CHAPTER XXI
IDENTITY AND
GLOBALIZATION: THE METAPHYSICAL QUESTION OF THE 21ST CENTURY
H. DANIEL DEI
Summary
This paper considers the main issues as we enter the 21st century to be
not primarily "problems" but "questions" or mysteries, that
is, issues of meaning. Without a spiritual disposition, beyond strategies of
self-interest and control at the expense of others and things, it is impossible
to visualize an inclusive human horizon. For this reason, our philosophical task
is to resolve these problems by transcending the theoretical basis of Reason
that has defined the world as an order of possessions.
Man has to remember the man,
who forgets where the path leads.
Heraclitus, extract 71.
POINT OF DEPARTURE: THE INEVITABILITY OF CAREFULLY
THINKING THROUGH REALITY
The theme of this volume invites one to investigate life as a
possibility, that is a place or piece of earth able to shape itself as a project
of history.1 In other words, "life as possibility" is a way
of asking one to discover life or allow it to be revealed to us as an
alternative and consequently to assume it as our destiny or life as lived by us.
In fact, man lives experiences without being able to unite them through
reflection. This phenomenon, that has become prevalent and even characteristic
in our age is expressed in the fragmentation of identities.2 It
appears in the loss of the old Reason that shaped utopian worlds and legitimated
our actions. The same can be said about the seductiveness of empirical truth so
that there is lack of confidence in the group of philosophers who seek meaning
in such issues as God, the world and existence. The logic of validation is
rather in terms of efficiency, which masks or disguises3 the way
identity is constituted.4 The implication of this logic is loss of
reliance in modernity's omnipotent and falsely liberating Reason5
and, naturally, in the narcissist blindness of those who seek protection
therein.
The 21st century has confronted us with the challenge of the metaphysical
dimension, just when thinkers and philosophers are less prepared to see and
think in those terms. The exaltation of scientific-technological devices, the
search for a "God who has died" among the comings and goings of the
hypertext, cybernetics and epistemology, leaves us blinded by the footlights.
To create room for encounters in thinking and feeling regarding the
destiny of man I will search for the sense of events already lived. The hope is
to recover in the process the object of the philosophical search, namely,
"to accompany man in his passage towards consciousness of his
dignity".6
The link of man to philosophy makes of this discipline, at the same time,
knowledge, attitude and, above all, passionate testimony to life, and finally a
path towards truth. This is one of the first moments of that reflective
conscience which had been relegated to the dust bin for lack of scientistic
precision. The so-called "exactness" of the reductionist knowledge
temporally took us away from any existential commitment. But this choice is also
a symptom of the spiritual weariness of Reason that emptied knowledge of
meaning. Here I rely to some extent on the characterization of philosophy
bequeathed by Hegel in the Preface of his Grundlinien der Philosophie
des Rechts, with his image of the owl personifying "the thought of the
world, which appears only when reality has finished and completed its process of
formation". It is curious that this aspect of Hegelian thinking has been
accepted as true, even by those who strongly reject his work; I know of no
generalized criticism of this characterization. Elsewhere, I have called this
"model" of the mission of philosophy "speculative auditing".
This sees philosophy as `critical history'. Although incapable of knowing
the future . . . it can be a systematic and legitimating inventory based on
control over others: some kind of `speculative auditing' that intellectually
takes account of the meaning in which man has developed a moment of his vocation
for infinity, but that does not exhaust his full ambition therefor.7
Hence, a conversion is needed if philosophy is to become a
living and profound experience of radical thinking.
The principal world problems begged for an answer at the end of the 20th
century. Amid the enthusiasm of some people and the uneasiness of others, few
foresaw that gaining domination was a Pyrrhic victory. For example, the victory
of capitalism opened uncertainty regarding its capacity to solve social,
political and economic problems. These arose from the new state of affairs in
the world which current theories are inadequate to solve. Obviously, to initiate
a revolution and make peace requires new strategies, attitudes and, above all, a
substantially different use of freedom and power. This is why it is so difficult
to understand why good meditative thought is scarce.
The present proposal highlights the central problems we face in this
millennium, many of which will reach a serious and decisive point in our
children's life time. They are not primarily problems, but questions which
demand from each person -- especially from leaders -- a reordering of the course
of events in the direction of the possibilities of human life. Hence the role of
metaphysics is radical reflection without any restriction in order to realize
the full possibilities of humanity. This requires that we not be already
committed (metaphysically speaking) to "living the illusion of the
world".
THE MEANING OF EVENTS: THE EFFECTS OF THE EARLY 21ST
CENTURY
Many of the main problems we face today and that many historians and
social scientists have already described and accurately analyzed, concern human
destiny. This is implied as well in the wrong or invalid projections of
developmental trends over the long term and on a world-wide scale with regard to
demographics, ecology, politics and the social-economy.
A critical approach looks for the possibilities of all and any human
beings. This is not another megalomania which intellectuals are accustomed to
produce theoretically, but an ethical condition.8 At the heart of any
possible solution lurks a question about the meaning of life.9 Unlike
a problem, a question imposes an unavoidable decision which cannot be avoided,
but is subject to our freedom and to knowing where to stand in terms of
existence. The challenge is to be able to accept life in its fundamental
possibility for interchange and of communicating with others.
But the so-called phenomenon of "globalization", as established
by the decision making centers, far from giving priority to a planetary
conscience, has oiled the mechanisms of supremacy. By not including the other,
in the end, globalization lacks its own identity. This has already happened
through lack of effective historical consciousness in the Western World.10
Globalization consists of an updated and efficient expression of the old logic
of supreme domination, capable of erasing differences and flattening landscapes
as if they were deserts. This phenomenon may continue as a tragic imitation of
instrumental reason of it remains anchored in the fragmentation and isolation of
populations and human beings. As already pointed out,11 the term sums
up the pincer-like maneuver in the `80s by the concepts of postindustrialization
and postmodernism. Together these constitute the present socio-economic paradigm12
and the force of the postmodern mentality: the imperative of political and
cultural freedom.
One of the questions to be considered is the very nature of the
phenomenon of globalization. Is it just a relapsed sign of appropriation,
acquisition and consumption, of supreme control by calculating Western Reason?
Or, can we hope from this phenomenon, the rise of an authentic and true
"communicative society" as Vattimo trusts. This must be in the sense
not of pure technological readiness which is always restricted, but of the
effective creation of a realm of encounter. This must allow our conscience to
overcome barriers so that we can grow with the real -- not virtual -- presence
of the Other. This alternative globalization is no longer defined in markedly
economic terms, at least not unilaterally as regards interests. Instead it
projects a global vision, in which singularities (not fragmentations) constitute
the fulfillment of its universal condition. However, for the time being, this
alternative is only slightly possible, not even probable, because its
realization depends on an essential change in understanding in the Western
world.
Certainly, an implicit questioning of reason is required. Whether
criticized or not, reason has been fundamental to metaphysics from Greek times
until now. Nevertheless, a transformation or, better still, a change of spirit
may rise from the need to provide an answer to the crisis of systems of order
and interchange of society at the planetary level as the basic historical
operating trends of the beginning of this century engage in conflicts for
survival.
The main problems of the world must be pondered in the light of a
spiritual disposition that is alien to any strategy founded on self-interest or
on power achieved at the expense of the others and of things. Otherwise, a
generalized holocaust is likely to come sooner or later in the next generations.
Earlier the thought of the death of the species was impressed on the conscience
of the European population. It prevented a nuclear war by forcing the world's
political leaders to reformulate their ambitions. Similarly, we can hope that in
view of a new threat of annihilation or "infinite of nothing"13
a conversion of humanity is feasible, although the present historical conditions
are more complex and determining.
As Professor Eric Hobsbawm14 and most serious historians point
out,
the [twentieth] century ended with a global disorder of an unclear
nature, and without any mechanism to stop the disorder or keep it under control.
. . . The reason for this impotence is not only the depth of the world crisis
and its complexity, but also the apparent failure of all the programs, new or
old, to deal with the issues of humankind to better them.
There are two decisive problems for the long term, one
demographic, the other ecological. Both problems must be examined in a context
of generalized anomia, questionable or illegitimate institutions and
leaderships, exaltation of the banal and a total commercialization of people's
expectations and grievances. These entail social, political, economic and
cultural phenomena whose results are absolutely uncertain from the point of view
of the normal predictions of the sciences and of the present resources of the
today's intelligentsia. Only a break in observable trends makes it possible to
identify unexpected and alternative solutions to present conditions.
This underlines the need, responsibility and opportunity of philosophers
to focus their efforts on carefully thinking over the available scientific
information on these problems. By nature, they immediately turn them into
questions, into a reflection in which the decision to give new sense to our life
as "human beings" -- with all the philosophical connotations of this
expression -- is foundational for any practical consideration.
This is not a mere academic discussion; the future of humanity is at
stake. It is the choice between supporting the birth of a new threshold of the
conscience of humanity, or, on the contrary, accelerating the final phase of its
prostration -- the inertial process of the death of the species, as some
post-modern authors have already diagnosed. By the term "man" I mean
to designate all and every concrete human being living on the planet; not one
class of people or some populations to the exclusion of others. This
clarification ceases to be obvious as soon as we examine the partiality of the
solutions to the world's present problems proposed by the specialized organisms
and the governmental leaders of those countries relatively capable of taking
steps.
Even taking into account the hypothesis of moderate growth in the world
population with a tendency to stabilization and with a lower birth rate than
estimated for the year 2025,15 there are many and grave problems:
regional imbalance, the deepening of the abyss between rich countries and poor,
the installation of "essentially unequal societies" in a region or
state, the increase of urbanization, intolerance, racial, religious and
juridical discrimination towards immigrants in search of work and a better
standard of living. All are real causal vectors of social conflicts, hardly
predictable or manageable.
The contradictions of progress made legitimate by the work of Cartesian
Reason, have, in fact, created the bad place, the "distopia," of the
utopian dream of Modernity. In this process of decomposition of order there is
prospect that some countries will be left out of history for ever. This
discourages our daily claims to a spirit of justice and dignity. Where there are
no "strategic" interests, that is, where there is no dominant
self-interest the West has no "humanitarian" disposition. Other humans
-- as important as the other biological species which are the object of
international concern -- in Africa "the Third World's Third World",16
Asia, Latin America and in the social margins of the rich countries die of
starvation, AIDS or of silent forgetfulness in this era of communication.
Despite rational anxiety over the ecological crisis and the efforts to
overcome it, global solutions seem to aim unilaterally at the benefit of those
countries which have achieved an acceptable development for most of their
citizens.
Proposals such as the one of a world with zero growth . . . are
completely impracticable. Zero growth in the existing situation would freeze the
present inequalities among the countries in the world, something that turns out
to be more bearable for the average inhabitant from Switzerland than for the one
from India. It is not by chance that the main support to the ecological politics
comes from the rich countries and from the middle and wealthy classes from all
countries (except for those businessmen who expect to earn money from
contaminating). The poor, who multiply and are underemployed, want more
development, not less.17
Sustainable development in the mid-term is a self-limited possibility, as
long as the principles and instruments of action continue to be incompatible
with the true and unclear aim of the efforts. What is meant by "sustainable
development"? "Undoubtedly," says Hobsbawm,
scientific experts can establish what is necessary to avoid an
irreversible [ecological] crisis, but we mustn't forget that establishing this
balance [between Humanity, the renewable resources it consumes, and the
consequences that its activities produce in the environment] isn't a scientific
technological problem, but a political and social one. . . . There is no doubt
that this balance would be incompatible with a world economy based on the
unlimited search for economic benefits by some corporations, which are
essentially devoted to this aim and compete with each other in a global market.
From the environmental point of view, if Humanity is to have a future, the
capitalism of the crisis decades shouldn't have one.18
THE HYPOSTASIS OF INEQUALITY IN THE LANGUAGE OF SOCIAL
SCIENCES
In fact, what derives from the data provided by specialized international
organizations in our interpretation is not only the "problem" that
humanity has to face in this millennium, but the metaphysical question of
choosing a new way, as I have previously pointed out. If we want to succeed in
the solutions or, even better, in the "re-solutions" we make,
"choosing a new way" must refer explicitly to the tremendous task of
reformulating the symbolic universe that has sustained the history of humanity
up to this day.
In order to allow for the improvement of our perspective on reality, it
is important to pay attention to the use of language as a conditioning factor in
the formulation and testing of the problems themselves. Here I refer to such
expressions as "central societies" and "peripheral
societies", "North-South", "development" and
"underdevelopment", "Third World-First World," etc. It is
not simply a way of speaking or a conjecture that subsequently may be refuted.
It consists of a starting point in terms of which alone solutions can be
thought. Its truth function is accepted more naturally than a statement about
the existence of God. Social sciences and, of course, philosophy evidence here
their incapacity for a prior criticism and submit to a structure of
institutionalized power.
What is "North"? Is it perhaps a geographical place, the
direction in which we have to go, the meaning of the power of dominion, a
welfare model? Why is it necessary to identify "South" with what is
peripheral and marginal, marginal with respect to what? Is it not a cultural
scope, a life-style, or maybe a geographical place too? What are the
developmental parameters? Are these concepts the result of an aseptic linguistic
agreement, in which event is it possible to imagine an asepsis in social
sciences? Or is there present in linguistic usage a "cosmovision," a
necessary idea about life, about man and his ontological possibilities? Are
linguistic games not essentially power games?
This appalling "metaphysics of legitimization", that the
philosophy of dusk is unable to account for, sustains at present the whole
discursive assembly of social sciences and the operative logic of international
actors. It closes the way for all open interchange about the true metaphysical
questions that today should define the future horizon of humanity. Ignorance,
indolence or the interested justification of dominant power spaces are installed
in the conception of the world as an entity. This ontology has imploded into a
fragmentation of expectations in a recurrent and purposeless history. Certainly,
the dominant-submission relationship and the manipulation of hope put into
practice the principle of inequality between men and nations. This is the reason
for contradictions between discourses and facts in the "humanitarian
help" game: the need for subtle but revealing conditions of growth,
speculation about sustainable development, care for environment, the effects of
indebtness, or the political appraisal of human rights.
If every living thing has its cycle, then it is proper to hypothesize
that central societies are entering -- if they have not already done so -- into
a cycle of "inertial prostration" having completed the shapes in which
historically they have modeled their destiny? Why count further on some finite
ways of manifesting freedom as if they were the necessary unfolding of being. In
this millennium, "societies with an integrated history," enter a
process of exhaustion of their historical time. They face the choice of either
being defeated by the spiritual weariness that vitiates their future
realization, or joining together as societies with a possible history. This must
begin from recognition that they are immersed in a logic of appropriation and
consumption.
THE METAPHYSICAL QUESTION IN THE 21ST CENTURY: THE
AUFHEBEN OF POSTMODERNISM
What is our responsibility in the problems of humanity in the 21st
century? What can we do with philosophical reflection from the anchorage of a
living metaphysics that engages the ontological-existential questions involved
in the social, political, economic, and scientific-technological problems of
this new century?
The first is to break with the assumption that the task of philosophy is
to arrive late and to contemplate the world in the somnolence of dusk. If
philosophy is a way of thinking, then action must be preceded by thinking. The
search for truth that has accompanied it during the worst moments of its history
must sustain it in permanent wakefulness. This critical task regarding our own
foundations and position before the world can be translated into practice as an
openness to truth, not the possession and legitimization of one truth above the
other. In philosophical questions truth is not a term of knowledge, but a state
of openness. Has this not been the Socratic inspiration in the Western
philosophical tradition and mutatis mutandis the principle that has
encouraged the real, silent and effective work of authentic scientists in all
times?19
The second step in accompanying man in the configuration of a new
ontological horizon is to determine what is essential, namely, to discover that
we confront not problems, but questions of meaning. This calls for joining
together with the others and with things in the symbolic configuration of the
world. It is essential, then, to assume the questions of human destiny and to
re-solve them.
The third step is to open truth by questions of the meaning of being with others. This is to recognize that in
the event itself of questioning there is neither "a unique account" of
our history nor "a unique idea of reason" that articulates the meaning
of human life. The task at this stage for the Western philosophical tradition is
to be capable of a new Aufheben. That is, of a leap in the consciousness
of being from opposition or contrast to others, to a way of thinking, feeling
and, above all, acting with all others without exclusions. In this way the
distopic experience of modernity reflected in postmodern culture can be thought
of as the human possibility of a free decision to exist in the world according
to an identity which is not one of appropriation, grasping or consumption.
"It is a rule of being and of life," said Jean Guitton20
that when time is compressed and failures obstruct progress, the species
-- whether biological or rational -- confronted with the threat of death passes
through a threshold, rises, and is sublimated. There is an unknown way of
adaptation at the highest level. The first model for this is thinking, when
animality appeared limited by its `giant's wings' and unable to go further then,
the choice emerges between death or survival, destruction or a way out.
If it is true that common sense or reason is the best distributed thing
in the world and that it is just a matter of applying it correctly in life, then
instrumental reason as the prime product of modernity can find in globalization
its universal meaning. This universality, however, does not imply a planetary
historic consciousness of truth. Rather, it is a universality without identity,
a space of things in a time of things. Like things, it is mired in what is
useful, in presences without faces or names.
NOTES
1. La esperanza del sentido. El pensamiento metafísico del hombre,
2 vol. (Buenos Aires: Editorial Docencia).
2. Partly inspired by the reflection by Otto F. Bollnow [cf. Neue
Geborgenheit, Stuttgart und Köln, Verlag W. Kohlhammer, Spanish version: Filosofía
de la Esperanza, Buenos Aires, Fabril Editora, 1962], I first developed the
difference between "expectation" (`espera', [lat.: spectatio])
and "hope" (`esperanza', [lat.: spes]) in the essay Discépolo.
Todavía la Esperanza (Buenos Aires: Editorial Almagesto, [2ª] 1995).
3. The use I make of this term can be broadened according to the
characterization of post-modern society in my paper: "La lógica del
travestismo y el metarrelato de la postmodernidad", in Postmodernidad y
Postcolonialidad, (Theorie und Kritik der Kultur und Literatur) (Frankfurt
am Main: Vervuert Verlag, 1997); pp. 155-175.
4. Cf. the foundation of the expression "spaces of identity"
in, among other writings, my essay Poder y libertad en la sociedad
postmoderna (Buenos Aires: Editorial Almagesto, 1995, 2ª edic. 1998).
5. Op. cit., pp. 108 ss.
6. H. Daniel Dei, "El sentido de la indagación filosófica",
in Revista de Filosofía de la Universidad de Costa Rica, XXVI (63-64),
1988; pp. 71-76. Also, as a chapter of my essay Antropodicea. La cuestión
del hombre (Buenos Aires: Editorial Almagesto, 1997).
7. Poder y libertad en la sociedad postmoderna . . ., pp. 28-30.
8. Cf. the contribution of Karl Otto Apel and of Jürgen Habermas to the
"communication ethics" and "discourse ethics".
9. From my philosophical point of view, the difference between
"question" and "problem" is the key to understanding the aim
and work of Philosophy. See especially Antropodicea . . ., already
mentioned.
10. For further information and theory, doubtless, on this daring
statement see: "La reparación de una distopía. La conciencia histórica
de la Postmodernidad", in Damero, nº 1, 1997; pp. 40-55.
11. Cf. "La reparación de una distopía . . .", # 7.
12. For more information on the neologism `paradigm' see, among other
works, my lecture material: "Paradigmas y paradogmas en las ciencias
sociales," in La Cuerda Floja, nº 10, January 1998, electronic
publications of the Universidad de Chile, Facultad de Ciencias Sociales.
13. This expression belongs to J. Guitton. Cf. H. Daniel Dei - Silvia D.
Maeso, "Jean Guitton: La dimensión metafísica de la guerra actual",
in Revista E. S. G, n°
479, August-October 1986; pp. 29-54. Translation, comments and criticism of the
conference "Le Philosophe et la Cité Future", read by the author on
June 26 at the École Militaire en France.
14. Historia del siglo XX, (Crítica) (Barcelona: Grijalbo
Mondadori, 1995), pp. 555 ss.
15. Calculated as eight billion persons.
16. D. E. Duncan, "Africa: The Long Goodbye", en Atlantic
Monthly, July 1990, p. 20. Doubtless it's a cruel expression to
evince a reality and the ambiguity becomes an object of the Western ethical
consciousness. From the beginning of the present decade, the technical reports
about the situation and the future of the African continent were pessimistic.
Paul Kennedy (Hacia el siglo XXI, Barcelona, Plaza & Janés,
1995, pp. 318 ss.), gives a summary of the state of the art with words that were
taken from these reports, such as "a catastrophic human and environmental
zone", "moribund", "marginalized", "peripheral
zones of the remaining of the world", with so many problems that some
foreign experts in development abandon it and they prefer to work in other
subjects. "In the World Bank's opinion, he says, practically all of the
regions of the world will experiment a lessening of poverty in the year 2000,
except for Africa, where the situation will change only for the worst."
17. Hobsbawm, p 562.
18. Ibid.
19. I share the spirit of Prof. Franz Wimmer's ("Intercultural
philosophy", in Rev. Filosofía Univ. Costa Rica, XXXIII (80), 7-9,
1995). As regards the item I considered, he says: "The first consequence
when considering the situation of humanity as globalized in regional ways of
thinking, that are essentially different, consists of a critical evaluation of
philosophy as a discipline. We must admit that each attempt by philosophers to
match the general concept of "philosophy" with the cultural concept of
"Western philosophy" is misled. This matching was the standard in
almost all the academic philosophers during a long period, at least in the West.
On account of this, it will not be an easy task, because it is a necessary
precondition -- not sufficient -- to criticize Eurocentrism and turn that
criticism into a general criticism of the centrist ways of thinking. . . ."
20. Op. cit., p. 53.