There are at least two great images of how philosophical reflection relates to its contemporaneous world. Hegel proclaimed that ‘philosophy is its time comprehended in thought’, but that this comprehension was necessarily reflective and retrospective. Philosophy grasped its current moment as the culmination of a process of conceptual development; so in philosophy one can at most claim to have reconstructed and analyzed how things are up to the present. On this account there can be no futural dimension to philosophy; philosophers are not in the business of prediction, but rather of understanding. This way of understanding the legitimate aim of philosophical activity carries a related though conceptually distinct claim: philosophical reflection is not action-oriented; it’s aim is not to provide advice on how what ought to act in the contemporary world.
A different image is provided by a Kant’s suggestion in the essay “What is Enlightenment?”, and as influentially interpreted by Michel Foucault, that a legitimate aim of philosophy is to reflect on the present so as to grasp, in Foucault’s phrasing, “the historical ontology of the present.” The goal of such reflection is to grasp the present as something contingent, and so as something that need not be; if the present is something that results from the interaction of various contingent social, political, cultural, etc. processes, we can immediately infer that had such processes not taken the particular courses they did, we in the contemporary world would be different, and that there was nothing necessary about the particular courses that did in fact occur. Secondly we might then think of the present not in the Hegelian manner as something complete and completed, but as something at least potentially open to alteration and reconstruction. So the future is a task, but philosophy still cannot offer any guidance in how it might be changed, and only rather the assurance that nothing necessary blocks it from changing and being changed.
A third image haunts philosophical reflection: Karl Marx’s final thesis on Feuerbach, that “philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world; the point however is to change it.” Even on the assumptions that one is attempting to unify one’s theory and one’s practice, and that one agrees that the point of one’s efforts is in part to change the world, the thesis suggests two emphases that are prima facie in tension: if the emphasis is placed upon changing the world through action, the thesis suggests that one abandon philosophy for political activity. But if the emphasis is upon a course of reflection aiming to contribute to world-changing activity, then one’s conception of philosophy shifts, from attempting to understand the world as it is, to a least including in one’s philosophizing some sense of how the world should be changed, and moreover what are the possible actions and their conditions that might contribute to the sought for change; additionally one will want to ask what are the criteria relevant to evaluating proposed courses of action.
Already some distinguished contemporary philosophers have attempted a philosophical account of the figure and presidency of Donald Trump. Alain Badiou’s little book on Trump was published earlier this year. The book consists of two lectures on Trump, one initially delivered only two days after his election as president, the other just two weeks later. It’s a tribute to Badiou’s long-pondered political philosophy and his analytic powers that the lectures remain pointed and stimulating nearly three years later. Badiou’s thought generally is marked by an enthusiastic and remarkably clear-sighted pursuit of the activist interpretation of philosophy suggested by Marx’s thesis. I will not attempt here even to sketch Badiou’s general philosophy and the role of politics within it, other than to say that Badiou considers politics to be one of the central ways in which people pursue the events that orient meaningful human action. Examples of such events for Badiou would be such things as the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia or the collapse of the Soviet Union. Can the election of Trump be treated as such a fundamental orienting event? If not, what if anything does the phenomenon of Trump offer to political philosophy?
Badiou’s reflections begin with a diagnosis: the most fundamental political feature of our time is the seeming triumph of globalized capitalism. Its triumph is a miserable one: few people are so blinkered as to think such a formidably destructive system, and one that has produced the greatest unequal distribution of human wealth in history, represents any fulfillment of worthwhile human capacities and aspirations. Rather, our contemporary plight is that we can’t imagine an alternative to it. Analogously to Winston Churchill’s famous characterization of democracy, capitalism is the worst economic system, except for all the other ones. Consequently, Badiou says in the first lecture (p.12), “this global totality [of capitalism] has effects on the various peoples [of the world], effects of disorientation. Nobody can conceive clearly what a life with a meaningful direction might look like or what would be a strategic vision of the future of humanity.” Badiou then seems to suggest that people nonetheless seek some way out of the nightmarish stasis of global capitalism, and that this results in “the appearance of a new kind of activist, who defends violent and demagogic proposals and who seems more and more to take as his model gangsters or mafias, rather than trained bourgeois politicians.” The most recent of these thugs is “Trump, the vulgar and incoherent billionaire.” (ibid)
The task of an action-oriented political philosophy is then two-fold: first (and this is the aspect that occupies much of Badiou’s discussion), we need to “create a real contradiction” (p.23) or, in the second lecture, “invent” (p.46) an alternative. A genuine alternative must be something that can in principle attract all people, induce aspirations for action, and provide criteria for judging proposals. The alternative must be a principle or idea of orientation. Such an alternative is given by what Badiou calls ‘communist orientation’, “whose central point is the making in-common (hence the world “communism”) of everything concerning the great processes of production and exchange.” (p.24)
Further, Badiou thinks that by ‘inventing’ the communist orientation we can place Trump philosophically. Badiou offers the following schema (p.35):
On this account, ‘communism’ represents the aspiration towards universality and equality. The field of ‘acceptable’ political views in the United States is split between the dismal Democratic Party and the demented Republicans. The opposite pole to communism is ‘fascism’, an aspiration towards thorough-going political and cultural identitarianism and hierarchy. So Trump and Bernie Sanders represent the ‘real contradiction’ in American political life. Sanders is poised between the mediocre consensus of the Democrats and a more radical aspiration beyond capitalism; Trump is likewise poised between the deranged consensus of the Republicans and a more extreme aspiration towards hierarchy and ethnic and nationalist idenitarianism.
Has Badiou thereby grasped the significance of Trump for political philosophy? In my next post I’ll consider a different diagnosis offered by the philosopher Hans Sluga.