Between Necessity and Artifice - THE SOCIAL SYNTHESIS in Political Theory This is the problem of the social syn-thesis

because the very possibility of social life depends on the possibility of intersubjectivity, not merely on the sharing of moral values, or on the agreement on established symbols for communication. Perhaps above all else Nietzsche does not understand that human being is a product of sociality, and that social life depends on the possibility of communication, and even of scientificity what Nietzsche calls the invariant persistence, the established convention, the obligatory style for everyone! For it is still not clear how individual Subjects can ever form a society without being able to co-ordinate their activities by means of scientific values. By breaking down the Subject and also its causality its agency Nietzsche ought to have thrown back the question of the Political to the sphere of physiological demands intended in an immanentist phylogenetic sense, not in the ontological sense he pursues with the ontogeny of thought, from the instincts for freedom, to the Will to Power or better, to its perspective of the herd, to its mediation in the relation to other human beings and their instincts giving rise to the averageness of consciousness. For the negatives Denken, society is therefore an ob-ject (Gegenstand) that stands op-posed to the individual instincts which necessarily pre-date society and the onto-geny of thought. Similarly with Heidegger, society is facticity, the world into which the Dasein is thrown, the place (Ort) that makes the Da-sein a Sein that is there (da). Nihilism begins with this contingency of human being and therefore of all being, and then terminates in a well of despond once it remains mired and entangled in this valuelessness, like a petulant child who had been promised an inexistent toy. Values seek to rationalize existence, to give it a purpose and therefore a beginning that is also an action initiated by an agency, a Subject. The underlying reality of life and the world, the sub-iectum, is therefore turned first into an energy that is an agency that is conscious of its activity a Subject, an Ego, a Self.

The Hobbesian social contract is founded on the individuals apprehension of imminent and violent death at the hands of other human aggressors in the state of nature in which man is a wolf to man (homo homini lupus) and in which reigns the total civil war of all against all (bellum omnium contra omnes, bellum civium). But wherein lies, upon what rests, the rationality of this decision to reach, to con-vene on, a social com-pact and erect a Commonwealth? Surely if this decision is rational in the state of nature, then the state of nature could never exist historically because human beings would have agreed to a Common-wealth or status civilis from time immemorial and certainly before a state of nature could exist? There is a sense in which Hobbess State is not a state by institution, then, but a state by acquisition acquired from the beginning of human history. But the rationality of human beings remains yet to be established and Leibniz formulated it some years after the publication of Hobbess Leviathan with the principle of sufficient reason. Thus, Hobbes invokes the appetitus for life, for existence, and its rational fear of death and not just its violent apprehension as the motivations that allow human beings to escape the state of nature so as to enter the civil state, the Economic bourgeois society protected and preserved by the Political state. Easily superseding the fallacious jusnaturalist theories of liberal society that flourished from Locke to Mill, Hobbess schema constitutes the most potent combination of free convention and necessary hypothesis. (Cf. A.Negri, then Koselleck.) The subiectum of the Hobbesian construction, its foundation or ground (Grund), and therefore what determines the transition from the state of nature to that of civil society under the Sovereign State, is the rationality of preserving existence. Hegel will follow in Hobbess and Leibnizs steps in erecting his own theory of the origins of society and the State, though basing himself this time on the dialectic of self-consciousness, the mediation of Self and Other through the Ob-ject whereby labour becomes the material carrier of human emancipation.

Both Hobbes and Hegel seek to identify the corpus, the hypokeimenon, the sub-iectum, the rock bottom of human and social reality. For both, human and social motivations and institutions are subject-matters (sub-iecta) over which human beings claim to have in-sight by virtue of the fact that we originate or initiate them. Therefore, the subject of this initium (beginning) must be able to know the subject-matter, the sub-iectum, of human reality for the simple reason that the initiator or author (auctor) of the action is also able to cogitate (co-agitare, agere, to act) on the motive of its ex-ertion or execution. It is thus that human beings can imagine that consciousness or thinking (cogitare, whence co-agitare) is by itself proof not merely of existence, but also of the existence of an agency, an Ego or ego-ity (Ich-heit), of the id-entity that thinks. The entity that thinks is conscious of itself, and therefore acquires an id-entity, an Ego. Thus, all reality is finally sub-ordinated to the Logos, the ratio of the Subject, the Ego, the Ich-heit: that is to say, the unity of appetitus and perceptio is posited as the only possibility of being (Leibniz). To ec-sist, to be real, a being must be perfect. But to be perfect, a being must also be a unity, a monad, not a composite, for that would beg the question of how being could be many. Therefore, as Leibniz puts it, only a being can be a being! Being is unity; unity is simplicity; simplicity is the seal of truth. Simplex sigillum veri. Whatever exists, ec-sists because it strives to come out, it strives to be. Ec-sistence is the ultimate reason for what is, because what is has greater reason to be than what does not exist at all: This, in a nutshell, is the principle of sufficient reason. All modern social theory begins with two fundamental assumptions about human beings: - the instinct of self-preservation and the ability to be self-sufficient. Already with Hobbes, and even Rousseau, the being of each individual is measured by his Power, the power of self-preservation and to be self-sufficient against the Power of other in-dividual human beings. Thus, this Power is dependent on the individual ability to command other individuals, other Bodies and their Powers. This command depends in turn on the ability of an individual to force other individuals to ex-ercise (ex-ertion, from Greek ergos, work) their labour-power so as to maintain itself in existence and then to

thrive. And this command over the labour-power of other individuals can be obtained with ones own labour-power as well as with ones possessions so long as these can provide the means of sustenance needed by other individuals. Beyond the free will of each in-dividual, therefore, the Hobbesian schema decrees axiomatically the mechanical and physical necessity the conflict of opposing Powers the natural physical drive of individuals to exercise control over the labour-power of other individuals through the control of their labour-power and of possessions that can secure their survival. Thus, ownership of the means of production determines the command of dead objectified labour (possessions) over living labour considered as a mechanical quantity, as work, as labour-power. It is the separation of living labour from the means of production that allows this quantification of living labour, and therefore of the human experience of time. At the dawn of the rule of the bourgeoisie, at the very inception of capitalist industry, Hobbes had hoped to formalize its rule scientifically through the combination of the con-vention of free wills to erect the Political, on one side, and the hypothesis of the necessity of their survival from the state of nature into the equal exchange of labour-powers and possessions between in-dividuals in the new civil state or Common-wealth, the Economy, on the other. These were the philosophical foundations that allowed the homologation of the free convention of the social contract instituting the Political with the scientific hypothesis based on the necessity of individual survival and reproduction in the acquisition of an automatic, self-regulating market Economy. Hence, Political Economy became the dismal science: - dismal because still founded on the value-positing free will of in-dividuals who set the prices of resources rendered scarce by competition with one another. And science, because it derives its laws from what it understands to be the necessity of this competition based on the antagonistic state of nature, the mechanistic conflict of wills. Hobbes and Hegel invoke the apprehension of death to rationalize and explain the exit of individuals from the state of civil war into that of bourgeois civil society (the Economic) and the State (the Political).

But whereas Hobbes simplistically assumes an axiomatic, almost Euclidean, mechanicism about the homologation of individual selfinterest or Power and their social synthesis or mediation in the new Common-wealth, Hegel understands that no such mechanical equivalence is possible and that the social syn-thesis must allow for the satisfaction of human needs - material through labour and symbolic through interaction. (Cf. the homonymous study by Jurgen Habermas in Theorie und Praxis.) Nietzsche instead denounces this social syn-thesis for what it is: - mere con-vention. He opposes it for its con-venience, for its being an arbitrary substitution that transforms the real world of the state of nature into an anthropomorphic fable of symbolic exchange, into a metaphor of language, science and numbers into the artificial categories of truth and lie. Hobbes and Hegel and even Schopenhauer assume that the human beings that con-stitute civil society are virtually and essentially the same as those who now live in it that the transition from the state of nature to civil society does not essentially trans-form the character, psychological if not physical, of individual human beings to the extent that the categories that we employ to con-ceptualise the state of nature and indeed nature itself (!) may be themselves the pro-duct of civil society and therefore may be in-applicable to the state of nature! And it is this transition, as we saw earlier, that will interest Nietzsche in his mature work. Yet even as early as 1873 when he dictated the short notes on Uber Wahrheit und Luge, Nietzsche is already questioning whether the categories, the concepts that we utilize to com-prehend civil society and the state of nature that preceded it are not fundamentally dis-torted by our very belonging to this civil society. In other words, it is inappropriate to analyse the transition from state of nature to civil society by applying to both states the perspective of civil society! It is essential first to subject the perspective of liberal civil society, the categories of bourgeois civil society themselves, to a thorough critique so that we do not let them unduly colour our interpretation and analysis of the transition. It is incorrect to assume that Nietzsche accepts Hobbess

axiomatic-hypothetical expostulation of the state of nature as if it referred to a historical-institutional stage of human being. Rather, he takes the Hobbesian hypothesis as the theoretical framework or paradigm for a critique of Christianbourgeois society, independently of whether such a state of nature ever existed leading up to the Selbst-Aufhebung of that society and to its nihilism. (Nietzsche looks at civil society in controluce, in the backlight of the hypothetical status naturae.) Nietzsche does not accept Hobbess hypothesis of the apprehension of death in the state of nature, the necessity of the bellum civium. In this his approach is much closer to Rousseaus. Yet he does accept it as mere hypothesis, that is, as a reductio ad absurdum of the conventions of Christian-bourgeois society and its self-dissolving ideals. That is why he cheekily suggests tedium as a motive leading to the convention of civil society for the sake of peace. He concedes that in the state of nature all forms of human behaviour even dissimulation, by which he means also artistic mimesis are genuine and authentic, and therefore they involve the intellect only to the extent that it is needed for survival or the satisfaction of needs. But this is not the case in civil society and the State, which are purely conventional. Their necessity, their truth and science are utterly fictitious social masks worn by individuals to facilitate communication and make the social world predictable and familiar the better to satisfy their need-necessity. It is not the truth that interests human beings in society, but rather the illusion of truth; it is whatever suits their selfish needs and interests, just as much as in the state of nature, but this time filtered through the conventions of civil society, through the perspective of the herd, which has little to do with truth itself but everything to do with con-venience and utility. There is therefore a distancing of human intuition from its original mimetic state in which forgetfulness prevails, and the historic-scientific or rational state in which the forgetfulness of forgetfulness, or memory, triumphs and becomes the apex of the ontogeny of thought to occasion the dis-integration of the instincts [Disgregation der Instinkte].

Clearly at this early stage, Nietzsches thought is still confined to the Humean skeptical critique, the velleitary and arbitrary, metaphorical and anthropomorphic assessment of signification and ultimately of physical mathematics, of mathesis. He fails to identify, except for his insistence on persistence and crystallization and sclerosis and then on utility and safety and eventually fear and internalization, the problem of why science and logic as specific practices have come about, of why they have triumphed. And above all he fails to explain how they could have done so, again, outside of sheer habit, repetition and therefore con-vention (persistency [Verharren] and crystallisation and sclerosis [Hartund Starr-werden])! Nietzsche is mixing up the arbitrariness of signifiers (semeiotics) with the establishment of science as an activity and of scientific causation as its object both of which in practice boil down only to regularity and predictability. He still fails to see that it is not so much the predictability that is a convention, and not even the direction of scientific and technological practice, but rather its very doing that responds to antagonistic values being presented as objectivity or necessity or causality when in reality it occurs in conventional experimental circumstances which supply the problematic, all-important nexus. All that can be established then not proven or explained but merely described - are the regularities that can be given numerical expression in space and time and be exploited instrumentally by humans. Consequently, these regularities are mere conventions, anthropomorphic metaphors or metonymies. The very relation of a nerve-stimulus to the produced percept is in itself no necessary one; but if the same percept has been reproduced millions of times and has been the inheritance of many successive generations of man, and in the end appears each time to all mankind as the result of the same cause, then it attains finally for man the same importance as if it were the unique, necessary percept and as if that relation between the original nerve-stimulus and the percept produced were a close relation of causality: just as a dream eternally repeated, would be perceived and

judged as though real. But the congelation and coagulation of a metaphor does not at all guarantee the necessity and exclusive justification of that metaphor. (p185)
Selbst das Verhltnis eines Nervenreizes zu dem hervorgebrachten Bilde ist an sich kein notwendiges: wenn aber dasselbe Bild millionenmal hervorgebracht und durch viele Menschengeschlechter hindurch vererbt ist, ja zuletzt bei der gesamten Menschheit jedesmal infolge desselben Anlasses erscheint, so bekommt es endlich fr den Menschen dieselbe Bedeutung, als ob es das einzig notwendige Bild sei und als ob jenes Verhltnis des ursprnglichen Nervenreizes zu dem hergebrachten Bilde ein strenges Kausalittsverhltnis sei: wie ein Traum, ewig wiederholt, durchaus als Wirklichkeit empfunden und beurteilt werden wrde. Aber das Hart- und Starr-Werden einer Metapher verbrgt durchaus nichts fr die Notwendigkeit und ausschlieliche Berechtigung dieser Metaphe r.

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