Cartesian Egalitarianism Essay Published

As a reader of this blog, you've probably heard that I am working on a book about Jacques Rancière. In the first two chapters, I seek to trace the egalitarian precedents to his work. In doing so, I place Rancière in the Cartesian and existentialist lineages in French philosophy. 

In "Cartesian Egalitarianism: From Poullain de la Barre to Rancière," which is now available in Phaenex 7.1:

I present an overview of what I call “Cartesian egalitarianism,” a current of political thought that runs from François Poullain de la Barre, through Simone de Beauvoir, to Jacques Rancière. The impetus for this egalitarianism, I argue, is derived from Descartes’s supposition that “good sense” or “reason” is equally distributed among all people. Although Descartes himself limits the egalitarian import of this supposition [restricting the import to the evaluation of epistemological and metaphysical claims], I claim that we can nevertheless identify three features of this subsequent tradition. First, Cartesian egalitarians think political agency as a practice of subjectivity. Second, they share the supposition that there is an equality of intelligences and abilities shared by all human beings. Third, these thinkers conceptualize politics as a processing of a wrong, meaning that politics initiates new practices through which those who were previously oppressed assert themselves as self-determining political subjects.

For previous discussions on this blog, see here and here.

Cartesian Egalitarianism: A Follow Up Post

In a comment on the previous post on Cartesian egalitarianism, Scu raised some important concerns, one that I address in the forthcoming essay, and one which was beyond the scope of the paper, but nevertheless important.

First, to the question of whether Cartesian egalitarianism has any value for anti-colonial or post-colonial theory and praxis, I cite a passage from Aimé Césaire's Discourse on Colonialism, which was in many ways the impetus for my reconsideration of Descartes. In this paper I only had a chance to mention this in passing:

Aimé Césaire, in his Discourse on Colonialism, invokes the principles of Cartesianism against the false universality of the colonial legacy (its science, politics, and sociology), which denigrates the non-European to the benefit and “glory” of Western bourgeois society. He argues that “the psychologists, sociologists et al., their views on ‘primitivism,’ their rigged investigations, their self-serving generalizations, their tendentious speculations, their insistence on the marginal, ‘separate’ character of non-whites” rest on “their barbaric repudiation, for the sake of the cause, of Descartes’s statement, the charter of universalism, that ‘reason…is found whole and entire in each man,’ and that ‘where individuals of the same species are concerned, there may be degrees in respect of their accidental qualities, but not in respect of their forms, or natures’” (56).

Second, about the problem of Descartes's account of animals. Here, I completely agree that Descartes is unhelpful and infuriating. But in reading through the replies and objections to the Meditations, I discovered that Pierre Gassendi might be a resource for considerations of the human/animal distinction (not just against Descartes, but against Aristotle as well):

You [Descartes] say that brutes lack reason. Well, of course they lack human reason, but they do not lack their own kind of reason. So it does not seem appropriate to call them ἄλογα [irrational] except by comparison with us or with our kind of reason; and in any case λόγος or reason seems to be a general term, which can be attributed to them no less than the cognitive faculty or internal sense (AT, VII: 270-271) .

Cartesian Egalitarianism

I am currently putting the finishing touches on an essay entitled "Cartesian Egalitarianism: From Poullain de la Barre to Rancière," which will be published in a forthcoming issue of Phaenex (their site). 

We do not typically consider Descartes an egalitarian. He is more often interpreted, in the post-Heideggerian tradition of philosophy, as an epochal figure of the modern destiny of metaphysics. On this account, Descartes introduces the metaphysical ground of technicity by dividing all beings between thinking subjects and objects of a calculable objective world. Or, following Antonio Negri, he is considered an architect of a “reasonable ideology” that expresses the class compromise constitutive of the formation of bourgeois class power after the 1620s: whereas Descartes formulates his philosophy as the production of human significance (and practical utility) in its separation from the world, the bourgeoisie affirms its position in civil society at the same time it accepts a temporary class compromise with absolutism (Negri, Political Descartes, 295-296).

I argue that Descartes's legacy cannot be reduced to either of these interpretations, that there is something more to his philosophy.

As of late, both Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek have laid claim to the legacy of the Cartesian subject, but their appropriation is largely programmatic (Zizek, in fact, is more interested in the Kantian/Hegelian subject; and Badiou the use of mathematics to reconceptualize ontology).

With Rancière (just as, I would argue, François Poullain de la Barre and Simone de Beauvoir), the discussion of the Cartesian subject has a specific content: equality. Cartesian egalitarianism pursues the consequences of Descartes's supposition, found in the Discourse on Method, that reason is equally distributed to all human beings (looking, of course, past the ironic posturing of the first sentence):

Good sense (bon sens) is the best distributed (partagée) thing in the world: for everyone thinks himself so well endowed with it that even those who are the hardest to please in everything else do not usually desire more of it than they possess. In this it is unlikely that everyone is mistaken. It indicates rather that the power of judging well and of distinguishing the true from the false—which is what we properly call ‘good sense’ or ‘reason’—is naturally equal in all men, and consequently that the diversity of our opinions does not arise because some of us are more reasonable than others but solely because we direct our thoughts along different paths and do not attend to the same things. (AT, VI: 1-2)

This claim, that good sense or reason is equal in all human beings, is fundamental to later Cartesian egalitarians, beginning with Poullain de la Barre. Here's Rancière's gloss of the way that Poullain and Jacotot take up this passage: “there are not several manners of being intelligent, no distribution between two forms of intelligence, and then between two forms of humanity. The equality of intelligences is first the equality of intelligence itself in all of its operations” ("L’actualité du Maître ignorant,” 412-413).

As I said, I'm still putting the finishing touches on the essay, so I can't get into all the details here (or else why would you read the article when it is finally published?). I can provide what I take to be the conditions necessary to count a thinker as a Cartesian egalitarian, as I've given them in the abstract (slightly edited here): 

 

I present an overview of what I call “Cartesian egalitarianism,” a current of political thought that runs from François Poullain de la Barre, through Simone de Beauvoir, to Jacques Rancière. The impetus for this egalitarianism, I argue, is derived from Descartes’s supposition that “good sense” or “reason” is equally distributed among all people. Although Descartes himself limits the egalitarian import of this supposition [restricting the import to the evaluation of epistemological and metaphysical claims], I claim that we can nevertheless identify three features of this subsequent tradition or tendency. First, Cartesian egalitarians think political agency as a practice of subjectivity. Second, they share the supposition that there is an equality of intelligences and abilities shared by all human beings. Third, these thinkers conceptualize politics as a processing of a wrong, meaning that politics initiates new practices through which those who were previously oppressed assert themselves as self-determining political subjects.

Descartes's Philosophy: "Made in Bavaria"

Over the last few days, I have been putting the finishing touches on a paper on what I call "Cartesian egalitarianism," which discusses the work of Descartes, Poullain de la Barre, Beauvoir, and Rancière. As you can imagine, getting the connections between these four into focus has been fairly time-consuming, especially the effort of keeping the paper right near the upper limits of the word count (9000 words, if you're curious). Which is why I haven't been posting much. 

At some point, while reading and writing about Descartes, I had the vague recollection that Schelling had made an odd 'nationalist in an imagined communities kind of way' comment about Descartes in his On the History of Modern Philosophy. These kind of comments are usually associated with Hegel, but Schelling was not inoculated against them. Turning to page 45, we discover that Descartes's philosophy was "made in Bavaria" (note that it also ends with a reference to Spinoza):

A special peculiarity lies for us in the fact that this beginning of completely free philosophy was, to all appearances, made in Bavaria, that, therefore, the foundation of modern philosophy was laid here. Descartes had, as he says himself in his essay De Methodo, which I take this opportunity to recommend to everyone as a splendid exercise, come to Germany in order to see the beginning of the Thirty Years' War; he had been present under Maximilian I at the battle on the white mountain and the capture of Prague, where, though, he primarily only made inquiries about Tycho Brahe and his unpublished work. In 1619, when he returned to the camp from Frankfurt, from the coronation of Ferdinand II, he had his winter quarters in a place on the Bavarian border, where he, as he says, found no one with whom he would have liked to converse, and there he conceived (aged twenty-three) the first ideas of his philosophy, which he, however, published much later. In the same way as Descartes began to philosophise in Bavaria, he later found in Princess Elisabeth, daughter of the unfortunate Elector of the Palatinate, Karl Friedrich, the so-called Winter King, a great and devoted admirer, just as it was later again a prince from the house of the Palatinate who became Spinoza's protector.

The irony of these kinds of statements is that they provide ample evidence for Marx's sarcastic remark that "we Germans have experienced our future history in thought, in philosophy. We are philosophical contemporaries without being historical ones. German philosophy is the ideal prolongation of German history."

The Correspondence Between Princess Elisabeth and Descartes

For my introductory philosophy courses, such as 'Great Philosophers' this semester, I always teach Descartes' Meditations. However, for my 'Fundamental Questions' course I've been using The Good Life, edited by Charles Guignon, and he includes selections from The Passions of the Soul rather than the Meditations or the Discourse on Method. Which means that rather than concluding with the problem of Cartesian dualism I was beginning my lectures with his attempted resolution.

Discussing this material reminded me that I had wanted last year to read The Correspondence Between Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and René Descartes, edited by Lisa Shapiro (University of Chicago Press, 2007; it is part of their series "The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe"), as a companion to Descartes' published work. This month, I finally did, and it was well worth the effort-- not the effort of reading their correspondence, but of fitting it into the reading stack. They prove to be a lively and engaging pair. Elisabeth refuses to accept Descartes' attempts to dodge her objections to his dualism, and he proves willing enough to eventually draft an early version The Passions of the Soul to answer her questions, only to, of course, provoke more objections and questions. Elisabeth, for her part, seems to approve of the Cartesian perspective in general, although she seeks to overcome the dualism between mind an body, and to work out (with Descartes) an ethics that can help her with both personal and political situations. Along the way, they discuss Seneca, Epicurus, and Machiavelli. If not for anything else, there are unlikely moments for those accustomed to Descartes' published work, such as his admission that "the Schools are right to say that the virtues are habits," or his verdict on Machiavelli: after noting the faults of The Prince, he notes that "I have since read his discourses on Titus Livy where I noticed nothing evil."

I can't always say that I like reading the winding paths of philosophers' correspondence. That being said, I recommend The Correspondence Between Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and René Descartes to the reader who is looking for a different and not often noticed side of early modern philosophy and letters.

Schelling and Absolute Idealism, Part One

When I wrote the course outline for my Great Philosophers course, I was near the completion of my dissertation on Schelling's philosophy of art. At the time, I got it in my head that I would teach about 8 pages of one of his works over one week of class, which seemed like a good idea until I went to reread the System of Philosophy in General and of the Philosophy of Nature in particular that he delivered in 1804 in Wurzburg. Because some of you have asked me what Schelling was all about, and why I spent several years figuring out just how his system and his philosophy of art fit together, I will be posting my notes about Schelling on the blog over the next week or so. Get your copy of Idealism and the Endgame of Theory, down from the shelf, turn to pages 141-194 and judge for yourself!

(Update: the sequel is here)

1. Schelling: A Biographical Introduction

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775-1854) is an important German philosopher who, until the last few decades, has been largely ignored in the English speaking world. Schelling excelled in his education: at 11 years old he had mastered Greek and Latin, and was admitted, despite being only 15, to the Tubingen Seminary. There he became friends with Friedrich Hölderlin (the poet) and G.W.F. Hegel (who, after 1807, became the best-known philosopher of his time). In 1798, at age 23, Schelling was appointed to professor of philosophy at the University of Jena, where he taught until 1803, when he accepted a post in Wurzburg. A list of Schelling’s acquaintances, whether they are friends or enemies, reads like a who’s who of German letters; it includes Goethe, Fichte, Schiller, Novalis, Ludwig Tieck, Friedrich and August Schlegel, Friedrich Schleiermacher and Friedrich Jacobi. After 1807, Schelling’s published output declined to a few obscure publications, a preface or two, and a few polemics, although in 1841, he took up Hegel’s chair of philosophy at the University of Berlin, in order to refute the system of his erstwhile friend. During the few years he spent in Berlin, Søren Kierkegaard, Jacob Burkhardt, Friedrich Engels and Mikhail Bakunin attended his lectures, although they had fairly negative things to say about Schelling.

Before all this, back in Tubingen, Schelling discovered the works of Kant, Fichte and Spinoza, which, no matter how critical Schelling became of them, remained a lasting influence on this philosophy. Schelling’s early works (the first few on Kant and Fichte date from 1794 and 1795) develop both an idealist philosophy with some similarity to Descartes’ concept of the self and then, starting in 1797, what Schelling called nature-philosophy, which argued that nature, far from being mechanistic (like Newton thought), was a dynamic and organic totality; it was a philosophical version of a romantic conception of nature. Schelling sought to show how the self emerged within nature, which eventually required rejecting the dualism underlying Descartes’ dualism of the self and world.

Schelling’s philosophical development is much more complex than this, but for our purposes, it’s enough to grasp the point of his System of Philosophy delivered in Wurzburg in 1804. He argues that there is only one infinite substance (that he calls God, although this God is not like a personal god that intervenes with miracles, listens to prayers, and the like) that is the world, and that everything else, selves and things, subjects and objects, exist within this absolute totality in some way. The central difficulty with this system (called either ‘absolute idealism’ or ‘identity-philosophy’) is showing how the deduction of the infinite and its qualities can lead to the existence of finite beings, like you and I. In this text, he tries to show how life is the bridge, as it were, from the infinite to the finite (p. 175).

2. Schelling’s Critique of Modern Philosophy

Let us begin with what Schelling argues is the first presupposition of all knowledge: “The first presupposition of all knowledge is that the knower and than which is known are the same” (p. 141). Previous philosophers have separated the subject (the known) from the object (what is known), and then attempted to put the two back together through reflection. As we have seen, this is true of both Descartes and Hume, regardless of one being a rationalist and the other an empiricist. For Schelling this is the “fundamental error in all knowledge,” because it reduces truth to the correspondence between subject and object, between knower and known.

Schelling maintains the opposite: that knower and what is known are fundamentally the same. He calls the intuition that All is One (more to the point, ‘the All-One’) intellectual intuition. In the Wurzburg System, he also gives an indirect proof of his first principle by showing how other alternatives are untenable. If knower and what is known are not the same, but are different, there are only two alternatives (p. 141). Either:

A1) the knower is absolutely separated from the known; there is no relation between them; or:
A2) they are separate, but some relationship between them takes place.

A1 is easily refuted, because if there is an absolute separation between the knower and what is known, then there is no way to explain the correspondence between subject and object, or the self and the world. I can sit here looking at my stack of books, and (if I believe A1) I cannot explain how I could know anything about these books, without assuming some thing or power outside of the knower or known, which is itself unknown. This is impossible: A1 requires having (or assuming) a kind of knowledge that is outside of knowledge.

So A2 must be the case, and there is some relationship between the knower and what is known. Again, there are two possibilities (p. 142):

A2.1) the unilateral option: the object determines the subject, or the subject determines the object.
A2.2) the bilateral option: there is a reciprocal reaction between subject and object.

Let’s look at A2.1 first. There are two unilateral accounts. By unilateral, Schelling means that one term completely determines the other. So, in the first case, what is known would completely determine the knowledge of the knower. The problem is that the knower, the subject, would only know the effects of the object that determine knowledge, and not the object itself. Thus if the stack of books determine everything I know about them, but acting on my knowledge, I really only know their effects, and not them in themselves. In the second case, the knower completely determines the object. This account is a criticism of Kant. In a nutshell, Kant held that our knowledge of objects is determined by the laws of thought, including time and space and what he called the categories. Our empirical experience is only possible because the faculty of understanding applies the laws of thought to sensibility. This is how Kant got around Hume’s skepticism. However, it left the problem of the status of things in themselves, because in Kant’s system we cannot know things in themselves, only as they appear to us. In this account, I would only experience the stack of books through the way the laws of thought determine my sensible impressions (to uses Hume’s terms) of the books. Schelling dismisses Kant because Schelling wants to know how things are in themselves, and Kantian philosophy leaves them unknown, that cannot be known, but can be thought as possible.

This leaves A2.2, that subject and object has a reciprocal relationship. The problem with this account is that the reciprocal effects between the knower and what is known cannot explain experience because the idea of reciprocality itself requires explanation. Because both A2.1 and A2.2 both are impossible, A2 is also untenable (p. 143). Therefore, with A1 and A2 refuted, the only possible presupposition is that the knower and what is known are the same. The faculty of reflection cannot be the basis of the system, because it still needs to be explained.

3. Schelling’s Solution

This leaves us with the question of what it means to say that knower and what is known are the same. Schelling states that it means that the knower and what is known are one substance: the One. The One, he argues, is Reason, or, God, which are both knower and known (so God is not a personal God of religion who makes miracles happen or listens to prayers; it is much more like Spinoza’s idea of a God who is identical with nature, which is why Spinoza was considered a heretic, or by some, an atheist). All knowledge is the self affirmation of reason or God. The One is infinite: immutable and eternal, and the philosopher is the one through which divine reason recognizes itself:

In reason, that eternal identity itself is at once the knower and the known– it is not me who recognizes this identity, but it recognizes itself, and I am merely the organ. Reason is Reason precisely because its knowledge is not subjective; instead, an identity in it comes to recognize itself as self-same, thereby reconciling the opposition between subjectivity and objectivity in its highest power (p. 144).

Reason works through the self; the self does not determine reason. Were reason limited to the self, it would only be valid for the self and nothing else. The self would only be caught up in the mirroring of the faculty of reflection (such as in Descartes, Hume, Kant and Fichte), which knows things only “for itself.” Reason, however, aims for the “in itself” (p. 145).

By claiming to discover Reason itself (which is the same as the world), Schelling’s system can be considered as a form of absolute idealism (the most famous version of absolute idealism is Hegel’s system). His system claims to discover the truth of the One-All through reason alone: ‘absolute’ because the whole universe is rational’ and ‘idealism’ because it is through thought– philosophy– that this truth can be discovered. The central problem remains, as I have mentioned, of how Schelling can start with the infinite One-All and then deduce the finite world that exists within the One. In the next class, we will see that 1) Schelling’s solution to this problem is the idea of life; and 2) that the proof of absolute idealism in the real world (as opposed to the ideal world of philosophy) is found in art.