169345391 ARCHER Defending Objectivity

Andrew Collier is the boldest defender of objectivity – in science, knowledge,thought, action, politics, morality and religion. In this tribute to Andrew, hiscolleagues acknowledge the influence he has had upon them. They show that theyhave been challenged by his thinking and, in turn, offer challenging responses to him.

This wide-ranging book covers key areas with which defenders of objectivityoften have to engage. Sections are devoted to the following:

• The ‘Objectivity of value’ – are things of value in the world, independentlyof the labels we subjectively attach to them?

• ‘Objectivity and everyday knowledge’ – do our workday practices possess anobjectivity which our theories do not, or vice versa?

• ‘Objectivity and materialism’ – does that which is materially based have aspecial claim to being objective?

• ‘Objectivity in political economy’ – is the moral dimension systematicallydistorted in economic and social theory and can such a claim be substan-tiated?

• ‘Objectivity and reflexivity’ – can we reason and reason reflexively withoutundermining the very objectivity we seek to defend?

• ‘Objectivity, postmodernism and feminism’ – can these common attacksupon objectivity remain coherent or are they necessarily self-undermining?

• ‘Objectivity and nature’ – is appreciation of nature or advocacy of deepecology dependent upon the objective value of the natural world?

The diverse contributions range from social and political thought to philosophy,reflecting the central themes of Collier’s work.

Margaret S. Archer is Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick.She is a Trustee of the Centre for Critical Realism.

William Outhwaite is Professor of Sociology at the University of Sussex. Heis an associate editor of the European Journal of Social Theory.

Defending Objectivity

Critical realismEssential readingsEdited by Margaret Archer, Roy Bhaskar,

Andrew Collier, Tony Lawson and Alan Norrie

The Possibility of Naturalism(3rd edition)A philosophical critique of thecontemporary human sciencesRoy Bhaskar

Being and WorthAndrew Collier

Quantum Theory and the Flightfrom RealismPhilosophical responses to quantummechanicsChristopher Norris

From East to WestOdyssey of a soulRoy Bhaskar

Realism and RacismConcepts of race in sociologicalresearchBob Carter

Rational Choice TheoryResisting colonisationEdited by Margaret Archer and

Jonathan Q. Tritter

Explaining SocietyCritical realism in the social sciencesBerth Danermark, Mats Ekström, Jan Ch.

Karlsson and Liselotte Jakobsen

Critical Realism and MarxismEdited by Andrew Brown, Steve Fleetwood

and John Michael Roberts

Critical Realism in EconomicsEdited by Steve Fleetwood

Realist Perspectives onManagement and OrganisationsEdited by Stephen Ackroyd and

Steve Fleetwood

After International RelationsCritical realism and the(re)construction of world politicsHeikki Patomaki

Critical realism: interventionsEdited by Margaret Archer, Roy Bhaskar, AndrewCollier, Nick Hostettler, Tony Lawson and Alan Norrie.

Critical realism is one of the most influential new developments in the philosophyof science and in the social sciences, providing a powerful alternative to positivismand postmodernism. This series will explore the critical realist position in philos-ophy and across the social sciences.

Capitalism and CitizenshipThe impossible partnershipKathryn Dean

Philosophy of Language and theChallenge to Scientific RealismChristopher Norris

TranscendenceCritical realism and GodMargaret S. Archer, Andrew Collier and

Douglas V. Porpora

Also published by Routledge

Routledge studiesin critical realismEdited by Margaret Archer, Roy Bhaskar,

Andrew Collier, Nick Hostettler, Tony

Lawson and Alan Norrie.

Marxism and RealismA materialistic application of realismin the social scienceSean Creaven

Beyond RelativismRaymond Boudon, cognitiverationality and critical realismCynthia Lins Hamlin

Education Policy and RealistSocial TheoryPrimary teachers, child-centredphilosophy and the newmanagerialismRobert Wilmott

HegemonyA realist analysisJonathan Joseph

Realism and SociologyAnti-foundationalism, ontology andsocial researchJustin Cruickshank

Critical RealismThe difference it makesEdited by Justin Cruickshank

Critical Realism andComposition TheoryDonald Judd

On Christian BeliefA defence of a cognitive conception ofreligious belief in a Christian contextAndrew Collier

In Defence of Objectivity andOther EssaysAndrew Collier

Realism, Discourse andDeconstructionEdited by Jonathan Joseph and

John Michael Roberts

Critical Realism, Post-positivism and the Possibility ofKnowledgeRuth Groff

Defending ObjectivityEssays in honour of Andrew CollierEdited by Margaret S. Archer

and William Outhwaite

Defending ObjectivityEssays in honour of Andrew Collier

Edited by Margaret S. Archerand William Outhwaite

First published in 2004 by Routledge11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canadaby Routledge29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group

© 2004 Margaret S. Archer and William Outhwaite selection and editorialmatter; individual chapters the contributors

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproducedor utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means,now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording,or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission inwriting from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication DataA catalog record for this title has been requested.

ISBN 0–415–338239

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004.

ISBN 0-203-43397-1 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-67979-2 (Adobe eReader Format)(Print Edition)

Notes on contributors xiForeword xv

PART I

Encounters with Andrew Collier 1

1 A considerable realist: a personal and intellectual tribute to Andrew Collier 3ROY B H A S K A R

2 Losing the plot 14RU T H M E RT T E N S

PART II

Critiques of counter-objectivity 31

3 Objectivity, postmodernism and biographical understanding: Andrew Collier on R.D. Laing 33R AY M O N K

4 Objectivity and phallogocentrism 48D O U G L A S V. P O R P O R A

PART III

The objectivity of value 61

5 The objectivity of value 63A L I S O N A S S I T E R

Contents

6 Commerce and the language of value 75J O H N O ’ N E I L L

7 Restoring the moral dimension in social scientific accounts: a qualified ethical naturalist approach 93A N D R E W S AY E R

PART IV

Objectivity and everyday knowledge 115

8 Objectivity and the growth of knowledge 117M A RG A R E T S . A RC H E R

9 Practical knowledge and realism: linking Andrew Collier on lay knowledge to Karl Popper on the philosophy ofscience 129J U S T I N C RU I C K S H A N K

10 Being and knowledge 143J O NAT H A N J O S E P H

PART V

Objectivity and materialism 159

11 Towards objectivity: from Kant to Marx 161J O LYO N AG A R

12 The contradictions of capital 183C H R I S TO P H E R J. A RT H U R

13 Understanding objectivity in a material world 199P H I L WA L D E N

viii Contents

PART VI

Objectivity and reflexivity 211

14 Reason and its own self-undoing? 213A L A N M O N T E F I O R E

15 Intentional and reflexive objectivity: some reflections 226W I L L I A M O U T H WA I T E

PART VII

Objectivity and nature 237

16 Realism about the value of nature? Andrew Collier’senvironmental philosophy 239T E D B E N TO N

17 Objectivity, experience and the aesthetic of nature 251K AT E S O P E R

Index 261

Contents ix

Jolyon Agar teaches political theory at Queen’s University, Belfast. His mostrecent publication is ‘G.A. Cohen’s Functional Explanation: A CriticalRealist Analysis’ (Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 2003). His current researchfocuses on the connection between Bhaskar’s critical realism and dialecticalcritical realism and the relationship between the philosophies of Kant, Hegeland Marx.

Margaret S. Archer is Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwickand her main interests are in social theory, specifically in both understandingand explaining the linkage between structure and agency. She is a pastPresident of the International Sociological Association. Her latest book isStructure, Agency and the Internal Conversation (Cambridge University Press, 2003).

Christopher J. Arthur taught philosophy at the University of Sussex. Hispublications include Dialectics of Labour (Blackwell, 1986) and The New Dialectic

and Marx’s Capital (Brill, 2002).

Alison Assiter is Assistant Vice-Chancellor at the University of the West ofEngland and Professor of Feminist Theory; her publications includeEnlightened Women (Routledge 1996) and Revisiting Universalism (Macmillan,2003).

Ted Benton is Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex. His interestsinclude biology, the environment and philosophy of science. He has recentlypublished Philosophy of Social Science (with Ian Craib; Palgrave, 2001).

Roy Bhaskar is the founder of the Centre for Critical Realism. His booksinclude The Possibility of Naturalism (Harvester, 1979), A Realist Theory of Science

(Leeds Books, 1975), Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom (Verso, 1993) and The

Philosophy of Meta-Reality (Sage, 2002). He is currently Visiting Fellow at theSwedish Collegium for Advanced Study in Social Science (SCASS).

Justin Cruickshank is a lecturer in the Department of Sociology at theUniversity of Birmingham. His research deals with the tensions within criticalrealism concerning ontology and epistemology, the notion of canonicity in

Contributors

sociology and the relationship of pragmatism to social thought. He is theauthor of Realism and Sociology (Routledge, 2003).

Jonathan Joseph studied philosophy at Southampton under the supervision ofAndrew Collier. His PhD has been published as Hegemony: A Realist Analysis

(Routledge, 2002). He has also published Social Theory: Conflict, Cohesion and

Consent (Edinburgh University Press, 2003) and has edited Realism, Discourse

and Deconstruction (with John Roberts; Routledge, 2003). He teaches in theDepartment of International Politics at Aberystwyth.

Ruth Merttens tutored at London University in the 1970s, after which shebecame a teacher. She now specialises in Primary Education as well ascurrently directing the Hamilton Maths and Reading Projects in Oxford. Herareas of academic interest remain at the intersection of theology with prac-tice – educational, political and moral.

Ray Monk is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southampton. Hehas written biographies of Wittgenstein and Russell, and is currently writing abiography of the physicist, Robert Oppenheimer.

Alan Montefiore is an Emeritus Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford. He isnow Visiting Professor at the Centre for European Philosophy at MiddlesexUniversity. He is also President of the Wiener Library in London and ofthe Forum for European Philosophy, and is a past Chairman of the FroebelEducational Institute. He has published books on moral philosophy, theUniversity and political commitment, contemporary French philosophy,the political responsibility of intellectuals and the relationship between thecausal description and explanation of goal-directed behaviour. He iscurrently working on aspects of the relations between personal andcultural identity and hopes to produce a book on his reading of Kant.

John O’Neill is Professor of Philosophy at Lancaster University. He has writtenwidely on the philosophy of economics, social and political theory, environ-mental philosophy, and the philosophy of science. His books include The

Market: Ethics, Knowledge and Politics (Routledge, 1998) and Ecology, Policy and

Politics: Human Well-being and the Natural World (Routledge, 1993).

William Outhwaite is Professor of Sociology at the University of Sussex. Hisresearch interests include the philosophy of social science (especially realism),social theory (especially critical theory and contemporary European socialtheory), political sociology, and the sociology of knowledge. He is the authorof Understanding Social Life: The Method Called Verstehen (Allen and Unwin, 1975),Concept Formation in Social Science (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), New

Philosophies of Social Science: Realism, Hermeneutics and Critical Theory (Macmillan,1987), and Habermas: A Critical Introduction (Polity Press, 1994).

xii Contributors

Douglas V. Porpora is a sociologist who is Professor and Head of theDepartment of Culture and Communication at Drexel University, Philadelphia.His latest book is Landscapes of the Soul: The Loss of Moral Meaning in American Life

(Oxford University Press, 2001).

Andrew Sayer is Professor of Social Theory and Political Economy atLancaster University’s Sociology department. His books include Realism and

Social Science (Sage, 2000), and he is currently working on moral economy.

Kate Soper is Professor of Philosophy at the University of North London. Herpublications include What is Nature? (Blackwell, 1996) and To Relish the Sublime

(with Martin Ryle; Verso, 2002).

Phil Walden completed a PhD under Andrew Collier’s supervision in 2002,entitled ‘The Rise, Decline and Revival of Dialectical Materialism’. He hasjust taken up a post at Ruskin College, Oxford.

Contributors xiii

This Festschrift was conceived in the Spring of 2003. The principal aim was, ofcourse, to present Andrew Collier with a tribute to the enormous affection inwhich he is held by all who know him and to the enormous influence which hisremarkably creative and original work has had over a wide readership. Thepublication, in June 2003, of Andrew’s important volume of essays, In Defence of

Objectivity, gave a clear focus to the project; contributors were provided with acopy of the title essay, and many of the contributions refer explicitly to this book.A special seminar in the Critical Realism series, held on a beautiful Midsummer’sDay, enabled contributors to present preliminary versions of their argumentsand to hear Andrew’s characteristically generous and witty responses. Six weekslater, final versions were in, and Routledge generously accelerated the produc-tion of the volume.

Andrew Collier was born in 1944 and studied philosophy at the University ofLondon. After temporary jobs at Warwick and Sussex, he taught at Bangor forfifteen years, moving to Southampton in 1988 on the closure of the Bangorphilosophy department. He has quietly but steadily built up a major reputationas one of the UK’s leading realist and socialist philosophers, and his work onrealism has succeeded in making accessible even the most difficult parts of RoyBhaskar’s work.

Andrew is an enormously widely read and wide-ranging thinker, equally athome across a wide range of topics in social and political thought as in philos-ophy. These essays reflect central themes in his work, notably in realistphilosophy and in socialist and ecological thought. His early and continuinginterest in existential psychoanalysis and motifs of encounter and self-forming isreflected in a personal memoir by Ruth Merrtens which we have placed along-side Roy Bhaskar’s.

Since Andrew has produced a boldly unfashionable defence of objectivity,Ray Monk and Doug Porpora examine the merits of social science, whose objec-tive is to produce objective knowledge, in comparison with two currentlyfashionable alternatives – poststructuralism and postmodernism.

Next, one of Andrew’s most challenging arguments, put forward in Being and

Worth, is for the objectivity of value, in the strong sense that values are inherentin the nature of things and are not matters of human orientations to them.

Foreword

Alison Assiter provides a critical discussion of this argument, whilst John O’Neilltakes up the falsely objective de-moralisation of language in economics andAndrew Sayer defends the need to restore a moral dimension to social the-orising and analysis.

In the following section, Margaret Archer, Justin Cruickshank and JonathanJoseph address Andrew’s approach to the theme of everyday knowledge. In theirdifferent ways, these contributions focus upon the relationships between theoryand practice in the development of knowledge, and whether both kinds ofknowledge make claims to objectivity which necessarily imply realism.

In the fifth section, Joly Agar, Chris Arthur and Phil Walden trace questionsof objectivity through Marxist materialism. Penultimately, Alan Montefiore andWilliam Outhwaite explore in different ways the theme of reflexivity in thetheory of knowledge and in contemporary social and cultural theory. Finally,Ted Benton and Kate Soper discuss aspects of Andrew’s theorisation of nature,and thus return to the central issue about the objectivity of value, raised at thebeginning.

When the idea of a Festschrift was first mooted with Andrew, his response wasthat he didn’t think he was a sufficiently eminent subject. We hope that this richand coherent array of papers serves to convince him about the extensiveness ofhis intellectual influence, the wide appreciation of his academic integrity, and thepersonal affection felt for him by his colleagues.

Margaret S. Archer and William OuthwaiteAugust 2003

xvi Foreword

Part I

Encounters withAndrew Collier

My personal experience of Andrew can be divided into five phases, which Iwill dub:

1 the right-thinking radical philosopher;2 walking in the rain to Balfern Street;3 arson in Altenburg Gardens;4 revelations in Brahmes Hall;5 the unfinished business of the Southampton Synthesiser.

I will start this memoir by recollecting some of my experiences of Andrew inthese ‘five phases’, and then use this to lead briefly into a short résumé of hisintellectual achievement. But when I say ‘intellectual achievement’, a word ofcaution is necessary. For Andrew is no mere intellectual and his intellectualconcerns always follow from his practical engagements in life. We shall see howhe gradually developed a comprehensive realist philosophical position, whichcould comprehend the unity and totality of life, in a still-evolving system which isa form of differentiated realist monism. This is a totality he exemplifies in hisown life, itself a totality he always feels free to draw on in the theoretical articula-tion of philosophy.

The right-thinking radical philosopher (1977–1983)

I first began to notice the name ‘Andrew Collier’ when reading the journalRadical Philosophy in the mid-1970s. In the pages of this journal could be identi-fied an Andrew rather different from, but recognisably continuous with, the onewe know today. An unabashed polemicist and partisan, a kind of revolutionaryLeninist in philosophy, he wrote about all the pressing concerns of his day: aboutsocial mores and personalist liberal philosophy, about hedonism and amour de soi,about existentialist psychoanalysis and radical politics. Above all, he wrote indefence of the possibility of objectivity and even of its possibility in epistem-ology, as well as within philosophy – then under attack from the quarter hereferred to disrespectfully as ‘Hingis and Horsa’ [Barry Hindess and Paul Hirst].I began to notice very nice references to my work in his pieces. I thought to

1 A considerable realistA personal and intellectual tribute to Andrew Collier

Roy Bhaskar

myself, ‘This is a very right-thinking person: I must get to know him.’ Sooner orlater we spoke to each other on the telephone (while I believe he was about tocommence a tutorial with a student on my work) and arranged to meet. Beforewe could actually keep our date, we had bumped into each other at a radicalsocialist meeting and so initiated a phase of meetings in London and elsewhere.Andrew has nicely recorded in his book Critical Realism: An Introduction to Roy

Bhaskar’s Philosophy, that my initial meeting with Rom Harré was a case of ‘intel-lectual love at first sight’. It was similar between Andrew and myself. Ourmeetings would range over almost every aspect of philosophy and life whichseemed relevant to us then, though it is significant that we never discussed reli-gion or spirituality. Indeed, I did not know that Andrew was a devout Christianuntil the mid-1990s when I explicitly began to articulate my so-called ‘spiritualturn’ in philosophy, in a project in which he, alongside Margaret Archer andDoug Porpora in particular, was to explicitly join me.

However, it was significant that despite the omission of any religion ortheology, he was already writing over a wide field. Thus his first book was onR.D. Laing and his working papers often made reference to important but littleknown thinkers such as John Macmurray. However there is no doubt that hisprincipal, one could say his dominant, though not perhaps ultimately determi-nant, intellectual concern was with the articulation of a scientific realist positionwhich would uphold the objectivity of a social science, especially, but not only, inpolitics. In this context in the mid-1970s it was natural to take as one’s point ofdeparture the work of the French Marxist philosopher, Louis Althusser. And itwas an engagement between the Althusserian and transcendental realist and crit-ical naturalist philosophies that was the topic of his brilliant first major book onthe terrain of contemporary philosophy, Scientific Realism and Socialist Thought, onwhich I will comment further below.

Walking in the rain to Balfern Street (1983–1987)

The next phase of Andrew’s life saw him as a principal in the development ofthe emergent institutional structures and forums of critical realism, as well asearning a reputation as a leading interpreter of my thought. Indeed, he, togetherwith William Outhwaite, who played a parallel role, were friends, interpretersand fellow catalysts in the emerging networks of critical realism. The three of us,together with our mutual friend and critical realist, Ted Benton, came to meet inmy house in Battersea for a two-week-long series of discussions. This ultimatelyculminated in the first of the standing conferences on realism and the humansciences at the University of Sussex in 1984. For the first of these sessions,Andrew was coming up by train from Southampton1 to Waterloo. William andTed were already ensconced in my kitchen, a tape recorder had been assiduouslytested, coffee was simmering and the three of us were already ardently talkingpolitics, philosophy, the philosophy of politics and the politics of philosophy. Itwas pouring with rain in a quasi-torrential downpour, when Andrew’s apologeticknock was heard at the door. I invited him in to join the bustling activity, passing

4 Roy Bhaskar

him a cup of coffee while William coached him in the intricacies of therecording device and Ted briefed him on the formal agenda for our first session.Andrew slipped naturally into this scene and after about ten minutes, it seemedto me that it would be right to begin our deliberations proper. I asked Andrew ifthere was anything in particular he wanted to say before we started, expecting nodoubt some item to be put on the agenda. Speaking standing (he had yet to sitdown) and now, as to my horror I noticed, dripping from his already prematurelybalding head, he asked: ‘Do you think I could have a towel?’ He had walked allthe way from Waterloo to my house in Battersea in the torrential rain!

Andrew was a phenomenal walker. He rarely used public transport, except forlong-distance trips, and could not drive. In his days in London he would regu-larly walk (on business) twenty or more miles a day, he went on long walks of twoor three days’ duration (and sometimes more) and only in later days did he beginsystematically to substitute the bicycle. This was not primarily for ecologicalreasons, nor at all, I think, to keep himself fit, but mainly out of the joy anddelight he took in the activity itself and especially in being at one with nature. Itcould also be said that Andrew would never knowingly take a shortcut when alonger route was possible. Thus, I remember him walking from his home to ourlodgings in a student hall in Southampton at the time of the 1991 conferencethere and then marching us briskly every morning through one mile or so offorest until we arrived at the designated venue for the day’s sessions. On the lastevening of these conferences, when it was customary for us all to go for a regula-tion ‘tandoori’ meal, he would always argue persuasively that there was no wayany number of taxis or cars or other arrangement of the local transport servicescould get us there commodiously. The heated discussion would inevitably beterminated by Andrew leading the contingent of critical realists along at his briskpace by foot!

The discussions the four of us had in Balfern Street were typical, in a way, ofthe flavour of many first conferences. The discussions then would proceed eachday from abstract philosophy through to the methodological problems of thesocial sciences and thence to the practical details of political transformation.They embraced friendly gossip and reflection about the nitty-gritty of the polit-ical events of the day and politicised daily life – between which there did notseem to be a vast difference. Nevertheless, we made good progress and eventu-ally sowed the seeds for The Realism and Human Sciences Conferences, fromwhich were to flow the Centre for Critical Realism, the International Associationfor Critical Realism, Alethia and the Journal for Critical Realism, the ‘CriticalRealism: Interventions’ book series and much more. In the 1980s, these con-ferences also became a focal point for the international permeation andinterdisciplinary spread of critical realist ideas, and an exchange of people,information and ideas, which included such initiatives as the setting up of theBhaskar List on the Internet.

The conferences themselves were quite exceptional. They were unique inthat the participants were concerned neither with personal career advance-ment nor such other typical conference activities as ‘getting laid’, but rather

A considerable realist 5

with the systematic attempt to understand, explore and enjoy ideas, in thecontext of each other’s company, oriented to a determined pursuit of thetruth. Each year, miraculously, at the end, a new city and a new group ofvolunteers would take on organising the next year’s conference. Andrew,William and myself would almost always participate in this activity, but therewas no formal hierarchy and critical realism began to thrive and prosper. Tothese conferences, Andrew would come as a dedicated critical realist and hedo-nist, limiting himself assiduously to a maximum of, say, two sessions out of apossible eleven, but participating enthusiastically in the all-night-long discus-sions and investigations we were pursuing.2

Arson in Altenburg Gardens (1988–1994)

This was an important period for Andrew, which saw his own reputation consoli-dated and critical realism flowering. It witnessed the publication, as alreadymentioned, of Scientific Realism and Socialist Thought, concluding his engagementwith the Althusserian current in Marxist philosophy, and the bulk of his work forCritical Realism: An Introduction to Roy Bhaskar’s Philosophy, which was eventuallypublished in 1993. At the same time his Socialist Reasoning prefigured hispublished interest in ethics and in theological, or more properly, spiritualconcerns, as revealed in Being and Worth and his sequence of four books onvarious issues dealing with realism in religion, especially Christianity. It is signifi-cant that Andrew always took his concerns with the burgeoning development ofcritical realism, through its ethical, dialectical and spiritual phases, in directionsto which he felt himself committed, for example, Marxism, ecologically sensitivesocialism and Christianity, as concrete exemplifications of the more generaldirection of his thought. Just as he was to seek to embody the ideal of the unityof theory and practice, so he sought always to unify in his writings and his talks aunity of the abstract and the concrete. It is this quality, together with his refusalto disdain personal examples from his own life or experience, which gives somuch of his writing and speaking its honest, direct and down-to-earth character.Andrew has always worn his heart on his sleeve, and walked his talk in philos-ophy, never hiding his own values and preferences, which gives his own work itssuperficially ‘easily contestable’ character.

My relationship with him in this period was still (as it remains) that of a verygood friend. Indeed, he would often stay at my place on his frequent trips toLondon. I got to know Heather and his son Adam during this time too. Indeed,on one visit of the three of them, for a lunch party at which my late friend, RoyEdgley, doyen of the radical philosophy movement, and his wife, Liz, were alsopresent, Adam was caught playing in the garden with a set of sticks and matcheswith which he was about to set fire to the house. He must have been about sevenat the time and I always teasingly refer to him to Andrew as the ‘little arsonist’.On a later occasion, probably some five years on, at a party in the grounds ofBrahmes Hall, Adam was to be seen instructing Tony Lawson’s daughter in theelementary facts of anatomy!

6 Roy Bhaskar

Revelations in Brahmes Hall (1994–2000)

It was during this period that the Centre for Critical Realism was born out ofmeetings in my office in St Peter’s Street, between our long-suffering accountantand constitutional adviser, Mike Jellicoe, and the founding trustees. These were,besides Andrew and me, made up of Margaret Archer, Alan Norrie, TonyLawson and Sean Vertigan. We were a little bit later to be joined by NickHostettler and, in a representative capacity (as the editor of Alethia and theJournal for Critical Realism), Mervyn Hartwig. Alan Jarvis, who led the Routledgeteam in setting up the ‘Critical Realism: Interventions’ and the ‘RoutledgeStudies in Critical Realism’ series, is another who participated in these discus-sions. In those days, we had a very full agenda for our meetings. Assuming therewas no public seminar or meeting, we would start at 12:00 noon on the CCRbusiness, accompanied by a round of sandwiches (or two), coffee, tea andbiscuits. With the formal business completed, ideally around 4 o’clock, we wouldthen adjourn to the ‘Camden Head’ in Islington, where we would have booked aroom for a group discussion or seminar. One of us would always open a discus-sion on some matter of intellectual and practical concern to critical realism.Then, at around 7:00 p.m., we would move on to a choice Italian (most often the‘Portafino’, known to us affectionately, after its head-waiter, as ‘Stefano’s’) oroccasionally to an Indian restaurant and often the party would only break upwhen last trains had to be caught. Islington had been, of course, Tony Blair’sborough and was full of yuppies and other trend-setters. In this company,Andrew was known affectionately by Stefano as one of my ‘builders’.

Andrew has indeed always been a great builder. By now he was acknowledgedas a canonical exponent of at least the first three (transcendental realist, criticalnaturalist and explanatory critical) phases of my work. But it was also notablethat he wrote probably the best-informed initial introduction to my Dialectic: The

Pulse of Freedom in Radical Philosophy, though his enthusiasm for this phase wasprobably less than for the ones that preceded and immediately succeeded it.

Of course, he was also becoming known now as an important contributor tothe growing body of critical realist scholarship in his own right. Thus, in Scientific

Realism and Socialist Thought, he introduced the distinction between structure andstructuratum. The same structure can be manifest in many different structurata,and the same structuratum may manifest a plurality of structures. Structure is auniversal; structuratum, a particular. Similarly, in Being and Worth (1999) he was toseek to supplement the theory of explanatory critique with the beginning of atheory of objective value, which he called for in his review of Dialectic: The Pulse

of Freedom. Indeed, we could say that the four keys to Andrew’s work are structural

realism; the objectivity of value; the primacy of the whole; and Christian belief. By the endof this period the first two had been securely consolidated and the second twowere beginning to emerge in to view.

By the time the Centre for Critical Realism was established, I had alreadybecome subjectively convinced of the necessity for a spiritual turn in philosophy.Margaret Archer shared my enthusiasm and it was not long before Andrew


joined us. Doug Porpora, too, was enthusiastic about this development. In talksin the middle and late 1990s, I began systematically to articulate this position,which first culminated in the publication of From East to West in 2000. Over thepreceding eighteen months or so, the four of us met at my home in Suffolk,Brahmes Hall. Here, as we were working through issues in the philosophy of reli-gion and spirituality, we came to see the need for a conscious recognition andaffirmation of the role of spirituality, first in our activity of discussing it, andsecond, more generally, in all the practices of our everyday life.

The unfinished business of the SouthamptonSynthesiser (2001–)

These years saw a quickened tempo of production for publication in Andrew’slife, as books and manuscripts, half-finished in drawers, were rapidly completed,in the wake of Andrew’s ill health, and published. So far, four books defendingobjectivity in religion, alongside Andrew’s defence of objectivity in science, socialscience and ethics, have found their way into print. Let me just rehearse whatwas the central claim of those of us who promulgated the spiritual revolution incritical realism. The critical realist trinity of ontological realism, epistemologicalrelativism and judgmental rationality, which applied in science and to ordinarymaterial objects, was to apply here too, as it had been shown (at least inAndrew’s and my eyes) in ethics. To put it bluntly, we could ask whether Godexisted or not, as this was a legitimate question from a critical realist perspective.Moreover, if God is real, this is clearly compatible with a number of differentinterpretations or manifestations of him/her/it. And once an interpretation ormanifestation is accepted as authentic, then issues about the rationality of reli-gious practices can also be legitimately asked. That is to say, ontological realismabout God not only went hand in hand with epistemological (and social) reli-gious tolerance, but also paved the way for a consideration of the rationality andindeed the authenticity of any given religious practice. The radical move oftreating God as a scientific object was to make possible the view that Andrewexpounds in On Christian Belief, namely that religious belief ‘is not somethingunlike any other kind of belief, but is cognitive, making claims about what is real,and is open to rational discussion between believers and nonbelievers’.

Standing back

I now want to summarise the significance of Andrew’s work. If there’s anythingwhich is distinctive of his initial critical realist engagement with Althusserianepistemology, it is his accentuation of the element of structural realism. The struc-tures which Marx, like other scientists, talked about were real in principle andreal independently of any account of them – hence, the continuing theme ofobjectivity in his work. Now, there are two significant features to this structuralrealism. The first consists in the fact that structures are in themselves real, sobelonging to what I had characterised as the intransitive dimension of science or

8 Roy Bhaskar

the re-nascent science of ontology. Conversely, the neo-Kantian wings had onlyrecognised the epistemic structuration of a science or form of thought, a struc-turation which, of course, it could not itself consistently uphold. The secondsignificant feature is that this is not a dualism of knowledge and being. Thedistinction between knowledge and being was necessary in order to revindicateontology which had been denegated (that is, denied while in the very act of itsbeing inexorably expressed) in what I characterised as ‘the epistemic fallacy’.This was not a dualism, but rather what could be called a constellational monism,insofar as knowledge was itself part of being, so that being constellationally over-reached the distinction between any one knowledge and its being. Thuseverything was to be conceived as pertaining to ontology or reality, includingbeliefs, and therefore errors, contradictions and also, I later argued, negation,and also of course values and God.

Now putting structural realism and constellational monism together we candevelop the idea of the alethic truth of a thing, that is the reason why it is the wayit is. I have claimed that this conception resolves almost all the standard prob-lems and issues in western philosophy from the time of Plato and Aristotle on,until contemporary times, including, for example, the problem of induction.Thus if there is a reason why emeralds are green, independent of any particularemerald being green, namely its possession of an electronic structure whichdifferentially reflects light of a certain wavelength, then all emeralds must reflectgreen light. That electronic structure is the alethic truth of the fact that needsexplaining. Given that alethic truth, it is not possible for emeralds to behave in adifferent way. This conception of alethic truth enormously deepens our under-standing of objectivity. It is presaged on the four-fold analysis of truth which Iessayed in Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom, as involving fiduciary, epistemic, expres-sive and alethic aspects.

This takes us to what I have called the second key to Andrew’s philosophy– the objectivity of value, and indeed of the whole sphere of subjectivity. Theextension of realism to ethics means that there is a real answer to the questionof what is valuable or good or right or wrong for any agent or species, in asituation or context. An agent may of course get the answer to his ethicalquestions wrong, but the fact that these beliefs are part of the very unitarysystem in which the facts that ground them exist means that a dialecticaltension will be set up. Then, gradually, the agent will be led to approximate toa greater reflexivity or to the unity of theory and practice in his behaviour.Thus values are part of the totality they describe, and subjectivity is part ofan overarching objectivity.

By the same token, God is part of the same reality that man is, if he is rel-evant to it at all. For if there is some relevance or causal connection, then God isin relevant respects part of the same cosmos or universe as man. If he is not partof the same cosmos or universe, then he can not have any effect on this one. Toput it another way, as soon as we allow that God has or may have some effect inthis world, then he is ipso facto part of it. Thus whether or not God is regarded asimmanent in man, on this account, he is necessarily immanent in being.


Moreover, since God is part of one single reality, a universe which constitutesthis world, the properties attributed to God or the divine must constitute or becontinuous with the most fundamental level of our being, what I have called ourground-states. Such properties must be implicit or enfolded in us and, for a‘believer’, our role in life may then be seen as to explicate or articulate them, orpromote or allow their articulation in the world – in a project which somemedieval theologians called ‘theosis’ or the maximisation of the presence of Godin the world. These properties must at the very least include consciousness,which also gives grounds for what is, in effect, a view of matter as a synchronicemergent power of consciousness – alongside the view of consciousness as asynchronic emergent power of matter.3

Thus, we have a surprising series of results, not all of which Andrew wouldnecessarily agree with, namely that: the relevance of God presupposes Hisimmanence within being. In turn, this entails that human beings must at thevery least have some features or properties which are continuous with or analo-gous to His (the assumption of a universe presupposes unity). And, indeed, itfollows that they must really share, actually or transfactually, implicitly orproleptically, some features or properties of His (unity presupposes a momentor respect of identity). The respects in which human beings are the same asGod are precisely those which constitute the most fundamental level of theirbeing, what I have called their ground-states, threaded together with theground-states of other beings within the cosmic envelope. It is this level ofbeing for human beings from which all other levels and phases of their beingare emergent.

Andrew is thus committed to a very radical form of realism indeed, inwhich the unity of theory and practice can be fully displayed and potentiallyachieved. Indeed, from this perspective, it can be argued that it is somethingthat must eventually be achieved, since the consistency of the properties ofbeing to its ground-state is the one basic norm which can never be lost.Certainly, it can be said that if a being sets itself any objective inconsistentwith its most fundamental level or ground-state, then it will necessarily fail.And the process of emancipation or freedom can then be conceived as one ofthe dis-emergence or shedding of strata and aspects of our being inconsistentwith our ground-states, and the flowering of our ground-state potential in thetotality of our lives.

As I have already said, it is not clear that Andrew would agree to all theseimplications. Be that as it may, there are certain problems in Andrew’s for-mulation of his objectivism, which I have characterised as a constellationalmonism. First, there is the question of hearsay. This assumes enormousimportance in Andrew’s later work, though he was already thoroughlyfamiliar with the concept from Macmurray’s writings very early on (when itacted as an important corrective to the dominant and complacent empiri-cism). He says in In Defence of Objectivity (p. 216) that ‘we must acquiresecond-hand knowledge before we have the wherewithal to produce first-handknowledge’. He goes on to say:

10 Roy Bhaskar

that this applies to lay as well as scientific knowledge is suggested by threefacts:

(I) The huge bulk of our knowledge is and remains pure hearsay: All knowledge of times before we were born and places we have never beento, and most knowledge about our own time and place as well as all lay reception of scientific knowledge.

(II) Hearsay precedes other knowledge …

(III) When we do see for ourselves, we do so in ways made possible by what we have been told.

The contrast between hearsay and non-hearsay knowledge (or belief) is, I think,a residue of an atomistic empiricism in Andrew’s thought. Non-hearsay knowl-edge will eventually collapse to a point of immediately intuited certainty, whichby the same logic will vanish. What this neglects is the social world in which ourknowledge is actually constituted, and the totality of our life experience in termsof which we can check it. Thus, there would be something very wrong in holdingthat our knowledge of 9/11 was hearsay. Rather we can say that 9/11 wasconstitutive of our experience when it happened and is still a significant featureof the epistemic and social world in which we live.

This in turn raises a more general problem which runs throughout Andrew’sdeclension of critical realism – or rather it is more of an imbalance. We couldsay that Andrew’s account of the transitive dimension of knowledge and scienceis underdeveloped in comparison with the intransitive or objective side. While itis true that there is nothing irreal about the subjective, the particular way inwhich some subjective item, such as an experience, a piece of knowledge or ameaning is actually fleshed out is all-important. Thus the subjective realm mustitself be seen as objectively constituted as a totality in process and actually expe-rienced or lived by the agents whose subjectivity it is.

If the problem of hearsay begins to indicate a weakness in Andrew’scurrent philosophical position, one which is rooted in the under-elaboration ofthe transitive epistemological or subjective moment in knowledge, I think itcan equally be said to be overly Spinozist, accentuating the whole at theexpense of the part. He tends to leave out the subjectivist, Leibnizian(monadic) moment, in which we must see the whole (implicitly enfolded) withineach part. This is consistent with the reality of each part as also external toeach other and the reality of the whole as itself external. Moreover, on thisconception, we can see that each part depends, for its exact constitution and inits concrete singularity, upon the whole. Thus we can retain the idea of theprimacy of the whole. Moreover, if ground-states are partially or indeedwholly constituted by consciousness (implicit or explicit), what ultimatelydistinguishes any concrete singularity is what amount of or level of the wholeit is conscious of, i.e., its consciousness or more exactly its self-consciousness.


So, on this perspective, all change is immediately or ultimately to be analysedas a change in consciousness.

Third, and related, it is very difficult for Andrew, or so I think, to uphold thereality of change. Any change must involve an element that is ex nihilo and notjust de novo, that is the presencing, production or appearance of something new,which was not there, and the absenting, elimination or disappearance of some-thing old, which was there. To deny irreducible novelty and demise is effectivelyto view all change as being the result of different quantitative combinations ofthe same unchanging elements – or atoms. And so we have the resurgence againof a residual atomistic empiricism, manifest both ontologically and epistemologi-cally (as in the aporia of ‘hearsay’). In effect, there is a tendentially static elementin this system, as the universals tend to collapse into abstract analytical universalsin respect of differentiation, diversity and other qualitative considerations,besides novelty, becoming and emergence. As things evolve in time, in the worldof becoming, properties which were implicit, enfolded as potential or co-present,in the order of being, also unfold or manifest themselves in the order ofbecoming.

Finally, Andrew is faced with a problem in relation to sustaining, as he wantsto do, the duality within the non-dualism described as the unified whole orontology. This is that this whole, if it were really to be permeated by a singleunbreachable duality, namely that of knowledge and its being, could no longerbe described as a whole, since that polarity would shatter it, reverberatingendlessly wherever it was seen. Unless subject and object melt or shade into eachother, and become one, we have not non-dualism but dualism. The only wayaround this is to accept a vastly enlarged role for non-duality in the activities ofknowledge-constitution and everyday life. The moment of alethic identity (andanamnesis) which, in my books on Meta-Reality, I have described as being theheart of creativity, is actually the kernel of any scientific or other dialecticalprocess. It is of course, I have been arguing, in relation to knowledge and theepistemological moment that Andrew has a problem – from a tendential episte-mological over-naturalism in his earlier works to the current aporia of hearsay.And it is knowledge, in the couple being–knowledge, which we normally see asthe one that is changing. Hence, the difficulties I have been making for Andrewin relation to subjectivity, change and knowledge (including hearsay) are inter-connected.

Corresponding to an understanding of non-duality as constitutive ofeveryday life, through various modalities of transcendental identification,complemented by an understanding of non-duality, in its form as the ultimatumor ground-state of all beings, and non-duality as the deep interior of all experi-ence and phenomena – we need to explicitly and philosophically thematise theprimacy of unity and identity over division and difference. Together with thisgoes the irreducibility of the subjective moment of ‘I see it’, in all epistemicprocesses. This can of course be objectively verified by our seeing whether thebeing has acutally, as we say, ‘got it’ – and the irreducibility of the implicit andenfolded and of change and becoming in the world as we know it. In the world

12 Roy Bhaskar

of becoming, only a monadology, not an atomism, is consistent with real devel-opment and change or differentiation and variety.

In virtue of the range of his achievements and interests, at the colloquium inhonour of his on Midsummer’s Day 2003, I compared Andrew’s achievement tothat of Aquinas, and demanded more of him. For me he has been a good friendand a wonderful human being, dedicated to the true spirit of critical realism,which is the unity of theory and practice in practice, and which entails adialectic in which one integrates the totality of one’s experience into a unifiedview. This I have called complete reflexivity and we are truly privileged to havesuch a fine example of this dialectic in practice as Andrew has displayed in hislife and writings – which are still unfinished.

Notes

1 Andrew’s part of the Philosophy Department at Bangor, which had an excellent repu-tation for Welsh philosophy, had been moved to the University of Southampton. Thiswas to prove enormously costly for Andrew, since he had to move (in the wake of the‘Thatcher cuts’ and rationalisations), with his wife Heather and little son Adam, froma five-bedroom house in Bangor, from which he could see both the sea and the moun-tains, situated a stone’s throw from the university in the most idyllic ruralcircumstances (to which, I am afraid to say, he never succeeded in enticing me), to anexpensive city in the south of England, leaving behind him the many friends he hadin Wales and his erstwhile rural bliss.

2 I should just mention two of those participants who played key organisational roles,who were particularly close to Andrew and who are unable to contribute to thisFestschrift: John Lovering, who organised a wonderful conference at the School ofUrban Studies in Bristol in 1989, and Maureen Ramsey, who organised the confer-ence in Manchester in 1990.

3 See my Reflections on Meta-Reality, London, New Delhi and Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage,2002, p. 212.


The moral good is not a goal, but an inner force which lights up man’s life fromwithin. The important thing is the source from which the activity springs and notthe end toward which it is directed.

(Berdyaev 1937)

There is no way to peace. Peace is the way.(Muste 1967)

We are the inmates not begetters nor masters of our lives.(Steiner 1989)

In this short essay I hope to tell two stories – one persuasive and the other evoca-tive. First, I want to help us understand that it is not just necessary but essentialthat we, all of us, collectively and individually, objectively and subjectivelyspeaking, ‘lose’ the plot. Second, I would like to evoke the story of my personal,ongoing philosophical and literary conversation with Andrew Collier. I say‘literary’ because, as I reflect on the thinkers whose work has underwritten ourdiscussions, I realise that they perhaps belong more to the canons of literaturethan to those of philosophy. No matter.

Three terms will weave this particular narrative and, as always, will importtheir own particular baggage – in a (possibly futile) attempt to curtail thisembarrassment of connotation, I offer a definition of each for the purposes ofthis essay.

Narrative

I am taking this as a sequence of events or actions, viewed from reflection,appreciated from a (sometimes contrived) distance, ‘pulled’ as Sartre has said,from an end point. ‘To narrate is to re-live, from the standpoint of a finishedposition’ (Tambling 1991). It is important to my purpose that both the ‘end’ andthe ‘distance of the narrator’ are implicit in, and complicit with, this notion ofnarrative.

2 Losing the plot

Ruth Merttens

As if there could possibly be such things as true stories; events take placeone way, and we recount them the opposite way. You appear to begin at thebeginning, ‘It was a fine autumn evening in 1922. I was a solicitor’s clerk atMarommes’. And in fact you have begun at the end. It is there, invisible andpresent. And it is the end which gives these few words the pomp and valueof a beginning. … The end is there transforming everything. For us, the fellow is

already the hero of the story. … And the story goes on in reverse, the moments have stopped

piling up upon one another in a happy-go-lucky manner, they are caught by the end of the

story which attracts them, and each of them in turn attracts the preceding moment.

(Sartre 1965 [1938]: 62)

It is also important to recognise the extent to which, as Barthes famouslysuggested, narrative is fundamental to human society.

The narratives of the world are numberless. Able to be carried by articu-lated language, spoken or written, fixed or moving images, gestures, and theordered mixture of all these substances; … narrative is present in every age,in every place, in every society; it begins with the very history of mankind,and there nowhere is nor has been a people without narrative.

(Barthes 1977)

And, as we shall appreciate later in the essay, narrative may also be said to becorrelative with personhood. Steiner’s dictum that ‘man is a language animal’might equally well have identified the ability to narrate as constitutive of ourshared humanity. Through narratives, we ‘give order to the world’ (Bakhtin1984). We shape the chaos of primeval experience into the patterns and struc-tures of life. Myths, fables and legends may have structured the lives of those in pre-historical societies, but De Certeau points out that the narrativities ofmodern life bring about an even greater organising function.

Captured by radio as soon as he awakens, the listener walks all day long in aforest of narrativities from journalism, advertising and television, narrativi-ties that still find time, as he is getting ready for bed, to slip a few finalmessages under the portals of sleep … these stories have a providential andpredestinating function: they organise in advance our work, our celebrationsand even our dreams.

(De Certeau 1984: 84)

Narrative in this essay, then, will be taken as a basic human activity, fulfilling aneed to impose structure on, and derive pattern from, subjective experience, andtherefore intrinsically linked to the requirement that our lives are meaningful.Narratives also allow us to ‘cast nets north of the future’ (Celan)1 and to envisagepossibilities for what has not yet occurred. In this sense, narrative may bedescribed as teleological, as pointing beyond itself. Without narrative, humankindwould turn forever on ‘the treadmills of the present’.

Losing the plot 15

Story

Although ‘story’ and ‘narrative’ are often taken as correlative, it is useful in thisessay to impose a distinction. I shall take a story to be something we make up,a recount, no more and no less. The personal and indeed subjective elementhere is crucial. Stories are experience recounted, passed on from person toperson, from mouth to mouth. There is always, therefore, in all stories, andespecially in our personal recounts and anecdotes, the element of ‘fiction’.Walter Benjamin in ‘The Storyteller’ points out that the dissemination ofinformation has introduced the requirement of ‘plausibility’ into the stories wetell each other. Although the basis of modern information is often no moreexact and certainly no more ‘grounded’ than were the legends of prehistory orthe accounts of the miraculous deeds and events of medieval times, neverthe-less the demand for ‘realism’, for the plausible, has proved inimical to the art oftrue storytelling. ‘If the art of story-telling has become rare, the disseminationof information has had a decisive share in this state of affairs’ (Benjamin 1970[1955]: 89). Benjamin draws a distinction between stories and explanations:

Every morning brings us news of the globe, and yet we are poor in note-worthy stories. This is because no event any longer comes to us withoutbeing shot through with explanation. In other words, by now almost nothingthat happens benefits storytelling; almost everything benefits information.Actually, it is half the art of storytelling to keep the story free from explana-tion as one reproduces it.

(1970 [1955]: 89)

Stories then embody neither the teleological structure of narrative nor the causalexplanation and goal-orientated physiognomy of plot. Stories, in the sense identi-fied here, are neither ‘pulled by their ends’ like Sartre’s narratives, nor structuredby cause or effect. They are certainly fictions and, as such, are both subjective andpersonal, inescapably driven by unconscious as well as by both intended and unin-tended motivation, largely unacknowledged by listener and speaker. This in noway repudiates their function, and nor does it nullify their effect. Stories are bothpsychologically necessary and emotionally indispensable to a shared existence.

Plot

Plot embodies the notion of an organised and sequenced narrative, structured

according to a purpose or goal. For Aristotle, plot was the ordered arrangement ofincidents; for Forster it was the narrative of events with the emphasis oncausality; ‘the pattern or structure in the arrangements of events giving rise tocausal explanations and goals’.2 No longer does the pattern emerge through theconscious or unconscious motivations that drive the narrative sequence. We nowhave a goal – a series of ‘if …, then …’ causal propositions, which direct andcoerce the various and diverse elements of the narrative. Plot implies authoring,

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and the question as to whose narratives are being thus authored, or furthermanipulated, and in what directions, for what multifarious and unacknowledgedpurposes, remains always to be answered.

It is the necessary conjunction of the goal and the authoring, the espousal ofthe ‘cause’ inextricably coupled with the purposeful manipulation of activity,that I am terming ‘plot’. I wish to convey the sense in which the ethical dimen-sions of this seemingly ‘natural’ (i.e., taken-for granted and thereby rendered‘invisible’) modus operandi are rarely explored or highlighted, still less critiqued. Itis my intention to insert a warning, no less needed for running orthogonal to thedirection of western progress, as to the effects of this obsession, political andpersonal, with sustaining the ‘plot’; I wish to plead for ‘losing the plot’. Thisincludes, though it also exceeds, a complete rejection of the idea that the endjustifies the means. And I am not alone in this concern. The quotation at thestart of this essay asserts exactly this point and continues as follows:

It may be said that the ‘means’ that a man [sic] uses are far more importantthan the ‘ends’ which he pursues, for they express more fully his spirit. If aman strives for freedom by means of tyranny, for love by means of hatred,for brotherhood by means of dissension, for truth by means of falsity, hislofty aim is not likely to make the judgement of him more lenient. I actuallybelieve that a man who worked for the cause of tyranny, hatred, falsity anddissension by means of freedom, love, truthfulness and brotherhood wouldbe the better man of the two.

(Berdyaev 1937: 103)

Down memory lane

I wept as I remembered, how often you and IHad tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky.

(Cory 1858)

My conversations with Andrew Collier started with a shared love of two writers,Lawrence and Sartre. Looking back, and with the benefits of hindsight, it isinteresting how these two certainly embodied particular aspects of this antipathywith ‘plot’. Lawrence, particularly in his four greatest novels, and in much of hispoetry, encapsulated for us at that time a sense of passionate fusion – both ofone person with another, through intimacy and through loving sexual congress,and also of the union of this poor forked creature with the natural world whichsupports it. The loss of the narrative of the ‘individual-I’ in the narrative of the‘other-Thou’; the concomitant loss of ‘self ’ in this fusion attained through sexand intimacy, were both part of an acknowledgement of the blurred nature ofthe age-old distinction between self and other. Much later in my academichistory I came to understand how this sense of merged or joint subjectivity wasechoed in other, more theoretical, fields of enquiry.

Losing the plot 17

The very being of man (both internal and external) is a profound communi-cation. To be means to communicate. … To be means to be for the other,and through him for oneself. Man has no internal sovereign territory; he isall and always on the boundary.

(Bakhtin 1984)

The elevation of sex, and indeed passion, as the locus of this out-pouring of selfinto other is not, of course, exclusively Lawrentian, although Andrew and I wereby no means exceptional at the time in our recognition of Lawrence’s assimilationof a philosophical position roughly summarised as anti-dualistic (in a Cartesiansense) and anti-individualistic (in an Enlightenment sense) within an aesthetic ofovert physicality. We perhaps appreciated, without fully understanding why, theexcesses of Lawrence’s abandonment of the only-then-contested, previously-assumed superiority of the mental over the physical, his capitulation not to theeconomies of the bourgeois agenda or the protestant work ethic, but to thewonder of passionate sexual union and his refusal to surrender feeling to calcula-tion. Two decades later I was to encounter Bataille, who espoused a similarphilosophical position, although embedded, at least in his fiction, in a somewhatdifferent aesthetic.

The main thing is the moment of violent contact when life slips from oneperson to another in a feeling of magical subversion. … In a general way,what comes into play in physical or psychological eroticism is the samefeeling of magical subversion associated with one person slipping intoanother. … What fusion brings into me is another existence. It brings thisother into me as mine but at the same time as other.

(Bataille 1988 [1961]: 45)

With Lawrence as with Bataille, I discovered then, and only appreciate now, thesense that it was neither ethically nor emotionally desirable to construct the self-imposed distance from the action that enables the authoring of a plot. It was thesubstance of the activity itself which could and should lead the endeavour.

Desire makes you its victim – stripped of the identity imposed upon you bysocial/cultural discourse, there is nothing within which you can contain orpreserve yourself. … Desire throws identity into turmoil. You cannot buyyour way out.

(Bataille 1957: 73)

I read Sartre with Andrew, and in his writing, especially in Being and

Nothingness, a similar dizzying precipice presented itself. We discovered ourselvesto be, in the words of Laurie Lee, ‘affronted by freedom’. We were (or at least Iwas) captivated by the idea that there was no escaping the choice, to do or not todo, to speak or not to speak, and, most importantly, to be or not to be thecreation one wished to become. All our lives, up until this point, we had imbibed

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with our mothers’ milk the idea that we each had a certain ‘character’ or nature;an essentialism all the more thoroughly pervasive for being largely unrecognisedand certainly unremarked. By contrast, in existentialism, particularly in Sartreand Heidegger, there was certainly no escaping the responsibility of being. And in both it is ‘being for-itself ’ or Dasein (being-there), that is, intentionalconsciousness, upon which the rest is predicated and which attains an authentic‘being-in-the-world’ only in the recognition of nothingness (néant) at the centre. Itwas this characterisation of the outward and directed turn of being, the inten-tionality of consciousness, which, for me at that time, defined what is specificallyhuman. It was as if, aged nineteen and standing at the threshold of so manypossible experiences, I needed to confront this miracle for the first time.

Children wake up and find themselves here, discover themselves to havebeen here all along. They wake like sleepwalkers, in full stride; they wakelike people brought back from cardiac arrest or from drowning: in media res,surrounded by familiar people and objects, equipped with a hundred skills.… I woke in bits, like all children, piecemeal over the years. I discoveredmyself and the world, and forgot them, and discovered them again. … Inoticed this process of waking, and predicted, with terrifying logic that oneof these years not far away I would be awake continuously and never slipback, and never be free of myself again. … I never woke at first, withoutrecalling, chilled, all those other waking times, those similar stark views fromsimilarly lighted precipices: dizzying precipices from which the distant, glit-tering world revealed itself as a brooding and separate scene – and so let slipa queer implication, that I myself was both observer and observable, and soa possible object of my own humming awareness.

(Dillard 1987: 11)

Alongside this re-assertion of the intentionality of consciousness and the miracleof self-awareness, we found in the existentialists’ thinking a determined effort toacknowledge the ‘gap’ at the core of ‘being’ itself. Sartre’s ‘Nothingness’ andHeidegger’s ‘Nichtigkeit’ are the source of our being, the cause of our ‘thrown-ness’. Reading Lacan many years on, I was reminded of all our conversationsabout this ‘gap’ or lack which is structured into the very notion of a consciousbeing. Freud’s discovery, Lacan informs us, is that ‘man is not completely inman’. There is a lack of ‘meaning’ creating a gap between what we say and whatis said, as well as heard. Meaning is replaced, inevitably, by signification. Lacanrepeatedly designates this ‘lack of meaning’ as the only meaning that humanshave. What is between people, the inter-human, is given over to the mediumwhich shapes and re-directs it, to cultural significance.

Later in this essay, in an effort to ‘join the dots’, I shall hope to show howmany of these themes re-surface in our discussion of means and ends, plot andnarrative. This ‘lack’, structured into the heart of being, embodies a radical turnfrom an essentialism which precludes choice, and toward a recognition of theother. The writings of Lévinas and Berdyaev, in their different ways, enable us to

Losing the plot 19

move toward an affirmation of the responsibility of solicitous being – trueauthenticity entails active involvement with others. In a similar vein, the relationof self-to-other which we first explored in the writings of Sartre and Heideggerall those years ago, leads to the conviction that the desire to construct the plotmust be abandoned in favour of the recognition that it is the substance of oureveryday activity which matters, which counts, morally as well as philosophically,and which, in the final analysis and as the kids say, is ‘where it’s at’.

Graham Greene had been a favourite of mine before I met Andrew, but itwas in our discussions that I came to realise that for Greene there was alwaysthe unwanted third: ‘The Third Man’, the third force (The Quiet American), thethird party (The End of the Affair), the uninvited guest at the feast – namelyGod. Underwriting every one of Greene’s books was this haunting presence; apresence at once fearful and familiar, comforting and yet strange. Greenespoke often of the gamble, the wager. Quoting Pascal, the lonely and intelli-gent policeman Vigot in The Quiet American gently chides the reporter whowishes to remain on the sidelines, ‘disengaged’ from life – and also from thenecessity of choice.

‘What a gambler you could be, Vigot. Do you play any other game ofchance?’

He smiled miserably, and for some reason I thought of that flashy blondewife of his who was said to betray him with his junior officers.

‘Oh well,’ he said, ‘there’s always the biggest of all.’‘The biggest?’‘Let us weigh the gain and the loss,’ he quoted, ‘in wagering that God is,

let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, youlose nothing.’

I quoted Pascal back at him – it was the only passage I remembered.‘Both he who chooses heads and he who chooses tails are equally at fault.They are both in the wrong. The true course is not to wager at all.’

‘Yes, but you must wager. It is not optional. You are embarked.’ He wentsadly on. ‘You don’t follow your own principles, Fowler. You are engaged likethe rest of us.’

(Greene 1955: 152)

To remain ‘outside’ is not an option. Like Sartre, like Lawrence, Greene forceshis characters into choice, into life. But for Greene it is not the choice which isthe problem, it is the relation with God, and thus with each other. For Greene –and the universal metaphor here is potent – once the existence of God isaccepted, the rest follows: the responsibility of the face-to-face encounter, thepolitical imperatives of hunger, suffering and justice, the ethical aesthetic of pityand love, and, crucially, the very possibility of a guarantee of meaning itself.When writing of his conversion to Catholicism in ‘A Sort of Life’, Greene evokesprecisely the fear, perhaps terror, of this particular step outwards onto theshifting sands of belief, where afterwards no terrain is ever same.

20 Ruth Merttens

I didn’t disbelieve in Christ – I disbelieved in God. If I were ever to beconvinced in even the remote possibility of a supreme, omnipotent andomniscient power, I realised that nothing afterwards could seem impossible.It was on the ground of a dogmatic atheism that I fought and fought hard.It was like a fight for personal survival. … In the first confession, a convertreally believes in his own promises of repentance. … I took the name ofThomas, after St Thomas the Doubter, not Thomas Aquinas, and Iremember very clearly the nature of my emotion as I walked away from thecathedral. There was no joy in it at all, only a sombre apprehension. I hadmade the first move with a view to my future marriage, but now the landhad given way under my feet and I was afraid where the tide would take me.Even my marriage seemed uncertain now. Suppose I discovered what fatherTrollope had once discovered, the desire to be a priest. … At that moment itseemed by no means impossible. Only now, after more than forty years, I amable to smile at the unreality of my fear and feel at the same time a sadnostalgia for it, since I lost more than I gained when the fear belonged irre-vocably to the past.

(Greene 1972: 166)

Conversations with Andrew about Greene led to his presenting me with avolume by Nicholas Berdyaev, The Destiny of Man (1937). The epigram on thetitle page gives the hint of the character of both the author and the book, ‘It issad not to see any good in goodness’ (Gogol 1846). Later, I was also to acquireand read his autobiography Dream and Reality in which Berdyaev repeatedlydisclaims the title of ‘theologian’, and describes himself as a religious free-thinker, orthodox by background and in aesthetic taste. Certainly the notion offreedom is central, not only to his writing but to his life. The details of hisbiography bear witness to the number of situations, academic and socialcontexts, or communities in which Berdyaev has been able to maintain only aperipheral connection because of his passion for freedom. Any form ofdogmatism or authoritarianism is alien to him; he resists fiercely the temp-tation to create and sustain an ‘insiderness’ to any religious or politicalmovement, precisely because of his passionate rejection of ‘the outsiderness’that will inevitably result for others. This extends to a huge dislike of any formof Nationalism, and also to a radical impatience with the Russian émigré move-ments in both pre-war Paris and post-war Britain. ‘To be frank, I dislike thevery term “foreigner” or “alien” with all its evil undertones and overtones, andI cannot put myself in the position of distinguishing human beings accordingto their nationality’ (Berdyaev 1937: 265).

Berdyaev was the final, and most influential, of the writers that I discussedwith Andrew in the long watches of the evening, before the demands of profes-sional and personal life cast us too far adrift for such conversations to be morethan spasmodic. It is not, perhaps, coincidental that the work of this Russianexistentialist philosopher knits together into one rich fabric all the strands I havesince identified in Lawrence, Sartre, Heidegger and Greene. Berdyaev starts and

Losing the plot 21

ends with the divine presence, and with the implications of this for our relationswith each other.

The existence of evil is not so much an obstacle to faith in God as aproof of God’s existence, a challenge to turn towards that in which lovetriumphs over hatred, union over division and life over death. … God isfreedom; he is not Lord but Liberator. God never operates throughnecessity, but always through freedom; and he never forces recognition ofhimself. Herein lies the mystery of religious experience, and I see noevidence for it except the possibility and the reality of freedom. Everydenial of freedom was for me a calling into question of my deepest andmost fundamental Christian conviction.


For Berdyaev, God is not only presence in the world, the guarantor of meaningand truth, he is also spirit. This is to say, God acts – but not within the order of,as Berdyaev puts it, ‘objectified necessity’ but within freedom itself. ForBerdyaev then, this precludes all notions of God as ‘powerful’ in any human orsocial sense. ‘God has no power: he has less power than a policeman. Power is a social and

not a religious phenomenon’ (1950: 179). It follows not only that we should eschewall misapprehensions such as the notion of a ‘power for the good’, but also thatin our search for truth we must look elsewhere. It is not in following the ‘cause’or in pursuing the ‘aim’ of high-minded Christians, or anyone else for thatmatter, that we will find goodness. It is rather in the humdrum daily activity oflife-with-others, in, to quote Joyce, the ‘epiphanies of the ordinary’, that God’swill is done.

Unashamedly partisan

In approaching the ‘great teachers of humankind’ I find myself spontaneouslyapplying this test: Do they recognise that morality itself can be a source of evil? Idon’t just mean that a false moral code can cause evil, as none will deny. I meanthat morality, pursued in the wrong way, pursued that is, for its own sake, or with‘ultimate concern’ can be just as destructive a sort of idolatry as pursuit of power,money, etc. The world’s greatest philosophers – Plato, Aristotle, Kant – all failthis test. Among those who pass it are St Paul, Luther, Spinoza, Blake, Marx,Freud, Barth, Berdyaev, Tillich; in general, innovating Christians or lapsed Jews.

(Collier 2003)

We started this essay with some definitions – narrative, story and plot. The essayitself is a kind of story, although it would fail on Benjamin’s criteria of trying tokeep a story ‘free from explanation’! I have recalled – in this more public forum– the litanies of past academic commitments, which I have aligned alongside allthe conversations which took place around those originary and seminal discov-

22 Ruth Merttens

eries. Andrew was an important part of these conversations, and, concomitantly,a part of the discoveries too. So, the ‘story’ of this piece of personal history. Butwhat of the plot?

Although I love the story, and although I accept the necessity for the narra-tive, I would plead, as the title suggests, that we ‘lose the plot’. The plot is thepart where we assign causes, posit goals, assert aims. Producing a plot suggeststhat we place ourselves in the position of ‘author’. It follows that we are ‘outside’our own moment-by-moment activity, driving the action. We are more interestedin the posited goal than in the now-ness of the ‘doing’. We justify a ‘bad’ thingnow by a promise of a ‘good’ to come. Alternatively, we assert a ‘greater good’, alarger-than-this-moment law, by appeal to which our uncharity or selfish satisfac-tion may be cancelled or even affirmed. Tony Blair and George Bush repeatedlyjustify their actions now with reference to ‘the-good-to-come’.3 Irrespective ofwhether that ‘good’ will ever arrive, or even of whether the envisaged outcome isindeed a moral ‘good’, the argument is, as Berdyaev points out in no uncertainterms, a thoroughly bad one – ‘If a man strives for brotherhood by means ofdissension, for truth by means of falsity, etc. … his lofty aim will not save him.’Furthermore, we learn that the law will not, indeed cannot, save us.

The gospel puts sinners and publicans above the Pharisees, the uncleanabove the clean, those who have not fulfilled the law above those who havefulfilled it, the last above the first, the perishing above the saved, the ‘wicked’above the ‘good’. This is the paradox of Christian morality which theChristians have found it hard to accept. … They imagine that the Gospeldenunciations refer to the Pharisees who lived in the distant past, and them-selves join in denouncing them as villains. But in truth those denunciationsrefer to us who are living today, to the morally self-righteous. … Why is itbetter to be a sinner conscious of his sin than a Pharisee conscious of hisrighteousness? … The Pharisees stood on the confines of two worlds, at thedividing line between the ethics of law and the ethics of grace and redemp-tion. The impotence of the ethics of law to save from sin had to be mademanifest. One can fulfil the law down to the smallest detail – this wasprecisely what the Pharisees did. Then it appeared that perfect fulfilment ofthe law does not save, does not lead to the Kingdom of God. The lawsprang up as a result of sin, but it is powerless to free man from the fallenworld. It is powerless to conquer sin and cannot save.


I want to argue for a change in orientation. We should cease to worry somuch about goals or intentions. As the old adage has it, ‘The road to hell ispaved with good intentions’ – having meant well may matter to us, but it isequally unlikely to matter to the person who suffers as a result of our actions or,indeed, to St Peter. It is the here-and-now of our moment-by-moment speechand action that counts. We do not and should not have to produce a ‘plot’; it isenough for us that we tell our own stories truthfully and faithfully. For one thing,

Losing the plot 23

although we have a responsibility for our actions and our speech, we cannot, asFoucault points out, be aware of all their effects. ‘We can know what we do, butwe cannot know what what we do does.’ However it would be a mistake tobelieve that this change in orientation from ‘plot’ to story, from ‘goal’ to activity,gets anyone off the hook. It makes matters harder not easier. Berdyaev is notarguing that we may disobey the law.

It is impossible to wait for a gracious regeneration of the world to makehuman life tolerable. Such is the correlation of law and grace. I must lovemy neighbour as my self, this is the way to the Kingdom of Heaven. But if Ihave no love for my neighbour, I must in any case fulfil the law in relation tohim and treat him justly and honourably. It is impossible to cancel the lawand wait for the realisation of love. Even if I have no love, I must not steal,commit murder or be a bully.


Neither am I suggesting that we have no responsibility for what happens as aresult of what we do. Some effects are not only foreseeable, they are inevitable.And although we are not required to produce a ‘plot’, it is necessary to be faithful

to what we know to be true. ‘I am the Way, the Truth and the Life’ (John 14, vi).We shall explore the moral implications of this notion of faithfulness below.

The above argument certainly incorporates a whole-hearted refutation of thenotion that ‘the means justifies the ends’ either in relation to political agendas orin relation to legalistic or personal ethical dilemmas. However, it does not stopthere. The change in orientation suggested prompts a concomitant transforma-tion of our relation to one another. Harkening back to the mention of Lévinaswhen we discussed Heidegger’s ‘solicitous-being’, we can see in this orientationof immediacy, in this focus upon being-here-and-now in action and speech, thatit is an ontological rather than a psychological relation which constitutes thedistinction between self and other.

The I–Thou relation consists in confronting a being external to oneself, andrecognising it as radically ‘other’. This recognition of otherness is not to beconfused with the ‘idea’ of otherness. To have an idea of something is appro-priate to the I–It relation. What is important is not thinking about the other,even as an other, but of directly confronting it and saying ‘Thou’ to it. Hencea real access to the otherness of the other does not consist in a perception butin thou-saying and this is at once an immediate contact and an appeal thatdoes not posit an object. … The I–Thou relation therefore, escapes the gravi-tational field of the I–It in which the external object remains imprisoned.

(Lévinas 1958: 67)4

This not only gets us out of the Sartrean circle of difficulty raised by the threatthe Other poses to my freedom (and I to his) through interpellating me as ‘an in-itself ’, it also directs attention to the whole notion of responsibility which, for

24 Ruth Merttens

Lévinas, suggests that our relation to the other is quintessentially ethical. TheI–Thou meeting does not take place ‘within the subject’ but rather in the ‘realmof being’. It is the meeting itself, the ‘betweenness’ which functions as what heterms ‘the fundamental category of being’. Further, it is the presence of ‘Thou’,of the other, which implies a ‘word’ which is addressed directly to me and whichtherefore requires a response. It is impossible to remain a spectator of the Thou,for the very being of I–Thou, the meeting of self/other, depends upon the‘word’ addressed to me. And, Lévinas argues; ‘only a being who is responsible foranother being can enter into dialogue with it’. Alterity then, is structured into theheart of being. For Lévinas it is precisely this I–Thou meeting which reveals thepresence of God. ‘I and You and the Third who is in our midst. And only as aThird does He reveal himself ’ (Lévinas 1972: 247). But it is in describing thismeeting with the Other that Lévinas really shifts our attention to the ethicalcentre. We are called into question by the Other. ‘The Other calls me, summonsme, begs for me, and in so doing, recalls my responsibility, and calls me intoquestion’ (Lévinas 1984: 83). He evokes the ‘face of the other’, and constantlyreminds us of the immediacy of this encounter, which is the original passage tobeing and also to freedom.

This summons to responsibility destroys the formulas of generality bywhich my knowledge of the Other re-presents him to me as my fellow man.In the face of the Other, I am inescapably responsible. … By this freedomhumanity in me (moi) signifies … the anteriority and uniqueness of thenon-interchangeable.

(Lévinas 1984: 85)

This sense that it is the actual encounter with others that is at the heart of theethical dimension to our lives resonates with the previously expressed change inorientation from ‘goal’ to ‘activity’, in other words, with the abandonment of theplot. Letting go of the idea that justification for actions is produced through anappeal to something beyond us, an end posited with reference to a greater good,compels an alternative economy of motive and posture. Rather than contrive aplan or a set of reasons produced from the standpoint of a spectator upon theaction, we are required to generate an ongoing fabric of morally justifiableaction and speech – morally justifiable not from the viewpoint of an observer,not with reference to an ‘end’, but rather in the immediate context of our face-to-face encounter, our responsibility to and for the other. In the literary parlanceof narrative and story, it argues an accent upon ‘content’ rather than ‘plot’. The‘content’ of our lives may be described as the multiplicity of actions, words,events and occurrences which can only ever be viewed partially and subjectively,through the twin lenses of prejudice and position. It is in this sense that somethinkers have wished to represent life as a text, although as Julian Barnesreminds us, ‘Books say: she did this because. Life says: she did this. Books arewhere things are explained to you. Life is where things aren’t. I’m not surprisedsome people prefer books’ (Barnes 1984).

Losing the plot 25

Keeping on top, morally speaking, of one’s day-to-day activity would be alaudable practice, if only it were remotely possible. However, the reasons whichmake it not so have nothing to do with the theory – rather they are whollycontingent upon circumstance. In almost any given and immediate situation it isnot actually difficult to know what the ‘good’ thing to do or say is – nor is itlikely to be particularly debatable. This is not to deny that moral dilemmasexist, nor that they should not be recognised as such and faced. But it is to pointout that morally uncertain situations are in a minority in my life and in those ofmost people. Often I know very well what I ought to do, or how I ought torespond. The obstacles are not moral but practical and personal. I may be toobusy or too lazy (or both) to greet my partner or children as they come home,but this does not mean I am not aware of the moral imperative that I shouldexpress my love more frequently and less ambiguously. I just don’t do it! I amnot suggesting that ceasing to place means before ends, or losing the plot, willimmediately produce a moral regeneration of daily practice – ‘if only’, as mychildren say. What I am arguing is that it allows the focus of our ethical atten-tion to be where it should be – on the small details, the daily ‘content’ of ourlives, rather than on the grand plan.

Susan Sontag wrote, ‘I am a writer, yes? You know that I write every day. ButI might not write tomorrow. From tomorrow I might never write again. I am awriter because I write. I do not write because I am a writer.’ It is in exactly thissense that Berdyaev argues that true freedom consists not in fulfilling the law orin chasing a greater good, but in creating new realities and new values. We aregood – or bad – insofar as we make good or bad choices in each and everymoment of each and every day. Our intentions are, unfortunately, only one partof this – and not the most important part either. Similarly, the law may or maynot be on our side, but it will not save us.

As a free being man is not merely a servant of the moral law, but acreator of new values. … Man is called upon to create the good and notto fulfil it. Creative freedom gives rise to new values. The world of valuesis not a changeless realm rising above man and freedom; Man is free inrelation to moral values, not merely in the sense that he is free to realiseor not to realise them. … Man can choose to co-operate with God, tocreate the good and produce new values.

(Berdyaev 1937: 57)

Finally, it should be acknowledged that there is a real presence throughout thisessay – as in a Graham Greene novel – of a third party. The stories, and my wholepersuasive endeavour, are predicated upon the presence of God, upon the Pascalianwager on transcendence. I make no apology since it is, at the end of the day, my

story, and my responsibility is simply to tell it faithfully. But it is not only a personalor private story which requires this presence; arguably any narrative, to be sensible(able to be made sense of ) or legible (able to be read ), to be meaningful at all, necessi-tates the same. The start of George Steiner’s book, Real Presences, proposes just this.

26 Ruth Merttens

We still speak of ‘sunrise’ and ‘sunset’. We do so as if the Copernican modelof the solar system had not replaced, ineradicably, the Ptolemaic. Vacantmetaphors, eroded figures of speech, inhabit our vocabulary and grammar.They are caught, tenaciously, in the scaffolding and recesses of our commonparlance. There they rattle about like old rags or ghosts in the attic.

This is the reason why rational men and women, particularly in the scien-tific and technological realities of the West, still refer to ‘God’. This is why thepostulate of the existence of God persists in so many unconsidered turns ofphrase and allusion. No plausible reflection of belief underwrites His pres-ence. Nor does any intelligible evidence. Where God clings to our culture, toour routines of discourse, He is a phantom of grammar, a fossil embedded inthe childhood of rational speech. So Nietzsche, and many after him.

This essay argues the reverse.It proposes that any coherent understanding of what language is, and

how language performs, that any coherent account of the capacity ofhuman speech to communicate meaning and feeling, is, in the final analysis,underwritten by the assumption of God’s presence.

(Steiner 1989: 3)

I have argued that we abandon the plot, that we stick with the narrativesbecause we have no choice – narratives being the ways in which we give order tothe chaos of experience – and that we tell our own stories in all their subjectiveand ‘fictional’ particularity. I have suggested that this will enable a focus upon‘content’ rather than purpose, means rather than ends, activity and not goals.And, in an even more dangerous turn from the discursively constructed subjec-tivity of the post-modern era, I believe that it is not necessary to return to theessentialism I discarded all those years ago upon reading Sartre in order toespouse a view that there is a moral ‘substance’ to this ‘content’, the sum ofactivity in our lives. I want to explore this notion of substance, which may be seenas akin to the ‘substance’ which underwrites a text – and which makes it imposs-ible to argue that an infinite number of interpretations may be generated.

An interpretation, to be useful or sensible, rests upon a notion of faithfulness tothe text. We all know – and can argue – that some interpretations, whether ofhistory, or of a book, poem or film, or of a sequence of actions and words in ourlives, are ‘unfaithful’, perhaps deliberately so. They run orthogonal to the direc-tion of truth in the text. I am suggesting that it is this ‘direction of truth’ in thecontent of the text which may be termed ‘substance’. And we may extend thisnotion of substance to our lives by considering that a mini-section of life canalways be considered as a ‘text’. Once an utterance or an action, or a sequenceof utterances and actions, have occurred, they remain ‘on-hand’, so-to-speak, tobe discussed, scrutinised and interpreted by ourselves and others.5 If themeaning of inter-human communication is underwritten by the assumption ofGod’s presence, then I would argue that, in a similar vein, there is a truthembodied in texts of all description, including those ‘texts’ which constituteretrospective analyses of aspects of our lives. This truth may be aligned to the

Losing the plot 27

‘substance’ of the text. This is in no sense a return to the propositional truth ofrepresentational theories of language. Rather, it is to assert a limit to interpreta-tion, ethical as well as epistemological, whether the texts are creative artefacts orparts of our lives viewed post-hoc. To attend to this substance is to interpret it in away which runs with the weave of truth in a text, rather than against it. Theformer may be described as ‘faithful’. Thus, my son Wilf gives me an account ofsomething his older brother Fred has done. This sequence of actions and wordsis woven into a ‘story’ by Wilf, and it will be more or less faithful as a story, i.e. itwill run either with or counter to the substance, the weave of truth in the text.Of course there are many competing agendas – Wilf ’s desire to get Fred introuble, to get ‘his own back’, Fred’s desire to ‘put Wilf in his place’, to avoidtrouble, and so on. And there are, or may be, at least as many competing‘stories’. But some are faithful to the substance, and some are not, whether or notthis faithfulness is recognised, consciously or unconsciously, by any of the partici-pants. Once we accept that this notion of substance applies as much to a set ofepisodes in our lives, although we can only view these as spectators (as indeedothers do), as it does to any other text, we have a means of accounting for andproducing the moral ‘charge’ which is inextricably a part of such retrospection.

To conclude …

In the eighteenth century, God was wheeled in to underwrite reality.

Dear Sir, your astonishment’s odd:I am always about in the quad.And that’s why the treeWill continue to be,Since observed by Yours faithfully, God.

In the twentieth century He was drafted on side to guarantee the presence ofmeaning between us (Steiner, Lévinas). But in the twenty-first century perhaps agreater challenge is to persuade each other – and hence our politicians – to trustGod with the plot and to leave it to Him. Our responsibility is the ‘content’, theday-by-day activity, the ‘means’. If these choices are moral, I believe we can trustGod to take care of the ends.

Notes

1 Paul Celan, quoted in Steiner 1989.2 E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel, quoted in Tambling 1991.3 On 20 July 2003, Tony Blair addressed the American people with a speech in which

he claimed that ‘Whatever the truth about the weapons of mass destruction, Historywill applaud us’, in relation to the invasion of Iraq.

4 All the references to Lévinas’s works are taken from writings reproduced in TheLévinas Reader edited by Sean Hand and the page numbers given refer to this text.Dates refer to the original paper.

5 See Shotter 1993b: ch. 1, pp. 20–25 for a fuller explication of the ‘tool-text’ ambigui-ties in language.

28 Ruth Merttens

Bibliography

Bahktin, M. (1981) The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Emerson and Holquist, Austin: Univer-sity of Texas Press.

—— (1984) Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. Emerson, Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press.

Barnes, J. (1984 ) Flaubert’s Parrot, London: Picador.Barthes, R. (1977) Image-Music-Text, trans. Heath, London: Fontana.Bataille, G. (1988 [1961]) Guilty, trans. Boone, Venice, CA: Lapis Press.—— (1973 [1957]) Literature and Evil, trans. Hamilton, London: Marion Boyars.Benjamin, W. (1970 [1955]) Illuminations, trans. Zohn, London: Fontana/Collins.Berdyaev, N. (1937) The Destiny of Man trans. Duddington, Geoffrey Bles, London: Cente-

nary Press.—— (1950) Dream and Reality trans. Lampert, Geoffrey Bles, London: Centenary Press.Collier, A. (1999) Being and Worth, London: Routledge.—— (2001) Christianity and Marxism, London: Routledge.Cory, W. (1858) Heraclitus (translation of Callimachus Epigrams 2) in Ionica.De Certeau, M. (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkeley: University of California

Press.Dillard, A. (1987 ) An American Childhood, New York: Harper and Row.Flower-MacCannell, J. (1986) Figuring Lacan, Beckenham, Kent: Croom Helm.Greene, G. (1955) The Quiet American, Harmondsworth: Penguin.—— (1972) A Sort of Life, London: Bodley Head.—— (1983) Monsignor Quixote, Harmondsworth: Penguin.Hand, S. (ed.) (1989) The Lévinas Reader, Oxford: Blackwell.Heidegger, M. (1967) Being and Time, trans. Macquarrie and Robinson, Oxford: Blackwell.Lawrence, D.H. (1999) The Rainbow, Harmondsworth: Penguin.—— (1999) Women in Love, Harmondsworth: Penguin.Lévinas, E. (1958) “Les Cahiers de l’Alliance Israelite Universelle CXIX 25–7” in Sean Hand

(ed) The Levinas Reader, Oxford, Blackwell.—— (1967) ‘Martin Buber and the Theory of Knowledge’, in Paul A. Schilpp and

Maurice Friedman (eds) The Philosophy of Martin Buber, Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press.

—— (1984) “Transcendence et intelligibilite” in Sean Hand (ed) The Levinas Reader, Oxford,Blackwell.

Lévinas, E. (1989) The Lévinas Reader, ed. Sean Hand, Oxford: Blackwell.Muste, A. (1967) The Essays of A.J. Muste, Indianapolis : Bobbs-Merrill.Sartre, J.P. (1965 [1938]) Nausea, trans. Baldick, Harmondsworth: Penguin.—— (1948) Existentialism and Humanism, London: Methuen.—— (1969) Being and Nothingness, trans. Barnes, London: Methuen.Shotter, J. (1993a) Conversational Realities, London: Sage.—— (1993b) Cultural Politics of Everyday Life, Buckingham: Open University Press.Steiner, G. (1972a) Extra-Territorial, London: Faber and Faber.—— (1972b) On Difficulty, Oxford: Oxford University Press.—— (1978) Heidegger, London: Fontana.—— (1989) Real Presences, London: Faber and Faber.Tambling, J. (1991) Narrative and Ideology, Milton Keynes: Open University Press.

Losing the plot 29

Part II

Critiques ofcounter-objectivity

As a defender of lost causes, Andrew Collier is surely without equal in contem-porary philosophy. In his latest book, In Defence of Objectivity, he describes himselfas ‘a Bhaskarian in theory of knowledge, a Spinozist in philosophy of mind, aKleinian in psychology, an Augustinian in ethics, a Lutheran in theology, and aneco-Trotskyist in politics’ (Collier 2003b: 127). To find a defender of any ofthese positions at a present-day philosophy conference would be a fairly rareevent; to find a defender of all of them could mean only one thing: one has metAndrew Collier.

In his very first book, R.D. Laing: The Philosophy and Politics of Psychotherapy,Collier set his face defiantly against the dominant trends in his own disciplinewhen he announced: ‘The appearance of the sciences of historical and mentalprocesses, associated with the names of Marx and Freud, defines the task ofphilosophy in our time as I see it.’ He went on:

Misconceptions which stand in the way of the extension of knowledge onthe basis of these sciences must be cleared away. This involves clarificationof the method and structure of these theories, and the refutation of claimsby the Canutes that they are unscientific or inappropriate to their specificobjects. And this is precisely what most philosophers do claim.

(Collier 1977: viii)

Since 1977 the reputations of Freud and Marx have taken such a battering thatthe depiction of their detractors as ‘Canutes’ looks almost quaintly inappropriate.Who now believes that Marxism and Freudianism are sciences? Well, AndrewCollier for one. In his latest book, Marx and Freud are repeatedly named asscientists whose discoveries are paradigmatic of what Collier calls ‘counter-phenomenal knowledge’, that is, knowledge, which, because it contradictsappearances, can perform a liberating function. Neither society nor the mind is asthey appear to be and, if we want to free ourselves from enslaving deceptionsabout them, Collier still believes, we should acquaint ourselves with the ‘know-ledge’ that the ‘sciences’ of Marxism and Freudianism have uncovered.

Given the way that intellectual tides have turned, nothing more Canute-likecan be imagined. But, from Collier’s point of view, it is even worse than this. For

3 Objectivity, postmodernismand biographicalunderstandingAndrew Collier on R.D. Laing1

Ray Monk

those tides have brought with them not only (what I consider to be) a healthyscepticism about the scientific status of Marxist and Freudian theories, they havealso washed up what I, along with Collier (and most of the ‘Canutes’ referred toby Collier above), regard as a deeply pernicious form of scepticism: postmod-ernism. In resisting this tide, Collier stands shoulder to shoulder with the verytraditionalists (those described in the above quotation as ‘most philosophers’)against whom he had so resolutely set his face twenty-five years ago.

Though the discipline of Philosophy has, thank heaven, remained relativelyuntouched by postmodernism, we have watched aghast as our colleagues inadjacent disciplines in the humanities and the social sciences have adopted themost facile and intellectually barren forms of relativism and subjectivism imag-inable. The truth of those theories that Collier holds so dear in the ‘sciences ofhistorical and mental processes’ has been denied, not because those theoriesfail to meet some specified criteria for science, nor even because of a moregeneral claim that no theories of human society or the human mind couldpossibly be scientific, but rather because the notion of truth itself has becomeunacceptable. In the postmodern world, there are no theories, no knowledgeand no truth; there are only ‘narratives’, stories, the fictionality of which isassumed, whether these stories are those told by physicists about quarks orthose told by astrologers about sun signs. Of course, this means that on oneimportant point, the postmodernists and Andrew Collier are in agreement:Marxism and Freudianism do indeed have the same epistemic status as thenatural sciences. However, where this means that none of them provide us withany more truth than does (say) witchcraft, Collier is surely right to reject anycomforts that this agreement might bring.

In academic life, particularly in interdisciplinary seminars and conferences,we are subjected to this kind of nonsense on a daily basis, but it is surprisinglydifficult to find direct statements of these absurd doctrines in print.Postmodernist literary theorists, sociologists, historians, etc. very rarely statethese views directly in their published work, still more rarely do they argue forthem. Rather, they are just assumed in the things they do write. This is presum-ably why, though Collier repeatedly criticises postmodernism, he hardly everquotes from published work to illustrate the views he is attacking.2 Criticism onthis point stung him, in his essay, ‘Critical realism and the heritage of theEnlightenment’, to make the following prefatory remarks:

when I am stimulated to write polemically against a prevalent idea, it isalmost always in live discussions in seminars or conferences or pubs or polit-ical meetings that are the stimulus. I am arguing against positions that I haveheard put forward, often by people that I didn’t know and have never metagain. For this reason my polemics are scant in attributions or textual refer-ences. Nevertheless, I think the positions criticised are at any rate close topositions typical of much postmodernist literature, as well as of muchcontemporary intellectual conversation.

(Collier 2003b: 47)

34 Ray Monk

In order to confirm that the views Collier has heard in seminars, conferencesand pubs are actually representative of postmodernism (and are not, e.g.,teasing, provocative statements made in the heat of the moment), it is instruc-tive to see what is written in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy under theheading ‘Postmodernism’,3 an entry written by Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth (1998:587–590), who clearly sees herself as sympathetic to the postmodernist move-ment (the views she attributes to postmodernists are not – as one might initiallythink – given with the intention of ridiculing the movement, but rather withthat of presenting it in a favourable light):

Although diverse and eclectic, postmodernism can be recognized by two keyassumptions. First, the assumption that there is no common denominator –in ‘nature’ or ‘truth’ or ‘God’ or ‘the future’ – that guarantees either theOne-ness of the world or the possibility of neutral or objective thought.Second, the assumption that all human systems operate like language, beingself-reflexive rather than referential systems – systems of differential functionwhich are powerful but finite, and which construct and maintain meaningand value.

(Ermarth 1998: 587)

It is a little difficult to know what the first assumption, as expressed here,amounts to and whose views it is intended to challenge. Has anyone everbelieved, for example, that there is a ‘common denominator’ that guarantees‘the One-ness of the world’?4 I have trouble understanding what this mighteven mean. And when she says that there is no common denominator thatwould guarantee ‘the possibility of neutral or objective thought’, does she intendus to understand that neutral or objective thought is, in fact, impossible? Ofcourse, its impossibility would not actually follow from the fact that there isnothing to guarantee its possibility. It would seem, however, that she doesindeed believe that postmodernism has shown objective thought to be im-possible, this being a consequence of the second assumption, the denial of thepossibility of reference:

The view that all systems are self-contained and largely self-referential has aradical implication that either alarms or inspires – the implication that nosystem has any special purchase on Truth and, in fact, that it is impossible toestablish a Truth. This implication goes beyond the recuperable relativism ofthe nineteenth century to unrecuperable difference in the twentieth. Whererelative systems could still cohabit in the single world of modernity, post-modernity involves the recognition that, to a large extent, one’s relativesystems construct the world. In short, that the world is not One; that wordslike ‘truth’, ‘nature’, ‘reality’ and even ‘human’ are weasel words becausethey imply, falsely, that an autonomous world of meaning and values exists,and that it transcends all finite and mutually exclusive human systems andsomehow guarantees them. Postmodernism denies absolute status to any

Objectivity, postmodernism and biography 35

truth or nature or reality. The question always remains – what truth, whichnature, whose reality?

(Ermarth 1998: 589)

Her use of the qualifying phrases ‘largely’ and ‘to a large extent’ is rather un-settling here, because it entirely undermines her argument. If systems are onlylargely, but not entirely, self-referential, then it would certainly not follow that it isimpossible to establish a truth (since truths might be established using those partsof the system that did manage to refer to something outside it). Likewise, if itwere only true to a large extent, and not entirely true, that one’s systems constructthe world, then it would not follow that the assumption of the existence of aworld that transcended that system is necessarily false. I think these qualifyingphrases have to be understood as a stylistic tic, characteristic of people who areconvinced that nothing is true in an unqualified, ‘absolute’ sense (not even theproposition: ‘nothing is true in an unqualified and absolute sense’). An advantageof this stylistic tic is that self-referential paradoxes are avoided5 (if ‘nothing istrue in an unqualified and absolute sense’ is true in an unqualified and absolutesense, then, clearly, it is false); the disadvantage is that an unbridgeable gap opensup between premise and conclusion.

Nevertheless, it is fairly clear what some of these conclusions are: language isself-referential (words do not refer to things in the world, but only to otherwords); so are all other ‘systems’ (I take her to include in this: science, philosophy,religion and all political theories); truth is always relative to a system, and there-fore objective knowledge, knowledge of reality, is an illusion. In her concludingparagraph, Ermarth suggests that ‘postmodernism offers both a new freedomand a new constraint’:

The emphasis on the constructed nature of all knowledge and projectsmeans that, because they have been invented, they can be changed; there is,morally and socially speaking, no ‘nature’ of things. On the other hand, thefact that with our languages we inherit so much of our beliefs and valuesready-made means that we are much less original and autonomous thanmodernity suggested, and we express agency more locally, more collectivelyand less heroically than modernity allowed.

(Ermarth 1998: 590)

In other words, we cannot arrive at a true view of the world, nor can we changeit; we are, however, free to re-interpret it as often and in whatever way we like.Nothing further from Collier’s notion of liberating ‘counter-phenomenal’ knowl-edge could possibly be imagined, and, if one wanted to identify a philosophicalposition that embodied everything that Collier’s latest three books – Being and

Worth, In Defence of Objectivity and On Christian Belief – are campaigning against,one would find it in this encyclopedia article.

Is there any point in arguing against a view as transparently silly as post-modernism? For example, would any purpose be served by pointing out to

36 Ray Monk

Ermarth that her use of the word ‘fact’ in the passage quoted above is incon-sistent with the general position she claims to believe? For, if something is afact, and we know it to be such, have we not succeeded in establishing a truth?And, has she not previously told us that it is impossible to establish a truth?She could, of course, escape this inconsistency by claiming that this fact, likeall others, is part of that invented ‘knowledge’ she claims to be subject toendless change. But, if this is so, how does it provide any kind of ‘constraint’?If we feel constrained by it, why do we not simply change it? The answer, ofcourse, is that if it is a fact that with our language we inherit much of ourbeliefs and values, then we can’t simply change that fact because we areconstrained by it in the very act of transforming it. And that means that it isnot true that because all our knowledge was once invented it can therefore bechanged right now.

Postmodernism is so enmeshed in contradictions, so committed to denyingwhat is obviously true and to asserting what is obviously false, that one is drivento doubt whether anybody actually believes it. As Andrew Collier (2003b: 135)says, the notion that facts are objective is denied ‘only ever by academics in theirstudies’. Outside their studies, the views of postmodernists would be regardednot as a philosophical position but as symptoms of psychosis.

And yet, postmodernism has had, and continues to have, a lamentable influ-ence on the way humanities and social science subjects are studied and taught atour universities. When, as I often do, I attend interdisciplinary conferences onbiography, I am routinely told that biography is a form of fiction, that selves arecreated by the words used to describe them, that any claims by biographers toobjectivity are illusory, and so on.

An illustrative, if particularly grotesque, example of the kind of thing withwhich one has to deal if one engages with contemporary academic reflectionson biography is a book called Interpretive Biography by Norman K. Denzin, aprofessor of sociology. This book, which was published in a series with themisleadingly austere title, ‘Qualitative Research Methods’ and which is widelyrecommended to undergraduate students, brings to bear on the subject of biog-raphy all the assumptions and conclusions of postmodernism as described byErmarth, announcing them (with unconscious irony) as if they had the status ofdefinitive truths. ‘Students of the biographical method’, Denzin (1989: 25)declares, ‘must learn how to use the strategies and techniques of literary inter-pretation and criticism. They must bring their use of the method in line withrecent structuralist and poststructuralist developments in critical theory’. Whatthis means in practice is accepting – without any argument whatsoever – thefollowing dicta:

Derrida (1972) has contributed to the understanding that there is no clearwindow into the inner life of a person, for any window is always filteredthrough the glaze of language, signs, and the process of signification. Andlanguage, in both its written and spoken forms, is always inherently unstable,in flux, and made up of traces of other signs and symbolic statements.


Hence there can never be a clear, unambiguous statement of anything,including an intention or a meaning.

(Denzin 1989: 14)

as Derrida (1981) argues, the principle knowledge of (and about) a subjectonly exists in the texts written about them. Sartre proclaims the existence ofa ‘real’ person, Flaubert. However, … the linguistic concept of person orsubject in language only refers to the person making an utterance, as in ‘I amwriting this line about persons’. My referentiality in the above line is onlygiven in the pronoun I. My personhood is not in this line. The pronoun I isa shifter, and its only reference is in the discourse that surrounds it. … Myexistence, or Flaubert’s, is primarily, and discursively documented in thewords written about or by them.

(Denzin 1989: 20)

When a biographer purports to be giving the ‘real’ objective details of a‘real’ person’s life, he or she is, in fact, creating that subject in the text that iswritten. To send readers back to a ‘real’ person is to send them back to yetanother version of the fiction that is in the text. There is no ‘real’ personbehind the text, except as he or she exists in another system of discourse.

(Denzin 1989: 22)

to argue for a factually correct picture of a ‘real’ person is to ignore howpersons are created in texts and other systems of discourse.

(Denzin 1989: 23)

Sartre found the Flaubert he wanted to find by positing a ‘real’ subject wholurked inside his so-called ‘fictional’ texts. But this distinction betweenFlaubert’s two texts, his first person accounts and his fictions, cannot beallowed. All of Flaubert’s writings were fiction. There were (and are) onlymultiple versions of his subjectivity.

(Denzin 1989: 66)

As we write about lives, we bring the world of others into our texts. Wecreate differences, oppositions, and presences which allow us to maintain theillusion that we have captured the ‘real’ experiences of ‘real’ people. In fact,we create the persons we write about, just as they create themselves whenthey engage in storytelling practices.

(Denzin 1989: 82)

To try to sum up: when we refer, say, to Gustave Flaubert, we are referring, notto a real, objectively existing individual, but rather to a fictional character, onewho has created his (fictional) self through the writing of fiction, by which wemean, not only the novels he wrote, but also his letters, essays, memoirs, etc.(since ‘All Flaubert’s writings were fiction’). When Sartre writes a biography of

38 Ray Monk

Flaubert, he, too, is writing fiction and the subject of his biography is not a realperson whose existence is independent of Sartre’s text, nor is it even the fictionalcharacter self-created through Flaubert’s fiction; no, it is a (presumably different)fictional character created by Sartre. To think otherwise – to think, for example,that the facts of Flaubert’s life are quite independent of Sartre’s book and that,in writing a biography of Flaubert, Sartre has a duty to remain faithful to thosefacts – is to ignore the insights of ‘recent structuralist and poststructuralist devel-opments in critical theory’, particularly those of Derrida, who has shown us that(‘as a matter of fact’, one would be tempted to say, were it not so ludicrouslyinappropriate) all language is so unstable that we never succeed in uttering anytruth-claim about anything. Of course, it follows from this entirely general thesisthat Derrida is writing fiction when he discusses the nature of language, and thatDenzin is writing fiction when he analyses Sartre’s biography of Flaubert. Allone can do in the face of such ‘multiple subjectivity’ is pity the poor ‘students ofthe biographical method’ who ‘must’ learn these lessons.

Denzin’s choice of Sartre’s biography of Flaubert as an example is not, ofcourse, arbitrary. For Sartre’s purpose in writing his long, unreadable and exas-perating life of Flaubert was precisely to demonstrate the opposite of Denzin’sview: that one can present an objective account of the details of a person’s lifeand, in doing so, add, not just to literature, but also to knowledge. The preface toThe Family Idiot describes it as a ‘sequel to Search for a Method ’, its subject being:‘what, at this point in time, can we know about a man?’ Sartre’s answer to thisquestion is: quite a lot.

What do we know, for example, about Gustave Flaubert? Such knowledgewould amount to summing up all the data on him at our disposal. … Thefragments of information we have are very different in kind: Flaubert wasborn in December 1821, in Rouen – that is one kind of information; hewrites, much later, to his mistress: ‘Art terrifies me’ – that is another. Thefirst is an objective, social fact, confirmed by official documents; the second,objective too.

(Sartre 1981: ix)

Sartre’s aim in writing his biography of Flaubert was to demonstrate that, using(his version of) Marxist sociology, together with (his version of) Freudian psycho-analysis, a complete, exhaustive account of a person’s life could be written, onethat presented, not a view of the life but the view of it. It is therefore no coinci-dence that the two kinds of information that Sartre identifies correspond to thetwo kinds of ‘science’ the defence of which constitutes the task of philosophy asseen by Andrew Collier. On the one hand, we have historical facts – the time andplace of Flaubert’s birth, for example – and on the other we have facts aboutFlaubert’s mental life – that, for example, he found, or claimed to find, art terri-fying. If, then, we take ‘the appearance of the sciences of historical and mentalprocesses, associated with the names of Marx and Freud’ as seriously as Collierdoes, might the result of clearing away the ‘misconceptions which stand in the


way of the extension of knowledge on the basis of these sciences’ be that we seethe possibility of writing biography scientifically? Or, to pose a question which, ifnot identical, is clearly closely related: can there be a science of persons?

This is the question at stake in Collier’s fascinating, career-long engagementwith the work of R.D. Laing. My own view on this question is a Wittgensteinianone: biography is not, and cannot ever be, a science, and neither can the under-standing of people. I say this while siding with Sartre and Collier on almost allthe points at issue between them and the postmodernists. I reject wholeheartedlythe notion that biography is a branch of fiction, and I agree with Sartre thatboth the historical details of Flaubert’s life and his ‘inner’ mental life are mattersof objective fact. However, where I disagree with Sartre is over his claim that asingle, definitive, unifying biography of a person is possible. I believe that, even ifall the facts of a person’s life could be established, there would still be room forseveral different ways of looking at that life, several different possible ways ofwriting the biography, and that these different possible biographies could all befaithful to the facts, and equally ‘objective’.

Sartre raises this issue in the preface to The Family Idiot. ‘We have no assuranceat the outset’, he writes, ‘that such a summation [as the one alluded to in thequotation given above] is possible and that the truth of a person is not multiple’.Referring to Flaubert’s expressed feeling that art terrified him, Sartre writes: ‘wecan draw no conclusions about the sense and import of this feeling until we havefirst established whether Gustave is sincere in general, and in this instance inparticular’. Do we not then risk ending up with layers of heterogeneous and irre-ducible meanings? This book attempts to prove that irreducibility is only apparent,and that each piece of data set in its place becomes a portion of the whole.

Of course, if you ask a Wittgensteinian how there can be two or more legiti-mate ways of looking at something even when the relevant facts have beenagreed upon, he or she will most likely start talking about ‘gestalt switches’,‘aspect seeing’ and ‘seeing as’. I am no exception to this, though I am aware that,to Andrew Collier, such talk is like a red rag to a bull. In On Christian Belief, hedismisses the importance of ‘gestalt switches’ in the following paragraph:

It is perhaps worth mentioning in passing the unhelpfulness of onemetaphor often used to give credibility to a non-cognitivist reading ofparadigm shifts: the gestalt switch, like Wittgenstein’s celebrated duck-rabbit. Because with gestalt switches we can make sense of the phrase‘seeing things differently’ without seeing different things, we assume that thiscan be made sense of in other contexts too. But gestalt switch pictures are avery special phenomenon; they require an expert draughtsman to do themwell – a Dali or an Escher; and they are only possible because of theconventions (not recognised by all cultures) for representing three dimen-sional objects on a two dimensional surface. Elsewhere in life, there arenothing like gestalt switch pictures, and ‘seeing things differently’ can onlymean seeing different things.

(Collier 2003a: 56)

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I disagree with this. It seems to me that the multiplicity of different ways ofseeing the things around is an ineradicable and widespread feature of ourlives. We can read a poem, listen to a piece of music, study a facial expressionfirst one way and then another, without changing our views about the facts ofthe matter. One might be inclined, in many of these cases, to describe whatwe experience as seeing something different, rather than as seeing the samething differently, but, after all, it is the same poem we are reading, the samepiece of music we are listening to and the same face we are looking at. And,when we see first the duck and then the rabbit, in that case too we mightdescribe ourselves as seeing something different. That is part of Wittgenstein’spoint: that we see something different, even when what we look at is the same thing.6

Consider, for example, what happens when we ‘get’ a joke. For example:

Q: What, according to Dr. Freud, comes between fear and sex?A: fünf.

To understand this joke, we have to change the aspect under which we hear thetwo key words in the question: first, we hear them as ‘fear’ and ‘sex’, then as‘vier’ and ‘sechs’. It is not the case that one of these is the correct meaning;rather, the joke requires both to be correct and for us to be able to switch fromone to the other.

It is important to recognise, as Wittgenstein (2001 [1958]: 195) does, that‘seeing as’ is not characteristic of all seeing (we do not see the cutlery in front ofus on a dinner table ‘as’ a knife and fork – we simply see a knife and fork).Nevertheless, it is equally important, I feel, to recognise that it is nothing like asrare as Collier suggests. Irreducible ambiguity is not, as the postmodernistswould have it, a ubiquitous feature of all our experience and all our language,but it is, nevertheless, a fairly widespread phenomenon. Of course, to recognisethis is not to give up on objectivity. There is a huge difference between sayingthat there are two correct ways of seeing something and saying, with the post-modernists, that there are no correct ways of seeing things, just lots of differentways. From the fact that there is more than one way of being right, it does notfollow that there are no ways of being wrong. It is impossible to write a defini-tive biography, but it is certainly possible to write a misleading and distortedbiography.

That the same phenomena can be seen in a variety of different ways iscentral to R.D. Laing’s understanding of the status of his investigations intoschizophrenia, as he makes clear in the first chapter of The Divided Self (1965).‘Man’s being’, he writes there, ‘can be seen from different points of view and oneor other aspect can be made the focus of study. In particular, man can be seenas a person or thing.’ Illustrating his point with precisely the kind of gestaltswitch drawing that Collier suggests above is ‘a very special phenomenon’ (notthe duck–rabbit, but the almost equally familiar two faces–vase picture), Lainggoes on:


Now, even the same thing, seen from different points of view, gives rise totwo entirely different descriptions, and the descriptions give rise to twoentirely different theories, and the theories result in two entirely differentsets of action. The initial way we see a thing determines all our subsequentdealings with it. Let us consider an equivocal or ambiguous figure:

[here he reproduces the two faces–vase drawing]In this figure, there is one thing on the paper, which can be seen as a vase

or as two faces turned towards each other. There are not two things on thepaper: there is one thing there, but, depending on how it strikes us, we cansee two different objects. …

Now, if you are sitting opposite me, I can see you as another person likemyself; without you changing or doing anything differently, I can now seeyou as a complex physical–chemical system, perhaps with its own idiosyn-crasies but chemical none the less for that: seen in this way, you are nolonger a person but an organism. … There is no dualism in the sense of theco-existence of two different essences or substances there in the object,psyche and soma; there are two different experiential Gestalts: person andorganism. …

One acts towards an organism differently from the way one acts towardsa person. The science of persons is the study of human beings that beginswith a relationship with the other as person and proceeds to an account ofthe other still as person.

For example, if one is listening to another person talking, one may either(a) be studying verbal behaviour in terms of neural processes and the wholeapparatus of vocalising, or (b) be trying to understand what he is saying.

(Laing 1965: 20–21)

Though this passage seems obviously crucial in understanding Laing’s concep-tion of what he was doing in The Divided Self, Collier never once quotes it,discusses it, or even mentions it, despite the fact that he devotes many pages ofhis book on Laing to a discussion of Laing’s meta-psychology during which hequotes liberally from the first chapter of The Divided Self.

‘To many of us who read Laing’s works in the 1960s’, Collier (2003b: 203)writes, ‘they came as a revelation, and a liberating revelation.’ This, surely, istrue, but as to what, exactly, people found liberating about Laing’s work, Collierand I have very different impressions. My impression is that what people foundliberating in Laing’s work was precisely the gestalt switch described above: theconscious decision to see schizophrenics as people rather than as malfunctioningorganisms. What is impressive about Laing’s early work is his determination tounderstand the patients with whom he came into contact, to see meaning in whatthey said, rather than dismiss their utterances as the product of a diseasedmind. For the first time, it seemed to many, the voices of schizophrenics werebeing heard and taken seriously and, in a world of straitjackets, padded cells,insulin treatment and ECT, this seemed a humane and positive development.Of course, it did not lead to a better understanding of the causes of

42 Ray Monk

schizophrenia, or to anything that would either cure it or even alleviate itssymptoms, but it did do something to combat the tendency to treat the insaneas if they were somehow less than human. And, to that extent, despite theexcesses of the ‘anti-psychiatry’ movement to which it gave rise, the work ofLaing was indeed a liberating revelation.

So much for my impression. Andrew Collier’s impression is very different. Forhim, what was liberating about Laing’s works was that: ‘They explained muchthat had seemed inexplicable and they were liberating quite simply by virtue oftheir explanations’ (Collier 2003b: 203). What he found impressive about Laingwas not his humane determination to see schizophrenics as people, but rather hisscientific achievement in revealing the counter-phenomenal reality behind thephenomena of mental illness (for: ‘The knowledge or understanding that liber-ates is necessarily that which is counter-phenomenal, contrary to appearances’(Collier 2003b: 204)). ‘The human world too has its structures’, Collier (2003b:205) insists and, just as Marxism reveals the structures of society – not as theyappear, but as they really are – so Laing’s work revealed the structures of fami-lies, structures which, it is implied, go some way towards explaining the causes ofschizophrenia. In families, ‘people appear differently to others than to themselvesand differently again to different others’ (Collier 2003b: 206), and so a series ofcontradictions appear. Laing’s achievement, according to Collier (2003b: 206)was to ‘liberate the participants (or at least the victims) of the [family] group, bysupplanting the various appearances with a more adequate – more objective –understanding of the group’s structure’. Armed with this objective under-standing of the family structure, the contradictions among the beliefs held by thefamily members can be resolved, not by granting equal validity to every point ofview, but, on the contrary, by sorting out the true beliefs from the false ones, thusmoving from illusory appearances to objective reality:

Micro-social contradictions can be resolved only by an understanding thatdisproves at least some of the beliefs it starts by describing. It is a matter ofmoving from appearances to the counter-phenomenal realities underlyingthem.

(Collier 2003b: 206)

The rather idiosyncratic view of Laing’s work that emerges from this analysis isthis: Laing investigates the family of a schizophrenic, discovers a complicatedstructure of contradictory beliefs, and liberates the family from the tensions thatgave rise to schizophrenia by distinguishing reality from appearance in such away as to demonstrate that some beliefs held within the family are in fact false.It would seem to follow from this that the cause of schizophrenia is lack ofobjectivity!

Not surprisingly, Collier is dismayed to find in Laing’s later work an explicitattack on what Laing calls ‘the objective look’, which, in Collier’s words, is ‘thelook that goes beyond appearances and uncovers the counter-phenomenal realitybehind them’ (Collier 2003b: 207). ‘To the purely objective point of view’, Laing


writes, ‘everything is an object’. Collier sees in this no more than a confusion.‘Of course knowing objects is not knowing people,’ he writes, ‘but no reason isgiven why we cannot also know people in a way that is objective in the usualsense – that is, independent of the knower’s subjectivity’:

One could, of course, have knowledge of people considered purely asobjects – their weight and spatial location, for instance. But there is noreason why equally objective facts, such as whether they love each other,should not be known as well.

One is reminded here of Sartre’s insistence that Flaubert’s fear of art was anobjective fact. Both are, in my view, correct; there are objective facts about aperson’s ‘inner’ mental life, and there is nothing, in principle, to prevent us fromknowing those facts. To acknowledge this, however, is not to dismiss Laing’s pointabout ‘the objective look’. Laing’s point, I take it, is not that there are no objec-tive facts about people considered as people. Rather, his point is that to seesomeone as a person is to take a certain attitude towards them. As Wittgenstein(1958: II, iv, p. 178) once put it: ‘My attitude towards him is an attitude towardsa soul. I am not of the opinion that he has a soul.’ Likewise, the doctor who looksat a patient as an organism is not of the opinion that the patient is nothing morethan an organism. In The Divided Self, Laing puts it like this:

The clinical psychiatrist, wishing to be more ‘scientific’ or ‘objective’, maypropose to confine himself to the ‘objectively’ observable behaviour of thepatient before him. The simplest answer to this is that it is impossible. To see‘signs’ of ‘disease’ is not to see neutrally. Nor is it neutral to see a smile ascontractions of the circumoral muscles.

(1965: 31)

Quoting with approval Dilthey’s remark:

We explain by means of purely intellectual processes, but we understand bymeans of the cooperation of all the powers of the mind in comprehension.In understanding we start from the connection of the given, living whole, inorder to make the past comprehensible in terms of it.

(Laing 1965: 32)

Laing makes it clear that his concern is not to explain schizophrenia, but rather tounderstand schizophrenics, a difference he describes in terms of a gestalt switch:

To look and listen to a patient and to see ‘signs’ of schizophrenia (as a‘disease’) and to look and to listen to him simply as a human being are to seeand to hear in as radically different ways as when one sees, first the vase,then faces in the ambiguous picture.

(1965: 33)

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‘I think it is clear’, he adds, ‘that by understanding I do not mean a purely intel-lectual process. For understanding one might say love. … One cannot love aconglomeration of “signs of schizophrenia”.’

Laing’s remarks on ‘the objective look’ in The Voice of Experience, then, arenot an aberration, or a departure from his previously held views; they areentirely of a piece with the views he expressed in his very first book. I agreewith Andrew Collier that Laing’s work got worse as he got older, but I do notsee this deterioration in the terms in which Collier describes it.7 The liberating,counter-phenomenal explanations of the family origins of schizophrenia thatCollier wishes to see in Laing’s early works are, in my view, simply not there.Laing’s concern, throughout his career, was not to explain, but to understandand to describe. He did not claim to be unearthing the reality behind themyriad of conflicting appearances, but rather to be describing a way oflooking at reality to which the ‘objective look’ is necessarily blind and, thereby,presenting an alternative way of seeing schizophrenic patients, one that isprecisely, and crucially not ‘independent of the knower’s subjectivity’.

In R.D. Laing: The Philosophy and Politics of Psychotherapy, Collier wrestles repeat-edly and at length with the suggestion that Laing’s work is essentially descriptiverather than explanatory, concerned with reasons rather than with causes, but healways stops short of accepting that this is so, preferring to see the suggestion ashighlighting a possible mistake that Laing is in danger of making, rather than asan accurate description of what he is doing. Recognising that Laing has, ifnothing else, ‘accomplished a very valuable descriptive task’, Collier (1977: 41)refuses to accept that this could possibly be all that Laing’s purported ‘science ofpersons’ amounts to:

His writings have an important place in the literature to which one shouldturn if one wishes to understand what it is like to be schizoid or, so far assuch understanding is possible, to be schizophrenic. Such description isinvaluable from a scientific point of view as well as from that of therapyitself or of a layman’s attempt to understand himself and his fellow crea-tures better. However, it is not itself science; a biography or a novel mightserve the same purpose.

Here, I think Collier has hit the nail on the head, only he has drawn the wrongconclusion from what he has correctly analysed. Laing’s descriptions of theinner lives of schizophrenics are closer to biography than they are to science,and the conclusion to draw from this is not that we must seek the justificationfor the word ‘science’ elsewhere in Laing’s work and see his resistance to ‘theobjective look’ as an aberration; rather, we must see his use of the phrase‘science of persons’ as an aberration.

If our interest is in explaining schizophrenia and finding a cure for it, then wewould be well advised to look at schizophrenic patients in the same way in whichwe look at cancer patients – that is, as organisms – and try to find an organiccause for the illness.8 However, if our interest is, as Laing’s was, in understanding


the mind, the soul, of the schizophrenic person, then the tools of medical andbiological science are of no use to us and we would be better off adopting theapproach of a biographer. Of course, as Laing came to realise (his use of thephrase ‘science of persons’ was short-lived), this means that what we engaged inis not, and cannot be, a science. This does not mean, contra the postmodernists,that we have to accept that we are engaged in writing fiction, but it does meanthat Andrew Collier’s hopes of finding in Laing’s attempts to understandschizophrenics an ‘extension of knowledge’ on the basis of the ‘science’ ofFreudian psychoanalysis are misplaced.

In insisting on the scientific status of Laing’s ‘explanations’ of schizophrenia,Andrew Collier has been defending, not so much a lost cause, as a cause thatnever was.9

Notes

1 Though this essay is critical of Andrew Collier’s reading of R.D. Laing, I would liketo emphasise here how much, over the eleven years I have been his colleague, he hascommanded my respect and admiration. In the many conversations I have had withhim, I have learned a great deal, not only about philosophy, but also about the aston-ishingly wide range of topics covered by his immense learning, including: theTrotskyist groups of the 1960s, the history of Wales, medieval methods of calculatingthe calendar, the finer points of English grammar, and the correct way to use thephrase ‘brought to fruition’.

2 One of the few exceptions I have found is in Critical Realism, where Collier (1994:97–101) discusses the work of Richard Rorty, who, he says, is ‘often regarded as themain representative of “postmodernist” philosophy in the English-speaking world’.Even here, however, only two quotations from Rorty are given and, in any case,Collier’s concern in these pages is not to criticise Rorty himself but to summarise thecriticisms of Rorty made by Roy Bhaskar in his book, Philosophy and the Idea of Freedom(criticisms with which, of course, Collier entirely agrees).

3 Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. 7, pp. 587–590.4 I suppose, with quite a lot of straining, one could use phrases like this to describe the

thinking of neo-Hegelians like Bradley and McTaggart, and perhaps even of Hegelhimself, though one would struggle somewhat to specify what in their thought corre-sponds to the notion of a ‘common denominator’ as used by Ermarth.

5 Not that this passage avoids paradox altogether – with or without its qualifyingphrases. For example, if we know, as Ermarth suggests we do, that the proposition ‘anautonomous world of meaning and values exists’ is false, then surely its negation (‘anautonomous world of meaning and values does not exist’) is true, thus showing that itis not, after all, ‘impossible to establish a Truth’.

6 See Wittgenstein 1958: Part II, section xi, p. 196: ‘The expression of a change ofaspect is the expression of new perception and at the same time of the perception’sbeing unchanged.’

7 As I see it, the deterioration in Laing’s work is not characterised by a withdrawal fromobjectivity to subjectivity, but rather by an increasing – and increasingly vehement –refusal to admit that schizophrenics are ill.

8 -I realise, of course, that Laing resisted this view, but I think he was wrong to resist itand that what is insightful in his work is entirely consistent with it. To say that wehave to look at schizophrenic patients as people if we want to understand them doesnot entail that we cannot switch gestalts when our interest is in identifying anorganic cause for their condition. When we listen sympathetically to what a drunken

46 Ray Monk

man is saying we do not have pretend that he is not drunk, and neither, when welisten sympathetically to a schizophrenic person, do we have to pretend that he/sheis not ill.

9 I would like to thank my colleagues Maria Alvarez, Aaron Ridley and GrahamStevens for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this essay.

Bibliography

Collier, A. (1977) R.D. Laing: The Philosophy and Politics of Psychotherapy, Hassocks: Harvester.—— (1994) Critical Realism: An Introduction to Roy Bhaskar’s Philosophy, London and New

York: Verso.—— (2003a) On Christian Belief: A Defence of a Cognitive Conception of Religious Belief in a

Christian Context, London: Routledge.—— (2003b) In Defence of Objectivity, London: Routledge.Denzin, N.K. (1989) Interpretive Biography, London: Sage.Derrida, J. (1981 [1972]) Positions, trans. A. Bass, London: Athlone.Ermarth, E.D. (1998) ‘Postmodernism’, Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. 7, London:

Routledge, pp. 587–590.Laing, R.D. (1965) The Divided Self, London: Penguin.Sartre, J.-P. (1981) The Family Idiot, vol. I, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Wittgenstein, L. (2001 [1958]) Philosophical Investigations, trans. E. Anscombe, Oxford:

Blackwell.


In his In Defence of Objectivity, Andrew Collier (2003: 19) asserts that ‘the first andcentral use of the word “objectivity” is to refer to what is true independently ofany subject judging it to be true’. Thus, for Andrew, the concepts of truth andobjectivity are closely connected. What is true is what is objectively the caseindependent of our saying so. Conversely, what is objectively the case is what wecan truthfully assert to be the case.

The idea that there is a truth and an objective reality independent of what wemay take reality to be is what Derrida refers to as the ‘metaphysics of presence’.It is a view, Derrida argues, that is ‘logocentric’, privileging language, truth, andlogic. And since language, truth, and logic are, following the thought of psycho-analyst Jacques Lacan, innately phallic, the metaphysics of presence is not onlylogocentric but phallocentric as well. We thus arrive at the word that post-modernist feminism (see, for example, Butler 1990: 16; Cornell 1995a) uses tocharacterise the metaphysics of presence: ‘phallogocentrism’. While language isperhaps inescapable for all of us who theorise, to continue believing today inlogic, objectivity and truth is to be phallogocentric. Phallogocentrism, it follows,is what Andrew is urging us to uphold.

In this paper, I will not defend Andrew or objectivity against the charge ofphallogocentrism – at least not directly. Instead, for the sake of argument, I willaccept the charge. What I will try to show is that whether a commitment toobjectivity is or is not phallogocentric, we cannot do without it. The ‘we’ hereincludes feminism. It, too, must commit itself to objectivity.

Discourse’s need for objectivity is not something I will try to establish philo-sophically. Instead, for once, I will remember that I am a sociologist and seek todemonstrate the point empirically. I will do so, moreover, in a way that demon-strates I have learned something from postmodernist feminism. I intend to offera discourse analysis.

Specifically, I intend to analyse the discourse of a debate among several majorfeminist theorists. The debate’s discursive style, I will argue, aims to escape thefoundationalist truth claims of phallogocentrism without really doing so. Instead,the style succeeds only in erecting uncontested counter-foundations that serve –with less epistemic warrant – as truth surrogates. Truth surrogation is not theonly problem. In the discourse we will examine, claims and claimants are not

4 Objectivity andphallogocentrism

Douglas V. Porpora

detached as they routinely are in phallogocentric discourse. The result is a levelof acrimony that effectively shuts down reasoned contention. Such discursivefeatures, I suggest, are ultimately disabling to the feminist movement.Accordingly, I suggest, feminists should not cede objectivity to men as a distinctlyphallic construct.

The debate to be examined was originally sponsored in 1990 by theGreater Philadelphia Philosophy Consortium. It brought together SeylaBenhabib, Judith Butler, and Nancy Fraser to discuss the relation betweenfeminism and postmodernism. The debate subsequently appeared in a specialissue of the journal Praxis International. After that, the debate was republishedin German as a book, including, in addition to the original papers and a newcontribution by Drucilla Cornell, the reaction of each author to what theothers had written. Finally, in 1995, a somewhat altered version of the collec-tion, introduced by Linda Nicholson, appeared in English as the book Feminist

Contentions.The debate opens with Benhabib reacting to three theses that another

prominent feminist thinker, Jane Flax (1990), had previously identified withpostmodernism and, which, indeed, most of us in social theory would identifywith the postmodern movement. These postmodernist theses are: the death ofthe coherent subject; the death of encompassing historical narratives; and thedeath of metaphysics.

Benhabib arrives at the debate to argue that the human subject, narratives,and metaphysics are not yet dead and, moreover, cannot die. She argues that thefeminist movement itself needs to retain the concept of coherent subjects whooppress and who suffer from oppression; that feminism needs to write macro-histories of that oppression; and that it needs to do so in ways that are truthful,that is, in ways that can be shown to correspond to how things objectively are.

Benhabib’s first paper is followed directly by Butler’s. Displaying what Fraser(1995a: 65) describes as Butler’s ‘characteristic genius for insubordination’,Butler, like a guerrilla army, simply melts away from the intended scene ofengagement. She professes not to know what postmodernism is. ‘Who are thesepostmodernists?’ she asks (Butler 1995a: 35). ‘Is this a name that one takes on foroneself, or is it more often a name that one is called if and when one offers acritique of the subject, a discursive analysis, or questions the integrity or coher-ence of totalizing social descriptions?’ By dubiously going on to suggest that‘postmodernism’ was invented first as a term of abuse by ‘paranoid’ defenders offoundationalism, Butler effectively aligns Benhabib with the forces of reactionaryoppression.

Butler’s paper is followed by Fraser’s, which is a remarkably even-handedattempt at feminist mediation. The antithesis, Fraser argues, between Benhabib’smodernist critical theory and Butler’s post-structuralism is a false one. There is,instead, a middle ground.

Finally, Cornell’s first paper, aligned more with Butler than Benhabib,presents an independent defence of Lacan’s importance to the feminist move-ment. So ends in brief the first round of debate.

Objectivity and phallogocentrism 49

What becomes particularly striking about the debate is the acrimony itgoes on to produce. In a note to her first contribution, Benhabib (1995a: 31)says that the process of public disagreement has ‘strained personal loyaltiesand friendships’. In her second piece, Benhabib (1995b: 111) describes herself– herself and not her arguments – as having been ‘taken to task’ by Fraser’scritical comments, and she bristles (1995b: 120, n. 4) at Butler’s charge thatBenhabib’s response almost ‘willfully’ misreads what Butler had written.Fraser (1995b: 169, n. 6) in turn accuses Butler of misunderstanding – ormisreading – her own comments. Cornell’s (1995b: 145) second pieceexpresses a dream, shared with Butler, of not being ‘branded’ postmodernist.It goes on (Cornell 1995b: 146) to accuse Fraser – Fraser, and not her argu-ment – of failing to understand the importance of unconscious motivation.Butler (1995b: 127), finally, remarks that, ‘in the end, I find the work of thisvolume to be saddening’.

What happened here? As I said in the beginning, my theory is that the acri-mony is tied to what I call the ‘hyper-situated’ nature of the discourse. To seethis, however, I first need to contrast it with a more phallogocentric form ofdiscourse.

Claims and claimants in phallogocentric discourse

As Andrew puts it, objectivity refers to what is true independent of any subject’ssaying so. Implied is an independence of claims and claimants. In phallogocen-tric discourse, claims are detached from claimants for independent evaluation incritical space. In this sense, claims in critical space are evaluated precisely as theoften lampooned ‘view from nowhere’.

Of course phallogocentric discourse recognises that claims are alwaysadvanced from one site or another, always in this way reflecting a particularperspective. However, as Andrew says, to the extent that a claim is meant to beobjective, it is meant to reflect the object it is about and not the subject viewing itor the site from which it is viewed. Thus, from a phallogocentric perspective, thetruth status of a claim is independent of its origin and can be examined sep-arately. However much a claim may have issued from resentment or from aposition of power, it may, nonetheless, be true. There is a place in phallogocen-tric discourse for genealogical analysis, but that analysis must also vindicate itsown claim to truth and will always carry more weight if the claims at which it istargeted have independently been shown to be false.

In phallogocentric discourse, the truthfulness of a claim may in part be evalu-ated in terms of its effects. If a claim affords successful predictions, for example,its truth status is enhanced. Yet, just as a phallogocentric discourse detaches theevaluation of a claim from its claimant, so, too, does it detach the evaluation ofthe claim from its practical or political effects. In phallogocentric discourse, it isnot in itself an argument against the truth of a claim that it has an effect judgedadverse from one or another political perspective. Again, in phallogocentric

50 Douglas V. Porpora

discourse, the analysis of political effects is something that carries weight onlyafter the truth of a claim has independently been called into question.

Talk of truth and objective reality immediately gives rise to a lot of confusionabout ‘foundationalism’. Fraser (1995a), for example, writes that ‘social criticismwithout philosophy is possible, if we mean by “philosophy” … ahistorical, tran-scendental discourse claiming to articulate the validity for all other discourses’. Ifthis is what Fraser means by philosophy, then even a phallogocentrist can grantphilosophy’s death. Of course, Fraser has essentialised philosophy by equating itwith positivism. As Andrew is at pains to point out, we who are committed toobjectivity do not believe we already are in possession of all truths about allobjects. Instead, truth is generally not where we begin argument but where wehope to arrive at the end.

How exactly do we arrive at truth? In phallogocentric discourse, we arrive attruth – at least provisionally – by what Janet Moulton (1983) describes critically –without, however, rejecting it – as the ‘adversarial method’. In the adversarialmethod of phallogocentric discourse, no claim is privileged. All claims can becontested – whether or not they actually are. Phallogocentric discourse progressesthrough conjectures and refutations.

In phallogocentric discourse, a claim is judged true not a priori but only on thebasis of an argument for its truth and, more importantly, on the survival of thatargument against counter-argument. It is precisely through their survival ofcontestation that claims are judged true.

Even then, in phallogocentric discourse, the judged truth of a claim is alwaysprovisional. A claim judged true is one that rests on the best argument so far. Butthe argument is never closed. It can always be reopened, in which case, re-examination is necessary.

Understood in this sense, phallogocentric discourse is philosophy and is

science. Of course, on this rendering, the adversarial method of philosophy andscience is farther from the positivist foundationalism of Popper and Hempel andcloser to the methodological anarchy of Feyerabend. All – even the criteria oftruth – are always up for grabs, always contestable. On this view, science andphilosophy are already the falibilistic, revisable, open-ended form of discoursecalled for by Flax, Nicholson and Fraser.

Although we need to distinguish between the truths we hold provisionally andtruth per se, our provisional truths are often close enough. While all claims can becontested, the contests that result may be decidedly unequal. Some truths arebacked by sufficiently strong arguments so as continually to defend their titlesagainst contenders. Where it is precisely the strength of argument that makes aclaim incontestable, we do not privilege that claim by calling it true. That truthstatus has not been ascribed but, rather, earned. It is relativism, rather, that privi-leges weakly defended claims by a priori ascribing to them, independent ofargument, a status equal to the most powerfully defended claims there are.

Whether we would speak of truth or not, Habermas has argued that truth isan ineluctable validity claim of all intelligible discourse, down to the singleproposition. That in itself is a truth claim. If Habermas is right, and even Butler


implicitly concedes that he is, then we should expect to see truth claims surfaceeven in discourses that renounce claims to truth. That prediction, I now hope toshow, is borne out in the postmodernist discourse of Feminist Contentions.

Claims and claimants in postmodernist discourse

Whereas in phallogocentric discourse, there is a disconnection between claimsand claimants, the discourse in Feminist Contentions is – in conformity, perhaps,with feminist standpoint theory, hyper-situated – so much so as at times even toundermine the wider significance of the debate. For example, in her introduc-tion to the volume, Linda Nicholson is at pains to assure us that the volume isnot representative of feminist theory in general. Although she does not put itquite so laboriously, Nicholson wants us to understand that the volume repre-sents only four white women; four white women from the United States; fourwhite women from the United States who are in the academy; who, within theacademy, each represent only a particular tradition within particular disciplines.If that does not yet make the point, Nicholson (1995: 1–2) further denies that thevolume represents even ‘a state of the art discussion of “the relationship of fem-inism and postmodernism” ’.

What then does the volume represent? If the views of these women have nowider significance, then what justified their being brought together in the firstplace? What justified the republication of their debate, first in German and,then, again in English?

Nicholson (1995: 1) at least describes each of the four women as a‘powerful theorist’. ‘Powerful theorist’ is a delightfully ambiguous phrase.Does it just acknowledge that these women are theorists who are powerful inthe academy, whose voices are important because of their power? Are we, aswe surely could, to subject the ‘repetition’ of this debate in the public forumto genealogical critique?

Surely, Nicholson does not mean the phrase ‘powerful theorists’ in this way.Nicholson means to indicate, rather, that these are women whose theoreticalinsights are powerful. The problem is that by so hyper-situating the debate,Nicholson disavows the only way we have of making sense of this theoreticalpower. If, as claimed, these women truly do offer us powerful insights, then thoseinsights should be about some object and should be objectively defensible inde-pendent of the voice that first uttered them. In that case, it should not matterwhether the insights are offered from the United States, by academics, or bywomen who are white.

While a phallogocentric disconnection between claim and claimant is neededto justify the impersonal significance of the debate – to make it more than just apower play in its own right, this phallogocentric disconnection is precisely whatthe debate’s discourse disavows. Butler in fact offers us a hyper-situationist theoryof the subject as a construction of linguistic performatives. For Butler, it is notenough to accept a symbolic interactionist account in which we become humansubjects by our acquisition of language. According to Butler (1995a), the


symbolic interactionist account still leaves an ‘I’ that is intact prior to any indi-vidual discursive encounter. But if (pace Butler) there is no pre-discursive ‘I’ inthis strong sense – not only no I prior to discourse in general, but no I prior evento any individual discursive encounter, then our entire identities must be recon-stituted de novo in every linguistic encounter. Essentially, that is what Butlermaintains. As Butler (1995b: 135) puts it, that ‘an “I” is founded through recitingthe anonymous linguistic site of the “I” (Benveniste) implies that citation is notperformed by a subject, but is rather the invocation by which a subject comesinto linguistic being’.

What Butler’s Lacanian position implies is that in the single linguisticencounter, the claimant himself or herself is constituted as an I by the veryclaims he or she makes. If that is so, then in discourse, we cannot attack a claimwithout simultaneously attacking the claimant. To counter a claim is to threatenthe entire identity of the one who made it.

Butler’s position represents an extreme. Yet, in Feminist Contentions, the debate asa whole is likewise characterised by a principled refusal to separate claims andclaimants. Claims are instead regarded as identifying standpoints of the claimants.Thus, the same point applies to the debate as a whole: claims cannot be attackedwithout simultaneously attacking the identity of the claimant.

Attacks not just on claims but on claimants are reflected in the very person-alised nature of the critiques that are offered. Fraser, for example, offersBenhabib the usual prefatory applause for a ‘clarifying’ and ‘fruitful’ approach,but then goes on to criticise not Benhabib’s argument but Benhabib’s conduct ofthe argument. According to Fraser (1995a: 61), Benhabib does not use her ownapproach ‘to fullest advantage’. Instead, says Fraser (1995a: 61), Benhabib’s‘reasoning wavers’. Benhabib herself is described as ‘ambivalent’ (1995a: 62)about and ‘shrinking’ (1995a: 63) from a position previously offered by Fraserand Nicholson. Finally, Fraser (1995a: 65) says Benhabib has ‘unnecessarilypolarised’ the debate with false antitheses.

Butler, in her second essay, entitled ‘For a Careful Reading’, suddenlybreaks with poststructuralism to assign her own work a univocal meaningcapable of being misread. And in fact, according to Butler, that univocalmeaning has been misread and deliberately so by both Fraser and Benhabib.Departing just as suddenly from her prior claim that ‘there is no doer behindthe deed’, Butler is sufficiently privy to the doer behind Benhabib’s deeds toknow that that doer has actually ‘chosen’ (1995b: 134) to misunderstandButler’s always clear prose. Cornell (1995b: 146), meanwhile, knows thatFraser herself ‘fails to understand how unconscious motivation … must bepart of any critical social research program’.

No wonder this debate ended in acrimony. From a phallogocentric perspec-tive, the acrimony appears to be a structural consequence of the discursive styleitself, a discursive style that makes no separation between claim and claimant. Italso does not help that claims tend to be evaluated in terms of their effects ratherthan their truth. Perhaps if feminists are to continue debating with each other, areturn to a more phallogocentric discourse is in order.


Now as soon as I attribute the acrimony to the discursive style of postmodernfeminist debate, you, dear readers, might start thinking that while somethingmust have caused the acrimony, it may not necessarily have been the cause Isuggest. You might start wondering whether, even in phallogocentric discourse,there are not times when debate among men also ends in acrimony.Alternatively, perhaps, the acrimony was caused by the Philosophy Consortium’svery imposition of an adversarial frame on what otherwise might have been acongenial conversation among women.

If you were thinking something along those lines, you have taken the bait.You have detached my conjecture from me and treated it as a view fromnowhere to be examined independently. And by weighing the truth of my claim,you have further affirmed the possibility of our arriving at truth.

Should my conjecture about the acrimony be refuted, this I who is me will notdisappear. Contrary to what Butler suggests, my conjecture is quite incidental towho I am. Even I can detach the claim from myself, treat it as a view fromnowhere, and adopt a posture of scepticism towards it.

Truth and truth surrogation

Notice that my larger claim – that feminist debate needs to return to phallogo-centric discourse – only follows if my initial claim is true about the source of theacrimony in Feminist Contentions. We can press the implications of a truth in a waythat we cannot press the implications of mere conjecture.

This distinction between the relative importing power of truth and conjectureis largely deserted in the discourse of Feminist Contentions. In that discourse, truthlurks as an absent presence that dare not speak its name. And yet, for anyconversation to move forward, it must mark and build on what it has establishedso far. If what a conversation establishes is not truth, then truth-surrogates atleast are needed.

In Feminist Contentions, conjectures often covertly surrogate for truth. Cornell(1995a), for example, tells us that there is no one truth of women’s situation.Instead, feminist consciousness-raising just represents endless attempts to re-imagine and re-symbolise the place of women. Cornell herself likes tore-imagine women’s place in Lacanian terms, which she variously describes as‘important’ for or even ‘crucial’ to the feminist movement. Why is Lacan socrucial? Because, Cornell (1995a: 86) explains, Lacanian psychoanalysis gives usa method to examine the ‘unconscious fantasies that have become so much apart of us that we cannot imagine reality without them’.

We need to stop Cornell here. How do we know that unconscious fantasieshave become so much a part of us that we cannot imagine reality without them?If there were no question that these fantasies exist, then Lacan’s address to themmight well be important. But the very existence of these fantasies is itself a positof the Lacanian analysis held up as the method for uncovering them.

Although Cornell does criticise certain aspects of Lacan’s approach, she neverquestions its basic premises. She does not even acknowledge their questionability.


Instead, Cornell gives us an extended and actually very helpful exposition ofLacan’s complicated thought, by the end of which it is entirely forgotten that thetruth status of it all remains conjectured re-imagining. Thus, in a speech act thatin this discourse is strangely valorised, Cornell simply announces her ‘insistence’(1995a: 87) on the need for social theory to incorporate psychoanalysis and theunconscious. Effectively, through extended exposition, Cornell transforms Lacan’sconjectures into a foundational surrogate for truth. Although I lack the space todemonstrate it here, in Gender Trouble, Butler (1990) performs exactly the samemanoeuvre of truth-surrogation to make Foucault similarly foundational. In bothcases, permit me to insist, the manoeuvre is a sleight of hand.

Extended exposition is not the only manoeuvre of truth-surrogation at workin postmodernist feminist discourse. There is a second manoeuvre that, again,Cornell and Butler both perform. The manoeuvre begins with a conditional ofthe form ‘If a then b’ and then goes on to insist on the importance of b withoutever establishing the truth of a.

This time, I will illustrate the manoeuvre from Butler’s Gender Trouble.Immediately ensconcing Foucault as an uncontested foundation, Butler (1990: 2)begins by saying not that Foucault claims or argues but that Foucault ‘points out’‘that juridical systems of power produce the subjects they subsequently come torepresent’. Butler (1990: 2), then, offers us the following conditional: ‘If this anal-ysis [Foucault’s] is right, then the juridical formation of language and politicsthat represents women as the “subject” of feminism is itself a discursive forma-tion and effect of a given version of representational politics.’ What Butlermeans is that if Foucault is right, then the category woman is an effect of discur-sive power. The conditional may follow, but is Foucault right?

The phallogocentric reader now expects Butler to establish that Foucault isright so as to pursue what logically follows. Butler, however, ignores this step toinsist immediately on the importance of what follows from Foucault’s beingright. ‘The question of the subject’, Butler (1990: 2) says, ‘is crucial for politics,and for feminist politics in particular, because juridical subjects are invariablyproduced through certain exclusionary practices.’ Although Butler still has notestablished that human subjects are produced in this Foucauldian way, she,nevertheless, goes on, ‘It is not enough to inquire into how women mightbecome more fully represented in language and politics. Feminist critique oughtalso to understand how the category of “women”, the subject of feminism, isproduced and restrained by the very structures of power through which emanci-pation is sought’ (Butler 1990: 2).

Although the name of truth is absent in this discourse, the place of truthremains and is now occupied by Foucault. Yet, the phallogocentric reader, everwary, remembers that Foucault’s claims are neither self-evident nor uncontestedoutside this discourse. Thus, in a book-length manuscript, the phallogocentricreader expects to see somewhere a defence of Foucault’s position against rivalpoints of view. That expectation is disappointed. Although Butler (1990: 16) doesacknowledge the existence of a rival literature, she just tells us simply and quietlythat ‘it is not examined here’.


Part of the persuasiveness of such manoeuvres rests on postmodernist fem-inism’s pragmatic grounds for adjudicating claims. Fraser (1995a: 64) explicitlyrejects ‘discourse aspiring to the God’s-eye view of foundationalist thought’ infavour of what she calls a ‘postmodernist, pragmatic, fallibilistic mode of fem-inist theorising’. I am sympathetic to Fraser’s position, but, too often, whatpostmodernist, feminist pragmatism comes to mean is that claims are adjudi-cated not on the basis of their truth but in terms of their consequences for thefeminist movement. Thus, where Lacan and Foucault are criticised and revised,they are often criticised and revised not because their claims have indepen-dently been shown to be false but because their unrevised claims are consideredto be unhelpful to feminist critique. Fraser (1995b: 165), herself, criticisesCornell’s view of a single, ‘phallogocentric symbolic order’ largely on thegrounds that it is a totalisation that ‘erases conflicts of interpretation, discursivestruggles, and the differential positioning of different women, all of which arecrucial to feminist theory’.

Yet, Cornell’s position could still be objectively true even if it has all theseadverse affects on feminist theory. Naively to assume otherwise is to court adanger Andrew specifically warns objective thinkers against: wishful thinking.Just as phallogocentric discourse evaluates the truth of a claim detached from itsclaimant so does it evaluate the truth of a claim detached from its alleged effects.From a phallogocentric point of view, truth is no respecter of either persons orconsequences. Truth may reside on one side of a dispute rather than another,but that needs to be established independently of the interests in contention.

Although, with the exception of Benhabib, the disputants in Feminist

Contentions all attempt to ward off truth as something unholy, truth continues tomanifest its absent presence. Truth manifests itself in Fraser’s accusation thatCornell provides a totalising viewpoint, deleterious to the feminist movement,and in Fraser’s complaint that Benhabib and Butler both erect false antitheses.Fraser’s charges here are ordinary, phallogocentric truth claims, positionedprecisely as the God’s-eye view Fraser disavows. God’s-eye truth manifests itself,similarly, when Fraser (1995a) repeatedly asks of both Benhabib and Butlerwhether what they claim is really the case. In Gender Trouble, Butler (1990: 3)(repetitively) describes foundationalism as a ‘fiction’ and as a ‘fable’, but what dothe words ‘fiction’ and ‘fable’ mean when there is no correlative concept oftruth? When in Feminist Contentions, Butler says it is a ‘fantasy’ to think of thehuman subject as its own point of departure, what exactly is the epistemologicaldifference between that fantasy and Cornell’s Lacanian re-imaginings? Is it justas Trotsky puts it in Their Morals and Ours that they have their fantasies and wehave our own?

Our utter inability to do away with the objectivity Andrew defends is mostvivid in Butler’s (1995b: 133) accusation that Benhabib literally misquotes her.Whereas Butler had written of ‘the doer behind the deed’, Benhabib, Butler says,misquotes her as writing ‘the doer beyond the deed’. It is unclear that anythinghangs on this misquotation other than establishing a minor sloppiness onBenhabib’s part. The charge, nevertheless, stands as a truth claim. As such, the


charge carries force only to the extent that it does in fact represent the objective,God’s-eye view of reality.

The interesting thing – apart from Butler’s resort to such phallogocentrism –is that the charge of misquotation is a claim, the God’s-eye truth of which wecan establish with almost complete certainty. Because my own sympathies are somuch with Benhabib in this debate, I confess I did not want this charge ofmisquotation to be true. Well, I said, maybe Benhabib was just paraphrasingButler, in which case, Butler has no grounds to complain. That is how I wantedthe truth to turn out. However, as Andrew (Collier 2003: 185–186) points out,‘wishful thinking is still an error which we try to avoid, not a process which wecan accept with a good conscience’. I felt myself epistemically obligated, there-fore, to face the objective facts whatever they were.

Are there objective facts in this case? Well, when I looked back at Benhabib’spaper, there, sure enough, on page 21 was the phrase ‘the doer beyond the deed’in quotation marks and attributed to Butler. Although my eyes may deceive me,every time I look – or think I do, the misquotation remains the same. I assume itwill be so for anyone. Thus, however much I would have it otherwise, I am actu-ally more convinced of the truth of Benhabib’s misquotation of Butler than Iam of the truth of the theory of evolution – and I am pretty convinced of that.That Benhabib misquoted Butler appears to me practically and timelessly incon-testable. There is then not only a reality independent of what we think or want,but also a correspondence with that reality that our claims can sometimesachieve – and achieve almost indubitably.

What have I tried to establish about the discourse of Feminist Contentions? Ihave argued that, out of principle, claims in this discourse are not detachedeither from their claimants or from their consequences. I conjectured that theacrimony ending the debate was partly due to this non-separation of claims andclaimants so that an attack on claims becomes an attack on the claimants whomake them. Although I think there is something to this conjecture, I do not thinkI have proven it.

My ultimate concern, however, was more fundamental. There is in thediscourse of Feminist Contentions a principled evasion of the matter of objectivityand truth, which Andrew Collier defends. Because I believe this principledevasion is deleterious to the feminist movement, I have tried to offer a reversedeconstruction, a deconstruction of deconstructionism, to show that in it too therepressed returns. I have tried to show that even in the postmodern discourse ofFeminist Contentions, the conversation cannot proceed far without marking andbuilding on something truth-like. Thus, if truth and reality are repudiated, some-thing more suspect comes to stand in their place. I tried to show how in thisdiscourse the place of truth is taken by what I call truth-surrogates. Even then, Ihave tried to show, plain old ordinary truth claims keep returning. We cannotlong repress the matters of truth and objectivity.

Why do truth and objectivity matter? Are they just some male obsessions? Ido not think so. As I tried to illustrate in the case of my own conjectured rela-tion between the acrimony of the debate and the way it was conducted, the


implications of a truth can be pressed in a way that we cannot press the impli-cations of mere conjecture.

In the end, it is perplexing why feminism would even want to surrender truthto men. Surely, the objective truth of women’s situation is that women continueto be oppressed and devalued. Truth, then, is something that belongs to thefeminist side.

Of course, for truth to belong to the feminist side, feminism itself must adopta more rigorous attitude toward the truth. If there are important ways in whichwomen today are still oppressed and devalued, there are also oppressions anddevaluations that are only imagined. Feminism is not served by just proliferatingnew and interesting critiques without also asking whether those critiques areobjectively true. Where warranted and unwarranted critiques are countenancedequally, the mixture only dilutes the case for changes that are warranted. Theobjectivity Andrew Collier defends is embraced by feminists from the criticalrealist perspective. It should become a desideratum for the feminist movement asa whole.

References

Benhabib, Seyla (1995a) ‘Feminism and Postmodernism’, in Seyla Benhabib, JudithButler, Drucilla Cornell, Nancy Fraser and Linda Nicholson, Feminist Contentions, NewYork: Routledge, pp. 17–34.

—— (1995b) ‘Subjectivity, Historiography, and Politics’, in Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler,Drucilla Cornell, Nancy Fraser and Linda Nicholson, Feminist Contentions, New York:Routledge, pp. 107–127.

Butler, Judith (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York:Routledge.

—— (1995a) ‘Contingent Foundations’, in Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler, DrucillaCornell, Nancy Fraser and Linda Nicholson, Feminist Contentions, New York: Routledge,pp. 35–48.

—— (1995b) ‘For a Careful Reading’, in Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell,Nancy Fraser and Linda Nicholson, Feminist Contentions, New York: Routledge, pp.127–144.

Collier, Andrew (2003) In Defence of Objectivity, London: Routledge.Cornell, Drucilla (1995a) ‘What is Ethical Feminism?’, in Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler,

Drucilla Cornell, Nancy Fraser and Linda Nicholson, Feminist Contentions, New York:Routledge, pp. 75–106.

—— (1995b) ‘Rethinking the Time of Feminism’, in Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler,Drucilla Cornell, Nancy Fraser and Linda Nicholson, Feminist Contentions, New York:Routledge, pp. 145–157.

Flax, Jane (1990) Thinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism in the Contem-

porary West, Berkeley: University of California.Fraser, Nancy (1995a) ‘False Antitheses’, in Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler, Drucilla

Cornell, Nancy Fraser and Linda Nicholson, Feminist Contentions, New York: Routledge,pp. 59–75.

—— (1995b) ‘Pragmatism, Feminism, and the Linguistic Turn’, in Seyla Benhabib, JudithButler, Drucilla Cornell, Nancy Fraser and Linda Nicholson, Feminist Contentions, NewYork: Routledge, pp. 157–172.


Moulton, Janice (1983) ‘A Paradigm of Philosophy: The Adversary Method’, inSandra G. Harding and Merril Hintikka (eds), Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives

on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science, New York: Kluwer,pp. 149–164.

Nicholson, Linda (1995) ‘Introduction’, in Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler, DrucillaCornell, Nancy Fraser and Linda Nicholson, Feminist Contentions, New York: Routledge,pp. 1–16.


Part III

The objectivity of value

Throughout his work, Andrew Collier offers a consistently anti-idealist and anti-postmodern agenda in philosophy, which is resistant to fashion. In his early yearshe was a regular contributor to the journal Radical Philosophy, presenting no-nonsense defences of a materialist and realist epistemology against the critiquesoffered by the Althusserians and the post-Althusserians. In one of his relativelyearly articles, for example, he defended epistemology against the attacks on thesubject promoted by some of the post Althusserians (Collier 1978). (The title ofhis recent book, In Defence of Objectivity (2003), echoes that of this early work, ‘InDefence of Epistemology’.) He also offered a balanced view of Sartre’s Marxismagainst those who would either see Sartre as an ‘individualist’, who was irrele-vant to the class struggle, or see Marxism as offering nothing to the philosophers(Collier 1976). In the middle years of his life, he excelled as the clear and cogentpresenter of the ideas of Roy Bhaskar and other transcendental or critical real-ists, offering perspicacious accounts of Bhaskar’s early works in the philosophy ofscience and social science.

Indeed, he remained a loyal defender of Bhaskar’s writings even when thelatter moved into broader territory – into, as the title of one of Collier’s reviewsof one of Bhaskar’s recent works has it, ‘negative thinking’ (Collier 1995: 36).For example, in his book Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom (1993), Bhaskar movedfrom his specific interests in philosophy of science and social science into moregeneral philosophical territory, and developed the concept of real absence. Realabsences, according to Bhaskar, can have causal effects. For example, the absenceof Vitamin C in a person’s diet can cause scurvy. Collier refers to Sartre’s discus-sion of Pierre’s absence in Being and Nothingness. For Sartre, there are absencesbecause there are people. Collier points out that it is because Sartre is expectingto meet Pierre in the café, that Pierre’s absence is noteworthy. This is an absencethat is significant. On the other hand, Collier indicates other ‘absences’ that donot have such significance. For example, it does not make the same sort of senseto refer to the absence of Wellington or Napoleon who happened not to be inthe café at the time (Collier 1995: 36).

Latterly Collier has continued his defence of objectivity. Whilst Collier hasbeen a significant voice in challenging the vagaries of relativism and valuepluralism, he has not couched his work specifically in terms of such challenges.

5 The objectivity of value

Alison Assiter

Instead, he seeks to clarify the meaning of key concepts such as the notion ofobjectivity. He regularly refers to figures in the history of philosophy, sometimeslittle-known thinkers, such as John Macmurray, in order to illustrate and clarifypoints he wishes to make.

In his recent discussion of the nature of objectivity, Collier seeks to debunksome myths that surround the notion of objectivity and the views that have beenattributed to critical realists on this matter. One myth he notes is that objectivityis infallibility. Put like that, it invites the retort: surely nobody believes preciselythat! However, he points out that many of their detractors accuse critical realistsof believing in a complete and final account of what is true, which we could inprinciple possess. Rorty, for one, has referred to a God’s-eye view of reality andclaimed that realists purport to possess it. However, Collier insists that realists arealso and always fallibilists. Indeed, he puts the point more strongly: ‘belief inobjectivity entails and is entailed by, the fallibility of our judgements’ (Collier2003: 140). I am not certain that I believe this strong claim of Collier’s, since itseems to me that nothing is entailed about the fallibility or otherwise of ourbeliefs about the world by claiming that those beliefs pertain to something inde-pendent of the believer. However, he is certainly right to challenge the claim thatthere is a connection between realism and infallibility.

The objectivity of value

I would like to concentrate on one aspect of Collier’s writing: his notion of theobjectivity of value. I think that this highly controversial and unfashionableview of his is tremendously important. However, there is one issue, appreciatedby his ‘early self ’, which I believe is obscured by his ‘later self ’. In his article‘On the Production of Moral Ideology’ (1974), Collier discusses Althusser’sessay, ‘Ideological State Apparatuses’ (Althusser 1971). There, Althusser raisesthe questions: How does the capitalist system ensure the reproduction of theconditions that make for its continuation? Why do individuals comply with therequirements of the capitalist mode of production? These questions might beput in an alternative language were they to be raised today. Lara, for example,has written of the ‘imaginary’ – the collective awareness a group might have ofits group identity or group cohesion. She writes of ways in which forms of theimaginary can be subverted or changed, and of the way in which New SocialMovements have begun to do this (Lara 1998).

In the above article, Collier articulates a view that both draws on and claimscritical distance from the Althusser of the ‘Ideological State Apparatuses’ essay.He argues, contrary to Althusser, that the most significant ideological stateapparatus is in fact the workplace itself, and not, as Althusser had argued, thoseapparatuses that appear to be more clearly focused on the production of ideo-logical forms, such as the school or the church. The reason for this, Collierargues, is that in fact, if one looks at the school, the most important ‘ideological’message that is conveyed is subservience on the part of the pupils to the ‘power’dynamics of the school. This, he writes, has far more important and lasting

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effects than the content of the information conveyed to the pupils through thecurriculum. The most effective medium, for Collier, therefore, for conveyingthese relations of domination/subordination, is the workplace itself, since it is inthe workplace that people really learn about power dynamics. (Personally I amnot certain whether this is in fact the case. Habits learned in childhood aredeeply formed in a way that later patterns are not.) Collier believes that the‘ideological values’ conveyed in the workplace are connected to moral theoriessuch as that of Kant. Presumably, this is insofar as both presuppose that theagent – embodied in the worker – is a free, rational being. In turn, and longbefore this notion became fashionable, Collier saw this emphasis upon therational being as entailing a clear distinction between humans and otheranimals, and an implicit claim that morality need have nothing to do with non-human animals. He is critical, as am I, of this particular view of morality.

Instead, Collier maintains (in the same article) that ‘true’ moralities have todo, in some important respects, with ‘our’ natural natures and with theirneeds’ satisfaction. I am not sure that either he or I would use such expres-sions today (i.e. ‘true’ morality as opposed to ideologically based morality)but, to my mind, this moral premise remains extremely significant. The claimthat there is a ‘true’ set of moral imperatives and the claim that this setderives, in some manner, from our natural natures is one with which I wouldconcur. These two claims seem to me to be both broadly true and to be onesof whose pertinence ‘the later’ Andrew sometimes appears to lose sight.Broadly the reason why the claim about our natural nature is so important isthat no person can do anything at all unless her basic needs are satisfied. Inthis respect, the satisfaction of basic needs is, in Keith Graham’s words, a‘constraint of precondition’ (Graham 1996). Because the satisfaction of needsis so crucial, in my view, these needs ought to be satisfied, and there is a moralobligation to ensure that the needs of all are satisfied. I have spelt out thisargument in my recent book (Assiter 2003). Indeed, in my view, there arespecific moral obligations that arise from this perspective on natural needsthat constitute a challenge to the pluralistic premise of much contemporaryliberal political theory.

I therefore believe that Andrew’s continuing commitment, in his books Being

and Worth and In Defence of Objectivity, to a robust defence of objectivity in thedomains both of ‘fact’ and of value, is very important. In his latest book, he putsthe point in typical no-nonsense fashion:

These two judgements – that facts are objective and that values are objective– which I have introduced as examples, in fact carry widely differingcredence. The former is doubted by Feyerabend and by some postmod-ernists, but only ever by academics in their studies. It is generally acceptedby plain men and women, and by academics when they are not posing assuch. The second is doubted by virtually all twentieth-century thinkers andby non-academics as much as by academics. I hold both.

(Collier 2003: 135)


Values, for Collier, have no less of a claim to objectivity than facts, and he is ofthe view that both positivism and existentialism are misguided in this respect.The former relegates values to the status of the ‘merely’ subjective, whilst thelatter celebrates the non-objective status of value. Both claims, he considers tobe wrong.

I should like to spend a little time discussing this issue, dwelling in particularon the question of the objectivity of value, and the cognitive status, accorded byCollier, to value judgements. Collier argues: (a) that morality is ‘about’ emotions;(b) that emotions can be rational or non-rational; and (c) that emotions arerational to the extent that they correspond to the ‘way things are’. The transitionfrom an irrational to a rational emotion is a matter for the intellect. Realismabout value is the capacity to behave in accordance with the nature of theobject. One example offered by Andrew is the following: fear of mice is irra-tional; once I see the irrationality of my fear, I will cease to have it. He arguesfurther that the tendency to expect the worst is a vice that is cognitive in nature.What makes an emotion appropriate or not is the nature of the object of thatemotion. Fear, for example, involves an idea that the object is dangerous.

Whilst I believe that the overall and unfashionable claim that value is objec-tive is an extremely important one, I also think that Andrew may have lost sightof the reason why it is so important. It seems to me that his ‘early self ’ was awareof this reason. In the remainder of this article, I will spell out where I think that‘the later’ Andrew is wrong about value and why I think he is wrong.

I have two queries, one minor and one less so. First, fear does not invariablyinvolve any kind of belief that the object of the fear is dangerous. Fear may noteven have an obvious object. My son, for example, for a long time was afraid togo to sleep. He did not know why. Eventually he came to the view that his fearhad been connected in some complex way to a burglary that had occurred someyears earlier. But a deeper analysis of the cause of his fear may connect it to thefact that I – his mother – had started working away from home at approximatelythe same time as the burglary had occurred. The object of his fear may thereforeindirectly have been the absence of his mother. But it is not the case that my sonwould ever have claimed that he was afraid of the absence of his mother. Simplypersuading him, as Collier might suggest, that he should not be afraid of a hypo-thetical burglary – the immediate object of his fear – would not have allayed hisfear. In other words, emotions and their causes seem to me to be somewhat morecomplex than Collier’s analysis allows, on the face of it. More importantly, itseems to me doubtful that morality is exclusively, if at all, ‘about’ emotions.Instead, I would maintain that a crucial part of morality concerns ‘objective’facts about needs.

The second query is more major, although I do not think that it need beinsurmountable. Many modern ethical theorists argue that ethics is concernedwith providing the principles to guide a decision-making procedure, bysuggesting what one ought to do in cases of moral conflict. Take, for example,Sartre’s famous dilemma faced by the young man who has to choose betweenstaying at home to look after his mother or joining the French forces and going

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to war. His dilemma is a classic one and is faced in a different form by Antigone.Hers was the choice between obligations to family and friends and obligations toking and state as a citizen. One might put the following question to Andrew: howdoes his approach to morality help to resolve these kinds of problems? It may bethat Andrew would say that he would not want to couch his discussion of ethicalissues in these terms. My own view is that if we use our reason in relation to suchsignificant moral matters, we will eventually be able to discern our obligationstowards one another in these matters – precisely because these obligations arisefrom our possession of common natures.

The scope of ethical issues

I would like to discuss further two concerns about the form of Andrew’s recentdefence of the objectivity of value. The first relates to the scope of ethical issuesand the second to their nature. Collier would like to extend the notion of valueinhering in an object, rather that in a valuing subject, to a whole range of possibleobjects beyond humans and animals. Thus, he claims, even rocks ‘have’ value; arock possesses a tendency to continue in its being (that is a conatus, followingSpinoza). One can ascribe some sort of ‘value’ to a rock, despite the fact that it isnot alive, because of this tendency to continue in its existing state. Collier thenfollows Augustine in offering a hierarchy of value, with physical objects in thelowest position and human beings in the highest. With regard to physical objectssuch as the rock, one should simply appreciate and love their being.

Collier states that it seems to him to be a matter of ‘verbal convention’ whereon the scale of things one draws the line underneath that which has value (e.g.the atomic or molecular constituents of objects, which are themselves objects).On the contrary, I would argue that it should not be a matter of verbal conven-tion where the line is drawn, but that some rationale should be provided for thelocus of the line. To my mind, one needs some sort of rationale, explaining whatit is for something to have value and in what the objective good consists. Plato,for example, presented an account of the objectively good which transcendedthe empirical world. Good lives were to be guided by the Form of the Good.Aristotle too, insofar as he can be read as a universalist, outlined an account ofthe Good which applies to all, independently of the location of any particularindividual. He proposed a conception of the Good for Man, deriving from hislist of virtues, which was historically invariant. O’Neill (1996) points out that,although for many contemporary political theorists, ‘virtue’ and ‘justice’ havediverged, with the former being associated with particularists, and the latter withuniversalists, both Aristotle and Plato offered standards of both virtue and ofjustice, whose observance would constitute that good. In this sense, Aristotle’s‘man of practical wisdom’ was intended as a description of any and every one ofus and thus as a description of what it means for a human being to ‘have’ value.

Many contemporary liberal universalists reject their predecessors’ reliance onmetaphysical assumptions, and rely instead upon a minimal conception ofreason. It is because we humans are reasoning beings that we are moral agents


or beings that ‘have’ value, to use Andrew’s language. Their particularist criticsargue that universalists implicitly draw in more than they are entitled to indescribing this minimal notion. Implicitly, they refer to ‘white men’ or to whitewestern men, or to some other grouping that they represent as universal. Inother words, to use Andrew’s language, they purport to ground their view ofvalue in something ‘real’ but, in fact, they fail to anchor it in something trulyuniversal.

It seems to me that the early universalists were right to attempt to groundtheir notion of reason and their account of what it is for something to havevalue. Instead of this ‘something’ being metaphysical, however, I believe thatcommon human nature provides the sort of foundation required for an appro-priate universal view of certain ‘goods’. I have spelt out this argument in myrecent book. Andrew, it seems to me, implicitly held a version of this account inhis earlier writing, that is lost in his later work.

Since ‘the recent’ Andrew’s view of the scope of value seems both counter-intuitive and odd in describing physical objects as having value, some rationaleneeds to be offered for their inclusion in the category of objects with value.Andrew claims that the rock has value in the sense of having the right tocontinue in its being. But why should the rock not be used to make some usefulobject? If every physical object had a right to continue in its being, then no toolscould ever be created and no work could be undertaken. If the rock were to bevolcanic, would it, according to the Spinozist perspective defended by Andrew,then have the right to explode and possibly destroy human and animal life in theprocess? Collier, in these circumstances, would no doubt argue that the rock doesnot have the ‘right’ to do this, since the place of the rock in the chain of being ismore lowly than that of the animal or the human. But does the volcano there-fore have the ‘right’ to destroy other physical objects? Is the grass in my gardenin a parallel position to the rock? Does it have the ‘right’ not to be cut? Colliercannot, without contradiction, extend this kind of right to both the bindweedthat is killing my rose and to the rose itself.

It is not entirely clear to me whether Collier would suggest that all physicalobjects have the same kind of value. To him, do naturally occurring objects havea higher value than manufactured objects? What kind of value does a nuclearbomb have, for example, or a kitchen sink? The former can be used to destroyvast numbers of lives as well as physical things; the latter is useful, and serves aparticular purpose, but the person who uses it may wish, at some point, toreplace it with a different sink. How would ‘loving’ the sink and appreciating itsvalue be spelt out? There would seem, in these circumstances, to be nothing thesink could claim in favour of its not being replaced. If the sink is in perfectlygood condition, then there is a clear sense in which it has value, but the value isonly instrumental – it has a use value and an exchange value. It is not these kindsof value, however, that Andrew is interested in. However, would Andrew wish toextend the line further to include the value of negative entities like the non-appearance of Pierre? Does every non-existent thing have value as well? In whatsense does it do so?

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If the type of value in question involves moral concern or moral obligation,in what sense can one have a concern or an obligation towards a physical thing?Having a moral obligation towards some ‘thing’ presupposes that such a ‘thing’stands in a certain kind of relation to the person having the obligation; the‘thing’ has somehow induced the obligation. I might have inter-personal obliga-tions for all sorts of reasons, ranging from the person having helped me out andmy wanting to return the favour, through to that person simply being in need,and thus my incurring an obligation to give help. However, that range of rela-tions does not apply to any relation possible between a person and a rock. Therock can neither act towards me in such a way as to impose an obligation on me,nor can it have needs that I am obligated to fulfil. The rock has no subjectivityand therefore cannot take cognisance of its feelings.

In the philosophical tradition, moral value is ascribed either to acts carriedout by people or, for Aristotle in particular, to people of a certain character.Rocks can neither act in a moral way nor can they ‘be’ moral. Furthermore, Ican have only one kind of obligation towards an animal of a non-human species.It is very unlikely that an ant, for example, will be in a position to act towards mein such a fashion that I can incur an obligation to it. However, the ant might wellhave needs that I should satisfy.

Thus, in my view, a case has to be made out for the claim that any ‘thing’ hasvalue. It is not enough that the object simply exists for it to have value. For me tohave any kind of obligation towards anyone or anything, then that person orthing has to have shown itself to be either deserving of my obligation or needingme to act in a certain way towards it. If, for example, someone is starving, then Ibelieve there is an obligation (on someone) to satisfy that person’s need for food.This obligation is present even if the needy person has not entered into anymoral or causal relations with the one who has the obligation. However, thisclaim of mine is a strong one, and there are many who would argue that Icannot have an obligation towards anyone or anything unless there has beensome sort of prior moral or causal relationship between us.

The epistemic and ontological claim, made by Bhaskar (1975) and other crit-ical realists, that purely physical things existed and acted in the world beforethere were any human beings around makes perfect sense to me. For him:‘realism is the theory that the ultimate objects of scientific inquiry exist and act(for the most part) quite independently of scientists and their activity’ (Bhaskar1989: 12). But the extension from the claim that physical things existed beforehuman beings to their having value independently of human beings seems to meto be considerably less plausible.

Being as such

This brings me to the second of the two issues I would like to discuss. Collierwrites that it is important to attach value to existing beings, to value things andpeople for what they are. He stresses the importance of valuing things for whatthey are and not for what they might become or might be at some future date.


Drawing on Augustine, he writes that he has no duty to bring about some idealman or woman in the future, only to try to ensure that life is good for those wholive now and for those who might live in the future (Collier 1999: 69). I think thatthis is a very important corrective to those theories of morality that stress thatthe person who is valued is the person as rational being or as citizen of somedemocratic polity. On the contrary, it resonates with the views of those feministswho have stressed the importance of a relational conception of morality thatconcerns itself with the here and now and with caring for real people in theircomplexity and their variety.

However, some of the criticisms of ‘care’ theory, as it relates to feminist ethics,bear on matters here. Is care necessarily such a good thing? If someone is aheroin user and killing themselves, then they may require some careful discussionof the pros and cons of what they are doing rather than straightforward care. Dolove and care of themselves help if someone is starving and needs food? Doesn’tthis person need more than care? Should we care equally for Hitler, Bush, apsychopath and Mother Teresa? Should each of us value each of them equally?Furthermore, it has been argued that care could constitute a form of tyranny, ifthe carer does not seriously attempt to engage with and understand the person tobe cared for (Narayan 1995). If one does not allow the ‘other’ sufficient scope forthe development of an independent personality, then care, of itself, may not bethe right action.

Nevertheless, it is not quite people as they are, without any qualification, whoshould be valued according to the Augustinian perspective as adumbrated byCollier. It is, for him, ‘being’ as ‘being’ that is to be loved, but this being is inher-ently virtuous. It is not clear to me what Andrew means by this inherentlyvirtuous being. If he means that each is a virtuous being in the Aristotelian sense,then I would have reservations for a different reason. It is not obvious to me thatthose specific Aristotelian virtues are the right ones. In any case, a rock cannot bevirtuous in Aristotle’s sense. It is also not clear to me how the view that we loveeach being as a ‘virtuous’ being fits with the view, advanced in his chapter ‘TheWorth of Human Beings’ in Being and Worth, that it is important that each beingshould be loved for what it is. Each being, he claims there, should be loved in adifferent way, in accordance with its particular nature. The ‘complexity andspecificity’ of each individual being should, he says, be recognised’ (Collier 1999:91). I should like more elaboration of what he means by this notion, and of theclaim made in the following chapter – that the criticism that this allows one to‘love’ evil people rests on a misunderstanding of what is meant by ‘evil’.

It seems to me not possible for one person to love everyone. It is also unclear,without further discussion, why I should love everyone. I am unsure what such anotion would mean. Perhaps, in some respects, Andrew’s perspective resonateswith the feminist view that, in gaining knowledge, we should recognise our ownembodied, embedded identity, and attempt constantly to engage with otherperspectives. We should, on this outlook, metaphorically travel the world –engaging with other positions, where our own outlook is continually tested andmodified (Seller 1994). We should aim, in this fashion, really to understand the

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other; to arrive at an authentic understanding of the other. Indeed, Collier’soutlook also resonates with the view of Taylor, that I should recognise theauthenticity of the other (Taylor 1989, 1991).

However, the question arises in relation to each of these perspectives: on whatgrounds are others owed these rights? How do we differentiate between worthyand not so worthy life projects? How, on Collier’s premises, can we differentiateauthentic from inauthentic life projects? How can we love each person equallyfor their ‘being’ at the same time as recognising their complexity and differencefrom one another? There are some ‘others’, whose values are such that it is inap-propriate for me or for anyone to empathise with them – the Nazis come to mindas one clear example. How do we decide which ‘others’ to take seriously? Whose‘being’ or ‘what’ kind of being should we love?

The ‘earlier Collier’ would, I think, have held a different view. I have argued(Assiter 2003) that it is not really loving every other for what they are thatmatters, rather what matters is that every other has basic needs that must besatisfied before anyone can do anything at all. In Andrew’s chapter, ‘The Worthof Human Beings’, there is a hint of the earlier writer. Andrew writes thateveryone has the right to the ‘bare’ necessities of life: ‘the list of necessities willinclude in the first place things without which one cannot have health, such assufficient food, protection against the weather, an environment without harmfulpollution, and access to medication when ill’ (Collier 1999: 96).

However, as it stands, this view does need more elaboration, for there are manywho have questioned (a) the extent to which it is possible to satisfy needs of thiskind; (b) whether these needs are genuinely universal or not; (c) what kinds of moralobligation flow from this kind of claim and whether or not an ‘infinity’ (Levinas) ofpossible obligations is generated, all of which cannot possibly be fulfilled.

Moreover, prioritising these kinds of basic needs is a different matter fromvaluing each person for their authenticity as a being. Instead, it involves valuingeach and every person because each one of them is a being with natural andbasic needs.

A related reservation I have about Collier’s latest defence of the objectivity ofvalue is that following his claim about the natural natures of human beings is aquite separate view about the importance of the plurality of value. Collierwrites:

Differences between different sets of virtues and duties may be entirelyrational, since they may derive from the same ordered love of being underdifferent material and social conditions. For in different kinds of society,appropriate to different stages of human history and even differentgeographical environments, different duties may need to be observed, and toan extent different virtues cultivated. This kind of moral diversity is neitherarbitrary nor a matter of one code being right and the other wrong, but amatter of different practices being the best way to love in one set of condi-tions from those that are best in another.

(Collier 1999: 92)


Indeed, Collier goes on to write that even within the same society there may be arange of moral codes that are not intrinsically better or worse than each other.For some reason he writes ‘this sort of pluralism may be particularly in place inthe sphere of sexual ethics’ (Collier 1999: 92). I am not sure why he believes thatpluralism is more appropriate in this sphere than in relation, for example, to thediffering views about abortion very strongly held by a white, Anglo-Americanfeminist, versus those equally strongly held by a woman living in contemporaryChina, forced to abort or abandon her second-born child. My more funda-mental question is, why pluralism?

It seems to me that a belief in pluralism in relation to value may be incompat-ible in the end with the objectivity of value and with Andrew’s very strong claim,with which I concur, that values are objective. If values are objective, then thereis a right set of values and a wrong set. Perhaps no one as yet has discovered thisright set of values, and that explains the existing plurality of views about value.However, in just the same way that epistemic claims are true or false by virtue ofthe way the world is, so value claims are true or false by virtue of the way humanbeings are. Crucially, they are natural beings with natural needs. Equallycrucially, there is a difference between the fact that there may ultimately be onetrue set of moral values and the fact that, in the present world, there is a vastrange of disparate values. In other words, moral monists must also be fallibilistsabout moral beliefs. Just as, according to Collier, scientific objectivity is aboutmaking discoveries about the way the world is, so too objectivity about value isabout making discoveries about values.

Therefore, it seems to me that the very strong claim articulated by Collier tothe effect that value is objective sits oddly with his further claim that what ismorally right and wrong can vary from society to society and even within soci-eties. If value exists objectively in some agent-neutral fashion, then there surelymust be a right and wrong way of valuing things and either the capitalist or thesocialist, to take one of Collier’s examples, is wrong.

Maternal issues

Before I conclude this piece, I would like to raise one other issue. There is a sep-arate and quite different kind of difficulty with Collier’s Augustinian perspective.According to the Augustinian perspective on being, woman is so made that she isdesigned by nature to procreate. She is the passive receptacle of the male seed;she is ‘selfish’ and ‘sinful’ if she refuses her destiny. One example of her refusingher destiny would be to engage in non-procreative sex. On the Augustinian view,abortion is a sin against God in defiance of a woman’s nature. There is, indeed,underlying some exponents of the contemporary ‘right to life’ viewpoint, a viewanalogous to this Augustinian outlook. From this perspective, women who haveabortions have been accused of ‘murdering’ their own children.

Whilst Andrew places the religious overtones of the Augustinian view inbrackets, and whilst he would no doubt wish to propound a rather differentperspective on the ‘being’ of woman, nonetheless, his view is liable to lead to a

72 Alison Assiter

kind of unidimensional view of the self and of personal identity. Motherhoodmight become a state of being rather than a social role. Since I maintain thathuman beings gain their personhood and subjective sense of identity throughinteractions with others, the notion of a ‘true being’ suggests a static and possiblyreductive model of the self that might lend itself to these kinds of conservativeconceptions of being. Personhood, on my alternative view, is a process; it is notstatic. A relational concept of personhood requires self-awareness on the part ofeach of the parties to the relation. It is difficult to see how any of this can be thecase if a person is a ‘being’ with a static nature. In my view, even as a naturalbeing, a person exists as part of a polity with others similarly placed.

To conclude, I believe that Collier’s resolute defence of the objectivity ofvalue against opposition from all quarters is courageous and right. I also concurwith his early view that the notion of human beings as natural beings is vitallyimportant in any ‘true’ moral theory. However, I am a little more sceptical abouttwo of Collier’s further claims. I am sceptical about his desire to extend therange of valued objects to physical things as well as to human beings and otheranimals. I also have some doubts about the view that people should be valued as‘beings’. If he had qualified this claim, such as to be about people as naturalbeings, then it would have accorded with my own view. However, Collier is to beadmired for consistently defending a series of views that have gone against thegrain of fashion.

Bibliography

Althusser, L. (1971) ‘Ideological State Apparatuses’, in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Articles,London: New Left Books.

Assiter, A.. (2003) Revisiting Universalism, Basingstoke, Palgrave.Bhaskar, R. (1975) A Realist Theory of Science, Leeds: Leeds Books.—— (1989) Reclaiming Reality, London: Verso.—— (1993) Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom, London: Verso.Collier, A. (1974) ‘On the Production of Moral Ideology’, Radical Philosophy, 9, pp. 5–15.—— (1976) ‘Alienations’ (review of Chiodi, P., Sartre and Marxism, trans. Kate Soper,

Harvester, 1976), in Radical Philosophy, 15.—— (1978) ‘In Defence of Epistemology’, Radical Philosophy, 20 (Summer), pp. 8–22.—— (1995) ‘The Power of Negative Thinking: Review of Roy Bhaskar, Dialectic, the Pulse

of Freedom’, Radical Philosophy, 69, pp. 36–39.—— (1999) Being and Worth, London: Routledge.—— (2003) In Defence of Objectivity, London: Routledge.Graham, K, (1996) ‘Coping with the Many Coloured Dome: Pluralism and Practical

Reason’, in D. Archard (ed.), Philosophy and Pluralism, Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-sity Press.

Lara, Maria (1998) Moral Textures, Feminist Narratives in the Public Sphere, Cambridge, PolityPress.

Lennon, K. (1997) ‘Reply to Longino’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, SupplementaryVolume LXX1, p. 38.

Narayan, U. (1995) ‘Colonialism and its others: Considerations on Rights and CarePerspectives’, Hypatia, 10: 2.


O’Neill, O. (1996) Towards Justice and Virtue, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Seller, A.(1994) ‘Should the Feminist Philosopher Stay at Home?’ in K. Lennon and M.

Whitford, Knowing the Difference, Feminist Perspectives in Epistemology, London: Routledge,pp. 230–249.

Taylor, C. (1991) The Ethics of Authenticity, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.—— (1989) Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity, Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press.

74 Alison Assiter

As a good atheist I want to start from a passage in my favourite book in theBible, Ecclesiastes: ‘Cast thy bread upon waters: for thou shalt find it after manydays’.1 The translation is from a version which as a good Catholic atheist I wasbrought up believing should be treated with some scepticism, the King JamesBible. However, the translation offers a fine expression of a metaphor about thegoodness of giving and the value of reciprocal relationships. Given all thatAndrew Collier has given us over the years, it is a remark that I hope finds appli-cation to his own work, that in this book I hope he finds at least something inreturn, and that in this paper the ideas do not return in too soggy or stale a state.This paper is a reflection on a number of themes in Andrew Collier’s work onthe relation of commerce and the language of value from which I have a learneda great deal.

I want to start that reflection with another translation of the passage fromEcclesiastes that I have just quoted. As part of its attempt ‘to present the Biblicalcontent and message in standard, everyday, natural English’2 the same passage istranslated by the American Bible Study for the Good News Bible as follows: ‘Investyour money in foreign trade, and one of these days you will make a profit.’3 Thedifferences between the translations are striking. A metaphor about the good-ness of giving and the value of reciprocal relations is re-written in theunadorned language of market exchange and self-interest. The result is bothdescriptively and normatively objectionable. The shift in translation is inaccu-rate – it involves the conflation of quite different kinds of acts and relations. Itis pernicious – it renders as universal acts and relations that are specific to themarket and it impoverishes the ethical language which we use to speak of suchacts and relations. If it were the case that the new translation was required tomake any sense of the original in ‘standard, everyday, natural English’, then somuch the worse for the way we understand and speak of our relations to others.Fortunately, it is not completely so. I take it that these inadequacies in therevised translation are fairly obvious and it is certainly not my purpose in thispaper to engage in details of Bible translation. What I rather want to explore issomething about the way we talk of ourselves and our relations to others thatthe contrast the two passages illustrates so dramatically – the way statementsabout the human condition are presented in the language of commerce. In so

6 Commerce and the languageof value

John O’Neill

doing I will be taking up the claim that Andrew Collier defends in his essay ‘InDefence of Objectivity’ that a commercial ideology permeates modern philos-ophy (Collier 2003: 149–151). I think this claim is true and Andrew Collier’sformulation of that claim in his previous writings and in conversations has verymuch influenced my own thoughts on the subject. In this chapter I examinesome of the uses of market metaphors to describe the human character andcondition in modern economic, political and ethical theory. In the first section Ioutline a shift that has occurred in the language of economics, from a thickAugustinian language of vices and virtues that survives into the classicaleconomists of the eighteenth century to the thin value-neutral language ofmodern professional neo-classical economics. In the second section I argue thatfar from offering a value-neutral language that improves the objectivity andexplanatory power of economic theory, the shift has led to an increasinglyimpoverished theoretical basis for understanding the social world which hasgiven spurious plausibility to the claims made for economics to offer thelanguage and explanatory principles that are able to unify the social sciences. Inthe third section I argue that the shift in language leads not just to a decline inthe explanatory power of economic theory, but also to a normative loss in itsaccount of human well-being. It involves an indefensible form of subjectivismthat loses the critical content of the concept through its failure to acknowledgea gap between a person’s belief about what it is for her to live well, and what infact it is for her to live well.

Augustine, economics and the language of self-interest

Thus by means and help of … commerce all necessaries for this life are suppliedwithout intermixing charity with it. So that in states where charity has no admit-tance, because true religion is banished there, men do not cease to live with asmuch peace, safety, and comfort, as if they lived in a Republic of Saints.

(Nicole 1997: 3)

There is by now a large and fairly imposing line of economists from Adam Smithto the present who have sought to show that a decentralised economy motivatedby self interest and guided by price signals would be compatible with a coherentdisposition of economic resources that could be regarded, in a well defined sense,as superior to a large class of possible alternative dispositions.

(Arrow and Hahn 1971: vi–vii)

If ‘rational economic agent’ is defined to mean ‘person who pursues monetarygain in preference to all other aims’ its corresponding term in ordinary English isnot its homonym, but ‘moneygrubber’.

(Collier 1990: 118)

Contrast and compare the following sets of questions:

76 John O’Neill

1 Is there a universal tendency to avarice in all persons?2 If avarice is a universal disposition in all persons can a good social order be

constructed?3 Is avarice conducive to individual well-being?

1* Is there a universal tendency in all persons to maximise their own expectedutility?

2* If there is a universal disposition to the maximisation of personal utilitycould a good social order be constructed?

3* Is the pursuit of the maximisation of personal expected utility conducive toindividual well-being?

The first set of questions has a long history in the Augustinian tradition ofpolitical thought (Deane 1963). To those questions at least one strand ofAugustinian thought answers roughly as follows: to the third question, ‘no’ –avarice, the insatiable appetite for worldly things is a source of human unhappi-ness; to the first question, ‘yes’ for we are fallen creatures; and to the secondquestion also a qualified ‘yes’, an earthly political order of sinners is possibleand indeed has to be constructed on the basis of the assumption that we arefallen beings. The second set of questions has a much shorter history. They arenot questions that economists have asked ‘ever since Adam Smith’: Smith askeddifferent questions. They rather define part of the project of modern welfareeconomics in the neo-classical tradition and within that tradition the answer toall three questions is, with some qualifications, ‘yes’: the positive answer to thefirst question is an axiom defining the rational economic agent; the positiveanswer to the second is a basic theorem of welfare economics – ideal marketsissue in Pareto optimal outcomes; a positive answer to the third question is morecontentious – there are economists who want to distinguish ‘utility’ and‘welfare’4 – but in most economic textbooks on the new welfare economics it istaken to be true in virtue of the fact the terms ‘utility’ and ‘well-being’ are inter-changeable, so that to maximise personal utility is to maximise well-being.

There are parallels between the questions, and in their more popular exposi-tions neo-classical economists sometime shift into more Augustinian turns ofphrase. Not only are there are parallels between the questions, there is a histor-ical story to be told about the relation between them: the Augustinian passagefrom the seventeenth century Jansenist, Pierre Nicole, that opens this paper, is adistant ancestor to the passage from Arrow and Hahn that follows. The claim bysome Jansenist theorists that it is through commercial society that an earthlysocial order of sinners can be constructed was at least the start of the thoughtabout the virtues of commerce that is developed in classical and neo-classicaleconomics. It is a story to which I will return briefly later. However, while thereare parallels and historical connections, there is a clear shift in the language inwhich the questions are put and answered. It is that shift in the vocabulary of thedebate that will concern me here. My concern in examining this shift, I shouldstate at the outset, is not to endorse either the Augustinian questions or the

Commerce and the language of value 77

answers. It is rather to show how the shift in language gives undeserved plausi-bility to contentious explanatory and normative claims in social theory.

What is the nature of these changes in language? Some of the changesinvolved occurred only in the last century. The concept of ‘utility’ in economictheory has over the last hundred years shifted from a substantive to a formalinterpretation, and in so doing has moved in an increasingly subjectivist direc-tion. In the last century and early in this century, the term ‘utility’ carried acommitment to a substantive account of welfare, which was subjectivist incontent. ‘Utility’ is defined in terms of subjective states. In Jevons ‘utility’ isdefined in hedonistic terms (Jevons 1970: 91 and passim), and in Marshall andPigou it still refers to some psychological state, an ‘affection of the mind’: thestrength of preferences for a good, measured by a person’s willingness to payfor their satisfaction at the margin, is an indirect measure of subjective states(Marshall 1962: III.iii.1; Pigou 1920: 24). In the modern textbook the relationbetween preferences and subjective states disappears.5 The term utility isdefined in terms of a preference ordering. The account is purely formal in thesense that it says nothing about the content of preferences – only their struc-ture. It makes no assumptions about the constituents of human well-being. It ishowever subjectivist in a deeper sense: it is committed to a subjective determi-nation of well-being. What is good for a person is determined by what theydesire. There is no gap between what a person thinks is good for them andwhat is good for them. I return to this feature of the modern definition ofutility later in the chapter.

Another feature of this formal account of utility that is sometimes remarkedupon is that in itself it makes no assumptions about the egoism or altruism ofagents, or their proclivity to avarice or generosity. That individuals areconcerned to satisfy a consistent set of preferences under budget constraints doesnot imply that agents are egoists in any strong sense of the term. It all dependswhat preferences they have. As Hahn and Hollis (1979: 4) put it, the definition ofutility rules out neither Ghengis Khan nor the saint. Much economics doesassume, however, that individuals are ‘self-interested’ or ‘egoistic’. The notion ofindividuals maximising their utility retains its Benthamite self-seeking sense.However, of significance here is a second and earlier shift in terms of the debatebetween Augustinian questions and their modern counterparts, namely thelanguage of egoism and self-interest itself.

An under-discussed feature of discussions of egoism and altruism is the veryrecent origin in European languages of many of the concepts we use for self-interested dispositions and behaviour (Price, 1988). The term ‘altruism’ wascoined by Comte in the mid-nineteenth century. The term ‘egoism’ along withmany other concepts to describe self-seeking dispositions emerged in the mid-eighteenth. While the concepts of private as against public ‘interests’ is older, theconcept of ‘self-interest’ in its modern usage to describe economic advantage islikewise one that emerges in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries(Hirschman 1977, especially pp. 31–42). Now clearly, the late arrival of theterms does not necessarily indicate the late arrival of the dispositions they

78 John O’Neill

attempt to capture: much of the behaviour that we now call ‘egoistic’ and ‘self-interested’ has a much longer history. However, what does change are the termsof description. There has been a shift away from the use of specific virtue andvice terms such as avarice, ambition, pride, envy, vanity, vainglory, conceit andthe like in which the political economy of the seventeenth and eighteenthcentury is still often framed, to a more sober language of ‘interests’, ‘preferences’and ‘utility’ in which the language of economics and rational choice in the nine-teenth and twentieth is almost entirely framed.

Eighteenth century economics lies in the cusp of the two languages. Mucheighteenth century economic writing is still largely written in the language ofvice and virtue. In Mandeville’s work for example it is the vices such as avarice,prodigality, pride, envy, vanity, folly and fickleness which have unintended ben-eficial consequences (Mandeville 1988: I, pp. 25, 100ff). Mandeville directlyinherits the Augustinian themes of the Jansenists that fallen men without charityand driven only by self-love can live together in peace. The claim that commerceis a key institution through which peace is possible is already to be found inJansenist texts. It is evident in Nicole’s restatement of the Augustinian claim thatopens this section of the paper. However it is not only in writers who writedirectly under Augustinian influences like Mandeville that the language of virtueand vice persists. It still pervades the work of the classical economists such asHume and Smith, who were critical of Mandeville.6 In the work of Hume andSmith the language of the interests and the languages of passions is used inter-changeably. Consider, for example, the characteristics that Hume takes to beuniversals of human nature: ‘Ambition, avarice, self-love, vanity, friendship,generosity, public spirit’ (Hume 1975: VIII, p. 65). The term ‘self-interest’ is usedinterchangeably with two different concepts on this list – ‘avarice’ and ‘self-love’– and each use carries a distinct sense.

Hume often uses self-interest interchangeably with avarice, the love of gainor avidity, ‘the interested affection’, most notably in Book III of A Treatise of

Human Nature. Thus understood, self-interest is central to Hume’s account of theconditions for commercial society. The passion of avarice, avidity, the love ofgain is for Hume the foundation of commercial society: ‘it is more easy toaccount for the rise and progress of commerce in any kingdom than it is forthat of learning. … Avarice, or the desire for gain, is a universal passion, whichoperates at all times, in all places, and upon all persons: But curiosity, or thelove of knowledge, has a very limited influence’ (Hume, ‘On the Rise andProgress of the Arts and Sciences’, 1985: 113). The problem of avarice forHume is that it is both universal and destructive of society. ‘This avidity alone,of acquiring goods and possessions for ourselves and our nearest friends, is insa-tiable, perpetual, universal and directly destructive of society’ (Hume 1978: III,part II, section II). As such it must be controlled, but neither our benevolencefor strangers, nor more importantly any of the other passions – vanity, pity,envy, revenge, etc. – are able to restrain it, the former because it is too weak, thelatter because they are not constant. The only constant passion that is able torestrain the love of gain is that passion itself: ‘There is no passion, therefore


capable of controlling the interested affection, but the very affection itself, by analteration of its direction. … [T]he passion of self-interest … itself alonerestrains it’ (Hume 1978: III, part II, section II). The self-restraint that thepassion of self-interest exerts upon itself is the condition for the rules of justiceand commerce. Thus goes Hume’s argument in A Treatise of Human Nature andin this context ‘the passion of self-interest’ is being used in a narrow sense torefer specifically to the love of gain in contrast with the other passions.

However, Hume uses the term ‘self-interest’ not only to refer to the specificpassion of avarice, but also, especially in Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding

and Concerning the Principles of Morals, in a more general sense interchangeably withthe concept of self-love.7 The use is common in the eighteenth century. Butlerfor example uses the phrase ‘self-love and interestedness’ understood ‘to be anaffection to ourselves, a regard to our private good’ (Butler 1983: IV.11). Theconcept of self-love is the one single older term that might be thought to dosome of the work of the more recent term egoism. Indeed it is not uncommon tofind commentators using the terms egoism in discussions of classical texts thatemploy equivalents of the English term self-love and employing the distinctionbetween egoism and altruism to describe the contrast drawn between self-loveand benevolence.

What is meant by ‘self-love’? In both classical philosophical and biblical textsthe concept of self-love is used in both a narrow negative sense and a wide non-negative sense. Thus Aristotle claims that while it can be used to describe both anarrow pursuit of ‘the biggest share of money, honours and bodily pleasures’,and is commonly thus understood, proper self-love incorporates wider attach-ments: the virtuous are proper self-lovers (Aristotle 1985: IX). In Biblical texts,the concept is sometimes likewise used in a narrow negative sense to describevarious vices of character – covetousness, pride, an absence of filial obedience,etc. (Timothy 2, 3) – and sometimes in a neutral or positive sense, most notably inthe commandment ‘love thy neighbour as thyself ’ (Leviticus XIX, 18; Luke X, 27;Matthew XIX, 19; XXII, 39). The distinction between improper self-love in thenegative sense and true self-love runs through Augustine’s texts.8 It is later statedwith particular clarity by Aquinas: ‘Love of self is common to all in one way; inanother way it is proper to the good; in a third way it is proper to the wicked’(Aquinas 1952: II.II.25.7). The first refers to the desire for self-preservation, thesecond to self-love that is founded upon a proper conception of what it is toflourish as a human being, the third self-love founded upon a misconception ofhuman flourishing. The negative use of the term self-love is that which is takenup in the writings of Jansenists such as Nicole, where self-love (l’amour-propre)in a narrow sense is taken to underlie commercial society.

Something of these classical distinctions survives into the eighteenth centurywriters in the contrast between ‘immoderate’ or ‘excessive’ self-love and ‘reason-able’ self-love (Butler 1983: II.9). The distinction is central for example toButler’s influential arguments for the compatibility of self-love and benevolence.A dispassionate and reasonable understanding of our interests requires that weshould not be over-concerned with ourselves (Butler 1983: IV.8). Thus ‘immod-

80 John O’Neill

erate self-love’, love of self to the exclusion of other affections, is contrary to aperson’s private good. ‘Immoderate self love does very ill consult its own inter-ests; and how much soever a paradox it should appear, it is certainly true thateven from self-love we should endeavour to get over all inordinate regard to andconsideration of ourselves’ (Butler 1983: IV.8). The paradox allows Butler toconclude that the call of benevolence, acting for the sake of others, is notcontrary to self-love: ‘there is no peculiar contrariety between self-love andbenevolence, no greater competition between these than between any otherparticular affections and self-love’ (Butler 1983: IV.12). Implicit in the last remarkis Butler’s more general point that self-love is a second-order affection thatpresupposes more specific passions and interests to give it content:

The very idea of an interested pursuit necessarily presupposes particularpassions or appetites; since the very idea of interest or happiness consists inthis, that an appetite or affection enjoys its object. It is not because we loveourselves that we find delight in such and such objects, but because we haveparticular affections towards them. Take away these affections, and youleave self-love absolutely nothing at all to employ itself about.

(Butler 1983: preface.37)

These uses of ‘self-love’ in both narrower and broader senses are also still acknowl-edged by Hume. Thus he notes, with criticism, its narrow and pejorative use:‘Avarice, ambition, vanity and all passions vulgarly, though improperly, comprisedunder the denomination of self-love’ (Hume 1975: 221). In contrast to that account,Hume echoes Butler’s claim that self-love in its proper sense is a second-orderaffection that is parasitic on first-order passions (Hume 1975: 253–254).

Hume, Butler and other eighteenth century economists such as Smith,however, stand on a cusp of a change in the language of political economy from alanguage that employs specific virtue and vice terms, such as avarice, ambition,vanity, along with the more general concept of self-love, to a language exclusivelyof self-interest, egoism and the maximisation of expected utility in which virtueand vice terms largely disappear. Is there anything of significance in this shift inlanguage? Does it matter? One possible answer is that it does not. Price (1988), forexample, argues that it is simply a paradox that the recent terms which describeuniversal self-seeking dispositions have arrived so late in history. Had the termshad a longer history earlier theorists such as Machiavelli would have agreed withthe assertion that human action had an egoistic or selfish character. This responseis not I think satisfactory. The shift in language, like the Good News Bible translationof Ecclesiastes, fails on both descriptive and normative grounds. The language itoffers is descriptively impoverished and gives a spurious plausibility to attempts touniversalise a particular economic conception of the human agent. The languageis normatively deficient, involving a form of subjectivism about well-being whichdoes not allow for sufficient distance between a person’s belief about what it is forher to live well, and what in fact it is for her to live well, and hence underminesthe critical content of the concept.


Rational choice and universal economics

There is only one social science. What gives economics its imperialist invasive power isthat our analytical categories – scarcity, cost, preferences, opportunities etc. – aretruly universal in applicability.

(Hirschleifer 1985: 66)

[O]bjectivity is not neutrality. … As has been pointed out before, if you take aseries of descriptions of an event – millions of people died; millions of peoplewere killed; millions of innocent civilians were massacred – then assuming allare true, each is more objective and less neutral than the last. It is more objec-tive because it gives a fuller account of what occurred, excluding moremisconceptions; and it is less neutral because it paints what occurred in a moregruesome light.

(Collier 2003: 139)

One argument that might be offered for the elimination of the older languageof vices and virtues is that it offers a more value-neutral language that is appro-priate to a properly scientific social science. The shift from the language ofavarice to the language of self-interest and the maximisation of utility stripsdescriptions of their normative connotations and hence allows for more objec-tive and factually accurate descriptions of the social world. However, as AndrewCollier notes, the conflation of objectivity with neutrality is a mistake. It can bethe other way around, that it is as one moves away from neutral descriptionsthat one arrives at fuller and more objective accounts of the social world. In thissection I want to suggest that this is true of the shift in the language ofeconomics away from that of virtues and vices. It has lead to an increasinglyless adequate account of the social world that has given spurious plausibility tothe claim that economics is a social science that is universal in its scope.

Consider for example the claims made by public choice theorists about theuniversal applicability of the concepts and assumptions of economic theory toall human behaviour: ‘the economic approach provides a valuable unified frame-work for understanding all human behaviour’ (Becker 1976: 14). If individualsact as rational self-interested agents in the marketplace, ‘the inference should bethat they will also act similarly in other and nonmarket behavioural settings’(Buchanan 1972: 22). In particular, against the ‘conventional wisdom’ which istaken to hold ‘that the market is made up of private citizens trying to benefitthemselves, but that government is concerned with something called the publicinterest’ (Tullock 1970: v), the public choice theorist claims that the sameassumptions about the agent should apply in both. Specifically, the axioms thatcharacterise the rational self-interested agent in economic life should be taken toapply also to the explanation of the behaviour of bureaucrat and politician intheir political activities.

Much of the initial plausibility for these claims stems from equivocations thatterms such as ‘self-interest’ and ‘maximising expected utility’ allow. One reading is

82 John O’Neill

to take them to be used in a narrow sense to refer to specific motivations thatdrive accumulation – the passion for gain or avarice. The assumption of self-interest in general equilibrium theory amounts to an assumption of non-satiation:given a choice between a smaller and larger bundle of commodities, the agentalways chooses the larger (Arrow and Hahn 1971: 78; cf. Haussman 1992). Evenif this claim is true of market actors it is not obvious at all that such motivationsare universal. The older language of vices and virtues was clearer on the differen-tiations of different motivations in different settings. The classical economists,such as Hume and Smith, in part because they were concerned with the condi-tions in which commercial society could emerge at all, were less likely to assumethat avarice was a motivation that operated in all social settings. Thus, forexample, a central problem that Hume, like other classical economic theorists,was concerned to address was the specification of the conditions for the existenceof commercial societies, both objective and subjective. Consider Hume’s remarksabout the incompatibility of absolute monarchy and commerce:

Commerce, therefore, in my opinion, is apt to decay in absolute govern-ments, not because it is there less secure, but because it is less honourable. Asubordination of ranks is absolutely necessary to the support of monarchy.Birth, titles, and place, must be honoured above industry and riches. Andwhile these notions prevail, all the considerable traders will be tempted tothrow up their commerce, in order to purchase some of those employments,to which privileges and honours are annexed.

(Hume, ‘Of Civil Liberty’, 1985: 93)

In traditional societies, ‘birth, titles and place’ are defined as the object of one’sinterest: to sacrifice them for money would be a sign of vulgarity. At the limit theprince, driven by the desire for glory, could throw away all goods for its sake. Thetheme runs through Hume’s The History of England. Typical is his censure ofRichard I:

Elated with hopes of fame, which in that age attended no wars but thoseagainst the infidels, he was blind to every other consideration; and whensome of his wiser ministers objected to this dissipation of the revenue andpower of the crown, he replied, that he would sell London itself could hefind a purchaser

(Hume 1983: I, p. 380)

In conditions of absolute monarchy, the passion for fame could subdue thepassion of self-interest. For Hume, successful commercial societies require notjust the redirection of the ‘interested affection’,9 but also conditions in which it isnot subdued by countervailing passions.10 Whatever the adequacy of Hume’sclaims here, and my purpose is not to defend them, they at least have the advan-tage of allowing a clearer statement of the ways in which in different socialsettings different motivations will operate.


In practice public choice theorists do not assume constancy of motivationsacross different institutional settings. Once the utility functions assumed in differentsocial settings are unpacked, public choice accounts are far more traditional than isnormally supposed. In the political domain, for example, the individual is taken tobe driven by ambition, not avarice. Bureaucrats aim to maximise the size of theirbureau budget, since that is correlated with their utility understood in terms ofpersonal promotion and advancement (Niskanen 1973: 22–23). Politicians offergoods to different interest groups since they aim at power. In other spheres such asscience, the utility function is defined in terms of the desire for recognition, and soon. As the institution changes so does the utility function that is invoked.11 Farfrom offering a more objective account of the nature of the social world than oldervirtue and vice terms, reference to ‘self-interest’ or ‘maximisation of expectedutility’ disguises the diversity of motivations and possible conflicts between themthat are explicit when the language of avarice and ambition is employed. Vice andvirtue terms describe dispositions of character to involve specific desires and feel-ings towards par-ticular objects: ambition, for power; avarice, for material gain;vanity, for recognition or glory. As such the older terms such as avarice, vanity,ambition, and pride describing dispositions of character are clearly associated withdiffer-ent institutional settings. Hence, they render more clearly conflicts betweendifferent motivations that are associated with institutional conflicts than do themore neutral terms of ‘self-interest’ and ‘maximisation of expected utility’.

The plausibility of the public choice claim for the universality of self-interestas a motivation across different institutions draws much of its strength from anequivocation between the narrow sense of the term as it is used in explanationsof market behaviour and a wider sense in which it appears in the basic axioms ofneo-classical theory. It is possible for the defender of the claim to retreat to ageneral sense of ‘self-interest’ or ‘the maximisation of expected utility’ in whichit is understood as the pursuit of preference-satisfaction, given some constraintsof consistency on preferences. However, thus understood, the claim that theassumption of self-interest can be generalised to explain behaviour in differentspheres may well be true, but it begs the explanatory questions. Self-interest inthis general sense has the same logical attributes that Butler notes of ‘self-love’understood in its broad sense. The concept refers to a second-order motivationthat is parasitic on prior first-order motivations. Without some specification whata person takes to be in their interests or what their preferences are the concept isempty. Appeal to ‘self-interest’ without reference to the prior motivation will beexplanatorily inert. Once these are specified appeal to self-interest begs theexplanatory questions. In different institutional contexts an individual’s concep-tions of their interests will shift. In particular in non-market institutional spheres,interests and preferences will differ from those expressed in markets. Hence,where markets are introduced into non-market spheres the consequence willoften be a shift in persons’ conceptions of their interest. The shift is evident notjust in the transition from pre-commercial to commercial society, but also in theshifting boundaries of markets within modern market economies. For example,the interests of the scientist in institutions that follow the norms of Mertonian

84 John O’Neill

science will not be the same as those of a scientist in institutions governed bycommercial norms: a self-interested act in the former – publishing a novel resultin a peer-reviewed journal – might be an altruistic act in the latter in which apatent rather than publication is the object of an individual’s interests.12

The shift from the thick virtue and vice concepts of the Augustinian threadin economic thought in the eighteenth century to the value-neutral language ofinterests and utility in the modern economic textbook has not been the occasionfor an improvement in either the objectivity or the explanatory power ofeconomic theory. Rather the opposite: it has rendered economic theory lesssensible to the differences of motivations in different social spheres. As such ithas been the basis of erroneous claims about the universal applicability of theassumptions about the behaviour of agents in the market sphere to all others.13

Subjectivism, objectivism and the human good

And when we value something, say the New Forest, that valuing is a judgementabout the New Forest – that it has value – not about some mental process of oursthat could be inspected in isolation from the New Forest. One discovers the valueof the New Forest by going to the New Forest, not by describing a set of humanpreferences.

(Collier 2003: 138)

Again the most mathematical of the social sciences, economics, is also the mostsubjective, because it reduces values to purely subjective preferences, and becauseit prefers arbitrary mathematical models to realistic non-quantitative ones.

(Collier 2003: 141)

But all that are blessed have what they will, although not all who have what theywill are forewith blessed. But they are forewith wretched, who either have notwhat they will, or have that which they do not rightly will. Therefore he only is ablessed man, who both has all things which he wills, and wills nothing ill.

(Augustine, De Trinitate 13.5.8)

I opened this paper by comparing the questions ‘Is avarice conducive to indi-vidual well-being?’ and ‘Is the pursuit of the maximisation of personal expectedutility conducive to individual well-being?’ In the Augustinian tradition theanswer to the former question is no. The answer to the second question is, in thetradition of modern economics of both neo-classical and Austrian traditions, yes.As I noted earlier, well-being is defined in terms of utility, ‘utility’ in terms of thesatisfaction of preferences. Well-being consists in the satisfaction of preferences,the stronger the preferences satisfied the greater the improvement in welfare.Modern economic theory is committed to a strong form of subjectivism thatrenders human well-being a matter of the satisfaction of preferences.Subjectivism about what it is to live well can come in many varieties and it isimportant to distinguish this modern form of subjectivism from earlier classical


hedonistic theories. Classical hedonism of the form defended by Epicurus is asubjectivist view of the content of well-being. Well-being consists in having theright subjective states, of the experience of pleasure. It is not subjectivist aboutwhat determines the content of well-being. It holds that it is true that pleasure iswhat is the ultimate good for people even if they do not believe it to be. Classicalhedonism is objectivist about human well-being in the sense that Andrew Collier,I think rightly, takes to be the basic sense of objectivism: ‘The first and central useof the word “objectivity” is to refer to what is true independently of any subjectjudging it to be true’ (Collier 2003: 134). Since it is objectivist in this sense, it canand does hold that many people make mistakes about the goods of human life.For example, from misidentifying the goods of life they mistakenly fear death anddesire posthumous honour even though the former cannot be an evil in itself andthe latter cannot be a good. Preference satisfaction theories of well-being are not,or at least need not be, subjectivist about the content of well-being. What is goodfor people is a matter of what they desire and it is false that people desire onlypleasure. Preference satisfaction theories are rather subjectivist in the more basicsense that what is good for a person is a matter of what that person thinks is goodfor him. They are subjectivist about the determination of well-being. What is ofvalue for me is determined by what I value. What is good for me is determined bywhat I actually desire or believe is good for me. Alan Wood claims that thisdoctrine concerning the subjective determination of the good is a peculiarlymodern one (Wood 1990: 55). The claim that it is entirely new would I think befalse. The passage from Augustine’s De Trinitate which opens this section is aresponse to the thesis of subjective determination, specifically to the claim thatsince people want different things – Epicurus pleasure, Zeno goodness – wesimply define a person’s good by what they desire. However, I think Wood is rightthat its status as the commonplace view is peculiarly modern. Classical accountsof the human good were objectivist – the truth of a claim about what is good forhuman beings was not simply a matter of what they judge is good for them.

A feature of subjectivist accounts of well-being that simply defines well-beingin terms of the satisfaction of preferences is that they leave no room for error.One consequence is that the distinction between different forms of self-love that,as I noted above, runs through classical discussion becomes indefensible. If anindividual desires ‘the biggest share of money, honours and bodily pleasures’ andhe gets them, then his life goes well. The space for critical reflection on the verypossibility of a mistake about the constituents of a good life disappears. However,that looks plainly implausible. It defies the common observation that people canget what they want and be worse off than before. While there are some that arewilling to defend a crude subjectivist view of well-being, most defenders ofsubjectivism recognise it will not do. The defender of a more sophisticated subjec-tive determination thesis will allow for the possibility of error by identifying theconstituents of well-being not with what people in fact value, but what we wouldvalue were we fully informed and competent to make requisite judgements. Well-being can be identified with the satisfaction of fully informed preferences. Hencefor example Griffin’s definition of utility: ‘ “utility” is the fulfilment of informed

86 John O’Neill

desires, the stronger the desires, the greater the utility’ (Griffin 1986: 14). Theposition allows for the possibility of mistakes, but still holds that whether some-thing is good for a person depends on ultimately on what they would want orvalue. What is good for us is still determined ultimately by our preferences.

This position is still however unsatisfactory. It fails to acknowledge thedifferent ways in which informing a person about an object can affect theirwell-being. The subjectivist account is consistent with some roles that infor-mation can play in a person identifying a mistake about what they desire, inparticular where information concerns whether an object that a personcurrently desires in fact satisfies other given preferences that person has. Aperson has a settled preference for some fast-food burger, which unbeknownstto him is full of fat and carcinogenic. Were he fully informed about the foodhe would no longer prefer it, given he had some settled preference for goodhealth which has priority over a preference for a somewhat dubious gastro-nomic pleasure. This role for information is quite consistent with theinformed preference account of well-being. However, informing a person canalso act in other ways to form or reform her preferences which are less easilyrendered consistent with a subjectivist position. Thus, education often isn’t aquestion of telling you about an object so that it fits current preferences, butaltering preferences by pointing to features of the object that make themworthy of being preferred.

This point is a version of the one made by Andrew Collier in connectionwith the New Forest in the passage quoted at the start of this section. Aperson who has a strong preference for the vertical pleasures of climbing grit-stone on the largely treeless hills of Northern England may have littleappreciation of woodland, grassland, bog and heath and no preference fortheir company. However on being taken on a cycle ride and walk in the NewForest by a friend his preferences may change. The friend tells him somethingof its history as a site of social conflict from its original appropriation as adeer hunting area by William the Bastard. He makes him aware of thedappled light, the texture of lichen and bark. He indicates something of thevariety of life it contains. The person emerges with his preferences changed asa lover of woodland and heath.14 The experience is commonplace. It is whatmost education is about and it is how education, both formal and informal,mostly deeply develops our well-being. However, welfare here is increased notby fitting objects to current desires, but by forming those desires for theirobject. This educative role for information is inconsistent with the subjectivedetermination. Talk of informed preference is a disguised way of talkingabout objective determination. Indeed, the point is summarised well byGriffin in his own presentation of the informed preference account of well-being:

What makes us desire the things we desire, when informed, is somethingabout them – their features or properties. But why bother then withinformed desire, when we can go directly to what it is about objects that


shape informed desires in the first place? If what really matters are certainsorts of reasons for action, to be found outside desires in the qualities oftheir objects, why not explain well-being directly in terms of them?

(Griffin 1986: 17)15

As Andrew Collier notes, ‘one discovers the value of the New Forest by goingto the New Forest, not by describing a set of human preferences’ (Collier2003: 138).

Resistance to an objectivist account of our well-being also however has a pol-itical dimension which is related to the employment of subjectivist accounts ofwell-being in defence of commercial society. A worry about objectivism is that itleads to some form of authoritarianism or paternalism. If what is good for someoneis independent of what they believe is good for them then doesn’t this entail there isa justification for some informed central authoritative body over-riding individuals’own aims and desires about their lives? Doesn’t it lead to a form of ‘dictatorshipover needs’ characteristic of some of the most clearly objectionably features of thecentrally planned economies of Eastern Europe (Fehér et al. 1983)?

Three points I think need to be made in response to this quite proper concern.The first is epistemological. To reiterate a point that Andrew Collier makesforcibly in ‘In Defence of Objectivity’, objectivity is not infallibility (Collier 2003:140). That it is an objective matter about what goes to make a person’s life go wellor ill does not entail that there is some committee of experts with incorrigibleknowledge of that matter. Furthermore, while no one has incorrigible knowledgeof their own good, it is generally true that individuals often have knowledge ofthe particularities of their own situation that is unavailable to distant strangers.There are epistemic limits to the knowledge of particular human needs that anyplanning central committee might have, and the recognition of those limits isquite consistent with the objectivity of claims about human well-being.16 Second,to defend an objectivist account of human well-being does not entail that whatpeople want is irrelevant to their happiness. Thus it is possible to argue, as doesAugustine in the passage quoted at the start of this section, that if a person doesnot get what they want they will be unhappy. Or as more modern liberals haveput it, there is an endorsement constraint on what makes a person’s life go well.One cannot improve an individual’s life by supplying resources that are by someobjective criterion valuable to the individual, but which are not in the lights of theconception of the good life recognised and accepted by that individual: a person’slife cannot go better in virtue of features that are not endorsed by the individualas valuable (Dworkin 1983). The point is an important one. There is a particularform of the ‘dictatorship over needs’ which fails to acknowledge that point, thatassumes that one can improve people’s lives by giving them what they needwhether or not they believe that to be so. However, as Augustine also notes, thatendorsement is a necessary condition of a good life does not entail that it is suffi-cient. That people are unhappy if their desires are unfulfilled does not entail theyare happy if they are. A person can will something ill. The third point is that thedevelopment and exercise of the capacity to make autonomous choices about

88 John O’Neill

one’s life is itself a part of the human good. One reason why the endorsementconstraint has the force it has is to do with the value of autonomy for us as beingswith capacities for self-reflection and judgement about what is and is not of value.To live a life according to values we do not endorse or accept is not to lead ourown lives. However, that point itself is consistent with an objectivist account ofwhat makes our lives go well. Autonomy is a good of human life, given the kind ofcreatures with the capacity for rational choices that we are. Moreover there arereasons to suppose that a defensible account of the value of autonomy itself callsupon the objectivity of certain values. What makes autonomous choices so toughis that values are not a matter of decision, but of discovering what is of value.The difficulty of making choices between different values only makes sense if weassume that we can be mistaken.

Nothing in an objectivist account of well-being commits one to a paternalismor an authoritarian dictatorship over needs. What it does commit one to is theclaim that a good social order requires forms of social association in which indi-viduals are able to reflect properly upon and educate their preferences boththrough practical engagement with objects of value and theoretical reflection.And what an objectivist account of well-being does undermine is the ratherdirect form of argument for modern market society that is to be found in bothneo-classical and some forms of Austrian economics that runs roughly as follows:(1) well-being consists in the satisfaction of an individual’s preferences; (2) marketeconomies are that institutional arrangement of economic life that best meetsthe satisfaction of individual consumer preferences; hence (3) a market economybest improves human well-being. There are good reasons for doubting thesecond assumption of this argument, most notably those concerned withinequalities in the distribution of wealth. However, even were it to be true thefirst assumption should in any case be rejected. While it may be true that thosewhose preferences go unsatisfied may be unhappy, it does not follow that if pref-erences are satisfied they will be happy.17 The critical import of the concept ofwell-being or welfare depends upon the possibility of maintaining a distancebetween what it is to live well and what a person believes it is to live well.

In this chapter I have examined a shift in the language of economics that isakin to a Good News Bible account of the human condition. The effect of thatshift, I have suggested, is to render a spurious plausibility to the attempt topresent specifically market relations and motivations as universal and to under-mine an account of what it is to live well that provides part of the basis forcritical reflection on commercial society. Good News Bible accounts of human lifein the end blind us to the existence of alternatives to market society. Indeed theyrender non-market orders even in our own societies invisible. Different forms ofreciprocity other than market exchange disappear from view. For those of us stillcommitted to the project of developing an alternative to a modern capitalisteconomy, there is a need to criticise those forms of subjectivism that, as AndrewCollier has noted, are a consequence of the ways in which commercial societyaffects our ways of seeing and understanding the world and through which thatform of commercial society is sustained.


Notes

1 Ecclesiastes 11.1, The Holy Bible: Authorized King James Version (London: Collins, 1957).2 Good News Bible (Glasgow: Collins, 1976), foreword.3 Ecclesiastes 11.1, Good News Bible (Glasgow: Collins, 1976). My thanks to Paul Lancaster

for pointing out this translation.4 Samuelson, for example, interprets the shift to a formal definition of utility as ‘a

steady removal of moral, utilitarian, welfare connotations from the concept’(Samuelson 1938: 344). Hence his comment: ‘any connection between utility … andany welfare concept is disavowed’ (Samuelson 1937: 161). Broome makes similardivorce of the concepts without the commitment to positivism (Broome 1991: 65). Ifthat line is taken then the answer to our question 3* should not be a straightforwardyes – no immediate conclusions about welfare follow from the results of moderneconomics about the relation between ideal markets and utility.

5 I discuss the shift in detail in O’Neill 1998b: ch. 3.6 For the criticisms see Smith 1982: VII.ii.4; Hume, ‘Of Refinements in the Arts’,

1985: 280.7 See for example Hume 1975: 174, 178.8 For a detailed discussion see O’Donovan 1980.9 In the Treatise Hume approaches the problem by way of consideration of the institu-

tional principles for the ‘stabilisation’ and ‘transference’ of property and thepossibility of mutual promising through which the passion of self-interest is taken tobe redirected to control itself (Hume 1978: part II, sections III-V).

10 See also for example Hume’s comments on the effect of commerce on making ‘thelove of gain prevail over the love of pleasure’ (Hume, ‘Of Interest’, 1985: 301).

11 See O’Neill 1994 for further discussion.12 For a more detailed discussion see O’Neill 1990; 1992; 1998b: chs. 11–12.13 For more detailed development of the arguments in the last two sections see O’Neill

1998a, 1998c.14 Andrew will hopefully recognise something of my own visit to the New Forest in his

company a few years ago.15 Griffin has since moved in the direction of endorsing this objection (Griffin 1991,

1996).16 I discuss these epistemic arguments in more detail in O’Neill 1998b: ch. 10.17 I develop this argument in more detail in O’Neill 1998b: ch. 4. It should be noted

that the defences of commercial society in the classical economics of Smith andHume do not rely upon any such direct relation.

Bibliography

Aquinas, T (1952) Summa Theologica, Chicago: William Benton.Aristotle (1985) Nicomachean Ethics, trans. T. Irwin, Indianapolis: Hackett.Arrow, K. and F. Hahn (1971) General Competitive Analysis, San Francisco: Holden-Day.Becker, G. (1976) ‘The Economic Approach to Human Behavior’, The Economic Approach to

Human Behavior, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Broome, J. (1991) Weighing Goods, Oxford: Blackwell.Buchanan, J. (1962) Calculus of Consent, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.—— (1972) ‘Towards Analysis of Closed Behavioral Systems’, in J. Buchanan and R.

Tollison (eds), Theory of Public Choice, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.Butler, J. (1983) Five Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel, ed. S. Darwell, Indianapolis:

Hackett.Collier, A. (1990) Socialist Reasoning, London: Pluto.—— (2003) In Defence of Objectivity and Other Essays, Routledge, London.

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Deane, H. (1963) The Political and Social Ideas of St. Augustine, New York: Columbia Univer-sity Press.

Dunleavy, P. (1991) Democracy, Bureaucracy and Public Choice, New York: Harvester.Dworkin, R. (1983) ‘In Defence of Equality’, Social Philosophy and Policy, 1, pp. 24–40.Elster, J. (1986) ‘The Market and the Forum: Three Varieties of Political Theory’, in J.

Elster and A. Hylland (eds), Foundations of Social Choice Theory, Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press.

Fehér, Ferenc, Agnes Heller and György Márkus (1983) Dictatorship over Needs: An Analysis of

Soviet Societies, Oxford: Blackwell.Griffin, J. (1986) Well-Being, Oxford: Clarendon Press.—— (1991) ‘Against the Taste Model’, in J. Elster and J. Roemer (eds), Interpersonal Com-

parisons of Well-Being, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.—— (1996) Value Judgement: Improving Our Ethical Beliefs, Oxford: Oxford University Press.Hahn, F. and M. Hollis (eds) (1979) Philosophy and Economic Theory, Oxford: Oxford Univer-

sity Press.Haussman, D. (1992) ‘What are general equilibrium theories?’, Essays on Philosophy and

Economic Methodology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Hirschleifer, J. (1985) ‘The Expanding Domain of Economics’, American Economic Review,

75, 6, pp.53–68.Hirschman, A. (1977) The Passions and the Interests, Princeton: Princeton University Press.Hume, D. (1975) Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of

Morals, Oxford: Clarendon Press.—— (1978) A Treatise Of Human Nature, Oxford: Clarendon Press.—— (1983) The History of England, Indianapolis: Liberty Press.—— (1985) Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, Indianapolis: Liberty Press.Jevons, W. (1970) The Theory of Political Economy, Harmondsworth: Penguin.Mandeville, B. (1988) The Fable of the Bees or Private Vice, Publick Benefits, Indianapolis:

Liberty Press.Marshall, A. (1962) Principles of Economics, 8th edn, London: Macmillan.Nicole, P. (1997) Of Charity and Self-Love VI, in E. Hundert (ed.), The Fable of the Bees and

Other Writings, Indianapolis: Hackett.Niskanen, W. (1973) Bureaucracy: Servant or Master, London: IEA.O’Donovan, O. (1980) The Problem of Self-Love in St. Augustine, New Haven: Yale University

Press.O’Neill, J (1990) ‘Property in Science and the Market’, The Monist, 73, pp. 601–620.—— (1992) ‘Altruism, Egoism, and the Market’, Philosophical Forum, 23, pp. 278–288.—— (1994) ‘Preferences, Virtues and Institutions’, Analyse & Kritik, 16, pp. 202–216.—— (1998a) ‘Against Reductionist Explanations of Human Behaviour: Rational Choice

and the Unified Social Science’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, SupplementaryVolume LXXII, pp. 173–188.

—— (1998b) The Market: Ethics, Information and Politics, London: Routledge.—— (1998c) ‘Self-Love, Self-Interest and the Rational Economic Agent’, Analyse & Kritik,

20, pp. 184–204.Pigou, A. (1920) The Economics of Welfare, London: Macmillan.Polanyi, K. (1957) The Great Transformation, Boston: Beacon Press.Price, R. (1988) ‘Self-Love, “Egoism” and Ambizione in Machiavelli’s Thought’, History of

Political Thought, 9, pp. 237–261.Samuelson, P. (1937) ‘A Note on Measurement of Utility’, Review of Economic Studies, 4, pp.

155–161.


Samuelson, P. (1938) ‘The Empirical Implications of Utility Analysis’ Econometrica, 5, pp.344–345.

Smith, A. (1981) An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Indianapolis,Liberty Press.

—— (1982) The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Indianapolis: Liberty Press.Tullock, G. (1970) Private Wants, Public Means, New York: Basic Books.Wood, A. (1990) Hegel's Ethical Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Introduction

As a social scientist I have long been troubled by the lack of recognition incontemporary social science of what might be termed the moral dimension ofsocial life. In much of recent social theory, action is assumed to be either merelyinterest-driven, or habitual, or a product of wider discourses and institutions.Often it adopts a sociologically reductionist account of actors’ motives andactions, in effect, saying ‘they would say/do that, wouldn’t they, given their socialposition’, which is in contradiction with the first person accounts which actors(including social scientists) offer for their own behaviour, which involve justification

rather than sociological explanation. Actors’ rationales or normative dispositionsare discounted – either altogether, or by reducing them to conventions orfeatures of discourses. Even those social theorists who, like Durkheim, invokemorality a great deal, often concentrate on its effects in reproducing social order,reducing it to mere convention backed by sanctions. This gives no insight into itsnormative force, and hence why it should matter so much to us. The idea thatethics or morality1 is simply ‘what we do round here’ will always be uncon-vincing, producing an alienated view of actors as mere dupes that misses whatthey care about and why.

Positive, including positivist, social research can of course treat actors’ moralconcerns as social facts, but the effect of the expulsion of normative thoughtfrom modern social science tends to mean that the normative force of thosemoral concerns is not analysed, thereby reducing them to apparently arbitraryconventions. Hence, the attempted barring of values from science that hasoccurred over the last two centuries has been accompanied by an expulsion ofreason from values, and the rise of the view that values can only be subjective,not objective. More recently, post-structuralists have adopted what Habermashas termed ‘crypto-normative’ stances, both abolishing the subject and refusingnormative valuation while surreptitiously appealing to the readers’ normativevalues by using terms such as ‘domination’, ‘oppression’, ‘racism’, etc., withoutjustifying these evaluative descriptions. This treatment of actors as mere prod-ucts and bearers of discursive conventions and the discounting and evasion ofmoral judgement is not something theorists or anyone else can live.

7 Restoring the moraldimension in socialscientific accountsA qualified ethical naturalist approach

Andrew Sayer

Moral judgment is what we ‘always already’ exercise in virtue of being immersed in a

network of human relationships that constitute our life together. Whereas there can bereasonable debate about whether or not to exercise juridical, military, thera-peutic, aesthetic or even political judgment, in the case of moral judgmentthis option is not there. The domain of the moral is so deeply enmeshedwith those interactions that constitute our lifeworld that to withdraw frommoral judgment is tantamount to ceasing to interact, to talk and act in thehuman community.

(Benhabib 1992: 125–126, emphasis in original; see also Habermas 1990)

Nor can subjectivist and relativist approaches to morality be adhered to in prac-tice. In engaging in arguments about ethical matters, we can hardly avoidappealing to common standards and to objective or independent circumstances,rather than merely to our own individual preferences or those of our community.To reduce morality to no more than personal preference or arbitrary discursiveconvention would be to render incomprehensible both the inherent seriousnessof moral issues and the way in which we (including post-structuralists when offduty) argue about them.

But while it is easy to identify the performative and theory–practice contra-dictions involved in these positions, it is much more difficult to provide anaccount which does justice to lay normativity, one which acknowledges both thevalidity and the fallibility of lay ethical values, which tells us where such valuescome from, what encourages or discourages their development, and from wheretheir force and legitimacy derive. This paper offers some suggestions towards thisend, as regards ethical dispositions or moral sentiments and how they might beunderstood. It proposes a ‘qualified ethical naturalism’ which acknowledges boththe intransitivity or otherness of human social being, its scope for both flour-ishing and suffering, and its possibilities for extensive cultural mediation,diversification and development. In other words it seeks to do justice to actors’ethical dispositions or moral sentiments and hence contribute to the restorationof the moral dimension to social scientific accounts. This ethical naturalism isless ambitious than the moral realism advocated by Andrew Collier in Being and

Worth (1999) but very much in keeping with his arguments in In Defence of

Objectivity (2003).In trying to restore the moral dimension, I have turned to ethical theory,

and to classical social theory, in which normative and positive thought werenot separated and in which the conception of society as a moral order wasmore common. Being particularly interested in normativity and economicactivities, or ‘moral economy’, Adam Smith has an obvious appeal and part ofthis paper amounts to a response to his work on moral sentiments. This, I willargue, is highly sophisticated and implies a realist view of ethics, albeit a ‘thin’form of realism that needs supplementation to prevent it lapsing intoemotivism or conventionalism.2

At the same time, attempting to bridge the divide between social science andmoral philosophy also exposes weaknesses on the latter’s part. Just as positive

94 Andrew Sayer

social science has neglected the normative character of social life, so moralphilosophy tends to pay insufficient attention to positive matters regarding thenature and context of moral concerns in everyday life. Typically, it tends to indi-vidualise the explanation of good and evil, as if the problems of the world weremerely a product of bad moral decisions.3 I shall argue that the causes for muchevil and suffering derive from particular forms of social organisation, though notindependently of individuals, and that the scope of ethical theory needs toexpand to consider these.

From the point of view of a social scientist wanting to understand the moraldimension of social life, much ethical theory is too purely normative, tooreduced to abstract reason and hence too alienated from recognisable actorsembedded in recognisable social settings to provide much insight. It might offergood reasons for philosophers, or indeed others, to approach ethical issues in aparticular way, but this might be quite different from how people think and act(Glover 2001: 295). Of course, at one level this is only reasonable, insofar as thepurpose of moral philosophy is openly normative, and lay ethics are imperfect.4

For example, Rawlsian theory offers an imaginative and original normativeapproach to certain ethical issues, but it does not pretend that people think inthis way. But even if we accept this radical normative purpose, and thus a certaindistance from how things are, there must be some connection between the posi-tive and the normative: ‘[E]thics must be grounded in a knowledge of humanbeings that enables us to say that some modes of life are suited to our nature,whereas others are not’ (Wood 1990: 17).5 A normative ethics which took noaccount of what kind of beings humans (or indeed other species) are would bean absurdity. On the one hand, moral philosophy has to take account of humancapacities (many of which exist in potentia) and limitations, on the other it is oflittle use if does not help us see how, within those constraints, we could not cometo lead better lives. As Jonathan Glover remarks, the attribution of ethical dispo-sitions to people as part of their ‘humanity is only partly an empirical claim. Itremains also partly an aspiration’6 (Glover 2001: 25).

Equally, any positive account of social life needs to acknowledge that actorsare evaluative beings, for whom normative questions are generally more im-portant than positive questions. In this sense, the normative is an important partof the positive. Part of the socialisation of social scientists involves learning toforget the peculiarity of prioritising positive questions about the social world,but this often comes at the cost of neglecting the importance of normativequestions to actors.7

From a positive or explanatory point of view, the obvious realist questionabout the moral dimension of social life would be: what is it about humans andhuman society that makes us have moral concerns? Any good answer to such aquestion would have to go beyond invoking our capacity for language andmeaning making and deal with what it is that makes us care about anything.Thus, an adequate account of the moral dimension of social life needs an under-standing of the nature of the subjective experience of it. As Charles Griswoldputs it: ‘Ethical life cannot be rightly understood when what is indispensable for

Restoring the moral dimension 95

it – the subjective standpoint of the actor – is downplayed’ (Griswold 1999: 53)This is not a license for a subjectivist view of ethics; on the contrary it is a neces-sary component of realist or naturalist views of ethics. Moreover, actors are alsoof course objects as well as subjects of moral concern. Consideration of this dualnature is necessary for answering our realist question, what is it about peoplethat makes them capable of moral concern? Without an understanding of laysubjectivity, ethics is reduced to a philosophical genre.

While some conception of the nature of human being must be at least implicitin any ethical theory, if it is left implicit there is a danger that it will be inade-quate. Thus, for example, many ethical theories ignore the fact that a significantproportion of social relations occur not between adults but between adults andinfants, and hence they propose as universally appropriate actions which might beharmful for such cases – most obviously liberal theory. Any normative moraltheory has somehow to balance the vulnerability and the material and psycholog-ical dependence of individuals on others and their capacity and need forautonomy. The kinds of dependence and autonomy and the balance betweenthem varies between different societies, so that the development of subjects itselfvaries too – with different mixtures of good and bad effects. However, althoughthe universal human capacity for cultural diversity is highly distinctive, humansare not so plastic that just any imaginable form of culture and society can be livedwith indifference, without pushing against any limits, without making any differ-ence to whether they flourish or suffer. Some forms of culture and society aremore detrimental or beneficial than others. The diversity of cultural forms doesnot disqualify or relativise ethical theory but just presents it with more difficultjudgements.

The social character of life is also central, not only abstractly but in terms ofthe difference made by concrete forms of social organisation. When philos-ophers ask how we should live or what is the good life it is tempting to think ofthis in individualistic terms and as a matter of reasoning how one should act.However, of course, in practice the good life does not depend simply on makingthe right decisions, on thinking well about how to live, but upon the constraintsand enablements, including discourses or world views, of particular forms ofsocial organisation.

Finally, we need to be aware of the fact that the philosophical standpoint canlead one to project onto lay actors the exceptional rationalist, contemplativestance of philosophy (Rawls’ ‘plans of life’ is an extreme and slightly comicalexample). As recent social theory has shown, particularly that of PierreBourdieu, this overlooks the practical character of everyday life, and the extentto which action is habitual, embodied, partly non-discursive and done largely ‘onautomatic’ (see especially Bourdieu 2000; Crossley 2001). Although this point isexaggerated by Bourdieu (Sayer 2004), it is important to be open to it. I shallsuggest ways in which this can be acknowledged, that is how restoring the moraldimension can be done through the concept of ethical dispositions, and bytaking emotions seriously. Conscious reflection is still acknowledged but supple-mented with a recognition of the habitual. In other words I shall argue that we

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need to adjust the relations between concepts of reason, emotion and habit in away which counters the tendency to render them as opposites.

Ethical dispositions: emotion, reason and habit

While there have been important developments in realist philosophy and socialtheory on the relations between emotion and reason (Archer 2000, 2003; Collier2003), I shall argue that in seeking an adequate understanding of the moraldimension of social life, it is important to consider embodiment, dispositions and habit too, in order to avoid an overly rationalistic concept of action. Moralphilosophy inevitably tends to exaggerate the role of reason in moral life, for thesimple reason that it is itself the application of reason to the subject, though thisoverrationalisation is a common failing or occupational hazard of the socialsciences too (Bourdieu 2000). I shall first summarise some of these developmentsand then suggest how they might be related to ideas of dispositions and ‘habitus’.

At the same time as the role of reason in everyday action has been exagger-ated, the meaning of ‘reason’ has itself often become attenuated, at worse, to theapplication of deductive logic and to instrumental rationality. This is mostevident in contemporary economics, but sociologists such as Weber have rein-forced it too (MacIntyre 1985). This attenuation has frequently been coupled toa complementary attenuation of concepts of emotion and habit, so that they arede-rationalised. When we say things such as ‘we have reason to be angry’(because someone has deceived us, slandered us, or whatever), we don’t meanmerely that we have a logical argument for being angry,8 or that being angry is ameans to an end. Rather, citing such reasons also indicates that reason can berelated to needs, desire,9 commitments and practical matters of welfare. AsMargaret Archer’s recent research shows, people’s internal conversations includethinking and worrying about their commitments, weighing them up in a waywhich involves a kind of practical reason or substantive rationality, and dealingwith the valuation of ends and concerns themselves, not merely means towardsthem (Archer 2003).

Attenuated, alienated conceptions of rationality are complemented by de-rationalised conceptions of emotions in emotivist, subjectivist and relativisttreatments of value or valuation. These have become popular in lay thought aswell as philosophy. Not the least of the deficiencies of these approaches is thatthey render unintelligible the seriousness with which we argue or reason aboutvalues and moral issues (Collier 2003; Midgley 2003). As Andrew Collier notes,while many are attracted to such views when discussing ethics in the abstract,when challenged to consider particular problems that arise in everyday life, theyinvariably abandon this and argue that x (itself ) is good or bad.

Realists have challenged such de-rationalised views of emotions, arguing thatemotions have a cognitive aspect, providing ‘unarticulated commentaries’ onmatters that are important to actors, with regard to the physical world, practicalaction and social relations (Archer 2000, 2003; Collier 1999, 2003; Norman1998; Nussbaum 1986). Thus one might feel sad as a result of illness, failure to


carry out some practical task, or unfriendly treatment by others. In all cases theemotion is about something independent. Of course, reflexivity allows the self tobecome an object of such commentaries, and for some moral emotions, espe-cially shame, their object is primarily internal (Sedgewick and Frank 1995).Emotional responses may be mistaken – a possibility deriving precisely from theindependence of their referents. It is possible where the object is internalised forthem to take on a self-fulfilling character (for example, self-contempt for lack ofconfidence leading to further loss of confidence). Even in such cases there maybe grounds for arguing that the resulting emotion (low self-esteem) is falselybased and hence unwarranted (the individual underestimates the goodwill ofothers). Moreover, fallibility does not counterpose emotion to reason for thelatter is fallible too, and emotions can also successfully direct us towards objectssuch as selfish or violent behaviour, which exist independently of the spectator.Our survival depends on this kind of reference being successful at least for asubstantial part of the time. The fact that emotions normally have a palpablephysical expression does differentiate them from reason, but these expressionsare intelligible and rational rather than inexplicable – the cringe of fear, the curlof the upper lip of contempt indicating physical distaste, and so on (Sedgewickand Frank 1995). As Raymond Williams observed, thoughts can be felt, and feel-ings can be thought (Williams 1977).

While the capacity for some emotions seems to be innate, others exist in

potentia and are developed contingently through social interaction. The acquisi-tion of a capacity for or disposition towards particular moral emotions or sentimentsregarding particular practices is the product of a practical learning processdepending on both these primary emotions and contingent forms of socialisa-tion. This learning process is partly subconscious and non-discursive, like thelearning of practical skills, through which we achieve a ‘feel for the game’(Bourdieu 2000; Crossley 2001). Through practice, through the repeated experi-ence of social interaction, ‘ethical dispositions’ become part of the structure ofdispositions oriented to the individual’s habitat and position within the socialfield that Bourdieu termed the habitus.10 This is not to say that there is noconscious reflection involved in their acquisition. Just as one has to think andconcentrate in trying to learn how to return the ball at tennis, even though theskill is a practical, bodily one rather than a matter of learning a description, sothe acquisition of ethical dispositions may involve reflection on what emotionsare telling us during particular social episodes, which of course can then modifythe emotional response. The reflection is both about the object and ouremotional response, mediated by reference to the responses of others. As dis-positions, they enable us often to respond immediately to some situation withouthaving to reflect on it. At the sight of an adult beating up a child, we wouldexpect an observer to be horrified, and we would have doubts about the char-acter of anyone who had first to reflect on whether it was good or bad. Ethicaldispositions can therefore be ‘intelligent dispositions’. Hence, someone who hasformerly been indifferent to sexism can become sensitised to it through beingchallenged by others and through learning and reflection, developing embodied

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dispositions towards it, so that their responses to instances of sexism do not haveto await further reflection.

An implication of the intelligent character of ethical dispositions is thatwhile there are grounds for distinguishing ethical dispositions embedded in thesocial relations of communal life from formal moral norms, they need not beseen as antithetical; it may be possible for norms to be internalised as dis-posi-tions. Conversely, some formal norms may be largely formalisations ofcommon dispositions.

There can also, of course, be unethical dispositions – for example, to be cruel,selfish, vain, and so on. How far these develop depends, like ethical dispositions,on the nature of socialisation or everyday moral education, including thediscourses and reasoning available to and contingently drawn upon by actors.

Once acquired, (un)ethical dispositions have some inertia, but their strengthdepends on the seriousness of the concerns which are their object and thefrequency with which they are activated. The mode and context of their activa-tion can recursively change dispositions, making actors more, less, or differentlyethical. Some experiences, like blood donation, may be ‘consciousness-raising’,while others, like a night out with the lads, may be ‘consciousness-lowering’. Ineither case the process of change is likely to take place through small steps. Forexample, in the negative direction, people may find that minor immoral actsmay pave the way for the sanctioning of major ones, though they may realise,usually too late, that they have crossed a moral boundary (Glover 2001: 35).11

That our capacity for unethical as well as ethical action is nurtured or stuntedby our involvement in particular social practices and situations in contextsrarely of our own choosing, is often ignored by normative moral philosophy, butis crucial for any critical social science and philosophy. It raises the question ofhow, given that we are obviously capable of both evil and good, each of whichmay bring good or bad consequences for individuals, the good is preferred onthe whole. Moral philosophy’s dominant individual focus leads us to neglect thefact that in practice, both ethical and unethical behaviour tend to have clearsocial causes,12 though of course this is not a determinism, for individuals maysometimes reflect on such causes and override them. I shall return to theseissues later. For now I want to enlarge on the social context of (un)ethical actionvia the work of Adam Smith.

The virtues of Smith’s analysis of moral sentiments

One such study of the morality or ethics in context is Adam Smith’s The Theory of

Moral Sentiments (1984 [1757]). One of the virtues of this is that it adopts a‘bottom up’, empirical approach (Griswold 1999), analysing moral sentimentsand judgements through examples so that one can appreciate what the objects ofthe particular moral sentiments in question are. Smith achieves this with consid-erable insight, sensitivity and nuance. He also takes human imperfections – ourcapacity for immoral sentiments and acts – more seriously than do many philos-ophers. His account incorporates a social psychology in which moral sentiments


and acts arise from an ongoing process of moral education and regulationthrough interaction with others. Individuals are analysed as thoroughly socialbeings, not merely continually situated in social relations or influenced by them,but continually needing others and their approval, and being alive to their welfare.(They are thus far from the asocial, autistic figures assumed by contemporarymainstream economics, sometimes through appeals to egregious misrepresenta-tions of Smith’s work.) Smith’s analyses of moral sentiments are therefore alwaysset within the context of individuals’ real and imagined relations to others.

He begins with an empirical claim concerning the universal humancapacity for (developing)13 ‘sympathy’, defined not as commiseration orcompassion but more broadly in terms of ‘fellow feeling with any passionwhatever’ (1984 [1757]: 10 [I.i.1.5]).14 We can infer that while this capacity ispartly hermeneutic, it is also partly pre-linguistic. Like a realist, Smith refers tothe objects of moral sentiments, which in many of his examples are the senti-ments and experiences and situations of others. While we have a capacity forunderstanding others’ situations and responses and for having similar feelingsto theirs, Smith insists that this understanding is fallible, and that just as arepresentational discourse is a different kind of thing from what it represents,so the emotions that we experience when we observe others’ experience arenot, and indeed cannot ever be, identical to theirs.

Smith’s imputation to individuals of a certain capacity to distinguish goodfrom evil derives from a twofold relation: to the object and its properties, and toothers and their responses of approval or disapproval. Individuals stand in needof the approval of others and continually monitor their own and others’conduct. In reflecting on how to react they invoke the imagined judgement of an‘impartial spectator’. This does not imply a god’s-eye view, but the fallible view ofan imagined other. Nor does it imply a demeaning ‘hypodermic’ model of actorspassively absorbing discursive constructs, but some degree of deliberation anddiscrimination, though as we have argued, in many familiar situations responsesmay have become largely spontaneous products of learned intelligent ethicaldispositions. Like any kind of knowledge, moral judgement is social and it is epis-temologically and psychologically, and sometimes socially and politically, difficultfor us to decide to act in ways which are at variance with the views of others,though not impossible. One of the ways in which the moral failings of individ-uals are restricted is by the regulative effect of the approval and disapproval ofothers (real and imagined), and of course this same mechanism is crucial for ourmoral education. Thus, Smith’s account of this regulative effect provides a socio-logical but not sociologically reductionist explanation of the acquisition anddevelopment of moral sentiments. At the same time, the analysis of how actorsconsider the responses of real and imagined others provides an element ofuniversalisation. Unlike some moral theories, however, it locates this as atendency inherent in everyday social interaction instead of treating it simply asan abstract principle.

Smith’s insistence on individuals’ need of others, on the socially embeddedcharacter of judgement and action, together with his discussions of moral senti-

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ments such as benevolence and compassion and his criticism of self-love, suggestthat while he also famously noted the importance and value of self-interest, atleast with regard to market exchange, he saw our imaginations and our mostintense cares as connected to the good of all. This implies a fundamentallyeudaimonistic rather than egotistic orientation, though as we shall see, this canbe overridden, with mostly undesirable consequences, in certain kinds of socialcontext which promote the latter (see also Nussbaum 1996: 48).

While the most striking feature of The Theory of Moral Sentiments is its system-atic and subtle analysis of how individuals make moral judgements withininterpersonal relations, it also addresses another kind of relationship – namelyhow particular forms of social organisation tend to encourage particular kinds ofmoral sentiment, good or bad. The most famous example which concernedSmith was the way in which commercial society tended to promote vanity, andthe elevation of the pursuit of praise and prestige over the pursuit of praise-worthy action. Again, to acknowledge that the kinds of social relations we growup among influence the kinds of people we grow up to be is not to deny thatanyone can resist their influence, but to recognise that it may sometimes be toomuch to expect.

To return to the matter of lay moral judgement itself, Smith appears towaver between realist and conventionalist views.15 Although he could be takento be proposing a purely conventionalist view of the good – the good is merelywhatever the community approves of,16 or what spectators find ‘agreeable’,which might also suggest an emotivist view of moral sentiments – he mostlyrejects such conclusions. While he argues that this approval or disapproval isitself fallible, it is often warranted, because it is in keeping with the nature ofthe action or situation being evaluated: ‘Originally, however, we approve ofanother man’s judgement, not as something useful,17 but as right, as accurate,as agreeable to truth and reality’ (1984 [1757]: 20 [I.i.4.4]). However, thisrealist point is immediately compromised when he continues ‘and it is evidentthat he attributes those qualities to it for no other reason but because we findthat it agrees with our own’ (1984 [1757]: 20 [I.i.4.4]) – implying a subjective orconventionalist view of truth.

Smith’s most clearly realist argument is his insistence on a distinction betweenpraiseworthy acts and acts which are praised, arguing that a praiseworthy act isnot, contra sociological reductionism, simply any practice which happens to bepraised, but one which is good or worthy even if it is not praised.18 Moral actsare not merely ones which are conventionally approved but acts which are doneregardless of whether they receive approval, in fact even, in exceptional cases, inthe face of disapproval. The behaviour of those who hid Jews from the Nazis inthe Second World War was moral despite the fact that their behaviour broughtthem not merely disapproval but considerable risk. Thus, sociologically reduc-tionist, conventionalist accounts of morality merely reproduce the mistake thatthe praiseworthy is no more than what happens to be praised.19 Smith alsodescribed virtues in non-conventionalist ways; for example, he considered benev-olence, and the restraint of selfishness as ‘constituting the perfection of human


nature’ (1984: 24 [I.i.4.4]) implying it is necessary for us to flourish, which pointsto an ethical naturalism, a point to which I shall return.

As to just what constitutes praiseworthy behaviour as an object, aside fromwhether it is praised, Smith is somewhat vague, and he tends to rely on appealsto the particular examples he works from rather than making general claims. Inany case, the above argument does not say enough because of course many actswhich are carried out in the face of disapproval are not moral but immoral,indeed that is why they are despised (though again, they are not immoral because

they are despised).It is at this point that we need to go beyond Smith and consider ethical

naturalism.

Ethical naturalism

As a theory of the nature of ethics I am proposing what might be termed aqualified ethical naturalism. It is ethically naturalist in that it considers that thevery meaning of good or bad cannot be determined without reference to thenature of human social being. As a first cut, we can say that the meaning ofgood and bad ultimately relates to human needs and human capacities forflourishing or suffering. This is not merely a matter of ‘values’ or ‘subjectiveopinion’, or of pleasure and pain, for it concerns objective matters – objectivein the sense of being independent of what particular observers happen tothink.20 Like ‘needs’, the categories of ‘flourishing’ and ‘suffering’ transcendthe positive–normative divide.

It is a qualified ethical naturalism because it also acknowledges that thesecapacities are always culturally mediated and elaborated, in three ways:

1 Cultural influences upon our environment condition bodies in certain ways– for example to be tough or soft, violent or passive. While these influencesmay be articulated discursively they are also produced physically throughaction and materials.

2 Human needs and capacities for flourishing or suffering are always inter-preted in various ways by particular cultures, so that the same circumstanceswill be interpreted differently, though not just any interpretation is likely toaccepted. For example, to some extent socially produced suffering may belegitimised as natural, and perhaps be accepted as fate by the dominated,but not just any suffering can be coped with or legitimised, and thereforeresistance is always likely.

3 Further, some kinds of goods and needs are indeed wholly culturally-determined and relative, so that their satisfaction also influences whethermembers of particular cultures flourish (for example, the need of Muslimsto pray). These goods are both defined and valued by particular communi-ties as part of their norms, and they are internalised (to varying degrees)by their members in their commitments so that individuals identify withthem and give meaning to their lives through them. Hence many morali-

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ties and their associated ethical sentiments apply primarily to those insidea particular community, and not or less so to other communities.

Many will want to say that human flourishing and suffering are ‘sociallyconstructed’, not merely in the sense that people construe them in differentsocially available ways (which critical realists would accept), but in the sense thatthere is no human essence, so flourishing and suffering, morality and immoralityare no more than what particular cultures happen to construct or ‘constitute’them as. This tends to accompany a relativist view of ethics, so that, for example,there are no independent grounds for deeming female genital mutilation to beunethical (see Nussbaum 1999 for critiques of such absurdities).21 However, eventhe third kind of culturally specific needs presuppose natural human qualitiesnot available to most species or objects and so are not entirely independent ofany naturalistic preconditions. Socialisation cannot possibly ‘go all the waydown’ as Rorty argued, for socialisation presupposes an organic body withparticular powers and susceptibilities not possessed by objects, like planks ofwood, which cannot be socialised (Geras, in Archer 2000: 41). Bodies can besocially modified but always within limits.

This qualified ethical naturalism attempts to accommodate both thewondrous variety of human cultural forms and elements which seem to becommon to all (Nussbaum 1993).22 While there are universal human needs theseare always culturally mediated – though within limits – and in addition there arewholly culturally produced (but naturally enabled) needs. This capacity forconsiderable cultural diversity is an essential feature of human beings, involvingissues as fundamental as sexuality, identity and cosmology.23

As a second cut, we need to note that actors’ concepts of the good and thebad and their understanding of human flourishing and suffering are, like allunderstanding, formed in terms of available schema or discourses, which in turnare embedded in cultures. They are fallible, though again it would be absurd toimply that they are all entirely mistaken (since this would involve theory–practicecontradictions and make simple survival incomprehensible, indeed impossible).Strong versions of social constructionism collapse the difference between under-standings and what they are about or of, and hence can make no sense of thefallibility of beliefs, for they assume that what is thought must be, so that under-standings always successfully construct the world as they imagine it, and socialwishful thinking always works. (The opposite idea – the belief that ideas can beperfect reflections of the world – is little better.) Of course, cultural practices do

construct or attempt to construct social life in their own image, but how far theyare successful depends on how they relate to the properties of the objects theymanipulate and address, including people, which are not the product of wishfulthinking but are ‘other’.

While it might seem easy to accept that cultures can be wrong about humanphysical capacities for flourishing (for example promoting foods which causeheart disease) it is perhaps harder to accept this might be true of the moreculturally autonomous practices of the kind referred to in (3), which seem to be


more self-confirming. Cultural discourses provide commentaries on the extent towhich cultural practices enable flourishing and suffering, more simply on what isgood for us, and to the extent that conformity to such beliefs helps one beaccepted as a member of a community, their claims have a self-fulfilling char-acter: those who conform may flourish more than those who rebel. But suchdiscourses may be deeply ideological, encouraging the oppressed to embrace andvalue their position as worthy, for example, encouraging full-time housewives toembrace domesticity, dependence and subservience to their husbands. At thesame time, discourses, belief systems or cultures are usually rich enough toprovide ways of questioning their own beliefs. Thus, one doesn’t have to be anon-westerner to see that many beliefs about what constitutes flourishing in thewest are mistaken. The complexity, unevenness and (increasing) openness of realsocieties tends to invite actors to compare situations of relative flourishing withother situations of oppression and to question why what is possible in one sphereis not in another; for example why values of equality have not been extended togender relations. The fallibility of any discourse, practice or ‘social construction’is a product of the independence or otherness of the materials (includingpersonal, social and discursive materials) from the concepts their users may haveof them, and this otherness can often be detected.

As stratified beings, that is simultaneously physical, chemical, biological,psychological and social beings, we can be affected by different kinds ofsuffering on different levels: physical sickness; socio-psychological pathologiesresulting from culturally produced double-binds; and social contradictions (forexample, the development of money as an end in itself rather than a means toan end). There may also be feedbacks from one level to another; when capi-talism (social level) makes you sick it does so via its influence on thepsychological and biological levels.

However, to acknowledge the fallibility of popular conceptions of the goodand of morality is not to suppose that there is only one best way of living. AsNussbaum (1999) and Collier (2003) argue, it is possible, indeed necessary, toacknowledge the remarkable cultural diversity of human societies, and thatthere is more than one way in which flourishing may be achieved. Societies areopen systems. It is therefore quite consistent to argue both that cultural,including moral, values are fallible, providing mistaken ideas about what consti-tutes flourishing, and hence produce physical suffering, psychological damage,and limitation of human powers, and that in principle different cultures couldprovide different but equally successful forms of flourishing.

This is not to underestimate the difficulty of assessing what constitutesflourishing or suffering, but we can make some discriminations between them.Clearly it requires us to assess what human social being involves and what isdistinctive about it. Thus, recognising the human capacity for agency andcreativity and need for stimulation, all people have not only certain basic needsregarding ‘beings’ (such as food and shelter, and a healthy environment), butalso a need for access to diverse activities or ‘doings’ (Sen 1999). As Aristotleargued, flourishing is assisted by full, active use of capacities – which is why

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the deprivations of prison really do damage people; ‘the more enjoyable activi-ties and the more desirable pleasures arise in connection with the exercise ofgreater abilities involving more complex discriminations’ (Rawls 1972: 426n).There are many actually existing kinds of being and doing and many morepossible ones, but it is by virtue of our stratified nature that it is possible,notwithstanding this cultural diversity and openness, to speak of ‘basic needs’without falling into ethnocentrism (Nussbaum and Sen 1993).

Flourishing and suffering are typically unevenly distributed. As social beings,the extent to which particular individuals flourish or suffer depends on theirrelationship to others, on social structures and on embedded distributions ofpower which enable, constrain and provide interpretations of their lives. Someindividuals or groups may flourish at the expense of others or may suffer inways that help others flourish. In other words there may be localised possibili-ties for flourishing for some, which, though better than some alternatives, areinferior to other social arrangements that allow flourishing to be more of a posi-tive sum game. The ideal would be a society in which the flourishing of all isthe condition of the flourishing of each individual. However, the very existenceof local secondary optima, and material conditions such as the spatial segrega-tion of the dominant and the oppressed, reduce pressures to work towards moreinclusively beneficial forms of social organisation. One of the impediments tobetter forms of society is therefore the fact that the eudaimonistic impulse canbe met tolerably well from the point of view of people’s well-being locally, andsometimes at the expense of others who are, or are imagined to be, remote.24

In proposing this qualified ethical naturalism I am trying to avoid two mainpitfalls:

(1) An over-extended naturalism which grounds ethics in ahistorical bodies.This ignores cultural variety and historical change, and hence the openness ofhuman development – the fact that we can become many more things than wehave been or currently are. We might be able to become more – instead of less –ethical than we are now. In addition, social change may pose novel moral prob-lems: for example, new forms of technology (e.g. reproductive technologies),social association (e.g. global neoliberalism) and developments in social thought25

(such as animal rights arguments). Ethics cannot be reduced to a matter of authen-ticity in relation to a primordial human nature, though as we argue neither can itbe wholly divorced from human nature. Human nature allows us to be cruel andviolent as well as kind and caring, and therefore even when dealing withuniversal human characteristics we need to distinguish between what constitutesflourishing and suffering. We need to avoid both a naive objectivism – in whichthese matters are simply self-evident and not culturally interpreted – and variousforms of idealism that falsely assume that whatever is culturally interpreted issolely the product of culture. This confuses mediation and interpretation withproduction, and supposes that creativity or ‘construction’ can occur out ofnothing, regardless of the properties of the materials used in construction.

Our qualified ethical naturalism avoids this kind of reductionism, byacknowledging the openness of social systems, the fact that humans can come


to live in many more ways than they have so far. In developing those new waysthey will acquire new culturally emergent powers, and create and discover newways of flourishing – and suffering. Consequently, ethics must allow a creativedimension, albeit not creation out of nothing, as if there were no natural limitsand enablements, as seems to be implied in some of Foucault’s work (Foucault2000), but creation through the use and development of existing materials.There therefore need be no conflict between an ethics of authenticity and anethics of creativity.26 Nor need there be any conflict between this concept of thepursuit of the good as one of discovery in the dual sense of discovery of whatalready is and of what could be, and the concept of objectivity as defended byAndrew Collier (2003). We learn through social experimentation what is objec-tively possible and what objectively expands human flourishing. That socialexperiments, such as those of state socialism, Talibanism or global neoliber-alism can go horribly wrong, is precisely in keeping, rather than incontradiction with, the idea that what constitutes human flourishing is an objec-tive matter, in the strong sense, that is, one independent of ‘social construction’.

(2) Various forms of relativism and idealism, which treat norms, includingmorality, as purely a matter of convention, as nothing more than ‘what we doround here’. The relative success of various norms or arguments is interpreted ina sociologically reductionist way, being attributed wholly to matters of socialpositioning, socially-granted authority, performance and confidence, and powerand luck. This is often coupled with refusals of normative argument and, indeed,through a sociological reductionism which reduces the internal force or validityand veracity of arguments to matters of social authority and power. Suchapproaches run into three related problems. First, they cannot articulate whyanything is progressive rather than regressive – why, for example, racist resistanceto liberalism is not progressive while anti-racism is (each, after all, involvesdifferent ideas about ‘what we do round here’). Second, they involve a performa-tive contradiction (why argue or reason so carefully for a position which deniesargument or reason any force?). Third, they involve theory–practice contradic-tions (when crypto-normative writers are wronged in everyday life, they don’tcomplain by merely appealing to ‘what we do round here’, or by pulling rank, orusing force to gain revenge; they usually explain to the person who has wrongedthem why their actions were wrong or unfair, and they expect them to ‘seereason’ (arguments and evidence), not merely authority or power).

These three problems all derive from a more basic one in social science: acommon but often unnoticed inconsistency between third person accounts ofbehaviour which explain it wholly in sociological terms (‘they would say/do that,given their social position’), and first person accounts of behaviour which usejustification (‘I do that not because of my social position but because I believe –and am willing to argue – that it is the best thing to do, given the nature of thesituation’). Ironically, there is a complicity here between sociologically reduc-tionist accounts of the effectivity of discourse and the belief of populistpoliticians and media that political argument reduces to a matter of confidence,style and conviction.27

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An a priori assumption that all societies or cultures are completely differentand incommensurable would be as dogmatic as an assumption that they areno different. (It would also render inter-cultural communication inexplic-able.) Just how much difference and similarity there is among them is anempirical question, and existing evidence suggests both extraordinary differ-ences and overlaps and similarities.

(Nussbaum 1993, 1999)

Social structures as objects of moral concern

I noted earlier that Smith correctly recognised that moral and immoral senti-ments and behaviour tended to be encouraged or discouraged by particularforms of social organisation, and that his concerns about the damaging effects ofmarkets were consistent with this recognition of social influences. I now want todraw out some critical implications of this approach regarding contemporarymoral philosophy’s tendency towards individualistic approaches which neglectthe evaluation of social structures.

Acknowledging the importance of social influences on individual behaviourenables us to see that it is no accident that instances of evil or anti-socialbehaviour tend to be concentrated in particular places or institutions, for theyare induced by problematic forms of social organisation involving inequalities ofpower, material deprivation and various forms of discrimination and refusal ofrecognition.28 In this way Hobbesian and violent behaviours are often inducedby absolute deprivation and refusal of recognition, coupled with expectationsraised in the wider society regarding levels of consumption and desirablelifestyles, including gender models (Gilligan 2000). Many of these formativeprocesses are multilateral and highly self-reinforcing in character; it becomesdifficult for individuals not to behave in a Hobbesian manner if the majority oftheir community are already doing so.29 The young men of the Chicago blackghetto interviewed by Loic Wacquant make it clear that if they were not suspi-cious of others and prepared to use force, indeed sometimes to treat attack as thebest form of defence, they would be sure to end up as victims (Bourdieu et al.1999: 130–167). Of course, such social conditions do not wholly excuse anti-social individual behaviour, for individuals might be expected to reflect on andoverride such influences, but again, this is often a lot to expect.

In such cases, critical concern should be focused on the whole situation ratherthan simply on individual conduct. In everyday life, people tend to resort to indi-vidualistic explanations, assuming that if there are local concentrations ofanti-social behaviour there must simply be local concentrations of evil people. Inthis way, political objections are defused and diffused into moralistic condemnationof individuals. However, much of moral philosophy, with its focus on individualaction and its neglect of social contexts, offers little challenge to this view.30 Thestandard questions in practical ethics tend to concern what individuals should do,not what kinds of social organisation should exist. Thus, for example, problemsconcerning inequalities of wealth are often reduced to the question of whether the


affluent should give money to the absolutely poor, not how poverty comes to existin the first place and whether the mechanisms that reproduce it should be allowedto persist (e.g. Singer 1993).31 It tends to imply that the proper response to povertyis for the well-off to do X, even though it is clear that poverty is caused by Y (struc-tures of exploitation and domination) rather than the lack of X.

This prioritisation of questions of what the individual should do in the face ofsocial circumstances such as entrenched inequalities has tended to give moralphilosophy a bad name in social science, for encouraging a diversion of concernswhich are properly political into moral or moral matters, and what Weberscathingly described as:

[T]hat soft-headed attitude, so agreeable from the human point of view, butnevertheless so unutterably narrowing in its effects, which thinks it possibleto replace political with ‘ethical’ ideas, and to innocently identify these withoptimistic expectations of felicity.

(Weber, cited in Bellamy 1992: 216)

This polarised (and partly unfair) response is complemented by a kind of amorallibertarian socialism which values political struggle in itself and lacks any justifi-cation for its goals other than power itself.

Hence, in addition to overcoming the divide between positive social scienceand normative moral philosophy, we need to overcome the divide betweenmatters of individual morality and political concern about social structures.

Conclusions

I have argued that we need to relate ethical dispositions or moral sentimentsboth to the kinds of beings we are – social, embodied beings located in varioussocieties or communities – and to what it is that makes people not merelyrespond to conditions but discriminate among them. Individuals are both vulner-able and hence dependent on others, and are capable of having dominion overthemselves to some degree, of seeing themselves as ends and not merely meansfor others. We are dependent on others not only in terms of needing their careas infants or in ill-health or needing their products through the division oflabour, but in terms of recognition and the public, shared nature of many formsof flourishing. We are vulnerable to losses and susceptible to benefits because wehave things we care about and with which we identify, whose enhancement orloss affects our well-being (Frankfurt 1998; Norman 1998; Nussbaum 1986). Ifwe were not beings who were capable of caring, needing, lacking and desiringwe would lack much reason to seek or resist anything. Reason on this view is notmere logic. When we say we have reason to do some thing, we do not meanmerely that we can produce a piece of reasoning but that we have a need to doit. At the same time, to appeal to reason is to refer to standards and circum-stances which are not reducible to our desires or preferences but are independentof them, hence objective, and are intersubjectively verifiable, at least in principle.

108 Andrew Sayer

An adequate understanding of the moral dimension of social life needs todraw upon both social science and moral philosophy, indeed to ignore theboundary between them. It needs to recognise the rational, cognitive aspect ofmoral sentiments while acknowledging that they can be based on embodiedethical dispositions as well as introspection. It needs a strongly social conceptionof the formation and exercise of moral judgement, though without lapsing intosociological reductionism that renders morality as no more than ‘what we doround here’. It needs to consider not only what are the proper objects of moralconcern but also what it is about human beings that enables them to be subjects(and also objects) of moral concern. In other words it needs to provide a moralpsychology, ideally one that goes far beyond Smith and deals with the develop-ment of moral sensibilities from birth. An understanding of the subjective aspectof the moral dimension of social life in no way licenses a subjectivist view ofmorals but is in fact a necessary component of an adequate realist analysis.

In these respects, Adam Smith’s sophisticated analysis of moral sentimentsoffers a good starting point, illuminating the fact that we are evaluative socialbeings, aware that others are spectators of our own behaviour or could be, as weare of them. However, it is only a start. For example, with regard to its moralpsychology, an analysis is needed of the processes by which infants grow up tobecome moral individuals. He also fails to resolve the tensions between conven-tionalist or emotivist views of values and realist views. For this we need an ethicalnaturalism, albeit one which is qualified to take account of the reality of culturaldiversity and innovation. This is compatible with realism and with AndrewCollier’s analysis of the nature of objectivity, although its claims are morelimited and modest than those of strong versions of moral realism, as advocated,for example, in Being and Worth, which require us to accept that being itself isgood (Collier 1999).

I have argued for the restoration of the moral dimension to social science’sdescriptions of social life, partly by drawing upon the insights of moral philos-ophy and some of the classical social theory that predated the divorce of positiveand normative thought. At the same time, I have noted the limitations ofcontemporary moral philosophy in terms of its individualistic tendencies. Takingthe social influences upon individual behaviour seriously requires us to evaluatesocial structures themselves as proper objects of moral concern, thereby unitingthe moral and the political instead of allowing moral deliberation to have indi-vidualising and depoliticising effects. I am sure that this is consistent withAndrew Collier’s enduring concern not only with morality but with the searchfor a socialist society.

Acknowledgement

My thanks, with the usual disclaimers, to John O’Neill for comments andsuggestions.


Notes

1 I shall use the terms morality and ethics interchangeably, while recognising that thereis a difference between formal norms and dispositions relating to an ethos, whichsome authors use the two terms to distinguish.

2 Though I do not want to misrepresent Smith, my main purpose in referring to hisideas is not to produce either an authoritative account of his moral philosophy, but touse and adapt certain elements that might help us understand the moral dimension ofsocial life.

3 Critical realism is an exception here for its analysis of structure and agency and ofexplanatory critique enable it to avoid individualism and voluntarism (Archer 2000;Bhaskar 1979; Collier 1994).

4 For instance, everyday thinking is patently inadequate for dealing with matters such asresponsibilities towards distant others and future generations.

5 Behind a veil of ignorance, we might be encouraged to consider such questions,indeed Rawls’ arguments regarding primary goods presuppose them.

6 This identifies the weakness of simple dichotomies of the positive and the normativewith respect to ethics.

7 While empirical researchers are often exasperated by their interviewees’ tendency tointerpret positive questions normatively (for example, when they ask questions aboutclass), they should sometimes pause to reflect on the extraordinary nature of theirown tendency to bracket out normative questions.

8 Anti-naturalists would refuse such a possibility by denying that it can ever entail ought.This is not only flawed in its own terms, as Bhaskar has demonstrated (Bhaskar 1979),but it argues on the wrong terrain, for it misidentifies relations between substantialprocesses, such as being assaulted, insulted or deceived, and the consequent effects onone’s well-being and state of mind, as logical relations between statements.

9 This also implies that reason itself has ‘shoving power’ (Archer 2003; Collier 2003).10 However, as Smith suggested, individuals’ ethical dispositions seem to vary less

according to their social position than do their aesthetic dispositions, presumablybecause of the greater role of universalisation in the formation of the former (Smith1984 [1757]; Sayer 2004).

11 This is a tendency taken advantage of in military training: for example, novicesoldiers are made to alter their ethical disposition towards violence through bayonetpractice.

12 For a compelling analysis of the social causes of individual violence see Gilligan2000.

13 This should be unpacked to distinguish innate capacities from acquired capacities.Exceptional conditions may inhibit the acquisition of certain of the latter, such assevere deprivation of contact with others in childhood. One of the complexities isthat we have to deal with capacities which contingently (but often almost invariably)develop from pre-existing capacities as emergent powers, and in which that develop-ment depends on environmental factors. Thus, a capacity for language usepresupposes but is not reducible to certain non-linguistic preconditions. Likewise,moral imagination – the capacity to imagine the consequences and implications ofactions – may be restricted or extensive.

14 While many commentators have overlooked this point, and thus imagined a contrastbetween the ‘sympathetic’ individuals of The Theory of Moral Sentiments and thesupposedly merely self-interested individuals of The Wealth of Nations, it has to be saidthat Smith does sometimes use ‘sympathy’ in the more common sense. It is importantto note that the common idea that there were thus two Smiths has now been over-whelmingly refuted by intellectual historians (Winch 1978, 1996; Griswold 1999;Weinstein 2001).

15 Several commentators have noted this. See Griswold 1999, for an overview.

110 Andrew Sayer

16 This is a common view in sociology (MacIntyre 1985: 115). It raises interesting ques-tions about what sociologists do when they mark essays or referee each other’s papers,and how they argue.

17 In addition, he is clearly rejecting a utilitarian account here (see also Griswold 1999:244).

18 This argument has antecedents in Aristotle, and is further developed by MacIntyrethrough his distinction between internal and external goods (MacIntyre 1985).MacIntyre cites the work of Goffman as an example of this sociological reductionism.It is analogous to the conventionalist view of truth favoured in recent sociology ofscience. In both cases it seems to encourage a view of detached superiority on thepart of the sociologist, a view which is at odds with its absurdity.

19 In the terms of critical realism, this involves what Bhaskar terms an ‘epistemic fallacy’in that it transposes ontological matters into epistemological ones (Bhaskar 1975).

20 See Collier 2003 for a brilliant analysis of the multiple meanings of – and confusionssurrounding – objectivity.

21 This also tends to involve an ‘upward’ reduction of the biological to the socialthrough a denial of ontological stratification and emergence. Another component is adogmatic anti-essentialism, which typically argues, illogically, that because gender andidentity have no essence, nothing has any essence, and which imagines that to imputeessences to things is to deny that they can change or assume different contingentforms according to their associated accidental properties (Sayer 2000).

22 It is interesting that the beliefs and practices of ancient Greece can, without contra-diction, be drawn upon to illustrate both points.

23 It is both a generative essence – generating cultural variety – and a diagnostic essence,that is a characteristic which is distinctive in humans, though some degree of culturalvariety has been found in other higher animals too (see Sayer 2000: ch. 4).

24 Likewise, from the perspective of an ethical theory based on the need for recognition,this can often be met locally, within particular groups, which may at the same timedeny, and indeed depend on, the denial of full recognition to others (Wood 1990: 93).

25 Of course these three things tend to be connected – new technologies involve changesin social relations and ways of thinking.

26 It is not only absurd to call, as Foucault does, for an ethic of creativity that is notbased on truth about desire, life, nature or body (Foucault 2000: 262), as if thesewould prevent creativity and new discoveries; it is also dangerous to call for an ethicswhich disregards the affordances and limits of human social being.

27 I recall attending a seminar on the impact of discourse which took a sociologicallyreductionist and crypto-normative line on this topic. It was held on the day on whichBritain and the United States committed themselves to invading Iraq, and the speakermade a derogatory aside about the government’s stance. While the remark was, in myview, quite justified, it undermined the whole thrust of the talk in appealing to thelack of internal force in the government’s arguments rather than to the social posi-tion, authority and habitus of politicians.

28 This is not to deny that unethical behaviour is possible in more favourable circum-stances too, though even then, one suspects, there would be a social or socialpsychological dimension to their explanation.

29 See also Glover’s analysis of ‘Hobbesian traps’ (Glover 2001).30 An important exception is the large volume of work on markets (e.g. O’Neill 1998).31 Critical realist emphasis on explanatory critique allows more attention to be given to

the social causes of problems. However, as I have argued elsewhere (Sayer 2000), crit-ical realism has only just begun to consider ethical theory (e.g. Collier 1999), and asyet offers little help in deciding just what are problems and why.


Bibliography

Archer, M.S. (2000) Being Human, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.—— (2003) Structure, Agency, and the Internal Conversation, Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press.Bauman, Z. (1993) Postmodern Ethics, Oxford: Blackwell.Bellamy, R. (1992) Liberalism and Modern Society, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Benhabib, S. (1992) Situating the Self, Cambridge: Polity.Bhaskar, R. (1975) A Realist Theory of Science, Leeds: Leeds Books (2nd edn, Brighton:

Harvester, 1979).—— (1979) The Possibility of Naturalism: A Philosophical Critique of the Contemporary Human

Sciences, Brighton: Harvester.Bourdieu, P. (2000) Pascalian Meditations, Cambridge: Polity.Bourdieu, P. et al. (1999) The Weight of the World, Cambridge: Polity.Collier, A. (1994) Critical Realism: An Introduction, London: Verso.—— (1999) Being and Worth, London: Routledge.—— (2003) In Defence of Objectivity, London: Routledge.Crossley, N. (2001) ‘The Phenomenological Habitus and its Construction’, Theory and

Society, 30, pp. 81–120.Foucault, M. (2000) Michel Foucault: Ethics, ed. P. Rabinow, London: Penguin.Frankfurt, H.G. (1998) The Importance of What We Care About, Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.Gilligan, J. (2000) Violence: Reflections on Our Deadliest Epidemic, London: Jessica Kingsley.Glover, J. (2001) Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century, London: Pimlico.Griswold, C.L. Jr (1999) Adam Smith and the Virtues of Enlightenment, Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.Habermas, J. (1990) Moral Consciousness and Communication Interaction, Cambridge: Polity.MacIntyre, A. (1985) After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2nd edn, London: Duckworth.Midgley, M. (2003) Heart and Mind, revised edn, London: Routledge.Norman. R (1998) The Moral Philosophers, 2nd edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press.Nussbaum, M.C. (1986) The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philos-

ophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.—— (1993) ‘Non-relative virtues: an Aristotelian approach’, in M.C. Nussbaum and A.

Sen (eds), The Quality of Life, Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 242–269.—— (1996) ‘Compassion: the Basic Emotion’, Social Philosophy and Policy, 13, 1, pp. 27–58.—— (1999) Sex and Social Justice, Oxford: Oxford University Press.Nussbaum, M.C. and A. Sen (eds) (1993) The Quality of Life, Oxford: Clarendon Press.O’Neill, J. (1998) The Market: Ethics, Information and Politics, London: Routledge.Rawls, J. (1972) A Theory of Justice, Oxford: Clarendon Press.Sayer, A. (2000) Realism and Social Science, London: Sage.—— (2004) Moral Dimensions of Class.Sedgewick, E.K. and A. Frank (eds) (1995) Shame and its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader,

Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Sen, A. (1999) Development as Freedom, Oxford: Oxford University Press.Singer, P. (1993) Practical Ethics, 2nd edn, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Smith, A. (1976) An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. E. Cannan,

Chicago: University of Chicago Press.—— (1984 [1757]) The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.Weinstein, J.R. (2001) On Adam Smith, Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.

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Williams, R. (1977) Marxism and Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press.Winch, D. (1978) Adam Smith’s Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.—— (1996) Riches and Poverty: An Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain,

1750–1834, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Wood, A.W. (1990) Hegel’s Ethical Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.


Part IV

Objectivity andeveryday knowledge

Introduction

The following debate with Andrew marks one spot of turbulence on an other-wise smooth flight. What is at issue is the relationship between practical andtheoretical knowledge. Both of us accept that these two types of knowledge aredifferent in kind; we agree that they interact and we assert that each can advancevalid claims to objectivity. The issue between us concerns the more limited ques-tion about how practical and theoretical knowledge contribute to one another’sdevelopment. It is thus a debate about the process or processes by which objectiveknowledge develops.

Why is this issue of importance to realism? The reason is not merely becausecritical realism makes claims about the nature of reality which would be non-sensical if they did not also claim to be objective. This is true of any theory. Forexample, social constructionists hold society to be made up of inter-subjectivemeanings, but they are also maintaining this to be objectively the case. Althoughrelativism undermines their social ontology, it does not prevent their aim fromhaving been to make a true statement about the nature of social reality. Like theWelshman asked for the route to Snowdon, a realist would reply they werestarting from the wrong place – not that Snowdon was an undesirable destination.

Instead, because critical realism is in the business of maximising thewarranted assertions which it can make about reality, it is supremely concernedwith objective knowledge. These assertions are always provisional because ourknowledge is always fallible, but our interest is in minimising our fallibilitythrough correction and testing. Then, we can improve upon our ontologicalassertions, because what we hold reality to be can never be indifferent to whatwe discover about it. In other words, realists believe in the progress of knowl-edge. Without such progress, ‘judgemental rationality’ would stand still andcould not make further inroads into ‘epistemic relativism’. Hence the signifi-cance of this debate about the processes by which knowledge develops – becausewithout the growth of knowledge there would be no growth in substantiverealism itself, such as realist social theory.

Andrew and I are agreed that the objective of knowledge is objectivity. Theroot question, to be examined in this paper, is whether or not there is one source

8 Objectivity and the growthof knowledge

Margaret S. Archer

of such knowledge, or do practical and theoretical knowledge represent twodifferent and irreducible sources of it? Because epistemology matters, I will beaccentuating the differences between us on this matter. Whilst we both endorsethe primacy of practice in the ontogenetic and phylogenetic development ofknowledge, I maintain that practice remains pivotal to knowledge developmentin general, whilst Andrew tends to give theoretical knowledge pride of place inthis process of development. We have rehearsed these arguments and counter-arguments together on various occasions, with give and take on both sides. I trusthe will forgive me if I present the bare bones of these exchanges for those whodid not take part.

On the ‘objectivity of everyday knowledge’

In a short section of his book In Defence of Objectivity (Collier 2003: 210–223),Andrew distinguishes ‘lay knowledge’, which stands for tacit, embodied andskilled know-how (not folk wisdom), from ‘theoretical knowledge’, which isdiscursively formulated. He also wants to vindicate the objectivity of both formsof knowledge, without assimilating one to the other – as empiricists did byconstruing the two as being matters of ‘just looking’, that is making similarappeals to sense data. So far, there is no difference between us. However, as aphilosopher, Andrew is more concerned to resist the denigration of ‘theoreticalknowledge’, exemplified in the thought of Heidegger and Macmurray. As asocial theorist, I am more exercised about the denigration of ‘practical knowl-edge’, exemplified by Bourdieu’s work which held it to manifest the poverty of‘fuzzy logic’, typical of the poor themselves. In other words, Andrew and I dostart off feeling that we have opposite things to defend. Nevertheless, we bothwant to maintain that ‘practical knowledge’, to use my own term (Archer 2000),and ‘theoretical knowledge’ are (fallible) sources of objectivity and we seek togive a realist account of them. Since both of us also accept that these two typesof knowledge are different in kind, then we each have to give an account of therelations between them. It is our accounts that differ.

Even here, the difference takes place within overall accord. Andrew’s charac-terisation of ‘lay knowledge’ accords it exactly that robust objectivity which Idefend for ‘practical knowledge’ – and for present purposes, the difference interminology is unimportant. Thus he writes that practical experience entails‘reality-testing’ because ‘it provides access to the reference of concepts of whichhearsay only teaches us the sense’ (2003: 216). ‘Hearsay’ stands for the way inwhich most of us receive most of the theoretical knowledge we possess – a short-hand term that I find unobjectionable because such is precisely the status of myunderstanding of electricity, despite my familiar use of light switches.

Andrew agrees that theoretical knowledge pre-supposes practical knowledge(or hearsay presumes experience) because unless we understood the relation ofthe entities or mechanisms that theory uncovered to those that we are used tooperating and being affected by, we could not grasp the theoretical point.Nevertheless, it is here that our difference begins. I think that Andrew both

118 Margaret S. Archer

subordinates practical knowledge and makes it dependent upon theoreticalknowledge for its development (not its origins). He does so for two reasons, and Iwill disagree with both of them in a moment. Before that, it is important to askwhat turns upon rendering practical knowledge subordinate to and dependentupon theoretical knowledge. Since the aim is to give a realist account of bothkinds of knowledge, it follows that if the theoretical can be shown to be super-ordinate, then only one such account is needed. That is the reason why Andrewsays, ‘this will lead me into a discussion of hearsay and the means of testing andcorrecting it; this seems to me to be the central issue in the theory of knowledge’(2003: 211). However, because I dispute the dependence of practice uponhearsay, then I must also disagree with this ‘one step’ method for securing theobjectivity of both kinds of knowledge. If I deny that this is the central issue ofepistemology, then it is incumbent upon me, but not on him, to show how eachindependently necessitates realism. I accept this implication and the challenge.However, I will put forward only arguments intended to support the independent

claim of practical knowledge to objectivity, because I am in agreement with hisaccount of theoretical knowledge per se.

Theoretical and practical knowledge – precedence or independence?

To begin with, it is necessary to clarify what is meant by the subordination anddependence of practical knowledge, which I am attributing to Andrew – andwhy his reasons for doing so are found wanting. First, he seems to put forward adeficiency model of practical knowledge, as follows. Question: why do we notsimply make do with the vast store of tacit knowledge that is implicit in oureveryday work, and ignore theoretical knowledge? Answer: because the origin oftheoretical knowledge lies in practical breakdowns for which theory provides therepairs. That was also the response common among American pragmatists.However, Peirce was unique in maintaining that to see problems where othersdid not was a sign of mental sophistication. In other words, no breakdown wasneeded for practical knowledge to furnish its own growing tip that thrust throughtheoretical ground. Later on, I will argue that Peirce was correct and give exam-ples of the development of increasingly sophisticated skilful practices – occurringwithout breakdown or extraneous theoretical borrowing taking place.

His second argument, which underpins the dependence of practical knowledge,is a longer one about the historical relationship between the two forms of knowl-edge. Here Andrew points to an entirely different phenomenon from ‘breakdown’,namely, that much of our now tacit, technical skill ‘was once learnt by being speltout and communicated in words by someone else’ (Collier 2003: 214). As we famil-iarise ourselves with such instructions, to the point where they become embodiedknow-how, we forget that our tacit skills were once someone else’s hard-won theo-retical knowledge. Consequently, what seems to us common sense is notacknowledged to be, in fact, second-hand theory. The final and crucial move is tomake yesterday’s ‘hearsay’ into the prerequisite for today’s practical and skilled

Objectivity and the growth of knowledge 119

knowledge. Hence, ‘If knowledge is produced by means of knowledge, we mustacquire second-hand knowledge before we have the wherewithal to produce first-hand knowledge’ (2003: 215). Three ‘facts’ are offered to substantiate thisproposition, but I do not find any of them incontrovertible.

To begin with, Andrew states that ‘the huge bulk of our knowledge is andremains pure hearsay’. Yet, there always have been, are now and ever will becrucial tracts of our embodied and our practical knowledge which must be recapit-

ulated anew by every living and functioning human being. Here, Andrew and Iagree that these unmediated encounters between the way we are made and theway the world is constituted are crucial to our being recognisably human andrealising many of our potentials. Prosaically, which of us was ever taught to leaninto the wind or to incline ourselves forwards when going up hill and backwardswhen going down? These unmediated encounters are equally crucial to ourcapacity to acquire language (Collier 1998) and thus to understand hearsay. Butif we are agreed on this, why should there be any limits to the new knowledgewhich can be acquired in this theoretically unmediated manner throughout life?There are not, and I do not think that Andrew is saying there are: I take him tobe making only an empirical generalisation.

But what about that generalisation – the ‘huge bulk’ he assigns to hearsayknowledge? Phenomenologically, we may feel this ‘bulk’ to be the case, but is itreally so? Undoubtedly, there has been a secular explosion of theory and weare acutely aware of the specialised theoretical knowledge of others on whichwe depend – without the need for slogans like ‘the information society’. But,there has also been a parallel explosion in material culture, from computers toevery kind of technology and gadget, upon which this so-called ‘informationage’ depends. These are novelties, and if our children pick up computing morequickly than we do, this is not because of parents’ or teachers’ say-so.Moreover, most of us recognise that it is usually quicker to fiddle around witha new appliance than to consult the book of instructions. Nowadays, jobschange rapidly in their skill requirements and in many cases the upgrading ofskills, as in secretarial work, has little to do with increased theoretical mastery.Indeed, it could even be argued that both at work and in everyday life we areall increasingly pressed to become practically adept in areas that we do nottheoretically understand – from on-line booking and texting to using telephonemenus and digital sources of entertainment. There is little hearsay to help uswith this quotidian reskilling. At the moment, in writing this paper directlyonto the screen, I am practising in order to break the typewriting habits of alifetime – but there are no verbal tips to help. In short, I simply do not knowhow it is possible to make a quasi-quantitative statement about what the ‘hugebulk’ of our knowledge is.

Andrew’s second argument is that ‘Hearsay precedes other knowledge. Firstwe are told about things, then we discover them’ (Collier 2003: 215). I supposewhat he has in mind here are indisputable examples, such as (babies apart) thatwe have all heard about Australia before we visit it. However, is this an accept-able factual assertion about the development of knowledge in general? In the


context of our present argument, this statement denies that practical knowledgedevelops without the intervention of theoretical hearsay. This I would challengeby reference to the growth of practical skills themselves, where it seems to methat matters are precisely the opposite way round from in the above proposition.Phylogenetically, our direct relations with nature regulated human practice (itsuse and misuse) without verbal mediation. There, I think we both agree.However, natural relations not only supplied feedback on error, they spurred uson to improvements and rewarded our improvement. Better eye–hand co-ordination brought the reward of catching more fish or game and developing abetter swimming style enabled us to traverse greater distances and get to safetymore quickly. My contention here is that it was precisely from bodily experimen-tation in nature that the theoretical attitude itself was born. If the ice crackedand we got a ducking, or the liana broke and we fell, this did not foster simpleaversion (stimulus–response), but rather a heightened awareness that there wasice and ice and fibre and fibre. In turn, this was midwife to the theoretical atti-tude of tapping-and-testing or hanging-and-feeling. Yet, this domain withinwhich practical knowledge is elaborated retains its autonomy from discursive

theory. What is felt through the foot and fingers is known by them and translatesbadly into words. We can tell someone to ‘tap and test’, but have insuperabledifficulties in conveying the feel of the tap which indicates that it is safe to crossthe ice. I maintain that the same remains true of skilled practice today.

If anthropological speculation is too tenuous to challenge the proposition that‘hearsay precedes other knowledge’, let us introduce a concrete example of theautonomous growth of knowledge in the practical domain. The development ofnavigational systems based upon our embodied ability to maintain a ‘sense ofdirection’, in conjunction with environmental cues and clues, has been welldocumented amongst desert nomads, American Indians and AustralianAboriginals. The most sophisticated exemplar of how this promoted a growthwithin practical knowledge is Polynesian navigation by ‘dead reckoning’ around1500 BC – and accurate to a distance of 2,000 miles. Eurocentric history usuallybegins the story only 200 years ago, with Captain Cook’s exploits, in an era ofnaval instrumentation derived from theoretical science, which is to start the storyback to front. As Keith Oatley (1977) describes it, Polynesian non-instrumentalnavigation was a complex system involving knowledge of the relative locations of50–100 islands and the rising and setting positions of 32 stars, which constituteda natural compass system. That this represented a growing body of knowledgewas witnessed by its artefactual codification – charts made with pebbles andsticks in the Marshall Islands and memorised through mnemonics. In this way, itwas nosing into theoretical knowledge and discursive instruction.

Andrew’s third argument is a continuation of the second, and it intensifies thedependence of practical skills upon discursive knowledge. ‘We are largely taughtthrough language how to “see for ourselves”. … When we do see for ourselves,we do so in ways made possible by what we have been told’ (Collier 2003: 215).Here, I think we have two disagreements, one about the nature of the two kindsof knowledge – practical and theoretical – and the other, deriving from it, about


the relations between them during the teaching and learning of skills. In concep-tualising the nature of practical knowledge, I depart more radically than he doesfrom the European logocentric tradition by viewing practical knowledge asintrinsically non-linguistic. Practical knowledge comes in chunks or stocks ratherthan in linear sequences like sentences, it is stored by being embodied in the seatof our pants rather than in the declarative memory, and it may be accessed by allof our senses, not just by the auditory system. Thus we respond to music, take upthe rhythm of a dance and savour wine or cooking, without using some counter-part to the alphabet or sentence string.

It follows from this divergence between us that we also disagree about theplace of discursive knowledge in acquiring practical skills. To me, becomingskilled in any area is quintessentially a question of ‘catching on’ – whether thepractice is riding a bike or a horse, driving a car, acquiring a nose for wine, a feelfor using a tool or an ear for music. This would still seem to be the case even ifverbal instruction were present. Thus, the driving instructor may say ‘let theclutch up as you press the accelerator down’, but don’t most tyro drivers stall thecar frequently before the indescribable moment when they suddenly get the feelfor synchronising the movement of the two pedals? Once you have ‘got it’ theseare the skills that, as people say, you never forget. However, Andrew and I havean empirical dispute here because we use the identical example to illustrate ourdifferent points of view. As a child, he learnt to ride a bike by following theinstruction to ‘turn the way you’re tipping’, whereas I ‘caught on’ through usingthe bike as a scooter and coasting with the right foot on the near pedal and theleft ready to touch ground when tipping threatened. Since there is no reason tosuppose we are not both telling the truth and supposing we are both remem-bering more or less accurately, do instances of this contrary kind simply cut offthe discussion?

Not entirely, because I could still insist that hearsay does not necessarily precedethe acquisition of practical knowledge. But that would only invite an investiga-tion of individual (psychological or perhaps physiological) differences, whereaswhat we are trying to resolve is a question about the relationship between twoforms of knowledge. What I can proffer in support of my own case – for theindependence of practical skill from verbal mediation – is evidence from thebrain-damaged, where the hippocampus is affected and with it the declarativememory. In such cases a subject may be unable to say or remember that shepossesses a skill which she can nevertheless readily exhibit (see Rose 1992).Because all knowledge is conceptually formed, what this seems to point to is thatskilful practice is inscribed throughout the body without being discursive in formand therefore capable of articulation. However, this is not decisive becauseAndrew agrees that embodied knowledge is indeed the end-state; what he isdenying is its direct or verbally unmediated acquisition.

Do we get any further in this argument about precedence between the twoforms of knowledge by leaving our first bikes behind and talking about thehighest levels of skilled performance? At first it seems not, because again we usethe same example (of musical virtuosity) to opposite ends. I stress the great


divide between apprenticeship and scholarship, see the Masterclass as a placewhere ‘the words run out’ and the talented gradually, but inarticulately, refinetheir ‘feel for music’ through living in it (Archer 2000: 170–171). Andrew takesa different tack and, without minimising the difficulty of doing so, maintainsthat the singing teacher must somehow put it into words if she is to teachothers. Here, he agrees that this often means asking the pupil to do somethingthat she literally cannot do, such as ‘sing from the top of your head’ (Collier2003: 40–41). It is not part of my argument to deny the meaningfulness of suchinstructions. In every field where language is being stretched one could give asend-up like Peter Ustinov’s sketch of the Masterclass; and advice like ‘go withyour horse over the jump’ sounds plain daft, until you know what it means toget ‘left behind’. However, it is central to my argument to ask how such instruc-tions can be effective. How can the pupil even imagine how to go about singing‘as though’ from the ‘top of her head’? As a hopelessly untalented singer, Icannot – from which I conclude that prior skilful practice is a predicate offollowing the instruction. More importantly still, how does the teacher knowthat the appropriate phenomenal feel to produce the desired effect is capturedby those words? Only by being thoroughly familiar with that feel – which makesthe practical skill prior to the quest for words, as the very notion of searchingfor words implies. Indeed, Andrew states at the beginning of this example, ‘Firstof all, a singing teacher is or has been a singer herself. She knows what it feelslike’ (Collier 2003: 40).

The growth of knowledge

Theoretical knowledge → practical knowledge

The foregoing has been leading up to an assessment of the process by whichknowledge develops – knowledge that can claim to be objective. As has beenseen, both Andrew and I locate the dynamics of growth in the relationshipbetween theoretical and practical knowledge. The difference between us is thathe regards this as a one-way relationship, in which development is led by theory,whilst I argue for a two-way relation and for the independent contribution ofpractical knowledge to the common stock. This difference comes to a head in hisfollowing statement. ‘Tacit knowledge may be prior in a hundred and one ways;nevertheless, theory is the growing tip of knowledge. Without it, tacit knowledgestagnates. Any attempt to downgrade theory relative to tacit knowledge is neces-sarily conservative’ (Collier 2003: 213–214). I want to challenge this generalproposition without being charged with conservatism.

However, let it be clear that I fully agree in regarding theory as a powerfulgrowing tip of knowledge. What I contest is the exclusivity claim whichaccords this role solely to theory and the subordinate clause, that without theinjection of theory then practice is condemned to stagnation. Indeed, wherethe ‘theoretical knowledge → practical knowledge’ relationship is concerned,Andrew and I seem to conceptualise it in very much the same way – one that is


far from universal. Neither of us sees abstract knowledge or pure science ashaving a direct impact upon practice. Why should it? As Andrew argues, it is inareas where people have well-developed practical knowledge that they are leastlikely to be theoretically deceived (Collier 2003: 218) – and what purports tobe theoretical knowledge has often been wrong. My own line is to query whatcould reasonably induce people to jettison a proven working practice in favourof a theory whose relevance to their concerns is unclear. Instead, both of usmaintain that in order to have an impact upon practice, theoretical knowledgehas to make a detour through applied science or technology to demonstrate itsworth. In short, we reject ‘the assumption that abstract knowledge can be usedto explain concrete particulars without passing through the stage of concreteanalysis’ (Collier 2003: 219, 37–45).

Thus the impact of new theoretical knowledge on practice is both indirectand delayed. The initial effect of a novel theory is to undermine the old theo-retical bases underpinning established practices. What it does is to show that thepremises of practice are ill founded. However, although the theoretical import isthat the practice should be abandoned, because the new theory does not tell uswhat to do instead, it is a poor pragmatic reason for jettisoning an establishedpractice whose practical utility remains unassailed. Thus, for discursive theoryto act as the growing point of practice, a second stage is involved, where newtheories enter the practical order, but only through their application assuccessful additions to material culture. This pays their admission fee. Appliedscience and technology are the artefactual modes of transition from discursiveto practical knowledge.

Let us return to an earlier example. If we think of formal celestial navigation,at least two of its necessary theoretical components long pre-dated it. First, thenotion of a spherical earth set in a Copernican planetary system challenged the‘flat earth’ basis of Polynesian-type ‘dead reckoning’, but this certainly told noone of a better way to navigate a boat. Interestingly, the second component, thedevelopment of an elaborate theory of spherical trigonometry, appeared purelypropositional and of little interest to the practical explorer. It was only whenthese two elements of discursive knowledge were combined into accurate instru-ments, such as chronometers and sextants, that the superiority of a navigationalpractice, which enabled a ship’s position to be established anywhere on theearth’s surface within about a mile, then encouraged its adoption. In otherwords, applied discursive knowledge is only considered to be an advance when itcan accomplish everything that previous practices enabled, plus some additionalpractices (Archer 2000:182–184).

Practical knowledge → theoretical knowledge

This relationship is the source of our differences about the growth of knowledge.To begin with, I want to maintain that there is an arrow working in this direction.I am far from sure that Andrew would disagree, rather than regarding it as beingof much lesser importance than the arrow running in the opposite direction.


What I have in mind at the moment are those cases where skilled practice andtacit knowledge set problems for theoretical understanding. By cracking them,theoretical knowledge is advanced. Such cases are not derisory in importance. Forexample, western medicine does not simply co-habit with various ‘alternative’forms; science can also explain and extend the benefits of certain forms of home-opathy. Equally, archaeology would not even exist if its theorists did not acceptthe challenge of theorising past practice through examining artefactual remains.Of course, theoretical knowledge is not always enriched because practice isfallible too. My father told the story of visiting a small, traditional factory with thehighest reputation for its tempered steel. During the tempering process, workerswere found beating the steel with boughs of heather and assured him this wasintegral to excellence. The chemical analysis of heather pollen did nothing tosubstantiate the claim, nor did the abandonment of the practice detract from thequality of the product. Old wives tales can turn out to be tittle-tattle, but that isprecisely Andrew’s point about the need to test and to correct hearsay.

My point is not to argue that the arrows linking practical and theoreticalknowledge are equally strong in the two directions. It is rather to maintain thatpractical knowledge does grow ‘by itself ’, rather than stagnating, that the tacitsets problems that theory cannot crack, and that therefore skilled practice represents an autonomous domain of knowledge. In other words, sticking todiagrammatic representation, there is an independent arrow pointing fromgrowing tacit skills to the growth of knowledge. If I can justify this, then I willalso have to justify the objectivity of this kind of knowledge independently,because of rejecting Andrew’s ‘one step’ procedure. So be it.

The case for the independent growth of practical knowledge entails three pointsthat will be made very briefly. First, I take it that in many (though not all) areasof skilled practice, such as singing, wine-tasting, golfing or cabinet-making, noone is going to deny that there are varying levels of expertise, that some practi-tioners are truly outstanding, or even that proficiency itself is (discontinuously)pushed forward. It would be hard to dissent universally because in some suchareas these statements can be supported by direct observations – who consis-tently wins golf tournaments or how many seconds have been clipped offrunning the mile? Of course, it remains open to journeymen of suspicion toexplain these facts away by bribery or steroids. Nevertheless, private practice inDIY is enough to convince most people that some jobs would be much betterdone by a skilled carpenter.

Second, if we do seek to acquire and develop a skill, we may well accept thatproficiency requires practice but also (and without contradiction) seek theoreticalguidance. In other words, we turn to books or to instructors – which are bothforms of ‘hearsay’. The first few chapters or lessons can be very profitable to thebeginner, but the point arrives where the words become stretched and verbalcommunication is largely metaphorical – as in the earlier Masterclass. Yetmatters get worse. As has already been seen, communication within theMasterclass requires shared practical experience to act as a bridgehead for themetaphors to convey meaning. What happens when the common reference point


is exceeded is that hearsay becomes incomprehensible without the relevant practice. There are ‘theoretical’ terms which make sense amongst proficientpractitioners but which make no sense to the less advanced or are subjected toan impoverished ‘mistranslation’. In wine-tasting, ‘length’ or ‘balance’ are prob-ably incomprehensible and ‘bouquet’ is likely to be taken simply as ‘smell’.Similarly, in religious practice, the feeling of ‘sinfulness’ is usually incorrectlyconstrued by non-practitioners as one of ‘wrong-doing’ and ‘detachment’ as anattitude of ‘unconcern’. An interesting example of such misconstruction isprovided by Rom Harré who lists ‘accidie’ (approximately ‘spiritual listlessness’)as an extinct emotion (Harré and Gillett 1994) – which tells us that he is alien toreligious practice.

Third, when discursive incomprehension or impoverishment sets in, isanything to be done? Yes, for those who are motivated to press on towardsproficiency. But this means a return to practice and to the long haul that con-stitutes apprenticeship or discipleship. What is acquired there is practicalvirtuosity, where the ‘feel’ for the task is virtually incommunicable and thus canonly be developed in practice itself. Through immersion or embeddednessemerges a tacit sense of the things to be done – a sense which allows of appro-priate improvisation rather than mere imitation and is the hallmark ofvirtuosity. It involves a creative response because our ‘feel’ means that we live inthat medium, take our prompts from it and can ‘play along’ with others who dothe same. In short, when skilful knowledge defies either verbal formulation orunderstanding and progress towards proficiency requires a return to practiceitself, then theoretical knowledge cannot be its growing point. Therefore, themethods for testing and correcting hearsay do not work for practical knowledgeand cannot secure its objectivity.

Conclusion: on the objectivity of practice

In that case what does secure the objectivity of practical knowledge? Can arealist account of it be given? The objectivity of skilled and tacit practice oftenseems to be cast in doubt because realists frequently turn empiricist in relation toskilful practices. This seems to be rooted in confining realism to theoreticaltopics, rather than accepting its thoroughgoing applicability to everyday activi-ties. In short, for some, realism does not ‘go all the way down’. Whilst sense datamay be crucially important in everyday life, nevertheless quotidian practice doesnot mean that everyone similarly situated and in full possession of their facultieshas the same experience. For instance, at a wine tasting enthusiastic amateurswill not ‘have the same experiences’ as a sommelier; so why is it reasonable(rather than snobbish) to follow his advice in our purchases? Perhaps because weaccept that at a dégustation there is a proper set of tests, such that if a wine tasterdetects too much tannin, then there are chemical tests for its measurement.However, the Meilleurs Sommeliers du Monde did not become such by followinganalytical chemists around and assimilating their findings into embodied knowl-edge. Nor is their role confined to such, for they will also evaluate ‘balance’,


‘bouquet’, ‘heaviness’ and ‘length’, which are qualitative assessments. When thelads at the Lagavulin distillery pronounce that this malt is best drunk when it is16 years old, they are not making a skilled judgement that can be checked by theanalytical chemist; the only test is their agreement, which is based upon experi-ence itself.

No single experiential report is auto-veridical, but it is scrutinised against anaccumulated tradition of practice by the highly proficient. Given that the relia-bility of all tests is imperfect, this workable degree of inter-subjectivity amongstthe virtuosi suffices in practice for practical knowledge. Nevertheless, how doesthis secure the objectivity of skilled practice? Are the judgements of the virtuosinot just another form of ‘hearsay’, thus bringing the argument round full circle?And, in that case, what prevents their pronouncements from merely beingmatters of social consensus?

The response is that it is not the inter-subjective agreement of proficient prac-titioners which counts, but rather their shared proficiency. What they say collectivelyis only warranted by what each and every one of them can do. In short, beingskilled is itself objective. To possess a skill is to have acquired a particular masteryover one’s body or one’s body in relation to the environment, be it natural orartefactual, animate or inanimate. It is the ability to know how to do something– whether or not one says anything at all about it.

In turn, this entails a realist account of skilful practice. It employs the tran-scendental argument and asks what needs to be the case for a particular practiceto be possible. For example, the world being made the way it is and humansbeing constituted the way they are, upon what does the possibility of crossing abroad, deep river (without aids or equipment) depend? The answer is a skill – theability to swim. Nevertheless, it could still be objected that swimming is a demon-strable skill, whose objectivity relies on the perceptual criterion – which couldnot be invoked for (say) wine tasting. So what anchors the objectivity of thelatter? In other words, what prevents the world’s sommeliers from being a self-interested bunch of charlatans or, less cynically, just a social group upholding aparticular definition of the situation?

Ultimately, the answer is practice itself. If in doubt, don’t listen to thembecause you could indeed be buying into their social epistemology, but rather tryout the practice for yourself. As Andrew puts the matter, ‘Experience in the rel-evant sense also presupposes realism. Experience is always the experience ofsomething, it is always referential and makes sense only in terms of the indepen-dent reality to which it refers’ (Collier 2003: 216). Yet, ‘trying out’ involves aserious commitment where skills are concerned. It is incompatible with the atti-tude, ‘There’s nothing in this carry-on about wine; I once tried twenty reds andcouldn’t tell them apart.’

If we do work at acquiring a skill we might still fail to master it fully, forreasons of age, ability and, in some cases, social background. However, we willlearn something because we will have acquired knowledge about that at whichwe have failed. We will also have gained some level of appreciation of the quali-ties that it takes to become proficient. Both are quintessentially wordless sources


of objectivity, which are embedded in gaining a ‘feeling’ for a practical activity.If, after years of practice, I had been able to develop a better ‘feel’ for the co-ordination involved, I would not now be writing this article but practising for thenext dressage competition.

Bibliography

Archer, Margaret S. (2000) Being Human: The Problem of Agency, Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press.

Collier, Andrew (1998) ‘Language, Practice and Realism’, in Ian Parker (ed.), Social

Constructionism, Discourse and Realism, London: Sage.—— (2003) In Defence of Objectivity, London: Routledge.Harré, Rom and Grant Gillett (1994) The Discursive Mind, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.Oatley, Keith G. (1977) ‘Inference, Navigation and Cognitive Maps’, in P. N. Johnson-

Laird and P .C. Watson (eds), Thinking: Readings in Cognitive Science, Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.

Rose, Steven (1992) The Making of Memory, London: Bantam Press.


Introduction

It is an honour to contribute a chapter to this Festschrift on Andrew Collier’sphilosophy. In this chapter my concern is with the essay from which Andrew’srecent book, In Defence of Objectivity, takes its title and, within this, Andrew’s argu-ments about lay knowledge.

Andrew argues that empiricism sought to assimilate both lay and scientificknowledge into one (flawed) epistemology. He goes onto argue that this assimi-lation was resisted by philosophers of science (including Popper) who wantedto stress the uniqueness of scientific knowledge, and ‘existential phenomenolo-gists’ who wanted to stress the uniqueness of lay knowledge (Collier 2003:211–212). Andrew notes that these two approaches have misunderstood anddespised each other, which is unfortunate, given their common rejection ofempiricism and their shared emphasis on knowledge as the outcome of prac-tical work. In his essay Andrew focuses on the existential phenomenologistphilosophy of lay knowledge, and seeks to support a modified version of this,stressing that such philosophy goes awry when it becomes anti-realist and anti-science. Although there is a discussion of objectivity in relation to science, thisdeals with defending science from the attempt to undermine it by showing howextra-scientific factors influence outcomes. There is no discussion of thephilosophy of science because Andrew believes that Bhaskar’s critical realismhas provided an adequate philosophy of science, and that the task is to extendcritical realism from natural (and social) scientific methodology, to the topic oflay knowledge.

I take a different view from Andrew on this. I argue that Andrew’s work onlay knowledge may be read as a complement to Popper’s work on scientificknowledge. In making this argument I note the complementarities that existbetween the two philosophies, note how Andrew’s work has some problemsregarding his notion of objectivity (which can be overcome by taking a morePopperian approach to the issue of realism), and argue that critical realism is anuntenable philosophy of scientific knowledge.

9 Practical knowledge and realismLinking Andrew Collier on layknowledge to Karl Popper on the philosophy of science

Justin Cruickshank

Andrew’s argument for a realist practice-basedphilosophy of knowledge

Defining objectivity

Andrew defines objectivity in terms of what is true independently of any subjectjudging it to be true. In outlining what objectivity is not Andrew makes threepoints. First, objectivity does not commit one to a claim to be infallible, ‘[f]orone’s belief cannot be fallible unless there is something independent of thebelieving of it which would make it true and something which would make itfalse’ (Collier 2003: 140). Conversely, if we abandon objectivity, making beliefsself-referential, then we have infallibilism, as the beliefs are irrefutable (2003: 140).Second, objectivity is not based on a claim to have a God’s-eye view becausebeliefs are to be judged by the extent to which they are true, and not by being adefinitive truth. Objectivity is therefore the precondition for any critical dialogueabout the world. Conversely, debate is closed if beliefs lose their ‘aboutness’ asthere is no way to adjudicate between competing claims (2003: 141). Third,objectivity does not necessarily lead to physicalist reductionism. Whilst some posi-tions may argue for objectivity and physicalist reductionism, this is not entailed bythe position Andrew seeks to defend. For Andrew, thoughts, intentions, emotions,etc., are not to be understood as epiphenomena (2003: 142). Conversely, subjec-tivism is held to be ‘deeply reductive’ because reality is reduced to our ideas of it.

Reductionism is linked to Cartesian philosophy by Andrew. He argues that:

All forms of reductionism, whether subjectivistic or physicalistic, have theirroots in Descartes’ dualism: Descartes reduces everything to human con-sciousness on the one hand and extended matter on the other. Subjectiveidealism is Cartesianism with the material pole suppressed, physicalism isthe Cartesian with the subjective pole suppressed.

(Collier 2003: 142)

Pursuing the issue of subjective idealism, or the ‘new way of ideas’, Andrewargues that once one has accepted Descartes’ division between the world and ourideas of it, then it is hard to avoid Berkeley’s conclusion that we can only knowour ideas. Once the emphasis is put on our ideas then reference to anythingbeyond those ideas becomes problematic. So, when the question is askedconcerning how we may ascertain the veracity of ideas, the answer cannot bethat the ideas can be compared with their objects because, for empiricists, wecan only compare our perceptions with remembered images. That is, we canonly compare an idea with another idea (Collier 2003: 144).

On Heidegger

Showing how Heidegger breaks from the Cartesian inheritance, Andrew notesthat for Heidegger:

130 Justin Cruickshank

the world is not something external like the ‘external world’ of Cartesianand empiricist philosophy. We are our worlds. Whereas for Descartes what aperson has apart from a body that makes them a person is a spiritualsubstance whose essence is to be conscious, for Heidegger he or she has aworld, and that is what it means to be a person, a ‘Dasein’: to be in a world.… [I]n place of Descartes’ ‘I think therefore I am’, someone mightsummarise Heidegger’s argument as ‘I fix a shutter with a hammer, there-fore I am in a world’.

(Collier 2003: 176)

Elaborating on Heidegger’s position, Andrew describes the three types of beingdiscussed by Heidegger. These are Dasein, the present-at-hand, and the ready-to-hand. Dasein (‘being there’) refers to our presence in the world; thepresent-at-hand refers to the physical world and the ready-to-hand ‘refers to theinstrumental world encountered in our daily work; it is not a world of differentthings than the present-at-hand, but rather of the same objects encountereddifferently’ (Collier 2003: 177). Corresponding to the ready-to-hand, and thepresent-at-hand, there are two ways of knowing, which are understandinginherent in any practice and contemplative staring, respectively (2003: 178). Thenatural sciences, and theoretical knowledge generally, are taken to be charac-terised by the purely contemplative form of knowledge, rather than practicallyoriented looking, or ‘circumspection’.

In describing what he thinks is right with Heidegger’s philosophy, Andrew statesthat he accepts the point that the original motivation for theoretical knowledge isfound in the breakdown of pre-theoretical practice. Turning to John Macmurray’srendering of Heidegger, Andrew notes that instead of knowledge presupposingthought, thought presupposes knowledge because it is only when the knowledgeimplicit in practice fails that we start thinking about how to resolve the breakdown(Collier 2003: 178–179). This brings us to a problem with Heidegger’s philosophy.If we accept the above account of theoretical knowledge then it would seem thatwe ought to conclude, Andrew asserts, that theoretical knowledge can correct prac-tical knowledge, by bringing in new information, and perhaps opening up hithertounknown regions of being. However, Heidegger and Macmurray are reluctant todraw that conclusion and Heidegger insists that theoretical knowledge is an impoverishment relative to practical understanding (Collier 2003: 179).

Before moving on to Andrew’s discussion of practical knowledge a word ortwo has to be said about the issue of realism and idealism in Heidegger’s work.Andrew notes that Heidegger was doxographically a realist, meaning that hepreferred realism to idealism in the historical dispute between the two positions(Collier 2003: 177). Heidegger draws this conclusion because he thinks it is absurdto remove the world from us. This also leads him to be critical of realism, forrealism assumes that proofs of an external world are required. Andrew adds ‘Ithink most modern realists would agree with Heidegger that such proofs are notrequired, once a mistaken view of our place in the world [i.e. any Cartesian influ-enced view which separates the world from us] is rejected’ (Collier 2003: 177).

Practical knowledge and realism 131

Heidegger does however go on to claim affinities with idealism. This isbecause for Heidegger, Andrew notes, idealism ‘expresses an understandingof the fact that Being cannot be explained through entities’ (Heidegger, Being

and Time, p. 251, cited in Collier 2003: 177). Andrew then speculates thatHeidegger’s dislike of the term ‘realism’ may be due to his interpretingrealism as the view that being is defined by a collection of things, with thepresent-to-hand being exhaustive of being (2003: 177). Such a view ofrealism is rejected by Andrew because for him, and critical realists moregenerally, being is to be understood in terms of relations and mechanismsthat are not immediately manifest as a collection of empirical things: the realis more than the present-at-hand.

Further, the claim that being cannot be explained through entities is, Andrewnotes, purely negative and, if being is to be more than this, then it must be beingfor someone (Collier 2003: 181). This rendering of being as being for someone(or being in the world) results in the relativising of Being to Dasein. As Andrewputs it: ‘Being does not seem to be objective for Heidegger, not only in the sensewhich ‘objective’ acquires in existentialist polemics – value-free, atomistic, mech-anistic, quantitative – but also in the straightforward sense of independent ofhuman subjects’ (2003: 181).

So, in order to make Being more than the mere present-to-hand Heideggerhas to bring us in. Andrew concludes his discussion on Heidegger by saying that‘[h]e has done more than anyone to liberate us from the spell of Descartes; buthe has not freed us from the spell of Kant’ (Collier 2003: 182).

Practical and discursive knowledge

Building on his criticism of Heidegger and Macmurray, Andrew argues thatbreakdowns in practical knowledge do not lead to pure contemplation, ‘but a new kind of work with cognitive aims’ (Collier 2003: 213, emphasis added). Hecontinues by arguing that any attempt to downgrade theoretical knowledge relative to tacit or practical knowledge is ‘necessarily conservative’ because tacitknowledge will stagnate without theoretical knowledge (2003: 213–214).Theoretical knowledge is needed to correct practical knowledge and to overcomebreakdowns. Without theoretical input our practices and knowledge of the worldwould remain unchanged, and so theoretical knowledge has a key role to play inour practices.

Theoretical knowledge is not the only form of discursive knowledge that mayinform practical knowledge. Hearsay too may inform practical knowledge.Andrew argues that ‘[m]uch – though by no means all – knowledge that is nowtacit, and implicit in some practical skill, was once learnt by being spelt out andcommunicated in words by someone else’ (Collier 2003: 214). He goes on to saythat the issue of hearsay, and the means to correct it, ought to be the centralquestion of epistemology (2003: 214).

Hearsay is of central importance for epistemology, Andrew argues, becausewe cannot bypass ‘second hand’ knowledge and concern ourselves only with


‘first hand’ knowledge. Andrew argues that second hand knowledge precedes(what is confusingly called) first hand knowledge, meaning that our knowledge ofthe world is always mediated via a background of presumptions. He gives threereasons for this. First, most of our knowledge can only be hearsay as we cannotsee everything for ourselves. Second, hearsay precedes other knowledge becausewe discover things after being told about them. ‘We are largely taught throughlanguage how to “see for ourselves” ’ (Collier 2003: 215). Third, although we can learn from experience, we are heavily influenced by our conditioning. AsAndrew argues ‘[w]hen we do see for ourselves, we do so in ways made possibleby what we have been told’ (2003: 215).

Moving to the issue of criticising hearsay, Andrew puts forward three groundsfor such criticism. The first is logic, and he argues that mutually exclusiveaccounts need to be rejected. The second is experience, meaning work ratherthan the passive reception of images, and here Andrew argues that hearsayneeds to be tested in practice. The third is suspicion, meaning explanations as towhy people may believe and transmit false ideas which they could have known to be false (Collier 2003: 216–217). Andrew notes that each of these grounds hasbeen used as the foundation of knowledge, or of an all-encompassing replace-ment of epistemology in the case of suspicion. Against this, he argues that logiccannot generate knowledge in the way deemed possible by the rationalists, expe-rience is not passive reception of images, and a ‘universal sympotology’, whichregards all beliefs are expressions of power, rather than being true or false, makessuspicion uninteresting, as all beliefs are formulaically explained away. Treatinglogic, experience and suspicion as means to correct hearsay, however, presup-poses a realist commitment to objectivity, as it foregrounds the aboutness ofknowledge, connecting what we think and do to what is the case.

So, for Andrew, lay knowledge, in the form of practical know-how, is linked todiscursive knowledge in three ways. First, hearsay, i.e. the discursive rendering ofpractical know-how, plays a strong role in constituting our practical know-how. Itis the discursive form of lay knowledge. Second, theoretical/technical knowledgemay be used to improve our practices, especially after breakdowns in practice.Third, we may distinguish practical utility from truthfulness, to correct hearsaythat, presumably, had been useful up to a point, but which was erroneous in itsassumptions about reality. The latter point is not really explored by Andrew, butwe may note that he rejects pragmatism because it removes the aboutness ofideas, in the sense that it is more about how our ideas manipulate our world,than how our ideas correspond to a world that exists independently of us.

Popper’s philosophy of science

Turning now to Popper, we can begin the exegesis by noting that Popper (1972a)rejected what he referred to as the bucket theory of mind, meaning that herejected the view that knowledge accumulation is to be understood in terms ofthe mind passively receiving ideas of objects. Such a view committed whatPopper referred to as the subjectivist error of defining reality to fit the mind.


This critique was made because Popper wanted to distinguish science clearlyfrom psychology. For Popper, scientific knowledge was not to be understood interms of statements trying to record the ‘immediate’ impression of private sense-data. Rather, science, in the Popperian view, is to be understood as a practicaltrial and error process, with knowledge being developed from our mistakes, andprogress occurring through the development of responses to our mistakes. Thecriteria used for assessing the success or otherwise of theories, would be inter-subjective criteria, in the form of the conventions adhered to by the scientificcommunity. Of course Popper was not a conventionalist, because he stressed theaboutness of theories. Nevetheless, as Hacohen (2000: 244–245) notes, he posedas a conventionalist to the positivists, arguing that methodological conventionsdemarcated science from non-science, and as a positivist to the conventionalists,arguing that testability and falsificationalism set limits to conventionalism.

This meant replacing the bucket theory of mind with the ‘searchlight theoryof knowledge’. With the searchlight notion the emphasis was on a theory’sclaims about reality being tested by the scientific community via public (intersub-jective) norms, rather than on trying to translate private sense data into publiclanguage. Such testing via intersubjective norms may afford us a partial view ofreality, and the knowledge obtained will always remain partial given that thefallibility and openness to refutability of scientific theories means that there willbe no ‘finished science’ or God’s-eye view. Using public criteria for testing wemay attain better searchlights but we will not move beyond partial perspectiveson reality. This approach to science meant that Popper combined an emphasison empirical testing with an emphasis on methodological conventions or norms.

In setting out his critique of the bucket theory of mind Popper was mainlyattacking empiricism. He also thought that Kant’s epistemology could bedescribed as a bucket theory of mind because the emphasis was on the contentsof the mind rather than on reality. To be sure, Kant had a more active concep-tion of the mind than naive empiricism, but still, the emphasis was on thecontents of the mind. This did not lead Popper to dismiss Kant, however.Instead Popper adopted a post-Kantian position, arguing that our knowledge ofthe world was via fallible and changeable categories. We impose an interpreta-tion on reality via our categories or ideas, but as we are fallible, we can and mustrevise these ideas. Our searchlights have to change their focus and scope.

Popper regarded himself as a realist because he emphasised the ‘aboutness’ ofscientific knowledge. This led him to reject logical positivism not just because of its inductive method and verification principle, which were premised uponempiricism (and were therefore subjectivist), but because it took the linguisticturn. Popper was steadfast in his rejection of the linguistic turn because theattempt to create a pure scientific language, purged of metaphysics andrestricted to reporting sense data, resulted in language being detached fromreality. With the linguistic turn language lost its aboutness and was restricted toreporting psychological/perceptual phenomena. Indeed, during the argumentwithin the Vienna Circle about protocol sentences Neurath argued (to later positive regard by some post-structuralists) that any notion of correspondence


between propositions and reality was metaphysical and therefore meaningless. Inwhich case propositions could only contradict other propositions and not reality(see Hacohen 2000: 261–275, for an excellent discussion of this matter).

A commitment to realism did not lead to a clear metaphysical position.Popper was initially wary of metaphysics (i.e. during the time he wrote the Logic

of Scientific Discovery (1972b)). This was not because he was influenced by posi-tivism, but because he was concerned that embracing any metaphysicalcommitment to universal laws of nature beyond our changing theories may openthe door to an inductive method (Hacohen 2000: 259). Consequently meta-physics was bracketed off from methodology. Later, in Objective Knowledge (1972a)Popper stated a clear acceptance of metaphysical realism, arguing that oneought to accept the view that there is a reality beyond our ideas of it rather thanthe idealist view that we make reality. He held that whilst neither realism noridealism could be disproved (as they were metaphysical positions), ‘there are argu-

ments in favour of realism; or, rather, against idealism’ (1972a: 35, emphasis inoriginal). His basic point here was that one had a choice between idealism orrealism and, as idealism was a philosophical conceit, one ought to acceptrealism. Idealism was regarded as a philosophical conceit because it wouldrender science pointless (as there was no real world to investigate), and wouldentail a megalomania whereby one’s ideas about what constituted good art, etc.would necessarily be correct as there would be no other criteria for assessment.(Popper (1972a: 41) notes that megalomania is the most widespread occupationaldisease of the professional philosopher.)

Although realism has been taken to mean a commitment to the existence ofuniversals, which is rejected by those who adhere to nominalism, Popper arguedfor a nominalist method, and redefined the sort of realism he wanted to attackas ‘methodological essentialism’ (2002). This basically meant that a ‘method-ological nominalist’ would ask questions about how certain phenomenabehaved, whereas the ‘methodological essentialist’ would ask what questions,pertaining to the definition of some essential defining feature. Popper embracedthe former as it dealt with testing the predictions of theories, and rejected thelatter as it was based upon trying to describe some ultimate property. For themethodological nominalist words were ‘merely useful instruments of description’(Popper 2002: 26), whereas for the methodological essentialist words as defini-tions would be an explanation, as they defined the essential nature of whateverone was interested in.

Dialogue: complementarities and criticisms

The first point of agreement to note is that Popper rejects Cartesian and empiri-cist epistemology for the same reasons that Andrew gives in his discussion ofepistemological subjectivism. For both, such epistemologies define reality to fitthe mind. Many other philosophers have made a similar point, and we mayregard this criticism of certain types of epistemology as something of a ‘given’.The case of Kant is more of a moot point. Given Andrew’s comment (noted


above) about Heidegger not breaking fully from ‘the spell of Kant’, it is clearthat Andrew would regard Kant as a subjectivist to be placed alongsideDescartes and the empiricists. Others, though, have different views. Popper, aswe have just seen, sought to modify Kant’s epistemology, mixing an ‘aboutness’in the form of empirical testing with a conventionalist emphasis on intersubjec-tivity, to explain how we change public and fallible categories in the course oftrial and error engagement with the world.

Second, Popper’s philosophy can fit in with Andrew’s claim that we needsecond hand knowledge to produce first hand knowledge; which Andrew says he thinks applies to scientific as well as lay knowledge (Collier 2003: 214–215).Popper would concur with this, as for him, scientific progress is built uponconstructing new theories as we try to learn from our mistakes, or theoreticalbreakdowns. This leads Popper to say (in the context of criticising Kuhn) that:

I do admit we are prisoners caught in the framework of our theories; ourexpectations; our past experience; our language. But we are prisoners in aPickwickian sense: if we try, we can break out of our framework at any time.Admittedly, we shall find ourselves again in a framework, but it will be abetter and roomier one; and we can at any moment break out of it again.

(Popper 1993: 56)

So, what we experience is a product of what we know, via our theoretical search-lights, to a large extent. There would be some tension between Popper andAndrew on this topic though. Andrew argues that ‘when we do see for ourselves,we do so in ways made possible by what we have been told. While it is possible tolearn from experience that what we have been told is false, it is not easy’ (Collier2003: 215). This claim is not surprising, given the way Andrew describes secondhand knowledge. Popper would accept the first sentence of the above quotation,with regard to the searchlights we use to approach the world, but question thesecond. For Popper, any Pickwickian Prisoner of the framework is free to rebuildtheir prison. It should be said, however, that Popper is probably a bit toosanguine about scientists’ ability to change frameworks, for a whole host ofreasons, concerning (legitimate) intellectual commitments to only partiallyrefuted theories, institutional and financial constraining factors, and so forth.Nevertheless we ought to be careful about downplaying our ability to change ourguiding assumptions and the perspectives that frame our understanding of theworld, as putting a heavy emphasis on these may reduce their aboutness andusher in a strong form of conventionalism. Discursive knowledge, in the form ofhearsay or theoretical knowledge, needs to be treated critically to avoid down-playing reality.

The third point of complementarity, which follows on from the second, is theimportance of correcting or criticising knowledge claims rather than securingknowledge. Thus Andrew, going against the view noted above concerning secondhand knowledge, talks of ‘the methodological primacy of the pathological’ (Collier2003: 178). What he means by this is the importance of practical breakdowns in


pre-theoretical knowledge, for the generation of theory which will, pace Heideggerand Macmurray, enhance our understanding of being. In addition to discursiveknowledge, in the form of theoretical knowledge, being used to correct practices,Andrew also holds that the form of discursive knowledge that constitutes layknowledge, i.e. hearsay, needs to be subject to the three forms of correction notedabove. Andrew does not directly discuss the correction and criticism of theoreticalknowledge, and here we may draw on Popper’s philosophy. The important point tonote here is that for Popper science is a trial and error process, with progress occur-ring through the development of new theories to overcome past mistakes andrefutations. Instead of relying on private sense-data to verify theories, we rely onpublic intersubjective criteria to assess theories in the process of continuallylearning from our mistakes.

As regards the issue of realism, matters become more complex. As we haveseen, Popper had some doubts about engaging in metaphysics for fear ofendorsing a positivist world view and methodology, but ended up arguing formetaphysical realism, saying that it was more reasonable than idealism.Andrew’s arguments about objectivity could be regarded as arguments for meta-physical realism, because he defines objectivity in terms of the independence ofreality from our judgements or knowledge of it. Thus he says: ‘To say that it isan objective fact that the Earth is the third planet from the Sun is to say that thisis so whether or not anyone knows or believes it, or is even able to formulate thestatement’ (Collier 2003: 134). Now Andrew may object to this reading, andcomplain that metaphysical realism reintroduces a Kantian split between theworld we know and an unknowable reality-in-itself. This would be unacceptablefor Andrew because it would entail a form of epistemological subjectivism,which divorced the world from us, leaving us with knowledge claims that couldnot be meaningfully related to reality.

Andrew’s alternative, following Heidegger, would be to argue that it is absurdto separate the world from us and to then seek philosophical proofs that realityexists. This is because our practices presume a reality into which we are situatedand that, pace Heidegger, our theoretical knowledge deepens our understandingof being, by enhancing our practices. In which case, no argument need beforwarded about the existence of reality, as it is necessarily implied in the discus-sion of knowledge that Andrew develops. However, the trouble with this route isthat it encounters the very problem that Andrew complained of in Heidegger’sphilosophy. This problem is the relativising of being to Dasein, or the relativisingof a putatively independent reality to our knowledge of it, as construed via ourlay-practical projects or our theoretical enhancements of such projects. InAndrew’s terms we would still be spellbound by Kant.

Turning from Andrew’s discussion of Heidegger, lay knowledge and what wemay call ‘implied realism’, back to his initial definition of objectivity, we maynote that Andrew’s definition of objectivity, which turns on objective factsexisting without necessarily being stated explicitly or known, is problematic. It isproblematic because it presumes that there are discrete facts and that successfulknowledge claims will mirror such facts. This is not to reject the correspondence


theory of truth because, as Andrew notes (Collier 1994: 239), it is a definition oftruth and not a criterion of truth, meaning that correspondence does not implysome form of isomorphism where language directly mirrors a non-linguisticreferent. Similarly, Popper (1972b) accepts the correspondence theory of truthwhilst holding that our knowledge claims can only be approximations to reality.

The problem is not with the correspondence theory of truth, but with theclaim that it is meaningful to define reality in terms of discrete facts thatsuccessful knowledge claims will mirror. Such a position is a form of whatPopper would call methodological essentialism, because the emphasis would beon knowledge claims defining certain essential properties. Instead of languagebeing used in a methodological nominalist fashion, to describe certain eventsunder intersubjective criteria, language would be taken as a medium forexpressing the key essential properties beneath the level of mere appearances.Such an essentialist position is to be rejected because it eschews fallibilism infavour of an unwarranted metaphysical assumption that a definition hasunearthed a moving force that operates beneath appearances. In this case, objectivism would commit one to an infallibilism. Rather than be the basis for anon-going, fallible and self-critical exploration of reality, a commitment to objec-tivism, in the way construed by Andrew, would result in a metaphysicalmonologue. In Popperian terms, rather than revise world three (knowledgeclaims as realised in books, etc.) to help us deal with world one (the physicalworld), we would take world three to mirror world one, with world threebecoming akin to the realm of Platonic Forms. The scientist would become thephilosopher-king, confusing their knowledge of putative essences with reality.

To avoid such problems we may agree with Popper’s post-Kantian position.With this we could be methodological or common-sense realists, who thoughtthat the trial and error process was about something, as it engaged with theworld. We could say that whilst knowledge was developed by testing theoreticalsearchlights under intersubjective criteria, knowledge production was not solely amatter of construction via other discursive knowledge, as there was a role forempirical/practical input. To be sure, this would always be construed via aninterpretative framework, but the framework would not be taken as self-referen-tial: we would be ‘Pickwickian Prisoners of the framework’. If one wanted morethan this, then one might turn to metaphysics and accept metaphysical realismover idealism and, whilst this may be the most reasonable choice in the meta-physical dichotomy, it could not yield any proofs. In Andrew’s terms, we wouldnot have removed the world from us, and then tried to reunite it by seekingproofs. Instead, we would presume the world to exist as we engaged with it, andwe could entertain reasonable metaphysical speculation to support this, but therewould be no subjective (Cartesian) or metaphysical (essentialist) proof.

A critical realist may immediately retort that this response committed the‘epistemic fallacy’, as defined by Bhaskar. He defines the epistemic fallacy bysaying that it occurs with any position which holds ‘that statements about beingcan always be transposed into statements about our knowledge of being’ (1997:16). The claim is that it is fallacious to shift from questions about being to ques-


tions about how we know being because the latter is different from the former,and so being will be misconstrued. However, if a claim about being is to be sep-arated from a claim about how we know being, in order to stop us misconstruingbeing, then the former must pertain to a substantive definition of what reality is.It could not be the claim that reality simply existed independently of our repre-sentations of it as there could be no attempt to translate this into epistemologicalterms of reference. One could not say that the reality beyond our representationsof it is to be represented as X, Y or Z. Now, if it were granted that the claimabout being is a substantive claim that reality is X, Y or Z, then the injunction isto not define what we know in terms of what we know! In other words, anyknowledge claim qua knowledge claim would be fallacious.

Searle makes a similar point with his argument (against Putnam) that external(or metaphysical) realism cannot entail a God’s-eye view because it is an ontolog-ical claim that reality exists independent of our representations of it, and not anepistemological claim about our perspective on reality (1995: 154–155). Searleargues thus: ‘the whole idea of a “view” [such as a God’s-eye view] is alreadyepistemic and ER [external – or metaphysical – realism] is not epistemic’ (1995:154). In other words, to say that reality may be defined in such and such a way(rather than just saying it exists independently of our representations of it) is tomove into epistemic territory. This, for critical realists, entails the epistemicfallacy and thus negates their own ontology, as it is a knowledge claim aboutdefining what reality is.

As well as noting how the formulation of the epistemic fallacy is so broad itnegates critical realism, along with any knowledge claim, we may note howPopper, or a Popperian, may respond to critical realism. Popper would find suchan approach to philosophy objectionable. The reason for this is that criticalrealism is based upon what he would refer to as methodological essentialism,given its concern to define what reality is. This would be objectionable becausesuch essentialism would preclude a trial and error approach in favour of anattempt to terminate critical dialogue by turning to an ultimate definition.Instead of trying to improve our practices, using words as useful tools of descrip-tion, words would be used to replace trial and error practices with definitions. Itmay be objected that for critical realism the method of concept derivation (viaimmanent critique) meant that the ontology was not taken to be a fixed anddefinitive world view, or absolutist metaphysic, but a fallible view. A Popperianrejoinder to this would be to point out that this entailed the linguistic turn, andcommitted one to the strange endeavour of trying to purify language on a rela-tivist basis, holding that theories must use vocabulary X to say what reality was,when vocabulary X was not claimed to be an actual definition of reality, but analternative to other theoretical vocabularies. Moreover, it may also be objected that, ifone accepted the method of concept derivation advocated by critical realists,then, in order to be consistent and not dogmatic, one would have to hold thatthe vocabulary would change. In which case, one would be arguing that theorieswould need to be constructed using a vocabulary that, of necessity, would bereplaced. This is not to denigrate any recognition of fallibilism, but it is to render


problematic the notion of imposing a meta-theory to furnish the key conceptsfor the sciences, when such concepts are not actually held to be more thantemporary responses to alternative theoretical vocabularies. Alternatively, onemay hold that the ontology is a correct definition of what reality is, and not seekto change that, but then we come full circle back to the initial problem.

One way of describing critical realism is to say that it wants to have its cakeand eat it (to use an English colloquialism). That is, it wants to say that all knowledge is fallible, and that all renderings of reality are relative to conceptualschemes, which are themselves relative to other conceptual schemes. Thus theontology derived from science is held to be the ontology implicit in scientificknowledge claims, rather than a definitive definition of reality in itself, and similarly, the social ontology is relative to the immanent critique of other socialontologies. Yet it is also assumed that the critical realist ontology is the definitiveaccount of reality. The ontology (of emergent properties in open systems) istaken to be the one correct definition of what reality is. The task of critical real-ists becomes one of showing how existing theories are wrong for not conformingto this definition, and then putting forward an alternative account, with thecorrect definitions.

Chalmers picks up on this issue. In response to Bhaskar’s discussion of naturalscience, Chalmers (1988) pointed out that this argument allowed for the possi-bility that other renderings of ontology were possible. He argued that as noclaim was made to know the ultimate nature of being, alternative ontologiescould be derived from scientific discourse in the present, and that as sciencechanged the ontology rendered explicit within scientific discourse would change.In short, a plurality of ontologies was potentially possible and the developmentof ontological schemes would lag behind the development of scientific discourse.

Bhaskar, in a rather strained passage, accepted both these points, but went onto draw the non sequitur conclusion that his account of science was ‘uniquelyconsistent’ with the presuppositions current within contemporary science (1998:170). Having admitted to the possibility of ontological plurality, on the basis thatall such renderings are fallible, Bhaskar claims to have the one correct renderingof the ontology held to be implicit in contemporary science. Moreover, Bhaskarmust assume that this ontology is the one correct (i.e. non-fallible) definition ofreality, in order to answer the transcendental question he poses. He needs to sayscience is possible because the world is defined as X, rather than the world canbe defined in a number of ways, all of which may be contested and replaced. Inwhich case, fallibilism and conceptual relativity are ejected in favour of the viewthat the critical realist ontology does actually achieve the ultimate definition ofreality. To say how science is possible we leap outside our conceptual schemes todefine reality-in-itself.

Or, we could stick to the claims about conceptual relativity and fallibilism. Ifwe did that though, and accepted that a plurality of ontologies was possible, thenone could not answer the transcendental question. One could try and get aroundthis by saying that the ontology may be fallible, because science may be fallible,but that the ontology was ‘uniquely consistent’ with the sciences. The ‘unique-


ness’ argument, once shorn of its absolutism, is circular though. We would havethe tautology that science is possible because the world is like X, with X being, exhypothesi, the world view implicit in science: i.e., science is possible because theworld it postulates is the world it postulates. The activity and the condition ofpossibility of the activity are used to define each other. Then, when sciencechanged, another circular argument would be needed to say that the new sciencewas possible because the world was like Y, with Y being the putative world viewimplicit in the new science.

From this one may conclude that the critical realist philosophy of sciencewould entail either an absolutist definition of reality, or a tautological definitionof how science was possible, or an admission that there may be a plurality ofontologies which renders the transcendental task pointless. In the first case onewonders what role scientists could fulfil if metaphysicians knew what ultimatereality was beyond the level of mere appearance and, in the second case, philos-ophy would be worse than useless. Philosophy would be worse than uselessbecause science would progress under its own steam, and any attempt to ‘under-labour’, by forcing scientists to use the ontological definitions rendered explicitby critical realists, would inhibit scientists from developing new world views – ifthey read their Bhaskar and took him seriously.

Returning to Andrew’s work, we can say that the janus-faced character ofcritical realism is evident in his work on lay knowledge. On the one hand there isthe claim that we know the world through practices which presume the worldwhilst, on the other hand, there is a claim about reality being constituted bydiscrete facts, waiting to be rescued from a useless oblivion by a handsome youngdefiner. That is, reality is defined as the world for us, as known via our practices(which relativises being to Dasein, and which Andrew complains is too Kantian);and reality is defined as a set of discrete essences existing independently of us,with our knowledge being correct only if it takes on a isomorphic relation to thesaid essences (which replaces Heidegger under Kant’s ‘spell’ with Plato). So,whilst Andrew’s work on lay knowledge is different from critical realism, insofaras it is not concerned with applying a meta-theory of emergent properties inopen systems, it remains trapped within the critical realist mode of theorising,which turns on saying all views are relative – but our’s are right!

Andrew’s work may be used to complement Popper’s philosophy of science.We may use Andrew’s work to develop a practice-based complement to Popper’sphilosophy of scientific practice, by reconfiguring Andrew’s realism. If we read,or rather re-read, Andrew’s notion of objectivity to fit the realist claims made byPopper, then we may happily accept Andrew’s work on lay knowledge. We mayaccept a common-sense realism, and the form of metaphysical realism definedby Popper (and Searle), without worrying that the reality we know is known viaour practical engagment with it. Andrew may object and argue this is tooKantian, but it is better to be clear about being a Pickwickian Prisoner of theframework rather than a closet Kantian acting as a Heideggerian realist – oreven a closet Platonist.


Bibliography

Bhaskar, R. (1997) A Realist Theory of Science, 2nd edn, London: Verso.—— (1998) The Possibility of Naturalism: A Philosophical Critique Of The Contemporary Human

Sciences, London: Routledge.Chalmers, A. (1988) ‘Is Bhaskar’s Realism Realistic?’, Radical Philosophy, 49, pp. 18–23.Collier, A. (1994) Critical Realism: An Introduction To Roy Bhaskar’s Philosophy, London: Verso.—— (2003) In Defence of Objectivity: On Realism, Environmentalism and Politics, London:

Routledge.Hacohen, M.H. (2000) Karl Popper: The Formative Years 1902–1945. Politics and Philosophy in

Interwar Vienna, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Popper, K. (1972a) Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach, Oxford: Oxford University

Press.—— (1972b) The Logic Of Scientific Discovery, London: Hutchinson.—— (1993) ‘Normal Science And Its Dangers’, in I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave (eds),

Criticism And The Growth Of Knowledge, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.—— (2002) The Poverty Of Historicism, London: Routledge.Searle, J. (1995) The Social Construction Of Reality, London: Allen Lane.


The long essay in Andrew Collier’s latest book, In Defence of Objectivity (2003),begins with a distinction between scientific and lay knowledge. Collier mentionstwo twentieth-century movements, the philosophers of science – Popper,Bachelard, Kuhn, Lakatos, Harré and Althusser among others – and the philo-sophers of lay knowledge (or existential phenomenologists) – Heidegger,Macmurray and Merleau-Ponty. These two traditions do not fit together well,but they should not be seen as opposed to each other. As Collier says:

That these two traditions have had little contact should perhaps not matter:they are fighting on different ground, one to liberate scientific knowledgeand one to liberate lay knowledge from the empiricist straightjacket … theyhave in common that both have foregrounded the notion of knowledge asthe outcome of work; the intended product of scientific work or the tacitconcomitant of everyday work. But unfortunately they have often misunder-stood and despised each other.

(2003: 211)

As an example, we can take two philosophers who most influence Collier’s ownthinking – Althusser and Heidegger. Althusser, Collier notes, would seem todenigrate lay knowledge, while Heidegger is keen to assert the objectivity ofeveryday knowledge but in doing so denies that of science (Collier 2003: 210).Now Andrew Collier’s commitment to scientific knowledge is clear in hissupport for critical realism (as well as his critical support for Althusser andMarxism). But he also wants to argue that there is a place for a theory of layknowledge in critical realism. By this he means that we need to look at non-scientific knowledge, especially that acquired by and implicit in our practicalinteraction with our environment (2003: 211). Knowledge is therefore notnecessarily a product of ‘thinking’ but of practical activity. For existentialistsknowledge comes from practical interaction with the world and understandingcan be based on pre-reflective knowledge. The Scottish philosopher JohnMacmurray argues that knowledge is first and foremost immediate experienceof things prior to expression and understanding and that it is upon this thatreflection is based (Macmurray 1936: 17). He goes on to argue that reflective

10 Being and knowledge

Jonathan Joseph

knowledge (including science) is abstract, incomplete and relative, and is apartial one-sided expression.

Heidegger talks of our practical interaction with the world in terms ofconcern. It is concern because knowledge comes from our Being-in-the-world,from being with things and being alongside others. For Heidegger, Being andknowledge relate to issues of concern and care, but also to facticity and thrown-ness. Heidegger’s Being-in-the-world is objective in that we are already ‘outthere’ and if the world is not external to us, this is not because it is in our minds,but because we are out there in it (Collier 1999: 81).

Our Being-in-the-world is expressed through our practical relation with ourenvironment and it is in what might be called practices that lay knowledge exists.The philosophy of science tradition would tend to denigrate this knowledge.Althusser would go so far as to see it as ideology. Nevertheless, despite privilegingscience over ideology, Althusser regards ideology as a necessary feature of ourinteractions with the world.

However, is it fair to call all forms of practical and lay knowledge ideology?Lay knowledge is not merely ‘pre-scientific’ or ‘non-scientific’ knowledge, butcomes from interactions with the world that scientific understanding presup-poses. Ideology, especially within Marxism, tends to have a negative connotationas something false or misleading. However, while this may be true of knowledgeembedded in work practices – a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay – this is nottrue of the knowledge needed to cook a meal or ride a bicycle or to find one’sway around a city.

This essay will argue that we can combine existentialist notions of practicalknowledge with structuralist (Althusserian) notions of ideology as secreted throughsocial practices. However, it is important to see this across a range of differenttypes of knowledge. We need to distinguish between practical knowledge (how tocook a meal) and knowledge in practices (how to earn a living, how to bring up afamily). We can start with lay knowledge involved in practices and look at how, asthis gets more complex, it may become more ideological. Ideology, as a necessaryfeature of social practice (Althusser) should be seen less as false or misleading (asecondary factor related to the type of society in which it is produced) and more asa necessary facilitation of our practice through simplifying our relations with theworld. This simplification can be seen in the first instance in an existential sense assomething that guides us through our complex interactions. But this carries overinto the Althusserian notion of ideology as being a simplification that may misleadus or establish an imaginary relation with the world. The structure of this chapteris to look first at existential (especially Heideggerian) notions of Being and knowl-edge and to look at how lay knowledge has a practical basis. Second, it willexamine how this may become ‘ideological’ in the sense of being inauthentic orthe idle talk and commonsensical views of the ‘they’. At the same time, it will criti-cise Heidegger’s argument that we must turn to our individual selves to findauthentic self-being – a turn which is premised on Heidegger’s denigration of thealternative route to enlightened knowledge – that of scientific explanation. Ingiving support to Althusser’s concept of ideology, it will be argued that his concept

144 Jonathan Joseph

can be strengthened by accentuating its relationship to our existential being. Thisallows us to understand ideology in its practical state as something that simplifiesour journey through the world but which at the same time contains dangers in thatit may be misleading or mystifying or open to articulation and manipulation. Thechapter concludes by looking at how these two very different traditions might bebrought together by critical realism and how the work of Andrew Collier andMargaret Archer has begun this much needed project. The point is not to suggestthat existential views on practical knowledge and Althusserian views on ideology fitneatly together, but rather, that together they provide us with a wider scope forunderstanding knowledge in its many manifestations.

Heidegger on practical knowledge

For Heidegger there are three fundamental kinds of being – Dasein, ready-to-hand and present-at-hand. Dasein is our special condition of Being-in-the-worldwhich forms the frame for intelligibility. Characteristic of Dasein is its under-standing of being where its very being is an issue for it (Heidegger 1962: 32).The present-at-hand is like the physical world or the empirically real. The ready-to-hand is the instrumental world encountered in our work. We encounter thesethings differently depending on our practical orientation. Knowledge derives notso much from looking or contemplation, but from practical engagement.

As mentioned earlier, this practical knowledge is not merely ‘pre-scientific’ butpresupposes scientific or theoretical knowledge. As Collier says:

That the world of our practical concern, composed of the ready-to-handand understood implicitly by what Althusser would call ‘knowledge in apractical state’, is necessarily both historically and biographically prior tothat given by theoretical knowledge, and remains closer to us even when wehave theoretical knowledge.

(2003: 178)

The problem, for existentialism, is that we tend to understand the world in termsof the present-at-hand or ‘everything that is the case’, rather than in terms ofactivities, relationships and projects. Thus we lose sight of what is important tous. As Heidegger puts it: ‘That which is ontologically closest and well known, isontologically the farthest and not known at all’ (Heidegger 1962: 69). He there-fore argues for the priority of that which is ready-to-hand rather thanpresent-at-hand. Things in the world should be understood in terms of the possibility-to-hand. Consequently, as Collier argues, ‘Understanding is alwaysunderstanding of a “for-a-sake-of-which”, that is, of a possibility for the sake ofwhich we are engaged in that world’ (1999: 108).

Understanding, therefore, is characterised by the projection of some possi-bility of being. For Heidegger, understanding is like a torch that sheds light onthe path to that possibility as well as on the instruments to be used and the ob-stacles to avoid. The way that the world is disclosed is through the projection of

Being and knowledge 145

some possibility of Being. Thus Heidegger talks of this disclosure as like aclearing in the forest. As Collier says of this metaphor, it is not that we are in theclearing, but rather that we are the clearing, we are our worlds. And the unifyingforce that organises our world is practical concern (2003: 9). Therefore theclosest world to us is the work world of practical objects. This world is prior totheoretical explanations and in this sense is more authentic. It is structured inrelation to our projects.

Practical knowledge is often tacit knowledge that was at some stage learned. Itis only when practice starts to break down that we need to go back to the manualto find out what informs our actions. Heidegger thinks theoretical knowledgeoriginates in such breakdowns and it helps to correct our understanding. In theoretical behaviour one observes whereas in practical behaviour one acts.Heidegger argues that action needs theoretical knowledge if it is not to remainblind (1962: 99). However, although Heidegger admits that sometimes theknowledge implicit in practice is not enough, he still regards it as having primacyover scientific or theoretical knowledge.

But Collier argues that if theoretical knowledge is to correct the practice, itmust have access to knowledge not available in the practice or going beyond theknowledge generated by the practice (2003: 179). Contra Heidegger,1 theoreticalknowledge is not secondary to practical knowledge. When the knowledgeimplicit in practice fails we have to start thinking. We have to stop and think inorder to restore the practice.

Heidegger believes that phenomenology can liberate us from wrong percep-tions and make things show themselves to us. Science is not given the role ofuncovering appearance and reality, indeed, as Collier notes:

he tends to invert the relation as usually conceived between scientific andpre-scientific knowledge, treating scientific results, despite – or perhapsbecause of – the fact that they are the product of a laborious work ofuncovering, as merely subjective, and as tending to cover up Being, to whichknowledge implicit in everyday practice gives us genuine access.

(2003: 205)

Interestingly, Heidegger regards technology as a mode of revealing and un-concealment (1993a: 319). But he criticises the technological worldview forregarding reality – natural, human and cultural, as a ‘standing reserve’ or stock-pile of materials for production (1993a: 322). He argues that this is part of theprocess whereby we forget being or that which is closest to us and turn instead toa philosophy based on calculation rather than existence. To resist this we have toreassert our existence, to stand out, to refuse to be absorbed into the system. Toexist is to be in a world, but at the same time to be able to organise our world.

Collier describes Heidegger’s stance on technology as ‘the right rebellion inthe wrong cause’. Heidegger wrongly locates this problem in a productivist meta-physics inherited from the Greeks (Collier 2003: 69).2 But the process by whichour world comes to be treated as a stockpile of raw materials for production has

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a more modern origin. ‘The essay concerning technology’ should be a polemicagainst commerce and the logic of capital. However, if this is a more straightfor-ward answer, it demands a more complex solution. Heidegger places too muchreliance on our practical work–world relationships. To escape from the inau-thentic nature of these relations requires more than a reassertion of existenceover the technological world view. Being-in-the-world must deal with the widersocial structures described by Marx and other social theorists.

‘They’ and inauthenticity

Heidegger writes that Being submits itself to a world it encounters (1962: 121)and that Dasein understands its own being in terms of a factual present-at-hand.The way that our Being is related to this factual world is described in terms ofour facticity, which is to say, the inner aspect of factuality and a limiting factor inour existence. This limiting factor is described negatively as ‘thrownness’.

Heidegger talks of thrownness as our factual condition. We are ‘thrown’ intothe ‘there’, thrown in such a way as we are ‘there’ in the world. We are throwninto our existential situation. Thrownness is the facticity of being delivered overto Being (1962: 174); it represents the gap between our facticity and our possi-bility. But this thrownness is not a finished fact. It is expressed as falling; itconstitutes a fleeing in the face of itself. Heidegger writes that ‘temptation, tran-quillizing, alienation and self-entangling (entanglement) – characterize thespecific kind of Being which belongs to falling … Dasein plunges out of itselfinto itself, into the groundlessness and nullity of inauthentic everydayness’ (1962:223). Dasein in its thrownness is for the most part in the manner of an evasiveturning away. This we will now consider in terms of inauthenticity.

For Dasein to have authenticity is for it to be something of its own, to be itsown possibility (Heidegger 1962: 68). Both authentic and inauthentic modes ofBeing are characterised by mineness, but if the possibility of being is fore-grounded, we have authentic understanding; if the world is foregrounded wehave inauthentic understanding. Heidegger claims that inauthentic being doesnot constitute any lesser or lower mode of being (1962: 68). But it is clear thatthe inauthentic mode of being deprives us of ‘true’ selfhood, suppresses thepersonal and imposes uniformity upon us. This imposition of uniformity isrelated to what Heidegger calls the ‘they’ (das Man). The ‘they’ are not definitepeople, but the anonymous, faceless other – the crowd, the herd, the mass, thecommunity, the multitude. We are dominated by others, by the ‘they’, but at thesame time we are the ones who contribute to this and use the ‘they’ as our excuseto escape authentic being. In our everyday lives we assume the ‘they-self ’ ofinauthentic Being.

Dasein is a with-world and our Being in is Being-with Others (1962: 155). But:

These Others … are not definite others. … What is decisive is just that incon-spicuous domination by Others which has already been taken over unawaresfrom Dasein as Being-with. One belongs to the Others oneself and


enhances their power. … We take pleasure and enjoy ourselves as they [man]take pleasure. … The ‘they’, which is nothing definite, and which we all are,though not as the sum, prescribes the kind of Being of everydayness.

(Heidegger 1962: 164)

Everyday being sees the dimming down of Dasein; the truncation of its possibili-ties in accordance with the interpretions of the ‘they’. The average everydaynessof concern tranquillises itself with that which is merely ‘actual’ (1962: 239). OurBeing is absorbed into the world and lost in the publicness of the ‘they’. Daseinfalls away from its authentic self so that now: ‘Idle talk, curiosity and ambiguitycharacterize the way in which, in an everyday manner, Dasein is its “there” – thedisclosedness of Being-in-the-world’ (1962: 219). By idle talk Heidegger meansthe way things have been publicly interpreted. We do not recognise those thingsthat are most important to us and we allow our everyday self to be constituted byothers. Authenticity is overcome by the self-certainty and decidedness of the‘they’. Through its absorption into the ‘they’, Dasein gets lost in the world.

In relation to knowledge, we can say that inauthentic understanding repre-sents a form of concealment or a fleeing from the real situation. Now this canclearly be related to some notion of ideology as misleading, simplifying, or evenmystifying. Like certain forms of ideology, it gives us some comfort: ‘In the faceof its thrownness Dasein flees to the relief which comes with the supposedfreedom of the they-self ’ (Heidegger 1962: 321). Because they represent anattempt to escape responsibility, Collier links Heidegger’s inauthentic existence,along with Sartre’s notion of bad faith, to Gramsci’s term ponziopilatismo whichmeans to disavow one’s actions (Collier 2003: 83). We can further develop theideological aspect of this in saying that we seek to escape into the feelings of thecommunity. To use Gramsci again, we could say such things as the idle talk ofthe ‘they’ and the ambiguity of everyday discourse represent the ideology articu-lated by the ‘common sense’ world view.

But the way out of this inauthentic being and this inauthentic knowledge isdifferent for Marxists such as Gramsci and Althusser and existentialists such asHeidegger and Sartre. The existential option is to suggest that it is theconscience that summons Dasein from the lost-self of the ‘they’. For Heidegger,conscience comes from the depth of our own Being; it is the call of the authenticself trying to escape. Marxists would clearly look to the ‘they’, rather than the ‘I’to become a ‘for-itself ’. For them, the answer lies in collective rather than indi-vidual acts of transformation.

Althusser and ideology

We have looked at how Heidegger conceives of practical knowledge and thenhow this practical knowledge might come to be ideological. Now we need to lookat how Althusser conceives of ideology and how the ideological is practical. Thepoint here is not necessarily to show that Heideggerian and Althusserian notionsof knowledge and ideology are comparable, but at least that they are compatible.

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Further, it is clear that there is an existential element to Althusser’s conceptionof ideology that can be rendered explicit through a comparison with Heidegger’sconception of knowledge. First of all, Althusser relates ideology to our existence,or to our conditions of existence, our facticity: ‘it is clear that ideology (as a system

of mass representations) is indispensable in any society if men are to be formed, transformed

and equipped to respond to the conditions of their existence’ (1979: 235).Ideology is indispensable to any society since it is intimately related to our

conditions of existence and it helps to represent these conditions to us. However:

ideology is a matter of the lived relation between men and their world … notthe relation between them and their conditions of existence, but the way theylive the relation between them and their conditions of existence: this presup-poses a real relation and an ‘imaginary’, ‘lived’ relation.

(Althusser 1979: 233)

Therefore, ideology ‘represents the imaginary relationship of individuals totheir real conditions of existence’ (Althusser 1984: 36). Although the term‘imaginary’ has negative, mystifying implications, we might also see such aclaim in terms of some necessary representation that allows us to function inthe world. This may be compared to a map that simplifies the world in order toguide us through it – in this sense the imaginary might be compared to existen-tial (Sartrean) notions of hodological space and time where the world is mappedin relation to our activities.

If we conceive of ideology in this practical way, then it is clearly a necessaryfeature of social activity. Like existential practical knowledge:

ideology is as such an organic part of every social totality. It is as if human societiescould not survive without these specific formations, these systems of representa-tions (at various levels), their ideologies. Human societies secrete ideology asthe very element and atmosphere indispensable to their historical respirationand life.

(Althusser 1979: 232)

We ‘breathe’ ideology when we carry out certain social activities. Ideologyrelates to human actions and these actions are organised through social prac-tices. Ideology is essential to the functioning of these practices and is producedby them. Therefore, as Althusser puts it, ‘there is no practice except by and inan ideology’ (1984: 44). We can therefore summarise Althusser’s conception ofideology thus; that ideology is something that is secreted through social prac-tices and that it is consequently a necessary feature of our functioning in thesocial world.

Althusser advocates a theory of ideology in general, not of particular ideol-ogies. Ideology, he writes, has no history: ‘it is endowed with a structure and afunctioning such as to make it a non-historical reality’ (1984: 35). And the waythat it operates through the various human practices in which we engage means


that it is generally unconscious or non-conscious. For Althusser, the differencebetween this sort of ideology and scientific or theoretical knowledge is thatideology is not conscious of itself or is unconscious of its theoretical presupposi-tions (1979: 69). For this reason, Althusser draws a sharp distinction betweenideology and scientific knowledge, arguing that it is only by trying to step outsidethe relation between practice and knowledge that we can develop a properunderstanding of the social relations we are engaged in. By contrast, ideologicalrepresentations ‘are perceived-accepted-suffered cultural objects and they actfunctionally on men via a process that escapes them’ (1979: 233).

Ideology is a general feature of all societies, or like Freud’s unconscious,ideology is eternal: ‘if eternal means, not transcendent to all (temporal) history,but omnipresent, trans-historical and therefore immutable in form throughoutthe extent of history … ideology is eternal, exactly like the unconscious’ (Althusser1984: 35). This unconsciousness may derive, in part, from the practical aspect ofideology that forms the basis of its eternal need. Like much practical knowledge,ideology may escape us because it is often so obvious. Ideology imposes itself onus without appearing to do so; it operates on the basis of its obviousness (1984:46). Ideology is something that is lived rather than ‘known’. But at the sametime, as has been argued in relation to practical and lay knowledge, that which isobvious still has to be learned.

In his essay on ideological state apparatuses (ISAs) Althusser discussesprocesses of learning such as the education of children at school. Here we learn:

a number of techniques … including elements (which may be rudimentaryor on the contrary thoroughgoing) of ‘scientific’ or ‘literary culture’, whichare directly useful in the different jobs in production (one instruction formanual workers, another for technicians, a third for engineers, a final onefor higher management, etc.). Thus they learn ‘know-how’.

(1984: 6)

‘Know-how’, in this sense, is a slightly more sinister version of the tacit or layknowledge that we discussed in relation to existentialism. People also learn therules of good behaviour, attitudes to be observed, rules of morality and rules ofrespect. Althusser talks of ideology in the context of the reproduction of theconditions of production, or more particularly, labour power which ‘requires notonly a reproduction of its skills, but also, at the same time, a reproduction of itssubmission to the rules of the established order, i.e. a reproduction of submissionto the ruling ideology’ (1984: 8). School, church and other apparatuses teach‘know-how’ in forms that ensure subjection to the ruling ideology. So, historicalideology is a system of representations with historical existence in a given society(Althusser 1979: 231).

Clearly the difference here is that Althusser, as a Marxist, is interpretingconditions of existence to be conditions of production. But under differentconditions of production, where the production of conformity is not so biased,we can still imagine the process of teaching the kind of know-how necessary for

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us to get on in our everyday lives. In this respect, Althusser’s ‘know-how’ is apoliticised version of existentialism’s practical knowledge.

Social practices require an ideological apparatus. We are inserted into prac-tices governed by the rituals of the ISAs. Althusser writes that the ISAs are notthe realisation of ideology in general, but the form in which the ideology ofthe ruling class must necessarily be realised (1984: 58–59). But in a way, this ishow ideology in general is realised. Ideology is necessary in a general sense inorder for us to function in social practices. But the realisation of this takesplace through the specific ideologies of the ruling class. It is through the domi-nant ideology of the ruling class that the more general form of ideology isrealised. The term ‘realised’ is also interesting in that it suggests that the ISAsare emergent from these general conditions. Althusser also writes that ‘whatunifies their diversity is precisely this functioning, insofar as the ideology bywhich they function is always in fact unified, despite its diversity and its contra-dictions, beneath the ruling ideology’ (1984: 20). So to put this in critical realistterms, ideology exists at a general social level and is necessary to the func-tioning of society. But how this underlying ideology is realised is throughspecific apparatuses that may reflect the ruling ideology or, at least, will havetheir own emergent properties and form.

Another aspect of Althusser’s conception of ideology is that it examines howit functions to produce subjects whose consciousness is appropriate to the socialpositions they occupy. One way this is done is through the concept of interpella-tion. We are recruited into identity positions by being interpellated or hailed.This is a process whereby people recognise themselves in a particular identityand think ‘that’s me’. Although it has been suggested that ideology is oftenunconscious, it does often involve this act of recognition. But it is a very limitedform of recognition that represents, in fact, a form of subjection. We mightagain make a very limited comparison with Heidegger’s ‘they’. The process ofhailing interpellates us in our inauthentic Being so that we have the excuse todeny our own responsibility by identifying with the ‘they’. In fleeing authen-ticity we shrink back into the ‘they’ which hails us, which we identify with andthink, ‘that’s me’.

However, this is a very negative conception of ideology. To conclude thissection, it must be stressed that Althusser does have a more positive conceptionof ideology precisely because he sees that it is necessary to all human practices:

So ideology is not an aberration or a contingent excrescence of History: it isa structure essential to the historical life of societies. Further, only the exis-tence and the recognition of its necessity enable us to act on ideology andtransform ideology into an instrument of deliberate action on history.

(1979: 232)

Because of its necessity, ideology is open to abuse. In class society it is expressedin class terms. But outside of class society ideology will allow us to live our rela-tion with our conditions of existence in a more beneficial and fulfilling way:


In a class society ideology is the relay whereby, and the element in which,the relation between men and their conditions of existence is settled to theprofit of the ruling class. In a classless society ideology is the relay whereby,and the element in which, the relation between men and their conditions ofexistence is lived to the profit of all men.

(1979: 235–236)

Being humans

Heidegger’s work is important because it helps us to understand the nature ofhuman existence through such issues as facticity, concern, practical knowledge,thrownness and inauthenticity. Althusser might be broader in scope in terms ofoutlining a social ontology of structures and generative mechanisms that gobeyond experience, human existence and Being. However, a Heideggerianaccount of human existence might be run alongside rather than in opposition tothis, so long as we realise the limited nature of Heidegger’s ontology as anontology of our Being-in-the-world rather than of the world more generally.

Critical realists are starting to notice this. There is not space here to go into alengthy account of Margaret Archer’s recent work, but we can at least mentionbriefly how she might be doing a similar thing. That is, drawing on the existen-tialism of Merleau-Ponty and giving an account of what it means to be humanor to have human Being, while recognising wider social forces that are at play.Archer’s book Being Human looks at the properties and powers of human beingsand how they emerge through our relations with the world (2000: 7) and howour embodied encounters instil a sense of self (2000: 8).

Surprisingly Heidegger is not mentioned in Being Human. Instead, Archerdraws upon Merleau-Ponty (who Collier mentions alongside Heidegger andMacmurray as the most useful of the existentialists), and the way in which hegives us an account of the primacy of practice that relies on nothing more thanour ‘ineluctable embodiment and inescapable relations with our environment’(Archer 2000: 137). From here it is necessary to see the embedding of reasoningin natural praxis:

it is through the activities of embodied practice that we develop the powersof thought at all. To do so it is necessary to demonstrate that practicalaction is also the source, (i) of our thinking about distinct objects … (ii) howthey are subject to transfactual laws of nature which belong to them, but donot emanate from us.

(2000: 146)

It can be seen how Archer is insisting on the realist aspect of existentialism.3

Criticising postmodernism for its discursive irrealism she argues that ‘there is a

genuine primacy of practice which yields reasoned knowledge non-discursively and which also

underlies practical proficiency in the linguistic domain’ (2000: 151). Therefore realists goalong with existentialists in claiming the primacy of practice over language

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which must be seen as emergent from these practices (2000: 26). So for Archer‘[t]he primacy of practice in conceptualising our experience is what alliesrealism with phenomenology’ (2000: 127). Likewise Collier sees a realist elementin existentialism. Objectivity, he writes, means recognising the primacy of theobject. Existentialism can help insofar as we are seen primarily as actors ratherthan subjects. As actors, we are ‘out there’ and our thinking is governed by thatwhich we seek knowledge of (Collier 2003: 137). The world is logically prior toideas and we can only define an idea in relation to that aspect of the world thatthe idea is about (2003: 145). Experience presupposes realism. Experience isalways experience of something, and is referential insofar as it makes sensebecause of the independent reality it presupposes (2003: 216). It is because ofthe independence of reality that our theory, as an attempt to map it, can berational or irrational (2003: 230). This constitutes an ontocentric rather than ananthropocentric relation to the things that are independent of us. Our relationsshould be measured in terms of truer or less true understanding of these things –not just in terms of thought, but also our emotions and actions (2003: 159).4

Finally, we have said that the limitations of existentialism should be recognisedby moving from the nature of our Being-in-the-world, and how we experiencethis through human practices, to wider social structures and generative mech-anisms. However, Margaret Archer’s recent work can be seen as pushing in theopposite direction, from wider structures to how we see ourselves, and how‘society enters into us’ (Archer 2000: 13). The point is to see this aspect of beingalongside wider socio-structural relations, but to focus particularly on that aspectof life in which we develop a conception of the self. Our self-consciousnessderives from our embodied encounters and practices in the world. We discoverthrough embodied practice the distinction between self and other and subject andobject (2000: 8). We live simultaneously in natural, practical and social orders.Our emotions can be regarded as our commentaries on our welfare in the world(2000: 9). We are who we are because of what we care about. We clearly haveissues of care and concern and self-worth. But at the same time, our involuntaryplacement as Primary Agents (our ‘thrownness’) brings us back to the role ofsocial structures and the need to act on a wider stage.

Knowing the real

Existentialism challenges the dominant epistemological basis of western philos-ophy by starting with being and the practical issues that arise from this.Existential phenomenologists shift attention from perception to the work thatcharacterises our Being. Perception is situated within the context of our engage-ment with the world through activities or practice. Practical understanding isregarded as the most fundamental form of knowledge with theoretical under-standing derived from this. John Macquarrie summarises this position as ‘I am,therefore I think’, I am in the world, I am with others (Macquarrie 1973: 94)while Collier writes that for Heidegger it is a case of ‘I fix a shutter with ahammer, therefore I am in a world’ (Collier 2003: 176).


Everyday existence is characterised by living or dwelling. To be ‘in’ the worldis to have concern for our environment since our interests coincide with thosethings around us. We therefore understand things through the projection ofconcern and it is through this concern that the world is lit up for us. Macquarriesays that to understand the world is to be able to cope with it, to know our wayabout, to know how it relates to our concerns, to bring things into service, toavoid dangers. This practical understanding manifests itself through our patternsof action. Theoretical understanding develops out of this, as we move from theparticular to the general, from the concrete to the abstract, from the actual to thehypothetical (Macquarrie 1973: 98).

Therefore, for existentialism, knowledge and truth occur in the context ofpersonal existence. We are in the truth insofar as we are free and open to thingsas they are, in their un-hiddenness. In fact, since the emphasis is on experience, itis not so much that we ‘have experiences’ that may be truthful or mystifying, butthat we experience things in different ways. It is our engagement with things thatmakes things appear to us the way they do. Since we use things in particularways or with a particular purpose, we come to have knowledge of something inrelation to our practice. This means that the knowledge we have of somethingmay be limited by the practice that we are engaged in and that it is only if wecan step outside of that practice that we can gain a wider knowledge of theprocesses involved. As Collier says, ‘[t]he work-world understanding of thehammer as “ready-to-hand” is indeed an appearance, not in the sense of beingfalse, but of being partial’ (2003: 205).

If we stick with Althusser’s view of ideology as secreted by human practices,then Heidegger, in particular, is useful in giving an account of practical knowl-edge. This does not mean all practical or lay knowledge is ideological; the mostbasic knowledge is simply practical know-how which, if it is partial, is so for goodpractical reasons. But as knowledge develops and becomes more complex it maybecome ideological, either as a necessary simplification, or as an outright distor-tion of the way things are. But to understand the basis of this we need to go backto how this knowledge grows out of our practical relations with our environ-ment. At the same time, to know how this practical knowledge turns ideological,we need an account of the wider social forces in play. This leads to problemswith Heidegger’s account.

Heidegger’s argument is that we become trapped in the unthinking routine ofeveryday existence and that this leads to inauthenticity and a fleeing from oursituation. We need to reawaken our involvement with the world through the callof conscience. For Heidegger, conscience is the call of the authentic self – tryingto escape. But to escape from the inauthentic nature of these relations requiresmuch more than a turning to the self. Being-in-the-world must deal with thewider social structures and the other agents who can help to change them. AsArcher says, we need a ‘historical movement from the “Me”, which seeks tomake out within the confines of the existing socio-cultural structures, towards the“We” which together seeks strategically to transform such structures’ (2000: 11).To do this we need knowledge. We need an emancipatory critique that can show

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how inadequate or inauthentic knowledge is a product of bad practices that arethemselves related to a wrong social system than needs to be changed.Heidegger’s argument that we must turn to our individual selves to findauthentic self-being is a turn which is premised on a denigration of the alterna-tive route to enlightened knowledge – that of scientific explanation and humanemancipation.

Another existentialist Macmurray talks of two types of knowledge, the philo-sophical and the scientific. The philosophical is knowledge of persons as personsand therefore as agents. This is knowledge of the personal other. Macmurrayargues that the scientific is limited and abstract, turning the personal into adeterminate object. For these reasons he regards scientific knowledge as limitedand subordinate (1995: 40–41). But we must ask why it is that we need toabstract. Surely it is because everything is not revealed by experience and that tounderstand this better we are required to reveal other layers of social being. Innot fully accepting this, Macmurray’s work is in danger of embracing a praxisontology where: ‘Reality, therefore is bound up with the unity and completenessof the world in our immediate experience of it’ (Macmurray 1936: 34).5

If scientific realism tells us anything, it is that there is more to reality than this.Existentialists rightly see knowledge as derived from practices, however, they arein danger of elevating practices and experience to the most fundamental onto-logical level. This may tell us quite a lot about being human, but it will not tell useverything about the social world. We need to examine wider structural condi-tions and we need scientific knowledge to be able to do this.

Louis Althusser writes that ‘ideology is a matter of the lived relation betweenmen and their world’ but that this is not the same as the real relation betweenthem and their conditions of existence (1979: 233). This lived relation implies,unlike existentialism, that there is a level of reality beyond that which is lived – alived level and an underlying level. The problem with existentialism is that ratherthan looking at lived and underlying levels, it focuses on the lived level andcontrasts inauthentic living with authentic living.

There is a reason why existentialists tend to denigrate scientific knowledge,which is that they tend to ignore the underlying social structures that scienceattempts to uncover. The focus on practical knowledge derives from a tendencyto reduce ontology to Being-in-the-world. Where Marxism and existentialismcome together – in Sartre and Merleau-Ponty – it is on the basis of a praxisontology rather than a scientific realist one. To gain a wider picture of the worldwe need to go beyond practice and look at structure. This is what makes us critical realists rather than just existentialists.

Conclusion: practice, knowledge and ideology

Knowledge is produced through human practice. The knowledge produced is‘practical’ insofar as it helps us to engage in that practice. However, the natureof that knowledge varies considerably according to the nature of that practice.A more straightforward practice, like finding one’s way round a building or an


equipmental relation to a piece of machinery, produces relatively straightfor-ward knowledge about how to do something or how to carry out a task. A morecomplex practice such as bringing up a family produces practical knowledgewhich, in simplifying our relationship to the practice, may be ideological in thesense of being partial, concealing or even misleading. It may help us to do whatwe want to do – such as earn money – but it may also be misleading orconcealing in letting us think that we are being paid a fair wage. Heidegger andAlthusser help us to understand this moving from practical, equipmental relations to more complex social engagements. As the ideological componentdevelops, knowledge goes beyond being practical and may be articulated invarious ways to serve various ideas and interests or to conceal certain socialrelations.

If practices produce practical knowledge, practical ideology and a more articulated and developed form of ideological discourse, they may also produceanother type of knowledge – that which is denigrated by existentialists andoverly revered by Althusser. For science is also a practice and this practiceproduces both practical knowledge about the scientific practice and scientificknowledge about that with which the practice is engaged. Contra Althusser,scientific knowledge always has an ideological component due to the practicalconditions of its production. Contra Heidegger, scientific knowledge can gobeyond practical knowledge in seeing beyond those things that are closest to usand explaining why our practical relations are the way they are.

The point is not to demarcate firmly between different types of knowledge,but to look at knowledge across its various forms and determinations. We havedetermined that knowledge has many different forms and effects. It is not beingclaimed that combining Heidegger and Althusser provides all the solutions tothis question, but a comparison of them broadens the scope of enquiry andhelps us to address the relations between knowledge, practice and ideology innew and revealing ways.

Notes

1 And contra Macmurray and Merleau-Ponty (science is a second order expression(Merleau-Ponty 1962: viii)).

2 In Heidegger’s ‘Letter on Humanism’ he says that Marxist materialism says morethan just that everything is matter, but introduces a metaphysics founded upon thematerial of labour. This essence of materialism he then links to technology and writesthat the metaphysic of technü goes back to the Greeks (1993b: 243–244).

3 Collier makes the case for why Heidegger is a realist of sorts (Collier 2003: 177;Heidegger 1962: 251). Merleau-Ponty is also a realist of sorts, saying that the real hasto be described, not constructed or formed (Merleau-Ponty 1962: x). But Merleau-Ponty poses the relation in a rather dialectical and possibly compromising way whenhe says: ‘The world is inseparable from the subject, but from a subject which isnothing but a project of the world, and the subject is inseparable from the world, butfrom a world which the subject itself projects’ (1962: 430). Merleau-Ponty believesthis transcends the dilemma between realism and idealism. Macmurray, I think, it isharder to make a case for.

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4 There is something of Macmurray in this – that truth and falsity lie in the relationwith the things to which they refer (1935: 24). Macmurray further extends this rela-tion to rational or irrational feelings (1935: 25).

5 ‘All life is activity’ (Macmurray 1935: 23); ‘life is essentially concrete activity’ (1936: 36).

Bibliography

Althusser, L. (1979) For Marx, London: Verso.—— (1984) ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards and Investiga-

tion)’, in Essays on Ideology, London: Verso, pp. 1–60.Archer, M. (2000) Being Human, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Collier, A. (1999) Being and Worth, London and New York: Routledge.—— (2003) In Defence of Objectivity, London and New York: Routledge.Heidegger. M. (1962) Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson, Oxford:

Blackwell.—— (1993a) ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, in Basic Writings, ed. D.F. Krell,

London: Routledge.—— (1993b) ‘Letter on Humanism’, in Basic Writings, ed. D.F. Krell, London: Routledge.Macmurray, J. (1935) Reason and Emotion, London: Faber and Faber.—— (1936) Interpreting the Universe, London: Faber and Faber.—— (1995) Persons in Relation, London: Faber and Faber.Macquarrie, J. (1973) Existentialism, Harmondsworth: Penguin.Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962) Phenomenology of Perception, London: Routledge.


Part V

Objectivity andmaterialism

In this chapter I want to show that in the writing of Karl Marx we can identify aphilosophical materialism within which the grounds for what I want to refer to asgenuinely objective theories of ontology and epistemology can be located. But Iwant also to show that this achievement owes a considerable amount to prin-ciples in the philosophy of the sciences that have striking similarities to two of hispredecessors in the German intellectual tradition of critique, namely Kant andHegel. In short, I wish to demonstrate that Marxian materialist objectivismrepresents a materialist inversion of Hegelian and Kantian notions of objectivityin the natural and social sciences.

We should understand critique as the examination of the structure of humanrationality and the limits of its claims to objectivity. Kant formulated it becausehe was dissatisfied with traditional and contemporary resolutions of the philo-sophical problem of antinomy – how are we to reconcile the domain of intuitiverationality with that of experience? How are we to account for the relationshipbetween the process of knowledge acquisition and the objects which it seeks tounderstand? Traditional resolutions – such as with Plato – involved the dissolu-tion of experience – the domain where we encounter the things which our ideasare about – and concentrated exclusively on the intuitive appreciation of ideas(what we might call a philosophical consciousness). The problem with contempo-rary solutions – such as that of empiricism – was that the other pole of antinomywas dissolved, reducing the mind to something akin to a blank slate where rawsense-data from matter is passively received. Kant wanted to reconcile thesepoles, not solve the problem by simply eliminating one or other of them andplacing sole importance on the one remaining. His dissatisfaction with theseearlier traditions motivated him to examine the rational structure of knowledgeand what caused the errors in philosophies from Platonic idealism to empiricism.He set about positing underlying (cognitive) structures that create the conditionsfor cognitive experience; what there is a priori that makes knowledge possible. Inthis way, the intuitive pole was seen as indispensable to the process whereby wegain knowledge through experience. And so the method of critique was born.

Hegel, on the other hand, wanted to restore intuition to a non-empiricalstatus very much akin to its status within Plato and Aristotle. But, unlike them,he posited a necessary connection to experience and so the empirical/actual

11 Towards objectivityFrom Kant to Marx

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was defined as historico-cultural moments in the development of the (intuitive)philosophical consciousness. In short, Hegel wanted to dispel notions of objec-tivity from the domain of experience and to locate what he called ‘essences’ in anon-empirical/actual domain of pure reason. Now I want to argue that bothKantian and Hegelian approaches lead to subjectivity. But what is more im-portant is that I also want to demonstrate that in the process of Marx’sinversion of Hegel’s method we can detect a materialist transformation of theKantian idealist principle that experience yields knowledge of a priori transcen-dental structures of the subject matter of science. The end result is theformulation of a materialist critique that is genuinely objective.

The first issue at hand must be to define what I mean by ‘genuinely objec-tive’ and, for that matter, what I mean by subjectivity. Andrew Collier claimsthat subjectivity in our truth-claims about the world occurs when epistemology‘loses its reference to what ideas are about, and comes to be a matter of coher-ence between ideas’ (2003: 144) and as a consequence ‘the objects of ideashave dropped out of the picture altogether’ (2003: 144). So we are subjectivewhen the things about which truth-claims are made disappear from viewcompletely. Ideas thereby lose their ‘aboutness’. Conversely, Collier claims thatto be objective ‘is to refer to what is true independently of any subject judgingit to be’ (2003: 134). Since the Enlightenment (and, I want to show, up untilMarx) the philosophy of the sciences has been characterised by the post-Humean notion that, on the contrary, objectivity consists of constantconjunctions of events that the human mind perceives in the form of impres-sions or raw sense-data.

Now most empiricists are also aware that every philosophy must presuppose aconception of the world as being in some sense ordered – a schematic answer tothe question of what the world must be like to make knowledge of it possible(Bhaskar 1978: 28–29). And so they are prepared to acknowledge the intransitivity

of the subject matter of science. They defend the objectivity of empiricism byinsisting that the conditions of possibility of experience have two levels – theHumean level of raw sense-data (empirical ) and the recognition that manyconstant conjunctions of events occur unexperienced (actual ). But actualism isitself subjective in the sense that the things which theories are about are notontologically distinguished from the scientific activity which produces our knowl-edge of them. This represents the way our knowledge loses its ‘aboutness’ in thedomain of science. What I mean by this criticism is that the logic of scientificexperiment involves a third transfactual level whereby an ‘ontological distinctionbetween (scientific) causal laws and patterns of events’ (Bhaskar 1978: 12; 1998:10) is drawn. Scientists set up ‘artificial closures’ (experimental conditions) inorder to isolate real generative mechanisms from others with which they interactin open systems to bring about events. In other words, scientists draw ontologicaldistinctions between the subject matter of science (i.e. real generative causalmechanisms) and the events they generate. Now the lack of empirical regularityis due to the multi-layered nature of being – from the lowest (physical) to thehighest (sociological) – where each has causal powers. This is known as the strati-

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fied and emergent character of reality (Bhaskar 1998).1 And the complex andmultiform nature of inter-acting generative mechanisms means that events inopen systems can only be analysed as tendencies; constant conjunctions are thuspurely a phenomenon of closure. These scientific conditions involve the activation

of one or more real generative mechanisms thereby making the subject matter ofscience empirically manifest. We do not actually see the mechanisms themselves butonly ever the constant conjunctions that are produced, and we extrapolate fromthe latter accurate accounts of the former. And so if we accept the logic of scien-tific practice then events produced scientifically are irreducibly and unmistakablyhuman activities, with the mechanisms that produce them being ontologicallydistinct from them. Scientific laws are about ‘things, not events’ (Bhaskar 1978:51). Empiricists and actualists fail to take sufficient account of the reality thatour experience is always of something that is external to our experiencing it. Ifwe fail to incorporate this a priori fact about human experiences into ourphilosophising then we commit a fatal error which, as Andrew Collier has put it,is ‘the error of believing that experience is an object which we can inspectwithout reference to its objects – which makes subjectivism or idealism possible’(Collier 2003: 138).

Now, the lack of constant conjunctions in open systems means that even atthe level of events the actualists have got it wrong. They posit something thatdoesn’t actually prevail in nature or society as constitutive of being in opensystems. In so doing they enter very dangerous epistemological and ontologicalterritory because they cannot draw adequate distinctions between scientifichuman activity and the things that it is supposed to discover independently of it.The latter, so to speak, ‘falls out of the picture’ and they become interested onlyin a type of event produced by our activity. What produces the event is lost. Thisis not to say that events are not real in the sense of having an ontological status.But if we say that it is only events that are real then we cannot make the neces-sary ontological distinction between the process that produces our knowledgeand the things which our knowledge is about. The consequence of this subjec-tivistic error is the view of the world as made up of atomistic events. This loss ofgenerative mechanisms means that the world becomes unidimensional and flatand so ‘ontological depth’ disappears. In other words, the world is deontologised.This whole process is what Bhaskar calls the epistemic fallacy (Bhaskar 1978: 16).And so to be truly objective necessitates drawing categorical distinctions betweenthe domains of the empirical, actual and real (Bhaskar 1978: 56; Collier 1998:689; Bhaskar 1993: 4–5). If we accept this then we accept the possibility thatthere is necessity in nature that is independent of human activity, somethingwhich Bhaskar has called natural necessity (1978: 14).

To posit the world as structured and made up of infinitely complex transfac-tual generative mechanisms commits science to the search for the referential

detachment of our conceptions about the world from the world-in-itself. We muststrive to decipher more layers of this world and progress towards a greaterunderstanding of its complex structures in the search for alethic truth (Bhaskar1994: 24–28). Of importance to our discussion in this chapter is the fact that

Towards objectivity: from Kant to Marx 163

both Kant and Hegel commit the errors of what a Bhaskarian might call subjec-

tivistic deontologicisation because their systems are dependent on actualism orempiricism. Now, as Hegel conceptualised the object as existing independent ofexperience (as we shall see) it might be said that he stands alongside Marx as animportant philosopher who saw the errors of empiricism/actualism. However, Iwant to affirm what Roy Bhaskar (1994) has aptly demonstrated – that theidealist character of Hegel’s philosophical methods means that he cannot escapethe spectre of Hume irrespective of the anti-empiricist truism of his criticism ofKant – that objectivity exists outside the domain of experience. It is with Marx’smaterialist and (I suggest) realist transformation of Kant’s transcendentalism thatHegelian methodology is at last freed from the grip of Hume.

As I have mentioned, objectivity is not simply about distinguishing intransi-tivity from transitivity and establishing conditions of transfactuality and naturalnecessity. I want to stress that we must also appeal to concepts of ontological bi- and

polyvalence. This is evidence of the dialectical significance of transcendentalrealist concepts. Quite simply, a theory which is ontologically bivalent or polyva-lent is one which allows for the notion of real negation or absence. This is animportant example of how objective being consists of the non-actual and non-empirical. Real absences are important because they are integral tointransitivity/transitivity, transfactual efficacy of phenomena and emergent andstratified structures. As such, absences and negation of absences are the dialec-tical functioning of realist concepts in historical realities. An example of thiswould be what anti-capitalists regard as the existence and development ofslavery in capitalism. Slavery is a positive real existent thing to be sure but it alsoinvolves a real absence – the absence of freedom. Bhaskar calls such things 2E(Second Edge) moments; the concrete forms that the essentially abstract transcen-dental realist and critical naturalist concepts of transfactual efficacy, emergenceand natural necessity (known as 1M or First Moment) take in socio- or natural-historical contexts (Bhaskar 1993: 8, 53; 1994: 61, 67). Why 1M categories take adialectical significance in 2E is because their concrete functioning involves nega-tion and includes the category of real determinate transformative absence. Thus,subjectivistic deontologicisation also involves the rejection of ontological non-being or absence, an error which is known as ontological monovalence (Collier 1995:8–9). Dialectical critical realism will be important to our understanding of howMarx’s materialist inversion of Hegelianism allows for a realist transformation ofKantian transcendentalism that has a dialectical significance, so it is worth intro-ducing these terms here. With this task accomplished it is time to proceed toexamine in detail the passage of critique from Kant through to Marx.

Kantian transcendentalism

Kant’s major motivation for writing The Critique of Pure Reason was to recover theidea that real relational unities can be found in the objects that the mindperceives and experiences, an idea that, as I have said, theorists from the empiri-cist tradition had rejected. Eminent empiricists such as Locke and Hume

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contended that the apparent unity which goes to make up objects of our percep-tion (e.g. a forest or a planet) was simply a plurality of independently existingelements. To gain an explanation of any such object we simply reduce every-thing down to its essential constituent properties. The logic of this was that it wasonly these properties that have an ontological status. For example, they would saythat a tree is ontologically prior to a forest. In our sensate experiences the onlythings we take cognition of are the trees and we thus formulate simple ideasconcerning them. That we also insist that we see such a thing as a ‘forest’ is false– what we are in actual fact doing is merely taking simple ideas and using themto postulate a unified object which is unverifiable because it plays no role in ourexperience of the world. Locke prevented taking this type of thinking to itslogical conclusion – a complete dissolution of the object – by his doctrine of realbut unknowable unified essences that explain why we insist in thinking in termsof conceptual unities (Locke 1975: III.vi, §6, p. 442).

However, in A Treatise of Human Nature Hume rejected Locke’s quasi-substratum of real essences and insisted that the unified object was nothingmore than a product of the imagination in its attempts to understand the thingsthat the mind perceives (Hume 1978: Book I, Part 4, §3, p. 221). If we cannotknow about any underlying unifying substratum intrinsic to mind-independentmatter then it is impossible for it, if it even exists, to have any bearing at all onwhy we think, for example, that a collection of trees constitutes a forest. But thisdoes not mean that there is anything particularly special about the way ourminds organise their perceptions of elemental properties either. We do notimpose a unity onto these properties nor an account of their activities (i.e.causal laws) in any sophisticated sense. Hume thought that when the mindthinks of an object it is associating together various ‘particular qualities’ orperceptions. For example, when I see something that I recognise as fire it isbecause I am associating together various perceptions of its heat, appearance,causal activity, etc. that I know are characteristic of that object. Now thisconnection is so strong that I am not aware of any transition between qualitiesand it is by virtue of this alone that unified objects are formed. To this end,Hume talks about the mind’s ‘principles of association’, namely resemblance,contiguity in time and place and cause and effect (Hume 1978: Book I, Part I,§6, p. 16; Stern 1996: 12). In his account ideas about how objects are consti-tuted (relational unities) are simply reflections on how the mind takes cognitionof the objects of experience after we have experienced them. Hence, by radical-ising the Lockean attack on substance (by rejecting any talk of an underlyingsubstratum) Hume dissolved ontology altogether.

Kant agreed with Hume that explanations for objects and their activities wereproducts of how the mind seeks to understand the sensate experience ofelemental properties and that Lockean talk of some unknowable quasi-substratum was folly. But Kant believed that Hume had vastly underestimatedthe function of consciousness in this task. It does not simply organise the objectsof experience after the process is completed but is actively involved in theprocess of their structuring and ordering (McCarthy 1988: 24–25).


Kant asserted that there was a formal connection imposed onto objects bywhat he called a synthetic unity imposed onto sense-experience by the mind. Inother words, experience not only involves the intuition of the senses (Hume) butalso something which exists a priori and that is the condition of possibility of

intuition. That something was a particular type of concept of those objects. Rawsense-data involves simply receiving representations through the faculty of sensate-intuition. For Hume the explanation for how the mind constructs unity andcoherence out of what it perceives lies entirely at this stage. But Kant thoughtthat the mind could only have these representations if it had a conceptual under-

standing that it uses to connect together the representations it receives throughsensate-experience. Kant posited two types of concept. First, we have particular

concepts that enable the mind to make judgements about certain representa-tions, for example the judgement that ‘when water is boiled it turns to steam’.But this concept is dependent on much more general concepts that are the condition of possibility of the intuitive understanding of this event and they areknown as categories (Stern 1996: 19). In our example, to make the particularjudgement ‘when water is boiled it turns to steam’ requires the categories of unity

(so that the mind can understand the plurality of intuitions involved in observingthe event of boiling water turning into a gas) and cause (so that the mind couldunderstand why the water turns into a gas). Categories thus function to unitevarious concepts and their judgements and are indispensable to intuition (Kant1998: A79/B104–105, 211). Kant’s theory that the mind synthesises the object istherefore dependent on these categories.

The consequences all of this has for ontology are revolutionary, for Kantappears to place the structure of the knowable world in the mind. If the cate-gories are central to the unity of intuition then they must be said to determinethe structure of objects that are experienced. In other words, by positing a priori

connections of the understanding (Kant 1998: 6; McCarthy 1988: 24) in thisway, Kant was saying that the mind was actively involved in constructing realityas it was experienced and not just organising its understanding of intuitions itpassively receives. Kant thus revived explanations of underlying unities of objectsby placing them firmly within a constituting subject, something which Humecould not allow given the rather modest powers he gave to the mind. We canthus see how Kant developed a transcendental ontology of the subject because heplaces concepts of causation and unity exclusively within certain a priori capaci-ties of the mind that it brings to its experience of the world around it and so wehave a world-constituting subject. This allows science to make claims of universalitybecause there exist the conditions of possibility of universality by virtue of theontology of the object that the a priori synthetic structures of the consciousnessallowed. And since the object of experience is ‘nothing other than the formalunity of consciousness’ (Kant 1998: A105, 231) (a phenomenological object) theobject-in-itself remains unknowable (a noumenal object) and is as such bereft ofstructural components in itself (i.e. unity and causal powers) that would give itontological significance. Kant in fact calls the latter the transcendental object2

(Broad 1978: 226; Stern 1996: 26; Kant 1998: A250–251, 347–348).

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And so we have a unified ontologically grounded object formulated by themind known as a transcendental subject. Such was the Kantian approach to critique –the location of the conditions of possibility of experience in the synthesisingconsciousness – and it is known as the transcendental analytic.

It is important therefore to understand Kantian critique as an idealistic (and Ihope to show, unsuccessful) reconciliation of the poles of antinomy. By claimingthat synthesis was the a priori condition of possibility of experience Kant positedan intrinsic interconnection between the process whereby we understand theobject and the structure of the object itself in the sense that any possible objectmust conform to the conditions of possibility of our knowledge of it. This iswhat philosophers mean when they talk about Kant’s Copernican Revolution –the reversal of the assumption of Cartesian epistemology that our representa-tions of the object must conform to the object-in-itself in the same way thatCopernicus reversed the assumptions of astronomical science regarding the rela-tion between the Earth and the Sun. Kant’s answer to the question of how weare to understand the relation between the object and our representations of itwas not to accept the basic premises of Cartesian epistemology (Locke) nor todeny that such a relation is detectable (Hume) (Stern 1996: 13) but rather toreverse its direction. Now I want to suggest that Kant’s endeavour fails becausewhat is involved is the collapse of the object into the process whereby we under-stand it. At this point Hegel’s critique of Kant is absolutely central in exposingthe weaknesses of Kant’s position.

Hegel’s immanent phenomenological critique of Kant

Hegel’s major achievement in his criticism of Kant was to correctly identify thatthe latter’s definition of the object as a synthetic unity imposed onto a pluralityof simple intuitions constituted deontologicising rationalism. Hegel rejected the basicHumean assumption that was presupposed and extensively developed by Kant,namely the notion that objects were mere congeries of properties broughttogether by the consciousness. He wanted to revive the Platonic/Aristoteliannotion of the object as immanent irreducible unity that was not at all dependenton the character of human experience. That is, the object-in-itself had anintrinsic unity that made it more than the sum of its elemental material proper-ties. But Hegel didn’t want to get rid of sense-experience because he thoughtthat it could help human beings come to understand non-material essences.

In this regard Hegel appealed to the Aristotelian notion of the immanence ofPlatonic Forms. Plato had argued that unified essences consisted of non-materialtranscendent Forms above and beyond the world that can be experienced byhuman cognitive faculties. Accordingly, he displayed stoicism about the world ofmatter (he called it pure matter) because according to him this was not thedomain where the unity of the object was to be found. Instead he argued thatthe understanding of objects depended on intellectual philosophical intuitionknown as pure reason. Aristotle, on the other hand, posited the immanence ofPlatonic Forms, an interconnection between matter and form known as


matter–form composites (Bhaskar 1994: 182). Platonic Forms were actualised inexperience in this account in the sense that perception of matter by theconsciousness always revealed something about the intrinsic unity and essence ofthe object, as it was independent of that perception. And so induction became a wayfor humankind to gain knowledge of essences (Forms). But since the logic ofinduction involves the restriction of universals to the level of empirical laws (i.e.an implicit Humean-like scepticism about the possibility of knowledge discon-nected from experience) Aristotle supplemented induction with the notion thatultimately knowledge of essences depended upon Platonic intellectual intuition.Thus, in the end he failed to immanentise transcendent Forms because he knewthat induction taken through to its logical conclusion would lead to their dissolu-tion. Philosophy was therefore left at the Platonic/Aristotelian fault-line (Bhaskar1994: 5), stuck between two methods of knowledge acquisition – philosophicalintellectual intuition and empirical-sensate intuition (i.e. the poles of antinomy).

Hegel’s resolution involved the transformation of objective idealism (Plato)into absolute idealism. The empirical-sensate pole was given recognition in so far asthe consciousness did indeed experience a plurality of intuitive sensations. Butthis was hardly a concession to the empiricists and Kant because Hegel did notaccept their dissolution of a detectable intrinsic unity in the material world; objec-tivity did not depend on our experiences for its realisation but it had anontologically primary unity (Stern 1996: 42). This was because matter wasdefined as merely the finite manifestation of objective unified essences that resideat the level of pure reason. Thus, the essence of a finite material object lies insomething other than its appearance to us in its material form (Colletti 1973: 14).And so we have the resurrection of intellectual philosophical intuition butwithout the thought–matter split of Platonic Stoicism that led to the dissolutionof the empirical-sensate pole of antinomy.

We should therefore see the Hegelian contention that the unity of the objectlies in the mind as a far cry from Kant’s transcendental subject. That theKantian concepts and categories were synthetic meant they could not existwithout sense-intuition and thus experience – their purpose was merely to helpthe mind deal with the plurality of perceptions. But since Hegel wanted to placeobjective unity in the philosophical consciousness then the object did not dependat all on experience. He argued that by tying ontology to experience Kant in factdeontologicised the world because he reduced ideas about the constitution of theobject to the status of ideas concerning how we experience the world. We shouldunderstand this as precisely the sort of thing Collier means when he definessubjectivism as the error of believing that the process whereby we gain knowl-edge becomes an object to be studied.

Nevertheless, Hegel thought that Kantianism had some promise insofar as itrepresented an important rejection of the empiricist claim that the consciousnesspassively receives data from the world and constructs unities thereafter. Thefoundation of Kantian critique – the notion of concepts and categories – werevaluable discoveries about the mind’s function in constituting the world of expe-rience. But Hegel wanted to radicalise critique by giving concepts and categories

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the status of ontological objective essences located at the level of pure reason; i.e.as ontological totalities that were independent of our experiences. Thus, sciencehad the task of progressively organising the mind’s complete picture of the worldprovided by pure reason; that is, to make the whole that the mind already hascoherent to it. Hence, there was no such thing as Kantian matter-in-itself becausewhat we experience through sense-intuition is merely the projection of humanconsciousness in the historical process of its self-formation, a process thatcompletes itself when we come to awareness of the intrinsic holistic unity ofeverything in what Hegel calls Absolute Reason or Spirit. Now, for Hegel AbsoluteReason/Spirit means essentially an incontestable and complete idea of absolutehuman freedom. Each epoch is characterised by a particular idea of absolutefreedom that is presented by the philosophical consciousness as eternal. Thecharacter of the material world of that epoch therefore is the representation ofthat infinite idea in finite matter. This meant that ontological dialectics reclaimedtheir speculative character reintroducing questions of intrinsic unity and whole-ness to objects. Epochal change occurs when, guided by pure reason,philosophical consciousness exposes an idea as incomplete and replaces it with amore complete idea which is then posited as eternal. When I say ‘morecomplete’ I mean one that is closer to infinity as it exists in AbsoluteReason/Spirit. This is basically Hegel’s view of the history of philosophy – ateleological progression of consciousness guided by Absolute Reason/Spirit andending when infinite mind is reconciled to that infinite Absolute Reason/Spirit.

Let us look at what Hegel is proposing in more detail. If matter is merelyrepresentations of historically progressing pure reason then it has a definite rela-tionship with pure reason in that it is constantly developing towards unity with it;towards realising itself and Hegel calls this the dialectic of matter. Thus, the rela-tionship between thought and matter is a natural one (Hegel 1969: 129). Realityis conceived as the logical unity of positive and negative in all things; the co-exis-tence in a material object of its character as illusory being as a material object inwhich its true being or essence as pure reason or thought is reflected. As such thismove represented the Hegelian response to the ascending phase of the ancientIonian strand of dialectic (i.e. that there existed a higher reality of objective non-material essences) (Bhaskar 1994: 116). This is how we should understand hisclaim that materiality, although not objective in itself, is nevertheless part of objec-tivity. In our experiences Hegel believed that we therefore could differentiatebetween our fallible ideas of the things we encounter in the world and theiressences which transcend it completely, something which Kant could never allowfor because his unified objects were products of the transcendental subject.

But just as Hegel argued that he could eliminate Kantian subjectivistic deon-tologicising rationalism by making sense-intuition dependent on non-empiricalobjective essences, he also felt he could eliminate the source of Platonic subjec-tivistic deontologicisation – pure matter – by making pure reason dependent onmatter for its self-realisation. This was the Hegelian response to the descending

phase of Ionian dialectics (i.e. how essential objective unities are manifested inthe phenomenal world of alienated (pluralistic) essences) (Bhaskar 1994: 116).


Hegel hoped that by making idealism ‘self-consistent’, in which negative matterwas seen as part of pure reason rather than the latter existing totally separatelyfrom the former, there would be no ‘dualistic or non-rational residues’ (purematter). And so just as Hegel’s response to the ascending phase of dialectic eliminated the Kantian phenomena–noumena duality so his response to thedescending phase eliminated the Platonic matter–being dichotomy. As Bhaskarhas noted:

Hegel … develop(ed) a self-consistent idealism, which, in fusing the finite inthe infinite, would retain no dualistic or non-rational residues, therebyfinally realising and vindicating the primordial postulate of the identity ofbeing and thought in thought … at the same time underpinned by aprogressivist view of history … the speculative understanding of reality asabsolute spirit shows, in response to the problem posed by the … Ionianstrand, how the world exists (and … develops) as a rational totality preciselyso as (infinite) spirit can come to philosophical consciousness in the Hegeliansystem demonstrating this.

(Bhaskar 1994: 117)

Hegel thus thought that Absolute Reason/Spirit reconciled the Ionian strandwith the other major strand of ancient dialectic – Eleatic – by making dialecticthe logical process of reason (Bhaskar 1994: 115). As a result the poles of anti-nomy were also reconciled. The world was not simply what the character of ourexperience said it was by virtue of the non-empirical nature of objects but thisdid not mean that our experience yielded nothing of objectivity.

With all of this Hegel hoped to establish the grounds for genuinely objectiveontology and epistemology. In terms of our discussion in the introduction it wasHegel’s claim to firmly establish the ‘aboutness’ of our experience. I want tostress that this does not mean that Hegel is above reproach on the issue ofsubjectivism, far from it, but his analysis of the weaknesses of the Kantianversion of critique provides us with an important principle – that to be sustain-able, any notion of objectivity must be posited as prevalent outside the ways inwhich we have experiences but that these experiences nonetheless have a role inhelping us to come to an understanding of it. And the logic of Hegel’scontention that what we say is objective varies from different definite forms ofconsciousness means that he believed that objectivity is determined by theconsciousness itself (rather than by transcendentally subjective functions of itwithin the domain of experience) as it developed towards its fullest form inAbsolute Reason/Spirit.

Let me elucidate. Because Hegel’s conception of matter as something nega-tive destroys the confidence we can have that the external objects we experiencereally objectively exist (or what Lucio Colletti (1973: 68) called the sense-certainty in the existence of what is immediately perceptible) the objects of ourexperience become fundamentally unstable. And so it is pointless to try to positanything objective in the domain of experience itself because its function is

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simply to help the mind understand non-empirical/actual essences that residewithin it. Given this, if we, as Kant does, tie objectivity to the transcendentalsubject then we cannot possibly sustain objectivity in any meaningful way. To besure, Hegel recognised that experience must be about understanding objectiveessences that reside in the mind but these essences are not products of the mind’ssynthesising representations of material objects-in-themselves that it experiencesbut are products of (non-empirical) pure reason.

Hegel therefore wants to give consciousness its own criterion of truthmeasurement – pure reason – and so the objectivity of the things about whichour knowledge is becomes disconnected from experience. This is known as Hegel’sphenomenological method (McCarthy 1988: 31). The problem Hegel has with theKantian transcendental consciousness is that by virtue of the transcendentalsubject the object does not reside external to the moment of experience but isextrapolated from it and this is why Hegel dismissed Kantian ontology, as wehave seen, as fundamentally deontologicising. Now we will see in a momentwhen we come to look at Marx that Kant’s principle that through our experi-ences we gain knowledge of objects that have transcendental a priori structures isvery useful to our understanding of how the former’s inversion of Hegelianidealist dialectics establishes a genuinely objective form of materialism. This is sobecause we see that Hegel’s principle that essences are non-empirical/actual isevident in the Marxian idea that the objects of possible sense-perception have apriori transcendental structures that are prevalent independent of experience.And in this way Marx can get the transcendental method of critique out of theKantian subjectivistic trap of deontologicising objectivity. We will see that this isaccomplished by placing transcendental structures in a knowable transcendentalobject rather than subject, thereby transforming transcendental idealism intotranscendental realism.

Before we do I want to point out that the way Hegel commits subjectivisticerrors is more complicated than it might at first seem. Pure reason is not as inde-pendent of experience as we might think. As we shall now see, Hegel cannotadequately resolve Kantian subjectivistic deontologicisation because he musthave recourse to Kantian metaphysical empiricism in order to sustain it.

Hegel’s recourse to Kantian metaphysical empiricism

Bhaskar calls Hegel’s unification of finitude and infinity in a theory of unity-in-diversity spiritual constellational monism. (Bhaskar 1994: 121). The dependence ofthe finite (matter) upon the infinite is known in dialectical terms as the identity of

exclusive categories. But the unity-in-diversity is also dependent on the identificationof these exclusive opposites – what we have already said in our discussion ofHegelian epistemology is the conceptualisation of material by empirical scienceknown as the exclusion of mutual opposites. And we have seen that this is thedescending phase of the Ionian dialectical strand. Thus, Hegel’s central logicalclaim, upon which his entire project of achieving a matter–thought organic unitydepends, is that the identity of exclusive opposites depends upon their exclusion


(Bhaskar 1994: 118–119), what Bhaskar calls the moment of formal logical contra-

diction (Bhaskar 1993: 57).Now Hegel’s dialectic consists of three moments – Understanding (U),

Dialectic (D) and Reason (R). (This process is perhaps more well known as thethesis–antithesis–synthesis triad.) It is illustrated in Figure 11.1. U is the momentof the exclusion of mutual opposites (Humean) and D the moment of formallogical contradiction when we locate contradictions, anomalies or inadequaciesin our experiences (Bhaskar calls this a s transform). We should understand thisin Hegelian terms as the moment when our experience is yet to fulfil its func-tion of organising (and hence reflecting) pure reason’s complete picture of theworld. Finally, R is the transcendence of experience altogether (via whatBhaskar refers to as a t transform) in the positing of essences beyond materialforms (Bhaskar 1994: 119). Hegel correctly contends that Kant’s principal erroris that he must have recourse to the empirical (the development of a meta-physics of experience that is constrained by empiricist ontology) therebycontaining his transcendental epistemology at the Humean moment. And weknow that Hegel breaks from the empirical domain by positing a third level ofspeculative unified essences. This moment leads to what Bhaskar has calledpost-philosophical wisdom (PPW). We should understand this as the momentwhen our experience at last fulfils its function of organising the completepicture of the world produced by pure reason. For Hegel, the end of the processis represented by a return to pre-scientific and pre-empirical-sensate speculativephilosophy of immanence in what Bhaskar calls pre-reflective thought (PRT).(Bhaskar refers to the return to pre-reflective thought as a u transform at PPW.)Once this has been achieved there is a transition to a period of scientific andphilosophical stability at U (via what Bhaskar calls a r transform).

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PRT

PPW

RDUσ τ

ν

PRT = pre-reflective thoughtPPW = post-philosophical wisdom

ρ

Figure 11.1 The logic of Hegel’s dialectic

Source: Bhaskar 1993: 22; 1994: 119.

But Hegel is guilty of his own strictures against Kant in that his realisedidealism cannot progress beyond transcendental subjectivity (what we have saidis Hegel’s phenomenological method). There are two parts to this failure. Thefirst part concerns the rather obvious accusation that we may level at Hegel thatby equating objectivity with pure reason we lose what I have called genuineobjectivity. We can say that this is Hegel’s error in his response to the Eleatic

strand of traditional dialectics (i.e. the idea of dialectic as Reason) (Bhaskar 1993:17; 1994: 116–117). His spiritual constellational monist contention that R isspeculative means that questions of being are reduced to thought because thenatural ultimately conforms to its notion. This is the Hegelian transfiguration ofactuality onto the infinite realm, what we might call the immanentising of transcen-

dent reality (i.e. the finite in the infinite, as we have seen).The less obvious part concerns his realised idealist response to both phases of

Ionian dialectical philosophy (Bhaskar 1993: 17; 1994: 116). In the U–D–Rschema Hegel correctly points out the need for D and R moments but since thetheory of the identity of exclusive opposites depends upon critical science it isultimately dependent upon what is achieved at U because we return to R onlyafter we have completed the process that begins with U. In other words, the studyof the realm of being which can only be undertaken by philosophical thought inaccordance with Hegel’s absolute idealism is premised upon the process ofscientific knowledge acquisition. We said above that Hegel’s dissolution ofPlatonic pure matter hinged upon demonstrating that Absolute Spirit dependedupon finite matter for its self-realisation. This is important because Hegelbelieves that valid scientific laws are based on the empirical-sensate intuition ofpluralities and so he advocates a speculative ontological dialectic that has as itsfundamental condition a Humean moment. That is, Hegel transcendentisesactuality and in so doing eternalises it (Bhaskar 1994: 121–122). As Bhaskarargues, ‘Hegel presents … the process of thinking generally, transformed into anindependent subject (the idea), as the demiurge of the empirical world. …[Hegel’s] thought actually consists in uncritically received empirical data …which is in this way reified and eternalised’ (Bhaskar 1994: 126). Being is thusreduced to the conceptualisation of being starting at the level of experience. Andso Hegel rationally transfers empiricist categories onto the realm that is supposedto transcend those categories. Even with the crucial third moment (R) we areunable to break free from the first Humean moment. Hegel is ultimately relianton the empirical-sensate in very much the same way as Kant. Bhaskar argues, onthe one hand, that the consequence of transcendental subjectivity is that Kantcannot sustain the knowability of the intellect (Bhaskar 1994: 204); how the a

priori presuppositions of critical philosophy can be proven if they are only a func-tion of experience the consequence of which is the reduction of objectivity tothe status of discursivity. But Hegel’s ultimate reliance on the empirical-sensatemeans that transcendental subjectivity is simply transformed into a speculativeform. And so he cannot, despite his claims to the contrary, progress beyondKant. Just as Kant de-ontologicises the world and loses genuine objectivity, so


does Hegel. As Bhaskar contends, Kantian transcendentalism is speculativelytransfigured:

Hegel’s totality is empty of non-actualised essence, as it is of essence notintrinsically related to transcendental subjectivity, indicating his failure totranscend transcendental idealism in respect of science. In effect, Hegel’sconceptual necessity is Kant’s transcendental necessity without Kant’srestricting condition, so that Hegel spiritualistically ontologically trans-substantiates the Kantian phenomenal world, without Kantian discursivity.

(Bhaskar 1993: 339)

I now want to conclude this chapter by discussing how Marx uses invertedforms of Hegelian essences and Kantian transcendentalism to formulate a materialist philosophy of science that can confidently claim to be genuinelyobjectivist.

Towards materialist objectivism – Marxianepistemology and ontology

I want to start by looking at some textual evidence from Marx to support mycase, a lengthy passage from the introduction to the Critique of Political Economy

(1857):

The concrete concept is concrete because it is a synthesis of many defini-tions, thus representing the unity of diverse aspects. It appears therefore inreasoning as a summing-up, a result, and not as the starting-point, althoughit is the real point of origin, and thus also the point of origin of perceptionand imagination. The first procedure attenuates meaningful images toabstract definitions, the second leads from abstract definitions by way ofreasoning to the reproduction of the concrete situation. Hegel accordinglyconceived the illusionary idea that the real world is the result of thinkingwhich causes its own synthesis, its own deepening and its own movement;whereas the method of advancing from the abstract to the concrete is simplythe way in which thinking assimilates the concrete and reproduces it as aconcrete mental category. This is, however, by no means the process ofevolution of the concrete world itself. … Thus to consciousness – and thiscomprises philosophical consciousness – which regards the comprehendingmind as the real man, and hence the comprehended world as such as theonly real world; to consciousness, therefore, the evolution of categoriesappears as the actual process of production – which unfortunately is givenan impulse from outside – whose result is the world; and this (which ishowever again a tautological expression) is true in so far as the concretetotality, as a mental fact, is indeed a product of thinking, of comprehension;but it is by no means a product of the idea which evolves spontaneously andwhose thinking proceeds outside and above perception and imagination, but

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is the result of the assimilation and transformation of perceptions andimages into concepts. The totality as a conceptual entity seen by the intellectis a product of the thinking intellect which assimilates the world in the onlyway open to it. … [Nevertheless] the concrete subject remains outside theintellect and independent of it. … The subject, society, must always beenvisaged therefore as the pre-condition of comprehension even when thetheoretical method is employed.

(Marx 1977a: 206–207)3

We can break the analysis of the passage into three main parts – the Hegelian,Kantian and what I want to call the materialist–realist moments respectively. AHegelian logic is evident when Marx describes the ‘concrete’ as the ‘synthesis ofmany definitions’, ‘a unity of diverse aspects’. What Marx is arguing in thispassage is that in the process of thinking – the conceptualisation of the concrete –the concrete appears as a resultant. This is the Hegelian moment in Marx’sconception of the ‘concrete’ when it is seen as the ‘synthesis of many definitions’,‘a unity of diverse aspects’; a unity of diverse determinations in the consciousnesswhich enables conceptualisations of the concrete and hence truth-claims to arise.These ‘many definitions’ of the concept constitute historico-culturally groundedforms of knowledge based on the Hegelian truism that ‘the concrete totality, as amental fact, is indeed the product of thinking’. We might call this the changingforms that subjective creativity takes. The synthesis of these diverse definitions istherefore the point at which thought, by virtue of this fact that the concrete totalityappears to result from the concept, seems to reformulate its own criteria of truth-measurement thereby transforming the conceptualisation of the concrete. It istherefore the point at which science goes beyond the moment of observation andonto this essential (conceptual) reality (McCarthy 1988: 35). It is the R moment inHegel’s U-D-R triad. Insofar as the concrete is a product of thought it is seen to be apoint of arrival for epistemology, the place where the quest for truth ends becausethought ‘causes its own synthesis, it own deepening and its own movement’ thatresults in the production of the concrete. As such, it is the PPW moment in theU–D–R Hegelian phenomenological schema. This therefore takes the processbeyond the Kantian transcendental one whereby the world of perception is seen assomething produced by the philosophical intellect. This is suggestive of themethod of phenomenological immanent critique in that the consciousness doesnot explain the essence of phenomena, contra Kant, from within the domain ofHumean empiricism, but rather transcends the domain of the empirical alto-gether. This goes contrary to Kant’s idealist contention that the process of theconceptualisation of unified and structured objects is tied to the processes wherebyexperience is appropriated to the understanding. We have seen how this involvesthe Kantian subjectivistic error of restricting the concrete as a mental category tothe domain of the experience of the object. And we know that this isHegelianism’s usefulness in exposing Kantian subjectivistic deontologicisation.

We can therefore see how Hegelian dialectical epistemology overcomes thenormativism necessitated by Kant’s insistence that unified objects are tied to the


domain of experience. Epistemology becomes a fundamentally dialecticalprocess whereby changing forms of mental categories are allowed. Nevertheless,Marx believes that in reality essences only appear to be products of thoughtalone whereas it is actually thought that is produced by the material worldexternal to it. Non-empirical/actual ‘essences’ become material in this account;rather than being products of pure reason they assume a genuinely mind-independent ‘in-themselves’ character. This is the moment of Marx’s inversionof Hegel because the essences of objects that transcend the domains of theempirical and actual lie in materiality. This is an important move by Marxbecause it is evidence of his intention to remove the very thing that, as we haveseen, ultimately ties the Hegelian account of objectivity to experience (therebymaking it subjectivistic), namely its speculative character. Marx establishes thegrounds for genuine objectivity by getting rid of speculative essences that,despite Hegel’s opposite intention, simply bring us back to empiricism.

However, I want to suggest that Marx is only successful in this because heemploys a critical method that involves defining objectivity in transcendentallyrealist terms. In order for Marx’s theory of non-empirical/actual materialessences that are knowable through (but not reducible to) experience to deliver,then the essences he posits must have transcendental a priori structures (i.e., tran-scendental structures that are the condition of possibility of experience). Weknow from our discussion in the introduction that genuinely objective ontologymust involve this type of thinking about the object. And, as we also know,Kantian transcendental critique means positing an ontologically grounded, struc-tured and unified object by virtue of the a priori transcendental subject – theexistence of which is the condition of possibility of experience. But we know thatgrounding what is a priori in the transcendental subject means that the object isdefined in terms of the process whereby we wish to gain knowledge. The factthat Marx wants to ground reality in matter means that his object represents thematerialist transformation of Kantian transcendental structures, because whatmakes it a condition of possibility of experience is not synthetic a priori structuresof the consciousness but real structures of matter. In this way, he dissolves thetranscendental subject and instead makes a priori structures intrinsic-materialcomponents of the thing-in-itself thereby reconstituting it as a knowable object-in-itself and so freeing the objects of sense perception from their dependence onthe processes of human knowledge acquisition. Hence, we have a knowable tran-scendental object. Thus, by positing intrinsic-material a priori structures Marx hasthe means of making the materialist inversion of Hegelian non-empirical/actualessences genuinely independent of speculative reason and, ultimately, the domainof experience.

That Marx’s ontological theory was informed by the transcendental way ofviewing the object can be demonstrated in his use of retroductive techniques.Derek Sayer (1979a, 1979b) argues that something analogous to the method ofKantian transcendental analytic is evident in Marx’s works on political economy.It will be remembered that the transcendental analytic was Kant’s use of tran-scendental subjectivity to define the object as intrinsically tied to the way we gain

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knowledge. Marx, like Kant, worked from phenomenal forms that appeared tohave an objective mind-independent existence to their conditions of possibilityand specifically to their historical conditions of possibility. This is central toSayer’s thesis: ‘It is just such an analytic, I shall argue, which furnishes Marx withthe principles on whose basis he eventually constructs the scientifically adequatehistorical categories’ (Sayer 1979b: 109).

According to Sayer’s analysis, Marx claims that a priori categories – trans-historical categories that all forms of production share – are necessary in orderto identify those characteristics of specific productive forms that define them asunique (Sayer 1979b: 113). That is, without the a priori deduction of certain transhistorical categories it is impossible to identify those features of specificproductive forms that are unique to them. These concepts are thus the a priori

conditions of existence of phenomenal forms analogous in method to the identi-fication of the structures of the mind in Kant’s analysis. The difference is thatMarx’s structures are material and real rather than the result of a cognitivesynthesis, a difference that allows him to posit transhistorical categories as also aposteriori because they could only be identified by studying various modes ofproduction throughout history and drawing comparative conclusions from them.This is a rather big difference between Marx and Kant not least because itundermines the latter’s Copernican Revolution, enough of a difference to ensurethat we could never stretch the analogy far enough to risk classifying Marx as aKantian (Sayer 1979a: 36). But I don’t think that this is enough to deny thatfairly crucial methodological similarities can be found. The importance of a

posteriori analysis is simply the consequence of placing a priori transcendentalstructures in matter rather than in the mind, as I hope to show in a moment and,while this may shatter the foundations of Kant’s Copernican Revolution, it doesnot shatter the logic of his transcendental method.

Let me elucidate. I first of all want to agree with Sayer’s contention thatMarx used a posteriori analysis. To this end it is necessary to demonstrate that thestarting point of Marx’s substantive social scientific investigations must be withphenomenal forms. For example, what all labour-products have in common istheir use-value and is thus said to be the natural form of production in generaland is ‘the necessary condition, independent of all forms of society, for the exis-tence of the human race; it is an eternal nature-imposed necessity, without whichthere can be no material exchanges between man and nature and therefore nolife’ (Marx 1977b: 50). But he only arrives at this generalisation via the study ofthe commodity that is a specific form in capitalist economies and so a priori cat-egories depend upon scientific study. After identifying the phenomenon of thecommodity form Marx can then distinguish its natural ahistorical attributes thatit shares with all forms of labour (its use-value) from those which establish it as adefinite social form (its exchange-value) (Marx 1977b: ch. 1, § 1). It is those characteristics of production in general that allow Marx to identify those charac-teristics of definite social forms which do not accord with them and it is in thisway that he is provided with his epistemically interesting subject matter, thestudy of those characteristics in specific modes of production which define their


status as specific modes (the specific forms of exchange-value) that thus constitutetheir socio-historical forms. It is these modes that constitute Marx’s explananda

and he thus proceeds to identify their conditions of possibility, their explanans.The necessarily a posteriori character of Marx’s method means that transhistoricalcategories cannot be said to have any real existence independent of the partic-ular forms in which they inhere; they are merely attributes of phenomena (Sayer1979b: 79). In the ‘General Introduction’ to the Grundrisse (1857) Marx is clearon the matter:

There are characteristics which all stages of production have in common,and which are established as general ones by the mind; but the so-calledgeneral preconditions of all production are nothing more than theseabstract moments with which no real historical stage of production can begrasped.

(Marx 1974: 88)

And so we can see how Marx’s method depends upon precisely the use of a poste-

riori analysis because it is only by distinguishing ahistorical from definite aspectsof social phenomena that we can proceed to uncover that which is epistemicallyinteresting to us – our explananda – towards explaining their conditions of possi-bility – our explanans. What is striking in all of this is that what Marx seems to bedoing here is trying to identify transhistorical characteristics that are aspects ofmaterial objects without which their historical forms and so our experience ofthem could not arise. It is obvious that in the process of identifying thephenomenological object he is also identifying its material conditions of possi-bility analogous to Kant’s a priori structures of the consciousness. However,because these conditions are intrinsically material their conditions of possibilityof existence are not considered in terms of our experience of them. It is in matterrather than cognition that we find the a priori transcendental structures thatprovide us with the conditions of possibility of our experiencing them. And it isprecisely this material nature that necessitates the a posteriori method. Freeing theobject from its transcendentally subjective dependence on forms of cognitionallows us to posit phenomena such as exchange-values as objectively real in away that meets our criteria of genuine objectivity. And so we have in Marxian aposteriori transcendentalism the revival of the knowable and real (rather thanideal) transcendental object.

Materialist dialectics and the possibilities for human emancipation

I want to finish by drawing some important conclusions from all of this. IfMarx can be said to attribute successfully to non-empirical material objects thecharacter of transcendentally real objects then the a posteriori techniques thatthis necessitates must involve a realist dialectical ontology. An analogy of thisapproach to objective reality can be found in the development of Bhaskar’s

178 Jolyon Agar

transcendentally real object into a dialectical transcendentally real object. As Isaid in the introduction, Bhaskar’s earlier works establish the abstract 1Mconditions of transcendental realist objectivity – natural necessity and transfac-tuality (allowing for referential detachment and alethic truth). His later worksintroduce 2E, 3L and 4D categories and are the spatio-temporal functioning ofthe abstract 1M categories. And so it seems to me that we should see the worksconcerned with establishing the transcendental realist object (Bhaskar 1978)and its implications for social science in terms of critical naturalism (1998) andexplanatory critique (1987) as similar to Marx’s conceptualisation of objectivereality in terms very similar to Hegelian methodology and at least analogous toKantian transcendentalism. But the very fact that Bhaskar’s philosophy of thesciences includes the Hegelian principle of non-empirical objectivity opens thepossibility of developing a dialectical significance to transcendental realismwhich is precisely what he does (Bhaskar 1993, 1994) because we can attributeto non-empirical objective material essences the character of changing spatio-temporalities. In this regard Bhaskar is giving the transcendental object a realistdialectical character, something which Kant never wanted to do. Given hisrejection of pure reason the latter dismissed the method of traditional dialec-tical inquiry and set about in the sections of Critique that came under thegeneral title ‘The Transcendental Dialectic’ to tie dialectics to possible objectsof sense perception only. He regarded speculative dialectics as ‘that part oftranscendental logic which showed the mutually contradictory or antinomicstate into which the intellect fell when not harnessed to the data of experience’(Bhaskar 1994: 116). Conversely, that Marx posits a knowable transcendentalobject means that transcendental philosophy could also involve positing realdialectical material objects. Thus, just as Bhaskar (1993, 1994) arrives at adialectical transcendental material object, so does Marx, and so we arrive at anew way of looking at the latter’s dialectical materialism.

Why this is important to emancipatory social science is because it is preciselydialectics that Bhaskar (1993) refers to as the ‘pulse of freedom’. The centralityof realist dialectics to scientific projects can be demonstrated in the DREI modelof scientific analysis (Bhaskar 1987: 68; Collier 1994: 163). In their search fordescriptions (D) of law-like behaviour scientists retroduce (R) underlying causesfor empirical events and so bring science onto a transcendental level where material causal generative mechanisms analogous in structure to Kant’s tran-scendental subject (but transformed into a transcendental object) are posited.This character of the transcendental object necessitates Elaboration/Elimination(E) and Identification (I), both Hegelian moments. E involves eliminating inade-quate hypotheses and elaborating on accepted ones that rely on the identification(I) of the generative mechanisms that are said to offer explanations of thebehaviour of the phenomenon in question.

Now we see how the Hegelian epistemological dialectic (U–D–R) schema isintroduced. This is because explanations lie at a level beyond the empirical,thereby giving us a dialectical epistemology that is premised upon a genuinelyobjective dialectical ontology; we know that this is the important contribution


that Hegel makes to our account of objective reality and how we gain knowledgeof it. And so the act of referential detachment depends upon the materialistinversion of Hegelian notions of ontological and epistemological dialectics. Withthe materialist transformation of these important Kantian and Hegelian aspectswe arrive at dialectical ontological and epistemological processes that avoid thesubjectivistic errors of these respective philosophies. By grounding theory/prac-tice contradictions that Hegelian methodology introduces in a transcendentalmaterialist–realist dissolution of Kant’s transcendental subject, Marxists canstart talking about taking concrete physical action to remove conditions that theysee as perpetuating human injustice.

By seeing theory/practice inconsistencies (antithesis or D moments) in termsof transcendental realist non-empirical/actual essences, Marxists can starttalking about the existence of genuinely real and objective conditions of injustice.It is in this way that abstract (1M) realist concepts involve concrete (spatio-temporal grounded) (2E) concepts of ontological bi/polyvalence. Rememberthat I said spatio-temporal functioning of 1M categories involves real absencesthereby introducing us to ontological bi/polyvalence. As such, the concepts ofbi/polyvalence function at the Third Level (3L) at which various levels of strati-fied being inter- and intra-act within totalities causing negations; it is thedomain where real absences are created. Bhaskar posits a Fourth Dimension (4D)and it is here that real absences are negated by intentional transformativehuman praxis (e.g. the absenting of unfreedom in capitalism). It is only byvirtue of positing transcendentally real essences that we can start talking aboutconcrete material totalities (3L) and the possibility of (4D) transformativeabsenting (negating) structures that must be responsible for causing empiricaloutcomes in the social and political world.

In short, Hegel’s conception of dialectics provides us with the means ofexposing the ontological monovalence that clearly results from Kant’s suspicionof traditional dialectical philosophy. Despite this, we should be aware thatHegel’s error of conceptualising non-empirical objects in terms of speculativephilosophical reasoning meant that this version of unity-in-diversity was irresolv-ably ontologically monovalent as well because the errors at 1M involve acommitment to the denial at 2E of real transformative absenting processes (andthus detotalisation at 3L and loss of 4D praxis). In other words, the category ofabsence – so crucial to the spatio-temporal functioning of 1M realist categories –is lost and so too is ontological bi/polyvalence. Thus, truth measurement – whatis objectively true independent of our experience of the world – is not internal tothe consciousness but exists independently of it, allowing us to take physicalaction to remedy conditions of existence that do not accord with objective truthand so create new concrete social conditions. These conditions are thensubjected to further scientific dialectical scrutiny in a consequently expandeduniverse of discourse. (Bhaskar 1994: 119; 1993: 22). In all of this we should seethat dialectics become genuinely objective when tied to the Hegelian notion ofnon-empirical essence on the one hand and the transcendentally real object onthe other and I want to suggest that this is exactly what we find with Marx.

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Conclusion

Hopefully I have done enough to prove that there is enough evidence that Marx,even his later works on political economy, employed a comprehensive system ofthought via an inversion of Hegelian and Kantian methodological principles.The logic of Kantian accounts of the a priori structures of the object that wewish to gain knowledge of is instrumental to the exposure of the subjectivisticweaknesses of Hegel’s own account and the logic of Hegelian accounts of theindependence of objectivity from experience to expose subjectivistic weaknessesof Kant’s transcendental subject. Alone, Kant and Hegel both fall foul of idealistsubjectivity, but the logic of Marx’s system shows that together, and materialisti-cally inverted, their methodologies are essential to genuinely objective ontologyand epistemology.

Notes

1 I am aware that there is some controversy regarding the correct definition of Kant’s‘transcendental object’. Broad contends that the classification of it that I have usedbelongs to the ‘very early stages of Kant’s critical thinking’ according to which thetranscendental object was ‘the unknown cause which produces phenomena’ (Broad1978: 226). But for our present purposes the definition of it provided by Robert Sternis as good as any and so I have retained it.

2 Andrew Collier has shown that the stratified nature of being necessitates horizontalexplanation in science – the interaction of causally efficacious levels of being inoutcomes – and that emergence (e.g. that of sociological from psychological) neces-sitates studying the real causal powers of each level at an abstract level (Collier1989: 60).

3 In the Grundrisse, the passage is repeated almost word for word (Marx 1974:101).

Bibliography

Bhaskar, R. (1978) A Realist Theory of Science, Brighton: Harvester.—— (1987) Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation, London: Verso.—— (1993) Dialectic – The Pulse of Freedom, London: Verso.—— (1994) Plato Etc. – The Problems of Philosophy and Their Resolution, London: Verso.—— (1998) The Possibility of Naturalism – A Philosophical Critique of the Contemporary Human

Sciences, London: Routledge.Broad, C.D. (1978) Kant – An Introduction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Colletti, L. (1973) Marxism and Hegel, London: New Left Books.Collier, A. (1989) Scientific Realism and Socialist Thought, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester

Wheatsheaf.—— (1994) Critical Realism – An Introduction to Roy Bhaskar’s Philosophy, London: Verso.—— (1998) ‘The Power of Negative Thinking’ in Archer, M. et al (1998) Critical Realism:

Essential Readings, London: Routledge.—— (2003) In Defence of Objectivity and Other Essays: On Realism, Existentialism and Politics,

London: Routledge.Hegel, G.W.F. (1969) Science of Logic, trans. A.V. Miller, London: Allen and Unwin.—— (1977) The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J.B. Baillie, New York: Humanities Press.Hume, D. (1978) A Treatise on Human Nature, ed. L.A. Selby-Bigg, revised and notes by P.H.

Nidditch, Oxford: Oxford University Press.


Kant, I. (1998) Critique of Pure Reason, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Locke, J. (1975) An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. P.H. Nidditch, Oxford:

Oxford University Press.Marx, K. (1974) Grundrisse – Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, Harmondsworth:

Penguin.—— (1977a) A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Moscow: Progress Publishers.—— (1977b) Capital: A Critique of Political Economy – Volume I, London: Lawrence and

Wishart.McCarthy, G. (1988) Marx’s Critique Of Science and Positivism: The Methodological Foundations of

Political Economy, Dordrecht: Kluwer.Sayer, D. (1979a) ‘Science as Critique: Marx vs. Althusser’, in J. Mepham and D.-H.

Rubin (eds), Issues in Marxist Philosophy: Volume 3 – Epistemology, Science, Ideology, Brighton:Harvester.

—— (1979b) Marx’s Method: Ideology, Science and Critique in Capital, Brighton: Harvester.Stern, R. (1996) Hegel, Kant and the Structure of the Object, London: Routledge.

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This paper offers alternatives to orthodox interpretations of Marx in severalareas. Mainstream Marxist theory reads concepts such as value, and sociallynecessary labour time, largely in a technical sense. But all such categories shouldbe explicated within an account of the specifically capitalist social form of produc-tion and exchange. I will show that, in the capital-relation, labour and value arenot to be positively identified with each other, but rather are dialectically inter-penetrating opposites; the capital-relation is constituted as a contradiction in essence.This theoretical diagnosis of the contradictions of capitalism leads ineluctably tothe objective necessity for its overthrow.

The object of Capital1

I hold that from the start the object of Marx’s Capital is the capitalist economy. Thismeans that the circulation of commodities discussed in the early chapters is intruth the circulation of capitalistically produced commodities. Their value, and therelevant determinations of labour, are concretely constituted only in the capital rela-tion. But it has to be acknowledged that the early chapters of Capital do not evenmention wage-labourers, capitalists and the like. Why not? The orthodox under-standing of Marx’s method explains this by arguing that he presents his theorythrough a sequence of models, that a model of ‘simple commodity production’allows him to give a complete account of the law of value, and that the subse-quent introduction of a model of capitalism allows him to demonstrate theorigin of surplus-value through the specific inflection capital gives to this law ofvalue. In opposition to this reading, the position taken here is that the order ofMarx’s presentation is not that of a sequence of models of more and morecomplex objects. It is that of a progressive development of the forms of the same object,namely capitalism, from a highly abstract initial concept of it to more and moreconcrete levels of its comprehension.

I shall not enter on a discussion of the historicity of ‘simple commodityproduction’; for there is a prior more interesting question from a theoreticalpoint of view: does the model work conceptually? In such a case exchange at‘value’ is supposed to take place because otherwise people would switch into thebetter rewarded occupation. It should be noted that this presupposes that

12 The contradictions of capital

Christopher J. Arthur

everyone knows what labour is expended by others; this is a very doubtfulproposition historically. However, even if it is accepted as an idealising assump-tion it is still true that we have nothing like an objective law operative. For theassumption is here that the only consideration affecting the choices of individ-uals is avoidance of ‘toil and trouble’, as Adam Smith originally argued; equalquantities of labour are always ‘of equal value to the labourer’, he claimed.This subjective hypothesis has little to do with Marx’s argument that there existsin capitalism an objective law of value which makes exchange at value necessary. Ifone relies on a merely subjective judgement of producers, then other subjectiveconsiderations to do with the trouble of learning new methods, or the prefer-ence for one occupation rather than another, may be operative also. Even ifSmith’s fishermen noticed their working day was longer than that of thehunters with which they exchanged, they might simply prefer life on the river tothe darkness of the forest.

Why should there be any tendency to establish a socially necessary labourtime? It is only in modern industry that competition within a branch, and themobility of capital between branches, brings about the development of acommon measure. Only in capitalist industry are tea-breaks timed to thesecond, and abolished entirely if possible. The heart of the matter is not anideal type of rational economic man read back into the natural state, but theobjective rationality of the system of capitalist competition. There is a starkcontrast between the peasant saying ‘Time costs nothing’ and the capitalistmotto ‘Time is money’.

Just because there is exchange of goods produced, this does not mean any lawof value governs the ratio of exchange. Price in a pre-capitalist case would besimply a formal mediation, allowing exchange to take place but without any deter-

minate value substance being present. According to Marx the law of value is basedon exchange in accordance with socially necessary labour times, but in the caseof simple commodity production there is no mechanism that would force a givenproducer to meet such a target or be driven out of business. When all inputs,including labour power itself, have a value form, and production is subordinatedto valorisation, then an objective comparison of rates of return on capital ispossible and competition between capitals allows for the necessary enforcementof the law of value. ‘If the value of commodities is determined by the necessarylabour-time contained in them’, said Marx in Volume 3 (1981: 180), ‘it is capitalthat first makes a reality of this mode of determination and continually reducesthe labour socially necessary for the production of a commodity.’

If ‘simple commodity production’ is not what chapter 1 of Capital is about,what then is going on there? Marx is dealing with ‘simple’ forms to be sure; butthe abstract moment of the whole system analysed is that of simple circulation,commodities being taken as given. Only after developing the categories of circu-lation is it appropriate to turn to the relations of production that underpinexchange relations apparent in simple circulation. The key transition in Capital isnot from simple commodity production to capitalist production, but from the‘sphere of simple circulation or the exchange of commodities’ to ‘the hidden

184 Christopher J. Arthur

abode of production’.2 Once this turn is taken, circulation is grasped as thesphere in which production relations are reflected.

But, to begin with, circulation is not comprehended as thus mediated. HenceMarx started with commodity value as such; not because value pre-existedcapital, but because ‘value … is the most abstract expression of capital … and of theproduction resting on it’ (Marx 1973: 776). However, just because it is thusabstracted from the capitalist totality, no finished definition of value can be givenat the start; for it is to be understood only in its forms of development. Value,therefore, is concretely determined only when the commodity is grasped as aproduct of capital. Moreover if ‘labour’ itself is situated in the capital relationthen interesting consequences follow for the status of the category that are onlyimplicit in chapter 1. This will be the theme of the rest of this paper.

The thesis that ‘labour is value’3 is refuted

I presuppose here, then, that genuine values result only from capitalist commodityproduction, but not from a supposed ‘simple commodity production’. That is thecontext of this4 and subsequent arguments.

As we know, Marx insists that the secret of valorisation in production lies inthe distinction between what is bought or hired, namely labour-power, and living

labour, the use of labour-power employed during production. But of course thedistinction between the value, and the use, of commodities is a general feature ofthem. It is possible, for example, to distinguish between the cost of machineryand ‘machining’, the more so with automatic machinery. Why is ‘labouring’different from ‘machining’? With a standard commodity (such as a machine) itsvalue is set by its conditions of production, its use-value is a known quantity,and the use made of it is of no concern to the seller. But labour is not a stan-dard commodity because it fails on all three counts. The wage is set throughclass struggle in the context of the historically given level of ‘subsistence’. Thecontract of employment does not guarantee in advance any specific supply ofservice. On the contrary this too is the outcome of class struggle at the point ofproduction; and, finally, so far from its employment being of no concern to theseller, the inseparability of the labourers from their labour-power means it is ofvery great importance to them. In these three ways, then, wage-labour is pecu-liar, and labour power is very different from a standard commodity. Therefore,with wage-labour we have not merely labour-power as a use-value, but we havea use-value which is itself inherently at odds with its social determination as a toolof capital.

In its endeavour to organise production, and to maximise output, capital findsthat the ‘subjectivity’ of the worker poses unique problems because it gives riseto a definite recalcitrance to being ‘exploited’ which the other factors do notpossess. The other ‘factors’ of production, land, machinery, materials, enter withtheir productive potential given, known in advance; only with labour is produc-tivity contestable and contested, known only in the upshot of the working day.Capital is limited by the extent to which it can enforce the ‘pumping out’ of

The contradictions of capital 185

labour services. The consequence of this special feature of labour is that therelation of capital and labour is intrinsically antagonistic. On this basis there isreason to speak of waged labour not so much as ‘productive labour’ but as ‘counter-

productive labour’ in that the workers are actually or potentially recalcitrant tocapital’s effort to compel them to labour. In the early chapters of Capital it is not yetclear to what exactly ‘socially necessary labour time’ refers. Lacking any otherinformation one takes it in a technical sense; but once this labour time is set inthe context of the capital relation it has to be seen as primarily the necessitycapital is under to extort labour from the exploited, something which is informedby the balance of class forces. In this way the full implications of its ‘social’determination are brought out. So, whereas at the start of Capital it is assumedthere is no problem about objectified labour appearing as value, we now discoverthat this is consequent only on the success (partial and always contested) of thestruggle to subsume labour under capital. Value is then implicitly a political

category, its magnitude being conditioned by class struggle.This has consequences for the conceptualisation of the relation of value and

labour. Any theory that conflates labour and value is bound to consider their rela-tion in an entirely positive light; the activity of labouring is immediately identifiedwith a value stream. The critique of capital then has to take the form of acomplaint that, while there is a reflux of value to the labourers under the wage-form, capital diverts part of the stream to its reservoir of accumulated value.Exploitation consists in expropriating this value. But, on my view, expropriatedlabour is the real content of value; it is under the value form that the specifically capitalist exploitation of labour occurs; value is constituted through capitalsubordinating living labour to itself.

In Capital Marx (1976: 142) says that ‘labour is not itself value’; although‘labour creates value’ it ‘becomes value’ only in ‘objective form’ when the labourembodied in one commodity is equated with the labour embodied in anothercommodity. ‘Only as objectified labour is it value’ (Marx 1988–1994: vol. 34, p.91). But it is not simply a question of appearing in objectified form. Under capi-talist conditions this objectification is at the same time alienation. As Marx (1973:638) says, value ‘is the product of alien labour, the alienated product of labour’.Alienated labour produces for capital; and thus its product is not to be seenunproblematically as the expression of living labour. New value is the successfulreification of living labour. This is why, for a theory grounded on the social form ofthe economy, ‘labour’ can be correlated with value only in a contradictory way.

The distinction in Marx’s Capital between the living labour employed, and itsrepresentation as ‘dead labour’ in the value of the product, is put, even morestrikingly, in Marx’s Grundrisse where labour is defined as ‘not-value’, that whichstands opposed to value but on which valorisation depends.5 Value is not thesocial recognition of labour’s success at producing a good, but of capital’ssuccess in producing a commodity through alienating labour to itself.

Marx spells out the contradictory movement of labour into value when hewrites in the 1861–1863 manuscript: ‘This process of the realisation of labour isat the same time the process of its de-realisation. It posits itself objectively, but it


posits its objectivity as its own non-being, or as the being of its non-being – thebeing of capital.’6 By contrast with the orthodox tradition, which sees labour assomething positive, issuing in something positive, namely value, then expropri-ated, we find that behind the positivity of value lies a dialectic of negativity.

Contrary to Marx, the thesis that labour is the‘creator’ of value is refuted

We have seen that in Capital itself Marx said that ‘labour is not itself value’. Buthe does allow that ‘labour creates value’. However, there is a tension implicit inMarx’s theory of valorisation. He says two things: that labour is the creativesource of surplus-value, and that capital is self-valorising value. It is hard to knowwhat ‘self-valorisation’ can mean other than that value as capital creates surplus-value, which flatly contradicts the thesis that labour creates value. That livinglabour is the source of new value is something I find convincing. But I dissentfrom the claim that labour is the creative source of value. I suggest this phraseshould be disaggregated: ‘source’ and ‘creator’ are two different things.

To create surplus-value is to produce capital by means of capital.7 To be thesource of new value is to be that out of which capital creates value. It is thematerial dependence of the valorisation process on the labour process whichgrounds the claim that living labour is the source of surplus-value. But sourceand creator should not be conflated. The source of the tree’s growth is the soiland solar energy; but does the soil ‘create’ the tree? That would be a strangeway of talking. It is surely a matter of an immanent force in the tree itselfthat impels it to seize upon sources of nutrients so as to grow. Anotherexample: a waterfall is the source of the power generated by hydroelectricity;but it does not ‘create’ the electricity. That is the achievement of thedynamos. Water always had this capacity, it might be said, but only whenharnessed and exploited in a particular way is it the power source for thegeneration of electricity by the machinery. In the same way capital harnessesand exploits living labour so as to create value from this source of energy. Ifliving labour is the source of capital accumulation, this still leaves capital’sdynamic as the creative principle.

Of course it would be fair to argue that labour creates use-values. It creates –not value – but what has value. But that the surplus product is determined assurplus-value, and is indeed produced in the first place for that very reason, isnot a result of living labour and its aims, but of alienated labour, of labour directedby the requirements of capital’s drive for accumulation. Again it may be properto argue that value is nothing but reified, ‘abstract’ labour, but such a claim thatlabour is the ‘stuff ’ of value, so to speak, does not prove that it created it, anymore than the marble created the statue.

If this is so it cannot be living labour as such that originates value but waged

labour, i.e. alienated labour which is reified in value. This is because what createsvalue is not the ahistorical labour process but that only under the rule of capital,whereby capital produces value out of its exploitation of labour.


The orthodox interpretation of exploitation, and ‘the surplus approach’ of theneo-Sraffians, have in common an account of exploitation in the context of astruggle over the distribution of the surplus, however measured, ‘after the harvest’so to speak. My argument is that the struggle over exploitation is primarilylocated in production. It is capital which ‘creates’ value and surplus-value; but itdoes so only through the unremitting ‘pumping out’ of labour servicesthroughout the working day. When capital succeeds in really subsuming produc-tion under the imperative of valorisation it appears as the creator of value andsurplus-value.

Capital accumulation realises itself only by negating that which resists thevalorisation process, labour as ‘not-value’. In short, capital is self-valorising value,while labour is negatively posited as its sublated foundation.

Capitalism is characterised by a ‘contradiction in essence’

I introduce the topic of this section with a passage in which Marx is glossing theviews of the socialist Ricardians. He wrote:

Ricardo’s phrase ‘labour or capital’ reveals in a most striking fashion boththe contradiction inherent in the terms and the naivety with which theyare stated to be identical. … It was natural for those thinkers who ralliedto the side of the proletariat to seize on this contradiction. … Labour isthe sole source of exchange-value and the only active creator of use-value.This is what you [economists] say. On the other hand, you say that capital

is everything, and the worker is nothing or a mere production cost ofcapital. You have refuted yourselves. Capital is nothing but defrauding ofthe worker. Labour is everything. … Just as little as [Ricardo] understands theidentity of capital and labour in his own system, do they understand thecontradiction they describe.

(Marx 1988–1994: vol. 34, pp. 393–394)

It is possible to seize on the phrase ‘Labour is everything’ and treat it as Marx’sown;8 but it is clear Marx here speaks for the socialist Ricardians; it does notfollow that he endorses it. In truth he does not; he regards this claim as equallyone-sided as that of the bourgeois theorists who think capital is everything.Neither side has understood that there is an objective contradiction here; both

claims are true, and neither makes sense on its own.By constituting labour as wage-labour, capital constitutes itself and embarks on

its inherent dynamic of accumulation. This cannot be explained on the basisthat ‘labour is everything’. Successfully subsuming living labour, and consistentlyreproducing the capital relation, capital has a fair claim to assert ‘I am every-thing’. That labour-power has to be reconstituted in a non-capitalist domesticsphere it can dismiss as a secondary derivative function, to be treated as a blackbox in the circulation of commodities. To argue that ‘Everything is labour:


capital is nothing but labour’ (Dussel 2001: 196) gives inadequate attention to theconcept of capital.

Capital seizes living labour under the wage-labour form and reifies it in thevalue of commodities. In value ‘dead’ labour is the opposite of ‘living labour’.Albeit that capital is ‘nothing but’ dead labour, it has become autonomous. Marx(1988–1994: vol. 33, p. 144) says ‘Capital shows itself more and more as a social power … an alienated social power which has become independent, andconfronts society as a thing’. This objective social power of capital ‘Hodgkinregards … as a pure subjective illusion which conceals the deceit and the inter-ests of the exploiting classes. He does not see that the way of looking at thingsarises out of the actual relationship’ (1988–1994: vol. 32, p. 429).

The capital relation is a contradictory unity. Any attempt to remove the contra-diction ideologically by claiming ‘all is capital’ or ‘all is labour’ will find such areductionist programme impossible to carry through coherently. Labour’s alienation and capital’s self-constitution are inseparable. It is of the highestimportance to understand that the contradiction in the capital relation is notbetween capitalist and labourer (that is merely a conflict). The inner contradiction

arises because both ‘capital’ and ‘labour’ have claims to constitute the whole oftheir relation; hence ‘capital is nothing but (alienated) labour’ and ‘labournothing but (variable) capital’. It is often said that productive labour is theessence lying behind the appearances of value interchanges and capital accumu-lation. However the many passages9 in which Marx assigns productive power tocapital could well lead in a contrary direction: that capital is the real subject ofproduction. As Marx (1973: 305) said, labour appears then as ‘the mediatingactivity’ by means of which capital valorises itself. In sum the second view is aninversion of the first. Both views are in truth correct, although contradictory.What this means is that capitalism is characterised by a contradiction in essence.


Capital’s identity with its ‘other’

Labour’s identity with its ‘other’

C L

variable constant

capital capital

living ‘dead’

labour labour

Figure 12.1 Contradiction of capital and labour

Each side claims to constitute the whole of their relation, reducing what is notidentical with itself to its own other. At first sight the capital–labour relationappears as a two-place one, but each tries to represent the other as a difference

within itself. Capital divides itself into constant and variable components; and itclaims to absorb labour to itself in the shape of variable capital; for it nowpossesses that labour. Hence it understands the relation as a relation to itself. Onthe other side, living labour claims that capital is nothing but dead labour. It, too,understands the relation as a relation to itself (see Figure 12.1).But in reality these contradictory positings run into each other, such that theaffirmation of the essence (whichever one) leads to its appearance in the modeof denial. Thus labour’s objectification coincides with its expropriation, itspositing as a moment of capital; while capital’s subjectification appears as itsutter dependence, not only on its personifications such as owners andmanagers, but on the activity of living labour. Each by being incorporated inits other becomes other than itself. Thus living labour is other than capital, butwhen subsumed under capital it is at the same time other than itself, alienated

labour. The same thing happens to capital when it descends from the self-referring ideality of the forms of value to struggle with the materiality ofproduction. But of course this process of mutual othering is not balanced. Thestruggle for dominance is won by capital which successfully returns from thesphere of production with surplus-value, while living labour returns from thefactory exhausted and deprived of its own product. Realisation of capital is de-realisation for the worker.

As a result of labour’s alienation, and of its subsumption under capital, theobjectivity of value-positing becomes autonomous, and reflects back on thelabour process as its ‘truth’. At the very same time as being still in some sensenothing but the objective social expression of labour, value achieves domi-nance over labour; labour is reduced to a resource for capital accumulation.This contradiction in essence is a result of the fact that the whole relation ofproduction is inverted, that is the producers are dominated by their product (asvalue, capital) to the extent that they are reduced to servants of a productionprocess originated and directed by capital. Capital as value in motion is notdistinct from matter in motion shifted by labour; labour acts as capital, notjust at its behest. Marx (1973: 297) says: ‘Labour is not only the use-valuewhich confronts capital, it is the use-value of capital itself.’ This labour isabsorbed by productive capital and acts as ‘a moment of capital’, he claims(Marx 1973: 364). All the productive powers of labour appear as those ofcapital. Marx thinks capital is productive in the sense that, through its‘personifications’ the owners and managers, it both organises production andenforces exploitation.10

On the other hand capital is able to produce only because it can rely on its‘agent’, the working class, whose social productive powers are ‘displaced’ and‘transposed’ to capital (Marx 1973: 308–309). The category of value is rootedprecisely in capital’s struggle with labour to accomplish this ‘transfer’ of itsproductive powers.


Since the workers are ‘possessed’ by capital and the material labour process issimultaneously a valorisation process, the same thing has two frames of refer-ence. But this is not merely a matter of different ways of talking, or of theco-existence of alternative realities, it is also a matter of determination, of one sideinforming the other with its own purposes. Capital determines the organisationof production; but the character of labour, natural resources and machinerylimit it in this endeavour. Although capital is hegemonic in this respect (Marx1973: 693), its subsumption of labour can never be perfected; labour is always‘in and against’ capital. Albeit that the production process is really subsumed bycapital, the problem for capital is that it needs the agency of labour. Even if theproductive power of labour is absorbed into that of capital to all intents, it isnecessary to bear in mind that capital still depends upon it.

Now let us try to explain more precisely in what ways both capital and labourmay claim to be ‘everything’. To be ‘everything’ implies that all relevant pre-

suppositions must be posited as results.First, capital – to posit its presuppositions it does three things.

(a) It itself produces all its presuppositions arising in commodity circulation, i.e.means of production and subsistence goods for workers.

(b) It thoroughly subordinates to the value form those presuppositions, namelyland and labour-power, which it cannot itself produce. This is achieved forland in the form of modern landed property available for rent. It is achievedfor labour-power in so far as it takes the wage-form because it is separatedfrom its conditions of realisation, and hence must sell itself on the market inorder to have the money to purchase subsistence goods from capital.

(c) It really subsumes living labour to the dictates of the machinery of produc-tion such that it acts as capital wishes.

In sum, one set of presuppositions are immediately produced by capital, whilethe latter two are posited by capital through the mediation, respectively, of thevalue-form and of the factory system.

Second, labour – it claims to be everything in so far as it posits the presuppo-sitions of its own estrangement; thus it

(a) produces its own wages;(b) reproduces constant capital including the factory itself; and hence(c) reproduces the capital relation.

As Marx says: ‘All moments which confronted living labour capacity as alien,

external powers, employing it under certain conditions independent of it, are now positedas its own product and result.’11 In sum it exists as wage labour and remainscondemned to this fate because it reproduces in its (self-alienating) activity thecapital relation, through submitting to its exploitation.

The conclusion is that in a sense capital totalises and reproduces all itspresuppositions, while in another sense this totality is itself the result of thealienation of labour.


Much criticism of Marx (e.g. from the neo-Sraffians) is from the standpointof the always already constituted reified system, ignoring how living labourbecomes subsumed in it. But the entire sphere of the value-forms totalised ascapital posits itself only in negating that which is other than capital: centrally,living labour. The result is a contradiction in essence, which develops from themore basic contradiction between value and use-value, extremes whosedialectic achieves ever more concrete mediatedness without ever reaching afinal resolution.

Thus already in 1844 Marx (1975: 345) draws this conclusion: ‘Labour, thesubjective essence of private property as exclusion of property, and capital,objective labour as exclusion of labour, constitute private property in its devel-oped relation of contradiction: a dynamic relationship, therefore, drivingtowards resolution.’

On the transformation problem

Characterising capitalism as a ‘contradiction in essence’ throws fresh light on thetransformation problem. In the ideality of its form capital declares itself to be thesource of its own profit; all use-values it must seize upon in production, so as togenerate this profit, count simply as unresisting bearers of the capital circuit.However, although the capital circuit seems merely a more complex shape ofsimple circulation, the phase of production-capital involves essential reference toa use-value of a peculiar kind; it is the material potential for labour to producemore than it consumes which grounds the possibility of a surplus.

Marx stresses that use-value questions are here of central importance to histheory:

For money as capital, labour capacity is the immediate use-value for which ithas to exchange itself. In simple circulation, the content of the use-value wasa matter of indifference, dropped out of the form of economic determina-tion. Here it is the essential economic moment.

(Marx 1987: 504)

The capital relation is a peculiar combination of formal commodity exchangeand material exploitation. Value measures capital’s success in this battle to appropriate labour to itself and as a first approximation each capital would berewarded accordingly. Then a different relation supervenes, that between capitalsthemselves, so it is necessary to elaborate further categories to conceptualise this;but the fundamental relation is between capital and that which is its other and hasto be subdued by it. It is through this relation to labour that capital constitutes

itself as self-valorising value and it is therefore logically prior to any analysis ofrelations between capitals.

But, as we have seen, capital claims to constitute the whole of this productionrelation. In so doing the true source of profit is abstracted out, and capital as such

counts as fruitful. Hence all capitals demand a proportionate share in the social


surplus. In so far as a uniform rate of profit obtains, which rewards all capitalsequally, including those of even the most parasitic sectors, then important ma-terial differences are abstracted from, centrally the key role played by industrialcapitals producing surplus-value ‘at the coal face’ so to speak. Material differ-ences in this respect (including different compositions of capital) are ignored bycapital-in-general in the formalism of its universal recognition of all sums ofcapital as equally worthy.

The notorious ‘transformation problem’ is not primarily the site of an issue intheory. Rather than being a technical issue on the way to the determination ofprices, it springs from an objective hiatus in the ontology of capital, the placewhere the ideal form of self-positing value collides with the material content ofthe capital relation. Hence the need to disguise value in production price. Marxwrites:

In the capital-relation what is characteristic is the mystification, theupside-down world, the inversion of the subjective and the objective. …Corresponding to the inverted relation, there necessarily arises, already in

the actual production process itself, an inverted conception.(1988–1994: vol. 33, p. 72)

Because of the inversion inherent to it, capital is unable to take the measure ofits own ground. It becomes literally deranged, and exists in a state of denial.This hiatus is inherent to capital itself, in that its own logic cannot grasp its origin.Capital in its own self-absorption is too locked up in the value form to graspthat it is not self-constituted but rests on expropriating the energies of labourand nature.

Capital without contradictions?

Because capitalism is marked by a contradiction in essence, capital (= value-for-itself ) and labour (= use-value-for-itself ) are locked in a continual struggle tonegate each other. But in Capital the relationship concerned is termed the capital

relation. This marks the objective fact that in the bourgeois epoch the ‘principalfactor’ in the relationship is capital. At present capital is winning the battle forself-assertion. It is the dialectic of capital itself which brings every aspect of theproduction process under its sway, proletarianises the working population, andaccumulates wealth through exploiting them. (The same relationship consideredfrom the opposite standpoint would be the relationship of waged labour, alien-ated labour.) If the basic separation of the worker from the object of labour islogically and historically the presupposition of capitalism, it is then posited as theconsequence of the movement of capital itself.

When capital takes possession of the material world of production it attemptsto subsume within its own structures all otherness, including living labour andnatural forces. Its success is shown in its developing wealth and power. In situ-ating all otherness merely as a moment of its own reality, capital posits itself as a


self-identical totality. But capital achieves this only through a continual struggleto overcome its opposite.

So far I have assumed that the capital relation is structured by the internalopposition between the value form and living labour. It is interesting to considerwhat difference would obtain if there were no such opposition. This could bepostulated on two grounds: either if workers passively obeyed capital, or if theywere replaced by robots; even if the first case is empirically unlikely, it has beenargued by Tom Sekine that it must be temporarily assumed for methodologicalreasons so as to generate a concept of ‘pure capitalism’.

In my opinion, in such cases the value form could not be interpreted on thebasis of a labour theory of value. Labour as a resource would have nothingspecial to distinguish it from waterfalls or machines; it has been shown that on amaterial basis it is possible to calculate the rate of ‘exploitation’ of steel and soon; labour has a special role in production only as a social reality. What thenwould be the content of capital? It would be its own content; instead of labour-time, the relevant determinant would be the time for which capital is locked upin production. The distinction between variable capital and constant capitalwould have no meaning, hence nor would organic composition of capital.Accordingly value would collapse into production price; without any ‘detour’through ‘labour-value’ capital would become the Sraffian utopia of ‘productionof commodities by means of commodities’, or, better, production of capital bymeans of capital. In the terms we have used capital would really appear as aself-relation.

However this appearance would still be deceptive because capital has two

‘others’ which it cannot reduce to itself: the proletariat I call its ‘internal other’,Nature the ‘external other’. Nature (including now labour as a natural resource)is posited by capital as ‘raw material’ to be formed into valuable commodities;but capital’s accounting system cannot register Nature’s inherent dimensions, e.g.the finitude of all resources; hence in the long run capital will destroy its ownmaterial basis.

Whether such a capitalism should still be ‘capitalism’ is a matter of definition;if capital is defined as command over labour it would not; if capital is defined asa monetary form of investing in means of production with a view to maximisingreturns, it would.

Fetishism and ideology

Throughout this paper I continually refer to ‘capital’ acting and making claims.In face of the objection that only human beings act (albeit within the structure ofcapital), and only ideologists make claims on behalf of the capitalist system, Iremain unrepentant.

The value forms commodity, money, capital, carry with them the fetishisationof material things; these things are attributed powers (acting, claiming) properlyattributable only to human beings. Fetishism may be ‘improper’ but it is objectively

present; Marx (1976: 169) himself emphasised that the fetishistic categories have


objective validity and are not dispelled by his critique. Social relations ‘appear aswhat they are’ (N.B.), ‘as thing-like [sachliche] relations between persons andsocial relations between things [Sachen]’.12

In taking capital to be an agent I rely on two key characteristics, first that it isstructured teleologically in that its movement has an aim (a monetary incre-ment); second, like humans, it applies a universal form (value) to instances(production and circulation of commodities). It acts without consciousness orsubjectivity but it acquires this through colonising the consciousness of its‘personification’ (Marx), the capitalist. To speak of the capitalist in this way is notto employ an ideal type for methodological reasons; rather it is the power ofcapitalist competition that purifies the type (the more so when the corporation asa legal person has the sole purpose of profit).

The human individual is not the subject originating value relationships. Humanactivities are objectively inscribed within the value form. The law of value isimposed on people through the effectivity of a system at the heart of which liescapital, which subordinates commodity production to the aim of valorisation,and is the real subject (identified as such by Marx (1976: 255)) confronting us.Capital is a self-positing alienated social power, not a resource to be used by itsowners as they please.

In what sense is it possible to attribute ‘claims’ to truth by capital? Are not allapologetics for capital merely ideological, and in any case false? Some are, butnot all. In so far as the contradiction in essence obtains, then objective realitypresents two faces, which allows for two different ‘truths’ to be ‘read off ’ corre-spondingly. These are contradictory ‘claims’ because they are implied by twoopposed social standpoints rooted in forms essential to reality.

Be that as it may, I think it is certainly possible to distinguish between notionsthat are ‘of the essence’ and what are cast as ‘shadow forms’ (a term I take fromPatrick Murray). That value is inherent to a commodity is objectively true, evenif fetishistic; likewise that money is a social power is objectively true, even if astill more accomplished fetish. These notions are directly inscribed in socialconsciousness; there is a ‘spontaneous ideology’ secreted by these forms as theirnecessary correlate if social reproduction is to continue.

I distinguish such forms of thought corresponding to objective structures frommere ideology, which arises from shadows cast by social forms. The paradigmcase of a shadow form is ‘utility’ in the philosophical sense. This absurd categoryarises in the following way. A person enters a supermarket with £100 and isfaced with the fact that many different baskets of goods can be bought with itand, furthermore, in at least two cases the person is unable to exercise any pref-erence for one over the other. Now if that person is a philosopher they mayspeculate that this means there is an identity in the goods themselves, or in thesatisfaction they give, and term it ‘utility’. This metaphysical hypostasis does nothave any correspondence with reality; ordinary people reject it; and studentsmay be disabused of it through persuasive argument. It is a mere shadow. Onthe other hand, that these baskets are identical as values is a reality, an objectivesocial hypostasis. Thus we can only agree with Marx when he writes that:


The apparent stupidity of merging all the manifold relationships of peoplein the one relation of usefulness, this apparently metaphysical abstractionarises from the fact that, in modern bourgeois society, all relations are subor-dinated in practice to the one abstract monetary-commercial relation.

(1976: 409)

It might be thought that I am objecting to abstraction as such, but I am not.The question is of the type of abstraction. Utility is an abstraction acrossdesire for goods, value is an abstraction across commodities; the former is(supposedly) carried out in the head of the shopper (or, worse, a calculation theywould make if they were rational); the latter is carried out in practice in exchangeand becomes crystallised in money, and teleologically active as capital. Capitalcolonises the subjectivity of the agents, and its action is the explanation of, notwhat has to be explained by, ‘utility’. ‘Utility’ is the subjective reflection of thelevelling effect of the value form; but is then read back into a theory of humannature by the ideologist so as to provide a premise for exchange. Marx (1976:410) says: ‘The category of “utilisation” is first of all abstracted from actualrelations … and then these relations are made out to be the reality of the cate-gory that has been abstracted from them themselves, a wholly metaphysicalmethod of procedure.’

The ‘felicific calculus’ (Bentham) of books like F. Y. Edgworth’s wonderfullytitled Mathematical Psychics (1881), which looks like absolute rubbish, is in realityan absolutisation of the very real reduction to pure quantity of all commodityrelations in the value form. So far from money being a disguise for these relationsof subjective preferences, it is in reality the social bond that makes possible theillusion that there is something to be maximised in people’s lives. But in truth thismaximising is the impoverishment of need and desire when everything has to bejustified as the abstraction of itself by the ‘bottom line’.

This ideology of utilitarianism may be eradicable but nonetheless commodi-ties continue to be equatable as values even when we are persuaded of Marx’scritique of political economy.

The critique of political economy

Marx said that his exploration of economic categories was at the same timedescriptive and critical. I think that a theory which identifies a contradiction inessence is simultaneously a critique in that it calls for resolution. However, thenature of the interpenetration of opposites is such that a practical supersessioncannot take the form of a simple abolition of one side in favour of the other. Wehave already seen that without the recalcitrance of labour, capital becomessomething different; likewise if labour threw off the shackles of capital, its wholemode of being would require reforming. Labour as presently shaped could not‘become everything’ for it is defined by its subordination.

We have seen, with Marx, that living labour realises itself only by its de-realising itself, producing its opposite, capital. Marx writes:


Since the positive, dominant side of the [capital] relation is expressed in [thecapitalist], he feels at home … whereas the wage-labourer, who is trapped inthe same inverted notion, only from the other extreme, is driven in practice,as the oppressed side, to resistance against the whole relation, hence alsoagainst the notions, concepts and modes of thinking corresponding to it.

(1988–1994: vol. 33, p. 74)

But the negation of labour by capital can be reversed through a second negationonly if it is conceptually separable from its subsumption under capital in the firstplace, only if it is possible to separate living labour from its historically deter-minate form as wage-labour. Production must always be socially mediated. Theproblem with the value-form is that it is an alienating, and alienated, mediator.Yet however highly self-mediated the value form becomes, no matter howremote from reality are certain financial instruments, the ‘topsy-turvy’ world ofcapital must mediate itself in the labour process. The labour process, by contrast,however distorted by the requirements of valorisation, does not in itself requireits current mediation in the latter. Only this insight makes space for a necessarycritical distance from the existent totality. The ‘labour theory’ of classical politicaleconomy had the merit of shifting attention from the ‘being’ of value to its‘becoming’; however, since bourgeois economists could not take this criticaldistance from the object, their ‘labour theory’ remained within the capital-relation. Only the critically adopted standpoint of living labour allows space forconceptualising the supersession of capital.

Notes

1 For a fuller development of this section see Arthur 2002: ch. 2.2 Marx, Capital, Volume I (1976): 279–80.3 A common interpretation; see, for example, Mandel 1990: 20.4 For a fuller development of this section, see Arthur 2002: ch. 3.5 ‘Nicht-Werth’; Marx 1973: 295–296.6 ‘Economic Ms. of 1861–63’, MECW vol. 34, p. 202; copying from his Grundrisse

(1973: 454).7 ‘Capital essentially produces capital, and it does this only as long as it produces

surplus value’ (Marx 1981: 1020).8 As does Enrique Dussel (2001: 130–131, 190). See my review in Historical Materialism

11, 2 (2003).9 See the review in Arthur 2002: 48–51.

10 Marx 1976: 1056 (Appendix: ‘Results’).11 Marx 1973: 451; Marx 1988–1994 (MECW 34): 200.12 Marx 1976: 166; the translator, B. Fowkes, is here corrected; since German has two

words for ‘thing’ it is a good idea to tell us which one was used here; but only if it isthe right one! Fowkes puts ‘dinglich’ where the original has ‘sachliche’ (Marx-Engels Werkevol. 23, p. 87); and then he translates as ‘material’ instead of ‘thing-like’.


Bibliography

Arthur, Christopher J. (2002) The New Dialectic and Marx’s Capital, Leiden: Brill.Dussel, Enrique (2001) Towards an Unknown Marx: A Commentary on the Manuscripts of

1861–63, trans. Y. Angulo, ed. F. Moseley, London and New York: Routledge.Mandel, Ernest (1990) ‘Karl Marx’, in J. Eatwell et al. (eds), The New Palgrave: Marxian

Economics, London and Basingstoke: Macmillan.Marx, Karl (1973) Grundrisse; Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans.

M. Nicolaus, Harmondsworth: Penguin/NLR.—— (1975) Early Writings, trans. G. Benton, Harmondsworth: Penguin/NLR.—— (1976) Capital, Volume 1, trans. B. Fowkes, Harmondsworth: Penguin/NLR.—— (1981) Capital, Volume 3, trans. D. Fernbach, Harmondsworth: Penguin/NLR.—— (1987) ‘Original text of A Contribution to a Critique … of 1859’, in K. Marx and F.

Engels, Marx–Engels Collected Works (MECW), Volume 29, London: Lawrence andWishart.

—— (1988–1994) ‘Economic Ms. of 1861–63’, in K. Marx and F. Engels, Marx–Engels

Collected Works (MECW), Volumes 30–34, London: Lawrence and Wishart.Marx, K. and F. Engels (1976) The German Ideology, in K. Marx and F. Engels, Marx–Engels

Collected Works (MECW), Volume 5, London: Lawrence and Wishart.


What Collier puts forward in In Defence of Objectivity is an erudite and mostwelcome defence of philosophical realism against postmodernism and variousother forms of subjectivism which deny the existence of an objective realityoutside of our thoughts, ideas, conceptions, and theories. One of the manystrengths of the book is its intensely focused attempt to present a unified argu-ment; a refreshing change from the type of book that assumes that there is nocoherence in the world and all one can do is comment on small parts. Theresulting clarity of In Defence of Objectivity is reinforced by the felicitous use ofexamples and at times the illuminating placement of the ideas in a historicalcontext. I find that Collier has made a convincing defence of realism. Thecomments that follow are divided into three sections.

The relationship between realism and materialism

It is true, as Collier says, that ‘the world is independent of us and the same foreveryone’ (2003: 180). However, there seems to be something more to say here.The realist can agree with Collier against the idealist that there is a reality outthere beyond our ideas. But what is this reality? The dialectical materialist has aresponse to this question: matter. In other words, the world that is independentof us is a material world – which clarifies the material interconnection betweenthe world that we attempt to cognise and our minds which are doing thecognising. It is necessary both for the world to be material and also for ourminds to be material in order that there can be a material interconnectionbetween them:

The object, the content and the function of thought apparently coincide.Reason deals with itself, considers itself as an object and is its own content.But nevertheless the distinction between an object and its concept, thoughless evident, is just as actual as in other cases. It is only the habit ofregarding matter and mind as fundamentally different things which concealsthis truth. The necessity to make a distinction compels us everywhere todiscriminate between the object of sense perception and its mental concept.

(Dietzgen 1906: 68)

13 Understanding objectivity ina material world

Phil Walden

This is also how Dietzgen accounts for the problem that even though there is amaterial basis to ontology, idealism seems constantly to arise. The differencebetween an object and its expression in thought can generate the idealist illu-sion that thought expresses autonomous reason, separate from the objects in thematerial world. (Thus even such a great advocate of reason as Spinoza left thisidealist problem unresolved.) Realism can make concessions to idealism in thisregard because it does not specify that the independent character of the worldhas a material content, and instead leaves open the possibility that the relationof the mind to reality is an expression of the primacy of consciousness. For tothe realist, what is important is establishing the independence of reality frommind, but it is entirely possible that this independent reality could be inter-preted to have an ontological character that is compatible with an idealistphilosophical standpoint.

Collier’s epistemological standpoint must be treated cautiously. In his view:‘[Realists] claim that each particular belief is a claim to truth about its object’(2003: 141). If taken to extremes, this could suggest that we all perceive objectsin the same manner. This would be an absurdity. Although the material world isthe same for everyone, this does not exclude our ability as individuals to have aunique and personal perspective on the material world. Indeed, if we were all to have the same perspective on the world it is impossible to imagine howphilosophy, science, or even truth could exist. Nevertheless, I maintain that whatenables us to have a common epistemological reference to the same world is itsmaterial content, which explains both its interconnections and the relation of theparts to the whole.

These points can be clarified by reference to an example from everyday expe-rience. If I go to the shop, what enables that process and action? It is becauseboth the shop and my idea of going to the shop are matter that they are able tointer-relate to each other and the action is completed successfully. If the shopand my idea of the shop existed in two completely separate realms, it would notbe possible for me to visit the shop (I might perhaps entertain the illusion that Ihad visited the shop when in fact I had not, but the falsity of this would becomeclear when I checked the fridge). It is a condition of my being able to visit theshop that my mind and the shop exist in the same dialectical monist materialistuniverse – both my ideas and the shop are forms of matter; those forms ofmatter interact with each other monistically (there is not a dualist separation);and there is a dialectical inter-relationship between my mind and the shop (theshop is a possible place for me to visit, and my mind is familiar with the where-abouts of the shop). So dialectical monist materialism can give an account ofthe intelligibility and unity of the world which neither the idealist nor even therealist can offer. The realist can say that the action would not have been possibleif the shop had not been real (that is, having a real existence outside my thoughtprocesses). This is of course true. But this transcendental point about realityenabling and limiting my possibilities is not the whole story. For the shop beingthere does not mean that I know that it is there. In order for me to be able tovisit the shop there has to be a material relationship between my ideas and the

200 Phil Walden

shop, otherwise the shop’s reality will not in itself help me. This can only happenin a dialectical monist materialist universe in which shops and ideas are in thesame ontological realm in which minds can know the whereabouts of shops andin which there is a material inter-relationship between minds and shops.

The distinction Collier makes between body-actual and body-cosmic iswelcome (i.e. recognising that there is indeed a body-cosmic). But what definesthe unity of these two realms? Collier summarises the body-cosmic as the causalinteraction of humans with nature, and the body-actual is the interaction ofthe body with its immediate environment (2003: 9–15). According to Collier, thepower of the body-cosmic is increased by any extension of the causal interactionbetween the body-actual and its world: ‘The more we are sensitive to the worldaround us, and the more we control it, the more it is part of us’ (2003: 13).Unfortunately, this fruitful suggestion about the relation between the body-cosmic and the body-actual does not specify what ontologically makes thisinteraction possible. The dialectical materialist – such as Dietzgen and Engels –can answer this question in terms of matter. For what the dialectical materialiststandpoint can show is that human practice – or the body-actual – is onlypossible in terms of the possibility of humans being able to transform the ma-terial world around them, or the body cosmic (Dietzgen 1906: 124–132; Engels1954: 62–68). Thus the body-cosmic is the objective and primary basis for thebody-actual to occur. If this materialist ontological understanding is not devel-oped, then the epistemological result can be a concession to idealism, in that thebody-actual becomes the main and primary expression of causal activity, and thebody-cosmic becomes considered to be a derivative aspect of the body-actual.

It could be objected and argued that the body-actual is sufficient to upholdrealism, in that the body-actual expresses the whole range of human activities, andso is the starting point for understanding the ontological character of the relation ofthe body-actual with the body-cosmic. However, such a view would amount to whatCollier’s closest co-thinker, Roy Bhaskar, has called the anthropomorphic fallacy, inthat human social activity is defined by a human-centredness that denies a mean-ingful objective relation to the wider independent reality of nature and the universe(Bhaskar 1993: 394, passim). Collier would agree with this stance of Bhaskar’s, butthe problem about the philosophical ambiguity surrounding the relation betweenthe body-actual and body-cosmic is that it creates the possibility for their relation-ship to be interpreted in an anthropomorphic manner. Materialism establishes amore credible conception of the body-actual and body-cosmic relation because ithas an ontological starting point in the universality and objectivity of matter inmotion. On this objective basis, it is possible to establish the interconnectionsbetween the primacy of a non-human body-cosmic and its relation to the specificityand dynamism of the body-actual of human society (Engels 1954: 82–88).

Thus Collier’s defence of realism, without its being connected to philosoph-ical materialism, is problematic. The thrust of my disagreement with Collier canbe summed up by one word: interconnection. The word ‘mediation’ would alsodo, but, as this is not to be an essay on Hegel’s method, I will stick with intercon-nection. For example, what is largely lacking in Collier’s treatment of Spinoza’s

Understanding objectivity in a material world 201

notions of mind and body is a conception of interconnection. This means thatSpinoza’s claims about the body-actual have a very ambiguous relation to thebody-cosmic, in that ‘providence’ represents the connection between them,rather than the interconnection being between the attributes of one substance(Collier 2003: 14). Collier may be claiming that ‘providence’ is the substance, butfrom a materialist standpoint such a claim is epistemologically problematic andcannot establish the unity of the body-actual and the body-cosmic.

Is Collier defending Spinoza’s conception of substance? Again the dialecticalmaterialist question is: what is this substance? One should reject a crudeSpinozist view that monism is merely about the mind being a form of matter justlike any other matter. Rather, the dialectical materialist view is that mind is thehighest expression of matter and that it interacts with the rest of matter in anextremely rich and complex manner. Ilyenkov interprets Spinoza in dialecticalmaterialist terms:

In order to disclose the really general, truly universal forms of things inaccordance with which the ‘perfected’ thinking body should act, anothercriterion and another mode of knowledge than formal abstraction wasrequired. The idea of substance was not formed by abstracting theattribute that belonged equally to extension and thought. The abstract andgeneral in them was only that they existed, existence in general, i.e. an abso-lutely empty determination in no way disclosing the nature of the one orthe other. The really general (infinite, universal) relation between thoughtand spatial, geometric reality could only be understood, i.e. the idea ofsubstance arrived at, through real understanding of their mode of interac-tion within nature. Spinoza’s whole doctrine was just the disclosure of this‘infinite’ relation.

(Ilyenkov 1977: 60)

In other words, Spinoza goes some way to establishing monism – but nature or‘substance’ could still be an idealist product of consciousness. Not until theadvent of dialectical materialism did we arrive at the understanding that natureor ‘substance’ is matter, and that matter is the basis for the interaction of mindand external reality in a way which epistemologically privileges the latter overthe former. For if the interaction was left epistemologically at the point whereSpinoza left it, we would indeed have a monist relation, but it could be a relationin which consciousness is epistemologically prior to external reality. The samecriticism could be levelled against Hegel. Feuerbach partially corrects this errorwith his emphasis on materialism, but at a deeper level of epistemology he is stillidealist because he places a greater weight on building humanist relations withinsociety than he does on cognizing objective material reality. The need to do thelatter in order to be fully and dialectically materialist is the starting point ofMarx, Engels, and Dietzgen.

In contrast to this dialectical materialist interpretation of Spinoza, and whatis epistemologically necessary to overcome the idealist limitations of his concept

202 Phil Walden

of substance, Collier accommodates to the idealist view of substance. This isbecause the ontological unity of the monist character of substance is provided bythe role of ‘providence’. Hence, Collier does not consider Spinoza’s views asbeing in flux, or as an uncertain materialism that is limited by a concession toidealism. Instead he seems to embrace the standpoint of idealism withinSpinoza’s view of substance, as if it is not in need of philosophical improvementand clarification from a materialist standpoint. So Collier is making his ownconcessions to idealism and reconciling them with a realist standpoint. What isbeing indicated here is that realism has its own philosophical ambiguities thatallow for these concessions to idealism. For what Marxist materialism is arguing,in seeming contradiction to Collier, is that it is not enough to uphold the monistconception of substance; what also has to be asked is what is the ontologicalcontent of this substance and what does it suggest in regard to the relationbetween being and consciousness. Collier’s approach of the body-actual andbody-cosmic is undermined by similar epistemological limitations, and alsorequires the same materialist clarification as Feuerbach provided for Spinoza.

The character of philosophy and its limitations

Collier’s charge is that modern philosophy has wrongly accepted a dualist separation of mind and body, allegedly inherited from Descartes: ‘All forms ofreductionism, whether subjectivistic or physicalistic, have their roots inDescartes’ dualism; Descartes reduces everything to human consciousness on theone hand and extended matter on the other’ (Collier 2003: 142). But this is nothow to understand the history of philosophy. Error and truth are in a complexrelationship. Descartes was tackling an issue that had long been avoided – thenature of the relationship between mind and body (Cottingham 1986: 79–84). Indefence of Descartes it can be argued that he was trying to develop an alterna-tive to the religiously inclined medieval philosophy which located God at thecentre of the universe. Descartes could not entirely break from this paradigm,which was why he developed a ‘conceivable’ dualist separation between distinctrealms of mind and body (Descartes 1985b: 50–62). Nevertheless, despite theseepistemological limitations, Descartes’ philosophy was a huge advance in relationto being able to conceive a world without God as the centre of the universe, andfor the possibility of a human-centred reason, such as through mathematicalproofs (Descartes 1985a: 290). So Spinoza was advancing on a foundationalready laid down by Descartes, but in terms of rejecting any dualist inconsisten-cies. Kant and Hegel theorised an even richer relationship between ideas andreality, based on previous philosophical advances. Finally, Marx, Engels andDietzgen were in a position to understand the interconnection between ideasand material reality (or mind and body) as a material interconnection.

The important point to be made is that philosophical ideas do not develop ina vacuum. Descartes was elaborating his ideas in the period of the decay offeudalism and the emergence of capitalism. He can justly be considered to be atthe radical forefront of the bourgeois enlightenment. In contrast, Collier seems


to have a negative perspective on Descartes because Descartes upholds thephilosophy of the subject and its cognitive powers, a stance which Collier hasrejected along with most of modern philosophy. For example, Collier castigatesDescartes’ view that the quantitative methodology derived from mathematicscan overcome the tendency towards epistemological scepticism. Rather, thereliance on quantitative methods becomes a pretext to justify the value of theobject under emerging capitalism (Collier 2003: 28). But the philosophical pointis to differentiate Descartes’ durable and historical contribution to philosophyfrom that which represents an ideological adherence to the bourgeois classviewpoint. If this process of differentiation is not carried out we end up with avulgar Marxist-type of reduction of the role of philosophy to the partisan justi-fication of various types of alienated ideologies. In this context, the Sovietphilosopher Oizerman has indicated the great philosophical importance ofDescartes: ‘Descartes was the founder of the rationalist metaphysics of theseventeenth century and his method was the scientific method of his time’(Oizerman 1988: 164).

Thus Collier’s criticism of Descartes for allegedly launching modern philosophy down a mistaken epistemological path does not take account of howphilosophy has progressed as a result of the complex interaction betweenchanges in material reality and the attempts to understand that reality (which arealso material). For what Descartes was articulating was the massive historicalimportance of the economic and social changes of the seventeenth century andthe theoretical necessity for new scientific methods to understand these newdevelopments. Collier is prepared to praise Francis Bacon’s empiricist method-ology in this regard, and yet he is unable similarly to locate the progressivecontent of Descartes’ rationalism (Collier 2003: 203). This is an expression ofepistemological inconsistency, in that Collier is prepared to utilise recentadvances in the philosophy of science in order to critique Descartes and yet doesnot carry out a similar process of critique in relation to Bacon. What seems to becalled for is an understanding of philosophy as a theory of knowledge, or thedevelopment of a method which can more adequately assess the merits and limi-tations of philosophers within their social and historical context, and thus canlocate them more precisely within the progress of the history of philosophy.

Collier’s criticism of modern philosophy seems to focus one-sidedly on therole of consciousness. There seems to be an insufficient recognition of theimportance of the interaction of consciousness with the objective in order toexplain changes in material reality. His starting point is that: ‘human beings aremuch else besides knowing subjects’ (2003: 134). This view is connected to thestance that: ‘Objectivity is now generally used as to mean independence of any(knowing or valuing) subject’ (2003: 133). On this epistemological basis, hecontends that the object–subject relation is unsatisfactory for explaining the rela-tion of human activity within the world (2003: 133–134). He does accept arelation of intentionality, and even a reflection of the object in the perceptions ofthe subject, but there is no recognition of the transforming role of the subjectwith regard to defining the object and objectivity. Instead:

204 Phil Walden

The attitude of objectivity involves recognising the primacy of the object.… This is so because even the phenomena of which human subjectivity iscomposed – experience, emotion, practice, language, value judgements,beliefs – are all object-centred and defined by their objects.

(2003: 137)

This epistemological standpoint is very similar to a contemplative objectivismthat seems to consider all attempts by the subject to transform the object as anexpression of a misguided idealism. Collier also appears to be passivelyaccepting the nature of the object. Lukács, despite his limitations in reasoningabout subject–object identity, was surely correct in arguing for a role for thesubject to rebel against the object. The point is that there must be somethingunsatisfactory about the object which prompts the subject to consider the neces-sity of its transformation (Lukács 1971: 148–150, passim). Many people thinkthat for the subject to rebel against the object it is necessary to adopt an unreflec-tive praxis stance towards reality, trying to change reality primarily through one’snon-theoretical practice. The philosopher who argues most trenchantly againstthis mis-ordering and severing of practical from theoretical priorities is Adorno,who argues for an intensely serious theoretical approach to reality and a highlyreflective relationship between theory and practice (Adorno 1973: 143–144,passim). Because of this Adorno is often accused of being too contemplative.Yet, Adorno is not over-emphasising contemplation – in fact he argues for thesubject not to be epistemologically dominated by the object, and for the subjectto play a reflective role in the relationship between subject and object. The pointbeing made by Adorno is that if the subject attempts to know the object in adialectical and reflective manner, then the object can be changed in a real andmeaningful manner. The subject will only be able to change the object in animaginary and delusional manner if the subject only knows the object in shallowand impressionistic terms (Adorno 1973: 66–68). In contrast to Lukács’ revolu-tionary optimism about the subject changing the object, and Adorno’s moredialectical and nuanced view, Collier seems to be ruling out any possibility of thesubject changing the object in the context of the primacy of the objective.

Furthermore, in this regard I find problematic Collier’s outright antipathy toKant’s idea of the constructive mind (Collier 2003: 160). Instead, Adorno ismore convincing in suggesting that epistemology is important and that there is aneed for sympathetic criticism of Kant’s insight that: ‘understanding has ruleswhich I must presuppose as being in me prior to objects being given to me, andtherefore as being a priori. They find expression in a priori concepts to which allobjects of experience necessarily conform’ (Kant 1992: B, pp. xvii–xviii andAdorno 1973: 292–293). Adorno criticises the subject-centred element ofKantianism by arguing for the preponderance of the object, but he retains andsublates Kant’s focus on the activity of the mind in its dealings with reality(Adorno 1973: 240–241). By contrast, Collier has a one-sided focus on the objec-tivity of the real world (a point which Adorno accepted) at the expense oftheorising the active role played in cognition by the mind.


The importance of theory and practice

Collier is clearly right when he says that theory can correct a fault in aHeideggerian-type ready-to-hand practice (like driving a nail into a wall with ahammer) (Collier 2003: 179). However, by restricting his consideration ofpractice to this kind of mundane and unambitious ready-to-hand activity, Collierdoes not arrive at a theory of how theory and practice can be in a highlycomplex relationship and how out of such a complex relationship can emergerevolutionary change. Theory and practice are interconnected. Theory canprovide an assessment which gives rise to a change in practice. Practice canfalsify, confirm, or suggest a change in theory. An example would be theBolshevik programme of proletarian revolution in 1917. This was a theorywhich the Bolsheviks thought, in the summer of 1917, would be put into practice by the soviets based upon the domination of the Mensheviks, and theBolsheviks called on the soviets to do this. This theory was falsified when thesoviets failed to put into effect proletarian revolution. Informed by this conserva-tive stance of the soviets, the Bolsheviks then realised the fault in their theory –proletarian revolution could only take place if there was a Bolshevik majority inthe soviets. The Bolsheviks therefore redoubled their efforts in propagandisingfor proletarian revolution, pressed hard for elections in the soviets, and when theelections came they were able to gain big majorities in the soviets. The prole-tarian revolution followed. Thus the initial theory was modified in the light ofpractice, and then the revised theory proved sufficiently accurate to put the original theory into successful practice. There is a bootstrapping relationshipbetween theory and practice.

However, there is a point to be made that in order to establish what constitutedprincipled revolutionary practice, the initial and most active aspect that needed tobe corrected was in the sphere of theory, and only by the modification of theorywas it possible for a principled practice to be envisaged and developed. It was vitalfor Lenin to reject his previous theory of the democratic dictatorship of the prole-tariat and peasantry and replace it with a perspective of ‘All Power to the Soviets’if the concessions made by some Bolsheviks to the Mensheviks and the bourgeoisgovernment were to be overcome. Thus in order to make qualitative leaps in revo-lutionary practice it was necessary to make similar leaps in theory, and overcomethe limitations of existing theory as the basis for meeting the political challengesof the time. Hence, theory is not in a passive role as a servant of practice, butrather theory acts as a ‘material force’ and active promoter of what is required inpractical terms in order to transform the objective situation. As Lenin (1976: 212)argues in the Philosophical Notebooks: ‘Man’s consciousness not only reflects theobjective world, but creates it.’ It is also important to point out that without theobjective development of the soviets by the working class it would not have beenpossible to change the situation. Thus, theory actively promotes what is possibleand overcomes any concessions to conservatism in the sphere of practice.

Hegel makes a similar point in his ‘Little Logic’ in relation to the question oftheoretical and practical reason: ‘the explication of the notion in the sphere of

206 Phil Walden

being does two things: it brings out the totality of being, and it abolishes theimmediacy of being, or the form of being as such’ (Hegel 1987: 123). What isbeing indicated by Hegel is that the very theoretical clarity represented by thenotion challenges the limitations of the immediacy of being and suggests thepossibility of transforming the being in order to bring it into conformity with therequirements of the notion. This idealist view, which represents the primacy ofconsciousness for understanding the narrowness of objective reality, was materi-alistically transformed by Lenin into the recognition that the limitations ofexisting material reality produce the subjective aspiration for revolutionarychange. The role of theory is to mediate between consciousness and practice,and to articulate why the content of practice is revolutionary and strives not tomodify reality but to bring about a qualitative change in accordance with over-coming the limitations of existing being.

In contrast to the Hegelian–Leninist view of the importance of theory inrelation to the possibility of principled practice, Collier makes important conces-sions to the pragmatic and anti-theoretical view of the theory–practice relation.He writes:

For a theory to work better in practice than another theory means this: thatif we base our actions on the assumption that the theory is true, we getbetter results than if we base them on the assumption that the alternativetheory is true. Truth in a non-pragmatically defined sense is tacitly pre-supposed in every use of the test of practice.

(2003: 229)

Now the first of these sentences is unexceptionable – theories surely are tested andconfirmed or refuted by practice. But the second sentence does not follow from thefirst. We can see this by looking at the assumptions involved in the second sentence:

1 That non-pragmatism is guaranteed by the mere abstract fact that there isan objectively real world and objectively real values. However, while we cangrant this objectivity, it ignores the question of the epistemology or themethod we use to try to come into contact with this objectivity through ouractions.

2 That putting theories to the test of practice is the only way in which we candetermine whether a theory is objectively true. The problem here is thatthere are many complex social theories – such as the Marxist theory thatproletarian revolution is needed for human progress – which are not testablein Collier’s sense, but which can, however, be objectively evaluated by askinghow well Marxism explains what is going on in the world in comparisonwith competing theories.

Assumption (2) is in fact a philosophical pragmatist assumption, despite thebelief Collier has here that he is arguing against philosophical pragmatism.The advocacy of the ‘test of practice’ as the only way in which the relative


validity of competing theories can be ascertained is to make concessions to thephilosophical pragmatist idea that what determines the worth of a theory iswhether it works or not. Yet, at least in social theory, this begs the whole ques-tion of whether or not our standards and criteria for ‘what works’ are optimal.An important philosophical problem with the pragmatic approach is that it isinclined to connect the standpoint of what works with an adaptation to whatis, and therefore to reject a perspective involving a connection between thepresent and the striving for a better future. This is precisely why the mosteminent contemporary pragmatist philosopher, Richard Rorty, rejects anypossibility of connecting philosophy to the struggle for revolutionary change,because what work for him are the politics of reconciliation, reform andmoderation (Rorty 1995: 203; 1999: 201–209). The question of the ontologicalcharacter of social structures, and their limitations, is not posed because such aquestion is an abstraction in comparison to the functional utility of contempo-rary society. As George Novack has argued, pragmatism is the ideal philosophyof dominant ruling elites that do not want to ask searching questions about thepossible systemic problems and limitations of modern capitalism (Novack1975: 282–292).

The pragmatic standpoint of privileging the present over the future meansthat existing practices become considered to be the only possible practices thatare viable and functional. This means that pragmatists have an almost intuitiverejection of any epistemological criteria upon which another subordinate prac-tice should be validated and encouraged. This standpoint is connected to anapathetic denial of the significance of any theoretical elaboration explainingwhy a subordinated practice should replace the dominant social practice. Incontrast, the Marxist standpoint tries to show in theoretical terms why a subor-dinated practice is both explanatory and necessary because of its transformativecontent. Marxism shows that the pragmatists cannot establish that what isobjective and true about practices is their continually changing character. Whatthe pragmatists omit is a recognition that the process of evaluation of practicesis connected to the enrichment of theories by an often lengthy debate as anecessary prelude to testing a theory in practice. For example, the Marxisttheory of the necessity of proletarian revolution came into being through theexhaustive process of dissidents trying various other theories, in debate withtheir more conservative interlocutors, until the point at which Marx and Engelsand their co-thinkers were able to formulate the necessity of proletarian revolu-tion. Contrast this with Bakunin and the anarchists, who thought that youdidn’t need a theory of insurrection, you just needed the insurrection – as if thelatter could happen without the former (Marx 1977: 561–564). Thus it seems tome that Collier’s advocacy of the ‘test of practice’, as the only High Court inwhich theories can be judged, is neither true, nor is it in fact consistent with theMarxist theory of proletarian revolution.

Collier’s account of truth contains some concessions to pragmatism. Hecomments: ‘[Realists] claim that beliefs are attempts, more or less successful, atobjectivity, and are to be judged by the extent to which they achieve it’ (2003:

208 Phil Walden

141). This viewpoint begs a number of questions. First, it seems to be an almostdogmatic contention that objectivity is connected to practical success. What isproblematical about this standpoint is the rigid view that seems to preclude anyother criteria of what constitutes objectivity. Indeed, Collier’s approach could bein conflict with that of Bhaskar, who elaborates the view that what is explanatoryis an important basis for differentiating and comparing theories (Bhaskar 1989:14–15). In this context, it is possible to differentiate the ideological claims ofvarious theories from what is objectively valid in relation to what they tell usabout the ontological character of reality, both natural and social. Thus, it ispossible to show that despite its ambiguous practical success, Marxism can be avalid research programme in relation to what it elaborates in terms of under-standing historical development and the contemporary importance of thecapital–labour relation (Mészáros 1995: 40–65). It is possible to abstract theseimportant methodological principles and theoretical premises for research fromthe more disappointing, and some would suggest unsuccessful, attempts byMarxists to develop a society according to Marxist principles.

In contrast, Collier’s conception of truth does not seem to allow for this levelof flexibility and methodological plurality. Instead, all truth claims are to bejudged harshly in terms of their capacity to generate practical success. This begsthe question of whether a subordinated social agency is able to develop thepossibility of social success. For example, Marx’s standpoint, that the workingclass is the universal class, may be explanatory in relation to understanding thestructures of social reality. Nevertheless, for important specific and conjuncturalreasons it has not been possible for the working class to realise its potential to bethe universal class. This does not mean that it is no longer historically necessary,as an expression of structural contradictions and the possibilities of socialagency, that the working class aims to act as a universal class. Indeed, this possi-bility is still located within the materiality and objectivity of the capital–labourrelation (Mészáros 1995: 30–38).

Second, Collier’s standpoint suggests that what is valid, explanatory and func-tional is the success of present achievements in existing societies, and so what ishistorically problematic is the uncertainty of a utopian and unrealistic future.This view could amount to a powerful claim for conservatism, because it is thevery triumphalism of bourgeois political economy to assert that there is no alter-native to capitalism (Mészáros 1995: 118–126). In other words, in contrast to thepragmatic epistemological standpoint, which tries to deny the importance of anontological horizon beyond what works in the present according to uncriticalcriteria of practical success, Marxism has a historical perspective which showsthe real social possibilities of what could be. This perspective has probably beenarticulated most cogently by Ernst Bloch, who showed that the Marxist utopia isnot an expression of dreams and fantasy, but is located within real material andsocial conditions (Bloch 2000: 234–245). On this ontological basis, the im-portance of social practice is not defined by the pragmatic acceptance of thelimitations of what exists, but rather practice is understood in terms of its poten-tial for facilitating the realisation of what is possible. In this ontological and


epistemological context, Collier’s conception of objectivity seems to be a con-cession to the static pragmatic approach and a rejection of the more dynamicMarxist understanding of what represents practical success.

In a previous work, Collier outlined a vehement critique of utopianism(Collier 1990: 15–18). It is to be hoped that this rejection of utopianism has notbeen transformed into a contemplative acceptance of what is, in relation to InDefence of Objectivity’s epistemological concessions to pragmatism and the rigiditiesof its view of objectivism – one that does not seem to allow for the transformingrole of the subject. Nevertheless, these important criticisms have to be locatedwithin an appreciation of Collier’s elaboration of a realist epistemology and itstruth claims. On the basis of this substantial work Collier is indicating thatrealism is a coherent expression of the progress of the history of philosophy, andshows why realism is needed to advance the claims of a progressive philosophyof science.

Bibliography

Adorno, Theodor (1973) Negative Dialectics, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.Bhaskar, Roy (1989) Reclaiming Reality, London: Verso.—— (1993) Dialectic, London: Verso.Bloch, Ernst (2000) The Spirit of Utopia, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Collier, Andrew (1990) Socialist Reasoning, London: Pluto.—— (2003) In Defence of Objectivity, London: Routledge.Cottingham, John (1986) Descartes, Oxford: Blackwell.Descartes, René (1985a) The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Volume I, Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.—— (1985b) The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Volume II, Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.Dietzgen, Joseph (1906) The Positive Outcome of Philosophy, Chicago: Charles H. Kerr.Engels, Friedrich (1954) Anti-Duhring, Moscow: Foreign Language Publishing House.Hegel, Georg (1975) Hegel’s Logic, Oxford: Oxford University Press.Ilyenkov, Evald (1977) Dialectical Logic, Moscow: Progress Publishers.Kant, Immanuel (1992) Critique of Pure Reason, Basingstoke: Macmillan.Lenin, Vladimir (1976) Collected Works, Volume 38, Moscow: Progress Publishers.Lukács, Georg (1971) History and Class Consciousness, London: Merlin.Marx, Karl (1977) Karl Marx: Selected Writings, Oxford: Oxford University Press.Mészáros, István (1995) Beyond Capital, London: Merlin.Novack, George (1975) Pragmatism Versus Marxism, New York: Pathfinder.Oizerman, Theodore (1988) The Main Trends In Philosophy, Moscow: Progress Publishers.Rorty, Richard (1995) Rorty And Pragmatism, Nashville and London: Vanderbilt University

Press.—— (1999) Philosophy and Social Hope, London: Penguin.

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Part VI

Objectivity andreflexivity

It may well be that Reason with a capital ‘R’ – or, it may perhaps be better tosay, the human capacity for reasoning – always ends up by getting itself into amess – always has and always will. However that may be, it would seem thatthe last century has provided overall a particularly striking example of this. Ofcourse, Reason, being what it is, always struggles to extricate itself from themess; so it is wrong, no doubt, to speak of it ending up in one. There is andcan be no conceivable end to its struggles with and against itself. Neverthelessthe last century (or so) has provided what to many has appeared as a peculiarlydistressing version of them, if to others perhaps a no less strangely liberatingone. The story of Reason’s conflict with the emotions, or with bodily instinct,is a very old one, familiar through many different retellings. The more recenttwist to this ancient story, however, is one of Reason’s own stubborn under-mining of itself.

This tendency towards its own self-undoing has its roots further back, ofcourse. Or rather, for Reason is not to be thought of as a temporally situatedactor upon some spatio-temporally situated stage, the evident roots of thistendency towards self-frustration are already to be discerned deeply embeddedwithin the apparently all-too-reasonably rational philosophy of theEnlightenment. Hume was very well aware of the way in which desires orpassions could run counter to each other, including ‘that reason, which is able tooppose our passion; and which we have found to be nothing but a general calmdetermination of the passions, founded on some distant view or reflection’(Hume 1978: part III, section 1). As is well known, these tensions come mostevidently to the surface within the philosophy of Kant, and nowhere moreexplicitly so than in his discussions, recurrent within the latter half of his Critique

of Pure Reason, of what he calls ‘transcendental illusion’. For example:

Transcendental illusion … does not cease even after it has been detectedand its invalidity clearly revealed by transcendental criticism. … We takethe subjective necessity of a connection of our concepts … for an objectivenecessity in the determination of things in themselves. This is an illusionthan can no more be prevented than we can prevent the sea appearinghigher at the horizon than at the shore … here we have to do with a

14 Reason and its own self-undoing?

Alan Montefiore

natural and inevitable illusion, which rests on subjective principles, andfoists them upon us as objective. … There exists, then, a natural andunavoidable dialectic of pure reason … one inseparable from humanreason, and which, even after its deceptiveness has been exposed, will notcease to play tricks with reason.

(Kant 1933: A297–298/B353–354, passim)

Or again:

We have here presented to us a new phenomenon of human reason – anentirely natural antithetic … into which reason of itself quite unavoidablyfalls. It … subjects it to the temptation either of abandoning itself to asceptical despair, or of … dogmatically committing itself to certain asser-tions, and refusing to grant a fair hearing to the arguments for thecounter-position. Either attitude is the death of sound philosophy.

(Kant 1933: A407/B434)

Kant himself, of course, in obedience to the principle of Reason within him,looks for a coherent way of explaining the illusions and of somehow resolving theprima facie irreconcilable contradictions into which that very Reason seems irre-sistibly to lead him; he tries to take the sting out of these tensions and to unmaskwhat he sees as the illusions as being no more than simply illusory, through aninsistence on his crucial distinction between appearances or phenomena, that is tosay our sensory experiences of the natural order, on the one hand, and noumenaor things in themselves, on the other – the underlying reality of which we cannotprevent ourselves from positing, but to the ‘concepts’ of which we can give noproper meaning and of which, therefore, we can in principle have no genuineknowledge whatsoever. The problem is, of course, that his account of the naturalorder as a strictly spatio-temporal and causally conditioned one and his character-isation of the realm of Reason as one of noumena or things in themselves and asbeing, therefore, equally strictly non-temporal, leaves him unable to give any logi-cally intelligible account of how the two might interact – as interact they must ifhe is to be able to give any coherent sense to the notions of rationally guided ormorally motivated action. As Kant himself puts it: ‘Transcendental freedom isthus, as it would seem, contrary to the law of nature, and therefore to all possibleexperience; and remains a problem’ (Kant 1933: A803/B831). Reason tells him,as it were, both that he must and yet that he will never finally be able to resolvethese paradoxes. And this itself may be seen as a paradox of a higher order, as themark of an ultimately unresolvable tension within the human condition.

Kantian insight or Kantian confusion? His immediate successors, of course,finding the situation in which he seemed to have left them to be philosophicallyintolerable, tended either to try somehow to transcend the tensions inherentwithin his philosophy by showing how Reason was after all in the end ‘cunning’enough to resolve them or, on the other and more typically Anglo-Saxon hand,to retreat to some more logically sophisticated version of what they saw, not alto-

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gether accurately perhaps, as robust Humean common sense. It was, no doubt,in the differences between these two reactions that some of the most importantseeds of divergence between the so-called ‘Continental’ and ‘Analytic’ or ‘Anglo-Saxon’ branches of the western philosophical tradition were sown. Any attemptto follow through the historical details of this story would be far beyond thescope of the present paper. For the moment let it suffice to recall two highlysignificant features of it.

First, if Kant, both directly and indirectly, was one of the dominant philo-sophical influences of the nineteenth century – and, of course, beyond it – sotoo, it would seem, has been Jacques Derrida in the twentieth.1 He is mostprobably best and most widely known for his introduction of the term andnotion of deconstruction – if, indeed, one may be allowed the use of the term‘notion’ in such a context. In its most generalised form, deconstruction may notunreasonably be understood as the work of showing how, when appropriatepressures are applied, every form of discourse can be shown to contain withinitself the mutually conflicting elements of its own self-undoing. What is one tounderstand by this? One – tangentially Kantian, if slightly cryptic – way ofputting it would be to say that the threat of antinomies is to be found lurkingwithin every attempt at an organised body of discourse, however would-besystematic it may be, and however internally consistent it may have appeared tothose who designed it. That is to say that it will always be possible to find latentwithin it the starting-points for lines of argument that, if developed, may beshown to undermine each other and thus, taken together, to generate contradic-tions; and this is tantamount to saying that all would-be rational constructionsmay be shown in the last resort to generate their own characteristically recur-ring irrationalities. (It is not clear to me that Derrida himself wouldconstrue/pursue the claims – or threats? – of deconstruction to such acompletely unrestricted or generalised extent. If I have understood himcorrectly, he would, nowadays at any rate, regard the discourse of justice, forexample, as being somehow immune to such a development.)

The second point is in effect an even more general one. If the deconstructiveclaim is indeed in principle applicable to every form of argument or of discourse,it must equally apply – reflexively – to any line of argument that purports tosupport it.2 In this, its apparently self-refuting reflexivity, it resembles that othergreat bugbear of latter day thinking, the disarmingly persuasive claim that thevalidity of all points of view or pretensions to theoretical insight have to be under-stood as limited to the cultural or conceptual contexts within which they areexpressed. There can, it would seem, be no plausibility to any general claim thatall claims except this one alone are thus strictly relative or that they must inevitably becouched in language containing the seeds of their own logical undoing.

To the relativist version at any rate of this seemingly paradoxical reflexivity,there would seem, broadly speaking and at first sight, to be two possible reactions,each standing in diametric opposition to the other. On the one hand, the rela-tivists may be tempted to respond by accepting that they can no more provide anywholly context-independent justifications of their arguments, their criteria of

Reason and its own self-undoing? 215

validation, the senses of their key terms than can any of their opponents – thatwe are all indeed in the same relativist boat; but that, he may add, is, of course,just his point. On the other hand, the anti-relativist may claim – and many ofthem have done so with one degree of sophistication or another – that relativism’savowal of its own self-relativity amounts in effect to its own self-refutation.

In fact, neither of these responses seems to me to be altogether satisfactory.An important part of my own response – broadly speaking once again – wouldbe to argue, first, for the impossibility of dispensing with some version or otherof a transcendental presupposition of objectivity as a necessary condition of theacquisition and intelligibility of any language within which one might find itpossible to communicate – including most notably the very language in whichone was trying to set out and communicate this very argument. I would thenseek to extend the argument to any other languages that might be encounteredby showing that anyone’s ability to recognise any other sustained pattern ofsigns that they might come across as actually constituting a symbolic system orlanguage must always in the last resort depend on their being able to work outat least some partial intertranslatability between that language and their own.

Clearly, this condition cannot apply to anyone’s very first entry into membershipof a speech community. As the infant first catches on to the acquisition of languageit has ex hypothesi no already available resources into which to translate its newly (andat first uncertainly) acquired capacity for symbolisation. It is, of course, true thatthose who go on to acquire relative fluency in a second language do typically learnto use and to understand certain of its expressions and sentences, which they find tobe strictly and obstinately untranslatable into the language from which they started,but whose meaning they are nevertheless able to explain in it. It is, perhaps, justconceivable that someone might come to learn a second language in exactly thesame way as that in which they had acquired their first, that is to say, by direct inter-active contact with speakers of that language and without any mediating referenceto the language with which they were already familiar. (Even to begin to make senseof such a hypothesis, one would need to suppose it possible that the circumstancesin which the second language was acquired contained absolutely no features forwhich terms of the first language might be recognisably applicable, and it is in factfar from clear that such a possibility can coherently be fleshed out.) But it is virtuallyimpossible to see how one and the same person might properly speaking possess twodistinct languages while being strictly unable to relate them in any way to eachother by way of partial translation or at least by interpretive explication. And inas-much as such passage between them must of necessity be assured, then – or so Ishould argue – the transcendental supposition of objectivity will apply as much tothe one as to the other; and inasmuch as this is so, the wilder claims of subjectiverelativism may be shown to be … wilder than can be sustained.

These are, certainly, arguments that call for much detailed working out beforethey can be made to stick. In any case, however, even if one takes them to besuccessful, they only deal with part of the problem. Let us assume, for presentpurposes at any rate, that arguments can indeed be made out to the effect thatany language – starting with ‘my’ own and extending therefrom to any others of

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which I may, one way or another, learn enough to be able to recognise them aslanguages – must contain within its constitutive presuppositions that of an‘objectivity thesis’. By this I mean the assumption (which I take to be, in spirit atleast, characteristically Kantian) that the world which I come to grasp throughthe organising structures with which my language or languages provide me, is ingeneral the way in which it is, in at least partial independence of how it mayseem to me to be at any given moment. As Terry Eagleton has noted in a recentreview article, ‘there are many competing versions of how it is with the world,including the Postmodern belief that it is no way in particular’.3 It is in fact quiteplausibly arguable that the Postmodern belief, when formulated in this way, isbasically correct. That is to say that it may very well be true that there is no oneway of describing the world, or even any particular part of it, that is uniquely‘true to the facts’, all other descriptions being ‘false’.

But this should not, and indeed cannot, seriously be held to mean that nodescriptions or would-be statements of fact can ever be shown to be decisivelyfalse. To take just one simple example, there are languages in which I cannotstraightforwardly assert that I have just one brother without making it clear by theterm that I use in formulating my assertion whether the brother in question is anelder or a younger one. But whatever the way in which I seek to describe myfamily situation, my assertion could be shown to be demonstrably false if it turnedout that my only sibling was either an elder or a younger sister. All that the ‘objec-tivity thesis’ is designed to show is that it is a condition of the meaningfulness ofany symbolic system that its terms can be used incorrectly as well as correctly, that(in a significant proportion of cases at least) assertions made through the deploy-ment of its terms may in principle turn out to be falsifiable through meeting withthe resistance of relevantly recalcitrant facts and that neither the correctness norincorrectness, the truth nor the falsity in question should depend always andentirely on how the matter appears to the subject or speaker. One might perhapssum up the situation by saying that if truth is always in some sense (conceptually)relative, falsity must at least sometimes be absolute. And this, one may add, musthold true, however otherwise relative the symbolic or conceptual system fromwithin which the world of experience may be characterised.

Arguments concerning the cultural relativity of concepts and their reflexiveimplications, however, are one thing. Arguments concerning the limitations ofReason and the irreducible deceptiveness of reasoned arguments, though analo-gous in their potentially threatening reflexivity, are nevertheless another. If rationalargument is to be trusted, one may reasonably hope to show that the idea that anyand every representation of the state of the world or account of its causal structuremay, so long as it is internally consistent, have to be recognised (and thereforerespected) as being as good as any other, belongs in effect to the psychopathologyof epistemology. But what if the very criteria of rational argument, including eventhe Law of Non-Contradiction, are themselves to be understood as no more thanculturally relative? What if any pretention to assess the beliefs of some so-called‘primitive society’ as prima facie self-contradictory has to be acknowledged as nomore than a manifestation of ‘western’ cultural imperialism? Or what, again, if


that same Law of Non-Contradiction is to be seen as only the most centrallyprotected element in a continuous ensemble of propositions, those nearest thesurface, so to speak, being the most directly exposed to the risks of modification orabandonment in the light of the non-propositional evidences of experience, but allof them ultimately liable to modification or even rejection, should the costs ofabandoning certain of the most highly valued outer elements be judged or felt tobe too high, even if the price of their preservation be that of a far-reaching re-adjustment of the very innermost elements of the system?

Even some of the most professional and hard-headed philosophers of thecentury just past found themselves led at one time or another to take suchhypotheses with the utmost seriousness. Peter Winch and Quine were, of course,among the most notable of these. It is at least equally significant, however, thateach of them was led subsequently to retreat from such extreme underminingthrough cultural or logical relativisation of the Law of Non-Contradiction. Foronce contradiction is allowed free and unrestricted entry into a language ordiscursive system it can spread as might a sort of symbolic cancer, ultimatelydestructive of any possibility of coherent assertion, of translation from onelanguage to another and, in the last resort, of meaningfulness itself.

It may go without further saying that all such reasons as might be put forwardin support of such a radical down-grading of the status of this very central prin-ciple of both rational and reasonable meaningfulness cannot but carry with themthe seeds of their own dissolution. Kant himself, of course, never suggested thatthe ‘natural and unavoidable dialectic of pure reason’ might lead to such dire anduniversally disabling discursive consequences as this. On my understanding of hisunderstanding of the matter, we are left not so much in a situation of a quitegeneral and generally crippling inability to decide between any and every pair ofprima facie mutually contradictory propositions, as in one in which we seem to befaced with equally strong sets of reasons for holding each of two directlyconflicting affirmations concerning the status, structure and origin of the world,affirmations of a very high and far from everyday level of generality. Even, then,Kant, of course, thought that once we recognised the distinction between thephenomenal and noumenal realms, we should be able to see this apparent conflictof reason with itself as the dialectical illusion that it was – an illusion which wecould no more dispel, however, than the traveller in the desert is able to banishwhat he may know to be nothing more than a mirage vision of the oasis thatseems to present itself before him. No doubt, the Transcendental Idealist way ofrescuing Reason from its own tendency to self-inflicted paradox gave rise in itsturn to notorious puzzles of its own – in particular, of course, that of under-standing how a rationally determined action can be at once self-initiated and yet,qua spatio-temporally situated event, stand in fully determinate causal relations toall other such events. Even so, Kant made it clear that he did not so much see thisdeeply rooted tendency of Reason to turn back upon itself as potentially destruc-tive of all attempts at reasoning, but rather as constituting some sort of barrier orlimit to the natural human drive to push the achievements of rational under-standing ever deeper and further. As he put it in the last sentence but one of the

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Groundwork, ‘while we do not comprehend the practical unconditioned necessity ofthe moral imperative, we do comprehend its incomprehensibility’ (Kant 1948:131); and this, he thought – at that point at any rate – was as much as anyonecould fairly or sensibly demand of human reason.

The deconstructive worry – not just that it is of the very nature of rationalenquiry that it should lead us into making rationally unsubstantiatable claims inanswer to certain rationally unsatisfiable but rationally insistent demands, butthat ‘every form of discourse can be shown to contain within itself the elementsof its own self-undoing’ – insinuates itself as an apparently more general andthus even more destabilising one. As in the case of Transcendental or Dialecticalparadox, the suggestion is not that so-called rational arguments can never besecured as valid within the contexts of their particular construction, but ratherthat these contexts are always limited and can never themselves be finallysecured against all possible rival overlapping contexts. If too much weight isplaced on any key term or terms central to any given body of discourse, this willtend to give way to a kind of dispersal of its constitutive semantic elements, eachof them straying off into a diversity of associations, all of them different andsome of them in the last resort irreconcilable with each other. One may think byanalogy of trying to walk through an area of marshy land, characterised by rela-tively resistant tufts of bog-grass interspersed with patches of waterlogging moss.If one keeps on moving as one passes from tuft to tuft, one may hope to keepone’s feet dry; if, however, one looks to rest with both feet firmly placed on oneand the same tuft with all one’s weight thus resting upon it, one finds it sinkingbeneath one. There are no foundations on which one might ultimately rely – or,as it is often put when the question is one of analysing bodies of discourse ratherthan of walking through bogs, there are no ultimately first origins.4

(It is evident that the term ‘discourse’ is no more immune to the pressures ofwhat has been called ‘dissemination’ than is any other apparently key term. Toallow myself a purely anecdotal personal memory, I remember asking MichelFoucault once what exactly he understood by ‘discourse’, a term of which hehad made some not inconsiderable and well-known use. His reply was that,finding himself with a need for some such general term (of art rather than ofscience, as it were), he had realised that while nearly all the other potentiallyavailable expressions – ‘conceptual scheme’, ‘weltanschaung’, ‘language’,‘symbolic system’, and so on – had already acquired their own type-cast identi-ties, the term ‘discourse’, on the other hand, still seemed to be relativelyunencumbered and available; and so ‘discourse’ it was.)

What I have called the deconstructive worry, then, does not so much presentitself as one that calls into question the possibility of establishing compellingsequences of valid argument within particular contexts or structures of discourseinsofar as they may be taken as given and the meanings of the key terms of theargument may be taken as locally stable. Rather it calls into question the stabilityor reliability of any such context-boundaries as such – including, of course, thoseof the very context within which this worry is itself raised. The implicationseems to be that the choice of contexts (of discursive viewpoints, conceptual


frameworks or whatever), from within which to characterise the world and one’sfield of action within it, is simply up for grabs.

But here we seem to be doing no more than return, after a set of variations, asit were, to a restatement (if perhaps in a different key) of the central relativisttheme. Whatever the aspect of the world with which we may be concerned, ourswill not be the only way in which it may be characterised; as the world itself isnever going to come down decisively in favour of one characterisation rather thananother, each may have equal claim to be true relative to the perspective fromwhich it is proposed. What, then, may justify the suggestion that two differentcharacterisations may yet apply to one and the same aspect of the world otherthan the evidently unsustainable assumption that it may be possible to identifyaspects of the world independently of any and all of the ways in which they maybe characterised? The answer lies somewhere in the fact that, however differentthe characterisations of the world by people coming from different cultural (orideological) backgrounds may be, no one would or could remark on these differ-ences other than on the fundamentally inescapable assumption that they do afterall live in the same world. We come back once again to the facts that two differentcharacterisations of a world – of an aspect of the world – can only present them-selves as potentially rival alternatives to each other insofar as they overlap to atleast some significant degree; and that overlaps there are bound to be as a neces-sary condition of anyone actually being able to recognise the very existence of acharacterisation – a discourse, a language – other than his or her own.

What all this amounts to, then, is something like this. We have to accept boththat there can in principle be no one account of the way that the world is which isuniquely 'true to the facts' in a way that entails that all other accounts must be erro-neous or 'false'; and that there can in principle be no chain of reasoning whosevalidity depends on the meanings of the key structural terms of its argument thatmay not be liable to slippage when attempts are made to deploy it universally acrossall possible identifiable contexts. We have, furthermore, to accept that these limita-tions hold reflexively even for the very same argument which purports to makethem explicit. Nevertheless, this does not and can not mean that 'the way that theworld actually is' may not always be capable of showing an account of how it issupposed to be, to be in fact incontrovertibly false - and that no matter the perspec-tive from which that account may be proposed. No doubt, anyone reallydetermined, or in some sense compelled, to hold on to such a would-be world-descriptive and explanatory account, may always be able to find available within itresources enabling them somehow to 'show' that what appear to be falsifying factsare either not what they seem to be or are not really falsificatory. But if discursivecommunication of any sort is to maintained, sthere must always be, if not a theoret-ically definitive, at any rate a practically effective limit to such apparent'resourcefulness'.Where that limit comes will depend on the essential practical needsor purposes of the person or people concerned and on how close is the bearing ofthe world-description in question on the nature of the outcomes that would makefor the success or failure, satisfaction or neglect of the needs and purposes in ques-tion. We have to accept both that there can in principle be no one account of the

220 Alan Montefiore

way that the world is which is uniquely ‘true to the facts’ in a way that entails that allother accounts must be erroneous or ‘false’; and that there can in principle be nochain of reasoning whose validity depends on the meanings of the key structuralterms of its argument that may not be liable to slippage when attempts are made todeploy it universally across all possible identifiable contexts. We have, furthermore,to accept that these limitations hold reflexively even for the very same argumentwhich purports to make them explicit. Nevertheless, this does not and cannot meanthat ‘the way that the world actually is’ may not always be capable of showing anaccount of how it is supposed to be, to be in fact incontrovertibly false – and that nomatter the perspective from which that account may be proposed. No doubt,anyone really determined, or in some sense compelled, to hold on to such a would-be world-descriptive and explanatory account, may always be able to find availablewithin it resources enabling them somehow to ‘show’ that what appear to be falsi-fying facts are either not what they seem to be or are not really falsificatory. But ifdiscursive communication of any sort is to be maintained, there must always be, ifnot a theoretically definitive, at any rate a practically effective limit to such apparent‘resourcefulness’. Where that limit comes will depend on the essential practicalneeds or purposes of the person or people concerned and on how close the bearingof the world-description in question on the nature of the outcomes that wouldmake for the success or failure, satisfaction or neglect of these needs and purposesconcerned. In the last resort, however, both social and physical survival depend onthe ability to adapt to the way which the world shows itself to be, whatever the cate-gories and concepts through which one culture, or world view, or another may havecome to represent it as intelligibly describable.

If this sounds like a return to simple common sense – or perhaps to simplecommon scientific sense, that no doubt is what it is. But it would be quite mistakenfor common sense to feel so reassured as to relapse into complacency. The wholehistory of philosophy is there to teach us that scepticism concerning the existenceof the so-called external world, however implausibly far removed it may seem tothe philosophical eyes of basic common sense, is never finally and definitivelybeaten. And rationally based scepticism as to the powers and trustworthiness ofReason itself will surely prove itself to be at least equally resistant and resilient.

One (philosophical) reason for this lies in the fact that the reasons for doubtingthe apparently universal power of Reason are curiously seductive in their appeal toReason itself. This, however, is but one side of the story. It has become almost acommonplace to note the extent to which the last century has fallen under theinfluence of the great ‘masters of suspicion’, Marx, Freud and (in one of the mostinfluential of his many possible readings) Nietzsche, all of whom, of course, hadtheir roots firmly in the nineteenth century, but whose influence came to what maywell turn out to have been its fullest flowering in the twentieth. The lesson that theyall seemed to teach, each in their own way, was that the reasons that men andwomen give themselves for their actions can never safely be assumed to be their‘real’ motivations, and that people are in general self-mystified. It is only too easyto see how this form of argument too can be given a reflexive and thus a self-undercutting turn. There is even a prima facie common sense version of this general


theme of distrust of conclusive reason and subject-independent truth; for truthand conclusive reasoning, it may quite plausibly be argued, are simply matters ofwhat works best in the majority view of the relevant community. The most influen-tial representative of this version of suspicion of the would-be universal is nodoubt Richard Rorty. But once again even his brand of pragmatism has its roots inthe nineteenth century.

At the level of philosophical theory, one of the most closely argued episodes ofrecent times in this no doubt unending struggle between reason and its would-besuicidal doppelgänger is that which is fought out in Bernard Williams’ last bookTruth and Truthfulness (to which Rorty himself devoted an attentive and more thanrespectful review in the London Review of Books).5 The stakes, however, are by nomeans only theoretical. There is undeniably a certain very real sense of liberationand exhilaration to be found in casting off the ‘constraints’ of reason and in givingoneself over to the release of one’s emotions, whether in individual passion, in theforgetfulness of self that comes with the feeling of belonging, as a mere part, to agreater whole of instinctive solidarity or in those forms of self-forgetfulness that areto be found in one or other of the many techniques of self-intoxication. (None ofthese possibilities, moreover, is exclusive of any of the others.)

There is a clearly romantic version of this abandonment of reason to passion.There is an even more clearly sinister version, one that has been exhibited andexperienced far too often and on a monstrous scale over the last century. One wayof reacting to what may very naturally and easily be perceived as the irrationalismof the philosophical and associated discourses of suspicion is to see them as bothan expression of and, in no doubt quite unintended effect, a further encourage-ment to these ultimately catastrophic excesses. It is against this background thatone may most naturally understand the rooted opposition to all such discourses ofa philosopher such as Habermas, who has experienced what it is to grow up insuch an excessive society, and his unvarying persistence in defence of an ideal ofrational communication premised on the assumption that, with sufficient patienceand a sufficient faith in its possibility in principle, mutual understanding may be areal practical – moral, social and political – possibility for all who are prepared toseek it. (It goes without saying that in practice such mutual understanding cannever be taken for granted or assumed to be definitive or complete.)

What, then, one may ask, of the prospects for mutual understanding betweenthe philosophers of reason and those of rational suspicion of reason and ‘toomuch’ rationality? This is itself, however, a question-begging question to ask. It istrue that, at first sight, it may in general appear to be fairly clear which philoso-phers are on the one side and which on the other. On the one hand, for example,we would seem to recognise a Derrida and on the other a Habermas, on the onehand a Rorty and on the other a Williams; and it would not be difficult tocontinue the list. But the idea that all philosophers are to be understood asbelonging fairly and squarely either to one side or to the other is surely just anillusion. Kant – on my reading of him at any rate – may be seen as standing onboth sides of the fence, if not at once, at any rate in unavoidable and everrepeated succession. There is the Kant of the Enlightenment, the Kant for

222 Alan Montefiore

whom the possession of Reason was at the very core of the essentially humancapacity for autonomy and for an ever-advancing organisation of knowledge – aReason, moreover, that demanded a rationally acceptable answer to all the ques-tions that were of its very nature to put. Equally insistently, however, there is theKant for whom this very Reason leads as of necessity to necessarily mutuallyirreconcilable answers to some of its most crucial questions, a Reason which wasthus itself the source of inescapable paradox and of the self-frustrationcontained in the knowledge that ultimately the only attainable certainty was tobe found in the knowledge of its own ineluctable limits.

On such a reading, Kant, for one, is to be seen rather both as a philosopher ofreason and as one of rational self-suspicion. Should one allow oneself thestylistic gloss of saying ‘at one and the same time both a philosopher of reasonand one of rational self-suspicion’? To this question there can be no one clearand comfortable answer; and this for two characteristically Kantian reasons. Thefirst is that for anyone who takes Transcendental Idealism seriously, reasoninghas itself to be reckoned an inherently paradoxical ‘activity’. For reasoning, assomething which one does as opposed to the structures of argument that onemay hope will result, has surely to be understood as an activity taking place inthe successiveness of time, moving on from whatever its starting point throughsubsequent stages to whatever may present itself as a conclusion. But on Kant’saccount of knowledge and of the world of experience, whatever takes place intime has necessarily to be understood as standing in relations of causal interde-pendence with all other temporally situated events or phenomena. The Reason‘within him’, however, is precisely that whereby man knows himself to share inthe domain of autonomy and of freedom from ‘merely’ causal determination. Inbrief, the relations between the temporality of his embodiment and his essen-tially non-causal and non-temporal capacities as a reasoning agent that go tomake up what Kant sees as the fundamentally dual aspect character of man lie –notoriously – at the very heart of his problematic. Thus, to characterise Kantover-simply as both a philosopher of reason and one of rational self-suspicion atthe same time is to risk softening the sharpness of the paradox inherent in thisdouble characterisation to the point of losing it altogether.

The second reason may be seen as yet another reflection of the fundamentaland essentially self-conflictual Kantian commitment to paradox. It is to beremembered that there is nothing half-hearted about him either in his role asphilosopher of reason or in that of one of rational self-suspicion. In the first ofthese roles, it is impossible for him to countenance flat and outright contradic-tions. But to assert the positions of confident Enlightenment rationality and ofalready post-Enlightenment rational self-suspicion in one and the same conjunc-tion – to maintain them at one and the same time – is precisely to commitoneself to an explicitly self-contradictory position. And this is something whichKant in the first of his two roles clearly cannot do.

So the question of the prospects for mutual understanding between the philoso-phers of reason and those of rational suspicion of reason turns out to be in effectthe same as that of the self-understanding of a philosopher such as the Kant of my


reading. There can in principle, it would seem to me, be no one conclusive answerto be given to this question in either of its two versions. For what after all can bemeant by ‘understanding’ in this sort of context? Should one be thinking of thekind of (rational) understanding whereby one may see how a given argument worksand why its conclusion follows validly from its premises; or of that whereby one maygrasp the nature of the causal impacts that conspire, or may be so organised, as tobring about some given state of affairs; or, again, of that understanding, more akinto a certain kind of human insight, whereby one may appreciate how and why agiven human being – who may, of course, be oneself – sees and feels the world inthe way that he or she does (without necessarily approving or supporting the atti-tudes involved)? And what might any of these have to do with what one may havein mind when speaking of people reaching a common understanding with eachother in the sense of seeming at least to come to some sort of common accord?

Many people must have had the experience of finding equally convincing thearguments leading to opposite and mutually incompatible conclusions and beingquite unable to come to any rational decision between them. One may, more-over, find each of these incompatible conclusions to be both theoretically andpractically equally attractive – it is after all an uncomfortably common and veryhuman experience to find oneself in a position of wanting both to have one’scake and to eat it. And although such an outcome may appear to be both theo-retically irrational and practically unattainable, it may be not at all difficult to seewhat are the causal factors that lie behind and explain the existence of this split-minded state of affairs. In one’s own case such self-insight may exist without itsnecessarily having any tendency whatsoever to bring about a resolution of theconflict. Where the conflict is one between one’s own beliefs or preferences andthose of another, the fact that one believes oneself to ‘understand’ both thereasons and the effective causes of the other’s beliefs and commitments wouldequally seem to have no necessary bearing on either one’s instinctive or practicalattitude towards the disagreement. One may sympathise or even empathise whileyet continuing to disagree and even to oppose, or one may strongly disapproveand feel a possibly violent antipathy, while yet refraining from any active opposi-tion – just, indeed, as one may simply accept one’s own inability to decidebetween the alternatives in question or, on the other hand, feel strongly self-crit-ical or even disgusted with one’s own rational or psychological inability to decide.

Thus a Kant who had been somehow persuaded of the rational untenability ofhis own key distinction between the phenomenal and noumenal realms might thenfind himself completely stuck in the position of being unable to reject either of themutually incompatible but apparently compelling conclusions of his various anti-nomic arguments; and he might indeed understand very well both just why it wasthat he was thus stuck and the psychological factors that might perhaps lead him, ifhe was forced in practice to choose, to opt for the one solution and his interlocutorfor the other. But once again – though for different reasons – what he cannot inprinciple do is at one and the same time remain stuck in a position of both tryingto reason his way forward and yet of accepting that Reason has run into its

224 Alan Montefiore

inevitable dead end and that it can do no more for him. Either he continues tolook for rational accommodations; or he despairs of the search.

Or so it might seem. In fact, of course, the Kant of my reading does do both ofthese things – but it could be seriously misleading to suggest that he might do so ‘atone and the same time’. What he may be said to know – however uncomfortably –at one and the same time is that he is fated always to be moving on, forwards andback; and then forwards and back again. This is not a knowledge to which he cangive properly coherent expression either in the immediate temporality of his ownthinking as he experiences it or in the non-temporal mode of a non-self-contradic-tory conjunctive proposition. It is the underlying knowledge that there are nodefinitive answers to be found, no ultimately objective ground to be finally secured,no absolute or ‘God’s-eye’ perspective to be attained; and yet with it also theknowledge that the existence of all of these remain as the indispensable postulateand goal of a never to be abandoned search. And if this is the unstable stable‘position’ of the Kant of my preferred reading, it does after all provide the groundfor a sort of self-understanding, even if one definitively resistant to any definitiveform of articulation; and with it the possibility at least of arriving at a similarcommon understanding between a philosopher who has chosen to take his stand inthe name of Reason and one who, at that particular moment at any rate, iscommitted to exposing its many possible weaknesses and deceits. For althougheach of them may find themselves unable conclusively to declare it, they may eachof them yet share the unstatable knowledge that by the time they have turned thenext corner they may have found themselves to have exchanged positions.

Notes

1 In saying this, one has not, of course, a comparable benefit of historical hindsight.2 In practice, of course, most deconstructionist writing avoids making general theoret-

ical pronouncements of this sort, but applies itself rather to the detailed examinationand deconstruction of particular texts.

3 London Review of Books, 20 February 2003, p. 17, para. 2.4 The Bible tells us that ‘In the beginning was the word’, and certainly practising

Derridians place immense emphasis on the actual words of the texts with which andon which they work. But if the concept or notion of a word is taken to include that ofits meaning, then the words of a text can provide no more secure or non-dissemi-nating foundations for their work than can anything else; and if the meaningfulness ofa word as such is not to be included in the very meaning of the word ‘word’, then weare left talking of ‘mere’ physical inscriptions, the ‘merely’ contingent vehicles ofpossible readings.

5 London Review of Books, 31 October 2002, pp. 13–15.

Bibliography

Hume, David (1978) A Treatise of Human Nature, 2nd edn, ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge, London:Clarendon Press.

Kant, Immanuel (1933) Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp-Smith, London:Macmillan.

—— (1948) The Moral Law: Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, trans. HerbertJames Paton, London: Hutchinson.


In section 5 of In Defence of Objectivity (2003: 166–169), Andrew Collier sketchesout a distinction between two types of objectivity which leads to the centre bothof his own thinking and of the issues at stake between realist and related posi-tions on the one hand and relativistic, deconstructionist or antifoundationalistpositions on the other. As Kate Soper and other contributors to this volume havenoted, one of the key elements of Collier’s thinking is his stress on a self-distancing relation to objects.1 This emphasis, paralleled by, for example, thequotations from Macmurray in section 4 of In Defence of Objectivity, or Adorno’sfrequent reference to ‘what the object has by itself ’, as distinct from our subjec-tivistic or, worse, narcissistic relation to it, gives Collier an interesting andsensitive angle of approach to existentialist thought, sharing elements of itscritique of excessive reflection and what Kierkegaard called calculation, whilewishing to curb its excessively voluntaristic approach to knowledge and practice.

Collier attempts to capture this tension in terms of a distinction betweenintentional objectivity, which is object-related in the sense of Husserl andBrentano, and a more distanced reflexive objectivity which is driven by ques-tions, often sceptical ones, about the nature of our relationship to the allegedobject, its status and the very possibility of an epistemic or practical relation to it.Objectivity in this second sense needs to be kept in its place:

It is useful in showing us how intentional objectivity goes wrong – that is,how is it that our thoughts and feelings are sometimes merely subjective inthe sense that they don’t correspond to their objects and are to be explainedby the nature of the subject rather than that of the object? … [But] [w]hatreflexive objectivity can never be is the criterion of intentional objectivity.

(Collier 2003: 168)

Collier illustrates this distinction via the difference between science and the soci-ology of science, or between theology and religious studies. Whether the scienceis good science or not is a scientific question, though the sociologist may be ableto explain after the event why it was good or bad, and even to suggest in advancesome reasons why we might reasonably expect it to be good or bad. Similarly, theexistence of gods and so forth is a question for theology, while the discipline of

15 Intentional and reflexiveobjectivitySome reflections

William Outhwaite

Religious Studies is concerned with religious beliefs, practices and experiences inisolation from their alleged objects. ‘A sociologist of science may be a good scien-tist, but only by switching off the sociology; an adept at Religious Studies may bea good theologian, but only by switching off the Religious Studies’ (2003: 169).More generally, Collier suggests that ‘It is a specific feature of human practicethat we can always monitor what we are doing. It is another feature of humanpractice that we always do things worse when we do them reflexively. A moni-tored activity is a badly done activity’ (2003: 169).

In this brief contribution I want to suggest that, while Andrew is on to some-thing of unquestionable importance in making this distinction, the ways in whichhe does so are unduly sharp, and that the relation is not so much between twomutually exclusive types of objectivity between which we can only ‘switch’, as acontinuum between the wholly unreflective practice (which I might have calledanimal if I had not been taught not to by Andrew, Ted Benton, and others), anda reflexivity so intense that it entirely inhibits the making of claims about theworld or any intervention in it.2 And contrary to the view that shifts from onekind of objectivity to another are discontinuous, I want to suggest the alternativeimage of a permanent oscillation between different forms of reflexive moni-toring relation.

If I were speaking these words to you rather than writing them, for example, I would have to pay some more or less conscious attention to my level of audi-bility, and I would be looking for reinforcing feedback that I had your attention.Three decades of lecturing to mostly impassive audiences does not diminish thisdesire for feedback, and experimental analysis of telephone conversations showshow quickly we become nervous if there is no response at all to our monologues.More complicated issues of whether I am writing this text as clearly as possibleor whether I am deliberately indulging in obscurity in order to impress andbamboozle you are not so much an interruption to the writing process as itsmore or less permanent accompaniment. Higher-order reflections on the natureof academic debate in the early twentieth century, the status of realism as aphilosophical position and the degree to which it is known in different parts ofthe contemporary world, and so on, are also ‘always on’ in the background, as Ithink about the intended audience for what I am writing. In what follows I shallillustrate this line of argument a bit more fully in relation to three major con-temporary social theorists, Jürgen Habermas, Pierre Bourdieu and AnthonyGiddens, whose work is paradigmatic of the very widespread use of the termreflexivity in contemporary thought,3 and I shall close with what I consider amore problematic and challenging case, that of Karl Mannheim.

As I have argued elsewhere, the theme of reflection is central to Habermas’sthought, and in particular to what he has come to call a model of rational recon-struction (Outhwaite 2000). His early critiques of technocratic and decisionisticpolitics are based on their neglect of reflection, as is his closely related critique ofpositivism. ‘That we deny reflection is positivism’ (Habermas 1968: preface). Themore precise language of rational reconstruction which he develops from themid-1970s expresses the epistemic dimension of this approach, while his model

Intentional and reflexive objectivity 227

of communicative action developed at the same time is intended to capture itspractical dimension. Habermas understands his theory of communicative actionnot as an abstract normative theory of how we ought to behave, such as theoriesbased on an initial decision to ‘take the moral point of view’, but rather as areconstruction of our existing practices. As he put it in an interview,

I am not saying that people should act communicatively, but that they must.When parents bring up their children, when living generations appropriatethe knowledge handed down by their predecessors, when individuals andgroups cooperate … they must act communicatively. There are elementarysocial functions which can only be fulfilled via communicative action. In ourintersubjectively shared lifeworlds which overlap with one another there liesa broad background consensus without which everyday action simply couldnot work.

(Habermas 1994 [1991]: 111–112)

Formal processes of argumentation, whether in everyday life or in specialiseddomains of morality and politics, are the exception, ‘islands in the sea of praxis’.

Habermas is therefore rejecting an approach which sees communicativeaction (which he distinguishes from merely self-interested or ‘strategic’ action,and from norm-conforming and expressive action) as a special activitybelonging to a different realm from that of everyday practice. In stressing thepervasiveness of processes of reflection and justification in everyday life he isalso rejecting the conclusions of Niklas Luhmann’s system theory, that moderndifferentiated societies consist of subsystems which have no common languagein which to communicate. At the same time, however, we cannot simply affirmthe model of individual or collective subjectivity which is based on the ‘philos-ophy of consciousness’ derived from Descartes and Kant, in which a subjectreflects on its relation to its own representations of objects. Neo-Marxist philos-ophies of praxis, Habermas believes, remain limited by this perspective, whileon the other hand many modern theories give up on subjectivity and rationalityaltogether. What is required is what he calls in The Philosophical Discourse of

Modernity ‘another way out of the philosophy of the subject’, one which recon-structs in a more complex intersubjective model the reflective operationspreviously imputed to an isolated subject or logos: ‘concrete forms of life replacetranscendental consciousness in its function of creating unity’ (Habermas1985b: 326) Although, as we have seen, Habermas rejects a simple conceptionof societies as subjects, his conception of ‘undamaged intersubjectivity’, inwhich he now attempts to render the idea of emancipation, is grounded in thelife-histories, retrospective and prospective, of individuals and collectivities.‘Forms of life, like life-histories, crystallise around particular identities’(Habermas 1994 [1991]: 48).

The universalism which Habermas upholds does not mean the authoritarianimposition of a particular conception with universalistic pretensions. As he put itin an interview in 1988 with Jean-Marc Ferry:

228 William Outhwaite

What does universalism mean? It means that one relativises one’s own formof existence in relation to the legitimate claims of other forms of life, thatone attributes equal rights to the alien and the other, with all their idiosyn-crasies and incomprehensible aspects, that one does not stick rigidly to theuniversalisation of ones own identity and precisely does not separate outwhat deviates from it, that the spheres of tolerance must become infinitelywider than they are today – all this is what is meant by moral universalism.

(Habermas 1990: 153)

This also means that our attitude to established structures and traditions canonly be a cautious and reflective one. Habermas stressed this earlier in the sameinterview with Ferry:

The horror [of the Holocaust RWO] took place without interrupting thepeaceful breath of everyday life. Ever since then, a conscious life is no longerpossible without a mistrust directed at continuities which unquestioninglyassert themselves and purport to derive their validity from their unques-tioned character.

(1990: 150)

What Habermas is offering then, is in a sense a philosophy of reflection whichdevelops outside the limits of what has traditionally been understood by thephilosophy of reflection, consciousness and the subject. It is a philosophy or asociology for a world of the kind described, for example, by Ulrich Beck andAnthony Giddens, with the notion that modernity has become reflexive.4 This isa world in which individuals are increasingly thrown onto their own resources todefine their own social relations – what Habermas (1990: 88) calls ‘risky self-steering by means of a highly abstract ego-identity’. The process itself was builtinto modernity from the beginning and described as such by Max Weber andothers at the turn of the century, notably in the concept of rationalisation. Therehas been a tendency to stress the promethean and world-making aspect of thisprocess, but the ‘moderns’ captured in Max Weber’s concept of ascetic protes-tantism and in Lucien Goldmann’s analysis of Jansenism were also racked withanxieties and self-doubt which for theological reasons they could not acknowl-edge. This negative or tragic consciousness of modernity eventually developed,in Romanticism, into aesthetic and often ironical forms. The tension betweenthese two aspects of modernity continues, and many of the earlier descriptions,with their contradictory emphases, seem to become truer than ever as modernitydevelops in its many and varied forms.

But if Habermas’s models of communicative action and reconstruction, andtheir application in his theories of discourse ethics, discursive democracy andconstitutional patriotism, involve reflection and reflexivity at all levels, histhinking is perhaps uncomfortably dualistic in one aspect of the way in which hetheorises reflection. Habermas regularly invokes a distinction, derived no doubtfrom social phenomenology, between a second- and a third-person orientation or


between that of participants and observers. In the former, we interact with theother as an interlocutor; in the latter, we move towards a more distanced inter-pretation or explanation of his or her behaviour. Once again, however, it seemsto me that the complexities of taking the role of the other involve a complexinterplay between these perspectives, to such an extent that their analyticaldistinctiveness is rapidly obscured, rather as the distinctness of the left- andright-eye view is effaced in stereoscopic vision.

My second theorist of reflexivity is the late Pierre Bourdieu, who explicitlydecribed his sociology as reflexive (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992). Althoughthis exphasis grew stronger with time (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992), the motifis present even in early works such as Le métier de sociologue (Bourdieu et al. 1968).Here Bourdieu shows how a vigorously, even brutally, Durkheimian andBachelardian conception of the separation of social science from everydaythought can be combined with a sensitivity to issues of reflexivity and a non-defeatist strategy for handling them. Bourdieu’s rejection of structuralistobjectivism had been partly driven by an awareness of the gap between formalrules, whether located in the heads of actors or those of social scientists, andthe reality of practice(s). He was, therefore, suspicious both of sociologicalcommon sense and of actors’ concepts, and also of the formal models designedto replace them.

the sociologist who refuses the controlled, conscious construction of hisdistance from the real and his action on reality may not only impose ques-tions on his subjets that their experience does not pose them and omit thequestions that it does pose them, but he may also naively pose them thequestions he poses himself about them, through a positivist confusionbetween the questions that objectively arise for them and the questions theyconsciously pose themselves.

(Bourdieu et al. 1968: 65 [1991: 38])

The objectivity of science cannot be built on such shaky foundations as theobjectivity of scientists. The gains from epistemological reflection cannot bereally embodied in practice until the social conditions are established forepistemological control, i.e. for a generalized exchange of critiques armedwith, among other things, the sociology of sociological practices.

(Bourdieu et al. 1968: 109 [1991: 74])

For Bourdieu, the sociology of knowledge is not a mere specialist field of thesubject but rather an essential preliminary and accompaniment to sociologicalinvestigation. Like budding psychoanalysts who have to undertake a ‘traininganalysis’ with an established practitioner, all sociologists, he argued, shouldundertake a more or less formal autosocioanalysis. It is of course no accidentthat Bourdieu cut his teeth in ethnographic fieldwork, where the interplay andtension between the horizons of expectations of the anthropologist and theculture under investigation are explicitly thematised as an epistemic resource.


Bourdieu’s response to ‘postmodern’ sociology and anthropology is thus thathe has been long aware of these issues and drawn more appropriate conclusionsthan the postmodernists. He insists that his is an ‘anti-narcissitic’ reflexivity that‘has little in common with a complacent and intimist return upon the privateperson of the sociologist or with a search for the intellectual Zeitgeist thatanimates his or her work’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 72). Such indulgences,like a concentration on the ‘poetics’ of ethnographic writing, ‘open the door to aform of thinly disguised nihilistic relativism … that stands as the polar oppositeto a truly reflexive social science’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 72).

This orientation can be seen, for example, in Bourdieu’s increasingly promi-nent statements in the 1980s and onwards about the roles and responsibilities ofintellectuals, beginning with an interview with Didier Eribon in Le Monde in May1980. In response to Eribon’s suggestion that his polemics in Le Sens pratique

(Bourdieu 1980) and elsewhere come close to anti-intellectualism, Bourdieureplies with a denunciation of the closed circuits of mutual admiration andsupport among intellectuals which ‘make a Golden Delicious pass for an apple’and by a summary of his more formal analysis of the class position of intellec-tuals as a dominated fraction of the dominant class – this ambiguous situationexplaining many of the political positions they take up. But he goes on to saythat their understanding of this situation gives intellectuals a certain possibility offreeing themselves from it:

the privilege to be placed in conditions which enable them to work at under-standing their specific and generic determinations. And thereby to liberatethemselves from them (at least partially) and to offer means of liberation toothers. The critique of intellectuals, if it is a critique, is the other side of ademand (exigence), an expectation.

Bourdieu’s own critical interventions in the public sphere should be understoodin this spirit. And in another interview (Le Monde, 14 March 1992) he suggests:

There is no effective democracy without a true critical countervailing power.The intellectual is one, and of the first importance. … I wish that writers,artists, philosophers and scientists could get a hearing in all the areas ofpublic life in which they are competent. I believe that everyone could benefita lot from the extension into political life of the logic of intellectual life, ofargumentation and refutation. Today, it is the logic of politics, that ofdenunciation and defamation, which often spreads into intellectual life. Itwould be good for the ‘creators’ to fulfil their function of a public serviceand sometimes of public safety.

Bourdieu’s model of reflexive sociology has been enormously fruitful in his ownand others’s research. Like Habermas, however, he displays a certain inflexibilityin one aspect which must surely be central to any reflexive sociology; the lay soci-ology practised by social actors themselves. Again the psychoanalytic comparison


is relevant: lay sociology, like lay (self-) analysis is seen as an object of suspicionand a likely source of distortion. As he and his colleagues put it in 1968:

It is perhaps the curse of the human sciences that they are concerned with an

object which speaks. When the sociologist believes that he is deriving from the factsthe problematic and the theoretical concepts which enable him to constructand analyse the facts, he is always in danger of drawing them from the mouthof his informants. It is not enough for the sociologist to listen to his subjects, tofaithfully record their statements and their reasons, for him to explain theirconduct and even the reason they propose: in doing so, he risks substitutingpurely and simply for his own preconceptions the preconceptions of those he isstudying, or a falsely scholarly and falsely objective mixture of the spontaneoussociology of the ‘scholar’ and the spontaneous sociology of his object.

(Bourdieu et al. 1968: 56–57)5

Thus, as he put it in another text published in English in the same year, theanthropologist

gives no credit to the representation the subjects form of their situation but,rather, tries to explain it. However, anthropological science would notperhaps deserve any consideration if it were not its task to restore the agentsto the sense of their practice by unifying, against the appearances of theirirreducible opposition, the truth of the lived-through significance ofconduct and the truth of the objective conditions that make such conductand the experience of it possible and probable.

(Bourdieu 1968: 705)

The same motivation, I think, can be seen in one of his later works, La Misère du

monde (Bourdieu 1993), even though the emphasis there is much more on thespontaneous expression of their situation by his respondents. As in his earlierwork, however, Bourdieu’s suspicion was directed primarily at what he calleddoxa, the taken-for-granted and shared assumptions of interviewer and inter-viewee and the false reassurance that the social scientist has captured theobjective reality of the respondents.

On this issue Giddens is a good deal more flexible. Influenced, likeBourdieu, both by structuralism and by the sociologies of Goffman andGarfinkel, he gives more weight to the knowledgeability of actors and to theenabling as well as constraining effects of structures. And the spread of socio-logical and other social scientific language into the life-world appears inGiddens’ analysis less as a methodological danger for the researcher and moreas an important aspect of the reflexivity of modernity and of modern self-identities. For Giddens:

The concepts and theories invented by social scientists circulate in and outof the social world they are coined to analyse. The best and most original


ideas in the social sciences, if they have any purchase on the reality it is theirbusiness to capture, tend to become appropriated and utilised by socialactors themselves.

(1987: 19)

This process has been described by the French sociologist Anne Mesny (1999a,1999b) as the production of a ‘lay sociological imagination’. This of courseraises the possibility of major research projects on the ways in which publicdiscourse about the social and political world has been shaped by more academicinfluences.6 And while we have mostly abandoned the simple faith in the rapidtranslation of science into society in programmes such as Comtean orDurkheimian positivism or Marxist scientific socialism, and have been led byFoucault to a sharper awareness of the disciplinary role of academic disciplines,there seems no reason to doubt the ultimately beneficial effects of the extensionof social scientific knowledge in these areas. As Marx classically put it, ignorancenever helped anyone.

I shall end with a discussion of one of the most problematic but tantalisingattempts to enlist reflexivity into the pursuit of objectivity, Karl Mannheim’sconception of relationism which he put forward in Ideology and Utopia (Mannheim1925). Mannheim developed his sociology of knowledge out of what we wouldnow probably call a post-Marxist awareness of the relativity or perspectivalquality of knowledge and the relativisation of knowledge-claims to their socialbase in classes, ethnic groups, generations, and so on. This is generally, andrightly, seen as a major stage in the development of relativistic theories of knowl-edge where, as in Berger and Luckmann’s Social Construction of Reality (1967),knowledge simply means whatever is counted as knowledge. What Mannheimcalled relationism is often presented as simply a moderating gloss on this basicmessage. But Mannheim, rightly or wrongly, had something else in mind. Thechapter of Ideology and Utopia published under the title ‘The Prospects ofScientific Politics’ translates more accurately as ‘How is Politics Possible as aScience?’7 Here, and in the immediately preceding pages in which he presentshis conception of relationism, one can see Mannheim moving towards what hecalled ‘a new type of objectivity’ (Mannheim 1931, 1925). This is essentially anattempt to salvage a defensible conception of totality constructed via a criticalanalysis of perspectival knowledge.

Totality in the sense in which we conceive it is not an immediate and eter-nally valid vision of reality attributable only to a divine eye. It is not aself-contained or stable view. On the contrary, a total view implies both theassimilation and transcendence of the limitations of particular points ofview. It represents the continuous process of the expansion of knowledge,and has as its goal not achievement of a super-temporally valid conclusionbut the broadest possible extension of our horizon of vision.

(Mannheim 1960 [1925] : 94–95)


I shall not discuss here the massive volume of criticism which Mannheim’sconception attracted, from Horkheimer (1930) onwards. This has focused gener-ally, and with good reason, on his residual idealism and relativism, histechnocratic inclinations which became more prominent in his writing after hismove to the UK and his notoriously problematic faith in the ‘relatively free-floating’ position of the intelligentsia. I believe however that it is possible todefend something like Mannheim’s conception of reflexive objectivity, in situa-tions where we are concerned to understand and incorporate, rather than simplyendorse or reject, a variety of different perspectives.8 Janet Wolff (1975) andSusan Hekman (1986) have shown in different ways how hermeneutics and thesociology of knowledge can be reworked into new and creative configurations. Adefensible reconstruction of Mannheim’s conception would paradoxically bringhim to the aspiration, if not the achievement, which his alter ego Georg Lukácsattributed to Marx:

Classical economics and its vulgarisers have always considered the develop-ment of capitalism from the point of view of the individual capitalist …Marx’s Capital represents a radical break with this procedure. Not that heacts the part of an agitator who treats every aspect exclusively from theproletarian standpoint. Such a one-sided approach would only result in anew vulgar economics with plus and minus signs reversed. His method is toconsider the problems of the whole of capitalist society as problems of theclasses constituting it, the classes being regarded as totalities.

(Lukács 1923 [1971: 28–29])

In terms of Andrew Collier’s distinction, then, I suggest that a disciplined,object-centred approach is strengthened, rather than undermined, by a reflexiveobjectivity which is open to all alternative perspectives and accounts availableand meaningfully conceivable, but which does not nihilistically reject the possi-bility of rational mediation between them.

Notes

1 See, for example, the discussion at the end of section 12 of In Defence of Objectivity.2 For a brilliant example of a strong form of reflexivity applied to the end-of- philos-

ophy debate, see Skinner 1998.3 See, for example, Delanty 1997; May 1998.4 See Beck 1992 [1986]; Giddens 1990, 1991; Beck et al. 1994.5 My translation. I have retained the masculinist formulation which was still dominant

at the time of writing.6 Mesny (1999b: 174–175) gives some examples of the translation of sociological and

psychoanalytic concepts into everyday discourse. See also the special number ofAnthropologies et Sociétés on ‘Savoirs et gouvernementalité (vol. 20–21, 1996). The mostsystematic analyses of this kind so far have been conducted in relation to totalitarianlanguage systems in fascism and state socialism (see, for example, Klemperer 1946,2000; Faye 1972; Thom 1987).


7 This was also incorporated in the title of a play put on in 1930 by Mannheim’sHeidelberg students on the occasion of his departure to a chair in Frankfurt. Theoriginal text is reprinted in Woldring 1986: appendix 2.

8 It is interesting that Habermas, who has for a long time upheld a strong and in myview mistaken conception that we cannot understand assertions without judging theirtruth or falsity (or at least deciding to suspend judgement), has increasingly empha-sised the narrative construction of subjectivities and ‘the incorporation of the other’.For a creative proposal to incorporate a Mannheimian approach into a ‘neoclassical’sociology, conceived as a critical theory of contemporary capitalism, see Eyal et al.2003, especially p. 9.

Bibliography

Beck, Ulrich (1992 [1986]) Risk Society, London: Sage.Beck, Ulrich, Anthony Giddens and Scott Lash (1994) Reflexive Modernization, Cambridge:

PolityBerger, Peter and Thomas Luckmann (1967) Social Construction of Reality, New York:

Doubleday.Bourdieu, Pierre, J.-C. Chamboredon and J.-C. Passeron (1968) Le métier de sociologue, Paris:

Mouton. Translated by Richard Nice as The Craft Of Sociology, Berlin: Gruyter, 1991.Bourdieu, Pierre (1968) ‘Structuralism and Theory of Sociological Knowledge’, Social

Research, 35, 4, pp. 681–706.—— (1980) Le sens pratique, Paris: Minuit. Translated as The Logic of Practice, Cambridge:

Polity, 1990.—— (1987) Choses dites. Translated as In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology,

Cambridge: Polity, 1990.—— (1993) La Misère du monde, Paris: Seuil. Translated as The Weight of the World: Social

Suffering in Contemporary Society, Cambridge: Polity.Bourdieu, Pierre and Wacqant, Loïc (1992) An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, Cambridge:

Polity.Collier, Andrew (2003) In Defence of Objectivity, London: Routledge.Delanty, Gerard (1997) Social Science: Beyond Constructivism And Realism, Buckingham: Open

University Press.Eyal, Gil, Iván Szélenyi and Eleanor Townsley (2003) ‘On Irony: An Invitation to

Neoclassical Sociology’, Thesis Eleven, 73, May, pp. 5–41.Faye, Jean-Pierre (1972) Langages totalitaires, Paris: Hermann.Giddens, Anthony (1987) Social Theory and Modern Sociology, Cambridge: Polity.—— (1990) Consequences of Modernity, Cambridge: Polity.—— (1991) Modernity and Self-Identity, Cambridge: Polity.Habermas, Jürgen (1968) Erkenntnis und Interesse, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Translated as

Knowledge and Human Interests, London: Heinemann, 1972.—— (1985a) Der Philosophische Diskurs der Moderne, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Translated as The

Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987.—— (1985b) Erläuterungen zur Diskursethik, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1991, p. 48. Translated as

Justification and Application, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993.—— (1990) ‘Grenzen des Neohistorismus’, in Die nachholende Revolution: Kleine Politische

Schriften VII, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, p. 153.—— (1994 [1991]) The Past as the Future, Cambridge: Polity.Hekman, Susan (1986) Hermeneutics and the Sociology of Knowledge, Cambridge: Polity.


Horkheimer, Max (1930) ‘Ein Neuer Ideologiebegriff ?’. Translated as ‘A New Concept ofIdeology?’ in Max Horkheimer, Selected Early Writings, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,1993, pp. 129–149.

Klemperer, Victor (1946) L.T.I., Leipzig : Reclam.—— (2000) The Language of the Third Reich LTI, Lingua Tertii Imperii: A Philologist’s Notebook;

translated by Martin Brady, London: Athlone Press.Lukács, Georg (1923) Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein, Berlin: Malik. Translated as History

and Class Consciousness, London: Merlin, 1971.Mannheim, Karl (1925 [1925]) Ideologie und Utopie. Translated as Ideology and Utopia,

London: Routledge, 1960.—— (1931) ‘Wissenssoziologie’. Translated as chapter 5 of Ideology and Utopia, London:

Routledge, 1960.May, Tim (1996) Situating Social Theory, Buckingham:Open University Press.—— (1998) ‘Reflexivity in the Age of Reconstructive Social Science’, International Journal

of Social Research Methodology: Theory and Practice, 1, 1.Mesny, Anne (1999a) ‘The Appropriation of Social Science Knowledge by “Lay People”:

The Development of a Lay Sociological Imagination?’, PhD thesis, University ofCambridge.

—— (1999b) ‘Sociology for Whom? The Role of Sociology in Reflexive Modernity’,Canadian Journal of Sociology, 23, 2/3, pp. 159–178.

Outhwaite, William (2000) ‘Rekonstruktion und methodologischer Dualismus’, in S.Müller-Doohm (ed.), Das Interesse der Vernunft, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, pp. 218–241.

Skinner, Catherine (1998) ‘The “End Of Philosophy Debate”: A Social TheoreticalPerspective’, DPhil Thesis, University of Sussex.

Thom, Françoise (1987) La langue de bois, Paris : Julliard. Translated by Ken Connelly asNewspeak: The Language Of Soviet Communism, London: Claridge, 1989.

Woldring, Henk (1986) Karl Mannheim: The Development of his Thought, New York: StMartin’s.

Wolff, Janet (1975) Hermeneutic Philosophy and the Sociology of Art: An Approach to some of the

Epistemological Problems of the Sociology of Knowledge and the Sociology of Art and Literature,London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.


Part VII

Objectivity and nature

Among Andrew Collier’s most enduring philosophical achievements are hiscontributions to environmental thought, and especially to the linkage of environ-mental concern with socialist politics. In what follows I will focus on the ideasdeveloped in two essays Andrew published in Radical Philosophy in the early 1990s,and his more recent arguments as presented in Being and Worth.

Both the essays in Radical Philosophy were aimed at demonstrating, against awidespread prejudice among greens, the great value of the tradition of thoughtstemming from Marx and Engels for understanding and responding to contem-porary environmental problems. Central to the arguments of these essays were,first, the concept of nature as man’s ‘inorganic body’, drawn from Marx’s earlywritings, and the key distinction between use- and exchange-value, as elaboratedin Marx’s Capital.

The first essay (Collier 1991) explored the implications of Marx’s notion ofman’s inorganic body with the help of ideas drawn from Heidegger andSpinoza. This yields a concept of freedom as identical with our active andpassive powers in relation to other beings, and makes sense of the idea of theinorganic body as a ‘cosmic body’, more extensive than one’s individual ‘actual’body. But this cosmic body is common to all the beings whose interactions itsustains, and so recognising its existence requires us to take into account theeffects of our individual exercises of freedom on the cosmic body we share.Directly political conclusions follow: notably a key distinction between the‘dispersed’ freedoms of the market, celebrated in neo-liberal thought, and the‘gathered’ freedoms of citizens able to decide to preserve or transform theworld they inhabit. Under prevailing conditions dominated by the capricious-ness of market forces ‘one’s freedom to live as one chooses is short term, and inany case not freedom to live in a congenial world one has collaborativelychosen, but freedom to move about in an alien world in pursuit of congenialbits’ (Collier 1991: 8).

The second essay centres on Marx’s distinction between use- and exchange-value. The discussion here aims to demonstrate an intrinsic connection betweenthe forms of rationality associated with exchange value (‘chrematistic calcula-tion’) and, among other things, environmental destruction. Conversely, forms ofrationality associated with use-value, which recognise and value qualitative

16 Realism about the value of nature?Andrew Collier’s environmentalphilosophy

Ted Benton

difference, are subordinated in capitalist societies, but provide the basis for alter-native, non-destructive forms of social life. The economic interactions of marketsociety are governed by exchange-value calculations in which qualitativelydifferent goods are measured in terms of a single unit of value, and in whichlimitless accumulation is promoted. Beyond the market, prevailing moral theo-ries such as utilitarianism, and decision-procedures such as cost-benefit analysisecho the logic of exchange calculation. Chrematistic calculation, the rationalityof the capitalist market, and its moral and political off-shoots, necessarilydevalue or entirely discount what cannot be assimilated to a single unit ofmeasure: ‘Only those effects of the production process which are saleable are theproduct; only what costs or brings in money goes into the calculation. Henceenvironmental effects, among other things, are invisible’ (Collier 1994: 4).

By contrast, use-value rationality involves choices between concrete, complex,multi-faceted whole ways of living: a sort of decision-making for which a math-ematical calculation of ‘more or less’ is of no use. So, in the case of economicproduction:

To evaluate a labour-process for its productivity of use-value is to evaluate itin all its concreteness and for all its effects. Effects of the process on theworker and the environment, effects of the goods turned out on the well-being and life-style of the community, and so on. The cost of every carproduced includes its contribution to the boredom of the machinists, theslicing up of the countryside, the garagisation of cities, the pollution of theair, the likelihood of squirrels getting run over and cyclists getting brokenarms, and so on.

(Collier 1994: 7)

Collier provides an outline sketch of the sort of institutional framework in whichsuch decision-making might be favoured: much planning would be decentralisedto local communities with ‘democratic command economies’, whilst some plan-ning and policing would have to take place at a global level.

More recently, and in particular in Being and Worth (1999), Collier has broughttogether and extended some of these arguments, underpinning them with aphilosophically more fundamental – and contentious – ontological value-theory.I share many of his substantive judgements, and especially the environmentalsensibility underlying them. Still, I remain variously doubtful, unconvinced orjust puzzled by some elements in his moral ontology. If these doubts aresustained, then the question arises as to whether what we share in our substan-tive environmental outlook can be successfully argued on other premises. Thediscussion is rendered still more complex by Collier’s reliance on St Augustine’stheologically grounded moral ontology, whilst simultaneously attempting todefend its conclusions on a secular basis.

However, I’ll start with what is shared. One of the great attractions ofCollier’s thought is his refusal to be drawn along with the prevailing philosoph-ical fashions. His commitment to a critical realist philosophy of science in the

240 Ted Benton

context of pervasive ‘social constructionism’ and relativism in this and adjacentfields is one striking instance of this. Still more striking, and perhaps still moreprovocative, is his commitment to an analogous realism about value. As willbecome clear, I cannot follow him in this, but I do support some of the con-siderations which lead him to it. We have common ground in resistance toprevailing moral relativism and subjectivism. An acceptable account ofmorality should have a place for reasoned discussion between rival moral stand-points or judgements. It should also have a place for moral learning and moralprogress as well as for grounded judgements of moral failings and bankruptcy.Whether such an account of morality can be given which nevertheless avoidsfull-blown commitment to an ontology of value of the sort Collier advocatesremains to be explored.

Collier’s transcendence of dualistic oppositions between reason and emotionin favour of a cognitive account of emotion, such that emotions can be judgedrational or irrational according to their appropriateness, or lack of it, to theirobjects is also persuasive. This is a good starting point for a theory of whatAdam Smith called ‘moral sentiments’.

More directly addressing environmental philosophy, Collier provides a deeperphilosophical grounding for some of the claims made in the earlier essays – inparticular his clear sense of the moral considerability of non-human beings.Until quite recently, the dominant western traditions of moral philosophy tookhuman actors and their transactions to be the exclusive topic of moral concern.The rise of connected animal rights and welfare and ecological social move-ments in the last three or four decades has provoked some academicphilosophers into challenging this set of assumptions. The more limited chal-lenge has come from writers such as Peter Singer and Tom Regan who haveargued for an extension of moral concern beyond the species boundary on thebasis of existing moral theory (utilitarianism and rights-theory, respectively). Inso far as at least some animals share morally relevant attributes with humans, tothat extent it is inconsistent and unjust to deny them moral standing in their ownright. In part, at least, Collier’s case for recognising the existence of value inde-pendent of human valuers seems to rely on such considerations. If other sentientbeings can exhibit preferences, desires, aversions and the like, then why shouldwe refuse to acknowledge them as, like us, bestowers of value?

But there are currents in contemporary environmental philosophy which gobeyond such limited, and implicitly anthropocentric (if not ‘anthroposcopic’)extensionism. Perhaps the best known of these is that deriving from the work ofArne Naess, who famously counterposed a limited, instrumental and anthro-pocentric ‘shallow ecology’ to his own ‘deep ecology’. This latter relied on aholistic ontology of interconnectedness of all beings, and an associated attribu-tion of intrinsic value to all beings, human or non-human. There are clearaffinities between Collier’s Spinozistic reading of Marx’s idea of nature as man’sinorganic body and the ontology of deep ecology, especially as Collier revisesSpinoza to acknowledge intrinsic value in non-human beings. However, there aredifficulties in sustaining the deep ecologists’ attribution of intrinsic value even to

Realism about the value of nature ? 241

non-sentient beings short of some theological or broadly super-natural premises.For Collier’s most frequently cited source, St Augustine, the attribution of value,or worth to such beings is unproblematic: they are the creations of a beneficentgod. Collier seeks to defend Augustine’s moral ontology without reliance on thetheological premises. Again, Collier’s commitment to a non-anthropocentricmoral outlook is one I want to endorse, whilst retaining some scepticism aboutthe Augustinian moral ontology. Again, the question for me is how to do thiswhilst avoiding what seem to me problematic features of Collier’s own defence.

A fourth area of common ground is Collier’s deeply unfashionable view ofscience as a non-instrumental struggle to gain ever-deeper understanding of theworld – a world which, for the most part, exists and acts independently of ourbeliefs about it. This critical, even utopian view of science is indispensable for arational environmental morality and politics, especially so if it is connected, as itis in Collier’s work, with the insight that this deepening of understanding hasmoral value in itself. As our understanding grows, so can our love and respectfor the independently existing beings who are the objects of our study –whether self, society or nature. This view of science together with its moralpotentialities is necessary to any critical politics which seeks to expose andcontest the extent to which the scientific enterprise has today been largelyappropriated by and perverted to the commercial and military objectives ofcorporate capital and state power. If I have a disagreement with Collier, it iswith his tendency to see the appropriation and distortion as lying with the tech-nical application of science, whereas the capture of the core scientific researchagenda itself in many fields, most notably in biotechnology, is a still moresinister and intractable reality.

Fifth, but with a little more ambiguity, I share Collier’s view that humans, asembedded in, and belonging to nature, nevertheless have a special status withinit. This has to do with the way their historically evolved technical ingenuity hasenabled them to acquire ‘super-power’ status vis-à-vis the rest of nature. It alsohas to do, as Kate Soper has very effectively argued, with the (contingently)unique powers humans possess, individually and through socially co-ordinatedactivity, to reflect upon and modify their relationships to the rest of the world onthe basis of normative or prudential considerations. However, how we conceptu-alise this distinctive status humans have acquired is a controversial matter, and Ido have continuing disagreements with Collier over some aspects of his way ofdoing this.

Finally, there is Collier’s continuing emphasis on capitalist markets, thedynamics of capital accumulation, as the prime underlying cause of environ-mental destruction, and his insistence on the necessary (if not sufficient) role ofa socialist transition in overcoming it. This cuts against the dominant trend incontemporary environmentalism to make peace with capitalism, as ‘the onlygame in town’, and to attempt a certain restraining influence and moralising ofits operation. Well-intentioned as such adaptations often are, their fundamentalaccommodation to the chrematistic rationality of exchange values binds themto the very social forces they seek to restrain. To assign a monetary value to the

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environmental costs of, say, carbon emissions is to render them visible, even toimpose them as an item in the cost structure of an industrial product, but at thesame time it is to commodify them, to render them subject to the play ofmarket forces, to allow that, if the commercial calculations so dictate, they areacceptable.

So much for the agreement: and there is plenty of it! Now for an explorationof some of the doubts and confusions. The Augustinian ethics from whichCollier derives his environmental philosophy is summarised particularly clearlyat the beginning of chapter five. There are five main propositions:

1 All being, as being, is good.2 There is a hierarchy of beings – some exist in a greater degree, and so have

greater goodness, than others.3 We ought to love beings in proportion to their goodness.4 Evil has no independent reality, but is privation, or lack of being.5 Evil comes from loving lesser goods more than greater.

As to the first, ontologically most fundamental thesis, the central question is howto defend such a claim independently of theological premises. The narrow,‘extensionist’ recognition that non-human beings also in some cases and in somesense may be said to value objects of fear, desire, etc., will not carry the requisitemetaphysical burden. Non-sentient living beings, inanimate objects, concreteassemblages of them in ecosystems, landscapes, etc., cannot be said to havevalues or purposes by any plausible stretch of the meaning of these terms, yet itis claimed that they possess worth, or goodness simply by virtue of their exis-tence. Collier’s main secular justification for this thesis seems to be grounded inan analogy with the critical realist view of science. We can only make sense ofvarious aspects of scientific practice on the basis of a distinction between thesocio-cultural process of devising accounts of reality, on the one hand, and the‘intransitive’ dimension of the independently existing and acting objects of thoseaccounts, on the other. Similarly, the argument goes, we can only make sense ofour moral sense in relation to the rest of nature on the basis of worth, or value,as an intransitive object of our valuing. Things are not made good by ourvaluing them, but, rather, we learn to value them because, independently of us,they have value, or worth.

I’m not sure whether I disagree with these claims, or whether I don’t under-stand them. To say that being as being is good is, as Collier acknowledges, not toattribute moral goodness to things, since many sorts of being are incapable ofmoral agency. So what is meant? Is worth or value a property of things, over andabove the properties established by perception or scientific investigation? Thisseems implausible, and does not fit well with other aspects of Collier’s philos-ophy. Another possibility suggests itself by way of Collier’s support for a versionof moral naturalism: the view that an ‘ought’ can be logically derived from an‘is’. The standard example in the critical realist literature is the idea of anexplanatory critique: forms of social relationship can be judged worse or better


than others by virtue of their effects on people who stand in those relationships,always with the proviso ‘other things being equal’.

I find two main problems with this sort of argument for moral naturalism. Ina small number of cases, to assert the factual premise but deny the moral con-clusion does appear contradictory. To reject, for example, the normativecommitment to truth-telling would be to be guilty of a performative contra-diction, given the dependence of the institution of language itself on generalobedience to the norm. However, this is not plausibly generalised very far, andfor the most part morally deviant or eccentric outlooks can be sustained in theface of factual evidence without falling into logical contradictions. The intuitionhere is that rock-bottom moral pluralism is ineliminable.

The second problem I have with this sort of moral naturalism is that otherthings never are equal in the practical contexts of life in which we are faced withmoral dilemmas. Faced with whether to tell a dear friend that her lover ischeating on her it is not much help to know that ‘other things being equal’ it isbetter to have true than false beliefs. In the case of the particular belief that herpartner is faithful it might be better for her not to know its falsehood, or it mightbe better for her to find out from another source, or it might be more importantnot to interfere in what is a private matter between the two (or three) of them,and so on. Most of our moral headaches come from the difficulty of makingchoices as between alternative courses of action each of which may be problem-atic, involving weighting of incommensurable and conflicting considerations.

This, of course, is familiar territory to Collier, as it maps well onto his accountof use-value rationality. However, it does suggest that the elementary claim thatbeing as being is good may not carry us very far when it comes to decision-making in concrete situations. Part of Collier’s response to this may be hissecond thesis, that there is a hierarchy of beings, and therefore of degrees ofgoodness. I’ll return to consider that response, but first there remains theproblem of what could be meant by the claim that being as being is good. Isthere some connection weaker than logical implication between the being ofsomething and its goodness? Is it being claimed that to acknowledge the inde-pendent existence of something ought to engender a certain set of moralsentiments towards it – of love, or respect, with the concomitant obligations forthe way we should treat it? If this is what is meant, and sometimes it seems thatit is, then it sums up a moral standpoint with which I have great sympathy.However, it would be misleading to characterise this in terms of an ontology ofintrinsic value in the object.

One reason for this is that, expressed as a moral standpoint, the positionrepresents value as inhering not in the object, independently of an encounterwith a (human) valuer, but rather as emerging in the course of such an actual orimagined encounter. But we know that this desirable response to other beings isnot a universal – or even general – human response. More common – in ourculture, at least – are attitudes of instrumental domination or outright destruc-tive impulses. The moral sentiments Collier endorses in relation to other beingsseem to have definite psychological and socio-cultural conditions. Perhaps only

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certain kinds of personal and emotional life-histories, and the availability of aset of cultural – including cognitive – resources enable the kind of respectfuland loving world-openness that Collier values. If this is so, then for those whoshare a vision of a social world in which such values could be realised, the taskis to struggle for the sorts of social relations, cultural values and personal con-ditions of life in which they might flourish. I’m sure Collier would have nodifficulty in agreeing with this, but it seems to me that, paradoxically, his objec-tifying of value as inherent in the beings we might come to value runs the riskof de-politicising the project of rendering more universal what is currently theprivilege of a few.

Now to the issue of a hierarchy of beings, with its associated hierarchy ofvalue. This is an important qualification of what would otherwise be an outlookvery close to deep ecology. It is also a view which, as Collier rightly says, raisesdoubts on the part of environmental philosophers otherwise close to him, such asJohn O’Neill and myself. The hierarchy of being adhered to by Collier owesmuch to Augustine, and has echoes of the eighteenth century notion of a ‘greatchain of being’. According to it, living beings are higher than non-living, whilewithin the category of the living, sentient beings are higher than the non-sentient, rational higher than non-rational, and so on through the order ofnatural beings, and up the scale to god in Augustine’s version. So far as the orderof nature is concerned, humans are at the apex of the hierarchy. For Collier,there are two distinct respects in which humans are superior to other beings. Thefirst is their more extensive interaction with the rest of nature, which for himtranslates into greater consciousness of other beings, greater rationality andmore value. The implication is that whilst we should respect, love and protectbeings lower than us in the order of nature, since they, too, have intrinsic value,in cases of conflict, human interests should take priority: we should do what wecan to protect the fox, but if the huntsman is injured, we should give his needspriority over those of the fox. Indeed, not to do so would be a perversion of thetrue order of value, and so an evil. The second respect in which Collier seeshumans as superior has to do with our status as ‘rulers of the earth’. I’ll return tothis thesis later, but, first, the question of the hierarchy of being.

It has to be acknowledged that there is something intuitively obvious aboutthe hierarchy. The death of an ant or a flower seems as nothing against theimmense moral and metaphysical significance of death for humans. Therewould, indeed, seem to be a perversion of values if one were to grieve andmourn the death of a wasp in the same terms as that of a human. However, onegood reason for practising philosophy is to call into question our unreflectivemoral intuitions: indeed, Collier’s non-anthropocentric value-theory is already atsome distance from common-sense moral intuitions. Also, even if we find theseintuitions confirmed on reflection, they may turn out to be sustainable otherthan by reliance on a hierarchy of being.

One difficulty in the way of accepting the hierarchy of being as Collierderives it from Augustine is that it is called into question by modern science. It istrue that the Darwin/Wallace discovery of the mechanism of organic change in


nature was rapidly assimilated to a historicised version of the great chain ofbeing, such that evolution itself came to be understood in the wider culture as anarrative of progression from primitive ancestral forms to ourselves (in manyversions, ‘ourselves’ not as a species, but as the European ‘race’) as the crowningachievement of natural selection. Though Wallace, from the beginning, sawevolution as evidence of a principle of progress written into nature itself, andDarwin himself tended to fall in with the narrative in his later work, there is nowarrant for the hierarchical ordering of organic beings in the theory. Naturalselection licenses no such ‘meta-narrative’, explaining, as it does, only the long-term diversification of populations in the direction of ever-more successfuladaptation to the exigencies of their ecological conditions of life. Moreover, thetheory situates humans more firmly within the order of nature than does itshistoric predecessors, and emphasises not only our ecological interdependencywith our fellow beings but also our evolutionary kinship with them. I am fond ofquoting an extraordinary passage from Darwin’s early notebooks which is astartlingly condensed expression of the egalitarian implications which he drew atthe point of his first, speculative arrival at the evolutionary hypothesis:

Animals – whom we have made our slaves we do not like to consider ourequals. – Do not slave-holders wish to make the black man other kind? …the soul by consent of all is superadded, animals not got it, not look forwardif we choose to let conjecture run wild then animals our fellow brethren inpain, disease, death, and suffering & famine; our slaves in the most laboriouswork, our companion in our amusements. They may partake, from ourorigin in one common ancestor we may be all netted together.

(Darwin 1987: 228–232)

Of course, this egalitarian ethic does not flow logically from recognition that weare ‘all netted together’, but it seemed to Darwin a proper response, and I thinkit severely undermines whatever rational basis belief in human superiority andthe great chain of being once had. In the particular case of Collier, there issurely something paradoxical in his adherence to a medieval ontology of naturewhilst strongly advocating a realist defence of the rationality of modern science.There is also a sober materialist humility in Marx’s metaphor of the ‘organicbody’, a recognition of the life-sustaining necessity of our metabolism with therest of nature which seems to me under-represented in Collier’s reading of theearly Marx.

But would a ‘species egalitarianism’ require us to set the value of the life of ahuman at the same level as that of a fly? Whilst I don’t quite share Collier’s senseof the obviousness of the priority of the needs of the fox-hunter over those ofthe fox, I accept in general terms the ethical priorities he outlines. So, can thesebe sustained other than through the ontology of the hierarchy of being? I thinkthey can. To regard, as do deep ecologists, the sheer diversity of beings as itselfsomething to be respected, valued and defended is to have a sense of the signifi-cance of each form of life in its own particularity. Understood and respected in

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its particularity, rather than as a step in the evolutionary ladder, or level in thehierarchy of being, each form of life can be seen to have its own special condi-tions of existence and flourishing, and to have its own specific sorts ofvulnerability to harms. An eye-catching title in a second-hand book shop Ivisited the other day was The Insects of the Cow Dung Community. For some species,life lived within the confines of a cow-pat is heaven; for others, perhaps, somemore diversity might be welcomed. Anyone who has visited a zoo, or had a handin managing a nature reserve, will be familiar with these basic points.

So, how does this help? First, I think it makes sense to distinguish between thenatural and also proper depth of feeling one may have about the life or death ofanother being, on the one hand, and one’s commitment to principles of just treat-ment as between different individuals. What Collier says in another context suggestshe would be sympathetic to this distinction. We may care deeply about the well-being of a close friend, lover or relative, in a way we do not about a distant figurewhose fate we learn about in the paper or on TV (there is something odd and evensinister about extreme displays of public grief at the death of such figures). There isnothing unjust about this difference of feeling – it is a consequence of the bindingtogether of our particular lives, the sharing of experiences and of bits of historywhich make us part of one another. But these natural responses are, and should be,counterbalanced at the level of institutions and societies by rules of justice whichacknowledge that everyone – those we know and love, no more than the ones wehave never met – is equally entitled to the means for a fulfilling life. I think this canwork across the species divide. It may be both natural and proper for us to havedeeper feelings, in general, about the fate of our fellow humans, just as it is naturaland proper for us to have deeper feelings for the fate of those we know and lovewithin the human species. In the same way, this may be consistent with, and coun-terbalanced by, rules of justice which apply as between humans and other species.

But here, as also among humans, the morality of rights and justice has itsproblems. Conceptions of justice which abstract too far from the particularitiesof the beings to which they are applied can be unjust and oppressive in theirresults. There is, for example, a powerful line of feminist criticism of suchabstraction, which emphasises the implications for justice of a proper acknowl-edgement of difference. Equal treatment of men and women in promotioncriteria, for example, effectively discriminates against women by not takingaccount of their more frequent career discontinuities because of child-bearingand child care, for example. But the need for a conception of justice which issensitive to difference of need and condition among those to whom it applies iseven more pressing if it is to be applied across the species boundary. Opponentsof animal rights make much of the evident absurdity of giving dogs the right tovote (notwithstanding the claim by pet-food advertisers that they have definitepreferences!). But this is not an argument against rights and justice in our treat-ment of other beings: it is an argument for a difference-sensitive practice ofjustice, in which justice first imposes the duty of a struggle to understand andacknowledge the particularity of the other, and then to take seriously the obliga-tions to proper treatment which flow from that recognition.


So, difference of treatment among different species may be consistent with adifference-sensitive practice of justice. An ontological hierarchy of beings isboth unnecessary to the justification of such a view of just treatment, andwould be an obstacle to it. The notion of such a hierarchy carries with it animplicit commitment to a single measure of ‘higher’ and ‘lower’, of just the sortthat Collier rejects in his discussion of chrematistic rationality. This is some-thing he seems to recognise himself, as he elaborates and defends his ontologicalhierarchy: ‘The hierarchy of beings is a hierarchy of complexity of natures,with different kinds of love and consequent obligations owed to each kind invirtue of their specific nature. It is not a pecking order’ (Collier 1999: 86). Butwhat is a hierarchy other than a pecking order? Full recognition and valuing ofqualitative diversity surely cuts against any attempt to rank beings in a singlehierarchical order?

Now to the second respect in which Collier sees humans as superior to therest of nature. This has to do with our greater causal powers compared to otherspecies. As we have seen, for Collier this greater capacity for interaction impliesgreater consciousness and rationality. It is not always entirely clear whetherCollier is committed to the view that human superiority in this sense justifies ourrule over the rest of nature, or whether he simply takes it as an irreversible factthat we do have this dominion by virtue of the development of science and tech-nology. Either way, to rule over nature is not something we can decide to do ornot to do. However, we do have the possibility of a destructive ‘bootboy’ rule, aninevitable consequence of the blind operation of the ‘free market’, or, alterna-tively, a democratically planned rule, which seeks to protect and enhance thediversity, complexity and fecundity of nature.

This notion that human consciousness and rationality justifies a humanproject of benign rule over the rest of nature comes close to Murray Bookchin’sview of humans as nature become self-conscious. For Bookchin, too, humanshave a special place in nature, capable of comprehending and shaping thecourse of evolution. Hitherto blind forces of natural change and diversificationare henceforth to be subject to self-conscious shaping by human agency. ThoughBookchin, as an ecological anarchist, polemicises vigorously against Marxism, hisvision is in this respect very close to Marx’s early nature philosophy. For Marx,human ‘species being’ is distinctive in its universality – its capacity to act uponthe whole of nature and to co-ordinate the life-activity of the whole species inthis project. The historical vision is one in which the transition to communismentails at its most fundamental level a transformation in our relation to nature.This transformation takes the form of an overcoming of the opposition betweenhumans and nature. But there is a deep ambiguity in Marx as to what is involvedin this reconciliation between humans and nature. He describes it as a ‘humani-sation of nature’, implying that the reconciliation will take place on the side ofhumans, so to speak. Our transformative powers will be exercised in such a waythat the nature which we (re)create will conform to our values and identities: wewill see ourselves reflected in nature. We might think of this as the ‘landscapegarden’ version of the humanisation of nature. It left an important legacy of

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green left thinking in the arts and crafts movement, and the utopian thought ofWilliam Morris in particular.

These are closely related visions of a transformed relation between humansand the rest of nature. They are clearly very different in intention and in theirunderlying values from the anthropocentric doctrines criticised by deep ecolo-gists as implying an instrumental domination, or ‘mastery’ of nature. Suchvisions of benign rule deserve to be taken seriously and evaluated in their ownright. Over large parts of the over-developed world, there are few, if any,remaining fragments of natural terrestrial habitat. Almost all remaining bio-diversity inhabits ecosystems substantially or wholly modified by past humanactivity – whether agricultural, industrial or residential. Such species-rich habi-tats as continue to exist are themselves relatively small-scale and increasinglyfragmented. In this context, benign rule is the only feasible option. Sites have tobe managed if natural succession is not to eliminate communities of specieswhich thrive at early successional stages. Such planned management of sites, inthe context of wider market-driven ecological transformations, unavoidablyinvolves decisions about which animal and plant communities are to be favoured.These decisions are themselves unavoidably shaped by human cultural prefer-ences – more or less well-informed by depth of understanding of the beingswhose life conditions are to be sustained or ruled out.

However, to accept, as I do, the pragmatic necessity for this version of the‘benign rule’ approach under present conditions of the overwhelming power ofmarket forces, is not to endorse it as an appropriate philosophy for a transformedsociety and human ecology. Of course, large areas will of necessity be given overto agriculture, residence, production and recreation in any human future, andthe philosophy of ‘benign rule’, applied more coherently and extensively than isnow possible, must remain appropriate within this domain. However, beyond thisdomain the deep ecological vision of living more lightly on the planet, of lettingnature be, of allowing things to take their course, seems to me to have much tobe said for it. It expresses a certain humility in relation to the rest of naturewhich I would argue is plausibly read into Marx’s idea of the ‘inorganic body’,and it is consistent with the egalitarian ethic which can be sustained by contem-porary evolutionary thought. Further, it expresses more fully than does the ideaof benign rule the sentiments of respect and wonder which Collier himselfendorses. In Collier’s version, too, an increase in human power over natureincludes ‘the power to abstain from using our power, and in an ideal world that isa power we would use rather a lot’ (Collier 1999: 86).

Bibliography

Benton, T. (1993) Natural Relations: Ecology, Animal Rights and Social Justice, London: Verso.Bookchin, M. (1982) The Ecology of Freedom, Palo Alto, CA: Cheshire.Collier, A. (1991) ‘The Inorganic Body and the Ambiguity of Freedom’, Radical Philosophy,

57, pp. 3–9.—— (1994) ‘Value, Rationality and the Environment’, Radical Philosophy, 66, pp. 3–9.—— (1999) Being and Worth, London and New York: Routledge.


Darwin, C. (1987) Charles Darwin’s Notebooks 1836–1846, ed. P.H. Barrett, P.J. Gautrey,S. Herbert, D. Kohn and S. Smith, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Marx, K. (1975) Early Writings, Harmondsworth: Penguin.—— (1976) Capital, Volume 1, Harmondsworth: Penguin/New Left Review.Naess, A. (1989) Ecology, Community and Lifestyle, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Regan, T. (1988) The Case for Animal Rights, London: Routledge.Singer, P. (1976) Animal Liberation, London: Cape.Soper, K. (1995) What is Nature? Oxford: Blackwell.

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In a development and synthesis of previous engagements with existentialphenomenology and psychology, Bhaskarian realism and the ethical topicsaddressed in Being and Worth, Collier provides a compelling and very readabledefence of objectivity in his latest book. As with all his writing, the argument isclear and forceful, its illustrative material manages to be both arresting and unas-suming, and – unusually for a philosopher – there is a welcome leavening ofanecdote and autobiographical reference. What I particularly liked about thiswork were the powerful arguments it offers for the importance of self-distancing.Against the postmodern tendency to endorse a constantly self-referencing, self-seeking and self-confirming engagement with the world, Collier reminds us ofthe importance of the detour via the object, of ‘reality-testing’, of the limitationsand distortions that threaten epistemological narcissism, and of the forms ofneglect and insensitivity to what is other to self – whether fellow humans, othercreatures or inanimate being – that come with an overly subjectivist focus inontology and ethics.

Collier approaches the question of objectivity as a critical realist, an advocateof the Augustinian view that being qua being is good, and a defendant of theobjectivity of both facts and values. Even though I do not subscribe to all thesepositions, I am enough of a realist myself, and sufficiently in sympathy with crit-ical realism, to appreciate the force of Collier’s overall approach and to agreewith much of the detail of his argument. As should be clear from the followingdiscussion (which is centred on Part II of In Defence of Objectivity (2003)), my differ-ences are very often points of qualification to his theses rather than outrightrejection of their main message. One has to be grateful to Collier for havingprovided such a lucid and substantial body of argument for those, like myself,who needed to clarify and refine their own position, and to think through theimplications of adhering to it in a variety of differing contexts. I shall focus heremainly on some of Collier’s remarks on nature and the implications of his posi-tion for environmental ethics and aesthetics, but I want to approach those issuesby way of some more general considerations.

17 Objectivity, experience andthe aesthetic of nature

Kate Soper

What is objectivity ?

First, some thoughts prompted primarily, though not exclusively, by Collier’scharacterisation of objectivity in the chapter. In the opening discussion of this,Collier makes some useful distinctions, and presents a generally persuasive casefor the objectivity of facts. What I missed, though – and it is my only majorreservation – was any explicit recognition that objectivity, understood as a valueor attribute of facts, is always so in the conception of a subject. In this respectascriptions of objectivity are subject-dependent: to be ‘objective’ is to be objec-tive for someone. Collier makes the point, for example, that criteria of selectionfor candidates for a job interview that are spelt out beforehand ‘reflect nothingbut the interviewers’ subjectivity’, and that it is the qualities that candidates infact possess that are the objective grounds for selection (Collier 2003: 132). Thismay be so, but it is also surely true that interviewers always bring subjectiveforms of assessment to those grounds, some of a kind of which they may not befully aware, and they will also (one hopes) be disposed subjectively to be as objec-tive as possible about the qualities of the candidates. This latter point doesindeed seem to be acknowledged at a later stage in the chapter, where Colliertells us that in calling a judgement objective one is saying that it is caused by itsobject ‘not by some feature of its subject other than openness to the effects of theobject’ (2003: 135). But openness of this kind is, I would say, itself a subjectivedisposition (as is, for example, a determination to ‘get at the truth’, to proceedwithout prejudice, and so forth), and a disposition of this kind is arguably essen-tial to the passing of objective judgements. Judgements are not rendered ‘merely’subjective, as Collier at one point rather dismissively seems to imply, by virtue oftheir reliance on subjective dispositions (2003: 136). Objective facts are so inde-pendently of judgement. The earth goes round the sun whether I or anyone elsejudges that to be the case. But the selection of this as an objective fact is surelyhumanly dependent: to be objectivity conceived of as a property of factsdepends on subjective assessment.

I suspect that I am here taking up a position somewhat akin to that whichCollier finds ‘disappointing’ in Heidegger, and which causes him to complainthat Heidegger ‘relativises Being to Dasein’ (Collier 2003: 278–279). In a much-discussed passage quoted by Collier, Heidegger writes,

when Dasein does not exist, ‘independence’ ‘is’ not either, nor ‘is’ the ‘in-itself ’. In such a case it cannot be said that entities are, nor can it be said thatthey are not. But now, as long as there is an understanding of Being andtherefore an understanding of presence-at-hand, it can be said that in this

case entities will continue to be.(1967: 255)

In Collier’s view, this means that it is only while people exist that we can truly saythat entities would exist even if we did not, and he presents this as Heideggermaking Being equivalent to ‘the world for us’. To my mind, however, this is not

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to render the world, but only judgements on its independence dependent on us(on Dasein). The issue here, no doubt, turns on what exactly Collier intends by‘world for us’, and I shall not pursue it further here, though I shall have a littlemore to say on Collier on Heidegger in my discussion on nature.

On the somewhat differing theme of whether being objective involves objecti-fying in any negative sense, Collier points out that this is by no means the case,and usefully warns us against assuming any automatic equivalence between thegrammatical subject–object distinction and the ontological patient–agent distinc-tion. But while I accept his general line of argument against the assimilation, Iam not entirely convinced by the examples used in illustration of it. He asks, forinstance, whether the agent of seeing is the seer or the seen, and argues that it isthe seen to the extent that we accept, as we surely should, some version of thecausal theory of perception. Certainly, what we see can be said to be occasionedthrough the causal ‘agency’ of what is seen, but the seer is surely also always theagent of the act of seeing, whatever the cause of what is seen, in the sense thathe or she could choose to close their eyes or turn the other way. Likewise withthe analogies from voyeurism he gives, it seems that the element of subjectiveagency is insufficiently acknowledged: a man, says Collier, who sees a womanundressing in a window can be prosecuted as a peeping tom, but a man who isseen undressing in a window by a woman can be prosecuted as an exhibitionist.Yet, in both cases, prosecution would depend on proving subjective intention:deliberately to watch in the first instance, and to undress in order to be seen, inthe other, and this complicates using the example as any straightforward illustra-tion of the slippages between agent and patient and subject and object (Collier2003: 134). That said, it is important, as Collier says, not to pass thoughtlesslybetween the two distinctions, and I agree even more readily with what he saysagainst eliding the ontological agent–patient distinction with the epistemologicalknower–known distinction. He rightly points out in this context that since theclass of subjects of knowledge and the class of human beings are often deemedco-extensive, ‘subject’ becomes a synonym for human being, and ‘object’ corre-spondingly comes to designate what is subhuman. ‘Subjects and objects come tomean “people and things” ’ (Collier 2003: 134). But since human beings can beboth the objects of knowledge and the objects of action (with no implication ofthis involving a degrading ‘objectification’) this alignment is misleading. Collier’sarguments seem comparable here to those of Adorno, for whom the differencebetween people and things is that whereas the latter can only be epistemologicalobjects, the former can be both subjects and objects (Adorno 1978). Anothercomparison (though Collier might not welcome it) is with Derrida’s questioningof the co-extension of humans and subjects in the tradition of western meta-physics (Derrida 1991: 96–119, especially p. 109f ).

Science and objectivity

Let me now pursue the point I make above about the interviewers in Collier’sexample bringing subjective attitudes to bear of which they themselves will not

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be aware, or in a position fully to take account. I mention this because while Igenerally endorse Collier’s realist approach to science and much that he has tosay about the importance of realism to uncovering scientific bias, he tends topresent bias as essentially the outcome of commercial or other pressures towhich the scientist more or less knowingly succumbs, and says little on thoseforms of bias or distortion that are less consciously introduced. But it wouldseem clear that one can seek to adopt an objective attitude to one’s studies whileremaining blind to the skewing of vision introduced by the specific lens of one’sown social and cultural formation. For example, as feminist critics of scienceand epistemology have cogently argued, scientists have frequently, and in animportant sense unintentionally, interpreted the data through a gendered optic(Harding 1986; Tuana 1989; Keller and Longino 1996; Wyer et al. 2001). Thisis not a matter of extrinsic pressures, or of wishful thinking trying to square theevidence with the desired outcomes, but a case of a genuinely scientific attitudebeing unconsciously misled by a too partial outlook. These considerations donot ultimately conflict with Collier’s form of realism, for which knowledge, ashe several times insists, is neither infallible nor to be understood as making finalclaims about its objects. But it does, I think, complicate his implication (Collier2003: 137) that science is pursued in detachment from any affective promptings,or that bias is always the product of a form of deceit or bad faith or cynicalyielding to external influence.

These points concerning the more intrinsic and unrecognised intrusions ofsubjectivity in scientific investigation relate to some more general reservations Ihave about Collier’s seeming reluctance to acknowledge the role of language andthe discursive dimension in mediating our experience. Language for Collierappears to be essentially a matter of representation, a tool for the expression ofideas about a world that is said to be not only ontologically but epistemologicallyprior: ‘there can be no knowledge of ideas without prior knowledge of theworld. And the world is logically prior to ideas, in that we can only define anidea in terms of what in the world it is about’ (Collier 2003: 145). This begs thequestion, however, as to whether this prior knowledge is conceived as ideas-free,and there are some indications that Collier does indeed think of it as essentiallypraxis, a matter of doing, rather than of thinking (2003: 146). But even practicalactivity and experience are conceptually mediated, and I find more helpfulCollier’s expansion of his argument in terms of ‘ideating’ something rather than‘having an idea’ of it. Thus, he writes, ‘if I know the footpath from Fritham toLinwood, then I have an idea of that footpath, but my knowledge is not of thatidea but of the footpath’ (2003: 146). This is indeed a valuable distinction,because it registers clearly the fact that when we ‘ideate’ something, a footpathfor example, we do so on the basis of our experience of it, but we do not think ofit as ontologically dependent on that experience. However, that is surely not tosuppose that our experience of the footpath is wholly ‘of it’, independently ofany cultural shaping or influence. This is a point to which I will return below indiscussing the nature of ‘nature’, but here, suffice it to say that it seems import-ant to distinguish between two rather differing claims: the claim that there is

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objective knowledge (that objective knowledge is possible), a claim which I fullyaccept, and whose philosophical concerns are the conditions under which it isachieved; and the claim that there is an ‘objective’ access to reality (meaning bythat an access unmediated by any ideas/discourse). The slippage between thesetwo positions is responsible for what I would argue is a misleading presentationof the postmodernist claim that ‘there is nothing outside discourse’ as a contem-porary form of Berkeleyan idealism. Though the postmodernist position remainsproblematic from a realist point of view, I think it is more accurate to say that itsclaim is not that there is nothing but discourse or that only discourse exists, butthat there is no access to the ‘real’ other than discursively. If this is right, then thecritical difference between the realists and the postmodernists concerns not theexistence of extra-discursive reality but whether true claims can be made aboutit. Against the Nietzschean perspectivism of the postmodernists, critical realistsrightly say they can.

The nature of experience and the experience of nature

In defence of his strong version of objectivity (according to which both factsand values have objective status), Collier makes a number of claims about expe-rience and emotion, relating them at various points to an environmental ethic.It is to these aspects of his argument that I now want to turn. The main burdenof his argument here, if I understand it rightly, is that experiences (andemotions and beliefs) are objective in the sense of being determined by theirobject. Experience, in other words, is always of something, and makes senseonly in terms of the independent reality to which it refers. A non-objectiveexperience or emotion or belief is, says Collier, a ‘failed’ experience, emotion orbelief (2003: 138). But one has to wonder how far this is always true in the lightof what one might call ‘fictive’ experience (or to pose the question in an alternative mode, one has to wonder in what sense Collier is defining the ‘inde-pendent reality’ to which experience, etc. refers: does this include, for example,mental states?). Fantasies and imaginings are certainly experienced, but it isquestionable whether they can be said to be separate from that experience, tobe anything other than the entertainment of them. Perhaps it is a little odd, too,to speak of fictive beliefs as ‘failed’, when these can have such momentousconsequences. Collective beliefs, for example, in such ideological ‘entities’ asnational identity are very real and have real effects although they are arguablynot determined by any objective entities or attributes. In Slavoj Zizek’s argu-ment, for example, national identity or what he terms the ‘nation thing’ isbelieved in only because others believe in it too (Zizek 1991; Anderson 1983). Ido not myself necessarily endorse this account of nationalism, but it would beinteresting to hear Collier’s reply to it.

The claims made about the objectivity, and therefore fallibility, of emotionaland aesthetic responses are, to my mind, also rather problematic, given theextent to which they encourage us to regard emotional responses as right orwrong depending on their object. In the case of erotic relations between persons,


for example, who is to judge what it is that makes the beloved the normativelyappropriate object of the lover’s love? Can we really say that love in the case ofpersonal relations is either ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ depending on its chosen object?Collier tells us that ‘it is appropriate to enjoy one’s friends and lover, good music,and beautiful landscapes; it is not appropriate to enjoy scenes of torture ormurder’ (2003: 236). This, surely, begs too many questions. Does it imply that itis wrong to enjoy films or dramas or paintings in which torture or murder arefeatured, or that it is wrong to like, say, ‘bad’ music? In any case who is to saywhat is objectively ‘good’ or ‘bad’ in music, or to pronounce in general on thesevery vexed issues of aesthetic merit?

What, moreover – to turn now more directly to environmental issues –constitutes a ‘beautiful landscape’ such that it can be approved as an appro-priate object of aesthetic appreciation? The question is not easy to answer, notonly because there are differences of individual taste, but because quite radicalshifts have taken place in the prevalent social conceptions of what is beautifulin nature at any given point in time. In an important sense, ‘nature’ has hereitself to be recognised as a culture-bound and culturally constructed idea.Collier rightly notes that ‘one discovers the value of the New Forest by goingthere, not by describing a set of human preferences’ (2003: 138). But this doesnot make the value entirely independent of the preferences of its assessors, fordifferent groups of people have – and do – find it valuable in differing ways.Indeed, whereas the term ‘forest’ today usually summons for us a place ofrepose and aesthetic beauty, in its original meaning it is a legal term desig-nating a protected area for hunting by the nobility. It is worth recalling too,perhaps, that the New Forest hardly counts as pristine ‘nature’, having beencreated by William the Conqueror through the destruction of villages previ-ously on the land (Coates 1998: 46–47).

I would stress that in making these kind of claims I am not denying that thereis an independent nature both in the sense of a non-human world of causalpowers and processes that are the object of scientific study, and in the sense ofan objectively existing environment. The first sense obviously has some affinitywith Heidegger’s concept of the present-to-hand – which Collier, in fact, refersto as ‘brute matter’, and presents as the stuff of science. However, it is not to beequated with Heidegger’s concept, since nature in the sense I intend here is notnecessarily directly perceptible, and the contrast is not between a contemplativescientific way of seeing and other ways of seeing the same object, but betweenthe physical and biological powers that are independent of, and cannot bealtered by, human beings, and the ‘surface’ and directly experienced forms whichare not independent of, but moulded by human activity, either literally orthrough cultural representation (Soper 1995: ch. 5). It should be clear, therefore,that I am also not denying the reality of the landscape as surface phenomenonindependent of its discursive representation or subjective appreciation. But whatI am saying, first, is that insofar as landscape is allowed to count as ‘nature’ then‘nature’ must include much that has been handled by human beings and onlytakes the form it does by virtue of human intervention, often very intensive and

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over centuries. I am also saying that it is cultural influence and mediation that toa significant degree determines what makes this landscape appear as an object ofaesthetic esteem, as and when it does.

It is a commonplace to point out that the taste in the sublime is a late arrival,that the wild and mountainous aspects once regarded as nature’s uglier andruder parts are often now regarded as the most subtle and beautiful, and thatthe attractions of pastoral and managed landscape are not what they once were(Soper 1995: ch. 7; Coates 1998: chs. 6 and 7). Thomas Hardy charts thispassage very eloquently in his opening description of Egdon Heath in The

Return of the Native. Hardy concludes by predicting that ‘ultimately, to thecommonest tourist, spots like Iceland may become what the vineyards andmyrtle-gardens of South Europe are to him now; and Heidelberg and Baden bepassed unheeded as he hastens from the Alps to the sand-dunes ofScheveningen’ (Hardy 1965: 12–13).

The subject–object dialectic involved in the appreciation of natural beauty isexceedingly complex. This emerges if we pursue – as I propose to do brieflyhere – some of the implications of Adorno’s position in his Aesthetic Theory,beginning with his claim that disinclination to talk about natural beauty ‘isstrongest where love of it survives. The “How beautiful!” at the sight of a land-scape insults its mute language and reduces its beauty’ (Adorno 1997: 69). Theidea is arresting, and probably strikes a chord with many of us. In my own case,although I am not one to be particularly gratified by the thought that on thisAdornian aesthetic I would count as a more sensitive nature lover than themore talkative, there is no question but that I do tend to fall silent whenconfronted by a compellingly beautiful landscape, resent having to express myappreciation for it, and am slightly grudging in my tolerance of others expostu-lating over it. On the other hand, I am very hard put to say why I react in thisway, let alone to justify it.

Adorno’s own explanation of course, if we can call it that, is that talk is‘insulting’ to nature and detracts from its beauty. Yet, in reality landscape cansense no insults, and it is we who observe and admire it who experience anydiminishment there might be of its beauty. Therefore, what Adorno would seemto have in mind here is that speech mediates, either deliberately or as an effect,that which is immediate and pre-conceptual, and thus renders conceptual – andin the process ‘betrays’ – that which is as it is, and is experienced as it is, onlybecause it cannot be spoken. This would conform to his argument elsewhere thatnatural beauty cannot be copied, a point he links with his claim that the tabooon images in the Old Testament has an aesthetic as well as a theological dimen-sion: the prohibition on imagery is itself an expression of the impossibility ofcreating it.

On the other hand, as one would expect of a dialectical thinker like Adorno,this is not the whole of the story because he also wants to recognise that ‘pureimmediacy does not suffice for aesthetic experience’, that natural beauty needsits speaker and interpreter, and is in this respect akin to art (which needs aninterpreter in order to say what art left to itself is only able to say by not saying


it). Indeed, Adorno recognises in the immediate sequel to his point about thedisinclination to talk being strongest where love survives, that the experience ofbeautiful nature is not one that you can keep quiet about in the end – even asnature requires silence, anyone capable of experiencing its beauty feelscompelled, he tells us, to speak as a way of signalling the momentary liberation itaffords from the confines of the enclosure within the perceiving and representingself. The paradox is that one talks in order to register the beyond of nature toconceptualisation; one represents it in order to capture its independence ofrepresentation. Natural beauty needs to be conceptualised, but to be conceptu-ally determined as something that is not conceptual. Relatedly, Adorno suggeststhat nature can act as a kind of reminder of, or utopian gesture towards, a worldin which humanity would be in harmony with it. He argues, for example, thataesthetic appreciation of natural beauty recollects a world without domination.But this too is paradoxical. Not only is this a world that he admits probably neverexisted (so that any recollection of it could only be a fantasy), there is the furtherconsideration that it is ‘through this recollection that experience dissolves backinto that amorphousness out of which genius arose and for the first time becameconscious of the idea of freedom that could be realised in the world free ofdomination’. Harmonious immersion in nature is incompatible with the humanconsciousness that comes to an understanding of freedom and desires the releasefrom domination.

Yet there is still more to the paradox, since we also have to recognise that theconcept of ‘natural beauty’ is ideological in presenting as immediate what isactually mediated. In other words, we have to accept that what we areacclaiming as the ‘natural’ beauty of natural beauty is, in part at least, a cultur-ally mediated and historically specific apperception of its charms. For a start,unlike those in that impossible golden age of harmony with it, we appreciate itas, or because it is, ‘nature’. So even as Adorno recognises the summons of thepre-conceptual in nature, and stresses – in somewhat question-begging fashion –the urge to silence that it supposedly induces in us, he also acknowledges theextent to which what is discoverable as ‘beautiful’ owes its reception as such toculture. In this, his position is altogether more complex and politically perceptivethan that of the many nature lovers who also emphasise the dumb-striking andineffable qualities of natural beauty (especially wilderness) but fail to recognisethe role of culture in conditioning what they select as most ‘beautiful’ (whichtoday, at least for Westerners, is usually the wildest parts).1

Now, on my reading of Collier’s argument on nature, he will readily agreewith the Adornian stress on its pre-conceptual objectivity, but will be less happyabout allowing for the dependency on subjective representation and articulation,and also resistant to recognising the historical relativity and culturally mediatedquality of what we value or find beautiful in a landscape. This, at any rate,would seem to be implied by his claim that values in nature are not invented butonly discovered through social and scientific changes (Collier 2003: 232–233). Itwould also seem to follow from his remarks that in environmental concern ‘it isprecisely the value of things independent of us that is dear’ (2003: 160); that

258 Kate Soper

‘nothing could be moving about nature were nature not something which existedin itself, independently of us, yet could be explored by us. … One could not be aKantian and have a real feeling for nature’ (2003: 193); and that

There would be no point (apart from pragmatic, technological ones) ininvestigating nature if it were somehow our product. No point in cosmolog-ical science or zoology, but no point either in gazing at the night sky, out inthe country where it is free from light pollution, no point in being amid treesand hills and waterfalls rather than watching cartoons or television. Forthese things involve appreciation of what we did not make and what is inde-pendent of us, partly for its independence and strangeness.

(Collier 2003: 239)

To my mind, what these formulations fail sufficiently to recognise, is, forexample, that ‘being amid trees and hills and waterfalls’ is, almost always, beingwithin a humanly modified landscape; that there is no valuing of naturewithout a human valuer; and that we do not dispense with a reference tohuman subjectivity in stressing that what is valued in nature is its ‘indepen-dence’, since independently of human appreciation of that there is no aestheticof independence.

These formulations also tend to downgrade, or abstract from, the role ofcultural representation in the appreciation of nature. Collier gives the impressionat times that a concern with the way in which objects have been symbolised orrepresented is often less interesting or valid than a (supposedly more direct andobjective) understanding of them for ‘what they really are’. I suspect if pressedhe would want to agree that it is just as valid (and objective) for the student ofculture to consider human representations and their mediation as it is for scien-tists to consider the represented objects in a more immediately materialistic orfunctional light. At any rate, I cannot see that agreeing to it would be incon-sistent with his own argument. As indicated in my opening remarks, theobject-oriented quality of Collier’s argument is a welcome counter to post-modernist commentary that is exclusively focused on discourse and ideas. But indefending objectivity we need also to be wary of falling into an anti-ideocentrismthat underestimates the contribution that human beings and their ideas make tothe world and, not least, through their art, music and literature to the enhance-ment of the pleasures of nature.

Note

1 And the contemporary aesthetic of wilderness is in many respects ecologically regret-table, since it encourages air flight travel to far-flung places, and has generated a veryextensive eco-tourist industry that may conserve relatively untouched parts of theenvironment, but often only at the cost of violent displacement of their one-timehuman inhabitants, and exploitation of those servicing the industry. See the bulletinsfrom Tourism Concern and Rethinking Tourism, and cf. the Guardian, 22 May 2002,pp. 8–9.


Bibliography

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Essential Frankfurt School Reader, Oxford: Blackwell.—— (1997) Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor, London: Athlone Press.Anderson, Benedict (1983) Imagined Communities, London: Verso.Coates, Peter (1998) Nature, Western Attitudes since Ancient Times, Cambridge: Polity.Collier, Andrew (2003) In Defence of Objectivity, London: Routledge.Derrida, Jacques (1991) ‘ “Eating Well”, or the Calculation of the Subject’, in E. Cadava,

P. Connor and J.-L. Nancy (eds), Who Comes after the Subject?, London: Routledge.Harding, Sandra (1986) The Science Question in Feminism, Milton Keynes: Open University

Press.Hardy, Thomas (1965) Return of the Native, London: Macmillan.Heidegger, Martin (1967) Being and Time, Oxford: Blackwell.Keller, Evelyn Fox and Helen E. Longino (eds) (1996) Feminism and Science, Oxford: Oxford

University Press.Soper, Kate (1995) What is Nature? Culture, Politics and the Non-Human, Oxford: Blackwell.Tuana, Nancy (1989) Feminism and Science, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Wyer, Mary, Donna Cookmeyer, Mary Barbercheck, Hatice Ozturk and Marta Wayne

(eds) (2001) Women, Science and Technology: A Reader in Feminist Science Studies, London andNew York: Routledge.

Zizek, Slovoj (1991) ‘The Republics of Gilead’, New Left Review, 183. Reprinted inChantal Mouffe (ed.), Dimensions of Radical Democracy, London: Verso, 1991.

260 Kate Soper

a posteriori analysis 177–8a priori: in Kant 166–7, 173, 205; in Marx

171, 176–7abortion 72–3‘aboutness’ 162absences 63, 164, 180absolute idealism 168absolute monarchy 83Absolute Reason 169, 170, 173‘accidie’ 126actual body 201–2, 239actualism 162–3Adorno, Theodor 205, 253, 257–8adversarial method 51Aesthetic Theory (Adorno) 257aesthetics 256–7Alethia 5, 7alethic truth 9, 163alienation 186, 187, 189–91Altenburg Gardens 6Althusser, Louis: ‘Ideological State

Apparatuses’ 64–5; ideology 148–52,155; influence of 4; lay knowledge 143,144, 145

altruism 78–9anarchy 208animals 241, 246anthropology 230–1, 232anthropomorphic fallacy 201Antigone 67antimonies 161, 168, 170, 215, 219Aquinas, St Thomas 80Archer, Margaret 4, 7, 97, 152, 153, 154Aristotle: flourishing 104; the Good 67;

matter–form composites 167–8;morality 22; plots 16; self-love 80; value 69

Arrow, K. 76Assiter, Alison 71

Augustine of Hippo: morality 70, 240,242; self-love 80; value 67; well-being85, 86, 88

Augustinianism 72, 77avarice 77, 79–80, 81, 83

Bacon, Francis 204bad faith 148Bakhtin, M. 18Bakunin, Mikhail 208Balfern Street 4–6Bangor University 13n.1Barnes, Julian 25Barth, Karl 22Barthes, Roland 15Bataille, G. 18Beck, Ulrich 229being: being as such 69–72; being for-itself

19; being humans 152–3; being-in-the-world 132, 144, 145, 152; benign rule248–9, 248–9; goodness and 243–4; inHeidegger 252–3; hierarchy of 243,245–9; interconnectedness 241

Being and Nothingness (Sartre) 18, 63Being and Worth (Collier) 6, 7, 36; value 65,

240; ‘The Worth of Human Beings’ 70, 71

Being Human (Archer) 152beliefs 255benevolence 80–1, 101Benhabib, Seyla 49, 50, 56–7, 94Benjamin, Walter 16Benton, Ted 4–5Berdyaev, Nicholas: on freedom 26;

influence of 19–20, 21–2; on law 24;on moral good 14, 17, 23

Berger, Peter 233Berkeley, George 130Bhaskar List 5

Index

Bhaskar, Roy: 2E moments 164, 179, 180;anthropomorphic fallacy 201; defenceof 63; emotions 110n.8; epistemicfallacy 9, 138–9, 163; formal logicalcontradiction 172; Harré and 4; onHegel 170, 173, 174; ontologicalplurality 140–1; realism 69;transcendentalism 179–80

bias 254the Bible 75, 80, 81biography 37–9, 40Blair, Tony 23, 28n.3Blake, William 22Bloch, Ernst 209body-actual 201–2body-cosmic 201, 239Bolshevik revolution 206Bookchin, Murray 248Bourdieu, Pierre 96, 98, 118; reflectivity

230–2Brahmes Hall 7–8Broome, J. 90n.4Bush, George W. 23Butler, Joseph 80–1Butler, Judith 49, 50, 52–3, 56–7

Capital (Marx): capital relation 193–4;labour as creator of value 187–8;‘labour is value’ 185–7; object of 183–5

capitalism: alternatives to 209, 239–40;capital relation 193–4; continuation of64–5; contradictions in essence 188–92;environment and 242–3; fetishism194–6; ideology 195–6; slavery 164;transformation problem 192–3; withoutcontradictions 193–4

care theory 70categories 166, 168–9, 171Centre for Critical Realism 5Chalmers, A. 140change, reality of 12choice 66–7On Christian Belief (Collier) 8, 36, 40Christianity 4, 6, 7, 23circumspection 131class societies 151–2coherent subjects 49Collier, Andrew: characteristics 5, 6;

Descartes and 203–4; hammer analogy153, 154; idealism and 203; on thebody-cosmic 201; on cultural diversity104; on economics 76, 85; on ethics 97;on existentialism 153; on experience127, 153; on facts 37, 68; on great

teachers 22; on hearsay 10–11; onHeidegger 131, 146–7, 252–3; onintentional objectivity 226; onknowledge 143; on Laing 42, 43–4, 45;on love 70; on nature 259; onnecessities 71; on objectivity 82, 86,204–5; on practical knowledge 145; onreductionism 130; on subjectivity 162,163, 168; on tacit knowledge 123; ontheory–practice relation 207; onunderstanding 145–6; on use-value240; on value 68, 71–2, 85, 88; onwishful thinking 57; religion 4; self-description 33; significance of 8–13

commerce 83commodity form 177common-sense 221–2communicative action 227–8concepts 166, 168–9; concrete concepts

174–5concern 154conscience 148consciousness: in Hegel 168–9;

intentionality of 19; in Kant 165–7; inMarx 174; matter and 10; in Spinoza202

constellational monism 9, 10contemplation 205contradictions 172; law of non-

contradiction 218Copernican Revolution 167, 177Cornell, Drucilla 49, 50, 53, 54–5, 56correspondence theory of truth 137–8cosmic body 201, 239critical naturalism 179critical realism: development of 4–6;

epistemic fallacy 9, 138–9, 163; layknowledge and 129, 143; in Popper139–40

Critical Realism: An Introduction to RoyBhaskar’s Philosophy (Collier) 4, 6, 46n.2

“Critical realism and the heritage of theEnlightenment’ (Collier)” 34

‘Critical Realism: Interventions’ series 5, 7critique 161, 162Critique of Political Economy (Marx) 174–5Critique of Pure Reason (Kant) 164–7, 179,

213–14culture, ethical naturalism and 102–4

Darwin, Charles 246Dasein 19, 131, 132, 145, 147–8, 252De Certeau, M. 15dead labour 189–90

262 Index

deconstruction 57, 215, 219–20democracy 231Denzin, Norman K. 37–9deontologicising rationalism 167Derrida, Jacques 37–8, 39, 48, 215, 253Descartes, René 130, 131, 203–4The Destiny of Man (Berdyaev) 21Dialectic (Bhaskar) 7, 9, 63dialectical materialism 169, 178–80, 200–2dialectics: in Bhaskar 178–9; in Hegel

179–80; in Kant 179; paradoxes 219dictatorship over needs 88, 89Dietzgen, Joseph 199–200Dillard, A. 19Dilthey, Wilhelm 44‘discourse’ 219The Divided Self (Laing) 41–2, 44Dream and Reality (Berdyaev) 21DREI model 179Durkheim, Émile 93Dworkin, R. 88

Eagleton, Terry 217Ecclesiastes 75, 81ecology 241economics 76–81; rational choice 82–5;

subjectivism 85–9Edgley, Adam 6Edgley, Roy 6Edgworth, E.Y. 196education 87, 150egoism 78–9, 80Eleatics 170, 173emancipation 178–80, 178–80emotions 66, 241, 255; morality and 97–9empiricism: perception 164–5; rejection of

129, 134Engels, Friedrich 201Enlightenment 34, 213–14Enquiries (Hume) 80environmental philosophy: Augustinian

ethics 242; benign rule 248–9;capitalism and 242–3; experience and255–9; man’s inorganic body 239;naturalism 243–4; value 239–40

Epicurus 86epistemic fallacy 9, 138–9, 163epistemology see knowledgeequilibrium theory 83Eribon, Didier 231Ermath, Elizabeth Deeds 35–7essences 162, 165, 168–9; in Marx 175–6ethical naturalism 94, 102–7ethics 97–9, 103

evil 22, 100, 108evolution 246excesses 222exchange-value 177–8, 239–40existential phenomenology 129, 153existentialism: knowledge 143, 145, 153–5;

Marxism and 155; realism and 152–3;responsibility 18–19; value 66

experience: hearsay and 133; in Hegel161–2, 168–9, 170–1, 172–3; ideating254; in Kant 161, 166; nature of255–9; realism and 127, 153

exploitation 186, 187–8

facticity 147facts 35–6, 65–6, 252faithfulness to the text 27–8fallibility 64, 130, 138, 255–6The Family Idiot (Sartre) 39, 40fear 66feminism: justice 247; language and 55;

morality 70; phallogocentrism and48–9; postmodernism and 49; scienceand 254; truth and 57–8

Feminist Contentions (Benhabib) 49, 52–8Ferry, Jean-Marc 228fetishism 194–6Feuerbach, Ludwig 202, 203First Moment 164, 179, 180Flaubert, Gustave 38–9, 40Flax, Jane 49flourishing 102–6Forster, E.M. 16Foucault, Michel 55, 106, 219, 111n.26foundationalism 51, 56–7Fourth Dimension 180Fraser, Nancy 49, 50, 51, 53, 56freedom 239Freud, Sigmund 19, 22, 33Freudianism 33–4, 39From East to West (Bhaskar) 8

Gender Trouble (Butler) 55gestalt switches 40Giddens, Anthony 229, 232–3Glover, Jonathan 95God: immanence of 9–10; in Lévinas 25;

proof of existence 22; as scientificobject 8; in Steiner 26–7

Goldmann, Lucien 229good 85–9; in Augustine 243–4; evil and

100; Form of the Good 67; Good forMan 67; ‘the-good-to-come’ 23;internal 111n.18; in Smith 101

Index 263

Graham, Keith 65Gramsci, Antonio 148Greene, Graham 20–1Griffin, J. 87–8Griswold, Charles 95–6Groundwork (Kant) 219group identity 64Grundrisse (Marx) 178, 186

Habermas, Jürgen: morality 93, 222;reflection 227–30; truth 51, 235n.8

habit, morality and 98–9Hacohen, M.H. 134Hahn, F. 76, 78Hardy, Thomas 257Harré, Rom 4, 126Hartwig, Mervyn 7hearsay: criticisms of 133; experience and

118–19; non-hearsay knowledge and10–11; precedence of 119–23; realitytesting 118, 125–6, 132–3, 136

hedonism 86Hegel, G.W.F: critique of Kant 167–71;

dialectics 179–80; experience 161–2;Hume and 164; in Marx 174–5;metaphysical empiricism 171–4; theoryand practice 206–7

Heidegger, Martin: authenticity 147–8;concern 144; Dasein 19, 131, 132, 145,147–8, 252; elaboration of 130–2; the‘gap’ 19; practical knowledge 145–7,154; theoretical knowledge 118, 146

Hekman, Susan 234hermeneutics 234Hindess, Barry 3‘Hingis and Horsa’ 3Hirschliefer, J. 82Hirst, Paul 3historical materialism 33–4, 39–40Hobbesian behaviour 107Hollis, M. 78Hostettler, Nick 7human nature 79–80, 165, 90n.9humanities, postmodernism and 34, 37Hume, David: absolute monarchy 83;

Humean moment 172; perception164–5; reason 213; self-love 81, 90n.9;universals 79

I–Thou relation 24–5idealism: in Dietzgen 199–200; in Hegel

173; in Heidegger 131–2; morality and106; in Popper 135; self-consistent 170

identity of exclusive categories 171‘Ideological State Apparatuses’ (Althusser)

64–5, 150–1ideology 64–5, 144, 148; in Althusser

148–52Ideology and Utopia (Mannheim) 233illusion, in Kant 213–14Ilyenkov, Evald 202‘imaginary’ 149immanence 167–71In Defence of Objectivity (Collier): hearsay

10–11; lay knowledge 118; objectivity48, 88, 226; self-description 33;strengths of 199; value 65

inauthenticity 147–8, 154–5induction 168infallibilism 130infinite relation 202intellectuals 231intentional objectivity 226–7International Association for Critical

Realism 5Interpretive Biography (Denzin) 37–9intuition 166, 167Ionian dialectics 169–70

Jansenism 77, 79, 229Jarvis, Alan 7Jellicoe, Mike 7Jevons, W. 78Journal for Critical Realism 5, 7judgements 252justice 67, 247

Kant, Immanuel: a priori 205;contradictions 218–19; critique 161, 162;dialectics 179; failure of 22; Hegel’scritique of 167–71; in Marx 176–7;metaphysical empiricism 171–4;noumena 214, 224; in Popper 134,135–6; Reason 222–3; transcendentalillusion 213–14; transcendentalism164–7

know-how 150–1knowledge: bucket theory 133–4; counter-

phenomenal 33, 36, 43; dualism 9, 12,203; empiricism and 129; growth of123–6; ideology and 144; inauthenticity148; prior 254; a priori 166–7, 171, 173,176–7; realism and 130–3; relativity of34–5, 233–4; search-light theory 134,136; sociology of 230–2; transitive

264 Index

dimension of 11; types of 155; see alsohearsay; practical knowledge

labour 185–8; living labour 185, 189–92labour-products 177Lacan, Jacques 19, 48, 54Laing, R.D. 4, 41–6, 43–4, 45language: acquisition of 216–17; feminism

and 55; God and 27–8; instability of37–9; linguistic turn 134–5; protocolsentences 134–5; representation and254; of self-interest 76–81

Lara, Maria 64law 23–4Lawrence, D.H. 17–18Lawson, Tony 7lay knowledge see practical knowledgelearning 98Lenin, Vladimir 206–7Lévinas, E. 19–20, 24–5lived relation 155living labour 185, 187, 189–92Locke, John 164–5logic 133logical positivism 134love 70–1Luckmann, Thomas 233Luhmann, Niklas 228Lukács, Georg 205, 234Luther, Martin 22

MacIntyre, A. 111n.18Macmurray, John: on Heidegger 131;

influence of 10, 64; knowledge 118,143–4, 155

Macquarrie, John 153, 154Mandeville, B. 79Mannheim, Karl 233–4Marshall, A. 78Marx, Karl: a posteriori 178; essences 176;

influence of 33; inversion 193; man’sinorganic body 239; morality and 22;nature philosophy 248; objectivity of174–5; on Ricardians 188; on socialpower 189; use-value 190, 192; utility196; on value 184, 185, 186–7; wage-labour 197

Marxism: biography and 39; existentialismand 155; inauthenticity 148; injustice180; materialist objectivism 174–8;pragmatism and 208–10; as a science33–4; structuralism 8

Masterclasses 123, 125materialism: dialectical materialism 169,

178–80, 200–2; historical materialism33–4, 39–40; objectivism 174–8;realism and 199–203

maternal issues 72–3Mathematical Psychics (Edgworth) 196matter 10, 168matter–form composites 167–8matter-in-itself 169meaning, lack of 19Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 152, 156n.3Mesny, Anne 233meta-psychology 42Meta-Reality 12metaphysics 135, 139, 171–4metaphysics of presence 48Le métier de sociologue (Bourdieu) 230mind–body dualism 9, 12, 203La Misère du monde (Bourdieu) 232modernity 228–9, 232–3monism 202morality 22–8; animals and 65; concerns

of 241; emotions and 66, 97–9; evil and22; habit and 98–9; ideology and 64–5;in Kant 219; naturalism 243–4;normativity and 93–7; paradox of 23;reason and 97–9; in Smith 94, 99–102,99–102, 109, 110n.14; social structuresand 107–8; substance 27; truemoralities 65

Morris, William 249Moulton, Janet 51

Naess, Arne 241narratives 14–15nationalism 255natural necessity 163naturalism 243–4nature: experience of 255–9; idealism and

202–3; man’s inorganic body 239;man’s status 242

navigation 121, 124necessities 71needs 65, 88, 102–3neo-Kantianism 9neo-Marxism 228neo-Straffianism 188Neurath, Otto 134–5neutrality 82New Social Movements 64Nicholson, Linda 49, 52Nicole, Pierre 76, 77, 79, 80nominalism 135Non-Contradiction, Law of 218non-human beings 241–2

Index 265

Norrie, Alan 7nothingness 18, 19, 63noumena 214Novack, George 208Nussbaum, M.C. 104

Oatley, Keith 121Objective Knowledge (Neurath) 135objectivity: definition of 48, 130, 137–8,

252–3; ethical naturalism and 109; inHegel 170–1; myths of 64; negativityand 253; neutrality and 82; types of226, 226–7

obligations 66–7Oizerman, Theodore 204O’Neill, John 67, 245ontological monovalence 164ontological realism 8ontology: alternatives to 140–1;

bi/polyvalence 164, 180Others 147–8Outhwaite, William 4–5

paradigm shifts 40paradoxes 223particularists 68passion 222Paul, St 22Peirce, Charles Sanders 119perception 153, 165–6personal relations 256phallogocentrism 50–2, 55–6phenomenology 146, 171The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity

(Habermas) 228philosophical knowledge 155philosophy: limitations of 203–5; task of

33, 45physical objects 67, 68–9physicalist reductionism 130Pigou, A. 78Plato 22, 67, 167–8plot 16–17political economy, critique of 196–7politics 4, 55, 233ponziopilatismo 148Popper, Karl 133–41Porpora, Doug 4, 8positivism 66, 93, 227post-philosophical wisdom 172post-structuralism 93postmodernism: assumptions of 35; claims

and claimants 51–4; contradictions of

35–6; feminism and 49–50, 55–6; inhumanities and social sciences 34;irreality of 152–3; language and 217;realism and 255; ‘seeing as’ 40; socialsciences and 230–1

power 22practical knowledge: critical realism and

129; dependence of 119–23; inHeidegger 145–7, 154–5; nature of121–2, 155–6; objectivity of 118–19,126–8; philosophers of 143; primacy of152–3; reality and 141; from theoreticalknowledge 123–4; into theoreticalknowledge 124–6; theory and 132–3,206–10

pragmatism 207–9praiseworthy acts 101–2praxis 228, 254pre-reflective thought 172preferences 78–9, 84, 85–8present-at-hand 131, 145, 256Price, R. 81‘On the Production of Moral Ideology’

(Collier) 64–5protocol sentences 134–5providence 203psychoanalysis 33–4, 39, 55psychotherapy 33, 45public choice theory 82, 84pure matter 169–70pure reason 167–71

The Quiet American (Greene) 20Quine, W.O. 218

Radical Philosophy (journal) 3, 239rationalisation 229rationality, alienated conceptions of 97Rawls, John 95, 96R.D. Laing (Collier) 33, 45ready-to-hand 131, 145real absences 63real, knowing the 153–5Real Presences (Steiner) 26–7realism: in Bhaskar 69; common-sense

141; criticisms of 137; emotions and97–8; fallibility and 64; first conference4–6; in Heidegger 131; idealism and156n.3; materialism and 199–203;morality and 95–6; in Popper 133–5;value and 66

The Realism and Human SciencesConferences 4–6

266 Index

reality 162–3, 200, 255reality-testing 118, 125–6, 132–3, 136, 251Reason: common-sense and 221–2; in

Derrida 215; in Kant 213–14, 222;limitations of 217–21; morality and97–9; passion and 222; self-undoing213–14, 218–19; suspicion 221, 223–4

reductionism 130, 203reflexive objectivity 226–7; in Bourdieu

230–2; in Habermas 227–30; inMannheim 233–4

Regan, Tom 241relationism 233–4relativism 106, 215–16, 233–4religion 4, 6, 7, 8, 23, 36, 40Ricardians 188Richard I, king of England 83rights-theory 241Romanticism 229Rorty, Richard 64, 103, 208, 221, 46n.2Routledge 7Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy 35

Samuelson, P. 90n.4Sartre, Jean-Paul: absences 63; bad faith

148; dilemmas 66–7; influence of18–19; on narrative 14–15; ‘real’subjects 38–40

Sayer, Derek 176–7scepticism 204, 221schizophrenia 41–6schools 64–5science: objectivity and 253–5; philosophy

of 133–5, 242scientific knowledge: ‘aboutness’ 162;

ideology and 150, 156; in Macmurray155; philosophers of 143

Scientific Realism and Socialist Thought (Collier)4, 7

Searle, J. 139Second Edge moments 164, 179, 180‘seeing as’ 39–40self-consciousness 153self-interest 76–81, 82–3, 101self-love 80–1, 86sex 17–18simple commodity production 183–5Singer, Peter 241singing teachers 122–3slavery 164Smith, Adam: moral sentiments 94,

99–102, 109, 110n.14; self-interest 79;toil and trouble 184

social construction 103–4Social Construction of Reality (Berger) 233social practices 149, 151social sciences: assumptions of 232;

modernity 232–3; morality and 93–7;postmodernism and 34, 37, 230–1;rational choice 82–5

social structures 107–8socialisation 103Socialist Reasoning (Collier) 6societies, system theory of 228sociology of knowledge 230–2, 233Sontag, Susan 26Soper, Kate 226, 242Southampton Synthesiser 8Spinoza, Baruch 22, 201–3, 241Spirit 169, 170spirituality, role of 7–8Steiner, George 14, 15, 26–7stoicism 167stories 16‘The Storyteller’ (Benjamin) 16structural realism 7, 8–9subjective idealism 130subjectivism 85–9; merged subjectivity

17–18; realism and 11; subject–objectdistinction 253; truth-claims and 162

substance 202–3suffering 102–6suspicion 133, 221, 223–4Sussex University 4sympathy 100system theory 228

tacit skills 119, 132Taylor, C. 71technology 146–7test of practice 208theoretical knowledge: correction of

136–7; in Heidegger 131, 146;importance of 206–10; from practicalknowledge 124–6; into practicalknowledge 123–4; practical knowledgeand 118, 132–3

The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Smith)99–102

theosis 10thesis-antithesis-synthesis triad 172‘they’ 147–8Third Level 180thrownness 147, 148Tillich, Paul Johannes 22transcendental illusion 213–14

Index 267

transcendentalism: in Kant 164–7; inMarx 171; paradoxes 219; realism 179

transfactuality 164, 179transformation problem 192–3transitivity 11, 164A Treatise of Human Nature (Hume) 79–80,

165, 90n.9De Trinitate (Augustine) 85, 86truth: analysis of 9; existentialism and

154–5; feminism and 57–8; inHabermas 51; in Hegel 180;objectivity and 48; phallogocentrismand 50–2; relativity of 217;surrogation 48, 54–8

Truth and Truthfulness (Williams) 222

understanding 145unity-in-diversity 171–2universalism 67–8, 79, 228–9use-value 177, 185, 187, 190, 192, 239–40utilitarianism 241utility 78, 82–3, 87, 195–6, 90n.4utopianism 210

value: ethical issues 240–1; hierarchy of243, 245–9; as labour 185–7; labour as

creator of 187–8; law of 183–5;objectivity of 7, 9, 64–7, 67–9; physicalobjects and 68–9; plurality of 71–2;use-value 177, 185, 187, 190, 192,239–40

Vertigan, Sean 7vices 79virtue 67, 70–1, 101–2The Voice of Experience (Laing) 45

Wacquant, Loic 107wage-labour 185–6, 188–9, 197Weber, Max 97, 108, 229well-being 85–9whole, primacy of 7, 11–12Williams, Bernard 222Williams, Raymond 98Winch, Peter 218wishful thinking 57Wittgenstein, Ludwig 39, 40, 44Wolff, Janet 234women 72–3Wood, Alan 86workplaces 65

¯i¿ek, Slavoj 255

268 Index

169345391 ARCHER Defending Objectivity

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