Topic: 34. FORCE THEORY AND PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY: RECENT THINKING
Man needs society. That has been commonly said and we accept it as true. But it is also the case that society needs man. There is more. Society needs man as society conceives man to be. And society conceives man as society needs man to be. This will be a work in philosophical anthropology. I want to talk first about the liberating effect--freedom and spontaneity--of this discipline. As the word philosophy suggests, we do not commit ourselves in this essay to hard or empirical so-called facts. Precisely because we are only creatively objective we are sensitive to the high-sounding moralistic notions of other theoriests--notably with regard to the concepts "human" and "humanity" that parade as empirical science. Obviously the scientific method gives proven results; but its methods are plodding and unimaginative. Science has come to be the haven of dull personalities (consider archeologists). The great advantage in garnering facts that hard science has is offset, in part, by the extreme lack of creativity of science. I would suggest that world knowledge advances through philosophy, or soft science, rather than through strict empiricism. Positivism is a case in point. As a dominant position in philosophy, positivism shows this stiffling and deadening effect of science. The history of science is full of creativity. Though the history of science shows moments of intuition and creativity, such intuition is not science itself; rather intuition is philosophical. The plodding methods that have been practiced in recent anthropology tend to dull, rather than inform, the general questions intelligent people have regarding their own existence as human beings. I began my philosophical adventure 50 or more years ago, probably on the beaches of northern Michicgan where I whiled away the (then) long summers in protracted periods of introversion. I grew up in the leisure class of America, in the summer wonderland of Lake Michigan where I was unsucessfully admonished that, if I did not care to have a summer job I should take up water skiing (or something like that). This was the wisdom such as it was of my parents. But I just read. I will talk sometime about the books I read, above all Schopenhauer who was my first and still beloved mentor. My path continued more or less constantly in a winding and plodding course toward my goal. I believe in something called destiny. My conception of destiny is nothing supernatural, on the other hand, but is an idea one has in one's head that will not let go of one. For someone who did not want a regular workaday life and or kind of finance-oriented discipline, I was nevertheless focused. The path I took and the stops I made along the way were all related, I feel, to the topic taken up by Philosophical Anthropology. I married a future professor of German partly because I was attracted to German philosophy; in Germany, in those early years, I bonded with my wife but also I bonded simultaneously with Germany which I love as much as my own Country. In Tuebingen, where I was with my wife, I took a course titled Philosophische Anthropologie under Otto Friedrich Bullnow, who I consider a mentor of mine. After Tubingen there was a winding road which led to a doctorate in anthropology, a termination at the University of Mississippi on grounds reported to be, but not officially announced, of "unprofessional remarks of a racial nature." As Oscar Wilde would put it: I know these statements to be true but I only wish I could have said them about myself. But that is all past history. I have no regrets about this period of my life. I want to avoid the whinnyness that creeps into many Conservative writings and speeches. After Mississippi I took a short bumpy road to my present university, where I have now spent 39 years. Again, there are no regrets. This is the place where I was "destined" to be. I will, on the other hand, put my own work up against the work of any other man, and that includes another mentor of mine--and a great enemy--Friedrich Engels. I will talk later of his argument with Eugen Duehring. To conclude my authobiographical section: I was a landlord for many years where I sought to bolster my teaching salary. My wife and I put for children, all white (in case there is any doubt), through The University of Illinois. My outward life has been one of a staid professor (with a little real estate on the side). It remains only to be said that my great love of Philosophical Anthropology, which has been my guiding light, has shut as many doors to me as it has opened. That is, in a practical sense. America is simply not ready for Philosophical Anthropology. This has nothing to do with any ideology, since PA is more liberal than conservative, but simply a suspicion that Americans and British have of "anything German." The British anarchist, who had a small newsletter called The Egoist, SE Parker, has truthfully characterized me as follows: "Swartzbaugh is a mix of soft science and German metaphysics." I feel that Parker was being seriously unfriendly; but I will accept his statement as flattering to me and definitely true. I make no apology for "soft science"; and metaphysics is my aspiration. Finally it remains to be said what the goals of this essay are. A complete theory of society does not avoid, as theories unfortunately always seem to do, the relationship that society as a creation of man has with biology as a creation of nature. Sociology does not commonly look at the foundation of society. That foundation is biological. The idea that concludes our statement is this: The idea that society presents as its own subject and object, the so-called human species, is not at all science. Homo sapiens is studied even by biological science without clearly descerning whether the entity talked about is fact or, on the other hand, a creation of moral philosophy. Science is likely to be a product of society itself, and reflect social values, all the more in the so-called science of man, when man, precisely, is simply an ideal citizen and one who supports society in the face of nature.
First, it is said, man stands outside society "in nature." This is where he began; but this nature was not a pleasant place. Life there was "nasty, brutish and short," in the words of Hobbes. But the state of nature was not to last forever. Finally at some point in time, in a burst of understanding and inspiration, the human being "decides" to establish society. The human for a moment stands still and reflects that he would be better off in something he spontaneously knows to be society. Society magically appears at this precise moment in time. The construction is a house, so to speak, which the human first builds and then enters. There he is sheltered from the wild animals and forces of nature that tortured him in his previous life. As we see, entering into society the human being is blessed with all sorts of advantages. There is food and shelter. Above all there is protection from humans of a preditory sort. How, and on what terms, and whether this decision to build and enter society was a sudden or was gradual, are open questions. I need not document the fact that this version of how human beings came to have society is central to any particular social theory in modern times. Rousseau and Locke's social contract idea of society--that men voluntarily and for good reason entered society--can properly be called a "myth." It is an idea whose origin is unclear but it was taken up by the communists and even Christians. The implications of the idea are serious. We understand that we must cherish society--it is fragile and hangs on a thin thread--and any disruption of this creation would be devastating. The fear of losing society is perhaps what holds society together: the consciousness that without it we would all be cast down into the abyss of raw nature. This is something we have to be afraid of, it is said. We need, in this view, above all to respect those few individuals who, by mysterious and solemn rituals, hold society together, in order that, in other words, we might not all perish. The thought that society might perish through human thoughtlessness is the source of all morality, I suggest, and one that holds humans to a predictable, agreed upon course. This course we call society. The Social Contract is an idea of social origins that is several hundred years old; Philosophical Anthropology is more recent. I suggest that the methods and basic concepts of PA suit it well to enter into any controversy over the origins of society and, because of new information available today--on apes, for instance and early hominid life--can rightfull take issue with the outdated concepts of Rousseau and Hobbes. The Social Contract and Natural Law theories of society relate to a subject matter--ancient, pre-civilized life of human beings--that fall within the baliwick of Philosophical Anthropology. This is a new discipline, one that has not so much new subject matter--since human origins have always been a subject of interest--but with new methods and general concepts. I earlier talked about my own exposure to PA whose seminal work, Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos, by Max Scheler in 1930 antedated by own life by a mere ten years. A major war involving Germany and America had to pass; but by the time I was twenty I was already planning to travel to Germany to begin my serious studies. There is a long and tiresome story, which most do not want to hear, about how in my travels and even in my circumscribed life in Kentucky, Mississippi and Illinois I still managed to keep in touch with important Philosophical Anthropologists. In Lexington at a convention on PA and Phenomenology I had a disappointingly short conversation with Helmuth Plessner (who wanted preferably to chat with some diminutive Hindu chap, a fact I have not forgotten) and Irwin Strauss, a Philosophical Anthropologist who was a refugee from Germany (I believe he was Jewish). I mention these encounters because they reflect a commitment on my part to the agenda of Philosophical Anthropology. I want to mention another important experience: attendence at a lecture by the formidable Dr. D. Duke on the occasion of a memorial service for the late classics professor at University of Illinois, Revilo P. Oliver who was also an acquaintance of mine. These were true friends, I have felt, and persons with whom I am ideologically compatible while, at the same time, thankful to my colleagues in PA. Somehow, in the intellectual desolation of the Midwestern United States, rays of knowledge penetrated the gloom and kept me on track. The story continues. At one point in time, with my wife, I left the land of Ango-American empiricism to enter, for 14 months, what SE Parker has called the realm of "soft science and German metaphysics." As I said before, here my alliance with Oliver and Duke did not serve me well; the postwar climate of Germany was hypersensitivity to the old ideas, including Duehring (who is castigated as racist and antisemitic); I believe my own recent writings on a German webbsite have been deleted from their "cached" status by, probably, the German government itself as being "verfassungswidrig"--contrary to the modern German constitution. I was censored by this government! But that is all water over the proverbial dam. I believe with Spengler that philosophy springs inexorably from the land itself. My land (heimat) is downstate Illinois where Philosophical Anthropology may or may not take root; but this is where I live and write. Finally, at this late period of my life I came across the writings of Eugen Duehring, the German economist made famous through his disagreement with Friedrich Engles, the founder of modern socialism. Duehring offered something he called Force Theory. As for the theory itself, Duehring was not his own best advocate and his ideas at the time of first writing were sketchy. I am borrowing his title FT but expanding on his otherwise incomplete ideas. In his argument with Engels, Duehring was very much the loser. In our present expanded version of Force Theory I will go head-to-head with Engels, I feel, on very much equal terms. Engels as I said earlier is a worthy adversary and one to be respected; his statement on the transitions of society is of timeless importance. What this argument is with Duehring I will shortly state. But my emphasis is on the Social Contract theory of the origins of society. At present it suffices to say that, as a theory of the origins of society, the Social Contract idea is deficient and in some points wrong. The viewpoint submitted at present is that society began, as a matter of fact, with the first human technology. This technics is an artificial creation that antedates, in fact, the enlarged human brain but provided pre-humans, anyway, a method of intimidating one another. A simple stick waved by one man at another man, thereby inducing fear in the second man, constituted, by itself, society. This is the "myth" of origin of updated Force Theory. What remains is to see how humans "mitigated" this leveraged violence through contracts and agreements. I discuss in this connection the "Rule of Thumb" and the significance of the handshake (to abjure weapons). Finally, I spoke earlier of "raw nature" which we are taught to fear; the word for this nature is "race." Race represents in Force Theory the (Taoist) river which flows through reality and carries everything, including society, with it.
Last edited by richard_swartzbaugh (2010-04-28 14:09:22)