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Marxism and good conduct
Europran
Hisro,y of Ideas. Vol. 5. No Printed in Great Britam.
I. pp. XY-YX. 1983
MARXISM
01Y14,599/83$3 no+o.(x) Pcrgamo” Press Lfd.
AND GOOD CONDUCT
Ethics and Society, Milton Fisk (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1980), xx + pp. 272, f20.00. The Political Philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, Sonia Kruks (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1981), xiv + pp. 152, f16.50. Milton Fisk’s Ethics and Society is subtitled ‘A Marxist Interpretation of Value’, and in the Preface Professor Fisk further informs us that ‘In both method and motivation, the ethics elaborated here is a Marxist ethics’. Following Marx, he continues, such an ethics emphasises the social nature of the person, the class nature of society, the importance of exposing ideological concepts of morality, ‘and the necessity of replacing them with moral conceptions that can be said, with some empirical warrant, to serve the interests of one’s own group’. The elaboration of this ‘Marxist’ ethics, it transpires, will have relatively little to do with the topics of Marxism and the good society, but a great deal to do with the topic of Marxism and good conduct. It will have relatively little to do with the former for two reasons: about the good society; it is, quite (i) the belief t hat there is no problem uncomplicatedly, ‘a form of society controlled from below by those who are productive in it, in short, by workers’ (p. xvii); 1 tlon of ethics as ‘a systematic study’. In this study, Professor (ii) th e d e f’ni Fisk explains, ‘one might inquire whether the right thing to do (my emphasis) is the thing that would maximise happiness. . After solving such general problems, ethics as a systematic study can be extended to include application of their solutions to concrete problems, such as abortion, war resistance, and academic freedom’. As to (i), Professor Fisk thinks that the workers should have little trouble creating and running the good society. There is, he says, ‘enough evidence of worker ingenuity in self-governance to demolish the necessity of elites. Workers initiated and ran governments within governments during the general strikes of 1934 in the U.S. In 1973, 1,300 workers at the Lip watch factory in BesanGon, France, took control of their plant after the owners threatened closure’ (pp. 252, 253). As to the topic of Marxism and good conduct, the Preface once again tells us that Ethics and Society will propound a ‘class relativist ethics’. The following are its salient characteristics: (1) It is concerned with the ethical dimension of behaviour. (la) For an action to have an ethical dimension is for it to advance or set back the interests of the group to which the agent belongs. (2) It is ‘naturalist’, i.e. it holds that valid ethical principles must conform with the nature of the person. (3) The person is a ‘core social entity’. This is the idea that there ‘is 89
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something to the person that does not depend on specific groups’, and that ‘being in different epochs and being in different groups moulds the person in such a way that there are essential differences between the persons in these epochs and in these groups’ (p. 12). (4) The basis of morality, its fundamental meta-principle, is group-interest. This is because one becomes what one is by way of membership of a group. It follows that one cannot go against one’s group without going against oneself. So, ‘the principle of group interest has its plausibility on the basis of this coincidence between the group and human nature. It asserts that in a conflict between the person and the group the right thing to do will advance the characteristic interests of the group’ (p. 18). (4a) Not all groups are important for ethical life. ‘Class, race, nation, sex, and family are important, whereas sophomores, wearers of size eleven shoes, and gardeners are less important, if important at all.’ (4b) Among the important groups class is pre-eminent, since class domination provides the basis for continuing racial and other forms of domination. (5) It is non-absolutist. ‘For, from the fact that persons have a social nature and that ethics is naturalistic, it follows that the validity of ethical principles is relative rather than absolute’ (p. 28). (6) It is relativist both in form and content. The appropriate form for judgements imputing moral goodness is ‘Action x is good relative to group A’. The content of a moral claim is relativised as follows: ‘An action is a good one relative to a given group provided it is one that in some way advances the interests characteristic of that group’ (p. 35). (7) Since human groups divide broadly, but basically, into those that dominate and those that are dominated, ethical principles may also be divided along the same lines. Thus valid ethical principles, for the dominated group, are those that stabilise and advance its interests, for the dominant group those ‘that call for solidarity within this group in maintaining the domination it enjoys’ (p. 44). (8) (7) rules out the moral principle of tolerance. The members of dominated groups are ‘by continued domination, being denied the realisation of their natural impulse to escape domination. Thus by the very principle the justification employs we get, once we have added the fact of domination, that domination is not to be tolerated, at least not forever’ (p. 87). (9) (3) and (5) rule out ‘angel’ and ‘devil’ theories of human behaviour and, as such, some supposed rationales for social authority and ethical principles. Since there is no universal or absolute human nature, all statements of the form ‘All men are (ineliminably) wicked/good at bottom’ are logically unsound. (10) (3), however, licenses a ‘weak’ theory of human nature, the idea that ‘human kind is a weak, not a strong kind’. In a weak kind, there are several different but connected natures and hence no one nature common to all members of the kind. In Part III, Chapter 8, this thesis is expounded on the basis of a distinction between survival and derived needs. The former are universal, natural and trans-historical. In Fisk’s view, they are the needs for food, sex, support and deliberation. (lOa) (10) Does not entail a human essence:
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Each of the survival needs is indeed a natural feature of most humans. But these needs for food, sex, support and deliberation are, even together, only one side of the nature of anyone. This allows for the fact that the Detroit autoworker and the Indian peasant have different natures (p. 100).
(11) (4b) and (10) d o not give us an ethical absolute, viz. a society in which there is both an organisation of the basic needs, and no conflict. The flaw in this conflict-free ideal is the presumption that the only worthwhile thing is satisfying basic needs in this way. Such an ideal holds little attraction for Fisk; it is compatible with existence in a land where necessities are provided simply by pushing buttons. The only important matters of life would be ones over which the briefest and simplest deliberations are required. In this utopia there is no production to be controlled, there are no institutions of governance, and there are no challenges, intellectual, aesthetic, or moral, to be faced (p, 117).
(12) On the basis of, among others, (lo), Fisk presents the following theory of alienation and obligation. In specific social formations the survival needs are permitted satisfaction in accordance with the pattern of domination for each such society. For example, ‘Within capitalism, the productive worker has his or her desire for food and other necessities put within the context of working to increase the wealth of someone else’ (p. 120). The need to deliberate, moreover, leads the worker to perceive the crucial relationships between his needs and the economic structure in which he is situated, in particular that he needs employment, that he is vulnerable to unemployment, that his interests are best protected by combining with other workers, etc. So, the specific patterning of basic needs generates further specific, historical needs. Alienation is now defined by Fisk as the blocking of these historical needs. (The blocking of basic, i.e. survival, needs themselves is not alienation, but annihilation.) The historical needs are, moreover, internal, since they arise directly out of the specific mode of patterning of basic needs. On this basis alienation is then formally defined as follows: ‘Alienation arises when a given society restricts the realisation of some of the internal historical needs of groups within that society’. Finally, from (la) and (12) we get the following formal definition of moral obligation itself: ‘Action x is obligatory for a person relative to a’s group A when, in the given circumstances, u’s not doing x would be likely to make the realisation of the internal historical needs of members of A more difficult’ (p. 128). (13) Fisk adds that life is not all alienation. There are ‘gaps’ in the conflict(s) when people can and do encounter each other as classless (e.g. a chance encounter on a train). Such encounters have moral implications too: ‘Though Rockefeller of Exxon is owed nothing by me, Rockefeller the unidentified hit-and-run victim . . . is’ (p. 131). (14) Fisk also opts for a relativised concept of virtue:
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Reviews Virtue channels other capacities in directions that fit with a social purpose. If I am virtuous, the actions I perform and the emotions I express are performed or expressed ‘at the right time, on the right occasion, towards the right people, for the right purpose, and in the right manner’.
(15) The fifth and final part of Efhics and Society offers ‘A Prospectus for a Theory of Rights’. The rights discussed are social freedom (Chapter lh), equality (Chapter 17) and economic justice (Chapter 18). Fisk rejects the Millian principle of non-interference as at once too strong and too weak; too strong, for example, because it would exclude some perfectly legitimate cases of interference (e.g. ‘In family activity, a certain effort to be cooperative can be expected on the part of the members even when doing so causes inconvenience’, p. 202). In place of the liberal principle of non-interference, Fisk substitutes the following relativist principle of non-inte~erence: A persan has a ‘right’ relative to a given group to exercise freedom by an action of a certain kind when it is likely that it would be incompatible with advancing the interests characteristic of that group either for its members to place obstacles in the way of that person’s exercising freedom by an action of this kind or even for its members to allow others to place obstacles in the way if members of the group are in a position to block these obstacles without a greater setback to their group than would result from allowing them (p. 203).
The right to exercise freedom by an action of a certain kind implies, Fisk argues, a corresponding obligation to eliminate already imposed needs and to avoid the creation of new ones. Another implication is that the ‘lower classes’ have “a right to revolution’ (p. 205). Part of the reasoning here is that the working class has an obligation to get rid of domination, and this implies a right to change capitalist society. There is this implication ‘For, in general, if obstacles to a certain act could be allowed to stand then the failure to perform that act would not set the class tendencies back, and hence would not be obligatory’ (p. 205). I will ask three questions about Fisk’s theory of value. (1) Is it Marxist? (2) Is it coherent? (3) Is it instructive? (1) I can see little justification for calling Fisk’s theory ‘Marxist’. Mainly, this is because it is not based on a detailed, careful reconstruction of the Marxist classics. Quotations from the ctassical writings are few and far between, and indeed some chapters make no reference to the Marxist corpus. If the theory is not Marxist in this technical sense, is it Marxist even in spirit? There are two substantial reasons for saying that it is not. First, many contemporary authors, including many Marxists, find the notion of a Marxist ethics profoundly problematic. Fisk is right, I think, in contending that there is a distinctively Marxist ethics, but he cannot expect to win much sympathy for ignoring the large-scale debate which this claim has generated. Second. Marxist ethics, I would want to argue, is not a class relativist ethics. A detailed reading and reconstruction of the Marxist classics can show
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(a) that Marx and Engels discussed moral issues in characteristically moral terms, i.e. in terms which, among others, make no (special) reference to the interests of a particular class; (b) that in evaluative ethics Marx and Engels rejected bogus theories of value, in&&g class-specific ones; (c) that in, dare one say it, the more metaphysical areas of their work, they formulated a (more or less clear) concept of human nature, which concept is a postulate of any rigorous presentation and defence of historical materialism, though for polemical and other reasons they sometimes opposed, or seemed to oppose, the notion of a strong human kind (e.g. their dismissal of Feuerbachian ‘essence’ as ‘an internal dumb generality which naturally unites all individuals’). (2) Is the class relativist ethics a coherent ethical theory? Again, I do not think so. I will concentrate here on (just) four items in the theory: (i) its reasoning about human nature; (ii) its reasoning about needs; (iii) its analysis of the logic of moral discourse; (iv) its rejection of the ideal of a conflict-free society satisfying all needs. (i) Many readers will probably think that Fisk tries to have the best of both worlds in his discourse on human nature. I certainly do. I would also want to argue that there is more to the concept of the core-person than Fisk allows. Survival or first-order needs differ from other kinds of needs in that they must be satisfied no matter what. One cannot go indefinitely without food, whereas one can go indefinitely without reading one’s favourite newspaper. (ii) Fisk’s list of survival needs is not very satisfactory either. Sex, for example, is not a survival need: the inhabitants of a geriatric ward do not have very good survival prospects, but this has nothing to do with the fact that they are beyond having a sex life. (iii) The nature of moral discourse is not, in my opinion, as Fisk analyses it. The right thing to do may well be the thing that advances the interests of one’s class, i.e. it may well have that effect, but that is not the same as saying that the right thing to do is (i.e. means) the thing that advances class interests. Second, if ‘X is good’ is to be read as ‘X is good relative to group A’, then there will be a serious problem about the scope of moral discourse. This is because ‘X is good relative to group A’, tells us a lot about group A, but very little, if anything, about X. The fact that X is good relative to group A does not entail that X is good, any more than the fact that someone sneezes entails that the weather is cold. (iv) Fisk recoils from the prospect of a conflict-free society satisfying all needs. The push-button society would make human skills and creativity redundant, he believes. But isn’t an absence of conflict a good thing? Second, can’t human creativity be exercised in activities other than production? Third, why shouldn’t all that spare time be devoted to writing novels, learning to swim, growing exotic plants, etc.? Why should the fact that my need for wine can be satisfied at the push of a button (beautiful thought) incline me against wanting to produce wine by some centuries-old method? That I could still want to do so is no more improbable than the fact that I have a car at my disposal does not always incline me to take it to my destination.
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(3) While Fisk’s ethical theory is, I believe, seriously flawed, there are some valuable things to be found in his book. First, the chapters, though many, are commendably short and elegantly written. Second, the sections on class, domination, ideology and alienation, though none of them highly original, are written with exceptional clarity. Third, there is a strenuous effort to draw out the implications of the relativist thesis, some indication of which, I hope, is given by my (l)-(C). Finally, there is some useful material in the book for anyone unfamiliar with Left-wing critiques of utilitarianism and Rawlsian theory. Putting all of these remarks together, the book deserves, I think, a cautious welcome.
In the mid-1970s Sonia Kruks contributed an essay on Merleau-Ponty to a Radical Phi~os~p~~?~ series devoted to undeservedly neglected philosophers. That essay was lucid, painstaking and immensely informative. Her recently published book, The Political Philosophy of Merleau-Panty, is a most welcome and valuable addition to that earlier essay. It was Merleau-Ponty’s fate, not only to have been born into a petitbourgeois family, but also to have been born within three years of Sartre by whom he would always be overshadowed. Both studied philosophy in the inter-war years and. independently of each other, moved towards phenomenology as an alternative to the inward-fooking French academic philosophy of the time. Their paths first crossed significantly, however, only in German occupied France, in 1941, when they belonged to the same shortlived intellectuals’ resistance group, ‘Socialism and Liberty’. Thereafter, they met more often, discussed phenomenology and, from 1943 onwards, talked of forming a journal together. In October 1945 that journal was born: Les Temps Moderrzes, symbol of existentialism in the heady years following the Liberation. That journal was associated most in the public mind with the name of Sartre, but, as its political editor between 1945 and 1950 it was Merleau-Ponty who made the journal an instrument of independent Left-wing analysis and critique. Yet Sonia Kruks’s book is not, she insists, a history of Les Temps Modernes; nor is it a reconstruction of the SartresiMerleau-Ponty relationship. Instead, it focuses on Merleau-Ponty’s political philosophy as a whole, though much of this, afterwards published in the collections Humanism and Terror, and Sense and Non-Sense, was first published in Les Temps Modernes. Her general thesis is that ~erleau-Panty’s political philosophy is inseparable from his general philosophy. This latter may be summed up in the following series of propositions: (1) It isphenomenological, i.e. sees consciousness heading towards objects as opposed to passively reacting to them, and being acted upon, from outside (‘All consciousness is consciousness of something; it is essential for us to move toward things, and consciousness seeks in them, so to speak, a stability which it lacks’). (2) It is non-idealist, i.e. does not see consciousness as creative of the world about it. Consciousness is not constituante du monde.
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(3) It is dialectical, i.e. sees the subject/object relationship as a ‘circular process such as does not exist in the physical world, through which the individual organism. . , itself measures the action of things upon itself and itself delimits its milieu’. That was how he put it in The Structure of Behaviour. In the (later) essay ‘The Battle over Existentialism’, he says that the relationship between subject and object is ‘no longer that relationship of knowing postulated by classical idealism, wherein the object always seems the construction of the subject, but a relationship of being (rapport d’&tre) in which, paradoxically, the subject is his body, his world, and his situation, by a sort of exchange’. (4) It is non-dualist, i.e. rejects the mind/body dichotomy as incapable of yielding worthwhile concepts for a philosophy of mind. As Merleau-Ponty says in ‘The Film and the New Psychology’ (1947), Psychology did not begin to develop until the day it gave up the distinction between mind and body. We learned nothing about emotion as long as we limited ourselves to measuring the rate of respiration or heartbeat in an angry person, and we didn’t learn anything more when we tried to express the qualitative and inexpressible nuances of lived anger. To create a psychology of anger is to try to ascertain the meuning of anger, to ask oneself how it functions in human life and what purpose it serves. (5) It is non-Sartrian. If, as for Sartre (in Being and Nothingness), each individual is a consciousness, then the world, including other people, always appears as an object of consciousness. The result, as Kruks observes, is that ‘when two people meet each reduces the other to an object, an opaque “thing-in-itself” which he can observe, but whose perceptions and feelings he cannot share’ (p. 14). For Merleau-Ponty, on the other hand, the other person is not a threat to my subjectivity, but an extension of it, for his perception confirms mine. ‘This is because we are both bodily beings, a composite of objectivity and subjectivity, grounded in the same dialectic with the primordial world’ (p. 14). (6) It is libertarian. Man is free, but not, as the idealist would have it, absolutely free. Man is not an individual who is free and then acts, but someone capable of exhibiting freedom in action. Free acts are those pointing to the future and transcending the given; in Sonia Kruks’s words, ‘actions therefore which further the human dialectic’ (p. 19). (7) It is sympathetic to Marxism, for the following reasons. (a) Historical materialism does not claim that all non-economic institutions, or superstructures, are the effects of (their) economic counterparts; it is rather that economic phenomena provide ‘an historical anchorage’ for law, culture, etc. (b) Marx, too, makes man the fulfy human rather than the (partly) epistemological subject of the historical process. (c) In so far as Marx does talk about the laws of historical development, he is not talking about something analogous to the laws of natural science, for social ‘laws’ are historically situated and mediated by human subjectivity. Thus ‘Marx’s entire effort in Das Kapital is directed precisely to showing that these famous laws, often pre-
Reviews sented as the permanent features of a “sociai nature”, are really the attributes (and the mark) of a certain “social structure”, capitalism . . . . A Marxist political economy can speak of laws only within qualitatively different structures, which must be described in terms of history.’ (d) Finally, the concept of class is also contributive to the existential nature of Marxism. Class is neither an ‘objective’ reality nor a wholly subjective choice, but a ‘mode’ of existence. Class is neither an ‘objective’ reality nor a wholly subjective choice, but a ‘mode of existence’. Class consciousness is not ‘caused’, nor is it the result of an intellectual choice; rather it is ‘a certain way of being in the natural and social world’ (~he~~menoiogy of f’erception). Turning to Merleau-Ponty’s political philosophy, the following are among its notable features: (1) It is dismissive of trad~fi~~a~ French ~ibera~~s~n.For this Cartesian’ conception of politics, the human world is seen as the sum of individual consciousnesses, freedom as consisting in individual acts of juclgement and will, and politics therefore as an area of personal moral decisions to be comprehended in terms of the ideals, especially that of justice, which men pursue. For such a politics, Nazism and all other apparently irrational ideologies are ‘accidents’, unfortunate and abnormal intrusions into an otherwise rational order. Merleau-Ponty makes several criticisms of this liberalism. The violent and the irrational, he observes, are typical of politics, not marginal to it. An account of politics which ignores this fact cannot provide an adequate explanation of the normal course of political events, let alone of the exceptional irrationality and brutality of the Nazi regime. Liberalism was also defective at the prescriptive level. In Sonia Kruks’s words, It was unable to provide the ethical guidelines the intelligentsia needed, since it failed to acknowledge their problems. What relevance could precepts such as Main’s have in a situation where, simply by continuing to live, one was forced constantly to cooperate with and, in practice, to sustain the Nazis? (p. 64). (2) It is Marxian-tinged in the 1945-50 period. This is mainly because for Merleau-Ponty at this time the proletariat is ‘the privileged class’, the possible vehicle of historical truth and initiator of the era of (true) morality. It is the privileged class because it is the universal class, and it is universal because it alone experiences dependency as total and as totaf alienation. The proletariat alone have a historical role which is not coercive and thus are able to fully recognise their fellow men, rather than objectifying them. It is from this intrinsic quality that their ‘historic mission’ stems: to create history as the advent of humanity. (3) It is pessimistic about the prospects for the good society (nonetheless). Since the proletariat is often divided and confused, leadership of the revolutionary movement has to be in the hands of those who realise its objective potential - the Party. Merleau-Ponty, Kruks points out, never thinks of questioning Lenin’s theory: He seems implicitly
to assume
that a vanguard
party is necessary.
is part and
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parcel of Marxian praxis, while also arguing that a possibly unacceptable and undiminishing degree of violence is implicit in its existence - forms of violence over and above those used on the capitalist and allied classes (p. 92).
The remainder of the Me&au-Ponty story may be briefly chronicled as follows. The Korean War broke out in 1950, and there was widespread anxiety that if the conflict escalated the USSR would invade Western Europe. Within this context a position of ‘critical support’ for communism could no longer be contemplated. It was not, said Sartre, that Merleau-Ponty ‘took sides with the other monster, capitalist imperialism’, but that suddenly the Soviet Union was as bad: a Soviet occupying force in France would be an imperialist occupation, not a socialist liberation. In 1955, after a period of silence, Merleau-Ponty publishes Adventures of the Dialectic, which MS Kruks describes as a puzzling book. Its purpose would appear to have been to justify Merleau-Ponty’s decision to end his support for Marxist politics of any kind and to announce his move towards the kind of radical, or ‘new’ liberalism which he outlines in the ‘Epilogue’ . . It consists of ‘several small works’ concerned . one with Weber, one with Lukacs, two with the Russian Bolshevik experience . and one with Sartre’s Marxism. They purport to show the apparently inevitable collapse of the Marxian dialectic into either objectivjsm (Lukacs, Lenin and Trotsky) or subjectivism (Sartre) (p. 103).
Finally, in The Visible and the Invisible, on which Merleau-Ponty was (still) working at the time of his death (1961). there is, as Sonia Kruks sees it, a parallel rejection of the tenets of his earlier general philosophy: Probably the main shift is a movement away from a humanistic conception of the world towards a conception in which Being is conceived as something vaster and more significant than human existence. For example, in the Phenomenology of Perception, it is man, a ‘body-subject’, who overcomes the dualism of subject and object. In The Vkible and the Invisible it is claimed that this dualism . . . simply does not exist in fundamental or ‘wild’ being and is a product only of our own intellectualisations. The human body is now conceived as one ‘variant’ of ‘carnal being’ . . which is itself a ‘prototype of Being’ in a more universal sense - Being which is a unity, a mysterious harmony of what touches and is touched, of what sees and what is visible . . (p. 121).
Sonia Kruks concludes, with commendable modesty, that ~~rl~au-Panty’s thought is susceptible of endless exploration. I find it difficult to give my assent to this proposition. It seems to me that, contrary to what she herself would have wanted, her book proves conclusively that Merleau-Ponty is a deservedly neglected philosopher. Both from her reconstruction of his work, and from reading it in the original, the overwhelming impression is of a few flabby generalisations against idealism and positivism being propounded over and over again. The account of Marxism as a humanism never comes to grips with Marxism as a full-blown theory of history. The rejection of Marxism, including Marxist humanism, exhibits the deepest inconsistencies in Merfeau-
98 Ponty’s thought taken as a whole, and deeply-felt psychological response to the post-war era. What is needed, be it for history, are rigorously defined concepts Ponty’s general and political philosophy both.
Reviews it also has all the appearances of a mid-European political drama of the political philosophy or the theory of and theoretical strategies. Merleauseem to me to be badly lacking in
Joseph University College, Galway
Mahon
Hisro,y of Ideas. Vol. 5. No Printed in Great Britam.
I. pp. XY-YX. 1983
MARXISM
01Y14,599/83$3 no+o.(x) Pcrgamo” Press Lfd.
AND GOOD CONDUCT
Ethics and Society, Milton Fisk (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1980), xx + pp. 272, f20.00. The Political Philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, Sonia Kruks (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1981), xiv + pp. 152, f16.50. Milton Fisk’s Ethics and Society is subtitled ‘A Marxist Interpretation of Value’, and in the Preface Professor Fisk further informs us that ‘In both method and motivation, the ethics elaborated here is a Marxist ethics’. Following Marx, he continues, such an ethics emphasises the social nature of the person, the class nature of society, the importance of exposing ideological concepts of morality, ‘and the necessity of replacing them with moral conceptions that can be said, with some empirical warrant, to serve the interests of one’s own group’. The elaboration of this ‘Marxist’ ethics, it transpires, will have relatively little to do with the topics of Marxism and the good society, but a great deal to do with the topic of Marxism and good conduct. It will have relatively little to do with the former for two reasons: about the good society; it is, quite (i) the belief t hat there is no problem uncomplicatedly, ‘a form of society controlled from below by those who are productive in it, in short, by workers’ (p. xvii); 1 tlon of ethics as ‘a systematic study’. In this study, Professor (ii) th e d e f’ni Fisk explains, ‘one might inquire whether the right thing to do (my emphasis) is the thing that would maximise happiness. . After solving such general problems, ethics as a systematic study can be extended to include application of their solutions to concrete problems, such as abortion, war resistance, and academic freedom’. As to (i), Professor Fisk thinks that the workers should have little trouble creating and running the good society. There is, he says, ‘enough evidence of worker ingenuity in self-governance to demolish the necessity of elites. Workers initiated and ran governments within governments during the general strikes of 1934 in the U.S. In 1973, 1,300 workers at the Lip watch factory in BesanGon, France, took control of their plant after the owners threatened closure’ (pp. 252, 253). As to the topic of Marxism and good conduct, the Preface once again tells us that Ethics and Society will propound a ‘class relativist ethics’. The following are its salient characteristics: (1) It is concerned with the ethical dimension of behaviour. (la) For an action to have an ethical dimension is for it to advance or set back the interests of the group to which the agent belongs. (2) It is ‘naturalist’, i.e. it holds that valid ethical principles must conform with the nature of the person. (3) The person is a ‘core social entity’. This is the idea that there ‘is 89
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something to the person that does not depend on specific groups’, and that ‘being in different epochs and being in different groups moulds the person in such a way that there are essential differences between the persons in these epochs and in these groups’ (p. 12). (4) The basis of morality, its fundamental meta-principle, is group-interest. This is because one becomes what one is by way of membership of a group. It follows that one cannot go against one’s group without going against oneself. So, ‘the principle of group interest has its plausibility on the basis of this coincidence between the group and human nature. It asserts that in a conflict between the person and the group the right thing to do will advance the characteristic interests of the group’ (p. 18). (4a) Not all groups are important for ethical life. ‘Class, race, nation, sex, and family are important, whereas sophomores, wearers of size eleven shoes, and gardeners are less important, if important at all.’ (4b) Among the important groups class is pre-eminent, since class domination provides the basis for continuing racial and other forms of domination. (5) It is non-absolutist. ‘For, from the fact that persons have a social nature and that ethics is naturalistic, it follows that the validity of ethical principles is relative rather than absolute’ (p. 28). (6) It is relativist both in form and content. The appropriate form for judgements imputing moral goodness is ‘Action x is good relative to group A’. The content of a moral claim is relativised as follows: ‘An action is a good one relative to a given group provided it is one that in some way advances the interests characteristic of that group’ (p. 35). (7) Since human groups divide broadly, but basically, into those that dominate and those that are dominated, ethical principles may also be divided along the same lines. Thus valid ethical principles, for the dominated group, are those that stabilise and advance its interests, for the dominant group those ‘that call for solidarity within this group in maintaining the domination it enjoys’ (p. 44). (8) (7) rules out the moral principle of tolerance. The members of dominated groups are ‘by continued domination, being denied the realisation of their natural impulse to escape domination. Thus by the very principle the justification employs we get, once we have added the fact of domination, that domination is not to be tolerated, at least not forever’ (p. 87). (9) (3) and (5) rule out ‘angel’ and ‘devil’ theories of human behaviour and, as such, some supposed rationales for social authority and ethical principles. Since there is no universal or absolute human nature, all statements of the form ‘All men are (ineliminably) wicked/good at bottom’ are logically unsound. (10) (3), however, licenses a ‘weak’ theory of human nature, the idea that ‘human kind is a weak, not a strong kind’. In a weak kind, there are several different but connected natures and hence no one nature common to all members of the kind. In Part III, Chapter 8, this thesis is expounded on the basis of a distinction between survival and derived needs. The former are universal, natural and trans-historical. In Fisk’s view, they are the needs for food, sex, support and deliberation. (lOa) (10) Does not entail a human essence:
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Each of the survival needs is indeed a natural feature of most humans. But these needs for food, sex, support and deliberation are, even together, only one side of the nature of anyone. This allows for the fact that the Detroit autoworker and the Indian peasant have different natures (p. 100).
(11) (4b) and (10) d o not give us an ethical absolute, viz. a society in which there is both an organisation of the basic needs, and no conflict. The flaw in this conflict-free ideal is the presumption that the only worthwhile thing is satisfying basic needs in this way. Such an ideal holds little attraction for Fisk; it is compatible with existence in a land where necessities are provided simply by pushing buttons. The only important matters of life would be ones over which the briefest and simplest deliberations are required. In this utopia there is no production to be controlled, there are no institutions of governance, and there are no challenges, intellectual, aesthetic, or moral, to be faced (p, 117).
(12) On the basis of, among others, (lo), Fisk presents the following theory of alienation and obligation. In specific social formations the survival needs are permitted satisfaction in accordance with the pattern of domination for each such society. For example, ‘Within capitalism, the productive worker has his or her desire for food and other necessities put within the context of working to increase the wealth of someone else’ (p. 120). The need to deliberate, moreover, leads the worker to perceive the crucial relationships between his needs and the economic structure in which he is situated, in particular that he needs employment, that he is vulnerable to unemployment, that his interests are best protected by combining with other workers, etc. So, the specific patterning of basic needs generates further specific, historical needs. Alienation is now defined by Fisk as the blocking of these historical needs. (The blocking of basic, i.e. survival, needs themselves is not alienation, but annihilation.) The historical needs are, moreover, internal, since they arise directly out of the specific mode of patterning of basic needs. On this basis alienation is then formally defined as follows: ‘Alienation arises when a given society restricts the realisation of some of the internal historical needs of groups within that society’. Finally, from (la) and (12) we get the following formal definition of moral obligation itself: ‘Action x is obligatory for a person relative to a’s group A when, in the given circumstances, u’s not doing x would be likely to make the realisation of the internal historical needs of members of A more difficult’ (p. 128). (13) Fisk adds that life is not all alienation. There are ‘gaps’ in the conflict(s) when people can and do encounter each other as classless (e.g. a chance encounter on a train). Such encounters have moral implications too: ‘Though Rockefeller of Exxon is owed nothing by me, Rockefeller the unidentified hit-and-run victim . . . is’ (p. 131). (14) Fisk also opts for a relativised concept of virtue:
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(15) The fifth and final part of Efhics and Society offers ‘A Prospectus for a Theory of Rights’. The rights discussed are social freedom (Chapter lh), equality (Chapter 17) and economic justice (Chapter 18). Fisk rejects the Millian principle of non-interference as at once too strong and too weak; too strong, for example, because it would exclude some perfectly legitimate cases of interference (e.g. ‘In family activity, a certain effort to be cooperative can be expected on the part of the members even when doing so causes inconvenience’, p. 202). In place of the liberal principle of non-interference, Fisk substitutes the following relativist principle of non-inte~erence: A persan has a ‘right’ relative to a given group to exercise freedom by an action of a certain kind when it is likely that it would be incompatible with advancing the interests characteristic of that group either for its members to place obstacles in the way of that person’s exercising freedom by an action of this kind or even for its members to allow others to place obstacles in the way if members of the group are in a position to block these obstacles without a greater setback to their group than would result from allowing them (p. 203).
The right to exercise freedom by an action of a certain kind implies, Fisk argues, a corresponding obligation to eliminate already imposed needs and to avoid the creation of new ones. Another implication is that the ‘lower classes’ have “a right to revolution’ (p. 205). Part of the reasoning here is that the working class has an obligation to get rid of domination, and this implies a right to change capitalist society. There is this implication ‘For, in general, if obstacles to a certain act could be allowed to stand then the failure to perform that act would not set the class tendencies back, and hence would not be obligatory’ (p. 205). I will ask three questions about Fisk’s theory of value. (1) Is it Marxist? (2) Is it coherent? (3) Is it instructive? (1) I can see little justification for calling Fisk’s theory ‘Marxist’. Mainly, this is because it is not based on a detailed, careful reconstruction of the Marxist classics. Quotations from the ctassical writings are few and far between, and indeed some chapters make no reference to the Marxist corpus. If the theory is not Marxist in this technical sense, is it Marxist even in spirit? There are two substantial reasons for saying that it is not. First, many contemporary authors, including many Marxists, find the notion of a Marxist ethics profoundly problematic. Fisk is right, I think, in contending that there is a distinctively Marxist ethics, but he cannot expect to win much sympathy for ignoring the large-scale debate which this claim has generated. Second. Marxist ethics, I would want to argue, is not a class relativist ethics. A detailed reading and reconstruction of the Marxist classics can show
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(a) that Marx and Engels discussed moral issues in characteristically moral terms, i.e. in terms which, among others, make no (special) reference to the interests of a particular class; (b) that in evaluative ethics Marx and Engels rejected bogus theories of value, in&&g class-specific ones; (c) that in, dare one say it, the more metaphysical areas of their work, they formulated a (more or less clear) concept of human nature, which concept is a postulate of any rigorous presentation and defence of historical materialism, though for polemical and other reasons they sometimes opposed, or seemed to oppose, the notion of a strong human kind (e.g. their dismissal of Feuerbachian ‘essence’ as ‘an internal dumb generality which naturally unites all individuals’). (2) Is the class relativist ethics a coherent ethical theory? Again, I do not think so. I will concentrate here on (just) four items in the theory: (i) its reasoning about human nature; (ii) its reasoning about needs; (iii) its analysis of the logic of moral discourse; (iv) its rejection of the ideal of a conflict-free society satisfying all needs. (i) Many readers will probably think that Fisk tries to have the best of both worlds in his discourse on human nature. I certainly do. I would also want to argue that there is more to the concept of the core-person than Fisk allows. Survival or first-order needs differ from other kinds of needs in that they must be satisfied no matter what. One cannot go indefinitely without food, whereas one can go indefinitely without reading one’s favourite newspaper. (ii) Fisk’s list of survival needs is not very satisfactory either. Sex, for example, is not a survival need: the inhabitants of a geriatric ward do not have very good survival prospects, but this has nothing to do with the fact that they are beyond having a sex life. (iii) The nature of moral discourse is not, in my opinion, as Fisk analyses it. The right thing to do may well be the thing that advances the interests of one’s class, i.e. it may well have that effect, but that is not the same as saying that the right thing to do is (i.e. means) the thing that advances class interests. Second, if ‘X is good’ is to be read as ‘X is good relative to group A’, then there will be a serious problem about the scope of moral discourse. This is because ‘X is good relative to group A’, tells us a lot about group A, but very little, if anything, about X. The fact that X is good relative to group A does not entail that X is good, any more than the fact that someone sneezes entails that the weather is cold. (iv) Fisk recoils from the prospect of a conflict-free society satisfying all needs. The push-button society would make human skills and creativity redundant, he believes. But isn’t an absence of conflict a good thing? Second, can’t human creativity be exercised in activities other than production? Third, why shouldn’t all that spare time be devoted to writing novels, learning to swim, growing exotic plants, etc.? Why should the fact that my need for wine can be satisfied at the push of a button (beautiful thought) incline me against wanting to produce wine by some centuries-old method? That I could still want to do so is no more improbable than the fact that I have a car at my disposal does not always incline me to take it to my destination.
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(3) While Fisk’s ethical theory is, I believe, seriously flawed, there are some valuable things to be found in his book. First, the chapters, though many, are commendably short and elegantly written. Second, the sections on class, domination, ideology and alienation, though none of them highly original, are written with exceptional clarity. Third, there is a strenuous effort to draw out the implications of the relativist thesis, some indication of which, I hope, is given by my (l)-(C). Finally, there is some useful material in the book for anyone unfamiliar with Left-wing critiques of utilitarianism and Rawlsian theory. Putting all of these remarks together, the book deserves, I think, a cautious welcome.
In the mid-1970s Sonia Kruks contributed an essay on Merleau-Ponty to a Radical Phi~os~p~~?~ series devoted to undeservedly neglected philosophers. That essay was lucid, painstaking and immensely informative. Her recently published book, The Political Philosophy of Merleau-Panty, is a most welcome and valuable addition to that earlier essay. It was Merleau-Ponty’s fate, not only to have been born into a petitbourgeois family, but also to have been born within three years of Sartre by whom he would always be overshadowed. Both studied philosophy in the inter-war years and. independently of each other, moved towards phenomenology as an alternative to the inward-fooking French academic philosophy of the time. Their paths first crossed significantly, however, only in German occupied France, in 1941, when they belonged to the same shortlived intellectuals’ resistance group, ‘Socialism and Liberty’. Thereafter, they met more often, discussed phenomenology and, from 1943 onwards, talked of forming a journal together. In October 1945 that journal was born: Les Temps Moderrzes, symbol of existentialism in the heady years following the Liberation. That journal was associated most in the public mind with the name of Sartre, but, as its political editor between 1945 and 1950 it was Merleau-Ponty who made the journal an instrument of independent Left-wing analysis and critique. Yet Sonia Kruks’s book is not, she insists, a history of Les Temps Modernes; nor is it a reconstruction of the SartresiMerleau-Ponty relationship. Instead, it focuses on Merleau-Ponty’s political philosophy as a whole, though much of this, afterwards published in the collections Humanism and Terror, and Sense and Non-Sense, was first published in Les Temps Modernes. Her general thesis is that ~erleau-Panty’s political philosophy is inseparable from his general philosophy. This latter may be summed up in the following series of propositions: (1) It isphenomenological, i.e. sees consciousness heading towards objects as opposed to passively reacting to them, and being acted upon, from outside (‘All consciousness is consciousness of something; it is essential for us to move toward things, and consciousness seeks in them, so to speak, a stability which it lacks’). (2) It is non-idealist, i.e. does not see consciousness as creative of the world about it. Consciousness is not constituante du monde.
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(3) It is dialectical, i.e. sees the subject/object relationship as a ‘circular process such as does not exist in the physical world, through which the individual organism. . , itself measures the action of things upon itself and itself delimits its milieu’. That was how he put it in The Structure of Behaviour. In the (later) essay ‘The Battle over Existentialism’, he says that the relationship between subject and object is ‘no longer that relationship of knowing postulated by classical idealism, wherein the object always seems the construction of the subject, but a relationship of being (rapport d’&tre) in which, paradoxically, the subject is his body, his world, and his situation, by a sort of exchange’. (4) It is non-dualist, i.e. rejects the mind/body dichotomy as incapable of yielding worthwhile concepts for a philosophy of mind. As Merleau-Ponty says in ‘The Film and the New Psychology’ (1947), Psychology did not begin to develop until the day it gave up the distinction between mind and body. We learned nothing about emotion as long as we limited ourselves to measuring the rate of respiration or heartbeat in an angry person, and we didn’t learn anything more when we tried to express the qualitative and inexpressible nuances of lived anger. To create a psychology of anger is to try to ascertain the meuning of anger, to ask oneself how it functions in human life and what purpose it serves. (5) It is non-Sartrian. If, as for Sartre (in Being and Nothingness), each individual is a consciousness, then the world, including other people, always appears as an object of consciousness. The result, as Kruks observes, is that ‘when two people meet each reduces the other to an object, an opaque “thing-in-itself” which he can observe, but whose perceptions and feelings he cannot share’ (p. 14). For Merleau-Ponty, on the other hand, the other person is not a threat to my subjectivity, but an extension of it, for his perception confirms mine. ‘This is because we are both bodily beings, a composite of objectivity and subjectivity, grounded in the same dialectic with the primordial world’ (p. 14). (6) It is libertarian. Man is free, but not, as the idealist would have it, absolutely free. Man is not an individual who is free and then acts, but someone capable of exhibiting freedom in action. Free acts are those pointing to the future and transcending the given; in Sonia Kruks’s words, ‘actions therefore which further the human dialectic’ (p. 19). (7) It is sympathetic to Marxism, for the following reasons. (a) Historical materialism does not claim that all non-economic institutions, or superstructures, are the effects of (their) economic counterparts; it is rather that economic phenomena provide ‘an historical anchorage’ for law, culture, etc. (b) Marx, too, makes man the fulfy human rather than the (partly) epistemological subject of the historical process. (c) In so far as Marx does talk about the laws of historical development, he is not talking about something analogous to the laws of natural science, for social ‘laws’ are historically situated and mediated by human subjectivity. Thus ‘Marx’s entire effort in Das Kapital is directed precisely to showing that these famous laws, often pre-
Reviews sented as the permanent features of a “sociai nature”, are really the attributes (and the mark) of a certain “social structure”, capitalism . . . . A Marxist political economy can speak of laws only within qualitatively different structures, which must be described in terms of history.’ (d) Finally, the concept of class is also contributive to the existential nature of Marxism. Class is neither an ‘objective’ reality nor a wholly subjective choice, but a ‘mode’ of existence. Class is neither an ‘objective’ reality nor a wholly subjective choice, but a ‘mode of existence’. Class consciousness is not ‘caused’, nor is it the result of an intellectual choice; rather it is ‘a certain way of being in the natural and social world’ (~he~~menoiogy of f’erception). Turning to Merleau-Ponty’s political philosophy, the following are among its notable features: (1) It is dismissive of trad~fi~~a~ French ~ibera~~s~n.For this Cartesian’ conception of politics, the human world is seen as the sum of individual consciousnesses, freedom as consisting in individual acts of juclgement and will, and politics therefore as an area of personal moral decisions to be comprehended in terms of the ideals, especially that of justice, which men pursue. For such a politics, Nazism and all other apparently irrational ideologies are ‘accidents’, unfortunate and abnormal intrusions into an otherwise rational order. Merleau-Ponty makes several criticisms of this liberalism. The violent and the irrational, he observes, are typical of politics, not marginal to it. An account of politics which ignores this fact cannot provide an adequate explanation of the normal course of political events, let alone of the exceptional irrationality and brutality of the Nazi regime. Liberalism was also defective at the prescriptive level. In Sonia Kruks’s words, It was unable to provide the ethical guidelines the intelligentsia needed, since it failed to acknowledge their problems. What relevance could precepts such as Main’s have in a situation where, simply by continuing to live, one was forced constantly to cooperate with and, in practice, to sustain the Nazis? (p. 64). (2) It is Marxian-tinged in the 1945-50 period. This is mainly because for Merleau-Ponty at this time the proletariat is ‘the privileged class’, the possible vehicle of historical truth and initiator of the era of (true) morality. It is the privileged class because it is the universal class, and it is universal because it alone experiences dependency as total and as totaf alienation. The proletariat alone have a historical role which is not coercive and thus are able to fully recognise their fellow men, rather than objectifying them. It is from this intrinsic quality that their ‘historic mission’ stems: to create history as the advent of humanity. (3) It is pessimistic about the prospects for the good society (nonetheless). Since the proletariat is often divided and confused, leadership of the revolutionary movement has to be in the hands of those who realise its objective potential - the Party. Merleau-Ponty, Kruks points out, never thinks of questioning Lenin’s theory: He seems implicitly
to assume
that a vanguard
party is necessary.
is part and
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parcel of Marxian praxis, while also arguing that a possibly unacceptable and undiminishing degree of violence is implicit in its existence - forms of violence over and above those used on the capitalist and allied classes (p. 92).
The remainder of the Me&au-Ponty story may be briefly chronicled as follows. The Korean War broke out in 1950, and there was widespread anxiety that if the conflict escalated the USSR would invade Western Europe. Within this context a position of ‘critical support’ for communism could no longer be contemplated. It was not, said Sartre, that Merleau-Ponty ‘took sides with the other monster, capitalist imperialism’, but that suddenly the Soviet Union was as bad: a Soviet occupying force in France would be an imperialist occupation, not a socialist liberation. In 1955, after a period of silence, Merleau-Ponty publishes Adventures of the Dialectic, which MS Kruks describes as a puzzling book. Its purpose would appear to have been to justify Merleau-Ponty’s decision to end his support for Marxist politics of any kind and to announce his move towards the kind of radical, or ‘new’ liberalism which he outlines in the ‘Epilogue’ . . It consists of ‘several small works’ concerned . one with Weber, one with Lukacs, two with the Russian Bolshevik experience . and one with Sartre’s Marxism. They purport to show the apparently inevitable collapse of the Marxian dialectic into either objectivjsm (Lukacs, Lenin and Trotsky) or subjectivism (Sartre) (p. 103).
Finally, in The Visible and the Invisible, on which Merleau-Ponty was (still) working at the time of his death (1961). there is, as Sonia Kruks sees it, a parallel rejection of the tenets of his earlier general philosophy: Probably the main shift is a movement away from a humanistic conception of the world towards a conception in which Being is conceived as something vaster and more significant than human existence. For example, in the Phenomenology of Perception, it is man, a ‘body-subject’, who overcomes the dualism of subject and object. In The Vkible and the Invisible it is claimed that this dualism . . . simply does not exist in fundamental or ‘wild’ being and is a product only of our own intellectualisations. The human body is now conceived as one ‘variant’ of ‘carnal being’ . . which is itself a ‘prototype of Being’ in a more universal sense - Being which is a unity, a mysterious harmony of what touches and is touched, of what sees and what is visible . . (p. 121).
Sonia Kruks concludes, with commendable modesty, that ~~rl~au-Panty’s thought is susceptible of endless exploration. I find it difficult to give my assent to this proposition. It seems to me that, contrary to what she herself would have wanted, her book proves conclusively that Merleau-Ponty is a deservedly neglected philosopher. Both from her reconstruction of his work, and from reading it in the original, the overwhelming impression is of a few flabby generalisations against idealism and positivism being propounded over and over again. The account of Marxism as a humanism never comes to grips with Marxism as a full-blown theory of history. The rejection of Marxism, including Marxist humanism, exhibits the deepest inconsistencies in Merfeau-
98 Ponty’s thought taken as a whole, and deeply-felt psychological response to the post-war era. What is needed, be it for history, are rigorously defined concepts Ponty’s general and political philosophy both.
Reviews it also has all the appearances of a mid-European political drama of the political philosophy or the theory of and theoretical strategies. Merleauseem to me to be badly lacking in
Joseph University College, Galway
Mahon