SYSTEM

System

System: an introduction

It seemed to me that in constructing this web= -site, and so attempting to draw together a discussion of so many disparate fields= , it was necessary for me to put together the many ideas which feed into this project into a central system of thought which would be employed in those various contexts. It is that combination of central concepts with particular contexts which informs so much of my work, particularly my work on equity. =

&= nbsp; So this brief flit through the key ideas which underpin my work remains a work= in progress at the time of writing. Its purpose is to survey the field, at fir= st, and then to identify some key themes in general theory, before supplying the keys to the inter-action of some of those themes with the particular contex= tual issues dwelt on in this site.

&= nbsp; This system will grow and develop over time – any amendments to this docum= ent will be posted on the “new developments” page of the web-site. There are some links from these pages to the remainder of the site: but for= the most part this discussion is continuous: you can return to the main menu by clicking here.

&= nbsp; We begin with a history of Western philosophical thought, as I see it, leading= up to the late modern ideas which inform my current work on law and theory, wh= ich is then followed by a thumbnail sketch of the key thinkers in the various fields which make up that body of ideas. Putting this system into written f= orm has itself been a powerful exercise for me in pulling this material together and in considering how to express these ideas.

Human reason after the enlightenment

In truth the whole of post-Enlightenment thou= ght has been concerned with the notion of freedom. Whatever the avowedly primary principle in any given philosophical scheme, in truth the thinker’s concern is with the patterns in which human reason should be organised. Post-Enlightenment thought is by definition concerned with a spectrum of thought spanning the macrocosmic organisation of society through to the microcosmic condition of individual human beings in a world in which a god is no longer sovereign and that feud= al social structures are no longer to be supported.

From the roots of German philosophy in Kant a= nd Hegel there was a concern with the nature of human reason: a free will which can operate without genuflecting to a god or to an aristocracy. English philosophical thinking through Hobbes, Locke and Hume made the secular state possible by displacing obedience to god but at the same time suggested that universal truths were impossible to support in theoretical terms. The German idealists required a system which could advance such universal truths. The basis for such truths would be human reason. Even in the modern thought of Habermas there remains a concern with rationality and communicative action.= So Hegel and Marx sought to tie a theory of the inevitability of the effect of reason on human history into larger philosophical systems. Perhaps demonstrating a return to a doubt in the viability of universal truths, Fre= nch deconstruction and post-structuralist theory have sought to probe the bases= of such truths.

The notion of autonomy is a core part of the development of reason. By developing human reason we come to understand the autonomy of individuals: their value as individuals, whether understanding = the human condition or founding human rights; the need to displace oppressive social structures, embracing both the dismantling of feudal power and fight= ing sex and race discrimination; and the complexity then of rethinking how sepa= rate autonomous individuals can be understood as combining (or not) into societi= es.

Are we rational …? One of the key quest= ions facing any philosophical system, which I do not have time to probe in detail now, is whether or not one should construct such a system on the assumption that human beings are rational and that they will act rationally or predict= ably in certain circumstances, or whether one should predicate one’s theor= y on the notion that human beings are random creatures who are slaves to their impulses. To take the latter course makes systematic thinking almost imposs= ible and would presumably advocate hiding in a bunker until the human beings des= troy the planet. To take the former course necessarily erects walls which ignore= the impulses of greed, idiocy and so forth on the development of human history = and quotidian “thought”. I am realistic about the natural chaos of life and (I hope not overly) cynical about the human race’s possibility for stupidity in parallel with its possibilities for greatness. Quite how one thinks of rationality within tho= se confines in another discussion for another page. In short, it’s the problem is mixing theory with one’s fears about its practical applications.

[The epistemological roots of modern social sciences]

The roots of social thought should be underst= ood in the techniques of that thought. These roots are epistemological: that is, i= t is only by a sea-change in the manner in which human beings were able to considered propositions to be supportable that the social sciences and the humanities as we currently understand them have become possible.

The beginning must be in Rousseau’s fundamental epistemological proposition that the only thing which any human being can possibly know with any certainty is that they exist because they = are capable of thought: I think, therefore I am. All else flows from that proposition.

In the natural sciences there is a manner of thinking which takes a proposition and th= en requires empirical proof by observation, by mathematics or by some such met= hod. Raymond Guess in his Idea of a Crit= ical Theory then gives us a sign as to the manner in which the social sciences are organised epistemologically. It is through Marx and Freud that social scientists acqu= ired the core techniques to criticise and to understand their models, systems and lifeworld through argument and discourse without the need for empirical proof. From Marx a theory of social alienation, historical materialism and the bedrock for a technique of social critique (as well as a specific examination= of economic and political theory). From Freud an understanding of the individu= al human psyche as based on competing forces, the circumscription which civili= sed society requires of man’s natural desires, and the drive to pleasure = as the root of human behaviour. These two core thinkers offer means of thinking about human society at large and about individual human beings in particula= r.

Thinking about autonomy – in the form of understanding human reason and in the interrogation of the human condition – thus forms one of the key projects of philosophical thought. Thinki= ng about social, communal and inter-personal relations then constitutes anothe= r of these projects – whether in the form of understanding human perceptio= n of the outside world, in the form of social attachments, and in the form of communication.

The Giants on Whose Shoulders this System is Built

The title, if a little outré, does giv= e a flavour of what is to come. This section selects those aspects of the work = from the following list of thinkers where that work is important to this system.= It does not purport to be a complete survey of any of their work. Those thinke= rs whose names are highlighted have their own discussion elsewhere on this site (or will have one day): you can access those discussions by clicking on the list below.

The use of other&#= 8217;s thought: relativism and taking what I want

I am a relativist in many senses: most partic= ularly in the sense that I rarely believe absolutist arguments are absolutely righ= t in all contexts. Equally, though, I am a relativist in that I consider the location of individuals when making pronouncements of their philosophical viewpoints to be important when considering their views. Of course, most philosophers are at pains to argue for their systems in the abstract and in terms of complete rationality. I am suspicious of rationality. I am also of= the view that it is only when one understands something of the biography of the thinker that their work seems to make most sense. Thus Hegel’s later system, arguing for a strong state to protect the freedom of the individuals and to wage war against other states, makes sense when one realises that he= has been appointed chief ideologue for the Prussian state after the Franco-Prus= sian War; and that Nietzsche went clinically insane not so very long after pronouncing that we live in a god-less universe without any possibility for universal values.

So, in using the people who follow I feel no compunction in borrowing from their oeuvres so as to help compile my own sy= stem in a way that involves borrowing some concepts, possibly out of context, wh= ile leaving others behind or undiscussed. So, with Hegel for example, I am happ= y to follow Marcuse in seeing Hegel’s system as giving us the foundations = for thinking about alienation and class consciousness (which influenced the ear= ly Marx) but to overlook all the claptrap which in his political thought apologised in effect for totalitarian government. The borrowings in what follows, then, will make sense only as part of my own project and not necessarily as an account of the complete thought of the people quoted ther= ein.

The English enlightenment

Hobbes<= span lang=3DEN-GB style=3D'font-family:Georgia'>: life is nasty brutish and shor= t and the role of the state is to protect individual human beings from the state = of nature in which the nastiness and the brutishness of that life would otherw= ise be visited on each human being by her neighbours. The role of the state, and particularly of the monarchy, is little more than that. In essence then the individual’s freedom is paramount and the state must withdraw its activities to that minimum of protection against force and fraud. Law-makin= g is therefore valid only to prevent intrusions on one another’s liberty: = by extension, the individual is free to act however she pleases unless her behaviour is proscribed by law.

Locke: private property rights are ju= stifiable once a person has combined her labour with that property: in consequence she acquires a right in that property. The advent of money queers his pitch somewhat because payment of money (particularly in the twenty-first century when that money may have been stolen, or inherited or acquired from unworthy means e.g. being a z-list celebrity selling wedding photos) does not necessarily connote the worthy combination of labour with property. Neverth= eless, the role of the state is to protect these property rights. (although there = are questions about Locke’s own views here versus the views which are generally ascribed to him by modern apologists for the unthinking protectio= n of property rights – Locke was concerned that property be used for the common wealth, the veneration of god, and that property could be taken away from an “owner” if not being used by that owner.) Again, the us= e of Locke in the modern sense is to provide a focus primarily on the freedom of= the individual and the freedom from sovereign-monarchical power, replaced by the sovereign power of law. In time the positivist legal theorists, Bentham and Austin, will come to consider law as being thought of as based on a series = of commands made by a sovereign, instead of the natural law theory which had b= egun to hold sway.

In both of these theorists there= is a profound Christianity for all that we might mistakenly suppose them to be displacing the power of the Church and so of religion: in their own terms t= hey are consciously concerned with the significance of god, although our secular use of their ideas tends to downplay this element. They were both very controversial in their day, however, in that their support for the political state as a sovereign power displaced the divine right of kings to rule as t= he direct appointees of god.

Hume: people do not act altruistical= ly but rather they act so as to create a society in which life is acceptably free = for all.

What strikes me most clearly about the though= t of Locke and Hume is their cynicism. It is a deeply unappealing trait in their thought. Their assumption that human beings will only act altruistically or= in a civilised fashion out of a sense of self-preservation. Out of this strain= of thought comes the English veneration of private property rights and of a pa= ssion for freedom from any superior force. These are indomitable parts of the Mid= dle English spirit and of much mainstream English culture in here – from = the instinctive assumption that any international political initiative can only= be a popish plot to destroy English autonomy right through to the innate assumption that any English sports team will win any given competition desp= ite the weight of history and common sense to the contrary in many circumstance= s.

German idealism

Kant: in this system Kant’s mo= st significant contribution is the basis he lent to moral thought by means of seeing individuals as ends in themselves and requiring us, in effect, to do unto others as we would have them do unto ourselves by virtue of being obli= ged to accept that any moral view we hold should be accepted as a universal rul= e.

Hegel: the notion of a system of thou= ght comes from the Hegelian system itself. My views of Hegel swam into focus wh= en I read Herbert Marcuse’s excellent Reason and Revolution (the umpteenth book on this difficult thinker but the fi= rst to take a viable perspective for me). Hegel was a part of the history of Ge= rman idealism which saw the need for universal truths which would enable the onw= ard march of human reason: reason in itself being considered to be the motor of human history after the enlightenment. Hegel’s sense of the world spi= rit and the inevitable path of history towards the increasing autonomy of human society by virtue of the application of rational thought to social structur= es and problems gave rise to a particular form of political system. Thus, by w= ay of example, the rationale for the provision of rights in property is an extension of free will over property and its application to the purposes of individuals as opposed to its deployment for the feudal order.

&= nbsp; German idealism thus marks a significant break from the English thinking of the [seventeenth] century and thereafter. Whereas Kant’s thought goes in = and out of fashion like flared trousers and Hegel’s system now seems wilf= ully obscure and antique, the roots of both remain particularly significant in t= he Western tradition.

Marxism

Marx: giving birth to an –ism = which held sway over a large amount of the surface area of the Earth demonstrates= the importance of a range of books and pamphlets researched and written in no s= mall part in the unassumingly bourgeois surroundings of the British Library and Museum reading rooms. It is impossible to do justice either to Marx’s work or to the broader Marxian project here. For the purposes of this system there are five elements of particular interest: (1) class antagonism between capital and labour; (2) ownership of the means of production; (3) alienatio= n; (4) a technique of critique; and there is also (5) historical materialism, which is deployed here only to demonstrate a bridge with Hegel, and the distinction between base and superstructure which is less admired now perha= ps. The socialist project was re-shaped by Marxism from a comfortable fabianism into a means of understanding class antagonism between the haves and the have-nots. Understanding the ownership of the means of production became a means of rethinking social relations in economic terms, as well as a techni= que for unpicking many other social relations through the social sciences. Alie= nation is a particularly powerful idea which encapsulates and explains how social relations create antagonisms between individuals.

Gramsci= : a particularly significant upd= ating of the Marxian project in the twentieth century was found in Gramsci’s analysis of the phenomenon of hegemony effected in modern society by means = of controlling the culture through which the ideology of the proletariat is communicated and understood.

Chomsky= : in part at least an anarchist = rather than a straightforward Marxist, Chomsky’s project (once he had influe= nced the field of linguistics) is the critique of the current hegemony of (particularly American) mass culture which both manufactures consent among = the populace by restricting the scope of the public discussion of politics and = also generates the necessary illusions as to society’s common values which make such consent possible (and indeed necessary for the maintenance of our economic worldview).

Psychoanalysis

Freud: Civilisation and its Discontents is a fundamental text in the structure of this syst= em: it shows how human beings instinctual drives are necessarily compromised by= the demands of civilisation. The rules of living in a society are rules which a= re constantly being written – in the form of law, of customs or of inter= -personal relationships – and which are constantly being learned and unlearned = by each individual member of those societies. The ability to understand a human being’s instinctive, conscious and unconscious drives makes it possib= le to understand a person’s behaviour by reference to argument and reaso= ned supposition rather than by needing empirical proof of what is frequently incapable of empirical inquiry. One can begin an analysis of social forms, = in the manner which Marcuse does for example, by reference to attributing motivations and reactions to individuals making up that groups in society. = What is also made possible epistemologically is that extrapolation of impacts on= an individual’s early life into resultant behaviour later in life: a mod= e of thought which informs consequentialist rationalisation of the effects of particular social policies on large numbers of individual members of societ= y.

Jung: the link between Freud and Jun= g in the school of psychoanalysis is well known, as is the break between the two by reference to Freud’s determination that all drives are at root sexual= and Jung’s quasi-mystical interest in an unconscious world spirit, alchemy and pagan religion, and other forms of quasi-religious experience. My inter= est in ideology is similar to Jung’s ideas of mass unconsciousness and the illusions which are made possible by mass delusion: e.g. if we all keep behaving like this then we too could become a millionaire or President desp= ite the fact that I am currently in a job I hate; or, if we vote for lower taxes somehow that will lead to better social services and a more contented natio= n; or, if I buy the product which I have just seen advertised and which I never knew I wanted, then my life will become more fulfilling. Politics relies on creating mass delusions so as to drive electorates into supporting economic systems which will do idiotic things like polluting the planet, keeping the bulk of the world’s population in poverty (much of it near famine) an= d bombing civilian populations so as to “liberate” them. Jung tells us ab= out the individual human’s capacity for believing these things whereas Gramsci and Chomsky tell us how these ideologies work at the mass level.

Phenomenology

Phenomenology is the complex business of considering how the individual perceives the world: not simply how she sens= es or experiences the world, but rather how that world is perceived (Merleau-Ponty’s distinction). Within my scheme= it is important to understand how social inter-actions, social systems and the lifeworld are perceived in order that we can understand how individuals inter-act socially so as to form that mass of humanity which is the object = of systems like law.

Husserl

Heidigger

Sartre

Merleau-Ponty

Existentialism

Sartre: it will take a while to summarise Sar= tre’s system but two aspects are important in headline terms. First, Sartre’= ;s own project of transmitting his message through philosophy, fiction, theatr= e, journalism and direct action is astonishing – and something which see= ms improbable in the 21^st century. Second, the difficulty of measur= ing the famous sentiment in Huis Clos that “hell is other people” with a commitment to communism: i.e. how do we balance a love for human beings with a suspicion/dislike/loathing= of some particular human beings and their beliefs? The correlation between “I” and “we” is the central question for social the= ory, in my view.

Camus: The Myth of Sisyphus is central to this system: the idea that individuals bother to strive in a ludicrous life because of those lighted moments of victory or joy, as Sisyphus must have felt free when he had rolled the rock= to the top of the hill and then felt it slip from his grasp back to the bottom= so leaving him free to walk back unburden before he put his shoulder to the ro= ck again.

Critical theory

Adorno

Horkheimer

Marcuse

Habermas

Arendt

Modernism, Communicative action and systems theory

Habermas

Luhmann

Bauman

Nihilism, absurdity and modernity

Nietzsche: god is dead and therefore we m= ust find some other power to act as the grundnorm for our social relations and opini= ons. From Nietzsche the postmodernists take the underlying conviction that our underlying truths are not to be depended on. This nihilistic turn led Fried= rich Nietzsche to an asylum: the rest of us were left with the uncertainties generated by the excoriating critique of post-structuralism and deconstruct= ion.

Ionesco= : a human being must ingest fore= ign bodies through a hole in the front of her head and excrete the remains thro= ugh one of a selection of holes elsewhere just in order to survive. Each human being sees the world only from the perspective of her own five senses, and = is locked within those five senses for the whole of her sensory experience, bu= t is nevertheless reliant on other human beings locked beyond their five senses = to survive. The very process of being alive is absurd. Ionesco’s theatre= of absurdity throws up the nature of fascism, power and so on in plays like Rhinoceros in which the mundanitie= s of peoples’ lives are played out in front of the absurdity of surreal activities all around them. The modern world is just such an inter-play of absurdities – so pivotal to our lives that we tend to overlook them, except at times of great stress or elation – among which are in counterpoint to the purported rationality of our lifeworld. I do not believ= e in the omnicompetence of human rationality: indeed, it seems that an understan= ding of absurdity is a central part of understanding the rational order.

Beckett= : one of the principal themes of modernity is the anomie which it has created in the lives of individuals: distancing them from the natural rhythms of life, disturbing comfortable so= cial patterns, and failing to offer a means of filling the resulting space. The ideal metaphor for this state of being is provided by Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in which the four protagonists stand in a blank landscape by a single tree waiting for a man = who it seems will never come. So our lives are without meaning, unless we can supply it, as we wait for something about which no-one has any certain news= to bring us. Similarly, his novella Me= rcier and Camier talks of facing a similarly empty lifeworld but this time in= the company of another person with whom we can face down the absurdity of our living, comforted perhaps by the reassuring familiarity of a shared languag= e, and intimate history.

&= nbsp; The modern world is absurd: its purported rationality can neither prevent war n= or poverty nor loneliness. This absurdity, and the nihilism which initiates to= a realisation of the extent of that absurdity feel, is core to whether any gi= ven individual will be optimistic or pessimistic about the prospects for late modern society. See the comparative optimism and pessimism of Beck’s individualisation and Bauman’s attitude to globalisation: each identi= fy the same social forces changing the human world and yet each sees a differe= nt future resulting from those forces.

Post-structuralism and postmodernism

Foucault

Derrida

Lacan

Baudrillard

Jameson

Late modernism

Giddens

Beck

Elias: The Society of Individuals cuts to the heart of my project: posing the ques= tion how we should understand individuals forming together into a society. Elias’s viewpoint is that individuals are dependent on other people f= rom birth to be weaned, to learn language and to learn everything else about ho= w to inter-act with other people. As a result, society has changed (The Civilising Process) over time = in the manner in which it requires individuals to play particular roles in a hyper-differentiated society. The human condition results from these method= s of assimilation into the social world. There is an Elias page on this site: click here.

Castells

Liquid modernity

Bauman<= span lang=3DEN-GB style=3D'font-family:Georgia'>: The term “liquid modernity” is Bauman’s. Bauman is a thinker whose spirit infuses this site: he is as much a novelist as a theorist of postmodernity. The liquidity refers to the collapse of traditional social structures and his thought deals with the effect of that collapse. There is a Bauman page on t= his site as a result: click here. That discussion divides between Bauman= ’s modern and postmodern thought, analysing the new patterns of work, of pover= ty, of familial relationships. His work on technology and its automatic impact = on social relations – the most significant example being the link between the possibilities offered to the Nazis by the technological capability to c= arry out the final solution and their decision to do it (so chillingly depicted = in the film Conspiracy) – is= one context in which Bauman takes a poet’s sensibility into social theory. Much of my work on pr= operty law theory is built explicitly on Bauman’s ideas – click her= e.

Levinas

Capra: chaos theory has a central metaphorical force in this system. Capra’s work on the link between t= he logic of quantum physics in identifying the lack of structured links between physical bodies and the looseness of social relations lends this metaphor force. For example in relation to equity I have proposed the strength of accepting chaos as being part of human existence as a means of developing suitable principles. Chaos, like complexity theory in this context, does not require simply anarchy but rather adds the extra dimension of that chaos resolving itself into patterns and rhythms which are elegant, fractal and ultimately capable of being modelled.

Turner<= span lang=3DEN-GB style=3D'font-family:Georgia'>: one of the theorists who consi= der the fragility of existence as a human being is Turner. The inter-action between= Body and Society is one which prioritises the protection of the individual within a suitable social framework. We are fragile, we become sick, we sense the world in this fashi= on.

Van Parijs<= /b>:

Englishness and the Edwardian spirit

Forster

Waugh

Smith:= Robert Smith, that is.

Morris= sey

&= nbsp;

And then trailing the field …

Hudson: So where does t= his leave me? It leaves me recognising the need for belief whilst also being suspicious of the claims to truth of any given belief system. It leaves me seeking individual freedom whilst also wanting to ensure that individual freedom does not prevent the creation of social bonds and the recognition of social responsibility. It leaves me concerned to pursue a personal project = in active participation with my fellow humans while recognising that all too o= ften hell is other people. That there is no absolute truth but rather a need to understand that all rational thought systems will have their role in many g= iven situations so that context will impact on concept.