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Books: One-dimensional man: chapter seven

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control. Language not only reflects these controls but becomes itself an
instrument of control even where it does not transmit orders but information;
where it demands, not obedience but choice, not submission but freedom.
[...]
What is taking place is a sweeping redefinition of thought itself, of its
function and content. The coordination of the individual with his society
reaches into those layers of the mind where the very concepts are elaborated
which are designed to comprehend the established reality. These concepts are
taken from the intellectual tradition and translated into operational terms—a
translation which has the effect of reducing the tension between thought and
reality by weakening the negative power of thought.
### Science and technology of domination
The principles of modern science were a priori structured in such a way that
they could serve as conceptual instruments for a universe of self-propelling,
productive control; theoretical operationalism came to correspond to practical
operationalism. The scientific method which led to the ever-more-effective
domination of nature thus came to provide the pure concepts as well as the
instrumentalities for the ever-more-effective domination of man by man through
the domination of nature. Theoretical reason, remaining pure and neutral,
entered into the service of practical reason. The merger proved beneficial to
both. Today, domination perpetuates and extends itself not only through
technology but as technology, and the latter provides the great legitimation of
the expanding political power, which absorbs all spheres of culture.
In this universe, technology also provides the great rationalization of the
unfreedom of man and demonstrates the “technical” impossibility of being
autonomous, of determining one’s own life. For this unfreedom appears neither
as irrational nor as political, but rather as submission to the technical
apparatus which enlarges the comforts of life and increases the productivity of
labor. Technological rationality thus protects rather than cancels the
legitimacy of domination, and the instrumentalist horizon of reason opens on a
rationally totalitarian society:
“One might call autocratic a philosophy of technics which takes the technical
whole as a place where machines are used to obtain power. The machine is only a
means; the end is the conquest of nature, the domestication of natural forces
through a primary enslavement: The machine is a slave which serves to make
other slaves. Such a domineering and enslaving drive may go together with the
quest for human freedom. But it is difficult to liberate oneself by
transferring slavery to other beings, men, animals, or machines; to rule over a
population of machines subjecting the whole world means still to rule, and all
rule implies acceptance of schemata of subjection.” Gilbert Simondon, Du Mode
d’existence des objets techniques (Paris, Aubier, 1958), p. 127.
[...]
The incessant dynamic of technical progress has become permeated with political
content, and the Logos of technics has been made into the Logos of continued
servitude. The liberating force of technology—the instrumentalization of
things—turns into a fetter of liberation; the instrumentalization of man.
[...]
No matter how one defines truth and objectivity, they remain related to the
human agents of theory and practice, and to their ability to comprehend and
change their world. This ability in turn depends on the extent to which matter
(whatever it may be) is recognized and understood as that which it is itself in
all particular forms. In these terms, contemporary science is of immensely
greater objective validity than its predecessors. One might even add that, at
present, the scientific method is the only method that can claim such validity;
the interplay of hypotheses and observable facts validates the hypotheses and
establishes the facts. The point which I am trying to make is that science, by
virtue of its own method and concepts, has projected and promoted a universe in
which the domination of nature has remained linked to the domination of man—a
link which tends to be fatal to this universe as a whole. Nature,
scientifically comprehended and mastered, reappears in the technical apparatus
of production and destruction which sustains and improves the life of the
individuals while subordinating them to the masters of the apparatus. Thus the
rational hierarchy merges with the social one. If this is the case, then the
change in the direction of progress, which might sever this fatal link, would
also affect the very structure of science—the scientific project. Its
hypotheses, without losing their rational character, would develop in an
essentially different experimental context (that of a pacified world);
consequently, science would arrive at essentially different concepts of nature
and establish essentially different facts. The rational society subverts the
idea of Reason.
I have pointed out that the elements of this subversion, the notions of another
rationality, were present in the history of thought from its beginning. The
ancient idea of a state where Being attains fulfillment, where the tension
between “is” and “ought” is resolved in the cycle of an eternal return,
partakes of the metaphysics of domination. But it also pertains to the
metaphysics of liberation—to the reconciliation of Logos and Eros. This idea
envisages the coming-to-rest of the repressive productivity of Reason, the end
of domination in gratification.
[...]
By way of summary, we may now try to identify more clearly the hidden subject
of scientific rationality and the hidden ends in its pure form. The scientific
concept of a universally controllable nature projected nature as endless
matter-in-function, the mere stuff of theory and practice. In this form, the
object-world entered the construction of a technological universe—a universe of
mental and physical instrumentalities, means in themselves. Thus it is a truly
“hypothetical” system, depending on a validating and verifying subject.
The processes of validation and verification may be purely theoretical ones,
but they never occur in a vacuum and they never terminate in a private,
individual mind. The hypothetical system of forms and functions becomes
dependent on another system—a pre-established universe of ends, in which and
for which it develops. What appeared extraneous, foreign to the theoretical
project, shows forth as part of its very structure (method and concepts); pure
objectivity reveals itself as object for a subjectivity which provides the
Telos, the ends. In the construction of the technological reality, there is no
such thing as a purely rational scientific order; the process of technological
rationality is a political process.
Only in the medium of technology, man and nature become fungible objects of
organization. The universal effectiveness and productivity of the apparatus
under which they are subsumed veil the particular interests that organize the
apparatus. In other words, technology has become the great vehicle of
reification—reification in its most mature and effective form. The social
position of the individual and his relation to others appear not only to be
determined by objective qualities and laws, but these qualities and laws seem
to lose their mysterious and uncontrollable character; they appear as
calculable manifestations of (scientific) rationality. The world tends to
become the stuff of total administration, which absorbs even the
administrators. The web of domination has become the web of Reason itself, and
this society is fatally entangled in it. And the transcending modes of thought
seem to transcend Reason itself.
### Positive and Negative Thinking
In terms of the established universe, such contradicting modes of thought are
negative thinking. “The power of the negative” is the principle which governs
the development of concepts, and contradiction becomes the distinguishing
quality of Reason (Hegel). This quality of thought was not confined to a
certain type of rationalism; it was also a decisive element in the empiricist
tradition. Empiricism is not necessarily positive; its attitude to the
established reality depends on the particular dimension of experience which
functions as the source of knowledge and as the basic frame of reference. For
example, it seems that sensualism and materialism are per se negative toward a
society in which vital instinctual and material needs are unfulfilled. In
contrast, the empiricism of linguistic analysis moves within a framework which
does not allow such contradiction—the self-imposed restriction to the prevalent
behavioral universe makes for an intrinsically positive attitude. In spite of
the rigidly neutral approach of the philosopher, the pre-bound analysis
succumbs to the power of positive thinking.
Before trying to show this intrinsically ideological character of linguistic
analysis, I must attempt to justify my apparently arbitrary and derogatory play
with the terms “positive” and “positivism” by a brief comment on their origin.
Since its first usage, probably in the school of Saint-Simon, the term
“positivism” has encompassed (1) the validation of cognitive thought by
experience of facts; (2) the orientation of cognitive thought to the physical
sciences as a model of certainty and exactness; (3) the belief that progress in
knowledge depends on this orientation. Consequently, positivism is a struggle
against all metaphysics, transcendentalisms, and idealisms as obscurantist and
regressive modes of thought. To the degree to which the given reality is
scientifically comprehended and transformed, to the degree to which society
becomes industrial and technological, positivism finds in the society the
medium for the realization (and validation) of its concepts—harmony between
theory and practice, truth and facts. Philosophic thought turns into
affirmative thought; the philosophic critique criticizes within the societal
framework and stigmatizes non-positive notions as mere speculation, dreams or
fantasies.1
[...]
The contemporary effort to reduce the scope and the truth of philosophy is
tremendous, and the philosophers themselves proclaim the modesty and inefficacy
of philosophy. It leaves the established reality untouched; it abhors
transgression.
Austin’s contemptuous treatment of the alternatives to the common usage of
words, and his defamation of what we “think up in our armchairs of an
afternoon”; Wittgenstein’s assurance that philosophy “leaves everything as it
is”—such statements2 exhibit, to my mind, academic sado-masochism,
self-humiliation, and self-denunciation of the intellectual whose labor does
not issue in scientific, technical or like achievements. These affirmations of
modesty and dependence seem to recapture Hume’s mood of righteous contentment
with the limitations of reason which, once recognized and accepted, protect man
from useless mental adventures but leave him perfectly capable of orienting
himself in the given environment. However, when Hume debunked substances, he
fought a powerful ideology, while his successors today provide an intellectual
justification for that which society has long since accomplished—namely, the
defamation of alternative modes of thought which contradict the established
universe of discourse.
### Language, philosophy and the restricted experience
The almost masochistic reduction of speech to the humble and common is made
into a program: “if the words ‘language,’ ‘experience,’ ‘world,’ have a use, it
must be as humble a one as that of the words ‘table,’ ‘lamp,’ ‘door.’
[...]
The self-styled poverty of philosophy, committed with all its concepts to the
given state of affairs, distrusts the possibilities of a new experience.
Subjection to the rule of the established facts is total—only linguistic facts,
to be sure, but the society speaks in its language, and we are told to obey.
The prohibitions are severe and authoritarian: “Philosophy may in no way
interfere with the actual use of language.”9 “And we may not advance any kind
of theory. There must not be anything hypothetical in our considerations. We
must do away with all explanation, and description alone must take its
place.”10
One might ask what remains of philosophy? What remains of thinking,
intelligence, without anything hypothetical, without any explanation? However,
what is at stake is not the definition or the dignity of philosophy. It is
rather the chance of preserving and protecting the right, the need to think and
speak in terms other than those of common usage—terms which are meaningful,
rational, and valid precisely because they are other terms. What is involved is
the spread of a new ideology which undertakes to describe what is happening
(and meant) by eliminating the concepts capable of understanding what is
happening (and meant).
To begin with, an irreducible difference exists between the universe of
everyday thinking and language on the one side, and that of philosophic
thinking and language on the other. In normal circumstances, ordinary language
is indeed behavioral—a practical instrument. When somebody actually says “My
broom is in the corner,” he probably intends that somebody else who had
actually asked about the broom is going to take it or leave it there, is going
to be satisfied, or angry. In any case, the sentence has fulfilled its function
by causing a behavioral reaction: “the effect devours the cause; the end
absorbs the means.”11
In contrast, if, in a philosophic text or discourse, the word “substance,”
“idea,” “man,” “alienation” becomes the subject of a proposition, no such
transformation of meaning into a behavioral reaction takes place or is intended
to take place. The word remains, as it were, unfulfilled—except in thought,
where it may give rise to other thoughts. And through a long series of
mediations within a historical continuum, the proposition may help to form and
guide a practice. But the proposition remains unfulfilled even then—only the
hubris of absolute idealism asserts the thesis of a final identity between
thought and its object. The words with which philosophy is concerned can
therefore never have a use “as humble … as that of the words ‘table,’ ‘lamp,’
‘door.’ ”
[...]
Viewed from this position, the examples of linguistic analysis quoted above
become questionable as valid objects of philosophic analysis. Can the most
exact and clarifying description of tasting something that may or may not taste
like pineapple ever contribute to philosophic cognition? [...] The object of
analysis, withdrawn from the larger and denser context in which the speaker
speaks and lives, is removed from the universal medium in which concepts are
formed and become words. What is this universal, larger context in which people
speak and act and which gives their speech its meaning—this context which does
not appear in the positivist analysis, which is a priori shut off by the
examples as well as by the analysis itself?
This larger context of experience, this real empirical world, today is still
that of the gas chambers and concentration camps, of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, of
American Cadillacs and German Mercedes, of the Pentagon and the Kremlin, of the
nuclear cities and the Chinese communes, of Cuba, of brainwashing and
massacres. But the real empirical world is also that in which all these things
are taken for granted or forgotten or repressed or unknown, in which people are
free. It is a world in which the broom in the corner or the taste of something
like pineapple are quite important, in which the daily toil and the daily
comforts are perhaps the only items that make up all experience. And this
second, restricted empirical universe is part of the first; the powers that
rule the first also shape the restricted experience.
[...]
Ordinary language in its “humble use” may indeed be of vital concern to
critical philosophic thought, but in the medium of this thought words lose
their plain humility and reveal that “hidden” something which is of no interest
to Wittgenstein. [...] Such an analysis uncovers the history13 in everyday
speech as a hidden dimension of meaning—the rule of society over its language.
[...]
Orienting itself on the reified universe of everyday discourse, and exposing
and clarifying this discourse in terms of this reified universe, the analysis
abstracts from the negative, from that which is alien and antagonistic and
cannot be understood in terms of the established usage. By classifying and
distinguishing meanings, and keeping them apart, it purges thought and speech
of contradictions, illusions, and transgressions. But the transgressions are
not those of “pure reason.” They are not metaphysical transgressions beyond the
limits of possible knowledge, they rather open a realm of knowledge beyond
common sense and formal logic.
In barring access to this realm, positivist philosophy sets up a
self-sufficient world of its own, closed and well protected against the
ingression of disturbing external factors. In this respect, it makes little
difference whether the validating context is that of mathematics, of logical
propositions, or of custom and usage. In one way or another, all possibly
meaningful predicates are prejudged. The prejudging judgment might be as broad
as the spoken English language, or the dictionary, or some other code or
convention. Once accepted, it constitutes an empirical a priori which cannot be
transcended.
[...]
The therapeutic character of the philosophic analysis is strongly emphasized—to
cure from illusions, deceptions, obscurities, unsolvable riddles, unanswerable
questions, from ghosts and spectres. Who is the patient? Apparently a certain
sort of intellectual, whose mind and language do not conform to the terms of
ordinary discourse. There is indeed a goodly portion of psychoanalysis in this
philosophy—analysis without Freud’s fundamental insight that the patient’s
trouble is rooted in a general sickness which cannot be cured by analytic
therapy. Or, in a sense, according to Freud, the patient’s disease is a protest
reaction against the sick world in which he lives. But the physician must
disregard the “moral” problem. He has to restore the patient’s health, to make
him capable of functioning normally in his world.
The philosopher is not a physician; his job is not to cure individuals but to
comprehend the world in which they live—to understand it in terms of what it
has done to man, and what it can do to man. For philosophy is (historically,
and its history is still valid) the contrary of what Wittgenstein made it out
to be when he proclaimed it as the renunciation of all theory, as the
undertaking that “leaves everything as it is.”
[...]
The neo-positivist critique still directs its main effort against metaphysical
notions, and it is motivated by a notion of exactness which is either that of
formal logic or empirical description. Whether exactness is sought in the
analytic purity of logic and mathematics, or in conformity with ordinary
language—on both poles of contemporary philosophy is the same rejection or
devaluation of those elements of thought and speech which transcend the
accepted system of validation. This hostility is most sweeping where it takes
the form of toleration—that is, where a certain truth value is granted to the
transcendent concepts in a separate dimension of meaning and significance
(poetic truth, metaphysical truth). For precisely the setting aside of a
special reservation in which thought and language are permitted to be
legitimately inexact, vague, and even contradictory is the most effective way
of protecting the normal universe of discourse from being seriously disturbed
by unfitting ideas. Whatever truth may be contained in literature is a “poetic”
truth, whatever truth may be contained in critical idealism is a “metaphysical”
truth—its validity, if any, commits neither ordinary discourse and behavior,
nor the philosophy adjusted to them.
This new form of the doctrine of the “double truth” sanctions a false
consciousness by denying the relevance of the transcendent language to the
universe of ordinary language, by proclaiming total non-interference. Whereas
the truth value of the former consists precisely in its relevance to and
interference with the latter.
### Philosophy and science
This intellectual dissolution and even subversion of the given facts is the
historical task of philosophy and the philosophic dimension. Scientific method,
too, goes beyond the facts and even against the facts of immediate experience.
Scientific method develops in the tension between appearance and reality. The
mediation between the subject and object of thought, however, is essentially
different. In science, the medium is the observing, measuring, calculating,
experimenting subject divested of all other qualities; the abstract subject
projects and defines the abstract object.
In contrast, the objects of philosophic thought are related to a consciousness
for which the concrete qualities enter into the concepts and into their
interrelation. The philosophic concepts retain and explicate the pre-scientific
mediations (the work of everyday practice, of economic organization, of
political action) which have made the object-world that which it actually is—a
world in which all facts are events, occurrences in a historical continuum.
The separation of science from philosophy is itself a historical event.
Aristotelian physics was a part of philosophy and, as such, preparatory to the
“first science”—ontology. The Aristotelian concept of matter is distinguished
from the Galilean and post-Galilean not only in terms of different stages in
the development of scientific method (and in the discovery of different
‘layers” of reality), but also, and perhaps primarily, in terms of different
historical projects, of a different historical enterprise which established a
different nature as well as society. Aristotelian physics becomes objectively
wrong with the new experience and apprehension of nature, with the historical
establishment of a new subject and object-world, and the falsification of
Aristotelian physics then extends backward into the past and surpassed
experience and apprehension.15
### A funny paragraph
The neglect or the clearing up of this specific philosophic dimension has led
contemporary positivism to move in a synthetically impoverished world of
academic concreteness, and to create more illusory problems than it has
destroyed. Rarely has a philosophy exhibited a more tortuous esprit de sérieux
than that displayed in such analyses as the interpretation of Three Blind Mice
in a study of “Metaphysical and Ideographic Language,” with its discussion of
an “artificially constructed Triple principle-Blindness-Mousery asymmetric
sequence constructed according to the pure principles of ideography.”17
Perhaps this example is unfair. [...] Examples are skillfully held in balance
between seriousness and the joke
[Three Blind Mice](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Blind_Mice) is a crusty rhyme.
### A suspect language
Analytic philosophy often spreads the atmosphere of denunciation and
investigation by committee. The intellectual is called on the carpet. What do
you mean when you say …? Don’t you conceal something? You talk a language which
is suspect. You don’t talk like the rest of us, like the man in the street, but
rather like a foreigner who does not belong here. We have to cut you down to
size, expose your tricks, purge you. We shall teach you to say what you have in
mind, to “come clear,” to “put your cards on the table.” Of course, we do not
impose on you and your freedom of thought and speech; you may think as you
like. But once you speak, you have to communicate your thoughts to us—in our
language or in yours. Certainly, you may speak your own language, but it must
be translatable, and it will be translated. You may speak poetry—that is all
right. We love poetry. But we want to understand your poetry, and we can do so
only if we can interpret your symbols, metaphors, and images in terms of
ordinary language.
The poet might answer that indeed he wants his poetry to be understandable and
understood (that is why he writes it), but if what he says could be said in
terms of ordinary language he would probably have done so in the first place.
He might say: Understanding of my poetry presupposes the collapse and
invalidation of precisely that universe of discourse and behavior into which
you want to translate it. My language can be learned like any other language
(in point of fact, it is also your own language), then it will appear that my
symbols, metaphors, etc. are not symbols, metaphors, etc. but mean exactly what
they say. Your tolerance is deceptive. In reserving for me a special niche of
meaning and significance, you grant me exemption from sanity and reason, but in
my view, the madhouse is somewhere else.
[...]
Under these circumstances, the spoken phrase is an expression of the individual
who speaks it, and of those who make him speak as he does, and of whatever
tension or contradiction may interrelate them. In speaking their own language,
people also speak the language of their masters, benefactors, advertisers. Thus
they do not only express themselves, their own knowledge, feelings, and
aspirations, but also something other than themselves. Describing “by
themselves” the political situation, either in their home town or in the
international scene, they (and “they” includes us, the intellectuals who know
it and criticize it) describe what “their” media of mass communication tell
them—and this merges with what they really think and see and feel.
[...]
But this situation disqualifies ordinary language from fulfilling the
validating function which it performs in analytic philosophy. “What people mean
when they say …” is related to what they don’t say. Or, what they mean cannot
be taken at face value—not because they lie, but because the universe of
thought and practice in which they live is a universe of manipulated
contradictions.
### Metalanguage
Here the problem of “metalanguage” arises; the terms which analyze the meaning
of certain terms must be other than, or distinguishable from the latter. They
must be more and other than mere synonyms which still belong to the same
(immediate) universe of discourse. But if this metalanguage is really to break
through the totalitarian scope of the established universe of discourse, in
which the different dimensions of language are integrated and assimilated, it
must be capable of denoting the societal processes which have determined and
“closed” the established universe of discourse. Consequently, it cannot be a
technical metalanguage, constructed mainly with a view of semantic or logical
clarity. The desideratum is rather to make the established language itself
speak what it conceals or excludes, for what is to be revealed and denounced is
operative within the universe of ordinary discourse and action, and the
prevailing language contains the metalanguage.
### Ordinary universe of discourse
The crimes against language, which appear in the style of the newspaper,
pertain to its political style. Syntax, grammar, and vocabulary become moral
and political acts. Or, the context may be an aesthetic and philosophic one:
literary criticism, an address before a learned society, or the like.
[...]
For such an analysis, the meaning of a term or form demands its development in
a multi-dimensional universe, where any expressed meaning partakes of several
interrelated, overlapping, and antagonistic “systems.”
[...]
in reality, we understand each other only through whole areas of
misunderstanding and contradiction. The real universe of ordinary language is
that of the struggle for existence. It is indeed an ambiguous, vague, obscure
universe, and is certainly in need of clarification. Moreover, such
clarification may well fulfill a therapeutic function, and if philosophy would
become therapeutic, it would really come into its own.
Philosophy approaches this goal to the degree to which it frees thought from
its enslavement by the established universe of discourse and behavior,
elucidates the negativity of the Establishment (its positive aspects are
abundantly publicized anyway) and projects its alternatives. To be sure,
philosophy contradicts and projects in thought only. It is ideology, and this
ideological character is the very fate of philosophy which no scientism and
positivism can overcome. Still, its ideological effort may be truly
therapeutic—to show reality as that which it really is, and to show that which
this reality prevents from being.
In the totalitarian era, the therapeutic task of philosophy would be a
political task, since the established universe of ordinary language tends to
coagulate into a totally manipulated and indoctrinated universe. Then politics
would appear in philosophy, not as a special discipline or object of analysis,
nor as a special political philosophy, but as the intent of its concepts to
comprehend the unmutilated reality. If linguistic analysis does not contribute
to such understanding; if, instead, it contributes to enclosing thought in the
circle of the mutilated universe of ordinary discourse, it is at best entirely
inconsequential. And, at worst, it is an escape into the non-controversial, the
unreal, into that which is only academically controversial.
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