Presented at the "2022 Concordia Graduate Philosophy Conference: Disastrous (In)Determination: Exploring the intersections of domination, desire, and dialogue". April 9-10 2022, Concordia University, Montreal (Canada).
Outline
Looking at the world one notices crises in different areas: the environmental crisis, political crises both between states and systems ("Rise of Asia") and within them ("Post-Democracy"), as well as consciousness-related crises, such as the constantly increasing numbers of psychological diseases or the so called “Individualism Crisis”. Overall, there is the impression of general instability, which is noticeable in affluent societies at the latest with the corona pandemic.
I want to debate whether this general instability in the external world could result from internal instability due to modern individualism. My thesis is that in the course of the early history of modern philosophy were far-reaching shifts in the meaning of basic concepts such as "human" or "self", in the course of which a concept of "human" developed that made the individual, single-human self once located in the omnipresent divine now bottomless. One can mention three major turning points:
1. The unique individuality of single humans became heralded, and the point of reference for generating the meaning of "human" relocated from the divine (Middle Ages) into human individuality (Renaissance): substitution of an absolute entity as a reference point by something relative.
2. Rene Descartes’ addition of what is called "cartesian dualism", or "cartesian psychology", i.e., the human self-view as something separated from anything beyond itself (including fellow human beings), followed by the dismissal of the individual as a reliable foundation of certainty (Hume, Locke, Kant).
3. The anthropological shift by Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jeremy Bentham, through which human motivation was degraded to seeking pleasure and avoiding pain, while the "other" was viewed as a source of potential risk and competitor of the "self".
One could also read this as a process of several attempts to relocate the individual self in something persistent since every self-image needs a meaningful basis, e.g., Kant's moral law or Hobbes' Leviathan.
At any rate, any shift concerning the "self" will inevitably affect the "other", scilicet the "other" was also relocated, as it began with the distinction between the "civilized and the uncivilized" after 1492. These philosophical developments were accompanied by the practical reality of society, such as the priest's replacement by the scientist, the omnipotent God by the modern nation-state and its institutions, tremendous possibilities to control and structure the public, law enforcement, and the like. However, just like the ideologies of collective unities of the 20th century were shacked by crises such as the two world wars, we face crises that disturb our orders. The danger consists of repeating patterns: the bottomless modern subject is grounded on something that will not hold up in the face of crises, which in turn threaten to unleash destructive potential.
Against this background, I attempt to prove that "Dialogue", "Desire" and "Domination" are intertwined by being all together shaped by the axioms "human nature" and "origin of being", before suggesting that the specific modern notions might cause relations dispositional competitive and exploiting.
My first argument will be analytical, suggesting three postulates on human decision-making. In this section, I shall illustrate how foundational the concepts of "human nature" and "origin of being" for any notion of "self" and "other" are ("dialogue as knowing the other" vs. "dialogue as self-examination"). Afterward, I shall move on with a historical sketch of a gradually evolving process of anthropocentric-individualistic subjectivism and how alternatives tried to fill the gap left by the gradually removed divine. Noteworthy, the labels change, but the expectations remain the same, namely filling the gap the omnipresent divine left (e.g., the expectation of an exact, all-knowing science, which proves to be far-reaching once the expectations are not met). I shall end by asking whether the affairs of such a "self" founded on unreliable grounds could remain stable.