We Have Never Felt So Free. Why Do We Feel So Helpless? Part Three.

This essay begins, in its first part, by questioning the assumption that human agency is individual and identical with the activity of a pre-social core of conscious experience. Its second part examines alternative models of personality and agency, first in the Sri Vidya practice of South India and then in the philosophy of Fichte. Fichte’s deconstruction of the thinking self and his focus on the generative activity of an unknowable totality are not merely of theoretical interest. They have political implications as well.

Fichte, along with many other participants in the efflorescence of classical German philosophy, saw all human activity embraided in a global process, “a rationality that, without a fundamental orientation towards the contents of the world or toward eternally fixed, given rules, spontaneously generates ways of organizing thought and the dynamics of rational life,”[i] This vision shaped his political schemes. These were all designed to foster equality of participation, not merely equality of opportunity. The curbs on accumulation he advocated, the periodic redistribution of land and equipment, and the abolition of inheritances, among other proposals, were meant to ensure that each citizen was self-supporting and had sufficient free time to join all others in mutual self-cultivation.[ii] The life of reason had to be made and remade from below, not imposed from above, and for this to happen the external conditions of life had to be ordered so that nobody was denied a role in that creative activity.

He was also an early proponent of the French Revolution; in 1795 he famously drafted a request to the revolutionary government for a pension on the grounds that he was doing in philosophy what it was doing in politics.[iii] If this was not accurate it was only because he went farther than the revolutionary governments did. The flaws in his concrete schemes should not blind us to the power of his overall vision, in which equality is the both the immediate aim and the ultimate goal of politics, and where the higher calling of morality leads us ever upward, past the traps of subjectivity and the unavoidable but unreliable sense of self. To “annihilate” one’s adventitious individuality and engage with all others in the mutually transformative life of the whole is not a sacrifice of our essential being, then. It is the realization of what rational beings truly are.

Such a global transformation was never going to be a simple task. Unlike Hegel, who saw the Absolute itself as the subject and mover of history, Fichte left substantial room for human agency; we could choose to align ourselves with the movement of the whole or we could decline that choice, or at least fail to acknowledge it. Although he had no interest in or taste for real history, he developed a philosophical history, a typology of the stages through which humanity would pass as it grappled with its relationship to Reason.[iv] He had no idea of the immense changes that were to come in the industrializing nineteenth century, and his narrative, like all other philosophical histories, is a schematic one, but it includes a critique of the culture of his day which remains surprisingly relevant. The overthrow of arbitrary authority had been a necessary advance towards human liberation, he argued, but it had led to a shallow and static world grounded on and corrupted by its extreme individualism. Concealing and resisting the creative activity of common human life and of Reason itself, bourgeois society is frozen in place, trapped by its own presuppositions.

The cogency of this critique is all the greater in the light of Marxian notions of ideology and commodity fetishism, which put historical flesh on Fichte’s bare-bones intellectual vision. Marx never appears to have mentioned him, but Tom Rockmore, among others, has argued that Fichte was a major influence on the younger man’s work.[v] He had come of age philosophically in the early 1840s, a period which saw something of a Fichte revival with the publication of the Collected Works, and the first few of the “Theses on Feuerbach” seem even more applicable to Fichte than they are to Feuerbach or Hegel.

Fichte understood how ideas could be used to assert and justify the power of elites, and how an oppressive monopoly of knowledge and power could lead to a revolution in the name of personal freedom,[vi] but he described these without giving any attention to the concrete lives of human beings. In The German Ideology, though, Marx and the young Engels tied them together: “Men are the producers of their notions and ideas, etc., but they are real, active men, conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces and by the relations that correspond to these forces, up to and including their most extended forms.”[vii]

Fichte did come close to a very similar insight, though, and he emphasized, as Marx did not, how intimately this fundamentally ideological process shapes private experience. In the unfairly-derided Addresses to the German Nation he wrote that each person’s “scientific view … is formed for him by his life and it is actually the internal root of his life itself, otherwise unknown to him, manifested as an intuition. That which you really and inwardly are steps before your outward eye, and you are unable ever to see anything else. To see differently, you would have to become different from what you are.”[viii]

From this perspective the peculiar intensity of contemporary individualism and its concomitant blindness begin to appear explicable and even inevitable. The social relations typical of capitalist production are uniformly individualist. People obtain rights to share in social production only through their individual ownership of productive resources or the sale of their individual labor power. This appears to be the natural order of things, and it becomes especially persuasive thanks to what Marx called the fetishization of commodities, the process whereby social relations assume the “fantastic form” of relations among things:

One can see the merit in this critique without sharing Marx’s historical analysis, his labor theory of value, or his faith in a proletarian revolution. We do indeed experience ourselves as isolated individuals, confronting and carried away by a contingent social process that seems as fixed as the laws of nature and as deaf to our own needs. “The market,” like “society,” has a mind of its own, and those who ignore its commands are condemned to failure.

Yet we are the ones who issue those commands. Self and world are so intertwined that we can never create a neutral playing field or a Newtonian social space. We can achieve only the illusion of negative liberty, conjuring a vast swath of our common life into invisibility. That life goes on, constantly calling into question our inner experience and our ideas of self-identity, but even though it is our own shared activity we become aware of it only through its echoes, the off-stage noises from the nighttime clash of ignorant armies, and we are all too likely to see it as a threat.

We worry that a sufficiently advanced AI system will commandeer world-systems and leave us powerless, but we fail to notice that have already performed that trick by channeling our interactions through a metastasized market economy. We are rendered powerless, not by any external force or logic, but by our refusal to let our one hand know what the other is doing. This makes an historically specific problem look like the human condition, pure and simple. Capitalist modernity relies on a structural similarity between one way of structuring personal experience and one type of social order. The inner self’s estrangement from the external world mirrors the individual’s alienated confrontation with the economy and society. These reinforce each other, which is why no brainwashing is required. It is enough that nobody looks behind the obvious.

Neoliberal modernity has thus brought history to an end, but in one of the worst of all possible ways. When social order and self-experience reflect one another there is no Archimedean point outside the system, and alternative forms of life appear untenable if they are thinkable at all. “That which you really and inwardly are steps before your outward eye, and you are unable ever to see anything else.” We are stuck in an infinity room, surrounded by reflections of our own presuppositions, and the difficulty of seeing our way out of the room is thanks, in part, to the absence of any strong cultural elements that could counter the partiality of self-consciousness.

***

That lack is bound up with the peculiarities of Christianity and the persistence of its own world-picture and image of human agency within what used to be called “Christendom.” Christianity is not a religion like most others.[x] It relies on assertions of historical fact even more than do Islam and Judaism, let alone Buddhism and Hinduism, it is uniquely obsessed with the facticity of dogma, and—most crucially—it embraces the first-person perspective and affirms the division between self and world that many other religions repudiate.

The soteriology of Chinese and Indic traditions, for example, centers on dispelling the illusions of individuality and the suffering that goes along with them. That of Christianity aims at assuring believers that their individual lives are all precious, and that they will live in eternal glory as separate brings, even in their own glorified bodies; the tragedies and disappointments of life will be healed and justified by an all-loving God who “shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.”[xi]

This is a profoundly individualist vision. In its formative years, in fact, Christianity had set itself against the “common city of gods and men” of classical antiquity, where the lines between individual and society were as blurred as those between humanity and the divine. The Roman citizen was obligated to bear children to maintain the divinely-ordained life of the city, and Christian teaching undercut this duty by its glorification of celibacy.[xii] Greeks and Romans lived in a world full of gods, not unlike the residents of today’s Tamil Nadu or Kerala, and their religious life was face-to-face, as complex and fluid as the social life of the agora or forum. Christianity swept the gods away or sent them to hell as demons, leaving believers alone in the universe.

Religion, like nature, abhors a vacuum, and the Church was soon to fill it up with saints, angels, and the rest of the heavenly host. Tendencies to destructive individualism were countered by lessons in stone, stained glass, and sermons about the awe-inspiring self-sacrifice of the Son of God. But this ocean of ideas and practices was uniquely vulnerable, because even its experiential elements were premised on an assent to unprovable and highly improbable factual claims. What was left washed up on the shore after its long, melancholy withdrawal was the skeleton of the Christian world picture: the individual stranded in a world made by others. Atheists, believers, Jews, Muslims, or agnostics—it makes no difference. In the European world and its former colonies, at least, we are all pilgrim souls.

There are strong resonances between the human subject in a capitalist economy and the human subject in a Christian and post-Christian world, and it may well be that a cultural belief in the essential isolation of the individual made Christian Europe a particularly auspicious site for the rise of the individualistic economic form of capitalism. Whether or not this was the case, we seem stuck with the Christian self, and that leaves us unable to give serious attention to anything that undermines the practices and institutions that depend on it. We fight for diversity, which only ends up expanding the consumer class and multiplying our shopping choices. Our transgressive art is quickly commodified. Tanta becomes soft porn, the liberatory anti-individualism of German Idealism appears to rest on irrational and even dangerous fantasies, and the transformational revolutionary theory of the young Marx becomes just another science of society. It is not that there really are no alternatives; our problem is that they point beyond the horizons of the thinkable.

***

Ours is not an age that takes kindly to metaphysics, but this essay does not seek to encourage its readers to take up Sri Vidya or Fichtean idealism. It is enough to understand these as metaphors, as different ways of thinking about inner life, and as evocations of social worlds unlike the one we inhabit. Seen this way there is nothing bizarre about them. It has been plausibly argued that we, like other organisms, are reciprocally embraided with all others, our activity shaped by the constant adjustments needed to maintain our own inner organization.[xiii] It is thus hardly irrational to start with the assumption that the multiplicity of our experience is, at the same time, the efflorescence of a single process in which all things are interwoven. This is the underlying commitment of both tantra and German Idealism, and it is arguably less problematic than the assumption that we, and perhaps our non-human relatives, too, enter the world from our mothers’ wombs or eggs and spend our lives trying to make sense of an essentially alien order of things.

The notion that self-consciousness arises from a break, a diremption in which we split both experience and agency in two, is also plausible, and in fact is strongly supported both by contemporary research (it underpins much of the work described in Nørretrander’s book) and by evolutionary theory. We see nothing like full-fledged self-consciousness in most other animals, and yet they learn, solve problems, experience intense and complex emotions, form strong and lasting relationships, and act intentionally and with greater focus and grace than we are usually able to muster. We would not expect such highly effective ways of living to be replaced by self-conscious observation, analysis, and strategizing; evolutionary change is generally a matter of repurposing or modifying existing systems instead of trading one in for another. From a Darwinian perspective the activities of self-consciousness make most sense as a supplement to embodied processes such as those we share with our non-human fellows.

This was Darwin’s own view, in fact. His correspondents had related many instances when birds abandoned their nestlings to fly south, and he theorized that “[w]hilst the mother-bird is feeding, or brooding over her nestlings, the maternal instinct is probably stronger than the migratory; but the instinct which is the more persistent gains the victory, and at last, at a moment when her young ones are not in sight, she takes flight and deserts them.” She is saved from “an agony of remorse” by the fact that no “image” will ever “pass before her mind of her young ones perishing in the bleak north from cold and hunger.”[xiv] Humans, he knew, were different.

To conjure or be haunted by such an image requires distancing from experience, the scission between self and world on which self-consciousness is founded. Thanks to that split, and to the perspective it grants us, our awareness is no longer confined to the immediate. Within this self-forged space we can imagine what is not present and what was, might be, or could never be,[xv] and through our interactions with those images we can reframe and reshape our progress through life.[xvi] We can undertake more complex projects and forge more durable social bonds than would otherwise be possible.

This has clear evolutionary advantages for animals whose young cannot survive without years of their parents’ only intermittently rewarding efforts. Reflexive self-consciousness presents itself in misleading ways, however. It seems to occupy the entirety of our inner lives, which it does not, and it seems to be a way of apprehending reality and providing us with information reliable enough to lead to efficacious action. It is not that, either. Other animals act efficiently without it. The unique accomplishment of self-conscious awareness is that it allows us to involve ourselves with things that are not there. It did not evolve to present us with reality. Its business is fiction, and at its best it works to augment reality. At its worst it replaces it.

The self-conscious I is a part that parades itself as the whole, its inherent claim to act in isolation from everything else an uncashable check. Self-consciousness is thus as dangerous as it is useful, and Fichte, though often annoyingly eupeptic, never managed to eliminate the pathological from the Fichtean I.[xvii] We are not separate from the movement of the whole, and we become self-conscious only by imagining that we are. From the moment we tear ourselves away from that activity, though, we long to undo our own handiwork. The self-posited I tries to incorporate the Not-I, to do away with all difference and all limitation, even though that accomplishment would would eliminate the I as well.

The dilemmas of individualist politics echo that split. The forms of human agency at its heart turn out to be imperially self-aggrandizing and beleaguered at the same time. We wish to be everything, we fear that we are nothing, and what lies in between seems like a self-denying compromise. Any politics founded on first-person agency and third-person community must also be flawed or even pathological, plagued alternately by an absence of all conviction and by a terrible and passionate intensity.

We have no cure to hand; thanks to the inheritance of Christianity we cannot appeal to any other ideas of human agency or social order. These are harder to imagine than the end of the world. Yet this need not drive us to despair, because the grounding for an alternative is hiding in plain sight. Our selves and our world have always been collaborative projects, provisional and subject to change, and the ones we inhabit today are no exception even though they are grounded in a denial of that very activity. The underlying biological reality is that we are no different from other organisms; we have always been networked. Only in self-conscious reflection do we appear to be self-made individuals whose inner being must always be projected on and protected from the world outside. As many religious traditions have insisted, reality is intimately present yet out of reach so long as we try to apprehend it in terms of self and other.[xviii] The trick, which of course is not a trick at all, is to accept the necessity of the first-person perspective but to set it to one side in our thinking and our action, to practice a radical non-attachment to whatever binds us to the ideology of everyday common sense.

We have not yet done this. We have taken the conflict between self-interest and social needs as a given, not as a contingency of our own making, and have tried again and again to resolve individual isolation and planetary problems by starting from the very divisions that have made their dangers so extreme and their solutions so difficult. We have tried to stitch together congeries of individuals into ethnic communities, political communities, religious and racial communities. These attempts were harmless when they failed and destructive when they seemed to succeed. None grew from the real spontaneous intercourse of human beings, and all of them were based in theory, which always comes after the split between self and world and thus can never connect the two.

It is easy enough to see where we have gone wrong. It is harder to see how we might go right. What may just save us is the likelihood that the underlying activity in which everything participates pushes steadily against all separation. It is not just information that wants to be free. Any system of reciprocal action will resist moves to withdraw or dominate, for its tendency is always towards the dissolution of boundaries and the integration of all of its actors, linked in a dance like Hegel’s Bacchanalian whirl in which we lose ourselves even as the ripples of our every gesture extend to infinity.[xix] That is the liberatory movement inherent in tantra, and its concrete realization in a truly collaborative and humane world was what Fichte saw as the vocation of humanity. We do not need to invent it or formulate it, because we always already live in the generative activity that flows through the body and beneath the imagined sovereign self. To paraphrase Simone Weil, we do not need to seek it, either. We need only turn our attention in its direction.

But it is very late.

Notes:

[i]           Henrich, Dieter, “The French Revolution and German Philosophy,” trans. W. Martin & S. Bernecker, in Henrich, Dieter, Aesthetic judgment and the moral image of the world: studies in Kant (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), p. 91.

[ii]           A convenient summary of his proposals and their rationale is in Wood, Allen W., “Fichte’s Philosophy of Right and Ethics” in James, David, and Zöller, Gunther, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Fichte. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), especially the section titled “Economic Justice,” pp. 183 ff.

[iii]          Fichte, J.G., tr. Breazeale. Early Philosophical Writings. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), p. 385.

[iv]          This is set out in most detail in Fichte, J.G., “The Characteristics of the Present Age,” in The Popular Works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, trans. William Smith (London: John Chapman, 1859), Vol. 2, pp. 6-10; SW VII: 8-12.

[v]           He first made this argument in Fichte, Marx, and the German Philosophical Tradition (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980), and recently reaffirmed it in “Marx the Fichtean,” Ethics in Progress, Vol. 12 (2021). No. 2, pp. 124-137. DOI:10.14746/eip.2021.2.9

[vi]          “The Characteristics of the Present Age,” supra, p. 8.

[vii]         In Marx: Early Political Writings, ed. & tr. O’Malley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 124.

[viii]         Fichte, J. G. Addresses to the German Nation, tr. Moore (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 86, SW VII, 360

[ix]          Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy: Volume One, tr. Fowkes. (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), p. 187; see also p. 165.

[x]           I am not speaking of the by-now-unrecoverable “religion of Jesus.”

[xi]          Revelation 21:4 (Authorized Version).

[xii]         The classic presentation of this argument is in Brown, Peter. The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).

[xiii]         This Kantian and Fichtean notion is the foundation of the autopoietic biology of Maturana and Varela.

[xiv]         Darwin, Charles. The Descent of Man: And Selection in Relation to Sex, in Wilson, E.O. From So Simple a Beginning: The Four Great Books of Charles Darwin. (New York, Norton, 2006), p. 829.

[xv]         These need not be visual representations, and can as easily take the form of sounds, odors, tastes, visceral sensations, or inchoate emotional states.

[xvi]         Fichte argued that all representations were the products of imagination; the conjurings of self-consciousness are therefore not fundamentally distinct from other acts of perception.

[xvii]        See, especially, Goddard, Jean-Christophe. La Philosophie Fichtéenne de la Vie: Le Transcendantale et le Pathologique. (Paris: Vrin, 1999).

[xviii]       Fichte saw this idea in Christianity, too, referring to Matthew 16:25: “For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it.” (Authorized Version)

[xix]         Hegel, G.W.F., Phenomenology of Spirit, tr. Miller. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), § 47, p. 27.