Human Image, World Image

Ye shall know them by their fruit.

 

Autonomy, individual freedom, and self-determination, are celebrated within the framework of capitalist societies driven by scientific and technological progress. Sounds good. I love freedom. I don’t want to live without it. But there is a paradox: the very systems that promise autonomy produce alienation—from nature, community, and for religious individuals, from deeply held spiritual values.

Words shift meaning when used to justify or reinforce (or undo) the powers that be. I just wrote how the normal meaning of “ambivalent” mutates when used as part of postcolonial “discourse” (another one of those words that mutate). If you use ‘ideology’ / ‘forms of social consciousness’ it is like you imported Marx’s philosophy into your argument without argument, as a taken-for-granted background being forced on your reader. If you choose ‘discourse’, then you assume Foucault. If you choose ‘paradigm,’ then Thomas Kuhn, etc. It is a bit like choosing between ‘sex worker’ or ‘prostitute’; or ‘fetus’ and ‘unborn baby.’ Your word choice already pushes the reader or listener toward your conclusion. It puts pressure on the reader/listener to be part of the ‘in’ group, like saying “Obviously the cutting-edge way to understand these things is Foucauldian; if you don’t use ‘discourse’ (even if you don’t really understand Foucault), then you are not in the ‘in’ group.” I suppose I prefer Wittgenstein’s ‘grammar’ because it is the least politically loaded. We need a way to refer to the phenomenon without smuggling in a whole controversial philosophy or worldview.

In any case, ‘autonomy’ is a word whose meaning (whose grammar) depends on a particular way of thinking, talking, and feeling about the world – one that is part of the regime of ‘science-capitalism-technology’ in the way ‘discourse’ is part of postcolonial studies.  My use of ‘science-capitalism-technology’ is also not neutral or value-free. (I took it over from Wendell Berry.) Nevertheless it expresses something important about our world: what seem distinct areas of endeavor (‘praxis’) are so intertwined that they cannot be separated. And this complex is the most powerful influence on the structure of society as well as changes in society.

     Autonomy has many uses that raise no political or philosophical problems. I am not talking about these. I am talking only about how ‘autonomy’ functions in the ‘discourse’ – the ways of thinking, speaking, and feeling – that more or less reinforces the regime, even when it appears otherwise. The ideological use of autonomy, rooted in capitalism’s profit maximization and consumerism ethos, contributes to these forms of alienation.

 

   Autonomy is supposed to be the pinnacle of individual empowerment. It encompasses economic autonomy—the freedom to participate in markets and accumulate wealth; political autonomy—the right to vote, voice opinions, and shape governance; and personal autonomy—the liberty to make choices about one’s life, identity, and pursuits. This notion is intricately linked with capitalism’s promise of meritocracy and upward mobility, where success is equated with individual effort and achievement.

    Deeper, it is a denial of authority – particularly the authority of parents and teachers. It is a denial of tradition. A man who becomes an officer because for generations every man in his family has become an officer is not autonomous. It is a denial of community in favor of individualism. Self-expression trumps community belongingness. Community – having to make a common life with others in a place – limits free self-expression i.e. autonomy.

   So far, I haven’t really touched on the problematic aspect of autonomy. If you asked me whether autonomy is good or bad, depending on what I have written so far, I would say: It is complex. It depends on the community, tradition, and authority we are talking about. I see these things – call them roots – as necessary for a good life. I see ‘autonomy’ in this sense as necessary for a good life. Neither can be absolute. We must find ways to live with the tension. These kinds of tensions are built into human life. That is one reason why utopia can only be a dystopia since utopia removes these necessary tensions.

   The problem comes when community, tradition, and authority are thought to be bad per se. As not even in principle being able to nourish the soul. As only being a chain on it. As being the equivalent of Plato’s Cave. And if roots are seen this way, as something only to be overcome, then nature will also be seen only as a limit to the will. If a community is completely rotten, only something to be overcome, then it is really not a community anymore anyway. It can only be a corrupted community in that case.

   I have recently written about how Aristotle and then Aquinas saw nature as the source of value and meaning – even when they allowed ideological distortions to creep into their understanding of nature.  Nature was a book, whose definitive reading was beyond human capacity, but like a youth reading Macbeth, we could understand something, enough even to disagree. This interpretative (hermeneutic) dimension was not something emphasized by Aristotle or Aquinas, but I emphasize it because it was implicit in the understanding that nature came into being through Ideas in the mind of God, an infinite and perfect Being, and thus by definition beyond the full comprehension of finite and fallible creatures. (I know of a painter who did nothing but paint ducks. It was a life project, grasping the being of a duck. Even so his understanding – though vastly more profound than my own – only distantly approached the Idea in God’s mind [take that as a metaphor if you want]. At some point, he must have experienced the kind of joy that C. S. Lewis described in Surprised by Joy, which is perhaps the closest we can get to the true being of a duck (a duck as God sees it). [Some philosophers need God at least as a metaphor to be able to account for Being: i.e. they can’t account for Being, for the experience of Being, without inserting God into their philosophy. A kind of a proof of God’s reality.] But I digress.

   But in this book of nature, humanity plays its part, i.e. there is also a nature of human beings. Part of this nature is that we are social and political beings. We cannot even survive as individuals much less inhabit a world (a Welt, as opposed merely to an Um-welt) in which we realize our humanity through craft, art, politics, science, religion, friendship, and so on). As individuals we cannot be anything but a deformed human being, one that did not blossom into a fully real human being. As individuals, we are closer either to the beasts or the gods, as Aristotle put it. Thus by nature we are beings that can only become what we are through living in a certain kind of community. In this proper (natural) form of community authority, tradition, and the virtues needed to cooperate on a common project with others you are bound to are thus also natural – in Kantian language, preconditions for the possibility of actualizing your human potential. And a good, valuable human life consists of nothing else but actualizing this potential. (Which you can’t do if you lay in bed all day and zone on TikTok!)

 It is the meaning of autonomy in the culture of modernity (science-capitalism-technology) that bothers me, in that web of concepts, and as time went on in the form of ideology/discourse/framework/paradigm/narratives. [so much jargon, like space junk, floating around in my conceptual web LOL – not that some valid insights don’t lie buried in these words before they became jargon. So many people use ‘discourse’ and ‘narrative’ in those special senses as though they had read and struggled with those French inheritors of Nietzsche and Heidegger – I mean Derrida and Foucault. And I get it; you have to be a special kind of person to find pleasure in reading the ‘texts’ of those guys, though there are diamonds in the rough.] Because it is a central idea in the picture of humanity that has led us to where we are now, standing on the abyss of ecological and social collapse, the former perhaps being more urgent. This passage has exerted a profound influence on me for many years now; I can’t get it out of my head:

The industrial and technological inferno we have produced around us, and by means of which we are now devastating our world, is not something that has come about accidentally. On the contrary, it is the direct consequence of our allowing ourselves to be dominated by a certain paradigm of thought – embracing a certain human image and a certain world image – to such a degree that it now determines virtually all our mental attitudes and all our actions, public and private. It is a paradigm of thought that impels us to look upon ourselves as little more than two-legged animals whose destiny and needs can best be fulfilled through the pursuit of social, political and economic self-interest. And to correspond with this self-image we have invented a world-view in which nature is seen as an impersonal commodity, a soulless source of food, raw materials, wealth, power and so on, which we think we are quite entitled to experiment with, exploit, remodel, and generally abuse by means of any scientific and mechanical technique we can devise and produce, in order to satisfy and deploy this self-interest. Having in our own minds desanctified ourselves, we have desanctified nature, too, in our own minds: we have removed it from the suzerainty of the divine and have assumed that we are its overlords, and that it is our thrall, subject to our will. In short, under the aegis of this self-image and worldview we have succeeded in converting ourselves into the most depraved and depraving of all creatures upon the earth. – Phillip Sherrard

If the picture, which made sense to the artists, scientists, inventors, and capitalists intent on throwing off the intolerable authority of the Church (with its God-cursed burnings and torturings) has brought us here, of what use is the picture? The corruption and injustice of the Church are the beginning of the picture.

  I can't be the best kind of critic because I have had a good life in capitalism if I abstract my life from the general tendency. I had hard-working parents who provided me with a high middle-class standard of living. I have received the precious gift of good education. My failings are my failings, not capitalism's. Many of the worst failings of capitalism are correctable by enlightened state policy as I know from living in Germany - which for all its problems is so much better governed than my home country that I feel anger and shame. (This is a result of the political constitution and culture, not individuals in the first place.)

    Although I would love a world freed from the Internet, social media, computers, cars, nuclear bombs, and such, there are some things in capitalism I would not want to do without: the quality of dentistry, optics, toilet paper, solar energy panels, and more. Some choices would be hard: I love my fridge but the world might be more sustainable without it?  

    Kept in its proper sphere and tightly intertwined with a decent political and moral culture, with regions and local communities, free enterprise in some form is probably a necessity. Every city needs a market. The market can't be allowed to swallow up the whole city. 

. . .

  The picture that has brought us here is a puzzle with many pieces that cohere to liberate man from reality – from nature. It liberates man from limits. It is a picture of human power over nature.

“Now, the desire for money, Thomas Aquinas pointed out, knows no limits, whereas all natural wealth, represented in the concrete form of food, clothing, furniture, houses, gardens, fields, has definite limits of production and consumption, fixed by the nature of the commodity and the organic needs and capacities of the user. The idea that there should be no limits upon any human function is absurd: all life exists within very narrow limits of temperature, air, water, food; and the notion that money alone, or power to command the services of other men, should be free of such definite limits is an aberration of the mind.”  – Lewis Mumford, The Pentagon of Power

 

Then there is the crime of Galileo. He posited as a precondition of his mechanical science this reductive doctrine: we cannot conceive a physical substance without size, position, motion/rest, and number; nor can we imagine bodies separated from any of these attributes. However, a body can be conceived without color, taste, aroma, or making a sound. We would not imagine such things were part of nature if we lacked senses, intellect and imagination. We project such qualities – including value and meaning – onto indifferent nature.  Thus Galileo:

Thus, from the point of view of the subject in which they seem to inhere [these things] are nothing but empty names, rather they inhere only in the sensitive body … [I]f one removes the animal, then all these qualities are … annihilated. (Galileo 1623 [2008: 185])

Thus for Lewis Mumford Galileo was indeed guilty of a crime; I will quote the whole passage for I cannot say it better:

Though Galileo’s interpretation of planetary movements led to a charge of heresy by the Roman Catholic Church, the heresy that he was accused of was one he did not utter. As he plaintively put it at the end of the ‘Dialogues on Two Worlds,’ he could not be justly convicted of a crime he had never committed. Like so many eminent later colleagues in science, such as Pascal, Newton, and Faraday, he was a theological conservative; and even in science he had no notion of bringing about any revolutionary overthrow of previously established truths: he error there, if anything, was to attempt clumsily to shore up and repair Ptolemy’s traditional structure.

     But actually, Galileo committed a crime far graver than any of the dignitaries of the Church accused him of; for his real crime was that of trading the totality of human experience, not merely the accumulated dogmas and doctrines of the Church, for that minute portion which can be observed within a limited time-span and interpreted in terms of mass and motion, while denying importance to the unmediated realities of human experience, from which science itself is only a refined ideological derivative. When Galileo divided experienced reality into two spheres, a subjective sphere, which he chose to exclude from science, and an objective sphere, freed theoretically from man’s visible presence, but known through rigorous mathematical analysis, he was dismissing as unsubstantial and unreal the cultural accretions of meaning that had made mathematics – itself a purely subjective distillation – possible.

      For the better part of three centuries scientists followed Galileo’s lead. Under the naïve belief that they were free from metaphysical preconceptions, the orthodox exponents of science suppressed every evidence of human and organic behavior that could not be neatly fitted into their mechanical world picture. They thus committed, in reverse, the error of the early Christian Fathers who had suppressed any interest in the natural world in order to concentrate upon the fate of the human soul in eternity. That ‘mass’ and ‘motion’ had no more objective existence from ‘soul’ and ‘immortality’ apart from their derived relation to other human experiences, was not even suspected by those who strained at the theological gnat and swallowed the scientific bat. Galileo, in all innocence, had surrendered man’s historic birthright: man’s memorable and remembered experience, in short, his accumulated culture. In dismissing subjectivity he had excommunicated history’s central subject, multi-dimensional man.

I could go on tracing how the contributions of Empiricism and Kantianism played their role in making all of nature unreal, of making reality a construct of the mind, a social construct it then became. How political economy made all value contingent on man’s desire and labor. How existentialism denied there was a human essence or human nature, positing we are called on (like Milton’s Satan) to create our own nature (and morality). Or the idea that there is no text, only interpretation (Barthes), a denial that Plato, Aristotle, or Aquinas have anything to teach us. That a book, rechristened ‘text,’ shall go the way of nature and be turned over to the “creative” projections of interpreters – rather like a modern theater direction imposing his sexual hang-ups on a play by Shakespeare (I was an unfortunate witness to such a performance of King Lear). Thus the modern and some self-styled ‘post-modern’ (which as a serious philosophical undertaking I do not disparage) elites make anything that could ‘talk back’ to them bow down. There is a connection between the violence capitalism does to nature and the violence that director did to Shakespeare’s play.

  And that is ultimately what autonomy means in this ‘discourse.’ The power to violate nature, community, books, etc. – anything that talks back to the ego.

  These cultural movements are interwoven with the material and social changes brought about by science-capitalism-technology. They are one, this regime and this human image.