On the Need for a New Enlightenment

"One should never miss an opportunity to celebrate the Enlightenment ..." 

Christopher Hitchens

 

What is Enlightenment? For over two centuries this has been a question central to modernity; one which philosophy has, according to Foucault, never quite been able to answer, but never quite able to ignore either. From Kant and Hegel, through Nietzsche to Habermas and, indeed, Foucault himself, hardly any serious thinker has failed to confront this question, directly or indirectly.

And still today, the question was ist Aufklärung continues to resonate; in fact, it might even be said to have renewed urgency in a world that some describe (either with triumphant glee or horrified concern) as not only postmodern, but post-secular; i.e. a world that seems to be creeping at pace towards a new age of fundamentalist stupidity, having rejected the exit from superstition and prejudice offered by reason.

Having, briefly, dared to think and to question, we are once more asked in all seriousness to place faith in those who claim spiritual authority and would rule by divine right. All that social, cultural, and political upheaval and transformation in Europe and the New World - all that great work by men of science and men of letters to liberate themselves from the moral absurdities and disgusting bigotries of religion - and we end up in 2014 having to worry about offending the sensibilities of those who call for the implementation of sharia law.

It's deeply depressing to say the least. But it's also why one is obliged, as an atheist and anti-theist, to fight once more on all the old grounds: Marx was right, criticism of religion is the beginning of all criticism and they key to all freedom. To have done with the judgement of God is always the ultimate goal.

But, in order to achieve this objective, we need a new way of thinking and feeling, of acting and behaving - i.e. what the Greeks called an ethos - that in some manner refers back to the complex historical events that took place in the 18th century and which became known as the Enlightenment. 

This is not, as Foucault points out, a matter of subscribing slavishly to some kind of doctrine, or resurrecting a facile model of humanism; rather, it's the permanent reactivation of a philosophically critical and experimental attitude that interrogates everything and allows nothing to pass as self-evidently true (not even the Rights of Man).               

    

eBay and the Question of Holocaust Memoribilia

Image: BSkyB

The mock-horror and fake outrage that greeted the news that online auction site eBay does good business selling mementos from the Holocaust was, of course, all-too-predictable. 

When will the editors of The Mail on Sunday simply admit that such trade - just like child pornography - is inevitable in a free market in which, as Marx pointed out long ago, all values are resolved into exchange value and all objects and events are commodified and given price tags.

Capitalism doesn't care about respecting the memory of the dead anymore than it cares about the rights of the living. It is systematically amoral and inhuman: everything is permissible. To paraphrase Marx once more, under capitalism all the sensitive bonds and small kindnesses that tie us together are dissolved until all that's left is shameless greed, naked self-interest, and callous cash payment. 

Money is substituted by capitalism for the very notion of a social code and the possibility of living a good life. And whilst love of money may not be the root of all evil, it certainly doesn't seem to encourage ethical behaviour. And so it is that traders have no qualms about adding a small bar code beneath the yellow Star of David attached to the striped uniforms of death camp inmates.

It's a financial solution to the awkward question of genocide: what shall we do with the remains? Nazis everywhere will be smiling ...

Nietzsche and Capitalism

Nietzsche's opposition to capitalism and his loathing of modern bourgeois society is present throughout his writings. In an early essay entitled 'The Greek State', for example, he argues that self-seeking, money-loving entrepreneurs and stateless corporate executives should be regarded as the enemy within, threatening as they do the stability and welfare of the community. 

Like Marx, Nietzsche is concerned by the manner in which the market determines the value of everything; including the value of all other values. The consequence of this is not only that all things become commodified and given price tags, bar codes, and registered trade marks, but that everything becomes permissible - providing, of course, that it's economically viable and can generate profit. Thus it is that, within liberal society, all types of commercial exchange and all modes of conduct are discreetly sanctioned; including those that many advocates of free trade like to publicly condemn and make illegal, but do nothing to actually prevent.

Like Marx, Nietzsche is concerned by the prospect of a world in which there is no connection between people other than shared greed and a desire to succeed at any cost. Such a world would be one suspended in a state of systematic anarchy and nihilism; a world in which an aggressive philistinism would effectively cancel out the possibility of culture as he conceives of it in a classical sense. 

The permanent substratum of money under everything in the modern world causes Nietzsche to experience a feeling of ugly disillusion; he rejects liberalism and democracy as forms of political degeneracy. As for the equality of opportunity that is said to be opened up by capitalism, he dismisses this as merely the freedom to buy and sell one another in a universal slave market. 

As an alternative, Nietzsche advocates a strong model of volksgemeinschaft that rests upon a bond of trust formed between rulers and ruled and an agreed series of duties and obligations. If this fails to guarantee the rights of the private individual, it will, he says, at least ensure the production of a small number of sovereign men and women and allow for cultural greatness (which is something other than material and scientific progress).

Of course there are problems with Nietzsche's thinking here as elsewhere; his views on politics, culture and society are never fully developed and often in need of radical revision and recontextualization. But one thing is surely clear: Zarathustra hates shopkeepers and there is nothing - neither property rights nor human rights - given to us by liberalism which fully compensates for what Deleuze and Guattari describe as the "meanness and vulgarity of existence that haunts democracies ... The ignominy of the possibilities of life that we are offered".

See Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Graham Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson, (Verso, 1996), pp. 107-08.