Wittgenstein: Sin and Sovereignty

Wittgenstein notes in his posthumously published remarks on Cause and Effect: Intuitive Awareness:

The basic form of our game must be one in which there is no such thing as doubt.—What makes us sure of this?  It surely can’t be a matter of historical certainty.

Wittgenstein's later philosophy was rooted in the notion of a language-game, a unified system of words and activities.  Language-games have two general features:  they are arbitrary, and they are learned.  For example, modern educated people may have a concept of imaginary numbers, but an isolated tribe may have no concept of number at all, and certainly no concept of an imaginary number.  We can compare the respective meaning of the Coke bottle in the movie the Gods Must be Crazy.  Modern civilization ascribes one meaning to a Coke bottle, but to the San tribe, it possesses a different meaning. 

With respect to the second point, conventions of language and customs are learned, they are transmitted by parents and teachers to children, who master the conventions without question or doubt.  Only when a child learns a certain basic level of linguistic competency is the possibility of doubt on the table.

Mathematics (and logic) depends upon a system of determinant definitions, e.g. "2+2 = 4" or "'A v ~A' is true".  Mathematics is an activity that human beings engage in out of love, but it is also a tool that human beings use to develop applied techniques.  The question of whether '2+2' could sometimes equal 4 and sometimes 5 is not permitted in the standard conventions of mathematics.  It is not false, it is meaningless within the language-game of mathematics.  It is akin to the question of what happens after someone takes an opponent's king in chess:  in chess, the game always ends before an opponent takes the king.  But the other point is the fact that "'2 + 2 = 4' is true" does not tell us something profound about the nature of the universe or the nature of the human mind.  Mathematics has determinant conventions because without these conventions, it would not be a useful tool.  Poetry has very fluid and malleable conventions, but whatever its uses, it is not helpful in the design and construction of a suspension bridge.  The question of the superiority of poetry to mathematics, or vice versa, is not question of "truth" in the sense of correspondence with some sensible reality, but rather with the end, or good, to which these tools are placed.  There are two types of good, instrumental goods, means, and final good, ends.  The value of mathematics and natural science, at the end of the day for most people, is because they are instrumental goods for the develop of techniques, in the form of engineering and medical applications.    In contrast, poetry is an example of a final good, a good in itself, which people pursue without regard to its instrumental value.  Thus, any thoughtful, intelligent person must say that good poetry is superior to a good innovation in mathematics.   

This discussion leads us back to sin, the acquisition of the knowledge of good and evil.  In a form of life without doubt, everyone plays their determinant role in the social order without question.  Goods and territory are distributed in accordance a predetermined scheme.  Each individual participates in the totality in full obedience and the community embodies harmony and peace.  There is a cooperative social network of production and distribution.  This is the "Garden" to which we seek to return.

With the genesis of doubt comes a sense of individuation, the possibility of defection from the communal harmony.  With the prospect of defection comes the question of distrust, loyalty, and the possibility of hidden enemies in the community.  We speak of the soul, because no matter what a person can say or do, we can always doubt their loyalty to the preservation of the communal order.  Likewise, with doubt and defection comes repression, the cooperative order, in order to maintain obedience, must punish and repress its defectors.  Ideally, punishment allows the defector to re-integrate themselves into the community, e.g. pay their debt to society.  On the other hand, if their crime is too grave (in the perception of the community), they must be exiled or executed.  In addition, punishment helps to deter would-be defectors from openly defying the social order.

In terms of collective production and distribution, we can distinguish between the process of decision-making and the execution.  Decision-making can reside in one or many, and the execution of orders may be performed by one or many.  D -> M -> O.  Decisions are made on production and distribution, resulting in operations on material objects to produce and distribute goods.  With the creation of doubt comes the emergence of sovereignty, there is decision-making, execution, but instead of operations on objects, the operations are performed on subjects.   D -> M -> S.  At the same time, the decision-makers monitor and measure the subjects, and use this intelligence in decision-making.  S -> M -> D.  This occurs, whether voluntarily, through voting, or involuntarily, through surveillance. 


Sovereignty defies ultimate rational analysis because it is ultimately self-referential.  The Sovereign is one and many.  The exercise of power defines the subjects in the image of the sovereign, but the formation of the subjects defines the nature of the sovereign order.  For example, a realm of Christian subjects will be Christian, and its political monitoring and repression of heretics and non-Christian minorities will establish its political identity as Christian nation.  A realm of Liberal subjects will be Liberal, and its repression and monitoring of heretics and anti-Liberal minorities will establishes its political identity as a Liberal nation.  Autonomy, or self-law (autos + nomos), belongs ultimately to the sovereign state, which has the capacity to legislate and enforce laws.  The notion of individual autonomy is ultimately a misnomer, as law provides the principle of order (arche) to a collective of individuals.  An individual is defined by their role in the order, in accordance with the arche.  An individual can never exercise true autonomy, they can only, on their own, defect, living as outlaw in the state of anarchy, until they are captured and brought to justice, and reconstituted into the lawful order.  

With perspicacity, the ancient Greeks supposed that world existed in chaos until the coming of the gods, who brought with them nomos, law and order.  We can distinguish between norms and rules.  Norms are unwritten customs or practices, while rules are formalized, written imperatives.  As Goethe said, "In the beginning was the deed."  Human societies are organized in the first instance by unspoken norms and customs.  The meaning of words is parasitic upon an shared order of customs.  Nomos in the primary sense is manifest in customary forms of life.  Only on account of custom, can written laws be meaningfully interpreted.  A people do not have, and cannot reach an agreement in spoken and written language, without participating in the shared unspoken (and unspeakable) normative order.  The constituting power which gives rise to the constituted order orders all members.  The arche are in this sense above the members of the sovereign body, and it is the arche, the hidden principality, which makes the body intelligible, unified.  Living in a dark age, we equate law with written rules, without considering the unspoken norms which make the rules capable of interpretation.      

Sovereign rule entails that power belongs to the office, never to individuals.  Political power requires the cooperation between decision-makers and the bureaucracy, and the acquiescence of the subjects.  Power belongs to the role of the decision-maker, and secondarily to the officials implementing the decisions, but never to the person playing the role.  Power is only manifest in transpersonal relationships.  For this reason, all political careers end in failure, as one can never ultimately have power, one can only exercise power, and one as one's self is defined by its exercise (e.g. what you are, not who you are).  Even the prophet, who is followed on the basis of personal charisma, claims to speak on behalf of one above him.  Although sovereignty can never ultimately be democratic (though the sovereign can manifest as democracy), sovereignty can never lie in a lone individual or a group of individuals either.  If there were no society, Margaret Thatcher would not exist.  The order is power, and power is the order, and from power can flow written constitutions, laws, and procedures for the transfer of office.  There can be no legal democratic election without the preexistence of election laws and procedures.  Even an informal conclave of Saxons electing a war leader must collectively ascribe to democratic norms, or the result will not have the power to command obedience.  Control is established, without an ultimate controller.  Even a king or a despot depends on maintaining coalitions in support of the regime through carrots and sticks, and must fear the appearance of rival factions of elites or a de-stablization from a revolt of the subjects.  Every nation punishes its internal enemies, and makes war on its external enemies when the opportunity presents itself.       

We live in a world of sovereign nation-states.  As John Mearsheimer points out, the international space is anarchic, there is no higher power that will intervene to resolve disputes between nation-states.   Nations cannot discern the true intentions of their rivals, and so they must assume the worst.  Nations inevitably act as expansionist powers, in order to increase their power relative to their rivals, never content unless they attain hegemony.  The means of expansion leads invariably to war, and according to Mearsheimer, the successful prosecution of war requires primarily land armies, which necessitates conscript age population and industrial production.  The nation with the largest military age population and the highest industrial output, and the most efficient capability of transforming industrial production into war production will be the most powerful nation in the world--all other factors, especially geographical, being equal.

The fundamental political problem of human beings is the issue of trust, which stems from the knowledge of good and evil, and the knowledge of the invisible human capacity for evil.  This lack of trust translates into the rise of sovereign powers, which in turn form, educate, control and punish their subjects.  According to Genesis, Eve and her descendents were cursed to bearing children in agony, often dying in childbirth, and to the subjection to their husbands.  Adam, on the other hand, was cursed to labor in the fields, and both were cursed with death.  If we consider the natural defense needs of the nation, youth for conscription, and production in order to field equipped armies, we can understand the connection between sin and sovereignty.  A nation requires a procreative ethos which necessitates that women to devote themselves to having children, sacrificing their lives, often literally, for the benefit of their children and the nation.  (We can imagine a world before modern medicine, where a family might have ten children in order to have two that live to adulthood.)  A nation requires production, which requires men devote themselves to labor in order to provide for war production, as well as serving as soldiers at the behest of their leaders.  Every citizen must sacrifice, even to the point of death, for the good and the security of the whole.  These general principles can be ignored or neglected, but their abandonment ultimately leaves the nation vulnerable to foreign conquest.  Only through the metaphorical, and literal, death of the subjects can a nation survive and perhaps attain hegemony through the destruction and defeat of its enemies.  Further, because hegemonic power creates conditions of opulence and security, the ethos of sacrifice necessary to attaining hegemony inevitably decays into an ethos of hedonism and selfishness, that places the individual over the collective security of the group.  Individualistic hedonism does not end the order of sacrifice, it defers it to future generations, who will only pay a greater price.  To suspend collective sacrifice means to sacrifice the future.  Greatness is possible, but a sustainable society based on collective self-fulfillment or individual "autonomy" is not.  All hegemonic power is temporary, and civilizations ultimately fail.  This is the human condition:  the wages of sin are death.     

The above is intended as descriptive, but it can also serve as a prescriptive message, should we value the collective security of our nation.