Hegel describes this [utilitarianism] as the relentless consumerism that appropriates, manipulates, and exploits the last shred of objectivity, including that of the social world. The human community will be reduced to a collective survival mechanism regulated by a tepid pleasure principle dedicated to the rule of maximum reciprocal serviceability: the gang or “troop” (Trupp) rampaging like animals in the garden of Eden - Hegel’s startling anticipation of Nietzsche’s description of utilitarianism as a herd morality. “One hand washes the other” (PhG §560). Hegel darkly suggests that this collective self-regulation is a thinly veiled defense against what lies beyond the pleasure principle. This is why utilitarianism is a slave ideology: I learn to wait. I pace my pleasure, I dilute it, I diversify it, I experiment with it, I count it, I parcel it into bite-sized units, I want it to last forever, I make use of the world so as to curb my own unappeasable desire to consume it, to destroy it, to use it up. The utilitarian social contract is therefore designed to produce a maximum of happiness: it tries to give a term or measure to desire, to prolong pleasure within “natural” limits, which amounts to reducing it to the thinnest terms of self-preservation: pleasure can be enhanced only by stretching it out into the empty bad infinite self-reproduction - sheer animal survival. “’Measure’ or proportion has the function of preventing pleasure in its variety and duration from being cut short; i.e., the function of ‘measure’ is immoderation” (PhG §560).
Rebecca Comay, Mourning Sickness, p. 67.
Only our most distant descendents will be able to decide whether we should be praised or reproached for first working out our philosophy before working out our revolution.
Heine, On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany, cited in Comay, Mourning Sickness.
“… jeden Begriff als
einen Punkt ansehen, der, als der Standpunkt eines Zuschauers,
seinen Horizont hat, d.i. eine Menge von Dingen, die aus demselben
können vorgestellet und gleichsam überschauet werden. Innerhalb
diesem Horizonte muß eine Menge von Punkten ins Unendliche
angegeben werden können, deren jeder wiederum seinen engeren
Gesichtskreis hat; d. i. jede Art enthält Unterarten, nach dem Prinzip
der Spezifikation, und der logische Horizont besteht nur aus kleineren Horizonten (Unterarten), nicht aber aus Punkten, die keinen
Umfang haben (Individuen).”
Kant, KrV, A 658/B 686
“(…) for the signifying chain by which the unique experience of the individual is constituted is perpendicular to the formal system on the basis of which the significations of a culture are constituted: at any given instant, the structure proper to individual experience finds a certain number of possible choices (and of excluded possibilities) in the systems of the society; inversely, at each of their points of choice the social structures encounter a certain number of possible individuals (and others who are not) – just as the linear structure of language always produces a possible choice between several words or several phonemes at any given moment (but excludes all others).”
Foucault, Les mots et les choses, p. 392.
The trouble is that the notion of fitting the totality of experience, like the notions of fitting the facts, or being true to the facts, adds nothing intelligible to the simple concept of being true. To speak of sensory experience rather than the evidence, or just the facts, expresses a view about the source or nature of evidence, but it does not add a new entity to the universe against which to test conceptual schemes.
D. Davidson, On The Very Idea of Conceptual Scheme, 16