We have never been Old Hegelians

(I dedicate this post to John who has recently wondered whether he might, deep down, be a liberal ironist.)

1.

One doesn’t ‘take’ what one knows as the cutlery at a meal for cutlery; any more than one ordinarily tries to move one’s mouth as one eats, or aims at moving it. (Philosophical Investigations, Iixi, p. 195)

Wittgenstein writes this in the context of pointing out some asymmetries between first- and third-person attributions of aspect seeing or “seeing as,” which asymmetries, I believe, cut to the quick of the deepest philosophical problems about representation, a recurring preoccupation here at Fort Kant.

But what interests me here is this remark’s rejection of a mode of philosophy that sees propositions everywhere, that cognitivizes the experience of having a world (as if “having a world” were a sort of experience; as if “having a world” had a sense!), that analyzes habits into beliefs of a certain sort.

As I read the remark, its point is this: it is peculiar to speak of our ordinary actions as embodying beliefs about things, as if our movements in the world were packed with crypto-propositions that a linguistically overcharged phenomenologist could decode.

When I step forward, I “take” the floor to be solid. The proper response to such a remark is either No, you don’t or I don’t know what you’re telling me.

While it’s best not to try to get too philosophically specific about it, what someone does can show something about how they see the world, whether they know they see it that way or not. And sometimes it is useful to treat someone’s embodied sense of how the world is as a sort of text and subject it to ideological critique. (John does this forcefully in his post on Malcolm Gladwell and the Amadou Diallo case (“The power of thinking without thinking about ideology”), where he argues that "perception is not innocent"and that it makes sense to hold someone morally accountable for how the world shows up for them.)

Mark at Charlotte Street, like the sovereign individual who "hold[s] his kick in readiness for the frail dogs who promise although they are not permitted to do so," reserves a swift kick for those who would be judged on the considered beliefs that represent their conscience, instead of the inverted-comma beliefs that make up their practical identity in the lifeworld. Professed beliefs cover over the embodied beliefs we’d rather keep out of sight, but they don’t reflect what is most deeply the case about us.

Belief as stated is one thing; but more stubborn is that belief incarnate in practice - I.e., ‘materialized’ in what we do. Teaching for example, will involve certain implicit ‘beliefs’ about power, pedagogy and so on, which inhere in things as seemingly trivial as the layout of chairs etc. Belief circulates in objects and actions as much as in (or before) the mind of the individual teacher. If belief resides in, has its ‘proof,’ in the behaviour, the practice, then what we think of as ‘beliefs’ – i.e., articulated propositions – are often defences against, or ways of evading the actual belief.

(This is a deeply Platonic thought, parallel to Socrates’ denial of weakness of the will: if you know that x-ing is good, you’ll x. If you say that x-ing is good but fail to x, your avowal is nonsense, and you don’t know from living well.)

I wonder if we are to see Mark’s post as an endorsement of theory—the activity that susses out the structural or lived belief that professed belief masks—or a criticism of it as so much professed but unlived belief, a display of engagement in excess of the theorist’s real engagement. Let us turn to Marx to sharpen our thinking on these matters.

2.
Anything calling itself political theory might ought to respond to this:

Since the Young Hegelians regard concepts, thoughts, ideas, and all products of consciousness, to which they give independent existence, as the real fetters of man—while the Old Hegelians pronounced them the true bonds of human society—it is obvious that the Young Hegelians have to fight only against the illusions of consciousness. In the Young Hegelians’ fantasies the relationships of men, all their actions, their chains, and their limitations. This amounts to a demand to interpret what exists in a different way, that is, to recognize it by means of a different interpretation. The Young-Hegelian ideologists are the staunchest conservatives, despite their allegedly ‘world-shaking’ statements. They forget, however, that they fight them only with phrases of their own. (The German Ideology)

“But interpretations and phases are things, with material histories and material effects; there’s no principled way to mark off intellectual labor from other kinds of labor, to mark off theory from practice. Only a liberal idealist would still try to maintain a distinction between words and things.”

Let us grant without resistance this point about the ontology of language and proceed to ask, if theory is a practice, who practices it? For whom is it practiced? What is changed by this practice? Who gains by this practice? Quaeritur.

The answers to such questions are embarrassing only if we had high hopes for theory. But if we aren’t overly moralizing, if we don’t wear jackboots and fatigues to lecture, if we don’t make noise about our peers’ being insufficiently radicalized or engaged, if we don’t pretend that a deluded friend of humanity is more dangerous than an enemy of humanity, if we don’t get too uppity about left-vs.-liberal, if we don’t act as if revolution could spring from the armchair—in short, if we are properly ironic in our theoretical activity—and by “ironic” I mean something like “trusting” or “open to inspiration from anywhere” or “honest about the dynamic nature of mental life, and not unrealistically insistent on ideological perfection or austerity (‘out of crooked timber…,’ after all!)” or “underenthused about the project of eradicating humanism”—then we can freely theorize without looking silly if we fetch up as academics writing for other academics. (And perhaps we’ll be less susceptible to the neo-conservative pendular swing that Young Hegelians seem to undergo later in life.)

“But irony is complicity. Worse: it appropriates the surface of revolution and guts its substance, simply to make the ironist feel comfortable in acquiescing to something monstrous.”

I guess it depends what it is toward which one adopts an ironic attitude. Theory as a form of discourse—no sweat. The dehumanizing effects of capital—more alarming. The welfare and dignity of human subjects and communities—this where the solidarity kicks in, and where we might be better off worrying about projects than theories. (Here is a doubt that haunts the ironist: projects may be more important, but I’m better at playing with theories. Perhaps the liberal ironist's motto might ought to be this: Let us be the party of ideas, in every sense of “the party of ideas.”)

P.S.: The double modals are dedicated to my friend Matt Weiner, soon to be one of “the boys back in Lubbock.”

P.P.S.: I have just read Henry's post on Radical Literary Theorists at Crooked Timber ("Look, he vomits crooked pins!"), and I have become ashamed. I pray that if this post has a conservative streak, it is at least conservative in a marginally more interesting way. I would like to think that I'm not defending something pre-theoretical against theory, but rather defending theory—by which I mean free-ranging, raving, roving abstraction that's not afraid to try to frame thoughts that are still too big to think—against the monological sham austerity that it can adopt.