354. Reading Hegel

I read Hegel long ago (in the late 1960’s), and I remember being highly impressed with some of his work and disgusted with another part. I let myself be diverted from Hegel by Popper’s attack on his historicism and his groundwork for totalitarianism[i]. Žižek is an admirer of Hegel, and studying Žižek I wondered if I had missed something. So I started re-reading Hegel.

I was, and still am, immensely impressed by Hegel’s dedication to dynamics, of ideas and social structure, in the form of structural change arising from oppositions or what Hegel called contradictions, in dialectical change, notably in his Phenomenology of the Spirit. That was a welcome change with respect to earlier Western philosophy, which I read as being almost exclusively preoccupied with substance and permanence.

Thinking back, I now see that it may be largely due to inspiration from Hegel that I dedicated myself professionally to innovation. But why stick to Hegel? Surely, there has been development of thought on dynamics since Hegel, certainly in the self-manifestation of the absolute spirit that Hegel proclaimed. 

In Hegel’s Logic, which is not a logic in the usual sense, but a metaphysics, the prime category is Being, and to Hegel being is not like some fixed object but a process of becoming, in the dialectical process. That sits well with my process view of philosophy, and of knowledge, meaning, etc., as discussed in this blog (item 342).

On the other hand, what I abhorred, and still do, is the idea that history is a progressive, teleological, process of self-realization of the Hegelian Absolute Spirit. Here one recognizes the notion of an Aristotelian final cause that in my view is a mistaken way of looking at history and society. It even seems contradictory in Hegel’s own thought, which I read as pointing to non-linear transformations that may not be progressive, may embark on a cul de sac, and may be degressive.

I do recognize the philosophical significance of the attempt to bring together the infinite and the finite, with the absolute spirit replacing God, in its self-realization through the actions of the finite spirit of mankind. But politically that has inspired a communist ideology of a march towards utopia in which human sacrifice and suffering are of negligible significance. Of course this is an anachronism: Hegel could not foresee such perversion of his ideas. But Hegel did also see war as an inevitable clearing of what exists, to make room for the next transformative step in the march, which I find hard to stomach but do recognize as possibly true, harsh as it may seem.

Žižek offers an alternative reading of Hegel. I am not sure I fully understand it, so I give a direct quote: ‘.. what gets lost in it (the usual reading) is the interaction between the epistemological and ontological aspects, the way ‘reality’ itself is caught in the movement of our knowing it (or, vice versa, how our knowing of reality is embedded in reality itself’ (Parallax view p. 30). That may approach my approach, as set out in this blog. I would add language as an intermediary between epistemology and ontology.

   
Also, I detested what I thought was Hegel’s agreement with Rousseau’s view of the general will of the people to which the individual should surrender his own opinion or interest. There is too much of a platform for totalitarianism there. A platform on which populists are now eager to dance their folk dances. But re-reading Hegel (and reading Rebecca Comay’s Mourning sickness), I now see that while Hegel was thrilled by the French revolution as a necessary step in the march of the absolute spirit, he in fact opposed Rousseau’s absolute general will in which individuals should be eager to dissolve themselves, for the same reason that he rejected Kant’s duty ethics for its demand to transcend individual interests and contingencies.   

That fits with Hegel’s view of any universal, including that of the state as the universal will of the people, as a ‘concrete universal’, though that sounds like a contradiction in terms. What this means is that the universal is not homogeneous, but includes a variety of particulars some of which may even be at odds, in some partial way, with the universal. Indeed, according to Žižek’s reading of Hegel the essence of the universal is the strife between its particulars. Hegel insisted that the state must allow for the free development of individual personality, and should respect the rights of individuals, existing in and through its particular citizens.

What, then, is democracy? As I noted earlier in this blog, what I can make of it is the following. In a democracy one has to accept what has been democratically debated and decided, but that does not require that one drop one’s conviction, saying and testifying that one must have been wrong.

The issue concerning the universal and its particulars is important, but I take a somewhat different view of it, as I will discuss in the next item in this blog. The challenge there is to show how there can be space for deviance of particulars, and how that can shift or topple the universal, doing what Hegel seems to have left undone. 

            

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[i] In Popper’s Poverty of historicism and The open society and its ennemies.

353. Žižek and Basic Income

It can be difficult to find coherence in Žižek’s oracular utterances. The pieces of the jigsaw puzzle are beautiful, and I have learned a lot from them, but they do not seem to fit together.

Here I give an example from a lecture and subsequent questions on ‘The courage of hopelessness’ at the Schauspielhaus In Hamburg, in 2017, available on YouTube. In the process I contest Žižek’s  arguments against a Basic Income (BI), for which I have been an advocate since the 1980’s (see also items 154 and 226 in this blog). I think a BI would fit in what he pleads for.

As I discussed in a preceding item in this blog (item 346), I go along fully with Žižek’s diagnosis of a crisis in capitalism.

Strikingly, and interestingly, Žižek came up with a defence of Ayn Rand’s[i] claim that the use of money in capitalism, in payment for labour, is the only alternative to direct domination and exploitation. But later he also railed against monetization, commodification, of clean air, water and soil. I don’t know how to reconcile these two things.

On the question what to do in the face of capitalist crisis, Žižek does not see any utopian model to replace capitalism, but something needs to be done because present representative democracy proves unable to curtail capitalism. He is against evasion, a passive flight into hedonism, and pleads for ‘doing something revolutionary, dialectical … to develop a new solidarity’ in ‘full ethical engagement’.

In question time, one question was ‘how to do revolution right this time … avoiding a fall into fascism’. Žižek replies that there is no answer, but we are moving towards fascism anyway, so let us …. Let us do what? He doesn’t say.

In another question, someone from Iran asked what Žižek would think of a revolution in Iran.

Žižek put her down, saying that the notion of revolution is too abstract. She should be more concrete. ‘What would you do about the economy’, he asked.

In another question, Žižek was asked how he would reconcile his plea for revolution with his plea for modesty concerning big ideas. He answered that one should look for something simple that could still fit in the capitalist system but would operate as a kernel of radical change from within. One might call this the Trojan horse approach to revolution (my words, not his). For an example he mentioned Obama’s health bill.

He was also asked about his view on the idea of a BI. He answered that he was somewhat sympathetic to it, but rejected it because ‘people should work and contribute to society’. Here, he goes along with the view of economists, the neo-liberal view, that without wage as reward for labour people will do nothing. In fact, all the available evidence from experiments points the other way.

I propose that a BI is a good case of the ‘something simple’ that can be introduced into the capitalist system to develop a revolution from within. The radical thing about a BI is that it enables people to choose their own activity, and reinforces the bargaining position of employees (‘Treat me better or I will exit and fall back on a BI’). At some point elsewhere in his voluminous work, Žižek defines liberty as room to follow ‘inner necessity’. A BI gives that room.

Žižek next says that if there were a BI, people would have to be forced to work, in jobs assigned to them for the public good. So, while first he defended wage labour as freedom form direct domination he now pleads for such domination in assignment of jobs without wage.

So, again, as I asked in the preceding item in this blog: what does Žižek want? I appreciate the Hegelian virtue of seeing something good in the bad and something bad in the good, but with that, how can one avoid paralysis? Next to all the critical rejection, does he have any positive proposal? He makes far-ranging statements and when challenged retracts, twists or dodges them. The problem is not that he wants to have his cake and eat it too, but that he wants his cake but does not dare to eat it. Without thinking them through, he rejects suggestions for the simple trojan horses that he recommends. He did that in rejecting the local ‘commons’ as a form of direct democracy, as I argued in item 347 in this blog. He does it also to the idea of a BI.

He recommends strategic thinking in the design of Trojan horses: they should plausibly fit in the ruling capitalist order. With the BI, the strategic twist is that it appeals to the libertarian drive for deregulation: many elements of social security can be abolished when people have a BI to fall back on. The arch-libertarian economist Milton Friedman was an advocate of a BI.

An other objection of Žižek to the introduction of a BI in a well-developed country is that it would enlarge the gap with the poor elsewhere in the world. In other words: you may only introduce something if it solves problems everywhere. How can this be reconciled with his gradualist view of bringing in a Trojan horse somewhere? And in any case, a BI could well, perhaps especially, be introduced in poor countries. Successful experiments were conducted in India[ii] and Namibia.       

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[i] Libertarian icon, (author of The fountainhead and Atlas shrugged)

[ii] Sarah Davala, Renana Jhabvala, Soumya Kapoor Metha, & Guy Standing, 2015, Basic Income; A transformative policy for India, Bloomsbury.

352. Žižek: What does he want?

Žižek lambasts and lampoons much of what he comes across but rarely offers alternatives. That is not the task of philosophy, he claims. This is vintage Hegel: philosophy can and should only try to understand and clarify what happens, and can do this only when it has already passed, after the sun has set. That is the meaning of the famous dictum that ‘Minerva’s owl spreads its wings only at dusk’.

To me, this is a cop-out. At the basis of present problems lie philosophical issues, and philosophy should learn from this not only to clarify but also to contribute to ideas for improvement. Such as the crisis of capitalism, discussed in preceding items in this blog. It is a matter of elementary intellectual decency, in my view, that when you criticize something you must give some indication of at least the direction for an alternative.

In fact, Žižek does make suggestions. In a debate with Will Self, the latter gave up on solving problems and advocated a withdrawal into the comfort of one’s private bubble, closing the curtains. During and after the debate, Žižek quite rightly burst out in indignation at this. An example of his suggestions is how one should deal with the refugee problem.

For Žižek, true faith is not based on logical or empirical reason, but is a commitment regardless of that, going back to the old motto ‘I believe because it is absurd’, in a leap of faith. Here, he admits to being a fan of Kierkegaard. He also remains a revolutionary, and does not exclude violence. Peaceful attempts to change the existing order by argument are lost in advance, in concession to the established symbolic order of ‘reasonable discourse’. It is a weakness of leftists to say that yes, radical change is needed, but the time is not ripe. The time is never ripe.

On the other hand, Žižek calls for patience, for not rushing in, for having trust, and taking time, and being self-critical. Perhaps one can have both: belief as an unreasonable leap, action in prudence and patience. But how can that still be revolutionary? 

Žižek picked up Kant’s distinction between the private and the public use of intellect. The first is aimed at answering practical questions raised by private concerns. The second stays away from that, to maintain intellectual independence. Žižek claims, and I agree, that in recent years there has been an increasing pressure on academia to develop useful knowledge. In the Netherlands the motto for that is ‘valorization’.

I agree that this has adverse effects, of two kinds. First, it indeed jeopardizes the independence and intellectual integrity of science. Second, it is myopic: independent, fundamental research uninformed by practical interests has proven to be the most productive.

How far the perversity of private reason can go is illustrated in the following case in my own experience. When working at a semi-public institute for research I produced a report that did not sit well with established policy, and I was asked, or rather muscled, to align the report more with it. I was told that next to scientific rationality there was something called ‘policy-oriented’ rationality (’beleidsmatige rationaliteit’ in Dutch). That should take into account the costs sunk in the political decision process, and corresponding political commitments crafted with much effort. Many similar cases of pressure have been reported. It is disastrous for trust in science.   

However, on the other hand the essence of science is testing, and application is a form of testing. At some places, Žižek himself admits that for ideas the proof of the pudding lies in its eating. I can even put this in the Hegelian parlance that Žižek covets: the real is the rational and vice versa. The rational gets embodied in the real, and the real reflects the rational.

My argument is that of pragmatist philosophy: one develops new ideas by using and rejecting them. That also is vintage Hegel. It is connected to the issue of the universal in relation to its particulars, which I will discuss in a later item in this blog: practical use of reason is attention to particulars that will shift or topple the universal. And how, in the manifestation of absolute spirit through the working of individual spirits, can this be if those spirits only reflect and do not contribute to action?  

So, how to proceed? One can engage in practical reason while not being diverted by private reason. The difference is that one does not adopt the problem as formulated by private interest, but as formulated by oneself after thorough familiarization with the practice and one’s analysis of it, preserving one’s intellectual autonomy. This ethic should be defended in academic teaching and research.

The risk is, of course, that when defending such integrity one no longer gets the commissions for research that bring in the money one is expected to chase. The answer to that is to become one’s own principal, taking the initiative of initiating and applying one’s research according to one’s independent formulation of the problem. Again from my own experience: when I did that in a project for the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs, I became a persona non grata there. The money then should come from state institutions such as science foundations. The problem there is that they also begin to give in to the demands of ‘valorization’.   

351. When is tolerance tolerable?

Tolerance can be a sham, as indicated by Žižek. It then falls into politically correct gestures and intimations of respect towards the excluded (immigrants, Muslims, Jews, blacks, ….), not with corresponding actions of acceptance and solidarity, but rather as a front to hide indifference, and the will to keep them at distance, or even to surreptitiously dominate or suppress them. That is the false gloss of multiculturalism.

That fits in the present politics of identity, of who you are, and what you think, rather than what you do, while justice is about what you do.

Žižek gives the example of colonialists who expressed respect, even awe, for indigenous cultures, as a cloak to cover exploitation and lack of rights. He also relates it to the rhetoric of ‘opening our hearts’ to refugees, instead of recognizing their rights, regardless of your feelings for them.   

Yet tolerance is needed as indispensable for a just society, because modern societies are multi-cultural, as a matter of fact. But it should then be a solidarity that yields actions of justice and solidarity.

There is a connection here with the discussion of empathy, in the preceding item in this blog. You don’t have to love the refugees or have the same views, but you should try to understand them, for a workable society.  

What does all this do to the universality of, in particular, human rights? Should tolerance include tolerance of violations of such rights? Honour killings? Clitorectomy? Enforcement of chadors? Of bourka’s? Arranged marriages? If not, where, precisely, does tolerance end?

Žižek adopts the Hegelian view of the ‘concrete universal’, that a universal allows for variety of its particulars, according to which one should allow for variety in the adoption and practice of universal rights. He mentioned the example of the autonomous Kurdish Rojava region in Nort-Eastern Syria, which should be allowed to ‘do it their way’.

That seems an easy case. Their constitution is in accordance with international laws of human rights, including equal rights for women, freedom of religion, equality of all ethnic groups, and a ban on the death penalty and torture. However, they do engage in child labour and military conscription of children. Is that tolerable?

So, what is ‘sufficient’, tolerable accordance with human rights? I do not think that there is some single, context-independent essence here, anymore than anywhere else. What then? Can we fall back, perhaps, on Wittgenstein’s family resemblance? There, things belong to the same class if they resemble each other in a sufficient number of features from one member of the family to the other, even without having a single feature in common for all? Or can tolerance depend on circumstance, of history, education, religion, economy? Then the questions till remains: how far can that go?

However that may be, it seems simple to say that within a democratic nation tolerance concerns obedience to the laws of the land, not on ideas, feelings, thoughts or inclinations. But how about things not covered by laws? There, people have to deal with it together, in discourse and activities. And that, again, requires empathy in the sense of understanding how people think and feel, as a basis for trying to work things out, without necessarily sharing those thoughts and feelings.

As argued before in his blog (item 35), the notion of scripts may help to bridge the gap between ideas and actions: what does an idea or concept entail in terms of underlying elements and their connections, logically, causally or sequentially? Mapping that helps to pinpoint, identify and understand differences, depending on how fundamental they are. Variety of how nodes in a script are filled in are easier to accept than a difference in the structure or logic of the script.            

350. Žižek and Devisch: Understanding empathy

In my work on trust, also in this blog, I argued that empathy is needed for trust (items 21, 171, 319). Now I see empathy criticized, by Žižek and Ignaas Devisch[i], among others. Am I mistaken?

Žižek criticizes empathy in two ways. First, he claims that the idea that we can fully understand people is an illusion: we cannot even clearly know ourselves. It is a myth that psycho-analysis unearths, clears up, and cures trauma’s, repressions and tensions that lurk in the dark of the self. The best psycho-analysis can do is to help a patient to learn to live with them. The self remains an abyss, as Žižek calls it.

Žižek and Devisch claim that empathy undermines justice, because it is partial, personal and prejudiced by feeling and impulse, while justice should be universal, applied to all anonymously, indifferently, based on reason. Worse: empathy can be and is being used to divert attention from a crumbling of justice.

Also, Empathy requires effort and personal contact, which have their limits, and can apply only to small numbers. There lies the lie of having hundreds of Facebook ‘friends’.  

According to Devisch, empathy settles on kin or the loved, or beyond that on the personalized, innocent and cuddly (babies, children and Panda bears are best), not on the bad and ugly, and not on the anonymous. Charities use that, appealing for donations with pictures of a drowned boy on the beach, or a crying girl that will not get the medicine she needs unless you contribute. 

Currently in the Netherlands, under the motto of ‘participative society’, austerity is imposed on different forms of care, of the ill, old, lonely, mentally ill (now called ‘confused’), lost, and destitute. They are thrown back on the mercy of empathy from family, friends, or neighbours.

When empathy turns into benevolence, it can oblige the recipient to be thankful and submissive, not to blemish the moral superiority of the giver with ungrateful criticism. Victims should behave. Nietzsche showed how benevolence and pity become an exercise of the will to power.

I agree with all this. However, there is an underlying misunderstanding. Devisch defines empathy not only as understanding how another thinks or feels, but also to ‘feel along’. That comes close to what I call ‘identification’. As I put it in my work on trust, empathy is understanding what ‘makes someone tick’, while identification is ‘ticking in the same way’, with a feeling of sharing a destiny.

The misunderstanding is that empathy is always, by definition, benevolent, loving, and helping. It is not. Empathy should not be confused with sympathy, identification or altruism. It does not demand benevolent help.

We all agree that it is good to ‘know thy enemy’. That is empathy. It is needed to rationally assess reliability, or trustworthiness, and may lead to the conclusion they are lacking, and then it produces distancing, not approach, prudence that may lead to distrust.

It does not mean having sympathy for your enemy. But it does go further than understanding how he thinks and feels. It also includes understanding the contingencies that affect his conduct: temptations and  pressures that make him do things even which he might not himself want. It requires openness and receptiveness, extending the benefit of the doubt, engaging in ‘voice’. But doubt can go two ways: acceptance, even identification, but also refusal and ‘exit’.  

A psychopath usually has great cognitive empathy, with an acute understanding of hidden fears, hang-ups, weaknesses, or longings of his victims, to harm them more effectively.

It remains true that empathy, of whatever form, is necessarily selective, reserved only for a limited number of personal relationships. It cannot replace justice but can supplement it.

I haven’t yet adequately answered Žižek’s claim that we cannot fully understand the other. Indeed: not fully, but surely to some extent we can, with a certain ability and experience. I grant that the self remains an abyss. David Hume already recognized that there is no single, univocal, stable identity lying there to be found.

Here, think also of the increasingly accepted (though not new) insight that there is limited free will: our choices are largely made subconsciously, and the reasons we give for actions are largely rationalizations post hoc.    

In my studies of trust I deal with this as follows. The actions of others are not just risky, but uncertain. With risk you don’t know what will happen but you do know what can happen, so you can attach probabilities, but with uncertainty you don’t even know that. Actions of people regularly go beyond what one would have considered possible. Well-behaved husbands suddenly kill atrociously. A friendly neighbour kicks your dog. Since uncertainty is not calculable, trust becomes a leap of faith.

In the end, there still is what I now will call ‘the problem of Levinas’. Empathy may lead to identification, in awe of the ‘visage’ of the other, in a personal relationship.[ii] But how do we go from there to justice, as a universal that applies to all anonymous others, and how in that can the personal, the empathic, survive? Levinas recognized this problem, as I discussed in item 224 of this blog.

I will not attempt to answer that question here, but my hunch is as follows. As Hegel recognized, and in his footsteps Žižek, the universal allows, indeed needs, its differentiation in particulars. That then must also apply to justice.

A final question is this. Is empathy a virtue? In preceding items in this blog I went back to the classical ‘cardinal’ virtues of reason, courage, moderation and justice. Empathy should be virtuous in that sense. It should be thinking, prudent, using reason for assessing trustworthiness. It should be courageous, in accepting the uncertainty of conduct. It should engage in moderation, in not demanding the impossible, of oneself and the other, accepting an ineliminable distance between self and other. And, as indicated above, it should not break down justice.   

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[i] Ignaas Devisch, 2017, Het empathisch teveel; Op naar een werkbare onverschilligheid,(Empathic excess; Onwards to a workable indifference), Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij.  

[ii] Note, however, that Levinas resisted identification: self and other do not merge but remain radically distinct.

349. Democracy and market: are they compatible?

In Hegelian dialectics, in opposition between A and B a third element is needed to mediate between them. Here I try to apply that idea to tensions between democracy and market.

In democracy, collective choices are made in deliberation and voting by individuals. In markets, individuals make individual choices for themselves. The two are clearly incompatible, in the sense that you cannot have both at the same time in the same place. You can combine them in assigning some choices to the one and others to the other, but this is full of tensions. How is the choice between the two made?

In the recent past, there has been a shift, in neoliberal policy, from democracy towards markets, in privatization and liberalization. What, if anything, is the mediating third here? For a thought experiment I propose that it is authority, in two forms.

First, there is authority in the form of managerial discretion, in organizations public and private, such as firms. This has expanded its reach and power due increase of scale and concentration of firms (and governmental authorities), in waves of mergers and acquisitions. It is leading to organizations that are internally dysfunctional, in not fitting with present conditions of work, and dysfunctional in relations between firms. In globalization, it is leading to power play by multinationals imposing their will on national governments, under the threat to move their business elsewhere.

Second, there is a re-emergence of authoritarian politics, in countries such as China, Russia, Turkey, Malaysia, Hungary, Poland, pushing aside constitutional democracy, but often in combination with capitalist markets. Here the ideology is that of the will of the people, going back to Rousseau, under the wings of the populist leader who stands up to protect national culture, identity and prosperity. Here, as Žižek noted, a third element between the people and the leader is the scapegoat, that carries the blame as promises of the leader cannot be kept, such as the Jews under the Nazis, and now the refugees (or the lazy Greeks).

And now the question, discussed in preceding items in this blog, is: ‘what to do?’ As indicated there, I want to do away with neither democracy nor markets. But, to quote Žižek, the shift to markets is endangering the commons of various forms, the worst of which is increasing exclusion of unemployables, refugees, and the poor and suppressed. Would it help to have an alternative third element, replacing authority? Isn’t it especially authority that excludes?

The alternative, I venture, might be collaboration. The basic underlying idea is that technology and knowledge have become so far advanced, with rising complexity of processes of production, and social systems in general, that it has become an illusion to think that management or political leadership can supervise and direct labour or citizens. Authoritarianism is not only unjust, in creating exclusion, but now simply does not work anymore.   

There is a parallel here with the dialectic involved in the ‘Liberty, equality and brotherhood’ of the French revolution.[i] Liberty is associated with the market, equality with democracy, and brotherhood with collaboration, solidarity, balance of power and dependence.

Here also, collaboration applies on different levels. On the local level it entails more involvement of citizens in local commons, as argued in item 347 of this blog. Within organizations it entails a shift from authoritarian to inspirational and enabling leadership, and between organizations a shift from mergers and acquisitions to cooperation in alliances, as I have argued for a great part of my career. In outside relations with society it entails a shift from catering to the exclusive interests of shareholders to attention to the combined interests of shareholders and other stakeholders, such as employees, customers, suppliers and the environment. In public supervision of organizations (firms and public bodies) horizontal control is needed, to replace the traditional top-down control, as I argued in item 75. At the supranational level, collaboration between nations is needed to curtail excesses of globalized capitalism.

In all this, are the liberty of markets and the equality of democracy still there? Yes: next to collaboration there will remain competition and rivalry, and collective choices for collective resources, such as the commons of the environment, health care, security, justice, and information. Also, the striving for a balance of power, of mutual dependence, in relations of labour and ownership that are sufficiently durable to yield quality and justice, and sufficiently flexible to avoid stagnation. All this I have studied extensively, as discussed also in his blog.

All this requires the art of trust, not as ‘being nice’ to each other, but to extend the benefit of the doubt, to craft and manage the balances of power and dependence, with the art of empathy in the sense of understanding of how other people think and feel, and the contingencies they face, in Aristotelian phronesis, practical wisdom, with the exercise of the classical virtues of reason, courage, restraint and justice, as I have also extensively studied and discussed, also in this blog.  

Here, counter to the pristine model of libertarianism, markets are not simple, do not work everywhere and where they do work need more or less regulation, and require different forms and combinations of competition and collaboration, depending on the industry involved. I will elaborate on that in a future series of items on the economy and markets.

   

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[i] As noted by Žižek, in one of his lectures, Rebecca Comay, in her book Mourning sickness; Hegel and the French revolution, 2011, and Lieven de Cauter, in his book Van de grote woorden en de kleine dingen, discussed in ‘De Wereld van Morgen’, 2 January 2018.