and Zabala's well-known work on the weakening of religion, Hermeneutic Communism realizes the fully transformational, politically effective potential of Marxist thought.

PART I

FRAMED DEMOCRACY

1. IMPOSING DESCRIPTIONS

THE TASK OF THE PHILOSOPHER IS TO GET THE PROBLEM INTO A PRECISE ENOUGH FORM, TO STATE THE PROBLEM CAREFULLY ENOUGH, SO THAT IT ADMITS OF A SCIENTIFIC RESOLUTION.

—JOHN SEARLE, FREEDOM AND NEUROBIOLOGY (2007)

ON WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 17, 2004, PRESIDENT GEORGE W. Bush awarded the National Humanities Medal to, among others, John Searle. In this beautiful ceremony at the White House, Searle was honored for his “efforts to deepen understanding of the human mind, for using his writings to shape modern thought, defend reason and objectivity, and define debate about the nature of artificial intelligence.”¹ What is most interesting about the awarding of this prize is not that Searle accepted it but rather what sort of philosophy is endorsed by a president who had both just invaded a country contrary to the desires of the majority of the world’s population and restricted the fundamental civil rights of his own citizens. While Searle’s justifications for accepting a prize from such a source might run from a need for national recognition to a feeling of personal accomplishment, the prize itself is appropriate to his philosophical position, which represents a politics of descriptions as the latest development at the service of power.

A politics of descriptions does not impose power in order to dominate as a philosophy; rather, it is functional for the continued existence of a society of dominion, which pursues truth in the form of imposition (violence), conservation (realism), and triumph (history). These metaphysically framed political systems hold that society must direct itself according to truth (the existing paradigm), that is, in favor of the strong against the weak. Only the strong determine truth, because they are the only ones that have the tools to know, practice, and impose it. Philosophers like Searle, just as Plato, Hegel, or Tarski, for example, do not want their philosophies to dominate, but in fact they help maintain a society in which they find themselves at ease—that is, in which they have become more or less conscious servants of the dominant political class. But what is most significant is not that philosophers have been serving the dominant political powers but that the need for dominion often results in metaphysical thought. Metaphysics is an aspect and a consequence of dominion, not its cause.

Although legislators, politicians, and ownership classes need all members of a society to follow their imposed paradigm, such paradigms cannot be sustained without the support of the intellectual community. If, among all the disciplines, the empirical sciences have maintained a central role within the structures of power, it is not because they manage to obtain better results but because they represent the greatest fulfillment of the essence of metaphysics. This essence consists in revealing the ultimate truthful context of the subject matter under analysis, which can vary from the intrinsically materialist nature of physical reality to the theological meaning of divine commands. Regardless of the subject matter, the search for objective truth came to condition not only these philosophers but also those different sectors of culture whose progress should not be measured objectively. Richard Rorty (who for the past thirty years fought against this objectivist tradition) indicated how the “Newtonian physical scientist,” since the Enlightenment, became the “model of the intellectual” from whom social reforms were requested. But the problem with this intellectual is that he centered these reforms only around “objective knowledge of what humans beings are like—not knowledge of what Greeks or Frenchmen or Chinese are like, but of humanity as such.”² As we can see, the search for universal truth became an imposition on individual differences and identities.

Derrida, following Nietzsche and Heidegger, indicates how this metaphysical nature of philosophy has not only structured knowledge in terms of established polarities (presence vs. absence, truth vs. error, mind vs. matter, good vs. evil, man vs. woman) but also produced a hierarchical order in a way that always favors the first term over the second. In sum, by determining Being as presence, Western philosophy has become a simple set of descriptions of the present state of affairs and automatically privileges terms of temporal, spatial, and unified presentness over their opposites. This is why Heidegger explained that “insofar as the pure relationship of the I-think-unity (basically a tautology) becomes the unconditioned relationship, the present that is present to itself becomes the measure for all beingness.”³ Although these sets of measurable descriptions took very different approaches throughout the history of philosophy (from the Platonic realm of pure forms, to Kant’s transcendental conditions of experience, to Marx’s inevitable movement of history), the philosopher was committed to considering Being always as a motionless, nonhistorical, and geometric object, operating just like the European sciences (which Husserl declared to be in crisis). In order to assure its progress within society, philosophy, through its metaphysical obsession with truth, dissolved into the sciences, that is, into the global organization of all beings within a predictable structure of causes and effects.

As we can see, especially since the Enlightenment, when the empirical sciences were given priority because of their access to Nature, philosophy became a scientific enterprise, leaving aside the wider realms from which philosophic problems arise. For this reason, prominent philosophers such as W. V. O. Quine can declare that “philosophy of science is philosophy enough,”⁴ and now Searle, with other contemporary metaphysical philosophers, tries to submit philosophy to scientific methods or, as Rorty indicated, to “the secure path of science.”⁵ But by submitting thought to the secure path of science (or to truth in general), contemporary analytic and continental philosophies have fallen back into “realism,” that is, into the simple analysis and conservation of facts in order to help scientific disciplines develop, which was already the main concern of the Enlightenment. However, in doing so, philosophy evades what has been one of its most important tasks: suggesting alternative, different, or innovative possibilities. Philosophy is not a disengaged, contemplative, or neutral reception of objects but rather the practice of an interested, projected, and active possibility. In this return to “reality,” through the complete neutralization of differences, philosophy becomes not only conservative but also a servant of the strongest political power (in this case the American-style neoliberally framed democracies), which in turn maintains philosophy. It must have been for these reasons that Heidegger noticed, already in the early 1930s, how it did not take long for “‘science’ to realize that its ‘liberal’ essence and its ‘ideal of objectivity’ are not only compatible with the political-national ‘orientation’ but also indispensable to it.…The national ‘organization’ of science moves along the same lines as the ‘American’” organization of science.⁶

Although many philosophers believe this critique (of the bond between the objectivist goals of the sciences and the prevailing political power or, which is the same, the foundation of politics on truth) only began with Heidegger, Kuhn, and Derrida, already at the beginning of the twentieth century Spengler, Popper, and others were sounding the alarm about the dangers that came from spreading Enlightenment-style scientific objectivism to all the disciplines. Classic texts such as Spengler’s The Decline of the West (1918–1922), Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), and even Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) were concerned with the rationalization of the world, a rationalization that we are witnessing today at a much more profound level. Although all these texts did accuse the Enlightenment, it was Adorno and Horkheimer, in their Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), who explicitly stated that the “enlightenment is totalitarian” in order to indicate how the disastrous world wars of the twentieth century were rooted in its development.⁷ But the most important feature of these classic alarms over the politics of descriptions is not a belief that objectivism is erroneous, fallible, or untrue but rather that it is unjust, in other words, a murderous attack on ethics, freedom, and democracy. The “total subordination of reason to metaphysical reality,” declared Herbert Marcuse, “prepares the way for racist ideology.”⁸ It is not an accident that all these classic texts appeared at the same time that Claude Lévi-Strauss was producing his anthropological studies, that is, when encounters with different cultures provided a starting point for the theoretical decentralization of European civilization.

The goal of this first chapter is to remind the realistic strain of contemporary philosophy that Popper’s, Adorno’s, and Benjamin’s alarms against scientific objectivism and realism were also directed against future metaphysical inclinations. We also seek to indicate the authoritarian political meaning of this realism into which philosophers such as Searle have fallen. Heidegger, who can be considered the first to demand an explicit return to the ontological nature of philosophy against scientific or phenomenological inquiries, was not only criticizing the oppressive objective impositions of truth seeking but also indicating what metaphysics left out: the forgotten Being. Against the majority of Heidegger’s interpreters, we believe that this did not demand a deeper scientific search for the “object” of Being but rather a recollection of the oppressed history of metaphysics, what Derrida called “the margins of philosophy” and Benjamin “the tradition of the oppressed.” It is in this forgotten, defeated, and different history that one can find the victims of the politics of descriptions—and probably also an emancipation from it. Also, it should not be considered an accident that most of these antiobjectivist authors (Popper, Benjamin, and Adorno) wrote these texts against Western rationality in exile, in other words, in a condition of exclusion and foreignness. But why are we able today to expose the history, reasons, and politics of the weak? Certainly not because we have found the appropriate representation of truth. Rather, after the deconstruction of metaphysics performed mainly by Heidegger and Derrida, it is no longer possible to impose truth without violence, that is, to force the rational results obtained by the dominating civilization.

The paradigmatic example of these politics of descriptions is represented not only by centuries of oppressive colonialism but also by the recent failure of the American capitalist system all over the world. While the economic and military consequences of metaphysically framed democracy will be examined in the second chapter,⁹ we will now venture into three essential theoretical features of the politics of descriptions: the violence of truth, the conservative nature of realism, and the winner’s history.

TRUTH’S VIOLENCE

In a discussion with the distinguished French analytical philosopher Pascal Engel on the uses of truth, Rorty showed how contemporary philosophy is divided not only between realist and antirealist conceptions of truth but most of all between those who argue over truth’s realism or antirealism and those who try to avoid this metaphysical quarrel altogether.¹⁰ While Engel was only interested in justifying his “minimal realism” theory of truth at all costs, Rorty tried to indicate that while both realist and antirealist theorists belong to the politics of descriptions (because even the antirealist imposes his description of truth’s nonexistence), those who overcome such dualism belong to a postmetaphysical culture, that is, to a politics of interpretation (which we will study in chapter 3). But Rorty’s most significant implications concern not the democratic opportunities that philosophy might gain from leaving aside the realist-versus-antirealist quarrel but rather the violent political consequences of the politics of descriptions. It must be for these reasons that Rorty, in a famous essay of 1985 entitled “Solidarity or Objectivity?” emphasized the centrality of truth in our philosophical tradition:

The tradition in Western culture which centers around the notion of the search for Truth, a tradition which runs from the Greek philosophers through the Enlightenment, is the clearest example of the attempt to find a sense in one’s existence by turning away from solidarity to objectivity. The idea of Truth as something to be pursued for its own sake, not because it will be good for oneself, or for one’s real or imaginary community, is the central theme of this tradition.¹¹

While most philosophers would agree with Rorty that truth is the central theme of our tradition, not all of them will believe it is responsible for a turn away from solidarity. The origin of this dispute lies in the essence of truth, that is, in its pragmatic nature, without which it also loses its meaning. Truth is not only “violent,” in that it turns away from solidarity, but it is “violence,” because it can easi...