Kierkegaard, Metaphysics and Political Theory

Unfinished Selves

Alison Assiter

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781441182203
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

Alison Assiter argues that the notion of the person that lies at the heart of the liberal tradition is derived from a Kantian and Cartesian metaphysic. This metaphysic, according to her, is flawed and it permeates a number of aspects of the tradition. Significantly it excludes certain individuals, those who are labelled 'mad' or 'evil'. Instead she offers an alternative metaphysical image of the person that is derived largely from the work of Kierkegaard. Assiter argues that there is a strand of Kierkegaard's writing that offers a metaphysical picture that recognises the dependence of people upon one another. He offers a moral outlook, derived from this, that encourages people to 'love' one another. Inspired by Kierkegaard, Assiter goes on to argue that it is useful to focus on needs rather than rights in moral and political thinking and to defend the view that it is important to care about others who may be far removed from each one of us. Furthermore, she argues, it is important that we treat those who are close to us, well.

Chapter 1
The Metaphysical Assumptions of the Classical Liberal

I would like, in this opening chapter, to outline some of the central metaphysical features in the sense outlined in the introduction, that underlie the liberal tradition, as they appear in some of its key thinkers. I cannot claim to discuss all liberal thinkers and I recognize that some communitarian liberals, for example, have criticized some of the features of the idealized metaphysic outlined in the introduction. It is also true that the form of liberalism, like that of Sandel, for example, I am assuming, owes more to Rawls than to Mill. It is closer to the ‘deontological’ liberalism of Rawls than it is to the consequentialism of Mill.

I will suggest that even those who reject some of the central features of the metaphysic retain a commitment to certain other features, which means that their thinking is coloured by the metaphysic in crucial respects. Some radical particularists, who reject, for example, the Rawlsian model of justice, go so far as to deny that there can be ethical principles of any sort; others doubt that there can be ethical principles of universal or cosmopolitan scope. I will suggest that this is because some of them retain, despite themselves, a certain metaphysical vision of the nature of the self. Even if it is only to reject this vision altogether, and to deny that there can be an idealized image of the self, this image will colour their thinking.

The ontological and metaphysical perspective that I have characterized as underlying the liberal political position derives at least in part from Descartes and Kant. I recognize that there are also, importantly, derivations, particularly in relation to the concept of a human right, from Locke and Hobbes. I am aware too that the notion of a right is underpinned by social, economic and cultural assumptions as well as by the bare bones of a metaphysic (see, for example, Shapiro, 1986). However, there is something very important, I believe, in the bare metaphysical assumptions of some key thinkers in the tradition. Although Descartes is not usually seen to be a liberal thinker, it seems to me that there are significant resonances of his thought in that of Rawls.

Descartes

For Descartes, the ideal self is a pure reasoning being. His self is disembodied and it is a being that deploys a particular conception of reasoning. Descartes applies

certain and simple rules such that if (he) observes them accurately, he shall never assume what is false as true and never spend his mental efforts to no purpose, but will always gradually increase his knowledge and so arrive at a true understanding of all that does not surpass his powers. (Descartes, 1972, in Lloyd, 1984, p. 41)

In Descartes’ system of method, as Lloyd has argued (Lloyd, 1984) method ceases to be, as it was in the Aristotelian system, a reasoned way of proceeding and it becomes a precisely ordered mode of abstract thinking. The right order of thought is determined by the natural order of the mind. A single and identical method could be applied to all the sciences, for these sciences, taken together, were nothing but the unity of reason itself.

The Cartesian self, then is a reasoning, a thinking being. But it is more than this. I should like to spend a few moments looking at the way in which, in Foucault’s reading of Descartes, Descartes excludes certain groups of people from the scope of this ‘reasoning being’. This aspect of Descartes’ thought, it seems to me, is implicit in certain components of contemporary liberal political philosophical thinking. Accordingly, unpacking the immanent politics of Cartesian reason will provide critical purchase on that thinking.

In his early work, Madness and Civilisation, Foucault (1965) analyses the historical coincidence of the emergence of the Cartesian Cogito, the birth of the Enlightenment, which splits reason and its others, with the beginnings of the interment of the insane. Prior to this, madness was seen to be a moment in reason; in mediaeval Europe, for instance, the ‘fool’ epitomized the fate of humanity in dreams and illusions. Madness fascinated; madness evoked a certain ‘wisdom’; it presaged ‘ultimate bliss and supreme punishment, omnipotent on earth and the supreme fall’ (Foucault, 1965, p. 19). Up until the Renaissance, mad people were listened to. Renaissance people recognized the limitations of reason.

In the original 1961 edition of Madness and Civilisation, (Foucault, 2006) in a section of the second chapter, The Great Confinement, which was omitted from later editions of the book, and which Derrida criticized very strongly (Derrida, 1978), Foucault outlines how Descartes split reason and its others, symbolized by madness, within the method of doubt.¹

In the original version of the chapter, Foucault writes: ‘On the methodical path of his doubt, Descartes came across madness beside dreams and all the other forms of error’ (Foucault, 2006, pp. 44–47). For Descartes, all that might threaten reason’s certainty is banished: dreams, errors, the senses, madness. Reason is affirmed over against unreason, and the self-reflective subject is thereby constituted. In the process of doubting, Descartes considers, in order to reject, various possible sources of knowledge: he might, he suggests, gain knowledge through the senses. But his senses sometimes deceive him. Therefore they constitute an unreliable source of knowledge. He considers the possibility that he might be dreaming: it is possible that he is dreaming that he sees the fire in front of his eyes. In all cases except the hypothesis of madness, however, Descartes sets up a hypothesis to refute. He might gain certain knowledge through the senses. But he cannot, because they sometimes deceive. Madness, however, is simply ruled out of account. As Descartes puts it, in the first Meditation:

And how could I deny that these hands and this body belong to me, unless perhaps I were to assimilate myself to those insane persons whose minds are so troubled and clouded by the black vapours of the bile that they constantly assert that they are kings, when they are very poor; that they are wearing gold and purple, when they are quite naked; or who imagine that they are pitchers or that they have a body of glass. (Descartes, 1972, p. 62)

Foucault stresses that whereas dreaming is contained in Descartes’ method, as a possible subject for rational discussion, madness is excluded a priori; madness both demarcates the individual’s domains of irresponsibility, and constitutes the banished ‘other’, excluded from the civil community, from the domain of subjecthood. ‘Descartes does not evade the danger of madness in the same way that he sidesteps the possibility of dream or error’ (Foucault, 2006, p. 44). The subject who doubts excludes madness.

If Descartes were to take seriously the hypotheses of mad people that would presuppose that he himself were mad. In the case of potential errors of thinking occurring in dreams or through the senses, the object of thought is analysed. With madness, however, it is the subject of thought himself that is at issue. The subject as intellect cannot be mad. This Cartesian subject of reason becomes the subject of the post Renaissance world.

This argument stands on its own feet, independently of the status of the rest of Foucault’s discussion of madness, which has been much debated (see, for example, Ree, 1974; Gordon, 1992). In addition to Derrida’s critique of Foucault, which focuses primarily on the impossibility of writing about something that, on Foucault’s own admission, is excluded from reason, Foucault’s claim that the eighteenth century inaugurated a radically different form of treatment of the mad has been contested (see, for example, Midelfort, 1980). However, even if there are some historical inaccuracies in Foucault’s text, this does not invalidate the claim that there are certain tendencies in the modern treatment of madness that resonate with the Cartesian and post Cartesian view of the self. Even if Derrida were right that Descartes does not treat madness differently from all forms of thought, since, Derrida claims, all forms of thought are exclusionary, that would not invalidate Foucault’s central claim that the imposition of a form of rationality with claims to universal status necessarily involves the imposition of power relations based on the exclusion of an other.

Descartes implicitly, then, according to this reading, excludes those who are ‘mad’ from the scope of the reasoning or thinking being.² In offering this reading of Descartes and madness, derived from Foucault, I have relied, as Foucault does, on one sentence from the Meditations. Perhaps some might ask for further textual support from Descartes for my claim. There is not deemed, however, to be a need for further textual support when it comes to discussion of the Cogito. That one sentence has been subjected to innumerable interpretations. As Ree puts it: ‘these words (Cogito ergo sum) have acquired an extraordinary fame…’ (Ree, op. cit.). The sentence about madness occurs as part of Descartes’ very famous argument leading up to the Cogito and has, therefore, a very important role in Descartes’ hugely influential outlook.

Rawls

There are aspects of the Cartesian metaphysic, as outlined above, that are assumed in Rawls’ thinking and in the thinking of some of his followers (Rawls, 1973). In Rawls’ Original Position – the idea he employs to generate the conditions under which a fair agreement on principles of justice can be reached, individuals are free and autonomous. Like Descartes, in his sceptical mode, Rawls abstracts away, from his hypothesis about the characteristics of individuals in the original position, all contentious religious, political and moral doctrines. The individuals in the original position who operate behind the ‘veil of ignorance’ possess two moral powers – the ability to develop a sense of justice and the ability to form and revise a conception of the good. Like Cartesian thinking beings, individuals in the original position, and in general, Rawls argues, are rational. For him this means that they follow principles that serve both their short-term interests, and their overall plan of life. Since there is a wide variety of reasonable comprehensive doctrines, reasonable people will not seek to use their political power to impose their own particular doctrine upon others. Therefore reasonable people will endorse a freestanding conception of justice. There are immediate resonances, then, with the Cartesian position, in so far as both seek to abstract away from the reasoning being, features of the self that stem from contingent bodily, emotional or motivational facts, or that flow indeed from any kind of bodily or emotional interaction with others. (There is a brief mention of Descartes and Rawls in Fullbrook, 2004.)

But the similarities run deeper than this. The conception of the person suggested by Rawls here is a notion of the individual as an autonomous, reasoning and yet self-interested being, who, as such a being, is capable of rationally pursuing a model of justice that will work for society as a whole. This individual, importantly, tolerates a plurality of moral positions and he will believe that it is wrong to force people to act in a fashion that is contrary to their reasonable conception of how to live.

Liberal tolerators of moral difference, following Rawls, stress the importance of agreeing principles of justice that would be perceived as fair and impartial by all adherents in a society that is characterized, as one person has put it, following Rawls: ‘by a deep and enduring pluralism of views about human excellence’ (de Wietz, 1999, p. 85). Most liberals of such a persuasion stress how difficult, if not impossible, it is to agree on what human flourishing should consist in. Yet most liberal pluralists rule out some views as unacceptable. Rawls, when putting the view that there is a plurality of views about human excellence, stresses that these views, to be acceptable, must be ‘reasonable’ views. Such doctrines:

are not simply the upshot of self and class interests, or of people’s understandable tendency to view the political world from a limited standpoint. Instead, they are in part the work of free practical reason within the framework of free institutions. (Rawls, 1993, p. 37)

This conception of the reasonable, indeed, represents, for Rawls, the possibility of a shared point of view, from which citizens who uphold radically different moral outlooks, can deliberate and reach agreement upon the political decisions which affect them. This notion of the reasonable is governed by what Rawls calls the ‘principle of reciprocity’. ‘Our exercise of political power is proper only when we sincerely believe that the reasons we offer for our political action may reasonably be accepted by other citizens as a justification for those actions’ (Rawls, 1993, Introduction to the Paperback edition. xvi–xvii).

Liberal pluralists, following Rawls, accept some limitation on the incommensurability of value. Bearing in mind the liberal emphasis upon reason, de Weitz, following Rawls, rules out some categories of moral thought as ‘unreasonable’. De Weitz, indeed, draws on two of the classic notions of reason in the liberal tradition. On the one hand, there is the normative conception of rationality, according to which individual human beings are self defining, autonomous agents, with the ability, in virtue of their rationality, both to recognize the ‘moral law’ and to determine, in accordance with this law, their own ends. This notion of reason can be found in Kant, but also in Rawls’ thought. On the other hand, he draws on an ‘instrumental’ conception of reason, deriving initially from seventeenth century science and from Descartes. According to this latter notion, each individual must be consistent in the pursuit of his or her ends.

Importantly, then, the intrinsic dignity and worth of the individual is grounded in reason. De Weitz stresses that there are two broad categories of moral thought that are ‘unreasonable’ and that should therefore be ruled out of the scope of recognition and toleration. One category, which fits the instrumental notion of reason, is the set of bizarre beliefs about the world – for example a doctrine that insists that the world is made of cream cheese and pink elephants, not human beings. The second, the normative view, is a doctrine that is ‘evil’ – a doctrine that seeks, for example, the unlimited domination or destruction of others. Anyone, therefore, who holds such views, according to de Weitz, should be excluded from the scope of those who need to be tolerated. Unreasonable or ‘mad’ views of the world are ruled out of account for the Rawlsian liberal as are ‘evil’ views of the world.

This perspective, however, rests, as does that of Descartes, on vetoing certain views of the world and presenting them as outside the scope of reason, or as ‘mad’ or ‘evil’. But one difficulty with the outlooks of both Descartes and Rawls, is that the scope of the ‘mad’ and ‘evil’ are not a priori defined and they can vary with historical circumstances. Furthermore, perhaps views that come within the purview of the ‘mad’ might be discussed and debated rather than ruled out of account.

In Descartes’ time, as Foucault (Foucault, op. cit.) points out, madness ‘ceases to be endowed with moral or eschatological significance, and comes to be viewed solely in terms of deviance and disruption’ (McNay, 1992, p. 19). Simultaneously, a major change takes place in the treatment of the mad. Now, instead of being set afloat in the Ship of Fools, mad people come to be ‘detained and maintained’ in houses of confinement and hospitals. Foucault argues that this confinement was partly a response to the economic crisis affecting Europe in the seventeenth century. But it also represented the taking of a stand against perceived sources of disorder in society. Whole swathes of the population were characterized as falling within the domain of ‘unreason’ and confined: ‘young men who disturbed their families’ peace or who squandered their goods, people without profession, and the insane’ (Foucault, 1965, p. 41). Confinement represented the ‘abusive amalgam of heterogeneous elements’ (ibid., p. 41). The Hôpital General set itself the task of ‘preventing mendicancy and idleness as the source of all disorders’ (op. cit., p. 43).

By detaining ‘troublesome’ elements of the population, confinement both acted as a means of social control – it protected society against uprisings – and it provided a source of cheap labour. Foucault writes that, in Paris, at a certain point in the seventeenth century – close to the country and at approximately the same time as Descartes is sitting in his room in front of his stove – one in every 100 inhabitants were detained for a certain period (Foucault, op. cit., p. 35). Symbolically, Foucault writes, the mad person represents ‘the other’ of bourgeois rationality. Descartes purports to be writing about everyone. Foucault suggests that he is not: that the form of rationality he depicts necessarily excludes the mad. The argument is a very strong one: it is not that Descartes’ argument does not in fact apply to a certain group despite his best intentions. It is rather that it necessarily excludes a whole segment of the population: that it is set out in such a way that it logically omits a significant number of people, who also happen to be morally and socially excluded from society. They are excluded from the scope of the autonomous person who is deserving of respect. One might argue that a theory that includes 99 per cent of the people is actually pretty successful. However, it is important to see this one per cent in the context of what Descartes what setting out to do: to provide certain and indubitable foundations for knowledge. This section of the argument is not an ‘argument’ at all. Montaigne, Foucault argues, writing at the time of the Renaissance, could not have spoken as Descartes does about the mad: he could not have excluded the mad person from the structure of rational thought.

Critics of Foucault (e.g. Habermas, 1981 and 1986; Stone, 1983; Rose, 1984) have argued that he overstates the dark side of Enlightenment thought. But it seems to me, as Beaulier and Fillion (2008) have recently argued, that Foucault is not arguing that there is any kind of simple causal relationship between, for example, Descartes writing and the confinement of the insane. He is rather drawing attention to trends. Beaulier and Fillion suggest that Derrida, in his critique of Foucault, focuses only on Descartes’ text and not sufficiently on the context of his writing. They write: ‘Foucault is absolutely correct in presenting confinement as a trend that became established during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’ (ibid., p. 83).

Rawls and Descartes

In our own period, Rawls (1993) requires us to endorse a particular epistemic position. He requires us all to accept, as Brian Barry (1995) has claimed, as a consequence of the principle of tolerance and pluralism, that we are sceptical about our own moral and ‘comprehensive’ doctrines. Only if we can accept that the foundations of our own moral outlook are, at some level, questionable, can we tolerate the outlook of someone who disagrees radically with each one of us. But those who are strong believers in some religious creed do not accept this level of scepticism. Indeed, such people believe that foundations of their religion represent revealed truths that should be accepted by all. Some strong Christians or strong Muslims, for example, would not accept that they should tolerate other faiths. Indeed, one does not need to deploy this kind of example from religion. Convinced naturalists are unlikely to accept this level of scepticism about their doctrines.

Effectively, then, Rawls’ position represents such views as lying outside the scope of the reasonable person and therefore as mad in Descartes’ sense. Indeed, Rawls himself writes ‘A given society may also contain unreasonable, irrational and even mad comprehensive doctrines. In their case, the problem is to contain them so that they do not undermine the unity and justice of society’ (Rawls, 1996, pp. xvi–xvii). It is interesting, indeed, that Rawls uses the word ‘contain’ here. Foucault talks of confinement, but the motive for the containment referred to by Rawls is the same: the taking of a stand against sources of disorder in society.

Moreover, it has been argued that the scope of the unreasonable or potentially ‘mad’ doctrine becomes very wide for Rawls and could even include the classical utilitarian. This is because, for him, it is unreasonable to expect the state to uphold one’s own comprehensive doctrine. Yet the classical utilitarian would want a just state to decide policy on the ground of the greatest happiness principle (see Talisse, 2005, for example).

There is a different way of suggesting how narrow the conception of reason might be in certain versions of liberal thinking and how corres...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. The Metaphysical Assumptions of the Classical Liberal
• 2. Human Rights and Fundamentalism
• 3. Some Limitations of the Discourse of Human Rights
• 4. Autonomy and ‘Evil’
• 5. The Beginnings of an Alternative Metaphysic and Ethics
• 6. Natural Needs
• 7. Metaphysics and Morality
• 8. Love for Family, Friends and Close Associates
• Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Index