Spectral Nationality

Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation

Pheng Cheah

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9780231503600
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This far-ranging and ambitious attempt to rethink postcolonial theory's discussion of the nation and nationalism brings the problems of the postcolonial condition to bear on the philosophy of freedom. Closely identified with totalitarianism and fundamentalism, the nation-state has a tainted history of coercion, ethnic violence, and even, as in ultranationalist Nazi Germany, genocide. Most contemporary theorists are therefore skeptical, if not altogether dismissive, of the idea of the nation and the related metaphor of the political body as an organism. Going against orthodoxy, Pheng Cheah retraces the universal-rationalist foundations and progressive origins of political organicism in the work of Kant and its development in philosophers in the German tradition such as Fichte, Hegel, and Marx. Cheah argues that the widespread association of freedom with the self-generating dynamism of life and culture's power of transcendence is the most important legacy of this tradition. Addressing this legacy's manifestations in Fanon and Cabral's theories of anticolonial struggle and contemporary anticolonial literature, including the Buru Quartet by Indonesian writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer, and the Kenyan writer Ngugi Wa Thiong'o's nationalist novels, Cheah suggests that the profound difficulties of achieving freedom in the postcolonial world indicate the need to reconceptualize freedom in terms of the figure of the specter rather than the living organism.

PART 1

Culture as Freedom: Territorializations and Deterritorializations

THE RATIONALITY OF LIFE: ON THE ORGANISMIC METAPHOR OF THE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL BODY

1

MYTHS OF THE ORGANIC COMMUNITY

In “What Is a Nation?” (1882), Ernest Renan provides an exemplary definition:

The nation, like an individual, is the culmination of a long past of endeavours, sacrifice, and devotion…. A nation is therefore a large-scale solidarity, constituted by the feeling of the sacrifices that one has made in the past and of those that one is prepared to make in the future.¹

As the subject and object of a common inheritance that requires repeated affirmation, the nation is a quasi-natural force from the past that constrains the present and future actions of its members. As a personality in its own right, it exacts sacrifice from them. Renan thus unintentionally captures for posterity the two fundamental characteristics of the idea of organic community. We are told often enough that the nation holds itself together by means of atavistic hallucinations and the violent and oppressive subordination of its members to the larger whole. Accordingly, the idea of organic community is often associated with “bad” nationalism—the Prusso-Germanic nationalism of Bismarck, the National Socialism of Hitler, ethnic fundamentalism and cultural chauvinism in decolonized Asia and Africa, and with totalitarianism in general.² In the conventional history of ideas, the organismic theory of the political body is said to entail the permanent inequality of members within the collective because the individual is seen as an abstraction that must be subordinated to its function within the larger whole qua living organism.³ Moreover, these oppressive consequences are said to issue directly from the theory’s intellectual origins in the German romantic movement understood as a mystical, irrationalist view of life that arose in ideological reaction to the Enlightenment. As Hans Kohn puts it, “the connection between nationalism and tradition received its strongest expression in German romanticism…. Starting as extreme individualists the German romanticists developed the opposite longing for a true, harmonious community, an organic folk community, which would immerse the individual in the unbroken chain of tradition…. To the optimistic idealization of the future, so characteristic of the Age of Enlightenment, the romanticists opposed a similar idealization of the national past.”⁴ Their ideal of the organic state “represented a flight from reality into mythology. It was not a return to any real past; it was an idyllic myth and poetic dream which transfigured the past into a Golden Age.”⁵

One feature of Renan’s definition of the nation is, however, not so easily reconciled with this received understanding of the organic community. For instead of defining organic bonds in terms of biological race or geographical and ethnolinguistic descent, he suggests that the nation is first and foremost a moral project that involves rational willing and consensual acts of self-renunciation. “A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle” (“WN,” 19):

Man is a slave neither of his race nor his language, nor of his religion, nor of the course of rivers nor of the direction taken by mountain chains. A large aggregate of men, healthy in mind and warm of heart, creates the kind of moral conscience which we call a nation. So long as this moral consciousness gives proof of its strength by the sacrifices which demand the abdication of the individual to the advantage of the community, it is legitimate and has the right to exist. (“WN,” 20)

The nation is spiritual because its life issues from purposive moral work in which individualistic interests are sacrificed so that the ideals of the community can be incarnated and given objective existence. This work binds together the nation qua organic whole.

Renan’s definition of the nation is significant because it implies that the concept of “organism,” from which the organismic metaphor of the social and political body is derived, is an important philosophical basis of nationalism. It is difficult to grasp the moral dimensions of the organismic metaphor today because both it and the nation-form are unfailingly read under the sinister sign of ideology and subjected to the profoundest caricature and misunderstanding. In fact, the metaphor was first formulated in German idealist philosophy before the advent of Jena Romanticism. It had a crucial role in Kant’s and Fichte’s moral and political philosophy because it was a response to the question of how freedom could be realized in the world of experience. The historical coincidence of the rise of European nationalism with the decline of the mechanistic metaphor of the state and the corresponding articulation of the organismic metaphor is part of the complex traffic between German idealism and nationalism, philosophy and politics. In the first half of this book, I examine the metaphor’s origins in the German philosophy of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in order to understand its inherent rationality and to reconstruct a more progressive genealogy for it and the nation-form from which it is indissociable. The organismic metaphor persists in the discourse of Third World revolutionary decolonizing nationalism. The second part of the book assesses the metaphor’s continuing feasibility and whether postcolonial nationalism has a future in our global conjuncture. It is important to stress from the outset that I am offering a critique of political organicism. I argue that the organismic metaphor is not plausible in contemporary globalization and that its apparent plausibility in the past masked an entire complex of unanswered questions concerning the transcendence of finitude that it promised. But instead of rehearsing tired arguments about the irrationalism of organic community, I proceed from an understanding of the rationality of organic life itself.

It is useful to begin with a brief consideration of the confusions riddling earlier critiques of organic community that follow from a resolute refusal to acknowledge the organismic metaphor’s rational underpinnings. Written in the aftermath of National Socialism, many of these critiques remain extremely influential in contemporary discourse. They have perpetrated an intellectual-historical myth about the organic community that reduces the organismic metaphor to a manipulative mystification. These critiques can be divided into two main positions. They are not mutually exclusive and can be found in various combinations in a given thinker. The first position is a socioeconomic determinist argument that holds that German organic nationalism is the tendentious hallucination of a marginal intelligentsia who overcompensated for its political inactivity and economic backwardness in the realm of speculative thought. This was, of course, Marx’s view. A harsher formulation holds that early German nationalism was a psychosocial pathology of a socially disgruntled Bildungsburgertum irresponsibly out of touch with political and economic reality. This lack of a reality principle led to disastrous historical consequences when others put their ideas into practice. In Hans Kohn’s words, “the idealism of Fichte, of Hegel, the dreams of Novalis, the brilliant formulations of Schlegel and Adam Muller opened no doors to a responsible mastery of reality. They were, at their best, lofty excursions in the realm of thought …, but dangerous by reason of their claims to explain or change reality through their surrealistic concepts. Yet they exercised a disturbing and profound influence on politics and history in Germany and other lands where the cautious and sober empiricism of a Locke or a Hume, the skeptical and rational clarity of a Descartes or a Voltaire, the critical analysis of a Kant, never took root.⁶

This type of argument invariably conflates German idealism with romanticism and views the organic community as a romantic product, which is denounced as mystical, fantastic, or irrational because it appeals to faith, imagination, and the passions. But this denunciation is not always convincing or unequivocal. Since the same idea is also found in the work of many idealist philosophers who were the architects of elaborate philosophical systems, it is also paradoxically characterized as overly rational to the point that it lacks realism.⁷ The complex links and discontinuities between German idealism and romanticism, especially that of the Jena period, and an evaluation of romantic social and political thought are beyond the scope of this book.⁸ But even if the romantic use of the organismic metaphor is mystical and may have led to an oppressive form of nationalism, this is not an inevitable consequence of the idea of organic community per se. Indeed, the charge that the idea of organic community is irrational is often based on a terminological confusion wherein a critique of the mechanical state based on the understanding (Verstand) is taken as a complete flight from reason without consideration of the philosophical distinction between the understanding and reason (Vernunft) in Kantian and post-Kantian thought.⁹

The second conventional critique points to the inner affinity between the organismic metaphor and German conservatism although it concedes that the metaphor has also been deployed in progressive and democratic political theories. It is argued that since an organism implies slow evolution and growth, the organismic metaphor is fundamentally conservative and, hence, has been more readily used by historicists, such as Gentz and Savigny, to justify conservative politics.¹⁰ In his accounts of the organismic theory of the political body and German conservatism, Karl Mannheim combines both of the above arguments. He suggests that there is an elective affinity between political conservatism and the irrational mysticism of organismic thinking: “conservative thinking tends to favour theological-mystical, or, in any case, transcendental definitions” of state legitimation and mythical transcendence is easily given a historicist inflection.¹¹ However, he gives a sociological-determinist explanation for why German romanticism took on an irrational and mystical cast. Echoing Marx, he suggests that this hypertrophy of metaphysical abstraction is a reflection of and compensation for the political and economic underdevelopment of Germany, especially the political inefficacy of romantic intellectuals and their detachment from their bourgeois class origins.

Romanticism, Mannheim argues, is the first oppositional critique of the capitalist rationalization of the world. It “is … a reception, a collecting of all the [irrational] elements and ways of life, derived ultimately from the religious consciousness, which were pushed aside by the onmarch of capitalist rationalism” (C, 66). “It made it its task to salvage these elements, to lend them a new dignity and to save them from extinction. ‘Community’-bound experience is pitted, in various forms, against manifestations of the turn to ‘society’ … : family against contract, intuitive certainty against rationality, inner experience as a source of knowledge against the mechanistic” (C, 65). But because these intellectuals are socially anomalous and politically inactive, their ideas were incorporated into the ideologies of more politically active social strata such as the feudal powers and landowners. They were also “without interest in the capitalist process or even threatened by it with extinction, and … were, moreover bound by tradition to the lost world forms [Weltgestalten] of the various stages of the pre-capitalist past,” and they used romantic ideas as resources against bourgeois industrialism (C, 66). The strong affinity between mystical organismic ideas and conservatism thus obeys a strict sociological law governing German conditions.

Mannheim’s critique of organismic theory is more incisive because he emphasizes that romanticism is not entirely irrational. “The romantic solution does not destroy the Enlightenment faith in reason, but merely modifies it. The faith in the power of reason, in the capacity of thought, is not abandoned. Only one type of thinking is rejected, the immobile thought of the Enlightenment with its deductions from single principles and mere combinations of rigid conceptual components, and the horizon of potential thinking is expanded only in contrast to this one type” (C, 142). This distinction between the static rationality of the Enlightenment and a more dynamic form of thought is precisely the distinction between the understanding’s mechanical operations and reason’s living procedures. But Mannheim’s repeated identification of organismic thought with romantic mysticism prevents him from affirming the organismic metaphor’s inherent rationality. He is clearly aware that Kant, who provided the first thorough philosophical elaboration of the idea of organism, “foreshadows the growth of the spirit of nationalism and the theory of the ‘ Volksgeist.’” “The great builders of philosophical systems such as Fichte, Schelling and Hegel could only free themselves from the spell ...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• List of Selected Works Cited and Abbreviations
• Introduction. The Death of the Nation?
• Part I. Culture as Freedom: Territorializations and Deterritorializations
• Part II. Surviving (Postcoloniality)
• Epilogue. Spectral Nationality: The Living-On of the Postcolonial Nation in Globalization
• Index