Author: staceymeeker

Ostensive Dreams

To purport Generative Anthropology as a new way of thinking is to recognize, fundamentally, its stated break with metaphysics, or the philosophical obsession to get at the thing-in-itself. Many ontic systems before Generative Anthropology have come and gone (actually, are still around). Generative Anthropology’s break with these systems comes in its attempt to situate what Eric Gans calls the “ostensive” utterance prior to a “propositional” one.

[T]he anthropologies of Marx and Freud are derived, or more precisely, retrodicted from the specific foci, respectively economic and psychological, of their analyses of the modern world. Freud’s scene in Totem and Taboo of the murder of the father who has monopolized the women of the horde is an a posteriori justification of the Oedipus complex rather than a parsimonious hypothesis of human origin. There is no analogous Marxian scene of origin; for Marx the source of the human is labor, that is, interaction with objects, rather than the scenic interaction with other humans that gives rise to language.[1]

As ontic systems designed to explain human behavior, both Freudians and Marxists begin with certain “propositional” truths that can conceivably be verified in the external world. The evidence, as Gans notes above, for the existence of the Oedipus complex occurs a posteriori, meaning that as a hypothesis, it must be verified by lived experience, or what we observe somewhere in nature. Similarly, Marxism looks to material causes for its explanation of human behavior. Hypothesizing “labour” as the central focus of human relations allows us to see how and why human beings act the way they do.

The implicit assumption, then, within these and any “metaphysical” scheme that seeks to explain human behavior based on observable phenomena is that by isolating a certain criterion, we can, fundamentally, explain how human beings behave. The promise inherent in these metaphysical systems comes via their explanatory power as evidenced by the type of cultural work that follows and their ability to help us make sense of who we are.

Marx’s and Freud’s anthropologies provide means for interpreting cultural and religious phenomena and ultimately all the events of human history; the quantity and quality of the works they have inspired bear witness to their productivity. Yet, however persuasive may be the idea that production-relations are the motor of history or that the human psyche is determined by a complex of metapsychological forces, neither of these theories explain the emergence of the specifically human ability to create symbolic signs or representations. Marx, Freud, and their disciples emit propositions about the human-in-general without explaining how we came to acquire the faculty that allows us to emit these propositions. Thus, despite their pretensions of getting to the thing itself, both fall within the boundaries of the mode of thought, first elaborated by Plato, that has since come to be called, after the title of one of Aristotle’s treatises, metaphysics.[2]

So what? If we choose to call all matter of human inquiry “metaphysical,” meaning that the validity of such human inquiry is to be found in the actual observable world via posterior verification, why such a dramatic call to break from this tendency, to instead follow a “new way of thinking” grounded in something intuitive, originary, and non-verifiable?

One reason might be that moving forward, propositional ontic systems help us explain the world, but moving backwards—to something like the origin of language—these metaphysical systems, which purport to explain the human, cannot adequately account for the most glaring trait that makes a human a human. This of course is neither an Oedipal complex nor labour, but language itself. How are we to imagine language emanating from the Oedipal complex, or from the fact that human relations are indeed heavily mediated by strictures and protocols of labour and production? We cannot, not adequately anyhow, so we can either look to another metaphysical, propositional schema to test against the observable world to try to account for language. Or we can, in a way, do away with metaphysics altogether, forgoing our ability to propositionally verify the origin of the human—that is, human language origin. The first case is the sort of never-ending trajectory of inquiry that the West has been on since the time of Plato and constitutes what I am characterizing in this paper as a series of “declarative nightmares.” The second case marks a break in this trajectory, has something to do with linguistic “ostensives,” and is why Gans calls Generative Anthropology “a new way of thinking.”

But again, so what? Perhaps it was never in the purview of Freudianism and Marxism to explain precisely where language came from. Rather, Marx and Freud were interested in explaining human behavior. Is one of necessity tied to the other? The unabashed answer Generative Anthropology gives us is yes, so that to lack one is to fundamentally lack, or have something lacking in, the other. Moreover, we cannot assume that labour or the Oedipus complex came first, spawning the human ability of representation. In such a scenario, we are forced to conclude that there existed a time when proto-humans were either Oedipally charged or exploited by the forces of production prior to representation. Generative Anthropology puts forward the radical idea that only subsequent to the human ability of representation could we perceive, initiate, or be aware of anything like Oedipal resentment or exploitative labour practices. Such resentments do not cause language; rather, they are the effect of humankind’s language-making capability.

Part of the promise of such thinking, as I will attempt to argue in this paper, is in the ethical work such an understanding of a common, hypothetical origin (unverified and unverifiable) might engender. Stepping out of, or beyond, an ability to propositionally verify our existence has the potential to make us more humane. Prima facie, it seems that relying on observable phenomena to make claims about the human, rather than relying on originary intuitions and subsequent hypotheses, is a claim to a certain brand of intellectual seriousness and responsibility. It seems reckless to forgo truths capable of being verified in the observable world. If reality cannot corroborate our version of reality, what business have we to believe it real in the first place?

Yet the value of this “new way of thinking” cannot be known beforehand. We posit a hypothetical origin. So what? The value of doing so cannot come, moreover, after corroboration via some future laboratory experiment but by what such a position allows us to conceive of and how it allows us to conceive ourselves. Gans is confident that this new heuristic, once accepted, will entail equally productive work as any previous (metaphysical) system. But to step out of the metaphysical quest for verification requires establishing the logical necessity (rather than necessary verification) of a more fundamental linguistic unit: the ostensive.

In our hypothetical originary scene, the role of language is reduced to its strict minimum: the momentary hesitation between the (chaotic) beginning and the (minimally ordered) end of an act of collective appropriation. The minimal linguistic act is the re-presentation of an already-present object by means of an ostensive sign that will preserve the memory of the object after its disappearance. The ostensive word is not yet a concept; it is the name of an object-in-situation, a phenomenon that we can no doubt better understand as the “name of God.” It is by means of the ostensive that we teach words to children; they subsequently learn to use these words as imperatives to make-appear objects designated in their absence, and finally to construct “complete sentences,” that is, declaratives.[3]

An ostensive is the re-presentation of an “already-present” object, meaning that language is not (at least not initially) uttered in the absence of its referent, but precisely in its presence. To say further that the ostensive is “the name of an object-in-situation” is to recognize that language begins not simply as a means of cataloguing objects in the external word. It is the simultaneous recognition by all members present on a scene of representation of an object immediately before all of them. Temporally speaking, an ostensive utterance marks one’s participation in the present. The seeming redundancy of calling attention to an object immediately present anyhow makes the ostensive of “little interest for linguists . . . . [Ostensives] fail to provide a context-free linguistic model for the knowledge the love of which constitutes philosophy.”[4] Ostensives, much like metaphors, cannot be verified as true or false. They simply are, and philosophy’s business is not, strictly speaking, to ascertain the “cultural” conditions that make language, say, “felicitous.” Philosophy should tell us where and how these conditions arose by appealing to “context-free” criteria, for example, those arguably described by cognitive science, evolutionary biology, or ordinary language philosophy. Yet refusing to pose a hypothetical at the origin of language will ensure that we continue to look, ultimately unfruitfully, to the outside world to verify how language came to be—an intellectual red herring.

In the more mature phase of language operation, the ostensive is eclipsed by the declarative, that is, the proposition.

In the declarative sentence, language achieves its mature capacity to create imaginary models on the “other scene” of representation. We may then give a preliminary definition of the concept as the word/noun understood as necessarily an element of a declarative sentence, cut off from the original act of naming. Metaphysics, by denying the existence of an utterance-form more primitive than the declarative, incarnates the refusal to think the origin of language as an event.[5]

This refusal, I am making the case, has ethical consequences. In lacking a specific ethical lacuna, all metaphysical systems replace an ethics of presence with an ethics of deferral. Important to note here is that in Gans’s taxonomy of speech-acts, the ostensive proper is followed by the ostensive-imperative, which is a “make-appear” utterance, so that the inability to “make-appear” marks a “failed” ostensive. No doubt, the value of human language is precisely that we can talk about objects in their absence. I can say “Ferrari” without expecting it to appear. Moreover, I can say “God” without expecting it to appear. But in the case of God, if we want to insist on its existence despite its non-appearance, we can either demand that it appear via ritual ostensive, or delay its appearance via the declarative, that is, the temporal prolongation of its eventual return. Alternatively, if one wants to do away with both the ritualistic ostensive fetishization of an event, and the idea that God will reappear at some point in the future, one must fetishize the concept itself and deny the existence or importance of the immanent thing.

Put simply: the good-as-thing is the ostensive. The ostensive utterance points to a thing (like the carcass of a bison) which is not easily divisible. The good-as-word, or concept, is the declarative. The word, as substitute for the thing in its absence, is equally and infinitely sharable. So the ostensive/finite world is not derivative of the infinite declarative word (something akin to a “fall” in language); rather, the idea of God and infinity are drawn from, derived from, an original idea of scarcity and finitude. The idea of perpetual, lasting, and holy peace is derived from the initial possibility of violence. Violent thoughts are not, therefore, indicative of a “fall from” a previously irenic existence. The reverse is true. The threat of violence breeds an understanding of peace.

But if the concept itself does the deferring (in a more “mature” phase of language), if the declarative concept is infinitely sharable, promoting the perpetual peace, why is Gans (correctly, in my view) suspicious of the lack of ethical content in the philosophical declarative utterance? If conceiving of the origin of language as an event brings to the fore not the infinite sharability of the sign, but the finite non-sharability of the thing, why should we mistrust metaphysics or the declarative at all? It is the ostensive, or its possible failure, that ought to initiate nightmares. Declaratives mean we can keep on dreaming.

Let us keep in mind three things. First, the declarative does a type of ethical work. Second, the move from ostensive to declarative language mirrors Northrop Frye’s move from metaphorical to metonymic language. And third, Plato/Socrates himself makes a tripartite distinction between the appetitive, the rational, and the spiritual.

I touch on Frye because he is both a writer who takes religion seriously and one who promotes the ethical value of metaphysics. Frye makes a distinction between metaphoric language to metonymic language, which, in a loose way mirrors, I think, what Gans is talking about when he says ostensive and declarative respectively. A metaphor means “this is that.” Metonymy, as Frye discusses it, is a loosened metaphor, something like: “this is put for that” (roughly, a part stands for the whole). And Frye notes further that the rise of metonymic language (language as “put fors”) occurs in the time of Plato’s Republic.

In metaphorical language the central conception which unifies human thought and imagination is the conception of a plurality of gods, or embodiments of the identity of personality and nature. In metonymic language this unifying conception becomes a monotheistic “God,” a transcendent reality or perfect being that all verbal analogy points to. Such conceptions as the Form of the Good in Plato or the unmoved Mover in Aristotle are not difficult to absorb into this idea of God.[6]

So the ethical content of metonymic language that Frye notes (the ethical content of the declarative utterance) is the ability for it to rescue us from the immediacy of the metaphor/ostensive. Ostensives, say, have the ability to call up immediate human passions and energies thought to be mirrored in the natural world.

Each phase of language has its characteristic virtues as well as limitations. In the first [metaphorical/ostensive/ritualistic] phase, language can be used with an immediacy and vitality, such as we find in Homer, that later ages never consistently recapture. Yet this use of language is restricted by an identity with nature from which metonymic dialectic has freed itself.[7]

According to Frye, this marks a revolution in language, and has been similarly articulated by Gans (in moving from the ostensive to the declarative) as introducing into human affairs an ethics of linguistic deferral. Yet the primary difference between this declarative deferral and an ostensive one is that while the ostensive defers the eventual distribution of some immediate thing that can be conceivably pointed to or at, the declarative refuses to point at anything at all. If anything is given primacy, it is the concept itself, subsequently fetishized.

Although metaphysics is a fundamentally anti-religious mode of thought . . . it has its own conceptions of God. It is not certain whether the metaphysical divinity was the God of Socrates but it was certainly that of Plato . . . . [F]rom its earliest formulations, Platonic religion is essentially delocalized.[8]

Platonic religion is delocalized, meaning it is made “universal,” in a way, bereft of any embarrassing “local” (read ritual) ostensives, put in motion, dialecticized, propositionalized, initiating an ethics of spiritual deferral—which is what I take Gans to be talking about, and to be dismayed by, when he expresses concerns about the Western obsession with metaphysics, particularly of that obsession lacking real ethical content.

But how to escape the declarative, or, in a sense, regain the ethical content of an event that we can no longer see or point to? We may have survived the barbarities of certain “declarative” nightmares that presuppose an ethics of deferral, whether Plato’s stable notion of the “good” or “justice,” the second-coming of Christ, or the Communist Utopia. None of these endgames, for instance, can be pointed to, or at. Hence the ethical content in all of these structures of ideology remain elusive, and perhaps it is the fact or continual discovery of their elusiveness, hence the ultimate ineptitude of our declarative utterances, that drives us to commit further acts of barbarity. Taken this way, the act of deferral itself entails a type of barbarity, but not the sort that occurs in an immediate exchange between you and me but which occurs in the aggregate, over time—that is, in our willing to bring something forth or into existence, something indeed that we cannot exactly point to. And it is of no use nowadays to pretend, with the benefit of Gans’ revelatory work on how ostensive utterances work, that because we are armed with a suitable conceptual heuristic (GA), we can sidestep any future declarative nightmares to come. Rather, we must ask ourselves what current declarative nightmares we are currently in to wonder if GA can help us in any way get out.

Declarative Nightmares

I can name two conceptual, declarative myths, hence nightmares, that we are caught in right off the bat: the myth of “progress” and the myth of “technology.” Set aside the fact, for now, that both “technology” and “progress” are difficult things to point at or to exactly, we certainly know that progress is something we all like to believe is “being made,” every day and that it leads somewhere. And, further, though we all understand that technology has the potential to be used against us, we still believe that this will only occur if technology falls into the wrong, dastardly hands; but as long as we will or even intend technology to do good, it will almost of necessity do nothing but good (i.e., make our lives easier, with new gizmos and gadgets), and moreover, help us make “progress” to boot. So the story of humans and human beings becomes, in suitable declarative fashion, the story of our collective “progress” as a species, technological and all. Gans says that philosophy (metaphysics, in particular) has an “eventless” ethic. I want to say that “progress” and “technology,” the pursuit of which organizes our collective lives together in the West, are similarly “eventless.”

This critique of metaphysics has appeared in Canadian letters as a critique of technology, most notably through what is known as the “Toronto School of Communication Theory.” The most prominent luminaries in this “school of thought” are Marshall McLuhan and Harold Innis, but I don’t think it impertinent to include the thinking of Northrop Frye and also George Grant, the latter of whom especially devoted considerable energy to critiquing, for example, technology in a “mass age.”[9]

But let’s begin with McLuhan. I am not making the claim that McLuhan’s works ought to be “reappraised,” or that lessons exist in McLuhan’s oeuvre which must be rehashed necessarily for our benefit. Rather, I am interested in the failure of his philosophical project—not because he himself is a failure or a fraud. But because, in the marketplace of ideas, even intellectual ones, everyone has a shelf-life. In our gusto to maintain a metaphysical, declarative edge over ourselves, in order not to face the finitude of our existence, we are always looking to tell a story—in the case of McLuhan, an intellectual story about how technology is leading us somewhere. I’ll note briefly here that McLuhan, unlike Grant and perhaps Frye, was optimistic about technology. Just as the materialists chided the humanists for being unable to “point at” anything to establish some manner of objective criteria to ground their claims, McLuhan was equally derisive of the materialists. Here is Arthur Kroker discussing McLuhan’s legacy (and note here the move from one declarative nightmare (of some economic utopia) to another (a technological utopia):

In McLuhan’s lexicon, the privileging of the “economic” relationship belonged to an obsolete era: the now superseded age of specialism, fragmentation, and segmentation of work of the industrial revolution. McLuhan viewed himself as living on the other side, the far side, of technological history: the coming age of “cosmic man” typified by “mythic or iconic awareness” and by the substitution of the “multi-faceted for the point-of-view.” What was capitalism? It was the obsolescent content of the new era of the electronic simulation of consciousness. For McLuhan, economy had also gone electronic and thus even the corporate world, with its “magic” of advertisements and its plenitude of computers, could be subsumed into the more general project of surfacing the reason in technological society. Consequently, it might be said that McLuhan’s blindspot on the question of economy was due not so much to a strain of “technological determinism” in his thought . . . but due rather to his, transparently Catholic expectation that if the electronic economy of the corporate world was not an “agent intellect” in the creation of a new technological horizon, it was, at least, a necessary catalyst in setting the conditions for “cosmic man.” McLuhan was a “missionary” to the power centres of the technological experience; and he could so faithfully, and guilelessly, discuss the civilizing moment in technology because there never was any incompatibility between the Catholic foundations of his communication theory and the will to empire.[10]

I will get to this idea of “willing” in a moment but notice here the curious and fortuitous phrasing. Kroker says of McLuhan that when he “so faithfully, and guilelessly discuss[ed] the civilizing moment in technology, there never was any incompatibility between the Catholic foundations of his communication theory and the will to empire.” So set aside for now that in Kroker’s estimation, McLuhan replaces one metaphysical dream (or nightmare) with another: that of a Roman Catholic mission of “civilization” or “civilizing” with a “communication theory” that posits or puts forward an equally redemptive notion, or metaphysical quest, of “civilizing” via “technology” and “the will to empire.” Part of McLuhan’s prerogative was to see in the proliferation of technology a type of technological humanism, or God’s work—and while we may have suffered the horrors of something like the Spanish Inquisition in the past, it is quite possible that the metaphysical nightmare underway right now has something to do with this “civilizing will” of “technology” that lacks an “agent intellect”—in a word, that lacks an ethic. Where or what exactly is the civilizing moment (originary moment) in technology? Like any metaphysic (or like a Christianity that lines up Paradise (the declarative) before the Fall (the ostensive)—essentially backwards), this metaphysic of a technological humanism is philosophical—that is to say, eventless.

Which brings me to another great Canadian thinker, George Grant, whose critique of technology was far less redemptive than McLuhan’s. Where McLuhan’s critique was somewhat apolitical (i.e., a critique that transcended old ideologies, even capitalism itself), Grant’s critique of technology had a sharper political edge. Here is Jordan A. Todd explaining how Grant tied the twin declarative nightmares of “progress” and “technology” to the political imperatives of both Marxism and American Liberalism.

Grant understood the modern world as one that has been secularized. However, he didn’t mean this in a strict sense, that is, without religious or spiritual basis. Rather, he saw a transition from a Western Christian cosmology to one which embodied the relentless pursuit of technology. This marks the most recent ‘great western schism’—essentially the split between liberalism and Christianity. Grant defined religion as any, “system of belief (whether true or false) which binds together the life of individuals and gives to those lives whatever consistency of purpose they may have.” Based on this definition, he described liberal humanism and Marxism as religion. This transition away from Christianity was not limited to the West. Recognizing that Marx had established what would become the most powerful modern humanism, Grant saw Marxism as bringing the western spirit of progress to the East. Marx was an important subsequent thinker of Kant in a process that had secularized the teachings of Western Religion (Judaism and Christianity) repackaging them more appropriately for the modern world, in the form of ideology. This places liberal humanism (more specifically American Liberalism) and Marxism in the same bed—as the religions of progress. As mentioned previously, liberalism was initially founded on Christian cosmology, but then unbeknownst to those who adhered to liberalism, cosmology shifted to that of technology and progress.[11]

Todd shows how Grant seamlessly ties Western liberalism to Christian cosmology, itself “metaphysical” in origin (i.e., in its emphasis of future redemption rather than past, “event-like” sacrifice). From there, Kroker shows us how McLuhan then seamlessly, if somewhat unknowingly, extends this same metaphysic to the American capitalists:

It was McLuhan’s special ability . . . to transfigure the grubby leadership of the American business world, and then of a good part of the new class of technocrats in the West, into the dizzying heights of a greater historical destiny, that made him such a favoured courtesan of the technological empire . . . . McLuhan dangled that most precious of gifts: a sense of historical purpose (the age of communications as “cosmic consciousness”); and an intellectual justification (the technological imperative as both necessary and good).[12]

But Grant understood that McLuhan’s flattery of said business classes and technocrats was itself a metaphysical cover for something much more sinister. And this was the act of willing itself, human willing, without ethical content emanating from a past historical event that could conceivably be pointed to or at, but willing towards some future ungrounded in any conceivable originary event.

These are those who understand that they can know nothing about what is good to will. Because of the historical sense, they know that all values are relative and man-made; the highest values of the past have devalued themselves . . . . But because men are wills, the strong cannot give up willingly. Men would rather will nothing than have nothing to will.[13]

Kroker adds this bit of commentary:

With this profound understanding of technological society as directed, in the end, by the “creative” who would “rather will nothing” than not will at all, Grant achieves an almost luminous insight into the psychology of modern life. For what can motivate last men and nihilists other than, as Nietzsche has already said, the loosing of a “howling spirit of revenge.”[14]

I’ll contrast the previous quotation—which highlights the sinister “willing” of human beings, say the “metaphysical” willing, an eventless, ethic-less willing—with more fortuitous phrasing from Gans describing the nature of a “philosophical” deity or divinity:

The philosophical divinity [as opposed to a religious divinity] covers over a profound contradiction: he is a person-subject possessed of a will, yet this will, like the content of the Platonic concept, never reveals itself in any specific time or place. It is by means of this construction that metaphysics conjures away the paradoxicality of its “declarative” sacred.[15]

A will to sacrality with no sacred event—this is the paradox and the fundamental non-thing that lurks behind any declarative nightmare.

So can this metaphysical belief in a non-thing be somehow ostensified, made apparent in a way that would conjure into existence some sort of ethical content? Or, by virtue of its non-thingness, are we doomed to nihilistic willing not exactly in our commitment to something like the unfolding of technology, but say, our non-committal attitude to its unfolding, as though wherever it leads us we must indubitably follow?

Indeed, how can we ever hope to point to the historicity of something like “technology” and “progress” when these things are “eventless”? As Gans reminds us, these are types of Platonic concepts, or philosophical divinities that never reveal themselves at any specific time or place.

Moreover, that an ethical, ostensive, originary event has a “history” does not mean that it happened in time per se, or must needs happen again in time. Rather, the event’s historicity acts precisely to conflate our understanding of the past with the present—to make them one and the same, to offer a “frozen” metaphor (i.e., an understanding that this, what we do now, is, somehow and despite our historical distance from it, exactly, precisely, that—not an indication of progress, but its intimate and necessary negation) some understanding of which I think is necessary to put a stop to excessive, endless, and ultimately nihilistic willing purported by Nietzsche’s last men.

So back to my original question: can (or should) this understanding or comprehension of willing move beyond the strictly metaphysical? Can we find post-facto ostensive ethical currency behind human willing? I’ll end with a quotation from Frye and some more questions.

When the mind takes over from the body, it holds the body quiet, in study or in concentration. Sense perception is directed and controlled. Some programmes of experience, such as yoga, assume a spirit-mind relationship parallel to the mind-body one. They say that the spirit is the real self, but can’t emerge until the mind is kept quiet.[16]

Let us equate here for a moment mind with concepts, and spirit, say, with ethics, or originary being. Generative Anthropology provides us a conceptual understanding of how ostensives function and the ethical work they engender by virtue of being scenic and event-oriented. And what I am claiming has occurred, in the Western metaphysical quest to get at the thing-in-itself, a trajectory of knowledge pursuit that continues to this day under the guise of “technology” and “progress,” is a degradation or denial of the ethical work that only ostensive language can allow us to reclaim—that is, a claim to community, or something communal, scenic, local. And to what end? To an end of non-willing, as though our reach for declarative criteria and imaginary scenes of representations is wreaking havoc on the earth.

To eliminate the ostensive is to expunge the local historicity of the deferral of collective violence by means of the sign. The originary opposition between center and periphery that founds and is founded by language is the source and model of all the great philosophical dichotomies: word and thing, form and content, Idea and copy, ontological and ontic. But if all these oppositions are already latent in the sign as such, it is only from the time of the declarative sentence that they can be thematically expressed. To understand a declarative sentence, one situates it on an “other scene” that is not a simple prolongation of the present scene but a mental scene inhabited by imaginary objects.[17]

Can a conceptual understanding of ostensives save us from the unfolding of history in time, a history intimately pegged to ideas of progress and technology? Can we access the atemporal stillness of the originary event by telling an originary narrative that begins with the ostensive? We all know GA provides us with suitable concepts. But then, is there access to Being without concepts?—which is to ask if all concepts nowadays, somehow, presuppose a metaphysics. All concepts tell a story in time; or, put another way: concepts are never metaphorically knowable (if we say, nowadays, that this is that, we know that this is not really that, hence not really an ostensive); concepts are only metonymically, or declaratively knowable (this can be verified in time as a suitable put-for that). How to step out of that story, away from mind-made quests for more knowledge or verification in time or progress or technology or what have you to the atemporal realm of spirit? We may have a linear trajectory or anthropology, even, of revelation, but does such an anthropology presuppose that we are, or should be, getting somewhere—indicative, I think, of an eventless metaphysic—or is the movement backwards toward the originary event a reminder that with the ostensive we are not so far removed from our originary ancestors, a reminder not of where we are going (i.e., somewhere), but that we are, and always have been, here—that the true lesson of being human, or being ethical or having an ethic at all, comes with an understanding that we are, in a sense, going nowhere.

“For the days are surely coming when they will say, ‘Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that never bore, and the breasts that never nursed!’³⁰ Then they will begin to say to the mountains, ‘Fall on us’; and to the hills, ‘Cover us.’”
Luke 23:29-30

Introduction: Geopolitics, Fukuyama, and Japan

Current international news presents a challenge, to put it mildly, for Francis Fukuyama’s thesis that liberal democracy and free markets comprise the inevitable, triumphant system of human organization. With the resurgence of ideology, nationalism, and authoritarianism around the globe, with the re-assertion of regional and cultural identity, and with a growing ambivalence, if not outright hostility, toward globalization, “history” in Fukuyama’s sense of the term seems to be returning with a vengeance. A quarter century after Fukuyama’s essay (“The End of History,” 1989) and book (The End of History and the Last Man, 1992), the world appears to be taking on a decidedly “Huntingtonian” cast. Samuel Huntington’s rival thesis, the “Clash of Civilizations,” predicted that cultural primacy among the world’s great civilizational blocs would drive events and override the forces of globalization, the basis for Fukuyama’s more hopeful projections.(1)

However, the dramatic, real time repudiation of Fukuyama’s thesis distracts from a question that is equally important, if not more so. Let us suppose that the “end of history” were to proceed as Fukuyama projected, and that all ideological alternatives were indeed discredited and abandoned. In such a case, could the “end of history” succeed, not against ideological opponents, but on its own terms? This question, as to whether Fukuyama’s post-historical society could survive its own success, worried Fukuyama himself, who was convinced that the end of history would succeed. He wrote the “last man” section of his book to address precisely this concern.

Real world examples are not lacking, though. Japan presents a particularly interesting case for exploring this aspect of Fukuyama’s thesis, for investigating what the end of history would look like, and for asking what kind of society, what kind of person it would produce. Fukuyama himself made much of Japan as a kind of advance guard for post-historical developments.

Yet Japan is not the same country it was when Fukuyama first advanced his thesis a quarter century ago. Japan’s “bubble economy” was already collapsing when Fukuyama’s book came out. A continuous period of stagnation and economic insecurity has followed, along with persistently elevated rates of suicide and depression. The widespread psychological distress, excellently documented by Junko Kitanaka (Depression in Japan), has ushered in the trend of mass palliative medication, and to some extent, redefined the terms of social existence itself. There has also been a rise in social isolation with substantial numbers of people removing themselves from society, or any social interaction at all. Furthermore, the burgeoning population of the elderly has presented increasingly urgent, even intractable problems of care in a society no longer buffered by the bonds of extended families. Given these demographics, democratic mandates tend more and more to be socialist in nature.

Any one of these developments would present problems for an optimistic reading of Fukuyama’s thesis. Taken together, they might be considered a looming catastrophe at the end of history, indicating that Fukuyama’s world is not sustainable. Insofar as his “end of history” succeeds, it carries within it the seeds of its own unraveling. It establishes a society that cannot renew itself, and which must inevitably collapse under its own weight. While the twin forces of liberal democracy and free market capitalism do indeed have, as Fukuyama so well observes, a forward momentum that is unstoppable, they leave in their wake a spent and nonviable social and economic order; one whose weaknesses are already becoming apparent. I hope to make this case economically, psychologically, demographically, and politically, by examining these four factors in Japan: the very nation Fukuyama regarded to be a showpiece for his thesis.

In the background of this reflection is Eric Gans, the founder of generative anthropology (GA), who has consistently endorsed Fukuyama’s thesis (for instance, Chronicles 174, 227, 498, 503, and 527). Like Fukuyama, Gans sees liberal democracy and the market system as the best hopes for establishing a stable, peaceful, and flourishing human order. The main downside Gans identifies in this system is “victimary thinking” which can be broadly understood as identity politics. However, in Japan, where identity politics are as yet a novel distraction, the unraveling of the social order has little to do with victimary thinking. Thus, I would argue that the peculiarities of Western partisan politics may work to limit the conceptual focus of GA, and distract from what are more important civilizational dilemmas.

In this reflection I first offer a brief overview of Fukuyama’s “end of history” argument. I then outline what I regard to be its strengths, including its resonance with GA. In the main section of this essay I elaborate on the challenges to Fukuyama posed by contemporary Japan, indicating a failure at the “end of history.” Finally, I conclude with more general reflections about the global predicament and the direction of GA. Overall, this reflection is not intended as an attack on Fukuyama’s thesis, which in many ways is admirably clear-sighted, but as a critical engagement. Fukuyama’s problem was not that he was wrong per se but often, if anything, more right than he realized. Specifically, he was not wrong to put Japan, and by extension East Asia, at the cutting edge of history. Yet developments in Japan call into question the sustainability of his “post-historical” future, and Japan’s demographic trends in particular seem to augur a disconcertingly literal interpretation of “last man.”

Fukuyama’s End of History in Brief

The context of Fukuyama’s essay and book was the end of the Cold War, dramatically realized with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the “Iron Curtain,” the rapid collapse of communist governments in the Eastern bloc nations, and soon after that the dissolution of the Soviet Union itself in 1991. However, Fukuyama pointed out that long-standing authoritarian regimes around the world had also been collapsing, often bloodlessly, on the right, for instance in Spain (in the late 1970s), and Chile, South Korea and the Philippines (in the late 1980s). The trend was clear: the world was turning steadily, swiftly, and often unexpectedly, toward liberal democracy and free market capitalism. Together they were proving to be the ultimate, optimal, final, and triumphant system of government. It was no longer a question of if but of how long the rest of the world would take to enter the fold.

Fukuyama argued that this process would continue until the entire world had effectively adopted democracy and capitalism. He called this the “end of history,” a term and idea taken directly from Hegel.(2) Fukuyama’s thesis is from beginning to end a Hegelian one, though he also made much use of Hegel’s 20^th century interpreter Alexandre Kojève. The “end of history” did not mean that time or human events would cease but that “history,” if it is defined as the great contest of empires and ideologies, would simply cease to exist as such. The default winner was liberal democracy and capitalism. All viable alternatives had been or were in the process of being defeated, discredited, or dissolved. While there would certainly be holdouts and even regressions along the way, the overall direction was clear. It might be useful to think of the “end of history” as a milder, secular version of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s “Omega Point,” a singularity of integrated human development that would introduce a qualitatively different level of consciousness. Likewise, the “end of history” is the “end” of one state but also the beginning of another.

Fukuyama made much of Japan as a model for his thesis. Not so very long ago Japan had invested its all in the fascistic, expansionist State Shintoism of Imperial Japan. Following its devastating defeat in World War II, a democratic constitution was imposed on Japan by the U.S., as occupiers. This small, crowded, ruined, impoverished and humiliated nation, poor in natural resources (and hardly a natural heir to liberal democracy), rose through wits and pluck and human capital to develop into a solid civil society with stable democratic institutions, and became an industrial and economic powerhouse. Fukuyama focused on post-war Japan extensively in his book, paying particular attention to its “economic miracle” and Japan’s famous worker culture. Fukuyama was impressed with the corporate culture of the overworked “salaryman” who gave his all to the company, receiving in recompense a sense of belonging, or Hegelian “recognition,”(3) meaning roughly, sufficient respect or acknowledgement as an autonomous human agent.

Yet Fukuyama was impressed not just that Japan had adopted liberal democracy and capitalism with such astonishing (and unexpected) success, but that it had become one of the great evangelists for both, through the marketing of its high quality products around the world. Japan had become the promoter of a sophisticated global consumer culture and presented an example of national success that was already becoming the envy of peers, particularly in East Asia. Fukuyama noted in particular the Asian “Tigers” (Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan) that were set to reproduce Japan’s success.

Fukuyama developed the “last man” component of his thesis to consider what kind of human being would emerge when the end of history’s triumph was complete. The last man was taken from Nietzsche,(4) and Fukuyama also made use of a parallel idea from C. S. Lewis, “men without chests.”(5) These were the small-minded, rationalistic, materially preoccupied, self-interested humans who would emerge as the norm at the end stage of a materialistic or technocratic society. Fukuyama worried likewise that in a post-historical world where no more great battles or great causes could inspire humanity, we would lose some essential component of heroism, of idealism. Fukuyama was concerned that humanity would lose its soul, or in C. S. Lewis’s stark terms, “man” as such would cease to exist. Fukuyama took these concerns quite seriously but was guardedly optimistic, and argued that while it was true there would no longer be great causes or battles to rally behind, those of heroic bent could find—were indeed already finding—their “niche” in activities provided by the free market in a free society. They could, he observed, test their mettle in courageous physical challenges such as rock-climbing, hang-gliding, whitewater rafting, or equivalent pursuits.

Positively Assessing Fukuyama’s Thesis

Fukuyama’s geopolitical projection has been arguably the most widely cited and discussed since the end of the Cold War. Its closest rival is the “Clash of Civilizations” thesis explicitly developed (also in an essay and book) by Fukuyama’s teacher Samuel Huntington as a refutation of his former student’s position. Fukuyama’s thesis is thought provoking, well stated, well-informed, and deeply informative. It provides a powerful framework even for those who would contest it, including Huntington.

On some levels, it is very hard to quarrel with Fukuyama. For instance, whether or not one applauds the spread of liberal democracy, consumer capitalism, and globalization, it is hard to deny that they have spread, and have been extremely powerful forces, often virtually unstoppable. Like the Borg civilization in Star Trek‘s Next Generation series, they seem to conquer and co-opt the strengths of nearly every system in their path. In the words of the Borg, “Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.” To those ambivalent about or hostile to globalization, Fukuyama was, if anything, too correct.

Fukuyama was also right about Japan and Asia, more than he would have predicted. Japan is more politically mature than it was 25 years ago (Fukuyama found Japan’s then one party rule by the Liberal Democratic Party underdeveloped), and the “Asian Tigers” now include other emergent or emerging economies like Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and before long Cambodia and Myanmar. China has quickly grown to dominate global markets while (contra Fukuyama’s thesis) retaining an official communist ideology and pursuing nationalistic goals and aggressive territorial ambitions, so it remains to be seen if China will ultimately follow a “Huntingtonian” course. Nevertheless, it could plausibly be argued that political and economic developments of this “Asian Century,” taken as a whole, vindicate Fukuyama’s vision.

What of GA? Eric Gans has consistently endorsed Fukuyama’s thesis, though never without caveats, including the term “end of history” itself. It is important to note the general consonance between Fukuyama and Gans. The consonance is a natural one because of the emphasis in generative anthropology upon the market and the exchange system, both real and symbolic. Though originating in mimetic theory, GA does not see the world in the same apocalyptic terms, especially those spelled out in Rene Girard’s last great work, Battling to the End. In the GA view, the exchange of signs and goods can and does defer violence. In this regard, Fukuyama and Gans use different terms but talk about very similar things.

For Fukuyama, the key to understanding participation in political and economic life in a liberal democratic order is that it allows people to get a sense of Hegelian recognition. Gans tends rather to interpret the same things in terms of resentment: voting and economic participation allow people to discharge and recycle resentment, and transform it into positive good for society. More recently, Gans has seen both the administration of Barack Obama and the election of Donald Trump as operating more or less successfully within Fukuyama’s paradigm, where ongoing negotiation of values between left and right (in this case specifically about “victimary thinking”) unfold within the framework of liberal democracy and the market system. Obama’s “arc of history”—that the direction of history was inherently toward social justice—essentially took an end of history perspective (Chronicle 503), while Gans argues that Trump’s election has renegotiated the terms of victimary thinking (Chronicle 527). In other words, identity politics present an ever expanding range of seemingly non-negotiable propositions, based on resentment, which threaten the give and take of a functioning democracy. The right re-negotiates this range, hopefully at a pace faster than or at least equal to the generation of new resentments. Yet both left and right actually work within the same framework and toward the same end: the triumph, in one form or another, of the market system and the liberal democratic order.

Failure at the “End of History”: The Case of Japan

As noted, geopolitics is moving away from rather than toward Fukuyama’s ideal, but the challenge I issue to Fukuyama is from within his system rather than without, societal rather than geopolitical. I argue that Fukuyama’s world is not sustainable, and make the case economically, psychologically, demographically, and politically, by examining these respective factors in Japan.

Scenes of Economic Distress

Fukuyama made his analysis of Japan with its “economic miracle” in mind. A quarter century later, we are better able to assess this aspect of Fukuyama’s thesis, but even at the time his essay and book came out (the early 90s), Japan was experiencing what came to be known as the collapse of its economic “bubble.” The bubble in specific terms related to extraordinarily inflated land prices that were tied into banks and the lending mechanisms that underwrote “Japan Inc.” (corporate Japan in the bubble years). Now it has come to signify more generally the surreal extravagance and frivolity of the era, roughly equivalent to “the Gilded Age” in the U.S. In popular culture, the “bubble jidai” (bubble era), particularly of the 1980s, is looked upon both sardonically and nostalgically as a great, wild, naïve, fun-filled illusion.(6)

Post-bubble Japan presents a much different economic picture, one characterized by stagnation, uncertainty, and decline. The long recession, first called the “lost decade” of the 90s, extended itself into the 2000s, and up to the global financial crisis of 2008 (Tsutsui and Mazzotta, 67-73). That crisis further undermined many of the great manufacturers Fukuyama so much admired, including Toshiba (which he praised for introducing the joys of consumerism to Iran), now in a state of imminent disintegration after hiding its losses for years (Fuse). Olympus lied about its finances for decades and is now a shadow of its former self (Hawkes and Goodley). The electronics giant Sharp was recently sold off to a Taiwanese manufacturer after suffering continuous losses, and Sony, Hitachi and Panasonic have only survived by scaling back and refocusing production, while their more limber Asian competitors now lead the fields they once dominated (Yoshida). Thus, to the extent that Fukuyama was right economically, namely, the replication of Japan’s success in other East Asian nations, it has also meant that Japan’s economic and industrial power have steadily eroded as its competitors become the newer centers of vitality.

It is important to recall in this context Fukuyama’s focus on the then famous work culture of Japan, as exemplified by the overworked but dedicated salaryman, the lifelong employee who got a sense of Hegelian recognition from his company identity, however poorly he might be rewarded or enriched personally relative to his output. Fukuyama generalized this, somewhat naïvely though understandably, to the entire worker culture of Japan. However, the post-bubble period, which in a sense introduced real capitalistic forces into Japan, as opposed to a somewhat benign corporate paternalism, also introduced risutora: restructuring, or downsizing. Many workers have lost or can lose their jobs as companies struggle to cut costs and compete with more vibrant economies, or relocate or outsource industrial production to other Asian countries.

Lifelong job security is by no means the norm at present; for instance, the percentage of workers who are working either part-time or hired on short-term contracts has risen dramatically, standing now at about 40% (“Plight of Irregular Workers”). Thus, an increasing number of workers find they are only as valuable as their skill set until the termination of their contracts, or the bankruptcy of their company, or its cannibalization through mergers and acquisitions. This has introduced, increasingly, a two-tiered society in Japan, and a growing split between the stably and unstably employed, who very often work side by side. The Japan that Fukuyama so much admired was in many ways a universally middle class society, and his characterization of Hegelian recognition applied rather well when this social compact was in force and everyone’s contribution to society was valued, if not equally, at least sufficiently. Clearly this is no longer the case.

Another recent development is that both the stably and unstably employed may find themselves in shamelessly exploitative work environments typified by notoriously ruthless “black companies,” which focus aggressively on the bottom line (Suzuki). This is indicative yet again of the advance of “real” capitalism in Japan, as opposed to paternalistic corporatism. Again, even if one can see merit in this relatively unbridled mode of capitalism, in the form, for example, of more economic vigor, one certainly cannot see Fukuyama’s “recognition,” however well such a characterization may have applied during the bubble years. The contemporary work culture of Japan bears little resemblance to the one Fukuyama described. He was describing a temporary—and depending how one looks at it, illusory—period of economic success, not a permanent aspect of society.

This is a crucial point because Fukuyama’s projection is long term by definition: the “end of history.” If he held up as exemplar what amounts to a temporary stage of economic development lasting a decade or two, then clearly Japan as it was in the bubble years can no longer be considered valid support for his thesis. Conceivably, one could look to reinforce Fukuyama’s thesis elsewhere, for instance, by looking at Japan’s successful Asian competitors. Yet it would be just as easy, and more plausible, to see that success, too, as a temporary stage of economic development, and one that will end in more or less the same way: stagnation, uncertainty, and decline.

One could in fact project a wave of prosperity for global consumerist capitalism, advancing as Fukuyama describes but leaving everywhere in its wake not stably prosperous societies but a hollowed out economy and labor force. The “end of history” is, in other words, a kind of global economic bubble. The “cutting edge” of the bubble surges ahead like a tide, disruptive, destructive, with no regard to consequences, and with no reference for success other than itself. Unfortunately, the bubble brings along more than just economic debilitation.

Scenes of Psychological Distress

Unsurprisingly, the period following the collapse of the economic bubble in Japan saw a dramatic increase in clinical depression, along with elevated levels of suicide that were already quite high in comparison to other industrialized nations. Depression became as much an issue among the stably employed as among those who were experiencing the brunt of the economic decline, and to the surprise of few in Japan, the overworked salaryman, so lionized by Fukuyama, easily became someone whose depression caused him or her to be hospitalized. In fact, many high profile cases of suicide—high profile because they resulted in litigation, leading in turn to new laws and workplace guidelines—concerned victims who worked for prestigious corporations, whose depression and suicide were directly linked to the workplace environment.(7)

The widespread depression necessitated a new public consciousness; while there was traditionally a strong stigma associated with emotional illness and a reluctance to talk about it, openness was needed now because depression had become too large a problem to ignore. This process, superbly documented by Junko Kitanaka in the book Depression in Japan: Psychiatric Cures for a Society in Distress, was a complex and multifaceted one, but it could roughly be characterized as twofold. On the one hand, depression was medicalized, and approached as a biological illness that could be treated with medicine. For instance, Kitanaka notes prominent ad campaigns for pharmaceuticals that called depression a “cold of the heart” (14). This sort of campaign lifted the stigma of depression by characterizing it as nothing to be ashamed of, comparing it to catching a common cold, and facilitating the acceptance of psychotropic medication. In this way, mass medication for depression was introduced to Japan. On the other hand, and at the same time, a somewhat contradictory public narrative about depression emerged that identified its nexus in intractable situations, social expectations, and human relations, particularly in the work environment. To no small extent, this led to a subtle redefinition of social existence itself; it was a potential scene of distress that might overcome anyone, anytime, anywhere, for any number of reasons.

The psychosocial scene in Japan indicates that the “last man” is (contra Fukuyama, Nietszche, and Lewis) not a small-minded person but a deeply distressed one. The twin forces of liberal democracy and consumer capitalism, even when most successful—perhaps especially when most successful—appear to be poorly calibrated toward fulfillment or human happiness, at least not for the multitude that need to stay medicated.

Another sign that the social order has become increasingly dysfunctional in Japan is that many are withdrawing from it.(8) In childhood, this has often taken the form of futouko (“school refusal”): prolonged absence from school. In adolescence and young adulthood it has manifested as various forms of co-dependence, most strikingly hikikomori (“pull-inside”), who for extended periods, sometimes indefinitely, do not leave their home, and sometimes even their bedroom. Other kinds of social isolation have been emerging among the middle aged or elderly.(9) The term muen shakai (“no relationship society”) was for a short time an umbrella term (no longer current) for people who live alone and have virtually no meaningful social relationships. The most striking manifestation of this phenomenon has been kotokushi (“lonely death”): isolated individuals who die alone in their homes, often undiscovered for days due to their lack of social contact.

There is certainly a tendency, inside and outside of Japan, to sensationalize such developments. Nevertheless, taking these psychosocial trends as a whole, it is fair to observe that debilitating neuroses and social isolation have become a common and even normal condition in Japanese society. This appears to be the legacy of Japan’s economic miracle, the last man at the end of history.

Scenes of Demographic Distress

A grim irony is that the last man may literally become the last man. Japan’s population implosion is now widely known, with fertility and birth rates far below replacement level, a rapidly aging society, a depleted labor force, and a strained safety net emerging as the nation struggles to allocate resources while fewer and fewer tax-paying workers support more and more aging retirees (Eberstadt, Pilling). Less well known outside Japan (though a constant topic in media within it) are the concrete difficulties involved as the nation comes to term with its aging population. Directly or indirectly, virtually everyone in Japan has been affected by the problems of the aging society.

Much of this is not immediately apparent in the middle of the bustling urban centers, but rural areas have been hollowing out for decades, and it is now in the areas ringing cities that the texture of life in an aging society can be most strikingly observed (“Desperately Seeking Young People”). In some areas, it is rare to see any children or young adults. Care facilities for the aged, both live-in accommodations and day care facilities, continue to proliferate in suburban neighborhoods. Care is now a growth industry and a major source of employment, often a default one with the decline of formerly vibrant sectors in the lingering post-bubble recession. Since 2000, government-supported care increased in response to families overwhelmed with the care of aging parents (Holder). Now the government typically supports 90% of care through insurance (National Institute of Population and Social Security Research) which has been incentivizing its growth and spurred the current explosion of facilities. However, these facilities may become less financially viable when government support is inevitably reduced (Brasor and Tsubuku). At any rate, they are not sufficient to accommodate the projected aging population, and there is also expected to be a shortage of care workers (Japan Nursing Association). Work in the care industry is often difficult and poorly compensated, and there are frequently cases of depression and fatigue connected with it (Eberstadt, Japan Support Center).

To the extent that publicly assisted care is reduced, the burden of care for the aged will increasingly fall back on families (Oi, Japan Support Center). A key difficulty is that families themselves are much smaller now, often down to two or three people, and the caretakers themselves may be quite old, a phenomenon now called roro kaigo (“care of the aged by the aged”). Many people middle-aged or older may experience a sudden downward mobility into poverty when they quit their jobs to care for aging parents (“Japan’s Middle-aged Workers”). It should be noted that caregivers like these are often facing the situation alone; no family is available to care for them when their time comes.

Senile dementia is a particularly acute problem for caregivers. It is projected that by 2025 one in four people in Japan over 65 will have senile dementia, which is one in twenty people in the general population (Eberstadt). This is already an urgent public safety concern and incidents connected with it such as fatal traffic accidents, fires, and missing persons, are now quite common (McCurry, Japan Support Center, “Car Accidents Rampant,”). Care for dementia can be extremely difficult, and there have been cases of abuse when caregivers at facilities snap (Japan Support Center), or even murder-suicide among distressed family members who are caregivers, famously including the tragic case of a former pop singer (Brasor).

Turning back to Fukuyama, it is striking that demographic issues were not touched upon in his essay or book, even once. This most famous of expert prognosticators failed to see what in a very short time would become the most pressing concern in Japan, the centerpiece for his post-historical future. In retrospect, it ought to have been easy to predict the population collapse and its associated ills; there was enough data available to extrapolate with small nuclear families using a little math. That Fukuyama, along with more or less the entire educated world through the 60s, 70s, 80s and even 90s, could not imagine such a demographic crisis coming, either in Japan or beyond, cries out for explanation. How did such conceptual blindness become so pervasive that educated people could not grasp the fact that modern society might need babies?

A provisional answer is that a “population crisis” was conceptualized only in terms of swollen populations, scarce resources, and privation. Fukuyama seems to have adopted this view, albeit tacitly, as axiomatic. Thus, the good life in the paradigm of liberal democracy and consumer capitalism was equated with small families (if children were even considered at all) and the bad life with overpopulation and poverty, what the end of history was destined to overcome. But Fukuyama, along with most of the rest of us, missed the fact that children are the wealth of a given society, not its detriment. This “lost wisdom” is now blindingly obvious, but it seems to have been rediscovered too late to reverse the downward demographic spiral.

Scenes of Politics: The End of Capitalism?

It is easy look at Japan from the perspectives of partisan politics in the West, but post-war Japan, whether in boom or bust, has nearly always been governed within a statist consensus, wobbling slightly between center-right and center-left, and generally with very low voter turnout and widespread emotional detachment from the “political process.” It seems clear now that Japan as a political order is morphing de facto into socialism, whatever name is ultimately applied to it. Japan must of necessity veer more and more to the “left,” but not for ideological reasons. It is simply that there’s nothing remaining for it to do; society has to make arrangements for the aging and the incapacitated, and to step in to provide basic benefits (e.g. insurance, pension supplements, welfare) for the workers who can no longer get the kind of positions that used to provide such benefits when the economy was booming.

These dependent groups also constitute voting blocs that—assuming the constituents vote at all—will likely vote in the end not for robust capitalism but for their particular self-interest, meaning the public safety net standing between them and total destitution. Thus, if Japan is any indication, Fukuyama’s system relies on a reciprocal synthesis of liberal democracy and free market capitalism that must, as a democratic order, progressively vote capitalism out of existence. However, to look at this in terms of right or left seems to be like adopting opposite and reinforcing errors, at least in the Japanese context. In these views, either capitalism has failed and we need to adopt socialism, or socialism fails to produce growth and therefore we need to go back to capitalism. In fact, capitalism has succeeded spectacularly well and, because of its success, has undermined the basis for growth. As a result, it must now morph into socialism. Socialism ultimately cannot sustain itself because it does not generate sufficient wealth, and capitalism cannot sustain itself because it generates a preponderance of wealth best enjoyed by singles, childless couples, or if one insists on children, at most small nuclear families. This demographic decline leads to a society that cannot sustain growth, whether it is governed on the basis of a progressive or conservative approach: in the end it will be progressive by default as the statist, interventionist dispensing of public welfare benefits becomes the paradigm.

From a post-historical perspective Japan, the near perfect exemplar for the end of history, simply cannot sustain its success. The end of history is in fact the “end of capitalism” insofar as the state must intervene increasingly to fill in the gaps in social support that cannot be addressed by the market economy. This is certainly the case now as the focus of intervention shifts increasingly from futile initiatives to boost the birthrate, or attempts to revive Japan’s national success via monetary policy like “Abenomics,” toward an attempt to manage the social decline in practical and reasonably humane ways—essentially a throwing up of hands. This consumes more and more of the energy of government and, so to speak, sucks all of the other air out of the room.

Conclusion

Japan, limited militarily by its own constitution, is not among the world’s top military players, nor is it torn by such polarizing ideological struggles as those that roil so much of the West. The very fact that Japan has existed in this kind of blessed, if now more precarious, isolation makes it particularly illuminating for assessing Fukuyama’s thesis, apart from the “noise” of history. Japan shows that the ideal society Fukuyama describes cannot viably propagate itself long-term. Even in the absence of imminent external threats, as is evidenced by Japan’s national security and access to trade under the protection of the US military umbrella for decades, and even as a “post-ideological” country, the end of history can’t work in Japan. If it cannot work here, of all places, how could it ever work anywhere? It is little surprise in this regard that Japan’s problems, particularly its demographic problems, are being replicated in Europe and in other East Asian countries (Pilling), and before long will be spreading to the developing world (Roser).

A group of analysts led by Susan Yoshihara and Douglas Zerlov have recently begun connecting demographic decline with the Huntingtonian projections presented at the beginning of this reflection.(10) Counterintuitively, the “geriatric” nations may not be the calm and rationally calculating ones but will likely be prone to use military force in impulsive and unpredictable ways from a sense of their own depleted position of strength. Likewise, neighbors may sense the weaknesses of demographically challenged nations and may be duly emboldened. Thus, demographic decline could very well introduce a new and destabilizing calculus into the so-called “clash of civilizations.” Whether or not this view, or for that matter Huntington’s, turns out to be vindicated, what is less in dispute is that demographics will be directing and shaping the world in upcoming decades, much more than the post-historical forces that were the focus of Fukuyama’s analysis.

That Gans continues to endorse Fukuyama’s thesis raises the obvious question, in the context of this reflection, of whether he is correct to do so. There is no intellectual diktat that Fukuyama’s thesis and GA must converge, but there are prominent commonalities, as mentioned earlier, particularly with regard to participation in the market and democracy as a way of negotiating resentment, usually subsumed by Fukuyama under the treatment of recognition. One way to reconcile the resonance between Fukuyama and GA with the manifest shortcomings of the former may be this; just as Fukuyama astutely observed the forward momentum of liberal democracy and the market economy while failing to predict their aftermath, so has Gans insightfully analyzed the same process from the GA perspective, though neglecting the downsides, unless they have to do with victimary thinking. As I have argued earlier, though, and as I hope this reflection has shown at a minimum, Japan demonstrates that there are profound economic, psychological, social, and demographic problems at the “end of history” that have nothing to do with identity politics.

How might GA, with its unique perspective on “the human,” address these quintessentially human problems connected with labor, social relations, psychosocial pathology, or demographics? I am not competent to analyze Hegel but can at least offer the intuition either that GA premises do not align particularly well with the “master-slave” dialectic, or that GA needs to develop a much different approach to it than Fukuyama.(11) Fukuyama seems to have gone astray with his application of the dialectic in his treatment of recognition, since, equipped with this “anthropology,” he could not grasp the most basic components of a human scene, and certainly not enough to anticipate current conditions, not even at a birds-and-bees level (population and reproduction). In contrast, GA by its very nature apprehends “the human” as existing within a communally signifying scene that, as a matter of course, encompasses the problems of co-existence, reciprocity, distribution, and long-term survival and flourishing—as opposed to one-to-one contests of will. It seems that for GA to rise to its potential here, it needs to play to its own strengths. Or, to consider it another way, to apprehend communal or societal dysfunction, GA may need to move beyond resentment. As a social model, GA certainly has an advantage over mimetic theory, which cannot comprehend social cohesion as anything other than an effluence of sacrificial violence.

One surprisingly hopeful contribution—surprising because it is a literary study concerning non-humans in dystopian science fiction—is Andrew Bartlett’s Mad Scientist, Impossible Human. In addressing the objectification of the human vis-à-vis science and technology, Bartlett takes pains to articulate an alternate vision of the human as communally situated, both humanized and humanizing through participation in labor, consumption, and exchange, as well as social, romantic, family, and community life: the agony and horror of Mary Shelley’s monster is that he cannot share in any of this. Bartlett’s vision, thoroughly informed by GA, is a deeply humanistic one and quite useful in thinking through the human within a different dystopian context—namely the currently unfolding one, as described in this essay. Another relevant contribution is Benjamin Matthews’ analysis of alternative work environments in the present issue of Anthropoetics. Matthews shows how such emerging communities structure the chain of command in such a way as to acknowledge and “humanize” the contributors, without ignoring market realities.

In my view, both Bartlett’s and Matthews’ studies connect with the original “social justice” that developed in the context of 19^th and 20^th century Catholic social teaching to articulate the principle of subsidiarity, or the scaling down of social responsibility to the lowest practical levels, and the economic philosophy of “distributism,” where ownership and production are established as far as possible at the smallest human scale.(12) These twin concepts were proposed to address the inherent weaknesses of socialist collectivism and capitalist corporatism, both of which stripped human beings of property and alienated them from their own labor, their fellows, and their sense of worth. In fact, Japan’s “post-historical” crisis is unfolding uncannily closely to what was predicted by distributist thinkers: the inexorable morphing of capitalism into socialism, a nonviable social and economic order, and a disfigurement of the psyche.(13) It may be worthwhile, therefore, to follow up this reflection by considering subsidiarity and distributist thought from a GA framework, and to examine alternative business and community models along the same lines that Matthews has explored digital collectives.

As a final note of concession to Fukuyama, the implausibility of Japan serving as a model for the “end of history” is not an occasion for smug naysaying, but something to be truly regretted. The qualities that make Japan such a pleasant and interesting place are very “Fukuyaman” ones: including the advanced infrastructure, the civic culture, and the in many ways fair and egalitarian social system, all coexisting alongside Japan’s strong retention of cultural distinctiveness. A global civilization structured along such lines might have been a very fine one indeed. One can hardly fault Fukuyama for having recognized a good thing when he saw it, and it is arguable that no nation has made a better “go” of realizing Fukuyama’s ideal. The inherent fragility of advanced, industrialized democracies is tragic for it indicates the end, not of history, but of a very grand dream.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to my wife Emi for guiding me through current trends in Japan and much relevant data, to Benjamin Matthews for extensive and invaluable editorial support, and to my interlocutors at GASC 2016 in Nagoya, Japan for helpful comments. The views in this paper, and any defects, are my own.

About Our Contributors

Peter Goldman is Professor of English at Westminster College in Salt Lake City. He serves on the editorial board for Anthropoetics and is also a board member of the Generative Anthropology Society & Conference (GASC). Peter teaches classes on Shakespeare, Renaissance literature, and film studies. His publications include articles on Shakespeare, Reformation literature, film studies, Generative Anthropology, and Kafka. His current project is a book on Shakespeare and the problem of iconoclasm.

Amir Khan is Assistant Professor of English at Liaoning Normal University – Missouri State University’s College of International Business in Dalian, China. His first book is Shakespeare in Hindsight: Counterfactual Thinking and Shakespearean Tragedy (Edinburgh 2016). His second book, on comic cinema entitled  The Comedies of Nihilism: The Representation of Tragedy Onscreen, is forthcoming (Palgrave Macmillan 2017). He is also the managing editor of Conversations: The Journal of Cavellian Studies.

Benjamin Matthews is an Adjunct Fellow in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts at the University of Western Sydney and a freelance consultant in the media industry. He has a PhD in Communication from the University of Newcastle, where he was a Digital Communication Lecturer 2000-2014. His research interests lie in the area of anthropology of representation and the media, and in particular, with texts and textuality provided through digital communication technology.

a href=”mailto:kieran.stewart@hotmail.com”>Kieran Stewart is a PhD student in the department of Humanities and Communication Arts at the University of Western Sydney. In 2012, he was awarded a first-class honours from the University of Western Sydney for his work on Nietzsche and archaic religions. He is currently writing his dissertation on Eric Gans’s hypothesis on the origin of the human and Friedrich Nietzsche’s central notion of the eternal recurrence of the same.

Matthew Taylor is Professor of English at Kinjo Gakuin University in Nagoya, Japan. He teaches courses in English as a Foreign Language (EFL), academic writing, teacher training, and culture. He has written and presented on EFL pedagogy, literature, and mimetic theory. He has co-authored textbooks for EFL students, including two for academic writing (Cengage Learning) and one for oral communication skills (Macmillan Languagehouse). His previous articles for Anthropoetics explored mimetic elements in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park  and the phenomenon of social isolation in Japan. The article for the present issue extends the focus on Japanese society.

In politics and religion John Milton was ahead of his time, advocating modern developments such as freedom of the press and religious toleration (within limits). His opposition to state-mandated tithes anticipates the separation of church and state in America and elsewhere. Almost no one in England was happy with the tithing system during Milton’s lifetime, and disputes were common. Ministers complained that parishioners avoided their legal obligations, land-owners protested against a system with obvious inequities, and Puritans opposed a tax that went against their conscience.[1] Adding to the controversy was the fact that England alone among European countries required individuals by law to give 10% of income to the established Church.[2] And because of idiosyncrasies in the laws governing tithe collection in England, some groups were hit much harder by this tax than others.[3] Furthermore, tithes did not always benefit the Anglican clergy and Church. Since King Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries, the tithes for particular parishes were sometimes made over to laypeople, often rich landholders, in exchange for political favors, or even sold to the highest bidder. The ownership of tithes amounted to the right to collect a 10% income tax every year on the people in a parish. Shakespeare scholars will recall that in 1605 Shakespeare purchased a share of the Stratford tithes. It was as a tithe-holder that he was entitled to be buried in Holy Trinity Church. During the English Civil War and Interregnum, landowners tended to perceive attacks on compulsory tithes as equivalent to, or as the prelude to, an attack on private property. Tithe holders were a powerful faction, and when their interests appeared threatened in the late 1550’s, many supported the restoration of King Charles II in 1560.[4]

When the time seemed ripe for reform in 1559, Milton published his pamphlet, The Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings Out of the Church, a fierce and uncompromising assault on forced tithes. The title suggests what Milton believed was the main problem with tithes, that they enabled clerical corruption. Milton shows how free market forces were the solution for the problems caused by forced tithes. By, in effect, mandating wage-controls for ministers, the government created a special-interest faction that distorted the labor market. Milton proposed that by doing away with State force, the normal reciprocity between congregation and minister would be restored, eliminating corruption. Milton’s proposal participates in the shift to a market economy in England during this time and anticipates the work of Adam Smith.

Abolishing the State enforcement of tithes in effect desacralizes them, making them a voluntary payment for a voluntary service, not identical to other payments for services but similar. There would be no legal imperative for tithes, and the government freed from religious responsibility. Such desacralization is a process central for the development of Modernity. From the perspective of my methodology, Generative Anthropology, the sacred is not just a contingent element of culture but rather a necessary feature of our origin. How is desacralization even possible? I argue that the sacred is an ethical issue involving social order. Understanding secularization is key for understanding the new forms of social order that emerge in Modernity. There is considerable controversy about the definition and meaning of secularization.[5] But any definition must recognize the separation of church and state, advocated by Milton, as of crucial importance.[6]

The irony of Early Modern desacralization is that it was often justified by religious considerations. Milton opposed tithes on biblical grounds, as did many English Protestants of the day. So his tract also raises the question of what role, if any, Christianity and especially Protestantism play in the development of Modernity and capitalism, a question that has been addressed by Max Weber and many others.[7] The second half of my essay will discuss the connection between the Judeo-Christian tradition and the rise of capitalism.

Milton characterizes the ministers of the established Church as “hirelings,” “a word,” he claims, “always of evil signification” (Likeliest Means 279).[8] We may recall his sharp denunciation of priests in his poem Lycidas as “Blind mouths,” a catachresis describing those who “for their bellies’ sake, / Creep and intrude, and climb into the fold / . . . [while] The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed, / But swoll’n with wind, and the rank mist they draw / Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread” (lines 114-127). Milton identifies the source of clerical corruption as England’s forced tithing system, giving ministers a sinecure with minimal responsibility to their parishioners for biblical preaching and teaching. Anglican ministers were appointed by the clerical hierarchy, not elected by congregations.

But Milton makes an important qualification in his condemnation of “hirelings.” He writes, “Hire of it self is neither a thing unlawful, nor a word of any evil note, signifying no more than a due recompense or reward” (278). Milton does not condemn wage labor as such, the performing of a service for money, even for ministers, as one Marxist critic has claimed (more on this below). Milton notes that Jesus said plainly to the Apostles, if people give you food, drink, and shelter, you may accept it without any qualms, “for the laborer is worthy of his hire” (Luke 10.7). “[T]he very light of reason and of equity hath declar’d,” Milton writes, the justice of hire (280). But he claims, “That which makes [hire] so dangerous in the church . . . is either the excess thereof, or the undue manner of giving and taking it” (278-9). “Excess” hire presumably refers to situations in which a minister or tithe holder is paid “too much” (more than he could earn by his service and merits), and “the undue manner of giving and taking” hire can only refer to the mandatory tithing system and the abuses following in its train (more on this issue below).

The key issue for Milton, as always, is liberty, which he identifies with New Testament Christianity, freeing humans from the power of sin and any requirement for empty religious ceremonies. As we see in Paradise Lost, Milton’s God gives his creatures, angels and humans, free choice, even though he foresees the catastrophic results, with the fall of Satan first, and then humankind.[9] Freedom is the necessary condition for virtue, faith, happiness, and true religion. Even reason is a function of liberty, in Milton’s formulation: “When God gave [Adam] reason, he gave him freedom to choose, for reason is but choosing” (Areopagitica 944). Milton’s God can no more limit our freedom than he can stop being God.

Milton’s opposition to tithes is not just a natural reluctance to pay taxes. He notes, “it concerns every mans conscience to what religion he contributes” (308). Giving tithes to the English church meant supporting a church and ministry that Milton considered corrupt at best and anti-Christian at worst. He describes forced-tithes as “violence and extortion: . . . to pay for what he . . . approves not” (309). Protestants had a high concept of conscience as the voice of God within humans, one to be obeyed before the magistrate or minister. In Paradise Lost, Milton’s God states,

I will place within them [humans] as a guide,
My umpire Conscience, whom if they will hear,
Light after light well used they shall attain,
And to the end persisting, safe arrive. (3.194-197).

For Milton, religion was a private matter between the individual and God. For this reason, he placed no value on conformity or uniformity in religion, much less a national church. He had no fears about the splintering of Christianity, since Christianity was meant to take the form of individual congregations. He writes,

the Christian church is not national, but consisting of many particular congregations, subject to many changes, as well through civil accidents as through schisms and various opinions, not to be decided by any outward judge, being matters of conscience . . . (308)

For Milton, the state’s authority in matters of religion—tithes, attendance, church membership—constitutes a dangerous overreach of its power.[10] He writes,

the civil magistrate is intrusted with civil rights only, not with conscience, which can have no deputy or representer of it self, but one of the same minde . . . . that what each man gives to the minister, he gives either as to God or as to his teacher; if as to God, no civil power can justly consecrate to religious uses any part. (308-9)

Milton views “Mammon,” the greed for wealth, as a continual danger to Christianity from its very beginnings. The first “hireling,” Milton writes, was Judas and he was soon followed by Simon Magus (279). Milton had an idealistic conception of Christianity as antithetical to the pursuit of wealth. Ministers, he believed, should not be motivated by any monetary or material desires in their work.

Milton’s argument against tithes rests on his interpretation of the Bible, especially the key distinction between Old Testament Law and New Testament Gospel. His opponents defended tithes by appeal to Old Testament law. Milton, however, argues that tithes belong to the Jewish ceremonial laws that have been superseded by Christianity (281-297). Christ’s sacrifice on the cross made those ritual prescriptions unnecessary, as various New Testament authors agreed. Milton considers at length a number of Bible passages that might seem to justify tithes. He argues, for example, that the Levitical priesthood, the original recipients of tithes, simply cannot be compared to Christian ministers.

But how then are ministers to be supported? Milton argues they should live on what their parishioners freely donate to the church, citing several New Testament passages in support (300-1). The minister offers his flock biblical instruction, and they recompense him, through the church, according to their conscience. Both minister and church member are free to enter into or withdraw from this relationship, so it can be characterized as a free “market” transaction that benefits both participants.

For Milton, the solution to the tithing controversy was clear and simple: abolish forced tithes, abandon any attempt to impose a national church, allow for freedom of religion (within limits), and let the members of individual congregations elect their ministers and support them with donations (307).

Such a relationship between minister and congregation can only be viewed as free in a literal sense, free of any state or external control. Milton approves Christ’s command to the apostles: “Freely ye have received, freely give” (309). Nevertheless, David Hawkes argues that Milton saw free market principles as incompatible with religion, and that he opposed “wage-labour” for ministers. Using a Marxist vocabulary to describe Milton’s position, Hawkes implies that Milton was, in effect, a kind of proto-Marxist. Yet Hawkes recognizes that Milton approves the justice of “hire,” and that Milton further argues that what makes “hire” evil is “the undue manner of giving and taking it” (Likeliest Means 279); or, in another place, “the undue and vitious taking or giving it” (280). Hawkes writes, “My purpose here is to determine what Milton understands by this ‘undue and vitious . . . hire’” (64). To answer this question, we should note, it is necessary to distinguish the “undue and vitious . . . hire” condemned by Milton from the legitimate hire approved by Christ.

Hawkes claims, “By the term ‘hireling,’ Milton intends a clergyman who receives compulsory tithes” (71). According to Hawkes, in the context of the tithing controversy, “Compulsory tithes” actually meant wage labor, for Milton and his audience. Hawkes concludes,

Clerical wage labor is “the undue manner of giving and taking” payment, the “undue and vitious taking or giving” of money, which Milton distinguishes from his objections to luxury and monopoly. (73)

This is Hawkes’ thesis, the answer to the question with which he began his article. But it doesn’t answer the question of how the approved biblical “hire” is different from the supposedly evil wage labour. Obviously, everything depends how we define key terms. Hawkes claims, “according to the contemporary terms of debate [in Milton’s time], voluntary tithes were not legally owed wages but charitable ‘alms’” (73). So, according to Hawkes, for Milton, tithes are wage labor only when they are legally forced, but when freely given, they are not wages, but rather alms.

But “wage labour” is defined by the mutual understanding of employer and employee, the terms of employment; not the source of the wages. We can understand why tithes given voluntarily could be called “alms” and why Milton opposed involuntary tithes, but there is no apparent reason why Milton should oppose “clerical wage labour,” a clerical job with a salary, whether backed by a printed contract or an implied contract renewed on a daily basis, by the actions of the parties. Here is where Hawkes imposes a Marxist framework alien to Milton and the seventeenth century. Hawkes argues that Milton’s deep objection was to the practice of spiritual labor being “commodified” and thus reified—reification being a form of idolatry, a category error by which one treats the idea or sign as the thing (Hawkes 70-71). It’s true, of course, that Milton saw individuals as souls, which cannot be bought and sold like horses or sheep. Whether such a recognition would prevent one individual from selling his labor to another for an agreed-upon price is another question. Hawkes finds correctly a deep-seated fear of the profit motive (greed, or “mammon”) in the New Testament as received by Protestants; and it’s well known that Marx drew upon religious vocabulary to describe capitalism. But can we accurately characterize Reformation Christianity as proto-Marxist? The superficial similarity of some terminology is weak evidence to support the strong connection Hawkes claims between Milton’s anti-clericalism and Marx’s hostility to wage labor. In the “Vanity Fair” episode of his allegory Pilgrim’s Progress, a classic passage which epitomizes Protestant fears of the market, John Bunyan satirizes what he considers the logic of the marketplace, in which, literally, everything is for sale:

houses, lands, trades, places, honours, preferments, titles, countries, kingdoms, lusts, pleasures, and delights of all sorts, as whores, bawds, wives, husbands, children, masters, servants, lives, blood, bodies, souls, silver, gold, pearls, precious stones, and what not. (§ 216)

But to assimilate Reformation fears of the marketplace to Marx’s critique of capitalism is anti-historical and reductive, doing a disservice to both.

Even granting Marx his premises, Hawkes’ argument doesn’t really work. According to Marx, capitalists exploit workers by treating them as machines; whereas in Milton’s England, ministers exploited taxpayers by receiving an inflated salary. There is also the question of state compulsion: whereas Marx saw the “free market” as simply the justification for exploitation, and state force as the remedy; for Milton it is just the opposite. As we’ve seen, state force, the reverse of political freedom, is the key issue for Milton, and on which his position places him in diametrical opposition to Marx.

Hawkes doesn’t give any evidence to support his claim that “alms” and “wages” were mutually exclusive terms “according to the contemporary terms of the debate” (Hawkes 73). We must remember that the English Bible, accepted as authoritative by all sides of the debate, explicitly approves “hire” on the authority of Jesus himself. Hawkes is claiming, then, that for Milton and his audience, “hire” in the Bible actually meant alms, not wages; and furthermore, that Milton distinguishes the approved biblical “hire” from supposedly evil wage labor.

What Hawkes ignores is that “hire” and “wages” were synonymous terms in Milton’s England and, indeed, continuing until today. In the Geneva Bible (both 1560 and 1599 editions), the relevant passage is translated, “the laborer is worthy of his wages” (my emphasis). In the King James Version of 1611, given by Milton in his tract, we find, “the laborer is worthy of his hire” (my emphasis). And in succeeding versions down through the centuries, translators continue using one or the other term, “wages” or “hire,” interchangeably. If Milton was claiming that ministers could not legitimately receive “wages,” or perform “wage labor,” he would have been contradicting Christ’s direct command. But Milton explicitly approves Christ’s command. Milton writes, “God hath given to ministers under the gospel, that only which is justly given them, that is to say, a due and moderat livelihood, the hire of thir labor” (300, my emphasis). I don’t see how Milton could have made his position more plain: Ministers justly receive wages for their labor, and what makes such wages “just” is simply that they are exchanged freely. By characterizing all clerical wages or hire as “undue and vitious,” Hawkes elides Milton’s key distinction between freedom and force.

The question remains, then, what exactly Milton meant by “the undue and vitious taking or giving it,” and how such hire is distinguished from biblically-sanctioned hire. As we’ve seen, the key distinction, first, is whether the wages are given freely, independent of any state law. Milton had no problem with wages from tithes given freely; only the forced tithes are unbiblical. On the part of the congregation, the givers of the tithe, state force is what distinguishes the “undue and vitious . . . giving” of tithes from the biblical hire.

But the distinction also concerns the minister, the “taking” of the hire. Milton makes clear that ministers must not be motivated by mercenary considerations. Compulsory tithes—a steady cash flow with minimal responsibilities—lure the avaricious into the clerical profession, and the minister’s greed is the second consideration that distinguishes “the undue and vitious taking or giving” of tithes that Milton abhorred (my emphasis). The two criteria are related of course: forced tithes attract the covetous; they go together. For Milton, then, “undue and vitious . . . hire” refers to forced tithes combined with mercenary ministers.

The forced tithe is obvious to all, a feature of English law; but the motivation of the minister, the second problem, is not always so clear. As Milton says in Paradise Lost:

. . . neither Man nor Angel can discern
Hypocrisy, the only evil that walks
invisible, except to God alone. (3.682)

This passage refers to Satan’s success, on his way to Earth, in deceiving the Archangel Uriel. But we should note that this deception is successful only temporarily, and before the day is through, Uriel sees through Satan’s disguise and warns the angels guarding Earth. By the same token, Milton considered himself able to identify corrupt ministers, and he assumed that congregations are also able to discern such ministers.

This is where the free-market nature of the relationship between the minister and his congregation becomes so important. If the parishioners find that the minister is covetous, or if he fails to provide biblical instruction, they are free to withhold tithes. And in the Church organization favored by Milton, they are free to fire him and hire someone else (or rather “dismiss” him and “elect” someone else, to use the terms favored by such congregations). Such are the free market principles Milton wanted applied to the church, as the best possible remedy for the corruption fostered by forced tithes. The free market can be efficient in rooting out at least some forms of corruption. State interventions, on the other hand, enable corruption, by creating what modern economists call “rent seekers,” factions that seek out and rely on special treatment from the government. Milton sought to eliminate any government interference in the economics of religion.

Furthermore, Milton suggests that tithes be given to the church or rather congregation (Likeliest Means 300), who would then distribute a portion of them to the minister, and reserve a portion of the tithes for other needs, such as poor relief or building maintenance. There is nothing in Milton’s tract that would prevent an independent church from giving a minister a regular salary, exactly as is done in churches today. As long as the source of the salary is freely given tithes, and the minister is not mercenary in his motives, Milton’s proposal would not prevent a standard salary arrangement for ministers (i.e., “wage labour”). Another situation in which a minister might draw a regular salary is when a well-off congregation sponsors him as a missionary. Milton suggests the sponsorship of missionaries as a way to bring preaching to poor areas that cannot support a minister by themselves.

In his article, Hawkes gives a brief history of the tithing controversy, showing that Milton’s opponents, the defenders of compulsory tithes, found themselves required to defend tithes as wages, and legitimate on this basis. Milton indeed attacks this position, but only the forced collection of such wages, not wages as such, which were commanded by Christ. He writes,

It remanes lastly to consider, in what manner God hath ordained that recompense be given to ministers of the gospel: and by all scripture it will appeer, that he hath given it them not by civil law and freehold [legal tenure], as they claim, but by the benevolence and free gratitude of such as receive them. (309)

The problem with tithes was simply that they were forced by the state; all the abuses followed from this, not the fact that tithes recompensed ministers for their labor.

According to Marx, we should remember, wage labour does not corrupt the workers but rather exploits them. In general, labour teaches discipline and makes a person stronger, leading to self-knowledge. It’s the owners or masters who are corrupted by wealth and become decadent. All the workers need, as per Marx, is some consciousness-raising; they are already stronger than the capitalists. For Milton, in contrast, ministers are corrupted by the money offered by the existing tithing system. Milton’s point has no necessary or logical connection to Marx’s critique of wage labor. Anyone can be corrupted by the prospect of wealth, in a great variety of situations; ministerial “hire” just happens to be the route offered by the compulsory tithes. Hawkes confuses the general point (common to all times and ages) that wealth corrupts the greedy with the Marxist claim that wage-labor is the “original sin” of capitalism.

As we observed above, Milton’s tract argues that the then current tithe system forces Christians to go against their conscience, to support a ministry and church they found unbiblical, even if just by the mere fact that it included forced tithes, not to mention other departures from biblical practice. Hawkes and others have noted, however, that Milton does not, in contrast to other contemporary writers on the subject, emphasize the “violence” against conscience mandated by the tithing system. Rather, Milton spends more time on the “corruption of teachers [which is] most commonly the effect of hire” (Milton 277). Milton’s emphasis on clerical corruption distinguishes his tract from other tracts of the time period opposing the tithe system. Hawkes suggests that Milton’s stress on corruption supports Hawkes’s point that Milton was opposing not just the forcing of conscience but rather the whole tithing system, which Hawkes characterizes as “wage labor.” But as we have seen, Milton did not oppose the whole tithing system, only compulsory tithes. Furthermore, Milton’s claim that “hire” was “corrupting the teachers [ministers]” (Likeliest Means 279) is something of a red herring, even by the terms of Milton’s own argument. When Milton discusses ministers throughout his tract, he makes clear that they are already greedy; compulsory tithes merely attracted them to the profession and provided an opportunity for corruption. For example, in reference to the apostles of Christ’s time, Milton writes,

religion brought forth wealth, and the daughter devoured the mother. But long ere wealth came into the church, so soone as any gain appeered in religion, hirelings were apparent; drawn in long before by the very scent thereof. Judas therefore, the first hireling, for want of present hire answerable to his coveting, from the small number or the meanness of such as then were the religious, sold the religion it self with the founder thereof, his master. Simon Magus the next . . . (279 emphasis by Milton)

In the above example, Judas is already covetous, and he is drawn to the apostolic group by the “scent” of wealth. In reference to forced tithes, Milton writes,

the undue and vicious taking or giving it [hire] , though but small or mean, as in the primitive times, gave to hirelings occasion, though not intended, yet sufficient to creep at first into the church. (Likeliest Means 289)

In no case does Milton give an example of a just minister becoming corrupt through the temptation of tithes. Compulsory tithes merely provide corrupt men an opportunity for gaining wealth. Milton’s unusual (within the tithing controversy literature) emphasis on the corruption of the ministers is rather an example of his pointed anti-clericalism.[11] It seems that what offended Milton about compulsory tithes most of all was that they enabled the hypocrisy and greed of ministers. Free market forces, according to Milton, would best restrain the corruption of ministers and discourage them from “creeping” into the pulpit.

Milton notes the likelihood that ministers will “frame themselves to that interest and those opinions which they see best pleasing to thir paymasters” (318). Furthermore, Milton recognizes that those in charge of distributing forced tithes might hire none but those “they find conformable to their interest and opinions” (318). Milton clearly recognized that the desire for money may corrupt a person who is so inclined. But this raises the question, why didn’t Milton consider the possibility in his tract that ministers might be corrupted by the freely-given tithes from their congregation, and preach only what their listeners found easy and pleasant, like Chaucer’s Friar? (A few of Milton’s contemporaries thought that only tax-supported ministers would retain theological and moral independence.) Remember that the Catholic Church claimed a monopoly on salvation, which was exploited by unscrupulous clergy, such as we find in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. But the Protestant church never claimed to hold a monopoly on salvation, and Milton advocated doing away with all compulsion in religion. Free access to the Bible would free Christians from servitude to the Church and its ministers.

Furthermore, in Milton’s time, before the age of mass media, freely-given tithes did not appear to be an attractive proposition for those seeking wealth. In fact, the central concern for Milton’s contemporaries (the main reason why even a Puritan-dominated Parliament refused to reform the tithing system) was that without State tithes, there would be no one to preach the gospel at all. Milton refutes this claim first by recourse to the Biblical promises that the gospel would be preached; second, he gives the counter-example of Continental countries with active preachers but no forced tithes (Likeliest Means 318).

Milton did, however, witness the rise of numerous cult leaders during the Civil War and Interregnum, so he understood the dangers posed by charismatic preachers. Yet he defended the right of non-conformists to publish in Areopagitica, trusting the marketplace to sort out the wheat from the chaff. And he apparently trusted the freedom of the marketplace to distinguish true ministers from “hirelings.” In Paradise Lost, Eve was corrupted by the desire for knowledge; yet God didn’t change the conditions of creation to prevent such corruption; much less would Milton try to prevent the possibility of corruption by a government intervention that could only be tyranny. Such are the necessary conditions of freedom.

Milton’s hostility to mammon in The Likeliest Means can be fully explained by his critique of clerical greed. Placing mammon before God was indeed a kind of idolatry, as Hawkes notes, one that was practiced by the clergy and enabled by the government. Greed was the problem, not “hire,” the practice of rewarding a needed service with money or goods.

Far from finding the market hostile to Christianity, we have seen that for Milton a free market is the best way to reform the church: a free labor market for ministers is precisely “the likeliest means to remove hirelings from the church.” Free the church from forced tithes, and the market will serve to expunge any “hirelings,” ministers whose motivation is mercenary.

To his contemporaries, especially after the Restoration in 1660, Milton was clearly on the “wrong side of history,” on tithes and every other political and religious issue of the day. But from our standpoint, he was ahead of his time, moving with the larger tide of history. Forced tithes were a relic of the sacred in English society, along with monarchy, aristocracy, and state-sponsored religion. What authorized these various structures in society was their connection to divine tradition; they were not well rationalized from a modern perspective. Milton’s characterization of forced tithing as “violence” and “extortion” (309) recalls René Girard’s famous thesis about the connection of violence to the sacred. The “violence” to conscience is metaphorical, of course, but the laws compelling tithes were administered with physical force.

Milton found support for desacralization in the New Testament:

And the tenth part, though once declar’d holy, is declared now to be no holier than the other nine, by that command to Peter, Act. 10. 15. 28: whereby all distinction of holy and unholy is removed from all things (312)

Milton here refers to a New Testament passage that is usually interpreted to mean that Old Testament food restrictions, and Judaic ritual prescriptions in general, have been suspended for Christians, including, according to Milton, the tithe requirement. Milton’s phrase, “all distinction of holy and unholy is removed from all things,” is striking, since the concept of the holy is central to Judeo-Christian religion. When we remember Milton’s assertion of the priesthood of all believers (312), however, it’s clear that the holy remains but is not to be separated out as taboo as anymore. Milton anticipates William Blake’s doctrine that “Everything that lives is holy.” The everyday life of believers is to be holy; holiness is not to be a privilege of monks, priests, and nuns anymore. This is a radical revision of the concept of the holy. The sacred will be integrated into the fabric of everyday life.

How, then, is the danger of the sacred, in Girardian terms, the danger of mimetic competition leading to violence, to be alleviated? Milton, of course, did not think of the question in these terms. For Milton, the point was, first, to do away with all forms of priestly privilege. Second, while all ceremonial requirements were to be discarded, the corollary was his insistence upon the highest moral standards for Christians—the democratization of monastic discipline characteristic of Puritanism.[12]

Because of his idealistic conception of the minister’s calling, Milton doesn’t discuss any possibility of differential selection of and rewards for ministers. But without state controls, and according to the free market principles he advocates, merit would serve precisely this function. We know from his other writings that Milton considered merit as the primary qualification for public status, to the extent that Milton’s God, in Paradise Lost, declares even Christ “By merit more than birthright the Son of God” (3.309).

In a free market, the inevitable result of rewarding merit is competition. Congregations will compete to attract the best ministers, and ministers will compete for the best congregations. There could well be a mimetic dimension to such competition, because of the effects of reputation; but essentially it is a rational process that rewards talent and discipline. To some extent, competition is a human, even biological, constant. On the ancient  battlefield, in hand-to-hand combat, for example, status means little: only ability. But traditional societies limit competition by means of divinely-sanctioned hierarchy; and we should ask why, given that free market competition seems so innocuous.

As Ernest Gellner puts this point, traditional societies are governed by coercion and force, while modern societies are characterized by production and trade (176-80). The assertion of status in traditional societies was an expression of thinly-veiled force, with the aristocracy and the priesthood working sometimes in tension but mostly hand in hand. Émile Durkheim saw correctly that the power of the sacred is the power of the community, its potential for collective violence. The representation (and ritual performance) of the sacred in traditional societies often serves (directly or indirectly) to govern the distribution of desirable goods, avoiding competition, and thus containing the threat of violence, the Hobbesian war of all against all. Destructive competition breaks out only occasionally in the form of raw power struggles. But somehow, in modern Western societies, competition is relatively unconstrained and serves to rationalize the distribution of power and resources within a state, according to the rule of law. Milton’s proposal exemplifies the process by which the sacred, as per our anthropological definition, is rationalized and thus integrated into society. In economic terms, the resources, the capital, that formerly went to tithes would be redirected to more productive uses, both within and without the church.

Historians have long recognized the anomalous nature of what’s called “the rise of the West,” the shift to a free market, capitalism, and the modern state—characterized by individual rights and limited government—along with the decline of traditional hierarchies.[13] Max Weber’s thesis about the connection of the Protestant ethic to the spirit of capitalism is generally dismissed today, on the grounds that the Protestant ethic actually condemned the pursuit of wealth, just as Milton condemned mammon among the clergy.[14] (Weber, of course, was well aware of this paradox.) In general, critics of the Weber thesis start with the commonsense observation that the actions characteristic of Protestantism and the actions characteristic of capitalism are quite distinct and bear no necessary connection. It’s possible to discuss the historical development of capitalism in considerable detail without mentioning religion.[15] The psychological attitudes that Weber emphasizes are rather nebulous and, at this late date, there is no way to establish a correlation using the kind of empirical research that modern sociologists favor. Weber’s critics have proposed, with considerable ingenuity, that the economic habits of Protestants were derived from England’s mercantile culture, rather than the other way around;[16] or that capitalism thrived only when Protestantism declined.[17]

Critics of the Weber thesis tend to focus on narrow points. For example, they point out that Puritans were actually a minority in Early Modern England (the Church of England can be regarded as closer to Catholicism than Protestantism);[18] and that industrial development in England was sometimes more intensive in the areas that were less Puritan. It’s also pointed out that we can find little evidence that Protestants regarded success in business as evidence of salvation, as Weber proposed. These critics tend to take a very narrow view of Protestantism, and they fasten on isolated claims of Weber without confronting the larger implications. It’s very possible that Weber was mistaken about some of the specific psychological mechanisms that led to the association of Protestantism and capitalism.

I do not propose to defend the Weber thesis in detail but rather to explore the correlation of Protestantism and the rise of the West in terms of the unique features of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

We need to remember that Protestantism was a revival (or reinvention, if you prefer) of New Testament Christianity, with the critique of Jewish ceremonialism transferred to Catholicism. And Christ’s critique of priestly hypocrisy was a continuation of the Jewish prophetic tradition and derived ultimately from the iconoclasm of the Mosaic revelation. It’s widely recognized that the Jewish and Christian religions are unique in world history, and, as we’ll see, they bear an indisputable connection to Modernity.

The ancient Hebrews founded their identity on a rejection of the ancient world’s priestly, polytheistic hierarchies (See Sacred Discontent by Herbert Schneidau). Fully-developed Jewish monotheism was unique in rejecting all other gods as false and non-existent. Ancient gods tended to be partisan and tribal but not hostile to the concept of existence of others. Foreign gods were commonly appropriated and assimilated to a nation’s pantheon after a military victory. As Jan Assmann has shown convincingly in a number of important articles and books, there is an identifiable trend towards monotheism even before the Mosaic revelation—but it tended toward a philosophical concept of “the God beyond god(s),” (i.e., a logical deduction of the underlying unitary basis for the sacred) and was in principle not hostile to polytheism or foreign gods.[19] True, one’s god could be  “jealous” before Moses, but largely as a expression of national rivalry. Assmann argues persuasively that the ancient Hebrews were the first to make the move of rejecting foreign gods, as gods, and to assert an absolutely transcendent, singular God.

The Hebrews invented the idea of idolatry, which went hand in hand with a rejection of divine hierarchy. The one true God levels out the hierarchy of gods and divinized men; God is absolutely transcendent such that all humans are relatively equal.[20] Assmann points out that the second commandment prohibition of “graven images” is essentially political, directed not at images as such, but rather the support images give to the political hierarchy:

Idolatry primarily means the legitimization of the state in terms of divine representation. The state presents itself in its images, symbols, and ceremonies as a representative of the divine. From the viewpoint of the Bible, this is idolatry. From the viewpoint of Egypt, however, it is precisely for this that the state was created. . . . the Egyptians believed the gods to be remote and hidden, having withdrawn from earth and made themselves invisible. In lieu of their corporal presence, they installed the state on earth to represent them in the form of kings, images, and sacred animals. . . . the king acts as representative of the creator, installed on earth “for ever and ever” in order to establish “Ma’at” [true order and justice] and to expel disorder. . . . The prohibition against images means, in the first place, that the “living God” (Elohim hayim) must not be represented. Images contradict the real presence of the divine implied by the idea of the covenant. The latter is a form both political and “living” reflecting God’s turning toward the world. Images are media of a “magical” representation of an absent divine power and therefore imply or presuppose the idea of divine absence. The “living God” hides and reveals himself as he chooses and forbids any attempt at a magical summoning of his presence. (Assmann 87)

The biblical critique of idolatry was fundamentally a critique of a political theology that united religion and state. Arguably, the most important innovation of the Axial period was this critique. The separation of religion and state was desirable and possible for the ancient Jews because of their peripheral position in the Babylonian and then the Roman empire. Theodore Dalrymple makes the valuable observation that Christianity, unlike Islam, tended toward separation of church and state from its beginning, because of the marginal status of Jews and then Christians within the Roman empire (288). This separation was never stable, however, and the medieval Church sometimes achieved hegemony in the political sphere. The seventeenth century in England saw political reforms which led to a large degree of religious freedom and the separation of church and state in Western Modernity. Milton’s tract against compulsory tithes is essentially an argument for the separation of church and state.

Hebrew monotheism also rejects magic, a crucial move that bears fruit with the emergence of modern science in the 17^th century. Max Weber recognized that the ancient Israeli rejection of magic was singular, a world-historical event that contributed to the eventual development of Modernity (see Swedberg 309).

The Jewish prophets continued the Mosaic critique of idolatry and applied it to Jewish legalism and “backsliding”: the tendency to revert to polytheism. Jesus, in turn, radicalized the prophetic critique of ceremonialism and minimized the law, reducing the Law and the Prophets to two commandments: love God and love your neighbor as yourself. Protestants revived this iconoclastic strain and applied it widely to existing religious practices.

Protestant iconoclasm, however, could not be restricted to medieval traditions. The critique of idolatry, magic, and superstition was simply too powerful to be limited to Catholicism. It created a skepticism about the divine nature of political authority that contributed significantly to the English Revolution, the destruction of divine-right monarchy, as well as modern science and secularization. It is no exaggeration to say that iconoclasm is the essence of modern culture and criticism. Critics today continue to ferret out the last vestiges of the sacred in our cultural and philosophical traditions, and modern art is overtly iconoclastic.[21] The detractors of Weber’s thesis generally ignore the role of Protestant iconoclasm. Yet the destruction of a magical world-view and associated religious-political institutions is perhaps the most important condition for capitalism as well as modern science. Milton’s condemnation of the tithing system is just one small example of such “creative destruction.” Milton also denounced a political system based on divine right and inherited status, arguing instead for one based on merit.

Iconoclasm supports capitalism by freeing the West from inherited traditions that can inhibit innovation and efficiency. A necessary condition for Modernity is the freedom that comes from the iconoclastic rejection of traditional, divinely-sanctioned institutions like aristocracy and established religion. Freedom is necessary for the belief in progress that fuels economic change and growth.

Iconoclasm, however, does not always lead to progress. No one was more iconoclastic than the Communists in Russia and China. Reformers are almost always iconoclasts in name, but revolution may lead simply to regime change. We know that traditional forms of the sacred function to enable social order, by repressing the possibilities for destructive conflict, but simultaneously repressing certain possibilities for progress. The loosening of sacred taboos releases these mimetic tensions for good and bad. How do modern societies prevent such competition from reverting back to what one may call “gangsterism,” by which entrenched factions prey upon the disenfranchised? We must constantly revise our laws to try and prevent gangsterism, to stay one step ahead of those who try to game the system, but we are never completely successful. As sacred taboos are loosened, we actually become more mimetic, culturally, because there is more freedom, more avenues and rewards for mimetic competition. Population growth, mass media, and now social media make Modernity into a mimetic hothouse of sorts. For these reasons, the question of social order remains; the threat of violence within modern societies is still real today (but see Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence has Declined).

Modernity witnesses the rise of totalitarian states like Nazi Germany and Stalinist USSR, but the most economically successful modern states are not totalitarian. How is this possible? The minimizing of sacred and quasi-sacred taboos is important but not enough by itself. A necessary condition for the political freedoms of Modernity is a populace capable of internal moral discipline, a development that Weber, Gellner, and others have attributed to Protestantism and, by extension, the Judeo-Christian tradition. Among nominally-free countries today, widespread corruption, not the long-term effects of colonization, remains as the most significant barrier to economic prosperity. What we call corruption, of course, is really the more traditional way of doing business: the exchange of favors between tribe or group members, and bias against all outside the group. Such behavior is rational in a society dominated by factions, in which everyone is looking out only for their short-term interests. But such short-sightedness makes economic investment and development difficult or impossible. Capitalism does not thrive under a government with endemic corruption, which can sometimes take nominally legal forms, e.g., when special interest groups, in and out of the government, receive resources disproportionate to their contribution to society. Established ministers in Milton’s England are a minor example, and it’s significant that Milton condemned them on moral grounds as corrupt.

The remarkable moral and work discipline (work as a moral or spiritual duty) of Early Modern Protestants has been recognized by Weber, Gellner, and others as an important condition for the development of capitalism, making possible the trust that is essential between trade partners, investors, and producers. By “moral discipline,” I don’t mean to suggest that Protestants in particular were morally superior to other groups of the period. Such discipline is both internal and cultural, a feature of a larger culture that respects law and limits the tendency of rulers to aggrandizement: what Alan Macfarlane has called “the culture of capitalism,” which, as he shows, was already well-established in England by the 16^th century, and that has roots going back to the 14^th century at least.[22]

We can understand such moral discipline better by examining its place in the larger Judeo-Christian tradition. The ancient Hebrews made the written law, which is partially ritual but largely moral, the center of their religious practice.[23] The place of morality, the establishment of justice, in the Hebrew religion was unusual in the ancient Middle East, which traditionally separated religion and morality (as concern with justice), with religion concerned mainly with ritual practice.[24] Moses and the Prophets realized, in effect, that the function of religion is essentially ethical. Integrating justice into religion allowed for the separation of religion and state. Making justice the focus of religion freed the Jews from servitude to the state, the traditional locus of justice. The focus on the law in Jewish religion serves to internalize the commandments as personal values. The prophets emphasized justice and faith over ritual sacrifice. As an iconoclastic religion, Judaism is minimalist; reducing the numbers of gods, the role of priests, and the whole ritual apparatus; while placing ethics at its core. But the Jewish religion still distinguished sharply between Jews and Gentiles. Christianity, on the other hand, deepens the emphasis on morality by discarding most Jewish ritual practices, and doing away with all distinction between Jew and Gentile in the new, Christian dispensation, which is embodied most effectively in the Sermon on the Mount, a masterpiece of ethical and religious reform.

Christ iconoclastically radicalized the Jewish emphasis on law as morality, rejecting ritual prescriptions as legalistic, and calling for no less than moral perfection, in anticipation of the Kingdom of God. He raised the bar for morality in the Sermon on the Mount, for example, by prohibiting not just the act of adultery but even the feeling of lust. Christian morality is by definition deeply internalized. The Protestants revived Christ’s teaching and tried, at least, to take it quite literally.

Weber quite rightly linked the Protestant conception of calling to the capitalist work ethic. The concept of calling can be derived ultimately from the ancient Hebrew idea of national election, an original and influential model of identity. Election is intimately connected to the Judeo-Christian emphasis on morality. Monotheism, election, iconoclasm, and the Law form a tightly-bound complex of ideas that are governed by the same logic. The requirements of the Law in Judaism are linked to the covenant between God and Israel in the Torah. Israel’s status as a nation chosen by God for a special destiny in history is dependent upon their fulfilling the Law, which is both ritual and moral. Those who receive special favor from God must be prepared for special duties. They will be a “light to the gentiles,” bringing a new form of religion to the world. The Jews were able to interpret every defeat and failure as further evidence of God’s favor only by virtue of their chosen status. The idea that “whom the Lord loves he chastens” (Hebrews 12.6) is implied in God’s election of Israel from the beginning. Christianity, as we know, does away with the ritual requirements of Judaism, the distinction between Jew and Gentile; and it makes election both universal and individual, through conversion, which is often experienced as a calling or election. Christian election in turn requires moral discipline. With Protestantism, the idea of calling is extended to one’s work in this world, a move that Weber recognizes as important. One’s job–whether a carpenter, farmer, merchant, or industrialist—becomes a spiritual calling to be pursued with monastic discipline. The idea that success in one’s calling could be interpreted as evidence of salvation is actually foreign, however, to any rigorous understanding of Christianity, and Weber placed too much emphasis on this particular hypothesis. Christian iconoclasm warns against placing too much emphasis on appearances such as worldly success.

We find three characteristics of the Judeo-Christian tradition that are crucial ingredients to the  development of Capitalism and Modernity: iconoclasm, election, and internalized moral discipline. All three can be traced back to the Mosaic revelation, although their development in Christianity and Protestantism is equally important. Iconoclasm and moral discipline make possible greater political freedom, and freedom is a key condition for the development of a dynamic, capitalist economy. No one believes that the behaviors characteristic of capitalism are “natural,” but trade and exchange are as old as our species, and investment, understood in the widest sense, is also universal. For example, the early hominid shaping a stone ax invests his time and effort in the hope of a future reward. Political freedom makes possible the development of these characteristic human behaviors in new spheres.

Going back to Milton and the Tithing controversy, we can find all of the above three elements in Milton’s pamphlet and other works. First, his argument against state sponsorship of tithes is iconoclastic and supports a free market among ministers and congregations. Second, internalized moral discipline and rewarding merit are values found throughout his oeuvre. And third, Milton clearly saw himself as a member of the elect, and in Areopagitica, he suggests that England is a chosen nation. Milton’s biblical fundamentalism may appear reactionary today, but his ideas on politics and religion are actually quite progressive by any standard.

Nietzsche’s Interpreters

Even a brief literature survey of the major interpretations of Nietzsche’s thought highlights the tremendous variation that exists between them. Such a paradoxical and divergent historical reception of Nietzsche is indicative of his wide-ranging thought. René Girard claims that Nietzsche’s legacy remains tied to his 20^th Century interpreters: Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault, and Deleuze. Indeed, the last century has witnessed Nietzsche as: the Heideggerian Nietzsche, who characterises beings as such as the will to power; the Deleuzian Nietzsche, the creator of new values through the affirmation of eternal return; the Foucauldian Nietzsche, the father of genealogical analyses and power relations; the Derridian Nietzsche, who claims that truth, as well as Nietzsche’s texts, is as elusive as ‘woman’ and open to inexhaustible interpretation; the Löwithian Nietzsche as the coherent systematic philosopher of the single idea of the eternal recurrence of the same; and the Klossowskian Nietzsche, whose thought is irrevocably linked to his fluctuating valetudinary states.

What does this tell us about the main preoccupations of the interpretations of Nietzsche?  Perhaps Nietzsche himself is to blame for such widely divergent readings. Towards the end of his productive life, Nietzsche famously asks his readers whether or not his project has been understood at all. In the brilliant and bizarre autobiographical effort, Ecce Homo, Nietzsche asks: “Have I been understood?”[1] Although we can no longer respond to the man himself, it is certain that such a divergent historical reception of Nietzsche is indicative of his wide-ranging thoughts.

Apart from Nietzsche’s twentieth-century interpretations being utterly divergent, they all seem to miss one aspect of Nietzsche’s thinking: that he was first and foremost a classical philologist, deeply entrenched within 19^th Century thinking about origins. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that Nietzsche’s early conclusions about the origin and function of language greatly influence his later thinking—for which he is most famous—about consciousness, truth, and the ethical. After a brief introduction to The Birth of Tragedy (1872), I will concern myself with Nietzsche’s theory of the origin of language, as espoused in On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense (1873), in light of Eric Gans’s chapter “The Two Varieties of Truth” in Signs of Paradox: Irony Resentment and Other Mimetic Structures. My aim here is to examine the minimal elements of Nietzsche’s theory of language, as the arbiter of his ideas about the truth-value of language, in contrast to generative anthropology’s model of the origin of the human. Although there are some very obvious—and not so obvious—topical proximities between generative anthropology and Nietzsche’s model of language, there is a divergence in thinking about consciousness, truth, and the ethical in relation to language. For Gans, the ethical comes before the aesthetic contemplation of the sign on the scene of representation. For Nietzsche, the ethical and truth are relegated to mere tributaries of the aesthetic emergence of language, where all individuals are ostensibly in the centre of a scene.

The late philosopher of language, Wilbur Marshall Urban, claims in his Language and Reality that the entire history of Western philosophy can be described in terms of the high or low evaluation of language. Nietzsche’s suspicion of language, I argue, places him in the latter category. I argue that Nietzsche’s views about truth and the ethical reside in his early conclusions about the relation between the “truth-value” of a word and its relationship to an object. Nietzsche characterises language as an aesthetic phenomenon, where the ethical becomes a mere relic generated by what he calls, in The Gay Science, the “error of consciousness.”[2] I claim that generative anthropology offers a solution to not only Nietzsche’s, but also the post-modern suspicion of language. Gans clearly outlines the problems with Nietzsche’s thinking in The Scenic Imagination: Originary Thinking from Hobbes to the Present Day. Gans writes: “Nietzsche replaces the Marxian triumph of historical reason with the triumph of the individual will over the imprisoning force of falsely universal truth. This paradoxical struggle of the Nietzschean self with its ‘own’ representations has been the obsession of philosophy ever since.”[3] Indeed, the postmodern Nietzschean solipsism in which so many thinkers have found themselves in “the prison-house of language,” I argue, can be directly attributed to Nietzsche’s thinking about language as an instinct or artistic drive whose function is to produce metaphors, where the ethical is a mere consequence of the slow, drawn-out development of the “sign-language” that constitutes human consciousness.

The Human Drive Towards Metaphor

 Aristotle’s Poetics defines metaphors as “the application of a word that belongs to another thing: either from genus to species, species to genus, species to species, or by analogy.”[4] Nietzsche, however, does not share Aristotle’s division of the world into genera and species that correspond to what Kant refers to as ‘things in themselves.’ Instead, “genera” and “species” are understood as human metaphors, as set out in the work On Truth and Lie in an Extra-moral Sense. Nietzsche writes: “if I create the definition of a mammal and then, having inspected a camel, I declare, ‘behold, a mammal!’ then a truth has certainly been brought to light, but it is of limited value, by which I mean that it is anthropomorphic through and through and contains not a single point which could be said to be ‘true in itself,’ really and in a generally valid sense, regardless of mankind.”[5] So, for Nietzsche, in response to Kant’s notion of the ‘thing-in-itself,’ metaphor is not a valid picture of the world, where metaphorisation is a “metamorphosis of the world in human beings.” Yet despite the “limited value” of metaphorical truth, Nietzsche’s preference for it is clearly seen from The Birth of Tragedy onwards, where his diagnosis of the sickness of modern culture is precisely his preference for metaphor and the critique of concepts.

Basic to Nietzsche’s theory, as espoused in The Birth of Tragedy, is his use of the ideas of the Apollonian and the Dionysian. For Nietzsche, the reciprocation between Dionysian musical sonority and the imagistic nature of Apollonian words makes new linguistic creations possible. In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche claims that a Dionysian artist unites with the primordial One and reproduces it in the form of music, and then under the influence of Apollo, music becomes visible in words. The relation between the Dionysian and Apollonian “drives of nature” is the source of the aesthetic and allows for the production of new artistic/linguistic creations. When one drive is suppressed, the other weakens. The weakening of the Dionysian is what Nietzsche calls Socrates’ “logical drive,” eradication of the Dionysian drive and forcing the Apollonian drive to “disguise itself in logical schematism.”[6] Nietzsche declares Socrates’ “instinct-disintegrating influence”[7] as giving preference to “concepts” over the original, imagistic metaphors that are the source of their production. When a single drive becomes dominant, Nietzsche calls this the decadence of the instincts. This paves the way for linguistic impoverishment, as conceptual language is static and rigid and attempts to make equivalent all singularities, thereby limiting their multiplicity of meanings. This is essentially the premise of the Birth of Tragedy. Nietzsche ultimately valorises vocal music as the arbiter of language. He writes: “we must regard the duality in the essence of language which is prefigured by nature as the original model of that combination of music and poetry.”[8] For Nietzsche, music and language are inseparable, as they always include the “tone of the speaker” and the “gestural symbolism of the speaker.”[9] Nietzsche associates the origin of music with the origin of language, where there exists “vocal music” and “the combination of sound with image and concept.”[10] To sum up The Birth of Tragedy, music (the Dionysian) prevents metaphor from being reduced to a fixed or determined meaning, while metaphor (the Apollonian) allows music to reveal itself through imagistic Apollonian representation.

On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense

The drive toward the formation of metaphors is the fundamental human drive, which one cannot for a single instant dispense with in thought, for one would thereby dispense with man himself.
–Nietzsche

In On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense, Nietzsche claims that there is a drive or force towards the formation of metaphors. Here, Nietzsche characterises the human as having two distinct drives: the “drive to truth” and a “drive to form metaphors.”[11] Where the Birth of Tragedy discusses the relationship between the Dionysian and Apollonian drives, the interaction between language and music, On Truth and Lie concerns itself with the three steps toward the creation of words: first a nerve stimulus, then image, then sound.

On Truth and Lie provides a compelling scene of human representation by deflating universal constants and questioning the epistemology of objective truth by speculating on the “truth-value” of language. I believe this is an important text to examine in light of GA.

(1) On Truth and Lie is Nietzsche’s first well-defined, established attempt at dealing with what he calls the Entstehung der Sprache or “genesis of language.”

(2) Nietzsche’s notion of “truth” as an established linguistic convention is not, I would argue, outside the realm of generative anthropology.

(3) Nietzsche designates language to be entirely within the arena of the human; here is Nietzsche first non-metaphysical theory of the origin of the human. Similarly, one of generative anthropology’s fundamental propositions is that the emission of the first aborted gesture of appropriation on the scene of representation triggers the event of the emergence of the human as human.

(4) In On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense, Nietzsche develops a thesis on the origin of concepts from the residue of what he calls “pure metaphor.” Indeed, there are many passages of interest to be found in Nietzsche’s early account of language that appear at first hand to complement Gans’s originary hypothesis in more than one way. For example, we have both parties in agreement on the social cohesion that emerges from the production of language. Nietzsche describes consciousness as something that arose for the preservation of the individual and group through the “simulation” of the external world: a clear synergy with generative anthropology’s idea of the aborted gesture of appropriation, where a proto-human represents an external object of desire. Ultimately Nietzsche contends that language is a phenomenon that gradually developed in unison with consciousness, which in turn was the precursor to human communities. Yet, Nietzsche’s suspicion of language as having no “truth-value” is the beginning of his suspicion of what he calls the “social utility” of consciousness.

On Truth and Lie is a work grounded on the notion that established “truths” designated by the conventions of language are merely a socially imposed consensus whose function is to both create and maintain order within a community. Simply put, this text challenges the certitude of human knowledge through a natural-cultural theory of both the origin and development of metaphor and conceptual language. According to Nietzsche, we have forgotten that our arbitrary, singular metaphors are merely nerve-stimuli (triggered by external phenomena) converted to images, then sounds; finally we “believe” we know something about an “X” and so make our moral value-judgments based on these false, all-too-human artistic drives towards the formation of metaphors. Yet as the title suggests, Nietzsche’s early work is about the relationship between truth and human language through the lens of a non- or extra-moral sense.

Nietzsche introduces On Truth and Lie with an allegorical fable on the invention of knowledge. He claims that a certain type of “clever animal” once inhabiting the earth had invented “knowledge.” Indeed, “after nature had drawn a few breaths,” the clever animals had to die.[12] From this passage, Nietzsche reminds us of how “shadowy and flighty, aimless and arbitrary” the human intellect appears in relation to the world. Nietzsche gives us an account of exactly what this shadowy “intellect” is. He writes:

The intellect, as a means for the preservation of the individual, unfolds its chief powers in simulation; for this is the means by which the weaker, less robust individuals preserve themselves, since they are denied the chance of waging the struggle for existence with horns or the fangs of beasts of prey.[13]

The contention here is that the “intellect” is a means for the preservation of the individual by simulating Nature. What does Nietzsche mean here by the intellect unfolding its powers in simulation? The imitation of an external object is incorporated into the body first as a nerve-stimulus, then down the causal chain from word to sound. Here we arrive at metaphor. He writes:

The ‘thing in itself’ (for that is what pure truth, without consequences, would be) is quite incomprehensible to the creators of language and not at all worth aiming for. One designates only the relations of things to man, and to express them one calls on the boldest metaphors. A nerve stimulus, first transposed into an image—first metaphor. The image, in turn, imitated by a sound—second metaphor.[14]

Here, Nietzsche is pointing out that it is quite impossible to “know” the “thing-in-itself” by means of a perception that transposes a nerve-stimulus into a doubly removed imitation. Our stimulus response is merely the metaphorical representation of the relationship between external phenomena we presuppose to exist outside. He declares that, as a consequence of the human only ever being able to evaluate the relation between itself and the eternal world, the “X” thing-in-itself remains forever hidden from our purview. From this premise, Nietzsche turns his gaze to the notion of “truth.” In a most famous passage, he writes:

What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seems firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.[15]

Here, Nietzsche tells us that this “sum of human relations” has taken hold of “truth” is by means of a slow, drawn out, gradual process spanning generations in order to become an obligatory sign system whose participants have lost the gesture’s original figurative singularity. The relaying back and forth of these same “metaphors” over a long lapse of time betrays the human memory. We arrive at the present with an endless combination of these metaphors, but have forgotten their origins as having little significance in seeking out “meaning” or “truth.” What is ultimately important in this text, in relation to GA, is Nietzsche’s emphasis on language as lacking truth. The only “truth” arising from language, argues Nietzsche, is the “pact” made between individual humans, for the sake of social cohesion. Later, in The Gay Science, Nietzsche claims this communal reciprocation of “truths” to be the origin of consciousness. He writes:

consciousness has developed only under pressure of the need for communication; that from the start it was needed and useful only between human beings (particularly between those who commanded and those that obeyed); and that it also develops only in proportion to the degree of this utility. Consciousness is really only a net of communication between human beings; it is only as such that it had to develop; a solitary human being who lived like a beast of prey would not have needed it.[16]

Nietzsche’s closes The Gay Science with something quite similar to the viewpoint of modern, evolutionary epistemology, and which is also close to Charles Darwin’s concerns regarding mankind’s convictions when considering the mind’s slow development from the lower animals:

we have not any organ at all for knowing, or for “truth”: we “know” (or believe, or fancy) just as much as may be of use in the interest of the human herd, the species; and even what is here called “usefulness,” is ultimately only a belief, a fancy, and perhaps precisely the most fatal stupidity by which we shall one day be ruined.[17] [Nietzsche’s emphases]

Perhaps it is right to think that Nietzsche valorizes a quasi-Darwinian, historical-evolutionary perspective concerning the origin of language, where truth and consciousness develop from a “convention” made possible only by language. The problem concerning Nietzsche’s early theory of language, which is the beginning of his suspicion of just about everything, is the ethical.

Types of Truth: Rethinking On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense in light of Generative Anthropology

Gans claims that the human originated with the emergence of language on a scene, where a gesture of appropriation is aborted through the paradoxical emergence of the sign as a gesture of representation. Indeed, this suggests that there is a minimal, universal claim to be made for the human–language. On the other hand, we have Nietzsche explicitly stating that there is no universal, objective truth to be extracted from language, and we must therefore be suspicious of it. Ultimately the first forms of human language, for Nietzsche, were “proto-artistic” impulses. These impulses (arising from a drive to represent the external world in the “image” of the human) were gradually replaced with linguistic conventions for the sake of communal cohesion–and of the development of consciousness, which is a social network of communication, not an individual’s awareness. Clearly, Nietzsche is demonstrating the problem of metaphysical “truth.” Accordingly, for Nietzsche, the foundation of language is based on the “drive” to represent external phenomena (i.e., a rock). If, indeed, each individual responds to a particular external stimulus via an imagistic symbol, then we must characterise each individual response as closed off from another’s individual response to the exact same stimulus. Therefore, each individual human metaphor is entirely distinct from another. Hence there cannot be any communion, for Nietzsche, between the thing-in-itself and symbolic language charged by an instinctive “artistic drive” to represent stimuli. One theoretical maneuver to situate Nietzsche’s theory is to consider GA’s position on the notion of truth in relation to the originary hypothesis as found in Signs of Paradox.

In On Truth and Lie, Nietzsche writes: “whence in all the world comes the urge for truth?”[18] The chapter “The Two Varieties of Truth” in Signs of Paradox considers the problem of Nietzsche’s question about truth in relation to Gans’s hypothesis on the origin of language. For Gans, there are two distinctive variations of truth. The first category of truth, for Gans, is the ostensive (the truth of faith). The second: the declarative (the truth of reason). Language begins with the ostensive; that is, the first sign/grunt/gesture’s “intention” was to directly demonstrate its object of inquiry. Ostensive truth, for Gans, depends on the fact that “significance is prior to signification.”[19] Of course, the ostensive emerges before declarative truth. Indeed, if we are to peer beyond the propositional thought of the declarative, we arrive at the original ostensive gesture that was to simultaneously defer violence and produce formal closure of the originary sign. To go beyond propositions toward the ostensive means, for Gans, to escape from the “metaphysical prison-house of language,” whence ostensive truth “liberates from the formal propositions of metaphysics.”[20]

Yet what is ostensive truth? Obviously, it must be explained through a “model of the familial declarative conception.”[21] Here Gans offers the analogy of a child pointing to a cat, but the child declares the cat as “dog.” The use of the ostensive in this example “cannot be understood as simply equivalent to the use of the correct sign.”[22] What is vitally important for the ostensive truth of the sign, according to Gans, is the “significance prior to signification; the question of whether it is appropriate to use a sign at all [pointing to the cat] outweighs that of the appropriate sign to use [using the incorrect ostensive “dog”].”[23] In other words, we cannot conceive of the originary, ostensive sign as having a correlation to an assigned meaning. Rather, Gans claims the ostensive truth lies in the potential of something worth being re-presented in the first place; something a “nascent community” of proto-humans can draw their unified attention to, and something that risks becoming a cause of mimetic violence (if the gesture were not to be uttered). In other words, the thing that is to be signed through an ostensive gesture must be charged with the potential for the proto-community to perceive as a source of unity and disunity. For Gans, the truth of the ostensive is the “birth of the human.”[24] Why is the ostensive truth the “truth of faith,” however? Gans would contend that the “gesture of representation” (the first sign) instead of a gesture of appropriation” expresses the communally accepted truth “as revelation of central Being.”[25] In other words, for the emerging community of proto-humans, the ostensive sign (pointing to an object of dual relevance: unity and disunity) does not reveal the object in-itself. Rather, the ostensive sign “recognises an object that can only be represented.”[26] The sign that replaces an object in its absence leads to the emergence of the imperative. Gans claims that there is a tension that exists in the ostensive sign in the absence of its referent, which leads to the “awaiting characteristic of the imperative.”[27] In other words, the imperative uses the sign to demand the “making-present” of what is now absent from the scene. For Gans, this making present is an expression of desire.

Let us go back to Nietzsche’s theory of language as espoused in On Truth and Lie. What are we to make of Gans’s contention of ostensive truth in relation to Nietzsche’s theory of language? It would be useful to remember Nietzsche’s position that the representation of a nerve-stimulant is an instinctive, superfluous, over-reaching “artistic drive.” One observation is that this “artistic drive” corresponds to Gans’s notion of the desire expressed by the imperative, making the absent referent present in the imagination. Yet can we reconcile Gans’s ostensive sign with Nietzsche’s theory? GA explains the significance of the sign, whereas Nietzsche only accounts for signifying. To go back to first premises, for Nietzsche, “a word is the image of a nerve-stimulus in sounds.” Yet there is a fundamental difference between Nietzsche’s artistic transference of a response to a nerve-stimulus and Gans’s hypothesis. On the one hand, Nietzsche is referring to the instinct of an artistic drive to utter a word. On the other hand, Gans is referring to the production of the sign as self-demonstrating something significant for it to be uttered in the first place. For one, Nietzsche must rely on the aesthetic for the human to emerge as a human.

In the face of GA’s originary sign, we must declare that Nietzsche has come quite close to a plausible hypothesis on the origin of language. Nietzsche’s theory of language as espoused in On Truth and Lie reaches a close proximity to many fundamental theoretical postulates found in the originary hypothesis: (1) the emergence of a community with language, (2) the emergence of human consciousness as language, (3) the primacy of language as an anthropological model for the human, (4) and, the recognition that language is something immanent, not transcendent. If only Nietzsche had taken a step further to consider the fundamental importance of the primacy and function of the sign itself, as Gans has pointed out, we may not have found ourselves in such a characteristically postmodern age, suspicious of not only our “own” representations, but others as well. The quintessential importance of the sign is not that it is representative, but that it is reciprocal.

Conclusion

In Nietzsche’s theory as espoused in On Truth and Lie, the sign is cut off from reciprocation, from the collective centre, as an individual artistic image, and the ethical therefore has no place within the aesthetic emergence of language. For Nietzsche, there are no metaphysical truths; there is only what Nietzsche refers to as metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms, which bear no relation to Nature. Ultimately, Nietzsche would conclude by stating: “this conceptual edifice is an imitation [artistic process] of temporal, spatial, and numerical relationships in the domain of metaphor.”[28] From the early, unpublished writings of On Truth and Lie, Nietzsche draws many of his conclusions about the world from his theory of language as an artistic process, which lacks any objective truth whatsoever. Throughout his active career, Nietzsche maintains that metaphor has no truth-value or truth relation to the phenomenal world. He is therefore suspicious of the world of signs, specifically in relation to the conceptual. Generative anthropology has had quite a bit to say about Nietzsche, and to quote The Scenic Imagination: “Nietzsche was both the first genuine theoretician of the scene of representation and a dangerous mystifier whose historical hypothesis presents the scenic as the transcendence of the ethical, ‘beyond good and evil.’”[29]

Nietzsche’s originary scene of aesthetic representation does not require the ethical. Furthermore, we have an “instinct” or “drive” towards the formation of metaphors. To relegate human language to a mere instinct is to relegate the human to animality, to a kind of Darwinian nihilism, placing the human in the category of a mere higher order of animal. Nietzsche is conscious of this when he later attempts to ‘naturalise man.’ Nevertheless, Nietzsche’s theory of language assumes what he detests the most: a rigid dichotomy of commanding and obeying between both the drives and individual humans. In other words, Nietzsche proposes a scene of which the sacred centre is not the object of communal recognition to defer violence, but rather an instinctive drive to dominate nature, where he adamantly concludes, everything is “will to power and nothing besides.”[30] Indeed, the very origin of the “instinct” is tie up in Nietzsche’s all encompassing will to power. Gans, on the one hand, claims that language is coeval with the ethical–the deferral of violence through representation. Nietzsche, on the other hand, considers the ethical to have emerged from an aesthetic drive towards the formation of metaphors. The ethical exists as a kind of “slave drive” in service of a “social utility,” which according to him represents an error in the development of the human. Yet, if one is to think about generative anthropology while reading Nietzsche, one cannot help but notice his profound understanding that language is the essential characteristic of the human, regardless of whether it has been developed from an “instinct” or proto-artistic impulse. On the one hand, Gans declares, “human experience, as opposed to that of other animals, is uniquely characterised by scenic events recalled both collectively and individually through representations, the most fundamental of which are the signs of language.”[31] Nietzsche would contest the notion that language and/or consciousness has any value in representing the external world–or any value at all–because language itself is derived from the lower instincts.

Where Gans claims there is a series of singularities of scenes of representation, each echoing or representing the original scene, through communal recognition from the periphery to the centre, Nietzsche proposes a flux of drives and affects prompted by external stimuli, which are themselves incomprehensible by reason, stimulating the nerves into an imagistic representation into an acoustical drive forming metaphor. Language is the “conserving association of the instincts.” where “all our consciousness relates to errors.”[32] Yet the danger in Nietzsche’s originary scene of human representation lies precisely in his aesthetic vision of the production of metaphor, where Gans rightly suggests that the “paradoxical struggle with the Nietzschean self with its ‘own’ representations has been the obsession of philosophy ever since, arguably even of analytic philosophy, haunted by the same paradoxes in a more dryly schematic form.”[33] The originary hypothesis, I argue, offers a solution to the symptoms of a postmodern uncertainty of language, the Nietzschean crisis that has plagued modern thinking; that is, thinking the self out of the self.

What I have tried to impart is that looking at the minimal elements of Nietzsche’s understanding about language, its origin, and function, may give an indication of his particular formulation of the ethical. If language, for Nietzsche, is an instinct or drive towards the formation of metaphors, he is seeking for the deeper Dionysian instincts, which are bereft of an imagistic Apollonian structure, concepts, but are rather a superfluous creativity where only the individual is on the scene of representation. Nietzsche’s theory of language is a language governed only by a proto-artistic instinct, or drive towards the formation of ever-new metaphor. What Nietzsche fails to take into account, however, is a minimal hypothesis of the origin of language that incorporates the primacy of the ethical and the ostensivity of the original sign. To think of language as some retroactive regulator of the instincts in the service of social utility, which relegates the ethical to an artifice of the aesthetic impulse to represent the external world, is a dangerous way of thinking about the human that, in one form or another, continues today.