The Crisis of Modern Philosophy: Authenticity, Powerlessness, and the Struggle for Humanization

To say there is a crisis in philosophy could be the understatement of the past few centuries. Ever since Kant, and especially since Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the rise of postmodernism, philosophy has been responding to the crisis of modernity which is the crisis of reality versus unreality. Understanding this crisis involves demonstrating the connections between three forms of what may be called “instrumentalization”: that of myself, of others, and of nature itself.

This threefold instrumentalization undergirds and produces an our/their reality, which is what Josef Pieper terms “unreality.” Ordinarily we live in unreality, which philosophy, as philosophy, resists and transcends. Although many modern philosophers have rejected the belief in God, they are still, in some sense, transcendent thinkers even if they now locate the heart of transcendence in humans and not in a Divine Being.This is an iteration of the Platonic theme of periagogue, which I picked up primarily from the philosopher Eric Voegelin but also Bernard Stiegler.

The sense of qualifying the word “our” with “their,” above, comes primarily from Stiegler. In Heidegger, I think it’s clear that “the they” is not first of all “them” but “me” insofar as I tend to be reducible to my they-self. This is something, incidentally, that someone like Richard Wolin, for example, appears to overlook. Whatever the merits of his Heidegger’s Children—among which I think we can gratefully include a certain admirably irreverent attitude taken toward Heidegger as “master teacher,” which, paradoxically (as I will show), seems unique in this field—it appears to be based on a fundamental misreading of at least what is vital in Heidegger.

This latter can be broached in terms of authenticity, although Stiegler himself rejects this term, claiming this is not what Heidegger has in mind. It’s a question rather of individuation. Partly owing to my reading of Foucault (particularly the later lecture courses), however, I personally would like to retain the word “authenticity” even while appreciating Stiegler’s contribution.

It’s a question of the self, the other, the collective. Stiegler gives a rather imprecise but revealing “definition” of philosophy as “an exemplary relation between the I and the We,” Rather, there is no I without the We and the reverse. Ordinarily “we” are reduced to a “they,” and “myself” to my “they-self”—so insofar as the so-called critique of so-called “individualism” doesn’t take this reality into account, it, like everything else in our (or their) ordinary unreality, never gets off the ground. It doesn’t get off the ground, in other words, because it in its most fundamental gesture eschews philosophy, even in the name of the latter.

There’s a fruitful connection to be made between this Heideggerian conceptualization of “the they,” whose most important interpreter to date is Stiegler, and the somewhat more familiar discourse on group formation, othering, etc., with regard to which my primary references are Girard (particularly through the lens of Michel Serres), Nietzsche, Foucault, and Carl Schmitt.

That is perhaps beyond my scope here (although I will discuss Girard later), so to return to Stiegler. Perhaps his most important contribution, for me (that is, to my thinking and to my existence in the world generally, to, in a word, my “well-being”: my sanity and my happiness) lies in his showing that ordinary human existence consists in a “regression from noesis,” in light of which ordinary regression we require rules, laws, customs, and mores to preserve basic social bonds. Yet as Voegelin writes, “the love of men for their own noetic self will make the nous the common bond between them. Only insofar as men are equal through the love of their noetic self is friendship possible; the social bond between unequals will be weak.”

Stiegler’s “non-noetic orientations” preserve the social bond, so are necessary, but they do so weakly, so are insufficient.

Voegelin memorably and elegantly “defines” philosophy as: “Love of being through love of divine Being as the source of its order.” I believe Stiegler’s “definition” quoted above should be seen as an iteration of this, although there is no evidence to my knowledge that Stiegler was even aware of Voegelin’s work.

I will return to this problematic particularly with regard to the question, broached here by Voegelin, of equality and of order. But first I need to take recourse to Pieper’s understanding of “creation.” For Pieper, briefly, humans, as humans, do not create themselves. This is the primary datum of human existence. I think we can approach it as an arche, but an “anarchic arche” in the following sense:

Arche is a beginning/origin: I did not create myself (I was born).

Arche is an underlying principle/rule: I do not create myself (or in other words I do not master myself—or others, or nature. I myself and others and all of creation itself is and remains essentially a mystery to me). (This distinction between mastery and mystery comes from Pieper himself.)

So creatureliness is an arche because it has these two senses, but it is an anarchic arche because its second sense, its “rule,” amounts to unruliness. In terms for instance of the old “situation ethics debate”—which is the title of a curious little book I stumbled across recently—ethics has nothing or very little to do with rule-following and everything or almost everything to do with love, or, in another register, phronesis. (For Stiegler perhaps, it is necessary to continually fall back on non-noetic rules, but only to the extent that we are incapable of love, which, as mere humans, we ultimately are.)

John Cobb distinguishes schematically between two basic approaches to the idea of creation within “Christianity”: on one hand, humans are co-creatures with all the rest of creation, including non-human animals and nature. On the other hand, humans, unique among God’s creatures, are created in the image of God. It is far from clear to me that there should be any contradiction between these two approaches, and indeed I believe Cobb himself suggests as much, but only implicitly.

The question is how to understand God’s “rule” in such a way that (if we’re created in that image) gives us a sense of how we are to understand our “rule” over the rest of creation. Here I have recourse to the idea of the philosopher-king, particularly as elaborated by the likes of Voegelin and Jacques Rancière—strange bedfellows perhaps, but who am I to legislate which theorists are allowed in bed with each other? I merely pay attention to whatever truth can be found in their texts, and in the case of these two theorists, they are intimately connected on this fundamental point.

Both recall that what makes the philosopher, unique among all citizens, fit to rule is the fact that philosophers have no desire to rule. That’s one way of stating the matter, and indeed perhaps amounts to a cliché. More rigorously: philosophers not only have no desire to rule, they have the unique capacity for not-ruling, or “letting-be” in Heidegger’s parlance. They do not master themselves, nor others, nor nature. Philosophy is radical powerlessness.

My understanding of power has hinged primarily on a conceptual distinction I’ve drawn between humans as “social animals” (dependent on each other) and as “social creatures” (created by each other). These are usually taken as synonyms, but for me to be a “social creature” is to be quite literally created by whatever society I happen to find myself in (taking “society” in a broad sense). For instance, Jean Vanier has apparently claimed that “everyone is a reflection of how he or she is seen by others.”

To distinguish between this social creatureliness and creatureliness proper (the latter informed primarily by the work of Pieper), I’ve adopted the term “distortion” to refer to social creatureliness, which, for me, amounts to a kind of “original sin.” Humans, being born, immediately fall into social distortion. We’re “thrown” into it, in Heidegger’s parlance: it’s irreducible but inessential. This irreducible/original social distortion is a transgression of the anarchic arche that makes humans human. It amounts to dehumanization at both ethical and moral levels, or what I’ve already called instrumentalization in general—in one’s relation to oneself (ethics) and to others (morality) and to nature in general—or, again, a presumption toward “mastery.”

As I will elaborate below, this means we’re thrown into “power,” understood as a continuum of relative powerfulness and relative powerlessness, and from which philosophy, as radical powerlessness, “steps back,” in something like a phenomenological epoche.

Pieper schematically distinguishes between mastery and mystery with reference, for instance, to Descartes’ project of “mastering and possessing nature.” I am claiming that this disastrous project of controlling nature was and is possible only “within and from out of” (in Heidegger’s language) a socially distorted view of human selfhood.

Pieper will refer to Kant to argue against the pseudo-ethical view according to which the rational will is called on to autonomously limit our unruly and antisocial desires. This instrumentalization of oneself in the name of ethics presupposes a natural desire to instrumentalize others. Pieper’s point perhaps is that this latter is already a distortion. To attempt willfully and “rationally” to restrict or tame antisocial desire is to perpetuate the distorted instrumentalization on which it rests (by turning it against oneself) and thus to remain in unreality. It is to neglect and even actively repress philosophy.

This repression of philosophy had already, in Pieper’s day, created, he says, an “embarrassing” situation in the so-called “academy.” What was called “academic philosophy” struggled to justify its very existence, and this situation is of course still more embarrassing in the neoliberal university of today. Even supposing the successful eradication of academic philosophy as a discipline by neoliberalism, this will perhaps actually affect philosophy only very minimally, if at all. That is to say, philosophy scarcely exists, and whatever it is that occurs in its name within the university or without is perhaps not worth preserving.

The repression of philosophy is, moreover, intrinsically related to both intrapersonal repression and interpersonal oppression, if you like, to adopt a distinction from Catherine Keller. I have only just started reading her book on separation and sexism, but my inclination is to view this distinction as related to the one I’ve drawn between the instrumentalization of self and of others (ethical and moral failings respectively).

I’ve previously intervened into this field by proposing the term “sol(ic)itude” to theorize the necessary connection between solitude and solicitude, or again ethics and morals. I did so particularly with reference to Levinas and (Quinodoz’ reading of) Winnicott, and subsequently I found this validating quotation in De Waal, attributed to one Bamberger: “The measure of your solitude is the measure of your capacity for communion.”

But solitude, or separation, has to be understood as occurring against the background of social distortion. “The practice of the self,” writes Foucault, “is established against a background of errors, bad habits, and an established and deeply ingrained deformation and dependence that must be shaken off.”

The second part of Vanier’s claim quoted above (in relation to “social creatureliness”) is: “The very way you look at someone can help to transform them.” This way of looking at someone, or comporting oneself toward them, paying attention to them, caring for them, is a way of lovingly facilitating their separation from social distortion—not from me as me (as Heidegger might say) but from both me as they and from them as they, if I can put it that way. That is to say, morally I can facilitate the other’s separation from the they—their individuation (and this is basically why Stiegler says individuation is an intrinsically collective project). But ultimately it is up to the individual person to develop a practice of individuation for themselves—to develop, that is, an ethics.

*

It’s embarrassing, I’m aware, this thing I did: but I’m not embarrassed. (Charity)

It’s good, I’m aware, this thing I did: but I’m not for that reason good. (Humility)

The difficulty here is in conceiving who “I” refers to in each case. Very quickly: on one hand I’m not to be identified with the embarrassing sin because sin reveals nothing about who I essentially am. Sin is inauthenticity. On the other hand, I’m not to be identified with the gracious action because I did not perform it willfully or autonomously. Grace is authenticity, but is nothing I myself bring about willfully.

Voegelin helps illuminate this reality for us:

(1) “Man in his mere humanity is demonic nothingness.” (Inauthenticity)

(2) …the truth about human existence on the border of transcendence. [… This] is not an arbitrary idea of man as a world-immanent being, but the idea of man who has found his true nature through finding his true relation to God.[1] (Authenticity)

Such is Voegelin’s philosophical basis for what I would call a critique of meritocracy. I don’t merit a reward for good behavior; I performed well by the grace of God. Neither do I merit a punishment for bad behavior; I am of course sinful (so is everyone), but sin is wholly peripheral to my true nature.

This is the very meaning of Voegelinian “order.” If you think it condones or promotes disorder, you’re not yet philosophizing. You’ve not yet converted yourself from the unreality of sin/power into which we’re thrown and under which we inevitably to some extent (despite periagogue) suffer.

Humility and charity thus rest on this distinction, if you like, between human nature (grace) and the human condition (sin). When Thomas Merton writes of “the humility to care nothing for what other people say or think [about me],” he could just as well have said “charity.” If humbly I know my true nature, I can charitably interpret whatever point other people might plausibly make about me as, even if not entirely wrong, nevertheless essentially wrong to the extent that it identifies me with my sin (or for that matter with my grace).

This misidentification of me with my sin or with my so-called success can itself then be interpreted charitably. These people making such uncharitable accusations about me are themselves deficiently humble: they’re inauthentic, i.e. sinful. A charitable interpretation of their misidentification of myself with my sin would refuse to identify them with this misidentification (itself a sin), in addition to eluding the position they’ve presumed to put me in. I am not what they presume I am, but neither are they reducible to this presumptuousness.

As Chales Bukowski said, “Darling, this is the trap: believe you are good when they tell you you are good and you are thereby dead, dead, dead. Dead forever.”

With regard to the other point (feeling bad, as opposed to good as in this Bukowski quote, about myself in keeping with their opinion of me), Girard’s scapegoating comes to mind, although it’s not the best example for my current purposes. What interests me about Girard is not so much the theory of the scapegoat mechanism as it functions during periods of crisis, but rather in its everyday functioning, in “those small acts of cowardice that everyone commits and no one remembers.” Peter for example “makes Jesus the victim in order to stop being the sort of lesser victim that first the servant girl and then the whole group make him.” Peter deflects the servant girl’s scapegoating of him by scapegoating Jesus (as, of course, Jesus had predicted he would do). He thus insinuates himself into the group (he’s “good”) by excluding someone else, in this case Jesus (who’s “bad”), and he does so in order not to be “bad” himself—that is, in order to resist the experience of himself as “bad” which the servant girl forces on him. There’s nothing wrong with resistance itself; it’s just a shame that he resists cowardly in this case, which is what we do, Girard says, most of the time.

In either case (I’m either good or bad because they think I’m either good or bad), the fundamental distinction between human nature and human sin is collapsed. It seems to me that Heidegger’s gelassenheit (“releasement,” or “letting-be”) recovers it. A humble/charitable stance toward myself is one that refuses to identify my nature with my condition. It “lets me be” (to some extent) who I really am, as opposed to who I have (to various persons as well as to myself) merely appeared to be. A charitable interpretation of the sinful/powerful appearance of others likewise sees through this socially distorted appearance to the lovable and loving creature created in God’s image. The fall away from this creatureliness (toward social distortion) is moreover a suffering, and it is a suffering[2] that I myself have inadvertently solicited in them as well as in me—acknowledgement of which quite naturally calls for sympathy, charity, etc.

And one final suggestion: as Foucault especially points out in his later lectures, philosophical therapies in Greece tended to include the idea that you shouldn’t “care” what most people think about you, but you should definitely be able to discern “serious” people among your acquaintances and “care” what they and they alone might think about you. My closing suggestion, in this context, is that when Paul says “Remain in the condition in which you were called”—this has other, more interesting and plausible interpretations, but I suggest viewing it as an admonition to remember having been called/addressed by some serious person or other who was capable of seeing past “sin” (which latter is a category that encompasses both worldly success and worldly failure).[3]

*

The carving up of the various “disciplines,” for Pieper, coincides with the degradation and perhaps finally destruction of “philosophy,” and it also has something to do, according to Philip M. Ferguson following Foucault, with a perverse desire to “legitimize” one’s thinking (in what Pieper would call a more or less unphilosophical or anti-philosophical world), often in the name of “professionalization” and thus, for me, as a means toward empowerment, an expression or assertion of power, whereas what I’m calling “spirituality” is a project of cultivating radical powerlessness.

So the disciplines are not separable—but moreover they’re not even “disciplines.” It might seem pedantic, but I object to this terminology on the grounds that study is not a form of “work” but rather of “play”—or specifically what Voegelin following Plato calls “serious play,” of which, Voegelin claims, only “mature humans” are capable. In Simone Weil’s words, “Will power, the kind that, if need be, makes us set our teeth and endure suffering, is the principal weapon of the apprentice engaged in manual work. But contrary to the usual belief, it has practically no place in study. The intelligence can only be led by desire. For there to be desire, there must be pleasure and joy in the work. The intelligence only grows and bears fruit in joy.”

I believe this is a crucial insight. “Discipline,” however it might be used simply to refer to a field of study and not to characterize what the act of studying entails, nevertheless has certain negative connotations that I should like to avoid. I think it’s a fruitful intervention to make here even if only because philosophy through the centuries (and—as Pieper and Stiegler show—increasingly in the ages of industrialization and hyper-industrialization) has been fraught with and essentially undermined by a self-conception that involves reducing the leisurely pursuit of wisdom to a form of labor. Voegelin himself perhaps fails to consistently avoid this pitfall, as does, for example, even the single most influential figure on my spiritual formation, namely Stiegler.

Stiegler, like Foucault and Arendt (among others), recovers leisure for philosophy from out of its reduction to entertainment, recreation. He does so, however, while nevertheless insisting that philosophy is hard work.[4]

It is really Pieper who most lucidly brings these strands (both objections to “discipline”) together in a persuasive and profound way. Much hinges on his conception of “creation.” Without elaborating further on that, this much is already enough to suggest why “(inter)disciplinarity” is problematic. The ecological implications, for example, of the Cartesian presumption toward mastery of nature are obvious; the ethical and moral (including sexual, etc.) implications are perhaps less clear. As Thomas S. Hibbs claims, paraphrasing Pieper, “Not sex itself or even its pleasure, but the selfish instrumentalizing of the object of one’s sexual gratification is the mark of unchastity.” Or as the poet Irving Layton has written, “Desire without reverence is lust.” I consent wholeheartedly to this usage, following Pieper himself, who in his Theory of Festivity writes of “…the true evil and hopelessness of this lustily celebrated nonsense.” This latter (to give some context) refers to the false festivity, the pseudo- or rather even anti-festivity generally on offer to denizens (not to say “citizens”) of “our” (or their) hyper-industrialized pseudo-civilization. (To the extent that we tend to reduce ourselves to our they-selves, we don’t form a “we” but a “they,” for Stiegler, and this is another way of describing what I am calling our inhuman pseudo-civilization, which is inhuman to the extent that it is caught up in the presumption of mastering creation.) Lust, or unchastity, is the anti-festive festivity that appears to many to be our/their only acceptable or even possible alternative to labor, yet itself amounts to just another form of labor (such is what Pieper terms our world of “total labor”). Leisure as entertainment/recreation is labor, and although Pieper doesn’t explicitly connect “the infinite boredom of utter unreality” that characterizes this labor to what I am calling “power,” I believe he enables me to do so convincingly.

You can see in this light that studies of ecology and sexuality cannot so easily be separated as distinct “disciplines” because the possible (or inevitable) abuse and injustice occurring in either case is owing ultimately to the same presumption toward mastery, power, “discipline,” which Pieper’s account of creation—or in a word philosophy—undermines and transforms.[5]

NOTES:

[1] Voegelin’s language here (“man has found his true nature through finding his true relation to god”) recalls his elegant characterization of philosophy as “love of being through love of divine Being as the source of its order.” Something is said to occur “through” (1) “finding his true relation to god” and (2) “love of divine being.” In the first case one resultantly “finds one’s true nature” and in the second one “loves being.” My point in reading these quotations side by side is that it suggests a coincidence of authenticity with love. It is for instance in this light that I take issue with Esther de Waal’s assertion that “being committed to God is not about being nice. It is about being real”—as if this opposition could be taken for granted.

[2] I have adopted this language from Stiegler: “To be free is a suffering. It is suffering because usually it reproduces itself not as liberty but precisely as alienation.”

[3] It’s really not a matter of “looking past” (ignoring) sin but of “seeing through” it. Sin is translucent. But that also means it is (occasionally) invisible. Sometimes you don’t see it at all; sometimes you think you see it but don’t because it isn’t there at all, etc.

[4] For Stiegler, philosophy is hard work because of the “ordinary regression from noesis.” Non-noetically one attempts to provoke noesis and philosophize: this can be quite draining, and Stiegler says it requires extraordinary patience. For Voegelin, it is hard work primarily, I think, because the history of philosophy consists mostly, he says, in its “derailment,” so that one has to laboriously sift through a lot of pseudo-philosophy in order to be able to explain why/how it is pseudo-philosophy and thus to distinguish it from the real thing.

[5] Adopting a structure from Levinas, perhaps: Lack of discipline is a form of discipline. The “rational” instrumentalization of oneself in order to curb the lustful instrumentalization of others suggests nothing whatsoever of periagogue, that is, philosophy, which would convert one from the unreality of instrumentalization.

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