Do We Share in Creation?

Alexander Blair Berkeley, California

April 28, 2003

Received 2002 March 9; Revised 2003 April 1; Posted 2003 April 28

This paper analyzes stark differences between the cultures within which the Bible and western Christian theology are written, differences in whether individuals relate organically or generically to form community and whether this relation is understood as determined anthropologically or cosmologically. Classical Greek perennial western philosophy sees human community cosmologically ordered from outside with mixed organic and generic relations. Enlightenment modern philosophy holds to an anthropologically ordered and generically structured community. In the last century and a half in the West a communal philosophy has emerged finding in practice, and advocating, a corporate structure combining organic interaction and distributed, hence interactive, anthropological control. Such an orientation is incompatible with cosmological or generic control. The Christian movement has constructed theologies within each of these three philosophical perspectives. The communally oriented theologians find scripture itself to be a sophisticated and coherent call for building a corporate form of human community–a radical call to abandon the perennial or modern presuppositions of western culture.

CONTENTS

Introduction

I Three social structures, abstractly viewed

II The perennial philosophical movement

III The modern philosophical movement IV The communal philosophical movement

1 Political philosophy: Georg W. F. Hegel, Karl Marx

2 The philosophy of history: Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer

3 Language philosophy: Ludwig Wittgenstein

4 Remodernizing communal political philosophy: Jürgen Habermas

5 Post-critical philosophy of natural science: Charles S. Peirce, Imre Lakatos

Conclusions

INTRODUCTION

The disciples of Jesus of Nazareth followed the practice of their leader in trying to reform the Judaism of their time from below, that is, as a movement of the people in opposition to a ruling bureaucracy misusing the tradition, the “Law,” for unilateral control. The reform sought a return to the orientation of the Torah and Prophets, an orientation increasingly under cultural challenge from surrounding bureaucratic empires since the captivity, particularly Indo-European ones, Persian and Hellenistic. The disciples produced a body of writing, eventually called “New Testament” after Jeremiah 31:31 (itself a “prophecy” of reform), using the Hebrew Bible to further their present reform activity^{1} in the same way those scriptures themselves had at each historical stage used Israel’s thus far developed scriptural tradition to interpret current issues analogously with the tradition’s interpretation of earlier events. This new reform Israelite movement, following the earlier emphasis on Israel as Servant to the nations, and imitating the Exodus returnees to Canaan who brought the existing population of Canaan into inclusion with Israel, worked in the Jewish dispersion at bringing the Mediterranean world into inclusion, unfortunately thus placing itself in isolation from Israel’s existing leadership. When the thus separated Christian movement acquired official status in the Roman Empire in the early fourth century its Hebrew scriptures, without which the New Testament’s advocacy of a reform validated by Israel’s scriptural tradition would be unintelligible, acquired canonical status in the European world under the name “Old Testament.”

14320 allusions, an average of one per 1.87 New Testament verses, are listed in Novum Testamentum Graece, 26th ed. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Biblelstiftung, 1979) Appendix III, “Loci citate vel allegati.”

The Torah and Prophets presuppose the human community to have been delegated responsibility for creating its own culture or civilization, but for doing so in such a way that its individual members can find their individuality precisely in contributing to the ongoing creation of a communal life offering all individuals an active complementary part in that creation. In Indo-European terminology this would be delegated responsibility for creating truth. Such a delegation of responsibility could not even be conceived within the Greco-Roman cultural world, for which truth comes to humanity as fixed, eternal, and unchangeable, with each person responsible for seeking it and carrying it out individually, without innovation, without risk, without mistakes, and independently of the fate of the others.

How is the European world to handle a scripture become canonically authoritative yet calling it to a way of life nearly diametrically opposed to its own commitment scheme, its metaphysics, ontology, and ethics, all built into its language, social institutions, and individual psyches? How can it even understand a call so distinct from the reality it knows and believes in? To the extent it does understand, how can it sidestep the call?

The western world has had eighteen hundred years experience covering up the difference between the two orientations. Is it possible, in a spirit of academic neutrality, to “compare and contrast” Christianity’s non-western canonical scriptures with their European interpretation, or does the word “academic” limit us to western ontology, to describing scripture’s western interpretation, not its intended meaning in its own culture?

This paper attempts to characterize the difference between these two orientations. Since writer and readers are western, the task is attempted first in the western manner, abstractly, and then in non-western style with contemporary historical examples from western secular philosophy since 1800. It will be shown that surprisingly both orientations can be found in that recent philosophy, one in modern philosophy (Descartes, Hume, Kant, Husserl) with its adaptation of western essentialism from classical Greece, and the other in a recent western anti-essentialist philosophy of internal human relations (Hegel, Marx, Troeltsch, Gadamer, Wittgenstein, Searle, Peirce, Lakatos). None of those in the second list claimed to have been influenced by biblical thought, which their position resembles, rather they understood their movement as growing out of limitations in Enlightenment thought. And their orientation has not been broadly understood—Marx, the only one active outside the academy, was misunderstood as essentialist by the subsequent Marxist movement.

Displaying two alternative orientations is, of course, not the same as insisting on one of them. Ironically, of the two the one that does not ask for a “fundamentalist” automatic acceptance is the second one, the one more like the biblical one. Unlike western ontology’s claim for an a priori unchanging truth to be discovered, it asks the interacting community jointly and continuously to construct its interacting structure, its tradition, its truth. It calls for continuing joint construction; it does not discover or prescribe a structure (see below).

I THREE SOCIAL STRUCTURES, ABSTRACTLY VIEWED

What is the relation between the human individual and the human community? Often the two are seen as in tension, a tension to be ameliorated by finding a middle ground, a compromise. But the concept of the individual, the indivisible one, the smallest unit in the analysis of humanity, implies a larger divisible unit to which the individual belongs. Conversely, the concept of community, a gathering of smaller units, implies the smaller units to be brought together. The concepts of individual and community strictly understood are not opposed to each other; each requires the other for its meaning. Individuals belong to communities and communities are made up of individuals.

The difference between the two orientations is rather over two issues: (1) what kind of structure relates the individuals to the community? and (2) who determines this structure?

(1) The kind of structure relating the individuals is normally a mixture in various proportions of two ideal types of structure, which I will call generic and organic. The generic pure ideal type sees the individual participating by sharing the same characteristics, and doing the same things, as all other members of the community. The community is viewed as a species or genus or class, and the individual belonging to it possesses the characteristics that define the genus. The behavior ascribable to the individual by virtue of membership in the community is similar to the behavior of other members. Community is not based on interaction among members, but on holding common characteristics and performing common actions. Each individual has a position in the genus parallel to the other members; its relation is to the genus, not to the other members. Each individual is generic; an analysis of any one individual in the genus can be universalized to apply collectively to all. Being a member of a generic community imposes conformity, by analysis or in fact, to the group’s defining characteristic; the member can vary only in how perfect its conformity is. An example is Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative, “So act that the maxim of your will could always hold at the same time as a principle establishing universal law.”^{2} Another example is from Jean-Paul Sartre: “To choose to be this or that is to affirm at the same time the value of what we choose …. The image is valid for everybody …. In choosing myself, I choose man.”^{3}

2Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956) 30.

In the organic ideal type distinct individuals interact with one another within the physical and cultural world with complementary roles; they are not alike and do not do the same things, as in the complementary roles of voter, legislator, police officer, prisoner, prosecuting attorney, defense attorney, judge, and jury member. Larger communities are usually not purely organic, but have mixed organic and generic relations. Plato’s Republic proposes three social classes in organic, complementary relation with one another, philosopher-rulers, soldiers, and productive workers. Each class makes a different contribution to the whole; the community relies on a useful distinctiveness of some individuals from others rather than similarity with them. But within each class the relation among the members is generic.

(2) The source of the structure is the other issue. I call cosmological a structure, be it generic or organic, imposed from outside the human community. Plato’s Republic is cosmological. Its mixed generic-organic structure is so imposed; it has, or “participates in,” a timeless a priori cosmic order. Individuals, separately or together, cannot modify the class assignments; again they can vary only in how well they perform those assigned to them. Membership in the philosopher, soldier, or worker social class is part of what the philosopher, soldier, or worker is, that is, is intrinsic to the person, is part of the person’s unchanging essence. The member can vary only in how well it conforms to its essence.

I call anthropological a community whose structure is determined, within environmental limits, by voluntary choices of some internal intelligent human agency, be it a single despot, an oligarchy, or the interacting choices of all its members. Voluntary interactive relation with an intelligent agency outside the community is not excluded.

I call corporate the orientation combining organic interaction and distributed anthropological control. Thus the corporate community jointly creates its own organic structure. The contributions each member chooses to make permit and invite complementary contributions from others. Each member acts by choosing from among the possibilities offered by the total context, communal and natural. These choices change the context within which others can act in turn, limiting some possibilities and opening others, but do not dominate the others by removing all choice of contribution. Thus the context develops continuously, created by the members’ interaction. The group has authority and sufficient freedom to create its own structure and goals, to create, within natural limits, its world. As said, influence from outside the community, be it from a God, another community, or a larger including community, is not excluded as long as it also interacts bilaterally with the community, does not impose itself unilaterally.

3Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism (New York: Philosophical Library, 1947) 20f.

The essence of each community member, what the member is, is determined by the community’s source of order. With control by an unchanging cosmic order, all essences are unchangeable, but with changeable anthropological control essences may change. In a corporate community the essence of each member is determined, within natural limits, by the total history of all intentional relational acts among members. The essence of a single member changes continuously as interaction proceeds, creatively determined by the intentional interaction of the member and of the others with whom the member interacts. Although the member’s essence develops, the member contributes creatively to that development along with the others; the member does not loose continuity as the same person.

An intrinsic or internal relation with another is one that affects one’s essence, who one is. A bilaterally intrinsic relation is one that changes the essences of both interactors. In a cosmological orientation one has a monolateral intrinsic relation with unchanging cosmic order and no intrinsic relation with anything else. In a corporately interacting community each member is bilaterally intrinsically or internally related with the other members.

Thus what we are calling “corporate” in this paper is a community operating under distributed control by its members through bilaterally intrinsic intentional relations among the members. This definition of “corporate” is different from the term’s meaning in ordinary language, which is something closer to “organic.” It is creative complementary interaction that makes for membership in the corporate view rather than the prescribed interaction of the cosmological view, or passive similarity of the generic view.

The corporate orientation is fundamental to the Old Testament. It is explicit at the very first opportunity, the account of humanity’s creation. “God created humanity in his image, in the image of God he created it; male and female he created them. … And God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply … and have dominion … over every living thing.”’ This is Gen 1:27f NRSV with “humankind,” the generic collection of human individuals, changed to “humanity,” the same individuals together with their internal relations, taking adam as corporate humanity as Israel understands humanity; and also with “them [text] / him [margin]” changed to “it” to agree as in the Hebrew with its antecedent “humanity,” thus preserving the abrupt shift in the Hebrew from singular it to plural them, from community to the individual members thereof.

For two millennia the West, because it lacked a corporate orientation, has allegorized this passage to the universal individual. But the passage says literally that God created adam, the ongoing human community, in his image. The account continues literally until figurative Gen 2:20 (from another source) “for Adam there was not found a helper as his partner,” where adam, humanity, changes from literal meaning to whole-for-part metonymy for ish, a man, to prepare for the subsequent figurative account of the “first family” as part-for-whole metonymy for humanity. The western term “myth” is too broad, it often includes allegory, which universalizes generically to a different context (A is to C as B is to D),^{4} whereas Old Testament figurative language is usually metonymy, which remains within the same relational context (A is to C as B is to C). The interrelating family is not only analogous to interrelating humanity; it is an interrelated part of it. The passage’s “truth” is not a literal meaning that would be more absurd for them than for us but a figurative meaning according to its culture’s anti-essentialist rhetorical rules. And it is not about the universal unchanging God of Plato or Descartes, but the intrinsically relating God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

As said, our passage Gen 1:27f places the human community, not the individuals in it, in God’s image. Efforts by individuals to “be like gods” (Gen 3:5,19c) constitute rather the fall of humanity. This image of God, attributed to the community, not its separate members, includes four properties, community, complementary diversity, creativity, and authority. In that culture which valued progeny, male and female provided a paradigmatic case where non-similar complementary partners can create what similar partners can not, that is, human creativity belongs to the community, not to separate individuals; individuals contribute to it by interacting creatively with complementary individuals. The passage does not denigrate the individual. Rather it provides each individual the opportunity to interact as a unique person with other unique persons different from itself to receive and to make unique individual contributions, something not possible in a generically ordered community. It withholds a freedom to act without regard for others, but offers the individual the larger freedom, in interaction with others, to make a creative difference in the world. And finally, the community has “dominion,” is delegated by God an interactive share of responsibility for creating order in its world, that is, responsibility for creating a corporate society. This claim for God’s sharing of creativity with humanity is in direct contradiction with European culture’s typical attempted avoidance of responsibility for designing and creating a culture by placing the source of all truth and order in heaven or, since the Enlightenment, in nature, including passive human nature.

Interaction among community members beyond the use of brute individual force requires as vehicle an order or structure with some stability through time. There could be no conveying of information, for instance, without some community language or other symbolic means, and some minimal community commitment to truth-telling. In Platonism each member is born with a pre-existing microcosmic copy of cosmic order, including all concepts and truths, ready to be expressed in words and statements. But corporately ordered communities have the privilege and duty of creating and developing such a stable order by the members through the very mutual interaction which it facilitates.

4Aristotle, De Poetica 21 1457b17.

The amount of order can vary from total compulsion to total disorder, at the first extreme with a blind obedience of slaves, in a middle range with a communally created order sufficient for creative interaction in a corporate community, and at the other extreme with complete autonomy for each self, in which case there would no longer be any community. The nominal form of government does not tell us the kind of community. An absolute monarch could choose to preside in a way that makes a community corporate—the Genesis passage above claims precisely this for God. And a democracy with everyone voting in self interest would quickly become an oligarchy of the few with the most effective sales “spin.”

Ethics in a corporate context differs from ethics in cosmological and generic contexts. All ethical systems make the individual responsible for choosing among possible acts. In the cosmological and generic perspectives this choice is one-dimensional along the scale of degrees of conformity to one’s Form or one’s generic norm. The end of the act and the means are identical, conformity to the norm. But the corporate perspective treats the act as only a means, and asks for a choice based on a resulting end, namely more opportunity for all members to interact creatively with one another. Such an end involves considering all the consequences of the act, not just some single desired result.

Since there are indefinitely many kinds of possible creative group interaction, the end of improving that interaction can be realized in many only vaguely comparable ways. Also, one cannot predict precisely the overall effect of an act once chosen since at each step in the resulting series of successive reactions the reacting individuals can choose how to react. Hence exact comparison of the effectiveness of different approaches to increasing creative interaction is doubly unreachable. No wonder the western world has searched over the millennia for fixed principles that will tell its members what they ought to do!

As said, the corporate community is defined as one that recognizes no specific a priori Forms prohibiting internal relations, but instead has chosen a “meta-Form,” the ideal of continuously interactively creating and maintaining an internal interactive structure giving everyone opportunity to participate creatively. In such a structure one cannot increase the space for others’ interaction without oneself actively entering the field, thus also closing off some of the others’ choices. But the other is thus enabled to interact, learning to accept the limitations of contexts that also offer opportunity for effective creative participation.

Sub-communities and institutions in a community also relate either generically or organically, that is, have a role either parallel or complementary to other sub-communities and institutions. For corporate communities, the relation among sub-communities is creative for the whole community. If some sub-communities cannot contribute, the whole is not corporate. A corporate society is pluralistic; it allows not only individuals but subgroups to have distinctive characteristics, and also expects and accepts creative contribution from each. Corporateness requires creative interaction for all, but not similarity or consensus.

The distinction between generic sharing of similarities and corporate sharing of differences can be illustrated by the institution of marriage. Is it better to choose a spouse with which one has as much as possible in common, or should one base the relationship on the advantage of having useful differences—in background, temperament, or sex? Of course all spousal relationships involve both similarities and differences—even at the biological level complementary partners cannot produce offspring unless they belong to the same species—but the two approaches to choosing a spouse not only involve different analyses of the spousal relation, they lead to different kinds of spousal relation.

Thus the generic and corporate orientations differ at two levels, the level of analysis— whether generic or corporate roles for the individual are considered more fundamental in analyzing the group’s operation, and the level of practice—whether similar parallel action or dissimilar complementary interaction within the group is predominant. But ideas lead as well as describe. Emphases on generic or corporate analyses lead to cultures respectively with more generically or corporately structured activity. Indeed, within the corporate orientation a sharp distinction between theoretical and practical levels cannot be maintained.

There is always some mixture of generic and corporate relations. We will normally use the terms corporate and generic to refer not to ideal types but to the dominant orientation, allowing a subordinate role for the contrary perspective. For example we call generic a view allowing linguistic interaction among individuals but treating that as subordinate to a prior generic competence needed by the interactors (as with linguistic competence in Chomsky, below); and we call corporate a view recognizing the generic analysis of reality implicit in common nouns but taking that as subordinate to a corporate overall purpose for language (as with language games in Wittgenstein, below).

Communities persist through time, and present members are related to past and future members as well as current ones—there is a diachronic dimension to membership as well as a synchronic one. A corporate community operates within a trilateral interaction among its inherited past structures, current circumstances, and decisions for the future. In contrast, Enlightenment critical history, that is, objective history by a neutral historian,^{5} describes past events by static analogy with present events, a generic relation, and disallows any complementary interaction between past and present. But a history finding meaning in the community’s past as a source for dealing with that community’s present accepts a corporate, interactive relation between past and present. This issue is treated below in a section on philosophy of history.

These issues spill over into epistemology, the study of how we know. In the generic view those knowing a thing simply have the same knowledge, whereas in the corporate view “knowing” includes interacting with others creatively to produce a corporately realizable result, and does not require the cooperating parties to know the same thing theoretically or apply the same principles practically. For example, my cat and I know each other, we interact creatively even though we do not belong to the same species and do not speak, think, or act in the same way. We enjoy a corporate intersubjectivity but not a generic intersubjectivity. My cat and I know something about each other, but this is only a contributing small part of knowing each other. Knowing as interacting is basically a doing (practical reason), with knowing about (theoretical reason) an abstraction useful in the doing.^{6} An example of corporate knowing is Gen 4:1 “Now the man knew his wife Eve, and she conceived and bore Cain.” Modern philosophers separate theoretical and practical reason, whereas the corporate view treats the first as a truncation of the second.

In addition to the generic and corporate orientations, both involving the individual and the community, two additional anthropological orientations are also possible, one striving to merge the individual so completely with the community that any individual identity is lost in the “all,” as in certain mysticisms, and the other taking the single human being alone without reference to any community. This second view will be considered here, and I call it the self-as-such orientation. An example of it is the existentialism of Søren Kierkegaard and his followers. Within the self-as-such orientation the spousal dilemma spoken of earlier is best resolved by remaining single, as Kierkegaard himself did, dramatizing his existentialist orientation by breaking his engagement to Regina Olsen.

Of the three orientations, generic, corporate, and self-as-such, each two share something in common against the third. The self-as-such and generic views agree in seeing the person’s individuality as intrinsic to the person, while the corporate view finds individuality in the person’s interactions, which need a social context provided by a group. The self-as-such and corporate views agree in protecting the uniqueness of each person by refusing the straight-jacket of a generic collectivity, whereas the generic view is concerned with the similarities between the individual and others. The generic and corporate orientations agree in being ways of understanding the relation between the individual and the community, while the self-as-such view treats the person apart from any community.

5As for example in section 10.1, middle third of David Hume’s An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), and Adolf von Harnack, The History of Dogma (New York: Dover, 1961) 1.vii.

6Some sympathetic with the communal perspective refuse this extension of meaning, e.g. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979) 356. Yet Rorty, and Kant (below), concede knowing is a relation of the object to the subject.

The three orientations impose different limitations. On the self-as-such view influencing one’s neighbors is harassment and is forbidden. The generic view does allow one (perhaps somewhat inconsistently) to influence others, but only by setting an example for them to imitate. On the corporate view one influences others also by interacting with them in complementary relations going beyond imitation, such as a parent protecting a young child, or an employee refusing a work assignment from an employer. In such relations the two parties offer different contributions, hence the relations are by definition non-symmetrical. With respect to each contribution the relation may be “hierarchical” in the sense that the one making the contribution ranks higher with respect to that contribution, as for example with a presider or an expert. But the whole relation only becomes unilaterally hierarchical if overriding value is placed on one of the several complementary contributions, and this is explicitly rejected by the corporate view which depends on each member taking the particular contributions of the others into consideration. A teacher’s active teaching is only possible if the students respond with active learning.

Another example illustrating the three orientations: for the existentialist, education is the provision of a protected environment where the young can learn to express themselves without being accountable to the constraints of community. On the generic view education is the process by which a culture reproduces copies of its more erudite, skillful, or insightful members. On the corporate view education is corporate practice in creative application of the corporate cultural tradition to contemporary issues.

The self-as-such orientation has some difficulty maintaining its distinction from the generic one in practice, since a public philosophical insistence on one person’s freedom from social constraints has the force of an invitation to others to imitate, and appropriation by imitation leads to generic relations. Kierkegaard himself tried unsuccessfully to dodge the paradoxical urging of others not to allow themselves to be urged by presenting his position neutrally under the pseudonym Johannes Climacus. Self-as-such oriented theologians treat the Old Testament and many other theological issues similarly with generically oriented ones.

As said earlier, the term “corporate” as used in this study names a concept substantially missing in western culture until recently, and so will be treated here more extensively than the other more familiar ones. In ordinary English the term is widely used in the sense of “organic,” but here it will be used strictly to characterize a community offering each member a personal original intentional complementary part in the ongoing creation of its culture.

The term “individual” is used in this study to mean member of any community, be it generic or corporate. In ordinary English, “individual” is widely used to imply the generic view, being contrasted with “corporate” used for the organic view, and is also used to imply the self-as-such view rather than the more precise terms “single one” or “self.”^{7} But in this study “individual” is not used in these ways, because putting it in contrast with “corporate” ignores the importance of the individual member’s innovative contribution to communal creativity in the corporate view, as compared to merely being counted as one of a host of similar individuals in the generic view. The individual has more significance in the corporate view than in the generic view. The contrasting terms to “corporate” will be “generic,” or “merely organic,” or “cosmological,” or “self-as-such,” not “individual.”

II THE PERENNIAL PHILOSOPHICAL MOVEMENT

The three abstract orientations defined above, cosmological, generic, and corporate, have been incarnated in the West at various times over the last two millennia in three historical movements, which I will call the perennial, the modern, and the communal.

The European philosophical system inherited from classical Greece, the perennial philosophy, is a cosmological orientation. In its most characteristic form, Platonism, there is a cosmic order consisting of perfect, non-material, unchangeable Forms, which provide the structure for all imperfect, material, changeable objects, including human beings. Physical circles drawn by pencil, lopsided, and capable of being erased, are only imperfect reflections of the perfectly circular and un-erasable Form of Circularity. Human beings are born knowing circles since the individual human mind is a microcosm reflecting the order or structure of the cosmos. Aristotle varies only slightly in claiming rather that one learns the forms by seeing examples, like spreading ripples that exhibit the form of circularity.

The thoroughly hellenized Alexandrian Jewish philosopher Philo interpreted the Torah narratives as allegorical statements of the truths of Greek philosophy, for example that in Genesis 18 “man” is mind, “woman” is sense perception, and “virgin” is virtue. Abraham loved wisdom and rejected sense perception, and is never said to “know Sarah.” After “it had ceased to be with Sarah after the manner of women” God, who relates only with virtue, visited Sarah, with result the virgin birth of Isaac, who is wisdom from virtue rather than from the senses (De cherubim 40-130). Greek “virginity” as non-relational purity was, of course, foreign to biblical culture which gave highest value to human creative complementary relations. Origen, an equally middle-Platonic Alexandrian, used Philo’s allegorical interpretation of scripture as base for the first comprehensive Christian systematic theology. It was refined in neo-Platonic terms by Augustine, mixed with Aristotelianism by Aquinas, restored to its neo-Platonic purity by Luther, and is still basic in Barth, Rahner, Tillich, and many other twentieth century theologians. Space does not permit more than this quite skeletal sketch of a well-known movement.

7E.g. the English translation of Kierkegaard’s “‘The Individual’: Two ‘Notes’ Concerning My Work as an Author,” in The Point of View for my Work as an Author (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), in which hiin Enkelte, “single one,” is mistranslated as “individual.”

The medieval lord was born into responsibility for managing the well-being of his estate as an organic community, with his complement, the serf, born into working the land for the same purpose. But by the Renaissance the land-holder was responsible only for individual success; he had reduced himself from responsible local sovereign to private owner. A new class of entrepreneurs had arisen, committed to acting independently of both cosmic order and traditional organic structure, and this required formalizing a new commitment system that was anthropological, not cosmological, and generic, not organic.

III THE MODERN PHILOSOPHICAL MOVEMENT

I call modern this anthropologically oriented generic philosophy of the Enlightenment first formalized by Descartes in 1637 and still dominant at present. It understands knowledge fundamentally as a property of the individual, as in the rationalism of Descartes, the empiricism of Hobbes and Hume, the transcendentalism of Kant, the existentialism of Kierkegaard, and the empiricism and positivism of the twentieth century.

Resistance to the new perspective by the church, institutionally committed to the perennial perspective, resulted in separation of philosophy from theology at the Enlightenment. Philosophy continued as abstract representation of the basic social commitments of an increasingly secular European culture, while theology did the same but now only for the increasingly disestablished church, which maintained overall loyalty to the perennial perspective until the appearance in the nineteenth century of modern theology with Schleiermacher and communal theology with Möhler.

The new epistemology of René Descartes in his Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sciences (1637) and his Meditations on the First Philosophy in which the Existence of God, and the Real Distinction of Mind and Body, are Demonstrated (1641) is usually taken as the beginning of the modern period in philosophy. Descartes begins his first Meditation with the sentence “Several years have now elapsed since I first became aware that I had accepted, even from my youth, many false opinions for true, and that consequently what I afterwards based on such principles was highly doubtful; and from that time I was convinced of the necessity of undertaking once in my life to rid myself of all the opinions I had adopted, and of commencing anew the work of building from the foundation, if I desired to establish a firm and abiding superstructure in the sciences.” In fact Descartes called in question all opinion, all he has “received either from or through the senses,”^{8} that is, learned directly from the senses or received through them from tradition, and replaced this knowledge, or rather replaced the two methods of observation and dependence on tradition used to obtain it, with a new method, the method of establishing one fact by rational introspection and then giving an “exact demonstration … similar to that in use among the geometers”^{9} of the other principles of his system. The one fact was cogito, “I think,” and key principles deduced from it were the existence of the self, the distinction of mind from body, the immortality of the soul, and the existence of God. This position, technically called rationalism, asserts that human reason in the individual acting alone is sufficient without reference to sense data, the accumulated cultural tradition, or revelation. It generalizes the method used since Euclid in geometry, Descartes’ specialty. Descartes, avoiding church censorship with scholastic philosophical terms and honorary inclusion of a merely theoretically existing God, managed to publish a philosophical system not based on cosmological control or organic relations. For this he is recognized as inaugurator of Enlightenment philosophy.

Contemporaneous and subsequent empiricists, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume, working in a less censored environment, rejected such a rationalist source for knowledge and claimed instead that all knowledge was based on experience through the senses. Hobbes wrote “For there is no conception in a mans mind, which hath not first, totally, or by parts, been begotten upon the organs of Sense,”^{10} and this view, stated with increasing sophistication, was basic for the other three empiricists.

Both rationalists and empiricists, despite their differences, were primarily interested in epistemological method, and the epistemologies of both were based on first-person mental processes in the individual. Both positions skirted solipsism. Descartes’ rather formal existence of God was the only one of his principles derived from the cogito that moved beyond the first-person. For Berkeley the existence of God was his sole defense against solipsism. Hume’s system did not include the existence of God. Thus the rationalists and empiricists broke with the medieval cosmological mixed organic-generic perspective and took a strong anthropological stand ambiguously situated between the self-as-such and generic perspectives, generally assuming it to conform to the latter rather than the former.

8René Descartes, Meditations, in The Rationalists (New York: Doubleday, 1960), Meditation I, p.

112, 113.

9Meditations, “Synopsis of the Six Following Meditations,” p. 108.

10Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London: Andrew Crooke, 1651) 1.1 (p. 3)

Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781-87) combined the empiricist observation of sense data with a rationalist disposition to interpret them transcendentally, that is, by means of a pre-existing structure of human cognition with two parts, a sensibility organizing individual sense intuitions within two sensory modes of intuition, space and time, and an understanding synthesizing the intuited representations into judgments within the forms provided by twelve abstract categories, such as “a has the property b” and “a causes b.” The concepts “having a property” and “causing” are in the understanding, not in the external object. Judgments are called synthetic a priori, that is, true neither logically nor empirically but in the sense of just being the inborn way the generic human individual senses and cognizes objects. What is known is not the external object-in-itself but what appears after its input to the senses has been processed transcendentally by the mind, the phenomenal object. The phenomenal object is “only the relation of the object to the subject, and not that which is internal to the object in itself.”^{11} Although we do not know the object in itself we do know the relation with it—the object is not an illusion. Whereas Descartes still claimed an epistemological method reaching a truth independent of the method, Kant offers a knowledge consisting of empirical data molded by the sensory modes and fitted into blank forms of judgment from the understanding’s categories. The boundary between ontology, the study of reality, and epistemology, the study of knowing, begins to dissolve. Knowing is not objective but a relation between subject and object.

The synthesizing of representations into the concept of the object, the transcendental unity of apperception, requires the representations to be unified in one consciousness, and so also represents the identity through time of the individual consciousness. The thus unified subject knows generically; different individuals can know the same things not by consultation but separately through their identical transcendental structures. Kant is generic.

Kant limits cognition to judgments based on sensation, rejecting dialectical judgments, those made independently of sense representations, as illusion. The rejection of dialectical judgments outlaws metaphysics and the cosmological perspective. Three traditional areas of dialectical judgment, morality, the existence of God, and immortality of the soul, survive in Kant as practical choices of the will rather than theoretical judgments. By contrast, in the communal orientation, which does not separate theoretical and practical reason, such a demotion is neither possible nor needed.

11Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) B67.

In Critique of Practical Reason^{12} (1788) Kant looks for a purely rational basis for practical reason and finds it by insisting on a generic, universal principle equally applicable to everyone. Kant says practical principles “are subjective, or maxims, when the condition is regarded by the subject as valid only for his own will. They are objective, or practical laws, when the condition is recognized as objective, i.e. as valid for the will of every rational being” (§1, p. 17). It must apply equally to everyone: “the rule is objectively and universally valid only when it holds without any contingent subjective conditions which differentiate one rational being from another.” (§1, p. 19) The resulting categorical imperative “So act that the maxim of your will could always hold at the same time as a principle establishing universal law” (§7, p. 30) is given the same shaping function in practical reason, reason used in ethics or value judgments, as the categories have in theoretical or discursive reason. Kant is looking for ethical rules for the community, but it is a generic community, needing generic rules. There is no provision for complementary rules for complementary contributors in a corporate relation, nor provision for an interactive method of establishing rules when any one of several alternative rules might resolve the same dysfunctional problem.

A significant partial move away from the modern movement is the existentialism of Søren Kierkegaard. In his Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846),^{13} the most systematic account of his anti-systematic (“unscientific”) program, he condemns all philosophical system, be it cosmological, generic, or corporate, finding it useless for the passionate, inwardly turned existing self. Against cosmological system: “Speculative philosophy is objective, and objectively there is no truth for existing individuals, but only approximations; for the existing individual is precluded from becoming altogether objective by the fact that he exists” (p. 201). Against generic system: “Only in subjectivity is there decisiveness, to seek objectivity is to be in error” (p. 181). “The scribbling modern philosophy holds passion in contempt; and yet passion is the culmination of existence for an existing individual” (p. 176). Against corporate system: spirit, passion, decisiveness, truth are private, first person, cannot be shared between human beings: “A direct relationship between one spiritual being and another, with respect to the essential truth, is unthinkable. If such a relationship is assumed, it means that one of the parties has ceased to be spirit” (p. 221). “The knower is essentially integer [whole, complete], and … with respect to the knowledge of the eternal truth he is confronted with no other difficulty than the circumstance that he exists, which … means that existing, the process of transformation to inwardness in and by existing, is the truth” (p. 184). Truth belongs ultimately only to the self as “existing,” as making independent choices, as passionate rather than passive.

12Kant, Critique of Practical Reason (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956).

13Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 1941).

Existentialism accomplished the unimaginable, the rejection of western theoretical reason, the bulwark of both the cosmological and generic movements. Attacking theoretical reason opened the potential for the communal perspective’s reduction of theoretical reason to merely a useful but truncated form of practical reason. After the First World War existentialism was the jumping off point in passing from the modern perspective toward, but not reaching, the communal perspective in the early position of Martin Heidegger treated below.

In conclusion, we have found a historical movement, the modern movement, beginning with Descartes’ cogito, a movement (a) formally epistemological, hence anthropological, (b) with a first-person epistemology, and (c) lying along a range of positions from a universalizing and therefore generic pole (Kant) to a self-as-such pole (Kierkegaard), with Descartes and Hume lying at undefined points between the generic and self-as-such poles.

The modern perspective was the basis for nineteenth-century Modern Theology, from Friedrich Schleiermacher through Adolf von Harnack, and for modern criticalhistorical study of scripture, for example with Rudolf Bultmann, Norman Perrin, and Norman Gottwald. After 1922 Bultmann, under the influence of early Barth and early Heidegger, moved to an existentialist perspective, transforming Luther’s generic Wordof-God spoken to the individual into an existentialist Word-of-God spoken to the existing self, the self resolved “to be a human being, a person who accepts responsibility for his own Being,” Kerygma and Myth p.194, a word which “meets each man in his own little history,” New Testament Theology 1.25, a word to be abstracted from any historical, mythological, psychological, or scientific vehicle, Jesus Christ and Mythology.^{14}

IV THE COMMUNAL PHILOSOPHICAL MOVEMENT

The freeing of philosophy from cosmological control at the Enlightenment suggested a similar romantic freeing from non-creative generic similarity, and a vast increase in historical knowledge in the nineteenth century aroused a new understanding of the relation with the past. These two influences gradually led to a developing communal historical movement with a corporate anthropological basis in confrontation with the continuing modern movement with its generic anthropological basis, as outlined at the start of section II. This movement is presented here in four overlapping and more or less successful manifestations, political philosophy in Hegel and Marx, philosophy of history in Gadamer’s extension of Heidegger, language philosophy in Wittgenstein and Searle, and philosophy of natural science in C. S. Peirce and Lakatos. Hegel is initiator of the communal perspective, Gadamer and Wittgenstein represent it most adequately.

14Rudolf Bultmann, Kerygma and Myth (London: S.P.C.K, 1953, Theology of the New Testament (New York: Scribners, 1951–55), Jesus Christ and Mythology (New York: Schribners, 1958).

While the term “modern” is standard for the generic movement beginning with Descartes, no standard term has emerged for the radically differing corporate perspective emerging in the West since Hegel. Our term “communal” does not imply that the communal movement prefers community over individual. As with the corporate perspective in any historical period, the communal movement provides for creative contributions to the community by each individual, thus giving each individual a creative potential it does not have in the modern perspective, and in a social arena it does not have in existentialism.

1 Political philosophy: Georg W. F. Hegel and Karl Marx

Political philosophy contained the seeds of a corporate perspective even during its modern phase. In Leviathan (1651) Thomas Hobbes presented an early version of the social contract theory later to appear in Locke and Rousseau. As a modern thinker Hobbes had a problem with the obviously corporate nature of justice. “Justice, and Injustice are none of the Faculties neither of the Body, nor Mind. If they were, they might be in a man that were alone in the world, as well as his Senses, and Passions. They are Qualities, that relate to men in Society, not in Solitude.”^{15} As an empiricist, Hobbes wished to base this practice of corporate society somehow on an empirical characteristic of the self, the “man that were alone in the world.” He did so by claiming that selfpreservation is an empirical characteristic of the self, then treating this characteristic somewhat inconsistently as a right, then arguing that since the unbridled use of this right may be counter-productive, the same empirical laws of nature also permit “that a man be willing, when others are so too, as farre-forth, as for Peace, and defence of himselfe he shall think it necessary, to lay down this right to all things; and be contented with so much liberty against other men, as he would allow other men against himselfe.”^{16} Such a covenant is sufficient to define justice: “For where no covenant hath preceded, there hath no Right been transferred, and every man has right to every thing; and consequently, no action can be Unjust. But when a Covenant is made, then to break it is Unjust.”^{17} Thus social justice is given its origin in the voluntary contracting by selves among themselves to redistribute and limit the natural rights they already possessed singly, (logically) prior to membership in society, in exchange for other advantages. For Hobbes, humanity is not intrinsically social; rather the existing interacting community is created by agreement among intrinsically independent selves. The social contract creates the possibility of social justice, but the generic rights of selves are more fundamental.

15Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan 1.13 (p. 63).

16Leviathan 1.14 (pp. 64f).

17Leviathan 1.15 (p. 71).

This new possibility is given further expression in John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (1689-1690) and in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Social Contract (1762). Rousseau puts it this way: “In place of the individual person of each contracting party, this act of association creates an artificial and collective body, … and by this same act that body acquires its unity, its common ego, its life and its will. The public person thus formed by the union of all other persons … is now known as the … body politic.”^{18} This body politic then subjects its members to a radical socialization, as Rousseau tells us fulsomely. “The passing from the state of nature to the civil society produces a remarkable change in man; it puts justice as a rule of conduct in the place of instinct, and gives his actions the moral quality they previously lacked. It is only then, when the voice of duty has taken the place of physical impulse and right that of desire, that man, who has hitherto thought only of himself, finds himself compelled to act on other principles, and to consult his reason rather than study his inclinations …. His faculties are so exercised and developed, his mind is so enlarged, his sentiments so ennobled, and his whole spirit so elevated that … he should constantly bless the happy hour that lifted him for ever from the state of nature and from a narrow, stupid animal made a creature of intelligence and a man.”^{19}

While Rousseau formally maintains the modern position that justice in a community originates in separate natural rights of its members, passages such as these on the unity, ego, life, and will of the body politic begin to have a communal ring. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel kept the body politic and left out the prior natural rights of the individual.

German romanticism, a reaction to Kant’s finalization of the Enlightenment generic anthropological perspective, looked beyond the first-person for a spiritual source for the civilization noticed by Hobbes and Rousseau. Hegel’s philosophical objectivization of German romanticism, seminally presented in his Phenomenology of Spirit^{20} (1807), is as ideal as Platonism, but differs radically from it in replacing the fixed a priori Forms with equally ideal but dialectically interacting principles or concepts (Begriffe). The logic of dialectically interacting concepts is not the abstract, timeless logic of Euclid, Aristotle, and Frege, but a Hegelian Logos, a living, spirited, interactively developing structure of the universe. Concepts interact with one another, and the meaning of any concept necessarily leads to others. For example, the most abstract concept, being, only has meaning in contrast with its negative, nothing, and the two interact intrinsically or internally with each other to produce becoming, a third concept including the other two. “The truth of Being and of Nothing is accordingly the unity of the two: and this unity is Becoming. … The whole progress of philosophizing … merely renders explicit what is implicit in a [concept].”^{21}

18Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Social Contract 1.6 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), p. 61.

19Social Contract 1.8, p. 64f.

20Georg W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977). Section references in the treatment of Hegel are to this edition.

The individual human being develops into a person through such a dialectical confrontation with the world and especially with other persons, a confrontation producing consciousness of others, and consciousness of self as being in free intentional creative interaction with free but related others (SelbstbewuSStsein). Consciousness of self “has its own self-certainty in the other free self-consciousness, and possesses its truth precisely in that ‘other”’ (§349). “The deed … is the actual self” (§464). “The relationship of husband and wife is …. one in which one consciousness immediately recognizes itself in another. … [But] this relationship … has its actual existence not in itself but in the child—an ‘other,’ in whose coming into existence is the relationship” (§456). The dialectical relation of concepts is intrinsically related to the social relations in the material world.

Hegel’s dialectic absorbs the earlier concept of social contract in a way that effectively reverses its argument; the individual autonomy necessary to enter a social contract is a result of acculturation into a creatively interacting society, not a prerequisite. Freedom to interact comes not from isolation but from belonging to a social context and thus gaining both opportunity and competence to interact creatively within it: “Absolute freedom has thus removed the antithesis between the universal and the individual will” (§595).

All concepts, like being, nothing, and becoming, or husband, wife, and child, are more “true” together in dialectical interaction than any one of them is alone. Their interaction gives them meaning, becomes part of their essence. In interaction they converge toward complete (absolut) truth, a reconciliation not into a fixed perfection but toward an active fully internally relating whole. The human individual converges toward internally interacting member of the community, as said. The community has converged from the dawn of culture through classical Greece and Rome, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment as far as the sophisticated interaction it has reached in the Prussian state and German romantic high culture of 1807. World religious development culminates in the Christian religion with its interacting Trinity, in which the Father reaches consciousness as free creator through dialectical relation with the Son: “The first is the Absolute Being, Spirit that is in and for itself …. But in the actualization of its [concept] … it passes over into being-for-another, its self-identity becomes an actual, self-sacrificing absolute Being …. the third moment is the return of [the two] into their original simplicity …. the externalization of this … Spirit … makes itself a participant in the self-consciousness of the believer” (§§ 532f). Such a God is a creatively interacting part of the dialectical system, unlike the impassive Platonic cosmic order. This dialectical relation also continuously resolves itself harmoniously, as part of the convergence of all toward perfect internal relation. History is not a collection of facts, but a development of human community and corresponding continuing unfolding of communal meaning.

21Hegel, Logic (part 1 of Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences) (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975) p.

128f.

As said, in Hegel the internally relating abstract concepts and human conceiving and acting out of them are the same. Whereas Platonism distinguishes ideal unchangeable Forms from the changing world, Hegel identifies the changing concepts and the changing social and historical world, thus eliminating the “Platonic Fall,” the gap between the imperfect world and the Platonic Forms or their substitutes, the neo-Platonic mindof-God, or the scriptures allegorized as Indo-European “law of the Medes and Persians which cannot be revoked” (Daniel 6:8). In Hegel “who we really are” is just “who we are,” something continually changing as we interact. Hegel is close to the corporate orientation.

Whereas Kant sees individual autonomy manifested in the individual’s ability to unify representations; Hegel sees it actually created through interaction with the corporate “spirit” of a public, social, political, cultural, and historical world. With Kant two persons know the same thing because they have the same cognitive ability; with Hegel they know each other through intrinsic interactive relation.

But there is a flaw. One can conceive of perfect internal ongoing interaction of persons with free will—it is the ideal corporate orientation we defined at the beginning of the paper as an ideal type—but it is another thing to claim inevitable convergence toward it, amounting to a shadow meta-Platonic Form intruding on the human responsibility claimed by the corporate orientation. Scripture also claims humanity’s tendency to use its freedom in a dysfunctional way, rather than to be subject to a built-in overall inevitable progress

Hegel’s system is conceived in ideal, cultural, spiritual terms, as his Germanromantic project was to explicate the human individual as a spiritual (that is, living, thinking, deciding, freely participating) person. In spite of its cumbersome cosmological dress and its inevitable convergence toward perfection Hegel has, if imperfectly, formulated the concept of bilaterally intrinsic relation, the key to the communal orientation. The next partial step is for someone to produce an anthropologically located analog, as we find Marx doing below.

Hegel is critiqued from all sides. The obliqueness of analyzing bilaterally internal interaction in a human community as a formally identical interaction among ideal concepts allows some cosmologically oriented scholars to claim Hegel as their own. Paul Tillich, for example,^{22} speaks of “the classical tradition from Parmenides to Hegel,” treating Hegel’s inevitable convergence as convergence to truth in an end-of-history fulfillment for a Platonized Christianity.

Kierkegaard’s self-as-such critique of Hegel rejects both the cosmological and communal features, vehemently rejecting the synthesis of all spirit into a dialectically interacting universal spirit, and affirming instead the self, the “single one,” as the true and only locus of spirit: “spirit is inwardness, inwardness is subjectivity, subjectivity is essentially passion, and in its maximum an infinite, personal, passionate interest in one’s eternal happiness.”^{23}

Karl Marx retains Hegel’s dialectical convergence of history toward corporate relations in community, but does not view it through ideal world spirit. He does not, as often said, “invert” Hegel but rather looks at Hegel’s unified abstract-worldly system from the worldly rather than the abstract side. He seizes on Hegelian dialectic as basis for understanding the ongoing multiple cross influences in the concrete political and social world with which he was actively engaged as a reformer. In The German Ideology (1845)^{24} Marx says: “This conception of history depends on our ability to expound the real process of production, … and to comprehend the form of intercourse … created by this mode of production, … to show it in its action as State, to explain all the different theoretical products and forms of consciousness, religion, philosophy, ethics, etc., … by which means … the whole thing can be depicted in its totality (and therefore, too, the reciprocal action of these various sides on one another)” (p. 128). In this characteristic quotation as in so many others Marx’s mention of influence in one direction, from production to social intercourse, is followed by reminder not to forget the Hegelian-derived dialectical influence in both directions he always assumes. He condemns Ludwig Feuerbach’s modern empiricism: “The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances … forgets that it is men who change circumstances.”^{25}

Thus Hegel’s ideal world spirit loses its preeminent place as window through which the development is viewed; it is replaced by detailed consideration of material historical events. Marx says “the ‘liberation’ of ‘man’ is not advanced a single step by reducing philosophy, theology, substance and all the trash to ‘self-consciousness’ …. it is only possible to achieve real liberation in the real world and by employing real means, … slavery cannot be abolished without the steam engine and the mule and spinning-jenny, serfdom cannot be abolished without improved agriculture” (p. 133). This “liberation,” as we will see momentarily, is freedom to interact creatively, not freedom from all restraint as idolized in the twentieth century West. Marx keeps all Hegel’s interacting moments, ideational and material, but calls them all “material” in the sense of being moments of historical action in the world. Human concepts, decisions, and social structures are as material as the other moments, and just as much in two-way interaction with them.

22Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology I (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951) 72.

23Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript 33.

24Karl Marx, The German Ideology, Part I, in Robert Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader, (New York: Norton, 1972).

25Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach” 3, in Karl Marx: Frederick Engels: Collected Works, (London:

Lawrence & Wishart, 1976) 5.3-5.

In an internally related world, in which the essence of each thing includes its relations with other things, there is no way to delineate a set of irreducible individual elements of which the world is made up, or even ultimately to distinguish “things” from “relations.” Areas of experience are staked out by us conceptually as “things” to assist in understanding our world, and as we understand better we move and partially erase the boundaries between them, and conceive of systems of things as “relations” or more inclusive “things.” Marx says for example “production is … at the same time consumption, and consumption is at the same time production.”^{26} Production and consumption can be conceived separately, but are intrinsically bound with each other, and are also part of a larger unit, “relations of production,” including also distribution, exchange, and division of labor. In such a world things in intrinsic relation have no sharp boundaries separating them and thus enjoy some kind of identity, while at the same time they can only interact with one another if there is some kind of difference.

Such interrelatedness exists not only between objects but also between subject and object. Knowing something is being internally related with it. “The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real premises …. They are the real individuals, their activity and the material [i.e. social] conditions under which they live …. These premises can thus be verified in a purely empirical way” (p. 113)— not empirical as in Hume but as in Hegel, interacting with them, sharing a world with them, taking account of them in relations. Knowing is interacting, with knowing-about being a useful abstraction.

Marx says “The human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations.”^{27} “Only in community with others has each individual the means of cultivating his gifts in all directions; only in the community, therefore, is personal freedom possible” (p. 161). Thus a person intrinsically needs to be purposively active in relations with others, to participate in the community’s creativity; that is, to relate to it not only organically, but corporately. This accords with the communal perspective.

26Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, “Introduction,” (Chicago, 1904) 278.

27Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach” 6.

But Marx further expects the persistent striving of individuals to fulfill their need for creative interaction, and the inevitable acceptance of this need by others, to bring about a factual convergence of history away from one-sided domination toward ever more creative interaction. This latter is Marx’s anthropological specification of Hegel’s inevitably successful striving of concepts for perfect dialectical reconciliation.

Since production is the chief way individuals relate with the community, it is the chief activity through which they may be able to find creative fulfillment as part of society. “This mode of production …. is … a definite form of expressing their life …. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce” (p. 114). Again, “coincide” is to be read compatibly with bilaterally internal interaction. But at the tribal, feudal, and industrial stages in history the conditions of production limit fulfillment of the human need for creative relations, and so are eventually overthrown. Using the term “self-activity” for unalienated, i.e. creative activity, Marx says “These various conditions, which appear first as conditions of self-activity, later as fetters upon it, form in the whole evolution of history a coherent series of forms of intercourse, the coherence of which consists in this: in the place of an earlier form of intercourse, which has become a fetter, a new one is put, corresponding to the more developed productive forces and, hence, to the advanced mode of the self-activity of individuals—a form which in its turn becomes a fetter and is then replaced by another” (p. 158f). The alienating fetter presently limiting individual creative participation in society is the class system based on a division of labor in which the class of workers, “which was determined by their common interests over against a third party, was always a community to which these individuals belonged only as average individuals, … a relationship in which they participated not as individuals but as members of a class” (p. 161). “Average” in our terminology means generic membership in the class of workers; the “fetter” is the dominating merely organic relation between generic worker and owner classes—precisely the ideal in Plato’s Republic.

In the capitalist period this alienation emerges thus: the worker sells non-creative productive power to the owner, carrying out tasks specified by the owner with machines, raw materials, and finished product the private property of the owner. The worker does not interact creatively with the owner or the ultimate consumer; he is limited to working only for his own individual subsistence in parallel with other workers. The owner is not interested in the worker or the consumer, but only in selling the finished product at a profit to add to his own subsistence. The consumer is often manipulated into buying the product for reasons not related to its real use, thus the market hides, sometimes destroys, the use value of the product. The resulting alienation of worker, owner, and consumer from one another has eliminated the creative aspect of interaction for all three. Marx says “The division of labour implies the contradiction between the interest of the separate individual … and the communal interest of all individuals who have intercourse with one another. … As long as a cleavage exists between the particular and the common interest … man’s own deed becomes an alien power opposed to him, which enslaves him instead of being controlled by him” (p. 124). The complaint is not over material deprivation of the worker, the “particular interest,” as it would be in the competitive twentieth century, but over not being taken seriously as potential creative contributor to the “common interest.”

This alienation infects every other area of society as well. “The State is the form in which the individuals of a ruling class assert their common interests” (p. 151). “Religion, family, state, law, morality, science, art, etc., are only particular modes of production, and fall under its general law,”^{28} that is, share in the alienating organic but not corporate treatment of non-elites by the elites in each of these social structures.

Marx says “This contradiction between the productive forces and the form of intercourse, which, as we saw has occurred several times in past history, … necessarily on each occasion burst out in a revolution” (p. 161). This series of revolutions leads inevitably, according to Marx, toward a corporate, non-alienated society: “With the community of revolutionary proletarians, on the other hand, who take their conditions of existence and those of all members of society under their control, it is just the reverse; it is as individuals that the individuals participate in it” (p. 161f). In our terminology “participation as individuals” is corporate participation that takes the individual’s creative contribution seriously. As noted, for Marx inevitable historical convergence toward non-alienated community grows out of humanity’s intrinsic striving for corporate relations.

Marx’s work was and still is historically influential in the emergence of the communal perspective, but from the communal point of view it is limited by its retention of Hegel’s inevitable convergence toward truth. The subsequent Marxist political movement has had as limited success in eliminating the alienation it condemns as have other forms of political life. Elimination of the private-ownership fetter may only make room for an equally centralized bureaucratic fetter. Marx’s program, wholesale critique of alienating social structures, including private property, family, class, state, law, science, art, and religion, to make way for an expected inevitable convergence to communal relations, did not see a need for the community itself to create non-alienating reformed or replacement structures sufficient to support the level of creative interaction already developed in history, much less to increase it. Freedom to interact creatively requires the constraint of a structure within which to interact.

28Marx, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (New York: International, 1964) 136.

In contrast, the Old Testament, not influenced by the Hegelian logos, places the continuing historical conflict not between humanity and alienating structures but between two tendencies within humanity, tendencies to build both corporate and alienating structures. The Old Testament takes for granted what today is considered empirical fact, that the same human powers needed for corporate relations, the power to discriminate, to choose, to offer, to accept, can also be used to dominate. It sees unaided social evolution naturally tending downward from its corporate beginning through successive stages of alienation to a complete loss of human dignity in a morass of military and economic exploitation, rather than upward toward emancipation as the West sees it. Convergence toward unalienated community is not a historically inevitable working out of human nature. But also the Old Testament presents a God in bilaterally creative interaction with the human community, not participating in the behavior that causes the downward spiral but rather encouraging, not forcing, it to create less alienating social structures by choosing corporate rather than exploitive goals out of its mixed cultural heritage, a choice that would establish a social accountability limiting the ways its members might exercise their human powers. The Old Testament shares the goal of human solidarity with Marx (and Hegel), but since the difficulty is understood differently, the solution offered is different.

Western culture conceives the world as made of things, not relations, and the subsequent Marxist political movement itself neither accepted nor even understood Marx’s internal relations. Even V. I. Lenin wrote in 1914 “It is impossible completely to understand Marx’s Capital, and especially its first chapters, without having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel’s Logic. Consequently, half a century later none of the Marxists understood Marx.”^{29} After Marx, subsequent Marxism tended to move from mutual internal relation to a non-dialectical materialism or economic determinism, a one-way causal relation between a controlling material base and an ideational superstructure as epiphenomenon of the base. This “inverts” Platonism, depicting an upward controlling organic structure rather than a downward controlling ideational one, equally independent of human choice. The communal perspective’s bilaterally internal relations, already defective in Hegel and Marx by inclusion of necessary convergence, are totally nullified by economic determinism. Norman Gottwald applies economic determinism to biblical studies.^{30} On the other hand we find German Political Theology and latin-American Liberation Theology^{31} using scripture to compete with Marxism with as much bilateral human solidarity as Marx but without the unsatisfactory meta-Platonic shadow of necessary convergence, and of course also without the economic determinism of subsequent Marxism.^{32}

29V. I. Lenin, Philosophical Notebooks, in Collected Works 38 (Moscow, 1961) 180.

We temporarily interrupt our account of the political-philosophy manifestation of the communal movement, since the remaining political philosopher to be covered, Jürgen Habermas, builds his system in interaction with the philosophy-of-history and language-philosophy manifestations, which two manifestations we present next.

2 The philosophy of history: Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer

Parallel to its emergence in political philosophy, the communal movement also emerged, a century later, as a new communal philosophy of history.

One of the achievements of the modern period had been the development of critical history, that is, a generically oriented history done on analogy with the natural science of the period, an attempt to describe impartially, without reference to the historian’s own situation, objective events as they took place in the past. The methods for obtaining these results included the discovery and comparison of sources and the estimation of the factual accuracy of sources by a similar investigation of the sources themselves (as in Hume and Harnack, note 5 above). The modern period has used this method to produce an immense amount of historical investigation and discovery, and has given western culture a historical perspective that it never had before.

But the new interest in history itself belied the assumed disinterested historian, and a recognition of the necessary presuppositions and interests of the historian led to the awareness that history is an interpretation of the past by those doing it in the present. We have already seen Hegel and Marx move beyond critical history. Two more early pioneers in the post-critical philosophy of history were Wilhelm Dilthey and Ernst Troeltsch.

Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911) looked for a more sophisticated way of understanding the historical past than critical history, a way that would reach its meaning as well as its facts. In his Der Aufbau der Geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften^{33} he holds that the past can be understood in the same way as one understands the life world of one’s own age, through cultural objectifications, which are “the manifold forms in which the things that individuals hold in common have objectified themselves in the world of the senses” (p. 209), that is, things that can be heard or seen, like speech or books or architectural structures. “Its realm extends from the style of life and the forms of social intercourse, to the system of purposes which society has created for itself, to custom, law, state, religion, art, science and philosophy” (p. 208).

30Norman Gottwald, The Tribes of Yahweh (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1979) parts 10-11.

31Johann Baptist Metz, Faith in History and Society (New York: Seabury, 1980); Gustavo Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1973); Juan Luis Segundo, Liberation of Theology (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1976).

32A thoroughgoing communal interpretation of Marx is made by Bertell Ollman, Alienation, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1976).

33Wilhelm Dilthey, Diltheys Gesammelte Schriften 7 (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1927).

One learns one’s own present culture through cultural objectifications. “From this world of cultural objectifications the self receives sustenance from earliest childhood. It is also the medium in which the understanding of other persons and their life expressions is accomplished. For each thing in which the culture has objectified itself contains something of oneself and the other together. Every plaza with trees planted, every living room with seating arranged, is understandable to us from infancy because human planning, arranging, and valuing done together have allotted plaza and furniture its place. The child …. can only learn to understand the gestures and facial expressions, movements and exclamations, words and sentences because it always encounters them as the same and in the same relation to what they mean and express. Thus the individual becomes oriented in the world of cultural objectifications” (p. 208f). The individual, formed in internal relation with its current culture, can understand the current cultural expressions of the other members.

Past cultures also can be understood. “Past ages, in which the great total forces of history have taken shape, are present in the cultural objectifications. The individual, as bearer and representative of the common features interwoven in him, enjoys and comprehends the history in which they arise. The individual understands history by being a historical being” (p. 151). Dilthey’s advance over critical history is his recognizing cultural objectifications as transmitting not only the objective “great total forces” from the past, but their meaning as well. But for him history is still only understanding, not interaction. The “common features” used by the historian in understanding the past cultural objectifications are those of the present culture. The past cultural objectifications are not allowed to be a means of interaction between the knower and the earlier culture. The influence and the understanding of the past is cumulative, not interactive. Dilthey recognizes the circular relation known from antiquity between the meanings of whole and part, between word and sentence containing it, between event and its own cultural context. But he does not broaden that circle diachronically to include a circular relation between an earlier culture and a later one. He misses any additional significance an earlier historical event has acquired since its occurrence. In the words of Hans-Georg Gadamer “Dilthey ultimately conceives inquiring into the historical past as deciphering and not as historical experience.”^{34}

Ernst Troeltsch (1865-1923) was under the three-fold influence of neo-Kantian philosophy, of Dilthey, and of Max Weber, who partly maintained the political-philosophy tradition of Marx. Troeltsch wrestled with the nature of history in Der Historismus und seine Probleme^{35} (1922). He found history distinguished from the natural sciences (of his day) by the fact that it deals with life unities: “History has generally no simple basic element analogous to the element, taken indifferently as atom or as energy, in natural science, but rather has before it from the beginning nothing but composite objects, in which an abundance of psychological elementary events along with certain natural conditions is always already bound up into a life unity or totality” (p. 32f).

Troeltsch’s goal was a “philosophical mastering of historicism” (p. 113), to be realized somehow through “the fundamental historicizing of all our thought about humanity, its culture, and its values” (p. 102). How can historicism be mastered by submitting oneself to history completely? This question, turned into a defining statement, characterizes Troeltsch’s program. The historicism to be mastered is the old critical history of facts, separated from the values to be drawn from them as in the Kantian-influenced history of von Harnack.^{36} In the new emerging historicizing of everything, history, although influenced by “certain natural conditions,” is to be understood from within itself, and the necessity and the possibility of such an understanding derive from the recognition that for us history, all of our recoverable socializing structure laid out before us, is all there is, that there is no absolute method for obtaining truth nor standard for measuring it from outside history. Not everything in a particular culture is true, but each culture contains within it its own standard of truth.

Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) made explicit the internal relation between knower and known, the key to the communal movement’s philosophy-of-history manifestation, even though he remained outside the communal movement and was early considered the theoretician of the very non-communal existentialist movement.

What does it mean to say that things are, that things have Being? Heidegger rejects essentialism, the western doctrine that things have an unchangeable essence, shared by both perennial and modern philosophy from at least the time of Plato according to which things have an objective essence or nature or Form independent of any subjective observer. In Being and Time^{37} (1927) Heidegger begins his asking about Being by saying Being is “that which determines entities as entities, that on the basis of which entities are already understood” (pp. 25f). But if “Being means the Being of entities, then entities themselves turn out to be what is investigated” (p. 26). To investigate entities, Heidegger chooses an adaptation of the phenomenological method of Edmund Husserl, a starting point squarely in the first-person perspective and so precluding any communal result. Phenomenology “uncovers” the thing being investigated, allowing it to show itself directly with no separate image in the investigator (sense-datum in empiricism, idea in idealism) distinct from the thing being investigated. Investigator and investigated are in direct relation; there is no subject-object separation. The motto of phenomenology is “To the things themselves!” (p. 58f). “Only as phenomenology, is ontology [the study of Being] possible” (p. 60).

34Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Continuum, 1999) 241.

35Ernst Troeltsch, Gesammelte Schriften 3 (Tübingen: Mohr, 1922).

36Troeltsch, “The Dogmatics of the ‘Religionsgeschichtliche Schule,’” AJT 17 (1913) 12.

37Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (New York: Harper and Row, 1962).

From this first-person starting point Heidegger will argue that the fundamental relation between such a first person and anything except another person is internal, and will reject the cosmological perspective as wrong and the generic perspective as undesirable. The first-person starting point precludes reaching a corporate perspective and tilts the analysis toward existentialism, although Heidegger’s concern is not that but the study of Being.

Which entities should be studied first? Since phenomenology studies things through their relation to the investigator, Heidegger starts with study of the investigator. “Looking at something, understanding and conceiving it, choosing, access to it—all these ways of behaving are constitutive for our inquiry, and therefore are modes of Being for those particular entities which we, the inquirers, are ourselves. Thus to work out the question of Being adequately, we must make an entity—the enquirer—transparent in his own Being. … This entity which each of us is himself and which includes inquiring as one of the possibilities of its Being, we shall denote by the term ‘Dasein”’ (p. 26f). Dasein is thus a human being or group not as biological whole but as enquirer, as capable of understanding entities. If Dasein is several together it is still treated as a unit with no internal analysis. This phenomenological approach to Being, unlike Platonism or nineteenth-century natural science, makes Being and the human enquirer internally related to each other. But, as we will see, it does not make one enquirer internally related to another enquirer.

The Being of Dasein includes its being an enquirer—Dasein is in-a-world, in an environment (pp. 78-80). “Dasein” is literally “to be there,” to exist; Dasein’s existence includes a there, a “world”; we do not need to prove its existence any more than that of Dasein itself. “The question of whether there is a world at all and whether its Being can be proved, makes no sense if it is raised by Dasein as Being-in-the-world; and who else would raise it?” (p. 246f) “‘The scandal of philosophy’ is not that this proof has yet to be given, but that such proofs are expected and attempted again and again” (p. 249).

The elements of Dasein’s world relate to it in three ways, as present-at-hand objects appearing to be independent of Dasein, as ready-to-hand equipment understood not as objects but as transparent to Dasein’s use of them in carrying out its activities in the world, and as other Daseins with their own worlds as Dasein-with.

The ready-to-hand relation is phenomenologically the closest. A hammer, for example, presents itself primordially as a tool for driving nails, not as an odd shaped physical body with steel and wood components—“the less we just stare at the hammer-Thing, and the more we seize hold of it and use it, the more primordial does our relationship to it become, and the more unveiledly is it encountered as that which it is—as equipment” (p. 98). The relation between us and the hammer is internal—what each one is depends on the other. The hammer is a hammer because we can use it for hammering, and we are hammer users because it can be so used. There is not “subject” and “object;” the hammer is an extension of the subject as the subject builds the house. But the hammer, not being a Dasein, does not have a world, and the interpretations “hammer” and “user” are only in our world. Non-manufactured items, like food and beautiful sunsets, are also ready-to-hand (p. 100).

A carpenter happens on a tool in the hardware store and thinks “Ha! This is just what I need for the job I am doing today.” The carpenter, being in the world of carpentering, interprets the tool by seeing how it fits in the world in which he is already involved. His world provides a fore-structure for the interpretation. Similarly, an interpretation of a document, or of a historical event, is the recognition of a relation between the document or event and elements in the interpreter’s world context; it gives a meaning to the document or event. “In interpreting, we do not, so to speak, throw a ‘signification’ over some naked thing which is present-at-hand, we do not stick a value on it; but when something within-the-world is encountered as such, the thing in question already has an involvement which is disclosed in our understanding of the world, and this involvement is one which gets laid out by the interpretation” (p. 190f).

Interpreting a tool, text, or event adds to our world of understanding; this modifies the fore-structure and so also our interpretation. When the carpenter starts to use the new tool and finds that it doesn’t quite fit the job, he has to modify the tool or the job or both. In the same way, as one continues to examine a document, the understanding of both the document and one’s world may be changed. There is thus an ongoing intrinsic bilateral or circular aspect to understanding, an aspect which is an abomination to all essentialists, Platonic, Aristotelian, and modern, who wish for a fixed “objective” signification they can reach without the object changing in the process. As Plato puts it “So how could that which is never in the same state be anything? … No indeed, nor could it be known by anyone. For at the very moment when the one who is going to know it approaches, it would become something else and different” (Cratylus 439C-440B). This hermeneutic circle, so proposed by Heidegger, claims an unavoidable bilaterally internal character for the relation between interpreter and interpreted. “The ‘circle’ in understanding belongs to the structure of meaning, and the latter phenomenon is rooted in the existential constitution of Dasein” (p. 195).

The part-whole relation, that is, the circular relation between hammer head and hammer, between the meaning of a part and the whole of a document, between a historical event and its own historical context, has been recognized since antiquity, but this relation does not change. The new hermeneutic circle puts the interpreter and interpreter’s context in bilaterally internal relation with the thing being interpreted, so that the relation between interpreter and thing changes the thing’s essence, as the partwhole relation does not do, and so violates the perennial perspective with its unchanging Form for each thing, and the generic perspective with its ability to classify each thing into its proper species and genus. Its innovation by Heidegger provided a key needed by the budding communal movement for a theoretical characterization of its position; Gadamer will use it to extend the circle to the relation with other Daseins, who are more than “equipment,” as Heidegger cannot do from his first-person phenomenological starting point.

Things become related to us as present-at-hand when they are perceived theoretically, no longer practically, when they are seen as objective and not internally related to Dasein. Heidegger believes that Sophocles and the pre-Socratic philosophers Heraclitus and Parmenides still perceived Dasein’s Da, Dasein’s world, to be internally related to Dasein, and he attributes to Plato the shift to the present western understanding of ordinary things as present-at-hand.^{38} Once a thing is given an unchangeable Platonic Form then what it is, its “whatness,” is fixed and independent of Dasein. Breaking its relation with Dasein allows a questioning of its “thatness,” questioning whether it exists. But Heidegger replaces Platonic essence with existence understood as what a thing is to Dasein, not whether it is, as what the there is that is already part of Being-there. Platonism obscures, covers up, the previously uncovered direct internal relation of Dasein with its world: “It was in the Sophists and in Plato that appearance was declared to be mere appearance and thus degraded. At the same time being, as idea, [Form] was exalted to a suprasensory realm. A chasm, chörismos, was created between the merely apparent [thing] here below and the real being somewhere on high. In that chasm Christianity settled down, at the same time reinterpreting the lower as the created and the higher as the creator. These refashioned weapons it turned against antiquity (as paganism) [i.e. against the pre-Socratic view of relation with reality as internal] and so disfigured it. Nietzsche was right in saying that Christianity is Platonism for the people.”^{39} Thus Heidegger sees the objective present-at-hand relation basic to western perennial philosophy as derived by the Platonists by truncation of a ready-to-hand relation still understood by the pre-Socratic Greek world. But Heidegger’s ready-to-hand relation does not extend to Dasein-with relations; it puts a reader in bilaterally internal relation with an old document, but not with the Dasein-with who wrote it.

38Heidegger’s forerunner Kierkegaard also found this shift beginning with Plato: “Socrates infinite merit is to have been an existing thinker, not a speculative philosopher who forgets what it means to exist.” Concluding Unscientific Postscript 184.

The third kind of relation, with another Dasein as Dasein-with, is phenomenologically distinct from the other two. Clothing made by a garment worker to fit another Dasein appears in the worker’s world as ready-to-hand, but the Dasein for which it is made appears in the worker’s world as more than present-at-hand or ready-to-hand, it appears as “a distinct entity that not only differs from equipment and things, but, itself a Dasein, is ‘in’ the [worker’s] world in the form of being-in-the-world [that is, ‘in’ it as one having its own world]…. The characterizing of an encounter with another is still yet by one’s own Dasein.”^{40} The phenomenal worlds of the two Daseins are distinct; there is no world common to both within whose shared changing interpretation the two Daseins could act jointly and intentionally in complementary creative cooperation. Nevertheless, the other Dasein is in the worker’s world as being-in-its-own-world, not as thing or equipment. To merely manipulate it as ready-to-hand or to know it theoretically as present-at-hand is to ignore part of its phenomenal relation with the worker. “By reason of this clinging-to-like being-in-the-world, the world is always something that I share with others. The world of Dasein is a with-world, Being-in is Being-with others. Their being visible within Dasein’s world is Dasein-with.”^{41}

Being-with is as intrinsic to Dasein as is ready-to-hand-ness; both are part of Dasein’s being-there. “Being-with is an existential characteristic of Dasein even when factically no Other is present-at-hand …. Being-alone is a deficient mode of Beingwith; its very possibility is the proof of this” (p. 156f).

Dasein is commonly inauthentic, it has fallen into submission to “everydayness,” “averageness,” the “leveling down” of all possibilities. “In utilizing public means of transport and in making use of information services such as the newspaper, every Other is like the next. This Being-with-one-another dissolves one’s own Dasein completely into the kind of Being of ‘the Others,’ in such a way, indeed, that the Others, as distinguishable and explicit, vanish more and more. In this inconspicuousness and unascertainability, the real dictatorship of the “they” [das Man, generic personhood] is unfolded” (p. 164). One’s world has lapsed into the “lowest common denominator” of all the others’ worlds.

39This paragraph, pp. 79-172, the quotation, p. 90, of Heidegger’s An Introduction to Metaphysics (1935) (New Haven: Yale, 1959).

40Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 7th ed. (Tübingen: Neomarius, 1953) 118 [Being and Time 154].

41Sein und Zeit 118 [Being and Time 154f].

Authentic Dasein, on the other hand, is “the Self that has been taken hold of in its own way” (p. 167), that has found itself, that is resolute. Authentic Dasein calls itself out of generic personhood so as to be “individualized down to itself in its uncanniness, … something that simply cannot be mistaken for anything else” (p. 322). Heidegger’s authentic self, grown out of German romanticism, offers a basic ingredient that will be needed in the communal perspective, the distinctness from others required for any bilaterally creative relation with them.

A paradigmatic way Dasein is called to authenticity is by anticipation of its own death: “in anticipating death it understands itself unambiguously in terms of its ownmost distinctive possibility” (p. 435). This death is non-relational: “By its very essence, death is in every case mine. … This ownmost non-relational possibility is at the same time the uttermost one” (pp. 284, 294). This centrality of individual death is an integral consequence of the radical first-person orientation of the phenomenological standpoint, which rejects the genericizing attempts from Plato to Kant to bring multiple “first-persons” somehow together. Heidegger is unaware of the corporate biblical and rabbinic option of death as most relational possibility: Isa 53:5 “by his bruises we are healed”; Rom 6:4 “we have been buried with him by baptism into death”; Emmanuel Levinas: “to be for death in order to be for that which is after me.”^{42} But Heidegger is not opposed to all relation with Dasein’s world: “The appeal to the Self in the they-self does not force it inwards upon itself, so that it can close itself off from the ‘external world’. The call … appeal[s] solely to that Self which, notwithstanding, is in no other way than Being-in-the-world” (p. 318).

If the authentic self’s mode of being in the world is not the generic mode of the “they,” then, we want to ask, what mode is it, self-as-such, or corporate? Heidegger answers that phenomenological analysis is neutral; there are several modes of being an authentic self.

The attitude which expresses Dasein’s being-in-a-world is called care (Sorge). Care toward the ready-to-hand is called concern (Besorgen), and care toward Dasein-with is called solicitude (Fürsorge). Heidegger distinguishes three modes of solicitude. Solicitude is in a deficient mode when persons “who are with one another do not ‘matter’ to one another” (p. 158). In its positive modes solicitude “has two extreme possibilities. It can … take away ‘care’ from the Other and put itself in his position in concern …. In such solicitude the Other can become one who is dominated and a dependent” (p. 158). At the other extreme solicitude acts toward the other “not in order to take away his ‘care’ but rather to give it back to him authentically …. This kind of solicitude [belongs] essentially … to the existence of the Other, not to a ‘what’ with which he is concerned; it helps the Other to become transparent to himself in his care and to become free for it” (p. 159). Thus Dasein’s solicitude is deficient if it ignores others, and positive both when it dominates another, taking away the other’s authenticity, and when it acts to free another to be authentic. In the vocabulary of the present paper the first two modes are respectively self-as-such and organic, and the third glances toward, but cannot reach, the corporate.

42Emmanuel Levinas, “Meaning and Sense,” Basic Philosophical Writings (Bloomington: Indiana University, 1996) 50.

Heidegger calls the third an authentic bond: “when [two] devote themselves to the same affair in common, their doing so is determined by the manner in which their Dasein, each in its own way, has been taken hold of. They thus become authentically bound together” (p. 159). “Only by authentically Being-their-Selves in resoluteness can people authentically be with one another” (p. 344). Heidegger envisions a relation in which people work together with such solicitude for one another’s authenticity that they take up no project which would require one person’s care, one person’s responsibility, to be determined in part by another, no project involving parties with complementary roles simultaneously exercising and accepting controls of and from one another within their respective roles in order to accomplish a jointly undertaken task, as in the corporate perspective.^{43}

Heidegger’s intellectual predecessor Kierkegaard similarly looked for a completely non-coercive relation between selves: “Inwardness [authenticity] cannot be directly communicated, for its direct expression is precisely externality …. the reproduction of inwardness in the recipient constitutes the resonance by reason of which the thing said remains absent …. To communicate in this manner constitutes the most beautiful triumph of the resigned inwardness.”^{44} Advocacy of inwardness (Kierkegaard) or authenticity (Heidegger) is a significant historical step against cosmological control or generic conformity. Both philosophers saw authenticity of others compatible with authenticity of self in the third, non-interacting mode, but certainly not required for it, indeed their first-person perspective required them also to allow authenticity of self in the first, non-solicitous mode and the second, dominating mode. Both defined authenticity of self in a way making it incompatible with corporate community. Neither philosopher could conceive, much less ask for, a different, communal authenticity of self that could be reached only through a sharing of sovereignty in co-intentional ongoing bilaterally internal relations with complementary others—something requiring the two to share a common “world.” There is a common world in Platonism; each mind possesses a microcosmic copy of the cosmic order, so that each person can communicate with the others using the same preexisting semantic (if not phonetic) language. Such a common world persists in the modern generic perspective without the support of cosmic order, but disappears in first-person phenomenalism. In what follows we will find the corporate perspective agreeing with the authentic “existing” individual’s rejection of such a generic common world, but doing so to clear the way for an attempt at an interactively constructed common world distinct from, but in non-dominating creative bilaterally intrinsic relation with, each individual world.

43Martin Buber: “In mere solicitude man remains essentially with himself, even if he is moved with extreme pity; … the barriers of his own being are not thereby breached,” in “The Doctrine of Heidegger” in “What is Man?” in Between Man and Man (New York: MacMillan, 1965) 170.

44Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript 232.

Early Heidegger was taken as theoretician of the existentialist movement because anti-essentialism and authenticity of the self are basic to that movement. But in 1930 he said “It was never my idea to preach an ‘existential philosophy.’ Rather, I have been concerned with renewing the question of ontology.”^{45} Early Heidegger also contributed substantially to the communal movement, to which he also did not belong, with his anti-essentialist exposition of the present-at-hand as truncation of the ready-to-hand, thus uniting the theoretical and practical rather than dismissing the theoretical as existentialism did, and so overcoming in Germany the then prevailing neo-Kantian separation of fact and value. But it was left to Gadamer, not bound by a first-person perspective unable to place two Daseins in the same world, to extend the two-way intrinsic character of the ready-to-hand relation to the being-with-others relation, thus inaugurating the philosophy-of-history manifestation of the communal movement, to be taken up momentarily in Gadamer.

But first a sketch is given of Heidegger’s later development, making language prior to individual thought.

The later Heidegger maintains his search for a non-Platonic Being, but no longer through analysis of particular Dasein’s first-person world. In What is Metaphysics (1929) he interprets Kierkegaard’s “dread” as fear of nothingness, and raises the question “Why are there beings at all and not rather Nothing?”^{46} leading to marvel that there is anything at all. The earlier “existence” as “whatness” of a thing to Dasein is no longer the path to “Being.” In a “Postscript” (1943) to What is Metaphysics he adds “Nothing, as the Other to beings, is the veil of Being.”^{47} In Letter on Humanism (1947) Heidegger says that what he earlier called authenticity of the self is “an ‘ecstatic’ relation of the self’s essence to the truth of Being.” The initiative has shifted — Dasein’s search for Being has now changed into Being’s approach toward Dasein. “Thought brings the relation of Being to the self’s essence. It does not create or cause this relation; it brings it from Being only as that which was delivered to it by Being. This offering consists in the fact that in thinking Being comes to language. Language is the house of Being. In this lodging the self dwells.”^{48} In Identity and Difference (1957) he says “At stake is simply experiencing this owning in which self and Being are delivered over to each other.”^{49} In On the Way to Language (1959)^{50} he adds “If the self dwells within the claim of Being through its language, then we Europeans … dwell in a completely different house than do East Asians.” Language has replaced Dasein as the path to Being—“the word itself is the relation, in that it holds each thing into being and sustains it there. Without this maintenance, the whole of things, the ‘world,’ would sink away into obscurity, including the ‘I.”’ Language is prior to the individual: “Language is in its essence neither expression nor activity of human beings. Language speaks.” Being has the initiative; language is its means of speaking its truth to individuals.

45Heidegger, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (Bloomington: Indiana University, 1988) 13.

46Heidegger, “Was ist Metaphysik?” in Wegmarken (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1967) 19, (1978) 121 [“What is Metaphysics?” in Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings (New York: Harper & Row: 1977) 112].

47Heidegger, “Nachwort zu: ‘Was ist Metaphysik?’” in Wegmarken (1967) 107; (1978) 310; [Existence and Being (Chicago: Regnery, 1949) 192].

The later Heidegger’s exalting of language as a priori call from Being is a significant move away from the western perennial, modern, and self-as-such views of language as mere a posteriori expression of individual thought. French philosophy adapted Heidegger’s exalting of language to support a communal perspective. In 1964 Emmanuel Levinas wrote: “There never was a moment in which meaning first came to birth out of a meaningless being, outside of a historical position where language is spoken. And that was doubtless what was meant when we were taught that language is the house of being.”^{51} The French theologian Louis-Marie Chauvet simply names Heidegger’s a priori origin of language, that “Being” Heidegger never identified, as human community.^{52}

Hans-Georg Gadamer inTruth and Method (1960)^{53} incorporates early Heidegger’s fore-structure and hermeneutic circle into a philosophy of diachronic and synchronic human community relations that amounts to a philosophy of culture or a philosophy of history. But he does so starting with community rather than with first-person phenomenology. His concern is not analysis of Being starting with self as in Heidegger, but a “truth” to be encountered by the community in its history. Not limited by a first-person method, he is free to extend the fore-structure of meaning and intrinsic circularity of understanding beyond the ready-to-hand relation to a two-way internal Being-with-one-another relation, the extension we saw above as out of reach for Heidegger and Kierkegaard.

48Heidegger, “Brief über den Humanismus” (1947) in Wegmarken (1967) 163, 145; (1978) 329, 311 [“Letter on Humanism” in Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings 212, 193].

49Heidegger, Identität und Differenz (1957) (New York: Harper & Row, 1969) 100 Identity and Difference 36].

50Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache (Pfullingen: Neske, 1959) 90; 176f; and 19 [On the Way to Language (New York: Harper & Row, 1971) 5; 73; and Poetry, Language, Thought (New York:

Harper & Row, 1971) 197].

51Levinas, “Meaning and Sense” 38.

52Louis-Marie Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1995) p. 142, note.

53Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Continuum, 1999).

The “truth” which Gadamer looks for in history is not objective information about the past, not “just the facts,” but insight in answering some question we are asking ourselves in the present, resolving some issue, talking and listening to one another. The search for that kind of relation with the past goes counter to the modern period’s attempt to study the past objectively, its attempt to be free from a rigid authority of “classical” historical periods, classical Greece, Renaissance painting, classical music, and the like.

A case where the authority of the past is recognized as useful in structuring the present without being rigidly prescriptive is the judge’s application of a law promulgated in the past to a new situation not existing when the law was adopted. Such an application adds to the meaning of the law and simultaneously adds to the understanding of the present. But also the historian, who is not a judge, has to interpret a past law in the same way. Understanding a law, even if from a different culture and not legally binding, involves interpreting it into contexts the historian knows, seeing what it would say in such contexts. And it is the same for religious texts, the secular historian no less than the theologian can understand them only by seeing what they might mean in contexts the interpreter knows. A similar relation exists for all historical study (pp. 324-341).

This cultural context from within which we interpret the past is an extension of Heidegger’s fore-structure of meaning in the self’s “world” to Gadamer’s bilaterally interacting social “world,” an extension Heidegger could not make because being-with-others could not reach the coherence of a bilaterally interacting social “world.” Such a tradition is part of ourselves as human beings belonging to community. “History does not belong to us; we belong to it. Long before we understand ourselves through the process of self-examination, we understand ourselves in a self-evident way in the family, society and state in which we live. The focus of subjectivity is a distorting mirror. The self-awareness of the individual is only a flickering in the closed circuits of historical life.” (p. 276).

Thus the fore-structure for interpreting history is also a product of history, a product of a long process of making history by applying the past to the present over and over. We understand the past in terms of the present, and the present in terms of the past. Past and present are internally related; they form a hermeneutic circle. Gadamer says “The circle, then, is not formal in nature. It is neither subjective nor objective, but describes understanding as the interplay of the movement of tradition and the movement of the interpreter. The anticipation of meaning that governs our understanding of a text is not an act of subjectivity, but proceeds from the commonality that binds us to the tradition. But this commonality is constantly being formed in our relation to tradition. Tradition is not simply a permanent precondition, rather we produce it ourselves inasmuch as we understand, participate in the evolution of tradition, and hence further determine it ourselves. Thus the circle of understanding is not a ‘methodological’ circle, but describes an element in the ontological structure of understanding” (p. 293). One inherits one’s fore-structure from a long development of the tradition within which one lives; one also sees it modified before one’s eyes as it is used by oneself and others to interpret something new—one must “be aware of one’s own bias, so that the text can present itself in all its otherness and thus assert its own truth against one’s own fore-meanings” (p. 269).

The interplay of the tradition and the interpreter’s horizon takes place through time; understanding is intrinsically a temporal process. In interpreting the past the time difference is not an impediment to be eliminated but rather provides a continuing array of new standpoints from which more comprehensive understandings can be reached. We can understand the past in some ways not possible in its own time, since we can see both historical consequences and new applications to our own situations today. This contrasts with critical history, which tries to ignore the temporal distance and understand the past in itself without reference to the historian’s own perspective (p. 298). And, more generally, it contrasts with Platonism and with critical empirical science: “classical metaphysics as a whole is an ontology of the present-at-hand, and modern science is, unbeknownst to itself, its heir” (p. 455). Gadamer says “The overcoming of all prejudices, this global demand of the Enlightenment, will itself prove to be a prejudice” (p. 276). Gadamer, like Heidegger, is not asking that we interpret in the relational way but is claiming that we always do so inevitably, that knowledge is intrinsically a relation, an interpretation.

For Gadamer, the cultural world which exists through the interplay of tradition and the current situation, and which is constantly changing and enlarging as it deals with new situations, is open. There is no absolute world to compare it with, no teleological movement in history. Each particular cultural world is different, but is capable of extending itself to include additional human experiences, and so to include some common ground with other particular cultural worlds with which it comes in historical contact (p. 447). The lack of an independent standard against which to measure the understanding a culture has reached, implies that truth cannot be reached by a method external to what is true, but rather is to be found within the internally related whole of what has come into being in the cultural world. The hermeneutic circle is all-encompassing.

Two leading mid-twentieth-century schools of biblical interpretation, Rudolf Bultmann’s “word speaking to the self” and Gerhard von Rad’s “transmission of tradition,” work respectively within the perspectives of Heidegger and Gadamer outlined above.

3 Language philosophy: Ludwig Wittgenstein

Language philosophy, like political philosophy and the philosophy of history, contained the seeds of a communal perspective while still being practiced in a modern mode. The logician Gottlob Frege’s work is still generic, but its base in language frees it from the first-person perspective of rationalism and empiricism. Frege held three positions later to be built on by the communal philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.

The first is the priority given to judgments over concepts, that is, to whole propositions over components. Whereas empiricism builds up judgments out of concepts originating empirically, Frege derives concepts from judgments. “Instead of putting a judgement together out of an individual as subject and an already previously formed concept as predicate, we do the opposite and arrive at a concept by splitting up the content of possible judgement.”^{54} One of Frege’s several illustrations is the way the same proposition can be split up into subject and predicate, that is, name and concept, in three ways in the three sentences “Mary gave the document to John,” “The document was given to John by Mary,” and “John was given the document by Mary.”^{55}

Frege’s second position later to be built on by Wittgenstein is his distinguishing the force of a statement from its propositional content.^{56} The question “Does everyone die?” and the statement “Everyone dies” have the same propositional content, expressible roughly as “that everyone dies,” but have different forces, interrogative and assertive. Frege, using the term “thought” for our term “propositional content,” says “An interrogative sentence and an indicative one contain the same thought; but the indicative contains something else as well, namely, the assertion. The interrogative sentence contains something more too, namely a request. … So it is possible to express the thought without laying it down as true.”^{57} The implication for communal philosophy is the recognition that assertive, interrogative, or other forces are expressed in the language along with the purely descriptive propositional content.

But Frege is not interested in the variety of forces. He introduces force only to separate assertive force from propositional content in order to distinguish propositions, which are either true or false, from component parts of propositions, which are neither. Working within the objective orientation of the cosmological and generic perspectives, Frege sees assertions properly made only after some propositional content, “a thought,” has been judged objectively true. “We may distinguish: (1) the apprehension of a thought—thinking, (2) the recognition of the truth of a thought—judgement, (3) the manifestation of this judgement—assertion.”^{58} An assertion conveys abstract information to another. “How does a thought act: By being apprehended and taken to be true. … The influence of one person on another is brought about for the most part by thoughts.”^{59} In contrast, communal language philosophy does not recognize an uninterpreted a priori truth; rather assertive force is rather the speaker’s claim to the hearer that his statement is true.

54Gottlob Frege, “Boole’s Logical Calculus and the Concept-script,” (1881) in Posthumous Writings (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1979) 17.

55Frege, “Logic” (1897), Posthumous Writings 141.

56Frege, Begriffsschrift (1879), § 2, in Peter Geach and Max Black, eds., Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1952), p. 1f.

57Frege, “The Thought: A Logical Inquiry” (1918), Mind 65 (1956) 294.

Frege’s third contribution to language philosophy which is of communal interest is his upholding of the public, intersubjective nature of language. In Frege, however, this intersubjectivity falls within the generic framework of a Kantian transcendental intersubjectivity. Frege distinguishes two parts of meaning, sense and reference. The reference of an expression is the object which is designated, while the sense is the mode of presentation of the object. For example “morning star” and “evening star” have the same reference, the planet Venus, but not the same sense.^{60} Frege introduced the distinction to show how the sense and reference of an assertive sentence are related to the senses and references of its component parts. In his system the sense of an assertive sentence is its propositional content and its reference is its objective truth or falsity; positions both necessarily abandoned in communal language philosophy.

The communal interest is in Frege’s claim that both sense and reference are public, not private like ideas. “The idea is subjective: one man’s idea is not that of another. … This constitutes an essential distinction between the idea and the sign’s sense, which may be the common property of many and therefore is not a part or a mode of the individual mind.”^{61} And the reference of an expression is also public. “The regular connection between a sign, its sense, and its reference is of such a kind that to the sign there corresponds a definite sense and to that in turn a definite reference.”^{62} For Frege, language is public.

Although Frege’s position is still generic, by starting with language he has avoided the first-person position of rationalism and empiricism based on the thinking processes or empirical experience of individuals.

58“The Thought” 294.

5959. “The Thought” 310.

60Frege, “On Sense and Reference” (1892), in Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege 57.

61“On Sense and Reference” 58.

62“On Sense and Reference” 56.

Ludwig Wittgenstein incorporates Frege’s three new positions in changed form into a thoroughly communal philosophy of language, which will here be developed from part 1 of his Philosophical Investigations.^{63}

Wittgenstein begins with a critique of Augustine’s account of learning language by hearing one’s elders name objects as they turn toward them (Confessions 1.8). Wittgenstein says for Augustine “the individual words in language name objects—sentences are combinations of such names” (§ 1). For Wittgenstein, in contrast, the meaning of language is its use in social interaction, and that meaning is conveyed by whole sentences, not separate components. Language use is Sprachspiele, the play of speech in interaction among people, conventionally translated “language-game.” Wittgenstein says “the term ‘language-game’ is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a form of life” (§ 23). A “form of life” is a community structure allowing for corporate interaction. Wittgenstein offers vivid examples of elementary language games, such as a stonemason calling out the whole sentences “Block!” or “Slab!” to let his assistant know when to pass up one or the other (§ 2). Wittgenstein adds, “I shall also call the whole, consisting of language and the actions into which it is woven, the ‘language-game”’ (§ 7). The meaning (sense) of an expression is not its mode of presentation as in Frege but its use in the language game being played: “But doesn’t the fact that sentences have the same sense consist in their having the same use?” (§ 20). Learning a language is learning not just its structure, but how to use it, and this includes learning the cultural interactions themselves in which it is used. The young Augustine learned more than the words for objects his elders talked about, he learned there were such objects in the cultural world of his elders. More than learning the syntax for asking a question he learned the social move of asking a question.

Wittgenstein appropriates Frege’s distinction between force and propositional content but says the two should not be separated; the propositional content alone “is not a move in the language-game” (§ 22). Whereas in Frege the meaning of a sentence (its sense) is just its propositional content, in Wittgenstein the meaning, as use, includes the force. Whereas Frege relates assertive force to reference, hence to truth, Wittgenstein relates it to sense, hence to use. Assertions are not the only moves in language. Wittgenstein gives equal significance to other kinds of force, offering an indefinitely large list of kinds of sentences, or language games, including ordering, obeying orders, describing, reporting, hypothesizing, joking, asking, thanking, cursing, greeting, praying (§ 23), recounting, chatting (§ 25), exclaiming (§ 27). These are all active, intentional, potentially creative moves by individuals through their community’s “form of life” or interaction-structure. And this structure has been created by the community itself through time: “Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses” (§ 18).

63Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (New York: Macmillan, 1953). References are to the numbered remarks in part 1, or, for notes, to page numbers.

Such a social conception of language conflicts with taking language as expression of individual human thought, based on introspection or empirical observation as in modern philosophy or on awareness of a pre-given world structure as in cosmologically oriented philosophy. Wittgenstein concedes he is asking us to abandon cosmological and generic ways of understanding to clear the way for a communal one. “Where does our investigation get its importance from, since it seems only to destroy everything interesting, that is, all that is great and important? … What we are destroying is nothing but houses of cards and we are clearing up the ground of language on which they stand” (§ 118). Philosophy is based on language, but also, he says, the cosmological and modern philosophies have been misled by it. “These are, of course, not empirical problems; they are solved, rather, by looking into the workings of our language, and that in such a way as to make us recognize those workings: in despite of an urge to misunderstand them. The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have always known. Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language” (§ 109).

The bewitchment is the attempt to base philosophy, cosmological or generic, on systematization of a language which as means for creative interaction in the community cannot be systematized. It is the bewitchment to which Platonism succumbs with its Forms, and the generic perspective with its genera or common characteristics. Wittgenstein says “Consider for example the proceedings that we call ‘games’…. What is common to them all?—Don’t say: ‘There must be something common, or they would not be called “games”’—but look and see whether there is anything common to all.—For if you look at them you will not see something that is common to all, but similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them at that. To repeat: don’t think, but look! … I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than ‘family resemblances’; for the various resemblances between members of a family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. etc. overlap and criss-cross in the same way” (§§ 66-67). And it is the same with language. “For someone might object against me: ‘… You talk about all sorts of language-games, but have nowhere said what the essence of a language-game, and hence of language, is: what is common to all these activities. …’ And this is true.—Instead of producing something common to all that we call language, I am saying that these phenomena have no one thing in common which makes us use the same word for all,—but that they are related to one another in many different ways” (§ 65). The warning is not against the discovery of a structure, a grammar, some rules, for games or for language, but against a generic or cosmological characterization of this structure that loses its complexity and open-endedness.

These structural rules are constitutive, not prescriptive. Constitutive rules do not tell us what to say, rather they provide a language within which to say what we want to say. “Disputes do not break out … over the question whether a rule has been obeyed or not. That is part of the framework on which the workings of our language is based …. It is what human beings say that is true and false; and they agree in the language they use. That is not agreement in opinions but in form of life” (§§ 240f). The rules are the grammar of the language; they give the expressions meaning: “Without these rules the word has as yet no meaning, and if we change the rules, it now has another meaning” (p. 147 note (b)). The rules are customs, uses, institutions, techniques, practices. “To obey a rule, to make a report, to give an order, … are customs (uses, institutions)…. To understand a language means to be master of a technique” (§ 199). The rules correspond to the fact that language is public rather than private. “‘Obeying a rule’ is a practice. … It is not possible to obey a rule ‘privately’: otherwise thinking one was obeying a rule would be the same thing as obeying it” (§ 202).

To help those still bewitched by a generic interpretation of language Wittgenstein mounts a refutation of the first-person empiricist position on its own terms, and does so in his argument against private language. By a private language Wittgenstein means a language having words that “refer to what can only be known to the person speaking; to his immediate private sensations” (§ 243), that is, a language with words with a private reference. The Enlightenment position that knowledge comes from internal first-person experiences, and the presumption that once realized it can be expressed in language independently of the external world or other minds, imply that our ordinary language, even though used by more than one person, is such a private language. Wittgenstein’s claim that a private language is impossible thus amounts to a rejection of Enlightenment first-person epistemology, a rejection of rationalism and empiricism.

Two fundamental errors are made, according to Wittgenstein, in holding that there is a private language, (a) that a sensation-word can have a private sense, and (b) that a sensation-word can have a private reference.

(a) According to Wittgenstein, no word can be given a purely ostensive definition, that is, a definition of its sense purely by indicating its reference. Wittgenstein says if one points to two nuts and says this is called two, the other may “suppose that ‘two’ is the name given to this group of nuts!… Perhaps you say … ‘This number is called “two.”’ For the word ‘number’ here shows what place in language, in grammar, we assign to the word. But this means that the word ‘number’ must be explained before the ostensive definition can be understood …. Defining, then, by means of other words! And what about the last definition in this chain?… The ostensive definition explains the use—the meaning—of the word [only] when the overall role of the word in language is clear” (§ 28-30). The original definition cannot be made entirely by ostention. Every definition of the sense (i.e. the use) of a word depends on the sense of other words, requires a prior context of sense.

In particular the attempt of an individual to make a private definition for words referring to allegedly private sensations, such as “pain” or “the color blue,” requires a prior context of sense. In order to assign a word privately to refer to some sensation of my own, with no communication with anyone else, I would also have to decide privately on a sense for the word before I could apply it to a subsequent sensation. But then I could not justify my memory of this sense independently, but only by comparing it with my memory of this sense; that is, with itself (§§ 258-269). “One would like to say: whatever is going to seem right to me is right” (§ 258). “As if someone were to buy several copies of the morning paper to assure himself that what it said was true” (§ 265). Rather, assigning a sense to the word requires a public context of sense: “When we speak of someone’s having given a name to pain, what is presupposed is the existence of the grammar of the word “pain”; it shews the post where the new word is stationed” (§ 257). A word for a sensation cannot be given a sense in a purely first-person or private manner. A sensation-word’s sense is public.

(b) Neither is the sensation itself (the reference of the word) a purely first-person or private matter. My sensation of pain is personal in the sense that only I have it, but it is not private in the sense that only I know it, since other people often know when I am in pain through my natural pain-behavior, such as wincing, or attending to the injured part (§ 246). Nor is it private in the sense that I know it better than others, since “I know that I am in pain” ordinarily means either that I am in pain, or that it makes no sense to say that I doubt that I am in pain (§ 246). The sensations we talk about are not private but public, that is, the public context needed for defining the reference of words referring to them does exist. A sensation-word’s reference is public.^{64}

If individuals could associate a word with a sensation, or with any referent, independently of any social context, the references of the word among different individuals would be unrelated to one another, and if the word had a sense, a use in society, that sense would have no relation to the references: “Suppose everyone had a box with something in it: we call it a ‘beetle.’ No one can look into anyone else’s box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle.—Here it would be quite possible for everyone to have something different in his box. One might even imagine such a thing constantly changing.—But suppose the word “beetle” had a use in these people’s language?—If so it would not be used as the name of a thing. The thing in the box has no place in the language-game at all; not even as a something: for the box might even be empty” (§ 293).

64Part of this systematization of Wittgenstein’s argument against private language is after Anthony Kenny, Wittgenstein (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973) 156-158, 178-202.

Wittgenstein is saying individuals can talk with one another only about things which have both a public sense and a public reference which they have learned as part of learning the community’s language. It is not sufficient to learn the words, or even the sense, from the community; they must also learn what they refer to from the community. The word “pain” has a public reference by means of its public sense. “A child has hurt himself and he cries; then adults talk to him and teach him exclamations and, later, sentences. They teach the child new pain-behavior” (§ 244). “I recognize that there is something there (in me) which I can call ‘pain’ without getting into conflict with the way other people use this word” (§ 283). “You learned the concept ‘pain’ when you learned language” (§ 384). Similarly, for color words (§§ 273-279): “Look at the blue of the sky and say to yourself ‘How blue the sky is!’—… the idea never crosses your mind that this impression of color belongs only to you. And you have no hesitation in exclaiming that to someone else. And if you point at anything as you say the words you point at the sky. I am saying: you have not the feeling of pointing-into-yourself, which often accompanies ‘naming the sensation’ when one is thinking about ‘private language”’ (§ 275). “How do I know that this color is red?—It could be an answer to say: ‘I have learnt English”’ (§ 381).

Wittgenstein’s argument against private language thus has two stages, (a) separating the sense from the reference of sensation-words and showing that it is public, and (b) going on to show that the reference of sensation-words is public, too. Language and meaning belong to the community, not the generic individual. The argument, if accepted, decimates Enlightenment first-person epistemology, the basis of modern philosophy.

But the Wittgenstein who says “don’t think, but look!” also rejects the cosmological perspective. With the cosmological perspective forms are real and material things are derivative; with the modern perspective things are real and their ideas are derivative. Each position is the other turned inside out, yet both hold their respective realities as objective and independent of the knowing subject. In contrast, for Wittgenstein reality is to be found not in cosmological forms nor in the material world nor in the individual, but rather in the form of life of a humanity having complementary diversity, creativity, and the authority to create its form of life within its environment, exactly the humanity depicted in Gen 1:27f and shown naming the domestic and wild animals in Gen 2:19b-20a. Language, a primary element in humanity’s interaction, is a priori to a participating member, but a posteriori to the community as ongoing creator of language.

Wittgenstein does not speak of the biblical God, but he does lay the corporate anthropological foundation needed for the West to understand the biblical epic. Speaking in metonymy, not metaphor or allegory, one can say Wittgenstein places humanity in a garden, in the east, naming the animals, embracing one another, deciding whether to eat the apple. Such a humanity could be bewitched by a cosmological or modern systematic-theological God but would readily interact meaningfully with a God walking in the cool of the evening and challenging it with “Why are you hiding behind those trees?”

Such a language philosophy is the basis for Paul Beauchamp’s biblical studies and Louis-Marie Chauvet’s liturgical theology.^{65}

Peter Winch in his The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy^{66} (1958) develops Wittgenstein’s remark “I shall also call the whole, consisting of language and the actions into which it is woven, the ‘language-game”’ (quoted above). Winch’s thesis is that the social sciences cannot be based on causal explanations in the way attempted in the natural sciences, but must involve an interpretation of the meaning of human actions; and that both the interpretation of these meanings and the meanings being interpreted require a corporately organized community for their existence.

According to Winch, epistemology is corporate, and the core of sociology is epistemology. “To understand the nature of social phenomena in general, to elucidate, that is, the concept of a ‘form of life,’ … [is] precisely the aim of epistemology. … The central problem of sociology, that of giving an account of the nature of social phenomena in general, itself belongs to philosophy” (p. 42f). The epistemology on which Winch grounds sociology carries with it a corporate anthropological perspective.

According to Winch social sciences must interpret the meanings of human actions, not merely the causal relations among them. He finds interpretation of the meaning of human actions already present in the sociologist Max Weber.^{67} Winch writes, “Weber considers the hypothetical case of two ‘non-social’ beings, meeting and, in a purely physical sense, ‘exchanging’ objects. This occurrence, he says, is conceivable as an act of economic exchange only if it has a sense. The present actions of the two men must carry with them, or represent, a regulation of their future behaviour. Action with a sense is symbolic: it goes together with certain other actions in the sense that it commits the agent to behaving in one way rather than another in the future” (p. 49f).

65Paul Beauchamp, Le récit, la lettre et le corps (Paris: Cerf, 1992); Louis-Marie Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament.

66Peter Winch, The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy (New York, Humanities, 1958).

67Max Weber, “R. Stammlers ‘Ueberwindung’ der materialistischen Geschichtsauffassung,” in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre (Tübingen: Mohr, 1922). Winch, belonging to the language-philosophy manifestation of the communal movement, draws on the political-philosophy manifestation through Weber, as Troeltsch, belonging to the cultural studies manifestation, does (as above).

Generalizing Wittgenstein’s argument against private language, Winch argues that rule-constituted behavior in society is behavior within a public context. “I can only be committed in the future by what I do now if my present act is the application of a rule” (p. 50). “It is only in a situation in which it makes sense to suppose that somebody else could in principle discover the rule which I am following that I can intelligibly be said to follow a rule at all” (p. 30). If a person is following a rule then “one can ask whether he is doing what he does correctly or not. … That is, if I make a mistake in, say, my use of a word, other people must be able to point it out to me. If this is not so, I can do what I like and there is no external check on what I do; that is, nothing is established. Establishing a standard is not an activity which it makes sense to ascribe to any individual in complete isolation from other individuals” (p. 32).

Winch also generalizes the language philosophy principle that some expectation of truthfulness is needed to make language useful. He speaks of “integrity, which is to human institutions generally what truthfulness is to the institution of language. There are important formal analogies between language and other social institutions; for to act in the context of a social institution is always to commit oneself in some way for the future …. To lack integrity is to act with the appearance of fulfilling a certain role but without the intention of shouldering the responsibilities to which the role commits one. If that, per absurdum, were to become the rule, the whole concept of a social role would thereby collapse.”^{68}

With Winch the insights which underlie Wittgenstein’s language philosophy are extended—actually, reextended—from language to all social institutions. Wittgenstein and Winch offer a philosophy-of-language manifestation of the communal perspective based on the concept “form of life” comparable in scope to the two previously presented political-philosophy and philosophy-of-history manifestations.^{69}

The complementary relation between the constitutive rules of language and the rule-constituted behavior they make possible is further developed and schematized in speech-act theory, developed by John Austin and early John Searle.

68Winch, Ethics and Action (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972) 70.

69Approximately these three versions of the communal movement, the political-philosophy, philosophy-of-history, and language-philosophy manifestations, are the “three faces” in Roy J. Howard’s Three Faces of Hermeneutics: An Introduction to Current Theories of Understanding (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).

Austin, in his book with the manifesto-like title How to Do Things with Words,^{70} claims that the making of an assertion is as much doing something as is the making of a promise, the issuing of an order, or the asking of a question. He gives the name illocutionary force to the aspect of the utterance that indicates the social function, such as assertive force, interrogative force, and so forth. Searle classifies illocutionary acts into five types: assertives, which commit the speaker to the truth of the propositional content of the utterance; directives, attempts by the speaker to get the hearer to do something (commands, requests, questions); commissives, which commit the speaker to some future course of action (promises, bets, threats); expressives, expressions of psychological states about presumed states of affairs (apologies, thanks, congratulations); and declaratives, which bring about a correspondence between the propositional content and the world solely by means of the speech act itself (“I resign,” “I take you as wife,” “I confer the degree of …”)^{71} Such classification schemes, shunned by Wittgenstein, are used by Austin and Searle as generic tools within an overall corporate philosophy of language.

Searle also systematizes language’s constitutive rules more than Wittgenstein does. The constitutive rules for a game, baseball for instance, are not rules for good playing but give the game its very existence as a game. Without the rules defining “strike,” “run,” and “out,” there would not be a game of baseball. The same is true of the constitutive rules of language. In Speech Acts^{72} (1969) Searle gives the constitutive rules for promises, for example, as follows. If a speaker is to promise to a hearer that he will do something, then (1) the propositional content of the utterance must be that he will do the something (propositional rule), (2) a promise is uttered only if the hearer would prefer that the speaker do it, and the speaker believes that the hearer would prefer it (otherwise it is not a promise but an assertion or a threat), (3) a promise is uttered only if it is not obvious to both speaker and hearer that the speaker will do it anyway (2 and 3 are preparatory rules), (4) a promise is uttered only if the speaker intends to do it (sincerity rule), and (5) the utterance of a promise counts as the undertaking of an obligation to do it (the essential rule) (p. 63).

In Wittgenstein, Austin, and Searle, meaning is carried by illocutionary force as well as propositional content. An assertion is not merely a linguistic representation of a thought in the speaker; rather through it the speaker makes a public commitment to the truth of the propositional content by telling the hearer that it is true. This conception of language transcends the first-person perspective of modern rationalism and empiricism.

70John Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962).

71John Searle, “A Classification of Illocutionary Acts,” in Keith Gunderson and Grover Maxwell, eds., Minnesota Studies in Philosophy of Science 6 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1975).

72Searle, Speech Acts (London: Cambridge University Press, 1969).

According to Searle language creates institutional facts. He says “Any newspaper records facts of the following sorts: Mr Smith married Miss Jones; the Dodgers beat the Giants three to two in eleven innings; Green was convicted of larceny; and Congress passed the Appropriations Bill. … Such facts … I propose to call institutional facts. They are indeed facts; but their existence, unlike the existence of brute facts, presupposes the existence of certain human institutions. … These ‘institutions’ are systems of constitutive rules” (p. 51). Searle skirts the question whether all facts are institutional, as Heidegger above, and post-critical philosophy of science below, hold. Searle claims institutional facts are paradigmatic for language. Language, like marriage, baseball, and law, is an institution. The obligation created by making a promise is as much an institutional fact as being married or having won a ball game, and its existence depends on the system of constitutive rules for promises (1) to (5) above. This claim relativizes the distinction between commissives and declaratives, and ultimately among all Searle’s five types of illocutionary act. It restates Wittgenstein’s core point: the meaning of an expression is its use in communal interaction.

Searle engaged in a published exchange with linguist Noam Chomsky, who works within the modern perspective. Searle began the interchange by saying “The purpose of language is communication in much the same sense that the purpose of the heart is to pump blood. In both cases it is possible to study the structure independently of function but pointless and perverse to do so, since structure and function so obviously interact.” This “failure to see the essential connection between language and communication, between meaning and speech acts” is the greatest “defect of the Chomskyan theory.”^{73}

Chomsky’s answer treats the issue as “the object of inquiry” in the chapter of that title in Reflections on Language.^{74} He counters with two arguments: (a) Language is a mental organ, analogous to a physical organ like the heart (pp. 36-38). The structure of neither the language organ nor the heart is determined by its use, although if either had been too dysfunctional the evolutionary development might have been aborted (p. 57f). Hence our primary concern should be the study of its structure, not its use. And (b), language is essentially a system for expression of thought (pp. 60-64). From both of these arguments Chomsky concludes that there is not the essential connection Searle claims between language and communication, between meaning and speech acts.

Both of Chomsky’s arguments are implicit restatements of the first-person perspective’s blindness to any internal relation between individual and social world. Chomsky’s second argument, replacing Searle’s study of the use of language for communication with a study of its use for representation, is moot if one accepts his first argument for studying its structure rather than its use. The two arguments together portray language as expression of individual thought rather than prosecution of corporate relations in society, which fits Chomsky’s generic linguistic program, investigating the constraints on grammar placed by the structure of the individual mind. Chomsky does not see the “language organ” as an organ of society; he sidesteps Wittgenstein’s argument against private language. The two programs fit the respective modern or communal interests of their authors.^{75}

73Searle, “Chomsky’s Revolution in Linguistics,” New York Review of Books, June 29, 1972.

74Noam Chomsky, Reflections on Language (New York: Pantheon Books, 1975), chapter 2.

Searle abandoned Wittgenstein in 1974,^{76} limiting the term “meaning” to apply only to representation, using the term “communication” where he had used “meaning” before to include both representation and the speaker’s intention that the hearer recognize the speaker’s meaning intention, and, also, renaming his school of language philosophy from “institutional” to “intentional.”^{77} His subsequent work belongs to the modern perspective.

4 Remodernizing communal political philosophy: Jürgen Habermas

Before going on to the remaining manifestation of the communal movement, we return as promised to Jürgen Habermas in the political philosophy manifestation.

Habermas as political philosopher inherited a critical theory tradition, starting with Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, made historical by Hegel, made concrete by Marx, and renewed in the years 1923-1973 by Frankfurt Marxist scholars Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse, who sought to recover Marx’s communal perspective lost in Marxism, and to fit it to twentieth century circumstances. It will emerge that Habermas progressively also abandoned Marx’s communal base. He is example of the many failed attempts to bring the communal perspective within the bounds of the modern movement.

Critical theory is a theory on the way the human community reflects on its own formation in order to further that formation. Habermas presents his first version of critical theory in Knowledge and Human Interests (1968).^{78}

75Ironically, the interests of Chomsky and Searle in their personae as speakers and writers on social and political issues are nearly the reverse of this.

76Searle, “Meaning, Communication, and Representation,” typescript of paper delivered at the University of Hamburg in 1974.

77“Institutional” in Speech Acts 71, “intentional,” in “Meaning, Communication, and Representation” 25.

78Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests (Boston: Beacon, 1971).

Habermas says critical theory provides an epistemological basis for knowledge. We never know anything disinterestedly or merely theoretically, rather knowledge is internally related to communal interest. There are three underlying knowledge-constitutive interests, the instrumental, the practical, and, most fundamentally, the emancipatory (pp. 191-197). The instrumental interest, pursued through empirical-analytic inquiry, aims at producing technically exploitable knowledge. The practical interest, pursued through historical-hermeneutic inquiry, aims at maintaining action-orienting communicatively accomplished mutual understanding, both synchronic and diachronic. The emancipatory interest, pursued through critical inquiry, aims at liberation from systematic communicative distortion, ideology, illusion, false consciousness, and whatever else blocks the coming of age of society, to reach a maturity or autonomy-and-responsibility in which the members interact without domination. The emancipatory interest is basic; the other two emerge out of it as necessary specifications of it when the community interacts with the material world (instrumental interest) or internally with itself (historical-hermeneutic interest).

The instrumental and hermeneutic interests are drawn out of C. S. Peirce and Dilthey. From Peirce (treated below) Habermas draws out technical interest as the epistemological basis for instrumental enquiry, and also the intersubjective character of empirical science requiring both historical-hermeneutic and instrumental action. From Dilthey (treated above) he draws out the mutual understanding mediated by language as basis for the historical-hermeneutic enquiry.

The emancipatory interest in autonomy-and-responsibility he draws from Kant’s essay “What is Enlightenment?” and with it critical enquiry from Kant’s three critiques as the means to accomplish it. From Hegel he draws out the corporate nature of critical self-reflection. He rejects a supposed Hegelian convergence to an a priori absolute truth as inconsistent with its corporate circular nature (p. 10), and holds rather to the more flexible goal of an emancipation that can take various forms under different circumstances. From Marx he draws out the concretization of the instrumental and practical interests in cooperative labor. For Habermas as for Marx, technical progress may open the possibility of reducing socially necessary repression; thus the instrumental interest serves the emancipatory interest. He also takes from Marx the concretization of the blockages to autonomy-and-responsibility as false consciousness caused by forces of exploitation, and the need of a critical social theory to reveal them and thus raise the consciousness of society. Habermas will later have to yield to critics on this joining of generic Kantian and corporate Marxian critical theories of emancipation.

From Freud he takes psychoanalytic repression as analogue of distorted communication caused by institutionalized power blocking resolution of conflicts and coming of age. He also takes from Freud the view that civilization consists not solely in maintaining technical means for survival but also coercive and ideological means for enforcing cooperation.

How communal is Habermas? Emancipation remains the basic interest, with historical-hermeneutic interest only a particularization of it in dealing with community. Missing is Marx’s claim that “human essence” is “the ensemble of the social relations,” that emancipation is opportunity for the individual to “cultivate his gifts” in creative communal “self-activity” rather than belonging “only as average” or generic individual. In Habermas the emancipatory interest is not the same as in Marx. In Marx it includes the instrumental interest, and it is the historical-hermeneutic interest, whereas in Habermas the emancipatory interest is a critical interest based on explicit reflection and consensus, after Kant and the Enlightenment. And Marx and Habermas also differ on historical-hermeneutic interest; with Habermas it is mutual understanding after Dilthey, not internal relation as in Marx and Gadamer, thus is inadequate to change the other two interests through interaction.

In a public exchange with Gadamer,^{79} Habermas objects to Gadamer’s giving the hermeneutic interest primacy over the other two interests, especially the critical interest. Habermas says if a society understands itself in the context of a systematically communicatively distorted tradition (an ideology), then the distortion will be continued indefinitely unless there is some critical emancipatory interest to direct the hermeneutic enterprise toward autonomy and responsibility.

Gadamer responds to Habermas’ critique in “On the Scope and Function of Hermeneutical Reflection.”^{80} He acknowledges common ground with Habermas, but nevertheless makes the following points. (a) The interpretation of the present which is available through the application of the tradition is the only absolute in the sense that the community cannot get outside of it. The instrumental and emancipatory interests are human interests, hence cannot have an a priori status outside this hermeneutic whole. (b) Interpretation itself leads to emancipation from rigidified prejudices, as the fore-structures that make understanding possible are always modified by the fusion of horizons during the understanding. “This is something that hermeneutical reflection teaches us: that social community, with all its tensions and disruptions, ever and ever again leads back to a common area of social understanding through which it exists” (p. 42). (c) Because of the finitude of human existence and the particularity of reflection, a society cannot base every understanding on explicit reflection and consensus (p. 34). (d) And explicit consensus does not guarantee shared meaning “precisely because meaning can be expressed even where it is not actually intended” (p. 30). Together (c) and (d) imply merging of horizons is not the same thing as an understanding defined by explicit consensus; rather it is a working relation which each side can interpret as communally effective (as exemplified above by my relation with my cat). Consensus is a generic rather than communal concept.

79“Summation and Response” to Gadamer’s “On the Scope and Function of Hermeneutical Reflection,” Continuum 8 (1970) 123-133; also “A Review of Gadamer’s Truth and Method, ” in Fred R.

Dallmayr and Thomas A. McCarthy, eds., Understanding and Social Inquiry (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977) 335-363.

80In Continuum 8 (1970) 77-95, reprinted in Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1976), pp. 18-43. Pagination is for Philosophical Hermeneutics.

(e) The analogy drawn by Habermas between emancipation of society and psychoanalytic emancipation of the individual is improper, since the analyst, acting as a professional, influences the patient from outside the mutual interpretive relationship between them. “But what happens when he uses the same kind of reflection … [when] he is not the doctor but a partner in a game?” The psychoanalytic power “must be given its boundaries through the societal context and consciousness, within which the analyst and also his patient are on even terms with everybody else. … Most fundamentally: Over against what self-interpretation of the social consciousness (and all morality is such) is it in place to inquire behind that consciousness—and when is it not?” (p. 41f).

(f) An a priori emancipatory reflection, independent of the existing social relationships of understanding, is anti-authoritarian and ultimately anarchistic, rejecting authority as well as power. “The basically emancipatory consciousness must have in mind the dissolution of all authority, all obedience” (p. 42). “I cannot accept … that reason and authority are abstract antitheses, as the emancipatory Enlightenment did. Rather … they stand in a basically ambivalent relation, a relation I think should be explored” hermeneutically (p. 33). (g) If the scientific method associated with the instrumental interest, and the a priori critical reflection associated with the emancipatory interest, fall outside of interpretation and the merging of horizons then they themselves become “a hermeneutically false consciousness, the antidote for which can only be a more universal hermeneutical reflection” (p. 42).

In 1970 critics complained that Enlightenment transcendental critical reflection and Marxian (or Freudian) critical self-reflection, which appear to be synthesized in Knowledge and Human Interests, are too distinct to be unified.^{81} The first is theoretical reflection on the conditions for generic human knowledge, whereas the second is selfreflection by a particular corporate (or single) body in the effort to eliminate particular communal (or single) self-deceptions. Habermas admitted this confusion in 1975,^{82} abandoned the latter, and declared himself for the generic former, in the modified form of rational reconstruction of pragmatics, presented in “What is Universal Pragmatics?” (1976).^{83}

81Karl-Otto Apel, “Wissenschaft als Emanzipation? Eine Kritische Würdigung der Wissenschaftskonzeption der ‘Kritischen Theorie,’” in Zeitschrift fur allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 1 (1970) 173-195; Dietrich Böhler, “Zum problem des emanzipatorischen Interesses und seiner gesellschaftlichen Wahrnehmung,” Man and World 3.2 (1970), 26-53; Thomas McCarthy, The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1978) 94-110.

Pragmatics is the study of the use of language in utterances. Habermas’ “rational reconstruction of pragmatic competence” is an a posteriori reconstruction of already existing cross-cultural pre-theoretical “intuitive” rules used by the generic individual to express meaning (analogous to competence in grammar). It is based on two analogies, one with Kant’s generic transcendental reconstruction of how the individual understands the empirical world, and the other with Searle’s constitutive rules for communicating meaning.

With the first analogy Habermas replaces Kant’s transcendental reconstruction of individual understanding with empirical reconstruction of individual language competence. For the second analogy, he changes Searle’s constitutive rules for communicating to rules for expressing oneself, and reduces them to three, those relating a speaker with the external world, the social world, and the inner world, He makes the first two correspond to technical interest and hermeneutic interest, but the critical emancipatory interest includes all three; it now appears as generic language competence in the individual. Habermas says “What raises us out of nature is the only thing whose nature we can know: language. Through its structure, autonomy and responsibility are posited for us. Our first sentence expresses unequivocally the intention of universal and unconstrained consensus.”^{84} But, we note, consensus is generic agreement, just the opposite of the difference needed for creative communal interaction.

Habermas concedes that “the model of transcendental philosophy undeniably suggests itself,” but he distinguishes his pragmatic competence from Kantian transcendental philosophy in two ways. (a) In the present system utterances are generated, whereas in the Kantian system experiences are constituted (‘how one speaks’ in place of ‘how one knows’). (b) In the present system the reconstruction in systematic form of the a priori rule consciousness of competent speakers is a posteriori, rather than being justified by a transcendental critical reflection (‘rational reconstruction of how one speaks’ in place of ‘rational reconstruction of how one knows’).^{85}

Habermas, starting with Enlightenment emancipation, sidesteps Kant’s generic a priori transcendental understanding by substituting an a posteriori study of generic pragmatic competence, in order to reach an a posteriori emancipatory interest outside the historical-hermeneutic whole seen by Marx, Gadamer, and Wittgenstein as inclusive of all interest, and found language-wise by the latter two in communal language use rather than generic language competence. The disagreement reflects the difference between the Enlightenment emancipatory goal, freedom from restraint, and the communal emancipatory goal, interacting with differently competent others.

82Habermas, “A Postscript to Knowledge and Human Interests,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 3 (1975) 182; also Theory and Practice (Boston: Beacon, 1973) 22.

83“What is Universal Pragmatics?”, in Communication and the Evolution of Society (Boston: Beacon, 1979).

84Frankfurt University 1965 inaugural lecture, Knowledge and Human Interests, appendix, 314.

85“What is Universal Pragmatics?” 23-25.

5 Post-critical philosophy of natural science: Charles S. Peirce and Imre Lakatos

In 1869 the natural scientist Charles Sanders Peirce leveled a devastating communal attack on Descartes, “the father of modern philosophy” in four points (5.264):^{86}

(1) “We cannot begin with complete doubt. We must begin with all the prejudices which we actually have when we enter upon the study of philosophy” (5.265).

(2) “To make single individuals absolute judges of truth is most pernicious. … We individually cannot reasonably hope to attain the ultimate philosophy which we pursue; we can only seek it, therefore, for the community of philosophers” (5.265).

(3) Against Descartes’ single deductive chain “in the mode of the geometers,” he says “Philosophy ought … to trust rather to the multitude and variety of its arguments than to the conclusiveness of any one. Its reasoning should not form a chain which is no stronger than its weakest link, but a cable whose fibres may be ever so slender, provided they are sufficiently numerous and intimately connected” (5.265).

(4) “Scholasticism … undertook to explain all created things. But there are many facts which Cartesianism not only does not explain, but renders absolutely inexplicable” (5.264).

These claims attack not only Cartesian rationalism but Kantian transcendental epistemology as well. Whereas Kant claimed that different individuals learn the same things through their similar filters, their modes of perception and categories of thought, Peirce claims that knowledge belongs to the community, that it builds on previous community knowledge through the interaction of scholars who do not all know the same thing. “In storming the stronghold of truth one mounts upon the shoulders of another who has to ordinary apprehension failed, but has in truth succeeded by virtue of the lessons of his failure” (7.51).

Peirce founded the American pragmatic school, defining pragmatism thus: “Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object” (5.402). This definition says that all meaning is practical; it eliminates the distinction between theoretical and practical reason. Peirce says “The whole function of thought is to produce habits of action. … There is no distinction of meaning so fine as to consist in anything but a possible difference of practice” (5.400).

86References are to volume and paragraph numbers in Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1931-1958).

American communal pragmatism, including Peirce, John Dewey, and George Herbert Mead (but not generic pragmatist William James), provides a foundation for subsequent post-critical philosophers of natural science Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, and Imre Lakatos.

In “Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes”^{87} (1970) Lakatos traces the history of the philosophy of science from the pre-Enlightenment view that science proves facts, through Popper’s view of science as a series of generalizing conjectures corrected by discovery of counterexamples, and Kuhn’s view of revolutionary introduction of new scientific paradigms, to his own view of science as a collection of research programs, each program consisting of cooperative contributions over many years from many scientists. Such a research program begins with the construction of a theory which agrees with as many observed facts as can be managed, in full knowledge that the first version will have many counterexamples. The counterexamples do not refute the theory, they spur on the search for adjustments that will make for a wider fit between theory and observation. The successful programs are those which not only continue to improve the fit with observed data but also predict previously unimagined facts (pp. 47-52). Two examples: the theory of gravitation when first worked out for several moving objects in space disagreed with the orbits of the known planets, thus predicting the location of another previously unobserved planet. The theory of relativity successfully predicted a previously unimagined change in the apparent positions of stars near the sun during an eclipse (p. 39). Successful programs discover new facts, not merely explain old ones.

There is no sharp boundary between observation and theory. Galileo “observed” mountains on the moon with his telescope, but the theory of lenses was too new to win against Aristotle’s theory that the moon was a faultless crystal ball (p. 14). More recently some have questioned the theory of radio telescopes used to locate astronomical bodies. In 1815 W. Prout claimed that the atomic weights of all pure elements are whole numbers, knowing full well that anomalies existed, such as chlorine’s atomic weight of 35.5. When the theory of pure samples was changed a century later to include centrifugal as well as chemical separation, the large-scale anomalies disappeared (pp. 43, 53f).

87Imre Lakatos, The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978) 8-101.

Lakatos differentiates between passivist, conservative activist, and revolutionary activist theories of knowledge. “‘Passivists’ hold that true knowledge is Nature’s imprint on a perfectly inert mind: mental activity can only result in bias and distortion. The most influential passivist school is classical empiricism. Now conservative ‘activists’ hold that we are born with our basic expectations; with them we turn the world into ‘our world’ but must then live for ever in the prison of our world. The idea that we live and die in the prison of our ‘conceptual framework’ was developed primarily by Kant: pessimistic Kantians thought that the real world is for ever unknowable because of this prison, while optimistic Kantians thought that God created our conceptual framework to fit the world. But revolutionary activists believe that the conceptual frameworks can be developed and also replaced by new better ones; it is we who create our ‘prisons’ and we can also, critically, demolish them” (p. 20). Lakatos is claiming that our experience with the world we live in is active as well as passive, that it is always moving forward through a creative internal circular relation between our conceptual frameworks and that experience, constantly changing each other.

CONCLUSIONS

At the Enlightenment, Renaissance entrepreneurial pressure broke the hegemony of the classical philosophy of cosmological control with an anthropologically oriented modern philosophy torn between generic control and solipsistic or existential independence of the self. The Romantic movement staged a second revolt against the Enlightenment, out of which a succession of early innovators, Hobbes, Rousseau, Dilthey, Troeltsch, Heidegger, Frege, built early steps leading to but not reaching a communal orientation. Hegel followed with a solution for romantic longings by introducing bilaterally intrinsic relation. Marx expressed it in practical rather than theoretical terms. Kierkegaard rejected both intrinsic relation and the cosmological control still implicit in Hegel. Early Heidegger combined removal of cosmological control with development of a bilaterally internal ready-to-hand relation between the single human being and things, thus reducing Kant’s theoretical reason to a truncation of practical reason. Gadamer extended that ready-to-hand relation to human relations, forming an internally interrelating human community. He initially, and Wittgenstein definitively, showed language and other symbolic action as the basic means for the bilaterally intrinsic relation that constitutes corporate community.

Where did this new movement come from? All these philosophers understood their work as steps in the continuing development of European philosophy. None of them claimed any source outside the western tradition, and all of them ignored the corporately oriented Old Testament which had enjoyed formal canonical status in Europe until the Enlightenment, even though Hegel, Heidegger, Gadamer, and Kierkegaard all had academic theological training. Marx, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger went so far as to imply that the church suppressed the possibility of even an approach toward the reforms they favored and only with the loss of Christian cultural hegemony would it be a possibility. The communal perspective’s development as a counter force to both Christianity and Enlightenment implies that the corporate perspective of the Bible had been hidden by a lack of overlap of biblical and western horizons since the introduction of Christianity into the West. Did grass-roots popular Christianity and dispersion Judaism, both below the western academic world’s line-of-sight, have an influence? If so, it was not recognized by the scholars.

But there is an obvious influence in the opposite direction. A next project, not done here, would be to show how recent western Christian theologians, aided by communally oriented secular philosophy, are beginning to rediscover the corporate biblical perspective. The Romantic turn away from the Enlightenment made possible the midnineteenth century advocacies of bilaterally internal synchronic relations by church historian Johann Adam Möhler^{88} and diachronic relations by John Henry Newman.^{89} And more recent communally influenced critical study of the Bible by pioneers like Hermann Gunkel,^{90} Walther Eichrodt,^{91} and C. H. Dodd^{92} facilitated the more fully developed explicitly corporate perspectives of Christian theologians such as Johannes B. Metz,^{93} Gustavo Gutiérrez,^{94} Juan Luis Segundo,^{95} and Louis-Marie Chauvet.^{96}

88Johann Adam Möhler, Symbolism (1832) (New York: Crossroad, 1997).

89John Henry Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (London: J. Toovey, 1845).

90Hermann Gunkel, Einleitung in die Psalmen (Göttingen, 1933).

91Walther Eichrodt, Theology of the Old Testament (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1961-1967).

92C. H. Dodd, According to the Scriptures (London: Nisbet, 1952).

93Johannes B. Metz, Faith in History and Society: Toward a Practical Fundamental Theology (New York: Crossroad, 1980).

94Gustavo Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1973)

95Juan Luis Segundo, Liberation of Theology (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1976).

96Louis-Marie Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1995) p. 142, note.