Cogito Ergo Blog

From another conversation...

"As I would put it, there is no essence to the self. At any point one has a certain amount of raw material as given - gender, height, strength, intelligence, language, ethnicity etc. - but this does not exist in abstraction from a contingent historic set of circumstances in which one finds oneself. Whether one 'really' is who and what one says one is (or thinks one is - these doubtless may not be the same thing) is perhaps therefore a question which has no final or unconditional answer.

That said, there are some tolerably reliable indicators. Perhaps the most important of these is whether one can persuade others to accept one's self-description of oneself as a dancer or indeed anything else. And an important issue here will be the question of performance; can one produce a performance of sufficient quality to win approval? Never, of course, unanimous approval, but at least that of a significant minority. Even that is not an absolute test - FN could not get himself accepted in his own lifetime as a philosopher, and Van Gogh only ever sold one painting. But they are extreme examples of visionary genius; for most of us the standards are more clear-cut, and the answer we receive will go a long way towards determining whether one becomes who and what one thinks one is

That is not to deny the importance of a settled disposition on one's own part. If one is perpetually wavering over whether one is or is not a dancer, assuming this self-doubt is not itself an expression of tortured genius, then all other things being equal, it is probably less likely that one 'really is' a dancer. One must play the role consistently. More importantly, one must, in the end, play some role, or more accurately, roles, in one's capacity as a member of a family, a friend, a lover, a worker of some kind, and so on. Failure to be able to play any of these roles effectively, at least most of the time, is ultimately one definition of madness. What constitutes effectiveness is of course itself a moving target as society changes; but the structure of the problem remains the same.

So, I agree - we are all indeed theatre people. It is in the nature of human action and the conditions of selfhood that it must be so. Personality, or better, personation, is inescapably a form of role-playing, and the only relevant questions are what one can bring to the part and how much of it one is capable of inventing for onself. I feel FN was right, in the end, that there are only masks. On your more specific analysis of the illusion on which theatre relies, the presentation of the whole within the part, I have no real comment to make; it seems plausible enough to me, and it even seems that it could be generalised to include all aesthetic forms if one so desired. But I would urge you, once again, to read Ch. XVI of Leviathan, 'Of Persons, Authors, and Things Personated'; Hobbes is marvellously profound on this theme."

This was a reply to a conversation with a colleague:

"The essence of comparison is that two things must be in some respect similar, if only in respect of their being things. Otherwise comparison is impossible. If Chinese political thought were either utterly different, or completely identical, to its Western equivalent, presumably comparison would be impossible, on the one hand, and otiose, on the other. It is because there are both significant differences and relevant similarities that comparison between them is interesting and important.

Now it seems to me that you wish to emphasize the differences, presumably because you feel (rightly) that China has been viewed far too exclusively through the lens of Western concepts. I can only agree (and I found Black’s essay on ‘decolonization of concepts’ helpful here) that it is at best misleading and at worst downright false to e.g. see Chinese history in terms of Western periodisations such as medieval, feudal etc. If I wavered on this before, I don’t any longer. Far better, as a starting point, to make use of the native dynastic and imperial periodisations that history generated autonomously. At a more abstract level, I have no difficulty either with the idea that at least some Chinese events, experiences, terminological fields, and so on, don’t have any equivalent at all in Western experience and require considerable elucidation to be made intelligible, if indeed they can be – there is always a zone of untranslatability, as we remarked. There are indeed some things you just can’t fully get (humour is notorious) unless you know the language at least almost as well as a native speaker.

But – if taken to the extreme – an emphasis on pure difference becomes its own form of error, not least because it violates the logical conditions of comparison just noted. It is necessary to disarm the critic who wants to know then why one does not just spend all one’s time talking in Chinese about Chinese things, if all this is so hard for non-Chinese experts to understand. I certainly do not, myself, see any reason why Chinese scholars cannot attain a full mastery of Western history and ideas; I am quite sure, indeed, that many have. The interesting question is, how is this possible?

Any answer is complex and seems to me to have at least two elements. One is biological-anthropological, and says that from this point of view, the things that divide us as human beings are trivial compared to the things that unite us. There has been a major push back in anthropology in the last decade or two against the received C20 wisdom that everything is culture (I found Brown’s Human Universals very helpful in summing up these debates). The trend instead has been to emphasize that we are all members of the same species, and as such we share a common set of experiences – sleeping, eating, excreting, reproducing, ageing, illness, and finally death – to which we cannot avoid responding in various ways. Then there are the natural facts of differing gender, strength, intelligence, height, and so on, which ensures that ‘power’, in a naturalistic sense that includes but is not limited to an ability to exert pure force, is unequally distributed.

This means that in each community of any size there inevitably arises what one might call the problem of order. If e.g. members of a community are allowed to excrete where they will and reproduce with whom they please, deleterious consequences follow. Given the different material resources available to divergent communities, and given also the radical contingency of our imaginations in which one thought does not follow necessarily from another, different solutions are arrived at. But they are recognizable, at least, as different solutions to the same problem. So far we have not got anything that I would be inclined to call ‘politics’, but we have, in the form of a response to the problem of order, the rudiments of ‘government’ in even very simple communities. One does not, at the limits, even need language for ‘government’ of this kind – the human problem is in this respect very analogous to one that animals at large face. I would, then, be inclined to follow Aristotle on this point, and to make language a condition of politics.

And here is where the other, philosophical, element of an answer to the question of how someone embedded in one form of culture can master another begins to appear; language is both the source of much (though not all) of one’s situatedness and the key to an escape from it. But let me not get ahead of myself. What language permits, amongst much else, is a greater ability to deliberate over alternative outcomes and possible courses of action. Of course, this only makes sense as an enterprise in light of the biological-anthropological condition that we find ourselves in, which includes, I should now say, a temporal aspect. This is implicit in ageing and death. We are in the present, but we cannot avoid being confronted with the future. And what is relevant for a discussion of politics is that this confrontation with the future must be faced not merely by individuals, but as communities. This I take to be a kind of structural, phenomenological truth, and so one way of thinking of about ‘politics’ is that it is what occurs when the future of the community is being self-consciously debated by some or all of its members, whether formally or informally.

Now at some point in the experience of all communities the question arises of precisely who is to be allowed to participate in these debates and to take decisions. Indeed, this is something of a permanent problem; it may be settled for a certain period (sometimes for centuries, indeed), but the point about it is that it is always liable to re-emerge; there is no way to put it entirely beyond question in principle. One may get on for a very long time with only ‘government’, and ‘politics’ may be restricted to a very small circle; but as the only condition of ‘political’ speech is in the end the intention to deliberate and decide upon the shared direction of the community, it can only be suppressed, not eliminated. Similarly, there will always be a fact of matter about who in a community is in a position under normal conditions to reliably get their own way, whether the means involve money, violence, status, or some combination of such factors. That is – again based on naturalistic foundations – there is always a problem of ‘power’ that goes along with the need for ‘government’.

I must pause here for a second to address the Burma issue. Once we have language, one of its uses will inevitably be to provide some kind of account that legitimates power. At least, I know of no society in which this has not been the case. The details of such accounts may vary widely, but they will always be present. In fact, from what you say of the Burmese case, it strikes me as broadly analogous to the Chinese ‘mandate of heaven’, the Western notion of the ‘divine right of kings’, and the Islamic belief that the existence of a caliph or sultan who implements shari’a law surpasses all other considerations. All of these different cultures developed what we can call a ‘cosmological’ perspective which was widely shared throughout the culture in question and exploited by those who, as a matter of fact, had power, in order to maintain it. Whether this is a good or a bad thing is not in question here; but I take the phenomenon itself to be undeniable, and, yes, universal.

The details of such narratives may differ, and may lose their persuasiveness over time, requiring them to be supplemented or replaced by other accounts, particularly where they are dependent on a more general background of cosmological beliefs that ceases to be credible for other reasons; but some such account there must be, and where the reasons why the group that in fact holds power cease to be credible, retaining power becomes far harder and must in the end rely on brute force. So that, in this sense, the Burma regime is ‘popular’ is something I can easily accept – that does not change my claim that in Burma power – which can by its very nature never in any community be ‘absolute’ in any case – is in the hands of a few. Divine right monarchy was similarly ‘popular’ in C17 France; it did not prevent LXIV from remarking, quite truly, that ‘I am the state’, because it was a feature of the ‘popular’ belief in divine right that authoritative decisions could only come from him.

I hope that it is now becoming clearer in what sense I wish to defend the idea that there are some universal, ‘logical’, truths about the nature of politics. It is neither an essentialist nor ahistorical position that I take myself be occupying. Instead, it is anthropological, and, very much for want of a better word because I don’t like all of its associations, “phenomenological”; it aims to take fully into account the dynamic quality of reality and the contingent quality of all historical change. So when I say that power must always be distributed between one, few, or many members of a community, of course this is in a sense an analytic or necessary truth – but it is only so in the context of the phenomena that I have briefly tried to set out above. I should perhaps also say that this account of politics is only part of a much larger project which aims to give some kind of systematic account of the regions of thought and experience. Let me try and briefly elucidate this.

‘Politics’ I take to belong to the realm of ‘value’. The category of ‘value’ itself I think I can derive anthropologically, partly from the experience of pleasure and pain, and partly from a broader evolutionary imperative. We are naturally averse in the majority of cases to what might lead to our own destruction. ‘Value’ in this sense is not a moral category; that something is pleasurable or painful is not, as such, an argument for or against it (I am not a utilitarian, which is not to say I don’t think consequences matter). But value has the possibility to become a moral category; and the dialectic of the concept of value is such that it can be made to yield the triad of the good, the beautiful, and the true. This dialectic seems to me to work as follows. Value splits first into the practical-aesthetic moment. This logical shift takes place at a time we could call prehistoric. All early peoples we know of responded to the practical problem of order by producing a narrative of legitimation of some sort; but they also exploited the superfluity of form over function which is a similarly naturalistic fact to produce cave paintings, jade carvings, etc.

Now inherent in the practical-aesthetic is also a certain claim to truth. One’s myth is not only right, it is also how things are – it is not merely a story; and similarly, one’s notion of beauty is not simply ‘aesthetic’ but reflects what we are calling ‘cosmology’, which is again a conception of how things are. Truth, however, has a dialectic of its own, and it too becomes internally divided, being made to yield two further dyads, the historical-scientific and the formal-philosophical. The occasion of the emergence of the historical is the scrutiny of the practical narrative of legitimation, and of the scientific to the scrutiny of the cosmology as conceived independently of ourselves. But there is a reflexivity in this process which in turn leads to the examination of its own conditions – their formal statement, as in logic, and their exploration in a process of critical questioning, philosophy. In putting forward this dialectical solution I am aiming to avoid so-called ‘metaphysics’. Where e.g. Hegel (who admittedly provides a lot of inspiration for this way of thinking) went so badly wrong was in thinking that this was a necessary process. It may occur, or not, for reasons that are contingent. I say only that *when* it does occur, and *if* it is worked out to its conclusion, thought will take this form of a triad of dyads. It may always be frustrated in its development. This is much more modest than anything Hegel had in mind.

My own anthropological-phenomenological emphasis is thus intended to ensure a certain conceptual minimalism; I altogether avoid, for example, a speculative philosophy of history of the Hegelian or Marxist sort in which everything has been leading up to the triumph of the West, the final overthrow of the bourgeoisie, or any other such scheme. And while I do insist that forms of thought have a certain logic to them which is operative wherever they arise, that logic is only in terms of their presuppositions; it does not dictate their content. It is thus quite consistent for me to be able to hold that Chinese political thought contains some (plenty?) of unique concepts and that it is located within the practical realm of value, because that is where *all* political thought, Western, Chinese, Islamic, Martian, etc., *must* be located. But of course to say this tells you nothing about the content of Chinese (or any other kind of) political thought, whether it is good or bad, similar or different to other discourses of the same type, dull or interesting, successful or unsuccessful etc. etc.

And that is also why I described the perspective I am outlining as amoral. (My) philosophy recognizes the reality of value as something in the world, if only because people and their values are as much ‘world’ as anything else is (I will have nothing to do with the dichotomy of subject and object insofar as it becomes absolutized; I am not a dualist any more than I am a utilitarian) without engaging in evaluation, but only elucidation. Nor in saying this am I denying the possibility of bringing philosophically-informed reason to bear on practical questions of value, only that when one does this, one has begun to do something else other than philosophy. As for the status I want to claim for this triad of dyads, I want to say only two things.

One is that it is my own – while I have my inspirations, I know of no-one else, for better or worse, who has developed a dialectic that is exactly like this one – and the other is that it is sometimes helpful when one wants to understand what kind of intellectual position one is occupying; and I readily confess that to very many questions, including the ones that interest you, it may be utterly irrelevant and unimportant. Certainly, nothing follows from it that I can see with respect to e.g. how one ought to live, what one ought to think or study, and so on and so forth. It is happily indifferent in this regard, and quite designedly so. It also ultimately has very little to do with ‘politics’, an activity which, regardless of whatever culture it arises within, is ultimately only one local feature of a far more major region on what is in turn a much bigger overall map, so far as I am concerned.

I hope these remarks are clarificatory. At least, the argument that the forms, though not the contents, of various types of thinking are significantly independent of particular cultures - while remaining historic in their changing categorial foundations - is intended to show how we (you and I, specifically) can both have our cake and eat it, because the level of abstraction at which I am claiming this argument is true is quite different to the level at which at least the great majority of so-called ‘political thought’ of any kind takes place; at this practical and evaluative level there is indeed significant and irreconcilable diversity. As a codicil to that, I do *not* see it as the task of ‘political philosophy’ to resolve these practical contradictions, so that we all become Rawlsians, or whatever. Philosophy might have something to say about the logic of political concepts, but it is incapable of decisions of this kind. Reason cannot act, as Hume put it. In very different, Hegelian, terms, I would call the practical realm of value the ‘negative moment’ in which difference reigns supreme. It is a corollary of my view that arguments for the good must be made from within that realm itself, even if informed by the conclusions of thinking elsewhere. But mere difference and simple identity both generate their own contradictions; and with this we reach the point from which I began, that there must be sameness as well as difference for comparison to be possible at all.

As a footnote, I find considerable irony in the ‘subaltern’ desire to defend the mythical Indian account of the past as ‘history’ in the same way that either Greek, Chinese, or Islamic cultures came to know it. Their claim is that it is somehow an instance of intellectual colonialism or a failure of recognition to refuse to admit it to an equal status. And yet it was these Indian myths which were the foundation of a rigid and hierarchical caste system which condemned the lower orders of society to a condition of permanent inequality, and continues to do so. Quite apart from the failure to recognize a real qualitative difference between the critical and the mythical in thought, this strikes me as a piece of intellectual perversity with which I can have no sympathy"

What is the extension of the concept of violence? That is, does violence come in different forms? For example, people often talk in a political context of colonialism and imperialism as forms of violence. In private life, verbal abuse is also considered as a form of violence, though in contradiction of the popular saying that ‘sticks and stones will break my bones but words will never hurt me’.

In fact, what is meant by extending the notion of violence to particular forms of government is unclear. That, as a matter of historical fact, colonialism and imperialism have been accompanied by a great deal of bloodshed is unquestionable. They have also been the occasion of large-scale expropriation of land, torture, forced migration, arbitrary justice, violations of customary ways of life and suppression of religious beliefs, destruction of property, and no doubt many other evils besides.

We may leave on one side the question of whether colonialism and imperialism are inherently or essentially violent; although the historical record suggests that in fact, they are not, and that there are many examples (the Roman Empire, ancient Alexandria, the Ottoman Empire, at least parts of the British Empire) where long periods of peaceful co-existence obtained. The question is, are all these different forms of mistreatment, most of which at any rate are unquestionably ills, best described as 'violence'?

In the same way, we may ask whether describing all the different ways in which it is possible for individuals to mistreat one another in private life as literal instances of violence is a helpful way of thinking about what is going on. A husband who repeatedly insults and belittles his wife even though he does not beat her is accused of violence of a certain sort. And no doubt, there is a metaphorical sense in which both public and private instances of such abusiveness can all be described as ‘violence’; one can even talk about doing violence to a text, in the sense of misreading it. But when one sets aside the literary value of such metaphors, and proceeds to examine the facts, there seems to be a distinction between violence in the strict sense (which we will define more carefully in a moment), and metaphorical usages of the term to describe other ways of doing harm that might be more appropriately described in other ways.

We might, in other words, be better served by regarding violence as one of a number of possible forms of harm or abuse with some very specific qualities of its own. One advantage of doing so would be to allow us to discriminate more carefully in our use of moral language (and perhaps also our search for appropriate legal remedies). But in order to make the particular advantages clear, we need to ask the question: What are the conditions of violence? It seems clear that the application of physical force by one human being to another cannot count, in itself, as violent.

We recognize, for example, that in some circumstances at least this can be a form of play. There are many popular sports (rugby is one example) in which one player is allowed to use force to bring another to the ground, within certain limits (so that, for example, one cannot tackle above the waist in order to minimise the risk of lasting injury). The fact that tackling and being tackled can be a painful experience, and that the risk of serious injury or even death cannot be entirely ruled out if one participates in playing games of this sort, does not strike most of us as a reason either to legally prohibit them or to regard them as forms of violence.

But equally, it is not obvious that without the application of physical force, directly or indirectly, by one human being to another, that there can be violence. In other words, physical force is a necessary though not a sufficient condition of violence. An additional factor is the intention of the agent. One must wish to cause bodily harm, and in fact not necessarily primarily bodily harm but the experience of pain in the object of violence. There would be little to be gained from attacking the body of a creature impervious to pain without also causing its death outright, which is by no means the usual object of violence as we know it. In fact, violence is more often employed as a means of securing a change in conduct. Violence which aims simply and solely to cause death is a special sub-category of its own, namely murder.

So, the conditions of violence include (i) bodily harm that is (ii) intentional and (iii) aims either to modify the conduct of its object or at the extreme, destroy it, while (iv) ignoring the wishes of the object of violence. This conception of violence, by the way, is also capable of capturing so-called ‘pointless violence’, for example the kind of instance in which a gang of thugs set upon an innocent passer-by in the street without the aim of robbing him but purely for the sake of amusement without actually intending to kill him. What is aimed at in this case is still a modification in the conduct of the other, in the sense of a fearful response. Their actions are expected to produce this to provide them with the pleasure of the exertion of power under conditions that are supposed to deny the other the privilege and opportunity of doing the same.

It is a corollary of (i) that violence must be quantifiable; it must be possible in principle to say exactly how much force has been used, in physical terms; to measure the impact of a blow or a bullet in pounds per square inch, or the explosive force of a detonation, or the voltage of an electric shock, and so on. Maintaining this position, however, has certain consequences. For instance, not all forms of torture will count as violence. Only those tortures which operate on the body will do so. It is necessary, in other words, to discriminate between psychological torture and physical torture.

The aim of torture (where it is not simply a form of judicial punishment) is to break a person's will in order to exact certain information, whether this is a confession or knowledge of certain plans, the location of particular items, etc. In what proportion actual force (ranging from restraint to blows), the threat of force, verbal interrogation, and psychological abuse are combined depends on circumstances including the skills and inclinations of the torturer, who may be more or less inclined to bodily sadism. Of course there are marginal cases; the use of constant noise to cause mental irritation can be measured in decibels, and there is a known threshold above which permanent damage to the hearing may result; the attendant sleep deprivation can itself be measured in hours, and over a certain duration madness or death will ensue, and so on.

But the important point is that for us to recognize torture in any form as evil clearly does not depend on identifying all these forms of torture as violent. Torture is an evil because it offends against the idea of persons as autonomous beings who are ends in themselves. Their status as such is violated if they are subjugated to another's will against their own wishes. It is not nonsense to say that one can have tortured someone without having done any violence to them; for they have no doubt suffered plenty of harm in other ways.

A consequence of (iv) is that the deliberate infliction of pain where the parties consent cannot be counted as violence, because it does not contravene their will. Sado-masochistic sexual situations are not violence but a form of play for reasons analogous to those given in connection with contact sports. They are by no means free of risk, but that is another matter. It is usual for participants in sexual games of this sort to have some agreed signal (a word or gesture) that will immediately end the game if it ceases to be enjoyable or begins to threaten permanent injury or death.

Of course, in the most extreme cases, death may be what is sought; one famous instance arose a few years ago in which a man with cannibalistic desires encountered another individual with a deep wish to be eaten. When the cannibal obliged his partner by severing his penis and preparing it for consumption, resulting in his death from loss of blood, on the view we are advancing, this was a forcible but not a violent act. Eating people and thus causing their death is wrong, but only if they would rather not be eaten and die as a result. (It would, then, be wrong to cause my death by eating part of me if I wished to be eaten but survive the experience).

It seems, therefore, that a restricted view of violence provides, amongst other things, grounds for a kind of libertarianism. One should not seek to prevent individuals from doing things which may involve risks to themselves, even the risk of death, so long as they are competent to assess those risks (whether they have in fact done so is another matter; one make seek legal security in the form of a waiver, as when for example one might have to sign a disclaimer before embarking on a particularly stressful fairground ride such as a roller-coaster which subjects the body to extreme gravitational forces). Equally, one should always seek to prevent individuals from physically interfering with one another whenever they do not wish to be interfered with.

Naturally, this does not mean that only that particular form of abuse we are calling violence which both impacts on the body in a measurable way and violates the will of the individual thus impacted should be prohibited. So far as possible we ought also to prohibit and prevent all forms of abuse which violate the wills of individuals, so far as their wills are consistent with peacefully pursuing their own purposes without malice aforethought, as the legal saying is. But by narrowing our conception of violence we can maximize the freedom of the individual. We can also bring into sharp focus the fact that violence has no place, properly speaking, in politics. The phrase ‘political violence’, that is, represents a certain kind of corruption of thought. Politics is an activity that takes place between persons as autonomous beings; it disregards, unless it is contingently relevant to the matter at hand, their embodiment. Perhaps more accurately, it takes it for granted, as it certainly does not deny the fact of it.

But it should not matter, as such, whether the participants in a political situation are male or female (or transsexual), black or white (or some other colour), young or old (or middle aged), homosexual or heterosexual (or bisexual), rich or poor (or just doing nicely), and so on. Of course, in any given situation, that one or more of the parties to the debate falls into one or more of these categories may inform the whole question under discussion. Nevertheless, that should not prejudice their equal right to be heard, or even be taken as prima facie evidence of partisanship. ‘You would say that, wouldn’t you’ is a classic piece of ad hominem argument that tends to foreclose any further conversation. And in any case, by no means all politics is ‘identity politics’.

The relevant point, however, is that one cannot at once seek to persuade someone by appealing to their reason and their passions, on the hand, and by physically interfering with their person, on the other. Violence, or the threat of violence (which is not itself violence but intimidation), can secure compliance through coercion, but not free consent. It is the exercise of power, but power without legitimacy. Terrorism is thus never ‘political’. Aside from the infantilism of believing that one’s discontent with the order of things provides a justification for killing at random, it is a denial of the necessity for persuasion inherent in all genuine politics. It is perhaps worth pointing out that one should by no means conclude from this that the presumption of right must always be on the side of established authority; it is incumbent on all parties in political life to ensure that they do not drive their interlocutors to violence through dogmatism and inflexibility and thus cause a partial or total breakdown of the ongoing political dialogue that is a necessity for all civilised societies. Nevertheless, where violence begins, politics ends.

This rules out the idea that war can be the continuation of politics by other means, unless of course we wish to defend the highly counter-intuitive view that not all forms of war constitute violence. Perhaps, however, this is not as counter-intuitive an idea as it first seems; if states are analogous to individuals in the sense of being corporate persons, and both parties wish to fight, there seem to be no grounds on which this ought to be prevented. War from this point of view would be analogous to a form of sport, or a game, as indeed it has often been described. But in fact the notion of states as corporate persons relies on a legal fiction, and it is very unlikely, to say the least, that all members of both states would wish to go to war, even if the governing classes on both sides have made up their minds to do so.

Perhaps a slightly more plausible case could be made for two armies facing one another on a battlefield, where all soldiers on both sides desire to fight one another to the death for motives such as personal honour and national glory. But even here it is unlikely that this condition could normally be fulfilled (though one might produce some examples from ancient or medieval history of at least small-scale engagements between committed bands of warriors which appear to meet it). If it were, then perhaps one might have to admit that war is a form of the use of lethal force between contending parties that is nevertheless not best understood as violence. In the vast majority of cases, however, war unquestionably involves violence, and many other evils besides, and ought therefore to be prohibited and prevented wherever possible.

This is not, however, to say that violence is always ‘wrong’, though it is always moral (unlike force, which is always purely physical). Self-defence may involve the use of violence quite legitimately, at least within certain limits; I must stop fighting when my attacker does and cannot retaliate to inflict my own punishment once I see that he has been deterred, and so on. But self-defence can equally mean just walking off, or talking my way out of the situation. As between groups or nations, where one is clearly the victim of violent aggression (a situation that is by no means usually as clear-cut as one would like), a resort to violence in return is sadly often the only option, presuming one wishes for one’s continued survival. But violence, in and of itself, as the application of force to the body or bodies of its object with the intention to cause pain and secure a change in conduct, is not in itself always morally wrong, though no doubt the occasion for its employment is always to be regretted. Civilized life depends in part on the existence of such a thing as the legitimate use of violence (and not simply the legitimate use of force, but specifically of violence, as force operates purely on the body and violence is aimed at both mind and body).

In this respect, ironically, it is the commitment to non-violence that turns out to be a form of moral extremism. To insist that one should never, under any circumstances, hit back, is to take up a position that lies clearly at one end of the spectrum of possible moral attitudes towards violence. This is not to deny that non-violence as a form of collective resistance to oppression cannot be a successful tactic, for there are clearly historical instances in which it has proved to be exactly that. Such action, and the motivation for the moral position itself, is doubtless admirable; but as a tactic it has depended on the presence of a charismatic figure able to exert such moral authority over his followers that they have been able to suppress the desire to retaliate or to defend themselves that many of them inevitably experienced as victims of violence, and as a motivation it suffers by definition the fate of all extremisms, of lacking an appeal to most of us.

Nevertheless, the desire to minimize, though not eliminate, the amount of violence in the world is based on sound reasons, and one step towards that minimization, arguably, is to restrict the number of things that we are prepared to regard as violence. The suggestion is not simply the naïve one that we get rid of violence by defining it away. It is rather that we insist on a strict understanding of violence as distinct from other forms of harm and abuse of which it is most unquestionably a species as a means of isolating it and grasping what is peculiar to it. When we do so, the fact that most forms of violence are illegitimate in character – in particular, the types of violence that have plagued the modern world in the form of war and terrorism – emerges in a stark fashion. At the same time, by separating physical force from violence we maximize the sphere of liberty within which individuals may use their bodies as they please, and by emphasizing that violence is aimed at the mind as well as the body we underline that it has no role to play in a free society.

In Western thought, it is often observed, the idea of nature has played a role that has been both fundamental and ever-changing. Three main stages in its development can perhaps be retrospectively identified. They are distinct from one another, of course, only as ideal types; historically speaking they overlap, and even the earliest of them continues to inform our thinking. But as ideal types, each can be seen as a reaction to the previous one.

The first is of nature as essentially harmonious. Human beings are at home in the world, and there is a cosmic order that is not physical but ethical. Reality is divinized. This broad framework has been compatible with a number of different stages of historical development. It seems characteristic of pre-historic peoples, of early civilizations, and even (to some extent) of the medieval period in the West. It is possibly (as Donald Brown has remarked) part of a universal phenomenology of human consciousness; that is, it applies to all human groups in their first formation. Even societies like the Inca who perceived their gods as in some sense threatening and demanding of human sacrifice can be said to conform to the pattern - they have only inverted the valuation of being in the world that is involved.

The second phase is a reaction to this one. In it, human beings are no longer in harmony with nature or one another, but must struggle to survive. Existence is a competitive affair. Perhaps the origins of this view, so far as the West is concerned, are Hebraic - the idea of the Fall and the casting out of man from paradise; though the Greeks too thought in terms of a lost golden age. Christianity took up this idea of the fallen condition of humanity, which is why the medieval (and even the ancient) notion of man as in harmony with nature was always qualified. But it is from the seventeenth century onwards that this idea of the state of nature as competitive develops. Hobbes is a central figure here. In the nineteenth century Darwin arrives at the view that nature itself and not merely the human place in it has competition as its fundamental feature.

The third phase is the attempted abolition of nature as a concept altogether. Human 'nature' is conceived of as entirely plastic. To some extent this phase too overlaps with the second; it is also characteristic of the Renaissance, and is articulated by Mirandola, for example. But it remains overshadowed by the idea there being a fixed order of some kind as defined by both of the first two phases until the later nineteenth century. Marx represents it only ambiguously, as he retains the idea of an unalienated nature in the concept of 'species being'. It is found more clearly in anthropology and psychology, in which culture and mind are empty categories waiting to be filled. Locke, from this perspective, is caught between the second and third phases of this movement. But for most of the twentieth century it was thought that with a sufficient effort of will, people could be made in whatever image one desired; this is one important root, though by no means the only one, of the ideological experiments that caused so much destruction.

The fourth and final phase is only just beginning; it is a product of the late twentieth century. It is the reassertion of a concept of human nature, but on the basis of empirical and historical evidence. Human beings turn out, on inspection, to have a great deal in common with one another; at least as much as what divides them. The reassertion of the idea that there are human universals has been prompted partly by reflection, and partly by circumstances; Foucault and many others are correct in pointing out that our continued survival as a species is now intimately bound up with our choice of political strategies thanks both to the awesome destructiveness of our weapons and our continued economic exploitation of our environment. But a common human identity which transcends national divisions is politically essential if we are to ensure a peaceful and prosperous future for ourselves.

The title of Nancy’s Globalization or the Creation of the World, as the author’s Preface makes clear, is intentionally ambiguous; the terms can represent an alternative, or be treated as synonymous. In the first sense, ‘Globalization’ stands for the continued dominance of the existing network of market relationships which are understood as an endless and self-destructive pursuit of profit (the ‘bad infinite’ of p. 40). But ‘globalization’ can also mean, or might be made to mean, the creation of the world, understood as ‘re-opening each possible struggle for…what must form the contrary of global injustice’ (p. 54). In this latter sense, we are to understand globalization in a positive light.

Nancy recognizes explicitly that this notion of the creation of the world is in origin a theological one (p. 67). This is an important point, for much of the argument of the book turns on the notions of what is involved in ‘creation’, and what is meant by a ‘world’. Creation in the Christian tradition was an activity strictly reserved to God of which all human works could be only a pale imitation, and there was an absolute divorce between the Creator and His creation. Indeed, Nancy points out that in Western thought at large, in classical as well as Christian times, the world has always been contrasted with something else. In the case of Platonism, it was the timeless, changeless, perfect order of form; in Christianity with a heaven usually conceived of as sharing these characteristics.

What has changed in our own time is that the force of this contrast has collapsed. There is no longer anything for us to contrast the world with, and consequently (if one accepts this view) our very idea of what a world is – what this world is – has fallen into confusion. This, however, is not an inevitable state of affairs, if we appreciate the nature of ‘the world’ as a concept. Perhaps most importantly, we must understand that it is an ideal whole; that is to say, the world as such is not something we can encounter directly in experience. To be a world is just to be the ‘form of forms’, understood as the framework which makes meaningful experience possible (p. 52). A world is a ‘totality of meaning’ (p. 41), and meaning requires form.

Nancy deliberately makes use of Platonic language here, perhaps to indicate the extent to which he is both remaining within and modifying the older tradition of thinking about the idea of a world. He is continuous with the earlier tradition insofar as he retains the irrational element of Platonism, as evinced in his quotation of Wittgenstein’s remark that ‘It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists’ (p. 52). But the key difference between Nancy’s idea of a world and the earlier ideas that he identifies is that for him, this ‘form of forms’, however mysterious, is something artefactual. The ‘world’, in his sense, is a human creation through and through (‘the world’ is entirely distinct in this sense from the material reality of ‘the globe’), and taking responsibility for the framework of meaning it provides is what is involved in ‘creating’ it.

As Nancy himself recognizes, this is a descendant of Nietzsche’s view that God is dead (p. 69), and the second section ends on a decidedly existential note: ‘It is for us to decide for ourselves’ (p. 74). In the remarks on history and philosophy at the beginning of the third section it becomes obvious, if it was not clear enough already, why he is placing this emphasis on decision; he wants to get away from conceptions of the historical process, whether theological or teleological or both, that dictate a pre-ordained path (‘the absence of auto-completion’, p. 81) for historical events. The future is open, rather than closed. Traditional philosophy (‘metaphysics’, p. 81) was a sometimes covert and sometimes overt attempt to close off the future in one particular direction; philosophy today (‘deconstruction’, p. 83) has achieved a self-consciousness regarding its own historic character that renders any such enterprise illegitimate.

Nancy associates this shift with a similar transformation in the notion of ‘nature’. Already in Hegel we find the idea that human intelligence generates a ‘second nature’ for us. In our own time, thanks to technology (in its broadest sense, which includes things like writing and accounting) we have moved beyond ‘nature’ altogether, in the sense that for human beings, absolutely nothing is fixed. We live in a condition of ‘extreme instability and mutability’ (p. 87), a condition that is underlined by the list of ‘the succession of technologies’ on p. 89.

This account of the world has implications, in Nancy’s mind, for the place of politics within it. He borrows Badiou’s notion of politics as one of the four ‘conditions of philosophy’ (p. 85), but also makes it a ‘structure of the impossible’ and itself a ‘technology’ (p. 88). Each of these claims requires some explication. The most plausible way of construing the idea that politics is a condition of philosophy is perhaps to say that philosophy can only occur in a civil order; it is certainly true that in Athens, for example, this is how it began. By calling it a ‘structure of the impossible’ he may possibly mean that it sets forth human goals that are constantly in the process of transformation and hence are never finally achieved. And politics as a technology is presumably akin to all other technologies in that it contributes to the process of ‘denaturation, or…the infinitization of ends’ (p. 90).

This understanding of politics, however, seems to be somewhat at odds with the idea of justice outlined in the ‘Complements’, a section in which Rousseau is invoked and Nancy himself strikes a very Rousseauian note when he declares that ‘an unbearable injustice is unleashed everywhere: the earth trembles, the viruses infect, men are criminals, liars, and executioners’ (p. 111). The notion that ‘the world is to itself the supreme law of its justice’ seems to suggest an appeal to a suitably dynamicized notion of natural law that will conveniently result in a condemnation of all those things of which Nancy disapproves; in particular the way in which ‘sovereignty…as pure violence’ and the ‘violence of capital’ have allegedly captured the modern state (p. 105).

As a confessed Marxist sympathizer, it is disappointing rather than surprising that Nancy should end up apparently contradicting his initial Nietzschean commitment to an idea of the world as a playful Heraclitean flux and retreating into trite gnomic utterances (‘And what if sovereignty was the revolt of the people?’, p. 109). Typically for a French intellectual, a virtual contempt for the mundane complexities of politics runs throughout the work, and a large part of the reason for this is the excessive voluntarism it displays. It is simply not true to say that ‘A people are always their own invention’, for the same reason it is not true that
It is for us to decide for ourselves’.

A great deal of individual and collective identity, and a great deal of historical change for that matter, is entirely outside the sphere of invention and decision. At the personal level, one’s gender, ethnicity, health, height, strength, appearance, and so on are all (at least initially and for the most part) given, as are indeed social status and religious confession – and yet they are absolutely constitutive of identity. So far as historical movements affecting the fate of peoples go, a great deal of our current political problems result from the fact that the world’s population has doubled in the last fifty years or so (here, on the increasing importance of so-called ‘biopolitics’ in the modern world, no doubt Nancy and Foucault have a point). And human history as a whole has been profoundly determined by considerations of climate, demography, disease, distribution of natural resources, and so on, that were within no-one’s control; indeed, for much of history these were factors of which we were all profoundly ignorant.

Thus, to represent our existential and by extension our political situation as one of continuous Protean self-creation by fiat seems profoundly misleading. While Nancy’s reflections on the nature of worldhood are frequently insightful, (despite the portentous tone), in the last resort his treatment of politics appears naïve. Real politics means wrestling with complex problems under conditions of severe constraint where the most one can usually hope to achieve is a compromise that will inevitably fail to fully satisfy most of those concerned.

Dealing with globalization is not a choice between existential self-enactment and the final victory of finance capital but an attempt to address such mundane but unavoidable dilemmas as, how are we to divide the world’s water resources given that the developing world is moving towards a meat-eating diet that consumes on average fifteen times the amount of water as a vegetarian one? How are we to adjust institutions of international society (the UN, the IMF, the World Bank, and so on) that still reflect the world as it was in 1945 and other countries (like China, India, and Brazil) are now far more prominent? How are we going to address climate change? Mitigate the inequalities of world trade? And so on.

Certainly, democratic politics must now be carried on the absence of the various illusions to which totalitarian ideologies, feudal monarchies, and dynastic empires were all subject in their different ways, but when one has said this, one has not really said very much. While it is in Nancy’s favour that he does recognize that power is necessarily part of politics (p. 106), he never really grasps what this means in concrete terms. The real problems of globalization require a mastery of detail, an acceptance of limitations, and a tolerance of imperfection for which (in common with Badiou and Latour) he seems to have little taste.