January, 2010: Michael Sandel and the Utopian Spirit

January 2010

Utopia Near - Expeditions in terram utopicam

Michael Sandel and the Utopian Spirit

But Man, in his incessant search, cannot be content with that boundary. He wills to and has to surpass it to find an answer to the most important and continuously recurring question of his live: How should I act? - And the answer cannot be found with determinism, with causality, not even with pure science in general. It can only be found through Man's moral attitude, his character and his Weltanschauung.

Max Planck, 1914¹⁾

Jürgen Kirchhoff: Saturnaufgang

J. Kirchhoff: Saturn Rising

Consciousness: Asking for the Impossible

Our stream of consciousness contains a bewildering whirlpool of constantly changing desires and fears. One minute, I may figure myself as an optimistic man-about-town, the other minute I may dream of a life as a hermit, contemplating the world from aside. One minute I may feel like doing good to the people around me, the other minute I reject my fellows as egotists who deserve a decent catastrophe, private or global. I do not actively call these feelings into being. They simply pop up in my consciousness only to disappear and give way to another impression shortly afterwards.

There is a number of theories trying to explain the origin of our emotions. Sociobiology quite convincingly reduces many if not all of them to rational consideration to further our genes or our species.²⁾ In the struggle of live, there cannot be any morality apart from the genes' or species' survival.

J. Kirchhoff: The Food Chain

Such a world view, however, reduces us to automatons in an unsympathetic determinist cosmos. Hence the quote above. Other thinkers conclude that within our conscious experiences there are indications of a divine volition.³⁾ For me, the question is all but settled.

Analyzing my emotions over a long period of time, I can distill a number of recurring themes: Firstly, I desire the world to be benevolent towards me. I do not want any hostile spirits around me, but spirits I want. That is point two. I want to live in a community of sentient and willing beings. Point three will lead us on to a logical conflict: I desire to be immune against painful and frustrating influences. Following up this thought to its final conclusion comes near demanding omnipotence, absolute freedom. Somewhat paradoxically, I want my fellow beings to be equally omnipotent as I am. That, obviously is a contradiction. Finally, I want the world and my life to be meaningful. But all my endeavours to attach sensible meaning to the word "meaning" have failed. To give just one example: I cannot imagine a meaningful world to be limited in time. It therefore has to be eternal. However, I cannot imagine to live in a world that cannot be improved upon. If the world is perfect, then I can't see any point in living on. So, a meaningful world must needs be imperfect and perfect at the same time or else I make a logical mistake.

In conclusion, my stream of consciousness seems to me like a nagging bunch of children who all wish different things and never stop making a noise. To make things worse, even the most abstract and persistent of these wishes seem to be conflicting with one another or they are even meaningless in themselves.

After years of fruitless philosophizing and theory building,⁴⁾ I have now made this the starting point of my thinking:

I want to take serious the desires produced in my stream of consciousness. Yet they are conflicting and don't give me reliable indications of a consistent hierarchy to use for moral navigation. The only answer can be to set moral premisses oneself - more or less arbitrarily: I prefer pacifism to self-assertion. Or: Withholding important information from a business client is like lying and I will not lie. Such are then my personal values and they probably differ from other people's values. My values have the the status of a working hypothesis. There follow two possible lines of action.

Utopia Far and Near

On the one hand, there is a strong desire within me to develop a coherent world view. A world view that accomodate some basic and contradictory wishes like living in a community of omnipotent beings, for example. Endeavors to construct such a Utopian state are most probably beyond the reach of human abilities for a long time.⁵⁾ There is even a chance that such a Utopia is impossible to construct, true to the original meaning of the word Utopia (Nowhere). The main effort towards such a perfectly Utopian state of affairs is to challenge logic and the laws of physics. I therefore call that state the Far Utopia: Out of our immediate reach and maybe impossible.

J. Kirchhoff: The Pioneering Spirit

The Will to strive for the impossible is nevertheless the final basis of all my thinking and acting. In contrast to the Far Utopia I want to use the term Near Utopia for any lifestyle or social arrangement that effectively strives for the Far Utopia⁶⁾ in an acceptable way thus combining the strive for the final perfect state with pragmatic social and personal developments.

Near Utopia: Community of Philosophers

I now leave the more abstract and general considerations and enter upon my personal prevalences. The Near Utopia I dream of is a community of quiet and tolerant people who are united by their wish to explore the world spiritually rather than dominate it materially.

As of now it seems that such a community is difficult to create within the present social atmosphere of competition. In fact, I believe that our present society actually transforms the Darwinist Laws of evolutionary optimization into the realm of our social and economic life. A spirit of competition and constant evaluation filters into our mentality and robs us of our effective utopian thinking.⁷⁾

The community that I dream of contains elements of lively academic intercourse, of monastic independence from the world, of Amish simplicity in life-style, of French savoir-vivre to cultivate ease of life, of German romanticism to entertain idealistic dreams and Anglo-Saxon pragmatism and individuality to keep clear of dangerous social adventures.

On this website, I want to collect names, institutions, books and key-words that might be useful in constructing such a Near Utopia, a community of easy-going, dedicated intellectuals. Such a community can only be founded on the basis of rather narrowly defined common values. It cannot be founded on the doctrine of laissez-faire liberalism. For liberalism, in practical life, always entails some form of competition. It naturally gravitates towards market economies where power rather than justice and slyness rather than intellectualty reign.

Michael Sandel: Living Intellectualism

Michael Sandel is a political philosopher who currently teaches at Harvard University. He lectures on Justice applied to everyday situations. His lectures are amongst the most widely attended ones in Harvard history. They are so popular that they have been recorded for TV-broadcast.

Philosophically, Sandel is said to plead the case that no desirable community can be built without shared values. His works, which I have not yet read, may therefore contain important arguments as regards the prevailing market economical spirit.

Technically, his lectures and his personality radiate intellectual integrity combined with a respect for his students. If this is not only show, Sandel might provide a model personality for a community of philosophers.

Here is a choice of Michael J. Sandel's works:

Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do? Farrar, Straus and Giroux, (September 15, 2009)
Justice: A Reader. Oxford University Press, (September 27, 2007)
The Case against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, (January 31, 2007)
Public Philosophy: Essays on Morality in Politics. Harvard University Press (October 31, 2006)
Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. Cambridge University Press, (March 28, 1998)
Democracy's Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (February 6, 1998)

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References and Footnotes

1) Planck, Max: Dynamische und statistische Gesetzmäßigkeit. Quoted from a speech delivered on August 3rd, 1914. In: Hans Roos; Armin Hermann (Herausgeber). Max Planck. Vorträge Reden Erinnerungen. Springer Verlag Berlin Heidelberg New York. 2001. ISBN 3-540-41274-3. I have translated the passage myself as I could not find an English translation anywhere. Here is the original version: "Aber der Mensch in seinem unablässigen Drange kann sich mit dieser Grenze nicht begnügen, er will und muß über sie hinausdringen, da er eine Antwort braucht auf die wichtigste, unaufhörlich wiederkehrende Frage seines Lebens: Wie soll ich handeln? - Und eine Antwort auf diese Frage findet er nicht beim Determinismus, nicht bei der Kausalität, überhaupt nicht bei der reinen Wissenschaft, sondern er findet sie nur bei seiner sittlichen Gesinnung, bei seinem Charakter, bei seiner Weltanschauung."
2) See, for example, the books by Edward Osborne Wilson and Richard Dawkins.
3) One source of possible examples of traces of the divine in our consciousness is the book The Idea of the Holy (1923), Oxford University Press by German theoligan and scholar Rudolf Otto.
4) In about 2005, I have tried to describe the philosophical impass. Follow this Link to read more.
5) A good exercise in trying to construct a logically consistent Utopia out of logically incompatible premisses is offered by Edward R. Wierenga in: The Nature of God. An Inquiry into Divine Attributes. Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London, 1989.
6) German Philosopher Ernst Bloch wrote extensively on the Utopian spirit. In Principle of Hope (MIT Press, 1986) he argues for the creation of a 'concrete Utopia' as opposed to impractible dreams.
7) I owe much to having read Herbert Marcuse's book One-Dimensional Man (first published in 1964). Marcuse unveils clearly the mechanisms of modern capitalist societies to stifle free individual thinking.