2.5 A Model of Economic Liberty
2.5.1 Economic Epistemology
It is not yet clear that a theological basis of personhood, as Zizioulas offers, can yet offer anything more substantive than humanism because it is not yet clear that theology can escape the economic rationality of modernity. In a hierarchical model of transcendence, rationality emerged from a single, pervasive cosmic order to which even the gods were subject. There was an organic synthesis between God, humanity, and the cosmos. As Dupré notes, when “the mind became the spiritual substratum of all reality . . . reality split into two separate spheres: that of the mind, which contained all intellectual determination, and that of all other being, which received
87 Taylor, Imaginaries, 72.
88 Ibid., 76.
89 “Freedom must project itself toward its own reality through a content whose value it establishes” (Beauvoir, Ethics, 69).
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them.”90 This was to become the transcendental phenomenology of Immanuel Kant going forward:
Hitherto it has been assumed that all our knowledge must conform to objects. But all attempts to extend our knowledge of objects by establishing something in regard to them by means of concepts have, on this assumption, ended in failure. We must, therefore, make trial whether we may not have more success if we supposes that objects must conform to our knowledge.91
Here Kant may have been offering an approach more akin to the sciences. When he says that objects must conform to our knowledge, perhaps he has in mind the hypotheses in which
scientific knowledge is conceived and the empirical experimentation in which that knowledge is then born. The condition of knowledge is that we human beings must take a stance toward the world. This stance is a stance of liberty.
The ideal of liberty provided a ‘language’ in which to talk about the legitimacy of knowledge. Taylor sees this epistemological innovation as a result of the overdetermination of liberty in modernity. He says, “Indeed, one of the reasons for the vigorous rejection of
Aristotelian teleology was that it was seen, then as now, as potentially circumscribing our freedom to determine our own lives and build our own societies.”92 Arguably, Kant’s
transcendental revolution was provoked by David Hume’s problem of induction, a problem that threatened the validity of the natural sciences themselves. Kant’s solution to the problem of induction is the transcendental unity of apperception wherein experience becomes a function of human concepts, categories, or (later) intentions. There is something intuitive about this
statement. There is little to experience in a spreadsheet of raw data. There is little meaning
90 Dupré, Passage, 3.
91 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason. Norman Kemp Smith, trans. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003):
22.
92 Taylor, Imaginaries, 80.
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available there – until a theory is applied and the data is organized. Does the recognition that raw data – whether raw empirical sense data or raw data on a spreadsheet – requires conceptual framing result in the overdetermination of liberty? Does it allow for the determination of our own lives and the construction of our own societies, as Taylor claims?
An element of the world gives itself to be perceived by one’s senses. The mind of the perceiver applies categories or organizational schemas to those perceptions, thereby rendering perceptions as experiences. Those experiences can be analyzed or synthesized to create ideas.
Complex ideas are simply the result of the combination of simple ideas mixed with other faculties of the mind such as reflection. So far, I have presented what I take to be standard empiricist dogma. It is the human mind that invests labor into the raw sense data that produces knowledge, much as when the farmer invests labor into the land to bring forth a productive and bountiful harvest. Contrast my simplistic account of Locke’s epistemology with the innate ideas of Plato and others that he was attempting to sweep aside. Plato’s recollections were not the result of labor, but the result of the participatory ontology to which he was committed. Locke’s epistemology is the result of an economy rather than a participatory ontology. These intuitions and theories function as “a hermeneutic of legitimacy” out of which a sense of ethical
prescription emerges.93 If Locke’s writings on private property came to justify imperialism, colonialism, and excessive economic differentials, what will his epistemology yield?
Michel Foucault demonstrated to us the connection between power and knowledge. In the interview titled, “Truth and Power,” Foucault argues that language and signs are not the source of meaning. Rather meaning occurs more in the mode of war and battle: “relations of power, not
93 Ibid., 7-8.
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relations of meaning.”94 He refers to these relations of power, internal to a discipline, as discursive régimes. However, far from being isolated within disciplines, Foucault says:
What makes power hold good, what makes it accepted, is simply the fact that it doesn’t only weigh on us as a force that says no, but that it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse. It needs to be considered as a productive network which runs through the whole social body . . .95
This productive network that Foucault gestures towards is an echo of what I am labeling the economic model of modernity. It is what I have connected to the work of John Locke, but clearly Locke was only catching glimpses of the power of labor to organize society. Despite his interests in knowledge, I do not think he grasped how deeply labor shapes knowledge as well as society.
Truth arises from sets of discourses which themselves have the form of competitive economic negotiations.
As influential as Foucault and Kuhn’s work has been, perhaps no other recent scholar has made the connection between knowledge and economics clearer than has the social
anthropologist, Pierre Bourdieu. While Kuhn’s work applied directly to scientific disciplines and Foucault’s work expanded to cover knowledge across disciplines, Bourdieu helps to provide insight into the social mechanisms behind paradigms and discursive régimes. This social mechanism is the habitus:
systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to
function as structuring structures, that is, as principles of the generation and structuring of
94 Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power,” Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, Colin Gordon, ed., Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, and Kate Soper, trans. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980): 114. Interestingly, Thomas Kuhn, writing contemporarily with Foucault, talks about paradigms as preparing
“the student for membership in the particular scientific community with which he will later practice. Because he there joins men who learned the bases of their field from the same concrete models, his subsequent practice will seldom evoke overt disagreement over fundamentals” (Kuhn, Scientific Revolutions, 11). Notice that a paradigm appears to function as a type of orthodoxy that authorizes particular models and interpretations within those models.
For more on the similarities between the work of Foucault and Kuhn, see Ian Hacking, Historical Ontology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004).
95 Foucault, “Truth and Power,” 119. Emphasis added.
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practices and representations which can be objectively ‘regulated’ and ‘regular’ without in any way being the product of obedience to rules . . . collectively orchestrated without being the product of the orchestrating action of a conductor.96
In his previous book, Distinction, Bourdieu had associated these habitus with class and economic status.97 Thus, we learn how these habitus arise and originate within society. What both the habitus and Bourdieu’s subsequent work, Language and Symbolic Power, do is show us how this social mechanism within concrete, particular societies leverages the inequality of power and capital to produce and to authorize meaning and knowledge.98 Importantly, this mechanism being pre-reflective is also material and embodied, all of which can be seen in the above stated
description of the habitus. For Bourdieu, there is a symbolic and linguistic market that authorizes and censors knowledge.99
While Bourdieu’s work makes use of the metaphor of the marketplace and capital to explain the structures of meaning, there is a more empirical way to describe this structure. Taylor says that “reality [is understood] . . . as shaped by a normal form, which maintains itself within certain limits of distance from its proper shape, and beyond them spirals off to destruction, just as the healthy human body does.”100 I do not know that Taylor ever names this form, but it
96 Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, Richard Nice, trans. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003): 72. Emphasis original.
97 See Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Richard Nice, trans. (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2000).
98 See Bourdieu, Language, 37-38.
99 “Grammar defines meaning only very partially: it is in relation to a market that the complete determination of the signification of discourse occurs . . . Through these unavoidable effects, the market plays a part in shaping not only the symbolic value but also the meaning of discourse” (Bourdieu, Language, 38).
That said, analytic philosophy coming out of logical positivism and the Vienna Circle seems to have attempted to
‘fix’ the meaning of words and the grammar of language so as to make language more profitable – taking it out of the commonwealth of language, as it were, and making it the private property of philosophy.
100 Taylor, Imaginaries, 78.
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strikes me as the statistically normal curve with its standard deviations and outliers. Maintaining that normal curve is the condition for social and economic health. When the curve is
denormalized, dysfunction results. But this statistical curve is also the basis of much scientific knowledge, both in the soft as well as the hard sciences. The bell curve, of course, requires outliers. There has to be a tail to the curve. Some are being left behind or are on the wrong side or the weak side. Others will be ahead of the curve and prospering dramatically as a result. In this regard, modern social order is every bit as much elitist as was Plato’s republic. We have just not yet recognized that statistical regulation as the basis for society is not the result of the
necessary order of things but rather a result of the way that we have pre-theoretically modeled reality.
From the origins of empiricism in Locke’s epistemology, we find that the economic model pervades rationality, meaning, and knowledge itself. What of theological epistemology, theological authority, and doctrines of revelation? The Protestant Reformation set up the Bible as its theological authority: sola scriptura and ad fontes. However, the Bible sitting on a shelf is not authoritative. The Bible read and interpreted is authoritative, which is to say that theological authority is the result of mixing private labor (interpretation) with a raw resource, held in common by all, namely the Bible. When we mix the private intellectual or spiritual labor of reading and interpreting with the Bible, we gain a proposition or a belief about divine truth. This belief empowers us. By mixing labor with the scriptures, revelation becomes one’s own property, one’s sacred interpretation. We gain a right to believe as we will and to relate to God as we will.
But there is still too much individualism at play here.
When we factor in the social context, the proposition that one derives from one’s labor of interpreting the scriptures must enter into the theological marketplace to compete with other
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interpreted propositions. Of course, the theological marketplace is itself structured by competing paradigms much like Kuhn’s depiction of natural science. Albeit, the theological marketplace is messier than the scientific one. In theology, Kuhn’s paradigms might be reflected in various orthodoxies: Reformed orthodoxy, Wesleyan orthodoxy, Catholic orthodoxy, feminist
orthodoxy, Black orthodoxy, and so forth. There are also popularist, conservative, nationalist, and progressive forces at work across that spectrum of theological orthodoxies. In this way, what comes to be considered theological truth within a community of faith is a result of ongoing
‘negotiations.’ And we must not fail to recognize the competition between the orthodoxies.
If theology is not ‘free’ from economic rationality, then the accounts that theology gives about all of the central doctrines and all of the narratives of salvation and hope are formulated within the framework of economics. The theological language that emerges through our commitments to the moral order of inalienable rights and popular sovereignty that shapes our understanding of God’s own being and purposes and will, that theological language is an economic language. Here we find more reasons to be concerned over Smith’s notion of non- predicative, formally indicative ‘concepts.’ Even such ‘concepts’ point from a place, and that place is today the place of liberal economics. ‘Concepts’ indicate economically.
What interests me is that while pursuing an ontological reversal that has its basis in more classical Platonic thought, Smith seems to accede to the trajectory of modern Western
epistemology in crediting knowledge to the knower – an economic or perhaps a classically liberal epistemology, if you will. Does he carefully evade the traps of a metaphysics of presence only to vault willfully into the pitfalls of economic epistemology? When he attempts to
synthesize the intuitions of ancient or classical thought – the intelligible appearance of reality – with the private agency of modern thought – knowledge seems to become, for him, the product
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of invested private labor – humble as that labor may be.101 Perhaps this explains why God must reveal Godself in ways that we can understand God.