Článek

Michael Hauser  Philosophy and the Question How to Resolve the Ecological Crisis

O autorovi

Michael Hauser (1972), český filosof, vysokoškolský pedagog a překladatel. Vystudoval filosofii na FF UK - v dizertaci se zabýval myšlením Theodora W. Adorna (v přepracované podobě vyšla knižně). Působí ve Filosofickém ústavu Akademie věd v Oddělení současné kontinentální filosofie a přednáší na Pedagogické fakultě UK. Roku 2002 založil občanské sdružení Socialistický kruh. V roce 2007 k výročí Charty 77 inicioval výzvu Jsme občané! upozorňující na defekty demokracie v ČR. V březnu 2014 byl Poslaneckou sněmovnou PČR zvolen do Rady České televize. Hauser rozvíjí koncepce, které postihují krizové společenské tendence a poskytují východisko k promýšlení alternativ. Ve svých knihách se na současnou dobu dívá jako na dobu přechodu či interregna a takto pojímá dnešní politiku, kulturu a ekonomiku. Ve své filosofii navazuje na první generaci kritické teorie (Adorno, Marcuse, Fromm), na francouzské marxistické a postmarxistické filosofy (Althusser, Badiou, Ranciere, Balibar), na Slavoje Žižka a české kritické myslitele (Machovec, Kosík, Kalivoda).

Anotace

Příspěvek Michaela Hausera zdůrazdňuje stanovisko, že filosofii je možné aplikovat na aktuální světové problémy a na jevy, jako je například ekologická krize. Klíčem k tomu je vzkříšení otázky po legitimitě kapitalistického systému a následná snaha o vypracování alternativních ekonomických modelů.

Philosophy is accounted as the branch that is without an importance in terms of the current world. My contribution intends to point out that philosophy can be grasped in the way that the philosophy can be applied to, on contrary, the actual world problems such as an ecological crisis. It can throw a light on the question of its resolving as well.

What is “the conditional problem“?

Philosophical thinking may be explained as the questioning how we think and what we think. Question “how we think“ relates to the forms of thinking and throws a light on the conditions of thinking. It´s called noetics. Question “what we think“ applies to the problem of being and its structure. It can be conceived as revealing the conditions of all what exists. It´s named ontology. First sort of questioning intents on “esse rationis“, second sort of questioning on “esse reale“, if we may apply the expressions of the medieval scholars.

We can say that philosophical thinking differentiates the reality which is a condition of being of other reality from the reality whose being depends on the being of other reality. Philosophy analyzes conditions and has found different things as these conditions: arche, substance, man. Marx was a break in history of western philosophy in the sense that he conceptualized the real conditions of human beings as the crucial conditions. From this time, philosophy has not only been a pure thinking according to the example of geometry but has become an analysis of human being’s character as well.

In Marx’s opinion the human being is conditioned by the need of producting the means of living. The ecological crisis may be then conceived so that nature that had not been a problematic condition of producting the means of living became a problematic one. This way of questioning is named as “green historical materialism“ (Grundmann, 1991, p.51).

Nature may be called a conditional reality conditioning the human being and therefore all that mankind has ever created. If the conditional reality is threatened, we counter a conditional problem. I then argue that one of the tasks of philosophy consists in three following points:

  1. detecting and formulating the conditional problem

  2. pointing out which another realities are also threatened by this conditional problem

  3. searching for a way how to resolve the conditional problem

By this way of reasoning, the philosophy can provide us with an argument for thesis that a resolving of the ecological crisis is of a principal meaning for all the people regardless their believes.

Two explanations of the ecological crisis

This way of reasoning could be the basis for a critical rating of the submitted suggestions of a resolving the ecological crisis as well. In my contribution I take for granted that the ecological crisis is caused by human activity.

If the ecological crisis is caused by the human activity, then we can make a differance between two sorts of its depiction.

A. Human activity is bad (sinful, consume, selfish) and it means that the ecological crisis is possible to be resolved by a change of the human behavior. This calls for other moral code of mankind and a transformation of minds and hearts.

B. Human activity is, to a great extent, ruled by the logic of economic system. The ecological behavior is found being in contradiction with the ruling economic system, if we define the ecological behavior as a behavior whose goal is to protect the nature. Ecology calls for the limitation of economy and economy breaks the limitation down. Ecology requires less production but economy demands more production.[1. A proof of that is also provided us with the conception of „externality“ that can be understood as an effort to harmonize economy with ecology. The premise is a disharmony between them.]

From the standpoint A, we can come to a conclusion that the current people are worse than the people living in the past because the ecological crisis has, in global extent, never occured in human history. The goal of an ecological policy would consist in turning the modern man to the moral conscience (conservative standpoint)[2. E.g. the Czech philosopher Erazim Kohák] or in convincing some citizens to accept a form of volunteer self-repression (standpoint of the ecological organizations which belive in the force of the civic society).[3. E.g. “Friends of the Earth“]

Great misunderstanding tied to the point B, consists in a depictation of the present economic system. The mainstream of the current economical theory considers this economic system to be the “market“ economy which is the only form of free economic relations. This assumption is of crucial relevance. Current economic system is supposed to be the „market“ economy and from this assumption it follows that the change of that economic system would mean the loss of the free economy. This suggestion is the point of departure for neoclasical ecology that strives to make the ecological reguirements an object of the trade (Coase, 1960). That depiction of the present economical system is, however, too abstract and ahistorical. We should depart from concrete image of current economic system. This system then appears as monopolic and oligopolic, linked up to the state (Baran, Sweezy, 1973) and ruled by the institutions as MMF, WTO, WB (Korten, 1995). We can say a defendence of free market is, in the exact sense, a defendence of non-existing system because the market is free only seemingly.[4. Equality of entry conditions exists at most only on the fringe of the economy. See Habermas 1973 and Korten 1995.]

The difference between A and B then consists in that, according to A, human moral can change the economic system and create the ecological economy. According to B, the change of the economic system is a condition of resolving the ecological crisis because it´s necessary to have such a system that it´s not in the contradiction with the ecological behavior and even it supports such a behavior. The crucial question is then in which sense to change this system.

To make economical system green

We can departure from the ecological crisis being the conditional problem. We can see that its unresolving would threaten the condition of man‘s being. If we are of opinion that the economical system is a cause of this conditional problem, then it means that we should search for such a system which isn´t in the contradiction with ecology.

This task assumes two things: we have a complex description of the present system that contents the description of the productive force (technology) and the productive relations (Adorno, 1970; Wallerstein, 1979; Harvey, 1990). That should also define the contradiction between economy, on the one side, and the state and politics, on the other side (Habermas, 1973). It´s the descriptive part of the task. On the ground of this description we should provide a model of the „green“ economic system. It´s the normative part. This point, however, should be conceived in terms of a political force or an institution that could carry it out.

The ways of resolving, which accept the self-determinate logic of the capital, seem to fail because the goal of the capital is self-reproduction. The ecological agreements are restrained by the capital‘s logic and therefore chronically insufficient. If we then believe the logic of the capital is the same as the free market and the free market is the same as the individual freedom, it followsthat its logic may not be changed without the loss of the individual freedom. But we can draw another conclusion: in this case, the resolving of the ecological crisis is almost impossible. Do we have to resign to the resolving and to wait for a miracle?

I don´t think so. As Slavoj Žižek, the contemporary political philosopher, put it, the only possible way is that we would extent the border of our discussions and we would discuss the logic of the capital, i.e. that we would do a repolitization of economy. It means that we should see that it is necessary to “submit the way of producting to the social control“ (Žižek, Plädoyer fűr die Intoleranz, 2001, p. 91) and so to reclaim the possibility to decide about the things which touch living conditions of each of us. This author asks question wether one resolving doesn´t consist in any way of the unmediated socialization of the process of production (Žižek, Die Tűcke des Subjekts, 2001, p. 485).

If it appears that it´s, indeed, only way how to resolve the ecological crisis, we can resort to the economical models bracketing the logic of the capital. We can name these models:

Jaroslav Vaněk´s economical democracy, Roemer´s market socialism or W. Paul Cockshott´s and Allin Cottrell´s computer central planning.

Conclusion

If we account the present ecological crisis as the conditional problem and if we accept opinion that logic of the capital is in the.contradiction with an aim of the resolving of the ecological crisis, then we come to the conclusion that these models of economy are preferably which, ceteris paribus, submit the logic of capital to an aim of its resolving.

References:

Adorno, Th.W.: Spätkapitalismus oder Industriegesellschaft? In: Adorno, Th.W.: Aufsätze zur

Gesellschaftstheorie und Methodologie. Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1970,

p. 149-166.

Baran, P.A, Sweezy P.M.: Monopolkapital. Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1973.

Coase, R.: The Problem of Social Cost. Journal of Law and Economics, 3, 1960, 1-44.

Cockshott, W.P., Cottrell, A.: Towards a New Socialism. Russell Press, Nottingham 1993.

Grundmann, R.: Marxism and Ecology. Clarendon Press, Oxford 1991.

Habermas, J.: Legitimationsprobleme im Spätkapitalismus. Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am

Main 1973.

Harvey, D.: The Condition of Postmodernity. ? 1990.

Korten, D.: When Corporations Rule the World. Earthscan, London 1995.

Roemer, J.E.: A Future for Socialism. Harvard University Press 1994.

Vaněk, J.: Unified Theory of Social Systems. Selfpublished, Ithaca 2000.

Wallerstein, I.: The Capitalist World-Economy. Cambridge University Press 1979.

Žižek, Sl.: Die Tűcke des Subjekts. Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2001.

Žižek, Sl.: Plädoyer fűr die Intoleranz. Passagen Verlag, Wien 2001.