Nothing is harder for this skeptical age than to believe that the universe ultimately has meaning --except, perhaps, the idea that such belief is not only warranted, but is in fact commanded, by reason. And yet, there is no greater obstacle to the struggle for social progress and social justice than gnawing doubt about the question of ultimate meaning. Hope, both individual and collective, withers and the highest objects of our love dissolve like so many phantoms or mirages. The existentialist claim that "life begins on the other side of despair (Sartre 1943, 1960)," has shown itself to be little more than wishful thinking as existentialist humanism has given way to postmodernist nihilism, and existentialist atheism into a critique of the human subject itself (Foucault 1966/1970). Unable to find an adequate ground for their moral ideas, people become incapable of judging --and thus of seeing injustice. Unable to find an adequate ground for hope, they become incapable of action on behalf of the Good.
But the current trend towards nihilism has a more specific significance: it is at once rooted in and serves to reinforce the market system. From the very beginning the marketplace has eroded humanity's confidence in the ultimate meaningfulness of the universe. In a market economy people experience society as a system of externally related particles, governed, perhaps, by certain formal laws, but lacking any global meaning or ultimate purpose. Soon they begin to see the universe in much the same way. This tendency was already apparent in petty commodity societies such as ancient Greece, where doctrines such as atomism, sophism, and skepticism attracted widespread support. Indeed, the whole project of Socratic philosophy can be understood as an attempt to reground a doctrine of meaning and value in the light of sophistic and skeptical critiques (Mansueto 1995, 1998a). What is unique in the present period is, first of all, the existence of a generalized market economy and second what appears to be a more or less permanent crisis in the capacity of human civilization to progress under this regime.
By a petty market economy we mean one in which production is increasingly for exchange, but labor power and capital have not yet been commodified. Production is carried out by village communities, individual peasants or artisans, or by large producers using nonmarket means of extracting surplus (rents, taxes, forced labor, or slavery). As the development of the marketplace proceeds, first labor and then capital are transformed into commodities. The transformation of labor into a commodity began with the industrial revolution which involved, among other things, the proletarianization of peasants and artisans and continues in the present period as ever-larger numbers of intellectuals are transformed into little more than skilled wage labor. The transformation of capital into a commodity is largely a phenomenon of the present period, as the perfection of capital markets and electronic information processing have made possible the constant reallocation of capital among different activities in the constant pursuit of an ever higher rate of return (Mansueto 1997a).
In petty market societies there remains a "fixed-frame" of reference (the network of nonmarket relationships) against which exchange takes place. This is reflected in an enduring belief in the objectivity of sense-experience, the existence of a fixed space within which events take place over time, etc. It is merely judgements of value which are relegated to the realm of subjectivity. In a generalized market society, on the other hand, the "fixed frame" tends to disappear. As in the derivatives markets, everything is defined in terms of everything else --and thus nothing has a stable definition at all. The fixed frame of Newtonian physics gives way first to relativistic and eventually to quantum schemae in which even the underlying structure of spacetime becomes a dependent variable (Mansueto 1997a, Tipler 1994).
The second factor in the emergence of contemporary nihilism is the existence of a global crisis in the human civilizational project. While it was still involved in its struggle against the old feudal nobility, the bourgeoisie needed allies among the intelligentsia, the industrial proletariat, and the peasantry. It thus pressed for economic, political, and cultural reforms which helped unleash the development of human social capacities. After about the middle of the nineteenth century (the precise time varied from one country to another) this dynamic gave way to an increasing concern with containing the rising socialist movements. Even so, economic imperatives --coming to terms with the tendency of the rate of profit to fall as the economy became more technologically developed and the tendency for wage-depression to lead to crises of underconsumption-- coupled with the dynamics of the class struggle itself, often forced the bourgeoisie to use nonmarket mechanisms to centralize resources and invest them in research, development, education, infrastructure, and other things which promote the development of human social capacities. By the early 1970s, however, this dynamic seems to have spent itself. And with the collapse of the Soviet Union the rationale for high levels of military spending, which indirectly financed much of the scientific progress during the course of this century, seems to have disappeared. As Eric Lerner points out (Lerner 1991) there have been no fundamental scientific innovations since the beginning of this century (relativity and quantum mechanics) and no fundamentally new technologies since the end of the Second World War (nuclear power and microelectronics). The much vaunted "technological revolution" of the present period is simply a result of improvement in and implementation of existing technologies. The underlying science is still relativity and quantum mechanics -- science which is nearly a century old.
When progress is still taking place, even if this is in spite of rather than because of the market system, the bourgeoisie can present itself as a liberating and progressive force. In reality the Enlightenment, far from being a real "age of reason," was in fact the first phase in a prolonged attack on the ability of human reason to grasp the ultimate meaning of the universe. This should be apparent to anyone who compares the powers allotted to reason by Ibn Rushd or Aquinas, with those allowed by Kant or Hume. But in the context of the other advances which were taking place at the time, it was possible to present the skeptical criticisms of the empiricists and the philosophes as a liberation from the authority of prelate and peer and a blow for freedom and progress. No one thought to ask just how the value of liberation or progress was to be grounded if reason cannot ascend to a principle which is infinite, necessary, perfect --and thus divine. One can still pick up the fading notes of this tune from neoliberals such as F.A. Hayek and Frank Tipler, so popular during the present period of relative stabilization, though the liberation they proclaim is no longer from prelate and peer but rather from commissar and community. When authentic progress is grinding to a halt, however, as it has been since the middle of the nineteenth century, it is necessary to attack head on the idea of progress as such, lest capitalism be found wanting by its own criteria. Thus the emergence in the mid- nineteenth century of pessimistic and nihilistic philosophies such as those of Schopenauer (Schopenauer 1819) and Nietzsche (Nietzsche 1889). Thus the advance of these trends into the forefront by the middle of the present century, when the (very different) "existentialisms" of Sartre (Sartre 1943, 1960) and Heidegger (Heidegger 1928) became so popular. And thus the triumph, in the present period of the postmodern nihilism which acknowledges that the present order is founded on violence, but which cannot imagine an order founded on anything else (Derrida 1967/1978).
What nihilism does is to undermine the possibility of any criticism of the market order and to make the search for ultimate meaning in terms of which criteria for judgement might be formulated into an object of ridicule, a neurotic obsession of those who are too weak to face the darkness of the abyss, to risk themselves in action in the knowledge that everything ends in absolute loss. And it glorifies the capitalist and the imperialist warlord who stops at nothing to make his mark on the world, knowing full well that with the rapidly shifting sands of time it will soon be eroded.
***
The effects of nihilism, however, extend well beyond the open partisans of Nietzsche and Derrida, of Heidegger, Foucault, and Deleuze. Nihilistic criticism has sapped the confidence and energy of those who see themselves as friends of meaning and of progress, and has resulted in profound ideological disorientation. Those who claim to believe in God, for example, increasingly come to this belief not because they find in the universe, as apprehended by ordinary common sense or by science, an organized system ordered to an end which can only be infinite, necessary, and perfect, but rather by means of "nonthematic preapprehensions" or leaps of faith which circumvent or set aside the evidence of the senses and of reason. Such intellectual sleight of hand and affective leaps of faith, however, can conclude only to a principle which is either impotent and unable to do much with this world of ours, or else hopelessly inscrutable with regard to His plans. In the first case, the object of belief is limited and thus not really God at all. And a universe governed by divine caprice is not really distinguishable from one governed by the "will to power." The result is practical atheism in religious disguise.
If knowledge of God, furthermore, is possible only on the basis of something other than rational inference from sensory experience, then we cut a chasm between our ordinary sensual appetites and any possible love of God. Love of God is not just higher than love of objects we know through the senses --it is radically different. And this is, of course, precisely the position of the whole tradition, beginning with Augustine, continuing through the Reformers, the Traditionalists, the Ontologists, and the Objective Idealists, who ground knowledge of God in this way. A whole host of evils follows in train --hatred of matter, of women, of sensuality, and ultimately of the whole universe. It is difficult to see how, from this point of view, "natural" humanity, still submerged in sensation and the sensual appetites, is not radically depraved, or how such a "natural" humanity would ascend to even civilized behavior, without benefit of divine intervention --which is, of course, precisely what the religious right argues. But clearly "theism" of this kind has nothing to do with the ultimate meaningfulness of the universe. On the contrary, it is, as Marx suggested, an opium for those who, living under conditions of brutal oppression, have lost faith in the world (Marx 1843/1978: 54). What he failed add is that it is also a practical atheism --a conviction that the universe, if it is indeed the handiwork of some great power, is shoddy work indeed, showing nothing of divine majesty, and pointing not towards God but towards a cosmic tyrant --and an cosmic incompetent.
Much the same must be said for the secular left. Marx and Engels can perhaps be forgiven if, in the middle of the nineteenth century they had not yet sorted out the internal contradictions of the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution. The polemic against "prelate and peer" had not yet spent its progressive potential, and it was difficult to reject what seemed like the inevitable cosmological implications of the very same thermodynamic theory which made possible the heat engine and the enormous technological progress it brought in its wake. But even then it should have been apparent that a consistent dialectical materialism, with its commitment to the infinitely self-organizing potential of matter, was no more compatible with atheism than it was with cosmic tyranny preached by Augustinian theology. Matter which evolves infinitely towards ever higher degrees of organization produces, over the whole span of an infinite space time, all logically possible forms of organization. The resulting system is thus perfect and, having no cause outside itself, is self- caused or necessary Being. This is what the philosophical tradition has historically understood by God. And this point was not lost on such diverse philosophers as Bogdanov and Lunacharsky, Deborin and Mil'ner-Irinin (all of them Soviet) who worked in various ways to resolve the internal contradictions of dialectical materialism, with the result that they were condemned as, among other things, conciliators of religion (Wetter 1958, Joravsky 1961, Dahm 1988).
Even the official Soviet tradition, however, showed a more consistent resistance to nihilism than European Marxism. Already by the beginning of this century most European Marxists had rejected the "dialectics of nature" --Engels' doctrine that not only human history, but the universe as a whole evolves towards ever higher degrees of organization, in favor of a de facto existentialism which treats humanity as an island of meaning in a universe which is ultimately indifferent to his concerns. The basis for this concession was, of course, a recognition that dialectical materialism was incompatible with the bourgeois cosmology which made the universe subject to chaos and contingency. The resulting doctrine left commitment to create meaning and value, and to build a society which develops and unleashes human potential --a commitment the depth and sincerity of which cannot be doubted-- without any cosmological or ontological ground. The European and North American proletariats can perhaps be excused if they chose not to invest in an enterprise which they were being told was ultimately without basis and was doomed to failure in the long run by the laws of physics itself!
Since the 1960s this existentialist humanism has given way to a rapproachment with postmodernism. Partly shift this is a result of the internal logic of European Marxism itself. Lacking an adequate cosmological or ontological ground the commitment to the proletariat and to socialism becomes just an arbitrary option. Attempting to make this partial interest seem universal by dressing it up in "totalizing metanarratives" (Lyotard 1979) which proclaim the "leading role" of the working class in the "historical process" seems no less an ideological cover for a bare exercise of power than the bourgeoisie's narrative of freedom and progress through individual initiative. Incomplete, atheistic dialectical materialism disintegrates into existentialism and then into postmodernist nihilism. But partly the shift must also be attributed to a decision by a section of the intelligentsia, faced with proletarianization, to attempt to save its class position by leaving behind its socialist sympathies and adopting a stance more useful to the bourgeoisie. That the ruling classes seem to have "bought" this alternative should be apparent to anyone who analyzes the composition of university faculties. Neoliberalism and postmodernism, the ideologies of the globally hegemonic bourgeoisie in its periods of stability and crisis respectively, are effectively hegemonic, as one would expect. But self-proclaimed "Marxists" are in no short supply --as social conservatives are always wont to point out. One can even find open supporters of the extreme left --of organizations such as the Peruvian Sendero Luminoso. But on closer examination it becomes apparent that these "Marxists" are all postmodernists in disguise, who regard their "option" for the proletariat as simply that --as an ungrounded choice, and who, therefore, present no real danger to the hegemony of the market order. On the contrary, the nihilism they teach their students contributes more to the formation of intellectual cadres for the global market than their publications in chic left journals could ever do to challenge the hegemony of the "neoliberal metanarrative."
One might imagine that the religious left which has risen to such prominence since the late 1960s, especially in Catholic circles in Latin America, would have offered an alternative to the cosmic autocracy of the Augustinians and the crypto-nihilism of the secular left. It has not. The road forward for the Catholic left in the 1960s --a synthesis of traditional Dominican Thomism and Soviet dialectical materialism, which were already quite close on a number of core philosophical questions-- was a road not taken. Instead, liberation theologians opted for a biblicist theology which grounds the struggle for justice and the option for the poor (not, it should be noted, the working classes) in divine decree rather than in the natural law accessible to human reason. Any impression of cultural chauvinism which may result from so privileging the biblical tradition is then softened by copious references to such postmodernist touchstones as the "hermeneutic circle" and by assurances that this tradition is normative only for those who place themselves within it. As a result the whole enterprise remains utterly ungrounded. It is little wonder that with the defeat of their sponsors in the Vatican at the end of the 1970s, and of their allies in the Kremlin at the end of the 1980s, liberation theologians have entered a period of prolonged disorientation.
Nihilism represents the avant garde of the bourgeoisie's offensive against the ideological resolve of the working classes, the cutting edge of their assault on the human civilizational project -- the project of participation in the self-organizing activity of the universe. But the so-called friends of meaning and of progress, be they "theists" who can find no good reason to believe in God or "socialists" who can find no good reason to believe in the proletariat, are engaged in acts of philosophical appeasement which are nearly as dangerous. We are at war. We are losing. We can give no quarter to the enemy. We must combat nihilism and combat all forms of philosophical appeasement.
***
This means that we have before us a difficult but vitally important philosophical task. Exposing the social basis and political valence of nihilism is important, but it is only the beginning of our work. We must restore humanity's confidence in the ultimate meaningfulness of the universe. And it must be admitted that, given the ideological confusion and philosophical obfuscation of the past four centuries, this is a formidable task. It involves addressing epistemological, cosmological, metaphysical, and ethical questions, any one of which might present a stumbling block to an honest seeker of truth in the present period. But the fact is that there are answers to the nihilistic critique. Consider the problem of knowledge. Relativism and subjectivism of one sort or another have been almost de riguer in bourgeois philosophical circles since the middle of the nineteenth century. Any claim that we know real objects has been treated as a sure sign of a lack of philosophical sophistication. But recent work in neuropsychology (Luria 1973, Sacks 1985, Damasio 1994) suggests that sensation does in fact produce an image in the brain which records data about the organization of the universe, rather than merely organizing sensations in a way which has little or no relationship to the objective determinations of the things which give rise to them. Cognitive development theory (Luria 1976) and the sociology of knowledge (Durkheim 1911/1965, Lukacs 1922/1971, Fromm 1941, 1947) have certainly demonstrated that the way in which we abstract the intelligible content of these images is radically dependent on participation in human society and indeed on the specific structure which shapes the way in which live. But far from implying a radical relativism, this evidence in fact provides a new way in which to understand the medieval debates around the Agent Intellect and the Thomistic doctrine of connatural knowledge. The Agent Intellect in Aristotelian psychology (Aristotle. De Anima III) is the faculty which illuminates the images we garner from experience and reveals their intelligible content. Due both to ambiguities in Aristotle's thinking on the matter, and contemporary socioreligious interests, the Middle Ages witnessed a vigorous debate between those (including most of the Arab commentators) who saw the Agent Intellect as a single unified intelligence illuminating all of humanity, and those who, like Thomas, treated it as a faculty of the human person (von Steenberghen 1980). Connatural knowledge is knowledge we have preconceptually due to a similarity of nature with the object known (Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II Q 45 a2). In a forthcoming work I will argue, against both Thomas and the Averroists, that the "Agent Intellect" is both individual and collective --that it is in fact nothing other than human society. By living in the way social structures of varying degrees of complexity require us to, and thus in a very real sense "living" these social structures, we gain a kind of preconceptual connatural knowledge of these structures which then illuminates the images we garner from experience, revealing their intelligible content. This "social intellect" is of course internally differentiated across different social systems, and is internalized differently by each individual within each society, depending on social location, the specifics of family structure and socialization, etc. Together these ideas help us to transform the "hermeneutic circle" in which the theory of knowledge has been caught at least since Kant, and which the sociology of knowledge has only tightened, into a dialectical spiral which permits an authentic ascent to Truth.
Once the epistemological problems facing us have been resolved, it is then necessary to demonstrate that the universe is structured in such a way as to point to a principle infinite, necessary, and perfect in character. We have come to take for granted claims rooted in science which is over a century old that that the universe is governed by chaos and contingency, and that meaning and value are at best temporary and fragile constructs of the human individual and human society --and at worst illusions which cover a weak-hearted inability to confront the darkness and the abyss. And a universe which is itself little more than a "quantum fluctuation," and the behavior of which is governed by chaos and contingency, hardly requires for its explanation (indeed would seem to exclude) a principle infinite, perfect, necessary, and thus divine. Only such a principle, however, can ground meaning which is ultimate in character. All else is partial and contingent.
And yet this science is in crisis --and has been almost since its inception-- because of a complex of internal contradictions. First of all, the claims of evolutionary theory seem to contradict those of equilibrium thermodynamics --the one pointing towards increasing and the other towards decreasing complexity. Both together, furthermore, with their emphasis on directional change over time (be it disintegration or evolution) contradict the time reversible laws of both classical and quantum mechanics. Finally mechanics (which, contradiction or no, forms the basis of the entire edifice of modern science) has shown itself unable to resolve contradictions between relativistic and quantum descriptions of the universe (Prigogine 1977, 1979, 1984, 1989, Lerner 1991, Mansueto 1998).
In the light of this crisis of the sciences perhaps it is time to review the seventeenth century verdict against Aristotelian physics and teleological explanation. Aristotle's physics was rejected for two reasons. First, it was unable to advance a unified theory of motion. How does one explain teleologically a decaying corpse or a thrown javelin? These processes do not seem in any sense ordered to the perfection of form. Thus the distinction between natural and violent motion. This in turn led to a distinction between the celestial realm, where all motion is natural, and the sublunar realm where both kinds of change occur. Second, Aristotelian science had considerable difficulty coming to terms with the growing evidence that even the heavens were not ordered in the perfect manner required by his theory (Murdoch and Sylla 1978, Grant 1978, Pedersen 1978, Lindberg 1992).
There were two ways to resolve this problem. One would have been to generalize the concept of teleology in such a way as to accommodate the reality of violent motion, and to abandon the particular cosmological models developed by Aristotle in order to save the principle of teleological ordering. There were powerful reasons to take just precisely this approach. Aristotle and his interpreters had, after all, already implicitly shown that the only complete explanation is a teleological explanation. This is because a complete explanation must terminate in a principle which (directly or indirectly) explains everything else while being self- explanatory. Such a principle must be necessary, infinite, and perfect (and thus divine), and it must cause exclusively by the attractive power of its own perfection (otherwise it would be in motion itself and would thus require some other explanatory principle, resulting in an infinite regress) (Aristotle, Metaphysics 1071b-1076b, Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, Q2).
This was not, however, the road taken. Teleology was abandoned altogether, and (though this was never acknowledged, or perhaps, even really recognized) the possibility of a complete explanation along with it. Instead, an attempt was made to develop increasingly general mathematical formalisms which describe motion (now conceived exclusively as change in place). Thus the whole history of mathematical physics, beginning with the special theories of Galileo and Kepler, up through the "first unification" by Newton, and each of the successive generalizations and unifications: Hamiltonian dynamics, Maxwell's equations, relativity, quantum mechanics, and most recently quantum cosmology.
But is mechanistic mathematical physics any better able than its Aristotelian predecessor to offer a unified theory of motion? The contradictions cited above suggest rather pointedly that it is not. Perhaps it is time to consider the road not taken. And this is precisely the direction implicit in the work of a number of physicists and biologists who are (sometimes in spite of themselves) rediscovering the necessity of teleological explanation to a complete science, and gradually helping to reground a teleological cosmology. One need only mention the work of such diverse thinkers as David Bohm (Bohm 1980), Benjamin Gal-Or (Gal-Or 1986), Ilya Prigogine (Prigogine et al 1977, 1979, 1984, 1989; Lerner 1991), Rupert Sheldrake (Sheldrake 1981), and Lynn Margulis (Margulis and Fester 1991).
If we can establish cosmic teleology then we can also, for the reasons cited above, prove the existence of God. A system which evolves infinitely towards ever higher degrees of organization eventually, over an infinite spacetime, realizes all logically possible forms of organization. It is infinite, perfect, necessary, and thus divine. And the teleological character of the divine causality which we are proposing effectively answers the old Marxist critique of religion. God is a lure the incredible Beauty of which attracts the potential latent in matter, not a cosmic tyrant who imposes order on something inert or who creates ex nihilo beings which are merely dependents. Knowledge of such a God awakens our powers; it does not dope them. And we can say with confidence to the postmodernists that such a God, which is the power behind the infinite diversity of a rich and growing universe, is never the Same, never effaces creative difference.
Finally, only after we have demonstrated the ultimate meaningfulness of the universe --only after we have shown it to be a system evolving necessarily, if often in a hesitant and contradictory manner, towards God-- can we return to harvest the principle of value and the criterion of judgement which makes it possible to challenge the market order. This principle is, of course, nothing other than the drive of matter towards ever higher degrees of organization, a drive grounded in the attractive power of a God whose Beauty, Truth and Goodness inspires in all things a dynamic of growth and development. Knowing this principle, we also know what we must do --and how resources must be allocated. We know that resources must be allocated first and foremost to those activities which make possible the full development of human social capacities: to guaranteeing the biological and social infrastructure for human development, and to cultivating the human intellect and the human will. And we know as well that the market does not do this, cannot do this, because it has no access to information regarding the impact of various activities on the integrity of the ecosystem or on the development of human social capacities.
It may seem strange for secular socialists to hear that their great error has not been to have claimed too much for reason, but to have claimed too little --to have failed to follow the dialectic through to its conclusion, which is God. It may seem strange for the partisans of the religious right to find themselves accused of practical atheism, and for those on the religious left to be told that it is precisely their concessions to relativism and postmodernism which give aid and comfort to the bourgeoisie. But this is the truth, a truth which the bourgeoisie was long able to conceal with its rhetoric of "Enlightenment" and its polemic against "prelate and peer." But now, its rise to power at long last completed, the final residues of nonmarket institutions approaching their final disintegration, the Soviet Union defeated and the working classes in political and ideological disarray, the mask has been dropped. The rhetoric of Enlightenment and progress has given way to the cynical laughter of the nihilist. We can see our adversary as he really is, and we can understand how and why he has deceived us in the past. There is no reason (and of course no way) to settle scores with those who (Catholic or Communist) were unable a century ago to understand the real terms of the battle. But now there is no excuse.
The struggle against the marketplace is first and foremost a struggle against nihilism, against atheism, and against the philosophical appeasers who are unwilling or unable to take a stand for meaning and value.
The struggle for meaning and value, for the God we know in the self-organizing potential of matter itself, in the beauty of the stars and in the shade of the oaks, in the laughter of lovers and in the child's commanding "Why?" is also always the struggle against the nihilism of the marketplace, which knows nothing except consumption --nothing except the ruthless predation of the bourgeoisie.
Comrades arm yourselves! The sword of Divine Wisdom hangs over the heads of the bourgeoisie. We need only claim it as our own.
Aristotle.
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