After Paris: Understanding not Revenge
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- Published on Wednesday, 18 November 2015 23:30
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin .... No. 1187 .... November 19, 2015
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After Paris:
Understanding not Revenge
Jeff Noonan
1. At the basis of all concrete identities: "Muslim," "Sunni," "French citizen," etc., lies a core human being, a capacity for self-making within the objective contexts of natural and social life. Selves are made, identities forged, reproduced, modified, and developed through processes of work and affective-symbolic interaction with other people within and across societies. Work relations and social interactions are contradictory -- they are both creative and alienating, mutualistic and antagonistic, peaceful and violent. When politics loses sight of or ignores for partisan advantage the underlying human capacity for self-making and re-making it fixates on the abstractions. A fixation on the abstract markers of particular identities leads to their reification, and their reification leads in turn to false,... quasi-natural explanations of conflict (the problems in the Middle east are the consequence of a ‘clash of civilizations,’ racism is a result of the ‘natural’ inferiority of the demonized race, etc).
2. Digging beneath the surface identity to the core human activity of identity formation, reveals it as the result (always modifiable) of a process of practical and symbolic labour that unfolds in dynamic interaction with other selves and the objective world. Other selves, the natural world, and the social institutions that mediate the relationship between individuals and nature are themselves dynamic and change in response to changed activities. Foregrounding this dynamic process and using it as a wedge against the stereotypes of reified thinking is the constructive political role that philosophical thinking can play. While philosophers will also be motivated by concrete political evaluations of the relative legitimacy of conflicting positions, if they are to be active as philosophers, they must ground their political assessments in the deeper understanding of human self-making activity explained above.
