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| 1997 copyright |
Despotism may govern without faith, liberty cannot. Religion is much more necessary in the republic which they set forth in glowing colors than in the monarchy which they attack; it is more needed in democratic republics than in others. How is it possible that society should escape destruction if the moral ties not strengthened in proportion as the political tie is relaxed? And what can be done with the people who are their own masters if they are not submissive to the deity?
--Alexi de Tocqueville (29)
[M]arx, as much biblical prophet as political philosopher, brokes decisively with Hobbes and the Enlightenment mainstream by brining religion back into politics. The Marxist sovereign has the duty to . . . end the class domination and social oppression that has marred all previous history. When this overweaning objective is joined to the general enlightenment drive for social perfection, the result is an ideological crusade for an earthly paradise – in effect, a secular religion. By resurrecting the eschatological element that Hobbbes had tried to exclude from politics, Marx unleased a new era of quasireligous warfare, both withing and between states. . . . As a political doctrine, Marxism therefore combines the autoritariansim of Hobbes with the very worst aspect of premodern politics: the religious element that Hobbes tried so hard to get rid of. (42)
The usual way of putting it is to say that women have escaped an anomalous and inferior status to take their rightful place in the modern world. But it would probably be more accurate to say that capitalism has finally succeeded incorporating the last major class to resist the blandishments of the market system. (52 )
There is an interesting parallel here with the science of economics as developed by Adam Smith, Ricardo and Malthus, which seemed to demonstrate with rigorous logic that the ‘laws of production’ doom our civilisation to final ruin. At this juncture, John Stuart Mill pointed out (in Principles of Political Economy) that although we cannot evade the rigid laws of production—which lead to overpopulation and the ‘rat race’—there is no law of distribution: we can do what we like with the wealth, once it has been created, and use it to build a less self-destructive society.
The idea of a creative unity transcending the opposites from which it arises is at the heart of Coleridge’s insights into polarity, something again which he shared with Goethe. Coleridge claimed that if he were granted ‘a nature having two contrary forces, the one of which tends to expand infinitely, while the other strives to apprehend or to find itself in this infinity,’ he could cause ‘the world of intelligences with the whole system of their representations’ to rise up before us. Coleridge’s two forces are Goethe’s ‘systole’ and ‘diastole’ and Schelling’s ‘expansion’ and ‘contraction’. They form the centre of what Owen Barfield, who wrote a book devoted exclusively to what Coleridge thought, called ‘polar logic’.
Nothing and nobody exists in this world whose very being does not presuppose a spectator. In other words, nothing that is, insofar as it appears, exists in the singular; everything that is is meant to be perceived by somebody. Not Man but men inhabit this planet. Plurality is the law of the earth.
There was no escaping decisions based on man’s place among others. “To be conscious of himself, of his fate in the world, is the specifically human quality in human existence.” Or as Arendt put it, “The modern age, with its growing world-alienation, has led to a situation where man, wherever he goes, encounters only himself.”
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