Series: The TNR Alphabet? (C-E)
"I always have the impression that in the best circumstances, I risk having an encounter with an idea."
This essay is part of an ongoing series by The Nostomodern Review on Modernism and its future in the 21st Century and beyond. Each essay forms parts of the Nostomodernist project: a quasi-scholarly attempt at reevaluating what it means to be Modern in contemporary times, to possibly reconcile the gap between Modernism and its supposed successors, and to speculate on new trajectories within the current era of history via a mythic reading of Modernity itself.
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A B C D E
C is for Critical Race Theory
As a disclaimer, I will not pretend that, at this moment, I might encompassingly and precisely represent the tenets and realities of Critical Race Theory (CRT); or rather, that I admit to the difficulty of honing down to a definition an evolving set of discourses on the racist legacies of the United States of America. Unlike most of the TNR Alphabet, in which I would prefer to adopt a more formal and distanced perspective, I feel that it becomes necessary here to shed that veil and to acknowledge that this subject—as someone not born in America—is not mine to proselytize nor to predominantly wield. Having said this, however, I must also admit and point to the fact that an understanding and interpretation of CRT is not limited nor restricted to those solely from the United States, and that historical outsiders to its specific issues and debates might still find inspiration for their own breakaways from similar histories of oppression and subjugation through its example, or that they might at least find CRT to be a contemporary discussion that warrants further study and concern as a point of general interest; hence, it is for those on the outside—attempting to look into these ongoing issues—for whom I venture to write this short exploration for.
Critical Race Theory (CRT) is a contentious subject. To some, CRT represents a dangerous, if largely vague, internal conspiracy within the United States—a revenge plot made by anti-Americans to undermine the political legitimacy of the American system based on a regressive hyperfixation on its racist legacies.
However, for others, it represents a significant—if not, long-overdue—dialogue to address and even dismantle the underlying socioeconomic disparities and legal treatments in the country historically ill-made on the basis of race—and therefore, made in violation of the tenets of American liberalism itself. But to gauge the credibility of the theory, we must first understand what CRT is for ourselves, instead of secondhand from other sources.
The basic premise of CRT is simple: in America, different races have historically been treated differently, in negative ways, and these negative differences still exist, having long entrenched themselves as both systemic and subtle injustices against racial minorities in favour of preserving or bettering the status quo of the Caucasian racial majority.
But objections rise against what the precise nature of these treatments are, and to whether or not they still constitute any real and meaningful differences or injustices, and hence, whether they ought to be the real foci for potential reform or change. For the proponents of CRT, the nature of these treatments is very real and often lethal, and can be traced to the early failings of the post-Enlightenment world order and its particular history of liberty, liberalism and the law—historically-made advantageous to certain racial groups over others.
Historically-speaking, the main subject of CRT has been the experience of the African-American in the United States via the lens of the legal system. While CRT has branched out to include the experiences of other minority groups within and outside of the United States—those who have likewise been affected by oppressive structures of racially-based power—the history of CRT begins in the 1970s with the law scholarship of Derrick A. Bell, Alan Freeman, Richard Delgado, and later, law scholars such as Mari Matsuda and Patricia J. Williams.
However, the Critical C in Critical Race Theory originates from Max Horkheimer’s suggestion for a new critical theory, as opposed to the traditional theory of the old sciences, that “never aims simply at an increase of knowledge as such. Its goal is man's emancipation from slavery.”
As he writes in the postscript to his influential 1937 essay, Traditional And Critical Theory, “The elaboration of theories in the traditional sense is regarded in our society as an activity set off from other scientific and nonscientific activities, needing to know nothing of the historical goals and tendencies of which such activity is a part. But the critical theory in its concept formation and in all phases of its development very consciously makes its own that concern for the rational organization of human activity which it is its task to illumine and legitimate. For this theory is not concerned only with goals already imposed by existent ways of life, but with men and all their potentialities.”
For Horkheimer, “Bourgeois thought is so constituted that in reflection on the subject which exercises such thought a logical necessity forces it to recognize an ego which imagines itself to be autonomous. Bourgeois thought is essentially abstract, and its principle is an individuality which inflatedly believes itself to be the ground of the world or even to be the world without qualification, an individuality separated off from events. […] Critical thought and its theory are opposed to both the types of thinking just described.” Hence, CRT builds upon this particular criticism of ahistorical liberalism, following in the contingent tradition of Critical Legal Studies (CLS), and thus seeking to identify and demonstrate the distinct history that creates and sustains the current order of things, and which might be turned from into a better place in the future.
In his famous 1995 law article, Who's Afraid Of Critical Race Theory?, Derrick A. Bell summarises CRT as then “a body of legal scholarship, now about a decade old, a majority of whose members are both existentially people of color and ideologically committed to the struggle against racism, particularly as institutionalized in and by law”, which also supports a “specific, more egalitarian, state of affairs. We seek to empower and include traditionally excluded views and see all-inclusiveness as the ideal because of our belief in collective wisdom.”
Within his article, Bell gestures to a tension in the deconstructionist and reconstructionist tendencies of CRT scholarship: it both normatively deconstructs as a “radical critique of the law” and normatively reconstructs as a “radical emancipation by the law”. Against the criticism that CRT simply seeks to destroy the American system, Bell replies that there is a restorative element in addressing the “problem is that not all positioned perspectives are equally valued, equally heard, or equally included. From the perspective of critical race theory, some positions have historically been oppressed, distorted, ignored, silenced, destroyed, appropriated, commodified, and marginalized—and all of this, not accidentally.”
At the time of his writing, CRT was keen on bringing to “legal scholarship an experientially grounded, oppositionally expressed, and transformatively aspirational concern with race and other socially constructed hierarchies”, in favour of the premise that “abstraction, put forth as “rational” or “objective” truth, smuggles the privileged choice of the privileged to depersonify their claims and then pass them off as the universal authority and the universal good.”
But a common criticism of CRT is that it incorrectly privileges a racial normativity over of a non-racial meritocratic normativity. In other words, in the latter case, such disparities can simply be explained by an absence of meritocratic hard work and unproductive cultural attitudes, which are rectifiable through sheer individual effort and which are not systematically-bound by an antagonistic and conspiratorial Other. However, in the former case, contemporary socioeconomic disparities between races can be explained by the historical ill-treatment of minorities and its protraction by related and continuing acts of racism today. This is to say, that for the latter, the nightmares of Jim Crow, the Nadir, the riots in Tulsa, Ocoee, Elaine and Rosewood have long perished and should be slowly forgotten; and that for the former, they have been displaced by a more insidious—but still present—structure and expression of race-based power on which the past remains a heavy toll.
Bell later writes that another feature of CRT, which is considered unorthodox by the usual conventions of academia, is its use of narrative and story-telling by CRT scholars. For Bell, the “narrative voice, the teller, is important to critical race theory in a way not understandable by those whose voices are tacitly deemed legitimate and authoritarian. The voice exposes, tells and retells, signals resistance and caring, and reiterates what kind of power is feared most—the power of commitment to change.”
In his 1987 book, And We Are Not Saved: The Elusive Quest for Racial Justice, Bell offers a series of personal stories and fables—both true and fictional—to reflect intimately and starkly on the African American experience in the United States: “I thought back to another dark road many years before. I had graduated from college with a B.A. degree and a commission in the air force. Driving to my duty station in Louisiana, my new uniform in the back seat, I missed a turn and found myself on a dark country road where my worst fear became fact in the presence of a state policeman, huge and hostile, who stopped my car, refused to accept "lost" as the reason I was so far off the main highway, and threatened to hold me responsible for various thefts in the area reportedly made by, as he put it, "some damned nigger." It was only by showing him my uniform with its gold lieutenant's bars and my military orders that I managed to calm him. […] The lesson of that exchange was not lost on me. While air force officers were entitled to wear civilian clothes while off duty, I wore my full-dress uniform every time I left the base. Northern-born and raised, and insulated by my parents from the meanest manifestations of discrimination, my first trip South was traumatic. I felt clearly, and was convinced accurately, that my life and wellbeing lay totally at the whim of any white person I encountered. Even when they were not hostile, as many were not, I knew that the choice of courtesy or rudeness was theirs to make, mine to accept—or face the consequences. Gaining a measure of protection for my person through my officer's uniform was the first of many techniques I have adopted in my “life as supplement—more accurately, substitute—for the respect racism denied me as a person. Even now, a respected lawyer and law professor, I was fearful of being stopped and hassled because of my race—even now, with the many civil rights statutes protecting me against police violation of my right to due process of law. On that dark country road, any legal rights I had seemed remote and irrelevant.”
For Bell, there is personally no question as to whether differences exist in the treatment of various ethnic groups in the United States: the terror of his own personal experience, as with many other and thus collective stories that have defined the African American experience in the United States, is real and hostile proof that such an existential issue is both relevant and unended, irrespective of what is written by the bare and absolute letter of the American law. In other words, the reality for racial minorities in the United States is both palpable and not fully protected by the promised extent of the current system of law, with the risk of deadly repercussions for those affected; and that in certain parts of the country, this is still a close and daily miasma.
Bell further explores the history of the United States via Geneva Crenshaw, a fictional senior civil rights attorney and Black woman who, aside from his seeking of wisdom from, due to her stature as an elder civil rights activist and scholar, once travelled back in time to the Constitutional Convention of 1787 in the invented fable, The Chronicle of the Constitutional Contradiction, so as to warn and protest to the delegates, from the various states of the antebellum Confederacy, of the troublesome and permanent racial legacy that shall be inherited by their forebears because of their failure to address their own contradictions, in their own time, on the issue of slavery.
For instance, Crenshaw raises the inadequacies of Section 2 of Article 1 of the Constitution of the United States, as written in 1787 and ratified in 1788, which bears the clause: “Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.”
Within this section, there is no clause which protects the rights of slaves; for Crenshaw—and thus Bell—there is only a contradiction which indentures the servitude of their people for the next century and their oppression for a century more. As Crenshaw describes, “The Chronicle's message is that no one could have prevented the Framers from drafting a constitution including provisions protecting property in slaves. If they believed, as they had every reason to do, that the country's survival required the economic advantage provided by the slave system, than it was essential that slavery be recognized, rationalized, and protected in the country's basic law. It is as simple as that.”
The famous lines of the United States Declaration of Independence, as written in 1776, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”, are thus compromised by the moral failure of the Framers in continuing the subjugation of the enslaved for the interests of commerce, taxation and the upholding of the same system from which they disproportionately benefit the greatest from. This is a decisive and tragic moment, reflects Crenshaw, for both its inescapability and the shame by which it forever stains the remaining life of her nation.
This is but one possible entryway to understanding CRT: its position is concerned with the tracing of historical lines, from the birth of the country to the present-day, of the manifestations of racism which endured and transformed because of the crucial and moral contradiction that continually finds itself at the heart of the United States.
As Angela Harris later writes of the legacy of CRT, in a foreword for Critical Race Theory: An Introduction (2015), “In reading groups we began to explore the literature of critical legal studies. But there seemed to be no critical literature on race and the law. There was, of course, law that had a lot to do with the lives of some communities of color: poverty law, welfare law, criminal law, immigration law. But there was, seemingly, no language in which to embark on a race-based, systematic critique of legal reasoning and legal institutions themselves. […] We finished our legal educations never having found a place where the sophisticated discourse of racial critique in which we lived our everyday lives could enter the legal canon.”
In this regard, CRT begins to fill this void in law scholarship and social reform; it is an outcrop of earlier civil rights movements and thus contends with the dire contradiction that becomes the focus for all such movements hence. In the wake of continued death and hatred in the United States, it is unsurprising to understand why CRT exists and why it continues to hold itself to its own mantle, much less why it is still a relevant tool in fighting its own premise of injustice.
D is for Dialectics
It is not enough to write that Heinrich Moritz Chalybäus, and not Georg W. Hegel, popularised what is widely-known as Hegelian Dialectics—taking the well-known form of thesis-antithesis-synthesis—but that Chalybäus, while broadly describing the theory, misrepresented one of its most important ideas: that the process of Dialectics is open-ended, ongoing, and something which cannot be codified into a simplistic three-point schema, or at least, without failing to reduce the concept into something else.
Given Hegel’s preface to Phenomenology Of Spirit (1807), as translated by A.V. Miller, he might have likewise objected to the very premise of this TNR Alphabet entry as much as Chalybäus’ interpretation of his theory: that we, in setting forth a goal to explain his dialectical method and thus hope to produced a finished entry as a result, are conducting philosophy in the wrong way.
As he writes, “when it is allowed to pass for actual cognition, then it should be reckoned as no more than a device for evading the real issue, a way of creating an impression of hard work and serious commitment to the problem, while actually sparing oneself both. For the real issue is not exhausted by stating it as an aim, but by carrying it out, nor is the result the actual whole, but rather the result together with the process through which it came about.”
For Hegel, philosophy is an active process—we must be thoughtfully-involved in both its process and its result—and not a result that we hope to receive as a neatly-packaged definition or understanding by the end of our time with a philosopher or their secondhand summary. This is what he proposes in his ambition to rework the notion of Science as distinguishing it from a mere love of knowledge into a real knowing of knowledge, and thus reorient philosophy into the study and proof of knowing itself.
Another popular form of the dialectical method, if we wish to sidestep reading Hegel himself, is to consider the form being-nothing-becoming; however, we might as well approach Hegel in his own words and meet his challenge. In his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences—first published in 1817—Hegel explicitly describes his dialectical method from numbered sections §79 to §83. In section §79, explains that “the logical domain has three sides: (α) the abstract side or that of the understanding, (β) the dialectical or negatively rational side, (γ) the speculative or positively rational side.”
For instance, take the example, which he offers in the section §83 Addition, “The aforementioned relationship of the three stages of the logical idea displays its concrete and real shape in the way that we know God (who is the truth) in his truth, i.e. as absolute spirit, only insofar as we recognize at the same time that the world created by him, i.e. nature and finite spirit, are, in their difference from God, untrue.”
If we apply his dialectical method to his logic of God, we might say that there is (1) the immediate knowing of ourselves, (2) the mediated unknowing of God, and (3) the knowing of our unknowing of God as being absolute. In other words, we first know what we know, we secondly acknowledge what we do not know—insofar as we are aware of the presence of our limitations to knowing—and we thirdly know that we are perfect in this contradiction: that we are beings in the midst of becoming, of unknowing knowing, and that this is an ongoing process of knowing.
A more down-to-earth example is that of an apple seed, which first exists as being a seed, followed by the nothing of the apple tree, into which it eventually becomes—having sublated itself into something new, while retaining its essence as that of relating to appleness, but now changed into a new form, as beckoned to it by the state of nothing—or that determinacy which it currently is not, but could potentially become—to which it eventually fills and becomes into an apple tree, such that the result is also a becoming of only one stage of becoming, because the apple tree might eventually bear fruit, and that too is a becoming, and likewise death is a becoming, and the rotting of the tree and the birth of new apple trees from its seeds is a becoming too—and this process does not end, as one might expect by the incomplete sense of finality, as given, by the concept of synthesis as some sort of end.
In another way, we are in the process of becoming ourselves, such that the immediacy of our being as we are, is confronted by the nothing which waits for us to become who we will become, but whose signifying of nothing gives us the opportunity to sublate ourselves in its preparation—to change and yet be retained—into new forms of becoming, such that the process is plural in a series of processes, which extend into many becomings, in a similar way as how an apple—if baked into a pie or blended into a smoothie—nevertheless has a quality and sense of appleness, which is guarded against the nothing and yet transformed by it too, now transformed into a new form.
As he writes in section §81’s Addition 1, that “for example, it is said that human beings are mortal, and dying is then regarded as something that has its cause in extraneous circumstances only. According to this way of viewing the matter, a human being has two particular properties, that of being alive and also that of being mortal. The true way to construe the matter, however, is that life as such carries within itself the germ of death and that, generally speaking, the finite contradicts itself in itself and for that reason sublates itself.”
In other words, that Hegel speaks of the determinacy of life being one-sided in favour of life, but that life is negated by the aspect of death, which it too contains and cannot deny, and likewise which is necessary to incorporate into an fuller understanding of life, because without death there is no life, and when life transitions into death, there is a new becoming henceforth, which continues onwards, negated by a new nothing, having itself become a primer for a new being and so on.
Hegel differs, in this way, from the dialectical methods of previous philosophers, such as Socrates and Plato; in the same Addition, he writes that “Among the ancients, Plato is called the inventor of the dialectic, and rightfully so, insofar as in the Platonic philosophy the dialectic occurs for the first time in its free, scientific and thus at the same time objective form. […] In Plato's rigorous, scientific dialogues, by means of the dialectical treatment, he shows the finitude of all fixed determinations of the understanding in general. Thus, in the Parmenides, for instance, he derives the One from the Many and, in spite of this, shows how the Many is just this, namely to determine itself as the One. Plato treated the dialectic in this grand manner.”
By the end of Parmenides, Plato summarises the dialogue, which offers an example of the dialectic as Hegel mentions, through the voices of Parmenides and Socrates—the former leads the dialogue—in the following back-and-forth conversation, as per the translation by Mary Louise Gill and Paul Ryan:
—“Let’s go back to the beginning once more and say what must be the case, if one is not, but things other than the one are.”
—“Yes, let’s do.”
— “Well, the others won’t be one.”
—“Obviously not.”
—“And surely they won’t be many either, since oneness would also be present in things that are many. For if none of them is one, they are all nothing—so they also couldn’t be many.”
—“True.”
—“If oneness isn’t present in the others, the others are neither many nor one.”
—“No, they aren’t.”
—“Nor even do they appear one or many.”
—“Why?”
—“Because the others have no communion in any way at all with any of the things that are not, and none of the things that are not belongs to any of the others, since things that are not have no part.”
—“True.”
—“So no opinion or any appearance of what is not belongs to the others, nor is not-being conceived in any way at all in the case of the others.”
—“Yes, you’re quite right.”
—“So if one is not, none of the others is conceived to be one or many, since, without oneness, it is impossible to conceive of many.”
—“Yes, impossible.”
— “Therefore, if one is not, the others neither are nor are conceived to be one or many.”
—“It seems not.”
Slightly-earlier in the dialogue, Parmenides explains it another way: “Accordingly, if one is not and many are, the many must appear both the same as and different from each other, both in contact and separate from themselves, both moving with every motion and in every way at rest, both coming to be and ceasing to be and neither, and surely everything of that sort, which it would now be easy enough for us to go through.”
For Hegel, this is one birth of the dialectical method; not namely in the conclusion, but the methodology of reaching such a conclusion, or rather, that of presenting the case for oneness as the first premise and undermining it with the opposite premise of manyness, such that the premise of manyness is likewise too undermined by the opposite premise of oneness, and that the final state of understanding is an acknowledgement of both premises—critically: not a rejection of one over the other—and the becoming of a new premise of understanding, now having encompassed the spheres of both initial premises, and perhaps on the closer way to the Absolute.
The German philosopher, Immanuel Kant also offers a transcendental dialectic—continuing the tradition from Plato—in his Critique of Pure Reason (1781); namely, that if one adopts the position of the transcendental idealist, one must also accept the contradiction of his four antinomies, or conflicts, of the transcendental ideas in a dialectical fashion. This is because one must therefore accept the transcendental distinction between things-in-of-themselves and their appearances to us, as mediated by the categories of our sensible intuitions and the pure concepts of understanding (i.e. quantity, quality, relation, and modality); in other words, we are limited by the bounds of our intuitions and experience, and hence dialectically interact with them to form a limited idea and knowledge about the world.
Following this interaction, we will encounter antinomies—or paradoxes—which seem to contradict one another; however, these oppositions can be reconciled if one accepts the limitations of sensible and intuitive human beings, that, for instance, in the first antimony we might be able to imagine that the world has a beginning, because we can observe the beginnings of things in miniature and know that they must follow a successive synthesis, but that likewise any birth of the world cannot be followed by a hollow time of nothing, given that nothing cannot give rise to something, and so there must be something, or rather, that the world might also be infinite and have no beginning, but further that both points of this antinomy are constrained by the limits of human sensibility and thus may falsely construe the problem into a narrow binary of infinite and not-infiniteness—these are simplistic versions of the actual proofs which Kant offers, and which accompany each of the four antinomies respectively, as transcribed below.
First Antinomy
Thesis: The world has a beginning in time, and in space it is also enclosed in boundaries.
Antithesis: The world has no beginning and no bounds in space, but is infinite with regard to both time and space.
Second Antinomy
Thesis: Every composite substance in the world consists of simple parts, and nothing exists anywhere except the simple or what is composed of simples.
Antithesis: No composite thing in the world consists of simple parts, and nowhere in it does there exist anything simple.
Third Antinomy
Thesis: Causality in accordance with laws of nature is not the only one from which all the appearances of the world can be derived. It is also necessary to assume another causality through freedom in order to explain them.
Antithesis: There is no freedom, but everything in the world happens solely in accordance with laws of nature.
Fourth Antinomy
Thesis: To the world there belongs something that, either as a part of it or as its cause, is an absolutely necessary being.
Antithesis: There is no absolutely necessary being existing anywhere, either in the world or outside the world as its cause.
Hegel comments on the Kantian antinomies in section §48’s Addition, “From the standpoint of the old metaphysics it was assumed that, if knowing falls into contradictions, this would be only an accidental aberration and rest on a subjective mistake in making inferences and in formal reasoning [räsonnieren]. According to Kant, however, it is inherent in the nature of thinking itself[ to lapse into contradictions (antinomies) when it wants to gain knowledge of the infinite. […] pointing out the antinomies is to be regarded as a very important advancement of philosophical knowing insofar as, by this means, the rigid dogmatism of the metaphysics of the understanding was done away with and the dialectical movement of thought was indicated. Nonetheless, […] Kant stopped short at the merely negative result of the unknowability of the in-itself of things and did not press on to the true and positive significance of the antinomies. The true and positive significance of the antinomies consists in general in this: that everything actual contains within itself opposite determinations, and that therefore knowing and, more specifically, comprehending [Begreifen] an object means nothing more or less than becoming conscious of it as a unity of opposite determinations. Now while, as pointed out earlier, in the consideration of objects the metaphysical knowledge of which was at issue, the old metaphysics went to work by applying abstract determinations of the understanding to the exclusion of their opposites, Kant sought, by contrast, to show how, for claims generated in this way, contrasting claims with an opposite content are to be posited with equal justification and equal necessity opposite them. In pointing out these antinomies, Kant restricted himself to the cosmology of the old metaphysics, and in his polemic against it he managed to produce four antinomies by presupposing the schema of the categories.”
For Hegel, Kant stopped short of embracing the dialectical method in full: that there is no contradiction, between the thesis and antithesis of each antinomy, that lies separated by its own relevant justification, but that each justification and thus antinomy is one part of the same whole and thus truth.
As he continues with Kant, “He juxtaposes the opposite determinations contained in them as thesis and antithesis and tries to prove both of them, i.e. to exhibit both of them as the necessary results of thinking them through. In the process he explicitly defends himself against the charge that he sought smoke and mirrors in order to perform a spurious lawyer's proof. However, the proofs that Kant proposes for his theses and antitheses must indeed be regarded as mere pseudo-proofs, since what is supposed to be proved is always already contained in the presuppositions that form the starting-point and only through the long-winded, apagogic process is the semblance of mediation produced. […] Thus, for example, the first of the aforementioned cosmological antinomies contains the notion that space and time are to be regarded not only as continuous but also as discrete, whereas in the old metaphysics one stopped short at mere continuity and, in keeping with this, the world was considered unlimited in terms of space and time. It is entirely correct to say that we can go beyond any given determinate space as well as any determinate time; but it is no less correct to say that space and time are actual only through their determinateness, i.e. as here and now, and that this determinateness is inherent in the concept of them. The same is true of the rest of the remaining antinomies listed earlier, for instance, the antinomy of freedom and necessity with which, looked at more closely, things stand as follows: what the understanding understands by freedom and necessity indeed concerns only the ideal moments of true freedom and true necessity, and the two in their separation amount to nothing true.”
Hence, for Hegel, the premise of a contradiction is not a barrier to understanding, but instead, reveals a truth between one premise and another; this is to say, that in the premise of one thesis lies an insight to truth in the premise of its antithesis or opposite, and that instead of dispensing one for the other, or destroying both as a mere limitation of human intuition and sensibility, we might instead reconcile the two premises, as both revealing the truths of each other, into a dialectical whole—a becoming—which preludes a further understanding and becoming in the future, as per the open-ended fashion of Hegelian dialectics.
In this way, we might finally understand what the Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Žižek, means when he writes in The Sublime Object Of Ideology (1989) that “it is Jane Austen who is perhaps the only counterpart to Hegel in literature: Pride and Prejudice is the literary Phenomenology of Spirit; […] we find in Pride and Prejudice the perfect case of this dialectic of truth arising from misrecognition. […] Elizabeth wants to present herself to Darcy as a young cultivated woman, full of wit, and she gets from him the message 'you are nothing but a poor empty-minded creature, full of faIse finesse; Darcy wants to present himself to her as a proud gentleman, and he gets from her the message 'your pride is nothing but contemptible arrogance'. After the break in their relationship each discovers, through a series of accidents, the true nature of the other—she the sensitive and tender nature of Darcy, he her real dignity and wit—and the novel ends as it should, with their marriage. The theoretical interest of this story lies in the fact that […] we cannot go directly for the truth, we cannot say, 'If, from the very beginning, she had recognized his real nature and he hers, their story could have ended at once with their marriage.' […] If we want to spare ourselves the painful roundabout route through the misrecognition, we miss the Truth itself: only the 'working-through' of the misrecognition allows us to accede to the true nature of the other and at the same time to overcome our own deficiency—for Darcy, to free himself of his false pride; for Elizabeth, to get rid of her prejudices. […] To articulate things in Hegelian terms: in the perceived deficiency of the other, each perceives—without knowing it—the falsity of his/her own subjective position; the deficiency of the other is simply an objectification of the distortion of our own point of view.”
Hence, in Mr Darcy and Elizabeth are both two separate points of view, each one insufficient to wholly know the other, in of themselves—with only partial knowledge of themselves too; therefore, it is only when two of them, viewing each other as the respective Other, and recognising themselves as the Self in relation to the Other, that they might understand each other and themselves on a deeper level, having been reified by the presence of the Other—and thus each other—into a sublimation of what they once were: together. And this is the takeaway: that Hegelian dialectics, in Austenian terms, is the dissolution of our pride and prejudices in the face of each other, away from our initial position of ignorance, and that we need other people to achieve this; in this sense, we are never alone in the dialectical method and this is such a way we can see the world too.
E is for Ecofascism
At the end of his 2011 book, Can Life Prevail?: A Revolutionary Approach to the Environmental Crisis, there is a transcribed presentation, Can We Survive? A Model for a Controlled Future, in which the Finnish fisherman and philosopher, Pentti Linkola, outlines his premises and ideas for an deep ecological programme in 1999.
It is important to note that Linkola is not a fascist; however, his recommendations for a radical environmentalism—or rather, the degree to which he willingly takes an misanthropic attitude against human beings—have been popular or reminiscent of those would be better called ecologically fascist, and thus they are those who would advocate, in mixed and various circles, for common degrees of illiberalism and even genocide in the name of preserving the threatened ecology of the Earth.
Nevertheless, Linkola’s presentation on Finnish environmentalism is a helpful introduction to the premise for misanthropic arguments. As he was transcribed, “Mankind, the human species, seems to have reached its end. We are in the midst of eco-catastrophes, in the eye of the storm. No natural scientist or serious futurologist believes we have more than thirty or—at the most—one hundred years left. [...] The most wretched of all current trends is of course the mass extinction of organisms, which has been escalating for decades and is still increasing in magnitude. [...] The point, however, is that neither mankind nor the nation—I am here referring to Finland—are reacting to this information in any way at all. [...] Even though news concerning the gradual suppression of life is really the only significant news, which all other human aspirations are subordinate to, it never really makes the headlines. [...] All these programmes, figures and percentages are remodelled in such a way as not to call for the most essential thing, an end to the extinction of organisms, by forcing the human species to retire from the domineering position it has acquired. [...] Undoubtedly, human population would also have to be reduced to about ten percent of what it is now. [...] It is possible that even this more limited objective would require lightening the intolerable burden of human population—although the present population would in this case not be reduced to one tenth, but only stripped of around two billion people. The resulting figure would roughly be equivalent to that of the world population just over half a century ago, when the great ecosystems of the world began to waver and collapse. A reasonable hypothesis can be formulated: that the globe could handle a demographic load of such a size, provided that the levels of material consumption do not rise to what they are today. In my presentation, I will be even less ambitious: I wish to begin by outlining a reckless attempt to lessen the present demographic strain by the sole means of controlling human birth-rates. This policy is deeply humane—and, precisely for this reason, probably too soft. Whatever the case, what is required is a radical turn, under the guidance of reason, away from the stray path of Western culture.”
For Linkola, ecological issues such as global warming and mass extinctions have long been sidelined, especially in proportion to their dire consequences, and that the only solution forward, so as to ensure a complete end to the unnatural rate of ecological destruction that the planet currently faces, is to enact a genocidal campaign, helmed by the radicalised governments of the world, to reduce the global population by billions of people and to revert national industries to an semi-agricultural level of subsistence. It might be clear, at this point, where the fascist tendencies of his argument may begin to appear.
However, it is important for us to define what fascism is. As Michael E. Zimmerman wrote in his famous 1995 article, The Threat of Ecofascism, “One could certainly describe such practices as draconian or tyrannical, but not necessarily as fascist. Fascism gains its power by claiming to restore dignity, nobility, purpose, and privilege to some unique people or race whose members feel that their original mystical-organic social unity and their ties with the homeland are degenerating because of the insidious influence of alien races and foreign ideas.”
As the Italian philosopher, Giovanni Gentile, co-wrote with Italian politician and leader, Benito Mussolini, in their infamous 1931 manifesto, The Doctrine Of Fascism—which built itself on the ideas of the Italian nationalist and humanist, Giuseppe Mazzini—“conception was a political conception—a conception of integral politics, a notion of politics which does not distinguish itself from morality, from religion, or from every conception of life that does not conceive itself distinct and abstracted from all other fundamental interests of the human spirit. In Mazzini, the political man is he who possesses a moral, religious, and philosophical doctrine.”
During the Italian Risorgimento, or the 19th-Century nationalist movement to unite the various parts of the country—then divided into the territories of various other states—into a unified Kingdom of Italy, Mazzini wrote in his 1858 book, The Duties of Man, that “Without Country, you have neither name, token, voice, nor rights, no admission as brothers into the fellowship of the Peoples. You are the bastards of Humanity. Soldiers without a banner, Israelites among the nations, you will find neither faith nor protection… Do not beguile yourselves with the hope of emancipation from unjust social conditions if you do not first conquer a Country for yourselves. Where there is no Country, there is no common agreement to which you can appeal; the egoism of self-interest rules alone, and he who has the upper hand keeps it, since there is no common safeguard for the interests of all. Do not be led astray by the idea of improving your material conditions without first solving the national question. You cannot do it. Your industrial associations and mutual help societies are useful as a means of educating and disciplining yourselves; as an economic fact they will remain barren until you have an Italy. The economic problem demands, first and foremost, an increase of capital and production. While your Country is dismembered into separate fragments—while shut off by the barrier of customs and artificial difficulties of every sort, you have only restricted markets open to you—you cannot hope for this increase. Today—do not delude yourselves—you are not the working-class of Italy; you are only fractions of that class; powerless, unequal to the great task which you propose to yourselves. Your emancipation can have no practical beginning until a National Government, understanding the signs of the times, shall, seated in Rome, formulate a Declaration of Principles to be the guide for Italian progress, and […] A Country must have, then, a single government. The politicians who call themselves federalists, and who would make Italy into a brotherhood of different states, would dismember the Country, not understanding the idea of Unity. The States into which Italy is divided today are not the creation of our own people; they are the result of the ambitions and calculations of princes or of foreign conquerors, and serve no purpose but to flatter the vanity of local aristocracies for which a narrower sphere than a great Country is necessary.”
From the political theory of Mazzini, Gentile and Mussolini created the political theory of fascism as an eternal, almost frozen, reclamation of this absolutist political state of affairs. If fascism combined the Mazzinian idea of the nation state, as overpowering and exceeding the importance of the individual, and the political sphere as all-encompassing—while eschewing the Mazzinian idea of service to a universal humanity—with the most revolutionary and exciting aspects of 19th Century socialism and the opportunity left by the disintegration of traditional European politics post-World War 1, the Fascist Italy of 1922 to 1943 saw itself as the best chance for the resurrection of a historical state of affairs: namely, that of the Roman Empire—and thus a fascist logic appears.
As Gentile later wrote in his 1925 essay, What is Fascism?, “Today we also affirm liberty—but within the State. The State is the nation, that nation that appears as something that limits us and subordinates us, and makes us sense and think and speak, and more than anything else, to be in a certain manner—Italians in Italy, children of our parents and of our history. All that is a fable, in the same fashion that nature, in general, with its laws is understood to have fashioned us in a certain form and figure, destined for a certain well-defined and immutable life is a fable. It all appears that way, but it is otherwise. […] the nation is not a natural existence, but a moral reality. No one finds the nation at birth, everyone must work to create it. A people is a nation not in the sense that it has a history, an empirically established past, but only insofar as it feels its history, senses that history, and accepts it in living consciousness as its personality, that personality on which it is necessary to work day by day. As a consequence, it is a personality that one can never claim as a possession. It is not something that exists in nature—as might the sun, the hills, or the sea—personality is rather a product of an active will that constantly directs itself toward its ideal and which can thereby be said to be free. A people is a nation if it conquers its liberty, assessing its value and confronting all the pain that might be required in the course of that conquest, uniting its scattered members in a single body, redeeming them and founding an autonomous State, which is not a given, but a creation […] That is the nation—a nation through which Italians can only feel themselves forever connected with Mazzini’s Young Italy and to those who today call themselves Fascists. The nation, in truth, is neither geography nor is it history: it is a program, a mission. And therefore, it is sacrifice. It is not, and will never be, a labor that is finished. […] Yes, museums, galleries, monuments of an ancient grandeur and splendor will remain—not so that we might catch butterflies under the arch of Titus or mindlessly sit through academic commemorations in the Campidoglio, but rather to defend the memories with works that recapture the most ancient traditions and ennoble them in the present and the future. The memories are a patrimony to be defended not with erudition, but with new labor, and with all the arts of peace and war, which conserve that patrimony. renewing and increasing it. To the monuments, should they be chosen, new ones can be added. We should raise monuments in our plazas to reinforce our moral strength, to honor the living more than the dead. […] Our recent past is really more glorious than that of history. […] Where the nation is conceived in such fashion, even liberty is more a duty than a right—another conquest obtained through the abnegation of the citizen prepared to give everything to the Fatherland without asking anything from it.”
Hence, while no ecofascist state exists today, it is possible to extrapolate what such a state may look like; namely, that the ecofascist state will hold a similar desire to recreate a previous and lost historical state of affairs—that of pre-industrial society in this case—and may substitute for a national body politic, in service of a common cause of blood and history, for a global body politic, in service of a common cause for the future survival of humanity, with its revolutionary terror of violence ingested and spat out again by the State itself, as its own radical insurgent for change, in fulfilment of its grand ecological programme to curb human growth and thus life.
In the worst-case scenario, driven by the sheer notion of survival, the ecofascist state may turn inwards, and blame its ecological failings on certain demographics, hierarchies and racial groups, to which it raises calls to extermination on the grounds of their harm to the greater ecological good. Consider the specific ways it might be framed: the First World against the Third World, the North against the South, the West against the East, with every atrocity justifiable through vague numbers, notions and panic-driven logic, in service of preserving the so-called best of humanity, if one must make the choice to sacrifice one part of mankind over another.
The ecological programme of Linkola, by comparison, might appear humane; the ecofascist is the revolutionary spirit against capitalism and the cultural decay of late Modernity, now charged and possessed by the hystericism of climate apocalypse, turned towards a subsistence evil and to anyone it deems threatening to its survivalist project.
Given the slow progress of climate change reform, relative to rising ecological changes and disruptions to local ecosystems and agricultural industries, it may not be surprising to see this scenario play out, in unique and nationalist forms, as things begin to fall apart.
Copyright © Thomas J. Pellarin, 2022. All rights reserved.