A Very Odd Piece of Philosophy:
Professor of philosophy J. M. Bernstein tries to grasp the Tea Party. He's quite alarmed by us, but I don't think he really grasps the thing. Most likely the problem is that he's a fan of Hegel.
Tea Party anger is, at bottom, metaphysical, not political: what has been undone by the economic crisis is the belief that each individual is metaphysically self-sufficient, that one’s very standing and being as a rational agent owes nothing to other individuals or institutions. The opposing metaphysical claim, the one I take to be true, is that the very idea of the autonomous subject is an institution, an artifact created by the practices of modern life: the intimate family, the market economy, the liberal state. Each of these social arrangements articulate and express the value and the authority of the individual; they give to the individual a standing she would not have without them....
All the heavy lifting in Hegel’s account turns on revealing how human subjectivity only emerges through intersubjective relations, and hence how practices of independence, of freedom and autonomy, are held in place and made possible by complementary structures of dependence. At one point in his “Philosophy of Right,” Hegel suggests love or friendship as models of freedom through recognition. In love I regard you as of such value and importance that I spontaneously set aside my egoistic desires and interests and align them with yours: your ends are my desires, I desire that you flourish, and when you flourish I do, too. In love, I experience you not as a limit or restriction on my freedom, but as what makes it possible: I can only be truly free and so truly independent in being harmoniously joined with you; we each recognize the other as endowing our life with meaning and value, with living freedom. Hegel’s phrase for this felicitous state is “to be with oneself in the other.”
Hegel’s thesis is that all social life is structurally akin to the conditions of love and friendship; we are all bound to one another as firmly as lovers are, with the terrible reminder that the ways of love are harsh, unpredictable and changeable. And here is the source of the great anger: because you are the source of my being, when our love goes bad I am suddenly, absolutely dependent on someone for whom I no longer count and who I no longer know how to count; I am exposed, vulnerable, needy, unanchored and without resource. In fury, I lash out, I deny that you are my end and my satisfaction, in rage I claim that I can manage without you, that I can be a full person, free and self-moving, without you. I am everything and you are nothing.
Now, I shouldn't critique a Hegelian reading of anything, because I simply detest German Idealism. The whole field is nothing but
indoor philosophy. My guess is that Dr. Bernstein is a specialist in Hegel, and probably has more insight into his work than I do.
Still, this is a reading of Hegel that is at odds with what I had understood him to be saying. Hegel rarely seemed to want you to set anything aside. His usual method was to argue for X, and then say that X is contradicted by Y, and that we must therefore have synthesis Z: but that X and Y and Z are all completely true, and continue to hold individually.
For example, consider a girl raised by an emotionally abusive mother. Our girl is dependent on the mother for her life and her identity, and learns to serve the mother. In time, though, she grows up and becomes capable of independence. She moves away, gets a job, supports herself. For a time, she cuts off communication with her mother. So now you have two ideas in conflict: what it is to be dependent, and what it is to be independent.
Now let us say that the girl, in having spent her early life in service to her mother, developed a sense of sympathy and pity for her mother. As an independent woman, she wants to remain involved in her mother's life; she wants to continue to have that social interaction, that sense of love that comes from family. However, she is no longer willing to be manipulated and abused.
Her independence is not set aside in order to create this new situation of neither-independent-nor-dependent. Rather, independence is a necessary condition for her being able to relate to her mother in a better way. The third way, the synthesis, relies on the existence of both of the original concepts. None of them 'go away': she must hold in her mind the bad aspects of dependence, and the beneficial pity that it engendered in her; the strength of independence, but also the sense of missing her mother; and only then can she manage the synthesis. The synthesis does not replace the earlier conditions, but bridges them, much as an actual bridge connects two cliffs. Remove either cliff, and the bridge falls.
If you want to insist on a Hegelian reading of the Tea Party movement, surely the way to read it would be that way: that it is a reaction against a destabilization of the synthesis by undermining the independence "cliff." The synthesis can't stand if we are no longer able to be independent: so we lose both the happy synthesis of an ordered communion with our fellow citizens, and the possibility of independence. All that remains is dependency.
Of course, as someone who wasn't that impressed with Hegel to begin with, I obviously wouldn't attempt to craft such a reading. The fact is that the good doctor is not right to say that "In truth, there is nothing that the Tea Party movement wants; terrifyingly, it wants
nothing."
Of course we want something. What we want is the Constitution. Liberty by law. A space for the individual, so that he can choose to serve (or not): and then, if he does, he is a free knight lending his sword to the Republic, not a slave forced to render obedience and tribute. That's a
metaphysical dispute only insofar as metaphysics includes aesthetics: which it very well may, given our recent discussions about the standing of
the True and the Beautiful.
