Topic: 52. VARIOUS TOPICS (MOVED FROM OTHER SECTIONS0
A lengthly segment was included early in this blog on the idea that human culture is "alien" to the human being himself. This notion does not originate with this blog, but has long been a leading idea of Hegelian and post-Hegelian philosophy. Such names as Feuerbach, Bauer, Stirner and Engels all come to mind. My perspective here has been that of Philosophical Anthropology. I have attempted ot find the beginnings of "alienation" in the earliest human culture, in the era before language but at the precise onset of tool-use. The stick used as a tool--which even chimpanzees are capable of but do not incorporate into their ordinary life--was also the moment of origin of "alienated culture." Hopefully some new insights were provided then, in this blog, as to the nature and fate of human culture. We have seen how human culture is "other than" the human being himself. That is, in simplest terms (and the ones we always come back to), the stick that "completes" the arm is also "other" than the arm. What is true of the arm-stick relation persists throughout the entire history of the relationship of the human being to his culture. In this last segment I have introduced something new. That is, the "practical alienation" inhering in culture is paralleled, in addition, by a certain "moral" alienation. That is, the human inherits from his animal past some sense or instinct as to certain "rules of the game" laid down by nature. There is a certain sense, that if the fruit is high in the tree, the human being, weaker and less agile than the ape, "should" not climb the tree; furthermore he should not hit the fruit with a stick. In his mind the person thinks that, simply, he should not have that fruit. In the Garden of Eden story, God denied Adam and Eve the fruit but they took it anyway. The force proscribing the fruit would in reality have been nature itself; and the enabler would have been human culture. There is a sense that humans inherit from their animal beginnings that, again, the fruit is just not the right of human beings. They take it anyway. There is the story of Prometheus; again, he was not given a "right" to fire--he took it anyway. I would say this--the prohibition of the human, by virute of "natural immorality" (essentially, weakness)--is what denies humans access to the fruits of nature. We run the risk here of lapsing into a sort of poetic or Rousseauian maudlin sentimentality about a "state of nature." There are, however, certain other facts that can be introduced here. These come mainly from newspapers and television about everyday American life. These reports have to do with happenings in our civilization that contradict all common sense. What I mean is this: things are allowed to happen which should not happen. There are events of violence in the face, merely, of some verkehrt morality of Christian or democratic forgiveness and tolerance, which, in a true State of Nature--we are thinking more of Hobbes than of Rousseau--which "naturally" demand retribution. A sort of nature-in-the-raw has overwhelmed our cities and our whole civilization. I cannot speak of this state of events without lapsing into a certain Conservative whineyness. Objectively, however, such events raise a legitimate philosophical issue. How, in departing our proverbial state of nature, in which life was "nasty, brutal and short" (Hobbes), have we come to reinstitute this state, precisely, in the middle of our cities. This is a paradox that attracts our most serious attention. This blog simply loves paradoxes; that is our stock in trade. In the context of what was said above in this segment, there is a clear answer: humans allow a certain State of Nature to reappear in their midst, a certain "struggle for existence," we may say, simply to expatiate the "sin" of our human departure from nature three million years ago. Thus if we think of society at all, we must say that it is both not nature and of nature. Humans have created a RITUAL wherein they act out the parts of our animal ancestors, for which or whom "nothing is or was ever free." Bruno Bauer said: "The history of religion is the critque of religion." Here we are offering a concept of society as an historical outcome; and we are suggesting, thereby, a critique of society, not as an entity that profits humans, solely, so much as one that expatiates the guilt of humans first entering culture. This makes society dangerous--not so much to humanity as a whole, because in fact human beings are secure collectively in their culture--but to individuals. Society is a menace, we are saying, to you and me personally. Society removes humans in general from a "struggle for existence," but it places you and me, individually, right back in that struggle. This is the paradox of culture and society.
Society may be defined as one's living together with people one simply does not like. This--a negation--is what society actually is. I say this at the risk of reducing what is a serious philosophical issue to a mere quip. Soceity as a concept is contrary to the old adage that if one does not like a person, one should simply avoid him. Under this assumption--that society is a negation--it could be suggested that one could rid oneself of enemies simply by abolishing society. That might be a more humane course of action than attacking these same enemies within society. We are not saying this, precisely, but perhaps something close to it. Force Theory has attracted adversaries just on account of this negatism. But there is more. Not only does one live with people he doesn't like, he may gain nothing from them materially or mentally. He is, in effect, carrying baggage that he does not need. This is a cynical definition of society but consistent with Force Theory. The corollary of this idea is that, if one accepts the idea of society, and can live with and in it, he accepts also close contact with people whom he does not like. The next--and obvious--question is: how did such an arrangement come about. And what, in the absence of practical material ties of trade and reciprocity, holds society together? Force Theory as stated above has some kind of answer; but not the answer we started with two years ago. What I am saying now is that the connections that human beings have with one another are not so much practical and material ones as moral ties. We are inching our way into the domain of religion, of moral principles and the idea of The Good. This notion is a turnaround for our blog. Following the line of thinking stated above--that culture is a "violation" of nature--we may say, consistent with what we said before, that what has appeared as "society" is a ritual grouping of human beings held together by respect for The Good. And The Good is a purely abstract conception that has come into being where culture and nature separate. The Good in its majesty--in its absolute position in the world--rivets the human's attention to what holds the world together, rather than dispairing regarding whatever it is that separates humans from nature and from one another. Society is now the issue before us. We have said that humans by virtue of their culture have separated themselves from nature. This could be physical nature, of course, of trees and rivers and such; but it is also the nature that binds humans to one another. Culture intrudes in the human relationship. It translates the biological family, for example, into a work group; and culture also translates that work group into a full industrial system. Humans in industrialism are "alienated," to use Hegel's word, from nature; but they are also alienated from one another. Alienation means here something other than what Engels meant. In fact Engels actually applauded industrialism for disrupting the natural relations of parent to child, and among close familials. The Good appears in the midst of such alienation. In other words, now--in the age of technology what will hold human beings together as some kind of community is no longer instinct and "nature," rather this tie will be through the shared idea of The Good. In other words, the relations within a group of people become so artificial and "material" that no concept of practical need for one another suggests itself. The people really no longer believe that they actually "need" one another in any actual or useful way. At this point--when all thought of a general usefulness or utility of relations has passed--there enters the very general thought that humans need one another "morally." That is, they need one another for no reason at all. The reason that is not a practical reason is the moral reason. Humans need one another, in this viewpoint, bcause to live together is "morally" right. I have hitherto neglected the issue of morality and ethical values in this blog; I have neglected the issue, but I have never denied the importance of The Good or of moral rightness that is derived from The Good. We are interested in knowing its history so that we can understand The Good.
Is culture in some sense "cheating"? Through culture the human can do what he is unable to do "naturally." What the human being does, in using a stick to reach an object, is in effect to INVENT A PROBLEM that was not there before. That is, the primal man aspired to reach a fruit hanging high in a tree; this fruit was previously "unreachable." Not only was the fruit outside the man's immediate reach, it was in a tree that the human--who is not an ape--simply did not want to climb. The man was weak, clumbsy and lazy. The human's present accomplishments are intellectual; early man had no comparison of himself to other animals except through physical prowess. In proposing that culture might be "cheating" we are undertaking an altogether strange and perhaps, in polite company, in appropriate train of thinking. This in normal conversation would be an odd question; but it is one we can ask here. The question is unusual and relegates Philosophical Anthropology to a remote corner of the human consciousness. If we assume "nature" is some sort of game or sport played by rules, culture would be cheating. Of course, nature in the raw is not a sport and there are no rules. So, in this sense, culture does not mean breaking rules. Culture would mean, rather, understanding nature from an oblique--Plessner would say, ex-centric--point of view. The human being understands, first, the inadequacy of his own hands and physical strength to do a job. He understands, too, that a mere stick or stone could solve his problem. So, the human interposes the stick or stone into the problem he has; he interposes the stick between himself and this objective. This seems to us now like a "natural" thing to do; by no means does this act, we think, "separate" this human being from so-called nature. We are wrong in our assumption. Culture in a sense is cheating. That is, we were given arms and hands to solve a given problem that was at hand at the time of the evolution of these appendages. Such a problem would be picking a fruit from a tree: hands are adaptive for that puroose. What the human being did, in using a stick, was to INVENT A PROBLEM. That is, he aspired to reach a fruit hanging high in a tree; this fruit was previously "unreachable." Not only was the fruit outside the man's immediate reach, it was in a tree that the human--who is not an ape--simply did not want to climb. It was simply outside the reach of the forager. In using the stick, the human had to "admit" that he is not as good a climber as an ape; nor is his neck as long as a giraffe's. The problem that the human had was to reach the unreachable. And to do so he "cheated" insofar as he "played the game" in a way that nature, so-called, never intended. Of course, nature is not a sport or game with set rules. We have already said that. In speculating whether culture is cheating, we are engaging in a purely other-worldly kind of intellectual play. From the vantage point of Philosophical Anthropology, however, where we stand for a moment outside ourselves, we can see a general sort of human error wherein short term benefits obscure long range consequences. The human being has, as the post-Hegelians have observed, is an "alien" being of the humans own creation. We may speak of culture as a kind of "rebuke" to human beings. What we are saying is that, in using a stick, the human has admitted, sadly, that he is incapable of climbing that tree and reaching the fruit. The human being made his appearance in the world, living as he does with technology that was simple but was the same in general concept as the technics of today, as one who understood himself to be a "cheater" and one deserving of criticism. For thousands of years he looked to animals for inspiration; his religion--totemism--had the premise of the natural superiority of animals. Modern man has not lost this admiration of the animal world. Nor has he ceased to rebuke himself for his "cheating" of what was assumed to be a sort of game plan of nature.
Does "nature" have a "game plan" or "rules"? We are inclined to assume that living nature, where "all is fair in love and war," has no rules or plan. But speculating idly, as we do here, and assuming that there is a broader plan to nature, one corresponding to the rules of football or basketball, is that plan "made known" to, and enforced within, the human psyhe? These are questions we can ask--but are not normally asked by outsiders to Philosophical Anthropology. Here we will ask them. In raising the possibility of a broader organization of nature, which also assigns the individual human being a definite role--and enforces that role--we seem to enter the domain of religion. We are at risk of seeming to propose that there is a plan laid down by a grand creator. I am talking purely hypothetically, without any direct knowledge of any grand plan of nature. I am proposing the mere possibility of such a thing, in which the human being is given--and here we say given at an "animal" stage of existence and before the advent of culture--a sort of book of rules. This book contains the plan--essentially, the morality--of nature. Assuming that nature has a plan, and one encoded or programmed into the human, then it follows that culture--which breaks with this plan and unilaterally announces its own rules--would be a sort of cheating. That is, the human being "knows" or has some instinctive respect for the rules of nature, yet--like Prometheus--goes away-without-leave from nature. In using technics rather than his own hands and physical strength, he refuses to play by the rules of the so-called game. These are questions raised in Philosophical Anthropology which human beings do not normally ask. Rather, the human being in his proverbial daily life is following--because he finally has no choice--the rules of culture. The rules of culture are not those of nature. We can put this conclusion differently, and qualify it--because in culture finally humans are indeed following very general rules of nature--with a difference. What humans do is not so much violate nature, as re-arrange it in a way that broader forces never "intended." But humans may still suffer from thoughts of guilt, unconsciously and instinctively, that they "violate" nature or the "rules of the game." The physical facts of a man lifting a stone are set "by nature." Using leverage is a circumvention of the stress "imposed" by the physical attributes of the man and the stone. But there is more. We may go on to suggest that in breaking the rules of nature, the human being brings to himself a certain guilt--and a guilt, moreover, that must be expatiated. There is the possibility in culture that humans are separated from nature; a separation, that is, which is not only physical (the physical break is only too obvious), but is mosral and guilt-inducing as well. We can easily point to the physical difference between the force of the human body, and on the other hand, the leverage of a stick or other tool. These are all physical facts. The human being as engineer and technician simply re-arranges nature to suit himself. But I have raised the possibility that, assuming there are "rules to the game" of nature, and that the human being is aware of himself, if only by instinct, as breaking these rules. Physically the human has separated himself from nature; but there is the further suggestion, raised here, that he is breaking some inbred "moral rule" as well. This moral rule is established by nature, and is one in which the human being instinctively participates; so that to break it is a"violation" of some code. This is not a code of God, really, but neither is the code of human making. Again, I emphasize that these speculations are not the ordinary fare of philosophy let alone of everyday existence. They are archane broodings of introverted minds, which is also the lot of the present writer. Our purpose here is to set down a premise--here of the "rules of nature"--and to draw out the logical conclusions of that premise. We may wait until a later time to ask further about this premise. All along in this blog, stress has been laid on the oppositions of human existence. We are simply strengthing or emphasizing the separation of man and nature by suggesting that this separation is not merely physical, but is in some sense "moral" as well. Simple separation thereby turns, through this consideration, into outright categorical or logical opposition. The human being feels he has morally challenged nature. And he sets out, by certain intellectual and ritual acts, to expatiate this guilt. We turn finally to questions of "moral reconciliation" that the human has. We will propose that this moral reconciliation is between humans, rather than between the human and physical nature. I want to be clear on this point. The human being has over time come to understand his separation from nature as a separation of man from man. Society, we are saying, is essentially religious and ritual rather than practical