Marx and Hayek are Both Orthodox; Contemplation is Heterodox

Why Moderns Are More Alike Than Different

According to Hannah Arendt, the biggest divide between ancients and moderns consists in their attitude towards the contemplative life. For ancients, the highest goal is contemplation. For moderns, by contrast, the purpose of life is action. For ancients, it was a sign of servitude and bondage to be focused on things like “impact.” The goal was to align one’s soul with unchanging truths: the good, the true, the beautiful. For moderns, beginning with Francis Bacon, the goal was not to behold (theory means “vision”) Nature but to alter it. Marx, in his Theses on Feuerbach writes that “philosophers have up until now sought to interpret the world, but the point is to change it.”

Marx may have had one vision for how things should change—a rebalancing of the relationship between labor and capital—but his anti-intellectual attitude is just as common amongst many free market capitalists. For Hayek, it is not intellectuals who grasp reality, analyzing it from without, but “the market.” To a Hayekian, Marx remains too intellectual as all ideas about reality prove to be a form of central planning—tyrannical and obtuse relative to the complexity and energy of market forces.

Foucault is mostly read on the left, and rarely interpreted as a libertarian, but he shares with Marx and Hayek the view that ideas and their proponents are immanent in the world, subject to power relations rather than free from them. The goal of philosophy is not to prescribe what ought to be, but to rework and play within the strictures that govern one’s way of thinking and being. You are never totally free (pace the Stoics), but you can, as it were, “choose” your bondage. Personally, I find Foucault’s vision deeply pessimistic, a variation on gnosticism. Instead of seeking to disassociate from the fallen world, Foucault’s thought urges one to embrace it with a wink. Become an anthropology professor, smoke cigarettes to demonstrate that you don’t believe in the Man, wear leather, cultivate a sense of superiority to Western normies while professing vague allegiance to anything provocative in the name of “the resistance.” But Foucault’s version of “choose your symptom” isn’t that different from Heidegger’s quasi-spiritual injunction to accept one’s “thrownness,” or Gadamer’s argument that reason is a form of hermeneutics, embedded in tradition. You can’t look at things from the outside view, because you are always already situated in them. Franz Rosenzweig also showed affinity for this view with his call to embrace “The New Thinking”—one in which lived experience takes precedence over systematic thought. Marx, Foucault, Heidegger, Rosenzweig, Gadamer, Hayek—and we could add, Machiavelli, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Sartre—all prove Arendt’s thesis that moderns have much more in common with one another than with the ancients, regardless of whether they end up on the political left, right, or center. Moderns are activists first and contemplatives second. Contemplation is a means to an end, not an end in itself.

Complain all you want about “cancel culture” on college campuses—the idea that a professor might be de-platformed or fired for espousing views that lie outside the moral consensus, but it’s also a legacy of modern thought which esteems the subjective over the objective and the practical over the theoretical. It hardly matters who does the canceling and on what grounds—the idea that thought is vindicated only by its social utility is the legacy of Marx’s “the point is to change [the world].” It is also a second cousin of the “What are you going to do with that [insert Humanities major]?” Pointing out that studying sonnets at an elite university can still land one a job in management consulting demonstrates the legacy of Marx’s challenge across the board.

“We wanted labor to own the means of production and all we got were more clickbait articles showing us the earning power of those who wrote senior theses on Kafka.”

The truly counter-cultural position is neither Marxist nor libertarian, but contemplative: the view that theory is a calling higher than “having an impact” or “making a difference.”

The reason the modern view has taken hold, according to the modern view itself, cannot be its intellectual superiority. Rather it has taken hold because it is more practical. We live in a time of great industrialization, technological progress, and leverage. In the past 15 years global GDP has increased 50%. In pre-modern times, it took centuries to achieve that level of growth and prosperity. Moderns esteem action, because they see their actions as having consequence. In ages past, when most people did not perceive their actions to make much of a difference they took refuge in contemplation. Adorno calls philosophy a message in a bottle. That was the view ancients seeking to make a difference must have taken towards their work—put the ideas down and hope that somebody in the future catches the Hail Mary and actions it. Now, if you have an internet connection, you can start a software company from your home. No wonder action gets so much love. But the fact that action now has traction does not make contemplation less noble, beautiful or true. You could argue that action is still all a distraction, despite its impressive results—for those results improve utility, but not insight or wisdom.

Arendt and Heidegger, while modern, appreciate the magnitude of our cultural change. In contrast to those who merely assume the modern view, they ask what we give up by adopting it uncritically. The goal is not to turn back the clock or worship the ancient approach, but to regard our own condition with humility, and to entertain the question: with all the gains in material quality of life, productivity and efficiency, with all the technological breakthroughs, what have we freed up our time for? The answer supplied by Weber is not more leisure, more contemplation, more freedom, but more work, more hustle, more grinding—even when we are supposedly chilling. If so, what to do about our spiritual malaise? The problem solving actors want quick solutions. But first it may worth dwelling on the malaise itself.