Politics and the imagination

217 Pages·2010·0.995 MB·English

by  Geuss, Raymond

POLITICS AND THE IMAGINATION
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POLITICS AND THE IMAGINATION
Raymond Geuss
princeton university press princeton and oxford
Copyright © 2010 by Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,
Princeton, New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street,
Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW
All Rights Reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Geuss, Raymond.
Politics and the imagination / Raymond Geuss.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-691-14227-2 (hardcover : alk. paper) —
ISBN 978-0-691-14228-9 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Political science—Philosophy. 2. Imagination (Philosophy) I. Title.
JA71.G47 2010
320.01—dc22
2009017105
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
This book has been composed in Sabon
Printed on acid-free paper. ∞
press.princeton.edu
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Preface vii
Acknowledgments xv
I Political Judgment in Its Historical Context 1
II The Politics of Managing Decline 17
III Moralism and Realpolitik 31
IV On the Very Idea of a Metaphysics of Right 43
V The Actual and Another Modernity
Order and Imagination in Don Quixote 61
VI Culture as Ideal and as Boundary 81
VII On Museums 96
VIII Celan’s Meridian 117
IX Heidegger and His Brother 142
X Richard Rorty at Princeton
Personal Recollections 151
XI Melody as Death 164
XII On Bourgeois Philosophy and the Concept of “Criticism” 167
Bibliography 187
Index 193
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Preface
It has sometimes been claimed that the oldest continuous fragment of
Western philosophical thought is a brief remark attributed by a commen-
tator on the works of Aristotle, Simplicius, to the sixth-century Ionian
philosopher Anaximander:
[λέγει ὁ Ἀναξίμανδροs] ἐξ (cid:1)ὡν δὲ ἡ γένεσίs ἐστι τοˆιs ο(cid:1)ὐσι, καὶ τὴν ϕθορὰν εἰs
ταῦτα γίνεσθαι κατὰ τὸ χρεών διδόναι γὰρ αὐτὰ δίκην καὶ τίσιν ἀλλήλοιs τ(cid:1)ηs
ἀδικίαs κατὰ τὴν το(cid:1)υ χρόνου τάξιν.1
Almost nothing about the text or interpretation of any part of this ar-
chaic statement is uncontroversial, and any translation of it must be
highly speculative, but the approximate sense seems to be:
[Anaximander says that] from whatever it is that things have their origin,
of necessity they must also have their destruction into that, for they must
give justice and make amends to each other for their injustice according to
the order of time.
Whatever the exact details of the metaphysical views which fi nd ex-
pression in this fragment, in one respect its basic meaning is clear enough.
It is a slightly spruced-up and intellectualized—and characteristically
gloomy—Hellenic version of a piece of enduring peasant wisdom: men
will reap what they sow; what goes around, comes around. A kind of
order which is both moral and “natural” prevails in the world, and this
order will eventually, but necessarily—κατὰ τὸ χρεών—reestablish itself.
Any apparent violations of this order will show themselves in the longer
run to be mere momentary aberrations. The gloomy gloss on this thought
consists in the tacit assertion that being-something—being anything at
all—is already an injustice that deserves, and will incur, punishment.
Even to be in existence at all makes something culpable.2 If one ignores
for a moment the pessimistic twist,3 one can see why the rest of this piece
1 Hermann Diels and Walther Kranz(Weidman, 1951), Fragment 1, p. 89. For further
analysis of this fragment see Friedrich Nietzsche, “Die Philosophie im tragischen Zeitalter,”
inKritische Studienausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (de Gruyter, 1967)
vol. 1, pp. 817–22, or the highly speculative Heidegger, “Der Spruch des Anaximandros,”
inHolzwege(Klostermann, 1950), pp. 296–344.
2 As Mephistopheles puts it in Faust (line 1339f): “denn alles was entsteht / ist wert daß
es zugrunde geht”[“Everything that comes into being / deserves to perish”].
3 One can trace a development here from this form of metaphysical pessimism to a politi-
cal version of the same thing in 1938. See also Brecht, “An die Nachgeborenen” (1938):
viii PREFACE
of peasant wisdom is still so deeply entrenched even in modern and pur-
portedly enlightened ways of thinking and why the view expressed is so
diffi cult to eradicate: it is too comforting to lose. Wrongdoers may seem
invincible now, but eventually they will pay. So powerful is the human
imagination that people can take some comfort in this thought, even if
they know they will no longer themselves be around to view the reestab-
lishment of the “natural order,” the triumph of “justice,” etc. Much in-
genuity over two and a half millennia has been devoted to fi nding a way
of putting this belief in a form which hides its essentially mythological
structure and makes it seem like a sober and cognitively well-grounded
assessment of the world.
At some point in the past, this story acquired an imaginative competi-
tor. Instead of deriving solace from the idea that everything will always
“really” remain the same, so that violations of “natural justice” will right
themselves and all will be as it was, people begin to think of doing some-
thing themselves to improve the future, and they begin to derive consola-
tion from the fact that no matter how diffi cult things seem now to be,
they can imagine that things will get better, or at any rate they could get
better if everyone pulled together in the right direction. It isn’t the thought
of the basic invariability of the world that gives solace, but the fantasy of
its plasticity, of a potentially infi nite process of change and improvement,
of the unlimited transformation of the world into something more perfect
and more to our taste. How much of reality can, however, be changed?
To jump ahead from the sixth-century BC to the beginning of the
twenty-fi rst century, we see that we still have no settled attitude on the
limits of the malleability of reality. In 2002 a reporter interviewed a
high-ranking but unnamed aide to U.S. president George W. Bush. Let
us call this aide “Anonymos.” Anonymos is reported to have said that
journalists were part of the “reality-based community . . . people who
believe that decisions emerge from your judicious study of discernible
reality. . . . That’s not the way the world works anymore. . . . We’re [i.e.,
the United States] an empire now, and when we act, we create our own
reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—
Man sagt mir: Iß und trink du! Sei froh, daß du hast!
Aber wie kann ich essen und trinken, wenn
Ich dem Hungernden entreiße, was ich esse, und
Mein Glas Wasser dem Verdurstenden fehlt?
Und doch esse und trinke ich.
This poem does not yet express a fully developed ecological consciousness, because in
1938 hunger and thirst were “merely” a political problem of distribution, and not a pro-
blem of absolute depletion. Finally to ecology: see George Monbiot, “Is the Pope Gay?” in
Bring on the Apocalypse (Grove Atlantic, 2008), p. 17.
PREFACE ix
we’ll act again, creating other realities, which you can study too, and
that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors. . . . and you, all of
you, will be left to just study what we do.”4
This statement draws attention to a suffi cient number of extremely
important features of all human politics to merit some further consider-
ation. As the young Heidegger noted, human beings are always “ahead
of themselves”;5 our lives are constituted by uncompleted projects, and
anyone with no concernful tasks outstanding, anyone with no unfi nished
business in the world, would not be alive at all. Vixit. My relation to
my own future, and our relation to our future, is always “open” and
to some extent “ungrounded.”6 I don’t have conclusive reasons for the
projects I have—they are neither fully explicable nor fully “justifi able”
by my antecedent beliefs and desires—nor are any of my projects fully
under my own power, but rather they are always at the mercy of external
circumstances and events over which I have little control. To act is in an
important sense always to create something new, an object, a change in
an existing situation, a new reality. Politicians, in particular, are sup-
posed to deal with emergencies as they arise and to ward off threats to
those aspects of the status quo that are particularly valued, but they are
also sometimes supposed to change the way things are, to create new
facts. Margaret Thatcher saw this very clearly when she embarked on her
policy of rejecting “consensus politics” in favor of trying to bring into ex-
istence new brute realities with which all other politicians would have to
learn to deal, one way or the other, and Anonymos put some similar im-
portant points in a salutarily provocative way. Any organized attempt at
improvement of our situation will include some at least minimal exercise
of the imagination, in that it will require agents to think of ways in which
their environment or modes of acting could be different from what they
now are. What is provocative about Anonymos’s statement is not the
claim about creating new facts, but the suggestion that the government
of the United States was so limitlessly powerful it could successfully con-
jure a completely new reality into existence without regard to antecedent
conditions. This, of course, is the point at which Heidegger,7 and most of
the rest of us, I trust, would part company from Anonymos.
This collection puts together essays I have written during the past few
years that deal with several issues concerning the nature of the imagina-
tion and its role in politics. These issues include such questions as: What
4 Ron Suskind, “Faith, Certainty, and the Presidency of George W. Bush,” in New York
Times Magazine,17 October 2004.
5 Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Niemeyer, 1963), §§31–32, 41, 68a.
6 Ibid.,§58.
7 Ibid., §§29, 31, 38.