the social synthesis - nietzsche, rousseau, hobbes - by joseph belbruno

7/28/2019 The Social Synthesis - Nietzsche, Rousseau, Hobbes - by Joseph Belbruno

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Between Necessity and Artifice - THE SOCIAL SYNTHESIS in Political

Theory

This is the problem of the social syn-thesis because the verypossibility of social life depends on the possibility of inter-

subjectivity, not merely on the sharing of moral values, or on the

agreement on established symbols for communication. Perhaps

above all else Nietzsche does not understand that human being is a

product of sociality, and that social life depends on the possibility of

communication, and even of scientificity what Nietzsche calls

the invariant persistence, the established convention, the

obligatory style for everyone! For it is still not clear how individual

Subjects can ever form a society without being able to co-ordinate

their activities by means of scientific values. By breaking down the

Subject and also its causality its agency Nietzsche ought to

have thrown back the question of the Political to the sphere of

physiological demands intended in an immanentistphylogenetic

sense, not in the ontological sense he pursues with the ontogeny of

thought, from the instincts for freedom, to the Will to Power or

better, to its perspective of the herd, to its mediation in the relation

to other human beings and their instincts giving rise to the

averageness of consciousness.

For the negatives Denken, society is therefore an ob-ject (Gegen-

stand) that stands op-posed to the individual instincts which

necessarily pre-date society and the onto-geny of thought. Similarly

with Heidegger, society is facticity, the world into which the Da-

sein is thrown, the place (Ort) that makes the Da-sein a Sein that

is there (da). Nihilism begins with this contingency of humanbeing and therefore of all being, and then terminates in a well of

despond once it remains mired and entangled in this value-

lessness, like a petulant child who had been promised an inexistent

toy. Values seek to rationalize existence, to give it a purpose and

therefore a beginning that is also an action initiated by an

agency, a Subject. The underlying reality of life and the world,

the sub-iectum, is therefore turned first into an energy that is an

agency that is conscious of its activity a Subject, an Ego, a Self.


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The Hobbesian social contract is founded on the individuals

apprehension of imminent and violent death at the hands of other

human aggressors in the state of nature in which man is a wolf to

man (homo homini lupus) and in which reigns the total civil war ofall against all (bellum omnium contra omnes, bellum civium). But

wherein lies, upon what rests, the rationality of this decision to

reach, to con-vene on, a social com-pact and erect a Common-

wealth? Surely if this decision is rational in the state of nature,

then the state of nature could never exist historically because

human beings would have agreed to a Common-wealth or status

civilis from time immemorial and certainly before a state of nature

could exist? There is a sense in which Hobbess State is not a state

by institution, then, but a state by acquisition acquired from the

beginning of human history. But the rationality of human beings

remains yet to be established and Leibniz formulated it some years

after the publication of Hobbess Leviathan with the principle of

sufficient reason.

Thus, Hobbes invokes the appetitus for life, for existence, and its

rational fear of death and not just its violent apprehension as

the motivations that allow human beings to escape the state of

nature so as to enter the civil state, the Economic bourgeois society

protected and preserved by the Political state. Easily superseding the

fallacious jusnaturalist theories of liberal society that flourished from

Locke to Mill, Hobbess schema constitutes the most potent

combination offree convention and necessary hypothesis. (Cf.

A.Negri, then Koselleck.) The subiectum of the Hobbesian

construction, its foundation or ground (Grund), and therefore what

determines the transition from the state of nature to that of civilsociety under the Sovereign State, is the rationality of preserving

existence. Hegel will follow in Hobbess and Leibnizs steps in

erecting his own theory of the origins of society and the State, though

basing himself this time on the dialectic of self-consciousness, the

mediation of Self and Other through the Ob-ject whereby labour

becomes the material carrier of human emancipation.


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Both Hobbes and Hegel seek to identify the corpus, the

hypokeimenon, the sub-iectum, the rock bottom of human and social

reality. For both, human and social motivations and institutions are

subject-matters (sub-iecta) over which human beings claim to havein-sight by virtue of the fact that we originate or initiate

them. Therefore, the subject of this initium (beginning) must be

able to know the subject-matter, the sub-iectum, of human

reality for the simple reason that the initiator or author (auctor)

of the action is also able to cogitate (co-agitare, agere, to act) on

the motive of its ex-ertion or execution. It is thus that human

beings can imagine that consciousness or thinking (cogitare,

whence co-agitare) is by itself proof not merely of existence, but also

of the existence of an agency, an Ego or ego-ity (Ich-heit), of the

id-entity that thinks. The entity that thinks is conscious of itself,

and therefore acquires an id-entity, an Ego. Thus, all reality is

finally sub-ordinated to the Logos, the ratio of the Subject, the Ego,

the Ich-heit: that is to say, the unity ofappetitus andperceptio is

posited as the only possibility of being (Leibniz). To ec-sist, to be real,

a being must be perfect. But to be perfect, a being must also be

a unity, a monad, not a composite, for that would beg the

question of how being could be many. Therefore, as Leibniz puts

it, only a being can be a being! Being is unity; unity is simplicity;

simplicity is the seal of truth. Simplex sigillum veri.

Whatever exists, ec-sists because it strives to come out, it strives

to be. Ec-sistence is the ultimate reason for what is, because what is

has greater reason to be than what does not exist at all: This, in a

nutshell, is the principle of sufficient reason. All modern social theory

begins with two fundamental assumptions about human beings: - theinstinct of self-preservation and the ability to be self-sufficient.

Already with Hobbes, and even Rousseau, the being of each in-

dividual is measured by his Power, the power of self-preservation and

to be self-sufficient againstthe Power of other in-dividual human

beings. Thus, this Power is dependent on the individual ability to

command other individuals, other Bodies and their Powers. This

command depends in turn on the ability of an individual to force

other individuals to ex-ercise (ex-ertion, from Greek ergos, work) their

labour-power so as to maintain itself in existence and then to


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thrive. And this command over the labour-power of other

individuals can be obtained with ones own labour-power as well as

with ones possessions so long as these can provide the means of

sustenance needed by other individuals. Beyond the free will ofeach in-dividual, therefore, the Hobbesian schema decrees

axiomatically the mechanical and physical necessity the conflict

of opposing Powers the natural physical drive of individuals to

exercise control over the labour-power of other individuals through

the control of their labour-power and of possessions that can secure

their survival. Thus, ownership of the means of production

determines the command of dead objectified labour (possessions)

over living labour considered as a mechanical quantity, as work, as

labour-power. It is the separation of living labour from the means of

production that allows this quantification of living labour, and

therefore of the human experience of time.

At the dawn of the rule of the bourgeoisie, at the very inception of

capitalist industry, Hobbes had hoped to formalize its rule

scientifically through the combination of the con-vention of free

wills to erect the Political, on one side, and the hypothesis of the

necessity of their survival from the state of nature into the equal

exchange of labour-powers and possessions between in-dividuals in

the new civil state or Common-wealth, the Economy, on the other.

These were the philosophical foundations that allowed the

homologation of the free convention of the social contract

instituting the Political with the scientific hypothesis based on the

necessity of individual survival and reproduction in the acquisition

of an automatic, self-regulating market Economy. Hence, Political

Economybecame the dismal science: - dismal because stillfounded on the value-positing free will of in-dividuals who set the

prices of resources rendered scarce by competition with one

another. And science, because it derives its laws from what it

understands to be the necessity of this competition based on the

antagonistic state of nature, the mechanistic conflict of wills.

Hobbes and Hegel invoke the apprehension of death to rationalize

and explain the exitof individuals from the state of civil war into that

of bourgeois civil society (the Economic) and the State (the Political).


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But whereas Hobbes simplistically assumes an axiomatic, almost

Euclidean, mechanicism about the homologation of individual self-

interest or Power and their social synthesis or mediation in the new

Common-wealth, Hegel understands that no such mechanicalequivalence is possible and that the social syn-thesis must allow for

the satisfaction of human needs - material through labour and

symbolic through interaction. (Cf. the homonymous study by Jurgen

Habermas in Theorie und Praxis.)Nietzsche instead denounces this

social syn-thesis for what it is: - mere con-vention. He opposes it for

its con-venience, for its being an arbitrary substitution that

transforms the real world of the state of nature into an

anthropomorphic fable of symbolic exchange, into a metaphor of

language, science and numbers into the artificial categories of

truth and lie.

Hobbes and Hegel and even Schopenhauer assume that the human

beings that con-stitute civil society are virtually and essentially the

same as those who now live in it that the transition from the state

of nature to civil society does not essentially trans-form the

character, psychological if not physical, of individual human beings to

the extent that the categories that we employ to con-ceptualise the

state of nature and indeed nature itself (!) may be themselves the

pro-duct of civil society and therefore may be in-applicable to the

state of nature! And it is this transition, as we saw earlier, that will

interest Nietzsche in his mature work. Yet even as early as 1873 when

he dictated the short notes on Uber Wahrheit und Luge, Nietzsche is

already questioning whether the categories, the concepts that we

utilize to com-prehend civil society and the state of nature that

preceded it are not fundamentally dis-torted by our very belonging tothis civil society. In other words, it is inappropriate to analyse the

transition from state of nature to civil society by applying to both

states the perspective of civil society! It is essential first to subject

the perspective of liberal civil society, the categories of bourgeois

civil society themselves, to a thorough critique so that we do not let

them unduly colour our interpretation and analysis of the

transition.

It is incorrect to assume that Nietzsche accepts Hobbess


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axiomatic-hypothetical expostulation of the state of nature

as if it referred to a historical-institutional stage of human

being. Rather, he takes the Hobbesian hypothesis as the

theoretical framework or paradigm for a critique of Christian-bourgeois society, independently of whether such a state of

nature ever existed leading up to the Selbst-Aufhebung of

that society and to its nihilism. (Nietzsche looks at civil

society in controluce, in the backlight of the hypothetical

status naturae.)

Nietzsche does not accept Hobbess hypothesis of the apprehension

of death in the state of nature, the necessity of the bellum civium.

In this his approach is much closer to Rousseaus. Yet he does accept

it as mere hypothesis, that is, as a reductio adabsurdum of the

conventions of Christian-bourgeois society and its self-dissolving

ideals. That is why he cheekily suggests tedium as a motive

leading to the convention of civil society for the sake of peace. He

concedes that in the state of nature all forms of human behaviour

even dissimulation, by which he means also artistic mimesis are

genuine and authentic, and therefore they involve the intellect only

to the extent that it is needed for survival or the satisfaction of

needs. But this is notthe case in civil society and the State, which are

purely conventional. Their necessity, their truth and science

are utterly fictitious social masks worn by individuals to facilitate

communication and make the social world predictable and familiar

the better to satisfy their need-necessity. It is not the truth that

interests human beings in society, but rather the illusion of truth; it

is whatever suits their selfish needs and interests, just as much as in

the state of nature, but this time filtered through the conventions ofcivil society, through the perspective of the herd, which has little to

do with truth itself but everything to do with con-venience and

utility. There is therefore a distancing of human intuition from its

original mimetic state in which forgetfulness prevails, and the

historic-scientific or rational state in which the forgetfulness of

forgetfulness, or memory, triumphs and becomes the apex of the

ontogeny of thought to occasion the dis-integration of the instincts

[Disgregationder Instinkte].


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Clearly at this early stage, Nietzsches thought is still confined to the

Humean skeptical critique, the velleitary and arbitrary,

metaphorical and anthropomorphic assessment of signification and

ultimately of physical mathematics, ofmathesis. He fails to identify,except for his insistence on persistence and crystallization and

sclerosis and then on utility and safety and eventually fear

and internalization, the problem ofwhyscience and logic as

specific practices have come about, of why they have triumphed.

And above all he fails to explain how they could have done so, -

again, outside of sheer habit, repetition and therefore con-vention

(persistency [Verharren] and crystallisation and sclerosis [Hart-

und Starr-werden])! Nietzsche is mixing up the arbitrariness of

signifiers (semeiotics) with the establishment of science as an activity

and of scientific causation as its object both of which in practice boil

down only to regularity and predictability. He still fails to see that it is

not so much the predictability that is a convention, and not even

the direction of scientific and technological practice, but rather its

very doing that responds to antagonistic values being presented

as objectivity or necessity or causality when in reality it occurs

in conventional experimental circumstances which supply the

problematic, all-important nexus. All that can be established then -

not proven or explained but merely described - are the

regularities that can be given numerical expression in space and

time and be exploited instrumentallyby humans. Consequently,

these regularities are mere conventions, anthropomorphic

metaphors or metonymies.

The very relation of a nerve-stimulus to the produced

percept is in itself no necessary one; but if the samepercept has been reproduced millions of times and has

been the inheritance of many successive generations of

man, and in the end appears each time to all mankind

as the result of the same cause, then it attains finally

for man the same importance as if it were the unique,

necessary percept and as if that relation between

the original nerve-stimulus and the percept produced

were a close relation ofcausality: just as

a dream eternally repeated, would be perceived and


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judged as though real. But the congelation and

coagulation of a metaphor does not at all guarantee

the necessity and exclusive justification of that metaphor. (p185)

Selbst das Verhltnis eines Nervenreizes zu dem hervorgebrachten Bilde ist an sich kein

notwendiges: wenn aber dasselbe Bild millionenmal hervorgebracht und durch viele

Menschengeschlechter hindurch vererbt ist, ja zuletzt bei der gesamten Menschheit jedesmal

infolge desselben Anlasses erscheint, so bekommt es endlich fr den Menschen dieselbe

Bedeutung, als ob es das einzig notwendige Bild sei und als ob jenes Verhltnis des

ursprnglichen Nervenreizes zu dem hergebrachten Bilde ein strenges Kausalittsverhltnis

sei: wie ein Traum, ewig wiederholt, durchaus als Wirklichkeit empfunden und beurteilt

werden wrde. Aber das Hart- und Starr-Werden einer Metapher verbrgt durchaus

nichts fr die Notwendigkeitund ausschlieliche Berechtigung dieser Metapher.

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the social synthesis - nietzsche, rousseau, hobbes - by joseph belbruno

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