ABSTRACT
Please find below an early draft of my paper “Self and Property.” The central question I will be discussing is: how does the self’s having of the external world correlate with the self’s being its self. I have already investigated this issue in Levinas, Hegel, and Marx. I am continuing to work through this problem in Locke and Rousseau, Kant and Fichte, Stirner and Proudhon, and Husserl and Heidegger. Below is a series of notes and texts I have patched together thus far. The discussion in the final presentation paper will be balanced differently, and will develop a consistent narrative thread.
This current draft traces Selfhood, and Property, and the Person:
I. LOCKE AS MODERN THEORIST OF THE PERSON AND PROPERTY
In his political and philosophical writings, John Locke articulates the notion of the self as an individual property owner. His Second Treatise on Government can be understood as a response to two currents of thought, both based on the biblical narrative of Genesis: legal theorists Grotius and Puffendorf proposed the idea that the earth was originally given to all men in common; Robert Filmer proposed that all ownership derives from God’s original dispensation of the earth to Adam and that property rights and political power follow exclusively and absolutely according to patriarchal descent from Adam.
In opposition to this, Locke bases the right to private property in an individual’s self-identity and self-ownership. “Though the earth and all inferior creatures be common to all men, yet every man has a ‘property’ in his own ‘person.’” For Locke, all property ownership ultimately originates in the fact that a man is his own, proper person.
In addition to locating the right to private property in an individual’s self-identity and self-ownership, Locke is generally credited as being the first thinker to propose a labor theory of property. One’s personhood is not an abstraction, but the concrete materiality of one’s body. By combining the efforts of one’s own physical body with the objects in the external world, the person can turn these objects into his own personal property.
The civil State arises from an agreement among persons to mutually respect and protect each other’s individual property.
ROUSSEAU
Especially
in the Second Discourse on Inequality, Rousseau contests Locke’s image
of the person as a property owner.
Although
individuals are born with inequalities in certain natural or physical
properties such as strength and intelligence, this does not automatically
justify moral and cultural inequalities in property ownership.
This
distinction seems related to his differentiation between two different kinds of
love: “We must not confuse Proper Love [amour proper, typically
translated as “self-love”] with love of oneself [amour de soi même],
two very different passions in their natures and their effects. Love of oneself
is a natural feeling which inclines every animal to watch out for its own
preservation and which, directed in man by reason and modified by pity,
produces humanity and virtue. Proper-love [amour propre] is only a
relative feeling, something artificial and born in society, which inclines each
individual to think of himself as more important than all the others, which
inspires in men all the evils they do to each other, and which is the true
source of honour.”
Proper
love thus arises out of a competition between actors in the sociopolitical
realm. Whereas each person in a state of
nature is his own master, the civic mutual dependences creates bonds of
servitude. Thus Rousseau claims “it is
impossible to make any man a slave, unless he be first reduced to a situation
in which he cannot do without the help of others.”
Rousseau
argues in the Second Discourse that property ownership arises not from
individual personhood but rather from social coercion:
THE first man who, having enclosed a piece of
ground, bethought himself of saying This is mine, and found people
simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. … The idea of property depends on many prior
ideas, which could only be acquired successively, and cannot have been formed
all at once in the human mind.
KANT
From Metaphysic of Morals:
Persons:
(1)
A person is a subject who is capable of having his
actions imputed to him. Moral personality is, therefore, nothing but the
freedom of a rational being under moral laws; and it is to be distinguished
from psychological freedom as the mere faculty by which we become conscious of
ourselves in different states of the identity of our existence. Hence it
follows that a person is properly subject to no other laws than those he lays
down for himself, either alone or in conjunction with others.
(2)
Someone
can be his own master (sui iuris) but not owner of self (sui dominis)
since he is accountable to humanity in his own person (6:270)
[Property] Right is “having”, a
type of spatial and temporal relation, as under my control, a predicable or
derivative concept in category of causality.
Doctrine of Right defines the
rightfully mine (meum iuris) and rightfully yours (tuem iuris)
Two kinds of possession
|
A Empirical |
Sensible |
Physical
proximity |
Analytic fact of
holding |
No p. property
in Nature |
Unilateral
acquisition, choice |
Individual
outside of society (perhaps fictional) |
|
B Rightful |
Intelligible,
noumenal, rational |
Physical presence
/ contact not necc. |
|
Civil Law
necessary for p. Property |
Omnilateral
contract [universal law of freedom] |
Social,
political, civil |
|
A |
Positive use |
Individual will |
Right of person
to self. Right of humanity in our own person |
Acquisition |
|
|
B |
Negative restriction
(exclusive) |
Will of all;
common will |
EXTERNAL:
Original common Possession of earth is precondition 4 exclusive ownership |
Ownership |
Right to coerce
and refuse coercion |
General Kant:
·
All
justification requires a public ground (eg categorical imperative, aesthetic
judgment)
· According to Henry Allison and Dieter Henrich, all three of Kant’s critiques are organized according to the common legal distinction between quid facti (fact of acquisition) and quid juris (right to have something).
HEGEL
AND PERSON
Hegel
continues the genealogy of property and persons
For Hegel, property rights
neither derive from specific claims of particular individuals nor emanate from
an abstract speculative ideal. Instead,
these rights emerge historically along with the general development of the
world spirit and of human subjectivity.
In Philosophy of Right, Hegel seeks the rational historical
meaning of the actual institution of property ownership in his contemporary
world.
Joachim
Ritter draws attention to the historical importance of Hegel's connection
between personhood and property. Hegel
transforms Kant's categorical imperative, a command to act according to a maxim
that one could accept as a universal law, into a generalized rule for all
particular relationships between persons.
"The commandment of right is therefore: be a person and respect others as
persons." Ritter explains that the
term "person" is not merely a generic synonym for an instance of the
human species, but has a specific historical valence for Hegel. In Roman Law,
the term "person" was used to refer only to a certain type of citizen
who had certain types of rights.
"What is called the right of persons in Roman Law, it regards a
human being only if he enjoys a certain status." Among his other privileges,
a Roman person is permitted to own as property certain unfree individuals,
Roman slaves. Hegel's assessment that history has made freedom common among all
persons therefore correlates with his analysis of the generality of property
rights.
For
Hegel, personhood is the first step in the ethical journey of the discrete
individual. Prior to socialization, one must be able to reflect upon one's own
unique freedom. Waldron explains, "To be a person is to be a subject
preoccupied self-consciously with the freedom of one's will" That is, a person is an independent
individual who (a "who" and not a "that") is capable of
having rights and of realizing freedom.
As a capacity for self-possession and for external appropriation,
property ownership is the first right of this emergent personhood. It is the foundation for the rights to life,
liberty, and all other possible rights. The historical realization of free
personhood for all men therefore entails the assertion of a general property
right. As Waldron "crudely"
puts it, "men have a general right to private property because being the
owner of something is in some sense constitutive of freedom."
To
be free, a will requires property as a way to externalize itself in the
world. Freedom is not an abstract and
transcendental quality that remains locked within an internal mental sphere.
Instead, it must be actualized in concrete matter. The mind first possesses its body as the
necessary medium for the development of its freedom. This embodiment of the will allows the
person to identify itself as a determinate being that is "free in its own
eyes" Furthermore, the will
permeates objects, converting them into property imbued with its labor. Because the will externalizes itself in such
a fashion, objects have a necessary and concrete reference to a particular
person's will. By juxtaposing this
notion to Hegel's analysis of the lord and bondsman, Waldron notes that
property not only extends the will spatially but also temporally. He explains, "Laboring on materials
imposes some sort of permanence and stability on the projects of the
will." (p. 372.) In this manner, a
general right of private property allocates enduring control over concrete
things to free persons.
As
a counterpoint to the individuated and free character of persons, Hegel posits
Nature as an open expanse where man can freely externalize his will and
domination. As in Locke, the person’s own labor transforms nature from an alien
terrain into a thing that serves his will. This realm of property functions as a medium
through which persons can relate to each other. Hegel asserts, "It is only
as owners of property that the two [persons] have existence for each
other." Concrete embodiment not only allows the individual to identify himself,
but also allows others to recognize him through this external manifestation.
When a thing is possessed as personal property, other persons can recognize
that this object ultimately refers back to the will of its owner. Private
property both demarcates the particular sphere of an individual's rights and
duties, and allows social actors to relate to each other in a rightful and
dutiful manner.
Property rights enable persons to interact through contracts. Whereas a person's will is embodied in and referenced through an external object, the will is not totally identified with this object. Therefore, one can withdraw one's will from a particular property and alienate it to another person. A contract allows a person to transcend herself through an exchange of external properties that relates her internal will to the will of another. In addition to alienating material objects, one can also alienate a limited portion of one's labor time while still maintaining one's freedom.
Whereas external objects may be alienated from a person and even his labor may be alienated for a certain duration, there can never be a right to alienate the entirety of his internal will. Hegel condemns the Roman institution of slavery for confusing personhood with property. He indicates that this institution is rooted in the misconception that man is simply a natural entity: one can only appropriate and dominate nature, but other persons have independent wills, freedoms, and rationality. By trying to treat the slave as something that can be dominated by her will, the master therefore attempts to externalize herself in an inappropriate way
Marx
Whereas Locke defines property as
that which can be integrated back into a person’s dominion through his bodily
labor, Marx argues that, under capitalism, private property emerges as the
thing that is alienated from the labor of the proletariat. “Private property is therefore the product,
result, and necessary consequence of alienated labor, of the external relation
of the worker to nature and to himself.”
According
to Marx, man’s activity is directed towards securing the means of his
existence. Human labor transforms nature
into the objects of culture, thereby developing the collective species being of
humanity. “In creating an objective
world by his practical activity, man proves himself a conscious species
being.” Capitalism, however, transforms this necessary objectification into
alienation. The wage laborer produces
neither something that will sustain him nor an object that belongs to him. Instead, the products of his labor become the
private property of another person, the capitalist.
Contra
Locke and Hegel, Marx insists that private property is not an essential factor
in human self-manifestation but a particular historical manifestation of
capitalist society. István Mészáros
elucidates Marx’s particular conception of private property by distinguishing
between first-order and second-order mediations. He explains that “‘first order mediation’
itself – productive activity as such – is an absolute ontological factor of the
human predicament.” As mentioned above,
human labor mediates the natural world by turning it into the objects of
culture. Because this productive
activity necessarily occurs within a certain social setting, labor also
mediates human relationships with one another.
Whereas this first-order mediation is part of human existence itself,
capitalism introduces a second-order mediation by interposing within the
dynamic process the commercial triad of exchange, private property, and
division of labor. These capitalistic
structures mediate the process of mediation itself, alienating the worker from
his ontological connection to objects, to other people, and even to her own
identity as an active being.
For Marx, money is the alienated
medium through which use value is alienated into exchange value. “By possessing the property of buying
everything, by possessing the property of appropriating all objects, money is
thus the object of eminent possession
… Money is the pimp between man’s need and the object, between
his life and his means of life.” Money
thus consummates the reification of capitalism. “The riddle of the money fetish
is therefore the riddle of the commodity fetish.”
The fact that money has become
the object of eminent possession indicates the worker’s relation to property
ownership. Marx explains that the worker
is compelled to pursue the abstract property of currency because capitalism has
expropriated from him all concrete means of production. A man enters into the world as a laborer only
because “he is free of all the objects needed for the realization of his
labor-power.” Not only does he not own
the objects of labor, he has little capacity to produce the means of life, the
use values, to satisfy his own needs.
Marx stresses that the situation of the worker is not the product of a
purely natural state of affairs, but the result of specific historical
conditions. “In order to become a
commodity, the product must cease to be produced as the immediate subsistence
of the producer himself.” Whereas the
peasant villager can provide for himself, the historical genesis of a
capitalist commodity economy has prevented an industrial worker from doing so.
Man’s
alienation from the means of production alienates him from his status as a
person. Marx defines humans through
their activity, calling labor power “the aggregate of those mental and physical
capabilities existing in the living form, the living personality, of a human
being,” However, capitalism reifies this
activity into a calculable commodity.
“What [the political economists] call the ‘value of labor’ is in fact
the value of labor-power as it exists in the personality of the laborer.” Marx
thus indicates the degree of alienation by showing how commodity capitalism
first converts the human person into a laborer, then views the laborer in terms
of her labor-power, then uses her labor-power for labor, and then exploits her
labor to extract value. Marx’s book Capital
enacts this transformation by referring to individual laborers and capitalists
as “personifications” of abstract categories.
Capitalism transforms the
human person into “variable capital” from which surplus value can be extracted.
Thus, Marx explains that this work process estranges the worker both
spiritually and physically, saying that “manufacture mutilates the worker,
turning him into a fragment of himself.”
Through
his labor, the worker establishes himself as a subject creating a world of
external objects, a totality of cultural products. Under capitalism, the worker experiences this
self-objectification as self-estrangement because the fruits of his labor do
not belong to him: they are delivered over to an Other, the capitalist. “If the product of labor does not belong to
the worker, this is only possible because it belongs to another man than the
worker.” (78) A process of self-mortification, alienated labor converts the
living essence of the worker into dead matter, sacrificing him to a
stranger. Work is “vitality as a
sacrifice of life, production of the object as loss of the object to an alien
power, an alien person ... who is
alien to labor and the worker.” (81)
Levinas
For Levinas, the critique of history
has always been echoed by a critique of property ownership. In the opening section Principle and
Anarchy of “Substitution,” Levinas explains that in Western ontology,
essence fluctuates by losing itself and finding itself out of an archē,
allowing it to “possess itself” and to instantiate a “moment of having
in being.” (1981, 99) This
doubling of having and being occurs throughout Levinas’s writing. In his 1935 article against “Hitlerism,” he
condemns fascist thought for figuring the body as an inevitable bondage to
history. In contrast, Western thought
has spiritually detached man from time and physicality. He characterizes this as a “power given to
the soul to free itself from what has been” (1990b, 66), italicizing the
pluperfect combination of to have and to be that grammatically
converts the past into a possession.
Immediately after World War II,
Levinas introduces the notion of an “il y a” (there is), the
undifferentiated whole of existence that compels part-icipation, possessing and
nullifying any private separation. Not
only does this term parody Heidegger’s idea of a generous “es gibt” (idiomatically
“there is”; literally “it gives”), it redefines Being as an anonymous it (il)
in a there (y) that has (a) existence. Emerging from this flux as someone who can
be requires becoming someone who can have: the me (moi) that I am doubles as
the self (soi) that I own.
Through this hypostasis, the self posits itself in a particular space at
a particular moment. This self-mastery
allows the self to convert exteriority into personal property by exerting its
labor.
Levinas’ economic analyses in Totality
and Infinity draw from classical political philosophy. Like Locke, he defines the act of possession
as an appropriation of external being.
One is born into a sensuous element whose arche escapes
ownership, something that is “coming always, without my being able to possess
the source.” Labor stills this
anonymous flux and postpones the unforeseeable future of Infinity by allowing
one to maintain oneself in a present. It
breaks me free of my dependence on the element by suspending its
independence. “Possession neutralizes
this being: as property the thing is an existent that has lost his being.” By generating a total ensemble of things that
answer to the needs of a separated ego, ownership thereby establishes the
self’s mastery over external reality.
Levinas inveighs against the
ontological tradition for reducing the world to Being and beings that
ultimately refer back to ownership.
Despite his insistence that Dasein is not a human person, even
Heidegger poses the question of Being as eigenlichtkeit, “own-like-ness”
or “authenticity,” and as ereigen, “en-own-ing” or “the event of
appropriation.” Levinas argues: “The
relation with Being that is enacted as ontology consists in neutralizing the
existent in order to comprehend or grasp it.
It is hence not a relation with the other as such, but the reduction of
the other to the same. ... a suppression or possession of the other”.
Although this possession establishes
one’s sovereign ownership over otherness, it also indicates “a certain form of
economic life” (Levinas 1969, 172) with an Other, a stranger. Levinas’s analysis of labor combines and
generalizes Locke’s understanding of property as integration with Marx’s
understanding of it as alienation, “an estrangement of man from man” (Marx
1978, 77). Labor relates the world to
the self by positing entities as graspable objects. Because these works are positioned within a
social ensemble of work, they also relate to the possessive grasp of an Other
who presents himself as a Master and property owner. “The inexpressive character of the product is
reflected in its market value, in its suitability for others, in its capability
to assume the meaning others will give it, to enter into an entirely different
context from that which engendered it.” (Levinas 1969, 227)
As in Marx, relationships of
exchange disrupt the integrity of personhood.
Not just commercial products, but one’s will and one’s body are
alienated in the instant that they are manifested. The projects a will initiates are always
co-opted by another person. As an owned
body, a “corps propre” (229), one
positions oneself as a corporeal being, exposing one’s material self to being
bought for gold or being murdered by steel.
Therefore, one’s birth into a present moment is experienced as a kind of
suicide. One becomes registered in
history through the mortified material products of one’s labor, “the works of
dead wills” (228)
As an act of appropriation, property
ownership necessarily proceeds from violence and ultimately from murder. Levinas’ discussion of the first ethical
commandment, You Shall Not Commit Murder,
is sometimes misunderstood to be simply an ultimate moral prohibition. However, Levinas explains, “this interdiction
is to be sure not equivalent to pure and simple impossibility, and even
presupposes the possibility which precisely it forbids.” (232-3) Although murder is an ethical
impossibility, it is preeminently an event that occurs within every single
instant of time. The Other is always approached and appropriated
through a doubling of his origination and his death: through his production in
a work, his incarnation in a body, and his representation under a concept. At every instant, I seize the Other through
his manifestation, suspending his existence, and grasping him historically
through the records of his past. This
everyday occurrence can be grasped most clearly on the digital commons where,
online, one encounters the preservation of moments from different past
identities; the real lives of real people reduced to and articulated as a
multiplicity of media.
This murder is enacted at every
moment as cannibalism, as consumption of another person’s corpse. All of Levinas’s analyses of materiality, of
need and eating, of the content of elemental jouissance, of the goods
encountered in a home, and even of hunger and destitution, must be understood
in relation to this vampirism, this flesh-eating. [Also taken from Husserl’s
concept of he content “filling” consciousness] Levinas explains, “in satiety
the real I sank my teeth into is assimilated, the forces that were in the other
become my forces, become me.” The past of the other, his death, has
become retrospectively incorporated into my own present moment of
consumption. Therefore, I -- as a
consumer, through the things I purchase and use -- become entangled in a net of
works, in networks of responsibility.
These responsibilities manifest in consciousness once I understand that
the products which result in my enjoyment are ultimately the results of human
and environmental degradation and death.
Taking into account the relationship
between death and consumable products, one can deduce that the first ethical
commandment, You Shall Not Kill,
results in a corollary: You Shall Not
Steal. Levinas explicitly recognizes
this relationship between ownership and robbery. “To approach someone from works is to enter
into his interiority by burglary; the other is surprised in his intimacy,
where, like the personages of history, he is, to be sure, exposed, but does not
express himself.” As mentioned above,
these ethical impossibilities point to everyday realities: not only does one murder in every moment of
consumption, one’s ownership of Property is Theft.