In Defense of Metaphysics

Paper published in Dialectic, Cosmos, and Society 12

Anthony Mansueto
Institute for Philosophy and Social Progress
2511 West Schaumburg Rd. #221
Schaumburg, IL 60194

www.geocities.com/Athens/Thebes/1593
[email protected], [email protected]

0.0 Introduction

There is, perhaps, no discipline which has been more uniformly derided for a longer period than metaphysics. Declared impossible (at least as it had traditionally been understood) by Kant (Kant 1781/1969), its assertions were determined to be logically meaningless by Ayer (Ayer 1937). Dialectical materialism, meanwhile, has historically maintained that the discipline is unnecessary, in so far as the universe as a whole can be explained on the basis of purely material principles (Engels 1880/1940). No critique has been so devastating, however --or so revealing of the temper of our times-- as the claim, which has come from diverse philosophical perspectives and divergent positions along the political spectrum (Kierkegaard 1848, Nietzsche 1889, Heidegger 1928/1968, Arendt 1958, Levinas 1965, Derrida 1967/1978, Amin 1988/1989), that metaphysics, quite apart from whether one believes it to be possible or impossible, meaningful or meaningless is, in fact, at the very root of a plethora of social evils, from technological domination through imperialism and totalitarianism to atheism and despair. This essay will analyze what we will call the "political-theological," as opposed to the epistemological (Kant 1781/1969), cosmological (Engels 1880/1940), and logical (Ayer 1937) critiques of metaphysics. We will begin by identifying the principal elements of this critique and showing that they are shared across what is usually taken to be a very wide ideological spectrum which includes religious existentialists and phenomenologists such as Kierkegaard and Levinas, crypto-fascists such as Nietzsche and Heidegger, democrats such as Arendt, postmodernists such as Derrida and theoreticians of the national liberation movements such as Samir Amin. We will then identify the common social basis and political valence of this critique and show why it is played out in somewhat different form in different social contexts. Finally we will attempt to answer the critique, offering an alternative analysis of the origins of metaphysics and an argument for its progressive --indeed foundational-- role in the human civilizational project. Questions about the possibility of metaphysics, as well as an answer to the dialectical materialist claim that the universe can be explained in terms of purely material principles have been addressed elsewhere (Mansueto 1997, 1998, forthcoming)

1.0 The Emergence of the Political-Theological Critique of Metaphysics

The political-theological critique of metaphysics is a complex and diverse ideological phenomenon. Before we can analyze either its social basis and political valence or its internal logic we need to define better its principal characteristics. This means including some elements which may not be shared fully by all of its adherents, and leaving aside some others which may be prominent within certain sub-trends, such as religious existentialism or postmodernism, but which do not characterize the phenomenon as a whole. Broadly speaking the main elements of the political-theological critique of metaphysics include:

1) a common definition of metaphysics as a universal causal theory which attempts to rise rationally to first principles of both explanation and of action,

techne

1.1 The Antidialectical Tradition

The origins of this critique can be traced back, at the very least, to the high middle ages, to the Augustinian reaction to Aristotelian dialectics, and to the parallel reactions against Aristotelianism in Islam and Judaism. Aristotelian dialectics, especially in its Averroist form, elevated philosophy, which grasps the truth in intelligible form, above religion, which conveys the truth in confused and imaginative form to the masses. It stressed the ordering of matter, and thus of the entire material universe, to God, who drew forth the potential for organization which is latent in matter through the operation of secondary causes, of which human reason in both its theoretical and practical-technical dimensions were among the most important. For many Augustinians this was tantamount to a materialist pantheism which undermined divine freedom and sovereignty. A whole host of "corrective" strategies, from Bonaventurian exemplarism to Scotist voluntarism and Occamist nominalism was employed to reign in metaphysics and safeguard revelation and divine liberty. In this sense the Protestant Reformers, with their claims that we know God only on the basis of revelation and are justified only on the basis of faith, simply radicalize the Augustinian reaction of the middle ages.
Even so, Augustinianism in its Catholic and Protestant forms never entirely abandoned metaphysics. Paley's argument from design and Berkeley's subjective idealism (Berkeley 1710, Paley 1802) --the two dominant strategies in Protestant apologetics in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries-- certainly represent a retreat from the bold claims of an Aquinas, a Maimonidies, or an Ibn Rusd, but they are, nonetheless, strategies for rising to first principles on the basis of rational arguments. They may represent by-ways or dead ends, but they are, nonetheless, part of the larger via dialectica. Even Kant (Kant 1761/1969), who rejects the possibility of a rational ascent to first principles, comes to this conclusion only after attempting such an ascent and, having reached his conclusion, immediately turns to the task of finding a new way to ground science, ethics, and religion. It is not until the middle of the nineteenth century, with Kierkegaard (Kierkegaard 1840/1941), that we find philosophers beginning to make arguments against philosophy as it has historically been understood --not simply restricting the scope of human reason, but actually arguing that the via dialectica is itself a path to perdition. For Kierkegaard the very attempt to construct a system excludes the possibility of discovering God, because in rendering the universe intelligible it rules out in advance the encounter with another free personality --human or divine. God is known only in the radical inwardness of human subjectivity, only after we have despaired of the effort to comprehend and organize the world on the basis of some principle accessible to reason.
Kierkegaard is one font of the political-theological critique of metaphysics; the other is Nietzsche (Nietzsche 1889/1968). At first no two figures could seem more different: the radical Christian and the prophet of the anti-Christ. And certainly their reasons for rejecting metaphysics are nothing if not diametrically opposed. Kierkegaard (who continues in the tradition of the Augustinian reaction) rejects metaphysics as a manifestation of human pride and the will to power; Nietzsche rejects it precisely because it represents a retreat from the raw struggle for power which, in his mind, is the only real principle which governs the universe --an attempt on the part of the weak-spirited to hide from the world as it is in the name of the world as it should be, a search for some pre-existing pattern of organization on which to depend rather than a bold struggle to organize the universe ourselves, as best we can, in full knowledge that our efforts will, in time, be swept away.
What is rejected by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche both is the presence of a meaning immanent in human activity and in the universe generally which, however, points beyond itself to an intrinsically meaningful ground. Both ultimately regard meaning as a function of power. For Kierkegaard this power is always and only the power of God before which the only proper human response is one of radical submission. Nietzsche, on the other hand, scorns such submission and counsels us to join the eternal struggle in which meanings are created and destroyed.
These two strains flow together in the work of Martin Heidegger, where we find the first really complete and rigorous statement of the political-theological critique of metaphysics. Heidegger's work is notoriously complex and obscure and has been buried in layer upon layer of commentary, so that it becomes difficult to say anything about him without risking exposure for some scholarly faux pas. This complex of defensive ramparts, however, in fact conceals a cluster of relatively simple claims. Heidegger's early critique of metaphysics, set forth in Problems of Phenomenology (Heidegger 1927) and Being and Time (1928) focuses on the failure of thinkers, beginning with Plato, to grasp the distinction between Being and beings, and instead attempts to theorize Being as the beingness of beings --i.e. it thinks Being in entitative terms. Where the pre-Socratics, according to Heidegger, were able to think the self-manifestation of Being, something he associates with the term physis or nature, Plato and Aristotle increasingly use the language of morphe (form) and energeia (actuality). Form, and especially the Good or the "form of forms" is, for Plato, what really is and that in terms of which this world of appearance must be explained and judged. Aristotle goes even further down this road, arguing that it is form which actualizes matter, bringing things into being. Rather than simply allowing Being to manifest itself, to present itself as a question, it is reduced to something other than Being, something which can be comprehended --and once comprehended, used to ground our own process of making, our own process of bringing into being. Indeed, as Heidegger points out, the very notion of morphe derives from the language of the craftsman: it is the look or appearance given to something by its producer. Energeia, similarly, is rendered in German as Wirklicheit, from the root for work. Metaphysics thus grounds technology, and the larger technological mode of relating to the world.
Later (Heidegger 1941) Heidegger modified both his historical analysis and his philosophical position. Increasingly identifying ancient Greek and German romantic thought, he claimed to hear in Plato and Aristotle echoes of the earlier Greek aletheia or unconcealment of Being and located the crystallization of metaphysics in the "translation" of Greek thought into Latin, the language of road builders and empire makers, a crystallization which is completed in the Middle Ages when Being is identified with the supreme maker, the Christian Creator God. This process culminates, of course, in Thomas, who is the supreme philosopher of the "ontotheologic," the universal causal-explanatory system in which Being is simply an instrument for explaining and ultimately manipulating entities. Modern metaphysical theories, such as those of Descartes and Hegel --or for that matter Marx-- differ only in giving human rather than divine subjectivity or labor pride of place. Nietzsche's claim that the world is just the "will to power" is simply the culmination of this long metaphysical tradition, and offers nothing but another formulation of the first principle.
Being, for the later Heidegger, manifests itself in a people only through the voice of the few who help it to discover its "god," a sort of mythos under which Being is revealed.

Volk

In this regard Heidegger remains close to Kierkegaard, seeing humanity as a passive instrument of Being rather than an active creator of meaning. After the "turn" in his thought, however, Heidegger also becomes more interested in analyzing the historical process by which Being is unconcealed --or by which it "withdraws" leaving the world subject to techne and to the will to power-- than he is in the existential analysis of Dasein (human being or literally "being-there") as an opening to Being. While the historical process is treated here simply as a product of Being's unconcealments and withdrawals, the effect is, nonetheless, to reinstate the Nietzschean focus on the nexus between power and meaning, while endowing this nexus with an ontological legitimation which makes the forcible irruption of meaning in history no longer the product of finite human organizing activity, but rather an epiphany of Being itself. It is this notion of the historical destiny of the people as an unconcealment of Being, by Being, which made Heidegger vulnerable to the appeal of Nazism, which appeared to him as the possible occasion of just such an unconcealment.
After its first complete formulation in the work of Heidegger, the political-theological critique of metaphysics developed in a number of apparently very different directions. Levinas (Levinas 1965) argued that Heidegger's continued use of the language of Being perpetuated the effacement of the Other in the interests of power and domination which had characterized the whole Greek philosophical tradition, which he refers to as "ontology" and advocates a new "metaphysics" rooted in confrontation with the radically Other, the victim, in which alone we can discover --but never conceptually possess-- God. This line of reasoning has been taken up by Latin American liberationists, explicitly by Miranda (Miranda 1972, 1973) and Dussel (Dussel 1998), and more loosely and eclectically by others, for whom the encounter with the poor and oppressed becomes the unique privileged hermeneutic key for reading the scriptures --and reality in general.
The "democrat" Hannah Arendt does not frame her argument in terms of a critique of metaphysics, but the link to the thought of her fascist lover (Heidegger) is readily apparent. At the very core of Arendt's political theory is a sharp distinction between labor, work and action. By labor she means the physical, biological, and economic processes which are necessary to sustain life. Labor leaves nothing behind except life itself, and perhaps the freedom of another (the master) to engage in work or action. By work she means the process of producing objects which possess some permanence, serve some purpose beyond themselves, and which are executed in accord with some pre-conceived plan. Work is an intrinsically teleological process. By action she means the disclosure of the subject in relationship with other subjects --a process which unlike labor or work directly presupposes the presence of others, which, consequently has a characteristic frailty, and the outcome of which is always uncertain (Ardent 1958). Arendt criticizes the entire tradition of Western political philosophy from Plato though Marx, which, she says, understands politics as a form of fabrication or work rather than as the quintessential form of action.

The tradition which Arendt criticizes, of course, reaches its consummation, in the work of Marx, for whom the transformation of the working class from mere makers of physical objects, into the conscious makers of history, constitutes the highest possible level of human development.
The link between making and metaphysics is located for Arendt as for Heidegger in the Platonic doctrine of forms or ideas, though Arendt focuses on the term eidos rather than morphe. She notes that according to Aristotle, Plato himself was the one to introduce this term into philosophical usage and that Plato (Republic X) explicitly uses an analogy with craftsmanship to explain the doctrine.
Is there any difference between the critiques of metaphysics advanced by Heidegger and Arendt? Absolutely. For Heidegger the critique of metaphysics makes way for the disclosure of Being, something which he makes quite clear takes place first and foremost in the historical destiny of peoples. This is especially true after the "turn" in his thinking, when he becomes less and less concerned with the existential analysis of Dasein and more and more concerned with the historical conditions for a new unconcealment of Being. For Arendt, on the other hand, the critique of metaphysics clears the way for a disclosure of the subject in action, to other like subjects, from whom there is some possibility of recognition. Thus the pull in Arendt's theory towards a broadly "democratic" politics. Note, however, that both share a common rejection of work, and of the historical movements which have regarded work or creativity as a privileged opening to understanding Being itself: i.e. Catholicism and dialectical materialism. We should note as well that Arendt's "democratic" politics is fully as elitist as Heidegger's fascism: it is only those who have been freed from the necessity of labor and from the obsession with work who are really capable of public life.
The most radical expression of the political-theological critique of metaphysics is, of course, that advanced by the postmodernists. There are many varieties of postmodernism, but for our purposes the most relevant is undoubtedly the deconstructionism of French philosopher Jacques Derrida (Derrida 1967/1978). Derrida develops his position dialectically, accepting the Heideggerian critique of all earlier metaphysics and Levinas' critique of Heidegger. But he then goes on to point out that Levinas, as well, is unable to escape the "violence" of metaphysics. In finding God in the face of the Other, do we not efface the differance and specificity of the Other as surely as if the Other (and his suffering) were reduced to a necessary expression of the divine first principle, an object of divine providence, of a vanishing moment of the human historical process? What Derrida suggests is that violence is unavoidable: there is no escape. The best that we can do is to unmask the violence embedded in our own discourse and that of others in an effort to contain the damage.

1.2 Dialectics Against Itself

It should hardly be surprising to discover a hostility to metaphysics among thinkers who are the heirs to the Augustinian reaction. It is something else to find such hostility among the heirs of Aristotle and Hegel. And yet the Marxist tradition, which has had an ambiguous attitude towards metaphysics from the very beginning, has increasingly embraced its own variant of the political-theological critique. One of the more cogent statements of this position comes from Egyptian Marxist Samir Amin. Amin, for those who are not familiar with his work, is one of the principal theorists of the national liberation movements. He contributed significantly to the analysis of unequal development and unequal exchange and has consistently argued, against both the hegemonic neoliberal trend, but also against the dominant tendencies on the left, in favor of a radical delinking from the world market and a broadly Maoist approach to the problems of socialist construction (Amin 1976, 1977, 1978, 1980, 1982, 1985). While not a philosopher, he has shown increasing interest in recent years in ideological questions.
Amin's comments on metaphysics are contained in a short book published in 1988 entitled Eurocentrism (1988/1989). The book is part of his larger polemic against the dominant social democratic and pro-Soviet "revisionist" tendencies in the international communist movement which, he says, have erred in a number of related ways:

At the same time, with the crisis of socialism and the rise of various nationalist and religious trends with in the national liberation movements, especially in the Islamic world, the critique of Eurocentrism has come increasingly to mean the critique of Marxism, which is increasingly understood as just another European import. Eurocentrism is an attempt to reframe the critique of Eurocentrism in a way which does not give aid and comfort to Islamic fundamentalism and which leaves open room for a "truly universal culture" based on the common experience of the revolutionary struggle against imperialism.
Amin situates "metaphysics" in the context of the emergence of what he calls tributary social formations. In communal societies, where there was little or no systematic exploitation, the social structure did not require any special legitimation; the religion of communal societies was first and foremost an expression of humanity's dependence on the natural world. As warfare and conquest became strategies for economic growth and development, the need arose to legitimate what would otherwise have been transparently exploitative social relationships. Furthermore, as empires grew, so too did the need of ideologies which transcended the religious particularism of the individual city or region. Rational metaphysics, of the kind developed independently in Greece, China, and India and brought to perfection in the various scholasticisms of the long "medieval period," (which begins for Amin with the Hellenistic era and not after the collapse of Rome, presented the universe as a vast hierarchical system in which all finite systems derive from a supreme first principle --a sort of abstract, cosmic reflex of the tributary imperial structure itself. It is only the advent of capitalism, in which the relations of exploitation are opaque, which eliminated the need for metaphysical reflection and legitimation.
It is interesting to note that Amin regards Soviet dialectical materialism, and indeed the entire tradition springing from Engels' Dialectics of Nature, as itself quasi-metaphysical. Indeed in so far as it is both a universal causal theory, and centered on grounding human techne it would also count as metaphysical from the standpoint of the other thinkers we have been considering, even though it has no recourse to immaterial principles. Elsewhere (Amin 1979/1980, 1981/1982) Amin has argued that the Soviet Union, far from being socialist was in fact a "statist" society, something which he describes in terms which suggest a sort of industrialized version of the tributary state. And the political expression of Soviet "diamat" is, of course, the "workerism," the privileging of productivity over revolutionary struggle, which is the principal object of Amin's polemics.
In a recent paper which appears in this issue of Dialectic, Cosmos, and Society, Amin nuances his critique of metaphysics slightly, acknowledging that human beings are "metaphysical animals" which by their very nature pose fundamental questions of meaning and value. At the same time, he develops an even more radical critique of metaphysics as an obstacle to the democratic revolutions. Judaism and Islam, he notes, are both oriented fundamentally towards the establishment of a society in which the divine will is fully accomplished, through the medium of a revealed law. For Judaism the complete realization of this project remains in the future, in the messianic age. For Islam the messiah has, in a sense, already come, in the form of the Prophet, whose law Islam seeks to extend by conquest or conversion throughout earth. In both cases, however, the ideal remains a society in which the revealed law is actually realized. This has made it difficult for Judaism and Islam to accommodate themselves to democracy, the essence of which for Amin is the right of the people to make their own laws and their own history, without reference to either a revealed or a rational metaphysics. Christianity, on the other hand, while it has often succumbed to the theocratic temptation, has an easier time accommodating itself to democracy because of its insistence that the kingdom of God is not of this world and that the people are free to work out their historical destiny under the guidance of only the broadest moral principles. Metaphysical systems, in other words, in order to be compatible with democracy, must not ground a revealed or natural law which stands in the way of the free legislative activity of the people themselves by setting up principles of which human positive laws are regarded as mere applications.

2.0 Social Basis and Political Valence

How should we understand the social basis and political valence of the political-theological critique of metaphysics? We would like to suggest that the leftist rhetoric of many of its practitioners aside, this critique can, in fact be understood only within the context of the ideological strategy of the bourgeoisie. Here it is necessary to distinguish between the spontaneous ideologies generated by the market system and the conscious ideological maneuvers made by the bourgeoisie in its attempt to hegemonize or at least neutralize resistance to capitalism. The marketplace spontaneously, and quite apart from any conscious legitimation strategy, tends to undermine dialectical reasoning and to break down metaphysical systems of the sort elaborated by the great philosophers of the Arabic and Latin middle ages. This is because people in a market society experience their social world either as a system of only externally related atoms (individuals) or as a system of quantities (prices). They soon begin to think of society as a whole in much the same way. Neither sort of system has any sort of global end, and thus provides no basis in experience for concluding to a cosmic telos, which was the aim of Aristotelian metaphysics. Thus the increasing difficulty which bourgeois philosophy, from the rationalists and empiricists through Kant, has experienced in the struggle to rise rationally to a first principle. Indeed, by the time we arrive at Kant, philosophy has even become skeptical about our ability to know things in themselves, a reflex, as Lukacs points out, of the market's own inability to "know" the use-value of things, as opposed to the commodity- form under which all things appear in the market system (Lukacs 1922/1971). At the same time, even in Kant there is no attempt to tear down metaphysical constructs. The historic aim of metaphysics, which was to ground science, ethics, and religion, remains central and the collapse of rational metaphysics impels Kant to seek an alternative road to the ground.
Ideology is not, however, simply a product of our efforts to make sense out of the universe under definite, and sometimes alienating social conditions. It is also a political weapon. And from the very beginning the bourgeoisie has faced a complex and difficult political task. It has had to rely on the support of the broad masses of the working classes (petty bourgeoisie, proletariat, peasantry) in order to break the back of the old feudal classes while at the same time containing any move on the part of these masses towards autonomous political power. It has had to break down the tributary states while containing movement in the direction of socialism. This has required the bourgeoisie to elaborate ideologies which constrain the working classes to see the universe in a way which is compatible with its own class aims.
Lukacs suggests that the bourgeoisie has, historically, used two distinct ideological strategies. During the period of its rise, when it could still present itself as a force for progress vis-a-vis the old feudal classes, and during periods of economic stabilization since then, it has employed a direct apologetic, arguing that capitalism is, in fact, a force for the development of human capacities. After about 1848, however, the developing contradictions of capitalism and the emergence of the workers movement puts the bourgeoisie on the defensive. It became increasingly difficult to legitimate capitalism as a force for social progress, which was being constrained both by ever deeper economic crises and by bourgeois resistance to the economic and political demands of the working class. The result was the elaboration of an "indirect apologetic," which argued not so much that capitalism was just as that a just society is impossible --and that socialism was therefore an empty dream. By the end of the century, this indirect apologetic had taken on the additional task of legitimating imperialist war and expansion --something deeply in conflict with the ideals of the democratic revolutions, but also the only way a capitalist society could resolve its internal contradictions (Lukacs 1953/1959).
The indirect apologetic was advanced along a number of fronts. At the epistemological level it became increasingly common to claim that it is impossible to make objective, rational judgements of value and that all knowledge is in a certain sense interpretive and perspectival. Physics, biology, sociology and psychology all stressed the absence of any underlying arche or telos in the systems they studied, other than the endless drive of all systems to survive and prosper, a line of reasoning which culminates in Nietzsche's doctrine of the "will to power." But without objective judgements of value and without some arche/telos to serve as criterion no critique of the marketplace or argument for a nonmarket allocation of resources is possible. And imperialist war seems like simply a natural expression of the underlying cosmic struggle for power. Lukacs points out that these theses were shared in common both by liberals such as Weber (and we might add Arendt), who seemed to believe that democracy represented Germany's best hope for realizing its imperial destiny, and protofascists such as Nietzsche and Heidegger.
Lukacs' theory has extraordinary explanatory power, but it also has some limitations from the standpoint of our task. Lukacs is, first of all, unable to measure the extent to which Marxism itself is affected by the dynamic which he identifies --something which is reflected in its rejection of a transcendental first principle and its ambivalence on cosmic teleology even as it struggles to uphold a realist epistemology and the objectivity of value. More broadly, because of his own acceptance of the bourgeois account of history and his own complicity in the rejection of metaphysics, Lukacs misses the fact that both the "direct" and "indirect" apologetics are, in fact, much older than he allows, and in fact embrace nearly the whole history of philosophy since the middle ages. This in turn makes it difficult to extend Lukacs' theory into two domains which he does not consider: postwar imperialism and its dialectical contrary: the national liberation movement.
We have already mentioned that the political-theological critique of metaphysics actually traces its roots to the Augustinian reaction of the thirteenth century and fourteenth centuries. We need now to analyze this reaction in a bit more detail, and above all to understand what it was reacting against. Like its critics, we too trace the origins of metaphysics to Ancient Greece. But unlike the critics of metaphysics, we see it as a progressive response to a profound social crisis. Located on the periphery of the great tributary empires of the Mediterranean Basin, Greece conserved communitarian and archaic social forms longer than other parts of the region. Early movements in the direction of tributary empire in Crete and Mycenae collapsed and gave rise to a protracted "dark age" in which these tendencies reasserted themselves. During this period, low levels of exploitation made possible key innovations in agrarian technology: the specialized cultivation of grapes and olives, for which the rocky hillsides and coastlines were eminently well suited. The result was the development of village communities into prosperous poleis which thrived on a growing export trade (Andersen 1974).
The emergence of market relations, even of the petty commodity variety, however, led to rapid internal differentiation. The old royal-priestly authorities --the archontes and dynasts-- were overthrown by nouveaux riches merchants and the peasant masses were gradually driven into debt peonage. The result was a series of peasant revolts which were settled differently in different cities. It is the Athenian settlement which interests us most. Here moderate agrarian reforms which guaranteed peasant land rights were coupled with the formation of a democratic public arena in which all landholders could participate. The large latifundialists, in the meantime, were forced to turn to chattel slaves, mostly prisoners of war, as a source of labor power.
We have already noted above the impact of market relations in the ideological sphere: a gradual loss of confidence in the ultimate meaningfulness of the universe and even in the objectivity of knowledge. In Athens this trend was accentuated by political developments. The combination of continued economic inequality with a formally democratic political arena required the ruling classes to gain the consent of the mass for policies which were not in their interest --i.e. expansionist warfare aimed at securing markets and a steady supply of chattel slaves. Schools of rhetoric grew up to train young men of the ruling class to make persuasive arguments in the public assemblies --and if necessary to "make the worse appear the better cause." This is the origin of the sophistic tradition. Moderate sophists such as Protagoras taught that morality was simply a matter of social convention; radicals such as Gorgias denied the objectivity of knowledge altogether.
The Socratic tradition emerged largely as an attempt to reground ethics and thus mount a resistance to the sophists and their bourgeois constituency. Socrates himself concentrated on showing the internal contradictions of the sophistic position and in the process invented the dialectical method. Plato went on to demonstrate the necessity of a cosmological and metaphysical foundation for ethics and to sketch the outlines of what a just society might look like. It was Aristotle, however, who actually did the hard work of grounding knowledge of transcendental principles, making an argument for cosmic teleology, rising through that teleology to a first principle, the Unmoved Mover, which is infinite, necessary, perfect, and divine, and then grounding ethics in that metaphysical principle. If the doctrines of Plato and Aristotle remain rather aristocratic then it is only because the low level of development of the productive forces made a "philosophical democracy" or a society of philosophers impossible; the best that could be imagined was a society governed by philosophers, that is by those who actually know the Common Good and can order society to it. This is a principle shared by Hegel, Marx, Engels, Lenin, and the whole dialectical tradition. As the critics of metaphysics point out, the whole mentality of the Socratic tradition is not that of a landed elite, be it tributary or bourgeois, but rather that of the craftsman. Indeed, while Plato probably came from an elite family, Socrates is reputed to have been a shoemaker and Aristotle a physician.
It might be objected that this Greek birth of metaphysics marks the whole tradition as essentially European and thus at least incipiently Eurocentric. What about the traditions of Asia, Africa, and the Americas? Two points are in order here. First, many of the societies in Africa and the Americas remained communitarian or archaic in character. They conserved a wisdom, an insight into first principles which is no less authentic for being imaginatively rather than conceptually articulated, and had no need to defend this wisdom from skeptical assaults and thus no need for dialectics and the metaphysical doctrine in which it terminates. Those societies which succumbed to tributary exploitation generally also conserved communitarian village structures which served as a crucible for prophetic resistance which sometimes took the form of a resurgent cult of the Great Mother (Tonantzi, Isis) (Stone 1976), and sometimes took the form of a transformation of tributary war gods in a popular revolutionary direction (the cult of YHWH, whose name probably was originally 'El yahwi sabaoth yisrael, El who brings into being the armies of Israel) (Gottwald 1979). While this prophetic criticism was opaque to the ruling classes it made obvious sense to the peasantry to whom it was principally directed. Dialectics was still unnecessary. It is only in market societies that dialectics becomes necessary, and marketization was always much weaker in Asia, Africa, and the Americas than Europe and the Mediterranean Basin.
This said, it must be noted that markets did develop in the advanced tributary societies of Asia, and in India and China in particular. The more abstract sort of religious speculation reflected in Buddhism and later Hinduism reflects the influence of the formal abstraction engendered by market relations, as does much Confucian scholasticism. The latter, in fact, often seems to attempt with a more concrete terminology (e.g. "heaven" and "earth" rather than "form" and "matter" philosophical constructions remarkably similar to those of the medieval Aristotelian tradition.
Dialectics, far from being intrinsically Eurocentric or a mechanism of European hegemony is a means of defending the authentic wisdom, the authentic insight into the organizing principle of the universe which is a legacy of humanity's communitarian/archaic era under the conditions of alienation engendered by the market economy. While the failure to develop, or to fully develop, the dialectical method does not compromise the authenticity of a wisdom or make it an unworthy contribution to the universal culture of humanity, no wisdom can survive in a market society without the defense which dialectics alone can mount.
Dialectics had, from the very beginning, a complex relationship with the great prophetic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam). It should be noted, to begin with, that these religions themselves derived from movements of popular resistance. Norman Gottwald (Gottwald 1979) has shown convincingly that Judaism emerged from a series of peasant revolts in late bronze age Canaan, which undermined the rule of the tributary warlords of the region and established, for at least a brief period, a revolutionary communitarian society in which the village community once again became the organizing institution of human society. Pressure from the resurgent tributary forces, now armed with iron technology, forced Israel to take on many of the characteristics of a tributary state --monarchy and standing army, centralized temple cult, etc.-- but the prophetic tradition kept alive the ethos which had developed during the peak of the revolution, as well as the "metaphysics" which grounded it. Against the cult of the ba'alim --the name means lord, master, owner of land, and husband, and was used both for the earthly warlord and his heavenly reflex-- the prophets defend the worship of 'El yahwi sabaoth yisrael --El who brings into being the armies of Israel. As Israel met with defeats and reverses, and as these defeats and reverses turned themselves into opportunities to exercise a transforming effect on a global scale, it became increasingly apparent that the struggle was about more than simply Israel's own liberation. The prophets helped Israel to discover that the God they met on the battlefields of Jezreel, who gave them amazing victories over a far more powerful enemy, was in fact the creator of heaven and earth, the causative power of Being itself. Thus the revolutionary struggle of a band of peasants from the hill-country of Judea and Samaria becomes the locus of the revelation of the divine name, YHWH (Exodus 3:13-16). Judaism preserves this truth in the insight that it is above all in ethical conduct that God is encountered.
Christianity and Islam, by comparison, represent a far greater degree of accommodation with the tributary state. For Christianity this accommodation is facilitated by the element of otherworldliness which forms an irreducible part of the religion. Unlike Judaism, which in most forms remains resolutely committed to the acceptance of human finitude, Christianity promises its adherents deification or, what amounts to the same thing, knowledge of God in essence, something which is inconceivable within ordinary human history. There is always a danger, however, that this recognition of our ordering to a good beyond history will leave history itself unredeemed, a tendency which is exacerbated in the Pauline and Augustinian political theology. According to this theology, human beings, having turned from God to themselves become hopelessly bound in sin and can be redeemed only by divine grace. This grace is mediated by the substitutionary atonement of the crucified God. Grace, furthermore, cannot touch the hegemonic political-economic structures which are actually constituted by the human pursuit of wealth and power. Even if the saved gain the upper hand, these structures remain necessary to restrain the wicked, the lovers of pleasure and honor, who will not respond to appeals to serve the Common Good. In the case of Islam, the accommodation with the tributary state comes about because the very mechanism for realizing the Law, and thus social justice, is itself a movement of Arabic military expansion which leads to the creation of new tributary states. In both cases, however, the ethical principles which emerged from the prophetic critique of the tributary state, and indeed the prophetic dynamic itself remain intact. These religions thus constituted a brake on exploitation and opened up the possibility of renewed social progress in the regions of their influence.
Dialectics exercises dual impact on the prophetic religions. On the one hand, as the prophetic religions came into contact with the increasingly marketized metropoles of the Hellenistic and Roman empires, they required new forms of legitimation, something which was supplied first by Platonic and later by Aristotelian philosophy which demonstrated the ultimately meaningfulness of the universe, existence of God, and the reasonableness of revelation, etc. Second, in Europe in particular, as the technological revolution of the middle ages lead to a rebirth of civilization, and especially the development of the guild system, the urban communes, and the universities, Aristotelian metaphysics in particular helped soften the otherworldliness of Christianity by showing that matter, as the potential for form, is naturally ordered to God, and that all forms of organization --and human civilization in particular-- far from being merely the product of pride and greed, are in fact a real participation in the life of God.
Progressive elements within the hierarchy found these developments encouraging. Indeed, the more positive outlook on human civilization in principle at least, opened up new possibilities for clerical influence. If civilization is ordered to God, then the Church has something to contribute to its direction and development. If it is simply an expression of greed and pride, as Augustine had argued, then while the Church can use it, it has little reason to hope that it can hegemonize it. These progressive tendencies were most prominent in the mendicant orders, and especially in the Order of Preachers, whose leading theologian, Thomas Aquinas, retheorized the Christian call to divinization in a way which built on, rather than pitting itself against, nature and civilization. Other elements in the hierarchy, however, were threatened by the new dialectics, which in their more radical manifestations raised the spectre of a human ascent to God without benefit of priestly mediation --a claim made, as we noted above, by the followers of the radical Averroist Amalric of Bena. The result was a series of condemnations and a resurgence of Augustinian theology which ultimately culminated in the Reformation. In response to this reaction, the secular intelligentsia of the urban communes, the original bearer of the new dialectics, became increasingly protective of its autonomy, allying itself with the Empire against the Papacy and beginning to produce a new anticlerical polemic stressing the independence of the state from clerical control. Where earlier Averroist theories had, like the more moderate Thomist theory, grounded the autonomy of the state on its natural ordering to God, something which did not require clerical baptism or the trappings of cult, later political Averroism, especially of the Padovan school, increasingly limits the state to creating the conditions for social order, and excludes it from higher order tasks such as cultivating virtue or promoting the Common Good --the only way in their mind of protecting it from clerical meddling (Goerner 1965). The result is close to later liberal theories in which the state is merely the guarantor of the market order.
What we have, here, of course, are the ancestors of what Lukacs calls the "direct" and "indirect" apologetics for capitalism. The Augustinian hierarchy and its Protestant heirs attack the dialecticians for their undue optimism about human nature and for reducing God and humanity alike to mere moments in a universal, causal system which at once undermines freedom and fails to acknowledge the reality of sin. The implication, of course, is that the "reality of sin" makes a just social order impossible, a refrain which differs only in form from the atheistic pessimism of a Nietzsche or a Freud and which in either key is music to the ears of the bourgeoisie. The secular intelligentsia, in the meanwhile, distances itself more and more from any "metaphysics" --even a dialectical metaphysics-- which might give aid and comfort to the clergy, and makes common cause with the "democratic" bourgeoisie, anxious to present itself as a force for progress against the pretenses of prelate and peer alike. Both apologetics leave the working classes ideologically disarmed. The secular intelligentsia, now agent of the bourgeoisie's direct apologetic, leaves them without any metaphysical ground from which to ground their ethical claims against the market order. The Augustinian reaction, preparing the ground for the indirect polemic, charges that any attempt to access that ground in order to leverage such a critique represents an assault on divine freedom and thus a negation of the divine love which alone can rescue humanity from its misery. The bourgeoisie laughs.

How does this analysis bear on the nineteenth and twentieth century thinkers who represent the fully developed form of the political-theological critique of metaphysics? The renewal of dialectical thinking in the work of Hegel represents first and foremost an attempt to answer Kant's critique of pure reason by arguing --as Thomas had more than five centuries earlier-- that there is a form of reason higher than the Kantian Verstand, what Hegel called Vernunft (Hegel 1830/1971) and what the scholastic tradition knew as the separatio (Aquinas. In Boethius De Trinitate). This higher form of reason goes beyond a formal description of the laws relating phenomena to each other --beyond even an analysis of underlying structures-- to grasp the organizing principle of things and thus the reason for their existence. Hegel's rediscovery of this sort of reason (which, with an arrogance typical of the modern world he took as an original discovery) enabled him to reconstruct rational metaphysics and, drawing on the extraordinary experience of the democratic revolutions to enrich the cosmic teleology on which it had been based, with a grasp of historical teleology and the ultimate meaningfulness of the human civilizational project. He even begins a critique of the market order. The social basis of this philosophical achievement is the broad democratic movement of which Hegel was a part, which in his time included but also transcended the bourgeoisie.
We should note, however, that Hegel answers only those aspects of the critique of metaphysics which we have classed as spontaneous effects of the alienation generated by the market system --largely the epistemological critique mounted by Kant on the basis of the contradictions within and between rationalism and empiricism. He seems largely unaware of the radical Augustinian critique of metaphysics as an assault on divine freedom and human responsibility, and while he distances himself from the more radical secularizers within the intelligentsia, he blithely reproduces within a Protestant context what amounts to a moderate (Arab) Averroist position on the religious question, apparently without even being aware of it. Religion is, for Hegel, simply an imaginative statement of truths grasped more completely and more profoundly by philosophy and above all by his own system.
By comparison with Hegel, Marx and Engels represent both a step forward and a step backward. On the one hand Marx is able to extend Hegel's critique of the marketplace and show that continued progress requires more than bureaucratic regulation and amelioration of its contradictions. At the same time, Marx more than Hegel is caught up in the "direct apologetic" of the bourgeoisie, which attempts to show the progressive character of the market system. This is reflected not only in Marx's "hymn to capitalism" in the Manifesto (Marx 1848/1878) but also in his critique of religion. The net result, as in the case of other progressive thinkers hegemonized by the direct apologetic was to disarm the working class. Without an adequate metaphysical and cosmological foundation, Marx's ethical claims against capitalism and on behalf of socialism become simply an expression of the interests of one particular group --just another form of perspectival knowledge, just another assertion of a raw will to power vulnerable to the Augustinians and the practitioners of the indirect apologetic.
Engels presents a more complex problem. His Dialectics of Nature (Engels 1880/1940) is nothing if not an attempt to argue for the ultimately meaningfulness of the universe and thus to supply dialectical materialism with a more adequate cosmological foundation --a foundation which is "metaphysical" from the standpoint of the political-theological critique, if not from the standpoint of the authentic metaphysics of Aristotle and Thomas. Specifically, he argues that matter has within itself a principle of motion which leads to the development of ever more complex forms of organization. This motion is governed by the "three laws of the dialectic:"

Engels' strategy, however, foundered on the emerging pessimism of nineteenth century science, something which was reflected most immediately in the somber predictions of cosmic heat death after the discovery of the Second Law of Thermodynamics but which, as we have noted, finds its fullest expression in the Nietzschean doctrine of cosmic struggle and eternal return. The most he can offer is the hope of a continuous cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. This growing cosmological pessimism was partly, of course, a spontaneous product of the deepening internal contradictions and growing stagnation of the market system. But mathematical physics, which has been the carrier of cosmological pessimism in the capitalist era, from the very beginning received no small aid and comfort from the forces of the Augustinian reaction. As Pierre Duhem (Duhem 1909) pointed out at the beginning of this century, it was the Augustinian critique of Aristotelian physics, motivated by a concern that this physics undermined divine freedom and human responsibility, which set in motion the turn toward empirical investigation in the later Middle Ages, a turn which was especially advanced in Franciscan circles, from Robert Grosseteste, who developed a kind of early version of the Big-Bang theory, to William of Occam, whose principles still govern scientific investigation of the more empiricist sort. If God is radically free to organize the universe in whatever way he wills, then the only way to discover that organization, is through empirical research. The effect, of course, is to drain the universe itself of any intrinsic meaning. Contemporary physical cosmology, with its willingness to violate the principle of sufficient reason by positing an origin through "quantum fluctuations," and its extreme pessimism regarding the long-range future of the universe, is simply an extension of this trend.

From here we must trace out the divergent paths taken by practitioners of the political-theological critique of metaphysics during the nineteenth and twentieth century. We must distinguish, first of all, between those who come to this critique out of the tradition of the Augustinian reaction and the indirect apologetic and those who come to the critique from the standpoint of a dialectics hegemonized by the direct apologetic. The first group includes both the religious existentialists and phenomenologists and militant atheists such as Nietzsche, Arendt, and Derrida, as well as those who stand in between (i.e. Heidegger). In the case of the religious existentialists and phenomenologists the social basis is more or less transparent. Thinkers such as Kierkegaard, Jaspers, Levinas, and Dussel represent the interests of various clerical groups threatened by the secular intelligentsia, and especially the organized secular intelligentsia represented by the Communist Party --but also deeply alienated by a capitalism which, they increasingly understand, is the real agent of secularization. Their doctrines allow them to distance themselves from the brutality of the market order but, as Lukacs pointed out, at the same time legitimate the market by arguing that the alienation it generates is, in fact, an ineluctable characteristic of the human condition. They aim their main ideological blows against the left, which persists in attempting to find at least limited and conditional meaning in human history, and scrupulously avoid answering critiques from the Thomistic center, which they simply pretend does not exist.
The atheistic variant of the critique has a similar social basis. From its origin the Augustinian tradition derived from a dualism within the ruling classes between those who had become frustrated with the endless agon and sought rest in God, and those who found the struggle still a source of joy. Nietzsche and Arendt represent the latter group: the first a full blown apologist for imperialist conquest and war, the latter a theorist of the more temperate agon of the democratic polity in which peer tests strength against peer. Nietzsche is the theorist of the imperialist upsurge of the late nineteenth century, Arendt of the imperialist stabilization of the postwar period. These ideological trends also, however, have an hegemonizing function. Even in periods of capitalist stabilization there remain those for whom the progress of the market system represents a degradation of economic independence, power, and social status. This is true for leaders of nonmarket, especially religious institutions, as well as most of the "humanistic" as opposed to the technocratic intelligentsia and broad layers of the traditional petty bourgeoisie. These sectors naturally gravitate towards the left and towards socialism which alone (among existing systems) can answer their concerns for an ethical reflection on the allocation of resources. What an ideology such as Arendt's does is to disarm these sectors, branding over-arching ethical claims as "ideological" or even "totalitarian" and to engage them in a form of political activity which flatters their desire to function as "leaders" concerned with "values" in a restored "public arena" while short-circuiting any critique of the underlying social structure. Indeed, Arendt's work, along with Nietzsche, provides much the ideological infrastructure for the "institutionally based organizing" of Saul Alinksy's Industrial Areas Foundation (Mansueto 1995). The appeal of and ideology like Arendt's is strengthened by the fact that most of the religious and secular-humanistic intelligentsia is already powerfully determined by irrationalist ideologies which undermine their confidence in the possibility of any rational public discourse on value. In the case of religious leaders this usually means some form of Augustinianism. Those who reject authoritarian legislation of morality grounded in divine revelation have little alternative but to accept a politics of democratic negotiation. Much of the secular humanistic intelligentsia on the other hand is directly formed in a milieu where "hermeneutic" theory influenced by Heidegger and Weber is already dominant.
Heidegger stands --sociobiographically and ideologically between these two groups. An ex-seminarian who more or less consciously rejected Thomism for a conservative Augustinian variant of Catholicism at a time when Neo-Thomism was ascendant (Caputo 1982), Heidegger's mature philosophy remains scrupulously ambiguous on the religions question. On the one hand, "Being" for Heidegger remains finite in the sense of being radically dependent on Dasein (human being) for its unconcealment. At the same time each historical order is itself a specific unconcealment of Being which functions in his system in a way which is not too different from the Augustinian God. Radical openness to God, for Heidegger is, however, not associated with a retirement from the agon, something which he accepted only when forced to by the failure of his attempt to exercise ideological leadership over the Nazi movement --to become, in effect the Nazi pope to Hitler's emperor, and later by the collapse of the whole Nazi project.
Deconstructionist postmodernism of the sort represented by Derrida derives from a social base similar to that of the other atheistic variants of the political-theological critique, but articulates the standpoint of those who choose to retire from the agon, but without finding rest in God. In order to understand them we will need first to consider the development of the political-theological critique of metaphysics within Marxism.

We have already noted that Marxism, from the very beginning, integrated elements of an authentic resurgence of the dialectical tradition with elements which reflect both the spontaneous alienation generated by the market system and the conscious apologetics of the bourgeoisie, which constitute a form of bourgeois hegemony over the socialist movement. In tracing the subsequent development of Marxism, it is necessary to distinguish between the three arenas in which Marxism has exercised influence: the Soviet bloc, the European (and to a far lesser extent North American) workers movements, and the national liberation movements of the Third World. From the standpoint of the analysis set forth here, it is hardly surprising that the Soviet tradition should have been more friendly to Engels' dialectics of nature than the European. The attempt to find a cosmological ground for socialism and indeed a pull towards metaphysics makes sense in the context of a successful revolutionary struggle which provides a basis in experience for hope in the ultimate meaningfulness of the universe. This pull towards a resurgence of metaphysics has come from widely diverse directions within the Soviet tradition, including both the "tektology" of Bogdanov (Bogdanov 1928) and his followers, which pretended to be a "universal science of organization" which replaced philosophy once and for all, but which, as a universal causal theory which claims to explain the universe and order action, qualifies as metaphysical from the standpoint of the political-theological critique, and the "dialectics" of Deborin and the "Menshevizing idealists," which represents a return, through Hegel, to positions not unlike those of the Arab and Latin Averroists (Wetter 1958, Joravsky 1961, Dahm 1988).
We must note, however, that the pull back towards metaphysics was sharply resisted by elements within the Communist Party, and that the ensuing conflict had a very specific political content. Both the "tektological" and the dialectical trends were based in the Communist Academy and the Institute of Red Professors, institutional predecessors of the Institute of Philosophy of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Lenin, in spite of his emphasis on ideological discipline within the party, seemed willing to tolerate and even encourage a quasi-independent philosophical leadership based in these institutions --and this in spite of the fact that Bogdanov had been Lenin's chief competitor for leadership within the Bolshevik party during its early years, and Deborin a former Menshevik who joined the Communist Party only late in life. After Lenin's death, however, both trends were attacked for, among other things, conciliating religion, and for failing to "integrate theory and practice," or, as the Maoists would later say, to "put politics in command." Under the leadership of Deborin's former student Mitin, "dialectical materialism" was retheorized in such a way as to give priority to the principle of contradiction, rather than that of "the negation of the negation," as had been the case for both Bogdanov and Deborin, and ideological leadership was transferred to the Central Committee, with the Communist Academy and the Institute of Red Professors, now merged into the Academy of Sciences, reduced to the status of a support staff.
At issue here is a concern on the part of the party apparatus that both the resurgent metaphysical tendencies represented by Bogdanov and Deborin (which certainly differed very profoundly from each other), and the existence of a philosophical authority independent of the party, would ultimately constrain their political autonomy. Here the metaphysicians are cast in the role of a new clergy, with the party defending the autonomy of the lay sphere --and in the process being hegemonized by the "direct apologetic" which leaves socialism's moral claims inadequately grounded. This configuration was not, however, stable. The new theorization of dialectical materialism, in a way which gives priority to the principle of contradiction, had the effect of making organization and meaning purely and simply a product of power (here human rather than divine), so that the metaphysicians become the object of a critique similar to that mounted by Nietzsche. Hegemonization by the direct apologetic almost instantaneously becomes its opposite and the metaphysicians, unable to constitute themselves as an autonomous philosophical authority, find themselves being persecuted by the secular political authorities for much the same reasons they had been persecuted earlier by the Augustinian reaction --with the difference, of course, that now it is the sovereign freedom of the General Secretary, rather than that of God, which they are accused of constraining. The long hand of the bourgeoisie's ideological strategy, in other words, made the Communist Party actually (or at least made it more nearly like) what cheap bourgeois propaganda had always claim it to be: just an expression of the raw will to power, an attempt to claim for humanity, or even for one man, what rightly belonged only to God.
In Europe, on the other hand, the principle of contradiction never completely overshadowed the other principles of the dialectic. Social democrats emphasized the slow, quantitative accumulation of forces in the hope that this would eventually lead to qualitative change. A diverse cluster of thinkers including Lukacs and the Frankfort School emphasized the search for wholeness and a higher synthesis --what Lukacs called "the standpoint of totality (Lukacs 1922/1971)." Only the Gramscian trend emphasized concrete political analysis, something which focused them on the identification of political contradictions. What all these trends had in common, however, was a rejection of the dialectics of nature and a tendency to transform Marxism into a purely sociological theory or into a philosophical anthropology ungrounded by any metaphysics.
This is, once again, hardly surprising given the situation of the left in Europe. Cosmological pessimism retained its hold over the defeated workers movements. But in Europe as in the Soviet Union, the conscious political strategies of the bourgeoisie also played a role. Even as Stalin and Mitin moved to constrain the resurgence of metaphysics in the Soviet Union, European Marxists rejected Soviet "diamat" and the dialectics of nature, which remained an integral part of Soviet doctrine even after Mitin, in large part because it seemed to chain them to a larger cosmohistorical process --and a central political authority legitimated by that process-- which constrained their autonomy. Socialist humanism became simply a left-wing form of secular bourgeois individualism.
Eventually, of course, the European left recognized this. The response, however, was not a turn towards metaphysics in search of a ground (and this in spite of the powerful opening by and to the Catholic Church during the 1960s and 1970s) but rather the "Althusserian reaction" which, even more so than Mitin's diamat gave priority to the principle of contradiction, and rejected the search for meaning and direction in even the limited arena of human history in favor of concrete political analysis of "complex structured totalities." Marxism was reduced to an analytic tool for the workers movement, which asked for an needed no ethical justification.
Deconstructionist postmodernism of the sort promoted by Derrida is simply the self-consciousness of this dynamic on the part of a section of the secular intelligentsia --the section most jealous of its autonomy and least interested in trading some of that autonomy in order to have an impact on the real world. Deconstructionists are, more specifically, drawn from those sectors of the intelligentsia (i.e. people trained in the humanities and the theoretical social sciences) who have been most subjected to the pressures of proletarianization in the postwar period, who fought and lost a struggle against this dynamic in the 1960s, and who then cut a deal with the bourgeoisie, which has agreed to provide them with comfortable academic sinecures provided they disarm, and provide specialized ideological disarmament services for the bourgeoisie should any new movements of resistance arise.
Marxism in the Third World represents a more complex problem. Third World Marxism derives almost uniformly from the Soviet tradition, which accepts the dialectics of nature but interprets it a way which gives priority to the principle of contradiction --or from Maoism, which accentuates the importance of the principle of contradiction even further, effectively depriving the other principles of practical import (Mao 1937/1971). But Third World Marxism has almost always been more or less integrated to one or another degree with indigenous traditions. In some cases the contribution of Marxism to the ideological mix has been rather small --little more than a vague impetus towards socialism-- while in other cases it is Marxism rather than the indigenous tradition which has dominated. Third World Marxism thus represents a complex and diverse phenomenon from the standpoint of the analysis we have been developing. In order to understand it we must first consider the complex social basis of the national liberation movements which have been the carriers of Marxism in the Third World, and then assess the role of diverse Marxist trends and indigenous ideologies within these movements.
The national liberation movements have been regarded by the Leninist tradition as based in an alliance of the national bourgeoisie (i.e. the bourgeoisie which produces, or wants to produce, domestically for domestic consumption), the petty bourgeoisie, the peasantry, and an only incipient proletariat which must, however, struggle for hegemony within the movement, something usually taken to mean the effective political and ideological monopoly of the Communist Party. This analysis has much to commend it, notwithstanding the complex issues surrounding the possibility of a real national bourgeoisie in a completed global capitalist system. What it neglects, however is the complex character of the intelligentsia which organizes these movements, at least part of which has strong connections to indigenous, precapitalist structures. At the lower echelons this means organic intellectuals of the peasantry with strong ties to village community structures --e.g. the "catechists" of the popular church in Latin America, who often come from families which have exercised leadership in indigenous, pre-Christian religions, and their equivalents elsewhere. At the higher echelons it has meant intellectuals drawn from gentry, noble, or even courtly circles who find themselves displaced and marginalized by the process of capitalist development. There are, of course, also intellectuals drawn from the ranks of the national bourgeoisie, the petty bourgeoisie, and the working class, as well as intermediate types, such as the Conservative semi-capitalist latifundiaries of Nicaragua who, marginalized by the Somocista monopoly, produced a whole generation of revolutionary intellectuals.
Regimes such as those led by the Indian National Congress and the various Arab, African, and Asian Nationalist and Socialist movements are generally characterized as national bourgeois or petty bourgeois in character. Even many regimes led by organizations with strong Marxist-Leninist tendencies, such as the Frente Sandinista de Liberaci�n Nacional (FSLN) never claimed to be proletarian in character, and were in fact quite clear in stating that their immediate aims were not socialism but rather national development, while others, such as the Peoples' Republic of China and Vietnam, have abandoned an earlier emphasis on socialist construction, now regarded as a misguided "left" deviation, in favor of an emphasis on economic growth.
But let us look at this analysis in a slightly different light. What we have here are societies which began their revolutionary history as basically capitalist in character, and which like other capitalist countries (including the imperialist metropoles) ran into fundamental obstacles to growth and development. Lacking the geopolitical-military positioning and resources to export these contradictions to a colonial periphery, the societies in question opt for the only real road forward: mobilization of the people around a nationalist ideology with vaguely socialist overtones designed to legitimate a state led process of industrialization. If one leaves out the specification that the societies in question not only lacked a colonial periphery to which contradictions might be exported, but that they in fact were the colonial periphery to which contradictions were being exported one might as well be talking about Germany, Italy, Spain, or Portugal during the 1920s and 1930s as China or Tanzania in the 1960s. The parallel is even more striking once one is willing to admit that the supposed national bourgeois and petty bourgeois tendencies in the national liberation movements in fact don't look very bourgeois at all in the European or American sense. These movements are not driven by small manufacturers or Main Street shopkeepers, but rather, as we suggested above, by displaced elements of the precolonial, usually tributary ruling classes, especially those associated with the state apparatus and by their associated intellectuals.
There is, of course, one important difference. Those who are resisting imperial domination, even in a very inadequate way, can make moral claims which those who are engaging in imperial domination cannot. But even here the lines are not so clearly drawn. Is Arab nationalism a struggle for liberation from European imperialism or a movement of imperial restoration? It would be difficult to deny that there are elements of both at work in this complex historical phenomenon.
It is within this context that the interaction between Marxism and indigenous traditions, and the struggle between various tendencies within Marxism has played itself out. Where indigenous traditions have conserved strong communitarian or archaic tendencies (e.g in Africa) or have other elements which support the development of human social capacities (e.g. the Ashokan Buddhism of Burma) there has been a tendency towards investment in education, health care, and other activities which promote the development of human capacities, even while the level of development of the productive forces has been low. Where the indigenous traditions are marked by a strong element of tributary-imperial restorationism, on the other hand, as in the Arab countries and the Islamic realm generally, the tendency has been to use state revenue to support a large military establishment, something which drains resources away from civilization building activities.. We should note, further, that the relationship of Third World revolutionary elites to their own indigenous traditions looks suspiciously like that of conservative European intellectuals over the course of the past two centuries to their traditions. The result is a cluster of ideologies which look a great deal like French traditionalism or German objective idealism in Afro-Asian or indigenista attire. Is Vasconcelos with his intuitivist ideology of the Raza Cosmica really so far from Schelling? Is Nyere's appeal to African tradition as a solution to the contradictions of capitalism really so different from de Maistre's appeal to the French? Romantic nationalism, in the Third World as in Europe, allows elites to mobilize the masses in service to a nationalist project, with more or less authentic popular content, without creating an objective standard by which the leadership of the elites might be judged, something which would follow immediately from the constitution of an authentic metaphysics which abstracted the intelligible content of the popular traditions and derived from that content definite moral principles.
More profound engagement between Marxism in the Soviet mold and indigenous traditions has generally involved two marked changes on the Marxist side. On the one hand, there has generally been real skepticism about the possibility of national capitalist development and the existence of an authentically nationalist bourgeoisie. Second, the militant secularism of the Soviet party has been softened to make room for a mass-mobilizing "linking ideology" (Lancaster 1988) which draws on the authentic if prephilosophical wisdom of the peasant communities as an ideological reserve for the national liberation movements, without allowing the formation of a real synthesis between dialectics and indigenous wisdom in terms of which the party and the national liberation movement might be held accountable.
This dynamic is most apparent in the case of liberation theology, which for the most part eschews the Thomistic dialectics characteristic of earlier Catholic theology in favor of a largely biblicist social ethics. The appeal here is the authority of revelation even if the scriptures are interpreted according to what Cardinal Ratzinger and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith call a "rationalist hermeneutic," e.g. some sort of sociological reductionism. Liberation theology for the most part has remained within the framework of a "left-wing Augustinianism" which grounds the preferential option for the poor (not, mind you, the working classes) not on their creative participation in the life of God but rather precisely in their suffering and their poverty which through an intellectual sleight of hand is confused with the voluntary poverty of the religious and taken as a sign of the ordering of the will to God. The struggle within the Catholic Church over liberation theology is really just a struggle within its Augustinian wing between these leftist forces and more traditional Augustinians who insist on an actual scrutiny of the will before rendering judgement on the spiritual state of the individual. It is, in other words, Ratzinger's Bonaventure against Boff's Angelo Clareno. Both parties reject the ultimate meaningfulness of the human civilizational project. Thomas is nowhere to be found.
What liberation theology does is to link the peasant communities, and working class communities which conserve a memory of the village community, and thus a spontaneous ability to understand the universe as ultimately meaningful and ordered to God, to the national liberation movements, via their organic intellectuals, e.g. catechists and other subaltern "pastoral agents." At the same time, the biblicist ethics and the underlying Augustinian theology actually subverts the spontaneous teleology of the indigenous wisdoms in favor of a doctrine which makes meaning and value a function of power: ultimately that of God, and immediately that of the revolutionary commandantes, who play a role in the scheme not unlike that of the Emperor Frederick in radical Joachite doctrine. The people and their pastoral agents don't notice that this is happening. Their most pressing demands are, after all, being prosecuted and their "faith" is being respected. But when the commandantes abandon the people, either after a successful revolution or after a negotiated settlement (Petras 1997) the people are ideologically disarmed. Nothing in the liberationist political culture, in either its secular or religious dimensions, allows them to ground specifically anticapitalist demands --the only demands which will really improve their situation in the long run.
Maoism reflects a fundamentally different configuration of forces within the national liberation movements. As we suggested earlier, at the philosophical level Maoism represents the reduction of dialectical materialism to the principle of contradiction --i.e. the claim that every system generates internal contradictions which provide the unique and permanent basis for development toward higher levels of organization. Both the role of the quantitative accumulation of forces and the goal of achieving a higher synthesis are eclipsed by a focus on identifying and "playing" the principal contradiction during any period or conjunction. In terms of political analysis, this focus allowed Mao and his followers to perceive clearly one of the principal dangers of the whole process of socialist construction: the contradiction between socialist property forms and the residues of commodity production, which reproduce bourgeois ideology and consumerist values and can lead to a capitalist restoration --something which did indeed eventually take place in the Soviet Union, even if one is skeptical about the claim that the restoration occurred under Khrushchev rather than Gorbachev. At the same time, the Maoist focus on contradiction tended to obscure the real achievements of the Soviet system in the areas of technological, economic, political, artistic, scientific, and philosophical development --i.e. the enormous contribution of the Soviet system to the human civilizational project, which is after all the whole point of socialism. More broadly, the Maoist focus on the principle of contradiction carries even further than Soviet diamat the transformation of Marxism in a Nietzschean direction --into a theory in which power grounds meaning rather than meaning power.
Maoism has, based on its analysis of the "principal contradiction" of the imperialist system, argued that the progressive bloc should be based on alliance between not only the working class and the peasantry, but also the national bourgeoisie, which produces domestically for domestic consumption in the countries of the Third World. This alliance was reflected in the generous terms of compensation for "patriotic" businessmen whose enterprises were nationalized early in the revolution, in the strategy of delinking from the global market coupled with radical land reform and rural demand-led industrialization during the peak years of Maoist dominance, and in the turn towards privatization within the context of a still carefully regulated and protected market economy in the past 20 years. At the same time Maoism, especially in its leftist forms, has been ruthless in its attacks against the tradition of the old Mandarin intelligentsia, mobilizing a series of campaigns against Confucianism and "self-cultivation" which led eventually to the Cultural Revolution. The bearers of these attacks on the intelligentsia were, however, themselves intellectuals --generally students whose prospects for intellectual employment were poor under the rather spartan Chinese regime-- acting in conjunction with the Red Army, with its poor peasant base, against the principal organization of the secular intelligentsia, i.e. the Communist Party. As late as the 1970s it would have been easy to regard the political significance of this movement as more or less transparent: an "ultra-left" movement of marginalized intellectuals and poor peasants frustrated by the ability of the socialist system to meet their demands, and determined to break the alliance with the national bourgeoisie and accelerate the pace of socialist transformation. Their defeat could, similarly, have been read as the triumph of national bourgeois elements within the anti-imperialist bloc. This analysis, however, fails to comprehend the real political valence of the Cultural Revolution. By liquidating the older gentry intelligentsia, especially its partially modernized section which was organized in the Communist Party apparatus, the Gang of Four and their allies removed or at least weakened one of the principal obstacles to marketization in China. They acted, in other words, as agents of the national bourgeoisie in its struggle against what Amin calls the "statist" (i.e. civilization building) tendency which gained the upper hand in the USSR. In this regard they are not unlike the deconstructionist postmodernists of Europe and North America, who often embraced Maoism during their youth. This is, again, hardly surprising given the Nietzschean transformation of Marxism worked by Mitin and Mao.
What does this tell us about the position of our friend Samir Amin? Samir Amin has historically identified himself with the Maoist trend, but his Maoism is heterodox at best, and he can neither be credited with the Maoists' insight into the dynamics of capitalist restoration in the Soviet Union nor blamed for the Cultural Revolution. But the trajectory of his own political-ideological development closely tracks what we have identified as the developing agenda of Maoism. In the 1970s he was an apologist for the Khmer Rouge; by the early 1980s he was defending Maoism in terms of its contributions to economic growth --i.e. in distinctively "national bourgeois" terms. In later 1980s he took up the critique of metaphysics, an indirect blow at the religious left, which by that point was practically the only left which remained, in favor of a universal culture based on the struggles of the poor and oppressed; now, at the turn of the new millennium he tells us that Moslems and Jews (and by extension everyone else as well) must learn from Christian Europe the radical laicism which renders religious metaphysics inert and accept what he himself acknowledges to be the fully bourgeois culture of secularism.
It can only be said that for those of us who have benefited from Amin's often incisive economic analysis, and who respect his lifetime of service to socialism, this turn is very disappointing. Has the prophet of delinking has become the ideological agent of Coca Cola Corporation and the international bourgeoisie? Samir would do well to heed a Maoist adage too often forgotten: to consult with and learn from the people. And the people that Samir purports to defend are not, for the most part laicists or secularists. While maintaining a healthy skepticism about the political agendas of various clerical groupings, they remain resolutely convinced of the ultimate meaningfulness of the universe. It is this conviction and this conviction alone which grounds their judgement against imperialism and against the bourgeoisie, and which sustains them in their struggle for a new order which will make it possible for them, or at least their children or their children's children, to develop more fully their capacity to participate in the movement of matter toward ever more complex forms of organization, a movement grounded in the infinitely attractive power of God. They are, in short members of the Party of Meaning and of Hope, which is the only true Party of Justice. Samir, alas, has defected to the faction of nihilism and despair.
A note, finally, is in order regarding that new wave of movements in the Third World which, having rejected Marxism and indeed all global ideologies and "totalizing metanarratives" are often, therefore, classified as postmodern. I am thinking, especially of movements such as the Ejercito Zapatista de Liberaci�n Nacional. Here a sharp distinction must be made between the communities which constitute the base of the movement and the political and ideological leadership, which seems, in the case of the Zapatistas, to be embodied in one person. If the indigenous and peasant communities of the Lacondan rain forest have, perhaps, grown weary of revolutionary commandantes and ideological vanguards which in the long run only betray them, and have thus chosen to distance themselves from the dialectical tradition, this is understandable. If they taken the further step of deciding to find their own voice and join the global dialogue in search for principles of meaning and value in terms of which the universe can be understood and action ordered, this is to be applauded. But the decision of a group of peasants to assert their autonomy in the struggle for liberation is not to be confused with the rejection of dialectics by secular intellectuals, for whom dialectics has always been the only road to wisdom. The Mayan communities of Chiapas have their own traditions on which to draw in charting a course for the future; Marcos does not. It would be a shame if his fashionable disillusionment with Marxism and other forms of "metaphysics" undermined the ability of the people of Chiapas to tap into the dialectical tradition when the time comes to confront the challenges of the marketplace, and to build the alliances with other communities around the planet which this confrontation will require.

3.0 For a New Metaphysics

Our analysis suggests that metaphysics plays a powerfully progressive role within the workers movement. It is rational metaphysics, product of dialectical reasoning, which allows us to rise to the transcendental principles of value which alone can ground our critique of the market order --and our proposal for an alternative allocation of resources. It also suggests that we need to see the international workers movement --and its relationship to other progressive forces-- in a very different light. We have already made it clear that we do not believe dialectics and the metaphysics in which it terminates is the only wisdom. On the contrary, peasant communities around the planet have conserved their own wisdom, expressed in the imaginative form of religious mythologies and prophetic oracles, and this wisdom has served and will continue to serve as a catalyst for revolutionary action directed at the creation of a social order which permits the full development of human capacities along the diverse lines envisioned by humanity's many different cultural traditions.
By comparison with these peasant communities, the international workers movement both enjoys a supreme advantage and suffers a profound defect. On the one hand, the workers movement is the carrier of a tradition uniquely adapted to do battle with the market system, something peasant communities have only recently had to confront. This tradition includes the whole of dialectics --both the logical-cosmological-metaphysical dialectics of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, and the historical dialectics of Hegel, Marx, and Engels. In this sense the workers movement needs to trace its history (and its struggle with the bourgeoisie for hegemony within the democratic movements) back to the guilds and the mendicant orders and not merely to the trade unionism and socialism of the nineteenth century. It is this capacity to confront the marketplace, and not the technological superiority of tools with which it works or the fact that it has "nothing to lose but its chains" which constitutes the basis for the leading role of the workers' movement within the larger progressive block. At the same time, the workers movement has been subject to the alienating impact of market forces far more intensely for a far longer period than have the peasant communities. This is reflected in the more profound influence of bourgeois ideology. The Marxist rejection of religion and metaphysics is only the first phase of this influence. Once the ordering to transcendental principles of value has been undermined, socialism becomes simply a way for workers to increase their consumption levels. The degeneration into "economistic" social democracy and the option for alliance with imperialism follow like clockwork. At the same time, the crisis of metaphysics undermines the intelligentsia's ordering to the Common Good and transforms it into just another (relatively privileged) interest group within civil society, anxious to defend its privileges and consumption interests against encroachments by both the state and the marketplace. Thus deconstructionism ...
Metaphysics does not make the workers movement of the advanced industrial centers into an adversary of the peasant and worker movements of the periphery. Rather, an authentic metaphysics binds these movements together in a common ordering to the Beautiful, the True, the Good, and the One, an ordering which is expressed in a common commitment to the full development of human capacities along the diverse pathways made possible by the incredible variety of human experience. It is when the metaphysical ground for the ethical claims of socialism is undermined that the workers movement of the Center turns towards economism and succumbs to the imperialist temptation. Metaphysics does not make the national liberation movements into agencies of tributary restoration. It is, on the contrary, the rejection of metaphysics which opens the way for irrationalist nationalisms which mobilize the masses for national development but inevitably lose sight of the long range goal of comprehensive human development. It is not metaphysics which has made the communist movement, in both the center and the periphery, occasionally degenerate into totalitarian violence, but rather the rejection of metaphysics which, under the sign of "contradiction," reduces politics to a war of all against all.
The rebirth of metaphysics is the condition for the rebirth of the international workers movement and of the unity between that movement and peasant communities around the world which are carriers of their own unique wisdoms, and which will reject any movement which is founded on a rejection of the principles to which those wisdoms, as much as any rational metaphysics, are ordered. Let us turn from the darkness and towards the light, knowing that while our path is crooked, and that growth takes place only through struggle and contradiction, it always and only leads upward, towards an ever fuller development of human capacities in a society where, on the other side of the doubt and despair induced by the market order and fomented by the bourgeoisie and its ideological agents, we will once again find the universe transparent to its ground and our hearts ordered to the single Good in which they can alone find rest.

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