On Critical Universality and the Discipline of Universics
Mikhail Epstein
1. Intellectuals and Universality
The twentieth World Philosophical Congress in Boston (1998), the last in the twentieth century, was symbolically titled "Paideia," which in Greek means "harmonic development." Its slogan was "Philosophy as an instrument for educating humanity." By the end of the 20th century, however, philosophy lost the dignity of universal reason--the basis of its self-esteem--that is necessary for teaching and educating. The contemporary philosopher is less like an exhorting preacher than a repentant sinner who does not believe huself[1] and is even less capable of securing the trust of non-philosophers. Western philosophy feels obliged to disavow its former claims to universality and such related concepts as humankind, truth, and objectivity. The very concept of "humanity as a collective (universal) subject" (Lyotard, 1996, p.503) has become suspicious and irrelevant in the postmodern age that prefers to define culture in terms of ethnicity and gender. However, this anti-universalist stance is dangerous in that it could be easily co-opted for the opposite cause. If universality is a fiction, then there is no limitation on the power of any particular group to expand its intellectual and political dominance at the expense of others.
"Away with objectivity and long live solidarity." This neo-pragmatic approach, formulated by Richard Rorty, is characteristic of many trends in contemporary Western thought. But if solidarity were the criterion of truth or rather a substitution for truth, then what would be the role of Socratic reflection and debate in contemporary society? What would have been the role of philosophy in a totalitarian society where solidarity clearly triumphed over truth? The fact that all people are in solidarity about something does not make their opinion automatically true. We know too well from the lessons of the 20th century that collective madness and even national madness are possible. By sacrificing the categories of truth and universality, philosophy renounces its critical role in the society; it stops being Socratic and becomes an ideology that serves the interests of the majorities or minorities involved in the struggle for the positions of power.
Michel Foucault has expressed his anti-universalist stance in the most resolute terms (1996):
It seems to me that what must now be taken into account in the intellectual is not the 'bearer of universal values.' Rather, it's the person occupying a specific position--but whose specificity is linked, in a society like ours, to the general functioning of an apparatus of truth. In other words, the intellectual has a three-fold specificity: that of his class position (whether as petty-bourgeois in the service of capitalism or 'organic' intellectual of the proletariat); that of his conditions of life and work, linked to his condition as an intellectual (his field of research, his place in a laboratory, the political and economic demands to which he submits or against which he rebels, in the university, the hospital, etc.); lastly, the specificity of the politics of truth in our societies. (p.380)
This suggests that the entire "three-fold specificity" of intellectuals is defined by their political roles. But is there anything specific for intellectuals in occupying a certain "class position"? What makes them different from mere "representatives" of a certain class? Are not intellectuals those who are capable to approach critically their own "class identities" and transcend the conditions of their life and work within a given society?
What makes intellectuals so valuable for society is precisely their trans-social mentality and imagination, the capacity to keep distance from those particular identities to which they belong by birth, by employment, by ethnic traditions. To use Mikhail Bakhtin's term, this is a position of being "beyond" (vnenakhodimost') that allows intellectuals to be critical about the existing conditions. Intellectuals who identify themselves completely with certain political attitudes turn out to be ideologists. In fact, Foucault's definitions apply not to intellectuals but to ideologists who identify themselves completely with certain social roles and use their reason in instrumental ways to promote a certain political agenda, class struggle, etc. The denial of universal values reduces reason to a pragmatic tool. How can an intellectual criticize the society if hu is completely defined by a certain social role? "It is impossible to live in a society and to be free from the society." This famous statement of Lenin has governed the repressive Soviet cultural policy for seven decades. But it is precisely the freedom from the society that enables intellectuals to be critical of this society.
The universal values shape the two most important responsibilities of an intellectual: first, to criticize any specific set of social rules and practices and, second, to reconcile those people who belong to different or opposing groups. Critique and reconciliation are two complementary aspects of universality, its forces of negation and affirmation. Universality is not something static and immutable; on the contrary, it represents the most explosive kind of intellectual energy. The universal is, in fact, the most critical and oppositional force that challenges all canons, both the established ones and those that aspire for dominance. Philosophy can be truly critical only if it refuses to identify itself with any particular social order or political interest and expresses the spirit of critical universality.
2. Universality against Totalitarianism
The contemporary refutation of the concept of universality emerged in response to the catastrophes of World War II, Soviet Communism and German Nazism. Surprisingly, the spirit of the Enlightenment was blamed for the outrageous acts of brutality and irrationality. Now we need to reexamine this alleged connection between the idea of universality and the crimes of fascism and communism. Postmodern critique of universality usually relied on the ideas of the Frankfurt school that Auschwitz and Kolyma are the historical consequences of the Enlightenment. But if we agree that the universals of "reason," "truth," and "knowledge" were indeed the offspring of the Enlightenment, then by no means can we blame the latter for the horrors of Communist or Nazi totalitarianism. How was universalism implicated in the fight of the proletariat against bourgeoisie and "non-class" morality and in the attack of Nazism against Jewish and "cosmopolitan" culture? The communist doctrine as practiced in totalitarian societies dramatically digressed from early Marx's universalist vision of the human species as a whole; as a politics of class struggle it was propagated in his later works, beginning with "The Communist Manifesto" (1848). The doctrines of class and national superiority have nothing to do with the idea of universality. Rather, these historical lessons prompt us to think about universality as the first and foremost victim of totalitarianism and invite us to be suspicious about any social, racial, and nationalist denunciations of universality.
The postmodern dismissal of universality under the pretext of the latter's complicity in the crimes of Nazism and Communism was a misunderstanding, a historical blindness of those European minds who had not experienced the reality of Communism or Nazism but learned about them second-handedly. What connection is there between Lenin, Stalin and the universal? None, except that some leftist Western intellectuals of the 1920s-1950s, such as Romain Rolland, Bernard Shaw, Leon Feuchtwanger, Alexandre Kojeve, Andre Breton and Frankfurt neo-Marxist thinkers saw something universal in Soviet Communism. Kojeve applied to Stalin the Hegelian vision of Napoleon as the concrete manifestation of the Absolute Spirit. The universal had to pay twice for the same mistake as European intellectuals only reversed its value sign from positive to negative. If in the past Stalin was praised as an embodiment of universality, now universality came to be condemned as associated with Stalinism. For the earlier generation of European intellectuals Communism and the so-called "Proletarian Internationalism" were justified by their connection to the Enlightenment; for the postmodern generation the Enlightenment is compromised by its connection with Communism and Fascism. But has there ever been any real connection between such obviously disparate world views? If we were to learn anything from the history of the 20th century totalitarianism and its ideological obsessions, it would be not the denunciation of universalism, but rather the need for its revival.
3. Universalism and Postmodern Pluralism
Postmodern pluralism asserted the intrinsic value of any existing culture and tradition. Who and on which grounds is entitled to judge and discriminate? Is there any universal criterion of evaluation? According to Jean François Lyotard, any consensus can be only local and partial and its language and values are "incommensurable" (Lyotard's preferred epithet) with the language and values of other discourses (1996):
Any consensus on the rules defining a game and the 'moves' playable within it must be local, in other words, agreed on by its present players and subject to eventual cancellation. The orientation then favors a multiplicity of finite meta-arguments, by which I mean argumentation that concerns meta-prescriptives and is limited in space and time. (p.504)
Lyotard finds that "consensus has become an outmoded and suspect value" (1996, p.504) and thus insists on its local and temporary limitations, on the plurality of consensuses.
If we accept this, then the next logical question would be how to achieve consensus among different consensuses. The question of universality does not disappear, but moves onto the next level, and will continue to move until all consensuses, all forms of rationality, all groups fall under some meta-consensus, some universal rules that would include an agreement to disagree peacefully.
Now, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, in the situation of growing globalization, we can see how utopian this idea of local consensuses was, which are blissfully isolated and do not transgress each other's borders. In contemporary world, interaction and mutual encroachment of various consensuses is inevitable, and one needs at least to have an agreement about the ways to disagree. Disagreement has its own essential value, but only in the case when it includes the rituals of negotiations and reconciliation. In other words, the right to disagree has to be recognized by all participants as a universal value.
The question of universality is relevant for the political dilemmas of the 21st century that emerge in the war between civilization and terror. Lyotard assumes that incommensurability of values and discourses should become a foundation for a new cultural order (1996):
A recognition of the heteromorphous nature of language games is a first step in that direction. This obviously implies a renunciation of terror, which assumed that they are isomorphic and tries to make them so. The second step is the principle that any consensus on the rules defining a game and the 'moves' playable within it must be local, in other words, agreed on by its present players and subject to eventual cancellation. (p.504)
It is instructive to note how in 1979 Lyotard conceptualizes terror, which, in our time, became the determining factor of political and everyday life. For Lyotard, terror is based on the assumption of isomorphic structure of social and cultural values. But the practice of terrorism demonstrates quite the opposite: the insistence on the incommensurable and irreconcilable. Now we have the evidence based on the experience that goes far beyond language games, that terror results not from isomorphism, but from heteromorphism, the idea of absolute heterogeneity and incommensurability of various cultures and religions. The idea that "consensus has become an outmoded and suspect value" does not help to renounce terrorism--in fact it encourages it.
We see that no localities remain isolated in the age of globalization. What becomes the principal issue today is how the "local consensus" achieved within a particular group, for example, militant Islamic fundamentalists or militant Basque separatists may come to metaconsensus with the varieties of consensus achieved within other ethnic, religious and political groups. Can we avoid metanarratives in our attempt to build this metaconsensus? The idea of local discourses, incommensurable and simultaneously peaceful, presents no less a utopian vision than the idea of absolutely homogeneous isomorphic world-state governed by the rules of pure reason. Incommensurable discourses can remain peaceful only in the state of blissful isolation, which can never be achieved in the increasingly globalized society and economy. It is only commensurability and translatability among discourses and values that may keep various groups peacefully negotiating their place and role in the global civilization.
We can accept Lyotard's defense of paralogy, the right to disagreement, but what needs affirmation today is not disagreement as such but the urgent need for all of us to agree about the ranges and consequences of our disagreement. It is the culture of consensus that includes the provisions for disagreement and dissent among the members of this binding convention. The lessons of postmodernism should in no way be forgotten or neglected; but they should be incorporated into a more broad, more tolerant, and simultaneously more demanding and responsible culture of agreement, culture of critical universality.
Jean-François Lyotard, in his famous critique of the Enlightenment and Modernity, pronounced that we have paid too high of a price for our nostalgia of the whole and universal. We shall not allow any metanarratives to impose on us their totalitarian logic.
Now with the growing danger of the world's disintegration along religious and cultural lines, it may be more appropriate to counteract this process with a statement like this: We have paid too high of a price for our nostalgia of fragments. We shall not allow the differences to blow up the world.
4. Apophatic, or Critical Universality
This raises again the issue of critical universality or, in this case, even self-critical universality. Every consensus, every heteromorphous discourse has to be critical about its own rules and abandon any hegemonic claims. It is not pride but rather humility that becomes the crucial ethical motive of new transcultural strategies.
The philosophy of the 21st century still has it as its task to elaborate the criteria of critical universality, in distinguishing it, first, from an old, pre-critical type of universality, and, second, from the critical attitudes of post-Kantian philosophy that undermined the value of universality. The universality of pre-critical, pre-Kantian epoch proceeded from the category of identity in two senses: first, self -identity of reason, allegedly possessing some immutable truths and, second, the identity of reason and reality, allegedly exemplifying transparent laws of reality open to cognition. The critical epoch following the Kantian revolution in philosophy has taught us to think in categories of difference and revealed the great diversity of historical, national, and ethnic reasons, or types of rationality. Also, it demonstrated the opaqueness of reality for rational comprehension.