Professional Documents
Culture Documents
IMAGINARIES
SOCIAL IMAGINARIES
Coordinating Editors: Suzi Adams (Flinders Ted Toadvine (University of Oregon, USA);
University, Australia); Jeremy Smith (Fed- Lubica Ucnik (Murdoch University, Aus-
eration University Australia, Australia). tralia).Erin Carlisle, Flinders University, AU;
George Sarantoulias, Flinders University, AU.
Editorial Collective: Suzi Adams (Flinders
University, Australia); Paul Blokker ( Charles Social Imaginaries is a peer reviewed bi-
University in Prague, Czech Republic); Nat- annual journal that publishes original articles
alie Doyle (Monash University, Australia); from diverse disciplinary constellations. Social
John Krummel (Hobart and William Smith Imaginaries interrogates the presuppositions of
Colleges, USA); Jeremy Smith (Federation cultural ontologies and instituted configurations
University Australia, Australia). of power. It presupposes an understanding of
society as a political institution, which is formed
Editorial Assistants: Erin Carlisle (Flinders — and forms itself — in historical constellations,
University, Australia); George Sarantoulias on the one hand, and through encounters with
(Flinders University, Australia). other cultures and civilizational worlds, on the
other. The journal aims to pursue intersecting
Editors-at-Large: Johann P. Arnason (La Trobe
debates on forms of meaning, knowledge and
University, Australia/ Charles University,
truth as they have been historically instituted
Czech Republic); Craig Calhoun (LSE, UK);
and reconfigured, both within disciplinary
Fred Dallmayr (Notre Dame University,
confines and beyond. It reflects on the human
USA); Vincent Descombes (EHESS, France/
condition in modernity, which, amongst other
University of Chicago, USA); Charles Taylor
things, ought to be centrally concerned with
(McGill University); George Taylor (Uni-
theoretical elaborations of and responses to
versity of Pittsburgh, USA); Peter Wagner
the ecological devastation of the natural world.
(University of Barcelona, Spain); Bernhard
Social Imaginaries pursues intersecting debates
Waldenfels (Bochum University, Germany).
on (inter)cultural and historical varieties of
Editorial Advisory Board: Chiara Bottici (New meaning, power and socially instituted worlds,
School for Social Research, USA); Craig and is situated within the ongoing, albeit
Browne (University of Sydney, Australia); incomplete, hermeneutical turn in the human
Ivan Chvatik (Centre for Theoretical Studies/ sciences.
Patočka Archives, Czech Republic); Marcel
Gauchet (École des Hautes Études en Sci- Social Imaginaries invites contributions from
ences Sociales, France); Stathis Gourgouris social theory, historical sociology, political
(Columbia University, USA); Dick Howard philosophy, political theory, phenomenology,
(Stony Brook University, USA); Wolfgang hermeneutics, and, more broadly, cultural
Knöbl (Göttingen University); Kwok Ying studies, anthropology, geography that criti
Lau (Chinese University of Hong Kong, cally advance our understanding of the
China); Karel Novotny (Charles University, human condition in modernity. The journal
Czech Republic); Mats Rosengren (Uppsala is published in May and November each year
University, Sweden); Hans Rainer Sepp (Fink by Zeta Books (Bucharest, RO).
Archives, Freiburg University, Germany); Submit an article:
Kate Soper (London Metropolitan Univer- social.imaginaries@zetabooks.com
sity, UK); Ingerid Straume (Oslo University);
SOCIAL
IMAGINARIES
Vol. 1 / Issue 2
¤
Zeta Books, Bucharest
www.zetabooks.com
ARTICLES
War, Peace and Love: The Logic of Lévinas, by Kwok-ying Lau . . . . . . . . . . . 103
‘Man Against the State’: Community and Dissent, by Fred Dallmayr . . . 127
Introduction
Suzi Adams and John W. M. Krummel
This issue of Social Imaginaries continues to delineate key thinkers and de-
bates in the social imaginaries field proper, whilst opening onto problematics
that configure the terrain more broadly. Contemporary approaches to social
imaginaries—as a paradigm-in-the-making—have emerged from a number of
intersecting currents of thought, including Durkheimian understandings of col-
lective representations, Marxian debates on ideology, structuralist debates on
the symbolic and the imaginary, and phenomenological and hermeneutical re-
assessments of the creativity of the imagination and its relation to—or institu-
tion of—the ‘real’. More broadly, the various interpretive frameworks that un-
dergird the social imaginaries field also draw from debates amongst third gen-
eration phenomenologists—such as Merleau-Ponty, Patočka, Levinas, and
Ricoeur—that seek to critique Husserl’s philosophy of consciousness through
reactivating specific aspects of Husserl’s phenomenological approach, in con-
junction with a critical encounter with Heidegger, from which new articula-
tions of selfhood, the social, and transcendence appear.
More generally, reflections on social imaginary constellations (and their
varied sources) invite engagement with—and interrogation of—the concrete-
ness of our social worlds within-the-world. Socio-cultural contexts of world-
hood, imagination, reason, art, and civilizational forms, as conceived here,
reference the human condition in modernity, in political, cultural and social
aspects. Modernity is not autonomous but relational, that is, it grounds—and
founds—itself in relation to a variety of ‘others’, including classical antiquity,
inter-cultural and inter-civilizational others, and, finally, intra-cultural con-
stellations. These inter- and intra-cultural elements call for interrogation of
our understandings of ‘the strange’, ‘the extra-ordinary’, and ‘varieties of oth-
erness’ at all levels of socio-political life, be that at the macro level of civiliza-
tions or the inter-subjective level of social selves in action. Such frameworks
must also be capable of interrogating the final frontier of otherness—the dif-
ferent regions of nature—where the formalization of mathematical reason and
the limits of the cultural-political project of rational mastery grow weary, and
thoughtful political ecologies and nuanced environmental phenomenologies
8 Introduction
arise in their place. From this, in line with the ancient Greeks, the world—and
the human condition in-the-world—is to be understood as a ‘unity in plural-
ity’, which emphasizes the importance of articulating both the commonality
and the diversity of the human condition. Indeed, the human condition in-
the-world can only be known in its concrete historical articulations, and thus
needs both comparative research and robust theoretical frameworks to address
these issues, be that in social theory, political philosophy, critical theory, his-
torical sociology or comparative history.
*******
We open this issue with two essays on Paul Ricoeur’s thought. Along with
Cornelius Castoriadis and Charles Taylor, Ricoeur’s distinctive elucidation of
the social imaginary has been pivotal for the emergence of the social imaginar-
ies field. Indeed, interpreters of Ricoeur increasingly highlight the centrality
of the imagination for his overall philosophical trajectory. The question of the
imagination was an enduring concern for Ricoeur, but it gained momentum
in his thought in the 1970s. The early- mid-1970s were particularly impor-
tant in the present context, as this period saw his developing engagement with
the problematic of the imagination gain traction and momentum. The year
of 1975 was especially propitious. During the course of that year, Ricoeur
presented two series of seminars on the imagination—the first on ideology
and utopia as the two poles of the cultural imagination that together comprise
the social imaginary, the second on the philosophy of the imagination—and
published The Rule of Metaphor: The Creation of Meaning in Language, in
which the role of the imagination, especially the productive imagination, was
underscored. These highly original works prepared the way for Ricoeur’s fur-
ther reflections on the productive-receptive imagination as ‘narrative’ in Time
and Narrative (3 volumes) in the early 1980s.
George H. Taylor’s contribution to this volume, ‘The Phenomenological
Contributions of Ricoeur’s Philosophy of Imagination’ focuses on Ricoeur’s
articulation of the productive imagination as it emerges from both the Lec-
tures on Ideology and Utopia, and the Lectures on Imagination. Taylor primar-
ily focuses on the productive imagination as fiction as it emerges from
Ricoeur’s Lectures on Imagination. While it is generally thought that Ricoeur’s
move to hermeneutics incorporated a simultaneous shift away from phenom-
enology, Taylor offers an alternative view, and reconstructs Ricoeur’s approach
to the imagination through a phenomenological lens. Ricoeur’s philosophy is
best understood as the interplay of phenomenology and hermeneutics, and
thus it is no surprise that Taylor reconnects Ricoeur’s phenomenology of the
imagination as fiction to hermeneutical themes, especially through the central
interconnection of vision and language—of seeing and saying. Of particular
interest is Ricoeur’s articulation of the productive imagination as iconic
Introduction 9
augmentation (a theme that has also been recently taken up under the aus-
pices of a ‘strong program of cultural sociology’, and for which Ricoeur’s dis-
tinctive take will prove of interest), his reworking of Husserl’s notion of inten-
tionality as the ‘consciousness of ’ the ‘absolutely nowhere’, and ‘imaginative
variation’ as ‘as if ’ and as the capacity to ‘shatter reality’.
In his essay ‘Between Receptivity and Productivity: Paul Ricoeur on Cul-
tural Imagination’, Timo Helenius also pursues the theme of the imagination
in Ricoeur’s thought. Helenius accepts Ricoeur’s critique of the possibility of
‘creation ex nihilo’ and instead draws attention to the ways in which the cul-
tural imagination operates in a dialectic of innovation and sedimentation as
part of an overall ‘disjointed continuity’ with the civilizational traditions that
inform western currents of history. Helenius argues that the cultural imagina-
tion forms the basis of a poetics of human action, and, in so doing, offers a
corrective to those approaches which stress the centrality of Ricoeur’s articula-
tion of the imagination as the basis of possibility of a human subject. Instead,
Helenius argues that the mediated or situated subject emerges from a cultural
basis—from the cultural imagination—that resides in the nexus of receptivity
and productivity.
One important component of a discussion of the social imaginary is how we
understand the world. Adam Konopka’s article, ‘Embodiment and Umwelt: A
Phenomenological Approach’ discusses the notion of the world and its “consti-
tution,” and especially in its relationship to the natural environment, in Hus-
serl’s phenomenological theory in regard to the intentionality of embodied ex-
perience vis-à-vis the pre-given Umwelt. The issue is necessarily complex as
Husserl’s understanding underwent several revisions and reformulations through
his career until culminating in his notion of the “life-world.” Konopka exam-
ines this development of Husserl’s theory of world constitution and his account
of environed embodied experience, especially as a phenomenological response
to the 19th century debate concerning the methodology of Naturwissenschaften
and Geisteswissenschaften, involving Wilhelm Dithey and the Neo-Kantians of
the Baden School. Konopka argues that Husserl develops his response in the
context of ‘unbuilding’ the Natur-Geist distinction in his identification of the
pre-given world as embodied and lived. He argues that for Husserl, environed
embodiment—pre-reflective bodily self-awareness in correlation with its Um-
welt as horizon—grounds both Natur (spatio-temporal materiality) and Geist
(human culture and history) and hence their dichotomy.
Ľubica Učnik’s essay takes up the question of the life-world, human re-
sponsibility and debates on scientific reason in engagement with Jan Patočka,
who, like Ricoeur, was a third generation phenomenologist whose reworking
of Husserl and Heidegger offers rich resources for the social imaginaries field.
Her essay, ‘The Problem of Morality in a Mathematised Universe: Time and
Eternity in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and the Concept of ‘Love’ in
Patočka’s Last Essay’, takes up some remarks made by Jan Patočka in his last
10 Introduction
world is inevitably forced to confront the other and deal with this issue of pos-
sible violence that stamps the voice of the other under a levelling sameness. A
noted critic of the violence of totalizing sameness is Emmanuel Levinas, the
subject of Kwok-ying Lau’s expository article, ‘War, Peace and Love: The Logic
of Lévinas’. Lau looks into this issue by examining the internal “logic” underly-
ing Lévinas’ provocative stigmatization of the realm of being as a state of war—
in its process of totalization that attempts to universalize, and in which Western
philosophy has played an active role since its inception in Greece. Levinas’ cri-
tique of Hegel and Heidegger’s phenomenological ontologies are examined as
recent examples of that western canon, both opting for the sameness of being.
The critique also extends to dialogue regulated under a unitary reason. Levi-
nas’ response, according to Lau, is a pathétique cry for love and peace. Implied
is an ethical relation, such as through love but also fecundity, that escapes the
realm of absolute immanence by opening the door to alterity. In this way Lau
presents the logic in Levinas’ reading of western ontology on the one hand as
a logic of negation of the rationalization of war and violence and on the other
hand as a logic of affirmation of alterity and plurality through love and justice.
The suggestion is that Levinas’ logic points to the possibility of an ethical
politics of non-violence that aims to restore justice in face of the other as non-
indifference to the other’s suffering and death.
If Lau argues for an ethical politics of non-violence, Fred Dallmayr’s con-
tribution, ‘“Man Against the State”: Community and Dissent’, focuses on the
relationship between freedom and community in the search for an ethically
responsible mode of dissent against the totalizing state. Taking as its starting
point the contrast between the “state” as castigated by Nietzsche and the “po-
lis,” Dallmayr’s essay examines the two contrasting forms which critical resis-
tance in pursuit of freedom can take: the libertarian social-Darwinian kind of
resistance in pursuit of self-centered interests and the ethically motivated con-
scientious kind that aims at the “common good.” In the first self-interest
comes to overrule any form of social solidarity, and in the second freedom and
dissent are in the service of justice and a more ethical mode of solidarity. Dall-
mayr begins the essay by examining Herbert Spencer’s formula of “man against
the state” and its dichotomizing tendency that separates individual interest
from public and social interest, and which eventuated a kind of laissez-faire
liberalism or libertarianism. To this he contrasts and affirms the more ethi-
cally responsible conception of liberty that he finds articulated in the thoughts
and actions of Thoreau, Gandhi, and Camus. Additional examples are found
in Socrates’s conduct in his confrontation with the Athenian public, and the
anti-Nazi German resistance movement, including people like Bonhoeffer. In
the face of the steady growth of the modern state realizing its totalizing ten-
dencies with ever more efficient technological means, Dallmayr’s essay pro-
vokes us into thinking and rethinking how our imaginaries shape our world
12 Editorial
and institutions and the possibility of acting in ways that can move towards
the realization of new imaginaries, worlds, that are ethically sound and just.
The place of the state, institutions, and social imaginary worlds can also be
analysed within broader civilizational frameworks. In his contribution to this
issue of Social Imaginaries, entitled ‘Elias and Eisenstadt: The Multiple Mean-
ings of Civilisation’, Johann P. Arnason constructs an encounter between two
very different approaches to civilizational analysis: those of Norbert Elias and
Shmuel N. Eisenstadt. At first glance, the dissonances between their respective
investigations into civilisations stand out: Elias emphasized the long-term
processes of psychogenetic transformations of the subject and sociogenetic
developments of state formation in Western Europe—the civilising process.
Eisenstadt, however, articulated a distinctive understanding of the civiliza-
tional dimension of society—the interrelations between cultural visions of the
world and institutional arrangements—that lead to a focus on the plurality of
civilizational forms that emerged historically. The Eisenstadtian perspective
leads to comparative approaches to the longue durée of civilizations. In addi-
tion, Elias focussed on power, whereas Eisenstadt’s turn to culture is well
known. Noting their common East Central European origins and life-world,
Arnason contextualizes Elias and Eisenstadt’s respective projects within an
overarching Durkheimian–Maussian (rather than Weberian) civilisational
framework, in the first instance. (This increasing emphasis on the Durkheim-
ian approach to civilisational analysis is in line with Arnason’s own growing
engagement with anthropological debates on stateless societies and civilisa-
tions.) In order to integrate some of their respective insights further, Arna-
son’s strategy is to demonstrate that each raises implicit questions that cen-
trally connect up with primary themes of the other. He seeks to show the la-
tent (inter)civilizational contexts of Elias’s articulation of state formation, and,
conversely the opening onto processual frameworks in Eisenstadt’s work on
the axial patterns of civilisations to more fully understand the historicizing
trends of the Axial Age. Despite the points of contact that Arnason establishes
between Elias and Eisenstadt, he does not seek to homogenize their approach-
es and remains attuned to civilizational dissonance.
******
The Social Imaginaries Editorial Collective would again like to acknowl-
edge the financial support provided generously for the journal by the Faculty
of Education and Arts at Federation University Australia, and Hobart and
William Smith Colleges of Geneva, New York, USA to cover production/
publication costs. We are grateful for their kind support.
Social Imaginaries 1.2 (2015) 13-31
One source of the social and political imaginary lies in the productive imag-
ination, that is, the human ability to move beyond and not be captured by cur-
rent norms, structures, and institutions. The work of Paul Ricoeur offers a vital
14 George H. Taylor
resource for uncovering the availability and capacity of the productive imagi-
nation, in particular in two sets of lectures on this topic that he delivered dur-
ing the 1970’s. The first, which I edited for publication, is his Lectures on
Ideology and Utopia (Ricoeur 1986), and the second, which I am currently
co-editing for publication, is his Lectures on Imagination (Ricoeur 2016*).
Ricoeur delivered the two sets of lectures during the same academic term, and
his goal was to develop a theory of productive imagination that encompassed
the social and cultural imagination (the Lectures on Ideology and Utopia) and
the epistemological and poetic aspects of imagination (the Lectures on Imagi-
nation). In this essay, I seek to disclose the significance of Ricoeur’s theory of
productive imagination through a particular vantage point, appreciating his
thesis through a lens into the lectures’ phenomenological contributions.
For many readers of Ricoeur, his work in the 1960s and 1970s reflects a
‘linguistic turn’ (Ricoeur 1995, p. 305), a turn toward hermeneutics and away
from phenomenology. In the last chapter of The Symbolism of Evil (1967) and
in Freud and Philosophy (1970), Ricoeur needed to introduce hermeneutics to
address symbolic language, and in The Conflicts of Interpretation (1974) and
subsequent essays on hermeneutics (Ricoeur 1991a) he moved to the ‘more
general problem of written language and texts’ (Ricoeur 1977a, p. 317). As his
readers know, Ricoeur extended his analysis of textuality beyond words to ac-
tion (Ricoeur 1991e). While Ricoeur typed his approach during this period as
one of ‘hermeneutic phenomenology’ (1991f, p. 38) and phenomenology re-
mained a subordinate topic at many points, hermeneutics seemed the focal
point and the value for Ricoeur of phenomenology itself seemed to be in de-
cline. Although, he said, ‘phenomenology remains the unsurpassable presup-
position of hermeneutics’, it was also the case that ‘phenomenology cannot
carry out its program of constitution without constituting itself in the interpre-
tation [the hermeneutics] of the experience of the ego’ (Ricoeur 1991f, p. 38).
In the middle of this period, in 1975, the same year that The Rule of Meta-
phor (1977b) was published in its original French version, Ricoeur delivered
during the fall two sets of course lectures at the University of Chicago: one the
Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, the second the Lectures on Imagination. The
two sets of lectures were conceived together and comprise Ricoeur’s principal
reflections on a philosophy of imagination. It is notable and, I hope, worthy
of pursuit that during years when Ricoeur otherwise seemed to have moved
away from phenomenology methodologically, these two sets of lectures are
explicitly phenomenological in orientation. Even more importantly, viewing
the lectures through their phenomenological contributions offers us some dis-
tinct insights into these lectures’ continuing value. I shall make limited refer-
ence to the Lectures on Ideology and Utopia and give more attention to the
Lectures on Imagination. I shall also incorporate some of Ricoeur’s other essays
on imagination during this period. Substantively, I largely concentrate on the
two main contributions of Ricoeur’s phenomenological analysis: on
The Phenomenological Contributions of Ricoeur’s Philosophy 15
For Husserl the imaginative variation was a procedure to test the sameness; it
gives support to the given in a kind of Platonic world. As soon as we presume
this kind of sameness, this fixity of the identity of concepts, then we don’t re-
ally get out from the narrow framework of instantiation (2016*, p. 15.11-12).
(Ricoeur 2016*, p. 14.16). The fiction has the capacity to shatter reality, ‘to
break through the thickness of reality,’ to ‘shape a new reality’ (Ricoeur 1986,
p. 309). Ricoeur is explicit that the fictions that remake reality include the
‘practical fictions’ that are utopias (1991b, p. 117).11 Because fiction has bro-
ken from a reference to present, existing reality, it can then provide ‘a new
dimension to reality. The paradox is that a theory of imagination has to be
connected with an ontology’ (Ricoeur 2016*, p. 19.13). In this function of
fiction, we no longer see as if, we see as. We see reality in a new way; reality
manifests itself to us differently (Ricoeur 2016*, p. 19.13). The fictional ‘no-
where’ that is the object of intentionality has ontological import. Although I
do not develop the point, the language of ontology and manifestation and the
movement beyond the ‘as if ” also seem to mark a horizon that moves beyond
the boundaries of phenomenology. Ricoeur’s conception of intentionality to
encompass the ‘absolutely nowhere’ is a signal achievement.12
Recognition of the consciousness of nothingness, of the ‘absolutely nowhere,’
is a preliminary stage, ‘the negative condition for remaking reality’ (Ricoeur
2016*, p. 14.13). Ricoeur still must show us how the fiction can accomplish
the remaking of our world, and that turns us to his theory of iconic augmenta-
tion, the second of the two major phenomenological themes in his work on
imagination that I want to develop.
Ricoeur’s philosophy of fiction—his philosophy of productive imagina-
tion—comprises the third and final part of the Lectures on Imagination and
takes up some five lectures. The theory of iconic augmentation lies at the
heart of Ricoeur’s approach. Let me offer two preliminary remarks here. First,
while in his discussion of Husserl and Sartre Ricoeur is clearly engaged in
phenomenological analysis, he does not frame these final lectures as phenom-
enological. Nevertheless, there are several references to the inquiry as a phe-
nomenological one. In these pages he refers variously to a ‘phenomenology of
fiction’ (Ricoeur 2016*, p. 14.3; cf 1991b, p. 120), a ‘phenomenology of the
work in fiction’ (Ricoeur 2016*, p. 15.8), a ‘phenomenology of discovery’
(Ricoeur 2016*, p. 15.10), a ‘phenomenology of creative imagination’
(Ricoeur 2016*, p. 17.8, 17.9), and a ‘phenomenology of iconic augmenta-
tion’ (Ricoeur 2016*, p. 17.10). Second, it is a specific innovation of these
lectures that they develop a theory of iconic augmentation as productive
imagination.
To delineate the meaning of iconic augmentation I examine first the mean-
ing of the ‘iconic’ and then turn to the meaning of ‘augmentation.’ The
iconic addresses the productivity of imagination at the level of language—at
the level of the text’s sense—while iconic augmentation will opens imagination
productivity at the level of reference, of reality (Ricoeur 2016*, p. 16.4).
Ricoeur’s exposition of the iconic will return us to the theme of the interrela-
tion between the visual and the linguistic. In the Lectures’ discussion of the
iconic, Ricoeur returns to his development of the topic in The Rule of Metaphor,
22 George H. Taylor
We shall return to the creative aspect of the icon. Note at present what the
character of the icon adds to our understanding of the creative image. We
have relocated the creative image from the framework of perception to that of
language (Ricoeur 1991b, p. 134). The icon is the product of language, and
the work of language becomes pictorial (Ricoeur 2016*, p. 16.4). In the writ-
ten, creative work, the icon displays. It was a critical task of The Rule of Metaphor
The Phenomenological Contributions of Ricoeur’s Philosophy 23
invention of oil painting allowed for raising reality to a new visibility (Ricoeur
2016*, p. 17.12-13). Against the entropic trend that leads to an annihilation
of differences, iconic augmentation is a form of ‘negative entropy’ that fights
against the elimination of differentiations and tensions in perception (Ricoeur
2016*, p. 17.8). Third, the more iconic augmentation deviates from ordinary
vision and ordinary language, ‘the closer it comes to the core of reality that is
no longer the world of manipulable objects’ and the more we experience the
relation to reality before its objectification (Ricoeur 2016*, p. 17.14-15;
1991d, p. 175-76; 1991b, p. 122, 129).
For Ricoeur the work of productive imagination through iconic augmen-
tation returns us to this work’s ontological consequence, which is again a phe-
nomenology of the creative imagination’s horizon. Through this analysis of
the strategies of language that display images, we open new ways of looking at
reality (Ricoeur 2016*, p. 16.4). ‘[I]f we start with an image without an orig-
inal, then we may discover a kind of second ontology that is not the ontology
of the original but the ontology displayed by the image itself, because it has no
original’ (Ricoeur 2016*, p. 16.1). Because the fiction has freed itself from the
governance of the original, it is open to depicting a new reality. Because the
object of fiction is inexistent, the fiction provides its own referent rather than
one borrowed from the world of experience (Ricoeur 2016*, p. 18.1). Ricoeur
acknowledges in the Lectures and elsewhere that of course Gadamer too is well
known for a theory of the image (Bild) where the image presents, in Gadam-
er’s words, ‘an increase in being’ (Gadamer 1989, p. 140, cited in Ricoeur
2016*, p. 14.14-15; Ricoeur 1984, p. 81).17 Although I cannot argue the
point here, Ricoeur’s notion of the increase in being seems much more a mat-
ter of productive imagination than Gadamer’s. As I have discussed, it is also
the case that Ricoeur demonstrates with much greater precision and detail
than Gadamer how the increase in being actually occurs.
To conclude, I hope to have shown the significance of viewing Ricoeur’s
contributions in his philosophy of imagination through the lens of phenom-
enology. Ricoeur’s development of the concept of intentionality as the ‘con-
sciousness of ’ the absolutely nowhere is a striking advance as is his analysis of
productive imagination as iconic augmentation. Throughout I have tried to
stress the inextricable interrelation in Ricoeur between seeing and saying, be-
tween vision and language. Substantively, this interrelation helps us reorient
the imagination away from its reproductive side—as copy of an image, a copy
of an existing reality—to its productive potential that can break through not
only the prison house of language (Jameson 1972) but the prison house of
existing social and political structures. Just as Ricoeur’s work on the text has
been extended to the text of action (Ricoeur 1991e; Michel 2006, p. 232-45),
it may be that his work on iconic augmentation may join and extend recent
work in the social sciences, most prominently thus far in sociology, giving new
attention to the iconic (eg Alexander, Barmański, and Giesen (eds.) 2012).
26 George H. Taylor
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(trans), University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL.
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28 George H. Taylor
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national Ricoeur conference, ‘New Perspectives on Hermeneutics in the Social
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tional Research University, Moscow, September 16, 2011.
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millan, New York.
Author Biography
George Taylor is a professor of law in the United States at the University of Pitts-
burgh. He specialises in legal hermeneutics and hermeneutics more generally. He
studied as a graduate student under Paul Ricoeur, and he is the editor of Ricoeur’s
Lectures on Ideology and Utopia and co-editor of Ricoeur’s Lectures on Imagination
(2016*). He has written on Ricoeur extensively. He was the founding President of
The Phenomenological Contributions of Ricoeur’s Philosophy 29
the Society for Ricoeur Studies and a co-founder of the online, bilingual journal,
Études Ricoeuriennes/Ricoeur Studies.
Address: University of Pittsburgh School of Law, 3900 Forbes Avenue Pittsburgh,
PA, 15260 USA. Email: gtaylor@pitt.edu
Notes
1 Richard Kearney (1984, p. 48) has noted the priority that the Western philo-
sophical tradition has granted vision in relation to the other senses.
2 Ricoeur 2016* is cited by lecture number and then manuscript page within the
lecture. Editor’s note: The asterisk in this reference indicates that this publication
is forthcoming.
3 The conditions of lived experience, says Ricoeur (2016, p. 10.1-2), ‘have, by ne-
cessity, linguistic implications and presuppositions that are akin to those of lin-
guistic analysis.’
4 As I shall pursue in the text, intentionality is a basic phenomenological concept
that consciousness is always consciousness of something (Ricoeur 2016, p. 10.5-6).
The nonintentional element of perception stems from our impression of, say, red
in a red object. This impression is passive, simply undergone. For Husserl it is not
an object (the intention of our consciousness) but something through which we
perceive perceive and so nonintentional. Ricoeur expresses some lack of ease with
this concept (11:9-10). Noema and noesis relate to the concept of intentionality;
they convey the ‘correlation between intentions and their objects’ (10.7-8). They
denote, respectively, the object as seen, as meaningful, and the seeing of the object
(7.8-9). The epochē is the famous phenomenological reduction or suspension of
judgment about the veracity of objects; it is ‘directed against the pseudo-evidence
of the given’ (10.3). The positional act involves the ‘way in which we posit the
thing,’ the object; by our belief, for instance, we may posit the object as existing
(12.17). By contrast, ‘we posit the image as nonexisting. . . we believe in the im-
age as nonexisting’ (13.2). The nonthetic consciousness is ‘an aspect of conscious-
ness that does not posit anything but which is consciousness of another aspect of
consciousness positing something.’ It’s not a consciousness of something, which
would be an intentional act, but ‘a consciousness that I am now having an image’
(13.2). In the eidetic reduction, we try to grasp the essential meaning of an experi-
ence—its types—rather than stay at the level of experience itself (11.2).
5 While Ricoeur here describes the intentional object as ‘nonexistent,’ elsewhere he
describes it more precisely as ‘inexistent’ (Ricoeur 2016, p. 7.13). The ‘inexistent’
suspends the question of existence, a point consistent with phenomenology’s
bracketing of the question of existence to focus on appearance.
6 While Sartre emphasises the relational quality of imagination in intention,
Ricoeur (2016, p. 12.13) notes that Sartre does not deny that the imagined also
appears.
7 Brentano (1995, p. 88) writes:
Every mental phenomenon is characterised by what the Scholastics of the Middle Ages
called the intentional (or mental) inexistence of an object, and what we might call, though
30 George H. Taylor
not wholly unambiguously, reference to a content, direction toward an object (which is not
to be understood here as meaning a thing), or immanent objectivity. Every mental phe-
nomenon includes something as object within itself, although they do not all do so in the
same way. In presentation something is presented, in judgement something is affirmed or
denied, in love loved, in hate hated, in desire desired and so on. (emphasis added)
8 Arguing similarly is Saraiva (1970). She maintains that Husserl poorly elaborates
the case of fictions, of the properly creative imagination. He treats imagination
finally as a passive synthesis (Saraiva 1970, p. 165).
9 In an appendix section ‘On Genuine Fictitious Objects,’ Brentano (1995, p. 292)
offers as an example the centaur, which is a figure of reproductive imagination that
combines the characteristics of two existing figures, the human and the horse.
10 Taylor (2007) incorporates much of Taylor (2004).
11 Ricoeur (1986, p. 289) explicitly challenges Marx on this point: ‘The utopia’s
intention is surely to change things, and therefore we cannot say with Marx’s elev-
enth thesis on Feuerbach that it is a way only of interpreting the world and not
changing it. On the contrary, the thrust of utopia is to change reality.’
12 As we turn from the theory of intentionality, it is appropriate to recognise that
Ricoeur does not uniformly endorse Husserl’s conception of the topic. Husserl
presents intentionality as the product of a subject-object relation that searches for
something that unifies them, and this leads to an originating subjectivity and
Husserlian idealism. Hermeneutics objects to this form of phenomenology, be-
cause hermeneutics claims that an underlying relation of belonging encompasses
both the subject and the object (Ricoeur 1991f, p. 29-30).
13 Ricoeur (2016, p. 16.16) holds that Wittgenstein remains at the level of reproduc-
tive imagination. In Wittgenstein’s examples such as the duck/rabbit, ‘there is
nothing productive.’
14 See also Ricoeur (2016, p. 16.13): ‘an element of depiction is implied in predica-
tive assimilation’; Ricoeur (1991b, at 127): ‘[T]o form an image is not to have an
image, in the sense of having a mental representation; instead, it is to read, through
the icon of a relation, the relation itself. Image is... evoked and displayed by the
schematisation.’
15 In his published work, Ricoeur refers to Dagognet and iconic augmentation in the
following, with original years of publication in brackets: Ricoeur (1976, p. 40-
43); Ricoeur (1991b [1979], p. 129-33); Ricoeur (1991h [1977], p. 334-36;
Ricoeur (1991d [1980], p. 150; Ricoeur, 1984 [1983], p. 80-82).
As I go on to mention in the text, Ricoeur does not discuss Dagognet in The Rule
of Metaphor (1977b), which was originally published in French in 1975. The
absence of discussion of Dagognet there leads me to suspect that although
Ricoeur’s book, Interpretation Theory (1976), began as a set of lectures originally
delivered in 1973, the few pages there on Dagognet and iconic augmentation were
added later upon the expansion of the text for publication in 1976. See Klein
(1976, p. vii), commenting on the 1973 original date of delivery and on the “ex-
panded text” for publication. Reference in the Paris Fonds Ricoeur to any avail-
able manuscript of the original 1973 lectures would help resolve this small biblio-
graphic issue.
The Phenomenological Contributions of Ricoeur’s Philosophy 31
The article on “Writing as a Problem” (Ricoeur 1991h [1977]) basically duplicates
chapter two in Interpretation Theory, where Ricoeur mentions Dagognet. That
article too began as a lecture, of an unknown year.
16 The journal, Chiasmi International: Trilingual Studies Concerning the Thought of
Merleau-Ponty will publish a special issue on Ricoeur and Merleau-Ponty in the
near future (Volume 17).
17 In the cited paragraph in the Lectures on Imagination (Ricoeur 2016, p. 14.14-15)
where Ricoeur mentions Gadamer, he also refers to Dagognet. The paragraph is
of additional interest as it provides a glimpse into what Ricoeur’s argument might
have been had he developed, as originally contemplated, an analysis of Merleau-
Ponty’s theory of painting instead of Dagognet’s. In anticipation of what he later
planned with Merleau-Ponty, Ricoeur mentions Merleau-Ponty’s response to the
paintings of Cezanne. In the present paragraph Ricoeur observes: “When I have
seen, for example, a painting by Cezanne, I’m related to reality as a landscape.
Now, for the first time, I see the country. There is a reconstitution of aspects of
reality that are overshadowed by ordinary dealing with manipulable objects.”
18 Elsewhere (Taylor 2011) I respond to Ricoeur’s change in vocabulary in Time and
Narrative, where he comes to reject the terminology of a productive “reference.” I
argue that Ricoeur’s stance is diminished by this change.
19 Kearney (1984, p. 47-48): ‘[L]e sens de faire ou de former, contenu dans le terme
figurer, nous permet de dépasser le privilège accordé au sens visual par le terme
imagination/phantasia . . . afin de reconnaître que tous les sens se déploient en tant
que modalities intentionnelles-créatrices-extatiques.’
Social Imaginaries 1.2 (2015) 32-52
aspect of our human condition is that ‘we are born into a world already qual-
ified in an ethical manner by the decisions of our predecessors, by the living
culture which Hegel called the [objectifiable] ethical life (Sittlichkeit), and by
the reflection of the wise and the experienced’ (Ricoeur 1973, p. 164).
The other side of the story, however, is equally true: ‘we never receive val-
ues as we find things or as we find ourselves existing in a world of phenomena’
(Ricoeur 1973, p. 165). A matrix of traditions is an unavoidable context in
which a person lives—hence the condition of traditionality—but he or she
has to reaffirm these traditions with his or her own choices and acts in order
for them to remain alive. Put differently, Ricoeur states that creativity is only
possible by the dialectic of affirmation and contestation that pertains to the
living and yet received tradition in which the ‘I’ lives (Ricoeur 1973, p. 165).
The human subject, he maintains, dwells between cultural receptivity and
productivity.
My thesis in this essay is that the cultural imagination (l’imagination cul-
turelle) is the basis for such poetics of human action and, therefore, a condi-
tion for the birth of a situated subject in the fullness of ‘Da’ or hereness. Fol-
lowing Ricoeur’s insight in his 1976 essay Ideology and Utopia as Cultural
Imagination, I argue that Ricoeur’s phenomenological hermeneutics ‘of being
able’ is ultimately based on the cultural imagination initiating tradition-con-
scious change in the social reality that then facilitates the post-critical appro-
priation of one’s self as capable (of being ethico-political that we, according to
Ricoeur, must be) (Ricoeur 1976a, pp. 17, 24-25; 1986a, p. 369 [300]).
The thesis that I pursue is not a novelty. It is instead a rather modest cor-
rective to a number of scholarly analyses and interpretations which all main-
tain that the theme of imaginary and the imagination has a central role in Paul
Ricoeur’s thought. Even though I personally portray Ricoeur’s work as a phil-
osophical anthropology that stresses the necessity of a cultural hermeneutic,
many scholars—such as Richard Kearney, Jean-Luc Amalric, Johann Michel,
and George H. Taylor—place their emphasis respectively on the side of po-
etical, poetico-practical, social, and political imagination as the ground for the
possibility of a human subject. I am by no means contesting the value of these
interpretations or denying that the question of the imagination, in various
forms, continued to intrigue Ricoeur throughout his long career. For me,
however, the question of the imagination in the context of Ricoeur’s work ties
in directly with his philosophy of a mediated subject that is explained in the
field of his cultural hermeneutics.
To introduce the theme further, and to gain a sense of the scholarly
landscape that my proposal re-evaluates, I will start this essay by outlining
some key interpretations of Ricoeur’s philosophy of the imagination. All these
accounts reveal how integral and richly developed the notion of imagination
is in Ricoeur’s work. Even though in reality Ricoeur’s handling of each theme
that he sought to explore is much more complex and variegated than can be
34 Timo Helenius
In spite of such reservations, the overall point Michel makes about the
social imagination is not without merit. Already in his early work Ricoeur
holds that a subject is not posited by him or herself but by his necessary social
situation. The most fundamental sign of it is that a person is born from an-
other human being. ‘I do not posit myself ’, Ricoeur summarises it in The
Voluntary and the Involuntary, ‘I have been posited by others’ (1949, p. 407
[433]).3 Furthermore, Ricoeur’s work in the 1980s and 90s—From Text to Ac-
tion (1986), and Oneself as Another (1990) to name only two—are evidence of
his explicit interest in the social dimension of human being. These works ex-
amine the social aspect of Ricoeur’s anthropology that remains secondary in
some scholarly analyses of it.
Michel’s summary that borrows from Castoriadis’s terminology, is a wel
comed clarification in terms of Ricoeur’s philosophy of the imagination: ‘the
integrative function of social imaginary expressions means that everyone is
recognised as a ‘member’, even beyond the idiosyncrasies of the individual
members of a society’, (2015, pp. 127-8). Michel’s reference to recognition ‘as
a “member”’, however, implies yet another dimension of Ricoeur’s thought
that reveals the necessity of social institution. This additional manner of
viewing Ricoeur’s philosophy is highlighted in the unadvertised shift that
Michel’s analysis makes from the social to the political (Michel 2015, pp. 125-
8, 132-3, 135-142). Those familiar with Johann Michel’s earlier work—and
also that of Ricoeur or of Castoriadis—are perhaps not at all surprised,
however, about the thematic change that ties in the social with the political.
Michel’s earlier discussion of Ricoeur’s understanding of tensive ethico-
political practices focuses on the moral dilemmas, the political paradoxes, the
conflicts of justice, and the ambivalences of law. Michel calls these, and
Ricoeur’s exploration of such themes, the ‘normative philosophy of Paul
Ricoeur’, and maintains that this philosophy mediates between Ricoeur’s
philosophical anthropology and his hermeneutic of social sciences (Michel
2006, pp. 289-467). The social imagination, it can be summarised, is never
only social but contributes to a ‘political’ dialectic that is an equal part of the
foundation for the concrete human being.
given, its re-making, and the new given—or between ideology and utopia, or
concrete prefiguration and concrete transfiguration—remains dynamic and
unceasing, as explained by Ricoeur’s various analyses on the poetic (Taylor
1986, pp. xxxii-xxxv).
the same time; Taylor argues that ‘we begin with an experience of belonging
or participation in the culture, class, time, and so on that give us birth, but we
are not completely bound by these factors’ (1986, pp. xxv, xxviii). The duality
of receptivity and productivity lies, therefore, in the core of the issue as it also
explains Ricoeur’s anthropological thesis—most recently analysed by Jean-
Luc Amalric (2011)—of the subject’s fragility. ‘Because we can never entirely
escape our cultural and other conditioning’, Taylor summarises this anthropo-
logical attunement, ‘our knowledge is necessarily partial and fragmentary’
(1986, p. xxvi; 2006, p. 98). Human being, it can be stated, situates itself
between receptivity and productivity which both rely on the culturally un-
folding imagination.
The cultural imagination, which is also always social, operates thereby ‘in
both constructive and destructive ways, as both confirmation and contestation
of the present situation’ that a subject faces in his or her sociocultural context
(Ricoeur 1986b, pp. 3, 323). This dialectic dynamism, or the dual activity of
the imagination, is well explained by Taylor in his 2006 essay:
‘Works’ of art and literature, and, in general, works of the mind (l’esprit), in-
sofar as they not merely mirror an environment and an epoch but search out
man’s possibilities, are the true ‘objects’ (les véritables ‘objets’) that manifest the
abstract universality of the idea of humanity through their concrete universal-
ity (1960, p. 139 [123]).
These ‘works’ that institute the idea of humanity are concrete and yet
universal because as works of imagination they always remain in the mode of
the possible—they explore human possibilities as art and literature demonstrate
in the most exemplary manner (Ricoeur 1960, pp. 160-1 [144]; 1956, pp.
88-9 [1974, pp. 78-80])
The struggle for recognition is pursued by means of cultural realities. (…) This
quest for mutual esteem (d’estime mutuelle) is pursued through images of hu-
man being (images de l’homme); and these images [that are embodied in cultural
works] constitute the reality that is culture (Ricoeur 1967, p. 121 [118-119]).
each work of art outlines and proposes a possible world, and as every possible
world is a possible environment for a possible human being, in each time it is
human being, the virtual centre of this world, that is in question (1957, p. 8).
The ‘proper’ cultural works both stand for and mediate the idea of the hu-
man quality; this cultural objectivity is ‘a vast imaginary experimentation of
the most impossible possibilities of being human’ (Ricoeur 1957, p. 8).9 Only
a few years later Fallible Man then stressed that such cultural objectivity fa-
cilitates becoming a human being:
The emerging pathology of the phenomenon of ideology comes from its very
function of reinforcing and repeating the social tie in situations that are after-
the-fact. Simplification, schematisation, stereotyping, and ritualisation arise
out of a distance that never ceases to grow between real practice and the in-
terpretations through which the group becomes conscious of its existence and
its practice. A certain lack of transparence of our cultural codes indeed seems
to be the condition for the production of social messages (Ricoeur 1986a, pp.
230, 309 [182, 251]).
I would like to place this dialectic [of ideology and utopia] within a single
conceptual framework that I will designate as the theory of cultural imagina-
tion, whose task would be to clarify both the polarity between utopia and ide-
ology and the ambiguities belonging to each of these terms respectively. The
paradox of the problem is, nevertheless, that each term deploys a multitude of
functions and roles, extending from a constitutive one to a quasi pathological
one. It is the task of a hermeneutics of imagination to arrange in these cultural
Between Receptivity and Productivity 49
expressions the traits that relate the constitutive expressions and the destruc-
tive expressions (les expressions déformantes) of the one with the constructive
and destructive forms of another. This labyrinth of relations is cultural imagi-
nation (Ricoeur 1976b, 51).
Put differently, Ricoeur argues that the cultural imagination facilitates the
task of sociocultural formation at all levels and in all its forms. ‘The interpreta-
tions through which the group [or the human self ] becomes conscious of its
existence and its practice’ (Ricoeur 1986a, p. 230 [182]) may be bound by the
condition of receptivity, but the unceasing act of ‘reading’ or interpreting the
given also results in a notion of being bound that opens up the critically
achievable realm of the possible. In short, the foundational human poiêsis is of
a cultural kind; human being resides between cultural receptivity and produc-
tivity—which are both theoretical and practical tasks. This dynamic polarity
of foundational receptivity and productivity, Ricoeur argues, can only be un-
derstood ‘within a single conceptual framework’ that constitutes a ‘theory of
cultural imagination’ (Ricoeur 1976b, p. 51; c.f. Ricoeur 1986a, pp. 379-380
[308-309]).
Final Remarks
Let me close off this essay with brief concluding remarks on the notion of
configuration with which I also opened the corrective analysis. One of the
many occasions in Time and Narrative 1 when the notion of culture appears,
is in relation to traditionality that, according to Ricoeur, is the second feature
of configurational action (1983, p. 116 [76]). Taken from the point of view of
traditionality, the so-called Western narrative paradigm, for example, is based
on the genre of Greek tragedy but also ‘several narrative traditions: Hebrew
and Christian, but also Celtic, Germanic, Icelandic, and Slavic (Ricoeur 1983,
p. 107 [69]). The Western cultural paradigm is heir (l’héritière) to all of these,
‘issuing from’ previous traditions, but still not uniform with any one of them.
This disjointed continuity points to a dialectic between innovation and
sedimentation, or productivity and receptivity, by which new types of works
and productions come about—Ricoeur uses the term ‘rule-governed defor
mation’, when he explains how the changes of paradigm take place (Ricoeur
1983, p. 109 [70]). ‘It is the variety of applications’, he writes, ‘that confers a
history on the productive imagination and that, in counterpoint to sedimen
tation, makes a narrative tradition possible’ (Ricoeur 1983, p. 109 [70]). In
sum, then, the lived experience finds itself as articulated in cultural products—
such as particular cultures—that capture the essence of the configurational
operation in its concretisation. This leads me to conclude that the productive
imagination that Ricoeur places in the very core of all this human action of
‘grasping together’ is nothing else but l’imagination culturelle that, in spite of
50 Timo Helenius
its force of contestation and creativity, still always operates under the condition
of affirmation that pertains to the living tradition in which the ‘I’ dwells as a
living, acting, and also suffering human being.
References
Author Biographies
Notes
1 Numbers in square brackets refer to the respective pages in the English translation.
2 It is fair to point out that Johann Michel is far from having been the first to rec-
ognise the social dimension of Ricoeur’s philosophy of the imagination. See Taylor
1986, pp. ix, xi; Kearney 1998, pp. 165-169.
3 Of Johann Michel’s discussion on the social and political positing, see Michel
2015, pp. 131-142.
4 As also mentioned in his essay in the present publication, Taylor is currently edit-
ing these lectures whose projected publication is in 2016. Furthermore, Taylor’s
2006 essay discloses that Ricoeur’s discussion on Dagognet, Gombrich, and
Goodman in the still unpublished lecture 17 in particular explores the cultural
imagination from the productive point of view by focusing in on pictorial art. See
Taylor 2006, pp. 93, 101.
5 Kant distinguishes determinate and reflective judgments with regard to the
universal rule: ‘Judgement in general is the ability to think the particular as
contained under the universal. If the universal (the rule, principle, law) is given,
then judgment, which subsumes the particular under it, is determinative (even
though as a transcendental judgment it states a priori the conditions that must be
met for subsumption under that universal to be possible). But if only the particular
is given and judgment has to find the universal for it, then this power is merely
reflective’. See Kant 1999, V.179-180.
6 Ricoeur, in fact, described his own philosophical attunement as ‘post-Hegelian
Kantianism’. Ricoeur acknowledges that the expression is borrowed from Eric
Weil. See Ricoeur 1969, pp. 402-405 [412-414]; 1986a, p. 251 [200].
7 Cf. Kant 1999, III.Bxvi-xvii; A118-125; B151-152.
8 Cf. Kant 1999, III.A145-146/B185-186.
9 Amalric expresses in passing a similar kind of idea when mentioning that ‘les
objectivités proprement humaines se sont progressivement constituées dans l’histoire
et dans la culture’. Cf. Amalric 2013, p. 455.
10 Ricoeur’s analysis of the birth of equivocal meaning in The Living Metaphor
addresses the unresolved issue of his earlier works. Rather than being a ‘linguistic
turn’ the work clarifies the question of symbolisation Ricoeur introduced already
in The Voluntary and the Involuntary. Cf. Ricoeur 1949, pp. 449-450 [478].
Social Imaginaries 1.2 (2015) 53-72
Introduction
If we assume that empirical reality is the only material of science, and if em-
pirical reality forms an infinite manifold whose purely factual rendition can
Embodiment and Umwelt: A Phenomenological Approach 57
never be provided by science, it is self-evident that science is possible only by
means of the reshaping undertaken by the subject.
The classification theory of the faculties during the time of Kant resulted in
the drastic separations, the divisive compartmentalization of his critique of
reason. This can be seen clearly as regards to the separation between intuition
and logical thought, as well as between the matter and form of knowledge.
Both distinctions, as sharp and they are with Kant, destroy the coherence of
a living nexus...
to the broad domain of the natural and human sciences. The attitude of the
natural scientist is the naturalistic attitude wherein the researcher confines her
theoretical interest to the physical or material features of the objects of experi-
ence. This isolation of the spatio-temporal materiality of objects is accom-
plished through the neutralization of subjective accomplishments in experi-
ence, e.g., the meaning predicates that indicate and express non-epistemic
value and so on, which allows the natural scientist to secure a stratum of ap-
pearances that are, in principle, reducible to res extensa (Husserl 1952, p. 33).
If a chemist, for example, were to investigate a painting in New York’s Metro-
politan Museum of Art in the naturalistic attitude, she would merely be con-
cerned and interested in the various chemical properties of the physical fea-
tures of the paint (Husserl 1952, p. 8). Her attention toward the author of the
work, the composition of the painting, and its historical significance would be
put out of play in the naturalistic attitude. The isolation of the physical fea-
tures of phenomenon results in a neutralization of a variety of cognitive, prac-
tical, and evaluative attributes involved in a full range of aesthetic experience.
The naturalistic attitude is thus a limiting attitude in that its theoretical inter-
est is confined to merely physical characteristics of experience and this restric-
tion of attention is a modification of the broader scope of meaning predicates
in the pre-theoretical natural attitude.
The personalistic attitude of the human scientist is also a modification of
the pre-theoretical natural attitude, but the scope of available possibilities for
theoretical interest remains much broader than its naturalistic counterpart. In
the personalistic attitude, our interest is not only directed toward the physical
features of objects and states of affairs, but other forms of givenness such as we
find in legal codes, intersubjective communities, and historical events. The
non-physical properties of objects and states of affairs, e.g., the motivational
features of a person in social interactions, do not present themselves apart
from their physical properties but neither is a full account of them reducible
to their material features. While the forms of givenness in the personalistic
attitude are not separate from or juxtaposed to their physicality, these phe-
nomena have an ‘excess’ or ‘surplus’ beyond their merely physical givenness
(Husserl 1952, p. 176). While personalistic interests cover a broad range of
phenomena, the particular human sciences confine theoretical attention to
specific types of phenomena – the historian relegates her interest to historical
events, the sociologist to social phenomena, and the psychologist to psycho-
physical properties of the person. These are all interests that, in principle, are
also available to the pre-theoretical natural attitude, but when we assume the
personalistic attitude, we theoretically modify these interests by neutralizing
their practical significances. The personalistic attitude is also thus a modifica-
tion of the personal concerns and interests of the natural attitude of life.
While Rickert confined his formulation of attitudes to the theoretical in-
quiry involved in scientific methodology, Husserl radicalized Rickert’s
64 Adam Konopka
Avenarius was critical of the naturalistic psychology of his day that uncriti-
cally accepted first person experience and he attempted to develop a synthetic
and analytic account of the mental contents of ‘pure experience’ that he un-
derstood to be analogous to physiological processes in the brain. Avenarius’
attempt to bring the psychic and physical into a close parallel operated with a
minimal commitment to presuppositions concerning a living thing. A living
thing, according to Avenarius, required the nourishment and exercise involved
in the striving to maintain a ‘vital maximum’ through the maintenance of
bodily equilibrium in response to a changing environment (Umgebung) (Av-
enarius 1888, pp. 64-72). He categorizes this orientation toward the stability
of bodily equilibrium in response to environmental changes as ‘System C’ and
describes the motivational attributes of this orientation, for example, in pe-
riphery perception in terms of relevancy and familiarity. Husserl’s account of
the feeling sensations proper to a lived body condition a process of world
disclosure engages this account of periphery perception. Let’s briefly consider
Husserl’s engagement of Avenarius in more detail.
Husserl’s approach to the formation of the concept of world can be intro-
duced through his account of ‘habitualities’ (Husserl 1970a, pp. 66-67; 1959,
p. 75). He employed this account of the habitual features of experience to
describe a wide range of higher order cognitive, practical, and evaluative phe-
nomena. He also characterized lower order perceptual and embodied habitu-
alities that contribute to a process of association involved in horizontal antici-
pation of novel objects and states of affairs. Husserl’s basic claim was that each
perception of an object with a new sense, especially when that experience is
evidential through a process of intentional fulfillment, produces an abiding
conviction for the perceiver. Consider again the example of quenching thirst.
The perception of the temperature and wetness of the water is accompanied
by resolved feeling sensations of increased bodily temperature and fatigue. As
these perceptions and feeling sensations retentionally recede into the past, the
perceptual fulfillments and resolved bodily sensations likewise recede into the
past but can also inform subsequent experiences in the future. While this
process of habitual association is not necessarily propositional, it can be re-
flected in judgments like ‘Cool water quenches thirst’ and the practical prop-
erty of ‘thirst quenching’ can accompany the anticipation of future experi-
ences of drinking water. The retentional phase of quenched thirst and the ac-
companying resolutions of feeling sensations thereby contribute to an abiding
conviction in the embodied perceiver regarding drinking water’s embodied
significance for quenching thirst. The accumulation of sedimented convic-
tions produces in the embodied perceiver an overall ‘empirical style.8 In the
course of accumulated confirmations of resolved feeling sensations, the per-
ception of anticipated objects and states of affairs become associated with af-
fordances for further bodily regulation.
66 Adam Konopka
Conclusion
Husserl’s lecture courses and research manuscripts on the Natur/Geist dis-
tinction develop a sense of ‘life-in-the-world’ that correlates an embodied ho-
rizon of feeling sensations with the habituated sensuous style of objects and
states of affairs in an Umwelt. The general sketch above is perhaps sufficient to
respond to Merleau-Ponty’s criticism that Husserl was not able to overcome
the duality between Natur and Geist or Barry Smith’s criticism that Husserl
conceived of mental experience in isolation from a ‘surrounding physico-bio-
logical environment.’ As we have seen, a lived body’s correlate with an Umwelt
is pregnant with sense associations that are prior to the theoretical modifica-
tions involved in the formation of the Natur as the correlate of the naturalistic
attitude and Geist as the correlate of the personalistic attitude.
The belief modalities and thetic characteristics involved in the natural at-
titude are inclusive of the goal orientation involved in the feeling sensations
involved in bodily regulation. As we have seen, the lived belief in the evalua-
tive possibility of embodied resolutions in pre-reflective bodily self-awareness
contributes to a sense making process in an Umwelt as a horizon of relevancy
and familiarity through a process of sedimented habitualities. This ‘overall
empirical style’ is inclusive of a sensuous style proper to associations among
objects and states of affairs in horizons of tendencies that condition and are
conditioned by the feeling sensations involved in bodily regulation.
Embodiment and Umwelt: A Phenomenological Approach 69
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Author Biographies
Adam Konopka currently serves as the Besl Family Chair at Xavier University. He earned
his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Fordham University, where he was twice awarded the
Teaching Fellow of the Year (2006-2007, 2007-2008). His research is broadly in-
formed by 20th century European philosophy and is focused on a phenomenological
development of environmental philosophy and public policy. He received the Early
Career Scholar Award from the Association of Practical and Professional Ethics (2013)
and the Emerging Scholar Award from the College of Mount St. Joseph (2013).
Address: Xavier University, Department of Philosophy, Ethics/Religion and Society, 3800
Victory Parkway, Cincinnati, OH 45207-3491, USA. Email: konopkaa@xavier.edu
Notes
1 Husserl gave lectures courses on the Natur/Geist distinction in 1912, 1919, and
1927. He also substantively engages the distinction in the seminars Phenomenol-
ogy and Psychology (1917) and Phenomenological Psychology (1925).
2 Smith thus finds it necessary to supplement a Husserlian account of environed
embodiment with the ecological psychology of J. J. Gibson in order to gain a ‘new
realist interpretation’ of environing phenomenon. See also Smith 1999.
3 The Natur/Geist distinction can be historically traced back to John Stuart Mill’s
distinction. See Mill 1974. On early uses of the scientific use of the term “Geist,”
see Rothacker 1948; Makkreel 1969; Plantinga 1980.
4 Dilthey’s position develops and culminates in his Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen
Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften (1910). For an account of this development, see
Jalbert 1988; Owensby 1994.
5 This unbuilding is developed further in Konopka, 2009.
6 Eugen Fink (1976, p. 190) argues that pre-theoretical natural attitude remained
an ‘operative concept’ in Ideas II, Luft, 1998.
7 This analogical methodology is developed in Walton, 2010; Melle, 1997.
8 Husserl’s account bears similarities with Alva Noë and Evan Thompson’s sensory
motor knowledge. See Noë and Thompson, 2004a and 2004b, Herbert and Pol-
latos, 2012; Craig, 2002.
9 Husserl (2002, p. 228) characterizes Umwelt as the constitutive ground of the con-
cept of world, ‘That which has already resulted for us in this regard is the fundamen-
tal basis of the original source of the determination of the concept ‘world,’ namely,
the necessary form of the correlation “I and my Umwelt,” and the correlation “I and
my pre-theoretical Umwelt”’ (Konopka 2010; Gurwitsch 1964, pp. 11).
Social Imaginaries 1.2 (2015) 72-91
Abstract: In this paper, I will use Jan Patočka’s last written essay, ‘Notes
on Masaryk’s Theological Philosophy’, to reflect on Dostoevsky’s novel,
The Brothers Karamazov. According to Patočka, in this novel, Dosto-
evsky offers an answer to Kant and his notion of immortality as a fea-
ture of practical reason only. Kant’s intervention in modern philosophy
is well known. It is much less discussed that his influence was to refor-
mulate not only metaphysics, but also theology. Dostoevsky takes up
the challenge of the Kantian solution and plays it out in his novels. His
critique of science and utilitarian morality and his treatment of chil-
dren, immortality and love will be the focus of this paper. I will suggest
that the problem of a duality between rationality and divinity limits
Dostoevsky’s critique of Kant.
In this paper, I will build on a few remarks that Jan Patočka makes in his
last written essay, ‘Notes on Masaryk’s Theological Philosophy’. The issues he
covers include, but are not limited to, the new scientific reconfiguration of
nature, the problem of subjectivity and objectivity, the Kantian theodicy
which changed the landscape of philosophy, and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s retort
to this new theodicy. Patočka also notes the problem of the Kantian endeavour
to explain the finite moral conduct of humans if ‘evil’ is allowed to become a
part of the finite world. The question Kant grapples with regarding the
problems that arise with the new scientific re-configuration of nature has
The Problem of Morality in a Mathematised Universe 73
become obscured for us. We accept without question the scientific description
of nature and a morality without God. As Patočka suggests, Dostoevsky’s novels
deal with this changing world and his writing can give us a glimpse of those
changes that earlier thinkers considered. Dostoevsky was a genuine seismographer
of a changing society. His vision gave us not only ‘the laws of this disintegration
and this new formation’; he also provided a reflection concerning the ‘old and
past’ that had ceased to be (Dostoevsky 1994d, pp. 847–848).
Patočka (1907–1977) was a Czech phenomenologist—the last student of
Edmund Husserl, a student of Heidegger, a student and later friend of Eugen
Fink, and a friend of Ludwig Landgrebe, Jacob Klein, Alexander Koyré, Walter
Biemel and many other phenomenologists. Except for two brief periods (after
1945 and 1968), he was not allowed to teach. Instead, he worked in the archives
of Tomáš Guarrigue Masaryk, a philosopher, sociologist and the first president
of Czechoslovakia; and when this archive was closed in socialist Czechoslovakia,
he worked in the archive of Jan Amos Komenský (Comenius). After his forced
retirement from the university, he held private seminars from the early 1970s
until his early death. At the end of his life, he became a signatory of and
spokesperson for the civic movement, Charta 77, which contributed to his
death, precipitated by a long interrogation by the secret police.
It is Patočka’s repeated return to Masaryk’s writing that I want to examine
in this paper. Patočka’s critique of Masaryk changes over time (Chvatík 2012),
but the motif that runs through his engagement with Masaryk is constant. It is
to question Masaryk’s critique of modernity, which Masaryk attributes to
modern subjectivism, which he sees as egotism, leading to an age where moral
Christian values are dead. In his few returns to Masaryk’s diagnosis,1 Patočka
struggles to formulate his answers. In his last written essay, Patocka again returns
to Masaryk and Dostoevsky, and their struggle with modern subjectivism.
According to Ivan Chvatík, in this last essay, Patočka finally formulates his
answer in non-theological terms (2012).
In this paper, I will expand on a few short, sometimes cryptic remarks by
Patočka, by going back to their sources, which Patočka only references, and
will try to map the trajectory of his final critique of Dostoevsky; which has
become, for Patočka, representative of the nineteenth-century Russian struggle
with modernity’s arrival in Russia.
Dostoevsky’s critique of scientific reasoning was firmly grounded in the
sphere of human affairs. His novel, The Brothers Karamazov,2 tackles utilitarian
morality, leading to his reflection on the immortality of the soul and the role
of love to offer a possible way to reconsider the role of divinity in the world of
our living; as opposed to the utilitarian moral auditing that eliminates human
responsibility in favour of environmental causes that (supposedly) inescapably
shape human conduct. Dostoevsky attempts to show how the consequences
of utilitarian moral accounting might lead to a disintegration of the fabric of
society itself. Patočka takes up Dostoevsky’s critique by attempting to rethink
74 Ľubica Učník
the character Zosima’s idea of love, which, for Patočka, need not be tied to
divinity. Patočka’s effort is to reconfigure the way we might think about our
individual social responsibility outside of a religious framework. In short, he
attempts to rethink the problem of time and eternity in a world bereft of God.
One of the first to realise the incompatibility of the modern scientific
understanding of nature with human meaning, leading to a problematic
‘place’ of morality, was Kant.
Kant on Theodicy
The tree, good in predisposition, is not yet good in deed; for, if it were so, it
surely could not bring forth bad fruit. Only when a human being has incor-
porated into his maxim the incentive implanted in him for the moral law, is
he called a good human being (the tree, a good tree absolutely) (Kant 1996
[1793], p. 6:45 [90], note*).
His existence (6:52 [96]: italics in original). In short, Kant realises that ‘our
reason is absolutely incapable of insight into the relationship in which any
world as we may ever become acquainted with through experience stands with
respect to the highest wisdom’ (8:263 [30], italics in original). We can never
have knowledge of God – knowledge is a prerogative of scientific reasoning
about the physical world – and, yet, as persons, we must think of God as the
ground of the highest Good, which we ought to strive for if we want to live in
a world that is a decent place.
In his essay, ‘On the Miscarriage of all Philosophical Trials in Theodicy’,
published in 1791 (Kant, 1996 [1791]),3 Kant suggests that the only concept
of God that we can think of – without knowing God – is ‘a concept of [H]im
as a moral being’ (8:256, note * [25]). As he elaborates, the attempt to ‘prove’
the divine existence using the notion of Necessary or Supreme Being by a
‘would-be advocate of God’ is futile (8:255 [24]). According to Kant, ‘there is
one thing…namely a proof of God’s wisdom’ that no human reasoning can
supply, ‘since omniscience would be required to recognize in a given world…
that perfection of which we could say with certainty that absolutely none
other is possible in creation and its government’ (8:256 [25]). We are not
omniscient, we cannot provide ‘a proof of God’s wisdom’, we cannot provide
any proof for our belief. We cannot know, but we can believe by thinking of
God and his wisdom.
The Kantian project aims to show that if reason is not anchored by human
experience, it transgresses its boundaries to make groundless claims for which
humans cannot provide any evidence, leading to the famous Kantian antinomies.
It is not possible to provide evidence for the existence or non-existence of God:
it is outside human experience. According to Kant, if we recognise natural laws
only – that is, the laws of nature that science reveals – morality is meaningless.
To think of moral laws, we must acknowledge, even if only as a stipulative idea,
of God’s wisdom. Or to put it differently, Kant accepts the scientific conception
of nature, which leads him to rethink theodicy.
For us, living in the twenty-first century, this is a simple fact. Science tells
us what the world is like and God is simply an empty idea, which some cannot
yet accept as empty – though this conclusion is inevitable. There is no God;
we are already schooled in this way of thinking. Kant is one of the first to
realise the implication for moral and existential human meaning in a world
left to itself and conceived as a mechanism that is only accessible through
scientific reasoning. Scientific reasoning is the only reasoning that can give us
knowledge of nature. Yet, how can metaphysics and theology explain God or
the purpose of the world that he has created if no knowledge of him or his
‘deeds’ is possible? This problem can be explained by looking at the shift in the
domain of knowledge.
76 Ľubica Učník
For science is not merely an accumulation of facts but a whole new way of
looking at the world. Scientific ideas and methods spread into areas of thought
where they had hitherto been absent… With the rise of science…science and
truth came to be synonymous, and religion was relegated to the sphere of
myth and superstition (Thompson 2002, p. 192).
his guarantee, human will is all that is left to us. As Stavrogin admits, referring
to those crimes, ‘the chief factor was my own wicked will’. Most do not realise
this groundlessness of moral precepts. They rely on their will only, performing
immoral deeds without realising that if there is no divine ground, their will is
without anchor. As Nikolai sums up, people are ‘uprooted from the ground’
and they ‘do not even notice their nasty acts and think themselves honest’.5
Ivan Karamazov expresses it thus: ‘Conscience! What is conscience? I make it
up myself. Why do I suffer then? Out of habit. Out of universal human habit
over seven thousand years. So let us get out of the habit, and we shall be gods!’
(2004, p. 653).
Moral Maxim
The question of human conscience is posed not by Ivan but by an inner
voice that he struggles with, represented by Dostoevsky as the voice of devil.
This voice presents to Ivan his own Euclidian reasoning; Ivan is not so sure
that it is good. One may suggest that the reasoning urging Ivan to will himself
to become a god is an extension of one of the two components of the Kantian
moral maxim: subjective human willing. The Kantian moral maxim is a
combination of divine law and human Willkür: in other words, Kant
acknowledges and affirms human subjectivity – active willing. Acting,
according to Kant, cannot be evil; only willing leading to a deed can, because
willing is based on freedom of our will (1996 [1793], p. 6:35 [81]). The moral
maxim is constituted by ‘two determining grounds’: one constituted by ‘a will
unconditionally obedient to the law’ and the other aiming at one’s own
empirical ‘natural perfection’ (6:4 [57], note*). For Kant, most humans,
sometimes even without realising it, pervert the moral maxim, placing it in
the service of self-love; in effect replacing unconditional moral law with
empirical ends that can only be ‘conditionally good’ (6:4 [57], note*). Hence,
subjectivity, relying on empirical ends, outbalances the immutable divine law,
corrupting the moral maxim. This is the egotism that Masaryk conflates with
subjectivism, as I noted above. In Kant’s ‘Religion Within the Boundaries of
Mere Reason’, ‘the human being is by nature evil’ (6:32 [79]).
This is the quandary brought about by a reconfiguration of nature that is
conceived as running independently of God and humans. Once we realise
that the final cause and purpose of the universe are eliminated in favour of its
mechanism, how can we account for human meaning and the purpose of
human life? Is God, as a stipulative idea, enough to stave off the victorious
march of utilitarianism, which explains everything in terms of the ideal
mathematised concept of causality and reconfigures it in reference to our
finite lives? This is the meaning of Kant’s heroic effort. He attempts to recover
the purpose and telos of the universe, which are not reducible to ideal causality.
The purpose and telos of the universe are unknowable in terms of modern
78 Ľubica Učník
knowledge, yet humans can think of them as ideas. Hence, humans can
understand the world’s meaning and their place in it, which science has
stripped away. Dostoevsky takes on this new problematic by imagining its
consequences in his novels. According to Patočka, in BK, Dostoevsky provides
a different approach to Kant’s solution by rethinking the notion of immortality
of the soul that had previously given support to human, finite morality.
In his novels, Dostoevsky problematises moral law as unconditional if it is
not guaranteed by belief in the immortality of the soul – in other words, by
God. Contrary to Kant, this moral law is a rational idea that can guide humans
in the world of contingency; through the actions of his characters Dostoevsky
suggests that moral law can only be binding if people believe in God and his
goodness. Otherwise, moral law as an idea is not unconditional, as Kant has
it, but is good only ‘on condition’ (6:4 [57], note*) that humans accept its
codification. Rationally, without God and his guarantee of eternity, the
present is relative to our human ends; no ground can be built anew for
universal moral law. Once utilitarians refuse the power of divine law, there is
nothing left to guide us in the maze of human affairs. Utilitarian reasoning is
rational, but this rationality is based on an impersonal natural reasoning that
has no regard for human action. Humans are already reduced to impersonal
mechanical processes. Morality cannot be taken into account in this rationally
reconfigured human mechanistic society. Thus, Dostoevsky, challenging the
Kantian solution, paints the outcome of the acceptance of the scientific
explanation of human affairs reduced to empeiria as the reductio ad absurdum
of utilitarian reasoning.
For Dostoevsky, ethics cannot become ‘a sort of science’, although in BK
he lets Mikhail Rakitin explain it in this way to Mitya Karamazov, accused of
patricide. To discuss morality as a possible object of scientific knowledge
derived from human experience is to turn morality into the logic of exchange:
quid pro quo. The new scientific ethics can explain Mitya’s presumed crime by
taking Mitya’s responsibility out of the equation: ‘[i]t was impossible for him
not to kill, he was a victim of his environment’ (2004, p. 588). Here one
exchanges responsibility for the environmental causality. All is well. Following
the laws of nature, nobody can change the effect of human acting proceeding
inevitably from a cause, be it a childhood or the environment conceived more
broadly. Humans could not do otherwise. God is no more and Mitya’s murder
of his father happened because of ‘nerves in the brain’ and their ‘little tails, and
not at all because I have a soul or am some sort of image and likeness’ of God
(2004, p. 589). Mechanical processes supposedly replace the human soul.
Once a mechanism replaces the domain of the human soul, it is possible to
account for deeds in terms of exchange. ‘Nerves in the brain’ cause Mitya to
become a murderer. Dostoevsky challenges this moral, mechanical accounting
of Mitya as not being a murderer.
The Problem of Morality in a Mathematised Universe 79
Yet, in our everyday living, we simply take for granted that there is a
purpose in things and in the world. Things are here, they have their ends, they
80 Ľubica Učník
come into being and then they vanish from the face of the earth; seasons
change, days follow nights and rain will nourish the dry land to enable plants
to grow. In a certain way, we assume the ‘concept of final causes’ without
realising it, although we know that, according to modern science, nature
exhibits nothing more than ‘the mechanical causes (the motive forces)’ (Kant
1987 [1790], pp. II, §72, 389–390 [270]). Nature is simply ‘a huge, mindless,
purposeless, mathematical machine’ (Sullivan 1933, p. 139).
So, the question is, as Kant asks: is there ‘also another kind of causality’, the
causality ‘of final causes’? (II, §72, 389–390 [270]) To assume this type of
causality, we would have to leave behind the physical world of causes and effects
and venture into the speculative, supersensible domain. This was the medieval
reasoning, in which all things were defined by their purposes, aiming to fulfil
the final telos that each strived for; God was the guarantor of this type of causality.
Kant observes also that there is a further problem if we accept the physical
causality of nature as the only causality. On the model of physical causality we
can explain nature as a mechanism, yet, it is not possible to account for the
regularity of its processes. We cannot give reasons why causes and effects
proceed in this regular manner. There are two types of explanations, physicalist
or idealist. Or we can follow Spinoza, who, according to Kant, reduces ‘our
concepts of purposive [things] in nature to the consciousness’ (II, §73, 393–
394 [274–275], square brackets in translation); in other words, positing a
supreme subject – presumably a God – where all inheres. Yet, if this Supreme
Being is simply defined by physical, mechanical causality, the same problem
ensues: we can use the hypothesis of physical causality, but we cannot explain
it. As Kant says, we cannot explain ‘how even a mere blade of grass is produced’
(§76, 400 [282–283]). In all cases, as Kant maintains, we surreptitiously
‘subordinate the mechanism of nature to the architectonic of an intelligent
author of the world’ (II, §85, 438 [325]). To reframe this Kantian remark, in
order to affirm mechanical causality, we either presuppose the creator who is
the author of this regularity, or forget our own participation in formulating
this idea. We simply forget that ‘purposes in nature are not given to us by the
object,’ since we cannot ‘observe purposes in nature as intentional ones’. It is
we who ‘add’ the concept of purposefulness to nature in ‘our thought’ alone
(§76, 399 [282], italics in Pluhar’s translation).
Despite either Kant’s suggestion or our reformulation of the problematic,
this is a pseudo-problem for modern science. Science does not need the
concept of the purposiveness of nature. It simply aims to explain why natural
processes are regular; it enables us to gloss over its processes with the
hypothetical law of causality that we have postulated. Science is interested
only in how these natural processes work, thereby giving us power over nature
that we can use for our human ends.
However, this pseudo-problem plays out differently in the sphere of human
affairs. The elimination of final causality in favour of efficient causality from
The Problem of Morality in a Mathematised Universe 81
the world of our living has implications for our moral conduct. Is there or is
there not a ‘unity of purpose’ that will provide guidance with respect to our
moral conduct? (II, §84, 434 [322]) If we accept that nature is nothing but a
mechanism, then questions such as ‘what are things in the world there for?’ or
‘how should we act?’ are impossible to answer. This type of question is
incomprehensible in the physicalist explanation of nature. Science provides a
description of natural processes in terms of their regularity; it does not aspire
to explain ‘why there is something rather than nothing’, as Leibniz asks, or to
give moral suggestions to us. Hence, as Kant realises, the problem is more
acute in the sphere of morality. If there is no God, no future life and no
immortality of the soul, why should people behave morally? For him, but not
for us, if a person is moral but does not believe in God and an after-life, the
only end to such people is a reduction to their mortal physical bodies. No
matter how ‘righteous’ people are, nature without purpose or telos ‘will still
subject them’ to the same meaningless demise (II, § 87, 452 [341]). Humans
will die and there is nothing more to it. No purpose, no end, no immortality
of the soul, no meaningful human life. In such a case, as Kant puts it, humans
will be subject to ‘all the evils of deprivation, disease, and untimely death, just
like all other animals on the earth…until one last tomb engulfs them…and
hurls them…back into the abyss of the purposeless chaos of matter from
which they were taken’ (II, §87, 453 [341]). Nature as a purposeless machine
is all that is left to humans and it swallows them up as it does all other creatures
and things. Oblivious to moral ends, humans are stripped of all meaning. As
Patočka notes, showing a difference between our present understanding and
the Kantian horror,
[In Kant’s time], this drama [of the mortality of human life without the prom-
ise of eternity] could be obvious only to individuals who have penetrated…
the problematic of reason and skepticism… Not much time passed, and the
mathematical projection of nature, deprived of transcendent support [by di-
vine reason] and made meaningful only by its relationship to relative human
purposes, i.e., technologically, became widely obvious to the masses, which
could not be kept calm by their [previous] confidence in the good intellectual
conscience of its upper classes (i.e., educated) (Patočka 1991 [1976], p. 59).
has not realised the implications of his position, is exemplified by Ivan. God
is dead and utilitarian logic follows: ‘for every…person, like ourselves…who
believes neither in God nor in his own immortality, the moral law of nature
ought to change immediately into…egoism, even to the point of evildoing’.
Everything ‘should not only be permitted to man but should be acknowledged
as the necessary, the most reasonable’. Put simply, this is the only possible
outcome for man in a world bereft of God; it is ‘the noblest result of his
situation’ (69).
Dostoevsky’s question, of course, remains: if there are only the mechanical
laws of nature, where does ‘the moral law of nature’ come from?
We simply assume that the world’s mechanics do not need a God for their
creation or running, and that there is no life after this one. Moreover, people
now – for the most part – treat the soul as an out-dated concept. We ‘know’
that human beings are at the end of the evolutionary process and that we
evolved from apes. Moreover, in turn – like everything else – humans evolved
from molecules of carbon (the infamous ‘primordial soup’). We know that we
are no more than animals, however ‘sophisticated’ we are. We know that we
will die, and thus that we share the same fate as any other animal. Our
understanding of ourselves is no longer burdened with the Christian concepts
of future harmony or the immortality of the soul. Most of us know that there
is no God, but this is not a scary realisation, as it was for Kant (1987 [1790],
pp. II, §87, 451–452 [341]). Due to our schooling, we no longer experience
the Kantian horror in the face of these ‘facts’.
Yet, we might suggest that some of the problems Kant struggles with are
not resolved, only obscured in our times. And Kant’s horror has adapted into
an attitude toward the world that comes with its own set of problems. Perhaps
if we are willing to concede that some of the things that concerned Kant are
still relevant to us, however these issues have ‘mutated’, then it might be worth
following Patočka and revisiting Dostoevsky and his preoccupation with
eternity and future harmony in the world beyond.
Children
Children are a strange lot: I dream of them and see them in my fancies (Dos-
toevsky 1994c, p. 309).
I advise you never to think about it…and most especially about whether God
exists or not. All such questions are completely unsuitable to a mind created
with a concept of only three dimensions. And so, I accept God, not only
willingly, but moreover I also accept his wisdom and his purpose, which are
completely unknown to us; I believe in order, in the meaning of life, I believe
in eternal harmony, in which we are all supposed to merge, I believe in the
Word for whom the universe is yearning, and who himself was ‘with God,’
who himself is God, and so on, and so on and so forth, to infinity…It’s not
God that I do not accept…it is this world of God’s, created by God, that I do
not accept and cannot agree to accept (235).
So, Ivan does not believe any more in a moral God. He might believe in
God but he cannot believe in the Kantian moral God (see Golosovker 1963),
a God who created the present world with all its evil suffering. His rejection
of God’s moral world is based on many examples from the newspapers, of
cases of tortured children. How can there be a future harmony, if innocent
children are murdered without any retribution for their murder in the present?
Yet, in a strange way, Ivan’s enumeration is impersonal. It is a case of Euclidean
mind, defined by an understanding of only three dimensions. In other words,
he accepts the scientific picture of the world. Informed by this scientific
attitude, he presents case studies, from which he draws his conclusion. His
question to Alyosha is in the same manner. The only possibility of an answer
is already framed by those examples:
Tell me straight out, I call on you – answer me: imagine that you yourself are
building the edifice of human destiny with the object of making people happy
in the finale, of giving them peace and rest at last, but for that you must inevi-
tably and unavoidably torture just one tiny creature, that same child who was
beating her chest with her little fist, and raise your edifice on the foundation of
her unrequited tears – would you agree to be the architect on such conditions?
Tell me the truth (245).
Most importantly, Alyosha, the perpetual child of all and for all,
wholeheartedly believes in Jesus, God’s love, future life, and love for others. As
Ivan says to him, ‘I’m exactly the same little boy as you are, except that I’m not
a novice’ (234). Ivan is ‘infected’ with Euclidean logic. He wants to believe,
but Euclidean logic holds him back. He sees the problem with this earthly
logic, but does not know how to overcome it, how to love. His confession to
Alyosha is reminiscent of Markel, Zosima’s brother, when he says,
I want to live, and I do live, even if it be against logic. Though I do not believe
in the order of things, still the sticky little leaves that come out in the spring
are dear to me, the blue sky is dear to me, some people are dear to me, whom
one loves sometimes, would you believe it, without even knowing why; some
human deeds are dear to me, which one has perhaps long ceased believing in,
but still honors with one’s heart, out of old habit (230).
Patočka’s Approach
The human being must make or have made himself into whatever he is or
should become in a moral sense, good or evil. These two [characters] must be
an effect of his free power of choice, for otherwise they could not be imputed
to him and, consequently, he could be neither morally good nor evil (Kant,
1996 [1793], p. 6:44 [89], italics and square brackets in translation).
society under the influence of modern science, turned into utilitarian moral
accounting – elevating human egoism to the highest rank – without reducing
all reasoning to Euclidean logic? In short, how can we think human
responsibility, without God, in a world that is ineluctably defined by modern
science?
Patočka’s answer is a return to Socrates: to his knowing that we can never
know all, but that we must strive to be true to ourselves. We must take care of
our soul. In other words, we must take responsibility for our actions, realising
that we live in a world that is always in decline but can rise above it and
assume responsibility not only for ourselves, our acts, but also for the world as
we have inherited it. As he says, this is the meaning of the strange injunction
of Father Zosima: that we are guilty for all and everything. We act in the world
and can never predict the consequences of our actions. Consequentialism and
utilitarianism are wrong. Our actions create ripples that are beyond our
control. We must be aware of those potentially devastating consequences and
take responsibility for them. We can cause suffering where none was intended.
We are guilty in the sense that we must be responsible.
For Patočka, we live in the world, which was here before we were born and
will be here when we die. The world is a horizon that gives meaning to our lives
here and now. It is historical. It is not a machine that runs outside of us; it is an
abode in which we live. The world of science is not the world of our living but
proceeds from it. It is only one aspect of our understanding of the world.
Formalised, scientific nature is not the world of our living, although it proceeds
from an abstraction of the life-world, where the course of our lives runs.
We are not thrown into the world, as Heidegger has it (1996 [1927]). We
are born into a family. Others take care of our needs and teach us how to be a
person in the world. They care for us, love us and provide nourishment.
Patočka calls this the first movement of existence: ‘the movement of anchoring’.
The second movement of existence – ‘the movement of self-extension’
(unpublished, p. 176) – is when we grow up and become a part of society. We
become ruled by the public anonym, or, as Heidegger calls it, Das Man,
everybody and nobody. We use things and other people for our ends. In
Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, the underground man is one such
example, although, as Patočka remarks, the underground man is already aware
of the rule of the public anonym and wants to reject it, but does not know
how. He is unable to step outside of the prescribed rules. He sees the problem
when he says that ‘[f ]or man’s everyday use, ordinary human consciousness
would be more than enough’: but for him, this is not the case. He is aware of
problems around him, which cause him ‘to be overly conscious’. He knows
that ‘too much consciousness’, or even ‘any consciousness at all is a sickness’
(Dostoevsky 1993, p. 8). It is easier to function according to the rules of
everybody and nobody, according to the rules of the public anonym. He is
aware of his ‘amour propre’ (10), the self-love that is ruling his life and which,
88 Ľubica Učník
for Kant, is the subjective side of our moral willing; which corrupts the ground
of all moral maxims, although it cannot corrupt the unconditional moral law
– ‘the morally legislative reason’ (1996 [1793], p. 6:35 [82]). But if there is no
God, there can be no moral law – or moral law is valid only under the
condition of its acceptance, as Patočka suggests. The underground man
accepts this condition. He is aware that he is ‘the scoundrel himself ’
(Dostoevsky 1993, p. 10). But he cannot imagine that he can change. As he
says, ‘there is no way…to change yourself into something different…because
in fact there is perhaps nothing to change into’ (9). One is powerless against
the ‘laws of nature’ (10). They represent a stone wall that the underground
man hits every time he tries to do something different. The stone wall is a
conceded ‘impossibility’ in terms of doing otherwise than what the laws of
nature decree. ‘[T]he laws of nature’ are nothing but ‘the conclusions of
natural science, mathematics. Once it’s proved to you, for example, that you
descended from an ape, there’s no use making a wry face, just take it for what
it is’ (13). Likewise, in the space of moral law, ‘[o]nce it’s proved to you that…
one little drop of your own fat should be dearer to you than a hundred
thousand of your fellow men, and that in this result all so-called virtues and
obligations and other ravings and prejudices will finally be resolved, go ahead
and accept it, there’s nothing to be done, because two times two is –
mathematics’ (13–14).
It is this awareness that sets him apart from others and keeps him
underground. Yet, his rejection is sterile, he simply does not care, because his
understanding is simply framed by Dostoevsky in terms of the binary: either
God or the laws of nature. In fact, his dilemma between not liking ‘the laws of
nature and arithmetic’ and rejecting ‘two times two is four’ is presented as the
only option, which leads him to accept others shouting at him: ‘you can’t
rebel: it’s two times two is four! Nature doesn’t ask your permission; it doesn’t
care about your wishes, or whether you like its laws or not. You’re obliged to
accept it as it is, and consequently all its results as well. And so a wall is indeed
a wall’ (14). In short, this dilemma leads to the victory of the public anonym,
with its scientific, mechanical understanding of the world and society, because
the underground man does not know how to challenge this inherited
knowledge. Hence, no love of others nor care for them is possible. He does
not know how to care or how to love.
According to Patočka, a tentative answer to this problem is sketched by
Dostoevsky in his story, ‘The Dream of a Ridiculous Man’ (1994a). The story
starts with another example of one who knows he is ridiculous and who
accepts the rule of the public anonym, deciding to end it all by suicide. But
the little girl he meets on his way home changes his whole life. He comes back
home and falls asleep, having a dream of his own demise; only to be brought
back and to a land of strange people who do not know science as we have it,
who love without needing to know why. And so, he begins to understand that
The Problem of Morality in a Mathematised Universe 89
science cannot explain everything. The story ends with the realisation that he
is back, but he realises that the ‘main thing is that you must love others as you
love yourself ’ and to fight against the scientific reduction of life and love to
the formula that ‘[c]onsciousness of life is higher than life, knowledge of the
laws of happiness is higher than happiness’ (960–961). As Patočka remarks,
this realisation is worth fighting for.
For Patočka, this is the third movement of existence – ‘the movement of
breakthrough’ (unpublished, p. 185). It is a movement beyond the rule of
everybody and nobody. It is the acceptance of all; of responsibility, which
flows from our awareness that we are guilty for all and sundry. We have
inherited this world. It is not of our doing, but we are responsible for it. We
were born into the world but our life is not our creation. Nevertheless, we are
responsible for it. Others took care of us, now it is our turn. Others are not
‘means’, for us to use. We suddenly see and recognise and love them in their
own being. This is not a simple task and not all of us will reach this stage in
our lives. Yet, it is something we all can achieve. It is the task that we must
strive for all our life. Not because of God, but because we know that we will
never know all, and that despite this not-knowing, we are responsible for all.
Above all, we are responsible for our acts. But this realisation of our
responsibility is the work of a lifetime. As Patočka says, ‘human life in all its
forms is a life of truth, admittedly finite’, but always responsible (unpublished:
201). The real test of a man is not how well he plays the role he has invented
for himself, but how well he plays the role that is assigned to him by his
human lot in life (Patočka 2004 [1969], pp. 430–432).
We must carry this struggle for our true being in the present; we are finite
human beings. Neither eternity nor God, who has fled the world, can help us.
References
Where no published translation was available for works cited, the English translation
is by the present author.
Aquinas, T 2002, On Law, Morality and Politics, Hackett Publishing Co, Cambridge,
MA.
Burrt, EA 1925, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science: A Historical
and Critical Essay, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co [Bibliolife], London.
Chvatík, I 2012, Patočkovy studie o Masarykovi, Draft.
Dostoevsky, F 1993, Notes from Underground, Alfred A. Knopf, London.
Dostoevsky, F 1994a, ‘The Dream of a Ridiculous Man: A Fantastic Story’, in A
Writer’s Diary: 1877–1881, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL.
Dostoevsky, F 1994c, A Writer’s Diary: 1873–1876, Northwestern University Press,
Evanston, IL.
90 Ľubica Učník
Author Biography
Notes
1 See Patočka 1991a [1936], 1991b [1976], 2006 [1936]. In English translation, see
Patočka 1989 [1936].
2 From now on abbreviated to BK.
3 (Kant 1791).
4 Similar ground is provided by Platonic Ideas.
5 ‘And I did all this as an aristocrat, an idler, a man uprooted from the ground. I
admit, though, that the chief factor was my own wicked will, and had nothing to
do with my environment; of course nobody commits such crimes. But all, who are
uprooted from the ground, do the same kind of things, although more feeble and
watery. Many people do not even notice their nasty acts and think themselves
honest’ (Dostoevsky cited in Fricher, 1922 pp. 118–119).
Social Imaginaries 1.2 (2015) 92-102
Abstract: Equality and inequality are basic elements of law, justice and
politics. Equality integrates each of us into a common sphere by dis-
tributing rights, duties and chances among us. Equality turns into mere
indifference as far as we get overintegrated into social orders. When
differences are fading away experience loses its relief and individuals
lose their face. Our critical reflections start from the inevitable para-
dox of making equal what is not equal. In various ways they refer to
Nietzsche’s concept of order, to Marx’s analysis of money, to Lévinas’s
ethics of the Other, and to novelists like Dostoevsky and Musil. Our
critique turns against two extremes, on the one hand against any sort
of normalism fixed on functioning orders, on the other hand against
any sort of anomalism dreaming of mere events and permanent rup-
tures. Responsive phenomenology shows how we are confronted with
extraordinary events. Those deviate from the ordinary and transgress
its borders, without leaving the normality of our everyday world be-
hind. The process of equalizing moves between the ordinary and the
extraordinary. What makes the difference and resists mere indifference
are creative responses which are to be invented again and again.
---
The equating of the unequal resembles a swinging mobile that never comes
to rest. One can dull this unrest by unilaterally fighting on the side of the
equal or on that of the unequal. This leads to alternating tendencies and coun-
ter-tendencies, where the ‘sense of actuality’ and the ‘sense of possibility’ can-
cel each other of their positions. The first tendency results in equating the
different as far as it is possible, leveling opposites down, and reducing, repress-
ing, or even eradicating everything that is not in line with the general policy.
The normality of a functioning order, which could indeed be otherwise but is
taken as it is, forms the starting point. This includes harmless standards such
as paper formats and temperature scales, less harmless things such as health
standards, codes of conduct, guidelines for research, study modules, listener
quotas, visitation ratio, distribution of votes, age curves, stock quotations and
The Equating of the Unequal 95
even the ‘statistical demystification’ of one’s own person, which Ulrich, the
man without qualities, gets to feel first-hand during a police interrogation
(Musil 1978, p. 159/1995, p. 169). Such forms of normality are relatively
neutral since there is no absolute optimum or pessimum. Normalities, how-
ever, fall upon the tracks of a normalism when normality causes its own origin
and limits to be forgotten.8 Thus, the difference between functional and dys-
functional becomes the guiding difference and generates a pressure for equal-
ity, which we characterize as leveling. Anomalies appear as deficits, disturbing,
offensive, or superfluous. If something goes wrong, it is attributed to the ex-
penses or to collateral damage, which one accepts, passes-on to others, and
secures oneself as best as one can against their risks. The small happiness of the
‘last man’ remains: ‘A fool, whoever still stumbles over stones or human be-
ings! […] One is clever and knows everything that has ever happened: so
there is no end of derision. One still quarrels, but one is soon reconciled—else
it might spoil the digestion’ (Nietzsche 1980, p. 20; 1954, pp. 129-130). The
weakness of an uninhibited normalization is manifest here in that orders in
the end revolve only around themselves and legitimate themselves through
their mere existence. Thus one really has nothing to counter the Mephistoph-
elian motto, ‘for all that comes to be/ Deserves to perish wretchedly.’
The tranquility of a normal order is disturbed not only by unfavorable
external events. It sees itself threatened by internal erosion, and it is more dif-
ficult to find a remedy for that. If something here is of particular significance,
it is equality’s fatal relationship to indifference. Indifference lies as a shadow
upon everything which treasures its equality. If there is an equivalent for any
and all and if everything has its price—even truth and also love—the indi-
vidual loses its meaning (Hénaff 2009/2010). There still are differences but it
makes no difference whether one or the other comes into play. Even if every-
thing is all right, it is only all right. The whole is without brilliance. It threat-
ens with an entropy of meaning, an exhaustion of sense or an ‘increase of
meaninglessness,’ which Cornelius Castoriadis connects with the atrophy of
the social imaginary (Castoriadis 1996/2010). Thus the hero in Sartre’s novel
Nausea visits the library and orients his reading according to the order of the
alphabet. It comes to the absurdity of a knowledge that reaches from A to F
and is far more random than any superficial knowledge. The growing infor-
mation overload has similar consequences. There is not too little but rather
too much sense as suggested by the slogan ‘Stop making sense!’
The threatening indifference however is not restricted to the endless play
with one’s own possibilities, which Kierkegaard accuses the esthete for. This is
evident in Dostoevsky’s story of ‘The Dream of a Ridiculous Man,’ which can
be read as the story of an initial ‘indifferentiation’ and subsequent ‘dis-indif-
ferentiation’ (Dostoyevsky 1957/1971). The first person narrator lives with
the conviction ‘that everything in the world is indifferent,’ even his own life
and even a shot from the revolver that would end his life. And so he waits for
96 Bernhard Waldenfels
the moment, when it would ‘not be so very indifferent’ for him, what becomes
of him. The moment comes but not as expected. On a dreary evening as he is
hurrying through ‘a rain of blatant misanthropy,’ he comes across a girl crying
desperately for help. A quite ordinary scene of a big city, you might say. Some
sociologists thus evaluate the in-difference of the everyday not even as apathy
but as normality in the sense of the self-evident acceptance of differences with
the same validity. In the end it does not matter whether one speaks of a ‘world
without strangeness’ or of a ‘world of strangers’; if in the end all people are
strange, no one is strange.9 This may be so, but can this mean in its entirety
anything more than a sophism? Dostoevsky’s narrator, who has ventured
through the icy waters of social apathy, undergoes a different experience. Once
he returned to his room and to his revolver, he feels in retrospect as if struck
by an ethical trauma that ‘everything is not indifferent’ to him and that he
feels sorry for the girl. The dating of this change of mind on the third of No-
vember underscores the singularity of this apparently plain event, which flows
into a visionary dream and ends with an invitation to help himself: ‘I will go
there! Will go there!’
But it does not always go the way it did with this ridiculous man, who is
awakened from the slumber of indifference through the reverberation of an
external appeal. What opposes the paralyzing tendency towards uniformity is
often a reversal of things, which instead of the equal, inscribes the unequal,
the different, the heterogeneous, upon its banner. To a special degree this en-
tails the glorification of the new as new, driving back everything old as old. I
call this an anomalism. Deviation must be, no matter how. In the most ex-
treme cases, it leads to the declaration of a permanent state of emergency,
which—to paraphrase Carl Schmitt—decides between friend and foe.
This means in political and even cultural-political terms that moments like
transgression, breaks, violence, or decision, explosively emerge with an up-
roar, putting everything in a harsh light. The revolutionary, which is lacking
in social distress, tends to bask in its own glory. The ‘strong and slow drilling
of hard boards’ does not seem spectacular enough. In the German-speaking
regions, this once ran under the slogan of a ‘Conservative Revolution,’ where-
by one stressed the conservative or the revolutionary as needed. Among intel-
lectuals, there were too few who, like for instance Alexander Döblin or Kurt
Tucholsky, campaigned for the imperfect experiment of the Weimar Republic.
Movements of every kind appeared as self-perpetuating, often stimulated by
vitalistic or historicist ideas. When Brecht wrote in his poem The Buddha’s
Parable of the Burning House, ‘Indeed friends, if the soil underneath your feet
does not feel so hot that you would prefer to change places with anyone else
instead of staying, then I have nothing to tell you,’ he conjures an emergency
situation that cannot be turned into a permanent crisis without abandoning
the ground of the political. If we take a look at our Western neighbor, we are
confronted with intellectual spokespersons, sometimes with a disdain for the
The Equating of the Unequal 97
everyday, the normal, the ordinary, although this constitutes not only as ev-
eryday language but also as everyday morality, the humus of a culture. The
contingency that consists in the fact that things can also be different, all too
easily approaches the wholly Different, surrounded by a quasi-religious aura.
We find traces of such extremism, for example, in Sartre’s commitment à tout
prix [at all costs], in Bataille’s celebrations of cruelty, in the public conversions
of ex-Maoists, or in some abrupt change of sides, which almost becomes a
caricature in the series of conversions of Roger Garaudy. The ‘political’ as an
event runs the risk of losing the ground of ‘politics’ from under its feet (Bedorf
2007). This includes a new Pauline enthusiasm, which retains from Paul only
the event of conversion and of the law only its positing, reduced by the voice
of the law, which can still be heard clearly in Kant. As pure events, revolutions
become interchangeable (Finkelde 2006).
In the art scene, anomalism takes the form of an avant-gardism, which, as
Valéry already criticizes, devotes itself to an ‘automatic boldness’ (Valéry 1960,
p. 1321). For a philosopher of art and connoisseur of art like Arthur Danto,
we live in a period after the end of art. This means: ‘Anything ever done could
be done today and be an example of post-historical art’ (Danto 2000, p.
34/1997, p. 12). ‘There is no a priori constraint on how works of art must
look—they can look like anything at all’ (Danto 2000, p. 38/1997, p. 16).
The history of art henceforth ‘…can be anything artists and patrons want it to
be’ (Danto 2000, p. 63/1997, p. 36). ). I doubt whether this applies so gener-
ally to our situation, and I wonder if behind the ‘end of art’ proclaimed with
Hegelian tones there is not actually a certain philosophy of art history that has
overdrawn its account of meaning. But apart from the validity of this diagno-
sis counter-forces to solidified normality cannot be acquired by a mere rever-
sal. The merely new is tomorrow’s old. Moreover the agencies of normality are
now crafty enough to lubricate or season their equipment with ingredients of
the anomalous and the extra-ordinary. And why should one not also convert
the exuberance of joy into profitable entertainment? This sounds as follows:
‘Joy is infinitely beautiful. Joy is young. Joy is and. Not or. Joy wants it all, and
indeed always and everywhere. Joy is BMW.’ This sounds certainly more el-
egant than the slogan ‘Strength through Joy,’ which followed on the heels of
‘the wheels must roll for victory,’ but does it sound so different? The content
of empty formulas is interchangeable.
My reflections should not end with a jeremiad, which for the most part
mourns the wretchedness of the Others. Once again I take up the core for-
mula of the ‘equating of the unequal.’ In it there lies a resistance of its own
kind, if one lifts the veil of the forgotten and the repressed. The discourse of
the unequal achieves a negative tone only when one already assumes the level-
ing effect of an order. On the other hand if one assumes a possible change of
order that may happen at any time, one comes across invasions, challenges,
ideas and claims, that is, extraordinary events that occur by deviating from the
98 Bernhard Waldenfels
familiar and go beyond the expected. These are not mere symbolic or material
resources, which one uses as necessary, but forces of surplus, which manifest in
affects such as surprise or fright or even in ‘thoughts which come on doves’ feet.’
Singular events that fall outside of the framework of the familiar and the
tried and tested are found everywhere. The simple leaf, of which Nietzsche
speaks, is always already more than a mere rose or oak leaf and it is only thus
that it unfolds metaphorical and symbolic forces. When Victor Kaplan was
inspired by the mill wheels of the Murg Valley to invent a water turbine with
altered blades, this shows how even complicated discoveries emerge from in-
conspicuous impulses, which only reveal their significance after the fact. But
violent events can also be singular, which, just as the attack on September 11
activated new defenses, leads, however, to a chain of counter-violence as well.
The [phrase] nil novi sub sole [‘nothing new under the sun’] is speculative,
defensive, or blasé, but it is not true and it is at best a cliché. In the end, de-
viations and surpluses, in which the novel is heralded as significant and the
significant as novel, are nothing frivolous. They assume skills and traditions,
which like abutments in the technology of constructing churches or bridges
produce a stabilizing counter pressure. To be astonished or frightened in a
productive way, one must already know and be capable of something. One
must be composed in order to lose composure, one must be capable of speech
in order to become speechless. An equalizing that takes off from unexpected
events does not signify a leveling nor the elimination of differences but on the
contrary the formation of sensual and affective reliefs, contours, and contexts,
which enables us to transform that which affects us into something that can
be said, done and made. To this belongs the repetition of the unrepeatable,
expressed in rhythms of movements like in dance. What returns, returns al-
tered. Creations, which absorb and process what affects, stimulates, irritates
us, draw their weight from the fact that they act as creative responses, namely
not only in the form of solitary exploits but also as co-creations that go back
to co-affections as for instance in the case of an outbreak of war or a natural
catastrophe (Waldenfels 2007).10
We ultimately raise here a specific kind of ‘difference as non-indifference,’
which Emmanuel Lévinas considers as a colophon of the ethical. But it is a
feature of all the experiences that change us (Lévinas 1992, p. 187/1998, p.
83; Waldenfels 2006, p. 45-49). We are exposed to alien claims that put us in
a situation of inevitability, wherein we cannot not respond. Even the judge,
who from ancient times has been ascribed the task of equalizing (Gr. Isaze-
in),11 as a third party deals with the Other by speaking the law at the same
time about someone and to someone, including the victim whose personal
injury always means more than a case of an infringement of law. Normalism
that does not end with the law begins where the process of law-enforcement is
conceived only from the final verdict. Although justice would indeed be noth-
ing without the law, it is nonetheless more than a formal law resting on
The Equating of the Unequal 99
equality before the law (Waldenfels 2006, p. ch.5; 2005, ch.12). A similar
statement can be made for health care. Mechanized medicine that equates the
suffering of the patient with a general case of illness without considering the
singularity of the sufferer, inevitably gets on the tracks of a medicalization of
life. In order to resist an expertocracy and technocracy impending everywhere,
it is not enough to adduce, case by case, an additional ethics or to appoint
ethics committees. Instead it requires an inconspicuous kind of occupational
ethics, which is proven in the normality of the everyday work life, in the un-
remitting resistance to a normalization that threatens to reduce jurisdiction,
healing, and teaching, to the procedures of law, healing, and instruction. Dis-
tance belongs here as well as opposed to an ubiquitous competence that re-
duces life in all its facets, in its highs and lows, to a learnable skill in order to
distribute ‘life notes’ in the end (Gelhard 2001, p. 97). The critique Marx
exerts on the hypostatization of the homo oeconomicus retains something ex-
emplary even if the ‘total man’ has long since been proven to be a dangerous
illusion. The everyday as an unspecified life background is ultimately affected,
which—as Max Weber correctly remarks—flattens when it is robbed of the
surplus of the extraordinary. Yet surpluses can wear themselves out. On the
other hand if one follows Ulrich’s suggestion and limits the ‘moral expendi-
ture’ to the minimum, then it may be that ‘from every ton of morality a mil-
ligram of an essence would be left over, a millionth part of which is enough to
yield an enchanting joy’ (Musil 1978, p. 246/1995, p. 265; Waldenfels
2010/2014, pp. 181-198).
The non-indifference, which imposes limits on any leveling, in the end can
also be found in art, as when the writer Bergotte in Proust’s Search, confronted
with the ‘little patch of yellow wall’ in Vermeer’s View of Delft, which he gets
to see once more shortly before his death, says to himself, ‘That’s how I ought
to have written’; or when even the hardly noticeable unevenness of two uneven
paving-stones or base plates sufficed for the narrator to rekindle the past, and
he considers it his duty to ‘translate’ the ‘inner book’ of experience (Proust
[French] 1987-1989, vol.3, p. 692; 1987-1989, vol.4, pp. 445ff, 469; Proust
[German] 1994-2002, vol.5, p. 265; 1994-2002, vol.7, pp. 258-260, 294;
Proust [English] 2000, vol.5, p. 170; 2000, vol. 6, pp. 443f, 469). But who
still has the ‘all the same’ on the tip of the tongue, may watch the film In
Search of Memory, in which the famous neurologist Eric Kandel follows both
the memory functions of the brain and traces of his Jewish origin, both his
expulsion from Vienna and his settling in the New World. In an unexpected
way he discovers that ‘not everything is equal’ even for the brain. That the
ancestors of this great Viennese researcher, as in many similar cases, came
from eastern Galicia, may count as a ruse of geographical rationality that en-
sures that trees in metropolises do not grow toward the sky and that one does
not confuse metropolises with monopolies.
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100 Bernhard Waldenfels
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Author Biography
Notes
1 Translator’s note: This translation would not have been possible without the edit-
ing and suggestions made by translation specialist Julia Klug for the work as a
whole as well as by Ralf Müller for a particular passage. The translator thanks both
Ms. Klug and Prof. Müller for their help.
2 Editor’s note: For all in-text references, where necessary, the first date reference is
to the German or French original text, and the secondary date reference refers to
the English language publication of the work.
102 Bernhard Waldenfels
3 An initial version of this text appeared in the program of the steirischer herbst [Eng-
lish: Styrian Autumn] of 2008 under the title, ‘The Process of Indifferentiation’.
4 Marx refers, half approvingly and half critically, to the analysis of exchange and of
money in the Nicomachean Ethics, where it states: ‘Money serves as a measure,
which makes things commensurate and thus equal (isazei)’ (V, 4, 1133b16-17),
but where money functions as ‘a representative of demand’ (1133a29) and thus
contradicts the reduction of the means of exchange to a principle of exchange. On
the transformation from ancient to modern forms of society and economy, see
Marcel Hénaff, Der Preis der Wahrheit. Gabe, Geld und Philosophie (Hénaff 2009,
pp. 482-505 [English: The Price of Truth: Gift, Money, and Philosophy (Hénaff
2010, pp. 315-331].
5 [English: The Portable Nietzsche (Nietzsche 1954, p. 46)].
6 [English: Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ (Nietzsche 1968, p. 113)].
7 On this concept of order, which at the same time contains the seeds of a radical
strangeness, see Bernhard Waldenfels, Ordnung im Zwielicht (Waldenfels 1987)
[English: Order in the Twilight (Waldenfels 1996)].
8 For details on this see the author’s Grenzen der Normalisierung (Waldenfels 1998
(expanded edition 2008)). The remarks in this volume, which deal with scientific-
technical, practical, therapeutic, social and political normalization processes, refer to
authors such as Husserl, Schütz, Goldstein, Goffman, Canguilhem, and Foucault.
9 In regard to the functional generalization of the stranger and the normalization of
indifference, I refer to my critical reflections on cultural and social foreignness in
Vielstimmigkeit der Rede (Waldenfels 1999, pp. 98-103).
10 On this see the author’s Antwortregister (Waldenfels 2007). The answer constitutes
the core idea of responsive phenomenology, which takes as its starting point a
radical experience of the foreign.
11 See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics V, 4, 1132a7.
Social Imaginaries 1.2 (2015) 103-126
Not only is the realm of being, as realm of reality, a state of war; it is a state
of total war, a totality in which no one can be spared and from which no one
can escape. Worse, philosophy, at least as it is practiced in the West since the
Greeks, has played an active role in this universal and totalizing warfare by
providing it with the very basic conceptual determination: the very concept of
totality is the key to the intelligibility of being—being understood as an all-
embracing totality which excludes exteriority and otherness as such. On
reading the above passage, a student of philosophy, who understands her
mission as transmitting the baton of rational thinking from generation to
generation, will either have the feeling of being ‘profoundly trembled by the
thought of Emmanuel Lévinas’, as Jacques Derrida (1967, p. 122/1978, p.
82) has once admitted,3 for she will realize that what is at stake in Lévinas’
diagnosis of the history of Western philosophy as accomplice of universal
warfare is ‘philosophy’s life and death’ (Derrida 1967, p. 119/1978, p. 80), or
she will doubt whether this book is not just the aftermath of an existentialist
fever (Totality and Infinity was first published in 1961) in which its author
blackmails the whole history of Western philosophy with the habitual
irresponsibility of irrational nihilism. Even if she is of the latter case, she will
still have to argue, by providing evidence, that Lévinas’ reading of the history
of Western philosophy is wrong, that reality is never as black as depicted by
him. In doing so, she will have to first of all dismantle Lévinas’ reasoning, i.e.,
to show the inaccuracy of his ‘logic’. But then she will be admitting,
nonetheless, that Lévinas has a logic of some sort.
The present paper has no other ambition than to try to understand ‘the logic
of Lévinas’.4 It will attempt to show that Lévinas’ provocative denunciation of
the state of war is always accompanied by a sustained pathetic cry for peace. Yet,
in contrast to traditional Western humanism or rationalism, peace cannot be
obtained by means of the intellectual authority of the noble but frigid height of
a sovereign and unitary Reason. Instead, peace is possible only by attending to
our proximal relationship with the stranger and the Other as our fellow
human being and neighbor (le prochain): love without concupiscence. Thus,
instead of pursuing the traditional ontological task of searching for the
sovereign and self-sufficient Truth, Lévinas urges us to cultivate our
metaphysical desire for alterity, a desire towards infinity which can never be
satisfied. If the philosophical gesture inaugurated by Plato is the abandonment
of the multiple opinions (doxa) for the benefit of the Idea (Eidos) as the highest
War, Peace and Love: The Logic of Lévinas 105
It will not be too much of an exaggeration to say that the history of hu-
manity coincides with the history of wars: tribal wars, ethnic wars, wars be-
tween city-states, wars between feudal lords, religious wars, wars of indepen-
dence, wars of unification, civil wars, wars of colonization, wars between em-
pires, world wars … When, in 1795, at the high time of European Enlighten-
ment, Kant launched the ‘Philosophical Project towards Perpetual Peace’, a
project preceded by endeavours of the same sort in the century, he was simply
scandalized by the state of incessant warfare in which human civilization was
still engaging herself at a stage when she ought to have reached self-conscious
maturity enlightened by centuries of continuous advancement of knowledge.
Kant hoped to bring about peace by calling upon the power of a Universal
Reason, Reason with cosmopolitan intent equipped by a sufficient self-under-
standing of the limits of human knowledge and her possibilities of action, to
limit her own will to power in order to lay down the rules of pacific co-exis-
tence of different peoples in a new world order. Needless to say, the subse-
quent development of human history shows amply that Kant’s project of eter-
nal peace remains a pious hope. Lévinas, who himself has witnessed both
world wars of the 20th Century and was a prisoner of war in a German con-
centration camp during five long years in the Second World War, certainly has
the right to express his disappointment and also the authority to cast doubt on
the feasibility of a project of peace based on enlightenment by the mere means
106 Kwok-ying Lau
The reader of this passage will not be surprised that Lévinas is considered
as a postmodernist by some cultural theorists. Here Lévinas shares the critique
of the Enlightenment and of the instrumentalization of reason initiated by
Adorno and Horkheimer and continued by Foucault and Lyotard.
Yet Lévinas argues not only as a cultural critic, but primarily as a philoso-
pher, in particular as a phenomenological philosopher. He denounces the West-
ern philosophical tradition which, by declaring her intellectual neutrality, has
acted as the provider of the concept of totality that has served as an alibi to in-
stitute a state of permanent warfare throughout the entire realm of being.
Western philosophy has most often been an ontology: a reduction of the other
to the same by interposition of a middle and neutral term that ensures the
comprehension of being… To know ontologically is to surprise in an existent
confronted that by which it is not this existent, this very stranger, but that by
which it is somehow betrayed, surrenders, is given in the horizon in which it
loses itself and appears, lays itself open to grasp, becomes a concept (Lévinas
1961, pp. 13-14/1969, pp. 43-44).5
Being. When the Other can only be grasped as an object of knowledge, she is
merely a generic existence, she loses forever her unicity and irreducible alteri-
ty. She is always the same, she can never be the different Other. This philoso-
phy of totalization is totalitarian philosophy.
Reducing the Other to the Same, suppressing all boundaries within the
realm of being to create a vast space of homogeneity: the final form of Hegelian
ontology as System of Science and Absolute knowledge is the justification of
generalized violence by the elegant costume of speculative dialectics. Lévinas
admits that the suppressive nature of Hegel’s philosophy of totality was first
revealed to him by the German Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig’s
criticism in his book Der Stern der Erlösung (1988) (The Star of Redemption,
1971) first published in 1921, i.e. in the years immediately after the First
World War.8 It is with irony that Lévinas protests against the totalizing system
of the official philosopher of Prussia and his celebration of ‘Reason in History’:
The Hegelian system represents the fulfillment of the West’s thought and his-
tory, understood as the turning back of a destiny into freedom, Reason pen-
etrating all reality or appearing in it… Universal thought must no longer be
separated, in the heads of some intellectuals, from the individual whom it ren-
ders intelligible… according to the famous formulae, identity of identity and of
non-identity or concrete universal or Spirit. This sort of terminology, of course,
frightens the honest man! But it announces a form of knowledge that does not
get bogged down in specialization, an Idea that does not remain an abstrac-
tion, which animates in its form—in its entelechy—Reality itself… The history
of humanity, throughout religions, civilizations, states, wars and revolutions,
is nothing but this penetration, or this revelation, of reason within Being, long
before the philosopher’s thought has become aware of it in formulating the
System (Lévinas 1976, pp. 328-329/1990a, p. 235).
108 Kwok-ying Lau
In the all-embracing Hegelian system, every single event loses its uniqueness
and every human individual is alienated from the singularity of its fate. They
receive their place only in the total system of rational knowledge which is the
sole key capable of penetrating Reality—social, historical and political. This
latter is the totality of Being interconnected by the speculative movement of
dialectics. Thus, under the slogan ‘the real is the rational’, violence and war, as
part of historical reality, serve too as essential elements for the accomplishment
of the Spirit’s spiral ascension to Freedom as totalizing speculative knowledge.
The totalitarian character of the Absolute Spirit can best be shown in the
following passage of the Phenomenology of Spirit:
The Spirit of universal assembly and association is the simple and negative
essence of those systems which tend to isolate themselves. In order not to let
them become rooted and set in this isolation, thereby breaking up the whole
and letting the [communal] spirit evaporate, government has from time to
time to shake them to their core by war. By this means the government up-
sets their established order, and violates their right to independence, while
the individuals who, absorbed in their own way of life, break loose from the
whole and strive after the inviolable independence and security of the person,
are made to feel in the task laid on them their lord and master, death. Spirit,
by thus throwing into the melting-pot the stable existence of these systems,
checks their tendency to fall away from the ethical order, and to be submerged
in a [merely] natural existence; and it preserves and raises conscious life into
freedom and its own power (Hegel 1977, pp. 272-273, emphasis added).
In order to ensure that individuals will not be attracted to, and remain
isolated in, the comfort and pleasure of independence, war and the threat of
death is a necessary means of government. In the Philosophy of Right, Hegel
even confers a certain ethical essence to war, as he conceives war and the
sacrifice of the individual’s life as the necessary means to maintain or realize
the ethical substance of the State: ‘It is the substantial duty of individuals to
preserve … the independence and sovereignty of the state, even if their own
life and property … are endangered or sacrificed’ (Hegel 1991, §324, p. 360).
In its function to realize the Freedom and autonomy of the Spirit, the State is
a greater individuality than the single person. Thus for the sake of the State,
the life and property of individual persons should be sacrificed, and war is a
necessary means to this end.
Lévinas has in various occasions recognized the importance of Sein und Zeit,
that it remains one of the greatest work in the history of Western philosophy,
the author of Totalité et Infini nevertheless thinks that when Heideggerian
ontology subordinates all relation with beings (Seiendes as individuals) under
the relation with Being (Sein), ‘it affirms the primacy of freedom over ethics’
(Lévinas 1961, p. 16/1969, p. 45). Thus the apparent ethical neutrality of Sein
und Zeit is misleading. It is in fact ‘a tyranny’ (c.f: Lévinas 1961, p. 17/1969, p.
47), as much as the system in Hegelian ontology. Let us explain this in detail.
First of all, for Heideggerian ontology, all possibility of understanding
with regard to beings must refer to Being (the famous Seinsverständnis). The
relation to Being constitutes the ultimate source of meaning; it is the supreme
light of intelligence. Hence the phenomenological reduction practiced in Sein
und Zeit, the conversion of the gaze from beings (the ontical order) to the
Being of beings (the ontological order), is a reduction of the Other to the
Same. The phenomenological reduction neutralizes beings in order to
comprehend it, i.e. to grasp it with superior, because transcendental,
intelligence. Just as the Hegelian Spirit enjoys freedom over the individual
moments of the dialectical movement, Being in Sein und Zeit enjoys freedom
over beings: it maintains itself ‘against the other, despite every relation with
the other to ensure the autarchy of an I’ (Lévinas 1961, p. 16/1969, p. 16).
Thus freedom is not that of the individual; on the contrary, freedom emerges
only as the result of obedience to Being. Thus the ontological thematization
and conceptualization in Sein und Zeit is ‘not peace with the other but
suppression or possession of the other’ (Lévinas 1961, p. 16/1969, p. 16).
Secondly, let us consider from the side of Dasein. Even though Heidegger
emphasizes that Dasein is neither soul nor consciousness, neither the
anthropological subject nor the psychological self, for Lévinas Dasein
conserves the structure of the Self-Same (Lévinas 1974, p. 169/1987, p. 51).
Dasein is always first of all a ‘mineness’ (Jemeinigkeit) (Heidegger 1979, pp.
42-43/1962, pp. 67-68). Dasein always relates to the other as shown in its
structure of ‘being-with’ (Mitsein). But this is true only in the everyday
inauthentic state. Authentic Dasein cares for its properness or ownness
(Eigentlichkeit). The ownness of Dasein is shown through its potentiality of
being as total being. But the way Dasein can conceive of itself (we hesitate to
use ‘herself ’ as for Heidegger Dasein is sexually neutral) as a total being is to
conceive of itself as a being-towards-death (Sein zum Tode) (Heidegger 1979,
§§46-53, pp. 235-267/1962, pp. 279-311). Yet in such a consideration,
authentic Dasein can only consider its own death. In the contemplation of its
own death, Dasein can have no solicitude for any Other. The situation of
authentic Dasein is solitude. In Dasein’s totalizing potentiality of being, the
Other disappears; it is no more in the situation, as it is no more related to any
Other. Whatever authentic Dasein can relate to is nothing other than its
ownness. It is not only that authentic Dasein cannot consider the death of
110 Kwok-ying Lau
other Dasein. For Heidegger it simply makes no sense to talk about the death
of other Dasein: ‘Even the Dasein of Others, when it has reached its wholeness
in death, is no-longer-Dasein, in the sense of Being-no-longer-in-the-world
… , in the sense of the Being-just-present-at-hand-and-no-more of a corporeal
Thing which we encounter’ (Heidegger 1979, p. 238/1962, p. 281). At its
death, the other Dasein is just a corporeal thing, like a stone that we happen
to step on in our daily walk! A terrible conclusion of the author of Sein und
Zeit! It is no wonder that he could publicly utter such terrifying words after
the revelation of the Holocaust: ‘Agriculture is now a motorized food industry:
in its essence it is the same thing as the manufacture of corpses in gas chambers’
(Harries 1990, pp. xxx, 263 n.70).9 To Heidegger, all those who died in gas
chambers as victims of racial extermination are just samples of ‘being-just-
present-at-hand-and-no-more of a corporeal Thing’!
Now it becomes clear what ontological neutrality means for Heidegger: at
its death, the Other Dasein is just a corporeal thing which concerns me no
more than as something to be disposed. Thus underneath this apparent
ontological neutrality is in fact indifference—indifference towards the death
of the Other. Thus Lévinas cannot stop himself from challenging Heidegger’s
apparent ontological neutrality of covering what is in fact an axiological
decision:
Has not the firmness of this primordial ontology already gone through the
axiological alternatives and chosen between values and respected the authentic
and disdained the everyday? … [which is] the alternative between on the one
hand, the identical in its authenticity, in its own right or its unalterable mine
of the human, in its Eigentlichkeit, independence and freedom, and on the
other hand being as human devotion to the other, in a responsibility which is
also an election, a principle of identification and an appeal to an I, the non-
interchangeable, the unique (Lévinas 1991b, p. 208/1998c, p. 211).
It is clear that in the eyes of Lévinas Heidegger opts for the former—the
Same which is always his own authenticity—and declines in advance, like a
disclaimer, any responsibility towards the Other. Thus Heideggerian ontology
ends up ‘affirming a tradition in which the same dominates the other, in which
freedom … precedes justice’ (Lévinas 1974, p. 171/1987, p. 53). Worse, ‘it
thus continues to exalt the will to power, whose legitimacy the other alone can
unsettle, troubling good conscience’ (Lévinas 1974, p. 170/1987, p. 52).
Lévinas’ verdict on Heidegger is severe, but motivated, because what he opts
for is diametrically opposite to the former Rector of University of Freiburg
who was an enthusiastic supporter of Hitler’s Nazi regime. To Lévinas, peace
and non-indifference towards the death of the Other is absolutely prior to
ontology, be it fundamental.
War, Peace and Love: The Logic of Lévinas 111
This is the famous dialogue that is called to stop violence by bringing the inter-
locutors to reason, establishing peace in unanimity, and suppressing proximity
in coincidence. The path of predilection of Western humanism. A nobility of
idealist renunciation! ... An effacement before truth, but also a power of domi-
nation and a possibility of cunning: a knowledge of the other as of an object
prior to any social existence with that other. Yet consequently also a power ac-
quired over him as a thing and, through language, a power that ought to lead
to the unique reason all the temptations of a deceitful rhetoric of publicity and
of propaganda (Lévinas 1982, pp. 216-217/1998d, pp. 140-141).
strange, while conserving the identical and the same. Thus communication
means the monologue of unitary Reason with her inner self. It will be successful
only at the expense of ascertaining the tyranny of the unitary Reason of
communication. Thus a successful philosophy of dialogue must extend her hold
over every domain of human activity such that nothing is out of her command:
there is no more exteriority. It is then nothing other than an old version of
philosophy of totalization covered by a new but already worn out dress.
In fact, communicative rationalism, cognitivism or intellectualism—or
whatever name we call it—are all philosophies of reflection. As such they are
always preceded by the pre-reflective life of incarnated subjects in their
everyday life-world. To phenomenological philosophers, this state of affairs is
already well known from the rich descriptions and analyses of the later Husserl
and Merleau-Ponty. In the Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental
Phenomenology, Husserl succeeded in rediscovering the pre-reflective life of
the meditating subject and her rootedness in the everyday life-world by
enacting a backward questioning (Zurückfragen). Under this light, we further
understand the motivation behind the questions raised by Lévinas after his
deconstruction of the cognitivist mode of true-false-dialogue (in French: le
‘vrai-faux-dialogue’):
Yet we must above all wonder whether the elevation of this peace by the Rea-
son relished by noble souls owes nothing to the prior non-indifference to the
other man; whether it owes nothing to the social life with him which would
be a relation to the neighbor, a relation other than the representation of his
existence, his nature and his spirituality. We must ask ourselves whether the
dynamism and exaltation of peace by truth derives uniquely from the suppres-
sion of alterity and not just as much from the very possibility of the Encounter
with the other as other …, for which a common truth is the pretext (Lévinas
1982, p. 217/1998d, pp.141-142).
When Lévinas asks the above questions concerning the possibility of peace
out of a certain primordial sociality, is he not suggesting to enact a kind of
backward questioning similar to that practiced by Husserl in the Crisis of
European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology? That is to say: to go back
to the field where war actually takes place, and observe how hostility is brought
to an end. Only through this specific backward questioning is it possible to
understand how peace is possible. This in turn means: suspension of the idle
talk on peace and undertaking a phenomenology of warfare violence.
established out of the state of war. In Lévinas’ terms, this is the question of
how the domain of totality can be broken such that human beings no longer
exist simply as generic being but also as individuals with flesh and bone, and
thus can relate to the Other as Other.
First of all, Lévinas points out that ‘war like peace presupposes beings
structured otherwise than as parts of a totality’ (Lévinas 1961, p. 197/1969,
p. 222). If in a war, a human being is just like a pure object under mechanical
control, we cannot see how it is possible to create a crack within this domain
of totality. What is paradoxical about warfare is that in actual fact, war is far
from simply an immanent domain of totality, precisely because the individuals
who take part in the war refuse to be simply an object of mathematical
calculation or mechanical manipulation. This is because it is a question of life
and death. On the battlefield, no one is sure that he will be on the side of
victory. In order to save their own life, soldiers in an army facing defeat will
choose to surrender or even to defect. In this case, they refuse to be part of the
original community. In choosing defection, they even transgress the law. By
these acts, they exit from the totality. This is the first possibility of transcendence.
All this is described by Lévinas in very succinct terms:
War therefore is to be distinguished from the logical opposition of the one and
the other by which both are defined within a totality open to a panoramic view,
to which they would owe their very opposition. In war beings refuse to belong
to a totality, refuse community, refuse law; no frontier stops one being by
another, nor defines them. They affirm themselves as transcending the total-
ity, each identifying itself not by its place in the whole, but by its self (Lévinas
1961, pp. 197-198/1969, p. 222).
Since in war no one is sure of victory in advance, tactics and strategies are
important. The belligerent camps try to use ruse to foil the plan of the enemy
prepared in advance. On the battlefield, attack by surprise is one of the keys
to victory. But as both sides prepare attack by surprise, counter attack by
surprise has to be taken into account too. Thus there is planning and
calculation, but also surprise and risk. Nothing is absolutely decided in
advance. Thus war is never a pure being of totality. There is fissure inherent in
it, from where rupture and exit is possible. That is why transcendence is
possible. Again because the actors involved are human beings of blood and
flesh. By means of their antagonism with respect to one another, a space of
exteriority is opened up. Lévinas’ descriptions are without detour:
It is therefore not freedom that accounts for the transcendence of the Other,
but the transcendence of the Other that accounts for freedom—a transcen-
dence of the Other with regard to me which, being infinite, does not have the
same signification as my transcendence with regard to him. The risk that war
involves measures the distance that separates bodies within their hand-to-hand
struggle (les corps dans leur corps-à-corps). The Other, in the hands of forces
that weaken him, exposed to powers, remains unforeseeable, that is, transcen-
dent (Lévinas 1961, p. 201/1969, p. 225).10
The face of the Other, by virtue of its moral epiphany, solicits a response
from my part. I have to pay the debt I owe him. Thus the asymmetrical
relation between the Other and I can generate a more symmetrical relation,
that of paying back my debt. In doing so, I tie a reciprocal relation with the
Other in addition to the first one, which remains asymmetrical. The reciprocal
relation takes the form of exchange (Lévinas 1961, p. 201/1969, pp. 225-
226). On the modern battlefield, it often begins by the exchange of cigarettes
or food between soldiers originally hostile to one another. It can eventually
develop into the exchange of captured and wounded soldiers between the
belligerent camps, or further, the exchange of prisoners of war between
belligerent countries.
The phenomenon of warfare violence sketched above is quite different
when compared to Hegel’s metaphysical determination of war. In Hegel the
totality is absolute, exit is impossible; only the Spirit enjoys freedom, not the
individuals in the ultimate sense. This is a game of all or nothing: the Spirit is
the winner who gains all, while the individual is the loser who has to sacrifice
even his own life and property. In Lévinas’ phenomenology of warfare violence,
there is the possibility of exteriority and transcendence; individuals can enjoy
freedom, even if this freedom is never total. Yet it is a game of fifty-fifty which
no one is sure of winning in advance. Precisely because war is a form of
undecided violence that renders possible freedom, transcendence and relations
between individuals. It is even a relation of the first order, because it is a
question of life and death between human individuals.
a. Phenomenology of Eros
First of all, love is not the addition of knowledge by some affective ele-
ments. Love is blind, for there is no concept. It does not involve the fixed
structure of subject and object. In a love affair, the lovers are engaged in a
game which advances towards infinity. Let us listen to Lévinas:
Love as Eros is rather the affair between two persons, which is extremely
complex and paradoxical. Lévinas gives patient and detailed descriptions of
the phenomenon of erotic nudity which involves the moments of modesty
(pudeur), profanation, caress and voluptuous pleasure or voluptuosity (vo-
lupté). In the case of voluptuosity, it is a game of hidden desire, of vertigo or
dizziness, of going beyond the personal while the personal never completely
submerges. It is an experience of quasi-death (the French used to say ‘la petite
morte’—the little death). Erotic love brings the two sides into a situation of
instability. As a being in love, I cannot maintain a stable equilibrium with
myself, nor with the one I love. I am overcome and taken away by a non-I
towards a direction and a future over which I have no control. Again Lévinas
has vivid descriptions of the metaphysical character of erotic love:
It disrupts the relation of the I with itself and with the non-I. An amorphous
non-I sweeps away the I into an absolute future where it escapes itself and loses
its position as a subject. Its ‘intention’ no longer goes forth unto the light, unto
the meaningful. Wholly passion, it is compassion for the passivity, the suffer-
ing, the evanescence of the tender. It dies with this death and suffers with this
suffering (Lévinas 1961, p. 237/1969, p. 259).12
In short, a subject in love loses her sovereignty as a subject. She loses her
freedom and becomes passive. She is literally thrown into the breast of an
intimate Other.
The descriptions of erotic love show that love is neither friendship, as it is
not something among several persons or within a community, but rather an
affair of extreme intimacy between two persons. Nor is love the possession of
the soul of the Other, because the two consciousnesses are not united to form
a single consciousness. Since the union passes by voluptuous pleasure, so love
is not an intellectual and reflective relation but something immediate and
passive.
War, Peace and Love: The Logic of Lévinas 119
Voluptuosity is not a sentiment to the second degree like a reflection, but
direct like a spontaneous consciousness. It is inward and yet intersubjectively
constructed, not simplifying itself into consciousness that is one. In volup-
tuosity the other is me and separated from me. The separation of the Other in
the midst of this community of feeling constitutes the acuity of voluptuosity.
The voluptuous in voluptuosity is not the freedom of the other tamed, ob-
jectified, reified, but his freedom untamed, which I nowise desire objectified.
But it is freedom desired and voluptuous not in the clarity of this face, but in
the obscurity and as though in the vice of the clandestine (Lévinas 1961, p.
243/1969, p. 265).13
In a love affair, I expect the one I love to love me, so this is a reciprocal rela-
tion. But the loving relation is not merely reciprocal, because I am moving to-
wards an Other, to the profound depth of alterity. In short, love is a movement
of transcendence, a relation with the Other who is entirely an exteriority:
b. Phenomenology of Fecundity
tedium of this repetition ceases; the I is other and young, yet the ipseity that
ascribed to it its meaning and its orientation in being is not lost in this
renouncement of self ’ (Lévinas 1961, p. 246/1969, p. 268).
As parents, we get older, but we do not need to abandon ourselves. On the
contrary, with the new generation, fecundity is the continuation of history. As
continuation, it is neither a beginning from zero nor an aging without end.
With the coming of a child, I am able to transcend the world by renewing my
substance with someone who is at the same time the Same and the Other. I
realize a trans-substantiation. It is transcendence towards the Other, exit of
the being of Parmenides. Whereas in Parmenidean being it is the Same which
reigns, fecundity brings about a new species of being which is ‘infinite being,
that is, ever recommencing being—which could not bypass subjectivity, for it
could not recommence without it’ (Lévinas 1961, p. 246/1969, p. 268). We
are able to leave the philosophy of Parmenidean being by this very movement
of transcendence towards the Other brought about by fecundity. If exit of the
Parmenidean being means exit of the state of war, peace is possible.
As such fecundity brings about a kind of peace that the heroes of the
battlefield are incapable of realizing. The latter are just postponing their death,
while fecundity, by giving birth to new generations, is the realization of
plurality. This is the possibility of peace among a maximum number of
individuals. Lévinas summarizes his conception of peace in the following
terms:
Peace therefore cannot be identified with the end of combats that cease for
want of combatants, by the defeat of some and the victory of the others, that
is, with cemeteries of future universal empires. Peace must be my peace, in a
relation that starts from an I and goes to the other, in desire and goodness,
where the I both maintains itself and exists without egoism. It is conceived
starting from an I assured of the convergence of morality and reality, that
is, of an infinite time which through fecundity is its time (Lévinas 1961, p.
283/1969, p. 306).
as neighbor and fellow human. We have to give hospitality to the stranger, let
them enjoy the rights we enjoy. We have to establish institutions to guarantee
justice. For this purpose, we have to employ our knowledge and wisdom. But
knowledge and wisdom are employed at the service of love and not vice versa,
as for Lévinas love is always prior to knowledge and wisdom.15
To many commentators of Lévinas, the author of Totality and Infinity is not
merely preaching a certain kind of moralism without political implications.16
While some readers emphasize the utopic character of Lévinas’ ethics of
asymmetric responsibility towards the Other (Abensour 2006, 2012), others see
in it germs of an ethical politics which argues for another practice of politics and
justice (Drabinski 2004; Perpich 2004; Tahmasebi-Birgani 2014).
In fact since his youth Lévinas has always been aware of the dangers of
both bourgeois liberalism and totalitarianism, as seen in his early essay
‘Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism’ (Lévinas 2006/1990b). The
mature Lévinas was critical of both Western Liberalism and Marxist Socialism.
The basic concern of Western Liberalism is the preservation and protection of
freedom. But this unilateral emphasis on formal freedom often degenerates
into indifference towards the Other. The result is the prevalence of social and
economic violence in the form of unforeseen social inequality in Western
liberal societies. At the diametrically opposite pole of Western Liberalism,
Marxist Socialism strives to guarantee social equality through economic
justice. But the means it employs is the state as a totalizing machine which
extends her control over every individual both in the public and the private
domains. The exercise of political violence without control is unforeseen and
incommensurate with the social rights such a regime claims to protect.
Lévinas’ ethical politics injects the ethical imperative into political life with
the following double requirements. First of all, non-indifference towards the
third: as the third is the other of my other, the ethical command from the
face-to-face with the third holds for me too, namely ‘thou-shall-not-kill’. This
is the basic principle of the politics of non-indifference, non-violence and
struggle against all forms of oppression of the Other in the ethical politics
inspired by Lévinas. This is a politics which is sensible to the sufferings of the
others which goes beyond merely formal political freedom. This ethical politics
also goes against Marxist Socialism which, in the name of giving priority to
the exploited social class (the proletariat), in fact deprives all individuals of
their basic human rights and political freedom. The Marxist Socialist state
legitimizes the exercise of political violence over not only non-proletarian
social classes, but in fact on the entire civil society, thus on all individuals. The
ethical politics inspired by Lévinas aims to restore justice to individual human
beings both in its socio-economic aspect as well as its political aspect. It aims
at introducing another practice of justice beyond merely formal procedural
justice. It includes the following two interrelated aspects:
122 Kwok-ying Lau
The two directives combine to form a political practice that aims at ‘a non-
violent rebellion against injustice committed against the Other’ (Tahmasebi-
Birgani 2014, p. 32).
Of course questions concerning the concrete operation of this political
practice arise. For example, how should I proceed to understand the other’s
call for assistance? How can I be sure of my knowledge of the demand of the
other? How can I be sure that on hearing the voice of the other and in
responding to her voice by my own voice, I would not have substituted her
voice with my own voice? Lévinas’ apparent depreciation of knowing activities
in contrast to the absolute ethical responsibility towards the other will render
these questions difficult to answer. A convincing theory of ethical politics of
Lévinasian inspiration must consider this most seriously. Yet the two basic
guiding principles of a Lévinasian ethical politics are still rich elements for
imaginaries towards a new practice of social justice.
Conclusion
In the above pages, I have shown that behind Lévinas’s provocative inter-
pretation of the whole history of Western ontology as a state of war and its
denunciation pronounced at the very beginning of Totality and Infinity, there
operates an internal logic. It is first of all a logic of negation: negation of the
rationalization of war and violence committed in the name of the highest
truth. It is also a logic of affirmation: affirmation, through love and justice, of
plurality and infinity incarnated by the face of all figures of alterity. It is an
affirmation of a utopia too: the utopia of an ethical politics aiming at the res-
toration of justice by taking up the absolute responsibility towards the other
as non-indifference to the suffering and the death of the Other. This utopia
also aims at repairing the wound inflicted to the world by all forms of vio-
lence. Lévinas’ logic is thus a logic of a politics of non-violence, accompanied
by a continuous pathétique cry for love and peace.
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War, Peace and Love: The Logic of Lévinas 125
Author Biography
Born and educated in Hong Kong of parents from China, Kwok-ying Lau received
his PhD in Philosophy at the University of Paris I in 1993 with a dissertation on
Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. He is currently Professor and Director of MA in
Philosophy Program at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is founding
editor-in-chief since 2004 of the ‘Journal of Phenomenology and the Human
Sciences’ (in Chinese), published by the Edwin Cheng Foundation Asian Centre
for Phenomenology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is the author of
Towards a New Cultural Flesh: Phenomenology and Intercultural Understanding
(Springer: forthcoming, Spring 2016) and Traces of French Phenomenology: From
Sartre to Derrida (in Chinese, Taipei, forthcoming, Spring 2016), and the editor
or co-editor of twenty volumes of works of philosophy in English and Chinese.
Address: Room 427, Fung King Hey Building, Department of Philosophy, The
Chinese University of Hong Kong. Shatin, N.T. Hong Kong.
Email: kylau@cuhk.edu.hk
Notes
1 The term ‘pathétique’ used in this paper should not be understood in the usual
adverse or negative sense it bears in English (as ‘pathetic’), but rather as the con-
notation of the French term ‘pathétique’ with its Greek origin ‘pathetikos’, which
means emotional with a strong power of affectivity.
2 Editor’s note: For all in-text references, where necessary, the first date reference is
to the French original text (or in one case, the German original), and the second-
ary date reference refers to the English language publication of the work.
3 The translation of the French has been slightly modified by the author.
4 This expression is inspired by the title of Jean-François Lyotard’s famous article
devoted to Lévinas, ‘Logique de Lévinas’, or, ‘Lévinas’ Logic’ (Lyotard 1980, pp.
127-150/2005, pp. 278-333). While Lyotard undertakes an analysis of Lévinas’
works from the perspective of pragmatics of language, our approach is more phe-
nomenological. In particular I will reconstruct Levinas’ logic from his phenome-
nology of warfare violence as possibility of peace and phenomenology of Eros and
fecundity as elements of phenomenology of love.
5 The translation of the French has been slightly modified by the author.
6 Lévinas’ article ‘Totalité et totalisation’ was originally a contribution to the Ency-
clopaedia Universalis in 1968, and can be found in Lévinas 1995 or in English in
Lévinas 1999b.
7 Lévinas’ relation to Husserl is much more complicated than can be treated here.
Yet, in the Preface to Totalité et Infini, Lévinas claims that ‘Husserlian phenome-
nology has made possible this passage from ethics to metaphysical exteriority’
(1961, p. XVII/1969, p. 29). Lévinas has even expressed very laudatory words
concerning the founder of contemporary phenomenology with regard to the re-
covery of the human dimension in a dehumanized modern world: ‘No one
126 Kwok-ying Lau
combatted the dehumanization of the Real better than Husserl, the dehumaniza-
tion which is produced when one extends the categories proper to mathematized
matter to the totality of our experience, when one elevates scientism to absolute
knowledge... Husserl’s phenomenology has furnished the principal intellectual
means for substituting a human world for the world as physicomathematical sci-
ence represents it... [Husserl’s p]henomenology has not only permitted the ‘de-
thingifying’, the ‘de-reifying’ of the human being, but also the humanizing of
things’ (Lévinas 1960, pp. 51-56/1998a, pp. 131-132). For a very clarifying dis-
cussion, see the excellent article by Jacques Taminiaux (1998).
8 Lévinas refers to Rosenzweig’s Stern der Erlösung in the Preface to Totalité et Infini
(1961, p. XVI/1969, p. 28) and other interviews (Lévinas 1991a, p. 128/1998b,
p. 118). Lévinas has contributed a philosophical essay to Rosenzweig in the ‘Pref-
ace’ (pp. 7-16) to a study written in French by Stéphane Mosès (1982), who has
also published a small volume on Lévinas (2004), from which the present author
has benefited.
9 Heidegger is reported to have said these words in the second of the Bremen lec-
tures in 1953, cited by Wolfgang Schirmacher from a typescript, but these words
were later deleted from the published version. Cf. Harries (1990, pp. xxx, 263 n.
70)
10 This English translation has been slightly modified by the present author. Lévinas’
propos can be best illustrated by the recent American war film Fury (2014), di-
rected by David Ayer. There is only one soldier who remains alive at the end of the
fighting in the crew of a platoon of four American tanks, the young Norman. His
life is saved thanks to a young German soldier who discovers Norman hiding be-
neath the destroyed tank but does not report him. Norman is able to continue to
hide himself after the surviving German soldiers move on until he is discovered by
U.S. Army troops. While Norman is hailed as a hero by these American troops
who discover him, he reacts to this by a facial expression of incredulity.
11 This English translation has been slightly modified by the present author.
12 This English translation has been slightly modified by the present author.
13 This English translation has been slightly modified by the present author.
14 This English translation has been slightly modified by the present author.
15 This point is well expressed by the title of Roger Burggraeve’s book The Wisdom of
Love in the Service of Love: Emmanuel Levinas on Justice, Peace and Human Rights
(2007).
16 Please consult the rich collection of articles in Emmanuel Lévinas: Critical Assess-
ments of Leading Philosophers, Vol. IV, Beyond Lévinas (Katz 2005).
Social Imaginaries 1.2 (2015) 127-145
The opening part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra contains these stark lines:
‘State is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it tells lies too;
and this lie crawls out of its mouth: I, the state, am the people’. These lines
128 Fred Dallmayr
more generally. This attraction has prompted many critics to present him as a
proponent of ‘social Darwinism’ (a label meaning the transfer of the principle
of natural-biological selection to social relations) (c.f. Hofstadter 1955;
Williams 2000). Used as a summary verdict, the portrayal seems exaggerated,
given Spencer’s preference for ‘synthesizing’ many views (including the
utilitarian maxim of ‘the greatest good for the greatest number’). Still it is hard
to deny certain ‘social Darwinist’ features in his work. Thus, after having read
Darwin’s The Origin of the Species, he is reported to have coined the phrase
‘survival of the fittest,’ an expression which soon became a catch-phrase in
discussions of both biological and social evolution. That Spencer himself was
ready to transfer aspects of the ‘survival’ motto to the social and political
domain is evident from his Man Versus the State. As we read there, the ‘vital
principle’ of individual and social life, and indeed the vital principle of ‘social
progress,’ is maintained if each individual is ‘left secure in person and
possessions to satisfy his wants with its proceeds.’ Despite its broad generality,
the concrete application of this principle quickly reveals stark social differences,
deriving from the diversity of individual aptitudes and energies. The principle,
Spencer adds, is a guarantee of progress ‘inasmuch as, under given conditions,
the individuals of most worth will prosper and multiply more than those of
less worth.’ Seen in this light, the idea of ‘utility,’ properly understood, enjoins
‘the maintenance of individual rights’ despite different outcomes. Any attempt
to interfere with this principle—especially by ‘meddling legislation’—is ‘a
proposal to improve life by breaking down the fundamental conditions to life’
(Spencer 1969b, p. 181).
Whatever Spencer’s own leanings may have been, reception of his work
soon inspired (rightly or wrongly) a broad movement of ‘social Darwinism’
throughout the world. In America, the undisputed leader of the movement
was William Graham Sumner (1840-1910), a sociologist and social theorist
who combined Spencer’s teachings with neo-classical ideas of free enterprise,
a combination made plausible by the rapid rise of unfettered capitalism in
America at that time. In a highly influential pamphlet published in 1883
under the title ‘What Social Classes Owe to Each Other,’ Sumner insisted that
social classes owe each other precisely nothing, relying for this conclusion on
a version of the ‘survival of the fittest’ motto. In a stark swipe at any form of
socialism, Sumner excoriated all attempts to alleviate or uplift the lot of
disadvantaged people or classes as an assault on social progress and
advancement; given their essential role as social pioneers, business people and
economic enterprises were to be left as free as possible from taxes and public
regulations. From England and America, Spencerian and social Darwinist
ideas migrated to many other places, often greatly revising or modifying their
initial emphases (sometimes becoming fused with doctrines of racial eugenics)
(Sumner 1883).3 The strongest and most lasting impact of Man Versus the
State, however, was exerted on the field of neo-classical economics, and
‘Man against the State’: Community and Dissent 133
put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones—and perhaps
wooden men [or else automata] can be manufactured that will serve the
purpose as well.’ According to Thoreau, even people who are ‘commonly
esteemed good citizens’ often prefer to act in conformity with mechanical
rules rather than raise their voice in alarm or opposition. In most societies,
exceptions to this conduct are rare—and they are usually made to pay for their
non-conformism. In Thoreau’s words: ‘A very few—as heroes, patriots,
martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men—serve the state with their
consciences also, and so resist it for the most part.’ But he adds (in a warning
to all conscientious objectors, civil resisters, and whistleblowers): ‘And they
are commonly treated as enemies by it’ (Thoreau 1975, pp. 112-113).
Thoreau did not only write about the consequences of resistance; he took
some upon himself. For some six years he refused to pay a poll-tax and he was
put into prison for a while. But he did not seek to evade the penalty. As he
states in his essay: ‘Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the
true place for a just man is also a prison.’ His refusal to pay taxes was meant as
a protest against slavery and against the Mexican-American war, both of which
he considered profoundly unjust. (One can safely guess what he would have
done at the time of the Vietnam and Iraq wars.) The important point to
consider is that his act of resistance was prompted not by any desire for
personal gain, profit or influence, but for ethical reasons which sometimes
require suffering or sacrifice. If an injustice is of such a nature, he writes, ‘that
it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law.
Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine.’ His sentiments toward
his own government prior to the abolition of slavery were radical—and still
upset some American readers. ‘How does it become a man to behave toward
this American government today?’ he asks, ‘I answer, that he cannot without
disgrace be associated with it. I cannot for an instant recognize that political
organization as my government which is the slave’s government also’ (or which
enslaves other people). As he adds, again somewhat provocatively: ‘Action
from principle, the perception and performance of right, changes things and
relations; it is essentially revolutionary and does not consist wholly with
anything which was.’ What remains crucial here is that change is not pursued
for its own sake, but for the sake of social and public improvement: ‘I please
myself with imagining a state at last which can afford to be just to all men, and
to treat the individual with respect as a neighbor’ (Thoreau 1975, pp. 113,
119-120, 122, 136).
Thoreau’s text was favorably received by many audiences, both in the West
and in non-Western countries. The most important non-Western reader was
Mohandas Gandhi who considered the text as a welcome supportive
inspiration for his own endeavors. To be sure, although a life-long admirer of
Thoreau (as well as John Ruskin and Tolstoy), Gandhi modified the former’s
approach in many ways, mainly by shifting the accent from individual or
136 Fred Dallmayr
life is the only necessary good since it is precisely life that makes this encounter
possible. . . . To say [as the nihilist does] that life is absurd, the conscience
must be alive.’ However, the affirmation of life cannot stop at the banishing of
suicide or self-annihilation, but carries a broader significance. ‘From the
moment,’ the text continues, ‘that life is recognized as good, it becomes good
for all men. Murder cannot be made coherent when suicide is not considered
coherent.’ For Camus, proceeding on the premise of nihilism, there can be no
half-measures: ‘Absurdist reasoning cannot defend the continued existence of
the spokesman and, simultaneously, accept the sacrifice of others’ lives. The
moment we recognize the impossibility of absolute negation—and merely to
be alive is to recognize this—the very first thing that cannot be denied is the
right of others to live’ (Camus 1956, pp. 6-8).7
As can be seen, rebellion in Camus’s treatment is not a purely individualistic
or self-centered venture but has broader social implications: the freedom of
the rebel relies on a solidarity with other human beings and, in fact, with
humanity. In his words: ‘Rebellion, contrary to current opinion, questions the
very idea of the [isolated] individual. If the individual, in fact, accepts death
and happens to die as a consequence of his act of rebellion, he demonstrates
by doing so that he is willing to sacrifice himself for the sake of a common
good which he considers more important than his own destiny.’ In going
beyond his own self-interest or selfish desires, the rebel affirms and upholds an
ethical order of rightness and justice which reveals a deeper human bond. In
resisting an unjust order, he signals that the order ‘has infringed on something
in him which does not belong to him alone, but which is common ground
where all men—even the one who insults or represses him—have a ‘natural’
community.’ Thus, in contrast to Spencerian libertarians, rebellion for Camus
is not ‘an egoistic act,’ but a conduct gaining its sense or significance from its
insertion into a social community. Basically, even in challenging existing rules,
the rebel does so in order to improve them, bending them in the direction of
social justice. As Camus adds, in a stark modification of the traditional
Cartesian formula: ‘In our daily trials, rebellion plays the same role as does the
‘cogito’ in the realm of thought: it is the first piece of evidence. But this
evidence lures the individual from his solitude. It founds its first value on the
whole human race: I rebel—therefore we are’ (Camus 1956, pp. 15-17, 22).
Long before the terms became common currency, Camus’s book speaks of
violent ‘state terrorism’ and the equally violent counter-terror—either
irrational or ideologically sophisticated—unleashed by insurgents. For him,
the two sides of terror feed and have always fed on each other. ‘All modern
[violent] revolutions,’ The Rebel states, ‘have ended in a reinforcement of the
power of the state’—from Napoleon to Stalin and Hitler. In Nietzschean
language, the text speaks of ‘the growing omnipotence of the state’ and of ‘the
strange and terrifying growth of the modern state’ seeking to impose total
domination on populations. In the case of German fascism, the book
‘Man against the State’: Community and Dissent 139
denounces the striving for ‘a technological world empire,’ for a ‘religion of anti-
Christian technology’—a striving which has not come to an end in 1945.8
However, violent revolutionaries—today called ‘terrorists’—only replicate the
striving for total control and the elimination of dissent. Camus carefully
distinguishes genuine rebellion from violent revolution. ‘The revolutionary,’ he
writes, ‘is simultaneously a rebel or he is not a [genuine] revolutionary but a
policeman and a bureaucrat who turns against rebellion. But if he is a rebel, he
ends by taking sides against revolution’ (operating as terrorism). A genuine rebel
refuses to be treated as an ‘object,’ as a cog in a totalizing machine, or be reduced
to part of an engine of history. An act of rebellion, for Camus, introduces a
breach in the totalizing apparatus of power; it testifies to the unique dignity of
human beings and also to something ‘common to all men which eludes the
world of power.’ Ultimately, rebellion involves both a rejection or negation and
an affirmation: it rejects the dominant nihilism and all forms of complicity in
violent destruction and mayhem; at the same time, it upholds and cherishes life,
fully aware of human limits: ‘The affirmation of a limit, a dignity, and a beauty
common to all men entails the necessity of extending this value to embrace
everything and everyone’ (Camus 1956, pp. 175, 180, 249-251).
These comments lead Camus to the most inspiring part of his book: his
‘Thought at the Meridian.’ As he observes, rebellion assigns a limit to oppres-
sion and totalizing power; in doing so, it acknowledges the dignity common
to all human beings. It places in the center of its frame of reference ‘an obvious
complicity among men, a common texture, the solidarity of chains, a com-
munication between human being and human being which makes men simi-
lar and united’ (in their differences). By contrast, murder or mayhem ‘cuts the
world in two’; it sacrifices commonality by ‘consecrating difference in blood.’
What motivates the rebel is an ethical impulse, a desire for concrete inter-
human justice. ‘If injustice is bad for the rebel,’ we read, ‘it is not because it
contradicts an eternal idea of justice, but because it perpetuates the silent
hostility that separates the oppressor from the oppressed. It kills the small part
of existence that can be realized on this earth through the mutual understand-
ing of men.’ Murder and mayhem are not only acts of physical violence, but
destroyers of shared meanings. All totalitarian regimes and all totalizing forms
of terrorism proceed by way of monologue ‘preached from the top of lonely
mountains’; but ‘on the stage as in reality, monologue precedes death.’ In re-
bellion, thus, freedom and solidarity necessarily cohere. To be sure, extreme or
limitless freedom—the freedom to kill others—is not compatible with rebel-
lion. But, on the other hand, the rebel requires the freedom to act against in-
justice—which excludes ‘the right to destroy the existence and freedom of
others.’ Camus sums up his argument in these lines: ‘It is then possible to say
that rebellion, when it develops into destruction, is illogical. Claiming the
unity of the human condition, it is a force of life, not of death. Its most pro-
found logic is . . . the logic of creation’ (Camus 1956, pp. 281, 283-285).9
140 Fred Dallmayr
Dissent in Community
accusers against him were unjust, and so was the final verdict of death handed
down by the court. The basic issue here becomes the relation between the
city—or the opinion of the multitude in a city—and the rule of justice. Was
it the case that, due to the injustice inflicted on him, the rule of justice and the
bond linking Socrates and the city had been broken and he was now free to
escape the verdict by seeking refuge elsewhere—as his friend Criton suggests?
But, by seeking to escape the verdict, Socrates himself would commit an injustice
and thus descend to the level of the ignorant and vindictive multitude. This
Socrates refuses to do, arguing: ‘We must not do wrong in return, or do evil to
anyone in the world, however we may be treated by them.’ With this refusal,
Socrates seals his fate—but he also maintains the idea and the bond of justice
linking him to the city (which he had never left throughout his life). With his
final action, Socrates strongly affirms his freedom—a freedom from injustice
though not from the city and its ethical bond of solidarity. In dissenting from
the multitude, his aim was not to destroy the city but to lift it up to the rule of
justice without which a city cannot endure (Plato 1956b, p. 454 54E).11
The second example is taken from the time of modern civilization’s
derailment, when the modern state in Germany decayed into Nazi totalitarianism.
Although there were pockets of dissent acting sporadically since the beginning
of the regime, more organized forms of resistance surfaced before and during
the course of World War II, and mainly within the military establishment. Even
prior to the outbreak of the war, a group of officers sought to avert the looming
disaster through political means; but the fast pace of events nullified this effort.
Once the war was underway, there were repeated acts of resistance—in the
form of assassination plots or suicide bombing attempts—planned or carried
out by members of the higher officer corps; but unforeseen circumstances
always foiled these moves. In evaluating the attempts, one has to take into
account the extreme complexity of the situation: the fact that military officers
are bound by an oath of loyalty to their country—an oath weighing especially
heavily during wartime (and even more so when the war was turning against
Germany). One can be certain that many or most officers involved in the
resistance felt deeply this burden of loyalty, while also being profoundly
troubled by the growing barbarism and criminality of the country’s leaders.
Thus, like Antigone long ago, they were starkly conflicted between two
loyalties: one to their ‘city’ or political regime, and the other to the higher ‘rule
of justice’ and the ‘better angels’ of their country. This may account for some
of their prevarications and periods of indecision. The resistance movement
against Hitler came to a head in 1943 with Operation Valkyrie. One of the
members of the plot was a young staff officer, Graf von Stauffenberg (who in
addition to his scruples as an officer was also troubled by religious scruples).
The plot was enacted on July 20, but failed in its main goal; Stauffenberg and
most fellow-resisters were executed (c.f. Hoffmann 1988, 1994; Wunder
1972).
142 Fred Dallmayr
As one should add, anti-Nazi resistance was not exclusively in the hands of
military officers, but also had civilian support in some quarters. One instance
was the anti-war campaign ‘White Rose’ launched and carried forward by
some students and teachers at the University of Munich in early 1943 (a
campaign that was quickly crushed and its leaders executed). Another
important civilian figure in the resistance movement was Dietrich Bonhoeffer
(1906-1945), a Lutheran pastor, theologian, and life-long anti-fascist.
Bonhoeffer had studied theology in Berlin where he discovered the neo-
orthodox ‘dialectical theology’ of Karl Barth. Subsequently he spent a year at
Union Theological Seminary in New York under the guidance of Reinhold
Niebuhr. After returning to Germany, he immediately launched an attack
against Hitler, publicly calling the ‘Führer’ a ‘Verführer’ (seducer or pied-
piper). In early 1934, at a gathering of Lutheran clergy, he endorsed the so-
called ‘Barmen declaration’ (drafted by Barth) which insisted that Christ and
not a political despot was the head of the church. At the same time, he was
instrumental in founding the ‘Confessing Church,’ standing in opposition to
Protestant clergy coopted by the regime. The regime was quick to retaliate and
to harass Bonhoeffer in his clerical and academic activities. In 1936 a teaching
position in Berlin was revoked, forcing him into the role of an itinerant
clergyman. At the beginning of the war, he became acquainted with members
of a resistance movement located in the heart of German military intelligence
(so-called ‘Abwehr’), a linkage which made him familiar with assassination
plots. As in the case of Stauffenberg, Bonhoeffer’s scruples were deeply
nurtured by his faith and the divine commandment against killing. As he
wrote in his Ethics: ‘When a man takes guilt upon himself in responsibility, he
imputes his guilt to himself and no one else. . . . Before himself he is acquitted
by his conscience, but before God he hopes only for grace’ (Bonhoeffer, 2005,
p. 244).12 Arrested in April 1943, he spent a year and a half in military prison.
In February 1945 he was moved to Buchenwald where he was executed by
hanging on April 9 (just two weeks before the camp was liberated).
Many decades have passed since the Great War and in the meantime, one
says, totalitarianism has disappeared. But has it really? Or has it returned in dif-
ferent guises? Probably one should not underestimate the ingenuity and re-
sourcefulness of the modern state—of that ‘cold monster’ and ‘horse of death’
bemoaned by Nietzsche. Quite likely, the great Leviathan has not been caught
or tamed; even when outwardly assuming innocuous airs, it may still seethe in-
side with fires of destruction. Moreover, since the totalitarianism of the last
century, the Leviathan has acquired new and unheard-of methods: unprece-
dented technological powers of mayhem, unlimited capabilities of surveillance,
and uncanny forms of brain washing and ‘double-speak.’ Camus’s The Rebel
contains some dark lines which one needs to ponder: ‘The sources of life and
creation seem exhausted. Fear paralyzes a Europe peopled with phantoms and
machines’ (Camus, 1956, p. 279).13 What is the meaning of the politics of fear
‘Man against the State’: Community and Dissent 143
recently gripping the West? What should one make of the cult of violence and
death evident in movies, video games, and often in real life? What does the cult
presage? Here, by way of conclusion, a line from Nietzsche’s ‘The Wanderer and
His Shadow’: ‘Rather perish than hate and fear. And twice rather perish than
make oneself hated and feared—this must someday become the highest maxim
for every single commonwealth too’ (Nietzsche 1968, p. 72).
References
Bonhoeffer, D 2005, ‘Ethics’, in C Green (ed.) Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, vol. 6, trans.
R Krauss, DW Scott and CC West, Fortress Press, Minneapolis.
Bonhoeffer, D 2010, ‘Letters and Papers from Prison’, in JW de Grunchy (ed.),
Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, vol. 8, trans. I Best I, Fortress Press, Minneapolis.
Camus, A 1956 [1951], The Rebel: An Essay of Man in Revolt, trans. A Bower, Vintage
Books, New York, NY.
Dallmayr, F 1998, ‘Satyagraha: Gandhi’s Truth Revisited’, in F Dallmayr, Alternative
Visions: Paths in the Global Village, Rowman and Littlefield, Lanham, MD, pp.
105-121.
Erikson, EH 1993, Gandhi’s Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence, Norton
and Co, New York.
Gandhi, M 1932, India’s Case for Swaraj, Yeshanand, Ahmedabad.
Gandhi, M 1958, Satyagraha, Navajivan, Ahmedabad.
Gandhi, M 1997, Hind Swaraj and Other Writings, AJ Parel (ed.) Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge, UK.
Gheorghiu, V 1950, The Twenty-Fifth Hour, trans. R Elden, Knopf, New York.
Hoffmann, P 1988, German Resistance to Hitler, Harvard University Press, Cambridge,
MA.
Hoffmann, P 1994, The Second World War: German Society and Resistance to Hitler,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.
Hofstadter, R 1955, Social Darwinism in American Thought, Beacon Press, Boston,
MA.
Marcel, G 1962 [1952], Man Against Mass Society, trans. GS Fraser GS, Regnery,
Chicago, IL.
von Mises, L 1949, Human Action, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT.
Nietzsche, F 1968, The Portable Nietzsche, W Kaufmann (ed.), Viking Press, NY.
Orwell, G 1943, 1984: A Novel, New American Library, New York, NY.
Pantham, T 1986, ‘Beyond Liberal Democracy: Thinking with Mahatma Gandhi’, in
T Pantham and KL Deutsch (eds.), Political Thought in Modern India, Sage
Publications, New Delhi, pp. 325-346.
Persons, S 1969, (ed.) Social Darwinism: Selected Essays of William Graham Sumner,
Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ.
Plato, 1956a, ‘The Apology’, in EH Warmington and PG Rouse (eds.), Great Dialogues
of Plato, trans. WHD Rouse, New American Library, New York, NY.
Plato, 1956b, ‘Criton’, in EH Warmington and PG Rouse (eds.), Great Dialogues of
Plato, trans. WHD Rouse, New American Library, New York, NY.
144 Fred Dallmayr
Author Biography
Fred Dallmayr is Packey J. Dee Professor in the departments of philosophy and political
science at the University of Notre Dame. He has been a visiting professor at
Hamburg University in Germany and at the New School for Social Research in
New York, and a Fellow at Nuffield College in Oxford. Among his recent publications
are: The Promise of Democracy: Political Agency and Transformation (2010); Integral
Pluralism: Beyond Culture Wars (2010), Comparative Political Theory: An Introduction
(2010), Return to Nature? An Ecological Counter-History (2011); Contemporary
Chinese Political Thought (with Zhao Tingyang, 2012) and Being In the World:
Dialogue and Cosmopolis (2013). He is a past president of the Society for Asian and
Comparative Philosophy (SACP). He is currently the Executive Co-Chair of ‘World
Public Forum - Dialogue of Civilizations’ (Vienna) and a member of the Scientific
Committee of ‘RESET - Dialogue on Civilizations’ (Rome).
Address: Department of Political Science, University of Notre Dame, 539 Flanner
Hall, University of Notre Dame, IN 46556, USA. Email. Fred.r.dallmayr.1@
nd.edu
Notes
1 The phrase ‘specialists without spirit’ was used by Max Weber in Weber (1988, p.
204). Compare in the above context, George Orwell’s 1984: A Novel (1943) and
Virgil Gheorghiu’s The Twenty-Fifth Hour (1950).
‘Man against the State’: Community and Dissent 145
2 For some of Spencer’s major works, see: Spencer (1901 [1868-1874]; 1903 [1876-
1896]; 1969a [1873]; 1970 [1851]; 1978 [1879-1893]).
3 Compare also to Persons (1969). One of the prominent later heirs of Spencer and
Sumner is the Russian-American writer Ayn Rand whose writings have exerted a
major influence in recent times on American (‘Tea Party’) libertarians.
4 The Ludwig von Mises Institute established in 1982 in Auburn, Alabama, is
strongly under the influence of Spencer’s Man Versus the State.
5 For Erikson, the ethical-spiritual motif of satyagraha is missed in many transla-
tions: such as ‘passive resistance,’ ‘non-violent resistance,’ and ‘militant nonvio-
lence’ (Erikson 1993, p. 347).
6 Compare also to Rothermund (1986), and Dallmayr (1998).
7 As Camus adds in an existentialist vein (showing the influence of Heidegger, Jean-
Paul Sartre, and others): ‘Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.
The problem is to know whether this refusal can only lead to the destruction of
himself and of others, whether all rebellion must end in the justification of univer-
sal murder’ (1956, p. 11).
8 Recent disclosures of total global surveillance systems maintained by some coun-
tries clearly reveal a striving for ‘a technological world empire’ animated by a ‘reli-
gion of secular technology.’ The total collection and storage of all communications
in the world aims at the achievement of total knowledge as a corollary of total or
absolute power. In religious terms, the systems emulate God’s omniscience and om-
nipotence—while completely sidelining divine benevolence, grace, and charity.
9 Camus’s arguments proceed from a secular-humanist perspective; but many of his
views could also be stated in Christian religious terms, as was done by Gabriel
Marcel in his Man Against Mass Society (first published in 1952, one year after
Camus’s book). As Marcel states there: ‘It would be necessary to show that the idea
of being creative [or free] always implies the idea of being open toward others: that
openness I have called intersubjectivity. . . . The freedom which we have to defend
is not the freedom of Prometheus defying Jupiter; it is not the freedom of a being
who would exist or would claim to exist by himself. . . . Freedom is nothing unless,
in a spirit of complete humility, it recognizes that it has a vital connection with
grace’ (extended to all). See Marcel (1962, pp. 24, 247).
10 As he adds: ‘It is necessary that one who really and truly fights for the right, if he
is to survive even for a short time, shall act as a private man, not as a public man.’
Perhaps this comment can be read as counseling not a retreat into individual pri-
vacy but an engagement in ‘civil society’ (to use the modern term).
11 The dialogue puts these words into the mouth of the ‘Laws’: ‘As things are, if you
depart from this life, you will depart wronged not by us, the Laws [the idea of
justice], but by human beings only’ (Plato 1956b, p. 459, 54 E).
12 Compare also his ‘Letters and Papers from Prison,’ in Bonhoeffer (2010).
13 Camus adds, ‘Between two holocausts, scaffolds are installed in underground cav-
erns where executioners celebrate their new cult of silence. What cry would ever
trouble them?’
Social Imaginaries 1.2 (2015) 146-176
Abstract: The works of Norbert Elias and Shmuel Eisenstadt represent differ-
ent versions of civilisational analysis. Elias focused on a long-term transforma-
tive process, more precisely on state formation and its ramifications in the
course of Western European history, and neither he nor his disciples showed
much interest in a broader comparative approach. Eisenstadt defined the ci-
vilisational dimension of human societies as a configuration of cultural and
institutional patterns; he emphasised the plurality of such formations, but had
little to say on the specific processual paths taken by each of them. So far, there
has been no significant discussion of ways to bring the two approaches into
closer contact. Such attempts can start with a brief examination of the com-
mon background in classical sociology: the notion of civilisation adumbrated
by Durkheim and Mauss anticipated both Eliasian and Eisenstadtian lines of
argument. Drawing on this source, it can then be shown that each of the two
authors implicitly poses problems related to key concerns of the other. Elias’s
account of the ‘long middle ages’ that gave rise to the early modern European
state presupposes the overall civilisational context of Western Christendom
as well as specific cultural-institutional shifts within it, especially those of the
high middle ages. Eisenstadt’s interpretation of the Axial Age calls for fur-
ther development through analyses of the historical processes unfolding in the
wake of the axial turns.
and 1980s. But it is worth noting that their seminal contributions coincided
with a belated but rapidly growing interest in Elias’s much older work, now
widely recognised as ahead of its time, and with Eisenstadt’s completion of a
trajectory – from unorthodox modernisation theory to comparative civilisa-
tional analysis – that can be traced back to the 1950s.
That said, a closer look at the relationship between Elias and Eisenstadt
raises several interesting questions. It is surely not irrelevant that they were
both of East Central European origin: Elias was born in Wroclaw (or Breslau
as it then was) in 1897, Eisenstadt in Warsaw in 1923. An awareness of this
background must have counted for something when it came to developing a
general approach to social and historical issues; as I have argued elsewhere
(Arnason 2010), East Central European experiences and legacies are condu-
cive to scepticism about mainstream assumptions grounded in or at least re-
lated to the idea of progress. But subsequent changes of environment, very
important in both cases, took different directions and resulted in different
intellectual biographies. Elias spent much of the Weimar period in Heidelberg
and Frankfurt, within the orbit of main currents in German sociology as well
as of the Marxian alternatives, and it seems clear that his pre-1933 outlook
and work reflected this background. A reconceptualisation of the classical so-
ciological legacy, clearly demarcated from other attempts in that vein, was in
the making. However, it was the following phase that proved decisive. After
emigrating in 1933, Elias found himself in institutional and intellectual isola-
tion, but this did not prevent him from producing a comprehensive and em-
pirically anchored formulation of his new sociological paradigm. The Civiliz-
ing Process, to be further discussed below, combines two of the interrelated
achievements for which the idea of a paradigm was initially coined: an articu-
lated conceptual framework and an exemplary case analysis. The third one, a
scientific community, was conspicuously absent. This was a one-man job, and
the history of the notably productive German emigration between 1933 and
1945 contains no comparable case of a single-handed breakthrough. For Elias,
this work became a guide to further research and reflection. Not that there are
no significant thematic or theoretical innovations in later writings (the socio-
logical analyses of time and knowledge break new ground), but none of them
came anywhere near a paradigm shift. The basic framework of The Civilizing
Process remained in place.
Eisenstadt’s biography took a very different road. After emigrating to Pal-
estine with his mother at an early age, he received the first and probably the
most important part of his university education in Jerusalem. There is no
reason to doubt his testimony about the eminent role of Martin Buber, from
whose example and teaching Eisenstadt drew a double lesson: philosophical
thought was still a source of insights adaptable to the purposes of sociological
analysis, and this interdisciplinary link is especially relevant to questions con-
cerned with the creativity of human societies, its preconditions and its
148 Johann P. Arnason
used to categorise and classify them is the Parsonian version of systems theory.
This enduring reliance on a levelling paradigm also weakened Eisenstadt’s case
against the conventional distinction of tradition and modernity. Imperial re-
gimes, with their heightened levels of diversity and dynamism, were – in prin-
ciple – a key example of historical formations going beyond the stereotype of
stagnant traditional societies. There is no doubt that this point was very cen-
tral to Eisenstadt’s reasons for embarking on his study; but by linking the
whole project to a theory that was still predicated on an evolution from simple
to complex societies, he imposed a priori limits on his rethinking. In the up-
shot, the category of ‘free resources’ became a kind of code-word for the dy-
namics of empires. It refers to a whole spectrum of human, natural and tech-
nical means, mobilised for the purposes of imperial projects, and therefore not
bound to the rules of specific subsystems (economic, social or religious). The
encompassing imperial order that sustains mobilisation is less clearly defined.
In short, the comparative study of empires did not lead to the civilisa-
tional turn that might have resulted from closer analysis of their cultural back-
grounds and implications. We can speculate about the road that civilisational
analysis would have taken if it had built directly on the imperial theme; one
likely result is a more systematic and balanced focus on the interrelations of
culture and power. Eisenstadt’s introduction to the 1992 edition of the book
outlines some aspects that he had now come to see as essential to the under-
standing of imperial formations: imperial visions, grounded in interpretations
of the world, and imperial elites with varying social and cultural profiles. But
his presentation of these points reflects a conceptual transformation that had
already occurred in another context. The breakthrough to a civilisational per-
spective was achieved on the basis of a reinterpreted theme from the philoso-
phy of history: the Axial Age, intermittently glimpsed in European visions of
history since the late eighteenth century but properly labelled and identified
for the first time by Karl Jaspers in the aftermath of World War II (Jaspers
1949). Eisenstadt’s chronological demarcation of this period was roughly the
same as Jaspers’s: a demi-millennium from the eighth to the third century BC.
For Jaspers, this was a time of fundamental spiritual transformations, unfold-
ing in separate but comparable cultural worlds from the East Mediterranean
to China, and resulting in the creation of philosophical and religious tradi-
tions that shaped later history. Eisenstadt replaced this highly speculative ac-
count with a new model of interrelations among cultural and social forces. As
he saw it, a restructured vision of the world, with unprecedented emphasis on
the difference between transcendental and mundane reality, opened up new
horizons for political culture. The innovations were double-edged: the refer-
ence to a higher reality could serve to legitimise rulers and power elites as well
as to justify protest and resistance. Different constellations of this kind char-
acterise the Eurasian traditions that go back to axial origins. It should be
noted that the axial connection is less direct in some cases than in others.
150 Johann P. Arnason
Greek and Judaic sources were transformed by Christian and Islamic cultures;
a higher level of continuity is evident in the Chinese case, although both do-
mestic and Western interpretations have tended to exaggerate that aspect; In-
dia, with its complex history of interaction as well as rivalry between Bud-
dhism and Hinduism and later between Hinduism and Islam, represents yet
another pattern.
The above examples are Eisenstadt’s primary references for civilisational
theorising. More generally speaking, his new understanding of the Axial Age
became decisive for the very definition of civilisations; as he put it in a late
formulation, the changes during this period made the civilisational dimension
of human societies – consisting in the intertwining of interpretive and institu-
tional patterns – explicit and reflexive for the first time (Eisenstadt 2003). We
shall later consider the theoretical implications of this starting-point. As for
the historical aspect of the problem, the question why the Axial Age rather
than some other landmark appears as a catalyst for conceptual change, there is
no detailed answer to be found in Eisenstadt’s writings. But it seems possible
to reconstruct the basic reasons. Eisenstadt’s unorthodox studies of moderni-
sation had more and more emphasised the formative input of traditions, and
that meant allowing for patterns and processes that unfolded over long peri-
ods of time. He also rejected the economic-reductionist bias apparent in the
works of many modernisation theorists, and was therefore willing to consider
cultural transformations that might have shaped the paths to modernity. The
particular concern with the Axial Age should, in addition to these general as-
sumptions, be set against the philosophical background mentioned above.
The readiness to translate philosophical interpretations into historical-socio-
logical language, first acquired through the contact with Buber, was obviously
reconfirmed when Eisenstadt encountered Jaspers’s philosophy of history.
that enter into the making of social structures – was often noted by his critics.
The dynamic of the civilising process was reconstructed through a study of
long-term transformation of Western European societies and mentalities.
While this certainly did not rule out comparative analyses, there is nothing to
show that Elias regarded such work as essential to his project. As we have seen,
Eisenstadt took a longer and more circuitous road to the civilisational turn.
When it finally found expression in theory and research, the emphasis was
throughout on civilisations in the plural, and comparative analysis appeared
as the most promising way to clarify their patterns of formation and develop-
ment. It seems clear that Eisenstadt was not a cultural determinist in the Par-
sonian style (although he sometimes used the concept of a cultural programme
in ways suggestive of that approach), but there is no denying the centrality of
culture in his conceptual scheme, especially with regard to interpretations of
the world, whose involvement in the constitution of societies is the main con-
cern of civilisational analysis. Power formations are certainly not neglected;
centres, elites, elite coalitions and protest movements figure prominently in
Eisenstadt’s discussions of the Axial Age and its consequences. But the general
question of power as a constitutive but variously defined and structured com-
ponent of civilisations is not raised in adequate terms.
The following discussion will explore basic divergences and possible con-
tacts between the two civilisational approaches. Three main aspects of this
problematic should be considered. A closer analysis of sources and presuppo-
sitions will show that the two central ideas, civilisation in the singular and
civilisations in the plural, go back to common classical beginnings; but this is
no easy way to bridge the distance that separates them. In addition to the dif-
ference between singular and plural, each of the alternative concepts turns out
to be internally contested. The classical background is, in other words, an
opening to controversy rather than a guide to convergence. The next step will
be a more detailed examination of conceptual contrasts and affinities between
the projects pursued by Elias and Eisenstadt, with particular emphasis on
Elias’s conception of large-scale processes and Eisenstadt’s model of large-scale
patterns. Suggestions on combining the two perspectives will then be backed
up by more specific arguments concerning Elias’s analyses of state formation
and ways of adapting them to Eisenstadt’s civilisational theory.
Let us start with the earlier of the two landmark developments in social
research, Elias’s work on the civilising process. Its core idea is the interconnec-
tion of sociogenetic and psychogenetic transformations. The former concept
refers to changing structures and dynamics of social life, the latter to changing
mentalities and particularly to levels and modes of self-control. Since this
twofold focus requires extensive conceptual innovation, it seems clear that
Elias aimed at the refoundation of two mutually supportive disciplines: his-
torical sociology and historical psychology. The latter part of his programme
is all the more remarkable because he reinterpreted psychoanalysis in more
152 Johann P. Arnason
consistently historical terms than any other reader of Freud at the time (the
various currents of Freudian Marxism were less thoroughgoing in that regard).
With the wisdom of almost eighty years’ hindsight, it is nevertheless obvious
that the psychogenetic branch of the project proved less viable than the socio-
genetic one. The idea of historical sociology may still be subject to some inter-
pretive conflicts, but it is very visibly present in the debates of the human
sciences, and it is hard to imagine a wholesale retreat. Elias is firmly estab-
lished as one of the pioneers in this field. Historical psychology is a different
matter. Although we should not underestimate occasional work done in its
name, there is neither a continuous tradition nor a unifying vision, and Elias
is certainly not a recognised founding figure.
Despite these uneven results, the two proposed lines of inquiry must be
seen as equal and integral parts of Elias’s original project, and his use of the
concept of civilisation should be considered in that context. Katie Liston and
Stephen Mennell (2009) raise doubts about this choice and refer to Elias’s
own second thoughts, to the effect that a less ideologically charged concept
might have been more helpful. Such ex post reservations may be understand-
able as reactions to the misreadings that were to some extent facilitated by
Elias’s particular twist to the concept of civilisation. In fact, and from the
outset, Elias had very good reasons for preferring ‘civilisation’ to any conceiv-
able alternative, and they were not only related to what Liston and Mennell
describe – rightly – as a transition from an ‘emic’ to an ‘etic’ concept. Elias did
indeed move from the notion of civilisation as part and parcel of the self-de-
scription of Western culture, and towards an analytical, explanatory and po-
tentially comparative concept. But this shift had already been prefigured in
classical sociology, and we can assume that the aim to improve on classical
conjectures was part of Elias’s agenda. Generally speaking, it seems clear that
his relationship to the classics – especially Marx, Durkheim and Weber – was
more important and his interest in them more active than explicit references
might suggest. In the present case, it is the connection between Elias and
Durkheim that calls for closer examination.
The Durkheimian background to The Civilizing Process is twofold. On one
level, Elias sets out to correct a misconception stated at the beginning of Dur-
kheim’s first major work. The Division of Social Labour begins with the rejec-
tion of the idea that civilisation – understood as the gradual refinement of
manners and customs – could be a key to the workings of human societies.
This approach would, as Durkheim argues, not lead to proper understanding
of the moral basis that sustains the social nexus, and opts for a different path.
Elias tries to show that precisely the transformation of manners opens up
perspectives that can throw light on the social nexus, now understood in terms
more related to power than to morality; and not the least achievement of his
work is to locate the division of labour, Durkheim’s chosen key to social life,
within this alternative framework. However, it is the other implicit reference
Elias and Eisenstadt: The Multiple Meanings of Civilisation 153
dimension). The main direct and indirect heirs of the Axial Age – Chinese,
Indian, Islamic and European civilisations – fit this model. As for the interac-
tion of societies within a shared civilisation, this was clearly not one of Eisen-
stadt’s priority themes, but it can easily be envisaged as a further step of his
research programme. However, the most interesting connection has to do
with the question of the ‘moral milieu.’ As argued above, this term may be
read as an allusion to collective representations; Eisenstadt followed that line
and gave it a more specific twist with his emphasis on cultural visions of the
world. In this way, he also reopened the questions foreshadowed by Dur-
kheim’s reflections on the religious constitution of society and its world, as
well as by Weber’s analyses of cultural attitudes to the world. But there is an-
other side to the matter, most visible in light of comparison with Durkheim
and Mauss. In the jointly written text, they had already noted that civilisa-
tions take distinctive forms on the national level, and Mauss revisited this is-
sue in his later exposé on the concept of civilisation: ‘It is on the basis of ci-
vilisations that societies develop their distinctive features, their idiosyncrasies
and their individual characters’ (Mauss 2006, p. 62). He went on to observe
that nations sometimes imagine themselves as self-sufficient civilisations, and
to add: ‘Some nations have realised this ideal and others, such as the United
States of America, consciously pursue it’ (Mauss 2006, p. 62). This is a tanta-
lising statement, but Mauss leaves us with it. For those who want to continue
his efforts to understand civilisations, there is no way around the problems
thus signaled in very abbreviating terms. If the individualisation of societies
interacting within a civilisational context can lead to the emergence of a new
civilisation, what level of differentiation and which specific features should be
taken to mark this turn? Is this civilisation-forming process identical with a
nation-forming one or is the equation of a nation with a civilisation one his-
torical version among others? Neither Eisenstadt nor anybody else has tackled
these questions in a systematic way, but some themes in Eisenstadt’s work may
throw light on them. Two civilisations were of particular interest to him: Ja-
pan and Judaism. In both cases, the notion of a family of societies becomes
problematic, and the question of singularisation as a path to civilisational
identity must be considered. Eisenstadt’s book on Japan is his most detailed
case study of a civilisation, and this is at first sight a surprise. As noted above,
he formulated his project of civilisational analysis through a reinterpretation
of the Axial Age, but Japanese civilisation is described as a non-axial one. The
contrast is to some extent mitigated by the historical thrust of Eisenstadt’s
analysis: Japan is not simply a pre-axial survival, but a civilisation that main-
tained its pre-axial identity through a de-axialising appropriation of cultural
models from societies marked by axial transformations (first China, then the
West). In that sense, interaction with other societies would still be essential.
But on the level of fundamental cultural orientations and their institutional
expressions, differences are so marked that they overshadow the multi-societal
Elias and Eisenstadt: The Multiple Meanings of Civilisation 157
Elias was, in short, well aware of the need to specify his conception of
long-term processes. But despite his efforts, this key category of historical so-
ciology did not achieve the kind of comeback that he expected when he wrote
his introduction to the re-edition of The Civilizing Process. Its present status is
somewhat ambiguous: some version of it remains indispensable for sociolo-
gists in search of historical dimensions, but developments in sociological
thought have led to doubts about the coherence and the explanatory value of
processual models, especially the macro-processes invoked by various branch-
es of the sociological tradition (for recent comments on this issue, see Knöbl
2013). A systematic discussion would have to start with a comparison of dif-
ferent logics attributed to long-term processes, and of the explanatory claims
associated with them; it may, in due course, have to revive the question of
explanation and understanding, and consider the changing relationships be-
tween them that correspond to different interpretive models. Here I cannot
enter into that kind of debate. But before turning to Elias, it seems worth-
while to glance at contrasting examples of classical perspectives on long-term
processes, and to note their methodological implications. The growth of the
productive forces, invoked by classical Marxism as a universal historical dy-
namic, was defined in terms conducive to strong and simple causal explana-
tions: technical progress resulted from the interaction between human needs
and the natural environment, and adaptation to this primary process was the
underlying principle of social change. Max Weber’s notion of rationalisation
was a very different construct. Weber stressed the context-dependent meaning
of rationalisation, and that aspect of the processes in question is obvious to
every reader; it is much less clear what kind of overarching rationality we can
posit as a common denominator, and interpretations of Weber’s work still
diverge on this point. In any case, no definition flexible enough to cover the
whole spectrum of human activities would sustain strong causal claims.
We can approach the same problem from another angle by comparing two
well-known Weberian arguments. The analysis of bureaucratisation centres on
the unmistakably causal claim that modern bureaucracy is as superior to tra-
ditional modes of administration as is modern industry to traditional handi-
crafts; a complementary line of inquiry then deals with a wide range of causes
that help to set this factor in motion. The other relevant example is Weber’s
Protestant Ethic. I do not think that anybody would now defend Weber’s
claims to have revealed a direct and decisive causal link between Puritan theol-
ogy and capitalist development (the latter is, be it noted, seen as a long-term
process culminating in the all-encompassing ‘cosmos’ of modern industrial
capitalism). The alternative reading that has in the long run tended to prevail
presupposes a different vision of history. On that view, a new orientation of
religious life, eminently but not exclusively represented by radical currents of
the Reformation, changed the cultural horizons of European societies. To use
Weberian terms from other contexts, the new cultural framework lent
160 Johann P. Arnason
example of the ‘cultural plasticity of power’ (Pye 1988), which will be the
subject of further discussion below. Here it should be noted that the role of
strategic action in structuring power formations invites two kinds of criticism
of Elias’s account. The proposed model of a long-term process can either be
revised with a stronger emphasis on the inputs and choices of actors or re-
jected in the name of autonomous human agency. Both responses have ap-
peared in the discussion of Elias’s work. What I would like to explore here is
the possibility of strengthening Elias’s case by extending the figurations re-
ferred to in The Civilizing Process beyond the power relationships that consti-
tute the main focus of analysis.
The main result of this will be to bring cultural constellations to the fore-
ground, thus adding another dimension to Elias’s relational image of society,
and thereby reinforcing his arguments against the individualist approach. But
by the same token, the relational aspect will gain weight against the proces-
sual one. More precisely, historical contexts – both successive and simultane-
ous – will be emphasised. The cultural factors and horizons are best appreci-
ated on that level, rather than through any general models of development. A
historicising turn is, moreover, in line with the view that seems to have
emerged as a common ground between informed critics and conditional de-
fenders of Elias’s work on state formation: the general formulation of the
question as a matter of long-term processes remains justified, and so does the
emphasis on interconnected means of violence and modes of extraction, but
the whole analysis must be contextualised in a way that will allow less room
for alternative paths, innovative projects and contingent outcomes. It is less
easy to define a shared frame for discussion of Elias’s psychogenetic themes.
He rejected criticisms to the effect that he had conflated the civilising process
with a unilinear strengthening of self-control; but as key formulations show,
he did find it difficult to avoid claims of that kind. When he refers to a ‘pro-
gressive tightening and differentiation of controls’ (Elias 2000: 450; the Ger-
man original refers to Selbstkontrollen, and the 1994 English version uses ‘pro-
gressive’ instead of ‘increased’), the notion of linear evolution is not far away.
That said, it still seems appropriate to keep the clarification of connections
between social and psychic transformations on the agenda of civilisational
analysis; but the first step must be to abstain from assumptions about direct
causal links or continuous developmental trends. The issues are, in any case,
too complex and the field too vast to be tackled here; the following argument
will only deal with the problematic of state formation and its settings.
If we propose to bring more history into the narrative of state formation,
and to foreground the cultural dimension, it is best to begin with Elias’s own
acknowledgements of historical landmarks and the ambiguities in his percep-
tions of them. I will limit the discussion to three constellations of this kind.
Elias’s starting-point, the fragmentation of social and political power in the
aftermath of Carolingian empire-building, is a first sight compatible with
162 Johann P. Arnason
constituted by interrelations between the three centres was dynamic and flex-
ible enough to accommodate major historical shifts. It should be noted that
this civilisational pattern was in the making well before the rise of the Caro-
lingians (they were the most successful, but far from the first rulers who sought
to imitate the Roman empire). It resulted from the transformation of the Ro-
man world, and more precisely from the particular road taken in its Western
provinces, where the realm was divided between barbarian kingdoms and the
Christianisation of the empire had to be repeated in multiple versions with
local variations (Dumézil 2005). The Western pattern invites comparison
with other post-Roman configurations emerging at the same time. Here we
encounter another tripartite division: the formation of Western Christendom,
Byzantium and Islam as successors to Greco-Roman antiquity is in my opin-
ion one of the most promising historical themes for civilisational analysis.
And it is not only a matter of comparative study. Relations between the three
cultural worlds were an obvious case in point when the question of inter-civil-
isational encounters was first raised (Nelson 1981), and they involved con-
tacts of various kind, cultural or institutional borrowings and transmission of
classical sources (from both Byzantine and Islamic centres to the West), as well
as processes and strategies of mutual demarcation (such as the Western re-
sponse to eighth- and ninth-century Byzantine iconoclasm, seen as an attempt
to redefine the relationship between empire and Church at the expense of the
latter, or the thirteenth-century conversion of the crusades, the wars of the
papal monarchy against Islamic powers, into a destructive assault on the Byz-
antine empire).
To sum up, the implicit background to Elias’s account of state formation
is a civilisational and inter-civilisational context. And as the story unfolds,
another constellation of that kind comes to the fore. Elias certainly did not
underestimate the transformation of the High Middle Ages; his description of
that period is an exemplary survey of the multiple social processes connected
to state formation; but there is no attempt to develop an overall interpretation
of the cultural sea change often characterised as a ‘twelfth-century renais-
sance’. The decisive argument for considering it as a mutation within Western
Christendom, rather than a transition to a new civilisation, is that the above-
mentioned pattern of kingdom, empire and Church remained in place, and
was in various ways reinforced by new developments. For one thing, the ‘papal
monarchy’ (Morris 1991) was strictly speaking a high medieval phenomenon.
The same period also saw the most spectacular ups and downs of the relation-
ship between Church and empire, culminating in a short but anything but
insignificant episode of all-out conflict between a Church with imperial ambi-
tions and an empire disconnected from its original territorial basis (under
Emperor Frederick II in the second quarter of the thirteenth century). In the
longer run, it was the kingdom as an institution and a geopolitical formation
that profited most from the innovations. They included the rediscovery and
164 Johann P. Arnason
religion and politics. Finally, the intellectual innovations of the period, and
particularly the beginnings of the scientific revolution, led to the crystallisa-
tion of a new type of political thought, one-sidedly and controversially articu-
lated by Thomas Hobbes. Both theories and strategies contributed to the for-
mation of the raison d’État that became a hallmark of early modern political
culture. Taking all these things together, it seems justified to describe the early
modern turn as a civilisational transformation; it is then less important wheth-
er we interpret the outcome as a new version of European civilisation or as a
new type of civilisation, for which we can retain the originally less meaning-
laden term of modernity (Eisenstadt preferred the latter option, and so does
the present writer).
Patterns and processes, II: The Axial Age and its sequels
As I have tried to show, a closer reading of Elias’s most sustained effort to
combine theoretical and substantive analysis – The Civilizing Process – opens
up historical perspectives of the kind most congenial to Eisenstadt’s civilisa-
tional analysis. The analysis of long-term processes is, at critical junctures,
confronted with broader contexts decisively important for the developments
in question but not properly integrated into Elias’s frame of reference. Closer
examination would, in all three abovementioned cases, show that cultural ar-
ticulations of the world and their interrelations with the perceptions and for-
mations of social power enter into the picture: they do not exclude all conti-
nuity of directions across major historical thresholds and ruptures, but they
affect the course and shape the horizons of long-term processes. This line of
argument draws attention to configurations of the kind that Eisenstadt theo-
rised as civilisations in the plural. To round off our analysis, we should now
turn directly to Eisenstadt’s work and look for comparable openings to Elia-
sian ideas. It seems best to begin with the processual model that was, as argued
above, central to Elias’s sociology of civilisation.
No single work is as representative of Eisenstadt’s thought as The Civilizing
Process is for Elias. But we can identify a theme that proves more illuminating
than any other. The twin notions of the Axial Age and axial civilisations bring
a long-maturing field into focus and define the parameters of further inquiry.
Eisenstadt did not produce a systematic account of his new civilisational para-
digm, but the thrust of his general comments and case studies is clear enough
to allow some conclusions. In the first place, the very idea of the Axial Age as
a civilisational matrix implies a reference to long-term processes. As Wolfgang
Knöbl (2001) argues in his critical study of Eisenstadt, even the maintenance
of a civilisational pattern must be understood as an ongoing process, rather
than a given state of things. The processual aspect becomes more visible if we
take into account the combination of continuity and discontinuity that Eisen-
stadt outlines in various analyses. His comments on developments in the wake
166 Johann P. Arnason
of Axial Age breakthroughs and within the longue durée of axial civilisations
focus on different trends and transformations in different contexts. He em-
phasised the varying trajectories of orthodoxy and dissent in axial traditions;
he traced the ideological projects of modern revolutions back to axial sources,
and argued that revolutionary change was facilitated by traditions centred on
the political sphere (especially when they could absorb heterodox notions of
salvation); on a more general level, his conception of modernity as a new ci-
vilisation was sometimes linked to the idea of a second axial breakthrough. In
all these cases, he deals with processes combining pattern maintenance with
significant change.
Eisenstadt never tackled the problem of conceptualising historical pro-
cesses in ways that would fit his civilisational paradigm. We may try to address
this issue through critical reading of his work and in light of ongoing debates
on the Axial Age. To begin with, let us take another look at Knöbl’s criticism.
He interprets Eisenstadt’s axial genealogy of civilisations in general and mo-
dernity in particular as a variation on the theme of path dependency (Knöbl
2001, pp. 249-255). This notion has been associated with explanatory models
that stressed the long-term determination of historical trajectories by crucial
events, key factors or decisive constellations. Its origins seem to be in eco-
nomic history, and a generalised use in historical sociology is bound to raise
questions of adequacy and adaptability. The meaning, the importance and the
limits of path dependency will in turn depend on the underlying vision of
history. Parsonian-style cultural determinism is a straightforward case: cul-
tural programmes, emerging through evolutionary change, shape the further
course of evolution. As Knöbl notes (2001, p. 255), Eisenstadt’s genealogy is
more complex. Axial origins are not reducible to intellectual solutions of
problems resulting from a new vision of the world; the role and structure of
elites, geopolitical situations and the state of the social division of labour also
come into play. Here the type of path dependency has obviously more to do
with constellations than with any single key factor; in fact, it does not seem
far-fetched to suggest a parallel with Elias’s figurations.
It is tempting to take this point a little further; and to do so, I will draw on
discussions that have in some ways departed from Eisenstadt’s model (Arna-
son, Eisenstadt and Wittrock 2005; Bellah and Joas 2012). Three emerging
conclusions should be noted. In the first place, widespread agreement on the
exceptional importance of the Axial Age as a time of transformations does not
mean that a common denominator of changes in different cultural worlds is
easy to establish or generally accepted. Eisenstadt’s notion of a recurrent and
pre-eminently axial pattern, a culturally codified scission of reality into tran-
scendental and mundane spheres, has been questioned. Research on the four
main cases (ancient Greece, ancient Israel, India and China) is unequally de-
veloped, and strong claims about a common ground seem premature. The
present state of the debate suggests that models primarily derived from Greek
Elias and Eisenstadt: The Multiple Meanings of Civilisation 167
and Judaic resources (as is Eisenstadt’s ontological division) are less applicable
to Indian and Chinese thought. Moreover, the divergent currents within each
tradition do not easily lend themselves to mutual assimilation. The diversity
of Greek thought resists all unifying readings; there is no comparable level of
differentiation within ancient Judaism, but contrasts between priestly and
prophetic lines of religious development have been highlighted in recent
scholarship. Indian thought in the Axial Age, perhaps the least well under-
stood of the four traditions, was not only marked by the division between
Buddhist and proto-Hinduist trends; other aspects of a very complex picture
are still controversial among scholars. The internal conflicts of the Chinese
tradition (especially the tripartite division into Confucian, Daoist and Legal-
ist schools of thought) are well known, and a striking example of certain basic
categories shared across the field but put to very different uses; to the extent
that there is a common cosmo-anthropological background, it represents a
holistic world-view difficult to subsume under Eisenstadt’s dichotomy of tran-
scendental and mundane.
A second point to be added is the highly diverse dynamic of state forma-
tion during the Axial Age. The development of the polis in Greece, the emer-
gence of ‘warring states’ of a very different kind and size in China, and the less
known but obviously varied Indian polities in transition from tribal organisa-
tion to statehood are exemplary cases, but not yet given their due in compara-
tive studies of the period. Ancient Israel was of course a different matter;
however, the transfer of sovereignty to a divine legislator created an imaginary
space for new visions of kingship and statehood. Such possibilities were re-
alised in later civilisations affiliated to the monotheistic source. That brings us
to the third and final point. The concept of an axial civilisation and the con-
comitant list of such civilisations now look much more problematic than the
demarcation of the Axial Age. The contours and the complex history of the
latter have been clarified, whereas the idea of uniform civilisational continuity
after the axial breakthroughs proved much less sustainable. It now seems more
plausible to assume different pedigrees of successive – and sometimes coexist-
ing – civilisational formations for the various axial complexes.
With these developments in mind, it may be useful to revisit the question
of processual models and to link that issue to the notion of path dependency.
It should already be clear that the relationship between Axial Age transforma-
tions and subsequent historical trajectories calls for more differentiated read-
ings. Both the variety of intellectual currents and the enhanced political dy-
namics of the Axial Age were conducive to a change that might be described
as path diversification. It implies a larger scope for conflicts and a broader
spectrum of open historical situations with contingent outcomes. To put it
another way, the ruptures affecting patterns of culture and power resulted in a
new level of historicity. And there was another side to that transformation.
The interaction between new world-views, open to conflicting interpretations,
168 Johann P. Arnason
and changing forms of social power, influenced by strategic projects and pro-
test movements, enabled the cultures shaped by axial experiences to develop
an unprecedented capacity for path innovation. At its most momentous, that
upgrading led to the emergence of two new formations with historical hori-
zons and trajectories of their own: world empires and world religions. Here
the term path mutation seems appropriate. Empires existed before the Axial
Age, but more extensive reach and more emphatic claims to world domina-
tion set the imperial regimes of post-axial times apart from their predecessors.
The novelty was definitively evident in the roughly simultaneous Roman and
Chinese constructions of empire, but the most extreme example was the early
Islamic empire, which also represented the closest union with a world religion.
The emergence of world religions (Christianity, Islam and the transformation
of Buddhism that went hand in hand with its expansion into East Asia) can-
not be plausibly explained as a predetermined outcome of axial breakthroughs;
the less emphatic notion of ‘secondary breakthroughs’, briefly used by Eisen-
stadt and referring to reinterpretive combinations of axial themes, has been
abandoned. New religious and political ways of life orientation and world
articulation, not least those of late antiquity, are creative innovations and as
such irreducible to rearrangements within a given framework. Their genea-
logical links to axial origins are important, but precisely that part of the back-
ground becomes a basis for understanding beyond explanation. The axial turn
did not pre-program later transformations of a comparable kind, but it pro-
vides a focus for identifying similarities and differences, and thus helps to
make sense of phenomena that do not lend themselves to more than partial
and rival explanations.
I have not even begun to define the kind of processual models that could
serve to answer the questions left open by Eisenstadt. That would require a
much longer discussion. But the above reflections should highlight the need
for such models; clarify the context to which they would have to be adapted;
and show that a generalised idea of path dependency does not take us further.
The potential convergence of Elias and Eisenstadt has thus only been outlined
in the most general terms. To round off the argument, and to indicate at least
a way of establishing closer contact, I will conclude with another look at the
question of state formation, this time from the viewpoint of Eisenstadt’s ci-
vilisational analysis.
Extensive comments on the state and its transformation can be found in
Eisenstadt’s work, throughout its successive phases, but they are not integrat-
ed into a theory of state formation. The reasons why such a unifying frame-
work did not seem necessary have to do with the evolving relationship to
mainstream sociology. When Eisenstadt was closest to Parsonian theory, he
used the concept of the political system, rather than that of the state; conse-
quently, the abovementioned book on imperial formations dealt with political
systems of empires, not with imperial paths of state formation, which would
Elias and Eisenstadt: The Multiple Meanings of Civilisation 169
have been a significantly different thematic focus. When the civilisational turn
took Eisenstadt’s social theory definitively beyond Parsonian borders, the
strong concept of a system was abandoned, but a less clearly defined political
sphere, rather than the state, was still an essential part of the roadmap for
comparative analysis. Eisenstadt thus takes a line reminiscent of the authors
who have put the notion of ‘the political’, variously defined, ahead of the state,
with the difference that he places a much stronger emphasis on historical and
civilisational meanings of this category. But to distinguish and compare the
versions of the political, we need at least a provisional or approximate general
definition. Eisenstadt’s formulations suggest that the best starting-point is the
notion of a political arena. An arena is, to put it briefly, a space where multiple
actors enter into more or less conflictual relationships and develop more or
less explicit rules to manage them. As for the specifics of the political arena, no
definition can neglect the claim to impose regulating authority on other do-
mains of social life; but these domains, or arenas in Eisenstadt’s parlance, also
generate cross-border dynamics, and it remains to be clarified what sets the
political version of total social reach apart from others. At this point, let us
note some further aspects of Eisenstadt’s argument. He stresses the differences
between axial traditions: to mention only the four main sources, he contrasts
Greek and Chinese upgradings of the political sphere with Judaic and Indian
modes of devaluation. But then he signals a reaffirmation of axial unity by
subsuming the positive interpretations of the political under the general con-
cept of salvation, derived from Weber and adapted to the axial model in such
a way that it allows for this-worldly aspirations.
Eisenstadt’s reference to salvation is admittedly metaphorical, but even so,
it seems misleading. Greek and Chinese conceptions of the political did not
share substantive or normative goals. Neither of the two traditions was wholly
dominated by reflection on the political; to the extent that they did focus on
political themes, their respective visions were fundamentally different. Greek
political thought, up to and including the political philosophy inaugurated by
Plato and Aristotle, centred on the polis, its institutional problems and its
imagined versions; the main concern of Chinese thinkers were the art of ruler-
ship and the role that intellectual advisers could envisage in that context. In
both cases, the common ground allows interpretive conflicts with practical
consequences. As for axial downgradings or curtailments of the political, they
were also of diverse kinds. The Judaic transfer of sovereignty to a divine cre-
ator-legislator would, in strictly doctrinal terms, have entailed a theocratic
regime; but that could, in practice, only take the approximate form of priestly
rule, and such arrangements were limited to situations where state formation
could not go far (the temple state in Jerusalem survived in the shadow of im-
perial powers). In the long run, and under conditions more favourable to
political development, the monotheist innovation proved conducive to other
paths: re-elaborations of sacral rulership within a new framework. That form
170 Johann P. Arnason
absolutist phase seems even more important than it was for Elias. Not that its
presence and effective power on the ground were ever commensurable with
official claims; but historians who insist on this discrepancy are missing the
main point. The novelty of absolutist monarchy, and the justification for this
label, are to be found on the level of ambitions and institutionalised visions.
The regimes in question aimed at more extensive control and more variegated
mobilisation of resources than their predecessors had achieved (in the most
important cases, this included overseas expansion). By combining the claim to
divine right with the authority to determine the religion of their subjects, rul-
ers strove for a major redefinition of the religio-political nexus; it is true that
this pattern was not uniformly applied in the early modern monarchies, but
we can nevertheless regard it as a distinctive trend of the times. All things
considered, Christian Meier’s observation that the early modern state aspired
to a monopoly of the political (Meier 1980) seems justified. This was a mo-
nopoly going well beyond Elias’s twin pillars of state power. But it was also the
prelude to a fundamental historical shift: through a complicated and discon-
tinuous process, the absolutist monarchy gave way to modern democracy.
Elias was, of course, not unaware of this transformation. His understanding of
it was summed up in the concept of ‘functional democratisation’, coined to
describe a process prefigured by the very successes of monarchic state-build-
ing. On this view, the growing interdependence of increasingly differentiated
social groups and domains led, in the long run, to an irreversible diffusion and
de-personalisation of power. For a historical-sociological approach along more
multi-dimensional lines, the main problem with this interpretation is that it
does not relate the question of modern democracy and its genesis to the cul-
tural and political background. On that level, the crucial aspect of the process
is the transfer of the notion of sovereignty, with all its accompaniments, from
the ruler to a political community that proved capable of progressive broaden-
ing based on the overlapping identities of people and nation. This political
mutation reflects a new mode of social life, grounded in a radical upgrading
of human autonomy. This problematic is explored in Marcel Gauchet’s work,
especially in his still incomplete tetralogy on the historical trajectory of mod-
ern democracy (Gauchet 2007-2010).
For Eisenstadt, the transfer of sovereignty from kings to people is a prime
case of peripheral empowerment. But we can now – and this will be the last
step of our discussion – bring the whole field of state formation and its set-
tings into closer contact with his civilisational framework. The concept of
centre formation, occasionally used but not systematically introduced by
Eisenstadt, can serve as a key to further clarification. State formation appears
as a particular type of centre formation, and it is sometimes accompanied by
emerging centres of other kinds. This may be a matter of religious elites con-
solidating their specific positions; that applies, in very different ways, to Brah-
mins in India and the Church in the formative phase of Western Christendom
Elias and Eisenstadt: The Multiple Meanings of Civilisation 173
(it was only at a later stage that the development of Church institutions acquired
some characteristics of state formation). But there are also cases best described
in terms of a plurality of political centres. A very peculiar constellation devel-
oped in ancient Greece. There is no doubt about the centrality of the polis, but
it appears in a twofold capacity. Its institutions and the social power embodied
in them represent a dynamic of state formation, albeit very different from the
later European one; but as a political community, the polis limited the scope for
a separate centre, and this helps to explain the recurrent view that ancient Greece
was a civilisation of stateless societies. The autonomy of the political commu-
nity could take various forms: a collective identity that subsumes the emerging
statehood without acknowledging any institutional distance (‘the Athenians’ as
a label for the Athenian polis), an ability to problematise existing orders and
envisage alternative ones, but also a destructive turn toward internal conflict and
breakdown of order. And even the briefest summary of the Greek experience
would be incomplete without a reference to the phenomenon of tyranny, at least
in some cases conducive to state-building policies.
From a comparative perspective, and with particular emphasis on develop-
ments in the wake of the Axial Age, these reflections suggest two complemen-
tary lines of analysis: there are divergent patterns shaping the relationship of
states to other centres, and divergent paths taken by state formation. Among the
civilisations building on axial legacies, China stands out as the most precocious
example of intensive state formation, reaching unequalled levels in the period of
the Warring States (from the early fifth to the late third century BCE) and then
taking a uniquely durable imperial turn. For a long time afterwards, the Chinese
form of statehood was ahead of European ones in crucial respects (Wong 1997).
The European path was a relatively late development that proved exceptionally
sustainable across crises and transitions. In more concrete terms, the specific
features of this trajectory – the process analysed by Elias – include a particular
focus on the mutual reinforcement of military and economic foundations, a
growing ability to broaden and diversify the mobilisation of resources, and a
sequence of markedly different institutional frameworks, from the early medi-
eval dynastic kingdom with strong sacral claims to the more or less democra-
tised nation-state with its transposed version of sacral meaning.
Some clarifying comments on the concept of the state will be needed to
put this field of comparative research into proper focus. It is, I think, gener-
ally accepted that Elias’s conception of state formation historicises Max We-
ber’s equation of the state with the possession of a monopoly on legitimate
violence within a given territory. For Elias, the monopoly must be understood
as a gradual result of long-drawn-out processes. But in addition to the his-
toricising turn, there is at least an incipient change to Weber’s model on an-
other level. Each of the components mentioned by Weber can be diversified,
and Elias took a major step in this direction when he insisted on the interde-
pendence of violence and taxation (later referred to as the coercion-extraction
174 Johann P. Arnason
Acknowledgement
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176 Johann P. Arnason
Author Bio:
Johann P. Arnason is emeritus professor of sociology at La Trobe University, Mel-
bourne, and professor at the Faculty of Human Studies, Charles University, Prague.
His research interests focus on historical sociology, with particular emphasis on the
comparative analysis of civilisations. Recent publications include Nordic Paths to
Modernity (co-edited with Björn Wittrock), Berghahn Books 2014, and Religion and
Politics: European and Global Perspectives (co-edited with Ireneusz Pawel Karolews-
ki), Edinburgh University Press 2014.
Institutional address: Fakulta humanitních studií, Univerzita Karlova v Praze, U
Kříže 8, 15800 Praha 5, Czech Republic. E-mail: J.Arnason@latrobe.edu.au