Ping-Pong 3: The Prisms
The Cicero of last week left Thought with two deep problems. Firstly there is the philosophical problem of how one understands the kind of knowledge which was capable of producing not only perfect types of government, but also of demanding that the best overall form of governance then intermixed these types. A knowledge or a way of understanding thought was therefore needed which allowed for, or even encouraged, mixed systems of government, while also (and at other levels) allowing that these systems remained distinct (and in a hierarchy of their own). Secondly there was the odd historical fact, that this book, (Cicero’s Republic) so convincingly argued, and so apparently rooted in history, got that history so very wrong. Cicero’s Republic was not the fulmination of a history and the promise of a constitution to come (which it appears to claim to be) but rather the final epitaph or apology for a system dying even as Cicero wrote of it. Moreover the new imperial system, placed impossible differences between the subject and that monarchy. The very basic problem of political philosophy was thereby changed by political circumstance. It was not centred around how one shared in government, but rather, concerned how one became a good citizen in a system that was in its formation and day to day running, beyond one’s effective control.
The interspacing of these two very different theories (the first of which is roughly attributable to Plato, the second to Aristotle) was worked out across the centuries, and either side of the conversion of Rome to Christianity. For reasons of space only two different formations of this problem will be considered. These being the versions worked out by Plotinus and St. Augustine. Once again in my investigations the emphasis will be on drawing out what matters to us now, about what these thinkers wrote then, rather than one of absolute rigorous scholarship.
Plotinus is a figure not much remembered now, outside Philosophy. And yet in the third century in which he lived he was justly famous, as the greatest thinker of his day. Amidst the anarchy of the third century, in which Rome was gripped by numerous civil wars, and barbarian invasions, he produced a philosophy of startling beauty, and even more startling abstraction. At its centre lay the Platonic notion that there are ideas, which must somehow at once be removed from the world of lived reality, and yet at the same time, illumine that lived world. Ideas (such as the idea of perfect justice or even a perfect table) will therefore exist in a domain of their own (Plotinus calls it the domain of the intellect). This realm moreover will be complete in itself. And yet as a flame lights up the room, allowing other elements to grasp what could not otherwise be seen, then this world will illumine a world of the soul, that is only thinkable in the light of this life.
The world of the soul (which is the world of space and time) inhabits this light only by altering what it is. What is then fixed in the world of the intellect becomes a process and a series of changes in the world of the soul. But the Soul itself, in the cause of changing, allows to exist below it, another world, that of matter. The Domain of matter, which the soul itself illumines, is a domain characterized by instantaneous change, and impotence. Matter composes a domain in which everything is finished even as it is given. As such matter might appear impotent. And yet the effect of this finishing is to impose on the soul, which necessarily encase themselves within such matter, the additional demand that each of their actions are themselves a part of history (and expressible externally, in the world of matter itself). Matter impotent is itself, drags the soul (and Plotinus is rather stroppy about this) into the world itself.
Moreover Plotinus suggests that the intellect by itself, is diverse. Ideas are not the fundamental level of reality. There must be a level beyond the varying ideal forms, which is capable of expressing within itself (and thereby illuminating) what is diverse in the world of the intellect. This element Plotinus calls the ONE - the single God beyond all thought and being, inexpressible and unthinkable save through direct ecstatic revelation.
This schemata will no doubt on the face of it appear impossibly abstract and of interest only to the history of philosophy (and religion). However as ever, one needs to take care to identify the very useful two ideas that surely lie at the heart of this system. On the one hand this is a theory which seeks to explain just why everything in the world (including justice) is mixed up in everything else. It is, the theory suggests, that the natural state of the soul to be striving within matter. Thence it is the nature of life as we must live it, to contain elements which conflict, and need to be managed. On the other hand, as one ascends the realms of perfection, what is mixed up in this nature (and yet distinct) is not simply lost, but rather that mixing is itself explained by the realities of the previous level. What was diverse to us, is then united in a level beyond us.
Hierarchy is therefore not merely a matter of arbitrary power. But it is rather the consequence of the different ways in which ‘elements of being’ express diversity. The lower elements express themselves in the form of distinct and different realities, that the higher elements contain in themselves alone. To argue thus, is to create the most political of systems. What needs to be allowed to govern (at least on the abstract level) is the system which includes all change and all diversity in itself. And yet this entity cannot exist in its singularity in any one element of reality (as its very nature is to be pitched beyond all such elements). There must then exist numerous elements, all bound up in a system beyond them. Additionally these elements will only be thought to behave morally as they conform to the reality beyond their nature (and therefore understand what it is to be part of another, a greater world, which includes numerous others). Such elements are then always open to the temptation that they behave ‘immorally’ and act according to their own individual advantage, and not in the light of the overall system itself.
Moreover unless this model appears once again abstract, one must point out that this is surely the dominant political/economic model of our times. We have of course dethroned the one, and have replaced it with the notion of a perfect capitalist system. This system, unattainable in itself, captures and articulates within itself, all our economic (but also to a degree all our social) life. We might in ourselves act as selfish consumers. And yet all our actions are taken up within this perfect system which resonates and reasserts itself beyond all finite barriers, and all controls. This system articulates each action one against the other, and ensures as if by some hidden hand of fate, that the best of all possible systems is perpetually constructed in our world. Additionally capitalism pre-figures thought. That is, thought is not something simply external to the capitalist system (and its fictive unity). On the contrary the way we grasp at this system (and the way that we grasp at the world) is formed within the system itself (as its intellect). The tools by which we understand the world are therefore a product of the unity in which that world, that system, binds us.
However at this point the hard physics of Plotinus cut in. It is of course axiomatic that the One (and the Intellect) do not simply exist in the world of being. It will only exist therefore, as other agents, distinct in themselves are caught up in giving it. In our world these agents are no doubt nation states. Nation states exist in a realm beneath the capitalism system, and the understanding (industrial or social) which it creates. The professed role of these agents is to enable that system to be expressed within the world (this is the world of GATT).
However there is a real tension between the individuality of each of these states and the entire system which they claim to be a part of and in. This tension is most felt in the dual problems of migration and ownership. In the former case it is of course a pre-requisite for the ‘’one” (capitalism) that there be a free flow of goods and people. However the many (the state) can only assert their own specific individuality if they curtail (as far as they are able) the flow of the very system that they espouse, creates. Each state therefore demands (as any soul might understand) its own existence apart from the one system in which it is caught. In doing so it will of course (and here Plotinus, for one is very censorious) turn away from the element that created it, and start to value its own debased form (that is, what it itself is, and not what it gets directly from the one system itself).
This debasement is then further intensified by the same nation states, because it is a natural feature of such states that they confuse their own collective interests with the interests of the overall system. One talks of Britain’s (or America’s or India’s and even more China’s) economic interests as if it could be separate from the whole, and thought in itself. The real problem here then being not that such a thought is of itself wrong. On the contrary, the overall system does allow one to suppose such entities to be (as it allows that souls are, and are caught up in their own universe separate from the world of intellect). And yet this existence only comes at the cost, that by acting according to a local interest (and therefore against the interests of the one-system) one increases elsewhere the overall degree of anarchy (or for Plotinus the realm of matter) within the system: Anarchy which does not escape the one-system itself, and yet will only be absorbed by it (that is, only includes within its direct agencies, say the nation state) after many years and much soul ache.
To give a historical example. In the nineteenth century the West not only stripped as much of the resources as it could from the ‘third world’, but in the process it destroyed (or rather, simply ignored) the elaborate systems for regulation and control that existed in those societies and allowed them to manage famine or other global disasters. The result was, that the third world was left in the twentieth century, with the legacy of a form of governance which cared not a bean for the people, but was very effective at stripping the country of all its wealth. A tradition which was then of course continued. Now the problem is actually more complex than it might seem. For one should not to get too misty eyed about the systems which the west destroyed. The elaborate bureaucracies which were swept away, by imperialism were brilliant for handling complex rural economies, and yet were utterly unable to handle industrialization (think Stalin or Mao who tried this model). The deep problem was not then the simple removal of a previous system in the interests of the one system (perfected capitalism) so much as in that removal, the agencies of that system looked to their own advantage and not to the realities of the system they espoused.
However the problem here in itself is a very deep one, as it is never clear how one can move in the interests of the ‘one’. That is, if a system is stable and fixed, then it is easy enough to understand how one might serve the wider interests. The problem always comes when that system breaks down. That is, when anarchy - either caused by invasion or by the destruction of a previous system, (politically or economically), it is simply never clear how one should return to the logic of the One. One can see, after the events, all too easily that muscular Christianity combined with gun boat capitalism and self aggrandisement were not right. And yet this leaves open the problem of how one might have told at the time that they were not the policies to follow, and how one might have produced other policies.
This deep problem was one that was taken up (amongst many other problems) by St. Augustine. He suggests that there can be no answer to this problem on the level of human society at least. Each society is a mere human construction. It is therefore a mere amalgam, of chance, circumstance and history. One should not look, like Cicero did, for perfection in such contiguity or even look for, as Plotinus did, an underlying unity. One must always manage, St. Augustine suggests, with the world that one has been given, and not the one that one hopes for (or imagines to be the case). Augustine then contrasts his world with the City of God. God constructs a perfect or celestial system in which we are all bound up. The game of truth, and the game of political reform, is then to be able to listen to the will of God (embodied within the world of conscience), rather than the hubbub of voices which animates the worlds of men.
Augustine therefore transforms the Plotinian system by making the unity that animates it, personal and unattainable. It becomes a matter of conscience and good faith. The world is thereby changed not through the agency of some hidden transformationary force, but rather as a result of the action of a few good humans with sound (if tender) consciences. Augustine thereby inaugurs in a stroke, both the world of the Catholic minister with their over tender conscience, and the world of the revolutionary who cannot accept any injustice or poverty. Such sentiments may well be laudable (I for one feel the second deeply enough), and yet are always problematic, in that they hold the world up against a perfect ideal which may well be absolutely unattainable, as it certainly was for Augustine, who devised such thinking. The role of the ideal, is then not the role of the One whose will needs to be realized. On the contrary, what one hears in conscience is the desire to act according to one’s awareness of a purely notional ‘perfect’ system. It will then remain up to the individuals (and to the realities of their time) to work out what follows on from those actions. The only hope or clue that Augustine offers about what this action will be (and whether it is possible) is that it must at all times hook into a divine and eternal (if inner) world of God and conscience. The problem of course remained in our time but also in Augustine’s, exactly how one followed such a call and recognized others who were following it…
Both Plotinus and Augustine speak to us of anarchy. That is, the problem of how one copes with a world where there are elements which will undermine the most perfect of systems. The problems with the world lie never in the systems themselves, but rather in the impossibilities of their specific implementations. - A problem which cannot be ever simply solved as Plotinius (and also capitalism) hoped to do by self consciously including within itself all possible diversity. This is conceptually (on the level of the logic of the system) fair enough. And yet the system is prone to internal strains, and elements often act against the system’s own logic (for there is nothing in the one to stop them doing so); actions that then increase the amount of anarchy in the system as a whole (and take time for the one to absorb). Moreover this movement beyond the system in almost inevitable, when the system (or agents of that system), are faced with elements previously external to it. For there can be no real rules about how a system which claims to be universal absorbs elements which were (paradoxically enough) external to it. The only possible rule is that these elements will be taken directly into the self interest of whatever agent uncover his ‘virgin territory’ (thinking of imperialism, but also new technologies creating new territory).
What is more, this beyond is not simply external to the system, but rather is a necessary creation and even substrate. Capitalism therefore always opens itself up to absorb what it is not (it needs more consumers as well as capitalists) just as surely as the One needs matter. Indeed it must do so in order to survive (who else can one trade with?). Perfect systems are therefore hypnotized by anarchies which they require even as they deny them. That is, they require elsewhere a dimension in which they are not (and which can therefore be treated with the utmost cruelty, be that dimension ‘the Poor’, or dogs to vivisect). Augustine attempts to solve this deep dilemma by placing the logic which animates the entire system beyond any realized reality. Anarchy is therefore the normal state of matter, and anything in addition to anarchy is a bonus (and subject to constant improvement). He thereby creates a world of perpetual revolution. And yet as with all perfect perpetual revolutionaries, he can then provide no theory, beyond that is, history and destiny, as to the effectiveness of such revolutions. That is, exactly why (and how) God’s (or the communist state’s) will should be done. And why anarchy should play ball with forces that remain beyond it. Without such a theory, revolution remains a pious (or even self righteous) hope without any practical agenda or use. In short, perhaps one might say that the thinkers in the last centuries of Antiquity knew what anarchy was very very well, and loathed it. Their problem was always that they could not easily escape it, try as they might. A problem which world food shortages and the lack of water, might make us all too aware of once again.
