The New Conflict of the Faculties:
Kant, Radical Enlightenment, The Hyper-State,
and How to Philosophize During a Pandemic
Robert Hanna·
Independent Philosopher, USA
Abstract
In
this essay, I apply the Kantian (or at the very least, Kant-inspired) interpretation
of enlightenment as radical enlightenment
to the enterprise of philosophy within the context of our contemporary
world-situation, and try to answer this very hard question: “As radically
enlightened Kantian philosophers confronted by the double-whammy consisting of what I call The Hyper-State, together with the
2020-2021 COVID-19 pandemic, what should we dare to think and do?” The very
hard problem posed by this very hard question is what I’ll call The New Conflict of the Faculties. By
way of a direct answer to this very hard question and by way of an effective
solution to this very hard problem, I provide seven recommendations.
Key
words
Kant,
Radical enlightenment, Hyper-State, Digital media, Civil disobedience,
Voltaire, 2020-2021 COVID-19 pandemic
Our age is the genuine age of criticism, to which everything must submit. Religion through its holiness, and legislation through its majesty
[and, in the 21st century, the
military-industrial-university-digital complex through its ideological hegemony
and coercive authoritarianism—RH] commonly seek to exempt themselves from it.
But in this way they excite a just suspicion against themselves, and cannot lay
claim to that unfeigned respect that reason grants only to that which has been
able to withstand its free and public examination. (CPR Axi n.)[1]
I. Introduction
In this essay, I want to apply the Kantian (or at the
very least, Kant-inspired) interpretation of enlightenment as radical enlightenment to the enterprise
of philosophy within the context of our contemporary world-situation,
and try to answer this very hard question:
As radically
enlightened Kantian philosophers confronted by the double-whammy consisting of what I call The Hyper-State, [2] together
with the 2020-2021 COVID-19 pandemic,
what should we dare to think and do?
The very hard problem posed by this very hard question
is what I’ll call The New Conflict of the
Faculties.
II.
What Enlightenment Is
To coin a question, what is enlightenment? In his equally famous and notorious, but in
any case historically and philosophically seminal, same-named essay, Kant says
this:
Enlightenment
is the human being’s emergence from his own self-incurred immaturity.
Immaturity is the inability to make
use of one’s own understanding without direction from another. This immaturity
is self-incurred when its cause lies
not in lack of understanding but in lack of resolution and courage to use it
without direction from another. Sapere
aude! Have the courage to use your own
understanding! is thus the motto of Enlightenment. (WiE 8: 35)
Following Kant’s lead and elaborating a little, I will
say that the concept of ENLIGHTENMENT, as such, says that (i) because we are,
by virtue of a unified set of innately-specified cognitive, practical, and
affective/emotional capacities, autonomous
rational human animal agents possessing dignity, that is, persons, but (ii) because, tragically,
against the backdrop of various more or less brute, goading material conditions
of physical nature, human history, and social-institutional or political
culture, we have also freely—even if unreflectively and self-deceivingly—put
ourselves into a longstanding condition of cognitive, practical, and
affective/emotional passivity, robotic subservience, mind control, and mental
slavery, and thus into a longstanding state of self-incurred moral and intellectual immaturity, (iii) therefore,
in order finally to advance beyond this tragic immature condition and to
satisfy the categorically normative demands of our rational human nature as
persons, we ought to dare to use our own
understanding and think for ourselves, or as the classical slogan has it, Sapere
aude!
But unfortunately,
and fatefully, whether intentionally or not, Kant’s seminal essay is highly ambiguously written, in such a
way as to permit two sharply different readings of the concept of
enlightenment, depending on whether one interprets it, as most casual readers,
scholars, and Kantian or non-Kantian philosophers do, in the light of (i)
Kant’s neo-Hobbesian liberal Statist political philosophy in The Doctrine of
Right, or instead, as a few
contrarian “Left Kantians” (Hanna 2017a) do, in the light of (ii) Kant’s
uncompromising non-egoistic, non-consequentialist, autonomy-driven, dignitarian
ethics in the Groundwork and Critique of Practical Reason, his
post-Statist, spiritually-inspired moral cosmopolitanism in Religion Within
the Boundaries of Mere Reason, and his defense of the absolute autonomy of
philosophy in “The Conflict of the Faculties.” According to the first
interpretation, which I call Enlightenment Lite (EL), you ought to “argue as much you like about whatever you like,
but obey!” Correspondingly, EL is
committed to an essentially instrumental,
empiricist conception of cognitive and practical rationality, an
essentially deterministic or at least
compatibilist metaphysics of free
will and autonomy, an essentially egoistic
utilitarian conception of ethics, an
essentially individualist conception
of social life, and an essentially intellectualist
or dualist conception of the nature
of the human mind. But on the contrary, according to the second interpretation,
which I call Radical Enlightenment (RE),[3] or heavy-duty enlightenment, you ought to
dare to think and act for yourself, and in so thinking and so doing,
thereby exit the State in order to create and sustain a cosmopolitan
moral community that Kant calls the “ethical community”: hence RE is a Kantian version of philosophical
and political cosmopolitan anarcho-socialism (Hanna 2017b).
Correspondingly, RE is committed to
an essentially non-instrumental,
apriorist conception of cognitive and practical rationality (Hanna 2015), a
natural libertarian, source-incompatibilist metaphysics of
free will and autonomy (Hanna 2018b), an essentially dignitarian, respect-based
conception of ethics (Hanna 2018c), an essentially enactive and embedded
conception of social life (Maiese and Hanna 2019), and an essentially embodied conception of the human mind
(Hanna and Maiese 2009).
Now the
ideological allure of the first or EL
interpretation is so powerful that you may find it hard to believe that there
even is a second or RE
interpretation. If so, then I hereby invite you, as a self-consciously critical
Critical philosopher, to put the all-too-familiar EL interpretation in abeyance for a very brief moment, and
recognize that the RE interpretation
practically leaps out of these three
juxtaposed texts:
When nature has unwrapped, from under this hard shell,
the seed for which she cares most tenderly, namely the propensity and calling
to think freely, the latter gradually
works back upon the mentality of the people (which thereby gradually becomes
capable of freedom in acting) and
eventually even upon the principles of government,
which finds it profitable to itself to treat the human being, who is now more than a machine, in
keeping with his dignity. (WiE 8:
41-42)
A juridico-civil (political) state is the relation of human
beings to each other inasmuch as they stand jointly under public juridical
laws (which are all coercive laws). An ethico-civil state is one in
which they are united under laws without being coerced, i.e., under laws of
virtue alone…. In an already existing political community all the political
citizens are, as such, still in the ethical state of nature, and have
the right to remain in it; for it would be a contradiction (in adjecto) for
the political community to compel its citizens to enter into an ethical
community, since the latter entails freedom from coercion in its very concept.
Every political community may indeed wish to have available a dominion over
minds as well, according to the laws of virtue; for where its means of coercion
do not reach, since a human judge cannot penetrate into the depths of other
human beings, there the dispositions to virtue would bring about the required
result. But woe to the legislator who would want to bring about through
coercion a polity directed to ethical ends! For he would thereby not only
achieve the very opposite of ethical ends, but also undermine his political
ends and render them insecure. – The citizen of the political community
therefore remains, so far as the latter’s lawgiving authority is concerned,
totally free: he may wish to enter with his fellow citizens into an ethical
union over and above the political one, or rather remain in a natural state of
this sort…. THE HUMAN BEING OUGHT TO LEAVE THE ETHICAL STATE OF NATURE IN ORDER
TO BECOME A MEMBER OF AN ETHICAL COMMUNITY. (Rel 6: 95-102)
When it is a question of the truth of a certain teaching to be expounded in public, the teacher
cannot appeal to a supreme command nor the pupil pretend that he believed it by
order. This can happen only when it is a question of action, and even then the
pupil must recognize by a free judgment
that such a command was really issued and that he is obligated or at least
entitled to obey it; otherwise, his acceptance of it would be an empty pretense
and a lie. Now the power to judge autonomously—that is, freely according to
principles of thought in general)—is called reason. So the philosophical faculty,
because it must answer for the truth of its teachings it is to adopt or even
allow, must be conceived as free and subject only to laws given by reason, not
by the government. (CF 7: 27)
In any case, a striking contemporary example of EL is Steven Pinker's Enlightenment
Now (2018) and, for better or worse, I have recently developed and defended
RE in Kant, Agnosticism, and
Anarchism (Hanna 2018d).
Very much in the
spirit of RE, in “The Conflict of
the Faculties,” Kant is fully critically aware of the real possibility of
mind-control and mental slavery (aka “ideological hegemony”) within the
university, especially via the faculty of theology; and he correspondingly
asserts the absolute autonomy of the faculty of philosophy from the theology
faculty, from other university faculties, and from the government. But, as
radical as that is, perhaps suprisingly, Kant neglects to consider the equally
real possibility of ideological hegemony within faculties of philosophy
themselves (Hanna 2018e);
nor—perhaps unsurprisingly—does he
foresee the real possibility of almost unlimited mind-control and mental
slavery via contemporary digital media, not only within States but also
across States, worldwide.
Now when we
combine (i) the coercive authoritarianism of all States, especially including
all contemporary neoliberal nation-States, with (ii) global corporate
capitalism, (iii) complicit, conformist, neoliberal universities and their
faculties (Maiese and Hanna 2019: ch.4), and with (iv) globalized digital
media, then we have what I will call “The Hyper-State,” that is, the
military-industrial-university-digital complex that nationally,
internationally, and globally guides and shapes States and their governments,
often more or less covertly and without our being self-consciously critically
aware of it.[4]
In the rest of
this essay, as I mentioned in the Introduction, I want to apply the Kantian
interpretation of enlightenment as RE
to the enterprise of philosophy
within the context of our contemporary world-situation, and try to answer this
very hard question: “As radically enlightened Kantian philosophers confronted
by the double-whammy consisting of The Hyper-State, together with the 2020-2021
COVID-19 pandemic, what should we dare to think and do?” And as I also
mentioned in the Introduction, the very hard problem posed by this very hard
question is what I’m calling “The New Conflict of the Faculties.”
III.
The Argument From Socialism: Log Off, Subvert, and Dismantle
As a necessary preliminary to our fully facing up to
The New Conflict of the Faculties, I’m going to start with a recent critical
analysis of social media by Benjamin
Y. Fong in the American democratic socialist journal, Jacobin. Fong writes:
For the Left, … social media presents an imminent
threat: it attracts people who are natural fodder for socialist politics and
then absorbs them in the unthinking narcissism of pseudo-political statement
pronouncement, where they enter the negative feedback loop that distances them
from the reality of everyday human engagement. Twitter is thus not just a medium
of expression for the “psychic pathologies” of what Mark Fisher described
so well as the “Vampire Castle.”[5] It
is the Vampire Castle, doing capitalism’s work by further atomizing and
distancing people from the kinds of conversations required for real political
engagement. The sooner we realize this about social media, the sooner we can
get to the work of dismantling it. (Fong 2018)
Here, in turn, is a
four-step rational reconstruction of Fong’s argument:
1. Socialism—whether democratic socialism or social anarchism (aka anarcho-socialism, libertarian socialism, etc.)—is fundamentally concerned with
respect for universal human dignity; with human freedom of thought, expression,
choice, and action; with individual and collective creativity and flourishing;
and with the universal satisfaction of true human needs.
2. Internet-based social media may appear to be highly promising and
legitimate vehicles for the realization of socialist aims.
3. But in fact, social media are an essential part of the
“military-industrial-university-digital
complex” that not only produces widespread mind-control
and mental slavery, but has also enabled a worldwide mental health crisis of social media addiction (Griffiths 2018;
Nguyen 2018; Schulson 2015).
4. Therefore, anyone who recognizes the value of the fundamental concerns
of socialism should (i) engage in a serious critical analysis of social media,
(ii) “log the fuck off” on a regular basis, in order to resist their largely
malign influence, and also (iii) wholeheartedly individually and collectively
commit to subverting and dismantling the entire system of social media.
I think that this argument
is sound. Moreover, I also think that its conclusion should be generalized so
as to apply to all digital media
controlled by other parts of The Hyper-State, not just social media,
therefore all digital media, including all parts of the internet, that are
controlled by (i) the governments of contemporary nation-States, especially
including their coercive authoritarian enforcement-specialists, the military
and the police, and/or (ii) global corporate capitalists, and/or (iii)
universities and professional academic organizations. The rationale for this
generalization is that premises 1, 2, and 3 of the above argument apply just as
correctly and directly to all digital
media controlled by The Hyper-State, as they do to social media in particular.
Therefore, the generalized conclusion of the rationally reconstructed version
of Fong’s argument should be a starting point for all of us, including all philosophers, which in turn includes
all radically enlightened Kantian
philosophers.
Now we can advance to the philosophical main event of this essay, namely
fully facing up The New Conflict of the Faculties: specifically as
radically enlightened Kantian philosophers confronted by The Hyper-State, what
should we dare to think and do?
IV.
One Thing That Radically Enlightened Kantian Philosophers Should Dare to Think
and Do: Political Philosophy of Mind
In section III, I argued that anyone who recognizes the value of the fundamental concerns of socialism
should (i) engage in a serious critical analysis of all digital media
substantially controlled by The Hyper-State, (ii) “log the fuck off” on a
regular basis from the digital media substantially controlled by The
Hyper-State, in order to resist their largely malign influence, and also (iii)
wholeheartedly individually and collectively commit to subverting and
dismantling the entire system of digital media substantially controlled by The
Hyper-State. But these are things that anyone, not just radically enlightened Kantian philosophers, should
dare to think and do, insofar as they are confronted by The Hyper-State. So we
need to isolate some thing or things that radically enlightened Kantian
philosophers are especially well-positioned to be able to dare to think and do,
by virtue of their training and by virtue of their wholehearted commitment to real philosophy, aka rational anthropology, as a full-time,
lifetime calling (Hanna 2018a).
Here is one thing, namely what, following the
contemporary German philosopher Jan Slaby, I call political philosophy of mind. Political philosophy of mind, as I am
understanding it, has two parts: (i) the
mind-body politic, which is an extension of the theory of what Michelle
Maiese and I call the essential
embodiment theory of the mind-body relation (Hanna and Maiese 2009), to the
critical analysis and radical emancipatory politics of social institutions, and (ii) the
political philosophy of cognition, which is an extension of the theory of
human cognition to the critical analysis and radical emancipatory politics of ideologically-driven cognitive illusions.
Here is an example of the mind-body politic:
[The mind-body politic] fuses contemporary philosophy of mind and emancipatory political theory.
On the philosophy of mind side, we draw from our own previous work on the
essential embodiment theory and enactivism, together with work by Jan Slaby,
John Dewey, Bourdieu, and J.J. Gibson. On the emancipatory political theory
side, we draw from Kant, Schiller, Kierkegaard, early Marx, Kropotkin,
Foucault, and Frankfurt School Critical Theory. We begin with the claim that
human minds are necessarily and completely embodied, and inherently enactive,
social, and environmentally embedded, and proceed from there to argue that
social institutions partially determine and shape our essentially embodied
minds, and thereby fundamentally affect our lives. Our focus is on social
institutions in contemporary neoliberal societies, specifically higher
education and mental health practice. We hold that although these social
institutions shape our essentially embodied minds in a destructive, deforming,
and enslaving way, yet it’s possible to create social institutions that are
constructive, enabling, and emancipatory. According to our proposed
enactive-transformative principle, enacting salient changes in the structure
and complex dynamics of a social institution produces corresponding salient
changes in the structure and complex dynamics of the essentially embodied minds
of the people belonging to that institution. (Maiese and Hanna 2019: ch.1)
And here is an example of the political philosophy of
cognition:
I am deeply and fundamentally interested in explaining
how memory and sense perception can be ideologically manipulated for political
purposes, and also how the philosophy of cognition can be deployed to indicate
and justify practical, effective cognitive strategies for resisting this
manipulation and for ideological self-deprogramming and cognitive
self-liberation when the manipulation has already occurred. My proposal is that
the overall value of those cognitive theories will be made retrogressively
manifest through their ability to provide fruitful and robust consequences for
political theories and real-world political frameworks that emphasize individual and collective free agency and
radical enlightenment. (Hanna 2018f)
V.
Another Thing That Radically Enlightened Kantian Philosophers Should Dare to
Think and Do: Philosophical Civil Disobedience
What else should radically enlightened Kantian
philosopers dare to think and do? In recent work, I’ve argued (i) that a
metaphilosophical “second copernican revolution” will occur when and insofar as
radically enlightened philosophers exit
the professional academy in order to emancipate themselves from the mind
control and mental slavery of contemporary professional academic philosophy,
which is itself fully embedded within and fully reflective of the mind control
and mental slavery that pervades contemporary neoliberal universities and other
social institutions of higher education (Hanna 2018e), and (ii) that the
specific kind of philosophy that radically enlightened philosophers should be
doing is borderless philosophy, or anarcho-philosophy (Hanna 2018g).
Borderless philosophy, or anarcho-philosophy,
is a sub-species of real philosophy, aka rational anthropology (Hanna 2018a),
according to which (i) real philosophy is expressly anti-professional-academic
or at least extra-professional-academic, (ii) real philosophy is
expressly cosmopolitan or global, and
(iii) there are no in-principle
restrictions as to the format or content of real philosophical works.
But there’s
another aspect of borderless or anarcho-philosophy that is also closely
connected with Martin Luther King Jr’s doctrine of civil disobedience (King 2018), as per the following eight-step
argument.
1. By violence,
I mean the use of actually or potentially destructive force, and by nonviolence
I mean the refusal to use actually or potentially destructive force.
2. Violence with
respect to people is rarely if ever rationally or morally justified; indeed,
except in last-resort cases of self-defense against violent attack or in order
to protect the innocent from violent attack, universal nonviolence with respect
to people is rationally justified and morally obligatory.
3. Nevertheless,
sometimes it is not only permissible, but even rationally justified and morally
obligatory, to be nonviolent with respect to people yet also violent
with respect to private property, if the relevant private property
represents a basic and widespread source of violations of respect for universal
human dignity–e.g., if it’s private property owned by big-capitalist
conglomerates or corporations, that expresses and implements an inherently
oppressive social system, such as the symbiotic combination of racism, big
capitalism, and the coercive authoritarianism of the State (e.g., of the police
and the legal justice system of mass incarceration)–and the purpose of the
violence with respect to private property of this kind is solely to change this
inherently oppressive social system into something fundamentally better, in
that it sufficiently respects universal human dignity.
4. Martin Luther King
Jr (henceforth MLK), argues that massive nonviolent (with respect to people)
civil disobedience is required in order to effect fundamental social change for
the better in inherently oppressive social systems, and also that this
nonviolent civil disobedience can include “direct action” such as the
disruption of the daily operations of the inherently oppressive symbiotic
social system of racism, big capitalism, and the coercive authoritarianism of
the State, perhaps even including violence with respect to private property
owned by big-capitalist conglomerates or corporations (King 2018).
5. Although MLK
does not explicitly draw this distinction, there is nevertheless a basic
difference between (i) coercion, which is either (ia) imposing or
threatening to impose violence on people or (ib) imposing or threatening to
impose salient although nonviolent harms on people, in order to compel those
people to do various things, or heed various commands or demands, in order to
bring about egoistic or publicly beneficial ends of the coercer, and (ii) noncoercion,
which is the refusal to engage in coercion.
6. Since coercion
treats other people as mere means or mere things, and not as persons with
dignity, it violates sufficient respect for human dignity; hence all coercion
is rationally unjustified and immoral, even if it is beneficial for many
people.
7. So only nonviolent
(with respect to people), noncoercive civil disobedience is rationally
justified and morally acceptable for the purposes of effecting fundamental social
change for the better in inherently oppressive social systems, and only
nonviolent (with respect to people), noncoercive civil disobedient “direct
action” or “disruption” is fully consistent with MLK’s overall moral and
political philosophy.
8. Therefore,
although MLK was a serious radical—indeed, he was an anarcho-socialist,
since political anarchism is just a generalization of civil disobedience which
says that we’re always permitted or obligated to disobey the coercive
authoritarian commands of the State whenever those commands are
rationally unjustified and immoral, hence the State as such, as inherently
coercive and authoritarian, has no genuine rational and moral legitimacy—he was
not a dangerous radical, except insofar as he peacefully but also rebelliously
challenged the oppression of racists, big capitalists, and coercive
authoritarian Statists.
Civil disobedience in MLK’s sense, then, is the
refusal to heed, or the direct violation of, rationally unjustified and immoral
commands or laws of the State, for the sake of sufficiently respecting
universal human dignity. And anarcho-socialism is just a generalization of
civil disobedience. Or to to express this doctrine of anarcho-socialist civil
disobedience in the refined MLK sense pictorially,
via a famous image created by the British artist Banksy:
In turn, I think
that there are at least five modes of civil disobedience: (i) direct action or disruption, for example,
strikes, marches, sit-ins, occupations, etc., (ii) what I call emancipatory free speech or freedom of
expression, that is, free speech or expression whose essential purpose is to resist oppression for the sake of
sufficiently respecting universal human dignity, (iii) counter-cultural escape into independent or unincorporated creative, meaningful
activity, for example, artistic activity of all kinds, crafts of all kinds,
scholarship of all kinds, especially philosophy, and, more generally, J.S.
Mill's “experiments in living,” (iv) what the political anthropologist James C.
Scott calls weapons of the weak (Scott
1985), for example, foot-dragging, covert noncompliance, theft, sabotage,
defacement of property, etc., and finally (v) what I call philosophical civil disobedience.
As regards (v),
we’ll remember that according to the refined version of MLK’s conception of
civil disobedience that I sketched above, all civil disobedience must also be
(i) nonviolent (with respect to people), and (ii) noncoercive. So what kind or
kinds of civil disobedience in the refined MLK sense are especially appropriate
for radically enlightened Kantian borderless or anarcho-philosophers? Looking
back to the origins of western philosophy, Socrates and Diogenes, for example,
were both emancipatory free-speakers
and counter-cultural escapees:
Socrates was a subversive philosophical market-place conversationalist; and
Diogenes was an outrageous, Lenny-Bruce-style, philosophical sociopolitical
critic, and a self-styled hobo or vagrant. In these regards, Socrates and
Diogenes were both civil disobedients
in the refined MLK sense, and correspondingly they were regarded by their
contemporary governments and/or power-elites as dangerous thinkers. As we all know, Socrates was arrested by the
government of Athens, imprisoned, tried, and executed; and Diogenes was
banished from Sinope for defacing the currency, and later kidnapped by pirates
and sold into slavery. But neither Socrates nor Diogenes, unlike Voltaire, lived in the time of natural
disasters like the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, which killed 30,000 people—
Voltaire in turn, directly responding to the Lisbon
earthquake disaster in the light of the rationalist optimism of 18th
century Leibnizian-Wolffian professional academic philosophy, carried out an
act of radically enlightened philosophical civil disobedience by creating and
publishing his brilliantly satirical 1759/1761 anti-professional-academic
philosophy novel, Candide (Voltaire
1981). Kant, of course, knew about the Lisbon earthquake disaster, and had also
closely read Candide. So in the
“Practical Conclusion” to his own Voltaire-inspired satirical essay of 1766,
“Dreams of a Spirit-Seer Elicucidated by Dreams of Metaphysics,” he wrote:
It seems more consonant with human nature and moral
purity to base the expectation of a future world on the sentiments of a nobly
constituted soul than, conversely, to base its noble conduct on the hope of
another world. Such is also the character of moral faith (moralische
Glaube)…. [S]ince our fate in that future world will probably very much
depend on how we comported ourselves at our posts in this world, I will
conclude with the advice which Voltaire
gave to his honest Candide after so
many futile scholastic disputes: Let us
attend to our happiness, and go into the garden and work. (DSS 2: 373)[6]
Correspondingly, in the next section, I’ll apply what
I think is the core radically enlightened philosophically disobedient thought
in Candide—namely, “il faut cultiver notre jardin,” i.e.,
“we must cultivate our garden,” to our very hard leading question, namely, “As
radically enlightened Kantian philosophers confronted by the double-whammy
consisting of The Hyper-State, together with the 2020-2021 COVID-19 pandemic,
what should we dare to think and do?,” and also to the very hard problem posed
by this very hard question, namely, The New Conflict of the Faculties.
VI.
Il Faut Cultiver Notre Jardin Mondial, Or,
How to Philosophize During a Pandemic
The history of [Candide’s] world-famous phrase,
which serves as the book’s conclusion – il faut cultiver notre jardin –
is … peculiar. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it didn’t come into
written use in English until the early 1930s – in America through Oliver
Wendell Holmes and in Britain thanks to Lytton Strachey. But a long, unrecorded
history of its oral use and misuse can be deduced from Strachey’s announced
desire to cure the “degenerate descendants of Candide” who have taken the
phrase in the sense of “Have an eye to the main chance.” That a philosophical
recommendation to horticultural quietism should be twisted into a justification
for selfish greed would not necessarily have surprised Voltaire. (Barnes 2011)
In Voltaire’s Candide, the scathing critique of
abstract, world-alienated, self-alienating, sanctimonious theoretical
philosophy in general, and of professional academic philosophy in
particular—specifically exemplified by 18th century
Leibnizian/Wolffian rationalism and theodicy, or theo-idiocy, satirically
represented by that iconic moralistic idiot of professional academic
philosophy, Dr Pangloss—equally evocatively and provocatively concludes with
the phrase “il faut cultiver notre jardin,” i.e., “we must cultivate our
garden.” What does Voltaire’s world-famous phrase mean? As per the quotation at
the beginning of this section, the novelist Julian Barnes aptly noted that a
popular, vulgar misuse and twisting of it means “have an eye to the main
chance,” that is, a “justification for selfish greed,” and then proposed that,
contrariwise, its real meaning is “a philosophical recommendation to
horticultural quietism.” That reading of its real meaning seems wrong to
me, however, an anachronistic interpretation over-influenced by the later
Wittgenstein’s idea that real philosophy should only get clear on the
confusions of classical philosophy as represented by mainstream professional
academic philosophy, discharge all its bad pictures, engage in liberating
self-therapy, and then just “leave the world alone.”
Contrariwise to
Barnes’s Wittgensteinian contrariwise, I think that when Voltaire wrote “il
faut cultiver notre jardin,” fully
in accordance with his radically enlightened realistically optimist dignitarian
humanism (Hanna 2020), he was really saying:
In a world without an all-powerful (omnipotent),
all-knowing (omniscient), or all-good (omnibenvolent)—aka 3-O—God, it’s up to
all of us to nurture everyone and everything.
Correspondingly,
Voltaire was also telling us to revolutionize philosophy, and transform it from abstract, world-alienated,
self-alienating, sanctimonious theorizing into a concrete, world-encountering, self-realizing, emancipatory, rational
humanistic enterprise: in a nutshell, the real philosopher as a rational rebel for humanity. Hence what Voltaire is really
saying, in the context of 18th
century radical enlightenment, is essentially closer to what the early,
humanistic Marx is saying in his 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts
and his 1845 Theses on Feuerbach—
The resolution of theoretical considerations is
possible only through practical means, only through the practical energy
of humanity. Their resolution is by no means, therefore, the task only of
understanding, but is a real task of life, a task which philosophy was
unable to accomplish precisely because it saw there a purely theoretical
problem. (Marx 1964: 72)
The philosophers have only interpreted the
world in different ways; the point is to change it. (Marx 1964: 69)
and to what Thoreau is saying in his 1854 Walden–
There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not
philosophers…. To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor
even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its
dictates, life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to
solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically.
(Thoreau 1960: 9)
—than it is to what Wittgenstein is (or at least seems
to be[7]) saying
in the Philosophical Investigations.
That being so, how
do (i) the meaning of “il faut cultiver notre jardin,” (ii) Voltaire’s
radically enlightened critique of professional academic philosophy as abstract,
world-alienated, self-alienating, sanctimonious theorizing, and (iii) his
corresponding radically enlightened 18th century recommendation about real
philosophy, jointly apply to contemporary philosophy? First, I
think it’s entirely clear that the popular, vulgar misuse and twisting of “il
faut cultiver notre jardin” as “have an eye to the main chance” applies
directly to the professionalization and neoliberalization of academic
philosophy in late 20th and early 21st century liberal democratic,
or not-so-liberal and and not-so-democratic States, whether in Europe, North
America, or anywhere else in the world. Second, I think it’s also
entirely clear that Voltaire’s radically enlightened critique of professional
academic philosophy as abstract, world-alienated, self-alienating,
sanctimonious theorizing applies directly to the Ivory Bunker of
professional academic philosophy in the USA in The Age of Trump (Z aka Hanna 2016). Third, I
think it’s even self-evidently clear that Voltaire’s radically enlightened
recommendation about real philosophy directly applies to the three basic
proposals made by members of the Against
Professional Philosophy circle, including: (i) Robert Frodeman’s and Adam
Briggle’s conception of field philosophy (Frodeman
and Briggle 2016), (ii) Susan
Haack’s conceptions of reintegration
in philosophy and serious philosophy (Haack
2016a, 2016b), and most
radical of all, (iii) borderless
philosophy, or anarcho-philosophy,
as I’ve described it above. Therefore, 21st century philosophers, let’s eradicate
the infamy! (écrasez l’infâme!) that is the panglossian
professionalization and neoliberalization of academic philosophy worldwide,
together with the
ivory-bunker-ization of
professional academic philosophy in the USA in The Age of Trump, and cultivate our
garden.
But that’s not
all. The 2020-2021 COVID-19 pandemic is obviously a natural evil, and to that extent a very bad thing for anyone and
everyone who is adversely affected by it. Yet at the same time, I strongly
believe that the 2020-2021 COVID-19 pandemic is a borderless or cosmopolitan natural evil that demands an unpanicked, radically enlightened, dignitarian,
existential Kantian cosmopolitan anarcho-socialist moral and political
response, and not a panicked, insular, nationalist, Statist, and merely
instrumentalist (whether egoistic or utilitarian) moral and political
response. Moreover, the 2020-2021 COVID-19 pandemic also vividly highlights large-scale moral and political issues such
as (i) the oppressive, unfair healthcare system in the USA, (ii) massive
income-disparity between the richest and the other 99%, not only in the USA but
also in the rest of the world, (iii) Brexit-induced anti-EU nationalist
insularity in the UK, (iv) the anti-dignitarian threats of so-called “populism”
i.e., neo-fascism, worldwide, and
other dire situations in the contemporary world, especially including (v)
global poverty, (vi) the global refugee crisis, and (viii) global climate
change. And finally, since the 2020-2021 COVID-19 pandemic is being globally
presented to us by The Hyper-State, we need to be able to distinguish
critically and sharply between (i) what what
we really should be thinking and doing about the 2020-2021 COVID-19 pandemic,
and (ii) what The Hyper-State, via the
digital media controlled by it, is telling us to think and do about the
2020-2021 COVID-19 pandemic.
Now what do I mean
by the terminological mouthful, “radically enlightened, dignitarian,
existential Kantian cosmopolitan anarcho-socialism”? Before I can explain that, I’ll need to define some other terms: Statism, coercion, and authoritarianism. As Kant (MM 6: 203-372) and Max Weber have famously
pointed out (Weber 1994: 310), States possess a territorial monopoly on the
(putatively) legitimate control of the means and use of coercion; and as
philosophical and political anarchists have also somewhat less famously (or
even downright infamously) pointed out, States are also inherently
authoritarian. By coercion (also
briefly defined, in passing, in section V above) I mean:
either (i) using
violence (e.g., injuring, torturing, or killing) or the threat of violence, in
order to manipulate people against their will according to certain predefined
purposes of the coercer (primary coercion),
or (ii) inflicting
appreciable, salient harm (e.g., imprisonment, termination of employment, or
large monetary penalties) or deploying the threat of appreciable, salient harm,
even if these are not in themselves violent, in order to manipulate people
against their will according to certain predefined purposes of the coercer (secondary coercion).
So all coercion is a form of manipulation, and proceeds by following a variety of strategies
that share the same core characteristic: treating people as mere means or mere
things. Correspondingly by authoritarianism, I mean the doctrine that
telling people to obey commands and do things is legitimated merely by virtue
of the fact that some people (the purported authorities) have told them
to obey those commands or do those things—“it’s right just because we say it’s
right!”—and are also in a position to
enforce this by means of coercion, not on any rationally justified or objectively
morally defensible grounds. So authoritarianism and coercion per se are
different things, because although all authoritarianism requires coercion,
nevertheless the converse is not the case: coercion can occur without
authoritarianism—e.g., if you’re threatened or attacked by some random thug on
the street. Now all States are coercive
insofar as they claim the right to compel the people living within their
boundaries to heed and obey the commands and laws of the government, in order
to realize the instrumental ends of the State, whether or not those commands and laws are rationally justified or
morally right on independently ethical grounds. In turn, all States are also authoritarian insofar as they claim that
the commands and laws issued by its government are right just because the government says that they’re right and possesses
the power to coerce, not because
those commands or laws are rationally justified and morally right on
independent ethical grounds.
With those
definitions in place as conceptual backdrop, I’m now in a good position to
break down the complex phrase, “radically enlightened, dignitarian, existential
Kantian cosmopolitan anarcho-socialism,” term-by-term.
1. Radically
enlightened. See section II above.
2. Dignitarian. Dignitarianism, and especially the broadly Kantian version of it, says (i) that
everyone, everywhere, has absolute, non-denumerable, non-instrumental, innate
moral value, aka dignity, simply by virtue of their being real persons
(i.e., conscious, caring, cognizing, self-conscious rational animals with a
further capacity for free will) (Hanna 2018b), and that dignity is—or at the
very least, can be regarded as—a fundamental, irreducible, and therefore primitively
given feature of persons that cannot either be erased by any bad actions or
bad habits of character, or sanctified by any good actions or good habits of
character, and (ii) that everyone, everywhere ought to treat themselves and
everyone else with sufficient respect for their dignity.
3. Existential. By
existential,[8] I mean the primitive
motivational, or “internalist,” normative ground of the philosophical, moral,
and political doctrine I defend, which is the fundamental, innate need we have
for a wholehearted, freely-willed life not
essentially based on egoistic, hedonistic, or other merely instrumental
(e.g., utilitarian) interests, aka the
desire for self-transcendence, while at the same time fully assuming the
natural presence—aka the facticity—of
all such instrumental interests in our “human, all too human” lives. In a word,
the existential ideal of a rational human wholehearted autonomous life is the
ideal of authenticity.
4. Kantian. By
Kantian, in this context, I mean the
primitive objective, or “externalist,” normative ground of the philosophical,
moral, and political doctrine I defend, which is the recognition that the
fundamental, innate need we have for a wholehearted, freely-willed,
non-egoistic, non-hedonistic, non-consequentialist life, which we call the desire for self-transcendence, can
be sufficiently rationally justified only in so far as it is also a life of principled authenticity, by which I mean
principled wholehearted autonomy, or
having a good will in Kant’s sense,
guided by respect for the dignity of all real persons,[9] under the Categorical
Imperative.
5. Cosmopolitan. Notoriously, there is no
comprehensive, analytic definition of the term cosmopolitanism as it is used in either ordinary or specialized
(say, legal, political, or scholarly) language, covering all actual and
possible cases. It is variously taken to refer to globe-trotting
sophistication; to nihilistic, rootless, world-wandering libertinism; to the
general idea of “world citizenship”; to a single world-state with coercive
power; to a tight federation of all nation-states, again with coercive power;
or to a loose, semi- coercive international federation of nation-states and
related global institutions concerned with peace-keeping, criminal justice,
human rights, social justice, international money flow and investment, or
world-trade, like the United Nations, the International Court of Justice, the
(plan for a) World Court of Human Rights, the World Bank, or the World Trade
Organization (Kleingeld and Brown 2013). Nevertheless, the term
“cosmopolitanism” has an original, core meaning. As Kwame Anthony Appiah
correctly and insightfully points out:
Cosmopolitanism dates at least
to the Cynics of the fourth century BC [and especially to Diogenes of Synope],
who first coined the expression cosmopolitan, “citzen of the cosmos.” The formulation
was meant to be paradoxical, and reflected the general Cynic skepticism toward
custom and tradition. A citizen—a politēs—belonged
to a particular polis, a city to which he or she owed loyalty. The cosmos
referred to the world, not in the sense of the earth, in the sense of the
universe. Talk of cosmopolitanism originally signalled, then, a rejection of
the conventional view that every civilized person belonged to a community among
communities. (Appiah 2006: xiv)
In short, the original, core
meaning of cosmopolitanism expresses
a serious critique of existing political communities and states; a
thoroughgoing rejection of fervid, divisive, exclusionary, loyalist commitments
to convention, custom, identity, or tradition; and a robustly universalist
outlook in morality and politics, encompassing not only the Earth but also
other inhabited worlds if any, and also traveling between worlds (as per, for
example, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the
Galaxy), and, finally, the entire natural universe. By cosmopolitan,
then, I mean the original, core meaning of that term. And, borrowing from Kant,
I call the cosmopolitan universal ethical community, The Real Realm of Ends.
6. Anarcho-socialism.
Finally, by anarcho-socialism (Hanna
2018d; Kropotkin 1910; Bookchin 1986; Bookchin 1995), I mean philosophical and political social anarchism,
defined as follows. The thesis of philosophical social
anarchism says that there is no
adequate rational or moral justification for political authority, the State, or
any other State-like social institution. Correspondingly, the thesis of political social anarchism says that we
should reject and exit the State and other State-like institutions, in order to
create, belong to, and sustain a real-world, universal ethical community, The Real Realm of Ends, in a world in
which there are no States or other State-like institutions.
Now, finally, we’re in a position to dare to think for
ourselves about the 2020-2021 COVID-19 pandemic, by critically considering a real-world thought-experiment. Let’s
consider two scenarios.
SCENARIO
1.
In the first scenario, there’s a panicked,
nationalist, bordered, coercive authoritarian, liberal democratic, or
not-so-liberal and not-so-democratic, Statist response to the 2020-2021
COVID-19 pandemic, employing all the medical and epidemiological knowledge and
healthcare logicistics expertise that any given State has as its command, in
order to create a comprehensive plan to deal with the pandemic only insofar as it specifically affects that
particular State, a plan which is also such that, under a city-wide,
state-wide, or national “state of emergency,” individual city governments, individual
provincial or state governments, and/or the central government, are granted
temporary special powers, including the power to impose martial law, in order
to implement it, with individual mayors, individual state governors or
leaders, and at the central level, so-called “populist” but in fact neo-fascist
national leaders like Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, the UK’s Boris Johnson,
Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and the USA’s Donald Trump,
etc., or even neoliberal centrists like Joe Biden, etc., acting as, in effect, temporary military dictators for the
duration of the pandemic as it specifically affects their own countries.
SCENARIO 2.
By a diametric
contrast to the first scenario, in the second
scenario, there’s an unpanicked, borderless or cosmopolitan existential
Kantian dignitarian anarcho-socialist response to the 2020-2021 COVID-19
pandemic, not in any way restricted to
national boundaries, employing exactly the same amount of medical and
epidemiological knowledge and healthcare logistics expertise in order to create
a comprehensive plan to deal with it, and then a worldwide implementation
of the plan—say, by means of a worldwide, massively expanded Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans
Frontières operation, so let’s call it Super-Duper Doctors Without
Borders—but no authoritarian coercion whatsoever anywhere, rather only
strong recommendations and strongly-worded requests for voluntary compliance with the plan, and equally as much attention paid to dealing with the effects of the
COVID-19 virus on refugees, poor people, people put out of work due to the
crisis, etc., etc., anywhere in the world, as is paid to well-off people in
highly industrialized nations, and also sufficient
attention paid to dealing with the
ecological side-effects, both local and global (Koren 2020) of implementing
the comprehensive plan.
And let’s also
assume that in the second scenario, no force whatsoever is ever used, except
for minimally effective defensive and protective responses to direct
attacks on individuals or groups of innocent people, especially including
direct attacks on the people working for Super-Duper Doctors Without Borders
and/or on their medical installations and equipment (Hanna and Paans 2019).
Granting all that, then my question is:
From a philosophical, moral, and political point of
view, which scenario constitutes an all-around better and more effective
response to the 2020-2021 COVID-19 pandemic: SCENARIO 1 or SCENARIO 2?
I think that it’s
self-evidently and even gobsmackingly obvious
that SCENARIO 2 constitutes the
all-round better and more effective response. In other words, we should be
using SCENARIO 2 as what Kant would
call a rational practical Idea, that
is, as a fundamental commitment of moral
faith (moralische Glaube), for
guiding our critical thought and autonomous action about the 2020-2021 COVID-19
pandemic, and therefore, correspondingly, we should not allow ourselves to be bamboozled into thinking and acting
according to the panicked, nationalist, coercive authoritarian, liberal
democratic, or not-so-liberal and not-so-democratic, Statist response that’s
represented by SCENARIO 1 and
delivered to us 24-7 via the digital media controlled by The Hyper-State. So in
turn, that’s what I mean by the
Kant-inspired neo-Voltairean phrase, “il faut cultiver notre jardin mondial,”
in the context of the 2020-2021 COVID-19pandemic:
Not only must we not panic, and not only must we not complicitly, obediently, and
passively allow ourselves to be told what to think and do about the 2020-2021
COVID-19 pandemic by the digital media controlled by The Hyper-State, but
also we must cultivate our global garden.
VII. Conclusion
Now taking up the three radically enlightened Kantian
proposals for thinking about and dealing with digital media that I made in
section III, together with the proposal about political philosophy of mind that
I made in section IV, and also updating the Socratic, Diogenesian, and
especially Voltairean models of specifically philosophical civil disobedience
in the refined MLK sense that I described in section V, together with the
neo-Voltairean radically enlightened existential Kantian cosmopolitan
anarcho-socialist version of Candide’s famous last line, now upated to il faut cultiver notre jardian mondial,
as applied to the 2020-2021 COVID-19 pandemic, that I described in section VI,
I’m hereby proposing that radically enlightened Kantian borderless or anarcho-
philosophers should (i) wholeheartedly
individually and collectively engage in a serious critical analysis of all digital
media controlled by The Hyper-State, (ii) “log the fuck off” on a regular basis
from digital media controlled by The Hyper-State, in order to resist their
largely malign influence, (iii)
wholeheartedly individually and collectively commit to subverting and
dismantling the entire system of digital media controlled by The Hyper-State,
(iv) wholeheartedly individually and collectively pursue political philosophy
of mind, including the mind-body politic
and the political philosophy of
cognition, (v) like Socrates, Diogenes, and Voltaire, wholeheartedly
individually and collectively engage in emancipatory
free speech or freedom of expression, (vi) like Socrates, Diogenes, and
Voltaire, wholeheartedly individually and collectively perform counter-cultural escapes into
independent or unincorporated, anti-
or at least extra-professional-academic
real philosophy, and finally, (vii) as Kant-inspired neo-Voltaireans, dare to think and act about the 2020-2021
COVID-19 pandemic in radically enlightened existential Kantian cosmopolitan
anarcho-socialist ways. And then, since the world in which we live, move,
and have our being, is self-evidently a
thoroughly nonideal natural and social world, we should simply rationally hope for the best, or at
least for the substantially better.[10]
Kant-Text
Abbreviations and English Translations
CF Conflict
of the Faculties. Trans. M.
Gregor. Lincoln, NE: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1979.
CPR Critique
of Pure Reason. Trans. P.
Guyer and A. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997.
DSS “Dreams of a Spirit-Seer Elucidated by Dreams of
Metaphysics.” Trans. D. Walford and R. Meerbote. In Immanuel Kant:
Theoretical Philosophy: 1755-1770. Pp. 301-359.
MM Metaphysics
of Morals. Trans. M. Gregor. In Immanuel Kant: Practical Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.
Press, 1996, pp. 365-604.
OT “What Does It Mean to Orient
Oneself in Thinking?” Trans.
A. Wood. In Immanuel Kant: Religion and Rational Theology. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996. Pp.
7-18.
PP “Toward Perpetual Peace.” Trans. M. Gregor. In Immanuel Kant: Practical Philosophy, pp.
317-351.
Rel Religion within the Boundaries of Mere
Reason. Trans. A. Wood
and G. Di Giovanni. In Immanuel
Kant: Religion and Rational Theology. Pp. 57-215.
WiE “An Answer to the Question:
‘What is Enlightenment?’” Trans. M. Gregor. In Immanuel Kant: Practical
Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996. Pp. 17-22.
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