Table Of ContentReality
Its Dreams
and
Reality
Its Dreams
and
Raymond Geuss
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, En gland 2016
Copyright © 2016 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
First printing
Library of Congress Cataloging- in-P ublication Data
Geuss, Raymond, author.
Reality and its dreams / Raymond Geuss.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-674-50495-0
1. Pol iti cal science— Philosophy. 2. Politics,
Practical. 3. Utopias. I. Title.
B65.G48 2016
320.01—d c23 2015032021
Contents
Preface vii
1 Dystopia: The Elements 1
2 Realism and the Relativity of Judgment 25
3 Chaos and Ethics 51
4 Russell Brand, Lady T, Pisher Bob,
and Preacher John 64
5 The Idea of a Critical Theory, Forty Years On 79
6 István Hont (1947–2013) 85
7 The Moral Legacy of Marxism 91
8 Economies: Good, Bad, Indifferent 117
9 Can the Humanities Survive Neoliberalism? 148
10 Identifi cation and the Politics of Envy 163
11 Identity, Property, and the Past 184
12 The Future of Evil 204
13 Satire, Who Whom? 218
14 The Radioactive Wolf, Pieing, and the
Goddess Fashion 226
15 What Time Is It? 253
16 Augustine on Love, Perspective,
and Human Nature 261
Notes 279
Index 295
Preface
The contents of our dreams, imaginings, hopes, fantasies, and
inventions should not be mistaken for elements of our waking world.
Nevertheless in another sense dreams, desirous projections, utopian
hopes are a part of our reality. That we have the ones we have is a
fact about us. They do not come from nowhere. As Feuerbach noted,
we imagine the god we need, and so a study of the nature of that god
will tell us a lot about us, our needs, and our situations. Without that
knowledge, we do not know ourselves fully, but part of what we need
to know is from what real source our imaginary constructions arise.
As a response to what real diffi culties do we imagine that the world
ought to be other than it is? Rather than following Feuerbach, and
looking for the roots of our moral conceptions and our pol iti cal
fantasies in the reality of our situation, philosophy in the English-
speaking world has since the 1970s increasingly turned to Kant. Kant
claimed that his Critical Philosophy represented a “Copernican Rev-
olution” in that it vindicated a major shift in the way philosophy was
to proceed and how it was to conceive of what it was doing. Rather
than starting from the world and asking then how human subjects
came to know that world, one needed to reverse the order. It was nec-
essary to begin by studying the conditions of the possibility of
vii
viii PREFACE
experience, conditions rooted in and prescribed by the nature of the
human cognitive subject. These conditions put limits to what we can
know and how knowledge must be structured. Only then could one
go about the task of studying how the world was constituted, and this
would always mean how it was constituted in the light of “the condi-
tions of the possibility of experience.” We might say, although Kant
would probably not have put it this way, that he preached a priority
of epistemology (study of the conditions of the possibility of experi-
ence and hence of knowledge) over ontology. Similarly, some phi los-
o phers followed the lead of Richard Rorty in thinking there was
a parallel “linguistic turn” sometime in the early twentieth century.
If all knowledge had to be formulated in a language, it might be
thought essential to study the nature of language before embarking
on an investigation of what we could know (and a fortiori of how the
world was constituted). In po liti cal philosophy, fi nally, one might
wish to speak of a similar “normative turn” which took place in the
1970s. Instead of studying human societies, their needs, technolo-
gies, specifi c institutions, cultural forms, and history, as the basic
starting point and continuing framework for understanding and
evaluating them and for orienting potential po liti cal action, most
contemporary po liti cal phil os o phers in the English- speaking world
turned their attention to a purportedly pure normative realm that
could be studied in relative isolation from the messy facts of history
and the empirical study of human society. Philosophy being the
kind of discipline it is, of course, there is no consensus on the exact
status of this realm, how it was internally constituted, and what its
relation to real human action should be. Some phi los o phers think
we have moral intuitions and should begin by getting clear about
them (although this “clarity” is not to include any knowledge of the
origin of these intuitions or the actual social results of holding them);
others hold that preparation for a “normative evaluation” of politics
is best conducted via a thought experiment in which one imagines
anonymous people trying to make decisions under various artifi cial
conditions, such as that they are ignorant of certain facts about the
world; some begin with a simple stipulation of a set of “rights” whose
status is not really seriously questioned; others favor still other
variants. What is common is the systematic exclusion of sociology,
PREFACE ix
real politics, and history in favor of an appeal to some kind of “nor-
mativity” which is conceived as being contrasted with them.
It has often been pointed out that Kant’s Copernican Revolution
was really a counterrevolution. That is, Ptolemy put man in the
center of the universe and had the heavenly bodies revolve around
him; Copernicus displaced the human subject from this central po-
sition. With Kant, however, man (or “the fi nite rational agent”) goes
back into the middle as the fi rst and most important object of philo-
sophical attention. So also the “normative turn” is best understood
as a counterrevolution against historically and so ciol og ic ally sophis-
ticated views about ethics and politics developed in the period of
Herder and Marx (that is, roughly 1770 to 1850), which continued to
represent an important strand of thinking until the normative deluge
of the late 1970s and early 1980s. The followers of Herder (as one
might call them for the sake of conv e nience) held that “normative
ethical and po liti cal conceptions” did not arise from nowhere, as di-
vine commands or ahistorical imperatives of pure reason, and that
their origins in historically constituted societies were not always po-
liti cally and ethically irrelevant.
The chapters in this book are held together by a certain outlook.
This is the view that the normative (counter)revolution has been an
unmitigated catastrophe for ethics, politics, and the humanities in
general. The reasons for the success of “normative approaches” in-
clude the failure of the movements for po liti cal, social, and economic
change of the 1960s, and the especial suitability of normativism as
an ideology for the established economic and po liti cal structures
that, after the challenge of the 1960s, w ere able to entrench them-
selves even more fi rmly than before. It is a constituent part of the
view that I am proposing that I can assert this while also claiming
that normativism is a cognitively distorting way of looking at society,
and also morally and pol iti cally reprehensible. This is a consistent
thing to say (which is not to say it is true) because I do not accept the
sharp dichotomies between History and Normativity, Fact and Value,
Ought and Is, Philosophical and Nonphilosophical, Empirical and
Rational, which the normativist wishes to impose as preconditions
to discussion. The chapters in this book are part of the attempt to
see how the world would look if one were to undo the normativist
