Topic: 18. ZWANGSGELLSCHAFT
1. FORCE DEFINED
Relations between human beings in a "state of nature" would always be coercive. We have already said, and affirm here, that humans as such never were in a state of nature; that as soon as they had technics and tools they were already human in the full sense and lived in society in the full sense of that word. In (again hypothetical) Rousseaus state of nature, the condition of animals, the biggest baboon in the group would get what he wants. That is nature's way. But then, as Rousseau has described, man left the state of nature and entered the state of man. The human being thus gave up a certain freedom, that is to bully to get what he wants; but he also gained a new freedom to create, through intelligence, basic institutions and protections. This according to the Natural Law theorists was the turning point in human life. Thus, for example, unlike a biggest baboon the human being does not need to be a bully to get somethng, but can assert a "right" to that thing. Freedom would consist in these terms the assertion of "rights." Whereas the ape gets a thing by bullying several individuals, the human being asserts himself through the entire group as manifested in the laws and institutions of the group. But we are left with one final consideration. In passing from a state of nature and into a state of man have we not simply substituted one form of coercion for another. Laws and institutions are coercive. Arnold Gehlen, who has been at the center of the Philosophical Anthropology movement, points to the lack of capacity of the human being to live by the laws of nature, according to proverbial rules of tooth and claw, as the reason why humans instituted laws Freedom is what the human has only by virtue of his genetic deficiency, the fact, for instance, that a man has no special physical brute force or personality to coerce anyone to do or give up anything. Humans assert themselves through institutions. The freedom that humans have is the lack of constraint by "nature"; and the oportunity that they have to conceive institutions to replace what nature has deprived them of. The condition of freedom talked about by the Social Contract thinkers is the freedom to create institutions that paradoxically take away freedom. Gehlen says that such a lack of coercion by nature is essentially an empty freedom; it is a freedom from roots and orientation. The human being according to Gehlen is adrift. Gehlen suggests that humans therefore instituted rituals and social form which, even though these forms are often pointless, whereby they find form in life. We could point even to the seemingly empty rituals of religion as ways humans have of coming into relationships that are predictable and fulfilling. Gehlen may have affirmed the rituals of Catholicism and high church--only to reveal their lack of substative truth. The justification of religion by his pragmatic or expedient value is the real critique of religion, to paraphrase Bruno Bauer. We have rid human life of coercion by nature; but only to institute coercion by society. [this section will be for the time under constant revision]
Fascism corrects the fallacy of democracy, which is that the highly hypothetical entity the "voter" is in charge of anything. A good part of government is placing the blame in the event of failure. Under democracy, credit for success falls to the elected leaders; in the event of failure, blame falls upon the people who elected these leaders. But failure is as natural as success. Democracy is not anarchy so much as a state of mental confusion. Whenever we talk of institutions and ideologies we always must place our discussion in the context of modern industrial society. Engels understood communism solely as an outcome of Western civilization; within the context of African culture, on the other hand, any proposal for communism, fascism or democracy, either one, would be meaningless. We search for a general philosophical background for our discussion. Philosophical Anthropology would provide a basis for such a discussion, asserting as it does that thIe key consideration of social philosophy is technology. Insofar as humans use tools they have institutions and these modes of relationship bear discussion in terms of the ideological views we have identified. All the ideologies--communism, fascism and democracy--are ways of articulating the relations between human beings and their own technology-mediated cultures. I have said that the basic human drive, assuming technology, is for identity. Thus communism, fascism and democracy are all philosophies of human identity. But the basic relationship of man to man has already been set by the terms of technology, and more generally by the economy and terms of exchange. Engels was right as far as he went. Communism is not bad economics, necessarily, so much as it provides a false or only partial sense of identity. We are talking of the human being's conception of himself: we are talking, in other words, not of a fascist as opposed to a communist economy so much as we speak of a communist verus fascist conception of man. But the humans for who such theory is relevant are those who are already closest to the technics of their lives. Thus the European man can aspire to the highest philosophy of life, which is Fascist, precisely because he has long been most subjected to the impersonal and depersonalizing technics of his existence. Understanding that fact we may craft good coercive institutions rather than bad ones.
Fascism is not a philosophy that would deprive human beings of freedom so much as it relegates to freedom its proper place in history. The real role of freedom was in the remote past of human beings at the transition between the human being as a grazer and ungulate and, on the other hand, a tool user and technician. At this point in history humans had a wherein they had a choice regarding their own relationships. They could decide, we are saying, that it was "right" according to some formula of quid pro quo that this man should have this and that man should have that. This mentality endures today. But these same institutions, like nature, are inherently coercive. Fascism counters democracy by saying that the best laws are coercive but nevertheless are clearly stated. The best order of society is one is where there is no confusion as to the chain of authority. We know a man is a dictator under the Fascist form of society; we also understand how he came to be dictator; and we also understand the rationale for the coercion that he exerts. Simply knowing that coercion is the basis of orderly human relationships allows, or would allow, humans to adjust their own behavior to these laws and institutions. In short, Fascism is simply honest government. There is nothing that humans understand better than brute oppression; and there is nothing humans understand less that "freedom." There remains the obvious fact that a Fascist state can be run well or poorly. In any case, in the event of failure we know where to put blame.
Fascism has to be understood as an ideology unique to Western civilization and meaningful only within that context. Fascism, communism and democracy are all points of view that grow out an industrial system where chains of authority and relations of purpose are confused and mutually contradictory. Engels has stated this case well for communism; our purpose is not to decry communist theory but to follow its lead. Fascist theory grows out of communist ideology, in good part, just as communism is an inevitable reflex of life within industrial civilization. As Philosophical Anthropologists we are drawing the issue of industrial civilization into the broader question of human existence. This--"alienation"-- is not a modern condition but a primal and perennial condition of man. This is our philosophical-anthropological point of view. To begin with, and of basic importance, there is the fact that there is a confusion of purpose within the industrial society. I showed earlier how this same confusion developed early in human life in the relation between a man and the tools upon which he depended. The tool may be an extension of the man or, finally, the man may be an extension of the tool. Correspondingly, the individual in modern times may serve the society or the society may serve the individual. What we are saying is, simply, institutions have about them a certain authoritarian purpose. Communism as stated by Engels in his book Socialism aspires to define the chain of purpose and authority, putting humans as a species "in command" of its own technology. Earlier, we may suppose, under conditions of hunting and gathering, the "stick" asserted itself not only to enhance the man but to control the man. This confusion, which has extended itself into modern times in the oppression by the industrial civilization--quite aside from the issue of legal ownership--is rectified or reversed, in the view of Engels, by a socialistic system. We concur: Force Theory supports this view that humans must control the system rather than vice versa. Where Fascism departs from communism is not in the determination as to what should happen, but by whom and for whom it should happen. Fascism affirms the progressive principle in life--the aspiration for higher forms--while this ideology denies that the human species has an enduring place in nature; the species [see section] is decadent. Technology and society are made finally to serve not humanity as a whole but a special race of humans who affirm in nature what nature is, a "becoming" what is beyond the species.
Philosophical Anthropology, as the word suggests, is a union of science and philosophy. This is not a blend; rather, on the contrary, philosophy and science have their discrete respective roles. It is crucial in Philosophical Anthropology that its science be called science and its philosophy called philosophy. Examples are not hard to find. I spoke earlier of a large tooth found by paleontologists in Africa. The tooth is too large to be of a modern human; on the other hand the tooth's shape suggest that, indeed, this is a species related to our own. The tooth's biting area is rather flat, unlike that of an ape. The inference can be that this species ate in a manner similar to modern humans, grinding food rather than crushing and stabbing it. But there is more. Chemical analysis of the tooth shows that its owner ate meat. We are talking, then, of a species that ate large animals as food but did not, on the other hand, use teeth to kill its prey. How did protohumans of that period obtain large animals. The only possible conclusion (other than eating carion) is that they used tools and weapons to subdue large game animals. We may stop a minute here and these statements we have now made. The tooth--as a distinct shape that shows a genetic relation to our own teeth--is an ascertainable fact. Also, that the being ate meat is clear. These conclusions are hard science. But we move beyond these conclusions to an area of speculation that, indeed, may be called good speculation--responsible thinking--but, since the actual tools of the being are not present to us (later they will become visible, however), we are in a realm marginal to science, perhaps, but at any rate lacking the "hard" empirical test of science. This speculation we may call "science" in the "soft" sense of the word science. We have not drifted off, in other words, into the netherworld of arcane contemplation where nothing is entirely clear. But that is about to change. Philosophical Anthropology at some point passes over into just such vague speculation. The word "essence" of which Philosophical Anthropologists are so fond is just such an example. What do we mean by "essence"? What we are saying about our field, which is the subject area of this blog, is that science appears to us, under certain conditions, a restraint rather than a help. We want to get beyond science, not to bad science but to new science. The only way to pass from facts that are obvious but old and uninteresting is through a phase of "pure speculation" which is open and nebulous but free and creative. I draw out these observations about PA in order to form a basis of the subject under discussion. We are no longer looking at small objects with definite forms about which we can make definite statements. We have passed on to a much larger subject that includes many humans in complex relationships. We are bound to leave pure empirical science at some point and move on to a certain grandiose vision that bears resemblance to the speculations of Plato and Hegel. We are Hegelians. Engels' views were responsible and serious without being hard science; we follow in his path, hoping, that is, to make a statement that is testable and empirically definable. The point we are making now is rather simple. At present our point is that the ideologies that there are--communism, fascism and democracy--in no way affect the workings of a modern industrial and technological system; they pertain, rather, to the relationship of human beings to these systems. Ideologies of this sort are an afterthought, or after the fact of a system that somehow runs by itself; and it runs without any sense of purpose or direction. All these ideologies--like Philosophical Anthropology itself--are simply statements of human identity in the face of their own technology. They are all attempts to distinguish humans from their own technology. We are saying that PA, unlike fascism, communism and democracy, is a more or less self-conscious, purposive attempt to find a human identity in the technical and industrial system that engulfs us all.
I said earlier that technics is "intelligent." ; that is, intelligence is inherent in technology. Better said, we should add that technology uses the intelligence available to it. Intelligent humans produce intelligent technics. Yet the motive energy of technology shifts at some point to the technics itself, so that it is not humans who intelligently make and use technics, it is the technics which use what intellectual resources are available to it. In Africa technics does not thrive; in Europe it thrives.
Last edited by richard_swartzbaugh (2010-07-13 15:23:49)