Tag: hegel

Gillian Rose Against the Holy Middle

Remembering Britain’s Greatest Post-War Philosopher

By David Black

Maya Krishnan, in an article for The Point (‘The Risk of the Universal’, 3 June 2024). has contributed a substantial and readable introduction the writings of Gillian Rose (1947-1995).

Gillian Rose said that the collapse of state-socialism couldn’t kill Marxism, because ‘all the antinomies of modern state and society addressed since Hobbes, Smith and Rousseau, have been reopened.’ Furthermore, the antinomies raised the question of the ‘connection’ between liberalism and fascism, which might have seemed otiose in the 1990s, but certainly doesn’t now.

Rose recalls the words of the young Marx, writing in On the Jewish Question,

‘,,,the perfection of the idealism of the state is at the same time the perfection of the materialism of civil society. The shaking-off of the political yoke was at the same time the shaking-off of the bonds which had held in check the egoistic spirit of civil society. Political emancipation was, at the same time, the emancipation of civil society from politics, from even the appearance of a universal content.’

In Rose’s interpretation, Marx here exposes the ‘breaking of the middle’. In the pre-capitalist world, the guilds, statuses and privileges which determined the rights and duties of individuals, formed the legal estate in the ‘middle’ of the old feudal order. With the sweeping away of these institutions, the post-feudal individual is ‘naturalized as “egoism” and allegorized as “ethical”.’

Following the post-Hegelian ‘disasters of modernity’ – stalinism, nazi-ism and imperialism – we see the post-modern attempt to bypass the dichotomies by dismissing the whole Enlightenment project – and rational critique generally – as implicated in power relations.

Foucault’s monolithic concept of ‘power’ conflates actual power and knowledge in a way that ‘underwrites the Nietzschian drive toward a nihilist abandonment of reason itself’. Philosophic truth-claims are seen as ‘mere by-products of the will-to-power vested in figural language.’ In the ‘linguistic turn’ of post-modernism, rhetoric is privileged over reason: concepts and categories are entirely determined by the various signifying codes and systems that make up a given ‘discourse’. In Krishnan’s view, Rose’s critique of post-structuralism, in The Dialectic of Nihilism exposes ‘a kind of tantrum in which thinkers misdirect their anger over an irrational society by lashing out at rationality itself.’

As Krishnan suggests, the problem with the ‘Peoples of the Book’ – Jews, Moslems and Christians – isn’t so much that they have to negotiate between their ethics and the ‘voice of authority’ which issued the ‘god-given’ order: ‘go and smite Amalek’:

‘Where we go wrong, on Rose’s view, is not by accepting the wrong kind of authority; it’s rather by demanding the wrong kind of security. The risk of becoming a perpetrator of violence isn’t special to traditional authority. Rather, it is the risk of politics itself.’

What Rose calls the ‘fantasy of mending the world’ is the realm of the ‘Holy Middle’, in which it is imagined that following a set of principles will guarantee security. In the Middle discourse and principles displace political action of the universalist kind, because the latter has had violent consequences. Hence, post-politics is imagined to be risk-free, not just as regards personal safety, but also from the guilt of complicity in the violence of the system.

The political implications are summed up by Krishnan as follows:

‘None, then, are without sin. But the Rosean leftist traditionalist can say more than that. A capacity to appreciate forms of value caught up in compromised histories has particular relevance to the leftist, whose uniquely demanding vision of a transformed world is susceptible to giving way to a uniquely dispirited outlook. Living with disappointment over the political history of one’s ideals is a key aspect of Rose’s account of the “broken middle” and of her philosophy of mourning, which is not a counsel of resignation but rather its opposite. By giving up faulty conceptions of our ability to distance ourselves from risk and violence, Rose thinks we regain the political aspirations that the “nihilist” abandons.’

Rose takes off from Hegel’s understanding of modernity not as factor of unification, but of diremption, or division. According to Rose in Hegel Contra Sociology, ‘Hegel’s philosophy has no social import if the Absolute cannot be thought.’ Inasmuch as Marx’s philosophy does have social import – i.e. if the new society (the absolute) is immanent in the actuality of everyday life – it must also be thought. However, Rose continues,

‘A society’s relation to nature, to transformative activity determines its political and property relations, its concept of law, and its subjective or natural consciousness… as long as these relations and law prevails the absolute can only be thought by an abstract consciousness…’

The domination of abstract consciousness in commodity production is underwritten by the predominance of abstract labour. The problem of inversion is tackled in Marx’s Capital:

‘The theory of commodity fetishism is the most speculative moment in Marx’s exposition of capital. It comes nearest to demonstrating in the historically specific case of commodity-producing society how substance is (mis-)represented as subject, how necessary illusion arises out of productive activity.’

In Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, the history of reason’s determinations and self-(mis)understandings, begins with natural consciousness. Eventually, reason recognises that all along reason has been trying to know itself, rather than an external object. In modernity what Rose calls ‘aberrated mourning’ is the failure to recognise that what we have been mourning  is our own fantasies of mending the world. What Rose calls ‘inaugurated mourning’ would recognise the potential for challenging the abstract rationalism of bourgeois society, for which any traditional social forms either have to be destroyed or taken over (or recuperated) to render them relatively harmless. I say relatively, because traditional forms harbour their own fantasies of mending the world, and their own denials and evasions of the past.

Krishnan points out that Alisdair MacIntyre (another British philosopher) sees ‘tradition’ similarly to Rose. For MacIntyre,

‘… there is no such thing as a nontraditional form of life: everyone winds up embracing at least one tradition, whether they realize it or not. Even the modern liberal who self-defines against “the tyranny of tradition” has in fact merely given themselves over to one more tradition, with its own historically transmitted and locally specific forms of activity, its own canon, its own “contingency and particularity.” Tradition is the ground on which everyone stands, Marxist and monk alike. The concomitant risk of complicity in tradition’s tyrannies is therefore everyone’s problem.’

‘I may die before my time’, wrote Rose in one of her last lectures before she died, aged 47 in 1995 from ovarian cancer. Maya Krishnan summarizes:

‘In her writing on what is at once broken and bountiful, she wrote for an age whose difficulty might finally prepare readers to receive her intensities. Rose knew that she would die before her time; she also knew that her time would come.’

Penguin Classics have published a new edition of Love’s Work, an unfinished illness narrative which contains Gillian Rose’s reflections on life, death and personal relationships, all delivered with wry humour combined with deadly seriousness. Later this year, Verso will bring out a perviously unpublished a transcription of Rose’s lectures from 1979 entitled Marxist Modernism.

This artcle was first oublished on Substack

 

Culture Wars in the Spiritual Animal Kingdom

By David Black

From Culture to Cultures

‘Where does culture come from?’ is the question posed by Terry Eagleton in a piece for the London Review of Books (25 April 2024) As Eagleton explains, in trying to make sense of today’s ‘culture wars’:

’One of the original meanings of the word culture is the tending of natural growth, which is to say agriculture, and a cognate word, coulter, means the blade of a plough’.

However, since the Industrial Revolution kicked off in the 18th century, ‘Culture’ has tended to disavow its own origins. For Romanticism, the new art of Goethe, Beethoven and the like was autonomous and self-determining. But, as this ‘culture’ was born of material production in a class-divided society racked by conflict, culture developed a tendency to become ideology useful for legitimizing the social order and resolving endemic conflict.

In pre-modern (feudal) societies the position of ‘cultural workers’, such as ‘court poets, genealogists, licensed fools, painters and architects’ depended on the patronage of princes and the ennobled landed gentry. But with the growth of capitalism and impact of the  French Revolution the floodgate opened for cultural resistance to the old order:

‘This resistance is more likely to occur, curiously enough, once art becomes just another commodity in the marketplace and the artist just another petty commodity producer… in the marketplace your audience becomes anonymous. The world no longer owes the cultural worker a living.’

With commodification, culture becomes truly autonomous: ‘Deprived of its traditional features, it may curve back on itself, taking itself as its own raison d’être in the manner of some modernist art.’ This art of the avant garde finds itself ‘pushed to the margin’; but this process frees art ‘to claim visionary, prophetic, bohemian or subversive status’. Outside of the mechanised workplace ‘values and energies’ are ‘siphoned off into a sphere of their own, which consists of three major sectors: art, sexuality and religion’. The problem for utilitarian capitalism was that ‘A new actor had just appeared on the political scene – the industrial working class – and was threatening to be obstreperous.’

Edmund Burke saw in Revolutionary France an unstable political state of decision, calculation and practical rationality bent on a frenzied destruction of custom and tradition. Britain, in contrast (Burke was actually Irish): was contentedly mired in customs, habits, sentiments, prejudices expressed as spontaneity, gradualism, social improvisation, and a general imperviousness to rational political consciousness.

Matthew Arnold, a Gladstonian Liberal, school-inspector and minor romantic poet, is best remembered for his book, Anarchy and Culture, which upheld ‘culture’ in the face of what he called ‘the great Philistine middle-class, the master force in our politics’.  Culture, of course, had a canon, in which the Arnold, Goethe and Wordsworth were exemplary. In sum, according to Eagleton:

‘Culture, in the sense of the refined and civilised, was needed to buy off the other half of Matthew Arnold’s title, anarchy. Unless liberal values were disseminated to the masses, the masses might end up sabotaging liberal culture.’

And as religion was in crisis and in decline, ‘Culture, then, had to take over from the churches, as artists transubstantiated the profane stuff of everyday life into eternal truth.’

In Europe in the the course of the 19th century the ‘eternal truths’ of culture were interwoven with the Romantic mythologies of blood-and-soil nationalism: ‘With revolutionary nationalism, culture in the sense of language, custom, folklore, history, tradition, religion, ethnicity and so on becomes something people will kill for. Or die for.’

By the end of the 19th century, culture had become an industry churning out kitsch, nationalist propaganda. As Jack Hilton put it in Caliban Shrieks, regarding his pre-1914 school days:

‘What impartiality we got for history! Stories about little drummer boys’ valour, the minstrel boy and hearts of oak. The horrors of the Black Hole of Calcutta, the glory of Nelson and Drake’s game of tiddlywinks – or was it bowls? … What a fighting chance we were given to understand the happenings of world significance – it was not a dog’s chance. It worked out this way. 1st: Heaps of God; 2nd: England first – the world nowhere; 3rd: Blatant swagger; one good innocent honest Christian blue-eyed English schoolboy equalled twenty infidel Japs (Ju Jitsu being barred of course).’

Hegel: Adventures of the Unhappy Consciousness

Eagleton points out that for 18th and 19th century cultural theorists such as Friedrich Schiller and Matthew Arnold, the phrase ‘culture wars’ would have been an oxymoron: ‘Culture in their eyes was the solution to strife, not an example of it.’

From the befuddled perspective of the Far Right, ‘Cultural Marxism’ forms the Left’s intellectual cutting edge of the ‘Culture Wars’, supposedly formulated by German-Jewish intellectuals of the Frankfurt School; all of whom were well versed in the philosophies of German Idealism, especially Hegel’s. In his Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel traces the issue of ‘Culture’ in the development of the ‘Unhappy Consciousness’ under the legal tyranny of the Roman Empire. In this state of unfreedom, moral consciousness (conscience) retreats into spiritual inwardness and the community of Christians.

In the post-Roman world of feudalism there is no longer an abstract law of property distinguishing ‘persons’ (property owners) from ‘things’ (e.g. slaves). Consciousness is formed under the rule of a lawless barbarism in league with a corrupted church which depends on it and takes a share of the plunder.

The ‘Noble Consciousness’ is characterised by ‘virtue’, ‘honour’ and self-sacrificial devotion to the ‘divine’ universal Christian principle embodied by the hereditary monarch. Asserting the ‘Law of the Heart’, virtue fights its way through ‘the way of the world’ and places itself at the service of state-power, but more than that, Hegel writes, ‘it is the conscious essence of universal state-power’. But this power only resembles an actual state when its universality is asserted in times of war with a foreign power.

In war and in peace, the counsel of nobles are in fact vassals of the sovereign monarch, but are left with territorial sovereignty over their own vassals. Because of the nobles’ allegiance to, and dependence on, the monarch, their service degenerates into flattery. The very language of the courtier is inverted as ‘pure culture’.

The inversions of ‘pure culture’ culminate in what Hegel called the ‘last and grandest’ cultures of the Enlightenment: the German Reformation and the French Revolution. The German Enlightenment inaugurated by Luthers rebellion against Catholic corruption expresses itself as abstract spiritualism (culminating in the Kantian unknowable God); the French Enlightenment as abstract materialism based on the primacy of the finite..

Hegel’s Realphilosophie presents the idea of the state as the concrete mediation of interests and classes in civil society within a universal social totality. Marxʼs early essay, On the Jewish Question, is a crtitique of Hegel’s exposition on the state from the point of view of a critical ‘disciple’. The subject in bourgeois society is divided between the role of the private individual of civil society and that of the public citizen. But as the modern state is politically expression of the egoism of self-interest individuals in civil society, there is only an illusory unity of the political community.

The idea of autonomy for the atomised individual stems from the dilemma of the ‘Beautiful Soul’ of Hegel’s Phenomenology: consciousness as a self-willed impotence which utters morality but does not act; speaking a language ‘in which all reciprocally acknowledge each other as acting  conscienciously’. But, as Gillian Rose argues in Hegel Contra Sociology, in this scenario ‘in fact no-one is acting at all’. In the ensuing ‘frenzy of self-deceit’ conscience asserts its particularity as ‘law’:

‘It is opposed to others under the guise of furthering their particular interests as if they could be a universal law… we are left with the realization of the barbarism of our abstract culture, of how we have reproduced that barbarism by denying the ethical, by fixing the illusion that we are absolute or pure moral consciousness in our moral law or in the law of our hearts.’

Hegel does not trust the autonomy of the moral individaul in this sitituation, as its autonomy would exculpate it from what it is actually deeply implicated in: the violences of civil society now appearing as the ‘Spiritual Animal Kingdom’: ‘spiritual’ because of the apparent harmony of universal and individual which is in reality the rule of abstract property relations; ‘animal’ because it serves the particular ends of individuals and not the whole society. In this ‘kingdom’ – which is actually our modern world – society is vulnerable to fascist mob rule, anti-science quackery and authoritarianism – or worse.

Slavoy Žižek writes of an ‘ideological constellation’ in which the modernism of the Enlightenment  is denigrated and downgraded by postmodern ‘culture’. For Žižek the crucial point, which postmodernism seems to ignore, is that culture and barbarism do not exclude each other: the opposite of barbarism is not culture but civilization (designated as imperialist or cosmopolitan according to political stance, i.e. ‘non-civilized’). In fact, according to Žižek, ‘culture in itself, in so far as it is affirmed in its opposition to civilization, sets free an unmistakable barbaric potential. Apropos of Hegel’s description of ‘alienated consciousness’ under feudalism which is exposed as the ‘barbarism of pure culture’ Žižek offers the more modern example of the implementers of Nazi terror enjoying the supreme achievements of German culture such as Beethoven’s string quartets after a hard days work organizing the Final Soloution. In relation to the German Reformation, Žižek writes,

‘The first model of this German Kulturbarbarismus is Luther, whose Protestant refusal of Rome presents a reaction of pure, inner culture against the worldly Catholic civilization, and at the same time, by means of its savage, violent attitude, displays the latent barbarism proper to the German ideology.’

(Slavoj Žižek, For They Know Not what They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor)

Terry Eagleton describes how in Britain the liberal ‘vision of culture as common ground’ held until late 1960s, when expanded higher education drew in students from the lower orders. The ‘sixties rebels challenged the liberal consensus and the academic canon, both of which had been compromised by  association with racist ideology and imperialist anthropology.

‘Postmodernism happens not just with the arrival of mass culture but with the aestheticising of social existence, from design and advertising to branding, politics as spectacle, tattoos, purple hair and ridiculously large glasses. Culture, once the antithesis of material production, has now been folded into production.’

Culture, having lost its autonomy from politics, is reduced to the zero-sum round of political demands. Language now becomes the law of framing the demands rather than a way of transcending the political. From being a spiritual solution, the linguistic turn has become part of the problem, as the process has shifted from concerns with culture to cultures. In today’s multicultural society, Eagleton concludes, culture, having become ideology becomes an ism – culturalism.

Eagleton bemoans the fact that from the standpoint of postmodernism, ‘

‘Most such life-forms today are out not to question the framework of modern civilisation but to be included within it. Inclusion, however, isn’t a good in itself, any more than diversity is. One thinks fondly of Samuel Goldwyn’s cry: “Include me out!”’

As Heinrich Heine prophesised a century before the rise of the Nazis, ‘those who burn books will in the end burn people’. Contrary to what elements of both sides in the culture wars seem to think (with both Christian priests and Trans activists gleefully burning Harry Potter books) the struggle for justice should not be about arguing over which books to burn.