Tuesday, December 31, 2019

What is Truth ?




Truth must be understood as 'adequation' --a sort of cooperation between human mind and the created world, which seems to amount to poiesis.

So, we can reject the fact/value distinction, narrative, imagination, emotion, rhetoric etc ARE our only means of access to objective truth.

God and things truly give themselves to be participated in.

They are not obscure noumenon hiding behind phenomena.

To be "true" to things is to go along sympathetically with the inner reality of things. But this requires creativity, language, interpretation.

It is a receptivity which is also creative; an attuned creativity.

This is how Christianity (in its catechistic principles and mysteries) communicates truth, not as a theoretical or definable truth, but as an essential truth that ‘by some mysterious affinity’ is appropriate to humankind.

Such is how John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock explain it.

John Médaille HERE, speaks of reason as fully grasping the whole within contemplation,


“The rose can be “explained” by reduction to its causes, but it cannot be understood in this way. The scientist or the rationalist philosopher can only explain the rose by ignoring its actual being. ….the purchase of a rose does not have causes, but grounds.

When we look at the cosmos as a whole, we see order and beauty, and can only understand them through an aesthetic view. While the parts are governed by a strictly deterministic rationality and can be understood through knowledge of the causes, the whole is governed by order and beauty, and one that cannot be rationalized. The cosmos is cosmetic and like all things cosmetic, it escapes the purely rational in favor of pure contemplation. What it does not invite is some reduction of cosmic order to the four causes, the endpoint of all rational analysis. That is, the cosmos escapes rationalism.

When philosophy moves from the realm of causes to the realm of grounds it also moves from the world of determinism to the world of freedom. In one world, effects are determined by their causes, but in the other, actions are occasioned by their grounds. And clearly, the same grounds can always lead to different actions. The grounds are given, but the responses are, or can be, free.

Of course, abandoning the “knowledge by causes” of an analytic philosophy has its psychic cost. For one thing, we must abandon (or at least demote) the world of secure knowledge and enter the misty world, the cloud of unknowing, the world where humility rather than certainty is the watchword. And it brings us from the world of propositions into the world of art and story, of image and narrative.

In this world, “reason” itself shifts from “firm conclusions drawn from secure propositions” to reason as the ratio between the image and the object, between the narrative and the world. 




Some will allow that stories have an “emotive” power but doubt their necessary hold on reason.

But this gets it exactly backwards: a story might be emotive, but it must be reasonable. That is, a story must be proportional to a view of the world we either have or can imagine having. The story may extend or deepen our rationality, but it must appeal to it in some way, or else it will simply be rejected as untrue or as uninteresting. And it is precisely this proportionality, this ratio, which constitutes reason itself.

This view also solves a problem that bedevils the analyst, namely, why does God choose to speak to us as he does? Why did he give us a sermon on the mount rather than a seminar in the synagogue?

But this question is rooted not so much in bad philosophy as in bad anthropology. For the analytic philosopher, like the capitalist, imagines man to be a “rational” machine. But “rational” here loses it connection with ratio, proportionality, to become something more like “calculating,” either “utilities” (in the case of the capitalist) or “propositions” (in the case of the philosopher.)

But man does not work like that, and neither does God. Or at least, God chose to present himself as artist and historian rather than as philosopher.

He gives us stories, not propositions. And the stories must be believed before they can be used.

That being the case, I must start with the right stories rather than the “right” philosophy. Because that is how all people think and is the only way they can think."

Or, as David Bentley Hart puts it :

"There is no single master discourse here, for the good can be known only in being seen, before and beyond all words. Certain fundamental moral truths, for instance, may necessarily remain unintelligible to someone incapable of appreciating Bach’s fifth Unaccompanied Cello Suite. For some it may seem an outrageous notion that, rather than a collection of purportedly incontrovertible proofs, the correct rhetoric of moral truth consists in a richer but more unmasterable appeal to the full range of human capacities and senses, physical and spiritual." Ethics is in some sense primarily aesthetic and so is irreducible to epistemology (tradition/reason). Philosophical knowledge of God as being itself is similarly inspired by the experience of the total gratuity of finite being.






Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting, that I might not be delivered over to the Jews. But my kingdom is not from the world.” Then Pilate said to him, “So you are a king?” Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. For this purpose I was born and for this purpose I have come into the world— to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice.” Pilate said to him, “What is truth?” After he had said this, he went back outside to the Jews and told them, “I find no guilt in him.”
(John 18: 36-38)













Is all God talk just games ?




“We are not getting rid of God because we still believe in grammar”

- Nietzsche

Is all God talk just games ? Are we trapped in language, truth forever inaccessible ? Are there things with essences ?

Theistic and neoplatonic thought take God as the transcendent ground of which reality is the manifestation, and is a working out of the intelligibility of being, its conformity to the structure of thought (“grammar”).

Thus the great Platonist Eric Perls says,

"The alternative to the principle that to be is to be intelligible is nihilism.

If reality is not as thought must apprehend it, then there is no such thing as reality.

Conversely, if thought is not the apprehension of being, then all thought, in that it never apprehends being, is illusory.

As the alternative to this ultimately nihilistic, scientific- technological stance toward being, St Dionysius offers a contemplative-liturgical stance in which being is not an object for mastery and exploitation but a gift which is received only in being given. "

The intelligibility of the world and the power of thought to lay hold of it is a fact - I do not know how to explain science or mathematics without it.

The world is poetic before it is rational, rhetorical before dialectical…

That the inherently formal and intentional structure of rational thought corresponds so fruitfully to the rational structure of the world, to me, is an indication that something LIKE the causal language proposed in the Aristotelian tradition, in which nature’s deepest rational relations are more like the syntax of a sentence, or mathematical equations, than like mere accidental concrescences of physical forces.

The discrete processes nature, in itself, has something like the structure of intentional thought.

And, if it is correct to understand “being” as in some sense necessarily synonymous with manifestation for intelligibility—and it is—then the God who is also always Logos is also eternal Being.

Monday, December 30, 2019

Does Christian Truth need justification ? Does pain ?




Does Christian Truth need justification ?

Does pain ?

One doesn’t realize one is in pain through observation or deduction, the truth
of being in pain is the pain itself, there is no gap, it is imminent and immediate, self-authenticating.

Christ IS the word, He is One With His speech, could it be likewise ?

Michel Henry criticizes a theory of language that separates the act of saying from what is being said.

“….all philosophies of language agree on the basic relationship between the utterance (what is being said) and the referent (what is being talked about). Language always refers to something external to itself.”

Henry explores the possibility of a language in which this distance would not exist and that would therefore also exclude the possibility of lying and deception.

“The Truth of Christianity, instead, is a thoroughly phenomenological truth in that it does not make a distinction between manifestation and what is manifested.”

Christ’s words need no proof or validation because they are self-revelatory in that “what Christ says about himself is not a word about life which would still have to prove what it says, but it is Life itself—which reveals itself and speaks in his Word [Verbe] in such a way that, Word [Parole] and revelation of this absolute Life, it is the absolute Truth which bears witness to itself” .

They are a self-revelation that has no need of interpretation because it has no hermeneutic distance intervening between speaking and hearing. It is absolute Truth, the Truth in person.

Pain, for example, reveals itself in pain and only in that way, and joy shows itself only in joy. What shows itself in it is what it is, its own content, “showing itself in the appearance it makes of itself, and exhausting itself in this appearance... in the positivity of its bare and irrefutable phenomenological being, which cannot be questioned in any way.”

Life shows itself only in and through life. Its phenomenological structure is the immediate as such, absolute immanence. Its phenomenological effectiveness is its own doing, and what it reveals is itself. 




Henry distinguishes between worldly language and religious.

For Henry, the 'speech of the world is a speech which speaks of that which shows itself to us in this exteriority that is the world' . Henry argues that this kind of speech that relates to only one aspect of life, and that equates 'the appearance' with 'the condition of possibility of speech' is 'nothing other than what the Greeks called Logos' .

Henry asks whether the 'properties of this speech must not also depend on those of this appearance'. Henry's thesis argues that 'with Christianity arises the extraordinary intuition of another Logos - a Logos which is also a revelation, no longer the visibility of the world, however, but the auto- revelation of Life'

It is with this revelation and with this understanding of a new kind of Logos that Henry discovers the second kind of language that is found in the New Testament and that, he believes, must be imparted to humanity.

This new language is the language of suffering. For Henry, 'suffering experiences itself, it is the reason, one must say, that only suffering enables us to know suffering' (94). Henry's discovery of such a language returns us once again to his unique conception of the body as flesh, a conception that he has reiterated time and again in his works on the phenomenology of the body and on material phenomenology.

Henry describes the 'speech of suffering’ as follows:

"It does not discourse on suffering, it does not make use of any word, any sign sound or writing, of any signification, it does not rely on any wholly unreal significations through the appropriate linguistic formations - verbs, conjunctions, etc. Because suffering speaks in its suffering and through it, because it only makes one thing with what it says, a single suffering flesh to which it is delivered without the power to escape or break itself apart, it is then in effect that the speech of suffering ignores duplicity; it is in itself, in the effectivity of its suffering, that it testifies to itself without recourse to any other testimony."

This manner of remaining within oneself is what, according to Henry, philosophy designates as immanence. But the immanence of which Henry speaks here is 'neither a signification nor a concept, comparable ta those used by the speech of humanity' .

Henry suggests that it is by coming into contact with such a language of suffering that Christ's 'Speech of Life'  can be realized and interiorized. He argues that Christ as Word is not something strange and foreign to us, but that, on the contrary, in the same way as 'suffering says nothing other than suffering, the reality of which the Word of Life speaks, is Life itself which is the auto-reve/ation, the objective reality”





Life’s language is not ‘worldly’ language, which is a language of saying and showing.

Every speech of God is a power that speaks itself and shows itself in the effective speaking of the Word (Verbe), but it differs radically from human speech that always refers to the world and to what it shows therein.

Hence Henry speaks of a “speech (parole) of finite life” and a “speech (parole) of infinite life,” according to a precise epistemological axiom: affect = speech (world and life) = the sentiment that is religion. The living being is thus he who speaks that originary Word (Parole), the referent having been brought to the side of life as a normative ethical instance. In this sense we can say without the least doubt that the power of speech (parole) is in its power of conversion, of “metanoia,” insofar as the speech is capable of trans-forming.

In this sense, the arrival of the truth is not announced according to exteriority or visibility, that is, according to the most universal Greek modalities of being-in-the-world (be it given, thrown, or open); rather it is announced on the plane of interiority.








Saturday, December 28, 2019

The hollow Heart of Nietzsche’s fables


David Hart also critiques Nietzsche in The Beauty of the Infinite, the entirety of which can be found HERE, some brief excerpts :

"I shall address neither the factual accuracy of his interpretations of Christian history nor the limits of his grasp of the spectrum of Christian thought. It is more to the point to recognize in Nietzsche’s imaginative probings of the Christian tradition an attempt at narrative subversion; he understood that Christian truth depends first upon a story, and so to meet his critique of Christianity tellingly (so to put it), one must engage it on the field of rhetoric, persuasion, and aesthetic evaluation first, and not that of “historical science” or the discourses of “disinterested” reason.

Christianity, simply said, is false to the world (AC, 125).

But what exactly, one must pause to ask, is the world, and what precisely is nature? The current emphasis in the academy on Nietzsche’s “antiessentialism” and irony often fails to do justice to his equally pronounced inclination toward miraculously broad, but earnest, pronouncements.

Here we must beware of superficiality and get to the bottom of the matter, resisting all sentimental weakness: life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of what is alien and weaker; suppression, hardness, imposition of one’s own forms, incorporation and at least, at its mildest, exploitation……life simply is will to power. (BGE, 203)

The lessons of nature are “agonistic,” they enjoin contest and struggle, presuppose injustice, and have no end but ascent, growth, expansion, and ever greater acquisition. Values, though, that require the suppression of this “nature” rather than its spiritualization and the recognition of its necessity in the economy of culture (albeit in refined form), are the unique achievements of the most depraved world-haters: of, that is, priests.

Whether or not it is the case (as Karl Jaspers claims it is) that in opposing unconditional nature to unconditional morality, Nietzsche knowingly violates his own injunction against absolutes, it is quite beyond dispute that, for him, consonance with nature is the standard against which any morality must be measured.

One can scarcely deny, to begin with, the appearance of a seemingly unreflective naturalism in Nietzsche’s thought, prompting him to employ such words as “life,” “instinct,” and “nature” with a casual assurance that belies his own acute awareness of the cultural contingency of all “truths”; and one might justly wonder whether the life he celebrates is anything more diverting than the upward thrusting of an empty will, blind and idiotic, to which he has arbitrarily ascribed (in an ebullition of romantic enthusiasm) such qualities as richness, vitality, and creativity.

One is often sorely pressed to hear the ironic tone that will indicate to the attentive ear that discreet juncture where an apparently absolutist metaphysics reveals itself as an intentional and exotic feat of fabulation. If Nietzsche’s vision of nature – of being – is simply that of the pagan (Heracleitean, Epicurean, etc.) αγων κοσμικος, if the “life” of which he speaks is essentially appropriation, injury, and overpowering, then of course ontic difference appears in Nietzschean narrative as opposition and contradiction; indeed, difference is appreciably different precisely in the degree to which each force resists, succumbs to, or vanquishes another force: an ontology of violence in its most elementary form.

Not that this is in any sense a startling observation, nor does it somehow tell against Nietzsche’s position; it merely renders dubious the antimetaphysical rigor of his arguments. Can any degree of ironic distance make the Nietzschean critique any less “metaphysical” than what it attacks? Or, rather, can that critique sustain itself with any force or durability unless it stakes itself upon the “truth” of the narrative it invokes? And is then the nostalgia of Janus, at the last, unconquerable?




...this in no way alters the truth that in posing an ontology of violence against the Christian narrative, the advantage that Nietzsche seems to have gained turns out to be, ultimately, only as compelling as any other aesthetic preference. There would be no objection to this, of course, if it were not for Nietzsche’s habit of treating his preference as a more honest, less resentful, less arbitrary, and more truthful account of reality; Nietzsche’s post-Christian counternarrative (which is itself perhaps occasionally tainted by resentment rather than honesty) cannot be denied its power and its appeal, but it should be recognized not simply as critique but as always already another kerygma.

Between Nietzsche’s vision of life and an agon and the Christian vision of life as creation – as a primordial “gift and “grace” – there is nothing (not even the palpable evidences of “nature red in tooth and claw”) that makes ether perspective self-evidently more correct than the other. Each sees and accounts for the violence of experience and the beauty of being, but each according to an irreducible mythos and a particular aesthetics. A battle of tastes is being waged by Nietzsche, and the metaphysical appears therein as a necessary element of his narrative’s completeness; the difference that is immediately noticeable, however, between the Christian and Nietzschean narrative dynamisms is not that the former is indisceptibly bound to the metaphysics of identity and presence, but that the latter is simply more disingenuous regarding the metaphysics it advances.





Still, even within these limits, it is not altogether certain how far Nietzsche’s rhetoric can credibly be taken, for however just his condemnation of pious otherworldliness may be – and the church has seen no end of it – it is the unambiguous renunciation of gnoticism, and not the paradoxical renunciation of classical Christianity, that would correspond most nearly to his account. Indeed, no one familiar with late antiquity and the world in which the gospel was first preached can be unaware that a prevailing spirit of otherworldliness had long been moving inexorably through the empire: not only Gnosticism, but every variety of etherealizing devotion, mystery religions, Eastern esoterica, mystical Platonisms, and the occult; the contempt for the flesh expressed by Valentinus, Ammonias Saccas, Plotinus, the Mithraic mysteries, or even the sanctimoniously ungroomed Emperor Julian was more bitterly world-weary than any of the exorbitant expressions of spirituality to which the church fell prey.

One may agree with Nietzsche that this atmosphere of acosmic and incorporeal religiosity defames the world, and one may acknowledge that it infected every institution and spiritual aspiration of its age, including those of the church; but one should also recognize it as first and foremost a pagan phenomenon: a growing awareness, within an increasingly pluralistic and cosmopolitan empire, that the pagan cosmos was a region of strife, in response to which one could adopt only the grammars of empire or spiritual retreat, and an increasingly fashionable tendency to elect the latter. Christianity suffered from the contagion in some considerable measure, but was also able to resist it as paganism could not, because it had at its disposal means for renarrating the cosmos from the ground up.

But it was also into this crepuscular world of transcendental longings, of a pagan order grown weary of the burden of itself, that the Christian faith came as an evangel promising newness of life, and that in all abundance, preaching creation, divine incarnation, resurrection of the flesh, and the ultimate restoration of heavens and earth: a faith, moreover, whose symbols were not occult sigils, or bull’s blood, or the brackish water and coarse fare of the ascetic sage, but the cardinal signs of fellowship, feasting, and joy: bread and wine.

There was in such a faith an undeniable assault upon pagan values: a certain very Jewish subversion, a rejoicing in the order of creation as gift and blessing, an inability to grow too weary of the flesh, an abiding sense of the sheer weightiness – kabod – of God’s glory and the goodness of all that is; but it is a subversion that Nietzsche does not grasp from the perspective of his rather adolescent adoration of pagan harshness, and so his story grows shrill and unbalanced.

If Christian culture were simply spiritualist, if it endorsed an ethos like that of the Corpus Hermeticum or the libretto of Parsifal, Nietzsche’s indictments of Christian “castratism” would command great force; but for all the cunning and psychological inventiveness of his genealogy, it fails at every juncture to accommodate the complexity of what he wishes to describe.

The orthodox doctrine of creation out of nothingness, and its attendant doctrine of the goodness of creation, led the church (more radically even that Neoplatonism) to deny to evil any ascription of true being, to define it not as an essence or positive force but as mere negation, reaction, a privation of the good (στερησις αγαθου), a perversity of the will, an appetite for nonbeing – but no objective thing among things: all things had to be affirmed, and with equal emphasis, as God’s good creation.





And surely there is something almost tediously wrong in asserting that Christ’s crucifixion has ever figured in Christian tradition as a repudiation, rather than ultimately an affirmation, of the fleshly life Christ was forced to relinquish. “Verily I say unto you, I will drink no more of the fruit of the vine, until that day that I drink it new in the kingdom of God” (Mark 14:25; Matt. 26:29; Luke 22:18) – wine clearly appears here as the perfect and concrete emblem of the beauty of creation and the joy of dwelling at peace in the midst of others: not the wine of Dionysus, which makes fellowship impossible, promising only intoxication, brute absorption into the turba, anonymity, and violence, but the wine of the wedding feast of Cana, or of the wedding feast of the Lamb.

As for Nietzsche’s contention, in On the Genealogy of Morals, that the idea of a soul, an abiding subjectivity lying behind the actions of the nobles – the ravening birds of prey – was the invention of the imaginations of the weak upon whom the nobles visited their spoliations, and who wished to believe in a moral interval, an intermediate ground between agent and action at which they could direct their reproaches, it is unlikely that it can bear very close scrutiny.

Milbank can be credited with the most inspired riposte to this story: no leap of fancy, he observes, is required for the slave to reprehend the master; there is no need for a “metonymic” displacement of moral judgment onto a permanent “self,” because within “noble” actions there is always already a metaphoric tension. The wild warrior of primitive, tribal societies did not simply resemble the eagle or the lion, but actively imitated them, took them for totems; noble naturality was already a cultural invention, the mimetic piety of man-becoming-eagle.

Perhaps, then, the slave has merely seen the truth of metaphor, and so is entirely justified in denying the necessity of noble aggression or the inevitability of life’s boisterous violences, and equally justified in choosing another story, woven from a more pastoral tropology, whose grammar depends not upon the romance of strength and acquisition but upon the primordiality of love. 



Milbank also notes that Nietzsche is little interested in the codes that were already written into heroic society, but imagines the order of that society (rather fantastically) as consisting in the compromises arrived at between powerful men, in the prime of their animal exuberance; and he suggests, further, that another genealogy of subjective interiority might more plausibly locate its origins in the fanatical self-referentiality of heroic culture.

One should probably ask whether the phenomenalistic monism of Nietzsche’s account of noble naturality is not still as firmly wedded to a subjective essentialism as Christian thought could ever be. When, after all, one likens the unfettered power and uncomplicated immanence of the noble in his action to the indivisibility of lightning and the lightning flash, the felicity of the image veils a fairly obvious intellectual crudity.

Lightning, as it happens, possesses very little in the way of linguistic ambiguity, and any given flash has a very particular and uninvolved history; but one need only consider the linguistic, social, and political complexity of human existence, the historicity and metaphorical provisionality of every human “essence,” to recognize in the martial virtues of the noble not simply an original and natural phenomenon, but an effect – and a stage effect, at that. Were the noble warrior simply his own phenomenon, an immediate expression of himself, present to himself in the event of his “unveiling,” what would he be other than an egological substance? Where there is no distinction between action and identity, where no moral space intervenes, is this not still the concrete reality of a self, invariable and absolute, the Cartesian ego transposed into a phenomenalist key? 



Is it not obvious that his account of the self is just as irredeemably “identitial” from the very ease with which Nietzsche can construct analogies of resemblance: lightning, eagles, lions…?

The special pathos of the human is one of ubiquitous metaphor, the condition of being always an interpreted being, never to be traced back to a place prior to culture or language, to a state of nature and simple presence; there is always in the action of the person a formidable absence of the person; an “otherwise” within presence, even the instincts of the flesh, upon which Nietzsche places so great an emphasis, are curiously inadequate in delineating the shape of the human – “totemism” is born with human “nature.” In the end, for all his efforts tot liberate the subject from the labyrinthine metaphorics of the soul, Nietzsche can at best merely prefer the kids of animals that the “noble” chose to imitate.

And while Nietzsche may dispense with such notions as the thing-in-itself or the “soul,” he nevertheless clings to an equally naïve belief in the essential event, the transcendent event of power present in all the universe’s finite transactions: hence, a Christian repudiation of power must turn out to be the strategy whereby power assumes an unprecedentedly potent form. The will to power necessarily remains hidden within, and is indeed advanced by, its own negation. This is metaphysics tout court, more crudely monistic than Hegel’s, and no less dependent on the circular myth of negation.”


John Milbank has also made similar critiques of Nietzsche, which I blogged about HERE

Milbank against The fables of Nietzsche




John Milbank takes on the entire horde of Nietzchean genealogists, we start with his critique. He writes in Theology and Social Theory, Beyond Secular Reason :


“The key to the deconstruction of these stories is simply this: how can the understanding of the event as such, of every event, as a moment of combat, justify itself in merely historicist, genealogical terms? Supposedly, the genealogist is quite neutral with respect to the different sorts of value promoted by different historical cultures: he should be equally suspicious of them all.

Yet in fact, if the transcendental event, every possible event, is a military ploy of assertive difference over against ‘the other’, then cultures closer to realizing this truth will come to be celebrated as more ‘natural’, more spontaneous cultures. Hence Nietzsche celebrates a Homeric nobility delighting in war, trials of strength, spectacles of cruelty, strategies of deception. Unless it is clear that this really is a more ‘natural’ form of life, then the general thesis must fall into doubt, and Nietzsche’s genealogy will appear as itself but another perspective: an account of the rise of Christianity, written from the point of view of the paganism which it displaced.

And, of course, this cannot possibly be made clear. Nietzsche does not even claim that universal human warfare is the upshot of a utilitarian necessity of the struggle to grow stronger and survive, but rather that it is a concomitant of the pure creative will to difference, to self-assertion.

This preference for originality, even at the cost of danger, is purely (as Nietzsche admits) a matter of taste, and Nietzsche is not able to demonstrate that such a taste is more primordially lodged in human existence than the despised desires for security, consolation, mutuality, pleasure and contentment. It follows that only in terms of Nietzsche’s own unfounded hierarchy of values is the primitive noble who tramples upon or patronizes the weak free from blame.

Nietzsche argues that the weak fail to realize that they are dealing, not with a deliberating will, but with a natural force: an activity which is no more culpable than the eagle swooping down upon its prey. In the moment of their invention of a new ‘slave morality’, the weak falsely imagine a subjective doer standing behind the deed, an impossible noble who would be capable of refraining from his noble nature. 

The implication here is that the weak are already ‘Platonists’, that they already imagine that the strong noble possesses essentially their own set of supposedly abiding values. In response to these values he should ascetically restrain his baser, aggressive impulses. However, Nietzsche is quite wrong to suppose that the notion of a ‘moral interval’, of a possible doing or refraining, arises only through the metonymic displacement which substitutes a subject behind the action for the subject which is the action.

For within the latter subject there is already an interval, which is one of necessary metaphoric tension: not only is his action akin to that of the eagle – or the lion, dog or whatever – it consists, precisely, in a totemic identification with the eagle’s swooping flight. The behaviour of the strong man is never spontaneous, it is always imitative of a cultural paradigm of strength, and he never exercises a natural power, or the power of a man which is ‘like’ that of the eagle, but always an invented, simulated power, which is that of the man-becoming-eagle. Moreover, the strong man is already an ascetic, for he is already organizing his natural energies towards the achievement of this single goal.

Given the dedication of the strong to a narrative which invents their strength, it is possible for the weak to refuse the necessity of this strength by telling a different story, posing different roles for human beings to inhabit. This might, indeed, be a questionable, metaphysical story about a disembodied, characterless soul always free to choose, but it could also be a story which simply changed the metaphors: which, for example, proposed a humanity becoming sheep-like, pastoral.




“Because he conceived of a new sort of ‘giving’ virtue that acted non- reactively out of the plenitude of power, St Paul, as Alain Badiou has pointed out, was already more Nietzschean than Nietzsche.He refused the idea that goodness begins in a weak ‘resistance’ to evil (this is why, for him, nomos cannot redeem), whereas Nietzsche failed to see that even the affirmation of the strong over the hordes of the weak was a mode of ‘weak’ resistance to weakness. St Paul also realized that a true metaphysics of power must entail a primacy of unthreatened peace, and of the collective over the individual, since only a reciprocal ‘weak’ receptivity will build a real, shared strength.

Nietzsche declares to be universal a certain condition of primitive humanity: in this case a society which celebrates the agon or playful, competitive struggle. However, Nietzsche’s picture of paganism is also overdone. One can certainly characterize Homeric morality as not clearly distinguishing between ‘good’ and ‘success’, between demonstrations of strength and the achievement of what we should think of as ‘moral’ goals.

Yet this is not to say that it did not possess codes governing what constituted a fair display of strength. Such codes insisted that magnanimity, protection of dependents and hospitality to strangers were the duty of the strong, rather than merely one possible manifestation of their power. A heroic society characteristically ranks different degrees of achievement, has scales of value, and requires certain specific performances from different social strata. Yet these emphases find very little place in Nietzsche’s account: what one gets

Like positivism too, it does not simply privilege and universalize the standpoint of the primitive, it also claims to understand the primitives better than they understood themselves. Thus Nietzsche, first of all, celebrates primitive nobility, but secondly, makes agonistic struggles, understood ‘economically’, the real defining characteristic of their existence.

Nietzsche conceives of the ‘natural’ human state as one of the active flow of a ceaselessly inventive power (not so much the deliberate willing of the subject as, rather, an impersonal force of willing which brings the subject into being).

By contrast, the perverse, merely reactive condition of the Christian subject defines itself, negatively, as a refusal of this natural strength. Clearly, however, this is not how Christianity understands itself: for Christian self-understanding, the primary receptivity of ‘weakness’ is in relation not to the strong, but to God, the source of all charity. And this receptivity is a paradoxical, active reception, because the lover of God is authenticated by the love which she actively transmits to her neighbour. But then one may ask, why should the natural, active, creative will not be understood, as it is understood by Christianity, as essentially the charitable will, the will whose exercise of power is not a will to dominate, or to condescend, but rather to endorse, raise up, increase the capacity of, the human other.




The will to power ? Based on difference?

On the other hand, the Nietzschean understanding of the positive act as the will-to-power is equally problematic. As Gilles Deleuze stressed, the will- to-power negates nothing, and is not entailed by any dialectic of negation, but is rather a pure affirmation of difference.

However, no action ever re- mains safely within the sphere of the doer, but always already emanates beyond the doer, affecting those others by whom he is surrounded. It is at this point that, for a Nietzschean philosophy, difference is defined as oppos- itional difference, a difference which enters the existing common cultural space to compete, displace or expel. Yet if the objective effect of affirmative difference is aggression and enmity, then even if the noble will is ‘without malice’, even if, like the bird of prey, it has no conception of its victim, then there is a transcendental assumption of a negative relation persisting between all differences.

Now, quite clearly we do not live in a world where differences just lie benignly alongside each other, without mutual interference, but, rather, every difference is in itself an ‘overlap’, a disturbance within some area of common space. Yet does one need to interpret every disturbance, every event, as an event of war?

Only, I would argue, if one has transcendentally understood all differences as negatively related, if – in other words, one has allowed a dialectical element to intrude into one’s differential philosophy. If one makes no such presupposition, then it would be possible to understand the act of affirmative difference, in its passing over to the other, as an invitation to the other to embrace this difference because of its objective desirability. At the same time, it would have to be admitted that the reception of this difference by the other itself effects a further displacement, a further differentiation.

The ‘commonness’ which now embraces them both is not the commonplace of the given neutral terrain, nor of the act in its initial concep- tion, but instead of the new differential relationship. The question of the possibility of living together in mutual agreement, and the question of whether there can be a charitable act, therefore turn out to be conjointly the question of whether there can be an ‘analogy’ or a ‘common measure’ be- tween differences which does not reduce differences to mere instances of a common essence or genus. In other words a likeness that only maintains itself through the differences, and not despite nor in addition to them.

To argue that the natural act might be the Christian (supernatural) charit- able act, and not the will-to-power, is therefore to argue that such an ‘ana- logical relation’ is as possible a transcendental conception as the positing of an a priori warfare. And what is more, the former conception permits a purer ‘positivism’, a purer philosophy of difference, still less contaminated by dialectics. For a priori warfare not only supposes an ineradicable presence of the negative, it also supposes its dominance, as giving the only possible meaning-in-common.”



Finally, Milbank writes

"Nietzsche is often pushing liberal theses to their logical conclusions in order to subvert them, and also that, in his bitter opposition to socialism (the ultimate real target of his hostility), Nietzsche was driven to conclude that socialism was grounded in the deepest Western legacy of Platonism and Christianity.

Most recent thinkers on the left (Badiou, Zizek, Negri amongst others) seem to concur that Nietzsche was right in this realization and that Marx failed fully to realize its importance."

In this, he is also referencing the work of the great Marxist thinker Losurdo, and his massive bio - Nietzsche, the Aristocratic Rebel, over 1,000 pgs long...

It's interesting because many Marxist historians note that both the modern state and capitalism are born out of christianity....

Well, yes, but such wasn't inevitable, as if secretly Christianity WAS capitalism just waiting millennia to reveal it's "true" nature...

All these developments are empirically verifiable, but this does not mean that they somehow belong to the ‘essence’ of Christianity. On the contrary, they seem more connected to the management of a failure of the Christian ethos.

David Hart has also made similar critiques of Nietzsche, which I blogged about HERE

Christianity as the speech of suffering that returns us from alienation to Life.





Marx, and Nietzsche too, claimed religion was alienating to life.

So, what is life ?

I mean the raw, immediate, actually experience of living. No one has explored this more then Michel Henry, his material phenomenology is inspired by Marx’s return to life.

Life is affective, “the universal form of all experience in general and as the form of this form.”

Life is also self-appearing, by which he means that the subjective phenomenality (the one Descartes could not doubt) must self-reveal. For something to appear, and in order to avoid an infinite regress, there must be an ability to self-appear, and that is life. However, Henry does not identify life with biological systems.

Indeed, both Marx and Nietzsche are correct that religion CAN BE alienating. As long as religion is understood as merely devotional, it will alienate humanity from reality. However, Christianity also emphasizes reality, real Life. It is in this perspective that Marx speaks highly of Luther:

‘Luther, we grant, overcame bondage out of devotion by replacing it by bondage out of conviction. [...] He freed man from outer religiosity because he made religiosity the inner man.’

Here, the transformation of devotion, which always presupposes a phenomenological distance, to the spiritual domain of conviction, is crucial.

‘The recognition of the spiritual meaning of Lutheran thought leads us to the origins of dialectics, to a living experience’, says Henry.
This living experience is not a devotional experience, so it is not outside itself and needs no exteriority.

This allows us to understand religion as a way of experiencing ourselves, instead of experiencing externalisation and alienation.

Marx of course rejects Luther’s solution but praises his perceptivity on the transformation of devotion into conviction.

Christianity ought to be experience, not devotion or religion as mere representationalism. This is not a moral or hypothetical imperative, but precisely what ‘Christian experience’ means: a re-turn to life, understood as self-experience, without the alienation, without disassociation of the self.

It is a life of acting without ‘knowing’. As Henry already says in his monumental study of Marx, Christ is the metaphysical expression of experienced life itself:

“Christ is the metaphysical expression of experienced life itself: ‘The passion and the sacrifice of Christ reveal the metaphysical law of fundamental affectedness of Life itself.”

And so, Henry’s notion of Christ is defined by inner experiences that are understood phenomenologically instead of psychologically: ‘What Christ teaches is the purity of the heart, an internal and unlimited love. But what is love, that is not ‘realized’ and does not act?

So Christianity is truly a “Marxist" praxis in two senses of the word. First, there is no ideology that must be put into practice and second, life manifests itself in human performances.

Ultimately, Christianity is the performance of invisible life, which is consistent with the way Henry interprets the Marxist notion of praxis. 





Henry reads the form of religion that Marx critiques as little more than a version of idealism that has misrepresented the truth of religious life. Henry writes that Marx's critique of religion is not as radical as it appears; in fact, when it states that religion has reduced consciousness to a 'conscience that has become exterior to itself, self-contradictory, and alienated and dispossessed of itself it would appear to supply his own arguments against a philosophy of representation.

Since such a conscience has become 'the principle creator of religious representations', and since Marx's most fundamental claim against religion is that 'man makes religion, it is not religion that makes man', it is the reduction of religion to such a disempowering conception of representation that Marx is truly critiquing according to Henry.

The basis of religion does not consist of ‘believing in something’, for instance ‘in God’. God is not an object of faith, God is not a mirror either, but God is the immanent vitality of Life itself - in the actual phenomena of lived religious experience in the flesh that is, Henry makes no comment on the ontology or existence of God. Henry says,

“What is religion? Re/igio, this means a bond - whether the etymology is true or false, this is not of any importance, it is a scheme of work. This bond is for me that of a living to life. It is the mysterious and interior bond which makes it so that there is no living without life - a life that is its own and more than its own. Ethics has as its aim for us to make this bond come alive, that is, to make it so that this forgotten bond is re-experienced.”

Henry’s path is toward a conception of “life” as self-manifestation or self- revelation through his elaboration of a material phenomenology for describing the individual's relation to his or her self. Henry calls this material relationship, one that he has tirelessly investigated and elaborated through such terms as praxis, auto- affection, and incarnation, a rejuvenated subjectivity that is life itself.

Life “critiques” – in the Kantian sense– religion by obliging it to discover its real essence.

Therefore contrary to the representation that places everything in the horizon of the world, making the world its truth, Life self-reveals itself.

Henry writes: “Where is a self-revelation of this sort achieved? In Life, as its essence, since Life is nothing other than that which reveals itself – not something that might have an added property of self-revealing, but the very fact of self-revealing as such. Everywhere that something like a self-revelation is produced there is Life.

Everywhere there is Life, this self-revelation is produced. Where therefore does this Life find its essence? It finds its essence in that unique Truth that does not distinguish between what is true and what manifests, therefore merely in the only truth in which the revelation of the self takes place without becoming being nor object of the world.”

Henry argues that the tendency to regard Christianity as promoting such distinct material spaces as a 'beyond' and a 'down below' must veil its recognition of the fact that the individual must 'confront the world', 'not by illuminating an external and formal opposition to it', but coming into contact with it.

Christianity's concentration on the act or the good deed that realizes or fulfills the Commandment of love or the interiorisation of auto- affection, confronts the world 'by transforming it'.






This phenomenality, which he calls “life,” is in his view fundamental in the strong sense, in that it operates prior to the “phenomenality” known by the philosophical tradition, before any “world,” before ontology, and in the end, before phenomenology itself.

“Only if appearing appears first in itself and as such can something, whatever it may be, appear in turn, show itself to us. There can “be” things, real things imbued with real meaning, the world in all its wondrous diversity, only in life.

Pain, for example, reveals itself in pain and only in that way, and joy shows itself only in joy. What shows itself in it is what it is, its own content, “showing itself in the appearance it makes of itself, and exhausting itself in this appearance... in the positivity of its bare and irrefutable phenomenological being, which cannot be questioned in any way.”

Life shows itself only in and through life. Its phenomenological structure is the immediate as such, absolute immanence. Its phenomenological effectiveness is its own doing, and what it reveals is itself.

Henry’s path toward a conception of “life” as self-manifestation or self- revelation, says that, “the source of revelation, the power which produces it, is neither beyond revelation nor its effectiveness, but rather constitutes its effectiveness and hence reveals it.... Life testifies to itself, it itself gives testimony about what it is. The self-witnessing of life, the testimony which it makes concerning itself is its essence, its revelation.”

“Exteriority,” “transcendence,” “the outside,” each of these are for Henry names for the phenomenality of the world, where no revelation, no self, and no life can arise, because this mode of phenomenality reveals what it does always and only outside itself, indifferent to it, and independent of it

Not only can philosophy not determine the conditions of affectivity, it cannot add or subtract from such affectivity by conferring on it a “meaning.” Thus, for example, “no meaning given to the Being of suffering can change anything in its regard or in any way diminish the weight of its presence or parody its ‘truth.’




For Michel Henry, the world has no independent phenomenality outside life. Where would it appear?

In Henry’s view, this conception of the world begins with the “Galilean reduction” - the exclusion of specifically human qualities from its definition of the real, the exclusion of everything that depends upon human sensibility for its reality.

Starting from this premise, and from this definition of reality, one cannot construct “the human” after the fact, with that from which it has been excluded at the outset.

If the access to God is only through life, and if life shows itself only in affectivity, then the exclusion of this mode of revelation, the exclusion of the human, as such, can lead only to the disappearance of God, as such, and also to the unintelligibility of life’s revelation. 


This path is possible, only because revelation constitutes in itself its effectiveness. “The givenness of phenomena is possible only under the condition of a givenness of givenness itself, a self-givenness. This self-givenness is life.”

Where the one deals with this relationship starting from life, the other considers this relationship starting from the living it engenders. Here the distinction between philosophy and theology is the distinction between two different approaches to the same question.





Henry distinguishes between worldly language and religious.

For Henry, the 'speech of the world is a speech which speaks of that which shows itself to us in this exteriority that is the world' . Henry argues that this kind of speech that relates to only one aspect of life, and that equates 'the appearance' with 'the condition of possibility of speech' is 'nothing other than what the Greeks called Logos' . 

Henry asks whether the 'properties of this speech must not also depend on those of this appearance'. Henry's thesis argues that 'with Christianity arises the extraordinary intuition o f another Logos - a Logos which is also a revelation, no longer the visibility of the world, however, but the auto- revelation of Life'

It is with this revelation and with this understanding of a new kind of Logos that Henry discovers the second kind of language that is found in the New Testament and that, he believes, must be imparted to humanity.

This new language is the language of suffering. For Henry, 'suffering experiences itself, it is the reason, one must say, that only suffering enables us to know suffering' (94). Henry's discovery of such a language returns us once again to his unique conception of the body as flesh, a conception that he has reiterated time and again in his works on the phenomenology of the body and on material phenomenology.

Henry describes the 'speech of suffering’ as follows:

"It does not discourse on suffering, it does not make use of any word, any sign sound or writing, of any signification, it does not rely on any wholly unreal significations through the appropriate linguistic formations - verbs, conjunctions, etc. Because suffering speaks in its suffering and through it, because it only makes one thing with what it says, a single suffering flesh to which it is delivered without the power to escape or break itself apart, it is then in effect that the speech of suffering ignores duplicity; it is in itself, in the effectivity of its suffering, that it testifies to itself without recourse to any other testimony."

This manner of remaining within oneself is what, according to Henry, philosophy designates as immanence. But the immanence of which Henry speaks here is 'neither a signification nor a concept, comparable ta those used by the speech of humanity' .

Henry suggests that it is by coming into contact with such a language of suffering that Christ's 'Speech of Life' (113) can be realized and interiorized. He argues that Christ as Word is not something strange and foreign to us, but that, on the contrary, in the same way as 'suffering says nothing other than suffering, the reality of which the Word of Life speaks, is Life itself which is the auto-reve/ation, the objective reality”




As to Marx’s larger sociological critique of religious alienation, John Milbank sums up,

“As to the account of the economic processes themselves, what Marx purports to provide is an account of how, in this area also, human beings have been subject to ‘religious’ illusion. But in actual fact this illusion is only ‘exposed’ within the framework of a humanist/positivist metanarrative which itself reflects a variant of religious immanentism.

Marx’s critique of the ‘hieroglyph’ remains within the terms of antique materialism, which failed to perceive, as we saw earlier in the chapter, that every cultural reality is neces- sarily ‘hieroglyphic’ insofar as it deploys meanings which are always inde- terminate and therefore escape its total control.

Marx himself is actually close to recognizing this, because he knows that all specifically economic (as opposed to technological) categories fall within the realm of signs, and he knows, also, that the capitalist illusion is not an illusion in the sense of an appearance concealing an underlying reality (as commentators often wrongly suppose) but rather an illusion in the sense of a ‘dramatic fiction’ which human beings enact without recognizing its fictional character.

This is clearly the case, because capital only has power over labour to the degree that the ‘language of commodities’ is generally accepted, and labour itself is fetishized as generalized, quantifiable labour time. There is only power through illusion, and all that really gets concealed is the unreal, imaginary character of value, the commodity and fetishized labour.


However, Marx accepts too readily the notion of illusion, and fails to reflect that to be human, or to be a cultural being, is necessarily to inhabit a fiction. Merely to come to recognize the fictional character of capitalism need not lead one to denounce it as ‘illusion’, nor as the irrational seduction of humanity by its own signifying powers.

To take the three key instances of fetishization, alienation and reification: it is true, in relation to fetishization, that to make different commodities and kinds of labour ‘equivalent’ in terms of abstract quantifiability cannot be rationally justified; it is true, also, that not all cultures operate this mode of equivalence, which is uniquely well adapted for calculation and predictability. However, all cultures operate, in their social relationships, some principle of equivalence, of ‘equalizing the un- equal’ – this undergirds punishment and compensation as much as barter and gift-exchange – and none of these principles of equivalence can be rationally founded. In this sense, the capitalist ‘economy’ – or simultaneous disposition of forces and meanings-as-equivalences – is no more rational or irrational than any other economy.”

Can science know life ? 

Michel Henry says no.



Paul Klee Twittering machine

Michel Henry, the French philosopher who studies the material phenomenology of life, says no, life is precisely what science DOESN'T know.

Henry notes that, in order to study nature, Galileo, and later Descartes, decided to bracket out all subjective phenomena - colors, feelings - anything he supposed appeared only in the mind.

This method, however, turned into an ontology, where only “objective” things, like physical measurements, abstracted from our actually experience of them, became “real” things, or at least they were privileged, whereas everything appearing in the mind, and even consciousness itself, became an effect of these physical processes, and epiphenomenon.

Well, strip the cosmos of its lived phenomena of life, then use this method to study life, and one will find only death.

Henry departs from Descartes’ substantive mind.

“Life is not something, but rather a knowing.”

For Henry, life is a form of knowledge. What does life know? It knows joy and suffering.

This form of knowledge is non-spatial, non-representable, but it permeates all that is undertaken.

Perceiving colors, handling an instrument, caressing a body, are all experiences whose phenomenal manifestation is a modulation of the two fundamental tonalities of life: joy and suffering. That is why all life is tinted:

“the blue of the sky, the green of trees, the serene or threatening character of a landscape, the sweetness of scents, the beauty of shapes of old cities or the dread in the monstrous suburbs of our time.”

From a normative perspective, Henry claims that the knowledge of life is the primordial knowledge. The evolution of modern scientific knowledge has inverted the orders of knowledge, until it reached a point where it tries to derive the lived experience from an objective third person perspective, of which the hard problem of consciousness is the ultimate expression: how can a phenomenal subject even exist if we start from the natural physical world as conceived by the mind?








In his short essay, What Science Doesn’t Know, found HERE, Henry writes :

“By dismissing the sensible qualities of the world, Galilean science actually abolishes this absolute phenomenological life (the immediate experiencing of oneself present in every fear, in every pleasure, in every sensation, etc.) from its research. And here one

clearly sees that two paths open up before the human mind and that, choosing one or the other is one’s destiny: one must decide between life and death.

Regarding appearances as illusion is the supreme illusion. For every appearance is proof of itself by the very fact that it appears:

appearance is, in its appearing, the basis of every assertion and of every possible truth.

Thus in his last great work Husserl demonstrated that all the idealities and conceptualizations of science must refer to this sensible world that they are supposed to explain, they are erected on the previously given ground of the sensible world, assume it and only have meaning in relation to it.

What is more, these idealities and conceptualizations do not exist in nature: for example, neither circles nor squares are found in nature; instead there are only curves and sensible outlines from which the geometric shapes evolve through a process of ideation.

However this process is an act of consciousness, of that very subjectivity that has been presumed to be illusory and without which science and all its conceptual edifices would not exist.

Further, by creating from the sensible givens of the world the intelligible base that must be accounted for, science develops entirely inside of this experience of the world whose fundamental structures—space, time, causality, etc.—it presupposes.

More radically it assumes that the world itself, i.e. this space of light spread before our gaze, this horizon of visibility inside of which all that we are able to see—whether with our eyes of flesh or with those of the mind—appears.

In other words, scientific experience develops in the prolongation of perceptual experience, as it perceives only objects. Being an object means to be placed before, to become visible, to appear to an eventual gaze, in such a way that it is the fact of being placed before, it is the objectivity of the object, the exteriority of the world that creates visibility, the phenomenality of all that is found placed in this condition of being an object.

What then is an experience in which there is neither an object nor a world, and the content of which has escaped both the perceptual gaze as well as the gaze of science?

Such however is the essence of life, the phenomenological life that experiences and realizes itself interiorly without ever hollowing out, between it and itself, the distancing of a world (l’écart d’un monde), the place of any object. Life that can neither be seen nor understood in the sense of science, certainly, but which is no less unquestionable or incontestable, and which on the order of a fear, desire or sensation is found to be necessary, in that we experience it, and as we experience it.

This then is what science does not know: our life. This life is not something (as is the case for biological life for example) but rather a knowing, the first and most essential knowing of all, the one that presupposes all the others. For every knowledge by which we

know the world (whether it is a question of the sensible world or of the world of geometrico-mathematical idealities)—seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding—would not be if they weren’t first living, if they didn’t experience themselves interiorly and thus know themselves with a nonobjective and irrepresentable knowledge in the very act by which they see, hear, understand, etc.”



Sunday, November 10, 2019

Ruskin's conservative socialism







John Ruskin was an old Tory Victorian who advocated a kind of artistic right-wing socialism. Deeply paternalistic, even misogynistic, he was deeply concerned with creating a HUMAN world, one that took art and craft seriously. Early on he "de-converted" from Christianity for 20 yrs and concentrated on economic policies to help the poor, before regaining a mystical religiously in late life. His vision of a conservative socialism contrasts sharply with Marx, who, in his later years, become obsessed with productivity and industrialization, blind to the need for beauty and dignity in work. Ruskin was much moire radical, with an entirely different vision of what an economy ought to be.

Below I give excerpts from John Milbank's Social Theory, where he explores Ruskin against Marx :

“….unlike Marxist and Fabian socialism, which have proved unable to resist capitalist modernity, most nineteenth-century socialisms were ‘post- modern’, in the sense that they had absorbed some measure of a romantic, Counter-Enlightenment critique. They did not, like Marxism, locate socialism (or for Marx, ‘communism’) as the next stage in a narrative of emancipation, or the genesis of human autonomy. On the contrary, the enlightened goal of a self-regulation of the will, according to its own natural, finite desires and capacities, was seen as of one piece with the operation of political economy. The rejection of the latter could not, then, involve a ‘dialectic of enlightenment’, or an immanent critique of the present ideas of freedom.”

Milbank gives Ruskin as one example, he says :


“…..capitalism appeared to Ruskin as a kind of apostasy, the most remarkable ‘instance in history of a nation’s establishing a systematic disobedience to the principles of its own religion’.

Here, capitalism is not regarded as a partial development of freedom, but instead as a contingent pseudo-progress, whose emergence was the shame of Christendom. For Ruskin, capitalism was supremely the practice of a false knowledge, which made self-interest moderate self-interest without the intervention of virtue, and secured public order without the architectonic of justice. The triumph of political economy meant the promotion of certain quasi-virtues of busyness and frugality in place of true political phronesis and Christian charity. And the displacement of the ethical in the public sphere was held to be coterminous with the triumph of secularity. After the retreat of public religion, a vacuum was created, in which a merely ‘economic’ regime could ‘manage’ a society, even without moral or religious consensus.

Although this was a strictly moral critique of capitalism, one cannot say, with Marx, that this sort of socialism is blind to history. In the last analysis, what Marx meant when he accused other socialisms of being unhistorical was that they did not accept his own deduction to utopia from supposed laws of historical immanence. Ruskin never entertained any conception of this sort, but his moral critique precisely coincides with a historical vision which attempts to penetrate the level at which capitalism has inserted a completely different logic of human action, one which seeks to displace moral with ‘amoral’ regulation, or in Ruskin’s words substitutes ‘balances of expediency’ for ‘balances of justice’.

This level of historical change was not penetrated by Marx, precisely because he read back capitalist amorality as the supposed ‘economic base’, always finally determinative in every human society. By contrast, Ruskin realizes that the ‘knowledge’ embodied in political economy, far from being the ideological dress of underlying ‘material’ processes, is but the condensation and abridgement of the system of knowledge which capitalism itself consists of.

This knowledge, for Ruskin, is actually the first historical instance of ‘nescience’ because it does not promote, directly, a maximum excellence, but instead advocates the deliberate exploitation of differences in knowledge and ability. Relative failure, weak ability, bad craftsmanship and stupidity have a definite function for capitalism in the reducing of production costs and the extension of wealth. This new mode of knowledge is also a new, amoral, ‘moral economy’ which (as we saw with Hume and Smith in chapter 2) made a sharp division between the private and consumerist sphere of ‘natural’ sympathies based on supposedly universal feeling, and the ‘artificial’ sympathies which arise in relation to the positive facts of property, possession and political power. The ‘artificial’ sympathies do not generate a genuine public virtue, but only a Machiavellian virtue, which exalts, in a new mode, a heroic, regulated discipline.

In contrast to the Scots (but in continuity with a Scottish tradition of reflection on wealth and virtue, turned critical of political economy with Thomas Carlyle), Ruskin desires an integration of wealth with genuine virtue. He notes that ‘manly character’ and ‘production and exchange’ are not easily reconciled. Yet (one could add) this commonplace is specific to a classical legacy which subordinates the productive household to political relations in the city between property-owning males: economic production is ultimately subordinate to political virtue, yet production itself is not a virtuous activity.

By contrast, it is the post-Christian tendency to merge more perfectly the conceptions of polis and oikos – to make the household with its ‘pastoral’ oversight of material well-being the basic unit of government, and to include women, children and slaves as full members of the ultimate religio-political community – which permits us to demand that production and exchange discover within themselves immanent norms of virtue and paideia.

The trouble is, Ruskin notes, that trade and manufacture have never been seen as included within a Socratic ‘discipline of death’; it has not been recognized that there are here responsibilities for subordinates, and for the quality of products, which at the limit imply the same kind of sacrifice which we recognize as involved in soldiering, teaching or medicine.


Likewise, Ruskin wanted questions of the aesthetic quality of objects produced or exchanged to be coordinated with questions of ethical goals for social subjects. Economic value, he says, is properly ‘the possession of the valuable by the valiant’.

A just exchange of goods and labour presupposes a match between the ethical capacities of persons, and the interpreted excellence of material objects. The virtuous deserve beautiful, truly useful artefacts; artefacts of fine quality deserve a good use. This concern for the cultivation of high aesthetic standards, correlated with a certain style of life, has no equivalent in Marx, whose interest in creativity extends only to subjective ‘freedom of expression’ and who can be contemptuous of ‘craft idiocy’. Ruskin wanted to abolish ‘the economic’ as a realm of indifference to objective goodness, beauty or truth, whereas Marx merely wanted to fulfil it. 




Still more clearly than Hegel, Ruskin divined that capitalism was the logical management of the death of excellence, or the belief that one can discover through art and practice the ‘proper end’ of things. The clear implication is that only in the invocation of transcendence can there be a critique of capitalist order, whose ‘secularity’ is its primary character.

Moreover, Ruskin did not altogether fail to indicate how this concern to ethicize manufacture and exchange can go in an egalitarian direction. Although he stresses the all- importance of parental and pastoral roles, he wishes to remove them from their connection with wealth and privilege, and there is even a suggestion that the true character of these roles will only be secured if they are disseminated, and become as far as possible reciprocal in a kind of clerisy of all citizens.

The real point of necessity for hierarchy in Ruskin is the transitive relationship of education, where an unavoidable non-reciprocity nonetheless works towards its own cancellation. Liberalism, by contrast, tends to disguise this necessity, because it makes normative the spatial relationships between adult, autonomous subjects, a habit which received its reductio ad absurdum in William Godwin’s vision of a world of finite immortality, without sexual passion, without birth, and without death.
In this sense, because Christian socialism maintained a commitment to collective norms of justice which can only be handed down through time, it had a commitment to hierarchy.

But it was also capable of realizing that an arbitrary hierarchy, of a non self-cancelling kind, is partially responsible for the formation of the modern machine of abstract power. For example, Charles Pe ́guy later blames social hierarchies, and especially the ecclesial hierarchy, for a ‘reversal’ of the divine pedagogic mystique, such that right from the Church’s very foundation the energies of the many were recruited to maintain the securities of the few.

Likewise Ruskin does not merely celebrate the Middle Ages as a lost era of ‘true craft’. Just as importantly, he invokes this period in a purely allegorical fashion, when he wishes to bestow ‘kingly’, ‘queenly’ and ‘noble’, rather than merely mercenary, attributes upon the sphere of work and trade.

There is a double profundity here: first, Ruskin grasps that if work and trade are to be transformed into ‘virtuous’ spheres of self-realization, then the only way for us to think this is in terms of an allegorical recuperation of past ‘aristocractic’ values. But secondly, the implication of this typological appeal to medieval kingship and warfare, rather than to medieval art, is that the latter was not adequately prized and promoted as a sphere of virtue. By not sufficiently integrating poesis with ethical praxis, both antiquity and the Middle Ages were themselves gradually nurturing the horrors of modernity.

Ruskin ‘gothicizes’ in the obvious sense of favouring gothic ornamentation, but he also gothicizes in a ‘gothick’ sense of invoking the horrors perpetrated by lazy and absent aristocratic fathers, never fully true to their aristocratic role, which is to be virtuous. This ‘gothick’ plot is only to be finally resolved when aristocracy is democratized, and nurtured within the realm of labour.

Ruskin, therefore, was no mere medievalizing reactionary. Instead, he proposed something altogether new: a society where aesthetic perception of nature, and public standards of fine design, are seen as the vital keys to public virtue, together with the upholding of a sense of transcendence which goes along with a common sense of things ‘in their proper place’ and ‘rightly finished’. (Is this not a materialist religiosity?)

The example of Ruskin shows how socialism was able both to appeal to the fragmentary justice of the past – the medieval monasteries – and to connect present secular injustice with past social and ecclesial shortcomings."

"Marx," Milbank ends his thoughts with, "invented an impossible naturalistic mysticism, at once anarchic, and technocratically totalitarian."