The recent debates regarding identity politics have brought me back to thinking about the substance of the work I did leading up to my dissertation before I washed out of graduate school around 2000. The project in which I was engaged involved the interstices between conceptions of human identity and knowledge and the resulting variety of socio-political implications. My project was fundamentally directed towards demonstrating how specific ways of looking at both knowledge and human identity result in far right politics.
Why I come back to this now is twofold. Identity politics is the exemplar of the project of humanism, however, it is completely exposed to exploitation by rightist politics because it fails to recognize its own universalism - more precisely, it is stuck within a notion that 'politics' is a mode of being, a category, as opposed to a mode of knowledge.
Politics as a 'mode of being' originated with the original rightists of western thought, Plato and Aristotle. To quote some of my work as a grad student regarding the Greek idea of ousia - roughly translated 'inheritance' or 'substance':
Ousia first appears in philosophical texts with Plato. Its original meaning is merely inheritance, and it is most often thought in terms of the passing down of both property and familial heritage through generations of landed aristocrats. It is unsurprising in this regard that Plato seized upon it as a fundamental philosophical metaphor, as he was himself an aristocrat and championed philosophically a certain form of aristocracy, albeit an altered form in which the hierarchy of mettle sprang from virtue and knowledge rather than wealth. Ousia, however, finds its clearest treatment, indeed its seminal treatment, in the thought of Aristotle.
There are three central characteristics of Aristotle's development which both constitute the basis of its future development as a philosophical category and link it directly to what I am developing as the category of the ‘political’. 1. Ouisa is said to be the site of the relationship between form and matter [as it is developed in the middle books of Metaphysics]. We must qualify this, however, with reference to the Physics. Ousia is a ‘relationship’ between form and matter, in fact its defining relationship [this is the second point I will come to]. Yet, this relationship is by no means an equal one. In book II, chapter 7 of Physics, Aristotle groups the four causes according to their correspondence with the two principles developed in book I — namely form and matter. The formal, final, and efficient cause of motion in nature turn out to be ‘numerically one’, and their identity is that of form, while the material cause is of course the mute matter upon and in which form works. Substance [ousia]must be thought of as a relationship between form and matter, but a relationship in which form presides, ousia is their hierarchy.
The grouping of the four causes expresses as much: Matter is a cause of motion insofar as it is merely the medium in which form participates and through which form actualizes itself. It is not an active, but rather passive cause — a cause merely because of its presence. Such is also clearly reflected in 'On the Generation of Animals', in which menstruation, as the matter of animal generation, acts as a cause only insofar as it incubates the form of the animal [the semen] and is acted upon by it. So, in general, ousia is the hierarchical relationship of the principles — a relationship of inheritance whereby one being passes its form on to another through the vehicle of mute matter.
I must note, however, that the insistence of the material element of substance is far from unimportant, despite its ‘lower’ position in the hierarchy. Ousia, as the relationship between form and matter, necessarily implies that identity [point two] is embodied. Identity is not merely a logical entity [as could be argued in Categories], but a being, an existent. The insistence upon the embodiment of identity, of ousia, plays a very important political role in the post–Kantian texts.
2. Ousia is said to constitute both synchronically and diachronically the ‘whatness’ of a thing — ousia begets identity, and ‘beget’ is the proper word here as ousia is something passed on [see point 1], something which ‘fills’ a being with its identity as it approaches its actuality. This identity is both that of a being’s being [synchronically] identical [numerically one] with itself [as with Categories] and a being’s being in a [diachronically] stable unity with itself through change and over time [as with Physics and Metaphysics].
3. Ousia is the highest [hierarchical] category. In 'Categories', primary ousia is that which is unpredicable. What this entails is that all of the other ousiai can in some sense be regarded as accidents in their being predicates — i.e. the place of a particular ousia, though a mode of its being [category], is not the primary mode of its being, it is not its identity, only a predicate thereof. Likewise, in later texts, should we fail to determine the precise nature of ousia, as with principles, we cannot have a scientific knowledge of those entities said to possess it, but additionally as ousia is said to be the relationship of the principles [form and matter], it stands hierarchically higher scientifically than the principles in and of themselves. These three aspects of Aristotle’s conception of ousia are what I have in mind when I employ the term.
How then do we think ousia as the ‘political’? Plato’s Republic is of course the textbook case. It is no surprise that in many respects Hegel, Scheler, and Heidegger, among others, employ various elements of Platonic ontology in their political writings. Three elements are of particular interest. 1. In Republic, the political sphere constitutes the identity of its citizens. One might read this in the exact opposite manner. Plato begins his explicit depiction of the polis in book II in an entirely utilitarian manner — people band together in communities because one person cannot manufacture all that is required for subsistence by oneself. People enter into community bonds such that one can be a farmer and the other a shoemaker allowing the farmer to have shoes and the shoemaker food. However, in a typical Platonic reversal, it turns out that this ‘doing one’s due’ [which not incidentally is the ‘justice’ permeating the whole of the polis] envisions the identity of the member of the polis as one taking up one’s proper role in the hierarchy of its organism.
The polis, rather than an invention of utility, is an organism in which each member acts within their specific due, a due which pre–exists their activity, and such constitutes their identity. If it were an invention of utility, one’s due would be made [and thus also fluid], not acquired and pre–existent.
2. The philosopher [king] is the literal embodiment of the polis. We find in the middle and late books that the philosopher acquires in his soul, in perfect harmony, the various heirarchical spheres of the political community. Through recourse to the strongly ontological theses of books VI and VII, Plato’s vision of the soul of philosopher [king] directly mirrors the structure of the political community laid out in books II through IV, and his mettle as leader is the establishment of the perfect harmony between the spheres in the city precisely by maintaining that perfect harmony within his own soul.
3. To be brief, the city is a form in heaven to be realized on earth through the activity of those of proper mettle.
These motifs recur throughout the political texts of those thinkers who take issue with Kant’s bourgeois vision and, at least in the case of the first motif, represent the central issue dividing these thinkers from Kantian rationalism [as the typically German Kant still clings metaphorically to the medieval notion of king as the body of the state]. However, why do I tag these three notions as representing the category of the political as ousia? The most obvious point is the relationship between the points one and two with respect to Aristotle’s ousia and the first point in Plato’s Republic. Identity is not something made, but something which one acquires through taking one’s proper place in the political community. The ‘political’ for Plato constitutes the identity of the citizen as ousia constitutes the identity of the individual being. In a sense, the form of the polis acts upon the matter of the individual and molds it to enable its [the polis’] function — and the individual is necessarily a passive matter [unlike the construction of the individual on the utilitarian model whereby the individual has needs which he/she fulfills by actively entering into community relations with others].
The idea of the ‘political’ then is the relationship between polis and individual in which the polis presides as the active agent and the individual is present [or presences itself] as the passive medium for the actualization of the form of the polis. In the case of the second two points it is a bit more difficult to see and they must be taken together. With the metaphor of the cave and the immediately preceeding sections of Republic on the agathon, we find that the philosopher, by contemplating the eternal forms literally comes to embody them — truth, the good, are his/her ‘property’ [one can read this in both senses of the word, i.e. as the literal ownership, or the scientific principle, what is proper to a thing]. In the latter meaning of this, we find the good to be, in a sense, the ousia of the philosopher — the constitution of the identity of the philosopher as philosopher.
In this relation, once again, given Plato’s general ‘emanatory’ logic, the philosopher is the passive matter which the good then informs and embodies itself within — the philosopher turns toward and becomes open to the good [in Heidegger this will later be reinterpreted as gelassenheit]. This turn, however, is not effected by the individual will, but is a collusion of the pre–existent mettle of the soul and the emanation of the good. Likewise, the philosopher then turns toward the city, as form, and molds it via a rigorous paedeia, with the citizens as passive matter and himself as the eternal form incarnate.
Through a double process, the relationship of the good to the philosopher and then philosopher to citizen enact on a political level the ‘natural’ relationship between form and matter, a site we call ousia. In a sense, even more so than the simple constitution of the identity of the citizen by the political sphere, the ‘political leader’ as embodied good [or embodied actuality of state as we find in Hegel] ascribes direct substantial character to the category of the ‘political’ [could there be any greater expression of ousia than the man–god, the form incarnate]. In both cases, what remains central is the issue activity. While humanism typically understands political relationships and identity as the result of human activity, conceiving of the ‘political’ along the model of ousia leads to the contrary — human activity is the result of some pre–existent form which acts upon and molds humanity, giving rise to concrete political associations and identities.
Phew... I know that was long and boring, but it is the basis of right wing political thinking. Within Plato and Aristotle - and the many followers that include Heidegger, Scheler, the whole of the Republican Party - human identity is thought of as a vessel for the truth of the greater hierarchy to inform or mold and then take it's place within the order of that organism. It's not thought of as an individual being deserving of recognition or equality because of both its uniqueness and equivalence to every other human being. And before you cry, 'what about rugged individualism', the manner in which rightist politics inhabits that is precisely in the idea of hierarchy - it sees freedom as the freedom of those further up in the hierarchy to do what that hierarchy affords them and those lower on the totem pole to be relegated to their place, hence the difference between Cliven Bundy and Eric Garner: one was exercising his hierarchical rights within the organism of the state, the other was trying to climb out of his place. This is what 'politics' means, to this day - a hierarchy.
And so we get back to identity politics. I'll start with a quote from Kant:
Perpetual peace is guaranteed by no less an authority than the great artist Nature herself... We can not actually observe such an agency in the artifices of nature, nor can we even infer its existence from them. But as with all relations between the form of things and their ultimate purposes, we can and must supply it mentally in order to conceive of its possibility by analogy with human artifices
The alternative to the rightist ideas described above is precisely the idea that 'we can and must supply it mentally in order to conceive of its possibility by analogy with human artifices'. What Kant is saying here is that there is no nature, there is no truth - we simply conceive of that to ground our own grasp of the world - to make it align, by analogy, with human artifices. It is a completely different view of the world - one that is the ground of all humanism. The ground of identity politics is this notion - the only hierarchy in the world is made, not begotten. The socio-political environment into which we are born is not a reflection of some metaphysical truth embodied in the world, but rather, a human creation and a problem for human beings to solve.
Feminism, anti-racism, LGBT liberation, and on and on - they all speak specifically to the idea that the world can change and that the hierarchical environment in which we live is not a mandate, but a skin to be shed. However, they still cling to that one thing that underlies the structure they fight against - namely identity. Rather than adopt universalism, proponents of identity politics tend to position themselves within the hierarchy. They define themselves within the hierarchy. They fight against each other within the hierarchy. They fail to see the root problem - that we still see ourselves as defined, informed and molded to take our place within the hierarchy - that we cannot yet see identity as free. We cannot yet envision a world of free, equal people.
I don't know how we get to that point. When African Americans are still being summarily executed by police for no reason and gay men and women are still routinely beaten or killed on the streets and women are struggling to just have medical autonomy over their own bodies, it's really hard to see our way past that. It's hard to imagine a world in which we are all free; in which we are all equal. That's the ground of identity politics. That's the end of identity politics. But, unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be the process of the struggle from ground to end.
And the problem is the 'politics'. Politics are a 'way of being' rather than an imagination of what can be - they reiterate the same hierarchy regardless of intent precisely because 'politics' is about stabilizing and assigning 'identity', rather than problematizing and dispensing with it altogether.
We need to stand together and recognize solidarity. We need to recognize universal equality.