• Registered: 2009-03-17
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Topic: 32. DIGRESSIONS

AXIOMS OF FORCE THEORY (Written for a philosophy forum):

1. A value cannot be derived from a fact. (Hume, Carnap)

2. "Love of one's neighbor" is a value. Therefore, such "love" is not derived from any fact.

3. A fact cannot be derived from a value, any more than vice versa. What is can be derived from what is, but not from what merely should be.

4. If love is a value, it is capable of being expressed only as a value, not as a fact. "Humanitarian practice" is a contradiction in terms.

Apropos the race issue: let's separate value from fact. If we say love our neighbor as ourselves; or love another race as we love our own race--then that's a value decision. Or a point of view based on value.

I know the facts about race. "Superiority" is a value judgement. On the other hand, the idea that certain people are "better" at certain things is an issue of ascertainable fact. It doesn't take an anthropologist to know that blacks are better basketball players. Let's consider. If I valued basketball above all human undertakings, then I could say that black people are "superior" to whites and chinese etc. But I made an original assumption based on value.

I like to clarify these issues. Values have a certain problem about them. They are subjective and relative to individual persons so long as they are not rooted in fact. Fact is what makes a value "true." On the other hand, values are not rooted in fact, as Hume and Carnap showed. Values are always relative.

A consistent racial viewpoint never introduces values into the discussion. Such a view states only that there are racial differences; not that these differences relegate humans to one status or the other in an absolute system of value. I just do not think certain people--and I'm not saying who--think very well. But...who believes that thinking is a criterion for "superiority." (I do, of course, but I know my values are relative and unfounded. they are simple prejudices.)

I think Hume's distinction of fact and value should have ended all humanitarian and even so-called "civilized" values several hundred years ago. It did not. --richard


Later in this blog we raised the issue of fact and value, a distinction by Hume and Carnap.  We want to know, throughout this writing, whether when we say the word "man" we are talking about a fact or a value. 

Humanity and Homo sapiens are two different things, appearing as they do in two entirely different contexts.  They have different etymologies, different meanings; the words have nothing important in common.  Humanity, we are saying, is a kind of concept that is applied to a certain fact.  Humanity is about Homo sapiens in the same sense that marriage is about the nuclear family.  There are many uses of the word "human" in a moral rather than a factual sense.   "Inhumane act" is simply a word applied to the (all too) real fact of cruelty.  But such a concept is not itself  a fact and should not truthfully be considered a fact. The great difficulty in the task we are facing is the commonness of refering to an idea about a fact as something that itself is a fact.  Humanity is respected as something in itself real because as a word   
it is so commonly used to signify something that is real.  When a word is habitually applied to a thing, it would be assumed that the word always means that thing.  The contrary is true.  The word commonly becomes a concept and the concept begins, slowly or rapidly, to drift away from the the original issue of fact.  We do not have to look far for other examples of this drift of concepts and language from their factual basis.  What for instance is a "legal fact"?   It would be truthful to use the word "inhumane" to mean something factual only in the sense of illegal.    I object to the phrase "crimes against humanity" unless it is shown or considered in what sense  humanity is anything real or factual.   Marriage is something we have discussed before.  Marriage in signify mutual obligation is of the same order of idea as humanity.   For now it must suffice to say that humanity and Homo sapiens belong to different orders of being.  Humanity, we are saying, is a word--as in the word's most common context--of a "moral" order.  We are talking here not of an issue of fact but of imperative. In saying "humanity" we are ascribing a cateogory of being wherein one person--you or me--is admonished to act.  There is an issue of right or wrong.   Philosophical Anthropology, which has become a central field in German universities, announced its mission as "the wissenschaft der Menschen."  Much work needs however to be done in clarifying this one word--Mensch--on account of laypersons' prolonged confusion of factual and moral categories of being.    The entire content of Philosophical Anthropology could be the distinction of Homo sapiens from humanity without betraying the stated mission of PA.  Again, I hesitate to leap into an issue that has occupied philosophy for centuries:  the relationships of a word to a concept to a factual thing.    While there is no need to exhaust ourselves on the question, the question is relevant.  Humanity is a certain representation or statement about Homo sapiens.  Certainly thinkers three hundred years ago were aware, more or less, of the extent and nature of the species called Homo sapiens.  These thinkers also used the word "humanity"; were they to be questioned they would assert that what they thought of as humanity "corresponds" to our taxonomic species.

Human life separated from animal life at the moment an ancestral human picked up a stick and thrust it in the face, or waved it in front of, a person he knew.  This "assertion of the stick" was also the human's first social act; society thus appeared.  This second person, confronted by his or her friend's stick, could have been another male or, more likely, the armed male's own female partner.  The effect of the waved stick was mesmerizing; an altogether new cosmic era, of culture and intellectually conceived group life, magically appeared.  All that we know of human life in the purely human, or social, sense, derives (we are saying) from this first display of technology no more sophisticated than a waved stick. Society, we are saying, is the product of leveraged--by tools or weapons--violence.  The force of the stick, we are saying, produces something called "humanity" which is an abstraction from the real biological phenomenon Homo sapiens.  Through the stick the person is "forced" to be a human being.  This is a paradox.  The customary viewpoint is that every person is a member of Homo sapiens simply by virtue of being born into that species.  In fact, and here is where our focus is, a person is by birth a human being and more.    We may say the same of animal species.  A dove or dog is a member of a species and something more.  In fact, what is mutationally beyond the species definition acts, slowly or rapidly, to crowd out the species itself.   There is a tendency of the species to act on its own behalf to maintain a stable form; this it does through hybridization or a certain hostility born into creatures to purge members which or who depart from form.   But this conservative effect is reversed in nature, finally, by new forms which appear "radically."  The words radical and race have the same etymological history.    First the individual, and then the entire race, overwhelms and supplants the species.   Society, we are saying, reverses this order of nature.  Society acts aggessively not at first to purge the species of individuality and race but to affirm, rather, only species traits.  The species is supported and fostered at the expense of racial qualities, thus inhibiting the natural process wherein the old species dies to be replaced by the new one.  Society as we understand the word exists on behalf of only Homo spiens and proactively frustrates and even eliminates any movement that would supplant this species.  I will speak often of slavery.   Slavery is the active process--of force and intimidation--wherein the "stability" of the species Homo  sapiens is achieved.  Slavery in the way we define the word is simply the application of leveraged violence to achieve a status of generality commensurate with the support of the generality of society itself.  The slave master cannot find in a slave a match for his, the master's, individual needs; this, since every human being is different than every other, would be an impossible fit.   What the slave master strives to do, then, is to achieve through his stick and (what completes his stick) the slave a general accomodation of his, sthe master's, needs.  All society aspires to a staid and stable generality to the outer limit or form of the species Homo sapiens, which is the species compatible with the idea of leveraged violence.  Through this process, were it not for the pure violence of the race phenomenon, would end biological evolution.  All change would end with the human being by virtue simply of his society.

We return to the idea of slavery.This is a word, slavery, that has long and loosely been used; in the use of the word slavery here we must be careful.  In any case, what is avered is that the first use of leveraged force ("the stick") the effect was to affirm human species traits at the expense of racial and evolutionary traits.  The slave is one forced to be a human being and nothing more.    Our concerns are not new; they have appeared here and there throughout traditional philosophy, but only as bits and snatches.  We are trying here to be more organized.  We are saying that New Force Theory, building on the older ideas of the German economist Duhring, asserts that society consists of relations established through "the authority of the stick."  The homely stick, as it lies on the ground waiting for the intelligent vision of a human passer-by, is the essential subject matter of our entire discourse.  We will not depart very far here from that stick!   Where force theory differs from traditional free market and communist thinking is in stressing, as it does, the role of technics in building a hierarchy of humans.  But there is more.  In this paragraph I am attempting in a brief space to draw a relationship between, on the one hand, the human social proclivity, and on the other hand the issue of race.  Race is the dominant concern of our time, not in any positive way but as the source of extreme disruption.  We are hoping to address this grave issue in a calm manner.  But it is necessary to stress, as well, the effect of society--in the primal act of leveraged (tool-induced) intimidation--that the issue that presently exists here regarding race (from the Latin word radix or root) has its source in the particular interaction with society as a concept and, on the other hand, a concept of the species Homo sapiens.  Society exists solely for human beings, but only as human beings.   We are left to consider, in general, what Force Theory says about society.   Force Theory goes beyond simple sociological speculation but stands, rather, as a critique of society in relation to the broader issue of biological evolution.  Force Theory is a refutation of society in society's role in the subversion of nature.  Society inhibits evolution.  What that subversion is is the next phase of our presentation.

Society affirms the human being only in his species traits but denies the human being in his individual and racial traits.  Society is an environment that replaces nature itself (defined as anything in the world that is not precisely human) and one that favors only the existing species traits of Homo sapiens.  Society is a world that does change around the species Homo sapiens--even animal species change in order to accomodate human beings as Homo sapiens--while affirming the species as it always has been.  Humanity is the abstract form of the Human species as this species is affirmed by society.   Society provides a world in which no species evolves spontaneously, only at the behest of human beings;  meanwhile the species Homo sapiens endures forever as it always has been.   We talked of society as a structure of slavery in which every person is affirmed as a slave.  We mean here a slave of society, as society was instituted through the technological intimidation of one person by another.  The effect of slavery, that is society itself, has been to purge all traits from the person except those amenable to slavery, that is, the most general traits of humans as Homo sapiens.  The principle established in this connection is that the  master was originally best served in his general needs by the person who was generally human.  So, only generally human persons were regarded as members of the master's society.  This affirmation of the generality of the human being, as member of the species Homo sapiens, has tended to perpetuate only the species characteristics of Homo sapiens but has denied and hindered those traits which were mutant and threatened the established form of the species.  Such traits, when they were successful and viable, and so were spread around among a number of individuals, constituted in effect the racial character that appeared within the species form of Homo sapiens.  The race if continued would subvert the species Homo sapiens.  Throughout biological nature, on the other hand, species do disappear and are replaced by the races--in effect new species--that appear within these old species.  Society, as an invention of humankind, and one according to the abstract ideas of humankind--which would affirm and perpetuate their own species as a fixed form--acts to suppress the race.  The human being in his capacity as Homo sapiens acts against, precisely, what is evolving within himself and would finally surpass himself to become a new species.   

It  is possible, and it often happens, that a word or a concept separates over time from its factual basis.  That is the case with humanity and Homo sapiens.   Earlier I used the word representation.  I feel that "representation" means a statement about a human relationship along with a declaration of a standing in that relationship   If I represent myself as  a citizen of the US , I am saying that I not only am a citizen of the US but  should be treated as such.  I am setting myself in a relationship of mutual rights and obligations with other persons.    There are other representations of this sort.  If I represent myself as "married," I am treated as though I am married.  In one state, Colorado, if a couple represents itself as married, the man and woman are considered by the state legally married.  I have talked about marriage earlier and consider that issue relevant to the issue of humanity.  Humanity is essentially the same kind of representation as marriage.   Humanity is a "statement" of sorts about the relationship a person is in by virtue of being Homo sapiens. If I am born in the US I am automatically a citizen of that country.  Likewise, membership in humanity is regarded as automatic so long as the person is taxonomically Homo sapiens.  But there is more.  Along with such citizenship goes certain rights and responsibilities.  It follows that being a human being is a status that brings with it certain obligations.  Unlike under terms of marriage, the obligations that fall upon a member of humanity by virtue of that membership are vague.  Where they come from is also unknown.  Where do these obligations come from, however?   Such obligations cannot be derived from the absolute fact of the taxonomic species.   Where the categorical imperative comes from is anyone's guess.  I do not want to speculate here.  In any case, like the institution of marriage, the concept of humanity is a moral category, not a fact.  In all the words that there are expended daily, in conversation and newsmedia, the distinction between the concept and the fact is lost.  The political authority that there is, that controls many of my actions, says--and citizens generally accept this as true--that my membership in humanity, and the obligations such membership brings, is a fact.   That I am Homo sapiens is a fact; that I am a member of humanity, however,  is not a fact--it is someone else's, not my own, idea.     

The word Homo sapiens, on the other hand, contains no imperative but is simply an issue for scientists.  Homo sapiens is a thing of science we can safely leave to biologists and physical anthropologists.  As such--since our objectives here are more philsophical than anthropological--Homo sapiens will not be a topic of discussion.  The methodology of this essay, Philosophical Anthropology, has a history starting in Germany circa 1920 with the work of Max Scheler Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos.  This is a seminal work in philosophy and one from which, in the basic concepts and methods, later Philosophical Anthropologists--Arnold Gehlen and Helmuth Plessner to mention two--have not fundamentally departed.  The objective of these writers was to formulate a Wesensbegriff des Menschen or a view of a so-called essence of Man.  Examples are straightforward and simple.  Gehlen, for instance, defined the essential trait of a human being (who could be Homo sapiens or in a higher sense Humanity--as a Mangelwesen, or creature of deficiency.  The human being was deficient in biological weapons of defense and attack; he was slow moving and lacked biological, gene-based features that would allow him to survive; survival was left to his own creativity.  We are not inclined at this early point to review all the basic ideas of Philosophical Anthropology that there are; more of this will be left to later.  At this early time in our essay I want to point out, simply, that the early Philosophical Anthropologists never were clear about whether the thing or phenomenon they were talking about was Humanity or Homo sapiens.

Just how humanity and Homo sapiens come together occupies us, probably, in the same way that astrologers and astronomers are both aware of each other and likewise cautious of each other.   Of course a certain amount of confusion is likely wherever the methods are "philosophical"; thus this discipline, which has only just begun in recent times, has an excuse for vagueness.  What the quality of "humanness" was in the human being--where a person was human because of his humanity or his membership in the biological species Homo sapiens--was simply taken for granted.  It is taken for granted in the vast literature about human beings that what is meant by Homo sapiens is Humanity and vice versa.  We here are making no such assumption.  In saying this, while adopting some of the main concepts and methods of Philosophical Anthropology--for instance, that we focus upon "early man" to find the direction and essential nature of human life in civilization of later times--our main purpose is to move beyond this earlier discipline.  I propose a word taken from Eugen Duehring, Force Theory, to indicate a newer version of Philosophical Anthropology.  Our purpose is to reject the word Humanity as the moral imperative of human action and, on the other hand, to allow the substitution a likewise venerable word "race" or "rasse" to take its place.  There is no need to understand a moral proposition as opposed to a factual proposition.  In this short paragraph certain confusion is likely.  Human society, so far as this can be understood as a worldwide community, is based on the idea of humanity, which is the "moral" representation of Homo sapiens.  Society is a community of humanity.  Humanity for its part is the abstract summation of the species character of members of Homo sapiens.  Throughout this essay I will strive to produce better formulations of this principle.  Humanity is itself the species definition, but not the individual or racial definition, of the human species.  Humanity means that the definition of Homo sapiens includes only those traits which are species traits as opposed, say, to racial traits.  Later I will clarify this statement. The word humanity is a moral word insofar as the word supports a social institution and, as such, is affirmed by the masses of people.  This is true of the concept of humanity within the context of slavery.   Humanity consists solely of human beings who are nothing but human, and in this sense amenable to the universal and technological terms of slave society.  The passage of slave society into democracy does not change this.  Democracy proposes simply that humans enslave one another, so that, in other words, the person is a master and a slave at the same time.  This is true "mutuality."

Humanity is a word best understood sociologically.  Humanity as a concept means nothing outside the context of society; the concept is an abstraction from the species idea of Homo sapiens but one that includes, we are saying, only species traits.  As society itself is open to all human beings, humanity itself as the support of society is an absolutely general word.  Humanity is a word or concept devoid of any meaning that is not general and universal.  Thus, even while this idea supports society, humanity for that very reason as a concept excludes any notion of race or individuality. We are talking here only about the history of a word.  It is assumed that "humanity" is a product--the main product--of the European Enlightenment and, earlier, insights by the great thinkers of all time.  This is not the case.  Humanity as a concept originated much earlier, not in rebellion against institutions so much as an acceptance of them.  I suggest that the words humanity, human being, mankind and so forth are the great lie of all time.  The true sense of the words is not liberation of the individual so much as, on the contrary, bilateral enslavement.  Democracy means what marriage means:  mutual ownership.  To understand democracy in these terms is to resolve certain basic paradoxes of "rule of the ruled by the ruled."  This is a contradiction but one readily understood.  We may look at the history of humanity as a concept (of course the words change over time).   The concept "humanity" antedates all modern institutions and appears, rather, in ancient customs of slavery--not to oppose slavery but to support it.  The buden of proof will be upon ourselves as we attempt to prove this radical thesis. 

But the burden is not hard to bear.  We live in the conceit and complacency of a "liberated" time and place.  The great ideologies of freedom, whether democratic, communistic or christian "freedom," all oppose slavery in any terms.  And to adduce this position is promoted a concept of a "human being" whose great potential is in his freedom.  New Force Theory maintains the opposite view.   A human being, so long as this human being is first and foremost a human being--as opposed to an individual or a racial type--is not one who resists slavery but one, on the contrary, who submits to it.  That is why slave societies have promoted a concept of "man":  this is the person most amenable to slavery.  It is in his individual and racial qualities that the person rebells against slavery; that is why slave societies repress individual and racial qualities.  But there is more.  The slave society is the only society in sensu stricto  that there is; as such this human grouping acknowledges no purely subjective (individual and racial) boundaries.  Society everywhere strives for maximum inclusion.  What is approriate to a slave is that he is nothing more than a human being.  But a universal society--which is what every society potentially is--requires a universal human being.  To eliminate individual and racial qualities, in other words, from the masses of potential human beings that there are is to open the possibility of a universal society, which any society strives to become.  The key word is inclusion.  A human being can be included only so long as he is only a human being and nothing more than a human being.  Finally, what is democracy as a philosophy of "liberation"?     In the face of individuality, democracy has resolved the conflict between slavery and individuality, not by liberating individuals, truly, so much as declaring them masters of the slaves that are themselves.  But a slave does not become free when, as democracy forces him to do, takes possession of the person already enslaving him.  What we have left is bilateral slavery, which may well be slavery at its worst (in any case it is slavery at its most complicated).

Last edited by richard_swartzbaugh (2010-11-19 15:08:03)

  • Registered: 2009-03-17
  • Posts: 349

Re: 32. DIGRESSIONS

New Force Theory is focused, not on the opposition between society and nature, but upon the opposition between species and race, with society, for its part, based on the decadent species principle.   Humanity is the social form of the species Homo sapiens.  Any social act whatsoever, on any human level of interaction, affirms and supports the entire species.  To be social is to be human and show solidarity with other humans, but only insofar as these humans are only human and nothing more than human.   What is affirmed in one person by another person in a social relationship is only general traits.  The effect of the human social relationship is to affirm "humanity" in every person and thus, indirectly, cast the species Homo sapiens within a rigid form.  Within the context of society, the human species cannot change; or it is discouraged from changing.  The principles active here are not difficult to understand.  The effect of society as human behavior is to enhance and protect existing species boundaries.  In this sense the very idea of humanity, which is the ideology of the Human species and society, is counter-evolutionary.  Society itself can change in small degrees or radically and revolutionarily; but the overall effect is for humanity to counter all movement wherein the species is surpassed and replaced.  Thus, a social bond with an immediate neighbor, say, in effect and in the long term supports a human being in the most remote corner of the world.  A social act is in effect a humanitarian act.   We are not speaking of charity, simply, but an affirmation of a human being in his species character;  and thus, finally, the whole human species as such is affirmed.   But we are affirming this person who is distant from us in space only in his species, not his individual or racial, characteristics.  We may tolerate a pygmy or bushman, of course, but we do not affirm him except in his capacity as a human being like we are and one capable of the society that we have for ourselves.   In supporting the pygmy we are supporting the species form, or those traits which delineate or define the species and distinguish it from other species.  Society is based on those traits of the human being--such as capacity for language--which make society possible.  It is tempting to speak here of some proclivity of humans as social beings to desire conformity, that is, in those traits that promote society and, indirectly, the entire human species.  To be social, all considerations of charity aside, is to be humanitarian, to support humans as human beings everywhere in the world.  Society in these terms has a biologically conservative result.   That is, to be humanitarian means to promote species traits at the expense of individual ones.  However, there is more.    Social development or progress, which is the asiduous work of all humans, serves only to frustrate the natural process of evolution wherein the species exists only to engender and harbor those forms which will finally replace the existing species.  Social progress--in the morality of humanitarianism--attempts, mostly unsuccessfully, to hinder new and biologically progressive forms.  This effort to preserve adecadent form fails.   Having built itself as humanity on a decadent biological form--the comleted species Homo sapiens--society itself, and humanity as the social form of Homo sapiens--is fated to disappear.  This is the inevitable result of organic evolution against which there is no protection.  Race is the agent of this vital uprising.  That is why society so opposes the idea of race.

I have developed a framework and context for saying that humanity--which is the moral affirmation of Homo sapiens--is contrary to nature.  I will explain.  Homo sapiens as any species is "decadent."  A species is what has become and exists only as a transition to a new form of life that is expressed, already, in the race.  The species by definition has already within it all the possibilities that there could be; only one--the race--is still becoming.    Thus the moral imperatives that there are--collectively called "humanitarianism" or affirmation of humanity--only serve, with all the cleverness that human beings have, to counter nature herself.  Nature's plan is that what at any moment we call the species will pass away, or be surpassed by the race emerging out of the species.  As the individual by definition is a decadent predecessor of the child, so the so-called human race will disappear.  But society exists at any given moment with the sole intention of sustaining the species at the expense of the race.  The race then stands in relation to the species, and in relation to the society that supports the species (in this case Homo sapiens), as the destroyer of both the species and human society.  At the same time, however, through the race nature has advanced so that, obviously, there will be a new society and new possibilities.  We may review some of the literature on the relation of culture to nature and find nothing that contradicts what is said here at present.  In Rousseau's theory, society breaks from nature.  In the Romantic German view (Spengler, Klages etc.), human society not only breaks with nature, society opposes nature.   New Force Theory proposes only a refinement of these views.  Force Theory says that human beings do not intentionally oppose nature or even depart from it.  There is a clear advantage, all humans say, in acknowledging nature--in this case biological nature--and accomodating it.  The defect in society, on the other hand, and the one that finally dooms any given society in particular, is the fact that humans as social beings based their social life on the species rather than on any element within the species.  Society acknowledges one facit of nature--the species--while ignoring another, the race.  The view of humans as social beings is that whatever attacks the species, which is the "humanitarian" foundation of society, attacks also the society.  But the species is a living form among other; as such the species already carries within it what will destroy it.  I speak of the race, which is a new species in the act of becoming.   I have already discussed the reasons for society's inclusion of species beings:  they are the most numerous and most amenable by virtue of their species characteristics. The race is a relatively limited group whose character is expressed in change and becoming; an unsuitable basis, in other words, upon which to build a lasting society.   Society as itself an expansive--inclusive--force would include all human beings capable of society, which are all members of the species Homo sapiens.  I made this clear earlier.  But there is more.  The species is precisely the already decadent dimension of living nature.  The species is like the backwaters of a river, where there are swamps and bogs and rotting vegetation.  In the middle of this great decadent bog, on the other hand, flows a vital river; this is the race.  Society collapses because it bases itself on precisely what in nature has become but now is in decline; so it is that society itself passes away, inevitably, with its rotting foundation.

In der Literatur werden häufig Ableitungen vom lateinischen „radix“ (Wurzel im genealogischen Sinne), von „generatio“ (Geschlecht im genealogischen Sinne, aber auch „Art“, im Sinne von „Wesen eines Dings“), sowie „ratio“ (ebenfalls in der Bedeutung „Wesen eines Dings“ oder „Art und Weise“) beschrieben.  Wikapedia.de  Consistently, but not with iron certainty, the word race (German: rasse) appears derived from words of both Indo-European and Arabic languages that suggest "root" and "origin." Strangely, indeed, there is even a possibility that the word race descends from Arabic where, in a non-Indo-European language family the sound and sense are the same as in our own languages.  There is always a chance that these etymological researches are off track.  But there is a stubborn and persistent sense of the word "race" that should make race not anathema to philosophy but at the philosophy's very center. What is often said of the everyday use of the word--that the word is vague and undefinable--is obviously correct.   It is a word bandied around loosely, according to a person and group's situation.  Its history in civilization is venerable.   The word "being" is vague, used as it is in every sentence spoken (as "is" and "are"--Heidegger); but philosophy is only challenged to isolate and define "being." We are taking the position here that the word race has, or should have, a status in philosophy comparable to the word being.  The methodology and problem area of this essay will be, corresponding to the training and inclinations of the writer, within the tradition of philosophical anthropology.  This will not be an empirical study; allowances will be made for the vagueness of the subject.  This subject is both Homo sapiens, the species, and Humanity.  I say both.  There are actually two topics at issue; our purpose is not to combine them but to separate them.  Our sole purpose, it appears at this juncture, is to identify the idea of Humanity for what it is--a moral, not a scientific, category.  We want to show also, again using the basic concepts of Philosophical Anthropology, the role of the idea of Humanity in social institutions we identify as "democratic."  As our essay progresses we propose to show how Humanity, as a concept, is contrary toreality.   The idea of race is introduced.  The notion of race, as we present it, spans the divide between science and philosophy.   Race is a fundamental concept without which no understanding of the present human situation is possible.     We are proposing that race and being are synonymous concepts.  In the case of "race" we could even argue that race is a principle of the greatest cosmic proportions and one closely connected to being itself, as the root or origin of being.  In the idea of race we are moving in the direction, I aver, of ultimate reality.  Race is where we came from and where we are going.   Any sense of the meaning of a word--and any notion of whether such a word can simply be dropped from our vocabulary--may come from perusing the history of this word.  The word race, I suggest, can no more be abandoned, on grounds of philosophy or science either one, than can the word "being" which is in every sentence we speak.  We are "bound" to race as we are bound to being.

The word Race is used in this section as a counter-concept to the word Humanity.  Race is not seen as anything within Humanity; rather it is the antithesis and eventual replacement of Humanity.  Opposed to this assertion is a vast corpus of democratic theory, which we now oppose.  The word Humanity is the most important word in democratic theory; we now challenge the word Humanity.   We are not going to dispute the word Humanity on grounds of vagueness; on the contrary.  Humanity as a word has been made precise, however, only by giving it a logical consistency that deprives the word of any real content.  We become human, in other words, or acquire the prescribed shared humanity, only by excluding all personal qualities--among them the quality of race--that makes us real to ourselves.  Humanity has become universal only by expunging from itself particular content.  But there is more.  Actual democratic institutions, as they appear in practice, reflect this categorical denial of personality and race or anything about the person, his individuality, that is not universally "human."  Our task is not empirical science, here, but philosophy; a task, in other words, consistent with Philosophical Anthropology.  We may elaborate as follows.  Humanity is a word with a premise and a clear definition, a word, moreover, that is at the basis of our civilization--the Democratic West--as we know it.    Mankind is a synonym.   Humanity and Mankind are also words that have within their premise a logical contradiction.   They are words that, consistent with the world or global mission of a nation (now) such as America, have the intent to include the largest number of beings possible.  No boundaries, national or regional or racial, should inhibit this mission.   Democracy, on the pretext of Humanity, politically includes all persons considered universally human.  I will stress the point that the purpose of Democracy, as with Christianity and Communism, is inclusion.  The broadest number of persons included requires, on the other hand, the broadest conception of what a human person is.  This is an act of thinking or theory that precedes action.   "Universality" itself is not empirical but logical.  It is arrived at through an act of abstraction.  Those traits of a human being that are not uiniversal to all humans are excluded from the definition of Humanity.  There is a simple formula whereby this accomplished.  We do not need to elaborate further.    This is the way the words are written into the sacred documents--we mention our Declaration of Independence, our Constitution, the Gettysburg Address and so forth--of our Nation.  They are also impossible words.  They are impossible because, in professing to include a great number of beings--all so-called human beings--they must exclude everything about a human being that is individual and particular.  We are left with meanings of Humanity and Mankind with a perfectly abstract entity that could not possibly be a real human being.  But there is still more.  In order to compensate for this obvious deficiency of the word Humanity--and theorists of Democracy have seen the problem--there is, added to Democratic theory as a sort of adjustment to an inbalance in the theory--a notion of tolerance.  Those features of an individual person--or whole race--that are not universally human, and so are not written into the formula of democracy, are "tolerated."  That means, these traits, while in themselves obstacles to democracy, are "adjusted for" and forced into a relationship within the system that is compatible.

What should our purpose be in this forum? Certainly we should expunge from the word race any sense sts whom we trust to be honest.  To identify, rather, the moral content of the word humanity is our purpose; and to release the word race, as the categorical opposite of Humanity, from its moral stigma.  Disproving the moral word Humanity has the effect, we are saying, of vindicating the word race.  Such a view may be considered "anti-democratic."  All the pronouncements of New Force Theory are un- and anti-democratic either directly or indirectly.  Again, we must agree on a definition of democracy.  But there is more.  The approbrium that has befallen our word race has resulted from all the politics that there is in the world.  People don't like each other; this disposition we cannot call unhealthy because it is so widespread.  On the other hand, we have to separate the everyday politics of the word from its philosophical/ontological ("concerned with being") meaning.  It should simply be beneath anyone to distract us from our high purpose by charges of garden variety "racism."  So-called bigoted behavior is an altogether different issue than the one before us.    Let psychologists deal with that.  Racism in the ordinary sense is simply an instinct (and, we are saying, a healthy one); our aspiration is to rise above instincts in pursuit of knowledge for its own sake.  We may aspire to a pure theoretical idea of race. That has been my intention all along.  I suggest that as persons who are philosophically aware we should restore the word race to its rightful place as a central concept of being.

Today science is applied to the term "race."  Discussion as to the validity or invalidity of the word race has centered on the objectivity of the word.  In science, any word needs a precise definition.  That is where we stand now on the "science" of race.  The American Anthropological Society's Statement on Race  [cite] proposes that the word be abandoned for want of scientific rigor.  This proposal may be legitimately argued.  Any word, we are saying, may be dropped from scientific use on grounds of vagueness or lack of specific application.  I do not really believe the word race should be dropped, however; as an anthropologist I could say race means simply variety.  Variety is a general concept in biology and can be applied to human beings among other species.  But taxonomy is really not our issue here.  Nor really, is the taxonomy of humans, as one species among others, precisely an issue for anthropologists.   We can leave the biological questions to biologists.   As an anthropologist who is not a biologist I should say taxonomy is not my area of expertise.  We can leave the whole question of race in a scientific sense--whether race is a good scientific or taxonomic word--to trained biologists.  We may trust their judgement.   Where Force Theory is concerned the word race is not simply a valid word, it is a central concept.  The word race remains, of course, as vague for philosophy as it does for science.  But that is the proper business of philosophy:  to translate vague concepts into language that is precise as possibly.  Science and philosophy are somewhat at odds at this point.  Science tends to avoid questions that lack precise quantification and objectivity.  Philosophy on the other hand does not shy away from nebulous reality. 

Force Theory presents an etymological "proof" of the centrality of race in philosophy.   The "proof" of the "etymological reality" of race is the persistence, through countless languages and from ancient times, of the word race.  The word derives, perhaps, from radix (Latin) meaning root and origin.  But there are no doubt countless languages before Latin in our line of ancestry.  Where there is a word, we are saying, is a concept; and the concept talked about here is a venerable and central one.  What I said in my earlier post, however, is this:  race as a word--as razza (Middle French) or some other word--has long been, in all its vagueness, a seminal and fundamental concept of our culture.    I suggest that race is a word on the order of "being."  Being, we may say, is an much used word--it is in every sentence as "is." (Cf. M. Heidegger)  Being (Sein) itself is vague.  All I say is:  we can use the word race if we want to talk about "origins," of human beings, of us as individuals or of the entire cosmos.   Race may be held to be the "origin of existence."  What is being asserted here, finally, is that far from being a word to avoid--as some anthropologists would have us do--"race" should be embraced as our very reason for existence.  There is the consideration, basic to philosophy and science alike, that an entity--here we are talking about human beings--contains the thing that is its, meant here the person's, source.  (Note and later make sense of:  E.Heckel's "Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.")   The thing in which a being originates is the being's essence.  In this principle Darwinism meets Hegelianism.  New Force Theory makes that point. 

What I have said in this section is on the other hand by no means to be taken as a rejection of scientific racism.   Were we to assert that some races are more intelligent, say, or more atheletic, we would be taking upon ourselves a higher burden of proof (but by no means an impossible burden of proof) than we need to.  We are only saying we will leave science to the scientists.   Force Theory has so far made mostly statements of obvious or prima facie truth. There is not much here we are trying to prove, which, in a court of law, would be the best position to be in.   To repeat:  we are not trying to prove that some races are higher or lower than others or even different;  that is for others to affirm or deny.  "Eymological Racism," as we call it, claims only that race is a valid, meaningful word, as "root" of existence.  Our claims are only about the meaning and derivation of words while proof or disproof of these claims would have to come from etymologists, not anthropologists.   For the physical and biological sciences, precisely, there is a higher standard of truth--rigor and exactitude and experimental throughness--than there is for us.  If there is science anywhere in New Force Theory it would be in a minor area.  The small area of which we speak is the "science" of etymology, calling our position as we do simply an affirmation of a word, not of a reality.   This type of argument reduces itself to finally a "fallacy" called argumentum ad populum.  There remains only to say whether "the people" are right or wrong.  Race is the unconscious sense of the people.   We say that until New Force Theory race has not even risen to the level of a logical principle.  Race rather is embedded in the unconscious of "the people."  Again, we call our position etymological racism.  The history of a word, we are saying, "proves" the validity of the concept the word signifies.  For us presently that is science.

Last edited by richard_swartzbaugh (2010-04-15 14:11:53)

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Re: 32. DIGRESSIONS

A human being is a slave, merely.  The generality of his form suits him to both membership in humanity and society.  Our position is that the term and concept "human being" derives from the instituion of slavery in very ancient times, even before the classical civilizations.   A "human being" is the person defined since the human era of technology as one best fit for slavery.  One person exercises the aforementioned "authority of the stick"; this authority becomes a generality that elicits a response from a person who himself conforms to this generality.  The slave, as I already said, completes the "stick"' but the stick is an abstract idea that comands the respect only of a person whose form is likewise general and abstract.  The particularity of a stick is completed only by the abstract generality of a slave.  We are speaking first of a condition of the human species that set in already in the paleolithic cultural period.  Technology of course has since then evolved to much greater refinements.  Humans still use this technology as weapons of enslavement and ones, furthermore, that are effective only by humans who are themselves abstract extensions of that technology.  So, while the man in control of technics--and thus in control of society--is disposed in an abstract and general way, the slave at the opposite end of the stick must comply.  In so complying the human being becomes "just" a human being, that is, a member of society and of humanity as the abstract form of the species Homo sapiens.  But there is more.  A "human being" lacks all traits except those suited for slavery.  A human being is an extreme generalization that conforms to the generalization of a functioning member of the slave class.  Particularity and individuality is reserved for the master class, wherein persons are not human, precisely, but more than human.  Nietzsche in his notion of "slave morality" began this discussion, but he did not carry it far enough.  Nietzsche proposes a person who bases a morality on his own condition of subjugation and the wish to rise above that condition.    Equality with the master would be the longed for condition.   But the issue of "humanity" is far deeper than this.   We are saying here, on the contrary, that the ideal of humanity and "human being" originates not with the slave, who has little to say on any issue, but, as with most new things, in the mind of the master.  Slavery--and citizenship--is an idea in the mind of a master as to what a slave (or citizen) should be.  The slave--and the "human being"--is a product of the culture of the master.  In effect, we are saying, the word and concept slave becomes over time "citizen."  This generality of the slave is finally the basis of everything we call society--or mutual slavery.  We search even now for the concept of ideal citizen, and we see already the outline of the slave mentality. 

Force theory proposes that the nature and purpose of society--which is slavery--follows from the precise circumstances under which society originated.  I suggest the word "display" is critical to our understanding.  Traditional anthropology holds that a "tool," or artifact, has a "natural application" which is,  in our terminology, a technological application.  The purpose of a tool, it is said, is technological.  What we propose is simple. Natural law theory states that the human being is a creature of society, wherein the morality of all human relationships is derived.  The human being exits nature to reside in society, to his great benefit.   Society and nature are opposed.  Society provides laws of good relationships; nature provides no standards or choices.   Force Theory follows traditional theory as to the separation, and even opposition, of nature and society.  Still, having separated society from nature, we do not yet understand society.  At the heart of the anthropological viewpoint is a notion of the human being at a turning point in his history.  At some point the human, or protohuman, acquired tools and technology, which led to this "separation" from nature.  Again the theory we now propose, New Force Theory, does dwell upon the fact of technology and the role technics play in "separating" man from nature.   There is at this point, however, a divergencess of Force Theory from traditional anthropology.  Academic anthropology has emphasized the technics of technology; Force Theory stresses technology's  social side.  Anthropology says that the "purpose" of the tool, as leveraged force, is technological:  the tool manipulates the world around human beings, leaving human persons and groups "freedom."   Humans use tools to make for themselves a better world in which to live.   Thus, if a hunter has tools or weapons that best kill animals for food, the family of the hunter has a better chance to survive.  New Force Theory takes a different view.  We propose here that the first use of tools was not primarily to manipulate a world, so much as they were used to manipulate human beings.  Thus the first use of tools was social, not technological.  We must consider the meaning of the word "display" used by anthropologists to describe certain behavior of chimpanzees which, having a stick or branch, wave it in front of group members.  Display mesmerizes or "impresses" members of the group into submission.

ln waving a stick in front of a female (we are saying) the early human could coax her into sex; this would leave the male (we are saying) with more genetic offspring.  In an earlier version of this same material I said that the male's relation with the female was the main purpose of waving (using) the stick.  I now maintain that the display of the stick was to threaten all the members of his group into a certain order and submission.  We are moving in the direction of a general theory of society.  New Force Theory now says that the act of using a stick as a weapon, and using it in relation to members of one's familial group, was the first act of society.  The man with the stick was master; the others "slaves."  But there is more.  Once departing the relative "freedom" of the State of Nature, and entering the word of the unfreedom of the "stick," human beings forged agreements all of which pertained to the use of or restraint from using  stick.   The handshake and Rule of Thumb were symbols of the general recognition of the authority of the stick.  The rules and laws of society--that constituted the ideological infrastructure of society--specified situations and relationships in which the stick was not to be used.  An 'agreement" was simplly the abjuring  of weaponed violence.  In marriage the issue of property in humans was addressed:  the woman was still property of the man, but she simultaneously made property of the man.  Man and woman owned each other.  In different ways what we think of as the moral and ideological structure of society appeared as a careful understanding about the use of weapons in interpersonal relationships.   Society in an intellectual sense would then be to create understanding about a leveraged violence and slavery that had replaced the earlier State of Nature.

Society, as Force Theory understands the word,  bases itself on the species character, not on the individual or race character, of the human being.  There is a simple example of what we are talking about in principle.   We have already talked about marriage.  The nuclear family, or male and female in a reproductive mode, is what marriage is "about."  Marriage is a specifically human invention, made possible by the human's capacity for speech and promises.  I have already talked about "agreements."  The reproductive human unit (nuclear family), on the otther hand, is not itself cultural but purely instinctive.  Marriage then is a human invention that is "about" the nuclear family even while not being precisely "of" the family.  Marriage is not "about" the male or female or children in particular, but "about" the three in general.   As a rule I tend to accept common biological and sociological principles that are taught to beginning students in the behavioral sciences and remain accepted principles within the scientific and academic communities.  This is where I got my own training.  In the course of private investigation, on the other hand, where one is not tied daily to a discipline, certain ideas inevitably intrude--such as the opposition of race and species, that, in turn, lead to new speculations.  An old idea, and one I accept, is that it is necessary to distinguish, as anthropologists do, between a physical or biological entity and the cultural institution that represents the entity.  As anthropologists are aware, the lay public in general is not careful in separating, as idea and reality, the two phenomena.  Our purpose here is to be fastidious in that regard.  The word society pertains to just such a biologically-given thing.   But that thing is the entire human species, not any mutational part of it.   Society is not "about" the private person or the individual race.  These things may be "just tolerated," but what a society is "about" is the generality of persons.  Therefore, in any discussion or disagreement between people-in-general and particular people, the issue is decided in favor of the society.  The issue is not decided in favor of society itself, directly, so much as to the advantage of whatever it is--here the whole human species--that supports the principle of society.   We could profitably understand this whole discussion in the broader forum of public discussion.  I want to be as clear as possible at every level of this discussion, and not allow, as some writers do, for the argument to become to compacted and dense.  Computerized writing does not impose great requirements of time and space, and thus allows a much more relaxed discussion  There are unconventional ideas that will emerge here; but that is acceptable as long as there is complete discussion of these ideas.  To continue: there are issues of society, such as of marriage, that pertain to everyday human life but which involve paradoxes and contradictions.  Society is not a passive agency but has its own agenda and "enforces" a certain point of view on people in general.  Thus if we say, as we already have just now said, that society and the species are two different things, we must also make it clear that society is about the species.  Society is based upon and depends upon the species.  But the species is not the race, even though the race is within the species.  What is within the species does not affect--except negatively--what society is.  When the issue is raised of "citizens of society" those citizens are of the species, not of the race.    Elsewhere [cite] we have said that the race and species are two different things, both of the order of biology and instinct but on different levels of biology.  Race and species, albeit both biological, are opposed to one another within the biological realm.  It is easy to see, then, logically, that while the species is what society is about, the mutational subgrouping called race is opposed to society. 

How does the species support society?  We have already said that society is not "about" a human being in particular but about human beings in general.   The human being, a member of Homo sapiens the species, is capable of language and technology (weaponry) and capaple, therefore, of subjecting one another, and being subjected by one another, to leveraged (coercive) conditions.  Human society is brought about, first, by the leveraging affects of technology; and secondly by the institutional relationships of property--here property in humans, or slavery--which in themselves constitute civil society (cf.Hegel on civil society).   The ability to become a slave in the human sense constitutes, by itself, "the very essence of being human (das Wesen des Menschen).  That is how we, as Philosophical Anthropologists may, in the context of New Force Theory, define a human being:  as that being capable of slavery.  We might pause for a minute to speculate on the thinking of great predecessors, Rousseau, for instance.  Rousseau said the human being originate in freedom.  We are saying, on the contrary, the human being originated as soon as there was a master--one who weilded the first "stick"--who could make him a slave.  The whole idea of a sort of original condition of pristine freedom has occupied social thinking for several centuries; this is a false idea.  Also, human beings did not become slaves at some advanced period of society; but immediately at the outset of human evolution, at the time humans became technicians.  Society needed the tool as weapon for it to appear; and once the weapon was there, society itself was there.  The "Rule of Thumb" and the handshake--both refering to weaponry or the absence of it--were the original laws of mankind, and in that sense proper society.  This was at the very outset of humanity.  The laws that make up society all emanated from the principles of the Rule of Thumb and the handshake, agreements of non-agreesion by weaponry.  Society, then, consisted of the long, plodding process of  legal nuances--agreements of non-agression but accepted mutual slavery--wherein humans accomodated themselves to one another in the context of this new world of weapons and technology.  This was a species-wide practice that, beginning of course on a small scale, widened out as human beings spread throughout the world.  The whole effort of society as a thing of language and technology has been to attempt to ensure that the species which began primally at some point, never departed from its original general character as slavery.  The human being, we are saying, was exhorted never to be anything other than, or more than, a human being.  This was to be his perpetual and universal social destiny.  The race, of course, would make him free--a servant of biology, perhaps, but free of society.

Biology 101, where basic concepts are presented, leaves us with a clear idea of Darwinist "natural selection."  In simplest terms this idea outlines a process wherein species change and become "better adapted" to their surroundings.  At the risk here of seeming elementary, we see that individual beings with superior adaptive qualities do tend to survive and to leave their traits to their offspring.  Whole species emerge.  A species is a definable unit--definable through interfertility--that has proven, over time, to be in a viable, sustainable adaptation to its environment.  The species by definition a success story of the past; it has become what it is (we need not say more).   The proof of viability and even superiority in a species is simply that it presentlly exists.  This idea--of the viability of a species as such--is classic Darwinism.  There will be no attempt here, under the banner of Force Theory, to challenge this accepted and scientific doctrine of today.  We see that competition among organisms, whether as species or as individuals, is the mechanism of evolution.  But there is more.   Our interest presently is not evolution or "survival of the fittest."  We are concerned to know, rather, the connection between evolution as a general biological process and, on the other hand, a construct of human making--society.  New Force Theory is not a biological concept but a sociological one.  In general, we are now trying to understand biology on the one hand and society on the other.  We do not need here to peruse the entire literature of biology and social philosophy; we know already that academically and in the main literature on the two subjects, biology and sociology remain separate.  Herbert Spencer causes no concern when he places biology and sociology, as the study of the "superorganic," into two entirely different categories.   Philosophers such as Spengler and Gehlen develop Philosophical Anthropological concepts that hint, at least, on the connection of biology to society.  Nietzsche is still more perceptive, though his insights are intuitive.  Engels considers biology only as a scientific dilattante (sp.) whose entire emphasis is in a kind of superorganic phenomenon he calls society; he also considers humanity and Homo sapiens the same thing ohne weiteres.  Our own puruit is different:  we aspire to link biology and society in a way that is an ironclad necessity.  We should leave no loose strings.We want to know, as we have already said, what the relationship is between humanity, as a purely social idea, and Homo sapiens as a species with an ancient biological lineage.  Homo sapiens appeared, we are saying, simultaneously with society; the two were linked at the beginning and will always be linked.  But this fact does not itself give a clue as to the nature of the relation between biology and society. 

The position of Force Theory is that, to understand society in terms of its most basic principles, we need not look at biological evolution and change comprehensively--in its aspects of individual competition, species competition, sexual competition etc.--but in the particular area of evoution that has been neglected by biologists.  Our viewpoint is "radical."  We say that there is competition between individuals.  What is little observed, on the other hand, is that the particular mutational outgrowths within a species come to be in competition with the species as a whole.  This--the competition between the individual as a particular form and the species as a general form--has been neglected in the biological literature.  We want to correct that neglect because it is on this aspect of nature and man that society is essentially based.  Society appears within the context of the competition between a species and its individual manifestations.  I have not yet spoken of race; it suffices to mention only individual differences within species.  We are saying that society appeared at the outset of hominid (pre-human) evolution; the modern forms of hominids, Homo sapiens had already "adapted" to the technology and tools that they had acquired.  I spoke earlier [cite] of "mutual slavery," which is essentially society itself.  Society and Homo sapiens co-exist and are co-extensive, even though they are not the same thing.  I have discussed this difference earlier.  Now we are saying only that society is a creation of mind and intelligence; Homo sapiens is biological.  But there is more.  The creature Homo sapiens in his species characteristics is ideally suited for society.  It is a cliche of social philosophy that says that society is a "culture"--an artificial, man-made "growth"--that serves the purposes of Homo sapiens.  In Force Theory we are saying still more.  We are saying that Homo sapiens is a species is suited to society.     Therefore, the action of society in preserving itself will preserve also the species Homo sapiens.  This relationship of society to biology thwarts evolution.

Finally, the issue of race appears.  We have already outlined throughout this blog our basic ideas on race.  In summation:  race is the collected force of individual manifestations through which life, as formed energy [this needs explication], challenges all restraits to evolution--society being a restraint of human creation.  It is precisely in the context of society that the issue of race appears seriously.   Indivdiual mutational forms can challenge the species boundaries and definitions of a given life form; under pressure by society, these definitions are rigid and unyielding and thwart efforts by new forms to replace old ones, and thus replace the outer species forms themselves.  Race is the collection of such individual force and the projection of such force, finally, after ages of dead social "humanitarian" existence; under force of the race biology breaks through the dead forms of old species and replaces them with new species.  Also, of course, old societies are burst apart, more likely suddenly and slowly; these would be replaced by new societies that reflect the new racial priorities that come with the emerging race itself.  In this great epic of nature the white race, of all races, because of its close association with society as a race-suppressing agent of human making, will be the first, also, to dismantle existing society.

Last edited by richard_swartzbaugh (2010-04-22 14:24:54)

  • Registered: 2009-03-17
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Re: 32. DIGRESSIONS

Women were the first slaves, of men, and slavery was the first society.  Society today is nothing more, we are saying, than slavery, not of one man over another but of everyone over everyone else.  The word freedom--as applied to democracy--has no meaning here whatsoever.  The original human society was established, I am saying, through the "authority of the stick."  The stick in the hand of one man "leveraged" his dominance.  Leveraged dominance, the "authority of the stick," is all we mean by the word society; and this began in lower palelithic times with the first acquisition of "culture," which was simply a stick or stone used by one man as a weapon.  Such a stick had simply to be "displayed," or waved about in order to get the attention of some member or members of the stick-waving person.  This object of the first tool was likely a female fancied by a male.  Thus women were the first slaves and slavery was the first society.  Women finally shared in the slavery as they "married" their own master to make him a slave.  The conventional humor on this subject actually contains an important truth.  Once the masters were enslaved, as happened in the institution of marriage, and everyone was both a master and a slave--a slave of a slave--the entire process of unilateral enslavement began again.  The married couple together enslaved people around them.  The married couple contained the basic principle of society which gave the couple power over non-social persons around them.  Society--slavery--spread outward from the married couple.

Technology has always been weaponry wherein the person possesses it becomes master over the person without it.  The prime purpose of technology was originally, and remains, not technics (mastery of the external world) but social dominance.  Through the technology of intimidation society appears.  But there is more.  Technology originally was not cooperative. The man who first was inspired to use a stick to threaten his own group members did so without cooperation of the others.  His act was an individual act.  And so technology--and society--remained through the long years leading up to the present and modern industrialism. Technology was simple and, therefore, individual.  Technology in these early, premodern, times could be produced and managed by the individual.  This directness and simplicity of technology finally gave way, necessarily, to more complex forms.  The production and management of technology became a collective effort.  Of course, control of technology still remained an issue.  In the passage of technology from simple to complex forms the entire issue of who controled the technology also became confused.  In this confusion, on the other hand, there was never a question as to the social role of technology as human intimidation pure and simple. 

Society originates in an "unnatural" act of slavery wherein, through waving a mere stick, one man intimidates another man into submission. This waving of a stick, to express authority, I call a "display."  The stick itself becomes symbol of leveraged authority and social force.   Leveraged--through even the most primitive technics--violence is the binding force of early slavery and, perforce, society.  Slavery is human society in the full sense of the word society.  But there is more.  Social progress, as it is called, consists of the slow, millenia-old, process of "mitigating" slavery, not by ending it--on the contrary--but by imposing a certain mutual slavery.  This essentially is what marriage is and what democracy is.  Marriage is the original "bilateral" institution; democracy is a slow implementation of the basic principle contained in marriage in relationships generally.  Democracy is "rule of the ruled by the ruled."  This is not freedom but bilateral slavery; to call this mutuality true freedom would be a contradiction in terms.  In fact, it is precisely through such a contradiction that society dissolves itself.   We survey the general course of human history, from beginnings in hunting groups  through the slave societies of the classical societies of Greece and Italy.  The pervasive theme is one of slaves taking control of their own bonds of slavery, subjecting themselves to their own collective oppression.  The mastery that a slave has over himself results, finally, in the slave's destruction, not as a slave, merely, but as a human being.     ......Technology begins as unilateral force and becomes two-sided force.  The objective--practical--progress of technics has the incidental effect of subjecting two human beings, bilaterally, to one another.  Or maybe it's the other way around:  in an attempt to counter one man's leveraged force, the object of that force, the other man or slave, counters with force; and that force exerted bilaterally becomes the practical--materially helpful--entity we call modern technics.  ????  [What I am trying to say] is that  there is a relationship between the bilateral implementation of leveraged violence and, on the other hand, the great increase of technology in the modern world.  [Perhaps] all we see as modern technics is mutual, as opposed to unilateral, leveraged (technical) violence.  Technics turns from being primarily the agent of unilateral slavery, to a kind of warfare--an attempt of men to enslave one another--that results, finally, in men being slaves of one another.

Technology began with a "display" by one man toward another man or woman.  By saying "one man toward another" I have suggested that technology--at first the mere stick--had a unilateral application.  If there was to be a confrontation, it was to be a one-sided affair.  One man would have a clear advantage over the other man (or woman).  One man would lose the fight, the other would win.    We may carry this thought further.  The intitial intention of the first man in using the stick was to surpass and overwhelm the other man.  There was also the assumption that, at the moment of confrontation, the other man (or woman) would not have a similar weapon.   A fight between equals would have no purpose for either man, leaving them on a standoff that is the main reason monkeys and apes live in peace without laws--an animal of this order generally will not pick a fight with one who is more or less equal.  Dominance aggression is always a risky matter.  In the case of human beings, then, a weapon in the hands of the opponent would obviate the whole point of technology in the first place, as, we are saying, an advantage for the possessor of the technology.  But there is more.  These speculations of ours have taken us into a new area.   We are moving at this point in our speculations into an advanced dimension of social theory.  A point is reached where the technology that there is is the product not of one man's insight but of the insight and work of several or even many persons.   This is perhaps not the time to review the entire corpus of modern social theory; but the issue most commonly neglected is that of the role of technics in human relationships.  It is assumed that technology has a depersonalizing effect on human relationships.  Old relations such as the clan and nuclear family (the husband-wife relation) are dissolved in the face of more modern material enterprises using machinery and mass labor.  The force of such technics is irresistable.  Human beings working at machines are no longer in a direct personal contact with one another.  They have substituted these technics for the traditional bonds of family and small community (Gemeinschaft).  Engels, who in Socialism has had a great influence on me, demands respect; but his communistic theory has to be qualified.  This improvement comes through Force Theory which, on the other hand, goes beyond considering the merely depersonalizing effects of technology.  The nature of that depersonalization of relations is in the fact that, not biological teeth and claws and animal strength determine the outcome of dominance aggession, but the use of tools as weapons.   Technological weapons mean that animal aggression of dominance that there is and always has been can be leveraged, even highly leveraged, to produce great inequalities of rank order.  The rank order that every baboon group has is greatly extended, so that there are, in humans, vast distances of rank between the highest and lowest of a group.   But the assumption here is that, if there is to be social inequality, this can only happen if the weapons that there are are in the hands of some people, as masters, but not in the hands of others as slaves.    Society as a creation of the unilateral use of technology is inherently unequal:  some people are always going to be higher ranked than others.  This conclusion should surprise no one.  Where Force Theory claims originality, on the other hand, is in the idea that humans display this aggression among themselves by virtue of the primal fact of their existence as human beings, namely, through their technology.  We confront what may be the paradox at all times:  humans cooperate only to compete.  Technics as today a vast cooperative enterprise means is simply weapons that people use against one another, if not at one moment then another.  We are saying the following:  Where society "advances," on the other hand, is where (to use Engels' constant phrase) one social force "comes into collision" with another.   The intention of technology, which is leveraged aggression, comes into collision with the need of technology for cooperative advancement.  Technology which, as the simple stick, once brought into existence society as a leveraged dominance of one man over another, becomes a cooperative enterprise.  The best technology is the technology that is cooperatively produced.   The unilateral intention of technics--the leveraged dominance that one man has over another--"comes into collision with" the social (again to use Engels' word) production of such technology.  Technology advances in effectiveness and sophistication through the combined effort of many men, even though such men paradoxically have in mind using such technics against one another.  This is mental climate of modern society:  sublimated agression allowing cooperation.  We still need to take up the ways that, in the face of necessary cooperation, some persons gain unequal control of the technics of leveraged dominance and aggression.

Last edited by richard_swartzbaugh (2010-04-17 13:59:49)

  • Registered: 2009-03-17
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Re: 32. DIGRESSIONS

The opposition of two men with sticks resolves itself, finally, as cooperation.   But cooperation does not imply pacificism or any acceptance of equality in principle.  The human being is not and never was a pacifist or even naturally cooperative.  Force theory does not assume, for instance, that such a result as cooperation followed from some insight about the benefits of simply getting along together--which never entered anyone's mind--but simply from the thought, which is obvious, that equality in a stick fight would destroy both combatants.  In an earlier section [cite] I brought out this point.  Equality in principle--as in a technological standoff between two combatants with sticks--resulted in precisely the opposite of equality; the consequence was the oppression by two equals of a third individual who was technically inferior.  Equality begets inequality.   It was better, then, for both men together to turn their combined agression toward a stickless man.   The communist idea that cooperation is more productive than competition does not apply here.   The purpose that the human being has is not to be productive, anyway, but to be physically dominant.  We may suggest that human progress in civilization never did come about through any wish for progress, as such, but for a kind of prowess that the technological man had over the non-technological man--and over the latter's women.  Better tools were better weapons; that meant more sex.   It quite thinkable that higher technology came about as a consequence, irrespective of any technical--material or materialistic--advantage, of sexual selection.    There need be no assumption that the technology of today has the underlying or sustaining purpose of "benefiting" anyone in a material sense, to provide anyone, say, with pots and pans and food.  The purpose of such a machine is what Engels saw in the so-called capitalist system:  to oppress some people for the benefit of others.  It is not a radical thought to suggest that the machines of today serve only to establish and secure a rank order of human beings.   Perhaps material wealth is not even a consideration at present; only physical force or power.   Today's society is not different than it was during the paleolithic cultural period.  The Philosophical Anthropological point of view stresses the idea that the basic forms of modern institutions were already present in these earliest times.  That is the point of view taken here.  But there is more.  We pass to the question of modern democracy and free market economics where motives are unclear.  Our main point is that in the primal or seminal struggle, which took place solely between two individuals waving sticks at one another, there are the basic elements of modern democracy.  It is not enough to say that there is this connection; we must establish the connection with real examples.

The stick completes the arm; the slave completes the stick.  This has been the formula given throughout this blog.  There comes a time, however, when the slave and the stick complete each other.  More exactly, the slave becomes a slave of the stick rather than of the master of the stick.   I must be clear on this point.  Philosophical Anthropology, whose methods are followed here, has a different mode of reasoning than does traditional German philosophy.  With PA general conclusions--rather, conclusions about general phenomena such as society and humanity--follow from very specific observations.  Hegel, on the other hand, as the seminal German metaphysician, deduced his more specific observations on history from his general cosmic or world principles.  Philosophical Anthropology does the opposite.  There can be no doubt:  we are still German metaphysicians at heart and of course dominated, absolutely, by the principle of dialectic.  Dialectical materialism as I say is our life blood.   At this juncture in our argument, and having stated that the slave completes the stick, we must also say the opposite.   The human being becomes part of his own enterprise.   The stick that he raised in order to make another man a slave, did turn, at some moment later in history, to make him a slave.   That was not at first true.  The first human technician (who raised the stick as opposed to merely the arm) was "in control."  He saw himself and his own purpose.  There was his intention, clearly, and there was the stick as clear agent to carry out his purpose.  In the era of complex technology, on the other hand, we see that technics became "an expression" of human purpose.  Over the centuries the will of the man and the idea inherent in the implement that expresses that idea was blurred.  The man, depending on his tools and weapons, furthered the purpose of those weapons.  At the simplest level we may see clearly that a strong man weilds a stick most forcibly.  That is obviously true.  Thus, even though the purpose of the stick was to release the human himself from his burden and effort, the thought persisted that a human being did contribute to the workings of his technics.  The art of warfare appeared in which the possessor of arms had to exhibit warrior virtues of strength and bravery.  As history progressed, obviously, a relationship developed between a man and his weapons that could be described as "mutual dependency."   We may go back to the beginning of what we have just said.  The human species had at the primal "moment of truth," when the first hominid (or some such creature) picked up a stick and then, in a moment of insight, waved it in front of a member of his group; then and there at that instant the first culture and first society magically appeared.  Beyond that primal point the only existence human beings knew has been as an extension, either to weild the technology or to be the object of it.  But there is more.  The master was to finally enter into a paradoxical or "dialectical" relation with his own technology.    As the enterprise grew, and technology became more sophisticated, the human being--and first and foremost the actual inventer of the technics--became necessary to sustain and deploy the technics. In a sense, the slave became a slave of the stick rather than the master.  And the original master himself became just that sort of slave.   Of course the idea behind automation, that no human agency is required, is that the human being--the owner--is absolute master.  This thought of mastery runs through all technology and industry.  But this mastery is not the final chapter of the story.  There is still more.  The "stick" now absorbs the once-master as part of its process.   We need not assume that only the master could complete the stick; typically, however, that is the way technology advances--by including in its process human beings.  Among those beings is the "master" himself, now one, however, whose role has substantially changed and has even become opposite to what it first was.  Finally, we have put together evidence to make a case that human beings, now as interchangeable parts of a massive industrial system, in which oppression and mastery have been absorbed into the system, now are slaves in relation to one another even as they are simultaneously masters of one another.  Humans are not so much equal as they are interchangeable:  in any case it is this interchangeability that constitutes, for all intents and purposes, equality in principle.

Last edited by richard_swartzbaugh (2010-04-19 13:37:13)

  • Registered: 2009-03-17
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Re: 32. DIGRESSIONS

The human being benefits from and needs society.  Society is for the human being.  This is as far as sociology has come since Rousseau and the Enlightenment.   But there is more.   New Force Theory states that, furthermore, society needs the human being.  We may complete our idea by saying that society needs the human being exactly as he was--in the instant of the "display" of the stick--at some precise moment in ancient time.  Society needs the human being as such.   The human being that appeared at that earliest and decisive moment, in relation to the stick and the stick's owner, was the prototypical human of all time and one that endures into the present time.  This is the original but also the enduring generic human being,  one who, alone of all beings, is suited for society.  Society "wills," we may say, to affirm that particular person.  He is affirmed for his generically human traits that appeared at the seminal moment of leveraged (technological) intimidation, while, on the other hand, his traits that are above and beyond human traits are only tolerated.  We may speak here of the issue of toleration in general.  Traits may be tolerated or, on the contrary, they may be castigated.  Society is the most general institution that is supported by, and supports in return, only the species Homo sapiens, not the particular mutational forms within the species.   But as I say it is only in its most general and abstract form--as "humanity"--that society supports and affirms the species Homo sapiens.  We speak of American society and Chinese society.  We see how there appear to be different societies throughout the world that accomodate different cultures.  These differences are only superficial.  Society is elastic enough to accomodate the human group differences that there are.  On the other hand, the best human being--the "citizen"--for all social purposes is the one that appeared first in the creation of the human being in relation to the society that there first was, of slavery that was engendered by the first use of the stick by one man toward another.  The effect of human society is to affirm "humanity" as the social form of the species Homo sapiens.  Society, through the idea of the form of humanity, affirms a species as it was from the beginning of human or social time.  In this respect, society retards the course of biological evolution. 

It is wrong to say that a society is progressive or decadent, either one.  What is decadent is not society as such; what is decadent is the species that was and is the biological foundation of society.  This is the species as it was at the beginning of social time.  Every species is by definition, as a form of life that has entirely become, is decadent.  Society is decadent to the extent that the foundation of the society, which is the species, is decadent.  Society is bound to pass away as the species which supports the society makes way for new forms of life.  These new and creative forms are "racial," appearing as they do within the race.  The species comes into collision with its own particular forms and, inevitably, disappear within these new forms.  The species Homo sapiens passes away as does the social form of this species, which is "humanity."  If society is to reappear it must do so in the aftermath of the racial revolution which, as the Taoist river of life, is irresistable.

Last edited by richard_swartzbaugh (2010-04-23 18:37:32)