��������From the Hermeneutical Circle to the Dialectical Spiral
Philosophy and Ideological Criticism
Abstract
This paper argues that, far from leading inevitably to relativism, the notion that ideas have a social basis and serve to legitimate certain social structures can, in fact, help to solve long standing difficulties in realist epistemology, shedding important light on, for example, the Aristotelian and Thomistic concept of the Agent Intellect. Such Thomistic concepts as the convertibility of the transcendentals and the idea of connatural knowledge of God, meanwhile, can help to explain why ideas which legitimate social structures which hold back the development of human social capacities will also turn out to be wrong, and help us to make sense out of the dialectical materialist claim that the standpoint of the proletariat is the standpoint of totality.
One of the key insights of the sociological tradition is the realization that ideas have a social basis, a rootedness in the societies which produce them, which can be analyzed and used to produce an explanation of the idea which is, on the face of things, independent of its function as an attempt to describe, explain, or judge some set of physical, biological, or social phenomena. This insight is often associated with Marx and with the dialectical materialist tradition, but it is shared, in slightly different forms, by Durkheim and his interpreters, and forms the basis of the whole discipline of the sociology of religion and, more broadly, of the sociology of knowledge and of culture general (Marx 1866/1978, Durkheim 1911/1965, Mannheim 1936). What dialectical materialism adds is the claim that the ideas of a society, especially those produced by the ruling classes, serve to legitimate the structure of that society. If the structure in question is backward, if it is holding back the development of human social capacities, then the same is true of ideas which legitimate that structure, which ought, therefore, to be rejected. The activity associated with this somewhat stronger claim is often called ideological criticism.
These insights, as powerful as they are from a social scientific point of view, create some very difficult philosophical problems. If ideas can be explained in terms of the social structures of the societies which produce them, then what happens to claims regarding their truth value? Realization of ideas as social products would seem, at the very least, to lead to relativism, even if we allow the possibility that ideas produced by a society might also, with some kind of "relative autonomy," in turn affect that society; at the worst it calls into question the truth value of the very insight with which we are concerned. After all, the very claim that ideas are best explained as the product of certain social structures, if true, can itself be explained as a product of a definite social structure, with the same consequences for its truth value as for that of any other idea. The contradiction seems inescapable. The dialectical materialist practice of ideological criticism would seem to face even more serious problems. The realization that ideas are rooted in particular social contexts or even particular social classes would seem to suggest that all claims are partial, and represent relatively narrow, particularistic interests. This would seem to relativize radically the claim that socialism is superior to capitalism, and in general to undermine the basis of the judgement of value which is central to the socialist tradition. Attempts to resolve this problem by claiming universality for the standpoint of the proletariat --e.g. Lukacs's claim that the proletariat is the "identical subject object" of human history (Lukacs 1971)-- seem, at least at first glance, to be fantastic and incredible. Humanity is not, after all, the whole, but only a small part, and the proletariat is not humanity, but only a part, however large, thereof. It would appear that the road first charted by Marx and Durkheim leads inevitably to the postmodernist claim that all knowledge is relative and contextual and that claims to the "standpoint of totality" represent nothing but a totalization of irreducibly particular experience, grounded in a will to power which leads inevitably to totalitarianism (Lyotard 1979/1984).
I would like to suggest that these conclusions, which have become commonplace not only in philosophy and the social sciences, but also in the larger culture, are not in fact inevitable. It is possible to reconcile the insights of the sociology of knowledge and ideological criticism with a realist epistemology which makes strong claims regarding our ability not only to understand physical, biological, and social systems, but also to rise through these special sciences to an authentic doctrine of the first principle, and from there to descend to principles of value and moral and ethical judgements. Indeed, ideological criticism and the sociology of knowledge provide important resources for resolving long-standing difficulties in the theory of knowledge. Our solution involves three concepts from Aristotelian and Thomistic epistemology and metaphysics: the agent intellect, the convertibility of the transcendentals, and connatural knowledge of God. Let us examine each of these concepts in turn and see what light they shed on our problem. In the process we will discover a profound inner link between Aristotle and Aquinas on the one hand, and Marx and Durkheim on the other hand which makes it possible to speak of a single, unified, dialectical tradition.
***
According to St. Thomas, all knowledge begins with the senses (Aquinas Summa Theologiae I, Q 78 a 3,4). The five external senses gather data, while the internal senses transform that data in such a way as to produce a rudimentary knowledge of the material world. The data we gain through the senses are formed into coherent images by the sensus communis. This is the capacity which allows us, when observing a room, to see walls, chairs, desks, carpets, etc., and not just an undifferentiated feed of data regarding color, light and shadow, etc. These images may be stored in the memory and reorganized by the imagination, so that we are able to produce images of things which presumably do not exist, such as unicorns and Klingons. Finally, the internal senses involve what Aquinas called the estimative faculty. This is the ability to make judgments regarding the proper response to some stimulus prior to any knowledge of intelligible universals.
Before proceeding any further it might be well to point out that this approach to knowledge provides a powerful answer to skeptics and solipsists (Hume 1777/1886, Kant 1781/1969). It is, on the one hand, quite clear that our sensory apparatus is selective in what data it collects and in just how it fashions that data into images. A dog experiences me differently than a monkey would --no color, mostly smells. Human sensation, like all other animal sensation, privileges some data over others and thus gives an incomplete image of the object. There is also no real reason to believe that a one to one or "onto" relation exists between our images and the objects to which they correspond. At the same time, the fact that animal sensation appears to have survival value suggests that it conveys some real knowledge of the animal's environment. The phenomena of error and disappointment, furthermore, suggest that we are, in fact, capable of distinguishing between perceptions which convey real knowledge and those that do not. We don't always "see what we want to see," and when we do the illusion doesn't last for long. And even radical skeptics are hesitant to treat perceptions affected by brain lesions and other disorders as simply another point of view or a window into an alternate reality.
Human knowledge does not stop with sensation, but advances to knowledge of intelligible truths. We not only recognize cats, in the sense of knowing that they are different from carp and require a different response; we know what they are. We can grasp the form or underlying structure of things, and, if the system in question is sufficiently simple (this is clearly not the case with cats) represent it mathematically and then manipulate the resulting formalisms according to the rules of logic to generate new conclusions. We can even, Aquinas argues, rise to the first principle, God or Being itself, and show that this principle is convertible with the Beautiful, the True, the Good, and the One, providing a ground for judgments of value. Aquinas, following Aristotle, understands the process by which we grasp intelligible truths as one of "abstraction." A faculty called the "agent intellect" illuminates the images or "phantasms" we garner from experience and abstracts from them their intelligible essences. The passive or potential intellect then takes on the form of the thing known, thereby "becoming" it "intentionally" (Aristotle De anima III, Aquinas Summa Theologiae I Q 85, a 1, 2, and De Veritate 2:2, Maritain 1937, Peifer 1964).
Now Aristotle, who first advanced the idea of the agent intellect, left its status rather ambiguous. On the one hand, the intellect is a power of the soul, which is the form of the body, and would appear to be something individual. On the other hand, as an immaterial principle, the intellect was individuated by its species, suggesting that there was, in fact, only one intellect for all of humanity (von Steenberghen 1980: 29-74). Ibn Sina (Avicenna) regarded intellection as a fundamentally divine activity and treated the agent intellect as one of the intelligences which emanates from the unmoved mover --the lowest one in fact. This agent intellect was responsible for creating the forms of all material objects and for "informing" the individual "potential intellects" of each individual with the essence of the objects it experienced. Later commentators, such as Ibn Rusd (Averroes) went further, arguing that not only the agent but also the passive intellect is one --that we know universals not with individual minds but with a single collective mind which, in effect, does our thinking for us, using individual human animals essentially as data collectors.
The doctrine of the unity of the agent and even more so of the passive intellect seems bizarre and contrary to experience. We appear, for better or worse, to do our own thinking and to have different ideas from other people. It also created serious theological problems, calling into question personal immortality among other things. Still, the doctrine captures something important about the nature of human knowledge of universals --that it derives from our participation in a reality larger and higher than ourselves and distinctly different from, even as it builds on, our animal endowments. Dante, who had been influenced by the Latin Averroists but rejected the idea of the unity of the intellect, stressed that it took humanity as a whole, collectively, to realize the full potential of the human intellect. Partly this was a question of participation in the struggle for justice (an issue to which we shall return). But it was also a matter of securing the resources to build institutions which could cultivate the intellect --universities, the church in its exercise of the magisterium, etc. (Gilson 1968: 167)
The sociology of knowledge has picked up where Dante left off, suggesting a solution to this problem which so vexed medieval philosophy. It has become clear from the study of human cognition that, whatever the role of biological factors, the development of the intellect depends on, even as it contributes to, the emergence of ever more complex forms of social organization (Durkheim 1911/1965). Already at the beginning of this century Durkheim had demonstrated that the structure of human communities provides a kind of model for structuring human experience of the universe as a whole. Thus participation in a band provides the idea of whole and part, relationship, and a rudimentary idea of the connectedness of things. Participation in a tribe, with a complex kinship system, provides a basis for the development of more complex schemes of classification, and thus a rudimentary sense of structure. Later Bogdanov (Bogdanov 1928/1980) pointed out the role of the village community, in which each individual has a definite function in the context of a complex division of labor directed towards a common end, for the emergence of the idea of organization, and of the universe as an organized, meaningful system. Luria, in the 1920s and 1930s, showed that certain more complex intellectual operations, especially higher abstraction, presuppose involvement in more complex social interactions (Luria 1974/1976).
In other words, human society is the Agent Intellect (at least for humanity), the faculty which enables us to abstract from sense-images the intelligible essence of things and thus to know what they are. We should note that this way of understanding the agent intellect provides an interesting solution to the problem of its unity or multiplicity. The social system is both one and many. It is "one" in the sense that it is ultimately a single interconnected system, prior to the individual, which informs his/her particular intellect from the outside. It is many both in its internal diversity and in the sense that it is internalized, and internalized differently by different individuals, so that however dependent we are on our social context for the basic forms of our thought, there is no group mind which is doing our thinking for us. But the development of higher degrees of abstraction depends in part at least on the development of more complex forms of social organization, and might be held back by deformations in the social structure.
Doesn't this solution, though, open the floodgates for relativism and undermine the possibility of any authentic knowledge of universals? If society is the agent intellect, aren't these universals merely social products, artifacts of the way particular societies organize themselves, useful, perhaps, for understanding the customs and mores of the societies in question but hardly a window on the organization of the universe, much less on God and the transcendental principles of value?
This objection is really just a version of the one we addressed above. There can be no doubt that human societies, like the sensory systems of various animal species, are finite and can reveal only part of the systems which they perceive. There is, furthermore, no doubt that the part of reality which is revealed by these structures is selected by the needs of the social systems in question, just as animals develop those senses which serve their adaptive strategies. But abstractions which help a society to survive and flourish must disclose something important about the way the universe really works, just as well adapted sensory systems disclose something important about an animal's environment. Ideas and systems of ideas which lead to stagnation and decline are probably flawed in some way. And this is all we really need in order to show that abstractions are not merely social products which have no relationship whatsoever with the organization of the universe, but rather products of an interaction between human beings and the world which discloses real if limited truths, truths which can be tested in practice and then serve as the basis for further development.
***
If this understanding of the process of abstraction and the agent intellect is correct, then we have answered not only postmodernist objections to dialectical materialism and other "totalizing metanarratives" but also critical idealist and radical empiricist objections to "rational metaphysics" and "natural theology." Specifically, we have removed the strictures on rising from sensory experience through scientific explanations of that experience (partial theories or special sciences) to a global explanation of the universe --its existence and its structure-- in terms of a first principle, which can be shown to be necessary, infinite, and perfect, as well as Beautiful, True, Good, and One.
This is not the place to mount an actual argument for cosmic teleology and the existence of God or to develop a comprehensive ethical theory, something which we have, in any case done elsewhere (Mansueto 1995, 1997). Suffice it to say that with skeptical, critical idealist, and postmodernist objections removed, it becomes possible to reinstate much of the historic Thomistic vision of the universe as a teleological system ordered to God, whose Beauty, Truth, Goodness, and Integrity bring it into being and draw it towards ever higher degrees of development --with the one qualification that this development is not merely individual but cosmohistorical, so that the ethical imperative centers on the full development of human social capacities, and the construction of a society which makes that development possible. We want, rather, to suggest that the compatibility between Thomism and the sociology of knowledge extends to the more radical enterprise of ideological criticism, which not only demonstrates the social basis of ideas, but argues that ideas which are produced by, and which serve to legitimate, backward social systems should be rejected.
The key link in this regard is the convertibility of the transcendentals. The transcendentals (Aquinas Summa Theologiae I Q 5, 6, 11, 16; Reith 1958: 122ff) are those properties of Being which pertain to things simply in so far as they are, rather than because of what they are. Traditional enumerations of the transcendentals include Beauty, Truth, Goodness, and Unity. When we say that the transcendentals are "convertible" we mean that they differ from each other only in relation and not in nature. Thus Beauty is Being as an object of perception, Truth is Being as an object of judgement, Goodness is Being as an object of desire or will, or considered as an end. The underlying reality, however, remains the same.
Now "ideological-critical" judgements are fundamentally judgements that an idea is unjust, that it helps to legitimate a system which holds back the development of human social capacities. They do not address directly the truth value of the idea in question. But if "justice" is a form of the Good, and if the transcendentals are convertible, then an unjust idea will also be untrue or, to be more precise, lacking in a truth of which we are capable (since all ideas participate in truth to some degree). A false idea will, similarly, order action to an unworthy end and is, in this sense, wrong morally as well as intellectually.
We are now in a position both to explain the nihilism and despair which characterizes our epoch --and to judge it intellectually and morally. Under the market system people experience society as either a system of only externally related individuals (atoms) or as a system of quantities (prices), and begin to think about the universe as a whole in much the same way. Neither atomistic nor quantitative-formal systems have an immanent telos, with the result that teleological thinking largely disappears and people simply assume that the universe is not ordered to an end. The result is, first of all, atheism, and second an inability to ground ethical judgements. Without any principle of value by which to judge it, the market allocation of resources cannot be challenged and the market order is secure. Atheism, in other words, is a form of bourgeois ideology.
Now the market has no access to information regarding the impact of various activities on the development of human social capacities. It "knows" only supply and demand, production capacities and preferences backed by purchasing power and it allocates resources in a way which maximizes not human development, but rather return on investment. It has, moreover, been demonstrated, that these two criteria are in fundamental contradiction with each other (Marx 1867/1977, Mandel 1968). The market system, in other words, holds back the development of human social capacities, and is thus unjust. This means that the ideologies supporting the system are unjust and, by the convertibility of the transcendentals, false as well. This does not relieve us of the responsibility of arguing for cosmic teleology and the existence of God, or of demonstrating the superiority of nonmarket systems, but it does suggest that the ideological critical activity, as well as the essentially similar activity carried out by the magisterium of the Church in relation to doctrines judged dangerous to human spiritual development, is not contrary to the search for truth but rather consonant with and even supportive of it.
***
It remains to consider Lukacs' claim that the "standpoint of the proletariat" is in fact the standpoint of totality. Here we have recourse to a third Thomistic concept --that of connatural knowledge of God. The roots of this idea lie not so much in the philosophical as in the prophetic tradition, and specifically in the Jewish concept of da'ath elohim. Generally translated "knowledge of God," the prophets continually identified da'ath elohim with ethical conduct (see, for example, Hosea 4: 1-2, 6:3). The idea is that in the just act we know God experientially and nonconceptually, because in that act we share in the divine nature --i.e. we become connatural with God. This connatural knowledge of God is the basis for the Catholic doctrine of "caritative wisdom," the nonconceptual wisdom which characterizes the highest levels of mystical experience (Aquinas Summa Theologiae II, Q 45, a2, Maritain 1937).
What, however, is the "standpoint of the proletariat," if it is not the standpoint of the just act? Assuming, once again, the framework sketched above, the worker, in the very act of working creates, adds something to the degree of organization of the universe, and thus shares in the creative life of God. And in struggling to transcend the market order and create a new society the proletariat as a class struggles to create the conditions for still more productive labor. In this sense it is possible to argue that the standpoint of the proletariat is in fact the standpoint not only of totality but of God herself.
More is at issue, here, however, than validating one of dialectical materialism's more difficult claims. What connatural knowledge does is to help us locate the real ground and starting point of both philosophy and ideological criticism. The nonconceptual knowledge of God which we have in the just act inevitably seeks words so that it can persuade and arguments so that it can demonstrate, and thus effectively order others to justice. This was the starting point of Socrates, who set out to combat the relativism of the sophists, which left the people of Athens defenseless against the injustice of the emerging petty commodity economy, giving them no criterion by which to judge the transformation of the polis into an instrument of private gain. It was also the starting point of Marx, whose critique of religion as an obstacle to social progress ultimately has more in common with prophetic critiques grounded in experiential knowledge of that unnameable-bringing-into-being which Judaism calls YHWH than with the atheism which is a reflex of the marketplace and an option for nihilism and despair. And it must become our starting point as we cut through the thick web of illusions generated by the market system, illusions which block the perception of meaning and undermine judgements of value, providing the rentier elite with an alibi for its obscene consumerism and undermining the initiative of the working classes. It must become our starting point too as we unravel the "hermeneutical" and other circles drawn by the postmodernists and other teachers of despair and show them instead to be dialectical spirals which, firmly rooted in and ever cognizant of the finitude and partiality of all human knowledge, nonetheless mounts ever higher towards totality and the infinite.
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