Western History can often be best understood as the slow inversion of Plato. The history of culture is a history of changing class structure, beginning with the Platonic understanding of a tripartite division of class into the Reasoning, Spirited, and Appetitive classes.
The industrial revolution brought about hopes of a complete inversion of the hierarchy outlined in Plato's Republic. Communists dreamed of a world in which the class of producers would rule, eliminating the need for class division all together, uniting the world into a single global community of cooperative workers.
Such a dream would not come to pass. Instead, technology has allowed for a much stranger inversion of the Platonic model. For the majority of western history since Plato, a vast underclass has been responsible for the acquisition of raw materials from the earth, the processing of those materials into workable mediums, and the production of goods of consumption for a smaller middle class of educators, lawyers, doctors, managers and so on, who in turn followed the command of an elite class of the wealthy, who owned not just the means of production, but in fact the raw materials and the human beings would would operate on those natural resources.
We find ourselves in a time however, in which the acquisition, processing, and production of goods from raw materials is carried out more and more by machines. Oil refineries which once required a small army of well trained men to maintain operation are now operated entirely remotely, without a single human being on site. This change in the mode of production is in the process of obsolescing what had long been the primary mode of human existence. As a result, the middle class swells to unheard of proportions: the majority of American citizens are neither land-owners nor productive workforce, but a middle class of goods-users, consumers, a vast service class whose consumptive desires drive the machinery of industry indirectly. Those wealthy owners who must fight to the death of their rival corporations are at the mercy of the fickle wants of this vast middle class.
Rather than reason, we are now governed entirely by appetite. The type of power once wielded by the wealthy, for so long considered a divine right, handed down by God himself, has become instead an anxious rat race to keep enormous multi-national corporations afloat by catering to the whims of the middle class, whose ever growing sense of entitlement only solidifies their role as the massively unconscious, mostly mad dictator.
The middle class, divided against itself due to its plural culture, cut into a thousand and one compartments by the ever finer division of economic strata, drives the machine of capitalism forward without any guidance but want.
It is indeed the appetitive part of the soul that has come to rule, but it has not come to rule by an elimination of all class and a unification of the nations of the world, but instead by the sheer magnitude of the productive power unleashed by technologicla control of the material world.
We are still in the middle of this transition, of course. Countless human beings still work in factory positions that have yet to be overtaken by robotic workers, and our cultural understanding of the world is still largely shaped by the Platonic model. But it is no longer so easy for a few men in positions of great power to carry out their own wills on the people without fear of complete loss of the power they wield. Only by obeying the will of the masses, any of the many, so often contradictory wills of the many, can any man or woman in a position of power hope to remain in their privileged position. No longer can their be any myth of divine right handed down by God: power is given only by circumstance, and it is maintained only by moving with the flow of the unconscious consumer horde.
We can only expect this picture to become more clear as less and less of the confrontation between man and nature involves man at all. As technology takes over the role of the slave, it is desire that will shape our future, and it is then desire which must be shaped to determine the course of history.
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The creation of a desiring class, and of a technics of desire, is intelligible from within the internal logic of metaphysics and its technical or scientific unfurling. This history (or historicizing) of metaphysics could also be described as the negation of the negation of the body. The body of the earth. This occurs specifically in a way that does not result in a synthesis, but which seals the negation up within itself (negation incessantly delves into itself, attempting to reach bottom--chasing its tail) leaving the earth pristine. "Then death and Hell were thrown into the lake of fire. The lake of fire is the second death. "Has this new earth not been promised? It will be paradise, possessed of spiritual bodies.
ReplyDeleteThe history of metaphysics, as described by Heidegger, not only includes the immanentizing of truth, being, and the good, but also of the productive capacity. This productive capacity is exercised only derivatively or imitatively by us, and is the providence of the demiurge. this demiurge, being divine, sought to create a thing like himself; and so, out of matter,he created a perfect sphere, turning ever in a circle, and containing all motions of all the things within. It is this world spirit that reason partakes, moving in turn; the encompassing which is only spatial on the inside, turning to set things in order, radiating its motion down through the heavens. But on the outside, it is turned towards the deity, and flows into the idea.
This was made immanent. There is something in the platonic account of production (specifically, the production of the world by the demiurge, upon which all other production is ontologically dependent) that is left out; something that speaks only as an incomprehensible abyss, thwarting production through the resistance of sheer inertia. Matter always moved towards the abyssal center, distorting the design of the deity. The earth does not want to be set into any motion except down: it wants to clump together into a sphere not at the center, but at the periphery; and when it is set in motion, it does not want to be turned in a circle--it wants to continue on its trajectory indefinitely, rather that turning around in a wheel, until it is pulled back into the big ball. Aside from other than contrivances like the sail, circular motion is pretty much the only way we've figured out to direct motion for our ends; only by grinding on a resistance that is constantly feeding motion back into itself can we contain it and convert int into constants. motors still function this way, as do electric generators.
The sun is what sets the earth into motion: the clouds, and the growth of the soil. it is no myth, but the truth. The dream of reason is to rip itself out from between the two, and encompass them both, and make them turn according to its mind; to have appearances that hold out against them, appearing of their own accord. But this arises from the earth. The excited motion of technological civilization is just the expenditure of hundreds of millions of years of stored solar energy in the form of fossil fuels. So, in a sense, we haven't eliminated the energy requirements of production, we've just found ways of decentering more and more from the actions of the human body in interaction with the immediate biosphere. And instead transferred it into drawing massive amounts of stored solar energy into circles, which have the dual role of turning machines to do lifting , moving and assembling, in order to amplify the physical strength of select human bodies immensely; or, stripping off electrons and sending them down carefully planned channels to augment the memory and calculative power of brains, while also breaking down the barriers between brains in various ways.
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...But I believe the meek shall inherit the earth. the Tao Te Ching describes motion of the body of the earth. This way is described quite correctly as not consisting of magical or meditative practice, let alone monasticism. it is, rather, the peasant mode. This mode is the most durable of all; it outlasts everything, endures everything. It achieves the maximum of spread across the surface of the earth, the maximum density--nothing wasted--allowable by the the solar radiation of the earth, without relying on excess. Someday the excess will collapse in on itself, and the peasant will still remain.
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