The few passages shared below are from John Cottingham’s, Philosophy and the Good Life: Reasons and the Passions in Greek, Cartesian and Psychoanalytic Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 1998). I find the argument they adumbrate utterly persuasive and thus believe these propositions spell out at least one way we might interpret and take seriously the late-1960s slogan that “the personal is political.” As such, it should be axiomatic to any Left-inspired emancipatory strategy and project that traces its pedigree to the three principles enshrined in the tripartite motto that first appeared in the French Revolution: liberté, égalité, fraternité (the last can and should be interpreted in an anthropological sense sans a specific gender reference, although some have come to prefer the term ‘solidarity’ in its place, an unfortunate choice if only because it lacks the stronger connotations of community that resonate with the concept of ‘fraternity’)
For example, one can think of the meaning of this slogan as suggesting a political argument along the lines first brought to the table by self-defined feminists in which things heretofore, by design or default, were thought to be confined to the realm of “the private,” as matters that arise, one might say, in the intimate realm of everyday life, such as sexual or erotic relations, gender issues, women’s control over their own bodies, the household division of labor, marriage (or the choice to remain single) and so forth. In brief, these have political implications, and more significantly, claim classical political topics and questions in conjunction with conventional political actions invariably affect, in one way or another, the very constitution of privacy and the character of the intimate realm, including whether or not women are indeed truly equal to men in intimate, social and political realms. In short, the oppression of women and gender issues more widely flesh out the phrase “the personal is political.”
But we may accord an additional and no less important meaning to this proposition, one that suggests, for example, that questions of existential meaning (which are treated from various perspectives, both religious and non-religious or humanist), of vulnerability and suffering, of joy and the possibilities for happiness or human fulfillment, of the role—indeed salience—of the passions or emotions, of personal character or virtues and vices, of human nature and personhood, of personal and collective identity, of the meaning of “the Good,” and the good life, of knowledge and ignorance all, in one way or another, have implications for, are connected to or in dialectical and mutually constitutive relations with, the political, defined in the broadest sense (i.e., as something including but more than conventional power politics or the politics of elites, democratic or otherwise). In one sense, we might therefore say that realization of the significance of this proposition implies, assumes, or simply asserts the belief that conventional power politics can be brought closer in alignment with our visions of the Good, with the spiritual and ethical components of our personal lifeworlds or worldviews (the former being the individual or idiosyncratic articulation of one or more of the latter), with our most cherished values, with the inner world.
Perhaps another way to express this, like Gandhi, and using a metaphor more common to the religio-philosophical traditions of his family in India, is to say that politics is capable of being “purified”(for Gandhi, this involved a corresponding process of personal ‘purification’ or what we might prefer to term individuation or self-realization*), that public and political conduct is capable, in principle, of adhering to the norms and ethical principles and moral standards we apply to personal life and private conduct, that “the political” can and thus should endeavor to transcend both Realpolitik and raison d’état. In our time, the (especially philosophical) anarchists and post-structuralists have sought to trace the forces and effects of political power that has insinuated itself into the intimate realm (apart from the role such power plays in determining the nature and boundaries of private life) in both obvious and less visible ways which often serve to undermine or distort personal agency.
From a Gandhian-like conception of karma yoga, those of us on the Left who are genuinely committed to the path of spiritual and/or ethical living (i.e, not as some sort of New Age fad, affectation or lifestyle), who believe existential questions cannot be severed from political ones, that human suffering of all kinds is an urgent political subject (not always eliminable, to be sure, at least insofar as it is intrinsic to the human condition), that individuation and self-realization have political relevance and ramifications, that we must come to understand how the “inner world” is affected by and in turn capable of affecting the common good or the “Good society,” we are endeavoring or struggling to embody in political praxis the complex and subtle connections between the service of suffering humanity and the processes of individuation and self-realization (what Gandhi understood as spiritual self-purification).
Cottingham:
“The fact is that vulnerability—to pain, to loss, to fear, ultimately to extinction—is not simply a function of psychological or developmental difficulties, but is part of our very nature as human beings—one of the signs of existence [dukkha] as the Buddhists have it. And unless moral life can be lived in a compartmentalized way, in a way that ignores or dangerously blindfolds us to that vulnerability (and this would involve a sacrifice of our wholeness, our integrity), then we are going to need an askesis [‘spiritual exercises’ as found, for example, among the Stoics and monastic and mystical traditions] that enables us to come to terms with it.”
“Before we can begin on the project of seeing how we should live, we first have to embark on the task of trying to understand ourselves. That much, at least, is fully in accord with a long classical tradition stretching from the famous injunction at Delphi right down to Pope’s Essay on Man: “Know then thyself.” But what is new is the insistence that the process has to begin with an attempt to come to terms with the darker side of our nature—the side which is not revealed by simple introspection and rational weighing of ‘what on balance we most want,’ but which will be grasped only at the end of a long process of recovery, rehabilitating those parts of the self which are initially submerged beneath the level of ordinary everyday awareness.”
“The problem of mastering, or at least accommodating, the passions was seen in both Greek and in early modern ethics as absolutely central to philosophy’s goal of teaching us how to live. But the solutions offered by both of these earlier systems were defective in important respects, and…the defects only begin to be remedied with the development of the unconscious—the notion that important parts of the self are not fully transparent to the deliberations of reason.”
Cottingham turns, rightly I think, to psychoanalytic theory to transcend (aufheben) the Enlightenment trajectory (with Greek roots) of a purely ratiocentric philosophy and ethics (there are exceptions to this characterization, but the rise of Romanticism testifies to the extent of its truth), endeavoring “to uncover the seeds of an approach which comes to terms with the incapacity of controlling reason to settle the conditions for human well-being, while at the same time not abandoning the values of systematic analysis and rational reflection [which are, of course, intrinsic to psychoanalytic theory and practice].”
* For a thorough and incisive analysis of what Gandhi intended by the “purification of politics,” see the chapter on same in Raghavan Iyer’s nonpareil study, The Moral and Political Thought of Mahatma Gandhi (Oxford University Press, 1979; 2nd ed. Concord Grove Press, 1983).
A taste of further reading:
- Appiah, Kwame Anthony. The Ethics of Identity (Princeton University Press, 2005).
- Appiah, Kwame Anthony. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (W.W. Norton & Co. 2006).
- Bardacke, Frank. Trampling Out the Vintage: Cesar Chavez and the Two Souls of the United Farmworkers (Verso, 2011).
- Bilgrami, Akeel. Secularism, Identity, and Enchantment (Harvard University Press, 2014).
- Burston, Daniel. The Legacy of Erich Fromm (Harvard University Press, 1991).
- Coady, C.A.J. Messy Morality: The Challenge of Politics (Oxford University Press, 2008).
- Cottingham, John. On the Meaning of Life (Routledge, 2003).
- Cottingham, John. The Spiritual Dimension: Religion, Philosophy and Human Value (Cambridge University Press, 2005).
- Coy, Patrick G. A Revolution of the Heart: Essays on the Catholic Worker (Temple University Press, 1988).
- Danielson, Leilah. American Gandhi: A.J. Muste and the History of Radicalism in the Twentieth Century (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013).
- Danto, Elizabeth Ann. Freud’s Free Clinics: Psychoanalysis and Social Justice, 1918-1938 (Columbia University Press, 2005).
- Frost, Jennifer. “An Interracial Movement of the Poor”: Community Organizing and the New Left in the 1960s (New York University Press, 2001).
- Ganeri, Jonardon and Clare Carlisle, eds. Philosophy as Therapeia (Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement: 66) (Cambridge University Press, 2010).
- Ghosh, B.N. Beyond Gandhian Economics: Towards a Creative Deconstruction (Sage Publications, 2012).
- Goodin, Robert E. Reflective Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2003).
- Green, Marcus E. and Serap A. Kayatekin, eds. Special Issue: Marxism and Spirituality, Rethinking Marxism: a journal of economics, culture & society, Vol. 28, Nos. 3-4 (July-October 2016).
- Iyer, Raghavan. Parapolitics: Toward the City of Man (Oxford University Press, 1979).
- Lynch, Michael P. True to Life: Why Truth Matters (MIT Press, 2004).
- Nussbaum, Martha C. The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton University Press, 1994).
- Nussbaum, Martha C. Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice (Oxford University Press, 2016).
- Ransby, Barbara. Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (University of North Carolina Press, 2003).
- Rodrigues, Valerian, ed. The Essential Writings of B.R. Ambedkar (Oxford University Press, 2002).
- Rorty, Amélie Oksenberg. Mind in Action: Essays in the Philosophy of Mind (Beacon Press, 1988).
- Rustin, Michael. The Good Society and the Inner World: Psychoanalysis, Politics and Culture (Verso, 1991).
- Wiggins, David. Ethics: Twelve Lectures on the Philosophy of Morality (Harvard University Press, 2006).
- Zelliot, Eleanor. Ambedkar’s World: The Making of Babasaheb and the Dalit Movement (Navayana Publishing, 2013 edition).
I also have a more than a few bibliographies chock full of titles germane to topics broached above: please see here for a list with links.
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