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)