Philosophy, Peace and the Myth of Unity

Allow me to start with an observation which is also a self apology, an apology for philosophy which seems to engage in questions too general for its capacity of analysis and solution - especially in a country where philosophy has been mainly practised as the discussion and also, elimination, of specific and too abstract problems. In our time - usually indicated as the post 9/11 world - the specialised nature of philosophy is de facto lost, as many "normal" distinctions which used to belong to an "order" of life which is just a matter of the past.

So you will not be surprised if I start by rediscussing one of the most traditional notions of philosophy from its very beginning, the notion, and value, of the ONE. I don't know wether the central role of the ONE in our tradition depends on monotheism, or if monotheism is already a consequence of this preference. If this latter were the case - but note that this is just an hypothesis, and that one cannot cut the question so roughly - one could imagine that unity is at the very end a way of assuring a more efficient manipulation of external reality,more or less in the sense Max Weber considered western judeo-christian monotheism as the necessary condition for a general unified science of nature: the laws of the physical world could not hold if nature were the reign of different divinities often in open rivalry each against the other. No matter whether Weber was completely right or not, my impression is that twentieth century philosophy - or at least a "good" part of it - has progressively agreed that the preference for unity in the conceptual tradition of the west is, by and large, a matter of power, i.e. something which goes far beyond the pure logic of (individual) rational thought.

I want to recall briefly the case of one of the greatest philosophers of the last century, Martin Heidegger; who in his capital work, Being and Time, 1927, had defined human existence as "being in the world" - in der Welt sein; but in later works such as the essay "On the origin of a work of art" (1936) ceased to speak of THE world and started to use the expression in the plural form: A world etc. The reason of this transition is to be found in the increasing awareness of Heidegger that human existence could not be considered as having the same caracters independently from the concrete historical predicament in which everybody lives. This awareness, as you can imagine, was a sort of revolution in Heidegger's philosophy; and in philosophy as such, as far as it has assimilated the result of Heidegger's work: universality, validity of the reason, every form of essentialism were left without their traditional basis, the assumed "unity" of human nature and of THE world. What Heidegger in those same years called the end of metaphysics - an event which, although on different basis, is largely recognised by many other philosophers - was a consequence of the factual dissolution of the "modern" unity of the world. This unity had started to dissolve already before several centuries, with the protestant revolution and the great religion and dynastic wars in Europe; but it came to an end only with the progressive dissolution of colonialism and eurocentrism, which also marks the origin of post-modernity. Note that the end of metaphysics, in these terms, had been anticipated by Marx and Nietzsche in the previous century. Especially Nietzsche, even more than Marx (who still believed in a human reason capable of THE truth, once it would have been freed from the alienation of the social division of work), had warned against the mistakes of a language construed on the basis of domination relationships: until we use the same grammar, he said, we shall not get rid of God...

Both Heidegger and Nietzsche and Marx had not "discovered" that metaphysics and its belief in the unity of being, world, reason was false. They had rather listened to the "signs of the time", so to speak; and this was already a way of overcoming metaphysics towards what Marx would call the ciritique of ideology and Heidegger existential ontology. Note that, almost in the same years of Heidegger, Karl Popper had presented a strong critique of Plato's political philosophy, which reproached him for having inaugurated totalitarism by relating poltics, and policies, to philosophical truth. Also in this critique of Plato's doctrine of the state one can read, although not explicitly, a refusal of the leading notion of unity.

I realize that a complete critical revision of the central notion of unity in philosophical tradition cannot be outlined here. So, let me go back to the situation in which philosophy more or less radically became, and is becoming, aware of the dissolution of metaphysicas and unity. The situation of Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger was that of the explosion of conflicts which could no longer be mediated by a "universal" rationality supported by a strong philosophical and/or religious belief in the value of unity. Not only to Marx, but also to the much more "bourgeois" Nietzsche, the world of XIX century appeared as the place of conflicts which had become totally explicit - Nietzsche spoke of an "indian sauvagerie" typical of the new capitalist economy, which he saw especially represented by America. In many senses, our situation is deeply analogous to theirs. Not only in relation to the leading role of America, of course.

I propose again to skip a more detailed analysis, which is probably familiar to all of you, and simply agree on the following thesis: today we are not simply strongly mistrusting any idea of unity - of reason, of the world, even of "humanity" (while human rights are cited as a reason for imposing "democracy" on peoples...) - but we increasingly discover that unity is a dangerous myth, which instead of preparing peace and improvement of life, contributes powerfully to damage them. This seems to me a real philosophical point, of the kind of those which "provoked" the progressive dissolution of metaphysics in the past two centuries; i.e. the discovery of class struggle by Marx, the "discovery" of the domination structure of language by Nietzsche, the global critique of objectification-reification of human existence through metaphysics by Heidegger; and the related "facts": first of all, the revolt of the socalled third world against the central power of the West... These, among others, are the causes of the transition from modernity to the post-modern condition. Not merely "theoretical" discoveries, but social and political changes.

Today, a basic fact of the same kind (fact plus cultural consciousness, of course) is the more and more undeniable negative value of unity. Just consider the energy problem: can we really imagine that economic "progress" will go on by a universalization of the western, or American style of life and consumption? As you know, recently even the Pentagon, which used - at least officially - to share the optimism of the American presidents, has started to worry publicly about the imminence (twenty years or so) of a war for energy, clean water, unpolluted air! This is not at all unrealistic; at this stage of the "development", we don't have many alternative hypotheses. That is why, no matter how great and sincere the western world love for peace and solidarity (remember the enormous popular manifestations against the war last year), we seem to be taken into an "objectivce" mechanism which sooner or later will make o all of us (I mean, of our countries and of ourselves) disciplined soldiers in the infinite war against terrorism initiated by the attack to Iraq.

The fact is that, if put before the necessity of limiting our models of consumption, it is very likely that all of us decide that at the very end we have to defend our "lives" - cars, heating, air conditioning, elevators, etc - and no electorate will support a policy of radical transformation of all that. I may be a little too pessimistic. The only less disastrous alternative seems to be an effort to recover, if it not too late, the differences of cultures. There is not a single model of good human life. It's true that if chinese peasants or amazonian indians want to buy a refrigerator or a car, we cannot simply summon them to remain within their original culture. At this level, the problem seems absolutely unsolvable.

We can nevertheless imagine that from now on, having recognized the disastrous consequences of the "unique progress of mankind", we change our mind and our policies. Not only our mind, of course. As to the policies, they depend on so many objective (in fact, rather subjective: the corporations and so on) factors, that it is very difficult to imagine a change in the close future. Maybe that's why we, here, are an Academy and not an IMF or so. For an Academy as ours, nevertheless, it is important to start to promote a change of mentality. Remember Adorno's sentence by which he wanted to reverse Hegel's doctrine of totality. Not: the all is the truth; but: totality is the false. We can substitute the one for the totality.

Not only as citzens-consumers of the "affluent" world; also as simple workers of this same world we are more or less caught within the mechanism of unity. If chinese peasants or amazonian indians cease to desire a car or a refrigerator, we loose our jobs. Why then should we favour a restoration of different cultures and life styles? Fortunately or unfortunately, we are loosing our jobs also, and above all, because of the unification of the world under the sign of the market. Under the powerful imperative of the reduction of the costs, a large part of the production of the west is being dislocated to the countries of the East and generally there where the human work costs less.

We could go on listing all the negative implications of the current globalization. By the way, sociologists and economists hafe calculated that in the last ten-fifteen years - i.e. when the process of globalization started to be general - poor have become poorer and rich richer; not only on the international level, but also inside the rich industrial world. Optimists object that this is "just" a matter of relative distances: also the poor, in other words, have improved their condition, but they just feel poorer because of the greater difference with the rich-richer. Well, and so what? Is there really an objective natural standard of poorness?

But the perverse effects of unity - as an ideal, as a policy - are not only economic and environmentale (in perspectives like the ones of the Pentagon cited report). They are visible above all, and in the most dramatic way, in the concrete question of peace and war. Today more than ever, war is justified by citing "his umanitarian" motives. For all our antipathy against Carl Schmitt, we have to confess that his doctrine of the dychotomy between friend and enemy is much more acceptable and human than the current idea of the defense of human rights wherever they may be violated, even adopting preemptive action. If considered critically, the idea of making war in name of the human rights etc. is a variation of the perverse notion of unity. There is just one human reason, and as we imagine that it is ours (Gott mit uns) we have the right of intervention everywhere we judge it is violated. Remark how many terms have come to be used at the singular in recent political and media rhetoric: the terrorism, first of all, which unifies every kind of reluctance, although not violent, is listed under this name.

A recent variation of the term is the word "nihilism", largely used by André Glucksmann in a delirious panphlet on "L'occident contre l'Occident" (the title in the italian translation). At the very end, philosophers like Rorty or myself, which sympathize with the philosophical idea that metaphysical foundationalism has to be abandoned in favour of a more liberal and non-authoritarian notion of being and truth might be the object of some preemptive attack: censorship, i.e., or even worse. Fascism has never been nihilist, of course! But this, by now, the most remote worry. Look at what is happening to the civil liberties not only in the US, but in the whole western world, where the war against terrorism is becoming a justification for increased control in all fields of private and public life.

Even more than that, there is the fact that the efforts to secure peace and safety trhrough the use of military force are failing. One could think that this is just because the superpower does not want to use all its weapons. But this is also because it cannot. Not only an atomic strike would initiate a general destruction; but also, the extremisation of the use of the force would make more and more difficult to control the world of the consumers, voters, TV-watchers that is the sole thing which the superpowers want really to control. So the myth of the unity - one single world under a generally recongmìnised power - remains a myth, in the sense that it cannot be realized completely; like many myths, it functions as an ideological justification of war and of various kinds of reduction of freedom inside our societies.

Terrorism, you will say, is nevertheless a rough reality, which cannor be fighted by changing our idea of unity as a supreme value. Sure. But as it certainly not beaten by war, as we see these days, we should agree that politics has to take a different path. Seinlassen was another favourite word in he philosophy of Heidegger I named before. Of course, I don't want to defend his unhappy, unacceptable pro-nazi choice of the Thirties. But the idea that our task is not so much that of producing, making, creating actively something, and much more that of letting things, and human beings, human cultures (worlds) be, seems to me especially appropriate for our current condition. I am not sure in which measure this can be applied to the Iraq situation, for instance in order to call for a general abandonment of the region by occupying troops. At any rate, it seems very difficult to imagine a greater disorder and unsafety for everybody than the one we have under our eyes.

Some twenty (or more) years ago, a young franco-american philosopher, Reiner Schurman, published a very important and suggestive book on Heidegger under the title Le principe d'anarchie (ed.du Seuil). The term of anarchy was there used almost exclusively in the etymological sense - getting rid of the archaic, principles, authorities, etc. Among the new facts that Reiner has not been allowed to see, there is probably also an increasing identification, in philosophy too, between the etymological and the "current" meaning of the word. Emancipation, liberation from inauthenticity, reaching of a possiblity of "good life", depends more and more on the negation of the authority of the one. If marxist intellectuals of the past century took part wih the liberations wars of the third world because they believed that proletarians have the right view of history (no interest to defend, no ideological screen...), the (democratic) intellectuals of today have no longer this ingenuous faith in the the truth of the proletarian Gattungswesen; they simply sympathize with any, or almost any, kind of revolt against the unique order, because they are persuaded that unity is always a mask of the power, and liberty, if it possible, depend on multiplicity. Multiplicity is also, more and more clearly, the sole possibility of survival for the (multiform) human-kind. Even if we agree with St. Augustine that "pax est tranquillitas ordinis" we should never forget that order implies a multiplicity which keeps its internal differences, sometimews also its conflicts, and tries only tyo establish a set of rules in order to avoid violence. This is not exactly the imperial situation in which we have been thrown recently, and from which it becomes more and more difficult to exit.

Gianni Vattimo