nature – his own natural function… From this relationship one can therefore judge man’s whole level of development. It follows
from the character of this relationship how much man as a
species being, as man, has come to be himself and to comprehend himself; the relation of man to woman is the most natural
relation of human being to human being. It therefore reveals
the extent to which man’s natural behavior has become human, or the extent to which the human essence in him has become a
natural essence – the extent to which his human nature has come to be nature to him.32
As a follower of Hegel, Marx sees this alienation as a necessary
step in a dialectical process whereby man comes to know himself
through a history in which his nature is unfolded before him. Marx
believes that the estrangement is necessary because of the nature of
self-consciousness. Phenomenological y, man himself “establish[es]
nature as the mind’s world” – nature is the mind’s being, but its
“externality” confuses man into believing that nature is ‘outside’ of
him in the sense of being separate from him.33 This paradox resolves itself in history as Mind (Hegel’s Geist) reveals its true nature to man through the rise of inequality and oppression in the alienation of
labor culminating in the bourgeoisie-proletariat struggle.34
32 Robert C. Tucker [Editor], The Marx-Engels Reader (New York: W.W. Norton
& Company, 1978), 83.
33 Marx,
Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, 125.
34 Ibid., 112.
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lovers of sophia
Thus Communism is not a theory, movement, or regime,
but a metaphysical event in which there is an annulment of the
estrangement of man from his nature embodied by the annulment
of private property, and more abstractly by the annulment of God.
In this event the alienated object is drawn back into the self, and the objectified and mechanized world reappears as the manifestation of
human consciousness. Freedom and equality which were once taken
for granted and lost are now consciously regained and held in the
realization that God did not give nature to man, but that man ex-
is t(s) or is projected outside of himself – together with others – as nature.35 This is the spectral revolution that makes Communism a
“specter” – no, not just a specter, but the specter of human history.
Translators of Karl Marx often occlude the specificity and literality of his references to the specter by mistranslating it with a number of interpretively loaded terms that they mistake to be equivalent to his
usage of it, for example, “fantasmagorical, hal ucinatory, fantastic,
imaginary” and so forth.36 With his references to the specter and
the spectral, Marx was not merely manipulating the reader with
empty “rhetoric, turns of phrase that are contingent or merely apt to
convince by striking the imagination.”37 In Specters of Marx, Jacques Derrida wants to recover the radical y futural promise of Marxism,
its spectral possibilities in a movement without organization, party,
property, or state, and beyond the (materialist) ontological response
of Marx himself to this spectrality, namely his insistence, as well as that of Marxists in general, that the ghost must be “nothing, nothing
period (non-being, non effectivity, non-life)…”38 Marx wants to
distinguish the specter ( Gespenst) from the proper Spirit ( Geist) of the revolution, and yet the spectral and the spiritual thoroughly
contaminate each other in Marx’s texts.39 He still believes in a de-
contaminating purification or exorcism of the spectral from out of
35 Ibid., 84; 120.
36 Derrida,
Specters of Marx, 185.
37 Ibid., 186.
38 Ibid., 35.
39 Ibid., 138, 140–141.
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the spirit.40 Derrida repeatedly identifies the “difference between
specter and spirit” as “a différance.”41 In fact, it is the difference of which all others are traces:
The specter is not only the carnal apparition of the spirit,
its phenomenal body, its fallen and guilty body, it is also the
impatient and nostalgic waiting for a redemption, namely, once
again, for a spirit. The host would be that deferred spirit, the
promise or calculation of an expiation. What is this différance?
All or nothing. One must reckon with it but it upsets all
calculations, interests, and capital.42
The permanent revolutionary has memories of the future, of a time
for ghosts whose extremity lies beyond the “end” qua telos of any history.43 Derrida writes: “Untimely, ‘out of joint,’ even and especial y if it appears to come in due time, the spirit of the revolution is
fantastic and anachronistic through and through.”44 Marxism failed when it made common cause with those hunting its specter insofar
as it affirmed the dividing line between the ghost and the actuality
of utopia by demanding that this line ought to be crossed – as if
the coming utopia is not always spectral.45 The totalitarianism of
Marxism arises as a consequence of “an ontological treatment of the spectrality of the ghost…”46 On account of his materialism, Marx
in effect joins in with the conspiracy of the nobility and clergy who
assemble by the twilight verging on the end of history, in the castle
of Old Europe, to set out on a “holy hunt against this specter.”47
40 Ibid., 155.
41 Ibid., 170, 177.
42 Ibid., 171.
43 Ibid., 45.
44 Ibid., 140.
45 Ibid., 47, 45.
46 Ibid., 114.
47 Ibid., 49.
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lovers of sophia
In Specters of Marx, Derrida comes closest to the titanic spectral promise of Marx’s quest for a worldwide scientific society, which
will also be a universal liberation of the human potential, when he
contemplates the dramatic figure of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Derrida goes so far as to claim that “the only question” that he would like
to pose in Specters of Marx is the question: “what is the being-there of the specter? What is the mode of presence of a specter?”48 As he
later elaborates, this is “the originary question ( die ursprüngliche Frage), the abyssal question” that bares “on the non-identity to self, on the inadequation and thus the non-presence to self…”49 What are
“spectral forces”?50 What “spectralizes” is elemental y “neither living nor dead, neither present nor absent…”51 Spectrality and ideality are
somehow related in Derrida’s mind; he claims that the concept of the
“irreducible genesis of the spectral” is implicit in the very concept of an “idea.”52 There is an “ideality in the very event of presence” which always already dis-joins what is coming to presence so as to make
its apparition possible.53 Moreover, the ideality of time, its “being-
outside-itself” is “obviously the condition of any idealization and
consequently of any ideologization and any fetishization, whatever
difference one must respect between these two processes.”54
Explicitly referencing Martin Heidegger, Derrida notes how
the “passage of this time of the present comes from the future to
go toward the past, toward the going of the gone [ l’en al é] ( Das Weilen ist der Übergang aus Kunft zu Gang. Das Anwesende ist das
Je-weilige).�
��55 The past can be experienced as yet to come.56 What
“seems to be out front, the future, comes back in advance: from the
48 Ibid., 46.
49 Ibid., 151.
50 Ibid., 73.
51 Ibid., 63.
52 Ibid., 69.
53 Ibid., 94.
54 Ibid., 194.
55 Ibid., 28.
56 Ibid., xix.
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past, from the back.”57 To ask how an event – and in that one should
hear event uality – comes to pass in this way is to ask: “What is a ghost?” It is a question concerning the effectivity of a specter, which is disconcerting given that its virtual and insubstantial character as a simulacrum ought to render it ineffective.58 The comings and goings
of a specter manifest the essential – or rather in-essential – character of temporality itself insofar as the absence, non-presence, non-effectivity, inactuality, and virtuality that pervade its apparitions
disrupt the order of linear succession wherein past, present, and
future are grasped in terms of what is deferred to a place before
and after what is in “real time.”59 Derrida takes Shakespeare to have
epitomized this spectral character of temporality in Hamlet’s lament:
“The time is out of joint. / O cursèd spite, / That ever I was born to set it right!” This means not only that Time is “disadjusted” in the
sense of being “off its hinges” or “off course” but also in the sense of time being “beside itself.”60 It evokes the existential temporality that is the lived context for chronological time.
One way of hearing this phrase cal s to mind Prometheus’
brother, Atlas, if he were to shrug rather than to endure under his burden as the bearer of the celestial spheres that are the gear-works
of chronological time: “‘Le temps est hors de ses gonds,’ time is off
its hinges.”61 We can see the specter of Atlas in Derrida’s reading of Hamlet as a tragic kingly figure who is cursed by the burden of being
destined to put time back into joint, in other words: “to put history, the world, the age, the time upright, on the right path…” In Atlas, the sovereign of Plato’s doomed daimonic kingdom of “Atlantis” (i.e.
Realm of Atlas), we are dealing with a struggle against the decline
of the time,62 with the question of Justice in light of the world ages
– or the aging of worlds, and the reparation that would be required
57 Ibid., 10.
58 Ibid.
59 Ibid., 48.
60 Ibid., 20.
61 Ibid., 22.
62 Ibid., 23.
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lovers of sophia
for a world-historical renaissance. Hamlet declares that “the time is
out of joint” at just the moment when he swears together [ conjurer]
with the specter “who is always a sworn conspirator [ conjure]” from somewhere beneath Shakespeare’s world stage or, as it were “from
beneath the earth”63 – where titans such as Atlas are imprisoned for
their faith. As Derrida points out, a “conjuration” is both an oath
to take part in a conspiracy against a superior power and a magical
incantation or charm intended to summon a spirit.64
To redress the wrong of world history – this, for Derrida, is the essence of the tragic. Not to redress one or another unfortunate
mishap, or to right any particular wrong, but to be aware of what
he cal s the “pre-originary and properly spectral anteriority of the
crime.”65 As soon as we read these words, the Anaximander fragment
ought to come to mind. So it should be no surprise that several
pages later in Specters of Marx, Derrida enters into a sustained meditation on Heidegger’s reading of this Presocratic Greek text, a
fragment from that primordial epoch in the prehistory of thought
which Nietzsche refers to as “the tragic age of the Greeks.” It is the age wherein Aeschylus turned Prometheus into the first dramatic
persona in recorded history. One of the sole traces of Anaximander’s
thinking, the fragment concerns the anachronique character of Time itself.66 In Heidegger’s translation it reads: “But that from which
things arise also gives rise to their passing away, according to what is necessary; for things render justice and pay penalty to one another
for their injustice [ adikia], according to the ordinance of time.”67
The adikia in the fragment does not speak simply of juridical-
moral injustice but of its condition of possibility in the very injustice of being – in the way that the world is not going as it ought to go,
63 Ibid., 34.
64 Ibid., 50.
65 Ibid., 24.
66 Ibid., 25.
67 Martin Heidegger, “The Anaximander Fragment” in Early Greek Thinking (New York: Harper and Row, 1984), 20.
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“something is out of joint” and “all is not right with things.”68 It is not just “something” that is out of joint, but Time – the horizon of
being, and this means that the very Being of beings is haunted by the
essence of the tragic.69 We are called to an impossible task – the quest for a utopia founded on a different experience of Time than that
which accounts for the violence that we do to one another. Hamlet
or any other prince that takes up the mantle of King Atlas is a tragic figure because he is cursed with the knowledge that he can and
must strive to right the wrong of existence, to bear up under Time’s
declination. Of course, this is an impossible task, but as Derrida
remarks: “here as elsewhere, wherever deconstruction is at stake, it
would be a matter of linking an affirmation (in particular a political one), if there is any, to the experience of the impossible, which can only be a radical experience of the perhaps.”70 The “experience of the impossible” is constitutive of deconstruction.71 Towards the very end
of Specters of Marx, Derrida elaborates on this relationship of the impossible to the sociopolitical quest for Justice: “Present existence or essence has never been the condition, object, or the thing of justice. One must constantly remember that the impossible is, alas,
always possible.”72
68 Derrida,
Specters of Marx, 27–28.
69 Ibid., 29.
70 Ibid., 42.
71 Ibid., 111.
72 Ibid., 220.
431
FREE WILL VS. LOGICAL DETERMINISM
The metaphysical problem of free will is usualy defined
in terms of whether or not the world is physical y
deterministic. In On the Plurality of Worlds, David
Lewis maintains that while physical laws may differ from
world to world, and while there may be some worlds that are partly
or whol y non-physical, states of affairs in al possible worlds are nonetheless determined by logical laws.1 This prohibits contingency with respect to the totality of being: every way that anything could
be already is so in a completed logical space, and everything that one could ever do is actual y done by some counterpart of oneself living
at some other causal y-isolated world. Lewis is not unaware of the
potential problem for free will posed by this thesis, but he believes
himself to have adequately defeated this objection in section 2.6 of
On the Plurality of Worlds, entitled “A Road to Indifference”.2
In this section, Lewis misconstrues the central force of a
hypothetical “indifference” objection, according to which no
one will be motivated to do anything in the face of knowing that
anything they could possibly ‘choose’ to do wil , in fact, be done
by some parallel world counterpart of theirs. This objection real y
concerns the impossibility of novelty under his maximal ontology, and not merely the psychological question of motivation to act
decisively or the lack thereof. With reference to the writings of
1 David Lewis, On the Plurality of Worlds (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 91.
2 Ibid., 123-128.
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William James on ontological novelty in respect to the problem of
free wil , I will question the coherence of Lewis’s operative meaning
of the terms “causation” and “possibility”. I will elaborate on Lewis’s
“story” metaphor for what he rejects as an impossible ontology and
suggest that only this might allow for the real agent causality that
Lewis’s essential y mathematical ontology prohibits.
Let me begin by clarifying my point of contention by briefly
elaborating on what parts of Lewis’s response to a hypothetical
“indifference” objection I am not concerned to dispute here. Lewis goes on at some length about the “sum total” of ‘good’ and ‘evil’.
As indicated by my use of air quotes, it is very problematic what if
anything exactly defines ‘good’ and ‘evil’ as so real y distinct from
one another that one could even begin to quantitatively think about a “sum total” of each of them as compared to the other. Lewis also
claims that his thesis of the plurality of worlds only poses a problem for a universalist utilitarian morality, one based on a completely
altruistic or impersonal imperative to increase the total quantity
of good vs. evil.3 He believes that this is actual y a point in favor of his thesis, because such a morality is “a philosophical invention”
quite far from “common sense” moralities that concern the good
of a person, an emotional y bonded social group, or a nation. I do
not particularly care whether Lewis’s thesis prohibits this kind of morality, and I am quite willing to agree with him that a universalist morality is a false conception that does not speak against his
thesis. Furthermore, I am not concerned to dispute his claim that
otherworldly evils and goods are just as ‘good’ and ‘evil’ as those of this world that is (indexical y) actual for us.4
Lovers of Sophia Page 54