Ho chi minh and philosophy

Ho Chi Minh and Philosophy Jan Hoffmeister “Perhaps they really were the voices of the wandering souls of dead soldiers.” -Bao Ninh I: Introduction The question of being was first raised in Asia but it could not be answered there satisfactorily due to the constraints of natural religion.1 Finding one answer that explains the genesis and character of all being would have meant giving a categorical explanation of the coming into being and persistence for a diversity of entities that stretched from plants to deities in the Asian metaphysical mosaic.2 And so humankind had to wait until the advent of Buddhism in order for an answer to be provided that satisfied a society that now faced a religion where all being was characterized as belonging to a cosmos in whose environment man could be placed as one element among many seeking unity through asceticism.3 The answer that Buddhism provided, however, was as simple as it was influential: being, Buddhism says, emerged out of nothingness.4 And through a history of reflection, that spanned two and a half millennia and took almost exclusively place in the West, this convincing theory has been modified and reformulated in different contexts in diverse ontologies but its main point has largely remained untouched.5 In this essay I want to spell out the implications of this development in ontology by giving a coherent narrative that explains why historical materialism could have received such See Georg W F Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte Werkausgabe vol 12 Frankfurt on the Main: Suhrkamp,1986 142-275 Hegel is correct in assuming that civilizational developments before the Axial Age evolved in the triangle (Jan Assmann) between Egypt, Asia Minor, and China The mythical elements and the focus on ontology among the Pre-Socratics is a function of Asian influences emanating, as Hegel already saw, mainly from the East See David Arnold, Südasien Neue Fischer Weltgeschichte, vol 11 Frankfurt on the Main, S Fischer, 2012 But see also Shmuel Eisenstadt, Die Paradoxie von Zivilisation mit außerweltlichen Orientierungen Überlegungen zu Max Webers Studie zu Hinduismus und Buddhismus In Max Webers Studie über Hinduismus und Buddhismus Edited by Wolfgang Schluchter Frankfurt on the Main: Suhrkamp, 1984 Needless to say, I borrow the term asceticism from Max Weber as outlined in his Die Wirtschaftsethik der Weltreligionen Hinduismus Buddhismus Schriften 1916-1920 Edited by Horst Baier et al Tübingen: Mohr, 1989 See Georg W F Hegel, ibid.: „[…] dass das Nichts das Prinzip aller Dinge sei, dass alles aus dem Nichts hervorgegangen und auch dahin zurückgehe“ (210) See Kurt Flasch, Das philosophische Denken im Mittelalter Von Augustin zu Machiavelli Stuttgart: Reclam, 2000 Herbert Schnädelbach, Philosophie in Deutschland, 1831 – 1933 Frankfurt on the Main, 1983 a warm welcome in Asia after a period of almost two thousand years in which ontological questions remained separate from the West The title of the piece is reminiscent of Louis Althusser’s essay Lenin and Philosophy in which Althusser argues that breakthroughs in philosophy are but reactions to paradigm changes in science and he treats historical materialism as a science in the way described here.6 This was an intervention that took place in the center (France) After decolonization, however, political questions of importance can no longer be answered in this fashion exclusively.7 The world outside of the European context has been confronted with the question of reacting to a constellation of norms that has intruded its domain In the world outside of the West, answers have to be found that allow for a meaningful conversation between the two normative orders and although the center is still the place where the ideological processes receive the most elaborate answers, the periphery will be the place where their quality will come to be tested.8 If thought still has a chance in the modern world, categorical answers to political and philosophical questions will have to be found, as they are in the natural sciences on a daily basis, so that social organization in both parts, the center and the periphery, can be successfully solved This does not mean that the respective normative orders cannot be different but their difference will then be one that is based on an explanation that is comprehensible for both orders and, hence, capable of general understanding When Indochina was still a French colony the mysterious Ho Chi Minh was a stranger in the Parisian center hailing from the South East Asian periphery.9 And, as is well known, he attended the foundation meeting of the French Communist Party This was, in a way, the moment when fundamentally significant directions were taken for decolonization and late modernity I want to find out what was on Ho Chi Minh’s mind on that night when he left the founding meeting How did what he heard at the gathering fit into his habitus? Why did he find some aspects convincing and some others maybe not? What does this attendance mean for late modern politics? See Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy Translated from the French by Ben Brewster New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971 For the idea of the paradigm change see Thomas S Kuhn, The Essential Tension Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977 See Charles Taylor, The Politics of Recognition, Multiculturalism Edited by Amy Gutmann Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994 25-74 See Homi K Bhaba, Signs Taken for Wonders Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree Outside Delhi, May 1817 In “Race,” Writing, and Difference Edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986 163-184 See Martin Großheim, Ho Chi Minh Der geheimnisvolle Revolutionär Leben und Legende Munich: Beck, 2011 This essay has an easy structure I will first clarify Confucian ethical life and Buddhist philosophy in order to pave the way for their relation to historical materialism For this task I will not only make use of Confucian and Buddhist sources but also a discourse in which the two have found their aesthetically most nuanced representation: modern Japanese literature When this task is completed, we will have a theory for why and how Ho Chi Minh reacted to what he was exposed to in communist circles in the West and we may be able to trace his thoughts after coming from that important meeting in the French underground Having the theory for the Confucian Buddhist historical materialism-connection the paper will focus on how the Asian understanding of being can be made fruitful for a contemporary rendering of historical materialism and its relation to freedom I will, for the sake of coherence, also involve historical materialism’s intellectual twin, psychoanalysis, not because it played a role in the thought of Ho Chi Minh but because it shares central features with the Marxian system and must consequently be connected here.10 II: Discipline and Equilibrium: Confucius The Confucian humanistic revolution occurred in Chinese antiquity.11 It paved the way for East Asian and South East Asian culture through its reconfiguration between man’s emotional needs and the cultural needs of community As Freud has shown, civilizational developments are always bought at the price of the subjection of emotional economies that provide individuals with psychic safety.12 This might seem like a simple bargain where cultural products, such as advanced tools for the production process, or a political structure, such as a state, are brought into being through norms that hinder people from indulging in what makes them happy But this picture is a bit easy and the expert will agree with me that this is not how Freud viewed things The renunciation of pleasure is not accepted by a community on the grounds that it will make them culturally more advanced but has to be explained to them in terms of quality of life itself The emotional economy that Confucius suggested was based on the notion that for a people used to human sacrifices and random violence connected with high value on clan solidarity, surrendering a degree of their emotional pitch for an asceticism 10 See Herbert Marcuse, Triebstruktur und Gesellschaft Ein philosophischer Beitrag zu Sigmund Freud Translated from the English by Marianne von Eckardt-Jaffe Frankfurt on the Main: Suhrkamp, 1968 11 See Kai Vogelsang, Geschichte Chinas 4th edition Stuttgart: Reclam, 2013 97-170 As well as : Kai Vogelsang, Kleine Geschichte Chinas Stuttgart: Reclam, 2014 54-107 And Kai Vogelsang, Einführung, in Shangjun Shu Schriften des Fürsten von Shang Stuttgart: Kröner, 2017 1-94 For Confucius in particular see Herbert Fingarette, Confucius The Secular as Sacred New York: Harper, 1972 12 See Sigmund Freud, Das Unbehagen in der Kultur 8th edition Frankfurt on the Main: Fischer, 2003 that disconnected clan life from the emotional fever was a benefit in terms of the psychic structure of the people affected by the changes.13 Confucius did not teach that social relations have to be more equal or that violence has to be diminished.14 He stressed the disconnecting of strong emotions from affairs involving public life Chinese asceticism, the central feature with which the culture has been associated since antiquity, was the child of Confucius and can be discerned in his writings.15 It cooled down the high temperature with which clan life was associated and restructured social relations by relegating the open display of drastic power within the household (between man and woman and above all father and children).16 The public domain was the target of Confucius and his disciples because it hindered the rational organization of the relationship between the community and the individual by its high investment with emotions.17 Since Foucault we have been accustomed to think of discipline as a European phenomenon that arose after the demise of the monarchy.18 However, Foucault, who is sometimes surprisingly called the samurai among the philosophers and who visited Asia, did not recognize that in the East discipline had been in effect for centuries It dates back to Confucius who recognized it to be a weapon against emotionally loaded clan structures which hampered the development of larger communities and hence rational political power But discipline did not mean for the Confucians that power relations had to get rid of their public nature It simply meant that they no longer keep their strong emotional aspects And while Foucault rightly stresses that discipline was an institutional development in the West whose emergence coincided with a science and an institutional development leading to prisons and hospitals, Chinese society did not discipline its subjects through these discourses and institutions but channeled them into what may be called an aesthetic 13 As the reader will see, I not see the Legalists as the only opponents of clan structures in ancient China but think that Confucius himself played a key role in the institutionalization of what Max Weber calls a “patrimonial state,” that is to say, a functionally differentiated political system in a feudal context See Max Weber, Die Wirtschaftsethik der Weltreligionen Konfuzianismus Taoismus Schriften 1915-1920 Vol 19 of the Gesamtausgabe edited by Horst Baier Tübingen: Mohr, 1989 14 This feature was not seen by Hegel who believed that Chinese society was a kind of egalitarian social order without liberty However, as his student Marx clearly saw, and as it admitted by Luhmann, Chinese society at the time was stratified hierarchically through feudal social classes See Niklas Luhmann, Kontingenz und Recht Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2018 111 Luhmann challenges Vogelsang’s view of a differentiated state in early China 15 See Konfuzius, Gespräche 16 See Dieter Kuhn, Ostasien bis 1800 Neue Fischer Weltgeschichte, vol 13 Frankfurt on the Main, 2014 363 17 At this point already a similarity with Greece can be discerned Clan solidarities and those of a supra-racial order were debated at the time when philosophy flourished at Athens See Karl R Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies Vol The Spell of Plato London: Routledge, 1968 18 See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish The Birth of the Prison Translated from the French by Alan Sheridan New York: Vintage Books, 1995 Second edition Chinese public life after Confucius became a picture to be enjoyed.19 The fact, moreover, that the Chinese discipline project did not transpire through scientific discourses such as medicine and empirical psychology made the individual surrender a part of his emotional life at the price, not of bringing his habitus in line with empirical science, but of making public life a beautiful picture to be wondered at This is why Confucius collected songs and poems20 and this is also why poetry became such an important feature for entrance into the famous Chinese bureaucracy.21 Chinese asceticism was thus a phenomenon that could function without the heavy intrusion of light into the soul of the individual with which discipline worked in the West Instead it provided the society with the phenomenon of beauty which had been largely unknown before Women, being the subjects and objects of beauty in any clan society, could now enter public life to a degree unknown beforehand because public matters now revolved around the awe that the beauty of public life instilled in the members of the society.22 And once aesthetics and politics began to intermingle, the cultural products of Chinese antiquity such as pictures, songs and above all poems could take on the aura of the sacred because they now represented the terms in which the Chinese rendered their conception of the good life The mandarin who is stunned by the beauty of a poem from the Shijing recognized his personal psychic make up in the shape of the community of which he was a part The voice that he encountered in the poem was his very own passed down on him be the ancients who felt, acted, and lived largely in the way that he did.23 Confucius, like Plato, was a revolutionary with a conservative agenda.24 But unlike Plato, the Chinese thinker did not want to base his political world on principles of reason but instead opted for a reorientation to the traditions that had been in place in Chinese society for centuries.25 This is the reason for his frequent laudations concerning the so called wisdom of the ancients.26 Classical Greece was a democracy when Plato appeared on the scene and although he was critical of his society, Plato did not opt for the rule by an emperor Confucius 19 See Kakuzo Okakura, The Book of Tea London: Penguin, 2010; as well as Fingarette, Confucius, ibid See Shijing Das altchinesische Buch der Lieder Edited and translated from the Chinese by Rainald Simon Stuttgart: Reclam, 2015 21 See Max Weber, Konfuzianismus Taoismus, ibid 22 In clan society women have to be guarded against foreign intrusion constantly because they guarantee the purity of the family before they can become the object of exchanges See the Trojan War, Homer, Iliad Book III (translation by Raoul Schrott, Frankfurt on the Main: Fischer, 2010) where Helena’s infidelity causes the conflict not simply because she ran away with a Trojan but because she polluted the honor of the clan Her nine year old daughter could not come with her to Troy because she would never accept Paris as her father 23 For the Confucian imperative to study ancient wisdom see Konfuzius, Gespräche 24 See Plato, The Republic Transalted from the Greek by Desmond Lee 2nd edition London: Penguin, 2003 25 In this regard he resembles Cicero much more than the Greeks See Cicero, De re publica 26 See Konfuzius, Gespräche (Lun Yü) Translated from the Chinese by Richard Wilhelm Cologne: Anaconda, 2018 Book VII.1 The key phrase here is „loving antiquity“ (131) 20 did so.27 He mainly agreed with the political system as he saw it but recognized that too many emotions pervaded the system The Hegelians used to say that Chinese antiquity was based on egalitarian norms But this view misses the point Feudal society, which constituted Asia from Confucius’s time until modernity, was based on hierarchical stratification.28 Confucius saw that power relations were based on traditions in the Weberian sense29 and he agreed with the fact that this was so But besides his plea for a more neutral and unemotional public domain, he also understood that the soul of man needed reorientation in the new, disciplined social structure And so Confucius elaborated on a topic he found in the intellectual climate of his native land Chinese philosophers had, from early on, understood that social life, as well as nature, was based on opposites.30 Night and day, old and young, male and female: these were binary terms that betrayed a basic structure of the order of things Chinese ontology, before Buddhism, understood that beings are related to each other through opposition And ancient Chinese thinkers rightly made the point that oppositions have to be accepted as such and be dealt with There is no point in denying that good actions and bad actions, for example, are related to each other through their being poles on a scale between which people living in the community can be placed Person A is capable of better actions than person B is and to see this was to recognize that the order of things was based on opposites From early on Chinese thought was mythical.31 But the myths of the Chinese are incorporations of a normative order where moral behavior is represented in cosmological terms The image of the sun, which we find as a symbol of morality in Egypt, Greece, and Japan, is rendered in classical thought as an extreme pole on the opposite end of which stands the moon.32 This very old myth, in which good and evil find their cosmological representation in heaven, began to be seen by Asian thinkers as being in need of being brought into balance Confucius was familiar with this myth, as was Plato, and he simply opted for its application to public life As Chinese ethics already knew that good and bad are related opposites, Confucius’s move was not as revolutionary as it might appear at first sight But Confucius recognized that the soul of man 27 See Konfuzius, Gespräche Book XII.11 This chapter has strong Platonic similarities in its conception of the division of labor Only when all social classes are dedicated to their very own tasks can the state really function See Plato, The Republic, Book IV 28 See Karl Marx, Capital; vol Translated from the German by Ben Fowkes London: Penguin, 1990: “The structure of the fundamental economic elements of society remains untouched by the storms which blow up the cloudy regions of politics” (479) 29 See Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft Grundriss der verstehenden Soziologie 5th edition Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009 Here:“Gehorcht wird [den Herrschern] kraft der durch die Tradition ihnen zugewiesene Eigenwürde [dignity]“ (130) 30 See Lao-tse, Tao Tê-King Translated from the Chinese by Günther Debon Stuttgart: Reclam, 2012 Here above all chapter II 31 See Claude Lévi-Strauss, Strukturale Anthropologie vol 10th edition Frankfurt on the Main, Suhrkamp, 2015 275 Here similarities between Chinese and American Indian myths are apparent 32 See Claude Lévi-Strauss, Die andere Seite des Mondes Schriften über Japan Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2017 was a structure to be integrated into the value system.33 This was to be achieved, as is widely known, through learning the classics.34 Moral development in Chinese society thus ended being a natural learning process in which individuals simply achieve moral maturity through following the roles that the clan provided: child, adolescent, and adult were no longer stages to be simply moved through by adhering to the virtues of the warrior or the good mother but instead became phases in which the individual was to study the ancient texts and poems The goal of this lengthy operation was to become a moral person and Confucius believed that this goal could be achieved by recognizing what he called the wisdom of the ancients.35 But this wisdom was nothing else than the theory of opposites as the East knew it Morality could be derived from it because Confucius understood that beings are related to each other through opposition and the student was to understand this by seeing how his ancestors had dealt with this fact For these ancestors, however, this fact was purely mythical Confucius secularized the notion According to him, existence was by necessity characterized by oppositions There can be no good actions if there are no evil ones for how are we to arrive at an understanding of the good act without seeing what it is not? Through intense study of the classics, thinkers, of which there was abundance, were to develop a habitus that was in emotional balance Even before Aristotle urged us to find the mean, Confucius, who was an adherent to virtue ethics as his Greek contemporary, showed that the psyche is in optimal condition if it is in equilibrium.36 The Golden Rule was the moral, not the legal, norm in which this ontology became relevant.37 It advocated role taking for the sake of community and worked against the clan solidarities because it made empathy a force explainable by theory Not to put yourself in the position of your victim was not simply an insult to how the ancients had acted It also went against the order of things as it spoke to those who cared to think about it Discipline and equilibrium were thus new elements in a culture that became increasingly ascetic and where emotions were economized in a way unknown in other parts of 33 See Konfuzius, Gespräche Book V.10 and Book VI.16 Only a “gentleman” (Fingarette) has his mind in equilibrium 34 See Konfuzius, Gespräche Book XVII.9 as well as Book XIII.5 The main collection of texts here is, of course, The Book of Poetry. 35 See Konfuzius, Gespräche Book XII.15 36 This is a notion that stretches through the whole East and includes the Greeks See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Die Verborgenheit der Gesundheit Frankfurt on the Main: Suhrkamp, 2010 Fort he theme in Plato see Republic Book IV where the conversation turns to what Lee translates as “friendly and harmonious agreement” of the different elements of the soul (442d) Aristotle mentions the psyche in equilibrium in De anima, 432b 37 See Konfuzius, Gespräche Book XV.23 the world.38 But Confucius did not only change the relation of community and man He also placed the burdens for social recognition on all strata of society Power relations indeed lost their emotional quality but they did, obviously, not simply disappear Rulers in ancient China disagreed with each other what policies and norms rightly mirrored the notion of equilibrium Fidelity to the wisdom of the ancients was not only a path recommended by Confucius It was also a concept that people disagreed about They asked themselves how it could best be implemented Marx rightly stressed that the mode of production remained unchanged in feudal Asia and survived the power struggles raging among the ruling class in the society He refused, however, to spell out the reason why these struggles persisted But given the fact that in his more speculative moments, such as we find in his early work, Marx was a faithful student of Hegel, it makes sense to assume that he also saw these fights revolving about conceptions of the good life as handed down by tradition.39 He must have recognized the power struggles of Chinese society as based on the attempt to find a suitable political shape for the order of dignity that Confucius showed his contemporaries to be present in the wisdom of the ancients The Chinese power struggles were not teleological in the Western, Christian sense Humanity was not envisioned as moving toward freedom as prescribed in the Bible40 but was engaged in the constant effort to make life beautiful and full of dignity This dignity was the social embodiment of the moral code based on the concept of life as structured through opposites It was combined in Confucius with the notion of an aesthetic public life whose emotional energies had been redirected into poetry, music, and philosophy.41 The question in Chinese politics was thus not Who can save us? as in the West But, What will provide us with dignity? And dignity was the way to live a life that mirrored the wisdom of the ancients Its concern was aesthetic rather than moral, cyclical rather than teleological But the fact that rulers had to have dignity triggered extreme recognition struggles that were the 38 Kai Vogelsang places the emergence of the modern state in China roughly into our period and argues that it diminished public violence which had been a private vendetta affair before See Kai Vogelsang, Einführung, in Shangjun shu, ibid Luhmann believes Confucius worked against the Legalists as a king of moralizing conservative and he agrees with Vogelsang in seeing the revolutionary impact of Legalism in its state building functions against the culture of the violent clans However, we are still, as Marx reminds us, talking about a feudal social order and in such a one social relations are based on trust which is, in turn, a moment of the not yet colonized life world and in order for this trust to play its role in the social system an ethical theory such as provided by Confucius formalizes norms and bases them on first principles, such as harmony and equilibrium, thus strengthening the feudal order through rationalist means 39 For this anti-economic moment in Marx see Hauke Brunkhorst, Kommentar, in Karl Marx, Der achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte Frankfurt on the Main: Suhrkamp, 2007 133-328 The key to this riddle in social philosophy is, as I see it, the Habermasian resolution of the basis-superstructure dichotomy through the concepts of system and life world 40 See Karl Löwith, Meaning in History The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949 41 See Max Weber, Taoismus Konfuzianismus, ibid result of the constant quest for finding the good life as conceived by Confucius Power became connected with beauty to a degree unknown in Europe Etiquettes like the way you place your teacups in a tea ceremony or how you pass by a blind person in the streets became questions of political importance because the public asceticism of social life was an ever explosive combination of dignity and power.42 This feature can also be partly observed in classical Rome and it is a structural element of any feudal social order But in China and East Asia in general, public life had aesthetic characteristics that were lacking in the West and that made the attention to the minute details of etiquette so very important to its subjects Cruelty, again a phenomenon known in feudalism in general, was but the flipside of the feminine aspects of public life for as much as the latter became less emotional in the male sense, it moved towards extreme displays of power which became a necessity in ruling the ever rebellious extremely superstitious masses III: Transformation without Movement: Buddha Sakyamuni I have already mentioned, in the beginning, that Buddha Sakyamuni argued that being emerged out of nothingness The Buddhists were thus a school that had an ontology that the Confucians lacked.43 The latter did not care about the question of being They seem to have had a different philosophical temper Theirs was a more political, moral agenda while Buddhism relied on what the Greeks later called first philosophy But if being emerged out of nothingness, what is the point of existence? The Buddhists famously said that it was all about suffering.44 The goal of man was to be free from it and this could only be achieved by bringing yourself into harmony with the order of things as it existed, mainly through extreme asceticism (again) and meditation But Buddhism also had a view on the afterlife which it postulated without feeling the need to have it tested by any standards of theory as Confucius and the Pre-Socratic Greeks did and so its discourse merged with religious vocabularies Buddha Sakyamuni was treated as holy by his disciples and this is also something that 42 See Kakuzo Okakura, The Book of Tea, ibid See Wilhelm K Essler and Ulrich Mamat, Die Philosophie des Buddhismus Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2006 Just to get the picture right: I see Taoism as the oldest philosophical system in China with broad mythical roots and the most distinct formulation of the idea of harmony which is then picked up by Confucius as equilibrium The Legalists share Confucian objectives but pursue completely different means When Buddhism arrived in China the basic outlines of the philosophical culture were already in place but the Indian belief system provided ontological insights which have affinities with Taoist ideas although Buddhism seems to have been more categorical in its ontology 44 See Max Weber, Die Wirtschaftsethik der Weltreligionen Hinduismus Buddhismus, ibid and Robert N Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011 481-566 43 differentiates him from Confucius and, say, Plato who also speculated about what happens to the soul after death.45 But since we are interested in the way in which the discourse of ancient Asia received historical materialism, we cannot leave out the religious creed of Buddhism although, evidently, it is impossible to judge whether the creed is correct when it comes to how the afterlife looks like Buddhist ontology, which became more radical than that of the Confucians in a sense, paved the way for theory in that it dealt a death blow to the myths by which most people still lived in East and South East Asia This is because Buddha Sakyamuni gave one categorical answer to all questions revolving around man thereby refusing to accept the denial of categorical answers provided by polytheism His ontology, however, stopped after it had given its answer to how being comes into existence And like Heraclitus he recognized everything to be in constant flux However, while Aristotle thought he learned from this that there is movement between being and nothingness such as that beings perish and develop into their destinations,46 Buddha Sakyamuni’s students did not see the picture as such a dynamic one For them, the flux of life is a constant monotony that is cyclical rather than teleological For the Greeks beings in motion had a goal they were constantly moving towards and this was the Good which had been made an idea (or form) by Plato In Asia, however, first philosophy and moral theory went separate ways as Confucius did not ask about why there is at all being instead of nothing and how it may have come into existence After Aristotle, however, Western philosophical discourse stuck to the notion that beings as opposites are related to each other dynamically and this was the ontology that Augustine and Aquinas believed in and which received its most developed form in Hegel’s system where they are the basis of dialectics This development was propagated partly, as the German philosopher Karl Löwith said, because of Christian eschatology which, obviously, had a huge impact on Western philosophical thought But just as in the East the feudal mode of production remained in place until the first European vessels arrived on the shores after Marco Polo, so ontology kept its static structure refusing to see in the flux of life a development toward some kind of good But if moral theory and ontology went separate ways among the Buddhists this was not so for the Confucians who were, as we said above, not so much interested in first philosophy The creed of reincarnation that Buddhism introduced relied on a primitive notion of morality because it stated that your moral behavior in this life will affect you when you will 45 See Plato, Phaedrus Translated from the Greek by Robin Waterfield Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009 245c-246a 46 See Aristotle, Metaphysik Translated from the Greek by Hermann Bonitz Philosophische Schriften vol Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1995 Book XII 1069a-1070a 10 be reborn Just how men should be able to estimate if a life was lived in accordance with what is moral was not spelled out in Buddhism Confucius and his school, who had a more secular and political agenda, were different here They stressed the notion that the soul must be in equilibrium and this was so because only in that state was it really what it was as everything, living and inanimate, was subject to the laws of balanced opposites The two philosophical systems met at the point where Confucian discipline agreed with Buddhist asceticism and reincarnation agreed with the equilibrium theory The fact that the Confucians made public life a beautiful picture to be beheld and that Buddhism stressed abstinence furthered the notion, now taken for granted in Asia, that the public domain is a site of ascetic recognition struggles involving high stakes while being almost completely bereft of emotions But here we are already touching upon our discussion of the synthesis between Buddhism and Confucianism that provided the intellectual basis with which historical materialism was received in Asia and it is for this reason that we have to turn to modern Japanese literature IV: The Aesthetics of Silence: Japanese Literature after Meiji This excursus into the philosophical foundations of Asian culture has brought us quite a step away from our original intention of explaining Ho Chi Minh’s adherence to historical materialism Its use to the reader will hopefully become clear as we move toward the more theoretical part of this paper However, before we can get there a short glance at how the philosophical issues debated above materialized in Asian culture and a quick look at how this affects the lives of individuals is in place It is for this reason that I will now turn to modern Japanese literature so that we get an idea of what it means to lead a life characterized by the twin discourses of Confucianism and Buddhism The stories we will be looking at are tales that have their origin in a society that has already adopted Western political, legal, and cultural norms so that we run the risk of painting a muddled picture.47 However, as any reader of modern Japanese literature will know, Japanese novels, poems, and songs are mostly of a 47 The best book about modernization in Japan, to my mind, is the short monograph written in German by a Japanese Marxist: See Hiroomi Fukuzawa, Aspekte der Marx Rezeption in Japan Spätkapitalisierung und ihre sozioökonomischen Folgen dargestellt am Beispiel der japanischen Gesellschaft Bochum: Studienverlag, 1981 See, however, also Takeshi Ishida, Die Entdeckung der Gesellschaft Zur Entwicklung der Sozialwissenschaften in Japan Transalted from the Japanese by Wolfgang Seifert Frankfurt on the Main: Suhrkamp, 2008 Also enlightening is Wolfgang Schwentker, Max Weber in Japan Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1998 See also Shmuel Eisenstadt, Japanese Civilization A Comparative View Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996 However, Eisenstadt fails to see to what extent universalistic concepts have been ingrained in Japanese society since the introduction of Confucianism and Buddhism in antiquity 11 very strong conservative and traditionalist nature.48 The political situation of post-Meiji Japan explains why that is After the Meiji Restoration when Japan opened up to Western influence, social life in the country was tremendously transformed.49 Unlike the countries in Europe where exposure to modernity had been gradual and piece meal, Japanese citizens were faced with an all or nothing question: either adopt everything or close the borders Capitalism prevented the latter strategy as European and above all American merchants felt immense push factors to open up Japanese markets for foreign goods This needed a legal system that protected private property and hence liberal legislation And since Europeans and Americans rightly considered such legal norms to be part of a package that included freedom of speech, freedom of religion, as well as empirical science and technology, Japanese society became the first Asian country where the twin discourses of Confucianism and Buddhism met liberal modernity in full force The Meiji Restoration was the Asian counterpart to the European French Revolution but it occurred one hundred years later and in a culture that knew nothing of Lutheranism or Greek logic.50 Hence the dramatic dimension of this aspect of Asian history It was, as will be easily admitted, something which did not pass by the intellectuals in Japan unmarked They were the ones upon whom the task of making sense of the deep crisis was placed and they mastered their task with astonishing persistence.51 Modern Japanese literature starts with Natsume Soseki, the father of the genre He lived through the Meiji transformation and was sent to study Western culture in London which he did in extremely bad conditions (no contact with Europeans, hardly any money).52 When he returned to Japan he began to write novels and other texts All of these deal with the question how Japanese society should react to the intrusion of Western modernity into the culture The picture that Soseki paints in his novels is that of a loss that unfortunately has no alternative As a wide range of thinkers exposed to political developments of this kind from the mysterious German Stefan George to the tragi-comic French Honoré de Balzac, he was convinced that Western modernization was a catastrophe but admitted that all the alternatives 48 For the exposition of modern Japanese literature see Haruki Murakami, The Generally (Sweet) Smell of Youth, in Natsume Soseki, Sanshiro Translated from the Japanese by Jay Rubin London: Penguin, 2009; as well as Meredith McKinney, Introductions, in Natsume Soseki, Kokoro Translated by McKinney London: Penguin, 2010; and Meredith McKinney, Introduction, in Natsume Soseki, Kusamakura Translated also by McKinney London: Penguin, 2008; and Tobias Cheung, Kawabata Yasunari und die Welt der weißen Lilie, in Yasunari Kawabata, Schneeland Translated from the Japanese by Cheung Frankfurt on the Main: Suhrkamp, 2011 175-202 49 See Manfred Pohl, Geschichte Japans Munich: Beck, 2004; as well as Karl Löwith, Japan’s Westernization and Moral Foundation, in Gesammelte Schriften, vol Stuttgart: Metzler, 1983 541-555 50 See Claude Lévi-Strauss, Die andere Seite des Mondes; ibid 51 See Takeshi Ishida, Die Entdeckung der Gesellschaft, ibid 52 See Introduction, to Natsume Soseki, I Am a Cat Translated from the Japanese by Aiko Ito and Graeme Wilson Tokyo: Tuttle, 2002 iv-x 12 open to choose were even worse His belief in Asian culture remained, however, as he hoped for a reconfiguration of modernity along traditionalist lines Most authors writing in Japan after Soseki have followed him in this conviction Yasunari Kawabata, who lived until after the Second World War, wrote in a fashion that makes the traditional values of Asian culture as guidelines for individuals look trapped in tragic situations.53 And it is in his novels, much more than in those of Soseki, that we can discern the contours of an aestheticized public sphere In Yukiguni, for examply, the protagonist escapes to the Japanese hinterland in order to be away from the city and indulge in the pleasures of a witty geisha.54 In this hinterland country (the snow land) he discovers the atmosphere of silence and beauty whose architects we have encountered in the preceding section Public life is a harmony that must not be disturbed Disturbing it goes against the values of civil society and, for those who believe in Buddhist religion, the order of the cosmos Thus the protagonist has to move very carefully when he visits the snow land Every move has to be planned meticulously because it can interrupt a social world that is organized up to the smallest details like a Rembrandt picture Silence – that condition of Buddhist meditation – must be respected lest civil society breaks down The novel ends in chaos and the geisha the protagonist encounters is portrayed as a funny person but all of this does not damage to the notion, elaborated extensively in the text, that the world these people inhabit is one of sacred traditions This harmony must be respected and all characters in the plot so including the witty geisha and the pensive protagonist The reader may wonder why it took Japanese literature one generation to discover and disclose the true character of Asian culture The answer is simple Soseki was himself the child of a social system whose true quality eluded him as he took its basic elements for granted It is only when such traditions are exposed to risk and destruction and when an alternative picture becomes fathomable that artists discover the true outlines of the world they risk destroying Kawabata already could take one step away from Asian culture and looked at its cultural character This is why he saw the aesthetic character of public life that made Asia different from the West This feature of life at the periphery will become more nuanced the closer the student of Japanese literature moves toward the period that succeeded that of Kawabata And so it is in the work of Yukio Mishima, whom Kawabata knew in person, that the outlines of an Asian culture, with all those elements that Ho Chi Minh accepted as his own, will become apparent 53 54 See Tobias Cheung, Kawabata Yasunari und die Welt der weißen Lilie, ibid See Yasunari Kawabata, Schneeland ibid 13 Yukio Mishima was an outsider in Japanese society but understood his culture better than any other writer.55 He came from an upper class family and received the best education available in the Japan of the early 20th century This education involved aspects of the life of classical Greece just as Chinese classical culture Since Mishima has left a legacy that students of literature can spend a lifetime reading, I will limit myself here to his most celebrated work: the so called Sea of Fertility Tetralogy In this work we encounter a man named Honda who is a lawyer trained in Asian legal thought living at the court of an upper class family at the end of the nineteenth century in Tokyo.56 His friend, who is not a member of the upper class, desperately falls in love with the daughter of the noble family but given his young age and social situation is unable to reveal his love to the lady in question Honda is his best friend and together the two seek to make sense of the opportunities that their culture offers them An arranged marriage is worked out at the court so that the young lady can be married and the relationship between Honda’s friend and the daughter of the noble man comes to naught Honda is a character that watches and in the first volume of the narrative he cannot be properly called the protagonist He will only take on that role as the story enfolds through the later volumes His friend, who finally discloses his impossible love to the young lady, is willing to risk his life for the relationship he cannot have Honda stands at his side firmly as a true friend When the offer by the lower class suitor has finally been made, the marriage arrangements with the other noble man have already developed so far that there is no return to normal And so the daughter of the upper class family makes a tragic decision: she turns her back on civil life in order to become a nun at a Zen monastery secluded from public existence Honda’s friend dies in front of the ever closed gates of the monastery due to pneumonia and it is Honda, who witnesses the scene of the two lovers, who will keep this episode in his mind as a part of his character till the end of his long life In the second volume Honda is a famous lawyer with political connections moving in upper class Tokyo where he once encounters a young adolescent in a kendo school where boys are trained.57 Honda believes him to be a reincarnation of his friend who died of pneumonia But, as it turns out, the young man Honda becomes interested in – no homoerotic dimension here – is a conservative revolutionary who is extremely keen of bringing Japan back into feudal 55 See the novel that is recognized by experts as partly autobiographical: Yukio Mishima, Geständnis einer Maske Translated from the English by Helmut Hilzheimer Hamburg, 2007 This book had a strong influence on the French philosopher Michel Foucault who sometimes called himself the masked philosopher 56 See Yukio Mishima, Spring Snow Translated from the Japanese by Michael Gallagher London: Vintage, 2000 57 See Yukio Mishima, Runaway Horses Translated from the Japanese by Michael Gallagher London: Vintage, 2000 14 civilization away from Western influence He plans an attack on the leading capitalists of the country together with other loyal recruits from the kendo school The attack on the capitalists turns out to be a failure and the young revolutionaries are brought before trial – the world Honda knows But the reincarnation of Honda’s friend manages to kill one of the capitalist class, committing ritual suicide in the aftermath Here is the tragic dimension of the story The intrusion of capitalism into Asian society cannot be stopped and the young kendo fighter must recognize this as a failure on the part of him and his generation He preserves dignity and the order of things according to what Confucius would have called the wisdom of the ancients since capitalism cannot be stopped without building up its oppositional counterpart which might end up being equally destructive Honda is a spectator to this drama and his solidarity is, of course, with the young revolutionaries In the third book Honda embarks on a trip to India to encounter the roots of Buddhism58 and in the final volume he returns to war ridden Japan only to find out that his adopted son is anything but the true reincarnation of the beloved friend he lost at the court he lived at as a young man.59 In the final scene he is reunited at the monastery with the daughter of the noble family and the circle closes itself In the silence of the monastery, Honda recognizes the futility of this-worldly striving and dies in awe of the ascetic nun who has rejected all worldly pleasures for the sake of a love that, for reasons the protagonists cannot simply change, was destined to be impossible Throughout the narrative Mishima portrays a fragile world whose beauty does not escape the eyes of the protagonists Silence is the dominant condition in all four books At court, in the kendo school, in India, and at his own mansion in post war Japan, there rules a silence that is constantly threatened of being broken The protagonists have to pursue their life goals in this setting but all this by taking utmost care that the silence in which they move is not seriously threatened All characters that play a positive role in the story can be said to have an aura of dignity It is but the reflection of the silence that rules in the public sphere and that connects them Honda, above all, is, as the protagonist in Kawabata’s novel, a pensive character who seeks moral equilibrium He wants change and supports it with all his might but he has no fixed idea, no political plan for a yet to come utopia Conservative by character he cares about the state of society But this care is never that of the omniscient narrator who lays out the story for us Honda acts carefully, almost hesitantly The virtues that guide him are based on Buddhist and Confucian teaching and this gives his actions their peculiar 58 See Yukio Mishima, The Temple of Dawn Translated from the Japanese by E Dale Saunders and Cecile Segawa Seigle London: Vintage, 2001 59 See Yukio Mishima, The Decay of the Angel Translated from the Japanese by Edward G Seidensticker London: Vintage, 2001 15 character Honda wants to work through his problems which are also those of his contemporaries He wants bad to become good, night to turn into day but must recognized that love cannot be had without its counterpart This is why the love relation of Honda’s best friend is doomed Because love involves understanding of that which it is not, hence hate, learning processes cannot be had without subjects having their identities marked by the conflicts raging between opposite values Escape is possible but it has a price The lady at court recognizes that her love to the lower class boy is impossible for such is the condition of society, a structure that cannot simply be changed at will Individuals are part of a greater whole and without it they lose their dignity – a price none of the characters in the narrative are ready to pay because it would mean giving up on the good life And so choices have to be made within the parameters that society holds in store Opting for the good (the love relation) is possible But it has a price (the relation cannot be lived out) The lady at court recognizes the moral value of her feelings to the young and stubborn boy and she is willing to pay any price to save it But saving it must not mean destroying the community because it is, in the final analysis, the dimension from which all moral values derive And so she becomes an abstinent nun without seeing her suitor who dies in front of a gate that does not open In the world that Soseki, Kawabata, and Mishima portray many elements that we find in Western literature reappear Impossible love is a theme from Goethe to Virginia Woolf The pitfalls of capitalism are debated in Balzac and Zola And the tragic character of life did not escape James Joyce and Beckett But there is one feature that characterizes Western literature that you will not find in the authors I have discussed That is the banal fact that in contrast to the writers and their work that I have just mentioned, it cannot be said that the stories that appear in modern Japan are marked by alienation.60 This concept, which goes back to the young Marx, is widely accepted as a characteristic of bourgeois literature However, alienation is not a feature of the world in which Honda and his contemporaries live The price the persons in the novels pay for a life free from alienation, and thus for a life in dignity, is high But it is one that the protagonists are willing to pay knowing about the fragility of the good life.61 And so it comes as no surprise that Soseki was so concerned about the 60 See Karl Löwith, Man’s Self-Alienation in the Early Writings of Marx, Sämtliche Schriften, vol Stuttgart: Metzler, 1988 70-93 61 There is, however, now also Japanese literature that can be called alienated I am, of course, referring to the novels of Kenzaburo Oe and Haruki Murakami But there is a way in which these authors can seem like divergences from a path that may lack artistic subtlety but nevertheless remains within the parameters of traditional and hence conservative Japanese literature Even the later works of Kawabata which take place in the 1960s cannot be said, on this account, to be marked by alienation The fact that both, Oe and Murakami, produce great works is testimony to the extent that Japan has become a capitalist society with minor differences to such societies in the West 16 consequences of capitalist modernization that he constantly tried to warn his readers while not having an answer ready at hand His contemporary Ho Chi Minh, who came from a society that closely resembled Japan in transition, thought he heard one when he attended the founding meeting of the Communist Party in France Here was an answer of how it could be different And in order to bring our narrative to a close, I will now embark on a tour through the Asian roots of historical materialism pointing out connections and ruptures while not losing out of sight the main goal of our endeavor: to find the foundations of a social world in equilibrium V: Western and Eastern Ontology Plato had to admit that he did not have an answer to the question why there are at all beings in the world, why there is being and not nothing at all.62 Taking his clues from the Pythagoreans he postulated the ideas, or forms, as eternal entities beyond the ever changing domain of the empirical world.63 So in Plato we get a peculiar picture On the one hand are the eternal ideas while on the other there is flux His pupil Aristotle did, as is well known, not agree with this theory.64 He refuted the notion of a bifurcated world because it was not clear to him how the relationship between the two domains would look like So being (Sein), for Aristotle, had to have a structure about which knowledge could be gained and since he understood that such knowledge can only be had from beings (Seiendes) that not change, as the elements of Euclidean geometry, being itself had to give up the structure of flux it had received in Heraclitus and Plato65 and take on a stable form For Aristotle, however, this did not mean that beings were not in constant motion but rather that this motion has a discernible structure which will remain the same in all places and at all times This is the Aristotelian ontology developed in the Metaphysics according to which every being strives for its full realization 62 See Plato, Sophist, 244a See Julia Annas, An Introduction to Plato’s Republic Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981 64 See Aristotle, Metaphysik, Book I 65 See Karl R Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies, vol The Spell of Plato, ibid For Aristotle science can only be had when you are dealing with things that are characterized by the same persistence as Plato’s ideas The objects of science cannot be effervescent and subject to constant change This is why for Aristotle beings are not copies from a sphere which shows real persistence but embody such persistence themselves The change they are subject to is not the same as Heraclitus’s and Plato’s flux but must be one that shows a kind of persistence itself Aristotelian change when it comes to beings is always one from potentiality to actuality and a being is exactly the synthesis of these two conditions and hence a constant and not accidental feature of its quality This is why the Nicomachean Ethics says the following: “Scientific knowledge is supposition about things that are universal and necessary” (108) Translated from the Greek by Roger Crisp Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000 63 17 and hence the Good.66 This is true for plants, animals, human beings and cities They develop from an unfinished state into perfection thereby realizing their ultimate purpose In Western philosophy this theory became influential while it was unknown in the East While during the European middle ages, Aristotelian ontology was accepted and made to fit theological purposes,67 Asian philosophers kept on believing the static ontology that Buddha Sakyamuni had introduced And when Western philosophy reached its pivot in Kant, after the period of scholasticism, the difference between East and West began to take on more shape This is so because Kant postulated an anti-realism according to which the thing itself may never be really known.68 He reconfigured that Cartesian opposite between res cogitans and res extensa into the opposition between subject and object accepting the notion that being could not be had without the creative power of the cogito In this move Kant diminished being in its dynamism, which it had received in Aristotle, but he did not question the idea that knowledge must ultimately be based in an empirical world constantly in motion and having concrete, material shape The dynamism inherent in beings is, in Kant, dependent on the subject, without which these beings remain unintelligible, but there is no picture of being as a perpetual sameness whose opposite, nothingness, remains visible in it as in the Eastern model.69 Why there is being instead of nothingness is, for Kant, a theological question because without beings (Seiendes) there is no perceiving subject and hence no knowledge That which causes beings to be and also change is placed into the interplay between the subject and empirical reality rather than being admitted to be a part of this extra-subjective reality, as in Aristotle In this way, Aristotelian ontology is integrated into the opposition between cogito and empirical reality leaving intact the notion that the opposite of being, nothingness, does not belong to the world about which knowledge can be had Hegel brought nothingness back into the picture and he is closer to Aristotle as Kant is, as commentators have often pointed out.70 Because in the Kantian theory beings, conceived as empirical reality, are dependent on the subject and the subject on beings, the movement inherent in being becomes a function of the difference between cogito and nature The opposite of being is, for Kant, ultimately beyond what we can know Hegel refuted this claim For him, staying closer 66 See Aristotle, Metaphysik, Book XII See also Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics Book VI See Kurt Flasch, Das philosophische Denken im Mittelalter, ibid 68 See Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft Edited by J Timmermann Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1998 69 See Kant, ibid 70 See Charles Taylor, Hegel Translated from the English by Gerhard Fehn Frankfurt on the Main: Suhrkamp, 1983 67 18 to Aristotle, being is unintelligible without that which it is not, nothingness.71 And while Kant understood that beings are in motion, he failed to notice that this movement was an attribute of beings themselves This is why in Kantian ethics morality becomes a regulative idea that structures empirical reality without being completely a part of it For Hegel, Aristotle’s original idea, that movement is an essential part of beings themselves and hence of being, was crucial He argued that being and nothingness are related dialectically By this he meant that the dynamism inherent in reality could not be divided between a perceiving subject and the world it constitutes but must be placed in the order of things itself This is why in Hegel everything develops into its opposite and is marked by contradiction.72 In Aristotelian ontology things not move into their opposite They move into the full realization or the Good.73 But if this is so, the question of why and how being is possible cannot be satisfactorily answered because nothingness is not a part of the nature of beings In Hegel this is different Here the opposite of a being (Seiendes) is always already a part of the nature of that being Goodness always already carries badness in its dynamic structure and will be brought to perception once it is allowed that everything is in constant motion towards its negation Dialectical movement, the Hegelian move of placing the opposites into the form of being (Sein), is the true representation and fulfillment of Aristotelian ontology and is related to Buddha Sakyamuni’s ontology in the following way: There are opposites in the order of things There is no being without nothingness, no good without the bad, no finitude without infinity.74 This is a structural characteristic not of a relation of a subject to a world in flux but of being itself But while Western ontology understood the relation between opposites to be related dynamically, it differed from its Eastern counterpart In Buddhist ontology, which remained unaltered in India, China, Korea, and Japan for more than two thousand years, there is no such dynamism Without the Aristotelian move which introduced development into being, the Asian philosophers were not confronted with a theory of movement and kept on believing in the static model in which being emerges out of nothingness but remains without its opposite once it had given birth to it And so while Hegel says that being is nothingness,75 Asian thinkers said being once was nothingness but is now simply being: existence which remains unaffected by change generated from its own structure 71 See Georg W F Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes Edited by Hans-Friedrich Wessels and Heinrich Clairmont Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2006 Reprint 72 See Jan Hoffmeister, Dialectical Conservatism: an Essay on Hegel, on my academia website 73 See Aristotle, Metaphysik Book XII 74 See Georg W F Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik, vol Werke Frankfurt on the Main: Suhrkamp, 1986 75 „Das Sein ist das Nichts,“ see Georg W F Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik, ibid 19 Historical materialism, the political theory that Ho Chi Minh, Mao, and a lot of other Asians subscribed to, is based on Hegelian dialectics.76 For Marx, reality is contradictory.77 The human race develops through stages which negate each other because their opposites are always already a part of their social structure There is no capitalism without feudalism, no socialism without capitalism Every action carried out by any human being in any society is always determined by the order of things which is dialectical The history of humankind, from primitive society up to capitalism, has a goal that is already included in nucleus in the first social formations taking shape in African hunter and gatherer societies This goal is freedom Hegel argued civilization had reached its pivot in bourgeois society, freedom being realized in that normative order.78 But Marx sees that freedom, as conceived by Hegel, must mean an absence of power relations lest it is unclear why individuals perceive their social world as in need of change That which urges persons to act politically and change the societies in which they live, is their being conditioned by forces over which they never are in full control Slaves, bondsmen, and workers have identities conditioned by the society in which they live and it is within the parameters of that society that they can take action A slave will always act as a slave, a bondsman as a bondsman, and a worker as a worker Therefore the urge to act, which is nothing but the dialectical interplay between being conditioned and being free, is that which makes individuals take political action.79 And since freedom is, in any social formation, present to some extent and in some social strata, its realization in this world is perceived by actors as something that is in fact possible One thinks of Plato’s Guardians in his Republic.80 Freedom will be the condition of individuals in a society – the term is, as G A Cohen points out, not totally accurate because the world in that free individuals will live does not share the features of what we would recognize as society – where power relations are absent, or where, as Marx says, persons will have mastered the heteronomous elements that hold them captive This is a teleological dialectic in the best Aristotelian form and we will find in it all the attributes that make it differ from Asian ontology So why did Ho Chi Minh and so many other intellectuals from Asia find it convincing? 76 See Volkan Cidam, Die Phänomenologie des Widergeistes Eine anerkennungstheoretische Deutung von Marx‘ normativer Kritik am Kapitalismus im Kapital Studies in Political Sociology Baden Baden: Nomos, 2012 77 See Karl Löwith, Max Weber und Karl Marx, in his Sämtliche Schriften, vol Stuttgart: Metzler, 1988 324407 78 See Charles Taylor, Hegel, ibid 79 See Karl Marx, Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte Edited by Barbara Zehnpfennig Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2005 80 See Plato, The Republic, ibid 416a-421c 20 For one thing, historical materialism is a system in which opposites and contradictions have a place.81 This makes it resemble Buddhist ontology with its acceptance of opposites (being and nothingness) For another thing, The Confucian theory of equilibrium, which was fitted into Buddhist ontology as a static model where ethical opposites exist next to each other,82 was a theory which also accepted the idea that there are oppositional forces working on man Liberal political discourse hardly understood social reality to be based on opposites because, since Hobbes, it conceived as reality a nature free from any values.83 Historical materialism at least allowed opposites to play a role in political life and hence spoke more to the heart of the Asians But if opposites have a firm place in Marx, the notion of equilibrium, which was seen as a way to politics in a context marked by opposites in Confucius, is completely lacking in historical materialism Furthermore, dialectics is all about movement while for Confucius change is suspicious There is no goal in history for Confucius and wisdom (sophia) is about structuring the political world in such a fashion that there is a balance between the opposites The stasis and absence of a constant move forward, which figures so strongly in monotheism, is what gives Asian political life the character of an aesthetic of silence such as we have encountered it in modern Japanese literature The utopian dimension that we find in Marx thus appears as a foreign element at least in East Asian political thought to the extent that it is not religious Buddhism, of course, knows nirvana But if we assume that people like Mao, Ho Chi Minh, or the Japanese communists approached political theory from a strictly secular perspective, this aspect of Asian culture can maybe be neglected The ethics of equilibrium, however, which materialize in Confucius and whose roots go back so far on the Asian continent that even Aristotle’s ethics and Plato’s psychology are marked by it,84 cannot be left out of the picture I assume that most Asian political thinkers who turned to historical materialism did so because they recognized remnants of Buddhist ontology and Confucian political theory in Marx’s argument that man finds himself in a political world necessarily structured by opposites This was Ying and Yang in a foreign teleology 81 See Karl Löwith, Max Weber und Karl Marx, ibid See above, sequence II 83 See Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy Translated from the German by William Rehg Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998 90-92 84 See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics Book IV Plato, The Republic, 435a-439e 82 21 VI: The Problem of Freedom in Historical Materialism and Psychoanalysis We have now encountered what may have been the reasons for Ho Chi Minh’s, Mao’s and other East Asian thinkers when they turned to historical materialism as an answer to the political questions of their day I want, however, to push the narrative a bit further Ontology after Marx received a restructuring that cannot be neglected for our purposes here The Aristotelian theory, according to which beings develop into their perfection, is the basis of movement that we find in historical materialism However, in the 20th century this dynamic dimension in ontology was modified in such a way that it resembled the original, Asian theory, according to which opposites simply sit next to each other, much more Heidegger has shown that the question of being, as it was first raised in Asia a long time ago, has to be raised again if we want to have clarity concerning man’s position in the world Heidegger recognized that Aristotle wrongly assumed that being had a structure to be enlightened by science In Aristotelian ontology being is conceived as something that strives for its realization and that is, in a way, dynamic, a relation of potentiality and actuality Heidegger, however, shows that this approach, where being has a material character, misses the mark.85 To say that something exists, that something is, is not to argue for its bodily or psychological character, but to stipulate that man, with his or her concern for being itself, is present This is not a utilitarian theory in which man is concerned with physical survival but a picture in which the things and persons that exist can only so under the premise that certain structural features of existence are operative Among these are: a concern for others and one’s being thrown into circumstances one has not freely chosen This reconfiguration of ontology by Heidegger brought first philosophy away from the dynamic twist it had received by Aristotle and located it in much closer proximity to its original Asian counterpart which remained in place in the East for such a long time.86 This is so because Heidegger realized that stipulating a material or psychological existence for things and persons that exist, as Aristotle had helped doing, eclipsed the older conception from view according to which being has more to with the way in which man naively relates to his environment before theorizing it Man is concerned with being, Heidegger writes And beings only disclose their nature to us in our 85 See Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit 19th edition Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2006 §§ 43-44 See Reinhard May, Ex Oriente Lux Heideggers Werk unter ostasiatischem Einfluss Stuttgart: Steiner Verlag, 1989 May shows that Heidegger was familiar with Asian philosophy and used some of its concepts However, simply to show that this is the case is a bit simple What has to be done is make clear how ontology changed from Taoism to Heidegger 86 22 engaged relating to the world we know.87 Beings are not striving for a goal driven by their contradictory nature but reveal themselves to us in our everyday dealing with them If this picture is correct and Western philosophy from Aristotle to Hegel missed the mark in their teleological conceptions, it may be time to reconfigure historical materialism and psychoanalysis within the parameters of Heidegger’s first philosophy In this view the idea that humankind is on its way to utopia whose availableness is made visible to us through history must be discarded The picture that would emerge here may have much more to with regulating the political world through that which we know and have experience about It would mean giving up the notion that freedom lies beyond the social world as we know it and seeing theory not as a catalyst in a dialectical process but rather as a practice in which we are concerned with social organization within the sphere of which we have positive knowledge Historical materialism and psychoanalysis are sciences which have been dogged by the problem of determinism In historical materialism that has meant that our knowledge about the necessary development of society precludes the idea of freedom in politics So in the vein of Isaiah Berlin and Karl Popper we can say that historical materialism abrogates freedom in that it makes individuals into the playthings of external forces over which they have basically very little control.88 The march of history is inevitable and based on a program that the scientist can discern But if it follows with rigid necessity that feudal societies will inevitably become capitalist there is very little for me to instead of acting according to the scripts unveiled by critical economists If history becomes a science such as chemistry or physics, it precludes the moment of freedom that we know as an inevitable structural component of the life world And it is this inevitable knowledge that Asian ontology as brought back by Heidegger can make useful The Marxists have traditionally resolved the problem of freedom with dialectics, that is to say, they have assumed that being conditioned and being free are two sides of the same coin in the sense that freedom cannot be had without social structures that condition us while these structures, in turn, are the result of our free actions as individuals and classes But if we give up on teleological dialects and return to static ontology this theory appears as corrupt.89 And indeed, my class position in society is never something that I have freely chosen and it determines objectively the material parameters within which I can at all take action To regard this position with the straight eye of logic means accepting the fact that 87 See Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, ibid § 12 See Isaiah Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty, in his Liberty, edited by Henry Hardy Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.; and Karl Popper, The Poverty of Historicism London: Routledge, 1963 89 The reader will see that I assume, with Husserl, that the Hegelian attempt to undo the pasic premises of logic as discovered by Aristotle is a failure See Edmund Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen Edited by Elisabeth Ströker Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2009 88 23 we are always already conditioned by structures over which we are never in full control We are, to use the Heideggerian expression, thrown into the world whose outlines cannot be determined by us before we become volitional individuals Our socialization happens within a world we have not made ourselves but which is the product of the species (Gattung) But there is no agenda, no hidden plan that drives this development inevitably toward some kind of eschatological climax The knowledge we have about society is conditioned by that very society and therefore designing political institutions should be viewed as a process in which we balance the social systems that we know so that they serve our interests In post-marxist political science there are now several such approaches which all deny the plausibility of grand theory combined with a teleology of history.90 Our knowledge about just institutions derives from our conditioned social situation and freedom must mean making the best out of what we have received from society so that the social world becomes a habitable place A post-capitalist society will consequently depend on struggles that we wage against oppressive social systems but always under the premises that it is only from an internal and contextbound perspective that we can get glimpses of a better society In psychoanalysis the same situation obtains My family situation which conditions my mental life is one into which I have been simply thrown There is no point in thinking that the individual before socialization is free in any of the ways that the liberals would like to see And so just as my class position is something that determines my actions, my family situation does a similar job And yet, as Freud would have acknowledged, we as grown up people can make free decisions The temptation of applying the same dialectical schema that we have encountered in historical materialism is, of course, great However, it would be a mistake to assume that freedom and dependency are related dialectically It makes much more sense to say that in order for me to become a grown up person capable of his or her own decisions, I have to accept my involvement into a context whose character precedes my volitions by necessity This process of assuming freedom as a function of dependency should make us more humble when it comes to characterizing ourselves and our societies as free For talk of the free world in contrast to a semi-feudal social order neglects the extent to which such semi-feudal societies face up to their dependencies on social structures predating free action and makes them therefore, in a sense, more honest than the West with its constant reiteration of its discovery of political freedom Ho Chi Minh would have been more humble, as are most societies in the global South, when it comes to the question if citizens are truly free And this 90 See, for instance, Kolja Möller, Formwandel der Verfassung Die postdemokratische Verfasstheit des Transnationalen Bielefeld: Transcript, 2015 24 humility is needed if we are not to progress into a world where we are fooled by ourselves into believing that freedom obtains once you know the goal of history or the true nature of your childhood 25 ... completed, we will have a theory for why and how Ho Chi Minh reacted to what he was exposed to in communist circles in the West and we may be able to trace his thoughts after coming from that important... life was associated and restructured social relations by relegating the open display of drastic power within the household (between man and woman and above all father and children).16 The public... hinterland in order to be away from the city and indulge in the pleasures of a witty geisha.54 In this hinterland country (the snow land) he discovers the atmosphere of silence and beauty whose architects