Books: One-dimensional man: chapter eight

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     circle of the mutilated universe of ordinary discourse, it is at best entirely
     inconsequential. And, at worst, it is an escape into the non-controversial, the
     unreal, into that which is only academically controversial.
+
+### Universal Ghosts
+
+    Contemporary analytic philosophy is out to exorcize such “myths” or
+    metaphysical “ghosts” as Mind, Consciousness, Will, Soul, Self, by dissolving
+    the intent of these concepts into statements on particular identifiable
+    operations, performances, powers, dispositions, propensities, skills, etc. The
+    result shows, in a strange way, the impotence of the destruction—the ghost
+    continues to haunt. While every interpretation or translation may describe
+    adequately a particular mental process, an act of imagining what I mean when I
+    say “I,” or what the priest means when he says that Mary is a “good girl,” not
+    a single one of these reformulations, nor their sum-total, seems to capture or
+    even circumscribe the full meaning of such terms as Mind, Will, Self, Good.
+    These universals continue to persist in common as well as “poetic” usage, and
+    either usage distinguishes them from the various modes of behavior or
+    disposition that, according to the analytic philosopher, fulfill their meaning.
+
+    [...]
+
+    However, this dissolution itself must be questioned—not only on behalf of the
+    philosopher, but on behalf of the ordinary people in whose life and discourse
+    such dissolution takes place. It is not their own doing and their own saying;
+    it happens to them and it violates them as they are compelled, by the
+    “circumstances,” to identify their mind with the mental processes, their self
+    with the roles and functions which they have to perform in their society.
+    If philosophy does not comprehend these processes of translation and
+    identification as societal processes—i.e., as a mutilation of the mind (and the
+    body) inflicted upon the individuals by their society—philosophy struggles only
+    with the ghost of the substance which it wishes to de-mystify. The mystifying
+    character adheres, not to the concepts of “mind,” “self,” “consciousness,” etc.
+    but rather to their behavioral translation. The translation is deceptive
+    precisely because it translates the concept faithfully into modes of actual
+    behavior, propensities, and dispositions and, in so doing, it takes the
+    mutilated and organized appearances (themselves real enough!) for the reality.
+
+    [...]
+
+    Moreover, the normal restriction of experience produces a pervasive tension,
+    even conflict, between “the mind” and the mental processes, between
+    “consciousness” and conscious acts. If I speak of the mind of a person, I do
+    not merely refer to his mental processes as they are revealed in his
+    expression, speech, behavior, etc., nor merely of his dispositions or faculties
+    as experienced or inferred from experience. I also mean that which he does not
+    express, for which he shows no disposition, but which is present nevertheless,
+    and which determines, to a considerable extent, his behavior, his
+    understanding, the formation and range of his concepts.
+
+    Thus “negatively present” are the specific “environmental” forces which
+    precondition his mind for the spontaneous repulsion of certain data,
+    conditions, relations. They are present as repelled material. Their absence is
+    a reality—a positive factor that explains his actual mental processes, the
+    meaning of his words and behavior. Meaning for whom? Not only for the
+    professional philosopher, whose task it is to rectify the wrong that pervades
+    the universe of ordinary discourse, but also for those who suffer this wrong
+    although they may not be aware of it—for Joe Doe and Richard Roe. Contemporary
+    linguistic analysis shirks this task by interpreting concepts in terms of an
+    impoverished and preconditioned mind. What is at stake is the unabridged and
+    unexpurgated intent of certain key concepts, their function in the unrepressed
+    understanding of reality—in non-conformist, critical thought.
+
+    Are the remarks just submitted on the reality content of such universals as
+    “mind” and “consciousness” applicable to other concepts, such as the abstract
+    yet substantive universals, Beauty, Justice, Happiness, with their contraries?
+    It seems that the persistence of these untranslatable universals as nodal
+    points of thought reflects the unhappy consciousness of a divided world in
+    which “that which is” falls short of, and even denies, “that which can be.” The
+    irreducible difference between the universal and its particulars seems to be
+    rooted in the primary experience of the inconquerable difference between
+    potentiality and actuality—between two dimensions of the one experienced world.
+    The universal comprehends in one idea the possibilities which are realized, and
+    at the same time arrested, in reality.
+
+    [...]
+
+    This description is of precisely that metaphysical character which positivistic
+    analysis wishes to eliminate by translation, but the translation eliminates
+    that which was to be defined.
+
+    [...]
+
+    The protest against the vague, obscure, metaphysical character of such
+    universals, the insistence on familiar concreteness and protective security of
+    common and scientific sense still reveal something of that primordial anxiety
+    which guided the recorded origins of philosophic thought in its evolution from
+    religion to mythology, and from mythology to logic; defense and security still
+    are large items in the intellectual as well as national budget. The unpurged
+    experience seems to be more familiar with the abstract and universal than is
+    the analytic philosophy; it seems to be embedded in a metaphysical world.
+
+    Universals are primary elements of experience—universals not as philosophic
+    concepts but as the very qualities of the world with which one is daily
+    confronted.
+
+    [...]
+
+    The substantive character of “qualities” points to the experiential origin of
+    substantive universals, to the manner in which concepts originate in immediate
+    experience.
+
+    [...]
+
+    But precisely the relation of the word to a substantive universal (concept)
+    makes it impossible, according to Humboldt, to imagine the origin of language
+    as starting from the signification of objects by words and then proceeding to
+    their combination (Zusammenfügung): In reality, speech is not put together from
+    preceding words, but quite the reverse: words emerge from the whole of speech
+    (aus dem Ganzen der Rede).7
+
+    The “whole” that here comes to view must be cleared from all misunderstanding
+    in terms of an independent entity, of a “Gestalt,” and the like. The concept
+    somehow expresses the difference and tension between potentiality and
+    actuality—identity in this difference. It appears in the relation between the
+    qualities (white, hard; but also beautiful, free, just) and the corresponding
+    concepts (whiteness, hardness, beauty, freedom, justice). The abstract
+    character of the latter seems to designate the more concrete qualities as
+    part-realizations, aspects, manifestations of a more universal and more
+    “excellent” quality, which is experienced in the concrete.8 And by virtue of
+    this relation, the concrete quality seems to represent a negation as well as
+    realization of the universal.
+
+    [...]
+
+    These formulations do not alter the relation between the abstract concept and
+    its concrete realizations: the universal concept denotes that which the
+    particular entity is, and is not. The translation can eliminate the hidden
+    negation by reformulating the meaning in a non-contradictory proposition, but
+    the untranslated statement suggests a real want. There is more in the abstract
+    noun (beauty, freedom) than in the qualities (“beautiful,” “free”) attributed
+    to the particular person, thing or condition. The substantive universal intends
+    qualities which surpass all particular experience, but persist in the mind, not
+    as a figment of imagination nor as more logical possibilities but as the
+    “stuff” of which our world consists.
+
+    [...]
+
+    Now there is a large class of concepts—we dare say, the philosophically
+    relevant concepts—where the quantitative relation between the universal and the
+    particular assumes a qualitative aspect, where the abstract universal seems to
+    designate potentialities in a concrete, historical sense. However “man,”
+    “nature,” “justice,” “beauty” or “freedom” may be defined, they synthetize
+    experiential contents into ideas which transcend their particular realizations
+    as something that is to be surpassed, overcome. Thus the concept of beauty
+    comprehends all the beauty not yet realized; the concept of freedom all the
+    liberty not yet attained.
+
+    Or, to take another example, the philosophic concept “man” aims at the fully
+    developed human faculties which are his distinguishing faculties, and which
+    appear as possibilities of the conditions in which men actually live.
+
+    [...]
+
+    Such universals thus appear as conceptual instruments for understanding the
+    particular conditions of things in the light of their potentialities. They are
+    historical and supra-historical; they conceptualize the stuff of which the
+    experienced world consists, and they conceptualize it with a view of its
+    possibilities, in the light of their actual limitation, suppression, and
+    denial. Neither the experience nor the judgment is private. The philosophic
+    concepts are formed and developed in the consciousness of a general condition
+    in a historical continuum; they are elaborated from an individual position
+    within a specific society. The stuff of thought is historical stuff—no matter
+    how abstract, general, or pure it may become in philosophic or scientific
+    theory. The abstract-universal and at the same time historical character of
+    these “eternal objects” of thought is recognized and clearly stated in
+    Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World:10
+
+        “Eternal objects are … in their nature, abstract. By ‘abstract’ I mean that
+        what an eternal object is in itself—that is to say, its essence—is
+        comprehensible without reference to some one particular experience. To be
+        abstract is to transcend the particular occasion of actual happening. But to
+        transcend an actual occasion does not mean being disconnected from it. On the
+        contrary, I hold that each eternal object has its own proper connection with
+        each such occasion, which I term its mode of ingression into that occasion.”
+        “Thus the metaphysical status of an eternal object is that of a possibility for
+        an actuality. Every actual occasion is defined as to its character by how these
+        possibilities are actualized for that occasion.”
+
+    Elements of experience, projection and anticipation of real possibilities
+    enter into the conceptual syntheses—in respectable form as hypotheses, in
+    disreputable form as “metaphysics.” In various degrees, they are unrealistic
+    because they transgress beyond the established universe of behavior, and they
+    may even be undesirable in the interest of neatness and exactness. Certainly,
+    in philosophic analysis,
+
+        “Little real advance … is to be hoped for in expanding our universe to
+        include so-called possible entities,”11
+
+    but it all depends on how Ockham’s Razor is applied, that is to say, which
+    possibilities are to be cut off. The possibility of an entirely different
+    societal organization of life has nothing in common with the “possibility” of a
+    man with a green hat appearing in all doorways tomorrow, but treating them with
+    the same logic may serve the defamation of undesirable possibilities.
+    Criticizing the introduction of possible entities, Quine writes that such an
+    “overpopulated universe is in many ways unlovely. It offends the aesthetic
+    sense of us who have a taste for desert landscapes, but this is not the worst
+    of it. [Such a] slum of possibles is a breeding ground for disorderly
+    elements.”12
+
+    Contemporary philosophy has rarely attained a more authentic formulation of the
+    conflict between its intent and its function. The linguistic syndrome of
+    “loveliness,” “aesthetic sense,” and “desert landscape” evokes the liberating
+    air of Nietzsche’s thought, cutting into Law and Order, while the “breeding
+    ground for disorderly elements” belongs to the language spoken by the
+    authorities of Investigation and Information. What appears unlovely and
+    disorderly from the logical point of view, may well comprise the lovely
+    elements of a different order, and may thus be an essential part of the
+    material from which philosophic concepts are built. Neither the most refined
+    aesthetic sense nor the most exact philosophic concept is immune against
+    history. Disorderly elements enter into the purest objects of thought. They too
+    are detached from a societal ground, and the contents from which they abstract
+    guide the abstraction.
+
+### Historicism
+
+    Thus the spectre of “historicism” is raised. If thought proceeds from
+    historical conditions which continue to operate in the abstraction, is there
+    any objective basis on which distinction can be made between the various
+    possibilities projected by thought—distinction between different and
+    conflicting ways of conceptual transcendence? Moreover, the question cannot be
+    discussed with reference to different philosophic projects only.13 To the
+    degree to which the philosophical project is ideological, it is part of a
+    historical project—that is, it pertains to a specific stage and level of the
+    societal development, and the critical philosophic concepts refer (no matter
+    how indirectly!) to alternative possibilities of this development.
+
+    The quest for criteria for judging between different philosophic projects thus
+    leads to the quest for criteria for judging between different historical
+    projects and alternatives, between different actual and possible ways of
+    understanding and changing man and nature. I shall submit only a few
+    propositions which suggest that the internal historical character of the
+    philosophic concepts, far from precluding objective validity, defines the
+    ground for their objective validity.
+
+    [...]
+
+    The objects of thought and perception as they appear to the individuals prior
+    to all “subjective” interpretation have in common certain primary qualities,
+    pertaining to these two layers of reality: (1) to the physical (natural)
+    structure of matter, and (2) to the form which matter has acquired in the
+    collective historical practice that has made it (matter) into objects for a
+    subject. The two layers or aspects of objectivity (physical and historical) are
+    interrelated in such a way that they cannot be insulated from each other; the
+    historical aspect can never be eliminated so radically that only the “absolute”
+    physical layer remains.
+
+    [...]
+
+    I shall now propose some criteria for the truth value of different historical
+    projects.
+
+    [...]
+
+    (1) The transcendent project must be in accordance with the real possibilities
+    open at the attained level of the material and intellectual culture.
+
+    (2) The transcendent project, in order to falsify the established totality,
+    must demonstrate its own higher rationality in the threefold sense that
+
+    (a) it offers the prospect of preserving and improving the productive
+    achievements of civilization;
+
+    (b) it defines the established totality in its very structure, basic
+    tendencies, and relations;
+
+    (c) its realization offers a greater chance for the pacification of existence,
+    within the framework of institutions which offer a greater chance for the free
+    development of human needs and faculties.
+
+### Determinate choice
+
+    If the historical continuum itself provides the objective ground for
+    determining the truth of different historical projects, does it also determine
+    their sequence and their limits? Historical truth is comparative; the
+    rationality of the possible depends on that of the actual, the truth of the
+    transcending project on that of the project in realization. Aristotelian
+    science was falsified on the basis of its achievements; if capitalism were
+    falsified by communism, it would be by virtue of its own achievements.
+    Continuity is preserved through rupture: quantitative development becomes
+    qualitative change if it attains the very structure of an established system;
+    the established rationality becomes irrational when, in the course of its
+    internal development, the potentialities of the system have outgrown its
+    institutions. Such internal refutation pertains to the historical character of
+    reality, and the same character confers upon the concepts which comprehend this
+    reality their critical intent. They recognize and anticipate the irrational in
+    the established reality—they project the historical negation.
+
+    Is this negation a “determinate” one—that is, is the internal succession of a
+    historical project, once it has become a totality, necessarily pre-determined
+    by the structure of this totality? If so, then the term “project” would be
+    deceptive. That which is historical possibility would sooner or later be real;
+    and the definition of liberty as comprehended necessity would have a repressive
+    connotation which it does not have. All this may not matter much. What does
+    matter is that such historical determination would (in spite of all subtle
+    ethics and psychology) absolve the crimes against humanity which civilization
+    continues to commit and thus facilitate this continuation.
+
+    I suggest the phrase “determinate choice” in order to emphasize the ingression
+    of liberty into historical necessity; the phrase does no more than condense the
+    proposition that men make their own history but make it under given conditions.
+    Determined are (1) the specific contradictions which develop within a
+    historical system as manifestations of the conflict between the potential and
+    the actual; (2) the material and intellectual resources available to the
+    respective system; (3) the extent of theoretical and practical freedom
+    compatible with the system. These conditions leave open alternative
+    possibilities of developing and utilizing the available resources, alternative
+    possibilities of “making a living,” of organizing man’s struggle with nature.
+
+    [...]
+
+    the truth of a historical project is not validated ex post through success,
+    that is to say, by the fact that it is accepted and realized by the society.
+    Galilean science was true while it was still condemned; Marxian theory was
+    already true at the time of the Communist Manifesto; fascism remains false even
+    if it is in ascent on an international scale (“true” and “false” always in the
+    sense of historical rationality as defined above). In the contemporary period,
+    all historical projects tend to be polarized on the two conflicting
+    totalities—capitalism and communism, and the outcome seems to depend on two
+    antagonistic series of factors: (1) the greater force of destruction; (2) the
+    greater productivity without destruction. In other words, the higher historical
+    truth would pertain to the system which offers the greater chance of
+    pacification.