Telos 196 (Fall 2021): Thinking vs. Doing

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The dichotomy of thinking versus doing seems to arise out of our own sense of the difference between our minds and our bodies. On the one hand, the gap between mind and body is the basis of the perspective with which the mind can step back, criticize, and improve the world. Without this gap, we would be trapped in an eternal present, unable to imagine anything but what currently exists. On the other hand, the dichotomy can lead to a sense of detachment from the world. Such detachment can be negative if it leads to an isolation from the world, or to a sense of alienation if the world is such that its influence on the body becomes oppressive for the mind. The opposition between thinking and doing directs our attention toward this fundamental gap between the mind and the body within the human condition that is the source of both all human achievement as well as human debasement. As we focus on thinking, our detachment from our actions can allow us to make judgments about the wisdom of our actions, but such detachment can also lead us to bury ourselves in contemplation and ignore our responsibilities for acting, or even allow us to act with a kind of cruel coldness in trying to realize an abstract idea. This issue of Telos considers such different possibilities for the way in which we relate our thinking to our actions.

Nir Evron analyzes Hannah Arendt’s attempt to find a way of integrating the life of the mind with action in the world in order to maintain a sense of morality. Arendt focuses on contemplation as the place where humans might be able to find access to a morality that could lead them to resist the pull of mass movements such as Nazism. Yet contemplation turns out to be shaky ground for morality to the extent that Arendt also follows Nietzsche and Heidegger in taking all philosophical truths to be crystallizations of initial metaphors that then gain solidity and literalness with habitual use. In reaction to this danger of cultural relativism, Arendt continues to pursue the Kantian attempt to see human thought as the basis of a universal moral sense. She ends up in a contradictory wavering between the focus on the metaphorical character of all human sense-making and a commitment to a common core of human thought. Evron concludes that it is impossible to retain contemplation as the common human basis of morality while also embracing a postmetaphysical stance toward truth.

Matthew Sharpe analyzes an aesthetic as opposed to a philosophical approach to contemplation in his discussion of the way in which Albert Camus combined political engagement with a commitment to a contemplative life in art. As opposed to Jean-Paul Sartre, Camus insisted on the continuing importance of beauty, even in the face of violence and suffering. Because art seeks to reduce the chaos of existence to a humanly graspable unity, the resulting attitude of contemplation becomes essential for determining the proper ends and methods of all human endeavor. Without such a contemplative effort, political action would undermine itself in an activity that loses track of the totality of human existence in relation to a turbulent world. In order to act responsibly, we must constantly engage in reflection about the ways in which our actions fit into the totality of human existence, including the realms of love, friendship, leisure, beauty, and grief. Such contemplation does not detract from our political engagement but rather allows us to pursue the largest possible framing of our actions and thereby endow them with meaning. In contrast to Arendt’s search for a universal grounding of morality in contemplation, Camus focuses on the aesthetic aspect of contemplation that allows us to construct a totality out of the chaos of the world. Camus does not imagine any moral universals. Instead, his turn to aesthetic contemplation focuses on embedding political action within a sense of the totality of human life.

Lillian Hingley links aesthetic contemplation to philosophical concepts by uncovering the way in which Theodor Adorno’s concept of nonidentity was initially developed through his analysis of the feminine character in the work of Henrik Ibsen. In linking the feminine character to the wound, Adorno takes this character to be a gauge of the violence of capitalist society. His literary analyses of the tragic situations of the female characters in Ibsen’s plays thus establish the basic structure of the idea of nonidentity. The wound that is at the basis of the feminine character is the mark and measure of the lack of identity between the capitalist social totality and the individual elements that this totality is supposed to encompass. Their tragedies on the one hand provide an implicit critique of the existing order and on the other hand through this critique awaken the desire for a just order. The focus of Ibsen’s plays on personal tragedies does not detract from political action but in fact makes it possible by illuminating a structure of nonidentity. By pointing to the alienation of the ideal from the real, the reflection on personal tragedy provides the mind with the representational resources to formulate a critique of an alienating reality.

Our series of three essays on Michel Foucault approaches the problem of thinking and doing by analyzing the structures of subjectivity that lead to different stances regarding our actions in the world. Linus Recht describes how Foucault assumes the historical contingency of all conceptions of the self. The lack of an underlying objective truth of the subject leads Foucault to develop an ethics based on a subject who is constantly becoming rather than a subject who is and would have a stable set of desires. Because there is no underlying ultimate truth of the subject, Foucault focuses on the constantly transforming play of pleasure and the body. His promotion of a dissolution of the unity of the subject allows him to advocate for a continual freedom of invention and creativity in the subject’s relation to its own happiness. In the end, Recht argues that Foucault’s ideal of constant becoming has been realized in the structure of continually mutating gratification that has been enabled by smartphone technology and social media, suggesting that what seems like invention might in fact be the subordination to market forces. The resulting new forms of subjectivity in social media may have realized Foucault’s ideal of the dynamics of pleasure in a way that does not seem to result in happiness. Against the Foucauldian ethics of becoming, Recht suggests that the unity and harmony of the subject may in fact be psychologically more important for happiness and individual fulfillment than continual invention and creativity.

Kyle Baasch also addresses the way in which Foucault’s insight into the historical contingency of the structure of subjectivity leads to his embrace of an ever-changing self. Foucault criticizes the Marxist reduction of human activity to labor power because it leads to a single normative conception of human happiness that becomes oppressive. In this conception, the real culprit is not the capitalist economic system, which enables the continuing self-invention of the subject, but state structures of control that enforce upon the subject a single notion of what it should be. If Recht describes the ways in which smartphones manifest this Foucauldian dissolution of subjectivity, Baasch’s discussion focuses on a longer history of how the culture industry dissolves subjectivity into a set of commodifiable desires, revealing the apparent action of the subject to be in fact a product of its subjugation. Baasch sets Foucault’s notion of pleasure in opposition to Adorno’s critique of the way in which individual happiness has been undermined by the economic context of consumer culture. Where Foucault sees the freedom of the subject, Adorno descries a commodification of the subject’s impulses that turns pleasure into a function of the economic system. Adorno describes a notion of happiness that takes its measure from his own personal experience as a heartbroken lover, who can only discern happiness as the negative image of his own suffering. Adorno’s notion of harmony is not the positive conception that Foucault criticizes. Instead, it can only be discerned negatively, through a contemplation of the factors that prevent such harmony from realizing itself in the world.

Hammam Aldouri discusses Gabriel Rockhill’s recent critique of the political import of Foucault’s thinking. Aldouri identifies three fallacies in Rockhill’s argument. First, Rockhill equates Foucault’s personal politics with the political meaning of his theories. Second, while Rockhill dismisses Foucault’s idea of the episteme for simply giving a new name to ideology, Aldouri points out that the two can be clearly distinguished based on Foucault’s claim that the episteme is not a kind of false idea (and thus ideology in a Marxist sense) but rather forms the underlying conceptual framework that makes possible a specific scientific discourse. Third, while Rockhill contests Foucault’s radicalism by arguing that Foucault is not Marxist, Aldouri responds that Rockhill does not provide a definition of Marxism or a clear sense of what radicalism would mean. Nevertheless, Rockhill’s work is productive to the extent that it points to the way in which academia has created a Foucault “brand.” Aldouri argues that a focus on the institutional pressures that have made this branding possible would be more productive than an analysis of Foucault’s work itself as the source of this phenomenon.

In two notes, Alison Milbank and Adrian Pabst describe how the increasing bureaucratization of the Church of England has been undermining the parish church system by centralizing parish assets and threatening to close down parish churches. Against this centralizing orientation, Milbank and Pabst argue for the importance of the parish church as a center of local life as well as for an orientation of religion around community concerns.

Such a consideration of the relationship between religiously held values and local life also provides the context for our special forum on Afghanistan. In recounting the litany of failures that have led to the U.S. defeat in Afghanistan, our commentators focus especially on the way in which the United States has betrayed its values in its actions in the Middle East. Tim Luke chronicles the way in which the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan was the end of a twenty-year series of questionable decisions by which the United States has determined its own fate in the region. Renaud Girard argues that the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan was both foolish and cowardly, demonstrating to the world a U.S. inability to live up to its commitments and an incapacity for strategic consistency, thus strengthening U.S. enemies all over the world. Russell Berman’s comment on Girard emphasizes both the humanitarian costs of the withdrawal and the reasons why the U.S. abandonment of its obligations in Afghanistan will lead to a weakening of U.S. influence as its allies in Asia and Europe begin to doubt U.S. credibility and possibly start dealing more with its enemies. Adrian Pabst describes both the U.S. occupation and the withdrawal from Afghanistan as part of a larger decline in the legitimacy of Western values and institutions. Adding to this lament about the hollowness of Western values, Mark G. E. Kelly argues that the U.S. failure in Afghanistan was unavoidable because a state can only be constituted by local, organic forces and the Taliban are the embodiment of such forces. As opposed to the Islamic faith that provides the unifying cultural basis for Afghan society, the U.S. occupation failed because the Western world is no longer based on values but only on “hedonism and money.” Jay Gupta by contrast argues that the lesson to be learned from the U.S. war in Afghanistan is that only state security, and not morality, can form the justification for military action. He condemns the U.S. attempt to use military force to defend universal morality rather than more narrowly defined security interests. My own comment on Afghanistan echoes Girard’s and Berman’s opposition to the U.S. withdrawal by emphasizing the need for the United States to see the conflict in Afghanistan as part of a larger global conflict between authoritarianism and universal human rights. The United States still stands for a set of clear values, and the defense of these values will be essential for maintaining national sovereignty.

Finally, in his review of a recent volume on The Future of the State, Antonio Cerella considers the meaning of the state today and its status as a representation of the sovereignty of the people. State power is not just a function of violence but rather a merging of violence with a representation of the meaning of such violence.