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March 18, 2003
The subtitle of philosophy.com in its earlier form was a critical philosophy in public life. In philosophy.com Mark 2 I have worked on pulling out the philosophical implications of current events around water, universities, writing Australian history and war to show that philosophy is more a than just an academic discipline.
I have used Hegel to get philosophy to speak critically in public life because his text, the Phenomenology of Spirit, opened doors for philosophy to engage with human history. It is an innovative and influential text, but it is extremely difficult to read, let alone to understand.
It took me 5 years of hard intellectual slog to read it the first time. You can read a whole page and feel yourself lucky to get a glimmer of a sentence or so. But when you get a glimmer its transformation time. The effect of the text is that you become Hegelian of sorts---, that is, you see human history historically, developmentally and dialectically. Its transformation big time because the focus is on the concepts we employ not the empirical evidence.
This attempt to make philosophy speak publicly has to accept the reality that philosophy is not everyone's cup of tea, and so the readership is low by weblog standards. It is not a way to challenge the big name celebrity webloggers with their daily readerships in the hundreds of thousands. But it is my attempt to ensure that philosophy contributes to a ‘deliberative democracy’—a democracy in which public judgment means more than public opinion; a democracy in which informed citizens consider public matters of concern to them and act according to their careful deliberations.
Well, here is someone doing the same thing! And they are doing it at Techcentralstation of all places. Who would think that Hegel would appear from a century long banishment as junk on a weblog that is devoted to the meeting of freemarkets and technology; and does so in relation to the war on Iraq. Who indeed. Aah, the cunning of reason.
I am referring to a long but important essay by Lee Harris called, 'Our world historical gamble'. There were brief comments on the essay over at Seablogger
The core thesis of Harris is that:
"The war with Iraq will constitute one of those momentous turning points of history in which one nation under the guidance of a strong-willed, self-confident leader undertakes to alter the fundamental state of the world. It is, to use the language of Hegel, an event that is world-historical in its significance and scope. And it will be world-historical, no matter what the outcome may be. Such world-historical events, according to Hegel, are inherently sui generis - they break the mold and shatter tradition. "
An example of a world historical event is the French Revolution of 1789. The Russian Revolution of 1917 is another. Is the Iraqi War 2003 another one?
Bookmark the essay and read it in your own leisure. Harris understands Hegel, has a feel for world history and has an insight the significance of the war with Iraq. He uses Hegel to develop that insight and even gets the dialectics working.
On the surface it does not appear that war with Iraq is a world historical event like the Russian revolution. It is more akin to another minor war in the confrontation between western powers and Arab states that has marked the bloody history of the Middle East in the twentieth century. But Hegel meant something different: he meant a world historical event to refer to a possible pathway out of the kind of historical impasse or deadlock in which a culture or civilization presently finds itself.
This pathway emerges out of a situation that cannot simply stay put; something has to give. So what is going on here?
Harris captures it well when it says that a world-historical event breaks a historical deadlock; and that we understand this breakup as an unavoidable conflict arises between the old order caught up in its impasse and the new order erupting through it. He quotes Hegel:
"It is precisely at this point that we encounter those great collisions between established and acknowledged duties, laws, and right, on the one hand, and new possibilities which conflict with the existing system and violate it or even destroy its very foundations and continued existence, on the other…."
The key to Hegel is his focus on the changes to our historical concepts and categories that we use to understand and make sense of history. In a situation of world historical event our old concepts and categories are of little use in enabling us to understand a transformative event, because the essence of the world-historical is the disclosure of new and hitherto unsuspected historical possibilities.
That is Hegel outlined. We could go on about the dialectics of change through contradiction but there is no need. We have enough for the job to look at current events from the perspective of a possible pathway out of a historical impasse that involves confronting the historical categories of our thought.
The question to ask now is: Does this fit what is what is happening in Iraq. Harris says yes: the old concepts embedded in basic languague of international relations----"empire", "national self-interest", "multi-lateralism" or "sovereignty" no longer fit the new historical state of affairs that will emerge out of the crisis. He makes his case thus:
"...with few exceptions, each side in this debate is working with a set of ethical and political concepts and categories that have been derived from an early historical era. For example, those who oppose action against Iraq often justify their position by an appeal to the Iraqi people's right to self-determination. On the other hand, those who argue that America should try to contain Iraq, or to deter it by sanctions, or even many of those who argue for a limited military intervention, justify their position on the principles of classical Realpolitik.
All of these positions are fatally undercut by the fact that they appeal to the outmoded conceptual categories of an earlier epoch - an epoch in which all the relevant actors in an international conflict were playing by the same basic rules. They were all nation states, each deploying a foreign policy - in both war and peace - that was designed to advance their own interests, where these interests could be easily predicted by the other actors in the conflict."
He then adds:
"... if we in fact lived in a world where concepts like self-determination and Realpolitik could be applied, there would be no crisis, since there would be no Saddam Hussein in Iraq, nor terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda, nor conflicts like the Israeli-Palestine conflicts --- for in such a world the players would all be limited to making rational calculations and pursuing predictable policies: their undesirable actions could be deterred through the traditional methods of deterrence, and there would be no fear that a player might suddenly undertake risks that any realist would know to avoid. Everyone could be counted on to consult his self-interest in a way that was generally recognized, even by his most bitter opponents, as realistic."
This is no longer the case because the liberal world system has collapsed internally: there is no longer a set of rules that govern all the players. These rules, or maxims of prudence, are those regulatory principles that enforce a realistic code of conduct on all the participants in a well-ordered system, and which allows us to know for a near certainty what the other players will not even conceive of doing. Without the transcultural or universal rules of politically stable international system we have anarchy and that is the gateway to disaster.
Harris's case is that both the "liberal" concept of national self-determination and the "conservative" one of Realpolitik are no longer adequate to the historical actuality that is unfolding before our eyes. They are obsolete for the same reason: the epoch of history governed by the principle of classical sovereignty is in the process of dissolution.
There is something right about this. The anti-war case Public Opinion has been doggedly argued on the grounds of Australia's national interest---the Iraqi regime presents no threat to Australia's national interest. But the war is broader than this as can be seen by the melancholy cultural critic's military machine & individual experience. We sense that these perspectives are limited because it is the liberal ordering of international relations which has become a historical impasse and that the US Bush administration is breaking open the deadlock.
The way this has been officially expressed is that international terrorism has changed the terrain of classical sovereignty of the classical nation-state; warfare as the conflict between different classical nation-states under a centralized command to change the behavior of other classical nation-states in a desired direction. The 9/11, kind of attack on the US has no Clausewitzian justification because it was not launched by a nation-state. Though the US is fighting a Clausewitzian war with Iraq, it is not doing so in terms with the war on international terrorism and Al Qaeda.
Thats enough of the case argued by Harris. What it does is enable us to put a finger on what people sense is happening----that we are living through a world historical event. Now Harris wants to save the liberal world order from its own internal contradictions. He says that this can be done by limiting the principle of national self-determination by being prepared to dismantle and reconstruct another nation-state, if, like Iraq, its behavior poses a threat to the general international system.
A limited negation of the principle of national self-determination is required, he says, because rogue states armed with weapons of mass destruction "spell the end of the liberal world order as we now know it, and will mark a steep descent into a Hobbesian world of nightmarish proportions." This means that there is one state "who is permitted to use force against other agents who are not permitted to use force.... The only alternative to this is the frank and candid acceptance of anarchy, the state in which all recourse to violence is equally legitimate." But anarchy with nuclear weapons is a no go option since it means the end of liberal civilization.
This is why the US is not just engaged in an old fashioned war with Iraq. Iraq represents the first case of putting the new policy into action. And it gives an insight into the new world that is forming. First, Europe fades into the background as an area of strategic concern and the Middle East comes into the foreground. Secondly, though the official justification for the war never stacked up in a convincing way, but it did its job to provide a cover for the US shift to a global empire. The first step in this is the US conquering Iraq, and then creating a permanent military bases in that country from which to dominate the nation states in the Middle East. This formation of the US empire is a new epoch of history.
Harris, along with many Americans, objects strongly to this account of the new order. He says that 'to invoke antiquated concepts like Empire to describe this new stage in world-history is sheer anachronism.' He says that this overlooks a number of critical distinctions. He says that:
"An empire acts to insure its own self-interest. But, in this case, the U.S. is rather acting as an agent for the interests of others at precisely the same time it is acting to insure its own national interests."
Agreed. Only some empires though, eg., the European colonial ones of the 18th and 19th centuries. The defenders of the classical Roman empire would have argued similarly, that in pursuing its selfish policy, Rome was also forced to increase the general level of security throughout the world. So in using pax American like Pax Roman we are not simply applying outmoded labels to the newly emergent possibilities: we are re-thinking the concept of empire in terms of a hegemonic superpower.
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When you get back to your response, I'd love to hear it since I was rather awed and trembling at the implications of that article "our world historical gamble." Up until reading it, I've been firmly on the anti-war side, but it gave me cause to think, so any comments would be welcome. Warmly, Scott