| Review of: | Reflections of Equality by Christoph Menke |
|---|---|
| Reviewed By: | Steven Levine |
| Reviewed in: | Constellations |
| Date accepted online: | 14/01/2008 |
| Published in print: | Volume 14, Issue 03, Pages 454-461 |
Book Reviews
In recent years Christoph Menke has argued for the provocative thesis that a correct understanding of modernity must be situated in relation to tragedy. While one does not hear this thesis often today, it has a distinguished lineage, being offered in different versions by Hegel, Schlegel, Weber, Freud, Simmel, and Benjamin. All of these thinkers take it that modernity is the time in which tragedy no longer exists, either because modernity has definitively overcome tragedy, leaving it behind, or because tragedy only arises through Modernity's self-vitiation or end. For our purposes, the former position, best represented by Hegel, is most important. Tragedy for Hegel represents a situation of irreconcilable practical conflict, a situation in which there is no way to adjudicate between the disparate normative claims that agents take to be binding. What leads to tragedy, at least in the ancient world, is the fact that practical agents do not separate themselves, through a process of reflection, from their first-order normative commitments. Instead of ordering their commitments based upon a principle of reason, the agents described in ancient tragedy stand directly under a normative principle which conflicts with other principles of equal weight. Hegel argues that with the emergence of the modern autonomous subject a figure emerges who, through reflection, stands beyond these first-order norms and so beyond the conflicts that they enter into. The modern subject does this: 1) by scheduling her normative commitments according to a self-grounded rational principle or principles - i.e., the moral law or principles of justice - in such a way that deliberation about what is best to do will not be subject to irreconcilable conflict, and 2) by acting in accordance with these principles in such a way as to dissolve the pre-given norms and practices that she finds as social givens, i.e., precisely those norms and practices that the ancient tragic figures stood under unreflectively. Here the conditions for tragic conflict are overcome.
In contrast to this Hegelian picture, Menke argues that modernity must not be seen as having overcome tragedy but as itself tragic. This means that modernity's ethical/political order is subject to irreconcilable conflicts that cannot be overcome through reflection or the power of reason. Stated so baldly, this could remind one of Isaiah Berlin's liberal pluralism. But Menke's argument runs much deeper than Berlin's. While Berlin accepts the irreducible plurality of norms and values, he also accepts that a liberal normative order can provide a framework in which these conflicts can be worked out before becoming violent antagonisms. His pluralism is thus domesticated by the emergence, at the level of reflection, of the liberal normative order. In contrast, Menke argues that the principle normative idea of modernity, equality, not only enters into conflict with other norms and values, but is itself inherently conflictual. The purpose of Menke's book
Menke's position stands in contrast to two other reflective views of equality: 1) a mainstream view that thinks equality is a self-sufficient normative concept derived from the "'natural' capacity of rationality as the capacity of justification" (9) (Kant, Mill, Rawls and Habermas), and 2) a view that questions equality, not from the standpoint of its justificatory ground but in terms of its consequences for individuals (Burke, Schiller, Nietzsche, Foucault). Although these positions oppose one another, Menke thinks that they share the same insufficient idea of equality as something with a 'simple and homogeneous constitution' that can be either reflectively grounded from within or opposed globally from the outside. Both views therefore "overlook the fact that the idea of equality already contains its other, the normative orientation toward individuality, in itself. This is what I [call] the dialectical constitution of equality" (13). What makes this internal relation an example of a
In the first programmatic essay of the volume 'The Self-Reflection of Equality' Menke unfolds this dialectic in great detail. Equality for Menke is the 'principle normative idea of modernity' because both the legal and the ethical spheres are mediums that realize the "same egalitarian understanding of normative rightness: a practical decision can only be normatively correct if it accords to everyone the same weight as everyone else" (4). Equality in its fundamental sense must be seen as not only involving the impartial application of moral and legal rules, but as informing the process by which the
Some philosophers have taken it that with this argument Menke is simply undertaking a negative-dialectical
The second way of interpreting the charge that Menke dissolves the idea of equality does not ascribe to Menke perfectionist motivations, but sees him as grounding the idea of equality in something non-rational. This charge, which is put forward by Habermas, seems well founded. As Menke says the ground of equality "cannot be attained by means of the concept of practical reason" but is to be found in a "consideration of the suffering of each individual that is expressed as a complaint;
The second part of Menke's book, which we can only briefly mention, includes two essays that elaborate more specifically the normative conflicts that beset modern societies. Specifically, Menke tries to show that the conflicts - between the coercive effects of equality and the individual, between justice and freedom - which beset modern societies can only be gotten into focus by the discovery of the concrete individual and his or her needs. This discovery is vital because without it the
One of the great virtues of Menke's book is that it unfolds the negative-dialectical thesis concerning equality in a rigorous and clear manner. For those who have difficulty reading Adorno for stylistic reasons this is something to celebrate. Another virtue of this book is that it does not simply discuss its object from the outside but rather performatively enacts the negatively-dialectical constitution of equality. For readers who are accustomed to analytical discussions of political topics this will pose a challenge. However, Menke's book is well worth reading because it introduces into contemporary discussion - in a way that is markedly different from standard liberal theories - a position that puts the individual and his or her needs squarely at the center of ethical and political reflection.