(1) Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring, Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science, 166.
(2) Certainly this questioning has not been limited to Engels and Veblen. Joan Robinson and more recently Alfred Eichner have posed the question.(See Alfred S. Eichner, “Why Economics Is Not Yet a Science" and Joan Robinson, “What are the Questions?”)
(3) Of course the very act of problematizing international industrial competitiveness rather than, for instance, the sustainability of man and the Biosphere or socioeconomic equality, is a paradigmatic privileging characteristic of legislative thought.
(4) Surely there is space for a little humor! A totalitarian head of state asked for an economist with one arm to advise the government. Why? Because he was tired of economists who say: “Well on the one hand ... But on the other hand...”
(5) From our remarks in the section “The Politics of Truth" it is conspicuously clear that, for Antonio Gramsci and Michel Foucault the quip that “knowing is knowing the truth" is an unwarranted bit of common sense.
(6) Martin Heidegger, in The End of Philosophy, referred to ontology as the science of our process of “worlding the world”; itself a process whereby we make the world our home through establishing our Being in it and by dwelling in it through our Being in it.
(7) Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, 56.
(8) Piero Mini, Philosophy and Economics: The Origins and Development of Economic Theory, 222.
(9) Philip Mirowski, “The Philosophic Bases of Institutional Economics,” 1005. Though, there have been numerous attempts to establish alternative foundations, no sooner is one posited than the process of critical undercutting begins. After a while we see that the foundation is less sound than originally thought. (See Richard J. Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis).
(10) An epistemological, rather than an ontological, appreciation of claims to the “good" and claims of the “truth" must be legitimated through the mediating agency of individual insight.
(11) It is of no coincidence that the Physiocrats—authors of the first political economy—were committed to a Platonist concept of objective reason. Contemporary and heightened concern for the coevolution of man and the Biosphere commits itself to a neoplatonist concept of objective reason (See Stokes, Man and the Biosphere).
(12) “Ethics,” may provisionally be defined as a “normative definition of the ethos,” including the web of obligations and senses of “ought" that are experienced in social life.
If “objective reason" pertains to the issue of responsibility (the ethical dimension) to “ends”; are they “ends-in-view” and of limited knowledge? How is “practical reason" distinct is a relevant question.
(13) It is perhaps of more than passing interest to note that for Albert Einstein science was apparently without a praxiological dimension. It was a way of transcending the tragedy of time and a way of escaping the misfortunes of history. We might juxtapose Einstein's remark with that of Wilhelm Dilthey for whom “Life is very closely related to the filling of time. Its whole character, its ephemeral nature and its continuity through the unity of the self is determined by time" (Wilhelm Dilthey, Selected Writings, 232).
(14) Ivan Illich, “Hugh of St. Victor or Science by People,” 519.
(15) Science, as a project of disclosure (uncovering), is a meaning consistent with the ontology of physicist David Bohm's explicate/implicate order and with that of Roy Bhaskar's interest in transcendental reality.
(16) At issue is whether a second-order disclosure can, in fact, contribute to a PEBS. In this connection, we might refer to John Dewey who recognized that attempts to distance ourselves from the reach of current interpretations of the world, to integrate dissonant perspectives and experiences into a new, more coherent interpretation, do not occur without struggle. The crisis-inducing effects of disclosure, that is, its decentering effects, can be handled properly only through our constant activity of reconstructing shattered interpretations of the world in light of new ones.
(17) The word “theory" has religious origins. The theoros was the representative sent by Greek cities to public celebrations. Through theoria, that is through looking on, representative-cum-spectator abandoned himself to the sacred events. In philosophical language, theoria referred to the contemplation of the cosmos. Theory, in a Platonic sense, only had an impact on life because it was thought to have discovered in the cosmic order, an ideal world structure, including the prototype for the order of the human world. As cosmology, theoria was capable of orienting human action.
(18) Provisionally, Being is the most general concept. It is that concept that something has persistence in manifestation in some form for some time. Being is the most general concept because it is an abstraction that applies to everything. Because it is a characteristic of everything, it is said to tell us nothing about anything. Thus the concept of Being is at the same time a barren and prolific concept.
(19) Charles Taylor, “Rationality.”
(20) Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics.
(21) Gadamer, The Idea of the Good in Platonic/Aristotelian Philosophy, 160.
(22) Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 289.
(23) Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Problem of Historical Consciousness,” 108.
(24) Ulrich, “Systems Thinking, Systems Practice and Practical Philosophy: A Program of Research,” 140.
(25) Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, 122n.
(26) Rolf Ahlers, “The Overcoming of Critical Theory in the Hegelian Unity of Theory and Praxis.”
(27) Martin Heidegger, Wegmarken, 81.
(28) While Hobbes viewed nature as a free gift to be utilized by man, Adam Smith disregarded nature as an economic category—social value manifests itself through traded commodities. Ricardo similarly put nature aside, defining labor as an abstract quantity that generates abstract social value. In general, economists have assumed an infinitely available and infinitely self-generating nature. Gregory Claeys and Prue Kerr refer specifically to Ricardo's mechanicalist bent. See Gregory Claeys and Prue Kerr, “Mechanical Political Economy: Review Article.”
(29) Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Hermeneutics and Social Science,” 313-14.
(30) See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 4.
(31) Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Le philosophie et la Sociologie.”
(32) Emmanuel Levinas, “Is Ontology Fundamental?” Also see Idem., Time and the Other.
(33) It may be argued that perhaps the terminology of our ontological discourse is cryptic and that we need to make it unambiguous. However, every subject has its special vocabulary and ontology is no different. We adhere to the vocabulary of the philosophers of this study in the interest of remaining attached to its tradition(s).
(34) Socrates posed the following: how will you look for something when you do not in the least know what it is? How on earth are you going to set up something you do not know as the object of your search? To put it another way, even if you come right up against it, how will you know that what you have found is the thing you did not know? For a man cannot try to discover either what he knows or what he does not know? He would not seek what he knows for since he knows it there is no need of the inquiry, he does not even know nor what he does not know, what he is to look for.
With recourse to Socrates, we might argue that empiricism fails to appreciate that unless we know what we are looking for, we would not be looking for it. Similarly distracted knowledgeability casually disregards the view that we need to be ignorant of what we are looking for, or equally again we should not be searching.
(35) For Marx to understand the essence of some particular social phenomenon is to understand the social relations that make that phenomenon possible. For him bourgeois political economy merely reflects the phenomenal forms of bourgeois life. It does not penetrate to the essential reality that produces its forms. But it is not “bad faith" that accounts for this. For the phenomenal forms that are reflected or rationalized in ideology actually mask the real relations that generate them. It is not the subject who deceives himself but the structure of society that produces the deception in him.
(36) W.V.O. Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism.”
(37) Quine's proposition that theories are undetermined may be interpreted as merely an expression of the Socratic idea referred to above and in an accompanying note.
(38) First accorded a central role by the eighteenth century German rationalist Christian Wolff, ontology was distinguished from the other branches of metaphysics from which it had previously been associated. Wolff attempted to devise a coherent deductive system explaining existence and nonexistence. Since Kant subjected to a powerful critique Wolff's ontology, any ontological standpoint has stood open to question.
(39) Albert Einstein quoted in “General Systems Bulletin,” 48.
(40) Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge.
(41) Peter Berger and Steven Pullberg, “Reification and the Sociological Critique of Consciousness,” 60.
(42) This discussion links to our later remarks on economic knowledge “The two meanings of economic knowledge.”
(43) Vickers, Freedom in a Rocking Boat, 15.
(44) Indeed, Plato's “Allegory of the Cave” may facilitate an appreciation of the concept of the manifest as opposed to the nonmanifest order. The cave itself may be seen to correspond to Bohm's explicate order, and that of Plato's light with the implicate order. The light and Bohm's implicate order can be apprehended, but is inaccessible to all but those willing to undergo a single-minded change. See David Bohm, “The Implicate Order: A New Order for Physics" and Idem., Wholeness and the Implicate Order.
(45) Plato speaks of one who has struggled free from the cave, but whose eyes are still too filled with darkness to gaze upon the Forms of things in their true luminosity. Such persons must look at the reflections of the Forms until their eyes adjust to the light.
(46) Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, n.p.
(47) F. Nietzsche, The Will to Truth. Of course, Nietzsche was not the only philosopher to deeply question the value of truth. Alexander Herzen lamented: “It mortifies us to realize that the idea is impotent, that truth has no binding power over the world of actuality" (Alexander Herzen, My Past and Thoughts: Memoirs).
(48) Plato, Republic.
(49) For Plato education meant the teaching of ethics in order to give structure to the good life. (See R. Belah, Habits of the Heart, chapter on education.)
(50) Heidegger, Wegmarken, 187.
(51) The word “truth" in Latin (veritas) means “that which is.”
(52) The importance of correspondentialism is sufficient to necessitate a thorough review. In this connection please turn to chapter 3, “Correspondential Thinking.”
(53) We refer here to the Cultural West because non-dualist thought, perception, and action are apparently a ground from which Asian religion and philosophy begins. In the tradition of the Cultural West we have ignored, repudiated, and generally expunged non-dualism, relegating it to mysticism that we subsequently devalued.
(54) Emergence is a particular kind of “essencing” that refers to the unexpected appearance of discontinuities that segment long-lived traditions. It creates epochal breaks that may occur at any of the levels of our cultural tradition: facts, theories (Paul Feyerabend, Against Method), paradigms (Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions), epistemes (Michel Foucault, The Order of Things). (Also see G.H. Mead, The Philosophy of the Present.)
(55) Hannah Ardent, Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy; Goldman, Kant.
(56) Appropriating Hegel's interest, for Heidegger, “the term `phenomenology' expresses a maxim which can be formulated as `to the things themselves'" (Heidegger, Being and Time, 50).
(57) H. Feigl, “The Origin and Spirit of Logical Positivism,” 21.
(58) A. Kaplan, “Positivism,” 393.
(59) Karl Korsch, Marxism and Philosophy, 77.
From the rostrum of particle physics, Erwin Schroedinger affirmed Korsch's position and remarked that “subject and object are only one. The barrier between them cannot be said to have broken down as a result of recent experience in the physical sciences, for this barrier does not exist.”
Moreover, Korsch's argument may, in view of recent developments in systems science, be extended. Indeed, let us submit that systems science includes systemic consciousness. In this sense, not only is our consciousness an integral part of all systems that we select and interpret out of the total reality, but it also is a system by itself. Systemic consciousness may be defined as holistic thinking. It is whole consciousness.
The work of Maturana, et al., is suggestive of the proposition that consciousness may be an emergent property. However, we are perhaps giving too much credit to those recent developments. Erwin Schroedinger said, “there is nothing but the eternal Now.” This systemic consciousness is not anything new, it is a consciousness in the Jetztzeit ("now time")—not about the Jetztzeit, but as the Jetztzeit. This “Here and Now" knowledge is not new—it is a message that has been passed down from the beginning of recorded history, and remains to this day the one big secret sutained by nearly every esoteric philosophy.
The reason this works is simply because relationships are what things are doing to each other, in other words, they are activity, and all activity occurs in the Jetztzeit. Even our memories occur Now. So in a very strict way, systemic science may be known as the science of the Jetztzeit.
(60) Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations. The phenomenological approach of taking the world as it appears without asking metaphysical-cum-ontological questions allegedly describes reality as it appears. Whatever appears can be interpreted as being the exclusion of other possibilities. It may not be what it seems to be, but its selectivity cannot be denied. This epistemological view is similar to that of structuralism: if something appears as structure (or can be observed or reconstructed as structure), it is an argument for its being an indication of reality.
(61) Husserl sought to catch the world as it shows itself to the unprejudiced eye, as if to an optical instrument. Similarly, Salvador Dali was concerned as an artist to suspend the beliefs that define normality in order to experience the world “with pure eyes.” “People,” he wrote, “only see stereotyped images of things, pure shadows empty of any expression, pure phantoms, and they find vulgar and normal everything they are used to seeing often, however marvelous and miraculous it may be.” Dali, having anesthetized the stereotypes of common sense, perceived the world as if out of his mind, allowing all his fears, anxieties, wild associations, to flood into reality, so the world becomes the canvas of objective terrors.
(62) Husserl, Crisis of European Sciences, 22.
(63) Richard Bernstein, The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory, 128, 128-29, 131.
(64) According to Husserl, “Kant's philosophy is on the way to" what he regards as an authentic “transcendental (phenomenological) philosophy" for, “it [Kant's] is a philosophy which, in opposition to prescientific and scientific objectivism, goes back to knowing subjectivity as the primal locus of all objective formations of sense and ontic validities, undertakes to understand the existing world as a structure of sense and validity, and in this way seeks to set in motion an essentially new type of scientific attitude and a new type of philosophy" (Crisis of European Sciences, 99).
However in Husserl's purview, Kant is only “on the way to" transcendental phenomenology, because “Kant, for his part, has no idea that in his philosophizing he stands on unquestioned presuppositions and that the undoubtedly great discoveries in his theories are there only in concealment" (Ibid., 103). Now, what is that which, in Husserl's opinion, was dogmatically taken for granted in Kant's critical endeavor?
Husserl accuses Kant of not being radical enough to initiate his critique by a critique of the primary “structures" of everydayness (or life-world) in which any possibility (for example, philosophical or scientific thinking) is embedded. “A transcendental philosophy is the more genuine, and better fulfills its vocation as philosophy, the more radical it is and, ... it comes to its actual and true existence, to its actual and true beginning, only when the philosopher has penetrated to a clear understanding of himself as the subjectivity functioning as primal source" (Ibid., 99).
In this way, the program designed by Husserl for phenomenology could be understood as a “critique of basic presencing in everydayness,” from which “critiques" of the different particular forms of presencing (like the Critique of Pure—metaphysical—Reason) could stem in a more critical fashion.
(65) It may be argued that intentionality is legislative in the sense of being prescriptive of Being. The Kuhnian concept of “paradigm" or “disciplinary matrix" is an expression of intentionality. It situates what (and how) we can know something.
(66) Out of this strife comes a necessity. As Jacques Derrida, in “Violence and Metaphysics,” writes: “It is necessary to state the other in the language of the Same;...necessary to think true exteriority as non-exteriority ... without being interiority.”
(67) S.B. Mallin, Merleau-Ponty's Philosophy, 11.
(68) Ibid., 15.
(69) Clearly an appeal to the thing itself is not sufficient to clarify the concept (Begriff) of truth, since the question can always be asked: When do we have a true understanding of the thing itself?
(70) Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror, 110-111.
(71) The search for an understanding of a hard philosophical core in the thought of Martin Heidegger, stumbles, as it must, upon Heidegger's Nazi loyalties. Let us understand Nazism not as something that crawled out from under the floorboards, as Hannah Arendt claimed. It was partly an attempt to complete the Enlightenment and partly a reaction against it. To the intellectually minded its mission was to lead Europe out of nihilism. It took seriously the view that man was a part of nature. In practice this meant that in assessing man's real satisfactions and values, one had to pay more attention to his real drives such as aggression and domination than to abstract, cerebral, and resentment-engendered ideals such as universalism and social ethics. There is little doubt that national socialism mobilized the spiritual hunger of the German masses (and considerable numbers of intellectuals, like Martin Heidegger, as well), giving them a sense of integral wholeness largely missing from modern society.
Heidegger had some grand ideas of what Nazism was going to be, ideas that he was vain enough to assume that Hitler must share. In Heidegger's state of mind at the moment when Hitler came to power, his great enemy was “technological nihilism,” and he mysteriously believed that Nazism was going to save Germany and the Western world from that. Suffice to say that Heidegger's support for Hitler was not, as Hannah Arendt and other apologists have thought, an “episodic `flight' from the realm of philosophy into everyday politics.”
Heidegger looked into the abyss of modernity and saw the beasts of Nazism only to become a Nazi. American liberal philosopher, Richard Rorty looks into the abyss that is Heidegger and sees an “original and interesting writer.” In a conspicuous footnote addressing the fact that Heidegger, was a Nazi, Rorty remarks: “On the general question of the relation between Heidegger's thought and his Nazism, I am not persuaded that there is much to be said except that one of the century's most original thinkers happened to be a pretty nasty character—but if one holds the view which I put forward—one will be prepared to find the relation between the intellectual and moral virtues, and the relation between a writer's books and other parts of his life, contingent" (Contingency, Irony and Solidarity). While Rorty concedes that Heidegger was “a nasty piece of work,” Heidegger's worst mistake, according to Rorty, is to have taken philosophy “seriously" rather than “light-mindedly,” “playfully,” “aesthetically.” Leaving aside Arendt's apologetics and Rorty's light–mindedness, one is left with the impression that there is scarcely any connection between a philosopher's words and deeds, or his theory and character.
(72) Jürgen Habermas, “Work and Weltanschauung: The Heidegger Controversy from a German perspective,” 433.
(73) Martin Heidegger, Einführung in die Metaphysik as quoted in Michael Zimmerman, Heidegger's Confrontation with Modernity. Heidegger maintained that the depersonalization of modernity was an ontological condition arising from Dasein's tendency toward falling. Far from being the result of economic material causes depersonalization resulted from the human fallenness that itself made possible a world dominated by (inauthentic) economic and material concerns. Heidegger later claimed that human rootlessness was not a result of the individual's or humanity's flight from the truth, but instead the result of the self-concealment of that truth from humanity.
(74) Burrel Gibson, “Modernism, Post modernism and Organizational Analysis 2: The Contribution of Michel Foucault.”
(75) Popper's Plato is allegedly Heideggerian. For Popper, Plato's basic vision was one in which the “Fall of Man" that resulted in “the internal disunion of human nature,” and was manifested as “war, class war, [which] is the father and promoter of all change, and of the history of man, which is nothing but the history of the breakdown of society.” Plato proposed a radical reconstruction of society to reverse the fall of man and to lead the way back to an earlier natural condition, a happier existence characterized by a state of “tribalism" (Karl Popper, “The Spell of Plato,” as found in The Open Society and Its Enemies, I: 87, 83, 171).
Popper also argued that Plato possessed a basic “hostility to reason" and that he “hated" deeply the “equalitarianism and humanitarianism" as well as the “love of freedom" that were emerging in the Athens of his time. To encourage “self-interest and especially material or economic self-interest" was to bring about “internal strife" and “class war.” In order to ward off the pernicious effects of the pursuit of self-interest, Plato's solution, notes Popper, was a “communism of the ruling class.” Indeed, Marxism was merely a “theory revived" from Plato. In Plato's Republic is told the story of humankind alienated from original nature by the forces of pride, ambition, and greed. Humankind must therefore seek to recover its true nature in a radical transformation of the human condition. For Popper, both Plato and Marx called for an “utter radicalism, the demand for sweeping measures.” In essence, “both Plato and Marx are dreaming of the apocalyptic revolution which will radically transfigure the whole social world,” (Ibid., 199, 94, 39, 48, 38, 165, 164).
(76) “Philosophy, noted Husserl, “is in danger, i.e., its future is endangered" for the simple reason that “it is impossible to establish a world-view truth which is totally valid for each human being" (Crisis of The European Sciences, 390).
(77) Ibid., 8.
(78) However, Heidegger may have gotten Plato's “Theory of Ideas” wrong, insofar as he treated it as an attempt to make Being into an object, rather than to explain why we should not try to objectify Being.
(79) According to Heidegger, the discovery of an authentic mode of production would be tantamount to the inauguration of an entirely new, post-metaphysical (post-productionist) epoch for the Cultural West. Authentic producing in this new era would be akin to what the Greeks originally meant by techne.
(80) Heidegger's analysis of being-in-the-world and Habermas's of the “life world,” are analogous attempts to show that we are always already situated in a pre-reflective, holistically structured regulated world.
(81) Heidegger, Being and Time, 129
(82) See Parmenides, Parmenides of Elea: Fragments.
(83) Maurice Merleau-Ponty, both in The Phenomenology of Perception and The Visible and the Invisible, attempted to translate Heidegger's ontological argument in Being and Time into psychological terms and found that pure-presence or the present-at-hand correlates with pointing or the ready-to-hand correlates with grasping. Being as pure presence is dualist in the sense that it assumes a subject/object split that distances and separates us from the things of the world.
(84) Ortega y Gasset, History as a System, 192.
(85) Feyerabend, Against Method, 19.
(86) We may argue that Eleatic onto-epistemology is non- or even anti-human insofar as it casually equates human life with mere existence. Apparently, Heidegger was convinced that productionist metaphysics obtained from Eleatic onto-epistemology insofar as it conceived of “making” in terms of “actualizing" or “effecting" a thing, in the sense of “causing" it to be present. However, Heidegger thought he found in Heraclitus, a nonproductionist producing as a “letting-be" or a “freeing" that enabled an entity to come into presence, to show itself, to emerge, analogously to how a living thing comes forth into presence. Heidegger's constructive “retrieval" of this alternative conception of producing was central to his political effort to save the West.
(87) Ortega y Gasset, History as a System, 216.
(88) If to Be is to be fixed, static, and permanent, change is externalized with regard to Being. Here change is accidental to what is primarily fixed. Time becomes the connecting thread along which entities pass and enables the description of the entity. In this sense it becomes an external coordinate where entities are located. This conception of time appears at once consistent with Bergson and distinct from a description of something whose very essence is change, in the sense of Heraclitus.
(89) Bohm, “The Implicate Order: A New Order for Physics”; Idem., Wholeness and the Implicate Order.
(90) Once we appreciate that the genesis of the thing in its temporal gestalt is important then we see that the essence is no longer static. Rather, we have to speak of the thing “essencing" forth as it emerges into existence. The unfolding of the essence makes it necessary to see the existent thing as dynamic as well. At the level of process Being we find that we have entities presencing themselves as they emerge and then recede from existence. Processual essentialism is radically distinct from traditional static essentialism.
(91) Heidegger had earlier and optimistically interpreted Parmenides's phrase “being and thinking are the same" to mean that there is an internal relationship between the temporal transcendence of human existence, on the one hand, and the presencing of entities, on the other.
(92) Lukács, The Destruction of Reason, 503.
(93) Richard J. Bernstein, Habermas and Modernity, 86.
(94) David Couzens Hoy, “Hermeneutics”; Sing C. Chew, “From Dilthey to Habermas: Reflections on Verstehen, Hermeneutics, and Language”; Ludwig Lachmann, The Legacy of Max Weber.
Hermeneutics is reacting against and yet partially in league with empiricism's emphasis on the pure presencing of reality as ready-at-hand with its Humean concept of law. Hermeneutics engages an ontological presupposition. For if we admit complex causality (rather than lineal causality), process Being (rather than static Being), and stratified reality, (rather than the one-dimensional reality of empiricism), the domain of hermeneutics is restricted.
(95) With Dilthey there is a sustained emphasis on individuality. Every individual entity, whether a monad, a person, or a culture is understood in terms of itself, such that, as Dilthey notes, all individuality is ineffable. (See Dilthey, Selected Writings, 259.)
(96) Ibid., 181. For Hans-Georg Gadamer, referring to Dilthey's historical consciousness, notes that it “transpose[s] itself into the situation of the past and thereby claims to have acquired the right historical horizon.... When we have discovered the other person's standpoint and horizon, his ideas become intelligible without our necessarily having to agree with him; so also when someone thinks historically, he comes to understand the meaning of what is said without necessarily agreeing with it or seeing himself in it" (Gesammelte Werke, I: 255). Gadamer asks if “historical consciousness is able to fill the place vacated by Hegel's absolute knowledge, in which spirit comprehends itself in the speculative concept? Dilthey himself has pointed out that we understand historically because we ourselves are historical beings. This is supposed to make things easier. But does it? ... How are things made easier epistemologically? Are they not, in fact, made more difficult? Is not the fact that consciousness is historically conditioned inevitably an insuperable barrier to its reaching perfect fulfillment in historical knowledge? Hegel could regard this barrier as overcome by virtue of history's being superseded by absolute knowledge. But if life is the inexhaustible, creative reality that Dilthey thinks it, then must not the constant alteration of historical context preclude any knowledge from attaining to objectivity?” (Idem., Truth and Method, 230-231).
(97) For Dilthey experience consists of (a) elementary acts of thought or reflection, (b) an objectification of the content of that thought, and (c) a judgment of that objectification and that occurring in the flow of time, unveils temporality (or history) as the fundamental category of Being.
(98) Verstehen, the methodology of subjective understanding, according to Alfred Schutz, is first of all the name of a complex process by which all of us in our everyday life interpret the meaning of our actions and those of others with whom we interact. See Alfred Schutz, Collected Papers. Also see Kurt Mueller-Vollmer, ed., The Hermeneutics Reader, 257-292.
(99) Charles Taylor, “Interpretation and the Sciences of Man.”
(100) This position was argued by Peter Winch in The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy.
(101) Peter Winch, “Social Science,” 25.
(102) Heidegger, Being and Time, 224.
(103) Critics such as Karl Lowith argued that by making “being" dependent on humanity, and by making humanity so radically different from all other entities, Heidegger, followed the anthropocentric trail blazed by his Cartesian predecessors.
(104) See K.M. Stokes, “Social Ethics and Socioeconomic Transformation.”
(105) Gadamer, Gesammelte Werke, 236.
(106) Bernstein, Beyond objectivism and Relativism.
(107) The reference to the “things themselves" is not to be misunderstood as suggesting that these “things" exist as such and that we must “purify" ourselves of all forestructures and prejudgments to grasp or know them “objectively.” To the contrary, the meaning of the “things themselves" can only be grasped through the circle of understanding, a circle that presupposes the forestructures that enable us to understand.
(108) Ortega y Gasset, History as a System, 217.
(109) José Ortega y Gasset, Meditations on Quixote, 45. Ortega continues that “if I do not save [my circumstance], I cannot save myself.” Morality is non-materialistic, non-rigid, but a constantly vivified quest to find our place in the whole. For Ortega “Life is previous to philosophy and ideology and is ultimately impervious to their failures. Hence life becomes in itself a principle to which man may appeal; it becomes, in a word, morality.”
(110) Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Rorty argues that we do not need philosophy to offer us warranted views of justice, knowledge, or almost anything else.
(111) To this extent Karl Polanyi might be identified as a foundationalist, that is one whose basic conviction is that there is some matrix or framework to which we can ultimately appeal in determining the nature of rationality, truth, reality, goodness or knowledge, that situates an ontological ground. However, every time someone has challenged foundationism and has argued that what is alleged to be fixed, eternal, ultimate, necessary, is open to doubt and questioning. The relativist accuses the objectivist of mistaking what is at best historically or culturally stable for the eternal and permanent. When the foundationalist claims to come up with clear and distinct criteria or foolproof transcendental arguments to support his or her claims, the relativist argues that close examination reveals that there is something fraudulent and ingenuous about such claims. But ever since Plato foundationalists have argued that relativism is self-referentially inconsistent. For implicitly or explicitly, the relativist claims that his or her position is true, yet the relativist also insists that since truth is relative, what is taken as true may also be false. One cannot consistently state the case for relativism without undermining it.
Karl Polanyi, usually not associated with the discourse entertained by the likes of Heidegger, Husserl, etc., is of consequence enabling a foundational socioethical dimension coevolutionary political economy.
(112) Karl Polanyi, “Hamlet”; Idem., The Great Transformation; Idem., “The Essence of Fascism,” in Christianity and the Social Revolution.
(113) F. Schafer, untitled, unpublished manuscript in Text of the Introduction to Democracy, Fascism and Industrial Civilization: Selected Essays of Karl Polanyi, 13.
(114) Heidegger, Being and Time.
(115) Dilthey attempted to make the social sciences more relevant to the problems of his day, and tried to define the characteristics of the human sciences. He tried to preserve the traditional values that were being threatened by the emergence of industrialism and searched for social ethics that would generate social harmony and order. For a reference to Dilthey see: Bernard Eric Jensen, “The Recent Trend in the Interpretation of Dilthey.”
(116) Aristotle's ethics and politics are intricately intertwined with his metaphysics, cosmology, analysis of scientific knowledge (episteme), physics, psychology, and biology. While this is a source of the systematic power of the Ethics and the Politics, it is also problematic for any contemporary appropriation of Aristotle. There is scarcely a claim that Aristotle makes in his Ethics or Politics that does not at once presuppose and draw upon doctrines that are embedded in other parts of Aristotle's corpus. Habermas pointed out, “The ethics and politics of Aristotle are unthinkable without the connection to physics and metaphysics, in which the basic concepts of form, substance, act, potency, final cause, and so forth are developed.... Today it is no longer easy to render the approach of this metaphysical mode of thought plausible. It is no wonder that the neo-Aristotelian writings do not contain systematic doctrines, but are works of high interpretive art that suggest the truth of classical texts through interpretation, rather than by grounding it" (Jürgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, 201-2).
(117) Heidegger, Being and Time, 195.
(118) This Kantian notion is remarkably similar to Maturana's autopoietic appreciation of cognitive processes.
(119) See Theodor Adorno, “The Fragility of Truth" in Negative Dialectics. Walter Benjamin distinguished between two kinds of experience: Erfahrung, something integrated as a purposeful life experience with depth and commitment with existential coherence and, meaning, as opposed to Erlebnis, which is something merely lived through. Erlebnis characterizes the modern age and refers to the inability to integrate oneself and the totality via experience. Erlebnis, is the form of experience of the CEMP, and our relation to not only commodities, but ourselves is characterized by ahistoricity, repetition, sameness, reactiveness. Here Erfahrung is problematized by late modernity's relentless demands. Perhaps it flourishes only in that order of time Henri Bergson called “duration"—long time, time experienced without the awareness of time passing; time to reflect and think critically and possibly act thoughtfully.
We have destroyed duration and with it Erfahrung. Until quite recently most people on the planet lived mainly in terms of duration: time not artificially broken, but shaped around the rhythmic cycles of the Biosphere. The re-production of society, previously effected through the transmission of tradition comes increasingly to depend on the emergence of “systemic mechanisms that stabilize non-intended consequences of action by way of functionally intermeshing action consequences.” Two self-regulating subsystems separate themselves off the life-world—the market and the state. The co-ordination of action comes to depend less and less on a depth of reflective knowledge and shared understandings, and more and more on the impersonal operations of perceptively autonomous subsystems, “techniciz[ing]" the life-world in the sense that the expenditure and risk of consensus-forming processes are obviated while the prospects for purposive-rational action are enhanced" (Jürgen Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, II: 184,263). Moreover, with globalization we have created invisible elsewhere that are as immediate as our actual surroundings. We have fractured the flow of time, layered it into competing simultaneities and in the bargain exchanged reflected knowledge for data immediately suitable to problem solving and profit making. We are left with lives merely to be lived through. (See Walter Benjamin. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”)
(120) Heidegger was critical of this so-called “productionist" approach to knowing thing-in-themselves.
(121) Warren J. Samuels, “An Essay on the Nature and Significance of the Normative Nature of Economics”; also see Idem., Economics as Discourse: The Language of Economists; Idem., “Four Strands of Social Economics: A Comparative Interpretation”; Idem., “The Knight-Ayres Correspondence: The Grounds of Knowledge and Social Action”; Idem., “The Self-Referentiability of Thorstein Veblen's Theory of the Preconceptions of economic Science”; Idem., “`Truth’ and `Discourse’ in the Social Construction of Economic Reality: An Essay on the Relation of Knowledge to Socioeconomic Policy.”
(122) Bhaskar, The Possibility of Naturalism, 22.
(123) Schutz, Collected Papers.
(124) In this way idealism is avoided as a fundamentally individualistic concept because Schutz's theory is a sociological view of knowledge.
(125) Alfred Schutz and Thomas Luckmann, Structures of the Lifeworld, 3-4.
(126) See Gadamer, “The Problem of Historical Consciousness.” The distinction between the present-at-hand and the ready-to-hand is a distinction drawn by Merleau-Ponty in the closing pages of The Phenomenology of Perception.
(127) Gadamer, Truth and Method, xviii.
(128) Georgia Warnke, “Hermeneutics and the Social Sciences: A Gadamerian critique of Rorty”; Hoy, “Hermeneutics.”
(129) Gadamer, Truth and Method, xii.
(130) Gadamer, Truth and Method; Idem., “On the scope and function of hermeneutical reflection”; Idem., “The problem of historical consciousness.”
(131) Gadamer, Truth and Method, 263.
(132) Ibid., xviii.
(133) Ibid., xix.
(134) Ibid., 270.
(135) The phrase “negotiating the social order" must not be interpreted without an appreciation of closure associated with the knowledge/power matrix. The problem of closure and specifically the communicative capabilities of those involved in “negotiating" is subjected to critical examination by Jürgen Habermas. (See Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action; Jürgen Habermas in Peter Dews, Habermas, Autonomy and Solidarity: Interviews with Jürgen Habermas.)
(136) We refer the reader to the earlier section titled: The Objectivation of Reality.
(137) Alfred Whitehead, Process in Reality: An Essay in Cosmology.
(138) Bohm, “The Implicate Order”; Idem., Wholeness.
(139) Bohm’s image offers a particular appreciation of the relation between appearances (which may be misleading, mystifying, etc.), and the concrete reality of society. Such a position breaks with two major traditions in social thought. According to one strand, that is ontological individualism, society is no more than the sum of individuals in it. Social forces and historical change are to be explained in terms of the summation of the actions of individuals. The level of empirical individuals and “events,” which we can observe, experience, describe, and sometimes measure, is ultimately all there is. This view is embraced by much of mainstream economic theorizing where economic behavior is reduced to a few simple essentials. Indeed, science as conceived by Kant, must start from axiomatic principles, that is, from definitions whose validity is intuitively accepted without proof, argumentation or demonstration and which serve the purposes of being principles from which new propositions are deduced. The core neoclassical theory is constructed from axiomatic first principles and is portrayed as an absolute, free from institutional detail, and relevant in all times and places. From Bohm's perspective such a theory gives an impoverished view of reality; one inconsistent with the complex, concrete/implicate reality presupposed in critical naturalism. In the second view, that is ontological holism, the structure explains the individuals in it. This history of individuals and society depend on developmental processes that are conditioned in the structure of society as a totality.
The union of observer and observed undermines the dualism of Descartes where individual units are decomposable into separate parts. To some extent it has always been necessary and proper for man, in his thinking, to divide things up, if we tried to deal with the whole of reality at once, we would be swamped. However when this mode of thought is applied more broadly to man's notion of himself and the whole world in which he lives, (i.e. in his world view) then man ceases to regard the resultant divisions as merely useful or convenient and begins to see and experience himself and this world as actually constituted of separately existing fragments. What is needed is a relativistic theory, to give up altogether the notion that reality is constituted of basic objects or building blocks.
Bohm argues that “relativity and quantum theory agree, in that they both imply the need to look at reality as an undivided whole, in which the observer and his instruments, merge and unite in one totality. In this totality, the atomistic form of insight is a simplification and an abstraction, valid only in some limited context" (Wholeness, 11).
As Bohm emphasizes, “unless we understand the subtleties of wholeness, we will not only divide what can't be divided, we'll try to unite what cannot be united. Real differences and similarities will become hopelessly mixed up" (Ibid., 134). One has to view the world in terms of universal flux of events and processes.
(140) Roy Bhaskar, A Realist Theory of Science.
(141) This proposition bears a similarity to that of Clarence Ayres.
(142) Bhaskar, A Realist Theory of Science, 24.
(143) Ibid.; Idem., The Possibility of Naturalism; Idem., Reclaiming Reality. The methodology of Bhaskar's critical realism, described as “retroductive,” is as follows.
(144) Bhaskar, A Realist Theory of Science, 16.
(145) Ibid., 28.
(146) Nicholas Rescher, Scientific Realism: Critical Reappraisal, 116.
(147) This proposition links to circular complex causality.
(148) Bhaskar, The Possibility of Naturalism.
(149) Model building is not itself a problem; in fact, abstractions are necessary to an asymptotic approach to explanation.
(150) Anthony Giddens, Classes, Power, and Conflict: Classical and Contemporary Debates; Idem., The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Louis Althusser, in his essay “Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatuses,” sought to examine the ways in which bourgeois social relations are reproduced through ideology's ability to shape, and indeed to perform the conscious desires and beliefs of individuals. Jürgen Habermas has concentrated on the “normative structures,” law, morality, world-views, and the formation of individual and collective identities, whose development, he claims, is “the pacemaker of social evolution.”
(151) This is not to suggest that such theory testing is pointless, but that it must ultimately be placed within warranted and meaningful accounts of human conduct.
(152) More than any philosopher before him, Wittgenstein was concerned with the link between language and reality. He wanted to understand how, by emitting sounds, we manage to say something about the world beyond language. By what mechanism or means does language, and hence thought, come to be meaningful? And what are the limits of meaning?
The Wittgenstein of Tractatus Logico Philosophicus pictured the world as virtually coextensive with the range of the language deployed by an individual: what could be said but was not really worth saying, and what could not be said but ached for articulation, was in each case identical in all men, and so significant cultural diversity was not really allowed. All minds, languages and uses of language were actually alike.
Wittgenstein did think that there is a residue of significance not covered by such an account of meaning. For there are things that cannot be said, but only shown. “There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.” This realm includes ethics, aesthetics, philosophy itself. Strictly speaking, utterances of those kinds are literal nonsense, since they cannot be brought under the picture theory of meaning, but Wittgenstein has no doubt about their importance and their legitimacy. The famous last sentence of the Tractatus, “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence,” is perhaps not intended to suggest a dismissive attitude toward the unsayable. It recommends, instead, a reverential, attentive speechlessness in the face of the transcendent. What cannot be put into language can still be apprehended, in quiet obliqueness.
(153) Can we fairly say that “the social" is “the institutional"? What do we mean by “the social" if not “the institutional" for it is the institutional that is understood to be the “glue" that binds society, that gives it coherence and makes it an on-going process. To speak of the reality of society then is to speak of the institutional milieu.
(154) philosophy, for the Wittgenstein of Philosophical Investigations, is not to be conceived in the traditional way as a maximally general science, so that the task of the philosopher is to develop an entirely universal theory of reality. Instead, philosophical work consists in dismantling confusions and mythologies by paying careful attention to our ordinary concepts, resisting the false analogies suggested by our forms of expression. The problems are difficult, not because they concern especially deep features of reality, but rather because it is hard for us to obtain a clear view of what we already know very well. Philosophy, or the search for the ultimate theory, is over, but philosophizing must go on.
(155) See Winch, The Idea of a Social Science.