During the Cold War, which lasted for 40 years and has now been over for 30, Western political philosophy took a deeply abstract turn. Sartre attempted to ground radical freedom on the purely empty activity of “nihilation,” consciousness’ constant surpassing of its current situation. Habermas formulated his highly abstract “ideal speech situation.” In the US, Rawls articulated an “original position” defined by the ignorance of those in it of all the concrete facts of their lives.
This abstract turn, I suggest, was pushed by an aspiration to universalism, born of global struggle; it seemed urgent to find principles that everyone, East and West, should live by. But there was a still more urgent, and less philosophical, imperative: winning the Cold War. To that end, philosophers in the West, committed to and financed by their side of the global struggle, formulated a succession of “universal” truths that the Communist East could not accept. Thus, Stalinist societies could hardly accommodate the constant surpassing of present givens of Sartrean nihilation, or the unconstrained speech of Habermas’ ideal, or the centrality of rational choice presented in Rawls. Philosopically at least, they had to give in, refuted by philosophical argumentation. (In fact, of course, world events paid no attention to the philosophers. What refuted the East was not the West’s exemplification of universal truths, but its much higher standard of living and military prowess.)
“Cold War” philosophies, eager for universal validity yet rooted in partisan struggle, postulated a realm of thought unaffected by socio-political pressures—a realm styled a “space of reasons” or an “enclave of freedom.” Only in such an impartial arena could universal truth be won. But the philosophies that confronted each other in that arena all ran into the same problems.
First problem: the “space of reasons” doesn’t exist. We are not able to surpass all givens, or to occupy the Rawlsian original position for more than a few moments at a time. Habermas, perhaps anticipating this problem, insisted that ideal speech was, precisely, an “ideal;” it is not the space of reasons itself, but the idea of it, that grants us whatever objective knowledge and moral justification as we can obtain. But (as Kant would ask), what status can an admitted fiction have when it comes to determining moral behavior?
Second problem: committed to the fiction of an apolitical space of reasons, none of these approaches could reflect on its own origins in Cold War partisanship. The very existence of such origins, in fact, would make it path-dependent, and so call into question its claims to universality. That was why the “space of reasons” came to be postulated in the first place.
Third problem: universality must be purchased with abstraction, so these social philosophies had little to say about the concrete struggles of their time: matters of feminism, racial justice, the collapse of colonialism, and a long list of other struggles were met either with silence or with well-meaning common sense, for which we do not need philosophy. When the Cold War ended, and particular struggles like these replaced the one great global struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union as the driving forces of history, universality claims became nostalgic, and the space of reasons which was meant to vindicate them became vestigial.
Fourth and Final Problem: the universalism, for all its abstractness, was imperialistic. In the universalistic realm of the space of reasons, gender, color, and class were all bracketed out. The result was regression to traditional defaults: the inhabitants of the “space of reasons” turned out in fact to be, not universal humans (because universals can’t reason or, in fact, do anything), but white guys of a certain age.
The time was ripe for a thinker who denied the common root of these problems—the apolitical space or reasons—and moved philosophy into the center of the new struggles. That thinker was Michel Foucault, who can thus be called the most important political philosopher of the second half of the Twentieth Century.
The contretemps between Foucault and mainstream philosophy was not a debate, but a paradigm shift. As with paradigm-shifts in general, misunderstandings abounded. Adherents of the space of reasons often saw Foucault’s rejection of it as a rejection of knowledge and morality themselves. Foucault’s claim that power is present in all social relations was transmuted into the claim that all social relations can be reduced to power relations. He was then saddled with the view that that resistance to power is impossible, overlooking the fact that he accepts the classical definition of power—that it is the ability to overcome obstacles. Power for Foucault cannot exist without resistance.
The time was ripe for someone to cut through these misunderstandings and to show, in careful detail, why rejecting the space of reasons as Foucault did does not put an end to morality. This was Richard Lynch, on whose Foucault’s Critical Ethics much of the next section will be based.
For the moment, let us learn the lesson of these thinkers and admit that the quest for universality is one of humnaity’s less productive enterprises. What we really want from philosophy is guidance in our lives. For that we need philosophy to deal not in abstract truths, but in individual experiences. Philosophy should, therefore, be more an art than a science.