Living on
By
Egidius Berns
Abstract
In my paper I’ll analyze the relation between life under the conditions of economical globalization in a context of finite resources and practical rationality sustaining the possibility of global justice. As from de beginning of Western Philosophy, philosophers have related economy to life. According to Aristotle, one can determine economy as a kind of administration or management of life. However, a succeeded life does not restrict itself to these economical activities that are not free, even though they are inevitable and they more or less determine life. Aristotle calls this other life the “good life”, “eu zèn”. It is a free life, as we can encounter in the practice of virtue, science, friendship and politics. Hence, to a certain extent, we can say that life doubles itself as a “bare” (Agamben) life and a good life. From Aristotle to Kant, economy is understood as the endlessness of the provision of life by life itself. Bare life, and therefore economy, is from itself limitless. Therefore the possibility of practical rationality can only be found if a ground for delimiting bare life can be indicated, unless the limitlessness of bare life is as such the preservation of life, as Marx and liberalism would sustain and Heidegger has explained in his philosophy of technique.
Nevertheless, both options are impossible as is showed once again by the economical rationality of globalization, where life only lives in so far as it lives on, i.e., in the survival, without the possibility of totalizing itself. Within the global world, life is labour that to a certain extent provides for life, but that also to a certain extent looses itself, especially if we have in mind the finitude of earth and resources. This life is usury and life is only alive and productive in relation to death, or to use the words of Derrida, alive in “an economy of death”. The economy is, therefore, not the endless middle of pure instrumental rationality as some economists and most philosophers still too often consider it. It is a middle of bounded rationality permeated by both power and morality. For it is precisely the impossibility of an original delimitation between bare life and good life that gives meaning to practical reason, since only this impossibility offers an opening to morality and politics.
Good life
As from the beginning of Western philosophy in old Greece, philosophers have related economy to life. According to Aristotle, who extensively examines in his book Politica what he calls ‘oikonomia’ – which is literally the law of the household –, one can determine economy as a kind of administration or management of life. Because of that it resembles medical science. Aristotle does not refrain from mentioning this resemblance. Economy guarantees the necessities (anangkaioi) without which life (zooè) is impossible.[1] Man as a living being just has needs and desires to which he can only give in by producing goods that are useful for him. He is not free in doing this; one cannot lay aside hunger and coldness. However, a succeeded life does not restrict itself to the activities that are not free, even though they are inevitable and they more or less determine life. Aristotle calls this other life the “good life”, “eu zèn”. It is a free life, as we can encounter in the practice of science or friendship.
Aristotle uncovered with these insights the fundamental structures of our Western society and morality. Life does not involve life, bare life,[2] but the good life. Hence, to a certain extent, we can say that life doubles itself as a bare life and a good ulife. Life tout court is the domain of economy, and it is true that it is necessary, but it needs to be delimited by the domain of the good life if human existence wants to be meaningful. In our modern demarcations of coercion versus freedom, zealous versus enlightened, interest versus disinterested, self-interest versus public interest, private versus public, we still recognise this old delimitation. Aristotle is obsessed by this limit. He argues and we agree in our finest hours that life, and hence economy, have the tendency to transcend all limits and to be busy with itself in a endless process of wanting more and more. “The cause of this state of mind [that, according to Aristotle, consists in ‘safeguarding and increasing their substance in money to an unlimited amount’] is that their interests are set upon life but not upon the good life; as therefore the desire for life is unlimited, they also desire without limit the means productive of life”[3] According to him, the economy is unable to keep to any measures, since life is unable to keep to them. When the illusion of wealth that is brought along by the idea that money is an undifferentiated purchasing power takes possession of life, the desire to live is beyond measure, and with it the economy. Only insofar as we focus on the good life will life and economy be brought back to the human measure, will wealth loose its illusionary character and will they be allocated a meaningful and reasonable place within the whole of human destiny. Because of this it was possible to think that the economy has to be subdued to the generality of law and to political decision-making as an expression of public interest.
It is remarkable that Aristotle approaches this theme in terms of a limit. In his opinion, life does apparently aim at a natural purpose – the good life -, but this can only be realised when life retains itself[4] and delimits itself. The life that I previously called ‘bare life’ and that shows itself in the economy is, then, the life that does not retain itself, that is left to itself and that becomes endless - apeiros - when an end or limit – peirar[5] – is absent. Hence, the limit that Aristotle discusses has a certain exteriority that is opposed to life, even though this is the actual goal of life and in that sense an internal border. Therefore, he emphasises that this delimitation is “natural”.[6] It corresponds to the nature of human life of which the purpose is the “good life”. The claim that the limit makes in order to delimit bare life from the outside, is according to Aristotle derived from this naturalness, from the fact that it is the actual purpose of life. This does not mean that bare life is devoid of all rationality. On the contrary. There is no life without bare life and everything would end without it. Therefore, Aristotle does not resist becoming wealthy, unless this is done at the expense of enjoying the amassed fortune. Furthermore, this process of amassing wealth requires insight and expertise. Hence, it is bound to follow rules and laws, and in that sense it has its own measure and limits. Economical arguments always appear irrefutable because of this, and bare life can become the purpose of life. This happens in what Aristotle calls chrematistikè (technè), wich is wealth getting. In his opinion, this kind of economy is opposed to the oikonomia in which the practice of the economy takes place within the limits of practical rationality, that is to say, of the good life.
I will spare you the later developments of the central idea of our civilisation that bare life has a external border. But whether we look at Hobbes or Rousseau, every time that we observe a social contract that is or should be at the foundation of a well-ordered society, we also notice that this contract ends all the chaos of the war of all against all by clamping down this war for bare life.
The moral and political vision of our contemporary society in a time of globalisation is still marked by the idea of a limit that divides bare life from a humane life. To a certain extent this globalization realizes the old politico-philosophical dream of the unity of the world and humanity: cosmopolitism. Our time is also the time of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, hence, rights that every human being has as a human being, apart from his or her nationality. According to Kant, the cosmopolitan unity of the world consists in the right of every human being to freely visit all places on earth, which not only condemns every form of xenophobia[7] on the site of the visitors and of the ones who have been visited, but also every imperialism and colonialism. This involves a right and not a favour. They have this right of hospitality as human beings and, therefore, as a citizen of the world, and not as a citizen of some country. They have this right because the surface of the earth is common property of mankind. This does not go for institutions and facilities that are brought about by certain groups on certain places on that surface of the earth. According to Kant, the right of access to these facilities is restricted to the members of this group. The stranger does not have the right on the basis of which he or she can beforehand demand to have access. This access is only possible on the basis of an agreement between the stranger concerned and the group concerned. However, everybody has the right to hospitality, since earth belongs to everybody. And this is because the earth is spherical. For this reason “men cannot infinitely disperse and hence must finally tolerate the presence of each other. Originally, no one had more right than another to a particular part of the earth.”[8] Hence, the call of the Far West is a deceit. One cannot move endlessly westwards to appropriate land, since there is, apart from the Indians, in any case no unlimited amount of land obtainable. The sphericity of the earth is the reason for eventually always encountering each other once more. Hence, we have to tolerate each other’s proximity. That is the foundation of tolerance. It is not a favour, but a right that one is allowed to apply in the presence of the other and on which reversely the other has to be able to appeal to.
Similar to Aristotle, Kant draws up a limit with this cosmopolitan right of hospitality. In bare life we have to take a limit into account, namely not to be hostile to another human being and not to subject and exploit the other. Other texts of Kant state that “if justice [Gerechtigkeit] goes, there is no longer any value for human being to live on the earth”[9] or thatthe dignity of the human being transcends everything else. It is true that Kant calls this border differently than Aristotle does – his deontology makes clear why we will have to practice the virtues, even apart from every teleological consideration –, but in essence it is the same: taking care of the provisions for life looses its meaning when it is left to itself. In our time of globalisation, a systematic and global appropriation of nature provides for life. But this appropriation is subordinate to the respect for human dignity. When Kant claims that everything has a relative value, that is, a market price, but that the human being is an end in itself, that is, it has a dignity that elevates him above every price,[10] he expresses the European moral legacy. Man is the end. All the rest (nature included) is a means.
Bare life
However, the Aristotelian-Kantian schema, that emphasizes the good life or the dignity of a human being instead of the economical life in order to account for true life, is not our only inheritance. A significant and mainly modern part of our culture inverts this schema and emphasizes the economical dimension of life for grasping the essence of life. What Aristotle already sensed when he referred to the excess of life and economy is gradually and more explicitly formed with the rise of the middle class in the medieval cities. This middle class aims for a freedom of private activities that does not experience any delimitation by the government that is supposed to act in the name of public interest. What we now call civil society arises, and with it the social space for capitalism. Life becomes disenchanted. The taste for the ‘good life’ evaporates. Bare life is more and more identified with real life. All delimitation that is given to it by morality, politics or religion is not only unjust and illusorily, but also unnecessary, since the economy of bare life takes care of its own limits in its endless desire for more and more.
Marx concludes from this that man is in essence a producer in the economical sense of the term. Labour is the activity of life par excellence. Labour is the provision in life because of the appropriation of nature. That is why this labour is the process in which life produces itself. The economy “ist das Leben erzeugende Leben”.[11]Marx rigorously draws all possible conclusions from the essential idea that bare life provides for itself in production. Life is here not that of some individual. It is the life of the human kind. As soon as an individual acknowledges this, it becomes clear that life can only be explained from its own activity. Because of this God and religion will as a matter of course become unnecessary. And the individual death even looses its tragic meaning, because man considers himself to be part of the life of mankind.
Liberalism is saved from these extreme consequences because of its individualism. However, liberal authors do not differ from Marx when it concerns the repudiation of everything that has to do with limits and obstructions[12]. Contrary to Aristotle, who thought of bare life as a necessary evil and because of that assumed that it needed to be delimited by the good life, in the opinion of both Marx and liberalism, all political, religious or moral delimitations are a hindrance and a kind of deceit when compared to the actual procedure. Life, and with it the economy, should be able to be left to itself. As we saw, Aristotle also noticed that there is nothing life and economy like to do more than this. Hence, philosophers from Aristotle to contemporary liberals essentially agree on what is meant by economy, viz., the unlimited provision of life by life itself. The difference between all these philosophers is restricted to the way they deal with this unlimitedness. However, this is an unnecessary solicitude for economy itself: it draws up its own limits.
When I merely have to bend and pick up an apple in order to appease my hunger, then there is no economy yet. It only originates when I have to withhold part of the harvest and I, therefore, (partly) have to suspend the satisfaction of my needs in order to be able to eat tomorrow. Or when I sell part of the harvest in order to buy later or somewhere else of the profits something else, such as clothes. However, the economical man is not concerned with the loss of the expenses in endlessness, but with the return of the costs, possibly with some profit. As Aristotle already recognised, economy develops an endless movement. But its concern is not to lose itself in this movement, but to appropriate it. There is a genuine Dutch saying painted on a old house in Amsterdam near the Stock Exchange,: “De kost gaat voor de baat uit”, “Cost goes before the profit”. Hence, economy has its own limit. Economy originates when one feels a shortage and a sacrifice has to be made for nullifying it. However, the stake is that the expenses are at least made up by the profit, viz., the nullification of the shortage. Only when the profit of the costs that are made is assured can we say that life provides for itself, that life preserves life. The internal limit of economy is this return, this circulation, that Heidegger described as the essence of technology and of which he saw in Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence the realization. Therefore, the endlessness that seemed to characterize the economy ever since Aristotle has to be considered as the endlessness of a circulation.
When we want to have an idea about how such a life that is handed over to itself looks like, then the world of globalisation imposes itself upon us. This world is a world without limits and hindrances, a world of deregulation. Life has become, to use the word of Zygmunt Bauman, “liquid” in this world.[13] The oppositionbetween man and woman that is never neutral and always ordered in a hierarchy here desist. The communication technology connects in real timethe ends of the world. Companies have become multinationals that organise their production by encompassing the whole world as a place of settlement and a possibility for investment. The fall of the Berlin Wall has united the Western world with immense areas, such as Russia and China, and the world is turned into one world. National sovereignty is shattered and gets involved in processes of multi-level global governance. The means of violence that were previously a monopoly of the state are no longer only in the hands of the state, but also in the hands of private groups called terrorists who are no longer tied to the borders of a state. Capital, culture, language – English –, the mobility of labour, tourism have become global and hardly care anymore about borders. The economy does not know night’s or Sunday’s rest anymore. The classical opposition between public and private, between administrative law and civil law fades. Corruption, i.e., the use of private means in the public realm, has become an inevitable evil. Public services and public utilities that previously functioned on the basis of legitimacy and integrity are more and more subjected to demands of efficiency, at least when they have not been privatised yet. Civil servants are acting like managers. Universities have become ‘enterprising’. Political actions are more and more guided by the economical logic of maximising opinions gathered in polls. The personality and private lives of politicians seem to become more interesting than the way they perform their public tasks. Etcetera. This description is indeed far from exhaustive, and, furthermore, restricted to our Western situation.