III. Letters from Quebec: A Philosophy for Peace and Justice.
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Letter 68
PovertyPublished in Eleanor Godway and Geraldine Finn (eds.), Humanity has paid dearly, is still paying, and will pay more dearly still, for ignoring, despising, deconstructing, and, as Martin Heidegger put it, "destroying," traditional western metaphysics. Thus spoke the author of the Summa Theologiae and the Summa contra Gentiles, the two great summaries of western metaphysics which, just before the dawn of modernity, synthesized the western tradition, weaving together Greek, Latin, Arabic, Judaic, feudal, and Christian elements. The scholasticism that was epitomized in his Summae had been the main target aimed at by the classical authors of modern western ideology - Ockham, Bacon, Hobbes, Descartes, Locke, Hume, Leibniz, Kant ..... Saint Thomas did not exempt the eastern or the indigenous peoples from his list of victims of the neglect of traditional western metaphysics; because even though their cultural traditions were not western, they were ruled today by western legal and economic concepts which had impoverished their hearts; their minds; and, yes, their bodies also; just as, earlier, modernity had impoverished the common people of its native West. Modern western legal and economic concepts grew, directly, from the rejection of western metaphysics. He did not distinguish modernism from high modernism, nor either of them from postmodernism; nor capitalism from socialism; nor feminism from patriarchy; for him these were all variations on a single theme: disobedience. Evidently the thoughts the angelic doctor had been thinking, while sitting seven centuries in heaven, watching from a distance the slow disintegration of Christendom, had done nothing to improve his temper. And evidently those thoughts had led him to a point where he was willing to make bold claims, which some might regard as intemperate. Since the hostess had urged everyone to feel at home and to proceed informally, Frederic Jameson, taking her at her word, volunteered a question, trying to be helpful and to move the conversation along by asking the speaker whether he meant to say that together with the historical process known as pauperization, through which the traditional common lands of the European peasantry were enclosed, and through which the people were deprived of their ancient tenures, thus creating the poverty required by capitalism, a landless laboring class; there was also - perhaps the speaker meant to say - as part and parcel of the same historical process, a cultural pauperization; which consisted, among other things, of a devaluation of the European society's traditional norms for right conduct, which had - according to the view the speaker perhaps had meant to express - protected the poor by making mutual aid obligatory. And perhaps the featured speaker of the evening had meant to say that the traditional metaphysics had been supportive of the traditional norms for right conduct, placing the accepted norms for conduct in the context of a cosmic vision which gave them meaning. The visiting Saint replied that Mr. Jameson had asked an excellent question, which deserved an excellent answer. Unfortunately, however, he did not think it possible to give an answer at once excellent and brief, and he was afraid that, accustomed as he was to eternal adoration of the divine, he would tire the patience of the company, accustomed as they were to the frenzied pace of earthly life in the present century, by answering Mr. Jameson's very gracious question at the length necessary to do it justice. After being assured by each and every one of the assembled company that nothing could exhaust their patience, not even a dead man advocating onto-theology, Saint Thomas proceeded to prepare the context for expressing his opinion of the interpretation Frederic Jameson had given of his opening remarks. His words were tape-recorded and the following is an edited transcript of them, into which interpolations have been inserted between brackets such as these: [ ]. The crux of the matter is obedience to form. Given that value, onto-theology follows. What I will say will have two parts. First I will develop the idea of obedience to form. Then I will connect the appreciation of form both to today's problem, the poverty and insecurity of the majority of people, and to metaphysics. Let me say before I begin, in order to allay certain prejudices against me you may have absorbed from the schoolbooks you read as children, that my metaphysical practice (if I may adopt Louis Althusser's word "practice") integrated faith with the most current, the most solid, science of the day. Following my teacher Albertus Magnus, I worked more with Aristotle, and less with Plato and Dionysius, precisely because Aristotle was more down-to-earth, more prosaic. I do not propose in what I shall say this evening to deny a single one of the facts the natural sciences of your century have discovered, nor to contradict a single word that Jacques Derrida has written; now as then my aims are synthesis and integration. I. Obedience to FormThe word "form" in modern English consists of four letters. F, O, R, and M. Forma in Latin is almost the same. When I asked a gentleman of your century what came to his mind when he heard the word "form," he said, "Nothing. My mind is a complete blank." When I asked a lady she said, "a frame for a picture." Someone else said, "a cookie-cutter." Another person thought of "a formal," which is to say, a type of gown worn to a dance. The Germans say Gestalt. The Greeks said morphe. The French say forme, which is pronounced almost like English. The French contrast forme and fond (figure and background). The English contrast form and substance. Mathematicians talk about the "form" of an equation. They contrast formal proofs with informal proofs. So, you see, I have been visiting different places and times, making myself invisible, overhearing different conversations, and collecting observations about how people use words like "form." You may wonder why I am talking as I am. You probably expected me to put my discourse in the form (there is that word "form" again!) of scholastic debate, of questions and articles, with objections and answers, just as I did when I wrote the Summae in the thirteenth century. Or you might have expected my thoughts to be expressed in the form (again!) of a commentary on an obscure text by Jean Jacques Rousseau (like Derrida's Grammatology), or in the form (!) of a study of Friedrich Nietzsche's writings (like one of Martin Heidegger's accounts of the history of traditional western metaphysics). Well, the truth, my friends, is that I am talking as I am because . . . No ..... It is too soon to tell the truth. Let me go back to the beginning of my discussion of form and start over. In certain parts of Spain, the peasants use the word formal to refer to a person who does things correctly, the way they ought to be done. To say that people are gente formal is to say that they are reliable, that they keep their promises. I particularly enjoyed my visit to Andalucia, sitting invisibly on bar stools, overhearing the conversations of peasant men as they drank red wine, hearing them praise the gente formal, hearing them condemn the informales, whom they despised. It was a nostalgia trip for me. It reminded me of old times back in 1250 A.D. I was a mortal then, studying with the monks at European universities where we spoke of "formal causes." According to us then everything whatever had a formal cause, as well as a material, an efficient, and a final cause. The material cause was what it was made of; its mother, so to speak, its mater. Its efficient cause was what moved it, its vis - a notion that was elaborated several centuries later by Sir Isaac Newton in his Principia Mathematica - a long tale of vis from beginning to end. Thus Newton formed (there's that word again!) the worldview of modern times. The third of Aristotle's four causes which we studied back in 1250, inhabiting as we did the worldview of traditional times, as you today inhabit the worldview of modernity, was the final cause. The final cause of anything was its purpose or end, its fin as the French and Spanish say. Now the form, the formal cause. That was the thing's identity, its definition, its shape; it was what marked it off from other things and impressed upon it the characteristics singling it out from unformed matter, from hyle as Aristotle put it (hyle was the Greek predecessor of the Latin materia). The original idea that each thing had four causes was Aristotle's, but we who inhabited Christendom back in the time when Europe was Christendom gave a special twist to it. For us the form of each thing was what it was supposed to be; it was what God intended it to be; the formal cause was the identity of any person or thing because it represented the idea God had in mind before creating it. That is why I took fond pleasure in listening to peasants talking about gente formal. The way they talked implied that the people who are following their form (!) of life (thank you Ludwig Wittgenstein, may you rest in peace) - the form of life prescribed by the culture of the Andalucian peasantry - are people who are living according to the way the world should be; they do things properly; ils agissent comme il faut, als echte Leute; they show good form; that is why they are called formal. What I am showing sheds some light, I believe, on why Derrida thinks it important to deconstruct some main ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his Grammatology. Rousseau put Nature in the place of God - this can be seen on almost every page of Emile. For Rousseau the way the world should be was the way Nature intended it to be. Rousseau thought he was replacing Christendom's religious metaphysics with a secular one, but he preserved the essentialism we of Christendom so eagerly embraced when he removed God from his throne and put there an imposter, Nature, to rule instead. Rousseau is, consequently, a partisan of Authority, albeit a different Authority, and, therefore, Derrida, always the enemy of specious justifications for illegitimate authority, cannot carry out his project without deconstructing Rousseau's theory of language, and, with it, Rousseau's worship of the Authority of Nature. But let me go on with what I was trying to say about form. I know you are trying to understand me. Thank you. I mean shape. Order. Obedience. If you will forgive me, then I will forgive you for distrusting my Reality; I know you have so many reasons for distrusting Reality - any Reality. But I am speaking the future. The past is the future. This is not a lie - the past is the only way to the future. Modernity cannot last. Life is not a triumph; it is a slow struggle of pulling yourself together versus falling apart. Only grace, whether you know it or not, prevents falling apart from winning. That is what Flannery O'Connor shows in her stories. You should read her. People can't live this negative way; we have to get ready for the positive day. But I digress - I listen to Bob Marley in heaven, and keep hoping that on one of my visits to Earth I will meet him.
You may be thinking, "the old man's mind is wandering." Perhaps
I wander, perhaps I weave.... There ought to be a name for the metaphysics
I am doing. Call it "gathering fragments." (following Gramsci)
Or call it "running briefly with a stolen word, then dropping it."
(following Barthes) Social reality is different from what it was when I
wrote the Summae. Method follows reality. Back then one could
write a Summa. No, I am not such an egotist that I insist that every
word I ever wrote was true. I insist only that you should recognize your
loss. That there have been gains in the transition from traditional to modern
everyone will admit. The loss. The price paid. The empirical evidence in favor of what I am trying to say is overwhelming. It is evident on every hand that human conduct is organized by language, ritual, symbol, story, number...; we become human the same way anything becomes what it is, by form. Our very bodies are structured in their growth by genetic information,... again by what I call form. There are millions of good people - everybody knows this - the world around; there have been in every age; I mean the ones who question their impulses. The salt of the earth. They ask whether what they are doing is right. Right for their role. Is this what a proper bookkeeper would do? Am I acting as a parent should ? What would a good friend do in this situation? - and then when they intuit what a good friend would do, they pull themselves together and do it; they do that, the right thing, acting as they should. They are the heroines, the heroes, the reborn. They keep the world going. I mean the ones who live up to form. The problem is not lack of evidence; it is that the very definition of what you call "empirical evidence" excludes the way I see the world. It does not matter how "down-to-earth" I think I am; it does not matter that practically every page of my Summae has practical advice and connects with real-life problems; it does not matter that you can read fifty volumes of your experimental psychology and not find anything that will help you to get through one day of life; still, you will always read me as "in the air." Am I talking too fast? Is this over your head? You must excuse me if I interpret myself differently. It appears that you and I do not share the same metaphysics; we do not share the same system of interpretation; hence you interpret me differently from the way I interpret myself. Thank you for trying to understand me - I know it's hard. Interpretation, after all, is what metaphysics is all about. "Metaphysics" is a name for a wide intellectual context within which we interpret the many events and phenomena of life. Your age lacks the capacity to apply constructively the limitless quantities of information you learn in school and store in electronic data banks. In the thirteenth century we knew less, but we synthesized better. We hit on something true back in 1260 - I am talking about Form as Creator. We hit on something true in spite of our wickedness, in spite of our ignorance, in spite of our physical poverty, in spite of our mental poverty, in spite of our many thoroughly wrong ideas and practices. We hit on ... I wanted to say we hit on an important set of facts. But no. It was not the facts; the same facts are there today, but you haven't the language to express them in. We hit on a system of interpretation. It was not really "hit on" either. It grew over the centuries; it was the culmination, the refinement, of the labors of thousands of people whose aim was to make sense of the worlds they lived in. You too see the facts of form. They are confirmed daily by your social science, your psychology, your natural scientists, your linguists. What is more clear than that human life is ordered? That disorder is pathology? The New Atlantis by Francis Bacon, one of the books that created your blindness to reality, was a program for the future; and what Sir Francis Bacon had to say about using science to improve human life was not wrong - it only needed to be expanded to embrace everything he rejected. A modest adjustment was needed, a mere reconciliation of nonsense and sense, a mere refund of the full price paid for rejecting traditional western metaphysics. The idols of the tribe, the idols of the theater, the idols of the marketplace ... that's us ... that's the human race ... idol-worshippers one and all ... and I as a Saint can only regret that it is hard to explain to a modern audience - some people do not believe it yet - that Form is our Creator. II. Ending Poverty by Social TransformationThere is poverty now because now the slow improvement of customs is stifled by Economics; now when people we make some painful progress in cooperating and sharing, in the soft and careful nurturing of relationships, they are borne down, as by gravity, by the harsh demands of the marketplace, and by the heavy artillery of Economic Science which provides the intellectual defense of what moderns call "reality." Martin Luther King, Jr., who grew up in black churches, was one of those citizens of your century outside the mainstream of its thought; he saw history differently: he thought that God acted in history through the improvement of inner discipline, which made freedom possible by making it workable. However, just a moment please ... I am feeling lost. I fear that I am losing track of what I wanted to say; the idea that was forming (!) in my brain is escaping me.... ... King, Economics, inner discipline, the slow improvement of customs, poverty.... Please excuse me while I gather my thoughts. [Saint Thomas stopped and gathered his thoughts. There was a murmur throughout the room as people used the break to refill their beer steins, to chat, and to go to the bathroom. Saint Thomas got up from his chair, marched his burly frame a few paces, kneeled, crossed himself, said a Hail Mary in Latin, stood up, marched back to his chair with his head bowed, and sat down again.] I am the first to admit that philosophy in many senses is no longer a feasible enterprise. At the end of the twentieth century educated people, whether or not they have read Derrida, know philosophy's (formerly) secret tricks. The ruses philosophers have used to give an appearance of necessity to conclusions that are arbitrary have been exposed. "Deconstruction" is as good a name as any for destroying the history of philosophy by unmasking the deceptions used throughout the ages to make philosophical concepts appear to be true and important. Its patient textual labors are fueled by a moral passion: the passion to destroy the tyrannies have exercised over women and men's minds and bodies. I am the first to renounce nonsense. In the thirteenth century I was known for insisting on the integration of faith with the most stringent standards of reason. I have not changed. What has changed is the credibility of reason. But what you must know is that not every ideology is tyranny. None of you believe the following fallacy: most ideologies most of the time have been part and parcel of the exploitation of the weak by the strong; therefore, when all ideologies are deconstructed and discredited there will be freedom, fraternity, and friendship. All of you know that if it were so utopia could be achieved by narcotics. Turning off the cerebral cortex by chemical means would answer all questions. Given that we all agree that building civilization is harder than that, I ask only that you give me some credit. In the thirteenth century we made some contributions to building civilization; if you despise us you will not do the good work you are called to do to rebuild your own failing culture. Your culture is failing physically. Let me not take time now - some other day you can go through the litany of the absurdities of the dismal science, treating all existing markets as "imperfect," regarding economies of scale as a mere exception to the so-called law of supply and demand, externalities as mere exceptions to the theory of choice, theories which imply that unemployment is impossible, etc. etc. - enough of that. Let us ask instead what we would do and think if we were serious about ending poverty. If we were serious about ending poverty on this planet, if we were serious as Gandhi and King were serious, as Rene Dumont and Frances Moore Lappe are serious, as E. F. Schumacher was serious, if we really wanted to meet basic human needs, then we would be building solidarity from the grassroots up, person by person, family by family, community by community. Democratic control of resources. Commitment. Building consensus. Empowerment. The strength of the weak. Participatory planning. Promises that are kept. Not just a new economic model - no, we have had too many of those - but a cultural transformation of the context of economics, a re-embedding (thank you Hazel Henderson, thank you Karl Polanyi, thank you Charles Wilber) of economics in culture. In a strong culture, one capable of inspiring cooperation. Whoever said the weakness of words was the strength of the weak? Poverty is, as you know, a man-made institution. The ladies will perhaps forgive me for the non-inclusive language, since it would give no honor to women to insist on asserting their complicity in the construction of those institutions through which humanity destroys itself. If we are serious about replacing poverty with sharing - its only logical alternative - then we have to create a world where the members of families and communities care for each other, and support each other. I admit that in the 13th century we were poor; but in some ways we were richer than you; permit me to suggest that if we had possessed the capacity for producing goods and services to meet every need that is inherent in the natural science that you possess, then we would not have used that capacity in the disgraceful way that you are using it. Pardon me, a moment ago I should have said "help God create a world where people support each other" instead of just "create a world where people support each other." I momentarily forgot, even I forgot - that shows how bad it is - that it makes no sense to speak of you or I, or you and I, creating a world. How could we ? Worlds are made by widely shared stories that last generation after generation, and such stories are stories about Gods, thank you Northrop Frye; I claim no originality for the thought, and apologize for my absentmindness in momentarily forgetting it. Communities without poverty would resemble those of the early church, recorded in the Acts, thank you Saint Luke; they would be places with lots of trees - I point this out because humans and other animals can't live without plants; there would not be enough Oxygen - communities with lots of trees where each gave in proportion to her ability, and goods were shared as every one had need. "Her" ability because for all humanity mothers are the paradigms for giving. I repeat myself because I want to participate in an upward spiral of meaning, in which the unpracticed becomes practiced, the unsayable sayable, because the forms grow and grow stronger as they are repeated; the seed is in the trace, thank you Jacques Derrida; that is why unmaking poverty, making sharing, is about form. My point is logic-al. You and I are not anybody without the voice that relates us. Listen to the voice in the desert; it speaks through you, it speaks through me. Hello Voice, we are codependent. Fun, isn't it? If practice is guided by form, which it is, then the new practices will be guided by new forms, expressed by new voices. We have John MacMurray to thank for expressing a sort of insight which has been expressed through the centuries in myriad ways, and by me among others, using "relation" in the metaphore de base, i.e. the insight expressed in the thought that voices, forms, and practices have a common root: being in relation. Neither formlessness nor violence is revolution. La douceur est la seule vraie force. We cross out Community, as Martin Heidegger crossed out Being, to avoid violence. We write a word under the crossing out to avoid formlessness. Community is a sharing of difference; difference is an identity given by community. The children are wiser than we, as they care for their dolls. They know that feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, clothing the naked, attending to the sick ... is a game, as is motherhood. It is a game that can be encouraged or discouraged by metaphysics, which is, I have been trying to say, mainly discouraged by the persistent, and futile, anti-metaphysical themes of modernity; persistent because the times, in their corruption, call for it; futile because the destruction of metaphysics is always itself too a system of interpretation, thank you Paul Ricoeur. Why not see our lives as essentially fulfilled in giving ? That too would be a seeing, a seeing as, and, therefore, an Auslegung, an interpretation. After Piaget's contributions to knowledge about knowledge, the metaphysical prejudice that is Ockham's razor (thank you, Mario Bunge), which is only elaborated, not added to, in Michel Foucault's Archaeology of Knowledge, in any of its many versions, can only be described as contrary to fact. Relations. We were not wrong in our century to nurture our imaginations with images of the divine mother with the divine child. I do not want to be known as the sort of person who always says, "I told you so." But I did tell you so, and although I was wrong on so many issues that I have lost count, I can still give you a good reason why it is better to celebrate gender equality by letting boys play with dolls than by bringing up girls to be machos, and the reason is that all being is participation. I did say that every finite thing consists of act (Aristotle's energeia), that is, its actuality, its completedness; and act is always together with potency (Aristotle's dynamis); that is, the thing's capacity to receive actuality. I did write in that time now so long past and so far lost, that every material thing is composed of form (Aristotle's morphe), which determines what a thing is, and materia prima, the matter (mater) which receives the form and individuates it. My century's hylomorphism, the way of seeing that saw form everywhere and matter everywhere, could hardly have chosen a more androgynous principle. We asked of nothing any obedience other than obedience to its own nature, because its own nature is beautiful and good (kalos te kai agathos). Admittedly, if I was then aware at all that the "nature" of something is socially constructed; then when I said that substantial form was participation in divine thought, I expressed my awareness in a theological perspective that lent itself to rigidity and consciousness-lowering. But if each creature perfects itself in perfecting the others, as I did say, then let us together take the next step and say that perfection itself is defined by sets of norms that change over time. And although we can choose to contribute to making forms of life change for the better, or we can fall into contributing to making social forms change for the worse, living (Being) without them is a choice reality denies us; we improve culture, or we make it worse. Anomie, apart from being painful, is not sufficiently generalizable to become an ideal that a human group could choose, even if it were silly enough to want to. This Dasein business, this business of always being the-one-who-is-questioning, must come to an end somewhere, and so must this speech. Let me summarize: (1) the institutions that will bring an end to poverty will be new institutions, built from and out of the previously and presently existing institutions; (2) they will, therefore, be institutions, (3) i.e. forms of life; (4) i.e. forms; (5) they will function effectively only if we mortals cultivate habits of obedience to form; (6) i.e. if we seek to bring our lives into conformity with the good, the beautiful, and the true. |