In the early years of the eighteenth century, when Leibniz and Clarke debated, there were at least two plausible ways for European thinkers to imagine the cosmos and, by implication, the human world. Leibniz and the idiosyncratic John Toland evoked an ungraspable complex of relation and activity from which the discrete objects of experience and even space and time were abstractions. For Newton, by contrast, absolute space—the void—was primary, just as it is in the Bible. It was the field on which objects and people could interact in compliance with universal laws.

The debate did not end with Leibniz and Clarke, but it was Newton’s model that prevailed, and with it came Foucault’s human subject. People were now assumed to be self-sufficient and bounded entities, and this made them puzzles and objects of analysis. Their objective interactions could be considered apart from their subjective experience, and a new disciplinary structure arose in which sociology and psychology addressed those separate realms. But this model also rendered every human interaction as an opposition between law and subject, society and citizen, or self and other. Every contact became fraught; every step demanded that individuals stand their ground or yield. Common life, once imagined as a system of reciprocity and mutuality, now appeared to be an incessant struggle for power.

Power relations have never been absent from human communities and indeed from non-human life; simply setting up a bird feeder will demonstrate this. But in traditional societies and in medieval Europe these were specific conflicts among specific individuals standing in specific social relations. Foucault’s power is different. It is amorphous and all-pervasive: “power is co-extensive with the social body; there are no spaces of primal liberty between the meshes of its network[, but] there are no relations of power without resistances; the latter are all the more real and effective because they are formed right at the point where relations of power are exercised.”[i] This seems obvious from the Newtonian perspective, where human life is pictured as a confrontation between an isolated subject and a social world with its own logic and sources of authority. From the relational standpoint, however, “the point where relations of power are exercised” is just one out of an uncountable number of reciprocal interactions, and so far from constraining the freedom of a discrete subject it is a site of mutual transformation. This reciprocity is often distorted by disparities of economic or physical power, but it remains an occasion for human liberty in the positive sense. For Foucault, by contrast, there is only negative liberty, and the only realm of pure human freedom is Rousseau’s primal forest. Any social world must keep us in chains.

Newton’s cosmos had an obvious appeal to the defenders of order; its motto could easily be the one that Kant imputed to Frederick the Great, “argue, as much as you like and about whatever you want, only obey!”[ii] That the mainstream thinkers of the Enlightenment did not advocate any more thoroughgoing tyranny can be ascribed to an additional assumption, that all people were the same at heart. That step allowed the philosophes to avoid the problem that Hobbes had inherited from theories of providence and the biology of humors: that people’s notions of the good and the desirable were inevitably in conflict.

The progress of natural philosophy from Galileo onward had eliminated the particularity of Aristotle’s objects and their tendencies to seek their own places. This allowed Newton to reduce the apparent complexities of celestial mechanics to the working out of a few elegant laws. In the eighteenth century it seemed reasonable to think that the complexities of social life could be grasped and managed in the same way, and the now-much-criticized universalism of the Enlightenment rested on the assumption that human beings were as interchageable as Newtonian bodies—Cosí fan tutti.[iii] The wise had only to listen to the demands of universal reason and write them into law.

Burke saw this as the dangerous delusion behind the revolutionary turmoil in France, but it had been a commonplace in Enlightenment thought long before then, and it had led to something of a fixation on the figure of the lawmaker. Nobody put it more flatly than Montesquieu: “At the births of societies, the leaders of republics create the institutions; thereafter, it is the institutions that form the leaders of republics.”[iv] This put obstacles in the way of writing history, since it confined the analysis and narration of social transformations to the working out of initial conditions, but its consequences in the realm of action were more serious by far. It seemed to authorize social engineering of the sort that Robespierre and the Jacobins tried to carry out, but the need for a new beginning could also justify the elimination of those unfortunate enough to have been formed by the previous set of institutions. Down that road lay terror.

There was no single “Enlightenment theory” of anything, of course, and the era saw no shortage of countervailing theories. There was an increasing interest in self-organizing systems and many arguments for a vitalized nature and the centrality of drives. Theorists of self-organization, however, focused on external relations that generated optimal economic outcomes or states of equilibrium. The Wealth of Nations is the obvious example, although Smith’s Theory of the Moral Sentiments also implies a form of self-organization, but his economics and ethics both presume that the human subject is at root isolated and self-seeking. The second countervoice had different weaknesses. The theory of drives seemed to look back to the relational model, but it was difficult to apply to human behavior without reducing people to slaves of their appetites.

It was Fichte who offered a resolution of the early-eighteenth-century debate, but to see how he did this requires a bit of background. He may not have been the loyal Kantian he claimed to be, but Fichte certainly accepted Kant’s division between noumenal and phenomenal worlds. He rejected the Kantian things in themselves, though. What lay behind experience “is not something that possesses being; but rather [it is] acting.”[v] Our structured and cognizable world of objects is not our rendition of noumenal objects but our response to noumenal activity.

This radicalizes the ideas of Fichte’s predecessors. Toland had argued that we constitute the objects of experience in accordance with our own forms of thought. Fichte agreed, but saw this as driven by biological needs: “I do not feel hunger because there is food for me,” he wrote, “instead, something becomes food for me because I am hungry.”[vi] For Toland movement is inherent in matter, but so are solidity and extension. Fichte did away with the category “matter” altogether, transforming “universal extension” into the interweaving currents of the noumenal. Both changes put action first.

Fichte’s central argument is that the I, and thus the discrete, “empirical” human subject, is nothing but the process of its own self-making, producing both reflection and the self to which reflection is directed. We can accomplish this only by abstracting ourselves from the noumenal activity of the whole, though, and by defining ourselves over and against everything else. We then structure and organize this not-I as a set of external objects, each one picked out by one or another need, and this self-constitution and simultaneous self-alienation is what accounts for the appearance of the Newtonian void, the gaps within the cosmos among beings and objects. It is only an appearance, but it is how the noumenal world must appear if it is to appear at all, for there can be no appearances and no knowledge without an observer and without objects of knowledge.

This allows a dialectical synthesis of Newton and Leibniz. Fichte’s dialectical method, unlike Hegel’s, generally consists of showing oppositions to be partial truths, and his philosophical perspective makes it clear that the Newtonian and relational worlds are both valid. They just address different aspects of reality. The relational model describes the world as a noumenon and the Newtonian model describes the world of phenomena. Reality is continuous activity and transformation, a reciprocal interweaving of drives with drives and ultimately of a single self-manifesting drive with itself, but we cannot know it as it is. Knowledge is only knowledge of phenomena, for Fichte as for Kant, and it defines and then explores not reality in itself but the space and time we constitute and in which we place ourselves, other beings, and various objects of desire or revulsion. We live in Leibniz’s world, then, but whenever we think about it we find ourselves in Newton’s.

Fichte also rediscovered and reinvigorated the union of relational cosmology with radical communitarian politics that can be seen in Gerrard Winstanley and which Clarke thought he saw in Leibniz. His deep egalitarianism, most evident in his ethics, is rooted in the suprapersonal movement of the noumenal. We are not really the selves we make ourselves into; we are moments in a whole, making and unmaking our own worlds and making and remaking ourselves through reciprocal interactions. Fichte, both religiously and politically radical, called on his contemporaries to transform the world accordingly, into a free community that was the image of the unknowable divinity which “is in all things and [by which] all things consist.”[vii]

Hegel was to surpass him as a philosophical influence, but Fichte’s tone of ethical uplift and his exhortations to change the world had an afterlife well beyond that of his theory of self-consciousness. It can be traced in Bakunin, who translated some of Fichte’s lectures into Russian, and in the writings of Bakunin’s friend and revolutionary colleague Wagner, including the Ring cycle.[viii] But Fichte’s insights into the dialectic of Newtonian and relational worlds find their strongest echo in Marx.

Although he never mentions Fichte’s name, there seems to be a good deal of Fichte in Marx’s early manuscripts, and there is also something very Fichtean in one of the most celebrated chapters in Capital, “The Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secret,” which examines the “metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties”[ix] of that subject. Marx is no doubt exercising his sense of humor here, but his point is a serious one: his analysis of the commodity operates in much the same way as Fichte’s analysis of self-consciousness. The apparent givenness of both the commodity and the I of self-awareness conceals the operations through which the fluidity of human activity is presented as a set of fixed relations among discrete objects. As every good Marxist knows, the commodity “is nothing but the definite social relations between [people] themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things.”[x] One could easily turn this into a one-sentence precis of Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre: experience is nothing but the noumenal activity of the Absolute which assumes, in self-consciousness, the fantastic form of a relation among things and beings.

Similarly, Marx’s critique of bourgeois political economy could stand as a critique of all psychological and sociological analyses that assume the bedrock reality of the isolated Newtonian subject and its law-bound world, the ordinary standpoint that Fichte insists we must leave behind:

Reflection begins post festum, and therefore with the results of the process of development ready to hand. The forms which stamp products as commodities and which are therefore the preliminary requirements for the circulation of commodities, already possess the fixed quality of natural forms of social life before man seeks to give an account, not of their historical character, for in his eyes they are immutable, but of their content and meaning.[xi]

We have always been the masters of our own fate and the creators of our own world, but humanity’s collective self-making cannot be thought until the proletarian revolution—grounded in the enforced mutuality of the dispossessed—makes it manifest in new relations of production. Until that moment we must stand powerless before our own creation, which we can only present to ourselves in a Newtonian guise, as a restraint on our selfhood and subjectivity.

It is most likely due to Marx that elements of the relational vision of humanity and its world survived into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It suffered greatly along the way. Engels’s recasting of his ideas as a science of society led the Marxist tradition back towards the eighteenth century. The Bolsheviks ignored the trap Marx had identified in the “Theses on Feuerbach,” that nobody can stand apart from history and teach the teachers, and they embraced a top-down, Jacobin program with the Party as the wise lawgiver, with state terror available to dispose of the recalcitrant and the unteachable.

Something closer to Marx’s early ideas could be found in the anarchism of the early Spanish Republic and in the collectivism of early Scandinavian social democracy, but Fascists and Stalinists killed off the anarchists and internal flaws led to the decay of the Swedish model. Mutual aid has survived as an ideal and even as a temporary practice, but it no longer even suggests any larger-scale political vision, and most progressive political currents tend to remain within the individualist presuppositions of the Newtonian model and the “natural” inevitability of the market, the current form of laws-from-nowhere which regulate the people and objects within the void. Rather than reshape the totality, they strive to limit anything which impinges on personal autonomy. They urge us towards the full incorporation of individuals into a world which has not lived up to its professed values, their proponents unwittingly performing the same ideological function as the political economists whom Marx critiqued: a refined and perfected form of the present is the only goal they can imagine or advocate. Not even the projects aimed at breaking or reducing corporate power or the destructive influence of the wealthy aim at much beyond a kinder, gentler form of neoliberalism. Everything else carries the whiff of the Gulag.

The sterility of these projects may be why matters of spirit have returned to political discourse. Most of the time, however, this, too, comes post festum. The invisibility of the relational world cries out to be addressed, but that world will not be brought back to awareness, let alone importance, by teaching virtues in grade school or by herding us into church. This is especially so because post-Reformation Christianity tends to make individualism and discourse primary, while commonality and direct experience tag along behind as supererogatory fruits of a personal faith. This gets things backwards. What needs to be recovered are not the theories that grew up to explain transcendent experience. It is a shared openness to the experiential content itself, which is cultivated in religious practice but is, at best, merely figured in religious ideas.

Conservatives often say that Marxism itself is a form of religion. This is meant to paint the proletarian revolution as apocalyptic fantasy, and Marxists understandably try to distance themselves from this characterization, but it is not entirely wrong-headed. Marxism does resemble much religious thinking. The parallels, though, are in its ontology, not its eschatology. There is the evidence of things seen: life structured around the circulation of commodities and the seemingly free but factually exploitative relationship between capitalists and workers. Over and against this Marx posits the evidence of things not seen, the concealed common life which is the real source of value and of personality itself. This is the world that the revolution was supposed to reveal, and it has much the same shape as the ones that Hildegard and Winstanley evoked and that Fichte saw as Jesus’ Kingdom of Heaven. It cannot be said that any of these teachings have brought us any closer to that goal, but considering the failures of politics based on Newtonian premises it may be worth looking for a politics founded on relational ones instead.

This is a tall order. The smart money these days is on Yeats’s rough beast, not on a religious visionary or a worldwide revolution. But Foucault was right to see that we stand in an unstable and historically conditioned situation. Like capitalist modernity itself, our image of humanity arose out of a specific concatenation of circumstances, and these will eventually fall apart thanks to their own inconsistencies or the impact of events not outside the ream of the unforseen. To imagine ourselves alone and apart from our own collective activity is to inhabit a no-place, in need of substitutes or palliatives for the real intimacy we have denied ourselves. We have been able to afford those substitutes thanks to the unprecedented rise in living standards in much of the world, but the bill we are running up will eventually come due, and when that happens it may not be waves that wash away the face of our variety of humanity. It may be the ever-rising level of the sea that does the job.

Notes:

[i]     “Power and Strategies,” in Michel Foucault, ed. Colin Gordon, Power/Knowledge. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), p. 142.

[ii]    Immanuel Kant, tr. James Schmidt, “Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” in Schmidt, What is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. 63.

[iii]    A statement applicable to both genders, thus the change from Mozart’s and DaPonte’s title.

[iv]    Montesquieu, tr. David Lowenthal, Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1965), p. 25.

[v]    J. G. Fichte, tr. Daniel Breazeale, Foundations of Transcendental Philosophy (Wissenschaftslehre) nova methodo (1796/99). (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), p. 243.

[vi]    J.G. Fichte, tr. Daniel Breazeale & Günter Zöller, The System of Ethics According to the Principles of the Wissenschaftslehre. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 118-119.

[vii]   Gerrard Winstanley, Fire in the Bush, in Christopher Hill, ed., Winstanley: ‘The Law of Freedom’ and Other Writings. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 219.

[viii]  See generally, Michael Steinberg, The Philosopher’s Ring—Wagner as Thinker and Dramatist. (Rochester: Camden House, 2026).

[ix]    Karl Marx, tr. Ben Fowkes, Capital: Volume One. (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), p. 163.

[x]    Ibid., p. 165.

[xi]    Ibid., p. 169.