It is 4:30 a.m. and I think that is a trifle too early to
commence my morning walk, so I shall while away the time by replying to a very
interesting question posed by Magpie [I really love these web aliases -- if I
am not mistaken, Magpie is an Australian academic.] Here is what Magpie says:
"[I]n your Mannheim tutorial you mentioned
that Mannheim conceived the "free-floating intellectual" as a
workaround to the relativism resulting from the ideology problem. This "free-floating intellectual",
however, was clearly a self-serving solution. Besides, how could one defend
one's perception of being a "free-floating intellectual", if one were
challenged by another would-be "free-floating intellectual" with
opposed views? So, Mannheim's solution
is not a very good one. But, is there any other solution?"
Magpie is of course quite right. Mannheim's "solution" is so
manifestly self-serving as to be a tad embarrassing, although I suspect in the
social and intellectual context in which it was advanced it would not have
seemed so to many readers. Is there
another solution? Magpie asks.
My own view is, No. I spent a good deal of my earlier career
looking for some pou sto [as the
Greeks would have said] from which to make moral and political judgments, and
indeed In Defense of Anarchism is
written with the expectation that such an objective standpoint could be found
[although that assumption plays no role in the argument of my little book,
fortunately.] My search, for a long time,
took the form of a deep engagement with Kant's ethical theory. In effect, I adopted the operating premise
that if anyone could find such an argument it would be Kant. When I concluded, in The Autonomy of Reason, my commentary on the Grundlegung, that Kant had failed, I drew the conclusion that the
argument was not to be found.
The most heroic effort after Kant to find such a
standpoint, I thought, was Rawls' A
Theory of Justice, but I quickly concluded that Rawls had failed, and I
demonstrated that failure in Understanding
Rawls. Oddly, and completely in contradistinction
to Mannheim, I found that outcome of my long search liberating, not
immobilizing. I embraced the wisdom of
my young student at Columbia who told me that if I wanted to know what I should
do, first I must decide [not deduce, but decide] which side I am on.
For many years now I have defended the view that
in this life, the most important moral and political choice one makes is the
choice of one's comrades. Do you make
common cause with the exploiters or with the exploited, with the oppressors or
with the oppressed, with those who seek to work for the common welfare of
common men and women or with those who defend the interests of the privileged
elite? These are not questions to which
there are objectively defensible answers.
They are questions whose answers define who you are and seek to become.
This is a view I have several times expressed on
this blog, and as my golden years approach [which I identify as the time when I
turn ninety ;) ], I find myself more and
more comfortable with it.
4 comments:
Thanks, Prof.
I suspected as much, but I wanted to make sure.
This goes a long way into explaining why "ecumenical dialogues", like the ones economists claim are desirable, usually produce more heat than light. The implications for the praxis of politics seem pretty obvious.
Aren't your comrades a result of your socialization and other extra deductive causal factors? "I'm with the rabbit whompers like my father and my father's father...." Why, then, is it a matter of choice?
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