on
Morality and the Grounds of Social Critique
Kristian Klockars 9.2 1999
paper presented at the North American Sartre Society Tenth biennale conference in Los Angeles 1999
1. Introduction
2. Sartre's ethics of praxis
3. The intelligibility of praxis and Sartre's normative
outlook
4. Concluding remarks
Bibliography
tillbaka till Inriktning Filosofi etc.
tillbaka till KK's
hemsida
back to the website of Kristian Klockars
In my recently published book – Sartre's Anthropology as a Hermeneutics of Praxis (1998, Ashgate) – I characterise the standpoint of the later Sartre 'a hermeneutics of praxis'. The book's approach is reconstructive: its primary intention is to locate aspects of Sartre's philosophy that I think deserves both recognition and development, if viewed from a certain point of view. It is thus an attempt, so to speak, 'to go beyond Sartre by the means of Sartre', and the generalised standpoint of a hermeneutics of praxis is both indebted to Sartre, but relatively independent of his actual position and opinions. In my subsequent work, one purpose is to work out the options that are opened up by such a generalisation.
The thematic constellation that informs my perspective mainly consists of the question of the grounds of social critique, the relation between ethics and critical social theory and the hermeneutical heritage in philosophical thought.
By ‘a hermeneutics of praxis’ I generally mean:
(1) an outlook that claims praxis to be the paradigmatic, conceptual key in an ontology of human being-in-the-world, and which takes the question 'how we are to understand what we do', or the intelligibility of praxis, as the entrance gate to questions concerning the intelligibility of human, social reality. It thus differs from a hermeneutics that takes linguisticality as paradigm.
(2) a conception that accepts historicity and historically tied reflexivity as its mode of investigation. As Sartre's says in Critique de la Raison dialectique: a critical investigation must "… bear on the nature of bonds of interiority … on the basis of the human relations which define the investigator" and it "… reveals itself only to an observer situated in interiority, that is to say, to an investigator who lives his investigation both as a possible contribution to the ideology of the entire epoch and as the particular praxis of an individual defined by his historical and personal career within the wider history which conditions it" (CDR, p. 38).
I have elaborated more fully on these issues in my book. In this paper I shall focus on the problems of morality and the grounds of social critique, primarily on the basis of Sartre's praxis-philosophical standpoint in Critique de la Raison dialectique and other relevant writings of that period. However, before I go into the actual content of Sartre's discourse on ethics, I shall, in order to set the background stage, give a brief account of the contemporary debate in ethics and critical social theory.
I shall list two series of opposite standpoints, one that mainly concerns ethics, the other from critical theory. First, neo-Kantian approaches, for example of John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas, put their emphasis on the investigation of the concept of justice. Thus, according to Habermas, today only moral questions concerning the formal content of justice, in interpersonal relations and collective will-formation, allow to be treated by a philosophical ethics, whereas all questions concerning the good life must be decided on an individual basis. The neo-Kantians combine a rather strict limitation of possible themes to be investigated with a view that philosophy mainly deals with what may be treated on a universal level.
On the other hand, neo-Aristotelians, such as Gadamer, Ricoeur and Charles Taylor argue that the primary domain of ethical reflection is situated in the relation between the abstract universality of norms and culturally embedded, historical situations. A focus limited to general principles has too little to say about this domain, and both Gadamer and Ricoeur singles out the Aristotelian concept of phronesis, or the practical wisdom involved in our reflective deliberations in concrete circumstances, as primary domain of ethical reflection. According to such a perspective, if philosophical ethics is to remain of any interest, it must be able to leave the domain of possible universality, and engage in questions that might not have any stronger status than that they participate in the dialogue we carry out with ourselves, as Gadamer says.
In contemporary critical theory, again, we might trace an opposition
between accepting the use of ethical ideal-models as the normative
ground of critique and a historising morality of unmasking that
rejects such idealism. According to Habermas, critical social theory must
involve itself in working out the possible normative ideals that govern
its diagnostic reflections. In a morality of unmasking, on the other hand,
the focus is interpretative-diagnostic and intended to unmask negative
traits of social life, but it does not strive to formulate basic ethical
principles. For example, according to Foucault, it is true that such a
perspective has a normative outlook, but this does not imply that it has
to be organised around an explicitly expressible ethical ideal. The main
hope involved is that we by the means of unmasking and historical re-interpretation
may contribute to minimising the power of dominant interpretations, and
may re-cast the perspective of our lives by the means of alternative views
on reality.
It is towards the background of this constellation that I want to approach Sartre's challenge. I claim that Sartre's standpoint, in Critique and in his writings on an ethics of praxis in the 1960's, has things in common with all of these positions.
On several central points Sartre's second attempt at developing an ethics shows kinship with an Aristotelian perspective on ethical reflection. Sartre proposes to develop an ethics of praxis, aiming at a standpoint on concrete morality. As he says in the extract from the Rome lecture published as "Détermination et liberté": "… if we do not define ethics at the level of man in society – of man at work, in the street or at home – we fall into a parasitical form of literature which may be easily accounted for in terms of the social function of the moralist" ("Determinism and freedom", p. 241). By 'the moralist' Sartre seems to mean someone who diagnoses reality in terms of ethical values, but only from the viewpoint of the values and not in terms of the historical conditions of realisation.
A concrete morality locates its paradigmatic point of view in the relation between praxis and history. According to Sartre, it must incorporate both a normative perspective that necessarily contains universal elements and an interpretative-diagnostic perspective on the concrete circumstances. Norms, Sartre claims in a Kantian manner, are unconditional possibilities, and as such, they are dressed up in a universal form. However, this universality originates from our way of imagining ourselves beyond the real in terms of the possible. Concrete action – the domain of morality – can only be real and concrete in history. Historicity is a condition that makes practically impossible any attempt at the full and complete realisation of a norm.
The intelligibility of this co-presence, of the necessary universality of norms and the necessary particularity of the concrete, is the starting point for ethical reflection. It is probably this situation Sartre has in mind in Saint Genet when he writes that "… morality is for us inevitable and at the same time impossible. Action must give itself ethical norms in this climate of nontranscendable impossibility" (Saint Genet p. 186n, fr. 177). Thus, in "A Plea for Intellectuals" Sartre characterises the problem as aiming at the practical mediation between the universal and the particular, and this brings to mind Aristotle's idea of practical wisdom.
Sartre, of course, does not use the concept of practical wisdom, but stays firmly within an action-centred vocabulary. At the far end of Sartre's conception, we thus find the notion of invention. Invention, Sartre says, is the real moment of morality. By this he transforms his earlier and often misinterpreted claim that ethics, in the last instance, is a matter of choice, into a framework that better fits his praxis-philosophical standpoint, while preserving the claim that morality can never, and must never, be turned into a rigid system of commands.
But if invention is the real moment of morality, and if there is to
be any sense in engaging in such an ambitious project as an anthropology
and in developing a highly sophisticated and laborious progressive-regressive
method, as Sartre does in Critique, it must surely be possible to
distinguish between morally better and worse inventions. On what grounds
are we to make such enlightened decisions? This brings us to the question
of normative ground.
3. The intelligibility of praxis and Sartre's normative
outlook
At the heart of Sartre's anthropology stands the question of the intelligibility of praxis, and its continuation in the question of the intelligibility of history. In ordinary language, these may be said to concern the question 'how we are to understand what we do'. Although this question is primarily posed in epistemic terms, their ethical dimension is obvious. Since ethics is concerned with the grounds of our decisions of action, the question how these actions are to be understood must be of primary importance. On the other hand, a purely epistemological discourse is naturally not sufficient to unravel the problem of morality
On the basis of Sartre's investigation, one can claim that a study of the intelligibility of praxis must go in three different directions: (1) an ontology of praxis intended to clarify on a formal level the bond of interiority between praxis and world, (2) a social theory that incorporates a normative or diagnostic framework and (3) concrete historical interpretations.
Sartre investigates the intelligibility of praxis on the level of meaning. According to Sartre, the meaning of an action is not reducible to the intentions of the agent. Meaning depends on, and must be studied in terms of, the contextual, social field in which praxis is inserted. In Notebooks for an Ethics, Sartre writes: "The movement of praxis does not consist in defining a world over and against oneself but in plunging into a world that closes in around you. The world which is the object lays siege from all sides to the subject that unveils it and returns his image to him" (Notebooks for an Ethics, p. 356). In "Search for a Method" Sartre discusses the example of a black ground-crew member at an airbase that one day steals an airplane. As a black person, he was not allowed to fly. Sartre now argues that, although the person had no conscious intention to rebel against the system – he was simply obsessed by the idea of flying – his action carries the social traits of being 'a protest against racism'. All our actions are in this way signified by a complexity of social meanings that are independent of our intentions.
The epistemic problem thus consists in the attempt to clarify this complexity of meanings, of unravelling the relations between intentional projects and the layers of meaning that originate from the social field. This task can be approached by the means of the progressive-regressive method.
The ethical problem, again, concerns what would be the best thing to do if meaning is constituted in this way. Thus, the man in the example would be involved in ethical reflection if he would (1) try to discover beforehand the possible social meanings of his action, (2) reflect on a hierarchy of norms and (3) try to reconcile understanding and the normative outlook in a concrete action that mediates the two.
What, then, constitutes a normative ground in Sartre's conception? Sartre
is not very explicit on this matter – indeed one might even claim that
he never properly reached this level. In the following, I shall claim that
the question of normative grounds in such a reconstructed conception can
possibly be answered by the means of mainly two kinds of argument. The
first constitutes a kind of anthropological regress to the ontological
level of; the second adds the dimension of critical social theory by thinking
through Sartre's principle of totalisation on a normative level.
(1) In praxis, a level of universality is brought to the fore through our way of positing a possible end of action in terms of a value. However, if an ethics of praxis is to ground itself on nothing else but praxis, we must be able to find some significant differences between kinds of values in praxis itself, even some fundamental norm or norms. It is a fact that Sartre in the 1960's expresses a viewpoint on such a basic norm. This is a social ideal, or ethical ideal-model, he calls 'integral humanity', 'making the human' or as he writes in "A Plea for Intellectuals": "the emancipation, universalization and hence humanization of man" (A Plea for Intellectuals, p. 266). However, this social ideal must be re-connected to Sartre's praxis-philosophical standpoint if it is to be intelligible as a normative ground.
In my book, I have discussed this more at length and I can only repeat my argument in brief. I claim that Sartre's normative outlook consists of two main values: freedom and intersubjective reciprocity. If we characterise human beings as free beings of praxis, a central internal value for us as historical beings is to be able to realise in a historical situation what ones posits as willed. The realisation of a goal, however, is dependent on the meaning of what we do, not only on its physical realisation. Thus, to strive for the realisation of a certain goal means to will a certain meaning to be realised. But the meaning of what we do depends on the presence of others in the field, more precisely on whether and in what sense they recognise this meaning. This implies that to will to realise something means to will that others recognise the meaning of what I do in a way that conforms to my original intention.
This, Sartre seems to think, implies the reciprocal recognition
of human beings free beings of praxis. What originally seems to be a demand
from my side that others recognise what I do, implies, at the heart of
the intelligibility of praxis, that I first recognise others as free beings
of praxis. For my bond of interiority with the world is also constituted
by human relations of reciprocity, and I cannot simultaneously expect that
my praxis is recognised by the other, and refuse to recognise that the
others recognition is an act of freedom. Thus, in the ideal case, the demand
to be recognised that originate in the internal individuality of an intentional
project, is, if we grasp the real intelligibility of what we do, turned
into a reciprocal appeal of mutual recognition.
(2). To this should, however, be added an interpretation of the principle of totalisation in terms of practical reason. In Critique, the principle of totalisation is almost exclusively discussed on the level of epistemology. Sartre criticises analytical rationality for not enabling us to make intelligible the human world of action and social meaning, and posits the synthetic principle of totalisation in its place. I argue, however, that, although Sartre never properly reached the level of practical rationality, we will have to rethink this distinction between the analytical and the totalising view on a normative level.
First, it is quite clear that Sartre's critique of analytical rationality
is also a critique of ideology. The divisions made by analytical rationality
correspond with the social divisions that build up contemporary society
and analytical rationality functions to legitimise these divisions. Second,
in contemporary society, the divisive outcomes constitutive of human relationships
of seriality and institutional hierarchy can only be countered by reasserting
the truth of totalisation on a concrete level of social organisation. Only
the practical embodiment of the principle of totalisation in social organisation
may enable us to have a firmer grip on the meanings of history, although,
thanks to human freedom, no one may ever be in full control.
The diagnostic perspective that opens itself on this basis focuses on
the relation between the normative orientation of praxis and the limiting
conditions inherent in history, towards the background of a totalising
conception of praxis that posits freedom and intersubjective reciprocity
as its internal norms. Alienation originates from a social constellation
in which the externalised objects of praxis, that is, collective structures
and institutions, has come to dominate our possibilities to realise what
we posit as willed. It thus limits our possibilities to realise freedom
and mutual recognition. Thus, an ethics of praxis, understood on the level
of concrete morality, depends both (1) on a correct understanding of the
normative outlook of integral humanity, rooted in the intelligibility of
praxis itself, and (2) on a morality of unmasking that enables us to understand
the forces that run counter to the normative ideal. The outcome is neither
an ethics focused on values only, nor a political realism, but rather what
Sartre calls an ethical radicalism that is constantly prepared critically
to rethink the relation between the universal and the singular, and invent
actions that conform to this understanding.
I have proposed a re-examination of Sartre's conception in terms of the generalised standpoint I call a hermeneutics of praxis. To conclude I shall express some views on how I think such a reconstruction should be carried out on the normative level. First, it will have to take up some position on what 'thinking historically' or 'hermeneutically' really means, and more clearly work out a self-understanding on the place and meaning of ethical reflection in a condition of historicity.
As is well known, Sartre develops his own, historically situated standpoint on concrete morality for mid-century France in the direction of the revolutionary option. He argues that concrete morality must take the form of an ethical radicalism, and that only a militant, revolutionary politics, aiming at the radical change of the conditions under which human beings make history, can transform the abstract ethical project of making the human into a concrete project.
On a theoretical level, the basis of Sartre's diagnosis is a certain normative conception of the relation between praxis, practico-inert processes and hierarchic institutional frameworks. In short, the realisation of integral humanity would mean that human beings co-operating on the level of praxis would hold the key to the meaning of history, in opposition to the domination of inhuman processes and institutional frameworks over human beings and their projects. When at his most polemical, Sartre argues that the contemporary domination of matter over men can only be abolished by fighting against the power of the practico-inert and social institutions. In this, Sartre refrains from thinking through the option of a less radical and perhaps less dangerous middle route: that of a project of indeed unmasking the power of institutions, but without throwing overboard the idea of institutions as constitutive of the kind of democratic society Sartre otherwise defends.
Thus, in his ethics of praxis Sartre attempts to think historically, but simultaneously he defends a view according to which we ought to try to transgress the present conditions of making history or the present human condition. I think that if we really attempt to reflect hermeneutically, this vacillation between an emphasis on historical conditioning and a relapse into the Utopianism of a revolutionary perspective must be re-examined. For example, if we reject the revolutionary option as a general blueprint of action, as I would surely do today, Sartre's ethics of praxis can be taken in another direction. We would then have to understand 'integral humanity' as an action-informative ideal that enlightens action on a here and now basis, and drop its dependence on a revolutionary perspective.
Furthermore, the analysis of alienation in terms of an, overall negative perspective on collective structures and institutions will have to be re-examined. If our bonds with the world are truly interior and historical, it seems both incoherent and impossible simply to fight them.
In conclusion, in relation to the contemporary debates in ethics and
critical theory, the idea of a hermeneutics of praxis initially promises
a different but non-exclusive option. Its neo-Aristotelian emphasis on
concrete morality is made considerably deeper by its explicit connection
to an interpretative-diagnostic perspective that, furthermore, integrates
an explicit normative outlook. This combination in a single conception
is unique today. I do not thereby suggest that this standpoint is wholly
coherent, but emphasise the possibility and importance of keeping the dimensions
mentioned together in a synthetic, although perhaps not totalising, outlook.
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1. Introduction
2. Sartre's ethics of praxis
3. The intelligibility of praxis and Sartre's normative
outlook
4. Concluding remarks
Bibliography
tillbaka till Inriktning Filosofi etc.
tillbaka till KK's
hemsida
back to the website of Kristian Klockars